Sunrise — 6:33, 6:36.

"The judges wrote that the White House and the Office of the Surgeon General had 'coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences'..."

"... and 'significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes.' The appellate court also found that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had used coercion in its interactions with the companies, which took down 50 percent of the material online that the bureau’s agents flagged as troublesome...."

From "Appeals Court Rules White House Overstepped 1st Amendment on Social Media/A Fifth Circuit panel partly upheld restrictions on the Biden administration’s communications with online platforms about their content" (NYT).

"Hawaii’s governor announced on Friday that the list of people missing from the Lahaina fire had been whittled down to just 66 names..."

"... down from 385. The new number is a vast relief to officials who at one point feared that hundreds of people would never be accounted for. In the first days after the fire, the missing list swelled to close to 3,000.... The official death toll remains at 115, a figure that hasn’t budged in more than two weeks...."

 
The NYT reports.

6:09 a.m. — the lake, the fog, the moon.

"To me... he’s the supreme model of how an artist can meet the times head-on, and rewrite the rules of culture as the world outside jerks forward."

Writes Jason Farago, in "The 19th Century’s Most Scandalous Painting Comes to New York/'Olympia,' the brothel scene that birthed modern art, crosses the Atlantic for the first time in the Met exhibition 'Manet/Degas'" (NYT).

"We felt three intense shocks from the earthquake in our building. People ran out into the street in a total panic."

"Some families are sleeping outdoors because they’re afraid to go back inside. It felt like a train rolling through our houses."

From "Morocco earthquake kills more than 1,000, officials say" (WaPo).

"I don't even know how many years ago we cut cable, and initially the only thing I really missed was live sports."

"The longer we've gone without cable and the harder they make it for you to access live sports without it, the less I care about watching sports."

A comment on the WaPo article "Can’t watch ESPN? Try these alternatives to watch or listen to sports. A blackout of TV channels for 15 million cable customers is a glimpse at the pain coming for anyone who watches or streams."

Somebody else says: "My favorite strategy is to wait until after the game is over, then youtube "description of the game highlights". I get a great 15 minute highlight reel, feel the vicarious surge of endorphins and move on with my day. It's awesome and free. Love it."

The article itself offers the old-timey alternative: local radio.

“The mug shot did good for him. They’re just grasping at straws to try and get him to stop running. And he’s running anyway.”

Said Lydia Lozano of Summerset, S.D., "who wore Mr. Trump’s mug shot on a blue T-shirt with the outline of an American flag," quoted in "‘I’m Being Indicted for You,’ Trump Tells South Dakota Rally/In his first rally since his fourth indictment, the former president focused on his Republican rivals and President Biden, as some in the crowd wore Mr. Trump’s mug shot on their T-shirts" (NYT).

Also, Josh Haeder, South Dakota’s treasurer, proffered a riddle: "How many indictments does it take to steal the presidential election in 2024? Here’s the answer: There’s not enough, because Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States of America."

By the way, how would "the outline of an American flag" look different from the outline of any other flag (I mean, excluding Nepal, etc.)?

Meanwhile, in The Washington Post, there's this modest note from Aaron Blake — "A reminder of how one juror could save Trump."

"There was definitely a thumb on the scale to get boys. We were just a little more forgiving and lenient when they were boys than when they were girls. You’d be like, 'I’m kind of on the fence about this one, but — we need boys.'"

Said Sourav Guha, assistant dean of admissions at Wesleyan University from 2001 to 2004, quoted in "‘There Was Definitely a Thumb on the Scale to Get Boys’/Declining male enrollment has led many colleges to adopt an unofficial policy: affirmative action for men" (NYT).

This article is illustrated with many photographs of large groups of beautiful young women in shorts. The idea seems to be to cause the reader to agonize over the wasted pulchritude. No boyfriends!

At the Not-the-Sunrise Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

(The photo shows Lake Mendota at 2:02 in the afternoon.)

Making the anglerfish hotter.

TikTok avoiders, you are forwarned... and I feel sorry for you.

Random "garner" sighting of the day.

I'm reading "No, bad tourist, you can’t touch the hot springs at Yellowstone/Omnipresent warnings and scalding temperatures do not stop park visitors from testing the waters" (WaPo):

Photos from nearly a century ago show visitors peeking their heads into geysers. This summer, more examples have been captured on social media or posted to YouTube, fitting into a larger pattern of rule-breaking tourists emerging from the pandemic. A few months ago, a woman garnered national attention after dipping her foot and fingers into a scalding Yellowstone hot spring as well....

"The special grand jury in Fulton County investigating the 2020 presidential election in Georgia recommended charges against Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and former GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler..."

"... according to the special counsel grand jury report released Friday," CNN reports.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis did not charge the lawmakers when she returned an indictment last month against former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants in the sprawling racketeering case. It was up to the district attorney to decide how closely to stick to the special grand jury’s recommendations.

I'm reading "D.E.I. Statements Stir Debate on College Campuses/Yoel Inbar, a psychology professor, thought he might be teaching at U.C.L.A., but his reservations about diversity statements got him in trouble"...

... in The New York Times.

Now, I'm very interested in the way schools are demanding these statements of commitment to diversity, but there's something else going on in this story, and there's no discussion of it, and there's no comments section to smoke it out, so this is all I want to talk about for now. Look what the article blithely glosses over:

The Wisconsin Capitol looms ominously in The New York Times today.

I'm seeing this Jamelle Bouie piece this morning:

 

The issue, as you may have guessed, is legislative districting, which strongly favors Republicans, and the current threat to impeach the new Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, Janet Protasiewicz, who got elected after declaring that the districting in Wisconsin is "rigged."

Bouie writes:

"Much has been made of Ramaswamy’s irrepressible annoyingness... But what I found striking about Ramaswamy..."

"... both in our conversations and on the debate stage, was not that he’s especially irritating (how many people who run for president aren’t?) but that he represents a distinct, very familiar flavor of irritation: He’s the epitome of millennial hustle culture, less a Tracy Flick know-it-all than a viral LinkedIn post come to life. The guy who’s always mining and nurturing new connections, always leveraging those connections into the next new thing, always selling and always, always closing. Seen this way, Ramaswamy’s otherwise quixotic-seeming presidential run makes perfect sense. Whether or not it wins him elected office, running for the White House is the ultimate rise and grind.... [H]is current comfort with [the word]  'woke' works for winning over a G.O.P. primary audience. When he needs to cultivate a broader base... I’m sure he won’t hesitate to reach out and tell me just what he thinks I want to hear."

Writes Farhad Manjoo in "Vivek Ramaswamy Is a LinkedIn Post Come to Life" (NYT)

"It has been one month since a wind-whipped wildfire engulfed the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, and the authorities are still trying to determine exactly how many people died..."

"... in the nation’s deadliest conflagration in more than a century. Nearly all of Lahaina has now been searched by teams of rescuers, cadaver dogs and anthropologists trained to detect fragments of human remains, yet the official death toll has stood at 115 people for more than two weeks. That has meant an agonizing wait for the families of more than 380 people whose names populate a list that the F.B.I. says it is still trying to reconcile.... The last time the death toll changed was on Aug. 21, the day that President Biden visited Lahaina.... The authorities will have to determine whether their investigative results are sufficient to declare those still missing as dead.... The heart of Lahaina is still closed to the public.... But...  the county had moved closer toward allowing people to return and inspect their properties before the Army Corps of Engineers begins bulldozing and clearing debris...."

From "Grim Reality in Maui: Hundreds Still on Missing List a Month After Inferno/The F.B.I. says more than 380 people remain unaccounted for. Many residents have begun to accept that their loved ones will not be coming back, and survivors wonder what comes next" (NYT).

"[Kanye] West, who was with her, donned his favorite all-black getup featuring a loosely fitted unhemmed T-shirt, slouchy pants, a cloth covering his head and face, and socks — with no shoes."

