At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night.

"... a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East...."

Trump at Truth Social, an hour ago:

Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated. On behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East, it is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

"He hears the ticking of the clocks/And walks along with a parrot that talks...."

That's this morning's sunrise. Video by Meade. Music by Bob and Jerry.

"These videos are an unintended result of a law passed by Congress in 2016, mandating that providers give patients full access to the entirety of their medical records..."

"... as quickly as possible. The law went into effect in 2021, and ever since, 'raw' test results have arrived on our screens the instant they’re processed at the lab. This may be a victory for patients’ rights. But it also has the potential to be extremely unsettling. Information that was once delivered via live conversation with a human being, one trained in medical interpretation, is now frequently encountered first as decontextualized data on the screen. This unmediated medical data is now arriving at random moments in our lives. It can come any time of day, when you’re surrounded by people or all alone. Suddenly, you’re faced with a private decision — open? ignore? wait? It is out of the strangeness of this moment that the genre of medical results videos was born. People don’t know what to do with the experience of getting their data, and so they turn their cameras on...."

From "Why Am I Watching People Get Their Medical Results? What was once discussed with a doctor is now frequently encountered first as decontextualized data on a screen" (NYT)(gift link, with links to examples of these videos).

"First photo from the far side of the Moon...."

EARTHSET.
April 6, 2026.

Humanity, from the other side. First photo from the far side of the Moon. Captured from Orion as Earth dips beyond the lunar horizon. Photo: NASA pic.twitter.com/ZEBTQA85TY

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 7, 2026

Of course, it's not actually the first photo from the far side of the moon. It's a photo from this new trip to the moon... to the vicinity of the moon. They always overhype space travel and ruin the potential for a real emotional response.

"Writing is an invasion of your own privacy and the privacy of others, but the writer is always deciding where and how far to invade."

I wrote in a July 2021 post called "Rewatching 5 movies I saw in the theater when they first came out and I was in my early 20s."

I'm reading that this morning because in last night's Sunrise Café, people got to talking about Kurosawa movies and I was motivated to search my own archive for Kurosawa. Kurosawa is only mentioned in passing in that 2021 post, on a list of movies I was excited to consume all at once when I was in college — "All the Bergman films, the silents, the noir, the Fellini, the Marx Brothers, the Kurosawa, the Cary Grant movies, Katharine Hepburn, the entire French New Wave — half a century of great stuff to catch up on."

But the last line of that old post — the line that is this post's title — resonated with a post from 3 days ago, where I quoted an author who wrote "I decide which parts of me you see; I curate the way you understand my pain with sharp precision." And: "This is my book, and you’re reading it. Presumably, you like me. At the very least, you’re stuck in my head, and I control the aperture."

Are you having a psychotic break?

How is a person supposed to tell if they are having a psychotic break or not these days?

Everyone else can see the big rabbit listening to Trump talk about bombing Iran, right? pic.twitter.com/aH9C2RohFE

— Peter Hague (@peterrhague) April 6, 2026

AND: May I recommend a movie double feature, both involving visitation by large rabbits: "Harvey" and "Donnie Darko"?

"... maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?"

"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!"

That's Trump, an hour ago, at Truth Social, somehow declining to add his trademark "Thank you for your attention to this matter," perhaps because it is too cruel... or too lighthearted. I see he's calling God "God" again. 

At the Sunrise Café...

...  you can talk all night.

"Pittsburghers take pride in their practical solutions, especially the quirky ones, such as the 'Pittsburgh chair'..."

"... that we use to save the parking space we shoveled out after a snowstorm. There are folding chairs, barstools, even an occasional upholstered chair — whatever your choice. The chairs are sacrosanct, and they help avoid neighborhood disputes. Or the 'Pittsburgh toilet' that stands alone and unobstructed in the basement of many older working-class homes — porcelain artifacts of when the mills were booming. It made practical sense when the men returned from the mills to wash off the grime in the laundry tubs and finish their business in the basement before going upstairs for their meal. But there has been no easy solution for keeping schools open when an expected 500,000 to 700,000 visitors attend events...."

Writes Duquesne lawprof Joseph Sabino Mistick, in "Schools are closing for the NFL draft. What does this teach students? Pittsburgh prides itself on showing up and working hard. Students should, too" (WaPo).

"Well, today, Artemis, they're supposedly flying around the moon. So these are the first people that have gone into deep space since 1972, since the Apollo missions...."

