"Her heart’s desire included a $400 sea-foam green jacket from the New York Liberty women’s basketball team that reads 'New York or Nowhere.'"

She'd had more than $200,000 in student loans, but qualified for loan forgiveness, so "One thing I did is I gifted myself an extra loan payment for whatever my heart desired."

She is New York City Council member Tiffany Cabán, who "spends much of her day thinking about how to address New York City’s affordability crisis," and rents a two-and-a-half-bedroom place in Astoria, "where she lives with her rescue dog Ducky."

I'm reading the latest entry in the NYT series "Affording New York," "How a City Council Member Lives on $148,500 in Queens" (gift link, with photos of Cabán place and her dog and her jacket).

It is a nice jacket for a City Council member, and it's nice that she has season tickets to the game ($5,000), and that her salary is going up from $148,500 to $175,500, after she and other council members voted them a raise. Well earned, no? You wouldn't want to try to live in NYC for only $148,500.

The jacket's slogan is "It will Always be New York or Nowhere." You know that wonderful New York feeling: every place else is nowhere. It reminds me of my old saying: Better than nothing is a high standard. But acquiring nothing leaves you intact as a living human being, and you save whatever money you'd have spent on that item that's not better than nothing. But with "New York or Nowhere," it seems you cease to exist if you can't swing life in New York. Life without being in New York is not better than nothing. It's nowhere. 

"I am a virgin. I grew up with no friends. I didn't have anyone growing up besides my two girlfriends that I'm still very close with today...."

"And I didn't like like I didn't do extracurricular activities. Like I didn't go out. I didn't have fun. Like I was just school home school home. So like I never had a relationship with anyone. And then I started working. I was serving for about four years at a mom and pop restaurant. I was a waitress.... And then now I'm here and I'm just waiting for the right person. But now everyone knows me and it's like weird. So like I'm trying to date but it's going to be a little weird now. It's hard. It's hard now. So I'm just waiting for the right person. Worth it. You know I'm waiting. Worth 100 million...."

Said Sophie Rain, the 21-year-old biggest moneymaker on "Only Fans," talking to the 70-year-old Bill Maher for nearly 2 hours. Creepy? Or is this helpful insight into a business you ought to understand? She's made $100 million. And yet: lonely! 

But you know the answer when people are so remote and loveless. Animals! She's all:

I love animals. That's what I want to do is I just want to live on a farm. That's that's the goal for me is to own a lot of land and just rescue animals. That's all I want to do....

Maher is all Me too. I love animals too. I'd just love to live on a farm too.

Animals are easy. People are hard. But what do you want from people? If you have 2 very close girlfriends, why would you say I grew up with no friends? 2 is so much more than zero. 2 very close friends seems like more than any number of remote friends. Or do you love remote friends... in social media?

IN THE COMMENTS: Leland writes: "Successful farms don't 'rescue' animals. They raise them, grow them, and then sell them..."

That's true for the restricted meaning of "farm," but there is an extended version of "farm" — watch and see who uses it — that's just a home in the heart of the country.

I want a horse/I want a sheep/I wanna get me a good night's sleep...

"Trump is going to get his ballroom — even if courts conclude it’s illegal."

Said lawprof Leah Litman, quoted by Adam Liptak in "Trump’s 'Lightning Speed' Outpaces the Courts/In his breakneck construction of a grand ballroom and in many other initiatives, critics say, the president has tried to outrun judicial review" (NYT gift link).

When the ballroom case was argued before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in June, Judge Patricia A. Millett asked... If the government were to move very quickly to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty... was it true that “nothing can be done” by the courts? 

Yaakov Roth, a Justice Department lawyer, did not try to duck the question. “I think that’s right, yes,” he said.... 

When the case reached the Supreme Court last month, the challengers warned the justices that Mr. Trump had “decided to try to outrun judicial review.” In response, Solicitor General D. John Sauer did not exactly deny the charge. He crowed that a 250-person crew had been working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, and that the project, which he said included key security upgrades for the White House, had passed the point of no return....

It's in the structure of things that the Executive has speed as a tool. Remember when Justice Robert Jackson quoted Napoleon — "The tools belong to the man who can use them"?

"In the life we lived that summer, we represented to ourselves what we wanted — and it was not the headlong pilgrimage after money and comfort and prestige."

Wrote Wendell Berry, in "The Long-Legged House," quoted in "Wendell Berry, Writer Who Extolled America’s Agrarian Past, Dies at 92/A Kentucky farmer, he railed against agribusiness and championed small family farms and the environment, winning widespread acclaim" (NYT gift link).

