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In Tehran in 2017, on a day of hard snow and spiritual distress, I kept having visions of the city destroyed. As if everything I saw—the energy and endurance, the countless daily mutinies, the will to joy—was just the “before” to an aftermath of total ruin. I pray I’m wrong.

Los Angeles is so kitsch that it transcends kitsch entirely and becomes newly real again, a place without referents, a place that refers only to itself. That's what makes it fascinating. Oddly enough, it is Europeans who understand this best, while it disturbs Americans.

I love these Morrison editions. Bought them a few years for $2 each at the Pasadena Central Library.

Agreed. The Caribbean has produced some of the best prose stylists of the past century. Jean Rhys, for instance, whose greatness (in my view) is yet to be fully understood.

The Israeli government and much of the society is in a state of total disassociation from reality. They are dragging the entire world into their death spiral.

The scale of the wreckage on Patrice Lumumba Street in Tehran from an Israeli strike.

I reserve my maximum contempt for LA Iranians who support this.

Jeremy Lybarger London Review of Books I haven’t read the new novel — but it seems to me the universal pans are a sort of delayed and pent up reaction to his debut novel, which everyone pretended to like for so long, despite its sloppiness. This pile on now is retroactive.

I hope the Pahlavi name is completely erased from Iranian memory

NEW: 130 Iranians Arrested Across U.S. in Past Week, 670 Now in ICE Custody Fox News, citing multiple federal sources, reports that ICE is ramping up nationwide efforts to locate and detain Iranian nationals as part of a broader Trump administration crackdown following the U.S.

As sharp as people say, a real horror story. I think the book’s strength is that it (mostly) resists the temptation to just mock the expat Berlin couple. It’s more than a cheap satire of “digital nomads.” We are all implicated in the trap it describes.