No, I don't remember.

"Do you remember the 'fruity boyfriend' discourse a few years ago in which young women online confessed their desire for men with painted nails and emotional fluency?"

That's the question from the Washington Post advice columnist as she addresses the problem, "I’m a bisexual man. Why don’t women want to date me?"

Straight women in droves [were] saying they wanted to date a guy who was “a little gay,” something of a metrosexual. They called these men “fruity,” but actual bisexuality wasn’t material to the categorization. They never got that far. A recent YouGov poll of Brits showed that two-thirds of straight women wouldn’t date a bisexual man, and even among women who had a “very positive” view of the group, almost half were still unwilling to date bi men....

Wait. Half were. That's a lot!

Anyway, the columnist decides that the problem is geographical. He needs to relocate to a major city — a place "where the guys are acting fruity, the women are acting butch, and no one is so sure of anyone else’s sexuality."

So people are saying "fruity" in a positive way now... or a few years ago? Here's some poor lady in 2025 anguishing over her inability to make her boyfriend "fruity":

"When you inspect these paintings — and even feel them, through tactile replicas of four paintings with four different kinds of dotting — you may be surprised..."

"... by their nubbiness, and how thickly the pigment has been lashed through a punched aluminum screen. The dots are raised. They grow and shrink, chafe or splinter. The sun may be setting on humanity, but look up close: Every dot, and every pixel, means nothing without you and me."

Writes Jason Farago, in "Connecting the Dots Between Roy Lichtenstein and Today The Whitney’s retrospective is full of jokes, but it captures our image overload with surprising tenderness. Our critic calls it 'the most momentous exhibition of the season'" (NYT).

That "sun may be setting" line has resonance because: "A remake of [Lichtenstein's] 1967 'Super Sunset Billboard' stands in front of the Whitney’s western picture window, so if you come at day’s end you can see two sunsets in one."

Speaking of breaking images up into tiny components and the effect on humanity:

Sunrise.

"My dad saw Houdini once—did I ever tell you this? He said it was much like you’d expect."

"They tied him up this way and that way, ropes, cables, locked him in a jail cell, then before you knew it came the sound of bolts dropping to the ground and locks flying off, and the great Houdini emerged. He just came walking out three paces behind the sheriff—and it was nothing! Anticlimax! Where was this? Manistique, Michigan, the county jail. Poor Houdini, she said. You should write a poor Houdini sonnet, Vern said. I hate it when people tell me what I should write, she said. I bet, Vern said. But still."

Wrote Anne Carson, the new winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in "Poor Houdini," published in 2024 in The New Yorker.

Manistique, Michigan is a real place. It sounds made up, though, don't you think? Like a portmanteau of "man" and "mystique." There's no [famous] book called "The Masculine Mystique."

"One of the things I am most proud of is introducing people to Bob through the building. Anytime I brought anyone there, they gasped..."

"... and had an immediate inhalation of what New York once was like, and who Bob Rauschenberg was. I thought the building felt like Bob in its elegance and eccentricities. He brought a lot of junk in."

Said Kathy Halbreich, former executive director of the Rauschenberg Foundation, quoted in "Should Robert Rauschenberg’s Art Studio Be Saved? The potential sale of the groundbreaking painter’s home in New York by his foundation, on the heels of the sale of his Florida studio, has alarmed many in the art community" (NYT).

A description of the endangered real estate: "Unlike more famous artists’ haunts, like Claude Monet’s water-lily garden at Giverny, the Rauschenberg manse, for which he paid $65,000, is grittily urban, a 9,200-square-foot townhouse set on a wide, truck-rumbling block just north of SoHo. For years gold letters were visible above the red door — Mission of the Immaculate Virgin — hinting at the building’s former life as a home for orphaned boys. Rauschenberg set up his studio on the ground floor, in a high-ceilinged room that was once the chapel."

Here's a short clip from a documentary, with Rauschenberg, in his deconsecrated chapel, speaking about his art (and, oddly, reminding me of George W. Bush):

"What we had in common was touch. I was never interested in their pessimism or editorializing. You have to have time to feel sorry for yourself if you're going to be a good Abstract Expressionist, and I think I always considered that a waste. What I did that looks like Abstract Expressionism is that with their grief and art passion and action painting... they let their brush strokes show."

"What do you love most about your human?"

@manwire68 #CapCut #dogsoftiktok #mypet #mansbestfriend🐶 ♬ original sound - Unfluencers AI

Julianne Moore wants you to see her interact charmingly with all the cool objects she has in her apartment.

Including a copy of "The Joy of Sex," which she keeps on the table by the bed because she's making a movie out of it. I guess it's like that time Woody Allen made a movie out of "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex/But Were Afraid to Ask." Oh, no, actually, per IMDB, it's the story of the the author, his wife, and his wife's best friend. Somehow they lived in a way that inspired the big best seller.

My favorite part of the Architectural Digest video? When she pulled the sleeve of her sweater over her hand and used it to polish the nickel light switch in the bathroom. The wealth + humility mix was ideal. 

The Nobel Peace Prize as a "grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice."

I'm reading "Live Updates: Human Rights Lawyer Navi Pillay Is Awarded Nobel Peace Prize/Ms. Pillay has served as a judge in her native South Africa and on international courts investigating war crimes. She led a U.N. panel that determined that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding the Israeli government rejected" (NYT):

Last year, a United Nations commission led by Ms. Pillay determined that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding that the Israeli government rejected. The decision to honor her added to the growing global blowback against Israel’s actions in Gaza. The Israeli foreign ministry denounced the Nobel committee’s decision, calling it "the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice." Though the committee did not mention Gaza in its official statement honoring Ms. Pillay, its chairman, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, told reporters that her work on the U.N. commission was "an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize."

"Start in the middle."

@newyorker The newly minted Nobel Prize winner Anne Carson shared a book recommendation and some timeless writing advice at the 2024 National Book Awards. #annecarson #poetry #booktok #classics ♬ original sound - The New Yorker

"We'll make sure that people are able to watch it — that it's public — because people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things."

Said Pete Hegseth, promising a public execution.

Holy shit…

SecWar Hegseth just confirmed the Fort Hood terrorist execution will be made public for The People to see.

Not just that, but he infers we are in times similar to WW2, and that this mindset of executing traitors is here to stay.

The noticing will continue. I am…

— Clandestine (@WarClandestine) October 8, 2026

So we are called to contemplate something that we have long believed to have been abandoned. There is some excitement — I see it in Hegseth's body language — over the return of the spectacle of imposing the death penalty.

There are serious writings to be read. I will begin with the letter Charles Dickens published in the London Times on November 13, 1849:

"Man, that Fanta tastes fantastic."

Don't think it gets better than #Brewers rookie Cooper Pratt celebrating with soda.

"They didn't have sparkling cider, so I got some Fanta... tastes special after that one, frick!"@lanceallan | @CBS58 pic.twitter.com/Nnw8UWTkq0

— Cameron Ezeir (@camezeir) October 8, 2026

That non-drinking is not because he's underage. He's young but not that young. 22. 

Pratt says he couldn't find "sparkling cider" — that's the classic Mormon substitute for champagne. 

"Times Square has always been the site of spectacle, but with FALL RISK, that spectacle is reoriented around the human body and its limits, resilience, and exposure."

Said Anna Starling, director of Times Square Arts, quoted in "Artist to be suspended 150 feet above Times Square in one-night performance" (PIX11).