I'm reading "Bianca Censori keeps breasts covered with pillow as she steps out in another sheer outfit" (NY Post)(Kanye West’s 'wife' Bianca Censori stepped out in yet another sheer outfit — this one, accessorized with a couch cushion").

I'm blogging this to help you keep up with the latest news in fashion and humiliation.

"I've heard about you. And you'll be caught soon."

Said Conan O'Brien to Danny Masterson, 19 years ago:

Danny Masterson sentenced to 30 years to life for raping 2 women….Conan knew pic.twitter.com/KEE596oqdl

— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) September 7, 2023

I'm reading "Conan O’Brien told Danny Masterson ‘you’ll be caught soon’ in resurfaced 2004 clip after 30-year rape sentence" (NY Post)("Speaking in court, the victims testified that Masterson handed them drinks that would make them pass out before he violently rape[d] them... in his Hollywood-area home in 2003 at the height of his fame").

Sunrise — 6:30, 6:33.

"I hope the government will not be so foolish as to completely dispense with India, which has incalculable brand value built up over centuries."

Said Shashi Tharoor of the opposition Congress party, quoted in "India or Bharat? Invites fuel speculation that the country could change its name" (CNBC)("Invites" refers to an invitation to a dinner reception at the G20 summit that came from the "President of Bharat").

"A corporate law firm that was accused of racial discrimination for offering a diversity fellowship to law students of underrepresented groups has opened its program..."

"... to students of all races, according to a change on its website. A few weeks earlier, Morrison Foerster, based in San Francisco, was sued for excluding nonminority students from the program. The lawsuit was brought by the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER), founded by conservative activist Edward Blum, who was behind the cases that culminated in the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action in college admissions. Now his groups are among those launching a broader campaign to dismantle diversity initiatives in the private sector...."

WaPo reports.

Suddenly, this morning, it looks like fall.

Something about the light at 6:58.

5-foot tall Danelo Cavalcante walks up the wall and out of prison.

Some details here.

"I would pay a lot of money to sit down with that 51 percent of respondents and ask them to tell me five things Trump accomplished in office."

"I’d even spot them the first four: a tax cut; the appointment of three SCOTUS judges; the killing of Qasem Soleimani; Operation Warp Speed."

Writes Jonathan Last, reacting to a Wall Street Journal poll asking whether Trump or Biden had a better record of accomplishments — 51% said Trump, 40% said Biden — in "America’s Authoritarian Exceptionalism/Demagogues usually arise in times of chaos and privation. In America, our demagogues have become powerful during a period of peace and prosperity" (Bulwark).

So Last is offering "a lot of money" to name one more Trump accomplishment. I'm sure he'll want the power to deny that any particular thing deserves the designation "accomplishment" — e.g., Trump's efforts to secure the southern border.

ADDED: I'll name one that liberals are practically compelled to view as an accomplishment: the First Step Act.

"President Biden has rejected a list of proposed conditions sought by the five men who are accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks..."

"... in exchange for pleading guilty and receiving a maximum punishment of life in prison, according to two administration officials....  The case has been bogged down in pretrial proceedings in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for more than a decade.... In talks with prosecutors, defense lawyers said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind, and four other defendants wanted certain accommodations, including assurances they would not serve their sentences in solitary confinement and could instead continue to eat and pray communally — as they do now as detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The prisoners also sought a civilian-run program to treat sleep disorders, brain injuries, gastrointestinal damage or other health problems they attribute to the agency’s brutal interrogation methods during their three to four years in C.I.A. custody before their transfer to Guantánamo Bay in 2006...."

From "Biden Rejects Proposed Conditions for Plea Deals in Sept. 11 Case/Five Guantánamo detainees accused of aiding the attacks wanted a promise of care for torture-related trauma and to avoid solitary confinement" (NYT).

"... Mr. Biden took no position on the general notion that a plea deal could eliminate the possibility of death sentences...."

