Oct
22
2025

The Oligarch's Daughter

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

I think this thriller from Joseph Finder went on my get-at-library list thanks to a review from Tom Nolan in the WSJ. The opening sentence is pretty grabby: "Until that day, Grant had never killed anyone." But by page 9, that's something he can check off his bucket list.

In Grant's defense, it's entirely self-defense. The guy was going to kill him. Sent, apparently, by someone named "Berzin". After disposing of the wannabe assassin's corpse in the shark-infested waters off the New Hampshire seacoast (?!), Grant realizes that his past has (at last) caught up with him, and he needs to bug out from his quiet Granite State life. Fortunately, he's somewhat prepared, and he heads out for the White Mountains to implement his desperate plan.

Then we flash back to six years earlier, back when Grant was "Paul Brightman" (his real name), an analyst for a small financial firm in New York. One evening, attending a charity gala, he does a classic rom-com "meet cute", mistaking a fetching young lady for a server. But it turns out she's an attendee named Tatyana, and instead of wisely apologizing and getting on with his life, Paul makes a life-changing mistake: getting to know her, getting to know all about her. What's the problem? Well, take a good look at the book title.

The book alternates between timelines: In the "present day", Paul is on the run from Berzin and his army of killers, experiencing one near scrape with death after another. And in the past, there's his growing love for Tatyana, which involves both a personal and a professional relationship with her dad, the Russkie oligarch Arkady Galkin We know that somehow Paul is on a path to fall far out of favor with Arkady, the only question is how.

It's, yes, a page turner. It's also pretty long, with a plot that only gets twistier and also less credible. The bad guys are very resourceful, but (like Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies) not resourceful enough to just shoot Paul in the head.


Last Modified 2026-04-13 11:27 AM EDT

Fearless Prediction: Steven Pinker Will Never Be President of Harvard

I base that prediction on:

There are probably more than a few disqualifying quotes in that article, but these two would probably be sufficient:

  1. “[T]he suggestion that the gender gap [in some STEM fields] may arise, even in part, from differences between the sexes can be fightin’ words. Anyone bringing it up is certain to be accused of ‘wanting to keep women in their place’ or ‘justifying the status quo.’ This makes about as much sense as saying that a scientist who studies why women live longer than men ‘wants old men to die.’” [Source.]

  2. “Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group… If we recognize this principle, no one has to spin myths about the indistinguishability of the sexes to justify equality.” [Source.]

Pinker is (I'm pretty sure) a stalwart Democrat, but there's a lot of woke nonsense up with which he will not put.

Also of note:

  • While people were getting big mad about the White House East Wing being knocked down… Something actually important and outrageous was happening too, as Noah Rothman reports: Vladimir Putin’s Endless Reprieve. (archive.today link)

    Late last week, Trump revealed that he and Putin had “agreed that there will be a meeting” as soon as this week, but on Monday, the Kremlin scuttled a preparatory meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov. Moscow subsequently informed the White House that the timing of a potential second Trump-Putin summit would have to remain up in the air for now. The Russians are dragging their feet, and why wouldn’t they? Putin already got what he wanted from Trump: an indefinite pause on the provision of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine.

    The Putin call amounted to a rushed and, apparently, successful effort to preemptively complicate last Friday’s sit-down meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Kyiv’s representatives hoped to secure American Tomahawks.

    A four-bylined item in the Financial Times paints a grim portrait of the proceedings. The meeting reportedly devolved into a “shouting match” in which Trump was described as “cursing all the time” while insisting that Russia would “destroy” Ukraine unless Zelensky surrendered unconquered territory to Moscow.

    I remember being encouraged by reports a few days ago that the US would provide Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine. I should have remembered the TACO acronym: Trump Always Chickens Out. Especially when Putin is involved. Occasional tough talk always seems to be followed by mush.

  • "MAMA" doesn't have the same ring, somehow. Alan S. Blinder is not a fan of Trump's "Compact" proposal: Trump’s University ‘Compact’ Would Make America Mediocre. (WSJ gifted link)

    No, our universities aren’t perfect. They’re too expensive. They sometimes provide platforms for silliness, including speech that some people find offensive. Yes, it’s probably true that more faculty members lean left rather than right. But America has had the best universities in the world for decades. These schools have yielded substantial economic and social dividends, especially in science. That’s worth cheering and supporting.

    Yet President Trump, himself an Ivy League graduate, has all but declared war on universities since his second term began. It started with Columbia and Harvard under what many people viewed as the guise of protecting students from antisemitic attacks—a worthy goal, and an area in which both universities needed improvement. But it wasn’t long before it became clear that the president’s actual agenda was to bend Columbia and Harvard to his will.

    Columbia’s leaders mostly caved to Mr. Trump, to the dismay of most of its faculty and students. Harvard’s resisted, to cheers and support from the higher-education community. The school gave the retort that the president often gives: See you in court.

    Blinder is way too defensive about the current state of American higher ed. As discussed in one of my recent book reports, there's very little innovation going on. Other problems: "falling enrollments; decreased public confidence; a censorious ideological climate; a (resulting) lack of intellectual diversity; ever-increasing cost; a manifest failure (in many cases) to teach students much; administrative bloat; increased inaccessibility to the poor; an overall poor "return on investment"; and (finally) inefficient and wasteful use of human and physical resources."

    That's not to say that the "Compact" is good. You can think that (a) "viewpoint diversity" is a good thing (I'd agree), while also thinking (b) that enforcing that via Federal regulatory ham-fistedness is a very bad thing.

  • "Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see." And to add to Poe's famous quote: ObamaCare Premiums Are Doubling? Don’t Believe It. (WSJ gifted link) Chris Jacobs writes:

    As the government shutdown drags on, Democrats claim that “premiums will double” if enhanced ObamaCare subsidies expire as scheduled on Dec. 31. That would be shocking if it were true, but it isn’t. The misleading claim is based on research by KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation. It ignores the sizable subsidy that the federal government will still provide to most exchange enrollees if the enhanced subsidies expire and overstates the expiration’s effect on most households.

    On Aug. 6, KFF published an analysis showing “a median proposed premium increase of 18%” for insurers’ exchange plans. But on Sept. 30, several of the same researchers issued a second report with a headline asserting that “premium payments would more than double” if enhanced subsidies expire. What happened? Did premium estimates for 2026 rise sixfold in one month?

    No. KFF’s second study was misleading. It used cleverly parsed terms—“premium payments” rather than “premiums”—to conflate total premiums with enrollees’ out-of-pocket payments. The two aren’t the same. Focusing on the latter to the exclusion of the former, as the September study did, omits important context.

    I guess my state's junior senator didn't read that before she tweeted:

    So in addition to the "doubling" lie, she doubles down on the "lowering costs for families" lie. What about the taxpaying families, Maggie?

    But: "Life is already unaffordable for many Granite Staters"?

    If life is unaffordable, doesn't that mean they'll be dead soon?

  • But it's not just Maggie. Twitchy reports on a Minnesota pol getting flamed by her constituents: Klobuchar’s Pity Party Flop: Posts Sob Story About Early Retirees Big Bills, Gets Roasted Instead. At issue is…

    The responses are pretty good. Many point out that "Bill and Shelly" decided to retire in their 50s. And you have to read a pretty long way down in the "sob story" from CNBC to discover:

    The couple had a modified adjusted gross income of about $123,000 in 2023 and $136,000 in 2024, mostly from pensions and some from individual retirement account withdrawals, according to their tax returns. Modified adjusted gross income is an income measure used to calculate eligibility for premium tax credits.

    Kudos to CNBC for that. I don't want to second-guess Bill's and Shelly's life choices, but people are understandably averse to having to finance them.