I have a lot of Joyce Carol Oates to catch up on, since she's written well over a thousand books. Did finish Carthage, which is a gender provocative Crime and Punishment, set in America, dealing with the the collective national guilts of the Iraq War and our prison system; there's one long chapter about the latter…

"My Dearest Wife,

That too. I believe we definitely have class in this country, but since our national shibboleths proclaim otherwise, it's hidden and therefore all the more potent, like with your co-worker. In a hyper-capitalist country with fewer social welfare programs than other countries, doing anything to make it, including…

You guys split the interview up into segments for only the really charming people! It would be nice—though less profitable for you—to have it all as one segment.

The Lost City of Z. Well, this was bloody fantastic. I'm still amazed that writers and directors can portray a world, a life, in two hours, slowing down the story and action to produce intimate powerful moments, run cumulatively to add up to a grand epic, and this was a grand epic. Charlie Hunnam is King Arthur in…

We need a tough but just badger in the WH.

Last week I hadn't really thought of that. This week, yes, he could have dementia! Republicans in Congress are very likely not going to get a tax plan, nor any other thing they want—Ryan, ever the evil fool, is speaking again, publicly, to a Wisconsin radio station about privatizing Medicare. Yeah, no. I can see…

If he has only animal impulses, he'll, you know, act like a vicious animal.

No, it was not, but if his voters didn't pay attention to the news—distrusting it and/or not having time in their hard, busy lives to follow it and/or just willful ignorance—I can see why Trump sounding totally convinced of what he was saying would be very persuasive; as this theory describes, he was totally convinced…

She was great on tonight's Real Time. I like her!

The best and most fits-the-evidence explanation of Trump I've read so far is Vox writer David Robert's Twitter thread he made yesterday. 40 tweets about Trump not having any "beliefs, intentions, plans, or schemes which are carried from place to place." He doesn't have any "beliefs, intentions, etc, that are stable,…

Nice! I'll watch it later.

I'm sure 9 year old girls swear like sailors. Or they should, dammit.

And now I'm imagining the entire population of America's Girl Scouts becoming a guerrilla resistance—and it is awesome.

Psst! I wasn't serious. Though the fear from day one of candidate Trump has been he'll impulsively nuke something. But let's hope not!

It was crazy but it demonstrated that America was very, very conservative and proper. Now it's a Bacchanal of what the Republicans are allowing to get away with. Yeah, the former was because a democrat did it and the latter is a Republican, but still that's accepting a ton of malfeasance and vulgarity so quickly.

2. "I'm sorry, John, but you're going to have to run again."
"What?"
"RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!"
Lifetime adoration from me just for that role.

ACLU's good, but what I'm really hoping for are the other advanced democracies joint invading America. "You're destroying the world. Enough is enough, you wankers." and such.

I don't know whom I hate more—Ryan or McTurtle. Ryan at least has a vision of doing evil. McTurtle appears to believe in nothing but his own survival and will do anything, including destroying the country, to do it, which means destroying himself. So he's much stupider than Ryan.

Not Cancelled, yet: The Trump administration. But ratings keep going down.