From "Love, Hate or Fear It, TikTok Has Changed America" (NYT). That's a free-access link. The article has a much wider scope what I excerpted, which is interesting to me, as an old-school blogger, a living relic of the pre-modern period.
April 19, 2024
"News aggregation and analysis accounts like Mx. Spehar’s are shaping the discourse about current events in the United States, especially among young people."
From "Love, Hate or Fear It, TikTok Has Changed America" (NYT). That's a free-access link. The article has a much wider scope what I excerpted, which is interesting to me, as an old-school blogger, a living relic of the pre-modern period.
"Biden’s Catholic faith should make him a natural middle-grounder..."
Writes Ross Douthat in "Why Can’t Biden Triangulate Like Trump?"
April 18, 2024
"Behind the scenes, Trump’s defense team is scrambling to find and review potential jurors’ social media accounts..."
"Since Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016, many campuses have become especially volatile places, seeing an increase..."
From "Colleges Warn Student Demonstrators: Enough/After years of tolerating unruly protests, some schools are starting to suspend and expel students, raising questions about where they should draw the line" (NYT).
"'I think that, like, boys’ rooms as a concept is interesting,' said Mr. Isaacson, who is a full-time comedian."
Men in stores.
Trump at an NYC bodega: Pandemonium.
— Suburban Black Man 🇺🇸 (@niceblackdude) April 18, 2024
Biden at a Sheetz gas station: Crickets. pic.twitter.com/iFRV6g22rd
Trump later proclaimed, "That was great action at the bodega," and there was an instant campaign ad.President Trump will put New York in play this November!
— Lee Zeldin (@LeeMZeldin) April 16, 2024
It is only Day 2 of this show trial, and President Trump is already breaking the internet by visiting Jose Alba's bodega.
Alba was shipped to Rikers Island by Bragg after acting in self-defense.
pic.twitter.com/60wIKUpMWT
"Furry is a fandom. We don’t think that we’re animals. I really like the idea of animals that walk and talk, so I’m going to dress up as one, as kind of a fun sort of cosplay thing."
"Donald Trump, who relentlessly undermined the justice system while in office and since, is enjoying the same protections and guarantees of fairness and due process before the law that he sought to deny to others during his term."
So says the Editorial Board of the New York Times, in "Donald Trump and American Justice."
That's a free access link, in case you want to search for details about that relentless undermining.
I got there via Mickey Kaus, who tweeted, "@NYTopinion gives zero (0) examples of Trump denying due process to others during his term."[Trump] portrays himself as a victim of an unfair and politically motivated prosecution. That defense is built on lies. Mr. Trump is no victim. He is fortunate to live in a country where the rule of law guarantees a presumption of innocence and robust rights for defendants.
I don't like how the Board is conflating the prosecution and the court and the rule of law. The rule of law is an abstraction. Rights exist within the abstraction, but rights can be violated. The abstraction doesn't guarantee the rights. People exercising power must ensure that those rights are protected, and they may deviously hide behind the abstraction... perhaps with the help of elite onlookers who make abstract pronouncements in print.
April 17, 2024
Breadcrumbing.
[I]f she has a vision of a shared future that doesn’t resonate with you... exaggerating your feelings in order to preserve the status quo would amount to “breadcrumbing”: leading her on, and preventing her from moving along with her life. The prototype breadcrumber is the manipulative cad who just wants to keep all options open on a Friday night. More typical breadcrumbers, I suspect, are driven not by cynicism but by uncertainty, and by a desire to avoid conflict....
Breadcrumbs. I tend to think of Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs to mark a path that leads back out of the forest. But breadcrumbs fail as path markers because the birds eat them. But there's also the idea of feeding a person mere crumbs. Isn't that usually seen from the point of view of the person offered the crumbs? You're just giving me crumbs! I don't think I've seen it from the perspective of the person hoping to get what they want by only giving crumbs. So I don't think this is a good buzzword — not unless it's used by the person who's rejecting the offer of crumbs.
