Vice President JD Vance was explicit: “He’s not banning media outlets.” Trump had merely decided, Vance said, “we’re not going to give you special access inside the White House.”

U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz made the same distinction. Freedom of the press did not confer “an inherent right to any government facility that you want, whether it’s Langley or the White House.”

The White House itself reduced the argument to a slogan: “White House access is a privilege — not a right.”

In other words: whatever you thought of the policy, the administration’s defense depended on geography. Trump wasn’t trying to prevent these organizations from covering the president. He was deciding who got through the White House gates.

Then the president— the same one those aides had been taking about— arrived at the United Nations.

He spotted CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and said: “I’m surprised that CNN is here covering me. You shouldn’t be here. You should not be here covering me.” Collins pointed out that the United Nations had allowed CNN in. Trump repeated: “You should not be here covering me.”

Should. Three times. That word gives away the game. His aides had argued about where CNN had a right to go. Trump was talking about what CNN ought to be allowed to do. Even after Collins reminded him that the United Nations had granted CNN access, he didn’t retreat to the geography defense. He repeated it: “You should not be here covering me.”

The United Nations, of course, is not the White House. Nor is it a U.S. government facility.

So, as he so often does, Trump cut the legs out from under the people explaining what he really meant. His own words suggest something considerably broader than the rationale his administration had spent the previous days offering: his objection followed CNN beyond the White House gates.

This has nothing to do with location and it has nothing to do with the press. A president must have thick skin, endure countless abuses and maintain equanimity because they make the most consequential decisions in the world. Donald Trump has lashed out at the press before when pressed to explain himself. Those episodes were windows into his temperament. That window is stuck open.

After the interaction with Collins, the president then went inside and addressed the United Nations, where he discussed whether to annihilate Iran if it did not make a deal.

A president does not get to choose which news organizations cover him according to whether he likes their coverage. The whole point of an independent press is that the government does not decide what gets reported about it.

There will be plenty to say about the First Amendment questions raised by that decision. But the president’s attack on those who cover him and my recent piece in the Atlantic made me think that we should spend some time thinking about how we should judge what the president chooses to do?

In my Atlantic piece, “The Pinball President,” I argued that a president’s enormous capacity to attract attention is a power that requires discernment and stewardship. It is also a rough proxy for his priorities.

One way to evaluate a president is to apply the Eisenhower matrix test.

Dwight Eisenhower famously distinguished between the urgent and the important. The Eisenhower Matrix that grew from that distinction divides work into four categories and quadrants:

Every time the president speaks, posts, stages an event, launches an initiative or directs the machinery of government toward something, we can ask ourselves: Which quadrant is this?

The question isn’t whether the press approves of the president’s priorities. It is whether the president’s priorities correspond to the responsibilities of the office and the needs of the country.

That is one way to test the argument I made in “The Pinball President.” And it has an advantage at a moment when the president calls unfavorable coverage propaganda: You don’t have to take the press’s word for it.

IDENTIFY THE ACTION

Select a specific implemented policy, not the president’s rhetoric.

What changed in government policy or practice?

Examples might include an executive order, a new regulation, legislation the president signed, a change in enforcement, a funding decision, a grant program, a tariff, a change in benefits or services, or a change in federal personnel or deployment.

ESTABLISH THE MECHANISM

Explain how that action could produce the measured outcome through any of these actions. Trace the chain from presidential action to the claimed result.

ESTABLISH IMPLEMENTATION

Did the action actually change what government did?

An executive order, for example, may direct agencies to act. But issuing the order does not establish that agencies implemented it, how quickly they did so or at what scale. Measure what actually happened on the ground.

CHECK TIMING AND REACH

Did the intervention precede the measured outcome? Or was the thing already happening? Did the policy have enough time to work and reach the people or places being measured? (Running to the front of a parade to claim credit for trends doesn’t count).

ESTABLISH THE COUNTERFACTUAL

What probably would have happened without the policy? For example, has the Iran war won more than diplomacy would have?

Did affected people or places improve more than credible comparison groups, after accounting for earlier trends and relevant differences in the places you’re comparing?

Where no comparison group exists, look for other evidence capable of distinguishing the policy’s effect from the existing trend.

LOOK FOR DIFFERENCES IN EXPOSURE

If some people or places received more of the intervention than others, did greater exposure correspond with a larger effect?

A federal grant program, enforcement initiative or funding increase should generally leave some evidence where its reach or intensity differed.

