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Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
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16 Oct, 5 tweets, 1 min read
I'm so glad Maki the missing lemur is safe. sfchronicle.com/bayarea/articl…
It was very, very wrong to steal him, but I do understand how tempting it must have been.
When I was young, I broke into a zoo. In Madrid. It was wrong, first, because it's obviously wrong to break into anything. That goes without saying. No matter how badly you want to see the animals.

In the fullness of time, however, it occurred to me that it wasn't just wrong--
--it was insane. We had no idea what was on the other side of the fence we jumped over.

It all worked out. We wound up among some herbivores. We had a great day. But how easily we could have been an unfortunate headline.
A warning to parents: Your kids may be as stupid as I was. Never allow them any freedom at all.

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More from @ClaireBerlinski

Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
14 Oct
I'm just going to call attention to this again, because it's really bizarre. In May, I sent out a series of newsletters, deploring our hysterical culture, titled "The Years of Living Hysterically." claireberlinski.substack.com/p/the-years-of…
Gingrich subscribes to my newsletter. In May, I was pleasantly surprised—if puzzled—to see a recent surge in subscribers. Then I saw why. Newt Gingrich had recommended my newsletter on Fox News.
I was dismayed, however, when I read the column, as I explained: claireberlinski.substack.com/p/welcome-frie…. I was discussing hysteria in the context of the Me Too movement. He felt the notion of the "hysterical culture" explained what--at the time--he thought a hysterical overreaction to Covid-19.
Read 15 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
13 Oct
Presumably like most people who read this article, I finished it and then immediately went off to read Snows of Kilimanjaro, trying to understand it as McCain did. Like @MarkSalter55, I remembered it as a story of heartbreaking regret.
Upon re-reading it, I discovered that it is indeed a story of heartbreaking regret. There's no other way to read it.

If you read it in middle-age, during a pandemic, from the bedroom where you've sat for months--
--months that increasingly seem like years, stale, flat, weary and unprofitable, slowly reviewing, in your mind, the ambitions of your youth, your memories of Paris and Istanbul when you were younger--
Read 4 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
10 Oct
Here are some questions I have about a post-Trump world.
1. I would describe the Trump presidency as a national trauma. The trauma has involved *humiliating loss,* one of the most potent and destructive of human emotions--
--and an emotion, many have observed, that often gives rise to deep clinical depression.

Among those who didn't support him, Trump has attacked our narcissistic pride. Our pride in being Americans; in believing Americans were immune to low-rent, third-world demagoguery;
our pride in believing ourselves, deep down, to be *serious* and *responsible* people; our pride in our system of governance--which wasn't supposed to create results like a Trump Presidency.
Read 11 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
9 Oct
More from the indictment, which is horrifying. They came to the attention of the Feds because one of them became uneasy about the plan to kill cops.
They met at a "Second Amendment rally." They planned to "storm the Capitol building" and take hostages.
June 25: They call Whitmer a "this tyrant bitch" because gyms are closed. Recall Trump's Tweets:
Read 13 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
9 Oct
Trump has always sounded like this. Remember the crazy conspiracy theories about Obama and calling Hillary "the Devil?" Those weren't signs of desperation, that's his personality. (That's why it's called a personality disorder.)
Yes, it's getting worse--but that's age and stress, and possibly illness. It's not some kind of marked change, not at all. If this didn't bother voters last time around, it probably won't bother them this time around.
What *will* bother them, though, is having lived through four years of a personality-disordered president--and seeing for themselves that this hasn't in the least made America great again--but rather diseased, poor, chaotic, and nearly as nuts as he is.
Read 5 tweets
Claire Berlinski. Profile picture
8 Oct
foreignaffairs.com/articles/unite…

This is critical. I was once a skeptic about the value of soft power, but I am a skeptic no more. Only if we get our own house in order will we prevail.
Our current inability to govern ourselves, our violence, inability to control disease--Covid19, but also all manner of epidemic disease from addiction to suicide to obesity--and our inability to cooperate to achieve great, or even reasonably good things,
has darkened the prestige of our political model, internationally. If our system fails, visibly, to promote human well-being and flourishing, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics will sound better and better--and not just in China. It is a true contest of ideas.
Read 4 tweets

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