Issue #19 · August 8th, 2016 · View in your browser

Special announcement! I have returned to producing a blog. It is aptly named The Sundry Letter, over at sundryletter.com. This newsletter will be a relay of what I post on the blog. Thank you for reading!

Why it’s so irritating when people use periods in their texts  Nicolas DiDomizio, writing for Mic: 

‘When using [a period] in a text message, it’s perceived as overly formal,’ Collister wrote. ‘So when you end your text with a period, it can come across as insincere or awkward, just like using formal spoken language in a casual setting like a bar..

“Text [messages] and many other online forms of communication are intended to be brief, and adding a period which signals ‘the end’ is for many users a conscious choice and can communicate a message like, ‘I’m really done talking about this,'” she said.

Nixon, booze and nuclear weapons This is Tyler Cowen‘s excerpt of this NYT story:

…there were at least two instances in which top officials tried to slow, or undermine, the president’s nuclear authority.

The first came in October 1969, when the president ordered Melvin R. Laird, his secretary of defense, to put American nuclear forces on high alert to scare Moscow into thinking the United States might use nuclear arms against the North Vietnamese.

Scott D. Sagan, a nuclear expert at Stanford University and the author of ‘The Limits of Safety,’ a study of nuclear accidents, said Mr. Laird tried to ignore the order by giving excuses about exercises and readiness, hoping that the president who sometimes embraced the ‘madman theory’ — let the world think that you are willing to use a weapon — would forget about his order.

But Nixon persisted. Dr. Sagan reports that during the operation, code-named Giant Lance, one of the B-52 bombers carrying thermonuclear arms came dangerously close to having an accident.

Then, in 1974, in the last days of the Watergate scandal, Mr. Nixon was drinking heavily and his aides saw what they feared was a growing emotional instability. His new secretary of defense, James R. Schlesinger, himself a hawkish Cold Warrior, instructed the military to divert any emergency orders — especially one involving nuclear weapons — to him or the secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger.

It was a completely extralegal order, perhaps mutinous. But no one questioned it.

So the President’s power when it comes to nuclear can be quite limited. 

*Thanks and have a nice week, 

Ulysse*