Planted about 70 nasturtium seeds around the backyard. I’m very late getting them into dirt, but it’s a small investment for a possibly great payoff. (If they bloom, photos to follow in the next couple of months.)
He’s certain where he’s headed it’s too late.
West Broadway glitters in a mist of rain
that amber cones of light elucidate.
He’s certain. Where he’s headed, it’s too late
to stop for flowers, dry off, or get things straight:
a story, his misshapen hat, his brain.
He’s certain where he’s headed. It’s too late.
West Broadway glitters in a mist of rain.
N.B. An example of a “triolet,” a form that’s not much in vogue these days (if ever). But I think this is an excellent, sad poem. I especially appreciate how the repeated first line changes meaning simply through varying punctuation.
Robert Pape, University of Chicago:
Iran is not a palace dictatorship resting on a handful of men. It is a state of roughly 92 million people, with governing institutions embedded across society…. Roughly one in eight Iranians works for the state or in state-linked institutions. The regime’s authority is threaded through provincial administrations, economic networks, and local security structures. Removing several dozen senior leaders — even highly placed ones — touches only a small fraction of that governing apparatus. It does not dismantle the structure; it activates it.
There are moral and legal cases against Trump’s Iran attacks. But a purely practical one is that heavy bombing doesn’t drive the other side to surrender, as history has shown again and again: The Blitz, “bombing North Vietnam back to the Stone Age,” Shock and Awe in Iraq …
Sabbaths 1979 | Wendell Berry
V
How many have relinquished
Breath, in grief or rage,
The victor and the vanquished
Named on the bitter pageAlike, or indifferently
Forgot–all that they did
Undone entirely.
The dust they stirred has hidTheir faces and their works,
Has settled, and lies still.
Nobody rests or shirks
Who must turn in time’s mill.They wind the turns of the mill
In house and field and town;
As grist is ground to meal
The grinders are ground down.
There are good arguments that Chapters 4 and 5 of P. G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith are the pinacle of English literature. For an extra treat, try the audiobook read by Jonathan Cecil.
Letters from children held in detention by the United States government in Dilley, Texas.
There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning, in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning, in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each morning, in the spoon and the chair that cry "hello there, Anne" each morning, in the godhead of the table that I set my silver, plate, cup upon each morning. All this is God, right here in my pea-green house each morning and I mean, though often forget, to give thanks, to faint down by the kitchen table in a prayer of rejoicing as the holy birds at the kitchen window peck into their marriage of seeds. So while I think of it, let me paint a thank-you on my palm for this God, this laughter of the morning, lest it go unspoken. The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard, dies young.
Michael Wear, The Dispatch, February 8, 2026,
This last decade of American politics cannot become the new standard. If it does, few of our institutions will survive… This is the danger, of course. That everything will orient around this man [Trump]. That he will succeed in making everything subject to his interests and his whims. He’s willing to do it with God, and he’s certainly willing to do it with the country. Our nation’s choice about whether to elect him is in the past, but the choice we have to make about whether we will become like him is ongoing.