How to understand the rash of NYT headlines beginning with "How."

First, here at the headlines that begin with "How" on the front page of The NYT as I write this:

• How the El Paso Killer Echoed the Words of Conservative Media Stars
• How Facebook Is Changing to Deal With Scrutiny of Its Power
• How a Nanny’s Adventure in the U.S. Ended in Bloodshed
• How to Stay Financially Stable When the World Might Be Falling Apart
• How to Make Parent Friends
• How I Came to Own My Name/My parents never told me that they had changed my name from Tiffi to Lauren when I was 6 months old. Would I have been a different person as Tiffi?
• How YouTube Radicalized Brazil
• How Do We Say ‘Have a Good Night’? Let Us Count the Ways
• How Bill de Blasio Went From Progressive Hope to Punching Bag
• How to Plan a Wedding. (Or, You Could Just Elope)

Writing my own post headline beginning with "How," I saw the charm, the con. It gives the reader the feeling that something will be explained. There's a gift of understanding inside. And yet it seems practical and down to earth, even when it's selling a theory (like the causation between conservative media and the El Paso murders).

You can test your personality by asking which of today's NYT "How" headlines you'd click on. I can tell you I only felt motivated to click on one. You can test how well  you know me by guessing before clicking to read more.

At the Memory and Meaning Café...

... you can patch a conversation together.

"It turns out that a surprising number of Axios AM readers are sticklers that the wildfire-prevention icon is properly 'Smokey Bear' — not 'Smokey the Bear,' as I blasphemously posited..."

"... in a 75th birthday note yesterday. The U.S. Forest Service says you're right. Alexander Great and Attila Hun tip their broad-brimmed hats."

Writes Mike Allen at Axios.

Similarly, it's Teddy Bear, not Teddy the Bear. And it's Mickey Mouse, not Mickey the Mouse. It's Bugs Bunny, not Bugs the Bunny. It is, however, Kermit the Frog. And yet...



... it's Fozzie Bear. It's also Yogi Bear, not Yogi the Bear. You can count on it, with bears there is no "the"... unless the bear is a pooh. I mean the pooh. Or... I have to concede... a panda (yes, a panda is really a bear). I'm thinking of Peetie the Sexual Harassment Panda.

Is oblivion about the problem of violence against women sometimes okay?

These people are all stricken with small penis syndrome. Even the ladies.

They just want to feel and look tough. A "hero complex" for those with nothing impressive or worthwhile in their lives.

— Wesley Miller (@wesleymillerlaw) August 9, 2019

ADDED: I love the way the photo has her fingers gently touching the word "WHITE." Screams posed, don't you think? Quietly, subtly screams...

"Jeffrey Epstein... was supposed to have been checked by guards every 30 minutes, but that procedure was not being followed the night before he was found [dead]..."

"... a law-enforcement official with knowledge of his detention said. In addition, the jail had transferred his cellmate and allowed Mr. Epstein to be housed alone in a cell just two weeks after he had been taken off suicide watch, a decision that also violated the jail’s normal procedure, two officials said. The disclosures about apparent failures in Mr. Epstein’s detention at the Metropolitan Correctional Center deepened questions about his suicide and are very likely to be the focus of inquiries by the Justice Department and the F.B.I.... The federal Bureau of Prisons has already come under intense criticism for not keeping Mr. Epstein under a suicide watch after he had been found in his cell on July 23 with injuries that suggested that he had tried to kill himself. A person with knowledge of the investigation said that when the decision was made to remove Mr. Epstein from suicide watch, the jail informed the Justice Department that Mr. Epstein would have a cellmate and that a guard 'would look into his cell' every 30 minutes. But that was apparently not done, the person said.... Mr. Epstein’s suicide has also unleashed a torrent of unfounded conspiracy theories online, with people suggesting, without evidence, that Mr. Epstein was killed to keep him from incriminating others...."

