On Reddit, commenters wondered what, exactly, the newly free-standing maybes referred to. And do eight words really need four periods?"

"Some, on Instagram, wrote off the rebrand as corporate word salad. Others jokingly offered their own alternatives. 'Maybe we are born with it. Maybe not. Maybelline,' Tracy Silagi, a freelance brand copywriter, suggested on LinkedIn. Another user, on TikTok, presented a more Shakespearean spin: 'Maybe or not maybe, that is the Maybelline.'"

I'm reading "What’s. The Deal. With Maybelline’s. New Slogan. An attempt to update one of the most famous tag lines in marketing history left many consumers scratching their heads" (NYT).

Here's the ad in question:

I think the ad people were just endlessly fascinated by the happenstance of the first 5 letters of the company's name spelling the word "maybe."

"James Talarico and Adam Hamilton... draw on the Hebrew scripture, especially Micah 6:8..."

"... where the prophet says the Lord requires us 'to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.' They draw, too, on the New Testament: the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Sermon on the Mount; on the two great commandments to love God and to love your neighbor; and Matthew 25, where Jesus says that whatever we did for the least of these we did for him. There are Christians all across America who may not agree with Talarico and Hamilton on every issue but who are deeply grateful these men won, because they offer an ethic and a disposition profoundly different from those of MAGA world. The senators-elect from Texas and Kansas believe that statecraft is soulcraft, that words should heal rather than wound, and that mercy is not weakness. They take seriously Isaiah’s invitation: 'Come now, and let us reason together.'"

Writes Peter Wehner, in "A Good Night for the Christian Faith/A pair of victories may do much to help the Democratic Party—and even more for the evangelical world" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

"Statecraft is soulcraft" — is that a standard phrase? Apparently, it is. There's a 1984 George Will book called "Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does." He says things like "I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislation because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation."

Will is not mentioned in the Atlantic article, and I'll take that as a sign that Will's idea caught on. Checking my 22-year archive — because I didn't remember ever seeing the phrase before and I felt sure if I ever saw it, I would blog about it — I had to laugh when I found a post titled "Soulcraft," from October 1, 2021:

I'm thinking about the game Monopoly this morning because...

... it's the subject of the New Yorker's "Catalogues" game, which I play every morning. There's some category with 7 items and you've got to put the in some kind of order. 

Seeing Mediterranean Avenue in the lowest position — low rent — on the Monopoly board motivated me to prompt Grok: "List the monopoly squares in order and make the argument that they express an opinion that is not politically correct. I'm especially interested in the racial meaning of 'Mediterranean' (which is put in a lowly position)."

Grok point me toward this 2021 Atlantic article by Mary Pilon: "The Prices on Your Monopoly Board Hold a Dark Secret/The property values of the popular game reflect a legacy of racism and inequality" (gift link). Excerpt:

Jesse Raiford, a realtor in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the early 1930s and a fan of what players then called “the monopoly game,” affixed prices to the properties on his board to reflect the actual real-estate hierarchy at the time. And in Atlantic City, as in so much of the rest of the United States, that hierarchy reflects a bitter legacy of racism and residential segregation....

Pilon has a whole book: "The Monopolists/Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game" (commission earned).

What board games have you been thinking about? Yesterday, I was thinking about chess, specifically the artwork called "Horses Running Endlessly," by Gabriel Orozco:

Sunrise.

"This isn’t another 9/11. This is a telecommunication outage."

Said Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of homeland security, quoted in "Live Updates: F.A.A. Declares a Rare Nationwide Ground Stop Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of homeland security, says Trump administration officials do not suspect foul play. He added that officials did not know the cause and said it would 'take some time' to restart airport operations" (NYT).

"There was no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against us. It’s just a telecommunication outage as of right now."

ADDED: From that NYT live coverage: "Friday’s outage comes just a few days after the F.A.A. announced it would begin rolling out an artificial intelligence tool nationwide to help controllers avoid delays.... SMART, short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories was made by an A.I. company called ASI, or Air Space Intelligence, which won an $875 million contract for the program...."

"A $9,000 leather moto is not the outerwear of a man faithfully going home to his wife and kids after a long day of architecting the AI revolution."

"That’s a man in a midlife crisis with an active Raya profile and a Harley in the garage. If someone had consulted me years ago, I’d have said Huang is clearly someone who drinks wine with his mistress in the middle of the day. (The Times uncovered a 2023 photo of Jensen appearing to do exactly that at a luncheon in Shanghai with Alice.)"

I'm reading "17 Ways to Think About Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Mess" (New York Magazine)(gift link).

Lots more at the link, but what's Raya? Here's a Reddit discussion of it, where the top comment is: 

"Why would you fire the manager when you just won the World Series?"

Said Angus King, the independent Senator from Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats, quoted in "Van Hollen Says He Will Challenge Schumer for Senate Majority Leader/Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland has emerged as a favorite of Democrats seeking an alternative to Senator Chuck Schumer, who says he has the votes to win" (NYT).

“Chuck has outlined an aggressive plan for the new Democratic majority, which is directly responsive to the message we heard from the voters, and he has the experience and unique mastery of the Senate process to make it happen,” Mr. King said.

Aggressive, but maybe not aggressive enough. I'm sure many Republicans are standing back, watching, hoping Democrats will overplay their hand. I know I've mixed up the metaphor now, but give me credit for not trying to stretch this out into a euchre/Uecker joke.

Why is Talarico saying this and what does it mean — especially the comparison to LBJ?

