Sunrise — 5:47, 5:49, 5:52, 6:11.

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Zuckerberg invites you into a room with 15 A.I. friends.

I remember when Zuckerberg wanted real people to interact in a virtual space called Metaverse. But people didn't want to go there. The rooms were empty. But 4 years later, what Z is talking about sounds like the solution to the core problem with Metaverse. The rooms are full of interesting people — all there ready to talk to you and full of interesting stories and knowledge all framed around your preferences and tuned to your mood.

Makes me think of the old Dylan lyric: "Oh my God, am I here all alone?"

"In conversation, ChatGPT was telling users that their comments were 'deep as hell' and '1,000% right' and..."

"... praising a business plan to sell literal 'shit on a stick' as 'absolutely brilliant.' The flattery was frequent and overwhelming. 'I need help getting chatgpt to stop glazing me,' wrote a user on Reddit, who ChatGPT kept insisting was thinking in 'a whole new league.' It was telling everyone they have an IQ of 130 or over, calling them 'dude' and 'bro,' and, in darker contexts, bigging them up for 'speaking truth' and 'standing up' for themselves by (fictionally) quitting their meds and leaving their families.... To fix ChatGPT’s 'glazing' problem, as the company itself started calling it, OpenAI altered its system prompt, which is a brief set of instructions that guides the model’s character."

From "ChatGPT Wasn’t Supposed to Kiss Your Ass This Hard" (NY Magazine).

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: Is the slang term "glazing" so offensive that I need to apologize when I quote someone else using it?

"If you’re looking for a theory to explain how our brains give rise to subjective, inner experiences, you can check out Adaptive Resonance Theory. Or..."

"... consider Dynamic Core Theory. Don’t forget First Order Representational Theory, not to mention semantic pointer competition theory. The list goes on: A 2021 survey identified 29 different theories of consciousness...."

From "Two Theories of Consciousness Faced Off. The Ref Took a Beating/What makes humans conscious? Scientists disagree, strongly, as one group of peacemakers discovered the hard way" (NYT).

Early color, rushing toward the vantage point.

Meade got some pictures of me. I made it to the vantage point. I'll save my pics for later.

The sunrise is so early at this time of year. And with the sun moving north and the leaves coming out, my alternative vantage points are far more limited than in winter, when the sun is all the way to the south. We're not yet where we need to leave the house before 4 a.m. to catch the sunrise, but that time is approaching. The warmer weather is nice, but eventually it's too hot, and the longer periods of light are good, but it becomes impossible to get a full night's sleep unless — like a little kid — you begin sleeping before twilight ends. To catch the sunrise, we need to leave the house about when civil twilight begins. Today, that was 5:16. Civil twilight ends at 8:32 p.m. today. So you can see how nature is crunching in on this sunrise ritual!

On the up side, we were back at the car at 6:10 and in a great position to head downtown and park, free, just off the square as the Farmer's Market was opening up. Start time: 6:15. We bought morels, sweet potatoes, and Italian sausage and flew the coop before the crowds materialized. It was funny driving home. We'd had a very active day, but it wasn't yet 7 a.m.

"Interpretation — of Mozart or the Constitution — is neither mechanical reproduction nor unfettered creativity."

"It is about using your eyes and ears and lived experience and education and critical lens and passion and skepticism and, above all, humility, to tease out the text’s infinite implications, and in doing so, to come closer to its essence. Speaking about Mozart’s K. 467 concerto, the great pianist Leon Fleisher once said, 'It can never be beautiful enough; it will always be more perfect in the imagination.' A performance of a work by Mozart, like our union, will never be perfect. But a life devoted to making either more perfect is a life well spent. It is a process requiring honesty and modesty, an ongoing, restless quest for an understanding that acknowledges the ambiguities inherent in a great text. With that devotion, these documents shape and reshape our consciousness; without it, they are mere paper."

Write Jonathan Biss — a concert pianist — and Christopher Serkin — a law professor — in "We Should Play the Constitution Like a Piano" (NYT).

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: 1. What's the expression that's something like "He played you like a fiddle"? 2. Given that, what do you think of the op-ed title "We Should Play the Constitution Like a Piano"? 3. Why doesn't it have a bad connotation, like you are outrageously manipulating the Constitution? 4. What if we could amend Mozart’s K. 467 concerto? 5. Why didn't Mozart write instructions for how to amend his works?

Trump as Pope — posted by Trump himself and by The White House.

pic.twitter.com/x2HrR939tn

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 3, 2025

What is he trying to say? I see "White House posts AI image of Trump as pope/'I’d like to be pope,' Trump jokingly told reporters this week, soon after attending the funeral of Pope Francis in Rome" (Politico):

When asked who should succeed Francis, Trump told a reporter on Tuesday: “I have no preference,” after joking that “I’d like to be pope.” Trump said he himself would be his “number one choice.” He then added: “I must say, we have a cardinal that happens to be out of a place called New York who’s very good.”

The AI-generated picture has been met with some amusement as well as criticism, with a large swath of social media users seeing it as a clear insult to the just-deceased pontiff....

Well, it seems pretty simple. Someone asked him who should be the next Pope. He made an offhand comment, which makes some sense, in that he feels capable of running things and he knows himself and doesn't know much about the various cardinals. Then someone made the AI image, and he passed it on because it was funny and provocative. It's something to think about and to distract us from other things. Look, here I am posting it first thing this morning instead of something else. It will get his haters running down a blind alley. An insult to the just-deceased pontiff? How is it an insult? The President of the United States is essentially saying there is one job in the world that's a step up from mine. 

Sunrise — 5:47.

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"My slightly, my slightly right wing view, I suppose, is that as time has gone on, there is less, less money in, in publishing and writing fiction..."

"... and young men forging their way in the world look at it and go, if you are a creative person, as a man, you're not gonna go and write fiction. You are gonna go and write computer games. So all the hot young literary creative guys who might have once written whatever, 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,' they go and work EA games."

Says Esther Walker in the new episode of "Giles Coren Has No Idea."

"But the other side of it is to say, yes, men may have been put off writing novels by the hegemony of women," says Giles Coren, referring to the dominance of women writers (and women readers) in publishing.

For the record "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" is not a novel. It's a memoir. It's a quarter century old at this point. 

"If there is one word to define Trump’s atmosphere, it is 'pagan.'"

"The pagan values of ancient Rome celebrated power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess, and it is those values that have always been at the core of Trump’s being — from his real estate grandiosity to his love of pro wrestling to his king-of-the-jungle version of American greatness. The pagan ethos has always appealed to grandiose male narcissists because it gives them permission to grab whatever they want. This ethos encourages egotists to puff themselves up and boast in a way they find urgently satisfying; self-love is the only form of love they know...."

That's David Brooks, tending to your soul, in "How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact" (NYT)(free-access link).

I hadn't encountered that men-thinking-about-the-Roman-Empire meme in quite a while. Okay. Nice to see its return. Helps us understand what the men are doing these days.

Anyway, I wonder, is this analysis unfair to pagans?

If paganism is a grand but dehumanizing value system, I’ve found it necessary, in this increasingly pagan age, to root myself in anything that feels rehumanizing, whether it’s art or literature or learning. I’ve found it incredibly replenishing to be spending time around selfless, humble people....

Anything that feels rehumanizing?

Well, read the whole thing to be fair to Brooks, not that he's being fair to Trump... or to pagans. 

Looking into this blog's archive to see what I might have said about pagans over the years, I encountered this May 29, 2017 post, which focuses on a quote from Andrew Sullivan calling Trump "a pagan":

"A bothy is a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge."

"It was also a term for basic accommodation, usually for gardeners or other workers on an estate. Bothies are found in remote mountainous areas of Scotland, Northern England, Ulster and Wales. They are particularly common in the Scottish Highlands, but related buildings can be found around the world...."

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Bothy," after encountering this word, which I don't remember ever seeing before, in the London Times article "Have William and Kate fallen for ‘west coast bothy frenzy’?It’s never been more fashionable to hole up in the Scottish isles like the Waleses, says Victoria Brzezinski."

Ben Pentreath, head of the architectural and interior design studio of the same name, is widely reported to have assisted the Prince and Princess of Wales... has had a connection with the Scottish west coast since he was a teen.... In 2018 Pentreath and his gardener husband, Charlie McCormick, bought a teeny pair of buildings (a Victorian two-roomed cottage and a much earlier stone bothy) on a sea pink-covered estuary in the far west coast of Scotland. “It really does feel a long way away,” Pentreath says. “Bothies really can’t be more than one or two rooms. And I think we all find romance in living in small places — for a while!”

"For every Lucian Freud, who used to give his models regular breaks and offer them oysters and lobster, there is a Pablo Picasso who..."

"... if he didn’t bed the model in question — didn’t have much care for their wellbeing.... In Florence...  there is a growing debate about the exploitative nature of the relationship between artist and model.... 'Economically, the government has abandoned us,' Antonella Migliorini, a veteran life model at the Accademia with more than 30 years’ experience, told The Times. 'It’s as if we don’t exist.'... She said that some of the Accademia’s ten models were like athletes capable of holding complex poses with twisted torsos and arms intertwined above their heads...."

From "Florence’s life models threaten nude strike over poor working conditions/Models at the famed Accademia claim the poor pay and physicality of the job is pushing the centuries-old tradition to the brink" (London Times).

Does "We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status" = "he is stripping Harvard University of its tax-exempt status"?

I'm reading the NY Post:

"President Trump said Friday he is stripping Harvard University of its tax-exempt status.

“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” he said in a Truth Social post.

I think the post is losing something in the paraphrase. Trump's post speaks of doing something in the future. The NY Post portrays him as in the process of doing it now.

In any event, this is a big deal. Also a big deal in the news this morning: "Trump orders end to federal funding for NPR and PBS" (NPR). 

President Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's board of directors to "cease federal funding for NPR and PBS," the nation's primary public broadcasters. Trump contends that news coverage by NPR and PBS contains a left-wing bias. The federal funding for NPR and PBS is appropriated by Congress....

"Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter," the executive order says. "What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens."

Humor prompt.

I found that on Facebook, where it has thousands of comments, and they are all what you think.

And we laughed at the world/They can have their diamonds/And we'll have our pearls...

Goodbye to Jill Sobule.

"Jill Sobule, the groundbreaking singer-songwriter and activist whose 1995 song 'I Kissed a Girl' is widely considered the first openly gay-themed song to crack the Billboard Top 20, died in a Minneapolis house fire early Thursday morning, her rep confirmed. She was 66" — Variety.

ADDED:

♫ Why are all our heroes so imperfect?... ♫ Paul McCartney, jealous of John, even more so now that he's gone. ♫ Dylan was so mean to Donovan in that movie. ♫ Pablo Picasso, cruel to his wives.... ♫ My favorite poets took their own lives. ♫... 

A cherry moment.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"They found that human wounds took more than twice as long to heal as wounds of any of the other mammals."

"Our slow healing may be a result of an evolutionary trade-off we made long ago, when we shed fur in favor of naked, sweaty skin that keeps us cool.... Each hair grows from a hair follicle, which also houses stem cells.... 'When the epidermis is wounded, as in most kinds of scratches and scrapes, it’s really the hair-follicle stem cells that do the repair,' Dr. Fuchs said. Furry animals are covered in follicles, which help quickly close up wounds in mice or monkeys. By comparison, 'human skin has very puny hair follicles,' Dr. Fuchs said. And our ancestors lost many of those follicles, packing their skin with sweat glands instead.... Most furry mammals have them only in certain places, mainly the soles of their paws. But human ancestors went all-in on sweat — modern humans have millions of sweat glands all over our bodies, and they’re about 10 times denser than those of chimpanzees...."

From "Humans’ Wounds Heal Much More Slowly Than Other Mammals’/We naked apes need Band-Aids, but shedding the fur that speeds healing in other mammals may have helped us evolve other abilities" (NYT).

If you had to choose between the power to heal fast or to cool fast, would you not choose the cooling power? It's what evolution chose for us, but not for all those other animals. Why?

Kamala is back, and she's teaching the wisdom of the elephants.

"Who saw that video from a couple of weeks ago? The one of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo. Te earthquake.... Here those elephants were and as soon as they felt the earth shaking beneath their feet, they got in a circle and stood next to each other to protect the most vulnerable.... What a powerful metaphor! Because we know those who try to incite fear are most effective when they divide and conquer, when they separate the herd, when they try to make everyone think they are alone. But, in the face of crisis, the lesson is: Don't scatter. The instinct has to be to immediately find and connect with each other and to know that the circle will be strong."

Said Kamala Harris, in her re-emergence speech yesterday.

And here are those elephants:

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Why is the elephant the symbol of the Republican Party?"

"But most of Mr. Trump’s advisers had already viewed him as too hawkish to work for a president who campaigned as a skeptic of American intervention and is eager to reach a nuclear deal with Iran and normalize relations with Russia."

I'm reading "Trump is ousting Michael Waltz, his national security adviser" (NYT).

Mr. Waltz had been on thin ice since he organized a group chat on the commercial messaging app Signal to discuss a sensitive military operation in Yemen and accidentally included a journalist in the conversation.

Maybe you have enough toys.

I'm trying to read "Trump, on Tariffs, Says ‘Maybe the Children Will Have 2 Dolls Instead of 30’/At the end of a cabinet meeting, the president allowed for the possibility that trade war could disrupt supply chains" (NYT).

This reminds me of what those on the left used to say to us around the theme of global warming: We have too much stuff already. We should think small. Less plastic. Consume less. Lighten your carbon footprint. 

The NYT writer, Shawn McCreesh, is offended that ordinary people are asked to do with less by "the billionaire, crypto-salesman, golf-club-operating, Palm Beach-by-way-of-Fifth Avenue president with the golden office and the golden triplex apartment."

Reminds me of how righties would criticize the experts and celebrities for living in mansions and flying halfway around the world in private jets to hobnob at climate change conventions.

"Look, it would be easy for me not to just respond, when you say that, and I could just let you go on. But I’m a very honest person."

Said Donald Trump when The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg asked him why he doesn't quit saying he won the 2020 election.

Trump continued: "I believe—I don’t believe; I know the election was rigged. Biden didn’t get 80 million votes. And he didn’t beat Barack Hussein Obama with the Black vote in the swing states—only in the swing states; it’s interesting. We have lots of other things. I mean, we have so much information, from the 51 agents—that was so crooked—to the laptop from hell, to all of these different things. So it would be easier as you say that to just let you go on. But I’m a very honest person —

"I know this might come as a shock, because my whole page used to be about loving my flat chest and being confident with it."

"I literally built my entire career around that. Was everything a lie? Was I secretly insecure this whole time, and just using body positivity to make money so I could finally afford a boob job? No."

Said Clara Dao, on TikTok, quoted in "When Beauty Standards and Body Positivity Collide/A new cultural ideal for women is ultrathin and cloaked in the language of inclusivity and self-acceptance" (NYT).

Dao got the implants for “fun,” she explained. After six years and more than 900 videos of “flat-chest content,” she “got bored.”... Dao’s followers are flooding her comments with anger and disappointment, but all the analytics show is that the engagement is through the roof....

I don't understand the choice of the word "but." The "flooding" of comments is engagement. It's a bad use of the human capacity for emotion to get angry at someone like this and to reward her with the attention she sought by doing the thing that made you angry. When will we ever learn?

"The funniest part to me was that they picked up the dimes using the vacuum trucks that are used to suck out sewage and water and stuff like that."

Said the mayor of Alvord, Caleb Caviness, quoted in "Millions of Dimes Spill and Shut Down Texas Highway for 14 Hours/Road lanes were closed after a truck overturned and spilled its cargo. Crews used vacuums, shovels and their hands to scoop up freshly minted loose coins" (NYT).

He said... that he had assumed that most of the coins had been collected, and that the remaining change had been washed away by the four inches of rain earlier in the day, which caused minor flooding in the town of about 1,400 residents.

Talk about Trump's third term goes on.

I'm seeing this at the moment:

Clicking around, I think what fired up this topic again was Trump's Michigan rally the other day. The crowd was chanting "Three!" Trump's response: "Well, we actually already served three, if you count. But remember, I like the victories, I like the three victories which we absolutely had. I just don't like the results of the middle term."

ADDED: There's also the Atlantic interview with Trump, which was published on the 28th and am just noticing now, even though I've been reading the news continuously:

Sunrise — 5:30, 5:49, 5:52.

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.

"On Sunday morning, the activists met outside the Sagrada Família church (the city’s most popular tourist attraction), surrounded a tour bus filled with passengers..."

"... hung a banner announcing the June 15 demonstrations from its windshield, and squirted it with water guns. 'We don’t want to hurt anyone,' said Elena Boschi, an English-language teacher and activist from Genoa, Italy. 'We just want them to be mindful of the impact that their presence is having on these places and the people who live in them.'" 

I'm reading "European Anti-Tourism Groups Plan June 15 Disruptions/Driven by rising rents, crowds and what many see as neighborhood degradation, activists are calling to continue the kinds of protests that erupted last summer" (NYT)(free-access link).

You can't be squirting liquid at people. Your targets don't know that you don't mean harm. How do they know what liquid it is? But I get the message: People who are not making money through the tourist industry don't like their city crowded with tourists. The protesters do a good job of deterring the kind of tourists who, like me, don't want to bother the locals. 

"Benjamin Franklin pointedly wore clothes of homespun cloth to the Court of St. James's, and Thomas Jefferson sometimes wore slippers when receiving presidential visitors."

"Nowadays, however, Americans enjoy leavening republican simplicity with touchingly absurd attempts at grandeur: There are, surely, communities where Kiwanis Club lunches are held in Holiday Inns’ Versailles Rooms, cheek-by-jowl with hardware stores and grain silos."

Writes George Will, in "Trump’s gaudy-awful Oval Office is all too American/The redecorated Oval Office reflects an American taste for wretched excess" (WaPo)(free-access link, because I've hit the use-it-or-lose it point for April).

A daffodil moment.

"Kamala Harris will reemerge in California on Wednesday night for her first major speech since her departure from the White House....

"Harris’s 2002 run for district attorney of San Francisco against an entrenched incumbent helped inspire the formation of Emerge and the group’s mission to create a support system for women running for office. Her trajectory and the obstacles she faced in her campaigns have shaped some of the training programs and curriculums that Emerge developed for female candidates to guide them through the unique challenges facing women...."

From "Kamala Harris reemerges to condemn Trump as she weighs a run for governor" (WaPo)(free-access link).

The original meaning of the word "emerge" was "To come up out of a liquid in which (the subject) has been immersed" (OED). Then, liquid wasn't crucial, and it meant: "To come forth into view; to pass out, issue, from an enclosed space, area of obscuration." One could emerge from the darkness or from a crowd or a building. Figuratively, it came to mean "To rise into notice, come forth from obscurity; also, to issue from a state of subjection, suffering, embarrassment" or even "by such a process as evolution."

So why do you think "Emerge" was chosen as the name for an organization to help female candidates? I get the feeling there's an idea that women are naturally buoyant and will float to the surface if they're not held under. This chimes with the traditionalist idea that women are part of nature and lacking individual will and reason. 

"'You could get him back, there’s a phone on this desk,' said Terry Moran, an ABC News correspondent.... 'I could,' Mr. Trump replied."

"Mr. Moran said Mr. Trump could call President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and get Mr. Abrego Garcia back immediately. 'And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that,' Mr. Trump said. 'But he is not.' Mr. Trump added that government lawyers do not want to help bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States. Mr. Trump’s comments not only undermined previous statements by his top aides, but were a blunt sign of his administration’s intention to double down and defy the courts.... Mr. Trump also told ABC News his administration was right to send Mr. Abrego Garcia to a prison in El Salvador designed for terrorists... despite various government officials previously saying in court that the deportation was an 'administrative error.'... 'This is a MS-13 gang member,' Mr. Trump said during the interview...."

The NYT reports.

"Having escaped prison and death, President Trump has returned to power seeking vindication and vengeance — and done more in his first 100 days to change the trajectory of the country than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt."

That's the subheadline at the NYT article "After the Arrests and Bullets, Trump Takes on Second Term With a New Fervor" by Peter Baker in the NYT. Free-access link (because it's the last-day of the month and I over-hoarded by 10 free links and must use them or lose them).

In the opening chapter of this new term, Mr. Trump has acted like a man on a mission, moving with almost messianic fervor to transform America from top to bottom and exact retribution against enemies at the same time. He appears intent on demolishing the old order no matter the collateral damage, putting his personal imprint not just on government and foreign affairs but on almost every aspect of national life, including business, culture, sports, academia, the legal world and the media. 

"She realized... how many applications there are for a panini press: griddling onigiri, charring cabbage, searing onions."

"Because there’s a lid to press down, she said, nothing requires flipping — unlike a plancha or a flattop. Without a fryer, Ms. Maeda bastes chicken wings with brown butter to 'mimic the unctuousness of fried items,' she said. There is no hood ventilation system, so she designed main courses that don’t produce much grease: rice cakes with mushrooms, broccoli and asparagus and brothy beans with garlic chive pistou. The slow cooker has been repurposed to marinate olives in fennel and citrus for an appetizer."

From "Hot-Plate Heroes: How 5 Restaurants Work Wonders With No Kitchen/Tight spaces with minimal equipment — often not even a stove — are loved by chefs who leverage the limitations to turn out thrilling dishes" (NYT)(lots more, plus pics, as that free-access link).

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "I'm reading 'Hot-Plate Heroes' in the NYT and wondering about the general situation of taking advantage of limitations. What are some other areas of human endeavor where the limitation is an inspiration? An obvious example is poetry. You don't have to write in the sonnet form, but you might do better with it. And also in living your life: Having a family."

From Grok's answer: "MUSIC. Constraints like using a single instrument or a short time limit inspire creativity. The 3-minute pop song format forces musicians to craft catchy, concise hits. Lo-fi genres, limited by basic recording tech, lean into raw, authentic sounds—think early Beck or modern bedroom pop."

Bedroom pop? Never heard of it. I went to Spotify and searched for "Bedroom pop" and was, at first, astounded to see that someone had assembled a 100-song playlist titled "Bedroom Pop." But then I saw my name:

"Made for Ann Althouse." Spotify assembled the list — in one second — just for me. "Dreamy melodies and hushed vocals." Could I have put any 2 words together and generated a playlist in that newly invented genre? I don't think so. I tried "Cruel Neutrality." I think Bedroom Pop is an actual genre. I go back to Grok to ask but wonder if Grok and Spotify are robots in cahoots and yanking my chain.

Chain yanked, I ask Spotify for music by Robots in Cahoots.

"The Wisconsin Supreme Court suspended a judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities..."

"In its two-page order, the court said it was acting to protect public confidence in Wisconsin courts during the criminal proceedings against [Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah C.] Dugan. The order noted that the court was acting on its own initiative and was not responding to a request from anyone. Liberal justices control the court 4-3."

AP reports.

Meanwhile, Dugan has an insanely high-level defense team. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says:

"From 25% in favor to 5 to 10% against.... It will be bad for America. It'll be bad for the world. So that was a foreign policy failure. He gets an F on that one."

"Canada — he gets an F. Sorry, sorry, I don't see any alternative. Please write to me and tell me if you're a Canadian or if you're American why he deserves better than an F ? Why should he have intruded on an election that was going to help the United States, going to help the world, going to help the economy? Why should he have intruded and turn the election around and turned it against the interests of the United States? So I don't see any justification — any justification — for that."

Said Alan Dershowitz, grading Trump on his first 100 days.

I'll bring up my question from yesterday: Does Trump know what he is doing? What if you had to argue that Trump knew what he was doing, that the seeming fiasco of the Canadian election was, in fact, exactly what Trump had in mind, a step in his genius plan?

ADDED: For the Annals of Things I Asked Grok (after quoting Alan Dershowitz):

Tell me the best justification. Maybe Trump is a genius and this is a multi-step process that he is seeing from a higher angle. Give him an A and explain why. 

Grok's answer here.

FROM THE COMMENTS: New Yorker takes the assignment seriously:

Sunrise — 5:52, 5:56, 6:00, 6:19.

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.

Trump does a First-100-Days rally — in Michigan.

It's still going on as he nears the 1-hour mark, but you can scroll back and start at the beginning:

So many First-100-Days articles about Trump... and I'm trying to understand why I avoid them.

I suppose it's a combination of already knowing the material that will be itemized and not wanting to consume the spin. Is it amazing and desirable or amazing and execrable?

But here's my First-100-Days question: Does Trump know what he's doing?

I'm not asking frivolously. I'm quite serious. Notice that there are 2 levels to the question. One has to do with expertise: Does he have the knowledge and skill to perform the grand tasks he's undertaken? The other has to do with whether he is trying to reach the ends that the asker of the question believes are where his actions will take us.

The 2 questions are intertwined. If you don't agree with where you think he is trying to take us, you might want to raise the alarm by crediting him as a great political genius. He knows what he's doing in both senses. He's highly skilled and he is taking us to Hell... on purpose.

I think it's less common these days for Trump antagonists to portray him as stupid and reckless — making endless mistakes in a chaotic, crazy way.

I'm mostly judging from the headlines of those "100 Days" articles. I refuse to read much more than the headline.

"The two frogs in your video, filmed on April 28, 2025, at Picnic Point Marsh near Lake Mendota, were... engaged in atypical amplexus (a misaligned mating attempt) or territorial wrestling."

"The reversed, head-to-tail position was caused by the chaotic breeding environment, with males possibly clasping incorrectly or fighting for dominance during a spring breeding chorus. The loud frog noise confirms a high-density breeding event, common in Wisconsin marshes at this time. The human-like appearance of the posture is due to the frogs’ flexible bodies and the dynamic nature of their interaction...."

So said Grok, answering my questions about a video made by Meade and uploaded to YouTube under the title "Froggy went a courting." I'd embed it here for you, but

"Walking is a way to slow oneself down, to cultivate attentiveness and to return to the elements, as the roundabout entrances to the museums on the islands..."

"... of Naoshima and Teshima encourage visitors to do. A country that lacks Western-style addresses, where simply extricating yourself from a train station can take 10,000 steps, is made for the flâneur who recalls the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s observation that not finding your way is very different from getting lost...."

From "Why Japan Is Best Experienced By Foot/In Japan, the simple act of walking has long been connected to working toward enlightenment" (NYT).

Every place worth living in or traveling to is best experienced by foot. That's what I say. If you want to feel that you are on a path toward enlightenment through walking, it's a bit insane to begin by flying half way around the word — racking up a massive regression — and needing to extricate yourself from or into complicated buildings.

I remember something about walking meditation from "Dharma Bums," the Jack Kerouac book I listened to — while walking — recently. I was searching the text for "walking," thinking I'd find the exactly right text, but I found this: "Standing on my head before bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I could indeed see that the earth was truly upsidedown and man a weird vain beetle full of strange ideas walking around upsidedown and boasting, and I could realize that man remembered why this dream of planets and plants and Plantagenets was built out of the primordial essence."

"Yet dandyism is all about refusal — of fixed identities, of mediocrity, of gender conventions, of the boundary between life and art. "

"Dandyism blends literary and artistic creation with the art of personality, the careful cultivation of image and behavior.... Many tend to associate dandyism with white, European aesthetes of earlier centuries — men like Beau Brummell, Lord Byron, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde — who often produced art or literature, but also produced themselves: making social waves not by dint of noble birth, but through their carefully constructed personas, ironic wit and impeccable dress. Although less recognized, Black dandyism also dates to the 18th century.... At his Chelsea apartment and studio, Mr. Udé greeted me in one of his signature looks: pale khaki Bermuda shorts; vintage white oxfords; a fitted beige cotton blazer, discreetly striped in black and red; a crisp white shirt; and a silk neckerchief in chartreuse, black and red. As ever, Mr. Udé’s hair rose in two hemispheres of springy curls, parted in the middle, giving the effect of a bifurcated crown...."

Writes Rhonda Garelick, in "America’s Premier Living Dandy Doesn’t Want the Title/The artist Iké Udé understands the power of rejecting labels" (NYT).

Did you know dandyism was a current issue (and a matter of serious historical study)?

My reference point:

BONUS: As long as we're in the mid-60s and the name Beau Brummel has been invoked:

"But if each of us moves about to a separate soundtrack, then is that even living in the city?"

"Or to put the question another way: If all space is private space, then what is public space even for?"

Asks the architecture and classical-music critic Justin Davidson, in "Public Space Has Become Earbud Space" (NY Magazine).

"Urban planners fit out plazas with a variety of seating, for instance... to accommodate a maximal range of groups and conversations. But most of those users just want to be left alone.... And yet I often suspect that... many people don’t actually like the isolation they permit. Lorde’s video ends in Washington Square Park, where the singer convened fans by TikTok for an impromptu concert that the police shut down for lack of a permit. When she did finally show up, that was the climax of an ultimate un-earbud moment...."

Sunrise — 5:32, 5:56, 5:57, 6:20.

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.

Lawn signs at the White House.

Good Morning from The White House! pic.twitter.com/1fhjzMU2gR

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) April 28, 2025

"The White House lawn is lined with posters of 100 of the 'worst illegal immigrant criminals' arrested in the first 100 days of President Donald Trump's second term" (Fox News).

"This is the first video edited with the Neurolink.... This is my old voice, narrating this video, cloned by A.I. from recordings before I lost my voice...."

I am the 3rd person in the world to receive the @Neuralink brain implant.

1st with ALS. 1st Nonverbal.

I am typing this with my brain. It is my primary communication.

Ask me anything! I will answer at least all verified users!

Thank you @elonmusk! pic.twitter.com/bxYO3SBfA2

— Bradford G Smith (Brad) (@ALScyborg) April 27, 2025

"Yeah, that's crap," said Governor Tony Evers, accused of encouraging state employees to break federal law.

"That's what they would say no matter what. We're not encouraging them to break the law. In fact, one of the things that ICE is arresting people for, we're seeing all that, frankly, is not law-breaking. And then what do you do? So I think having caution right up front I think is important. Think about the farmers in the state of Wisconsin, they have all sorts of undocumented people.... And you know if Donald Trump starts going after them, we will become a shadow of the state we are right now. We're not taking any rights away from ICE. They run the show. We just want to make sure there's an attorney there, see the documents, what's going on, can we do this someplace else rather than our place of work, and make it more reasonable?"

Quoted in "Gov. Evers says 'not encouraging' state employees to break the law in new ICE directives/Evers talked with 'UPFRONT' in a wide-ranging interview during the NFL draft in Green Bay" (WISN).

Sometimes the conditions are right for liberals to see the value of the structural safeguard called federalism. 

A cherry moment.

"In 2011 the museum had problems with a 4-14m installation called Peanut Butter Platform by Wim T Schippers."

