And Glenn Thrush flashed back to one Trump enabler’s collision with another: “Todd Blanche, then the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, had been on the job only for a couple of months in May 2025, when he was handed a migraine in a Detective Columbo trench coat by the name of Edward J. Martin Jr.” (Rich Delmar, Arlington, Va., and John Murtagh, Bronxville, N.Y., among others)
In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis processed Vice President JD Vance’s recent three-hour chat with Joe Rogan: “Watching Vance’s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss’s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither.” (Alex Gontscharow, Ashburn, Va., and Mike Marquard, Portland, Ore.)
Given the heights of hoopla to which the World Cup ascended, it seems fitting to present a contrary view. In Quillette, Robert Lynch offered one, arguing that soccer “just drones on — pass it back, pass it sideways, pass it back, pass it sideways, lose it, win it back, pass it back again — for ninety minutes.” He added: “It’s not that nothing happens. It’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.” (Sam Downing, Houston )
And in his newsletter, Ron Charles captured the vertical charms — and challenges — of Portugal’s capital: “We walked 24,000 steps, and somehow 23,000 of them were uphill. Lisbon, we’ve discovered, is basically an antique StairMaster tiled blue.” (Donna Peremes, Hyattsville, Md.)
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