AP bans the "archaic and sexist" term "mistress."

My son John notes (on Facebook).

But what's the alternative? AP recommends "companion" or "lover."

That made me laugh. "Lover" is so silly. How many times have I heard Trump talk about Peter Strzok and his "lover" Lisa Page?

But to oust a word, you need a replacement word. Thesaurus.com has these synonyms for "mistress":

concubine, girlfriend, paramour, prostitute, roommate, sweetheart, chatelaine, courtesan, doxy, inamorata, ladylove, moll, shack, sugar, sweetie, bedmate, best girl, dream girl, fancy woman, kept woman, main squeeze, old lady, other woman, shack job

Some of them are inappropriate, referring to prostitution (including the unfamiliar words "chatelaine" and "doxy") or to a financial arrangement that may not exist ("kept woman"). I like "bedmate," but not all sexual acting out happens in bed (especially the kind that ends up in the news). The concrete specificity of "bedmate" is a plus but also a minus. So I must say that the word that jumps out as the word to oust "mistress" is...

paramour.

Why "shirtless" was trending on Twitter.

This. Is. BANANAS!! 🤣🤣🤣 Too bad it's not ACTUALLY Jeff Goldblum. That would be even greater.

(For the record, OP confirmed shirtless dude both started it AND deserved the ass-whooping for yelling rapey shit at women on the street) https://t.co/hidSf8nK5y

— Dorian Connelley (@dorianconnelley) May 12, 2020

How better to react to disrespect than to turn and walk away? And yet, it's Trump's usual way to stand his ground and fight.

Fake Journalists! https://t.co/fdFWf95Zz1

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2020

Notice the effort to drag Trump into a new racial controversy.

"According to Caro’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, no book receives more inquiries about its completion than the last Johnson volume..."

"... even though anyone with a long memory, a love for history or access to Wikipedia knows how his life turns out. The escalation of the Vietnam War, and the failure to win in it or reach a negotiated settlement, drove Johnson to announce in March 1968 that he would not seek re-election. He lived just four years after leaving the White House, dying of a heart attack in January 1973, at age 64. 'As great as his (Caro’s) earlier books have been, this is the culmination, the one many of us have been waiting for,' [said] the journalist-historian David Maraniss.... 'Everything that came before leads to these years, all of LBJ’s work and all of Caro’s amazing reconstruction and assessment, when the world explodes at home and overseas and Johnson struggles with his powers, his beliefs, and his soul.'"

From "Robert Caro writes, and waits, during the COVID-19 outbreak" (AP). Robert A. Caro is 84, and so many of us are counting on him to finish the last volume. If I had to name one old person in the world whose continuing to live is most important to me, it would be him. With or without the threat of coronavirus, I was thinking about him. He has a specific and huge task to finish. The last volume is the part of history that I remember enduring, that shaped my young life and my attitude toward my country. As the AP writer puts it, we all know generally what happened in those years, but that's so much less than what we will know when at long last we have Robert A. Caro's last volume.

So how is Robert A. Caro doing? He's in the hot spot, New York City. We're told he "rises early, walks to his office down the street, spends hours on the fifth and final volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography and enjoys a late-day stroll in Central Park with his wife, Ina, both of them wearing protective masks." We're told that he "jokes that he has a long history, like many writers, of social distancing." The Caros have "one of their children [to] bring them groceries." (Strange the way we use the word "children" to refer to adults.) The inability to travel is having some effect: "The historian had been hoping to visit Vietnam in March as part of his research for his Johnson book... [and h]e needs to [look] through some papers in the Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas," but he can put them off. He's "immersed in one section of the last Johnson volume, set during 1967" that "is as long as many books."

Such a long writing project! It's been going on since the mid-1970s, since he was 40. Such a brilliant achievement. I do wish him well.

ADDED: I wrote "If I had to name one old person in the world whose continuing to live is most important to me, it would be him." I should have written something like "If I had to name one old person in the world outside of my personal circle...." I myself am an "old person in the world"!

Sunrise run.

At the Monday Night Café...

... reach out.

(And remember to use the Althouse Portal to Amazon.)

"It’s not that there’s no sincere sentiment underneath the Republican reticence to do too much to save the economy."

