A Grand Coalition for Germany

“The key message to Donald Trump is that Germany is back,” said incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz after clinching a coalition deal with the Social Democrats whose own coalition’s fall had led to snap elections in February. The new Große Koalition (grand coalition or GroKo) will take office in May. Germany is in recession, with its ‘analog’ economy needing major restructuring. The energy sector junked nuclear power when Russian gas was cut, in a suicidal call by outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The far-right Alternative for Germany has just overtaken Merz’s Christian Democrats. Above all, Trump’s tariffs, now on a 90-day pause, have set global trade afire and the European Union is looking at its biggest economy for leadership. Merz promises the last and successfully manoeuvred a reform of Germany’s strict debt rules to enable increased defence spending, partly in deference to Trump’s demands and partly in acknowledgement of America’s new unreliability. But AfD is rising on the anti-immigration plank and the coalition’s plans to curb immigration won’t satisfy the far-right and its voters. The fifth grand coalition of the centre-right and the centre-left promises continuity when continuity cuts both ways.

Professors of Desire

Philip Roth wanted to shut the literature departments in universities so people would go back to reading literature without being led astray by critical theory. In 2021, Blake Bailey had published a 900-page biography of Roth to put the Roth industry out of work. It was as much critical homage as hanging Roth out to dry, with the late author’s evident permission since Bailey had spent countless hours interviewing him. There were calls for Roth to be cancelled and his books pulped. And then, disaster hit in the form of revelations about Bailey “grooming” his eight-grade students and forcing them to have sex with him later as adults. He was cancelled. His book was withdrawn. This month he is back with a memoir, Canceled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me, which is predictable about the scandal bit—denial. But it’s an intimate portrait of his family and his father Burck, a US Supreme Court lawyer. It is also a meditation on death. Blake’s brother Scott was a drug addict who had killed himself. Burck never recovered from the ‘human stain’ that destroyed Blake. Perhaps Blake is the sole survivor, reimagining his life as a Roth phantasmagoria.

It’s the First Amendment, Stupid

The White House cannot ban the Associated Press for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. That violates the First Amendment as the government was punishing AP for the content of its speech. A federal judge has ordered the Trump White House to restore full access to the news agency to cover presidential events but the government has time to respond. The ruling does not ask the White House to grant AP permanent access to the Oval Office, etc but simply that “it cannot be treated worse” than its peers.

AmericaAssociated PressFriedrich MerzgeopoliticsGermanyGulf of AmericaMexicoPhilip Roth