Jonathan Cohen

@jkcohen.com

693 Followers 1073 Following

Jonathan Cohen is a literacy tutor. He's been a frequent contributor to the Santa Monica Review and Citric Acid. A Community of Writers alum (2004), he and his wife have proofread the Santa Monica Review for 22 years.

A poetree: an artificial tree made out of a carpet roll for a trunk, fake cherry boughs for branches, and bright green paper "leaves" hanging from the branches with short poems printed on them. The poems are by Ogden Nash, Marianne Moore, ee cummings, and Grace Paley.
Web page, text only: What is the Catholic "just war" doctrine? Question: What qualifies as a war that is moral to wage? Answer: The Catechism of the Catholic Church lays out the conditions for just war in paragraph 2309: • the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; • all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; • there must be serious prospects of success; • the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition. The Catechism goes on to conclude in that same paragraph: These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war״ doctrine. The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.
The "Glyphs" window from Adobe InDesign. The font Scotch Modern offers both an extensive range of special characters and a few fleurons (decorative elements).
A menacing, florid stone gargoyle peers down from its perch at the University of Chicago campus.
Image of postcard with the following printed: ERRATUM: It has come to our attention that in our 2025 Holiday Letter, Jonathan incorrectly attributed the Kung-Fu Grip mechanism to the mid-1970s Six Million Dollar Man action figure. In fact, the Kung-Fu Grip is a feature of the G.I. Joe action figure from the same period. We regret any inconvenience or distress the error may have caused. Beth and Jonathan
A yellow shepherd mix with his "guilty" face, feigning being chastened for something about which their owner is angry.
Silver Volvo V40 station wagon in a blurred European street setting.
Culver Drive, a thoroughfare in Irvine, California, on 1/3/2026. On the far side of the intersection, there is a sizable protest staged by Iranian-Americans with dozens of 8-foot Iranian flags.
Receipt showing a donation of $21.15 to Capital Area Food Bank. (Chosen for laid-off Federal workers.)
A tiny, slightly peeved burgundy dragon sitting on their hoard, which is in theory gold but which looks more like popcorn. There's not a lot of it.
Graphic saying: The Archbishop of Los Angeles, José Horacio Gómez Velasco, said a few weeks ago that people fearing kidnap by ICE did not have to attend church or receive the sacraments there. Archbishop Gómez was formerly a member of Opus Dei and was elevated by Pope Benedict. For him to tell his parishioners this is a complete red alert. There’s a disconnect between Cardinal Dolan characterizing Charlie Kirk as a holy and righteous man, possibly a martyr, and the situation of Archbishop Gómez’s parishioners. Cardinal Dolan recently retired, and perhaps he can now speak more freely. Perhaps Cardinal Dolan will tell the faithful of Southern California to return to church, be kidnapped, and become martyrs themselves.
White rectangle with the following words: "Who sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood he shed." (Genesis 9:6) BUT "[Rabban Gamliel] saw a skull floating on the face of the water. He said to it: ‘Because you drowned others, they drowned you. And in the end, they that drowned you will be drowned.’" (Pirkei Avot 2:6) Beware the cycle of violence and those who perpetuate it.
An architectural mockup of an enormous gold-plated dining hall in two-point perspective, fading off into the infinite distance.
LinkedIn listing for SAT tutoring position. "Senior SAT Tutor, Established Firm, $50/yr-$60/yr."
Quotation by Hilton Als, quoting James Baldwin. "I was chilled by their merriment. . . . It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real."
Dialogue from Shakespeare's Richard III, I.iv: Are you drawn forth among a world of men To slay the innocent? What is my offense? Where is the evidence that doth accuse me? What lawful quest have given their verdict up? Unto the frowning judge? Or who pronounced bitter sentence of poor Clarence’ death Before I be convict by course of law?
An American flag. The field and canton are all in black. The stripes are barbed wire; the stars are the intersections of mesh fencing. Hail the Carceral State.
When the Martians came, they had a habit of running into skyscrapers and toppling them. We didn’t know why. We figured that they had a kind of internal logic that made sense. Eventually, we realized that they didn’t topple buildings smaller than four stories. We could resettle most of the population across the river in three-story brownstones, and then we could live side-by-side with the Martians. So we did that. This was when the Martians brought out their death rays. Moral: The Supreme Court majority is inimical to human life.
Meme: When you're taken into a cult, at the end of lovebombing, the members coerce you into doing something awful with which they can blackmail you. Once they have it, no one on the outside can ever look at you the same way; your lot is with the cult. This is what Netanyahu and Trump have done to us. They have led us to Gaza and Iran. No one in the rest of the world will see us with any respect for a long time. The end of that could be a detrumpfication process or a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but in the past, returning to norms of justice has required failure as a state -- postwar Germany and Japan, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia, among others. It's a costly price to pay, and we may be on the hook. But seeing those bastards on trial at the Hague may be worth it.
