"[Yayoi] Kusama was... part of the artistic avant-garde. Her death, at 97, is a cold reminder that the avant-garde no longer exists...."

"It was an attempt to see the world afresh. For many of its leading figures, from the Impressionists in the 1870s to conceptual artists a century later, this also meant proposing new and better solutions to the problem of how to be and how to live together. These proposals, many times rooted in sympathy and love, were presented as alternatives to the political structures and market logic that had so often led to war, exploitation, hopelessness, and suffering. Even when attempts to turn these imagined alternatives into reality failed—and often dismally—the avant-garde stood in a clear relationship to modernity’s traumas. It was like the whistle cap in the spout of a boiling kettle: both a release of suppressed pressures (psychic and cultural) and an alarm. But society got sick of hearing the alarm. And the kettle got tired of whistling...."

Writes Sebastian Smee, in "The Limits of Yayoi Kusama's Infinity/The visionary artist once challenged ways of seeing—until she was seen by everyone" (Atlantic gift link).

"Kusama... talked about her repeating dots as an expression of an inclination toward 'self-obliteration' —an urge to dissolve into forever-expanding patterns.... The artist—an adorable maker of giant spotted pumpkins who lived in a psychiatric institution—became beyond criticism. You could no more criticize her than you could a grandmother giving a teddy bear to an orphan.... Successful branding is exactly what art at its best is not: a form of general seduction rather than specific engagement...."

"Through much of the 19th century, noncitizen voting expanded alongside U.S. territorial gains..."

"(the government offered the vote to Europeans who helped dispossess Indians and colonize the West). But in the mid- to late 1800s, immigrants started to become scapegoats for changes that native-born Americans saw as threatening.... Confederates banned immigrant suffrage during the Civil War because they thought migrating Europeans were anti-slavery, while northern states rolled back voting rights in reaction to waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century, which they associated with crime. By 1926, no state let noncitizens vote in federal elections. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, making noncitizen voting in federal elections a crime...."

Writes Zak Cheney-Rice, in "The Fear of Noncitizen Voting/For Trump, it is the death of America. For liberals, 'Woke 1' excess. Why is noncitizen voting so terrifying?" (New York Magazine).

My MAGA status expires in 5 minutes.

Note: I have made a political contribution approximately twice in my entire life and not even once in this century. I would never respond positively to a political text message, but obviously some people do. I'm pestered with material like this multiple times a day, but I'm choosing this one to blog because "Your MAGA status expires in 5 MINUTES" takes the cake.

"That sucker is open. The Iranian response is very mild. They don't want us to go back at them. That's the whole ball game. The rest doesn't matter."

Said President Trump to Axios, quoted in "'That sucker is open': U.S. gains the upper hand in the battle for Hormuz."

After the MOU fell apart, the military worked to reopen the strait unilaterally. The effort included several elements: Together with the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. military task force started guiding ships through the southern channel of the strait while giving them air cover and intercepting Iranian drone and cruise missile attacks. A two-week U.S. bombing campaign significantly undercut the IRGC's capacity to attack ships crossing the strait. A mine-sweeping operation involved Navy divers, Navy SEALs, underwater and surface drones, and private contractors to detect and neutralize the mines. A blockade of Iranian ports was restored.... 

The Strait of Trump. 

Sunrise.

Oh, no! Now, we have to call Lake Ontario "Lake America."

I'm reading "Trump signs order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America, escalating Canada feud/President Donald Trump called Canadian officials 'nasty people' and said the country 'has been ripping us off for a long time on trade, very sadly.'"

“We filed all the necessary papers, documents, everything else,” Trump said. “We notified all the various people that we have to notify. So we’ve done everything that you have to do. And this is official, effective immediately.”

"A man who parked a truck carrying a guillotine in the heart of Washington was arrested by the United States Capitol Police on Tuesday...."

"The police arrested Philan-Tam-Duy Le, 35, of Julian, Calif., for 'being in possession of the guillotine,' the department said in the statement. He was charged with carrying a dangerous weapon. 'It did have a real blade,' the police’s public information office said.... The man had driven to the nation’s capital from California, the police said. The truck was parked not far from the Library of Congress and other prominent Washington buildings.... It was unclear whether Mr. Le had driven the truck across the country with the guillotine on it, a journey that could have been more than 2,500 miles."

From "Man Accused of Bringing Guillotine to D.C. Is Arrested/Philan-Tam-Duy Le, 35, of Julian, Calif., was taken into custody for 'being in possession of the guillotine,' the police said" (NYT).

Is "being in possession of a guillotine" a crime? There's this at Law Commentary:

D.C. law bans several weapons by name, including machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, switchblade knives, and knuckles. It also covers other dangerous weapons when someone possesses them with the intent to use them unlawfully against another person. A guillotine is not specifically listed.... Prosecutors must establish that it qualifies as a dangerous weapon under the law and address the required intent....

D.C.’s highest local court applied that rule last year in Carrington v. United States, throwing out a weapons conviction involving an umbrella because prosecutors had not shown that it was likely to cause death or serious injury in the way it was used....

 The police asked Le if it worked and he said, "Yeah, it’s the real deal, man."

I went back to see the APT production of "The Chairs" again.

Hard to get tickets at this point, but go here. It's not impossible. What a fantastic performance! I don't know that I've ever heard a more enthusiastic standing ovation.

How often have you gone back to see the same theatrical production? I can only think of 2 other occasions, both in this theater (the indoor theater at APT). 

"I can’t count how many messages I’ve received over time about my appearance. Especially that I have ugly teeth and thin hair."

"The fact that I have an ugly 'wart' on my nose and good advice on getting Botox. I’m fine with my body. Such as it is, when you are a woman approaching 50."

Wrote Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who got a text that asked "Do you want to get that little spot on your nose fixed?"

She's quoted in "'I’m Fine With My Body': Danish Leader Responds to Unsolicited Beauty Advice/Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had just returned from Ukraine when she received a message from a plastic surgeon asking if she wanted to fix her nose" (NYT gift link).

The Times makes this a discussion of the pressure on women to meet beauty standards. I think that's an important issue. I'd like to see it tied to the massive celebration of Dolly Parton, who went to an immense amount of trouble to manifest her ideal of highly exaggerated feminine beauty.

But what I want to talk about is the facial phenomenon often called a "wart." First of all, it's not a wart!

Devilish imagery.

 

That's at the top of the WaPo home page.

The red glow of the photograph is transfixing. If you can tear your eyes away from it and look to the text, you see "Mike Collins" and "KKK and Nazi." Emotional tainting accomplished. There's little potential for your mind to travel on to pull out "former... staffer" and "what appear to be," let alone to click through to investigate whether there's really anything to damage Collins.

Clicking gets you to this article (gift link):

"Reading Count of Monte Cristo in One Sitting."

Its a TikTok thing. I'm seeing 12 videos in this group. Check it out. Reading "The Count of Monte Cristo" is a thing these days, but why? It's super-long, so people have been avoiding it, but word has got out that it's a very exciting, gripping read. If you like — or think you might like — video of people reading, click through. It really is people reading — reading "The Count of Monte Cristo."

By the way, I have not read "The Count of Monte Cristo." It was my father's favorite book, or so he often said, often conjoined with the opinion that he hated "The Return of the Native." I have read "The Return of the Native" and 4 other Thomas Hardy novels. My son Chris recently read "The Count of Monte Cristo," though his main reading project is biographies of U.S. Presidents.

This post was inspired by a comment from Jaq on my previous post, which is about the decline of childhood reading. Jaq wrote: "Just bought The Count of Monte Christo [sic] through your link, and there it sits, like a cinder block on my coffee table, will I finish it? Now I guess I’ll have to, but it will hardly fit in my hip pocket the way I always sported one as a teenager. You can’t blame kids though, we are the ones who invented the crack, I mean smartphones."

And here's the latest photograph from a presidential biography sent to me by Chris. The scene is JFK's reception for black leaders on the 100-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation:

"Looking back, I grew up in the last great age of childhood reading. Juvenile bookworms..."

"... were still a regular sight in the early Noughties. You could glimpse our kind on trains and in cafés: wan, bespectacled and dreamy, trailing after our parents, clutching our grubby, sticky copies of The Chronicles of Narnia or Northern Lights. It was the era of Philip Pullman, of Horrible Histories, of Artemis Fowl. Above all, it was the age of Harry Potter, with its feverish midnight queues of miniature witches and wizards up past their bedtime to get their hands on the latest instalment (my sister and I went to the cavernous, warehouse-sized Borders bookshop at Silverlink Retail Park wearing bin bags for Hogwarts capes).... [A]s the age of print fades away and the angry, distractible age of the smartphone dawns, I think we find ourselves facing a post-literate world that will resemble the pre-literate world: less democratic, less rational and less enlightened...."

Writes James Marriott in "The 36 books that changed my life/An obsession with words got the Times columnist through his eccentric childhood and his parents’ divorce. Now 33, he has written a book — in praise of reading, of course" (London Times).

I don't know if that link will work for you to see the list, but it's an excellent list. I've read many of the books, and I was motivated to buy one of them on the spot — "The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous." Another — "In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England." — I would have bought if there had been an audiobook. 

Marriott's new book is "The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society," and I will buy that too when it comes out in October, assuming there's an audiobook. There are some things I know I need to walk to read. 

If you use any of those links to buy a book, I receive a commission, and I'm telling you that because I believe that transparency is required, but in fact, I only link to books that I wanted to mention anyway.

Sunrise.

"He was the world’s most mature 12-year-old. He had a fantastic case of arrested development; he could sense immediately, 'This is what kids will love.'"

Said Art Spiegelman, quoted in "Len Brown, the Kidlike Creator of ‘Mars Attacks,’ Dies at 84/He brought a juvenile creative sensibility to the Topps Chewing Gum company, where he was able to unerringly predict what would appeal to adolescents" (NYT gift link).

The terrifying global invasion ['Mars Attacks'] played out in 55 vivid cards. But parents’ complaints about the gory incidents that were depicted — a dog being destroyed, for example, as a boy “cried out in horror” — kept them from being distributed nationally.... 

His many projects in the 1960s included helping to create a card set devoted to Soupy Sales, the mischievous TV personality. During the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Brown was part of the team that created two major sticker series: “Wacky Packages” mocked consumer products, parodying them with names like Cap’n Crud, Jolly Mean Giant and Ratz Crackers; “Garbage Pail Kids” spoofed Cabbage Patch Kids, the wildly popular, round-faced dolls that came with adoption papers.

"I was hesitant in that, if it worked, it might be a difficult image to shake off. But then, really, I’ve always thought it wasn’t worth doing unless you took a risk, really. So I just took the risk."

Said Tim Curry, quoted in "Tim Curry, Star of ‘Rocky Horror’ and Much More, Dies at 80/The actor’s gift for garish eccentricity was indelibly appropriate for the outlandish, cross-dressing mad scientist Frank-N-Furter" (NYT gift link).

Here's Curry — who had a stroke in 2012 — discussing his roles:

"Even as Trump’s Standing Slips, He Slingshots a Political Novice to Victory."

Headline at the NYT for the story about Darline Graham's victory in yesterday's primary runoff.

You can see the story the Times wants to tell, even as the facts on the ground don't line up exactly right:

Some of the luster had seemed to come off Mr. Trump’s political brand in recent weeks. His approval ratings have drooped, his party’s midterm outlook has darkened and his chosen picks in several races for governor and the House have fallen short.

ADDED: He slingshots her. It's like something Wile E. Coyote would do to himself to cross a canyon. Or what the Lost Boys did to Robin Williams:

The Mythbusters tried it:

"Meta on Wednesday reached a landmark settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties..."

"... and make major changes to its products over claims it endangered children with addictive social media platforms. In a dramatic capitulation, the owner of Facebook and Instagram agreed to the financial penalties for violating federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws, the states announced. Meta also agreed to limit how long teenagers can spend on its platforms and to bans on features that stoke mental health issues, striking at the heart of the company’s business of engagement for advertising.... Meta still faces numerous other lawsuits from school districts and individuals.... 'Meta wouldn’t settle unless it sees the writing on the wall and feels really exposed,' said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a law professor at Stanford University."

I'm reading "Meta to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion in Landmark Settlement Over Social Media Addiction Claims/The social media giant settled with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, and agreed to make major changes to its products over claims its platforms endangered children" (NYT gift link).

"Women in rural Devon are being coached on how to give birth in the back of a car after their local hospital shut its maternity service."

That's in the London Times.

Catherine Mchomvu, an antenatal class teacher at the Devon Antenatal Family Centre, said it was important that women and their partners had supplies, including towels, blankets and water in the car....  “It’s about trying to create the birth environment that you would normally have in the hospital or at home, in your car.

And here's an article from 12 days ago: "'Maternity deserts' leave women with two-hour journey to give birth/Mothers-to-be fear delivering their babies on the roadside as NHS staffing shortages and closures leave swathes of England without nearby maternity care."

The Royal Family pays tribute to Dolly.

Remembering the late, great Dolly, who brought joy, comfort and inspiration to so many - including the millions of children given free books through her Imagination Library. We will always ❤️ you. pic.twitter.com/wdKHKGALlH

— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) August 26, 2026

Sunrise.

Goodbye to Dolly Parton.

"Dolly Parton, Superstar Whose Songs Spoke to Millions, Dies at 80/Known for her outsize persona, appearance and talent, she rose from rural poverty to become a top-selling singer, songwriter and entrepreneur" (NYT gift link).

She wrote unabashedly, in simple Southern vernacular, about growing up as the daughter of an illiterate sharecropper. “I’ve seen Daddy’s hands break open and bleed / And I’ve seen him work ’til he’s stiff as a board,” she sang over wistful harmonica and acoustic guitar in “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad).” “I’ve seen Mama layin’ in sufferin’ and sickness / In need of a doctor we couldn’t afford. / Anything at all was more than we had / In the good old days when times were bad.”... 

“Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast,” she told The Times in 2002. “I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder. I write every day, even when I’m on a plane, in the tub or on the bus. It burns in me.... Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out. Not everything I write is good, but it’s all good for me — like therapy.”

It has long seemed to me that she was the most-loved celebrity in the world — universally loved.

ADDED: "Very sad to report that Dolly Parton, one of the greatest Country singers, and far beyond, EVER, has just passed away. This is a true loss for millions of people. There has never been anyone like her, and never will. In her honor, I am lowering the American flag throughout the United States for a one week period beginning tonight at 6:00PM. Rest in Peace, Dolly! The World loves you. President DONALD J. TRUMP."

I believe this is the first time a President has lowered the flag for someone in the entertainment world.

AND: My oldest post with the "Dolly Parton" tag has this quote from her: "A cartoon character is how I see myself and it's worked for me for 40 years. I would rather be a cartoon than a genius!"

"But in our conversations, he would return again and again to the electric chair, still an object of primal, almost talismanic fear all of this time later."

"'It cooks you,' he would repeat, folding into himself. 'It cooks you.' While the time of his trial is always within reach for Smith, the intervening decades are somewhere else, behind a curtain he won’t or can’t push aside. Smith isn’t in the habit of personal disclosure, in any case. He does not have friends in the nursing home. 'I keep to myself,' he says often. He doesn’t want to know what people were convicted of, and doesn’t ask. He says he didn’t have friends in prison either, and he isn’t exaggerating: 'Minds his own business and has no associates,' reads one behavioral report from 1964. Smith waves every question about those decades away with an impatient, 'It was prison' or 'I don’t think about that.'... Smith now spends most of his time in his room, watching TV. In conversations over the course of a year, the only person I hear him express something like friendship for is Tucker Carlson.... 'He’s my type of guy. We’re the same type,' he says, though he won’t say more.I could see it, somehow. The grievance, the paranoia, the sense that things are stacked against you."

Wrote Annalisa Quinn, in 2022 in the Boston Globe, "Frank Smith was locked up for eight decades. At 98, what would it mean to be free? Likely the longest-serving prisoner in America, he’s been paroled into a Connecticut nursing home. But he’s still not out."

That article is linked in this NYT obituary from a few days ago, "Frank Smith, Who Served 70 Years for Murder, Dies at 101/One of the longest-serving prisoners in American history, he was sent to death row in 1950 before his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment."

The Times obit doesn't mention Smith's affinity for Tucker Carlson... perhaps to maintain the Times reader's empathy for the ancient convict.

"Claims of having grown up in the wild are widely viewed with skepticism, and expertise in the subject is rare."

"There have been some notable cases, though they are few.... As Mr. Rodríguez told it, he was born into a poor family in southern Spain in June 1946. His mother died when he was very young, and the woman his father later married was an abusive stepmother.... When he was about 7, he said, he was put in the care of an old goatherd, to be trained to replace him..... The old man then died or disappeared, and young Marcos began to fend for himself.... Mr. Rodríguez said he lived in the wild for about 11 years with the help of wolves and other animals. In 1965, he was discovered by law enforcement authorities among wolves, wearing animal skins. He described his return to life among humans as something he did not know how to manage and would never fully embrace.....  Mr. Rodríguez said he struggled with human society for much of his life. Employers had taken advantage of him over the years, people had mocked him and he had been happiest among the animals, he said in interviews...."

From "Man Who Told of a Childhood With Wolves Dies at 80/Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja’s improbable story of a wild youth became the subject of a study, and inspired a novel and film" (NYT gift link).

"In the most eye-popping moment of the exchange, Mr. Watters asked if Dr. El-Sayed believed it was OK 'for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off'..."

"... referring to transition surgeries for minors. Dr. El-Sayed responded by asking if Mr. Watters was circumcised. 'Uh, yeah, but that’s a personal question, doctor,' Mr. Watters responded, laughing, before contending that 'circumcision’s different than castration.' Dr. El-Sayed said that he believed the government should not tell Americans what health care procedures they could undergo, but he did not directly say whether he approved of transition surgeries. The interview showed the strategy Dr. El-Sayed is adopting as Mr. Rogers seeks to paint him as a radical leftist who is out of touch with Michigan voters. The Democratic nominee’s approach is to cast 'culture-war' issues as a distraction from the everyday problems Americans face, like rising costs and worries about health care...."

From "El-Sayed Joins Fox News for Some Light Verbal Combat and a Pitch to Republicans/In a smiling yet tense interview, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, argued that his Republican critics were using culture-war issues to distract from Americans’ economic concerns" (NYT gift link).

"Mr. Rogers" = Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate.

"I have just been informed by the United States Navy that all mines have been removed and/or detonated from within the International Waters of the Strait of Hormuz."

"Iran has been notified that any ship or boat placing new mines will be immediately and systematically destroyed. Through Space Force, we are watching every square inch of the Strait, as we are, also, with Pickaxe Mountain and the already destroyed three other Nuclear sites. There is a Zero Tolerance policy on mine placement in full force and effect. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Writes Trump, at Truth Social.

So that means we won the war?

"Men are struck and killed more than four times as often as women.... The United States has seen 12 lightning fatalities so far this year."

"The vast majority (90 percent) of lightning-strike victims survive. Most who don’t suffer cardiac arrest or stop breathing. Most victims can be revived by immediate CPR. Strike victims do not hold a charge and are safe to touch.... In many cases, people are struck and killed even when it’s not raining. Lightning bolts can leap up to 10 miles from a parent thunderstorm, and often the more errant, farther-venturing bolts carry more charge. If you can hear thunder, you are close enough to be struck by lightning."

From "Woman and her 2-year-old daughter killed by lightning in Florida/Four people have now died from lightning in the state this year. Florida averages seven such fatalities annually" (WaPo).

"In 1983 she was mugged when she was out with her friend Larry David. She smiles. 'This is the curse of Larry David...'"

"'... it was terrifying but it was also hilarious. We both co-operated because there were two young guys and one of them had a shotgun, but Larry, I guess through stress, slipped into sounding like [the confident sports journalist] Howard Cosell. Going, "All right, take the money, everybody just stay calm." And I was looking at him, like, who are you?'"

From "I wrote Thelma & Louise — nothing has changed for women since then
Callie Khouri is turning her film into a musical. She talks about discovering a young Brad Pitt, getting mugged with Larry David and why she would love to return to Nashville" (London Times).

Also: "... Khouri says, looking resigned, that she doesn’t think much has changed for women since that day when, fired up, she wrote a fantasy about striking back against everything she had to put up with. 'In the US it’s got worse,' she states.

Target apologizes for a costume that — accidentally? — looks like blackface.

You decide. It's the "Kids’ Glows under Blacklight Circus Clown Halloween Costume Bodysuit":

I'll do a poll:

"In 2021, Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger argued that the U.S. public school system violates the First Amendment."

"'Education,' he wrote, 'consists mostly in speech, and parents have a right under the First Amendment to exercise authority over what their children hear.' Forcing families to accept government messaging — or pay a steep price to escape it — amounts to unconstitutional pressure. A lawsuit filed in Nebraska on Aug. 13 brings that argument into court — and could open a path toward universal school choice."

From "Are public schools unconstitutional? A Nebraska court will decide. The challenge to compulsory education combined with public-school-only funding could lead to universal school choice" (WaPo)(gift link).

The headline is bad. The argument is about compelled public schooling, and the Supreme Court recognized long ago that parents have a right to choose to send their children to private school. The lively dispute is over whether privately schooled children are entitled to their share of public spending. If public school is the only free choice, then the choice is heavily weighted toward the government's preferred speech.

The Hamburger article, in the WSJ, is "Is the Public School System Constitutional? Education consists mostly in speech, and parents have a right under the First Amendment to exercise authority over what their children hear." The word "system" makes that headline less bad. The system is that if you pay your own way you can control your child's schooling but government schooling is free.

The old Supreme Court case is Pierce v. Society of Sisters, a unanimous 1925 case. Memorable passage: "The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations."

The Japanese Prime Minister and the possibly reincarnated cockroach.

"Even after moving to the official residence, I carefully wiped down the floor under the dining table, put food scraps in a sturdy lidded garbage can, and washed and sorted plastic containers, so I was shocked when, one day, a cockroach suddenly scurried past my feet."

Writes Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, at X. 

"But I’ve loved Osamu Tezuka’s *Firebird* since I was a child and have read it over and over many times. *Firebird* depicts the idea of reincarnation, that 'life is connected, changing forms,' and it had a huge impact on me even as a child. Maybe because of that, even now as an adult, I can’t bring myself to kill insects, cockroaches included. For the cockroach that ran through the official residence, I thought things like, 'Maybe this life is also part of that long cycle of reincarnation,' and for a while, I endured it, hoping it would somehow leave on its own—but when I told my secretaries about it, they were appalled. 'It’s unclean. I’ll handle it,' one of the secretaries said firmly, and arranged for Operation Combat. After that, the cockroaches stopped appearing. I felt relieved, but also a little lonely, or maybe sad…"

That got picked up in Western media with headlines like "Japanese PM Says She Felt ‘Lonely, or Maybe Sad’ When Staff Got Rid of the Cockroach in Her Home" (People) and "Japan’s PM: I’m so lonely I befriended a cockroach" (The Telegraph).

They seem to miss everything elegant and evocative about what Takaichi is trying to say through her carefully written vignette. Did they, at least, read Tezuka’s "Firebird"?

Sunrise.

"Supreme Court Allows Trump Plan to Restrict Mail-In Voting, for Now."

"The administration asked the court to clear the way for President Trump’s order that creates 'state citizenship lists' and directs the Postal Service to decide who gets a mail-in ballot" (NYT gift link).

"It’s tempting to look at Duffy’s political ascent—and Trump’s, of course—and reflect on the surprising cultural sticking power of turn-of-the-millennium-style reality TV...."

"The Trump Presidency likely wouldn’t have been possible without 'The Apprentice.’ Duffy’s rise has been less meteoric, but his launchpad, if anything, was an even purer distillation of the genre; as my colleague Emily Nussbaum has written, 'The Real World' pioneered many of reality TV’s modern tropes—the cast of strangers, the apartment as set, the confessional interviews—and cultivated a viewership.... When I revisited the show earlier this summer, it seemed a particularly propitious moment to assert the ongoing influence of reality TV, not least in politics. Spencer Pratt, the villain from 'The Hills,' was running for mayor of Los Angeles, depicting the city as a hellhole and attracting reams of media coverage. Luke Gulbranson ('Summer House') was running for a (year-round) U.S. House seat in Minnesota. Mark Moran ('FBoy Island') was running for Senate in Virginia. The moment no longer seems so propitious. Moran dropped out; Gulbranson lost, as, more significantly, did Pratt, occasioning some hand-wringing about whether his supposed surge had ever been real to begin with. (In fairness, almost nothing is more reality-TV than that.)..."

Writes Jon Allsop, in "Sean Duffy in the Real World/Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary got his big break on reality TV, and is now out with a six-part YouTube show about a family road trip. How bad could it be?"

"When choosing colors for dirty areas, including mudrooms, try green... 'If you’re a heavy Amazon shopper and get all those [brown] Amazon boxes, green looks really good with brown.'"

I'm reading "The secret to an orderly home? 'Dirty zones.' Laundry areas, small cabinets, baskets and even hooks are the 'first line of defense' against messes creeping into the whole house" (WaPo).

"Why you should never walk barefoot on a hotel carpet."

Headline at WaPo (free link).

[H]otel carpets are often flecked with food debris, dead skin cells and dust that engender mites, bacteria, mold, allergens and other microorganisms.... Guests’ in-room habits, such as eating takeout, brushing their hair or scratching an itch, contribute to the carpet litter. Shoes also drag in an array of vile material, including fecal matter picked up from places where dogs and humans do their business, such as sidewalks, parks and public bathrooms. Guests will disperse the excrement and other organic bits on their journey from lobby to hallway to room....

A comment from over there: "Another WP fearmongering article afraid of imaginary hazards. Yes, the carpets are germy, but so is everything else. Has anyone ever been harmed?" 

That reminds me, I was just about to blog this other WaPo piece, "Why we should stop eating lettuce, cyclospora or not/Lettuce makes us sick, wastes resources and has minimal nutritional value. Why are we still consuming it?"

The World Humanoid Robot Games, there were Olympic-style events like the 100-meter sprint as well as contests for robots to pick up beans.

Sunrise.

"Chance, fate—these are abstract ideas that usually raise abstract questions. Do people have story-like fates..."

"... or are they just subject to concatenations of occurrences? Do things happen 'for a reason,' or do we just make up stories after the fact to tie events together? Broadly speaking, there’s an ancient antagonism between the notion that life must make sense and the observation that it often doesn’t.... And yet, at times when fate is actually 'happening,' such questions recede. Instead, what stands out are the physical particulars of the here and now. In the hospital, after the accident, you know your life is changing; you sense your proximity to what the novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard calls 'the deep, slow-shifting layers of reality where fate is at work.' Somehow this abstract understanding exists alongside, or by means of, the objects in the waiting room—a paper cup from the water cooler, or a copy of People magazine."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Should You Believe in Fate? We’d be happier, perhaps, if we found meaning not through abstractions but through the physical things around us" (The New Yorker).

"More visitors are giving up on summer holidays in cities that feel like saunas and booking 'coolcations' in Iceland, Norway, or Denmark...."

"A 2023 European Commission study forecast 'a clear north-south pattern in tourism demand changes' that 'becomes more pronounced for higher warming scenarios,' signalling growing economic consequences for Madrid, Lisbon, Athens, and Milan. 'Travelling to European cities is about cultural experience,' Daniel Scott, a scholar of tourism at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, told me. 'Whether it’s Paris, Barcelona, or Rome, you amble around, sightseeing, street shopping, taking a riverboat tour, going to a museum, a restaurant, a café. Most of that time, you’re outside.' Climate change increasingly turns pleasure trips into exercises in escaping pain. 'When I’m in Europe, I always notice how many people crowd under trees and shaded areas,' Scott said. 'But at some attractions, like the Acropolis, there’s no way to avoid the blazing sun. On especially hot days, they’ve got the Red Cross giving out water, medics pre-positioned because they know many people are going to be in trouble when they come down.'"

From "The End of the European Summer/As extreme heat overwhelms the Continent’s great cities, they are racing to transform themselves for a climate that they were never built to withstand" (The New Yorker).

"Mortality is an immutable fact of the human condition, but the desire to cheat death has endured for a very long time."

"According to legend and history, Gilgamesh, Chinese emperors and medieval alchemists all tried to attain immortality. The allure is no less profound today, but the modern potions are somewhat more sophisticated and inherently appealing to a wealthy, techno-centric class of people like [Bryan] Johnson. Mr. Johnson, who lives in Los Angeles, is perhaps the best known of a cadre of scientists and influencers known as 'longevity bros.' They obsessively document their attempts to live cleaner and longer, known cuttingly as 'longevity fixation syndrome.'..."

From "He Said He Was the World’s Healthiest Man. Then Came a Stunning Diagnosis. Bryan Johnson, the longevity guru, wants to live forever. But the big question is why" (NYT gift link).

You can read that essay, but I went on to look for more about that Chinese emperor. I found this: "Trying To Live Forever Killed The Creator Of China's 'Forever Army'/Even the Terracotta Army can’t save you from mercury poisoning" (IFL Science): 

"This is the night I should go to the theater."

Chris — my son, the reader of presidential biographies — texts me another passage from "President Kennedy: Profile of Power" (commission earned).

"Ancient societies had another method to deal with debt. It was called an amargi — a blanket declaration of public debt cancellation."

"All public debts written off. Disappeared. It sounds laughable, I know. But, really, that’s just because the idea has been buried so deeply in history you’ve probably never heard of it. In the ancient world, it presented a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem. And now, faced with impossible-to-repay debts that are weighing down our economy, is the time to look at the amargi and the lessons it offers about how to think about finance...."

From "$40 Trillion Debt? The Ancient Sumerians Wouldn’t Have Cared" (NYT gift link).

The essay is by Paul Vigna, managing editor of American Banker and author of "The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin" (commission earned).

"The fact that [Jason Arday] was promoted as some kind of prodigy given how crazy his self-representation was is a sign of just how cultic and confused the left and left-leaning institutions have become."

"I mean, it's just it's just a sign of the the cancer having spread everywhere.... I mean, it's just, this is all, anti-racism.... This is putting the black — the BLM black — square not only in your bio but in your brain. Um, it's a cult. It's always been a cult. It's been obvious for for about a decade now that this is what we're witnessing is the the ramifications of a moral panic around race and social justice that got engineered on the left.... It's intolerable and if we don't get our heads clear of its new variant, this this far-left socialist/communist alliance with with Islamism, we're going to go for another round of right-wing ascendancy in America and elsewhere.... [Cambridge was] totally corrupt in its desperation to believe that somebody who checks all the identitarian boxes is a you know is... some kind of you know woke superhero.... I mean, you're you're in the presence of a lunatic who's making these claims about himself, right?... The social justice hysteria around race that has occurred in the last decade has been almost totally dishonest almost. I mean, this is the just Jussie Smollettification of everything, right?"

Said Sam Harris.

 

"The rollout could’ve been better. Absolutely, I said the rollout has to be cleaned up and fixed."

Said Governor Kathy Hochul, quoted in "How New York’s Second-Home Tax Turned Into a Headache for Mamdani/The bumpy rollout of the tax created an opportunity for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s opponents to fight him in court and in the City Council" (NYT gift link).

Ms. Hochul, was concerned about what she saw as clumsy messaging by Mr. Mamdani as he introduced the esoteric tax to New Yorkers. She told the mayor that he needed to be clearer about how the tax would be administered and whom it would affect, according to two people familiar with their talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. The governor had taken note of how the mayor, a democratic socialist who campaigned on “taxing the rich,” was talking about the policy. In a widely seen video, for instance, the mayor had decided to highlight an especially expensive second home owned by a hedge fund manager, Kenneth C. Griffin.

“There’s a better way to do it,” said, Ms. Hochul a pro-business moderate. “Point to Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes” rather than someone who invests in the city, she added.

Here's that widely seen video, which, exclaiming "Oh, no!," I impulsively clicked off at the 5-second mark:

I did finally watch the whole minute. From the transcript: "This pied-a-terre tax is specifically designed for the richest of the rich, those who store their wealth in New York City real estate, but who don't actually live here.... This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers." 

What's "fundamentally unfair"? It's a child's reasoning: If someone has something that he's not using, it should be mine. 

The NYT calls the new tax "esoteric." I wonder what other adjectives it considered. Is it esoteric because it's hard for the general public to understand, or is it esoteric because it only applies to a discrete group of people?

Sunrise.

"Patients who disagree with their doctor can be 'fired' or flagged with scarlet letters in the corners of their electronic medical charts."

"'Exaggerating.' 'Resistant.' 'Noncompliant.' 'Hysterical.' To be sure, there are problematic patients, even dangerous ones. But for the rest of us, the imbalance between our defenselessness and the doctor’s discretion can create an unhelpful dynamic, one that pushes us to stop advocating and start accommodating. The result is waiting rooms full of people pleasers and providers who never get the full picture. The pressure to be pleasant and pliant is especially strong for women. Just as 'bossy' women often don’t get promotions and 'uppity' women are more likely to be sexually harassed, women who are branded as difficult patients are at risk of not being taken seriously or losing access to care. This is one of the reasons women overapologize, even for their own pain. A simple disclaimer — 'I don’t mean to be difficult, but …' — can backfire as well...."

Writes Allison Sweet Grant, author of "Lump: A Memoir in Ineloquent Reflections," "This Is Why Women Are Scared to Tell Their Doctors the Truth" (NYT gift link).

A mere 30 years ago, this was a highlighted modern problem on "Seinfeld" (Season 8, Episode 5, "The Package"):

 

(Yes, I know this is my second "Seinfeld" post this morning. It was in looking for this Elaine-at-the-doctor material that I stumbled into the unfilmed episode stuff I blogged an hour ago, here.)

"The Seinfeld cast refused to film this episode. So we animated it instead."

"Jerry and and Julia read this one scene where she has the gun and she's holding in her hand and she says to Jerry in the car, 'All right, Jerry, where do you want it? The Kennedy, the McKinley?' And she could barely get it out of her mouth. And I used to sit right next to Juliet... and I remember her saying it and just looking at me with the most pathetic eyes and then looking at Jerry... and she went, 'I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this.'"

"[T]his relationship is pathological, and a source of great irritation among other courtiers. It is Trump distilled to his essence..."

"... cult leader and his most rabid follower, narcissist and his most flattering mirror. The daughter of a devoutly Christian real estate broker who died by suicide during the pandemic, [Natalie] Harp idolizes Trump with a rare fervor.... ... Trump told his staff that Harp was the only one who loved him as much as his wife and kids did. 'She’ll never leave me,' he would tell other staffers.... It’s a perfect (taxpayer-funded) relationship. She thinks he’s amazing. And he agrees."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Natalie’s Magnificent Obsession" (NYT gift link).

"Obsession" is the title of a current movie that is, as Dowd tells us, "about a man who wishes for more adoration from a young woman, who falls under his spell and maniacally provides it." 

I haven't seen it. And I haven't seen "Magnificent Obsession," but I know it's a 1954 movie starring Ronald Reagan's first wife:

ADDED: After reading Dowd's column, I scribbled this at Grok, writing quickly, without the intention of sharing it, but I'm sharing it:

I'm interested in they way many women in the workplace are competitive with other women in a way that's actually sexist — judging that other women are getting more than they deserve because of their looks and/or imagining that sexual things are going on. They're actually impeding the progress of women... or are they trying to help some subset of women by pulling particular women down? (I'm thinking about the reaction to Natalie Harp.)

And then I connected the Natalie Harp foofaraw to this passage from "President Kennedy: Profile of Power" (commission earned) that my son Chris — reader of presidential biographies — had just texted to me last night. We join the Cuban Missile Crisis in progress.

Sunrise.

The astounding delusion of Neom.

ADDED: Back in 2021, I blogged a NYT article about the the part of the project called "the Line" —  "a postmodern ecotopia... a narrow urban strip 106 miles long with no roads, no cars and no pollution...." Here's how Saudi Arabia announced the project:

"The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily allowed President Trump to continue construction of a luxury White House ballroom to replace the East Wing he demolished last fall."

The NYT reports.

In a one-sentence order, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., acting on his own, issued a place holder that gives all nine justices additional time to more fully consider whether construction of the planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom can proceed. The chief justice’s order did not provide a timeline for when the court would act next, stating only that a lower-court ruling against the Trump administration was paused “pending further order of the undersigned or of the court.”

"I looked in his eyes. I can't picture his face... I didn't see the skin. When I think about him... all I see is these deep oceans of blue in these deep concerning eyes."

"And this like white light behind them. That's what I picture when I think about what did Bob Dylan look like to me. All I can see is these the deepest bluest eyes with the most concerning emotion in them and then this like aura of like white light. That's what Bob looks like to me in my memory. I can't remember his face...."

Said Billy Strings.

Theo Von: "It's almost something that's like almost like maybe from another realm or something. I think God, like God's concern, like shows up in our eyes, I think. So maybe he just has a lot of like concern from the other side, you know?"

Billy Strings: “Yeah. And it's it's not a paranoid concern. It's more of like a compassion and and a like like a love like from an elder, you know?”

Theo: “Yeah. Maybe like a kind of semi-aggressive intrigue kind of.”

Billy: “Like a some kind of musical grandpa, you know?”

Theo: “Yeah, dude. Bob Dylan, bro. Wow.”

I see my name invoked over at Instapundit.

It's on the old "men in shorts" topic. Something about women being able to wear "sundresses" to work. I think the term "sundresses" is being used to mean sleeveless dresses. An actual sundress wouldn't look any more professional than a man in shorts, but sleeveless dresses exist and might look okay in the office. But isn't the office air conditioned? I think women are more likely to put on a sweater than to want their bare arms exposed. 

Anyway, my classic men-in-shorts topic was about men looking like children. It all started back in 2006. It all started with something Tom Wolfe wrote in "I Am Charlotte Simmons" [commission earned]. "I was amused," I blogged, "to run across this description of a man wearing shorts":

All that elegance was what made the personage of Dr. Lewin seem so curious. Last week, when the class first met, he had worn a plaid cotton shirt and pants -- nothing remarkable about that. The shirt had had long sleeves, and the pants had been long pants. But this morning he had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of his gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old, a pair of eyeglasses with lenses thick as ice pushed up to the summit of his forehead -- unaccountably addressing thirty college students, at Dupont, no less.

That's my motivation. Trying to encourage you to eschew the look of an ossified 7-year-old. 

"Rachel Cusk... wasn’t planning on having this conversation about the novel, 'Life of M,' but other people have had a lot to say — about whether 'M' is actually Natalie Portman..."

"... and whether, by writing about an actor who so closely resembles a real celebrity, Cusk has committed some kind of artistic betrayal.... Cusk seems bewildered, and a bit distressed, to find herself caught in the harsh spotlight of fame and the kind of tabloid feeding frenzy she evokes in the novel, which features an author who writes about a famous actress."

From "How a Highbrow Novel Became Celebrity Gossip 'Life of M,' Rachel Cusk’s new book, has a protagonist with an uncanny resemblance to Natalie Portman. But in an interview, Cusk says she never expected it would cause such a frenzy" (NYT gift link).

Cusk says: "It’s very stressful, the thought of these things happening.... It’s taking the novel that I’ve created into almost a sort of courtroom or a factual fight.... What I’ve done belongs much more in a world in which fame, and these people who are so known and yet so unknown, is a part of contemporary consciousness....

"Robert Plant bakes a pie."

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"I am using [the word 'scam'] more liberally than I think other people do. On purpose, because I think it’s funny."

Says Alex Falcone, who makes videos in a series called “Is It a Scam? Yep," quoted in "Alcohol. Manliness. Flushable Wipes. Since When Are These ‘Scams’?" (NYT gift link).

I like this expansion of the word. It is, as Falcone says, funny. 

Watch his videos on YouTube here.

Example:

ADDED: Once you start using the word "scam" this way, you quickly progress and will, I predict, get to "life itself" in less than 15 minutes. It's more light-hearted than calling everything "bullshit." It's reminiscent of Holden Caulfield calling everything "phony."

AND: There are quite a few things I've blogged about over the years that reflect an opinion that I could express with this broad use of the word scam — journalism, tourist travel, flying on a plane, manned space travel, the 2 major parties, calls for civility....

Steve Hilton, the GOP nominee for Governor of California, talks to Joe Rogan.

Joe and Hilton are old friends, and this discussion goes on for 3 hours, so this should be a major boost for Hilton. I'll just jump in at the point where they are talking about the waste of money on nonprofits that deal with homelessness:

Steve Hilton: This woman runs a homeless nonprofit, 1.6 million dollar salary. Homeless nonprofit.... There's another one...  2.6 million a year....

Joe Rogan: And here's the most important thing. The homelessness only got worse. Like if in the private sector, imagine if you were a CEO of a company that was just losing insane amounts of money and never completing its tasks, never doing the thing that it set out to do....

Steve Hilton: The more I look at it, the more insane it is. And everyone just looks at it and no one's ever pointed this stuff out.... The government just makes everything so expensive in California. Everyone says, oh, it's so expensive. What are we going to do? We'd better give them more welfare benefits... we better have a billionaire wealth tax.... They don't have that mentality of cutting costs like every normal business.... And this is what happens, I think, when you've got this one party rule thing that's been going on for 16 years now. They've run everything. They don't care because they think they'll be in power forever and it just doesn't matter....

"They were a success in Hollywood on one level. They brilliantly scammed some of the powers that be..."

"... and I never ceased to be amazed that very shrewd, extremely astute, hard-bitten, cynical executives are still blinded by celebrity. There was no proof from the beginning that these people knew how to produce material that people wanted to watch and yet they walked away with millions and millions of dollars. And on that level, they were a glowing success. On another level, which is return on investment, they failed abysmally."

Said Stephen Galloway, dean of the film school at Chapman University in California, quoted in "How Harry and Meghan ‘scammed’ Hollywood/The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are leaving California after deals with Netflix and Spotify failed, experts say. Is their brand dead?" (London Times).

Brilliantly scammed? What did they do that was brilliant? Maybe Galloway is a little scammed. He's proclaiming brilliance when all he is seeing are foolish executives falling for a man who inherited royalty. Or is Meghan brilliant — not brilliant at producing shows, but perhaps brilliant to see a way to bamboozle executives with royalty for a few years until the ludicrous inability to deliver the product became crushingly obvious?

Sunrise.

Talking crossword.

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"If 'lore' is in part a word about treating fiction as a set of discoverable facts, it is also a word that imagines the hard facts of real life as part of a grand story...."

Writes Mitch Therleau, in "A Simple, One-Word Trick to Turn Everyday Life Into Grand Fantasy" (NYT gift link).

“Share a piece of lore about yourself,” goes one perennial prompt post on X.... The responses these kinds of posts elicit are not unlike the fun facts you might be prompted to share in an icebreaker activity.... Calling these unfun facts “lore” perhaps blunts the pain of the original experiences, rhetorically placing them in misty antiquity and sarcastically puffing them up into arcane secrets.... “Does your brand have lore?” asks Advertising Week... “Lore” is a hinge word, a threshold word. Fiction passes through it and becomes tangible fact; facts pass through it and become part of a grand story. Its ultimate trick is to make knowledge not embarrassing or useless, but a form of dark magic.

ADDED: This makes me think of the old Mothers of Invention song about becoming a hippie:

First I'll buy some beads
And then perhaps a leather band to go around my head
Some feathers and bells
And a book of Indian lore....

At the Coyote Café...

... you can talk your way through lunchtime.

"She won’t be here long"/"Next: H&M- the divorce"/"This is going to end in tears"/"My thoughts exactly. She does not want to be here. Lawyers will be circling...."

Various comments to be found at the London Times article, "Prince Harry and Meghan moving back to UK this month/Duke and Duchess of Sussex have enrolled Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet in a British school and are preparing to leave California."

"Unfortunately for [Jeff] Bezos and [Lauren] Sánchez, the very fact of their obscene wealth and fame may be keeping the gates of membership closed to them thus far."

"As the [Wall Street] Journal reported, 'As with many private country clubs, admission often comes down to hitting it off with existing members.... In fact, too much wealth or notoriety has become a deterrent, as wealthy new applicants arriving in Florida are learning.' In fact, 'old guard' members are apparently so turned off by what they see as 'billionaire interlopers' that they are said to be 'mounting a last stand' and refusing to 'offer membership to just anyone who has struck it rich.'... Bezos and Sánchez are not the only deep-pocketed duo living on the Miami island — known as the 'Billionaire Bunker' — who have yet to score an invite for membership. There’s also Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped $170 million on a waterfront estate last year; the Qatari royal family; and one Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump...."

From "Jeff Bezos, Javanka Have Yet to Score Invites to ‘Billionaire Bunker’ Club" (NY Magazine).

Well, this is an old old story, the story of old money socially shunning the newly rich. Those upstarts.

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