September comes in with a glorious sunrise.

"I enjoy it. From throwing on some wacky stuff to some really slick stuff," said Travis Kelce.

Link to Vogue.

More Kelce fashion-talk: "I kind of take bits and pieces from everybody and everything that I see, and just kind of change things around depending on which situation I’m in and what event I’m going to.”

Why do I find this so funny? "Dog Dad"... the posing... posing as nonchalant.

"The Vogue editrix has proven time and again that she’ll stand by the designer despite his hateful comments. But one thing matters more to her than loyalty: money."

I'm reading "Why Anna Wintour scrapped the Met Gala’s tribute to John Galliano" (London Times).

In February 2011, a drunk Galliano was caught on video at La Perle bar in Paris saying to a Jewish couple, “I love Hitler” and “People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be f***ing gassed.”

"Jurors have said they are unable to reach a unanimous verdict in the trial of Lindsay Clancy..."

"... a mother who was accused of murdering her three children while suffering from undiagnosed postpartum psychosis. After about 18 hours of deliberations, the 12 jurors — nine women and three men — informed the judge on Tuesday morning that they are deadlocked. Judge William Sullivan ordered the panel to continue deliberating...."

From "Lindsay Clancy jury unable to reach unanimous verdict/Jurors were ordered to continue deliberating on Tuesday morning after informing the judge they could not reach a consensus on murder charges" (London Times).

"Clancy’s defence attorney, Kevin Reddington, told jurors she sought care 19 times between September 2022 and January 2023 for her depression, anxiety and insomnia. In that time, he said she was prescribed 12 drugs — antidepressants, sleep aids and an antipsychotic — by five healthcare providers. 'My God, what does she have to do? She was reaching out for help, and she was not getting it,' Reddington said....Clancy cried at the defence table throughout the state’s closing argument. Her attorney, Reddington, told the jury: 'This young lady did nothing wrong in her life. She was a nurse. A daughter. A wife. And a darn good mother.'"

"Global spritz mania means that tourists demand the drinks even in formerly spritzless regions like Sicily..."

"... which is a bit like expecting a Creole restaurant in the French Quarter to make you a Rochester garbage plate. In Venice, where the spritz was invented and long seen as a working-class drink, it has been repositioned as a glamorous society accouterment. This historical revisionism irks some locals. 'It was drunk by gondoliers and prostitutes,' said Marco Salvadori, a Venice native who made drinks at Harry’s Bar for years. Mr. Salvadori is pro-spritz, but remembers when Harry’s and other elite bars and hotels would not deign to make them. They’ve since surrendered...."

From "What the Bartender Really Thinks About Your Spritz/You might expect the fizzy summer drinks to be a downer for the people who make them by the hundreds. But think again" (NYT gift link).

Are tourists hoping to emulate the social elite of the places they visit? Take Venice. I'd imagine the vibe of the old gondoliers and prostitutes would suit them just as well. I don't know. I don't travel too much, but when I do, I don't indulge in fantasies of oneness with the locals. So much mental work involved in that, and what does it get you? Or do you think that if you drink the right drink the fantasy will open itself up to you. But it's not the right drink, the article tells you. The bartender is laughing at you (but happy to take your money for a drink made in 2 seconds). Well, then, everyone wins. Everyone is happy, more than happy, including me, standoffish me, just writing a post about tourists who order spritzes in Sicily and Venice. 

Waking up to September.

"In 1986, Justice Byron R. White... summoned his clerks to his chambers for a special assignment that took several weekends. Together they marked his quarter-century on the court..."

"...  by feeding his records, including from the landmark Miranda rights case, into a shredder purchased for the occasion, according to Dennis J. Hutchinson, his biographer. 'Well, here’s an article. Here’s an entire book,' one of the clerks later told Mr. Hutchinson, describing what it was like to insert invaluable history into the jaws of the machine. 'I couldn’t believe how much history was going down the chute,' he said."

Writes Jodi Kantor "How the Supreme Court Locks Away Its Own History/After Justice Scalia died, the justices held private negotiations about locking away their papers. We may not see the ultimate record of the Roberts court for decades" (NYT gift link).

To suppress these communications is to promote the belief that the Justices are humble servants of the law, a belief that enhances their power. But how can that work unless all the Justices go Byron White on their papers? And it's too late for that. Justice Blackmun set the release date for all his papers at 5 years after his death. He died in 1999. You might think that would motivate the other Justices to formalize their position one way or the other, but Justice Scalia, who died in 2016, did not. Perhaps his papers are full of material that offsets things in Blackmun's, but it doesn't seem that he cared. Perhaps he thought the final written opinion was the operative text. That's what a humble servant of the law would believe. 

"Last week, Dr. El-Sayed mused in a social media post about whether the vice president would take her 'back in time to meet Papaw' if he could..."

"... referring to Mr. Vance’s deceased grandfather and seeming to imply that he would not have approved of the Vances’ interracial marriage. 'Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth because she’s way out of your league,' Mr. Vance said, prompting a roar from supporters. Ms. Vance is of Indian descent. In his first memoir, 'Hillbilly Elegy,' Vance wrote that it was 'one of the great regrets of my life that Mamaw and Papaw never met' her. It wasn’t Dr. El-Sayed’s first mention of Ms. Vance. In a podcast episode in April, he accused Mr. Vance of having made his career by 'hating people who are different' and suggested that the couple’s mixed-race children would have to reckon with that fact. He also suggested that Ms. Vance, who gave birth to the couple’s fourth child in July, was not physically attracted to her husband."

From "Vance Calls El-Sayed ‘Evil’ in No-Holds-Barred Michigan Speech/Vice President JD Vance also told Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, to “keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth'" (NYT gift link).

I'll just add a little poll:

"In the life we lived that summer, we represented to ourselves what we wanted — and it was not the headlong pilgrimage after money and comfort and prestige."

Wrote Wendell Berry, in "The Long-Legged House," quoted in "Wendell Berry, Writer Who Extolled America’s Agrarian Past, Dies at 92/A Kentucky farmer, he railed against agribusiness and championed small family farms and the environment, winning widespread acclaim" (NYT gift link).

Returning to his home as a place to write for the rest of his life was a way to insure, to himself, that he would always be bound by the truth, Mr. Berry said in a phone interview in 2018 for this obituary. 

“It made a permanent connection between me and my native place, and with its landscape,” he said. “The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky. I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them. It’s been a very rich experience.”

Sunrise.

JFK and the "lady of some note in Europe."

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

"He told all the children who were present — about 900 of the school’s total 1,643 students — to run to higher ground."

"Only older pupils, ages 11 to 18, were at school when the floods hit.... 'They were old enough to run immediately... It would not have been possible to save everyone, had kindergarten and primary school students also been there. 'Pupils who had arrived at the school earlier by bus were told to get back on them, and Mr. Dawadi instructed the drivers to leave the area as quickly as possible. 'A couple of students became traumatized and fainted,' Mr. Dawadi said, adding that those children were transported to safety on teachers’ motorbikes. 'I thought that even if the warning turned out to be wrong, the worst it would cost us was one day of study,' Mr. Dawadi said.... Around 9:23 a.m., about 13 minutes after Mr. Dawadi heard the first warning, a deluge of water, mud and debris swept through the area. The school was destroyed in seconds...."

From "A Principal Saved 900 Students Before His School Was Washed Away in Nepal/Rajendra Dawadi had less than 15 minutes to act on a warning of approaching floodwaters. His swift evacuation plan saved hundreds of lives" (NYT gift link).

900 students with 13 minutes to run for higher ground, and they all made it. Or, really, less than 13 minutes, because Dawadi had needed to understand the warning, decide how seriously to take it, and convey the plan to all of the students, and the students needed to hear and understand and launch themselves into that run. Perhaps that could all be done in less than a minute. I don't know.

The ever-vigilant deer.

That's Meade's video in the morning twilight yesterday. I was walking up ahead of him and moving slowly and quietly. Because I thought they were tolerating me, I stopped. I thought maybe they would approach me, which was dumb, because it wouldn't be good for them or for me. Habituation is bad for them, and as for me, I don't want their ticks (or hooves). But it was my stopping that caused them to panic and spring off. I thought stopping was completely nonthreatening, but I thought about it from their point of view afterwards. I should have continued moving slowly and quietly, keeping in my lane on the path. To stop was to show interest in them, and that crossed the line. Too much! 

"No one thinks, at least not yet, that a robot should be able to compete for Olympic medals or be eligible for Nobel prizes."

"Protecting innovation by limiting awards to humans makes sense. But music charts are supposed to measure popularity among consumers. Perhaps AI bots could be assigned their own category. Labeling works as AI-assisted or -generated is a sensible nod to transparency. Beyond that, consumers should be left to decide what it is they want to listen to — even when, just like a dream, the music is not what it seems."

I'm reading "Who’s that bot? An AI cover of Madonna spurs industry changes. Instead of blocking AI-assisted songs from the charts, require disclosure and protect creators" by the Editorial Board of the Washington Post.

That's a gift link, so you can read about what it was about the artificiality of that one cover of "Like a Prayer" that stirred up serious opposition to artificiality in pop music. To my ear, things have been unlistenably artificial for decades. People have developed a taste for robotic singing, and the robots keep giving them more of what they like. The machine that is Spotify serves me music from the 1960s and the 1940s, because it can see that I respond to the human voice, but younger people do not, and it doesn't matter what happens with the various prizes. The algorithm will give them what touches them, even if we elders think they have bad taste.

Back in the 1960s, my father expressed the sincere opinion that the rock music I was listening to was not music because of the electric instruments and the voices processed through microphones.

"Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD! They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police."

"Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country. The only thing they have is FAKE NEWS from the USA, a willingness to kill their protesters (now over 100,000 people dead. They must be tried for war crimes against humanity!), and a good line of 'BULLSHIT.' Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J.TRUMP"

A Trump Truth Social post this morning.

The period in that parenthetical makes it hard to read, so let me just tweak the punctuation:

The only thing they have is: FAKE NEWS from the USA, a willingness to kill their protesters — now over 100,000 people dead (They must be tried for war crimes against humanity!) — and a good line of BULLSHIT.

Why was "BULLSHIT" in scare quotes when "FAKE NEWS" was not? Both should be in or both out. Since the words "bullshit" and "fake news" are both used to express an opinion that what you are hearing is false, don't put quotes around them as if you are undercutting your accusation of falsity. You want to say the news really is fake and what the Iranians are saying is really bullshit. So, no scare quotes.

Now, the question I have is whether Trump means to say that the false message conveyed by U.S. news media and the the message conveyed by what's left of the Iranian government is the same message. I think he is. In his view, both are saying the United States has lost the war.

Sunrise.

Open thread.