"For the past few summers, men’s shorts have somehow been getting both shorter and longer."

"On one end, there’s the unmissable thigh-baring hemlines.... On the other side, you have the slouchier, below-the-knee joint.... [One fashion writer] cites that photo of Giorgio Armani on the phone as 'the Bible' for shorts right now. And then there’s the ongoing John F. Kennedy Jr. cosplay, as sparked by Love Story. 'Last summer, short shorts were everywhere. Now, a lot of men are like, "Oh, but JFK Jr. wore baggier shorts. Let’s ditch the short short...."' Of course, there will always be the extremes. Some guys prefer the ultra-trendy, downtown look of giant, capri-like shorts with white socks and black leather shoes.... But... 'In the city and polite society, you kind of want your shorts hovering right at the knee.'"

From "How Long (or Short) Should Your Shorts Be in 2026?/Here’s the definitive answer to the ultimate summer menswear debate" (GQ).

Who knew men were in such a quandary about the length of their shorts? One solution is don't wear shorts or don't wear shorts whenever you care how you look.

I'm interested in the notion that there is "ongoing John F. Kennedy Jr. cosplay" — interested enough to look up "cosplay" in the OED. Cosplay involves not just dressing up like a character but also performing as that character. Who would even know if you were performing the role of JFK Jr.? You'd know. And maybe that's all that matters.

"Trump administration officials have pressed the office responsible for printing the nation’s money to design a $250 bill featuring the president’s portrait..."

"... according to four current and former employees, in what would be the first appearance of a living person on U.S. currency in more than 150 years.... The employees spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution."

The Washington Post reports. Gift link.

I find this hard to believe. It's such a bad idea. I prefer to think it's just not true.

No living person has appeared on U.S. currency since 1866, when it was outlawed after the image of a mid-level Treasury bureaucrat showed up on a 5-cent note. Legislation that would allow Trump to appear on a $250 bill was introduced in Congress last year to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary but has languished. In a statement, a Treasury Department spokesperson said the printing office “is conducting appropriate planning and due diligence” in response to the proposed legislation. “Should this legislative mandate be signed into law, the BEP is moving proactively to produce a $250 commemorative note which will appropriately recognize the 250th Anniversary of our great nation,” the statement said.

So it is, essentially, not true. They went through the exercise of creating the note that might be issued if Congress passes a law permitting it, which is not going to happen. So meanwhile, you can see the thing and celebrate or get steamed up or whatever this latest provocation moves you to do.

Is that his mugshot?!

"GLP-1 drugs may be rewiring circuits involved not only in appetite but in emotion, desire and beyond."

WaPo reports. Gift link. Excerpt:

Tens of millions of people are now taking the medications worldwide, turning what began as an obesity and diabetes treatment into what could be modern medicine’s largest unplanned neuroscience experiments. Scientists are studying GLP-1 drugs — medications that mimic the hormones involved in appetite, blood sugar and digestion — for how they affect not only eating behavior, but also addiction, cognition, neurodegeneration and even motivation and pleasure....

On social media and at doctor’s offices, some users have reported a type of brain fog and others something broader and harder to define: a strange emotional flattening. People describe less pleasure, less motivation, diminished interest in hobbies and even reduced sexual desire. Those accounts are beginning to raise deeper questions about what, exactly, these drugs are changing. If GLP-1s alter the brain systems involved in reward, craving and motivation, researchers wonder, where is the line between quieting a person’s destructive impulses and reshaping personality itself?...

"A dated tick taped to a card is one of the most useful things you can hand a doctor who’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with you."

Advice for tick-o-phobes.

The prairie's edge at dawn.

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"Bob would just mow paths through the meadows and put a bench down and just read his book, and probably have a drink."

I'm reading "Sometimes, the Best Way to Explore a Landscape Is to Sit Down/Madoo, in Sagaponack, N.Y., is giving visitors a different way to view a garden, with outdoor seating in a variety of styles and colors" (NYT).

"No one ever believes me when I tell them it’s 1.91 acres.... They always think it’s much, much bigger, because you have all of these little mini-follies and these little windy paths that you get a little bit lost in as if you were in a much larger garden. But you’re not."

