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Ferdia Lennon’s novel Glorious Exploits brings to life an episode from the Peloponnesian War, when seven thousand Athenian soldiers were captured and crowded into a quarry outside Syracuse after a failed attack on the city. As Fintan O’Toole suggests in his review in our November 7, 2024, issue, the book “makes us feel like its story is […]

The post A Richer Sense of Humanity appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

No matter who gets the most votes A couple of weeks ago the gang down in Mar-a-lago was popping the champagne and gleefully drawing up plans to further destroy the White House gardens once the Trump’s are in residence again. They were looking at the early voting in the swing states and they figured they had it in the bag. According to Puck’s Tara Palmieri: It hit Trump in the last couple of weeks that early voting is a good way to win,” a person with knowledge of his thinking said. The campaign has been papering Pennsylvania with signs like, “Swamp them with votes,” “Make it too big to rig,” and “Vote early today!”  They’ve actually been strutting around for a while, but that’s to be expected. Republicans always go with the bandwagon effect, and no one is more natural at it than Trump who just last night told an audience in Arizona, “if Ronald Reagan came back from the dead at the height of Ronald Reagan, if he went to California to have a rally, he would 250–300 people in a ballroom.

The bros are getting hysterical: Two of former president Donald Trump’s most prominent backers in the right wing influencer sphere fretted Wednesday after early voting numbers showed massive early turnout among women that could imperil their candidate’s path to victory. “Male turnout in Pennsylvania for Trump has been a disaster,” tweeted Mike Cernovich on Wednesday. “Unless this changes, Kamala Harris takes PA and it’s over.” Cernovich is a longtime far right gadfly and commentator with a massive online following He’s been around long enough to have played a role in the anti-feminist Gamergate harassment campaign and to have helped spread the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, though has disavowed the alt-right and drifted closer to the mainstream conservative movement in recent years. (Trump’s eldest child, Donald Jr., once said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize).

I know we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the early vote and this might not mean anything. But if it holds up it’s big. Old people vote: Donald Trump is lagging Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania early voting with a critical and once-reliably Republican constituency: seniors. It’s a warning sign for the former president that reflects early vote data and polling across the battlegrounds, after Republicans won the senior vote in each of the last five presidential elections. In Pennsylvania, where voters over the age of 65 have cast nearly half of the early ballots, registered Democrats account for about 58 percent of votes cast by seniors, compared to 35 percent for Republicans. That’s despite both parties having roughly equal numbers of registered voters aged 65 and older. The partisan gap is narrower than it was in 2020, when views of early voting were more partisan, and Republicans take that as a good sign. But the GOP still is counting on more of its older voters to show up on Election Day, while Democrats have more votes in the bank. The data is in line with polling in the state that has shown Trump shedding support among older voters.

I know that some of you don’t listen to podcasts and I’d guess that most of you have never listened to Joe Rogan, the man who runs the most popular podcast in the world (making hundreds of millions of dollars at it.) Trump appeared on his show last week and it’s been dowloaded 35 million times. Anyway, here’s a taste of the kind of thing this superstar is selling to his massive audience: He is very stupid and he makes everyone who listens to him stupid. A case in point: his interview with JD Vance who is not as stupid as Rogan but knows the audience will believe anything: During a prolonged discussion about the environment, Vance asserted that he “didn’t have a strong view about what the carbon footprint ultimately does,” appearing to waffle about whether human-caused climate change exists.  “It’s interesting that the environmental movement in America, the only thing that it talks about is the carbon footprint, and it never talks about . . . why do we have the highest rates of obesity in the world right now,” Vance said.

If you are thinking of not voting for Harris over the Gaza issue, I understand the impulse. But it’s a mistake. Bernie Sanders explains why: AOC says: And then there’s this: Nuff said.

Kamala Harris speaks the truth: Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris warned voters on Thursday that Republican Donald Trump and his allies would scale back healthcare programs if he wins the White House and said his comments at a Wednesday rally were offensive to women. In a brief press conference, Vice President Harris reminded voters that former President Trump had tried unsuccessfully to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, during his 2017-2021 presidency. Now he says this: He said he wouldn’t cut Social security but presented a budget that cut it every single year he was president. And they still plan to do it: If they get the chance they’re going to repeal it, don’t ever think otherwise. It’s their holy grail.

I know it’s the day after Halloween but it’s still pumpkin season: They did the mash! The elephant family stomped and snacked on over 1,200 lbs of pumpkins this morning during our Squishing of the Squash!