TEST COMPETING EXPLANATIONS

Examine local policies, inherited federal programs, economic changes, reporting changes and other plausible causes. Ask whether those explanations fit the timing, geography and size of the change as well as or better than the presidential action.

REPORT THE LIMIT

Distinguish a demonstrated contribution, suggestive evidence and an effect that has not been established. (But just because a presidential connection has not been established does not mean “zero,” it might mean you just don’t have the data.

The critical question: What changed because of the policy, beyond what was already happening?

A before-and-after comparison to an inauguration alone cannot answer that, no matter how hard a supporter or detractor tries.

IS THE FIGURE A CONTINUATION OR A TURN?

Every figure used to support a claim needs at least four comparisons:

LEVEL

How high or low is it now, compared with a meaningful historical baseline, not just a conveniently selected peak?

DIRECTION

Was it already rising or falling before the administration or intervention? Or is the rise or fall determined by causes an administration has nothing to do with, like population growth.

PACE

Has that rise or fall accelerated, slowed or reversed? Compare equivalent periods and consistent populations.

BREADTH AND DURABILITY

Is the change widespread and sustained, or concentrated in a few places or months?

TIMING OF THE TURN

When did the change in direction or pace actually begin? Did it precede the presidential action, coincide with its implementation or follow it by a plausible interval?

For economic measures, that also means separating inflation-adjusted from nominal values, per-person from aggregate totals, and median households from averages.

For crime, it means separating homicide from other violence and national estimates from selected cities.

REMINDER

A result can occur during a presidency without resulting from presidential action. Conversely, a trend that began earlier could still have been accelerated, slowed or otherwise altered by later presidential action.

Season One

Episode 1 — An Exploration of Inklings

Episode 2 — Sending our Son to College

Episode 3 — Remembering George and Defending the Morning

Episode 4 — The Power of Four Numbers

Episode 5 — Remembering Early 1990s New York

Episode 6 — The Sneaky Pitfalls of the To-Do List

Episode 7 — Moving in New York Twenty Years After September 11th.

Episode 8 — Time Travel Via an Assortment of Journal Entries

Episode 9 — The Meaning Behind All This Navel Gazing

Season Two

Episode 1 — A trip to the coffee shop

Episode 2 — It was all Mom’s Idea

Episode 3 — Why? Why? Why?

Episode 4 — What will you leave behind?

Episode 5 — Morning reading is a dunk of fluffy focaccia in olive oil.

First reading1: Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

“In South Carolina they’d treated him like a beast, and he’d survived. He’d grown bigger, stronger, older, better. But having returned to the world he’d grown up in, he had no idea how to sit in a room with his mother, or what to say to this sixteen-year-old girl, no idea how to get through a few days in his life until he shipped to Louisiana for Advanced Infantry Training, until he got back where people would tell him what to do.”

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Second reading: Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas

I found once more something of the joy there is in being nothing and in depending on Our Lady for everything. This is the key to the simplest and easiest way of the interior life: to have no greatness or holiness or distinction that one can claim as one’s own but to rely entirely on her love and her protection-- knowing that she will obtain for us,, at the right moment grace to do the good thing that God wills us to do. From then on the whole spiritual life becomes nothing else but a question of looking to her in confidence and faithfully receiving everything that comes to us through her without clinging to it or keeping it as our own, and without reflecting on ourselves.

Third reading: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

I have been so taken up with the thoughts of leaving Bag End, and of saying farewell, that I have never even considered the direction, said Frodo. ‘For where am I to go? And by what shall I steer? What is to be my quest? Bilbo went to find a treasure, there and back again; but I go to lose one, and not return, as far as I can see.’

‘But you cannot see very far, said Gandalf. Neither can I. It may be your task to find the Cracks of Doom; but that quest may be for others: I do not know. At any rate you are not ready for that long road yet?

No indeed!’ said Frodo. ‘But in the meantime what course am

I to take?’

“Towards danger, but not too rashly, nor too straight.”

Have at it with these quotations and stop reading if you’d like to simply enjoy those passages or your Sunday on the beach.

Here’s how they combined for me this rainy morning.

All three men want someone to tell them what to do.

The young soldier in Tree of Smoke, James Houston, has just finished basic training. He is seventeen, home for a few days before the Army moves him along toward Vietnam. The Army has made him capable of everything except sitting in a room with his mother, or his mother’s truck with his girlfriend. He finds that the choices of ordinary life make him physically ill. They overwhelm him and he just wants to be back where life is orderly and he knows what to do. Where there are no choices.

