On Wednesday night, as the guest at a banquet in New Haven, Connecticut, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made light of his waistline—a rare joke from a man whose utterances are more often vile than funny. Even so, he managed to blend the two. He said that when he assumed office in 2022, he took steps to make the food served to Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons less abundant and less palatable.

The national security adviser seemed at a loss.
It fell to Michael Waltz to explain to handpicked members of his staff this month why the president had ordered their dismissal after a meeting with Laura Loomer, the far-right activist who rose to prominence by making incendiary anti-Muslim claims and who last year shared a video that labeled 9/11 an “inside job.”
“He was upset and couldn’t explain it,” a person familiar with Waltz’s reaction told me.

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After Donald Trump won in November, I sat down to read all 922 pages of Project 2025. As I write in my new book, what I discovered was more radical and more interesting than I’d expected.

Hong Kong Supermarket looked exactly as it always had. When I visited the store in Manhattan’s Chinatown last week, buckets of live crabs were stacked precariously next to bags of sweet-potato starch and shrink-wrapped boxes of dried shiitake mushrooms. The instant noodles took up two walls, where I quickly found my beloved and gloriously weird cheese-flavored kind.

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“Jazz has absorbed whatever was around from the very beginning,” the writer Francis Davis told Wen Stephenson in a 1996 interview. The same might have been said of Davis, who died last week at 78. Nate Chinen, writing for NPR, called Davis “an articulate and gimlet-eyed cultural critic who achieved an eminent stature in jazz.

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I wish you were here, dear,
I wish you were here.
I wish I knew no astronomy
when stars appear
Yes! I thought, as I read these lines from the Russian American poet Joseph Brodsky in a 1989 love poem, “A Song.” There’s something about the ineffable beauty of life that formal knowledge misses. So it seemed to the 25-year-old me, a bohemian musician and hopeless romantic.