"He was relieved that everyone was home safe from the hospital, and yet he found he couldn’t connect with his [newborn] children, Olympia and Elisabetta."

"He became full of nervous, negative energy. He had physical symptoms of anxiety: a racing heartbeat, chest pains, burning and electric sensations in his torso and muscles. When the babies smiled and laughed for the first time, he found himself saying out loud: 'What do they have to be happy about?' He didn’t feel he could actively give his family emotional support, so instead he came up with practical solutions, such as creating organised systems and spreadsheets to track his daughters’ feedings and sleep schedules. 'Control was how I approached many things in my life,' he says. 'I had to control their sleep because only when I knew for certain that they were asleep could I settle and relax.'"

From "'Holding my IVF twins as a new dad, I felt only sadness'/As a doctor, Christopher Choukalas thought he could diagnose an illness when he saw it. But his paternal postpartum depression crept up on him completely unnoticed" (London Times).

"How did the adults of my youth manage these gatherings so effortlessly? Part of the answer is Oh, Dad, too: Life was simpler."

"Lake houses were more affordable then, and less fancy. No dishwasher, no A.C., no TV. And no choices. Meals happened at fixed times. You ate what appeared. Cleanup by committee followed, and then the moms would declare, 'The kitchen is closed,' with despotic authority. If we got hungry later, there were snacks. Snacks that would make a nutritionist spiral: Ruffles and onion dip, port wine cheese food. Breakfast was sugary cereal. Lunch was mystery bologna. Dinner was barbecue, beans and slaw. Repeat until Labor Day."

Writes Dan Kadlec, in "The Lake House That Taught Me How to Dad" (NYT)(gift link, in case you need to learn to dad).

Every woman is some man's daughter.

Link.

Just as I was complaining that I'm weary of the topics in the news, I run across "Jeffrey Epstein’s Sperm May Have Survived Him."

I thought Hormuz and Platner and the slush fund and Jill Biden were getting tedious, and then I see, in The New York Times, "Jeffrey Epstein’s Sperm May Have Survived Him/Mr. Epstein banked his sperm several years before his death and said that if he died, it should be left in the control of his estate."

Why is this news?

"Look, I'm 30 years old. Not one of my friends has children. Zero. No one. No one's having kids."

"Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children? Like, for real? Let's step back a moment, right?... Look, GDP goes up. People have enough food and whatever. No one's having kids. And this is across the world. This is across both the West, the East, everywhere it's happening. So why do I not have kids?... Do you know what dating app algorithms do?... They don't optimize for you to meet the love of your life. They optimize for you to keep coming back to the app.... We have treated technology as a wild west. Absolutely. Just everyone can do whatever they want. Oh, just sell all of our younger generations' dating lives to corporations for profit. And who pays the cost for this? Who has liability for every person who doesn't find the love of their life because the whole dating market is fucked up? Who pays for this? No one. There is no responsibility. It's completely worthless. And these dating companies, they're not even profitable...."

That's Connor Leahy, and I've got a problem with his abuse-a-mammal theory. Of course, he meant to say "Do you know how hard you need to abuse a non-human mammal to make them not have children?" But non-human mammals don't have access to birth control (and abortion).

"Lonardo met Skiles’s biological mother, Cheryl Brown, in the late 1970s while they were both stationed at Fort Dix. During a weekend off..."

"... they decided to travel to New York City together. They stayed at the Hotel Chelsea, Lonardo recalled, and visited the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. They had a fleeting romance, and shortly after they returned to Fort Dix, they went in different directions and never spoke again. But for nearly five decades, Lonardo has kept a bar of soap from the hotel...."

From "For years, he didn’t know he had a daughter. At 66, he adopted her. Jennifer Skiles said hearing her father’s voice for the first time 'felt like home.' Four years later, their emotional bond is now a legal one" (WaPo)(gift link, so you can read the whole story, which will make you cry, unless you never cry about strangers).

"I could have tried to adopt, though I think a single gay man would still be right at the back of the queue..."

"... but I remember seeing my nephew for the first time, back in 1997 — just recalling it makes me emotional — and feeling this tug, a real visceral knowing that I was related to this little human being, that we share a gene pool. I wanted the same with my own child. When I reached 50 I thought, ‘It’s now or never,’ and I really started looking into surrogacy seriously.... A couple of friends took a beat or two to respond when I told them about my plans. Another asked, 'Do you really want to be coping with a stroppy teenager when you’re in your seventies?' I think my parents, who are both in their eighties, and sister were concerned that, aged 50-plus, I didn’t realise the enormity of what I was letting myself in for.”

