Sunrise — 6:12 — and early afternoon — 1:00.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments. And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"And Sly is a pillar of the really American pop culture and a Hollywood superstar like few others and one of the biggest names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame."

"In fact, the only one that's a bigger name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, they say, is a guy named Donald Trump. I'm on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, too, if you can believe that one."

Said Donald Trump, announcing the 2025 Kennedy Center honorees...

The full list, in case you lack the patience to watch the whole announcement, is, according to the NYT: "the country music artist George Strait, the disco queen Gloria Gaynor... the glam rock band Kiss... Michael Crawford, a British actor decorated for his stage performances in musicals like 'Phantom of the Opera,' and Sylvester Stallone, the American film actor best known for portraying the boxer Rocky Balboa in a series of eponymous films and the mercenary warrior John Rambo is a second franchise." LOL. I love that the NYT needs to dump on Rambo. A mercenary!

"In 1973, Ms. Jong published 'Fear of Flying,' a roman-a-clef in which the young, pretty and privileged Isadora Wing leaves her husband and road trips through Europe..."

"... seeking creative and sexual fulfillment. The message was that women didn’t have to stay in unfulfilling marriages. That bigger, richer lives beckoned. That message sold more than 20 million copies and made Ms. Jong a celebrated figure. This year, that book got another kind of sequel, when Molly Jong-Fast, Ms. Jong’s only child, published a memoir called 'How to Lose Your Mother.' The book depicts Erica Jong, now suffering from dementia, as a narcissist, a drunk, a disinterested parent who was either mining Molly’s life for material or ditching her to pursue her own adventures. The memoir, like [the sequel to 'Sex and the City'], serves as a generational rebuke to the women who prioritized careers and sex and fame and fortune over family, and a warning to any mothers foolish enough to follow Ms. Jong’s bad example. For those of us who loved the originals, the rise of the reboots feels chilling...."

Writes Jennifer Weiner, the novelist, in "In ‘And Just Like That…’ a Craven Era Took Its Revenge on Youth and Hope and Fun" (NYT).

"Skeptics doubted that diners would pay hundreds of dollars for vegetables and fruit, no matter how artfully prepared."

"Others dismissed it as another high-end stunt from a chef who had taken the restaurant through a series of different menus since he took over in 2006, including one that required waiters to perform card tricks.... The meat-free menu met with mixed reviews. Although the restaurant retained the three stars that Michelin first awarded it in 2012, other critics were not as impressed. Pete Wells, then The Times’s restaurant critic, described vegetable dishes that... 'are so obviously standing in for meat or fish... that you almost feel sorry for them.'"

From "Meat Is Back at Eleven Madison Park, After 4 Vegan Years/The Manhattan restaurant drew global praise and skepticism with its climate-minded, all-plant menu. Now its chef wants to be more welcoming — and popular" (NYT).

"The restaurant has had varying levels of financial success since introducing the vegan menu.... Bookings for private events, an essential stream of income, have been particularly sparse. 'It’s hard to get 30 people for a corporate dinner to come to a plant-based restaurant'...."

Maybe there's just no way to be expensive and vegan. Pick one. It is, apparently, too much of a strain to shore up the customer's delusion that nonmeat items are very, very posh. We're told there was "tonburi, the seeds some call land caviar."

"These ramps are not typically built to meet city regulations that apply to many bigger businesses, with all their rules about materials, incline, width, landing areas and so on."

"There are exemptions for small businesses, and clearly an informal system has evolved. Wilson and I visited bodegas and other small businesses on the Lower East Side one morning and found no owner or employee who claimed to know when or how the ramps arrived, as if they had been there forever, like Manhattan schist. 'Tactical urbanism' is the term of art."

From "The Strange Beauty of New York’s Bodega Ramps/These humble, concrete blobs, designed to ease entry into delis and other stores, can resemble glaciers, pancakes or clamshells and affirm the civic compact" (NYT)(free-access link).

Wilson = Tom Wilson, "the earth science teacher who was also the unit photographer for his brother’s HBO series, 'How To With John Wilson.'"

Since I am (I think) the world's biggest fan of "How To With John Wilson," I'm going to mute my criticism of this DIY mess and go with the Wilsonesque flow:

"It’s a weird, decades-long fixation for a president who wanted a White House ballroom years before he became president..."