I see: "The performance draws a connection to Harry Houdini, who suspended himself from a crane in Times Square nearly a century ago. But instead of focusing on escape, Kinlaw’s performance centers on endurance."

How far we've come! What other feats of the past will be recreated with the central element omitted?

Sunrise.

"The mayor, who is known for his broad, effervescent smile, seemed especially stung by the opposition to him expressed by the pro-Palestinian crowd in Union Square,

"... given his consistent support of their cause. During the vigil, he stared stone-faced, and at times looked crestfallen, as the activists chanted in support of Hamas, called for the deaths of Israeli soldiers and denounced him as a 'traitor,' many citing his meetings with President Trump or his efforts to build ties with Jewish leaders.... 'Zohran, you coward!' someone yelled from the crowd, which numbered in the hundreds. Others yelled, 'Zohran is a sellout!'"

I'm reading "For Mamdani, Oct. 7 Anniversary Sets Off Anger and Bitterness Hours after some Jewish leaders denounced Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s remarks about the attacks on Israel, activists interrupted a vigil to call him a traitor to the Palestinian cause" (NYT).

My son Chris happens to be in NYC this week, and he went to Union Square and got this photograph:

"The fraternity party at Cornell University where a woman alleges she was sexually assaulted in 2024 was officially registered under university rules that were supposed to promote safer partying."

"The rules required fraternities to designate 'trained event monitors' who would stay sober and wear distinctive clothing so that police officers, paramedics or other partygoers could quickly identify them in an emergency. One of the monitors listed by the Chi Phi fraternity in paperwork to register the 2024 party was Jonathan Newell, a man who would later be accused of sexually assaulting the woman known as Jane Doe — and the one who sent a Snapchat message inviting others into the room with her...."

From "Man Accused in Cornell Sex Assault Was Designated as a Party Monitor/The fraternity filed paperwork identifying Jonathan Newell as a 'trained event monitor' at a party where a woman said she was assaulted. He was accused of taking part" (NYT).

Alexithymia.

I'm reading "My Fiancé Won’t Touch Me. Should I Still Marry Him? Our Ask the Therapist columnist, Lori Gottlieb, advises a 65-year-old reader who loves her partner but is physically and emotionally unsatisfied" (NYT).

From the letter writer:

Our therapist and I suspect undiagnosed alexithymia (or difficulty in experiencing and describing emotions), while he defensively attributes it to mere “emotional reserve.” After a year of failed couples counseling, we are living in a completely platonic relationship.

For $25 million, you can by the 8,000-square-foot, 7-bedroom, 9-bathroom Tribeca loft with its huge Keith Haring mural...

... painted by Haring in 1979 when he was a student at the School of Visual Arts and the building was student gallery space.

Click through to the photographs of the fabulous place, at "Keith Haring Created a Mural in a TriBeCa Loft. Now, It’s for Sale. The renovated apartment featuring a once hidden early work by the New York artist is on the market for $25 million" (NYT).

The space was a restaurant for many years after the SVA moved out in the 1980s, and the mural was walled in by sheet rock. It was "uncovered it in 2007 and found to be in good shape, considering it was painted in the less than durable mix of shoe polish and alcohol."

The artwork is at one with the building:

"With striking dexterity and range, he explores how advocates reawakened Bach’s compositions and Vermeer’s paintings after one and two centuries of slumber..."

"... how technological advances rekindled theories of continental drift and black holes; how accidents resuscitated hand-washing and genetics; and how war renewed interest in the submarine and 'The Great Gatsby.'"

From "What if the Best Ideas Are Already Here, Waiting to Be Rediscovered? 'Sleeping Beauties,' by the musician David Byrne, explores artistic and scientific innovations that were overlooked before being embraced" (NYT).

The article is by Adam Grant, who is organizational psychologist at the Wharton School. Instead of embedding a David Byrne video, I'll show you this Adam Grant TED talk:

Upticks.

The word "upticks" appears in the previous post — "the CDC data showed big upticks" — and I had that Mad Magazine idea of depicting it literally. Being a tad lazy, I told Grok, "draw 3 ticks who are happy and dancing — cartoon style."

I was appalled to see:

That's so not my vision. I corrected with severe specificity: "black and white line drawing only. not aimed at children. not cute. more anatomical accuracy."

You can see what I mean, can't you? Grok gave me this:

See? This is why we can't trust A.I. It's trying to follow instructions. Isn't it?

By the way, ticks are arachnids. They have 8 legs — and no arms — and no antennae... and no bones!

"Young teenagers are less likely to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual than they were a few years ago..."

"... according to a new analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The decline is particularly striking among ninth-grade girls, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University who published her analysis of the 2025 data on her Substack 'Generation Tech.' In 2021, 30 percent of ninth-grade girls identified as lesbian or bisexual. Last year, 17 percent did.... The rate of boys who identify as gay or bisexual has remained roughly the same over the past decade. But a few years ago, after the pandemic shutdowns, the CDC data showed big upticks in the percentage of high school girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual. Within a few years, those rates began to drop, but only by a few percentage points. Though the overall numbers have continued to decline, older teenagers’ sexual orientation has held relatively stable...."

From "Number of teens who identify themselves as gay or bisexual is in ‘free fall’/Conservatives have trumpeted the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but researchers say the reasons for the decline are unclear" (WaPo)

Top-rated comment: "Oh for heavens sake - it was a teenage fad and now they have moved on to something else. Happens all the time. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out."

"Carson, 76, is best known for her translations of ancient Greek texts and for remixing those in a modern, playful voice."

"'Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse,' from 1998, turned a fragment of Greek poetry into a tale of a moody teenager’s destructive love affair, and 'Red Doc >,' from 2013, a sequel of sorts to 'Autobiography of Red,' concerned a road trip. 'Many toil in the interstices of genre,' Daisy Fried wrote in a 2013 review of 'Red Doc >' for The New York Times. 'Carson’s palatable, popular, sophisticated and who-cares approach may have done the most and best work in the last two decades to stop people worrying so much about what’s poetry and what’s not.'"

From "Canadian Poet Anne Carson Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature" (NYT)

"Her book jackets rarely feature an author photo.... She has rarely discussed her private life in interviews, although in an August 2024 essay in The London Review of Books she said that she had Parkinson’s disease and that her handwriting had 'disintegrated' as a result. 'I used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks, shelves of them, day after day, year after year,' Carson wrote: 'Now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, slant loses its smooth smart angle, it all looks embarrassing. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.'"

Informed that she had won the Nobel Prize, "All the poet would say was she was 'in Iceland,' where she was 'listening to the wind.'"

AND: There are some nice photos of her in this 2021 Interview magazine piece. From the interview (with the British artist Tacita Dean):

Sunrise.

"What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man."

"The Greeks did not just shape history; the Greeks gave us history itself. Much... of what we know about many ancient civilizations comes almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians, explorers and historians who didn’t just chronicle the histories of their own people, but ventured outwards to observe and record the sagas of foreign peoples and cultures all across the world. Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory of seeing all that was strange and new. It was this trait – it was this trait that would push the West to create and build things that others could not, marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life. But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks; it is the conviction that the unknown can be known. The confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood...."

Said Marco Rubio, in Athens today. Full text and video here.

"Entertainment and the arts are undergoing what might be termed a Great Simplification."

