"Congress must demand a full accounting of the damage Mr. Musk and DOGE caused, and we will not let anyone obstruct our oversight."

Said House Foreign Affairs ranking member Rep. Greg Meeks, quoted in "Capitol agenda: Dem gavels are coming for Elon Musk/Democrats have long eyed investigating the world’s richest man and the GOP’s top donor. They may get their chance if they win back congressional power in November."

That's in Politico this morning, along with this: "Democrats have a message for Elon Musk: Watch out
From DOGE to Ukraine, the uberwealthy GOP donor could be an irresistible target if House gavels change hands."

"I grew up feeling that I was a vehicle for male pleasure. I never really considered my own needs."

"My priority has been to make sure I don’t get rejected or abandoned. Therefore, I’m prioritising my partner’s enjoyment because the first thing I’m protecting is my safety. Maybe it is controversial to say it.... You tell some men they’re not satisfying you and it’s terrifying what the potential reaction could be. Understandably, we avoid that conflict at all costs. I don’t think I’m unique. I think what a lot of us are doing when we’re having sex is making sure he’s OK, because otherwise you’re going to be left alone and be some old spinster."

Said Lily Allen, quoted in "Lily Allen: ‘I felt I was a vehicle for male pleasure — not my own’ It’s been a difficult few years for the pop star Lily Allen, whose marriage to the Stranger Things actor David Harbour fell apart in very public fashion. Now she’s riding high again" (London Times).

"If you're tired, go to sleep."

Enjoy three minutes of the Brewers talking about Murph’s funniest dugout moments. 😅 https://t.co/g9YNEcJrzR

— Sophia Minnaert (@SophiaMinnaert) October 19, 2026

"The incentives of the streaming era mean many documentaries are now preordained affairs: true-crime narratives populated by talking heads..."

"... and pitched when the outcome is already known, or cozy, authorized docs about celebrities. [Lance] Oppenheim, like [Nathan] Fielder and John Wilson, is after something more heightened and less predictable; unlike them, he doesn’t have a writers’ room or make himself a character in the proceedings. He borrows from the tradition of nonfiction filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman, seeking out stories that can unfold in real time. Often, the process involves a lengthy 'fishing expedition,' leaving him with hundreds of hours of footage to sift through in the edit. Then there are the surreal flourishes that bring the work into the realm of what Oppenheim calls 'docufantasia.'..."

From "Lance Oppenheim Is Going Places How the 30-year-old director cold-emailed his way into making two of the best films of the year" (NY Magazine).

The "2 of the best films of the year" are "You Can See Everything," that film about Elizabeth Holmes, and "Primetime, " the one about the "To Catch a Predator" guy, Chris Hansen.

By the way "How To With John Wilson" is my all-time favorite TV show.

And I like this quote from Oppenheim's wife: "It’s almost like he was an alien beamed down to Earth and the only piece of software that was downloaded was like, ‘You are going to make movies.'"

Sunrise.

Tourists salvaging what they can of their Paris trip? Or are these locals? I'm guessing locals. They're smoking!

A striking contrast on the streets of Paris: A couple sits sipping drinks at an outdoor café as flames burn just steps away. The moment was captured Saturday near the Arc de Triomphe, on the outskirts of rioting that erupted during demonstrations over rising prices, inequality and public spending. Video shows the pair continuing their conversation as a burning trash bin lights up the background.

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 19, 2026

ADDED: For me, a longtime connoisseur of travel critique, this video shows us a stark version of what is nearly always the case. I'm guessing these are, in fact, local residents, because they're smoking, but if they are tourists, they are doing what I think tourists more or less always do. They have a fantasy of a place and they believe they can go to that fantasy and they perform the mental labor of believing they have entered into the place they imagined. They screen out or rationalize the contradictory material and they determinedly live out their dream. 

Reminds me of that old Charlie Kaufman movie, "Synecdoche, New York," where a woman takes a real-estate tour of what is her dream house. The house is on fire, and she buys it and lives in in... dies in it:

ADDED: Protesters pop the bubble of tourist's fantasy of communing with the Mona Lisa:

"I did everything wrong 5 times."

Pat Murphy did not get a real big league managing job until he was 65 years old He has won Manager of the Year twice since Here is his whole story He never played a day in the major leagues himself. He was a catcher who signed with the San Francisco Giants and spent four years in the minors without ever getting called up He was the head coach at Arizona State for fifteen seasons. He won 629 games there and took them to the College World Series four times. Before that he was at Notre Dame and won 318 more Then it ended. He resigned in the middle of an NCAA investigation, after being told to resign or be fired The NCAA found him innocent of the violations. What they actually reprimanded him for was his attitude toward their investigators. They called it cavalier Here is how he describes that stretch "I was a college coach forever, and then I had this huge injustice happen, and I thought, Why me?" And then this, about himself "My ego was involved a great deal more than it should have been." So at 51 years old he went to the minor leagues Eugene, Oregon. Tucson. El Paso. Nearly five years riding buses in the low minors after fifteen years running one of the best programs in the country San Diego gave him the interim job and he went 42 and 54 in 96 games. They did not keep him "I did everything wrong five times." So he took a job as somebody's bench coach in Milwaukee. He did that for eight years Then Craig Counsell left for Chicago, and the Brewers handed it to the 65 year old Here is what happened next. Manager of the Year. Then Manager of the Year again. 97 wins last season, 103 this one And a sweep of a Los Angeles roster built to never lose a series like this He was not some nobody they found in a parking lot. He was one of the best college coaches alive before any of this, and the Brewers handed him a roster Counsell had already built. But he was 51 when he had to start over in the low minors, and 65 before anybody gave him a team of his own for a full season. Christian Yelich said it takes a certain kind of player to play for him. It took a certain kind of man to still be waiting at 65 (Via @thesportsontap)

— Punchoutpitch (@Punchoutpitch) October 18, 2026

I was interested in that quote — "I did everything wrong 5 times" — not because I'm following the Brewers, though I am, but because — just 5 days ago — I was blogging about the positive side of wrongness.

After Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize, I started reading her book "Wrong Norma," and I wrote about her answer to the question, "Tell me about the 'wrongness' in the title of Wrong Norma." She said that in academia you always feel "that you’re wrong or on the verge of being wrong and you have to worry about that, because everything is so judgmental and hierarchical." And that's "kind of a mentality I was interested in disabling." It "loosens the mind" not to worry about being wrong: "you can go on to think other things or wider things or the things underneath where you were. It’s just suddenly a different landscape." 

Apply that to baseball.

"The onslaught against [Jane] Doe and her supporters is taken directly from the playbook that established them: Gamergate."

"In 2014, a mostly anonymous digital horde waged a full-scale assault on women working in the gaming industry in an effort to damage their reputations and drive them from their professions. They harassed and doxxed their victims and fabricated and disseminated conspiratorial rumors about them.... Gamergate is a formative origin point for the alt-right, whose members and ideas have been absorbed into what is now called the new right. Once a subset of the broader conservative movement, the intellectuals and policy wonks of the new right, who almost all share atavistic visions of a masculine-obsessed politics, helped pave the way for Mr. Trump’s rise to power.... As a political tactic, resorting to a decade-old strategy of harassment should be evidence that the right’s bag of tricks is painfully meager. It’s also a bit baffling. In the face of a midterm election that could knock Mr. Trump’s presidency down into a posture of feeble lameness, the right’s online surrogates are instead burning crucial bandwidth on a grotesque persecution of a sympathetic woman — all while pushing a scolding grievance message about sexual values that is more likely to scare away new voters than bring them into the tent...."

Writes Nathan Taylor Pemberton, in "I Have Never Seen the Online Right So Happy" (NYT).

"Fiedler... would have been delighted by the ability of some of our best writers to dance knowingly around the volcano..."

"... the 'chuckles and whispers and much munching about the neck and shoulders' in Lorrie Moore’s 'Anagrams,' for example, or the 'tumblings and flexings and shudders' in John Barth’s 'The End of the Road,' or the 'stiffened giblets' in Tom Wolfe’s 'Hooking Up,' or the 'freaky rubs and naughty pinches' in Chuck Berry’s extraordinary autobiography."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "A Field Guide to the Dark, Sexy Swamp of American Literature With its bracing studies of fiction’s secrets, this 66-year-old work of literary criticism still surprises and delights" (NYT). The reissued book is "Love and Death in the American Novel" by Leslie A. Fiedler.

It's hard to write about sex! Apparently, the word "and" is helpful. Only the Tom Wolfe quote lacks an "and."

"Stiffened giblets." Wow, that's so offputting. Let's see, I've got "Hooking Up" here on Kindle. 

Ha ha, I've got the passage highlighted:

If anything, “sexual revolution” was rather a prim term for the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000. Every magazine stand was a riot of bare flesh, rouged areolae, moistened crevices, and stiffened giblets: boys with girls, girls with girls, boys with boys, bare-breasted female bodybuilders, so-called boys with breasts, riding backseat behind steroid-gorged bodybuilding bikers, naked except for cache-sexes and Panzer helmets, on huge chromed Honda or Harley-Davidson motorcycles. 

That's on page 5. Replete with "and." You need these pairs and lists for sex.

I see Wolfe uses "stiffened giblets" again — with 2 "ands" — on page 142:

Sunrise.

"You just have a sense of... brotherhood."

Said Robert Gasser, a Brewers pitcher:

To begin the season - Logan Henderson, Robert Gasser, and Shane Drohan shared an Airbnb at Triple-A.

In October, they started 3 straight games in the NLCS to help the Brewers win their first pennant in 44 years.

Before his NLCS start, Gasser talked about the tight-knit staff 👇 pic.twitter.com/t5DVbsHBCD

— Hunter Baumgardt (@hunterbonair) October 17, 2026

Texting that to Meade, I wrote "'brotherhood'/crystal blue persuasion/'There'll be peace and good — brotherhood.'"

He sent me this video of the song, and I said "I blogged that video in 2015." It was here: "The new Hillary catchphrase: 'Love trumps hate.'"

And I blogged about the song in 2006, describing what I'd just put in a podcast ("Audible Althouse #64," no longer on line):

Paris.

Galeries Lafayette in Paris is being looted tonight. It’s the French equivalent of Harrods in London or Bergdorf Goodman in NYC https://t.co/F5jZU4bswZ

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 17, 2026

"The D.S.A.’s rise is at once a story of party-blobification and of a revolt against it. Like the conservatives of the 1970s..."

"... the group frankly views the party it occupies as a host for an ideological movement rather than as a partner. It also practices an exaggerated form of the interest-group litmus-test politics that came to dominate Democratic politics in the post-1968 era, measuring its own strength less by general-election victories than by its ability to enforce candidate loyalty to left-maximalist positions.... It is a means of engaging seriously in Democratic Party politics while also casting a vote of no-confidence in the party itself...."

From "Is Anyone Actually in Charge of the Democratic Party? And Does It Matter? This year’s midterm elections are a test of whether a party can be a success and a failure at the same time" (NYT).

"If sexual misconduct prevents a victim from taking full advantage of her education, then the institution has to address it."

"That responsibility is an awkward fit in some ways, but it reflects the reality that colleges are not just classrooms; they are a very particular kind of community in which all members have a duty of care toward one another. The Cornell case shows how hard it can be for universities to enforce Title IX well and also why they have to keep trying...."

Writes Emily Bazelon, in "This Is One of the Saddest Facts About the Cornell Rape Case" (NYT).

The sad fact in question is that Jane Doe dropped out, and she did not complete her degree elsewhere. Her education — her path to a career — was disrupted. 

"I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down."

A column at the NYT, written by Chris Marquis, a professor at University of Cambridge Judge Business School.

When the case method is used in medicine and law, it serves a different set of goals.... In both fields, students are confronted by the messiness of reality, and the goal is to foster disciplined skepticism: ask what’s missing, challenge assumptions and test how an analysis could be wrong.

Business school cases operate on another logic.... The point is to practice acting like the person in charge....

"Rioters attacked city halls from Lille in northern France to Marseille in the south, where masked infiltrators broke into the local government headquarters..."

"...  and tipped over a bust of Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic. Fires also destroyed a tourist office in Lyon.... Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu placed the blame for the chaos squarely on a far-left party, France Unbowed.... Protest organizers had hoped that the demonstrations on Saturday would lead to a convergence between the student demonstrations that have roiled France since September demanding better school conditions, and a broader social movement that addressed a wider array of concerns, including the rising cost of living. What emerged on Saturday seemed like a split-screen event, with marches occurring peacefully in one part of a city and groups of black-clad agitators sparring with police and causing damage in other areas. Then, as things unraveled, opportunist rioters joined in, exploiting the chaos, government officials said...."

From "France Reels After Largest Riots in Years/Centrist and leftist leaders blamed each other after anti-government protests devolved into chaos" (NYT).

"The age of AI will disrupt the workplace in all sorts of ways. But the work will continue..."

"... as other kinds of work have continued through technological disruptions. People still run the 100-meter dash, even though a car or a cheetah could do it faster. We still cook elaborate dinners, even though the frozen food aisle is crammed with highly palatable substitutes. We still have dinner parties, even though we could stream wittier banter from Netflix — because we are humans, and we want to seek excellence, not just consume it. AI may make it harder for us to get paid for our work. But if so, it will also make it easier for us to focus on the reasons that work is worth doing."

So says Megan McArdle, in "Every novel might have to pass an AI test soon/Artificial intelligence threatens writers’ livelihoods. It may also remind them why they write" (WaPo)(gift link).

The frozen food aisle is crammed with highly palatable substitutes? I don't believe that for one minute. Strike the "highly" and maybe you've got the beginning of a good enough analogy.

Also: "a car or a cheetah could do it faster" — there's no antecedent for "it." Do what faster? Anyway, it's not that people run the 100-meter dash, it's that other people care about and watch them running. Speed is interesting to us because of whatever it is that is going fast. We also care about and watch cars and cheetahs going fast, but it's not the speed per se that matters. It's the thing that's managing to go that fast. I've been impressed by a fast-moving tortoise.

As for reading, there are different kinds of readers. I don't think I'm the kind of reader who reads the novels that AI is going to get away with writing — conventional, fast-moving narratives with heroes and villains. Does it bother me if readers of hackwork are not getting human hacks? Maybe it does!