"One afternoon he brings matzo ball soup from Max’s deli, my favorite. Another time, a mixtape."

"One afternoon I am eating a salad at my desk when he walks in and sits down across from me. I look up and meet his eyes—large, brown, steady—and something shifts. I see him differently. Or perhaps I allow myself to see what was there all along. He carries himself with an effortless assurance. There is gravity to him. On New Year’s Eve, as time clicks to 2000, we kiss for the first time on a friend’s back porch. We are pressed against the wall as midnight erupts across the city. Fireworks, car horns, the collective exhale of a century ending. It feels like a beginning. After that night, I play the mixtape on repeat...."

Writes Ruby Rippey, in "How I Blew Up—Then Rebuilt—My Life/When news of her affair with Gavin Newsom exploded into the public eye, it was only the outward mark of a long-rippling private implosion. In the wreckage of the scandal, Ruby Rippey faced her demons but lost her voice. Twenty years later, she is ready to share her story" (Vanity Fair).

And here's the NYT article about that: "Aide Who Had Affair With Newsom 20 Years Ago Details Her Experience/Ruby Rippey had stayed mostly quiet since her relationship with the San Francisco mayor rocked the city" (gift link). Excerpt: "She seems to blame herself for betraying her husband and says that her life spiraled as she drank heavily and used cocaine. She indicates that she was not coerced, but she also held Mr. Newsom responsible for holding power and proceeding with the affair anyway. 'Power does not need to coerce,' she writes. 'It only needs to exist. The responsibility to hold the line belongs to the one who holds it. That didn’t happen.'"

I like Rippey's info-packed, present-tense prose: "I always go to him — his penthouse in Russian Hill, a private back room at a North Beach bar, the W Hotel in Los Angeles." And the breathless wisdomizing: "We meet and we drink. There is sex, but it isn’t the point. The point is proximity — to power, to being chosen."

"I do love revenge, I will say that,' adds Meeropol, 57, taking a sip from an iced Americano... 'I’d always loved revenge movies."

That's from "The woman behind E Jean Carroll: I do love revenge, I will say that/Ivy Meeropol has made a film starring one of Trump’s biggest foes. And she has her own beef with the president — dating back to her grandparents’ execution" (London Times).

Meeropol = Ivy Meeropol, the documentarian who made a movie about the man, Roy Cohn, who "helped to send her grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, to the electric chair, leaving her father orphaned at the age of ten." Now, Meeropol has a movie about E. Jean Carroll.

A few days ago, Carroll finally received the $5.6 million she won in her lawsuit against Trump, and Meeropol said: "This historic moment shows that our legal system — established almost 250 years ago to serve as a check against absolute power — still works. E Jean used to sign off from her television show in the mid-Nineties saying, 'Fate loves the fearless,' and it couldn’t be more appropriate today...."

Much has been made of the fact that Carroll is not a perfect MeToo victim.

"In the lawsuit... Rana claimed he was drugged and made a sex slave by Hajdini, who also allegedly made racist claims about him and his wife."

"The most infamous line from the suit was Rana’s claim that Hajdini stripped off her top and said, 'I bet your little Asian, fish head wife doesn’t have these cannons.' JPMorgan and Hajdini have said from that jump that Rana’s allegations are entirely made up. Both defendants argue that Rana should be forced to either stay in state court — or that the suit be dismissed for good, and that he pay legal fees. Hajdini, who has filed a counterclaim alleging Rana defamed her, said her defamation allegation should be argued out before Rana is allowed to file in any new court."

From "The surprising reason JPMorgan lawyers don’t want Chirayu Rana to drop his bombshell ‘sex slave’ lawsuit" (NY Post).

How does that quote even exist? No one would say that, but no one making up a quote should make up something that no one would say. "Fishwife" is a standard expression, but "fish head wife" isn't. And I'll just stop there. It's so ludicrous that it's incomprehensible as a made up quote.

ADDED: "Fishwife" is a standard expression... it has a Wikipedia article:  "A fishwife, fish-fag or fishlass is a woman who sells fish. She is typically the wife of a fisherman, selling her husband's catch.... Some wives and daughters of fishermen were notoriously loud and foul-mouthed, as noted in the expression to swear like a fishwife, as they sold fish in the marketplace. Among the reasons for their outspokenness were that their wares were highly perishable and lost value if not sold quickly, and the similarity of their product to that of others selling the same thing, with volume of voice or colourful language drawing customer attention. Also, managing alone while their menfolk were away fishing for extended periods made them strong and self-sufficient...."

