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New York City Travel, Food, and Highlights – 2025
A couple of weeks ago, Selene and I took a family trip to New York. We did some cool stuff — some of it, rather touristy perhaps, but cool stuff nonetheless. I was going to show you a few highlights in a Monday update post, but then I ended up with about 280 pictures to go through.
Anyway, it was too much to be part of anything else. So here you go: here are pictures of cool things we did or delicious food that we ate.
Day 1
Arrival and Train Rides
We flew into JFK airport reasonably early in the day, then took the Long Island Rail Road into the city.
As we waited for our train to get to the station, I have a brief meeting with some locals.
Personally, I enjoy train rides. I find them relaxing.
We got off at Grand Central, which is always fun to explore. Here’s the ceiling.
From Grand Central, our intention was to walk to our hotel, but we got tired of lugging our suitcases around. So we cabbed it!
The Nintendo Store
After dropping our bags off at the hotel, we started a slow migration toward the Empire State building… but we weren’t due there until after sunset. Time for plenty of stops along the way… the first of which… was the Nintendo Store.
Super touristy. Very crowded. Do not recommend. Not really sure what all the fuss is about, but hey, I got to see Mario, Luigi, and Link.
There was also a Pikachu, but there were far too many people around to take a picture.
Next, more walking! By this point, we all realized that we hadn’t really eaten much all day, so we stopped and got a hot dog.
Selene maintains that this hot dog was delicious. I, however, believe that we were all just very hungry.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
This is like the second or third time we’ve tried to visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I don’t remember what happened before to cause the mission to fail, but we always found the doors locked.
We were very happy to find them unlocked and open this time.
There was actually a wedding service going on. I thought it was interesting that you could just walk in while people were getting married. There was some very beautiful music playing and the pipe organ was epic — you could really feel it in the core of your being.
It’s got crazy ceilings.
New York Public Library
It was getting later in the day, but it still wasn’t dark enough for the nighttime view of the city we were hoping to get at Empire, so there was time for one more stop: The New York Public Library.
The ceiling of the upper floor is painted beautifully. Yes, lots of crazy ceilings in NY.
Okay, call me uninformed if you wish, as I hadn’t been to any sort of physical library in a long time, but I really expected to see books somewhere inside.
“Where can we see some books?” I asked one of the attendants. I really just wanted to experience the smell of old books. You know? Libraries have a smell.
He educated that all of the books are kept underground in Bryant Park — and you have to make a request to have them brought up to you. Go figure.
And with that minor disappointment, it was finally dark enough outside.
The Empire State Building
Is it possible to do anything in New York City that is more touristy than the Empire State building? I don’t think so.
And you obviously have to pose inside of King Kong’s hand.
Here’s a couple of pictures of the view from the observation floor that is fully enclosed by windows.
And here’s a couple of pics from the top where everything is out in the open air.
Aren’t we cute?
Tacombi
By the time we descended back to ground level, we realized we were all very hungry again. On the same block, there’s a little taco place called Tacombi, so we popped in. It was delicious.
I actually got a burrito, but it was still delicious. And the churros are from a Christmas market that was going on in Bryant Park.
Day 2
The second day of our trip started with more walking.
This is a building shaped like a trunk.
Liberty Bagels
Is it legal to visit New York without getting a bagel? I don’t think it should be.
We waited in a giant line at Liberty Bagels. That place is ridiculously packed — and rightfully so, their bagels are delicious and they have an insane selection of cream cheeses.
I got their famous Rainbow Bagel, topped with half blueberry and half strawberry cream cheese. It was really good.
Central Park
This is probably one of my favorite places in New York. I’d like to go on a warm, Spring day to have a picnic.
And then all of a sudden, a thick fog rolled in and covered the tops of buildings.
And it started to rain. We took shelter in a nearby tunnel as we listened to a street performer play some classical guitar songs.
Then, off to the museum!
The MET Museum
The MET is one of those places where you could literally walk around all day and not be done.
I mean, I frequently search their archives for pictures of ancient stuff to use for the articles that I write, so seeing it in person is always awesome.
Like artwork on amphorae…
Or statues of dudes and carvings of stuff…
And look, it’s Pan! IO Pan!
And I can always get lost in the Ancient Egyptian wing…
They were currently doing an exhibition called “Divine Egypt.”
Yeah, of the nearly 300 photos I took, most of them are from the MET. I could have probably done an entire post just with those pictures.
And we finally got a chance to walk through the instruments section of the museum.
Alright, back to the hotel. It was raining really hard and we all needed a little rest.
Pasta Eater
We wanted to eat pasta, so we went to a place called Pasta Eater. Out of all the many places to eat pasta, however, this one was chosen specifically because they make one of the dishes in a wheel of parmesan cheese.
I’ve never had a bad experience with pasta made inside of a cheese wheel. Have you?
Macy’s
We stopped in at Macy’s flagship store, mostly because I needed a bathroom, but also in hopes that we could recreate some sort of Elf extravaganza by looking at Christmas tree displays through department store windows. There weren’t any decorated windows with trees, unfortunately.
They did have some sort of Christmas village going on in the lower floor, but we arrived 5 minutes after it was shut down and the security guard was very quick to let me know it was closed and that we should all gtfo.
I don’t really understand how a retail store has so many things that it can occupy such a large space. I’ve been in entire shopping malls that are smaller than this one Macy’s store. Capitalism at its finest.
Serendipity 3
Don’t worry. Even though we ate all that pasta earlier, we saved room for dessert.
We stopped into Serendipity 3 without a reservation and were initially told that it would be 45 minutes for a table. After some brief witchcraft, they sat us immediately.
After all, we just wanted to try their famous hot chocolate.
We got the s’mores flavor and it was unexpectedly delightful.
Pizza
As much as there should be a law against visiting New York without getting a bagel, there should also be one about pizza.
But I don’t care about bagels so much as I do pizza. And it doesn’t matter how much food we’ve already eaten or what time of day it is… if I walk by 20 different places that say “$1.50 Pizza” in neon lights, I’m going to have to go get one sooner or later.
And then it was time for bed.
Day 3
We had to check out of our hotel in the morning, but they held our bags for us so we could continue wandering around the city for a while.
I don’t know what this building is, but I guess I thought it looked cool, so I took a few pictures of it.
Our first stop of the day was a bookstore… uhhh… sorry, but I’m a little light on the details here. It was supposed to be where the filmed the tv show You or something like that. It didn’t catch my interest at all, so I didn’t take any pictures. Also, we sat outside in the rain for about 20 minutes past their scheduled opening time and nobody ever opened the store.
After that, we went to a little underground subway mall to check out some comics.
But the final stop of the day… truly the highlight… perhaps even the coolest part of the entire trip… was sushi.
Shirokuro
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to dine in a 2D comic strip? Maybe in a hand-drawn, black and white world?
Well… that’s basically what this place is.
It was pretty trippy.
But aside from the aesthetics, they also had amazing sushi.
I’ve never really been a sushi person. I’ll eat it, but I’ve never been like, “hey, I really want sushi right now.”
They may have converted me.
Seriously, it was that good.
Heading Home
And that was one of our last stops for the trip. We caught an Uber Airport Shuttle at the Port Authority Bus Station and went for a long drive to LaGuardia Airport.
LaGuardia was recently remodeled, apparently. We were there briefly for our last New York visit and it felt like one small, musty room… and the only food option was a tiny little shop that had some donuts, coffee, and snacks. But now… it’s huge! You basically have to walk through an entire shopping mall before you get to the gates. They even have a giant fountain of water that rains down from the ceiling with color-changing lights.
Once we made it past all the shopping, we were greeted by a large fight status display screen that claimed our return flight was cancelled. We continued to the gate to ask questions — there was nobody there, but the gate status said delayed.
And then it got delayed a little bit longer.
And then a little bit longer…
We eventually did make it back to Florida, however. I think in total we lost about 3 hours from the delays. Very happy it wasn’t a cancellation.
#eats #food #metMuseum #newYork #newYorkCity #nyc #pasta #pastaEater #serendipity3 #shirokuro #sushi #travel
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New York City Travel, Food, and Highlights – 2025
A couple of weeks ago, Selene and I took a family trip to New York. We did some cool stuff — some of it, rather touristy perhaps, but cool stuff nonetheless. I was going to show you a few highlights in a Monday update post, but then I ended up with about 280 pictures to go through.
Anyway, it was too much to be part of anything else. So here you go: here are pictures of cool things we did or delicious food that we ate.
Day 1
Arrival and Train Rides
We flew into JFK airport reasonably early in the day, then took the Long Island Rail Road into the city.
As we waited for our train to get to the station, I have a brief meeting with some locals.
Personally, I enjoy train rides. I find them relaxing.
We got off at Grand Central, which is always fun to explore. Here’s the ceiling.
From Grand Central, our intention was to walk to our hotel, but we got tired of lugging our suitcases around. So we cabbed it!
The Nintendo Store
After dropping our bags off at the hotel, we started a slow migration toward the Empire State building… but we weren’t due there until after sunset. Time for plenty of stops along the way… the first of which… was the Nintendo Store.
Super touristy. Very crowded. Do not recommend. Not really sure what all the fuss is about, but hey, I got to see Mario, Luigi, and Link.
There was also a Pikachu, but there were far too many people around to take a picture.
Next, more walking! By this point, we all realized that we hadn’t really eaten much all day, so we stopped and got a hot dog.
Selene maintains that this hot dog was delicious. I, however, believe that we were all just very hungry.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral
This is like the second or third time we’ve tried to visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I don’t remember what happened before to cause the mission to fail, but we always found the doors locked.
We were very happy to find them unlocked and open this time.
There was actually a wedding service going on. I thought it was interesting that you could just walk in while people were getting married. There was some very beautiful music playing and the pipe organ was epic — you could really feel it in the core of your being.
It’s got crazy ceilings.
New York Public Library
It was getting later in the day, but it still wasn’t dark enough for the nighttime view of the city we were hoping to get at Empire, so there was time for one more stop: The New York Public Library.
The ceiling of the upper floor is painted beautifully. Yes, lots of crazy ceilings in NY.
Okay, call me uninformed if you wish, as I hadn’t been to any sort of physical library in a long time, but I really expected to see books somewhere inside.
“Where can we see some books?” I asked one of the attendants. I really just wanted to experience the smell of old books. You know? Libraries have a smell.
He educated that all of the books are kept underground in Bryant Park — and you have to make a request to have them brought up to you. Go figure.
And with that minor disappointment, it was finally dark enough outside.
The Empire State Building
Is it possible to do anything in New York City that is more touristy than the Empire State building? I don’t think so.
And you obviously have to pose inside of King Kong’s hand.
Here’s a couple of pictures of the view from the observation floor that is fully enclosed by windows.
And here’s a couple of pics from the top where everything is out in the open air.
Aren’t we cute?
Tacombi
By the time we descended back to ground level, we realized we were all very hungry again. On the same block, there’s a little taco place called Tacombi, so we popped in. It was delicious.
I actually got a burrito, but it was still delicious. And the churros are from a Christmas market that was going on in Bryant Park.
Day 2
The second day of our trip started with more walking.
This is a building shaped like a trunk.
Liberty Bagels
Is it legal to visit New York without getting a bagel? I don’t think it should be.
We waited in a giant line at Liberty Bagels. That place is ridiculously packed — and rightfully so, their bagels are delicious and they have an insane selection of cream cheeses.
I got their famous Rainbow Bagel, topped with half blueberry and half strawberry cream cheese. It was really good.
Central Park
This is probably one of my favorite places in New York. I’d like to go on a warm, Spring day to have a picnic.
And then all of a sudden, a thick fog rolled in and covered the tops of buildings.
And it started to rain. We took shelter in a nearby tunnel as we listened to a street performer play some classical guitar songs.
Then, off to the museum!
The MET Museum
The MET is one of those places where you could literally walk around all day and not be done.
I mean, I frequently search their archives for pictures of ancient stuff to use for the articles that I write, so seeing it in person is always awesome.
Like artwork on amphorae…
Or statues of dudes and carvings of stuff…
And look, it’s Pan! IO Pan!
And I can always get lost in the Ancient Egyptian wing…
They were currently doing an exhibition called “Divine Egypt.”
Yeah, of the nearly 300 photos I took, most of them are from the MET. I could have probably done an entire post just with those pictures.
And we finally got a chance to walk through the instruments section of the museum.
Alright, back to the hotel. It was raining really hard and we all needed a little rest.
Pasta Eater
We wanted to eat pasta, so we went to a place called Pasta Eater. Out of all the many places to eat pasta, however, this one was chosen specifically because they make one of the dishes in a wheel of parmesan cheese.
I’ve never had a bad experience with pasta made inside of a cheese wheel. Have you?
Macy’s
We stopped in at Macy’s flagship store, mostly because I needed a bathroom, but also in hopes that we could recreate some sort of Elf extravaganza by looking at Christmas tree displays through department store windows. There weren’t any decorated windows with trees, unfortunately.
They did have some sort of Christmas village going on in the lower floor, but we arrived 5 minutes after it was shut down and the security guard was very quick to let me know it was closed and that we should all gtfo.
I don’t really understand how a retail store has so many things that it can occupy such a large space. I’ve been in entire shopping malls that are smaller than this one Macy’s store. Capitalism at its finest.
Serendipity 3
Don’t worry. Even though we ate all that pasta earlier, we saved room for dessert.
We stopped into Serendipity 3 without a reservation and were initially told that it would be 45 minutes for a table. After some brief witchcraft, they sat us immediately.
After all, we just wanted to try their famous hot chocolate.
We got the s’mores flavor and it was unexpectedly delightful.
Pizza
As much as there should be a law against visiting New York without getting a bagel, there should also be one about pizza.
But I don’t care about bagels so much as I do pizza. And it doesn’t matter how much food we’ve already eaten or what time of day it is… if I walk by 20 different places that say “$1.50 Pizza” in neon lights, I’m going to have to go get one sooner or later.
And then it was time for bed.
Day 3
We had to check out of our hotel in the morning, but they held our bags for us so we could continue wandering around the city for a while.
I don’t know what this building is, but I guess I thought it looked cool, so I took a few pictures of it.
Our first stop of the day was a bookstore… uhhh… sorry, but I’m a little light on the details here. It was supposed to be where the filmed the tv show You or something like that. It didn’t catch my interest at all, so I didn’t take any pictures. Also, we sat outside in the rain for about 20 minutes past their scheduled opening time and nobody ever opened the store.
After that, we went to a little underground subway mall to check out some comics.
But the final stop of the day… truly the highlight… perhaps even the coolest part of the entire trip… was sushi.
Shirokuro
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to dine in a 2D comic strip? Maybe in a hand-drawn, black and white world?
Well… that’s basically what this place is.
It was pretty trippy.
But aside from the aesthetics, they also had amazing sushi.
I’ve never really been a sushi person. I’ll eat it, but I’ve never been like, “hey, I really want sushi right now.”
They may have converted me.
Seriously, it was that good.
Heading Home
And that was one of our last stops for the trip. We caught an Uber Airport Shuttle at the Port Authority Bus Station and went for a long drive to LaGuardia Airport.
LaGuardia was recently remodeled, apparently. We were there briefly for our last New York visit and it felt like one small, musty room… and the only food option was a tiny little shop that had some donuts, coffee, and snacks. But now… it’s huge! You basically have to walk through an entire shopping mall before you get to the gates. They even have a giant fountain of water that rains down from the ceiling with color-changing lights.
Once we made it past all the shopping, we were greeted by a large fight status display screen that claimed our return flight was cancelled. We continued to the gate to ask questions — there was nobody there, but the gate status said delayed.
And then it got delayed a little bit longer.
And then a little bit longer…
We eventually did make it back to Florida, however. I think in total we lost about 3 hours from the delays. Very happy it wasn’t a cancellation.
#eats #food #metMuseum #newYork #newYorkCity #nyc #pasta #pastaEater #serendipity3 #shirokuro #sushi #travel
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The BAD & the Good with Billy Bookcase Part I
I fell in love with Billy on Instagram.
Bookstagrammer after bookstagrammer flaunted their extensive libraries and namedropped Billy as the ever-impressive bookcase that housed their precious books.
Nearly six months after closing on and moving into my Brooklyn co-op, hundreds of books remained packed in over a dozen boxes. Why? Because my library was not yet set up, even though my very own Billy had been delivered weeks after moving in.
Stalking Billy online, I learned my options were white, oak, black oak, and brown walnut. Different sizes and variations, including some with glass doors. Pretty, but I didn’t want to be cleaning glass.
One variation came in blue, but not the one with a corner unit and height extension—the one I wanted. I decided to purchase the white: three large bookcases with one stationary shelf, four adjustable shelves, the aforementioned height extender, and a slim bookcase designed to fit a corner. I’d paint it blue myself.
Despite knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that my brother Cliff is quite handy with a hammer and power tools, instead of being patient and having him build me a custom library in what shoe lovers or fashionistas would make a walk-in closet, I fell prey to Ikea’s Black Friday sale. I conferred with him about Billy fitting. He hesitantly agreed, preferring to measure.
No time, man! I gotta catch this sale!
He assumed he’d assemble it, but Ikea has an option to book Task Rabbit while ordering online. There goes that no patience thing again.
Patience could have saved me hundreds of dollars, pain, and aggravation.
After the Tasker spent two hours assembling Billy, he informed me the bookcases couldn’t fit as planned because a part of the wall jutted out. I had to forfeit the corner bookcase, the pièce de résistance that made me love it in the first place. I called Ikea. For a small fee, they’d pick it up and, after inspection, grant a refund. Before leaving, the Tasker had me Zelle him an additional $50+ because he’d worked longer than the time allotted.
I went to my neighborhood paint store to buy supplies for my library makeover. Brushes, rollers, a bin, one gallon each of Midnight Navy in matte and gloss finishes—for the wall and bookcases, respectively, and a lighter blue called Lapis for the backsplash. I had a roller extender, and Cliff said he’d buy me a spray gun.
I was leaving the store when I mentioned that I was ready to paint my Ikea bookcases.
“Ikea?” said Karl, the store attendant. “You can’t just paint Ikea bookcases. You have to sand and prime, or else the paint will crack and chip off.”
“I’m not doing all that,” I replied, defiantly.
“Look, I can’t in good conscience let you do that. You’d just be wasting your money.”
He asked me to pull up Billy to read the configurations and finish. He then pulled up YouTube videos to support his claim that paint would not adhere to the glossy finish.
“You broke my heart, Fredo!” He chuckled at my Godfather II reference.
Karl and I had built a rapport over the weeks. I’d been in and out of the store selecting color swatches for my kitchen, library, bedroom, and living room. He knew my brother had gifted me black paint for the bathroom.
“Work on one room at a time,” he advised, and I ignored.
I was in the process of coloring my grout black with grout markers, thanks to YouTube University. Yet, there I was buying paint for the library. I was determined to have it painted before the New Year, mere weeks away.
I deflated when “Fredo” showed me all the work to transform Billy. He wasn’t trying to upsell me. The store didn’t carry the tools I needed for the extra steps. I dropped off the paint at home, then hopped a bus to Home Depot in Bed-Stuy.
New Year came and went. The gallons of paint, painter’s tape, rollers, brushes, sander, and sandpaper sat by the door until Cliff could come from Boston. This man arrived on an April Wednesday evening prepared!
That night, we removed the bookcases and other stuff from the library. It had morphed into storage for random things. Once the room was empty, he unfurled green and blue painter’s tape to protect the hardwood (laminate) floors. He even laid out some of his tools as if it were the night before the first day of school. The paper would be laid the next day.
Lastly, he plugged in a huge portable power pack to charge overnight.
The next morning, after carrying the bookcases, power tools, and a worker’s bench I had no idea he had, into the building’s backyard, he started on the manual labor. I returned to my apartment for remote office work. Minutes later, he was at my door. The power pack was not working despite there being a reading.
A huge monkey wrench in plans. EVERYTHING was corded power tools. No outlets outside. We hopped online to search Lowe’s and Home Depot. Even if I could afford the pricey power pack, none were in stock nearby. My only option was to buy another sander, this time cordless. I owned battery packs for my DeWalt drills, so I purchased a DeWalt sander online for in-store pickup. He went solo.
We forgot sandpaper. More minutes as he completed the purchase.
One battery charged while he was out. The trip to and from and the pickup took about two hours. He entered my apartment to swap batteries a few times, so I didn’t look up. Lo and behold, a man approached him, asked who he was, etc. I figured it was the building superintendent. He stood a few feet away as I knocked on the Super’s door, located on the same floor but other side of the building as my apartment.
The Super informed me that other building shareholders had complained about the noise of the sander, which had been grinding for hours. Even if they hadn’t complained, there’s a NYC noise ordinance that loud construction must end at 4 pm.
When there’s still plenty of daylight left? We’d already lost a couple of hours because of the battery situation.
It was close to 4. I told my brother to go squeeze out some more work before quitting time. I fear(ed) an HOA fine.
The Super suggested I store the three bookcases in the nearby boiler room rather than lug them all the way back to my apartment.
“Please do not lose this key and return to me first thing in the morning,” he said in his heavy European accent.
Cliff was tired, and covered in the dust from sanding all afternoon, but he started painting the room. For whatever reason, the tape wouldn’t stick to the walls even after they’d been wiped down for dust. Fumes enveloped the apartment. The paint went on unevenly. Apparently, the previous owner had painted over a bad wallpaper job. It wasn’t noticeable because the room didn’t have light, and it was all-white. The line between the Lapis of the ceiling and Midnight Navy of the walls isn’t as crisp as I would’ve hoped, but c’est la vie.
Hours later, I served him dinner, just as I had served him breakfast and lunch. After he showered, we attempted to watch TV, but he was snoring within minutes.
The next morning, post-breakfast, I helped him pull out the bookcases from the boiler room. I still had to work on my project so I left him. Once submitted, I joined him to finish sanding and start priming. The 50-pack of sandpaper ran low. I told him to focus on removing the gloss and not so much the paint so that the primer could stick.
“But then it won’t be an even coat,” he protested.
“Sir, we need to focus. We are running out of time.”
I could tell it hurt him to his core. He wanted the job done right, no shortcuts. He compared it to me not allowing him to turn in half-ass papers that I proofread when we were young.
I donned gloves to manually sand the corners that the round power sander could not. I got a handcramp in 2.5 seconds. Ok, maybe not that soon, but I am not cut out for this line of work. This cramp surpassed that from a long journaling session.
I thought priming the shelves and bookcases would ease the pain. Tuh! I messed up by painting closed some of shelf pin holes. An error I’d pay for later.
“Paint in the middle then when it starts to lighten up move out to the edges,” he instructed.
“Ohhhhhhh, so much better,” I said when I spotted the difference and stopped clogging the holes.
Cramps aside, I enjoyed spending time with and working beside my brother. There was laughter galore. I saw his butt crack; he saw mine. He let me use the power sander. I was amazed at the power of a machine I gripped in the palm of my hand. I should note that he lowered the level so I wouldn’t accidentally drop and damage/break it.
It was a quick-drying primer, so we carried the bookcases in minutes after priming. Actually, I slowed him down when attempting to help him. He tilted those badboys sideways, propped them on his hip and carried them himself. I held the doors open and told him how to angle the top or bottom so they’d fit through the doorway.
“My name is Cliff. I have muscles.” Even the security guard laughed at my taunting.
Things were going too smoothly.
It was bad enough the bookcases couldn’t be spray-painted outside because the power pack wasn’t working. Next, we discovered only one of the three spray painters worked. One. The other two hadn’t been properly cleaned after being used by other people. While he used the one, I was tasked with cleaning and trying to unclog the others using alcohol, to no avail. I got loopy even with the bathroom window open.
During one of his brief, much-deserved breaks, I sprayed the shelves. I also hand-painted the extender that had broken off when we carried it inside. The hole was damaged. That’s what happens when you’re working with compressed wood.
Much like using the power sander, I loved using the spray gun. The paint went on smoothly and evenly. More hand and wrist pain.
I turned on a fan for ventilation, but we absolutely should’ve worn masks. I saw blue when I blew my nose. The Q-tip had traces of blue residue when I cleaned my ear. Two days later, my chest felt heavy, soreness in my hands continued.
My brother left Saturday afternoon. There was still work to be done, but nothing I couldn’t handle. He needed to return to Boston to work a double shift the next day. Knowing that he likes extra cold water, I put water in the freezer for his drive. I also packed snacks while he loaded his car.
Over the two and half days, tempers flared, but nothing crazy. He misunderstood my disappointment about things going wrong as being directed at him.
“I’m allowed to be disappointed about thing after thing going wrong. I’m not mad at you,” I reassured him.
He turned around and mimicked me when I tried to calm him down and remind him that he needed to be ok with not completing everything on the To-Do List, including wallpapering my bathroom and replacing my kitchen faucet.
He loves doing handiwork. He hated to leave the work undone. “I’m allowed to be disappointed.”
I laughed in his face.
I was disappointed and felt guilty that time didn’t permit me to treat him to a restaurant brunch or dinner. I did prepare three meals a day. I even took requests and set the table.
I’m grateful my brother spent his off days to help me realize the dream of setting up my own personal library. It’s been a shared dream/goal for a few decades. I always planned to be a homeowner. He always planned to do the renovations.
The library isn’t done by far, but it’s a good start. I can’t believe a tiny room and three bookcases almost took us out. Even during the homebuying process, I learned that I’d have to pivot from original plans. Billy sure did make me pivot, all with positive outcomes.
Subscribe or come back soon to read about the good in The Bad & the GOOD with Billy Bookcase Part II.
#Blue #Bookcases #Books #Bookshelves #coOp #fiction #Goodreads #HomeDepot #Homeowner #Homeownership #Ikea #library #life #LoweS #NYC #Paint #Painting #reading #Renovations #Siblings #writing -
The BAD & the Good with Billy Bookcase Part I
I fell in love with Billy on Instagram.
Bookstagrammer after bookstagrammer flaunted their extensive libraries and namedropped Billy as the ever-impressive bookcase that housed their precious books.
Nearly six months after closing on and moving into my Brooklyn co-op, hundreds of books remained packed in over a dozen boxes. Why? Because my library was not yet set up, even though my very own Billy had been delivered weeks after moving in.
Stalking Billy online, I learned my options were white, oak, black oak, and brown walnut. Different sizes and variations, including some with glass doors. Pretty, but I didn’t want to be cleaning glass.
One variation came in blue, but not the one with a corner unit and height extension—the one I wanted. I decided to purchase the white: three large bookcases with one stationary shelf, four adjustable shelves, the aforementioned height extender, and a slim bookcase designed to fit a corner. I’d paint it blue myself.
Despite knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that my brother Cliff is quite handy with a hammer and power tools, instead of being patient and having him build me a custom library in what shoe lovers or fashionistas would make a walk-in closet, I fell prey to Ikea’s Black Friday sale. I conferred with him about Billy fitting. He hesitantly agreed, preferring to measure.
No time, man! I gotta catch this sale!
He assumed he’d assemble it, but Ikea has an option to book Task Rabbit while ordering online. There goes that no patience thing again.
Patience could have saved me hundreds of dollars, pain, and aggravation.
After the Tasker spent two hours assembling Billy, he informed me the bookcases couldn’t fit as planned because a part of the wall jutted out. I had to forfeit the corner bookcase, the pièce de résistance that made me love it in the first place. I called Ikea. For a small fee, they’d pick it up and, after inspection, grant a refund. Before leaving, the Tasker had me Zelle him an additional $50+ because he’d worked longer than the time allotted.
I went to my neighborhood paint store to buy supplies for my library makeover. Brushes, rollers, a bin, one gallon each of Midnight Navy in matte and gloss finishes—for the wall and bookcases, respectively, and a lighter blue called Lapis for the backsplash. I had a roller extender, and Cliff said he’d buy me a spray gun.
I was leaving the store when I mentioned that I was ready to paint my Ikea bookcases.
“Ikea?” said Karl, the store attendant. “You can’t just paint Ikea bookcases. You have to sand and prime, or else the paint will crack and chip off.”
“I’m not doing all that,” I replied, defiantly.
“Look, I can’t in good conscience let you do that. You’d just be wasting your money.”
He asked me to pull up Billy to read the configurations and finish. He then pulled up YouTube videos to support his claim that paint would not adhere to the glossy finish.
“You broke my heart, Fredo!” He chuckled at my Godfather II reference.
Karl and I had built a rapport over the weeks. I’d been in and out of the store selecting color swatches for my kitchen, library, bedroom, and living room. He knew my brother had gifted me black paint for the bathroom.
“Work on one room at a time,” he advised, and I ignored.
I was in the process of coloring my grout black with grout markers, thanks to YouTube University. Yet, there I was buying paint for the library. I was determined to have it painted before the New Year, mere weeks away.
I deflated when “Fredo” showed me all the work to transform Billy. He wasn’t trying to upsell me. The store didn’t carry the tools I needed for the extra steps. I dropped off the paint at home, then hopped a bus to Home Depot in Bed-Stuy.
New Year came and went. The gallons of paint, painter’s tape, rollers, brushes, sander, and sandpaper sat by the door until Cliff could come from Boston. This man arrived on an April Wednesday evening prepared!
That night, we removed the bookcases and other stuff from the library. It had morphed into storage for random things. Once the room was empty, he unfurled green and blue painter’s tape to protect the hardwood (laminate) floors. He even laid out some of his tools as if it were the night before the first day of school. The paper would be laid the next day.
Lastly, he plugged in a huge portable power pack to charge overnight.
The next morning, after carrying the bookcases, power tools, and a worker’s bench I had no idea he had, into the building’s backyard, he started on the manual labor. I returned to my apartment for remote office work. Minutes later, he was at my door. The power pack was not working despite there being a reading.
A huge monkey wrench in plans. EVERYTHING was corded power tools. No outlets outside. We hopped online to search Lowe’s and Home Depot. Even if I could afford the pricey power pack, none were in stock nearby. My only option was to buy another sander, this time cordless. I owned battery packs for my DeWalt drills, so I purchased a DeWalt sander online for in-store pickup. He went solo.
We forgot sandpaper. More minutes as he completed the purchase.
One battery charged while he was out. The trip to and from and the pickup took about two hours. He entered my apartment to swap batteries a few times, so I didn’t look up. Lo and behold, a man approached him, asked who he was, etc. I figured it was the building superintendent. He stood a few feet away as I knocked on the Super’s door, located on the same floor but other side of the building as my apartment.
The Super informed me that other building shareholders had complained about the noise of the sander, which had been grinding for hours. Even if they hadn’t complained, there’s a NYC noise ordinance that loud construction must end at 4 pm.
When there’s still plenty of daylight left? We’d already lost a couple of hours because of the battery situation.
It was close to 4. I told my brother to go squeeze out some more work before quitting time. I fear(ed) an HOA fine.
The Super suggested I store the three bookcases in the nearby boiler room rather than lug them all the way back to my apartment.
“Please do not lose this key and return to me first thing in the morning,” he said in his heavy European accent.
Cliff was tired, and covered in the dust from sanding all afternoon, but he started painting the room. For whatever reason, the tape wouldn’t stick to the walls even after they’d been wiped down for dust. Fumes enveloped the apartment. The paint went on unevenly. Apparently, the previous owner had painted over a bad wallpaper job. It wasn’t noticeable because the room didn’t have light, and it was all-white. The line between the Lapis of the ceiling and Midnight Navy of the walls isn’t as crisp as I would’ve hoped, but c’est la vie.
Hours later, I served him dinner, just as I had served him breakfast and lunch. After he showered, we attempted to watch TV, but he was snoring within minutes.
The next morning, post-breakfast, I helped him pull out the bookcases from the boiler room. I still had to work on my project so I left him. Once submitted, I joined him to finish sanding and start priming. The 50-pack of sandpaper ran low. I told him to focus on removing the gloss and not so much the paint so that the primer could stick.
“But then it won’t be an even coat,” he protested.
“Sir, we need to focus. We are running out of time.”
I could tell it hurt him to his core. He wanted the job done right, no shortcuts. He compared it to me not allowing him to turn in half-ass papers that I proofread when we were young.
I donned gloves to manually sand the corners that the round power sander could not. I got a handcramp in 2.5 seconds. Ok, maybe not that soon, but I am not cut out for this line of work. This cramp surpassed that from a long journaling session.
I thought priming the shelves and bookcases would ease the pain. Tuh! I messed up by painting closed some of shelf pin holes. An error I’d pay for later.
“Paint in the middle then when it starts to lighten up move out to the edges,” he instructed.
“Ohhhhhhh, so much better,” I said when I spotted the difference and stopped clogging the holes.
Cramps aside, I enjoyed spending time with and working beside my brother. There was laughter galore. I saw his butt crack; he saw mine. He let me use the power sander. I was amazed at the power of a machine I gripped in the palm of my hand. I should note that he lowered the level so I wouldn’t accidentally drop and damage/break it.
It was a quick-drying primer, so we carried the bookcases in minutes after priming. Actually, I slowed him down when attempting to help him. He tilted those badboys sideways, propped them on his hip and carried them himself. I held the doors open and told him how to angle the top or bottom so they’d fit through the doorway.
“My name is Cliff. I have muscles.” Even the security guard laughed at my taunting.
Things were going too smoothly.
It was bad enough the bookcases couldn’t be spray-painted outside because the power pack wasn’t working. Next, we discovered only one of the three spray painters worked. One. The other two hadn’t been properly cleaned after being used by other people. While he used the one, I was tasked with cleaning and trying to unclog the others using alcohol, to no avail. I got loopy even with the bathroom window open.
During one of his brief, much-deserved breaks, I sprayed the shelves. I also hand-painted the extender that had broken off when we carried it inside. The hole was damaged. That’s what happens when you’re working with compressed wood.
Much like using the power sander, I loved using the spray gun. The paint went on smoothly and evenly. More hand and wrist pain.
I turned on a fan for ventilation, but we absolutely should’ve worn masks. I saw blue when I blew my nose. The Q-tip had traces of blue residue when I cleaned my ear. Two days later, my chest felt heavy, soreness in my hands continued.
