Pete Buttigieg has a splitting maul.

Instapundit reports on what's in The Atlantic.

And then there's this:

Rugged Lumberjack Pete sits at authentic rustic diner awaiting a heaping breakfast plate of carburetors, while Annie Leibovitz captures him in a moment of deep reflection https://t.co/52OgDhd5we pic.twitter.com/Unz6GxyyQQ

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 3, 2026

I know what a splitting headache is, but what's a splitting maul?

"I can't believe the bespoke NY magazine biz hasn't yet realized that an Annie Leibovitz puff piece photoshoot is a political death sentence."

I can't believe the bespoke NY magazine biz hasn't yet realized that an Annie Leibovitz puff piece photoshoot is a political death sentence pic.twitter.com/INL4dWe7Hb

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 2, 2026

"Then the vice president enters amid a rain-like patter of footfalls, and the energy in the room changes. 'Hi! How are you? Good to see you again!' Harris says, grabbing my hand and folding down into the opposite seat."

Let's fold down into Vogue Magazine.

I'm reading Nathan Heller's "Vice President Kamala Harris on Her Race to the Finish."

Distinctive photos... by Annie Leibovitz.

Making Beto seem like John Edwards....

Just remembered the last time a Conde Nast publication dressed a young Democratic hopeful in smart-casual workwear and posed them next to a dog and pickup truck in a cover story shot by Annie Leibovitz. pic.twitter.com/qvOzjdaUkw

— Freddie Campion (@FreddieCampion) March 13, 2019

Oh. My. God. pic.twitter.com/SFgITC1dlo

— Freddie Campion (@FreddieCampion) March 13, 2019

ADDED: The Beto photo is much bettah. Humanizing politicians with a dog is so tired. Both men have a truck — are they guys who'd really have trucks? — but the Edwards truck is blocking the entire background. Beto has a long windy dirt road. Is it the road ahead or the road behind? Needs to be the road behind. He came from Texas and he's going on to the White House. Not likely, but we can dream along with our little dreamboat.

The art donation tax evasion.

Compare how the NYT treats this story to what the commenters there say. I hate to cut and paste any of this because the text by the NYT is so evasive (about tax evasion) that I have to copy too much to get my point across. But let me try:

Someone — and absolutely no one involved seems ready to say who — came up with an idea in 2012 for a patron to purchase 2,070 photos by the American portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz and then donate them to a museum in Canada. This was a colossal score for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax, which owned nothing by Ms. Leibovitz at the time. For Ms. Leibovitz, who had a financial crisis several years earlier, the transaction meant she earned several million dollars.

And the donor, [Harley Mintz, the Deloitte Canada partner]... stood to qualify for a generous tax deduction and recognition as an arts patron. Four years later, though, a Canadian government panel that must sign off on the deduction is still balking at approving it, partly because the panel won’t accept a $20 million valuation for a collection that the donor purchased for just $4.75 million....

... Ms. Leibovitz has received only half of the promised $4.75 million. By contract, she does not receive the rest of the money unless the government panel signs off, according to Mr. Mintz.

This goes on at great length. By contrast, the commenters are brief and cutting:

1. "For the record, Ms. Liebovitz is generally considered a passable magazine photographer unworthy of museum collections. The MoMA, for example, has none of her photographs in its vast collection."

2.  "Ah, the good old-fashioned donation evaluation for taxes. The wealthy have been doing this for a very long time. Museums are there for this very reason. To deposit overly valued art pieces in lieu of a tax deduction. Same goes for property, buildings and other funding to arts, medicine and pet projects. Art is tricky. How is it exactly evaluated? And by whom?"

3. "High-end highly-paid & highly dated celebrity photography seems an odd multimillion-dollar art investment for Nova Scotia even without that dodgy tax dodge."

4. "Herein lies the heart and soul of the art industry in our time."

"But really, it would have been fine to skip this strange celebrity ritual, this complicated stew of personal indulgence, brand tending and sociopolitical me-too-ism."

"Yes, pregnancy is beautiful and powerful and worthy of celebration. You are womanly. You are phenomenal. God bless. But it has become virtually impossible for a celebrity to go through a pregnancy without getting naked for the cameras, her fans and — presumably — herself."

From "Let Serena Williams’s naked pregnancy photo shoot be the last of its kind," by Robin Givhan (in The Washington Post).

As Givhan notes, it all started with Demi Moore back in 1991. It was surprising then — unlike now — and it's never been done better. The photographer was Annie Leibovitz, who also did the Serena Williams portrait.

Givhan concludes:

But what is the broader value of the bared baby bump? Under the best of circumstances, pregnancy is a beautiful and life-changing experience. And every woman’s pregnancy is unique and captivating to her. But even if a woman is a celebrity, that doesn’t make her pregnancy newsworthy.

I'm not sure I agree. We could talk about the frivolity of our celebrity culture and the excess of vanity, nudity, and photography in American life today. But pregnancy is actually more important than we generally take it to be. It is our central purpose from a biological, evolutionary point of view. Our deep understanding of that reality pops out in weird distorted ways, but when we see the weirdness, we should take it as a cue to remember what we so often forget: We are all here because women carried babies in their bodies. Pregnancy is beyond newsworthy. By comparison, the idea of "news" is frivolous.

Everybody's talking about the "Call me Caitlyn" Vanity Fair cover.

Bruce Jenner, photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

Goodbye to Shirley Temple.

Here's the NYT obituary, with some of the details of the life of the greatest child star of all time and perhaps the most loved actress of all time. My mother taught me to love her in the 1950s when I was a child — my mother, who had loved going to the movies when she was a child during The Depression, when Shirley Temple movies were coming out and making people happy.

I watched so many Shirley Temple movies on our big black-and-white TV. They were on all the time — "Captain January," "The Littlest Rebel," "Curly Top," "The Little Princess." So many of the movies I saw as a child were Shirley Temple movies on TV. I was never taken to a movie theater with my parents, so I didn't see a movie in a theater until I was old enough to go without an adult. Movies were part of television, and there was Shirley in her childhood prime. She had a TV show — "Shirley Temple's Storybook" — where we saw her as a lovely adult woman, introducing a filmed fairy tale each week.

I've written many blog posts about Shirley Temple over the years, and I'm going to extend this post with some links to them.

January 29, 2014, blogging about the State of the Union:

"Shirley Temple is there," I said, spotting Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and being unfair to Shirley Temple, whose ringlets — as I do an image search this morning — look artlessly subtle and not at all like Debbie's headful of boing-y springs. Incredible what women can do to themselves and still be taken seriously.

June 20, 2013, blogging about Paula Deen's getting into trouble for the notion of a slave-themed wedding with "a bunch of little n-----s..."  like "in the Shirley Temple days," where "they used to tap dance around":

[O]bviously, there were all sorts of problems with the way black people were depicted in old Hollywood movies, let's at least get it clear in our minds what the movie reference is. There was a 1935 Shirley Temple movie called "The Littlest Rebel," and here's what it looked like when Bill Bojangles Robinson (playing the slave "Uncle Billy") danced. He's not tap dancing "around" — as if slaves dance around while working — he's giving a performance at an elegant affair — as a soloist, not in "a bunch." And he's not in shorts and shirt-sleeves. He's wearing long pants and a vest and a jacket. So Deen's mental image of what went on in the bad old days of Hollywood is itself an embarrassing distortion.

February 6, 2013, "My duck does a wonderful trick. My duck can lay an egg!" A sweet clip of Shirley, presented a propos of the "'Signs that people are tired of thinking about politics,' which highlighted the Washington Post article about the amazing fact that a bird laid an egg. And who better than Shirley Temple to epitomize the desire for distraction from politics?"

August 27, 2012, the topic was the desire for a movie that "helps me be a nicer person, not a sharper arguer":

I'm wracking my brain trying to come up with a movie that oriented me toward greater niceness. I can think of movies that might help you become a better person, but it's usually in the sense of becoming bolder, more independent, more resolutely opposed to evil and oppression. But nicer? Can you think of a movie in which the central character, someone you identify with, is especially polite and the politeness isn't basically something he must overcome in order to succeed.

A-ha! The answer: Every Shirley Temple movie.

April 28, 2012, somehow the top of Obama's gaffe about "clinging to guns and religion" led to Shirley, after some lady reminded somebody of Jane Withers, as Withers' appeared as an adult in the 1960s in ads for Comet scouring powder, and I said:

When my mother saw those Comet ads, she's always exclaim about how mean Jane Withers was to Shirley Temple. She was the child actress who was most emphatically not Shirley Temple....

Withers played the role of a girl who was mean to the most lovable child who ever lived, and therefore she became — in my mothers mind — the mean girl, indelibly, no matter how many sinks she scrubbed clean.

April 29, 2009, a controversy over a photographic presentation of teenaged Miley Cyrus looking overly sexualized led me to show you this clip of Shirley Temple as a toddler playing a seductress. It's simply astounding by today's standards:



April 9, 2007, I have "A profound movie experience... watching one of the first movies I ever saw... Perhaps the second movie I ever saw in my life -- the first was 'The Little Fugitive" -- was the Shirley Temple movie 'Captain January.'"

And speaking of influences, I can see how much this influenced me. Shirley is angrily defiant as she stands up to the prissy female truant officer who doesn't like the feisty attitude she's learning from the men. The truant officer wants to put her in an institution, away from Captain January, the kindly lighthouse keeper who found her after a shipwreck.

You should be taken home and spanked! What kind of man is this Captain January to allow you to run around?

This is some heavy dialogue for a young child to hear. (Shirley has just been looking at a picture she thinks is her dead mother and has tried to sing the song "Asleep in the Deep.")

Helen: How can anyone sleep in the deep?
Capt. January: That's the long last sleep, Star.
Helen: Does everyone have to die?
Capt. January: Yes, everyone does.
Helen: Even you and me?
Capt. January: Yes, when the time comes.
Helen: Do you think we'll make it till Christmas?
Capt. January: Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if we did.

Yes, Shirley reminds you of death, then tries to cheer you back up with Christmas and short term hopes.

April 23, 2004, I write my first (and best) Shirley Temple post, telling the story of "The Hagen Girl" — the movie she made with Ronald Reagan — complete with shot-from-the-TV-screen stills:

It's bad, but awesome. Ronald Reagan comes to town, hears people gossiping about him, and doesn't like it..... The gossip is all about how Mary Hagen, played by Shirley Temple, is an illegitimate child and the father is Reagan. Shirley was the most adorable child ever, but here she is as a gorgeous teenager:

Read the whole story at the link. I'll just tell you that Ronald Reagan rescues the suicidal Shirley from drowning — complete with pictures of Reagan diving into the raging river and Shirley looking "modern and fabulous" while wet — and in the end he tells her — so Reaganesquely — "It's what you are, and where you're going that really matters."

April 24, 2004, the day after that big Shirley-and-Reagan post, I posited a question for which you'll see no answers at the link, because I didn't have the comments on back then. You might find this a particularly interesting question today, what with all the recent talk of Woody Allen's depredations and travails:

So if a teenage girl goes for a year believing an older man is her biological father, but then finds out it was just rumor, is it okay to marry him? I mean in a conventional family-oriented movie. That's what happened in "That Hagen Girl" (discussed... with pictures, yesterday). Ronald Reagan was none too happy with the role of the father figure and begged for a rewrite in which he doesn't end up marrying Shirley Temple.

Reagan's misgivings about the script were borne out when the film had its first preview screening. After he rescues Temple from her suicide attempt, he admits that he loves her. But when he said the words on screen, the preview audience screamed "Oh no!" almost in unison.

So they recut it, so people wouldn't scream in horror! But that only made it an inexplicably sexless marriage.

Buzz Bissinger tries to write about Tiger Woods.

The Vanity Fair article has a fascinating Annie Liebowitz cover photograph of Tiger Woods's without a shirt — fascinating because the great athlete looks so different from those Men's Health-type torso models who work their muscles solely for the purpose of getting their muscles to look the way people these days want to see muscles looking and who squeeze out the excess fat so we can get the best look at those muscles. By contrast, Tiger looks slightly porky and squishy. That's not a criticism. That's a suggestion that, knowing the functionality of the torso we're gazing at — and I'm including the sexual functionality — we ought to adjust our taste in male beauty.

But on to Bissenger's silly writing. Here's a sentence — one sentence:

Tiger’s story has been driven by sex, tons of it, in allegedly all different varieties: threesomes in which he greatly enjoyed girl-on-girl, and mild S&M (featuring hair-pulling and spanking); $60,000 pay-for-sex escort dates; a quickie against the side of a car in a church parking lot; a preference for porn stars and nightclub waitresses, virtually all of them with lips almost as thick as their very full breasts; drug-bolstered encounters designed to make him even more of a conquistador (Ambien, of all things); immature sex-text messages (“Send me something naughty ... Go to the bathroom and take [a picture],” “I will wear you out ... When was the last time you got [laid]?”); soulful confessions that he got married only for image and was bored with his wife; regular payments of between $5,000 and $10,000 each month to keep his harem quiet.

Diagram that. The subject and verb are: story and has been driven. Yes, that sets up a list, and you can go very long, quite grammatically, with a list. But it purports to be a list of all different varieties of sex, and not everything on the list is a variety of sex. A confession about why you got married isn't a variety of sex. A payment of money is not a variety of sex. A preference for a type of woman isn't a variety of sex. And "lips almost as thick as their very full breasts" — I'm sorry... that's a hell of an "almost." The picture that put in my mind is just absurd. Lips as big as really tiny breasts would be scarily huge.

Then there's this insight into emptiness:

In the movie Up in the Air, George Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, travels nearly 330 days a year to fire people with a sympathetic look on his face.

Presumably, it's Bingham that has the sympathetic look on his face, not the people getting fired, as the sentence construction would have it.

... It now seems that when [Woods] returned home after a tournament and vanished back inside his gated community, the persona he left behind, the one he so obsessively presented to the public, was as empty as Bingham’s Omaha apartment, pieces of furniture without any meaning, a life without meaning.

This is the first mention in the article of Bingham’s Omaha apartment. We've been told about Bingham's emptiness, but suddenly the comparison is to Bingham's apartment, where there are — ooh, tragic! — pieces of furniture without any meaning. This is as silly as women with lips as big as their breasts... almost.

At the end of Up in the Air, Clooney realizes....

I'll spare you the spoiler.

But Woods, to the bitter end and with a kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance, still felt he could beat the tidal wave back.

What bitter end? Woods isn't a movie, and he's still alive. A kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance... These qualifiers are as meaningless as the furniture in Bingham's Omaha apartment. There's some particular kind of hubris involved? He's not just arrogant; he has fundamental arrogance? Bissinger fleshes out his point with nonevidence. Woods used a fake name at the hospital, like any celebrity who needed privacy. That's not arrogant. Woods avoided talking to the police. That's not arrogant. That's what your lawyer would tell you to do.

It was only when his paramours started pouring out of every cupboard like tenement cockroaches that Tiger expressed some sort of awareness that he was in deep shit....

The most sensible thing for him to do was to keep quiet and request privacy. That wasn't arrogant. And about that trite cockroaches simile — were their mandibles almost as big as their mesothoraxes?

With the number of alleged paramours reaching 14 as of mid-December (a figure bound to multiply), it is safe to say that behind the non-accessible accessibility and seemingly perfect marriage to a beautiful woman was a sex addict who could not get enough. There is nothing wrong with that, given that the opportunities for Tiger were endless.

Bissinger gives no reason for his pat assertion that having endless opportunities makes it completely right to be a sex addict. He just goes on to make the obvious point — bolstered, despite its obviousness, with the dubious concurrence of Hugh Hefner — that Tiger was cheating on his wife.

Things are only continuing to cascade downward for Woods.

Cascade downward? Does anything ever cascade upward?

... The swirling question is if, and when, he will return to golf.

Swirling, eh?  Is it swirling upward or downward?

... In the end it was the age-old clash of image versus reality, the compartmentalization of two different lives that inevitably merge at some certain point, whoever you are.

Well, I don't know who you are, but life is not a movie, and satisfying narrative arcs are not inevitable. For example, Woods could have died when his SUV hit that tree. And then we wouldn't have witnessed the age-old clash you're pontificating about.

"Compared to 99 percent of the world, she makes a vast fortune."

"The problem occurs when a person becomes so famous that they start feeling that they’re more in line financially with Oprah or Madonna.”

The linked article is long — but fascinating.