July 15, 2023
"One reason that may be behind the shrinking — if it is not just anecdotal evidence from a really small sample size — is that westernisation/modernisation/feminism encourages us to seek out and approve of 'safer' men."
Said Peter Karl Jonason, of the University of Padua, who has studied "the relationship between height and traits of narcissism and psychopathy," quoted in "Rise of the ‘short kings’: Can you guess how our leaders measure up? Size is being overlooked by voters as the idea of the ‘alpha male’ loses resonance, say experts" (London Times).
Googling the term "short king," I found this Vice article from last year: "I Asked Short Kings How 'Short King Spring' Is Going/I wanted to get a sense of what men like me are making of our time in the spotlight." I didn't notice that trend last year. Is it still going on? Is there still a trend of naming trends after a particular season? I remember "Hot Girl Summer."
"During a live audio event on the social media platform, Musk’s team of all-male math, AI and engineering experts spoke about how they wanted to create an AI..."
"... that was smarter than humans with the goal of benefiting society. Musk said the fundamental goal of the company is to understand 'what the hell is really going on.' The event showcased how Musk seems to initially be more focused on answering deep scientific questions, rather than competing head to head with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft to create consumer AI products. Musk did say he saw his venture as an alternative to bigger AI companies but said xAI was still 'embryonic,' and that it would take time for it to catch up with OpenAI and Google...."
If it's true that xAI is really about answering deep scientific questions — AKA understanding what the hell is going on — then this is a nice contrast to Mark Zuckerberg's Threads, which was created (it seems) to compete head to head with Twitter.
I went into the comments over there, mainly to see if they were saying what I expected them to say — essentially: We hate Musk. And, yes, there it is, right on top of the "most liked" pile of comments: "Just what we need, AI that is explicitly fascist and white supremacist."
IN THE COMMENTS: Leland writes:
WaPo commenters are why ChatGPT does so well. Their comments seem like coherent sentences, but the words used don't create a coherent thought. What is explicitly fascist? Was Musk proposing having his AI collude with the government to control the population? That's fascism, and while it exists quite a bit these days; I don't think that is what Musk is proposing. Musk is proposing quite the opposite.
Instapundit quotes that comment in full and adds: "Nowadays anti-fascism is called 'fascism,' just as explicit racism is called 'anti-racism.'"
"I discovered right away that I really like living alone. I like experiencing the world through my own eyes..."
"... with no thought of a partner. I like myself better single than in a relationship."
Said a woman whose husband of 20 years died a few months ago. She writing to the WaPo advice columnist because she's worried that it's "wrong" that she hasn't "grieved." She gets permission to live life her own way. No need to enact a stereotype.
Said a woman whose husband of 20 years died a few months ago. She writing to the WaPo advice columnist because she's worried that it's "wrong" that she hasn't "grieved." She gets permission to live life her own way. No need to enact a stereotype.
"Research has shown that a lonely brain is transformed. Neurotransmitters important for bonding and social connection go haywire."
"The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, responsible for modulating stress, is hyperactive. The amygdala, which triggers our fight-or-flight response and helps process emotional reactions, is in overdrive: In previous studies, Dr. Cacioppo found that lonely people detect negative or threatening pictures and words in under 400 milliseconds. This might explain not only the sadness that accompanies loneliness but also the palpable sense of danger.
Such changes in the brain may help to explain why lonely individuals perceive their social environment as threatening.... For some people, loneliness becomes a self-perpetuating feedback loop and turns chronic. The neuroplastic nature of the brain, its ability to create different structural pathways, can reinforce these changes.... Though the goal is not to pathologize loneliness or to add it to the D.S.M., health care workers will need clear guidelines for identifying loneliness and triaging care. Even if a pill for loneliness were to become widely available, the goal should not be to get rid of these emotions that make up loneliness.... Medicine will play an important role in recovery, and social reform is essential to prevent future generations from succumbing to chronic loneliness...."
Look out for the medicalization of everything. Medicine wants you.
July 14, 2023
"My Fetish for a Second Skin/As a gay Korean American, I yearned for the privilege of being heterosexual or white. So I began wearing latex, a new skin."
This is a "Modern Love" essay, by Preston Gyuwon So, in the NYT.
I was lucky that the sexuality gods, in minting a kinky Asian queer, anointed me with a fetish fun enough to give me an escape from the cruelty of this racist reality. Latex fetishism is a predilection for form-fitting rubber clothing that’s shiny, slippery, slithery, sultry....
"Why are the actors and writers striking?"
"Pay is often at the center of work stoppages, and that is the case here. But the rise of streaming and the challenges created by the pandemic have stressed the studios, many of which are facing financial challenges, as well as actors and writers, who are seeking better pay and new protections in a rapidly changing workplace.
Both actors and screenwriters have demanded increased residual payments (a type of royalty) from streaming services. Streaming series typically have far fewer episodes than television series typically did. And it used to be that if a television series was a hit, actors and writers could count on a long stream of regular residual checks; streaming has changed the system in a way that they say has hurt them...."
"On one hand, Luke Combs is an amazing artist, and it’s great to see that someone in country music is influenced by a Black queer woman — that’s really exciting."
"But at the same time, it’s hard to really lean into that excitement knowing that Tracy Chapman would not be celebrated in the industry without that kind of middleman being a White man."
