Sunrise — 5:24, 5:26.

"Flight attendants shouted for help from male passengers and people all around clung to him and pulled him in."

Said a passenger quoted in "Video Shows Inside of Aircraft After Passenger Opened Emergency Exit Door" (Newsweek).

When you really need help in an emergency, you don't add extra words to your statements, so any specificity is highly meaningful.

Here, with the plane door blown open, the flight attendants are said to have specified that they wanted help from male passengers. If you're female and feel called to give whatever help you can, it's a reminder, perhaps bitter, that your well-meaning effort would only get in the way.

ADDED: Here's a WaPo article from February 2022 that got updated yesterday: "No, unruly passenger: You can’t physically open a plane door midflight/Passengers have tried and failed." The reassuring headline is isn't so reassuring anymore.

"Find the Place You Love. Then Move There. If where you live isn’t truly your home, and you have the resources to make a change, it could do wonders for your happiness."

The Atlantic suggests an article for me — from a couple years ago — that's right in my zone. It's by Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic's happiness expert, who — I'd noticed — has a new article in The Atlantic that I'd seen but chose not to click on: "Think About Your Death and Live Better/Contemplating your mortality might sound morbid, but it’s actually a key to happiness."

Did the Atlantic somehow see that I looked at the death article but decided not to read it and calculate that I might want to contemplate falling in love with someplace other than home and moving there? 

The "Find the Place You Love" essay begins with an anecdote about a man who grew up in Minnesota, moved to Northern California, and then missed Minnesota. When I read the title, I thought the idea was to cast a wide net, consider everywhere, and fall in love with something. But if it's just look back on your life and understand what was your real home, that's a much more restricted set of options. There's a good chance you already live in what is for you the most home-like place, and if you were to leave, thinking you'd found a better place — Northern California is "better" than Minnesota — you'd become vividly aware of the feeling of home. 

What's the difference between hiking and walking?

I'm trying to read "Hiking Has All the Benefits of Walking and More. Here’s How to Get Started. Exploring the great outdoors offers a host of mental and physical benefits. But there are a few things you need to know first" (NYT).

Hiking offers all the cardiovascular benefits of walking, but the uneven terrain does more to strengthen the leg and core muscles, which in turn boosts balance and stability, said Alicia Filley, a physical therapist outside Houston who helps train clients for outdoor excursions. It also generally burns more calories than walking.

I'm guessing there's no clear line between a walk and a hike, and it's more of a state of mind. Or does it all come down to whether you wear a backpack?

Every hiker should bring the 10 essentials, which include food and drink, first aid supplies, a map and compass and rain gear — all inside a supportive backpack with thick shoulder straps and a waist belt.

I thought I went hiking just about every day, but if it's all about the backpack, I never go hiking.

I liked this comment over there from Kjartan in Oslo:

Sunrise — 5:09, 5:18, 5:26.

"That’s nice. But many of my generation will not make it to 100 … in fact did not make it to 25 … because of your father. They died in Vietnam."

The top-rated comment — one of many similar and utterly predictable comments — on "My father, Henry Kissinger, is turning 100. This is his guide to longevity" (WaPo).

"Grimes is enlisting free labor - potentially thousands of people, and a lot of them children - to make music with various aspects of her likeness, under the guise of a creative endeavor..."

"... and the chance to 'work with Grimes.' In reality, she's a burgeoning CEO in the midst of building a virtual sweatshop, something companies have been doing for eons, except now it appears this artist wants to give it a try. For example, not long ago she brought up taking 50% of the royalties of some of the more popular songs made with her likeness. And, just now in this article, she's playfully bringing up taking one of the AI-sampled songs someone made, and making her own version. She has all the right in the world to do it, but it's not a revolution I would like to see, and I don't understand why this would be something to praise."

The top-rated comment on "Grimes Invited Anyone to Make A.I. Grimes Songs. Here Are Her Reviews. The producer and pop singer, long a proponent of technological experimentation, has 'open-sourced' her voice using new A.I. tools. She’s been impressed by the results" (NYT).

Here's a page full of the labor of artists using Grimes AI and competing for a $10,000 prize.

Here's one example that was embedded over at the NYT and commented on by the true winner of this game, Grimes:

She said: "I love how weird this song is — it sounds really inhuman.... You can hear the technology very profoundly. What I like about the early A.I. stuff is that you can hear the technology very profoundly. I think people will appreciate that more in five years when they realize people only made stuff like this for a couple months."

So don't worry. This seems inhuman, but later AI will seem human. You'll be nostalgic for this in the future. You'll think something like: Remember when what was inhuman felt sweetly and tragically inhuman? We've lost touch with the poignancy that was the inhumanity of early AI. It's all just uniformly "human" now.

"... and I continue my nightly ritual..."

Ludicrously disingenuous letter to the NYT "Social Q" advice columnist:

My husband was chatting with our new neighbor when the neighbor mentioned he could see me undressing at night through my bathroom window. Our homes are on three-quarter-acre lots, so we’re not that close. My husband was speechless, and I continue my nightly ritual, which does not include drawing the shades. Was our neighbor wrong to say something? Shouldn’t he not look?

How do you "not look" at something that you must first see to know it's there and not to be looked at?

ADDED: The use of the word "ritual" lays bare the performance element of this woman's behavior. But the real question is, why did the NYT publish this letter? I'll bet I could write a blog, posting daily, devoted entirely to exposing the gratuitous nudity in the NYT.

