"Singapore will pay people to read in a government initiative aimed at mitigating the superficiality of online content and..."

"... encouraging 'curious minds, deep thinkers and informed citizen.' The city state has launched a programme called ReadSG under which people are encouraged to log their daily reading on an app in return for virtual 'coins,' redeemable for cash. The idea is inspired by the goal of walking 10,000 steps a day.... The sums of money in play are small and no one is going to get rich from reading in Singapore, although its organisers hope that the 'gamification' element and the rewards offered by the programme will motivate participants.... Someone who logged 15 minutes a day for a year would be entitled to S$7.30 (£4.25)."

I'm reading "The city that pays people to put down the phone and read a book Singapore is seeking to turn the page on ‘doomscrolling’ with a system in which readers can log their progress in exchange for cash" (London Times).

So... get off your phone... get on your phone... which is it?

"I slept with the guy who created it!"

Jane Fonda on her “Block the Merger” pin, saying that she “slept with the guy” who created CNN and doesn’t want to see the network owned by Paramount.

Vanity Fair #Oscar Party pic.twitter.com/bNj93GuO8A

— Variety (@Variety) March 16, 2026

This is a rare opportunity to use my old tag "charming bad logic."

And I enjoyed the garbled articulation: "The murders are going to be bad for workers."

"I have given already given nine different arguments for my immortality. I’m fallible..."

"... maybe there’s a clunker or two in there. But surely at least one is a good argument! Therefore I am immortal."

From "Why I am immortal," by Hilarius Bookbinder, at Substack.

"I did not like to think about it just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny."

"I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. 'Baby, don’t worry,' he said. 'It’s not a worm.'... I worry about evil.... Was it ever a question, that where there was a cloak there would be a dagger? A friend told me once, 'Never trust anyone wearing a lapel pin.' This politician did not wear one of those.... I mean to tell you that, as it relates to monsters, little can be assured beyond their ceaseless want.... I mean to tell you that as I studied them, I was sometimes fooled.... I mean to tell you that this is more meaningful and more meaningless than you might think. I mean to tell you that, before I was consumed by it, I could not have told you what it was.... I am talking, of course, about how it happened between me and the Politician. I am talking, of course, about how it happened between the country and the president... I mean to tell you now as best I can."

Writes Olivia Nuzzi, in "Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto: Read the Exclusive Excerpt/She flamed out and she faded away. Vanity Fair’s West Coast Editor returns to the written word to survey scorched earth" (Vanity Fair).

If you are a connoisseur of purple prose, don't miss this one. There are also some lovely pictures of Ms. Nuzzi, who seems to be quite beautiful.

Oh, A.I., make a charming argument for why purple prose should be celebrated when it is written by a beautiful woman. Answer: "A beautiful woman’s purple prose should be celebrated because her extravagant words are merely the audible shimmer of her own radiance spilling onto the page, and only a fool would demand a diamond dim its fire to spare the darkness."

AND: I had another prompt for A.I.: What do you think of the title "American Canto" for a purple prose account of a beautiful woman's love affair with a politician (specifically Olivia Nuzzi's book about RFK Jr., a married man)? I'll just give the conventional warning,  "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here."

But who is "wiser" than Elon Musk? If the answer is no one, he's nailed down his position while performing open-mindedness. That's wisdom for you.

We are simultaneously being told that gender differences do not exist and that genders are so profoundly different that irreversible surgery is the only option.

Perhaps someone wiser than me can explain this dichotomy.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 11, 2022

"After years of smuggling his obsessions into reviews or radio programmes, he was finally able to publish whatever was on his mind..."

"... from racism, propaganda and freedom of speech to make-up, birdwatching and the price of clocks. The most sombre topics rubbed up against brainteasers, jokes and nuggets of trivia. Orwell had opinions about everything under the sun and they were all worth reading even if you disagreed with them, which many Tribune readers did, loudly and often." 

I'm reading Dorian Lynskey's "The Ministry of Truth/The Biography of George Orwell's 1984."

George Orwell wrote an essay about makeup?! I like the way his Tribune column sounds like a blog, but what I really want is to find that essay about makeup. I've looked, but so far, no success.

IN THE COMMENTS: Leland said: "I think you are referring to 'As I Please'" — yes, I am — "so perhaps his column on American Fashion Magazines?" Maybe. Here's that full essay, from 1946. It mentions lipstick and nail polish, but though it's heavily opinionated, he doesn't really opine on makeup. It's more about the natural physical attributes of the models, the clothing, the style of writing, and the absence of men :

"The moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him, that moment, I am free."

