At the Sunrise Café...

 

... you can talk all night.

"The wheel's still in spin."

 

It's a podcast. 

Topics: "Coddling baby-adults, winning the culture war, Dylan’s losers, calling kids fat, walking the war out of your system, the museum’s accidental honoring of male supremacy."

No nudes is good nudes.

I'm reading this NYT article by Roberta Smith about the rearrangement of the various permanent galleries at the Museum of Modern Art. I see what's going on here:

The fourth-floor gallery, with a mix of what most people would recognize as Pop Art, was previously “From Soup Cans to Flying Saucers” and is now “Domestic Disruption.”... This gallery... is far less discombobulated than its previous iteration, corroborating more convincingly the internationalism that is a recurring subtext on this floor. Tom Wesselmann’s scaled up “Still Life #57” (1969-70) is one of his best installation paintings, not least for containing no nudes. It is in dialogue with Noah Purifoy’s “Unknown,” a balletic assemblage-painting in which a parasol armature radiates across saturated bands of green, yellow and red. To the other side stands Beatriz González’s “Lullaby,” a metal baby crib, painted enamel green with an appropriated image of mother and child.

"Still Life #57" — which you can see here — is a very large painting of a radio, an orange, and some daffodils. But longtime museumgoers almost certainly associate Wesselmann with vivid, forthright "Great American Nudes" like this one, "Great American Nude #75."

Now, the nudes are banished, the galleries are rearranged, Wesselmann will be known by an orange (instead of the orange's shape-mate, the breast), and it must be "in dialogue" with an African-American man's balletic parasol and a Hispanic woman's crib. 

I'm not looking at it, but it sounds like ham-handed inclusiveness. It sounds as though the white man is still the center of power: The arrangement seems like an exercise in diluting and offsetting him. That, ironically, is an expression of a deep, persistent belief in white male supremacy. 

Loser.

Professor Tushnet and Justice Alito got me looking for the Dylan songs containing the word "loser." There are 4 such songs, and the one the worked for that post was "The Times They Are A-Changin'." 

What are the other 3 "loser" songs? 

"The very intensity of Justice Alito’s remarks seems to me to confirm my judgment about who won the culture wars. His are in fact the observations of a person who hasn’t come to grips with the fact that he’s been on the losing side of many culture war issues."

Said Harvard lawprof Mark Tushnet, quoted in "In Unusually Political Speech, Alito Says Liberals Pose Threat to Liberties/The conservative justice’s pointed remarks, which he made in a speech to the Federalist Society, reflected thoughts he has expressed in his opinions" (NYT). 

Tushnet is the Harvard professor that Alito was referring to in his speech (transcript):

The question we face is whether our society will be inclusive enough to tolerate people with unpopular religious beliefs. Over the years, I have sat on cases involving the rights of many religious minorities — Muslim police officers whose religion required them to have beards, a Native American who wanted to keep a bear for religious services, a Jewish prisoner who tried to organize a Torah study group.... 

A Harvard Law School Professor provided a different vision of a future America. He candidly wrote, quote, the culture wars are over, they lost we won. The question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. My own judgment is the taking a hard line you lost live with it is better than trying to accommodate the losers, taking a hard line seem to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945. Is our country going to follow that course? To quote a popular Nobel laureate, "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."

Alito seems to like to refer to people without naming them. The "Harvard Law School Professor" was Mark Tushnet. Who was the Nobel laureate? 

 

ADDED: Hey, Professor Tushnet, you say the war is over and you won and the other guy is the loser, but the Nobel laureate says: 

... don’t speak too soon 

For the wheel’s still in spin 

And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’ 

For the loser now will be later to win 

For the times they are a-changin’

"I am quietly horrified by how fashionable it is to demean men in the academic setting and popular press. I heard a faculty colleague laughing about all the 'mediocre white men' in our shared course and it broke my heart, because even white men are people too."

Writes "a woman and an Assistant Professor at an R1 school" in the comments section of "I’m Tired of Babysitting Man-Babies at Work" (NYT). 

It's an advice column, and the chosen problem — from a woman who works "on a relatively diverse, gender-balanced team" at a job she says she loves — is that "the work itself does not feel fair" because "Within the project teams I’m a part of, it falls to women to take notes, organize their colleagues and make sure work gets done with regular check-ins and meetings."

