AH, BUT YOU SEE, THE IMAGINARY ARROW OF HISTORY IS WITH THEM:  Never left enough.

OPEN THREAD: Be part of the brotherhood.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Two Huge Reasons Why Emmys Have Become a Joke.

Watch any episode of “Landman,” and you’ll come away with one thought.

Billy Bob Thornton is as good as it gets.

The veteran actor’s turn in the Paramount Plus show is everything binge-worthy TV should be – smart, compelling, unpredictable and engaging.

You can quibble about the rest of the program, and some do. Loudly. Thornton’s performance is sublime.

Not to Emmy voters, apparently.

The main thing that keeps me coming back to “Landman” is that in every scene with Billy Bob Thornton, the writers give him at least one perfect Billy Bob Thornton line.

But do read the whole thing, which is really about the not-so-amicable divorce bettwen Hollywood and Taylor Sheridan.

ICYMI: SHOCK REPORT: The New York Times Almost Has Standards. “Not that exact piece, you say? So — there is some version of Kristof’s baseless canine consent irregularities story that Kahn’s news division would have run? Help me out here, because I’m a little confused.”

UGH: In the post-literate society … Look! A meme!

The End of Reading is Here, writes Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic. Everyone’s reading less — if you don’t count Instagram captions — and people who do read are choosing shorter and shallower books.

The best-selling novel of 1958 was the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, she writes. Last year, the top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series.

Adults are choosing young-adult fiction and romantasy (romance and fantasy). School librarians are stocking graphic novels and manga to match students’ lower reading levels and shorter attention spans.

In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument.

Reading is fundamental, they told me. And it still is.

I HATE THOSE THINGS: Wind Turbine Blade Dump Disposal Drama (Plus A Modest Proposal).

Wind turbine blades are made of fiberglass, which is very hard to recycle. Basically you have to shred them up, melt them and then pour them into new molds. Evidently Global Fiberglass Solutions just thought they’d take the same shortcut so many municipalities have by simply omitting the expensive “recycling” part of the recycling cycle.

But because I’m a waste-not, want-not sort of guy, I have a modest proposal to solve the dilemma of having too many wind turbine blades: use them for segments of the border wall.

Maybe sharpen them first.