Two copies of the same Jewish prayerbook, "Siddur Sim Shalom for weekdays." The one at right is quite old and has been loved to death; the one at left is new. Both have the name of the book on a pale blue rectangular field in Hebrew and in English.
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" Mario Savio, Berkeley, CA, 1967
Black and white screen capture: "Timothy Snyder said in On Tyranny, 'When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.' We aren't 100% there, but violent, plainclothed, masked government operatives are indistinguishable from paramilitaries. We are starting to slide toward something more like Chile or Argentina, where they disappeared people, loaded them into helicopters, tranquilized them, and dropped them over the Pacific Ocean. It scares the crap out of me. "
An enormous overgrown bush (Duranta) blocks the path to my door. Its vigorous growth suggests the plant will turn on its human caregivers, as plants did in the B-movie "Day of the Triffids."
Statement by Grimes, one of Elon Musk's paramours: "Overall, I think there’s quite a bit of abdication of responsibility around what we are going to do as people's jobs start being taken fairly aggressively. Luckily, there's a massive population drop coming. So maybe everything is just fate and it's gonna work out OK. But I feel like we might get, like, very, very, very good AI across every pillar of art before there aren't any more people to make art."
A greyish-gold heavily striated slab of quartzite for home decor. It has a green tag that gives the style name CRISTALLO, its thickness (2 cm), its finish (polished and brushed), and a 2D barcode, which allows you to add the stone to a rudimentary shopping cart app. It is in a warehouse the size of the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
A circular needlepoint frame in which the words "War Snail activated" and a fetching yet large and doughty snail are embroidered. Small tufts of grass are depicted around the snail's base.
Chapter 7: Concerning Those Who Have Obtained a Principality by Wickedness.
Sometimes you meet, coming down the leafy path along which you are walking, a man dressed as Napoleon; as he talks to you, you look at him with distrust, pity, and amusement—carefully do not look, rather. But as the two of you walk along, and people come up with wallpaper designs full of Imperial bees, rashly offer their condolences on the death of the due d’Enghien, ask for a son’s appointment as Assistant Quarter-master-General of the army being sent to the Peninsula, you realize that it is not he but his whole society that has “lost touch with reality.” Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution
OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR GAVIN NEWSOM Dear Governor Newsom: In a few days' time, many, many scientists working for the Federal Agencies will be unemployed. Their work runs contrary to the avowed aims of our new President and Congress. We have an enormous opportunity to avail ourselves of these great minds, these brilliant exiles. I suggest the formation of a California institution not unlike New York's New School for Social Research or Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where these people can continue their work and increase our knowledge of phenomena that Washington would like to deny. At the American Geophysical Union conference in December, 2016, your predecessor, Governor Jerry Brown, spoke of launching California's own climate satellites if Trump turned the existing ones off. The beginnings of an institution to take in this freed-up scientific talent would not cost the amount of a single rocket launch; the alternative is to miss out on the greatest pool of available scientific ability since the Second World War. You can make this dream happen.
In 2007, I edited a book by Beth Meyerson called "Ready To Go" about the A-Team of public health, CDC's PHAs, Public Health Advisers. They had quasi-police powers, and they used them to nail the U.S.'s syphilis epidemic. They could detain people and interrogate them to get their contacts. PHAs had lighter duties, such as running vaccination drives at county fairs. Still, they could rely on the full coercive power of the state to get the job done. A few hours after 9/11, a team of PHAs was on the only plane in the country allowed to fly, to assess the health effects of the explosions. ‪CDC phased the PHAs out, both for political reasons and for an HR dilemma. The PHAs had been doing the same thing for decades, and they were at the top of scale. They couldn't be reclassified, so they couldn't be paid more. They would be of great use today.
If we ever have an Article V Constitutional Convention, I can supply a few amendments -- national confirmation of the Equal Rights Amendment; denial of corporate personhood; the abolition of the Electoral College; the abolition of arbitration clauses, except for mediation in the early life of a class action suit (i.e., the next step after pretrial motions); and a ban on "contracts of adhesion," where you are forced to sign away your rights as a condition of service. (Consider doctors. They are notorious for demanding absurdly one-sided contracts when a patient walks in the door because it lowers the cost of their malpractice insurance.)