Jennifer Szalai
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Jennifer Szalai
@jenszalai.bsky.social
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https://www.nytimes.com/by/jennifer-szalai
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jenszalai.bsky.social
Sometimes a bare recitation of the facts yields a devastating parenthetical:
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/u...
At the center of his bet is that the currency of Argentina — a debt-ridden country whose economy has required more than 20 bailouts — is undervalued.
October 17, 2025 at 6:05 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
An insightful essay. A few years ago I wrote about the literature of shame, including questions about shamelessness, salutary kinds of shame and what shaming can (and cannot) be for:
www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/b...
But we shouldn't ignore how shame has also been used as a force for positive change, O'Neil says. She quotes what Frederick Douglass said he hoped to do for America: to use "the public exposition of the contaminating and degrading influence of Slavery" in order to "shame her out of her adhesion to a system so abhorrent to Christianity and to her republican institutions." At a time when slavery was still legally sanctioned, Douglass couldn't appeal to government authority, but he could appeal to its ostensible ideals. "In some cases, shaming is all we have, Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental studies, writes in "Is Shame Necessary?" (2015). Shame is powerful and also wildly imprecise, meaning it must be deployed "shrewdly," she says, with "scrupulous implementation." Overzealous deployment can backfire, making the target feel victimized and even more isolated. "As with antibiotics, if shaming is abused, we might all end up as victims," she writes. O'Neil and Jacquet encourage readers to try to think more deeply not just about what shame is but what it might be for. If it's for sheer punishment - for banishing someone out of the circle of concern forever — then there's no need for forbearance or mercy. But this can also sound like a nonviolent (and still extremely painful) form of sadism. Both books suggest that shame can help teach us how to live among one another, inculcate shared values and achieve mutual respect. O'Neil gives the example of Hopi "shame clowns," who poke fun at transgressors in a ritual that offers "ridicule and then redemption." The purpose of the ritual is reintegration, not ostracism: "The people they mock remain members of the community."
October 15, 2025 at 2:41 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
Philippe Sands‘s excellent new book traces the links between the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and an old Nazi named Walter Rauff — two men who embraced the deployment of state power to torture and murder human beings.
Pinochet - who issued an amnesty law in 1978 to immunize himself and his government from prosecution - blamed the people below, insisting he could not control their "excesses"; Rauff blamed the people above, insisting that he was only following orders.
October 5, 2025 at 5:40 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
Sporting a few piercings and tattoos, Lee says he used to have more subdermal piercings. Unlike regular piercings in ear lobes, these piercings cannot be removed by hand. If a wearer needs or wants them removed, they must consult a doctor or professional piercer. "An officer had been taking me to this room and he said: 'You aren't allowed to have those. • He pointed at my piercings," he recalls. "Next thing I knew I was being shackled again. Chains around my ankles, my wrists. They brought me to a hospital in Miami. "They made me stand with all of these people looking at me like I was some sort of murderer. It was so degrading. They brought me into a room. They told the doctors to cut out all of my piercings. "I had already been there for almost a month. I didn't understand why this was suddenly an issue. I just feel like everything was done to intimidate and torture. "I told the nurses specifically: 'I do not consent to this.' But they put lidocaine [for numbing] on my face and on the back of my neck. The thing is it is only supposed to work for 40 minutes; I was lying there for well over an hour and they just started doing it. I was shackled to the bed. I couldn't move.
September 10, 2025 at 11:25 AM
jenszalai.bsky.social
The agent asked whether Mr. Gavidia was American, and he said he was. The agent then asked what hospital Mr. Gavidia had been born in, and he said he did not know. According to the lawsuit, the agent and a colleague proceeded to slam Mr. Gavidia against a metal gate, twist his arm and seize his phone. “Fearing for his life, Gavidia offered to show the agents his ID,” the lawsuit said. “The agents took the ID, and about 20 minutes later, returned Gavidia’s phone and set him free. They never returned his ID.”
September 8, 2025 at 4:37 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
"The use of masks," Mr. Levitsky said, "is without question a bad sign." And it is extremely rare in functional democracies. "I cannot think of a democratic country with a reliable rule of law where security forces mask themselves," Mr. Levitsky said. "It just doesn't happen."
