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At the end of 2020 I wrote about that pandemic year so I wouldn’t forget what it was like. I wrote about hope and Thomas Merton: “By hope…the abstract and impersonal become …intimate conviction,” wrote the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. “What I believe in faith, I possess and make my own by hope.” Hope in […]

Usually, I’d just post this to the Twitter thread connecting public events to the book The Hardest Job in the World, but this passage is too big:

Another important contribution to history: presidents as wrestlers. Or, in Teddy Roosevelt’s case, a Brooklyn barista.

How it started: How it wound up: View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Prime Time with John Dickerson (@dickersonprimetime)

Quiet hired seems like a good new term for an old thing. That’s distinct from fad expressions to name things that don’t exist or that have existed forever but aren’t illuminated by the new phrase. A wave of the Quiet Hired might lead to a Quiet Riot.

Thank you to The Dispatch for the link to this article by Rhiannon Williams in MIT Review: “The problem isn’t necessarily the amount of time you’re spending scrolling on the phone as much as what you’re looking at.” The piece touches on something I wrote about in this piece for The Atlantic, which is about […]

Time magazine celebrated its 100th birthday on March 3rd. We’re coming up on the 30th anniversary of my first professional byline on March 22, 1993. Tanks to Joelle Attinger, John Stacks, Sam Gwynne, Jonathan Beaty and Jill Smolowe for that first shot: It was not for a few months that I’d get a top byline […]

Since every presidential candidate feels like they have to push a book first, the chance to be distinguished by doing so is limited. I expect this will encourage an innovative candidate to offer a branded juice cleanse soon as a first gambit.

— John Dickerson (@jdickerson) March 4, 2023

When you are president, things can get out of hand: This is from Jimmy Carter’s White House diary. It demonstrates something about Carter but also the benefit of a presidential retreat where a president can have a minor mishap like this and it won’t get blown out of proportion by the press. Think it wouldn’t? […]

This Twitter thread of presidents with mullets is hit or miss, but reminds that LBJ essentially grew a mullet at the end of his life: It kinda came to that: https://t.co/qoZwjxBF4i pic.twitter.com/vRCsu57Zgz — John Dickerson (@jdickerson) March 2, 2023  

The ranking of presidents provides hours of enjoyment for professionals and hobbyists alike. This ranking is perhaps the greatest of all: “…soon, remains of George Washington, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and Dwight D. Eisenhower will join the DNA and cremated remains of many of the people who worked on Star Trek and be blasted into […]

rage farming noun. Informal. the tactic of intentionally provoking political opponents, typically by posting inflammatory content on social media, in order to elicit angry responses and thus high engagement or widespread exposure for the original poster. 📝 This term was coined in 2022 (in the form rage farmed) by investigative reporter John Scott-Railton. Read about some other terms for […]

From Business Insider: “I do ‘Bare Minimum Mondays’ at work.” The TikTok creator and startup founder Marisa Jo Mayes says it helps her beat the “Sunday scaries” and avoid burnout — and it has completely changed her life. Find out more. If enough TikTok influencers can work really hard to brand not working at all […]

I found a quote in one of my notebooks from the second year of the Iraq war (3/20/2005). “Life goes on,” Hayawi says. “We are in the middle of a war, and we still smoke the water pipe.” This feels like a universal message to me. After some work in the shop with the search […]

I talked to Timothy Frye, the Marshall D. Shulman professor of post-Soviet foreign policy at Columbia University, for “CBS News Prime Time” about how Russia’s war in Ukraine has changed global energy, the economy and politics.    

Speaker McCarthy said House Republicans “learned how to govern” in the 15 rounds of voting. What did they learn? That in a debate over important matters the minority must be listened to and their ideas accommodated in order to get a good result?

— John Dickerson (@jdickerson) January 8, 2023

60 seconds before CPI number came out there was significant trading activity: Bloomberg thinks someone got the news!

“The world is much worse than it would have been had the virus not emerged, and that’s not the fault of columnists you disagree with.” Matt Yglesias.

The Ruskies next door. Our story on it on CBS News Prime Time can be found here.

“Like I, like, kind of vaguely knew, kind of, sort of maybe, um, on a qualitative level what was going on.” — Sam Bankman Fried on Unusual Whales podcast on movement of customer funds from FTX to Alameda without permission. via Dealbook