For example — from May 19th — "Naked Stand-Up Comedy: Everything You Imagine, but Oh So Much More/Do you wear shoes onstage? What’s it like to bomb while nude? And, ahem, where do you keep your notes? But the shows often sell out" ("... she is entirely naked...").

And, from yesterday — "Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Over Nudity in ‘Romeo and Juliet’/The actors in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film sued Paramount Pictures last year over a scene in which the star-crossed title characters woke up together in the nude" ("The judge dismissed the lawsuit, writing that the claim concerned filmmaking, a protected activity under the First Amendment").

"No violence is legitimate, whether verbal or against people. We have to work in depth to counter this process of decivilisation."

Said President Macron, quoted in "Radical left threatens civilisation in France, says Macron/President speaks out after pension reform protests and attacks on elected officials" (London Times).

Presidential advisers said the term was a reference to Norbert Elias, the 20th century German sociologist who described how self-restraint and social inhibitions had civilised Europe, first in royal courts and then among the rest of the population, in his book The Civilizing Process.

This resonates with me because I once used the word "civilized" in the presence of sociologists and experienced the iciest silence of my entire life. Used it jocosely... I'd thought. 

Macron is said to believe the process has gone into reverse in what one adviser called a “Trumpisation of minds and a denial of reality”. 

Trump gets blame for what the left is doing... in France.  

"This sudden enthusiasm for cottage cheese has been attributed partly to a new generation focused on protein and nutrients and also madly keen on 'bowl' meals..."

"... filled with grains, vegetables and fruit. 'All of these ingredients together make for a super nutrient dense cottage cheese bowl that will have you full for literally hours'...."

From "Why is cottage cheese trending again?" (London Times).

We're told there are blogs and TikToks devoted to re-popularizing cottage cheese. One suggestion is to whip it (in a blender, I think) to change the oft-disliked consistency and make it more like the substance that — over the last 50 years — replaced it: yogurt.

"My life goes on... I will go on living in this tiny cabin. But one thing has changed. I am going to dedicate myself to somehow figuring out a way for the women..."

"... who don’t have my platform to hold men accountable. Robbie and I are going to put our heads together. That’s how my life is going to change. I’m a crone. I’m an elderly woman on a mountaintop. But I think we’ve got a few good years left to figure out a way to end the culture of sexual violence. That’s what I want to do."

Said E. Jean Carroll, quoted in "E. Jean Carroll Discusses Trump’s Comeuppance/Since losing a civil case to the journalist, who accused him of sexual abuse and defamation, Trump has doubled down on his attacks" (The New Yorker). Kaplan is seeking additional punitive damages — not a gag order.

We're told:

Carroll is seventy-nine. She just adopted a new dog, a Great Pyrenees. “She’s right here, Miss Havisham, Sham for short,” she said, gesturing offscreen.

"Robbie" is the lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, who's quoted saying she considered seeking a gag order when Trump, having lost in the defamation case continued to repeat the defamation. But she didn't want the "First Amendment concerns," and she's seeking additional punitive damages instead.

The dog is named Miss Havisham — that is, the character in "Great Expectations" who devotes herself extravagantly to her disappointment in men. At trial, there was an unsuccessful attempt to introduce evidence that she'd once named a dog/cat "Vagina." 

"Black roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings/Silver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyes...."

"... he wrote for the song White Room, editing the lyric down to three stanzas and a chorus from what was originally an eight-page poem. Other songs such as Sunshine of Your Love were more spontaneous. At about 5am at the end of a long night’s writing session, Bruce had picked out the now familiar 11-note descending bass pattern and said, 'Well, what about this then?' Brown looked out of the window and said: 'It’s getting near dawn when lights close their tired eyes...."

From "Pete Brown obituary/Long-haired poet who wrote the lyrics for the Sixties supergroup Cream, including White Room and Sunshine of Your Love" (London Times).

"... normalcy only returns when we've largely vaccinated the entire global population."

 At 1:08 in this fascinating montage, Bill Gates says that word we were talking about yesterday:

Sunrise — 5:21, 5:27.

The Lincoln Project to Ron DeSantis: "[Y]ou’re going to get absolutely destroyed.... We’re sure going to love watching you crash and burn."

"Your awkwardness, disdain for people, and general disgust with the process, won’t help while you’re shaking countless hands in distant diners or standing in the middle of a fair posing for pictures with a butter cow. You think you are owed a win, but you’ve never been attacked like Trump will wreck you. Your height, your recent and sudden weight loss, your terrible political judgment, the bad advice from domineering advisors, will all be fair game to Trump. He’s going to go through you like fingers through pudding. You’re too weak and afraid of Trump and his MAGA cult members to fight him to win. It was a brilliant move to announce on Twitter so you don’t have to talk to real people or answer real questions. It’s just you and Elon Musk – a South African who believes that the radical right deserves their own space to scream racist tropes, promote political violence, and push a bizarre culture war.... "

From an open letter to Ron DeSantis from The Lincoln Project.

What the phrase "will all be fair game to Trump" really means is that it's completely fair game to The Lincoln Project. They're the ones saying these things, but they'd like us to imagine that the bad orange man will be saying them and they're only predicting it. They got me looking up DeSantis's height, which they clearly think is an issue, but they'd like us to believe it's not them, it's Trump who has contempt for men of less than above-average height. 

"'The Wrath of Becky'/Rated R for disgusting dialogue and dripping brain matter."

I'm reading a movie review in the NYT. I haven't been paying much attention to descriptions of new movies, but this one caught my eye because of its violently angry young female protagonist. It made me think of school shootings. I sometimes wonder what the entertainment business is trying to upload into the mind of Gen Z.