It was a chilly, cloud-covered sunrise this morning.

That's my photograph. Later, it got warm and sunny and you can see the blue sky as the background for an eagle in flight, video'd by Meade:

Write about whatever you want in the comments... except the return to Earth of the Artemis astronauts. Go one post down for that.

Artemis splashdown, live.

"Kristi Noem's husband, Bryon, had an on-off secret online relationship with a left-wing dominatrix for more than nine years..."

"Bryon fantasized about 'leaving' Kristi for the woman he worshipped as his 'goddess' and discussed his desire to transition his gender through surgery and hormone therapy. Sotomayor – a 5ft sex worker known as Raelynn Riley with extra-large 2500cc breast implants – has shared dozens of phone recordings and online messages with the Daily Mail.... 'He needed to just talk and talk, and it felt more personal than I was comfortable with,' said the 30-year-old from Colorado Springs who says she made tens of thousands of dollars off the relationship.... 'F*** your family,' Sotomayor texted Bryon in November, later calling the whole Noem clan 'gross.' 'Love that,' he responded. 'Besides the fact of who your wife is, no one is prettier than me. No one is as powerful,' she continued. 'F***ing true. Do you want me to be a woman?' he wrote.... 'I need to be your trans bimbo slut,' he wrote Sotomayor...."

That's what it says in The Daily Mail.

Kamala knows how to be President, because she "spent countless hours in my West Wing office, footsteps away from the Oval Office."

Here's Kamala Harris at the National Action Network conference, when Al Sharpton asked her if she's going to run for President again.

"Listen, I might [run again]. I'm thinking about it. Let me also say this. I served for four years being a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States. I spent countless hours in my West Wing office, footsteps away from the Oval Office. I spent countless hours in the Oval Office, in the Situation Room. I know what the job is. And I know what it requires...."

So she spent untold hours in a room near his room. But what was he even doing in his room? Weren't there other people in other rooms doing everything for him? So yeah, she knows what it takes, and she feels up to it, and, if that's the job, we're all up to it.

"I want you to imagine a guy today, if R. Crumb never existed, but he emerged as R. Crumb today and put that work out. He would 100% be labeled in the Andrew Tate camp, right?"

 

Duncan Trussell had sent Joe Rogan an R. Crumb drawing, and it sets Joe off:

A look at Trump's Triumphal Arch... with the Lincoln Memorial in the background, at a distance.

From "Trump officials unveil designs for president’s controversial 250-foot arch/The arch is intended to commemorate the United States’ 250th anniversary. Military veterans have sued to halt the project, saying it would alter key views of Arlington National Cemetery" (WaPo)(gift link). Excerpt:

"It is his nature to be very deliberate. We don’t have time to be very deliberate in the year 2026."

Said one UW regent, Timothy F. Nixon, quoted in "Top Regent Defends Firing of Wisconsin University Leader/In testimony before state lawmakers, regents suggested that Jay O. Rothman had been well aware of the board’s concerns about his leadership" (NYT).

There's also: "Mr. Nixon, paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, also cast doubt on Mr. Rothman’s contention that he had not known about the board’s misgivings, saying his claim had 'all of the substance of the shadow of a starving pigeon.'"

The oft-repurposed Lincoln hyperbole is: "as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death."

"Everyone seemed to agree that the patients were self-aware — that they could feel, that they had a grounding sense of being a someone who feels."

"But nobody knew exactly how much they retained of themselves: whether they knew themselves as a particular someone, or the someone they once were. It was impossible to know. In the view of these researchers, covertly conscious patients occupied a phenomenological gray space that was inaccessible to scientific probing and even to the human imagination. But some researchers believed that at least some of the patients were largely intellectually intact.... Tabitha learned that once a patient was diagnosed as 'vegetative' and then admitted into a nursing home, it was almost impossible for family members to get a second opinion and a new diagnosis and then, maybe, though only maybe, a new insurance-company authorization and entry into a rehabilitation program. Instead, when a family member, sitting at the bedside, reported the early flickerings of consciousness in a loved one, she was usually dismissed as seeing what she wished to see...."

From "Vegetative Patients May Be More Aware Than We Knew/New research is upending what we thought about the consciousness of patients, leaving families with agonizing choices" (NYT)(gift link, because there's a lot more material at the link, very well presented, including much about the Terri Schiavo case, the recent research about covertly conscious patients, and the vigilance of one wife at her husband's bedside). 

"But much of the ube flavor in foods and beverages doesn’t come from the yam itself."

"In T. Hasegawa’s low-slung building in an industrial district about 10 miles northwest of Anaheim, Calif., teams of food chemists spend their days trying to create concentrates of flavors — some that exist in nature and others that don’t, like 'unicorn' or 'glazed donut' — for food and beverage companies. First, the chemists analyze the composition of real food... to identify the molecules responsible for aroma and taste. Then, natural extracts, oils and aroma compounds are combined to create concentrated versions of the flavor.... 'You can’t just put blood orange juice into an energy drink.... It would require so much juice that there wouldn’t be enough room for other ingredients.' Compared with Dubai chocolate, which exploded in popularity a few years ago thanks to TikTok and its photogenic bright-green filling, ube has been more of a 'slow burn' flavor.... 'It had been on our radar for three years before we named it the flavor of the year'...."

From "A Must for the Next Food Craze? Be ‘Social Media Gorgeous.’ The ascent of ube has little to do with the purple yam’s taste or Filipino origins. It’s the color, flavor experts say" (NYT).

"The lack of outside help for [Janet] Mills has left some Democrats in Maine with the impression that Schumer and other powerful Democrats are leaving her to twist in the wind..."

"... as she fails to make up ground in the polls. With Platner ads airing regularly on television, Mills supporters have begun complaining to Democrats close to the governor about the lack of a response, with some wondering why Schumer recruited the governor to run if no help would be provided when she did.... Republicans have needled Democrats on the apparent lack of support for Mills in the ad wars, using it to paint Schumer as out of touch with the Democratic base. 'Chuck Schumer is bailing out his preferred candidates across the map, but Janet Mills’ air support is nowhere to be found,' the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s regional press secretary, Samantha Cantrell, said in a statement. '“As Maine’s Democrat base turns to the radical liar Graham Platner, Schumer’s dream of beating Susan Collins is slipping further out of sight.'" 

From "Is Chuck Schumer leaving his top candidate recruit twisting in the wind? Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, has gone negative against Graham Platner. The attacks have not worked, and Minority Leader Charles Schumer so far has declined to bail her out" (WaPo).

" I Made a Network of Every Home Run in MLB History."

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night.

"For almost everyone, writing books is a low-paying job! For most it pays literally nothing!"

Lindy West gives us a striking example of working very hard to get publicity for a new book and barely selling anything. Is this a specific example of female readers repelled by the author's finding a way to stand by her polyamorous husband or something much more general in book publishing these days:

"What if your world should fall apart?"

Why not eat 11 doughnuts?