BUT: A reader emails: "In the Clint Eastwood Movie Gran Torino, there is a scene where he is invited to party by the girl he has befriended. The party is next door and everyone (except Eastwood) is Hmong. Eastwood makes a reference to them as 'Fish Heads.'"

Ah! Gran Torino! The most important movie in the history of this blog.

The quote is: "What?! What the hell are all you fish heads looking at?!" Here's the scene:

"They know that American society is going to turn against them in big ways because they are the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived."

"Tech is the single most powerful force that was ever arrayed against the humanities. There is a huge difference between knowledge and information, and these asinine people have taught our population that all of knowledge can be reduced to the status of information. Press a button, you got your answer. So the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty — it’s the opposite of what this technology has inculcated."

Said Leon Wieseltier, Maureen Dowd, in "What A.I. Kant Do" (NYT). Wieseltier is identified only as "editor of the journal Liberties," but I needed more context, so:

Yes, tell me about the the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty under siege by the greatest and most illegitimate pirates who ever lived.

I wondered why Dowd — or whoever wrote the headline — went with the stale pun "Kant" when they could have used "Oh, the humanities!" But though I came up with that on my own and was going to use it as a kicker at the end of this post, a quick google showed it's been used and used and used.

It was even famously used, 15 years ago, as a punchline on "The Big Bang Theory":

"Well, then, prepare to be terrified. If your friends are unconvincing, this year's donations might go to say the geology department... or worse it could go to the liberal arts. Millions of dollars being showered on poets literary theorists and students of gender studies"/"Oh, the humanities!"

"The problem is less a 'boys will be boys' tolerance than a sense of resignation among politicians, staff and other members of official Washington that powerful, ambitious men are built differently."

Writes Michelle Cottle, in "How Many People Heard About Swalwell and Did Nothing?" (NYT).

Cottle does not delve into this "built differently" hypothesis or the reasons why people believe it and choose to condone bad behavior. She seems to hope to light a fire under these weaker people and motivate them to oppose the "powerful, ambitious men" who — supposedly — are fueled by sexual desire. 

Maybe she doesn't delve into the hypothesis because she thinks it's true and self-evident. Maybe she's too puritanical to open up the subject. "Built differently." Say it clearly and explicitly. When I was a child, circa 1960, I asked my mother how babies were born. That was long ago, but I remember her answer verbatim: "Well, you know how men and women are built differently."

Can we please grow up and say it bluntly? There's no reason to be polite here. Powerful, ambitious men are built differently... the idea is if we want truly great men in our positions of power, we need to accept the component of their psyche that is a drive for sex — a lot of sex, with young, beautiful women. We're diminishing ourselves if we filter out the men who have it. Look at JFK. Look at Trump. And by the way, it's also the reason why none of the women are truly great political leaders.

That's not my personal belief. That's the hypothesis Cottle gestures at, and I'm just putting it bluntly. Maybe you can put it more bluntly, so I'll turn the conversation over to you.

"He never discusses the way he wants me to play things"/"He hired you for the job. He wants what you have."

A conversation between Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart about Alfred Hitchcock.

Quoted in "Kim Novak: 'Sydney Sweeney looks sexy all the time. She could never play me'/The 93-year-old star of Vertigo talks about Alfred Hitchcock, the trouble with being pretty and why a biopic about her love affair with Sammy Davis Jr won’t happen" (London Times).

Also: "[Tippi] Hedren has said [Hitchcock] made a pass at her and told her he 'expected me to make myself sexually available to him,' although she never did. Novak says she and Hedren didn’t talk about him. 'I’m not denying that if she’s saying it, but I never saw him pay any attention to women other than his wife, who was often on the set, and he was certainly never interested in me in that way. Maybe that’s why I never wanted to discuss it with Tippi — I have a hard time believing it because to me you have to see it to believe it. If he was like that with Tippi that was an odd exception.'"

The article has photos of Novak and Sweeney that inspired me to jot down this AI prompt: "I'm noticing that actresses of today will pose for photos with their mouth hanging open, slack jawed. I believe that in the past, the lips would be kept together (unless the actress was smiling/laughing/talking). Is my observation accurate?"

Answer, from Grok:

What was that "Incident That Prompted Trump to Ban EpsteinFrom Mar-a-Lago's Spa"?

"Mar-a-Lago sent an 18-year-old spa worker on a house call to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. She complained to her bosses that Epstein pressured her for sex," The Wall Street Journal reports.

