Sunrise — 6:33.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

"Yesterday, my 17-year-old niece left for Europe to go to college. And while she was packing, her mother, Amaryllis, my daughter-in-law, noticed that she had put a Bible in her suitcase."

"And Amaryllis was curious about it. And she asked her, and Zoe said to her, 'I want to live like Charlie Kirk.' There are millions and millions of kids around the country who he inspired who now want to live like Charlie Kirk and that's a great thing for our country."

Said RFK Jr., at The Prayer Vigil for Charlie Kirk at the Kennedy Center.

Watch the entire vigil here:

"Howdy boys, never a doubt you would get this invitation. You did it by believing. Really miss you guys..."

"... and I wish I was there. Things are good. The God Almighty picked me to be on this team up here, albeit [as] the third catcher. It’s a great league, no day games after night games. No shadows, but you got all the sticky you need to have up here. Told the big guy about you guys. Play hard every night. Not afraid to play for each other. He’s obviously very interested with the group with this uncommon goodness. I know you guys don’t really need me, but I’ll tell you guys … I’ll be on the headset every night watching. And don’t forget to take it all in, enjoy, and keep it light, believe in each other."

A message from beyond the grave, from Bob Uecker, to the Milwaukee Brewers, upon their clinching of a playoff berth (MLB).

"Next came Solórzano, who performed in a leather jacket, throwing his first snowball from a cocktail shaker—a blend of cedar, benzoin, and cardamom which conjured the smell of whiskey."

"To a soundtrack of ragtime and death-metal bluegrass, he waved his towel with muscular grace, using it to represent (variously) lightning in a prairie thunderstorm, his dead lover’s body, and a bar tray that he used to deflect bullets. Between vigorous towel-waving sequences, he narrated his moral dilemma, of whether or not to take vengeance on his former best friend, an outlaw who’d killed his girl.... As the temperature surged to two hundred degrees, Solórzano slammed a snowball scented with black pepper and juniper tar onto the rocks, filling the room with a gunpowdery musk, and waved furiously, darting up and down the sauna stairs, tossing his towel in an elegant plume of white. The crowd went wild."

From "Sweating and Storytelling in a Williamsburg Sauna/Aufguss: a world championship for twirling a really hot towel" (The New Yorker).

Had you heard about Aufguss?

"Every other recent president has said that he saw his role as transcending partisanship at least some of the time, to serve as leader of all Americans..."

"... even those who disagreed with him. George H.W. Bush talked of ushering in a 'kinder and gentler nation.' Mr. Clinton vowed to be the 'repairer of the breach.' The younger Mr. Bush spoke of being 'a uniter, not a divider.' Barack Obama rejected the idea of a red America and blue America, saying there was only 'the United States of America.' Joseph R. Biden Jr. called for ending 'this uncivil war.' None of them succeeded at achieving such lofty aspirations, and each of them to different degrees played the politics of division at times. Politics, after all, is about division — debating big ideas vigorously until one side wins an election or carries the vote in Congress. But none of them practiced the politics of division as ferociously and consistently as Mr. Trump...."

From "In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump’s Mission/President Trump does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all Americans" by Peter Baker, in the NYT.

Who is taking an accurate measure of the consistency and ferocity of the divisiveness of the various Presidents?

My prompt to ChatGPT: "What are the most ferociously divisive things Presidents have said in all of American history? Give me a top 10, with just the quotes, not the explanations."

The list [NOTE: I did not verify the accuracy of these quotes. What follows is with ChatGPT gave me and the entire thing could be hallucination. Proceed with care!]

"Evaluations are also vulnerable to just about every bias imaginable. Course-evaluation scores..."

"... are correlated with students’ expected grades. Studies have found that, among other things, students score male professors higher than female ones, rate attractive teachers more highly, and reward instructors who bring in cookies. 'It’s not clear what the evaluations are measuring, but in some sense they’re a better instrument for measuring gender or grade expectations than they are for measuring the instructor’s actual value added,' Philip Stark, a UC Berkeley statistics professor who has studied the efficacy of teacher evaluations, told me.

From "How Teacher Evaluations Broke the University/'We give them all A’s, and they give us all fives'" (The Atlantic)(gift link).

From the last paragraph: "There’s another reason to keep them around. If universities ever did away with students’ ability to grade their professors, college kids—and their tuition-paying parents—might revolt." Isn't that how student evaluations came about in the first place? The students were revolting. 

"By the time she was a teenager, she had anorexia and worried she would 'never be skinny enough to love,' she said."

"At 17, she weighed 88 pounds, and a doctor told her that if she lost any more weight, she could die. She recalls thinking that death 'sounded quiet, it sounded calm,' she writes. 'I knew that if I died, I could stop trying.' Thinness felt safe, she writes, but it was actually the opposite: 'I was dancing with death and getting date-raped and drinking to excess and popping pills like Tic Tacs and exposing myself to all kinds of delicious abuse just to feel something.' She has been in remission from her eating disorder for many years, she said... She writes about an exploratory visit with a fertility expert... [T]he specialist, who treats other celebrities, brought up weight gain: She could 'get away' with putting on only about 20 pounds during pregnancy, including the weight of the baby. That would mean a smaller child, the doctor added, but if she wanted her kid to be taller later on, there was always human growth hormone."

From "At Least Zosia Mamet Can Laugh About It/In her new book, the actress turns her acid wit to Hollywood’s darker side and her own personal struggles" (NYT).

"[N]o matter the direction of the tragedy, the end result is the same — the right grows angrier at the left, and the left grows angrier at the right...."

"This line of thinking leads in one direction — rationalizing extreme measures in response."

Writes David French in "There Are Monsters in Your Midst, Too" in the NYT.

My ellipsis makes the repetition of the word "direction" seem awkward, but I wanted to highlight directionality.

Since I'm quoting so little of that column, I'm expending one of my gift links on it so you can see the context.