K Crary @Crary76

Odysseus is a character defined throughout Homer’s original by the open question of who he is. His name is left unspoken for the first 20 lines of the poem. He’s famously “polytropos”—a man of many ways. Homer sets up in the first word of the first line that his subject is “anēr,” a man, then gives us four books in which Odysseus is pretty much *not* present, establishing that the central character begins his own story as an absence, a void. That’s why—with respect to @MattWalshBlog—it’s important that it’s not Nolan who came up with the idea to tell the events of the story out of order. Homer did. Odysseus in the original tells much of his own story in retrospect, as in the movie, and many other characters in the poem also have a version of his story. Each new retelling adds another layer to his character. He’s known the world over for his cunning and trickery, but that means it’s very hard to know the core of the real him. He calls himself “nobody” to trick the Cyclops, and the resonance is clear: to survive he has to efface and reinvent himself, to hide. But to restore his place at home in Ithaca, he has to tell his own story and integrate all the layers of who he is—trickster, warrior, father, husband, king. It’s true that he’s full of righteous anger and hungry for glory. It’s also true that he weeps, in Homer’s original, to hear the story of his own Trojan horse. Homer says he weeps like a woman whose husband is killed at the walls of his city. The implication is very strong that he’s identifying with the enemy widows of his own war. None of this makes him less of a solider or means he regrets the war. It means Homer’s character contains multitudes and is one of literature’s most enormous, complex personalities. He’s like Hamlet in this way. It’s impossible to capture all of him in any telling except that of the original poem. That’s what makes the Odyssey itself a work of insurmountable genius. Many great artists have portrayed a version of Odysseus: Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Tennyson. Each one drew out and emphasized different aspects of the original. Sometimes he’s a deceitful louse. Sometimes he’s a wistful and restless adventurer. Every retelling refracts the white light of the original character through the prism of a new age’s concerns—Dante’s Christian condemnation of fraud, for example, or Tennyson’s sense that the age of heroes is fading from the world (Nolan, as has been said many times now, obviously has Tennyson in mind with the ending of his movie). And here’s the beautiful thing: the idea that different people would see and judge this guy different ways *is there at the center of the poem to begin with.* It’s like Homer already knew there would be many versions, and built that in. Have I mentioned he was a great artist? Nolan’s no Dante, and I agree that his retelling introduces a degree of guilt over the war itself—and war in general—that makes the character less rich and more modern than in Homer. But the problem’s not that his version of Odysseus is different from the original, or from others. In a way, that’s one of the things about the movie that places it right in line with the Western tradition. “There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies,” wrote Oscar Wilde. There are as many Odysseuses as there are homecomings. That’s why the poem never dies.

Andrew Klavan @andrewklavan

23 hours ago

Hey Matt. If you listen to the Klavans on the Culture show I did with @SpencerKlavan, you'll see I partly agree wtih you. I (and just about everyone else in America apparently) found the movie very entertaining, but it misses being a great film because Nolan's take on Odysseus

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Feels like I’ve been not calling it X for longer than that.

Pop Base @PopBase

a day ago

3 years ago today, Twitter rebranded to X.

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THIS

Noam Blum @neontaster

a day ago

The worst trend in politics is to hope your opponent puts forth the most radical wacko candidate because "they'll never win." This strategy has failed enough to be retired forever.

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Entirely apart from the issues at stake here, what is up with the all-caps bold in which “YOU” was always written in Biden’s memos? Was that unique to Biden, or do they do that with every president? It makes him (or them) look incapable of elementary reading comprehension.

Senator Eric Schmitt @SenEricSchmitt

17 hours ago

BREAKING: I am releasing a newly obtained internal Presidential memorandum from the Biden White House. It details how Biden was advised to block President Trump's deportation of 3.1 MILLION noncitizens—including Tren de Aragua members—through “Temporary” Protected Status.

