"Chance, fate—these are abstract ideas that usually raise abstract questions. Do people have story-like fates..."

"... or are they just subject to concatenations of occurrences? Do things happen 'for a reason,' or do we just make up stories after the fact to tie events together? Broadly speaking, there’s an ancient antagonism between the notion that life must make sense and the observation that it often doesn’t.... And yet, at times when fate is actually 'happening,' such questions recede. Instead, what stands out are the physical particulars of the here and now. In the hospital, after the accident, you know your life is changing; you sense your proximity to what the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard calls 'the deep, slow-shifting layers of reality where fate is at work.' Somehow this abstract understanding exists alongside, or by means of, the objects in the waiting room—a paper cup from the water cooler, or a copy of People magazine."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Should You Believe in Fate? We’d be happier, perhaps, if we found meaning not through abstractions but through the physical things around us" (The New Yorker).

"More visitors are giving up on summer holidays in cities that feel like saunas and booking 'coolcations' in Iceland, Norway, or Denmark...."

"A 2023 European Commission study forecast 'a clear north-south pattern in tourism demand changes' that 'becomes more pronounced for higher warming scenarios,' signalling growing economic consequences for Madrid, Lisbon, Athens, and Milan. 'Travelling to European cities is about cultural experience,' Daniel Scott, a scholar of tourism at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, told me. 'Whether it’s Paris, Barcelona, or Rome, you amble around, sightseeing, street shopping, taking a riverboat tour, going to a museum, a restaurant, a café. Most of that time, you’re outside.' Climate change increasingly turns pleasure trips into exercises in escaping pain. 'When I’m in Europe, I always notice how many people crowd under trees and shaded areas,' Scott said. 'But at some attractions, like the Acropolis, there’s no way to avoid the blazing sun. On especially hot days, they’ve got the Red Cross giving out water, medics pre-positioned because they know many people are going to be in trouble when they come down.'"

From "The End of the European Summer/As extreme heat overwhelms the Continent’s great cities, they are racing to transform themselves for a climate that they were never built to withstand" (The New Yorker).

"Mortality is an immutable fact of the human condition, but the desire to cheat death has endured for a very long time."

"According to legend and history, Gilgamesh, Chinese emperors and medieval alchemists all tried to attain immortality. The allure is no less profound today, but the modern potions are somewhat more sophisticated and inherently appealing to a wealthy, techno-centric class of people like [Bryan] Johnson. Mr. Johnson, who lives in Los Angeles, is perhaps the best known of a cadre of scientists and influencers known as 'longevity bros.' They obsessively document their attempts to live cleaner and longer, known cuttingly as 'longevity fixation syndrome.'..."

From "He Said He Was the World’s Healthiest Man. Then Came a Stunning Diagnosis. Bryan Johnson, the longevity guru, wants to live forever. But the big question is why" (NYT gift link).

You can read that essay, but I went on to look for more about that Chinese emperor. I found this: "Trying To Live Forever Killed The Creator Of China's 'Forever Army'/Even the Terracotta Army can’t save you from mercury poisoning" (IFL Science): 

"This is the night I should go to the theater."

Chris — my son, the reader of presidential biographies — texts me another passage from "President Kennedy: Profile of Power" (commission earned).

"Ancient societies had another method to deal with debt. It was called an amargi — a blanket declaration of public debt cancellation."

"All public debts written off. Disappeared. It sounds laughable, I know. But, really, that’s just because the idea has been buried so deeply in history you’ve probably never heard of it. In the ancient world, it presented a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem. And now, faced with impossible-to-repay debts that are weighing down our economy, is the time to look at the amargi and the lessons it offers about how to think about finance...."

From "$40 Trillion Debt? The Ancient Sumerians Wouldn’t Have Cared" (NYT gift link).

The essay is by Paul Vigna, managing editor of American Banker and author of "The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin" (commission earned).

"The fact that [Jason Arday] was promoted as some kind of prodigy given how crazy his self-representation was is a sign of just how cultic and confused the left and left-leaning institutions have become."

"I mean, it's just it's just a sign of the the cancer having spread everywhere.... I mean, it's just, this is all, anti-racism.... This is putting the black — the BLM black — square not only in your bio but in your brain. Um, it's a cult. It's always been a cult. It's been obvious for for about a decade now that this is what we're witnessing is the the ramifications of a moral panic around race and social justice that got engineered on the left.... It's intolerable and if we don't get our heads clear of its new variant, this this far-left socialist/communist alliance with with Islamism, we're going to go for another round of right-wing ascendancy in America and elsewhere.... [Cambridge was] totally corrupt in its desperation to believe that somebody who checks all the identitarian boxes is a you know is... some kind of you know woke superhero.... I mean, you're you're in the presence of a lunatic who's making these claims about himself, right?... The social justice hysteria around race that has occurred in the last decade has been almost totally dishonest almost. I mean, this is the just Jussie Smollettification of everything, right?"

Said Sam Harris.

 

"The rollout could’ve been better. Absolutely, I said the rollout has to be cleaned up and fixed."

Said Governor Kathy Hochul, quoted in "How New York’s Second-Home Tax Turned Into a Headache for Mamdani/The bumpy rollout of the tax created an opportunity for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s opponents to fight him in court and in the City Council" (NYT gift link).

Ms. Hochul, was concerned about what she saw as clumsy messaging by Mr. Mamdani as he introduced the esoteric tax to New Yorkers. She told the mayor that he needed to be clearer about how the tax would be administered and whom it would affect, according to two people familiar with their talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. The governor had taken note of how the mayor, a democratic socialist who campaigned on “taxing the rich,” was talking about the policy. In a widely seen video, for instance, the mayor had decided to highlight an especially expensive second home owned by a hedge fund manager, Kenneth C. Griffin.

“There’s a better way to do it,” said, Ms. Hochul a pro-business moderate. “Point to Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes” rather than someone who invests in the city, she added.

Here's that widely seen video, which, exclaiming "Oh, no!," I impulsively clicked off at the 5-second mark:

I did finally watch the whole minute. From the transcript: "This pied-a-terre tax is specifically designed for the richest of the rich, those who store their wealth in New York City real estate, but who don't actually live here.... This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers." 

What's "fundamentally unfair"? It's a child's reasoning: If someone has something that he's not using, it should be mine. 

The NYT calls the new tax "esoteric." I wonder what other adjectives it considered. Is it esoteric because it's hard for the general public to understand, or is it esoteric because it only applies to a discrete group of people?

Sunrise.

"Patients who disagree with their doctor can be 'fired' or flagged with scarlet letters in the corners of their electronic medical charts."

"'Exaggerating.' 'Resistant.' 'Noncompliant.' 'Hysterical.' To be sure, there are problematic patients, even dangerous ones. But for the rest of us, the imbalance between our defenselessness and the doctor’s discretion can create an unhelpful dynamic, one that pushes us to stop advocating and start accommodating. The result is waiting rooms full of people pleasers and providers who never get the full picture. The pressure to be pleasant and pliant is especially strong for women. Just as 'bossy' women often don’t get promotions and 'uppity' women are more likely to be sexually harassed, women who are branded as difficult patients are at risk of not being taken seriously or losing access to care. This is one of the reasons women overapologize, even for their own pain. A simple disclaimer — 'I don’t mean to be difficult, but …' — can backfire as well...."

Writes Allison Sweet Grant, author of "Lump: A Memoir in Ineloquent Reflections," "This Is Why Women Are Scared to Tell Their Doctors the Truth" (NYT gift link).

A mere 30 years ago, this was a highlighted modern problem on "Seinfeld" (Season 8, Episode 5, "The Package"):

 

(Yes, I know this is my second "Seinfeld" post this morning. It was in looking for this Elaine-at-the-doctor material that I stumbled into the unfilmed episode stuff I blogged an hour ago, here.)

"The Seinfeld cast refused to film this episode. So we animated it instead."

"Jerry and and Julia read this one scene where she has the gun and she's holding in her hand and she says to Jerry in the car, 'All right, Jerry, where do you want it? The Kennedy, the McKinley?' And she could barely get it out of her mouth. And I used to sit right next to Juliet... and I remember her saying it and just looking at me with the most pathetic eyes and then looking at Jerry... and she went, 'I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this.'"

"[T]his relationship is pathological, and a source of great irritation among other courtiers. It is Trump distilled to his essence..."