"For almost a century, scientists have known that people with schizophrenia struggle to regulate their body temperatures."

"In the 1930s, two doctors in Worcester, Mass., placed people with and without schizophrenia in a small, windowless room with eight electric heaters. Under hot conditions, the researchers noted, the patients with schizophrenia’s body temperatures rose farther and faster than the control group. 'Schizophrenic subjects,' they wrote later, 'are unable to comply normally … with the regulation of heat.'... Schizophrenia has also been linked to problems regulating dopamine, the chemical that makes the body feel good; altered levels of dopamine can also prevent the body from effectively cooling itself off.... Many antipsychotic medications... also make their users more sensitive to heatstroke....Then there is the tendency of patients with schizophrenia to wrap themselves in layers upon layers of clothing, even in boiling temperatures.... Experts also say that people with schizophrenia lack insight into themselves and their condition — in medical terms, this is known as 'anosognosia.'... Under psychosis, a patient might walk for miles engaging only with the voices and characters in their own mind. Under normal conditions, that might simply be dangerous. In Phoenix, it’s deadly."

From "The unexpected reasons that extreme heat is so dangerous for those with schizophrenia/Schizophrenia may be the deadliest preexisting condition during heat waves. The fate of one man in America’s hottest city shows why" (WaPo)(headline at the front page. At the article page, it's "Heat's Hidden Risk").

"The moves toward mask-wearing come as virus rates in the United States are rising by multiple measures, although hospitalizations are far below where they were a year ago."

"It is difficult to tell how widespread mild cases are because at-home test results are not reported, and many people are not testing, since free tests are no longer widely available. Still, experts worry people are more susceptible to getting the virus in this latest uptick because most Americans have not received the latest booster — including 80 percent of school-age children — and the newest variants are adept at getting around immunity from vaccinations and prior infections...."

From "A few schools mandated masks. Conservatives hit back hard. The politics of pandemic mitigation returned with the new school year" (WaPo).

This wording caught my eye (boldface added): "Mask mandates were instrumental in controlling the spread of the coronavirus during the peak of the pandemic. In the winter of 2020-2021, when nearly 4,000 Americans were dying per day, many saw face coverings as an alternative to the shutdowns of spring 2020. Mask-wearing was seen as paving the way for people to return to churches, schools and restaurants. The nation’s embrace or rejection of mask-wearing soon split along political lines."

Did the masks actually work or did they just help people "see" themselves as safe enough to return to something like normal life? Why am I even asking that question? I'm allowing myself to "look" like I'm on one side of a political line. Are masks mandates coming back because "many" are "seeing" a need to express where they are politically? By asking these questions, I know how I risk being "seen" by "many."

Sunrise — 6:20, 6:31.

"This could become a fireball that eats all of them up throughout 2024."

"The longer they push this forward, the more political price we want to build for Republicans in the Legislature and the whole G.O.P. machinery."

Said Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, quoted in "Why Republicans Could Impeach a Liberal Judge Before She’s Heard a Case/Republicans in Wisconsin have floated impeaching a newly seated liberal State Supreme Court justice who is threatening conservatives’ grip on state politics" (NYT).

"Until recently, Bryan Johnson was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to infuse one litre of his teenage son’s youthful plasma into his own ageing blood stream every month."

"'I’ve never paid more attention to what he’s eating … because that was going into my body,' the 46-year-old American tech entrepreneur says.... He also pumped his own plasma into his 70-year-old father’s body to help improve his declining physical and cognitive health: 'It was one of the most meaningful moments in his entire life. And it was the same for me.'... But Johnson had just begun using an algorithm to prevent biological ageing, which sifts through all research on longevity to create the best treatment plan and he was using his own body as a petri dish for it. Doctors have told Johnson he has the heart of a 37-year-old and the lungs of an 18-year-old...."

From "The Immortals: meet the billionaires forking out for eternal life" (The Guardian).