My brother left Saturday afternoon. There was still work to be done, but nothing I couldn’t handle. He needed to return to Boston to work a double shift the next day. Knowing that he likes extra cold water, I put water in the freezer for his drive. I also packed snacks while he loaded his car.
Over the two and half days, tempers flared, but nothing crazy. He misunderstood my disappointment about things going wrong as being directed at him.
“I’m allowed to be disappointed about thing after thing going wrong. I’m not mad at you,” I reassured him.
He turned around and mimicked me when I tried to calm him down and remind him that he needed to be ok with not completing everything on the To-Do List, including wallpapering my bathroom and replacing my kitchen faucet.
He loves doing handiwork. He hated to leave the work undone. “I’m allowed to be disappointed.”
I laughed in his face.
I was disappointed and felt guilty that time didn’t permit me to treat him to a restaurant brunch or dinner. I did prepare three meals a day. I even took requests and set the table.
I’m grateful my brother spent his off days to help me realize the dream of setting up my own personal library. It’s been a shared dream/goal for a few decades. I always planned to be a homeowner. He always planned to do the renovations.
The library isn’t done by far, but it’s a good start. I can’t believe a tiny room and three bookcases almost took us out. Even during the homebuying process, I learned that I’d have to pivot from original plans. Billy sure did make me pivot, all with positive outcomes.
Subscribe or come back soon to read about the good in The Bad & the GOOD with Billy Bookcase Part II.
#Blue #Bookcases #Books #Bookshelves #coOp #fiction #Goodreads #HomeDepot #Homeowner #Homeownership #Ikea #library #life #LoweS #NYC #Paint #Painting #reading #Renovations #Siblings #writing -
The BAD & the Good with Billy Bookcase Part I
I fell in love with Billy on Instagram.
Bookstagrammer after bookstagrammer flaunted their extensive libraries and namedropped Billy as the ever-impressive bookcase that housed their precious books.
Nearly six months after closing on and moving into my Brooklyn co-op, hundreds of books remained packed in over a dozen boxes. Why? Because my library was not yet set up, even though my very own Billy had been delivered weeks after moving in.
Stalking Billy online, I learned my options were white, oak, black oak, and brown walnut. Different sizes and variations, including some with glass doors. Pretty, but I didn’t want to be cleaning glass.
One variation came in blue, but not the one with a corner unit and height extension—the one I wanted. I decided to purchase the white: three large bookcases with one stationary shelf, four adjustable shelves, the aforementioned height extender, and a slim bookcase designed to fit a corner. I’d paint it blue myself.
Despite knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that my brother Cliff is quite handy with a hammer and power tools, instead of being patient and having him build me a custom library in what shoe lovers or fashionistas would make a walk-in closet, I fell prey to Ikea’s Black Friday sale. I conferred with him about Billy fitting. He hesitantly agreed, preferring to measure.
No time, man! I gotta catch this sale!
He assumed he’d assemble it, but Ikea has an option to book Task Rabbit while ordering online. There goes that no patience thing again.
Patience could have saved me hundreds of dollars, pain, and aggravation.
After the Tasker spent two hours assembling Billy, he informed me the bookcases couldn’t fit as planned because a part of the wall jutted out. I had to forfeit the corner bookcase, the pièce de résistance that made me love it in the first place. I called Ikea. For a small fee, they’d pick it up and, after inspection, grant a refund. Before leaving, the Tasker had me Zelle him an additional $50+ because he’d worked longer than the time allotted.
I went to my neighborhood paint store to buy supplies for my library makeover. Brushes, rollers, a bin, one gallon each of Midnight Navy in matte and gloss finishes—for the wall and bookcases, respectively, and a lighter blue called Lapis for the backsplash. I had a roller extender, and Cliff said he’d buy me a spray gun.
I was leaving the store when I mentioned that I was ready to paint my Ikea bookcases.
“Ikea?” said Karl, the store attendant. “You can’t just paint Ikea bookcases. You have to sand and prime, or else the paint will crack and chip off.”
“I’m not doing all that,” I replied, defiantly.
“Look, I can’t in good conscience let you do that. You’d just be wasting your money.”
He asked me to pull up Billy to read the configurations and finish. He then pulled up YouTube videos to support his claim that paint would not adhere to the glossy finish.
“You broke my heart, Fredo!” He chuckled at my Godfather II reference.
Karl and I had built a rapport over the weeks. I’d been in and out of the store selecting color swatches for my kitchen, library, bedroom, and living room. He knew my brother had gifted me black paint for the bathroom.
“Work on one room at a time,” he advised, and I ignored.
I was in the process of coloring my grout black with grout markers, thanks to YouTube University. Yet, there I was buying paint for the library. I was determined to have it painted before the New Year, mere weeks away.
I deflated when “Fredo” showed me all the work to transform Billy. He wasn’t trying to upsell me. The store didn’t carry the tools I needed for the extra steps. I dropped off the paint at home, then hopped a bus to Home Depot in Bed-Stuy.
New Year came and went. The gallons of paint, painter’s tape, rollers, brushes, sander, and sandpaper sat by the door until Cliff could come from Boston. This man arrived on an April Wednesday evening prepared!
That night, we removed the bookcases and other stuff from the library. It had morphed into storage for random things. Once the room was empty, he unfurled green and blue painter’s tape to protect the hardwood (laminate) floors. He even laid out some of his tools as if it were the night before the first day of school. The paper would be laid the next day.
Lastly, he plugged in a huge portable power pack to charge overnight.
The next morning, after carrying the bookcases, power tools, and a worker’s bench I had no idea he had, into the building’s backyard, he started on the manual labor. I returned to my apartment for remote office work. Minutes later, he was at my door. The power pack was not working despite there being a reading.
A huge monkey wrench in plans. EVERYTHING was corded power tools. No outlets outside. We hopped online to search Lowe’s and Home Depot. Even if I could afford the pricey power pack, none were in stock nearby. My only option was to buy another sander, this time cordless. I owned battery packs for my DeWalt drills, so I purchased a DeWalt sander online for in-store pickup. He went solo.
We forgot sandpaper. More minutes as he completed the purchase.
One battery charged while he was out. The trip to and from and the pickup took about two hours. He entered my apartment to swap batteries a few times, so I didn’t look up. Lo and behold, a man approached him, asked who he was, etc. I figured it was the building superintendent. He stood a few feet away as I knocked on the Super’s door, located on the same floor but other side of the building as my apartment.
The Super informed me that other building shareholders had complained about the noise of the sander, which had been grinding for hours. Even if they hadn’t complained, there’s a NYC noise ordinance that loud construction must end at 4 pm.
When there’s still plenty of daylight left? We’d already lost a couple of hours because of the battery situation.
It was close to 4. I told my brother to go squeeze out some more work before quitting time. I fear(ed) an HOA fine.
The Super suggested I store the three bookcases in the nearby boiler room rather than lug them all the way back to my apartment.
“Please do not lose this key and return to me first thing in the morning,” he said in his heavy European accent.
Cliff was tired, and covered in the dust from sanding all afternoon, but he started painting the room. For whatever reason, the tape wouldn’t stick to the walls even after they’d been wiped down for dust. Fumes enveloped the apartment. The paint went on unevenly. Apparently, the previous owner had painted over a bad wallpaper job. It wasn’t noticeable because the room didn’t have light, and it was all-white. The line between the Lapis of the ceiling and Midnight Navy of the walls isn’t as crisp as I would’ve hoped, but c’est la vie.
Hours later, I served him dinner, just as I had served him breakfast and lunch. After he showered, we attempted to watch TV, but he was snoring within minutes.
The next morning, post-breakfast, I helped him pull out the bookcases from the boiler room. I still had to work on my project so I left him. Once submitted, I joined him to finish sanding and start priming. The 50-pack of sandpaper ran low. I told him to focus on removing the gloss and not so much the paint so that the primer could stick.
“But then it won’t be an even coat,” he protested.
“Sir, we need to focus. We are running out of time.”
I could tell it hurt him to his core. He wanted the job done right, no shortcuts. He compared it to me not allowing him to turn in half-ass papers that I proofread when we were young.
I donned gloves to manually sand the corners that the round power sander could not. I got a handcramp in 2.5 seconds. Ok, maybe not that soon, but I am not cut out for this line of work. This cramp surpassed that from a long journaling session.
I thought priming the shelves and bookcases would ease the pain. Tuh! I messed up by painting closed some of shelf pin holes. An error I’d pay for later.
“Paint in the middle then when it starts to lighten up move out to the edges,” he instructed.
“Ohhhhhhh, so much better,” I said when I spotted the difference and stopped clogging the holes.
Cramps aside, I enjoyed spending time with and working beside my brother. There was laughter galore. I saw his butt crack; he saw mine. He let me use the power sander. I was amazed at the power of a machine I gripped in the palm of my hand. I should note that he lowered the level so I wouldn’t accidentally drop and damage/break it.
It was a quick-drying primer, so we carried the bookcases in minutes after priming. Actually, I slowed him down when attempting to help him. He tilted those badboys sideways, propped them on his hip and carried them himself. I held the doors open and told him how to angle the top or bottom so they’d fit through the doorway.
“My name is Cliff. I have muscles.” Even the security guard laughed at my taunting.
Things were going too smoothly.
It was bad enough the bookcases couldn’t be spray-painted outside because the power pack wasn’t working. Next, we discovered only one of the three spray painters worked. One. The other two hadn’t been properly cleaned after being used by other people. While he used the one, I was tasked with cleaning and trying to unclog the others using alcohol, to no avail. I got loopy even with the bathroom window open.
During one of his brief, much-deserved breaks, I sprayed the shelves. I also hand-painted the extender that had broken off when we carried it inside. The hole was damaged. That’s what happens when you’re working with compressed wood.
Much like using the power sander, I loved using the spray gun. The paint went on smoothly and evenly. More hand and wrist pain.
I turned on a fan for ventilation, but we absolutely should’ve worn masks. I saw blue when I blew my nose. The Q-tip had traces of blue residue when I cleaned my ear. Two days later, my chest felt heavy, soreness in my hands continued.
My brother left Saturday afternoon. There was still work to be done, but nothing I couldn’t handle. He needed to return to Boston to work a double shift the next day. Knowing that he likes extra cold water, I put water in the freezer for his drive. I also packed snacks while he loaded his car.
Over the two and half days, tempers flared, but nothing crazy. He misunderstood my disappointment about things going wrong as being directed at him.
“I’m allowed to be disappointed about thing after thing going wrong. I’m not mad at you,” I reassured him.
He turned around and mimicked me when I tried to calm him down and remind him that he needed to be ok with not completing everything on the To-Do List, including wallpapering my bathroom and replacing my kitchen faucet.
He loves doing handiwork. He hated to leave the work undone. “I’m allowed to be disappointed.”
I laughed in his face.
I was disappointed and felt guilty that time didn’t permit me to treat him to a restaurant brunch or dinner. I did prepare three meals a day. I even took requests and set the table.
I’m grateful my brother spent his off days to help me realize the dream of setting up my own personal library. It’s been a shared dream/goal for a few decades. I always planned to be a homeowner. He always planned to do the renovations.
The library isn’t done by far, but it’s a good start. I can’t believe a tiny room and three bookcases almost took us out. Even during the homebuying process, I learned that I’d have to pivot from original plans. Billy sure did make me pivot, all with positive outcomes.
Subscribe or come back soon to read about the good in The Bad & the GOOD with Billy Bookcase Part II.
#Blue #Bookcases #Books #Bookshelves #coOp #fiction #Goodreads #HomeDepot #Homeowner #Homeownership #Ikea #library #life #LoweS #NYC #Paint #Painting #reading #Renovations #Siblings #writing -
Going with the Flo
I’m still wearing a mask in 2026. In part it’s because of the inconvenience getting sick causes, making me fall behind in my weekday job and potentially lose money if I have to cancel my weekend craft courses. In part it’s because if I have to in a crumbling empire in a cyberpunk dystopia I feel I should at least be allowed to dress like it. But mostly I wear one because I’m furious that we have apparently collectively as a society decided that the ability of people with medical vulnerabilities to participate in public life is not worth the miniscule effort it would take to wear one. I am furious that we seem to have decided certain lives not worth protecting for the sake of the economy. I am furious that we as a society seem I am furious that we ended up in a situation where the government decided saving the hospitality industry was worth a second covid wave that caused 87,000 deaths. I am furious that the pandemic could have been a portal to a world where where we recognised that protecting and valuing one another was the most important thing we could do as a species, and instead we preferred a return to normal which we continue to justify by pretending its worst effects never happened and the people they happened to don’t matter.
I don’t want that world. I want one where we protect each other, where we reject the eugenicist framing that some disabled people are too inconvenient to protect and say every life is as valuable as every other. I’d say I was radicalised by the pandemic, but to be radicalised doesn’t have to require overthrowing the government or burning the system to the ground. Literally all you have to do is wear a small piece of plastic on your face. I don’t understand why that’s seen as such a huge demand.
Poster available as a free download from Grae Salisbury.I also want to protect my own health. It really shouldn’t need saying but here we are, catching infectious diseases is bad for you. There seems to be an emerging contrarian idea out there that infections are good for you, and that making your body work to fight a disease is the same process as strengthening a muscle by making it work harder. But muscles respond to exercise signals like this in a carefully coordinated system designed by evolution to make the body work more efficiently. A better analogy for infectious disease is a the unplanned, uncoordinated damage of a wound. If you’re lucky wounded skin will heal to be just as functional as it was before the injury. If you’re unlucky you will be left with a scar that may be less flexible or less sensitive than undamaged skin, or may be more fragile and vulnerable to future injury. But there is no scenario in which wounded skin will heal to perform better than skin that has not been damaged.
When you get an infection viruses or bacteria hijack the cells of your body to proliferate in, ultimately destroying them. they may also release substances that cause further damage elsewhere. Your body’s own immune system may also overreact a scorched earth tactic, destroying the infected tissue to prevent the infection from spreading, and may become primed to overreact in future. Replaced the abstract terms cells or tissues with you blood vessels, lung lining or brain and you can see why getting infections is not healthy. Repeated infections may train your immune system to respond to the pathogen a bit faster the next time around, but the damage is still done along the way. It’s far safer to get vaccinated, teaching immune systems to recognise the pathogens without the damage to the body infections cause.
XKCD 2557Most people without underlying health conditions will regain the same level of health as they had before an infectious disease like covid or flu over a period that can vary from weeks to months, but some will not. Two million people in England and Scotland, a hundred thousand of them children, are estimated to be living with the post-viral condition long covid and the official government response to this seems to be to pretend that they’re making it up. That is an astounding too of human suffering, physical, psychological and financial due to the lack of support people who can no longer work are receiving. And for political leaders who prefer to think in terms of economic costs than human wellbeing, it is estimated that long covid will cost OECD economies up to $135 billion a year over the next decade due to people leaving the workforce, lower productivity, and healthcare costs.
We are living in time of interconnected crises, where the damage done to our biosphere by the last century or so of industrial civilisation is increasingly outpacing our planet’s ability to absorb it and the highest human population in history is increasingly vulnerable to its impacts. Our political leadership seems to be turning away from the idea we need to protect one another, slashing budgets for public health both in country and aid programs to the wider world in spite of the fact that diseases don’t respect borders. While the UK isn’t far behind the US is one of the worst offenders here, with a leadership that seems ideologically opposed to disease control. Unfortunately it is also the worst country imaginable to deliberately sabotage its public health infrastructure, being unique globally in having a large population who lack access to healthcare among whom disease can spread but who can still afford to travel widely both nationally and internationally, importing and exporting pathogens freely. Add to this a network of vast industrial factory farms full of stressed vulnerable animals and you have the perfect breeding ground for future pandemics .
The good news is that the vast majority of people want to help each other and do the right thing. The bad news is that we humans are pretty awful at working out what the right thing is, which is why we have a climate crisis and why people think the most helpful thing we can do about it is recycling and changing lightbulbs rather than reducing flights, car journeys and meat consumption. We tend to take the mental shortcuts of assuming the correct course of action is what we see the people around us or the people we look up around us doing. We stop masking when everyone else on the bus is no longer wearing a mask; when celebrities and influencers act as though covid is over. And when our political “leaders” hypocritically flout the rules they impose, we tend to follow their example.
There are sound psychological reasons for this – throughout most of our evolutionary history, doing what the people around us were doing or what the people who looked to be successful were doing was a good way to survive. If everyone else in your tribe is avoiding the scorpions it’s probably a good idea to do so too even if you haven’t independently tested how much their sting hurts. If the impressive spearfisher who always hauls back a huge catch is going to the south side of the bay not the north side you’d probably be best off following her rather than wasting time testing the fishing in every spot for yourself. But the world has changed, or rather we have changed our world, and the strategies that worked best for most of our history may not work so well anymore. We can’t afford those cognitive shortcuts anymore, we have to be better than our leaders.
Which mask to wear
We have the technology to reduce the transmission of airborne infections in public spaces like schools, offices and nurseries through air filtration but have chosen instead to put the responsibility on individuals to protect themselves. Air purifiers with HEPA filters that remove virus particles (as well as allergens and pollutants) from the air have been shown to dramatically reduce the transmission of infections in schools, yet schools are rejecting offers of donated air purifiers because they feel they are unnecessary. No one would accept the idea that instead of removing pathogens from our drinking water we expected everyone to carry around Life Straws at work or when eating out, but this is the attitude we take to clean air.
By now the evidence is pretty conclusive that the most effective type of mask is the N95 (US) or FFP2 (European), also called a respirator in some places, which doesn’t just filter but attracts airborne virus particles using electrostatic charges. While valved masks protect the wearer from virus particles in inhaled air they do nothing to protect passers-by from any viruses in exhalations so should be avoided. Surgical masks and cloth masks trap droplets containing virus particles but are less effective against free floating virus particles, and surgical masks do so more effectively than cloth masks. So the order off effectiveness is N95/FFP2 > surgical > cloth, with the caveat that a well fitted cloth one say will be better than a gappy N95. There’s a helpful guide to how to find the best mask for your face shape here.
HOWEVER any mask is better than no mask! We are more likely to get masking to a population level where it would have an impact on disease transmission if everyone wears whatever they can, because a majority of people using cloth masks is going to be more helpful than 1% of people wearing perfectly fit tested N95s.
So given the above why isn’t everyone wearing an N95/FFP2? Everyone’s risk calculus and the weight they put on different costs and benefits is going to be different. For a start N95/FFP2s may not be available in many majority world countries. Here in the UK the best source of the widest variety of masks is probably The Facemask Store. They are also expensive single use or at least limited use items (I am aware many disabled people struggling to survive in a country that seems to have decided their existence is a luxury we can’t afford are reusing them more than is recommended).
Cloth masks on the other hand are infinitely reusable and everyone probably still has some about the house from the early stages of the pandemic. Surgical masks seem in many ways to be the worst of all possible worlds, combining the lower effectiveness of cloth masks with the environmental and cost issues of disposables, but I am aware that some people find them most comfortable. For those who need the most effective masks available but struggle to afford them it’s worth checking if you have a local Mask Bloc which distributes masks and potentially other types of PPE and healthcare supplies. Alternatively if you have money going spare consider supporting your local Mask Bloc if you can!
Disposable masks are also more environmentally damaging than washable cloth masks, made of single use plastic and packaged in single use plastic. Up to 15 trillion face masks are estimated to be used globally every year, resulting in 2 megatons of waste. Here your cost benefit weighting is obviously going to depend on your estimate of your degree of vulnerability – if you’re wearing a mask mostly to protect yourself you’ll want the most effective one possible, but if you’re trying to avoid harm to others you have to weigh infection harm against environmental harm. And unfortunately although solutions like feeding plastics to insects make good headlines it would take 100 mealworms four and a half months to consume a single facemask so it’s not really a scalable solution currently.
Painting by Jo Blakely, shared free to re use.I tried to navigate this by wearing different masks in different situations. I personally don’t judge myself to be particularly vulnerable, so am primarily wearing a mask to protect others, but I’d still like to avoid getting ill as much as possible. I started out by wearing a cloth mask for cost, comfort and environmental reasons in everyday situations like shopping, day to day commuting or meetings with colleagues, but wearing an FFP2 mask if I was in any way ill. I also wear an FFP2 when the data for respiratory infections suggest they’re high or rising rapidly. You can follow a good weekly summary of the status of Covid and other respiratory infections in the the UK here, compiled with data from the UK national flu and COVID-19 surveillance reports. I also wear an FFP2 wherever I’m with a lot of other people in an area of poor ventilation, like long train journeys, conferences, gigs etc and after coming back from a situation like this until I’m sure I haven’t picked anything nasty up. Finally I started wearing an FFP2 mask in the run up to events I couldn’t afford to miss by getting ill, like family celebrations, conferences, teaching booking or blood donation appointments.
As is probably becoming apparent, the proportion of the time I wear a reusable cloth mask has been steadily decreasing but I was feeling guilty about the amount of plastic waste my N95/FFP2 habit was generating. It was time to find a better option.
The Flo mask
I’d seen more and more people on Mastodon talking about the Flo Mask, and shortly after reading this positive review their European site had a sale so I decided to take the plunge.
Adult Flo masks come in two sizes, 1 for people with lower nose bridge (most common for those of Asian, Pacific Islander, and African heritage) and 2 for people with higher nose bridges (most common for people of European and Hispanic heritage). If you’re not sure which category you fall into there’s a printable measuring tool on their website. There is a disclaimer on their website that the masks won’t fit 10% of the population with particularly narrow or Roman noses. I was on the edge of too narrow but just made it, and having sympathised with friends of East Asian or West African heritage struggling to find outdoor clothing sized for their bodies I find it quite refreshing that the default body size and shape used for design that might not accommodate people of other ethnicities isn’t European for a change.
I do have to say that the mask body is pretty expensive, costing £68 at the time of writing for an adult model. A 50 pack of replacement filters costs £46, compared to around £9-£10 for a pack of disposables from The Facemask Store, and in another “Brexit bonus” postage from Ireland is about £14. The postage estimate incidentally said seven days but it took slightly over two weeks, so just be aware of this if you’re hoping to get one for a specific date. Delivery also requires a signature, which I didn’t realise – had I known I would have had it delivered to my work rather than home address.
This is a huge expense even with the replacement filters coming free on the two for one deal and I realise that I am very privileged to be able to pay it. Masks can be a significant expense for many, and infectious diseases are often more of a threat to those in poverty who can least afford them and are likely to be living, working and commuting in more crowded conditions. Like the fact that it is now necessary for most people in the to pay nearly £100 for covid vaccination, the shifting of the costs of public health health protect is not only a short-termist economic own goal it’s an ideological rejection of the idea that we have an obligation to protect those more vulnerable than us in society. This is why I feel it’s incumbent upon those of us who can afford to take disease control measures to do so, even if it shouldn’t be an individual responsibility in the first place.
I took it out of the packet, put it on for the first time, and my wife burst out laughing and said I looked like Bain. Needless to say this was not a reaction I particularly wanted from someone I would like to find me attractive, and it also made me worried that the mask could look intimidating. I teach various heritage crafts and skills at indoor events and wouldn’t want my mask to put potential customers off. I’ll explain what I tried to do about this after reviewing the mask itself.
The positives
First of all the Flo Mask is initially and for short periods of time the most comfortable mask I’ve ever worn. Some issues do arise in the longer term, which I’ll discuss in the next section, but the double back of the head strap is far more comfortable than ear loops even using ear savers and the silicone mask back conforms to the shape of my face perfectly. The mask is supplied with a ring of black foam padding but I took that out because it just seemed to fall out and flop about annoyingly inside, and even without it it’s perfectly comfortable. It produces a perfect seal to my face too with no fogging of my glasses, and the stretchiness of the straps make it easy to pull the mask away from my face briefly without taking it off completely to take sips of water. Straps snapping off the body when I tried to do this was one of the main problems I had with disposable masks breaking.
Although Flo Masks still use single use disposable filters which come in plastic packaging, they use less single use material overall than the disposable masks I had been using, containing half as much filter material, and not requiring a metal nose wire and elastic straps to be thrown away every time. They also score highly on the sustainability front by selling replacement parts like straps and pegs individually, so if one tiny component breaks you don’t need to replace the entire mask.
The negatives
I’m going to start by saying the issues I have encountered probably have more to do with my personal life circumstances and others may not experience them. They also don’t outweigh the many advantages of the mask outlined above. However something I have really struggled with in comparison to the more permeable disposable FFP2 masks is how sweaty the Flo mask gets in hot conditions, both inside the mask and where the silicone touches my face. I will say that I’m probably using it in hotter conditions than most users – I commute on trains that aren’t air conditioned and work in a greenhouse and in an office in a British University building constructed in the 1960s before the climate warmed. I also do a lot of walking and cycling to get around so my base body temperature may be a bit higher than average. But I have really struggled with how wet the inside of the mask gets.
The interior of the mask after a half hour journey on a hot train.I have also found that, presumably because of slight static charge, the silicone face rest is an absolute magnet for fluff and cat hair which can get quite itchy. Both of these issues mean I’m having to wash the back of the mask much more frequently than I expected to, which is a little disappointing as the filters are rated for 40 hours of use so I was hoping I could get about a week’s wear out of them to save money and waste but am instead having to change them every day or two when I take the mask apart to wash it. The back part is at least easy to clean with warm water and washing up liquid, and I’ve found a Swedish Glace ice cream tub is the perfect size to do it in. Washing the mask after getting home from work and then leaving it on the draining board overnight means it dries by the next morning.
Solving the Bain problem
In order to try and make the mask look less utilitarian and intimidating I decided to paint flowers on the detachable front piece using acrylic paint pens. I recently decorated my headphones this way, but although they looked good at first the paint quickly started to chip off and I didn’t want that to happen with my mask. After consulting with my friends who paint wargame miniatures and/or tiny trains I discovered that you need to use primer to ensure acrylic paint sticks to plastic, so that was my first step.
There is a stage of every new craft project where you think “Oh God I’ve made a horrible mistake!” and this was it for me, when I could smell the solvents from the primer for the rest of the evening on this thing I was planning to wear in front of my nose. Fortunately the smell did completely dissipate by the next morning.
This was the finished object which I think came out rather well. Sunflowers are my favourite flowers and I love daisies and forget-me-nots too.
Incidentally I’m not the first person to have had the idea to decorate my Flo Mask – the creator of this Instagram video used temporary tattoos and I could see a lot of scope for using stickers, decoupage or washi tape. Some people have also 3D printed accessories to clip on. When I can afford it I’m very tempted to get some more front covers to experiment with.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DBMbSg0Sui_/
Reactions to my mask
I have had a few hostile reactions to masking in the past, although the impression I get is what we experience in the UK is nothing compared to what people are getting in the US. In the decades to come I’m sure hundreds of theses will be written on how mask wearing, the most effective intervention we have against respiratory infections, has become so politicised that it has now been banned in parts of the US and widely ignored elsewhere. Let’s just say that I now understand how there was so much pushback against the idea of handwashing in medical settings when it was first proposed.
I haven’t so far had any negative responses to wearing my Flo Mask. I have had a few people staring on public transport, but honestly at this point I’m a flight free, car free vegan who doesn’t shave her body hair and was dopamine dressing before it had a name, I’m used to being a bit out of step with the rest of society. There’s a Quaker saying along the lines of not letting the fear of being seen as peculiar stop you from doing what’s right, and I have always lived my life that way without really consciously trying.
I do worry a little that my wearing a mask makes it seem like something only odd people do, rather than normalising it for everyone, but let’s face it I’m not any sort of trendsetter or influencer. I get about 20 views on your average post. If I’m lucky someone shares it and that goes up by an order of magnitude, if I’m extremely lucky wasn’t some idiot ranting about wokeness who shared it. To maximise my reach I should probably be breaking these ideas down into bitesized chunks and making 30 second videos of me dancing while sharing them, but frankly that sounds exhausting and anyway the dancing thing was probably about three centuries ago in TikTok time and is now cringe. Maybe the word cringe is itself now cringe. And I should probably stop this line of thinking now or I’ll start reminiscing about the early days of the web when information was mostly shared in good faith and not seen as a revenue stream (on the small part of the web not dedicated to porn anyway), and then I’ll start lamenting the demise of RSS and at that point frankly you may as well put me to bed with a nice warm (oat) milky drink.
I hope that if you have stopped wearing a mask in places without much air exchange this post has made you at least consider starting again, whatever type of mask you might choose.
#ableism #animalAgriculture #antivaxxers #birdFlu #covid #disabilty #facemasks #flu #H5N1 #localFood #longCovid #mpox #pandemic #plasticPollution #polycrisis #reviews #singleUse #UKPolitics #USPolitics #vaccines #waste -
Wednesday Reads: The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal and Immigration Horrors
Good Morning!!
Trump and Epstein ogle young women at a Mar-a-Lago party.
The Epstein story is still leading the news as Trump continues to panic and try desperately to distract from the scandal.
Yesterday, in a bizarre and incoherent oval office rant, he actually accused former president Barack Obama of committing treason by ordering an investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Trump doesn’t understand the concept of treason, which is defined in the Constitution as follows:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
But for malignant narcissist Trump, treason means any fantasized attack on him personally. ABC News: Trump accuses Obama of ‘treason’ in the Oval Office.
Days after President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated fake video showing former President Barack Obama’s arrest on his social media platform, the current president pushed conspiracy theories about Obama in the Oval Office on Tuesday, accusing him of treason without providing evidence regarding the 2016 presidential election.
“They tried to rig the election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.
Trump’s comments come after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice threatening the Obama administration.
NBC News: Obama pushes back on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ and ‘bizarre’ treason claim.
Former President Barack Obama’s office issued a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump on Tuesday after the president accused his predecessor of having committed “treason” and rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections.
“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
When reporters on Tuesday asked Trump about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he pivoted to what he called Obama’s “criminality.”
“After what they did to me — and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly,” Trump told reporters. “What they did in 2016 and 2020 is very criminal. It’s criminal at the highest level. So that’s really the things you should be talking about.”
“Look, he’s guilty. It’s not a question,” Trump added. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”
Imagine if any other president had said something like this. But Trump gets away with it.
Trump was referring to claims made by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in social media posts and television appearances that they had found Obama administration officials manipulated intelligence and conspired to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.
Gabbard posted on social media on Friday that she was making a criminal referral to the Justice Department.
At an event with congressional Republicans later Tuesday, Trump praised Gabbard and again accused Obama of being part of an effort to rig the elections. “These are vicious, horrible people,” he said of the former president and others.
Trump sits next to Epstein with two Don Jr. and Ivanka
Of course the Supreme Court claims the Constitution makes presidents immune from prosecution for official acts. But Trump is obviously freaking out about what releasing the Epstein files would reveal about him and desperately lashing out at his political enemies.
This is analysis by Stephen Collinson at CNN: Trump’s latest bid to end Epstein storm: Weaponizing the federal government.
Donald Trump’s bid to smother the uproar over accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein shows that he’s already achieved one goal his critics most feared from his second presidency.
The Justice Department and the head of the US intelligence community are now openly operating as fully weaponized tools to pursue the president’s personal political needs in a degradation of a governing system meant to be an antidote to king-like patronage.
This new dynamic underpinned a wild Oval Office press appearance by Trump on Tuesday, his latest attempt to put out the Epstein fire that had only the now-familiar effect of feeding the flames.
The extent of the president’s capture of two key agencies that are vital to keeping Americans safe was revealed when a reporter asked a question about his administration’s refusal to open all files related to the Epstein case.
The president pivoted to a tirade against Barack Obama, accusing the former president of staging a treasonous coup against him — basing his assault on a convenient and misleading memo about Russia’s 2016 election meddling that was released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The Justice Department has also been activated, yet again, to give Trump cover.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that he will take the highly unusual move of meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for carrying out a yearslong scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls — to ask what she knows but hasn’t so far told. Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday.
This seems a stretch, since Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer and plans to speak with a prisoner who has a clear incentive to offer testimony that could help a president who has the power to let her out of prison.
Read the rest at CNN.
Meanwhile, Trump sycophant House speaker Mike Johnson took action by cancelling the rest of the House session. Paul Waldman at MSNBC: The Epstein fallout literally shut down the House early for the summer.
It’s been a week and a half since President Donald Trump complained on Truth Social that his many, many accomplishments were being overshadowed, “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” There is a kind of truth in Trump’s lament: Six years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, Epstein lives on — and he has Republicans in something approaching panic. It’s gotten so bad that House Republicans apparently decided to shut the chamber down early before leaving town.
Things fell apart for the GOP in the House Rules Committee, which determines which legislation reaches the House floor. Knowing how much GOP leaders would like this issue to just go away, Democrats attempted to force the House to vote on releasing all the information the government has on Epstein. “To avoid embarrassing votes on Epstein,” NBC News reported, “Republicans decided to recess the committee and not attempt to pass a rule for bills this week. Without a rule, Republicans would be left with nothing to vote on after Wednesday.” Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., began the chamber’s five-week summer recess early, apparently in hopes that by the time the members return in the fall, the affair will all have blown over.
The whole episode recalls the famous line from “All the President’s Men”: “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of control.”
Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s and Marla Maples’ wedding.
Waldman notes that most Republicans don’t buy all the conspiracy theories cooked up by their base, but the Epstein conspiracy theories are base in reality.
…[U]nfortunately for the president and his party, the public interest and the political debate around Epstein concerns real life, including his relationship with Trump. Epstein really was a fabulously wealthy and well-connected pedophile and sex trafficker. He really did die in jail, awaiting trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance really did encourage speculation that Epstein did not commit suicide. There really are a huge number of documents from the government’s investigation of Epstein that have not been made public.