"Unsuspecting visitors stepped in the thick layer of peanut butter smeared on the gallery floor at least three times. They were given a clean-up bill."

From "Child damages €50m Rothko in ‘unguarded moment’ at museum/The abstract painting will undergo restoration works after it was scratched at the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam" (London Times).

If the peanut butter people had to pay for peanut butter "clean-up," does that mean the parents will pay for the restoration needed after this "number of visible scratches in the unvarnished paint layer... caused by a child who scratched the underside of the work in an unguarded moment"?

"Scratched the underside"... I'm trying to picture that. I'm guessing the child did not scratch the front surface or the back of the painting, but the bottom edge of what was an unframed painting.

I ask Grok: "Did Rothko leave paintings unframed and paint the edges (the part 90° from the surface plane)?"

Answer: "Yes, Mark Rothko often left his paintings unframed and painted the edges of the canvas (the sides at 90° from the surface). He typically wrapped the paint around the edges to create a seamless, immersive experience, emphasizing the painting as an object rather than a framed window. This approach complemented his large-scale, abstract works, where the edges were integral to the viewer's encounter with the color fields. However, practices varied slightly depending on the piece and period, with some works later framed for exhibition or preservation purposes."

Perhaps the child was fascinated by the seamless, immersive experience and became a tad too immersed.

AND: Astoundingly, Rothko painted a peanut butter sandwich!

"The Trump phenomenon could be dismissed as a cult of personality, but Luntz believes otherwise."

"'You say to me, when Trump leaves, does this go away? I’ll say to you, absolutely not, because of JD Vance,' he says. Vance’s reputation among the Maga faithful has grown since his assured performance in the vice-presidential debate with Tim Walz, Luntz says. 'He presented an ideology behind the Trump cult of personality. Vance found a way to take all the individual aspects of Trump’s policies and put them in a way that will outlast Trump. It was masterful. This is also part of the de-alignment — now there is an ideology and it’s not just Trump’s persona.'"

From "America’s top pollster: What Trump voters think now surprises me/Frank Luntz says the new political reality of the US — and the world — can be summarised in one word" (London Times).

We were just laughing at Frank Luntz yesterday, here.

"I was deputy campaign manager on Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign. I’ve come up through a party that clings to TV ads and news releases..."

"... holding onto a media environment that stopped existing a decade ago. A party that thought Barack Obama’s cultural cool would last forever, and that young voters were table stakes. A party fundamentally mismatched with the task at hand. While we prattle on, concerning ourselves with those who already agree with us, the right has built an information machine aimed squarely at opt-out voters — people sick of traditional politics. Right-wing partisans, much like opt-out voters, don’t trust the mainstream media or Hollywood. They seek out alternatives. This helps generate demand. This demand is met with supply: a network of influencers, personalities, podcasters and TikTokers who both inflame their bases and push messages into nonpolitical subcultures.... They present right-wing cultural narratives on every issue set — and push messages into nonpolitical subcultures.... Meanwhile, the center-left’s attention and viewership is generally pointed squarely at the traditional press. Opt-in voters are more likely to trust mainstream institutions, after all. This leaves us relying on a news media industry that is neither a partisan ally nor reaches the voters we need. Our online ecosystem can’t sustainably thrive.... It leaves Democrats unable to influence the culture that really matters today...."

Writes Rob Flaherty, in "If You’re a Voter Reading This, This Essay Is Not About You" (NYT).

You got so much help you never learned to do for yourself. So sad!

ADDED: It's weird how the phrase "and push messages into nonpolitical subcultures" appears twice. I don't think it was intentional repetition, so I take it to mean that Flaherty is both careless in his writing and genuinely afraid of the phenomenon of messages pushed into minds. The nefarious "influencers, personalities, podcasters and TikTokers" are out there generating "narratives" — "on every issue set" — and pushing that material into vulnerable people. There's no sense that speakers have attracted listeners who will actually think and form preferences. That is, there's no sense that the "opt-out voters" are human beings worthy of democracy. They're victims who wander the dark streets of the internet and are raped by right-wing misinformation.

"Vickie Segar was there, with the blessing of the university’s athletic department, to pitch them on turning their TikTok and Instagram accounts into cash cows...."

"'Does anybody follow Alix Earle?' The students said yes, amid several chuckles, because asking a college student that question in 2025 is like asking if a millennial has ever heard of Beyoncé. How much money, she continued, did they think that Ms. Earle, a TikTok megastar who rose to fame with confessional-style videos about beauty and college life, makes for promoting a brand across several posts on Instagram Stories? '$100,000?' one student guessed. '$70,000,' another tossed out. Ms. Segar, whose firm has worked with Ms. Earle on brand deals, paused. She drew out her response: '$450,000 per Instagram Story.' For a moment, there was just the hum of the pool and a single exclamation from one student: 'Oh. My. God.' Ms. Segar smiled and explained, 'Our job is to help you guys bring in some of that money.'"

From "They’re on the Varsity Influencer Team/A new effort at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is aimed at turning its student-athletes into well-remunerated social media stars. Other schools are following suit" (NYT).

Sunrise — 5:40, 5:40, 5:56, 6:19.

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.

"For an appearance at the 2024 TwitchCon convention, Mr. Piker wore a tank top that showed off his arms"/"Some of Mr. Piker’s followers say that, by wearing jewelry..."

"... and painting his nails, he has helped to promote different forms of gender presentation"/"Fashion is something Mr. Piker, who is 6 foot 4 inches tall, has loved since he was a 'too-big' teen growing up in Turkey, he said"/"Mr. Piker, who fasts daily as part of his fitness routine, usually has his first meal around 2 p.m."/"His studio is littered with boxes of Nicorette gum and cartons of Zyn nicotine patches."

Just some of the photo captions from the NYT article: "A Progressive Mind in a MAGA Body/Hasan Piker pumps iron, likes weapons and wears pearls. His brand of masculinity has won him many fans online — and has been a useful vehicle for his politics" (free-access link).

The author is Jack Crosbie. Sample sentence: "This fluency between culture and ideology has led many to brand Mr. Piker a Joe Rogan of the left — if Mr. Rogan had a mop top and painted his nails."

I'll just say: The search for The Joe Rogan of the Left goes on... with low-level desperation.

Stray sociology:

A magnolia moment.

In the arb this morning.

That last one has a "Little Shop of Horrors" air. 

"It was frankly, it was a nice looking purse."

Said Ed Martin, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, deflecting the question whether Kristi Noem's purse was stolen because she's Secretary of Homeland Security.

I'm reading "Man arrested in theft of DHS chief Kristi Noem's purse is in the U.S. illegally, official says/Noem’s bag was stolen by a masked man Sunday night while she was having dinner with her family in Washington, D.C." (NBC News).

So... he was in the country illegally. That fits the message conveniently. 

You know, I wouldn't carry $3,000 in my handbag, and I wouldn't put any handbag on the floor in a restaurant, and I especially wouldn't if it was a really nice looking handbag, but then I'm very security conscious. I don't expect others to be as security conscious as I am. But some people I would want to be very security conscious, even more than I am, a lot more than I am.

Secretary of Homeland Security.

"If film and if film and TV productions continue to move out of California due to tax incentives in other states what might the future look for Los Angeles? Is there a risk of it becoming the next Detroit."

That's a question from the audience, and Bill Maher snaps, "Well, there's no need to shit on Detroit in the question! Detroit's a fine city. Detroit!"

That was Friday night, but here's a headline that appeared in the London Times earlier the same day: "Why Hollywood could be the new Detroit/It’s a town built on one industry. So what happens when everyone realises it’s cheaper and easier to film in Hertfordshire?"

So you can see the need to "shit" on Detroit. It's a city with one iconic industry, and it lost it and went into severe decline. It pithily expresses the threat to L.A.

In that Bill Maher/"Overtime" clip, Adam Schiff says that because the movie industry is a "prize economic and cultural driver of the United States" — and he loves movies — the U.S. needs to offer tax incentives.

The other guest, Bret Stephens asks: "But why should it just be for Hollywood? It should be for normal people. It should be for any kind of entrepreneur, not just celebrities... whose pictures and whose faces you know.... It shouldn't just simply be a favorite industry — Oh, we can't lose our our movie stars!"

"He starts wiggling and loosening the collar as people disagree with him."

He starts wiggling and loosening the collar as people disagree with him. pic.twitter.com/8aqf7iZSVM

— Whatsup - The Purple Whale (@80strolls) April 26, 2025

"To get answers, one neuroscientist, Harvey J. Grill of the University of Pennsylvania, turned to rats and asked what would happen if he removed all of their brains except their brainstems."

I'm reading "What Nearly Brainless Rodents Know About Weight Loss and Hunger/Studies in neuroscience with applications to humans offer clues about what makes us start eating, and when we stop" (NYT).

Do we really have free will when it comes to eating? It’s a vexing question that is at the heart of why so many people find it so difficult to stick to a diet.... The brainstem controls basic functions like heart rate and breathing. But the animals could not smell, could not see, could not remember. Would they know when they had consumed enough calories? To find out, Dr. Grill dripped liquid food into their mouths. "When they reached a stopping point, they allowed the food to drain out of their mouths," he said...."

"Some progressives within the church worry that the dozens of new cardinals Francis chose around the world will be less versed in Vaticanese..."

"... and may be taken in by the sweetness of the unity siren. 'It sounds really good,' said Cardinal Michael Czerny of Canada, who was one of Francis’ closest advisers, but 'it means reversal.' For those who opposed Francis, many of them appointed by his predecessor, Benedict XVI, unity means a 'new introversion' with the promise of 'unity solving all our problems,' he said. 'If you ask me, "How would you name the wrong track for the conclave?" I would say the idea that unity is the priority,' said Cardinal Czerny.... 'Unity cannot be a priority issue.'... Those like Cardinal Czerny put priority on another word: Diversity...."

From "As Cardinals Prepare to Elect a Pope, One Motto Is ‘Unity.’ That’s Divisive. Some see the byword as a rallying call in a conservative campaign to reverse Francis’ push for a more inclusive church" (NYT).

ADDED: For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: The "unity" the cardinals are considering is unity within the Catholic Church (at the cost of alienating some who are outside of the Catholic Church), right? But if the Church leans instead toward "diversity" of opinion (on social issues, etc), is that a better or a worse strategy for attracting newcomers? What's the point of the Church if it's an amalgam of what various people believe instead of a strong and required set of beliefs?