Sunrise on the lake.

Afternoon in the woods:

"What’s the most memorable place you’ve cried in New York? (Be specific!)"

The NYT is soliciting stories about crying in the city. Fill out the form they have at "New Yorkers, Where’s the Best Place to Cry in the City? To help us report an upcoming article, we want to hear about all the places you’ve cried — subways, sidewalks, stoops, saunas and beyond."

I know from listening to pop songs over the years that the best place to cry is in the rain.

You cry in the rain so no one can tell you're crying. Similar but importantly different is "Raindrops" by Dee Clark. There, the man is crying, but he's in denial: "Oh no, it can't be teardrops/For a man ain't supposed to cry." It's not raining at all.

And here's Flight of the Conchords playing with the same idea:

There's also the situation where it really is raining and you nevertheless are perfectly aware that a person is crying. Most notably: "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain."

"So we had the privelege [sic] to watch one of the most amazing team performances in a World Series in history. And we wake up to see a summary of the game..."

"... and this is what we get? No offense to the author, but my goodness WaPo, what an embarrassment."

That's the top-rated comment on the main World Series article featured on the front page of The Washington Post. It's titled: "How a World Series team turns batting practice music into psychological warfare/The Milwaukee Brewers are famous for playing sleeping tunes during their opponents’ pregame sessions. So the Tampa Bay Rays came prepared."

And here's the last paragraph: "The World Series thus far has been tight, with the first two games, both Milwaukee wins, decided by a run apiece. The margins can come from anywhere, and the Rays’ chance to retaliate awaits. Game 3 begins at 8 p.m. in Tampa. But first, batting practice."

Here's the entire sports coverage on the front page, right now:

Game 3 has been over for more than 12 hours. It was quite something, 10 to 1, and nobody should be saying "The World Series thus far has been tight" at this point. But I get it. The Washington Post's sports coverage is for people who basically don't care about sports. So you get sports with music, sports with Paris, and sports with "short kings."

"Over the years, she dated several younger men, including a Russian 25 years her junior whom she met in the parking lot of a grocery store..."

"... where she found him admiring her Porsche Boxster. A month into the relationship, he casually mentioned that the last woman he dated paid him $1,000 a month. That’s when she implemented a new rule: 'I said, "From now on, they have to have been born when Kennedy was shot."'"

From "Boomer women are dating after divorce. Men don’t always meet their standards. In the 1990s, baby boomer women set records for divorce. Thirty years later, how’s their love life?" (WaPo)(gift link).

It's interesting — isn't it? — the rules people make as they try to guard against making the same mistake again. I would have thought: Get rid of that Porsche. Or at least: Don't trust anything that starts with him admiring your Porsche Boxster in a grocery store parking lot.

"Another way in which antidepressants may work involves the enhancement of neuroplasticity..."

".... or the brain’s ability to reorganize its structure and connections. Continued treatment with antidepressants may bolster brain chemicals and processes that promote neuroplasticity. (Psychedelics are thought to work as a treatment for depression and anxiety, in part, for a similar reason.) The hypothesis is that the drugs open a 'window' of plasticity through which the brain has a renewed ability to change the way it is wired. Patients treated with antidepressants often feel more mentally malleable and better able to move away from unhelpful thinking patterns. Some researchers have proposed that we should think about antidepressants as relieving a kind of cognitive constipation."

From "Millions Use Antidepressants. We Still Don’t Understand How They Work. Here’s how psychiatrists like me think about the most promising hypotheses" (NYT).

"I'm really good at real estate and fixing things. I fix things very good..... I always build beautiful and inexpensive.... I can do it naturally.... It actually relaxes me...."

"If you would have seen the White House...  it was in horrible condition.... The plaster was falling off the exterior.... They had four or five windows where literally the ornamentation was up on one side and had fallen off or half fallen off in the other. And I fixed it. We made a mold of the good one and we put it on the other one and we got it all beautiful. And then we skim coated with an exterior plaster that's phenomenal. The entire exterior with the best artisans you've ever seen.... The White House is now in better shape than it was in 1792, when it was built.... Look, tell Obama the following: The White House is a symbol of America. And when it's dirty, filthy dirty and broken, when the windows are cracked, when the exterior monuments — they call them monuments on the outside — when they're good on one side but missing on the other side of a window, people notice that... 20 years ago, I came into the White House and... I said, 'Man, this place is in bad shape.'... It's been a long time... and I made up for lost time.... And I didn't take any time. I'd literally do it when I walk home from the Oval. I'd walk I'd look up. I'd say, 'Boy, that wall is really bad. Let's go. We got to fix it, fellas.'... And I would try and explain that to a guy like Obama, but he wouldn't understand. He doesn't he doesn't understand the White House has to be clean, pristine, beautiful. It can't have cracks in the column. It can't have big blotches of stone laying outside on the ground from 30 years ago.... Nobody loved it like I do. Nobody loved it. And now the White House is in beautiful shape...."

"We merely believed two of the most powerful cultural icons of our time. Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton..."

"... each pointed my generation of aspirational teenagers toward a Black Camelot.... [Cosby] invested the cultural capital of being America’s dad into becoming America’s minister on Black aspirations. Despite being raised in subsidized public housing in Philadelphia, the comedian Cosby merged with the well-to-do Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable of 'The Cosby Show.' That’s the Bill who built Hillman to show Black families what was possible. But it was another Bill — William Jefferson Clinton — who made Cosby’s fictional world feel like an early draft of the real world. Clinton gave us Black cool in a white Southern package. He was from a place called Hope, like a divinely chosen character we could have learned about in vacation Bible school. He played saxophone on 'The Arsenio Hall Show' and prayed well in Black churches. His casual affinity with and for Black Southern culture was political gold...."

Writes Tressie McMillan Cottom, in a new piece in the NYT called "I Believed in the Promise of Hillman College. What Happened?"

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you like in the comments... including the Brewers game, World Series game 3.

"Grading for correctness just adds a huge incentive for them to use AI for homework instead of doing it themselves, and penalizes students for honesty."

Said UC Berkeley professor (and winner of the Fields Medal) Richard Borcherds.

Quoted in "UC Berkeley professor refuses to grade his students’ homework after noticing worrying trend: 'No point'" (NY Post).

"France has beautiful days ahead of it... its recovery begins here in Orléans. This is the symbol of the fight against stupidity, against abandonment, against resignation."

Said Marine Le Pen, addressing supporters of France’s "far-right" National Rally in Orléans (where Joan of Arc defended France in 1429):

The lakeshore woods at first light.

"He was a one of one. Anything he’d seen, he could draw for you — like the logo of a defunct 1910s company or a piece of footwear."

"He was like a visual savant. It was weird. You would refer to something visual, and he’d go, 'Oh, yeah, I can sketch that up for you.'"

Said Ethan Coen, quoted in "J. Todd Anderson Has Died. The Coen Brothers May Be Lost Without Him. The storyboard artist produced scene-by-scene sketches that shaped films like “Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski” and 'No Country for Old Men'" (NYT)(gift link, lots of drawings and photos).

"What happened to the internet? It used to be fun. Look at me in 2012. But lately, it's gotten a little weird...."

"The Parks Department sees an old, decaying, noncompliant place. We see versatile, high-quality, high-performance equipment."

Said Salo Coslovsky, an associate professor of urban planning, quoted in "New Fight at Gritty Manhattan Park Is Over ‘Punk Rock’ Pull-Up Bars/The Parks Department has a $10 million plan to renovate the northeast corner of Tompkins Square Park, but fans of its workout bars want things to stay just as they are" (NYT).

The idea that it's "punk rock" comes from a personal trainer, Danny Kavaldo: "People don’t come here to get the newest, shiniest equipment; people come here because it’s Tompkins Square Park. There’s an energy you can feel, it’s gritty, it’s punk rock, it’s the East Village."

"In a 1993 cover story — 'Revenge of the Philistines' was the headline — Forbes lumped a Stankard piece in with 'junk collectibles.'"

"If he heard the sneering, Mr. Stankard did not seem to care. A devout Catholic, he saw melting his woodland worlds into miniature as a higher calling. Wearing purple didymium lenses to protect his eyes from the sodium flare heated glass emits, Mr. Stankard worked beneath a Benedictine motto: Laborare est orare, Latin for 'to work is to pray.'"

From "Paul Stankard Has Died. Behold What He Did With Paperweights. Yes, paperweights. Working over a nearly 5,000-degree gas flame, he created glass marvels that sold for tens of thousands of dollars. He was 83" (NYT)(gift link, with photos).

I thought the whole thing was a joke, but there really are stingrays on view — and available for touching — at Tropicana Field.

Aaron Ashby and Brice Turang finding out there are stingrays in a tank in Tropicana Field is straight comedy 😂😂 #Brewers #WorldSeries https://t.co/eYD2tnaHVV

— Cameron Ezeir (@camezeir) October 26, 2026

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by TickPick (@tickpick)

I don't approve. Leave animals alone. But isn't a stingray the beast that took out the Crocodile Hunter? I look a bit more closely at the truth/fiction of this special feature of the Rays' ballpark. These are not stingrays but cownose rays. Still, I would leave fish alone. (Yes, they are fish, cartilaginous fishes, like sharks. No bones!)