"Republicans are genuinely fearful that people will be too thankful if government helps them too much and that the crisis will make the passage of stronger safety-net programs more likely in the future. But if you thought Trump could still win, your best move would be to give the economy the biggest short-term boost possible with massive government spending, then worry about cutting it back later. Doing nothing now, even if you’re planning to promote cuts in a year or two, suggests only that you think the Trump presidency is all but a lost cause."

From "Republicans have already decided Trump is going to lose" by Paul Waldman (WaPo). I've quoted the last 2 paragraphs, which account for the very dubious proposition in the headline.

"... another disciplined turn of the dial that will allow Wisconsin's business owners to safely get back to work and Wisconsin consumers to support their favorite local spots...."

Governor Tony Evers is allowing small stores with exits to the outdoors to admit 5 socially distanced customers at a time. Stores in shopping malls — where you have to enter and exit into an interior space — must remain closed.

Fox11News reports.

"Ikea has said it will take 'more careful' security measures in its shops in China after..."

"... an explicit video of a woman masturbating in one of its stores went viral online. The pornographic clip shows a woman pleasuring herself half-naked on various sofas and beds in the furniture store's showroom, while oblivious shoppers walk by in the background.... 'This woman is so brave, I don't understand, [she's] just doing it in broad daylight,' read one Weibo post that gained more than 8,000 likes. 'There are so many people around, I just don't understand,' another wrote."

Yahoo News reports.

"There is nothing like the energy and atmosphere of live music. It is the most life-affirming experience..."

"... to see your favorite performer onstage, in the flesh, rather than as a one-dimensional image glowing in your lap as you spiral down a midnight YouTube wormhole. Even our most beloved superheroes become human in person. Imagine being at Wembley Stadium in 1985 as Freddie Mercury walked onstage for the Live Aid benefit concert... It was Freddie's connection with the audience that transformed that dilapidated soccer stadium into a sonic cathedral. In broad daylight, he majestically made 72,000 people his instrument, joining them in harmonious unison.... I’ve been lifted and carried to the stage by total strangers for a glorious swan dive back into their sweaty embrace. Arm in arm, I have sung at the top of my lungs with people I may never see again. All to celebrate and share the tangible, communal power of music.... I don’t know when it will be safe to return to singing arm in arm at the top of our lungs, hearts racing, bodies moving, souls bursting with life. But I do know that we will do it again, because we have to. It’s not a choice. We’re human... [T]ogether, we are instruments in a sonic cathedral, one that we build together night after night. And one that we will surely build again."

Writes The Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl (in The Atlantic).

ADDED: Interesting that Grohl made Freddie Mercury his central example of the sublime. Mercury was the one artist Kurt Cobain — Grohl's former bandmate — cited in his suicide note:

[W]hen we're back stage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowds begins, it doesn't affect me the way in which it did for Freddie Mercury, who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration from the crowd which is something I totally admire and envy. The fact is, I can't fool you, any one of you.... I must be one of those narcissists who only appreciate things when they're gone. I'm too sensitive....

At the Sunrise Café...

... keep the conversation going.

(That is this morning's sunrise, a Type #5 sunrise, photographed at 5:44 — 7 minutes after the "actual" sunrise time.)

When Al Franken intersected with The Grateful Dead (back in 1980).

Don't miss the sexual harassment — at 3:30 — and the attempt to justify it with the invocation of the lyric "We can share the women, we can share the wine." Comically justify it. They're mocking the justification.

Here's a Reddit discussion from a year ago: "We can share the women we can share the wine?/Looking back, what are the most problematic Dead lyrics?"

Here's a defense of the line at Dead.net:

It’s unfortunate that the opening lines of the song ["Jack Straw"] are often taken by listeners at face value—I always felt very strange about the roar that would emerge at the lines “we can share the women, we can share the wine.” In fact, as has been pointed out, that attitude led our pair of ne’er-do-wells onto a path of self-destruction. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone else heard that at shows—that inappropriate roar of approval—kind of like the line in “Baba O’Riley”: “You’re all wasted!” Hmmmm... and that’s a good thing?

