The lake and the marsh.

A western view of Lake Mendota at 12:41 p.m.:

 

Gardner Marsh at 1:47:

Please use the comments section to talk about whatever you want.

"South Korea’s export of babies peaked in the 1980s, with as many as 8,837 children shipped abroad in 1985. Children were 'sent abroad like luggage'..."

"... the commission said, presenting a photo that showed rows of infants and young children strapped to airplane seats​.... Mia Lee Sorensen, a South Korean adoptee who was sent to Denmark in 1987, said the commission’s findings provided the 'validation' that she had been seeking. When she found her birth parents in South Korea in 2022, they couldn’t believe she was alive. They told her that her mother had passed out during labor and that when she woke up, the clinic told her that the baby had died...."

From "World’s Largest ‘Baby Exporter’ Admits to Adoption Fraud/A South Korean truth commission called for the country to apologize to those who were sent abroad 'like luggage' so that adoption agencies could profit" (NYT).

"Democrats have struggled to craft any sort of effective message of opposition to the second Trump Administration."

"One recent round of video clips featuring the speeches of Democratic senators was roundly mocked for repeating tired talking points. In the absence of anything more galvanizing, the formula 'Trump Take _____'—fill in the blank with 'egg,' 'cancer research,' or 'Social Security'—is, as [video editor Michael] Sweeney put it, 'sort of self-consciously stupid but at least feels like you’re landing a punch.' Another favorite target of late is Vice-President J. D. Vance. Vance hadn’t made much of an impression in the new Administration until he helped Trump berate the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky.... [T]he meme machine went to work: Vance as Humpty Dumpty; Vance as a toddler with a propeller hat and a lollipop; Vance as a hippie troubadour with a neckbeard and a mop of curly hair...."

From "Resisting Trump 2.0 with Brain-Rot Memes/We participate in political memes to express our anxiety that whatever is coming next might be even more chaotic than what is already happening" (The New Yorker).

Key phrase: "In the absence of anything more galvanizing."

ADDED: Here's my earlier post about the JD Vance images, "Tell me about the social media meme that's just different images of JD Vance." That has an embedded tweet from Vance himself, passing along one of the images. As I said in the comments there: "I think this works in favor of JD Vance. His antagonists probably thought he was thin skinned and would demand respect (like the respect he demanded that Zelensky show to Trump). Now the meme is making him a pop culture icon and a standout in the fight for the 2028 GOP nomination. It's in the tradition of Trump, whose appearance and personality have been subject to endless foolery for decades."

"We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America...."

We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. This… pic.twitter.com/BlQWUpK3u7

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 27, 2025

Katherine Maher — NPR CEO — was caught in a trap of her own design.

It really is amazing watching people like Katherine Maher hear things she’s said and posted, and be so stunned at how absurd and ridiculous they sound that they deny saying what they’ve already said
pic.twitter.com/nP2IKv3VtN

— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) March 26, 2025

I'm glad to see NPR is giving us:

I love those 2 pictures together. So expressive! Both women seem to be earnestly accessing some ideal that is positioned upward and to her left. Here's the link if you need NPR to hand you "4 takeaways."

Here's Maher's bio at NPR. A very interesting fact: "Maher is the Chair of the Board of Signal Foundation, responsible for the secure, private Signal Messenger app...."

"Until the recent rise of A.I, it was fashionable to claim that consciousness was an illusion or, perhaps, an ambient property of everything in reality..."

"... in either case, not special. Such dismissiveness has become less common.... Consciousness is lately treated as something precious and real, to be conquered by tech: our A.I.s and robots are to achieve consciousness. What follows, then, is that love is also real and also a target to be conquered. The conquest of love will not be abstract but vividly concrete for everyone, especially young people, and soon. This is because we are all about to be presented, in our phones, with a new generation of A.I. simulations of people, and many of us may fall in love with them. They will likely appear within the social-media apps to which we are already addicted. We will probably succumb to interacting with them, and for some very online people there won’t be an easy out. No one can know how the new love revolution will unfold, but it might yield one of the most profound legacies of these crazy years...."

Writes Jaron Lanier, in "Your A.I. Lover Will Change You/A future where many humans are in love with bots may not be far off. Should we regard them as training grounds for healthy relationships or as nihilistic traps?" (The New Yorker).

I tried the Grok app that let's you talk and be talked back to. You're forced to pick a voice — either male or female. It's binary. I picked male — not because I'm a heterosexual female, but because the female voice I was offered was perky and energized and the male voice was calm. It wasn't egging me on to feel that this is so much fun. But then I only used it for less than a minute, because it felt slow. A waste of time. Reading is much faster. Talking might work better if I succumbed to the illusion that a real person was on the line. I'd have to choose to go slightly mad to feel like that. But don't people make that kind of choice all the time — even in those seemingly "healthy relationships" with real human beings.