And before the pair had a “falling-out” (in the president’s words) in the mid-2000s, Epstein really was good friends with Donald Trump. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
After reiterating that Epstein’s death was a suicide and the case was closed, the administration faced a revolt from right-wing influencers who had been telling their audiences for years that the new Trump administration would blow the lid off everything Epstein was involved in. Then Trump begged people to talk about something, anything else, though his pleadings are falling on deaf ears. And on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that — at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s request — he intends to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring to aid Epstein in sex trafficking. The idea that Bondi and Blanche — both Trump loyalists who previously served among the president’s personal lawyers — are suddenly interested in Maxwell for solely apolitical reasons strains credulity, to say the least.
Waldman writes that Republicans are faced with an uprising from the base and Trump’s desire to prevent any further Epstein revelations, and so they decided to get out of town instead of taking a vote on the release of the Epstein files.
New Epstein Revelations
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck: Exclusive: Newly discovered photos and video shed fresh light on Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Newly uncovered archived video footage and photos reveal fresh details about Donald Trump’s past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Photos from 1993 confirm for the first time that Epstein attended Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. Epstein’s attendance at the ceremony at the Plaza Hotel was not widely known until now.
In addition, footage from a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event in New York shows Trump and Epstein laughing and chatting together ahead of the runway event. CNN’s KFile uncovered the raw footage during a review of archival video of Trump at events in the 1990s and 2000s. Trump and Epstein appeared together in at least one video among the limited archival footage reviewed.
The new footage and photos, which have not been widely reported and pre-date any of Epstein’s known legal issues, come amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s past relationship with Epstein. The Justice Department’s recent decision not to release long-promised files related to Epstein has spurred outrage in some corners of Trump’s MAGA movement, where people developed an expectation for bombshell revelations into Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators.
In a brief call with CNN on Tuesday, President Trump, asked about the wedding photos, responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” before repeatedly calling CNN “fake news” and hanging up.
In a statement to CNN, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said, “These are nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events to disgustingly infer something nefarious.
“The fact is that the President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”
Read the rest at watch videos at CNN.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Epstein Fiasco Takes Darker Turn as Dem Senator Drops New Bomb.
A few days ago, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal gripped Washington, Senator Ron Wyden offered a striking revelation in an interview with The New York Times. The Oregon Democrat said that his investigators had discovered that four big banks had flagged to the Treasury Department $1.5 billion in potentially suspicious money transfers involving Epstein, much of which appeared to be related to his massive sex-trafficking network.
Trump with Jeffrey Epstein at Victoria’s Secret event in 1999.
The revelation—which emerged via Wyden’s work as ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee—ratified widespread suspicions that there is still much we don’t know about Epstein’s relations with some of the most powerful and wealthy elites in the world in the lead-up to his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges.
Now Wyden is ratcheting things up once again. Wyden’s office just sent a new letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—which The New Republic obtained—suggesting seven potent lines of inquiry that the Justice Department could follow, right now, to dig more deeply into Epstein’s web of financial relations with global elites.
“I am convinced that the DOJ ignored evidence found in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Epstein file, a binder that contains extensive details on the mountains of cash Epstein received from prominent businessmen that Epstein used to finance his criminal network,” Wyden writes in the letter.
The Treasury Department has this information because that’s where banks file suspicious activity reports, or SARS. Wyden’s letter says his staff has documented that Epstein-related filings by banks contain “information on more than 4,725 wire transfers involving Epstein’s accounts, all of which merit further investigation.”
Wyden’s letter seeks to demonstrate what the Trump administration is not doing to examine Epstein’s financial relations with the rich and powerful….
Wyden’s move here is in some ways a trolling exercise, since DOJ won’t act on it. But such trolling by lawmakers can be constructive if it communicates new information to the public or highlights the failure of others in power to exercise oversight and impose accountability. Wyden’s letter does both.
Read more at TNR.
Immigration News
I want to recommend a powerful article by Stephen W. Thrasher that was published at Literary Hub: What ICE’s Assault on Ventura County, California Means for the Rest of America. The piece is very long, so I can’t really summarize it with a few quoted paragraphs. I hope you’ll go read the whole thing.
“Mom is gone. They took her away.”
These are the words of an 8-year-old Mexican-American girl I will call Maria, in my hometown of Oxnard, California. She spoke them to her summer school teachers this past week, one of whom is a friend of mine.
Maria’s mother was disappeared by ICE, the worst fear for many families in Ventura County, which emerged on the world stage recently as an ICE raid on the Glass House cannabis farm in Camarillo resulted in the death of farmer Jaime Alanís, the kidnapping of California State University Channel Island professor Jonathan Caravello, and the disappearance and presumed deportation of at least 200 farmers.
Fortunately for Maria, her two tias picked her up the day her mom was kidnapped, and “they took me to Toppers, and I got to eat the ice cream cookie!” Her teacher—I’ll call her Miss Garvin—told me how Maria had never had the ice cream cookie at Toppers before, and that she was trying to hold onto this treat. It seemed as if the adults in Maria’s life were letting her have anything special to distract her—because they did not know when, or even if, she was going to see her mother again.
Miss Garvin told me that “it was a shitshow of a day” as she kept Maria in her line of vision throughout the breakfast and lunch periods.
“It broke my heart,” she told me, to see this normally vivacious girl sitting shell shocked and mute around her friends.
Like Maria, I hail from Ventura County, and am a product of its Title 1 schools. From six to nine years old, I was bused through Oxnard’s bountiful agricultural fields and (literally) across the railroad tracks to the La Colonia neighborhood, where Ramona School educated students like me pretty well despite how economically neglected we were. (I still remember how few streetlights there were when we were bused before dawn, and that there were chickens running through the pot-holed streets just outside our school’s windows).
A bit more:
Like Maria, my biological mother disappeared when I was about her age, though not because she was kidnapped. (She just disappeared for three years while no one, including the private detective my dad and stepmother hired, could find any trace of her beyond an abandoned car.) Like Maria, my survival depended on the care of an Oxnard teacher like Miss Garvin.
Like Maria, I am also a product of Ventura County’s fields, which gave me a place to play, taught me about labor politics, employed the vast majority of my classmates’ parents, and fed me.
But you, wherever you are reading this, you are likely a product of Ventura County’s fields, too—especially if you’ve ever eaten a strawberry. Strawberries are harvested with backbreaking work usually done by undocumented migrant farmers. Oxnard is the largest producer of strawberries in California and is known as the “strawberry capital of the world.” Our 93,000 acres of farmland provides California, the United States, and even other countries not just various berries but avocados, mushrooms, corn, citrus, and even marijuana.
And you are also a product of Ventura County because the Oxnard plain is a hot bed of radical politics. Historically, Ventura County has played a pivotal role in the evolution of labor organizing, as Cesar Chavez lived there for a time and had a strong base of operations during the rise of United Farm Workers.
Just as importantly, Ventura County is playing a crucial role in the attempt to stop fascism right now, for the good people of Ventura, Camarillo, and Oxnard are not taking ICE raids without a fight. Since Trump came back into office, groups like VC Defensa and the 805 Immigration Coalition have been training volunteers to patrol for ICE agents. And when they’re spotted, a call goes out for community members to show up—and people from all walks of life (students, citizens, senior citizens) do.
That’s what happened on July 11: a scout patrol spotted ICE agents and tipped off hundreds of people who showed up at the Glass House Farm to bear witness to the ICE raid.
Scene from Glass House raid in Ventural Country, CA
During that raid, a man was chased off a rooftop to his by masked ICE agents. An activist professor from Cal State Jonathan Caravello was also arrested and jailed after he tried to help a man escape from a tear gas cannister under his wheelchair. Thrasher describes the state of terror that immigrants face in Ventura county. He writes:
If Ventura County falls, we are all going to fall. And the way people there have been treated as threats for interfering with the duties of police—a criminal charge I briefly faced as a professor under similar circumstances as the CSUCI professor—reveal the terror hundreds of millions could face if ICE does, in fact, get a six-fold increase in funding and becomes a bigger internal force than most countries’ militaries….
Even without the threat of ICE, farming has long been identified as one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Given that “more people die while farming than while serving as police officers, firefighters or other emergency responders,” the idea that ICE officers fear for their lives while approaching farmers is absurd.
But the terror of ICE has pushed immigrant families in Ventura County to their deaths in ways fast and slow.
Immigration expert Jeff Crisp at The New York Times (gift link): Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People.
In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”
Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.
What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin, but also explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.
This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.
Use the gift link to read the rest if you’re interested.
The Washington Post (gift link): U.S. deportees, freed from Salvadoran prison, describe ‘horror movie.’
Julio González Jr. had agreed to be deported to Venezuela. When the 36-year-old office cleaner and house painter boarded the flight in Texas in March, he assumed it would take him back to his home country.
Instead, the plane landed in El Salvador.
“The horror movie started there,” González said Tuesday.
When the shackled men refused to get off the plane, González and two other detainees told The Washington Post that they were yanked by their feet, beaten and shoved off board as the plane’s crew began to cry. Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.
“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The United States has paid the Salvadoran government of President Nayib Bukele $6 million to hold hundreds of migrants rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass removals — many without ties to El Salvador, many without criminal charges — at the world’s largest prison.
In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar. He asked for painkillers and medical attention but was given none for more than a month.
The three men returned to their family’s homes in Venezuela this week, among the 252 Venezuelans released from CECOT and taken to the South American country in a deal between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. They arrived on two flights in exchange for the release of 10 American citizens and permanent U.S. residents imprisoned in Venezuela.
Again, use the gift link if you want to read the rest.
I’ll end there, and post a few more stories in the comment thread. What else is happening? Please feel free to share.
#Deportation #DonaldTrump #GhislaineMaxwell #GlassHouseRaid #HouseSpeakerMikeJohnson #ICE #immigration #JeffreyEpstein #PresidentBarackObama #SenRonWyden #TulsiGabbard #VenturaCountyCA
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Wednesday Reads: The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal and Immigration Horrors
Good Morning!!
Trump and Epstein ogle young women at a Mar-a-Lago party.
The Epstein story is still leading the news as Trump continues to panic and try desperately to distract from the scandal.
Yesterday, in a bizarre and incoherent oval office rant, he actually accused former president Barack Obama of committing treason by ordering an investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Trump doesn’t understand the concept of treason, which is defined in the Constitution as follows:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
But for malignant narcissist Trump, treason means any fantasized attack on him personally. ABC News: Trump accuses Obama of ‘treason’ in the Oval Office.
Days after President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated fake video showing former President Barack Obama’s arrest on his social media platform, the current president pushed conspiracy theories about Obama in the Oval Office on Tuesday, accusing him of treason without providing evidence regarding the 2016 presidential election.
“They tried to rig the election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.
Trump’s comments come after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice threatening the Obama administration.
NBC News: Obama pushes back on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ and ‘bizarre’ treason claim.
Former President Barack Obama’s office issued a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump on Tuesday after the president accused his predecessor of having committed “treason” and rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections.
“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
When reporters on Tuesday asked Trump about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he pivoted to what he called Obama’s “criminality.”
“After what they did to me — and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly,” Trump told reporters. “What they did in 2016 and 2020 is very criminal. It’s criminal at the highest level. So that’s really the things you should be talking about.”
“Look, he’s guilty. It’s not a question,” Trump added. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”
Imagine if any other president had said something like this. But Trump gets away with it.
Trump was referring to claims made by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in social media posts and television appearances that they had found Obama administration officials manipulated intelligence and conspired to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.
Gabbard posted on social media on Friday that she was making a criminal referral to the Justice Department.
At an event with congressional Republicans later Tuesday, Trump praised Gabbard and again accused Obama of being part of an effort to rig the elections. “These are vicious, horrible people,” he said of the former president and others.
Trump sits next to Epstein with two Don Jr. and Ivanka
Of course the Supreme Court claims the Constitution makes presidents immune from prosecution for official acts. But Trump is obviously freaking out about what releasing the Epstein files would reveal about him and desperately lashing out at his political enemies.
This is analysis by Stephen Collinson at CNN: Trump’s latest bid to end Epstein storm: Weaponizing the federal government.
Donald Trump’s bid to smother the uproar over accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein shows that he’s already achieved one goal his critics most feared from his second presidency.
The Justice Department and the head of the US intelligence community are now openly operating as fully weaponized tools to pursue the president’s personal political needs in a degradation of a governing system meant to be an antidote to king-like patronage.
This new dynamic underpinned a wild Oval Office press appearance by Trump on Tuesday, his latest attempt to put out the Epstein fire that had only the now-familiar effect of feeding the flames.
The extent of the president’s capture of two key agencies that are vital to keeping Americans safe was revealed when a reporter asked a question about his administration’s refusal to open all files related to the Epstein case.
The president pivoted to a tirade against Barack Obama, accusing the former president of staging a treasonous coup against him — basing his assault on a convenient and misleading memo about Russia’s 2016 election meddling that was released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The Justice Department has also been activated, yet again, to give Trump cover.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that he will take the highly unusual move of meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for carrying out a yearslong scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls — to ask what she knows but hasn’t so far told. Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday.
This seems a stretch, since Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer and plans to speak with a prisoner who has a clear incentive to offer testimony that could help a president who has the power to let her out of prison.
Read the rest at CNN.
Meanwhile, Trump sycophant House speaker Mike Johnson took action by cancelling the rest of the House session. Paul Waldman at MSNBC: The Epstein fallout literally shut down the House early for the summer.
It’s been a week and a half since President Donald Trump complained on Truth Social that his many, many accomplishments were being overshadowed, “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” There is a kind of truth in Trump’s lament: Six years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, Epstein lives on — and he has Republicans in something approaching panic. It’s gotten so bad that House Republicans apparently decided to shut the chamber down early before leaving town.
Things fell apart for the GOP in the House Rules Committee, which determines which legislation reaches the House floor. Knowing how much GOP leaders would like this issue to just go away, Democrats attempted to force the House to vote on releasing all the information the government has on Epstein. “To avoid embarrassing votes on Epstein,” NBC News reported, “Republicans decided to recess the committee and not attempt to pass a rule for bills this week. Without a rule, Republicans would be left with nothing to vote on after Wednesday.” Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., began the chamber’s five-week summer recess early, apparently in hopes that by the time the members return in the fall, the affair will all have blown over.
The whole episode recalls the famous line from “All the President’s Men”: “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of control.”
Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s and Marla Maples’ wedding.
Waldman notes that most Republicans don’t buy all the conspiracy theories cooked up by their base, but the Epstein conspiracy theories are base in reality.
…[U]nfortunately for the president and his party, the public interest and the political debate around Epstein concerns real life, including his relationship with Trump. Epstein really was a fabulously wealthy and well-connected pedophile and sex trafficker. He really did die in jail, awaiting trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance really did encourage speculation that Epstein did not commit suicide. There really are a huge number of documents from the government’s investigation of Epstein that have not been made public.
And before the pair had a “falling-out” (in the president’s words) in the mid-2000s, Epstein really was good friends with Donald Trump. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
After reiterating that Epstein’s death was a suicide and the case was closed, the administration faced a revolt from right-wing influencers who had been telling their audiences for years that the new Trump administration would blow the lid off everything Epstein was involved in. Then Trump begged people to talk about something, anything else, though his pleadings are falling on deaf ears. And on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that — at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s request — he intends to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring to aid Epstein in sex trafficking. The idea that Bondi and Blanche — both Trump loyalists who previously served among the president’s personal lawyers — are suddenly interested in Maxwell for solely apolitical reasons strains credulity, to say the least.
Waldman writes that Republicans are faced with an uprising from the base and Trump’s desire to prevent any further Epstein revelations, and so they decided to get out of town instead of taking a vote on the release of the Epstein files.
New Epstein Revelations
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck: Exclusive: Newly discovered photos and video shed fresh light on Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Newly uncovered archived video footage and photos reveal fresh details about Donald Trump’s past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Photos from 1993 confirm for the first time that Epstein attended Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. Epstein’s attendance at the ceremony at the Plaza Hotel was not widely known until now.
In addition, footage from a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event in New York shows Trump and Epstein laughing and chatting together ahead of the runway event. CNN’s KFile uncovered the raw footage during a review of archival video of Trump at events in the 1990s and 2000s. Trump and Epstein appeared together in at least one video among the limited archival footage reviewed.
The new footage and photos, which have not been widely reported and pre-date any of Epstein’s known legal issues, come amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s past relationship with Epstein. The Justice Department’s recent decision not to release long-promised files related to Epstein has spurred outrage in some corners of Trump’s MAGA movement, where people developed an expectation for bombshell revelations into Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators.
In a brief call with CNN on Tuesday, President Trump, asked about the wedding photos, responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” before repeatedly calling CNN “fake news” and hanging up.
In a statement to CNN, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said, “These are nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events to disgustingly infer something nefarious.
“The fact is that the President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”
Read the rest at watch videos at CNN.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Epstein Fiasco Takes Darker Turn as Dem Senator Drops New Bomb.
A few days ago, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal gripped Washington, Senator Ron Wyden offered a striking revelation in an interview with The New York Times. The Oregon Democrat said that his investigators had discovered that four big banks had flagged to the Treasury Department $1.5 billion in potentially suspicious money transfers involving Epstein, much of which appeared to be related to his massive sex-trafficking network.
Trump with Jeffrey Epstein at Victoria’s Secret event in 1999.
The revelation—which emerged via Wyden’s work as ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee—ratified widespread suspicions that there is still much we don’t know about Epstein’s relations with some of the most powerful and wealthy elites in the world in the lead-up to his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges.
Now Wyden is ratcheting things up once again. Wyden’s office just sent a new letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—which The New Republic obtained—suggesting seven potent lines of inquiry that the Justice Department could follow, right now, to dig more deeply into Epstein’s web of financial relations with global elites.
“I am convinced that the DOJ ignored evidence found in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Epstein file, a binder that contains extensive details on the mountains of cash Epstein received from prominent businessmen that Epstein used to finance his criminal network,” Wyden writes in the letter.
The Treasury Department has this information because that’s where banks file suspicious activity reports, or SARS. Wyden’s letter says his staff has documented that Epstein-related filings by banks contain “information on more than 4,725 wire transfers involving Epstein’s accounts, all of which merit further investigation.”
Wyden’s letter seeks to demonstrate what the Trump administration is not doing to examine Epstein’s financial relations with the rich and powerful….
Wyden’s move here is in some ways a trolling exercise, since DOJ won’t act on it. But such trolling by lawmakers can be constructive if it communicates new information to the public or highlights the failure of others in power to exercise oversight and impose accountability. Wyden’s letter does both.
Read more at TNR.
Immigration News
I want to recommend a powerful article by Stephen W. Thrasher that was published at Literary Hub: What ICE’s Assault on Ventura County, California Means for the Rest of America. The piece is very long, so I can’t really summarize it with a few quoted paragraphs. I hope you’ll go read the whole thing.
“Mom is gone. They took her away.”
These are the words of an 8-year-old Mexican-American girl I will call Maria, in my hometown of Oxnard, California. She spoke them to her summer school teachers this past week, one of whom is a friend of mine.
Maria’s mother was disappeared by ICE, the worst fear for many families in Ventura County, which emerged on the world stage recently as an ICE raid on the Glass House cannabis farm in Camarillo resulted in the death of farmer Jaime Alanís, the kidnapping of California State University Channel Island professor Jonathan Caravello, and the disappearance and presumed deportation of at least 200 farmers.
Fortunately for Maria, her two tias picked her up the day her mom was kidnapped, and “they took me to Toppers, and I got to eat the ice cream cookie!” Her teacher—I’ll call her Miss Garvin—told me how Maria had never had the ice cream cookie at Toppers before, and that she was trying to hold onto this treat. It seemed as if the adults in Maria’s life were letting her have anything special to distract her—because they did not know when, or even if, she was going to see her mother again.
Miss Garvin told me that “it was a shitshow of a day” as she kept Maria in her line of vision throughout the breakfast and lunch periods.
“It broke my heart,” she told me, to see this normally vivacious girl sitting shell shocked and mute around her friends.
Like Maria, I hail from Ventura County, and am a product of its Title 1 schools. From six to nine years old, I was bused through Oxnard’s bountiful agricultural fields and (literally) across the railroad tracks to the La Colonia neighborhood, where Ramona School educated students like me pretty well despite how economically neglected we were. (I still remember how few streetlights there were when we were bused before dawn, and that there were chickens running through the pot-holed streets just outside our school’s windows).
A bit more:
Like Maria, my biological mother disappeared when I was about her age, though not because she was kidnapped. (She just disappeared for three years while no one, including the private detective my dad and stepmother hired, could find any trace of her beyond an abandoned car.) Like Maria, my survival depended on the care of an Oxnard teacher like Miss Garvin.
Like Maria, I am also a product of Ventura County’s fields, which gave me a place to play, taught me about labor politics, employed the vast majority of my classmates’ parents, and fed me.
But you, wherever you are reading this, you are likely a product of Ventura County’s fields, too—especially if you’ve ever eaten a strawberry. Strawberries are harvested with backbreaking work usually done by undocumented migrant farmers. Oxnard is the largest producer of strawberries in California and is known as the “strawberry capital of the world.” Our 93,000 acres of farmland provides California, the United States, and even other countries not just various berries but avocados, mushrooms, corn, citrus, and even marijuana.
And you are also a product of Ventura County because the Oxnard plain is a hot bed of radical politics. Historically, Ventura County has played a pivotal role in the evolution of labor organizing, as Cesar Chavez lived there for a time and had a strong base of operations during the rise of United Farm Workers.
Just as importantly, Ventura County is playing a crucial role in the attempt to stop fascism right now, for the good people of Ventura, Camarillo, and Oxnard are not taking ICE raids without a fight. Since Trump came back into office, groups like VC Defensa and the 805 Immigration Coalition have been training volunteers to patrol for ICE agents. And when they’re spotted, a call goes out for community members to show up—and people from all walks of life (students, citizens, senior citizens) do.
That’s what happened on July 11: a scout patrol spotted ICE agents and tipped off hundreds of people who showed up at the Glass House Farm to bear witness to the ICE raid.
Scene from Glass House raid in Ventural Country, CA
During that raid, a man was chased off a rooftop to his by masked ICE agents. An activist professor from Cal State Jonathan Caravello was also arrested and jailed after he tried to help a man escape from a tear gas cannister under his wheelchair. Thrasher describes the state of terror that immigrants face in Ventura county. He writes:
If Ventura County falls, we are all going to fall. And the way people there have been treated as threats for interfering with the duties of police—a criminal charge I briefly faced as a professor under similar circumstances as the CSUCI professor—reveal the terror hundreds of millions could face if ICE does, in fact, get a six-fold increase in funding and becomes a bigger internal force than most countries’ militaries….
Even without the threat of ICE, farming has long been identified as one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Given that “more people die while farming than while serving as police officers, firefighters or other emergency responders,” the idea that ICE officers fear for their lives while approaching farmers is absurd.
But the terror of ICE has pushed immigrant families in Ventura County to their deaths in ways fast and slow.
Immigration expert Jeff Crisp at The New York Times (gift link): Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People.
In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”
Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.
What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin, but also explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.
This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.
Use the gift link to read the rest if you’re interested.
The Washington Post (gift link): U.S. deportees, freed from Salvadoran prison, describe ‘horror movie.’
Julio González Jr. had agreed to be deported to Venezuela. When the 36-year-old office cleaner and house painter boarded the flight in Texas in March, he assumed it would take him back to his home country.
Instead, the plane landed in El Salvador.
“The horror movie started there,” González said Tuesday.
When the shackled men refused to get off the plane, González and two other detainees told The Washington Post that they were yanked by their feet, beaten and shoved off board as the plane’s crew began to cry. Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.
“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The United States has paid the Salvadoran government of President Nayib Bukele $6 million to hold hundreds of migrants rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass removals — many without ties to El Salvador, many without criminal charges — at the world’s largest prison.
In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar. He asked for painkillers and medical attention but was given none for more than a month.
The three men returned to their family’s homes in Venezuela this week, among the 252 Venezuelans released from CECOT and taken to the South American country in a deal between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. They arrived on two flights in exchange for the release of 10 American citizens and permanent U.S. residents imprisoned in Venezuela.
Again, use the gift link if you want to read the rest.
I’ll end there, and post a few more stories in the comment thread. What else is happening? Please feel free to share.
#Deportation #DonaldTrump #GhislaineMaxwell #GlassHouseRaid #HouseSpeakerMikeJohnson #ICE #immigration #JeffreyEpstein #PresidentBarackObama #SenRonWyden #TulsiGabbard #VenturaCountyCA
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Wednesday Reads: The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal and Immigration Horrors
Good Morning!!
Trump and Epstein ogle young women at a Mar-a-Lago party.
The Epstein story is still leading the news as Trump continues to panic and try desperately to distract from the scandal.
Yesterday, in a bizarre and incoherent oval office rant, he actually accused former president Barack Obama of committing treason by ordering an investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Trump doesn’t understand the concept of treason, which is defined in the Constitution as follows:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
But for malignant narcissist Trump, treason means any fantasized attack on him personally. ABC News: Trump accuses Obama of ‘treason’ in the Oval Office.
Days after President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated fake video showing former President Barack Obama’s arrest on his social media platform, the current president pushed conspiracy theories about Obama in the Oval Office on Tuesday, accusing him of treason without providing evidence regarding the 2016 presidential election.
“They tried to rig the election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.
Trump’s comments come after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice threatening the Obama administration.
NBC News: Obama pushes back on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ and ‘bizarre’ treason claim.
Former President Barack Obama’s office issued a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump on Tuesday after the president accused his predecessor of having committed “treason” and rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections.
“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
When reporters on Tuesday asked Trump about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he pivoted to what he called Obama’s “criminality.”
“After what they did to me — and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly,” Trump told reporters. “What they did in 2016 and 2020 is very criminal. It’s criminal at the highest level. So that’s really the things you should be talking about.”
“Look, he’s guilty. It’s not a question,” Trump added. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”
Imagine if any other president had said something like this. But Trump gets away with it.
Trump was referring to claims made by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in social media posts and television appearances that they had found Obama administration officials manipulated intelligence and conspired to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.
Gabbard posted on social media on Friday that she was making a criminal referral to the Justice Department.
At an event with congressional Republicans later Tuesday, Trump praised Gabbard and again accused Obama of being part of an effort to rig the elections. “These are vicious, horrible people,” he said of the former president and others.
Trump sits next to Epstein with two Don Jr. and Ivanka
Of course the Supreme Court claims the Constitution makes presidents immune from prosecution for official acts. But Trump is obviously freaking out about what releasing the Epstein files would reveal about him and desperately lashing out at his political enemies.
This is analysis by Stephen Collinson at CNN: Trump’s latest bid to end Epstein storm: Weaponizing the federal government.
Donald Trump’s bid to smother the uproar over accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein shows that he’s already achieved one goal his critics most feared from his second presidency.
The Justice Department and the head of the US intelligence community are now openly operating as fully weaponized tools to pursue the president’s personal political needs in a degradation of a governing system meant to be an antidote to king-like patronage.
This new dynamic underpinned a wild Oval Office press appearance by Trump on Tuesday, his latest attempt to put out the Epstein fire that had only the now-familiar effect of feeding the flames.
The extent of the president’s capture of two key agencies that are vital to keeping Americans safe was revealed when a reporter asked a question about his administration’s refusal to open all files related to the Epstein case.
The president pivoted to a tirade against Barack Obama, accusing the former president of staging a treasonous coup against him — basing his assault on a convenient and misleading memo about Russia’s 2016 election meddling that was released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The Justice Department has also been activated, yet again, to give Trump cover.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that he will take the highly unusual move of meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for carrying out a yearslong scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls — to ask what she knows but hasn’t so far told. Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday.
This seems a stretch, since Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer and plans to speak with a prisoner who has a clear incentive to offer testimony that could help a president who has the power to let her out of prison.
Read the rest at CNN.
Meanwhile, Trump sycophant House speaker Mike Johnson took action by cancelling the rest of the House session. Paul Waldman at MSNBC: The Epstein fallout literally shut down the House early for the summer.
It’s been a week and a half since President Donald Trump complained on Truth Social that his many, many accomplishments were being overshadowed, “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” There is a kind of truth in Trump’s lament: Six years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, Epstein lives on — and he has Republicans in something approaching panic. It’s gotten so bad that House Republicans apparently decided to shut the chamber down early before leaving town.
Things fell apart for the GOP in the House Rules Committee, which determines which legislation reaches the House floor. Knowing how much GOP leaders would like this issue to just go away, Democrats attempted to force the House to vote on releasing all the information the government has on Epstein. “To avoid embarrassing votes on Epstein,” NBC News reported, “Republicans decided to recess the committee and not attempt to pass a rule for bills this week. Without a rule, Republicans would be left with nothing to vote on after Wednesday.” Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., began the chamber’s five-week summer recess early, apparently in hopes that by the time the members return in the fall, the affair will all have blown over.
The whole episode recalls the famous line from “All the President’s Men”: “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of control.”
Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s and Marla Maples’ wedding.
Waldman notes that most Republicans don’t buy all the conspiracy theories cooked up by their base, but the Epstein conspiracy theories are base in reality.
…[U]nfortunately for the president and his party, the public interest and the political debate around Epstein concerns real life, including his relationship with Trump. Epstein really was a fabulously wealthy and well-connected pedophile and sex trafficker. He really did die in jail, awaiting trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance really did encourage speculation that Epstein did not commit suicide. There really are a huge number of documents from the government’s investigation of Epstein that have not been made public.
And before the pair had a “falling-out” (in the president’s words) in the mid-2000s, Epstein really was good friends with Donald Trump. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
After reiterating that Epstein’s death was a suicide and the case was closed, the administration faced a revolt from right-wing influencers who had been telling their audiences for years that the new Trump administration would blow the lid off everything Epstein was involved in. Then Trump begged people to talk about something, anything else, though his pleadings are falling on deaf ears. And on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that — at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s request — he intends to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring to aid Epstein in sex trafficking. The idea that Bondi and Blanche — both Trump loyalists who previously served among the president’s personal lawyers — are suddenly interested in Maxwell for solely apolitical reasons strains credulity, to say the least.
Waldman writes that Republicans are faced with an uprising from the base and Trump’s desire to prevent any further Epstein revelations, and so they decided to get out of town instead of taking a vote on the release of the Epstein files.
New Epstein Revelations
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck: Exclusive: Newly discovered photos and video shed fresh light on Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Newly uncovered archived video footage and photos reveal fresh details about Donald Trump’s past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Photos from 1993 confirm for the first time that Epstein attended Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. Epstein’s attendance at the ceremony at the Plaza Hotel was not widely known until now.
In addition, footage from a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event in New York shows Trump and Epstein laughing and chatting together ahead of the runway event. CNN’s KFile uncovered the raw footage during a review of archival video of Trump at events in the 1990s and 2000s. Trump and Epstein appeared together in at least one video among the limited archival footage reviewed.
The new footage and photos, which have not been widely reported and pre-date any of Epstein’s known legal issues, come amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s past relationship with Epstein. The Justice Department’s recent decision not to release long-promised files related to Epstein has spurred outrage in some corners of Trump’s MAGA movement, where people developed an expectation for bombshell revelations into Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators.
In a brief call with CNN on Tuesday, President Trump, asked about the wedding photos, responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” before repeatedly calling CNN “fake news” and hanging up.
In a statement to CNN, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said, “These are nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events to disgustingly infer something nefarious.
“The fact is that the President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”
Read the rest at watch videos at CNN.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Epstein Fiasco Takes Darker Turn as Dem Senator Drops New Bomb.
A few days ago, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal gripped Washington, Senator Ron Wyden offered a striking revelation in an interview with The New York Times. The Oregon Democrat said that his investigators had discovered that four big banks had flagged to the Treasury Department $1.5 billion in potentially suspicious money transfers involving Epstein, much of which appeared to be related to his massive sex-trafficking network.
Trump with Jeffrey Epstein at Victoria’s Secret event in 1999.
The revelation—which emerged via Wyden’s work as ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee—ratified widespread suspicions that there is still much we don’t know about Epstein’s relations with some of the most powerful and wealthy elites in the world in the lead-up to his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges.
Now Wyden is ratcheting things up once again. Wyden’s office just sent a new letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—which The New Republic obtained—suggesting seven potent lines of inquiry that the Justice Department could follow, right now, to dig more deeply into Epstein’s web of financial relations with global elites.
“I am convinced that the DOJ ignored evidence found in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Epstein file, a binder that contains extensive details on the mountains of cash Epstein received from prominent businessmen that Epstein used to finance his criminal network,” Wyden writes in the letter.
The Treasury Department has this information because that’s where banks file suspicious activity reports, or SARS. Wyden’s letter says his staff has documented that Epstein-related filings by banks contain “information on more than 4,725 wire transfers involving Epstein’s accounts, all of which merit further investigation.”
Wyden’s letter seeks to demonstrate what the Trump administration is not doing to examine Epstein’s financial relations with the rich and powerful….
Wyden’s move here is in some ways a trolling exercise, since DOJ won’t act on it. But such trolling by lawmakers can be constructive if it communicates new information to the public or highlights the failure of others in power to exercise oversight and impose accountability. Wyden’s letter does both.
Read more at TNR.
Immigration News
I want to recommend a powerful article by Stephen W. Thrasher that was published at Literary Hub: What ICE’s Assault on Ventura County, California Means for the Rest of America. The piece is very long, so I can’t really summarize it with a few quoted paragraphs. I hope you’ll go read the whole thing.
“Mom is gone. They took her away.”
These are the words of an 8-year-old Mexican-American girl I will call Maria, in my hometown of Oxnard, California. She spoke them to her summer school teachers this past week, one of whom is a friend of mine.
Maria’s mother was disappeared by ICE, the worst fear for many families in Ventura County, which emerged on the world stage recently as an ICE raid on the Glass House cannabis farm in Camarillo resulted in the death of farmer Jaime Alanís, the kidnapping of California State University Channel Island professor Jonathan Caravello, and the disappearance and presumed deportation of at least 200 farmers.
Fortunately for Maria, her two tias picked her up the day her mom was kidnapped, and “they took me to Toppers, and I got to eat the ice cream cookie!” Her teacher—I’ll call her Miss Garvin—told me how Maria had never had the ice cream cookie at Toppers before, and that she was trying to hold onto this treat. It seemed as if the adults in Maria’s life were letting her have anything special to distract her—because they did not know when, or even if, she was going to see her mother again.
Miss Garvin told me that “it was a shitshow of a day” as she kept Maria in her line of vision throughout the breakfast and lunch periods.
“It broke my heart,” she told me, to see this normally vivacious girl sitting shell shocked and mute around her friends.
Like Maria, I hail from Ventura County, and am a product of its Title 1 schools. From six to nine years old, I was bused through Oxnard’s bountiful agricultural fields and (literally) across the railroad tracks to the La Colonia neighborhood, where Ramona School educated students like me pretty well despite how economically neglected we were. (I still remember how few streetlights there were when we were bused before dawn, and that there were chickens running through the pot-holed streets just outside our school’s windows).
A bit more:
Like Maria, my biological mother disappeared when I was about her age, though not because she was kidnapped. (She just disappeared for three years while no one, including the private detective my dad and stepmother hired, could find any trace of her beyond an abandoned car.) Like Maria, my survival depended on the care of an Oxnard teacher like Miss Garvin.
Like Maria, I am also a product of Ventura County’s fields, which gave me a place to play, taught me about labor politics, employed the vast majority of my classmates’ parents, and fed me.
But you, wherever you are reading this, you are likely a product of Ventura County’s fields, too—especially if you’ve ever eaten a strawberry. Strawberries are harvested with backbreaking work usually done by undocumented migrant farmers. Oxnard is the largest producer of strawberries in California and is known as the “strawberry capital of the world.” Our 93,000 acres of farmland provides California, the United States, and even other countries not just various berries but avocados, mushrooms, corn, citrus, and even marijuana.
And you are also a product of Ventura County because the Oxnard plain is a hot bed of radical politics. Historically, Ventura County has played a pivotal role in the evolution of labor organizing, as Cesar Chavez lived there for a time and had a strong base of operations during the rise of United Farm Workers.
Just as importantly, Ventura County is playing a crucial role in the attempt to stop fascism right now, for the good people of Ventura, Camarillo, and Oxnard are not taking ICE raids without a fight. Since Trump came back into office, groups like VC Defensa and the 805 Immigration Coalition have been training volunteers to patrol for ICE agents. And when they’re spotted, a call goes out for community members to show up—and people from all walks of life (students, citizens, senior citizens) do.
That’s what happened on July 11: a scout patrol spotted ICE agents and tipped off hundreds of people who showed up at the Glass House Farm to bear witness to the ICE raid.
Scene from Glass House raid in Ventural Country, CA
During that raid, a man was chased off a rooftop to his by masked ICE agents. An activist professor from Cal State Jonathan Caravello was also arrested and jailed after he tried to help a man escape from a tear gas cannister under his wheelchair. Thrasher describes the state of terror that immigrants face in Ventura county. He writes:
If Ventura County falls, we are all going to fall. And the way people there have been treated as threats for interfering with the duties of police—a criminal charge I briefly faced as a professor under similar circumstances as the CSUCI professor—reveal the terror hundreds of millions could face if ICE does, in fact, get a six-fold increase in funding and becomes a bigger internal force than most countries’ militaries….
Even without the threat of ICE, farming has long been identified as one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Given that “more people die while farming than while serving as police officers, firefighters or other emergency responders,” the idea that ICE officers fear for their lives while approaching farmers is absurd.
But the terror of ICE has pushed immigrant families in Ventura County to their deaths in ways fast and slow.
Immigration expert Jeff Crisp at The New York Times (gift link): Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People.
In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”
Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.
What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin, but also explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.
This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.
Use the gift link to read the rest if you’re interested.
The Washington Post (gift link): U.S. deportees, freed from Salvadoran prison, describe ‘horror movie.’
Julio González Jr. had agreed to be deported to Venezuela. When the 36-year-old office cleaner and house painter boarded the flight in Texas in March, he assumed it would take him back to his home country.
Instead, the plane landed in El Salvador.
“The horror movie started there,” González said Tuesday.
When the shackled men refused to get off the plane, González and two other detainees told The Washington Post that they were yanked by their feet, beaten and shoved off board as the plane’s crew began to cry. Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.
“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The United States has paid the Salvadoran government of President Nayib Bukele $6 million to hold hundreds of migrants rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass removals — many without ties to El Salvador, many without criminal charges — at the world’s largest prison.
In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar. He asked for painkillers and medical attention but was given none for more than a month.
The three men returned to their family’s homes in Venezuela this week, among the 252 Venezuelans released from CECOT and taken to the South American country in a deal between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. They arrived on two flights in exchange for the release of 10 American citizens and permanent U.S. residents imprisoned in Venezuela.
Again, use the gift link if you want to read the rest.
I’ll end there, and post a few more stories in the comment thread. What else is happening? Please feel free to share.
#Deportation #DonaldTrump #GhislaineMaxwell #GlassHouseRaid #HouseSpeakerMikeJohnson #ICE #immigration #JeffreyEpstein #PresidentBarackObama #SenRonWyden #TulsiGabbard #VenturaCountyCA
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Wednesday Reads: The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal and Immigration Horrors
Good Morning!!
Trump and Epstein ogle young women at a Mar-a-Lago party.
The Epstein story is still leading the news as Trump continues to panic and try desperately to distract from the scandal.
Yesterday, in a bizarre and incoherent oval office rant, he actually accused former president Barack Obama of committing treason by ordering an investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Trump doesn’t understand the concept of treason, which is defined in the Constitution as follows:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
But for malignant narcissist Trump, treason means any fantasized attack on him personally. ABC News: Trump accuses Obama of ‘treason’ in the Oval Office.
Days after President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated fake video showing former President Barack Obama’s arrest on his social media platform, the current president pushed conspiracy theories about Obama in the Oval Office on Tuesday, accusing him of treason without providing evidence regarding the 2016 presidential election.
“They tried to rig the election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.
Trump’s comments come after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice threatening the Obama administration.
NBC News: Obama pushes back on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ and ‘bizarre’ treason claim.
Former President Barack Obama’s office issued a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump on Tuesday after the president accused his predecessor of having committed “treason” and rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections.
“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
When reporters on Tuesday asked Trump about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he pivoted to what he called Obama’s “criminality.”
“After what they did to me — and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly,” Trump told reporters. “What they did in 2016 and 2020 is very criminal. It’s criminal at the highest level. So that’s really the things you should be talking about.”
“Look, he’s guilty. It’s not a question,” Trump added. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”
Imagine if any other president had said something like this. But Trump gets away with it.
Trump was referring to claims made by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in social media posts and television appearances that they had found Obama administration officials manipulated intelligence and conspired to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.
Gabbard posted on social media on Friday that she was making a criminal referral to the Justice Department.
At an event with congressional Republicans later Tuesday, Trump praised Gabbard and again accused Obama of being part of an effort to rig the elections. “These are vicious, horrible people,” he said of the former president and others.
Trump sits next to Epstein with two Don Jr. and Ivanka
Of course the Supreme Court claims the Constitution makes presidents immune from prosecution for official acts. But Trump is obviously freaking out about what releasing the Epstein files would reveal about him and desperately lashing out at his political enemies.
This is analysis by Stephen Collinson at CNN: Trump’s latest bid to end Epstein storm: Weaponizing the federal government.
Donald Trump’s bid to smother the uproar over accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein shows that he’s already achieved one goal his critics most feared from his second presidency.
The Justice Department and the head of the US intelligence community are now openly operating as fully weaponized tools to pursue the president’s personal political needs in a degradation of a governing system meant to be an antidote to king-like patronage.
This new dynamic underpinned a wild Oval Office press appearance by Trump on Tuesday, his latest attempt to put out the Epstein fire that had only the now-familiar effect of feeding the flames.
The extent of the president’s capture of two key agencies that are vital to keeping Americans safe was revealed when a reporter asked a question about his administration’s refusal to open all files related to the Epstein case.
The president pivoted to a tirade against Barack Obama, accusing the former president of staging a treasonous coup against him — basing his assault on a convenient and misleading memo about Russia’s 2016 election meddling that was released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The Justice Department has also been activated, yet again, to give Trump cover.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that he will take the highly unusual move of meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for carrying out a yearslong scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls — to ask what she knows but hasn’t so far told. Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday.
This seems a stretch, since Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer and plans to speak with a prisoner who has a clear incentive to offer testimony that could help a president who has the power to let her out of prison.
Read the rest at CNN.
Meanwhile, Trump sycophant House speaker Mike Johnson took action by cancelling the rest of the House session. Paul Waldman at MSNBC: The Epstein fallout literally shut down the House early for the summer.
It’s been a week and a half since President Donald Trump complained on Truth Social that his many, many accomplishments were being overshadowed, “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” There is a kind of truth in Trump’s lament: Six years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, Epstein lives on — and he has Republicans in something approaching panic. It’s gotten so bad that House Republicans apparently decided to shut the chamber down early before leaving town.
Things fell apart for the GOP in the House Rules Committee, which determines which legislation reaches the House floor. Knowing how much GOP leaders would like this issue to just go away, Democrats attempted to force the House to vote on releasing all the information the government has on Epstein. “To avoid embarrassing votes on Epstein,” NBC News reported, “Republicans decided to recess the committee and not attempt to pass a rule for bills this week. Without a rule, Republicans would be left with nothing to vote on after Wednesday.” Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., began the chamber’s five-week summer recess early, apparently in hopes that by the time the members return in the fall, the affair will all have blown over.
The whole episode recalls the famous line from “All the President’s Men”: “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of control.”
Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s and Marla Maples’ wedding.
Waldman notes that most Republicans don’t buy all the conspiracy theories cooked up by their base, but the Epstein conspiracy theories are base in reality.
…[U]nfortunately for the president and his party, the public interest and the political debate around Epstein concerns real life, including his relationship with Trump. Epstein really was a fabulously wealthy and well-connected pedophile and sex trafficker. He really did die in jail, awaiting trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance really did encourage speculation that Epstein did not commit suicide. There really are a huge number of documents from the government’s investigation of Epstein that have not been made public.
And before the pair had a “falling-out” (in the president’s words) in the mid-2000s, Epstein really was good friends with Donald Trump. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
After reiterating that Epstein’s death was a suicide and the case was closed, the administration faced a revolt from right-wing influencers who had been telling their audiences for years that the new Trump administration would blow the lid off everything Epstein was involved in. Then Trump begged people to talk about something, anything else, though his pleadings are falling on deaf ears. And on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that — at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s request — he intends to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring to aid Epstein in sex trafficking. The idea that Bondi and Blanche — both Trump loyalists who previously served among the president’s personal lawyers — are suddenly interested in Maxwell for solely apolitical reasons strains credulity, to say the least.
Waldman writes that Republicans are faced with an uprising from the base and Trump’s desire to prevent any further Epstein revelations, and so they decided to get out of town instead of taking a vote on the release of the Epstein files.
New Epstein Revelations
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck: Exclusive: Newly discovered photos and video shed fresh light on Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Newly uncovered archived video footage and photos reveal fresh details about Donald Trump’s past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Photos from 1993 confirm for the first time that Epstein attended Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. Epstein’s attendance at the ceremony at the Plaza Hotel was not widely known until now.
In addition, footage from a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event in New York shows Trump and Epstein laughing and chatting together ahead of the runway event. CNN’s KFile uncovered the raw footage during a review of archival video of Trump at events in the 1990s and 2000s. Trump and Epstein appeared together in at least one video among the limited archival footage reviewed.
The new footage and photos, which have not been widely reported and pre-date any of Epstein’s known legal issues, come amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s past relationship with Epstein. The Justice Department’s recent decision not to release long-promised files related to Epstein has spurred outrage in some corners of Trump’s MAGA movement, where people developed an expectation for bombshell revelations into Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators.
In a brief call with CNN on Tuesday, President Trump, asked about the wedding photos, responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” before repeatedly calling CNN “fake news” and hanging up.
In a statement to CNN, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said, “These are nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events to disgustingly infer something nefarious.
“The fact is that the President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”
Read the rest at watch videos at CNN.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Epstein Fiasco Takes Darker Turn as Dem Senator Drops New Bomb.
A few days ago, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal gripped Washington, Senator Ron Wyden offered a striking revelation in an interview with The New York Times. The Oregon Democrat said that his investigators had discovered that four big banks had flagged to the Treasury Department $1.5 billion in potentially suspicious money transfers involving Epstein, much of which appeared to be related to his massive sex-trafficking network.
Trump with Jeffrey Epstein at Victoria’s Secret event in 1999.
The revelation—which emerged via Wyden’s work as ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee—ratified widespread suspicions that there is still much we don’t know about Epstein’s relations with some of the most powerful and wealthy elites in the world in the lead-up to his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges.
Now Wyden is ratcheting things up once again. Wyden’s office just sent a new letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—which The New Republic obtained—suggesting seven potent lines of inquiry that the Justice Department could follow, right now, to dig more deeply into Epstein’s web of financial relations with global elites.
“I am convinced that the DOJ ignored evidence found in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Epstein file, a binder that contains extensive details on the mountains of cash Epstein received from prominent businessmen that Epstein used to finance his criminal network,” Wyden writes in the letter.
The Treasury Department has this information because that’s where banks file suspicious activity reports, or SARS. Wyden’s letter says his staff has documented that Epstein-related filings by banks contain “information on more than 4,725 wire transfers involving Epstein’s accounts, all of which merit further investigation.”
Wyden’s letter seeks to demonstrate what the Trump administration is not doing to examine Epstein’s financial relations with the rich and powerful….
Wyden’s move here is in some ways a trolling exercise, since DOJ won’t act on it. But such trolling by lawmakers can be constructive if it communicates new information to the public or highlights the failure of others in power to exercise oversight and impose accountability. Wyden’s letter does both.
Read more at TNR.
Immigration News
I want to recommend a powerful article by Stephen W. Thrasher that was published at Literary Hub: What ICE’s Assault on Ventura County, California Means for the Rest of America. The piece is very long, so I can’t really summarize it with a few quoted paragraphs. I hope you’ll go read the whole thing.
“Mom is gone. They took her away.”
These are the words of an 8-year-old Mexican-American girl I will call Maria, in my hometown of Oxnard, California. She spoke them to her summer school teachers this past week, one of whom is a friend of mine.
Maria’s mother was disappeared by ICE, the worst fear for many families in Ventura County, which emerged on the world stage recently as an ICE raid on the Glass House cannabis farm in Camarillo resulted in the death of farmer Jaime Alanís, the kidnapping of California State University Channel Island professor Jonathan Caravello, and the disappearance and presumed deportation of at least 200 farmers.
Fortunately for Maria, her two tias picked her up the day her mom was kidnapped, and “they took me to Toppers, and I got to eat the ice cream cookie!” Her teacher—I’ll call her Miss Garvin—told me how Maria had never had the ice cream cookie at Toppers before, and that she was trying to hold onto this treat. It seemed as if the adults in Maria’s life were letting her have anything special to distract her—because they did not know when, or even if, she was going to see her mother again.
Miss Garvin told me that “it was a shitshow of a day” as she kept Maria in her line of vision throughout the breakfast and lunch periods.
“It broke my heart,” she told me, to see this normally vivacious girl sitting shell shocked and mute around her friends.
Like Maria, I hail from Ventura County, and am a product of its Title 1 schools. From six to nine years old, I was bused through Oxnard’s bountiful agricultural fields and (literally) across the railroad tracks to the La Colonia neighborhood, where Ramona School educated students like me pretty well despite how economically neglected we were. (I still remember how few streetlights there were when we were bused before dawn, and that there were chickens running through the pot-holed streets just outside our school’s windows).
A bit more:
Like Maria, my biological mother disappeared when I was about her age, though not because she was kidnapped. (She just disappeared for three years while no one, including the private detective my dad and stepmother hired, could find any trace of her beyond an abandoned car.) Like Maria, my survival depended on the care of an Oxnard teacher like Miss Garvin.
Like Maria, I am also a product of Ventura County’s fields, which gave me a place to play, taught me about labor politics, employed the vast majority of my classmates’ parents, and fed me.
But you, wherever you are reading this, you are likely a product of Ventura County’s fields, too—especially if you’ve ever eaten a strawberry. Strawberries are harvested with backbreaking work usually done by undocumented migrant farmers. Oxnard is the largest producer of strawberries in California and is known as the “strawberry capital of the world.” Our 93,000 acres of farmland provides California, the United States, and even other countries not just various berries but avocados, mushrooms, corn, citrus, and even marijuana.
And you are also a product of Ventura County because the Oxnard plain is a hot bed of radical politics. Historically, Ventura County has played a pivotal role in the evolution of labor organizing, as Cesar Chavez lived there for a time and had a strong base of operations during the rise of United Farm Workers.
Just as importantly, Ventura County is playing a crucial role in the attempt to stop fascism right now, for the good people of Ventura, Camarillo, and Oxnard are not taking ICE raids without a fight. Since Trump came back into office, groups like VC Defensa and the 805 Immigration Coalition have been training volunteers to patrol for ICE agents. And when they’re spotted, a call goes out for community members to show up—and people from all walks of life (students, citizens, senior citizens) do.
That’s what happened on July 11: a scout patrol spotted ICE agents and tipped off hundreds of people who showed up at the Glass House Farm to bear witness to the ICE raid.
Scene from Glass House raid in Ventural Country, CA
During that raid, a man was chased off a rooftop to his by masked ICE agents. An activist professor from Cal State Jonathan Caravello was also arrested and jailed after he tried to help a man escape from a tear gas cannister under his wheelchair. Thrasher describes the state of terror that immigrants face in Ventura county. He writes:
If Ventura County falls, we are all going to fall. And the way people there have been treated as threats for interfering with the duties of police—a criminal charge I briefly faced as a professor under similar circumstances as the CSUCI professor—reveal the terror hundreds of millions could face if ICE does, in fact, get a six-fold increase in funding and becomes a bigger internal force than most countries’ militaries….
Even without the threat of ICE, farming has long been identified as one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Given that “more people die while farming than while serving as police officers, firefighters or other emergency responders,” the idea that ICE officers fear for their lives while approaching farmers is absurd.
But the terror of ICE has pushed immigrant families in Ventura County to their deaths in ways fast and slow.
Immigration expert Jeff Crisp at The New York Times (gift link): Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People.
In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”
Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.
What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin, but also explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.
This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.
Use the gift link to read the rest if you’re interested.
The Washington Post (gift link): U.S. deportees, freed from Salvadoran prison, describe ‘horror movie.’
Julio González Jr. had agreed to be deported to Venezuela. When the 36-year-old office cleaner and house painter boarded the flight in Texas in March, he assumed it would take him back to his home country.
Instead, the plane landed in El Salvador.
“The horror movie started there,” González said Tuesday.
When the shackled men refused to get off the plane, González and two other detainees told The Washington Post that they were yanked by their feet, beaten and shoved off board as the plane’s crew began to cry. Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.
“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The United States has paid the Salvadoran government of President Nayib Bukele $6 million to hold hundreds of migrants rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass removals — many without ties to El Salvador, many without criminal charges — at the world’s largest prison.
In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar. He asked for painkillers and medical attention but was given none for more than a month.
The three men returned to their family’s homes in Venezuela this week, among the 252 Venezuelans released from CECOT and taken to the South American country in a deal between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. They arrived on two flights in exchange for the release of 10 American citizens and permanent U.S. residents imprisoned in Venezuela.
Again, use the gift link if you want to read the rest.
I’ll end there, and post a few more stories in the comment thread. What else is happening? Please feel free to share.
#Deportation #DonaldTrump #GhislaineMaxwell #GlassHouseRaid #HouseSpeakerMikeJohnson #ICE #immigration #JeffreyEpstein #PresidentBarackObama #SenRonWyden #TulsiGabbard #VenturaCountyCA
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Wednesday Reads: The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal and Immigration Horrors
Good Morning!!
Trump and Epstein ogle young women at a Mar-a-Lago party.
The Epstein story is still leading the news as Trump continues to panic and try desperately to distract from the scandal.
Yesterday, in a bizarre and incoherent oval office rant, he actually accused former president Barack Obama of committing treason by ordering an investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
Trump doesn’t understand the concept of treason, which is defined in the Constitution as follows:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
But for malignant narcissist Trump, treason means any fantasized attack on him personally. ABC News: Trump accuses Obama of ‘treason’ in the Oval Office.
Days after President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated fake video showing former President Barack Obama’s arrest on his social media platform, the current president pushed conspiracy theories about Obama in the Oval Office on Tuesday, accusing him of treason without providing evidence regarding the 2016 presidential election.
“They tried to rig the election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.
Trump’s comments come after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice threatening the Obama administration.
NBC News: Obama pushes back on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ and ‘bizarre’ treason claim.
Former President Barack Obama’s office issued a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump on Tuesday after the president accused his predecessor of having committed “treason” and rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections.
“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
When reporters on Tuesday asked Trump about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he pivoted to what he called Obama’s “criminality.”
“After what they did to me — and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly,” Trump told reporters. “What they did in 2016 and 2020 is very criminal. It’s criminal at the highest level. So that’s really the things you should be talking about.”
“Look, he’s guilty. It’s not a question,” Trump added. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”
Imagine if any other president had said something like this. But Trump gets away with it.
Trump was referring to claims made by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in social media posts and television appearances that they had found Obama administration officials manipulated intelligence and conspired to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.
Gabbard posted on social media on Friday that she was making a criminal referral to the Justice Department.
At an event with congressional Republicans later Tuesday, Trump praised Gabbard and again accused Obama of being part of an effort to rig the elections. “These are vicious, horrible people,” he said of the former president and others.
Trump sits next to Epstein with two Don Jr. and Ivanka
Of course the Supreme Court claims the Constitution makes presidents immune from prosecution for official acts. But Trump is obviously freaking out about what releasing the Epstein files would reveal about him and desperately lashing out at his political enemies.
This is analysis by Stephen Collinson at CNN: Trump’s latest bid to end Epstein storm: Weaponizing the federal government.
Donald Trump’s bid to smother the uproar over accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein shows that he’s already achieved one goal his critics most feared from his second presidency.
The Justice Department and the head of the US intelligence community are now openly operating as fully weaponized tools to pursue the president’s personal political needs in a degradation of a governing system meant to be an antidote to king-like patronage.
This new dynamic underpinned a wild Oval Office press appearance by Trump on Tuesday, his latest attempt to put out the Epstein fire that had only the now-familiar effect of feeding the flames.
The extent of the president’s capture of two key agencies that are vital to keeping Americans safe was revealed when a reporter asked a question about his administration’s refusal to open all files related to the Epstein case.
The president pivoted to a tirade against Barack Obama, accusing the former president of staging a treasonous coup against him — basing his assault on a convenient and misleading memo about Russia’s 2016 election meddling that was released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The Justice Department has also been activated, yet again, to give Trump cover.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that he will take the highly unusual move of meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for carrying out a yearslong scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls — to ask what she knows but hasn’t so far told. Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday.
This seems a stretch, since Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer and plans to speak with a prisoner who has a clear incentive to offer testimony that could help a president who has the power to let her out of prison.
Read the rest at CNN.
Meanwhile, Trump sycophant House speaker Mike Johnson took action by cancelling the rest of the House session. Paul Waldman at MSNBC: The Epstein fallout literally shut down the House early for the summer.
It’s been a week and a half since President Donald Trump complained on Truth Social that his many, many accomplishments were being overshadowed, “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” There is a kind of truth in Trump’s lament: Six years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, Epstein lives on — and he has Republicans in something approaching panic. It’s gotten so bad that House Republicans apparently decided to shut the chamber down early before leaving town.
Things fell apart for the GOP in the House Rules Committee, which determines which legislation reaches the House floor. Knowing how much GOP leaders would like this issue to just go away, Democrats attempted to force the House to vote on releasing all the information the government has on Epstein. “To avoid embarrassing votes on Epstein,” NBC News reported, “Republicans decided to recess the committee and not attempt to pass a rule for bills this week. Without a rule, Republicans would be left with nothing to vote on after Wednesday.” Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., began the chamber’s five-week summer recess early, apparently in hopes that by the time the members return in the fall, the affair will all have blown over.
The whole episode recalls the famous line from “All the President’s Men”: “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of control.”
Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s and Marla Maples’ wedding.
Waldman notes that most Republicans don’t buy all the conspiracy theories cooked up by their base, but the Epstein conspiracy theories are base in reality.
…[U]nfortunately for the president and his party, the public interest and the political debate around Epstein concerns real life, including his relationship with Trump. Epstein really was a fabulously wealthy and well-connected pedophile and sex trafficker. He really did die in jail, awaiting trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance really did encourage speculation that Epstein did not commit suicide. There really are a huge number of documents from the government’s investigation of Epstein that have not been made public.
And before the pair had a “falling-out” (in the president’s words) in the mid-2000s, Epstein really was good friends with Donald Trump. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
After reiterating that Epstein’s death was a suicide and the case was closed, the administration faced a revolt from right-wing influencers who had been telling their audiences for years that the new Trump administration would blow the lid off everything Epstein was involved in. Then Trump begged people to talk about something, anything else, though his pleadings are falling on deaf ears. And on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that — at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s request — he intends to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring to aid Epstein in sex trafficking. The idea that Bondi and Blanche — both Trump loyalists who previously served among the president’s personal lawyers — are suddenly interested in Maxwell for solely apolitical reasons strains credulity, to say the least.
Waldman writes that Republicans are faced with an uprising from the base and Trump’s desire to prevent any further Epstein revelations, and so they decided to get out of town instead of taking a vote on the release of the Epstein files.
New Epstein Revelations
CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck: Exclusive: Newly discovered photos and video shed fresh light on Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Newly uncovered archived video footage and photos reveal fresh details about Donald Trump’s past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Photos from 1993 confirm for the first time that Epstein attended Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. Epstein’s attendance at the ceremony at the Plaza Hotel was not widely known until now.
In addition, footage from a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event in New York shows Trump and Epstein laughing and chatting together ahead of the runway event. CNN’s KFile uncovered the raw footage during a review of archival video of Trump at events in the 1990s and 2000s. Trump and Epstein appeared together in at least one video among the limited archival footage reviewed.
The new footage and photos, which have not been widely reported and pre-date any of Epstein’s known legal issues, come amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s past relationship with Epstein. The Justice Department’s recent decision not to release long-promised files related to Epstein has spurred outrage in some corners of Trump’s MAGA movement, where people developed an expectation for bombshell revelations into Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators.
In a brief call with CNN on Tuesday, President Trump, asked about the wedding photos, responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” before repeatedly calling CNN “fake news” and hanging up.
In a statement to CNN, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said, “These are nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events to disgustingly infer something nefarious.
“The fact is that the President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”
Read the rest at watch videos at CNN.
Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Epstein Fiasco Takes Darker Turn as Dem Senator Drops New Bomb.
A few days ago, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal gripped Washington, Senator Ron Wyden offered a striking revelation in an interview with The New York Times. The Oregon Democrat said that his investigators had discovered that four big banks had flagged to the Treasury Department $1.5 billion in potentially suspicious money transfers involving Epstein, much of which appeared to be related to his massive sex-trafficking network.
Trump with Jeffrey Epstein at Victoria’s Secret event in 1999.
The revelation—which emerged via Wyden’s work as ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee—ratified widespread suspicions that there is still much we don’t know about Epstein’s relations with some of the most powerful and wealthy elites in the world in the lead-up to his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges.
Now Wyden is ratcheting things up once again. Wyden’s office just sent a new letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—which The New Republic obtained—suggesting seven potent lines of inquiry that the Justice Department could follow, right now, to dig more deeply into Epstein’s web of financial relations with global elites.
“I am convinced that the DOJ ignored evidence found in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Epstein file, a binder that contains extensive details on the mountains of cash Epstein received from prominent businessmen that Epstein used to finance his criminal network,” Wyden writes in the letter.
The Treasury Department has this information because that’s where banks file suspicious activity reports, or SARS. Wyden’s letter says his staff has documented that Epstein-related filings by banks contain “information on more than 4,725 wire transfers involving Epstein’s accounts, all of which merit further investigation.”
Wyden’s letter seeks to demonstrate what the Trump administration is not doing to examine Epstein’s financial relations with the rich and powerful….
Wyden’s move here is in some ways a trolling exercise, since DOJ won’t act on it. But such trolling by lawmakers can be constructive if it communicates new information to the public or highlights the failure of others in power to exercise oversight and impose accountability. Wyden’s letter does both.
Read more at TNR.
Immigration News
I want to recommend a powerful article by Stephen W. Thrasher that was published at Literary Hub: What ICE’s Assault on Ventura County, California Means for the Rest of America. The piece is very long, so I can’t really summarize it with a few quoted paragraphs. I hope you’ll go read the whole thing.
“Mom is gone. They took her away.”
These are the words of an 8-year-old Mexican-American girl I will call Maria, in my hometown of Oxnard, California. She spoke them to her summer school teachers this past week, one of whom is a friend of mine.
Maria’s mother was disappeared by ICE, the worst fear for many families in Ventura County, which emerged on the world stage recently as an ICE raid on the Glass House cannabis farm in Camarillo resulted in the death of farmer Jaime Alanís, the kidnapping of California State University Channel Island professor Jonathan Caravello, and the disappearance and presumed deportation of at least 200 farmers.
Fortunately for Maria, her two tias picked her up the day her mom was kidnapped, and “they took me to Toppers, and I got to eat the ice cream cookie!” Her teacher—I’ll call her Miss Garvin—told me how Maria had never had the ice cream cookie at Toppers before, and that she was trying to hold onto this treat. It seemed as if the adults in Maria’s life were letting her have anything special to distract her—because they did not know when, or even if, she was going to see her mother again.
Miss Garvin told me that “it was a shitshow of a day” as she kept Maria in her line of vision throughout the breakfast and lunch periods.
“It broke my heart,” she told me, to see this normally vivacious girl sitting shell shocked and mute around her friends.
Like Maria, I hail from Ventura County, and am a product of its Title 1 schools. From six to nine years old, I was bused through Oxnard’s bountiful agricultural fields and (literally) across the railroad tracks to the La Colonia neighborhood, where Ramona School educated students like me pretty well despite how economically neglected we were. (I still remember how few streetlights there were when we were bused before dawn, and that there were chickens running through the pot-holed streets just outside our school’s windows).
A bit more:
Like Maria, my biological mother disappeared when I was about her age, though not because she was kidnapped. (She just disappeared for three years while no one, including the private detective my dad and stepmother hired, could find any trace of her beyond an abandoned car.) Like Maria, my survival depended on the care of an Oxnard teacher like Miss Garvin.
Like Maria, I am also a product of Ventura County’s fields, which gave me a place to play, taught me about labor politics, employed the vast majority of my classmates’ parents, and fed me.
But you, wherever you are reading this, you are likely a product of Ventura County’s fields, too—especially if you’ve ever eaten a strawberry. Strawberries are harvested with backbreaking work usually done by undocumented migrant farmers. Oxnard is the largest producer of strawberries in California and is known as the “strawberry capital of the world.” Our 93,000 acres of farmland provides California, the United States, and even other countries not just various berries but avocados, mushrooms, corn, citrus, and even marijuana.
And you are also a product of Ventura County because the Oxnard plain is a hot bed of radical politics. Historically, Ventura County has played a pivotal role in the evolution of labor organizing, as Cesar Chavez lived there for a time and had a strong base of operations during the rise of United Farm Workers.
Just as importantly, Ventura County is playing a crucial role in the attempt to stop fascism right now, for the good people of Ventura, Camarillo, and Oxnard are not taking ICE raids without a fight. Since Trump came back into office, groups like VC Defensa and the 805 Immigration Coalition have been training volunteers to patrol for ICE agents. And when they’re spotted, a call goes out for community members to show up—and people from all walks of life (students, citizens, senior citizens) do.
That’s what happened on July 11: a scout patrol spotted ICE agents and tipped off hundreds of people who showed up at the Glass House Farm to bear witness to the ICE raid.
Scene from Glass House raid in Ventural Country, CA
During that raid, a man was chased off a rooftop to his by masked ICE agents. An activist professor from Cal State Jonathan Caravello was also arrested and jailed after he tried to help a man escape from a tear gas cannister under his wheelchair. Thrasher describes the state of terror that immigrants face in Ventura county. He writes:
If Ventura County falls, we are all going to fall. And the way people there have been treated as threats for interfering with the duties of police—a criminal charge I briefly faced as a professor under similar circumstances as the CSUCI professor—reveal the terror hundreds of millions could face if ICE does, in fact, get a six-fold increase in funding and becomes a bigger internal force than most countries’ militaries….
Even without the threat of ICE, farming has long been identified as one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Given that “more people die while farming than while serving as police officers, firefighters or other emergency responders,” the idea that ICE officers fear for their lives while approaching farmers is absurd.
But the terror of ICE has pushed immigrant families in Ventura County to their deaths in ways fast and slow.
Immigration expert Jeff Crisp at The New York Times (gift link): Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People.
In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”
Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.
What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin, but also explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.
This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.
Use the gift link to read the rest if you’re interested.
The Washington Post (gift link): U.S. deportees, freed from Salvadoran prison, describe ‘horror movie.’
Julio González Jr. had agreed to be deported to Venezuela. When the 36-year-old office cleaner and house painter boarded the flight in Texas in March, he assumed it would take him back to his home country.
Instead, the plane landed in El Salvador.
“The horror movie started there,” González said Tuesday.
When the shackled men refused to get off the plane, González and two other detainees told The Washington Post that they were yanked by their feet, beaten and shoved off board as the plane’s crew began to cry. Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.
“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The United States has paid the Salvadoran government of President Nayib Bukele $6 million to hold hundreds of migrants rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass removals — many without ties to El Salvador, many without criminal charges — at the world’s largest prison.
