Sunrise.

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"I could have tried to adopt, though I think a single gay man would still be right at the back of the queue..."

"... but I remember seeing my nephew for the first time, back in 1997 — just recalling it makes me emotional — and feeling this tug, a real visceral knowing that I was related to this little human being, that we share a gene pool. I wanted the same with my own child. When I reached 50 I thought, ‘It’s now or never,’ and I really started looking into surrogacy seriously.... A couple of friends took a beat or two to respond when I told them about my plans. Another asked, 'Do you really want to be coping with a stroppy teenager when you’re in your seventies?' I think my parents, who are both in their eighties, and sister were concerned that, aged 50-plus, I didn’t realise the enormity of what I was letting myself in for.”

Said Simon Burrell, quoted in "What it’s like to be a single dad (with a child via surrogacy)/The frequency of single fathers having children through surrogacy has tripled. Simon Burrell tells Helen Carroll why he spent £200,000 on becoming one. Plus: I was the UK’s first solo surrogacy father" (London Times).

"But Trump’s urge is toward gigantism, not grace. This is as true about his ballroom... as it is about the proposed arch."

"It is, simply, un-American. It is even, in its derivative way, un-French, since the Parisian instances are, at least, right-sized for their place and their purpose. If it were ever to be built, future generations would dream of its demolition. Its injury to the democratic spirit is too large to contemplate, and would be too hard to look past, even from a distance."

Writes Adam Gopnik, in "Donald Trump’s Triumphal Arch and the Architecture of Autocracy/When asked by a reporter whom the arch would be for, Trump said, 'Me'" (The New Yorker).

Is gigantism un-American?

Sundust.

"It's discouraging to come up here and see all the heads down..."/"Sir, you're on a 2-minute timer here so let's go."

Resident speaks at the Seattle City Council

The Democrat city council wouldn’t even look up at him. He asked them to at least look at him and they rudely tell him his time is almost up

He tells them they’re like Animal Farm

“It reminds me of George Orwell's famous saying from… pic.twitter.com/Unkx9ZEYcs

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) April 22, 2026

I love the elegance with which the citizen adapted to the city council's effort to throw him off, to reduce him to nothing. He made the experience into the substance of what he was able to say within the harsh time constraint. He spoke slowly and with dignity and even worked in a George Orwell quote. 

"As some of you might recall, earlier this year I had an AI oopsie of my own..."

Writes David Lat, in "An AI Screw-Up By... Sullivan & Cromwell? There are multiple ironies involved in this unfortunate incident."

I’ll simply repeat my two signature quips, urging you to extend grace when it comes to AI fails:

   • “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes… for an AI screw-up.”

   • “The next time you hear about an epic AI fail, instead of (or at least after) laughing your ass off, perhaps have the humility to say this to yourself: ‘There but for the grace of God go (A)I.’”

Or, if you prefer, here are some bon mots from Claude, which it generated after I fed it my two sayings and asked for more along the same lines:

"'If the Democratic Party is to flourish in the future,' Mr. Platner told me, 'it needs to be an antiwar party.'"

"As talks to end the latest disastrous war focus on reopening a narrow strait of water that was open before the war began, this seems like an obvious conclusion. And yet many Democratic politicians would most likely be wary of embracing it.... [M]any Democrats seem to fear being seen as antiwar. What if they vote against wartime funding, and then an Iranian attack targets U.S. troops or the homeland? Or what if Mr. Trump bombs Iran, and the regime collapses and is replaced by something better? You could feel this calculation within the Democratic Party as the war began — a hedging that only dissipated when the war’s brutality and insanity became clear.... We like to frame our wars as virtuous, but they are not. Instead, they resemble a declining empire sowing chaos along its periphery as a matter of strategy.... [T]he forever war has been destroying America from within, like an organism that must keep growing to survive, filling us with fear of outsiders and contempt for one another. War does that to societies: Once you normalize taking human life abroad, you tend not to value it at home...."

Writes Ben Rhodes, in "Graham Platner Went to Hell and Back. He Has a Simple Message for Democrats" (NYT).

Rhodes was a speechwriter for Obama. Platner is the likely Democratic Party candidate for U.S. Senator for Maine. 

Shaping the SPLC story.

I'm taking a position of cruel neutrality and see myself spending much of the day observing how the 2 sides are shaping the story.

Let's just start with the way things look at Elon's place:

Is it terrible or is that a huge loophole?

