Stephen Coss ☮️

Author of The Fever of 1721. Finishing up Harry & Hoppy, the first novel in my "who killed JFK" trilogy. I reserve the right to change my mind. You should, too.

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

Somebody tell Trump this is not what Teddy Roosevelt meant by "bully pulpit."

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

Gordon Wood was one of the most significant American historians of his generation. I learned a lot from his "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" while researching and writing my first book. RIP

[Daniel N. Gullotta ⚓️ @DanielGullotta]

Terrible news. And so close to America250.

https://t.co/I7hksRQtXU

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

The problem isn't that he's old. Or that he can't stand up. FDR couldn't stand up. The problem is that he's pure evil.

[Mike Madrid @madrid_mike]

The schtick is old. He’s a feeble unhealthy old man and the country is over it. He can barely stand up without help.

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

"Perhaps now that we are standing amid the ruins of the East Wing and the wreckage of the postwar liberal order...we will find it in ourselves to put away childish things and write something new." A must-read for anyone who cares about American fiction. Thanks, Becca Rothfeld.

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

The critic and enfant terrible Leslie Fiedler scandalized the literary establishment in 1948 when he published an article arguing that many of America’s boyish and putatively innocent classics are in fact fantasies of interracial, homosexual romance. Novels like “Huckleberry Finn” and “Moby-Dick,” he wrote, represent a vision “so sentimental, so outrageous, so desperate, that it redeems our concept of boyhood from nostalgia to tragedy,” a dream in which the white settler is embraced by those “he has most utterly offended,” those he has enslaved and colonized.

Fiedler’s classic and controversial study “Love and Death in the American Novel” expands on this thesis for 500 exhilarating pages. At the country’s inception, it fancied itself, in Fiedler’s words, “an escape from culture and a renewal of youth,” a “world without a significant history or a substantial past,” a realm that would “play out the imaginary childhood of Europe.” Being an avowedly juvenile country, it produced an avowedly juvenile fiction. Many of our classics—like “Huckleberry Finn”—are about children, and many more masquerade as adventures for children.

The book was ahead of its time in ways both good and bad, Becca Rothfeld writes. “Fiedler is capable of aggravating us but not of boring us. What makes ‘Love and Death’ so worth reading is also what makes it so worth disagreeing with.” Read about Fiedler’s notorious work—and the continued strain of immaturity in American fiction and our culture at large: https://t.co/PBTvR4KQT3

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

This is what the president has his people working on. And what he spends his time on.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Trump: I just had this done. *holds up chart comparing reflecting pool to buildings*

[James Martin, SJ @JamesMartinSJ]

Pope Leo XIV: "Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized. The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them." #MagnificaHumanitas

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

@BusterKGifs @Norm_Corn @BusterKeatonSoc awesome

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

@BusterKGifs @Norm_Corn @BusterKeatonSoc The wonder is he wasn't like this after every film.

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

And he's doing it all on the taxpayer's dime.

[Sarah Godlewski @SarahforWI]

Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020. In every recount. In every court. Now he’s sending the FBI to intimidate our election officials.

This is bullshit and Wisconsinites know it.

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

Ladies and gentlemen, our president.

[Akayla Gardner @gardnerakayla]

I asked @POTUS how the rising price of his ballroom (nearly x2 original estimate) and reflecting pool makeover (x7 original estimate) are any different than why he wanted to remove Fed Chair Jerome Powell for 30% cost overruns.

Here’s his response:

[Dead Wrong History @deadwronghist]

Kingsley Amis said — anonymously — that his own son's prose 'reeks of the lamp.' Martin's reply: 'Not unfair. Just wrong.'

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

@TheOtherMandela @harveyjkaye Their hearts are in the right place but they're sitting on their hands, and that won't do.

[Luke Barnett @LukeBarnett]

70% more bookstores today than there were in 2020. Huge win for society. Let's keep it going.

[The Paris Review @parisreview]

“As you grow older you realize that there are bad lines in ‘King Lear’ and it has survived.” —Robert Gottlieb https://t.co/0w1iJxuSlg

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

After about three years my book Harry & Hoppy is done and with my agent. It's historical fiction about the lives of two young men who team up in vaudeville and become movie stars in the 1930s. Lots of early 20th Century social/showbiz history, along with cameos from real people.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Spielberg clearly drew from Buster Keaton’s style when crafting Indiana Jones.

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

@SenMarkKelly @alala55 Shouldn't Congress be insisting Trump meet with it and explain his intentions BEFORE that happens?

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

I wish Jim Lovell was alive to see this. He would have loved it.

[The Associated Press @AP]

BREAKING: Artemis II breaks Apollo 13’s distance record as humans travel farther from Earth than ever before. https://t.co/N1lr2H6tRz

[Blue Georgia @BlueGeorgia]

Gen. Barry McCaffrey: The president sounds a little bit unhinged. Jumping from one subject to another. Anger. Attacking in the media, attacking former presidents. I've been in thousands of meetings in my life, I've never heard a group of people who are so apple-cursing, groveling in their veneration of the leader. Except possibly Kim Jong-un. It's really embarrassing.

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

We shouldn't ever forget how extraordinary this is.

[Jim Sciutto @jimsciutto]

There are four human beings orbiting the moon right now.

[Stephen Coss ☮️ @Coss1Coss]

The very worst leaders fire those who dare to push back. These are the very worst leaders. https://t.co/D1FQM0kZDo