"I’m aware that the president of the United States likes to go on television and beg me to call and ask him for troops."

"I find this extraordinarily strange as Chicago does not want troops on our streets … I refuse to play a reality game show with Donald Trump."

Said JB Pritzker, quoted in "JB Pritzker: is the Illinois governor the Democrats’ best hope?/Clashes with Trump have boosted his profile, and while a third Illinois term looks assured, a tilt at the White House could see old scandals return to haunt him" (London Times).

We're told that Trump "continues to mock Pritzker’s bulk, posting an AI video showing him as a sumo wrestler grappling with Chris Christie, a large former Republican governor." In case you're having trouble picturing that:

pic.twitter.com/KBZz0iosQX

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2025

Isn't it amazing that the President of the United States is fooling around — and fat shaming — like that? Trump is fat too, of course. I think he fairly cheerfully admits it.

There's also this quote from Frank Luntz: "If you’re the California governor, you have to defend San Francisco. If you’re the Illinois governor, you have to defend Chicago. Democrats do not know how to talk about crime and they do not know how to lead about it, because, quite frankly, they’re seen as being in bed with the criminal and being too distant from the victim.... I actually think that Rahm Emanuel is a better representative because Chicago was better off when he was mayor.”

"Have you noticed that trump is one of the very few presidents who does not have any kind of pet? I would sooner get rid of those folks than the cats and dogs. Absurd."

A comment on the NYT article, "We Love Our Dogs and Cats. But Are They Bad for the Environment? Some pets have wide-ranging effects on the planet. Here’s how to lessen them."

In the comments, everything always gets around to Trump. 

From the article: "Gregory Okin, a geographer at the University of California, Los Angeles, calculated in a 2017 study that the estimated 163 million cats and dogs in the United States consume a whopping quarter of the country’s animal-derived calories.

"Restaurants will have to tell the government what their customers order under plans drawn up by Labour to tackle Britain’s obesity epidemic...."

"Under the proposals outlined by Wes Streeting, the health secretary, restaurants employing more than 250 workers are expected to report the average number of calories that diners consume. The government will then set targets to 'increase the healthiness of sales.'... Streeting said:'“Obesity has doubled since the 1990s and costs our NHS £11 billion a year, triple the budget for ambulance services. Unless we curb the rising tide of cost and demand, the NHS risks becoming unsustainable. The good news is that it only takes a small change to make a big difference. If everyone who is overweight reduced their calorie intake by around 200 calories a day — the equivalent of a bottle of fizzy drink — obesity would be halved.'"

From "Restaurants to report diners’ calorie counts in obesity drive/The Department of Health says the data will be used to set targets and increase the ‘healthiness of sales’ — but the industry says it was ‘totally blindsided'" (London Times).

"There are people that come, and they’ve been on it for three years, and they’re just so tired of feeling nauseous and constipated."

"They have come to Mountain Trek to get off of it. To learn accumulated lifestyle habits, so that they don’t then gain all the weight back."

Said Kirkland Shave, co-owner of the wellness retreat Mountain Trek, quoted in "The Ozempic era is forcing wellness retreats for the elite to change/Attendees might be looking to wean off weight-loss drugs or mitigate side effects such as digestive discomfort and muscle loss" (WaPo)(free-access link).

I've never gone on a wellness retreat — though I have watched Season 3 of "The White Lotus" — but I was interested enough to click through to the Mountain Trek website and to momentarily bask in the idea of the place. But as with all travel, you have to do the hard creative work of imagining what it's really like there.

Big shot takes fat shot.

Trump: "A friend of mine who is a businessman. Very very very top guy. Most of you would've heard of him. Highly neurotic. Brilliant businessman. Seriously overweight. And he takes the fat shot drug." pic.twitter.com/pFFyXT6pHF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 12, 2025

"To get answers, one neuroscientist, Harvey J. Grill of the University of Pennsylvania, turned to rats and asked what would happen if he removed all of their brains except their brainstems."

I'm reading "What Nearly Brainless Rodents Know About Weight Loss and Hunger/Studies in neuroscience with applications to humans offer clues about what makes us start eating, and when we stop" (NYT).

Do we really have free will when it comes to eating? It’s a vexing question that is at the heart of why so many people find it so difficult to stick to a diet.... The brainstem controls basic functions like heart rate and breathing. But the animals could not smell, could not see, could not remember. Would they know when they had consumed enough calories? To find out, Dr. Grill dripped liquid food into their mouths. "When they reached a stopping point, they allowed the food to drain out of their mouths," he said...."