This is so insane

“Crumbl Cookies is now selling a cookie with the amount of sugar you would get, not in 1, not in 5, BUT 11 of these Krispy Kreme donuts”

This one cookie has 69 ingredients including one that crosses the blood brain barrier

How is this legal?? pic.twitter.com/ygUcmxo6n2

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) April 8, 2026

This made me think about the old expression "That's the way the cookie crumbles." The OED traces that expression to 1955, when a Cincinnati Enquirer columnist, Ollie M. James, wrote: "Well, as we say in the publishing business, sometimes that is the way the cookie crumbles." It was perceived at the time as a cute variation on "That's the way the ball bounces." I remember the late '50s excitement over "cookie crumbles" and other variations on the old "ball bounces." But the only other variation I can remember is "That's the way the grapefruit squirts."

Here's Tom Waits, "That's the Way." He remembers:

"They provided $0 to deal with the ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+."

Canada's New Democratic Party Member of Parliament Leah Gazan:

NDP MP Leah Gazan: "They provided $0 to deal with the ongoing genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+,"pic.twitter.com/9KXxlKUuf0

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) April 8, 2026

"My girlfriend turned into a worm."

"So every afternoon..."

After a year of using A.I., TurboTax looks and feels maddeningly clunky.

I paid for TurboTax and TurboTax kept goading me to pay even more to get more help from some additional service, but, of course, I took all my questions to Grok. Somehow it took me hours. What used to feel fast and helpful now feels archaic, abstruse, and ugly. I'm having deja vu. Did I say this last year? No, but looking for that, I found this:

At the Sunrise Café...

... you just might get some sleep tonight.

Ever notice that in "Friend of the Devil," there's a line "Ran into the devil, babe, he loaned me twenty bills" and then later "I ran down to the levee but the devil caught me there/He took my twenty dollar bill..."? Seems like the imagery is muddled. First, there are 20 bills and later, there's a 20-dollar bill, which is a single bill. 

"I was walking with my girlfriend when we saw him. Shirtless, in late-afternoon sunlight, J.F.K., Jr., was playing Frisbee, wearing nothing but black athletic shorts..."

"... tennis shoes, and droopy white socks. This was the Ivy League. Nobody worked out. (Nobody I knew, anyway.) And so I wasn’t prepared for the muscularity, the anachronistic virility, on display. John’s physique was so classically ideal he might’ve been throwing a discus instead of a Frisbee and been carved out of stone. You looked for the defect in him and you couldn’t find it. There had to be something wrong somewhere, but it would take a magnifying glass to detect. Most of his clan had inherited the freckled, rabbity Kennedy looks. John, lucky in everything, had received the enhancing admixture of dark, French Mediterranean, Bouvier blood. I mentioned it was 1979. Bisexuality was undergoing one of its periodic upticks. I’d fallen into some confusion on that score myself. But I had a girlfriend now. That wasn’t what was going on. The urge I felt wasn’t to possess. It wasn’t even to resemble. It was to draw near. To be allowed to draw near...."

Writes Jeffrey Eugenides, in "My Unrequited Love Story with J.F.K., Jr./I knew John F. Kennedy, Jr., not that well and not that long, but enough to have experienced the gravitational pull he exerted, like some great big moon"
 (The New Yorker).

"The euphoria of the first moon landing was directly connected to our ambivalence about the science that made it possible."

"Rocket technology, which lifted man to the moon, could also hurl hydrogen bombs across the planet. Like the promise of artificial intelligence and bioengineering, the promise of space was shadowed by the possibility of planetary annihilation.... The original space program had fierce and cogent critics in the United States, but the allure of the technology, the bravery and telegenic decency of the astronauts, and the symbolic power of winning the race to the moon eventually won out.... [O]n a nervous night, the world watched us again... wondering whether there might be nuclear bombs.... Trump backed down, but...[t]he distant, wide-eyed wonder of unprecedented achievement of the Space Age had been eclipsed by a deferred promise to return an entire people to the Stone Age...."

Writes Philip Kennicott, in "Trump’s dark rhetoric eclipses the new wonders of the Space Age" (WaPo).

I'm a little older than Kennicott, who was probably a young child at the time of the first moon landing. I was 18 and completely disaffected because of the Vietnam War. I didn't experience anything like "wide-eyed wonder." The boys my age were all in danger of being drafted and sent to fight in a war people were justifiably pessimistic about. Nixon was just as horrible to us as Trump is to the Trump-haters of today. I declined to respond with the awe the news shows told us to feel because I didn't want to see anything going well for Nixon. Less than a month after the moon landing, there was Woodstock. Who was a sucker for "telegenic decency" in the summer of 1969? Were we conned by "the symbolic power of winning the race to the moon"? Five years before the landing, we were laughing at Bob Dylan's sarcastic lines, "I ask you how things could get much worse/If the Russians happen to get up there first/Wowee! pretty scary!"

"The British government has blocked Ye from entry on the grounds that his presence would not be conducive to the public good...."

"Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it 'deeply concerning' that Ye was scheduled to perform 'despite his previous antisemitic remarks and celebration of Nazism.' 'Antisemitism in any form is abhorrent and must be confronted clearly and firmly wherever it appears... Everyone has a responsibility to ensure Britain is a place where Jewish people feel safe and secure.'"

I'm reading "London music festival canceled after Britain bans headliner Kanye West/The move comes after days of mounting controversy over past antisemitic statements made by the rapper, now known as Ye" (WaPo).

West has apologized and stated "I love Jewish people," but he did sell swastika T-shirts and release a song called "Heil Hitler." 

Meanwhile, in Toronto...

🚨 Iranians are OUT IN THE STREETS CELEBRATING, cheering President Trump and the collapse of the brutal regime!

After decades of oppression, the people are dancing, waving flags, and thanking Trump for finally taking action.

Freedom is coming to Iran!pic.twitter.com/Cjn7GEwsr2

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) April 7, 2026

This reminds me of the way her husband, Gavin Newsom, told black people "I’m like you. I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy."

Holy shit. Gavin Newsom’s Wife Jennifer ran over and killed her own sister with a golf cart…then tells San Quentin Prisoners for Life, “Yours were probably accidents too…”

What TF is wrong with her? pic.twitter.com/rbOk6gcYMu

— Liz Churchill (@liz_churchill10) April 7, 2026

Trump has determined that Iran "has gone through what will be a very productive Regime Change."

Trump, at Truth Social, about an hour ago:

The United States will work closely with Iran, which we have determined has gone through what will be a very productive Regime Change! There will be no enrichment of Uranium, and the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried (B-2 Bombers) Nuclear “Dust.” It is now, and has been, under very exacting Satellite Surveillance (Space Force!). Nothing has been touched from the date of attack. We are, and will be, talking Tariff and Sanctions relief with Iran. Many of the 15 points have already been been agreed to. Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

So the regime change has already happened —  or the declaration that it has happened has been made — past tense. But there's a switch to the future tense, declaring something to be true in the future: great productiveness. I presume Trump's adversaries will call this wishful thinking... at best. But who knows? They'll embrace good results if they become obvious or if they perceive that the people are repelled by their pessimism.

Trump also posted this a few minutes ago:

A Country supplying Military Weapons to Iran will be immediately tariffed, on any and all goods sold to the United States of America, 50%, effective immediately. There will be no exclusions or exemptions! President DJT

Trump would like to get back to managing everyone with the device of tariffs. 

"Berliner here. Don't fool yourselves. The Nightclub scene in Berlin is dead. And it was destroyed by people like you who turned it into a tourist attraction."

Says somebody in the comments section of the Washington Post article, "Pants are optional: What I learned navigating Berlin’s famous club scene/Here’s what happened when our travel reporter attempted to infiltrate some of the city’s iconic clubs as a tourist."

The WaPo travel reporter is an attractive mid-30s white woman. She writes: "When I got to the door, the bouncer said I could come in if I took my pants off." She'd prepared by wearing a black one-piece swimsuit as a base layer. She "soon realized I would have been in good company in my underwear alone — or even fully bottomless."

This gets my rarely used "underpants" tag.

I agree with the Berliner in the comments. It's sad when something local gets co-opted by tourists... even if the damned tourists will take off their pants as the price of entry and even if the pants-off price of entry only works if you are decently attractive and somewhat young.

"At its core, fentanyl is a supply-driven problem. Problem is, local efforts have relied on demand-reduction strategies..."

"... believing they alone will address the problem. For example, we offer treatment to people addicted to towering levels of fentanyl, only to be surprised when they refuse. Declining fentanyl supplies offers a chance for demand-reduction strategies to work, as they apparently did for that woman in Salt Lake City.... Public health officials who want to give their demand-reduction strategies a chance to work need to think of this as a supply-driven crisis...."

From "Overdose deaths are plummeting. Here’s what worked. Efforts to disrupt the supply of fentanyl are paying off. We cannot back down" (WaPo).

"There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made."

Trump at Truth Social:

A big day for World Peace! Iran wants it to happen, they’ve had enough! Likewise, so has everyone else! The United States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz. There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made. Iran can start the reconstruction process. We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds, and just “hangin’ around” in order to make sure that everything goes well. I feel confident that it will. Just like we are experiencing in the U.S., this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP

We’ll be just “hangin’ around”... ready to bomb you back to the Stone Age if you don't pick up on this lots-of-positive-action vibe. Don't you want big money?

The builder wants to build. On top of all of that demolition.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night.

"... a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East...."

Trump at Truth Social, an hour ago:

Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated. On behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East, it is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

"He hears the ticking of the clocks/And walks along with a parrot that talks...."

That's this morning's sunrise. Video by Meade. Music by Bob and Jerry.

"These videos are an unintended result of a law passed by Congress in 2016, mandating that providers give patients full access to the entirety of their medical records..."

"... as quickly as possible. The law went into effect in 2021, and ever since, 'raw' test results have arrived on our screens the instant they’re processed at the lab. This may be a victory for patients’ rights. But it also has the potential to be extremely unsettling. Information that was once delivered via live conversation with a human being, one trained in medical interpretation, is now frequently encountered first as decontextualized data on the screen. This unmediated medical data is now arriving at random moments in our lives. It can come any time of day, when you’re surrounded by people or all alone. Suddenly, you’re faced with a private decision — open? ignore? wait? It is out of the strangeness of this moment that the genre of medical results videos was born. People don’t know what to do with the experience of getting their data, and so they turn their cameras on...."

From "Why Am I Watching People Get Their Medical Results? What was once discussed with a doctor is now frequently encountered first as decontextualized data on a screen" (NYT)(gift link, with links to examples of these videos).

"First photo from the far side of the Moon...."

EARTHSET.
April 6, 2026.

Humanity, from the other side. First photo from the far side of the Moon. Captured from Orion as Earth dips beyond the lunar horizon. Photo: NASA pic.twitter.com/ZEBTQA85TY

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 7, 2026

Of course, it's not actually the first photo from the far side of the moon. It's a photo from this new trip to the moon... to the vicinity of the moon. They always overhype space travel and ruin the potential for a real emotional response.

"Writing is an invasion of your own privacy and the privacy of others, but the writer is always deciding where and how far to invade."

I wrote in a July 2021 post called "Rewatching 5 movies I saw in the theater when they first came out and I was in my early 20s."

I'm reading that this morning because in last night's Sunrise Café, people got to talking about Kurosawa movies and I was motivated to search my own archive for Kurosawa. Kurosawa is only mentioned in passing in that 2021 post, on a list of movies I was excited to consume all at once when I was in college — "All the Bergman films, the silents, the noir, the Fellini, the Marx Brothers, the Kurosawa, the Cary Grant movies, Katharine Hepburn, the entire French New Wave — half a century of great stuff to catch up on."

But the last line of that old post — the line that is this post's title — resonated with a post from 3 days ago, where I quoted an author who wrote "I decide which parts of me you see; I curate the way you understand my pain with sharp precision." And: "This is my book, and you’re reading it. Presumably, you like me. At the very least, you’re stuck in my head, and I control the aperture."

Are you having a psychotic break?

How is a person supposed to tell if they are having a psychotic break or not these days?

Everyone else can see the big rabbit listening to Trump talk about bombing Iran, right? pic.twitter.com/aH9C2RohFE

— Peter Hague (@peterrhague) April 6, 2026

AND: May I recommend a movie double feature, both involving visitation by large rabbits: "Harvey" and "Donnie Darko"?

"... maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?"

"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!"

That's Trump, an hour ago, at Truth Social, somehow declining to add his trademark "Thank you for your attention to this matter," perhaps because it is too cruel... or too lighthearted. I see he's calling God "God" again. 

At the Sunrise Café...

...  you can talk all night.

"Pittsburghers take pride in their practical solutions, especially the quirky ones, such as the 'Pittsburgh chair'..."

"... that we use to save the parking space we shoveled out after a snowstorm. There are folding chairs, barstools, even an occasional upholstered chair — whatever your choice. The chairs are sacrosanct, and they help avoid neighborhood disputes. Or the 'Pittsburgh toilet' that stands alone and unobstructed in the basement of many older working-class homes — porcelain artifacts of when the mills were booming. It made practical sense when the men returned from the mills to wash off the grime in the laundry tubs and finish their business in the basement before going upstairs for their meal. But there has been no easy solution for keeping schools open when an expected 500,000 to 700,000 visitors attend events...."

Writes Duquesne lawprof Joseph Sabino Mistick, in "Schools are closing for the NFL draft. What does this teach students? Pittsburgh prides itself on showing up and working hard. Students should, too" (WaPo).

"Well, today, Artemis, they're supposedly flying around the moon. So these are the first people that have gone into deep space since 1972, since the Apollo missions...."

"That's today, that's happening, right? Nobody knows it. That's what's nuts.... And they're going around the moon and coming back to earth. No one's done that since 1972. And it's happening today. No one cares. That's kind of weird, right?... It's very weird that we've become dull to like fascinating things...."

Said Joe Rogan, at 02:05:34, of his new podcast (with Theo Von).

Rogan wants us to marvel at the works of man. Meanwhile, Von is looking for a mystical relationship to nature itself:

"Sometimes if you lay there and look at the stars and stuff, it feels like, bro, and this is real shit I'm saying right now to me... it feels like they're looking back at you a little bit....

"Attempting a coherent portrait of Groypers can feel a bit like trying to describe the plot of a Surrealist film, or a fantasy board game that takes place in its own universe."

