Painful to see — but here is the attack on Paul Pelosi you'd been trying to visualize.

🚨BREAKING: The Paul Pelosi bodycam video has been released.

Here is the full video. pic.twitter.com/Z254Q8NGIM

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 27, 2023

"A new sculpture has become the first female figure to adorn one of the 10 plinths atop a powerful New York appellate courthouse in Manhattan."

"The plinths have been dominated for more than a century by now weathered statues representing great lawgivers throughout the ages — all of them men. Standing among Moses, Confucius and Zoroaster is the shimmering, golden eight-foot female sculpture, emerging from a pink lotus flower and wearing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s signature lace collar. Shahzia Sikander... 53, the paradigm-busting Pakistani American artist behind the work... 'She is a fierce woman and a form of resistance in a space that has historically been dominated by patriarchal representation... The sculpture is located at the courthouse of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court at 27 Madison Avenue."

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Here's the NYT article about the sculpture: "Move Over Moses and Zoroaster: Manhattan Has a New Female Lawgiver/The artist Shahzia Sikander calls the eight-foot sculpture she has placed atop a New York courthouse an urgent form of 'resistance,'" which explains why there is an empty plinth:

These turning-the-tables arguments don't always work out the way the table-turner thinks.

Ha! The men I know would be thrilled. pic.twitter.com/xWZxeabPKt

— Gail Heriot (@GailHeriot) January 27, 2023

Via Gail Heriot on Instapundit. 

Now, that's a screen shot, not a working embedded tweet, and there are lots of Twitter accounts named "Women in Power." There's no "@" line. Did someone make a screen shot, then erase the "@" part?

I suspect that "Women in Power" is copying someone else's nicely drawn, well-conceived comic. Where is the artist's name? Also erased?

Anyway, isn't Heriot right that a lot of men would get a charge out of hearing these stray, lame compliments? But what happens next?! I'm predicting a shit show. 

ADDED: I searched Google images until I found one that identified the artist. It is Kasia Babis.

What is the book Albie is reading 20 minutes into "In the Sandbox," Episode 4 of Season 2 of "The White Lotus"?

This is a key moment in the story, so I especially wanted to know what book it is...

... but I'm generally very interested in what books characters are reading in all episodes of both seasons of "The White Lotus." There's so much reading in these things, often "performative reading." The characters are on vacation, usually reading out in the sun by the pool. The writer/director, Mike White, is clearly big on reading. 

We see the back cover of Albie's book, and it's partly covered up, but I figured out that it said "Or, What Is the Power of Shit?," which is the second part of the title of "The Architecture of Closed Worlds: Or, What Is the Power of Shit?"

"The tale may seem like a throwback to 'Never Been Kissed' and 'Hiding Out,' PG-13-rated movies that featured the high jinks of adults impersonating high school students..."

"... to report a news story and hide from the Mafia. But students at New Brunswick High School said they were worried that [Hyejeong] Shin’s behavior suggested that her motives were far less comical.... Students told a New Brunswick Today reporter, in a video posted to YouTube, that Ms. Shin had requested to meet at least some people she met at a location outside of school. One teenage girl, who identified herself as Tatiana, said that the night before the woman’s arrest she got a text from Ms. Shin that left her feeling frightened for her safety. 'All I wanted to do was make her feel comfortable in a new school,' she said."

From "Woman, 29, Enrolled in High School and Pretended to Be a Teenager/The woman attended classes in New Brunswick for four days before her ruse was discovered, officials said" (NYT).

Here's that video. 

It's surprising this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. The school doesn't want to make a new student feel excluded. And there must be many lost and lonely young adults who wish they could regain the structure and camaraderie of teenagerhood. The person is not necessarily a predator.

Maybe some people are genuinely confused and feel that they "identify" as a teenager. I'm actually giving some thought to whether I'm being insensitive to transgender people by putting "identify" in scare quotes and by using the word "confused."

Sunrise/sunset.

Snow erased the line between the water and the sky at sunrise:

Those are my photos from this morning. Later, Meade went out and caught the sunset:

"If I run, there are forces within the Democratic Party who would be trying to invisibilize me."