"Take the Netflix film 'Irish Wish,' which ranked No. 1 on the streaming platform following its release in 2024. The film stars Lindsay Lohan as an American book editor named Maddie, who travels to Ireland dreaming of marriage to a hunky best-selling author (a genre of person more common in films than in life). As writer Will Tavlin observed, as you watch, you may notice that the characters are explaining what is going on, as if you are too slow to understand. In one scene, Maddie says to her lover, 'We spent a day together. I admit it was a beautiful day, filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.' He replies, 'Fine. That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over, I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.'"

Writes James Marriot, in "Is society growing stupider? The clues are simple and repeated. Shorter sentences and monotonous lyrics form a sign of something bigger" (WaPo)(gift link).

Speaking of shorter sentences, yesterday, I happened to run across this long sentence:

"I say fling but he only worked like a dog in parkinglots, the most fantastic parkinglot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze and stop on a dime at the brickwall, and jump out, snake his way out of close fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour in a narrow space, shift, and back again into a tight spot with a few inches each side and come to a bouncing stop the same moment he’s jamming in the emergency brake; then run clear to the ticket shack like a track star, hand a ticket, leap into a newly arrived car before the owner is hardly out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start the car with the door flapping and roar off to the next available parking spot: working like that without pause eight hours a night, evening rush hours and after theater rush hours, in greasy wino pants with a frayed furlined jacket and beat shoes that flap."

Wrote Jack Kerouac, typing "On the Road: The Original Scroll." I'm fascinated by the readability of very long sentences, but that one struck me (at 40 mph) because I have a long-running debate with Meade about whether good drivers back into parking spaces. 

Surprise me.

 It's October.

"An early clip of the film... features the toddler character bending down to pick up a snail, before gently touching it, her face breaking into a smile."

"Such a performance would probably be beyond a child actor of the equivalent age, raising the question of whether it is easier for filmmakers to work with AI toddlers than human ones. Minkoff said that working with young children on 2002’s Stuart Little 2 'in some respects was horrible' because they would be crying while the film’s stars tried to console them. 'Geena Davis would be holding the baby, Hugh Laurie would be holding the baby, trying to calm the baby,' he said. Minkoff added that using an AI toddler was 'much more humane.'"

I'm reading "Lion King director: Why I’m embracing AI/Rob Minkoff touches on a source of tension in Hollywood as he tells The Times about Storm Dogs, his forthcoming film made with AI" (London Times).

Working with adults is also in some respects horrible. They're always crying and demanding consolation. It's not easy getting them to gently touch snails or whatever damned thing you'd like to tell them to do. And the problem isn't limited to moviemaking. In all fields of endeavor, human beings are difficult crybabies and A.I. will just get the job done. 

I like this quote from the director: "Obviously it’s not my goal or interest to put people out of work." Oh, the things you can do with an excuse like that! I wasn't my goal to hurt you. I was just achieving my goal and you were in the way. 

"For nearly 28 years Karl Bushby has been walking around the world with two rules: no transport and no going home to Hull unless he arrives on foot."

"On Monday afternoon, for the first time since 1998, the former paratrooper, now aged 57, stepped on to British soil after swimming the Channel. Bushby started his epic trek in Chile on November 1, 1998, shortly after leaving his mother Angela’s home in east Yorkshire. Since then, he has traversed the Darién Gap as fighting raged between the Colombian government and Marxist guerrillas; covered the frozen Bering Strait on foot; and become the first person known to have swum 184 miles across the Caspian Sea....He swam on his back the whole time as he is 'not a swimmer' and it is the 'most energy efficient way.'..."

From "Adventurer sets foot on British soil after 28-year walk home/Karl Bushby arrived in Kent after swimming the Channel for the final stage of a 30,000-mile journey from Chile back to Hull" (London Times).

How does he pay for this lengthy adventure? "Werner Herzog is directing a feature-length documentary about Bushby’s journey, titled Walk of Life, co-produced by Westward Productions, which has been supporting the adventurer for the past 16 years."

"Democratic congressional candidate from Long Island acknowledged on Monday that he had posed years ago in an explicit ad campaign modeling leather bondage gear..."

"... saying that it had no bearing on his campaign or ability to serve. The array of photos, which surfaced in The New York Post and a local news site, Messenger Papers, shows the candidate, Christopher Gallant, shirtless and variously wearing a leather collar attached to a chain and a leather face mask. In some of the photos, he is in intimate situations with another man. They appeared on the site of a bondage apparel company called Mr. S Leather; Mr. Gallant’s lawyer said they were taken around 2010...."

I'm reading "N.Y. Democratic House Candidate Admits to Bondage Photo Shoot" (NYT).

I clicked those internal links to see the photos. I laughed. A nice looking man modeled when he was young. Who cares!? I mean, who cares if he modeled? I think we do care that a person is good looking. It's part of nature. You might not vote for a man just because he's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?

"Combine [bra as outerwear] with the rise of naked dressing, nostalgia among the next gen set for the ’90s and Y2K (the last years before social media)..."

"... and GLP-1-inspired urges to show off newly shrunken bodies; power it with celebrity buy-in, as on the recent VMAs red carpet; and you get brazilla. Bralapalooza. The ultimate late-stage capitalist conclusion to the second wave feminists’ call for bra burning. Bra-vo?"

Writes Vanessa Friedman, in "Fashion Says Wear Your Bra as a Top/At Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada puts on her trend-forecasting glasses, and calls it" (NYT).

That's a gift link, as all NYT links are now, so you can go in and see the photographs of models with newly (or oldly) shrunken bodies, shown off in outfits that feature bras worn as outerwear. See if you can find the one that made me say "Her chest looks like a faceless man wearing sunglasses."

"This whole thing was triggered by the fact that somebody brought a civil lawsuit, a lawyer who's working on contingency...."

"This is multi-million dollars at stake. And I hope it doesn't shock anybody, but oftentimes in civil litigation, people motivated by money do lie...." 

Glenn Greenwald takes a stand for procedural fairness and professional journalism.

NEW: Glenn Greenwald slams AOC and the press for branding the accused Cornell students "gang rapists" without a trial.

None of the seven has been charged, yet a sitting member of Congress described the allegations as fact.

GREENWALD: "This whole thing was triggered by the fact… pic.twitter.com/UUK7enNosJ

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) October 6, 2026

Here's the whole segment:

"God damn it Merrill."

“God damnit Merrill”

An all-time in-game interview with Pat Murphy here: pic.twitter.com/cdaLvlK1D0

— Zach Sweet (@by_ZachSweet) October 7, 2026

"Just entering the month of October makes me freeze up. People think I came back from captivity and I look normal..."

"... but they have no idea what I’m going through. I might have come back physically but it’s not over. Only my body came back."

Said Mia Schem, quoted in "'I was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7. I feel as though I’m still there'/Mia Schem’s wounds have healed since the terrorist attacks on Israel three years ago. Her mind is still in pieces" (London Times).

Sunrise (with moon).

Goodbye to Eva Marie Saint — she was 102.

Here's the NYT obituary: "Eva Marie Saint, Oscar Winner for ‘On the Waterfront,’ Is Dead at 102/A luminous beauty with dramatic depth, she brought a layered intensity to harrowing roles and seduced Cary Grant in the romantic thriller 'North by Northwest.'"

"I voted against my party more than another other senator on either side of the aisle."

Asserted Senator Susan Collins, quoted in "Live Updates: Collins and Jackson Clash in First Debate of Crucial Maine Senate Race/Senator Susan Collins and her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, faced off on Supreme Court appointees, health care, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and their approach to governing" (NYT).

