"Biden, always a little taller than you expect, wore a navy suit and a bright-blue tie."

"He passed a study off the Oval, where he keeps a rack of extra shirts, an array of notes sent in by the public, and a portrait of John F. Kennedy in a contemplative pose.... He continued to the Oval Office dining room, a small, elegant space where, in Biden’s eight years as Vice-President, he often visited Barack Obama for lunch. One wall is graced by 'The Peacemakers,' a famous painting of Lincoln and his military commanders, on the cusp of winning the Civil War. Another is dominated by a large television set, installed by Donald Trump."

From "Joe Biden’s Last Campaign/Trailing Trump in polls and facing doubts about his age, the President voices defiant confidence in his prospects for reëlection" by Evan Osnos (The New Yorker).

I paused over "always a little taller than you expect." It had a bit of a large-boulder-the-size-of-a-small-boulder feeling about it. It gets my favorite tag: big and small. I love these conundrums of size. Osnos is using "you" to refer to himself. He's talking about his subjective experience, and he — unlike, probably, you — has been in the vicinity of the President on multiple occasions. But what is this taller and taller effect? It must be that when he's around Biden, he's struck that Biden is a little tall, and, afterwards, Biden shrinks in Osnos's memory, setting him up to be struck once again, at the next encounter, by the slight tallness of Biden.

Biden was showing Osnos — as Biden put it — "where Trump sat and watched the revolution."

With the television remote and a Diet Coke close at hand, [Trump] watched the events live on Fox News, rewinding at times for a second look. It is a period in Presidential history that the House select committee on January 6th later called “187 Minutes of Dereliction.”...

“This is where he sat,” Biden said, and I braced for a bit of speechifying... [but] he let the moment pass. At the age of eighty-one, in his fourth year as President, he displays less of the reflex to fill every silence.... 

As the title indicates, this article is mostly about Biden's "defiant confidence" in his viability as a candidate. On that topic, I liked this:

The kind of people who believe that they should be President of the United States do not generally go graciously into retirement. Alexander Hamilton, who knew his share of ex-politicians, described them as “discontented ghosts.” When Richard Nixon was between stints in office, he fretted, “I’m going to be mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four.” Calvin Coolidge, the only twentieth-century President who voluntarily passed up a reasonable chance at reëlection, said that he hoped to avoid “grasping for office.” (Coolidge noted that Presidents “live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment.”) In Biden’s case, he has been in politics so long that one of his aides told me a decade ago that he seemed “afraid if he stops working he might just fall over.”