january 2000

John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, announced the title of his forthcoming memoir last night: The Room Where It Happened, a reference to the Oval Office, the scene of some of the misdeeds he is likely to attribute to the president. (I had hoped for something jauntier, perhaps ’Stached in the Cabinet.) Accompanying that announcement was a story in The New York Times teasing readers with revelations. The most significant is that Trump allegedly conditioned his release of Ukrainian military aid not only on that country’s announcement of an investigation into Hunter and Joe Biden, but also on its release of evidence of the Biden family’s involvement in Robert Mueller’s probe. In fact, there is no such evidence, and the only people who believe that there is such evidence are wing-nut conspiracy theorists and, it seems, the president of the United States.

“Left but not woke” is the Bernie Sanders brand. If anybody failed to recognize it before, nobody can miss it now. Last week, the mega-podcaster Joe Rogan endorsed Sanders. The Sanders campaign tweeted a video of the Rogan endorsement from Sanders’s own account. That tweet then triggered an avalanche of disapproval from other voices in the Democratic coalition.

Rogan is not an ally to the cultural causes that have come to predominate on the contemporary left. He even mocks many of those causes, while also dancing around conspiratorial thinking of the left and right fringes: 9/11 denialism, Obama birtherism, and speculation about dark deeds concerning Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

On a sweltering July day, I follow Annise Dobson down an overgrown path into the heart of Seton Falls Park. It’s a splotch of unruly forest, surrounded by the clamoring streets and cramped rowhouses of the Bronx. Broken glass, food wrappers, and condoms litter the ground. But Dobson, bounding ahead in khaki hiking pants with her blond ponytail swinging, appears unfazed. As I quickly learn, neither trash nor oppressive humidity nor ecological catastrophe can dampen her ample enthusiasm.

At the bottom of the hill, Dobson veers off the trail and stops in a shady clearing. This seems like a promising spot. She kicks away the dead oak leaves and tosses a square frame made of PVC pipe onto the damp earth. Then she unscrews a milk jug. It holds a pale yellow slurry of mustard powder and water that’s completely benign—unless you’re a worm.

Billie Eilish scarfs down spiders, scowls at cameras, and sings about murdering all her friends. She wears sneakers scrawled with the words FUCK U, and she makes music with dental-drill noises. She’s a creep; she’s a weirdo. What the hell is she doing here, on the Grammys stage, as the consensus pick of the music biz’s masses?

The 18-year-old Eilish took home five of the six trophies she was nominated for last night, including all of the “big four” awards: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Album of the Year, and Best New Artist. (Her 22-year-old brother, Finneas O’Connell, who produces and co-writes her songs, shared in the big four and won two awards of his own.) The only other time someone swept the general categories was in 1981, when the ultrasoft and now-obscure rocker Christopher Cross bested Pink Floyd’s The Wall in a year when Prince’s Dirty Mind and the Clash’s London Calling weren’t even nominated. Cross’s milestone is now often referenced to demonstrate how uncool the Grammys are, and Eilish would seem a much hipper pick. (Her songs are not about yachts, to start.) But for all her supposed edge, there’s safety in her sweep.

On the second day of President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial, Chief Justice John Roberts told a joke—though not intentionally. Presiding over the trial, the chief justice saw the House impeachment manager Representative Jerry Nadler snipe at the president’s defense team over the falsehoods the president’s defense lawyers had put forward, and Roberts then watched as the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, sniped right back.

Roberts then weighed in: “I think it is appropriate at this point for me to admonish both the House managers and the president’s counsel in equal terms,” he said, “to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Roberts was being earnest. But given the Senate’s conduct over the past weeks, the only reasonable way to interpret his description of the chamber is as the bleakest of jests.