"Biden, always a little taller than you expect, wore a navy suit and a bright-blue tie."

"He passed a study off the Oval, where he keeps a rack of extra shirts, an array of notes sent in by the public, and a portrait of John F. Kennedy in a contemplative pose.... He continued to the Oval Office dining room, a small, elegant space where, in Biden’s eight years as Vice-President, he often visited Barack Obama for lunch. One wall is graced by 'The Peacemakers,' a famous painting of Lincoln and his military commanders, on the cusp of winning the Civil War. Another is dominated by a large television set, installed by Donald Trump."

From "Joe Biden’s Last Campaign/Trailing Trump in polls and facing doubts about his age, the President voices defiant confidence in his prospects for reëlection" by Evan Osnos (The New Yorker).

I paused over "always a little taller than you expect." It had a bit of a large-boulder-the-size-of-a-small-boulder feeling about it. It gets my favorite tag: big and small. I love these conundrums of size. Osnos is using "you" to refer to himself. He's talking about his subjective experience, and he — unlike, probably, you — has been in the vicinity of the President on multiple occasions. But what is this taller and taller effect? It must be that when he's around Biden, he's struck that Biden is a little tall, and, afterwards, Biden shrinks in Osnos's memory, setting him up to be struck once again, at the next encounter, by the slight tallness of Biden.

Biden was showing Osnos — as Biden put it — "where Trump sat and watched the revolution."

"Manchin is especially vulnerable to accusations of imperial remove. Photos that circulated online show him chatting over the rail of his houseboat in Washington with angry constituents, who had arrived by kayak."

Writes Evan Osnos in "West Virginians Ask Joe Manchin: Which Side Are You On? The senator’s blockade against programs that have helped his constituents escape poverty makes some question 'who matters to Joe'" (The New Yorker).

Is it "imperial" to live in a houseboat — a houseboat accessible by angry kayakers?

Eh. Everyone has to write a lot of sentences about Joe Manchin right now. It's tedious but you can find some gems in there.

The Manchins are machers; Joe’s grandfather ran Farmington’s grocery store and served, over the years, as its fire chief, constable, justice of the peace, and mayor. His father had a similar stature in local politics, while also expanding the family business from groceries into furniture and carpets....

Machers... I had to look it up. It's a Yiddish word, I learned, reading "What Makes a Macher" (Forward):

"For him, basketball was everything."

"Kim [Jong Un] drew pictures of Michael Jordan and slept with a basketball, according to Ko Yong Suk, the aunt who cared for him [when he was at school in Bern, Switzerland].... It is a measure of how impoverished America’s contact with North Korea has become that one of the best-known conduits is Dennis Rodman, a.k.a. the Worm, the bad boy of the nineties-era Chicago Bulls. Rodman’s agent, Chris Volo, a hulking former mixed-martial-arts fighter, told me recently, 'I’ve been there four times in four years. I’m in the Korean Sea, and I’m saying to myself, "No one would believe that I’m alone right now, riding Sea-Doos with Kim Jong Un."' 2013, when Vice Media, aware of Kim’s love of the Bulls, offered to fly American basketball players to North Korea. Vice tried to contact Michael Jordan but got nowhere. Rodman, who was working the night-club autograph circuit, was happy to go. He joined three members of the Harlem Globetrotters for a game in Pyongyang. Kim made a surprise appearance, invited Rodman to dinner, and asked him to return to North Korea for a week at his private beach resort in Wonsan, which Rodman later described as 'Hawaii or Ibiza, but he’s the only one that lives there.' On his most recent trip, in June, Rodman gave Kim English and Korean editions of Trump’s 1987 best-seller, 'The Art of the Deal.'"

The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea/On the ground in Pyongyang: Could Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump goad each other into a devastating confrontation? by Evan Osnos (in The New Yorker).

ADDED: Here's a WaPo article from last year: "The secret life of Kim Jong Un’s aunt, who has lived in the U.S. since 1998":

“He wasn’t a troublemaker, but he was short-tempered and had a lack of tolerance,” Ko recalled. “When his mother tried to tell him off for playing with [games and machinery] too much and not studying enough, he wouldn’t talk back, but he would protest in other ways, like going on a hunger strike.”...

He was shorter than his friends, and his mother told him that if he played basketball, he would become taller, Ko said.

Wait. I thought the Civil War was inevitable and no President could have averted it.

"Just before Franklin Pierce took office, in 1853, his son died in a train accident, and Pierce’s Presidency was marked by the 'dead weight of hopeless sorrow,' according to his biographer Roy Franklin Nichols. Morose and often drunk, Pierce proved unable to defuse the tensions that precipitated the Civil War."

So writes Evan Osnos in a New Yorker article that considers, among other things, whether the 25th Amendment procedure (for removing a President who is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office") could be used against a President with a psychiatric disorder.

But last week, Trump was sneered at as ignorant (if not racist) for saying that Andrew Jackson, if he'd been around "a little later" would have prevented the Civil War.