"As for Jan. 6 itself, it was a 'national embarrassment,' [Enrique] Tarrio said, adding, 'I am not a political zealot.'"

"Some of the other Proud Boys sentenced so far were similarly contrite in their remarks to Judge Kelly — only to reverse themselves outside the judge’s presence. Last week, not long after telling the judge that he was 'a changed and humbled man,' [Dominic] Pezzola raised his fist as he was being led from the courtroom and shouted with a smile, 'Trump won!' Days after weeping at his own sentencing, [Joseph] Biggs called into a vigil being held outside the municipal jail in Washington that houses several Jan. 6 defendants, describing his punishment as 'insane' and declaring, 'We gotta stand up and fight — don’t give up.' In an interview with his former boss, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Mr. Biggs also said he expected that Mr. Trump, if re-elected, would pardon him...."

From "Ex-Leader of Proud Boys Sentenced to 22 Years in Jan. 6 Sedition Case/The prison term for Enrique Tarrio was the most severe penalty handed down so far to any of the more than 1,100 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack" (NYT).

"Medicare may even wind up saving money because of Covid-19 — because the older Americans who died from the disease tended to have other illnesses that would have been expensive to treat if they had survived...."

"If Medicare spending had grown the way it had for much of its history, federal spending would have been $3.9 trillion higher since 2011, and deficits would have been more than a quarter larger.... The difference is more than could be saved by raising the eligibility age for Social Security or converting Medicaid into a block grant, controversial proposals raised by legislators concerned about the federal debt. It’s so much money that almost no major legislation passed during this period comes close in scale. Even some major deficit reduction proposals, like the one known as Simpson-Bowles, aren’t much bigger.... The recent deficit reduction deal passed by Congress will save a relatively modest trillion dollars in comparison. A new Medicare policy that will allow it to negotiate on the prices of some prescription drugs is expected to save just under $100 billion over a decade...."

From "A Huge Threat to the U.S. Budget Has Receded. And No One Is Sure Why" (NYT).

But Covid doesn't explain the trend, which begins in 2010:

 

Sunrise — 6:14, 6:19, 6:24, 6:29.

"As the Democrats have become the party of the college-educated, and as higher education has become dominated by left-leaning staff and students..."

"Republicans have grown more skeptical that colleges are environments where either their ideas or their children are welcome [according to Frederick Hess, an education-policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. But the more] pointed critique... is a populist one, and it reflects sentiments that can be found these days on the left as well as the right. Economists have shown that higher education as a whole has become more stratified by income and class over the last 20 years.... Hess says many conservatives have grown skeptical that students are learning much at these selective institutions. Instead, he says, college has become simply a place for students to collect a gold-plated credential. 'It’s a racketeering situation,' Hess said when we spoke last month. 'In many elite occupations, the price of admission is now an elite degree. That’s true whether it’s a posh D.C. think tank or a big consulting firm or a fancy journalistic outlet.' For many students, Hess said, the point of an expensive college education is not to gain practical job skills. 'It’s just a really expensive toll that lets you jump the queue and get the good jobs.'"

From "Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That? For most people, the new economics of higher ed make going to college a risky bet" NYT).

"... why Musk has been so eager to dispel the idea that Tesla was building him an ostentatious glass house in Austin."

"For Musk, being investigated over potential violations of bureaucratic rules is nothing new and rarely slows him down. But being accused of wanting to live in a nice house of his own, like any other ordinary rich guy? That he cannot abide."

 
Writes Will Oremus in "Elon Musk wants you to know he doesn’t have a nice house/The Tesla CEO denies reports of Tesla building a ‘glass house’ for him in Austin" (WaPo).

"Billa is worried about his nephews, who are being exposed to luxury lifestyle videos from the U.K., which go against the values that he’s trying to teach them."

"They haven’t yet said they want to leave the country, but he’s afraid that they might start talking about it one day. 'They show me how they want a really expensive car, or tell me they want to be social media influencers. It’s really hard for me to know what to say to them,' he said. Billa feels like he’s fighting against an algorithm, trying to show his nephews that the lifestyle that the videos promote isn’t real...."