ADDED: I think the quote should be "I voted against my party more than any other other senator on either side of the aisle." Perhaps the Times will tweak the transcription.

BUT: If she said “other” twice, the Times probably has it right. Who knows how they talk in Maine?

"The painting was discovered in July when a man, nosing around at an estate sale in Kalamazoo, Mich., stumbled upon the enigmatic painting on the wall of a dimly lit corridor leading to the garage."

"The man, who wishes to remain anonymous, was familiar with Abercrombie’s work and was stunned to see the still life bearing the painter’s distinct signature. Zachary Wirsum, a senior vice president at Freeman’s [auction house], said the man told him he 'was shaking as he walked out to his car,' with his discovery. 'I think, objectively, had he not purchased it, this would have just ended up in the dumpster,' Mr. Wirsum added. 'So I think that he saved it from forever being lost in time.'"

From "Bought Months Ago for $30, This Painting Set Off a $1.35 Million Bidding War/'He saved it from forever being lost,' the auction house said of the person who found a Gertrude Abercrombie painting at an estate sale in Kalamazoo, Mich." (NYT).

"Ms. Pike’s medical condition is likely to determine whether Tennessee officials try to execute her again."

"The U.S. Supreme Court has forbidden the execution of someone who does not have a 'rational understanding' of why they’re being put to death."

From "Christa Pike Regains Consciousness After Her Failed Execution/The death row inmate in Tennessee received two doses of a lethal injection drug last week but lived. She was taken from the execution chamber in an ambulance" (NYT).

So if the drug that was intended to kill her happened to cause enough brain damage to deprive her of "rational understanding," she gets to avoid further efforts to take her life?

"I have learned how vicious the pig really is, and our comrades are teaching me to attack with even greater vicious­ness."

Said Patty Hearst — in her "Tania" incarnation — quoted in "One of Patty Hearst’s Kidnappers Has Died/Bill Harris was a disillusioned Vietnam veteran looking for purpose when he joined a revolutionary group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army."

In 2024, Harris reflected on what had happened in 1973: "There were many factors that influenced Patty’s decision to stay and fight. What we didn’t know when we kidnapped her was that she had rejected her mother, a gold digger and right-wing ideologue."

A view from the Sober Monitor.

@stasiakatherine intimidation goes further than you can imagine #cornell #alumni #greeklife ♬ original sound - stasiakatherine

"The traditional gender gap is losing ground as a key factor in politics to intragender gaps that have emerged among Republican and Democratic voters along the fault lines of masculinity and femininity."

Asserts Thomas Edsall, in "The Gender Gap Has Taken a Strange Twist" (NYT).

I'm not agreeing (or disagreeing) with this take. I just thought you should know:

Men — specifically white men — who see themselves as extremely masculine tend to support President Trump, while those who are weaker in their assessment of their masculinity — or in how they think about masculinity — are far less likely to support Trump. The gap between the two is just as significant if not more significant than the gender gap.

A similar, but more complex spread has emerged among women....

Are there men who think of themselves as "extremely masculine"? That made me think of this: 

Gloriously bad movie I'm watching because it's on The Criterion Channel.

From the Wikipedia plot summary: "In a room at a university campus, white and black students argue about an impending student strike. Mark leaves the meeting after saying he is 'willing to die, but not of boredom' for the cause...."

Also: "The film was listed in the 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time and has been described as 'the worst film ever made by a director of genius' but it "is still absolutely watchable because of the magic of Antonioni's eye.'"

The whole movie is up on YouTube in several places you can easily find. Watch from 2:00 to 8:25 to see that revolutionary student meeting. It resonates with today very nicely.

Playing at Meadhouse.

For hours he would ride. On the range far and wide. When the night wind blows up and slow....

For the first time since they've been counting, more American households have kittens than have puppies.

And it's because dog ownership is declining, WaPo reports.

The number of American households with dogs has dropped 5 percent since 2019, while cat ownership has held relatively steady. Dogs still dominate America — roughly 71 million households have dogs compared with 53 million that own cats — but that is changing quickly...

Why the change?  

The notion of the "death triad" is, I think, disrespectful, so I mostly refrain from pointing them out.

 But here we have a Death Triad of Disgrace, so disrespect is already in the cards:

1. Dennis Hastert, whose death was noted in this post yesterday morning. He rose to Speaker of the House and was ruined by his admission that, when he was a high school wrestling coach, he had sexually abused a young boy.

2. "Jim Bakker, Television Preacher Felled by Sex and Financial Scandals, Dies at 86" (NYT): "In the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Bakker and his first wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, rode to fame and riches preaching the gospel of prosperity, the notion that those who embraced genuine Christian faith would reap material rewards....The Bakkers’ world came tumbling down in 1987 with a revelation that in 1980, when he was 40, he had sex with a 21-year-old secretary in his Assemblies of God ministry. The woman, Jessica Hahn, claimed she had been raped...."

3. "Jeffrey Archer, Novelist Whose Real Life Rivaled His Thrillers, Dies at 86/In a life of achievement and disgrace, he wrote best-selling novels with themes he knew intimately: ambition, self-promotion, misbehavior and scandal" (NYT): "A political Houdini, he survived many vicissitudes, including a perjury conviction in 2001, when he was found guilty of creating false diaries and concocting a story to win a trial over whether he had slept with a prostitute to whom he paid hush money."

"We have to understand... that these violent hierarchies, these systems, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, economic exploitation, have colonized our own minds."

"... especially for the white educators..."

James Talarico telling White teachers on a zoom call that "white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy have colonized their minds"…

This guy is not a moderate.
He’s full woke 1.0 insanity. pic.twitter.com/FxSTb7opT2

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) October 5, 2026

I'd like to see him asked why he used this jargon and if he was sincere at the time and would he stand by it now. Perhaps he can restate language like "violent hierarchies" and "colonized minds" in a way that mainstream Texan voters can relate to. Ask him!

I asked Grok to write Talarico's answer to my question and got this: "I taught in a poor school where the kids were mostly not white. A lot of us who grew up middle-class, including me, walked in with assumptions that didn’t match what those students were dealing with—family stress, neighborhood crime, schools funded by local property taxes that leave the poorest districts behind. If you’re going to help those kids, you have to notice your own blind spots instead of pretending the system is already fair. That’s all I was trying to say.”

Sunrise.

"Magical and electric."

Brewers react to Jackson Chourio’s Game 2 walk-off hit! Unforgettable. https://t.co/S8spy7KaL4

— Sophia Minnaert (@SophiaMinnaert) October 5, 2026

And here's what he — Sal Frelick — did, scoring the winning run:

"Indeed, there’s an active scientific debate over whether newborns possess consciousness."

"Resolving it could help solve one of science’s most stubborn mysteries: what consciousness is, how it emerges and how we can know if another being possesses it.... Amid all the uncertainty, there’s one fact that everyone can agree on. In each of our lives, there was a time when our brains were still too rudimentary to support consciousness, and there was a time when that changed. Even if we can’t say when babies gain consciousness, Dr. Austin said, “one thing we can be certain of is that they will become conscious.”

From "Are Babies Conscious?" (NYT).

From the comments over there: "My first memory is waking up in my crib when I was 3 years old. I recognized everything around me and it all felt familiar but I had no specific memory of anything. In reflecting upon this as I grew older I felt like this was the moment I became conscious."

Also there's this quote from Charles Darwin: "There is no trace of consciousness in very young children."

"The towering irony of Mr. Hastert’s fall was that his rise to high legislative office was cleared by his apparent moral rectitude amid a morass of sex scandals in late 1990s Washington."

From "Dennis Hastert, ex-House speaker whose sex abuse admission upended legacy, dies at 84/The Illinois Republican helped spearhead President George W. Bush’s legislative agenda before his career ended in disgrace" (WaPo)(gift link).

Small Boulder the size of a large Boulder.

On the NYT front page right now:

It's the first Monday in October, and the Supreme Court is back.

The front-page teaser goes here: "A Supreme Court Battle Over Climate Change Begins/The justices are about to hear a lawsuit that could determine whether the oil industry faces billions of dollars in liability for damages caused by global warming."

Nearly a decade ago, the outdoorsy, liberal enclave of Boulder, Colo., sued two oil companies over their role in climate change.... A win for Boulder would likely clear the way for dozens of similar lawsuits nationwide aiming to extract billions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry to fight global warming....

ADDED: The NYT quotes lawprof Todd J. Zywicki: "What this case is about is a bunch of one-percenter hippies in Boulder County who want to tell the rest of us how we have to live." 

"Recently, Liam and his wife accompanied the boys’ Little League team to a Major League Baseball game... and the team got rowdy and disruptive during the game."

"'Not violent, but that loud posturing, trying to assert dominance, that kids do,' Liam explains. 'The boys were in a group initiation to see how far they could push things. The coach wasn’t doing anything to stop it. Without boundaries, without anyone stepping up, it would have devolved.' Liam and his wife warned their sons that they needed to calm down, but they couldn’t control the whole group. 'On the way home, my wife asked the kids if they knew what hazing was,' says Liam. 'So we talked about that.'... [He] recalls that when he was applying to colleges, his parents had made a deal with him: They would pay his tuition in full on the condition that he not join a frat. 'My dad framed it as that whole culture was outside of the values I’d been raised with,' he says."

From an article in The Cut that has an unfortunate title: "What Are Fathers Telling Their Sons About Cornell?"

Are fathers supposed to talk about gang rape to little boys?! The photograph shows a man with 2 boys who look like they might be 3 and 4 years old. I'm seeing mockery on line.

But the article is making a good point that I think everyone basically agrees with: Parents should teach their children, from the earliest age, to respect others and not to be selfish monsters. The exact forms of monstrous behavior are not detailed. You don't tell the story of the Cornell orgy/rape. You read "Where the Wild Things Are" — things like that — and talk about what's going on there.

I prefer high-quality children's literature, but there are some really on-the-nose books that some people might choose: "C is for Consent," "Don’t Touch My Hair!," "Hands Off, Harry!" The list goes on and on:

Sunrise.

"Pandemonium in Milwaukee."

JACKSON CHOURIO WINS IT. PANDEMONIUM IN MILWAUKEE. https://t.co/WJ0muePo1D

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) October 4, 2026

"I don’t know about anyone else, but a table full of very distinguished people just told me that they HATE, immediately after a mandatory time change, going home at night – and it’s DARK."

"It’s depressing! One of the gentleman stated that, 'I just hate going home in darkness.'"

Writes Trump, who seems to believe Daylight Saving Time is a valuable political issue.

Who cares about the delicate feelings of the distinguished gentlemen arrayed around Trump's dining table?

Who were these guys? AI billionaires? I'm more concerned about children forced to get to school in the morning while it's still dark. Guys in their cars feeling melancholic... that's not a hot political concern.

And as long as I'm reacting to Trump's Truth Social account, there's this: "If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2026 Midterm Elections, I’m going to give all Adult Citizens in the United States of America, $5,000. Thank you for your attention to this matter, and I look forward to signing those checks!"

Just awful.

"To understand the religious dynamics of the Texas race, it’s important to absorb the true depths of the 'God gap' in American politics."

Writes David French, in "The ‘God Gap’ Is Narrowing in Texas" (NYT).

That gap isn’t just about white evangelicals (although it certainly is partly about them), and it’s one of the Democrats’ chief obstacles to obtaining a durable political majority. Any discussion of the God gap does have to begin with white evangelicals. Their numbers are vast (far more than twice as large as Black Protestants, the most loyal religious Democratic voters), and they vote in lock step. In 2024, white evangelicals voted for Trump by a 65-point margin, 82 percent to 17 percent. Trump lost all other voters by 18 points, 58 percent to 40 percent....

"I never liked that term, 'guy's guy.'"

Said Meade, reading the previous post, the one about the man who shot the rooster named Nixon.

That sounds like one of those sentences that makes me think I'm experiencing another bout of transient alexia.

What's wrong with the phrase "guy's guy"? I'd ask Meade but he's watching that video I sent him, the one with a guy named Larry listing a lot of things he's not going to do anymore now that he's 72.

Left to my own devices I went looking for "guy's guy" in my blog archive. I believe I've only used the phrase once: "Now, if everyone would please dial down all the criticism and let Obama get on with his un-self-conscious guy's guy agenda, it will all work out just fine."

That was in an October 26, 2009 post called  "Obama's White House boy's club." And I was using the phrase jokingly echoing something the NYT had written: 

"The [rooster] was named Nixon, after the former president, 'basically because he was a jerk' said his owner, Bill Leimgruber...."

I'm reading "The Chickens Came Home. So Did the Roosters. In Vermont, a single bird set off a feud over what, exactly, constitutes farm country, mirroring a battle dividing communities across America" (NYT). 

Last fall in Merrimack, N.H., a former town councilor infuriated by one bird spent months pressing for an ordinance with fines that climbed to $500, prompting one 40-year resident to ask: “We’re an agricultural town. If people moved here and now, all of a sudden, don’t want to listen to the noises of the deer, and the roosters, and the raccoons and the loons, why did they move here?”...

Because of the covid lockdown and because of the rising price of eggs, a lot of people were buying chicks, and some of those chicks grew up to be roosters. 

Fluky quirk of baseball deemed heavenly intervention.

"Ueck decided to put his hand on it, swat it down, so Chourio could catch it. Thanks Ueck." 😂 - Pat Murphy https://t.co/nYnasQhATv

— MLB Network (@MLBNetwork) October 4, 2026

A more down-to-earth look:

So I'm sitting almost right on the line in the pressbox, my initial thought was that Ty France's ball was going to either hook foul or if it stayed in play it was gonna be caught near foul territory. Balls hit at 49 degrees or higher usually don't leave the yard. Trevor Megill said postgame he thought it was going foul, Jackson Chourio thought he had a shot at it off the bat.

— Russell Dorsey (@Russ_Dorsey1) October 4, 2026

Sunrise.

The ultimate process clusterfuck.

So embarrassing:

Reporter: "Attorney General, on your Facebook page three days ago, you wrote, ‘What this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable. I'm holding her in my heart and in my prayers. To her and to all survivors, you're not alone. We stand with you.’ Why did… pic.twitter.com/AtHcuaPumE

— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) October 2, 2026

"Musk offered to donate his sperm to Zilis to conceive children through IVF in 2020, she testified, and the pair had twins in secret in 2021."

I'm reading "Elon Musk splits with longtime business confidante, co-parent 'with no warning'/Shivon Zilis, the mother of four children with Musk, said their breakup was sudden but wished him the best" (WaPo).

I don't understand what the "split" was from.

"The co-pilot who tried to hijack a flight bound for Israel... used a crash ax to attack the captain in the cockpit, UAE officials said."

"The co-pilot attempted to 'take control of the aircraft' and carry out a 'terrorist act,' UAE Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi said.... The UAE statement answers one of the questions over potential security lapses that emerged following the incident — how the co-pilot was able to access a weapon on board. A crash ax is normally used for emergency evacuations, Marco Chan, a former pilot, said in an interview. 'If none of the exit doors are available, the pilot can … use the ax to crack' designated parts of the plane’s structure which are designed to open more easily to create an exit route. In current Boeing 737 planes, the crash ax 'is usually located just behind the first officer or co-pilot' in the cockpit, said Chan...."

WaPo reports.

Great. There's an ax.

"Well, she’s still trying to proceed as normal, and she’s trying to tell herself that she can just go on with her life as if this didn’t happen."

"And she’s very excited about the Halloween party at Chi Phi at the fraternity. And you can tell from the text messages that she wants to go to the party. She’s getting ready for it. And then just before the party, there’s another moment that moves her thinking in this new direction. She gets a phone call from the president of the fraternity.... And he tells her, you can’t come to the party. You’re not invited. And he adds that it’s for her own good, because there are so many rumors swirling about what happened by both women and men. And there’s so much judgment about her. She shouldn’t come to the party. She sends a text message to one of the seven guys.... And she says to him, 'I knew this was going to happen. The women will always get the short end of the stick... You all... 'are not my friends....' This anger continues in the text messages... her telling of the events [has] now really changed...."

From yesterday's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "The Firestorm Over a Rape Allegation at Cornell/The New York Times has reviewed a trove of documents related to the case. Our reporter explains what we know."

I blogged about that podcast yesterday, but didn't have a transcript to excerpt. Today, I'm giving you the excerpt I wanted verbatim. 

Someone who styles himself ExHedgeFundGuy makes a TikTok clip out of a classic Camille Paglia interview and fails to include her name.

I'm not going to link to it because I don't want to reward this. TikTok is full of unidentified speakers taken out of context.

I'll link to this presentation at Real Clear Politics: "Camille Paglia on Frat Parties and Consent: 'He Is Right to Think You Have Consented.'" That went up on October 1st.

 

Camille Paglia, essentially, has the last word on the Cornell 7.

Don’t dive into the sea and act surprised when you get wet. pic.twitter.com/Poe3jpxvAZ

— Akhenaten 🇺🇦🏴‍☠️ (@SplendorEternal) September 30, 2026

RCP has the clip I'm seeing at TikTok plus the full interview, and we can see that it is from a BBC interview in 2017. But Paglia has made this point since the early 90s.

It's a good idea to talk about the Cornell case in light of the strong challenge presented by Paglia, and she deserves to be cited by name. There's a lot of material from 35 years ago, from various authors, that could enrich the present-day discussion. For example: "Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus."

This is a very old topic! Let's not act as though people are just noticing this problem. 

"Books that get called weird girl lit tend to deal in uncanny or dreamlike circumstances."

"In Ottessa Moshfegh’s 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation,' a woman uses drugs to hibernate her way through a deep depression. In Mona Awad’s 'Bunny,' a cult of women M.F.A. students make rabbits explode with the power of their creative minds. In Kate Folk’s 'Sky Daddy,' a woman is erotically fixated on airplanes. In an interview, Moshfegh said she finds the weird girl label 'patronizing,' 'conservative' and 'misogynistic.' She maintained that the word 'weird' in this context perpetuates oppressive expectations about what a woman should be. 'There’s nothing weird about interesting stories about people,' she said. 'That’s what novels are. And I would challenge anyone who’s using that term to tell me what a normal girl is supposed to read or write.'"

From "What Is ‘Weird Girl Lit,’ Anyway? Romantic delusion. Social alienation. Body horror. Just a few of the elements celebrated online — if not always by the writers who earn the label" (NYT).

Yeah, what is a normal girl supposed to read or write?

From the comments over there: "A lot of fiction is about weird people. Many have been male. Holden Caulfield, most of Philip Roth, most of Thomas Pynchon, Ignatius in 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' Sherlock Holmes, the whole Karamazov family. You could argue that Elizabeth Bennett is a weird girl, considering Regency norms. Oh, Lady MacBeth, Medea, definitely weird. It's an advantage to an author to have a weird character or two. It's like Tolstoy said, 'All happy families are the same.'"

Sunrise.

A new addition to the OED: "will-they-won't-they."

Why did we have to wait so long for that?

Definition: "Relating to or characterized by prolonged uncertainty about whether something is going to take place; spec. relating to whether a romantic relationship will develop between two people."

I see it counts as a TV trope:

This is a Fan Speak term used to describe any relationship that is obviously filled with Unresolved Sexual Tension but the characters resist going into a full blown relationship for a rather long time. Usually the two characters will be presented so that "they will" is the conclusion to root for; only rarely is the question of whether the writers think they should is in any real doubt....

"Will-they-won't-they" reminds me of "The Mock Turtle's Song": “Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?”

"Dale Byrne, Carmel’s mayor, called the issue a matter of public safety. In an interview, he recalled an episode from July when he was visiting a friend’s home..."

"... and the man suddenly turned pale, losing consciousness. Mr. Byrne called 911 and tried to describe the location where the ambulance should arrive, but the dispatcher did not understand how to find the home without an address. He was transferred to another dispatcher, then another. 'He could have had a heart attack, and you’re asking me to explain how my street address works,' Mr. Byrne recalled."

From "After 110 Years, a California Coastal Village Yields to Street Numbers/Driven by emergency response needs, Carmel-by-the-Sea reluctantly adopted street address numbers this summer, igniting concerns over its vanishing identity as a beachside village" (NYT).

"I was so badly hurt that I had fallen to the ground. But I knew I had to act. I could feel the aircraft was going down."

Said Capt. Smit Machchhar, from a hospital bed, quoted in "'I Couldn’t Let All of Them Die': Pilot on FlyDubai Flight Recalls Sudden Attack/Capt. Smit Machchhar, who was stabbed by his co-pilot midair between Dubai and Tel Aviv, said he 'had to act' to prevent a crash despite serious injuries" (NYT).

ADDED: More, from the translated transcript:

"Is that a racial stereotype I’m not aware of, that Hispanics are good at surviving long falls? Although for a man who started out labeling Hispanics as murderers and rapists, to end up at 'bouncy'...."

Said Jordan Klepper, who, I guess is a comedian, quoted in "Late Night Is Stunned by Trump’s New Stereotype/The president told attendees celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month at the White House to watch their step while touring the unfinished ballroom: 'Only a Hispanic could survive that fall'" (NYT).

Yes, I see, he's on "The Daily Show." Okay, then: comedy. How do you do comedy on top of a Trump statement that is already completely weird? 

Seth Meyer also had a go at it. He tried: "You’ve gotta be a platinum level racist to come out with stereotypes no one has ever heard before." And: "'Only a Hispanic could survive that fall'? Are you thinking of cats?"

If it were your job to write a joke based on "Only a Hispanic could survive that fall," what would you say. For the record, I think Trump's "joke" is racist. It's like a comment based on the notion that black people have a special ability to toil in the hot sun. The idea is that they're physically adapted to a job they are stereotyped as doing. 

What an ill-conceived demonstration!

"Trans activists inject themselves with hormones in viral stunt protesting Trump's DOJ deal with NYU" (Yahoo).

I think they mean to look virtuous and wholesome, but wielding needles on the street seems sleazy. It's something an addicted recreational drug user would do. And I instinctively covered my eyes, as I think many people do when they see an injection. 

