"The book has also amplified debate about whether more blame should be placed on Democratic leaders, Mr. Biden’s staff and the press for not revealing more about the former president earlier...."

"Intentionally or not, by being an author of a major book on the subject, Mr. Tapper has allowed himself to become a symbol of the establishment press that conservatives have long accused of hiding the former president’s frailty from the public. [Megyn] Kelly, the former Fox News star, subjected Mr. Tapper to intense grilling on her popular podcast in an interview that went viral online. 'You covered the Biden presidency aggressively throughout the four years, and you didn’t cover mental acuity, hardly at all,' Ms. Kelly said at one point. 'I mean, time and time again when issues came up, you seem to be running cover for the president.' Mr. Tapper denied the charges. 'Conservative media absolutely has every right to say, "We were hip to this, and the legacy media was not,"' he said later in the interview. 'Now, I do not accept that I was part of a cover-up. I do not accept that I was just providing cover for Joe Biden.'"

From "Everyone Now Has an Opinion on Jake Tapper/A book the CNN host co-wrote has received positive reviews and appears to be a sales hit. But it has also generated intense scrutiny of him and his work" (NYT).

So... you weren't "hip to this."

Why not? And why would I read a book written by such an out-of-touch, unobservant, slow learner? Or should I ask why would I read a book written by such a liar?

The NYT description of NYC in August quotes "The Great Gatsby."

From "New York Today: Empty City":

But in the winding-down of summer, the city moves at a slower pace, and the lazy days of August can be quite pleasant.

Or, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in "The Great Gatsby":

"I love New York on summer afternoons when every one’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it — overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands."

Did we ever do that sentence in the old Gatsby project? Oh, it's 2 sentences, and we only read one sentence at a time, but it's the second sentence, the one with the fruits, that's asking for it. If we did, I'm sure we didn't take it to mean simply that summer in the city is lazy and pleasant.

So, yes, we did read that sentence, back on March 2, 2013, and I see that I did throw the first sentence in for context:

You should know that ["There’s something very sensuous about it"] refers to "New York on summer afternoons when every one’s away." That's New York City, of course, not the whole state. People in New York mean New York City when they say "New York." They call the state "New York State" if it's ever worth talking about....

What kind of sensuous, overripe, funny fruits are falling into your hands... wherever you are when "every one's away"?

In the comments, Sydney said, "New York City must have been a hell hole in the summer before air conditioning," and I said, enlarging the context:

Yeah, the sentence is from a passage in which the problem is no a/c. Some characters want to go to the movies and others want to just drive around, which seems to be a way of being out and catching some breeze.

Also, this sentence is very close to one of the favorite "Gatsby" project sentences, the one known for short as "hot whips of panic."...

There's less overripe, falling, funny fruit when air-conditioning is everywhere every where.

Anyway, in the end, the conversation orbited around Harvey Keitel's balls (after kentuckyliz brought up the old famous-for-male-nudity movie "The Piano").

"Small men feel... that the world belongs to big men. Seeing men you know to be small playing big on the silver screen is comforting...."

So says the small Fish — small fry — Stanley, who loves the short — under 5'9" — actors who play tough guys in the movies:

The pattern was set in the 1930s and ’40s by Edward G. Robinson (“Little Caesar”), James Cagney, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni — all small men who usually played tough and cruel. Sometimes camera angles obscured the physical facts — Robinson looked absolutely huge as Wolf Larsen in “The Sea Wolf” in what can be called, without irony, a towering performance — and sometimes the camera just didn’t care as when, for example, Cagney regularly beat up men obviously twice his size.

Slightly later came John Garfield, and the smallest of them all, Alan Ladd who played big in “The Blue Dahlia,” “The Glass Key,” “The Badlanders” and who more than holds his own against Ben Johnson and a tree-like Van Heflin in “Shane.”...

Famously slight Paul Newman displayed his chest and pugilistic abilities in movies like “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” “Hud,” “The Long, Hot Summer” and “Cool Hand Luke.” James Dean would have made the list had he lived longer. Now aging tough guy-short guys (by short I mean under 5-foot-9) include Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino, Mel Gibson, Jean Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone, who created not one but two iconic American males, Rocky and Rambo.

And these days we have a bumper crop of undersized super heroes — Tom Cruise, Tobey Maguire, Mark Wahlberg and Robert Downey Jr., along with the occasionally macho Johnny Depp and Sean Penn.

Is there something comparable for women? Maybe we could make a list of women who have fairly average looks who play beautiful women on screen. My favorite example of this is Bette Davis in "Mr. Skeffington," where the raving over Bette's beauty occasionally crosses the line into the laughable. No man could resist her:



Ah, yes! I remember laughing out loud in the theater when she comes down the stairs and a man exclaims "Fanny! You look beautiful!" And check out that death-bed dialogue: "A woman is beautiful only when she is loved." That's what the plain women in the audience — next to the hubbies they dragged to the chick flick — long to believe.

"The Path to 9/11."

I wouldn't have watched this show, because I never watch shows like this. What does "like this" mean? Oh, there are at least five factors that would designate this as the kind of thing I don't watch: 1. network drama, 2. hyped miniseries, 3. dramatization of some hot issue, 4. 4 hours long, 5. lots of concerned emoting by actors who are often looking at video screens or arguing on the phone or sitting around fretting about things. I could go on. Basically, I don't like watching much of anything, though I do like the occasional HBO series and I enjoy unwinding to certain bloggable reality shows that I don't necessarily really like all that much.

But I am going to watch this now because of all the fuss. So take that! That's what you get for making the fuss. I am going to watch. And, since at least one reader has requested it and since it's the main thing that makes watching TV worthwhile, I will simulblog (or as some people like to say live-blog -- though the thing is not live, nor am I on the scene except in front of my HDTV). I may not have much to say, but I'll be saying whatever I feel like saying as the occasion arises. I'll put time-stamps on the following paragraphs so you can see what's new as we go along. Here goes.

7:10. There is a disclaimer explaining how dramatizations are done, by compressing time, combining characters, etc. An elegant opening sequence with black and white photography and tastefully minimal music. Early scenes show various earnest low level investigators who are generally thwarted by higher ups. We see a brief shot of a George Bush, sweating in a stretched out T-shirt, seen on an airport TV on 9/11, before the attacks, and later a bit of Mario Cuomo, just after the 1993 WTC attack. Each says a few words, enough to give us the sense that they are disengaged from the problems that are brewing underneath them.

7: 55. It's talky, interspersed with some action scenes. There are also scenes in nightclubs and closeups of bombmaking doings. In film, it seems, you have to constantly think about keeping people excited. It's not really an effective way to convey information. I'd much rather get it in writing. So many names and dates fly by. The terrorist guys are all sweaty, grimy, and pimply. No one worried too much about ethnic sterotypes.

8:06. "I don't want any lawyers getting in our way," says Harvey Keitel, as John O'Neill, showing up and taking charge, barking orders. (A little "Pulp Fiction" resonance there.) I'm totally bored, clicking over to websites to read the details of Ramzi Yousef to make sure I've got his story straight. I realize it's way easier and quicker this way. The movie is more about making you feel the frustration and the danger.

8:20. But I don't like surrendering to the manipulation of my feelings. I don't need a movie to help me feel something about 9/11. I'd rather read the 9/11 Report... or any number of things. I especially hate the scenes where characters walk quickly through hallways with the camera shaking and swinging about so we'll sense the urgency. Sometimes the camera is taken in and out of focus to try to make it seem like a documentary filmed on the fly. I have to confess I switched it off just now. I'm still TiVo-ing it, so I can go back, but the flashy cutting and the anxious actors yammering at each other are getting on my nerves. I need a break. You know this commercial-free thing has a down side.

9:18. That's an irrelevant timestamp, just the time here in Madison, Wisconsin, after I've taken a break and gone back to the TiVo'd version of the show. I don't like it at all. Too chaotic. Really, I've got to wonder how those geniuses at ABC figured out how to get Bill Clinton, et al., to do their publicity work for them. Totally viral!

9:29. Osama Bin Laden is introduced in a scene where O'Neill must tell Sandy Berger, "We're at war." The screen goes black, and the disclaimer runs. Something was cut here!

9:48. A vivid scene showing Berger accused of caring too much about following the law and covering his ass gives way the voice of Bill Clinton saying "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." The visual is a little Clinton, a little Monica, and a little Washington Monument (for the phallic effect). Then Keitel in a car, hearing the tail end of the Clinton assertions, being told that the President insists the scandal won't affect his decisionmaking. Keitel is all "So it's okay if somebody kills bin Laden, as long as he didn't give the order. That's pathetic."

9: 56. The scene with Berger refusing to give the order to kill bin Laden ends early.

10:09. I'm turning it off with an hour left on the TiVo. Maybe I'll pick it up tomorrow, but I'm just forcing myself, and only half watching it. Hey, I was forced into it. But I can only take so much.