 
From "The Albanian town that TikTok emptied" (Coda).

"The thirty years since the release of 'Heathers' have solidified its legacy... Though J.D. emerges at first as a sensitive alternative to the football-playing lunkheads of Westerberg High..."

"... it becomes increasingly clear in the course of the movie that he is a product of what we now call 'toxic masculinity'.... J.D. is the kind of man who turns to violence because he feels that first, his mom, and later, his girlfriend, didn’t love him enough. With his trenchcoat and firearms, he can now be seen as a harbinger of the Columbine era, in which we unfortunately still very much reside.... The movie was ahead of its time in another respect.... [In 1988] 'Heathers' drew a prescient link between the self-satisfied, domineering Ayn Rand-ian cruelty of the Reagan era and the other side of the coin—sociopathic violence.... J.D., despite his seemingly subversive ethics, ends up espousing a vicious credo...."

Writes Naomi Fry, in "'Heathers' Blew Up the High-School Comedy/The 1989 cult classic ushered in a darker, weirder, more experimental era for teen movies" (NYT).

"An estimated 60 to 80 people were on the [UW Memorial Union] pier when it collapsed, police and fire officials said..."

"... but only those on the end of the pier, where it makes a 90-degree turn to the east, went into the water, said Debra Drewek, a retired nurse who happened to be at the Terrace taking pictures when the collapse occurred.... 'There were way too many kids on the piers. They were packed,' Drewek said. 'There was no warning. All of a sudden it went down and people were in the water.' Many swam to shore while others clung to the pier that had collapsed or to the pier that remained standing.... The video shows dozens of people falling into the water or riding the pier down as it collapsed.... 'A lot of kids were crying because they had laptops, wallets and phones underwater,' Drewek said."

From "Pier collapse at UW-Madison Union Terrace injures 20 and sends one to the hospital" (Kenosha News).

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"It was very difficult for my parents to understand that Elvis would be so interested in me and why. And I really do think because I was more of a listener. Elvis would pour his heart out to me..."

"... in every way in Germany: his fears, his hopes, the loss of his mother — which he never, ever got over. And I was the person who really, really sat there to listen and to comfort him. That was really our connection. Even though I was 14, I was actually a little bit older in life — not in numbers. That was the attraction. People think, 'Oh, it was sex.' No, it wasn’t. I never had sex with him. He was very kind, very soft, very loving, but he also respected the fact I was only 14 years old. We were more in line in thought, and that was our relationship."

Said Priscilla Presley, quoted in "Sofia Coppola’s ‘Priscilla’ Rocks Venice With 7-Minute Standing Ovation as Priscilla Presley Cries" (Variety).

"Woody Allen received a three-minute standing ovation at the Venice premiere of 'Coup de Chance' on Monday night, which would have gone on longer..."

"... had the filmmaker not started to exit. After two minutes and 30 seconds of sustained applause once the film finished, Allen began to make his way toward the door, cutting the standing ovation short. The filmmaker looked visibly moved during the reaction and at one point took out a tissue. Allen was greeted in the theater by a standing ovation before the movie even screened as fans tried to catch video of him. The reception was the same on the red carpet, with fans cheering him on enthusiastically — however, just outside the carpet a group of protesters walked by...."

From "Woody Allen’s ‘Coup de Chance’ Ignites Protests and Enthusiastic Standing Ovation at Venice Premiere" (Variety).

Sunrise — 6:28, 6:43.

"The fact, however, that another Omicron-like emergence event has occurred... should warn us against giving up our genomic surveillance infrastructure."

Said Ben Murrell, a researcher at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, quoted in "'Pirola' BA.2.86 may not be a 'black swan' event like Omicron, experts say. It’s what could spawn from it that has them worried" (Fortune).

"So, yeah, I said, ‘Okay, well, this floor is moving. So, the floor is going, and you have to just find how you relate to the floor."

