NPR's Ayesha Rascoe talks to the Boston Globe's Beth Teitell <> about the bay leaf and whether it's necessary or not for your dish.

 For journalists, at least the good ones, the commitment has been to the craft, the truth-telling, not to the ownership. 

For forty years, I worked on the copy desks at Gannett and Tribune papers, and our commitment was always to getting the stories factually accurate and clear for the reader. We lived in tension with our masters, cynical about the self-serving pronouncements of corporate apparatchiks. (God help me, I once worked for Sam Zell!) You did the best job you could to follow your principles under the circumstances. 

This year's presidential election has posed problems not just for journalists but for readers, and readers as consumers and customers. 

Some weeks ago I canceled my subscription to The New York Times after decades as a reader (I once applied for a job there). It covered President Joe Biden with ceaseless questioning about his age and capacity while covering Donald Trump as if we were in the South, murmuring, "Well, that's just his way." The editor's mealy-mouthed defense of this blatant disproportion fails to persuade. 

When it came out that Jeff Bezos had sandbagged his editorial staff's endorsement of Harris, several members of the staff resigned in protest and a quarter of a million readers canceled their subscriptions in disgust. I doubt that Bezos's bootlicking congratulations to Trump on his election will draw many back. 

Several voices have been raised urging readers to continue to support these papers, for the sake of the journalists still there struggling to do good work. I am sympathetic. 

After thirty-six years, I remain a seven-day-a-week print subscriber to The Baltimore Sun, where I worked for thirty-four years as an editor, even though the publication has been taken over by David Smith, who imagines that he can run a newspaper, and Armstrong Williams, who imagines that he can write. They have filled the news pages with low-grade pigswill from Sinclair and FOX45 and driven off some of their best people. (One is almost nostalgic for Sam Zell.) 

I continue to subscribe in support of the remaining staff, members of the News Guild struggling to negotiate a contract that will protect their ethical and journalistic standards. They are the Resistance operating at the Vichy Sun. But every morning I think, "How much more of this can I take?"

For you, the reader, the consumer, the customer, the question comes down to this. Your subscription supports the remaining journalists struggling to do professional work in troubling circumstances. It also supports the ownership and the ownership's decisions about what to cover and how. It's not clear-cut, but you have to look at what you are getting. What do you find good in it, and is the good worth what you pay for it? What do you find bad in it, and do you want your money to support that? 

For me, I have subscribed to The Guardian. 

It is inevitable that people will claim that the losing candidate in an important election was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign, even if there’s no particular evidence for it. To follow up on Erik’s post from yesterday, in 2016 and 2024 critiques of the Democratic are inevitably combined with claims that Donald Trump is such an unusually bad candidate that it would take a particularly inept campaign and/or bad candidate to lose to him. But this is not true. As Bill James once said about the San Francisco Giants of the late 60s and 70s, Trump isn’t a typical bad candidate, but one who yokes extraordinary strengths and extraordinary weaknesses. Trump is indeed a bad, undisciplined candidate in many ways. But he has two major strengths — an ability to mobilize sporadic and first-time voters, and the ability to lie about rejecting unpopular core positions of the party (in this election, pretending to be moderate on abortion and healthcare) without alienating the party’s base. And these strengths are evident when you compare Trump to other MAGA figures downballot. Erik mentioned Jacky Rosen winning Nevada with fewer votes than Harris. We can see this in other states:

• In Michigan, Harris lost with ~2,724, 000 votes, while Elissa Slotkin won with ~2,708,000, another election with a critical number of Trump-only ballots.
• In Wisconsin, Harris got ~1, 667, 000 votes, and Baldwin got ~1,672,000. Given that Baldwin is a very strong candidate with carefully cultivated ties to local interests, that still looks pretty good for Trump.
• The one key battleground where the Democratic Senate candidate decisively outperformed was Arizona, but this proves the point in a different way. Part of it is that Gallego is a really strong candidate, IMHO a much more interesting potential presidential candidate than Kelly. But part of it is Kari Lake demonstrating once again that hardcore Trumpism without Trump tends to be a losing proposition in competitive elections, even if you can find a candidate who was a fairly well-liked local celebrity before entering politics. (Mark Robinson is obviously the most extreme example of MAGA without Trump from this cycle; the teflon isn’t transferrable.)

