"What has happened to colour in movies? Was there a meeting in which it was decided that the visual medium of film should now be as visually depressing as possible?"

"That instead of rich greens, cheering pinks and passionate reds, today’s cinema palette should be muted pastels and smudgy browns, as if a horrid grey film now covered all camera lenses? What movie could possibly have prompted this torrent of rhetorical questions?"

From "I’m so sorry, this new Sense and Sensibility is simply dull/Daisy Edgar-Jones is lovely as Elinor Dashwood, but why mute the joyful comedy of Jane Austen’s funniest book?" (London Times).

Compare the color in the 1995 version of "Sense and Sensibility":

"I knew the risks were rising. The American basketball star Brittney Griner had been detained days before the invasion..."

"... the latest example of the Kremlin stockpiling foreign prisoners to secure diplomatic leverage. But the censorship laws hadn’t yet been applied to foreign journalists, and I felt a responsibility to continue working in the country if I could. I started taking short trips back to Russia. The importance of the work, and the sense of covering history in the making, made me feel alive. The door to cell No 40 slammed shut. I heard the clank of metal keys in the lock behind me, the deadbolt sliding into place with two noisy turns...."

From "Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter in Russia, thought he was meeting a sourceInstead he was arrested for spying. In an exclusive extract from his prison diaries, he reveals how he survived — and won his freedom" (London Times).

The Harvest Moon at sunrise.

Also called the Corn Moon.

And did you see Saturn?

"To the people who insulted Ramses, please remember that our children may someday read your words or watch your videos."

"I don’t want them to search for this memory and find strangers calling their dad a deadbeat. Those are untrue judgments to leave behind about someone you have never met.... My husband is a father, a son, and a person deeply loved by people who know who he truly is. Our children need their dad. I hope and pray you reflect on what you have written."

Woman writes a very lengthy Substack piece laboriously defending her husband after he was mocked (hilariously) by the announcers at a Giants game.

She was caught on camera carrying a baby and a stack of 3 food containers, lumbering back to her seat:

Mom of the year pic.twitter.com/nUTgAhr0nr

— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) September 24, 2026

The announcers — Giants announcers Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper —call her "a true definition of a multi-tasking mother" and "an Olympic champion" and "Mom of the Year" — and then we see him grabbing the food and immediately digging into it — and the announcers say "She'll be the last one to eat too."

The clip went viral, with predictable on-line trashing of the man, and now we've got the woman, in another dimension of multi-tasking, writing "I’m the Mom in That Viral Giants Clip. Let Me Tell You About My Husband. You saw me carrying our baby and food. There was more happening in our family that night."

What else was happening that night? We're told the couple attended the ballgame in remembrance of a recently deceased friend. The woman was carrying a baby and food, but the man was "carrying" his grief: "The camera showed what I was carrying in my hands. It couldn’t show what he was carrying that night."

By the way, the announcers were great, in true baseball-announcer form, so friendly and affectionate, with exclamations like "Holy smokes!" "Oh, my goodness!" and "Bless her heart." I love this part of baseball on TV — the camera finds interesting people in the crowd, and the announcers have gentle fun with it. There's so much affection for the fans. And those fans all know they could be caught on camera at any point. They're part of the show. 

I'd recommend against going into social media to call more attention to yourself. It seems as if it was one more thing the woman had to do for the man.

ADDED: Ramses, now there's a name. Was he named after the Ramses who was Ozymandias, the "vast and trunkless legs of stone" in Shelley's poem? Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

"She’d done everything she thought men expected of women on the far right, so when the hatred came for Amy Dangerfield she felt so depressed she could barely stand."

"She’d moved from Australia to the United States in 2017 with a dream of spreading her internet-inspired beliefs: that women had driven men to madness through rejection and disrespect; that society needed strong men to survive...."

From "She helped lead a far-right internet movement. Then it turned on her. Inspired by female conservative influencers, Amy Dangerfield worked to become one of Nick Fuentes’s model 'groypettes.' A vicious fight left her grappling with the dark side of far-right fame" (WaPo)(gift link).

Influencer in-fighting. 

Sunrise.

“During the Obama administration they tapped the AP bureau’s phones and the phones of AP bureau reporters. They tapped their phones!

Said Atlantic writer James Kirchick on Bill Maher's show last night.

Maher chimed in: "Josh Earnest, he was in the Obama administration. He admitted it. He said: 'The White House has demonstrated our willingness to exclude Fox News from news making interviews.... He said: 'We're going to treat them like we treat an opponent.' This is exactly what I say about this country. Everybody’s like this is the worst thing in the world except when we do it. And then it’s always perfectly okay."

New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan just got a stunning reality check from both Bill Maher and author James Kirchick.

Swan was spiraling over President Trump barring CNN and MS NOW from the White House, until Kirchick reminded him of some of the Obama-era media scandals.… pic.twitter.com/GopA8f61qD

— Overton (@overton_news) September 26, 2026

"But critics argue the bare nails trend actually says something about class, the hamster wheel of beauty standards, and who gets to define what is considered tasteful."

"Nail art's historical and creative roots are linked back to black, Latino, and Asian communities and the suggestion that bare nails are now a sign of high status could stigmatise bold manicures, they say. 'That trend really promotes blankness and this kind of sameness and erasure of culture and identity that is so important to black and brown communities,' beauty journalist Kristina Rodulfo tells the BBC. 'They are often called elegant or tasteful, and these are often usually euphemisms that perpetuate white supremacist standards of beauty.'"

