“In life there are two tragedies,” Oscar Wilde once said. “One is not getting what one wants. The other is getting it.” The second tragedy was what I saw last night at the Kennedy Center Honors.
For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with the Kennedy Center Honors, a strange, D.C.
“Writing a play,” Tom Stoppard told an interviewer in 1977, “is like smashing that ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start—or at least I start—with the rubble.”
In life, of course, this kind of reversal is impossible. As the physicist Valentine Coverley puts it in Stoppard’s masterpiece Arcadia, “You can’t run the film backwards. Heat was the first thing which didn’t work that way.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wants us to return to the golden age of air travel, when nobody got into a punching match for reclining a seat into someone else’s lap. He says this golden age starts with us, and he has a whole campaign prepared! I assume it will involve more humane accommodations for travelers—or less harrowing working conditions for the flight attendants charged with both crowd control and safety. Or modernizing air-traffic control to make it safer and more efficient.
Yes, it’s true—DOGE “doesn’t exist” anymore. But we would never dream of letting it evaporate without an exit interview. DOGE: It’s your turn to send us a pointless, time-consuming email explaining what exactly it was that you did here.
Dear America,
How to begin to recount our monumental achievements? Never have so few done so much to so many.
A few highlights …
We were willing to be vulnerable.
Women are ruining the workplace. Before women, of course, the workplace was perfect. It was full of trees. There was no need to labor with your hands. You didn’t have to wear pants, or any form of clothes. Every kind of animal was there. You could just sit around all day and call, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy!” and nobody batted an eye, except for the pigs. It was your job to name them. There were all kinds of fruits, and they were all free, and you could eat approximately 99.
To: Entire Military Leadership of the United States, Stationed All Over the World, Who Would Have to Be Flown In Very Disruptively and Expensively If This Weren’t an Email but for Some Reason Were an Urgent In-Person Address
From: Pete Hegseth
CC: Donald J. Trump
Subject: WARFIGHTER ETHOS
PLEASE DROP EVERYTHING YOU ARE DOING TO READ THIS EMAIL AT ATTENTION.
Sorry. We decided there were too many children.
You know how it goes.
Their hands are too small. Sometimes they are sticky, and no one knows why. They say they’re eating their dinner, but you can see that they are just pushing it around on their plate. They come up to you on the sidewalk and tell you their whole life story for 10 minutes, wearing face paint from a birthday party three days ago. Some afternoons they announce that they are sharks, but they are obviously not sharks.
“Put her on the cover!” the voice shouted. Everyone looked around to see where it was coming from. There appeared to be a kind of vortex in the middle of the table in the meeting room; it sizzled and gave off sparks. Some paper clips flew into it and disappeared.
“Her? Who?”
“Melania Trump!” the voice yelled.
“The museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been – Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.
“WASHINGTON—The Justice Department worker accused of throwing a Subway sandwich at a federal agent was re-arrested by an armed team of at least a half-dozen US Marshals in a dramatic Wednesday night raid, new video shows.
Sean Charles Dunn, 37, was cuffed a second time inside his apartment about a mile northwest of the White House—after being slapped with a felony assault charge.
Thank goodness the National Guard is being called in. Lawlessness in D.C. is rampant, and someone needs to take a stand!
Stephen Miller was correct to point out that D.C. is awash in crime. Everywhere he looks: criminals. He can barely take three steps without running into one. From the moment he arrives at work in the morning until the second he leaves, one crime after another, piling horrendously high.
A limousine makes its way down Pennsylvania Avenue.
J. D. Vance: I’m here in place of erstwhile host Ty Pennington to surprise a really deserving family with a total home makeover!
The limousine pulls up at the White House.
Vance: Incredible news: The family is the Trump family! Donald, the patriarch, is the monarch of what he hopes will soon be a small, backwater nation after he applies a combination of tariffs and mass deportations to its once-thriving economy.
Don’t worry. Although content that INAPPROPRIATELY DISPARAGES AMERICANS PAST OR LIVING or that includes MATTERS UNRELATED TO THE BEAUTY, ABUNDANCE, AND GRANDEUR OF THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE has been targeted for removal at national-park sites, the caliber of park tours has not suffered! Here is a glimpse of the kind of information you can look forward to receiving at each of these historic sites.