Said Donald Trump, quoting "the great religious teacher Swami Vivekananda," in his biggest-ever speech— to a crowd of over 100,00 — in a cricket stadium in India.

The speech begins around 1:27:00, and it begins with extolling the greatness of India, but let me pinpoint 18 seconds, when he deals with religion. He's just said that Indians and Americans believe that "every person is endowed with a sacred soul" and this belief unites our 2 countries:



Vivekananda connected the idea of seeing God in every person to one's own individual experience of freedom, and Trump continues the leaps of reasoning in a quick sequence, and the last thing on this list gets a massive cheer from the crowd:

1. Seeing God in everyone.

2. Freedom!

3. We're all here to strive for greatness.

4. Bollywood! 

ADDED: I had to look up the name Vivekananda, if only to spell it right (Trump carefully pronounces: Vee-vay-kuh-mun-nuum).  From the Wikipedia article "Swami Vivekanda":

"At 76, [Joe Biden] has enviable sharpness and physical fitness. But at 76, there are limits. And somehow, at 73, Trump’s psychological sickness..."

"... gives him an edge: a gob-smacking drive to keep going and going and going, with no signs of flagging at all, and many signs of mania. Who in their 70s is crazy enough to keep up? Even as he claimed he was seeking healing and unity this week, Trump was still tweeting insults, filming a shameless campaign video, and comparing crowd sizes with Beto O’Rourke’s. The sheer sociopathic narcissism in the face of such grief and trauma beggars belief. But it sure makes Trump seem younger than he is."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "Biden Knows How to Make the Moral Case Against Trump" (NY Magazine).

What if the secret to maintaining youthful vigor while getting old is mental illness?!

Finally, another chance to use my "charming bad logic" tag!

By the way, Sullivan indulges in fat-shaming:

If I were Biden, I’d [emphasize substantive policy issues].... But avoiding the lardaceous orange elephant in the room seems like a defensive dodge to me. It gives the impression of weakness. It cedes too much to Trump and normalizes him. It is not the relentless, epiphanous stare-down of Trump that a successful 2020 opponent needs to muster, and that so much of the country is yearning for. And it misses what is in fact the central issue in 2020: the unique danger this bitter bigot poses to this country’s liberal democracy and civil peace....

Vocabulary Lesson of the Day: Wow readers by adding endings to easily comprehensible nouns to achieve adjectival speed bumps. "Lard" can bulge expansively and metaphorically into "lardaceous," and "epiphany" will perversely resist sudden, intuitive perception as "epiphanous."

Biden... reminded us that in politics, words are acts, and they have consequences when uttered by a national leader: “The words of a president … can move markets. They can send our brave men and women to war. They can bring peace. They can calm a nation in turmoil. They can console and confront and comfort in times of tragedy … They can appeal to the better angels of our nature. But they can also unleash the deepest, darkest forces in this nation.” And this, Biden argues, is what Trump has done: tap that dark psychic force, in an act of malignant and nihilist narcissism.

Yes, Biden powerfully argued that Trump was an enabler of “white supremacy” in the sense understood by most people, and not the absurdly broad, new left definition that counts as a white supremacist nearly everyone not actively virtue-signaling on left Twitter....

So President Biden would deploy the super-power of presidential speech to get just precisely the right degree of racial critique into the mind of the people? That's very hard to believe. He's already fuzzed everything up badly. What is the right sense of "white supremacy" that's already understood by the people? I can see wanting to fend off  "the absurdly broad, new left definition" of "white supremacy," but I don't see precision or clarity in Biden's speech or in the mind of "most people." Sullivan insists that he sees it, but I find that incredible.

And although some of this might once have seemed like pabulum, in the Trump era, it comes off as fresh. There was even a nice line designed to get under Trump’s skin, ridiculing the listless condemnation of white supremacy Trump recited in the wake of the El Paso massacre: that “low-energy, vacant-eyed mouthing of the words written for him condemning white supremacists this week.”

Biden really said that? I guess he, ironically, was mouthing words written for him. Let's see how that looked and sounded:



He's trading in deep deceit and purporting to stand on the high ground. What a nauseating fraud!

And more importantly, Biden was able to express all this with authority.... 

Lying and race-baiting — with authority. That is the Biden campaign. He's doubled-down and committed. And we're supposed to see that as the antidote to the poison of Trump?

I’ve never been a huge fan of the logorrheic, egotistical grandstanding Biden sometimes engages in; I don’t agree with him on some issues; his treatment of Anita Hill was disgracefully off-key. But I have never doubted Biden’s core decency. Maybe I have a soft spot for a well-meaning Irish-uncle type. 

