Sublime

“The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive.”

Frank Donovan, a lifetime close friend and a lawyer from Detroit. He was known among his friends and clients as a brilliant legal analyst with a nonaggressive temperament. No litigator. When we were both twenty, I remember him saying: "When there's a fight, I pick up my hat and go home." He had a large head, somewhat out of proportion to

Home Guard

I said, “Yeah, it’ll be a veritable Alamo up there.” “What is this ‘Alamo’?” asked J.C. He seemed far too cheery for the circumstances. I was coughing again, so Reggie explained the history of the Alamo to him in three or four succinct sentences. “It sounds like a glorious battle,” said J.C. after Reggie had just sketched the outline of the fight w

Three white men approached Lamar Smith, who during World War II had enlisted in the Army at the age of forty-nine, and who now, having returned from the war to build up a profitable farm, had enlisted in another battle: “He was determined,” an admirer would say, “that his people would have a say in local government.” The three men warned Smith to s

In 2020, Avital Balwit had won a Rhodes Scholarship and turned it down, first to run Carrick Flynn’s congressional campaign and then to give away FTX’s money. Leopold Aschenbrenner, who had entered Columbia University at the age of fifteen and graduated four years later as class valedictorian, had just declined a spot at Yale Law School to work for

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