Happy New Year

A truly lovely New Year's Day to you all

Good Evening:

I don’t know how you spent New Year’s Day, or how you plan to spend tomorrow, but I truly hope it was remotely as sublime as mine was. No, I didn’t do anything especially out of the ordinary. But I am spending the first few days of the year making a point of enjoying myself with the simple things, which is how I plan to spend 2026.

I woke up this morning and did today’s show. Then I had breakfast with the most estimable Tamara Cofman Wittes and we spent much of the morning lounging about. Then I did some work on a very interesting project I’ve been noodling around with that was undertaken by the estimable Ian Enright, who has been trying to create a natural language search engine for Lawfare.

Then I went to a yoga class.

Then I did a little more work.

Then Tamara and I went to a New Year’s Day open house at the home of the estimable Mona Charen, where we saw many of Washington’s best pro-democracy people. And that was invigorating in a human way, because these are people who give me hope.

And then I drove to the cabin in the woods, where evening finds me writing today’s dog shirt.

And guess what I listened to on the drive out here? Jack Smith’s deposition testimony, of course.

Tomorrow I will wake up, do the show, and then spend the day doing carpentry and construction projects around the cabin while listening to the rest of the Smith deposition. And then, I will write my “The Situation” column, sharing my thoughts on the deposition. And I will read, and I will listen to the Brahms Op. 25 quintet. And I will write another dog shirt.

And if all of this doesn’t sound like a perfect start to a new year to you, it probably shouldn’t. It is a near perfect reflection of the things that are important for me to spend time doing, not anyone else. I can only wish for you that you are spending the first days of the year in such a perfect encapsulation of your own preferred ways of existing.

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Wednesday on #DogShirtTV, I welcomed the extremely estimable Kateryna Lisunova, Voice of America alumna and the best journalistic resource covering the progress of Ukraine negotiations. She came on the show to tell us about said negotiations and the experience of reporting on them. I strongly recommend this show:

Today on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Holly Berkley Fletcher, the estimable Jonathan Rauch, and various members of the Greek Chorus shared wishes for the new year. There was also a sagebrush rebellion in which people wished for shorter monologues. I put it down brutally:

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The Year On Lawfare

Lawfare’s year in review piece is out! Read it here, or check out the audio version:

I’m really proud of the work we did this year.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the baby owl, seen here being shooed off to bed:

Video Source

In honor of today’s Beast, go hide in a hole in the ground.

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Tell Me Something Interesting

In honor of the new year, I—EJ Wittes—have decided to give you all the opportunity to tell me interesting things.

I have here a list of questions that have occurred to me over the last few days, any of which might make for a good Tell Me Something Interesting post on its own, but none of which I’ve yet researched, because about fifty equally interesting questions occur to me every week, and I do actually have other things to do with my time. If you know the answer to any of these questions, tell me about it!

1. Why were there any number of people from the Greco-Roman world named Dionysius (see here for a list) but no one named Apollo or Ares? What was it about the cult of Dionysius specifically that made the name permissible for use by mortals?

2. Lasers are silent, and gunshots make a cracking noise. So how did we as a society decide that, if and when we invent guns that shoot lasers, those guns will make the sound “pew-pew” when they fire?

3. What is the oldest document that could be reasonably called a tabloid?

4. In societies that practiced large-scale castration, did eunuchs experience what we would consider gender dysphoria as a result of being castrated?

5. What exactly is “balsamic” about balsamic vinegar?