The best thing about New Years Day 2026 is that it means 2025 is over. President Ozymandias really hit the ground running for his second term, having surrounded himself with evil, shrewd, and power-hungry operatives this time instead of Republican normies who muted his bellowing. It’s hard to imagine (knocks on wood) that the worst of the self-aggrandizing vandalism isn’t over now.
Wordplay
Aphorisms
A platitude is a placebo for the mind; an aphorism is a wake-up call. Aphorisms provoke debate; they don’t promote dogma. Though they’re short, aphorisms spur considered reflection, not Pavlovian partisanship. At a time when polarization is so amped up, aphorisms can serve as psychological circuit breakers, interrupting our comfortable assumptions and prodding us to open our minds, unclench our fists, and think for ourselves.
Adapted from The World in a Phrase for an Atlantic article.
Selected sentences of the year
- In The Washington Post, Dana Milbank responded to some Republicans’ suggestion that the D.C. Metro be renamed the “Trump Train”: “It’s a great idea. Qatar will donate the subway cars, which will be powered by coal. Passengers will pay for fares with cryptocurrency after first showing proof of citizenship. And the trains will reverse themselves regularly and without warning — never quite reaching their original destination.” (Mary Ellen Maher-Harkins, Orwigsburg, Pa.)
- In The Atlantic, David A. Graham processed the addition of “Trump” to “Kennedy” in the moniker for Washington’s premier performing arts center: “He asks not what he can do for his country, but what his country can name for him.” (Darrell Ing, Honolulu)
- In Esquire, Dave Holmes acknowledged that Senator Lindsey Graham was maybe joking that Trump should be the next pope — but maybe not: “You can’t be tongue-in-cheek when you are actively licking the boot. There is just not enough tongue for both jobs.” (Susan Fitzgerald, Las Cruces, N.M.)
- In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay rued the effect of obsessive replays on the determination of what, in pro football, constitutes a catch. “It’s the affliction of overthinking: If it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, wait, hold on, it must be a chandelier,” he wrote. “It’s further evidence humans can ruin the spirit of anything, if given the time and technology.” (Bill Sclafani, Rockport, Mass.)
- \[I\]n The Washington Post, Ron Charles assessed “The Little Book of Bitcoin,” by the supremely self-confident pitchman Anthony Scaramucci: “In one passage, he touts the convenience of transporting $500 million in Bitcoin on a thumb drive, which is the best news I’ve heard since my yacht got a new helipad.” (Stephen S. Power, Maplewood, N.J., and Hannah Reich, Queens, among others)
- Charles also observed that the scolds who ban books have taken issue with “Maurice Sendak’s ‘In the Night Kitchen,’ which has been proven in the state of Florida to turn straight white Christian boys into polygender Marxists who eat only quinoa.” (Jill Gaither, St. Louis, and John Jacoby, North Andover, Mass.)
- In The Times, Kevin Roose worried that when it comes to regulations, the stately metabolism of institutions is no match for the velocity of A.I.: “It feels, at times, like watching policymakers on horseback, struggling to install seatbelts on a passing Lamborghini.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J.)
- In The Times, A.O. Scott sang a similar song: “Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris.” (Charles Kelley, Merrimack, N.H., and Trisha Houser, Durham, N.C., among others)
Frank Bruni, The Best Sentences of 2025 (shared link)
I saved three of Bruni’s best as personal favorites:
- Also in The Times, Matt Hongoltz-Hetling considered the importance of an annual communal feast to a Vermont town’s special fellowship: “Whether a vibrant community created the potluck or the potluck created a vibrant community is like asking which came first, the fried chicken or the deviled egg.” (Stacey Somppi, Cottonwood, Ariz., and Hillary Ellner, Durham, N.C., among others)
- In The Times, James Hamblin parodied the typical message and script of a television drug ad: “You will frolic on the beach at sunset psoriasis-free, with a golden retriever, smiling into the distance. You also may experience sudden loss of cardiac function, seizures of the arms or intermittent explosive ear discharge. Talk to your doctor.” (Susan Casey, Palm City, Fla.)
- In The Dispatch, Kevin D. Williamson gave thanks for academia, despite its flaws: “The American university system is the envy of the world, and we are burning it down because there’s a couple of nonbinary gender studies professors at Bryn Mawr who say crazy stuff from time to time and there is a brain-dead gaggle of Jew-hating weirdos at Columbia. Of course, there is room for reform. But you don’t have to love every feather on the goose when it is laying golden eggs.” (Dan Markovitz, Corte Madera, Calif.)
The first just feels perfect; “explosive ear discharge” in the second was the only thing in the list that made me laugh uncontrollably; Kevin Williamson captures perhaps the single most tragic thing about what “we” are doing, (purely by coincidence, of course, during the second reign of the orange barbarian).
