Mystal is, of course, referring to the fact that since September, the US military has struck civilian boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, killing a reported 83 people under the direction of “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth. Hegseth claims that his orders were justified because these boats carried “narcoterrorists.” “But that is just not how the law works,” Mystal points out. The government can’t kill people just because it thinks there may be danger ahead.

But what even are rules anymore—legally, journalistically, or otherwise? The other headlines this week remain focused on Ryan Lizza and Olivia Nuzzi, two almost-married journalists who have each broken their fair share of contracts over the years, from alleged sexual misconduct (Lizza) to forming romantic attachments to sources (Nuzzi). Right now, with her new memoir out, it’s Nuzzi’s transgressions that are in the spotlight. So how should we feel about her?

Joan Walsh thinks maybe it’s worth having some sympathy. Nuzzi’s memoir “is a sad and bizarrely told story about a motherless girl who technically did have a mother well into adulthood, and a daddy’s girl whose sanitation worker father did his best but could not protect her from her abusive, alcoholic mother,” Walsh explains. Nuzzi, for all her faults, didn’t have it easy.

Rules, I think, are better broken in fiction. If you agree, you might heed the advice of Dilara O’Neil and read the Danish writer Solvej Balle’s first three entries to On the Calculation of Volume, a work that somehow moves through time even though time in it is frozen. In On the Calculation of Volume, every day is November 18th. But O’Neil finds that the book itself serves as a “container” of time.

-Alana Pockros

Associate Editor, The Nation

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