Elusiveness.

I'm reading...



From "The Amazing Treasure Trove of Bill Cunningham/Here comes a big new picture book, organized by decade and with more than 700 photographs" (NYT).

I bought the book, "Bill Cunningham: On the Street: Five Decades of Iconic Photography."

What is the word for writing a word in a way that expresses its meaning? It was a popular form of humor, years ago. I'm talking about the accidentally elusive representation of "elusiveness" in the screenshot text above. For example, you might write the word "fancy" in letters that have curlicues. Does it seem like something that was done in Mad Magazine? It's almost the same thing as what you see in the best of Saul Steinberg (from "The Inspector"). Depicting "now or never":



This is a somewhat different humor idea from Steinberg (that is, if you know the word I'm looking for, I don't think it's the word for this):

At the Saturday Night Cafe...

... talk your Saturday night talk.

"Try to imagine yourself into the shoes of someone undecided on whether to support Trump in 2020. What argument against him do you think you'll find most persuasive?"

Asks Ben Wikler, Chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, on Twitter, quoted by my son John on Facebook.

One answer John gives (at Twitter) is:

The worst argument is he’s “NOT NORMAL,” “violates norms,” etc. That argument itself isn’t normal; “politics as usual” is an insult, not a compliment. WI, MI, & PA residents voted for him knowing he’s far from a normal politician and unlikely to change. They liked that about him.

"At a time when both public and private universities are shifting resources away from the humanities... conservative state legislators and donors like the Koch Foundation and BB&T Bank... have stepped in."

"They have funded new professorships in topics like 'the history of capitalism' and poured money into speaker series and academic programs that propagate libertarian policy ideas. The organization UnKoch My Campus has tracked 'undue donor influence' in conservative philanthropy at schools such as George Mason University and Florida State University.... In some cases, conservative funders are, indeed, buying academic platforms to promote policy interests. The case of Arizona State is different. Its foundation was partisan to a troubling degree, but the outcome is a Great Books-style program that is not particularly oriented toward policy — instead, it emphasizes 'old-fashioned' intellectual methods. 'A big thing I like, as opposed to other political science courses I’d taken, is that they focus on teaching through classic literature, reading entire primary texts rather than textbooks or fragments of texts with other people’s analysis,' [one student] said.... [T]his approach is not inherently loyal to Republican ideology and can be an empowering course of study that liberals neglect at their peril. They often forget that plenty of Great Books are among the foundation stones of their own political tradition. Progressive heroes ranging from Jane Addams to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were indelibly shaped by Great Books educations...."

From "Can We Guarantee That Colleges Are Intellectually Diverse?/Politicians and donors want to impose one set of solutions. Schools around the country are trying to find their own way" by Molly Worthen (NYT).

Will you join me in calling for a return to nylon stockings for women in skirts working in a high-level professional context?

In a context where men are wearing suits, shouldn't women look more polished?

I took that closeup screen capture from the photograph at "Trump's personal assistant fired after comments about Ivanka, Tiffany" (Politico).

I don't mean to body-shame anyone. I just think this is too casual for working in the White House and that it's a good idea for men and women to hit the same level of dressiness.

"Sirhan Sirhan, who is serving a life sentence for the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was stabbed in the neck and badly wounded at a San Diego prison."

[VIDEO DELETED]

ABC7.

Goodbye to Rhoda.

Remember the fabulousness:

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"Rhoda, come on, I know you! You're not going!"

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ADDED: From another episode with a lot of Rhoda — in the second half (the first half is heavy on the Phyllis — there's this fascinating moment when Mary lets us know she's not a virgin:

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At the Kiteboard Café...

... talk about whatever you want.

And remember the Althouse Portal to Amazon, where you can buy whatever you want.

The little video clip was taken in Blooming Grove, Wisconsin, on the shore of Lake Waubesa, where we stopped as we were biking the Capital City Trail yesterday. It was quite windy, and the kiteboarders looked like they were having a great time. The wind made the biking much tougher than usual, but I flew along with my e-bike.

"Richard Linklater to Spend Next 20 Years Filming a Merrily We Roll Along Adaptation."

"... Linklater is indeed sticking to the show’s reverse chronology, meaning that he won’t film the beginning of the musical for at least another couple decades... [T]he director gives you no choice but to share in his optimism that, even though there’s a chance that the globe might be reduced to a broiling sphere of molten ash within the next 20 years, there’s also a chance —slim, but real—that there will also be a movie house screening the best version of Merrily We Roll Along..."

Slate reports.

Linklater, who still lives in Austin and has been with but unmarried to the same woman since the 90s, will be 79 years old 20 years from now.

"Across the globe, travel providers and government agencies are responding to overtourism with suggestions for less-crowded places and quieter seasons in hopes of producing a broader but lighter footprint."

"In Colorado’s case, the tourism office’s online Colorado Field Guide outlines 150 multiday itineraries with the goal of dispersing its 82 million travelers across the seasons and across the state.... Expanding when and where to go mirrors the rise of tourism, linked to the growth of the middle class in emerging markets. From 25 million travelers in the 1950s, tourist arrivals around the world grew to 1.4 billion in 2018, and the World Tourism Organization forecasts that number to rise to 1.8 billion by 2030.... A wave of travel companies — new and established — are lining up to help them make that choice in the interest of destination sustainability as well as peace of mind.... Pioneering new trips to obscure destinations has long been the virtual arms race of the travel industry waged by adventure and luxury travel companies...."

From "Cooler, Farther and Less Crowded: The Rise of ‘Undertourism’/Across the globe, travel providers and government agencies are responding to ‘overtourism’ with suggestions for less-crowded places and quieter seasons" (NYT).

"Undertourism" indeed! It's more and more tourism, dispersed to more and more places.

I'm interested in this idea that going to more "obscure destinations" was the strategy of "luxury" travel countries, and now the lower tiers of travelers are getting dispersed to these less great but less traveled-to places.

And is this "broader but lighter footprint" a serious confrontation with environmental impact? Do I need to give this article my "eco-shame-contortion genre" tag? I'm only giving it because I'm talking about it. The article isn't shame-focused enough. It's pretty shameless and bent on pushing travel travel travel for the readers who think of themselves as affluent and therefore in need of quality travel experiences.

"She was a spy from day one who sought to use her proximity to the president to curry favor with his detractors."

Said a "former official," quoted in "Trump's personal assistant Madeleine Westerhout abruptly resigns" (CBS).

During the president's vacation at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey earlier this month, Westerhout attended an off-the-record dinner with reporters at the Grain and Cane restaurant in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. Sources with knowledge of the dinner told CBS she had been drinking and disclosed private details about the president's family. She also gossiped about TV news personalities seeking access to the president.

"Lee, if anybody shoots at you, I hope they are as good a shot as you."

Said James R. Leavelle to Lee Harvey Oswald minutes before Oswald was shot to death, as memorialized in a photograph without which there would not be a NYT obituary for Leavelle, "James R. Leavelle, Detective at Lee Harvey Oswald’s Side, Dies at 99."

We're told Oswald responded, "You’re being melodramatic."

"In the weeks I spent listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, I learned that lobsters have serotonin, that Elvis Presley suffered from parapraxis and that Mr. Gladwell adheres to a firm life rule that he drink only five liquids: water, tea, red wine, espresso and milk."

That's a fine first sentence. The article is "With ‘Talking to Strangers,’ Malcolm Gladwell Goes Dark/Read by millions — but savaged by critics — the author has a new book on police violence, campus rape and other bleak terrain" by Amy Chozick (in the NYT).

Excerpt:

At 55, in clear-framed spectacles and a head of curls, Mr. Gladwell still has the spindly, featherweight look of someone who can break a five-minute mile on a casual weekend run. He lives in a two-story townhouse apartment in the West Village, brimming with books, vintage furniture and a set of eclectic paintings of the Ethiopian Army. We sat at a heavy wooden table as 90-degree August soup poured through the open windows....

Books take years to complete, but thanks to [podcasting], Mr. Gladwell’s typical reader — whom he has described as “a 45-year-old guy with three kids who’s an engineer at some company outside of Atlanta” — can partake in a virtuous cycle of Gladwell programming. The podcast teases interest in a souped-up “Talking to Strangers” audiobook, which builds an audience for more speeches, which stokes advertisers for the podcasts....

August souped-up?

It was a simple writing error to re-use the word "soup" there, and it amuses me, especially since neither use is about actual soup. "Soup" is conventionally used to refer to air that seems thick, mostly for fog, where the traditional expression is "pea soup fog." The OED traces that metaphor back to 1849, to an entry in a journal by Herman Melville: "Upon sallying out this morning encountered the oldfashioned pea soup London fog." That makes it sound as though people had been saying "pea soup fog" for a long time.

And what about the soup in "souped up"? The OED doesn't go into any detail here, but I think it's just an analogy to feeding human beings with the hearty, humble food provided to hungry poor people. The oldest uses are not about adding fuel, but tinkering with the mechanical works, readjusting the engines — of airplanes and cars... and jitneys:

Here come a flat-top, he was moving up with me
Then come waving goodbye in a little old souped-up jitney
I put my foot in my tank and I began to roll
Moaning siren, 'twas a state patrol
So I let out my wings and then I blew my horn
Bye-bye New Jersey, I've become airborne

No, that one wasn't in the OED. That's just what plays in my head. Chuck Berry. Wonder if he had parapraxis... or if I do... What is parapraxis?!

Parapraxis, the clinical terminology for “Freudian slips,” as the episode explains, means abnormal acts in speech, memory, or physicality....

Gladwell focuses on the parapraxis that seemed to occur during performances in the late 60s and early 70s of Elvis’s song “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” which contains a minute-long spoken-word section aimed at a long-lost lover. Though Elvis performed the song many times, he consistently tripped over the interlude. His final sweat-soaked performance of the song is iconic for all the wrong reasons: the words are almost all gone . . . replaced instead by maniacal, uncontrollable laughter.

The spectacle is hard to explain....

Or easy to explain:



And so, as you sally out this morning, souped up on espresso or tea or milk, have some laughs, have some lobsters, and good luck with your parapraxis.

"My decision to accept an offer in Big Law was not driven by any allegiance to corporations or any Machiavellian analysis of whether it would be a springboard for future political ambitions."

"... Instead, it was a matter of practicality. To have enough money to pay off my student loan debt, which totaled more than $100,000 after three years of legal education, and send money home to support family members, I needed the six-figure salary that my firm was offering. Big Law offered an opportunity to earn enough money to lift myself, and by extension my family, out of poverty and into the middle class.... Many attorneys of color are in the same position...."

Writes Erika Stallings in WaPo, responding to "No More Corporate Lawyers on the Federal Bench/The next Democratic president should try nominating judges who haven’t been partners at big law firms" by Brian Fallon and Christopher Kang, founders of something called Demand Justice (in The Atlantic). Fallon was an aide to Chuck Schumer, and Kang was an aide to Dick Durbin.

As Stallings puts it, Demand Justice "believes that the number of judges with ['Big Law'] experiences creates an 'insular, back-scratching network of legal elites who work together to promote corporate interests.' But not everyone who works at a corporate law firm is the same. And in trying to purge corporate influence from the judiciary, Demand Justice risks making the ranks of judges more homogenous in another way: namely, whiter and richer."

From Fallon and Kang:

[O]ur point is not that corporate lawyers are incapable of becoming fair-minded judges. A judge’s legal background is not inherently predictive of how she will rule. Sotomayor herself is proof of that... Our point, rather, is that the federal bench is already filled with enough corporate lawyers, and that the law is being skewed in favor of corporations, giving them astonishing power. And for all the examples of progressive judges who spent time in Big Law, there are many more brilliant legal minds whose backgrounds too often, perversely, prevented their consideration for the bench. There are plenty enough highly qualified individuals with other backgrounds—civil-rights litigators, public defenders, and legal-aid lawyers—that the next president can afford to make identifying new types of candidates a priority.

In the coming weeks, Demand Justice will propose a list of potential judicial selections whom the next Democratic president should consider. We are confident that the exercise will prove there is no shortage of qualified picks who have chosen paths in public-interest work, labor law, academia, or other fields that deserve to be represented on the federal bench....

Democrats... must stock the federal judiciary with judges who have a more diverse array of experiences, who can help their colleagues more fully understand the competing perspectives on the law that come before them.

This is an interesting conflict. Stallings stresses the importance of racial and class diversity, things law schools take into account at the point of admission, and Fallon and Kang stress diversity in post-law-school experience. Stallings looks at the problem from the point of view of the career-seeking lawyer, and Fallon and Kang are talking about the way cases are decided.

At the Thursday Night Café...

... keep the conversation going.

#YangMediaBlackout.

Wow. It appears my ongoing MSNBC (+now also CNN) mega-thread about Yang coverage has helped spark the hashtag #YangMediaBlackout which is now the 4th highest trending topic nationwide. Way to go #YangGang, and thank you, Streisand Effect! Your move, MSM…https://t.co/7jAji9ubww

— Scott Santens (@scottsantens) August 29, 2019

It's a graphic depiction of exclusion!



But here's why it makes sense to leave Yang off:



The gap between Buttigieg and Yang is big and Yang is almost even with Booker and O'Rourke. Santens's image in the tweet shows the same chart of the polls but cuts it off before the Booker and O'Rourke columns.