In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar. He asked for painkillers and medical attention but was given none for more than a month.
The three men returned to their family’s homes in Venezuela this week, among the 252 Venezuelans released from CECOT and taken to the South American country in a deal between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. They arrived on two flights in exchange for the release of 10 American citizens and permanent U.S. residents imprisoned in Venezuela.
Again, use the gift link if you want to read the rest.
I’ll end there, and post a few more stories in the comment thread. What else is happening? Please feel free to share.
#Deportation #DonaldTrump #GhislaineMaxwell #GlassHouseRaid #HouseSpeakerMikeJohnson #ICE #immigration #JeffreyEpstein #PresidentBarackObama #SenRonWyden #TulsiGabbard #VenturaCountyCA
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Airports I’ve used
Last Friday set an ignominious personal milestone: I broke a record for consecutive days spent away from airplanes that went back to to 2001.
Back then, the post-9/11 shutdown of commercial aviation and my own relaxed travel schedule ensured I wouldn’t board a plane between early August, when I landed at National Airport after a summer vacation in California, and early January, when I took off DCA for my first Macworld Expo. This time, the novel-coronavirus pandemic has grounded me, and it’s unclear when I’ll once again feel jet engines shove me back in my seat and watch the ground fall away from the wing.
So I might as well document the airports I used in the Before Times, having already done the research for my friend Craig Fifer’s Flight Quest project to track who among his friends had taken off from or landed at more airports. As an inveterate list-maker and avgeek, how could I not have taken part in that competition?
So here you go: the 94 95 97 98 99 100 101 102103 104 105 106 109 112 113 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 airports I’ve used listed by IATA and ICAO code, plus my comments about each.
- AER/URSS, Sochi International Airport: A student trip to the Soviet Union after my high-school graduation (thanks, Mom and Dad) led me to this airport on the Black Sea.
- AMS/EHAM, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol: A friend’s bachelor party provided an excellent excuse to fly to the Netherlands.
- ATL/KATL, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport: I’ve spent shockingly little time here, aside from two trips to cover the E3 video-game conference in the ’90s.
- ATW/KATW, Appleton International Airport: This has to be the smallest U.S. airport on this list with “International” in its name–despite not having any regularly scheduled international passenger service.
- AUS/KAUS, Austin–Bergstrom International Airport: Thanks, SXSW.
- BCN/LEBL, Josep Tarradellas Barcelona–El Prat Airport: MWC put this airport on my map.
- BDA/TXKF, L.F. Wade International Airport: spring break in Bermuda with my family in high school.
- BER/EDDB, Berlin Brandenburg Airport: Five years after seeing this unopened airport as a infrastructure tourist, I experienced it as a passenger.
- BNA/KBNA, Nashville International Airport: The diversity of local dining options represented here reminded me of AUS.
- BOI/KBOI, Boise Airport: Shortest airport name on this list.
- BOS/KBOS, Logan International Airport: a family destination since the late ’90s.
- BRU/EBBR, Brussels Airport: I hear Brussels is a great city, so at some point I should not just connect through its airport.
- BUR/KBUR, Hollywood Burbank Airport: Among my easier airport car-rental experiences.
- BWI/KBWI, Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport: the greater Washington area’s third-place airport.
- CDG/LFPG, Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport: T1 is a master class in how not to design a terminal.
- CGS/KCGS, College Park Airport: I went to an airshow at the oldest continuously-operated airport in the late ’90s and paid $20 or so for a ride in a biplane.
- CLE/KCLE, Cleveland Hopkins International Airport: I’m told that my first flight was a hop from Newark to Cleveland to see my grandparents.
- CLT/KCLT, Charlotte Douglas International Airport: Yes, I’ve flown US Airways and American Airlines.
- CMH/KCMH, John Glenn Columbus International Airport: Part of a miniature mileage run I did on Sept. 11, 2020 to break an eight-month streak of being grounded after the novel-coronavirus pandemic shut down all my business travel.
- CPH/EKCH, Copenhagen Airport: The airport is easily reachable by train from both Denmark and Sweden.
- CRL/EBCI, Brussels South Charleroi Airport: Potential Ryanair passengers should be advised that Charleroi isn’t Brussels.
- CTU/ZUUU, Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport: The 1998 trip to Tibet that took me through this airport (I’m sure it’s much fancier now) will require its own post at some point.
- CUN/MMUN, Cancún International Airport: a pre-Christmas vacation a couple of years ago.
- CXH/CYHC, Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre: I couldn’t resist ducking away from Web Summit Vancouver to get in a floatplane tour of the city and its beautiful surroundings.
- DAL/KDAL, Dallas Love Field: Of course, Southwest Airlines was involved.
- DCA/KDCA, Washington National Airport: I don’t call the airport that I’ve probably used more than any other “Reagan Airport” because Republicans in Congress insisted on shoving that name on us while the 41st president was still alive. Never name things after living politicians.
- DEN/KDEN, Stapleton International Airport: I’m so old that I’ve flown in and out of and driven under Denver’s former airport.
- DEN/KDEN, Denver International Airport: Rail transit from here is surprisingly good.
- DFW/KDFW, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport: I think I’ve only flown here once; my second time would have been this March, but the pandemic intervened.
- DOH/OTHH, Hamad International Airport: Doha, Qatar, is the farthest east I’ve flown from home.
- DTW/KDTW, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport: I’ve only over connected through Detroit and have somehow never visited the city itself.
- DUB/EIDW, Dublin Airport: I was overdue to return until Dublin Tech Summit brought me back in 2022.
- EWR/KEWR, Newark Liberty International Airport: my home airport growing up, as well as the only one where I’ve experienced a departure from the jumpseat of an airliner.
- FCO/LIRF, Rome–Fiumicino International Airport: first stop on my honeymoon.
- FLL/KFLL, Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport: a nice start to a few days in the Florida Keys with friends.
- FRA/EDDF, Frankfurt am Main Airport: Germany’s biggest Star Alliance transfer point.
- FUK/RJFF, Fukuoka Airport: an unplanned connection on my way to Tokyo in 2019, also a source of childish hilarity for its IATA code.
- GIG/SBGL, Rio de Janeiro/Galeão International Airport: My first airport used out of the Northern Hemisphere.
- GRU/SBGR, São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport: I usually don’t like to be introduced to a new airport with less than two hours to connect through it, but my domestic-to-international connection at GRU was about as easy as they get.
- GVA/LSGG, Geneva Airport: Switzerland’s lesser airport.
- HEL/EFHK, Helsinki-Vantaa Airport: Also one of the more memorable IATA codes out there.
- HGR/KHGR, Hagerstown Regional Airport: Where I flew in a 76-year-old B-25 Mitchell.
- HKG/VHHH, Hong Kong International Airport: I’m sorry I never got to fly into Kai Tak.
- HND/RJTT, Tokyo International Airport: My belated introduction to Haneda came in 2019.
- HOU/KHOU, William P. Hobby Airport: This requires a whole lot less walking than its big brother on the other side of Houston.
- IAD/KIAD, Washington Dulles International Airport: my other home airport now.
- IAH/KIAH, George Bush Intercontinental Airport: so many connections here.
- IST/LTFM, Istanbul Airport: This has to be the largest airport terminal I’ve ever set foot in. If you have access to the Turkish Airlines lounge by the D concourse, show up hungry!
- JFK/KJFK, John F. Kennedy International Airport: I have a Pan Am boarding pass from here but have otherwise spent shockingly little time at JFK.
- KEF/BIKF, Keflavik International Airport: Decades after Tom Clancy’s “Red Storm Rising” introduced this airport to me as the site of a Soviet invasion, I had a much more tranquil welcome connecting through KEF in 2022.
- KOA/PHKO, Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keāhole: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Tech Summit took me here in 2021.
- -/KHES, Healdsburg Municipal Airport: A flight in a friend’s plane took me to this tiny Sonoma County airstrip.
- LAS/KLAS, McCarran International Airport: CES has given me an obnoxious level of familiarity with Las Vegas’ airport.
- LAX/KLAX, Los Angeles International Airport: The In-n-Out Burger franchise just northeast of the runways is my favorite fast-food spot in the world.
- LED/ULLI, Pulkovo Airport: I flew here in 1989, when St. Petersburg was still Leningrad.
- LGA/KLGA, LaGuardia Airport: It’s made Penn Station look good.
- LGW/LGKK, London Gatwick: London’s other airport, substantially more expensive to reach via rail than Heathrow.
- LHR/EGLL, Heathrow Airport: My opinion of it went way up after T2 opened.
- LIS/LPPT, Humberto Delgado Airport: Obrigado, Web Summit.
- LKE/-, Kenmore Air Harbor Seaplane Base: My first flight that started and ended on water happened here, at Seattle’s Lake Union.
- LXA/ZULS, Lhasa Gonggar Airport: At 11,710 feet above sea level, Tibet’s primary airport is the highest one I’ve used.
- MAD/LEMD, Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport: I was here as a kid.
- MCI/KMCI, Kansas City International Airport: Not everything is up to date in this airport.
- MCO/KMCO, Orlando International Airport: I’ve flown here to see rockets fly.
- MDW/KMDW, Chicago Midway International Airport: the other Chicago airport.
- MEM/KMEM, Memphis International Airport: a long-ago connection.
- MEX/MMMX, Mexico City International Airport: my first non-coastal airport used in Mexico.
- MHT/KMHT, Manchester–Boston Regional Airport: An early-morning departure after a friend’s wedding was not much fun.
- MIA/KMIA, Miami International Airport: My first in-person panel moderation since the start of the pandemic finally got me to this airport.
- MSO/KMSO, Missoula Montana Airport: After getting off the plane here, I knew I would not have Vasili Borodin’s dying regret in the film version of The Hunt For Red October, “I would like to have seen Montana.”
- MSP/KMSP, Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport: My 2001 connection here was so short that my skis didn’t make it on the plane home with me.
- MSY/KMSY, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport: great city, bad transfers to and from its airport.
- MUC/EDDM, Munich Airport: my second-most-frequent connection in Germany.
- MXP/LIMC, Milan Malpensa Airport: The last stop on our honeymoon.
- NRT/RJAA, Narita International Airport: I don’t think any other airport on this list sits as far from its city’s downtown as Narita is from Tokyo.
- OAK/KOAK, Oakland International Airport: I last flew here when you still had to take a bus to BART.
- ODS/UKOO, Odesa International Airport: It was still spelled Odessa when I visited in 1989.
- OGG/PHOG, Kahului Airport: A friend’s wedding in Maui was for years my only visit to Hawaii.
- ORD/KORD, O’Hare International Airport: Two great things about ORD: the neon sculpture between T1’s two halves, and Tortas Frontera.
- ORY/LFPO, Paris Orly Airport: When my family lived outside of Paris during my first two years of college, flying Continental meant I arrived at Orly instead of de Gaulle.
- PDX/KPDX, Portland International Airport: I, too, miss the old carpet.
- PEK/ZBAA, Beijing Capital International Airport: Transit connections were not that easy or discoverable in 2007.
- PHL/KPHL, Philadelphia International Airport: Amtrak should connect to PHL.
- PHX/KPHX, Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport: Yet another airport I’ve only used as a connection.
- PIT/KPIT, Pittsburgh International Airport: I haven’t been here since the last millennium.
- PSP/KPSP, Palm Springs International Airport: palm trees and runways.
- PTY/MPTO, Tocumen International Airport: I connected through Copa Airlines’ Panama City hub on my way to Web Summit Rio in 2023.
- PUJ/MDPC, Punta Cana International Airport: Wearing a Nats cap in the Dominican Republic will get you some “Juan Soto!” shout-outs.
- PVD/KPVD, T.F. Green International Airport: Providence has a very efficient airport.
- PVG/ZSPD, Shanghai Pudong International Airport: the fastest transit link I’ve ever used.
- PVR/MMPR, Licenciado Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport: a destination wedding in Puerto Vallarta.
- RDU/KRDU, Raleigh-Durham International Airport: Part of a mileage run in 2023, unless I flew in or out of there years earlier.
- RIX/EVRA, Riga International Airport: The TechChill conference brought me to Latvia in 2022.
- RNO/KRNO, Reno–Tahoe International Airport: My only flight here happened after I missed a flight out of IAD and had to rebook.
- RSW/KRSW, Southwest Florida International Airport: I forgot to include Fort Myers’ airport when I first posted this list.
- SAN/KSAN, San Diego International Airport: Enjoy the views of downtown on the way in.
- SAT/KSAT, San Antonio International Airport: the smallest United Club I’ve visited.
- SDU/SBRJ, Santos Dumont Airport: Rio’s rough equivalent of National Airport.
- SEA/KSEA, Seattle–Tacoma International Airport: Take the train to downtown and think of Steve Dunne from Singles.
- SFO/KSFO, San Francisco International Airport: my most frequent Left Coast airport.
- SJC/KSJC, San Jose International Airport: I haven’t been back to Silicon Valley’s self-styled home airport in a few years.
- SJD/MMSD, Los Cabos International Airport: another destination wedding in Mexico.
- SJU/TJSJ, Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport: Storms back home extended my senior-year spring-break trip to Puerto Rico by a day and got me rebooked into a first-class seat on American back to D.C.
- SLC/KSLC, Salt Lake City International Airport: a great ski trip in my pre-parenthood days.
- SMF/KSMF, Sacramento International Airport: I flew here in 1992 to drive across the country with my girlfriend at the time in a 1977 Toyota Corolla, which seemed like a super-logical thing to do at the time.
- SNA/KSNA, John Wayne Airport: The takeoff from this short 5,700-foot runway felt sportier than average.
- SPU/LDSP, Split Airport: My introduction to Croatia in 2023, courtesy of Infobip’s Shift 2023 conferencee hosting me as an emcee.
- STL/KSTL, St. Louis Lambert International Airport: my first two business trips had me going to E3 in L.A. via TWA from DCA, putting that airline’s hub in between.
- STS/KSTS, Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County Airport: The tiny waiting room is decorated with large prints of Peanuts strips featuring Snoopy and the Red Baron, which is awesome. Santa Rosa’s airport is also the only one I’ve departed via hot-air balloon.
- SVO/UUEE, Sheremetyevo International Airport: My introduction to the joys of communism came at the start of that 1989 trip, in the form of an approximately two-hour wait after landing in Moscow for Aeroflot to return our group’s luggage.
- SVQ/LEZL, Seville Airport: Having ATC delay a departure to FRA last spring by most of an hour required me to make a 10-minute connection in FRA.
- SZX/ZGSZ, Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport: This, too, looks a lot different than it did during my 1998 trip to China.
- TLL/EETN, Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport: Estonia’s primary airport is refreshingly close to the center of Tallinn.
- TLV/LLBG, Ben Gurion Airport: They don’t screw around with security at Tel Aviv.
- TPA/KTPA, Tampa International Airport: I landed here in 2011 to see my first space shuttle launch because Continental couldn’t get me to Orlando; fortunately, I-4 was devoid of traffic after 11 p.m.
- TUS/KTUS, Tucson International Airport: Having an Air National Guard base hosted at this airport allows your planespotting to include F-16s.
- TXL/EDDT, Berlin Tegel Airport: If Berlin Brandenburg Airport really and finally opens this fall (update: it did), TXL will be the next airport on this list to be retired.
- VIE/LOWW, Vienna International Airport: a lovely vacation in 2006.
- VNO/EYVI, Vilnius International Airport: I got my introduction to the last of the Baltic states’ three major airports about two and a half years after landing in Tallinn.
- YQX/CYQX, Gander International Airport: On our way to the USSR in 1989, our Aeroflot Il-62 made a scheduled refueling stop at this Newfoundland airport.
- YTZ/CYTZ, Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport: one of only two airports that I’ve exited by walking, the other being National.
- YUL/CYUL, Montréal–Trudeau International Airport: Montréal is high on my list of cities I’d like to see again.
- YVR/CYVR, Vancouver International Airport: I flew here to spend a few days skiiing at Whistler and still need to spend some time in the city itself.
- YYZ/CYYZ, Toronto Pearson International Airport: famous forever thanks to Rush.
- ZAG/LDZA, Zagreb Franjo Tuđman Airport: One of the smallest national-capital airports on this list.
- ZRH/LSZH, Zurich Airport: The 22-minute connection I pulled off here in 2013 remains my second-shortest international layover.
This almost certainly isn’t complete, as before 1997 I’m limited to incomplete paper records and my own memory. But I don’t think anybody can question my lifelong effort to prop up commercial aviation.
Updated 9/12/2020 to add CMH; 10/7/2020 to add DAL and HOU; 8/20/2021 to add TLL; 8/27/2021 to add RSW; 9/16/2021 to add HGR; 10/3/2021 to add MIA;12/6/2021 to add KOA; 5/2/2022 to add RIX; 5/26/2022 to add BOI; 7/2/2022 to add HEL; 8/1/2022 to add PUJ; 9/19/2022 to add BER, KEF and CPH; 5/8/2023 to add PTY, GIG and GRU; 7/20/2023 to add LGW; 9/23/2023 to add IST, SPU and ZAG; 12/5/2023 to add RDU; 2/11/2024 to add VNO; 7/2/2024 to add SNA; 8/16/2024 to add BUR; 10/16/2024 to add BNA; 3/16/2025 to add DOH; 5/2/2025 to add SDU; 6/20/2025 to add MEX; 10/16/2025 to add ATW and update the name of MSO; 5/22/2026 to add CXH.
#airportCode #airports #FlightQuest #IATACode #ICAOCode #landings #takeoffs -
Airports I’ve used
Last Friday set an ignominious personal milestone: I broke a record for consecutive days spent away from airplanes that went back to to 2001.
Back then, the post-9/11 shutdown of commercial aviation and my own relaxed travel schedule ensured I wouldn’t board a plane between early August, when I landed at National Airport after a summer vacation in California, and early January, when I took off DCA for my first Macworld Expo. This time, the novel-coronavirus pandemic has grounded me, and it’s unclear when I’ll once again feel jet engines shove me back in my seat and watch the ground fall away from the wing.
So I might as well document the airports I used in the Before Times, having already done the research for my friend Craig Fifer’s Flight Quest project to track who among his friends had taken off from or landed at more airports. As an inveterate list-maker and avgeek, how could I not have taken part in that competition?
So here you go: the 94 95 97 98 99 100 101 102103 104 105 106 109 112 113 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 airports I’ve used listed by IATA and ICAO code, plus my comments about each.
- AER/URSS, Sochi International Airport: A student trip to the Soviet Union after my high-school graduation (thanks, Mom and Dad) led me to this airport on the Black Sea.
- AMS/EHAM, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol: A friend’s bachelor party provided an excellent excuse to fly to the Netherlands.
- ATL/KATL, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport: I’ve spent shockingly little time here, aside from two trips to cover the E3 video-game conference in the ’90s.
- ATW/KATW, Appleton International Airport: This has to be the smallest U.S. airport on this list with “International” in its name–despite not having any regularly scheduled international passenger service.
- AUS/KAUS, Austin–Bergstrom International Airport: Thanks, SXSW.
- BCN/LEBL, Josep Tarradellas Barcelona–El Prat Airport: MWC put this airport on my map.
- BDA/TXKF, L.F. Wade International Airport: spring break in Bermuda with my family in high school.
- BER/EDDB, Berlin Brandenburg Airport: Five years after seeing this unopened airport as a infrastructure tourist, I experienced it as a passenger.
- BNA/KBNA, Nashville International Airport: The diversity of local dining options represented here reminded me of AUS.
- BOI/KBOI, Boise Airport: Shortest airport name on this list.
- BOS/KBOS, Logan International Airport: a family destination since the late ’90s.
- BRU/EBBR, Brussels Airport: I hear Brussels is a great city, so at some point I should not just connect through its airport.
- BUR/KBUR, Hollywood Burbank Airport: Among my easier airport car-rental experiences.
- BWI/KBWI, Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport: the greater Washington area’s third-place airport.
- CDG/LFPG, Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport: T1 is a master class in how not to design a terminal.
- CGS/KCGS, College Park Airport: I went to an airshow at the oldest continuously-operated airport in the late ’90s and paid $20 or so for a ride in a biplane.
- CLE/KCLE, Cleveland Hopkins International Airport: I’m told that my first flight was a hop from Newark to Cleveland to see my grandparents.
- CLT/KCLT, Charlotte Douglas International Airport: Yes, I’ve flown US Airways and American Airlines.
- CMH/KCMH, John Glenn Columbus International Airport: Part of a miniature mileage run I did on Sept. 11, 2020 to break an eight-month streak of being grounded after the novel-coronavirus pandemic shut down all my business travel.
- CPH/EKCH, Copenhagen Airport: The airport is easily reachable by train from both Denmark and Sweden.
- CRL/EBCI, Brussels South Charleroi Airport: Potential Ryanair passengers should be advised that Charleroi isn’t Brussels.
- CTU/ZUUU, Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport: The 1998 trip to Tibet that took me through this airport (I’m sure it’s much fancier now) will require its own post at some point.
- CUN/MMUN, Cancún International Airport: a pre-Christmas vacation a couple of years ago.
- CXH/CYHC, Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre: I couldn’t resist ducking away from Web Summit Vancouver to get in a floatplane tour of the city and its beautiful surroundings.
- DAL/KDAL, Dallas Love Field: Of course, Southwest Airlines was involved.
- DCA/KDCA, Washington National Airport: I don’t call the airport that I’ve probably used more than any other “Reagan Airport” because Republicans in Congress insisted on shoving that name on us while the 41st president was still alive. Never name things after living politicians.
- DEN/KDEN, Stapleton International Airport: I’m so old that I’ve flown in and out of and driven under Denver’s former airport.
- DEN/KDEN, Denver International Airport: Rail transit from here is surprisingly good.
- DFW/KDFW, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport: I think I’ve only flown here once; my second time would have been this March, but the pandemic intervened.
- DOH/OTHH, Hamad International Airport: Doha, Qatar, is the farthest east I’ve flown from home.
- DTW/KDTW, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport: I’ve only over connected through Detroit and have somehow never visited the city itself.
- DUB/EIDW, Dublin Airport: I was overdue to return until Dublin Tech Summit brought me back in 2022.
- EWR/KEWR, Newark Liberty International Airport: my home airport growing up, as well as the only one where I’ve experienced a departure from the jumpseat of an airliner.
- FCO/LIRF, Rome–Fiumicino International Airport: first stop on my honeymoon.
- FLL/KFLL, Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport: a nice start to a few days in the Florida Keys with friends.
- FRA/EDDF, Frankfurt am Main Airport: Germany’s biggest Star Alliance transfer point.
- FUK/RJFF, Fukuoka Airport: an unplanned connection on my way to Tokyo in 2019, also a source of childish hilarity for its IATA code.
- GIG/SBGL, Rio de Janeiro/Galeão International Airport: My first airport used out of the Northern Hemisphere.
- GRU/SBGR, São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport: I usually don’t like to be introduced to a new airport with less than two hours to connect through it, but my domestic-to-international connection at GRU was about as easy as they get.
- GVA/LSGG, Geneva Airport: Switzerland’s lesser airport.
- HEL/EFHK, Helsinki-Vantaa Airport: Also one of the more memorable IATA codes out there.
- HGR/KHGR, Hagerstown Regional Airport: Where I flew in a 76-year-old B-25 Mitchell.
- HKG/VHHH, Hong Kong International Airport: I’m sorry I never got to fly into Kai Tak.
- HND/RJTT, Tokyo International Airport: My belated introduction to Haneda came in 2019.
- HOU/KHOU, William P. Hobby Airport: This requires a whole lot less walking than its big brother on the other side of Houston.
- IAD/KIAD, Washington Dulles International Airport: my other home airport now.
- IAH/KIAH, George Bush Intercontinental Airport: so many connections here.
- IST/LTFM, Istanbul Airport: This has to be the largest airport terminal I’ve ever set foot in. If you have access to the Turkish Airlines lounge by the D concourse, show up hungry!
- JFK/KJFK, John F. Kennedy International Airport: I have a Pan Am boarding pass from here but have otherwise spent shockingly little time at JFK.
- KEF/BIKF, Keflavik International Airport: Decades after Tom Clancy’s “Red Storm Rising” introduced this airport to me as the site of a Soviet invasion, I had a much more tranquil welcome connecting through KEF in 2022.
- KOA/PHKO, Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keāhole: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Tech Summit took me here in 2021.
- -/KHES, Healdsburg Municipal Airport: A flight in a friend’s plane took me to this tiny Sonoma County airstrip.
- LAS/KLAS, McCarran International Airport: CES has given me an obnoxious level of familiarity with Las Vegas’ airport.
- LAX/KLAX, Los Angeles International Airport: The In-n-Out Burger franchise just northeast of the runways is my favorite fast-food spot in the world.
- LED/ULLI, Pulkovo Airport: I flew here in 1989, when St. Petersburg was still Leningrad.
- LGA/KLGA, LaGuardia Airport: It’s made Penn Station look good.
- LGW/LGKK, London Gatwick: London’s other airport, substantially more expensive to reach via rail than Heathrow.
- LHR/EGLL, Heathrow Airport: My opinion of it went way up after T2 opened.
- LIS/LPPT, Humberto Delgado Airport: Obrigado, Web Summit.
- LKE/-, Kenmore Air Harbor Seaplane Base: My first flight that started and ended on water happened here, at Seattle’s Lake Union.
- LXA/ZULS, Lhasa Gonggar Airport: At 11,710 feet above sea level, Tibet’s primary airport is the highest one I’ve used.
- MAD/LEMD, Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport: I was here as a kid.
- MCI/KMCI, Kansas City International Airport: Not everything is up to date in this airport.
- MCO/KMCO, Orlando International Airport: I’ve flown here to see rockets fly.
- MDW/KMDW, Chicago Midway International Airport: the other Chicago airport.
- MEM/KMEM, Memphis International Airport: a long-ago connection.
- MEX/MMMX, Mexico City International Airport: my first non-coastal airport used in Mexico.
- MHT/KMHT, Manchester–Boston Regional Airport: An early-morning departure after a friend’s wedding was not much fun.
- MIA/KMIA, Miami International Airport: My first in-person panel moderation since the start of the pandemic finally got me to this airport.
- MSO/KMSO, Missoula Montana Airport: After getting off the plane here, I knew I would not have Vasili Borodin’s dying regret in the film version of The Hunt For Red October, “I would like to have seen Montana.”
- MSP/KMSP, Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport: My 2001 connection here was so short that my skis didn’t make it on the plane home with me.
- MSY/KMSY, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport: great city, bad transfers to and from its airport.
- MUC/EDDM, Munich Airport: my second-most-frequent connection in Germany.
- MXP/LIMC, Milan Malpensa Airport: The last stop on our honeymoon.
- NRT/RJAA, Narita International Airport: I don’t think any other airport on this list sits as far from its city’s downtown as Narita is from Tokyo.
- OAK/KOAK, Oakland International Airport: I last flew here when you still had to take a bus to BART.
- ODS/UKOO, Odesa International Airport: It was still spelled Odessa when I visited in 1989.
- OGG/PHOG, Kahului Airport: A friend’s wedding in Maui was for years my only visit to Hawaii.
- ORD/KORD, O’Hare International Airport: Two great things about ORD: the neon sculpture between T1’s two halves, and Tortas Frontera.
- ORY/LFPO, Paris Orly Airport: When my family lived outside of Paris during my first two years of college, flying Continental meant I arrived at Orly instead of de Gaulle.
- PDX/KPDX, Portland International Airport: I, too, miss the old carpet.
- PEK/ZBAA, Beijing Capital International Airport: Transit connections were not that easy or discoverable in 2007.
- PHL/KPHL, Philadelphia International Airport: Amtrak should connect to PHL.
- PHX/KPHX, Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport: Yet another airport I’ve only used as a connection.
- PIT/KPIT, Pittsburgh International Airport: I haven’t been here since the last millennium.
- PSP/KPSP, Palm Springs International Airport: palm trees and runways.
- PTY/MPTO, Tocumen International Airport: I connected through Copa Airlines’ Panama City hub on my way to Web Summit Rio in 2023.
- PUJ/MDPC, Punta Cana International Airport: Wearing a Nats cap in the Dominican Republic will get you some “Juan Soto!” shout-outs.
- PVD/KPVD, T.F. Green International Airport: Providence has a very efficient airport.
- PVG/ZSPD, Shanghai Pudong International Airport: the fastest transit link I’ve ever used.
- PVR/MMPR, Licenciado Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport: a destination wedding in Puerto Vallarta.
- RDU/KRDU, Raleigh-Durham International Airport: Part of a mileage run in 2023, unless I flew in or out of there years earlier.
- RIX/EVRA, Riga International Airport: The TechChill conference brought me to Latvia in 2022.
- RNO/KRNO, Reno–Tahoe International Airport: My only flight here happened after I missed a flight out of IAD and had to rebook.
- RSW/KRSW, Southwest Florida International Airport: I forgot to include Fort Myers’ airport when I first posted this list.
- SAN/KSAN, San Diego International Airport: Enjoy the views of downtown on the way in.
- SAT/KSAT, San Antonio International Airport: the smallest United Club I’ve visited.
- SDU/SBRJ, Santos Dumont Airport: Rio’s rough equivalent of National Airport.
- SEA/KSEA, Seattle–Tacoma International Airport: Take the train to downtown and think of Steve Dunne from Singles.
- SFO/KSFO, San Francisco International Airport: my most frequent Left Coast airport.
- SJC/KSJC, San Jose International Airport: I haven’t been back to Silicon Valley’s self-styled home airport in a few years.
- SJD/MMSD, Los Cabos International Airport: another destination wedding in Mexico.
- SJU/TJSJ, Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport: Storms back home extended my senior-year spring-break trip to Puerto Rico by a day and got me rebooked into a first-class seat on American back to D.C.
- SLC/KSLC, Salt Lake City International Airport: a great ski trip in my pre-parenthood days.
- SMF/KSMF, Sacramento International Airport: I flew here in 1992 to drive across the country with my girlfriend at the time in a 1977 Toyota Corolla, which seemed like a super-logical thing to do at the time.
- SNA/KSNA, John Wayne Airport: The takeoff from this short 5,700-foot runway felt sportier than average.
- SPU/LDSP, Split Airport: My introduction to Croatia in 2023, courtesy of Infobip’s Shift 2023 conferencee hosting me as an emcee.
- STL/KSTL, St. Louis Lambert International Airport: my first two business trips had me going to E3 in L.A. via TWA from DCA, putting that airline’s hub in between.
- STS/KSTS, Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County Airport: The tiny waiting room is decorated with large prints of Peanuts strips featuring Snoopy and the Red Baron, which is awesome. Santa Rosa’s airport is also the only one I’ve departed via hot-air balloon.
- SVO/UUEE, Sheremetyevo International Airport: My introduction to the joys of communism came at the start of that 1989 trip, in the form of an approximately two-hour wait after landing in Moscow for Aeroflot to return our group’s luggage.
- SVQ/LEZL, Seville Airport: Having ATC delay a departure to FRA last spring by most of an hour required me to make a 10-minute connection in FRA.
- SZX/ZGSZ, Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport: This, too, looks a lot different than it did during my 1998 trip to China.
- TLL/EETN, Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport: Estonia’s primary airport is refreshingly close to the center of Tallinn.
- TLV/LLBG, Ben Gurion Airport: They don’t screw around with security at Tel Aviv.
- TPA/KTPA, Tampa International Airport: I landed here in 2011 to see my first space shuttle launch because Continental couldn’t get me to Orlando; fortunately, I-4 was devoid of traffic after 11 p.m.
- TUS/KTUS, Tucson International Airport: Having an Air National Guard base hosted at this airport allows your planespotting to include F-16s.
- TXL/EDDT, Berlin Tegel Airport: If Berlin Brandenburg Airport really and finally opens this fall (update: it did), TXL will be the next airport on this list to be retired.
- VIE/LOWW, Vienna International Airport: a lovely vacation in 2006.
- VNO/EYVI, Vilnius International Airport: I got my introduction to the last of the Baltic states’ three major airports about two and a half years after landing in Tallinn.
- YQX/CYQX, Gander International Airport: On our way to the USSR in 1989, our Aeroflot Il-62 made a scheduled refueling stop at this Newfoundland airport.
- YTZ/CYTZ, Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport: one of only two airports that I’ve exited by walking, the other being National.
- YUL/CYUL, Montréal–Trudeau International Airport: Montréal is high on my list of cities I’d like to see again.
- YVR/CYVR, Vancouver International Airport: I flew here to spend a few days skiiing at Whistler and still need to spend some time in the city itself.
- YYZ/CYYZ, Toronto Pearson International Airport: famous forever thanks to Rush.
- ZAG/LDZA, Zagreb Franjo Tuđman Airport: One of the smallest national-capital airports on this list.
- ZRH/LSZH, Zurich Airport: The 22-minute connection I pulled off here in 2013 remains my second-shortest international layover.
This almost certainly isn’t complete, as before 1997 I’m limited to incomplete paper records and my own memory. But I don’t think anybody can question my lifelong effort to prop up commercial aviation.
Updated 9/12/2020 to add CMH; 10/7/2020 to add DAL and HOU; 8/20/2021 to add TLL; 8/27/2021 to add RSW; 9/16/2021 to add HGR; 10/3/2021 to add MIA;12/6/2021 to add KOA; 5/2/2022 to add RIX; 5/26/2022 to add BOI; 7/2/2022 to add HEL; 8/1/2022 to add PUJ; 9/19/2022 to add BER, KEF and CPH; 5/8/2023 to add PTY, GIG and GRU; 7/20/2023 to add LGW; 9/23/2023 to add IST, SPU and ZAG; 12/5/2023 to add RDU; 2/11/2024 to add VNO; 7/2/2024 to add SNA; 8/16/2024 to add BUR; 10/16/2024 to add BNA; 3/16/2025 to add DOH; 5/2/2025 to add SDU; 6/20/2025 to add MEX; 10/16/2025 to add ATW and update the name of MSO; 5/22/2026 to add CXH.
