I got an email from someone I’d never heard of, “directing” me to stop work. It turned out this was the parent company of the staffing agency through which I’m contracted as a magazine copyeditor. The email was legit, and I stopped for a day and a half while a payment meltdown was sorted out.
So, I took a hike with my friend Dan, who had the week off, on the “blue trail” starting at Ringwood Manor, which is close to the midpoint of New Jersey’s northern border with New York. A couple of hours walking brought us back and forth several times across a stream, stepping from rock to rock. I thought about the samurai concept of “crossing at a ford,” venturing into some decision or transition. As the swordsman and strategist Miyamoto Musashi put it, “It means to set sail even though your friends stay in harbor, knowing the route, the soundness of your ship and the favor of the day.”
These days, it feels like I’m crossing at a ford while my right-wing friends and acquaintances stay in a harbor. Arguably, it’s the other way around—they’ve embraced a growing radicalization while my views haven’t changed that much. But a harbor, with anchors mired in mud, strikes me as a cogent metaphor for the territory occupied by right-wing interlocutors I’ve encountered lately. Often, they want to talk about Biden, as if something done by the former president, whatever it might be, makes for a logical rejoinder to a critique of something the current president’s now doing. Yet if Biden did X, and X is bad, and Trump does X, then redirecting to whether a Trump critic gave sufficient attention to X in the Biden era, is an acknowledgement that Trump’s doing something wrong, deliberately obscured. That’s even assuming Biden’s and Trump’s actions were similar, without which the rejoinder is pure bullshit.
“Confederates, Nazis, Russia, Apartheid, Gilded Age fat cats, and Measles. We’re in a comic book story where previously defeated villains come back and team up against the hero, like the Sinister Six v. Spider-Man. They're weakened by infighting, but in real life there’s no guarantee the hero wins.” So writes political scientist Nicholas Grossman at Bluesky. That sounds right to me, with the caveat that “Sinister Six” until now lay outside my comic-book knowledge, though I knew of most of the individual members, particularly Doctor Octopus, whose prospective wedding with Aunt May was a cover I’ll never forget.
During my brief interlude from work, I submitted several of my Splice Today articles for a prestigious science-writing award. I’d applied for the award in previous years, while recognizing my topics and perspectives may be considered oddball and have little chance of winning. Still, there’s something to be said for drawing connections between arcane physics and human aspirations, and discussing how thoughts about searching for, and possibly communicating with, aliens, are influenced by politics.
“Trump is deworming Washington — now to keep the parasites out for good.” That’s a noxious New York Post op-ed by law professor Glenn H. Reynolds. I’ve had some interactions with Reynolds over the years, including a 2000 piece I commissioned from him as opinion editor of Space.com. In the early-2000s, I had a lot in common politically with Reynolds, but we’ve veered far apart, as with my criticism of his group blog Instapundit a year ago. His Post piece, besides its dehumanizing language, doesn’t grasp that if you dislike unaccountable bureaucrats and other well-connected “parasites,” you should worry about DOGE’s opaque activities and Elon Musk’s role as both official and government contractor; and if you’re a law professor, you ought to say something about the legality and constitutionality of it all.
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky