"Fans gathered as close as they could to the arena in the 37C heat, hoping for a glimpse of the invitees."

The London Times reports the news/"news": Taylor Swift got married, in "Taylor Swift gets married to Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden/The bride chose Christian Louboutin shoes and jewellery from Cartier and both wore Dior for the ceremony officiated by the comedy actor Adam Sandler."

I see that these days, "Any person eighteen years old and over can solemnize a Marriage Ceremony in New York State AFTER obtaining a One-Day Marriage Officiant License from the Office of the City Clerk."

So you too can have a comedian officiate at your wedding.

"How did the adults of my youth manage these gatherings so effortlessly? Part of the answer is Oh, Dad, too: Life was simpler."

"Lake houses were more affordable then, and less fancy. No dishwasher, no A.C., no TV. And no choices. Meals happened at fixed times. You ate what appeared. Cleanup by committee followed, and then the moms would declare, 'The kitchen is closed,' with despotic authority. If we got hungry later, there were snacks. Snacks that would make a nutritionist spiral: Ruffles and onion dip, port wine cheese food. Breakfast was sugary cereal. Lunch was mystery bologna. Dinner was barbecue, beans and slaw. Repeat until Labor Day."

Writes Dan Kadlec, in "The Lake House That Taught Me How to Dad" (NYT)(gift link, in case you need to learn to dad).

"Casper weighed a little over 104 pounds at the time, which means the boy — who was 4 feet 2 inches tall when he died — gained roughly 150 pounds in less than two years. His diet consisted largely of potato chips and French fries...."

From "Michigan Couple Are Charged With Murder After Death of Morbidly Obese Son/Seven-year-old Casper O’Brien weighed 255 pounds when he died last year. Prosecutors said he was bedridden and subsisted on little more than snack foods" (NYT).

"These are very, very special times. And this is a very special place. You live in a very special place. Congratulations everybody."

Those were the very very very special words of our President, Donald J. Trump, speaking at Mount Rushmore, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the 4th of July.

"And we rededicate ourselves to being a nation as big, bold, noble, and as great as these American giants. And that's not easy to do, but we're going to do it. These men could only have been made in the USA. Their faces are engraved on these bluffs, not only because of what they did, but to remind us forever who we are. These heroes exemplify what is timeless, enduring, and eternal about the American character. And in the end, it has always been that character, our distinct and unique identity. It is a truly unique identity and it'll never change.... Liberty has prevailed here because of the culture and character of the people who declared it, defended it, and preserved it.... The identity of a nation is the destiny of a nation. And America has a destiny like no other because we are a people like no other. For whatever reason, that's just the way it is.

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

David Sedaris wants to go to the Post Office.

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ADDED: This reminds me of my favorite passage in my favorite movie, "My Dinner with Andre," quoted numerous times on the blog, such as here, in 2013, in "What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?":

"But however long Kennedy lasts in government, his Make America Healthy Again coalition already lies in shambles, its catalog of achievements short."

"What happened? At present, there is no confirmed head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or of the Food and Drug Administration. There is no surgeon general and no head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease... no confirmed boss at the F.D.A.’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.... MAHA has been steamrolled on food and pollution by business-aligned Trump appointees elsewhere in the government, forced to concede longtime crusades against glyphosate, mercury and other airborne toxins.... The administration just signed off on more forever chemicals in pesticides and drinking water. A much-hyped report trying to link autism with the use of Tylenol in pregnancy was quickly disproved by larger studies, and a memo linking 10 childhood deaths to Covid vaccination was contradicted by the agency’s own review of the evidence...."

From "Has the MAHA Movement Given Up? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies promised public-health libertarianism. The idea couldn’t survive once they took power" (NYT)(gift link, because there's lots more at the link).

"The process of note-writing helps me formulate my medical decision-making and then check whether it really holds up...."

"When that cognitive labor is offloaded to a machine, I’ve come to see, my job shifts. Even when I try to speak my reasoning aloud for the A.I. scribe, I am still doing something different from writing the note myself. I am no longer using the note, sentence by sentence, to think through the case in my own words, to decide what to emphasize, what to soften — or, as I’m writing, to identify when my reasoning strains. And unlike when I dictate a note, I can’t watch my own phrasing appear on the screen in real time. With the A.I.-generated note, I am instead auditing afterward. I am playing a version of 'Where’s Waldo?' — What’s missing? Has this note gone astray, and if so, where? — and it’s a search made all the more difficult because the A.I.’s draft arrives fluent, confident. It sounds so right."

Writes Helen Ouyang, in "How A.I. Might Change the Way Doctors Think/For generations, writing up a summary of a patient exam was a vital step for physicians trying to make an accurate diagnosis. What happens when A.I. does it for them?" (NYT).