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"I'm thankful that he's going after the real threat to citizens." buff.ly/ciNdiEs

This obvious lie was made up by The Quincy Institute and a lobby closely tied to the Islamic Republic. Now it’s been widely adopted by a ton of fringe figures and some politicians. I explained it back in May: x.com/aghamilton29/s…

Greg Price @greg_price11

19 hours ago

Who the hell made this crap up that the NDAA "merged" our military with Israel's? All it does is expand the already existing research and technology agreements that exist between the U.S. and Israel, which we have with basically all of our allies. It's like saying that NORAD is a

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I’m for free trade, but the notion that it’s illegal for the US to impose tariffs is crazy talk.

Scott Robertson @sarobertson_

19 hours ago

Freeland: "When the U.S. imposes tariffs illegally on countries, whether it's Canada or anyone else, I think what we should be doing is in a measured way, more in sorrow than in anger, retaliating."

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@janecoaston Both of them were freed, but regrettably, both were later returned to their oppressors. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

@MorlockP @cg_geometry Oof

@DrewHolden360 They're often confused

Step 1: “Voter fraud doesn’t happen,” CNN Step 2: “Fine, voter fraud happened,” CNN Step 3: “Voter fraud happening doesn’t mean what you think it means,” CNN

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@physicsgeek @instapundit Alas, this won’t work for long.

CNN anchor @DanaBashCNN says kapos were "Jews who were helping keep the peace, so to speak, in the Nazi concentration camps.” But as @D_grunblatt observes, Bash's definition is absurd. "The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that beating and punishing subordinate prisoners was a required duty for kapos, with many committing murders to meet SS expectations, a brutal reality Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel documented in his memoir Night," Grunblatt writes in a recent analysis. Bash is supposed to be "CNN’s premier voice on American Jewry and antisemitism." But instead of confronting misinformation about the Holocaust and Israel, she's aiding in "amplifying harmful revisionism under the banner of legacy journalism."

Why is it unspecified?

CBS News @CBSNews

21 hours ago

FDA says it identified new cyclospora outbreak linked to unspecified product cbsn.ws/4vIBdlK

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The press runs headlines like “missile attacks strain cease-fire” as though there could be any cease-fire amidst all the firing. But when the topic is the War Powers Act, suddenly the conflict has been raging for months without interruption.

POLITICO @politico

22 hours ago

BREAKING: The House voted to end Trump’s war in Iran, dealing him another loss. It is the second time lawmakers voted to halt the nearly five-month conflict. politico.com/news/2026/07/2…

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The War Powers Act is a dead letter. It died when Obama ignored it in Libya and no one did anything about it.

CBS News @CBSNews

23 hours ago

BREAKING: The House votes to direct President Trump to end the Iran war after four Republicans joined Democrats. cbsn.ws/4yC0px2

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There is an underappreciated phenomena where one generation of intellectuals says stuff that is rhetorically effective but they never act on it because they don't actually believe it but the next generation doesn't realize that the rhetoric was fake and suddenly acts on the inevitable outworking of the previous generation's unserious rhetoric

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor

3 days ago

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.

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When you visit the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, the *first exhibit* is about the number of senior SS with doctorates to make precisely the point that intelligence or culture do not guard you against moral depravity.

memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus

2 days ago

“Morality is a function of intelligence” is an argument I feel he would quickly abandon if applied to any other groups.

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What happens when the NDAA inevitably passes and our military doesn’t magically merge with Israel’s? The woke left and alt-right figures/politicians who fed their followers this lie will just move on and pretend the whole dishonest campaign didn’t happen.

AG @AGHamilton29

2 days ago

This was a ridiculous lie started by a lobby connected to The Islamic Republic. Now it’s being repeated by a bunch of members of Congress. America’s enemies want us to take the hit on tech so pay attention to who is spreading a lie to serve those same interests.

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In one notable example, an 88 year old woman who lives in a trailer and has no computer is listed as having donated over $150K to Dem campaigns. Including 47 times to @AbdulElSayed ‘s Senate campaign. Where is this money really coming from? Needs to be investigated.

AG @AGHamilton29

2 days ago

Wow. ActBlue has repeatedly been accused of shady practices to allow illegal foreign donations to Dem campaigns. This report found instances where the platform assigned hundreds of thousands to elderly donors that clearly didn’t give the money. enjoyer.com/is-el-sayed-s-…

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