A tribute to the well-tempered Tweet. (Dirt)
“When Pelosi paused to take a breath, Obama asked, ‘So does that mean you’re with me?’ The Speaker ‘impatiently’ replied, ‘Well, that’s not even a question, Mr. President. We’ve come too far to give up now.’” (Amy Davidson Sorkin/The New Yorker)
“No pilgrimage is complete without a visit to the CBGB bathroom. (Shrieks of horror.) Steel yourself. Vintage photographs, no matter how vivid, are unable to do justice to the stark depravity of the CBGB toilet resting on a raised platform, like a satanic throne.” (James Wolcott)
“Even before this week, Swifties were demanding that the Justice Department break up Ticketmaster, after the website to sign up for the presale crashed. It was even part of President Biden’s pre-election announcement that his administration would take on ‘junk fees’ attached to consumer products. A 2018 GAO report found that Ticketmaster fees add about 27 percent to the face value of a ticket on average, and represent half of Live Nation’s total revenue.” (Jarod Facundo)
“In November, writers began making little pilgrimages from New York City to Hudson to see Joan Didion’s things.” (Paris Review)
“Congressional Democrats are now the first line of defense for the Biden administration. And they will have a series of consequential decisions to make about which personnel they appoint to serve on Republican-led committees. The Biden administration’s best chance of weathering these politically charged probes may come down to Democrats’ willingness to buck tradition and ignore seniority, as they did when Issa became chair a decade ago.” (Kurt Bardella/The Atlantic)
“For Fox, that means all eyes are on Black Friday, Nov. 25, in what is shaping up to be the biggest match of the first round (at least for English-language viewers), when the U.S. takes on England.” (Alex Weprin/THR)
“In his introduction to The Paris Diary, Robert Phelps reaches even higher, drawing on comparisons with everyone from Whitman to Poe, before describing the author as a ‘social climber’ and ‘earnest narcissist”—as wells as ‘an intellectual, a hero-worshiper, an excessive drinker of alcohol, and a lover,’ whose daily jottings were ‘better written, more aptly observed, less fearfully self-guarding” than other first-person chronicles of its time.’” (Ted Gioia/Substack)
A Flabbergasting Update of Carroll v Trump (E Jean Carroll)