"Who cares about a parenting memoirist’s removal from a law-school teaching roster?"

"The answer is, in part, because this story manages to touch on seemingly every single cultural flashpoint of the past few years. Chua’s critics see a story about #MeToo—because of her husband, but also because Chua supported the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, even after he was accused of sexual assault. Meanwhile, Chua’s defenders see a morality tale about liberal cancel culture. 'What they’ve done to you is SOP'—standard operating procedure—'for conservative allies but chills me to the bone nonetheless,' a supporter tweeted at her, earlier this month. Megyn Kelly weighed in, tweeting, 'Make no mistake: this is retribution for her support of Brett Kavanaugh, & it is disgusting.' Chua’s allies have also suggested that anti-Asian bias is involved. 'The woke academy reserves a special vitriol for minority faculty who don’t toe the line politically,' Niall Ferguson, a historian, tweeted. Chua and her husband aren’t politically conservative—she says that [her husband Jed] Rubenfeld has historically been 'very left-leaning,' whereas she is a 'solid independent'—but they are provocateurs."

From "What Is Going On at Yale Law School?/The prestigious institution has tied itself in knots over a dispute involving one of its most popular—and controversial—professors, Amy Chua" (The New Yorker).

There's not much new in this article. It's bringing New Yorker readers up to speed on something I've already blogged about a few times, as you can see by clicking the "Amy Chua" tag. It was new to me that — as Chua tells it —Chua's daughter Lulu pushed her to go big:

“She’s, like, ‘You have to fight the narrative,’ so I just did something shocking,” Chua said. She wrote an open letter saying that she’d been falsely accused and described a Zoom call with the Yale Law dean in which she’d been treated “degradingly, like a criminal.”... “I sent it to my entire faculty, and I tweeted it,” Chua said. “Ever since then, it’s been kind of an escalating nightmare.”

If you choose to do "something shocking," aren't you seeking "an escalating nightmare"? I guess the something shocking is what she aimed at others and the escalating nightmare is what she found happening to her. Let me rephrase that: the something shocking what she now says she did and the escalating nightmare is her description, to be published in The New Yorker, of how her life feels to her now. 

And it worked. She's got a big New Yorker story about her. Look at that headline — parse it — and look a the nice photo of her perched on a glossy, empty desk. This is good press.

Who breaks up with you by telegram?

I'm reading "50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’/The singer-songwriter questioned everything on her fourth album. Twenty-five musicians speak about the LP’s enduring power on its 50th anniversary" (NYT), and there's this, from Graham Nash:

Obviously there are a couple of songs on the record that I recognize, from when she would write them in the house, that involved me. “My Old Man,” “River.” She finished the album after we parted, but for many months I saw her there writing this stuff. It was a fascinating process to see, I must confess. It’s as if she tore her skin off and just released all her nerves into music. I was repairing the house in Laurel Canyon, I was actually laying the kitchen floor when I got a telegram from Joan saying that our affair was over, officially. And she put it in a very interesting way. She said, “If you squeeze sand in your hand, it will run through your fingers.” I thought, got it. And that was it.

When was the age of telegraphy? I'm 70 years old, and I've never sent or received a telegram. I remember telegrams only as a way of communicating that someone had died. Maybe there's some poetry in using a telegram to convey the information that the relationship has died.

"Mr. Midgette, his hair painted and powdered silver-white and his face covered with pale makeup, passed himself off as Warhol at several colleges with Warhol’s blessing..."

"... fielding questions after showings of Warhol films.... Mr. Midgette pulled off his impersonation at a time when Warhol’s reputation had begun to spread beyond New York City but when, to most of America, he was still more of a vague concept than a recognizable personality.... 'The one thing I knew about Andy was, you could answer any question any way you liked and it would be fine,' he said... 'It might not have been the same thing he would say, but it would make as much sense... It made me realize how, in life, people just presume a lot of things.... Just because you’ve met Andy twice, does it mean you remember exactly how he looked, and how he would look under different circumstances? If you’re being told it’s Andy and everyone else is accepting it, you’ll go along with that. It shows you how people just aren’t very curious about what’s in front of them.'"