Googling, I see that it is, in fact, a well-established term for manipulating someone. Why are people letting themselves be manipulated by metaphorical crumbs? I'm blaming the victim here.
"No one’s been harder on Trump than me. But I get it, and I’m bored with it. And there’s a different way to do this...."
Said Bill Maher, criticizing the mainstream commentators who endlessly express negativity toward Trump, quoted in "Bill Maher Defends Trump Voters in Contentious Katie Couric Sit-Down" (Daily Beast)(video at the link).
"Having rarely missed a Morning Edition or All Things Considered every day every week for every year between 1984 and 2013, by 2014 NPR became less and less tolerable to this centrist..."
That's the second highest-rated comment on the NYT article, "NPR Editor Who Accused Broadcaster of Liberal Bias Resigns/Uri Berliner, who has worked at NPR for 25 years, said in an essay last week that the nonprofit had allowed progressive bias to taint its coverage."
Highest rated: "Kudos to Berliner for having the backbone to write the essay he did. Weren’t we all thinking it anyway and he just voiced the reason many of us stopped listening to NPR on a regular basis?"
Third-highest: "Mr. Berliner was on suspension not for working for outside organizations but for truthfully criticizing NPR's bias."
Fourth: "I've been listening to NPR my entire life. Things took wild turn after 2016. And now I am finding myself disjoint from almost all conversation happening on NPR.
Remember, these are NYT readers. These are most likely liberals who are put off by the left-wing slant. I was going to write What happened in 2016? I had to laugh at myself.
"My husband...’s a frat bro who loves sports, and I’m a radical alien witch academic nerd."
Said a woman named Ann, quoted in "Lessons From a 20-Person Polycule/How they set boundaries, navigate jealousy, wingman their spouses and foster community" (NYT)(free access link).
Anyway, what does Ann's husband think? He seems quite a bit less jaunty and managerial about the whole thing. This is actually pretty sad, so I will put it after the jump, for your protection:
"I don’t think the obvious thing needs to be stated out loud, which is that when Russia blocks YouTube, they’ll justify it with precisely this decision of the United States."
By targeting TikTok... the United States may undermine its decades-long efforts to promote an open and free internet governed by international organizations, not individual countries, digital rights advocates said. The web in recent years has fragmented as authoritarian governments in China and Russia increasingly encroach on their citizens’ internet access....
"Many people with obesity... have fat deposits in the tongue and in the back of the throat. The neck gets larger with fat that narrows the airway..."
Writes Gina Kolata, in "Sleep Apnea Reduced in People Who Took Weight-Loss Drug, Eli Lilly Reports/The company reported results of clinical trials involving Zepbound, an obesity drug in the same class as Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy" (NYT).
"Many younger women, for instance, shaped in part by the #MeToo movement, are engaging in intentional abstinence."
Writes Amanda Montei, in "Can a Sexless Marriage Be a Happy One? Experts and couples are challenging the conventional wisdom that sex is essential to relationships" (NYT).
"If a belligerent state launched 186 explosive drones, 36 cruise missiles, and 110 surface-to-surface missiles from three fronts against civilian targets within the United States..."
Asks David Harsanyi, in "The World Is Paying A Deadly Price For Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy" (The Federalist).
"I spent most of Mr. Trump’s speech not far from the stage, sandwiched between two exceptionally kind older guys clad in camo..."
Writes Michelle Cottle, in "What I Found Inside the MAGAverse on the Eve of Trump’s Trial" (NYT). That's a free access link, so you can find more of Cottle's experience among the deplorables and her seeming surprise at finding them happy, not angry, and pretty nice.
"There was a vibe of unity, common purpose, faith and joy. I didn’t run across anyone sweating the trial. But I spoke with plenty of folks like Lauren Herzog — who was rocking pigtails, a MAGA hat and an American-flag pajama onesie — with her husband and a bunch of their friends, who were happy to field my questions about whether they were concerned that Mr. Trump would soon be in court. There was much laughter and even more cross talk, but the bottom-line ruling from the group was, 'Nah.'"
