"Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2023 is authentic.... A high-volume lookup most years, authentic saw a substantial increase in 2023..."

"... driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.... Although clearly a desirable quality, authentic is hard to define and subject to debate—two reasons it sends many people to the dictionary."

Announces Merriam-Webster.

They call attention to a headline I hadn't noticed and don't feel I even need to understand: "Three Ways To Tap Into Taylor Swift’s Authenticity And Build An Eras-Like Workplace."

That article came out a month ago in Forbes, which tells us: "Swift’s events brim with energy, carried by the thunderous voices – some melodious, others less in tune – of thousands: the opposite of how work feels today. According to recent data, 60% of employees are emotionally detached, and one in five is miserable."

Why would anyone want the workplace to feel like a pop concert? Why would the answer involve the concept of "authenticity"?

Take Hannah Shirley, a 23-year-old tech worker who recently went viral for pointing out that her job was “like a full-time acting gig.” She tik-toked one consequence of this: feeling “drained — especially mentally, sometimes even physically — from the character that …we play at work.”...

A Taylor Swift lyric is quoted: “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism? Like some kind of congressman?”

Forbes goes on:

What happens during an Eras event that makes it so engaging? There is realness, empathy, kindness, listening, a narrative (or journey-like) space big enough for all to partake and feel whole with oneself and others. The whole experience is devoid of pretension. Take this recipe and break it into three precepts – avoid alienation, increase authentic living and balance external pressure – and you have a roadmap for creating an Eras-like workplace culture....

I don't see how merger with a huge crowd is a feeling that you could — or would want — to take into the workplace. Even if I did, I wouldn't think of it as "authenticity." 

***

I've written about the word "authentic" many times on this blog. A few examples.... (and the first thing I see, strangely enough, has Taylor Swift in it):

On March 20, 2010, I quoted John Hinderaker saying "Much as Bob Dylan was the most authentic spokesman for his generation, Taylor Swift is the most authentic spokesman for hers." I say: "that's a trick assertion, since Bob Dylan was never about authenticity." I quoted Sean Wilentz:

During the first half of the concert, after singing "Gates of Eden," Dylan got into a little riff about how the song shouldn't scare anybody, that it was only Halloween, and that he had his Bob Dylan mask on. "I'm masquerading!" he joked, elongating the second word into a laugh. The joke was serious. Bob Dylan, né Zimmerman, brilliantly cultivated his celebrity, but he was really an artist and entertainer, a man behind a mask, a great entertainer, maybe, but basically just that—someone who threw words together, astounding as they were. The burden of being something else — a guru, a political theorist, "the voice of a generation," as he facetiously put it in an interview a few years ago — was too much to ask of anyone.

On June 17, 2015, I talked about a Slate writer's advice to Hillary Clinton that she should "offer voters her authentic, geeky self. I said "We've been seeing the word 'authentic' a lot lately — what with Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal. There's this idea we seem to like that everyone has a real identity inside and that if we've got an inconsistent outward presentation of ourselves it would be wonderful for the inner being to cast off that phony shell. But 'authenticity' can be another phony shell...."

On December 19, 2017, I wrote about Facebook's purported goal of "authentic engagement." I said:

Facebook wants you to engage... with Facebook. They want the direct interface with the authentic person, not for some other operation to leverage itself through Facebook. And it makes sense to say that the exclusion of these interposers makes the experience better for the authentic people who use Facebook.... 

On a more metaphysical level: What is authentic anymore? What is the authentic/artificial distinction that Facebook claims — authentically/artificially — to be the police of? Is there an authentic authentic/artificial distinction or is the authentic/artificial distinction artificial?

AND: I'm reading a book that I think has a lot to say about the authentic/artificial distinction. You can tell by the title: "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" (Subtitle: "A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace"). But the word "authentic" never appears in the book, and the word "artificial" only appears in the context of "artificial spit" ("it’s called Zero-Lube. It’s an actual pharmaceutical product").

On March 9, 2018, I blogged about something Nancy Pelosi said about "RuPaul's Drag Race." According to The Hollywood Reporter, she "suggested that politicians could learn a thing or two from Ru's girls: 'Authenticity. Taking pride in who you are. Knowing your power....'" Reading the comments on my post, I added:

Everyone jumps on that word "authenticity." "I mean, I'm all for people doing what they want -- except for misusing words like 'authenticity'" (fivewheels); "Authenticity? A man dressed as an over-the-top woman is authentic?" (Annie C); and the inevitable "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means" (Ignorance is Bliss). Yeah? Well, when a person putting on a show is in costume and makeup, you could say he's an authentic showperson. And, anyway, what makes you think you're so authentic? 