#airportCode #airports #FlightQuest #IATACode #ICAOCode #landings #takeoffs -
Airports I’ve used
Last Friday set an ignominious personal milestone: I broke a record for consecutive days spent away from airplanes that went back to to 2001.
Back then, the post-9/11 shutdown of commercial aviation and my own relaxed travel schedule ensured I wouldn’t board a plane between early August, when I landed at National Airport after a summer vacation in California, and early January, when I took off DCA for my first Macworld Expo. This time, the novel-coronavirus pandemic has grounded me, and it’s unclear when I’ll once again feel jet engines shove me back in my seat and watch the ground fall away from the wing.
So I might as well document the airports I used in the Before Times, having already done the research for my friend Craig Fifer’s Flight Quest project to track who among his friends had taken off from or landed at more airports. As an inveterate list-maker and avgeek, how could I not have taken part in that competition?
So here you go: the 94 95 97 98 99 100 101 102103 104 105 106 109 112 113 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 airports I’ve used listed by IATA and ICAO code, plus my comments about each.
- AER/URSS, Sochi International Airport: A student trip to the Soviet Union after my high-school graduation (thanks, Mom and Dad) led me to this airport on the Black Sea.
- AMS/EHAM, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol: A friend’s bachelor party provided an excellent excuse to fly to the Netherlands.
- ATL/KATL, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport: I’ve spent shockingly little time here, aside from two trips to cover the E3 video-game conference in the ’90s.
- ATW/KATW, Appleton International Airport: This has to be the smallest U.S. airport on this list with “International” in its name–despite not having any regularly scheduled international passenger service.
- AUS/KAUS, Austin–Bergstrom International Airport: Thanks, SXSW.
- BCN/LEBL, Josep Tarradellas Barcelona–El Prat Airport: MWC put this airport on my map.
- BDA/TXKF, L.F. Wade International Airport: spring break in Bermuda with my family in high school.
- BER/EDDB, Berlin Brandenburg Airport: Five years after seeing this unopened airport as a infrastructure tourist, I experienced it as a passenger.
- BNA/KBNA, Nashville International Airport: The diversity of local dining options represented here reminded me of AUS.
- BOI/KBOI, Boise Airport: Shortest airport name on this list.
- BOS/KBOS, Logan International Airport: a family destination since the late ’90s.
- BRU/EBBR, Brussels Airport: I hear Brussels is a great city, so at some point I should not just connect through its airport.
- BUR/KBUR, Hollywood Burbank Airport: Among my easier airport car-rental experiences.
- BWI/KBWI, Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport: the greater Washington area’s third-place airport.
- CDG/LFPG, Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport: T1 is a master class in how not to design a terminal.
- CGS/KCGS, College Park Airport: I went to an airshow at the oldest continuously-operated airport in the late ’90s and paid $20 or so for a ride in a biplane.
- CLE/KCLE, Cleveland Hopkins International Airport: I’m told that my first flight was a hop from Newark to Cleveland to see my grandparents.
- CLT/KCLT, Charlotte Douglas International Airport: Yes, I’ve flown US Airways and American Airlines.
- CMH/KCMH, John Glenn Columbus International Airport: Part of a miniature mileage run I did on Sept. 11, 2020 to break an eight-month streak of being grounded after the novel-coronavirus pandemic shut down all my business travel.
- CPH/EKCH, Copenhagen Airport: The airport is easily reachable by train from both Denmark and Sweden.
- CRL/EBCI, Brussels South Charleroi Airport: Potential Ryanair passengers should be advised that Charleroi isn’t Brussels.
- CTU/ZUUU, Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport: The 1998 trip to Tibet that took me through this airport (I’m sure it’s much fancier now) will require its own post at some point.
- CUN/MMUN, Cancún International Airport: a pre-Christmas vacation a couple of years ago.
- CXH/CYHC, Vancouver Harbour Flight Centre: I couldn’t resist ducking away from Web Summit Vancouver to get in a floatplane tour of the city and its beautiful surroundings.
- DAL/KDAL, Dallas Love Field: Of course, Southwest Airlines was involved.
- DCA/KDCA, Washington National Airport: I don’t call the airport that I’ve probably used more than any other “Reagan Airport” because Republicans in Congress insisted on shoving that name on us while the 41st president was still alive. Never name things after living politicians.
- DEN/KDEN, Stapleton International Airport: I’m so old that I’ve flown in and out of and driven under Denver’s former airport.
- DEN/KDEN, Denver International Airport: Rail transit from here is surprisingly good.
- DFW/KDFW, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport: I think I’ve only flown here once; my second time would have been this March, but the pandemic intervened.
- DOH/OTHH, Hamad International Airport: Doha, Qatar, is the farthest east I’ve flown from home.
- DTW/KDTW, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport: I’ve only over connected through Detroit and have somehow never visited the city itself.
- DUB/EIDW, Dublin Airport: I was overdue to return until Dublin Tech Summit brought me back in 2022.
- EWR/KEWR, Newark Liberty International Airport: my home airport growing up, as well as the only one where I’ve experienced a departure from the jumpseat of an airliner.
- FCO/LIRF, Rome–Fiumicino International Airport: first stop on my honeymoon.
- FLL/KFLL, Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport: a nice start to a few days in the Florida Keys with friends.
- FRA/EDDF, Frankfurt am Main Airport: Germany’s biggest Star Alliance transfer point.
- FUK/RJFF, Fukuoka Airport: an unplanned connection on my way to Tokyo in 2019, also a source of childish hilarity for its IATA code.
- GIG/SBGL, Rio de Janeiro/Galeão International Airport: My first airport used out of the Northern Hemisphere.
- GRU/SBGR, São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport: I usually don’t like to be introduced to a new airport with less than two hours to connect through it, but my domestic-to-international connection at GRU was about as easy as they get.
- GVA/LSGG, Geneva Airport: Switzerland’s lesser airport.
- HEL/EFHK, Helsinki-Vantaa Airport: Also one of the more memorable IATA codes out there.
- HGR/KHGR, Hagerstown Regional Airport: Where I flew in a 76-year-old B-25 Mitchell.
- HKG/VHHH, Hong Kong International Airport: I’m sorry I never got to fly into Kai Tak.
- HND/RJTT, Tokyo International Airport: My belated introduction to Haneda came in 2019.
- HOU/KHOU, William P. Hobby Airport: This requires a whole lot less walking than its big brother on the other side of Houston.
- IAD/KIAD, Washington Dulles International Airport: my other home airport now.
- IAH/KIAH, George Bush Intercontinental Airport: so many connections here.
- IST/LTFM, Istanbul Airport: This has to be the largest airport terminal I’ve ever set foot in. If you have access to the Turkish Airlines lounge by the D concourse, show up hungry!
- JFK/KJFK, John F. Kennedy International Airport: I have a Pan Am boarding pass from here but have otherwise spent shockingly little time at JFK.
- KEF/BIKF, Keflavik International Airport: Decades after Tom Clancy’s “Red Storm Rising” introduced this airport to me as the site of a Soviet invasion, I had a much more tranquil welcome connecting through KEF in 2022.
- KOA/PHKO, Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keāhole: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Tech Summit took me here in 2021.
- -/KHES, Healdsburg Municipal Airport: A flight in a friend’s plane took me to this tiny Sonoma County airstrip.
- LAS/KLAS, McCarran International Airport: CES has given me an obnoxious level of familiarity with Las Vegas’ airport.
- LAX/KLAX, Los Angeles International Airport: The In-n-Out Burger franchise just northeast of the runways is my favorite fast-food spot in the world.
- LED/ULLI, Pulkovo Airport: I flew here in 1989, when St. Petersburg was still Leningrad.
- LGA/KLGA, LaGuardia Airport: It’s made Penn Station look good.
- LGW/LGKK, London Gatwick: London’s other airport, substantially more expensive to reach via rail than Heathrow.
- LHR/EGLL, Heathrow Airport: My opinion of it went way up after T2 opened.
- LIS/LPPT, Humberto Delgado Airport: Obrigado, Web Summit.
- LKE/-, Kenmore Air Harbor Seaplane Base: My first flight that started and ended on water happened here, at Seattle’s Lake Union.
- LXA/ZULS, Lhasa Gonggar Airport: At 11,710 feet above sea level, Tibet’s primary airport is the highest one I’ve used.
- MAD/LEMD, Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport: I was here as a kid.
- MCI/KMCI, Kansas City International Airport: Not everything is up to date in this airport.
- MCO/KMCO, Orlando International Airport: I’ve flown here to see rockets fly.
- MDW/KMDW, Chicago Midway International Airport: the other Chicago airport.
- MEM/KMEM, Memphis International Airport: a long-ago connection.
- MEX/MMMX, Mexico City International Airport: my first non-coastal airport used in Mexico.
- MHT/KMHT, Manchester–Boston Regional Airport: An early-morning departure after a friend’s wedding was not much fun.
- MIA/KMIA, Miami International Airport: My first in-person panel moderation since the start of the pandemic finally got me to this airport.
- MSO/KMSO, Missoula Montana Airport: After getting off the plane here, I knew I would not have Vasili Borodin’s dying regret in the film version of The Hunt For Red October, “I would like to have seen Montana.”
- MSP/KMSP, Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport: My 2001 connection here was so short that my skis didn’t make it on the plane home with me.
- MSY/KMSY, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport: great city, bad transfers to and from its airport.
- MUC/EDDM, Munich Airport: my second-most-frequent connection in Germany.
- MXP/LIMC, Milan Malpensa Airport: The last stop on our honeymoon.
- NRT/RJAA, Narita International Airport: I don’t think any other airport on this list sits as far from its city’s downtown as Narita is from Tokyo.
- OAK/KOAK, Oakland International Airport: I last flew here when you still had to take a bus to BART.
- ODS/UKOO, Odesa International Airport: It was still spelled Odessa when I visited in 1989.
- OGG/PHOG, Kahului Airport: A friend’s wedding in Maui was for years my only visit to Hawaii.
- ORD/KORD, O’Hare International Airport: Two great things about ORD: the neon sculpture between T1’s two halves, and Tortas Frontera.
- ORY/LFPO, Paris Orly Airport: When my family lived outside of Paris during my first two years of college, flying Continental meant I arrived at Orly instead of de Gaulle.
- PDX/KPDX, Portland International Airport: I, too, miss the old carpet.
- PEK/ZBAA, Beijing Capital International Airport: Transit connections were not that easy or discoverable in 2007.
- PHL/KPHL, Philadelphia International Airport: Amtrak should connect to PHL.
- PHX/KPHX, Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport: Yet another airport I’ve only used as a connection.
- PIT/KPIT, Pittsburgh International Airport: I haven’t been here since the last millennium.
- PSP/KPSP, Palm Springs International Airport: palm trees and runways.
- PTY/MPTO, Tocumen International Airport: I connected through Copa Airlines’ Panama City hub on my way to Web Summit Rio in 2023.
- PUJ/MDPC, Punta Cana International Airport: Wearing a Nats cap in the Dominican Republic will get you some “Juan Soto!” shout-outs.
- PVD/KPVD, T.F. Green International Airport: Providence has a very efficient airport.
- PVG/ZSPD, Shanghai Pudong International Airport: the fastest transit link I’ve ever used.
- PVR/MMPR, Licenciado Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport: a destination wedding in Puerto Vallarta.
- RDU/KRDU, Raleigh-Durham International Airport: Part of a mileage run in 2023, unless I flew in or out of there years earlier.
- RIX/EVRA, Riga International Airport: The TechChill conference brought me to Latvia in 2022.
- RNO/KRNO, Reno–Tahoe International Airport: My only flight here happened after I missed a flight out of IAD and had to rebook.
- RSW/KRSW, Southwest Florida International Airport: I forgot to include Fort Myers’ airport when I first posted this list.
- SAN/KSAN, San Diego International Airport: Enjoy the views of downtown on the way in.
- SAT/KSAT, San Antonio International Airport: the smallest United Club I’ve visited.
- SDU/SBRJ, Santos Dumont Airport: Rio’s rough equivalent of National Airport.
- SEA/KSEA, Seattle–Tacoma International Airport: Take the train to downtown and think of Steve Dunne from Singles.
- SFO/KSFO, San Francisco International Airport: my most frequent Left Coast airport.
- SJC/KSJC, San Jose International Airport: I haven’t been back to Silicon Valley’s self-styled home airport in a few years.
- SJD/MMSD, Los Cabos International Airport: another destination wedding in Mexico.
- SJU/TJSJ, Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport: Storms back home extended my senior-year spring-break trip to Puerto Rico by a day and got me rebooked into a first-class seat on American back to D.C.
- SLC/KSLC, Salt Lake City International Airport: a great ski trip in my pre-parenthood days.
- SMF/KSMF, Sacramento International Airport: I flew here in 1992 to drive across the country with my girlfriend at the time in a 1977 Toyota Corolla, which seemed like a super-logical thing to do at the time.
- SNA/KSNA, John Wayne Airport: The takeoff from this short 5,700-foot runway felt sportier than average.
- SPU/LDSP, Split Airport: My introduction to Croatia in 2023, courtesy of Infobip’s Shift 2023 conferencee hosting me as an emcee.
- STL/KSTL, St. Louis Lambert International Airport: my first two business trips had me going to E3 in L.A. via TWA from DCA, putting that airline’s hub in between.
- STS/KSTS, Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County Airport: The tiny waiting room is decorated with large prints of Peanuts strips featuring Snoopy and the Red Baron, which is awesome. Santa Rosa’s airport is also the only one I’ve departed via hot-air balloon.
- SVO/UUEE, Sheremetyevo International Airport: My introduction to the joys of communism came at the start of that 1989 trip, in the form of an approximately two-hour wait after landing in Moscow for Aeroflot to return our group’s luggage.
- SVQ/LEZL, Seville Airport: Having ATC delay a departure to FRA last spring by most of an hour required me to make a 10-minute connection in FRA.
- SZX/ZGSZ, Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport: This, too, looks a lot different than it did during my 1998 trip to China.
- TLL/EETN, Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport: Estonia’s primary airport is refreshingly close to the center of Tallinn.
- TLV/LLBG, Ben Gurion Airport: They don’t screw around with security at Tel Aviv.
- TPA/KTPA, Tampa International Airport: I landed here in 2011 to see my first space shuttle launch because Continental couldn’t get me to Orlando; fortunately, I-4 was devoid of traffic after 11 p.m.
- TUS/KTUS, Tucson International Airport: Having an Air National Guard base hosted at this airport allows your planespotting to include F-16s.
- TXL/EDDT, Berlin Tegel Airport: If Berlin Brandenburg Airport really and finally opens this fall (update: it did), TXL will be the next airport on this list to be retired.
- VIE/LOWW, Vienna International Airport: a lovely vacation in 2006.
- VNO/EYVI, Vilnius International Airport: I got my introduction to the last of the Baltic states’ three major airports about two and a half years after landing in Tallinn.
- YQX/CYQX, Gander International Airport: On our way to the USSR in 1989, our Aeroflot Il-62 made a scheduled refueling stop at this Newfoundland airport.
- YTZ/CYTZ, Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport: one of only two airports that I’ve exited by walking, the other being National.
- YUL/CYUL, Montréal–Trudeau International Airport: Montréal is high on my list of cities I’d like to see again.
- YVR/CYVR, Vancouver International Airport: I flew here to spend a few days skiiing at Whistler and still need to spend some time in the city itself.
- YYZ/CYYZ, Toronto Pearson International Airport: famous forever thanks to Rush.
- ZAG/LDZA, Zagreb Franjo Tuđman Airport: One of the smallest national-capital airports on this list.
- ZRH/LSZH, Zurich Airport: The 22-minute connection I pulled off here in 2013 remains my second-shortest international layover.
This almost certainly isn’t complete, as before 1997 I’m limited to incomplete paper records and my own memory. But I don’t think anybody can question my lifelong effort to prop up commercial aviation.
Updated 9/12/2020 to add CMH; 10/7/2020 to add DAL and HOU; 8/20/2021 to add TLL; 8/27/2021 to add RSW; 9/16/2021 to add HGR; 10/3/2021 to add MIA;12/6/2021 to add KOA; 5/2/2022 to add RIX; 5/26/2022 to add BOI; 7/2/2022 to add HEL; 8/1/2022 to add PUJ; 9/19/2022 to add BER, KEF and CPH; 5/8/2023 to add PTY, GIG and GRU; 7/20/2023 to add LGW; 9/23/2023 to add IST, SPU and ZAG; 12/5/2023 to add RDU; 2/11/2024 to add VNO; 7/2/2024 to add SNA; 8/16/2024 to add BUR; 10/16/2024 to add BNA; 3/16/2025 to add DOH; 5/2/2025 to add SDU; 6/20/2025 to add MEX; 10/16/2025 to add ATW and update the name of MSO; 5/22/2026 to add CXH.
#airportCode #airports #FlightQuest #IATACode #ICAOCode #landings #takeoffs -
Would of, could of, might of, must of
When we say would have, could have, should have, must have, might have, may have and ought to have, we often put some stress on the modal auxiliary and none on the have. We may show this in writing by abbreviating to could’ve, must’ve, etc. (Would can contract further by merging with the subject: We would have → We’d’ve.)
Unstressed ’ve is phonetically identical (/əv/) to unstressed of: hence the widespread misspellings would of, could of, should of, must of, might of, may of, and ought to of. Negative forms also appear: shouldn’t of, mightn’t of, etc. This explanation – that misanalysis of the notorious schwa lies behind the error – has general support among linguists.
The mistake dates to at least 1837, according to the OED, so it has probably been infuriating pedants for almost 200 years. Common words spelt incorrectly provoke particular ire, sometimes accompanied by aspersions cast on the writer’s intelligence, fitness for society, degree of evolution, and so on. But there’s no need for any of that.
Usage authorities unanimously call it a mistake, though some allow for its deliberate use (more on that below). Many associate it specifically with children and other less educated writers. For example, Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage finds it a practice of ‘semiliterate writers’, and accepts no excuses: ‘the word is have, or a contraction ending in ’ve, and it should be written so.’
Merriam-Webster’s Pocket Guide to English Usage says ‘children and those who have not completed grammar school may have an excuse for making this mistake, but most others do not.’ What’s meant by that most is what we’ll now consider: that the misspellings don’t always indicate carelessness or relative illiteracy.
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English finds room for the anomalous forms as a stylistic device:
substituting of for ’ve in writing can be an example of eye dialect, which deliberately misspells words to suggest Nonstandard or dialectal speech. . . . The important thing is to correct it when it isn’t intentional.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage elaborates on this, saying writers use the spelling ‘to create an unlettered persona’. It cites several examples, including a ‘he’d of got me’ from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who ‘used the spelling to represent the speech of a woman who was not overeducated’, as MWDEU politely puts it.
Here is must of in an intertitle in the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928):
And in Josef von Sternberg’s 1928 The Docks of New York:
Over the last number of years, I’ve seen the non-standard of-form in many books by authors who presumably knew what they were doing:
‘I could of sworn I’d run into you some place before.’ (Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding)
‘Oh Miz, oh Miz,’ he moaned, rubbing his leg. ‘You shouldn’t of done that, you shouldn’t, you reely shouldn’t.’ (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
‘All bloody and mucked up, with figuring away aboard the Vénus, when two minutes would of changed it.’ (Patrick O’Brian, The Mauritius Command)
‘I’d of liked to be stabbed – and have lashings of red paint.’ (Agatha Christie, Dead Man’s Folly)
‘Never should of married‘ (Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood)
‘See, they must of had them already saddled.’ (Elmore Leonard, The Law at Randado)
‘If I hadn’t of got my tubes tied, it could of been me, say I was ten years younger.’ (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale)
‘You could of just told him.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘You could of said no and I could of not believed you.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘She must of grabbed some pills.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘You ought to of asked for me in the first place.’ (Raymond Chandler, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, in Trouble Is My Business)
‘Maybe I had ought to of gone to the servant’s entrance.’ (Raymond Chandler, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, in Trouble Is My Business)
‘Youve never seen anything so mad, the lassie couldnt of known what kind of nut house she was in.’ (Alan Warner, Morvern Callar)
‘I don’t suppose he would remember you,’ the woman said thoughtfully. ‘Seems like he would of mentioned you sometimes if he did.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Lie’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘He shouldn’t of done it, that’s all’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘Root of Evil’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘My wife,’ he said, putting his elbows on the counter and still watching Judith, ‘my wife, you ought to of heard her when she thought I was going.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘Homecoming’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘If he’d of been a friend of mine you would have said plenty, believe me,” Mrs. Royster said darkly. (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘She sure must of been glad to see him, the way he looked,’ the old man said. (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘I never saw him,’ the clerk in the drugstore said. ‘I know because I would of noticed the flowers.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘If you had of been dead, you’d of had a funeral. I only just thought a that now. I’d of went along.’ (Claire Kilroy, The Devil I Know)
Mabey I shoudnt of let them oparate on my branes like she said if its agenst god. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
Now that makes me feel bad because I would never of hurt the baby. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
‘I should of had my head examined.’ (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
‘She should of got it lit before we arrived.’ (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
‘Maybe you should of shot us when we was far away.’ (Chris Cleave, The Other Hand)
‘If he’d been an animal, he’d of been the runt of the litter and we’d of put him down.’ (Gillian Flynn, Dark Places)
‘I could of used the money,’ Donna said. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’ […] ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I could of used the money.’ (Raymond Carver, ‘Vitamins’, in Cathedral)
‘And here I’d of sworn…’ He took another try at the coffee cup, registered surprise to find it empty. (James Sallis, Drive)
‘Figured they must of took you when they took Ellis.’ (James Sallis, Bluebottle)
Must of been May 14 as May 12 is my birthday and it was by way of a late present. (Minette Walters, The Ice House)
‘You could of got it from the paper.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
‘You should of shown me this last time.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
‘She went guilty so she must of done it.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
Yorkin cringed. ‘Me. Pierce told me to clip him. I shouldn’t of done it by the drop.’ (James Ellroy, L. A. Confidential)
‘That sure could of been true,’ says the clerk at the Salon City store (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild)
‘I must of fell asleep, eh?’
‘I guess you must have,’ said Isserley. (Michel Faber, Under the Skin)Then one day, it must of rained, and man discovered a new place: indoors. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
And where that monkey might of come from. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
I would of put loads more dinosaurs in. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
‘Donnie, we’d of finished this Betamax deal in ten days. And we’d have had winter money, all three of us.’ (Joseph D. Pistone with Richard Woodley, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia)
‘And who else could of built it?’ Mr Madden shouted. (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
Sheila, the woodshed, should of paddled you sooner. (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
‘You went had in there. Stark mad. You’d have raped her if . . .’
‘I’d of what?‘ (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)‘I never should of come here.’ (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
‘Whether Miriam would of been any different, I don’t know, but I’d say she’d of been worse.’ (Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train)
‘I’d of thought Mrs Herman was the last person in the world to—’ (Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse)
…the marshal hadn’t taken any of the Collinsons’ property though of course he might of. (Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse)
‘I wouldn’t of flagged that taxi if the For Hire flag hadn’t been up.’ (Dashiell Hammet, ‘Fly Paper’, in The Big Knockover and other stories)
”F he’d of been a man I’d of seen him in hell ‘fore I’d of gave it to him.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘Corkscrew’, in The Big Knockover and other stories)
‘They may of gone,’ he said slowly. (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Golden Horseshoe’, in The Continental Op)
‘But he must of gone through the house and out front . . .’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Girls with the Silver Eyes’, in The ContinentalOp)
‘Anybody could of got in them with a ladder.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Farewell Murder’, in The Continental Op)
‘Well, we would of if she hadn’t put the two X’s to me the same as she done to you’ . . . ‘but if my rod hadn’t of got snagged in my flogger you wouldn’t have seen nothing else.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Whosis Kid’, in The Continental Op)
‘If I’d known you five years ago I’d of given it to you.’ (Sara Paretsky, ‘The Maltese Cat’, in Windy City Blues)
‘Mate, I’ve probably said enough already. More than I should of (taps nose) . . . Professional conduct an’ all that.’ (Nicola Barker, Darkmans)
‘Yes, and if the bastard hadn’t of moved I’d have got him, too.’ (Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards)
‘I’m Billy Baker. Your Daddy might of talked about me, called me Space?’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher) (pictured and quoted below: Preacher no. 2: Proud Americans)
”Cause I hope I ain’t outta line here, but I think he’d of been cool about you hearin’ it…’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
‘He was stupid an’ clumsy an’ kind of a weakling, an’ he wouldn’t of lasted a fuckin’ day over there if it hadn’t been for one thing’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
‘See, we’d of done Murphy there an’ then, we’d of had to do Van Patten as well — an’ I knew your Daddy didn’t really wanna do that.’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. (Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower)
‘She must of really gotten knocked out.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape)
‘He’s not around now, or you’d of met him.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape)
‘They could of just been losing us,’ said Coney. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Your parents must of been hippies,’ he’d tell me. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘He might of been a little impatient for his date with Frank.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘If it weren’t for Gilbert I would of told him to stick it—’ (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Oh, I’d of straightened it out,’ Tony said. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Each one of them, he says it might of been you, it might of been two other guys.’ (Robert Anton Wilson, The Universe Next Door)
‘You must of been back on the reservation eating peyote again.’ (Robert Anton Wilson, The Universe Next Door)
‘And it wouldn’t of mattered to me whether you did or did not like women.’ (George Pelecanos, Drama City)
‘I wouldn’t of thought of such a thing in a million years.’ (George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown)
‘If you hadn’t of stepped in the middle of everything—’ (George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown)
It would of done no good gettin’ somebody else te scratch it for me because that was a sin as well. (Frances Molloy, No Mate for the Magpie)
‘Been calling all night. Four, five calls, must of been.’ (Lawrence Block, A Ticket to the Boneyard)
‘Six-thirty or so, you must of just got on your way to Maspeth, guy goes out back with a load of kitchen garbage.’ (Lawrence Block, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse)
‘Another minute and I would of made it, you rats.’ (Lawrence Block, No Score)
‘Now if you would of done this we wouldn’t have any trouble.’ (Lawrence Block, No Score)
‘Need a social security card,’ he said. ‘You must of had one, I guess.’ (Lawrence Block, Chip Harrison Scores Again)
‘Guess they must of been chafing you some on that bus ride.’ (Lawrence Block, Chip Harrison Scores Again)
‘You might not of noticed yesterday but he’s only got one hand.’ (Ron Rash, The Cove)
‘Would he of died?’ (Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic)
‘Pete should of told me,’ he said. (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘Okay,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Could be worse. She could of been wearing her habit, right?’ (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘Wound up, it took him forty-eight years to serve a ten-year sentence that he should of got out in three.’ (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘She has on a pair of bikinis I couldn’t of got into when I was ten years old.’ (Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise)
‘We could’ve settled, the city pays out a few bucks, it wouldn’t of cost you a dime.’ (Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise)
‘You know what I sor?’ said the child patiently. ‘Well, the train must of stopped, see, and some little men with bundles on their backs got on.’ (Mavis Gallant, ‘Up North’, in The Omnibus of 20th Century Ghost Stories, edited by Robert Phillips)
‘You two might of settled down and had a nice baby or something.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘Maybe you should of looked around some more.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘He must of gone to the show.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘I shouldn’t of toog you id,’ Angelo breathed. ‘I got nerbous.’
‘It was all my fault,’ Mrs Reilly said, ‘for trying to protect that Ignatius. I should of let you lock him away, Angelo.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)‘I don’t think I’d of wanted to go down there even for the Grape-Nuts. But maybe if we’d’ve gone real fast . . .’ (Harlan Ellison, ‘Sensible City’, in The Dead that Walk, edited by Stephen Jones)
‘You could of killed someone!’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘There’s a lot of places round here you could of bin.’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘If she’d stuck around, I could of asked her advice. I bet she could of come up with somewhere to put you that no one would think of lookin’, not if you paid them ready money.’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘If you’d gotten into a fight with that swordarm of yours, there’d of been bodies all over’ (Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier, translated by Dana Lewis)
‘It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known.’ (Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find)’The other vics probably would have lived if Lewin hadn’t of made that play.’ (George Pelecanos, Shame the Devil)
‘I should of thought of that my own self.’ (George Pelecanos, Shame the Devil)
‘If you’d gone in right away, you would of got him, none of this would of happened. . . . I’d of got off! You think I’d of stood around that roadblock for seven hours?’ (Richard Stark, Slayground)
‘That guy talks pretty big, Cory. We should of called his bluff right there.’ (Richard Stark, Ask the Parrot)
‘Everything screws up, it just gets worse and worse, we should never of got into this, we’re fuckups, that’s all, we’re just fuckups.’ (Richard Stark, Comeback)
‘Might of slipped in and out, nobody the wiser, except we were already on the scene, account of Parmitt being gone.’ (Richard Stark, Flashfire)
‘Couldn’t you of – oh, he was ignorant in his speech – couldn’t you of prevented it?’ (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
‘I should of thought to bring a sun lounger, from the garden centre,’ Mart said. (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
‘He could of been,’ her mother said vaguely. (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
When she provoked him and he was in a temper with her, he would say, count your blessings, girl, you fink I’m bad but you could of had MacArthur. You could have had Bob Fox, or Aitkenside, or Pikey Pete. You could have had my mate Keef Capstick. You could of had Nick, and then where’d you be? (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
He shouldn’t of been near enough . . . (Donal Ryan, ‘Aisling’, in A Slanting of the Sun)
Stupid idea anyway I dont think he ever wud of really done it. (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting – this example is from a teenager’s text message)
But if she hadn’t of drank she would never have seen him at all and better that she was there she thought where she could at least try to keep some grip on him before he lost the run of himself completely (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
Lar thought about it They must of gone out on a job he said (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I wonder what kind of life you might have had, if you hadn’t of been dragged back here. (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I paid a man to write it he says He must of never sent it at all (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I wish someone had of told me you croak into his shoulder (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
Lars frowns Choosing his words He didn’t think you should of married Dickie he says (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
U SHUD OF TOLD ME I CUD OF SHOWD U AROUD!!!! (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting, text message)
‘Hell, if I knew I was sitting on a gold mine, I’d of sold ’em a long time ago.’ (Jim Dodge, Not Fade Away)
‘And he couldn’t of loved me because he took away my kid, he’s off someplace where I can’t never see him.’ (James Baldwin, Another Country)
‘But I would of died for my kid, I wouldn’t never of let anything happen to him.’ (James Baldwin, Another Country)
‘I couldn’t of done nothing else,’ he cried, ‘what else could I of done? Where could I of gone with Esther, and me a preacher, too? And what could I of done with you?’ (James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain)
‘Must of had a heart attack or something!?’ (Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin, Tank Girl One):
A curious example in Jim Nesbit’s novel Lethal Injection, where a character says “would’ve of”. My first thought was that it was a copy-editing or proofreading fix that stopped halfway: changing “would of” to “would’ve” and neglecting to delete the “of”. But a search online shows occasional analogous examples in unedited writing, and adjacent discussion on Language Log, so it may well be authentically dialectal:
The example below, from alt-manga historian Ryan Holmberg’s The Translator Without Talent, is from The Marvel Times, a pretend-newspaper about comics that he created on his twelfth birthday. So its must of is probably not deliberate and also completely forgivable:
Such phrases appear often in Cormac McCarthy’s novels. Here are some from Cities of the Plain, all used in dialogue:
You’d never of knowed it though.
I wouldn’t of wrote home for nothin.
Looks like they’d of learned to stay out of it.
Johnny if he hadnt of found that girl would of found somethin else.
And there was nothin any mortal man could of done to of stopped it.
And from Blood Meridian:
No, No, he said. I mean ye was lost to of come here.
It might of been a mule.
Somebody ought to of pickled it a long time ago.
Must of been a thousand indians in there all settin around.
He appears to of spoke for hisself.
I couldnt of learned it off ten dutchmen.
Him and the governor they sat up till breakfast and it was Paris this and London that in five languages, you’d of give something to of heard them.
Don’t you know he’d of took you with him? He’d of took you, boy.
Glanton spat. Ort to of shot that one too, he said.
Well, he said. I’d of thought any damn fool could saw the barrels off a shotgun.
That old boy you bought them off of might of said they was injins but that dont make it so.
The man didnt answer.
Them ears could of come off of cannibals . . .You wouldnt of lived anyway, the man said.
And from All the Pretty Horses:
They might as well of, he said.
Otherwise I’d of been born in Alabama.
…it was a mistake not to of told you.
But if it hadnt of been for her I wouldnt of made it.
He might well could of
Might well could of is also a nice example of a double modal. The [modal]-of construction is used frequently throughout Chris Cleave’s remarkable novel Incendiary:
She was like that was Mena. Philosophical. I’d definitely of killed myself if it hadn’t of been for her.
If you could of looked in my eyes you’d of seen the same thing I shouldn’t wonder.
I wouldn’t of come near you I’d never of let you touch me you should be ashamed.
Most notably in this exchange between two people only one of whom uses it dialectally:
– He would of said something.
– Maybe he wouldn’t have.
– Wouldn’t you of?A remarkable example in A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore uses it without a preceding modal, in the speech of a young child:
‘You got brown eyes,’ she said. ‘I of brown eyes.’
Searching the Corpus of Contemporary American English for the string would of [v*], where [v*] is a verb, produces the graph below. It shows that the of-form’s predominant setting is fiction, usually ‘would of been’, and it also shows up in transcription of actual speech, as in the academic and newspaper instances. You can click through the image to view examples, sources, and further information at COCA.
The magazine data are false positives (‘we’d have a better chance of achieving a breakthrough in quantum gravity than we would of figuring out how to reliably connect with teenagers’), but you get an idea of the construction’s low frequency and particular genre distribution.
Plotting could of [v*] usages over time, using the related Corpus of Historical American English, suggests the construction may have peaked. Or is that just wishful thinking? Again, you can click on this graph for details, or open it in another tab.
Of 1000 occurrences of could/would of in the Oxford English Corpus, about 850 are from ‘representations of direct speech (mostly from the Fiction domain, but also from interviews and courtroom transcripts)’. That leaves 150 genuine written instances of could/would of, compared with 4 million examples of standard could/would have. I can’t help picturing a global battalion of editors keeping it firmly at bay.