Merton wrote this as a Trappist monk in Kentucky. He had already chosen the most constrained life on offer: vows of obedience, a bell for every hour, an abbot to tell him what to do. It didn’t take. He frets in his journal over whether he should be a hermit instead, or quit writing books.2 So he hands the steering to Mary3. All he has to do is listen to Our Lady and his restlessness goes away. (Not for long!)

Then there’s Frodo. He has inherited a ring he now knows must be destroyed, and he asks the wizard the soldier’s question: By what shall I steer? Gandalf, who could issue orders if anyone could, declines. Neither can I. What he offers instead neither the Army nor Our Lady provides: advice on how to choose. Not too rashly, nor too straight.

I’m suspicious, or I have been, of connections I see across my morning reading. But I’m starting to think that the artificial search for a through-line in very different texts causes meaning to rise up out of each individual text.4 I hadn’t read Fellowship of the Ring for twenty years, and the movies have taken up residence in my mind. So I might have sped past this moment. The hunt for a through-line slowed me down, and the soldier and the monk told me where to look.

Two lines I would have skated past now hook together. Frodo says Bilbo went to find a treasure, but he goes to lose one. Merton wants to receive everything without clinging to it. The monk prays for an open hand. The hobbit has to carry one across Middle-earth.

The soldier is the odd man out. He came home bigger, stronger, older, better. He can close his fist tight, but he can’t get through an afternoon. Training gave him everything but the ability to choose. (I think it kinda trains choosing out of you, no?) Frodo gets the choosing first and has to find the strength on the road. (Gandalf says it “you are not ready for that long road yet.” Thanks Gandalf!)

It’s a very human thing to long for peace from choices. What Frodo is about to step into is one choice after another, all of them with very high stakes (Towards danger!), and for which he recognizes he has no capacity. Yet! It is a moment of extraordinary courage which I hadn’t felt in my bones until this morning and for which I have Denis Johnson and Thomas Merton to thank.

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I’ve spent the last few weeks pressing these little black buttons arranged before me. Navel Gazing took some writing and rewriting, but I’m very happy with how Episode Five turned out. It’s about why I read fiction in the morning and how the container shapes what you put in it.

Less happy I am with gingham shirt guy, who is conducting animated phone conversations on this train.

That makes five episodes of Season Two. All of them live here, which subscribers should find easier than the previous arrangement. (I’m retiring the separate Substack soon and tucking the show under the umbrella at johndickerson.com. I’ll transfer the subscriptions when I do)

I’ve changed seats. The guy across from me looks homicidal. Frying pan. Fire.1

My latest piece for The Atlantic posted this morning. It’s about how a president uses public attention, and you can find it here.

This one required heavy work on the keyboard. The work lay in untangling public attention from private presidential attention—ideas linked but not identical, and often conflated. Margy Slattery, who spent a great deal of attention on the piece, reminded me why editors are so necessary and why I have such affection for them. I didn’t need reminding of course, but in this world of delights, where people are tempted to think that the craft and structure of an institution like The Atlantic aren’t worth the cost, I am here to testify that the care, fact-checking, and copy-editing all march toward precision and clarity.

NPR published my appearance on Wild Card with Rachel Martin. I really enjoyed being on the program. Rachel is very talented.

NPR published my appearance on Wild Card with Rachel Martin, recorded onstage in Aspen this summer. Rachel draws cards with questions on them, but the art is in her follow up and the space she creates for a conversation that covers some ground.

That’s it. I am going back to reading. I’ll have more to say soon enough, but I’ve thrown enough at you for a Sunday.

Thank you,
John

“Oh my God we dropped our son at college and our dog is dead.” -- Anne.

Anne is my wife. You’d like her.

She said this one Sunday in 2021 while we were reading in the living room.

There are at least two kinds of living room declarations. The first -- of which this is not an example-- punctuates a tense domestic exchan…

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Welcome to Navel Gazing.

I’m John Dickerson

We start this second episode of Season one as we have every episode in its long history, with a written notebook entry:

Notebook 75. Page 6, September 2021:

“They chose you.”

