NEW ARRIVALS: A new arrival on the front...

MONDAY, AUGUST 10, 2026

...was met with familiar old conduct: "The appearance on the front of a new arrival...became the topic of general conversation."   

In the translation by David Magarshack for Penguin Classics, that's the first sentence of Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog. The famous story has its own Wikipedia page. Included there is this:  

The Lady with the Dog

"The Lady with the Dog" is a short story by Anton Chekhov. First published in 1899, it...is one of Chekhov's most famous pieces of short fiction, and Vladimir Nabokov considered it to be one of the greatest short stories ever written.

[...]

Nabokov wrote about the unconventional ending:

"All the traditional rules of storytelling have been broken in this wonderful short story of twenty pages or so. There is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories every written."

You could call it a story without an ending. So too with our ongoing, unresolved, unfolding national dilemma.   

Variously named in various translations, The Lady with the Lapdog is a story about human growth. As such, it has no obvious political application under current arrangements. 

Still, we've been thinking about that opening sentence because of several new arrivals who have appeared on the scene in the past few weeks.   

First, we had the DSA's Megan Romer, a thoroughly good and decent person. She declared her support for that organization's party platform on the July 26 edition of Fox News Sunday.   

(To watch the entire interview, you can just click here.)   

Several parts of Romer's discussion with Shannon Bream "became the topic of general conversation," at least on the Fox News Channel's heavily watched "cable news" programs. Later, Romer's interview with The New Yorker's David Remnick also became widely discussed on Red American shows.  

Not long after that arrival, Francesca Hong joined Romer as a topic of conversation on Fox News Channel programs. 

Hong is the leading candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for governor of Wisconsin. A statement in 2021 about her desire to abolish Thanksgiving has received a lot of play on Fox, though also on CNN.  

(Then too, there's the easy-to-mock "proximity to whiteness" hook.)

Finally, we turn to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Party's nominee in the Michigan Senate race. News orgs have chosen to ignore the remarkable statements about this candidate made by the sitting president during last Wednesday's speech in Las Vegas.

Perhaps understandably, major news orgs have chosen to avoid that day's familiar old madness. With apologies, here are some of the things the sitting president said:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/5/26): In Congress, we're working every day to defend the American dream for you and your children. The radical left, the maniacs, they're trying to destroy it with the disaster known as, not socialism—Communism!

It's Communism. These are Communists. And the polls were wrong again last night when they thought it would be a landslide victory for a hater of Jews and a hater of Israel. 

This guy hates Jews. Somebody said, "Oh, that's a little strong." No, he hates Jews, and he hates Israel.

 "Abdul El-Sayed." Can you believe this? This could only happen to me. 

Abdul El-Sayed, a lovely gentleman! He's a man of hate, and now he's going around saying, "No, I love everybody." He doesn't love everybody. Put him in office, you're going to find out what he loves. 

He doesn't love Israel. He doesn't love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart, and there's not a fricking thing he can do about it. There's not a thing he can do about it because he hates them.   

That's what the sitting president said. Big orgs have largely averted their gaze.

(Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can read the transcript of the speech, and you can watch the tape.)

Dr. El-Sayed, a former Rhodes scholar, is a new arrival on the national front. Yesterday, Jake Tapper praised his performance on CNN's State of the Union. 

We're sorry to say that we disagreed—that we thought Dr. El-Sayed's relative inexperience may perhaps have showed.

El-Sayed is a new arrival on the national front. By way of contrast, the president was demonstrating the oldest form of ugly political conduct—and just for the record, moments later, he went on to say this:  

PRESIDENT TRUMP: One of the things I see, and you see it here in the Blue states run by Democrats, everything's filthy dirty all the time. The cities stink. They smell. The sidewalks are loaded with horrible stuff. 

I don't want to use the term because my wife will get—she hates it when I use the term. I use it, but she doesn't love it.  

There's more to what he said that day, but we're trying to keep it short.

It may be understandable when major news orgs duck the difficulty of reporting this kind of familiar old conduct. It may be understandable, but these new arrivals will be the subject of general conversation as the midterm campaign unfolds.

Tomorrow, we plan to focus on a different type of new arrival—a new arrival which won't produce much discussion at all. We refer to Kurt Andersen's new guest essay for the New York Times. 

The essay won't produce much conversation. But this is the way it starts:

Has America Already Undergone a Soft Breakup?

“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”   

That's the way the essay starts—and we'd say that headline about a "soft breakup" is itself rather soft, given the essay's contents and suggestions.

Does our flailing nation already qualify as a type of "failed state?" In the past, we've suggested that the answer may be yes. As the president rants and rails in the oldest and most familiar ways, Andersen's gloomy essay seems to be saying much the same thing.   

"We can’t keep going this way," Andersen eventually says. "[A]voiding real hostilities over the long term will require some kind of radical shift."

Tomorrow: From the New York Times identity line:

Kurt Andersen is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Breakup,” about the United States’ split into two nations.