Sunrise.

"When I’ve alluded to my penchant for audiobooks... I’ve occasionally been chided and told that they’re bastardizations of the real thing..."

"... and that printed volumes are truer to an author’s intent, better suited to lingering over language, superior through and through. Maybe so. But do the evangelists of that religion pause to wonder why we heretics exist? Some of us worship differently not because we haven’t seen the light, but because we don’t see well."

Writes Frank Bruni, in his newsletter (NYT gift link).

He describes his vision problem: "Almost nine years ago, I had a stroke that ravaged the optic nerve behind my right eye and rendered that eye pretty much useless. I wrote about that in this 2018 essay.... Since the incident, my slightly off-kilter monocular vision hasn’t deteriorated further.... [There is a] gap between what each of us struggles with and what the people in our orbits know or see of it.... It’s the source of so much ignorance, insensitivity and even cruelty."

(If you click through to the newsletter, you'll see the headline is "Buttigieg and El-Sayed Are Teaching Democrats to Speak Republican." You might want to read that. I did, but then I didn't want to blog about it... and did want to blog about the old audiobooks issue, even though I've blogged it many times before, as a click on my "audiobooks" tag will prove.)

"I just do not understand the mentality. If this is a representation of who our military is now… we’re just Rome sitting here waiting to burn. We’ve got nothing left."

From "Fox Host Trashes U.S. Sailors as ‘Weak’ for Speaking Out About Dire Conditions/Fox News host Joey Jones mocked service members speaking out about conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln" (MTN).

Joey Jones on concerns of service members on the USS Lincoln: pic.twitter.com/Va2npYmA9x

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 15, 2026

"After the 1997 Asian financial crisis South Korea realised that it was overly dependent on heavy industry, notably shipbuilding and carmaking."

"Ministers decided that the creative industries might successfully diversify the economy, after a team of economists pointed out that the film Jurassic Park alone had generated the same profit as selling 1.5 million Hyundai cars. They got behind everything from media and the arts to food and drink. A campaign for traditional Korean food supported restaurants, chef training and marketing. It has helped Korean food to travel alongside the 'K-wave' of pop culture. Kimchi is spreading like sushi and ramen did a generation ago...."

From "All points east — how the West got hooked on Korean and Japanese culture/K-pop titans BTS are taking on the Grammys, manga is on the London stage and Japanese literature is breaking records. What’s driving the boom?" (London Times).

We're told that BTS is very popular because of their "mix of pop, hip-hop, R&B and electronic music, with lyrics about mental health and social pressure," and it made me wonder what the group is saying about mental health and social pressure. So, the world being what it is, I said to Grok, "All I want from you is about 10 quotes from BTS songs that are 'lyrics about mental health and social pressure.'"

Click through if you want to know.

"Former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona is being sued in North Carolina under the state's 'homewrecker' law."

"Sinema admitted in a deposition to having a sexual relationship with her then-married former bodyguard. Sinema argues the affair did not happen in North Carolina, so she shouldn't be sued in that state. The lawsuit was filed by Heather Ammel, the ex-wife of Sinema's former bodyguard Matthew Ammel...."

I'm reading "'We went inside and had sex.' Sinema details affair with bodyguard" (The Arizona Republic).

Presumably, Ms. Ammel's argument is that the thing Sinema wrecked, the marriage, was located in North Carolina. 

"My hair stood on end and I became ferocious and, like, this is not happening, but I had nowhere to hide."

WATCH: Hayden Panettiere says she was 18 when a woman she trusted as a protector took her below deck on a yacht and physically put her in bed beside an undressed “very famous” man.

“By the time I’d realized I was in danger, I was quite literally out to sea.”

“She physically put… pic.twitter.com/rz5JAyxQo0

— Scott M (@EODWX5) August 17, 2026

Background: "Hayden Panettiere, Star of ‘Nashville’ and ‘Heroes,’ Dies at 36/In May, she published a memoir after a tumultuous decade that involved depression, substance abuse, losing custody of her daughter and stints in rehab" (NYT gift link).

