Pun Salad

A word I've been using in my reports on Peter Swanson novels: "gimmicky". That's not (necessarily) an insult, he makes his gimmicks work for me. This one was picked by the WSJ's Tom Nolan as one of the 25 best works of mystery and suspense of the 21st century (wsj gifted link), so it apparently works for him too.

Consumer note: Amazon deems this to be the third book in Swanson's "Henry Kimball" series. I read the second one back in 2023, and I haven't gotten around to reading the first one yet. I think it's fair to say Henry doesn't play a major role here until the end.

Anyway: the book opens with a murder in the first six pages: Josie, a teacher attending an "Art Educator Conference" gets tossed, naked, off her hotel room balcony by her anonymous, malfunctioning partner in a one-night stand. It's easy for the cops to dismiss as a suicide, though, and it's later revealed that's what happened.

Then we're into the main part of the book, where librarian Martha is developing a strong suspicion that her husband, Alan, is some kind of serial killer. His profession puts him on the road a lot, hawking cute shirts and tchotchkes to teachers at conferences … like the one Josie got killed at. And, indeed, Alan was at that conference! Martha starts doing some amateur detective work, connecting up Alan's sales trips to mysterious deaths. Eventually she contacts her old school friend, Lily, for assistance. Lily's had experience with this sort of thing too. (Again, described in those first two "Henry Kimball" books, I guess.)

Without further spoilers, the book has a number of everything-you-knew-was-wrong plot twists, along with a suspenseful climax. It's a real roller coaster ride. As a bonus for local readers, Martha and Alan live in Portsmouth, NH, and she works at the Kittery Public Library, just across the river in Maine.

Andrew Heaton brings his usual video mixture of hilarity and wisdom to a persistent myth, pointing out America still makes stuff!

There's no accompanying text at the Reason website to go with that, so instead I'll offer Jason Furman's recent NYT op-ed: Every President Tries It. It Never Works. (NYT gifted link) Want to guess what "it" is?

Jason was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017. Appointed by one of the guys he's implicitly criticizing in that last paragraph.

Also of note:

• Yum! John R. Puri says this like it was a bad thing: Seniors Are Devouring the Federal Budget. (NR gifted link)

  The excellent Penn Wharton Budget Model has a new report on how federal spending is distributed by age. It shows you where the government’s priorities lie: seniors front of the line, everyone else a distant second.

  In 2025, the federal government spent $7.1 trillion overall, of which only $2.6 trillion went to broad public goods such as national defense and transportation (as well as interest on the debt). The remaining $4.4 trillion was attributable to benefits for individuals: entitlements, income security, health-care and education subsidies, and veterans’ programs. That amount was broken down to see how much in outlays each age group in America receives.

  Children and adults under 26 received what seems like a fair chunk of change: $449 billion, concentrated in family welfare programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and education funding. But that amount was just 10 percent of age-assignable spending last year. “Working-age adults,” ages 26 to 64, received a lot more: $1.2 trillion. Much of that came from means-tested welfare programs, too, but also health and income benefits for disabled workers and veterans. In total, working-age adults claimed 28 percent of age-assignable spending.

  Where did all the other money go? To the last age group — seniors 65 and older — who took home $2.7 trillion, or 62 percent of federal spending on individuals. That’s nearly 40 percent of the entire federal budget. Like working-age adults, seniors receive a good amount in means-tested welfare and veterans’ benefits. The vast majority of the spending they receive, however, is in entitlement programs tailored to retirees: Social Security and Medicare.

  Depending on your own age, read it and feel irate. Or (as in my case) slightly ashamed.

  John plugs the proposal from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB). Which, in a nutshell, caps Social Security benefits for a couple at a nice round $100,000 per year. (Single recipients: $50K) Economist Scott Sumner also likes it; in fact his headline describing the proposal is Too good to be true.

  Unfortunately, he quickly adds:

  The plan is so good that I see almost no prospect for it ever being enacted by our Congress, an institution that has fallen to a sadly dysfunctional state.

  So something much worse will probably happen.

• If I had known, I would have scheduled a party. At the WSJ, Joshua Jamerson notes the confetti and piñatas: Drivers Celebrate the Demise of the Most Hated Feature in Their Cars. (WSJ gifted link)

  The hated feature is "stop-start", which automatically shuts off your engine when you stop at (say) a red light or stop sign. Unsurprisingly, it got help from the nanny-statists under you-know-who:

  Drivers have long wanted to put a permanent stopper on stop-start. Designed to lower auto emissions by temporarily shutting off the engine while the brake is engaged, it also makes driving feel unnatural, jerky and unenjoyable, Donio and his fellow stop-start haters argue.

  The technology was developed decades ago, but federal incentives during the Obama administration kicked U.S. adoption into high gear. The Environmental Protection Agency began tracking stop-start technology in 2012 car models, less than 1% of which had the feature. By 2024, roughly 58% of new gasoline non-hybrid cars had the systems installed.

  I have stop-start on my Impreza. I don't hate it enough to turn it off.

• I knew they were out there somewhere. Kevin D. Williamson writes on an (apparently) endangered species: The Last Conservatives.

  Like most other numbskulls, Donald Trump is a profoundly incurious man, and so it probably is the case that he wandered down to the Supreme Court as another halfhearted attempt at bullying the justices, who, thanks in part to their individual characters and in part to constitutional design, are very hard to bully. But maybe he really did simply want to know what the hell is going on with the Supreme Court, which has left the president both perplexed and irritated by doing the one thing Donald Trump never has and never will do: its job.

  Ideological progressives and partisan Democrats have been engaged in a shameful yearslong smear campaign against the Supreme Court, an intellectually dishonest attack on the institution’s legitimacy. I have written from time to time about the “Supreme Court legitimacy watch,” i.e. the habit our friends on the left have of declaring that the high court’s legitimacy is at stake every time it looks like it might not give them their way on a policy question. The runup to Dobbs may have been the high-water mark of “legitimacy” hysteria, but the habit endures.

  That a policy question is not the same thing as a legal or constitutional question is something that vexes and confuses progressives from both directions: How could the arch-conservative Antonin Scalia be on the ACLU’s side of a flag-burning case? How is it possible that most of the court’s liberal justices sided with the conservatives in an 8-1 ruling in the recent “conversion therapy” case? The answer is the same in both cases: The First Amendment protects speech, including—especially!—speech that powerful people do not like.

  Even though I'm a fan of that checks-and-balances thing, I was not panic-stricken by Trump's visit to SCOTUS during the argument about birthright citizenship. Just call me Pollyanna: I thought there was a chance that he might have been impressed, if not convinced, by the arguments on the opposing side.

• You're GO for article deployment, Dave. Mr. Barry writes on The Moon Mission.

  Yay! We’re going back to the Moon! And we’re taking a Canadian!

  It has been a long time coming, but finally, on Wednesday evening, after years of preparation and a brief launch delay caused by a long line at the TSA checkpoint, NASA’s Artemis II spacecraft — named for Artemis II, the Greek goddess of large federal contracts — blasted off, with a crew of four, from what is currently named the Kennedy Space Center, although that could change if the president finds out about it.

  And for my followup comment… oh, you've already clicked over to Dave's article, haven't you?