September 5, 2025 at 9:51 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
There's an arresting quotation that resurfaces online now and again, usually accompanied by a photograph of a dark- haired woman with an intense gaze: "The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs that a culture is about to fall into barbarism." It's followed by the name of the woman in the picture: the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who fled the barbarism of Nazi Germany. Only there's no record of Arendt ever saying that, or anything like it. The bogus quotation is the kind of artifact that flourishes on the internet in bewildering times - plausible-sounding and politically ominous.
August 22, 2025 at 12:50 AM
jenszalai.bsky.social
When he first arrived at his foster home, Maksim fastidiously counted the days he was apart from his parents. But recently, he told his mother he had stopped counting. "What's the point of counting days? We will not be united," his mother recalled him saying recently.
August 5, 2025 at 2:50 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
I mean:
A regal cat named Hank, known as the regional manager of the Literary Cat Co. in Pittsburg, Kansas
July 23, 2025 at 2:24 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
Great photos, too:
At Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, Vt., a Russian desert tortoise named Veruca Salt Murphy Grace and Whiskey Sue of Double Dog Bookshop in Wentzville, Mo.
July 23, 2025 at 2:23 PM
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June 24, 2025 at 1:24 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
“ The FEMA money will be drawn from a fund that was created during the Biden administration to pay organizations and local jurisdictions that help house and care for migrants going through the immigration court system in the United States.”
June 24, 2025 at 12:08 AM
jenszalai.bsky.social
In the basement of LAX:
Screenshot text: “ I did not know then whether I would be out in one hour, one day, or one month. When I was brought into the room, 1 encountered a young woman, in tears, begging the guard for information. He told her he had no information to give her and that none would be forthcoming. "That woman," he said, pointing to a bundle of blankets in the corner, "has been here for four days."”
June 19, 2025 at 2:51 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
He rephrased and reiterated this paradox: "There are nations, and I'm thinking of Latin America, which are too politicized, but they don't have political culture." Too "politicized," but with no "political culture"? What did he mean by this, by political culture? "One of the jobs of the church," he said, "also in the teaching in the [university] faculties, is teaching to have political culture." But what is this culture? "People are from this party or that one," he said, but "effectively without a clear thought on the foundations, the proposals." He was, I think, describing cultures where the population has become obsessed with politics, but as a form of entertainment, or perhaps a mere vehicle for venting outrage. In these countries, the people possess an inadequate grasp of the underlying ethical principles over which they argue. The problem, he seemed to suggest, was deeper than a choice between this or that candidate, and lay with the nation itself.
April 26, 2025 at 4:30 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
"It's a very sad thing," he said, recounting how Sanchez broke into tears when she saw her daughter in the video call on Thursday morning. "Separating a mother from a child who's only one year old when she is in the middle of a legal process? Where are human rights in this country?"
April 26, 2025 at 3:14 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
I keep thinking about this mother with cancer who couldn't afford her room in an extended-stay motel. She couldn't move to a shelter, because she had a 15-y.o. son, and shelters don't allow boys older than 13. And she didn't qualify for assistance, because she was not in a shelter or on the street.
The entrepreneurial Celeste started a cooking service from her room at Efficiency that came to a halt when her abdominal pain and loss of appetite turned out to be symptoms of ovarian and breast cancer. She could not live in a family shelter because she had a 15-year-old son, and family shelters would not take boys older than 13. Despite being a cancer patient, she did not score high enough on the Vulnerability Index for assistance because she was not in a shelter or on the street.
March 29, 2025 at 7:16 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/b...
March 15, 2025 at 1:55 AM
jenszalai.bsky.social
WaPo's Ron Charles, in his Book Club newsletter, on Meta's repeated questions about his plans to review Sarah Wynn-Williams's "Careless People":

"In my 27 years of reviewing and editing newspaper books sections, no company has ever done this with me."
Last Friday afternoon, I got my first message from Ryan Daniels, public affairs manager of strategic response at Meta. When I declined his invitation to talk by phone, he wrote back again: “I was wondering if the Washington Post was going to write a review about a book that’s coming out this upcoming week on Meta. Do you have a couple minutes to chat?” So, I called. Daniels said, “We don’t have the book,” but the company had prepared “preliminary statements” about it. Although he didn’t share those with me, he wrote to me again on Saturday and again on Monday trying to get information about our review plans. (In my 27 years of reviewing and editing newspaper books sections, no company has ever done this with me.) Yesterday, when I reached out to Daniels for a response from Meta, he wrote back: “Do you plan to write something about it, or are you just curious how we’re responding?” It’s always about controlling the narrative. But apparently, that’s not going so well. This morning, “Careless People” is No. 3 on Amazon. I know this is a long item, the longest I’ve ever written for the Book Club newsletter. But when one of the world’s most powerful media companies tries to snuff out a book — amid other alarming attacks on free speech in America like this — it’s time to pull out all the stops.
March 14, 2025 at 5:12 PM
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March 10, 2025 at 2:11 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
In her new book "Seven Social Movements That Changed America," the historian Linda Gordon includes a chapter on the 1920s KKK, pointing out that even as it collapsed, it had already succeeded in normalizing and intensifying a culture of bigotry.
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/b...
The second Klan eventually collapsed under the weight of its leadership’s corruption, much of which came to light when the K.K.K.’s Grand Dragon in Indiana was convicted of torturing, raping and murdering his secretary. Feeling abandoned by the Klan, the Grand Dragon released documents detailing a web of graft. But the Klan — which at one point had as many as five million adherents — had already succeeded in normalizing and intensifying a culture of bigotry. This, Gordon suggests, was perhaps its “greatest accomplishment.” Gordon is too restrained as a writer to go in for much editorializing, but she does quote from a speech about fascism that the novelist Toni Morrison delivered three decades ago. “Before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third,” Morrison said, reflecting on how a society slides from cruel rhetoric into violence. “The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”
March 5, 2025 at 4:37 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
Within days of assuming office, Trump fired at least 17 inspectors general. A week later, reports trickled out about the firing of more than a dozen prosecutors who had worked on the Jan. 6 cases. The same day, the public learned that Trump officials were “setting the stage for a possible purge” at the F.B.I. by ordering the bureau to compile a list of all personnel who had worked on the Jan. 6 cases. The number of names is likely to be about 6,000. Trump isn’t known for his consistency, but he has shown a consistent fascination with making bids for unchecked presidential power. Revoking birthright citizenship, unilaterally shutting down federal agencies, firing federal workers willy-nilly, handing over key government functions to the billionaire Elon Musk: Trump has been daring the courts to stop him; his vice president, JD Vance, has aired the possibility of defying those courts if they try to; and on Monday a judge ruled that the Trump administration had refused to comply with a court order to release billions of dollars in federal grants already allocated by Congress.
February 12, 2025 at 3:55 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
Mr. Vance’s post “opens the door to a potentially dangerous path,” said Quinta Jurecic, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare. “What Vance’s wording suggests here, without directly saying it, is that the executive could potentially respond to a court order by saying to the court, ‘You’re unconstitutionally intruding on my authority and I’m not going to do what you say.’” “At that point,” Ms. Jurecic said, “The Constitution falls apart.”
February 9, 2025 at 10:21 PM
jenszalai.bsky.social
At least in the short run, as the Trump administration continues its attacks on the administrative state, Musk and his small team will lack the human resources and administrative competence to use these powers in sophisticated ways. The more likely near-term risks are not efficient coercion but accidental calamity, as overconfident engineers in their early 20s mess about and find out. “Move fast and break things” is a terrible basis for widespread administrative reform. On the basis of Musk’s Twitter takeover, we can expect “what does this button do?” to rapidly shade into “we can figure out what we need by ripping everything out and seeing what fails.” It’s when they get to “who cares about bureaucracy anyway: we’ll have artificial general intelligence by 2027” that people should really start panicking.
February 6, 2025 at 7:57 PM
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open.substack.com/pub/executiv...
February 3, 2025 at 2:43 PM
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Story goes on to say that this could have implications for crops — the water is supposed to be used by farmers later, when it’s needed, and not squandered now.
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/u...
screenshot of a lede of a story in the NYT that says: “Trump administration officials began releasing significant amounts of water from two dams in California’s Central Valley on Friday in a move that seemed intended to make a political point as President Trump continued to falsely blame the Los Angeles wildfires on water policies in the Democratic-run state.“
February 1, 2025 at 7:24 PM