What this means for the post-Trump Republican Party is of course uncertain. But when I read that someone like DeSantis would have won a true landslide — I think that’s actually a highly questionable proposition. I can easily see a scenario where a candidate with less scandal baggage but more right-wing positions and less ability to mobilize low-information voters loses to this Harris campaign, and I don’t think it’s going to be easy for Republicans to find a good candidate in 2028 (especially if Trump is still around to effectively hand-pick his successor.)

The post Trumpism without Trump appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

by Gustavo Arellano photos by James Collier/Paprika Studios “Thank you for a fantastic week,” said Castro, chef and co-owner, along with her sister, Lydia, who sat across the table. “First week off the books. Many more to come.” The small, elegant spot opened in July to acclaim and crowds. On the evening I visited, it […]

I hate this.

Something that isn’t much talked about is the opportunity cost of electing Donald Trump. There are plenty of things to deal with more immediately, like the prospect of of mass deportations. I’m going to talk about what we can’t do because we will be dealing with the attempt at mass deportations and whatever else bubbles to the top of Trump’s mind and the agendas of his court.

In particular, I’ll focus on what I had planned to do. Maybe I can salvage something.

The problem where the opportunity cost is most obvious is global warming. Not only will actions fail to be taken, but there may be active reversal of what’s been done. Some of that has to do with markets, which will be less easy to stop, although a 60% tariff on Chinese goods might even mess with that.

Forward thinking about nuclear weapons and foreign policy has been slipping away for some time. The immediate need to respond to Russia’s desire to reconstitute its empire has been responsible for a lot of that, although another factor is the sense in the 1990s that a nuclear standoff between the US and the USSR was no longer a problem. Global warming displaced nuclear weapons as the source of anxiety about the end of the world.

But as long as they are there, they can be used. And the arms control structure built up through decades was wiped away, largely by George W. Bush and Trump. Four years of a president who didn’t tweet gave some space for thinking.

I came up with two big themes:

• Rethinking the concept of deterrence
• Following through on Carol Cohn’s program of considering the gendered thoughtforms applied to nuclear weapons

The two interact, and there are many sub-headings. I may go into that in a later post.

But now the priorities shift. I’m seeing panicky posts on social media about nuclear proliferation to additional countries. I’ll try to write a post about that soon. For now, I’ll say that this is not an immediate danger. But I am sure that conversations have taken place in many governments.

Then there is the question of exactly how dangerous it is to have the nuclear satchel (“football”) in Trump’s hands. In this, as in many things, Trump has given off signals in two directions. The way he has expressed one of them lately is along the lines of “Global warming is a sham. What we need to worry about is nuclear warming [sic].” He then goes into comments on nuclear war. His historical comments often indicate that he is very concerned about nuclear war and would like to be seen as the peacemaker who abolished nuclear weapons. His comments also indicate that he has a very poor understanding of nuclear weapons, both in strategy and in their physical manifestation.

On the other side of his mind, he has mused about the power of nuclear weapons and tweeted nuclear threats at Iran and North Korea. His advisors will uniformly be hawkish and desire to brandish that ultimate power.

The US and other nuclear powers are in the process of updating their nuclear arsenals. This is another area I’ve written a bit about already. These programs are immensely expensive and potentially dangerous in making smaller nuclear weapons that might not be distinguishable in flight from conventional weapons.

Again, Trump doesn’t understand this program or its implications. But some of the people working for him are eager to experience a nuclear test and to stockpile more and more of these weapons. Those are things I’ll probably write about.

I won’t stop thinking about deterrence and gender, but the more immediate concerns are what I’m more likely to write about.

Cross-posted to Lawyers, Guns & Money

This is the grave of William Porter, better known as O.Henry.

Born in 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Porter grew up middle class, the son of a physician. However, his mother died in childbirth when he was 3 years old. So his paternal grandmother took on the mothering role, as his father moved in with her. She encouraged his reading and he was voracious. He went to local schools, with extra tutoring from an aunt, until he was 15. Then he worked to become a pharmacist, starting with his uncle’s store in Greensboro, and by the time he was 19, he got a pharmacist license. I’m not sure what standards one had to meet to get such a thing in 1881; given what I know about late 19th century medicine, not much.

