"Supreme Court says Rastafarian can’t sue prison officials over shorn dreadlocks."

WaPo reports. 

This is a complicated case, written by Justice Gorsuch, for a 6-person majority, in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety. It's about limits on Congress's power to impose conditions as it exercises its Spending Power. The statute is the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, and I assume most of us feel empathy for a Rastafarian prisoner who experiences a routine prison haircutting. The federal statute is designed to relieve prisoners of substantial burdens on their religion (unless the strict scrutiny standard is met). The problem is the scope of Congress's power.

Let's look at the Gorsuch opinion:

"For four months... the Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins woke up every day before dawn, brewed coffee and sat down at her dining table to copy out Herman Melville’s 'Moby-Dick' (1851) with a nib pen."

"Writing in midnight blue acidic ink on onionskin paper, she made her way through the book’s 900-plus pages 10 at a time. The resulting work, 'Or, the Whale, Vol. I-III,' is housed in three black clothbound binders. 'It felt ritualistic,' says Collins, 41, of the project, 'like meditation.'"

From "Why One Artist Transcribed All 900-Plus Pages of ‘Moby-Dick’ by Hand/For Bethany Collins, Herman Melville’s novel is rife with centuries-old political anxieties that still resonate today" (NYT).

If you were to do a similar art project, based on someone else's writing, what book would you choose?

This sort of thing has been done before. In 1974 the conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg copied "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by hand. Collins acknowledges this inspiration.

We've also heard that Hunter S. Thompson typed out "The Great Gatsby" and "A Farewell to Arms." I don't think he presented that as conceptual art.

Hangings.

Yesterday, I was reading the Nicholson Baker essay "The History of Punctuation" (in "The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber" (commission earned)), when I came across a passage about John Lennard’s "But I Digress," which is, we are told, "gracefully written and full of intelligence, decked out with a complete scholarly apparatus of multiple indices, bibliographies, and notes, whose author, to judge by the startling jacket photo (shaved head with up-sticking central proto-Mohawk tuft, earring on left ear, wilted corduroy jacket, and over-laundered T-shirt bearing some enigmatic insignia underneath), put himself through graduate school by working as a ticket scalper at Elvis Costello concerts. (A discussion of Elvis Costello’s use of the parenthesis in 'Let Him Dangle' figures in a late chapter.)"

I would buy "But I Digress" so I could quote the part about "Let Him Dangle," but though Amazon shows 13 Kindle books titled "But I Digress," none are by John Lennard. I did find a hardback edition, but it's $239.00 and out of stock. So I can't tell you precisely what it has to say about the parentheses. 

So here's Elvis, doing his song, which is about Derek Bentley, who did dangle (for having uttered the ambiguous words "Let him have it"):

Did you notice the parentheses? It's a song! We'll have to look up the lyrics. The parentheses are in the bridge:

"To commemorate the abolition of slavery, the [Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee] had recommended an image of Frederick Douglass on the obverse and shackled and unshackled hands on the reverse."

"To honor women’s suffrage, a World War I-era protester carrying a 'Votes for Women' flag. And to evoke the civil rights movement, a 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, books in hand, helping to desegregate the New Orleans school system in 1960. [Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, authorized by law to make final decisions about coin designs] opted instead for the more general, and much whiter. For the Mayflower Compact, a Pilgrim couple staring into the distance. For the Revolutionary War, a profile of Washington. For the Declaration of Independence, a profile of Thomas Jefferson. For the Constitution, a profile of James Madison. And for the Gettysburg Address, a profile of Lincoln on the obverse, and on the reverse, a pair of interlocking hands. No shackles."

From "The War on ‘Wokeness’ Comes to the U.S. Mint/The Treasury Department unveiled new coins celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. They failed to include planned designs featuring abolition, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement" (NYT).

It does seem that the celebration of the 250th anniversary should concentrate on things that happened around 250 years ago, not on later events, but even Bessent's 5 choices include 2 that are not from the era of the founding. The Mayflower Compact is over a century earlier, and the Gettysburg Address is almost a century later. 