The NYT reports this morning in "Epstein Was Left Alone and Not Closely Monitored Before Jail Suicide/The disclosures about apparent failures in Jeffrey Epstein’s detention deepened the questions about his suicide."

Are the conspiracy theories "unfounded"? I've noticed that the NYT seems to be trying to squelch any doubt that Epstein killed himself (and killed himself without any support/encouragement from anyone else). There are no comments allowed on this new article, and I noticed that an earlier NYT article about the Epstein death had a lot of comments, and the highly rated ones doubted that it was suicide.

Compare The Washington Post, where the top headline on the home page is: "Questions mount over Epstein’s apparent suicide." The NYT doesn't have "apparent" before suicide and doesn't use a generic, conspiracy-supporting phrase like "Questions mount." The NYT directs us to think that the questions should be about prison procedures and overworked prison staff.

If you click through on the WaPo front-page teaser, the headline is: "Jeffrey Epstein dead after ‘apparent suicide’ in New York." Excerpt:

"Inmates [on suicide watch] are often placed naked in suicide cells, which are usually bare concrete, often without bedding (to prevent hanging by using bedsheets)..."

"... and under frequent or continuous observation by guards. Unsanitary conditions are also common since toilet paper, underwear and tampons (all potential means of choking) are restricted. Being exposed without any way of covering oneself, coupled with being under constant observation, can aggravate mental distress, particularly if the inmate has been a victim of sexual abuse. These harsh conditions came to light in 1998 when Elizabeth B., an inmate of Framingham prison in Massachusetts, USA, called a radio talk show to describe how she had been treated while on suicide watch: 'I was ... put on eyeball status, stripped of belongings, clothing, placed naked in a room with nothing but a plastic mattress on the floor. Watched 24 hours a day by a man or woman. I was on my period but because of my status not allowed to have tampons or underwear. I was very humiliated, degraded. Being on eyeball status with male officers, my depression intensified. I didn't want to be violated any more than I already was, so I put the mattress up against the window. When I did that I was in violation because they couldn't see me. The door was forced open, I was physically restrained in four-point restraints - arms, legs spreadeagled, tied to the floor, naked, helmet on head, men and women in the room.'"

From the Wikipedia article "Suicide watch," which I'm reading this morning because I saw on Twitter that some people had been aggressively editing the page inserting references to Jeffrey Epstein. If you look at the revision history for the page, you'll see that a huge number of back-and-forth edits were made yesterday until the "protection level" of the page was raised.

I copied the text you see above because it may help understand why Jeffrey Epstein was not kept on suicide watch, even though he had (apparently) attempted suicide last month. The treatment is so severe that to continue it might be cruel and unusual punishment. It could be used to deliberately torment a prisoner.

The end of art: "We have so many mentally deranged people out there. We do not want a movie that will give them any ideas."

I respectully disagree. We have so many mentally deranged people out there. We do not want a movie that will give them any ideas. I'm happy that they decided to pull it. If that makes me stupid....so be it.

— Trudy (@trudy_lecein) August 10, 2019

I'm objecting to the big proposition: There are so many mentally deranged people out there, so let's censor anything that will give them any ideas.

I wish people would listen to what they are saying.

Now, maybe there's a nuanced smaller proposition that isn't the antithesis of freedom of speech. Is there a very particular sort of person (as opposed to the "mentally deranged people," which could be millions of us) and a very particular sort of graphic presentation (as opposed to whatever gives "any ideas")?

This reminds me of the anti-pornography movement of the late 80s and early 90s. The assertion was: Ban all graphic depiction of sex because it is causally connected to rape:

Robin Morgan summarizes this idea with her often-quoted statement, "Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice."

Anti-pornography feminists charge that pornography eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and coercion of women, and reinforces sexual and cultural attitudes that are complicit in rape and sexual harassment. [Catharine] MacKinnon argued that pornography leads to an increase in sexual violence against women through fostering rape myths. Such rape myths include the belief that women really want to be raped and that they mean yes when they say no. Additionally, according to MacKinnon, pornography desensitizes viewers to violence against women, and this leads to a progressive need to see more violence in order to become sexually aroused, an effect she claims is well documented.

There's very little enthusiasm today about banning pornography, even with a heightened awareness and activism about rape. Why? I'd guess it's because pornography is so important to the people who consume it, because it's so widely and easily available that it can't be stopped, and because real-life experience doesn't seem to bear out the the causal connection. But it's possible that we actually care about freedom of speech.

These days, the issue is violence, specifically gun violence, and the would-be censors are talking about movies and video games. But they haven't been talking about government regulation. They're just using speech against speech. And that's how free-speech works. There's outrage expressed in social media, and the big corporation voluntarily withdraws the film: "Universal Scraps 'The Hunt' Release Following Gun Violence Uproar."

The studio's decision came a day after President Trump took aim at the film, saying it was "made to inflame and cause chaos." The story follows a group of elites hunting "deplorables" for sport.

The studio's Saturday announcement came a day after President Donald Trump took aim at the film — though he didn't name its title — and Hollywood, saying on Twitter, "Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate! They like to call themselves “Elite,” but they are not Elite. In fact, it is often the people that they so strongly oppose that are actually the Elite. The movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence, and then try to blame others. They are the true Racists, and are very bad for our Country!"

Now, many people speak against Trump's speech, and they argue a causal connection to violence. They would like him to voluntarily shut up. But he won't.

To state the obvious: The speech we hear is the speech of those who speak. Silence only creates better conditions for the speech of those who speak to be heard.

Just last night, Meade and I were talking about the old adage, "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything." You don't hear that one too much anymore, perhaps because all the people who live by that rule are invisible.

IN THE COMMENTS: John Henry quotes something that I brought up in the conversation Meade and I had last night — the famous counter-aphorism attributed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth, "If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit next to me." I said it was something she had emblazoned on a throw pillow. So let's read what Quote Investigator has to say about it:

At the Yellow Flower Café...

... you can talk all night.

(And remember the Althouse Portal to Amazon, where you can buy things all night.)

"How do you see a TV show 'by accident'?"

I'm curious, how do you see a TV show "by accident"? https://t.co/n5azf6VgFk

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) August 10, 2019

A theory...

So much better from r/PhilosophyMemes

"Don’t play games with me, kid," Joe Biden snapped at a young woman who'd asked him how many genders there are.

At first, he gave an answer: "At least 3." But then she asked him to name them. That's when he said, "Don’t play games with me, kid." And then he grabbed her by the arm, The NY Post reports.

It was a great one-two question combination, and according the Post, the questioner came from a right-wing student organization. How are candidates supposed to answer that "How many genders are there?"?

Was "at least 3" a clever try... or something that's obviously not going to work? You have to anticipate the "name them" follow-up, and then what do you say?

I'm picturing Joe stumbling along: There are at least 3 genders: male, female, and... what's the third one there? Let's see. Male, female and, let's see. I can't. The third one, I can't. Sorry. Oops.

I adapted that from the stylings of Rick Perry in that awful debate in November 2011:



ADDED: I'll bet all the candidates have figured this out already, but I'll say it anyway. The right way to answer the "How many?" question is to decline to speak in numerical terms. Say something like, "I believe gender is a matter of individual feeling and expression and not something for politicians to talk about and count."

If you're going to plaster your car with bumper stickers, you'd better drive properly, or it's like you're arguing for the other side.

This car veered across a solid white line and cut sharply in front of us as the street diverged and he suddenly needed to be in our lane:



Note the taped over left tail-light, indicating he'd cut somebody else off even more sharply on some prior occasion. He proceeded to drive for blocks straddling the white line like that. When he finally committed to a lane, I took 2 pictures of him as we passed on the left. I won't put those pictures up. He was a very old guy, and I don't think he even noticed me photographing him, so the intended message that we didn't appreciate his driving never reached him.