"When those on the creative side of fashion could be using their platform to share progressive values, it seems like many are acquiescing rather than pushing back."

"It’s frustrating to see the industry take a step back."

Said Sara Ziff, who leads a "models’ rights" organization. She's quoted in "Why Ultrathin Is In/When it comes to fashion models, the body diversity revolution appears to be at an end" (NYT).

Extreme thinness among models is “not really new — this kind of thing is cyclical,” she said. But this time around, she added, “it seems to echo the current political climate.”

Political???

"Baseball, which is dying all over the place, should get off its fat, lazy ass, and elect Pete Rose, even though far too late, into the Baseball Hall of Fame!"

Writes Donald Trump (on Truth Social):

Major League Baseball didn’t have the courage or decency to put the late, great, Pete Rose, also known as “Charlie Hustle,” into the Baseball Hall of fame. Now he is dead, will never experience the thrill of being selected, even though he was a FAR BETTER PLAYER than most of those who made it, and can only be named posthumously. WHAT A SHAME! Anyway, over the next few weeks I will be signing a complete PARDON of Pete Rose, who shouldn’t have been gambling on baseball, but only bet on HIS TEAM WINNING. He never betted against himself, or the other team. He had the most hits, by far, in baseball history, and won more games than anyone in sports history. Baseball, which is dying all over the place, should get off its fat, lazy ass, and elect Pete Rose, even though far too late, into the Baseball Hall of Fame!

I'm disconcerted that the President of the United States wrote "betted," but I'm amused at the metaphorical flourish of "dying all over the place" and "fat, lazy ass." 

To me, "betted" is embarrassingly wrong, but I see Shakespeare used it. From the OED:

1600 Iohn a Gaunt loued him well, and betted much money on his head. W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 iii. ii. 44

If you use "fat, lazy ass" metaphorically — baseball doesn't even have an ass — you do flout the niceties of the body acceptance movement, but Trump is well aware that his own ass is fat and thus presents a big target for his antagonists. He doesn't care. It's a fat ass, but emphatically not a lazy ass.

"There’s this tyranny of beauty, especially among trans women.There’s this feeling that, if we’re not beautiful enough, we’re not really women."

Writes Jennifer Finney Boylan, quoted in "A 'Weary but Fabulous' Poster Girl for Trans Life Opens Up About Aging/In her fifth memoir, 'Cleavage,' Jennifer Finney Boylan writes about her 36-year marriage, her adult children and why she keeps telling her story" (NYT).

Early in her new memoir, “Cleavage,” Jennifer Finney Boylan describes a moment of reckoning in a changing room. A size 12 dress is too snug....

The problem wasn’t that she’d gained almost 50 pounds in 25 years. “The crisis was that it mattered to me now, as a woman,” Boylan, 66, writes. “When I was a man (sic), I can say most definitively that it had not.”

Is that "(sic)" in the memoir or is the NYT inserting it? I'm going to guess, because of the use of parentheses instead of brackets, that it's in the memoir.

Did not looking good enough matter to Boylan because she was a woman — and that's female psychology — or because she was transgender — and had taken on the task of influencing others to perceive her as a woman? Is it about expressing what's inside you or getting the response you want from other people?

"Let's just take Superbowl Sunday. Mmkay? It's gonna affect beer. Mmkay? Most of it — Corona, here — comes from Mexico. It's gonna affect your guac. Because what is guacamole made of? Avocados. Both from Mexico."

Chuck Schumer claims that President Trump's tariffs will raise the price of beer because "most of it comes from Mexico" while holding a can of corona.

This might be the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen a politician do lmfao. pic.twitter.com/z4Z0W22gUe

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 3, 2025

Chuck Schumer is attempting to lure Americans away from Trump by tempting us with the humble indulgences beer and guacamole — drinking and snacking — paired with watching television. But even if Americans were hopelessly addicted to these fattening pleasures, we could still, easily, choose a non-Mexican beer and serve those tortilla chips with melted cheese instead of that avocado paste. That might work out well for Wisconsin — home of beer and cheese — and quite badly for Mexico. What is it going to do with all those avocados if we say we'd rather push for Mexico to help us with the border problem than continue to mindlessly consume that that green goo... that sludge... that guck... 

This is fresh fruit, farmed in vast quantity in Mexico, where it will rot if not sold. What am I missing? We will easily win this trade war. And I'm sure Schumer knows all this and is embarrassed to be smarmily plying us with a beer and an avocado.