"If our government is going to fund science, it should be good science."

Who could disagree? But what are the chances of getting good science on transgender medical treatments for children? 

I'm reading "Trump’s Attack on Trans Youth Research Is a Tragic Error" by Jesse Singal (in the NYT).

Singal writes:

I’ve long been a critic of American youth gender medicine. Researchers in this field have often produced slipshod work and drawn premature conclusions about the benefits of blockers, hormones and surgery. There are serious unanswered questions about the safety and efficacy of these treatments, which have been banned or restricted in about half of American states and a number of European countries in the wake of several damning government-sponsored reports.

But cutting back on research about these treatments would be a tragic error. What this field needs — and what gender-questioning youth deserve — is reform, oversight and higher methodological standards. To cripple this field in its infancy would be to leave countless families in intolerable limbo.

Wasn't it the bad science that crippled the field in its infancy? If that hadn't been so ghoulish and awful you wouldn't have Trump's attack. You probably wouldn't even have Trump as President. 

I regularly hear from parents whose kids express severe distress about their biological sex.

That's a badly miswritten sentence, and I don't want to be lectured about "good science" by someone who lacks the critical awareness of why it's so wrong.

"Since I was born with no legs, it wasn’t long before news crews, national telethons and even the talk show host Maury Povich arrived to capture me in action..."

"... always portraying my simplest activities as inspirational. The short film... 'View From the Floor,' captures my journey navigating tropes, exploitation and the question of whether I’m talented or typecast, superstar or supercrip (a person with a disability who is seen as a superhero for doing everyday things)."

Writes Mindie Lind, about an excellent 5-minute animation, which you can watch at this free-access link to the NYT. 

If you got to that link, the headline is "Applaud My Talent, Not My Disability," but the teaser on the front page is "I’m an Artist, Not 'Inspiration Porn.'" I was interested in the term "Inspiration Porn," but it doesn't even appear on the article page, where the text is by the person who has the disability. Oddly enough, she uses the term "supercrip."

I clicked the link on "supercrip," and, helpfully, I got to an article that used the term "inspiration porn." It's a 2022 article Ben Mattlin, "I Am Not Your Supercrip": "Supercrip stories are a subset of 'inspiration porn.' That term, coined by the late Australian comedian and journalist Stella Young, a wheelchair-user with dwarfism, refers to portrayals of disabled people that treat them as inspirations (rather than as individuals) in ways that effectively say disabled people only exist, or are only worth photographing and writing about, to inspire or motivate nondisabled people."

"Under what theory of the constitution does a single marxist judge in San Francisco have the same executive power as the Commander-in-Chief elected by the whole nation to lead the executive branch?"

Tweet Stephen Miller, quoted by David French in "Trump Is Coming for Every Pillar of the State" (NYT). 

French continues:

As Miller put it in a press briefing last month, “The whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president.” He is the only elected official who represents the whole of the American people, and he embodies the people’s general will....  

Trump and his team are furious at the federal judiciary, but they’re to blame for their own legal struggles. Trump has issued a host of poorly drafted executive orders. Trump’s administration has snatched people off the streets without adequate due process. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is unilaterally wrecking agencies that were established by Congress, usurping Congress’s primacy in America’s constitutional structure.

It is not the judiciary’s fault that Trump has chosen to attack the constitutional order, and it is hardly the case that he’s losing only to liberal judges....

"President Barack Obama... claimed the right to kill U.S. citizens abroad without trial, used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers and expanded domestic counterterrorism."

"He helped perfect the arsenal that Trump would later inherit. It was the left, not the right, that normalized censoring disfavored online speech during the pandemic, often using intelligence-linked partners to do so. It was establishment liberals who applauded when the FBI investigated Trump-world operatives — not on the basis of principle, but because they liked the target. Now the weapon is back in circulation, only in different hands.... That’s how weapons work.... Power, once created and normalized, rarely stays dormant — and never stays partisan...."

From "Trump is using weapons that liberals helped build," by Vinnie Rotondaro (at The Hill).

ADDED: It's as though Trump is saying: I am your mirror image — don't you hate it?

Sunrise — 6:22, 6:43, 6:49, 6:50.

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"The idea that your marriage is your own (secular, individual) business is the kind of thing that bedevils religious conservatives."

