In The Times Union of Albany, Steve Barnes assessed a very hot pepper spread: “Remember the old advertising line ‘A little dab’ll do ya’? For Mr. Naga Hot Pepper Pickle, it’s more like a little dab’ll do ya in.” (Bill Callen, Selkirk, N.Y.)
In her obituary in The Times of Peter Schickele, a.k.a. the musical parodist P.D.Q. Bach, Margalit Fox wrote: “Crucially, there was the music, which betrayed a deeply cerebral silliness that was no less silly for being cerebral. Mr. Schickele was such a keen compositional impersonator that the mock-Mozartean music he wrote in P.D.Q.’s name sounded exactly like Mozart — or like what Mozart would have sounded like if Salieri had slipped him a tab or two of LSD.” (Joe Moorman, Manlius, N.Y., and Michael Torguson, Medford, Ore., among others)
Also in The Times, Dwight Garner described the writer Calvin Trillin’s renown as a eulogist: “I’ve known people to attend the funerals of people they’ve never met because word had spread that Trillin would be speaking, in the manner that an N.B.A. nonfan might attend a Knicks game solely because he’d heard that Chaka Khan would be singing the national anthem.” (Allan Tarlow, West Hollywood, Calif.)
O.K., I could avoid politics for only so long.
Going back to The New Yorker, Benjamin Wallace-Wells took stock of Trump’s behavior in the face of defamation charges by E. Jean Carroll: “Trump wasn’t required to appear at the Carroll trial at all. But he found it politically advantageous to be there, not so much menacing the courtroom as Dennis-the-Menacing it.” (Glenn Lambert, Los Angeles)
In The Washington Post, Monica Hesse marveled — and not in a happy way — at Trump’s durable domination of our attention and our moods: “When sociologists and historians study this period of time, I wonder if this will be the most lasting psychological stain. Not any specific acts, but the general weight, the inescapable pull, the black hole, the fog, the fug, the reality that our atmosphere is coated in a thin, smoggy layer of Donald Trump.” (Spencer Ralston, Santa Fe, N.M., and Gussy Turner, Sutton, Quebec)