"Unfortunately for [Jeff] Bezos and [Lauren] Sánchez, the very fact of their obscene wealth and fame may be keeping the gates of membership closed to them thus far."

"As the [Wall Street] Journal reported, 'As with many private country clubs, admission often comes down to hitting it off with existing members.... In fact, too much wealth or notoriety has become a deterrent, as wealthy new applicants arriving in Florida are learning.' In fact, 'old guard' members are apparently so turned off by what they see as 'billionaire interlopers' that they are said to be 'mounting a last stand' and refusing to 'offer membership to just anyone who has struck it rich.'... Bezos and Sánchez are not the only deep-pocketed duo living on the Miami island — known as the 'Billionaire Bunker' — who have yet to score an invite for membership. There’s also Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped $170 million on a waterfront estate last year; the Qatari royal family; and one Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump...."

From "Jeff Bezos, Javanka Have Yet to Score Invites to ‘Billionaire Bunker’ Club" (NY Magazine).

Well, this is an old old story, the story of old money socially shunning the newly rich. Those upstarts.

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"A few years ago, Charlotte, which is not her real name, was referred to the Select Date Society, which then offered services starting at $35,000..."

"... (due to high demand, the fee rose to $75,000 shortly after, with a top tier that started at $150,000). Charlotte, 38 at the time, worked for a successful business that had just gone public, so the money wasn’t a huge issue for her. 'No one I know would ever do this, I know that,' she says of her thinking at the time. 'But you know what? I could use some help, so I’m raising my hand here — I could use some help. And I’ll be honest, I’m lonely.' An M.B.A. with a blistering career trajectory that had taken her to companies like Goldman Sachs and Google, she was mainly occupied renovating a townhouse she’d recently purchased. She was in a position where, she says, 'I can use a friend. I can use someone who’s like my best friend.'..."

I'm reading "The Good-Man Shortage Has Gotten Exponentially Worse/The crisis is both a boon and a challenge for high-end matchmakers helping women find love" (NY Magazine).

It used to seem like a joke — a prank — to get A.I. talking to A.I.

But these days:

"Students are writing essays with ChatGPT, and teachers are using A.I. to grade them. Workers are sending lengthy A.I.-generated emails to colleagues, who are responding with walls of chatbot text of their own. A.I podcast hosts are holding forth with A.I. podcast guests on topics like gas prices, the Iran war — and artificial intelligence.... In March, Meta acquired a social network designed for bots to talk to one another.... There was a telecom executive who had noticed customers sending A.I. voice agents to argue with his company’s A.I. customer service system. There was a man who used a chatbot to draft messages on a dating app to a woman who seemed to be doing the exact same thing...."

From "Chatbots Are Pushing Us Toward a Post-Human Internet/In matters of work, school and even romance, we turn to A.I. chatbots. But what happens when the bots begin talking to one another?" (NYT gift link).

The Amish method of dating makes sense to me.

Ex-Amish social media creator Lovina Hershberger Zook, who has amassed some six million followers sharing Amish recipes and stories, explains the traditions of dating in the community she grew up in, one of the most conservative among the Amish.

The 23-year-old tells @faithsalie… pic.twitter.com/tRylTEwCZm

— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) August 14, 2026

They get in bed together from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. and talk or sleep. If it goes well they do it again 2 weeks later. This seems more likely to find what you need in a life partner than sitting across a table in a bar or restaurant. More likely to lead to a rewarding and deep or amusing conversation. 

That made me think of this "Modern Love" discussion in the NYT: "Am I Too Anxious for Love? Jenny Singer worried the deep, loving relationship she wanted wasn’t something her brain would let her have" (gift link).

"Hobbies have helped Kimura feel more secure and find her voice, partly because many of her hobbies end with a finished product..."

"... giving her a feeling of accomplishment. Unlike the women in previous generations in her family, whose lives were centered on marriage and raising children, she feels empowered to pursue the activities that bring her happiness. 'I feel like I can design my future,' she said. As for romantic relationships, Kimura said she’s not closed off to dating indefinitely. 'I just don’t feel like I’m in such a rush anymore.'"