Returning to his home as a place to write for the rest of his life was a way to insure, to himself, that he would always be bound by the truth, Mr. Berry said in a phone interview in 2018 for this obituary. 

“It made a permanent connection between me and my native place, and with its landscape,” he said. “The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky. I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them. It’s been a very rich experience.”

JFK and the "lady of some note in Europe."

Chris — my son, the reader of presidential biographies — texts me another passage from "President Kennedy: Profile of Power" (commission earned):

"The rollout could’ve been better. Absolutely, I said the rollout has to be cleaned up and fixed."

Said Governor Kathy Hochul, quoted in "How New York’s Second-Home Tax Turned Into a Headache for Mamdani/The bumpy rollout of the tax created an opportunity for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s opponents to fight him in court and in the City Council" (NYT gift link).

Ms. Hochul, was concerned about what she saw as clumsy messaging by Mr. Mamdani as he introduced the esoteric tax to New Yorkers. She told the mayor that he needed to be clearer about how the tax would be administered and whom it would affect, according to two people familiar with their talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. The governor had taken note of how the mayor, a democratic socialist who campaigned on “taxing the rich,” was talking about the policy. In a widely seen video, for instance, the mayor had decided to highlight an especially expensive second home owned by a hedge fund manager, Kenneth C. Griffin.

“There’s a better way to do it,” said, Ms. Hochul a pro-business moderate. “Point to Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes” rather than someone who invests in the city, she added.

Here's that widely seen video, which, exclaiming "Oh, no!," I impulsively clicked off at the 5-second mark:

I did finally watch the whole minute. From the transcript: "This pied-a-terre tax is specifically designed for the richest of the rich, those who store their wealth in New York City real estate, but who don't actually live here.... This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers." 

What's "fundamentally unfair"? It's a child's reasoning: If someone has something that he's not using, it should be mine. 

The NYT calls the new tax "esoteric." I wonder what other adjectives it considered. Is it esoteric because it's hard for the general public to understand, or is it esoteric because it only applies to a discrete group of people?

The data center next door.

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"He does not appear to have suffered much stigma from living at home, and for several months even dated a woman he had met..."

"... at a cafe where he worked part time to burn off anxious energy. 'We ended up bonding really hard — we’re both writers,' said Mr. Balmat, who hopes to publish a novel someday. 'We were both really passionate about what we were doing, struggling to figure out how to turn it into money.' When he invited his girlfriend over to hang out, the attention from his parents was sometimes embarrassing. 'They would both drop in on us if we’re watching a movie on the couch, to be like, "Can I get anybody any snacks?"' But his girlfriend took it in stride. It turned out she had moved back home, too."

From "Moving Back Home After College? All Your Friends Are Doing It. More young adults are living with their parents. The development suggests that they face a weak job market, but also that fewer face stigma in returning to the roost" (NYT gift link).

Parents are only sometimes embarrassing.

Your job in a café is only a way to "burn off anxious energy."

I don't know. Maybe this is the stuff of a worthy novel. Actually it feels like a TV sitcom. A really old-timey one. I'm picturing Balmat's mother as a June Cleaver type. And Balmat is Wally. Gee, Mom.

"Every time we find out something new about GLP-1, it's a positive.... They're now saying that it reduces the likelihood of stage one cancer going to metastatic cancer..."

"... by 50%. Every time we keep waiting for another shoe to drop, we find out, 'Oh, it's actually a good thing.' Everyone at this table is going to be on a GLP-1 within 24 months....  I think when you look at the studies around the upside versus the downside here, it's the most transformative technology in the world."

Says Scott Galloway, ticking off Bill Maher:

Bill Maher shuts down Scott Galloway on the spot after he says “everyone should be” on a GLP-1 “within 24 months.”

GALLOWAY: “Every time we find out something new about GLP-1, it's a positive. They're now saying that it reduces the likelihood of stage one cancer going to… pic.twitter.com/2KUMXrkciF

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) August 1, 2026

AND: Speaking of Scott Galloway...

Scott Galloway is upset about being 'doxed' after he supported Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax:

"He's taken a legitimate source of tax revenue, and he's turning it into a wanted poster."

"What is the upside here? Why is he doing this?"

Incredible. pic.twitter.com/9Yrb9lw4An

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) August 1, 2026

"Because the ritual [of land acknowledgment] still treats land as something that can be owned..."

"... it names the theft while leaving the idea of ownership untouched. Indigenous relationships to land were not about possession or title. They were about reciprocity, care, responsibility. Wendy Red Star, an Apsáalooke artist, put it this way: 'The concept of territory is a completely Western idea. When we make land acknowledgments, we’re putting a Western, colonial concept on the relationship between the Native people who were stewards of the land. It’s not ownership.'"

Writes Reid Walker, in "Please Don’t Thank Us for the Land" (NYT gift link).

"Taking into account the space a building would need to leave from the highway, the water and neighboring properties..."

"... as well as a requirement to position the foundation well above flood level, Schwartz and Architecture outlined the maximum allowable building envelope for a home, which was tiny. But, within that envelope, the architects managed to design a 730-square-foot, single-story cottage elevated on tall posts, with a single bedroom and bathroom...."

I'm reading "Even the Architects Said the Build Would Be Nearly Impossible/An architect and his client overcame a steep site and regulatory hurdles to build a 730-square-foot house that hovers over the water in Sonoma County, Calif." (NYT gift link).

"Throughout the journey, Dr. Tang-Oxley frequently communicated with Mr. Schwartz by writing poems instead of providing more direct feedback.... It was a surreal play of disbelief, surprises and pure delights."

A Monday morning juxtaposition. .

I see this at the top of the NYT right now:

Sterile wealth, romanticized poverty, and mindlessness about sleevelessness.

1. The family of 5: "'Money right now, there’s not enough. Literalmente,' said Ms. Torres, speaking Spanglish. 'Sometimes I feel bad, like I can’t do enough for my kids.'"

2. The Biebers: "The 2,792-square-foot apartment has two kitchens — an open-plan kitchen for entertaining, with marble counters and Scandinavian larch wood cabinetry, and a secondary chef’s kitchen with stainless steel and matte aluminum cabinetry. The primary suite looks out to the Hudson River..." The living room, I see, looks out onto a big TV screen and turns its back on the uninspiring skyline of New Jersey.

3. The presumed dearth of sleeves: "In all of the discussions about body positivity and loving the different parts of you, including the parts of you that decades of social conditioning have deemed potentially problematic, arms, especially the upper arms, are often overlooked...." The letter writer is urged to "rethink the issue" and "learn to love your arms."

"Aimee Gardner and Dave Linnard were standing in the basement of their newly purchased, 1869 Hudson Valley fixer-upper when they heard a strange tinkling..."

"... like tiny drops of rain. They would soon learn this is the sound a lime mortar stone wall makes as its particles shift — right before it collapses. Seconds later, the entire north wall dropped vertically, some half a foot, with a thundering whoosh and an eruption of dust, leaving the floor above them precariously cantilevered. 'We’re just lucky it didn’t fall sideways,' Ms. Gardner said. It became another thing to add to the punch list as they restore their first home, a project that’s taken, so far, eight and a half years...."

From "When Even the Owners Call it ‘Disaster Mansion’/First-time buyers from the Bay Area won an abandoned house at a Kingston, N.Y. tax auction. Eight years later, they’re still restoring it" (NYT)(gift link, because it's pretty inspiring and actually kind of beautiful).

"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).

"It was now almost impossible for me to make a decision without getting A.I.’s opinion. By Friday evening, I was starting to worry that the interest in our house..."

"... was a little too strong. We had nearly 20 viewings scheduled for the weekend. I confessed to the chatbot my anxiety that we had underpriced the home. It offered some needed reassurance, saying that by pricing low, I had stumbled into an 'accidental strategy' that could result in multiple offers. 'When you get 1,100 views and 91 saves, you haven’t just listed a house; you’ve started a localized "gold rush,"' it wrote.... I had started this experiment thinking that the chatbot would create a superpowered version of myself — combining my own judgment with its vast knowledge. But once I started relying on A.I., witnessing its know-it-all competency with basically everything, my shortcomings started to feel enormous and even risky. I had thought I was elevating my own skills. In reality, I was replacing them...."

From "I Tried to Sell My House With a Chatbot/Over five frantic days, I gambled my family’s life savings on a hunch that A.I. could outperform a real estate agent" (NYT)(gift link, because this is really useful).

The top-rated comment over there: "When we sold our house in Hawaii, the realtor was excited to get the listing, but provided little actual service. We did the market research to set the price (her opinion — 'Whatever you think'). We decided what preparation was needed to make the listing more attractive (her only real contribution was recommending a great local painter). We staged the house. We negotiated the counteroffer. And we paid a 6% real estate commission. Let the AI revolution roll through the real estate monopoly. Power to the People!"

"While devoting most of her time to her son, Monita Wong said she needs to maintain a little distance."

