"A day into the silence, I felt like taking a nap, and the urge intensified into thorough exhaustion. I took a walk outside..."

"... and gobbled a few cookies in hopes of a sugar boost, to no avail. I fell asleep before dinner and, after rallying for the evening meditation session, was out for the night by 8:30 p.m. The instructor said she often sees this reaction. Some people experience an adrenaline crash as their stressed minds and bodies adjust to the calm. But it also turns out that suddenly shutting off external stimuli and turning attention inward can demand a startling amount of energy."

Writes Dana Milbank, in "I went into phone-free silence. Something disturbing happened. Suddenly shutting off external signals and focusing inward can demand a startling amount of energy" (WaPo)(free link).

I was surprised to see the cookies, especially the gobbling thereof. Even if cookies are available at a silent retreat, I would think slow, mindful nibbling would be seen as necessary. I mean, gobbling, it suggests obnoxious sounds coming from the mouth, and it is the word we use for the alarming awful sound made by turkeys. 

Be the Zeppo.

I thought Variety's "100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time" was pretty well done, but what I liked best about it was the way it inspired me to write one of my unwritten books. Look:

To my mind, this still from the movie establishes a proposition I've long been aware of: Zeppo was the funniest Marx Brother. For the uninitiated: Zeppo is second from the left. 

Now, for those of you who don't want to read anything written by A.I., it's time to leave. Here's the prompt I took to Grok: "Is it true that in the opinion of those whose opinion counts most Zeppo was the funniest Marx Brother?"

The answer is yes.

First, Groucho said it, repeatedly. Grok writes: "He described Zeppo as having the best natural comic timing and delivery in real life, a dry, deadpan wit that killed in a room, but that Zeppo simply didn’t care enough about performing to push himself forward on screen. Groucho claimed Zeppo could have been the breakout star if he’d wanted it."

Then there was George S. Kaufman, co-writer of "The Cocoanuts" and "Animal Crackers," who "reportedly said Zeppo was the funniest of the brothers in rehearsals and in person." Other authorities who said the same thing included Steve Allen, Woody Allen, and Billy Crystal.

So Zeppo was given the “straight man/romantic lead” role until after "Duck Soup" he quit movies altogether and "became a successful theatrical agent and inventor (he held patents related to the cardiac clamp used in open-heart surgery)."

I was motivated to say: "If the other brothers saw him as the funniest, they had something to strive to excel. Zeppo was maximizing the comedy by performing that role and he didn't have the motivation to excel anyone. He was secure."

Skimming Grok's somewhat lengthy mirroring of what I'd just said, I got a new idea: "I want to expand this into a larger life lesson and write a self-help book — in the manner of 'Let Them' — that would be titled 'Be the Zeppo.'"

1. By "write a self-help book," I meant write a blog post that would earn the tag "Unwritten Books," that is, the blog post you are reading now.

2. Of course, Grok immediately outlined this book for me, replete with subtitle options — like "The Power of Radical Non-Competition" — and 10 chapters — including "The 'Anything Further, Father?' Principle/One perfectly timed sentence beats a ten-minute monologue. The power of strategic silence."

3. Here, you can read everything Grok said.

4. Here's Mel Robbins, the author of "The Let Them Theory," quickly explaining the whole book to Bill Maher. 

5. Anything further?

"In 1969, at the age of 38, just as she was gaining attention for her brawny, abstract paintings, she abandoned the form and initiated her 'General Strike Piece'..."

"... which involved a gradual withdrawal over a period of several months from the art world’s openings and social events, the first step in a long process of distancing herself from her peers.... In August 1971... she undertook another, even more audacious project, 'Decide to Boycott Women,' stating her intention to stop speaking to other women. In her notes on the piece, she suggested it would be temporary.... But it ended up being a practice she continued throughout the rest of her life, mostly, though not entirely, avoiding women (even allegedly once refusing to be helped by a female clerk at a grocery store). The blunt hostility of this piece struck many of her friends and, later, art critics and historians as an act of self-destruction.... 'Lee was very moody, drinking a lot of cheap wine and smoking lots of dope. I was raising my young son and had to ask her to leave after a few days. I remember thinking that she was a kind of warning about what could happen if you mixed art and life too closely.'... A picture of her last decades emerges only in shards and anecdotes. For several years she lived with her parents, until her father filed a restraining order and she was forced to move into her own apartment in the same complex.... She’s like a character in a Kafka story, or Melville’s Bartleby, but funnier, more perverted, more playful and an invention not of another writer’s mind but of her own...."

I'm reading "She Didn’t Speak to Other Women for 28 Years. What Did It Cost Her?/ When it came to using her life in her work, the artist Lee Lozano went about as far as a person can go" (NYT).

Back in the 1970s, one would often read about things like this. I'd thought the culture had lost interest in this sort of thing. I wonder what prompted the revival of interest — wanting to forefront a woman artist? But this woman made a lifelong project out of boycotting women. Are we supposed to believe she sacrificed something she wanted to be able to do?

Here's the comment NYT readers rate highest: "Refusing to speak to other woman is sexist and borderline sociopathic. It is most definitely not art, it's merely an eccentric and fairly selfish personality trait...." That's consistent with my observation that the culture has moved away from seeing weird acting out as art. It's a mental disorder... unless it has the honor of counting as an expression of "identity."

"With subtitles on, I find myself being able to quickly gather what one character has said, look down at my phone, react to a message..."

"... then look up before that character has even finished their line. The viewing experience thus becomes multifaceted and efficient. The subtitles allow us to go on our phone but still absorb the content and gist of the TV show....  And social media itself has encouraged the use of subtitles across the board. It is now a given that most creators add text captions to their videos – without the option to turn them off.... This isn’t simply a trend but a feature anchored in the algorithm itself. Text captions, rather than dialogue, encourage the video to crop up in the TikTok search engine.... It began as an accessibility improvement, but the rapidity with which it has caught on suggests it’s business-oriented and crucial to getting that sweet algorithm boost. The fact that 85% of social media visual content is now watched on mute... coupled with the ease with which AI can generate subtitles without the need for human transcription, means we’re living in a subtitled world – one that is often poorly translated, low-quality and error-ridden...."

Writes Isabel Brooks, in "Most of gen Z watch TV with the subtitles on – and I understand why" (The Guardian).

"By the time she was a teenager, she had anorexia and worried she would 'never be skinny enough to love,' she said."

"At 17, she weighed 88 pounds, and a doctor told her that if she lost any more weight, she could die. She recalls thinking that death 'sounded quiet, it sounded calm,' she writes. 'I knew that if I died, I could stop trying.' Thinness felt safe, she writes, but it was actually the opposite: 'I was dancing with death and getting date-raped and drinking to excess and popping pills like Tic Tacs and exposing myself to all kinds of delicious abuse just to feel something.' She has been in remission from her eating disorder for many years, she said... She writes about an exploratory visit with a fertility expert... [T]he specialist, who treats other celebrities, brought up weight gain: She could 'get away' with putting on only about 20 pounds during pregnancy, including the weight of the baby. That would mean a smaller child, the doctor added, but if she wanted her kid to be taller later on, there was always human growth hormone."

From "At Least Zosia Mamet Can Laugh About It/In her new book, the actress turns her acid wit to Hollywood’s darker side and her own personal struggles" (NYT).

"Scholars who have studied the earlier age of electric vehicles see parallels in their demise in the early decades of the 1900s..."

"...  and the attacks they are facing now. In both eras, electric cars struggled to gain acceptance in the marketplace and were undermined by politics. A big knock against them was they had to be charged and ultimately were considered less convenient than vehicles with internal combustion engines.... Charging and access to fuel were also concerns a century earlier.... They also had to overcome gender stereotypes. Their benefits like quiet, smooth operation were considered by some men to be too feminine, and, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, many models like the Baker Electric were explicitly marketed only to women.... In the fall of 2022, Representative Majorie Taylor Greene [said].... 'There’s nothing more American than the roar of a V-8 engine under the hood of a Ford Mustang or Chevy Camaro, an incredible feel of all that horsepower.' But Democrats, she said, 'want to emasculate the way we drive.'... 'Musk has done everything he could to try to make a Tesla a manly vehicle,' said Virginia Scharff, ... author of... 'Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age.'... But, Ms. Scharff added, Mr. Musk may have gone too far... 'Tesla is so associated with a kind of toxic masculinity now...'..."

From "Electric Vehicles Died a Century Ago. Could That Happen Again? Battery-operated vehicles were a mainstay more than a hundred years ago, but only a few still exist — one happens to be in Jay Leno’s garage" (NYT).

Here's Jay with his Baker:

Here's a charming 1910 ad — "Daddy — Get Me a Baker":

She's very feminine but does seem to know about "the business underneath," the "shaft drive."

"It was just incredibly fast. There was a giant firewall down the side. I could actually feel the heat through the glass."

"Then we were going sideways. I'm not even sure how many times we tumbled, but we ended upside down."

Said passenger John Nelson, quoted in "'Hanging...like bats': Toronto plane crash survivor speaks out after aircraft flips on runway" (ABC News). 

When the plane finally came to a stop, Nelson recounted[,]... the cabin was suddenly quiet before the 80 people onboard -- most of whom were hanging upside down [like] bats in the cabin – attempted to “make a sense of what just had happened. We released the seat belts. I kind of fell to the floor, which is now the ceiling...."

I would have said "I fell to the ceiling, which was now the floor," but I get it and he was there. Do we have video of the scene with 80 people silent, but hanging like bats? 

Here's another view from the outside:

This is INSANE

pic.twitter.com/qegJ1P3wCa

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 18, 2025

"Flow."

I watched this on Max over the weekend and recommend it for the beauty of the visuals — I love the light and the water — and the wordlessness of the storytelling. 

There are various animals — cat, dog, secretary bird, lemur — but I was interested to see the capybara, because I'd just been reading this New Yorker article by Gary Shteyngart, "How the Capybara Won My Heart—and Almost Everyone Else’s/It’s not hard to understand why capys have a cultlike following on Instagram and TikTok. I fell for the giant rodent decades ago."

Looking back at that now, I see that Shteyngart discusses the movie "Flow":

Arlington Cemetery — "It is not a place for politics.... And I will never politicize them."

I've avoided discussing the topic, because I can see that to talk about it is to violate the principle that the military dead should not be politicized. And yet to follow that principle is to cramp political debate about war, and political debate about war should be central to every presidential campaign. And the assertion that this is no place for politics is itself political debate.

But the main reason I'm going to start talking about this issue is because the Kamala Harris X account put up this long tweet yesterday. I've boldfaced the quotes I used for the post title:

As Vice President, I have had the privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery several times. It is a solemn place; a place where we come together to honor American heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice in service of this nation. It is not a place for politics. And yet, as was reported this week, Donald Trump’s team chose to film a video there, resulting in an altercation with cemetery staff. Let me be clear: the former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt. This is nothing new from Donald Trump. This is a man who has called our fallen service members “suckers” and “losers” and disparaged Medal of Honor recipients. A man who, during a previous visit to the cemetery, reportedly said of fallen service members, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” This is a man who is unable to comprehend anything other than service to himself. If there is one thing on which we as Americans can all agree, it is that our veterans, military families, and service members should be honored, never disparaged, and treated with nothing less than our highest respect and gratitude. And it is my belief that someone who cannot meet this simple, sacred duty should never again stand behind the seal of the President of the United States of America. I will always honor the service and sacrifice of all of America’s fallen heroes, who made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of our beloved nation and our cherished freedoms. I mourn them and salute them. And I will never politicize them.

Those cannot be words straight from the mind of Kamala Harris. They sound like words written for Joe Biden to read off a teleprompter, replete with his oft-repeated claim that Trump said  “suckers” and “losers” and “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” It's entirely political, including, of course, the assertion that it is not political.

Trump's visit to the cemetery was also political. It was a first move in a political game that Harris ought to have chosen not to play. But she couldn't get all her supporters to refrain from playing, and in the end, she jumped in. She made the obvious move, and it is an awful blunder. You knew it was a blunder — didn't you? (I hope you are at least that savvy) — but you just had to do it. 

If only you'd had the sense and the restraint to delete most of the words. Let me help retrospectively and uselessly:

"The two candidates conveyed the customary air of indifference, neither saying anything publicly or appearing to lift a finger in his own behalf."

"Jefferson remained at Monticello, Adams at his farm, which he had lately taken to calling Stoneyfield, instead of Peacefield, perhaps feeling the new name was more in keeping with New England candor, or that it better defined the look of the political landscape at the moment."

From "John Adams" (p. 672) by David McCullough, describing the candidates' participation in the election campaign of 1800. (Commission earned.)

"But if you know a person who is OK with silence, you can try... 'companionate solitude,' where you do something alone together."

"When [psychologist Robert] Coplan was young, he would go fishing with his father on a quiet lake. 'We would sit there for hours at a time and wouldn’t say a word to each other,' he recalled. 'It was like I was alone, but he was there, and that was comforting.'"

From "We All Need Solitude. Here’s How to Embrace It. Alone time can help you reduce stress and manage emotions, but you have to be intentional about it, experts say" (NYT).

The false narrative.

"interviewer asks Columbia student to comment on the forcible takeover of the university building & the young woman says, 'I think it's a false narrative.' he asks her to comment on custodial staff being held captive by the occupiers of Hamilton Hall & she says, 'I think that's a false narrative.' He asks her if she is saying that the custodian is lying & she says, 'I think that's a false narrative.' He asks about Oct. 7 & she says, 'Get out of my face' & walks away."

Tweets Joyce Carol Oates.

At some point, you've got to be able to articulate what you think is true. Otherwise, you're trying to beat something with nothing. But you can always walk away.

ADDED: If the students of today don't know how to think about and articulate what they feel is wrong, the teachers and the parents bear responsibility. Young people feel that something is terribly wrong — to the point where they feel called to act out — and they're not accepting the pushback that says you are anti-Semitic if you don't support whatever Israel decides to do. 

The anti-Israel protesters are finding themselves on the receiving end of the cancel culture methodology they know how to wield. They know how to call you "racist" if you oppose affirmative action or say "All lives matter." They know how to call you "transphobic" is you're horrified by puberty blockers and "sexist" if you question abortion on demand. They've seen how that has worked to control speech and to control minds, and good for them if they decline to take what they've dished out.

Yes, the hypocrisy is glaring and the chaos is painful. And I'm not expressing optimism. I'm just saying I can see an opportunity to move to a higher ground. 

AND: Here's the interview.

"To see what happens at totality, how cold it gets, what the birds do, you know, if everyone gets hushed, and just kind of a surreal experience...."

Says a woman, anticipating the solar eclipse, quoted in "2024 solar eclipse preparations in home stretch in Carbondale" (ABC7Chicago).

That's a big if.

If everyone gets hushed, you may have a peak spiritual experience. 

But if you're in any kind of crowd, your shot at hearing a hush are approximately zero. Look at the videos from the 2017 eclipse and you will see how Americans respond. They scream:

 

LOOK AT IT JUSTIN!!!!

Every mom within earshot will be yelling her own kid's name, insisting that he look at this thing. And that was 7 years ago. These days, the kids will probably be staring into smart phones and the moms and dads will need to scold them. I can't believe we came all this way and you'd rather look at that fucking phone!  NOAH! Look at the fucking sun!!! And all the little Noahs and Liams will respond in variations of Mom! I told you I didn't give a shit about the sun!

Oh, yes, there will be some lovely children too and maybe some of them will even respond with hushed awe. But those are not the ones you will hear. Maybe someone will attempt crowd control, screaming, "Everyone shut the fuck up!" Or, less likely, Please honor those of us who have traveled here to experience the eclipse in a state of hushed awe.

Maybe you think you'll find the ideal secluded place....

"Look! Look up there!" someone will surely scream, as if it's tricky to find where the sun is. What are the chances you won't hear the phrase "Oh, my God!" at least a hundred times? Well, who going to count? Some blogger who wastes the hushed-awe opportunity to count the annoying things other people shouted?

I'm suddenly torn from my reverie by Meade, who has been reading something and decides to read this aloud: "It will be remarkably awesome for a few life-altering minutes."

My response: "I'm writing a poem about that.... I mean... where did that come from? I'm writing a post."

"In 2009, Christopher Frizzelle... pioneered the first 'silent reading party' at the city’s Hotel Sorrento."

"Accompanied by live piano music, the in-person and virtual reading series fosters 'healthy peer pressure' and a sense of community, according to the Silent Reading Party website. Silent Reading Party offshoots are proliferating worldwide.... The $20 events take place at night and typically sell out weeks ahead of time. Curious to explore the power of healthy peer pressure, I paid $10 to attend a recent late-night Silent Reading Party on Zoom.... For two hours, a pianist accompanied readers with dreamy New Age music, occasionally interrupted by the icy clink of a bartender’s cocktail shaker. I read my book, occasionally forgetting I was not alone. Then I’d peer at the hotel scene, where participants read in silence, took notes and sipped their drinks...."

Writes Stephanie Shapiro, in "I’m retired, and I still won’t let myself read in the daytime. Why not?" (WaPo, free access link).

You'll notice that the bit I quoted has nothing to do with what's in the headline. But it's a sidetrack that caught my interest. When I'd first read about the idea of a "silent reading party," I thought it was a pleasant idea. I thought the website was used to let people know where the group reading would take place. I was surprised that you had to buy tickets (and that some clown would be tickling the ivories). If you want to read with other people around you, go to a café. Or — here's an outlandish idea — a library.

"During the early stages of my father’s Alzheimer’s, when he still had lucid moments, I apologized to him for writing an autobiography many years earlier..."

"... in which I flung open the gates of our troubled family life. He was already talking less at that point, but his eyes told me he understood. I thought of that moment when I read that Prince Harry, in his new memoir, wrote about his father, King Charles, getting between his battling sons and saying, 'Please, boys, don’t make my final years a misery.'... My justification in writing a book I now wish I hadn’t written... was very similar to what I understand to be Harry’s reasoning. I wanted to tell the truth, I wanted to set the record straight. Naïvely, I thought if I put my own feelings and my own truth out there for the world to read, my family might also come to understand me better.... There isn’t just one truth, our truth — the other people who inhabit our story have their truths as well.... Years ago, someone asked me what I would say to my younger self if I could. Without hesitating I answered: 'That’s easy. I’d have said, "Be quiet."'"

Writes President Reagan's daughter Patti Davis, in "Prince Harry and the Value of Silence" (NYT).

Ezra Klein learned from the Quakers that you need to shut up.

I'm reading "The Great Delusion Behind Twitter" (NYT).

Midway into that diatribe against Twitter, Klein takes what he calls "a weird turn" and starts talking about the Quakers:

"Oh, no, I have been in prison for 10 months now listening to Russian."

Said Brittney Griner to Roger Carstens, special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, quoted in "Griner ‘compassionate, humble’ after release from Russia/‘We talked about everything under the sun,’ says the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs" (WaPo).

Carstens had gotten her to her seat on the plane home and told her: "Please feel free to decompress. We will give you your space." They "ended up talking for about 12 hours out of the 18-hour flight." And she also went up to everyone on the plane “looked them in the eyes, shook their hands and asked about them, got their names, making a personal connection with them.”

“We talked about everything under the sun.... I was left with the impression that this is an intelligent, passionate, compassionate, humble, interesting person, a patriotic person, but, above all, authentic."

"My mother has a large jar of pot gummies that she uses as a sleep aid. She doesn’t know that I know about them. She told a friend..."

"... whose daughter told me. I have been keeping an eye on the jar. She doesn’t seem to use many of them. Can I take a few gummies to sell to school friends (over-18 only) to pay for Hanukkah gifts for my family?"

A question addressed to the NYT ethicist. 

Hilarious, but it's fake, isn't it? Maybe, but not as fake, and not as hilarious — as this got-to-be-fake question addressed to WaPo's advice columnist:

"The electrification of mobility presents humanity with a rare opportunity to reimagine the way cities might sound...."

"As a result of [the 2010 Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act], every E.V. and hybrid manufactured since 2020 and sold in the U.S. must come equipped with a pedestrian-warning system, also known as an acoustic vehicle alerting system (avas), which emits noises from external speakers when the car is travelling below eighteen and a half miles per hour....  Automakers have enlisted musicians and composers to assist in crafting pleasing and proprietary alert systems, as well as in-cabin chimes and tones. Hans Zimmer, the film composer, was involved in scoring branded sounds for BMW’s Vision M Next car. The Volkswagen ID.3’s sound was created by Leslie Mándoki, a German-Hungarian prog-rock/jazz-adjacent producer.... The Porsche Taycan Turbo S has one of the boldest alerts: you’re in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab as he flips the switch to animate the monster.... If Boombox, a software feature in Teslas, is any indication of what’s on the way, it will be difficult to limit the sounds that drivers play through E.V.s’ external speakers. Boombox, which was released in December, 2020, as part of a software update, allows Tesla drivers, according to its promotional literature, to 'delight pedestrians with a variety of sounds from your vehicle’s external speaker,' including goat bleats, ice-cream-truck music, applause, and flatulence."

From "What Should a Nine-Thousand-Pound Electric Vehicle Sound Like? E.V.s are virtually silent, so acoustic designers are creating alerts for them. A symphony—or a cacophony—of car noise could be coming to city streets" (The New Yorker).

The Boombox feature violated some regulation, and now it only works when the car is parked, but still, you see the problem. The basic quietness of these vehicles demands that noises be concocted for them, and these noises could be anything. You'll be warned of their approach by all sorts of odd sounds and forced to live in a city that doesn't sound like real machines doing their mechanical work but like the imagination of whatever artist or prankster the manufacturer chooses. You can call that "a rare opportunity to reimagine the way cities might sound" or the inexorable encroachment of insanity. We had a chance to quiet things down, and we threw it away. 

Here are 5 TikTok items to amuse or intrigue you. Let me know what you like.

1. I had this feeling when I was a kid: That numbers have a personality!

2. How silently does an owl fly?

3. And speaking of birds: Imitating a parrot.

4. Tones a voice actor can use in a corporate training video.

5. Steve Coogan demonstrates the difference between young Al Pacino and old Al Pacino.