The of-form is not frequent in edited prose, but it appears quite often in casual writing and it has been around a while. Does that count for much? MWDEU says its prolonged use has ‘not made it respectable’, and recommends avoiding it – including in transcriptions of real speech, since ’ve serves the purpose equally well. I agree, and I think if someone explicitly says of, and stresses it, that might warrant a ‘[sic]’.
Regular readers know I like to make room for literary effect and poetic licence, but I have never warmed to this mistake. Every time I see it – be its use naive or intentional – I want to fix it. Authenticity of dialect and character are all well and good, but I think the main effect of the deliberate usage in edited prose is further uncertainty and error (not to mention irritation, in some quarters). What do you think?
Updates:
Years after writing this, I’ve softened considerably on the modal-of construction. This is partly because of exposure to its use by so many great writers, and also because it’s a good example of language change – a natural, essential characteristic of a living language. See my post on reconciling descriptivism with editing for more discussion.
I’ve come across many more examples in books, and have added them to the sets above and below. @desktopenglish on Twitter drew my attention to this BBC article that quotes a footballer saying he ‘Shouldn’t of reacted the way I did’.
What sounds to me like a good audio example comes from author Zadie Smith on the Adam Buxton Podcast. This link should cue the player automatically at 15:50, but if it doesn’t, that’s the time stamp. The relevant exchange is as follows, discussing Smith’s father:
Smith: He was very uptight about time, yeah.
Buxton: It rubbed off on you.
Smith: It must of, yeah.
Medievalist Lucy Allen found the line ‘For methowte I wold not for my life a sen it fallen’ in a 14thC religious text, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich. Translating it as ‘I thought I would not for my life of seen it fall’ [underlines mine], she writes: ‘it’s always fun when you notice something in a medieval text that is a dead ringer for one of the “modern” mistakes that horrify the pearl-clutchers’.
David Crystal adds further historical commentary in his book Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar:
On 5 September 1819 the poet John Keats sends an apologetic letter to his publisher John Taylor, in which he writes:
Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fierry phrase in my first Letter.
‘Should not of written’? From such a great poet? It must have been just a slip, because later on in the same letter he writes ‘You should not have delayed.’ What interests me is to find this confusion 200 years ago. It isn’t just a modern thing, as some critics say. That identity in pronunciation between the preposition of and the unstressed form of the auxiliary verb have has been around a long time.
Morph, a linguistics blog by the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey, has a great post on different aspects of the modal-of usage: ‘What’s the good of “would of”?’
Lots of examples in Anne Tyler’s If Morning Ever Comes, spoken by several different characters (of different ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities):
‘You mustn’t of been but twelve or so but I remembered.’
‘You shouldn’t of mentioned breakfast, boy,’ he said.
‘Course I think he could of made a better choice in wives, but then Sally’s right pretty and I reckon I can see his point in picking her.’
‘You know, when I was a boy we’d of been plumb through town by now.’
‘If we’d of known,’ she said, ‘I’d of cleaned up house a little.’
‘Folks tell me I take too good care of him, so it can’t of been that he got too cold. Though he is right much of a puddle-wader, that could’ve done it.’ [Note nearby use of could’ve.]
‘I don’t guess my letter would of made any change in him one way or the other.’
‘If I’d of married Jamie,” she said, “I would of had a different family.’
‘Well, if it hadn’t of been her, it’d been someone else.’
‘She mustn’t of seen us.’
Ross Macdonald also makes regular use of the construction:
‘If they knew they had a buyer, they might of stayed in business to accommodate you.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer)
‘I wish I could of died instead of him.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer)
‘The other man took them, he must of.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He must of got away.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He must of fell down on the knife and stabbed himself.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He would of killed him too.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘When Culligan came marching out, armed up to the teeth, you could of knocked me over with a ‘dozer.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘Lucky for him I was out, or I’d of shown him what’s what.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘You were just a tiny baby, but that wouldn’t of stopped him.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
As does Elmore Leonard; these are from The Hot Kid:
Emmett Long kept looking at him. ‘You had a gun you’d of shot me, huh?’
‘I’d of shoved the ice cream cone up his goddamn nose.’
What Oris did, he got mad, changed the name of the company from Busy Bee Oil & Gas – a cartoon bumblebee in the trademark they’d of had one day – to NMD Oil & Gas, standing for No More Dusters, and worked a year as a driller to restore his capital.
‘The only one I told was Emmett,’ Carl said. ‘It had to of been Crystal told the papers.’
She had to wonder if she had been here would he of recognized her, and bet he would’ve.
‘I’d of arrested him he’s walking in the door,’ Lester said.
Franklin was shaking his head. ‘I’d of seen ’em.’
‘I told him he shouldn’t of left the key in it.’
‘She looked at him again with a faint smile. ‘I would never of suspected.’
‘The first remark out of his mouth, I’d of pulled and killed him where he stood.’
‘She’d of given me the choice of taking a chance with Teddy or being locked up.’
‘She wouldn’t of started breakfast if they weren’t all downstairs near ready to eat.’
‘Jack’s a talker,’ Carl said. ‘He’d of thought of a reason to go alone, pick up a bottle? And Tony’s polite, he would’ve said don’t steal the car, okay?’
‘No, he couldn’t of known that.’
‘Jack Belmont wouldn’t of left with bullets in his gun.’
The minute Jack wasn’t looking, like taking a leak or something, she’d of run out of the house to find a cop.
But Nancy knew who he was, so so the kidnapping wouldn’t of worked.
‘If I hadn’t decided to step back inside to answer the phone, I’d of missed one of the great opportunities of my career as a journalist . . .’
Richard Stark, already quoted above, has half a dozen examples in his first novel, The Hunter:
The spelling occurs often in Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong:‘If Art wanted to see you, he’d of told you where to find him.’
Stegman blinked. ‘He must of believed me.’
‘His wife must of known it, but she never told me.’
‘Five minutes later,’ the owner told him, ‘you’d of been out of luck.’
‘…it must of meant something, that’s all.’
‘I wouldn’t of believed it.’
He should of taken it last year.
She might of come down and gone back, Ike said. She might not of too.
She must not of stuck.
She must of went home, Mr. Guthrie.
You shouldn’t even of touched that.
Well, he might of went to Denver, Raymond said. Then he might of went back to the Rosebud in South Dakota.
I should of called during these months, I know.
You could of done something yourself too, you know, he said.
Something must of happened to her, Harold said. She must of got taken off or something.
I can’t think of anything we might of did.
You don’t even know where he might of took her for sure.
He might of landed her in Pueblo or Walsenburg.We didn’t know what we might of done to cause you to want to leave here like that.
He better not of hurt her permanent, Raymond said.
And in Pete Dexter’s novel Train:
“They must of left the sprinklers on all night,” the fat man said after he got back in control of his deportment again.
“He must of got home somehow,” Train said.
“She all convulsed the whole time they going through the house; she keeps saying, ‘Oh, no, he couldn’t of did that….'”
Train began thinking more and more that the world might of decided to let him alone.
Now he thought about he, she might not of even noticed the table leg if he hadn’t dropped it and woke up the dog…
Train thought it must of reminded him of that feeling when he was hit by that car and rolled across the road.
Then, if it was the right officer, they might of just carted Mayflower out of there, just because she was pretty, and then took his ass out into the desert and left it.
“One of them must of got up here and took it,” he said.
It seemed like Mr. Cooper must of told him where he come from, or how else would he know?
Must of bought his clothes in the boy’s department.
Melrose might of been trying to say something too, and Train distinctly saw his jaw slide out from under his face.
It came to Train the Plural must of heard her before she even come out of the double-wide, that he must of known from how she was walking that she was mad.
“A blind man,” he said, “We should of sold tickets.”
Walter Tevis’s The Hustler, from multiple characters:
‘You should never of quit going to Sunday school.’
‘I already watched you lose – watched you lose to a man you should of beat.’
‘And if I hadn’t already paid for it I could of with the money I won in side bets.’
‘They couldn’t of helped but hear of me.’
‘I should of let that guy quit, Charlie, like you told me.’
#books #corpusLinguistics #couldOf #dialects #dialogue #etymology #eyeDialect #fiction #grammar #language #linguistics #literacy #modalVerbs #modals #phrases #reading #schwa #speech #speechErrors #spelling #transcription #typos #usage #verbs #writing
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Would of, could of, might of, must of
When we say would have, could have, should have, must have, might have, may have and ought to have, we often put some stress on the modal auxiliary and none on the have. We may show this in writing by abbreviating to could’ve, must’ve, etc. (Would can contract further by merging with the subject: We would have → We’d’ve.)
Unstressed ’ve is phonetically identical (/əv/) to unstressed of: hence the widespread misspellings would of, could of, should of, must of, might of, may of, and ought to of. Negative forms also appear: shouldn’t of, mightn’t of, etc. This explanation – that misanalysis of the notorious schwa lies behind the error – has general support among linguists.
The mistake dates to at least 1837, according to the OED, so it has probably been infuriating pedants for almost 200 years. Common words spelt incorrectly provoke particular ire, sometimes accompanied by aspersions cast on the writer’s intelligence, fitness for society, degree of evolution, and so on. But there’s no need for any of that.
Usage authorities unanimously call it a mistake, though some allow for its deliberate use (more on that below). Many associate it specifically with children and other less educated writers. For example, Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage finds it a practice of ‘semiliterate writers’, and accepts no excuses: ‘the word is have, or a contraction ending in ’ve, and it should be written so.’
Merriam-Webster’s Pocket Guide to English Usage says ‘children and those who have not completed grammar school may have an excuse for making this mistake, but most others do not.’ What’s meant by that most is what we’ll now consider: that the misspellings don’t always indicate carelessness or relative illiteracy.
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English finds room for the anomalous forms as a stylistic device:
substituting of for ’ve in writing can be an example of eye dialect, which deliberately misspells words to suggest Nonstandard or dialectal speech. . . . The important thing is to correct it when it isn’t intentional.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage elaborates on this, saying writers use the spelling ‘to create an unlettered persona’. It cites several examples, including a ‘he’d of got me’ from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who ‘used the spelling to represent the speech of a woman who was not overeducated’, as MWDEU politely puts it.
Here is must of in an intertitle in the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928):
And in Josef von Sternberg’s 1928 The Docks of New York:
Over the last number of years, I’ve seen the non-standard of-form in many books by authors who presumably knew what they were doing:
‘I could of sworn I’d run into you some place before.’ (Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding)
‘Oh Miz, oh Miz,’ he moaned, rubbing his leg. ‘You shouldn’t of done that, you shouldn’t, you reely shouldn’t.’ (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
‘All bloody and mucked up, with figuring away aboard the Vénus, when two minutes would of changed it.’ (Patrick O’Brian, The Mauritius Command)
‘I’d of liked to be stabbed – and have lashings of red paint.’ (Agatha Christie, Dead Man’s Folly)
‘Never should of married‘ (Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood)
‘See, they must of had them already saddled.’ (Elmore Leonard, The Law at Randado)
‘If I hadn’t of got my tubes tied, it could of been me, say I was ten years younger.’ (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale)
‘You could of just told him.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘You could of said no and I could of not believed you.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘She must of grabbed some pills.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘You ought to of asked for me in the first place.’ (Raymond Chandler, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, in Trouble Is My Business)
‘Maybe I had ought to of gone to the servant’s entrance.’ (Raymond Chandler, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, in Trouble Is My Business)
‘Youve never seen anything so mad, the lassie couldnt of known what kind of nut house she was in.’ (Alan Warner, Morvern Callar)
‘I don’t suppose he would remember you,’ the woman said thoughtfully. ‘Seems like he would of mentioned you sometimes if he did.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Lie’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘He shouldn’t of done it, that’s all’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘Root of Evil’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘My wife,’ he said, putting his elbows on the counter and still watching Judith, ‘my wife, you ought to of heard her when she thought I was going.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘Homecoming’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘If he’d of been a friend of mine you would have said plenty, believe me,” Mrs. Royster said darkly. (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘She sure must of been glad to see him, the way he looked,’ the old man said. (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘I never saw him,’ the clerk in the drugstore said. ‘I know because I would of noticed the flowers.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘If you had of been dead, you’d of had a funeral. I only just thought a that now. I’d of went along.’ (Claire Kilroy, The Devil I Know)
Mabey I shoudnt of let them oparate on my branes like she said if its agenst god. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
Now that makes me feel bad because I would never of hurt the baby. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
‘I should of had my head examined.’ (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
‘She should of got it lit before we arrived.’ (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
‘Maybe you should of shot us when we was far away.’ (Chris Cleave, The Other Hand)
‘If he’d been an animal, he’d of been the runt of the litter and we’d of put him down.’ (Gillian Flynn, Dark Places)
‘I could of used the money,’ Donna said. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’ […] ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I could of used the money.’ (Raymond Carver, ‘Vitamins’, in Cathedral)
‘And here I’d of sworn…’ He took another try at the coffee cup, registered surprise to find it empty. (James Sallis, Drive)
‘Figured they must of took you when they took Ellis.’ (James Sallis, Bluebottle)
Must of been May 14 as May 12 is my birthday and it was by way of a late present. (Minette Walters, The Ice House)
‘You could of got it from the paper.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
‘You should of shown me this last time.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
‘She went guilty so she must of done it.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
Yorkin cringed. ‘Me. Pierce told me to clip him. I shouldn’t of done it by the drop.’ (James Ellroy, L. A. Confidential)
‘That sure could of been true,’ says the clerk at the Salon City store (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild)
‘I must of fell asleep, eh?’
‘I guess you must have,’ said Isserley. (Michel Faber, Under the Skin)Then one day, it must of rained, and man discovered a new place: indoors. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
And where that monkey might of come from. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
I would of put loads more dinosaurs in. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
‘Donnie, we’d of finished this Betamax deal in ten days. And we’d have had winter money, all three of us.’ (Joseph D. Pistone with Richard Woodley, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia)
‘And who else could of built it?’ Mr Madden shouted. (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
Sheila, the woodshed, should of paddled you sooner. (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
‘You went had in there. Stark mad. You’d have raped her if . . .’
‘I’d of what?‘ (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)‘I never should of come here.’ (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
‘Whether Miriam would of been any different, I don’t know, but I’d say she’d of been worse.’ (Patrician Highsmith, Strangers on a Train)
‘I’d of thought Mrs Herman was the last person in the world to—’ (Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse)
…the marshal hadn’t taken any of the Collinsons’ property though of course he might of. (Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse)
‘I wouldn’t of flagged that taxi if the For Hire flag hadn’t been up.’ (Dashiell Hammet, ‘Fly Paper’, in The Big Knockover and other stories)
”F he’d of been a man I’d of seen him in hell ‘fore I’d of gave it to him.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘Corkscrew’, in The Big Knockover and other stories)
‘They may of gone,’ he said slowly. (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Golden Horseshoe’, in The Continental Op)
‘But he must of gone through the house and out front . . .’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Girls with the Silver Eyes’, in The ContinentalOp)
‘Anybody could of got in them with a ladder.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Farewell Murder’, in The Continental Op)
‘Well, we would of if she hadn’t put the two X’s to me the same as she done to you’ . . . ‘but if my rod hadn’t of got snagged in my flogger you wouldn’t have seen nothing else.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Whosis Kid’, in The Continental Op)
‘If I’d known you five years ago I’d of given it to you.’ (Sara Paretsky, ‘The Maltese Cat’, in Windy City Blues)
‘Mate, I’ve probably said enough already. More than I should of (taps nose) . . . Professional conduct an’ all that.’ (Nicola Barker, Darkmans)
‘Yes, and if the bastard hadn’t of moved I’d have got him, too.’ (Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards)
‘I’m Billy Baker. Your Daddy might of talked about me, called me Space?’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher) (pictured and quoted below: Preacher no. 2: Proud Americans)
”Cause I hope I ain’t outta line here, but I think he’d of been cool about you hearin’ it…’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
‘He was stupid an’ clumsy an’ kind of a weakling, an’ he wouldn’t of lasted a fuckin’ day over there if it hadn’t been for one thing’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
‘See, we’d of done Murphy there an’ then, we’d of had to do Van Patten as well — an’ I knew your Daddy didn’t really wanna do that.’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. (Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower)
‘She must of really gotten knocked out.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape)
‘He’s not around now, or you’d of met him.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape)
‘They could of just been losing us,’ said Coney. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Your parents must of been hippies,’ he’d tell me. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘He might of been a little impatient for his date with Frank.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘If it weren’t for Gilbert I would of told him to stick it—’ (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Oh, I’d of straightened it out,’ Tony said. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Each one of them, he says it might of been you, it might of been two other guys.’ (Robert Anton Wilson, The Universe Next Door)
‘You must of been back on the reservation eating peyote again.’ (Robert Anton Wilson, The Universe Next Door)
‘And it wouldn’t of mattered to me whether you did or did not like women.’ (George Pelecanos, Drama City)
‘I wouldn’t of thought of such a thing in a million years.’ (George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown)
‘If you hadn’t of stepped in the middle of everything—’ (George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown)
It would of done no good gettin’ somebody else te scratch it for me because that was a sin as well. (Frances Molloy, No Mate for the Magpie)
‘Been calling all night. Four, five calls, must of been.’ (Lawrence Block, A Ticket to the Boneyard)
‘Six-thirty or so, you must of just got on your way to Maspeth, guy goes out back with a load of kitchen garbage.’ (Lawrence Block, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse)
‘Another minute and I would of made it, you rats.’ (Lawrence Block, No Score)
‘Now if you would of done this we wouldn’t have any trouble.’ (Lawrence Block, No Score)
‘Need a social security card,’ he said. ‘You must of had one, I guess.’ (Lawrence Block, Chip Harrison Scores Again)
‘Guess they must of been chafing you some on that bus ride.’ (Lawrence Block, Chip Harrison Scores Again)
‘You might not of noticed yesterday but he’s only got one hand.’ (Ron Rash, The Cove)
‘Would he of died?’ (Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic)
‘Pete should of told me,’ he said. (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘Okay,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Could be worse. She could of been wearing her habit, right?’ (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘Wound up, it took him forty-eight years to serve a ten-year sentence that he should of got out in three.’ (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘She has on a pair of bikinis I couldn’t of got into when I was ten years old.’ (Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise)
‘We could’ve settled, the city pays out a few bucks, it wouldn’t of cost you a dime.’ (Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise)
‘You know what I sor?’ said the child patiently. ‘Well, the train must of stopped, see, and some little men with bundles on their backs got on.’ (Mavis Gallant, ‘Up North’, in The Omnibus of 20th Century Ghost Stories, edited by Robert Phillips)
‘You two might of settled down and had a nice baby or something.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘Maybe you should of looked around some more.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘He must of gone to the show.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘I shouldn’t of toog you id,’ Angelo breathed. ‘I got nerbous.’
‘It was all my fault,’ Mrs Reilly said, ‘for trying to protect that Ignatius. I should of let you lock him away, Angelo.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)‘I don’t think I’d of wanted to go down there even for the Grape-Nuts. But maybe if we’d’ve gone real fast . . .’ (Harlan Ellison, ‘Sensible City’, in The Dead that Walk, edited by Stephen Jones)
‘You could of killed someone!’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘There’s a lot of places round here you could of bin.’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘If she’d stuck around, I could of asked her advice. I bet she could of come up with somewhere to put you that no one would think of lookin’, not if you paid them ready money.’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘If you’d gotten into a fight with that swordarm of yours, there’d of been bodies all over’ (Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier, translated by Dana Lewis)
‘It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known.’ (Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find)’The other vics probably would have lived if Lewin hadn’t of made that play.’ (George Pelecanos, Shame the Devil)
‘I should of thought of that my own self.’ (George Pelecanos, Shame the Devil)
‘If you’d gone in right away, you would of got him, none of this would of happened. . . . I’d of got off! You think I’d of stood around that roadblock for seven hours?’ (Richard Stark, Slayground)
‘That guy talks pretty big, Cory. We should of called his bluff right there.’ (Richard Stark, Ask the Parrot)
‘Everything screws up, it just gets worse and worse, we should never of got into this, we’re fuckups, that’s all, we’re just fuckups.’ (Richard Stark, Comeback)
‘Might of slipped in and out, nobody the wiser, except we were already on the scene, account of Parmitt being gone.’ (Richard Stark, Flashfire)
‘Couldn’t you of – oh, he was ignorant in his speech – couldn’t you of prevented it?’ (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
‘I should of thought to bring a sun lounger, from the garden centre,’ Mart said. (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
‘He could of been,’ her mother said vaguely. (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
When she provoked him and he was in a temper with her, he would say, count your blessings, girl, you fink I’m bad but you could of had MacArthur. You could have had Bob Fox, or Aitkenside, or Pikey Pete. You could have had my mate Keef Capstick. You could of had Nick, and then where’d you be? (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
He shouldn’t of been near enough . . . (Donal Ryan, ‘Aisling’, in A Slanting of the Sun)
Stupid idea anyway I dont think he ever wud of really done it. (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting – this example is from a teenager’s text message)
But if she hadn’t of drank she would never have seen him at all and better that she was there she thought where she could at least try to keep some grip on him before he lost the run of himself completely (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
Lar thought about it They must of gone out on a job he said (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I wonder what kind of life you might have had, if you hadn’t of been dragged back here. (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I paid a man to write it he says He must of never sent it at all (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I wish someone had of told me you croak into his shoulder (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
Lars frowns Choosing his words He didn’t think you should of married Dickie he says (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
U SHUD OF TOLD ME I CUD OF SHOWD U AROUD!!!! (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting, text message)
‘Hell, if I knew I was sitting on a gold mine, I’d of sold ’em a long time ago.’ (Jim Dodge, Not Fade Away)
‘And he couldn’t of loved me because he took away my kid, he’s off someplace where I can’t never see him.’ (James Baldwin, Another Country)
‘But I would of died for my kid, I wouldn’t never of let anything happen to him.’ (James Baldwin, Another Country)
‘I couldn’t of done nothing else,’ he cried, ‘what else could I of done? Where could I of gone with Esther, and me a preacher, too? And what could I of done with you?’ (James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain)
‘Must of had a heart attack or something!?’ (Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin, Tank Girl One):
A curious example in Jim Nesbit’s novel Lethal Injection, which suggests an attempted copy-editing or proofreading fix that stopped halfway: changing “would of” to “would’ve” but not deleting the “of”. Or maybe it’s else entirely:
The example below, from alt-manga historian Ryan Holmberg’s The Translator Without Talent, is from The Marvel Times, a pretend-newspaper about comics that he created on his twelfth birthday. So its must of is probably not deliberate and also completely forgivable:
Such phrases appear often in Cormac McCarthy’s novels. Here are some from Cities of the Plain, all used in dialogue:
You’d never of knowed it though.
I wouldn’t of wrote home for nothin.
Looks like they’d of learned to stay out of it.
Johnny if he hadnt of found that girl would of found somethin else.
And there was nothin any mortal man could of done to of stopped it.
And from Blood Meridian:
No, No, he said. I mean ye was lost to of come here.
It might of been a mule.
Somebody ought to of pickled it a long time ago.
Must of been a thousand indians in there all settin around.
He appears to of spoke for hisself.
I couldnt of learned it off ten dutchmen.
Him and the governor they sat up till breakfast and it was Paris this and London that in five languages, you’d of give something to of heard them.
Don’t you know he’d of took you with him? He’d of took you, boy.
Glanton spat. Ort to of shot that one too, he said.
Well, he said. I’d of thought any damn fool could saw the barrels off a shotgun.
That old boy you bought them off of might of said they was injins but that dont make it so.
The man didnt answer.
Them ears could of come off of cannibals . . .You wouldnt of lived anyway, the man said.
And from All the Pretty Horses:
They might as well of, he said.
Otherwise I’d of been born in Alabama.
…it was a mistake not to of told you.
But if it hadnt of been for her I wouldnt of made it.
He might well could of
Might well could of is also a nice example of a double modal. The [modal]-of construction is used frequently throughout Chris Cleave’s remarkable novel Incendiary:
She was like that was Mena. Philosophical. I’d definitely of killed myself if it hadn’t of been for her.
If you could of looked in my eyes you’d of seen the same thing I shouldn’t wonder.
I wouldn’t of come near you I’d never of let you touch me you should be ashamed.
Most notably in this exchange between two people only one of whom uses it dialectally:
– He would of said something.
– Maybe he wouldn’t have.
– Wouldn’t you of?A remarkable example in A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore uses it without a preceding modal, in the speech of a young child:
‘You got brown eyes,’ she said. ‘I of brown eyes.’
Searching the Corpus of Contemporary American English for the string would of [v*], where [v*] is a verb, produces the graph below. It shows that the of-form’s predominant setting is fiction, usually ‘would of been’, and it also shows up in transcription of actual speech, as in the academic and newspaper instances. You can click through the image to view examples, sources, and further information at COCA.
The magazine data are false positives (‘we’d have a better chance of achieving a breakthrough in quantum gravity than we would of figuring out how to reliably connect with teenagers’), but you get an idea of the construction’s low frequency and particular genre distribution.
Plotting could of [v*] usages over time, using the related Corpus of Historical American English, suggests the construction may have peaked. Or is that just wishful thinking? Again, you can click on this graph for details, or open it in another tab.
Of 1000 occurrences of could/would of in the Oxford English Corpus, about 850 are from ‘representations of direct speech (mostly from the Fiction domain, but also from interviews and courtroom transcripts)’. That leaves 150 genuine written instances of could/would of, compared with 4 million examples of standard could/would have. I can’t help picturing a global battalion of editors keeping it firmly at bay.
The of-form is not frequent in edited prose, but it appears quite often in casual writing and it has been around a while. Does that count for much? MWDEU says its prolonged use has ‘not made it respectable’, and recommends avoiding it – including in transcriptions of real speech, since ’ve serves the purpose equally well. I agree, and I think if someone explicitly says of, and stresses it, that might warrant a ‘[sic]’.
Regular readers know I like to make room for literary effect and poetic licence, but I have never warmed to this mistake. Every time I see it – be its use naive or intentional – I want to fix it. Authenticity of dialect and character are all well and good, but I think the main effect of the deliberate usage in edited prose is further uncertainty and error (not to mention irritation, in some quarters). What do you think?
Updates:
Years after writing this, I’ve softened considerably on the modal-of construction. This is partly because of exposure to its use by so many great writers, and also because it’s a good example of language change – a natural, essential characteristic of a living language. See my post on reconciling descriptivism with editing for more discussion.
I’ve come across many more examples in books, and have added them to the sets above and below. @desktopenglish on Twitter drew my attention to this BBC article that quotes a footballer saying he ‘Shouldn’t of reacted the way I did’.
What sounds to me like a good audio example comes from author Zadie Smith on the Adam Buxton Podcast. This link should cue the player automatically at 15:50, but if it doesn’t, that’s the time stamp. The relevant exchange is as follows, discussing Smith’s father:
Smith: He was very uptight about time, yeah.
Buxton: It rubbed off on you.
Smith: It must of, yeah.
Medievalist Lucy Allen found the line ‘For methowte I wold not for my life a sen it fallen’ in a 14thC religious text, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich. Translating it as ‘I thought I would not for my life of seen it fall’ [underlines mine], she writes: ‘it’s always fun when you notice something in a medieval text that is a dead ringer for one of the “modern” mistakes that horrify the pearl-clutchers’.
David Crystal adds further historical commentary in his book Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar:
On 5 September 1819 the poet John Keats sends an apologetic letter to his publisher John Taylor, in which he writes:
Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fierry phrase in my first Letter.
‘Should not of written’? From such a great poet? It must have been just a slip, because later on in the same letter he writes ‘You should not have delayed.’ What interests me is to find this confusion 200 years ago. It isn’t just a modern thing, as some critics say. That identity in pronunciation between the preposition of and the unstressed form of the auxiliary verb have has been around a long time.
Morph, a linguistics blog by the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey, has a great post on different aspects of the modal-of usage: ‘What’s the good of “would of”?’
Lots of examples in Anne Tyler’s If Morning Ever Comes, spoken by several different characters (of different ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities):
‘You mustn’t of been but twelve or so but I remembered.’
‘You shouldn’t of mentioned breakfast, boy,’ he said.
‘Course I think he could of made a better choice in wives, but then Sally’s right pretty and I reckon I can see his point in picking her.’
‘You know, when I was a boy we’d of been plumb through town by now.’
‘If we’d of known,’ she said, ‘I’d of cleaned up house a little.’
‘Folks tell me I take too good care of him, so it can’t of been that he got too cold. Though he is right much of a puddle-wader, that could’ve done it.’ [Note nearby use of could’ve.]
‘I don’t guess my letter would of made any change in him one way or the other.’
‘If I’d of married Jamie,” she said, “I would of had a different family.’
‘Well, if it hadn’t of been her, it’d been someone else.’
‘She mustn’t of seen us.’
Ross Macdonald also makes regular use of the construction:
‘If they knew they had a buyer, they might of stayed in business to accommodate you.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer)
‘I wish I could of died instead of him.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer)
‘The other man took them, he must of.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He must of got away.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He must of fell down on the knife and stabbed himself.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He would of killed him too.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘When Culligan came marching out, armed up to the teeth, you could of knocked me over with a ‘dozer.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘Lucky for him I was out, or I’d of shown him what’s what.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘You were just a tiny baby, but that wouldn’t of stopped him.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
As does Elmore Leonard; these are from The Hot Kid:
Emmett Long kept looking at him. ‘You had a gun you’d of shot me, huh?’
‘I’d of shoved the ice cream cone up his goddamn nose.’
What Oris did, he got mad, changed the name of the company from Busy Bee Oil & Gas – a cartoon bumblebee in the trademark they’d of had one day – to NMD Oil & Gas, standing for No More Dusters, and worked a year as a driller to restore his capital.
‘The only one I told was Emmett,’ Carl said. ‘It had to of been Crystal told the papers.’
She had to wonder if she had been here would he of recognized her, and bet he would’ve.
‘I’d of arrested him he’s walking in the door,’ Lester said.
Franklin was shaking his head. ‘I’d of seen ’em.’
‘I told him he shouldn’t of left the key in it.’
‘She looked at him again with a faint smile. ‘I would never of suspected.’
‘The first remark out of his mouth, I’d of pulled and killed him where he stood.’
‘She’d of given me the choice of taking a chance with Teddy or being locked up.’
‘She wouldn’t of started breakfast if they weren’t all downstairs near ready to eat.’
‘Jack’s a talker,’ Carl said. ‘He’d of thought of a reason to go alone, pick up a bottle? And Tony’s polite, he would’ve said don’t steal the car, okay?’
‘No, he couldn’t of known that.’
‘Jack Belmont wouldn’t of left with bullets in his gun.’
The minute Jack wasn’t looking, like taking a leak or something, she’d of run out of the house to find a cop.
But Nancy knew who he was, so so the kidnapping wouldn’t of worked.
‘If I hadn’t decided to step back inside to answer the phone, I’d of missed one of the great opportunities of my career as a journalist . . .’
Richard Stark, already quoted above, has half a dozen examples in his first novel, The Hunter:
The spelling occurs often in Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong:‘If Art wanted to see you, he’d of told you where to find him.’
Stegman blinked. ‘He must of believed me.’
‘His wife must of known it, but she never told me.’
‘Five minutes later,’ the owner told him, ‘you’d of been out of luck.’
‘…it must of meant something, that’s all.’
‘I wouldn’t of believed it.’
He should of taken it last year.
She might of come down and gone back, Ike said. She might not of too.
She must not of stuck.
She must of went home, Mr. Guthrie.
You shouldn’t even of touched that.
Well, he might of went to Denver, Raymond said. Then he might of went back to the Rosebud in South Dakota.
I should of called during these months, I know.
You could of done something yourself too, you know, he said.
Something must of happened to her, Harold said. She must of got taken off or something.
I can’t think of anything we might of did.
You don’t even know where he might of took her for sure.
He might of landed her in Pueblo or Walsenburg.We didn’t know what we might of done to cause you to want to leave here like that.
He better not of hurt her permanent, Raymond said.
And in Pete Dexter’s novel Train:
“They must of left the sprinklers on all night,” the fat man said after he got back in control of his deportment again.
“He must of got home somehow,” Train said.
“She all convulsed the whole time they going through the house; she keeps saying, ‘Oh, no, he couldn’t of did that….'”
Train began thinking more and more that the world might of decided to let him alone.
Now he thought about he, she might not of even noticed the table leg if he hadn’t dropped it and woke up the dog…
Train thought it must of reminded him of that feeling when he was hit by that car and rolled across the road.
Then, if it was the right officer, they might of just carted Mayflower out of there, just because she was pretty, and then took his ass out into the desert and left it.
“One of them must of got up here and took it,” he said.
It seemed like Mr. Cooper must of told him where he come from, or how else would he know?
Must of bought his clothes in the boy’s department.
Melrose might of been trying to say something too, and Train distinctly saw his jaw slide out from under his face.
It came to Train the Plural must of heard her before she even come out of the double-wide, that he must of known from how she was walking that she was mad.
“A blind man,” he said, “We should of sold tickets.”
Walter Tevis’s The Hustler, from multiple characters:
‘You should never of quit going to Sunday school.’
‘I already watched you lose – watched you lose to a man you should of beat.’
‘And if I hadn’t already paid for it I could of with the money I won in side bets.’
‘They couldn’t of helped but hear of me.’
‘I should of let that guy quit, Charlie, like you told me.’
#books #corpusLinguistics #couldOf #dialects #dialogue #etymology #eyeDialect #fiction #grammar #language #linguistics #literacy #modalVerbs #modals #phrases #reading #schwa #speech #speechErrors #spelling #transcription #typos #usage #verbs #writing
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Would of, could of, might of, must of
When we say would have, could have, should have, must have, might have, may have and ought to have, we often put some stress on the modal auxiliary and none on the have. We may show this in writing by abbreviating to could’ve, must’ve, etc. (Would can contract further by merging with the subject: We would have → We’d’ve.)