"Would pulling a fire alarm before a vote qualify for 20 years in federal prison?"
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Would a sit-in that disrupts a trial or access to a federal courthouse qualify? Would a heckler in today's audience qualify, or at the state of the union address? Would pulling a fire alarm before a vote qualify for 20 years in federal prison?
The fire alarm scenario must allude to the Jamaal Bowman incident, but of course, the Solicitor General proceeds smoothly and professionally, and calls it a "hypothetical":
GENERAL PRELOGAR: There are multiple elements of the statute that I think might not be satisfied by those hypotheticals, and it relates to the point I was going to make to the Chief Justice about the breadth of this statute. The -- the kind of built-in limitations or the things that I think would potentially suggest that many of those things wouldn't be something the government could charge or prove
"When Peter first showed me some restored images of the film, one was of a couple of the Beatles from the back, and..."
Said Michael Lindsay-Hogg, quoted in "Long Dismissed, the Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ Film Returns After 54 Years Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s unloved — or misinterpreted? — 1970 documentary, the source for Peter Jackson’s 'Get Back,' will stream on Disney+" (NYT).
I saw "Let It Be" in the theater when it came out in 1970, when I was a "child" of 19. I guess I'll have to subscribe to Disney again to see this digitally restored version. If we can now see the individual strands of the famous hair....
When I get older, losing my hair... it will be digitally possible to restore your hair, to individualize the strands so that they pulsate and coruscate as never before. I was once 19, in a movie theater, gazing upon the film "Let It Be," trying to see the reason why Beatles were breaking up — couldn't Paul please lead more subtly? couldn't George tone down the sarcasm? — and now, at 73, I can strap Vision Pro goggles to my face, lie in bed, and marvel at the individuality of the hairs in the once seemingly clumpy moptops. It's getting so much better all the time.
April 16, 2024
"A first in the jury selection process: a man who says he read 'The Art of the Deal' and..."
"The Supreme Court seemed wary... of letting prosecutors use a federal obstruction law to charge hundreds of rioters involved in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021...."
Adam Liptak reports in the NYT.
"NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had 'lost America's trust' by..."
The shocking realization that Jack and Diane voted for Trump.
ADDED: I question whether Mellencamp was talking about Biden. Something bothered him and made him vindictive against the whole crowd:Just In:
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) April 16, 2024
John Cougar Mellencamp ends show early in a rage because the audience didn’t want to hear him give a lecture about his support of Joe Biden.
🔊
pic.twitter.com/rqJMn6DYKP
Well, it's obvious why but I doubt if David Frum comes out and says it.
"Park officials can’t patch up the fallen rocks and perch them back on their original site. Once people intervene..."
From "Lake Mead visitors caught on video destroying ancient rock formations/National Park Service rangers are looking for information on two male suspects in the vandalism incident" (WaPo).
Could the story "Fire consumes Copenhagen’s 400-year-old stock market building" have anything to do with Trump?
Not really, but after I read that Washington Post article, I opened the comments section fully expecting to find someone connecting it to Trump.
I was not disappointed. The 3rd most-liked comment is: "I know the cause: They started trading trumpy’s Truth Social, and the trash caught fire."
"The Supreme Court will hear arguments [today] in a case that could eliminate some of the federal charges against former President Donald J. Trump..."
A conversation about Tom Cotton and Bob Dylan.
April 15, 2024
"According to FIRE Campus Advocacy Rights Director Alex Morey, under the First Amendment, Chemerinsky’s 3L dinner is considered a limited public forum..."
From "FIRE calls Chemerinsky 3L dinner limited public forum, says free speech has limitations" (The Daily Californian/Berkeley's News)
"The black-clad man, stabbing wildly, had 27 seconds alone with him. That is long enough, Rushdie points out, to read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets..."
Writes Dwight Garner, in "Salman Rushdie Reflects on His Stabbing in a New Memoir/'Knife' is an account of the writer’s brush with death in 2022, and the long recovery that followed" (NYT).
"Right now, Steinglass, the prosecutor, is doing a lengthy recounting of Trump's comments on the infamous Access Hollywood tape."
I'm following "Live Updates: Trump Trial Poised to Begin, a Criminal Case Without Precedent/Jury selection is set to start as Donald J. Trump faces charges he faked business records to cover up a sex scandal before winning the presidency. The judge declined Mr. Trump’s request to recuse himself" (NYT).
They chant it before they know what it means. Then someone asks what it means. And they chant it again when they know what it means.
Anti-war activists in Chicago learn to chant “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” in Farsi.
— The Free Press (@TheFP) April 14, 2024
Read more from The FP’s @Olivia_Reingold: https://t.co/1jMM5ydhpp pic.twitter.com/z7T9AKNrF9
"Unlike nearly every other state, New York does not allow cameras in the courtroom and also prohibits audio recordings..."
From "Free the Trump Trial Transcripts/The New York court system’s maddening lack of transparency is about to be a national embarrassment" (New York Magazine).
"Trainers are good for one thing only: running in the forest or perhaps on a beach."
Said the shoemaker Manolo Blahnik, quoted in "How Instagram made brogues fashionable again/The classic leather shoe is making a comeback, aided by social media and vintage resale sites" (London Times).
April 14, 2024
"Maleness did not appeal to me at all, with its acrid musk, its stubble, its needful dangling genitalia, its oafishness and clumsiness, its sense of mission and conquest, its resemblance to the aspects of myself I most despised."
Also: "I created a male persona that was saturnine, cerebral, a bit remote, a bit owlish, possibly ‘quirky,’ coming close to asexual despite my best intentions."
"Me, as a New Yorker I can’t judge him for who he is. Basically, I can only judge him by the way he carries himself, especially in the White House."
"The Biden administration, hoping to avoid a wider war in the Middle East, is advising Israel that it does not necessarily need to fire back at Iran..."
The NYT reports.
"Even 30-mile-an-hour wind gusts whipping down from the nearby Poconos couldn’t move the bubble of Donald Trump-scented awe and alternative reality ..."
Writes Will Bunch, in "'Trumpstock' brings peace, unity and a ton of disinformation to Schnecksville/Fierce mountain winds in Lehigh County couldn't move the bubble of misinformation surrounding the throng at a Trump rally" (Philadelphia Inquirer).
"Record-level migration has brought record-breaking death to Maverick County, a border community that is ground zero..."
From "'WHERE DO WE PUT THE BODIES?’/Migration’s human toll overwhelms a border county in Texas" (WaPo).
Can't we use the torture devices in the best order?
"Why did this seamy Trump trial have to be the first?" Ruth Marcus complains, in The Washington Post.
Can't we conduct this persecution in a sequence most effective in shaping the emotions of the electorate?
Don't you hate when you're using the courts to destroy a man and the courts interpose their own ways of doing things and interfere with efficient destruction?
"When he was first running, I was, like, what is this guy even yapping about? Like, what is he even saying?"
Said a 23-year-old self-described former "Trump hater" named Maya Garcia, quoted in "Four Years Out, Some Voters Look Back at Trump’s Presidency More Positively/A new poll by The New York Times and Siena College finds that voters think highly of the former president’s record on the economy, but memories of his divisiveness largely remain intact" (NYT)
April 13, 2024
"The strain that runs really deep in the court in the last 10 years is a concern about prosecutors over-prosecuting."
Said Roman Martinez a former law clerk to Chief Justice Roberts, quoted in "Supreme Court to weigh if Jan. 6 rioters can be charged with obstruction/Defense lawyers say prosecutors improperly stretched the law by charging hundreds with obstruction of an official proceeding" (WaPo, free access link).
"I’m testifying. I tell the truth. I mean, all I can do is tell the truth. And the truth is that there’s no case. They have no case."
