Workin’ for the (Final) Weekend (of the Year) #25: NYE, LP & Eli

Plus, a grisly Rommelmann/Portland tale about a bail-fund recipient predictably murdering the mother of his children.

We made it to the end of 2022, friends! (Well, most of us did, anyway; here’s the requisite requisite playlist of those who…moved on.)  

* Speaking of people moving on, a certain former employee of Vice News went back on The Re-Education with Eli Lake (vet of episodes #52, #65, #141, #174, Special Dispatch #51, #326 & #368) to talk about the moment when Moynihan’s late friend Christopher Hitchens broke with the political left. Eagle-eared listeners will recall that S.D. #36 was a recorded 2008 conversation between Hitch and Moyn, and that this is the second time M.M. has appeared on E.L.’s joint.

* When MM went off-mic to go yell at the hired help in #388 I went on a soliloquy about making 2023 a year to go touch grass, which some of you seemed to enjoy. Here’s a Reason piece (and Paloma Media read) from me expanding on the idea. Speaking of Paloma, we’re winding that down as a regularly updated website; note (of gratitude!) from me about it here.

* In that prior link you will find reference to just a harrowing piece this week in the Washington Examiner from our great pal Nancy Rommelmann (#79, #198, #203), called “A Murder in Portland: How bail reform has enabled crime and chaos.” Over at Nancy’s always-taking-new-subscribers Substack, there’s a companion piece titled “The Reality Portland Does Not Want to See.” Must-read stuff for those interested in criminal justice, the 2020 riots, media, the stubborn clinging to narratives, and so forth.

* More credit (and links) where they’re due. From The New York Times, “Caught on Camera, Traced on Camera: The Russian Military Unit That Killed Dozens in Bucha,” and from the Washington Post, “Inside the Ukrainian counteroffensive that shocked Putin and reshaped the war.” And since I mentioned it in both previous episodes, here’s a link to George Will’s, “How Russia's invasion of Ukraine altered the world in 2022.”

* More good work this week from a beloved Fifster—Ben Dreyfuss (#83, #97, #148, #214, Members Only #129, M.O. #140) has a fine essay titled, “Romanian Cops Did Not Find Andrew Tate Because Of His Greta Thunberg Video: This is a lesson in media failure and misinformation.” I particularly enjoyed this passage:

And by the time someone in Romania publishes a story about what actually happened, this rampant unfounded speculation has already been repeated endlessly on the other side of the world. And it will inspire memes and arguments. To be fluent in the culture war you’ll have to be fluent in the fiction. And one day when you’re old and aged and grey, it will come up somehow and you’ll google it and find out it wasn’t true and think “huh” and then as the light dims out and you shuffle off this mortal coil you’ll wonder “I wonder what else I was wrong about” and then you’ll die 

* Related, somehow: Ethan Strauss’s “An Uncontroversial Guide to Being Controversial,” and Jesse Singal’s “How To Be A “Heterodox” (Or Whatever) Progressive Without Going Crazy.”

* Another link to another reference (whose names I bungled): The book is called Trump’s Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East, and it’s by Barak Ravid. Who, I can testify, is no, uh, right-winger. (Thanks Yael!)

* Someone mentioned, and listeners keep bringing up, the ever-elusive, ever-amazing community-generated Google doc of our various book recommendations and cultural references during the past 6.7 years of podcasting. Here ‘tis!

* As mentioned in #388, I am cursed with having written more about third-party politics than most people with any claim on being sane. Which means I’ve got a lot of built-in well ASKshuallys to fire off whenever the subject of, say, the past decade of the Libertarian Party comes up. For a not-too-dated piece that synthesizes some of that knowledge, while giving some context for the Mises Caucus “takeover” of the L.P., try “Can a Post-'Takeover' Libertarian Party Improve on Its Historical Run of 2012–20?”

OK jeez is this any kind of way to spend New Year’s Eve? I could be asleep, dammit! Here’s a send-off song (with clips from the movie it prominently features in) that potentially explains, among many other psychological defects, my terror of New Year’s Eve, cruise ships, the ocean, Shelley Winters, and harpsichords, not necessarily in that order.