On this day in 1601 a middle-aged Spanish gentleman named Alonso Quijano who spent too much time on Reddit Chivalric Romance threads lost his grip on reality and reinvented himself as the knight-errant Don Quixote de la Mancha, and set out to revive the age of knighthood and defend honor, justice, and the helpless.
At least that’s what Miguel de Cervantes tells us in the story of Don Quixote de la Mancha, widely regarded as the first modern European novel and one of the greatest works in world literature, which was first published on January 6, 1605 in Madrid.
And since video clips of Don Quixote tend to be either very long, academic lectures or Peter O’Toole in The Man of La Mancha, today you get a scene from Terry Gilliam’s underrated, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
Digby’s Hullabaloo: So, So Weak.
Show Me Progress: Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D): on Venezuela.
The Rude Pundit: Zohran Mamdani’s Radical Refocus of the Left Is What We’ve Needed.
Attention space nerds! January 2026: What’s in the sky this month? Jupiter reaches opposition, Mercury briefly appears.