This entry greeted me when I opened my Field Notes notebook on the living room Sunday …

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We’re two episodes in an I’m grateful for all of the feedback from those of you out there in the Navel Gazing corps. We’ll rummage in the mail bag at the end of this episode, but for now, let’s follow what the notebook has to tell us for this period of time that we’ve got under the mi…

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Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode four of Navel Gazing. Season One

I’m John Dickerson

The entry that starts today’s episode is:

1016

It’s from Notebook 75, p. 8, September 2021

That’s it: 1016.

And we thank you for listening. On our next episode, four random letters read aloud…

I kid.

This entry is found in the tight terrain of just a fe…

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“The day does not have to begin with a head dunk in the bilge pump. 8:40 and I still have not looked at Twitter.”

—Notebook 35, April 17, 2017

Hello again. We’re back on the terrain of attention where Season Two of Navel Gazing started. Those of you who listened to Episode One will recognize this notebook entry as an early attempt to preserve the start of the day. Defending the morning. Nine years ago, that meant trying to resist Twitter. The bilge pump.

Those of you who are of a seafaring nature are no doubt doubled over on the poop deck because you understand that a bilge pump is the mechanism that pumps water out of the bilge; you don’t and can’t dunk your head in the pump. You dunk your head into the bilge or into bilge water. We apologize for the offense this caused.

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The morning reading didn’t come into focus, despite the volume of material. But some out of context quotes for you in the hopes that looking at them this way will squeeze some meaning out of them for me:

“the fact of a woman traveling alone had created a tense solicitousness that felt to her like hatred.” -- Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson

“human nature is weak, and the kindly support and wise advice of one whom we trust often enables us to accept more perfectly what we already know and see in an obscure way.” -- Spiritual Direction and Meditation, Thomas Merton

This did kick up something. I was interviewing a priest recently about the questions people ask him. (I’m big into questions these days). He said people don’t actually want answers. They just want him to be there while they come up with their own answer.

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We have a CIA officer, two young soldiers, a priest. In the Philippines. I am reading Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson, the author of Train Dreams. How did I miss this book when it came out in 2007, when it won the National Book Award? I was covering the campaign I guess. I’m only 93 pages in but the novel is working on me. I’m not fully sure how.

I’m also not sure what’s going on. That’s part of the art of the novel, I think. To make you feel confused. That’s brave. I’m a writer who wants to make sure the reader has stepped on every cobblestone and is wearing the appropriate shoes in order to be on the pathway to the pleasing conclusion of the story or argument. (The Aristocrats!) No confusion allowed. But that’s limiting. It’s brave to resist that urge for certainty. To make uncertainty a character in the novel, as I suspect it will be in Tree of Smoke. To restrain, leave things out. To risk some reader misunderstanding. Maybe you don’t want your acclaim to be too universal, or that’s a sign that you haven’t risked enough to create something lasting and that changes a reader from the inside. You want confused Goodreads reviews!

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“But he could not think for long together of anything that evening, and he could not have analysed anything consciously; he was simply feeling. Life had stepped into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself out in his mind.”

— Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

After I finished reading Crime and Punishment I felt like I’d been released from jail. The book is close, hot, oily, stuffy. There is no shortage of shouting.

I thought I wouldn’t post today. I had theories, but who doesn’t. Since the book is about what hot takes can do to you, I thought I’d leave mine aside.

Anne made a lovely savory breakfast. We sat on the porch coming up with theories about the mushrooms growing out of our marble tabletop.

But then I picked up Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace to finish my morning reading and here I am.

Gravity and Grace starts out opaque as a breakfast plate.

“Generally what we expect of others depends on the effect of gravity upon ourselves, what we receive from them depends on the effect of gravity upon them. Sometimes (by chance) the two coincide, often they do not.”

Should I run early in the day today or later in the day?

I keep going. Weil’s point is that the soul is governed by gravity-like forces. Much of what we do happens almost mechanically. Pain produces anger. Humiliation seeks compensation. Suffering looks for somewhere else to go. Even when we do virtuous things, the energy can come from vanity, rivalry or some other base passion.

The reasoning becomes clearer after a few more paragraphs:

“The source of man’s moral energy is outside him, like that of physical energy.”

Grace. Great. But how does it work, Simone?

Like “a chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feeding on light.” Plants don’t manufacture light. Chlorophyll allows them to receive light and turn it into life.

For those who wish to be good, the central task, she is arguing, isn’t manufacturing goodness through heroic exertion. It’s developing the capacity to receive grace.

