"The Korean supergroup BTS has pulled its blockbuster album 'Arirang' from Grammy Awards consideration, in protest..."

"... of the new Asian Pop Music Performance category....The Recording Academy has been cooking up new categories for years. It started out with 28 in 1959. We’re up to 100 now.... Some reflect true genres and discrete markets. But most are the malignant offspring of the record business’s historical segregation, which divided Black and white artists into separate genres and markets, even if they were playing sonically similar music.... After a song from 'K-Pop Demon Hunters' won big this year, Asian Pop was created...."

Writes Dan Charnas, a professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYT, in "Pop Music Is the Problem" (NYT gift link).

Here's how I'd frame the question: Why don't the Grammys have a category called White Pop Music?

There are 2 directions to go with that question. You could say it's white supremacy or you could say it's anti-racism.

"So my brain was going, OK, here is one of the most outrageous, funny Black women in the world at that point, and I’m supposed to be roasting her."

"And I’m not a stand-up. I can’t run with the bulls.... Well, if I were Black, I could say all these outrageous things. I’m not. Then, my mind went, well, I will do it in blackface. That will be funny or not, but it’ll, like, be — oh, I have license to. I thought I could pull this off. There’s no one that’s been whiter than me in the world. Poor Whoopi Goldberg has had to defend me over the years, sweetly and gracefully...."

Said Ted Danson, on a podcast recently, quoted in "Ted Danson Apologizes for Blackface Roast of Whoopi Goldberg in 1993" (NYT).

How do you come up with the idea that because you're not a stand-up comedian, you can go even farther over the line? It's the stand-up who has the most reason to think he ought to seize the power of offensiveness.

If the answer to my question is he thought pull it off because "There’s no one that’s been whiter than me in the world," then he's openly embracing white privilege.

"It wasn’t long ago that casual contempt for white women was the domain of the left, at least that part of the left that took books like 'White Fragility' seriously."

"So it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy. But it also makes sense, because everyone hates an apostate. In the right-wing imagination, these women are acting like harpies — an epithet often seen online — when they’re supposed to be helpmeets. Fox News’s Will Cain described a 'weird kind of smugness' in the way 'some of these liberal white women interact with authority.' For MAGA, ICE’s eagerness to put women in their place might be a feature, not a bug."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "The Right Is Furious With Liberal White Women" (NYT).

There's a link on "casual contempt for white women." It goes to a 2020 BBC article about the mythic figure known as Karen — "What exactly is a 'Karen' and where did the meme come from?"

Contempt toward women is pervasive throughout the world and throughout history, but it can also be a special left-or-right problem happening at particular times and in particular places. Social media keeps feeding me videos of women acting hyper-privileged and oblivious of the risk or screaming and losing her mind over practically nothing.

"When they start killing white women, the devil not only leaves the station, but he moves to the suburbs and puts on a badge."

"When they start killing white women, they see a minivan and call it a tank.... When they start killing white women, and I have to say it...."

"It’s certainly a conspicuous choice following a year in which D.E.I. programs have been dismantled and the party in power..."

"... has been debating how friendly to be with a white nationalist. That may not be what Pantone means by 'peace, unity and cohesiveness,' but I have to imagine it will come up for some viewers.... This white, in particular, strikes me as a little flavorless. It’s the color of cottage cheese and dental floss, of marshmallows and AirPods."

Said Callie Holtermann, participating in a NYT conversation titled "Pantone’s 2026 Color of the Year Is ‘Cloud Dancer’/A shade of white will be the defining color of the next year..." (NYT).

"It reminds me of the clothes I put on when I’m in a rush and the foods I eat when I have a stomach ache.... Personally, I miss Viva Magenta from 2023. An insane choice, but at least it was a choice. Cloud Dancer feels like a product of being too tentative to make a statement in any direction. Which is, of course, its own kind of statement."

Here's how Pantone presents its color:

"Painting a historic building’s uncoated masonry can trap moisture, accelerate deterioration and cause it to crack or crumble...."

"That risk of permanent damage has led to preservation standards, including the Interior Department’s, to advise keeping a property’s historic appearance as unchanged as possible and caution against new paint schemes on historic masonry unless they replicate or closely match documented historic finishes, the complaint alleges. Paint could not be removed from the EEOB’s stone facade without risking its destruction...."

From "Preservationists sue Trump over plans to paint Eisenhower building/The complaint alleges Trump’s plan would ‘permanently alter one of the most architecturally significant and historic structures in the Nation’s Capital'" (WaPo).

He's the real estate guy. He should be able to explain why adding a layer of paint to an unpainted surface is good. Whether this lawsuit can or should succeed is a different matter. I just want to know why he thinks painting is good. I understand he wants the building to be white and not the gray that it is. I don't care one way or the other. I'm just troubled by the painting of surfaces that were designed to be unpainted.

ADDED: Trump shows his pictures to Laura Ingraham who seems quite disgusted. He's really into the intense whiteness of the imagined paint and condemns gray as a color "for funerals":

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"It's tricknological, when white people invoke the holocaust. allows them to step out of their whiteness and slip on fake oppression."

Wrote Doreen St. Félix, in an X post screencapped in an Instapundit post by Ed Driscoll.

St. Félix published an article — in The New Yorker — about the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes foofaraw. I'd skipped that article — I was Sweeneyed out by the time it appeared — but I see from the excerpt at Instapundit that it contained lines like "Interestingly, breasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man’s hunger for ass." The desire is the object of desire? That's defective writing, and The New Yorker got its lofty reputation in part because of its punctilious word editing. But St. Félix is in The New Yorker, thus making her statements conspicuous and goofier than they would be somewhere else, like X (or a blog). 

Hey! It says "Black man’s hunger for ass" in The New Yorker.

The screencappers of X plunged into St. Félix's X account, homing in on posts with the words "hate" and "white people." Go to the Instapundit link to see what they found. 

What calls me is that new word: "tricknological." The adjective is, apparently, formed from the word "Tricknology," which is in the OED and traced back to 1938. It's marked "U.S. disparaging." It means:

"The windmills are killing our country, by the way. The fields are littered with them. Junk. They get older and rusty and get bad...."

"It's the greatest scam in history. The most expensive energy you can buy. They are ugly. A friend of mine comes from Minnesota... He said it's unbelievable what happened.... The most beautiful fields.... I was so looking forward to seeing them again... and they had windmills all over them. These horrible structures.... these ugly horrible things.... I looked at this field that was one of the most beautiful places in my own mind and imagination. It's littered with this garbage. It looked like a junkyard, he said. Then you get different manufacturers, and [the windmills] don't look alike. And they're not painted alike. Different colors. Even if they're white, one's a beige-y white, one's a darker white, one's a lighter white. And they start to rust after four or five years. And then they start to wear out. And nobody takes them because you're not allowed to bury the props... There's a certain type of fiber, and if it goes the ground, we are all going to die. What bullshit this is! Okay?... What they do is leave them up.... Windmills all over the place. Tall ones, short ones, dead ones, they're all dead. Some are hanging over by a thread...."

Said Trump today.

 

You may not like Trump's aesthetics all the time. We were just talking about all the gold leaf in the Oval Office. But he is attentive to the details of the visual world. He's an aesthete. What kind of man cares that the windmills are not painted alike even if they are all white because one's a beige-y white, one's a darker white, one's a lighter white? He not only cares, he will calmly detail the problem of shades of white as if you are expected to notice the variations and become unsettled by them as he is.

You are expected to see it as part of what should concern the President of the United States, this discontinuity of the whiteness of windmills.

I like this about him. I think it matters how things look. These places that are beautiful in our "mind and imagination" need to be kept beautiful. Anyone who modifies the landscape owes us all a duty to take care of this beauty. I don't think this comes naturally to most politicians, but it's something that Trump slowed down to contemplate out loud. 

The privilege of white — le privilège du blanc.

The Queen of Spain was the opposite of "disruptive":

Why did Queen Letizia of Spain wear all white in the presence of Pope Leo XIV, while all the other women wore the traditional black? Many media outlets praised the Queen's 'disruptive' all-white style.

They are, unfortunately, ignorant of the tradition of Le privilège du blanc.… pic.twitter.com/5czbpkq3k8

— Dr Taylor Marshall™️ (@TaylorRMarshall) May 18, 2025

Who are the dummies Marshall is pushing back? Is he simply imagining other people getting it wrong to add spark to his assurance that the Queen got it perfectly right? 

"When you say things on a podcast like 'six women, all white, my understanding is you've got a six-pack of white women.'"

"Like that's not — that's something that you shouldn't — that no one should be saying as an officer of the Court and a member of the bar, right?"

Said US District Judge Arun Subramanian to lawyer Mark Geragos, quoted in "Diddy trial judge snaps at lawyer for calling prosecutors a 'six-pack of white women'" (Business Insider).

How to dress to work in the garden... if you are a goddess.

I got that image from the front page as it looks right now. It's sandwiched between "Tesla Sales Are Slumping, Even in the Most E.V.-Friendly Place" and "After a Slow Start, High-Speed Rail Might Finally Arrive in America."

Those 3 things in a row... oh, New York Times... must you?

IN THE COMMENTS: Aggie said, "Well, at least they got a good picture in that place away from the cameras."

"Just a heads-up."

Liberal woman informs everyone that she won't be dating white men anymore.

Groundbreaking information.pic.twitter.com/2lC5Kqm0Qb

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) March 29, 2025

Ridiculous on so many levels, but I'm just going to highlight the exaggerated enunciation — "as a WHiTTTTe woman."

It made me think of this TikTok video criticizing Rachel Zegler ("Snow White") for over-enunciating:

Festivities of whiteness.

Diddy White Party pic.twitter.com/pXfsutl3Jl

— Donna Marie (@sabback) March 22, 2025

Contemplating the meaning of whiteness, I reread Chapter 42 of "Moby Dick," "The Whiteness of the Whale." Help me answer the question as asked by Herman Melville: Why does whiteness symbolize "spiritual things" and also work as an "intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind"?

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? 

"The core assumption of the ad is men hate her... it's like... if we can't vote for that douchebag Trump... before you sock me directly in the nuts let me tell you..."

Says Ben Shapiro, watching what he assures us is the worst ad he's ever seen in his life:

ADDED: Ben says the ad is paid for by the "Beige Rainbow PAC," and I was a little skeptical and looked it up. I found this in The Daily Beast: "Kamala’s Splashy Play for Trump Toadies/Vice President Kamala Harris is seeking an elusive Trump-loving demographic." This piece is written by Mini Racker, who seems to be a young woman, that is, a member of the same demographic group as, Shapiro believes, the writers of the ad). Racker says:

Another year has passed in The Althouse Sunrise Project.

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of my daily photographs of the sunrise. A few days were skipped for bad weather and once or twice I overslept, but the ritual practice is nearly every single day. I try to get good pictures, but many days are like other days and simply doing it is more important to me than getting a distinctive photograph. Still I rejoice on those days when it looks especially great, and I take this annual occasion to repost a few of the best.

Like this one, with the most unusual color, from May 21:

And this, from April 26, where white showed its worth as a sunrise color:

And just last week, on September 3, brown was a delicate delight:

Higher thoughts.

I'm reading "White Dudes for Harris Was a ‘Rainbow of Beige’ That Raised $4 Million" (New York Magazine):

“I gotta laugh because I accepted the invitation not for being white, but because I’m a dude you know?” said actor Jeff Bridges, who pushed back on a philosophical point on the messaging from the campaign that Democrats must “fight” for democracy. “It’s not so much a fight, but a surrender to higher thoughts of how we want the future to turn out,” Bridges said. “That’s just my opinion, man.”

"That’s just my opinion, man" suggests he's joking. I get the reference.....

... but which way is he joking? Is it that the movie character of "The Dude" is averse to fighting and takes a slacker route to the same destination? You don't have to fight. Only surrender. That seems like a satire of the Democrats' message. Is he toying with them? Just fooling around? Or is he saying that white men really ought to surrender. Stand down and think of "higher thoughts." The future belongs to... somebody else. 

Why Andy Beshear will be KH's choice for VP.

It's obvious. Just look at the lineup (at WaPo): 

The force that makes her want a white man — she on her own maxes out the desired intersectionality — will make her exclude the white men who would add intersectionality — Pete Buttigieg and Josh Shapiro. That leaves 4. One is unusually unattractive. Two look old, just as KH and her accomplices are kicking old to the curb. They can't re-old. That leaves Andy. Wonderful Andy. He's 46! Just old enough to make J.D. Vance look too young. 

I don't know anything about Andy other than that he's the Governor of Kentucky. I tried googling his name and the first thing that popped up was "Andy Beshear issues apology to diet Mountain Dew after argument with JD Vance." What got him attacking Diet Mountain Dew? 

"What was weird was [Vance] joking about racism today and then talking about diet Mountain Dew. Who drinks diet Mountain Dew? But in all seriousness, he ain't from here. He is not from Kentucky. This is a guy who would come maybe in the summers for some period of time, or to weddings or funerals."

"We’re not judging you for the soap that you use. But, collectively, that can add up as billions of people wash their hands or bathe..."

"... hundreds or thousands of times a year. If you’re so inclined, it makes sense to switch to a more eco-friendly product. Just understand that there may be a trade-off between sustainability and comfort. 'The consumer has to decide: Are they serious about where their soap comes from, whether it’s synthetic or natural?...'"

From "Bar soap or body wash: Which is best for your skin and the planet? Depending on its ingredients and packaging, your soap could cut as much as a third of the carbon emissions from your next shower" (WaPo).

So: Don't feel judged, but feel judged. "We’re not judging you"... but you — you conscientious people — need to step up and judge yourself.

That reminds me. I'm reading a book — "Morning After the Revolution" by Nellie Bowles (commission earned) — and here's how the chapter "The Most Important White Woman in the World" begins:

"'There was a long period of time when there was this specific look people were after — white, with inset Shaker cabinets, an island, soapstone or marble countertop...'"

"'... stainless-steel appliances. Everyone wanted it,' says Mary Mendez, director of acquisitions at Renovation Angel, a charity that refurbishes and resells high-end kitchens.... 'We would get traditional kitchens and refinish them, and people could have a kitchen that looked new and save $50,000.' But now, Mendez says, the model is wobbling. The 'in' kitchen is white, minimalist, and German — think Poggenpohl — an impossible design to fashion out of an older, traditional kitchen, Mendez says. In a few years, she expects that they’ll get some second-hand ones in, though by then, tastes will have likely moved on. 'The attention span for style and color is far shorter than it was even two years ago,' she says. (All of this is, of course, terrible for the environment.)"

From "The Immediately Outdated Renovation" (NY Magazine).

It seems to me that once you start thinking in terms of what's "dated," everything is already dated or on the verge of being dated. Any recognizable style must be already out of style in the eyes of those who know better than you. I recommend not even trying, which — let me add, of course — is great for the environment.

"The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity."

"It holds that Israel is an 'imperialist-colonialist' force, that Israelis are 'settler-colonialists,' and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors.... It casts Israelis as 'white' or 'white-adjacent' and Palestinians as 'people of color.' This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the 'oppressed' to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an 'oppressor' to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as 'white' and 'privileged'; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of 'exploitative capitalism' and in the Middle East through 'colonialism.' This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts...."

Writes Simon Sebag Montefiore in "The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False/It does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians" (The Atlantic).

Much more at the link.