Has DC Felt Different With the National Guard?
And: Responding to reader feedback from the last week.
Hey everyone, happy Friday! I’m sorry that the newsletters have been coming a bit late this week: I’m on West Coast time for a change!
I actually should have been back in DC by now, but I was hit with a string of flight delays and cancellations yesterday — never fun.
It turns out that the root cause was a small plane whose landing gear collapsed as it was about to take off from the San Diego airport. Thankfully, no one was injured, but it sparked an hours-long ground stop, which then had a domino effect pushing flights back for the rest of the day.
Here’s a photo I took of the unlucky plane from the window of the plane I almost took off from, until we were delayed on the tarmac so much that the pilots timed out and our flight was canceled. So it goes.
Happily, the delays gave me lots of time to read and listen to podcasts, so I come to you today with two recommendations — one fiction and one non-fiction.
First, I recommend this New York Times podcast episode with Ezra Klein and Ben Shapiro (gift link). It’s a great example of dialogue between two smart voices on the left and right: polite, respectful, thought-provoking, and even containing some strands of agreement at different points. I enjoyed listening to it.
Second, during the hours on the tarmac, I devoured “Katabasis,” the new novel by R.F. Kuang. I don’t always have the time to read much fiction, but I’m a big fan of Kuang’s (a fellow Georgetown Hoya who I met once on campus), and her latest didn’t disappoint. Kuang is a unique writer — smart, funny, by turns a tad pretentious and then impressively informal — as was the premise of the book (summed up in four words: “Hell is a campus”).
Anyways, those are my recs for the week. Now, it’s time to dive into some reader questions. Today, we’ll tackle:
How DC has felt since the National Guard arrived
My response to criticisms from my pieces about Charlie Kirk
What stays open and closed during a government shutdown
How the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” has changed under Trump
And a lot more!
Let’s dive in…
Q: On 4+ weeks on National Guard(s) and Feds on DC Streets: Do you and your contacts feels safer? Are the restaurants fuller than before? Is Trump’s “We have no crime” true?