"... although he hosted just two state dinners during his first term. But majestic spaces are where the political and social elite — kings, aristocrats, tycoons — have traditionally asserted and cemented their power. 'It was a place where these structures of society were reiterated and brought into being, ... a kind of social, political, dynastic space of performance,' said Robert Wellington, author of the forthcoming book 'Versailles Mirrored: The Power of Luxury from Louis XIV to Donald Trump.' The modern ballroom — the one most of the American bourgeoisie have come into contact with — is a staid, multimodal, commercial space: a cavernous hotel room with collapsible wall panels in aggressively beige tones, a perfectly adequate place for hosting weddings, charity dinners and professional conferences. Ask anyone to describe a 'ballroom,' though, and most will conjure something from HBO’s 'The Gilded Age'...."

From "Trump loves a swanky ballroom. So did the Gilded Age elite. The president’s vision for a palatial addition to 'the People’s House' showcases the historical ties between architecture and power" (WaPo).

That's a free-access link, because there's much more about the history of ballrooms, with plenty of interesting photographs, interspersed with the anti-Trumpism you've got to expect.

But it could be way more anti-Trump than it is. I know when I hear the theme "architecture and power," I think of the Nazis, but there's no mention of Nazi architecture in this article. Why not? The easiest answer is that Trump's aesthetic is not like the Nazis'. It's gold leaf and chandeliers. French. The Nazis wanted "an impression of simplicity, uniformity, monumentality, solidity and eternity." Ironically, it's the absence of that sort of thing in Trump's ballroom that seems to be bothering The Washington Post. 

Of course, Mamdani takes advantage of the existing law, living in rent-stabilized apartment, paying a mere $2,300 a month for a 1-bedroom in Queens.

But Andrew Cuomo is challenging him. "[M]ove out immediately," he wrote on X. "[G]ive your affordable housing back to an unhoused family who need it. Leaders must show moral clarity. Time to move out."

Where is Cuomo, in his "moral clarity," living these days? And would he be forefronting this issue if he had scored the nomination, as he'd expected? I think it's only because Mamdani got the nomination that Cuomo talking about rent-stabilization, which is a problem, but not one that could be solved by trying to guilt-trip the beneficiaries of it to move out of their apartments.

This reminds me of the time Hillary Clinton tried to shame Donald Trump out of using the tax advantages that are written into the law:

"It means that the Justice Department is prepared to go out and use its criminal powers, the power of subpoena, the power to compel witnesses to testify, the ability to go to a judge and try and get a search warrant.... the federal government's most powerful tools...."

Words intoned unironically on today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, which is titled "The Sprawling Government Effort to Prosecute Barack Obama."

Transcript and audio at Podscribe, here.

I was out on my sunrise walk, listening with earbuds, and when I heard "get a search warrant," I had to restrain myself from voicing my sarcasm: Who could have thought that a former U.S. President would have search warrant executed against him? Is there a plan to invade his home in the early morning hours? To root through the underpants and bras of the former First Lady? Inconceivable — wasn't it? — before this tyrant fought his way back into the White House.

"I sincerely apologise for causing trouble despite being a person of no importance."

Said Kim Keon-hee, quoted in "The fall of a first lady: limos and luxury to a cell with no bed/Kim Keon-hee — the dog-loving wife of Yoon Suk-yeol, the impeached ex-president of South Korea — is in prison on suspicion of corruption and election meddling" (London Times).

Critics have compared Kim to Lady Macbeth, Marie Antoinette and, for her extensive cosmetic surgery, Michael Jackson. She lent an aura of glamour to Yoon, 64, a solemn former prosecutor.... There are 16 criminal allegations against her including suspicions that an expressway road project was changed to end in an area where her family owns land in Yangpyeong, east of Seoul.... Her one-person cell has a small table that can be used as a desk and for eating meals and a floor mattress to sleep on, said one source.... She can be held for up to 20 days while an indictment is prepared, but is unlikely to be granted bail according to legal analysts....

Prairie walk.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments. And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

Even as a composite? Might it not be fake, but accurate? Performative authenticity?

Oh... MY... GOD...

So Chuck Schumer has spent his entire career telling a story about a Long Island couple...

The only thing is... THEY DONT EXIST!!!! THEY ARENT REAL pic.twitter.com/dgmWLKvqwC

— kevin smith (@kevin_smith45) August 12, 2025

It's hard to think of other examples of a politician creating characters with actual names to spice up the rhetoric. I thought of John Edwards's little girl without a coat — "a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm" — but she didn't have a name. There was the name Julia, in Barack Obama's "Life of Julia," but she wasn't presented as a real person, just a cartoon everywoman.