"Judge Maryellen Noreika denied all five of [Hunter] Biden’s motions, keeping the case on track..."
"But from the start of her career as a cartoonist, she said she felt shut out by her male peers, who excluded her from parties as well as comic anthologies..."
From "Trina Robbins, cartoonist who elevated women’s stories, dies at 85/She put out the first American comic book created entirely by women. Years later, she chronicled the history of female comics artists, writing books that excavated the stories of overlooked writers and illustrators" (WaPo).
"To better accommodate diverse gender identities, some Spanish and Portuguese speakers are increasingly using the -e suffix for some nouns..."
From "Latine is the new Latinx" (Axios).
It's hard to imagine how this feels to someone whose native language envisions every noun as either masculine or feminine. I've spent time learning French and Spanish, and I have my feelings about the masculinity and femininity that permeates everything, but these are an outsider's feelings, weighed down by effort it takes to learn a lot of extra and seemingly arbitrary information. If it's your native language, you know what's masculine and what's feminine. Isn't it natural and fluent to you? Isn't it disturbing to be pressured to speak differently and to use made-up words in service to someone else's ideology? Do you feel a sense of loss when the world is not enlivened by the masculinity and femininity of inanimate objects and abstract concepts? I don't come from that world, but from a distance, it feels beautiful, and if I were you, I would want to believe it is beautiful.
April 12, 2024
Another look at that Berkeley dinner party violence.
In a viral video, Erwin Chemerinsky, a noted constitutional scholar, can be seen shouting "Please leave our house! You are guests in our house!" as a third-year law student, Malak Afaneh, interrupted the event on Tuesday, speaking into a microphone to the students gathered in the dean’s backyard in Oakland, Calif.
Mr. Chemerinsky’s wife, Catherine Fisk, also a Berkeley law professor, can be seen with her arm around Ms. Afaneh, trying to yank the microphone away and pulling the student up a couple steps.
"The mythological couples provided ideas for conversations about the past and life, only seemingly of a merely romantic nature."
But election denial is reprehensible, no?
Saying Trump is on trial for paying hush money to a porn star is like saying John Wilkes Booth was tried for sneaking up behind Lincoln in Ford’s Theater. Silencing Stormy was just the means Trump used to commit the crime of fraudulently killing Hillary’s 2016 presidential bid.
— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) April 12, 2024
"There is a booming market in tests of biological age.. Partly they are for people who want to study ageing. Mainly they are for curious consumers."
I'm reading "What’s your biological age? We had a shock when we found out ours/What happened when the Times science editor Tom Whipple and two of his colleagues, James Marriott and Robert Crampton, took the ultimate age test (price, £289)?" (London Times).Whipple is 42 and was told his "biological age" is 71.He goes to a regular doctor who administers various tests and says, “You don’t seem to be 71.”I just ran into this article while scanning the London Times, but I'm realizing that Bryan Johnson is the guy in a Tucker Carlson interview that Meade was nudging me to watch.
"I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way."
Said Salman Rushdie, quoted in "'So it’s you. Here you are': Salman Rushdie describes moment he was stabbed/In first interview since his stabbing, writer tells how knifeman was 'last thing my right eye would ever see'" (The Guardian).
"One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me, 'First you were really unlucky and then you were really lucky.' I said, 'What’s the lucky part?' and he said 'Well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife'"....
"The anxiety that’s been ricing my lungs turns steely and sharp when I see a pale wooden door built into a hillside, framed by lava rock."
Writes Tim Neville, in "The Darkness That Blew My Mind/Embarking on four days of total blackout, inside the sensory equivalent of a tomb, our writer went on a dark-cave retreat, the same one that quarterback Aaron Rodgers did" (Outside).
"One of the books that I find myself tapping on repeatedly—without ever getting past forty per cent, somehow—is Richard Brautigan’s novella 'Trout Fishing in America.'"
"I was initially startled in early 2020 when... a 16-year-old girl asked, 'How come boys all want to choke you?'"