The NYT's advice columnist is Roxane Gay, and she says: "If a natural, equitable system isn’t manifesting, assign people specific responsibilities. Stop assuming everything will fall apart if you don’t hold it together. Stop coddling grown men. Prioritize your own work and ambition more than you prioritize the man-babies you work with."

I don't really understand the answer, because it seems to me that to " ssign people specific responsibilities" is to assume you're the one that must "hold it together" and impose the proper order, the "equitable system" that didn't emerge "naturally." The problem seems to be the familiar "group project" problem, where some people hold back and let the more anxious over-achievers get most of the work done. That's the natural order — isn't it? — among the human beings.

And why does it just happen that it "falls to women to take notes, organize their colleagues and make sure work gets done with regular check-ins and meetings"? Is that "natural"? An underlying question is whether all the note-taking and meetings and regular check-ins really need to be done. 

You can look at this problem from different angles: 1. Women could be oppressing men by expecting work to be done with excessive meetings and documentation and bureaucracy. People who resist inefficiency are not necessarily babyish. 2. Men could end up coddling grown women if they get the message men violate gender equity norms when they don't go along with the expectation that work be done with lots of stultifying meetings and note-taking.

"The war on childhood obesity reached its zenith with the 2010 introduction of the national 'Let’s Move!' campaign, 'dedicated to solving the problem of obesity within a generation.'"

"It was a campaign against 'childhood obesity' — not specific health conditions or the behaviors that may contribute to those health conditions. It wasn’t a campaign against foods with little nutritional value, or against the unchecked poverty that called for such low-cost, shelf-stable foods. It was a campaign against a body type — specifically, children’s body types...."

From "Leave Fat Kids Alone/The 'war on childhood obesity' has only caused shame," an op-ed by Aubrey Gordon in The New York Times

This is the most negative thing about Michelle Obama I have ever seen in The New York Times. Not that the op-ed ever says the name Michelle Obama. I was going to check to see if the comments over there bring up Michelle Obama, but there are no comments on this piece. Perhaps that's to protect Michelle Obama, but probably also to protect the author of the op-ed from any of shaming, the op-ed being staunchly anti-shame.

Here's the Wikipedia article on "Let's Move." It begins: "Let's Move! was a public health campaign in the United States, led by Michelle Obama, wife of then-President Barack Obama."

"And their eyes — wow, it was like someone turned the lights on."

The image is from Earl Shaffer's Appalachian Hike Diary (1948), every page of which you can see at that link, at the Smithsonian website. 

I'm reading about Shaffer this morning in "Walking off the War on the Appalachian Trail," a new article at Gaia GPS. The author is Abby Levene.

Shaffer was the first person to through-hike the Appalachian Trail:

He travelled alone, walking around 17 miles a day. Shaffer packed light. He nixed a tent when he realized his poncho could double as a shelter. He mended his clothes, and cooked cornbread in a pan over an open fire. Shaffer made it over the rocks, roots, and rubble in just one pair of Russell Moccasin Company “Birdshooter” boots. He resoled them twice, and they were in tatters by the end. 

You can still buy Russell Moccasin Company “Birdshooter” boots. They're from Berlin, Wisconsin. 

The article says that Shaffer's motivation was to “walk the war out of my system.” The main focus of the article is Sean Gobin, a Marine veteran who through-hiked the Appalachian Trail and thinks it was good for his mental health:

At the Observatory Café...

 

... you can make all the observations you like.

"That's just an alabai."

 

It's a podcast.

Topics: "Elon Musk and COVID, my dream about Biden, Alito and the erosion of rights, colossal dog statue in Turkmenistan, the largest statues in the world, Meghan McCain mocks Trump, a cheeky interviewer in Nebraska, Trump adjust to losing, Harvard and affirmative action." 

Episode title appropriates a line from this:

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"A two-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit found that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process does not violate civil rights law..."

"... when the university selects an incoming undergraduate class.... The plaintiff alleged that Harvard... intentionally discriminated against Asian Americans in ways that benefited applicants from other groups seeking entry to one of the world’s most competitive universities.... Judge Juan R. Torruella, who had also been on the panel reviewing the appeal, died last month.... The university says it adheres to Supreme Court rulings over decades that have allowed the use of race within certain limits.... The court’s new 6-3 conservative majority, cemented with the recent appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to Ginsburg’s seat, could view the long-running controversy over race-conscious admissions in a new light.... Several states bar public universities from considering race. California voters on Nov. 3 rejected a ballot measure that would have repealed a ban on the use of race in public university admissions and other situations. But the politics of the issue are complex, as this year’s demonstrations for social and racial justice have shown the power of the Black Lives Matter movement...."

WaPo reports.

"Approximate heights of various notable statues."

"1. Statue of Unity 240 m (790 ft) (incl. 58 m (190 ft) base) 2. Spring Temple Buddha 153 m (502 ft) (incl. 25 m (82 ft) pedestal and 20 m (66 ft) throne) 3. Statue of Liberty 93 m (305 ft) (incl. 47 m (154 ft) pedestal) 4. The Motherland Calls 87 m (285 ft) (incl. 2 m (6 ft 7 in) pedestal) 5. Christ the Redeemer 38 m (125 ft) (incl. 8 m (26 ft) pedestal) 6. Michelangelo's David 5.17 m (17.0 ft) (excl. 2.5 m (8 ft 2 in) plinth)" 

From the Wikipedia article on the Statue of Unity, the tallest statue in the world. I got there from Wikipedia's list of tallest statues in the world, which I was reading because we're talking this morning about a 19 foot tall statue of a dog. 

That dog is in Turkmenistan, and it's quite big for a dog statue — the Balto statue in NY's Central Park is closer to actual-dog size — but a statue has to be at least 98 feet tall to get on the "tallest statues" list, so the Turkmenistan dog falls way short. 

Nearly all the statues on that list depict human beings (or dieties that look human). But there are a few nonhuman animals. If I read the list accurately, the tallest statue that doesn't have a human — or part-human — form is a merlion (in Singapore). No dog statues on the list.

Look how shrimpy the Statue of Liberty and Christ the Redeemer look juxaposed to the Statue of Unity and the Spring Temple Buddha. But in the real world, these statues are not near any other statues, so the sense of scale comes from the landscape (or harborscape) around them. 

I haven't visited too many colossi, and I don't know if I want to. I've gazed at the Statue of Liberty thousands of times, but I didn't care about taking a boat up to the island to get close to it and experience my tininess in contrast to the thing. I did it once, to go along with others. I'm resistant to exaggerated size. Make it beautiful before you make it big. Bigness as goodness, I reject.

"'He knows it’s over,' one adviser said. But instead of conceding, they said, he is floating one improbable scenario after another for staying in office..."

"... while he contemplates his uncertain post-presidency future. There is no grand strategy at play, according to interviews with a half-dozen advisers and people close to the president. Mr. Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next, seeing how far he can push his case against his defeat and ensure the continued support of his Republican base. By dominating the story of his exit from the White House, he hopes to keep his millions of supporters energized and engaged for whatever comes next.... As a next step, Mr. Trump is talking seriously about announcing that he is planning to run again in 2024, aware that whether he actually does it or not, it will freeze an already-crowded field of possible Republican candidates... His mood is often bleak, advisers say, though he is not raising his voice in anger, despite the impression left by his tweets, which are often in capital letters.... Advisers have nudged the president to stop talking about 'fraud' because that has legal implications that his team has not been able to back up. So Mr. Trump has taken to pronouncing the election 'rigged'...."

From "Trump Floats Improbable Survival Scenarios as He Ponders His Future/There is no grand strategy. President Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next" by Maggie Haberman (NYT).

Suddenly, everyone's interested in Leta Powell Drake — when people in Lincoln, Nebraska have watched her interview celebrities for 40 years.

She's gone big because of this tweet, collecting some of her sublime moments:

Currently obsessed with Leta Powell Drake, the greatest interviewer of all time. pic.twitter.com/3oCYAd9vZD

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) November 12, 2020

Now, Vulture has a interview with her. Excerpts: 

So... humor has not died. I question whether it's "too funny." But who cares? At least we're not too uptight to make jokes... or at least only if they are anti-Trump...

In light of tonight’s news....

*sorry I had to, the meme is too funny. pic.twitter.com/lo6xHqCbk0

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) November 13, 2020