My mind drifted back to this 1967 song by Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": 

chameleons changing colors while a crocodile cries
people rubbing elbows but never touching eyes
taking off their masks revealing still another guise
genuine imitation life
people buying happiness and manufactured fun
everybody doing everybody done
people count on people who can only count to one
genuine imitation life

"Circular, and dark blue, with a Tupperware-style lid, it is precisely the kind of vessel you’d transport a soup or salad in."

"I’ve even sealed it inside a freezer bag, to contain any leaks. Or smells. I walk slowly and with care across Westminster Bridge, because any trip could prove disastrous. As I enter St Thomas’ Hospital and head for the infection department on the fifth floor, I realise the object I’m carrying is still warm, and, despite my preparations, I’m sure I can detect a faint whiff of something ripe, like camembert. It is, in a word, a turd. Freshly laid, and brimming with bacteria, the doctors I’m delivering it to believe such faeces could be the future of medicine. I’ve carried mine across London to be made into capsules – that someone else will ultimately eat...."

 
Writes Linda Geddes, in "Keep taking the crapsules: how I became a faecal transplant donor" (The Guardian).

Sushi tero — sushi terrorism... contaminating the food at the kaitenzushi — conveyor-belt restaurant.

From "Licking things at sushi train restaurants, the latest viral Japanese trend" (WaPo):

Such scenes would elicit disgust anywhere. But they have set off a national wave of revulsion in Japan, known for its exacting standards of both hygiene and politeness. This week, Sushiro, a conveyor belt sushi restaurant chain where one of the most-viewed recent videos was filmed, took the rare step of submitting a complaint to the police about a boy who licked unused cups and soy sauce bottles and touched other people’s sushi after licking his fingers.... 

What was "deeply good" about Harry Reid?

"Few people have done more for this state and this country than this driven, brilliant, sometimes irascible, deeply good man from Searchlight, Nevada."

Said Barack Obama, quoted in the Washington Post account of yesterday's memorial service for Reid.

It's the "deeply" that gets you. It draws so much attention to "good." We might have let it go — was Harry Reid good? — if "deeply" hadn't forced us to stop and stare.

I haven't used my "deeply (the word!)" tag since last May.

Here's the original post — in 2014 — where I created the tag.

There are so many trite usages — deeply in love, deeply disappointed, deeply religious, thinking deeply, deeply troubled, deeply concerned, deeply offended, deeply regret — and "deeply" is deeply embedded in constitutional law doctrine with the phrase "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition."

I went back into my own archive to see how I had used it over the years and, funnily enough, the first thing on my list was about something Obama famously said about Kamala Harris:

1. "Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded," wrote Garace Franke-Ruta, explaining "Why Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' Comment Was a Gaffe."...

Oh, what's not a gaffe these days? 

But back to the memorial service. Biden and Pelosi spoke too, and both of them told a joke premised on the reputation Reid had for being untalkative. 

Here's Biden joke : "Harry and I both liked to talk a lot... I’m just testing whether you’re asleep yet."

Here's Pelosi's: "He was a man of few words — and he wanted everyone else to be a person of few words."

They kept it light. There was an opportunity to go much lighter on the man-of-few-words theme — man of even fewer words now, ha ha — or to go much more deeply....

But I won't end with the end of Hamlet. I will lighten up and give Chuck Schumer the last word, because who doesn't love kissing and because I have a "saliva" tag that I get a kick out of using:

It was election night 2006, when Democrat Claire McCaskill won her race in Missouri, a victory that gave control of the Senate to Democrats, and Reid rushed over and kissed McCaskill through the television screen.

“His lips remained attached to the TV screen for a full 10 seconds,” Schumer said. “I had to get up and wipe the copious spittle off the TV screen.”

"An early trickle of retirements from House members in competitive districts is often the first sign of a coming political wave."

"In the 2018 cycle, 48 House Republicans didn’t seek re-election — and 14 of those vacancies were won by Democrats. Now Republicans are salivating over the prospect of reversing that dynamic and erasing the Democrats six-seat advantage." 

From "Why Democratic Departures From the House Have Republicans Salivating/A growing number of Democrats in battleground districts are either retiring or leaving to seek higher office, imperiling the party’s control of the House and President Biden’s expansive agenda" (NYT).

ADDED: An emailer wanted to know the purpose of a post like this, devoid of explication of what to think about the NYT. You can read the email and my response in this new post.

ALSO: I do wish I'd given this my "saliva" tag. I'll add it now. Maybe that will prod David along in his personal thinking.

"A team of researchers in the Netherlands has discovered what may be a set of previously unidentified organs: a pair of large salivary glands..."

"... lurking in the nook where the nasal cavity meets the throat. If the findings are confirmed, this hidden wellspring of spit could mark the first identification of its kind in about three centuries. Any modern anatomy book will show just three major types of salivary glands: one set near the ears, another below the jaw and another under the tongue. 'Now, we think there is a fourth,' said Dr. Matthijs Valstar, a surgeon and researcher at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and an author on the study, published last month in the journal Radiotherapy and Oncology."

The NYT reports. I need to make a new tag for this: anatomy. I've got a lot of old posts that can take this tag, but I hadn't made it before.

Perhaps this new structure could have something to do with the mystery of the loss of the sense of smell, something I wish researchers were more interested in.

Remember when we all laughed at Mitt Romney for blowing out the candles on his birthday cake...

... by pulling them out of the cake — one by one — and blowing on them individually? He was mocked as some sort of germophobic freak.

But look at the video now, and you'll think it's not enough — he needs to turn away from the cake and blow in the opposite direction or the entire tradition of candles on a birthday cake is over.

That was a bit over a year ago. I noticed it just now because I'd gone into my "birthday" tag because — in last night's café — the first commenter, Andrew, asked me, "Did you forget that today was Bob Dylan's birthday?"

Last night, I'd said, "I’m not interested in birthdays. Maybe when he turns 80. Otherwise, he’s just old. I’m glad he’s alive. I don’t even celebrate my own birthday. I’m not a child." This morning, I thought, I probably blogged it when he turned 70, and I looked to see, because I think I'm pretty consistent about some things, and here it is, from 2011, "Bob Dylan turns 70," with just the line, "Thanks for staying alive, Bob!"

A commenter questions me for not making a bigger deal of it, and I respond by front paging his remark and saying I'm not interested in birthdays. And I also do something that I almost did last night in response to the commenter's prod: I look up "birthday" in the Dylan song-lyrics archive. There are 2 hits, and I analyze them and conclude that Dylan's not interested in birthdays either. There's a good chance I picked up my attitude from him, because these songs come from albums that got written on my soul when I was a teenager.

Back to Romney... Let me credit Eater for saying at the time, "Maybe Everyone Should Blow Out Their Birthday Candles Like Mitt Romney/What if he’s not weird and you’re just gross?"

People jumped at the chance to mock the senator’s “bizarre” candle extinguishing method, calling him awkward and even “deeply weird.” But Romney’s candle-blowing technique is not all that strange — just more sanitary.... [B]lowing out candles the standard way, over a birthday cake, increased bacterial levels on the cake by some 1,400 percent.... The standard method for blowing out candles is the weird ritual here, blessing a birthday cake with the dispersion of hot slobber....

The social sanctioning of people who deviate from social norms, even with good reason, isn’t a surprise. Food rituals have significance in social bonding and relationships; in the case of birthday cakes, Smithsonian magazine reported that the practice of blowing out the candles makes people enjoy the cake more, with studies showing that the ritual creates a special moment that gives people a warm and fuzzy feeling....

Not anymore!

There's no crying in baseball, and now, there's no spitting in baseball.

Not anymore.

I'm seeing the front-page teaser at WaPo: "No more spitting in baseball? Safety proposals would bar many MLB staples." The article is "MLB proposes safety plan that covers everything from sunflower seeds to lineup card exchanges." Excerpt:

A baseball game with no spitting? Yes, and that includes sunflower seeds, a staple for many modern ballplayers.

Players and coaches “must make every effort to avoid touching their face with their hands (including to give signs), wiping away sweat with their hands, licking their fingers, whistling with their fingers, etc.” There would be no bat boys or bat girls, and balls that are put in play and touched by multiple players — a groundout, a relay throw — would be removed and exchanged for a new baseball.

And no spitballs!



From the comments at WaPo:

I need a guy to explain this to me. i work in an office with tons of guys, all ages, and I have never, ever seen one of them spit. At their desk, in a meeting, on the phone, walking to a customer meeting, never. Why, then is it required for sports people to spit? Can’t they just swallow it? Is it contaminated or something?

Ha ha. It's funny, the presumed gender difference. It's a man problem... or prerogative. This made me think of a post I wrote 16 years ago: "Freud and the counterculture girl":

"Ordinary speech can emit small respiratory droplets that linger in the air for at least eight minutes and potentially much longer..."

"... according to a study published Wednesday that could help explain why infections of the coronavirus so often cluster in nursing homes, households, conferences, cruise ships and other confined spaces with limited air circulation. The report, from researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the University of Pennsylvania, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal. It is based on an experiment that used laser light to study the number of small respiratory droplets emitted through human speech. The answer: a lot."

From "Experiment shows human speech generates droplets that linger in the air for more than 8 minutes" by Joel Achenbach (in WaPo).

How did we ever sit together in restaurants and talk and eat? Saliva was always constantly flying about and getting up our nose and into our mouth and onto our food! It was inexpressibly gross. And now that we know, how can we ever eat anywhere near another person... at least another person whom we wouldn't feel okay about French kissing? How can we talk with anyone other than over the internet? Human life as we have known it is over... but we can't say that. What would be the point? Life is too unhealthful to be lived?

Louder speech produces more droplets, [the researchers] note. The paper estimates that one minute of “loud speaking” generates “at least 1,000 virion-containing droplet nuclei that remain airborne” for more than eight minutes.

Okay, so maybe just tweak human life. Make improvements. Speak, but speak quietly.



AND:



PLUS: Here's a game for your coronavirus lockdown: "Say It Don't Spray It - The Word Game That Gets You Wet! The Ultimate Party Game That Brings Uncontrollable Laughter!"

Say It Don't Spray It is a hilarious variation on the category game that most people have played at one time or another! It is amazing how just a small amount of water creates a tremendous amount of anticipation, funny faces and general hilarity.

Can Democrats please control the dispersion of their bodily fluids in this time of airborne diseased droplets?

Gross metaphor in this headline at The Hill: "Democrats salivate over Obama coming off sidelines."

Let me get past the headline. Excerpt from the text:

Sources say the former president is ready but that he and Biden are also conscious of the coronavirus pandemic dominating the country and changing the nature of politics....

“No one has heard from him in a long time, and people will pay a lot of money to hear from him, even on a computer,” one longtime Obama ally said....

“Seeing Obama on the campaign trail should excite voters who’ve longed to see him weigh in on current issues and give Biden the needed push,” said Basil Smikle, who served as the executive director of the New York State Democratic Party and a former aide to Clinton. “Obama would also remind voters of his competence while in office, creating a strong contrast between Trump and the Democratic alternative.”

Obama would also create a strong contrast between himself and Biden. The bet is that Obama is so exciting and beloved and missed that we'll just want to do whatever he wants, though we don't get him, we just get Biden. But the appearance of Obama could remind us that we want someone younger and sharper and more vigorous, which points to Trump.

I'm fascinated by the unintentional ambiguity of the headline "This teen got vaccinated against his mother’s wishes."

I'm looking at "This teen got vaccinated against his mother’s wishes. Now, he’ll testify before Congress" (WaPo). Fine. I know the story. Ethan Lindenberger, after he turned 18, went and got his own vaccinations.

His mother, Jill Wheeler, told Undark, an online science magazine that first reported Lindenberger’s story, that her son’s decision was "like him spitting on me, saying 'You don’t know anything, I don’t trust you with anything.' "

Interesting topic. Feel free to expound on it in the comments.

What I want to talk about is the fanciful idea floating from the poorly written headline — that there could be a vaccination that would give you immunity not from a medical disease but from your mother's wishes — as if the dreams from your mother are analogous to disease and infect you and degrade and destroy you.

Dreams from your mother... it makes me think of "Dreams From My Father" — that strange old book that created a persona who came to be embraced as a President of the United States. And I wonder, did Ethan Lindenberger have a father? I can see hidden in the URL for the WaPo article — teen-got-vaccinated-against-his-parents-wishes-now-hell-testify-before-congress — that there were parents but the headline as written leaves us with only the mother.

Searching the article for "father," I find only this, "According to Lindenberger’s Reddit post, his father was less resistant to the idea since he was of legal age," and I infer that both parents were involved in withholding vaccination from Lindenberger when he was a minor, but dad is keeping his distance from the current public dispute. Dad sounds pliable or noncommittal or weak — leaving the mother alone as she worked her will and then leaving the boy alone when he became a man.

"Ok then. My day has started. I just need to go read the article on the Delta airline napkin thing and I'll get out of bed."

That's the top-rated comment on "A Florida politician allegedly made a habit of licking men’s faces. She has now resigned" (WaPo).

I had not noticed "the Delta airline napkin thing," but I looked it up. Here" "Delta nudged passengers to slip their number to their ‘plane crush’ on napkins. Now the airline is sorry." (WaPo).

Falling in love on an airplane is the kind of story you only ever hear in a bar or see in a Lifetime movie. But for a brief time this winter, Delta Air Lines wanted to help passengers make it a reality — by gently nudging them to hit on other passengers. With cocktail napkins.

“Be a little old school,” said the small print on the napkin, advertising Diet Coke. “Write down your number & give it to your plane crush. You never know ...” There was a little space on the napkin where flirtatious passengers could write down their name and another space for their number. The larger print said, “because you’re on a plane full of interesting people and hey,” again, “... you never know.”...

Beyond dehumanizing Trump officials and on to dehumanizing Trump opponents who merely caution against the dehumanization of Trump officials.

Yesterday, we looked at Jennifer Rubin's creepy approval of disrupting the restaurant meals of Trump officials such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I say "creepy," because Rubin assures us that she's above such uncouth behavior, but she certainly understands the new trend in political expression and subtly nods permission: "[I]t is both natural and appropriate for decent human beings to shame and shun...".

Less than a day after Rubin's column went up in The Washington Post, the newspaper published an editorial, "Let the Trump team eat in peace." The editors made clear that they think the "terrible violations of human rights at the border" — "demonizing immigrants" — is "no ordinary policy dispute," but...

We nonetheless would argue that Ms. Huckabee, and [Kirstjen] Nielsen and [Stephen] Miller, too, should be allowed to eat dinner in peace. Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think for a moment how many Americans might find their own special moment. How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?

Down that road lies a world in which only the most zealous sign up for public service. That benefits no one.

That is, they might not mind if the interference with restaurant life could be limited to political officials who do things that WaPo editors think are truly hateful, but if ordinary people assume the authority to decide what counts as "no ordinary policy dispute" and to act out in restaurants, then eating in restaurants will lose its charm, and Washington will fill up with those awful characters who only want to get work done and will forgo the pleasures of fine dining.

Imagine the zealots who will take over! You need the kind of people who care about going out to restaurants, people like WaPo editors, who certainly don't want anyone screaming "Baby murderer!" in their face.

But let's look at the comments on that editorial. I'm sure the editors thought they'd expressed firm opposition to Trump alongside their carefully reasonable plea for peace in restaurants. Here's the highest-rated comment:

Oh shut up with the groveling, Fred Hiatt [WaPo's editorial page editor] or whoever wrote this drivel.

These Trump collaborators are the "Good Germans" of the day and they deserve every bit of public shaming and shunning they get. They're lucky they don't get spit on when they slither out in public.

Another commenter responds:

Drivel indeed ... they deserve no peace.

There is no rest for the wicked.

And another:

Well... This admin certainly has given us NO peace or rest since day 1 of the orange "American carnage". But they certainly have been busy amassing the "piece" for themselve and their filthy rich donors. Each new day is full of new absurdities, lawlessness and outrageous lies and ignorant tweets. And now thousands of faceless, defenseless kids lost in the Trump Baby Prisons...

So... We let them eat in peace until when? When they start delivering children MADE orphans to work farms? When they start dumping the undocumented children in the middle of nowhere in C America in the dark of the night? When they start carting them to the ovens? When would it be okay? When?

Another highly-rated comment is: "Give them hell and spit in their food.. They are not welcome in polite society," which is followed up by "like 'the help'" (a reference to a movie where shit is baked into chocolate pie).

ADDED: On reread, I'm seeing that I wrote "if ordinary people assume the authority to decide what counts as 'no ordinary policy dispute.'" My ordinary writing policy is not to let a word repeat like that unless there's a good reason, but one "ordinary" is in quotes and I can't think of a good synonym for the "ordinary" in "ordinary people" — even with the assistance of Meade's singing "Everyday People" — so I'm racking my brain for a justification for the repetition.



And different strokes for different folks/And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo-bee/Ooh, sha sha/We got to live together...

Maybe you want to talk about the "drool" flowing from the corners of Joe Kennedy's mouth as he delivered the Democratic response to Trump's SOTU.

I'd like to know who thought it was a good idea to pose a Kennedy in front of a car in a place called Fall River?



I know it's a vocational high school where the students work on cars, but the hood up on a car is a roadside signal of distress, and the words "fall" and "river" had us thinking about Mary Jo Kopechne.

As for the "drool," I think it's obvious that Kennedy overlubricated his mouth, perhaps out of fear that he'd make the devastating Rubio mistake and experience an overwhelming need for water as he gave the response to the SOTU. To me the "drool" is a symbol for what's bad about partisan politics. One party has its problem — too dry!! — and then the other party comes in and instead of correcting to a moderate position goes too far the other way — too wet!!!

And speaking of too wet... if you drive your car badly in Fall River and fall in the river, you'll get too wet and you might drown. And no matter how much the Democratic Party thinks we might love another Kennedy — another Clinton not good enough for you? we got another Kennedy! — the Kennedy brand is badly tainted by Chappaquiddick. And Chappaquiddick is due for further examination in this time of #MeToo and The Reckoning. Let's go through all of the story of the Kennedy dynasty from the point of view of enlightened women today.

Democratic Party, you need to process your Kennedy material into the present day, where we do not accept the subordination of women anymore. And when you're done with all that, you can roll out your new Kennedy. The Kennedy brand, right now, is a broken down car with its hood open, signaling distress.

ADDED: The first time the NYT ever noticed this blog was on October 13, 2004, when I was liveblogging the presidential debate:

"Just after 10 p.m., the Democratic Web blogger Ann Althouse wrote . . . : 'A glob of foam forms on the right side of [George Bush's] mouth! Yikes! That's really going to lose the women's vote.' "

I was all:

Oh, I'm blogging as a Democrat? Well, I read it in the New York Times, so it's probably true. Did Rutenberg read enough of my blog to see that I'm voting for Bush, or is he just concluding from the fact that I don't mind saying that I observed spittle in the corner of Bush's mouth that I must be opposed to him? Maybe Rutenberg is assuming that these bloggers are all so partisan that if they say one thing against a candidate, they must say everything against that candidate.

Facebook is taking action against what it calls "engagement bait."

"For example, 'LIKE this if you’re an Aries!'... starting this week, we will begin demoting individual posts... that use engagement bait."

To help us foster more authentic engagement, teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorized hundreds of thousands of posts to inform a machine learning model that can detect different types of engagement bait. Posts that use this tactic will be shown less in News Feed.

Additionally, over the coming weeks, we will begin implementing stricter demotions for Pages that systematically and repeatedly use engagement bait to artificially gain reach in News Feed.....

[W]e will demote posts that go against one of our key News Feed values — authenticity. Similar to our other recent efforts to demote clickbait headlines and links to low-quality web page experiences, we want to reduce the spread of content that is spammy, sensational, or misleading in order to promote more meaningful and authentic conversations on Facebook.

Facebook wants you to engage... with Facebook. They want the direct interface with the authentic person, not for some other operation to leverage itself through Facebook. And it makes sense to say that the exclusion of these interposers makes the experience better for the authentic people who use Facebook. So I support Facebook's effort to get its rivals out of the way of us authentic people, even if the rivals are no more "artificial" than Facebook itself. But I do know some people — authentic people — who pass along what I think is going to be considered "engagement bait," and a lot of these people aren't too aware of what they are doing. I think (if I understand the linked Facebook post correctly) that only the posts that share "engagement bait" will get demoted and the rest of what this authentic person has to offer will be unaffected.

ADDED: On a more metaphysical level: What is authentic anymore? What is the authentic/artificial distinction that Facebook claims — authentically/artificially — to be the police of? Is there an authentic authentic/artificial distinction or is the authentic/artificial distinction artificial?

AND: I'm reading a book that I think has a lot to say about the authentic/artificial distinction. You can tell by the title: "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" (Subtitle: "A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace"). But the word "authentic" never appears in the book, and the word "artificial" only appears in the context of "artificial spit" ("it’s called Zero-Lube. It’s an actual pharmaceutical product").

"I have been having conversations about Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment for more than 17 years."

Admits Rebecca Traister in "Why the Harvey Weinstein Sexual-Harassment Allegations Didn’t Come Out Until Now."

Back in 2000, in NYC, Weinstein called Traister "a cunt and declared that he was glad he was the 'fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town'" and knocked her boyfriend/colleague down "a set of stairs."

So why didn't she out him? And why didn't any of the other journalists who were there report anything? Photos were taken, but never published. Why did all you people shield him, and why should I listen to you now?

Back then, Harvey could spin — or suppress — anything; there were so many journalists on his payroll, working as consultants on movie projects, or as screenwriters, or for his magazine.

He could only do it because you were complicit. Were you all paid off?

I never really thought of trying to write the story myself. Back then, I didn’t write about feminism; there wasn’t a lot of journalism about feminism. 

There's been plenty of journalism about feminism for the last 50 years, but why did you need a foundation of plenteous journalism about feminism to write about such beastly behavior?

His behavior toward women was obviously understood to be a bad thing—this was a decade after Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas had helped the country to understand that sexual harassment was not just a quirk of the modern workplace, but a professional and economic crime committed against women as a class. But...

The "but" should be, but we the liberal journalists helped everyone forget what we'd learned because it was so important to help Bill Clinton. But Traister's "but" is:

...  the story felt fuzzier, harder to tell about Harvey: the notion of the “casting couch” still had an almost romantic reverberation...

Oh, bullshit. Harvey was another liberal, like Bill Clinton, so you pushed the obvious principles to the side and protected him. The only fuzziness is the blur imposed by politics, and once you let that in, you have no principle.

But another reason that I never considered trying to report the story myself... I remembered what it was like to have the full force of Harvey Weinstein — back then a mountainous man — screaming vulgarities at me, his spit hitting my face. I had watched him haul my friend into the street and try to hurt him. That kind of force, that kind of power? I could not have won against that.

Ridiculous. You were afraid of him because of his physical size and strength in an in-person encounter? What the hell is writing for?! You got your distance. He wasn't around. From a distance, in writing, his "mountainous" physicality is one more thing that makes it easier to portray him as a brute — an ugly brute. The photographs of this man that accompany any article about him stir up only revulsion, not sympathy. Why would you not have won with words?

