“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.
(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, …“