"What if the dilettante’s perpetual movement from one thing to another is not a failure of nerve but a different and defensible way of being..."

"... one whose exploratory zeal turns out to be just what a hyper-specialised, over-optimised and all-too-serious world needs most? Then the dilettante would turn out to be not a capricious buffoon but a kind of modern anti-hero. That, I argue, is a dilettantism worth defending...."

Writes Nigel Warburton, in "In praise of the dilettante/A wayfaring cosmopolitan who never gets stuck, the dilettante is the right anti-hero for our hyper-specialised age" (Aeon).

I was moved to make a tag for "dilettante"! It seemed absurd, at first, but once I saw the old posts to which I could add it, I liked it:

1. "But 'dilettante' is one of those words which deter people from taking up new pursuits as adults."

2. "And so if what you're trying to do is micromanage and solve everything then you end up being a dilettante but you have to have enough knowledge to make good judgments about the choices that are presented to you." 

3. "One moment they are a king, the next a murderer, a jaded dilettante, a passionate and forsaken lover...." 

4. "It must gall Biden to know that his predecessor... actually installed his dilettante daughter and-son-in-law at the highest level of policymaking...."

5. "[S]he is a millionaire dilettante, despite the fact she drives a Prius and lives in a modest Madison home...."

6."The mountains are the artifice of a clever scene painter... it is as if the whole region were an album, the mountains drawn on a blank page by an adroit dilettante for the lady who owns the album...."

7. "It is precisely at times of chaos that morally informed but tough-minded triage decisions must be made, otherwise morality is simply a dilettante’s luxury and a mere intellectual puzzle for the philosophy classroom, but irrelevant on the street."

8. "He's no dilettante. He's the real deal when it comes to being a celebrity judge... He's an ardent and opinionated fan of the show.''

Wednesday morning, 6:13 a.m. — sunrise was at 6:36 — the rain made things extra dark.

"Vice President JD Vance, a potential 2028 presidential contender, broke sharply with the president in owning the failures of the administration’s policies."

That's the WaPo subheadline, under the headline "Vance blames Republicans’ midterm losses on Iran war, cost of living" (gift link).

Here, read Vance's post. It doesn't strike me as a "sharp break" from Trump. I see it as just analyzing the  substance of yesterday's big losses:

The meeting between Pope Leo and Dylan—who wore a black hooded sweatshirt—was brief, consisting of greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges."

"The Holy Father presented the singer with a rosary, while Dylan reciprocated with a book: Chronicles: Volume One, his autobiography, which has been published in the United States and other countries around the world."

Vatican News reports.

Pope Leo XIV met with American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in a private audience on Wednesday, November 4. https://t.co/7OAJcluj0n

— Vatican News (@VaticanNews) November 4, 2026

Is the Pope mentioned in "Chronicles: Volume One"? Yes

"'I will forever mourn not having a daughter... I cry about it regularly.' Brazell’s complicated feelings are part of a larger conversation about 'gender disappointment'..."

I'm reading "Bye bye boys! The provocative reason so many moms now only want girls" (NY Post).

What's the "provocative reason"? 

I think that language refers to this quote from Heidi Murkoff, author of "What to Expect When You’re Expecting": "It’s being driven by a social-media and media generated narrative about toxic masculinity that’s become pervasive and self-perpetuating, but that’s really not grounded in biological fact."

That makes little sense to me. If you're genuinely worried about "toxic masculinity," you'd be better off with a boy. 1. You'd be actively involved in the development of one man and you could try to make him nontoxic, and 2. If you have a daughter, she's likely to want a man for a partner, and if he's toxic, that will be truly painful. 

"At first, he kept his apartment and a few changes of clothes. But gradually and methodically, Greenfield embraced asceticism and dedicated himself to it full-time."

"He let go of his possessions, as well as his connections to the government and commercial society. He has no phone, car, driver’s license, passport, health insurance, property, bank accounts or credit cards. He wears biodegradable clothing and has not paid taxes or taken pharmaceuticals for more than a decade. He lives under the poverty level, and said he has no romantic or sexual attachments. He brushes his teeth with a twig.... He likens his practices to those of wandering sadhus, holy men who take vows of poverty and celibacy to pursue spiritual freedom in India....  In June, he offended a group of women in California who had picked him up in a car to look for mushrooms. He was expecting just one person, he told them curtly, announcing that he did not like surprises, recalled a woman who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she is part of a tight-knit foraging community where Greenfield is revered. The difference between the mild-mannered online persona — an amalgam of Henry David Thoreau and the Dude — and the aggravated guy in the back seat was upsetting, she said."

From "He Wants to Be One With Nature. But He Can’t Quit Instagram. Once, Robin Greenfield aspired to wealth. Now, he has no home and eats from the earth. He chronicles it all on social media, but does the persona match the man?" (NYT).

I blogged about Greenfield a couple weeks ago, here, but there's different material in this NYT article and more skepticism about the man. 

Also, here's the list of 100 things Greenfield came up with back in 2020 — positive changes he wanted to make in his life — to "live free of lies and corruption." Much of it is what you might predict from a radical environmentalist, so let me — a connoisseur of travel critique — focus on the part about travel:

"[I]n Thailand... Buddhism has blended with a mélange of other spiritual traditions like animism, Hindu rituals and Chinese astrology to create a strong affinity for the supernatural in contemporary life."

"'In Thailand, superstition isn’t the opposite of modernity — it lives comfortably alongside it,' said Theeranuch Pusaksrikit, a business school professor at Chulalongkorn University....  'Each hospital has their own superstition culture,' [Thanat Tantinam, a colorectal surgeon, said]. He has also heard of colleagues avoiding nuts, pizza or coffee while at work, and knows of at least one hospital where bananas — otherwise regarded as a lucky food — are taboo.... But few medical superstitions have been as universal and long-running as the KFC curse...."

From "Why Doctors in Thailand Fear KFC/In a country where superstitions are as imaginative as they are many, physicians have come to fear a jinx involving Kentucky Fried Chicken" (NYT).

"Wisconsin voters have spoken, and Democrats will hold a governing trifecta for the first time in nearly two decades."

"Governor-elect David Crowley, Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, and Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein will set the agenda in Madison.... The new Democratic leadership also lacks any real private-sector experience. Crowley built his career in campaign organizing and political staff work. Neubauer and Hesselbein have the same resume. They know politics. Being good at politics will mean paying back their powerful political allies.... Many newly elected Democrats presented themselves as moderates; their leadership team has a different agenda. Wisconsin’s strengths—our workforce, our communities, and our tradition of common-sense governance—are durable. Republicans will work every day to protect those strengths, highlight what is working, and prepare for the moment when voters again choose balance and results over one-party control...."

Writes Robin Vos, who has been the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly since 2013.

"Impeaching Trump is a bad idea. I want to be clear that we believe that Trump commits five impeachable offenses before breakfast every morning."

"So this is not a question of his culpability. This is a question of political reality, and the reality is there’s literally zero chance that he will be removed from office unless he does something even more egregious. Impeaching him for a third time without succeeding in removal isn’t a good idea and it would send voters a message that we’re not listening. Voters are saying, yes we are concerned about corruption and of course Congress should do oversight, but mostly what they’re saying is, 'help me in my life right now because I am struggling.'"

Said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, quoted in "Will Trump be impeached? What happens now Democrats have won the midterms/Figures in the party that has won back control of Congress are wary of a third failure to remove the president and may target Pete Hegseth instead" (London Times).

Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries has said: "One of the first things we’re going to do in the majority, we’re going to run Pete Hegseth out of town."

"Many voters told pollsters and interviewers that they felt hoodwinked by Mr. Trump, believing that he was going to bring down prices and not start new wars."

"They expected him to close the border, but bristled at what they saw as heavy-handed arrests of people living in the country for years. They rebelled against the tariffs that increased costs for consumers. The way Mr. Trump spent his last day before the election proved to be a metaphor for how out of sync his political instincts were with the season. Instead of emphasizing plans to address the cost of living worries weighing on many voters, he delivered his final pre-election address at the Reflecting Pool, talking about algae and pipes."

Writes Peter Baker, in "Angry Voters Usher in Beginning of the End to the Trump Era/The electoral backlash extended even into deep red states and indicated that President Trump has lost his hold over the coalition that lifted him to the White House twice" (NYT).

"I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP."

Wrote Trump, on Truth Social, 7 hours ago.

6 hours ago, he wrote: "I’m going to become a Political Pundit, both good and bad, on the reasons these Candidates won and lost! President DONALD J. TRUMP."

It's pretty obvious how this punditry will go. 3 minutes before that post, he'd opined on Greg Abbott: "If Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, hadn’t become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost. He went back to his original formula, and it wasn’t pretty! President DONALD J. TRUMP."

Sunrise with rabbit.

The rabbit surprised me. Not at the time, but just now.

I wonder if the election results will be surprising. Settle in. Results should begin to come in soon. Feel free to hang out here for election night conversation. Or talk about anything else if you want.

"As in previous years, Republicans seem to be enjoying strong Election Day advantages in states that report live turnout by party registration."

"As of Tuesday afternoon, Republicans in Florida were enjoying a wider advantage than two years ago, voting on Election Day by a nearly two-to-one margin. Republicans were also leading registered Democrats by 12 percentage points in Nevada, a wider margin than their Election Day advantage in 2024. In both of those states, registered Republicans made up a smaller share of the advance votes this year than they did in 2024 — and a wide majority of votes are cast ahead of Election Day."

I'm reading "Election Day Turnout Is High Across Battleground States/A midterm campaign marked by high engagement showed no signs of slowing on Election Day, though it was unclear whether either party had an advantage" (NYT).

We voted.

 How about you?

"It sounds like the plane iced when they flew through the cell. They thought at first it was light to moderate icing. But then it sounds like it got really severe."

"The plane can become almost uncontrollable.... They couldn’t recover from it, and they crashed.... This, to me, is just a textbook example of exactly what we’re taught when we’re pilots, and that is, don’t fly through thunderstorms, because you just don’t know their severity."

Said Daniel Bubb, a former pilot who now teaches at the University of Nevada, quoted in "What Caused a Jet to Dive Nose First Into the Ground? Ice, experts said, can change the shape of a plane’s wing, disrupting its aerodynamics" (NYT).

"'When you’re in a glass house, your whole life changes,' Egan says. 'You live with the light.'"

"After 21 years of frantic days and late nights in Manhattan, she began rising with the sun and going to sleep at dusk. 'It informed everything about how I worked because it slowed me down.' Inhabiting the building through different seasons helped her understand the way it functioned: how the wide, floor-to-ceiling glass panes encouraged you to observe the birds in the old trees; how the kitchen’s spot in the center of the living space created implied corridors that let people and air circulate. She began talking with her frequent collaborator the architect Carl Muehleisen about converting the home into a more contemporary, year-round dwelling, adding a work space and rooms for visiting friends — all while retaining its rigor and economy...."

From "Living in a Glass House Changed Her Life/After the interior designer Carol Egan took over a Modernist home on Long Island, she discovered that it offered bountiful light and gave her a new affinity for the passing of the seasons" (NYT)(like all NYT links, it's a gift link, and this one is especially worth it for the photographs).