But Weinstein didn’t just exert physical power. He also employed legal and professional and economic power. He supposedly had every employee sign elaborate, binding nondisclosure agreements. He gave jobs to people who might otherwise work to bring him down, and gave gobs of money to other powerful people, who knows how much, but perhaps just enough to keep them from listening to ugly rumors that might circulate among young people, among less powerful people. For decades, the reporters who tried to tell the story of Harvey Weinstein butted up against the same wall of sheer force and immovable power that was leveraged against those ambitious actors, the vulnerable assistants, the executives whose careers, salaries, and reputations were in his hands.

That was even more material to use against him, and it's material that goes against all you reporters now. If you don't know how to get a story where a corrupt miscreant is using legal maneuverings and payoffs to suppress it, how are you a journalist?!

Something has changed. Sources have gone on the record. It’s worth it to wonder why. Perhaps because of shifts in how we understand these kinds of abuses. Recent years have seen scores of women, finding strength and some kind of power in numbers, come forward and tell their stories about Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump. 

So! Now, we get to the meat of it. When the targets were right wing (or perceived as right wing), like Clarence Thomas all those years ago in the pre-Clinton era, the journalists knew how to get at the story. But they did it so aggressively and brought down such big targets that the protection of Harvey Weinstein was too obvious. The wall of silence broke.

But now our consciousness has been raised. 

Oh, please. You had consciousness before. Take responsibility for the politically skewed reporting that has infected sexual harassment stories since the Clarence Thomas/Bill Clinton combination that shamed political liberals in the 1990s.

There's one more thing, according to Traister:

I saw Harvey Weinstein earlier this year, at a Planned Parenthood celebration. I was struck... by his physical diminishment; he seemed small and frail, and, when I caught sight of him in May, he appeared to be walking with a cane.

So what are you saying? You feel better about kicking a weak little guy? You really were holding back because of his erstwhile mountainousness?

He has also lost power in the movie industry....

This is a confession of the absence of courage in journalism. You should be going after the most powerful people and go after them when they are doing their damage, not tell us about it after age and bad fortune have done half the work of laying him low.

ADDED: "I saw Harvey Weinstein earlier this year, at a Planned Parenthood celebration. I was struck... by his physical diminishment; he seemed small and frail...." How awful to see the words "Planned Parenthood" come up when the subject is the author's comfort in going after someone who is weak and small! This is one more effect of the liberal cocoon. Traister must not have noticed the grisly irony. 

Bill Clinton wrote a novel?

The headline at EW — and linked at Drudge — is "Bill Clinton's first novel to become a Showtime TV series in major deal."

But I guess it depends on what the meaning of writing a novel is:

The former president and bestselling author James Patterson have selected Showtime to adapt their upcoming thriller, The President Is Missing.

Is the title a clue to who wrote the novel?

The novel, set to be published in 2018, tells the story of a sitting U.S. president’s mysterious disappearance with the level of detail that only someone who has held the highest office can know.

So Clinton at least told Patterson some details. Am I supposed to know of Patterson? I had to look up his Wikipedia page. It says:

Patterson has written 147 novels since 1976. He has had 114 New York Times bestselling novels, and holds The New York Times record for most #1 New York Times bestsellers by a single author, a total of 67, which is also a Guinness World Record. His novels account for one in 17 of all hardcover novels sold in the United States; in recent years his novels have sold more copies than those of Stephen King, John Grisham, and Dan Brown combined. His books have sold approximately 305 million copies worldwide.

I guess it's well established that this Patterson character can crank out a book. Clinton aligns with him to feed him some supposedly special details of life as a President or (even more conveniently) to allow the PR to say he did, and it's no surprise studios and networks vie for the privilege of throwing money at them.

“Bringing The President Is Missing to Showtime is a coup of the highest order,” said Showtime president and CEO David Nevins. “The pairing of President Clinton with fiction’s most gripping storyteller promises a kinetic experience, one that the book world has salivated over for months and that now will dovetail perfectly into a politically relevant, character-based action series for our network.”

A kinetic experience lubricated with months of drool? Sounds delicious. 

In the news: Women going where they don't belong.

1. "Republican leaders 'visibly annoyed' after Ivanka Trump enters Oval Office during debt ceiling talks" (Washington Examiner).

According to a Democratic aide, the conversation over spending ended when Ivanka Trump entered the room to say hello. "The meeting careened off topic," the aide said. "Republican leaders were visibly annoyed by Ivanka's presence."

A spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., rejected the idea that GOP lawmakers were annoyed by Ivanka Trump's presence. "This is false," said Ryan spokeswoman AshLee strong.

2. "Democrats dread Hillary's book tour" (Politico).

“Maybe at the worst possible time, as we are fighting some of the most high-stakes policy and institutional battles we may ever see, at a time when we’re trying to bring the party together so we can all move the party forward — stronger, stronger together,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democrat who represents a Northern California district. “She’s got every right to tell her story. Who am I to say she shouldn’t, or how she should tell it? But it is difficult for some of us, even like myself who’ve supported her, to play out all these media cycles about the blame game, and the excuses... There is a collective groan... whenever there’s another news cycle about this.”...

“I’ve always been a looking forward kind of a guy,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), asked the same question on Wednesday. “I think I’ll leave it at that."....

“I look forward to going to every place where she appears,” Sen. John McCain of Arizona said sarcastically. McCain pointed out that he didn’t write a book after losing the 2008 presidential race....

3. This one tips the other way. A woman has her own ultra-special woman's room, and a man is invited in (BBC):

No-one is precisely sure how or why the women in Vigo’s family started weaving byssus [the razor-thin fibres growing from the tips of a highly endangered Mediterranean clam known as the noble pen shell, or pinna nobilis], but for more than 1,000 years, the intricate techniques, patterns and dying formulas of sea silk have been passed down through this astonishing thread of women – each of whom has guarded the secrets tightly before teaching them to their daughters, nieces or granddaughters.

After an invitation to visit Vigo’s one-room studio, I suddenly found myself face-to-face with the last surviving sea silk seamstress, watching her magically spin solidified clam spit into gold.

I slowly approached the small wooden table where Vigo worked, walking past a 200-year-old loom, glass jars filled with murky indigo and amber potions and a certificate confirming her highest order of knighthood from the Italian Republic cast aside on the floor.

“If you want to enter my world, I’ll show it to you,” she smiled. “But you’d have to stay here for a lifetime to understand it.”

In the NYT: "Just after 10 p.m., the Democratic Web blogger Ann Althouse wrote...: 'A glob of foam forms on the right side of his mouth! Yikes! That's really going to lose the women's vote.'"

That was Jim Rutenberg writing about me and other "livebloggers" back in October, 2004. I said:

Oh, I'm blogging as a Democrat? Well, I read it in the New York Times, so it's probably true. Did Rutenberg read enough of my blog to see that I'm voting for Bush, or is he just concluding from the fact that I don't mind saying that I observed spittle in the corner of Bush's mouth that I must be opposed to him?...

The NYT also got my URL wrong and used the term "Web blogger," with doesn't make sense, because "blog" comes from "web log."  Why the second "b"? (But, then, why the second "g" in "blogger"?) Back in the old days, discussions of the word "blog" were insanely common. Many people disliked the sound of the word and felt compelled to say so.

I was thinking about the perverse recognition I received long ago because, watching last night's debate, I recoiled at a blob of spit that bounced forward and then retreated on the right side of Bernie Sanders's mouth. Too bad I don't — I can't! — live blog like I used to. I could even have made a little video clip of the moment, which I can't find now, because the word I remember him saying, the only word I could search for in the transcript, is — of all words! — "the."

I'm fascinated to see that the old NYT article was written by Jim Rutenberg, because the NYT just gave him the position — "media columnist" — that had been empty since the death of David Carr.

“Our hunt for David’s successor has been exhaustive, and we were privileged to have had extraordinary candidates from both inside and outside The Times,” the newspaper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, and its business editor, Dean Murphy, said in a memo to the staff. “Jim brings to the job a passion for the story, a track record in covering the industry and the experienced eye of an astute observer.”

Well, he called me a "Web blogger" and a Democrat, got my URL wrong, and boxed me in as a person concerned with saliva 12 years ago, but I await his columns, none of which have yet appeared.

Of course, I am still a blogger concerned with saliva.

"Even though we have sung China’s praises on this blog and social media, and saw some of the most incredible landscapes imaginable, the truth is we struggled there."

"China turned us into bad people. The pushing, the shoving, the pollution, the spitting, the lack of respect toward the environment and their fellow human beings, the oily food, the wasteful attitude that is now ingrained in their psyche, we could go on. This is not to say we didn’t have great experiences and meet wonderful people, because we definitely did. But those moments were far less common for us. We hate being negative, and it may sound arrogant or pathetic, but that is the truth.... We would snap at each other over small things, and these minor arguments would turn into all-day affairs. Alesha would get angry at me over trivial matters, and I would retaliate. In the end I stopped being the caring partner that I should be. I neglected Alesha’s feelings and she would attack me for neglecting her. I continued to neglect her because I couldn’t stand being attacked. It was a vicious cycle. Alesha started to resent travel, and I grew numb to it. Nothing excited us anymore. Just like you can lose your passion for a hobby when it becomes a job, we’re starting to become jaded with travel...."

From "This Couple Traveled The World Together And Admits It Strained Their Relationship/Social media makes traveling as a couple look like a honeymoon every day. One couple admits that that’s not always the case."

So part of this was that they made travel their job, but at least they were making money, not hemorrhaging money.