Oxford’s word of the year gives me the ick—even our oldest educational institutions apparently cannot resist the lure of clickbait.

Let us offer our condolences to the premier of Ontario, who will not get to enjoy running unopposed a third time in the next provincial election (sometime in 2026).

Rob Reiner’s documentary about his friend, Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (2023), was a delight—as was Brooks’s inevitable chat on the WTF podcast.

I am catching up on the London Review of Books. Here’s a thoughtful passage from Geoff Mann’s recent essay regarding climate catastrophizing:

The resources people have to manage this uncertainty remain largely the same as in the past: a mixture of information and doubt, faith and fatalism. What is different is the vast expansion in the range of what is now thought possible, which is no longer bound to the patterns of the past. Communities all over the planet are falling forwards into a future for which history is probably not a useful guide. If there are limits on the range of possible futures, they will become clear only after we, or a substantial proportion of us, are gone.

As a result, the words we use to calibrate our reality seem less and less like accurate descriptions of the conditions they are supposed to name. If ‘crisis’ is so continuous a state as to be ‘normal’, what help is either term?

Lastly, and certainly apropos of nothing, may I randomly remind everyone of Christopher Hitchens’s excellent book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001).