Finally: “Some of you should walk a mile in my shoes, because then you would be a mile away from me. Keep the shoes.” (Encountered by my wife on Pinterest)
My 2025
Reading
As I always note in my footer, I blog and socialize at micro.blog in addition to here. One of my friendlies at MB, an uncommonly sane Evangelicalish pastor in Chicagoland (very keen on racial reconciliation is he), posted his 2025 reading list and inquired about what others read this year.
My response:
At 77, I feel the Grim Reaper breathing down my neck, and I already own more books than I’ll get read before he wins. Further, I’ve read many, many books in my life already, including multiple books on many perennial themes. And although I love poetry, I either had poor teachers or was too barbarian to learn how to read demanding examples.
So I don’t have much toleration for books that are cumulative of what I already understand, or are neither pleasurable nor (so far as I can tell after reading a bit) profitable, including ones that many good people were raving about.
To avoid performative listing, then (e.g., Geoffrey Hill poetry, which defeated me utterly), I’ve eliminated all the books I abandoned part way in. Finally, listing a volume of poetry doesn’t mean I’ve read it all yet.
| Book | Author |
|---|---|
| Rings Trilogy | Tolkien |
| Albion’s Seed | David Hackett Fischer |
| The World After Liberalism | Matthew Rose |
| Coracle | Kenneth Steven |
| Table for Two | Amor Towles |
| Till We Have Faces | C.S. Lewis |
| Godric | Beuckner |
| Stalingrad | Anthony Beever |
| Small Is Beautiful | Schumacher |
| Rilke Poetry | Rilke |
| Apocrypha | Stephen De Young |
| The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in the Christian Tradition | Philip Sherrard |
| A Time of Gifts | Patrick Leigh Fermor |
| The New Science of the Enchanted Universe | Marshall Sahlins |
| Bread & Water, Wine & Oil | Fr. Meletios Webber |
| Lost in the Cosmos | Walker Percy |
| Giovanni’s Room | James Baldwin |
| The Long Loneliness | Dorothy Day |
| The innocence of Father Brown | G.K. Chesterton |
| Against the Machine | Paul Kingsnorth |
| You Have Arrived at Your Destination | Amor Towles |
| The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality | Glen Scrivener |
| The Year of Magical Thinking | Joan Didion |
| The Old Man and the Sea | Hemingway |
| The Wisdom of Father Brown | Chesterton |
| Istanbul | Orhan Pamuk |
| The Wizard of the Kremlin | Giuliano da Empoli |
| The Irony of American History | Niebuhr |
| Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York | Francis Spufford |
| The Bovadium Fragments | Tolkien |
On deck for 2026: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (along with Christmas gift books and a few dozen others).
Strange doings
Extra pills are piling up across America. Excessive refills by U.S. pharmacies cost Medicare and patients $3 billion between 2021 and 2023, according to a WSJ analysis of Medicare prescription data.
WSJ. Based on my own rigorous anecdata, this is 1000% true. Which means that although mail-order pharmacies may have started it, brick-and-mortar local pharmacies are in the game now, too.
I really would rather not manually refill every prescription, but my pharmacy seems incapable of waiting 90 days to refill a 90-day prescription, and when I get a text that a prescription is ready for pick-up, I go pick it up (with rare exceptions, like a post-op opioid painkiller I definitely did not need).
Tech
Deepfakes
2025 appears to have been the years when deepfake videos became convincing. Ted Gioia sees all kinds of problems coming from that:
Sam sans souci
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said in a recent podcast he can see ways that seeking companionship from an AI chatbot could go wrong, but that the company plans to give adults leeway to decide for themselves.
AI Chatbots Linked to Psychosis, Say Doctors. I can scarcely see ways that seeking companionship from an AI chatbot could go right, because friendship is a right-hemisphere sort of thing that AI sucks at.
Politics
MTG Repents
Nothing in her political career before September inclined me to cut Marjorie Taylor Green any slack whatever, but something has happened since then.
Her political conversion story, if you can call it that (it’s not about changing from MAGA to progressive or any other political position), rings true.
It started at the Charlie Kirk Memorial service:
What stayed with Greene long afterward were the last two speakers who took the stage. First there was Kirk’s widow, Erika, who stood in white before the crowd filling the Arizona stadium, lifted her tear-filled eyes and said that she forgave her husband’s killer. And then there was President Trump. “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose,” he said of Kirk. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”
“That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene wrote to me in a text message months after the memorial service. And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”
Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump and MAGA – The New York Times — Original profile (gift link).
I thought at the time that should have been a wake-up call for every “Christian” Trump supporter in America. I still do. It speaks ominous things about our religious and political culture that it seems to have awoken so few.
But Marjorie Taylor Green, of all people, recognized it! And it appears that she has genuinely repented of her role in stoking hatred and division!
Time will tell; she’s been taking the potent MAGA pill for a long time, and withdrawal may prove too hard. But it’s looking good so far.
I wish her what I wished for Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981: a long and happy and private life — plus a sustained repentance.
Paganism with worship music
We seem to be entering a pagan century. It’s not only Trump. It’s the whole phalanx of authoritarians, all those greatness-obsessed macho men like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. It’s the tech bros. It’s Christian nationalism, which is paganism with worship music. (If you ever doubt the seductive power of paganism, remember it has conquered many of the churches that were explicitly founded to reject it.)
David Brooks, How to Survive the Trump Years with Your Spirit Intact (gift link).
That last sentence is golden.
Christianity without Christ
“If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right,” Ross Douthat warned presciently at the dawn of Trumpism in 2016. … What Douthat calls the “post-religious right” certainly is more obnoxious and morally degenerate than its Bush-era forebear was, but it’s not correct to call a movement that’s developed its own alternate morality “post-religious.” It’s not even correct to call it “post-Christian,”…
The modern right is boisterously Christian, but without Christ. It extols Christianity aggressively but has ditched most of the moral content …
…
The purest expression of Christianity without Christ came from Trump himself, not coincidentally. At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, shortly after Kirk’s widow, Erika, moved viewers by publicly forgiving her husband’s killer, the president strode to the mic and said, “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.” That’s the literal antithesis of Christian morality …
But there were no mass defections by Christians from the president’s camp after his heresy. Erika Kirk herself remains a loyal Trump ally in good standing. And why not? Hating one’s enemies is squarely in line with the three purposes of post-Christ right-wing Christianity. The first is establishing the right’s cultural hegemony over other American factions; the second is narrowing the parameters of the right-wing tribe to exclude undesirables; and the third is deemphasizing morality as a brake on ruthlessness toward one’s opponents.
When populist chuds taunt Jews like Ben Shapiro by hooting “Christ is king” or walk onstage at political rallies brandishing their rosaries as if they’re trying to repel Dracula, they’re not expressing earnest Christian witness. They’re signaling that there’s a hierarchy in America and that Christians properly sit atop it.
…
That’s Christianity without Christ.
Alt-Right
Almost everything written about the “alternative right” has been wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stupid; it is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous; they are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy.
Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism
At the outset of debate
If we are willing to grant, at the outset, that the people we’re debating agree about ends—that they want a healthy and prosperous society in which all people can flourish—then we can converse with them, we can see ourselves as genuine members of a community. And even if at the end of the day we have to conclude that we all do not want the same goods (which can, alas, happen), it is better that we learn it at the end of the day than decide it before sunrise.
Alan Jacobs, How to Think
WASPs
Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century? We can scorn the smug WASP blue bloods from Groton and Choate—and certainly their era’s retrograde views of race and gender—but their leadership helped produce the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the postwar Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.
David Brooks, How the Ivy League Broke America
The contumely of allies
We are also offended by the contumely of allies as well as foes, who refuse to regard our prosperity as fruit and proof of our virtue but suggest that it may be the consequence of our vulgar Philistinism.
Reinhold Niehbur, The Irony of American History
Read the fine print
On the surface, it would seem that the assurances given in the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia were clear and unequivocal. But lurking in the shadowy annals of communist polemics there was a catch. To paraphrase, but not distort, Lenin’s position, nations have the right to self-determination, but only the proletariat has the right to decide. And, as if that were not enough, only the Communist Party can speak for the proletariat.
Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire
Raising the bar for Tinhorn Dictators
Ramsey’s intolerance for dissent has created what former employees call a cultlike environment, where leaders proclaim their love for staff and then fire people at a moment’s notice.
Bob Smietana, Is Dave Ramsey’s empire the ‘best place to work in America’? Say no and you’re out
Shorts
- A new crop of moderate Democrats is trying to counter both President Trump and progressive influence in their own party. (WSJ) May their tribe increase.
- And so we have before us one of the characteristic political necessities of our time: to take seriously what we cannot respect. (Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America)
- Conservative and mainstream media were drifting apart, not just ideologically but epistemically… (Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge) This epistemic drift (of the Right, I think, not the mainstream) tempts me to despair.
- “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” … was a damned funny thing for Franklin Roosevelt to say in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power. (Kevin D. Williamson)
- The face of my fear is not a new Hitler but the Old Adam. It is the face in the mirror. (Kevin D. Williamson)
- One category I used to apply to some of my posts became obsolete almost overnight around 1/20/2017: Zombie Reaganism. You never see that any more, and I miss it more than I thought I would.
Elsewhere in Tipsyworld
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 