"Quidditch has the same problem Rowling has, which is that the arbitrary combinations of sounds and syllables that we call words only mean something in relation to the world they describe..."

"... and more than that, the way they’re understood. You can tweak a reference all you like, but the referent will stay just the same. The author herself should know this better than anyone; after all, she claims the name 'quidditch' doesn’t come from any etymological root but was the result of pouring random nonsense sounds starting with the letter Q into five empty pages of a notebook. The leaders of the quidditch leagues can make a statement by disavowing J.K. Rowling, but they can’t make quidditch stop being, well, quidditch. Perhaps they will accidentally teach her the same lesson: that refusing to acknowledge transgender people for who they are will not magick them into something else, either."

Writes Molly Roberts in "Opinion: Quidditch’s new name might teach J.K. Rowling a surprising lesson" (WaPo).

The boldfaced sentence is the last line of the column, and it's awfully hard to understand. Or it's very easy to read as the complete opposite of what Roberts is — I think — trying to say. Roberts seems to be making a strong — and questionable assertion — that the words we use to refer to things or to people don't change what they are. But many — most? — transgender people seem to care deeply about the words used to refer to them. And I find it hard to believe that the sport of quidditch would have become anything at all if people weren't calling it quidditch.

But the worst thing about that last sentence is that Roberts is accusing Rowling of trying to change transgender people into non-transgender people, but she has not done that! How can Roberts be so ill-informed?! Rowling has expressed support for transgender people but has worried that some of the people who identify as transgender are making a mistake — going along with a social trend and misidentifying the reasons why they feel troubled by puberty. 

ADDED: Let me be more explicit about why I said it's very easy to read what Roberts wrote as the complete opposite of what she intended. If "refusing to acknowledge transgender people for who they are will not magick them into something else," then we may rightly ask who are they? It wouldn't be enough to say they are transgender because they say they are transgender. "Transgender" is just a word, and whether we use it or not, people are whatever they actually are. But I would expect Roberts to respond to my challenge by insisting that any person's invocation of the word makes the phenomenon true — and you're a hateful transphobe if you even entertain the notion that this person is mistaken.

"Sir, you need to go to prison."

 Said the Madison judge, the Wisconsin State Journal reports.

Circuit Judge Ellen Berz said the sentence [8 years] for Treveon Thurman was the first time outside a homicide or child sexual assault case that she had ever sentenced someone to prison for their first adult convictions....

Thurman, 20, pleaded guilty... to charges in eight of the 26 felony cases... four counts of operating a motor vehicle without the owner’s consent, two counts of taking and driving a motor vehicle without the owner’s consent and two counts of second-degree reckless endangerment....

Thurman would sometimes broadcast live video of himself while speeding around the Madison area in stolen cars, sometimes showing the speedometer at speeds over 100 mph. In one instance he broadcast himself going about 140 mph in a stolen car.

The audacity of that live broadcasting — at 140 miles per hour! — says something about the low value Madison has placed on keeping order. This person ought to have been stopped much sooner. We, as a community, have nurtured this outrageous danger.

"Manchin is especially vulnerable to accusations of imperial remove. Photos that circulated online show him chatting over the rail of his houseboat in Washington with angry constituents, who had arrived by kayak."

Writes Evan Osnos in "West Virginians Ask Joe Manchin: Which Side Are You On? The senator’s blockade against programs that have helped his constituents escape poverty makes some question 'who matters to Joe'" (The New Yorker).

Is it "imperial" to live in a houseboat — a houseboat accessible by angry kayakers?

Eh. Everyone has to write a lot of sentences about Joe Manchin right now. It's tedious but you can find some gems in there.

The Manchins are machers; Joe’s grandfather ran Farmington’s grocery store and served, over the years, as its fire chief, constable, justice of the peace, and mayor. His father had a similar stature in local politics, while also expanding the family business from groceries into furniture and carpets....

Machers... I had to look it up. It's a Yiddish word, I learned, reading "What Makes a Macher" (Forward):

"A long time ago, I munched on a few handfuls of fetid mushrooms and brought on personal crises of my own design."

"There weren’t many bright colors, but some theretofore unnoticed textural quirks—on clothes, on faces—went wild with deep, scrutinizing, photographic detail. For many hours after those visual effects had faded, I haunted the hallways of my mind, regretting how many memories I’d retained and neuroses I’d cultivated. Mostly, I regretted eating the things at all. Nothing happened that I’d want to put onstage; certainly, nobody sang.... The closest 'Flying Over Sunset' gets to true surreality is when Cary [Grant], a guy with mommy issues who is consumed with masculinity and its meanings, dons a body stocking and a cap and flails around, having become a facsimile of the phallus that possesses so much of his thought and his posture.... The play is based on a groovy idea, but it indulges in the myth that... drugs alone... make for interest."

Writes Vinson Cunningham in "The Bad Trip of 'Flying Over Sunset'/James Lapine’s new musical, at the Vivian Beaumont, sets the LSD hallucinations of three nineteen-fifties celebrities to song" (The New Yorker).

"The history of personal fitness is strewn with objects that once gleamed with promise and now seem redundant, even ridiculous."

"Take the Peloton — please! (As so many are imploring on Craigslist.) And while you’re at it, the step aerobic bench and its modular risers that lurk under the bed, ascended only by dust bunnies. As a bonus we’ll throw in those aptly named 'resistance bands' lying idle in the junk drawer. Are we mocking them or are they mocking us?"

From "ThighMasters, Jazzercise, Yoga and Other Chapters in the History of Women and Exercise" (NYT)(reviewing "Let’s Get Physical/How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World").

Remember Bonnie Prudden? This daytime TV fare from the 1960s is so drearily depressing it's surreal:

"This article was written by a semi-rational leftist using traditional rhetoric to persuade his perceived comrades."

"He has grossly misjudged his intended audience. The modern, hard left will conveniently ignore him and probably classify him as a conservative fellow-traveler."

 Writes Richard Dillman, commenting on this post yesterday.

I'm making a new post about this because it's so provocative, and it rings true to me — not just about the specific article he's talking about but about public discourse generally.

"Do Zoomers make good colleagues?"

Somehow I find that the most interesting question on the NYT's list of "The Year in 47 Debates" ("From the urgent conversations we had as a nation to the minor controversies that fascinated us, these are the things that got people talking, and talking, and talking...") 

Each debate is briefly explicated. Here's the discussion of Zoomers:

As Gen Z’s advance guard enters the work force, such as it is, their denim preferences, Slack etiquette and penchant for self-care are inspiring angst among older colleagues. Even the Zoomers’ immediate forebears — the millennials once at the white-hot center of youth culture — describe feeling fear and foreboding at the prospect of committing an emoji faux pas, fielding a request for a mental health day or staking out a companywide activist position. Some of these concerns reflect predictable anxieties about losing touch with the latest fashions; ominous “kids these days” tales have most likely circulated since our foraging ancestors were scandalized by Generation Agriculture. But others betray a sense of unease among managers who are dealing with a resurgence of worker power and a labor movement revival. The spotlight on generational trends may be obscuring a broader change in employee expectations for more humane hours, safer conditions and fairer treatment. A revolt, it would seem, is underway against a broken and oppressive corporate culture, but it’s coming from workers of all ages.

"In New York City, the slightest runny nose has people canceling holiday gatherings and lining up for hours outside coronavirus testing centers."

The NYT reports. 

In New York City, the slightest sniffle has people canceling holiday plans and packing coronavirus testing centers, where in recent days lines have stretched for blocks....

Despite receiving negative tests, some people keep burning through at-home coronavirus swabs just to stay calm....

There is a distinction between reasonable fear and anxiety that becomes disproportionate and all-consuming, said Dr. Itai Danovitch, the chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. A meta-analysis of dozens of community-based studies on mental health and the coronavirus showed that anxiety among the general population has increased threefold during the pandemic.

But in such tumultuous times, a certain level of anxiety is understandable, he said. “It is important to normalize how people are feeling: Anxiety and fear are common, it’s OK to feel anxiety, it’s OK to feel low, it’s OK to feel some distress,” Dr. Danovitch said....

There's a great photograph at the link of a woman wearing a T-shirt that says:  

My body is a temple

Ancient & crumbled

Probably cursed.

Harboring an 

Unspeakable horror

The caption quotes her saying: "I have thought so much about this disease for the past two years, that any potential brush with it feels a bit monumental."

Is it "important to normalize" that? How much fear and anxiety should a person simply accept as just the way it feels to be human? The psychiatrist tells us our bad feels are "OK." Fine. But how should we live? How can we flourish?

I've heard from my NYC informants that the lining up for testing is quite extreme. Why aren't people afraid they'll catch the disease from standing around in line? I know that people maintain distance between other people in the line, but they are still hanging around, not isolated, crowding the streets for hours. And what good is another test? It could be a false negative. At some point all the checking and rechecking is a mental disorder. But if the whole city is doing it, it's the new normal.

Sunrise — 7:10.

Talk about anything you want in the comments.

"The year since I wrote the original essay on the Five Deadly Sins of the Left has not resulted in a sea change in the left’s attitudes embodied in these five sins."

"Instead, they seem just as or more entrenched than they were. This augurs a future where working class voters continue to drift away from the Left, while highly educated elites increasingly define the left’s profile. The economist Thomas Piketty has referred to this development as the rise of the 'Brahmin Left.' For the Brahmin Left, the five deadly sins are virtues, since this is what the enlightened among them believe. But for the working class, as well as less ideological upscale voters, these ideas make the left less attractive. There is still an opening for a left that promotes universal values, a better model of capitalism, practical problem-solving on climate change, and an economy that delivers abundance for all. But the hour may be getting late...."

Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "The Five Deadly Sins of the Left/Time to Repent!" (Substack).

The sins are identity politics, retro-socialism, catastrophism, growthophobia, and technophobia — described in some detail at the link.

"Brigitte Macron is to sue over an 'outlandish' conspiracy theory being spread by extreme rightwingers that she was born a man before undergoing a sex change...."

"The lie is being spread by French extremists close to QAnon, the American movement that claims the US is in the grip of Satan-worshipping paedophiles. Although the rumours were begun by radicals so marginal that even the best-known French far-right website has dismissed them as 'grotesque,' they have started to circulate more widely on the internet in recent days." 

The London Times reports.

From the comments over there: "Mme Macron's daughter is so similar to her mother, It is a ludicrous suggestion that Mme Macron is not female. A more feminine woman is hard to find. What a ludicrous way to try to cause problems for the Macrons."

ADDED: Why sue over this? Doesn't it make her look transphobic? The rumors just seem like random internet bullshit, so you need a good motivation to elevate them. If the motivation is just to crush idiots who horse around and taunt people, that's mostly repressive and punching down. 

And that commenter I quoted also has unnecessary transphobia, because why would "A more feminine woman is hard to find" work as proof that Brigitte Macron is not transgender? The unspoken foundation of that remark is that transgender women are not feminine. Isn't that impolite?

The moon hangs on a tree...

 ... at 7:22 a.m. on the first day of winter.

"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."

Said the writer Anne Lamott.

Quoted in the top-rated comment at "She wrote a novel with her cheating ex as a villain. Is he stuck in this role?" (WaPo)(a man cheated on his wife, left her when the girlfriend got pregnant, and regrets it while explaining that he "needed to feel something other than grief and sadness" after the first wife had a late-term miscarriage). 

The commenter continues: 

So suck it up, LW. You did what you did. Instead of letting it destroy her she took her pain and turned it into a survival guide that is helping others feel less alone. Yes, some folks probably know it's about you. You'll have to suck that up too. I'm pretty sure that's what you're mostly worried about, or you would have been around with your apologies a long time ago.

I don't completely agree with Anne Lamott, though if I had something I truly wanted to write and publish, I would rely on her statement to give me courage. But the truth is that no one can behave well enough to save them from the fate of looking bad in someone's novel! The novelist might be a victim, but I think most novelists are not victims. They are observers, often highly judgmental, and they're inclined to develop their raw material into the most interesting and amusing and agonizing form, not to treat everyone fairly. Yes, you "own" the raw material you gathered from others, and no one can stop you from applying the brutal force of your creativity to what you've got there, but don't imagine that these people deserve it all because they weren't good enough!

That said, the letter writer in that WaPo column sounds perfectly awful, and I'm willing to believe that he deserved it. You know, he owns what happened to him, including the fate of becoming somebody else's fictional character. He's free to justify himself to the hilt and destroy the first wife by whipping up his own novel. Maybe she should have "behaved better." But I'm thinking it would probably be a better novel if he dragged himself through the mud. 

ADDED: I hope WaPo made sure the letter was really from the ex-husband of the novelist. It makes him look so bad that I'm imagining one of his enemies sending that letter in as a way to draw attention to the book and lock him into the interpretation that the character in the book is really him.

"What blows my mind is that it was all organic. It just happened. There was no planning. It just grew out of everybody’s desire for beauty and joy and connection."

Says one of the participants in a Christmas-decorating style described in "A man strung Christmas lights from his home to his neighbor’s to support her. The whole community followed" (WaPo).

Don't get any ideas about stringing lights across the street — from house to house — in your neighborhood. With ideas, it won't be organic, it won't have just happened, there will be planning. It does look nice... but what if I don't want to be connected by lights to my neighbor? Suddenly, I'm the Scrooge?

"Should a journalist — particularly one as distinguished and influential as [Thomas] Friedman — disclose his direct financial support of those he’s writing about?"

"The question is an unlikely twist on an issue that has occasionally ensnared other journalists. News organizations typically prohibit reporters and columnists from taking anything of value from those they write about, lest it corrupt or compromise what they write and report. The rules usually make no distinction between news reporters and opinion columnists, such as Friedman, the latter of whom are allowed to advocate for a cause or a point of view. But giving money, particularly without notifying readers, is rarely addressed."

 From "Thomas Friedman’s columns prompt a different kind of ethical question for the New York Times" (WaPo). Friedman has written favorably about Conservation International in many of his columns in the NYT, and his family foundation has donated $5.9 million to it over the years. 

Is this a problem, and what is the agenda of the people who are pushing the notion that this is problem? WaPo cites a "San Francisco community organizer named Michael Petrelis" who brought up this issue about Friedman at a NYT shareholder meeting:

When all else fails... get a puppy!

Welcome to the White House, Commander. pic.twitter.com/SUudQnPv29

— President Biden (@POTUS) December 20, 2021

Imagine if Trump got a German shepherd and called it Commander! What a Nazi he is!