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They Could Not Indict the Sandwich

Sean Dunn walked up to a line of federal agents at the corner of 14th and U Streets Northwest on the night of August 10, 2025. The agents were Customs and Border Protection officers posted outside a nightclub hosting a Latin Night, part of the federal force surging into Washington that weekend. Dunn shouted at them for the better part of seven minutes. He called them fascists and racists. He chanted “Shame.” “Why are you here?” he shouted. “I don’t want you in my city!” Then he threw his dinner at Agent Gregory Lairmore’s chest. The dinner was a Subway footlong, still in its wrapper. Dunn ran. The agents caught him. A body camera recorded what he said on the sidewalk. “I did it. I threw a sandwich. I did it to draw them away from where they were. I succeeded.”

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The Square Outlived the Paper

I live in a tower named for a square named for a newspaper. My building is called Journal Squared, three glass sections rising beside the Journal Square PATH station in Jersey City, one of the busiest stations in the system. The square below is Journal Square, which the city created in 1923. The newspaper was the Jersey Journal, which ceased publication on February 1, 2025, at the age of 157. Two of those three things still exist. The paper is not one of them.

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The Lotus Tea

Catherine Liu took the stage in London on September 21 to talk about trauma. She was there for Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, new from Verso. The book argues that trauma has been commodified into a politics of permanent victimhood, and that its loudest merchants trade in something other than the true suffering of people. Midway through the conversation with Ash Sarkar on Novara Media’s Downstream, Liu, a cultural critic and professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine, swerved into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. She apologized for the tangent, and her interviewer told her to keep going. “What a phenomenal tangent that was,” she said when she surfaced.

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The Receipt Democracy Must Not Give You

William Wade Dudley wrote a letter in October 1888. He was treasurer of the Republican National Committee, and he spent that autumn worried about Indiana, where the presidential race would turn on voters of no settled loyalty, men the campaigns called floaters. Floaters drifted to whichever side paid. His instructions to an Indiana county chairman were precise. “Divide the floaters into blocks of five, and put a trusted man, with necessary funds, in charge of these five, and make him responsible that none get away and that all vote our ticket.” A Democratic mail clerk on the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad had noticed the heavy mail flowing from Republican headquarters to Indiana Republicans. He opened one letter and passed it to his party. The Indianapolis Sentinel printed the letter on October 31, 1888, under a banner headline.

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Billed by the Line: Obituary Inflation, the Emptied Obit Desk, and the Last Working Vanity Press

The Sunday death notices all carry the same sentence. She died peacefully at home, surrounded by her loving family, after a courageous battle with cancer. He passed away peacefully, surrounded by family, after a courageous battle with Alzheimer’s. The names change. The sentence does not. It makes three claims. The death was peaceful. The family was present. The dying person fought. A reporter would have to verify all three. Nobody verifies them now, because nobody is paid to.

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Jersey City Drank It First

The water in my glass this morning fell as rain over Morris County, some twenty-three miles west of my kitchen. It pooled behind a dam on the Rockaway River and came down to Jersey City by gravity, the way it has since 1904. It carries a trace of chlorine, as almost every American city’s water does now. Mine got there first, on September 26, 1908. The chlorine arrived in the middle of a lawsuit, dosed toward two hundred thousand people without a public hearing, a statute, or a permission slip of any kind. The fight that followed is the closest thing this country has to a founding trial over what a government may add to everyone’s glass. The question that trial settled is back.

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The Second Cow

Howard Stein told jokes the way other professors assigned books. He ran the playwriting program at Columbia and chaired its Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Theatre Studies, after teaching stops at Iowa and Yale. By the time I knew him he had trained a generation of American playwrights, and he still worked a classroom like a man with one good story left. The story he returned to was the one about the two farmers. He told it flat, without performance, the way you tell something you believe is true.

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