Afternoon Tea (12/18/18)

Chris Hayes’s Work Diary: ‘My Life Is an Unceasing Festival of Impatience’

This is extremely sweet: My Dad's Friendship With Charles Barkley

Why YouTube’s Biggest Star Can’t Be Canceled

My Year with Julian of Norwich

The Crime Fiction of Galway

Afternoon Tea (7/19/18)

This is great: Chris Hayes Reviews Michiko Kakutani’s Book About Our Post-Truth Era

Glenn Gould Is Always on Fast-Forward

Olympian Alex Shibutani Shares His View From the Front Row at New York’s Men’s Shows (Josh Jackson alert.)

Queer Fat Girls Deserve To Be Heroines In YA Books, Too​

The Revolutionary War’s Most Enigmatic Naval Captain: Pierre Landais

Morning Coffee (6/3/18)

Chris Hayes: What ‘Law and Order’ Means to Trump

Congressional Candidate In Virginia Admits He’s A Pedophile

The Equestrian Coach Who Minted Olympians, and Left a Trail of Child Molestation

Heh: Hottest Heads of State Explains: Missouri Governor Eric Greitens

Which Pollsters To Trust In 2018

For ‘Columbiners,’ School Shootings Have a Deadly Allure

Italy’s Political Crisis: The Danger It Poses for the Global Economy

HBO Reteams With Alex Gibney To Chronicle Fall Of Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos Company

Goop’s Winning Retail Formula? It Doesn’t Have to Pay for Its Stores

5 Tips for Buying Cheese at the Counter

Morning Coffee (6/23/17)

FINALLY FRIDAY. Time for our traditional happy links.

Stop rubbing it in, Canada: Justin Trudeau Hugs a Puppet Unicorn in a Beautiful Universe Much Like Our Own

Road trip? The 41 Most Instagram-Worthy Ice Cream Shops in the United States

TRUE: No Chris Week Is Complete Without Nerd Hunk Chris Hayes

Important journalism: The CW All-Stars: Which Actors Have Appeared on the Most Shows?

Jessica at Go Fug Yourself made us an amazing Breton stripes shopping guide.

Aw, here's a firefighter and the kitten he rescued from a chimney.

This is as wacky as you'd expect: Summer solstice at Stonehenge – in pictures

I may need some Crayola nail polish.

Let's buy some beach bags!

Ooh: Vintage Royal Ascot Jewels

Stay Cozy with These Literary Socks

Morning Coffee (4/24/17)

Me elsewhere: TV news for the week.

The French election is pretty fascinating and the Guardian has live updates today.

Colombia's armed groups sow seeds of new conflict as war with Farc ends

I know this isn't funny, but I enjoyed the headline: Four bakers arrested over illegal brownies in Venezuela's 'bread war'

Fake Working Class: The muted response to the retail apocalypse shows which workers count in Trump’s America.

Henry Kissinger just damned Jared Kushner with the faintest of praise

Chris Hayes on escaping the “doom loop” of Trump's presidency

Unlike all previous U.S. presidents, Trump almost never mentions democratic ideals

Even if you're sick of reading about this lady, as I am, this is worth reading: The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black

Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia

!! Physicists observe 'negative mass'

Ooh: Europe’s Famed Bog Bodies Are Starting to Reveal Their Secrets

Morning Coffee (4/15/17)

Oh, thank goodness: Federal Judge Blocks Arkansas Executions

Can Churches Hire Police? Alabama Legislators Reckon With the First Amendment

U.N. Experts Condemn Killing and Torture of Gay Men in Chechnya

The Islamic State has tunnels everywhere. It’s making ISIS much harder to defeat.

How Russia Hacked Obama's Legacy

Riddle of Why Hitler Didn’t Use Sarin Gas Remains Unsolved

Donald Trump and Paul Ryan are the problem — a staff shake-up won't fix anything

Mary Beard on Women in Power is definitely worth your time.

Chris Hayes's By the Book is FULL of things I want to read.

Ha! PG Tips triumphs as ASA rules pyramid teabags make better cuppa

Ooh: Found: A Silver Snake Ring Dating Back to Roman Britain

Astronomers Capture the First ‘Image' of the Dark Matter That Holds the Universe Together

Morning Coffee (2/2/17)

I don't even know where to start these days. Here goes.

Eight-year-old American girl 'killed in Yemen raid approved by Trump'

Yesterday Trump antagonized Australia, AN IMPORTANT ALLY, and maybe threatened to invade Mexico? Who knows!

He ordered the CVE to focus solely on Islamic extremism and ignore white supremacists.

Evil and terrifying: Trump Pushes Dark View of Islam to Center of U.S. Policy-Making

White House refuses to condemn Bannon’s Islamophobic remarks

Senate Republicans just cheated Democrats out of a vote on controversial appointees

Trump used a Black History Month speech to talk about himself, how he did with black voters, and CNN (He maybe thinks Frederick Douglass is alive? McSweeney's published the actual speech as a "joke" monologue. Amazing.)

Fighting for the Poor Under Trump

Here's a good interview with Chris Hayes on what the media does now.

Whoa: A cheese factory goes high-design in Turkey

Shakespeare and the American oligarchy

How the 1963 'Career Girl Murders' Bolstered the Myth that Cities Aren’t Safe For Women

Morning Coffee (6/28/16)

Me elsewhere: At Insatiable Booksluts I reviewed a book I really wanted to like but REALLY didn't.

YAY SOME GOOD NEWS: Pro-choice advocates just won the biggest Supreme Court abortion case in decades

Jamelle Bouie being smart and calming, as usual: Embattled Whiteness Gave Us Brexit. It Won’t Give Us President Trump.

I'm kind of glad France and Germany aren't making this easy.

I've seen some questions about what's going on with Labour, so here's a useful explainer, plus I just like the word "omnishambles".

How That Idiot Nigel Farage Outsmarted the Political Elite

Bernie Sanders Has a Lot of Nerve

ALSO: The Sanders Campaign Tried to Rig Caucus Tiebreakers With Double-Sided Coins

WHAT: Why is Team Trump asking liberal Scottish politicians for donations?

I DO like that recent events mean everyone's interviewing Chris Hayes.

Welp: World’s Most Loyal V.C. Says Theranos Critics Are Just Haters

Book Review: Twilight of the Elites

Twilight of the Elites by Chris Hayes

I've long enjoyed Chris Hayes's reporting and commentary and had picked up a copy of his book Twilight of the Elites a while ago, but it sat in my bookcase with hundreds of other unread books until I started noticing how many of Hayes's Twitter followers were claiming that the book - published in 2012 - perfectly explained the state of the 2016 presidential campaign. I was skeptical. How could it? Clearly hyperbole! But these comments made me curious enough to give the book a try.

And: not hyperbole! I expected to like Twilight of the Elites but I was honestly shocked by both how good it was and how exactly it explained our current political situation, especially the rise of Trump and to a lesser extent Sanders. Hayes draws from a wealth of historical and cultural examples to analyze how the recent breakdown of trust in institutions (government but also the Church, the media, even Major League Baseball) due to corruption and failure have created a society that rejects experts and others seen as "elite" and creates an authority vacuum. It's engaging and readable and somehow both comforting, in that it makes what's going on make sense, and terrifying, in that it makes what's going on make sense.

My main quibble with the book was that it was too short; I would have happily read many more pages of analysis of each of Hayes's examples. There were a few points at which the differentiation of the themes of distinct chapters could have been stronger, but over all the book maintained momentum and felt remarkably cohesive for a text touching on so many varied subjects.

I've seen some reviews fault Twilight of the Elites for not being prescriptive enough, but that didn't really bother me: it's certainly possible to diagnose and analyze a problem in a useful way without also claiming you know exactly how to solve it, and if anything I'm glad Hayes didn't offer easy solutions to something so complex.

If you want to know how Trump could happen here, or if you just want a fascinating synthesis of recent American history, politics, and culture, I'd definitely recommend picking this up.

(If you'd like to see more reviews and other non-link posts, support the blog on Patreon!)

Morning Coffee (3/5/14)

Wow: Looking for the good Samaritan who saved the life of a man who jumped into the Potomac

The end of an era: Carl Kasell is retiring from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.

Huh: Chris Hayes is going to cameo on Revolution tonight.

Another casualty of climate change: Guacamole on our burritos?

The pope is getting his own gossip magazine.

The best Oscar-related article ever: Paging Bradley Cooper's Lawyers: He Might Own Ellen's Famous Oscar Selfie

Speaking of, here's Cleolinda's Storify of the best of the Oscars on social media. (Disclosure: I'm in it a few times.)

Veronica Mars fans, here's a behind-the-scenes video from a Jason Dohring photoshoot. You're welcome.

Morning Coffee (3/15/13)

Happy Friday! Let's try for a Friday of positive/cute/funny links . . .

The Archbishop of Philadelphia has ruled that an 11-year-old girl is indeed allowed to play football even though she's female.

Ooh, here's the Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist. (Formerly known as the Orange Prize.) I have read . . . one of these books. No, wait, two!

Digg may come to our rescue: They're building an RSS reader.

Finally: CBS has a full episode streaming app.

Chris Hayes is moving to 8 p.m. every weekday on MSNBC. Yay Chris!

Ooh: Google brings Bletchley Park to its Cultural Institute

Is there a homicidal maniac in your book club? (No, it's funny, I swear.)

I love this sort of thing: Kids and their toys from around the world