"My wife and I have been married over sixty years.... Like most we struggled with intimacy from time to time but being best friends forever we journeyed on...."

"Then it happened. My wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and we were devastated by thoughts and fears of what might be ahead.... I finally began to appreciate this unconditionally loving person I'd lived with for all these years in ways undreamed of. We found more intimacy than we'd known by sitting close and talking about our day, by holding hands as we took our walks, walks that became increasingly slow. Caretaking for my wife has allowed me to see and experience the depth of her caring and kindness and humility in allowing me to care for her. I have discovered, too late in some ways, the marvelous intimacy of simply giving to the other without measuring or thinking of what may be in it for self...."

From the top-rated comment — by far — on "The Best Sex Advice Might Also Be the Hardest to Follow/Some couples would rather get divorced than talk openly about their intimate lives" (NYT gift link).

The advice that's hard to follow is — big surprise — you're supposed to talk to each other.

"The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum...."

"This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day."

Wrote Annie Dillard, quoted by Sam Anderson, in "One of Our Greatest Writers Has Died. But Not for Me. Annie Dillard died this week. But her voice — wild and holy and hilarious — continues to live in my head, my soul and, somehow, my dog" (NYT gift link).

For some reason, this old post is the post of mine that got the most traffic in the last 12 months.

March 9, 2016

Elite media slowly absorbs the meaning of Donald Trump.

In the NYT this morning.

1. A photograph that exemplifies Donald Trump voters as they ominously approach a polling place. The sky is dark, the couple is old and funereal, the man is grim, the woman a clown.

2. A photograph that's mostly black space, with Donald Trump's face all the way over to the right, emerging from the gloom, and the shadows giving his neck the appearance of a scrotum.

3. The Editorial Board is "Trying to Read Donald Trump, in Translation." This is not — as I'd originally imagined — the NYT people translating Trump's simple statements into the language of the elite so they can understand it. It's attempting to imagine how Trump's statements are heard by people in other countries.

4. "Does Donald Trump represent a legitimate expression of the people’s will? Is his rise a manifestation of justifiable resentment among less privileged whites at their neglect by higher caste Republican leaders?" A columnist (Thomas B. Edsall) wonders.

"The case drew national attention when a surrogate from Alaska refused to have an abortion after the fetus she was carrying was diagnosed with a serious heart problem."

"She eventually traveled to Texas and gave birth to the child over the initial objections of the parents, a couple from California.... On Tuesday, Justice Kagan, who oversees emergency filings from California, denied the surrogate’s request to block the lower-court ruling in the couple’s favor. She acted on her own without referring the matter to her Supreme Court colleagues. The justice’s order did not include an explanation, as is often the case when the court responds to such filings...."

From "Supreme Court Order Gives Parents Custody of Baby in Surrogacy Fight/A surrogate refused to have an abortion after the fetus was diagnosed with a serious heart problem. She asked the justices to block a court order giving custody to the biological parents" (NYT gift link).

Here's the emergency filing. The proceedings below are all in state courts, and much of the argument is about jurisdiction, but that's interwoven with the merits of the case — who gets the baby:

Sunrise.

"Beyond their fixation on incredibly thin scarves, ukuleles and ungainly Sharpie art, these ['millennial optimism'] posts seem to obsess over the era’s supposed ease and quirkiness..."

"... to have Natalie Portman put on a Shins song and change your life. To wear ill-fitting running shorts like Michael Cera and seem approachably awkward. At the time, simply listening to superficially 'indie' music could signal some kind of eccentric individualism — yet it was individualism that was increasingly available on a mass scale. If you could identify with Seth Cohen on 'The O.C.,' squeeze into a sweater vest and listen to Death Cab for Cutie: Congratulations, you’re indie.... But for the Zoomers posting these clips, there is a pleasure in the opposite of independence: a homogeneity and cohesiveness that seems welcoming and communal..... That dreamy, half-real, lost world of social media, to Zoomers, is one that seems untethered from hierarchy — not yet tainted by algorithms and calculated recommendations. A cookie-cutter simplicity (or 'basicness,' when critiqued) could emerge: cheugy sunsets and sentimental drives into the country. The sad truth, but also the poignancy, of these videos, is that they fetishize an era that led directly to the one we’re in today...."