"He was so arrestingly good-looking, with his black hair and blue eyes, and the ruddy complexion of someone who couldn’t be contained within the walls of a New York apartment."

"No one else looks like that, I thought. I was twenty-one. On a shelf at the literary agency where I was working as a secretary, I’d recently found a copy of Jack’s first novel, 'The Town and the City.' I’d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading me, that I could have been one of the characters trying out some new, free way to live after leaving home."

Writes Joyce Johnson, in "What Gets Kept/More than half a century after 'On the Road,' Jack Kerouac is still a literary celebrity. But fame undid the man I knew" (The New Yorker).

I’d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading me.... that killed me. I read the line out of context to Meade and he laughed.

When do you ever say, I thought I was reading that book, but, really, that book was reading me?

More generally, when do you ever speak of interacting with an inanimate object and reverse the usual directionality of actor and acted upon?

I can only think of one example, something I considered the funniest thing in "A Hard Day's Night" when saw it the first time:

 

"[His wife] might have knitted it"/"She knitted him."

I asked Grok to help me think of other examples, and it gave me the highbrow answer: "When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

Paxton wins and gives us a dose of his comedy stylings.

Ken Paxton just put on a 30-second comedy routine for his audience, as he debuted his favorite nicknames for his radical Democrat opponent, James Talarico.

The crowd was loving every second of this!

PAXTON: “My opponent is the most extreme radical the Democrats have ever… pic.twitter.com/kvEtsoyKmY

— Overton (@overton_news) May 27, 2026

I know some people seem to think that's hilarious. I don't see the value of kicking someone around for being a vegan. You'll say but Althouse is not a Texan. I sort of am though.

AND: Paxton's satirizing of Talarico doesn't work on me, but Talarico just being Talarico strikes me as hilarious:

James Talarico: "I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign. We are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses." #TXsenpic.twitter.com/SkZZ05IXMj

— Lone Star Liberty PAC (@LoneStar_PAC) May 27, 2026

"Just as the Founding Fathers might have anticipated (had they been microdosing while drafting the Declaration of Independence)..."

"... the American republic will celebrate its two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary next month with a full card of mixed-martial-arts brawls on the South Lawn of the White House. Weigh-ins will take place at the Lincoln Memorial. The night of mayhem is also meant to celebrate the eightieth birthday of the President of the United States, a longtime fan of the sport...."

So begins "Dana White Thinks Everyone’s a Fighter/The U.F.C. president on his decades of friendship with Donald Trump, his relationship with Joe Rogan, and his 'awesome' night at the White House Correspondents’ dinner" in The New Yorker, written by David Remnick.

I wanted to quote that here because I feel as though I'm seeing a trend in Trump-hating writing. There's a choice to couch descriptions within a problem of the distortion of reality. In this article we have the idea of the Framers microdosing. Last night, I blogged a WaPo writer saying "at least half of life with RFK Jr. feels like something you dreamed"... though "It sure feels real in your lower intestines, doesn’t it?"

Why did the writer take us inside her body like that? It's one thing to say my mind is off, I feel like I'm on drugs or I must be dreaming or maybe I'm crazy, but it's another thing to invite us into the nether regions. People often speak of their "gut reaction," but it's rather intimate to bring up "lower intestines." At least we're not directed to think about the colons of the Founding Fathers.

Anyway, speaking of getting physical: mixed martial arts. Mixed martial arts for the celebration of America's "two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary next month." Next month is June. The 4th of July is in July. But the fighting on the White House lawn is June 14th. That's Trump's birthday. Can't he have what he wants?

What did George Washington do on his birthday? It's 4 in the morning, and I'm writing this wide awake and sober: I'm going to guess nothing.

History in the making 👀

New visuals for #UFCWhiteHouse and the UFC Freedom 250 Fan Fest are here!

[ Presented by @Cryptocom & @RamTrucks ] pic.twitter.com/PQP7dut7fE

— UFC (@ufc) May 23, 2026

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"When scientists try to model how hot Earth could get this century, they typically look at a range of possibilities..."