Said Simon Burrell, quoted in "What it’s like to be a single dad (with a child via surrogacy)/The frequency of single fathers having children through surrogacy has tripled. Simon Burrell tells Helen Carroll why he spent £200,000 on becoming one. Plus: I was the UK’s first solo surrogacy father" (London Times).

"Dad, are you running for President?... You can't... I'm too young. You need to spend more time with us."

Gavin Newsom quotes his son:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by CNN (@cnn)

"How do you deal with that one?" Newsom asks. "I'm asking you," he says to Dana Bash, who says "I'm not running." Then Newsom switches to inane verbiage: "That's the point. And the point is the point. And so what matters is what matters. Like, what matters is what matters."

That poor boy!

That video is from last month, but I'm looking at it now because it came up in this new NY Post article, "Huge wake-up call for Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris as dire poll released."

Alysa Liu — and her 4 siblings — are the children of a single father who had them through surrogate mothers and anonymous egg donors.

"Arthur Liu was born in the small mountain village, Mingxing, in China’s Sichuan Province... In 1989, Arthur participated in the Tiananmen Square protests.... After immigrating to the United States, Arthur Liu studied law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law.... Arthur Liu brought Alysa Liu to her first ice skating lesson when she was 5 years old.... 'I spared no money, no time,' Arthur said.... 'I just saw the talent.'... ... Arthur participated in his daughter’s training aspects by watching her practices and tracking the speed of her jumps with a radar gun.... When Alysa Liu announced she was retiring from ice skating in April 2022, she did not talk to Arthur Liu before making the decision. 'I didn’t really ask [my dad’s] opinion when I decided to retire. After all, it’s my life'.... When Alysa decided to make her return in 2026, she shared that her dad is less involved with her skating career. 'He’s a great father, I just didn’t want him to be as invested in it as he was before'...."

From "Who Is Alysa Liu’s Father? What to Know About Olympic Gold Medalist’s Dad Who Welcomed 5 Kids Via Surrogate" (Us).

Us is written on a really low level. Fine. But don't tell me this is "What to Know." There's obviously a deeper dimension. I want to know. What happened to the other 4 children? Were they pushed into any sport? What did they do while Arthur was spending so much time aiming a radar gun at Alysa? Were they all conceived as designer babies, then tested to determine who had the talent and who deserved attention and money showered on them? Should a single man be able to buy his way into fatherhood for 5 children? What does Alysa really know and how does she really feel?

ADDED: I'm just noticing the weirdness of the expression, "I spared no money, no time." We understand it to mean that he spent endless time and money, but if you stop and think about it, it seems to mean the opposite, that he gave no time or money. It does make sense if you understand "spared" to mean, held back for myself.

AND: I'm seeing this NYT article, "In Her Big Olympic Moment, Alysa Liu Celebrated Her Freedom/Competition can wreck a figure skater, but Liu and other Olympians shed the pressure and delivered transcendent performances focused on artistry." The word "father" appears nowhere. I searched for "Arthur" and got only "MacArthur Park," the song she skated to. Apparently, no on wants to touch the father problem. The Olympian parents are always devoted and earnest, watching hopefully from the stands.

Was it "remarkable"? I'd like to think it's totally normal — the part about the grand jury.

I'm reading "Grand Jury Rebuffs Justice Dept. Attempt to Indict 6 Democrats in Congress The rejection was a remarkable rebuke, suggesting that ordinary citizens did not believe that the lawmakers had committed any crimes" (NYT).

Federal prosecutors in Washington sought and failed on Tuesday to secure an indictment against six Democratic lawmakers who posted a video this fall that enraged President Trump by reminding active-duty members of the military and intelligence community that they were obligated to refuse illegal orders, four people familiar with the matter said. It was remarkable that the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington — led by Jeanine Pirro, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s — authorized prosecutors to go into a grand jury and ask for an indictment of the six members of Congress, all of whom had served in the military or the nation’s spy agencies. But it was even more remarkable that a group of ordinary citizens sitting on the grand jury in Federal District Court in Washington forcefully rejected Mr. Trump’s bid to label their expression of dissent as a criminal act warranting prosecution.

I agree that it was remarkable (and awful) to seek this indictment. It was an ugly abnormality that needs to be rejected. But what the grand jury did was — or should be — the norm. 

You know what this made me think of? This post from 2010:

Someone in the comments questioned my use of quotation marks around "heroic father," but I absolutely meant to do that. I said the father "behaved instinctively and even if he thought about [it, he did] pretty much all the only thing he could do to avoid a life of terrible pain and shame if the girl had died after he let her fall in.."

The grand jury was like the father. Not remarkable. Normal.

"Perhaps because they have so many kids, they said they aren’t the types to hover over their children and check their homework."

