november 1993

I noticed the shoes first. That I was wearing them. Real shoes, the leather kind, with laces. After a year and a half, I was finally returning to the office, and that meant giving up the puffer slippers and slides that had sustained me for so long. Real shoes, I quickly remembered, are terrible. Likewise pants. Likewise getting to work, and being at work. Whew.

That was summer 2021. I’ve since acclimated to the office once again: I don the uniform; I make the commute; I pour the coffee; I do my job; and then I go back home. There are costs to this arrangement, clearly. I lose some time—time I could spend working!—transporting myself, in shoes and pants, from one building to another. I miss the chance to finish household tasks between my meetings, or fix myself a healthy and affordable lunch. As a university professor and administrator, I have more flexibility than most professionals, and I’m not required to go in each and every day. But even so, I have less control over each hour of my life than I used to—a fact that could very well be making me less productive overall. Indeed, it’s possible, or even likely, that my employer—and yours—could help their workers and the bottom line, simply by allowing us to work from home or come in on a hybrid plan. Remote, flexible employment might be a win for everyone.

Carl von Clausewitz observed in his classic On War that “the maximum use of force is by no means incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect.” That means, in part, acting thoughtfully but with the utmost effort, understanding that war is more bar fight than chess game. Or, to put it in the simpler words of Jim Malone, Eliot Ness’s counselor in The Untouchables, “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone.”

Al Capone is an apt analogy for what the West confronts in Russia: a particularly noxious mix of Mafia mentality, hypernationalist ideology, and totalitarian technique. Elegance is not the Russian way, and it cannot be our way. This is the light in which one should measure the accomplishments of NATO’s recent gathering in Madrid.

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I wonder if the remaining sensible Republicans have accepted the irretrievable loss of the GOP they once knew.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

• Let’s use Chicago rules to beat Russia.
• Hybrid work is doomed.
• Uber Pool is a zombie.

Harsher Truths

In 1991, the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was briefly deposed in a coup by hard-line members of the Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev, upon his return to Moscow, tried to differentiate between the plotters and the Party itself. One of his closest advisers, Aleksandr Yakovlev, told him that this effort was pointless, akin to “serving tea to a corpse.”

When Michelle Stokes noticed a necrotic wound on her cat, Jellyfish, last July, she and her husband had to call about 50 vets before finding one that could squeeze them in.

The local emergency animal hospital was so backed up that it said the wound—serious but not yet life-threatening—wasn’t really an emergency. Jellyfish didn’t have a regular vet, because Stokes and her husband had just moved to the Cleveland area. They pulled up Google Maps and started going down the list of offices they found. It was the same response every time: no vacancies, not taking new patients, not until August or even September. Meanwhile, Jellyfish was getting sicker and more lethargic. “We just kept trying and trying and trying,” Stokes told me. “We pretty much called every single vet’s office in the greater-Cleveland area.” A week in, they finally got a lucky break. They managed to speak directly to a vet at one practice, and when Stokes sent over a photo of the wound, the vet said to bring Jellyfish in for surgery. The cat’s now doing just fine.

Even as we watch the reservoirs and lakes of the West go dry, we keep watering our lawns, soaking our golf courses, and growing water-thirsty crops.

As inflation mounts and the national debt balloons, progressive politicians vote for ever more spending.

As the ice caps melt and record temperatures make the evening news, we figure that buying a Prius and recycling the boxes from our daily Amazon deliveries will suffice.

When TV news outlets broadcast video after video of people illegally crossing the nation’s southern border, many of us change the channel.

And when a renowned conservative former federal appellate judge testifies that we are already in a war for our democracy and that January 6, 2021, was a genuine constitutional crisis, MAGA loyalists snicker that he speaks slowly and celebrate that most people weren’t watching.