What if all you wanted for President was a "well-meaning Irish-uncle type"? Frankly, I don't know what an "Irish-uncle type" is and this use of ethnicity to describe an individual's personality traits makes me want to go "all absurdly broad, new-left" style and say that this too is white supremacy.

"My mum was chasing me and I started running. At first I could hear her but then I got lost... I leaned on a stone, started calling her, but she didn't hear me... I [started] walking towards a light that was very far away."

Said Benjamín Sánchez, a 5-year-old boy who was lost in the desert (in Argentina) for 24 hours, quoted in BBC.

The decision to start "walking towards a light that was very far away" is interesting. A couple weeks ago, there was a story about 2 little girls who got lost in the forest in California who remembered and followed a survival rule they had been taught: Once you know you are lost, stay put.

1,000 people were looking for Sánchez, and the point at which he became lost was known, yet the searchers never found him. A passing motorcyclist did. That boy must have really been determined to walk. He made the wrong choice, but I'm interested in his determination. I'd like to know the details of what he thought about the light and why it made sense to him to walk toward something very far away.

"I was cold, I slept badly, leaning on a rock."

Kanye West was "talking about cleansing."

Kim Kardashian explains what she thinks her husband meant to be saying:

"I mean, I hear him say all these things in the house just about — I think what he was saying about, really to everything, he was talking about clarity, and he always talks about how we should not have our phones first thing in the morning and in the house when we’re with the kids, let’s not have our phones. It’s our rule that we really try to live by. So I think he was talking about cleansing."

Some feminist logic.

After quoting something I said about body-slamgate, Instapundit says: "But personally, I’m now sufficiently woke to praise Gianforte for body-slamming rapist Ben Jacobs":



And: "Thanks to male feminist Jordan Hoffman for enlightening me."

Note: Hoffman's post is about the exclusion of men from a movie theater's showing of "Wonder Woman" (which is the topic of my last 2 posts).

"The date ended pretty fast. She said she was jet-lagged because she flew in from Florida.”

"That's the same time zone. She also flew Sunday, and it was Wednesday."

What did Noel Neill — the Lois Lane of the 1950s — mean to you?

The actress has died at the age of 95, and I hadn't noticed, but I got a text from RLC saying: "I assume you're going to blog about Noel Neill!!" I didn't even remember the name, and I looked it up and saw the obituary, and I wondered why my ex-husband had that assumption about me. Or was it just that he liked her?

Then I was looking at old pictures of Neill and I saw one that took me back to a childhood memory that perhaps, long ago, I conveyed to RLC. Here's the picture:



"Adventures of Superman" was on TV from 1952 — when I was 1 — to 1958 — when I was 7. That show made some kind of impression on my undefended, very young mind. When I thought about becoming an adult — turning into a woman — I pictured Noel Neill. Dressed like that, hair like that, demeanor like that.  I had my own particular look and ways about me as a girl, but I believed a finished condition, adulthood, stood at the end of childhood. My formative period — girlhood — would end, and I would, of necessity, at the age of 21, become an adult woman, and that woman I saw in my head for years and years, was — as I got closer to actual adulthood I recognized her — NOEL NEILL!!

"Remember, my Rubio prediction was 100% wrong. That is objectively true. No wiggle room at all."

"Now watch me describe my wrong prediction as being more right than wrong. I do this for entertainment, and to make the point that you can force any data to fit the past if you try hard enough. I’ll do that for you now...."

Said the very entertaining Scott Adams.

ADDED: From another recent post (with a fascinating chart):

... I don’t believe our brains evolved to give us truth. Our brains evolved to create little movies in which we get to be the stars. And we can view our movies through many filters with no preference for which filter is the “right” one.

For example, Ted Cruz and Richard Dawkins believe totally different things about reality and yet both can use an ATM, shop at a store, and procreate. So your filter on reality need not be related to any actual underlying reality in order to keep you alive. It just has to NOT kill you.

That can't be true... by its own terms. But, boy, does it feel true! And, therefore, it's... true/not true.

It's not too hard to follow the political sleight of hand when it's Bernie Sanders prestidigitating.

From the transcript of last night's debate:

JOHN DICKERSON: Senator Sanders, you said you wanna rid the planet of ISIS. In the previous debate you said the greatest threat to national security was climate change. Do you still believe that?

BERNIE SANDERS: Absolutely. In fact, climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism. And if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say you're gonna see countries all over the world-- this is what the C.I.A. says, they're gonna be struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops. And you're gonna see all kinds of international conflict. But of course international terrorism is a major issue that we've got to address today. And I agree with much of what-- the secretary and-- and the governor have said. Only have one area of-- of disagreement with the secretary. I think she said something like, "The bulk of the responsibility is not ours." Well, in fact, I would argue that the disastrous invasion of Iraq, something that I strongly opposed, has unraveled the region completely. And led to the rise of Al Qaeda-- and to-- ISIS. Now, in fact, what we have got to do-- and I think there is widespread agreement here-- 'cause the United States cannot do it alone. What we need to do is lead an international coalition which includes-- very significantly-- (UNINTEL) nations in that region are gonna have to fight and defend their way of life.

Okay, let's look at that in slow motion. Stand by your former statement boldly and clearly"

Absolutely.

Open an escape path:

In fact, climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism.

The former statement, which now sounds wrong, is that X is the most important thing, but now people have reason to feel, very urgently, that Y is the most important thing. Create a springboard for yourself. Invite the audience to think that X and Y are really the same thing. That's tantalizing. They're looking to see this fascinating connection, so begin to create the feeling that X and Y are connected:

And if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say you're gonna see countries all over the world-- this is what the C.I.A. says, they're gonna be struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops. And you're gonna see all kinds of international conflict. 

Climate change isn't just about what the climate does but how people react to it, and there will be struggle and conflict, and that at least vaguely reminds us of the bloodshed associated with ISIS, but ISIS isn't fighting over the temperature. You can't get to that escape path, climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism.

So just act as though you've already arrived where you've said you'd go, and who cares if X or Y is more important? You've said X is important, so plunge right ahead and say Y is important:

But of course international terrorism is a major issue that we've got to address today. 

And then collapse into drivel. You agree with Clinton and you don't agree. What was the part that you disagreed with, that "The bulk of the responsibility is not ours"?

Well, in fact, I would argue that the disastrous invasion of Iraq, something that I strongly opposed, has unraveled the region completely. 

So you think bulk of the responsibility is ours?!

And led to the rise of Al Qaeda-- and to-- ISIS. 

The invasion of Iraq led to the rise of al Qaeda?! You're faltering badly, but you know there are magic words — 2 words that if only you can just get to them you've done your trick. Come on, Bernie:

Now, in fact, what we have got to do-- and I think there is widespread agreement here-- 'cause the United States cannot do it alone. What we need to do is lead an international coalition...

APPLAUSE!!!!

"Why do so many people think he’s good? Have you looked at his paintings?"

"In real life, trees are beautiful. If you take Renoir’s word for it, you’d think trees are just a collection of green squiggles."

Renoir is considered a good painter because his work is featured in museums, [Max] Geller added. But upon further inspections of his paintings, that line of argument “seems pretty fallacious”....

The Renoir Sucks at Painting... Instagram account... has even received the wrath of Genevieve Renoir, who says she is the painter’s great-great-granddaughter.

On one photo, Genevieve commented: “When your great-great-grandfather paints anything worth $78.1m dollars … then you can criticize. In the meantime, it is safe to say that the free market has spoken and Renoir did not suck at painting.”

Geller, who turned her comment into its own post on the account, said: “I think that is one of the most absurd and insane arguments for anything, the idea that we should let the free market dictate quality.”

Ms. Renoir's argument — staunchly opposed by Geller — bears an intriguing similarity the old free-speech argument that Oliver Wendell Holmes made back in 1919: "[T]he best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."

Would you call that — using Geller's words — "most absurd and insane argument for anything, the idea that we should let the free market dictate quality."

"I don't care about the consequences; put this plane down."

"I lost two dogs in the last month. I want her off of here, or I'm going to leave; or I want you to stop the plane."

Said the lady on the plane, whose crazy argument worked to force the plane down.

What was the relevance of the dead dogs? To her, I mean. I'm interested in bad arguments. I have a tag charming bad logic, but it's not quite right here, obviously, since everyone on the plane had their time massively wasted by this woman who must have seriously believed in the profundity of her special need.

"Frankly, I do not know what one makes from cocoa beans."

"I'm just trying to earn a living with growing cocoa. They make good food from them, but I've never seen that. I do not know if that's true."



(Cocoa farmers experience chocolate for the first time.)

MEANWHILE, on Vagina Mountain, none of that sweet first-world chocolate... "I want you to feel liquid chocolate for the first time. You can totally let go":

A bikini top printed to look like naked breasts.

2 women are promoting this as part of their campaign to "de-sexualize" breasts.

"Explain why women have to cover up their chests, but not men.... The only excitement that comes from seeing breasts is that you are conditioned to think they are something special...."

Of course, thinking you're seeing naked breasts, having to figure out what you're looking at, and deciding what to think about it is only going to make you look longer.

I'm 34.

According to "Can We Guess Your Real Age?"