It doesn't take much these days to be considered "formal."

I'm reading "Think It’s Cool to Wear Fancy Sneakers to Work? You Might Be Old. After years of office casual, young people are embracing loafers, derbies and oxfords" (NYT gift link).

Earlier this year, Esquire described the trend as the loafer’s “big generational shift,” describing how younger consumers “were bypassing sneakers in growing numbers.” And in January, The Times UK deemed 2026 “the year of the loafer.”...

The surging interest in formal footwear fashions has simultaneously been a boon for both high-end luxury retailers and heritage brands with classic shoe offerings, like Allen Edmonds, the Wisconsin-based retailer. Nick Wooster, the brand’s consulting creative director, said that they have “absolutely” seen a recent increase in interest in their handmade leather loafers and derbies among younger customers. 

Even sneaker brands are trying to be more dressy.

"Being a good teacher requires being sort of odd, even a bit immature."

"Some of my favorite professors married scholarly expertise with considerable eccentricity. My dissertation adviser insisted her students take up social dance like polka, line dancing and zydeco; another of my former professors would alight at 4 a.m. to teach himself Japanese before undertaking woodworking projects like making a life-size chess set. The passions are nonconformist. To be moved is to be a little bit weird."

Writes Matt Dinan, the director of the great books program at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, in "I Let My Students Watch Me Struggle With a Masterpiece. It Changed Everything" (NYT gift link).

"What I discovered anew in my encounter with 'The Brothers Karamazov' last term was that if you want students to be passionately engaged, not worried about the future, grasping, careerist or disengaged, you must transmit the spark of passion in your deeds, your mien — let’s face it, in your own soul. If you expect your students to choose books, ideas and genuine learning over shortcuts and distraction, you must be a bit courageous, too.... As [the Karamazov brother] Alyosha memorably notes, all capable people 'are awfully afraid of looking ridiculous, and it makes them unhappy.'"

"Let me be clear. I don't think the homoeroticism is the weird part...."

Says Democratic Congresswoman Becca Balint (D-VT), talking about Pete Hegseth and testosterone:

"There are so many people in this administration that have some weird, like, intense homoerotic feelings toward men while also being incredibly homophobic and not just homophobic but, like, hate mongering, fear mongering about the LGBT community. Let me be clear. I don't think the homoeroticism is the weird part. The weird part is that they pretend that that's not what it's about. And so, Pete Hegseth was, like, the example of this, like the manly-manly rugged macho man, and I don't know if you know who Tom of Finland is. Tom of Finland — this is gay male porn that was drawn by a man, and, like, Pete Hegseth is the embodiment of that. So I feel like they must be looking at that as, like, their example of what men look like...."

I blogged about Tom of Finland back in 2014 in a post titled, "Finland issues stamps honoring an artist whose 'sleek sado-masochistic drawings with abundant amounts of beefy male nudity' portrayed 'a sensual life force and being proud of oneself'" ("The first quote in this post title is the way the NYT described the work of Touko Laaksonen, AKA Tom of Finland, and the second quote is from someone in Finland who chose the particular images for the stamps, who added: 'There is never too much [sensual life force and being proud of oneself] in this northern country'")(the only image at my post is of one of the stamps issued by Finland).

Balint gets pretty excited about her ideas in that clip, and that made me want to look up what she studied in college.

Jimmy Kimmel finds it "unsettling" that "our first trillionaire, the richest man in the world, is also one of the weirdest people we've ever seen on this planet."

"This obscenely wealthy weirdo has the ability and means to blow up the moon if he chooses and also to put a lot of other people's money in his pockets. You know, SpaceX, it will enter the stock market so highly valued a lot of 401ks will get triggered to invest in it automatically.... Wasn't he supposed to be going to Mars? Can't we chip in to help speed that up? It's a trillion dollars. It's hard for our brains to conceptualize that. I mean, we know trillion is a number, but it's so large... we can't fathom it. The same way we know like Elon has a lot of kids, but we can't fathom him getting laid, right?"

Expressing contempt for Musk because you see him as weird — and unfuckable — reads as a careless cruelty against people who are on the autism spectrum.

Musk came out very openly — 5 years ago — as a person with Asperger's syndrome:

ADDED: Remember when the Democrats' chose their candidate for Vice President based on his use of "weird" as an insult against Trump? They seemed to really think that could win the election.

"I have no patience, incidentally, with those whataboutery critics invoking the Inquisition and the Crusades to diss Leo’s credentials."

"Nationalism, imperialism, fascism and communism are already far bigger killers than Catholicism, despite having been around for much less time. The main reason for that is, besides being inefficient, it is morally repugnant to most people to kill face to face, but to do it from a distance — with a machinegun, with artillery, with an aerial bomb, with a drone, now with a robot controlled by an algorithm — has become progressively easier over the past 150 years. As the Pope says, not 'seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict.' That is why he has called for 'the strictest ethical constraints' on the use of AI in warfare. He is right, obviously. I hate AI. But then I think social media has been a disaster and I don’t much like predictive texting, spellcheck or digital train tickets either. I’d have pulled the plug on the whole shebang in 2006, after email, Wikipedia and YouTube but before any of the other nonsense. But hey, I am also a realist.... We have to live with this madness. Given that, why would we let a few super-rich weird nerdy misfits decide what’s ethical AI and what isn’t?"

Writes Robert Crampton, in "Pope Leo’s come out all guns blazing against the AI war machine. Good/Allowing a few super-rich weird nerdy misfits to decide what is and isn’t ethical would be madness" (London Times).

My first draft of this post had one more sentence, but I decided to cut it because I think it's dumb and distracting. For the record, it's "They would blow up the world, as Pope Leo didn’t quite say but I’ll say it for him, if they thought it would bag them a hot babe with fake boobs." But what do you think of the sexualized analysis? The tech leaders are "super-rich weird nerdy misfits" driven by sexual frustration. I used to read analysis like that all the time 60 years ago, when Freudianism was still going strong. It's interesting, but that doesn't make it true. If these men are super-rich, can't they find sexual partners? And why fake boobs? Also, isn't it gauche these days to disparage the neurodivergent with insults like "weird nerdy misfits"?

I remember when a major political party in the United States got the idea that calling a weird person "weird" would be an effective way to win a presidential election. 

"If you say 'Keep Austin Weird' to somebody under the age of 40, they would think of that as an antique-y slogan, like Ye Old Shoppe."

"It doesn’t have any resonance for their lived experience of Austin."

Said H.W. Brands, a University of Texas historian, quoted in "Austin Welcomed Musk. Now It’s Weird (in a New Way). The famously liberal bastion of Austin is grappling uneasily with Elon Musk’s rightward turn, which has begun transforming his adopted home into an unlikely hub of right-of-center thinkers" (NYT).

Tie-dyed T-shirts still urge residents to “Keep Austin Weird,” mostly in hotels and tourist shops. But a different kind of counterculture has taken root amid an influx of decidedly right-of-center figures (including Mr. Musk), self-described freethinkers (like the podcasters Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman), and conservative entrepreneurs (like Joe Lonsdale). Already in town was Austin’s resident conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, and his far-right Infowars. There’s even a new, contrarian institution of higher learning looking to compete with the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Austin. Weird, perhaps, but not in the way of the old bumper-sticker mantra....

Can weirdness fans complain when weirdness gets weirder? Yes, they can and they do. They may prefer a softer, quirkier form of weird. And they may think weirdness is inherently left-wing. But the left got so censorious and repressive... and yet, the left is often weird... in specific, prescribed ways. 

Hey, remember when "weird" was the dominant insult deployed by the Democratic Party? It seemed that they chose their Vice Presidential candidate because he said it just so at the perfect time.

"The threat to democracy — indeed, the existential threat to democracy — is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime, tenured civil servants..."

"... who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for. So, Americans vote for radical FBI reform, and FBI agents say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote for radical reform in our energy policies, but EPA bureaucrats say they don’t want to change. Or Americans vote to end DEI — racist DEI policies, and lawyers in the Department of Justice say they don’t want to change. What President Trump is doing is he is removing federal bureaucrats who are defying democracy by failing to implement his lawful orders, which are the will of the whole American people."