"One imagines [JD] Vance gasping in horror at Mlotek’s account of the 'airiness' with which she makes her wedding vows, recalling 'how easy it was to swear I would want what I had'—as if marriage might be a commitment to one’s desires rather than a commitment to another person, or a role in a community. Reactionary and revolutionary views of marriage alike offer narrative satisfactions that the liberal view seems to lack. Eulogizing a marriage undertaken in this spirit presents a storytelling challenge: it requires inventing the stakes yourself. Mlotek—like many brides and grooms writing custom vows—doesn’t quite pull it off. But she does make privacy and its place in love feel idealistic and almost subversive. Her book is subtitled 'A Memoir of Romance and Divorce,' and her reticence is perhaps the most romantic thing about it, testifying to an abiding intimacy that transcends any legal relationship. After she and her husband decide to separate, she manages to avoid telling most of her family and friends for nearly a year...."

Writes Molly Fischer, in "Who Gets to Define Divorce/The battle for custody of a contested institution" (The New Yorker).

Mlotek = Haley Mlotek, author of "No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce" (commission earned).

Idealistic and subversive privacy in love... but you can still write a memoir about it... when the love dissipates beyond mere airiness and into utter nonexistence.

The aforementioned JD Vance is also a memoirist, as the New Yorker article pauses to say: "In 'Hillbilly Elegy,' his parents’ separation is the wellspring of childhood suffering; his grandparents’ home is the one source of stability, and he idealizes their volatile union." For the record, Mlotek and her erstwhile husband had no children, or even pets.

"We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court."

"We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act."

Said Mike Johnson, quoted in "Speaker Mike Johnson floats eliminating federal courts as GOP ramps up attacks on judges/Republican lawmakers are setting their sights on the judiciary following court rulings that have halted Trump's agenda" (NBC News).

The Constitution gave Congress the power to create the lower federal courts, and that seems to imply that Congress can eliminate them. Obviously, it hasn't done that, and there are some arguments that maybe it can't un-create them at this point in the development of federal law, but when speaking about Congress's power over the federal courts, it's standard to refer to its power to completely eliminate the lower federal courts, and to use that power as a basis for inferring a power to cut them back in less drastic ways.

"When you walk in by yourself, the look on the host or hostess’s face changes. It is sometimes a look of panic..."

"... like ‘What are we going to do with this person?’ Or sometimes it is a look of sympathy. I am just so tired of being treated like a second-class citizen."

Said Rajika Shah, "a lawyer in Los Angeles," who "is often led to the worst table in the dining room, neglected by her server, and then rushed out at the end of the meal," quoted in "Why Is Dining Alone So Difficult? With solo reservations on the rise but many restaurants still restricting tables to two or more, solitary Americans often feel left out or stigmatized" (NYT).

The assumption that people need to be coupled or grouped goes beyond restaurants, said Bella DePaulo... author of the 2023 book “Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life.”... Dr. DePaulo also pointed to a recent, highly circulated article in The Atlantic, “The Anti-Social Century,” which links practices like solo dining to reclusion and loneliness....

“People who are lonely are going to stay home,” she said. “They are not going to go out to a restaurant. People who go out on their own are confident.... We are a nation that really romanticizes romantic coupling and marriage, .and stigmatizing people who are single or do things alone is part of that”....

Here's a picture of me 17 years ago with my fisheye-exaggerated hand on a Bella DePaulo book, "Singled Out":

Obviously, I'm not alone. I've got Obama! I mean, I've got my tablemate, my photographer, and he was audaciously hoping, while I was preparing to do a Bloggingheads with Bella. And that Bloggingheads turned out to be momentous. It played a role in connecting me to Meade, as I described a bit later in a post called "Flashback '08: The Audacity Althousity of Hope."

So I'm always happy to see Bella DePaulo's name come up in an article, even though the important matter of living well while single isn't my personal concern anymore. I still care about it! And you don't have to be single to find yourself in situations where you need to or would like to eat alone in a restaurant and you waste part of your mind on the possibly disapproving expression on a restaurant employee's face and the way the other diners might be thinking, oh, that poor woman, no one loves her.

At least Obama loves us!

"Bob Woodward has spent an entire career trying to infiltrate groups like this. So how could you possibly have just been added to a group chat?"

The NYT "Daily" podcast interviewer prompts Jeffrey Goldberg, in this morning's new episode, "Inside the Group Chat Planning to Bomb Yemen" (Podscribe).

Goldberg responds: "Yeah. I mean, you know, and, and, and also it's weird that substantive government conversations we taking place over Signal, because Signal is not by the US government standards secure in part because obviously it's open — technically open — to anyone, including yours, truly. And I, I know that previous administrations have used different messaging services, but not for, not for substance. Right? I mean, I think in the Biden administration, it's a, it's a good example. They used Signal. But my impression is based on, on some reporting, my impression is that they use Signal to do things like setting up lunch appointments or, Hey, I've just left Saudi Arabia. I'll call you from a skiff when I get to whatever."

Only once the bombings in Yemen occurred did Goldberg — as he tells it — realize "this is almost certainly a real Signal group and not some sort of deceptive disinformation campaign." He's being careful, it seems, to protect himself. Did he do something wrong by failing immediately to drop out of the chat? He would like the timeline for judging his behavior to begin at the point when he knew "almost certainly" that the conversation was what it appeared to be:

And so then I had to begin to make a serious decision...

Key word: then. And: begin.

... consulting with colleagues that ultimately led me to remove myself from the Signal group later that day....

What was said in these conversations?

How did they analyze the legal problems and journalism ethics? What we know is that Goldberg signed out of the Signal group.

... knowing that the group administrator and Signal and the members, I believe, of a group as well, are notified that you have left the group.

That is, to withdraw he would have to expose himself as the eavesdropper he chose to be. Presumably, that problem was bandied about in those consultations with colleagues. During the time he was talking to colleagues, he was still in the group and he knew it wasn't a hoax. Now, to get out, he'd have to target himself. But, bottom line, he got out. 

I assumed at that point that Mike Waltz was gonna call and say, Hey, who, who is this? Or call and say, why'd you leave the group? And, and, and then I would say, you know, director Waltz or whatever, do you know, do you even know who this is? But nobody look the, I mean, here's the, the, the truth of it is nobody noticed when I was added and nobody noticed when I was left.

The truth is, you don't know what other people notice when they say nothing. 

The "Daily" interviewer invites Goldberg to reveal why he left the group. He says:

You know, I, I think people can make their own deductions here, but I can't get into for various reasons. The conversations I subsequently had with colleagues and others about my decision making, all I will say is that I, I removed myself from the group understanding the consequences of that....

He doesn't want to talk about it. And who knows the meaning of things not said?

ADDED, after listening to more of the podcast. The interviewer comes back to the material I've highlighted. She says:

I respect the fact that you can't go into the details, but I do want to ask you whether part of the reason why you left was that you were concerned you could get in trouble for it. Like were you worried at all that you had stayed in that chat too long? And, and not just you, but the people that you're talking to at the Atlantic that presumably you're getting advice from? 

Goldberg's answer shows that he needs to worry that he could be accused of a crime. He says:

I'm going to, your Honor, I'm gonna respectfully decline to answer that question on the grounds that I can't answer the question. I take the nation's laws very seriously, but I am not in a position to discuss decision making related to the type of material that I was seeing.

Then, Goldberg brings up something that shocks me into seeing why Trump hates Goldberg: "Four years ago, five years ago, I reported that Donald Trump referred to the World War I and World War II War dead as suckers and losers."

And then I had to wonder whether Goldberg was put on that Signal chat deliberately to entrap him into committing what would be characterized as a crime, and that's what I'm guessing he talked about with his colleagues that led him to withdraw from the chat. 

Of course, on the Trump side, they congealed very quickly around the story that it was a stupid mistake, but no harm, no foul. But isn't that what they would do if it were deliberate entrapment?

Another suspicion I developed listening to this podcast is that Goldberg is not the first journalist to be added to a chat like this and fed information, but other journalists have just written stories about the substance of what they heard. Look at that line: "Bob Woodward has spent an entire career trying to infiltrate groups like this." Well, maybe Bob Woodward is in groups like that. He just doesn't write articles about what happened to him. And maybe Goldberg knows that, but he chose to make the story about himself because he knows he's high on Trump's enemies list, and he and his colleagues/lawyers gamed it out and decided he needed to protect himself from criminal prosecution.

Why would Goldberg, of all journalists, be included in that chat?

Occam's razor says entrapment.

Sunrise — 6:34, 6:41, 6:47, 6:59.

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"What do you think Musk is buying?"/"What do you think will happen to us if Brad Schimel wins?"

Every day, multiple glossy anti-Schimel cards come in the mail. I photographed the latest bunch:

The quotes in the post title — to be found on the cards — ask us what we think. The facts are hazy, but threatening and sexual, and we're nudged to angst and ideate? This, in a city where an awful lot of people are cranking each other up about politics.

"Trump orders states to require proof of citizenship in federal elections" — can he do that?

 The WaPo article quotes "election experts" who, unsurprisingly, say he can't.

Trump’s order directs the Election Assistance Commission to change the federal voter registration form to require voters to provide government-issued documentary proof of citizenship. Under his order, voters could use passports or REAL IDs to prove citizenship but not birth certificates....

“The aim here is voter suppression pure and simple,” UCLA law professor Rick Hasen wrote on his blog. ... Hasen questioned the legality of the measure because the president does not oversee the Election Assistance Commission.

Should I be watching Alec Baldwin's new reality show? "The Comeback" is my all-time favorite TV comedy.

I'm reading "The Baldwins Isn’t Alec Baldwin’s Comeback—It’s Basically The Comeback/On his cringey TLC show, the actor bears more than a slight resemblance to Lisa Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish" (Vanity Fair).

Like Valerie, Alec is an actor who appears to be seeking redemption by turning to a foreign medium that he might have at one time considered beneath him. While Valerie often calls out for her producer “Jane,” it similarly takes Alec about a minute into his show’s first episode to look directly into the camera, as if pleading for help, and explicitly spell out why his five-bedroom apartment is too small for his big family. Valerie attempts to produce her show as she’s being filmed, constantly interjecting about what she thinks should be left on the cutting room floor. Likewise, as they shoot a close-up of him cleaning his garbage can, Alec tosses out a question to the crew: “You don’t really wanna film this, do you?” But when one of his sons says something Alec deems entertaining, he changes his tune: “That was worth the whole day [of filming]! Line of the day!” Alec can’t help but regularly point out the brushstrokes and the mechanics of the show his family is filming as they’re filming it.

“I just hate bailing out the Europeans again"/"I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC.”

Said JD Vance/Pete Hegseth, quoted in "Now Europe Knows What Trump’s Team Calls It Behind Its Back: 'Pathetic'/Trump officials have demanded more European military spending and questioned the continent’s values. Leaked messages show the depth of the rift" (NYT).

Wouldn't want that to get out, now, would you? 

At the Lunch Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

That's this morning's sunrise, at 6:41. 

"There are cultural norms... Takashima said. A thunderous sneeze is a learned behavior..."

"... and 'you hardly ever hear anybody sneezing boisterously in Japan,' where [otolaryngologist] Takashima was born. 'It’s frowned upon to create such a loud noise, to bother the public' Takashima said... 'There’s nothing wrong with a loud sneeze,' [some guy] said. 'People’s perception that I, or anyone else, is a loud sneezer is entirely subjective.' But Rob Blatt, 43, the co-owner of a bar in Peekskill, New York, said he would like to be able to control his sneeze when he’s driving because he knows someone who got in a fender bender after sneezing behind the wheel. Blatt said he sneezes 'like the Tasmanian devil.... It’s a full-body experience, for better or worse.... It’s like a gunshot going off.'"

"Sneeze smarter, not louder: The science of a quieter sneeze" (WaPo).

Maybe you enjoy the kind of freely expressive sneezing that's frowned on in Japan. You have to want to change, but if you do, the advice is:

"I just deleted my account. I only signed up for this bc my younger brother had suspicions that our Dad was not his real biological father..."

"... and that he and I were just so.....different.....from our older siblings. They had no interest in education beyond high school (surprise surprise, they all voted for Trump), while he and I were voracious re: higher education. So he signed up and discovered that he was right. He told me the deal and asked if I would sign up too, bc he trusted me to not freak out. Sure enough, we have the same bio-dad and my bro eventually discovered that we have 2 half-siblings that he met up with in January and introduced me to them via Zoom. Strange feeling."

A comment at the Washington Post article, "Delete your DNA from 23andMe right now
The genetic information company declared bankruptcy on Sunday, and California’s attorney general has issued a privacy 'consumer alert.'"

There are also plenty of comments expressing doubt that the data really is deleted. I was just highly amused to find another example of Trump showing up everywhere. Also, this man is flattering himself for his virtuous liberalism and, at the same time, expressing a belief in genetic determinism.

Am I free not to talk about Jeffrey Goldberg?

I remember the time — 16 years ago — he got annoyed at me for objecting to his characterization of Dahlia Lithwick as a "haiku genius."

Now, there's something about his bizarre inclusion in a group chat about crushing the Houthis.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: When did Shakespeare use the plot device of a character who thinks he's secretly eavesdropping who is being deliberately fed false information to get him to do something? (The answer involves "Othello," "Much Ado About Nothing," and "Twelfth Night.")

I'll just say...

Whispers cloak the stage
Hidden ears catch crafted tales
Truth bends in the dark

"The Supreme Court appeared split along partisan lines Monday over the creation of a second Black-majority congressional district in Louisiana...."

Writes Justin Jouvenal, in "Supreme Court seems split on Louisiana voting map, majority-Black districtsSeveral conservative justices were skeptical that the Voting Rights Act’s attempts to redress past discrimination can coexist with the Equal Protection Clause" (WaPo).

The legal arguments in the case center on the extent to which states can consider race in drawing legislative maps, a power they were granted as part of the Voting Rights Act in an attempt to address discriminatory electoral practices.

I wouldn't have written "granted."

Such maps cannot, however, be explicit racial gerrymanders.

Whatever happened to implicit racism? 

Sunrise — 6:53.

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"Samuel Taylor Coleridge scribbled a note in the margins of his copy of Othello about 'the motive-hunting of Motiveless malignity'..."

"... a reference to the way in which the play’s treacherous villain, Iago, cooks up a variety of shallow rationalizations for a hatred that’s too deep and insidious to stem from any neatly explicable circumstance. But what of the motive-hunting of a motiveless production?... It may be that [Denzel] Washington’s lackluster performance stems from a misfiring if understandable desire to avoid stereotypes of outsize passion—of big, blustery emotional fireworks in a thorny role of color—yet the result is that we go on no journey with his Othello. We listen to him say words; we don’t, even as he enters the bedroom of his innocent wife, Desdemona (Molly Osborne), to strangle her, experience his awful interior transformation. Instead, as he approaches her in these fateful moments, a truly unsettling percentage of the audience is still laughing.... 'I’ll not shed her blood, / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow, / And smooth as monumental alabaster,' he says.... Then he pauses before continuing, almost nonchalantly: 'Yet she must die.' The audience giggles. Is that what the production—what any production of Othello—really wants?"

Writes Sara Holdren, in "Money in Its Purse, No Heart on Its Sleeve: Denzel Washington in Othello" (NY Magazine).

What does the production really want? Enough Coleridge-style wondering about Iago's motivation. What did this particular production want? And what if the laughter is what it wants?! Put on a whole production of "Othello" with the ambitious goal that the audience will be transported to dizzying heights of inappropriate laughter. Desdemona is the new Chuckles the Clown and the audience is transfigured into Mary Tyler Moore.

"Long before Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall, she made 'Apple,' a piece of fresh fruit on a stand..."

"... at the Indica gallery in London. (Lennon, naughtily and biblically, took a chomp.) I am not an Ono-phile who wants to wallow overmuch in this kind of art, but applaud Sheff’s book as an important corrective to years of bad P.R. He’s done the opposite of a hatchet job, putting his subject back together branch by branch, like a forester. (Climbing trees is a big theme in her work.) He argues convincingly for her as survivor, feminist, avant-gardist, political activist and world-class sass...."

Writes Alexandra Jacobs, in "Yoko Ono, Demonized No Longer/David Sheff’s new biography convincingly argues for John Lennon’s widow as a feminist, activist, avant-garde artist and world-class sass" (NYT).

"Yoko, meaning 'ocean child,' was born in 1933 in Tokyo to wealthy but cold parents. She didn’t meet her father until she was 2½, and her mother was vain and germophobic. 'Even now I find it unpleasant to sit on a cushion or chair that still retains the temperature of somebody who had just been sitting there,' Ono once wrote."

"As Jolie moved through the rooms of her gallery with a cup of tea, she paused to take in the unlikely scene. 'Sometimes I think, what are we doing?'..."

"A clutch of women had found their place beside her, urgently wanting to talk about art and activism. 'And then I think, no, this is everything.'"

From "Angelina Jolie Wants to Pick Up Where Warhol and Basquiat Left Off/The actress is building a community of artists, thinkers and doers of all kinds, in a storied building in downtown Manhattan" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see the art, the artists, and the artsy spaces).

Jolie listened intently to Neshat, the Iranian visual artist and filmmaker, a striking figure with kohled eyes. “Art doesn’t come from intuition,” Neshat said. “It has to come from the life you have led. It has to relate to the world.”

Meanwhile, Jolie's ex, Brad Pitt, is running into trouble with his real-estate-based humanitarianism: "Brad Pitt Suffers Major Setback In $20M Legal Battle Over Defective Homes For Hurricane Katrina Victims" (Yahoo).

The actor had built homes for these individuals in the wake of the natural disaster, but the homes reportedly developed dangerous mold, leading to the class action they filed.... Pitt had spent $12 million through his Make It Right Project to build these homes, which were designed to be ecologically sustainable....

Did anyone listen to the oral argument this morning in the racial gerrymandering case?

I listened to some of it, and now I'm reading "Supreme Court hears pivotal Louisiana election map case ahead of 2026 midterms/The Supreme Court decision could reshape Louisiana's election map and may redefine rules for gerrymandering nationwide ahead of the 2026 midterm elections" (Fox News).

This is a painful topic — I've taught it in conlaw many times — because of the conflict between the constitutional requirement of equal protection (which one might think frowns rather severely on race discrimination), and the statutory interpretation, which requires that states create majority minority districts. The Constitution ought to win, you might think, but what if you really want the statute to win?

Unfortunately, the linked article doesn't tell us anything about the oral argument. I'll try to update with a better article or material from the transcript.

"So this country has had higher education since before the signing of the Declaration of Independence."

"But it wasn't until the late 19th century when Johns Hopkins University was founded as the Nation's first research university.... But around World War II is when the universities and the federal government really got to work with each other.... The idea was that the universities would get this research funding, it would fuel their labs, it would fuel the scientist, and then that research would flow into corporate America. It would flow into other parts of the government, other parts of academia. And the result was the country got new pharmaceutical drugs, new technology, Nobel Prize winners come out of university labs.... Now it's tens of billions of dollars a year that flow from the federal government down to the universities.... You know, you've got the University of Georgia, which for example, was getting federal funding for a lab that focused on peanuts. You know, Illinois, they get money for insulin research.... When you start talking about cutting research funding, the trickle down effect is enormous.... It's cutting off potentially state universities near you...."

Says NYT reporter Alan Blinder, in today's episode of "The Daily" podcast, "Trump’s Escalating War With Higher Education" (Podscribe link).

How did Georgia get all that money for peanut research? Are we supposed to think that's not super-elite, that shows the money is widely distributed and flows freely and equally — to the state universities as well as the Ivies — and the federal government is supporting research on practical things that benefit the general populace?

Or do we start wondering if there's something corrupt? I pursued my suspicion on Grok — you can read it here. I'll just quote one snappy sentence: "Georgia’s political muscle, peanut-centric identity, and strategic storytelling might give it an unfair leg up, leaving other universities and crops to wonder if the game’s rigged."

"I'm thrilled to announce that we're ending pharmaceutical ads in television. America is corrupted by Big Pharma."

"For years, they’ve pushed drugs like candy, silenced critics, lobbied the Congress and the White House, and cashed in on manufactured fear. Big Pharma, through drug advertisements, are also a huge source of income for mainstream media, effectively controlling the media outlets. Soros and USAID aren't the only ones who use the mainstream media to perpetuate propaganda. ALL THESE WILL END NOW."

Writes RFK Jr., on X.... in A PARODY ACCOUNT.

ADDED: Why isn't this what RFK Jr. would say and do?

"... the anile, demented echo chamber of social media."

A phrase I found — in a 2016 National Post article about Justin Trudeau’s "sunny Liberalism" — when I looked up the word "anile" in the OED.

A Wordle spoiler follows. "Anile" is not the answer, but "anile" was accepted as a guess, though after getting the right answer, I was told that "anile" would never be the answer in Wordle.

Why not?! "Anile" is a perfectly good word. It means, the OED tells us, "Of, belonging to, or characteristic of old women; resembling an old woman. Chiefly derogatory with connotations of foolishness, senility, or decrepitude."

"American Idol" seems to think it's doing Stephen Bishop a favor.

I'd never heard of Stephen Bishop or his "On and On" song, but I found his wife's outrage interesting:

"Thank you all for coming, and shame on you for being here."

Said Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, quoted in "'Twain hated bullies.' Conan O'Brien receives Mark Twain Prize at the Kennedy Center" (NPR).

I'd love to hear a lecture demonstrating — with lots of quotes — Mark Twain's hatred of bullies. I have a Kindle copy of "The Complete Works of Mark Twain" (only 99¢ at Amazon!), so I can easily do my own search, though it's hard to do a search for the word "bully," since many of the occurrences are in things like "Bully for the lion!" — shouted by "young ruffians" during a tour of the Coliseum in "Innocents Abroad" — an archaic usage.

But how can you delve into Twain and his times when you've got Trump... and your "shame" for showing up in what was once an arts paradise and is now the humbled plaything of that garish clod who is remaking everything in his own horribly orange image?

"The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst. She must have lost her talent as she got older."

Said Donald Trump, quoted in "Trump slams 2019 portrait of himself in Colorado State Capitol as ‘purposely distorted,’ wants ‘radical’ gov to pull it" (NY Post).

ADDED: "Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before."

I don't think the artist painted that badly on purpose, though perhaps she felt freer to exhibit her limitations. It reminds me of all the many portraits of 18th century Americans you see strewn about the walls of lesser museums. Use AI to redo the clothing and he'll look like a random Framer, rendered by a semi-primitive artisan in the days before photography.

AND: I love Trump's "even I, perhaps, have never seen before." What's up with the "even I"? Is he saying that he's seen more bad art than maybe anybody else ever? That's how it sounds. 

At the Tablescape Café...

... you can talk all night.

And you can support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"You can’t do things like that when you’re an older man with a young kid."

Said the woman who saw it on TV and made the video viral, quoted in "Girls’ Basketball Coach Is Fired After Pulling Player’s Ponytail/The coach of the girls’ varsity team in Northville, N.Y., was caught yanking a player’s hair on a television broadcast of a championship game on Friday" (NYT).

The NYT is too polite to embed or even to link to the video, but the video is powerfully clarifying, so I will put it here:



This stirred up old memories of advice to women who want to avoid physical attacks. I've heard: Don't wear a ponytail, because someone could grab you by the ponytail. It's common enough advice that there's a Snope fact-check on it. 

"An A.I. tool may learn how to superficially mimic the end result of writing, but it will never mimic a writer’s soul or how he or she actually produces meaningful writing..."

"... that process by which an individual idiosyncratic mind works out a problem, granting readers access to the inner life of another actual person, that constitutes the lifeblood of writing and storytelling.our institutions embrace a totally unproven technology. University administrators routinely announce new partnerships with A.I. startups, and well-meaning instructors — perhaps imagining an ideal student in an ideal world, or just wanting to feel like they’re on the cutting edge — incorporate these tools in their classrooms.... I will continue to teach students that, whether they go on to write a best-selling memoir or simply scribble in their journals occasionally, we can try to do the work as honestly and earnestly as possible, bringing our full obsessive selves to the page. The act of writing itself can be an act of self-preservation, even one of defiance...."

Writes Tom McAllister, in "I Teach Memoir Writing. Don’t Outsource Your Life Story to A.I." (NYT).

Good luck enforcing student authenticity. They're writing for you, but what you want is for them to do what's for their own good. So you must structure things so that when they do what's for their own good you will reward them. I'm tempted to... I mean, here I am, going straight to A.I. with: "A creative writing teacher wants students not to use A.I. How can that rule be enforced?" Grok gave me 7 ways to detect the use of A.I., then suggested "flipping the script: allow AI as a brainstorming tool but require students to document how they transformed its suggestions."

I've never taken a creative writing class, but I have thought of writing a memoir. If I did, at this point, I would definitely use Grok, not because I want help composing sentences and paragraphs, but to get encouragement to see the value of the material. 

"There are orange 'smart composting bins' on many street corners. But you’ll have to sign up for the NYC Compost app to open them...."

"You can also find a drop-off site with green bins that do not require an app. But the hours they are available may vary. The law says that any building with four or more apartments must have an area that’s accessible for compost drop-offs. What 'accessible' means is open to interpretation.... '"Accessible to residents" is going to look different in every building' and does not guarantee that a composting bin will be available around the clock or that there will be a bin on every floor...."

From "New York Is Getting Strict About Composting. Here’s What to Know. Starting April 1, buildings that don’t separate compostable waste from trash will face fines" (NYT).

Commence the ritual of atonement for your amorphous environmental sins. Or just eat every bit of every damned food item you buy. So: bone-out meat, fruit with edible peels, dried whole egg powder, etc.

"There’s a book that my therapist recommended. I didn’t read it, but I did read the first chapter on this practice called morning pages."

"It’s meant to get you connected with your creativity. I’ll sit down and free associate, either with writing or with doodles. I might sketch shapes that relate to an interior or a table. It was pushed on me by my therapist, to wake up, make tea and create a soft, uninterrupted moment for myself."

From "How the Owner of a Nightclub and a Roller Rink Spends His Sundays/Varun Kataria owns various nightlife venues in Bushwick, Brooklyn. His Sundays usually begin with creative projects and end with his dog, Mushroom" (NYT)(I made that a free-access link because the photographs draw you into a particular world).

1. "Morning pages" — similar to but different from what I'm doing here on this blog. Before this blog, I'd use a sketchbook and a fountain pen. There were more doodles, fewer quotes. 

2. "I didn’t read it... pushed on me by my therapist" — he's getting "connected with [his] creativity" and disconnected from that therapist. 

3. "Mushroom" — name your dog Mushroom, and those people who just have to ask "What's his name?" — or "What's his name or her name (I don't want to misgender him... or her)?" — will forever be inquiring whether it refers to psychedelic mushrooms. Good conversation starter actually... probably.

Festivities of whiteness.

Diddy White Party pic.twitter.com/pXfsutl3Jl

— Donna Marie (@sabback) March 22, 2025

Contemplating the meaning of whiteness, I reread Chapter 42 of "Moby Dick," "The Whiteness of the Whale." Help me answer the question as asked by Herman Melville: Why does whiteness symbolize "spiritual things" and also work as an "intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind"?

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?