Said Holly G, "founder of the Black Opry, an organization for Black country music singers and fans," quoted in in "Tracy Chapman, Luke Combs and the complicated response to ‘Fast Car’/Combs’s remake of Chapman’s 1988 hit now dominates the country charts, renewing difficult conversations about diversity in Nashville" (WaPo).
Said Holly G, "founder of the Black Opry, an organization for Black country music singers and fans," quoted in in "Tracy Chapman, Luke Combs and the complicated response to ‘Fast Car’/Combs’s remake of Chapman’s 1988 hit now dominates the country charts, renewing difficult conversations about diversity in Nashville" (WaPo).
[According to] Tanner Davenport, a Nashville native and co-director of the Black Opry: White country singers struck gold this past decade releasing songs heavily influenced by R&B and hip-hop, but few Black artists are even signed to major Nashville labels....
The immediate success of Combs’s “Fast Car,” Davenport said, “kind of just proves that when you put a White face on Black art, it seems to be consumed a lot easier.... This genre needs to expand their boardrooms and let marginalized people be in these rooms and make a bigger bet on these artists.”...
There are 2 very different issues here. 1. How is the country music genre defined and enforced (and to what extent does it exclude black artists who want to present themselves as within the country genre)? and 2. Should white artists cover songs that were originally written by/for black singers?
[T]he song has always had a particular significance in the Black and LGBTQ+ communities, Davenport said; the Black Opry performed a group singalong of “Fast Car” when it closed out its first show. (Chapman does not discuss her personal life, but writer Alice Walker has disclosed their relationship, which occurred in the 1990s.) “I think the song in general is pretty reflective for a lot of people who do identify as queer, and also for a person of color — the song almost seems like an anthem for us,” Davenport said. “It’s been pretty monumental in our lives, and I think it made us feel like we weren’t alone.”
So, actually, there are 4 issues here. Take the 2 spelled out above and replace "black" with "LGBTQ+."
Another issue is that there's a big difference between covering a new hit by a black/LGBTQ+ artist and covering an old song like "Fast Car." Tracy Chapman had her big hit 35 years ago. It is vastly in her interest for another artist to have a big hit covering it today. To convince straight white people not to cover the songs of songwriters who are not straight and white is to restrict the income of black/LGBTQ+ songwriters.
The author of the article, Emily Yahr, quotes an English professor who declares that "Fast Car," with its dream of driving a car away from painful circumstances, appeals to a wide audience:
Francesca Royster, author of “Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions” and an English professor at DePaul University, said the song’s story of the narrator feeling trapped and trying to escape is “a really American iconography” about cars holding the promise of freedom. “This is something country music is very invested in, too: invested in, too: the American dream of reinvention and finding happiness after a life of struggle,” Royster said....
And yet:
... as someone who lived in Oakland, Calif., when “Fast Car” came out and saw how it connected to the queer community, she said, it’s difficult to see the success of Combs’s cover knowing that country music, with its historic emphasis on “tradition,” has generally shied away from highlighting LGBTQ+ artists and their stories — which is all part of the complexity of the current life of the song.
But there's nothing LGBTQ+ about the lyrics of that song. That's why the article has to say "part of the complexity of the current life of the song." Some people who like the original recording have a personal bond with it that connects it to things that drop out of the picture when it's sung by a straight white man. But the song stands apart from the original recording and from the artist most closely associated with it. A great song deserves multiple versions and it would be horribly unfair if black/LGBTQ+ songwriters were put in a separate category and protected from covers.
CORRECTION: In the first draft of this post, I wrote that the song is "clearly about a woman dissatisfied with a no-good man, just like so many country songs." It was only listening to the Combs version that I realized that "my old man" refers to the singer's father. I noticed that Combs hadn't changed the lyrics to fit the heterosexual man's point of view and wondered whether he was just, as some singers do, adopting the voice of the opposite sex. That seemed interesting, and I paid more attention to the lyrics of Verse 3:
See, my old man's got a problem
He lives with a bottle, that's the way it is
He says his body's too old for working
His body's too young to look like his
At this point, I'm convinced I'm hearing about a sexual relationship. The singer, originally a woman, is unhappy with the man who won't work and doesn't even look good anymore. But then there's this:
When mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said, "Somebody's gotta take care of him"
So I quit school and that's what I did
Oh, it's dad. Deadbeat dad. Bleh. Sure. Leave him. I always thought she was leaving an inadequate sex partner. "My old man"... in my head, those words resonate with Joni Mitchell:
That's not about daddy.
Among the sunburn cases in Phoenix that have required hospitalization: fentanyl users who have collapsed and spent "minutes or hours splayed on the pavement."
I'm reading "Burning pavement, scalding water hoses: Perils of a Phoenix heat wave/Amid record-breaking temperatures, risks to public health from burns and other exposure soars" (WaPo).
Homeless people are particularly vulnerable. But other cases involve freakish missteps — people burned by their seat belts or mailboxes. Swimmers attempting to walk across not-so-cool cool decks. The hospital has seen truckers who drive barefoot, step down onto a parking lot surface and end up badly blistered. On the hottest days, patients have been scalded by the water coming out of their garden hoses. “That first burst of water out of there, it’s practically boiling,” said Kevin Foster, a physician and the director of the burn center. One current patient was celebrating his day off with a cocktail, fell and burned 20 percent of his body, requiring surgery and skin grafting, Foster said. “He was not a drinker. It was just enough. He went down and couldn’t get up,” he said. “All it took was that one little thing.”