Writes Peggy Orenstein, in "The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex" (NYT).
"I’d been a part of the pro-life movement my entire adult life... But now I’m left wondering how much of the movement was truly real."
Writes David French, in "The Great Hypocrisy of the Pro-Life Movement" (NYT). He's looking at the reaction to the Alabama Supreme Court decision that treated IVF embryos like in utero embryos under the state’s wrongful death statute.
"It was hard not to interpret these recent offenses within the broader context of a roving and seemingly ever-more-insidious misogyny."
Writes Ginia Bellafante in "Sexism, Hate, Mental Illness: Why Are Men Randomly Punching Women?/Conversation about the attacks on the streets of New York have centered on mental illness, but the offenses seem to have their roots in hatred of women" (NYT).
"I wouldn’t trust her farther than I can spit. She’ll say whatever..."
Said Ellen Doughty, about Stormy Daniels, quoted in "The horse wars of Stormy Daniels/As she tangles with a former president, the adult-film actress also plays a starring role in a drama that has rocked the world of competitive English riding" (WaPo)(long article, free access link).
"I think in the barbershops today, Black people are saying, 'he got away with it, but the police got away with killing a lot more of us.' That’s the mentality."
Taylor... remembers the day that Simpson led police on a car chase and how tens of thousands of people, including many White people, lined the streets and highways yelling, “Go, O.J., Go.”...
Local police prepared for riots if Simpson was convicted, Taylor said. “But Black people didn’t love O.J. like that. This wasn’t about O.J. the person,” he said. “O.J. was just an extension of the general polarization between Black America and law enforcement.”
“The sympathy for O.J. is not as deep as we think it is” in the Black community, Taylor said.
April 11, 2024
"In sharing her preferred title and pronouns, Ms Wood celebrates herself and sings herself – not in a disruptive or coercive way, but in a way that subtly vindicates her identity, her dignity, and her humanity."
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
"It's a rare verdict - she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime...."
From "Truong My Lan: Vietnamese billionaire sentenced to death for $44bn fraud" (BBC).
"I myself have long been skeptical of the value of increasing turnout, and am also a longtime opponent of mandatory voting...."
Writes Ilya Somin, in "Increased Voter Turnout Now Benefits Republicans/Survey data shows relatively infrequent voters are significantly more likely to support the Trump-era GOP than those who vote more often. Will this change traditional left and right-wing attitudes towards mandatory voting and other policies intended to increase turnout?" (Reason).
ADDED: I've declined to vote a couple times, and I strongly defend the right to abstain. I responded to critics on November 3, 2020, in a post titled "I'll just say this once, Althouse. Abstaining from voting is neither courageous nor principled."
"In Sudden Reversal, Harvard To Require Standardized Testing for Next Admissions Cycle."
The decision comes in the face of Harvard’s previous commitments to remain test-optional through the admitted Class of 2030, a policy that was first instituted during the pandemic....
"Liberal Justice Opts Out: Wisconsin Supreme Court Race Heats Up."
In a significant development for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley has announced she will not seek reelection next year, with her current term ending on July 31, 2025. This decision has stirred up the race for control of the court, as it could potentially shift the balance of power from the current 4-3 liberal majority. The announcement has improved the odds for conservatives to regain the majority they lost last year. The race for her seat is already heating up, with conservative and former Attorney General Brad Schimel announcing his candidacy. This news has far-reaching implications for the state's judicial landscape and political dynamics in the swing state.
I blogged many, many words about Ann Walsh Bradley, back in 2011, the days of the Wisconsin protests, e.g., "No criminal charges against Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser or Justice Anne Walsh Bradley in the so-called 'chokehold' incident," "I've finally waded through the 'chokehold' investigation file," and — sorry this is coming up on the morning of the obituary for O.J. Simpson — "Attacks upon the neck."
Non-accidents.