"... for how much planet-warming pollution humans might pump into the atmosphere. These scenarios get updated every seven years or so. In this latest update, the researchers abandoned a dire — and often criticized — high-emissions scenario known as RCP8.5 that has been prominently cited in thousands of climate studies over the past decade. The authors said the scenario was now 'implausible' given recent energy trends.... For years, critics of the high-emissions scenario had argued that it was always unrealistic, in part because it envisioned that countries would burn coal at absurdly high rates. They argued that any studies or news reports relying on that scenario exaggerated the risks of climate change. Why, those critics now asked, did the course correction take so long?..."

I'm reading "Why Scientists Retired the Dire Climate Scenario Used for Over a Decade/While global warming is still a threat, the decision to back away from a worst-case outlook raises questions about whether some risks have been overstated" (NYT).

"You don’t know if I’m joking, do you? Neither does Cheryl. That’s the point. The point is that at least half of life with RFK Jr. feels like something you dreamed..."

"... after ordering a party pack at Taco Bell. Is it real? It sure feels real in your lower intestines, doesn’t it? Back to the patio. The snakes are calming. How did RFK Jr. get them to calm?... 'Honey, honey, let them go,' pleads Cheryl, as the snakes dart up again and again, gnashing at her husband’s exposed flesh.... 'Oh, my God. Bobby, please!' Cheryl cries...."

Writes Monica Hesse in "RFK Jr. is now handling snakes. What does this mean? Decoding the latest manly video from our secretary of health and human services" (WaPo).

Cheryl cheerleads the removal of a pair of Black Racers from Dr Oz's patio. pic.twitter.com/A0iiRzOeIF

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) May 26, 2026

Chris sends pictures from Teotihuacán.

It's quite the climb, and you have to get back down again. Or hang out in the blazing sun:

Chris sends this snippet from a book:

Here's the book: "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" (commission earned). I'm going to read that. I can't see me climbing those steep stairs in full sunlight, but I do want to read that book.

Sunrise.

Video by Meade, this morning.

"I have no patience, incidentally, with those whataboutery critics invoking the Inquisition and the Crusades to diss Leo’s credentials."

"Nationalism, imperialism, fascism and communism are already far bigger killers than Catholicism, despite having been around for much less time. The main reason for that is, besides being inefficient, it is morally repugnant to most people to kill face to face, but to do it from a distance — with a machinegun, with artillery, with an aerial bomb, with a drone, now with a robot controlled by an algorithm — has become progressively easier over the past 150 years. As the Pope says, not 'seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict.' That is why he has called for 'the strictest ethical constraints' on the use of AI in warfare. He is right, obviously. I hate AI. But then I think social media has been a disaster and I don’t much like predictive texting, spellcheck or digital train tickets either. I’d have pulled the plug on the whole shebang in 2006, after email, Wikipedia and YouTube but before any of the other nonsense. But hey, I am also a realist.... We have to live with this madness. Given that, why would we let a few super-rich weird nerdy misfits decide what’s ethical AI and what isn’t?"

Writes Robert Crampton, in "Pope Leo’s come out all guns blazing against the AI war machine. Good/Allowing a few super-rich weird nerdy misfits to decide what is and isn’t ethical would be madness" (London Times).

My first draft of this post had one more sentence, but I decided to cut it because I think it's dumb and distracting. For the record, it's "They would blow up the world, as Pope Leo didn’t quite say but I’ll say it for him, if they thought it would bag them a hot babe with fake boobs." But what do you think of the sexualized analysis? The tech leaders are "super-rich weird nerdy misfits" driven by sexual frustration. I used to read analysis like that all the time 60 years ago, when Freudianism was still going strong. It's interesting, but that doesn't make it true. If these men are super-rich, can't they find sexual partners? And why fake boobs? Also, isn't it gauche these days to disparage the neurodivergent with insults like "weird nerdy misfits"?

I remember when a major political party in the United States got the idea that calling a weird person "weird" would be an effective way to win a presidential election.