- Adam Kirsch at The Atlantic suggests that reading is a vice;
- Paul Krugman on the Heritage Foundation;
- Robert Reich on the Trump administration’s policy of hate;
- Short items about everyone laughing at Trump; a measles outbreak at the Noah’s Ark Museum; how the Trump administration admits to stealing artists’ work; and how CBS is going MAGA.
Beginning with a counter-intuitive think piece.
The Atlantic, Adam Kirsch, 2 Jan 2026: Reading Is a Vice, subtitled “Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive.”
If you read a book in 2025—just one book—you belong to an endangered species. Like honeybees and red wolves, the population of American readers, Lector americanus, has been declining for decades. The most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, from 2022, found that fewer than half of Americans had read a single book in the previous 12 months; only 38 percent had read a novel or short story. A recent study from the University of Florida and University College London found that the number of Americans who engage in daily reading for pleasure fell 3 percent each year from 2003 to 2023.
…
Educators and policy makers have been agonizing about this trend line for decades, but they haven’t managed to change it. Now some are trying a new tactic: If people won’t read books because they enjoy it, perhaps they can be persuaded to do it to save democracy. The International Publishers Association, which represents publishers in 84 countries, has spent the past year promoting the slogan “Democracy depends on reading,” arguing that “ambitious, critical, reflective reading remains one of the few spaces where citizens can rehearse complexity, recover attention and cultivate the inner freedoms that public freedoms require.”
The problem with these kinds of arguments isn’t that they are wrong; it’s that they don’t actually persuade anyone to read more, because they misunderstand why people become readers in the first place. Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society. It’s a utilitarian argument for what should be a personal passion.
It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.
The writer goes on to discuss Proust, Cervantes, Flaubert, about the dangers of reading. And he says this:
Reading teaches you to be more interested in what’s going on inside your head than in the real world.
I think this piece is tongue-in-cheek. The writer concludes — see especially the last line:
If we want to keep reading from going extinct, then the best thing we could do is tell young people what so many great writers readily admit: Literature doesn’t make you a better citizen or a more successful person. A passion for reading can even make life more difficult. And you don’t cultivate a passion for the sake of democracy. You do it for the thrill of staying up late to read under the covers by flashlight, unable to stop and hoping no one finds out.
Because, and I shouldn’t need to spell this out, reading is not about what’s going on inside your head, it’s about vicariously experiencing the world beyond you immediate circumstances. Maybe reading won’t increase your salary, but it will increase your appreciation and understanding the world. It enriches your life.
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Paul Krugman, 30 Dec 2025: The Heritage Foundation Shows How MAGA Will Die, subtitled “Even corrupt institutions can reach a tipping point”
Caption of photo: Will they change it to “The Trump Heritage Foundation?” Post begins:
I have never, to put it mildly, been a fan of the Heritage Foundation. Ever since I started paying attention to Heritage’s work — which I started doing when I began writing for The New York Times, 26 years ago — the foundation has been a propaganda shop pretending to be a think tank, a producer of dishonest “research” purporting to justify a right-wing agenda of deregulation, dismantling the social safety net, and tax cuts for the rich. I wrote at length about Heritage’s deplorable record back in November.
I admit I’ve never paid much attention to think tanks of any kind. I’ve gathered that Heritage is right-wing, but off-hand couldn’t name another that is accused of being left-wing. They all exist to promote certain predictable talking points, on the right or the left. But here I’m fascinated by Krugman’s alignment of Heritage with MAGA.
Heritage has never been a source of credible research, but its role in the conservative movement has been to provide an intellectual gloss by producing what looked to the gullible — i.e., many people in the news media — like credible research. For example, back in 2002 David Broder, widely described as “the dean of the Washington press corps,” praised Heritage for its “intellectual honesty.” That was foolish even then, but I don’t think anyone would say that now.
But now that its illusion of credibility is gone, what is Heritage good for? It’s not as if MAGA wants to see any genuine policy research, or as if a hollowed-out Heritage would be capable of doing such research even if it tried.
And,
Indeed, while I may be making too much of the demise of one organization, I see Heritage’s fall as a preview of how MAGA as a political movement will eventually implode.
For white Christian nationalism — which is now clearly MAGA’s essence — remains very much a minority position.
…
What would a Heritage-style implosion of MAGA look like? It would involve large numbers of Republicans who secretly despise Trump and Trumpism going public and withdrawing their support.
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And another take on Trump and MAGA.
Robert Reich, 30 Dec 2025: Hate 2.0, subtitled “The defining ideology of Trump 2.0”
Consider, for example, Paul Ingrassia — who started off as Trump’s White House liaison to the Justice Department and then liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, before Trump nominated him in May to run the White House’s Office of Special Counsel.
Politico is out today with an exposé of Ingrassia — noteworthy because it so clearly illustrates Trump’s priorities when it comes to personnel.
With quotes from Ingrassia about his Nazi streak, how never trust a “chinaman or Indian,” how “all of Africa is a shithole,” how there should be no “moulignon” (black) holidays, how “We need competent white men in positions of leadership. … The founding fathers were wrong that all men are created equal,” and so on and on. Reich concludes,
So there we have it, friends. Hateful bigotry is fine inside the Trump regime as long as the hateful bigots are loyal to Trump.
But we’ve seen this over and over. Are Trump voters OK with this?
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Just the headline.
The Bulwark, Mona Charen, 30 Dec 2025: Somebody Needs to Tell Trump Everybody Is Laughing at Him
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Short items.
- Somehow appropriate.
- AlterNet, 2 Jan 2026: Noah’s Ark museum visitors hit with ‘highly contagious’ measles exposure warning
- And Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 2 Jan 2026: People who visited Ark Encounter may have been exposed to measles, subtitled “”An unvaccinated, out-of-state traveler” who tested positive for measles recently visited the Creationist attraction, according to the Kentucky Department of Public Health”
- That artwork at the top of yesterday’s post? Stolen, of course.
- The Daily Beast, 2 Jan 2026: ICE Barbie’s DHS Vows to Keep Stealing Artists’ Creations
- CBS News goes MAGA.
- JMG, 2 Jan 2026: CBS News: We’ll No Longer Cite “Academics Or Elites”
- Because the hoi polloi know better. Pandering to the rural yokels. The US, founded on grand principles, is doomed.
