Cartoons Sunday!

Graham gone, Mitch in limbo. Music by Mavis and Jeffy.

Still free to subscribe to this nearly daily newsletter! Greg Mitchell is the author of fourteen books and director of five films for PBS since 2022. In a previous life, he was a longtime editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. His latest film “Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today” is now streaming everywhere via PBS.

God only knows…

Famous Twitter quote from 2016: @LindseyGrahamSC

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.

Ann Telnaes, from the archives:

David Edelstein today:

I'm guessing it's Lindsey following Mitch into the Great Beyond and not vice versa because Lindsey was a follower to the core. Or to the lack of a core.

The end of reading (but not here we hope), Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic:

I investigated what our society will look like as reading vanishes for all but the smallest sliver of Americans. The share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day has fallen by 40 percent over the past two decades. In 2022, fewer than half of all adults had read a book of any kind in the prior year. Only 38 percent had read a novel or a short story. One historian I spoke with described reading as a “niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.” And its disappearance shows no signs of slowing down.

Humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect how we think, how our elected leaders campaign and govern, what skills our culture values, and even how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.

This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. But that’s not quite right. Americans can still read. Paradoxically, they might be reading more words than ever before. People’s lives are filled with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions. But these snippets of text have crowded out the time necessary for sustained reading of complex texts. And over time, people have lost the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s post­literate.

Paul Krugman sez:

AI is clearly a major technological shock, and it may take years before we fully understand its economic and social impacts. What we do know, however, is that this technological shock is occurring in the context of a pre-existing environment of extreme wealth and political inequality. And this pre-existing condition will magnify the downsides of the AI shock.

Heather Cox Richardson warns:

On Friday a Pentagon official told Rebecca Turco of WJLA 7News in Washington, D.C., that National Guard troops will stay activated in Washington through Inauguration Day 2029 “until law and order are fully restored in our Nation’s Capital.”

“So,” Bill Kristol of The Bulwark commented. “[M]ilitary troops under the direct control of Trump and Hegseth will be on the streets of our nation’s capital for the rest of Trump’s term. The rationale—they’re here to help with a crime emergency—is laughable. But of course the real reason is ominous.”

Meanwhile, conservative lawyer and Kellyanne’s ex-, George Conway, writes: “A severely mentally ill man has control of the launch codes for America’s nuclear arsenal, but it doesn’t seem that many people care.”

Music Pick

Missed Mavis’s 87 birthday on Friday, but here we go, with one of the great songs of this century, Tweedy’s “You Are Not Alone.”

From Tune to Toons

Bennett:

Anderson:

Brodner:

Goris:

Missed this last week, a Scarry takeoff:

Day:

“Woody Guthrie and The Ghost of Tom Joad Today”

is now streaming everywhere via PBS.

Photo Finish

From my camera to you: Butterfly Bush