By the way, Americans didn't use to care about avocados at all. Here's an 2015 article in The Atlantic — "The Selling of the Avocado/How the 'alligator pear' went from obscure delicacy to America's favorite fruit":

"I used to love feeling her body, her big body, next to me in bed, the softness of it. The extra tummy and..."

"... extra booty was comforting and reassuring. I miss that. The voluptuousness, being able to lean up next to her and feel her, for lack of a better word, draping over me or onto me. That’s no longer an option.... I’ve told her: 'I don’t recognize you. I need a road map.' I think she’s become a different person."

Said one husband, quoted in "How Weight-Loss Drugs Can Upend a Marriage/Doctors warn about their physical side effects, but they can also have unexpected effects on intimacy" (NYT).

When I clicked to read this article, I assumed it was going to be about the loss of sexual desire as a side effect of the drug. I was surprised to see that it was about the loss of desire in the partner who was not the one taking the drug.

But wait, the drug-taking partner is part of the problem (which is that they haven't had sex since she started the drug). She's finding it "easier to say no" to what she doesn't want, but purports to "want to want to have sex." 

If the drug removes the desire for food, why wouldn't it also affect that other physical desire? How closely related are these desires?

"Today, over 100 members of Congress support a bill to fund Ozempic with Medicare at $1,500 a month."

"Most of these members have taken money from the manufacturer of that product, a European company called Novo Nordisk. As everyone knows, once a drug is approved for Medicare, it goes to Medicaid. And there is a push to recommend Ozempic for Americans as young as six over a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed 100 years ago.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: "Today, over 100 members of Congress support a bill to fund Ozempic with Medicare at $1,500 a month. Most of these members have taken money from the manufacturer of that product, a European company called Novo Nordisk. As everyone knows, once a drug is… pic.twitter.com/NGaK6pMjbj

— Camus (@newstart_2024) January 29, 2025

"A picture of young successful happy people at a trendy cocktail party reads as right wing. A picture of a dad in flannel drinking a beer at Texas Roadhouse..."

"... also reads as right wing. Right wing is both cool, hip and metropolitan, and down to earth, older, mature, and working class. This is how you know that conservatism is culturally ascendant. We run the gamut. The only pictures that read as left wing are those of ugly, fat, mentally ill, dysfunctional, friend-less weirdos."

So says Matt Walsh, on X, looking at the "Cruel Kids" New York Magazine cover. 

 

That's one take. The other take is that the photo is cropped to make the event look all white. If you scroll down from that link above, you'll many tweets that should the wider view (and call attention to the text, "Have you noticed that the entire room is white?):

"On Friday, the staff often hears Michaels say, 'We have nothing.' He’ll be staring tensely at the index cards on his bulletin board, which lay out each tentative segment."

"Employees a quarter of his age are amazed that, after fifty years, he can still seem scared. If things look particularly bleak, he’ll ask writers if they’ve been saving any good material for an upcoming host, telling them, 'Sometimes you have to burn the furniture.' On Saturday afternoon, in Studio 8H, there’s a run-through of the sketches. The show is often considerably too long at this point, so more sketches might be cut... Sometimes the guest host nixes a sketch. In 2015, Donald Trump was to play a tree standing next to the Giving Tree, the Shel Silverstein character who gives and gives of herself until she’s reduced to a stump. The sketch ended with the Trump tree calling the Giving Tree a sucker. Trump refused to do the piece, not because it portrayed him as heartless but because he worried that the tree costume made him look fat."

From "Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of 'Saturday Night Live'/He’s ruled with absolute power for five decades, forever adding to his list of oracular pronouncements—about producing TV, making comedy, and living the good life" (The New Yorker).

Elon Musk drug endorsement.

"Musk, 53, noted that he prefers Mounjaro to Ozempic because taking 'high doses' of the latter drug made him 'fart & burp like Barney from the Simpson’s.'"

From "Lean-looking Elon Musk reveals he’s taking Mounjaro for weight loss in festive ‘Ozempic Santa’ post" (NY Post).

"He’s a good-looking guy. He looked really, very handsome last night. Some people look better in person? He looked great. He looked really nice, and I told him that."

Who said it? And who did he say it about?

“She explores how she struggled as a 'fat philosopher' — a representative of a field that prizes 'muscular and compact' forms of argument and 'prides itself on sharpness, clarity, and precision'..."

"... to 'reconcile my image of my body with its role in the world as the emissary of my mind.' That mismatch, she quips, has been her own, real-life 'body-mind problem.' But it’s really no laughing matter...."

From "The consequences of being fat are deeper than we realize/In the book 'Unshrinking,' philosopher Kate Manne argues that fatphobia is a form of structural oppression" (WaPo)(free-access link).

An "emissary" is — to quote the OED — "A person sent on a mission to gain information, or to gain adherents to, or promote the interests of a cause. (Until the 19th century used almost exclusively in bad sense, implying something odious in the object of the mission, or something underhand in its manner.)"

Do you think of your body as an emissary of your mind?

Why doesn't this article even mention RFK Jr.? This is precisely his issue.

I'm reading "We Tire Very Quickly of Being Told That Everything Is on Fire," by Jeneen Interlandi in the NYT:

The obesity crisis has... brought its share of unintended consequences. Alarm bells have almost certainly nudged more people to eat healthier foods. They also helped spur the development of effective anti-obesity medications. But they have not touched off any meaningful effort to repair our food system, which most experts agree is the root cause of expanding waistlines. 

"Obesity did not reach epidemic proportions because of changes in human nature or human willpower," says Tom Frieden, who served as C.D.C. director under the Obama administration and is now president of the public health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives. "What changed is that our environment became far more conducive to weight gain." 

What crisis vibes have managed to accomplish is to normalize fat-shaming, especially among doctors. Shame is a deeply ineffective way to resolve any health crisis, but it has proved especially counterproductive and cruel when it comes to weight loss.....

Why doesn't this article even mention RFK Jr.? This is precisely his issue. He blames the food industry, and Trump's elevation of him to Secretary of Health and Human Services surely  represents a "meaningful effort to repair our food system." But why look at him when we have an Obama era former C.D.C. director to quote? And, more importantly, why give him any credit for getting something right when we are deeply into the agenda of portraying him as a dangerous crackpot.

Yes, I'm journalism-shaming, and I think it needs to be cruel to be productive.

"Ozempic users... aren’t just eating less. They’re eating differently. GLP-1 drugs seem not only to shrink appetite..."

"... but to rewrite people’s desires. They attack what Amy Bentley, a food historian and professor at New York University, calls the industrial palate: the set of preferences created by our acclimatization, often starting with baby food, to the tastes and textures of artificial flavors and preservatives. Patients on GLP-1 drugs have reported losing interest in ultraprocessed foods, products that are made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in an ordinary kitchen: colorings, bleaching agents, artificial sweeteners and modified starches. Some users realize that many packaged snacks they once loved now taste repugnant. 'Wegovy destroyed my taste buds,' a Redditor wrote on a support group, adding: 'And I love it.'... Now, 'my first place I hit when I get to the store is produce,' [one Wegovy user said]. “My favorite is Mount Rainier cherries and apples, peaches, pears.”... Major food companies are scrambling to research the impact of the drugs on their brands — and figure out how to adjust.... Big Food is practiced at spotting perverse openings for new products...."

From "Ozempic Could Crush the Junk Food Industry. But It Is Fighting Back. As revolutionary new weight-loss drugs turn consumers off ultraprocessed foods, the industry is on the hunt for new products" (NYT Magazine).

Users of Wegovy and Ozempic are finding existing ultraprocessed foods disgusting, and they are currently drawn to fresh fruit, but Big Food can make new products for the new market — less sweet, more fruity, and much more fun and reliable and convenient. You know, fruit might need to ripen, it might bruise or rot. You've got to wash it and dry it and maybe peel it or core it, and it might drip on you or vary in flavor. It can be expensive, hard to carry around, not the right size for a snack, and in need of refrigeration. Big Food can compete for these newly created fruit lovers, and it is already hard at work on the task.

"The boys in our liberal school are different now that Trump has won."

This is an article by "Anonymous" in The Guardian, ostensibly written by a girl who is a senior in a high school in New York's Hudson Valley — a "mostly liberal" place, we're told. She purports to be capable of perceiving and reporting how boys have changed since 10 days ago. I have no idea how accurate any of this is, but I'm interested in the text that was published, which says something about The Guardian's attitude, if nothing else:

When we walked into school on the morning of 6 November, we exchanged quick glances with the other girls in our social circle – looks filled with uncertainty and dread about the future.... [A]s we walked to our first period classes... we noticed a very different attitude among our male peers. Subtle high-fives were exchanged and remarks about the impending success of the next four years were whispered around. It didn’t make much sense....