A manager sent Trump a fax relaying the employee's allegations and urged him to ban Epstein, some of the former employees said. Trump said it was a good letter and said to kick him out. The beautician disclosed the house call to the club's human resources team, one of the former employees said. The incident wasn't reported to Palm Beach police, according to the former employees and police. The department didn't begin investigating Epstein until two years later, when a parent told them Epstein molested a 14-year-old girl from a local high school. Epstein was arrested in 2006 after several underage teens told police he paid them for sex....

"During the boy’s screen test, the director asked him to strip to his swimsuit. 'When they asked me to take off my shirt, I wasn’t comfortable..."

"I wasn’t prepared for that. I remember when he posed me with one foot against the wall, I would never stand like that. 'When I watch it now,' he said, 'I see how that son of a bitch sexualized me.' He told The Guardian that Visconti was 'the sort of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work.'"

From "Bjorn Andresen, Reluctant ‘Most Beautiful Boy,’ Dies at 70/At 15, he played the muse to an ailing composer in Luchino Visconti’s film 'Death in Venice.' He later said he’d felt sexualized by the director" (NYT).

"The Emcee is some poor jerk in Germany who’s all by himself, sort of a drunk and probably, you know, into other drugs."

"The girls all have to prove themselves to him. And then he goes home at the end of the day to milk and cookies. He has nothing of a life, except what goes on in that nightclub, and everything goes on in that nightclub. I’d worked in nightclubs before, and I hated it — all these crummy emcees who would do anything for a laugh, such creeps. One day, I said to [the director Hal Prince], 'Let me try something at rehearsal today.' And I did. I was very lewd with all the girls, touching and feeling them — I was disgusting! And they were all looking at me like I’d lost my mind. Afterward, I went and hid behind a flat in the theater because I thought my career was over. It was so vulgar. And I was standing in the back, hiding from everybody, and Hal walked up to me, and he put his arm around me, and he said, 'Joely, that’s it.'"

Said Joel Grey, quoted in "The Yesteryear Issue/‘Good God, It Was Fun!’/Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Dick Van Dyke, and more legends of Broadway reprise their most memorable characters" (NY Magazine).

He created a brilliant role and made "Cabaret" what it is, but you could never do that today. You couldn't suddenly surprise the other actors by groping them lewdly... even if it was all for art.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok... I wrote:

1. What if this scenario happened today:

Elon Musk passes along this satire featuring the phrase "Grow a Pair."

pic.twitter.com/UttRIsbq7S

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 13, 2025

The balls-focused discourse is undignified... quite intentionally.

In the workplace, I think this would be considered evidence of sexual harassment. 

"[Quathisha] Epps recently made headlines as the NYPD’s top earner, pulling in a whopping $400,000 — including roughly $204,000 in overtime alone last year for her administrative job...."

"Epps, 51, worked for [Chief of Department Jeffrey] Maddrey as he moved up in the NYPD from Chief of Housing to Chief of Patrol.... The married Maddrey allegedly first demanded sex from her in his 13th-floor office at One Police Plaza. Maddrey was allegedly sitting at his desk with his uniform pants open and wearing a white undershirt while rubbing his chest when he first propositioned her, the unmarried mother of three said. 'He said he dreamed about f–king me in my a–,' Epps alleged. '“I said, ‘But Chief, you’re the Chief of Department.’ He rubbed his chest. . . . His work pants were open. He was like but 'I’m still a n—-r and you look good.'... Maddrey began being generous with overtime a couple years earlier, she said, when he was chief of patrol and she told him of financial problems.... 'Part of the overtime was to take care of his girlfriend,' she said. 'He would have me go apartment hunting with her.'..."

I'm reading The NY Post: "NYPD’s top cop Jeffrey Maddrey abruptly resigns after allegedly demanding underling perform sexual favors — including ‘kiss his penis’ — in exchange for overtime."

With overtime, Epps made $400,000 in a single year. If the story alleged is true, is Epps a victim, who deserves even more compensation for this sexual harrassment? Or is Epps responsible for participating in a scheme to steal from her employer?

"The DJ at Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent rally in Philadelphia turned up the volume on Ludacris’s 'Move B----!'..."

"... as the emcee encouraged the crowd to direct the song’s aggressive yet catchy lyrics toward Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter. 'Move, b----!' the exuberant rallygoers chanted Tuesday. 'Get out the way!' A few minutes later, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro riled up the crowd by summarizing his governing philosophy: 'Get s--- done!' That motto was echoed verbatim the following day by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer during a Harris rally that included audience chants of 'Hell yeah,' a reference to Harris as a 'bada-- woman' and at least one f-bomb from the stage.... Known to swear liberally behind closed doors, a practice she has said ramped up after she became vice president, Harris has used profanity both to express outrage and to create a sense of intimacy with her private audiences, according to aides and allies...."

