"[His diary] paints a portrait of Dr. Fauci as obsessed with himself, reveling in his own importance and the celebrities he knows..."

"... from the actress Julia Roberts to the singers Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand.... The entries were also full of references to Hollywood stars, some of whom seemed star-struck over him.... Barbra Streisand called asking for vaccine advice. When Dr. Fauci told her he listened to her music on Alexa, the virtual assistant, she confessed she didn’t know what Alexa was. 'I accidentally butt called her later in the evening,' Dr. Fauci wrote, and when he played her music over Alexa, she 'absolutely loved it!' Joan Baez painted a portrait of him. Julia Roberts introduced him at an awards ceremony. 'She is so charming, natural, fun and amazingly beautiful,' Dr. Fauci wrote of Ms. Roberts. 'When my image came up on the screen,” he added, “she gasped and said that every time she sees me her throat gets dry and she gets nervous.'"

From "Fauci, in Private Diary, Reflected on Covid’s Origins and His Own Fame/Private entries, released by a Republican senator, have reignited a furious debate over whether Covid-19 leaked from a lab" (NYT gift link).

The "Republican senator" is Rand Paul, who's engaging in some taunting:

What Anthony Fauci looked like every night when he wrote about how great he is in his diary. pic.twitter.com/KbPvbtyi7g

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) July 27, 2026

And here's that Joan Baez artwork. Baez enfolds Fauci in her political schemata:

My curiosity about the term "permission structure" pays off.

I'd never noticed it before, but I heard it twice, in rapid succession, in the new NYT "Daily" podcast that I was listening to on my sunrise run:

[This ad] employs this device of the disillusioned Trump voter as a stand-in for the viewer. It's a permission structure for the small sliver of undecided voters who might have voted for Trump before to say: It's okay, there are other people just like you, other people who don't think that Donald Trump is good anymore.... 

Here is a Harris supporting celebrity saying he is disillusioned with what she Harris has said. It's the same permission structure for Harris. You have a white lady saying: You know what? Maybe I can actually vote for Kamala Harris. 

"Permission structure" was used as if it's a standard term, so I wanted to get up to speed. 

I can see that Obama used it back in 2013, but I'm interested in its repeated use in the last few days. I'm seeing it first in Ms. Magazine, on November 1: "New Ad Creates ‘Permission Structure’ for Men to Support Harris":

"The media is doing its best to play down Joe Biden’s casual insult of half of America as 'garbage'.... Why on earth would anyone assume Mr. Biden would..."

"... again show derision for voters he’s labeled 'semi-fascists,' 'MAGA extremists' and proponents of 'Jim Crow 2.0'? Of course it wasn’t a gaffe. It’s the latest injection of toxic Democratic arrogance—and it explains the party’s electoral struggles. It’s of a piece with the open dismissal by the media and elites of critics as idiots, yokels, deplorables. The men accused of 'toxic masculinity.' The women written off as 'handmaids.' The religious 'fanatics.' The millions the left scorn with a long list of 'ist' and 'phobe' words. If you don’t bow to progressive dogma, you are a fascist. Sexist. Racist. Nationalist. Insurrectionist. Domestic terrorist. Extremist. 'Far' rightist. And a homophobe. And a Nazi. Who is bitter. And clinging to a gun and a religion...."

Writes Kimberley A. Strassel, in "Democrats Trash-Talk the Voters/From ‘deplorables’ to ‘garbage,’ contempt doesn’t seem to be a winning message" (Wall Street Journal)(no subscription needed).

And thanks to Strassel for giving me the push I needed to actually watch the ad they got Julia Roberts to do the voice-over for. I laughed a lot:

You can really see how stupid they think the ordinary men and women of America are. I guess it's possible that they meant to exaggerate their low opinion in an ironic way that could make everybody laugh. 

Maybe somewhere in America women have been under men's thumb. I think of P. Diddy parties, things like that.

But also, why would you insult the people you want to influence?

And another thing: I don't believe many men are bullying their wives about voting the "right" way. I think it's a lot more likely that a woman might see how important the election is to her husband and simply choose not to cast a vote that effectively cancels his vote.

We're all doing what we can.

The next time someone tells you that celebrities aren’t making sacrifices for the community, just show them this... https://t.co/iRM7PaMsbg

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) March 26, 2020

Headline typos are the worst.

Never dictate the headline over the phone. (h/t @NeilMcMahon) pic.twitter.com/0kPUGxQ2sd

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) December 10, 2018

"It is tempting to just whine about how Hollywood is so risk-averse that they will reboot or sequalize any remotely familiar 1980′s/1990′s property they can find."

"But these announcements never fail to make me a little sad. The stench in the air isn’t greed or fear of the new, but rather a token amount of desperation."

From an April 18, 2014 Forbes article titled: "Robin Williams Making 'Mrs. Doubtfire 2' Should Make Us Sad."

"I want my kids to know when I'm pissed, when I'm happy and when I'm confounded.."

Why Julia Roberts won't get Botox.

"It's unfortunate that we live in such a panicked, dysmorphic society where women don't even give themselves a chance to see what they'll look like as older persons.... I want to have some idea of what I'll look like before I start cleaning the slates."

Cleaning the slates? As in wiping the slate clean, the slate being the face? If I get that correctly, I think she's saying you should initially let yourself age and see how that is going, then make a judgment about whether to erase the signs of aging.

And... does Julia Roberts really talk like that? Confounded... dysmorphic... These quotes are in a British newspaper and they sound like their were written by a Brit.

It's also interesting that she says she wants to keep her natural face so her children will see her emotions. We moviegoers need to see that emotion too. I say "we," but the truth is, my moviegoing habit has decreased over the years, seemingly in proportion to the destruction of the human face. I don't want to see it. Ah, but I don't know. I remember a few years back — in my peak moviegoing times — hating a halfway good movie because I got sick of the big closeups, and it was a Julia Roberts movie, "My Best Friend's Wedding." My reaction was: Yes! I get it! You have a face! Now, step back!

It was around the same time that I walked out on a movie because the closeups were inducing nausea. That movie was "Antz." And I don't know what I hate more, plasticized human actors or computer generated animation. But those 2 phenomena are a big part of why I almost never go to the movies anymore.

Stingy actors!

I see that Sandra Bullock has donated $1 million for tsunami relief. So Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Drew Barrymore, Halle Berry, Angelina Jolie, Renee Zellweger, and Jennifer Lopez: you're going to have to give one million ... or you're stingy!

Here's a mean but funny list from NY Press: 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers (via Apt. 11D). At #50, the first entry hit me as hilariously dead-on--for Sophia Coppola:

AN ART BIMBO whose daddy happens to be movie royalty rides in on the tired back of Bill Murray and is proclaimed a new film genius. The genius' film, Lost in Translation, is the most pretentious, overrated movie of last year, about an alienated Yale brat who feels so lonely in her five-star hotel that she strips down to her panties and curls up on the windowsill every half-hour.

Love the drawings, even if they do make Sarah Jessica Parker (number 13) look an awful lot like Coppola. Aw, what's so bad about Parker?

WHEN GIRLS THINK another girl is beautiful, but guys know she isn't, call it the Sarah Jessica Parker syndrome. Parker is a dual monument to millennial American female vanity and inanity. Spoiled and groomed to the point of psychosis, Sarah Jessica Parker is the final dead-end in the American feminine odyssey.

Do girls think Parker is beautiful? It seems to me most actresses who are called beautiful are nowhere near beautiful. It's often a stretch to call them pretty. The fascinating ones are rather weird looking, really, like Angelina Jolie and Julia Roberts.