Terrible https://t.co/geK2swDv82

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 22, 2026

The litigation is already pending: "Lawsuits pending at Virginia Supreme Court over redistricting referendum" (ABC 13 News). There are 3 lawsuits, 2 of which challenge the language. The vote was allowed to go through, but we'll see what the court says. I can see how one might argue that the voters didn’t approve of anything that doesn’t "restore fairness" and the plan put forward by the Democrats was designed for the purpose of advancing the party— not to restore fairness — so the voters did not approve it.

Sunrise.

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"I wish I could designate myself as a 'foreign-policy Republican,' but there’s no such option, so I have to go whole hog."

"By registering as a Republican rather than an independent, maybe I can have some influence on moving some Republican policies toward the center. I have given up on trying to change the Democratic Party. My main goal is to send a message that many traditional Democratic voters can’t accept what it is becoming—a replica of left-wing European parties that are hurting their countries."

Writes Alan Dershowitz, in "Why I’m Becoming a Republican/I first registered as a Democrat in 1959. The party’s hostility to Israel is too much" (Wall Street Journal).

We're at war. If you find yourself cheering for the other side, you've lost your way.

The word traitor gets thrown around too much.

But, uh, this is a United States senator openly cheering on Iran against American military forces. pic.twitter.com/TYVYGO44oR

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) April 21, 2026

And look at him, grotesquely smiling, as he makes the excuse that we don't understand "sarcasm" anymore — you know, the form of humor that consists of saying the opposite of what you think:

JUST IN: Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy doesn't say he has any regrets after furious backlash to his X post calling reports of Iranian ships slipping past the U.S. naval blockade "awesome."

"I guess I just have to be more careful about sarcasm on Twitter," Murphy exclusively told… pic.twitter.com/MB6nuZjY9V

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 21, 2026

"Twitter has become kind of a cesspool, I probably should give up on sarcasm on Twitter," Murphy says, as if the debased speech of others — who?! — undermines our capacity to understand sarcasm. Why? If anything, this "cesspool" quality ought to make us more likely to think somebody's just talking shit.

But Murphy wants to elevate his cynically spit out "awesome" into something subtle. He's doing sarcasm and the shitheads of the cesspool can't figure it out. They can't see that when a Senator says something, it really counts as the opposite of what he said through the magic of the time-honored device known as sarcasm.

Does Chris Murphy need to apologize? Of course, not. He's essentially already said he's sorry — sorry "Twitter" made the people so shitty they don't understand sarcasm anymore.

"I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to 'kiss my ass.'"

Writes Donald Trump, on Truth Social this morning:

I have always been a big fan of Tim Cook, and likewise, Steve Jobs, but if Steve was not taken from the Planet Earth so young, and ran the company instead of Tim, the company would have done well, but nowhere near as well as it has under Tim. For me it began with a phone call from Tim at the beginning of my First Term. He had a fairly large problem that only I, as President, could fix. Most people would have paid millions of dollars to a consultant, who I probably would not have known, but who would say that he knew me well. The fees would be paid but the job would not have gotten done. When I got the call I said, wow, it’s Tim Apple (Cook!) calling, how big is that? I was very impressed with myself to have the head of Apple calling to “kiss my ass.”

Childrearing tips from Eleanor Roosevelt.

My son Chris sent me that clip, which I think is from "FDR: A New Political Life" (commission earned). Chris has a project of reading (at least) one biography of each of the U.S. Presidents. He's not reading them in chronological order though, and he's a lot closer to the end than it looks. Anyway, I'll correct this post if I'm naming the wrong bio. So hold off on snapping up that book until later in the day. And think twice about jury-rigging a chickenwire cage to hang your baby out an upper story window. Or are you the sort of busybody who calls the authorities on a very modern mother who just might be Eleanor Roosevelt?

UPDATE: The book is actually "FDR" by Jean Edward Smith. Chris says it has "a lot of anecdotes." 880 pages. That other one is a mere 284 pages. 

"Morante, born José Antonio Morante Camacho, is widely regarded as the leading 'torero de arte' of his generation, and deemed by some to be the greatest ever."

"Famed for his mastery of the cape and a style that blends risk, improvisation and aesthetic refinement, critics regularly attribute 'mysticism' to his best performances.... A recent El País commentary called one of his performances a 'virtuosic, stirring, surprising, baroque work — an act of improvisation by an artist who is not of this world, capable of hypnotising, with a supernatural ability entirely alien to modern bullfighting.' Another suggested it would not be surprising 'if a religion were founded in his honour.'..."

That's from The London Times., where it looks like this:

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

ADDED: Me, by Meade: