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not to be confused with East Baton Rouge, Eric Buell Racing, the Turkish art of paper marbling, etc

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@MeghanEMurphy In Michigan when husbands tease their wives about visiting a “secret Canadian family” that just means he is going hunting or fishing for the weekend. Almost no one actually does it. Do Canadians joke about secret American families?🤷‍♀️

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@IonaItalia Relevant

[Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌 @Chris_arnade]

When I was on Wall Street we had a customer, an odd little Argentinian man, who ran a highly endowed fund out of a single grubby office in Lima, that was about as shady as possible, probably running Venezuelan money, but he was given the green light by compliance, and was a cash machine because he was immune to price, and when he came to NYC I was tasked with entertaining him because he was a nerd, Jewish, and from Latin America, and they thought I fit since my dad was Jewish, from Latin America, and I was a nerd, so why not.

But all he wanted to do was go to J&R, buy the latest computer equipment and model kits, then dinner in the same Argentinian steak house, and catch a Broadway show on the weekends to collect autographs on the playbill, which I left him alone for because his tastes were for flamboyant musicals.

He was excruciating to talk to, beyond for a few minutes, a combination of eccentric, affectless, and tedious, once spending an entire meal detailing the history of sidewalk design in Latin America without any sense of humor about it being a weird thing to talk about.

Then one dinner we were accompanied by an annoyingly chipper junior salesperson, who desperate for conversation, made a small joke about the Falklands War.

This odd little man put down his Coke (served lukewarm at his request) and then said, blankly, "I was there." The junior salesperson, straight from a business school that had taught him to always stay positive, you know, so you could close the deal, said, "Wow. What was that like?" and then the odd little man went on a horrifying twenty minute soliloquy, again spoken flatly, about being drafted at the age of eighteen, sent to the front with little to no training and no proper gear, to sit for a few weeks, cold, wet, and hungry, stationed in a forward outpost, while bombs constantly dropped around and on them, always in terror of a British Gurkha charge, and being knifed to death (any death but that), a few taking shrapnel hits, which festered because medical attention was so slow, before early one morning, the bombs stopped, and dark figures swarmed across the field, and bullets started whizzing over them.

They all surrendered, happily, with only one guy being nicked by a bullet when he thought of running, and when this odd little man finally got back to Argentina months later, he was treated badly, and called all sorts of nasty names.

After he finished, the salesperson, smile still intact, said, "Well, I guess that'll make anyone anti-war!" at which point he responded, again mechanically, "I collect and build models from the war," and pulled out his phone and showed photos of a replica of the HMS Intrepid, a British ship from the war, that he had built.

[Mary Harrington @moveincircles]

In the same way as we teach little children about refraining from using their "outdoor voice" inside the house, we need to be more deliberate about teaching the psychologically incontinent not to post their "inside thoughts" on the internet

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@meghan_daum https://t.co/iYNmp2yOOA

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@TheAnnaGat Can I add an author to your reading list? Alfred Hayes. He was a mid century novelist who everyone forgot about for a few decades until the New York Review of Books republished his work

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@TheAnnaGat What was the last book you read that made you feel your mind was lit by fire?

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@meghan_daum If he dies before august 3, that would trigger a snap special election to fill the seat

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@evanwch Were you a staffer who went rogue, or were you outside that clique?

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@Leigh_Phillips When Theodore Roosevelt was traveling as a cowboy in the late 19th century mountain west, cowboys & rough necks were reading Shakespeare

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@DavidBe31099196 A good sign that the culture war is over is when movies & theatre passes through a "restoration drama" phase: lots of witty banter and vulgar sex comedy. Not happened yet ☹️

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@moveincircles Can you post your assigned reading list? Also looking forward to your new book!

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@blakeleynixon @clairlemon So you’ve read Homer? Name all the ships 😂

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Asians imagine American folk art

[Look at my shining eyes @GothicOrnate]

America's Founding Story

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@nyttypos @AndrewMarchand @TheAthletic @danshanoff Thank you. This is the sort of error I would have made.

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@katrosenfield @BovyMaltz You live in New England yah? How common is this downwardly mobile aesthetic? He had the sort of prep school education that should have launched him into a great university, instead he just sort of failed through life, and then into a senate nomination

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@pensandpoison Either Marlowe, Ben Johnson, or Alexander Pope (I forget which) Not about to cheat either. Was I close?

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@katrosenfield Pains me to say it, but if the electorate is in a “throw the bums out” mood, the scandal will have no effect

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@jk_rowling Come to Florida! 😀

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@JamesWHankins1 Leo Strauss argued that T was not so much vindicated as his argument was not refuted & quietly allowed to stand. I dunno if I buy that argument. Glaucon certainly ends the dialogue as a follower of Socrates, not T.

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@antoniogm Until 1868 Germany was called “the Germanys” and sometime around 1800 Spain was called “the Spains” The UK posh accent developed around 1870; the Australian accent around 1820