"That's today, that's happening, right? Nobody knows it. That's what's nuts.... And they're going around the moon and coming back to earth. No one's done that since 1972. And it's happening today. No one cares. That's kind of weird, right?... It's very weird that we've become dull to like fascinating things...."

Said Joe Rogan, at 02:05:34, of his new podcast (with Theo Von).

Rogan wants us to marvel at the works of man. Meanwhile, Von is looking for a mystical relationship to nature itself:

"Sometimes if you lay there and look at the stars and stuff, it feels like, bro, and this is real shit I'm saying right now to me... it feels like they're looking back at you a little bit....

"Attempting a coherent portrait of Groypers can feel a bit like trying to describe the plot of a Surrealist film, or a fantasy board game that takes place in its own universe."

"They greet each other with the salutation 'Christ is King'; they banter about their aspiration to re-create Agartha, a mythological Aryan kingdom supposedly situated somewhere in the earth’s core. Theirs is a would-be party of trolling, of 'discourse porn and conspiracy theories on Adderall,' as one adherent told me. But they see their movement as a gathering storm about to break over American politics. Liberals may think of the Trump era as a tragedy of democratic backsliding and authoritarian malignancy; Groypers view it as a cynical pantomime of a nationalist takeover that never went far enough. Fuentes has become the gleeful narrator of this dashed dream, building a career in part by insisting that Trump’s pledge to put America first has curdled into a lie. 'Nick said that Trump’s going to simp for Israel,' G. told me. 'He’s totally going to cozy up to the donors. He’s not going to give us mass deportations. He’s not actually going to advance any of our interests except performatively, to appease us. And, sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.'"

Writes Antonia Hitchens, in "How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics/Inside the battle for the post-maga G.O.P." (The New Yorker).

"The people who want AI to be off-limits are right that technology changes how you think and write."

"I am old enough to have done creative writing in longhand and then on a typewriter, before I got my first computer. Something was lost in each transition, because the slowness and forced rewriting of the old methods improved the text in certain ways. But they also raised the cost (in time and effort) of making changes, and ultimately most writers decided the new ways were worth it.... There will be artisanal holdouts who reject all those possibilities, but I doubt they’ll be a majority. So for the foreseeable future, the rest of us will be figuring out where to draw the lines, knowing that some lines will be crossed by others, if not erased entirely. The best we can hope for is that in the struggle to draw and redraw them, we’ll learn where they belong...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "I told the internet I use AI. Boy, was it mad. Artificial intelligence helps you work harder, instead of just outsourcing your brain" (WaPo).

ADDED: I write so I can see what I think. I asked Grok, "Has anyone ever said, verbatim, 'I write so I can see what I think.'" The answer, I'm told, is no, but there's a similar expression, examined in the Quote Investigator article, "Quote Origin: I Do Not Know What I Think Until I Read What I’m Writing."

Notably, Flannery O'Connor wrote, in 1948: "What you say about the novel, Rinehart, advances, etc. sounds very good to me, but I must tell you how I work. I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again." So there was this mythic "old lady" who seems to have been regarded as a fool. In 1927, E. M. Forster wrote of an old lady who said, "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?"

Why am I writing this as a postscript to McArdle's discussion of A.I.? It's because it explains something about how I've been using A.I.

"It is profound to hear people be so aware of and forthcoming about their hopes, and poignant to hear them baldly articulate what we all crave — companionship and acceptance."

"As much as the series focuses on neurodivergent experiences, it illuminates the universal experience of seeking connection and withstanding disappointment. Its cast members’ bald articulation of their desire for companionship and acceptance gives us a gift: the opportunity to see ourselves in these unlikely stars...."

From "The Unlikely TV Show Restoring Everyone’s Faith in Dating/Without exploitation, 'Love on the Spectrum' captures the triumphs and travails of dating. It has become one of Netflix’s most popular shows" (NYT).

From the comments over there: "[T]he reason this show is so successful is that it is one of the only, if not the only, show that truly depicts how important innocent, authentic, messy, real love is. In the show, love and finally being in partnership is a heart-opening, inspiring, special dream.... While the rest of society suffers through hollow culture of situationships, social media, p*rn, red pills, gender division, AI, this [is an] endearing alternative...."

I'm reading that this morning and blogging it because it's very close to how I answered, last night, when Meade asked me why I watched this show.

Easter sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Video by Meade.

Easter bonus:

"You stay to the left and then you lean to the right..."