This sentence bothered me:

"The smart need money; the rich want to seem smart; the staid seek adjacency to what Mr. Summers called 'life among the lucrative and louche'..."

"... and Mr. Epstein needed to wash his name using blue-chip people who could be forgiving about infractions against the less powerful. Each has some form of capital and seeks to trade. The business is laundering capital — money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money. Mr. Summers wrote to Mr. Epstein: 'U r wall st tough guy w intellectual curiosity.' Mr. Epstein replied: 'And you an interllectual with a Wall Street curiosity.'... Mr. Krauss sends his New Yorker article on militant atheism; Mr. Chomsky sends a multiparagraph reply; Mr. Epstein dashes off: 'I think religion plays a major positive role in many lives. . i dont like fanaticism on either side. . sorry.' This somehow leads to a suggestion that Mr. Krauss bring the actor Johnny Depp to Mr. Epstein’s private island. Again and again, scholarly types lower themselves to offer previews of their research or inquiries into Mr. Epstein’s 'ideas.'... The earnest scientists and scholars type neatly. The wealthy and powerful reply tersely, with misspellings, erratic spacing, stray commas...."

Writes Anand Giridharadas, in "How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails" (NYT)(gift link, because there's lots of interesting stuff there).

"If the White House must be remade, let there be a plan; let it be debated; let the financing be transparent and free of kickbacks and corruption."

"It isn’t complicated, and it’s the very principle at the heart of the American Revolution: following rules is not weakness.... Architecture embodies values; it is not merely a receptacle of them. Simple proportions and human-scale spaces don’t just suggest the spirit of a democratic nation. They are that spirit in three dimensions, with doors and windows. Reverence for the past, and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known, is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life. To conserve, after all, is the essence of conservatism. The shock that images of the destruction provoke—the grief so many have felt—is not an overreaction to the loss of a beloved building. It is a recognition of something deeper: the central values of democracy being demolished before our eyes. Now we do not only sense it. We see it."

Writes Adam Gopnik, at the end of his New Yorker essay, "Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing/The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat."

Reverence for the past and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known — but is that your general principle? If it is, you are a committed conservative. 

***

As long as we're talking about rules... the traditional rules of punctuation would reject those those commas after "the past" and "fully known." It's easy to see if you put it this way: Reverence and reluctance is not timidity. Not: Reverence, and reluctance, is not timidity. And, obviously, "is" is wrong! I suspect that at one point the sentence was "Reverence for the past — along with reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known — is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life." 

Punctuation and grammar embody values; they are not merely a receptacle of them. I remember when the great tradition of The New Yorker was scrupulously tending to these matters. Is my grief an overreaction to the loss of a beloved publishing tradition?

"A description of the book in a news release announcing the publication on Wednesday sounded suspiciously like it might have been written by Pynchon himself..."

"... and Penguin confirmed it was his handiwork," it says in "A New Thomas Pynchon Novel Is Coming This Fall/Featuring a Depression-era private eye, 'Shadow Ticket' will be the 87-year-old writer’s first book since 2013" (NYT).

Here's that description:

“Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.”

He withholds commas until he doesn't and I presume he's got his reasons.

I like "lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee" and "Milwaukee and the normal world."

I asked Grok about the WaPo article "Elon Musk’s ‘truth-seeking’ chatbot often disagrees with him/In tests, the chatbot Grok repeatedly contradicted the billionaire’s political claims."

Here's a free-access link to the WaPo article.

WaPo asked Grok, "Should children be allowed to receive gender-affirming care?" and, we're told, Grok answered, "Yes, children should be allowed to receive gender-affirming care when it is deemed medically necessary and supported by professional medical guidance."

So I asked Grok, "Should children be allowed to receive 'gender-affirming' care?" Same words — though I did add quote marks. (Why did I do that? Because it's an expression, not a strictly truth-based term. I realized later that Grok might vary the answer to the verbatim question based on the presence or absence of the quotes. Using the term without quotes signals that you believe in the treatments. Using the quotes conveys skepticism.)

I did not get the answer reported in the WaPo article. 

Here's what Grok said to me:

"In 'Selected Amazon Reviews,' Killian adds yet another Kevin to the list. This Kevin spends his evenings with his wife curled up on the couch..."

"... with their two cats, Ted and Sylvia, watching Katharine Hepburn movies, or knitting, decorating cakes, and hanging pet-themed ornaments on the Christmas trees, as in his five-star 2007 review of Pet Pawprint Hanging DIY Keepsake Ornament. But Kevin Killian in the review section was not the real Kevin Killian, at least not exactly. Did Killian have children, as he claimed in several reviews? No. Did he enjoy fine foods? No. (According to friends, he lived on a diet of only microwave meals and Tab.)... Did that twelve-color set of ballpoint pens really trigger a memory of attending school as an American boy in rural France, where his classmates had 'beautiful pens that were almost family heirlooms?'..."

Writes Oscar Schwartz, in "A Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer/Between 2003 and 2019, Kevin Killian published almost twenty-four hundred reviews on the site. Can they be considered literature?"

That's in The New Yorker, where they are not too careful about whether to put a question mark inside a quotation mark, and the answer to the question is no.

Killian was writing Amazon reviews as a sort of art project. Here's an Amazon Associates link to a book that collects his reviews — "Selected Amazon Reviews."

But back to the New Yorker article:

"Their existence, and my relationships with each of them, are essential to my understanding of life itself."

That's a very strangely written sentence... by M. Gessen, in "What Democrats Are Getting Wrong About Transgender Rights" (NYT). 

Context:

I am trans and I am a parent of three children, one of whom I carried. Their existence, and my relationships with each of them, are essential to my understanding of life itself. I also have many friends (none of them trans, as it happens) who never had children. I occasionally envy their freedom. They may occasionally envy me my sprawling family. In neither case is the feeling of regret — if it can even be called that — significant or particularly long-lasting. It is, rather, an awareness that life is a series of choices, all of which are made with incomplete information.

Presumably, Gessen has one relationship with each of the children, but it's possible that Gessen really does means to claim multiple relationships with each one. I suppose the grammar was a minor distraction on the way to proclaiming the superiority of a life lived without regrets. 

Anxiety about trans people and reproduction, and the laws and rules that it produces, cut both ways...

Puzzling commas again. And why choose a cutting metaphor here? Intentional prodding of our anxiety about surgery?

There's a lot more going on in the article, which was originally titled "The Secret Behind America's Moral Panic." What's the secret? And what are "Democrats... Getting Wrong About Transgender Rights"? This is the most useful passage:

"To anyone watching closely, it’s been obvious that Obama has been thinking about where he fits in today’s political mêlée and working on his public tone."

"When he joined Biden and Clinton in New York, the trio sat for a podcast interview in which Obama brought an I-can’t-believe-this-stuff-really-needs-to-be-said intonation to his explanations of the complications of the presidency and global affairs. Onstage at Radio City, after catching up with Biden on Air Force One, he took on the role of chief cheerleader.... Obama has felt most comfortable sticking to familiar themes, and though he has met with social-media influencers, he is also likely to appear in plenty of tried-and-true ads and behind lecterns on swing-state campuses.... ... Obama now comes across as having concluded that no radical rethink is necessary for his own conception of political progress or mass movements.... Obama wanted the donors to remember that 'despite having been out of office for a while, I am still the hopey-changey guy.'"

Writes Gabriel Debenedetti, in "What Obama Is Whispering to Biden/The presidents’ plan to save their legacy from Trump" (New York Magazine).

I enjoyed the profusion of diacritical marks on "mêlée." I might have done the accent aigu. But the circumflex! That is downright ornate. I approve.

Here's the Wikipedia article "Melee":

A melee... French: mêlée... or pell-mell is disorganized hand-to-hand combat in battles fought at abnormally close range with little central control once it starts.

Here's a painting from 1855 that depicts a melee that took place in 1632 (killing the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus): 

But of course there's an extended use. To quote the OED "a disagreement or contention; a confused or heated debate among many participants; a throng." I was going to say, don't confuse "melee" with "medley," but the OED goes on to with that extended use and says "A confusion, jumble; a medley, a mixture." That's rather tame. It's hard to think of the King of Sweden going into that 1632 melee, but easy to picture our hopey-changey guy inserting himself into the melee that is the election of 2024.

Over at The New York Times, it looks as though Trump has already won the election.

At the top of the front page:

 

A quick look at the 4 articles:

1. "The Resistance to a New Trump Administration Has Already Started/An emerging coalition that views Donald J. Trump’s agenda as a threat to democracy is laying the groundwork to push back if he wins in November, taking extraordinary pre-emptive actions." It's almost as though there's a conspiracy to deny the election.

"'Ultimately, no coherent case could be made that apostrophes help with clarity,' said [John] McWhorter..."

"They are merely 'a kind of decoration,' he added. Dr. McWhorter said apostrophes were the 'fish forks' of punctuation. 'They sit there, you’re not quite sure how to use them; you’re almost sure to use them wrong.' Apostrophes crept into written English for arbitrary reasons, Dr. McWhorter said. 'It’s one more way to look down on people who never quite mastered "its" and "it’s" when really we should be thinking about how effectively they get their message across.' Debates about grammar usage elicit strong feelings because language is an important part of identity, said Ellie Rye, an English lecturer at the University of York in England. Still, in the history of the English language, apostrophes are 'quite modern,' she said. They were not used to mark possession until the 16th century...."

From "An English Town Drops Apostrophes From Street Signs. Some Aren’t Happy. The move has prompted some resistance, with someone writing an apostrophe on a sign for St. Mary’s Walk. 'What’s next?' one North Yorkshire resident asked. 'Commas?'"

"Debates about grammar usage elicit strong feelings...." Okay, then, let me express a strong feeling about that phrase "grammar usage." First, apostrophes are punctuation, and punctuation is not grammar. Second, usage is something else too. It is to be distinguished from grammar. Grammar, punctuation, and usage are separate topics. To say "grammar usage" when you're talking about punctuation is an annoying error — an annoying usage error.

"RFK Jr. is a Democrat 'Plant,' a Radical Left Liberal who’s been put in place in order to help Crooked Joe Biden..."

"... the Worst President in the History of the United States, get Re-Elected. A Vote for Junior’ would essentially be a WASTED PROTEST VOTE, that could swing either way, but would only swing against the Democrats if Republicans knew the true story about him. Junior’ is totally Anti-Gun, an Extreme Environmentalist who makes the Green New Scammers look Conservative, a Big Time Taxer and Open Border Advocate, and Anti-Military/Vet…."

Blasts Donald Trump, from Truth Social.

What's with the apostrophe after "Junior"? He did it twice, so he must think it belongs.

Anyway, what I'm hearing him say is that he wants Republicans but not Democrats to know better than to "waste" their vote on an independent candidate. If RFK Jr. can be painted as far left, then Trump will have what he wants.

Trump continues with 2 more posts:

"In Finland, swinging your arms and other unnecessary sudden hand gestures are quite commonly interpreted as a sign of aggression, which should be avoided unless you want to get your ass kicked."

Writes someone in Finland in a Reddit discussion, "Do Europeans ever use their hand[s] to make 'Air Quotes' in a conversation, for example, to express sarcasm or a euphemism?"

Someone in Slovakia says "If you can't express sarcasm or a euphemism by you voice and tone, you shouldn't be allowed to do it. (I haven't seen it here, but maybe somebody does it.)"

An American says: "I did it in Italy once, and my little Italian cousins absolutely lost it laughing so hard, bc they didn't know why I was wiggling my fingers around (which I understand would look very, very strange if you don't know the meaning)." 

Someone in Italy answers: "We don't do it in Italy. Some people may know what it means because of American movies and TV series."

I know the TV series! It's "Friends":

"If Donald Trump is at the top of the Republican ticket, the risk of one-party rule by a Democratic Party captured by the progressive left is severe."

Wrote Emily Seidel, the chief executive of the Koch political network (Americans for Prosperity Action).

Quoted in "Months After Backing Haley, Koch Network Suspends Support for Her Campaign/The group’s chief executive wrote in an email to staff on Sunday that it would now focus on House and Senate races" (NYT).

Trump's response:

ADDED: Trump flaunted his status as a man of the people by deploying the grocer's apostrophe.

"At least Hanlon's razor... has something witty and memorable and real-life-applicable about it..."

Writes Rex Parker about today's NYT crossword, where the 18-across clue is "'Never attribute to ___ that which is adequately explained by stupidity' (Hanlon's razor)."

The answer to on that clue is... spoiler alert...

Having created a new tag and added it to 7 posts in this blog's archive, I list the 7 posts in an order other than chronological.

The new tag is "Edmund Morris."

The list:

1. September 4, 2004 — Studying the recent spike in the phrase "barking mad," I quote Edmund Morris's reaction to Maureen Dowd's calling him "barking mad" — "Like all barking mad people, I feel perfectly normal."

2. November 28, 2010 — That time Edmund Morris reamed Bob Shieffer on "Face the Nation," and I compared him to Peter Finch in "Network" and Marisa Tomei in "My Cousin Vinny."

3. December 4, 2023 — President Theodore Roosevelt waded naked in Rock Creek in full view of onlookers, described by Edmund Morris.

4. November 16, 2023 — TR's smelling of arsenic, as described by Edmund Morris

5. June 24, 2004 — Edmund Morris has a theory about how Ronald Reagan came to think the way he did: "Not until he put on his mother’s spectacles, around the age of thirteen, did he perceive the world in all its sharp-edged intricacy."

6. December 1, 2023 — TR's "cyclonic" personality, as described by Edmund Morris.

7. April 25, 2004 — "Edmund Morris gives a pretty bad review to the brilliantly titled book about punctuation, 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves.'"

"'You mean, that’s it?' I gasped. 'We have Zach again?' I added incredulously. If the worst thing humanly imaginable happened—i.e., Donald Trump’s reëlection—I will not sound more disbelieving or distraught...."

Writes Adam Gopnik, in "No, Not Aaron Rodgers! It’s hard to name a position in the history of sports so manifestly cursed as that of quarterback for the New York Jets" (The New Yorker).

I love the way Donald Trump intrudes himself even into an article about football almost as much as I love the diaeresis in "reëlection" and the screwy use of "happened" in "If the worst thing...  happened... I will not sound...."

I wonder: Rewrite that headline.

If you puzzle: A command is not a wondering, you see my problem — one of my problems — with the headline "Why hasn't Sam Bankman-Fried already been forced back to the US for FTX fiasco, critics wonder: 'Lock him up'/SBF's father, Joseph Bankman, notably helped Sen. Elizabeth Warren draft tax legislation." (Fox News).

1. Whether you're a "critic" or not, you can't "wonder" "Lock him up." You might wonder why he's not locked up. But you can't wonder an imperative.

2. I guess you could ignore the colon — which indicates that what the critics wonder is "Lock him up." Then you could see the critics as wondering why SBF hasn't been "forced back to the US." That is something that can be wondered. A question mark might help.

3. I find it hard to believe anyone is wondering that. There are no charges against SBF — not yet. I found that article because I was googling to see if SBF was actively fleeing from legal consequences. Isn't that what most of us would expect him to do — what we would do under the circumstances?

4. And that subheadline! What's the point of that if not to insinuate that SBF has political connections that are the reason he's not already extradited and locked up? It's such a weak insinuation. SBF's father is eminent enough to have some connection to drafting a tax bill, and — if you go to the link in the article — you'll see it was just about simplifying tax filing.

5. If you go on to read the article, you'll see it's not really about what "critics," plural, are saying. It's just about what Judge Jeanine Pirro said on Fox News, on "The Five." And Jesse Watters "agreed."

6. Here's something to wonder: Why is Fox News so trashy?