"They greet each other with the salutation 'Christ is King'; they banter about their aspiration to re-create Agartha, a mythological Aryan kingdom supposedly situated somewhere in the earth’s core. Theirs is a would-be party of trolling, of 'discourse porn and conspiracy theories on Adderall,' as one adherent told me. But they see their movement as a gathering storm about to break over American politics. Liberals may think of the Trump era as a tragedy of democratic backsliding and authoritarian malignancy; Groypers view it as a cynical pantomime of a nationalist takeover that never went far enough. Fuentes has become the gleeful narrator of this dashed dream, building a career in part by insisting that Trump’s pledge to put America first has curdled into a lie. 'Nick said that Trump’s going to simp for Israel,' G. told me. 'He’s totally going to cozy up to the donors. He’s not going to give us mass deportations. He’s not actually going to advance any of our interests except performatively, to appease us. And, sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.'"

Writes Antonia Hitchens, in "How the Internet Fringe Infiltrated Republican Politics/Inside the battle for the post-maga G.O.P." (The New Yorker).

"The people who want AI to be off-limits are right that technology changes how you think and write."

"I am old enough to have done creative writing in longhand and then on a typewriter, before I got my first computer. Something was lost in each transition, because the slowness and forced rewriting of the old methods improved the text in certain ways. But they also raised the cost (in time and effort) of making changes, and ultimately most writers decided the new ways were worth it.... There will be artisanal holdouts who reject all those possibilities, but I doubt they’ll be a majority. So for the foreseeable future, the rest of us will be figuring out where to draw the lines, knowing that some lines will be crossed by others, if not erased entirely. The best we can hope for is that in the struggle to draw and redraw them, we’ll learn where they belong...."

Writes Megan McArdle, in "I told the internet I use AI. Boy, was it mad. Artificial intelligence helps you work harder, instead of just outsourcing your brain" (WaPo).

ADDED: I write so I can see what I think. I asked Grok, "Has anyone ever said, verbatim, 'I write so I can see what I think.'" The answer, I'm told, is no, but there's a similar expression, examined in the Quote Investigator article, "Quote Origin: I Do Not Know What I Think Until I Read What I’m Writing."

Notably, Flannery O'Connor wrote, in 1948: "What you say about the novel, Rinehart, advances, etc. sounds very good to me, but I must tell you how I work. I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again." So there was this mythic "old lady" who seems to have been regarded as a fool. In 1927, E. M. Forster wrote of an old lady who said, "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?"

Why am I writing this as a postscript to McArdle's discussion of A.I.? It's because it explains something about how I've been using A.I.

"It is profound to hear people be so aware of and forthcoming about their hopes, and poignant to hear them baldly articulate what we all crave — companionship and acceptance."

"As much as the series focuses on neurodivergent experiences, it illuminates the universal experience of seeking connection and withstanding disappointment. Its cast members’ bald articulation of their desire for companionship and acceptance gives us a gift: the opportunity to see ourselves in these unlikely stars...."

From "The Unlikely TV Show Restoring Everyone’s Faith in Dating/Without exploitation, 'Love on the Spectrum' captures the triumphs and travails of dating. It has become one of Netflix’s most popular shows" (NYT).

From the comments over there: "[T]he reason this show is so successful is that it is one of the only, if not the only, show that truly depicts how important innocent, authentic, messy, real love is. In the show, love and finally being in partnership is a heart-opening, inspiring, special dream.... While the rest of society suffers through hollow culture of situationships, social media, p*rn, red pills, gender division, AI, this [is an] endearing alternative...."

I'm reading that this morning and blogging it because it's very close to how I answered, last night, when Meade asked me why I watched this show.

Easter sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Video by Meade.

Easter bonus:

"You stay to the left and then you lean to the right..."

"Candidates and incumbents should center each day on content creation.... creating output tailored specifically for TikTok or Instagram or YouTube."

"It means several hours a day filming in campaign offices — even candidates’ homes.... Successful candidates understand they are putting on a permanent show. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has championed the use of livestreams, including appearing on Twitch while playing Madden. James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, has used town halls and a late-night TV appearance as part of a strategy to produce nonstop content. Zohran Mamdani did this in his campaign and is still doing it as mayor of New York, understanding that reaching citizens should not stop when the campaign does. The bulk of Democratic candidates don’t have the range or talent of these three. Some who try to replicate it, like Andrew Cuomo, come across as more cringe than confident. But they still need to build the production studio..."

Writes David Plouffe, in "Always Be Posting: The New Rules for Democratic Candidates" (NYT).

The future looks a little something like this: 

"Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah."

That's the way our President speaks.

Full context, at Truth Social: "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Hard to believe, but there it is.

"It was an emotional reaction. I never imagined the gravity of it all."

Said Agostina Páez, a white Argentine woman, on trial for something she did when she was a tourist in Brazil.

She's quoted in "When Racism Is a Crime: Brazil Puts a Tourist on Trial for Word and Gesture/An Argentine woman, who is white, could face years in prison after being accused of racism. The case has set off intense debate in Argentina and Brazil" (NYT).

The video, recorded in January by an employee of the bar, showed Agostina Páez imitating a monkey and uttering a racist slur as she walked away.... Ms. Páez has said, online and in interviews, that the bar overcharged her and two Argentine friends. Then, as the women left, she claimed, the employees made obscene gestures toward them. 

Security camera footage from the bar, reviewed by The New York Times, appears to show an employee taunting the tourists as they were leaving the bar.

Here's the seemingly trivial interplay:

A statement from the prosecutor: "Brazil is being painted as this authoritarian country when we are only seeking justice for the harm done."

A NYT column refers to "Fuck around and find out" as "the unofficial Proud Boys motto."

I'm reading "America Is Used to Hiding Its Wars. Trump Is Doing the Opposite" by Charles Homans.

[T]he capture of Venezuela’s president, an oil blockade and intimations of regime change in Cuba, weeks of open deliberation over invading Greenland and finally the Iran war. These episodes followed the logic of content more than conflict, not so much ending as just kind of receding down the feed, replaced by bigger and better explosions. The White House social media team leaned trollishly into the idea, posting videos to X that spliced airstrike footage with movie and video game clips and a reference to the unofficial Proud Boys motto, “[expletive] around and find out.”

I'm interested in the larger theme of this column, but I got stuck on the aggressive intrusion of the Proud Boys. I would have thought "Fuck around and find out" was part of the ordinary discourse. But let's look. What's the origin and history of the phrase?

"The rescue followed a life-or-death race between U.S. and Iranian forces that stretched over two days to reach the injured airman, a weapon systems officer, officials said."

"The operation took commandos deep inside Iran and involved hundreds of special operations troops. There were no U.S. casualties among the rescue team, Mr. Trump said. The rescued officer had 'sustained injuries, but he will be just fine,' Mr. Trump added..."

From "Iran War Live Updates: U.S. Rescues Officer From Downed Fighter Jet in Iran, Trump Says" (NYT)

Here's how Trump put it, at Truth Social:

WE GOT HIM! My fellow Americans, over the past several hours, the United States Military pulled off one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in U.S. History, for one of our incredible Crew Member Officers, who also happens to be a highly respected Colonel, and who I am thrilled to let you know is now SAFE and SOUND! This brave Warrior was behind enemy lines in the treacherous mountains of Iran, being hunted down by our enemies, who were getting closer and closer by the hour, but was never truly alone because his Commander in Chief, Secretary of War, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and fellow Warfighters were monitoring his location 24 hours a day, and diligently planning for his rescue. At my direction, the U.S. Military sent dozens of aircraft, armed with the most lethal weapons in the World, to retrieve him. He sustained injuries, but he will be just fine. This miraculous Search and Rescue Operation comes in addition to a successful rescue of another brave Pilot, yesterday, which we did not confirm, because we did not want to jeopardize our second rescue operation. This is the first time in military memory that two U.S. Pilots have been rescued, separately, deep in Enemy Territory. WE WILL NEVER LEAVE AN AMERICAN WARFIGHTER BEHIND! The fact that we were able to pull off both of these operations, without a SINGLE American killed, or even wounded, just proves once again, that we have achieved overwhelming Air Dominance and Superiority over the Iranian skies. This is a moment that ALL Americans, Republican, Democrat, and everyone else, should be proud of and united around. We truly have the best, most professional, and lethal Military in the History of the World. GOD BLESS AMERICA, GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS, AND HAPPY EASTER TO ALL!

Happy Easter. 

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night.

“The same kinds of things they did in the 1870s to deny votes to African Americans is what they’re trying to do today.”

“We have got to start concentrating on what we can do to stop this deterioration taking place in our society, and stop arguing about how old or how young somebody is. It’s just a little bit silly to me.”

Said Representative James E. Clyburn, quoted in “Some Voters Say Congress Is Too Old. These Black Democrats Aren’t Leaving/As older members of Congress head for the exits amid growing pressure for fresh faces in the Democratic Party, some of the most seasoned Black lawmakers are resisting retirement” (NYT).

"Most striking, Mr. Newsom has drawn on the idiom of the manosphere and online right, communities noted for their unembarrassed racism and misogyny."

"In July, he called Mr. Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller a 'fascist cuck,' the latter being a term used to fault men for lacking sexual power and racial pride. In March, his press account shared a video of Mr. Newsom with the caption 'mog or get mogged.' This term describes a man who shows himself to be physically superior to other men and thus the 'alpha male of the group,' or AMOG, who 'mogs' lesser men.The most startling example of Mr. Newsom’s strategy came last week when he posted an image on social media comparing his looks to those of the immaculately groomed fictional villain Patrick Bateman, as played by Christian Bale in the 2000 film 'American Psycho.' The Bateman character, a serial killer whose hatred of women is rivaled only by his contempt for Black people, has become an object of fascination for the manosphere and online right, with memes coursing across X and TikTok.... The point is not that Mr. Newsom secretly desires the subjugation of women or minorities.... The point is that he is responding to a political and cultural energy that has shifted away from the celebration of feminism and diversity and toward the concerns of alienated, and especially white, men...."

Writes Matthew Schmitz, in "For Democrats, the Era of the Girl Dad and Male Ally Is Over" (NYT).

"That's the precise point, 1 minute and 10 seconds in, where I clicked off the audiobook."

I wrote, 2 days ago, in what I called "a short, enigmatic blog post." I said, "I think anyone, using AI, can now easily discover what book is being talked about."

Shortly after posting, I tested AI and added the story of how it failed to identify the book. The problem was that the language I found so off-putting — "For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land" — wasn't written by the book's author. It was the book's epigraph, a quote from "Moby-Dick," a quote that at least 2 other authors have used. AI never found the book I'd been listening to. 

At that point, I became curious enough to go back to the audiobook and I listened to the whole thing. It was a book I'd blogged about last Tuesday after reading a NYT column about it. The column was called "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking." I have a long-running problem with the word "heartbreaking," and I blurted out "Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy."

West = Lindy West. The book is "Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane" (commission earned). And I'm going to stand by my blurted-out opinion: It is not heartbreaking. It's dangerous bullshit. 

Let me quote from page 123, where the author call herself a “people pleaser" and calls "people pleaser" "a hideous misnomer for a hideous behavior." Boldface added:

“People pleasing” is never about pleasing people—it’s about the pleaser avoiding discomfort, confrontation, accountability. It’s a manipulation, a rot that threatens all my relationships, not because it makes me “too nice” and vulnerable to exploitation, but because it makes me a liar who isn’t willing to do the hard work of love.

Come, doused in mud...

LATER: Meade videos other food-foraging wildlife:

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night.

"Wealthy Republicans were first to form a daisy chain of nonprofit giving to funnel anonymous money into the political system."

"But recently, this path has been exploited to a far greater degree by wealthy Democrats, many of whom are seeking anonymity to avoid reprisals from President Trump, even as they donate tens of millions of dollars at a time to defeat Republican candidates. In the 2024 election cycle, over 40 percent of the nearly $2 billion raised by the largest Democratic super PACs came from entities that did not disclose their donors, according to the Times analysis. That was twice the rate of the largest Republican super PACs that cycle. Alexandra Acker-Lyons, an adviser to several prominent progressive donors, said that liberals had to use everything in the campaign finance arsenal to fight Mr. Trump. 'When we get power, we can change all of the rules so that everyone plays nice,' Ms. Acker-Lyons said. 'But until we have power, we can’t do that.'"

From "Wealthy Donors Are Hiding Political Money in Secretive Nonprofits/Using philanthropy for campaign donations is illegal. But an exception for some nonprofits has allowed Democratic billionaires like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg to remain anonymous when they want to play politics" (NYT)(gift link).

"A Visit to the Unabomber Cabin, 30 Years After the Arrest/A complicated piece of American heritage and culture sits intact in the F.B.I. headquarters."

This NYT article is inspiring 2 types of response response from commenters over there.

The first type:

Although this was quite the story 30 years ago, I have no interest in preserving this structure and potentially romanticizing or mythologizing it like we did with the outlaw murderer, Jesse James. Please don't speak of this killers hut in the same breath as Thoreau's or Lincoln's cabins. I say put a match to it and post the video. 

 The second:

Saying this may put me on a list, but everyone should read his manifesto, "Industrial Society and its Future." It's one of the most compelling and profound analyses of what ails the modern world I've ever read. Just to be clear: just because his ideas are worth engaging with doesn't remotely justify his barbaric crimes.

Insect baseball.

A praying mantis landed on his hat, and instead of freaking out, he gave the little guy an update on the game 😂pic.twitter.com/4tvP4z3huj

— Interesting things (@awkwardgoogle) April 2, 2026

This made be reminisce about "Campus Mantis: Non Compos Mentis."

"The big-picture reality is that many novels are poorly written."

"They can still succeed with readers because fiction, like music, is a forgiving art form. Just as a good song can have a groovy beat but a predictable melody, so a piece of fiction can work on some levels but not others. Partial success can be enough, as long as readers find something that moves them—suspense, beauty, realism, fantasy, even just a sympathetic protagonist in whom they can recognize themselves...."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Is It Wrong to Write a Book With A.I.? The nature of authorship isn’t as straightforward as it seems" (The New Yorker).

"Food can sew the seeds of love...."

I'm reading this in The New York Times: "Are You in a Restaurant Gap Relationship? You check Resy by the hour. Your date couldn’t care less. A misalignment in dining tastes is the ultimate test of compatibility."

I've got a homophone gap in my relationship with The New York Times.

ADDED: The trendy use of the word "gap" began in the 1950s, with anxiety over the Cold War. There was talk of the "bomber gap" and the "missile gap." This was satirized in "Doctor Strangelove" (1964):

"I think it would be extremely naive of us, Mr. President, to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Soviet expansionist policy. I mean, we must be increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over other mineshaft space, in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out of these superior numbers when we emerge! Mr. President, we must not allow a mine shaft gap!"

We boomers remember the talk of the "generation gap" in the 1960s, but that got started with a Look magazine article in 1967 titled  "The Generation Gap" — in a deliberate play on "missile gap." 

At the Rainy Day Café...

... you can talk all night.

"Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year. Pam did a tremendous job..."

"... overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country, with Murders plummeting to their lowest level since 1900. We love Pam, and she will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector, to be announced at a date in the near future, and our Deputy Attorney General, and a very talented and respected Legal Mind, Todd Blanche, will step in to serve as Acting Attorney General. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Trump, at Truth Social.

The spin at the NYT: "The firing of Ms. Bondi, 60, ends a turbulent 14-month tenure as attorney general in which she tried desperately to appease a boss who demanded unimpeded control of the Justice Department to pursue politically motivated investigations against targets of his choosing, even when prosecutors warned that there was no evidence to do so.... Yet Mr. Trump remained annoyed by Ms. Bondi’s inability to secure indictments of people he referred to as 'scum' during a speech in the department’s Great Hall about a year ago.... He has also complained about her shortcomings as a communicator and TV surrogate — a role he thought would suit her talents.... In mid-March, five Republicans on the House Oversight Committee blindsided their own leadership — and Ms. Bondi — by joining Democrats to vote to subpoena her to testify under oath behind closed doors about the Epstein case...."

The spin at The Daily Mail: "Trump's reasoning for the sudden dismissal comes in part because the President believes Bondi tipped off Eric Swalwell about the FBI's efforts to release investigative documents related to his relationship with an alleged Chinese spy."

"Earlier this year, Musk said that SpaceX was focused on building a 'self-growing city' on the moon..."

"... which could be achieved in less than 10 years. He said SpaceX planned to start building a city on Mars within five to seven years, 'but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilisation and the Moon is faster.'"

From "Elon Musk’s SpaceX prepares for world’s biggest stock market debut/The rocket, satellite and AI company has filed plans with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to float with a potential value exceeding $1.75 trillion" (London Times).

Meade records the pinkness of the day.

"My law clerks would be wasting 30, 45 minutes, an hour, developing a chronology of events. This thing does it instantaneously.... I’m not strictly relying on an AI tool. … It’s just an extra set of eyes."

Says Xavier Rodriguez, a federal judge in Texas, quoted in "Judges are increasingly using AI to draft rulings and prepare for hearings/A study found over 60 percent of surveyed judges have used AI in their work, even as some experts worry AI’s unreliability could compromise their authority" (WaPo)(gift link).

A study found over 60 percent of surveyed judges have used AI — that is to say, over 60 percent admitted to researchers that they've used AI. I've got to wonder what percent have used AI. How was the question asked? Was it "Have you used AI?"? Because what does "use" mean? Maybe things that aren't really substantive don't count. Maybe it doesn't count if you only rely on things you — that is,  your clerks — have double checked.

"When I once interviewed him, he had an orchestra playing live for us. He had the kind of paintings Spain would go to war with [Italy] over."

Said Antonio Mascolo, a journalist in Parma, quoted in "Thieves steal works by Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse in less than 3 minutes/Four masked men are believed to have forced their way through an entry gate, grabbed the paintings and escaped by climbing a fence, Italy’s Carabinieri said" (WaPo).

The museum is The Magnani Rocca Foundation museum in the town of Traversetolo. It was not well guarded. We're told the paintings might be worth $10 million total. 

The paintings are Renoir’s “Fish,” Cézanne’s “Cup and Plate with Cherries” and Matisse’s “Odalisque on the Terrace.” Will we miss them?

Hey, remember the old "Renoir Sucks at Painting" Instagram account?

"For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man...."

That's the precise point, 1 minute and 10 seconds in, where I clicked off the audiobook.

ADDED: I prompt Grok: "Here's a short, enigmatic blog post, but I think anyone, using AI, can now easily discover what book is being talked about."

The answer makes me laugh out loud:

"You can feel it in your chest!"

That was much more affecting than I expected. pic.twitter.com/641gB4OAbU

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) April 1, 2026

But did he really feel it or was he faking his moongasm?

A viewer demanded I touch the grass behind me to prove it wasn’t CGI on a green screen. pic.twitter.com/XRDJhluMBY

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) April 2, 2026

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night.

"In the tiny town of Castlewood, S.D., where everyone knows the Noems, the prevailing sense was that people can’t help but feel bad for Bryon Noem after a tabloid photo leak."

I'm blogging the NYT article, "In South Dakota, Neighbors Feel Sorry for Kristi Noem’s Husband," written by Shawn McCreesh.

I've avoided blogging this story until now because I too felt sorry for Kristi Noem's husband. What a cruel invasion of a person's privacy! 

“Must be A.I.,” a burly cattle rancher named Kevin Ruesink said as he inspected pictures of his neighbor Bryon Noem that had been published by The Daily Mail on Tuesday morning.... The rancher squinted at them with a mixture of suspicion and pity. “I grew up playing ball with Bryon,” he said. “I’ve never known him to be part of stuff like that. I don’t believe that at all.”... 

In response to multiple requests for an interview, Mr. Noem wrote in a text message on Tuesday: “I will at some point. Today is not the day. I appreciate your heart.” 

While the pictures of Ms. Noem’s husband with what appear to be enormous inflated balloons under his spandex shirt ricocheted across the internet, becoming a political punchline for her many, many enemies, the reaction back on the proverbial ranch was a little more … tenderhearted....

As the yard signs in my neighborhood say: Kindness is everything.

Another newspaper expressed puzzlement over the statement "I appreciate your heart." But the statement was made to the NYT writer Shawn McCreesh, whose article earned that sentiment.

"Key Justices Skeptical of Limiting Birthright Citizenship."

The NYT opines.

A majority of the Supreme Court appeared skeptical of President Trump’s efforts to limit birthright citizenship during arguments on Wednesday. Key conservative justices raised doubts about the constitutionality of the president’s executive order that would end automatic citizenship for children born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants and some temporary foreign visitors.

But in an argument that lasted more than two hours, several of the court’s conservative justices also asked tough questions of a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the legal challenge, making the outcome of the legally complicated and hugely consequential case not fully clear....

Here's the live chat that happened on SCOTUSblog. Excerpt from the end:

Alligator.

That's yesterday, with evocative clouds. Today was blustery:

"The delicate problem is restoring a sense of historical truth to the place to better convey a deeper understanding of who Monet really was. I don’t want it to become Disneyland. We’re not going to put in things that did not exist."

Said Alain-Charles Perrot, director of the Maison et Jardins de Claude Monet, quoted in "For the love of Monet: record crowds threaten impressionist’s centenary/In Giverny, up to a million visitors are expected this year but can the village balance the artist’s legacy with the pressures from mass tourism?" (London Times).

Giverny, now with its bus parks and columns of art pilgrims flowing over Monet’s green Japanese bridge, became the epicentre of the modern mania for impressionism soon after la Maison Monet was opened to the public in 1980. A recent social media-era surge was compounded when Emily strolled... over the water lily bridge... the Netflix series Emily in Paris.

Critics are often rude about the “Monetisation” of the art world, referring to its merchandise, immersive shows and the way the impressionists as a brand have eclipsed that of other art movements. “Claude Monet has become the sacred and milk cow of the art world,” Marianne magazine noted.

"The best experiences I’ve had have been going to swingers’ parties held in the West End and stately homes in the countryside, but you don’t find out the venue until hours before..."

"... either through the WhatsApp group or posted on the event’s socials. It’s way better than a nightclub. You might live in the middle of nowhere and have big, bold or boring lives, but on this night you get to be with 150 people who are all up for it.... The next party I’m going to has... [a rule that] if your outfit isn’t good enough, you have to take it all off at the door. There are body painters inside who can make anyone look good — they even do vajazzling. I remember being at a party where a beautiful blonde girl got out of a taxi wrapped in a silver cloak. She passed through the entrance hall, shrugged off the cloak, and walked into the party completely naked. I also have a friend who has been going for years and always does the same joke — when he gets in, he strips to nothing but a codpiece and walks around going, 'This is so embarrassing — no one told me there was a dress code.'"

Says Anthony, 28, quoted in "Why Gen Z say yes, yes, yes to sex parties. They’re supposedly the prudish and sober generation — so why are twentysomethings flocking to polyamorous foam parties and BDSM dungeons in secret warehouses?T hree twentysomethings reveal all" in the London Times. 

"Father God, dispatch your angels to encamp all around them."

Video going viral of kids going to their pastor’s home asking for prayers after seeing something upsetting. pic.twitter.com/RHlcAwLTbI

— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) March 31, 2026

"President Donald Trump plans to sit in on Wednesday’s Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, making him the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the nation’s highest court."

AP reports.

It’s not the first time Trump has considered showing up for a high court hearing. Last year, Trump said that he badly wanted to attend a hearing on whether he overstepped federal law with his sweeping tariffs, but he decided against it, saying it would have been a distraction....

“I’m going,” Trump said, when the upcoming arguments in the birthright citizenship case were mentioned. To a follow-up question clarifying that he planned to go in person, Trump said, “I think so, I do believe.”

He sat in court when they were trying him for those crimes they convicted him of. He knows how to sit in court.

From the transcript of the press conference:

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night.

"A federal judge ordered on Tuesday that construction be halted on President Trump’s proposed White House ballroom... saying work must come to a stop until the project receives a go-ahead from Congress."

The NYT reports.

In a 35-page opinion, Judge Leon wrote that Mr. Trump likely did not have the authority to act without consulting Congress to replace entire sections of the White House — changes that could endure for generations.

We're told there are 19 exclamation points in the opinion.

From Trump's response at Truth Social:

[A]ll I am doing is fixing, cleaning, running, and “sprucing up” a terribly maintained, for many years, Building, but a Building of potentially great importance. Yet, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005, is not suing the Federal Reserve for a Building which has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman.

Let's judge the architecture of The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library.

🚨 FIRST LOOK: The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library is officially here.

Over the past six months, I have poured my heart and soul into this project with my incredible team at @Trump.

This landmark on the water in Miami, Florida will stand as a lasting testament to an… pic.twitter.com/azV1hx0HG2

— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) March 31, 2026

"Justices Reject Colorado Law Banning ‘Conversion Therapy’ for L.G.B.T.Q. Minors."

"Colorado and more than 20 other states restrict therapists from trying to change the gender identity or sexual orientation of L.G.B.T.Q. clients under the age of 18."

The NYT reports.

“Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for himself and seven other justices from across the ideological spectrum. “But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.” 

Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, reading a lengthy summary of her opposition from the bench.

Here's the opinion: Chiles v. Salazar. 

The Times headline needs to be sharpened up. The Court didn't "reject" the whole "law." The opinion says that the therapist, Chiles, "stresses that she provides only talk therapy, employing no physical techniques or medications." And the case returns to the lower court to apply the correct standard — strict scrutiny.

Jackson's idea:

The horizontality tells you that this video is mine, not Meade's.

A mellow visual, but this is here for the audio:

More vivid visuals, including a cloud portending storms:

"The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!"

“All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you…” - President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/aPYmL0qspa

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 31, 2026

"It’s Not Going to Get Any Easier for Democrats After Trump."

That's a NYT headline for a column by Thomas Edsall. 

Key sentence: "The precariousness of the Democrats’ position in the coming decade hit home for me after reading 'The 2026 Midterms Are Critical. But 2032 Could Be Existential,' a March 24 essay that Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist based in Florida posted on The Bulwark."

I have no gift links left to give on this, the last day of the month, but even if I did, I wouldn't use one for this. Just go read Schale's piece at The Bulwark. It's not paywalled. Or don't even do that. The big point is just that the 2030 census is going to be very tough on the Democrats.

The tune will come to you at last...

"In earlier writing, [Lindy] West presented her union with the musician Ahamefule Oluo... as a kind of feminist fairy-tale ending."

"'My Wedding Was Perfect — and I Was Fat as Hell the Whole Time,' said the headline of a 2015 column she wrote in The Guardian. But if the wedding was idyllic, West reveals in 'Adult Braces,' the marriage was not. Almost from the beginning, she writes, Aham conditioned their relationship on his being able to sleep with other women. She gave in because she was desperate to keep him, but his dalliances made her intolerably insecure. Because West lived in a left-wing milieu in which nonmonogamy is common, she felt an extra layer of shame over her inability to accept Aham’s extramarital sex life. ('At the time, being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles,' she writes.) Her anguish was exacerbated by an excruciating degree of bodily self-hatred, which, as she knows, contradicts the persona she’s built her career on. 'Do you think I have ever felt like I deserved to demand anything from men?' she asks.... [Aham] used her politics against her; West reports that Aham, who is half-Nigerian, 'believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership.'... [At the end of 'Adult Braces,' West writes] 'If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.'"

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking" (NYT).

Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy.

"Mid-Lent is like punk rock — it was against the established order. We still do it because it’s really cool that our grandparents did it."

"Today, we don’t have to observe Lent, but they had to, and so Mid-Lent was a form of resistance."

Said Nicolas Harvey, 39, a high school history teacher, quoted in "Halfway Through Lent, a Small Quebec Island Celebrates With Masks and Jigs/Few islanders still observe Lent, but they cling to a tradition once seen as defying the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church" (NYT).

I'm out of gift links for the month or I would give you one. There are lots of nice photos of these islanders of the  St. Lawrence River.

Is it odd to carry on the traditional rebellion when you're no longer subject to the authority that inspired the rebellion? Or is it actually typical of our annual festivities? (I'm thinking of Halloween, Christmas, and the 4th of July.) 

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk 'til dawn.

The octavist.

An octave below bass.

Yesterday, today.

"President Trump is the best builder and developer in the entire world, and the American people can rest well knowing that this project is in his hands."

Said a White House spokesman, quoted in "Trump’s Ballroom Design Has Barely Been Scrutinized/Architects Say It Shows" (NYT)(gift link because there are some detailed graphics).

Also quoted is Carol Quillen, the president and chief executive of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is suing over the ballroom. She says: "Even if we are slow and we make mistakes and we fight, that process has meaning to us."

Have you ever paused to contemplate the meaningfulness of red tape? Maybe the deliberation and drawn-out procedure is subtly, secretly the very best part of what we do together, the very heart of democracy. 

"Certain pro-meat influencers even treat plants as hostile combatants. 'Plants are trying to kill you'..."

"... the influencer Anthony Chaffee says, repeatedly. Chaffee, who received his bachelor’s degree in medicine, surgery and obstetrics at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, has compared the long-term health risks of eating salad to smoking cigarettes. Kennedy hasn’t gone that far, though at the Annual Meat Conference, he denigrated vegetables. 'Most plants do not have the complete chain of amino acids that we need,' he said."

From "The Dogma of Meat/From Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s food pyramid to online influencers, beef has become more than just a source of protein" (NYT).

The Times doesn't elaborate the anti-plant argument, so it just sounds kooky, but what's the argument? Something about plants producing chemicals to ward off the creatures that would eat them? That was my guess, and, looking it up, I see that's the argument. To quote Grok: "Plants can’t run away or fight back, so they manufacture hundreds of different secondary metabolites (natural pesticides and toxins) as a defense strategy.

Have you heard from Newsom's wife?

In 2023 Gavin Newsom did what he called a "Red State" tour and visited Alabama, Florida and a few other red states.

Newsom's wife said she brought her children to the red states so they could learn about racism, sexism, and bullying first hand. pic.twitter.com/CBx8gfUBc9

— MAZE (@mazemoore) March 29, 2026

"And this is what he does to me!"

"Tiger Woods Banned From Driving Trump’s Grandkids Around."

Hot news from The Daily Beast.

The headline seems ridiculous. The real news is that "even before his latest car crash, the Secret Service had barred Woods from driving around Vanessa’s children."

Imagine having 5 children and dating a man who can't be trusted to drive a car. But then he's also world-famous for his very high level physical skill at something most people can't do even decently well. The high/low conflict is mind-bending. I guess the tie-breaker is whether you truly love him. Or maybe if the kids — Kai Trump, 18, Donald III, 17, Tristan, 14, Spencer, 13, and Chloe, 11 — think you with him is good for them.

"He never discusses the way he wants me to play things"/"He hired you for the job. He wants what you have."

A conversation between Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart about Alfred Hitchcock.

Quoted in "Kim Novak: 'Sydney Sweeney looks sexy all the time. She could never play me'/The 93-year-old star of Vertigo talks about Alfred Hitchcock, the trouble with being pretty and why a biopic about her love affair with Sammy Davis Jr won’t happen" (London Times).

Also: "[Tippi] Hedren has said [Hitchcock] made a pass at her and told her he 'expected me to make myself sexually available to him,' although she never did. Novak says she and Hedren didn’t talk about him. 'I’m not denying that if she’s saying it, but I never saw him pay any attention to women other than his wife, who was often on the set, and he was certainly never interested in me in that way. Maybe that’s why I never wanted to discuss it with Tippi — I have a hard time believing it because to me you have to see it to believe it. If he was like that with Tippi that was an odd exception.'"

The article has photos of Novak and Sweeney that inspired me to jot down this AI prompt: "I'm noticing that actresses of today will pose for photos with their mouth hanging open, slack jawed. I believe that in the past, the lips would be kept together (unless the actress was smiling/laughing/talking). Is my observation accurate?"

Answer, from Grok:

Sunrise — 6:17, 6:37, 6:44, 6:47.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"[Cesar] Chavez became infatuated with so-called Silva Mind Control meditation and what he believed was its power to influence events and people."

"Challenges to his authority, real or imagined, would prompt purges or mandates that one potential rival or another relocate. He taped meetings and dispatched union officials to root out what he called 'spies' and 'infiltrators.' He began managing according to the principles of Synanon, a drug-treatment program centered on verbal abuse, attack therapy and public humiliation...."

From "'The Cult of Cesar': Inside the Mountain Compound Led by Cesar Chavez/In his remote headquarters, the United Farm Workers leader began to see himself as not just a union leader, but a visionary healer" (NYT)(gift link).

"I can’t think of one person in a relationship that I would want for myself. I’ve done it before and prefer focusing on me and my own needs."

Says a 33-year-old Toronto woman, quoted at the beginning of a NYT article called "Why Marriage, for So Many, Is Less Appealing Than Ever/From Gen Z to Gen X, a pause in the march to the altar, or a decision to skip it altogether, is becoming more common."

There's also this from Shani Silver, 43, host of "A Single Serving Podcast": "[A]s millennials, we got to the age where we were promised all these things would happen, and they never did.... [We] worked on ourselves throughout our lives to become the desirable partners we were told to become... But the men didn’t rise along with us. They’ve stagnated. There are imbalances in domestic labor responsibilities, emotional labor responsibilities, in running a household... If you marry a man you’re settling for, I don’t see a lot of relationship longevity."

"Here’s a thought experiment: imagine Instagram, but every single post is a video of paint drying."

"Same infinite scroll. Same autoplay. Same algorithmic recommendations. Same notification systems. Is anyone addicted? Is anyone harmed? Is anyone suing? Of course not. Because infinite scroll is not inherently harmful. Autoplay is not inherently harmful. Algorithmic recommendations are not inherently harmful. These features only matter because of the content they deliver. The 'addictive design' does nothing without the underlying user-generated content that makes people want to keep scrolling.... If every editorial decision about how to present third-party content is now a 'design choice' subject to product liability, Section 230 protects effectively nothing...."

Writes Mike Masnick, in "Everyone Cheering The Social Media Addiction Verdicts Against Meta Should Understand What They’re Actually Cheering For" (TechDirt).

I found that because David French links to it in "Don’t Cheer Too Hard for the Facebook Verdicts." French writes: "It’s quite possible that these verdicts will be overturned or heavily modified on appeal. But that process can take years. In the meantime, there will almost certainly be many more trials and many more verdicts that will put social media companies under pressure to increase their own censorship and their own controls over free speech online."

"If you're the mother who was reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone aloud to your child..."

"... on the LNER train from London to Edinburgh yesterday, one of my grown up children was listening and says you did the voices brilliantly "

Writes J.K. Rowling, on X — a particularly fine use of X.

I love that there are responses right there, including the crabby ones, like: "Was reading it loud not disturbing others even though your child enjoyed it?"/"I’m the mother and I don’t care what your grown up children thinks"/"Hopefully she verbally edited all the grammatical and editorial errors you so carelessly left throughout the book"/"The best education lies in reading the Bible; fairy tales or magic wands don't solve everyday problems."

But isn't there a magic wand in the Bible though? See Exodus 7:8-13, Exodus 7-8, Numbers 17, Numbers 17:8, Numbers 17:10, Hebrews 9:4.