"In the exhilarating case of Madison, it’s important to pursue the frenzy, merge with the frenzy, ingest the frenzy."

"The frenzy beckons along State Street, the central nervous system of the city and the 50,000-strong university, with main quadrangle Bascom Hill at the end opposite the state Capitol. The frenzy churns up and down the streets and boulevards leading up to kickoffs, the multistory bars packed with people and red. It’s present in bits in the breakfast line at the famed Mickie’s Dairy Bar, or the doughnut line at Greenbush, or at State Street Brats, or the Memorial Union Terrace of the main student union. It’s bubbling at the Dane County Farmers’ Market, and it’s roaring at the frat houses near Camp Randall Stadium, where the inspiring sights might include a beer bong on the second floor delivering the nectar to a drinker on the ground. It reaches its peak, though, at the end of the third quarter.... If one seeks bouts of quiet, as unfitting as they can seem, there’s a daydream of a lake (Mendota), the Lakeshore Path, the city’s welcoming capacity for cyclists or the privilege of a lakefront room at the Edgewater Hotel...."

The Washington Post puts Madison first, in "The 10 best college football towns in America" (gift link).

Here's the daydream this morning, video'd by Meade:

 

Socialists in shorts.

I'm reading the NYT article "Is the Democratic Party Facing Its Own Tea Party Moment? A string of primary wins by progressive candidates has revealed the strength of a high-energy insurgent movement but also its potential limitations," which you can read for yourself at that gift link.

It's a topic I'm following, and I've recently blogged about. I said it a week ago: "The socialists are to the Democratic Party what the Tea Party was to the GOP."

So right now, all I want to do is put up something I cropped from one of the photographs:

"Dr. Abdul El-Sayed tried to attract young voters," and he did. They came toddling in wearing shorts, shuffling in slides and sneakers.

If I were a NYT essayist, I'd muse that they are showing us what real, human, embodied and, yes male power can look like.

ADDED: After publishing this post, I dashed off a question to Grok, "Can the males wear shorts and slides to the revolution?" Answer:

"Women remain, as linguists say, the 'marked' sex, the nonstandard, defined as the opposite of the male norm."

"There is no one effortless way to look as a congresswoman, no uniform of business suit and tie that allows her to blend in. Most female politicians handle this by approximating male attire with some tweaks. Usually that involves a blazer, pearls, and very discreet hair and makeup — ideally, none of which gets talked about. But there is power in rejecting this model. Power in embracing the variety of embellishments available to women — earrings, lipstick, dresses, different hair styles. And an extension of this power can be a woman experimenting with baring her belly, along with her reproductive journey. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is consciously working to fuse her body and mind on the public stage, to show us what real, human, embodied and, yes, female power can look like. She will not be a mere 'thing in a suit,' as she said."

Writes Rhonda Garelick, in "Ocasio-Cortez Rewrites the Rules" (NYT gift link).

It's an old idea — that feminine beauty is powerful and that power-seeking women can implement beauty to rise in the political world. Cleopatra, etc. But Garelick adds the notion that a woman baring her belly to the public and making a show out of shifting her fertility into the realm of science and technology will augment the power achieved through beauty and fashion. The old idea is a cliché. It works as far as it works. The new idea is barely coherent.

"I’m sorry to be crass about it, but I don’t think the point of the magazine is for self-pleasure. You no longer need a print magazine for that."

"It weirdly offers an artistic and highbrow view of the female nude, at a time when that is hard to come by."

Says Phillip Picardi, quoted in "I’ll make Playboy playful again, says its new gay editor/Phillip Picardi, a Catholic former Condé Nast wunderkind, also wants to attract women to the £30 magazine with more ‘artistic’ nudes and robust writing" (London Times).

He wants to “destigmatise male sexuality”, he says, and “help men to build a healthier relationship” with the women in their lives. “I’m hoping we can be a space for men who feel caught between needing to be manosphere-adjacent and needing to be the performative liberal male,” he says.... “We should promote the idea that we can be excited about sex and we can be excited about each other and excited about touching each other,” he says with a cheeky grin.

How Catholic is he? We're told he's "a lapsed Catholic who recently completed a master’s at Harvard Divinity School in order to rediscover his faith (his thesis was titled: Is Jesus Kinda Hot?)." Is religion part of making "playful again"? You can find "an artistic and highbrow view of the female nude" in church:

This reminds me of a sequence in the movie "Blue Moon," about the songwriter Lorenz Hart, who was gay, though not openly. The character has this conversation with the bartender. From the brilliant screenplay by Robert Kaplow (commission earned):

HART: You know what the sexiest thing on the planet earth is? A half-erect penis. 

EDDIE: Jesus Christ, Larry, nobody wants to hear this. 

Sunrise.

"[C]ritics of the state of the discipline say sociologists who aim to change the conditions they study can no longer claim to be rigorous scientists."

"A report released over the weekend about the state of scholarly standards in the field said it had been compromised by politics that influenced the discipline’s values and priorities. The report was produced by a commission led by Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, where leaders have argued that higher education is in need of reforms. The commission found that scholarship in the humanities and social sciences was sometimes in the service of political goals. 'Some topics cannot be studied or cannot be studied in an honest way,' said Jukka Savolainen, a Wayne State University criminologist and sociologist who is not part of the commission. For scholars studying incarceration, he said, 'the only research that’s rewarded and allowed and encouraged is to find the umpteenth way in which incarceration is harmful.'"

From "Conservatives Don’t Like Sociology. Some Sociologists Don’t Either. A group of sociologists broke away in protest from their colleagues over disagreements about Israel. Some worry the political stances are harming the field" (NYT gift link).

"... Americans love to turn to women when the house is burning down. Social scientists call it the glass cliff — the phenomenon in which women are recruited to lead failing companies."

"President Trump’s businessman brand of governance has many Americans feeling this nation is failing. I suppose the dumpster fire of climate denialism, political corruption and general scamminess of, well, everything would be dire enough circumstances to make a female president possible.  In particular, Democrats — whom you might expect to be wary of placing another female candidate before the American public — are facing a political disaster of their own making.... [A] lot of Democrats are faithful to conventional political wisdom that they cannot win the White House by running from the left. Ocasio-Cortez is made for this moment....  As we learned in 2008, when history says it’s your time, it’s your time."

Writes Tressie McMillan Cottom, in "Is Ocasio-Cortez Ready for the Glass Cliff?" (NYT gift link).

"There's a little bit of a quicksand feeling."

Althouse enters Lake Mendota for the first time after all these years.

Meade, who's great at instigating variations on old rituals, made the video.

"The other book I’ve been reading, Michael Glover Smith’s 'Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think,' takes up Dylan’s... forays into the world of cinema."

"I got to witness one of them a few weeks ago, when I attended a rare public screening of the provocative and polarizing 2003 flick 'Masked and Anonymous,' co-written by Dylan and Larry Charles. I hadn’t seen it before, but I immediately entered the cult of admirers who believe it was unfairly maligned when it was first released. (Roger Ebert called it 'a vanity production beyond all reason.' I hope Dylan chose to take that as a compliment.) I have also had the 'Masked and Anonymous' soundtrack on repeat — especially its eclectic assortment of Dylan covers by a global panorama of artists like the Sertab Erener, Francesco de Gregori and the Magokoro Brothers. You’ve never truly heard 'My Back Pages' until you’ve heard it in Japanese."

Writes Lindsay Zoladz, in "My Summer of Bob Dylan/Hear tracks inspired by his Long Hot Summer Tour, including 'My Back Pages' and 'Mississippi'" (NYT gift link, where you will find a playlist that includes "My Back Pages" in Japanese).

Here's "Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think." And for a second book Zoladz writes about, "After the Flood/Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace." Both of those links work to send a commission to me.

As for "Masked and Anonymous," I couldn't find it streaming anywhere. Meade, who's seen it twice, seems to think it's on YouTube, but here's a link to buy the DVD, if you still have a DVD player. It's only $9.48. Here's the trailer:

"An early affection for tossing pots on the wheel led her to graduate school... where she studied both ceramics and sculpture with Peter Voulkos... who believed in subjecting clay to Abstract Expressionist theatrics."

"As Ms. Heilmann later recalled, Mr. Voulkos liked to walk across the classroom holding a homemade pot, then trip (or rather, as she said, 'fake trip'), with the pot smashing on the floor. He would collect the broken shards and assemble them into a surprisingly interesting sculpture. Ms. Heilmann’s own early sculptures, which consisted of ragged-looking objects constructed from inexpensive craft-shop materials like plastic clay, tin foil, cotton balls, bamboo and glitter, similarly sought to foreground the process of their making."

From "Mary Heilmann, Painter of Vividly Wobbly Abstractions, Dies at 86/An emblem of the obstacles faced by women artists of her generation, she was 67 when her first museum retrospective opened to rave reviews in 2007" (NYT gift link).

ADDED: Something about the attitude in the comments here made me remember a line from the movie "Blue Moon":

She’s a college student. Sophomore. Yale. Not the general school; that’s for the guys. This is the School of Fine Arts! Bohemian goddesses in gray smocks mixing paint in morning light. She’s all of twenty years old.

