Mitch's Blog

“Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies” by Tom De Haven is one of my all-time favorite novels. I recommended it highly to a friend yesterday. That caused me this morning to revisit this review of the novel that I wrote for reactormag.com way back in 2010.

Two years after the review was published — 13 years ago — someone left a question in the comments, and no one answered that question, so I answered now.

It’s always a kick for me to get a response like that to some ancient comment, years later; hopefully “sarahp,” who left that question in the far-away year of 2013, will feel the same way.

“No, I’m actually not very concerned about the vandalism against Teslas. All cars matter”

Ami Angelwings:: “The original Dear Abby was a badass, esp for her time, she was a champion for queer acceptance in her column and was very big on telling parents to listen and accept their children instead of punishing and fighting with them. But also this response is a banger. Top 10 advice columnist responses of all time.”

Walking Tashkent (Uzbekistan) — I love Chris Arnade’s travelogues, served with political philosophy, discussion of why we don’t build things in American anymore and outstanding photography of ordinary street scenes,

“Trump loves Big Tech: So much for the ‘Khanservatives.'" (Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr) — The anti-big-tech wing of the Trump coalition, which included JD Vance, Josh Hawley, Matt Goetz, Marsha Blackburn, Ted Cruz, can eat shit and like it.

Melody Schreiber / The Guardian: Measles deaths include a 6-year-old girl, whose parents appeared on a video spreading deadly anti-vaccine lies soon after her death. They appeared in a video with Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organiation previously headed by RFK Jr.

“We would absolutely not take the MMR,” said the girl’s mother, referring to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. “The measles wasn’t that bad. They got over it,” she said of her four other children.

“It’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be,” the father said through a translator. Both parents fought back tears throughout the interview.

“The measles wasn’t that bad” — but all four of their kids got it and one died. Heartbreaking.

“Let’s disappear people to foreign prisons based on allegations they committed crimes isn’t a slippery slope, you’ve already rolled all the way down the mountain.”

Every time I empty my computer bag to search for something small I feel like a cartoon character pulling out progressively more ridiculous objects: a horseshoe, concertina, capuchin monkey riding a unicycle.

Thousands of “Kennedy Files” documents posted online this this week disappointed assassination conspiracy theorists, but “historians are finding many newly revealed secrets." ( Jennifer Schuessler and Julian E. Barnes / NYTimes) — Documents reveal the pervasive influence of the CIA.

The Underlying Problem (Hamilton Nolan) — “This is happening because some people are too rich.”

The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.

And it’s not just Musk:

We have allowed too few people to accumulate too much wealth. The imbalance has grown so severe that a tiny number of individuals with twelve-figure net worths have the means to purchase so much political power that they can effectively make the federal government’s decisions.