"Why Kamala Harris Isn’t Clamoring to Be Biden’s Running Mate."

The NYT offers to explain.

[T]here is no public campaign similar to that carried out by Stacey Abrams... no surrogate lobbying effort like the one for Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts... [P]eople close to Mr. Biden... have remarked about how little they have heard from Ms. Harris and her allies....

Ms. Harris has also overcome one critical obstacle in Mr. Biden’s orbit: the opposition of his wife, Jill Biden, according to people familiar with her thinking. Ms. Biden, who as recently as early March had publicly criticized Ms. Harris for her bruising attack on Mr. Biden in their first Democratic presidential debate, recently told those close to her that the perception that she was personally opposed to Ms. Harris was overblown.

Overblown ≠ overcome.

This is a long article, but I don't think it explained "Why Kamala Harris Isn’t Clamoring to Be Biden’s Running Mate." It establishes only that she isn't clamoring. You can pick up hints about why that might be, but it never comes out and says what feels most likely to me: She's preserving her dignity by not looking like she's eager for something she might not get and by maintaining the conditions for him to come around to seeing that he needs her.

"I don't even recognize a woman who communicates her needs, acknowledges any role in her partner's need for intimacy, and displays even a vestigial craving..."

"... for anything other than sleep, food, and more sleep. I'm staying in shape so that I can claw maybe a decade or so of sex and happiness between the ages of 45 and 60 for myself once I sever the dead limb I'm married to off my body."

Says a commenter at "The Woman So Sick of Screens She Can’t Watch Porn" (New York Magazine). I think that comment is written by a man. The screen name is Enquido. That means "inquisitive" in Spanish.

Something really ugly about "vestigial," "claw," and "sever... limb" so close together.

"The strongest brand in the world is not Apple or Mercedes-Benz or Coca-Cola. The strongest brands are MIT, Oxford, and Stanford."

"Academics and administrators at the top universities have decided over the last 30 years that we’re no longer public servants; we’re luxury goods. We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, 'This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants; we rejected 87 percent!,' and there’s a huge round of applause. That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last night. We as academics and administrators have lost the script.... But the ultimate vehicle for a luxury item is to massively and almost artificially constrain supply. Birkin bags are $12,000 because they create the illusion of scarcity. I’ll have 170 kids in my brand-strategy class in the fall. We charge them $7,000 per student. That’s $1.2 million that we get for 12 nights of me in a classroom. $100,000 a night. The gross margins on that offering are somewhere between 92 and 96 points. There is no other product in the world that’s been able to sustain 90-plus points of margin for this long at this high of a price point. Ferrari can’t do it. Hermès can’t do it. Apple can’t do it. Apple’s gross margins are 38 points. Hermès and luxury goods are somewhere between 50 and 60 points. There has never been a luxury item that’s been able to garner the type of gross margins as university education."

That's from "The Coming Disruption Scott Galloway predicts a handful of elite cyborg universities will soon monopolize higher education" (New York Magazine).

And, yeah, I saw it: "garner."

"Jerry Stiller, a classically trained actor who became a comedy star twice — in the 1960s in partnership with his wife, Anne Meara..."

"... and in the 1990s with a memorable recurring role on “Seinfeld” — has died. He was 92... The team of Stiller and Meara was for many years a familiar presence in nightclubs, on television variety and talk shows, and in radio and television commercials, most memorably for Blue Nun wine and Amalgamated Bank. Years after the act broke up, Mr. Stiller captured a new generation of fans as Frank Costanza, the short-tempered and not entirely sane father of Jason Alexander’s George, on the NBC series 'Seinfeld'.... Frank Costanza was a classic sitcom eccentric whose many dubious accomplishments included marketing a brassiere for men and creating Festivus, a winter holiday 'for the rest of us' celebrated with tests of strength and other bizarre rituals. His most noteworthy characteristic was his explosive, often irrational anger, and most of the episodes on which he was featured found him, sooner or later, yelling.... Growing up in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, young Jerry was inspired to perform by seeing Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante in person...  After serving in the Army during and immediately after World War II, he studied theater at Syracuse University under the G.I. Bill, learning about Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama...."

From the NYT obituary for the great Jerry Stiller.