Now, Porter was a bit sickly. He had developed a real nasty cough that would not go away. Of course he feared it was tuberculosis. It doesn’t seem to have been. But he was nervous about that. So he went to Texas. There, he started to sow what became a lifetime of wild oats. He worked on a ranch for a bit, but then started working as a pharmacist in Austin, while both writing his own stories and also being a huge party animal. He was a good musician who played the guitar and mandolin and was a part of a singing quartet who one hired for parties and who would go around and sing at women out and about at night, which probably annoyed many of them. While there, he met a sickly young girl named Athol Estes. She already had tuberculosis. They met at the laying of the cornerstone for the next Texas state capitol building, and what bad has ever taken place there? Her mother objected to the relationship, but she couldn’t really stop it and they got married in 1887.

They stayed in Austin and Porter got a job at with the General Land Office, working as a draftsman drawing up the maps from the survey data. He also started publishing his stories. These were mostly in little magazines, but then he started his own publication. The Rolling Stone didn’t last a long time, only about a year before closing, but it did have a subscription base of 1,500 at its peak and people liked Porter’s stories, which were broadly humorous, often based on people he knew in Austin.

Porter than went to work at a bank and this is where things got super sketchy. Did he embezzle money? He was fired for that in 1894, but it might have just been sloppy bookkeeping. Porter was also an unrestrained drunk and that might have been part of it too. Or he did steal the money, but if he did, he wasn’t exactly getting rich off it. In any case, his stories got attention from a newspaper in Houston, who invited him to write for it. He and his family moved there and when federal auditors did an audit on that bank in Austin, they charged Porter with embezzlement.

Porter freaked out. The day before he trial started, he bailed for Latin America. He sent his wife and daughter back to live with her parents. He ended up on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, because that nation had no extradition treaty with the U.S. He lived a pretty dissolute life there, becoming best friends with a notorious train robber and I am sure they drank their lives away. This also allowed Porter to see the operations of American fruit companies up close. He was disgusted and it was he at this time who came up with the term “banana republic” to succinctly describe the real political power structure of Honduras–the government ruled with the consent of the fruit companies.

But Porter came back. His wife was finally dying of her tuberculosis. He wanted to see her again. He returned to Austin in February 1897 and whether because the courts were slow or they were nice or he used his connections to get the trial delayed, he was able to take care of her until she died in July 1897. Then he went on trial, said nothing in his own defense, and received a 5-year prison sentence at a penitentiary in Ohio. He was able to use his pharmacy license there and worked in the prison pharmacy, which gave him some privileges and made his time there less hellish than it could have been. In fact, he had his own room in the hospital and evidently never had to spend time literally behind bars.

The time Porter spent in prison also gave him space to take his writing seriously. He started publishing under pseudonyms but increasingly used “O. Henry.” He was first published under that name in McClure’s, in 1899, with “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking.” One reason he used the pseudonyms is he figured he couldn’t get published if people knew he was in prison. A friend of his was the conduit between him and the magazines.

In 1901, Porter was released early and he moved to Pittsburgh to take care of his daughter, living with her grandparents. He now introduced himself to his publishers and by 1902 was in New York to be near them. He wrote like a beast, publishing 381 stories over the next several years. Wasn’t a novel guy. Not sure he ever he tried to write one. He published a story in New York World Sunday Magazine each week for over a year. He did well and made a good living, becoming extremely popular. He remarried, in fact it was a childhood sweetheart reunion thing.

As O. Henry, Porter had a bit of what we might today call a Tom Waits thing. He loved New York because he loved the down and out characters and hanging out with them. Many of his stories are about people of the street, criminals, outcasts, sometimes cops or waitresses. He was a master of the early 20th century naturalism popular in the U.S. and Europe. “The Gift of the Magi” is probably his most famous story, but there are really so many.

But Porter couldn’t get past his own demons. The bottle was his best friend. By 1908, his second wife had left him and the quality of his stories turned to mush as he drank more. The end came in 1910, from cirrhosis and all the other related issues that come with it. He was 47 years old.

O.Henry is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Asheville, North Carolina.

The Library of America published a volume of 100 O.Henry stories as Volume 345. If you would like this series to visit other authors in the Library of America, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Elizabeth Spencer, at Volume 344, is in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Virginia Hamilton, at Volume 348 is in Yellow Springs, Ohio. As an aside, I think the LOA has gotten more interesting in recent years as it ran out of iconic classic American authors and finally published every damn thing Henry James ever wrote that no one wants to read and had to move on to other authors. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,747 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.