Writes Vanessa Friedman, in "At the Japan State Dinner, Jill Biden Makes an Entrance/The first lady was glittering in crystals — four days after Melania Trump stepped out in pink at a Palm Beach fund-raiser. Together, the pictures offer a harbinger of what is to come" (NYT).
"Three men who were stranded on a remote Pacific island for more than a week were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard after spelling out 'HELP' on a beach using palm leaves."
O.J. Simpson has died.
"This is my home!"/"I had a home in Palestine too."
April 10, 2024
"There are, like, 8 people down there today. Is that normal?"
Said a woman returning from what is my sunrise vantage point.
My answer: "Maybe after the eclipse, there's more interest in the sun."
Mother wants to share her ridiculous dream with her gay son.
My gay son and his partner are getting married. They plan to wear themed outfits. I support their union and their choices. They identify as male and wear traditional male garb. But secretly, I’ve dreamed that one of them, preferably my son, would wear the traditional white wedding gown that I wore. Its elegance contrasts sharply with their planned outfits. Should I share my desire?
The way she framed the question — "Should I share my desire?" — makes it sound creepily Oedipal. The fact that it's her old wedding dress makes it sound like she's inserting herself as the bride. The fact that she thinks gay men want to be — or seem like — women is presumptuous (and stupid). The idea that someone else's wedding is a place to act out your dreams is mundane but lamentable.
And why are we not told the theme of the "themed outfits"? We're told her old dress, by its elegance, is a sharp contrast, so what could this "theme" be? Is it just "traditional male garb"? Maybe this lady has drunk so deeply of the current cultural brew, that she thinks everything is a gender performance and so when 2 gay men go to their wedding they are only going "as" 2 men. They are 2 men in the guise of guys. And they might alternatively go as a man and a woman or a man and a man in drag.
Or maybe the lady is really, underneath it all, quite old fashioned, and her dream betrays the traditionalist's belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.
"It sounds like a dream for some working parents: school for 12 hours a day, starting bright and early at 7 a.m. and ending after dinner, at 7 p.m...."
From "An Elementary School Tries a ‘Radical’ Idea: Staying Open 12 Hours a Day/A Brooklyn charter school is experimenting with a new way to help families by expanding the school day. Students can arrive at 7 a.m. and leave any time before 7 p.m. For free."
"You didn’t like the 'Seinfeld' finale? Well, here it is again times ten! Larry David is not about to cower."
Writes David Remnick, in "No Kaddish for 'Curb'/Larry David bows out" (The New Yorker).
And yet, as I was watching, something felt out of kilter. It wasn’t the occasional comic misfire that was bothering me. Nor was it the sense that the end of “Curb” signalled the end of something more than the show itself; the immigrant and children-of-immigrant Yiddishkeit version of Jewish humor has been on the wane for a long time.... No, what was off was the timing, the misery of the moment. It was hard to think about the finale of “Curb”... amid the cruelty and carnage of the past six months. The comedy of manners plays with the mores of civilization; it can lose its charm when civilization succumbs to barbarity. In life, as in comedy, timing is essential.
Did Larry David ever intend charm? Did Larry David ever purport to fit with the times? He went looking for where he did not fit and leaned into his own repugnance. But it is always possible to demand an end to comedy because it is unseemly in a world where people are suffering and dying. Here, Remnick is making a special complaint, based on Jewishness ("Yiddishkeit"): A Jew should not do Jewish humor at a time when Jews are conspicuously killing people. (Remnick himself is Jewish.)
April 9, 2024
We experienced the longest darkness in Indiana...
It seemed to be a grandiose claim, but I said maybe the people interpret God's requirements narrowly, so that it's not understood to be terribly difficult. My son Chris, texting, said, maybe God does not give them any particularly challenging purpose. I contemplated whether Chris was saying something different from what I'd just said and decided he certainly was. My idea was that people are self-serving, and his idea was that God was easy-going and pretty darned nice. Hearing that, Meade noted that "fulfills" could mean that citizens are simply wherever they are in a process of fulfilling.