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).

"I have a message, that's God's truth, I struggle, a mission, I have something to say, a message to communicate to humanity, to mankind"/"To mankind, my darling, your message!"

Said the old man and the old woman in Eugene Ionesco's absurdist play "The Chairs," which we saw last night at American Players' Theater — "A Comedy About the End of It All."

We settled into our chairs before the crowd arrived, and the 93-minute play is about a crowd arriving and settling into the many many chairs dragged onto the stage by the old woman:

"Democrats stopped talking about trans politics long before the court’s ruling this week."

"In June, which is L.G.B.T.Q. Pride month, no Democratic candidate mentioned the word 'transgender' in their TV ads, according to data from AdImpact, a media tracking firm. Their silence may be an attempt to deprive Republicans of campaign-trail ammunition.... A New York Times/Ipsos poll conducted in January 2025 showed that nearly 80 percent of Americans opposed allowing transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports.... May Mailman, director of the conservative legal organization Independent Women’s Law Center, said the ruling was less animating than it might have been a few years ago, because transgender advocacy feels 'less in your face' now, particularly in red states. Ms. Mailman recalled walking into retail stores across the country back when gender was one of the party’s most galvanizing topics and seeing mannequins of transgender people. That sort of display has become less prevalent, she said, as the opinion of most Americans has become clearer. By winning in the court of public opinion, Republicans in some ways lost ground on a potent political issue, she said.... 'It’s kind of like D.E.I.,' Ms. Mailman said.... 'Is D.E.I. gone, or is it hibernating?'"

From "Ruling on Trans Athletes Gave the G.O.P. a Win. Most Democrats Looked the Other Way. While Republicans celebrated the ruling, many Democrats stayed quiet on an issue that had proved divisive in the last election" (NYT).

I don't believe Nina Totenberg's explanation for why she reported that Justice Alito was retiring.

I'm reading "'I am so, so sorry': NPR reporter explains SCOTUS retirement error" (CNN):

"I rushed out of the courtroom after the opinion announcements, and when I realized that the usual rush of folks after a few minutes had not happened, I asked somebody [what] was going on inside, to which the answer was, ‘retirement announcements.’ I didn’t hear the ‘s’ on ‘announcements,’ and I assumed something no reporter should ever do, that you were retiring."

I don't believe she would report specific news about Alito based on a passing 2-word remark in answer to her question about why people are hanging back. Wasn't it already obvious that there could be a retirement announcement that day and therefore that there was reason to hang back and find out? If someone said "retirement announcements" — or "retirement announcement" — you couldn't assume it meant anything more than that people are waiting to hear if there are going to be any retirement announcements.

“It was the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism,” she wrote to Alito. “I could go on, but I don’t know what else to say except that I am so, so sorry.”

Say what really happened,  

"The DSA, in fact, seems to despise the Democratic Party. Darializa Avila Chevalier has called Joe Biden a 'rapist' and wrote 'Fuck Kamala Harris'..."

"... on social media. She proceeded to be nominated for a House race in New York last week by Democratic voters who presumably do not all share those feelings. The DSA now includes a growing caucus of supporters in Congress, has mayoral candidates well positioned to win in several big cities, and has plans to throw its weight behind a yet-to-be-determined presidential candidate in 2028. The DSA’s feelings about Democrats encompass not only the party’s leadership but also the philosophical commitments that have guided it since the New Deal: a mixed economy undergirded by democratic values. Chevalier, for instance, joined a post–October 7 celebratory rally and portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to Western 'bullying.' She previously called for seizing land and the means of production and has repeatedly praised communism. These positions are not holdovers from the idealism of youth or a bygone 'woke' era. They are a by-product of the DSA’s core ideology. The DSA has become a force in Democratic Party politics even as it has grown more hostile to the party, more illiberal, and more dogmatic...."

I'm reading "There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists," by Jonathan Chait, at The Atlantic.

At the Sundrop Café...

... you can talk all night.

Photos by Meade today. I slept in after the play.