Jim Grossman (American Historical Association): [Trump] starts from the wrong premise - the premise that the Civil War should somehow have been avoided, and that someone more skilled on the White House could have avoided it. If one sees the Civil War as a war of liberation, which is what it was, then it shouldn't have been avoided. Had you compromised out the differences between the government and the confederacy, or between anti-slavery forces and southern slaveholders, the victims would have been the enslaved people of the south. If the president has the notion that it would be desirable to compromise that out, without emancipation, it is frightening.

David Blight (Yale): If it reflects anything, it reflects a kind of great man idea of history, that if you just have the right man with the right strength you can change the course of history. And that is plain nonsense.

In that view, what's the problem with hopelessly depressed, drunk Franklin Pierce?

By the way, the historians were also contemptuous of Trump's statement that Jackson "was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War."

Grossman: Jackson died 16 years before the Civil War began. You can quote me on that.

Blight: He was dead even before the compromise of 1850 for God's sake. He was dead at the time of the Mexican war....

This contempt led me to read "AMERICAN LION: Andrew Jackson in the White House." Here are a few excerpts that show people in Jackson's time speaking of civil war:

"Nick Pinchuk, the C.E.O., led Trump past displays of Snap-on products... including small, colorful metal boxes that Pinchuk said some customers buy to hold ashes after a cremation."

"'That’s kind of depressing,' Trump said."

Just something that amused me in a New Yorker article that isn't otherwise amusing me, "How Trump Could Get Fired/The Constitution offers two main paths for removing a President from office. How feasible are they?" I haven't read the whole article yet, but I don't have to read it at all to answer the question asked. The answer is not feasible at all (not unless something quite different from everything we've see so far happens). So you can snap that dream into a little metal box.

The extremely wealthy survivalists of Silicon Valley and New York City.

Described at length by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker.

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.”... He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”...

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a prominent investor, recalls telling a friend that he was thinking of visiting New Zealand. “Oh, are you going to get apocalypse insurance?” the friend asked. “I’m, like, Huh?” Hoffman told me. New Zealand, he discovered, is a favored refuge in the event of a cataclysm. Hoffman said, “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.’...

The original silo of [Larry Hall's Survival Condo Project] was built by the Army Corps of Engineers to withstand a nuclear strike. The interior can support a total of seventy-five people. It has enough food and fuel for five years off the grid; by raising tilapia in fish tanks, and hydroponic vegetables under grow lamps, with renewable power, it could function indefinitely, Hall said. In a crisis, his swat-team-style trucks (“the Pit-Bull VX, armored up to fifty-calibre”) will pick up any owner within four hundred miles....

"At the age of forty-four, Rubio has lively dark eyes, soft cheeks, and downy brown hair affixed in a perfect part."

"He sometimes asks crowds to see him in the tradition of a 'young President who said, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."' (J.F.K. was forty-three when he entered the White House.) Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, is only five months older than Rubio, but nobody calls him boyish. If the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, the Party will be offering the oldest candidate that it has ever run in a general election, and Rubio has taken to saying, 'Never in the modern history of this country has the political class in both parties been more out of touch with our country than it is right now.' But in policy terms Rubio can appear older than his years. His opposition to same-sex marriage, to raising the minimum wage, and to restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba puts him out of step with most American Latinos. In the Spanish-language media, he is sometimes described as un joven viejo—a young fogey."

From a new, long article in The New Yorker by Evan Osnos titled "The Opportunist/Marco Rubio’s political dexterity."

When Samantha Power asked "Why do you think my dad was the one who died?"

From the "In the Land of the Possible/Samantha Power has the President’s ear. To what end?" by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker:

Her mother, Vera Delaney... a nephrologist... married a Dublin piano player, raconteur, dentist, and drinker named Jim Power—“a fearsomely formidable pub debater,” as the Irish Independent once put it. “I was extremely close to my father, inseparable,” Power said. “Where we hung out most of the time was the pub.” Her father expounded on the day’s papers, while she read mysteries by the light of a slot machine in the basement. Her parents’ marriage didn’t last. “My mother, in effect, started leading her own life,” Power said. At the hospital, Delaney fell in love with her boss, Edmund Bourke. Divorce was illegal in Ireland, and they wanted more opportunities in medicine, so, when Samantha was nine and her brother was five, the family moved to Pittsburgh and, later, Atlanta. Jim Power remained in Ireland. She said, “We stayed in touch, and, then, the drink, I think.” She trailed off. He died when she was fourteen. [Power's husband Cass] Sunstein recalled that, decades later, on a trip to Ireland, Power took him to visit her father’s favorite pub, where they met a woman who had worked behind the bar and remembered her dad. Others seemed to drink just as much, and Power asked, “Why do you think my dad was the one who died?” The barwoman answered simply, “It’s because you left.” Power told me, “I knew he was drinking too much. But I had no idea he was sick—he was just forty-seven, and his death was devastating.”