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Trump hosts $100,000-per-person Bedminster fundraiser to help Giuliani pay legal bills

Former President Donald Trump hosted a $100,000-a-plate fundraiser for disgraced former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club Thursday night as Giuliani struggles to pay his mounting legal bills.

Democratic official changes dismantle-the-police tune after vicious attack, carjacking

A Democratic official who called for dismantling the police at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests was singing a different tune after being carjacked and viciously beaten in her driveway in front of her children.

Reviewed: The Syriac World: In Search of a Forgotten Christianity by Francoise Briquel Chatonnet and Muriel Debie

A few years ago, I was in Paris and bought three books in French. Given my mediocre ability to read that language, it was overly ambitious. One of the books has remained unopened since, a second one started but unfinished. I had finished reading the third book, however, by the time I left Paris. It was well worth the struggle through the language of Voltaire, and it remains one of the best books I’ve ever read. Thankfully, that book, The Syriac World by Francoise Briquel Chatonnet and Muriel Debie, originally published in French in 2017, is now available in English translation.

Review: The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life by Clare Carlisle

“Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest,” George Eliot writes in Romola, a novel that presents marriage as the latter and charts the eponymous heroine’s efforts to escape a domineering husband. “Marriage is a state of higher duties,” the young Dorothea Brooke says in Middlemarch. “I never thought of it as mere personal ease.” Her marriage to the musty, dusty, cold-hearted scholar Casaubon, “a dried bookworm towards fifty,” turns out to be a trial. If only she had listened to her uncle, who declares marriage to be a “noose.” Gwendolen Harleth, in Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, feels a similar constriction in her marriage, imagining not a noose around her neck but rather the “throttling fingers” of her tyrannical husband Henleigh Grandcourt. In Eliot’s 1859 novella The Lifted Veil, love curdles into loathing for Latimer and Bertha, and their marriage becomes such an ordeal that she ends up conspiring with her maid to poison him.

Save the IRS!

The history of government is the story of bureaucracy. From temples, grain stores, and cuneiform tablets to ministries, standing armies, and the IRS website, the grasp of a government has been shaped by the reach of its bureaucracy. Any change in the nature of the bureaucracy will alter the capacity of the government. This will then alter the relationship between the government and its subjects and, if the bureaucratic changes and their effects are significant enough, the form of government and the nature of society.

The Middle Kingdom meets the Middle East

The U.S. seems aware, if belatedly, that it is losing ground in the Middle East to Beijing.

We don’t want to live in an angry veteran of a country

Lately, I’ve wondered if America has a national anger problem.

The immortal John McPhee basks in his mortality

Part of the fun is discovering that one of America's demigods of postwar nonfiction had any limits to his craft.

The many meanings of ‘I don’t know’

If you don’t know the answer, it’s perfectly acceptable to say so. It’s also kind of fun to just make something up.

Noem says she would be Trump’s running mate ‘in a heartbeat’

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem said Thursday she would be former President Trump’s 2024 running mate “in a heartbeat." “Oh, absolutely,” Noem said on Newsmax, when asked whether she would consider a theoretical offer from Trump to run as his vice president. “I would in a heartbeat.” “Just because you respect the position and the...

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