The main character in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, is consumed by a theory of the world in which his reason is in total control. We spend 500 pages watching him wrestle with that theory and fail. Lots of other shouty things happen along the way. Even near the end, after Raskolnikov has confessed and gone to prison, he still doesn’t really believe the crime was his great failure. His failure was that he couldn’t commit it and move on.

He’s been brought low by his failure to crime.

Then something happens that he doesn’t reason himself into.

A character who has spent the novel irritated by other people and bewildered by their affection for him finally allows himself to love Sonia. “How it happened he did not know.” He falls at her feet and weeps.

That evening, Sonya’s New Testament appears under his pillow. (A little much Fyodor, but I still love you.) He doesn’t open it. Instead, he wonders whether Sonia’s convictions, her feelings, her aspirations might somehow become his.

He doesn’t know. Something has happened to him that he didn’t reason himself into. And he doesn’t have a hot take. Or, Dostoevsky, in an act of beautiful artistic restraint, denies us one. (Which is why we forgive him the New Testament under the pillow.)

Life had stepped into the place of theory.

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I am peculiar. Do I mean particular? 1 Notebooks, sharpened pencils, old books with marginalia. It’s probably performative. On the other hand, if I knew how to make furniture, I wouldn’t consider the woodshop performative. What I actually believe is that these rituals (What, no burning of sage bundles?!) slow me down to the pace of understanding. Not to a better understanding than anyone else who lives a more normal life. It’s simply my process for converting exterior knowledge into intuition.

I’ve been pasting the word intuition all over the last few days since I came across it on a website devoted to explaining the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process—POMDP to the kids at the skate park—which I have been studying. The website starts this way: “This is a tutorial aimed at trying to build up the intuition behind solution procedures for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs).” I like that idea, “building up intuition.” That’s one of the ways we distinguish between knowledge and understanding. Knowledge flies away. Understanding becomes intuitive.

I spent an hour trying to explain the bond market in writing yesterday. (You’re welcome for the hot, steamy discussion topic for your Friday-night cocktail hour.) But I’m not sure I turned it into intuitive knowledge. (I’ve had to teach myself how the bond market works in one form or another since 1995.) These Notes posts on Substack exist to help me make ideas intuitive—explaining locks in learning—but the process doesn’t stop there. I have to do some number of things some number of times before it becomes truly intuitive. I’m not sure how many more.

Fragile: New information makes sense while the notes are visible.
Usable: You can reconstruct the explanation without them.
Intuitive: You can apply the mechanism to an unfamiliar case and anticipate what happens next.

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If you start your day reading Crime and Punishment, Dorothy Parker’s book reviews and Scientific American, you could be mistaken for apt. This is not apt. Unless we mean apt to confusion, interiority and the gasping need for another cup of coffee.

It was the Scientific American that really socked me. Quantum physics—the rules governing the very small, where a particle can be in several states at once until someone looks, behaves like a wave when it feels like it, and seems to know what its distant twin is doing—is confusing and not well explained.

I once interviewed Carlo Rovelli, the physicist about one of his books and I felt like I had become a kind of physics experiment measuring the smallest unit of understanding in a conversation by a person who by all external observations seems to be participating in the conversation.

The U.S. economy produced more jobs in August than expected. Economist Jason Furman pointed out on the Gabfest yesterday that we don’t talk about the unemployment picture because it’s quite good. Instead we talk about gas prices.

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I just passed Anne on the stairs as she headed down to her first floor office to work. We’re back to vertical living for a bit.

The Iran war keeps reminding us what bombing can’t do, while the Secretary of Defense reshapes the military in the image of the mindset learning its limitations in Iran. He’s reordered its culture around ten directives from a stage at Quantico, rebuilt its buying around a single word—speed, which he used 25 times in one speech—and ordered a “ruthless” review of the military’s lawyers with the instruction “no more moral ambiguity.” Is Iran proving that mindset to be a mistake, (not every problem is a nail despite what the hammer thinks?) or are the lessons of Iran the president’s to own, since he made the choices? (Author quotes self answering that question).

Six months ago, when Hegseth was two weeks into calling himself the Secretary of War, I asked a question: “What happens when decisive violence as a tool of strategy outruns the strategy it is supposed to serve?” The Iran war is answering it. I wrote then, "Eisenhower's question wasn't whether Patton was effective, it was who was holding the leash."

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I can feel the ghost particles moving through me since I read a piece in Live Science yesterday. An estimated 100 trillion neutrinos—known as “ghost particles”—pass through your body every second. This information escapes my capacity to understand it. Neutrinos are nearly massless, electrically neutral subatomic particles produced by nuclear activity—most of the ones passing through us come from the fusion powering the sun. They are called ghosts because they almost never interact with ordinary matter: they pass through your body, and even through the Earth, as though neither were there. Perhaps only one will interact with an atom in your body during your entire lifetime.

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This morning has a lot of faces. At six it looks like the fires of Mordor are burning but by 7:30 there’s mist in the valley. No deer today.

My mother-in-law told me that at church yesterday they were talking about Dolly Parton. Dolly grew up in the adjacent county. A little more than a half hour from where the church was in which she was being discussed. After the readings the kids gather on the steps of the altar. “A very famous East Tennessee lady named Dolly Parton died,” started the spiritual teacher who has the delicate job of talking to the kids in front of a congregation of adults. “People of your generation know her as the book lady,” she explained, locating the subject of her talk: Parton’s sweeping generosity. A few more sentences joined the world and then a child reached for the microphone to interrupt. “Not only was she generous,” said the young girl, clear and loud, “but she thought that being a billionaire was an actual failure.”

Nice work Dolly.

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“Inside me, I quickly come to the barrier, the limit of what I am, beyond which I cannot go by myself. It is such a narrow limit and yet for years I thought it was the universe. Now I see it is nothing. Shall I go on being content with this restriction? If I never become anything but a writer, that is what it will amount to—sitting on my own desert island which is not much bigger than an English penny. Desire always what is beyond and all around you, you poor sap! Want to progress and escape and expand and be emptied and vanish into God.

How quickly my limits accuse me of my nothingness and I cannot go beyond. I pause and reflect and reflection makes it more final. Then I forget to reflect any more and by surprise I make a little escape, at least to the threshold, and love moves in darkness, just enough to tell me that there is such a thing as freedom.”

-Thomas Merton, journal entry, 1949. Exact volume and page require the photographed book’s title and copyright pages.

“If you ran away, you’d come back to yourself.”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett, Part VI, Chapter II.

“Take care! I don’t care. Don’t you worry about me! I am as happy now as I have ever been, and that is saying a great deal. But the time has come. I am being swept off my feet at last,” he added, and then in a low voice, as if to himself, he sang softly in the dark.

--J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party,” p. 36 in the photographed edition.

I resisted picking these three because they’re so connected it would feel constructed which isn’t really the point. But who can tell what powers shape our ends. So:

I like Merton because it is the most intimate. Not surprising. It’s from his journal. Essentially we’re watching grace and the Holy Spirit work. Merton is fretting, as he does a lot in the journals, and just when he’s given up, he gets a vision of the thing he most wants. You’re not in control of it, Tom. (Or Louis) Instead: surrender, love, self-emptying. All bigger than an English penny.

Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov isn’t in charge either. Changing your location does not change the self you bring with you. You can run from circumstances, consequences, or other people, but eventually you “come back to yourself.” Geography cannot accomplish an inward transformation.

Bilbo does change his geography, though, and it’s a huge success. That passage comes just after he leaves the Ring behind. But he’s not merely shifting geography. He has relinquished the hold of power, control, and predictability. “The Road goes ever on and on,” he sings. The final lines are: “Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say.” He is surrendering to the Road—to uncertainty, encounter, and a larger story he cannot control.

None of these passages is really about escape. They are about the limits of self-propulsion. Merton reaches the edge of himself and cannot force his way through. Porfiry tells Raskolnikov that no distance will carry him beyond himself. Bilbo, having put down the Ring, is finally light enough to be swept off his feet. You cannot think, run, or command your way into freedom. The grip has to loosen before something larger—grace, conscience, the Road—can be encountered.

Hello everyone. I like to think you are indefatigable.1

Thank you for joining this week and welcome to all our new subscribers. I will continue the morning reading experiment next week. And thank you to those of you who have signed up for paid subscriptions.

Here’s a review of some experiments and traditional work this week in case you missed any of it:

This week I wrote about the presidency and the Iran war, reflected briefly on our love of Dollywood and examined the mounting bottlenecks created by artificial intelligence. On the Gabfest we discussed the Supreme Court ruling on mail ballots, the U.S. trade war with Canada, and AI security in “Please Do Not Ruin the Post Office”.