Said ballet master Antonio Castilla, quoted in "The perils and pirouettes of staging a ballet aboard the Queen Mary 2/The Cunard line’s flagship offers passengers a rare opportunity for performances at sea with the English National Ballet" (WaPo).

"The body of the dancer is very, very sensitive to the changes... We work down into the floor and then from the floor we adjust up, and unless you do it from the floor, it’s just fake."

"Colleges and universities across the country are scrambling to find legal means of maintaining the levels of diversity they would like to see."

"Though barred from actively using race as a factor, they will still 'see' race in signifiers such as name, ZIP code and, perhaps most notable, what students say about themselves in their essays. But this also means that this year’s class of high school seniors — the first to apply under the affirmative-action ban — must read the signals sent by colleges about how to articulate their case for admission correctly and effectively. They are living in a swirl of uncertainty, confusion and misinformation about an admissions process that has suddenly been made more opaque and bewildering. Rather than clarifying the role of race in the application process, the court has instead created a new burden for students: They must now decide whether, and how, to make race a part of their pitch for admission...."

 
From "Affirmative Action Is Over. Should Applicants Still Mention Their Race? The first high school seniors to apply to college since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision are trying to sort through a morass of conflicting guidance" (NYT).

The answer is yes, but The New York Times is determined to make the "swirl of uncertainty, confusion and misinformation" more "opaque and bewildering." It's the ongoing argument that the Supreme Court has made a terrible mistake. 

As this article — and every other article on this subject — points out, the Supreme Court's opinion explicitly says it shouldn't be "construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise."

By clouding the question, the NYT burdens non-white applicants, who shouldn't have to feel they might be doing something wrong by discussing their race. But clouding the question is part of critiquing the Court, and that is, apparently, the priority.

"Schools have begun using gender-neutral terms such as 'uniform A' and 'uniform B' instead of boys and girls...."

"Some schools have also introduced a third option of 'uniform C.'... Blofield Primary, in Norwich, set out its uniform policy last year which allowed pupils aged 4-11 to pick clothing based on their 'self-identified gender.' It said that to prevent discrimination it would 'avoid listing uniform items based on sex, to give all pupils the opportunity to wear the uniform they feel most comfortable in or that most reflects their self-identified gender.'..."

From "Skirting the issue? School uniform names go gender-neutral" (London Times).

Do the students also have the "opportunity" to choose clothing they simply like — say, for fashion reasons — or must your choice of clothing always represent a statement of how you truly feel inside? I remember when it was possible to play with gender and for boys and girls to wear each other's clothes without being so earnest about it. 

But if the uniforms are no longer designated "boys" and "girls," the youngest children won't know how to use these clothes to express "their self-identified gender." Without a foundation of gender conformity, how can you be a gender nonconformist? 

"What is distraction? Maybe it is just the need to be diverted: from the direction you originally set out on, from what it was you thought you wanted to do."

"After all, to desire something requires projecting yourself into the future—how do you know you’ll still want it when you get there? And along the way there are so many attractions, way stations, spots of time.... Now that I no longer work a forty-hour-a-week job, I tell many people I am writing a book. It is going along, I say, but slowly. How is it that so many chores, parties, trips, assignments, and plainly wasted hours intervene? Not everyone is distracted from their most cherished goals. But I think everyone is distracted from something—it is desire’s shadow, trailing behind our self-presentations. By beginning anything, we create the possibility of detours.... Research easily becomes its own distraction. Fiction writers are not unfamiliar with this crisis, having placed their character under a tree, then specifying what kind of tree it is, then wondering if that tree would be in flower at this particular time of year, whether it grows in the particular geographical region where the story takes place. We can become masters of rationalizing the inessential.... A common idea of distraction presupposes that you’re turning away from something more important that you ought to be paying attention to instead...."

Writes David Schurman Wallace in "In This Essay I Will: On Distraction" (The Paris Review).