"And as it is physically impossible to shuttle their children to extracurriculars all over town, they are often free to do what they want within a two-mile radius. In short, because they are not capable of meeting the expectations of parenthood in the modern age, they do not try to. 'We have these childless friends come over and they’re like, "You always seem so calm,"' Mrs Korczynski said. 'They say, "You ignore most things, but if something’s going on then you can hop on that."'  There are, of course, downsides. Every morning the children struggle to get into the one bathroom they share with each one banging on the door, yelling for the shower (the parents have their own). Dinners are like battles royale — 'they know if they’re late there might not be any food left,' said Mr Korczynski."

From "Why we decided to have seven children Americans are having fewer kids, worried about the high cost and uncertainty of the world. But for John and Sasha Korczynski, raising a large brood has been a leap of faith." That's in the London Times, but the family lives in the U.S. — in Florida.

How will they pay for college? "I think this is where having a big family comes in handy for college, because they do give you better financial aid packages."

"I was a little bitch. I just complained about everything."

Said Nick Reiner, questioned by Howard Stern about why he had written a script portraying his father as an asshole.

"What was the biggest complaint?" Stern wanted to know. The son could not itemize, in fact, he couldn't even stand by the assertion, in his movie script, that his father was an asshole. He took the blame onto himself: "I was a little bitch. I just complained about everything."

Howard keeps trying: "But was he not there enough for you, in your opinion?" Nick answers with exasperation: "No, he was there." 

Howard restates the question, as something of a joke: "He should have not been there?" Robin echoes: "He was there too much." Howard: "Yeah, big pain in the ass."

And the conversation moves on to the next topic. I can't find the full episode, but there is this contemporaneous (2016) written recap at Stern's website. I was interested in Rob Reiner's rejection of medical professionals and embrace of the idea that the parent know what is best for his child:

"But [Rob Reiner's] films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy that if we're good to our kids, everything will be okay."

So writes David Thompson in "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film," read out loud on the New York Times "Daily" podcast today by the NYT critic Wesley Morris.

Morris uses that book to try to get to an honest assessment of the career of the recently murdered film director. I don't know if I'm getting the punctuation right, but from the transcript of the podcast, Thompson seems to have written:

"As a director, [Rob Reiner] seemed more struck — or poleaxed — by the notion that niceness could save the world. It is a petty thought, but one that stifles so many human and social realities. And so his work turns to pie in the sky with good and bad all too clearly labeled. He's carried along by a fundamental decency and a sense of scenes that play. But his films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy that if we're good to our kids, everything will be okay. This is not true. Life is more interesting."

More interesting and, at times, far far more horrible. 

But Thompson's words are left to speak for themselves as Wesley Morris makes a quick turn to a happy ending. He says: 

"No, she meant that I’m — you see, I don’t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that — but I’ve often said..."

"... that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality. I’ve said that many times about myself. I’m fortunate I’m not a drinker. If I did, I could very well, because I’ve said that — what’s the word? Not possessive — possessive and addictive type personality. Oh, I’ve said it many times, many times before."

Said Trump, responding to the report in Vanity Fair that his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had said he has an "alcoholic’s personality," quoted in "Trump brushes off Wiles' 'alcoholic’s personality' nick as allies torch Vanity Fair piece/Cabinet members and Trump himself have dismissed the unflattering quotes, claiming they were taken out of context" (Fox News).

I wonder why he said "possessive" — twice — before changing to "addictive." I think the word he was looking for was "obsessive." 

I like that he's supporting her, and it's probably in his interest to support her and provide explanation that makes her remark into something almost positive, rather than part of a dark and devastating bombshell that Vanity Fair must have thought it had put together.

What is the "alcoholic's personality" anyway? Is that just folk belief or is it supported by respectable research? Perhaps it doesn't matter as much as what Susie Wiles was attempting to describe seeing in Trump. She had an alcoholic father, and presumably something makes her see Trump as that father figure, and Trump initially included her in his inner circle because of her famous father. That's a very specific and personal story that stands apart from whatever this concept of "alcoholic's personality" is taken to mean by the general public that harbors folk beliefs and little familiarity with the scholarly literature.

“If you read between the lines, it’s not that bad."

Said Rob Reiner after reading Roger Ebert's famous "Hated It" review out loud, for laughs:

It's a funny punchline, reminiscent of "Dumb and Dumber"'s "So you're telling me, there's a chance?"

But what was it that bothered Ebert so much about Reiner's movie, "North"?

Here's more of Ebert's review:

[The main character is] a kid with inattentive parents, who decides to go into court, free himself of them, and go on a worldwide search for nicer parents. This idea is deeply flawed. Children do not lightly separate from their parents – and certainly not on the evidence provided here, where the great parental sin is not paying attention to their kid at the dinner table. The parents (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander) have provided little North with what looks like a million-dollar house in a Frank Capra neighborhood, all on dad’s salary as a pants inspector.