From "Allen Midgette, an Ersatz Andy Warhol, Dies at 82/In a prank, or perhaps a piece of performance art, Mr. Midgette pretended to be the famed artist on a lecture tour in 1967" (NYT).

Andy Warhol said, "He was better than I am.... He was what the people expected. They liked him better than they would have me."

When are you such a thing that a fake you would be more you than you? We have one solid answer: Andy Warhol.

I stay out of the woods in a thunderstorm, but a Reddit user caught Madison's sunrise today.

"Do you think I control the laws of thermodynamics?!"

Video after the fold:

The Juneteenth flag.

Are you flying the Juneteenth flag? Is it this flag? 

 

I had a real-life conversation yesterday about flying flags other than the American flag.  If you fly an American flag in front of your house — as we do — do you think that you must always fly that flag and no other flag, that you're interfering with your usual message —or even unpatriotic — if you swap in a different flag some days?

In my neighborhood, which gets parked up on game days — we could get a $20 bill for letting somebody park their car in our driveway — many people put up a motion W or Bucky Badger flag when the team is playing. This month, "Pride" month, I'm seeing some rainbow flags and that complicated beyond-the-rainbow flag (now, with even more inclusivity).

I was saying I'd like to have rainbow flag for June, but that would mean taking the American flag down for an entire month. (I reject the 2-flag solution.) But what about Juneteenth? It's only one day. That makes it more flaggable to those who generally fly the American flag. (And I'll just set to the side the problem of Juneteenth interrupting the gender focus of the month of June, or, to put it another way, the problem of the gender interests having chosen the month that already contained the race-based celebration of Juneteenth).

We can all celebrate Juneteenth. No one objects to the abolition of slavery. (Yes, you can broaden the concept to include all the vestiges of U.S. slavery and slavery everywhere in the world, but people will still readily agree that's all bad, even if they're not going to do anything about it.) 

So: How to celebrate? You could fly a Juneteenth flag. When I think about doing that, I care about what the flag looks like, and I can see that the flag in that video is designed to make it easy for average Americans to see conventional American values. I'm just seeing that flag for the first time this morning. When we were talking about it yesterday, I was picturing this flag:

That's a more challenging flag! But that is not the Juneteenth flag!

That's the Pan-African flag, adopted by the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) at a conference in New York City in 1920. The UNIA drafted and adopted the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World on August 13, 1920 at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. It included the declaration that red, black and green (or RBG) be the colors signifying the African race.

That flag has a long history, and I think it's a great looking flag. It's better-looking than the official Juneteenth flag, which — I've got to say — makes me think of Canada. So fly whichever flag you want today or any day or fly no flag at all. It's a free country. Celebrate freedom freely.

The body of Christ, the semolina pilchard, the Mona Lisa, the Duracell batteries...

Oh, I see it now! The blog has a theme today: Things to be eaten.

"'Almost all of the girls here, they do not want to get pregnant, but it is forced on them,' Omodi said. And when they do get pregnant..."

"... 'we find that they want to have the abortion.' Some girls move away to other settlements and have their babies in secret. Some give birth and then abandon or kill their infants. Others try to end their pregnancies by taking ulcer drugs or local herbs; some dig up tree roots in an effort to make their own abortifacients. 'Sometimes, you hear they use Duracells,' he said, referring to a practice of steeping batteries in water and drinking the liquid... Although there are no reliable numbers on self-induced abortion in refugee camps, and no one knows exactly how many refugee women die of unsafe abortions every year, there is good reason to believe hazardous procedures are common. We do have solid data on the high rates of sexual violence against refugee women and girls: researchers have thoroughly documented this and, unsurprisingly, found links between rape and unplanned pregnancy. Worldwide, 61 percent of unplanned pregnancies end in abortion, and unsafe abortions cause an estimated 13 percent of pregnancy-related deaths worldwide. Every year, mothers who die from unsafe abortion leave behind some 220,000 children. Another five million women worldwide are hospitalized annually with complications from unsafe abortion; this is a phenomenon restricted almost exclusively to developing countries that limit abortion access."

From "How US Abortion Politics Distorts Women’s Lives in Conflict Zones/From Rwanda and Bosnia to Myanmar and Tigray, rape is now recognized as a genocidal crime. Yet its survivors rarely receive the health care they need—thanks to America’s deadly culture war" by Jill Filipovic (New York Review of Books).

"We were like, 'what if he bought it and ate it?'"

Said Kane Powell, author of the petition described in "Why Do People Want Jeff Bezos to Buy and Eat the Mona Lisa?/An online petition that started as a joke has gone viral, becoming a kind of digital performance art piece all of its own" (NYT). 

This article is illustrated with a photo of Jeff Bezos standing next to a portrait of Jeff Bezos. I would rather see closeups of Jeff Bezos and the Mona Lisa side by side, with Bezos looking as much like Lisa as possible. My slapdash effort:

 

Must I go back to the article? Powell's joke is explained pedantically. He's calling attention to "the absurdity of massive amounts of accumulated wealth." Oh, really? We're told the Mona Lisa isn't even up for sale, but if it were, what would it cost, and what would stop the buyer from destroying it? And what is it even made of? Tuna fish?

I swear I wrote that last question — a joke, based on the previous post — before I read this paragraph in the Mona Bezos article:

More recently, in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, the New York artist David Datuna ate the banana in Maurizio Cattelan’s buzzy and high-priced “Comedian.” (He said that “it tasted like $120,000.”) Mr. Datuna also claimed that it wasn’t an act of vandalism, but a performance. “This is the first time where an artist eats the concept of another artist,” he said.

The tuna! 

"No amplifiable tuna DNA was present in the sample and so we obtained no amplification products from the DNA... Therefore, we cannot identify the species."

Said the unnamed commercial food testing lab, quoted in the depths of a very long NYT article titled "The Big Tuna Sandwich Mystery/A lawsuit against America’s largest sandwich chain has raised questions about America’s most popular canned fish. We tried to answer one: Is Subway selling tuna? The spokesman from the lab offered a bit of analysis."

“There’s two conclusions,” [said the spokesman]. “One, it’s so heavily processed that whatever we could pull out, we couldn’t make an identification. Or we got some and there’s just nothing there that’s tuna."

"The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States, flouting a warning from the Vatican, have overwhelmingly voted to draft guidance on the sacrament of the Eucharist, advancing a push by conservative bishops..."

"...to deny President Biden communion because of his support of abortion rights. The decision, made public on Friday afternoon, is aimed at the nation’s second Catholic president, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief since Jimmy Carter, and exposes bitter divisions in American Catholicism. It capped three days of contentious debate at a virtual June meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The measure was approved by a vote of 73 percent in favor and 24 percent opposed." 

The NYT reports, in "Targeting Biden, Catholic Bishops Advance Controversial Communion Plan/The decision was aimed at the nation’s second Catholic president and exposed bitter divisions in American Catholicism." 

Are they targeting Biden? 

[T]he move to target a president, who regularly attends Mass and has spent a lifetime steeped in Christian rituals and practices, is striking coming from leaders of the president’s own faith, particularly after many conservative Catholics turned a blind eye to the sexual improprieties of former President Donald J. Trump because they supported his political agenda. 

And many liberal Catholics turned a blind eye to the sexual improprieties of Joe Biden because they supported his political agenda. But it's important to drag Donald Trump into this article somehow. 

