August 31, 2026

MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH: Morality Tales.

As part of the recent Bookforum symposium on the future of fiction, the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh penned a brief and extremely eloquent polemic against didactic fiction. That it’s being so heavily circulated, especially by fiction writers, suggests that Moshfegh hit on a touchy topic:

I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Art is not media. A novel is not an “afternoon special” or fodder for the Twittersphere or material for journalists to make neat generalizations about culture. A novel is not BuzzFeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. Let’s get clear about that. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitive industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves.

Wait, who is staffing those “murderous corporations and exploitative industries?”

Khachiyan’s tweet concludes:

It’s not “murderous corporations and exploitative industries” that poisoned culture either, but activist-brained cultural commissars who resent excellence and want to eliminate the competition using flimsy political pretexts so they can feel like Good People.

As Kevin Williamson wrote in 2018: Watch What You Say. Someone Else Is.

The generation that reached what passes for maturity in the age of social media is the most status-obsessed—and hence etiquette-obsessed—since the ancien régime. They are all miniaturists: There hasn’t been an important and original book of political ideas written by an American Millennial, and very few of them have read one, either. But they are very interested in individual pronouns and 280-character tweets. It is extraordinarily difficult for any one of them to raise his own status through doing interesting and imaginative intellectual work, because there is practically no audience for such work among his peers. Worse, the generation ahead of him stopped paying attention to Millennials years ago, and the generation behind him never started.

What that leaves is the takfiri tendency, scalp-hunting or engineering a court scandal at Versailles. Concurrent with that belief is the superstition that people such as Harvey Weinstein or Bret Stephens take up cultural space that might otherwise be filled by some more worthy person if only the infidel were removed, as though society were an inverted game of Tetris, with each little disintegration helping to enable everybody else to move up one slot at a time. Status obsession does funny things to one’s map of social reality. It leads to all manner of bizarre thinking.

The madness of 2020 was already hoving into view back then.

Posted at 7:44 am by Ed Driscoll

HE SAYS THAT LIKE IT’S A BAD THING: Hunter Biden’s Lawyer: DOJ Would Not Have Prosecuted Without Pressure From IRS Whistleblowers.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer asserted that the Justice Department was on the cusp of a “non-prosecution resolution” with his client had it not been for the two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers.

IRS agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler had alleged the Justice Department slow-walked the probe of the 46th president’s son. Shortly after going public with their concern, attorney Abbe Lowell said federal prosecutors changed course.

The Daily Signal obtained documents from the Justice Department about the prosecution of Hunter Biden for tax and gun charges through a Freedom of Information Act request. A Delaware jury convicted Hunter, but his father, President Joe Biden, pardoned him shortly before leaving office.

In an Aug. 14, 2023, letter to special counsel David Weiss, Lowell complained that prosecutors made a complete reversal.

“Before the May 2023 leaks, discussions with your Office involved a consensual non-prosecution resolution to all conduct under investigation, where the resolution proposed by both sides did not include any guilty plea,” Lowell wrote.

But he wrote that changed after Shapley was interviewed by CBS News.

Isn’t that how whistleblowing is supposed to work?

Posted at 7:32 am by Stephen Green

CHINA SYNDROME:

Posted at 7:18 am by Glenn Reynolds

“LATTE TOWN” ENTERS DOOM LOOP:

Also contributing to the descent of what David Brooks dubbed “Latte Town” in the mid-1990s is more than a soupçon of antisemitism: How Vermont Became Ground Zero for the Anti-Israel Movement.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

As InstaPundit readers know, Syracuse has been a dumpster fire for years.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

August 30, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds