Sunrise.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments. For us, it's time to watch the Brewers game.

"I hate travel. Just the slog of it. I like sleeping in my own bed."

Said Grace Coddington, quoted in "At Home: Grace Coddington/Inside the fashion stylist and creative director's ‘very catty’ East Hampton retreat" (NYT).

That's a gift link — like all NYT links — so you can see the very bed where she prefers to sleep and lots of other rooms in the cozy, catty house. The cattiness is in the artworks, not a lot of real cats, though there is one real cat, seen in 2 of the photos. I really like this house, especially with its tiny guest cottage, used as an office.

Speaking of travel — I'm a connoisseur of travel critique — I wanted to show you...

Sunrise, this morning, we thought there was a folk group with a strumming guitar.

"What Cornell Teaches Its Students About Sex/From feminist porn awards to guides on group sex, Cornell has promoted sexual liberation as a virtue."

An article by Jared Lederman, a senior at Cornell, in The Free Press.

Lots of links to the University's sex guides, such as "Yes, No, Maybe So: A Sexual Inventory Stocklist"."

Lederman opines: "Cornell’s philosophy on sex is so striking because it is much more measured when it comes to other facets of students’ lives. The school regularly instructs my classmates and me to limit our drinking, protect our sleep, and develop healthier habits. Cornell hasn’t adopted a libertarian philosophy on degenerate college behavior in general; it has simply chosen to champion sexual liberation...."

Hmm. I think he's underestimating how daunting that Sexual Inventory Stocklist is. It's a long series of lists and you're supposed to react to each one. Do you want this or not? Just to excerpt one section of one list: 

"Are you f–king stupid? It’s not your lived experience, so just shut the f–k up!...How is it so difficult for you to see space made for women at a Sex Pistols gig?"

"If you are a man who gets offended by a band making room for a female only moshpit then you are PART OF THE PROBLEM... Stay home, read a book by Bell hooks, come back when kindness, compassion and empathy have landed with you."

Said Sex Pistols singer Frank Carter, quoted in "Sex Pistols singer Frank Carter clashes with male concertgoer for crashing women-only mosh pit: ‘Just f–king leave'" (NY Post).

I thought the women-only section was justified by the physical difference between male and female bodies, that it was the same issue we see in the effort to limit women's sports to biological women, but no: Carter also said: "When I say a ladies-only moshpit pit, I of course mean a trans-inclusionary space. The space is for people who don’t usually feel safe."

Was there any way for this "male concertgoer" to identify as one of the "people who don’t usually feel safe"?

"We’ve got the gulf. We’ve got a beautiful lake... We need a river. We need an ocean. We call it 'Trump Ocean' or, or, 'Ocean of the Americas.'"

"Something like that. Before I get out, I think we should have an ocean. And we need a great river."

Said You Know Who, quoted in "Trump suggests ‘Ocean of Americas’ as new name for Atlantic or Pacific/The president also floated the idea of naming an ocean after himself" (WaPo).

I see the use of "float" to humorously carry the water theme, but is there a verb for "suggests" that could also be about water?

Now, I think the President is just toying with us. One clue is that name "Ocean of the Americas." That's a New York City joke,  isn't it? "Of the Americas" is so awkward, it must be intended as a reference to the long-derided renaming of 6th Avenue as "Avenue of the Americas." WaPo left out the "the" in its headline, but Trump said "Ocean of the Americas." 

"You don't have to look at the facts and the law. All you have to do is study what they do."

Letitia James offers a gift to Saritha Komatireddy:

"If Hegseth were not a musclebound intellectual void, he would know this."

"He would know that the Fort Hood killer told the mental health panel that he wanted to die. He would know his standby lawyers told the judge he was not mounting a defence because he craved the death penalty. He would know that the Greek word for 'martyr' and the Arabic 'shahid' both mean 'witness.' Abdullah Azzam, the godfather of modern jihadism, wrote that nations were built by 'the martyr’s blood and scholar’s ink.' The late al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri — who converted to jihadism after the hanging of a martyr in Egypt in 1966 — wrote that 'more than half the battle is fought in the media.' The great anthropologist Joe Henrich has persuasively argued that martyrdom, and the publicity secured by it, was key to the spread of early religions...."

Writes London Times columnist Matthew Syed in "America’s livestreamed execution is the ultimate gift to jihadists/The Trump administration must meet the Fort Hood killer and all terror with muscular indifference, not this gruesome circus."

Sunrise.

"Language and Linguistics for Decolonization and Liberation and for Peace and Community Building — From the River to the Sea in Palestine and Israel to the Mountaintops of Haiti and Beyond."

That's the name of the class discussed in "The Controversial Class That M.I.T. Is Paying a Professor Not to Teach/Michel DeGraff, a vocal pro-Palestinian activist, can’t be easily fired because he has tenure. But he has been kicked out of his department" (NYT).

"An M.I.T. panel rejected the course over questions about whether Dr. DeGraff, a Haitian scholar and expert in the study of Creole languages, had the expertise to teach it. That was supposed to finish the matter.... He disagreed that he lacked the ability to teach the course.... 'M.I.T. should not be repressing my teaching in this way,' Dr. DeGraff said in an interview. He called the decision a 'violation of my professional rights.'..."

"Legal experts say that Mr. Hasan could challenge the government’s decision to livestream his execution, perhaps by asserting..."

"... that a public broadcast would violate prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. Courts have rejected requests from private companies that sought to broadcast executions to the public. In 2001, a federal judge refused to allow an internet company to carry a live feed of the execution of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, citing Federal Bureau of Prisons rules that forbid recording or broadcasting executions.... But the Supreme Court has not weighed in directly on the question of whether public executions are legal, particularly when requested by the government, experts said. Public executions have been seen, including by United Nations officials, as a violation of international human rights protections under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights...."

From "Fort Hood Shooter’s Execution Could Face Challenge in Federal Courts/Legal experts say the former Army officer convicted in a 2009 mass shooting could face a narrow, rushed path to appeal a public execution by firing squad" (NYT).

No, I don't remember.

"Do you remember the 'fruity boyfriend' discourse a few years ago in which young women online confessed their desire for men with painted nails and emotional fluency?"

That's the question from the Washington Post advice columnist as she addresses the problem, "I’m a bisexual man. Why don’t women want to date me?"

Straight women in droves [were] saying they wanted to date a guy who was “a little gay,” something of a metrosexual. They called these men “fruity,” but actual bisexuality wasn’t material to the categorization. They never got that far. A recent YouGov poll of Brits showed that two-thirds of straight women wouldn’t date a bisexual man, and even among women who had a “very positive” view of the group, almost half were still unwilling to date bi men....

Wait. Half were. That's a lot!

Anyway, the columnist decides that the problem is geographical. He needs to relocate to a major city — a place "where the guys are acting fruity, the women are acting butch, and no one is so sure of anyone else’s sexuality."

So people are saying "fruity" in a positive way now... or a few years ago? Here's some poor lady in 2025 anguishing over her inability to make her boyfriend "fruity":

"When you inspect these paintings — and even feel them, through tactile replicas of four paintings with four different kinds of dotting — you may be surprised..."

"... by their nubbiness, and how thickly the pigment has been lashed through a punched aluminum screen. The dots are raised. They grow and shrink, chafe or splinter. The sun may be setting on humanity, but look up close: Every dot, and every pixel, means nothing without you and me."

Writes Jason Farago, in "Connecting the Dots Between Roy Lichtenstein and Today The Whitney’s retrospective is full of jokes, but it captures our image overload with surprising tenderness. Our critic calls it 'the most momentous exhibition of the season'" (NYT).

That "sun may be setting" line has resonance because: "A remake of [Lichtenstein's] 1967 'Super Sunset Billboard' stands in front of the Whitney’s western picture window, so if you come at day’s end you can see two sunsets in one."

Speaking of breaking images up into tiny components and the effect on humanity:

Sunrise.

"My dad saw Houdini once—did I ever tell you this? He said it was much like you’d expect."

"They tied him up this way and that way, ropes, cables, locked him in a jail cell, then before you knew it came the sound of bolts dropping to the ground and locks flying off, and the great Houdini emerged. He just came walking out three paces behind the sheriff—and it was nothing! Anticlimax! Where was this? Manistique, Michigan, the county jail. Poor Houdini, she said. You should write a poor Houdini sonnet, Vern said. I hate it when people tell me what I should write, she said. I bet, Vern said. But still."

Wrote Anne Carson, the new winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in "Poor Houdini," published in 2024 in The New Yorker.

Manistique, Michigan is a real place. It sounds made up, though, don't you think? Like a portmanteau of "man" and "mystique." There's no [famous] book called "The Masculine Mystique."

"One of the things I am most proud of is introducing people to Bob through the building. Anytime I brought anyone there, they gasped..."

"... and had an immediate inhalation of what New York once was like, and who Bob Rauschenberg was. I thought the building felt like Bob in its elegance and eccentricities. He brought a lot of junk in."

Said Kathy Halbreich, former executive director of the Rauschenberg Foundation, quoted in "Should Robert Rauschenberg’s Art Studio Be Saved? The potential sale of the groundbreaking painter’s home in New York by his foundation, on the heels of the sale of his Florida studio, has alarmed many in the art community" (NYT).

A description of the endangered real estate: "Unlike more famous artists’ haunts, like Claude Monet’s water-lily garden at Giverny, the Rauschenberg manse, for which he paid $65,000, is grittily urban, a 9,200-square-foot townhouse set on a wide, truck-rumbling block just north of SoHo. For years gold letters were visible above the red door — Mission of the Immaculate Virgin — hinting at the building’s former life as a home for orphaned boys. Rauschenberg set up his studio on the ground floor, in a high-ceilinged room that was once the chapel."

Here's a short clip from a documentary, with Rauschenberg, in his deconsecrated chapel, speaking about his art (and, oddly, reminding me of George W. Bush):

"What we had in common was touch. I was never interested in their pessimism or editorializing. You have to have time to feel sorry for yourself if you're going to be a good Abstract Expressionist, and I think I always considered that a waste. What I did that looks like Abstract Expressionism is that with their grief and art passion and action painting... they let their brush strokes show."