The top-rated comment over there is:
Jeezuz Christ getting burned from lying on the goddam ground?! From opening your mailbox?! From your garden hose?! And climate change deniers expect us to believe this is "just summer"?
Lisa Marie Presley died of "'a small bowel obstruction' caused by scar tissue that developed after bariatric surgery years ago."
It says in "Lisa Marie Presley Died From Bowel Obstruction, Officials Say/The singer-songwriter and only child of Elvis Presley died in January after she was found unresponsive, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s office said" (NYT).
Juan M. Carrillo, a deputy medical examiner in Los Angeles County, described Ms. Presley’s health problems after the bariatric surgery as a “known long-term complication of this type of surgery.”...
For months, she complained of abdominal pain, fevers, vomiting and nausea but did not seek medical attention, according to the report.
We're told "[t]he report stated that although Ms. Presley had a previous history of drug use, she was sober 'for the past few years'" but also that she "was prescribed opiates after her surgery" and then "another type of medication so that she could be taken off the opiates" and "toxicology results showed 'therapeutic levels of oxycodone' in her blood." Maybe I don't know the meaning of the word "sober."
July 13, 2023
Why aren't there so many songs about rainbows?
At Wednesday’s hearing, Tempel and her attorney, Summer Murshid... argued, the teacher’s tweets after school hours fall outside the scope of her employment and constitute "the type of speech that falls squarely within the protection afforded by the First Amendment," Murshid said.
"I thought that the fact that the tweet that I made, that 'Rainbowland' wasn’t going to be allowed, was something that the public would be really concerned about and that they would be interested in knowing about it," said Tempel, whose supervisor deemed her a “master teacher” who was “magical with children” in her last employment review.
"During that phone call from the White House, my father told us that if there was a nuclear war, none of us would want to be alive anyhow."
Writes RFK Jr. in "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family."
While I idolized my dad, I just couldn’t go along with him on that one. What about all that planning and practicing for the apocalypse at Our Lady of Victory? What was the point of all those drills?...
I, for one, intended to be among the survivors.
"... especially useful for young women, teenagers and those who have difficulty dealing with the time, costs or logistical hurdles involved in visiting a doctor to obtain a prescription."
From "F.D.A. Approves First U.S. Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill/The move could significantly expand access to contraception. The pill is expected to be available in early 2024" (NYT).
From the comments over there: "It should have been made available 50 years ago and should be as cheap as a bottle of generic aspirin. Let's get on with it and make it affordable."
"[Threads] chooses what posts you see, from whom and in what order. Frankly, it’s not the best. While this approach is exactly what has made TikTok such a success..."
"... Threads can choose an unfortunate, uncreative mix of posts. In one scroll you might see Christian prayer accounts, raunchy memes and endless thirsty brands desperate to be seen. The biggest thing you can do is follow more people. Drown out the ick with experienced creators, outlets and people you already know are going to be interesting. There’s no way to import your Twitter follows yet, but you can search manually, look through other people’s follows and see who they’ve found.... Next you want to go on a block and mute spree.... If all of this sounds like too much work, consider just waiting until the app has more features to help and a feed of who you follow. Not everyone needs to be a beta tester...."
From "How to make Threads work more like a good version of Twitter/Tips and tricks to help you navigate the latest social network, Threads" by Hearther Kelly (WaPo).
Christian prayer accounts, raunchy memes and endless thirsty brands.... oh, no! No no no no... and you're expected to "drown out the ick" and "go on a block and mute spree."
"[T]he school had no janitorial or medical staff and a bizarre list of rules. For example, students were served only sushi for lunch..."
"... which reportedly cost Ye $10,000 (£7,800) a week. The kids weren’t allowed to use forks and had to sit on the floor to eat because Ye 'banished chairs in place of foam floor cushions.' Another alleged no-no at Donda Academy was stairs: there weren’t any classes on the second floor, because Ye is 'afraid of stairs.' Colours were also prohibited: students had to wear all black; cups and bowls had to be grey. Windows were empty because the musician 'doesn’t like glass.' Perhaps most disturbingly, the school doors were locked from the outside during the school day...."
I'd love to watch this as a documentary, but right now, it's just 2 lawsuits.
I laughed out loud at "Windows were empty because the musician 'doesn’t like glass.'" How does that happen? Not liking glass. I could only think of Mary Sweeny, The Window Smasher.
"The graveyard of kitchen fads is wide and deep, littered with the domestic equivalent of white dwarf stars that blazed with astonishing luminosity for a moment..."
"... and then deteriorated into space junk. The allure of invention in the category is understandable, since preparing meals is a Sisyphean task and anything that promises to make it faster, or easier, or better, or healthier, or more fun, is irresistible—and often, for a while, anyway, profitable for the manufacturer. Some cooking 'tools' are so specific and inessential that they are hardly missed: cue the microwave s’mores maker, the pancake pen, the carrot sharpener, the hot-dog slicer, and the butter cutter. Many of these haven’t vanished completely; they have just transitioned from ubiquitous (or at least a fixture on Christmas-gift lists) to rarities, from being items you feel that you must have and will use to dust catchers that will end up front and center in your next Goodwill donation.
Other kitchen devices, such as the fondue pot, are so culturally and stylistically time-stamped that they become shorthand for an entire era and method of entertaining, long after anyone makes regular use of them...."
What if the thing you thought you hated really was what you loved most of all?
I'm reading "Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads? The app is vapid, boring and destined to fail/The blandness of the Threads experience makes me yearn for the trolls of Twitter" by media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan (The Guardian).
While millions might be using Twitter at any one time, one’s Tweets would only flow in the feeds of a few dozen, maybe hundreds. Occasion Tweets [sic] would rocket around within language groups if many people liked or re-Tweeted them. But that was unpredictable and unsystematic. That’s no way to run an information machine. That’s because Twitter never was an information machine. It was and is an emotion machine. Its fundamental emotion is indignation. We all overdid it with indignation in the best days of Twitter. Even nice people over-indulged, which is why it was ultimately corrosive to public deliberation and civic virtue....
On Threads, there are no hashtags.
When will you notice that you made your home in a desert? Why are you living there in the first place?
I'm reading "When Will the Southwest Become Unlivable? Air-conditioning and swimming pools are sustaining my community. I worry about the day when they won’t be enough" by Ruxandra Guidi in The Atlantic.
You're living where it was never livable. You kept yourself alive with artificial means in a place where the animal that is the human being did not evolve. Look around at what naturally lives there. That isn't you. Your arrogance is finally catching up to you.
"RFK Jr. meanwhile, a prospective president of the United States, watched calmly on."
I'm highlighting that amusingly elevated sentence that appears in the comic chaos of "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. press dinner explodes in war of words and farting" by Mara Siegler in the NY Post.
[A] guest asked Kennedy... about the environment. And it seems that the mere inquiry was enough to set off apparently drunk gossip-columnist-turned-flak Doug Dechert, the host of the event, who became enraged and screamed at the top of his lungs: “The climate hoax!”
"Research has shown that when people get older, they commonly recalibrate their goals; though they might be doing less..."
"... they tend to prioritize what they find meaningful and really appreciate it. A decline in openness to experience, then, could reflect someone relishing their routine rather than seeking new thrills; a decline in extroversion could indicate that they’re satisfied spending time with the people they already love. That may involve adjusting to what they can’t control, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re reacting to a bad life—just a different one.... There’s a stereotype that older people are grumpy shut-ins.... That judgment is obviously sweeping and unfair, but perhaps it’s also emerged, in part, from some real tendencies—tendencies that might be better understood as justified reactions to a harsh and inaccessible world...."
From "The Curious Personality Changes of Older Age/When people lose the ability to control their circumstances, their selves sometimes evolve instead" (The Atlantic).
Speaking of "a decline in extroversion," I'm finally reading a book I've had in my Kindle for years: "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" (paid link). I switched over to that book — in self-defense! — halfway through reading RFK Jr.'s "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family" (paid link).
So I was amused, to read, on page 6 of "Quiet":
If you’re an introvert, you... know that the bias against quiet can cause deep psychic pain. As a child you might have overheard your parents apologize for your shyness. (“Why can’t you be more like the Kennedy boys?” the Camelot-besotted parents of one man I interviewed repeatedly asked him.) Or at school you might have been prodded to come “out of your shell”—that noxious expression which fails to appreciate that some animals naturally carry shelter everywhere they go, and that some humans are just the same.... Now that you’re an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you’re told that you’re “in your head too much,” a phrase that’s often deployed against the quiet and cerebral....
July 12, 2023
"Doug Burgum is offering $20 to people donating $1 to his campaign. Is that legal?"
Asks NPR.
The campaign's offer is good for the first 50,000 donors — and is an unconventional bid to meet the fundraising thresholds required to be onstage for next month's Republican primary debate.... To participate in the debate, candidates must have at least 40,000 donors. They also have to bring in donations from 200 or more donors in at least 20 states.
"Professor Barry said that men wearing crop tops comes at a time of 'shifting dynamics of gender' and an 'openness in masculine fashion to truly embrace a variety of aesthetics.'"
"He added that the trend is relatively affordable for most men, requiring only a T-shirt and a pair of scissors.
To some men, Professor Barry said, crop tops can be more than just a fashion statement. He said he has seen crop tops embraced by men with larger bodies 'as a way to really kind of affirm their bodies and challenge stigmas against their bodies in public spaces.'"
Barry ≈ Ben Barry, "the dean of fashion and an associate professor of equity and inclusion at Parsons School of Design in New York."
He's not really encouraging this is he? Just grab the scissors and snip off the part of your T-shirt that is covering your belly whether it's in good shape or not and you'll be in fashion. No, it seems more as though he's observing a social trend, and the trend is something more like what used to get called "anti-fashion."
"Since the ruling, palpata breve - a brief groping - has become a trend on Instagram and TikTok in Italy, along with the #10secondi hashtag."
"Italians have posted videos looking at the camera in silence and touching their intimate parts for 10 seconds straight."
From "Italian uproar over judge's 10-second groping rule" (BBC)(judge ruled that there is no crime if a groping lasts less than 10 seconds).
From "Italian uproar over judge's 10-second groping rule" (BBC)(judge ruled that there is no crime if a groping lasts less than 10 seconds).
A miracle.
People see and experience things so differently it’s a fucking miracle we can even walk on the street without smashing into each other.
— Seán Ono Lennon (@seanonolennon) July 12, 2023
"Kramer’s old uniform—camp-collar shirts in colorfully printed silk or rayon, sack pants that pull up a little short at the ankle to reveal white socks, clunky-soled shoes, a thin gold chain..."
"... is new again. This summer, the stylish young men I’ve seen around New York have continued their rejection of the once-inescapable skinny pants and check shirts in favor of something a little looser and decidedly more louche."
Writes Amanda Mull in "It Was Only a Matter of Time Before Everyone Started Dressing Like Kramer/It’s the summer of Kramercore" (The Atlantic).
"Years of stretch fabrics that really needed the stretch have given way to breezy textiles and retro short-sleeved knits with a natural slouch, idiosyncratic prints, a lot more color, and maybe a little bit of embroidery. There are fewer sneakers and more loafers. And then there are all those camp collars.... Tired of the sameness and omnipresence of new clothes and nostalgic for a past that many of them don’t remember, young people have plunged themselves into thrifting and vintage resale, hunting for weird or interesting things from the ’90s and early 2000s."
The fragmentation.
I created a new tag a couple days ago: "The fragmentation."
The first post in this series was "'It’s a kind of mosaic of what it was moments before'/'My memories are a montage of magical madnesses.'" Those are quoted from Robert Downey Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and I asked:
Have minds fragmented? Are we dreamily struggling to pull them together with alliteration and the notion that splintered things really do cohere? This mess in my mind is... a mosaic... a montage....
July 11, 2023
Vermont.
Video at Twitter here.
An update from Montpelier at 11:50 a.m. on Tuesday #VTflood23 pic.twitter.com/bq619cnOnO
— Vermont Public (@vermontpublic) July 11, 2023
"I like the logo, definitely a piece thread that happens to be shaped like the Tamil கு (ku)."
A comment on the NYT article "What Is the Threads Logo Supposed to Look Like? Sure, it’s probably an @ symbol. But the abstract logo of Instagram’s new Twitter rival has drawn comparisons to an ear, an ampersand and a piece of spaghetti."
Threads is getting a lot of puffy press.
Is anyone saying that "Threads" sounds an awful lot like "threats"?
ADDED: Here's this in today's NYT: "Why the Early Success of Threads May Crash Into Reality/Mark Zuckerberg has used Meta’s might to push Threads to a fast start — but that may only work up to a point." That doesn't sound puffy. Mike Isaac likens Threads to Google+, which back in 2011, was supposed to be the "Facebook killer." It got a big headstart because there were pre-existing Google users. But by 2018, it was dead. You need people to keep using the thing."According to TikTok, where the trend has more than 30 million views, girl dinner is akin to an aesthetically pleasing Lunchable..."
"... an artfully arranged pile of snacks that, when consumed in high enough volume, constitutes a meal. Or so the thinking goes.
Typical girl dinners may include some kind of fruit, a block of cheddar, sliced salami, a sleeve of fancy crackers and a dish of olives. Girl dinner is 'both chaotic and filling,' as one TikTok commenter put it, requiring none of the forethought, cooking or plating demanded by an actual meal. As another commenter observed: It’s 'no preparation just vibes.'"
This sounds like the dinner my mother would make for the kids when my father away on a business trip. It had a name, and it certainly wasn't "girl dinner." It was "cold plate."
The article quotes some people who call "girl dinner" an eating disorder, which strikes me as crazy. Why wouldn't cheese and crackers and fruit be regarded as a perfectly ordinary end-of-the-day meal? It's an alternative to skipping dinner, which is an equally good idea.
"Climate therapy, I had come to think, could help people find this place of acceptance, shifting them into engagement or allowing them to remain there without losing their marbles."
"But the practice seems rooted in a faith that the world and the future will be best served by us maintaining our sanity—a sensible enough creed, though I don’t always share it."
Writes Jia Tolentino in "What to Do with Climate Emotions/If the goal is to insure that the planet remains habitable, what is the right degree of panic, and how do you bear it?" (The New Yorker).
"I have this fear of being buried alive in a box."
That scene from the old Bob Newhart show [see correction below] was cited by the psychiatrist/neuroscientist Judson Brewer, when he was asked about C.B.T. by Joshua Rothman, who's written this new New Yorker article, "Can Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Change Our Minds? The theory behind C.B.T. rests on an unlikely idea—that we can be rational after all."
"The atmosphere of Twitter has lately gone from one of a decaying dinner party... to that of a bar where the bartender has to eject the last swaying patrons."
"Threads, by contrast, was bright and new, like high school on the first day of class. Meta seemed to have encouraged celebrities and influencers to pre-stock the feed with aggressively enthusiastic posts. Users entered into the midst of a raucous party.... It is currently impossible to see posts solely from followed accounts.... As a result, much of what I see on Threads is the kind of banal celebrity and brand self-promotion that I tried to avoid on Twitter—posts from Chris Hemsworth and Ellen DeGeneres, Spotify asking fans for their favorite playlists, and suggestions to follow Kardashians.... What once made Twitter successful was its steadfast commitment to real-time information. It was a free-for-all shout fest of journalists, newsmakers, and creators, and anyone else could join the din on a relatively equal footing. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, posted on Threads that the app would not 'encourage' news, as Twitter once did.... Threads, he went on, is 'a less angry place for conversations.'... So far, no one seems to know quite what to post on Threads, though the dominant tone is anodyne and sincere...."
"The poisonings whipped the country into a panic and forced Tylenol’s parent company, Johnson & Johnson, to recall tens of millions of Tylenol capsule bottles."
"It led to major changes for the sale of over-the-counter drugs, including tamper-resistant packaging and the rise of tablets, which, unlike capsules, can’t be taken apart."
From "The ‘Tylenol murders’ terrified a nation. The main suspect is dead at 76. Seven people died in 1982 after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol pills, sparking a national panic" (WaPo).
From "The ‘Tylenol murders’ terrified a nation. The main suspect is dead at 76. Seven people died in 1982 after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol pills, sparking a national panic" (WaPo).
James W. Lewis became a suspect after he was discovered to be the one who sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson that said "As you can see, it is easy to place cyanide (both potassium & sodium) into capsules sitting on store shelves. If you don’t mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing…." He demanded a million dollars. He was convicted, but only of extortion.
July 10, 2023
"Taxidermy is a very homogeneous field. It’s very, very white and very, very straight."
Said Divya Anantharaman, who's "not either of those things," quoted in "How a Taxidermist Spends Sundays/For Divya Anantharaman, who runs a taxidermy business in Brooklyn, regular manicures are part of the job" (NYT).
Mx. Anantharaman sees the art form as a way to help people connect with nature, to experience “that moment of stillness, of vulnerability and enchantment” — even in an urban environment.
Taxidermy “shows you that bodies are not fixed and finite — they’re very liminal,” they said. “Bodies can really be whatever you want them to be.” Mx. Anantharaman, 40, lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with their partner and four cats: Fugazi, Garfield, Mani and Junior.Oh, that reminds me: The New York Times is disbanding its sports department:
"Some Biden aides think the president would be better off occasionally displaying his temper in public as a way to assuage voter concerns that the 80-year-old president is disengaged and too old for the office."
And that the answer to the question why we are getting this now: "Old yeller: Biden's private fury" (Axios), in which we are told that private Biden is very different from public Biden. He has "a quick-trigger temper" and says things like "God dammit, how the f**k don't you know this?!," "Don't f**king bullsh*t me!" and "Get the f**k out of here!"
When I first glanced at this article, I thought maybe it was the beginning of pushing Biden out of the 2024 race, but no. It's exactly the opposite. Biden has his public image as "a kindly uncle who loves Aviator sunglasses and ice cream," but his people want to "paint more complicated picture of Biden as a manager and president."
"I mean, there are certain attributes around masculinity that we should embrace. Men think about sex more than women. Use that as motivation..."
"... to be successful and meet women. Men are more impulsive. Men will run out into a field and get shot up to think they’re saving their buddies.... Where I think this conversation has come off the tracks is where being a man is essentially trying to ignore all masculinity and act more like a woman. And even some women who say that — they don’t want to have sex with those guys. They may believe they’re right, and think it’s a good narrative, but they don’t want to partner with them.... And so men should think, 'I want to take advantage of my maleness. I want to be aggressive, I want to set goals, go hard at it. I want to be physically really strong. I want to take care of myself.... My view is that, for masculinity, a decent place to start is garnering the skills and strength that you can advocate for and protect others with. If you’re really strong and smart, you will garner enough power, influence, kindness to begin protecting others. That is it. Full stop. Real men protect other people."
Said Scott Galloway ("author, entrepreneur and professor at New York University’s Stern Business School [who] has made a specialty of talking about the crisis of unattached, rudderless young men and helping them aspire to more").
Quoted in "Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness" by Christine Emba (WaPo). There's much more at the link, discussing many other people, including Jordan Peterson, so don't make assumptions about what's not in the article."The Taliban says that women’s lives have improved under its two-year rule."
"Supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada issued a ban on forced marriages shortly after taking power, and he vowed in a recent audio message that he wants women to live 'comfortable' lives.
But many women tell a different story. A 29-year-old participating in an art workshop for girls and young women in Kabul said she is afraid of the moments when her fellow students say they are starting to feel better. 'These days, it actually just means they have given up hoping for a better life,' said the woman, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals."
Is it a different story or is it the same story? What is a "comfortable life"? Is it not accepting the reality where you find yourself and feeling good about whatever it is you happen to have? Is hope comfortable?
"He doesn’t dispute the fact that people are buried on his land or that the area is steeped in Revolutionary significance..."
"... his vision for the IHOP involves a wait staff in tricorne hats and bonnets. But it was still a bit of a mystery exactly whose bones were buried on his property and who put them there. And, besides, if there really were hundreds of soldiers beneath the ground, Broccoli believed it to be self-evident that he was the one pursuing the vision of life, liberty, and happiness that George Washington’s troops had fought and died for: the right to sell pancakes where they were buried...."
From "The Battle of Fishkill/When Domenic Broccoli set out to expand his IHOP empire upstate, he didn’t expect to find a grave site — or start a war" (NY Magazine).
There's a misplaced modifier — "where they were buried" — but still, I like that passage. I love that a restaurant guy is named Broccoli, but he sells pancakes. And I love that it's IHOP — which is the first place that ever employed me and also iconic in the writings of David Sedaris. And Broccoli's opponents are colorful and sometimes dressed in Revolutionary War outfits.
"On a continuum of good vs. evil, Zuckerberg is probably less evil than Elon. I don't like Zuckerberg, but Elon is a disgusting bottom dweller. I hope this is the nail in Twitter's coffin."
This is the top rated comment at the WaPo article "What we love and hate about Threads, Meta’s new Twitter clone/Threads may be the first Twitter alternative that really matters because it’s built on top of Instagram’s existing base of billions of users."
And it's a better answer to the question of what to "love and hate about Threads" than anything in the article, which suggests we ought to love Threads because it's easy to get on it via your Instagram account (which millions did without realizing that they can't delete their Threads account without deleting their Instagram account).
Anyway, for me, the key thing to like (or "love") would be good, readable writing (and part of readability is the absence of visual clutter). But Threads won't let me look at it as a web page, and I won't accept the app without seeing that it's something I want. It's what people used to call a pig in a poke. Or, in some countries, a cat in a bag. At least with Twitter, I can see the pig/cat.
And didn't Thoreau say, "Beware of enterprises requiring new apps"?
But let's think about that comment (in the post title). It states the "lesser of 2 evils" principle. I understand that in an election, but is this a lesser-of-2-evils situation? We don't need to choose one or the other. We can reject both.
Now, I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Lesser of two evils principle":
In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes: "For the lesser evil can be seen in comparison with the greater evil as a good, since this lesser evil is preferable to the greater one, and whatever preferable is good". The modern formulation was popularized by Thomas à Kempis' devotional book The Imitation of Christ written in early 15th century.In part IV of his Ethics, Spinoza states the following maxim:
Proposition 65: "According to the guidance of reason, of two things which are good, we shall follow the greater good, and of two evils, follow the less."
I'm sure these wise men all realized that there are circumstances where you can choose neither. For example, I abstained in the last election, and I endorse abstention as an option and argue with those who say you're doing something wrong if you refuse to vote.
I get diverted into the Wikipedia article "False dilemma." The best thing about that article is this cool poster from 1910:
ADDED: I'm just noticing that the scales held aloft by the Chief Justice embody the principle of the lesser of 2 evils. There are just 2 options, and the weightier one ought to win.
AND: At least the Justice is considering legal arguments as the 2 options and choosing between the entities who are the parties in the lawsuit. By contrast, in the WaPo commenter's formulation, the 2 options are 2 human beings — Zuckerberg and Musk. We're not expected to understand the substance of what we'd be getting if we chose Threads or Twitter. That's too hard and too sober for us, the social media people, who gravitate toward decisions that are personified and inflated with scary, emotive insinuations of evil.
"At a Dumbo company warehouse recently in East Orange, N.J., on an industrial stretch opposite a cemetery..."
"... a crew of workers was preparing to jettison the last of a 9,500-pound office lot that a Brooklyn tech company had had in storage since April 2021.... [T]he client paid for the disposal of, among other things: 25 Herman Miller chairs; 20 computer monitor stands; 10 cubicle panels; nine boxes of carpet; and two flat-screen TVs.
'The amount of waste in this industry would boggle your mind,' said... the owner of... a refurbishing company and liquidator.... In a choppy motion, the mouth of the excavator swung over the half-ton pile of furniture and chomped down, contorting the chairs into a dangly metal cephalopod."
The reverent observation of 2 old men shuffling through gravel.
Biden meets with King Charles at Windsor Castle pic.twitter.com/N0CDLtG4B5
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 10, 2023
"It’s a kind of mosaic of what it was moments before"/"My memories are a montage of magical madnesses."
What if we all started talking like that?
Those are 2 quotes I've happened to blog in the last 24 hours — see here (Robert Downey Jr.) and here (RFK Jr.).
Have minds fragmented? Are we dreamily struggling to pull them together with alliteration and the notion that splintered things really do cohere? This mess in my mind is... a mosaic... a montage....
You know, we've been laughing at Kamala Harris's way of expressing herself, but she's not the only one.
"Since my ship came in in 2008, when 'Iron Man' had that big weekend, I have been a self-described expert on the ways of the world of creativity and commerce."
"It’s not that the playing field changes — it’s that it morphs into something that you can’t even really call a playing field anymore. It’s a kind of mosaic of what it was moments before. If I am running a major streamer — which sounds like a big No. 1; how serious is it if the mind immediately goes to peepee? — anyway, you look at the budget, you look at the numbers and it comes down to a spreadsheet."
Says Robert Downey Jr., after the NYT interviewer asks if he's able to "make sense of the business right now."
His new movie is "Oppenheimer," directed by Christopher Nolan, 3-hour "thriller" about J. Robert Oppenheimer. I don't know how that can be thrilling, and I'm reflexively annoyed by the idea that some movie folk are proposing to "thrill" me about Oppenheimer. Find another word. "Thriller" is so off-putting. Do some people see it and think Great, I'll be thrilled?
I'm skeptical about the movie "Oppenheimer," but I do like that quote up there. Downey has a distinctive way of speaking. Even reduced to text, it's alive and funny and multifaceted. But it's close to nonsense. And he's mixing up No. 1 and No. 2! Or did the meanings transpose over the years? He's got a mixed metaphor there in that sentence the NYT saw fit to print. Maybe he did that on purpose intending a scatological joke in "you look at the numbers" and that's what he thinks of the movie business: It's gone to shit.
CORRECTION: All my analysis is affected and ruined by my failure to see the first "r" in "streamer." I apologize... and laugh at myself. Downey was only ever talking about urine. There was no excrement, no innumeracy, no mixed metaphor.
July 9, 2023
"[O]ur mother shattered the protocols of stuffy Washington decorum. 'People were uptight and too concerned about how they appeared'..."
"... my mother remembers. To cure this contagion, she coaxed notables of different backgrounds into unfamiliar situations. A wizard at peer pressure, she compelled her guests to play charades, freeze tag, and capture the flag, and join in rope climbing and push-up competitions. She had Cabinet members fence with bamboo sticks on gangplanks spanning the pool....When Robert Frost visited Hickory Hill after Uncle Jack’s inauguration, she made him judge a poetry-writing contest among government officials and celebrity guests. At a party for Averell Harriman’s birthday the guests came dressed as the Harrimans during some episode of their eventful lives. My mother borrowed life-size wax figures from Madame Tussauds of Harriman, FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta, and placed them unobtrusively around the living room to mingle with the crowd...."
Writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family."
"Life-tenured federal judges should be wary of removing a vexing and novel topic of medical debate from the ebbs and flows of democracy by construing a largely unamendable federal constitution to occupy the field."
Wrote Chief Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton, quoted in "Transgender Care Ban Allowed to Take Effect in Tennessee, Appeals Panel Says/The ruling on Saturday is the first time a federal court has allowed a law banning transition care to fully go into effect, amid a flurry of legal challenges across the country" (NYT).
What exactly is the argument that the Constitution forbids this law? How did the court below find a likelihood of success on the merits (as was required for the preliminary injunction to issue)? It's not a question of whether the statute was a good idea, but whether the statute is impermissible under the Constitution. It's a new question.
"I see myself as something of a Yente the matchmaker... that character from 'Fiddler on the Roof.'"
"I seek out individuals or jurisdictions, corporations who have been discriminated against in various endeavors because of their race and ethnicity. Over the years, my outreach has diminished because I guess I’m a more high-profile individual and people contact me. I pair them with lawyers. Then if the lawyers believe that there is a cause of action, I go out and try to raise money to pay for the lawyers.
Now, philosophically, there’s a common theme in all of this. Like the vast majority of Americans, I believe that an individual’s race and ethnicity should not be used to help them or harm them in their life’s endeavors. And those life’s endeavors include, you know, if they’re gerrymandered into a voting district because they’re a certain race, if they’re applying for a job that they’re not going to get because they’re a certain race or they’re applying to a college or university that they won’t be admitted to because of their race or ethnicity."
Said Edward Blum, responding to a question about why he's involved in so many different cases, from affirmative action to gerrymandering. He's quoted in "He Worked for Years to Overturn Affirmative Action and Finally Won. He’s Not Done. Edward Blum’s latest victory at the Supreme Court is the culmination of a long fight to take race out of college admissions. Is the workplace next?" (NYT).
Said Edward Blum, responding to a question about why he's involved in so many different cases, from affirmative action to gerrymandering. He's quoted in "He Worked for Years to Overturn Affirmative Action and Finally Won. He’s Not Done. Edward Blum’s latest victory at the Supreme Court is the culmination of a long fight to take race out of college admissions. Is the workplace next?" (NYT).
The NYT interviewer, Lulu Garica-Navarro, pushes him about his Jewishness: "I know you were raised in a liberal Jewish family. What made you break from the way that you had been brought up?" That question contains an assumption, and Blum doesn't accept it. He puts it very politely, like someone who knows not to take bait: "It’s easy to characterize someone like me, who is against racial preferences and classifications, as someone who has broken with standard Jewish philosophy and Jewish heritage. I disagree with that."
I didn't even notice him the first time.
But, okay, Al Bowlly it is.
Bowlly ≈ like a bowl. (The song is "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.")
Life story, here, at Wikipedia:
"I think college admissions has really dipped into this fad of trauma dumping."
Said Rushil Umaretiya, who grew up in an Indian immigrant family and will be a freshman at the University of North Carolina.
Umaretiya's observation is based on what he saw colleges and applicants doing before the Supreme Court's new decision came out. After the decision, there will be even more emphasis on the applicant's personal essay, and what can students do but tell the best story of their life as a victim of society?
Even before the decision, [Umaretiya] had seen anxious classmates at his selective high school, Thomas Jefferson High School, in Alexandria, Va., making up stories about facing racial injustice.
What's the difference between framing your life story in terms of victimhood and making up stories? Umaretiya says he saw — how did he see? — his own classmates making up stories. That's the NYT paraphrase. Who knows? Maybe every applicant is honest or no more dishonest than to pick a tale of woe out of context and describe it colorfully. But the heavy reliance on the personal essay as the new way to pursue racial diversity creates far too much temptation and strikes me as quite unfair to those who are scrupulously honest. But who cares? Honest people are all alike. You want diversity.
"What the Navy story reveals is how dated and inauthentic the 80-year-old president’s view of family is."
Writes Maureen Dowd in "It’s Seven Grandkids, Mr. President" (NYT).
Once you could get away with using terms like “out of wedlock” and pretend that children born outside marriage didn’t exist or were somehow shameful. But now we have become vastly more accepting of nontraditional families. We live in an Ancestry.com world, where people are searching out their birth parents and trying to find relatives they didn’t know they had. I have sympathy for Hunter going into a “dark, bleak hole,” as he called it. I have sympathy for a father coping with a son who was out of control and who may still be fragile. With Hunter, his father can seem paralyzed about the right thing to do. But the president can’t defend Hunter on all his other messes and draw the line at accepting one little girl....
But that is his line, so let's try to understand it. Instead of saying this one thing is inconsistent with the rest of who you are, ask who are you if this is part of you? Dowd assumes there is a coherent, benevolent, good man, Joe Biden, and he's put family first:
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