"I think they will have an easier time invisibilizing me if I run third party. If I do run, and I run as a Democrat, I will be more inconvenient to the people who need to be inconvenienced."

Said the charmingly glib Marianne Williamson, quoted in "Potential Biden challenger Marianne Williamson heads to New Hampshire/The visit comes as state Democrats warn the ongoing showdown over primary dates 'will create an opening for an insurgent candidate' that could embarrass the president" (WaPo).

I love the quote. Great repetition of 2 cool words beginning with "i" — "invisibilize" and "inconvenien- t/ced." Invisibilizing as the defense to inconveniencing. And the way to fight invisibility is to be more inconvenient. Another way to fight invisibility is to say intriguing, interesting things.

"Our exaggerated reverence for the creative impulse derives from the romantics of the early 19th century... and filtered through from intellectual bohemia..."

"... to the upper middle classes.... Now, quite banal instances of human creativity are preposterously overvalued. Witness the often conceited superiority of those in only tangentially creative professions. Why should a newspaper columnist or an advertising copywriter feel himself to be more interesting than a banker or a cleaner? I have lawyer friends who complain of the rictus countenances and slipping eye-contact they get from artistic types at parties. But I know those parties. And I know my lawyers are the most interesting people in the room. ... [Some] argue that AI cannot be creative because it lacks internal understanding, is merely a 'king of pastiche'.... But this is close to what those original artists were doing too — the artist’s great struggle, the critic Harold Bloom argues, is confronting and overcoming the influence of predecessors. And does it even matter what’s going on internally now that human audiences fail to distinguish between a composition by a robot and one by Bach...?...  AI should disillusion us of the spurious glamour of creativity. It will be good for those who have suffered the social condescension of 'creatives.'"

Writes James Marriott in "AI spells trouble for creatives — about time too/Machines that can write and paint are a welcome rebuff to the prestige enjoyed by artistic types" (London Times).

"Driving 100 Miles in an EV Is Now More Expensive Than in an ICE/Deadhead miles and opportunity costs make electric vehicle ownership dramatically more expensive..."

"....than just your average car powered by a gas engine.... Combustion drivers pay about $11.29 per 100 miles on the road. EV drivers who charge up at home spend about $11.60 per 100 miles. The price difference is more dramatic for those who mainly recharge at stations. Frequent charging station users pay $14.40 per 100 miles.... [given] the deadhead miles to reach stations and the opportunity cost of waiting for vehicles to charge at stations. The difference highlights the lackluster coverage for electric vehicle charging infrastructure across the United States."

Jalopnik reports.

ADDED:

The very bottom of the Electric Vehicle supply chain. pic.twitter.com/SGC8q6DwNT

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) January 25, 2023

"At first, the suggestions my lover made were just funny. Right away he told me that I should be wearing much tighter clothes, sporting necklines that showed off my boobs..."

"... and dressing in brighter colors—that I should be, essentially, more gender-conforming. I told this to a female friend, who sighed, 'I’ve run that experiment before with men: "Be my stylist! What do you like seeing me in?" And the result is always, always being sexualized.' I had hoped for high fashion (strange knits, elegant linens, statement…. vests, I don’t know!), not 'How To Be A Pretty Lady 101.'" 

 Writes Blythe Roberson, in "I Let My Boyfriend Dress Me For an Entire Year/When I asked my stylish sweetie to help me dress better, it sometimes felt like negotiating with the patriarchy in real time. But now, I have a new understanding of what it means to feel desired and understood—and a killer wardrobe, too" (Esquire).

"It’s not that I dislike the royals themselves; I don’t know them personally and really don’t think about them much."

"But I do think about race, class, power, and postcolonial inequalities quite a bit, and so I harbor an unwavering contempt for an institution that stood at the pinnacle of empire and places inherited privilege at the very heart of the British establishment. There is also, if I’m honest, a lack of understanding on my part. I have never fully comprehended the monarchy’s popular appeal. Why would hundreds of thousands of people queue for hours and miles for a glimpse of the coffin of a leader they never elected, or get excited about the wedding of two wealthy people they are never going to meet? But while I loathe the monarchy, I love the Netflix series The Crown...."

Writes Gary Younge in "Heavy Is the Head/The British Royals in the age of streaming" (The Nation).

"Successfully marketing a product so that it feels local everywhere is an art. I’ve started calling this crucial step in a product’s development 'smallwashing'..."

"... i.e., when a brand positions itself as a small business and shows up on shelves as if it were small, even though it has probably been through at least one comfy fundraise and a hotshot General Catalyst VC sits on the board.... It’s up to the actual companies to decide on their values — Will the jarred condiment be woke, aligned with a cool chef, or 'artisanal' in some way? — but regardless of the chosen messaging, Instagram then takes over, drilling its users with targeted ads that help build a company’s story (Omsom lets you cook faster, for example; Momofuku’s noodles let you cook like David Chang). By the time a customer discovers an Instagram brand in a shoppy shop for the first time, it may even feel like a mirage: This chile crisp really exists just for me — it’s not only a story on my phone!"

From "Welcome to the Shoppy Shop/Why does every store suddenly look the same?" (NY Magazine).

The term "shoppy shops" refers to shops that sell these "smallwashed" products. We're told that the packaging is often designed by this place: Gander. Should you click and take a gander at Gander? Yes, the design of the design firm's page includes big pictures of everyone on The Team, and it seems oddly humorous, like a Wes Anderson movie credits sequence.

The woods at midday.

It was 12:36 p.m. and snowing when I took this picture today. This is a full color photograph, with absolutely no adjustments made to it. It looks so black and white, but there is a slight blue cast to the snow and some brownness to the twigs.

I laughed at this WaPo headline: "Biden’s devious plan to break the MAGA fever just might work."

That seems like more of the usual fluff. But it turns out the "devious plan" is to spend "enormous amounts" of federal money. That's not crediting Biden with cleverness — as I was expecting. 

But "devious" doesn't mean devilish. It means by way of a winding path — circuitous, rambling, deviating. The "-vi-" is key. It's the Latin "via" (that is, "way").

Here's how Robert Louis Stevenson used it:

"Late in Anna Karenina, in a period of self-imposed social exile in Italy, Anna and her lover, Vronsky, are treated to a tirade on..."

"... the destructive superficiality of the 'free-thinking' young men—proto-disrupters, if you will—who populate the era and have been steeped in 'ideas of negation.' 'In former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought,' Vronsky’s friend Golenishchev observes. 'But now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities.' The problem then, as Tolstoy presents it, was that such an ambitious young man would try, 'as he’s no fool, to educate himself,' and so would turn to 'the magazines' instead of 'to the classics and theologians and tragedians and historians and philosophers, and, you know, all the intellectual work that came in his way.'"

Writes Thomas Chatterton Williams, in "The People Who Don’t Read Books/Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character" (The Atlantic). Williams is aggrieved that Kanye West called himself "a proud non-reader of books."

"The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box."

"But that does not mean there are no limits to what people can say on our platform. When there is a clear risk of real world harm — a deliberately high bar for Meta to intervene in public discourse — we act."

Said Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, quoted in "Meta to Reinstate Trump’s Facebook and Instagram Accounts/Donald Trump had been barred from the social media platforms after the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol. Twitter reinstated him last year" (NYT).

I agree that "The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box." But why did it suddenly become true for Clegg? I've got to presume Meta recalculated its interests. 

Clegg hedges, reserving the power to kick Trump and others out again, when the calculation changes, but at least he said "clear" — "clear risk of real world harm" — and acknowledges a "high bar." 

ADDED: Here's where the exception swallows the rule: "harm." It could encompass hurt feelings and lost economic opportunities — and lost elections. The modifier "real world" doesn't keep "harm" from including the ordinary consequences of effective speech. Then, "clear risk" isn't much of a limitation. You could have a clear 5% risk. I appreciate the Clegg at least mouthed a commitment to free speech and purported to set a high bar, but there really is no assurance at all. There are words to be thrown in his face the next time Meta kicks out somebody we care about, but he'll have words to use to say they followed their commitment to the letter.