I really thought Ashley Biden was married to a man named Shady Post.

Link to absurd Daily Beast headline: here.

I asked Grok whether it's really that off to think a man could have such a name these days and was amused to hear that there really was a person — a woman — named Shady Marilla Post, who lived 1909-1972, in West Virginia. I'm told, "'Shady' shows up as a real first name in old records (maybe a nickname turned official, like from 'Shadrach' or just folksy Appalachian naming), and 'Post' is a legit surname. Combine that with modern trends—think Post Malone (real last name Post) or folks embracing 'Shady' as a vibe (hello, Eminem's alter ego)—and yeah, someone could absolutely rock that name today without raising too many eyebrows." Exactly!

By the way, Ashley's "shady post" was just the single word "FREEDOM" posted on social media.

"D.C. mayor meets police takeover with reluctant compliance" according to the teaser on the front page of The Washington Post.

At the article, the headline is "D.C. Mayor Bowser sticks with cautious approach amid Trump’s takeover/Bowser continued with the cautious approach she has taken over the past several months and said there is little D.C. could do to prevent Trump’s unprecedented actions."

Why isn't Bowser getting impassioned and denouncing Trump? Why the restraint? What is the long game?

Complicated business.

We found it. We declassified it.

Now Congress can see how classified info was leaked to shape political narratives - and decide if our institutions were weaponized against the American people. pic.twitter.com/PCpLFLuPmI

— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) August 12, 2025

AI is maddening, but also fascinating. This previously would’ve taken days of work, but Grok just did it in less than three minutes. pic.twitter.com/OH8wSqmrbH

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 12, 2025

Trump talks about the "land swapping" that he says will take place in ending the war in Ukraine.

 

From the transcript of his press briefing yesterday, Trump talks about the "land swapping" that he says will take place in ending the war in Ukraine:

We're going to change the lines, the battle lines. Russia's occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They've occupied some very prime territory. We're going to try and get some of that territory back for Ukraine. But they've taken some very prime territory. They've taken largely, in real estate we call it oceanfront property.

The most powerful man in the world — attempting to manage what he's just called "by far the worst that's happened since World War II" — seems comfortable reverting to real-estate mogul mode.

That's always the most valuable property. If you're on a lake, a river or an ocean, it's always the best property. Well, Ukraine, a lot of people don't know that Ukraine was largely a thousand miles of ocean. That's gone, other than one small area, Odessa, it's a small area. There's just a little bit of water left. So I'm going to go and see the parameters. Now, I may leave and say good luck, and that'll be the end. I may say this is not going to be settled. I mean, there are those that believe that Putin wanted all of Ukraine. I happen to be one of them, by the way. I think if it weren't for me, he would not be even talking to anybody else right now. But I'm going to meet with him. We're going to see what the parameters are, and then I'm going to call up President Zelensky and the European leaders.

ADDED: The very next headline I read was: "For Trump, Cities Like Washington Are Real Estate in Need of Fixing Up/'It’s a natural instinct as a real estate person,' he said in announcing his federal takeover of the capital’s police, despite falling crime" (NYT).

Tuesday "Authenticity" Watch.

1. "'Authenticity' can be the goal only of the inauthentic. Only those removed and fool enough to think they can get over on actual people by imposture try to 'project' authenticity, which can mean only 'to lie in a way someone you paid told you would be effective.'" — David Mamet in "Back When We Gave a Fuck" (Free Press)(and thanks to tcrosse in last night's open thread for bringing that quote to my attention and prompting this authenticity watch). 

2. "Democrats try a new tone: Less scripted, more cursing, Trumpier insults/Party leaders are swearing more, recording more direct-to-camera videos and trying to project an authenticity many voters have come to associate with Trump" (WaPo)(free link)(proving Mamet's point (or, given that this was published a few weeks ago, giving Mamet the idea to problematize WaPo's point)).

3. "Why 4?," asks Meade. "Why do you need 4 items to make it solid?" He's reacting to the notice I had here before, that I would need 4 "authenticity" items to make "a solid 'Authenticity' Watch post." He challenges: "Why not 3? Wouldn't 3 be solid?" Me: "Mmm... semi-solid."

4. [TO COME, AT LEAST IF THIS IS TO BECOME A SOLID AND NOT MERELY SEMI-SOLID "AUTHENTICITY" WATCH. I NOTE THAT THE LAST "AUTHENTICITY" WATCH 2 DAYS AGO WAS ONLY SEMI-SOLID.]