Emily St. James

OPINION: I asked a former Trump official to justify this war

So the case for Congress is, once we have gone to war, if they don’t like it, they can remove the money? Congress does not have a constitutional role in the declaration of war. Congress has a role in cutting off funds for wars, which it has threatened to do. And the president doesn’t have to get permission. But yes, you can debate, you can decide. That’s his choice in how he wants to do it. I mean, here I will quote the Constitution: “The Congress shall have power to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water.”

Behold the intellectual might of the conservative legal movement

I often think about the sequence where we're in a rollicking club right before an air raid, followed by thieves pilfering the jewelry off the many dead bodies in it after it is bombed. I think it gets at something profound about how easily a life can be snuffed out and how rarely we consider that.

I love Tati, but my wife once fell asleep in a screening of Playtime (in her defense, she had been up for, like, 22 hours before that), so I am voting McQueen FOR HER.

That said: I seem to be one of the few who really loved Blitz, but I did!

Tontines require less infrastructural lift, so definitely the former.

They're a pretty fun idea that has the unfortunate consequence of gamifying murder in many ways.

If we really tried, I'll bet we could get Trump to make tontines legal again.

I really wanted to like all those shows and frequently did like Glee and AHS!

Thank you!! Those were some of my favorite critical writing I've done.

goddamn is this a breath of fresh air after Allred 2024

Long-time buddies Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were out for a pleasant van drive in Oklahoma when, all of a sudden, their lives would change.

Very excited to read Lily on this show!!

(I am also very curious why we are discoursing about this.)

Not every critic is this way, but I hated writing negative reviews and got little pleasure in them. I knew it was time to hang it up when I could feel myself getting a little too mean.

When people say Lynchian or whatever it's always the strobe lights and the surrealism and the whooshing ambient dread, and never that scene in Twin Peaks when Ben and Jerry excitedly eat too much bread and deliver their dialogue through gobs of gluten

I sometimes worry that too many people think being a good critic means being a self-righteous dick about every little thing and I think far too many miss the point that you can't critique anything if you don't know how to love something.

My guess is it’s randomized because that was not my experience

Yes, I wouldn’t doubt that you could train AI to make plausible ersatz Cormac McCarthy that would fool most readers. But if you gave AI the sum of human literature up until McCarthy’s first novel, it would never spontaneously create his style.

So many people catching strays off something aimed only at me.

I realize this is designed to drive me, specifically, insane, but AI models can do reasonable pastiche of any given writer or style of writing, and the problem becomes more obvious cumulatively. Thus, I'm not sure what the point of a quiz like this is*.

*-it is to drive me, specifically, insane.

Obviously they're not the same person but I do feel like the trans attack ad stuff might roll off of Talarico in a similar way to how it rolled off of Zohran, because I think that both are able to stay on message and already talk to people like real people instead of like consultants

Guess What Moderate Democratic Voters Aren’t Anymore? Moderate. Two new polls suggest that moderate Democrats, too, want higher taxes on the rich and some measure of economic populism. Moderate isn’t what it was in 1992.

Moderate Democrats with columns in newspapers are constantly saying the Democratic Party is way too liberal on "social" issues. Moderate Democratic voters in real life do not feel this way. With some polling data from @gelliottmorris.com and @dataforprogress.org. newrepublic.com/article/2074...

Rambaldi's ultimate goal was to achieve immortality

I know that 13 Going on 30 is now the thing people know Jennifer Garner for, but for me, it's always been "I WOULD HAVE WAITED."

I forgot Vaughn "died" in the final season. Or that Sydney had a half-sister?

let's remember some Alias plotlines

Child, out of nowhere: "Oh dammit, I'm having trouble writing my book."

I am quite nearly done with my huge pile of deadlines (thank goodness), and I want to clear out my brain when the time comes. I am far too poorly versed in poetry, so please recommend me some great poetry to read, especially stuff published this century!

Life Aquatic is my favorite, and not a lot of people would say that. So.