Pun Salad

There's no mystery (heh) why I checked out this book at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library: it won the 2025 Edgar Award for "Best Novel". And (for once) I agree with the Mystery Writers of America: it's pretty good.

But while I was verifying that, I came across this abject apology:

Mystery Writers of America wishes to clarify the use of images of Humphrey Bogart and Edgar Allan Poe in a video shown at our recent Edgar Awards. Member authors wrote the script, but AI tools were used to animate the images of Bogart and Poe. Such use is inconsistent with our otherwise staunch support of our members’ fight against unauthorized use and potential for piracy of their work through AI. We apologize and have taken steps to assure this won’t occur in the future.

I get that some writers are upset with their works being used to train AIs. They are fine with people reading their books; they're unhappy with non-people reading their books. Or something.

Anyway: the main character here is British police detective ("DI" or "Detective Inspector") Caius Beauchamp. He and his team work on two unlikely cases: the more recent one being the discovery of that lady whose hand appears on the cover, drowned in the Thames; she's connected to a long-ago embezzlement of a company's pension fund.

And there's the matter of another dead body that shows up at a play Caius is attending; the victim appears to have been obsessed with the long-ago disappearance of a teen girl from a boarding school.

And, in the meantime, Caius has met a possible new romantic interest at that play: Calliope, milliner to the posh.

Could all these things be connected somehow. Sure, in some ways, not in others. Advice to readers: pay particular information to the party blather in Chapter One: you'll know things that don't become apparent to the principals until much later in the book.

Lots of Britishisms, which you, American, may have to either look up, figure out, or ignore. (Or, if you watch enough Britbox, maybe you know.)

Andrew Heaton asks and answers in a pretty funny, but also insightful, video: What happens to your kids if we abolish the U.S. Department of Education?.

As one of those shoe companies says: just do it, already.

Also of note:

• I'm pretty sure you've already guessed the answer here. And Betteridge's Law of Headlines doesn't apply.

  Nate Silver's headline asks: Did the media blow it on Biden?

  Beginning in 2023, I repeatedly criticized both the media and Democratic partisans for failing to take former President Biden’s age and fitness for office seriously enough. This was not exactly a popular opinion at the time: the more common complaint, at least until Biden’s disastrous debate, was that the press was covering the story too much.

  So I’ve been pleased to see two new high-profile books on Biden, Fight by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which include extensive reporting on his struggles to hold onto the Democratic nomination and — no less importantly — to manage his presidential duties.1 If you read these books, it’s pretty clear that Biden was not fit for the presidency by the end of his term — it is, after all, the hardest job in the world. With limited uptime and sometimes more severe symptoms like an inability to recall basic names and facts — Original Sin reports that Biden couldn’t even recognize George Clooney at a Hollywood fundraiser — his Cabinet worried about his capacities in a crisis.

  When it comes to criticizing Democrats, you probably can't distrust the mainstream media enough. I've found myself pretty confortable with Democrats like Nate.

• If KDW was wrong, I was probably wrong too. Kevin D. Williamson is another example of out-of-the-MSM thinking, and he's willing to call a foul on himself: Why I Was Wrong About Head Start.

  One should always be open to reevaluating long-held beliefs—and an especially good time to reevaluate them is when a guy with a Nobel Prize in the relevant subject tells you that you’ve got it wrong. 

  In at least a half a dozen articles and speeches, probably more, I have repeated something that I’ve understood to be a well-established fact for so long that I do not even remember when or where I first learned it: that Head Start does not work, that it provides no meaningful lasting results. Professor James Heckman of the University of Chicago, inconveniently enough for my longstanding belief, not only was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics (that is, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, as Jay Nordlinger taught me) but was so honored specifically for his work on developing rigorous methods for the evaluation of social programs. I do not immediately knuckle under to appeals to authority, but I am inclined to listen to guys who have equations named after them.

  […]

  Heckman, who does not want for confidence in his convictions, rejects the notion that randomized trials should be understood as the “gold standard” and mocks those who believe otherwise as a “cult.” But, as he tells the story, even if we were to accept the primacy of randomized trials here, we’d want them to be good randomized trials. “This all really comes from one experiment,” he says, referring to the 2005 Head Start Impact Study. “Students were randomized out of Head Start, and the ones randomized out were the control group. But what were they randomized out into?” Head Start, and pre-K education more generally, is a varied and decentralized enterprise, and many of the students randomized out of Head Start in the experiment in question ended up attending other Head Start programs or other kinds of preschool. “Some of them went to Head Start elsewhere. Some of them went to something better.” Better data from a better sample produces different results—results that point to a different outcome about Head Start’s efficacy.

• But speaking of Jay Nordlinger… He's separated from his longtime perch at National Review, where he was a reliable voice for liberty and decency. And (at least for now) he's started a substack. A recent article shows what he's up to: War and Peace, &c.

  One of the most loaded words I know is “pro-war.” It was used by Peter Szijjártó, Hungary’s foreign minister, yesterday. I have written a fair amount about Szijjártó. As Viktor Orbán’s emissary, he has nurtured relations with Russia, Iran, and China. In late 2021, as Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border, Szijjártó received the Kremlin’s Order of Friendship from the hand of Putin himself.

  In a tweet, Szijjártó said that Radek Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, was “pro-war”—one of “the most pro-war politicians.” Oh?

  A couple of years ago, Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican, responded to a critic by saying, “You support this war. I don’t.” He was talking about the Ukraine war.

  Let me quote from a post of mine, please:

  I once wrote a book about war and peace. For a meditation on peace—an essay drawn from that book—go here. The terms “pro-war” and “anti-war” are bizarre. No one supports war, except for psychopaths. (There are more than a few of those, to be sure.) As a rule, debates are between those who think that war is necessary, or just, and those who do not.

  Do the Ukrainians have a right to defend themselves against invasion and subjugation? Should the United States support them? This is what people are talking about.

  Um, bingo. That's why I've liked Jay in the past. And why I like Mike Lee (and others) a lot less than I used to.

• GFW says the bloom should be off the Rose, and stay off the Rose. We're talking baseball, and specifically Pete Rose (gifted link).

  Our polymath president should concentrate on his fields of intellectual mastery — geopolitics, macroeconomics, renaming mountains and gulfs — and spare a smidgen of American life from his perfectionist interventions. Including baseball.

  Does anyone believe that Major League Baseball would be reinstating Pete Rose if one of the president’s whims had not demanded it? Never mind MLB’s lawyerly rationale that the rule against gambling by baseball people need not protect the game from deceased gamblers. MLB has aligned baseball with the zeitgeist, which is no longer persnickety about lying and contempt for norms. Exhibit A is Rose’s twice-elected rehabilitator.

  Since we're talking about people I trust to tell it to me straight… yeah, George Will is one of those.