Fredrik deBoer

What are we doing? This is really all I have to say about the Trump administration’s plan—decision? infernal covenant?—to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan later this year. It will be the first ever government-sanctioned snuff film in American history. Of course I am against it. Is arguing about the subject worthwhile? It seems to me like something about which it is not even possible to argue. Maybe “arguing” is not the sort of thing you can do in a situation like this. Maybe instead we can talk.

Now that hardly anyone actually reads Lewis Carroll, it is perhaps once again possible to speak of the old East Germany as a country which was “Through the Looking Glass.” Half a century ago, this was a terrible cliché, though anyone who passed from one side of Berlin to the other quickly found that (as so often) it was a cliché because it was true. Every feature of life at first appeared the same as on the other side. But then it turned out to be wholly, profoundly different.

People occasionally ask me how to get into the writing business, which is a famously lucrative industry that expands to new horizons of prestige and profit yearly, almost daily. Their theory, I guess, is that I have been on both sides of transom and am in a pretty decent position to give a holistic account of the business. I think that confidence is a bit misplaced, but here I’ll lay bare whatever secrets or mysteries of the scribbling trade that I have learned through the slipping years.