“Shorts” is an annual feature found here on my Home page. Admittedly, I didn’t make much use of it last year. Maybe this year I’ll have more time for it. This page is set aside for sharing (sans commentary) brief excerpts — probably, just a sentence or two — from things I’ve read recently, or in the past. Check back, periodically, for new material. It’s that simple.
(43) “Is the world about to be overrun by trans mice? Not if congresswoman Nancy Mace has anything to do with it” (Mahdawi, Arwa. The Guardian, June 24, 2026)
Republicans rarely admit when they’re wrong, so I suspect that the more pushback Mace gets on her trans mice bill, the more she’ll dig her high heels in. Perhaps as her next act she’ll be demanding federal investigations into transmission fluid and transatlantic flights. Or maybe she’ll go beyond rodentity politics and take a deeper look at the animal kingdom. I’ve heard that male seahorses give birth and a group of lions is called a pride — which all sounds a bit gay to me. Quick, someone get Nancy Mace on the case.
(42) “The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes / In the age of A.I., Hany Farid is struggling to prove what’s real before the internet decides for itself.” (Saslow, Eli. New York Times, June 14, 2026)
“I miss the days when it was a grainy video of a shark swimming up the street,” Farid said one night, as he sat on the back deck of his house with his wife, Emily Cooper. He put down his phone and poured a whisky. “The technology is getting so good. It takes me to a dark place.”
“Because you can’t tell just by looking anymore?” Cooper asked.
Because nobody can,” Farid said. “I don’t trust anything. Every image I see, I’m drawing lines for shadows and doing geometry in my head, trying to figure out what I’m looking at. It’s over. Within a year or two, our whole visual system will be utterly useless.”
“And what then? You give up? You retire?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
(41) “At first, the idea does sound crazy’: meet the scientists trying to refreeze the Arctic / Sea ice is melting fast, worsening the climate crisis, but a bold attempt to rethicken it is showing early signs of success” (The Guardian, June 16, 2026)
Geoengineering is controversial, and a significant number of polar scientists are opposed to the idea of sea ice thickening: they published a critique in September arguing that it was unfeasible, would be “environmentally dangerous” and posed a dangerous distraction to the core climate need to cut carbon emissions rapidly.
(40) “He’s Ringo. And Nobody Else Is. / As he turns 85, one of the last surviving Beatles is still musically curious, dispensing his signature wisdom, and preaching the gospel of peace and love.” (New York Times, July 6, 2025)
Young Richie suffered two major illnesses: first, at 6, a bout of peritonitis so severe it put him in a children’s hospital for a year, and then, at 13, a case of tuberculosis that required a two-year convalescence in a Merseyside sanitarium. At one point, a music teacher came around with tambourines, triangles and small drums for the bored, bedridden children to play.
“It was like a craziness,” Starr once said of this eureka moment. “I hit the drum and I only wanted from that moment to be a drummer, and that was what my aim was.”
(39) “Gene Shalit, 100, the Witty and Incorrigible NBC Film Critic and ‘Today’ Fixture (New York Times, June 14, 2026) Obituary
His producer, Guy Ludwig, reflecting on Mr. Shalit’s long career in 2010, recalled seeing Mr. Shalit, late in his career, entering a theater for a screening with a look of glee on his face.
“My God, how could you?” he said. “You’ve seen two million movies.”
“Yeah,” Mr. Shalit replied, “but I’ve never seen this one!”
(38) “Planet Ooze” (The New York Review of Books, April 10, 2025) Jonathan Mingle reviews Dan Egan’s The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance
Soon after the Battle of Waterloo the British dug up their own fallen soldiers’ phosphorus-rich bones, shipped them home, then heated and ground them up as fertilizer to grow food for the living.
(37) ” ‘The Red and the Green’ ” (The New York Review of Books, July 24, 2025) Casey A. Williams reviews: Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto; Matthew T. Huber’s Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet; Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
Slow Down‘s principle weakness, shared with many degrowth proposals, is that it spends too little time spelling out what such a radically different system would look like, how it would work, and what it would take to move from today’s deeply entrenched global capitalism to something like its opposite.
(36) “Where the Wild Things Are / An engaging, lyrical biography explores the life of the famed naturalist George Schaller.” (New York Times, June 7, 2026) Gary Rosen reviews Miriam Horn’s Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller
But as Horn makes clear, despite her subject’s voluminous bibliography and more than 20,000 pages of accumulated field notes, the awkward, taciturn Schaller remains for her something of an “opaque creature,” not unlike those whose lives he devoted himself to understanding.