So it says at the BBC. 

Anyone who thinks the nails in that photo are unpolished must be the kind of person who thinks vanilla doesn't count as a flavor. But vanilla is a great flavor, and a thin coat of light pink nail polish is great way to paint your nails.

Anyway, if I prefer vanilla ice cream, it takes nothing away from your enjoyment of Rocky Road. If you want to be a maximalist, just be a maximalist. Don't try to bully minimalists into promoting the maximalist agenda. We're not "erasing" you! But maybe that's a hint about why people are drawn to maximalism: Is there a fear that unless you go big and bold and loud you might cease to exist? Quietness is not "blankness."

"'Next week, we’ll play a name game,' she said, explaining that it involves saying your name and then an animal starting with the same letter. 'For example, I’m Carol the Crocodile. It helps to remember.'"

So ends the NYT article "How to Be a 'Radical' Listener/The lessons in Carol Gilligan’s groundbreaking feminist book 'In a Different Voice' are more than 40 years old. She wishes they weren’t still so relevant."

"I no longer believe in extreme gender roles, especially when they’re wrapped in spiritual language."

"If any belief system creates a power imbalance that puts women or anyone in a position of fear, isolation or total dependence, I reject it. If my past content contributed to that, I am so genuinely sorry."

Said Bernadine Bluntly, quoted in "Her Brand Was Tradwife. Now She’s Divorced. What happens when a trad influencer leaves her husband, questions her beliefs, stops selling anti-feminism T-shirts — and still needs to make a living online?" (NYT).

"He chose the name Faust because it sounded cool, he said, and because, 'as a kid doing graffiti, you’re making this Faustian deal...'"

"'... this deal with the devil in exchange for fame. I was 15 years old, I was breaking the law, running from cops'... He now works out of a fifth-floor studio in a walk-up building on the edge of Chinatown. At the top of a rickety flight of wooden steps, the space is spare and well-organized.... 'Being born and raised in New York, really being inspired by this 50-year history of the culture and really trying to do whatever I can to continue to carry that narrative forward, I looked at all the pioneers before me and really tried to channel the ethos of New York City graffiti until I eventually was able to find my own voice within that,' he said."

From "The Graffiti Artist Top Brands Call On for That ‘New York’ Look/If the city had a font, would his lettering be it?" (NYT).

When the problem and the solution to the problem overlap this much, you have to be willfully blind not to see.

I'm reading "Travelers Are Reckoning With the Ultimate Disrupter: Climate Change/Once dismissed as occasional inconveniences, climate-related disruptions are now an inescapable fixture of summer travel. How will travelers respond?" (NYT):

The main "climate-related disruption" in question is that it's terribly HOT in the summer. The travel experience is BAD and, conveniently, the traveling is a cause of the heat. It's a big carbon footprint. So the thing that's not good anymore is exactly the thing you shouldn't do. 

"In an unsigned decision with no noted dissents, the justices warned of 'electoral chaos' if the state were to change course so close to the election and use the 2025 map."

"The election is not merely upcoming; it has already started. Ballots using the 2022 map have been printed and mailed. Absentee voting has already begun, as has military and overseas voting,” according to the five-page decision."

From "Supreme Court Once Again Blocks Republican-Backed Voting Map in Missouri/A federal appeals court had sided with Republicans seeking to use redrawn congressional district boundaries to give their party an advantage in the midterms elections" (NYT).

Note: All NYT links are gift links now. I'm not going to write "gift link" next to every NYT link anymore. Just know they are gift links. I'm not going to keep repeating myself, and there's also no need for you to repeat the complaint that the NYT requires you to register with them to get the access they're offering free. You can't have everything you want. What in this world is completely free?

"Cube enthusiasts... explain the plummeting age of champions by pointing to kids’ enthusiasm for the puzzle, their ability to learn quickly and that they simply have more time to practice."

"Many are from China, which has schools that teach speedy Rubik’s Cube solving.... Yunzhi practices two to three hours a day, her mother told Red Star News of Chengdu, China...."

I'm reading "6-Year-Old Girl in China Sets a Rubik’s Cube Record Lian Yunzhi of China solved a Rubik’s Cube five times in an average of 4.27 seconds, setting a women’s world record" (NYT).

And I'm not thinking oh, isn't she cute? like most of the commenters over there. I'm thinking: 1. Child abuse, and 2. A separate "women's" division is bullshit. 

The "men's" record — i.e., the record — is 3.51 seconds, almost 20% less.

These kids who train for hours a day in Rubik’s Cube solving — what are they really being trained for? It made me think of this viral video:

Sunrise, sunset.

"[I]n the face of the evidence we have so far, and given the incendiary nature of the claim, why would anyone say that the United States is experiencing a 'national crisis' of lynchings?"

"One reason is a stylized wariness that Black Americans are often taught as a kind of wisdom — to be ever on guard that the bad old days could return at any moment. Another reason is a belief that Black people don’t hang themselves because of the fraught historical associations with the act. 'It is very uncommon for young Black men to commit suicide, let alone by hanging,' Raymond Winbush, a psychologist who has treated hundreds of Black men and boys, told The Washington Post. 'That’s not the way we do' is how Black Americans often put it in conversation. But we must ask, with all due compassion: Suppose it is?"

Writes John McWhorter, in "Are Lynchings Really Happening?" (NYT).