(This is an excerpt—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
 

Luella's Ashes

But it wasn't her looks that caused some people to take to her so strongly. It was her direct, brutal honesty. There was nothing coy, roundabout, or affected about her. I sometimes called her "the digital woman"—fully on or fully off. She made no bones about whom she despised, and she despised many. But if she liked you—and she could end up loving the same person she had previously hated—there was nothing she would not do for you. She ended more than one friendship over what seemed to me a minor matter, but everyone who got to know her came to realize how loyal and generous she could be.

Thomas J. Hubschman
 

He Who Comes to Us with the Sword shall Die by the Sword

Donald Trump's escalator descent seemingly from the top of Trump Tower to announce his 2016 candidacy was likely taken directly from Hitler's descent from the clouds in Triumph of the Will. MAGA rallies often look strikingly like clumsy copies of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress as memorialized by Riefenstahl. One shudders to think what might have happened if the Republicans had found someone who paid the same painstaking attention to detail as Riefenstahl, who shot take after take to make the event fit her vision. Fortunately, while Hitler may remain popular with the Proud Boys and Madison Cawthorn, his place in the American Christian Nationalist movement has stayed sotto voce, at least this side of Tucker Carlson.

Marko Fong