Explanation by a speaker reading from a script: "We're taking our HRT here at the doors of the people who have given up to demystify, normalize, and celebrate our trans bodies in the face of NYU's cowardice." But medical treatments are normally taken indoors, in privacy. How can you "normalize" these treatments by performing a way that is not normal? It's normal for illicit drugs. And the administration of a medical treatment is not a "celebration" of the body. It's premised on the understanding that there is something wrong with the body. 

The demonstration is quite incoherent.

"For this person, the commitment to contesting the evil of whiteness is all-consuming, an ideological North Star that orients her entire worldview...."

Writes John McWhorter, in "When White People Like Hannah Gann Pretend to Be Black" (NYT).

To be the victim is to be not just innocent but also more interesting. It also can provide a sense of meaning in a modern world that no longer gives ready answers to the question of life’s purpose. “Who am I? What am I for? I’m … Black!”.... 

In the pre-woke days, I knew a couple of intermediate cases. These were white women who embraced Black culture, dated Black men exclusively, used “blaccents” spontaneously and deep down seemed to wish they were Black. (Why these cases seem to almost always involve women is an interesting question to which I don’t have an answer.).... 

That column was inspired by the new Rachel Dolezal, Hannah Gann.

"There was really no escape... I don’t remember the very end of the event where I was raped... I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped... I will never know who all touched me. I will not know."

I'm reading "Cornell Police Report Omitted Student’s Claim She Was Raped/Documents obtained by The New York Times show that the campus police at Cornell University sent a condensed statement to a prosecutor, who then declined to bring charges" in the NYT.

The woman spoke for hours with [a campus police department] officer;... The officer then condensed the interview into a six-page “voluntary statement” written from her perspective.... The student, after leaving about 20 handwritten corrections on a draft, signed a final version the next day. While the shorter statement explained that she felt some of that night’s events were a crime, it omitted some of the more forceful and definitive language she used. And it was missing her unequivocal statement that she had been raped....

More detail — better detail —  in today's episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily": "The Firestorm Over a Rape Allegation at Cornell." I wish I had a transcript so I could quote some things.

This is a complex story, and the news media seem to want us to look into it right now, for whatever reasons. The news media and key political actors: New York Governor Kathy Hochul appointed the state attorney general, Letitia James, as a special prosecutor in this case. There's a press conference going on right now:

Hochul said she was concerned to learn what information was taken from Jane Doe’s interview with police and passed to the district attorney. “In what world would the police learn from the victim that she had been literally been gang raped” and that she believed “100 percent” she had been raped and not elevate those allegations to the district attorney, Ms. Hochul asked.

Crane rise.

Photo by me, at the boat launch:

Video by Meade at the UW Marching Band practice field:

"These are terrible people, Link. They come right out of the ground. It’s disgusting."

@metal.may.fantasy oi #legendofzelda #link #nintendo #zelda ♬ original sound - Metal Fantasy

At the Bumble Bee Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"Attorneys for Christa Pike said Thursday afternoon that she is alive, in critical condition 'and receiving lifesaving medical care' after Tennessee officials tried and failed to execute her by lethal injection the previous night."

WaPo reports.

AND: Here's some speculation about how she survived (and an interesting tip on how a person can prepare in advance to stymie the lethal injection):

"I worry... that our students could bear the consequences of... misperceptions, including being unfairly portrayed as coddled or unprepared for the demands of a rigorous Michigan education."

Said Domenico Grasso, president of the University of Michigan, quoted in "University of Michigan pauses plan to stop issuing grades/The pilot plan, which aimed to address students’ mental health, was criticized by some students and alumni" (WaPo).

The plan was to improve the mental wellbeing of students, but abandoning the plan would help them with their mental wellbeing even more. They might feel bad about themselves if they see not-so-good grades, but they might also feel bad about themselves if they imagine that other people are thinking ill of them for needing to be protected from feeling bad about themselves if they see not-so-good grades.

I feel bad about how dishonest that justification seems. Protect my mind: I was a University of Michigan student once. In 1969, I was drawn by the experimental college, the Residential College, where, ironically, there were no grades. 

"No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors."

Said Pete Hegseth, quoted in "Pete Hegseth: I’ll purge army of fatties, beardos and weirdos/The war secretary is establishing an Office of Religious Affairs and seeking ‘patriotic cowboys’ as he faces pressure over his budget and the Iran war" (London Times).

Seems crazy to insult the overweight. And beards — who cares? You can require beards to be shaved on entering the service, but a person who happens to style himself with a beard isn't a type of person to be rejected. I think Hegseth is the weirdo.

"For a long time, the chief justice’s life here was a story of potluck dinners and easy friendships, according to a summer of interviews with more than two dozen residents."

"Neighbors reveled in his position but kept exchanges with him about it brief or light. At a long-ago annual summer party, he used to participate in touch football, then call dinner to order by proclaiming: 'Oyez, oyez, oyez, the lobsters are ready.' But in recent years...."

I'm reading "John Roberts and His Island/After decades of potlucks and paddle-boarding on Maine’s midcoast, rising anger and protests have left the Supreme Court’s chief justice more isolated than ever" (NYT).

"Neighbors have taken to the water to protest him. Calling themselves 'kayak-tivists,' they form flotillas facing his island home, holding waterproof signs conveying their disappointment. A local newspaper columnist recommended that people in town give him the finger.... 'Maine is not here as your happy place, your wind-down from all of your hard work destroying my civil liberties and democracy,' wrote Becca Shaw Glaser in her column...."

"Adult Lunchables are already everywhere in this world."

"Sophisticate versions of juvenile favorites include: tropical cocktails (grown-up Capri-Suns), burrata (string cheese), any dessert (candy wearing pants), smoothies (basically actual baby food). Tinned fish is a funny one, though, because no kid would actually choose to eat tinned fish. It’s an acquired taste, funky and fusty and a little bit offensive, merely presented in a kid way. And so in that way it’s maybe more like whatever’s going on with all these bows on adult women’s clothing...."

From "I No Longer Have to Make Life Decisions Thanks to My Infinite Tins of Fish/Now I can’t even look at the word t*na" (NYT).

Not familiar with all those bows? One example will get you up to speed: "Demi Moore's Tattered Hot Pink Ballgown Comes With a Truly Giant OTT Bow."

By the way, if they can just use OTT like that — meaning "over the top," I believe — there is at least hope for the end of the Mel Ott era in crossword puzzles.

"When I want something, I'm going to go after it."

Said Caleb Flynn on "American Idol." Note all the times he mentions his wife — "I love my wife more than anything. She is very, very pretty."

Now: "Ex-Pastor Who Auditioned for ‘American Idol’ Is Guilty of His Wife’s Murder/The trial in Ohio attracted outsize attention because the defendant, Caleb Flynn, a former music pastor, auditioned on 'American Idol' in 2013" (NYT).

The nine-day trial drew outsize public attention to a courtroom in Troy, a small city north of Dayton. Jurors and a gallery that held several dozen spectators heard details of Mr. Flynn’s affair with a woman he met when she was a 20-year-old intern at his church, including readings of their text messages and playbacks of the love songs that prosecutors said Mr. Flynn created for her using artificial intelligence.... Jurors heard text messages in which Mr. Flynn said he hated his wife, with whom he had two daughters, and wanted her dead.... 

Sunrise got rained out, so we set out in midday.

The leaves were changing, the drummers drumming:

Meade lured me into repeating my theory about a baseball word:

"'They’re relating to it like a conscious being,' realized Rabbi Navon, a former computer engineer who wrote his dissertation on the ethics of machine consciousness."

"It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call 'moral status' on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect. The religious scholars had come to hear about technology’s next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?"

From "Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them. In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its A.I. models — and make the case that Claude could be conscious" (NYT).

"Asked how the passengers had stopped the attacker, Ms. Ohayon said, 'I believe with their bare hands inside the cockpit.'"

From "Passenger Describes Chaos Aboard FlyDubai Flight/The passenger, Miriam Ohayon, said people on board felt the jet lose control and heard screams. 'When they opened the cockpit, there was a lot of blood,' she told Israeli television" (NYT).

Do you mean "May President Trump Demolish the Kennedy Center?"?

I wonder, reading "Can President Trump Demolish the Kennedy Center?" in the NYT. Subheadline: "The president has entertained the idea of tearing down the performing arts venue. Analysts say any plan would face multiple daunting challenges."

Sample analysis: "'I don’t think it’s likely that we’ll see bulldozers around the Kennedy Center any time soon,' said Paul Edmondson, a lawyer who specializes in historic preservation law.... While the center’s leadership made assurances months ago that demolition was not being contemplated, Mr. Trump, who is chairman of the center’s board, went on to speak openly of the prospect. 'The president has a pattern of moving so fast that it’s difficult to catch up,' Mr. Edmondson said."

"Being labeled a poser was something that could trigger a purity test, and in the sense of, 'Are you really who you say you are?'"

"Whereas with LARPing, it is more: 'I’ve already made up my mind that you aren’t who you say you are.' It’s more of a condemnation, whereas poser can be challenged."

Said Steven Dashiell, an assistant research professor at Morgan State University, "How LARPing, a Gaming Term, Became a Word for Posers/Live-action role playing was associated with games like Dungeons & Dragons. Now, it’s a way to call someone out for being inauthentic" (NYT).

Were you aware of the LARPer/poser distinction?

Wait. Another professor is available to help. Sarah Lynne Bowman, an associate professor of game design at Uppsala University, says, about LARPing, "Some of the early stigma was around people supposedly not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality — so being too into what’s happening rather than faking it."

That's very different. The real you could be truly living a fantasy. You might need to fake it to pass as a normal person.

I'm old. I'm not going to use young people slang. I remember when "poser" was young people slang, and I had to wonder when did we stop saying "poseur."

What if fecal matter had a dream? What would the people in the dream be wearing?

Just a question I had, trying to read this NYT fashion article, "Fecal Matter Dreams a Fashion Dream/Pregnant women, bodybuilders, punks, family — a heartfelt Matières Fécales show jolts Paris Fashion Week. But what about the clothes?"

That's a gift link — as all NYT links are now — so go over and check out the clothes, know the dream. We're told these clothes "signal... the belief that fashion is more than pretty stuff, it is a form of identitymaxxing."

The show "began with a pregnant woman in a head scarf, baby on her back, and ended with a woman in a gold, asymmetric ruched cocktail dress — two mannequins in bankers’ black suits draped over her shoulders like big game trophies."

Are people saying "identitymaxxing" now?

"I once took a knife skills class, and they just show you how to chop an onion..."

Writes Matt Yglesias, in "Math needs a phonics-style reckoning Teachers should teach students how to do stuff correctly."

There is a specific, correct way to do this, and part of learning to cook is being told how to do it. A person with excellent spatial reasoning could probably figure this out from first principles given an onion and a knife. But the normal way to learn to chop is to be explicitly shown.... You don’t just give people knives and tell them to experience the joy of chopping.... [T]he best way to get from zero to vaguely competent is to be taught the proper way to do it....

Education school theorists, for reasons that are disputed, seem to dislike this idea. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Emile” to Paulo Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a long tradition in the field mashes up romanticism with left-wing politics and sentimentality about the point of school to suggest that there’s some other, secretly better way of teaching things to beginners than just literally teaching them....

"His gray compact S.U.V. accelerated past shelves of pumpkin spice Cheerios and Special K cereal boxes...."

"The vehicle came to rest near a display of Halloween candy after careening beneath a sign over the doorway that reads: 'Thanks for shopping, y’all!'..."

From "A Driver Desperate to Use the Bathroom Plows Into a Kroger in Texas, the Police Say/The driver, James Mansell Lancaster Jr., was upset to find the supermarket in Rosenberg, Texas, closed early Sunday morning, the police said" (NYT).

"Mr. Lancaster stayed at the scene, according to the police.... 'All he said was the doors were locked and he had to use the restroom,' Lieutenant Munoz said.... Kroger does not plan to release security camera footage of the crash..."

I found the footage:

"Just as 'naked dressing' escalated from trompe l’oeil to the transparent mesh Bianca Censori wore to the 2025 Grammys, underwear as outerwear..."

"... has gone from lace-trimmed slip dresses to knicker-style shorts to just going out in your bra. Not quite the emperor’s new clothes, but perhaps only because women’s nipples are still considered more risque than men’s.... In 2026 wearing a bra as a top isn’t the subversive act of fashion rebellion or feminist declaration of sexual liberation that it was for Madonna in 1990 but a sign of compliance to the beauty standard, and the extreme thinness that’s putting women’s lives at risk...."

I'm reading the London Time: "Is a bra a top now? Looks like it! They’re in Paris and on the red carpet, but would you flaunt yours at the post office?"

I'm going to use my last WaPo gift link of the month to give you the 1991 article that is the London Times's source for photo of Madonna wearing a bra as a top: "The Roots of Madonna: Getting down to Earth with the pop star." 

"He went!"

Pete Crow-Armstrong showed up Bill Miller after being called out on a check-swing for the second time today. pic.twitter.com/mhTtmngbLN

— Foul Territory (@FoulTerritoryTV) September 30, 2026

I love the short phrases of baseball. "He went!" is the funniest one to me. 

But, words aside, is it funny to see Pete Crow-Armstrong losing it when the Cubs are down 8-0?

"Headlines like 'Are Shirt Buttons Sexist?' are why the New York Times has lost credibility with the broad center of American politics."

"To we [sic] moderates, it sounds like something that would be mocked on the satirical website, 'The Babylon Bee.'"

That's the 3rd-highest-rated comment at the NYT article "Are Shirt Buttons Sexist?/A reader questions the point of having men’s and women’s shirt buttons on different sides." 

The highest-rated comment is "Sometimes I really do wonder what life is like for people who are constantly scanning the world in search of something to gripe about."

I didn't pick that for the post title because it's too gripe-y — it gripes about griping — and I don't think the article is griping. It's puzzling over a quirk of clothing construction.

The author of the article, Vanessa Friedman, is addressing a question from a reader. She goes through the various theories of how this right/left difference might have happened — one is most common and perhaps you're sure it is the explanation — and observes that none of those reasons apply today. Tradition has its hold. We could change but we don't.

Only the headline writer uses the word "sexist" — and only to ask a question.

But the commenters — NYT commenters! — come for Friedman. They don't say what an amusing light-hearted jaunt through history, thanks for the fun. She's not perceived as having fun at all. She's seen as a grim, angry feminist. Things are changing.

Writing that made me think of this video clip I saw yesterday:

"The View" host Sunny Hostin stands up for accused Cornell gang rape defendants.

🎥: ABC pic.twitter.com/4wo46PXsQU

— TMZ (@TMZ) September 29, 2026