Derek Miller
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Derek Miller
@visualizingbroadway.com
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Theater historian. Little League coach. Cruciverbalist.
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(From today's Times updates.)
The language of the bill states that “any senator whose Senate data, or the Senate data of whose Senate office, has been acquired, subpoenaed, searched, accessed, or disclosed in violation of this section may bring a civil action against the United States if the violation was committed by an officer, employee, or agent of the United States or of any Federal department or agency.” Because the provision is retroactive to 2022, it would appear to make eligible the eight lawmakers whose phone records were subpoenaed by investigators for Mr. Smith as he examined efforts by Donald J. Trump to obstruct the results of the 2020 presidential election. Each violation would be worth at least $500,000 in any legal claim, according to the bill language. The bill would also sharply limit the way the government could resist such a claim, taking away any government claims of qualified or sovereign immunity to fight a lawsuit over the issue.
November 10, 2025 at 8:27 PM
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Uh.
A spending package expected to be approved as part of a deal to reopen the government would create a wide legal avenue for senators to sue for as much as half a million dollars each when federal investigators search their phone records without notifying them. The provision, tucked into a measure to fund the legislative branch, appears to immediately allow for eight G.O.P. senators to sue over their phone records being seized in the course of the investigation by Jack Smith, the former special counsel, into the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The provision would make it a violation of the law to not notify a senator if their phone records or other metadata was taken from a service provider like a phone company. There are some exceptions, such as 60-day delays in notification if the senator is considered the target of an investigation.
November 10, 2025 at 8:26 PM
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Somehow or other we must get into the Government men who can match our enemies in fighting spirit, in daring, in resolution and in thirst for victory. Some 300 years ago, when this House found that its troops were being beaten again and again by the dash and daring of the Cavaliers, by Prince Rupert's Cavalry, Oliver Cromwell spoke to John Hampden. In one of his speeches he recounted what he said. It was this: I said to him, 'Your troops are most of them old, decayed serving men and tapsters and such kind of fellows.'…You must get men of a spirit that are likely to go as far as they will go, or you will be beaten still. It may not be easy to find these men. They can be found only by trial and by ruthlessly discarding all who fail and have their failings discovered. We are fighting to-day for our life, for our liberty, for our all; we cannot go on being led as we are. I have quoted certain words of Oliver Cromwell. I will quote certain other words. I do it with great reluctance, because I am speaking of those who are old friends and associates of mine, but they are words which, I think, are applicable to the present situation. This is what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation: You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.
November 10, 2025 at 1:34 PM
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Leo Amery's 1940 speech in the Commons, which basically forced Chamberlain out of office, is worth revisiting:
What I would say, however, is this: Just as our peace-time system is unsuitable for war conditions, so does it tend to breed peace-time statesmen who are not too well fitted for the conduct of war. Facility in debate, ability to state a case, caution in advancing an unpopular view, compromise and procrastination are the natural qualities—I might almost say, virtues—of a political leader in time of peace. They are fatal qualities in war. Vision, daring, swiftness and consistency of 1150decision are the very essence of victory. In our normal politics, it is true, the conflict of party did encourage a certain combative spirit. In the last war we Tories found that the most perniciously aggressive of our opponents, the right hon. Member for Carnarvon Boroughs, was not only aggressive in words, but was a man of action. In recent years the normal weakness of our political life has been accentuated by a coalition based upon no clear political principles. It was in fact begotten of a false alarm as to the disastrous results of going off the Gold Standard. It is a coalition which has been living ever since in a twilight atmosphere between Protection and Free Trade and between unprepared collective security and unprepared isolation. Surely, for the Government of the last 10 years to have bred a band of warrior statesmen would have been little short of a miracle. We have waited for eight months, and the miracle has not come to pass. Can we afford to wait any longer?
November 10, 2025 at 1:33 PM
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Live from Cornell's campus:
Neville Chamberlain brandishes the Munich agreement after appeasing Hitler.
November 7, 2025 at 5:37 PM
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I don't want to beat up on social sciences. I think they're really important! But as a humanist, reading that key ideas in psychology are outright fabrications makes me super mad that "the humanities are dying." We lost our students to this bullshit? At least the fiction we read is well-written.
November 6, 2025 at 12:47 PM
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Good job, Wikipedia.
Andrew Mark Cuomo[a] (born December 6, 1957) is an American lawyer and politician from the state of New York. A member of the Democratic Party and son of former governor Mario Cuomo, Cuomo served as the 56th governor of New York from 2011 until his resignation in 2021 following numerous sexual misconduct allegations. In 2025, Cuomo ran for Mayor of New York City as an independent, having lost the Democratic primary to Zohran Mamdani. He would go on to lose to Mamdani again in the general election.
November 5, 2025 at 12:50 PM
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Not sure it's clear from reporting, but it's basically impossible to see the East Wing destruction from the street. Security barriers and trees block viewpoints almost entirely.
October 24, 2025 at 9:01 PM
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The first two paragraphs:
I was hired​ as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are. One woman, informed of my project, visibly retched over her quail. ‘No, listen,’ I told her, ‘there is something there. People write well about him,’ and I saw the red line of her estimation plunge like the Dow Jones. ‘Didn’t he write that thing,’ someone else said, ‘about how women don’t know how to piss, because their insides are too complicated?’ (Yes, in multiple books. It is at best puzzling, and at worst an indictment of both Pennsylvania public schools and Harvard.) ‘Please tell me you’re writing something about Updike’s 9/11 book,’ another said. ‘Can’t do that,’ I responded, ‘because I’m pretty sure I would die while reading it, and that would be another victim for 9/11.’ Taste and tact had departed hand in hand; I had been reading too much John Hoyer Updike.
October 20, 2025 at 11:43 PM
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Dhuhr prayer time. Eleanor watches thoughtfully.
October 17, 2025 at 4:46 PM
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Picture of a half-inflated purple hippo costume.
October 17, 2025 at 4:35 PM
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Please attend a No Kings rally tomorrow. I will wear an inflatable hippo. Just bring yourself. And everyone else you know who values living in a democracy.

A slightly modified Baldwin prophecy:
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious [whatever their other beliefs], who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the [fascist] nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything the fulfillment of that prophecy recreated from the Bible in a song by a slave is upon us. God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time.
October 17, 2025 at 4:32 PM
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Oh, and I grabbed some pretty good bagels down the block.
Bag of Kossar's bagels.
October 17, 2025 at 3:07 PM
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It's the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. One of the main prayer sites for taxi drivers working in Manhattan. And I've no doubt Eleanor Roosevelt would LOVE that view for what it says about humans' ability to live together across differences.
Entrance and awning to The Islamic Cultural Center of New York, which is across Riverside Drive from the statue.
October 17, 2025 at 3:03 PM
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Today in "My country is NYC" (@cjsprigman.bsky.social's coinage): You can contemplate what Eleanor Roosevelt lived through. How she fought against evil and for a country that valued everyone for their humanity. And you wonder what she's looking at. (1/3)
Statue of Eleanor Roosevelt at 72nd St and Riverside Drive, NYC. She is looking off to the right of the image.
October 17, 2025 at 2:59 PM
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As Americans of all backgrounds prepare to rally on Saturday against authoritarian government, [Jack] Smith is now speaking out. He is doing so in a way to underscore all that’s at stake. “No man is above the law, and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it,” he told the students at George Mason, quoting Theodore Roosevelt. And then, in his own voice, Smith added: “When we say we have no kings in this country, that’s what we’re talking about.”
October 16, 2025 at 2:08 PM
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This Wired story on cybertruck owners is on point.
October 16, 2025 at 12:01 PM
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Serious props to the Times for the last three paragraphs.
The covert finding is in some ways a natural evolution of those antidrug efforts. But the C.I.A.’s history of covert action in Latin America and the Caribbean is mixed at best. In 1954, the agency orchestrated a coup that overthrew President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, ushering in decades of instability. The C.I.A.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 ended in disaster, and the agency repeatedly tried to assassinate Fidel Castro. That same year, however, the C.I.A. supplied weapons to dissidents who assassinated Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the authoritarian leader of the Dominican Republic. The agency also had its hands in a 1964 coup in Brazil, the death of Che Guevara and other machinations in Bolivia, a 1973 coup in Chile, and the contra fight against the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s
October 16, 2025 at 1:17 AM
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Here's a thread, from oldest to most recent, of the key @nytimes.com reporting on an imminent deal between Harvard and the regime.
