A cautionary tale for those who may run. — Word leaked today that Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, will announce her candidacy for President next week. This makes Haley the second person to officially announce their candidacy for President, after the guy who was previously President and, theoretically…

Who else would it be? — This week, Marjorie Taylor Greene made her move. …

Definitely read to the end of this piece: It is not quite as it seems. — I know this might sound crazy, but hear me out: I think the United States should send tanks to Ukraine. Now, before you start calling me a warmonger, let’s think about this logically. The Ukraine is in the middle of a very tense situation with Russia, and they need all…

It’s OK to care! — The Oscar nominations came out this morning. Oscar nominations are silly because all awards shows are silly, but of all the awards shows, the Oscars are unquestionably both the silliest and the most serious. The Academy Awards may fail at this goal constantly, but they do at least try to…

Thank God. — Tonight, my beloved Illinois Fighting Illini men’s basketball team will play the Indiana Hoosiers. It’s an important game in the Big Ten standings, but the reason the game really matters is because of the history between the two teams. Indiana hates Illinois. But Illinois really hates Indiana. And the…

An interview with the author of “Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter” — I host the People Still Read Books podcast once a month, a podcast where I talk to authors about their books, their process, their fears, the excitement and terror of writing a book. (It’s also partly a way to help promote my upcoming novel The Time Has Come.) …

They focused this one on TV, not literature. — As a general rule, I don’t tend to read a lot of government reports. They’re long, they’re dull, they’re full of footnotes, I’m too busy playing Uno on my phone … lots of reasons. But I read “The 9/11 Commission Report” cover to cover. The purposefully bland cover and deceptively…

Great. — In February 2017, The Wall Street Journal, surely doing some pivoting to video, put together a clever video showing, in the wake of a brawl in the Japanese Parliament, how there were often fights in the United States Senate in the 19th Century, and how common they were in the…

An annual ranking. — This was as “normal” a movie year that we’ve had since the pandemic hit, but it still had that end-of-days vibe every movie year seems to have anymore: It strikes me as a worrisome sign that so many prestige end-of-year releases had “the power of the movies” as their explicit…