Daily Bafflements

• Our lovely readers have weighed in on our Bleak Friday reading list, “Good Books for Dark Times.” Over on our Facebook page, several readers offered their own additions, including: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, Albert Camus’s The Plague, and Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. There was one suggestion that’s a bit too dark, even for us: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. At that point, we might as well just tell you to read the “Book of Revelation”—which, well, you should, but don’t assume it’s a handbook for the next four years. Really—please, don’t be like this guy.

• Over at Tablet, Jacob Siegel goes inside the mind of Paul Gottfried, the paleoconservative intellectual harbinger of a new breed of white nationalism known as the “alt-right.” 

• With Betsy DeVos, the daughter-in-law of Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, in as Secretary of Education, perhaps it’s time to revisit our 1997 salvo on this noxious company. 

• “This is the doctrine on which progressive hopes have been sacrificed for decades, and now it is dead. Clinton outspent Trump two-to-one and it still wasn’t enough.”