Said Stephen Miller, at yesterday's press briefing.

Want to see a murder?

Libs in the White House press corps screamed at Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller that Elon Musk is “unelected!”

What happens next is a fatality.

I promise you - this is the single best video on the internet today:pic.twitter.com/Nxcw0qTtj1

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 20, 2025

ADDED: In the same vein, here's Victor Davis Hanson:

 

"A picture of young successful happy people at a trendy cocktail party reads as right wing. A picture of a dad in flannel drinking a beer at Texas Roadhouse..."

"... also reads as right wing. Right wing is both cool, hip and metropolitan, and down to earth, older, mature, and working class. This is how you know that conservatism is culturally ascendant. We run the gamut. The only pictures that read as left wing are those of ugly, fat, mentally ill, dysfunctional, friend-less weirdos."

So says Matt Walsh, on X, looking at the "Cruel Kids" New York Magazine cover. 

 

That's one take. The other take is that the photo is cropped to make the event look all white. If you scroll down from that link above, you'll many tweets that should the wider view (and call attention to the text, "Have you noticed that the entire room is white?):

"'Did you hear that guy order milk? Who orders milk?'... Their meal came — including the milk — and Milk Man went to town: taking big swigs..."

"... between chomps of steak with such gusto that my blood ran cold. That hairy, masculine hand. The glass of frothy milk. The pure delight. The cow two ways.... I couldn’t ignore it.... I interrupted his conversation. 'I don’t mean to be rude,' I said, 'but what’s with the milk?' 'Oh, I know it’s weird, right?” he responded, self-aware but not ashamed. Then he leaned over and drawled, 'I can’t explain it. I just love a big glass of cold milk with a rare steak. Mmmmm-mm!' Milk Man’s date didn’t seem to feel weird about it; she gave a 'Yes, my man is a freak' smile as he finished his Big Ol’ Glass of Cold Milk.... Milk symbolizes innocence and purity, and the adult who continues to indulge in it — nay, cling to it — long after their loss of innocence provokes light repulsion, confusion, and fascination in the observer...."

Writes Allison P. Davis, in "The Pervert’s Beverage/From Babygirl to Fellow Travelers, milk is for freaks" (Vulture).

"Perhaps no previous politician has taken up the mantle of Dad in quite the way Tim Walz has."

"From late summer’s Vice-Presidential pageant of Democratic middle-aged American white men, Walz emerged as an avatar of football-coaching, social-studies-teaching, father-figure affability, and this appeal helped carry him past arguably more strategic choices to a spot on the Harris ticket.... Walz embodies a model of nontoxic masculinity the Harris campaign has hoped to represent with such outreach as the 'White Dudes for Harris' fund-raising Zoom. 'Weird'—Walz’s inspired epithet for magaleadership—was delivered in a tone of goshdarnit perplexity, and with it, he laid claim to the role of norm-setting paterfamilias. The other guys were the basement-dwelling nephews and conspiracy-theorizing uncles.... The idea of fatherhood that Vance and his pronatalist ilk present is at once maximally literal and maximally abstract: it is a matter of gametes and hormones on one hand and social order on the other. In contrast, Walz’s rendition of fatherhood conveys an identity rooted in particularity—the reality of particular children, particular parents, a particular shared life...."

I'm reading "Tim Walz and J. D. Vance’s Battle of the Dads/Duelling visions of fatherhood will define the Vice-Presidential debate" by Mollie Fischer (in The New Yorker).

Abstract versus particular... dad.

I don't know if that's a fair representation of either man (or the theater surrounding them), but it makes me think about the way human beings can reason from the abstract or the particular. For example, in a legal case, one could begin with an abstraction like fairness or equality, listen to arguments by ideologues, and then decide what will be done, in the future, when particular cases arise, or one might wait for a concrete controversy between adversaries with a real stake in the outcome and then work from the particular to a rule that can be stated in the abstract.

Do you like things in context or out of context — abstract or concrete — when you're doing your own thinking? When you're stuck relying on the decisions of others?

Where is the news in the NYT that Tulsi Gabbard just endorsed Trump?

I had to do a search of the website to find it 7 paragraphs into "How Democrats View Kennedy and Trump: ‘A Weirdo Campaign Just Got Weirder’/Democrats once seriously worried that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be a spoiler. Now, after his endorsement of Donald Trump, they see a political opportunity":

And on Monday, after Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who has rebranded herself as a celebrity in the MAGA movement, endorsed Mr. Trump, the D.N.C. issued a news release with the headline: “Trump’s Circle of Weirdos Gets Even More Extreme.”

The NYT expresses some disapproval of the weirdness theme, calling it "a playground-style strategy" and giving us this juvenile quote:

“A weirdo campaign just got weirder,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a Democratic think tank that has led efforts to stop independent and third-party candidates from siphoning votes from Democrats. “This campaign of freaks is not going to do Republicans any favors.”

Tulsi Gabbard's name appears in another NYT article this morning, "Trump Hits Harris Over ‘Humiliation’ in Military’s Afghan Exit/Courting military votes, Donald Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery to observe the anniversary of a deadly Kabul bombing and then spoke at a National Guard group’s conference."

"And multiple speakers delighted the crowd by alluding to the fabricated viral claim that Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, wrote in his memoir about having sex with furniture."

"'I wouldn’t trust them to move my couch,' Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said of the GOP ticket on the final night. 'I know a couch commando when I see one,' Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said minutes later. The jabs were just part of a more expansive case against Trump that Democrats laid out over four nights in Chicago. But they reflected a broader shift in tone for Democrats toward a no-holds-barred kind of rhetorical warfare many in the party once eschewed. Eight years after the Philadelphia convention cheered Michelle Obama’s famous line 'When they go low, we go high' — and with Trump still waging a campaign full of personal insults and baseless accusations... some Democrats said they are tired of being polite...."

From "Democrats once strove to ‘go high’ against Trump. Not anymore. This year’s convention culminated recent efforts to needle Trump on topics known to strike a nerve in the former president, with some Democrats saying they are tired of being polite" (WaPo)(free-access link).

This gets my "civility bullshit" tag, which in this case reflects my belief that the old "When they go low, we go high" was just a strategy choice, to be abandoned when it didn't seem effective... or when the low material is tantalizing enough, like that well-upholstered couch that seems be calling out to you.

"A subset of people with extremely vivid imaginations are known as maladaptive daydreamers."

"Some choose to live in their imagination, rather than in real life, [researcher Nadine] Dijkstra says. 'They sit down on the couch, they don’t leave their house, they don’t go to school, they don’t see friends, they don’t go to their work. They just imagine their whole life just the way they want it. Because for them, it feels as real as reality.'..."

Writes Yasemin Saplakoglu, in "Scientists Are One Step Closer to Demystifying ‘Aphantasia’/Inside the brains of people who can’t picture things in their mind" (The Atlantic).

Most of the article is about people at the opposite end of the spectrum, the people with aphantasia, that is, no mental imagery.  

"[Tim Walz] jumped to the top of Ms. Harris’s list in a matter of days, helped by cable news appearances in which he declared that Republicans were 'weird.'"

"The new, clear articulation of why voters should reject Mr. Trump caught on fast and turned the spotlight on the plain-spoken Midwesterner behind it.... Mr. Walz leapfrogged better-known contenders in part because Ms. Harris viewed him as an Everyman figure from Minnesota whose Midwestern-dad-vibe balanced out her Bay Area background, according to three people familiar with the vice president’s thinking...."

I'm reading "Tim Walz Is Kamala Harris’s Choice for Vice President/The Minnesota governor, a former high school teacher and National Guard member, brings to the ticket Midwestern appeal and a plain-spoken way of taking on Donald Trump" (NYT).

It's so embarrassingly lightweight! He's the guy who thought up "weird" and reminded Ezra Klein of a "dad." 

"Are we just alternating between weird and normal — perceptions of weird and normal? If so, then 2024 is Trump's turn again."

That's the last line of a post I wrote on May 23, 2023 — "DeSantis uses Warren G. Harding's word, 'normalcy': 'We must return normalcy to our communities.'"

That was back when DeSantis was endeavoring to replace Trump by being essentially Trump minus the weirdness. Yes, there was talk of weird-versus-normal just like there is today. I said:

I myself am hungry for normality, but I don't trust people who keep saying "normal." I always think of Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in "Lolita" — "It's great to see a normal face, 'cause I'm a normal guy. Be great for two normal guys to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way...."

"Democrats need a dad?"

Says Meade, when I read this headline out loud "Is Tim Walz the Midwestern Dad Democrats Need?" (NYT).

It's an episode of "The Ezra Klein Show." From the transcript, here's the "dad" part:

KLEIN: Let me ask you about political geography. There’s a sense of, particularly, the Midwest as “That’s where people are normal. Then they get weirder on the coast.” You’re a former Army guy, right? You’re a former football coach. You’ve got real good Midwestern dad vibes. And so you can talk about the weirdness of Trump and Vance in a way that I think a lot of Democrats would not feel they could and also in a way that they’re like, “Oh, right, maybe we’re not the weird ones.” But I always think this is a very unhealthy dimension of our politics, a sense that there are sort of “real” Americans here, not “real” Americans there, beyond the coast. I’m curious how you think about this, both from the perspective of what it’s allowed you to say — maybe that would not have landed coming from others — and also just, like, what you do about it.

The emphasis there is on the geography, the "Midwestern" part of "Midwestern dad." I wanted the "dad" part, but I'll soldier on: 

The pervasiveness of "weird" in the mind of Tim Walz.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz — in the running for VP — has gotten attention over the past week for purveying the word "weird," but he was calling Republicans "weird" a year ago.

Here's something I blogged August 21, 2023: "Who's the 'most normal' in this 'pretty weird group'?":

"If I were advising the candidates, I’d tell them to double down on weirdness."

Says David Brooks, on September 8, 2008.

Blogging that at the time, here, I said that Brooks observed that "Obama started out weird and did well, then got conventional and did less well, especially with McCain getting weird. 'Weirdness wins,' [Brooks] says."

I thought you might like to see that today, when so many people are saying "weird" at the same time and as if it's a bad thing.

Let me give you a bit more of Brooks:

"These guys are just weird. That's where they are.... The fascist depend on fear. The fascists depend on us going back, but we're not afraid of weird people. No, we we're a little bit creeped out, but we're not afraid."

Said Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in audio played in the new episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "The V.P.’s Search for a V.P."

The podcast host observes that the message — "Republicans are... just too weird for America" — "does seem like it's sticking a little bit."

Is it "sticking" or is it just the word that's getting said by people who say the same word at the same time. I'm thinking of those people who all used the word "selfless" when Biden accepted getting ousted.

Here's a whole NYT article on the emergence of "weird" as the word: "One Word Has Elevated Minnesota’s Governor to the Democrats’ V.P. Wish List/'These guys are just weird,' Gov. Tim Walz, a former schoolteacher, has said of the opposition."

"Hillary Clinton’s laugh was criticized, and also called weird. There was a suggestion that it made her seem inauthentic..."

"... which was a bizarre point, since genuine laughter is, if not involuntary, then very hard to fake. Lenny Bruce once dared a crowd to try it four times in an hour. Calling women overly emotional or hysterical is a sexist trope, and there’s a long history of positioning laughter in opposition to reason. Plato warned against a love of laughter, suggesting it indicates a loss of control. Ever alert to the theater of power, Trump rarely laughs... ...."

Writes Jason Zinoman, in "Kamala Harris’s Laugh Is a Campaign Issue. Our Comedy Critic Weighs in. The Trump campaign sees Harris’s laugh as a vulnerability to exploit. But far from a liability, it is one of her most effective weapons" (NYT).

"What does a laugh say about a person? That he or she is human. In a divided country, it’s something we all do and enjoy. And as anyone who has hung out with friends late into the night knows, it’s contagious. That’s a powerful political tool. As the poet Ella Wilcox wrote, 'Laugh and the world laughs with you.'"

Ella Wilcox? She started that? Oh!

I am laughing at the surprise encounter with what looks like the childless cat lady J.D. Vance was talking about.

Here's the poem, "Solitude":