Retro-Spectives on Today
Echoes of the Inkwell — This essay is written in the voice and satirical tradition of Mark Twain, generated with AI assistance, and applied to a current event. Mr. Twain did not write this. The historical figure's documented preoccupations, targets, and rhetorical habits inform the piece; the opinions are an informed extrapolation, not a record... Continue Reading →
It has long been my habit, when the newspapers grow too proud of their own vocabulary, to take that vocabulary apart with the same tools a jeweler uses on a fraudulent stone — a loupe, a small knife, and no sentiment whatever. The government of these United States has lately enriched the language considerably, and a dictionary is owed. I offer these entries not as invention but as translation.
There are two kinds of immortality available to the American statesman, and the current occupant of that office appears determined to purchase both in the same season, on credit, with other people's currency.
There is, in the character of the American statesman, a hunger that no election, no adulation, no gilded ceiling can ever quite satisfy — the hunger to be carved in stone before the worms get at him. Kings used to settle for it with a tomb.
There has always been, in the annals of statecraft, a certain grandeur to the leader who faces peril alongside his men — who stands, however foolishly, on the same deck, breathes the same smoke, and takes his chances with the ranks he commands.
Who Was Ring Lardner Ring Lardner (1885–1933) was, in his day, the sharpest ear in American sportswriting, and then he became something rarer still: a sportswriter who turned into one of the country's best short story writers without ever losing the ballpark in his voice. He started out covering the Chicago White Sox and other... Continue Reading →
ECHOES OF THE INKWELL — The editors of this page occasionally invite the great wits and observers of ages past — reconstructed through the miracle of artificial intelligence — to cast their eyes upon the present day. The more things change, the more they stay the same. On th' Sellin' of th' Presidential Word Martin Dooley,... Continue Reading →
ECHOES OF THE INKWELL — The editors of this page occasionally invite the great wits and observers of ages past — reconstructed through the miracle of artificial intelligence — to cast their eyes upon the present day. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Sage of Baltimore on the Monetization of... Continue Reading →
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Ambrose Bierce adds new entries to his dictionary — Pardon, Lobbyist, Arbitration, Weaponization — drawn from a market that now prices forgiveness higher than most of the crimes it forgives.