That essay is also about Flaubert. I wasn't going to mention that, but there's a section about one of my all-time favorite books, a Flaubert book, "The Dictionary of Received Ideas."

Sunrise — 6:55, 6:19, 6:26.

"Leaning back slowly in my chair, I pictured myself as my lover, a cisgender man, talking to a woman dressed to receive him as I always have: pretty dress, light makeup, underwear off as a little surprise."

"It was taxing, this switch of roles, a kind of spiritual gymnastics. But the expansion in my body felt great — the open legs, arms and gestures — suggesting how much I usually compressed myself." 

Writes Maxine Swann in "Why I Dress (and Act) Like a Man/Tired of being deferential to men in my relationships, I decided to create my own drag king persona" (NYT).

"According to the standard model, which is the basis for essentially all research in the field, there is a fixed and precise sequence of events that followed the Big Bang."

"First, the force of gravity pulled together denser regions in the cooling cosmic gas, which grew to become stars and black holes; then, the force of gravity pulled together the stars into galaxies. The Webb data, though, revealed that some very large galaxies formed really fast, in too short a time, at least according to the standard model. This was no minor discrepancy. The finding is akin to parents and their children appearing in a story when the grandparents are still children themselves.... Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.... [W]e may need not just a new story of the universe but also a new way to tell stories about it."

 
From "The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel" (NYT).

"In 2016, I asked the Lord to give us the president who loves the country more than he loves himself."

"That would be the man that’s been persecuted by the Justice Department, by the media. We need to stand with him — you’ll gain a lot more votes if you stand with him."

Said "an older man with a small American flag sticking out of his shirt pocket," who posed the final question for Ron DeSantis "at a machine shop in Estherville, Iowa, last week," quoted in "Republican race remains stuck as Trump dominates heading into fall/Some campaigns don’t want to go after Trump for fear of alienating his supporters — but don’t see a path to beating him without attacking him at some point" (WaPo).

The WaPo article has over 5,000 comments. I haven't read them all, but I'd bet no one attempts to understand how Trump supporters feel. The most-liked comment is "If God answered that prayer with Trump, God is a psychopath."

"Joe Rogan & Bill Maher Discuss How Pfizer Sold Their 100% Effective Claim & Why Ivermectin Was Demonized."

Joe Rogan & Bill Maher Discuss How Pfizer Sold Their 100% Effective Claim & Why Ivermectin Was Demonized

“I didn’t believe that. I said that’s bullsh-t. Then Robert Kennedy, Jr sent me an email with the actual studies and I read it and I was like holy sh-t!”@joerogan… pic.twitter.com/GQDXxgZDhM

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) September 2, 2023

"Because for the Burning Man episode we spent so much money, so much time out there. And we can’t use any frame of it."

"And that was just, like, so annoying. But I felt like we still needed to include it, because it ultimately made the episodes stronger that we couldn’t get access to Burning Man because the whole episode is kind of about gatekeeping.... I didn’t know how abnormal it was to have such a devastating dust storm and the heat and all that stuff. Like, I could barely do anything during the day because of how fucked up it was outside.... [F]or the most part, I was shadowing the sewage-treatment people. So I was just in these porta potties that were 115 degrees, studying the infrastructure of Burning Man, in a way—like, the lost and found and all this other stuff...."

From "John Wilson walks us through the series finale of How To With John Wilson/The filmmaker discusses why he identifies more with 'the self-castration guy' than Ryan Seacrest, how his HBO show will finally pay off in 100 years, and more" (AV Club).

"How To With John Wilson" was my favorite TV show, and now it's over, after 3 seasons. Earlier this season, there was an episode — "How to Find a Public Restroom" — where he traveled to Burning Man but then he couldn't use any of the footage he shot. It was the devastating dust storm year. This year, of course, we're seeing it's the devastating rainstorm year. 

At Twitter, low-level wit flows like rain...

98% of the crowd literally makes the same joke...

 

More like you always hated Burning Man anyway.