"Restoring Van Gogh’s Ear & Mending His Broken Heart."

"Do you think Bari Weiss needs to be removed?"/"Oh, gosh, yes. Look, she’s a lovely person. And her Free Press organization that she founded has been very successful. But television’s not her thing."

"This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, 'There’s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.' I’m going to decline because I don’t have a clue. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, 'Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that.'"

That's Scott Pelley, answering a question in "The Interview/Scott Pelley on the Bari Weiss Era and His Last Days at '60 Minutes'" (NYT).

Here's the entire interview (with a transcript at YouTube):

"In the White House, there is a system for dealing with a president who rarely sleeps. The staff take it in shifts so they get a nap..."

"... even if he doesn’t. Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles starts early and stays on until early to mid-evening. Then it’s over to her deputy Dan Scavino, a true Trump old-timer — they met when 16-year-old Scavino was selected to caddie for him — to do the graveyard shift.... [T]he shifts are about being around to help, aid and occasionally advise, rather than blocking. Still, journalists and lobbyists study Trump’s schedule for when best to try to get him alone. A former aide says the best times to call are first thing in the morning or late evening, but he’s such a night owl that some enterprising hacks have got through at 3am. In the morning, his team wakes and checks Truth Social for what Trump has posted — often a mix of AI memes, criticism of his enemies or his latest views on a war — and any likely fallout. His record is 160 posts in one night. Some come via his adviser Natalie Harp, nicknamed the 'Human Printer' for giving the president stacks of positive press cuttings, others from the man himself...."

Writes Katie Balls, in "Donald Trump at 80: is refusing to act his age his secret weapon?/The president is still known to work 12-hour days and post all night as he enters his ninth decade" (London Times).

I wondered if there are some kind of barracks or hotel-like areas in the White House. I think not. That means Susie and Dan are most likely curling up on a sofa in their office. How old is Susie Wiles? Isn't it dangerous to be this sleep deprived? But Trump sets the tone, and he seems to be all about conquering sleep, the thief of life.

Genuine Trump quote: "You know, I’m not a big sleeper. I like three hours, four hours. I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what’s going on."

Live feed of the filling of the Reflecting Pool.

Can we all just say it looks beautiful? Pick the answer closest to what you think.

Never. It looks like Trump. That's all I see and that's always ugly.

Let's be empathetic to those who are so deeply troubled by Trump that they can't see what is true.

It's objectively beautiful, and everyone ought to acknowledge what is true.

 

pollcode.com free polls

AND: I just made a tag for "Reflecting Pool" and added it to old posts in the archive. The oldest post is striking. It dates back to the Obama administration, September 26, 2012:

Why did the bird cross the road? For dark and unknowable reasons?

Yesterday, we were talking about Arthur Miller's aphorism: "Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another."

My reaction: "Birds don't have dark reasons." You might have read that as if I were saying, birds are, in fact, thoroughly virtuous. I should have allowed for darkness, at least, in some birds. What about Poe's "Raven" or the albatross in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"? But it was more a matter of choosing to talk only about the possible dark side of birds, because that's all Miller brought up.

If the Glamour bird's motivations are unknowable, how does Miller know they are dark? Maybe Miller thought of that question and threw "largely" into the sentence as a quick fix. I don't know much about the mind of Miller, but I read it to think: I don't know much about the mind of the bird, but I do know this: The one called Glamour has dark reasons.

In the comments tcrosse said, "Why did the chicken cross the road? For some dark reason?"

We thought that was a very funny line and laughed about it before we went out for the sunrise. Driving home in the sun, we saw an odd bird standing in the road, then 2 birds. The light side of birds was demanding attention. Baby sandhill cranes just had to cross the road.

Why? No reasons at all. Never any reason.