I will give JD Vance some credit: He hasn’t asked what Amy Acton was wearing around her stepfather as a fifth grader. At least not in public. At least not yet. Share At a Cincinnati event about combatting fraud—already a surreal situation—a reporter asked the Vice President whether he thought Vivek Ramaswamy’s...

After the first 2026 U.S. House debate, I went to a lovely dinner with my wife and some friends. I was ready for a good night’s sleep, but my digestive system rebelled. The acid reflux was so bad that my wife, Kelli, thought I might be having a heart attack. When I assured her that it was only heartburn from Hell...

I was the first to give a one-minute opening statement. There was no clock. When the moderator made some sort of sound, I stopped. He said, “Sorry.” I started again, finished a sentence, but left one sentence unsaid. Should have put my thank yous at the end. At one point, a candidate said, “If you’re brown, you’re...

Not one of Kelli’s cats. I owe you an apology, especially if you are a paid subscriber. I have not been nearly as prolific as I should have been over the past few months or handful of months or half a dozen months. Time sometimes warps on the campaign trail. This time around I’ve had a couple instances of...

In case you wondered who most influenced Trygve’s writing. (Video at end) They are not my cats. I know that regular readers of this newsletter (blog?, column?) frequently see some version of “my wife and her cats” or “my wife’s cats.” There is more than a little gray area in our cat situation, and that’s not even...

I was ten years old the first time I remember being interested in politics. Early, I know. I was watching a CBS news program, with my parents, in the fall of 1994, at the height of election campaigns when a puff piece about politicians’ commercials came on. The topic: politicians wearing flannel shirts. Growing up...

The image below is from a CSIS report, “Left-Wing Terrorism and Political Violence in the United States: What the Data Tells Us” “If you look at two photographs and you see a normal American in the street and you see an Antifa protest, why do the people that are violently demonstrating – why is there not one...

If there were a National Museum of China, Glassware, and Crystal in Washington, DC, it would be on most of our minds about as often as we wondered who was the ninth-ranked badminton player in the world (Yu-Yu Ong, Taiwan) or whether there had always been an n in badminton and why we Americans hadn’t removed it as we...

In 1928, Trygve Hammer, a Norwegian immigrant skilled with a hammer and chisel, carved a stone relief of Theodore Roosevelt into a giant block of Indiana limestone. He flanked Roosevelt’s image with two life-sized limestone bears. On the opposite side of the monument, Hammer chiseled images of bison, moose, elk, and...

Sharia law was not on my candidate-forum bingo card. I thought that particular bogeyman had been knocked off the list of frightening things to think about while voting. When I heard it mentioned in a right-wing podcast last week, I thought, “These guys are a decade behind the times.” But during the social hour...

On a Wednesday night in September of 1989, Carl Sagan delivered a lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy. I should have paid better attention, but it was a mandatory event and thus a guaranteed snooze-fest. Sagan’s speech was that year’s iteration of the James Forrestal Lecture series. Today, the Forrestal lectures are...