A Charlie Brown comic strip panel showing Lucy and her football. Lucy (labelled "Trump") says, "Harvard cut a deal with us! We're gonna sign it today!" Charlie Brown (The New York Times), says "We'll print it in the paper!" The football is labelled with Harvard's seal.
October 13, 2025 at 11:52 PM
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Spotted at the uptown 1 stop at 79th St (the Zabar's stop).
October 10, 2025 at 5:58 PM
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Lucy Van Pelt holds a footbal for Charlie Brown. The football is tagged with Harvard University's seal; Lucy is labelled "Trump;" Charlie Brown wears the logo of The New York Times. Lucy/Trump says "Harvard cut a deal with us! We're gonna sign it today!" Charlie/The Times replies "We'll print it in the paper!"
October 1, 2025 at 2:39 PM
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From a JustSecurity essay about servicemembers' criminal liability for the murders in the Caribbean. These paragraphs summarize the gross illegality of these acts.
this post assumes that LOAC does not regulate this strike (because LOAC is lex specialis, applying only in an actual armed conflict). Further, it assumes Trump’s jus ad bellum self-defense argument is without merit. Finally, it assumes the attacks violate International Human Rights Law’s rights to life and fair trial and its prohibition on extrajudicial killings. But even if these attacks can be considered part of an ongoing lawful military operation in a non-international armed conflict (NIAC) akin to the campaign against al Qaeda and its associated forces or an international armed conflict (IAC) with the Maduro regime, the killings would still be crimes under LOAC’s prohibition on making “civilians the object of attack.”
September 24, 2025 at 4:18 PM
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This flew under my radar: Chris Rufo threatened troops on campuses in a podcast interview at @chronicle.com Two key passages:
Rufo So of course, previous presidents and administrations have worked with think tanks, scholars, civic leaders on policy, they continue to do so. And if anything — and maybe we can kind of leave with this provocative point — if anything, I think they should take stronger and even more decisive action against these institutions. And for me, the frame of reference is the campaign to desegregate universities in the 1960s, the early 1960s. And your listeners may recall that in fact, the President of the United States, President Kennedy, actually sent in armed … sent in the 101st Airborne troops to forcibly desegregate universities. I think he established an important precedent and I think the president to this day still retains all remedies up to and including parachuting in the 101st Airborne if these universities continue to discriminate on the basis of race, scapegoat students on the basis of race, and segregate students on basis of race. Rufo The president under Article II of the Constitution retains the power to enforce the law, to make sure that universities are adhering with the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act. And I’m not saying that the president should send in the 101st Airborne. I’m merely saying that he retains the right to do so under the Constitution and longstanding precedent. Stripling Well, if he does, I’m going to give you a call. Rufo I expect that you would. I don’t think it’s happening, I don’t think it necessary at the current time. Stripling Well, you’ve put the idea out there Chris and we know how these things work. Rufo But I think that yeah the ideas should be floating out there. I think it’s one that is worth the consideration.
September 23, 2025 at 11:40 PM
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I remember this essay very well, actually! Those passages had not stood out to me years ago, though they certainly resonate now. These sentences affected me profoundly, then and now. Thank you for the recommendation!!
Quotation from Hannah Arendt's "Personal Responsibility and Judgement." Included the argument that Germans who avoided participating in Nazism "refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command 'Thou shalt not kill,' but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves."
September 23, 2025 at 1:36 AM
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The John Wilson drawings/mural The Young Americans at The Met now is outstanding. In the hallway outside his exhibit. (Unfortunately, one panel is not included.)
Image of 5 of the 6 panels of John Wilson's The Young Americans, depicting his son and friends. Mid-1970s. Charcoal and colored crayon on paper.
September 22, 2025 at 4:15 PM