"On the second floor of the foundation building, she incorporated two small bedrooms, for [her husband] and herself. 'I am reluctant to go back to the condo,' she said. When the owner of the lot next to the condo chopped down the spruce that Matthew loved, she brought the stump to the foundation building. 'I could not stop them,' she said. 'But I thought it would be good to have it here. It is outside now.'"

From "A Grieving Mother Safeguards Her Son’s Artistic Legacy/The troubled painter Matthew Wong’s star was on the rise when he died [by suicide] at 35. His mother, Monita Wong, is making sure his work can still be seen" (NYT)(gift link so you can see more of the mother's story, some of the son's paintings, and photos with the captions "Wong's paint tubes, stained sneakers and even the light switch were relocated from his studio" and "Monita Wong carried over the clutter to recreate her son’s studio in the headquarters of the Matthew Wong Foundation in Edmonton, Alberta").

Quote from an art dealer: "He was a very attractive, tall figure, very well spoken. It was very refreshing the way he talked about art in general and not of himself. He was very direct and clear. I had no idea he was depressed. I had no idea he was autistic."

"Mr. DeCock hasn’t left New York in as long as he can remember. He barely even goes to Brooklyn."

"'Everything I do is in the neighborhood,' he said.... What Mr. DeCock doesn’t do, he said, is buy clothes or shop for much of anything, including groceries. He does not drink coffee at home. His fridge is empty.... Mr. DeCock... stopped cooking after the pandemic, when he admitted to himself that he was terrible at it. Now, he goes out for almost every meal — although he often skips lunch or dinner without noticing. He might run across the street for an order of the $27 seitan scaloppine at his favorite vegan restaurant, or walk a few blocks to a Mexican restaurant, where he’ll order the vegetarian enchiladas for $24.50. When Mr. DeCock is home and not working or sleeping, he’s often watching television. His big splurge is cable, his Spectrum bill is $250 a month. He also pays for Netflix, $19.99 a month, and Hulu, $18.99 a month. A Colorado native, Mr. DeCock sometimes misses nature, so he compensates by watching reality television shows about people who have to survive in the wilderness."

I'm reading "Affording New York/How a Hairdresser and Painter Lives on $70,000 a Year in Chelsea" (NYT). The 750 square foot studio apartment, in the Hotel Chelsea, costs $2700 a month.

"Affording New York" is a series. I love seeing how people express who they are by how they economize. This is the case of someone who's really splurging on food and television and making it work by harshly scrimping on travel and anything that might be shopped for. Gerald DeCock, 67, lives in a great part of town and he just stays put, getting the most out of that precise place. It's not just money he saves.  He saves a lot of time by avoiding all shopping and staying off the subway and every other form of transportation. Frankly, this way of life is appealing quite aside from the question of making it fit $70,000 a year. 

"A Visit to the Unabomber Cabin, 30 Years After the Arrest/A complicated piece of American heritage and culture sits intact in the F.B.I. headquarters."

This NYT article is inspiring 2 types of response response from commenters over there.

The first type:

Although this was quite the story 30 years ago, I have no interest in preserving this structure and potentially romanticizing or mythologizing it like we did with the outlaw murderer, Jesse James. Please don't speak of this killers hut in the same breath as Thoreau's or Lincoln's cabins. I say put a match to it and post the video. 

 The second:

Saying this may put me on a list, but everyone should read his manifesto, "Industrial Society and its Future." It's one of the most compelling and profound analyses of what ails the modern world I've ever read. Just to be clear: just because his ideas are worth engaging with doesn't remotely justify his barbaric crimes.

Let's judge the architecture of The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library.

🚨 FIRST LOOK: The Donald J. Trump Presidential Library is officially here.

Over the past six months, I have poured my heart and soul into this project with my incredible team at @Trump.

This landmark on the water in Miami, Florida will stand as a lasting testament to an… pic.twitter.com/azV1hx0HG2

— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) March 31, 2026

"President Trump is the best builder and developer in the entire world, and the American people can rest well knowing that this project is in his hands."

Said a White House spokesman, quoted in "Trump’s Ballroom Design Has Barely Been Scrutinized/Architects Say It Shows" (NYT)(gift link because there are some detailed graphics).

Also quoted is Carol Quillen, the president and chief executive of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is suing over the ballroom. She says: "Even if we are slow and we make mistakes and we fight, that process has meaning to us."

Have you ever paused to contemplate the meaningfulness of red tape? Maybe the deliberation and drawn-out procedure is subtly, secretly the very best part of what we do together, the very heart of democracy.