Writes Casey Michael Henry, in "Things Are So Bad, People Are Longing for Cringey Millennial Culture/Sepia tones, film cameras and ukuleles are a fast route to an imagined past of ease and quirkiness" (NYT gift link).

TrumpTV.

Background: "After Years as the Star of Must-See TV, Trump Faces the Sting of Cancellation/A boycott of the White House press pool by the major networks deprives the president of the oxygen of screen time. But he is still finding ways to get on the air" (NYT gift link).

So you get it: He doesn't need the fake-news networks. He's got a YouTube channel. Yeah, so do I....

"The US plans to open two military bases in Greenland after President Trump struck a deal with Denmark over security on the vast Arctic territory...."

"Trump announced the agreement last week after months of threatening to use force to gain control of the Arctic island, which is a semi-autonomous part of Denmark. Details on the deal have now begun to emerge. Reuters reported that the US plans to re-establish a Cold War-era military base at Narsarsuaq, in southern Greenland.... The other site is on the east coast of Greenland....The US, Denmark and Greenland are expected to sign the agreement at the United Nations general assembly in New York on Tuesday...."

The London Times reports.

Here's the NYT article on the subject: "Negotiators have been working for months on issues including the deployment of more American troops in Greenland, the territory’s mineral resources and ways of blocking Russia and China from gaining a foothold there. Russia and China have been stepping up their presence in the Arctic, sometimes working together, which Mr. Trump has used to justify his desire to annex Greenland...."

AND: This makes more sense now:

By the power of the NYT, Nikole Hannah-Jones was able to change the course of history.

Why wouldn't she think she had the power to transform her daughter's school?

Arrogance and obliviousness verging on hubris. What a tragic overestimation of her own expertise, importance and moral goodness compounded by a totally unjustified confidence in her chosen profession's power to influence events and circumstances in the real world. https://t.co/QRi5OntnQ6

— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) September 22, 2026

More from Chatterton Williams:

Meade texts me from upstairs, at 5:47 a.m., about how badly Democrats want to be rid of Donald Trump.

                             Today 5:47

Here's the link to the tweet Meade sent.

Assassination may be "underwater" at 29%, but there are 25% more who are neutral on the subject. A failure to view assassination as negative?! I'd say there's a majority — 54% — who fail to disapprove of assassination. 

AND: Only 28% disapprove of a military coup to oust Trump. 

"Franzen believes the most difficult part of writing a new novel is that it requires him to change..."

"... he needs to become 'the kind of person who can write the novel. I’ve had to become a different person in some significant way to get each book written.'"

I'm reading an interview with Jonathan Franzen in The Guardian.

"To move from The Corrections to Freedom he had to let go of his anger. To write Crossroads, he had to become more forgiving. Right now, he says, 'I’m waiting to wake up as the person who is alive again and not the same person he was five years ago.' Does this mean he sees writing as a means of self-improvement? God, no!... 'If you’re really engaged with [writing], it’s not a matter of morality, but a matter of getting at something true. So I prefer truth as a goal to morality, to self-improvement, to the betterment of one’s soul... I don’t really care about bettering my soul...."

Sunrise time on the last day of summer, but the orange disc chose not to pop.

"When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid..."

"... one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.... We are both beneficiaries of educational opportunities that were forced into existence by generations of Black parents willing to put their most personal stake — their own children — in the fight for school equality for all Black children....So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage.... Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.... We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there.... Najya deserved better. They all did. But she was mine. This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her. I almost cannot type the words...."

I'm finally reading the Nikole Hannah-Jones essay "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice" (NYT gift link).

"'What are you reading?' I asked. Here’s what 5 strangers told me."

Nora Krug — in WaPo — experiments with what seems to be an excellent topic as she provides more evidence that there really is — as I've said I'd observed — a talking-to-strangers trend.

Have you noticed the talking-to-strangers trend?

People are adopting a deliberate practice of making themselves talk to strangers.

I suspected as much — I noticed a pattern of 2 or 3 incidences — and asked AI to find me some writings on the subject. There are these, all from this year:

Celebrities in distress.

Ed Sheeran, "shattered" and "in tears" as he sat cross-legged onstage at Lincoln Financial Field.

Carrot Top, perhaps extorted over a sex tape and perhaps having attempted suicide.

Presley Gerber, son of Cindy Crawford, dead at 27. The ideally handsome model died at a rehab facility.