The stickers include "Recall Walker," the blue fist shaped like the map of Wisconsin (oft seen during the anti-Walker protests), and various pro-union things.

"One boring day in September, a co-worker brushed her fingers against my bare forearm, and when I glanced up, she held my eye contact a fraction too long. A millisecond."

"In the time it took for me to blush, the entire world shifted, came into focus, brightened. She was a charismatic person in the workplace with an unofficial fan club. It wasn’t her masculine energy that attracted me. It was her ability to make any day fun, her intense brown eyes and my own strangling loneliness. Her attention was flattering. I was stunned that I had worked with her for a couple of years and not noticed our chemistry before. How could I have missed it? I had been boy-crazy in junior high and married to my husband exactly 20 years. I had never considered anything other than male partners. She became my work wife, in office terms, and then some. Though I considered myself straight, I crushed hard. The idea was in my head, and this woman was in my heart. My husband lived only in my house...."

From "Seduced, Then Scorned, by My Work Wife/With my husband checked out of our marriage, I found flirtation at the office. It didn’t go well" a NYT "Modern Love" column by Carrie Malinowski.

"At 76, [Joe Biden] has enviable sharpness and physical fitness. But at 76, there are limits. And somehow, at 73, Trump’s psychological sickness..."

"... gives him an edge: a gob-smacking drive to keep going and going and going, with no signs of flagging at all, and many signs of mania. Who in their 70s is crazy enough to keep up? Even as he claimed he was seeking healing and unity this week, Trump was still tweeting insults, filming a shameless campaign video, and comparing crowd sizes with Beto O’Rourke’s. The sheer sociopathic narcissism in the face of such grief and trauma beggars belief. But it sure makes Trump seem younger than he is."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "Biden Knows How to Make the Moral Case Against Trump" (NY Magazine).

What if the secret to maintaining youthful vigor while getting old is mental illness?!

Finally, another chance to use my "charming bad logic" tag!

By the way, Sullivan indulges in fat-shaming:

If I were Biden, I’d [emphasize substantive policy issues].... But avoiding the lardaceous orange elephant in the room seems like a defensive dodge to me. It gives the impression of weakness. It cedes too much to Trump and normalizes him. It is not the relentless, epiphanous stare-down of Trump that a successful 2020 opponent needs to muster, and that so much of the country is yearning for. And it misses what is in fact the central issue in 2020: the unique danger this bitter bigot poses to this country’s liberal democracy and civil peace....

Vocabulary Lesson of the Day: Wow readers by adding endings to easily comprehensible nouns to achieve adjectival speed bumps. "Lard" can bulge expansively and metaphorically into "lardaceous," and "epiphany" will perversely resist sudden, intuitive perception as "epiphanous."

Biden... reminded us that in politics, words are acts, and they have consequences when uttered by a national leader: “The words of a president … can move markets. They can send our brave men and women to war. They can bring peace. They can calm a nation in turmoil. They can console and confront and comfort in times of tragedy … They can appeal to the better angels of our nature. But they can also unleash the deepest, darkest forces in this nation.” And this, Biden argues, is what Trump has done: tap that dark psychic force, in an act of malignant and nihilist narcissism.

Yes, Biden powerfully argued that Trump was an enabler of “white supremacy” in the sense understood by most people, and not the absurdly broad, new left definition that counts as a white supremacist nearly everyone not actively virtue-signaling on left Twitter....

So President Biden would deploy the super-power of presidential speech to get just precisely the right degree of racial critique into the mind of the people? That's very hard to believe. He's already fuzzed everything up badly. What is the right sense of "white supremacy" that's already understood by the people? I can see wanting to fend off  "the absurdly broad, new left definition" of "white supremacy," but I don't see precision or clarity in Biden's speech or in the mind of "most people." Sullivan insists that he sees it, but I find that incredible.