"... cult leader and his most rabid follower, narcissist and his most flattering mirror. The daughter of a devoutly Christian real estate broker who died by suicide during the pandemic, [Natalie] Harp idolizes Trump with a rare fervor.... ... Trump told his staff that Harp was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids did. 'She’ll never leave me,' he would tell other staffers.... It’s a perfect (taxpayer-funded) relationship. She thinks he’s amazing. And he agrees."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Natalie’s Magnificent Obsession" (NYT gift link).

"Obsession" is the title of a current movie that is, as Dowd tells us, "about a man who wishes for more adoration from a young woman, who falls under his spell and maniacally provides it." 

I haven't seen it. And I haven't seen "Magnificent Obsession," but I know it's a 1954 movie starring Ronald Reagan's first wife:

ADDED: After reading Dowd's column, I scribbled this at Grok, writing quickly, without the intention of sharing it, but I'm sharing it:

I'm interested in they way many women in the workplace are competitive with other women in a way that's actually sexist — judging that other women are getting more than they deserve because of their looks and/or imagining that sexual things are going on. They're actually impeding the progress of women... or are they trying to help some subset of women by pulling particular women down? (I'm thinking about the reaction to Natalie Harp.)

And then I connected the Natalie Harp foofaraw to this passage from "President Kennedy: Profile of Power" (commission earned) that my son Chris — reader of presidential biographies — had just texted to me last night. We join the Cuban Missile Crisis in progress.

Sunrise.

The astounding delusion of Neom.

ADDED: Back in 2021, I blogged a NYT article about the the part of the project called "the Line" —  "a postmodern ecotopia... a narrow urban strip 106 miles long with no roads, no cars and no pollution...." Here's how Saudi Arabia announced the project:

"The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily allowed President Trump to continue construction of a luxury White House ballroom to replace the East Wing he demolished last fall."

The NYT reports.

In a one-sentence order, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., acting on his own, issued a place holder that gives all nine justices additional time to more fully consider whether construction of the planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom can proceed. The chief justice’s order did not provide a timeline for when the court would act next, stating only that a lower-court ruling against the Trump administration was paused “pending further order of the undersigned or of the court.”

"I looked in his eyes. I can't picture his face... I didn't see the skin. When I think about him... all I see is these deep oceans of blue in these deep concerning eyes."

"And this like white light behind them. That's what I picture when I think about what did Bob Dylan look like to me. All I can see is these the deepest bluest eyes with the most concerning emotion in them and then this like aura of like white light. That's what Bob looks like to me in my memory. I can't remember his face...."

Said Billy Strings.

Theo Von: "It's almost something that's like almost like maybe from another realm or something. I think God, like God's concern, like shows up in our eyes, I think. So maybe he just has a lot of like concern from the other side, you know?"

Billy Strings: “Yeah. And it's it's not a paranoid concern. It's more of like a compassion and and a like like a love like from an elder, you know?”

Theo: “Yeah. Maybe like a kind of semi-aggressive intrigue kind of.”

Billy: “Like a some kind of musical grandpa, you know?”

Theo: “Yeah, dude. Bob Dylan, bro. Wow.”

I see my name invoked over at Instapundit.

It's on the old "men in shorts" topic. Something about women being able to wear "sundresses" to work. I think the term "sundresses" is being used to mean sleeveless dresses. An actual sundress wouldn't look any more professional than a man in shorts, but sleeveless dresses exist and might look okay in the office. But isn't the office air conditioned? I think women are more likely to put on a sweater than to want their bare arms exposed. 

Anyway, my classic men-in-shorts topic was about men looking like children. It all started back in 2006. It all started with something Tom Wolfe wrote in "I Am Charlotte Simmons" [commission earned]. "I was amused," I blogged, "to run across this description of a man wearing shorts":

All that elegance was what made the personage of Dr. Lewin seem so curious. Last week, when the class first met, he had worn a plaid cotton shirt and pants -- nothing remarkable about that. The shirt had had long sleeves, and the pants had been long pants. But this morning he had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of his gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old, a pair of eyeglasses with lenses thick as ice pushed up to the summit of his forehead -- unaccountably addressing thirty college students, at Dupont, no less.

That's my motivation. Trying to encourage you to eschew the look of an ossified 7-year-old.