Sunrise.

"In the exhilarating case of Madison, it’s important to pursue the frenzy, merge with the frenzy, ingest the frenzy."

"The frenzy beckons along State Street, the central nervous system of the city and the 50,000-strong university, with main quadrangle Bascom Hill at the end opposite the state Capitol. The frenzy churns up and down the streets and boulevards leading up to kickoffs, the multistory bars packed with people and red. It’s present in bits in the breakfast line at the famed Mickie’s Dairy Bar, or the doughnut line at Greenbush, or at State Street Brats, or the Memorial Union Terrace of the main student union. It’s bubbling at the Dane County Farmers’ Market, and it’s roaring at the frat houses near Camp Randall Stadium, where the inspiring sights might include a beer bong on the second floor delivering the nectar to a drinker on the ground. It reaches its peak, though, at the end of the third quarter.... If one seeks bouts of quiet, as unfitting as they can seem, there’s a daydream of a lake (Mendota), the Lakeshore Path, the city’s welcoming capacity for cyclists or the privilege of a lakefront room at the Edgewater Hotel...."

The Washington Post puts Madison first, in "The 10 best college football towns in America" (gift link).

Here's the daydream this morning, video'd by Meade:

 

Socialists in shorts.

I'm reading the NYT article "Is the Democratic Party Facing Its Own Tea Party Moment? A string of primary wins by progressive candidates has revealed the strength of a high-energy insurgent movement but also its potential limitations," which you can read for yourself at that gift link.

It's a topic I'm following, and I've recently blogged about. I said it a week ago: "The socialists are to the Democratic Party what the Tea Party was to the GOP."

So right now, all I want to do is put up something I cropped from one of the photographs:

"Dr. Abdul El-Sayed tried to attract young voters," and he did. They came toddling in wearing shorts, shuffling in slides and sneakers.

If I were a NYT essayist, I'd muse that they are showing us what real, human, embodied and, yes male power can look like.

ADDED: After publishing this post, I dashed off a question to Grok, "Can the males wear shorts and slides to the revolution?" Answer:

"Women remain, as linguists say, the 'marked' sex, the nonstandard, defined as the opposite of the male norm."

"There is no one effortless way to look as a congresswoman, no uniform of business suit and tie that allows her to blend in. Most female politicians handle this by approximating male attire with some tweaks. Usually that involves a blazer, pearls, and very discreet hair and makeup — ideally, none of which gets talked about. But there is power in rejecting this model. Power in embracing the variety of embellishments available to women — earrings, lipstick, dresses, different hair styles. And an extension of this power can be a woman experimenting with baring her belly, along with her reproductive journey. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is consciously working to fuse her body and mind on the public stage, to show us what real, human, embodied and, yes, female power can look like. She will not be a mere 'thing in a suit,' as she said."

Writes Rhonda Garelick, in "Ocasio-Cortez Rewrites the Rules" (NYT gift link).

It's an old idea — that feminine beauty is powerful and that power-seeking women can implement beauty to rise in the political world. Cleopatra, etc. But Garelick adds the notion that a woman baring her belly to the public and making a show out of shifting her fertility into the realm of science and technology will augment the power achieved through beauty and fashion. The old idea is a cliché. It works as far as it works. The new idea is barely coherent.

"I’m sorry to be crass about it, but I don’t think the point of the magazine is for self-pleasure. You no longer need a print magazine for that."

"It weirdly offers an artistic and highbrow view of the female nude, at a time when that is hard to come by."

Says Phillip Picardi, quoted in "I’ll make Playboy playful again, says its new gay editor/Phillip Picardi, a Catholic former Condé Nast wunderkind, also wants to attract women to the £30 magazine with more ‘artistic’ nudes and robust writing" (London Times).

He wants to “destigmatise male sexuality”, he says, and “help men to build a healthier relationship” with the women in their lives. “I’m hoping we can be a space for men who feel caught between needing to be manosphere-adjacent and needing to be the performative liberal male,” he says.... “We should promote the idea that we can be excited about sex and we can be excited about each other and excited about touching each other,” he says with a cheeky grin.

