The Fortnightly Rant

You don’t become the nation’s oldest newspaper by turning up your nose at technical innovations. So, when it comes to new wrinkles, we’re old hands. We also try to live up to that old yankee creed, “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” So, to conserve scarce resources such as editorial brain power, we rely on an AI algorithm to select the topic for our Fortnightly Rant. This time around, it spit out this: “the 2024 Presidential Election.” Naturally, the first thought that sprung to mind was… Well, it wasn’t really a thought, it was more of a groan. Two …

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Well, here we are now. Sheesh. It’s like life is just a never-ending process of trying to get used to things you never imagined could ever happen. Eventually it will end, of course, but what the hell. We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, stuff—if the reader will kindly pardon the euphemism—is in fact happening. So, let’s dig in. Who’s got the manure fork? * Former President, primary front-runner, presumptive Republican nominee, and Energizer Blowhard™ Donald J. Trump was charged with 37 felonies in Miami on Tuesday. Here’s how Fox News treated the event: In case that’s hard to read—and …

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Our paper goes to press this fortnight only a few hours before the U.S. House is scheduled to take a momentous vote: whether to permit the Treasury to pay such debts as the legislature has incurred already, or to refuse and plunge the world’s economy into a chaotic maelstrom. Vote “Yes” and the world goes on about its business. Vote “No” and you unleash chaos. For most people, this would seem to be a straightforward proposition and a fairly easy choice. We are dealing with Congress, though, so it’s all a little more complicated. For one thing, chaos can be quite entertaining. It is when …

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Putting out a newspaper is, on the most basic, practical level, simply a matter of repeatedly doing a series of mundane chores. Rebecca West, one most respected writers of the 20th century, put it this way: “Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space.” Like some happy Sisyphus, tending to these repetitive, unending chores generally keeps us occupied, calm, and out of the gin mills. From time to time, though, we are nearly overwhelmed by the existential weight of our unique position: steering the most-senior news organization in the mightiest nation in history through a period of turbulence more extreme than any …

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It had been so long since there had been any good news that it came as quite a shock: Fox News had fired Tucker Carlson. There is a limit to what one might reasonably expect from the firing of a single demagogue. The Former Guy was evicted from the Oval Office more than 27 months ago. Bill O’Reilly, Carlson’s own predecessor, has been gone for six years. Yet here we are, still on the brink of a dozen different catastrophes. But what the hell—it’s a start. Let us be grateful for what we’ve been given. Maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll fade forever from public view. …

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Three good things might be said about the fortnight which just ended: 1) It’s over; 2) We won’t have to go through it again; 3) It may help clarify the nature of the power structure in our much-vaunted, supposedly democratic republic. Two statements are sufficient to sum up how most people in this country stand in relation to our justice system: they are protected by it and unrestrained; or, they are restrained by it and unprotected. At the very apex of this justice system, doing his level best to assure that it stays the way it is—or becomes even more unjust—sits Clarence Thomas, on a …

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