And although some of this might once have seemed like pabulum, in the Trump era, it comes off as fresh. There was even a nice line designed to get under Trump’s skin, ridiculing the listless condemnation of white supremacy Trump recited in the wake of the El Paso massacre: that “low-energy, vacant-eyed mouthing of the words written for him condemning white supremacists this week.”

Biden really said that? I guess he, ironically, was mouthing words written for him. Let's see how that looked and sounded:



He's trading in deep deceit and purporting to stand on the high ground. What a nauseating fraud!

And more importantly, Biden was able to express all this with authority.... 

Lying and race-baiting — with authority. That is the Biden campaign. He's doubled-down and committed. And we're supposed to see that as the antidote to the poison of Trump?

I’ve never been a huge fan of the logorrheic, egotistical grandstanding Biden sometimes engages in; I don’t agree with him on some issues; his treatment of Anita Hill was disgracefully off-key. But I have never doubted Biden’s core decency. Maybe I have a soft spot for a well-meaning Irish-uncle type. 

What if all you wanted for President was a "well-meaning Irish-uncle type"? Frankly, I don't know what an "Irish-uncle type" is and this use of ethnicity to describe an individual's personality traits makes me want to go "all absurdly broad, new-left" style and say that this too is white supremacy.

Epstein dead!

ADDED: Is it really suicide? NYT:

Jeffrey Epstein Commits Suicide at Manhattan Jail

Mr. Epstein, the financier indicted on sex trafficking charges last month, hung himself and his body was found this morning.

AND: This happens as new information hits: "Jeffrey Epstein Accuser Names Powerful Men in Alleged Sex Ring/In newly unsealed documents, Virginia Giuffre claims that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell trafficked her to politicians, princes, and a high-flying financier, among others" (Daily Beast):

Virginia Giuffre, who says that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked her to powerful people for erotic massages and sex, claimed in depositions in 2016 that Maxwell directed her to have sex with former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Britain’s Prince Andrew (whom she has accused before), wealthy financier Glenn Dubin, former senator George Mitchell, now-deceased MIT scientist Marvin Minsky, and modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, as well as “another prince,” a "foreign president," a well-known prime minsiter" and the owner of a “large hotel chain” in France.

ALSO: Back on July 24th, there was news of a suicide attempt by Epstein. I was dubious at the time. With a recent suicide attempt — by hanging, too — how was he kept in a way that would allow him to kill himself by hanging? He was so important as a person with knowledge of possible crimes by many other people — such important people — the government had an especially strong obligation to keep him alive.

PLUS: Who will believe this was truly suicide? The conspiracy theories will go on forever. This is like Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. Even if Epstein directly sought and achieved his own death, the authorities apparently KNEW that he wanted to kill himself and therefore they caused the death by not stopping it. They were on notice and they let him do it. I infer they wanted him dead and got what they wanted, whether he killed himself or not.

MORE:

I agree @AOC.

Chairman @RepJerryNadler should prioritize a Judiciary investigation into how Jeffrey Epstein died in federal custody (in Nadler’s own neighborhood!) over the Kavanaugh confirmation (which already happened), and the Russia hoax (which never happened).

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) August 10, 2019

AND: I'm checking out the hashtags on Twitter, and what I'm seeing is the political weaponization of the Epstein death. Some people are jumping to blame the Clintons, and anything that seems like conspiracy thinking is already triggering observations that you're a nutcase.

Helter skelter in the cathedral.

"For such a place, steeped in mystery and marvel to buy in to sensory pleasure and distraction, is to poison the very medicine it offers the human soul," said The Right Reverend Dr Gavin Ashenden, former chaplain to the Queen, quoted in "Norwich Cathedral helter skelter 'is a mistake'" (BBC).

"The central aisle of Rochester Cathedral has also been converted into a crazy golf course..."



1. I already knew a "helter skelter" was some kind of British ride (which is why The Beatles sang, "When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide/Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride/Till I get to the bottom and I see you again!").

2. But I didn't know precisely what the ride was. I'd thought maybe something like Tilt-a-Whirl. But no, it's exactly the thing you see in the first video above, a slide wrapped around a tower.

3. The word "helter-skelter" dates back to 1593. The OED quotes T. Nashe Strange Newes: "Helter skelter, feare no colours, course him, trounce him." The definition is: "In disordered haste; confusedly, tumultuously, pell-mell." The word started meaning "A tower-like structure used in fun fairs and pleasure-grounds, with an external spiral passage for sliding down on a mat" in 1906, with "The World's Manufacturing Company, examples of whose ‘helter-skelter’ lighthouses are at Earl's Court, Blackpool, Southport, and other places."

4. We could go down the language rathole with "fun fairs"? "Pleasure-grounds"? The British have their own language, don't they?

5. Which brings up "crazy golf." That's British for miniature golf.

6. Or are you still wondering what was the "Strange Newes" in 1593? Wikipedia tells us that Thomas Nashe was "an Elizabethan playwright, poet, satirist and a significant pamphleteer." He was friends with Robert Greene who is famous for "Greene's Groats-Worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance," an attack on William Shakespeare. Greene had made fun of the writer Richard Harvey in "A Quip for an Upstart Courtier," and that inspired Harvey to make fun when Greene died. Nashe's "Strange News" is some sort of response. Here's the full text. Kind of complicated, so I'll just give you an easy example of Nashe's poetry:

"Unhappyie me," quoth she, "and wilt not stand?
Com, let me rubb and chafe it with my hand!"

7. When I went to Genius.com to get the lyrics for The Beatles' "Helter-Skelter" it looked like this:



Shirley Manson is a Scottish singer — whom you might know as the lead singer for Garbage. Manson is her name by birth, so there should be no association with the murderous Charles Manson. It's not like Marilyn Manson, which is a stage name and an intentional reference to the evil man. What strange advertising decision or algorithm put the ad for Shirley Manson on "Helter Skelter" lyrics page?

8. Here's what Wikipedia has at "Helter Skelter/Charles Manson interpretation": "Charles Manson told his followers that several White Album songs, particularly 'Helter Skelter,' were part of the Beatles' coded prophecy of an apocalyptic war in which racist and non-racist whites would be manoeuvred into virtually exterminating each other over the treatment of blacks. Upon the war's conclusion, after black militants had killed off the few whites that had survived, Manson and his 'Family' of followers would emerge from an underground city in which they would have escaped the conflict. As the only remaining whites, they would rule blacks, who, as the vision went, would be incapable of running the United States. Manson employed 'Helter Skelter' as the term for this sequence of events. In his interpretation, the lyrics of the Beatles' 'Helter Skelter' described the moment when he and the Family would emerge from their hiding place – a disused mine shaft in the desert outside Los Angeles." "Healter Skelter" was written (misspelled like that) in blood at the scene of the LaBianca murders. Manson wanted John Lennon to testify at his trial. John Lennon, years later, said: "All that Manson stuff was built around George's song about pigs ['Piggies'] and this one, Paul's song about an English fairground. It has nothing to do with anything, and least of all to do with me."

9. I've been avoiding all the stories about the 50th anniversary of the Manson murders which just could not avoid getting written this month. It took that helter skelter in the cathedral to get me here.

10. A cathedral has to do with a long-ago murder... or should I say attempted murder? Or will you say an execution is not a murder, whatever the circumstances?

11. Should there be fairground amusements inside a cathedral? Is it a sacrilege? One could argue that all the amazements and decorations of a traditional cathedral are themselves sacrilege and that if you don't think they are, you ought to accept the addition of other wonderful marvels to attract and grab hold of people. Or maybe that's precisely why you should object: Don't mix marvels! Keep the religious wonders separate from worldly tricks...

12. ... unless your aim is to knock religion down to earth.