OPEN THEAD: Make it special.
December 12, 2025
THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX plans to go public in 2026, seeks $1.5 trillion valuation: reports.
UPDATE YOUR SPACE: 6×9 Area Rugs for Living Room, Bedroom. #CommissionEarned
UGH! Oliver Sacks Was a Fraud.
Much of his life, apparently, revolved around his personal torment that derived from his shame over being a homosexual, having grown up in England at a time when it was especially frowned upon, including by his mother, who told him she wished he had never been born. In fact, his career ended over accusations that he sexually abused patients—an accusation he vigorously denied.
Sacks’ fame is based on his ability to tell stories, and he certainly told compelling ones that captivated generations of people. While his colleagues were deeply skeptical of him, the general public and, eventually, the elite who fund and set curricula for medical schools were quite impressed.
Consider the main character in Awakenings, Leonard. He is portrayed in the most sympathetic way possible, and the movie is as much a love story as a tale of medical success and ultimate tragedy.
In reality, Leonard was not the poet we were told, but a man who looked fondly back on his youth as a rapist.
In the preface to “Awakenings,” Sacks acknowledges that he changed circumstantial details to protect his patients’ privacy but preserved “what is important and essential—the real and full presence of the patients themselves.” Sacks characterizes Leonard as a solitary figure even before his illness: he was “continually buried in books, and had few or no friends, and indulged in none of the sexual, social, or other activities common to boys of his age.” But, in an autobiography that Leonard wrote after taking L-dopa, he never mentions reading or writing or being alone in those years. In fact, he notes that he spent all his time with his two best friends—“We were inseparable,” he writes. He also recalls raping several people. “We placed our cousin over a chair, pulled down her pants and inserted our penises into the crack,” he writes on the third page, in the tone of an aging man reminiscing on better days. By page 10, he is describing how, when he babysat two girls, he made one of them strip and then “leaped on her. I tossed her on her belly and pulled out my penis and placed it between her buttocks and started to screw her.”
In “Awakenings,” Sacks has cleansed his patient’s history of sexuality. He depicts him as a man of “most unusual intelligence, cultivation, and sophistication”—the “ ‘ideal’ patient.” L-dopa may have made Leonard remember his childhood in a heightened sexual register—his niece and nephew, who visited him at the hospital until his death, in 1981, told me that the drug had made him very sexual. But they said that he had been a normal child and adolescent, not a recluse who renounced human entanglement for a life of the mind.
All of Sacks’ characters were fictionalizations of himself, or rather, some aspect of himself. He put his own words in their mouths, inserted his personal history into their lives, and privately referred to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat as a “fairy tale.”
So many “non-fiction” best-sellers turn out to have quite a bit of fiction in them, from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood to Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men. As Greg Easterbrook tweeted in response to the news about Sacks being a fabulist, “NY publishing houses have enabled the making up of facts. It started with Alice Mayhew letting Woodstein put into quotation marks lines that could not in a million years be actual quotes.”
In 2022, historian Bonnie K. Goodman wrote: An enduring problem in academia professors also plagiarize but get away with it.
[Dorris Kearns Goodwin] was a seasoned academic writer with a doctorate from Harvard no less and never should have plagiarized mid-career; she never took responsibility and dismissed what she did. Still, it did not hinder her career, and she was celebrated afterward for another book. That it did not affect her career sends a wrong message that professionals can plagiarize, with few repercussions. Without repercussions, there are no deterrents for others to plagiarize and borrow without abandon. In 2002, Timothy Noah wrote in Slate, “How To Curb the Plagiarism Epidemic (Or, how Alice Mayhew gets her groove back).” Noah expressed, “Either instance would be considered plagiarism–and dealt with quite severely–if the perpetrator were a freshman at Harvard, where Goodwin was previously a professor of government and now serves on the board of directors.” [34]
A plagiarism scandal marred another high-profile historian in 2002. Simon & Shuster author Stephen Ambrose was accused of plagiarism in multiple books he published. Ambrose wrote over 25 books, including the World War II book Band of Brothers made in 2001 to an HBO Emmy Award-winning series. First, The Weekly Standard accused Ambrose of lifting passages of his book The Wild Blue from historian Thomas Childers’ “Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II,” without putting them in quotation marks, although he did cite him. Ambrose called it a “mistake,” an oversight; Ambrose would write more than a book year with his family and a team of research assistants, and his books were a mill of popular history books. After the first discovery, the speed he wrote and released books was to blame.
Ambrose responded to the accusation in The New York Times:
“I tell stories. I don’t discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation. I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn’t. I am not out there stealing other people’s writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people’s writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from.” [35]
Noah found Ambrose’s statement on the scandal was “more defiant than apologetic.” [36]
Ambrose’s scandal only grew as more accusations from journalists followed, with Forbes’ Mark Lewis looking to make it a story. Lewis discovered that Ambrose’s plagiarism went back to 1975 and his book Crazy Horse and Custer. Ambrose took passages from Jay Monaghan’s 1959 book, “Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer.” Lewis then discovered that Ambrose copied passages in two other of his books Citizen Soldiers (1997) and Nixon: Ruin and Recovery (1991). Ironically, the book Ambrose copied Robert Sam Anson’s “Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon” (1985) was also edited by Alice Mayhew; the revelation put more spotlight on his editor and Simon & Shuster. [37]Then the New York Times’s David Kirkpatrick found five more passages in The Wild Blue were plagiarized.
David Strom writes that “It is striking, as Steven Pinker notes, that The New Yorker seems unbothered by Sacks’ fabulism, or even entranced by the literary quality of his work.” And to bring things full circle: New Yorker blog confuses All The President’s Men movie with actual Watergate history.
JULIE KELLY: DC Pipe Bomb Arrest Raises Questions About Christopher’s Wray’s FBI. “If Cole’s arrest proves to have solved the mystery of who planted the bombs, it presents another perhaps even more consequential question: Why did it take law enforcement so long to find him? Although there are no clear answers as of yet, Bongino’s description of the efforts that led to an arrest seems to contradict public comments and congressional testimony regarding the pipe bomb case previously provided by Wray.”
THIS SOUNDS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY THAT WE WERE PROMISED:
The hardest part of becoming a quadriplegic isn’t the paralysis, it’s believing you’ve suddenly become a burden for your loved ones.
Before my Neuralink surgery, I honestly believed I would be a burden for the rest of my life. I wasn’t capable of much, and no matter how hard I… pic.twitter.com/Tcl5mDSFIo
— Noland Arbaugh (@ModdedQuad) December 11, 2025
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Pope Fanboy Gov. JB Pritzker Signs Bill to Legalize Assisted Suicide.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Airmoto Tire Inflator Portable Air Compressor. #CommissionEarned
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Supergirl — More Superhero Slop?
Related: The new Supergirl poster is trying too hard.
I’d like to preface that the poster itself isn’t the worst (nor is it the best). Featuring a trench-coated Supergirl against a spray-painted logo background, it’s a fairly inoffensive design. With her tousled hair, sunglasses and wired headphones, it’s clear DC are going for a laidback ‘cool girl’ vibe that I feel comes across a little forced, but I can suspend my disbelief.
Well, I could. That was until I saw the new tagline: “Truth. Justice. Whatever.” A quote befitting of my teenage Tumblr blog, the attempt at an edgy tagline simply comes across as a desperate attempt to capture a young audience. It’s giving ‘how do you do, fellow kids?’ in the worst way.
It also seems like a way to goad the right into giving the film a little free extra PR, given that it reads like a callback to the 2006 Superman’s infamous slogan, “Truth, justice and . . . all that stuff,” and Gunn’s own earlier efforts to tweak Superman’s motto to be more woke: James Gunn Doesn’t Just Omit “The American Way” In ‘Superman’ – He Changes It To “The Human Way.”
As the Drinker notes, after going through all of trailer’s myriad and exhausted cliches, “the party’s over, James. It’s been over for like five years now. You’re just too wrapped up in your own PR to realize it.”
CHARLIE IS TOO KIND:
Those are beauty pageant contestants, and you are a complete piece of shit https://t.co/LBjzsOV5ml
— (((Charlie Martin))) (@chasrmartin) December 12, 2025
IT’S FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: His Dirty Bomb Was a Filthy Lie “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week, we’ll learn how not to frighten away the police, where not to hide things from the police, and why roller skates aren’t the best way to flee the police.”
GUMMINT IS AMERICA’S BIGGEST AFFORDABILITY CRISIS: What Reagan told America in 1981 is even more true in 2025. But will Dems or the MSM ever level with American people on this issue? I’m back up on Substack.
TREAT YOUR SHOULDER PAIN: Shoulder-Heating-Pad-Heated-Wrap. #CommissionEarned
UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Obama administration ICE chief says Trump deportations are ‘remarkable accomplishment.’
Former acting ICE Director John Sandweg told MSNOW on Thursday, “I got to say two things quickly. One is that the way in which the White House structured this immigration enforcement operation with Stephen Miller running the policy, with Tom Homan being the border czar, but very interested … ,” the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
He also said, “There’s always a little tension between the department and the White House, but especially so when you have three, you know, cooks in the kitchen, so to speak,” likely referring to the Department of Homeland Security.
Sandweg added that he’s aware that “there’s frustration at these numbers, but I have to tell you, this is a — it is a remarkable accomplishment. These numbers are stunning to me.
“When I look at, let’s say, 600,000 deportations this year, those are all from the interior. And I think this is a critical distinction. When you’re doing the immigration enforcement, you divide the world into the border and the interior. And during the Obama Administration, when there were 400,000 deportations, the reality is about 250,000 of those were people caught right at the border. And it’s not as impactful because those are people trying to get into the United States. This is all people in the interior.”
Amazing what you can do when you try.