"Meghan has struggled to contact her father after his life-saving surgery because she has lost his phone number and he has stopped using his email address..."

"...it is claimed," The London Times reports in "Meghan ‘no longer has’ her father Thomas Markle’s phone number/The Duchess of Sussex is believed to have lost or deleted her father’s number as she claimed to have contacted him by email after his ‘life-or-death’ surgery."

Hilariously... I mean sadly... unbelievable, for about 10 reasons, including the way the "contacts" on your phone hang on steadfastly until you delete them. I just checked mine, and I see names of people I haven't phoned since the '00s. Maybe Meghan weeds hers out more assiduously than I do, but still... deleting your father's name?

"In recent days Meghan has continued promoting the Christmas special of her Netflix show... in which she talks about a Christmas tree encapsulating a 'family’s story.' In a video posted to... Instagram she is seen making a homemade advert [sic] calendar... and saying 'thank you so … honestly so, so much' to the television crew... Markle is yet to meet his grandchildren... although he did receive a call asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage...."

Now about that advent calendar:

Come on fathers don't hesitate/Send your sons off before it's too late.

I'm reading "Army Chief Ignites Uproar After Saying France Must ‘Accept Losing Our Children’/The furor erupted as President Emmanuel Macron is expected to present a plan for paid, voluntary military service to bolster the armed forces against the threat from Russia" (NYT):

The army chief, Gen. Fabien Mandon, who took over as chief of staff in September, told mayors gathered in Paris from across France last week that they must become the messengers of a new French resolve on an unstable European continent.

What is needed, he said, is “the spirit that accepts that we will have to suffer to protect what we are.” If France “wavers because we are not ready to accept losing our children,” then “we are, indeed, at risk,” he told the mayors, evoking the growing threat from Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Made me think of this:

"Of Hemingway’s three children, Patrick came closest to simulating, though hardly emulating, his father...."

"Hemingway’s first son, Jack, was an avid fly fisherman who fished in Europe between battles in World War II. He had difficulty finding a postwar career until he became Idaho’s fish and game commissioner in the 1970s. He died in 2000. Hemingway’s third child, Gloria Hemingway, was a physician who struggled with alcohol abuse. She wrote a memoir, 'Papa' (1976), before undergoing transition surgery later in life. She died in 2001."

From "Patrick Hemingway, Ernest’s Devoted Second Son, Is Dead at 97/Inspired by his parents’ travels, he spent much of his life in Africa and helped complete his father’s safari memoir. He also published a volume of father-son letters. He was Ernest Hemingway’s last surviving child" (NYT).

Transition surgery? I clicked on "She died in 2001" and got to the obituary "Gregory H. Hemingway, 69; Wrote a Memoir Called 'Papa.'" Excerpt:

Caught on camera.

1. "Coldplay’s ‘kiss cam’ zeroes in on mortified tech CEO Andy Byron and alleged HR-chief mistress Kristin Cabot" (NY Post)("Oh, what? Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy").

2. "Video shows boy, 7, being kidnapped at gunpoint — as dad runs and hides: 'Hell yeah I ran'" (NY Post)("I ran im thinking they tryna rob me not take my damn baby").

"In politics, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were, and maybe still are, daddies. A daddy-in-training is New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani..."

"... who Gates says 'hasn’t aged into daddyhood' quite yet. What all daddies have in common is the notion of or desire for a power imbalance — a dynamic at play in real and metaphoric, honorific paternal relationships.... Milo Yiannopoulos... began calling Trump daddy in 2017. At an October 2024 rally, speaking before Trump took the stage, Tucker Carlson compared Americans to naughty little girls who have misbehaved. 'When Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now,' Carlson told the crowd, in perhaps one of the creepiest moments of the campaign. 'And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you.' 'Daddy’s Home' shirts featuring Trump and the White House began circulating on Etsy shortly after his November win... We seem to have entered a deeply submissive era. Everyone is being well-behaved for Daddy, lest they be spanked.... But power and wealth are not all that a true daddy possesses....."

Writes Maura Judkis, in "Who’s your daddy? These days, who isn’t? Mack daddy, leather daddy, sugar daddy, Daddy Trump: The fraught and Freudian journey of a domineering archetype" (WaPo).

Gates = Bransen Gates, an Instagrammer who lipsynchs to Trump audio and demonstrates, comically, that Trump was born to be a gay man.

Perhaps you, like me, remember the phrase "Daddy's Home" as the title of a lovely doowop song from 1961 by Shep & the Limelites, so: here.

Even better: