Sunrise.

"Supreme Court Allows Trump Plan to Restrict Mail-In Voting, for Now."

"The administration asked the court to clear the way for President Trump’s order that creates 'state citizenship lists' and directs the Postal Service to decide who gets a mail-in ballot" (NYT gift link).

"It’s tempting to look at Duffy’s political ascent—and Trump’s, of course—and reflect on the surprising cultural sticking power of turn-of-the-millennium-style reality TV...."

"The Trump Presidency likely wouldn’t have been possible without 'The Apprentice.’ Duffy’s rise has been less meteoric, but his launchpad, if anything, was an even purer distillation of the genre; as my colleague Emily Nussbaum has written, 'The Real World' pioneered many of reality TV’s modern tropes—the cast of strangers, the apartment as set, the confessional interviews—and cultivated a viewership.... When I revisited the show earlier this summer, it seemed a particularly propitious moment to assert the ongoing influence of reality TV, not least in politics. Spencer Pratt, the villain from 'The Hills,' was running for mayor of Los Angeles, depicting the city as a hellhole and attracting reams of media coverage. Luke Gulbranson ('Summer House') was running for a (year-round) U.S. House seat in Minnesota. Mark Moran ('FBoy Island') was running for Senate in Virginia. The moment no longer seems so propitious. Moran dropped out; Gulbranson lost, as, more significantly, did Pratt, occasioning some hand-wringing about whether his supposed surge had ever been real to begin with. (In fairness, almost nothing is more reality-TV than that.)..."

Writes Jon Allsop, in "Sean Duffy in the Real World/Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary got his big break on reality TV, and is now out with a six-part YouTube show about a family road trip. How bad could it be?"

"When choosing colors for dirty areas, including mudrooms, try green... 'If you’re a heavy Amazon shopper and get all those [brown] Amazon boxes, green looks really good with brown.'"

I'm reading "The secret to an orderly home? 'Dirty zones.' Laundry areas, small cabinets, baskets and even hooks are the 'first line of defense' against messes creeping into the whole house" (WaPo).

"Why you should never walk barefoot on a hotel carpet."

Headline at WaPo (free link).

[H]otel carpets are often flecked with food debris, dead skin cells and dust that engender mites, bacteria, mold, allergens and other microorganisms.... Guests’ in-room habits, such as eating takeout, brushing their hair or scratching an itch, contribute to the carpet litter. Shoes also drag in an array of vile material, including fecal matter picked up from places where dogs and humans do their business, such as sidewalks, parks and public bathrooms. Guests will disperse the excrement and other organic bits on their journey from lobby to hallway to room....

A comment from over there: "Another WP fearmongering article afraid of imaginary hazards. Yes, the carpets are germy, but so is everything else. Has anyone ever been harmed?" 

That reminds me, I was just about to blog this other WaPo piece, "Why we should stop eating lettuce, cyclospora or not/Lettuce makes us sick, wastes resources and has minimal nutritional value. Why are we still consuming it?"

The World Humanoid Robot Games, there were Olympic-style events like the 100-meter sprint as well as contests for robots to pick up beans.

Sunrise.

"Chance, fate—these are abstract ideas that usually raise abstract questions. Do people have story-like fates..."

"... or are they just subject to concatenations of occurrences? Do things happen 'for a reason,' or do we just make up stories after the fact to tie events together? Broadly speaking, there’s an ancient antagonism between the notion that life must make sense and the observation that it often doesn’t.... And yet, at times when fate is actually 'happening,' such questions recede. Instead, what stands out are the physical particulars of the here and now. In the hospital, after the accident, you know your life is changing; you sense your proximity to what the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard calls 'the deep, slow-shifting layers of reality where fate is at work.' Somehow this abstract understanding exists alongside, or by means of, the objects in the waiting room—a paper cup from the water cooler, or a copy of People magazine."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Should You Believe in Fate? We’d be happier, perhaps, if we found meaning not through abstractions but through the physical things around us" (The New Yorker).

"More visitors are giving up on summer holidays in cities that feel like saunas and booking 'coolcations' in Iceland, Norway, or Denmark...."

"A 2023 European Commission study forecast 'a clear north-south pattern in tourism demand changes' that 'becomes more pronounced for higher warming scenarios,' signalling growing economic consequences for Madrid, Lisbon, Athens, and Milan. 'Travelling to European cities is about cultural experience,' Daniel Scott, a scholar of tourism at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, told me. 'Whether it’s Paris, Barcelona, or Rome, you amble around, sightseeing, street shopping, taking a riverboat tour, going to a museum, a restaurant, a café. Most of that time, you’re outside.' Climate change increasingly turns pleasure trips into exercises in escaping pain. 'When I’m in Europe, I always notice how many people crowd under trees and shaded areas,' Scott said. 'But at some attractions, like the Acropolis, there’s no way to avoid the blazing sun. On especially hot days, they’ve got the Red Cross giving out water, medics pre-positioned because they know many people are going to be in trouble when they come down.'"

From "The End of the European Summer/As extreme heat overwhelms the Continent’s great cities, they are racing to transform themselves for a climate that they were never built to withstand" (The New Yorker).

"Mortality is an immutable fact of the human condition, but the desire to cheat death has endured for a very long time."

"According to legend and history, Gilgamesh, Chinese emperors and medieval alchemists all tried to attain immortality. The allure is no less profound today, but the modern potions are somewhat more sophisticated and inherently appealing to a wealthy, techno-centric class of people like [Bryan] Johnson. Mr. Johnson, who lives in Los Angeles, is perhaps the best known of a cadre of scientists and influencers known as 'longevity bros.' They obsessively document their attempts to live cleaner and longer, known cuttingly as 'longevity fixation syndrome.'..."

From "He Said He Was the World’s Healthiest Man. Then Came a Stunning Diagnosis. Bryan Johnson, the longevity guru, wants to live forever. But the big question is why" (NYT gift link).

You can read that essay, but I went on to look for more about that Chinese emperor. I found this: "Trying To Live Forever Killed The Creator Of China's 'Forever Army'/Even the Terracotta Army can’t save you from mercury poisoning" (IFL Science): 

"This is the night I should go to the theater."

Chris — my son, the reader of presidential biographies — texts me another passage from "President Kennedy: Profile of Power" (commission earned).

"Ancient societies had another method to deal with debt. It was called an amargi — a blanket declaration of public debt cancellation."

"All public debts written off. Disappeared. It sounds laughable, I know. But, really, that’s just because the idea has been buried so deeply in history you’ve probably never heard of it. In the ancient world, it presented a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem. And now, faced with impossible-to-repay debts that are weighing down our economy, is the time to look at the amargi and the lessons it offers about how to think about finance...."

From "$40 Trillion Debt? The Ancient Sumerians Wouldn’t Have Cared" (NYT gift link).

The essay is by Paul Vigna, managing editor of American Banker and author of "The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin" (commission earned).

"The fact that [Jason Arday] was promoted as some kind of prodigy given how crazy his self-representation was is a sign of just how cultic and confused the left and left-leaning institutions have become."

"I mean, it's just it's just a sign of the the cancer having spread everywhere.... I mean, it's just, this is all, anti-racism.... This is putting the black — the BLM black — square not only in your bio but in your brain. Um, it's a cult. It's always been a cult. It's been obvious for for about a decade now that this is what we're witnessing is the the ramifications of a moral panic around race and social justice that got engineered on the left.... It's intolerable and if we don't get our heads clear of its new variant, this this far-left socialist/communist alliance with with Islamism, we're going to go for another round of right-wing ascendancy in America and elsewhere.... [Cambridge was] totally corrupt in its desperation to believe that somebody who checks all the identitarian boxes is a you know is... some kind of you know woke superhero.... I mean, you're you're in the presence of a lunatic who's making these claims about himself, right?... The social justice hysteria around race that has occurred in the last decade has been almost totally dishonest almost. I mean, this is the just Jussie Smollettification of everything, right?"

Said Sam Harris.

 

"The rollout could’ve been better. Absolutely, I said the rollout has to be cleaned up and fixed."

Said Governor Kathy Hochul, quoted in "How New York’s Second-Home Tax Turned Into a Headache for Mamdani/The bumpy rollout of the tax created an opportunity for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s opponents to fight him in court and in the City Council" (NYT gift link).

Ms. Hochul, was concerned about what she saw as clumsy messaging by Mr. Mamdani as he introduced the esoteric tax to New Yorkers. She told the mayor that he needed to be clearer about how the tax would be administered and whom it would affect, according to two people familiar with their talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. The governor had taken note of how the mayor, a democratic socialist who campaigned on “taxing the rich,” was talking about the policy. In a widely seen video, for instance, the mayor had decided to highlight an especially expensive second home owned by a hedge fund manager, Kenneth C. Griffin.

“There’s a better way to do it,” said, Ms. Hochul a pro-business moderate. “Point to Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes” rather than someone who invests in the city, she added.

Here's that widely seen video, which, exclaiming "Oh, no!," I impulsively clicked off at the 5-second mark:

I did finally watch the whole minute. From the transcript: "This pied-a-terre tax is specifically designed for the richest of the rich, those who store their wealth in New York City real estate, but who don't actually live here.... This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers." 

What's "fundamentally unfair"? It's a child's reasoning: If someone has something that he's not using, it should be mine. 

The NYT calls the new tax "esoteric." I wonder what other adjectives it considered. Is it esoteric because it's hard for the general public to understand, or is it esoteric because it only applies to a discrete group of people?

Sunrise.

"Patients who disagree with their doctor can be 'fired' or flagged with scarlet letters in the corners of their electronic medical charts."

"'Exaggerating.' 'Resistant.' 'Noncompliant.' 'Hysterical.' To be sure, there are problematic patients, even dangerous ones. But for the rest of us, the imbalance between our defenselessness and the doctor’s discretion can create an unhelpful dynamic, one that pushes us to stop advocating and start accommodating. The result is waiting rooms full of people pleasers and providers who never get the full picture. The pressure to be pleasant and pliant is especially strong for women. Just as 'bossy' women often don’t get promotions and 'uppity' women are more likely to be sexually harassed, women who are branded as difficult patients are at risk of not being taken seriously or losing access to care. This is one of the reasons women overapologize, even for their own pain. A simple disclaimer — 'I don’t mean to be difficult, but …' — can backfire as well...."

Writes Allison Sweet Grant, author of "Lump: A Memoir in Ineloquent Reflections," "This Is Why Women Are Scared to Tell Their Doctors the Truth" (NYT gift link).

A mere 30 years ago, this was a highlighted modern problem on "Seinfeld" (Season 8, Episode 5, "The Package"):

 

(Yes, I know this is my second "Seinfeld" post this morning. It was in looking for this Elaine-at-the-doctor material that I stumbled into the unfilmed episode stuff I blogged an hour ago, here.)