How Catholic is he? We're told he's "a lapsed Catholic who recently completed a master’s at Harvard Divinity School in order to rediscover his faith (his thesis was titled: Is Jesus Kinda Hot?)." Is religion part of making "playful again"? You can find "an artistic and highbrow view of the female nude" in church:

This reminds me of a sequence in the movie "Blue Moon," about the songwriter Lorenz Hart, who was gay, though not openly. The character has this conversation with the bartender. From the brilliant screenplay by Robert Kaplow (commission earned):

HART: You know what the sexiest thing on the planet earth is? A half-erect penis. 

EDDIE: Jesus Christ, Larry, nobody wants to hear this. 

Sunrise.

"[C]ritics of the state of the discipline say sociologists who aim to change the conditions they study can no longer claim to be rigorous scientists."

"A report released over the weekend about the state of scholarly standards in the field said it had been compromised by politics that influenced the discipline’s values and priorities. The report was produced by a commission led by Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, where leaders have argued that higher education is in need of reforms. The commission found that scholarship in the humanities and social sciences was sometimes in the service of political goals. 'Some topics cannot be studied or cannot be studied in an honest way,' said Jukka Savolainen, a Wayne State University criminologist and sociologist who is not part of the commission. For scholars studying incarceration, he said, 'the only research that’s rewarded and allowed and encouraged is to find the umpteenth way in which incarceration is harmful.'"

From "Conservatives Don’t Like Sociology. Some Sociologists Don’t Either. A group of sociologists broke away in protest from their colleagues over disagreements about Israel. Some worry the political stances are harming the field" (NYT gift link).

"... Americans love to turn to women when the house is burning down. Social scientists call it the glass cliff — the phenomenon in which women are recruited to lead failing companies."

"President Trump’s businessman brand of governance has many Americans feeling this nation is failing. I suppose the dumpster fire of climate denialism, political corruption and general scamminess of, well, everything would be dire enough circumstances to make a female president possible.  In particular, Democrats — whom you might expect to be wary of placing another female candidate before the American public — are facing a political disaster of their own making.... [A] lot of Democrats are faithful to conventional political wisdom that they cannot win the White House by running from the left. Ocasio-Cortez is made for this moment....  As we learned in 2008, when history says it’s your time, it’s your time."

Writes Tressie McMillan Cottom, in "Is Ocasio-Cortez Ready for the Glass Cliff?" (NYT gift link).

"There's a little bit of a quicksand feeling."

Althouse enters Lake Mendota for the first time after all these years.

Meade, who's great at instigating variations on old rituals, made the video.

"The other book I’ve been reading, Michael Glover Smith’s 'Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think,' takes up Dylan’s... forays into the world of cinema."

"I got to witness one of them a few weeks ago, when I attended a rare public screening of the provocative and polarizing 2003 flick 'Masked and Anonymous,' co-written by Dylan and Larry Charles. I hadn’t seen it before, but I immediately entered the cult of admirers who believe it was unfairly maligned when it was first released. (Roger Ebert called it 'a vanity production beyond all reason.' I hope Dylan chose to take that as a compliment.) I have also had the 'Masked and Anonymous' soundtrack on repeat — especially its eclectic assortment of Dylan covers by a global panorama of artists like the Sertab Erener, Francesco de Gregori and the Magokoro Brothers. You’ve never truly heard 'My Back Pages' until you’ve heard it in Japanese."

Writes Lindsay Zoladz, in "My Summer of Bob Dylan/Hear tracks inspired by his Long Hot Summer Tour, including 'My Back Pages' and 'Mississippi'" (NYT gift link, where you will find a playlist that includes "My Back Pages" in Japanese).

Here's "Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think." And for a second book Zoladz writes about, "After the Flood/Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace." Both of those links work to send a commission to me.

As for "Masked and Anonymous," I couldn't find it streaming anywhere. Meade, who's seen it twice, seems to think it's on YouTube, but here's a link to buy the DVD, if you still have a DVD player. It's only $9.48. Here's the trailer: