Sunrise — 5:20, 5:23.

"Zonked, bushed, or just plain hebetudinous, most readers will be glad to get to the end of 'A History of Fatigue.'"

"Its virtues are undeniable; it is stoutly industrious and inquisitive, and, in the corralling of evidence, Vigarello shows such dedication that he should seriously consider moonlighting as a homicide detective. Any corpse would give its eyeteeth to have him on the case. The problem is that Vigarello’s piling up of information becomes too much to absorb, and he’s so frantically busy thinking everything through, as it were, that he neglects to pause for thought. Compare one of his predecessors, the Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso... [who began his own study of fatigue with these words]: 'One spring, towards the end of March, I happened to be in Rome, and, hearing that the migration of the quails had begun, I went down to Palo on the sea coast in order to ascertain whether these birds, after their journey from Africa, showed any of the phenomena of fatigue. The day after my arrival I rose when it was still dark, took my gun, and walked along the shore towards Fiumicino.'"

 
Writes Anthony Lane in "The Exhausting History of Fatigue/Having too much to do can be tiring; having nothing to do may be worse" (The New Yorker).

The book under discussion is "A History of Fatigue: From the Middle Ages to the Present." by Georges Vigarello.

Yes, of course, it was "hebetudinous" that pushed me over the line toward blogging this.

The sound of no one calling for civility.

 

Seen this morning because I went to Twitter and clicked on "Kavanaugh" in the "What's happening" sidebar.

If you're wondering whether writing "Really fuck you" on someone's photograph and posting it on Twitter is a protected speech under the First Amendment, read the Supreme Court's new "true threats" case, Counterman v. Colorado.

Oh, but it's Elton John. We've got to go.

While French police officers are being molested by illegal immigrants Emmanuel Macron and his wife are enjoying themselves at an Elton John concert.

Priorities...
🥴🥴🥴#emeutes#parisriots#Paris#FranceRiots#FranceHasFallen#franceViolence#Marseille#Nanterre#Nahel pic.twitter.com/xheFDEXe88

— Richard (@ricwe123) July 1, 2023

"In the writers’ room, we have occasionally had a kind of recurring phrase: 'Which is the most funny thing that could happen here, and by that I mean the most painful?'"

"And, sometimes, 'Which is the most painful thing that can happen here, by which I mean the most funny?'" 

Said Jesse Armstrong, quoted in "The End of 'Succession' Is Near/The show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, explains why he has chosen to conclude the drama of the Roy family in its fourth season" (The New Yorker, February 23, 2023).

That's a quote I read recently — after watching all 39 episodes of "Succession" in something close to 39 days, which I did because I kept seeing New Yorker articles about the greatness of the final season and felt doomed to see the spoilers sooner or later. Having watched the show, I could finally read the articles, and so I have a vast trove of things to be reminded of when I'm reading other things, and that's how a post like this ends up happening. That last paragraph of the previous post — "Drinking is funny until it's not.... The need to say things like 'self-care,' 'virtuous aftercare,' and 'biohack' sounds desperate, but that can be part of the funny, especially for the drunkards" — got me thinking about Armstrong's quote about comedy and pain.

This is a big topic — comedy and pain — and I challenge you to discuss it without quoting Mel Brooks.

"Getting an IV at home after a hangover is like a flex. It’s like, 'Look at me. I’m pretty bougie. I don’t need to sit and suffer.'"

Said  Dr. Abe Malkin, the chief executive and founder of Drip Hydration, quoted in "Does It Help With the Regret, Too? Hangovers Meet IV Drips. High-powered revelers are trying to hack their hangovers with concierge infusions" (NYT).

Most [anti-hangover] IV drips are packed with a combination of saline, vitamins, headache relief and anti-nausea medications. It’s a cocktail after cocktails. A flush, for the flush.... Some regular users compared the drips to a post-marathon massage. Companies and influencers pitch them as virtuous aftercare. 

The marketing builds off a national obsession with staying hydrated and detoxing, and also nods to an online “biohack” conversation, a body-as-machine approach to physical enhancement.... The expense may be part of the appeal. Influencers post about their IV bags just hours after they show off V.I.P. passes. Status symbols compound in the conspicuous consumption of fun....

One influencer laughs: "I can’t say I walk around the office saying that I have a hangover. I frame it as my self-care."

Drinking is funny until it's not. Does this IV bag extend the funny phase or expedite the tragic? The need to say things like "self-care," "virtuous aftercare," and "biohack" sounds desperate, but that can be part of the funny, especially for the drunkards. 

At the Friday Night Café...

 ... you can talk about whatever you want.

"Gasoline cars are among the last remnants in our daily lives of the pistoning industrial age — machines powered not by quietly streaming electrons..."

"... but by noisy, fiery explosion, by sequential gears and timing belts, by the primal growl of thermal expansion. America’s overreliance on cars has been ruinous, but... let’s remember, too, how the gas-powered car helped realize a quintessentially American idea of liberty: the freedom to roam just about anywhere you please. Yes, I’m romanticizing the automobile.... But as critical as I’ve been of cars, I can’t deny loving driving and loving it in a primal way — loving the thrum of a revving engine, loving slaloming in and out of turns on a windy country road, loving simply going very far, very fast, conveyed by fire. And here’s another confession: I’ve never felt anything approaching this sort of exhilaration in an electric car...."

Writes Farhad Manjoo in "Gas-Powered Cars Are an Environmental Catastrophe. I’ll Miss Them Anyway" (NYT).

"'The point of this whole thing is to decrease the demand for commercial sex,' said Maine state Rep. Lois Reckitt (D), who sponsored the bill..."

"...  adding that she wanted to do something to help women in the 'revolving door' to get out of the sex industry. Reckitt said police traditionally have used the women they arrested for prostitution to get to the people trafficking them. 'Now they’re going to have to arrest the johns and lean on them to find out where the trafficking is coming from,' she said.... 'It denigrates all women when some women are being bought and sold,' said Reckitt, a former officer of the National Organization for Women who for three decades led an organization that fights domestic violence in Maine. 'There’s no way to have total gender equality in this world if we’re selling women.'"

From "Maine becomes first state to decriminalize selling sex/Buying sex will remain illegal in the state, as communities nationally reconsider how best to legislate prostitution" (WaPo).

"If White women have historically been both the beneficiaries of affirmative action efforts and its biggest detractors, why are we not interrogating them on what this ruling means?"

"Why are Black people being made to answer for and about these systems, which we neither created nor greatly benefit from?..."

Asks the WaPo columnist Karen Attiah, in "White women have helped sink the affirmative action ship."

"For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse than not hiring a trans person at all."

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"Please. Not to be afraid. We are nobody."

A fond goodbye to Alan Arkin.

A post of mine from 2019: "With all the talk about The Russians!!!! these last few years, it was fun to watch "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!"

The student loan case is out: "The court agrees with the states that the HEROES Act does not authorize the debt forgiveness plan."

I'm quoting SCOTUSblog.

Here's the opinion: Biden v. Nebraska.

Another 6-3 conservative liberal split. The Chief Justice writes the main opinion, there's a Barrett concurrence, and Justice Kagan dissents, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson.

Excerpt from the majority opinion:

"The Court holds that the First Amendment bars Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees."

SCOTUSblog announces.

Here's the opinion.

It's a 6-3, conservative/liberal split. Gorsuch writes. No concurring opinions. One dissenting opinion, by Sotomayor.

From the Gorsuch opinion for the majority:

Like many States, Colorado has a law forbidding businesses from engaging in discrimination when they sell goods and services to the public. Laws along these lines have done much to secure the civil rights of all Americans. But in this particular case Colorado does not just seek to ensure the sale of goods or services on equal terms. It seeks to use its law to compel an individual to create speech she does not believe. The question we face is whether that course violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.

The business in question is a website design firm (owned by Lorie Smith) that offers customized "text, graphic arts, and videos to 'celebrate' and 'conve[y]' the 'details' of [a wedding couple's] 'unique love story.'"

Whatever happened to the affirmative action concept of "critical mass"?

From the majority opinion in the new case, Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard:

The principal dissent’s reliance on Fisher II is similarly mistaken. There, by a 4-to-3 vote, the Court upheld a “sui generis” race-based admissions program used by the University of Texas, 579 U. S., at 377, whose “goal” it was to enroll a “critical mass” of certain minority students, Fisher I, 570 U. S., at 297. But neither Harvard nor UNC claims to be using the critical mass concept—indeed, the universities admit they do not even know what it means. See 1 App. in No. 21–707, at 402 (“[N]o one has directed anybody to achieve a critical mass, and I’m not even sure we would know what it is.” (testimony of UNC administrator)); 3 App. in No. 20–1199, at 1137–1138 (similar testimony from Harvard administrator).

But the dissenting opinions never use the term "critical mass."

The only other mention of "critical mass" is in the concurring opinion by Justice Gorsuch:

Following Bakke, this Court declared that judges may simply “defer” to a school’s assertion that “diversity is essential” to its “educational mission.” Grutter, 539 U. S., at 328. Not all schools, though—elementary and secondary schools apparently do not qualify for this deference.... Only colleges and universities, the Court explained, “occupy a special niche in our constitutional tradition.” Grutter, 539 U. S., at 329. Yet even they (wielding their “special niche” authority) cannot simply assert an interest in diversity and discriminate as they please. Fisher, 579 U. S., at 381. Instead, they may consider race only as a “plus” factor for the purpose of “attaining a critical mass of underrepresented minority students” or “a diverse student body.” Grutter, 539 U. S., at 335–336 (internal quotation marks omitted).

So is "critical mass" something no one believes in anymore? Here's how I — as a lawprof teaching these cases — explained it a decade ago:

"Somewhen about 50,000 years ago..appeared Homo Neanderthalensis."

Wrote H.G. Wells in 1920, noted in the OED entry for "somewhen," an unusual word, but a word nonetheless.

Discovered upon contemplating the question why we have the word "somewhere" but not "somewhen," because I was thinking about how you can travel to different locations but must accept that you are where you are in the flow of time. I was delighted to see that "somewhen" really was a word and to encounter the example from Wells, who, of course, dreamed up the time machine.

Grammarphobia has a very substantial discussion of the word "somewhen" — "Somewhen over the rainbow." Excerpt: