"Not only are women and men marching together into sexlessness; they’re also on the same road to loneliness...."

"In 21st-century America, loneliness is essentially omnipresent, and the high schooler’s cliché fear that 'everyone else is having sex' has never been less true.... Those of us in a position to be having more sex ought to be doing so.... Having more sex can be an act of social solidarity.... Sex is intrinsic to a society built on social connection — and right now, our connections and our sex lives are collapsing alongside each other. Many people... have resigned themselves to displacing their sexual desires, relying entirely on porn or other online stimuli.... As a balm for loneliness, digital sex can be little better than digital friendship — a source of envy, resentfulness and spite, a driver of loneliness rather than a cure for it. It’s no match for the real thing. So, any capable people should have sex — as much as they can, as pleasurably as they can, as often as they can." 

Writes Magdalene J. Taylor in "Have More Sex, Please!" (NYT).

"Teen girls across the United States are 'engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma,' according to federal researchers..."

"... Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago — according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 15 percent of teen girls said they were forced to have sex, an increase of 27 percent over two years and the first increase since the CDC began tracking it.... Almost 3 in 5 teenage girls reported feeling so persistently sad or hopeless almost every day for at least two weeks in a row during the previous year that they stopped regular activities — a figure that was double the share of boys and the highest in a decade, CDC data showed. Girls fared worse on other measures, too, with higher rates of alcohol and drug use than boys and higher levels of being electronically bullied, according to the 89-page report. Thirteen percent had attempted suicide during the past year, compared to 7 percent of boys...."

From "Teen girls ‘engulfed’ in violence and trauma, CDC finds" (WaPo).

The really serious threat: Republican questioning President Joe Biden’s leadership.

I'm reading "A trio of new intrusions leaves America’s leaders grasping for explanations" by Stephen Collinson (CNN). 

The flurry of attacks on the unknown crafts came a week after the highly public tracking and ultimate downing of a Chinese balloon suspected of carrying out surveillance. Now, the thin details trickling out of the Pentagon and Capitol Hill about are making an already highly unusual international episode even more bizarre and confusing. No one – not the White House, the Pentagon or the government of Canada, whose airspace has also been infringed – seems able to say exactly what is going on with these latest downed crafts. This raises questions for top military brass and US spy agencies as well as for the potential safety of civilian aviation. And it creates an information vacuum that Republicans are again using to question President Joe Biden’s leadership.

What does a man want? A wife and children who are happy to see him at the end of the day?

Recently, Matt Walsh tweeted: 

All a man wants is to come home from a long day at work to a grateful wife and children who are glad to see him, and dinner cooking on the stove. This is literally all it takes to make a man happy. We are simple. Give us this and you will have given us nearly everything we need.

That prompted David French to write "Men Need Purpose More Than 'Respect'" (NYT). 

French ties Walsh's statement about the joy of family life to "the demand for respect," which, he tells us is "a hallmark of much right-wing discourse about masculinity." If it's "right-wing," most NYT readers are going to think, okay, then, it's bad, so just tell us why it is bad.

At first, French gives an answer that's like the answer I came up with when I was a teenager and my father let me know he wanted respect: "[A] demand for respect or honor should be conditioned on being respectable or honorable."

He continues:

Terry Bradshaw is trending on Twitter because, apparently, he repeatedly referred to the fatness of Andy Reid.

Terry Bradshaw’s intrusive thoughts on their way to tell him to call Andy Reid fat multiple times during the post game interview pic.twitter.com/NZXWy1VSbb

— 🥶❄️TheNotoriousNeer🏂☃️ (@Notorious_Neer) February 13, 2023

I selected that tweet in case you'd also — or rather — talk about the halftime show. What were those puffed-up dancers supposed to represent? Rihanna's pregnancy? The UFO/balloon? Snowmen? Polar teddy bears?

I only half-watched the halftime show. I'm sensitive to vicarious acrophobia — basophobia, really — and I thought the sound quality was so bad that that the music could only be "heard" by those who already had the music implanted in their head. 

What, exactly, was the worse thing Bradshaw said? I think it was — directly to Reid, after the game was won — "Big guy. Let me get the big guy in here. C'mon, waddle over here." 

IN THE COMMENTS: Jim puts it more graphically: "The puffed up dancers represented her spouse’s semen. She in her red outfit represented her ovum. This was clearly a biology lesson."

Influencers held, awkwardly, to account.

this is so scary bro pic.twitter.com/dX9d1jymIi

— em (@emmacrochets) February 12, 2023

Sunrise — 7:04.

"Everyone over here talking about eye liner and I just want to know why they're sitting in order of least to most foot coverings."

Please go enjoy the comments at the subreddit r/pics on "Taliban announces graduation of three new pilots." 

Don't miss the Bee Gees parodies.

Mendota ice crack at sunrise — 7:11 a.m.

"The significant ideological gap between Justices Thomas and Alito, on the one hand, and the Trump nominees, on the other, can be seen in their Martin-Quinn scores..."

"... a measure of judicial ideology developed by political scientists. Based on their rulings during the court’s last term, Justices Thomas and Alito earn scores of 2.949 and 2.458, the higher number signifying greater conservatism. Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett earn scores of 1.019, 0.791 and 1.318, respectively — fairly close to one another, but markedly different from the two scores of the staunch conservatives anchoring the right wing of the court. Nor do the Trump justices march in lockstep with one another. In fact, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh disagreed more with each other in their first term together than any other pairing of justices appointed by the same president since the Kennedy administration.... They have found themselves on opposite sides of such issues as the death penalty, defendants’ rights, immigration law and Indian law.... 'The conservative wing of the court is not a monolith.'... And understanding these nuances is critical, especially for lawyers and legal organizations on the left who are 'playing defense'...."  

From "Trump’s Supreme Court Picks Are Not Quite What You Think" by David Lat and Zachary B. Shemtob (NYT).

"The handsome young senator told Washingtonian magazine in 1974 that he understood why he was 'a hot commodity': his youth and his 'tragic fate'..."

"The magazine compared him to 'Robert Redford’s Great Gatsby in natty pinstriped suits.' 'I know I can be a good president,' he said, adding, 'My family still expects me to be there one of these days.'..."

Writes Maureen Dowd in "Scranton Joe Is Ready to Go" (NYT).

"I feel like the only solution is pretty clear... In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass 'seppuku' of the elderly?"

Said Yale economics professor Yusuke Narita, quoted in "A Yale Professor Suggested Mass Suicide for Old People in Japan. What Did He Mean? Yusuke Narita says he is mainly addressing a growing effort to revamp Japan’s age-based hierarchies. Still, he has pushed the country’s hottest button" (NYT).

Dr. Narita, 37, said that his statements had been “taken out of context,” and that he was mainly addressing a growing effort to push the most senior people out of leadership positions in business and politics — to make room for younger generations....

It was a UFO... so... aliens?

When CIA mouthpiece @NatashaBertrand starts pushing UFO's, that's when you know: it's a totally false story. https://t.co/dUqVXHZmX1

— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) February 12, 2023

"I know auto theft is a growing issue, not just in Denver but everywhere, and it’s infuriating to be victimized like that, but I discourage any resident to taking a vigilante approach."

Said Jamie Torres, a Denver city councilwoman, quoted in "Boy, 12, Is Fatally Shot by Owner of Stolen Car in Denver, Police Say/The boy was in the car when the vehicle’s owner found it using an app and 'exchanged fire' with the people inside, the police said" (NYT).

Was this vigilantism? 

From the Wikipedia article on the topic:

Worried about your gas stove but not ready to replace it? Here's an amazing workaround that I bet you never thought of.

From "Worried about your gas stove? This comic will show you other ways to cook" (WaPo):

It's almost as though you don't even need a kitchen anymore. You can relive the carefree days of your youth, when you lived in a dorm... or a single-room-occupancy hotel.

The mulga scheme.

I'm reading "In Australia’s Outback, a controversial cash crop is booming: Carbon" (WaPo).

Here in the “mulga belt,” which stretches into northern New South Wales, is the unassuming epicenter of Australia’s roaring carbon-farming industry. In this area alone, roughly 150 properties have collectively made at least $300 million from carbon credits in less than a decade, according to government records....