Pun Salad

The book's Amazon page is effusive: "PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER" and "KIRKUS PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, TIME, and more." And (even) more.

But I liked it anyway.

It's a tale of (mostly) the events in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but told in first-person narration by the enslaved Jim. It helps to have read Twain's version first, I think, but not necessary. (I'm pretty sure I read it back sometime in the mid-1960s for school.)

The main change: Jim (or James) is literate, acquainted with works by John Locke and Voltaire. In fact, all that shuck-and-jive language he and the other enslaved people in Hannibal, Missouri use is an act put on to give the slavers a false sense of superiority. Among themselves, conversations happen in Standard English.

Upon learning that his "owner", Miss Watson, plans to sell him off, James flees to Jackson Island in the Mississippi, where he meets up with Huck, who is (in turn) on the run from his "Pap", faking his own death. A merry mixup: James is not only sought as a runaway, but also for murdering Huck. They make a desperate run downriver, somehow hoping that James can be reunited with his wife and daughter. But everything that can go wrong, does.

There's some dark humor, especially when the Duke and Dauphin show up. But the fundamental terror of that evil institution of slavery is never far away.

There are important differences between James and Huckleberry Finn, which I will not spoil.

Pun Salad is admittedly weak on foreign policy, torn between a sensible isolationism on one hand, and not wanting to see bad guys win on the other.

So: I link, you decide. Jim Geraghty, as always, makes a lot of sense: No, Vladimir Putin Does Not Want to See Ukraine ‘Succeed’.

Jim is pretty convincing that Trump's attitude and opinions toward Putin are based (at best) in fantasy. Which makes him the wrong guy to be running the foreign policy shop these days.

Also pretty damning is Peter J. Wallison over at AEI, who explains Why Trump Will Never Be Able to End the War in Ukraine.

Peter's theory, which sounds plausible to me:

Why is it so difficult to make an agreement with Putin to stop the war? The answer is simple. The war is the only thing that is keeping Putin alive. The oligarchs who hold the real power in Russia do not dare to overthrow him, because they’d be blamed for Russia’s surrender, and his death will produce a struggle for power among the oligarchs that will be hellish in its brutality. Moreover, those who overthrow Putin will be blamed for the loss of the war in Ukraine, which will swiftly follow.

But see above. What do I know?

Also of note:

• Just say no. Or have ChatGPT say no for you. Elizabeth Nolan Brown is thumbs-down on the latest stupid acronym: The TRUMP AMERICA AI Act is every bit as bad as you would expect. Maybe worse.

  Sometimes you can tell a bill will be really bad just from its title. So it goes with The Republic Unifying Meritocratic Performance Advancing Machine Intelligence by Eliminating Regulatory Interstate Chaos Across American Industry Act, from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.). And, boy, does it deliver on that disaster of a name, managing to combine nearly every bad tech policy idea of the past half-decade—including gutting Section 230 and creating new requirements around the suppression of sexuality online—into one massive piece of Trump-branded legislation.

  The bill's title alone is asinine, even if we put the North Korea-ness meets word-salad nature of it aside. Following the normal rules of making acronyms, it would be the TRUMP AMIERICA (or perhaps AMIBERICA) AI act, though Blackburn is throwing rules to the wind and referring to it as the TRUMP AMERICA AI act.

  If only the problems stopped there!

  Narrator: The problems do not stop there.

• If the right one don't getcha, then the left one will. Greg Lukianoff, who keeps his eyes wide open all the time, sees The Worst of Both Worlds for Campus Free Speech. (archive.today link)

  2025 was the worst year for campus censorship in decades, and that’s because it’s coming from every possible direction—especially the MAGAverse.

  For most of my career, the biggest threat to free speech on campus came from inside higher education: the on-campus left (students, yes, but more importantly administrators) using the power of investigation and discipline to punish “wrongthink.” The right pushed, too, but those pushes overwhelmingly originated off campus. This makes sense, given that there simply aren’t that many conservatives in the student body, on the faculty, or—least of all—among administrators in higher education.

  In 2025, what changed was the balance of power and the source of the pressure. The federal government and state governments, using the levers of state power, are now the leading forces behind attempts to punish campus speech. In the data my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, tracks—our Students Under Fire database—incidents involving censorship attempts from politicians or government officials jumped to roughly a third of all cases this year. In 2024, those incidents didn’t crack double digits.

  [Headline inspiration: Tennessee Ernie Ford, Sixteen Tons]

• An inspiration to all pundits. The Free Press invites some of its contributors to confess: What We Got Wrong This Year. First up is Nellie Bowles:

  This year, I really was wrong about why our government wastes money. I always knew the government was a little careless, a little silly. I’ve been following the California high-speed rail debacle for heaven’s sake, with more than $100 billion budgeted since 2015 and no high-speed track laid. I know how much San Francisco spends on “homelessness,” i.e., funding a vast array of nonprofit workers to wander around making sure addicts stay on the sidewalk as long as possible. I know these things. I think of them as absurdities that come from good intentions and silly plans. But then came the Minnesota fraud. It has rattled me to the core.

  There is no way for corruption that deep to happen without massive collusion from regulators, whose salaries are, of course, also paid by taxpayers. So this is the year I realized that the government doesn’t accidentally misspend money—it does it on purpose! Until this year, it really never occurred to me that there could be true corruption like that in America.

  To some extent this revelation is comforting: It reflects competence. It reflects sophistication, foresight, strategy, all of which I thought our elected officials lacked. So really there are pros and cons here. That’s just one thing I was wrong about, but the list is very, very long. Anyway, this is the year I open a Minnesota day care.

  Will Pun Salad carry an end-of-year confession of error? Tune in tomorrow!

Recently on the book blog: