"Salmon given antianxiety drugs take more risks, study finds."

Says the headline at The Washington Post — free-access link. Your first thought might be: Scientists, leave those fish alone! But they're not just getting the drugs from scientists:

We’re turning our rivers, lakes and oceans into soups of pharmaceutical pollution.... Nearly 1,000 pharmaceuticals have been detected in waterways around the world.... 

"We have now seen that the Trump administration manages the economy with the same expertise and competence it manages higher education, and as a result we might begin to rally the American people."

I'm reading "I’m a Columbia Professor. Here’s the Really Disheartening Part of This Mess," a NYT op-ed by Matthew Connelly, a Columbia history professor.

I'm all for expertise and competence, but who is this "we" threatening to "rally" us in the name of longing for expertise and competence?

Well, it doesn't say "rally us," it says "rally the American people." I used the "us" pronoun for "the American people," but that doesn't work very well with the "we" that is used twice in the quoted sentence.

Professor Connelly sees himself and his New York Times readers as the "we" who look on as Trump breaks things and hope to excite "the American people" to oppose and resist Trump. But the American people have supported Trump because the American people have seen what your "we" has done with its power when it has had the chance. "Let the Experts Handle It Again" is not a great rallying cry these days.

I'm railing about one sentence. Most of the column is about Columbia working with the Trump administration and professors at other schools boycotting Columbia. Connelly's "we" is not cohesive. It's in no position to "rally the American people." It's in what Connelly calls a "circular firing squad." And you want to be our "expertise and competence" providers?

"On American TV shows, the London native starred as an android brought to an asteroid to keep a prisoner (Jack Warden) company on 1959’s 'The Lonely'..."

"... the seventh episode of CBS’ 'The Twilight Zone,' and she was the self-described 'office bitch' Roz in 1982-83 on ABC’s adaptation of '9 to 5.'"

From "Jean Marsh, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ Actress and Co-Creator, Dies at 90/The British actress won an Emmy for her performance as the prim and proper parlormaid Rose Buck on the acclaimed ITV drama ['Upstairs, Downstairs']" (Hollywood Reporter).

I saw that yesterday and immediately watched the "Twilight Zone" episode, "The Lonely." Marsh plays a robot, given, mercifully, to a man condemned to 50 years alone on a desolate asteroid:

It's a great robot story! Watch the full episode here, on Vimeo. Great ending (with a great teaser for next week's show). I don't remember having seen "The Lonely" before, and I devotedly watched the show at the time, but perhaps not until after the first season, which aired in 1959, when I was 8. 

The actor who plays the condemned man in "The Lonely" is Jack Warden. That blew my mind! I had just finished watching "Shampoo" (on The Criterion Channel) the previous night.

In "Shampoo," Warden plays the male character who is not played by Warren Beatty. I never go around thinking about Jack Warden! And yet yesterday, before I got the prompt to watch "The Lonely," I was thinking about Jack Warden. Here's the trailer, which has everything you need to know about Warren Beatty and just a bit of Jack Warden:

"My friends and I are being described as like Satan’s lapdogs, the devil and the Manson family all rolled into one."

Wrote Michelle Zajko, in a letter from jail, quoted in The London Times, which looks like this:

 

Note the caption — The Times doesn't seem to know the difference between "peddle" and "pedal." Imagine riding lies around like they're some kind of bicycle!

As for these Zizians:

The Zizians have been described by authorities as an “extremist group”. A woman who knew one of their alleged members described them as a group of “highly intelligent, transgender, vegan” individuals. Social media posts attributed to the group have mentioned “evil people ganging up to kill off good people”, and a wish to “strip society of morality”....

About that figurative use of "lapdogs," the OED finds it first in the 1838 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton novel "Alice, or The Mysteries," where a character says:

"I allow that your beauty and talent were sufficient of themselves to charm a wiser man than Doltimore; but had I not suppressed jealousy, sacrificed love, had I dropped a hint to your liege lord,--nay, had I not fed his lap-dog vanity by all the cream and sugar of flattering falsehoods,--you would be Caroline Merton still!"

Now, that's writing! Perhaps you remember The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which "challenged entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels."

Sunrise — 6:16.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments. And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

I remember a blog post from December 6, 2021 titled "I remember...."

I remember it began: "I remember something made me read this old blog post of mine, from 2013, when I had a little project going where I'd take one sentence from 'The Great Gatsby' and present it for discussion.... The sentence of the day was 'I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands.'"

I'm looking back at that post because I just did a search of my archive for "Brainard," because I'm reading a new article in The New Yorker, by Joshua Rothman, "What Do You Remember? The more you explore your own past, the more you find there" and it begins: "Last year, for my birthday, my wife gave me a copy of 'I Remember,' an unusual memoir by the artist Joe Brainard. It’s a tidy little book, less than two hundred pages long, made entirely from short, often single-sentence paragraphs beginning with the words 'I remember.'"

Writing about that "Gatsby" sentence, I'd said: "Things remembered: fur coats, chatter, hands waving, matchings of invitations, and long green tickets. These remembered things give the reader a sense of the incompletely delineated human beings.... This is a mass of faceless humanity, cluttered with hands, waving and clasping.... " And a commenter, gadfly, said: "Althouse is doing her Joe Brainard, 'I Remember' schtick - but she can't top the master." He quoted Brainard's book, and it was obviously my kind of thing — very sentence-y. I immediately read it. I'll read it again, now that I'm reminded of it.

But what is Joshua Rothman saying about it?

"The Trump administration has begun to scrutinize the real estate transactions of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, in what could be the opening move..."

"... of President Trump’s first investigation into one of his foremost adversaries. The head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency sent a criminal referral letter to the Department of Justice this week, saying that Ms. James 'appeared to have falsified records' related to properties she owns in Virginia and New York in order to receive favorable loan terms.... When purchasing the Virginia residence, Ms. James signed notarized paperwork attesting that she would use it as a principal residence.... The referral letter also accused Ms. James of misrepresenting the number of units in a Brooklyn home she purchased in 2001, possibly in order to receive better interest rates.....The month before Ms. James’s lawsuit against Mr. Trump went to trial, anonymous complainants began to file documents with New York City’s Department of Buildings, several of them related to the number of units in the home.... One of the complaints, in October 2024, asked why Ms. James was 'NOT being prosecuted for fraud and filling false documents when other people have been persecuted for far less crimes,' then added a pointed question: 'a Double Standard???'"

From "Trump Official Scrutinizes N.Y.’s Attorney General Over Real Estate/The head of a U.S. housing agency told prosecutors that Letitia James appeared to have falsified real estate records, a move that could be the start of an investigation of a key Trump adversary" (NYT).

"The man accused of setting fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence Sunday indicated he was motivated by his views on the Israel-Gaza war and believed Shapiro needed to stop the killing of Palestinians..."

"... a newly unveiled search warrant says. Cody Balmer, 38, made the declarations in a 911 call after he left the property, in which he reported his own attack to dispatchers.... Balmer — who reportedly struggled with untreated mental illness — said the governor needed to stop having [Balmer's] friends killed and said 'our people have been put through too much by that monster,' according to the affidavit. He also said, 'All he has is a banquet hall to clean up.' Balmer allegedly identified himself by name and told the dispatcher he would “confess to everything that I had done.... Shapiro has expressed support for Israel, and last year pushed for the University of Pennsylvania to disband a pro-Palestinian encampment...."

From "Suspect who targeted Shapiro cited views on Palestinians, warrant says/Cody Balmer, 38, described his views in a call to 911 reporting the attack. His brother said that Balmer suffered from mental illness" (WaPo).

We're told that Cody Balmer's brother Dan says Cody "was diagnosed with bipolar disorder" and has expressed the belief that his sister-in-law is a witch. And: "Dan Balmer also said Cody Balmer was politically independent and had urged his family to vote for Donald Trump in November."

"August finally came in with a blast that shook my house and augured little augusticity. I made raspberry Jello the color of rubies in the setting sun."

"Mad raging sunsets poured in seafoams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of hope beyond, I felt just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words. Everywhere awful ice fields and snow straws; one blade of grass jiggling in the winds of infinity, anchored to a rock. To the east, it was gray; to the north, awful; to the west, raging mad, hard iron fools wrestling in the groomian gloom; to the south, my father's mist...."

So begins the last chapter of "Dharma Bums," by Jack Kerouac. Full text at the link. Now, I've finished it. I read it because it came up in the context of notes that people leave at the top of mountains, blogged here.

No, I don't know what "groomian" means, but somehow the Jello made me feel grounded. The word "groom" does appear elsewhere in the book. Maybe that's a clue. It's in this description of colleges as "nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity

Magnolia.

"I'm reading about a tennis player who smelled so bad that her opponent was heard complaining, and I'm wondering..."

"... if a sports player might in some cases, perhaps this one, deliberately acquire a bad smell to gain a competitive edge? Are there known cases? Do the rules cover this behavior? It could be a way of cheating. Beyond sports, what other areas of human competition offer opportunities to gain an advantage through smelling bad?"

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok.

You can read Grok's answer here.

And here's the news story that prompted my question: "British tennis player Harriet Dart apologizes after asking opponent to wear deodorant during match/Dart told the umpire that her opponent, Lois Boisson, 'smells really bad'" (CBS Sports).

"After becoming pregnant with their son, St. Clair and Musk’s relationship progressed.... In November, Musk responded to a selfie she texted him saying: 'I want to knock you up again.'"

"While she was pregnant, Musk had urged her to deliver the baby via caesarean section and told her he didn’t want the child to be circumcised. (Musk has posted on X that vaginal births limit brain size and that C-sections allow for larger brains.) St. Clair is Jewish and circumcisions are an important ritual in the religion, and she decided against a C-section. He told her she should have 10 babies, and they debated the child’s middle name.... She complied with the request to not name Musk on the birth certificate. Not long after the birth, [Musk’s longtime fixer, Jared] Birchall pushed St. Clair to sign documents keeping the father of the baby and details regarding her relationship with Musk secret in return for financial support. The offer was a one-time fee of $15 million for a home and living expenses, plus an additional $100,000 a month until the baby turned 21. Musk told her by text it was dangerous to reveal his relationship to the baby, describing himself as the '#2 after Trump for assassination.' He added that 'only the paranoid survive.' But she didn’t sign...."

From "The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers/The world’s richest man juggles more than a dozen children and ‘harem drama’ along with running his companies and advising Trump. He recently took a paternity test in a battle with one woman over money and privacy" (Wall Street Journal).

The life of a one-man genius sperm bank is not easy.

An "SNL" sketch that surprisingly spoofs the idea that you're not allowed to ask where that baby came from.

"This is going to anger a lot of people.... People say they want change in the Democratic Party, but really they want change so long as it doesn’t potentially endanger their position of power."

"That’s not actually wanting change. That’s selfishness.... 'What we are not saying here is, ‘Oh, you’re old, you need to go.' What we’re saying is we need to make room for a new generation to step up and help make sure that we have the people that are most acutely impacted by a lot of the issues that we are legislating on — that are actually going to live to see the consequences of this."

Said David Hogg, who is a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee and also the president of Leaders We Deserve, which has a plan to back young challengers to Democratic incumbents in Democratic primaries.

Hogg is quoted in "A Top Democratic Official Plots to Take Down Party Incumbents/David Hogg, a young liberal activist and now a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, is leading an effort to unseat the party’s older lawmakers in primaries" (NYT).

At a private meeting last month, a “neutrality policy” was circulated asking the party’s top officers to refrain from any activity that would “call into question their impartiality and evenhandedness,” according to two people with knowledge of the pledge, which sought to cover officers “both in their D.N.C. capacity and in their personal capacity.” Everyone signed it — except Mr. Hogg.

Donald Trump presents — without a word of commentary — Joe Biden, saying "colored kids."

pic.twitter.com/Y6OFeGKS4l

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 16, 2025

What do we think of Joe here? It can't be that he's racist for saying "colored kids." It's not as though Biden is attempting to revive the old expression. It's not like what the other Joe — Joe Rogan — has been doing with the word "retarded." Biden is painting a picture of the past, when he was boy: "I remember seeing kids going by — at the time, called 'colored kids' — on a bus going by." Part of the memory is the memory of what the black children were called. It was the completely common speech of that time and, I believe, the preferred term. Not racist. To cling to it, after the 1950s, became problematic, but Biden isn't clinging to it. He's recreating his boyhood experience, sensing and learning. I think Trump knows all that, and by merely showing the speech and saying nothing, he avoids criticism. He just hangs it out there for people to react to, as if Biden's mere voicing of the now-disfavored words is the same as his actually using the word as his go-to way to refer to black people today. Many will take the bait.

The UK supreme court has ruled that the terms 'woman' and 'sex' in the Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex....

"Five judges from the UK supreme court ruled unanimously that the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 did not include transgender women who hold gender recognition certificates (GRCs). In a significant defeat for the Scottish government, the court decision will mean that transgender women can no longer sit on public boards in places set aside for women. It could have far wider ramifications by leading to much greater restrictions on the rights of transgender women to use services and spaces reserved for women, and prompt calls for the UK’s laws on gender recognition to be rewritten. The UK government said the ruling 'brings clarity and confidence' for women and those who run hospitals, sports clubs and women’s refuges. A spokesperson said: 'We have always supported the protection of single sex spaces based on biological sex. Single-sex spaces are protected in law and will always be protected by this government...."

The Guardian reports.

"The gender critical campaign group For Women Scotland, which is backed financially by JK Rowling, said the Equality Act’s definition of a woman was limited to people born biologically female...." So, let's check out what Rowling is saying on X:

"Would [Harvard] recognize the Ku Klux Klan? For me, the National Lawyers Guild and the Ku Klux Klan are indistinguishable in terms of ideology...."

"If [Harvard] wouldn't recognize Klansmen or if it wouldn't recognize a group of sexists who called for the end of equality for women, then it shouldn't recognize the pro-Hamas National Lawyers Guild.... If this were the 1950s and there was a university say the University of Mississippi — Old Miss — that was forcibly integrated and it was allowing... some of the Klansmen who were students to harass black students, and the federal government came in and said 'Unless you stop Klansmen from harassing black students we're going to cut off federal funding,' people would be applauding that.'..."

Said Alan Dershowitz, in his latest "Dershow":

"A startup called Sperm Racing, run by four teenage entrepreneurs from the US, said it had raised $1.5 million to stage the event at the Hollywood Palladium..."

"... on April 25. Eric Zhu, the company’s 17-year-old co-founder, said the inaugural event would pit samples taken from two healthy young university students against each other on a racetrack 20cm (8in) long and modelled on the female reproductive system.... 'We want to turn health into competition,' Zhu said. 'Sperm is surprising as a biomarker. The healthier you are, the faster sperm moves.'... A live video feed, magnified 40 times to display the 0.05mm spermatozoa, will track the samples’ progress....The event will be run over three races in front of a crowd of 4,000 spectators, and feature play-by-play commentary, instant replays and leaderboards, according to Zhu.

I'm reading "What to expect from ‘world’s first competitive sperm race’/A fertility startup raised $1.5 million to stage the event at the Hollywood Palladium this month" (London Times).

With the sperm expected to swim at a speed of 5mm per minute, each race will take something like 40 minutes. There are 3 races... and room for 4,000 spectators. Interesting concept, and congratulations to the teenagers for getting $1.5 million and an article in the London Times, but I think success here depends on the quality of the play-by-play commentators.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "What is the key to doing good play-by-play commentary for a long race, say 40 minutes?"

At the Tuesday Night Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

About those shorts.

Link.

"Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting 'Sickness?'"

"Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!"

Said Donald Trump (on Truth Social).

That message follows the news: "The Trump administration says it will freeze $2 billion in funding after Harvard refuses its demands" (NYT).

The demands — in the words of the NYT — are "that the university reduce the power of students and faculty members over the university’s affairs; report foreign students who commit conduct violations immediately to federal authorities; and bring in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is 'viewpoint diverse,' among other steps."

“Let those peasants in the United States wail in front of the 5,000 years of Chinese civilization."

"The Chinese people do not cause trouble, nor are they afraid of trouble. Pressure, threats and blackmail are not the right way to deal with China."

Said "a top Chinese official," quoted in "China fumes ‘peasants in the US’ will suffer as country issues stark warning on Trump’s ‘shameless’ tariff war" (NY Post).

"I do a weird little thing that really works. I tuck the hem of my pants underneath my heel inside my shoe while I’m walking outside."

"I know it sounds strange, but it keeps them from getting filthy on the street or the train. Once I’m indoors, I just pull them back out and let them drape as they’re meant to."

Said the designer Hillary Taymour, quoted in "Are My Pants Really Supposed to Drag on the Ground? Puddle pants, or trousers with floor length, pooling hems, are everywhere right now. Our critic offers tips for wearing them without tracking dirt around with you" (NYT).

Don't we all have pants like that? Too long, and we're too busy to get them re-hemmed. We can just wear them now and inform people that they are "puddle pants."

Things we will know by September.

"We’ve launched a massive testing and research effort that’s going to involve hundreds of scientists from around the world. By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures."

Said RFK Jr., at a Cabinet meeting last Thursday, quoted in "Experts Doubt Kennedy’s Timetable for Finding the Cause of Autism/The nation’s health secretary announced that he planned to invite scientists to provide answers by September, but specialists consider that target date unrealistic" (NYT).

Why did he phrase it like that? I do not get the "by September." I could believe that scientists could be chosen to report their best ideas by a particular deadline and that a fact-finder could declare an answer, the way a court, after hearing evidence, could resolve an issue for the purpose of ending a dispute. But that's not the same as knowing. 

I note that he did not say we will know what causes autism. He said we will know what has caused the autism epidemic. Perhaps we will know — or have a pretty good answer to the question — whether the increased numbers are caused by more people seeking the diagnosis, or a changing standard in giving the diagnosis, or some substance (or combination of substances) in the environment, or (to quote Kennedy)  "different ways of parenting." To seek a cause for the epidemic is to ask what has changed. But a lot of things have changed over the years.

Plenty of people were already worried that RFK Jr. was not firmly rooted in science. His "by September" statement stokes that worry — and makes me think he likes to tweak the worriers. 

"Even Mao Zedong displayed a mischievous, almost grandfatherly warmth in private. Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger were both startled..."

"... during their historic 1972 visit to China: Mao joked with them, played with words and made them feel at ease — a deliberate mask concealing one of history’s most devastating authoritarian records. Private interactions, no matter how pleasant, should never influence how we weigh any leader’s record. Matthews softened his judgment of Castro after their personal encounter, helping shape American perceptions of the Cuban revolution — perceptions that soon collided with reality. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain trusted Adolf Hitler’s private assurances during their meetings, describing Hitler afterward as a man with whom he could 'do business' — just before Europe descended into war."

Writes León Krauze in "Bill Maher went to Washington. He got played. Authoritarians always smile in private — especially to journalists" (WaPo).

"Matthews" = Herbert Matthews, who interviewed Castro in 1957, and wrote in the NYT: "The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him."

"He was clearly eligible for naturalization. He met all the requirements for citizenship, and he had applied for it last year, and he was scheduled for an interview, and he should have been naturalized."

Said the lawyer for Mohsen Mahdawi, quoted in "Palestinian Columbia student detained by ICE at citizenship interview/Mohsen Mahdawi, who has been a green-card holder for 10 years, was detained at an ICE field center in Vermont while appearing for a naturalization test" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Stephen Miller goes into a long Trumpish "weave," and the reporters don't turn and walk away.

I guess they're still waiting and hoping that they'll be the one to wedge in a question that will somehow stymie the man who's never going to stop:

I am SO GLAD the Trump administration decided to completely UNLEASH Stephen Miller on the media.

He regularly displays a masterclass in debunking their lies.

"Guys - do you know the difference between a deportation order and a withholding order? Do you know the difference? Any… pic.twitter.com/sDmzpLtiyu

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 14, 2025

What a dysfunctional relationship! Miller will take any question and return to the tortured, raped, and murdered women and girls who rule his world. The reporters cling to the hope that the plight of the deportees will seize the hearts of America. If only Miller would say something sufficiently inhumane about them, but every answer is the same: Think of their victims — the women and girls!

Sunrise — 6:18, 6:19, 6:22.

Talk about whatever you like. And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"I feel I’ve lived my life well, but it’s a feeling. I’m just reasonably happy with what I’ve done."

"I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it. If you look at the universe and the complexity of the universe, what I do with my day cannot be relevant."

Said Daniel Kahneman, on March 19, quoted in "There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death" (NYT). On March 27th, he followed through with his plan to die by assisted suicide.

Another quote: "I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am 90 years old. It is time to go."

Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work in "behavioral" economics. You may know his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow."

Larch, magnolia, katsura.

Photos from yesterday in the Arb.

"The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States."

"I mean, we’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. We just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere and you want us to go back into releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? That’s not going to happen."

Said El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, quoted in "El Salvador President Nayib Bukele says he won’t return Abrego Garcia to U.S." (CNBC).

The Supreme Court — in Noem v. Abrego Garcia — obligated the Trump administration to "facilitate and effectuate" returning Abrego Garcia to the United States and sent the case back to the district court to "clarify" the meaning of "effectuate" and to do so with "the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs."

"Oh, the women got back already."

I say, scanning the headlines for a report on Katy Perry, et al., and seeing "Blue Origin flight lands safely after taking Katy Perry, historic all-female crew into space" (Fox News).

I hate space tourism, and I hate just about every use I see of the word "historic," but, of course, you don't want anything bad to happen to the humans hurled upward in a tin can and falling back down to where they started.

Here's Katy Perry's delightfully inane pre-flight commentary:

"It’s kind of hard to make a funny video about that. Like, ‘Yeah, they died. This is the end of the content.'"

"[Said the father, who] was burned out on social media and worried about disappointing people. He didn’t want to answer any more questions. Ultimately, he simply deleted TikTok from his phone and left the story unfinished. 'I mean, what do you think?' Dr. Clifford asked me. 'How would you have finished it?' He was finishing it now, I said. What did he want people to know? He paused and then said that he wanted to thank his followers for their support and tell them that he had given these octopuses his all. 'I think the obvious lesson is that they’re not good pets,' he said. 'They’re not durable pets, they’re not cheap pets, they’re not easy pets....'"

From "A Cautionary Tale of 408 Tentacles/One pet octopus suddenly became more than four dozen. They went viral. Then it all went south" (NYT).

To see the story of the little boy who loved octopuses and the dentist dad who made the boy's dream come true and displayed the the dream — while it lasted — go to the doctoktopus TikTok page: here. 

"With his death, the last of the Latin American Boom's great stars has gone."

I'm reading "Mario Vargas Llosa: Giant of Latin American literature dies at 89" (BBC).

His first novel, The Time of the Hero, was an indictment of corruption and abuse... based on the writer's own time as a teenager at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, which he described in 1990 as "an extremely traumatic experience." His two years there made him see his country "as a violent society, filled with bitterness, made up of social, cultural, and racial factions in complete opposition". The school itself burnt 1,000 copies of the novel on its grounds, Vargas Llosa claimed.

His experimental second novel The Green House (1966) was set in the Peruvian desert and jungle, and described an alliance of pimps, missionaries and soldiers based around a brothel.

The two novels helped found the Latin American Boom literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The Boom was characterised by experimental and explicitly political works that reflected a continent in turmoil....

The Governor's mansion, after the fire.

The man arrested for the crime, Cody Balmer, 38, has confessed, the NYT reports.

It was a low-key sunrise....

... but we got out later in the day — to the Arb — and found the earliest of the flowering trees in bloom:

That last photo shows my hand steadying the delicate bloom of the Polish larch. The previous 3 photos are all of the magnolia. These are our magnolias. You don't need to tell me that your magnolias look different or that only your magnolias deserve the name magnolias. These are magnolias. 

AND: Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

"The failure to find a clear biomarker doesn’t mean that there is no biological basis for A.D.H.D.; most scientists I spoke to..."

"... agreed that the condition is produced by some combination of biological and environmental forces, though there is little consensus about the relative importance of each. But it does have certain implications for the field, including for the question of medication. If we’re no longer confident that A.D.H.D. has a purely biological basis, does it make sense that our go-to treatment is still rooted in biology?... Adderall, now the leading treatment for the disorder, is a type of amphetamine.... A significant part of the A.D.H.D. establishment does, in fact, promote the message that children and adolescents who resist medication don’t know what’s good for them...."

I'm reading "Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong? With diagnoses at a record high, some experts have begun to question our assumptions about the condition — and how to treat it" (NYT)(free-access link).

"He remember... the night he thought his hair would turn white listening to the sound of Russian guards battering prisoners with fists and metal piping..."

"... knowing it would be his turn in the morning. Or the feeling of constant hunger, and the terrible disappointment of waking from a dream in which he was eating his favourite meal. Or the Russian pop song Forever Young, Forever Drunk, which one commandant would play as he selected who to beat...."

From "I was a PoW in Russia — guards played pop music before beatings/Ukrainians released in prisoner swaps with Putin struggle to understand or even remember the horrors they experienced" (London Times).

And here's a YouTube link, if you want to listen to Forever Young, Forever Drunk, the song chosen to intensify the fear of torture.

"The Podcaster Asking You to Side With History’s Villains/Darryl Cooper is no scholar. But legions of fans — many on the right — can’t seem to resist what he presents as hidden truths."

A long NYT article. Free-access link: here.

I don't listen to Cooper's podcast, but I heard a lot about it on the recent Joe Rogan podcast — this one — with Dave Smith and Douglas Murray. Snippet:

SMITH: Darryl is incredibly knowledgeable.

MURRAY: He's not, he's, he's not... when he was offered to debate the current greatest living biographer of Churchill, he said, I can't because he knows much more than me and I admire his work and I've learned from it, but I can't possibly debate him....

ROGAN: Right. But you don't have to be able to debate people to have opinions on things....  That's not your thing.

The world gave "SNL" some great material and "SNL" did not squander the opportunity. Enjoy the near perfection of "The White POTUS."

Why it's not complete perfection: 1. You need to have watched Season 3 of "The White Lotus" to get most of the jokes, 2. The joke about the watch is bad. It was like the old "moron" jokes of the 1960s — e.g., why did the moron throw his watch across the room?/He wanted to see time fly — and the idea that Eric Trump is a moron isn't worth spending time on. 

Mom & Pop Accounting.

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"Worrying about amorphous dangers can be paralyzing. Instead, if you’re considering non-coöperation work, write up a plan..."

"... for the worst-case scenario—what you’ll do if you get fired or audited, or find yourself in legal trouble. Reach out to a lawyer and an accountant, or others who could help you navigate complicated decisions. Now is the time to clean up your life—your digital life and even, perhaps, your personal life. Dissidents describe a pattern: autocrats and their cronies use even the most minor personal scandal to undermine the credibility of activists and weaken their movements. 'You have to be a nun or a saint,' a prominent Venezuelan political activist, who asked not to be named, told us. 'If someone wants to find dirt on you, they will find it, so give them the least dirt possible.'... Another key strategy, ironically, is compliance—as in compliance with as many laws as possible. Tax laws. Traffic laws.... The price for those who stand directly in the way of Trump’s plans may indeed grow steeper in the coming months and years. But these early acts... point to a coherent vision of a just and compassionate society.... [Soviet dissidents] raised their glasses in the traditional toast: 'To the success of our hopeless cause.'..."

From "So You Want to Be a Dissident? A practical guide to courage in Trump’s age of fear" (The New Yorker).

Eric Lee's photograph of Gretchen Whitmer in the Oval Office is a sublime work of art.

 

From the golden eagle under the table in the lower left to George Washington's camel-toe pants to the 3 shades of blue in the too-tight clothing of the 3 human figures to the insane line-up of gold objects on the mantle to the now-iconic desperate gesture of hiding behind binders, the photograph is perfect.

Link to NYT page: here.

You're either there or you're not. You can't concoct a way to not be there when you are there. It's like the way a baby might think in the early stages of learning the game of peek-a-boo. It's reminiscent of thousands of photos of perps — walked in front of the press — trying to hide behind their collar.

It made me think of Magritte....