Unstressed ’ve is phonetically identical (/əv/) to unstressed of: hence the widespread misspellings would of, could of, should of, must of, might of, may of, and ought to of. Negative forms also appear: shouldn’t of, mightn’t of, etc. This explanation – that misanalysis of the notorious schwa lies behind the error – has general support among linguists.
The mistake dates to at least 1837, according to the OED, so it has probably been infuriating pedants for almost 200 years. Common words spelt incorrectly provoke particular ire, sometimes accompanied by aspersions cast on the writer’s intelligence, fitness for society, degree of evolution, and so on. But there’s no need for any of that.
Usage authorities unanimously call it a mistake, though some allow for its deliberate use (more on that below). Many associate it specifically with children and other less educated writers. For example, Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage finds it a practice of ‘semiliterate writers’, and accepts no excuses: ‘the word is have, or a contraction ending in ’ve, and it should be written so.’
Merriam-Webster’s Pocket Guide to English Usage says ‘children and those who have not completed grammar school may have an excuse for making this mistake, but most others do not.’ What’s meant by that most is what we’ll now consider: that the misspellings don’t always indicate carelessness or relative illiteracy.
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English finds room for the anomalous forms as a stylistic device:
substituting of for ’ve in writing can be an example of eye dialect, which deliberately misspells words to suggest Nonstandard or dialectal speech. . . . The important thing is to correct it when it isn’t intentional.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage elaborates on this, saying writers use the spelling ‘to create an unlettered persona’. It cites several examples, including a ‘he’d of got me’ from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who ‘used the spelling to represent the speech of a woman who was not overeducated’, as MWDEU politely puts it.
Here is must of in an intertitle in the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928):
And in Josef von Sternberg’s 1928 The Docks of New York:
Over the last number of years, I’ve seen the non-standard of-form in many books by authors who presumably knew what they were doing:
‘I could of sworn I’d run into you some place before.’ (Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding)
‘Oh Miz, oh Miz,’ he moaned, rubbing his leg. ‘You shouldn’t of done that, you shouldn’t, you reely shouldn’t.’ (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
‘All bloody and mucked up, with figuring away aboard the Vénus, when two minutes would of changed it.’ (Patrick O’Brian, The Mauritius Command)
‘I’d of liked to be stabbed – and have lashings of red paint.’ (Agatha Christie, Dead Man’s Folly)
‘Never should of married‘ (Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood)
‘See, they must of had them already saddled.’ (Elmore Leonard, The Law at Randado)
‘If I hadn’t of got my tubes tied, it could of been me, say I was ten years younger.’ (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale)
‘You could of just told him.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘You could of said no and I could of not believed you.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘She must of grabbed some pills.’ (Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-bye)
‘You ought to of asked for me in the first place.’ (Raymond Chandler, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, in Trouble Is My Business)
‘Maybe I had ought to of gone to the servant’s entrance.’ (Raymond Chandler, ‘Trouble Is My Business’, in Trouble Is My Business)
‘Youve never seen anything so mad, the lassie couldnt of known what kind of nut house she was in.’ (Alan Warner, Morvern Callar)
‘I don’t suppose he would remember you,’ the woman said thoughtfully. ‘Seems like he would of mentioned you sometimes if he did.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Lie’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘He shouldn’t of done it, that’s all’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘Root of Evil’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘My wife,’ he said, putting his elbows on the counter and still watching Judith, ‘my wife, you ought to of heard her when she thought I was going.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘Homecoming’, in Let Me Tell You)
‘If he’d of been a friend of mine you would have said plenty, believe me,” Mrs. Royster said darkly. (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘She sure must of been glad to see him, the way he looked,’ the old man said. (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘I never saw him,’ the clerk in the drugstore said. ‘I know because I would of noticed the flowers.’ (Shirley Jackson, ‘The Daemon Lover’)
‘If you had of been dead, you’d of had a funeral. I only just thought a that now. I’d of went along.’ (Claire Kilroy, The Devil I Know)
Mabey I shoudnt of let them oparate on my branes like she said if its agenst god. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
Now that makes me feel bad because I would never of hurt the baby. (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
‘I should of had my head examined.’ (Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon)
‘She should of got it lit before we arrived.’ (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)
‘Maybe you should of shot us when we was far away.’ (Chris Cleave, The Other Hand)
‘If he’d been an animal, he’d of been the runt of the litter and we’d of put him down.’ (Gillian Flynn, Dark Places)
‘I could of used the money,’ Donna said. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’ […] ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I could of used the money.’ (Raymond Carver, ‘Vitamins’, in Cathedral)
‘And here I’d of sworn…’ He took another try at the coffee cup, registered surprise to find it empty. (James Sallis, Drive)
‘Figured they must of took you when they took Ellis.’ (James Sallis, Bluebottle)
Must of been May 14 as May 12 is my birthday and it was by way of a late present. (Minette Walters, The Ice House)
‘You could of got it from the paper.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
‘You should of shown me this last time.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
‘She went guilty so she must of done it.’ (Minette Walters, The Sculptress)
Yorkin cringed. ‘Me. Pierce told me to clip him. I shouldn’t of done it by the drop.’ (James Ellroy, L. A. Confidential)
‘That sure could of been true,’ says the clerk at the Salon City store (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild)
‘I must of fell asleep, eh?’
‘I guess you must have,’ said Isserley. (Michel Faber, Under the Skin)Then one day, it must of rained, and man discovered a new place: indoors. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
And where that monkey might of come from. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
I would of put loads more dinosaurs in. (Philomena Cunk, Cunk on Everything)
‘Donnie, we’d of finished this Betamax deal in ten days. And we’d have had winter money, all three of us.’ (Joseph D. Pistone with Richard Woodley, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia)
‘And who else could of built it?’ Mr Madden shouted. (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
Sheila, the woodshed, should of paddled you sooner. (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
‘You went had in there. Stark mad. You’d have raped her if . . .’
‘I’d of what?‘ (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)‘I never should of come here.’ (Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
‘Whether Miriam would of been any different, I don’t know, but I’d say she’d of been worse.’ (Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train)
‘I’d of thought Mrs Herman was the last person in the world to—’ (Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse)
…the marshal hadn’t taken any of the Collinsons’ property though of course he might of. (Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse)
‘I wouldn’t of flagged that taxi if the For Hire flag hadn’t been up.’ (Dashiell Hammet, ‘Fly Paper’, in The Big Knockover and other stories)
”F he’d of been a man I’d of seen him in hell ‘fore I’d of gave it to him.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘Corkscrew’, in The Big Knockover and other stories)
‘They may of gone,’ he said slowly. (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Golden Horseshoe’, in The Continental Op)
‘But he must of gone through the house and out front . . .’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Girls with the Silver Eyes’, in The ContinentalOp)
‘Anybody could of got in them with a ladder.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Farewell Murder’, in The Continental Op)
‘Well, we would of if she hadn’t put the two X’s to me the same as she done to you’ . . . ‘but if my rod hadn’t of got snagged in my flogger you wouldn’t have seen nothing else.’ (Dashiell Hammett, ‘The Whosis Kid’, in The Continental Op)
‘If I’d known you five years ago I’d of given it to you.’ (Sara Paretsky, ‘The Maltese Cat’, in Windy City Blues)
‘Mate, I’ve probably said enough already. More than I should of (taps nose) . . . Professional conduct an’ all that.’ (Nicola Barker, Darkmans)
‘Yes, and if the bastard hadn’t of moved I’d have got him, too.’ (Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards)
‘I’m Billy Baker. Your Daddy might of talked about me, called me Space?’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher) (pictured and quoted below: Preacher no. 2: Proud Americans)
”Cause I hope I ain’t outta line here, but I think he’d of been cool about you hearin’ it…’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
‘He was stupid an’ clumsy an’ kind of a weakling, an’ he wouldn’t of lasted a fuckin’ day over there if it hadn’t been for one thing’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
‘See, we’d of done Murphy there an’ then, we’d of had to do Van Patten as well — an’ I knew your Daddy didn’t really wanna do that.’ (Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon, Preacher)
The Dunns must of felt this when Tracy vanished. (Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower)
‘She must of really gotten knocked out.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape)
‘He’s not around now, or you’d of met him.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Girl in Landscape)
‘They could of just been losing us,’ said Coney. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Your parents must of been hippies,’ he’d tell me. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘He might of been a little impatient for his date with Frank.’ (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘If it weren’t for Gilbert I would of told him to stick it—’ (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Oh, I’d of straightened it out,’ Tony said. (Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn)
‘Each one of them, he says it might of been you, it might of been two other guys.’ (Robert Anton Wilson, The Universe Next Door)
‘You must of been back on the reservation eating peyote again.’ (Robert Anton Wilson, The Universe Next Door)
‘And it wouldn’t of mattered to me whether you did or did not like women.’ (George Pelecanos, Drama City)
‘I wouldn’t of thought of such a thing in a million years.’ (George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown)
‘If you hadn’t of stepped in the middle of everything—’ (George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown)
It would of done no good gettin’ somebody else te scratch it for me because that was a sin as well. (Frances Molloy, No Mate for the Magpie)
‘Been calling all night. Four, five calls, must of been.’ (Lawrence Block, A Ticket to the Boneyard)
‘Six-thirty or so, you must of just got on your way to Maspeth, guy goes out back with a load of kitchen garbage.’ (Lawrence Block, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse)
‘Another minute and I would of made it, you rats.’ (Lawrence Block, No Score)
‘Now if you would of done this we wouldn’t have any trouble.’ (Lawrence Block, No Score)
‘Need a social security card,’ he said. ‘You must of had one, I guess.’ (Lawrence Block, Chip Harrison Scores Again)
‘Guess they must of been chafing you some on that bus ride.’ (Lawrence Block, Chip Harrison Scores Again)
‘You might not of noticed yesterday but he’s only got one hand.’ (Ron Rash, The Cove)
‘Would he of died?’ (Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic)
‘Pete should of told me,’ he said. (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘Okay,’ Dortmunder said. ‘Could be worse. She could of been wearing her habit, right?’ (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘Wound up, it took him forty-eight years to serve a ten-year sentence that he should of got out in three.’ (Donald Westlake, Good Behavior)
‘She has on a pair of bikinis I couldn’t of got into when I was ten years old.’ (Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise)
‘We could’ve settled, the city pays out a few bucks, it wouldn’t of cost you a dime.’ (Elmore Leonard, Mr. Paradise)
‘You know what I sor?’ said the child patiently. ‘Well, the train must of stopped, see, and some little men with bundles on their backs got on.’ (Mavis Gallant, ‘Up North’, in The Omnibus of 20th Century Ghost Stories, edited by Robert Phillips)
‘You two might of settled down and had a nice baby or something.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘Maybe you should of looked around some more.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘He must of gone to the show.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)
‘I shouldn’t of toog you id,’ Angelo breathed. ‘I got nerbous.’
‘It was all my fault,’ Mrs Reilly said, ‘for trying to protect that Ignatius. I should of let you lock him away, Angelo.’ (John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)‘I don’t think I’d of wanted to go down there even for the Grape-Nuts. But maybe if we’d’ve gone real fast . . .’ (Harlan Ellison, ‘Sensible City’, in The Dead that Walk, edited by Stephen Jones)
‘You could of killed someone!’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘There’s a lot of places round here you could of bin.’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘If she’d stuck around, I could of asked her advice. I bet she could of come up with somewhere to put you that no one would think of lookin’, not if you paid them ready money.’ (Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living)
‘If you’d gotten into a fight with that swordarm of yours, there’d of been bodies all over’ (Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf and Cub, vol. 2: The Gateless Barrier, translated by Dana Lewis)
‘It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known.’ (Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find)’The other vics probably would have lived if Lewin hadn’t of made that play.’ (George Pelecanos, Shame the Devil)
‘I should of thought of that my own self.’ (George Pelecanos, Shame the Devil)
‘If you’d gone in right away, you would of got him, none of this would of happened. . . . I’d of got off! You think I’d of stood around that roadblock for seven hours?’ (Richard Stark, Slayground)
‘That guy talks pretty big, Cory. We should of called his bluff right there.’ (Richard Stark, Ask the Parrot)
‘Everything screws up, it just gets worse and worse, we should never of got into this, we’re fuckups, that’s all, we’re just fuckups.’ (Richard Stark, Comeback)
‘Might of slipped in and out, nobody the wiser, except we were already on the scene, account of Parmitt being gone.’ (Richard Stark, Flashfire)
‘Couldn’t you of – oh, he was ignorant in his speech – couldn’t you of prevented it?’ (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
‘I should of thought to bring a sun lounger, from the garden centre,’ Mart said. (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
‘He could of been,’ her mother said vaguely. (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
When she provoked him and he was in a temper with her, he would say, count your blessings, girl, you fink I’m bad but you could of had MacArthur. You could have had Bob Fox, or Aitkenside, or Pikey Pete. You could have had my mate Keef Capstick. You could of had Nick, and then where’d you be? (Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black)
He shouldn’t of been near enough . . . (Donal Ryan, ‘Aisling’, in A Slanting of the Sun)
Stupid idea anyway I dont think he ever wud of really done it. (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting – this example is from a teenager’s text message)
But if she hadn’t of drank she would never have seen him at all and better that she was there she thought where she could at least try to keep some grip on him before he lost the run of himself completely (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
Lar thought about it They must of gone out on a job he said (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I wonder what kind of life you might have had, if you hadn’t of been dragged back here. (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I paid a man to write it he says He must of never sent it at all (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
I wish someone had of told me you croak into his shoulder (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
Lars frowns Choosing his words He didn’t think you should of married Dickie he says (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting)
U SHUD OF TOLD ME I CUD OF SHOWD U AROUD!!!! (Paul Murray, The Bee Sting, text message)
‘Hell, if I knew I was sitting on a gold mine, I’d of sold ’em a long time ago.’ (Jim Dodge, Not Fade Away)
‘And he couldn’t of loved me because he took away my kid, he’s off someplace where I can’t never see him.’ (James Baldwin, Another Country)
‘But I would of died for my kid, I wouldn’t never of let anything happen to him.’ (James Baldwin, Another Country)
‘I couldn’t of done nothing else,’ he cried, ‘what else could I of done? Where could I of gone with Esther, and me a preacher, too? And what could I of done with you?’ (James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain)
‘Must of had a heart attack or something!?’ (Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin, Tank Girl One):
A curious example in Jim Nesbit’s novel Lethal Injection, where a character says “would’ve of”. My first thought was that it was a copy-editing or proofreading fix that stopped halfway: changing “would of” to “would’ve” and neglecting to delete the “of”. But a search online shows occasional analogous examples in unedited writing, and adjacent discussion on Language Log, so it may well be authentically dialectal:
The example below, from alt-manga historian Ryan Holmberg’s The Translator Without Talent, is from The Marvel Times, a pretend-newspaper about comics that he created on his twelfth birthday. So its must of is probably not deliberate and also completely forgivable:
Such phrases appear often in Cormac McCarthy’s novels. Here are some from Cities of the Plain, all used in dialogue:
You’d never of knowed it though.
I wouldn’t of wrote home for nothin.
Looks like they’d of learned to stay out of it.
Johnny if he hadnt of found that girl would of found somethin else.
And there was nothin any mortal man could of done to of stopped it.
And from Blood Meridian:
No, No, he said. I mean ye was lost to of come here.
It might of been a mule.
Somebody ought to of pickled it a long time ago.
Must of been a thousand indians in there all settin around.
He appears to of spoke for hisself.
I couldnt of learned it off ten dutchmen.
Him and the governor they sat up till breakfast and it was Paris this and London that in five languages, you’d of give something to of heard them.
Don’t you know he’d of took you with him? He’d of took you, boy.
Glanton spat. Ort to of shot that one too, he said.
Well, he said. I’d of thought any damn fool could saw the barrels off a shotgun.
That old boy you bought them off of might of said they was injins but that dont make it so.
The man didnt answer.
Them ears could of come off of cannibals . . .You wouldnt of lived anyway, the man said.
And from All the Pretty Horses:
They might as well of, he said.
Otherwise I’d of been born in Alabama.
…it was a mistake not to of told you.
But if it hadnt of been for her I wouldnt of made it.
He might well could of
Might well could of is also a nice example of a double modal. The [modal]-of construction is used frequently throughout Chris Cleave’s remarkable novel Incendiary:
She was like that was Mena. Philosophical. I’d definitely of killed myself if it hadn’t of been for her.
If you could of looked in my eyes you’d of seen the same thing I shouldn’t wonder.
I wouldn’t of come near you I’d never of let you touch me you should be ashamed.
Most notably in this exchange between two people only one of whom uses it dialectally:
– He would of said something.
– Maybe he wouldn’t have.
– Wouldn’t you of?A remarkable example in A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore uses it without a preceding modal, in the speech of a young child:
‘You got brown eyes,’ she said. ‘I of brown eyes.’
Searching the Corpus of Contemporary American English for the string would of [v*], where [v*] is a verb, produces the graph below. It shows that the of-form’s predominant setting is fiction, usually ‘would of been’, and it also shows up in transcription of actual speech, as in the academic and newspaper instances. You can click through the image to view examples, sources, and further information at COCA.
The magazine data are false positives (‘we’d have a better chance of achieving a breakthrough in quantum gravity than we would of figuring out how to reliably connect with teenagers’), but you get an idea of the construction’s low frequency and particular genre distribution.
Plotting could of [v*] usages over time, using the related Corpus of Historical American English, suggests the construction may have peaked. Or is that just wishful thinking? Again, you can click on this graph for details, or open it in another tab.
Of 1000 occurrences of could/would of in the Oxford English Corpus, about 850 are from ‘representations of direct speech (mostly from the Fiction domain, but also from interviews and courtroom transcripts)’. That leaves 150 genuine written instances of could/would of, compared with 4 million examples of standard could/would have. I can’t help picturing a global battalion of editors keeping it firmly at bay.
The of-form is not frequent in edited prose, but it appears quite often in casual writing and it has been around a while. Does that count for much? MWDEU says its prolonged use has ‘not made it respectable’, and recommends avoiding it – including in transcriptions of real speech, since ’ve serves the purpose equally well. I agree, and I think if someone explicitly says of, and stresses it, that might warrant a ‘[sic]’.
Regular readers know I like to make room for literary effect and poetic licence, but I have never warmed to this mistake. Every time I see it – be its use naive or intentional – I want to fix it. Authenticity of dialect and character are all well and good, but I think the main effect of the deliberate usage in edited prose is further uncertainty and error (not to mention irritation, in some quarters). What do you think?
Updates:
Years after writing this, I’ve softened considerably on the modal-of construction. This is partly because of exposure to its use by so many great writers, and also because it’s a good example of language change – a natural, essential characteristic of a living language. See my post on reconciling descriptivism with editing for more discussion.
I’ve come across many more examples in books, and have added them to the sets above and below. @desktopenglish on Twitter drew my attention to this BBC article that quotes a footballer saying he ‘Shouldn’t of reacted the way I did’.
What sounds to me like a good audio example comes from author Zadie Smith on the Adam Buxton Podcast. This link should cue the player automatically at 15:50, but if it doesn’t, that’s the time stamp. The relevant exchange is as follows, discussing Smith’s father:
Smith: He was very uptight about time, yeah.
Buxton: It rubbed off on you.
Smith: It must of, yeah.
Medievalist Lucy Allen found the line ‘For methowte I wold not for my life a sen it fallen’ in a 14thC religious text, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich. Translating it as ‘I thought I would not for my life of seen it fall’ [underlines mine], she writes: ‘it’s always fun when you notice something in a medieval text that is a dead ringer for one of the “modern” mistakes that horrify the pearl-clutchers’.
David Crystal adds further historical commentary in his book Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar:
On 5 September 1819 the poet John Keats sends an apologetic letter to his publisher John Taylor, in which he writes:
Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fierry phrase in my first Letter.
‘Should not of written’? From such a great poet? It must have been just a slip, because later on in the same letter he writes ‘You should not have delayed.’ What interests me is to find this confusion 200 years ago. It isn’t just a modern thing, as some critics say. That identity in pronunciation between the preposition of and the unstressed form of the auxiliary verb have has been around a long time.
Morph, a linguistics blog by the Surrey Morphology Group at the University of Surrey, has a great post on different aspects of the modal-of usage: ‘What’s the good of “would of”?’
Lots of examples in Anne Tyler’s If Morning Ever Comes, spoken by several different characters (of different ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities):
‘You mustn’t of been but twelve or so but I remembered.’
‘You shouldn’t of mentioned breakfast, boy,’ he said.
‘Course I think he could of made a better choice in wives, but then Sally’s right pretty and I reckon I can see his point in picking her.’
‘You know, when I was a boy we’d of been plumb through town by now.’
‘If we’d of known,’ she said, ‘I’d of cleaned up house a little.’
‘Folks tell me I take too good care of him, so it can’t of been that he got too cold. Though he is right much of a puddle-wader, that could’ve done it.’ [Note nearby use of could’ve.]
‘I don’t guess my letter would of made any change in him one way or the other.’
‘If I’d of married Jamie,” she said, “I would of had a different family.’
‘Well, if it hadn’t of been her, it’d been someone else.’
‘She mustn’t of seen us.’
Ross Macdonald also makes regular use of the construction:
‘If they knew they had a buyer, they might of stayed in business to accommodate you.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer)
‘I wish I could of died instead of him.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Blue Hammer)
‘The other man took them, he must of.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He must of got away.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He must of fell down on the knife and stabbed himself.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘He would of killed him too.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘When Culligan came marching out, armed up to the teeth, you could of knocked me over with a ‘dozer.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘Lucky for him I was out, or I’d of shown him what’s what.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
‘You were just a tiny baby, but that wouldn’t of stopped him.’ (Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case)
As does Elmore Leonard; these are from The Hot Kid:
Emmett Long kept looking at him. ‘You had a gun you’d of shot me, huh?’
‘I’d of shoved the ice cream cone up his goddamn nose.’
What Oris did, he got mad, changed the name of the company from Busy Bee Oil & Gas – a cartoon bumblebee in the trademark they’d of had one day – to NMD Oil & Gas, standing for No More Dusters, and worked a year as a driller to restore his capital.
‘The only one I told was Emmett,’ Carl said. ‘It had to of been Crystal told the papers.’
She had to wonder if she had been here would he of recognized her, and bet he would’ve.
‘I’d of arrested him he’s walking in the door,’ Lester said.
Franklin was shaking his head. ‘I’d of seen ’em.’
‘I told him he shouldn’t of left the key in it.’
‘She looked at him again with a faint smile. ‘I would never of suspected.’
‘The first remark out of his mouth, I’d of pulled and killed him where he stood.’
‘She’d of given me the choice of taking a chance with Teddy or being locked up.’
‘She wouldn’t of started breakfast if they weren’t all downstairs near ready to eat.’
‘Jack’s a talker,’ Carl said. ‘He’d of thought of a reason to go alone, pick up a bottle? And Tony’s polite, he would’ve said don’t steal the car, okay?’
‘No, he couldn’t of known that.’
‘Jack Belmont wouldn’t of left with bullets in his gun.’
The minute Jack wasn’t looking, like taking a leak or something, she’d of run out of the house to find a cop.
But Nancy knew who he was, so so the kidnapping wouldn’t of worked.
‘If I hadn’t decided to step back inside to answer the phone, I’d of missed one of the great opportunities of my career as a journalist . . .’
Richard Stark, already quoted above, has half a dozen examples in his first novel, The Hunter:
The spelling occurs often in Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong:‘If Art wanted to see you, he’d of told you where to find him.’
Stegman blinked. ‘He must of believed me.’
‘His wife must of known it, but she never told me.’
‘Five minutes later,’ the owner told him, ‘you’d of been out of luck.’
‘…it must of meant something, that’s all.’
‘I wouldn’t of believed it.’
He should of taken it last year.
She might of come down and gone back, Ike said. She might not of too.
She must not of stuck.
She must of went home, Mr. Guthrie.
You shouldn’t even of touched that.
Well, he might of went to Denver, Raymond said. Then he might of went back to the Rosebud in South Dakota.
I should of called during these months, I know.
You could of done something yourself too, you know, he said.
Something must of happened to her, Harold said. She must of got taken off or something.
I can’t think of anything we might of did.
You don’t even know where he might of took her for sure.
He might of landed her in Pueblo or Walsenburg.We didn’t know what we might of done to cause you to want to leave here like that.
He better not of hurt her permanent, Raymond said.
And in Pete Dexter’s novel Train:
“They must of left the sprinklers on all night,” the fat man said after he got back in control of his deportment again.
“He must of got home somehow,” Train said.
“She all convulsed the whole time they going through the house; she keeps saying, ‘Oh, no, he couldn’t of did that….'”
Train began thinking more and more that the world might of decided to let him alone.
Now he thought about he, she might not of even noticed the table leg if he hadn’t dropped it and woke up the dog…
Train thought it must of reminded him of that feeling when he was hit by that car and rolled across the road.
Then, if it was the right officer, they might of just carted Mayflower out of there, just because she was pretty, and then took his ass out into the desert and left it.
“One of them must of got up here and took it,” he said.
It seemed like Mr. Cooper must of told him where he come from, or how else would he know?
Must of bought his clothes in the boy’s department.
Melrose might of been trying to say something too, and Train distinctly saw his jaw slide out from under his face.
It came to Train the Plural must of heard her before she even come out of the double-wide, that he must of known from how she was walking that she was mad.
“A blind man,” he said, “We should of sold tickets.”
Walter Tevis’s The Hustler, from multiple characters:
‘You should never of quit going to Sunday school.’
‘I already watched you lose – watched you lose to a man you should of beat.’
‘And if I hadn’t already paid for it I could of with the money I won in side bets.’
‘They couldn’t of helped but hear of me.’
‘I should of let that guy quit, Charlie, like you told me.’
#books #corpusLinguistics #couldOf #dialects #dialogue #etymology #eyeDialect #fiction #grammar #language #linguistics #literacy #modalVerbs #modals #phrases #reading #schwa #speech #speechErrors #spelling #transcription #typos #usage #verbs #writing
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The Ten Best Children’s Books of 2025 Feature a Story of Untrustworthy Fish and a Tribute to a Beloved Bus Driver – Smithsonian Magazine
A Smithsonian magazine special report
The Ten Best Children’s Books of 2025 Feature a Story of Untrustworthy Fish and a Tribute to a Beloved Bus Driver
This year’s top titles run the gamut and include an adaption of a Korean folk tale, a highly entertaining question-and-answer book and much more
By Megan Gambino – Senior Editor December 17, 2025
Smithsonian magazine’s picks for the best children’s books of 2025 include The Three-Year Tumble, Let’s Be Bees and Every Monday Mabel. Illustration by Emily LankiewiczBack when I first published this list in 2017, my two daughters were just 3 years and 7 months old. Now somehow I find myself the mom of an 11-year-old and an 8-year-old who have largely outgrown picture books. My sixth grader is deep into The Hunger Games, and my third grader eats up The Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels. But I, however, will never grow out of them.
Reading picture books is like eating dessert for every meal. From rowdy rhymes to outrageous plots to all-absorbing illustrations, they are sweet and satisfying.
The authors of my favorite children’s books published this year succeed, I’d argue, because they genuinely tap into a childlike perspective. Mike Rampton poses questions that seemingly only kids could come up with in There Are No Silly Questions. X. Fang captures the complex emotions that swirl inside tiny bodies in Broken, and Gideon Sterer demonstrates how imaginary friends can lead to real ones in If You Make a Call on a Banana Phone.
Treat yourself, and the kids in your lives, to some dessert.
There Are No Silly Questions by Mike Rampton
I’d like to meet Britain-based writer Mike Rampton. With his debut picture book, There Are No Silly Questions, the author has proved that he thinks like a kid, and that usually makes for a good time. How else would he have come up with the 200-plus truly clever queries he poses in its pages?
Apparently, Rampton’s daughter inspired the project when she asked a real stumper: Can spiders run out of web? “I realized I had absolutely no idea, but really wanted to know,” the author explains on the title page. “Hundreds of questions later, here we are!”
Rampton delivers questions that feel like they’re straight out of our kids’ mouths. Why do my fingers get wrinkly in the bath? Why do dogs spin around before going to the bathroom? How many people’s birthday is it today? And much like our very own Ask Smithsonian series, he calls on experts to help answer them—only not curators and scientists at the Smithsonian Institution, but a cadre of researchers from the University of Cambridge near his home.
The encyclopedic nature of the book—covering the human body, animals, space, music, inventions, food and more—makes it a great diversion in a car ride. Or kids can jump to a page for a few fun facts before bed.
And about those spinning dogs … it could be something to do with the Earth’s magnetic field. Seriously.
There Are No Silly Questions: More than 200 Weird and Wacky Questions, Expertly Answered!
Have you ever wondered . . . If dinosaurs sneezed? How long would it take to run around the world? If moths like light so much, why do they only come out at night?
Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Ten Best Children’s Books of 2025 Feature a Story of Untrustworthy Fish and a Tribute to a Beloved Bus Driver
#2025 #ChildrenSBooks #MikeRampton #Smithsonian #SmithsonianMagazine #TenBest #ThereAreNoSillyQuestions #TributeToABelovedBusDriver #UntrustwothyFish -
The Ten Best Children’s Books of 2025 Feature a Story of Untrustworthy Fish and a Tribute to a Beloved Bus Driver – Smithsonian Magazine
A Smithsonian magazine special report
The Ten Best Children’s Books of 2025 Feature a Story of Untrustworthy Fish and a Tribute to a Beloved Bus Driver
This year’s top titles run the gamut and include an adaption of a Korean folk tale, a highly entertaining question-and-answer book and much more
By Megan Gambino – Senior Editor December 17, 2025
Smithsonian magazine’s picks for the best children’s books of 2025 include The Three-Year Tumble, Let’s Be Bees and Every Monday Mabel. Illustration by Emily LankiewiczBack when I first published this list in 2017, my two daughters were just 3 years and 7 months old. Now somehow I find myself the mom of an 11-year-old and an 8-year-old who have largely outgrown picture books. My sixth grader is deep into The Hunger Games, and my third grader eats up The Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels. But I, however, will never grow out of them.
Reading picture books is like eating dessert for every meal. From rowdy rhymes to outrageous plots to all-absorbing illustrations, they are sweet and satisfying.
The authors of my favorite children’s books published this year succeed, I’d argue, because they genuinely tap into a childlike perspective. Mike Rampton poses questions that seemingly only kids could come up with in There Are No Silly Questions. X. Fang captures the complex emotions that swirl inside tiny bodies in Broken, and Gideon Sterer demonstrates how imaginary friends can lead to real ones in If You Make a Call on a Banana Phone.
Treat yourself, and the kids in your lives, to some dessert.
There Are No Silly Questions by Mike Rampton
I’d like to meet Britain-based writer Mike Rampton. With his debut picture book, There Are No Silly Questions, the author has proved that he thinks like a kid, and that usually makes for a good time. How else would he have come up with the 200-plus truly clever queries he poses in its pages?
Apparently, Rampton’s daughter inspired the project when she asked a real stumper: Can spiders run out of web? “I realized I had absolutely no idea, but really wanted to know,” the author explains on the title page. “Hundreds of questions later, here we are!”
Rampton delivers questions that feel like they’re straight out of our kids’ mouths. Why do my fingers get wrinkly in the bath? Why do dogs spin around before going to the bathroom? How many people’s birthday is it today? And much like our very own Ask Smithsonian series, he calls on experts to help answer them—only not curators and scientists at the Smithsonian Institution, but a cadre of researchers from the University of Cambridge near his home.
The encyclopedic nature of the book—covering the human body, animals, space, music, inventions, food and more—makes it a great diversion in a car ride. Or kids can jump to a page for a few fun facts before bed.
And about those spinning dogs … it could be something to do with the Earth’s magnetic field. Seriously.
There Are No Silly Questions: More than 200 Weird and Wacky Questions, Expertly Answered!
Have you ever wondered . . . If dinosaurs sneezed? How long would it take to run around the world? If moths like light so much, why do they only come out at night?
Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Ten Best Children’s Books of 2025 Feature a Story of Untrustworthy Fish and a Tribute to a Beloved Bus Driver
#2025 #ChildrenSBooks #MikeRampton #Smithsonian #SmithsonianMagazine #TenBest #ThereAreNoSillyQuestions #TributeToABelovedBusDriver #UntrustwothyFish -
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So, I set to work on a tiny bit of #Python
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I needed a better way to control the #Hue light in my #home #office.
So, I set to work on a tiny bit of #Python
https://firesphere.dev/articles/let-there-be-light?mtm_campaign=social&mtm_kwd=mastodon -
I needed a better way to control the #Hue light in my #home #office.
So, I set to work on a tiny bit of #Python
https://firesphere.dev/articles/let-there-be-light?mtm_campaign=social&mtm_kwd=mastodon -
I needed a better way to control the #Hue light in my #home #office.
So, I set to work on a tiny bit of #Python
https://firesphere.dev/articles/let-there-be-light?mtm_campaign=social&mtm_kwd=mastodon -
I needed a better way to control the #Hue light in my #home #office.
So, I set to work on a tiny bit of #Python
https://firesphere.dev/articles/let-there-be-light?mtm_campaign=social&mtm_kwd=mastodon -
Red-ossier #dogwood flower buds & tiny blooms.
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Red-ossier #dogwood flower buds & tiny blooms.
#Spring #perennials #Saanich #VictoriaBC #VancouverIsland #VanIsle #PacificNorthwest #PNW #flowers #botanical #plants #NativePlantGarden #Bloomscrolling #florespondence #PollinatorGardens #FlowersIdentification #NativePlantsOfPNW #NativeWildflowers #NativePlants #PlantIdentification #botany #nature
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"Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy." - Wisława Szymborska
#quote #quoteoftheday #quotestoliveby #GoodWork #KeepGoing #SmallThings #BeingHuman