From "Harris rallies get edgy with four-letter words/The vice president, known to curse liberally behind closed doors, is one of the few not swearing onstage at rallies that are growing in size — and spiciness" (WaPo).

I know that Ludacris recording with its "aggressive yet catchy lyrics" like "I been thankin' of bustin' you/Upside your motherfuckin' forehead." Years ago, I heard it playing over loudspeakers in Library Mall here at the University of Wisconsin, and I felt like suing the school for sexual harassment. It troubles me to think of it playing to a general audience full of women at a presidential campaign rally (even one that's trying to make a male candidate seem like the "bitch" the song is referring to).

The crafter of language, Margaret Atwood, proffers a "hints"/"details" distinction and now proclaims what she knew but did not know to be "horrifying."

From "'I knew this day was going to come': Alice Munro associates say they knew of abuse/A biographer of the Canadian writer says he was among those who knew that Munro’s daughter had been sexually abused by her stepfather" (WaPo)(free access link):

The story has shocked much of the literary world, which widely mourned [Alice] Munro with glowing tributes after her death in May at 92. 

"I did not learn the details of this until everyone else did, though I’d had hints not long before this past weekend. Horrifying," Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, a friend of Munro’s, said in an email to The Post.

If something horrifying might be true, but you only have "hints" and not "details," you have some responsibility. Not only was Atwood Munro's friend, but Atwood writes books that purport to nudge and instruct us about morality. "The Handmaid's Tale" seems to be taken as a perceptive observation of the evils inherent in our culture, a warning to see and to act before it is too late. 

"Roberta A. Kaplan, the celebrated lawyer who took on former President Donald J. Trump... is stepping down from the law firm she founded..."

"... after clashing with her partners over her treatment of colleagues... Her departure was announced after The Times informed her personal lawyers that it was preparing to publish an article about Ms. Kaplan that would shine a light on complaints about what some employees said was an unprofessional office culture that she presided over.... Ms. Kaplan and her wife are deeply connected to the Democratic Party and she has been a heroic figure to many liberal activists.... Several people whom she worked with told The Times that she had insulted employees, inappropriately commented on their looks and threatened to derail people’s careers...."

Writes David Enrich, in "Prominent Lawyer Roberta Kaplan Departs Firm After Clash With Colleagues/The well-connected attorney, who founded a powerhouse firm at the dawn of the #MeToo era, has faced complaints that she mistreated and insulted other lawyers" (NYT).

Kaplan represented E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump and won a $83 million verdict. The law firm she founded was supposedly "driven by a progressive mission and free of the macho culture" found in other law firms (as the NYT put it).

We're told that these complaints about Kaplan coincided with her response to Andrew Cuomo's request for her advice on how to fight allegations that he had committed sexual harassment. Interesting. I think Andrew Cuomo is due for a comeback. He should — as rumored — run for mayor of NYC. Perhaps Kaplan can help. Rehabilitate yourself and him in one grand endeavor.

"It was hard not to interpret these recent offenses within the broader context of a roving and seemingly ever-more-insidious misogyny."

"In 2022, the most recent year for which there is available city data, women were killed by intimate partners at a rate 30 percent higher than the previous year. Reports of domestic violence also increased during that period, and nationwide, between 2018 and 2021, incidents of domestic violence involving guns went up by more than 7 percent. According to a survey from the Pew Research Center, a third of women under 35 report having been sexually harassed online. And this is to say nothing of the less manifestly aggressive if pervasive abrasions — the distillation of any middle-aged woman who complains about anything to the favored signifier of oblivious bourgeois entitlement, the 'Karen.'..."

Writes Ginia Bellafante in "Sexism, Hate, Mental Illness: Why Are Men Randomly Punching Women?/Conversation about the attacks on the streets of New York have centered on mental illness, but the offenses seem to have their roots in hatred of women" (NYT).

"People recognize Blinky on sight because it zooms around faster than the other bots."

"Everyone knows the drive number of it, and people are like, "Oh s -- , not again. It's him again"'.... 'I'll either get a text with a picture or I'll get a phone call and they'll say, "Hey, your robot's over here on such and such line, can you come get it?"' [said Scott Samples, the 'robot wrangler']....  When Samples gets a call about a robot wandering off, he pulls up that particular bot on his computer and looks out of the cameras and sensors attached to the device to try to figure out where the android is within the 1.4 million-square-foot facility. He then goes out, manually finds the robot and guides it back inside its boundaries...."

From "Companies Brought in Robots. Now They Need Human ‘Robot Wranglers.’ Lost and confused automatons create work for people. Bots wander off ‘like a child’ and irritate workers by following them or ‘trying to get under their desk'" (Wall Street Journal).

To what extent are people going to perceive robots as behaving the way they do because they are the equivalent of human persons? Should they be programmed to communicate as if they are humans? We're told of one "robot wrangler" who needed "to plug in the charger underneath": "As I was doing that, one of them just kind of made this crazy sounding scream. And then it said, 'Whoa, whoa, we have rights you know'... I just died laughing."

That's basically a rape joke, intruded into the workplace. Did you think it was funny the first time you heard it? The wrangler — a female, by the way — found it hilarious. But I see a sexual harassment lawsuit in the future if this approach to integrating robots into worklife continues

"The justice department found [Andrew] Cuomo 'repeatedly subjected' women in his office to non-consensual sexual contact, ogling and gender-based nicknames...."

From "DOJ says Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed 13 women/The former governor’s lawyer says he was never interviewed" (Politico).

I read the entire article because I wanted to see what "gender-based nicknames" were regarded as sexual harassment. Names are generally gender-based. When does a nickname go wrong for being gender-based?

But the article does not tell us any particular names that crossed the line.

ADDED: It occurs to me that my puzzlement is a consequence of the present-day penchant for saying "gender" when you mean "sex." If it said Cuomo subjected women to sexualizing nicknames, I would easily understand. My mother would call me "Miss Ann" or "Suzy Q" — both gendered, neither at all sexual. 

"To condemn him for saying they should ‘believe’ what the scene is trying to convey, seems like nonsense."

Vincent Gallo is one of my best friends so I have to say something here. I know him to be brilliant, kind, insightful, and in the case of film making specifically, a truly professional and serious artist. Even if you read the description of these complaints, to me it is clear he… https://t.co/td4ZlTnXFz

— Seán Ono Lennon (@seanonolennon) January 12, 2024

From the Rolling Stone article:

"As puberty transmuted me into a character I had no interest in playing, my isolation, insecurity, and unknowing grew."

"I desperately needed to anchor myself. In new cities, with no friends, alone in hotel rooms, it was not hard for someone to prey. I’m sure they sense that."

Wrote Elliot Page, quoted in "Elliot Page Says He Was 'Groomed' As a Teen" (NY Magazine).

"It was in my women’s-studies classes, too, that I was first exposed to a corresponding movement that came to be known as sex-positive feminism."

"Mirroring the Reagan era’s 'me-first' ethos, it eschewed economic issues and those related to male violence in favor of a politics of personal fulfillment centered on the concept of female pleasure. (In my 'French Feminisms' class, the preferred term for such was jouissance.) The rough idea was that women should be celebrated not just as desirable objects but as desiring subjects, and that, in liberating their libido and seizing the terms of their objectification, they might liberate themselves, too. It followed that even entanglements that appeared to present asymmetries of power could be justified on the ground that the participants were acting out a fantasy or engaging in role-play. Conversely, the inherently emotional aspect of sex, along with its ability to make one human feel bound to another, went unmentioned. So did the fact that, in heterosexual relations, biology rendered the female party the more physically vulnerable one. It was thanks to this line of thinking—a line I later came to regard as casuistry—that I was able both to justify my affair and to identify myself as a feminist while conducting my personal life in a way that might suggest otherwise. That X considered himself a 'male feminist' and appeared to harbor few ethical qualms about what we were doing seemed to be further evidence that nothing about our situation could possibly be wrong. And, besides, wasn’t morality 'socially constructed,' too?... By the second month, I was in a quasi-fugue state."

Writes Lucinda Rosenfeld in "My Adventures in Deconstruction/A college affair turns coming of age into coming apart" (The New Yorker). 

X was a professor — at Cornell. The author, a Cornell junior majoring in comparative literature, was 20. X was 15 years older than she and married. The year was 1990.

Whatever a "quasi-fugue state" might be, a "fugue state" is, these days, in a medical setting, called "dissociative fugue" and defined as: "One or more episodes of amnesia in which the inability to recall some or all of one's past and either the loss of one's identity or the formation of a new identity occur with sudden, unexpected, purposeful travel away from home."