(35) “How much does Sean Penn hate selfies? Enough to invoke the Holocaust” (The Guardian, June 8, 2026)
“The Holocaust grandmother and her six-year-old paraplegic wheeling over? It’s a hard no.”
(34) “The Interview / Scott Pelley on the Bari Weiss Era and His Last Days at ’60 Minutes’ ” (New York Times, June 7, 2026)
Question: Do you think Bari Weiss needs to be removed?
Pelley: Oh, gosh, yes. (. . .)
(33) “Anthropic calls for pause of global AI development” (Agence France-Presse, June 5, 2026)
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic suggested Thursday a global pause on building the most powerful AI systems as the latest models are beginning to show signs they could escape human control.
(. . .)
The proposal would face an uphill battle in Washington and Silicon Valley, where US officials and tech executives have repeatedly argued that any slowdown in AI development risks handing China a decisive strategic edge in what many see as the defining technology race of the century.
(32) “I Tried to Sell My House With a Chatbot / Over five frantic days, I gambled my family’s life savings on a hunch that A.I. could outperform a real estate agent” (New York Times, May 32, 2026)
As a technology journalist, I had watched artificial intelligence transform medicine, business and even warfare. But I didn’t know how it would function in the far more intricate world of Hudson Valley real estate.
(31) “How to Get a Pardon in Trump’s Washington / Fast-talking lawyers and lobbyists promise to get white-collar criminals out of jail — for a fee.” (New York Times, May 22, 2026)
According to a computation by Oyer, the former pardon attorney, Trump in his second term has already collectively given his clemency recipients as much as $1.5 billion in relief from restitution and fines. (By contrast, Biden’s acts of clemency over four years forgave less than $700,000 in potential penalties.)
(30) “Raise a Glass to Freedom / A new history illuminates the pervasive role that alcohol played throughout the colonial era.” (New York Times, May 31, 2026) J. D. Biersdorfer reviews Brooke Barbier’s Cocked and Boozy: An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution
And listen closely: Every time “The Star-Spangled Banner” plays, you can hear echoes of the country’s drinking DNA. That’s because Francis Scott Key paired his 1814 lyrics with a tune called “To Anacreon in Heaven” — an old British club ditty praising the god of wine.
(29) “Almost Heaven / Jayne Anne Phillips, a Pulitzer-winning novelist, remembers her West Virginia childhood as a bittersweet triumph. (New York Times, May 24, 2026) Sigrid Nunez reviews Jayne Anne Phillips’s Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir
That part of rural Appalachia “was beautiful then,” she recalls wistfully; now a “paradise lost” — to industrialization, mountaintop removal mining and fracking.
(28) “US justice department ‘forever’ bars IRS from auditing Trump’s past tax returns / Addendum quietly slipped into widely criticized agreement creating a $1.7bn fund to compensate president’s allies” (The Guardian, May 19, 2026)
The fund will be run by five people — all subject to be fired at will by the president — and does not have to make public who it awarded money to or its reason for doing so.
(27) “How Corrupt Is Trump? Here Are the Numbers / He’s the swampiest swamp creature ever.” (The Bulwark .com, May 18, 2026)
As the judge in the IRS case observed, Trump was sitting on both sides of the table, and thus there is no actual case, just an undisguised attempt to loot taxpayers. She asked for briefs on this question due by May 20. Rushing to beat the deadline in which sanity might prevail, the administration announced that a deal is in the works to avoid the court altogether and hand Trump $1.7 billion in taxpayer dollars for a gargantuan slush fund. Under the terms of the deal (…).
(26) “Translating Shakespeare? This Be Madness — Or Is It? / The translator Daniel Hahn makes the case that Shakespeare can be appreciated ‘even if we don’t hear a single one of his words.’ ” (New York Times, Apr. 25, 2026) John McWhorter reviews Daniel Hahn’s IF This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation
As Hahn notes, “Meanings that would have been clear to a Globe audience four centuries ago, and that have faded into obscurity (because our English is no longer Shakespeare’s), are now clear again in Ukrainian or Korean.” An American linguist friend of mine once admitted to me that the first time he really understood a Shakespeare play was when he watched it in French (…).
(25) “America the Undammed / More miles of the country’s rivers were reconnected last year thanks to dam removals than at any other time in history” (New York Times, May 7, 2026)
Lowhead dams, which are designed to have water flow over them, create a recirculating current downstream that can trap people and debris. They are known as “drowning machines” and have caused nearly 800 reported fatalities.
(24) “Mommie Dearest” (New York Review of Books, May 28, 2026)
“It’s remarkable, really,” wrote Lorna Luft in her own memoir, Me and My Shadows (1998), “how much of our life begins before we’re even born.”
(23) “Why So Few Babies? We May Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.” (New York Times, May 7, 2026) Anna Louie Sussman is a NYT contributing Opinion writer and author of the forthcoming book: Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty
Beyond paid leave (or universal health insurance, for that matter), she yearns for something deeper: a sense of security, something that she has yet to experience in America in her adult lifetime. “I feel like there’d have to be, I want to say a revolution, but basically big political change, like a moral awakening from everyone,” she said.
(22) “A Look Inside the Case That Enshrined Political Power for Billionaires” (New York Times, May 10, 2026)
Independent expenditures by wealthy outsiders for the first time in history exceeded what the candidates’ own campaign committees spent, a New York Times analysis showed. Mr. Koch’s brother Charles was among 300 billionaires and their families who accounted for 19 percent of all contributions in federal elections, either directly or through affiliated groups.
(. . .)
But it was Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who officially spent about $300 million on a single candidate, Mr. Trump — not counting the “dark money” donations that the Supreme Court’s later decisions did not require him to disclose. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election,” Mr. Musk boasted.
(21) “He’s a U.S. Citizen and Combat Veteran. ICE Tear-Gassed, Jailed, and Falsely Accused Him. / ‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ George Retes, a U.S. citizen imprisoned for three days, tells Reason.” (Reason magazine, June 2026 issue)
But a new practice was emerging. By October 2025, ProPublica had identified at least 170 Americans who’d been detained, sometimes violently, and held by immigration agents. (The full number is unknown, since the federal government doesn’t collect data on how many U.S. citizens are detained during immigration enforcement.) One citizen, arrested twice by immigration agents in Alabama, says that officers called his REAL ID fake. A woman in Los Angeles was tackled to the ground when her mother dropped her off for work near an immigration sting.
(20) “First, the F.B.I. Searched Her Home. Then, She Won a Pulitzer.” (New York Times, May 5, 2026)
In one of the articles submitted for the Pulitzer Prize, a first-person essay, Ms. Natanson wrote that she had amassed 1,169 current and former government sources after sharing her contact information online.
(19) “This Bitter Earth” (The New York Review of Books, Rosa Lyster. May 14, 2026. This is a review of Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, Caroline Tracey is the author.)
Perhaps most significantly, their disappearance indicates that things have gone seriously wrong. (. . .) As Tracy observes, “When the strange, hidden salt lakes start dying, it means entire ecosystems are in bad shape.” The speed at which they are shrinking is a very loud warning about unsustainable water use. Think of salt lakes as the canary in the coal mine, or the alarm that goes off when a nuclear reactor starts melting down. Keeping watch over what is happening to these places is a good way of keeping watch over everything else.
(18) “Charlatans & Bores” (The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2026)
In Lucian’s (. . .) Lapiths, a second-century satire about prominent philosophers brawling at a wedding dinner, Zenothemis the Stoic yelps when he loses an eye and has to be reminded that he isn’t supposed to care.
(17) “The Right Amount of Crazy” (The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2026)
. . . the only evidence that Trump might not be crazy is his obvious determination to seem so.
(. . .)
. . . He smiled playfully. “Do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet?” he asked, looking at each of us one by one. We all looked blank. “Just the right amount of crazy,” he said.
(16) “Traders placed over $1bn in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war. What is going on?” (The Guardian, Apr. 18, 2026)
Sixteen bets made $100,000 each accurately predicting the timing of the US airstrikes against Iran on 27 February. Later, a single user would make over $550,000 after betting that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would topple, just moments before his assassination by Israeli forces. On 7 April, right before Donald Trump announced a temporary ceasefire with Iran, traders bet $950m that oil prices would come down. They did.
(15) “Better by Design / Avoiding undesirable traits from the start could help chemists make molecules less meddlesome” (Science News, Mar. 26, 2011)
. . . a new analysis, reported online January 14 in Environmental Health Perspectives, finds that the blood and urine of 99 percent of pregnant American women tested contain a laundry list of chemical interlopers, including various PCBs, pesticides, PFCs, PBDEs, phthalates and the rocket-fuel ingredient perchlorate.
(. . .)
Currently more than 30 million metric tons of chemicals are produced in or imported to the United States each day, a quantity that would fill a line of tanker trucks 10,000 miles long. And industrial chemical production is expected to double in the next quarter century . . .
(. . .)
“Chemists are never trained to even think about what the consequences of a molecule might be,” Voutchkova says. “We aren’t trained to understand what the connection between structure, properties and biological effects might be — that’s alarming to me.”
(14) “Rice’s whales existed before humans. Now Trump could make them extinct / The US has invoked national security to remove protections for the endangered cetacean, of which only about 50 are left” (The Guardian, Apr. 5, 2026)
“Nothing surprises me with this administration but if I was still capable of shock, this would do it,” said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law expert at the Vermont Law School.
(13) “Only seven countries worldwide meet WHO dirty air guidelines, study shows” (The Guardian, Mar. 11, 2025)
Nearly every country on Earth has dirtier air than doctors recommend breathing, a report has found.
(12) “Toothpaste widely contaminated with lead and other metals, US research finds” (The Guardian, Apr. 17, 2025)
About 90% of toothpastes contained lead, 65% contained arsenic, just under half contained mercury, and one-third had cadmium.
(11) “A.I.’s Prophet of Doom Wants to Shut It All Down” (New York Times, September 12, 2025)
“To have the world turn back from superintelligent A.I., and we get to not die in the immediate future. That’s all I presently want out of life.” — Eliezer Yudkowsky
(10) Should your therapy session be outdoors? More Therapists are trying it.” (Washington Post, Feb. 17, 2026)
She said they made more progress in one session outside than they had in two years meeting in her office.
(9) “Hillary Clinton accused Republicans of ‘fishing expedition’ in Epstein testimony” (The Guardian, Feb. 26, 2026)
“If this committee is serious about learning the truth about Epstein’s trafficking crimes, it would (…) get answers from our current president on his involvement; it would ask him directly under oath about the tens of thousands of times he shows up in the Epstein files.” — Hillary Clinton
(8) “Plantation weddings and pre-civil war fashion: the film that critiques the historical fantasy of Natchez” (The Guardian, Feb. 14, 2026)
“One can walk through history during these tours without ever having to live with its consequences. As one tourist remarks while sipping drinks on a mansion’s porch, the pilgrimage offers a way to escape the present, to ‘pick and choose’ what to think about. [The documentary’s director, Suzannah] Herbert frames this not as naivety but as a philosophy of selective memory, a white nostalgia that functions as retreat and refusal at the same time.”
(7) “Bill Maher Issues Blunt Response to Gavin Newsom ‘Trolling’ Donald Trump” (TV Insider, August 23, 2025)
“I feel like Gavin has grasped the essential thing about American culture in this day and age. Don’t try to outsmart people. You have to outstupid them.” — Bill Maher
(6) “In Smithsonian Role, John Roberts Encounters History, Pandas and Trump” (New York Times, July 27, 2025)
In speeches, the chief justice often tells an anecdote about how he had wanted to become a historian, but changed his mind after a taxi driver told him that he, too, had been a history major at Harvard.
(5) “Flesh by David Szalay review — brilliantly spare portrait of a man” (The Guardian, Mar. 6, 2025)
In Flesh, Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat.
(4) “Manta man: film profiles unlikely bond between diver and giant sea creature” (The Guardian, June 8, 2025)
(. . .) mantas can recognize themselves in a mirror, demonstrating a rare sign of self-awareness.
(3) “The pet I’ll never forget: Stevie, the chicken who joined my dog pack” (The Guardian, Feb., 23, 2026)
“I still visit her from time to time, she remembers me just like a puppy would.”
(2) “Florida teacher loses job for calling student by preferred name” (Washington Post, Apr. 10, 2025)
“Not only is this a direct attack on educators who support trans students, but it also is an indicator of the bureaucratic overreach of antitransgender policy. A teacher could potentially be fired for calling a student Tim instead of Timothy.”
(1) “White Rural Rage review: Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ jibe at book length” (The Guardian, Apr. 7, 2024)
By 2040, 70% of Americans will reside in the 15 most populous states and choose 30 of the 100 US senators, . . .