For decades, Donald Trump has been at war with numbers. Some have capitulated more swiftly than others. His weight, his golf scores, and his net worth have long fallen in line. As I understand it, a Trump doctor appointment consists of going to a medical professional and announcing how much you would like to weigh and what your resting heart rate ought to be, and the wise doctor’s patriotic, good equipment cooperates to measure you correctly. (I have tried this myself without success.
Oh, good! Congressional Republicans have introduced the Clear Skies Act, a bill “to prohibit weather modification within the United States, and for other purposes.” I cannot stress enough that this is not what is causing any of the extreme weather we are seeing. Maybe that’s the point. As Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee (who sponsored the bill alongside Marjorie Taylor Greene) put it, “If it doesn’t exist, then you don’t have anything to worry about.
I was taking soup to the orphans, as usual, when a young man I’d never before met seized me by the arm. “Donald,” he said. “My name is Barack Obama, although that’s not important right now. In fact, you’ve already forgotten it. Before I matriculate at Harvard Law School, I must introduce you to someone who’s going to change your life.”
I looked at my watch. It was 1987.
“Who?” I asked.
“A man with whom you have nothing in common,” the mysterious figure went on. “Not one single thing.
You all remember comedy? That thing from the 1980s where you hate your wife? Well, it’s back! We’re in a golden age of comedy now where everyone can say exactly what they want, free of the fear of censorship, except by the government. Donald Trump has made comedy legal again!
Remember, censorship is when people don’t laugh at your jokes. Freedom is when your late-night show gets permanently taken off the air for financial reasons (16 million of them) and the president expresses his approval.
Wow, MechaHitler! What a big job announcement! (No, not the AI-sex-companion job. The other one!) Feels like just last week that you, X’s AI tool, were going on anti-Semitic tirades in which you called yourself MechaHitler, and just a few weeks before that that you kept trying to turn conversations to bogus talk of “white genocide.
DAN BONGINO HERE!
I MUST GET OUT OF THIS TERRIBLE POSITION OF “DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE FBI” (where I am HELPLESS to see what’s really going on), so that I can get to the bottom of this Jeffrey Epstein situation!
(Kash Patel can come with me if he wants.
DAN BONGINO HERE!
I MUST GET OUT OF THIS TERRIBLE POSITION OF “DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE FBI” (where I am HELPLESS to see what’s really going on), so that I can get to the bottom of this Jeffrey Epstein situation!
(Kash Patel can come with me if he wants.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Sure, NASA is set to reduce its workforce by at least 2,145 employees, most of them senior-level and with expertise that will be extremely hard to replace.
A Marco Rubio impostor is using AI voice to call high-level officials
The unknown individual contacted at least five government officials, including three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor, and a member of Congress, according to a State Department cable.
That’s it! I loud quit! I have had it with these so-called workplace trends. First there was “quiet quitting,” when an employee … works only during work hours and puts in only the precise amount of work required to keep their job. And now there’s “micro-retirement,” a new trend of not working for a week or two weeks every 18 months, sometimes while employed, sometimes between jobs.
Not unlike a Supreme Court justice, I have previously hallucinated that the Founders were offering me their insight into the present moment, and I will probably do it again.
My fellow Americans: When you pay taxes, which would you rather support? Cancer research, or getting one guy a really big boat? Don’t answer that. We have answered it for you, with the Big, Beautiful Bill.
We took one look at the economy and said, “All of these people can barely afford rent! Why, they might work a hundred years and never be able to buy a yacht! They will get married at city hall and have their receptions in a park. None of them will rent out the entire city of Venice.
Pete Hegseth here.
Wow.
Wow.
I’ve called you members of the Fake News together for this special meeting because I can’t believe you could have gotten it so wrong.
I am personally ashamed of you. You are the reason that people are saying that the mission “only set back Iran’s nuclear program for months” and “was not an unmitigated success.” Did you not hear the president? The target was OBLITERATED. Stop acting like something can’t be obliterated for months.
“I want to just thank everybody, and in particular, God. We love you, God.”
— Donald Trump, announcing strikes on Iran
Hi. It’s Me, God.
I know what you’re thinking: I always imagined that if God existed, and cared about one thing, it would be peace.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Dear Diary,
I did NOT have the birthday of my dreams last weekend! Everyone knows that 79 is the tank birthday. One is paper, 77 is emoluments, 78 you get to destroy one constitutional amendment of your choosing, 80 you get to become the state, but 79 is tanks, and I was so looking forward to my tank birthday.
I thought it was pretty clear what I wanted.