In any case, I'm not a Catholic, but my understanding of Christianity is that your sins are forgiven. Actively furthering abortion rights, going forward, is different from the sins in your past. We're at a point where it seems that the Supreme Court may overturn precedent and withdraw the longstanding right to have an abortion, and Biden is openly committed to appointing new Justices who will preserve the right. And he actively and publicly displays his commitment to Catholicism and uses Catholic priests in this presentation of himself. One way or the other, they participate in politics.

Stray questions:

1. What was the "warning from the Vatican" that the bishops are "flouting"? 

Last month Pope Francis’ top doctrinal official, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, warned the U.S. bishops in a letter that a policy on communion as relates to politicians could “become a source of discord rather than unity.”

2. Is Biden really "the most religiously observant commander in chief since Jimmy Carter"? That "perhaps" is carrying a lot of weight. When George W. Bush was President, his political opponents portrayed him as a religious fanatic.

Milkweed.

"Joan Crawford is a circus performer who can’t stand men’s hands, while Lon Chaney plays an armless knife thrower."

That's a description of the movie "The Unknown"....

 

... which my son John ranks as his 4th favorite movie of 1927, in his ongoing project "101 Years of Movies/My favorite movies of each year from 1920 to 2020." 

That movie was certainly unknown to me. I'd never heard of his 3rd-ranked movie either. And of the 4 movies, I've only seen the second one.

"'Political correctness' is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits..."

"... they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain... Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’ Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American. [And critical race theory is not] an externally applied pejorative... it’s the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.”

Wrote Christopher Rufo to Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who produced this New Yorker article: "How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory/To Christopher Rufo, a term for a school of legal scholarship looked like 'the perfect weapon.'"

Is that headline correct? You know, I've got a thing about headlines that begin with "how." Are we really going to be told "how" or only "that"? But is it even true that Christopher Rufo invented the conflict over Critical Race Theory? The article shows the Rufo has been collecting information about anti-racism training sessions and, since late July 2020, communicating about what he's found and what he thinks of it.

Rufo didn't invent the term. He took a term that already had a life and he exposed it and critiqued it. What did he "invent"? He's accused of — credited with? — inventing the conflict about it. If something is already out there — having an effect — and someone comes along and raises questions about it, has he invented a conflict? 

This is what activists do. It's the same thing the Critical Race Theorists themselves did. They looked at how systems were operating, and they "invented a conflict" about it. They said the systems contained racism, furthered white supremacy, even covertly and unintentionally. Their technique was to "invent conflict" — wasn't it? — just as much as Rufo's technique was to invent conflict. If we're going to use the phrase "invent conflict," he invented conflict about the conflict they invented.

"If you ask me what kind of a person and interlocutor President Biden is, I can say that he is a constructive person, well-balanced and experienced seasoned politician..."

"... and I expected that. He recalled his family and conversations he had with his mother. Well, these things don’t have directly something to do with our business, but nonetheless, it shows his qualities and his moral values. It is all appealing, and I believe that we spoke the same language. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to look into the eyes and see the soul, and to pledge eternal love. We defend the national interests of our countries. And these relationships are always based on pragmatism."

Said Vladimir Putin, from the transcript of his press conference after his meeting with President Biden on June 16th. 

Putin was responding to the Wall Street Journal reporter Ann Simmons, who'd prompted him with a reminder that Biden once claimed not to see "a soul" in Putin's eyes. What, she asked, did Putin see when he looked into Biden's eyes?

By the way, when Putin called on Simmons, he said "A lady. Please give the floor to the lady. She will rock my world here."

Back in April, I discussed soullessness at some length, here — "... I was having a real-life conversation about the notion that some people don't have a soul, and whether, if that could be true, the soulless person could acquire a soul, and whether a person who regards another person as soulless has a moral or intellectual obligation to look inside himself and seriously examine whether he himself has got a soul."

I don't know if Simmons rocked Putin's world, but I do see that he didn't take the opportunity to opine about whether Biden or Trump or anybody else has a "soul." And he also didn't dismiss or mock this "soul" talk.

"Slutty outfits for men."

It's TikTok, so... below the fold: