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In today’s edition:
- Advice from a septuagenarian — and to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who’s almost there
- The three types of swing voters in the 2024 election
- Punish Ecuador for infringing on an embassy’s sacred ground
The wisdom of 70
Please wish Anne Lamott a happy 70th birthday today. It is “a young age for an older person to be,” she writes, but “the oldest I have ever been by a long shot.”
Anne’s column is a celebration of the wisdom and other wonderful things that have come with age. When the young ask Anne when she graduated high school — 1971, although she “might as well have said 20 B.C.” — she answers with a smile, because though she would enjoy “their skin, hearing, vision, memory, balance, stamina and focus, I would not go back even one year.”
Largely, she’s happy to know that there’s so much she does not know, a theme Anne has written on before. But there are a few subjects on which she has collected bits and bobs of knowledge, including the certainty that everyone is screwed up, some convictions about hope and even a “very little bit about God,” though she doesn’t trouble herself with “ultimate reality, the triune nature of the deity or who shot the Holy Ghost.”
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Okay, as you read more and more of the essay, you will realize that Anne’s 70 years have taught her quite a lot — certainly more than I can skim over here.
One element of those seven decades, Anne recently told Alyssa Rosenberg, stands out as a particularly good teacher: becoming a grandparent. In an interview, the two discussed the delicate balance between love and control in grandparenting and parenting alike.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor will also turn 70 in June, but Jim Geraghty is wondering where the celebration is of all her accumulated wisdom. Instead, Jim writes, “it’s open season” on the justice, whom left-leaning court watchers are pressuring to retire.
The instinct is understandable, given the dim forecast for Democratic Senate control and the even dimmer reverse-cast of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 2020 death under a Republican majority, after declining to retire in 2013.
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But this is not how lifetime appointments work, Jim writes: “The effort to push Sotomayor out now represents a dramatic changing of the terms for a person nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court.”
Jim hasn’t attained 70 yet, but he nevertheless has his own bit of wisdom to share with the justice: She ought to tell the folks who want her gone “to go pound sand.”
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Chaser: Ruth Marcus had always urged justices to stick around, too — until 2021, when she ruled the Senate had so deteriorated that retirement was the only responsible choice for Justice Stephen Breyer.
From Perry Bacon’s analysis of the swing voters who could decide this fall’s election, which polling suggests could see an even higher share of third-party voting.
The major-party-to-third-party folks (or, conversely, third-party-to-major-party ones) are only one type of 2024 swinger. Perry identifies two other categories that could prove decisive: the classic switchers who yo-yo D to R to D to R, and the so-called occasionals who alternate between voting and not voting.
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Perry gives some great background on each bin’s behavior in previous cycles, but he concludes that this go-round is just really different. He hazards a few predictions about the swing voters, but ultimately, he writes, “six months from Election Day, it’s really hard to figure out how they will swing.”
More politics
A half-century ago, the Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman witnessed a sleeping bag and backpack drop into the garden he was standing in and two hands appear at the top of the garden wall — only for a moment before gunshots rang out and the hands fell away.
The only reason the same fate didn’t befall Dorfman is because he was on the other side of the wall, a dissident riding out Chile’s brutal dictatorship within the safety of the Argentine embassy.
In an op-ed, Dorfman condemns Ecuador’s norm-shattering storming of the Mexican Embassy in Quito this week to extract an Ecuadorian politician sheltering there. He urges the world to take whatever diplomatic actions necessary to punish Ecuador and ensure no other state follows its example — “or are we really prepared to let basic international norms that protect the vulnerable be trampled upon so wantonly?”
Smartest, fastest
- Reginald Dwayne Betts, founder of the nonprofit Freedom Reads, was once a teen in Virginia prison. He remembers in an essay how much of a lifeline books provided.
- A vital intelligence tool needs reauthorization, the Editorial Board writes. The House might wreck it instead.
- Jason Willick explains why special counsel Jack Smith’s zealousness on the question of former president Donald Trump’s immunity might turn out to be self-defeating.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Go on, open it!
Yes — surprise — a younger you
Just like we wanted!
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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You’re reading the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In today’s edition:
Please wish Anne Lamott a happy 70th birthday today. It is “a young age for an older person to be,” she writes, but “the oldest I have ever been by a long shot.”
Anne’s column is a celebration of the wisdom and other wonderful things that have come with age. When the young ask Anne when she graduated high school — 1971, although she “might as well have said 20 B.C.” — she answers with a smile, because though she would enjoy “their skin, hearing, vision, memory, balance, stamina and focus, I would not go back even one year.”
Largely, she’s happy to know that there’s so much she does not know, a theme Anne has written on before. But there are a few subjects on which she has collected bits and bobs of knowledge, including the certainty that everyone is screwed up, some convictions about hope and even a “very little bit about God,” though she doesn’t trouble herself with “ultimate reality, the triune nature of the deity or who shot the Holy Ghost.”
Okay, as you read more and more of the essay, you will realize that Anne’s 70 years have taught her quite a lot — certainly more than I can skim over here.
One element of those seven decades, Anne recently told Alyssa Rosenberg, stands out as a particularly good teacher: becoming a grandparent. In an interview, the two discussed the delicate balance between love and control in grandparenting and parenting alike.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor will also turn 70 in June, but Jim Geraghty is wondering where the celebration is of all her accumulated wisdom. Instead, Jim writes, “it’s open season” on the justice, whom left-leaning court watchers are pressuring to retire.
The instinct is understandable, given the dim forecast for Democratic Senate control and the even dimmer reverse-cast of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 2020 death under a Republican majority, after declining to retire in 2013.
But this is not how lifetime appointments work, Jim writes: “The effort to push Sotomayor out now represents a dramatic changing of the terms for a person nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court.”
Jim hasn’t attained 70 yet, but he nevertheless has his own bit of wisdom to share with the justice: She ought to tell the folks who want her gone “to go pound sand.”
Chaser: Ruth Marcus had always urged justices to stick around, too — until 2021, when she ruled the Senate had so deteriorated that retirement was the only responsible choice for Justice Stephen Breyer.
From Perry Bacon’s analysis of the swing voters who could decide this fall’s election, which polling suggests could see an even higher share of third-party voting.
The major-party-to-third-party folks (or, conversely, third-party-to-major-party ones) are only one type of 2024 swinger. Perry identifies two other categories that could prove decisive: the classic switchers who yo-yo D to R to D to R, and the so-called occasionals who alternate between voting and not voting.
Perry gives some great background on each bin’s behavior in previous cycles, but he concludes that this go-round is just really different. He hazards a few predictions about the swing voters, but ultimately, he writes, “six months from Election Day, it’s really hard to figure out how they will swing.”
A half-century ago, the Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman witnessed a sleeping bag and backpack drop into the garden he was standing in and two hands appear at the top of the garden wall — only for a moment before gunshots rang out and the hands fell away.
The only reason the same fate didn’t befall Dorfman is because he was on the other side of the wall, a dissident riding out Chile’s brutal dictatorship within the safety of the Argentine embassy.
In an op-ed, Dorfman condemns Ecuador’s norm-shattering storming of the Mexican Embassy in Quito this week to extract an Ecuadorian politician sheltering there. He urges the world to take whatever diplomatic actions necessary to punish Ecuador and ensure no other state follows its example — “or are we really prepared to let basic international norms that protect the vulnerable be trampled upon so wantonly?”
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Go on, open it!
Yes — surprise — a younger you
Just like we wanted!
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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