I bought the screenplay so I could quote that. (I highly recommend that movie, by the way. It's the most like "My Dinner with Andre" that I've ever run across: An unusual man talks about theater for a long time. Catch it on Netflix.)

I do appreciate the commenters focusing on the phrase "An emblem of the obstacles."

"Over the past 21 terms, the closest any member of the court got to Justice Jackson’s loquaciousness was Justice Stephen G. Breyer..."

"... who was famous for unspooling elaborate hypothetical questions featuring flights of fancy like marshmallow guns (in a case about attempted robbery) and tomato children (in a case about a federal drug law). Still, Justice Breyer... uttered an average of 818 words, or roughly two thirds as many as Justice Jackson [who averages 1263 words]. The runner-up to Justice Jackson in the four years since she joined the court... is Justice Sonia Sotomayor, at 791 words. His colleagues treated Justice Breyer’s professorial digressions with bemused tolerance. Justice Jackson’s extended questioning, by contrast, has been a source of annoyance to some of the other justices, The New York Times reported last October...."

Writes Adam Liptak, in "How a Covid-Era Scramble Transformed Supreme Court Arguments/Live audio, a new format and new voices have transformed and unsettled the court’s signature public ceremony" (NYT gift link).

Liptak offers 3 reasons why Justice Jackson seizes the opportunity to speak far more than anyone else and in defiance of clearly expressed annoyance: 1. She developed her style as a trial judge, the only judge in the courtroom, 2. Her side of the Court is outnumbered, 3. As the junior member of the Court, she's forced to go last when the Justices speak in order of seniority.

Jackson's outsized role at oral argument is so extreme, and so much attention has been paid to it. Clearly, she's choosing it, in spite of the criticism and even disdain and ridicule. She must believe she's doing exactly the right thing. Perhaps she views her contribution as proportionate if you measure not by the number of Justices but by the weight and power of the ideas they represent.

Sunrise.

"Jason Arday obituary: youngest ever black Cambridge professor/Sociology of education academic who made history before his career unravelled after accusations of plagiarism dies aged 41."

An obituary in the London Times.

Arday, who claimed to have been diagnosed with global developmental delay and autism spectrum disorder, was apparently unable to talk until the age of 11, and unable to read or write until he was 18. Despite this remarkable setback, by his early thirties he had begun writing and publishing academic papers, and he won his first academic post soon after....

We talked about Arday a few days ago, here. He was accused of plagiarism and various lies that made him a laughingstock. Now, apparently, he has killed himself. Though he is responsible for his deceit, I feel the greatest blame lies with the University that advanced him beyond anything that made sense. 

"As expected, Mr. Farage easily defeated dozens of fringe and novelty candidates, including Count Binface, who wears a trash-can-themed costume."

"None of Britain’s other major parties participated in the race, the results of which were announced early Friday. They called it a political stunt engineered by the Reform leader to distract from the investigation. Mr. Farage received 22,239 votes, or 63 percent. Count Binface, a character played by Jon Harvey, 46, a writer and comedian, received 9,455 votes, or 27 percent. Mr. Binface’s previous best result was 1 percent in a London mayoral election."

From "Farage Wins Special U.K. Election That He Initiated, as Expected/Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform U.K., won the Clacton by-election with 63 percent. Count Binface, his costumed main rival, came second with 27 percent, a personal best" (NYT gift link).

"This is no different from what the Heritage Foundation wants for women in the US. Except maybe instead of burqas..."

"... they want us in milk maid dresses, heavy hideous makeup, plastic surgery and naked. And it's actually worse when I think about their plans for society as a whole with illiteracy, poisoned food, toxic 'health' care, etc. Separation of religion and state must happen to even attempt a free society. This is why this concept exists."

A highly rated contribution to the comments section for "Afghan Women Erased From Public Life in Five Years of Taliban Rule/Decrees restricting the rights of women and girls to study, work, travel and act independently now threaten to damage Afghanistan permanently, experts say" (NYT gift link).

Rubio and his Pop-Tarts.

RFK Jr. and Marco Rubio are getting into the act

Fake news…….
I prefer cherry flavor https://t.co/bVMZJV9dPl

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) August 13, 2026

But there are also lots of things out there like this:

When Marco goes for the pop tarts 😂 pic.twitter.com/kbbr6XUNZf

— Politi_Rican 🇵🇷 𝕏 🇺🇸 (@TheRicanMemes) August 13, 2026

And this:

Marco Rubio in the first ever Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts ad 🤣💀 pic.twitter.com/4X5STDt7my

— DFF (@DumbFxckFinder) August 13, 2026