"That cognitive shift does not happen the moment the A.I. scribe delivers a note. It begins in the exam room. Because I know A.I. is recording, I stop listening in the same way. Before A.I. scribes arrived, I would outline a story in my head as a patient talked, fitting the pieces together so I would know what to ask next. In the scribe’s presence, that work is deferred. Let the machine do it! The mind drifts."

Happy Birthday, America.

From There I Ruined It:

"When we found him, he asked us not to tell his wife that he was alive, just in case he wouldn’t make it."

Said a rescuer with the Costa Rican Red Cross, quoted in "Man Rescued 8 Days After Quake, a Ray of Joy in Stricken Venezuela/The 44-year-old security guard was pulled alive from a pancaked basement, offering a fleeting moment of hope amid a soaring death toll" (NYT).

The man, Hernán Gil, was detected with radar, sonar, and acoustic detection equipment, and it took 12 more hours to make visual contact through a camera. He responded when they asked him to move the hand they were able to see. They tunneled for days.

Trey Espy, head of the search-and-rescue crew from the Los Angeles County Fire Department, said: “One wrong move, one thing moved the wrong way, and all that debris would have fallen down on him and killed him. And if there was another aftershock, the rest of the building could have come down — and all of our rescuers were there. We got to the point where it was moving just one rock at a time to make sure we didn’t pull out the wrong rock and bring the whole thing down on top of him."

Sunrise video.

Video by Meade.

How to eat like Babe Ruth.

I hadn't checked my Bluesky feed in a long time, but something made me go there today.

Here's what it offered me:

Why did I sojourn there? Meade, for his reasons, happened to text me a video I'd posted there:

That, along with the words "A New Day," made up my first post after I'd opened a Bluesky account. I had the idea of expressing something that might bring Trump lovers and haters together.

I see I only posted once more on Bluesky. It was the same day, the same minute:

A Lincoln Sunrise — yesterday, on the University of Wisconsin campus:

[image or embed]

— Ann Althouse (@annalthouse.bsky.social) October 18, 2025 at 4:20 AM

I see I got one like. It was probably Meade. This positive content thing... eh. Maybe I didn't try hard enough.

"It used to be that the holiday brought out dad jeans and cropped tops and everyone looked slightly embarrassing, but the atmosphere was good-hearted and welcoming."

Writes Robin Givhan in "I Used to Love the Fourth of July" (NYT). 

That's a gift link, so you don't have to guess about what went wrong with the 4th of July for Givhan. It's Trump. Right?

But this year, I can barely tolerate the sight of red, white and blue. When combined into a maximalist display of nationalist cheerleading, the colors make my heart ache. The flags on federal buildings are grand, but they hang alongside banners featuring President Trump’s scowling face.... It’s a wonder to see water dance in a fountain that had been dry for nearly 20 years. But that pleasure comes with the knowledge that the repairs were orchestrated by an administration that sees itself more as a regime than as the caretakers of a democracy....

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

Photo by Meade. I skipped the sunrise for a second day in a row. It was raining. 

"Madonna, who for so long was pushing the boundaries of what women could and should be able to do, has instead become the most powerful avatar of our terror of aging."

"Everything about her appearance signals that she has capitulated to some very punishing beauty standards that insist women’s value lies only in their performance of youth.... After a childhood so influenced by her boldness, and years of being encouraged to express myself unapologetically, I confess I felt a sense of betrayal that she seemed to have finally succumbed to society’s expectations. But as uncomfortable as it can be for me to recognize, I wonder if Madonna isn’t simply once again forcing us to confront some hard truths. That deep down, we are not perhaps as bold or fearless as we’d like to believe ourselves to be. That none of us want to age, or lose our beauty or the power that comes with it. That in the end, we are all vain creatures desperate to hold on to, by any means possible, a shred of youth. Transgression is out; filler is in. Instead of being uniquely, aspirationally free, is she — are we all — trapped?"

Writes Glynnis MacNicol, in "Madonna Has Become an Avatar for Our Fear of Aging" (NYT).

MacNicol is 48. She doesn't really know how we all feel, but I'd just like to say, at age 76, that it certainly isn't youthful to be desperate about clinging to youth. And we're not "all... trapped." If all the singing about expressing yourself has value, it should mean respecting who we really are, not hating it to the point of attacking it with needles and knives.

***

People are talking about Madonna because her new album arrives today: "Madonna’s Confessions II is her best album in 20 years/A celebration of the dance floor that incorporates tributes to her earliest days on New York’s club scene, the queen of pop’s new music is engineered to make you move, or indeed, sweat" (Independent).