Missive #654 Published 2 February 2026

Every day I clean the Winchesters' beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up to eat alone in my tiny room on the top floor.
I try to ignore how Nina makes a mess just to watch me clean it up. How she tells strange lies about her own daughter. And how her husband Andrew seems more broken every day. But as I look into Andrew's handsome brown eyes, so full of pain, it's hard not to imagine what it would be like to live Nina's life. The walk-in closet, the fancy car, the perfect husband.

Missive #652 Published 31 January 2026

Joe and Ruth Austin, sixtyish, retire, withdraw, in California after their son, an existentialist with whom Joe could never sympathize, dies. On the one hand, on his property, he is confronted with a reproachful reminder of his boy, a bearded graduate student who squats on his property and does a Tar-Zen bit in a treehouse. Nearby the Catlins move in, a young couple, and Joe is particularly susceptible to Marian, frail, loving, and fiercely defensive of "all the little live things" and a belief that there are no evil forces in nature. Even though she is being rapidly destroyed by cancer and her race against death is being run against the birth of a child. All of this then refutes resignation with involvement, equates life in terms of its loss, even though it fails to mediate any of the other problems between the mature citizens and the coffeehouse kooks. "Why does the older generation feel as it does about what is happening in the world today?" (the publishers). Probably for the same reason that that same generation feels as it does about what is happening in the novel today—and this book will be a very compatible compromise.

Missive #650 Published 28 January 2026

At Talavera in July of 1809, Captain Richard Sharpe, bold, professional, and ruthless, prepares to lead his men against the armies of Napoleon into what will be the bloodiest battle of the war. Sharpe has earned his captaincy, but there are others, such as the foppish Lieutenant Gibbons and his uncle, Colonel Henry Simmerson, who have bought their commissions despite their incompetence. After their cowardly loss of the regiment's colors, their resentment toward the upstart Sharpe turns to treachery, and Sharpe must battle his way through sword fights and bloody warfare to redeem the honor of his regiment by capturing the most valued prize in the French Army—a golden Imperial Eagle, the standard touched by the hand of Napoleon himself.

Missive #649 Published 27 January 2026

This is the first book in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks which is a science fiction series of ten novels and one short story collection, published between 1987 and 2012. The series centers on the Culture, a utopian, post-scarcity society of humanoid aliens and advanced artificial intelligences living in artificial habitats across the Milky Way. The Culture is characterized by its space socialism, where technology is so advanced that all production is automated, and citizens live without need for work, with Minds (superintelligent AIs) managing society.

Missive #648 Published 26 January 2026

In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to "the people," who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.

Missive #646 Published 24 January 2026

What, if anything, is it that makes the human uniquely human? This, in part, is the question that G.K. Chesterton starts with in this classic exploration of human history. Responding to the evolutionary materialism of his contemporary (and antagonist) H.G. Wells, Chesterton in this work affirms human uniqueness and the unique message of the Christian faith. Writing in a time when social Darwinism was rampant, Chesterton instead argued that the idea that society has been steadily progressing from a state of primitivism and barbarity towards civilization is simply and flatly inaccurate. "Barbarism and civilization were not successive stages in the progress of the world," he affirms, with arguments drawn from the histories of both Egypt and Babylon.