I also tried a few experiments inspired by my morning reading: Experiment 1 and Experiment 2.

“The Morning Ballet” wasn’t an experiment at all, but visual proof of the exciting action in Navel Gazing, Episode One. I also posted Episode Four of Navel Gazing, “John Dickerson explores the meanings of a giant bed, initials and The Sopranos”. You can browse the full archive at JohnDickerson.com.

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A lovely note form reader Beth Kapocias echoing the themes of Navel Gazing Episode Four:

I’ve been enjoying your Navel Gazing Podcast as much as your Stack the Week offering. I can see that it takes a bit of doing, so I wanted you to know your efforts are appreciated.

Yesterday my daughter and I were returning from a trip to Washington DC. Before the train left the station, she took out her watercolor field box, and asked if we’d brought along any water (she hasn’t yet got the hang of filling the water container). When we realized we neglected to bring a bottle of water, I remembered I’d packed my watercolor field box I’d used in 1993. I said perhaps there’s water in there from the 1900’s. And indeed, there was! Her eyes widened, as she was astounded to be painting with water from another century and another continent away.

A few items from the morning news:

Trump wanted lower rates. His Fed chairman just put a rate increase on the table.

Donald Trump selected Kevin Warsh after repeatedly attacking the Federal Reserve for keeping interest rates too high—and Trump reportedly sought reassurance that his nominee would lower them. But Warsh promised to protect the Fed’s independence, and his August 28 Jackson Hole speech demonstrated what that can mean in practice.

Warsh said inflation remained too high and suggested that rate increases might be necessary. In a matter of hours, traders raised the estimated probability of a September increase from 35% to nearly 58%, while the two-year Treasury yield jumped from approximately 4.22% to 4.35%.

Bank of America will pay $72.5 million to as many as 75 Epstein accusers.

A federal judge gave final approval to Bank of America’s $72.5 million settlement with as many as 75 women who accused the bank of facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse. Bank of America denied knowing about Epstein’s trafficking operation and admitted no wrongdoing. The settlement provides a financial consequence without resolving the underlying question of what the bank knew—or should have recognized—while servicing Epstein and his associates.

In 250 years, Americans have elected only three Black governors. Eight are on ballots this year.

Thousands of people have served as American governors, but voters have elected only three Black governors in the country’s history: Virginia’s Douglas Wilder, Massachusetts’ Deval Patrick and Maryland’s Wes Moore. All three are Democratic men. This year, eight Black major-party candidates—including five Democrats and three Republicans, and both men and women—are appearing on gubernatorial ballots. Even if none wins, the field is historically unprecedented. If several win, an office that has remained overwhelmingly white for 250 years could change visibly in a single election.

A Tree Keeps Growing in Brooklyn.

A silver maple stood in the middle of what two Brooklyn developers considered an ideal building site. It was approximately six stories tall, with a trunk five feet across—and removing it would have been the conventional real-estate decision. Instead, the developers spent approximately $400,000 redesigning and constructing their project around the tree. They compared the decision to rescuing a geriatric dog: financially irrational, perhaps, but difficult to resist once the living thing was in their care.

Now some sparkles:

Wildlife Photography.

I find these photographs transporting: The Wildlife photographs of the year.

A Record at the Plate.

“I just wanted to do something spectacular,” 12-year-old Carsynn Meyer told USA Today after hitting a double in her final at-bat of Nevada’s regional championship victory over Montana. The hit helped send her team to the Little League World Series, where Meyer became the first girl under the tournament’s current format to reach the United States championship game. Looking into the stands after the double, she remembered hearing the crowd screaming.

The achievement carried more than half a century of history. In 1972, 12-year-old Maria Pepe pitched three games for a Little League team in Hoboken, New Jersey, before officials forced her off the roster because girls were barred from the program. The resulting court case compelled Little League to admit girls in 1974, although Pepe had already aged out. Meyer first visited Williamsport in June for an all-female tournament named in Pepe’s honor. Two months later, she returned with her Nevada teammates—the boys “CarCar” had played beside for years.

Faster!

Everything feels like it moves so fast these days. Even the Universe is speeding up: A new analysis of Type Ia supernovas disputes recent suggestions that the universe’s expansion has begun to slow. Cosmic expansion still appears to be accelerating, leaving dark energy in its commanding—but entirely mysterious—place in the prevailing account of the universe.

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