James Talarico: "The American people cannot wait two years for change so we must work with President Trump. If President Trump wants the same plaques, and portraits, and busts as LBJ, we can help make that a reality. We should make the final two years of his presidency the most… pic.twitter.com/PRHYau8oeD

— Bulwark Clips (@BulwarkClips) November 12, 2026

"The American people cannot wait two years for change so we must work with President Trump. If President Trump wants the same plaques, and portraits, and busts as LBJ, we can help make that a reality. We should make the final two years of his presidency the most productive of any presidency in American history."

I hear that as: We should humor Trump where we can.... and that is where it has to do with his screwy ego. We did it with Lyndon Baines Johnson, and we can do it here.

Sunrise.

"The ouster of Huang is portentous for the alliance between the Trump administration and the so-called 'tech right,' or the leaders of Silicon Valley’s recent conservative inflection."

"Huang himself did not do much political giving or display overt partisan leanings. But he was a leader of the tech billionaire class’s political push, which included crafting a grow-at-all-costs A.I. agenda that the billionaires argued was good for the U.S. (and was certainly good for Nvidia.)"

Writes Theodore Schleifer, in "Live Updates: Jensen Huang Resigns From Nvidia After Affairs/The longtime head of the chip-making colossus admitted to an affair with a woman identified as a spy for China. He was also said to have had a relationship with an executive who reported to him" (NYT).

And here's today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, recorded before the resignation: "What Jensen Huang’s Potential Ouster Could Mean for A.I./ Nvidia’s board is considering firing Jensen Huang after revelations that he had affairs with an executive who reports to him and a woman who U.S. officials say is a Chinese spy."

"'I had the courage to believe in Mississippi,' Mr. Colom said at the Tougaloo College chapel, where Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar Evers once spoke."

"Before his speech, his supporters danced and embraced. One of them declared, 'Thank the Lord, we did it.'... During the campaign, Mr. Colom... did not often dwell on the historic implications of his candidacy, but [he] took time on Wednesday to talk about the legacy he would now continue in Washington. Mississippi was the first state to send a Black person to Congress, Hiram Revels, who joined the Senate in 1870. He was followed by Blanche Bruce in 1875, who was born in slavery in 1841. Mr. Bruce was replaced by a white former Confederate soldier who disavowed the ideals of racial equality and ushered in segregationist policies...."

From "Scott Colom, a Democrat, Wins Mississippi Senate Seat in Historic Upset/Mr. Colom, a prosecutor, will be the first Black senator elected from Mississippi since the post-Civil War Reconstruction period" (NYT).

It should be noted that Colom graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School.

"It's been a desperate search in the overnight hours."

UPDATE: "Live Updates: At Least 8 Dead in Brooklyn Building Collapse, as Crews Scour Rubble" (NYT).

"Lying in the scanner, I concentrated on a sequence of seemingly random images projected onto a screen a few feet from my eyes...."

"Pictures of traffic lights, cars, airplanes and trees were meant to elicit a 'boring' response from my amygdala (which governs fight-or-flight responses). Images of grotesque A.I.-generated faces or people making threatening gestures were meant to excite that part of my brain. In art school, I was taught to read images deliberately and slowly in the same way we might read and critique bits of literature or morsels of philosophy. In the fMRI machine, however, an image is just a visual stimulus to elicit a neurological response. On my second day of scanning, I learned that my amygdala is highly responsive to a certain type of 'boring' image: pictures of small airplanes against a big sky. This rattled me. Amy Kuceyeski, the radiology professor running this experiment, did not know that in my work as an artist, I spend enormous amounts of time tracking and photographing drones, satellites and aircraft. I felt like my mind had been read, that a machine had reached into my subconscious to unearth something deep, private and intimate about my professional life and personal interests...."

Writes Trevor Paglen, in "I Saw the Future of Mind-Reading" (NYT).

"The lesson in the Jensen Huang scandal... middle-aged men need to slow down with testosterone replacement therapy..."

"Feel the TRT oozing..."

Goodbye to Judge Posner.

NYT obituary: "Judge Richard A. Posner Has Died. His Influence in Law Was Beyond Compare. He was the most-cited legal scholar of the latter half of the 20th century and an unapologetic iconoclast, favoring pragmatism over judicial tradition. He was 87."

Judge Posner’s admirers said he had no real competition in the annals of American jurisprudence. They regarded him as a superb writer, with a limpid, conversational style and a sure command of tone. He wrote with self-confidence and authority, qualities his critics said were not always entirely deserved. Most important, in a field that overvalues tradition and formalism, he was known as a brilliantly original iconoclast....

Judge Posner called his approach to judging pragmatic. His critics called it lawless. “I pay very little attention to legal rules, statutes, constitutional provisions,” Judge Posner said in a 2017 interview. “A case is just a dispute. The first thing you do is ask yourself — forget about the law — what is a sensible resolution of this dispute?”

He was among the leading figures in the movement to analyze legal problems using economics. In looking to social utility rather than abstract moral values like fairness or equality, he gained a reputation as a cold, calculating conservative. He was just 33 when he published “Economic Analysis of Law,” a tour de force that helped establish the field....

I have so many posts with the "Posner" tag in my 22-year archive. It would take a long time just to cherry-pick the best things. Click the tag and scroll to find many fascinating quotes from Posner collected over all those years. For example, what he said when somebody asked him, "In what ways, if any, does it make sense to speak of the study of law as the study of legal science?"

But I will cherry-pick one thing that's very special to me, from April 2005. It's about blogging:

Sunrise.