The most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American marks seven years of daily letter writing:
Seven years later, we are approaching the midpoint of Trump’s second term, and the patterns I saw seven years ago are slicing to the heart of both the mechanics and the soul of the United States.
“‘The White House has a taxpayer-funded team that tries to incite harassment and threats against their political foes,’ Rupar told Salon. ‘They seem to be especially triggered about my posts about Natalie Harp and how she accompanies the president everywhere’”: “White House doesn’t want voters to see the real Trump” (Salon ).
Note the expression on the current occupant’s face in the photograph that accompanies the article. I think it’s the face of dementia.
“When I told him that to celebrate the day, I had set up a thirteen-foot model of the triumphal arch in one of the salons, he immediately left the party and hurried to the room”: from Read, Seen, Heard.
Him: who?
“Nyack’s new spot for fine stationery”: Busman’s Holiday. It’s the work of Sam Potts, who many years ago made a spectacular poster mapping character connections in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest .
The store offers a pencil exchange, a cloud registry, and other surprises. And a fun Instagram account.
The paper in my 2026 Moleskine datebook is an improvement over that of years past: ink does not bleed through. A problem that I didn’t notice until I wrote with a thicker nib and found the ink slightly ghosting: the print on the recto and verso doesn’t always line up. It happens only on a few pages, but it shouldn’t happen at all, should it? (No, Michael, you’re absolutely right. It shouldn’t.)
[A crude photograph, taken with a flashlight shining through the page, and with the white point adjusted to make the paper look more like paper.]
I have issues with Moleskine quality control. In 2024 I wrote three posts telling the story of getting a defective Moleskine planner (sixteen days missing!) and attempting to get a refund: 1, 2, 3. I wondered then and wonder now if my e-mail correspondence with “Donne” at Moleskine Customer Care was really just correspondence with a bot. I wrote a letter too to Moleskine’s New York headquarters. No reply. Moleskine, sono pazzi.
Related reading
All OCA Moleskine posts (Pinboard)
[I am a prisoner of Moleskine. I prefer the design of their daily planner to that of Leuchtturm.]
Sales of pens, puzzle books, Moleskines, and Fujifilm Instax cameras are all up: “The anti-AI portfolio” (Financial Times ).
The story has now made it to Newsweek : the White House’s Rapid Response 47 account has called the indefatigable Aaron Rupar “a sick, deluded freak” for calling attention to the current occupant’s travels with Natalie Harp.
Aaron Rupar’s Bluesky posts are a great public service. They show again and again what “the news” doesn’t: a president declining in real time. If you value the time and effort Rupar puts into collecting video clips, you can buy him a coffee or subscribe to Public Notice.
Brown bourbon, a neon red maraschino cherry, the crisp pages of a letter, a thick piece of cream-colored stationery someone is about to write on.
But bourbon just is brown, and maraschino cherries are bright red, at least if they come from a jar, as this one did. “Crisp” rightly describes potato chips and other delights, but the pages of a letter aren’t crisp, and it’s difficult to think of recognizing a piece of paper that’s not in one’s own hands as thick. Cream-colored? That’s good; it suggests an upscale product.
Elaine and I are reading a memoir — not our usual stuff, but someone recommended it, and we bit. It’s a good story, sometimes funny, often moving, at times terrifying, but the writer lards its sentences with intrusive adjectives. They become tiresome. Here is William Zinsser in On Writing Well , suggesting that most (I’d say many ) adjectives are unnecessary:
Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don’t stop to think that the concept is already in the noun. This kind of prose is littered with precipitous cliffs and lacy spiderwebs, or with adjectives denoting the color of an object whose color is well known: yellow daffodils and brownish dirt. If you want to make a value judgment about daffodils, choose an adjective like “garish.” If you're in a part of the country where the dirt is red, feel free to mention the red dirt. Those adjectives would do a job that the noun alone wouldn’t be doing.Related reading
Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit — a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education , Anastasia Berg suggests that “The Ivy League’s Surrender to AI Is Insane”:
How will encouraging students to use AI when writing papers in political theory, philosophy, literature, or history deepen learning? I have taught in UChicago’s social sciences core sequence, I have studied the linguistic and analytic capacities of LLMs, and I can say with confidence that there is no use of AI that can “deepen” students’ learning of Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Marx, and Du Bois over and above an unmediated engagement with the original works. If one wants to deepen students’ understanding of human beings’ most difficult, elevated and important intellectual and artistic achievements, one needs to give instructors the means of demanding that students spend time with the works, alone. Allow professors to require students to spend the time they are nominally already required to dedicate to the course outside the classroom in tech-free reading rooms; shut down the WiFi; scramble the cell signal; send them to weeklong retreats in the deep, dark woods. Whatever.Amen, and amen.
Failure to do so will mean giving up on mastery in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, and with it, the liberal-arts model of college education itself.
In The New York Times (gift link), Eric Schlosser writes about the current occupant’s large order of mystery meat:
If American consumers knew where that beef was coming from, they might not want to eat it.The details that follow are, well, disgusting. Our household has been off ground beef for some time now.
The cuts of meat covered by Mr. Trump’s proclamation aren’t fresh sirloins, rib-eyes and filets. They’re lean beef trimmings that will be added to fattier American cuts to make ground beef. They’re small chunks of frozen meat that could have been kept in cold storage overseas for years. They are the quintessence of generic industrial meat, imported here to be subsequently processed in massive grinders that combine pieces of tens of thousands of cattle from multiple countries, mainly into fast food hamburgers.