From "For Some Singles, ‘Hobbyamory’ Has Replaced Hookups/Is a packed social calendar the new relationship goals?" (NYT gift link).

"After kissing my husband and dog good night and putting them to bed in a separate room, I put magnesium lotion on my feet, do my Duolingo lesson, pull up my meditation app and, of course, go to the bathroom one last time."

From "The Little Rituals That Prepare You for Sleep/Origami, cleaning countertops, talking to plants — here are some ways readers wind down for the evening" (NYT gift link).

"I am QTBIPOC and an immigrant, he is cis-white-straight/ish citizen, a decade older than me and didn’t even know what queer or BIPOC meant before meeting me...."

"The question is: How do I know I am not only doing this 'under the influence' of love?..."

A nutty question to a WaPo advice columnist, in "I planned to always be a queer, single cat-mom aunt. Then I met him. How does she know she’s not changing her life plan 'under the influence of love'?"

If love is the wrong reason, what is the right reason?

"My father worked in a rock quarry. My mother was a kindergarten teacher. And I, anticipating a life of motherhood and Christianity..."

"... was engaged at 16. I had planned to marry after I turned 18, but my engagement ended shortly before our wedding day when my fiancé was arrested and charged with possessing child pornography. When that dream evaporated, I needed a new dream, so I decided to go to college, something my fiancé had discouraged. Partly out of spite for his low opinion of me, I applied to Harvard and was somehow accepted. Off I went, but the culture shock was extreme. I struggled but graduated, unsure of what was next."

Writes Emilee Hackney, in "I Hadn’t Planned on a Love Triangle/Bring on the ticks, bears and ice storms, but don’t make me choose between two men" (NYT gift link).

She was hiking the Appalachian Trail with the idea of being alone — a good trick for finding romance.

"California hits the brakes on the drive-thru boom/The American institution faces bans designed to stop people eating in their cars so much."

A headline in The London Times.

“Hopefully this will help encourage people to just, you know, socialise more, too, because drive-thrus, you’re just like waiting,” Commissioner Beverly Shotwell told The San Francisco Chronicle. “There’s not a lot of human interaction.”

That's what we need, more lines snaking around indoors. People will get to know each other. We'll chit chat and flourish.

Or everyone will order and pay on their iPhone then park and some person or robot comes out and hands them a bag and they drive off. 

You don't have to look, and you don't have to look and see anything other than a bodyguard.

Link to Instagram.

"Every summer, my husband, my daughter, and I stay with my mother out East so my child can spend time outside the city in an area I remain attached to from my childhood."

"Without my mom’s generosity, we could not afford to be there. I realize that having access to all this when I haven’t made the right career choices, shorted the market at a moment of crisis, or robbed a bank to be able to afford my own Hamptons house is deeply fortunate. And yet, as I’m often reminded during a flare-up with my mother over how to properly cut a $13 Il Buco filone (apparently, I saw bread too 'wavily' and ruin the rest of the loaf for straight-slicers), Chekhov’s greatest dramas were multigenerational tragicomedies set in country homes."

Writes Lucy Boyle, in "'I’m Sorry You’re in This Beautiful House We Pay For!'/There’s a glut of middle-aged children living with their parents in the Hamptons for the summer" (New York Magazine).

I'm interested in this tale of petty woe not because I've ever stayed at any beach house owned by my parents — I have not — but because we — in the midst of our summer here in our year-round home — took the half-hour drive out to the American Players Theater last week and saw "Uncle Vanya."

The troubles in "Uncle Vanya" were nothing like what we're seeing with these "middle-aged children" in the Hamptons. They're irked by rules about using coasters, taking out the trash, and not stealing things. Boyle gets a psychotherapist to analyze the parents: "When the house is full of the grandkids and the grandkids’ and kids’ friends, they’re kind of in the background. One way they can become the foreground and say ‘I am here’ is to foreground their ownership and possession.'"

"But it’s a familiar thought that new technologies lead to de-skilling, the erosion of capacities people used to cultivate."

"Socrates wasn’t wrong to worry that the widespread adoption of writing would take a toll on our powers of memory and attention...."

Writes the NYT Ethicist in "My Partner’s Dependence on Chatbots Is Becoming a Problem. How Do I Tell Him? One reason I love my partner is his sharp mind and critical thinking. Using A.I. for every decision is something I don’t understand."

"[O]ne risk in downloading deliberation to a machine is that your life will, in a certain sense, cease to be yours, because it won’t be your reasoning and judgment that guide it.... [And] your partner is degrading his relationships with real people.... It’s understandable that you’re feeling crowded out.... [H]e’s brought a third party to this two-person relationship, and it’s talking too much."

She's advised to just talk with him directly. She had to go to a third party — the NYT Ethicist — to figure that out. Why didn't she use her sharp, critical mind to get there — or somewhere! — on her own?

"Dog owners love pretending dogs are these magical social connectors, but in reality they just attract endless unwanted interactions with random weirdos."

"Every walk becomes an open invitation for strangers to stop you for pointless conversations about dogs. Suddenly some bloke you’ve never seen before is standing there for 15 minutes talking about breeds, dog food, dog behaviour or telling you stories about his own mutt while you awkwardly stand there wanting to leave. Half the people that approach dog owners are bizarre as fuck too. I never once understood why I was expected to happily stand around talking to random strangers in the middle of nowhere just because they spotted a dog. And honestly, I’m convinced a lot of dog owners enjoy this because the dog gives them instant validation and attention from other people. The animal becomes a social prop."

From a rant at Reddit called "I dated a dog owner and this is what I found." I'm only quoting one point on what is a 5-point list. To get the full effect, read the whole thing.

The ranter has a very receptive audience, because it's on the Subreddit "Dogfree: We Don't Like Dogs." It's not really anti-dog so much as anti-dogpeople: "This is a subreddit for those who do not like or own dogs to discuss modern-day dog ownership and its effects on society. This is our corner of the world. Weigh-in from dog owners is off topic and disallowed. Thank you for respecting our space."

"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).

"I kissed Bryan, a gardener, on his red leather couch. I kissed Ray, a painter, in his lofted bed and smashed my head into his ceiling fan."

"Andrew 1 kissed me at the Met in front of a painting of hell. 'Sometimes I think this is hell,' he said, gesturing around us before putting his mouth on mine. Andrew 2 seemed confident over text but wary in person. He surprised me with a smooch on a street corner while we waited for the light to change.... Haden, a sommelier, met me to walk a friend’s dog. We kissed kneeling on the welcome mat while our hands fumbled to free the pug from her harness. Thomas, a surfer, walked me to the subway after playing pool at a dive bar. He planted one on me outside the C train.... When men asked why I was single, I told them it was because my partner of 20 years walked out on me with as much warning as one might get before an earthquake.... In return, the men were unexpectedly kind. I had heard so many horror stories about the emotional capacity of the male species, but these guys told me I didn’t deserve to be treated that way...."

Writes Erin Chack, in "From Kissing One Guy in 20 Years to 11 in a Month My husband leaving nearly broke me. I tried to put myself back together by dating for the first time in my life" (NYT)(gift link, because I think it's a well-written essay).

"[Eric] Stewart came up with the idea for the song after his wife, to whom he had been married for eight years at that point, asked him why he did not say 'I love you' more often to her."

"Stewart said, 'I had this crazy idea in my mind that repeating those words would somehow degrade the meaning, so I told her, "Well, if I say every day 'I love you, darling, I love you, blah, blah, blah,' it's not gonna mean anything eventually." That statement led me to try to figure out another way of saying it, and the result was that I chose to say "I'm not in love with you," while subtly giving all the reasons throughout the song why I could never let go of this relationship.'"

From the Wikipedia article, "I'm Not in Love."

Researched this morning because the song Meade chose for his sunrise video got me thinking about lyrics that say the opposite of the meaning the singer conveys:

"That's the precise point, 1 minute and 10 seconds in, where I clicked off the audiobook."

I wrote, 2 days ago, in what I called "a short, enigmatic blog post." I said, "I think anyone, using AI, can now easily discover what book is being talked about."

Shortly after posting, I tested AI and added the story of how it failed to identify the book. The problem was that the language I found so off-putting — "For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land" — wasn't written by the book's author. It was the book's epigraph, a quote from "Moby-Dick," a quote that at least 2 other authors have used. AI never found the book I'd been listening to. 

At that point, I became curious enough to go back to the audiobook and I listened to the whole thing. It was a book I'd blogged about last Tuesday after reading a NYT column about it. The column was called "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking." I have a long-running problem with the word "heartbreaking," and I blurted out "Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy."

West = Lindy West. The book is "Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane" (commission earned). And I'm going to stand by my blurted-out opinion: It is not heartbreaking. It's dangerous bullshit. 

Let me quote from page 123, where the author call herself a “people pleaser" and calls "people pleaser" "a hideous misnomer for a hideous behavior." Boldface added:

“People pleasing” is never about pleasing people—it’s about the pleaser avoiding discomfort, confrontation, accountability. It’s a manipulation, a rot that threatens all my relationships, not because it makes me “too nice” and vulnerable to exploitation, but because it makes me a liar who isn’t willing to do the hard work of love.

"Food can sew the seeds of love...."

I'm reading this in The New York Times: "Are You in a Restaurant Gap Relationship? You check Resy by the hour. Your date couldn’t care less. A misalignment in dining tastes is the ultimate test of compatibility."

I've got a homophone gap in my relationship with The New York Times.

ADDED: The trendy use of the word "gap" began in the 1950s, with anxiety over the Cold War. There was talk of the "bomber gap" and the "missile gap." This was satirized in "Doctor Strangelove" (1964):

"I think it would be extremely naive of us, Mr. President, to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Soviet expansionist policy. I mean, we must be increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over other mineshaft space, in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out of these superior numbers when we emerge! Mr. President, we must not allow a mine shaft gap!"

We boomers remember the talk of the "generation gap" in the 1960s, but that got started with a Look magazine article in 1967 titled  "The Generation Gap" — in a deliberate play on "missile gap." 

"In earlier writing, [Lindy] West presented her union with the musician Ahamefule Oluo... as a kind of feminist fairy-tale ending."

"'My Wedding Was Perfect — and I Was Fat as Hell the Whole Time,' said the headline of a 2015 column she wrote in The Guardian. But if the wedding was idyllic, West reveals in 'Adult Braces,' the marriage was not. Almost from the beginning, she writes, Aham conditioned their relationship on his being able to sleep with other women. She gave in because she was desperate to keep him, but his dalliances made her intolerably insecure. Because West lived in a left-wing milieu in which nonmonogamy is common, she felt an extra layer of shame over her inability to accept Aham’s extramarital sex life. ('At the time, being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles,' she writes.) Her anguish was exacerbated by an excruciating degree of bodily self-hatred, which, as she knows, contradicts the persona she’s built her career on. 'Do you think I have ever felt like I deserved to demand anything from men?' she asks.... [Aham] used her politics against her; West reports that Aham, who is half-Nigerian, 'believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership.'... [At the end of 'Adult Braces,' West writes] 'If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.'"

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking" (NYT).

Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy.

"Ilsa was only 19 when she went gaga for Lazlo, who was 37. That's how she ended up married before she understood mature adult love..."

"... which she found with Rick. Now Rick is 37 when Yvonne is 19 and she's got a crush on Rick, but he rejects her. Maybe that's not just his wounded coldness. Maybe it's more he's not a sexual predator like Lazlo."

That's a prompt I wrote to Grok, after watching half of "Casablanca" last night while Meade was downstairs watching Purdue lose its "Elite 8" game.