Althouse

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• The NCAA "seeks immunity from the normal operation of the antitrust laws" — and loses.
• Man with Alzheimer's proposed to the woman he doesn't remember is his wife, and they have a wedding.
• "The Washington Post's @laurameckler spent three weeks preparing a hitpiece against me."
• "Now there’s a lot of fuss being made over it, but there wasn’t initially. The most feedback that I got was that I had gone too far and was exposing too much of myself."
• "An artist whose work was withdrawn from a gift shop at London’s Royal Academy of Arts after she was accused of transphobia has said she could pursue legal action if she is not given an apology."
• "Throughout most of the ’60s and ’70s, [Brigid Berlin] dragged her Polaroid 360 and a bulky cassette recorder everywhere, though she once said, 'No picture ever mattered, it was the clicking and pulling out that I loved.'"
• 5:21 a.m.
• "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... "

The NCAA "seeks immunity from the normal operation of the antitrust laws" — and loses. Posted: 21 Jun 2021 08:08 AM PDT In the new Supreme Court case, NCAA v. Alston. It's unanimous. Gorsuch writes the opinion. A snippet: From the start, American colleges and universities have had a complicated relationship with sports and money. In 1852, students from Harvard and Yale participated in what many regard as the Nation's first intercollegiate competition—a boat race at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. But this was no pickup match. A railroad executive sponsored the event to promote train travel to the picturesque lake..... He offered the competitors an all-expenses-paid vacation with lavish prizes—along with unlimited alcohol. The event filled the resort with "life and excitement," N. Y. Herald, Aug. 10, 1852... and one student-athlete described the "'junket'" as an experience "'as unique and irreproducible as the Rhodian colossus' "... Life might be no "less than a boat race," Holmes, On Receiving the Degree of Doctor of Laws, Yale University Commencement, June 30, 1886... but it was football that really caused  college sports to take off.... Yale reportedly lured a tackle named James Hogan with free meals and tuition, a trip to Cuba, the exclusive right to sell scorecards from his games—and a job as a cigarette agent for the American Tobacco Company.... The absence of academic residency requirements gave rise to "'tramp athletes'" who "roamed the country making cameo athletic appearances, moving on whenever and wherever the money was better.".... One famous example was a law student at West Virginia University—Fielding H. Yost— "who, in 1896, transferred to Lafayette as a freshman just in time to lead his new teammates to victory against its arch-rival, Penn." Ibid. The next week, he "was back at West Virginia's law school.".... College sports became such a big business that Woodrow Wilson, then President of Princeton University, quipped to alumni in 1890 that " 'Princeton is noted in this wide world for three things: football, baseball, and collegiate instruction.' " By 1905, though, a crisis emerged. While college football was hugely popular, it was extremely violent. Plays like the flying wedge and the players' light protective gear led to 7 football fatalities in 1893, 12 deaths the next year, and 18 in 1905. President Theodore Roosevelt responded by convening a meeting between Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to review the rules of the game, a gathering that ultimately led to the creation of what we now know as the NCAA....

Man with Alzheimer's proposed to the woman he doesn't remember is his wife, and they have a wedding. Posted: 21 Jun 2021 07:25 AM PDT "Peter Marshall, 56, has early onset Alzheimer's disease....In January, her husband's mind began declining at a faster pace. And so 20 years after their romance began, with her husband's recent proposal, it seemed like perfect timing to renew their vows... 'It was just magical — straight out of a fairy tale... There wasn't a dry eye, and I was over the moon... I hadn't seen Peter that happy in a long time'" —WaPo reports:

"The Washington Post's @laurameckler spent three weeks preparing a hitpiece against me." Posted: 21 Jun 2021 08:10 AM PDT "In this thread, I will expose five flat-out lies, from the fabrication of a timeline to multiple smears that are easily disproven by documentary evidence."  So begins a Twitter thread by Christopher Rufo.  Here's the WaPo piece he's attacking: "Republicans, spurred by an unlikely figure, see political promise in targeting critical race theory." From that article:  Critical race theory holds that racism is systemic in the United States, not just a collection of individual prejudices — an idea that feels obvious to some and offensive to others. Rufo alleged that efforts to inject awareness of systemic racism and White privilege, which grew more popular following the murder of George Floyd by police, posed a grave threat to the nation. It amounts, Rufo said, to a "cult indoctrination."... "We have successfully frozen their brand—'critical race theory'—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category," Rufo wrote. "The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory.' We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans." Rufo said in an interview that he understands why his opponents often point to this tweet, but said that the approach described is "so obvious." "If you want to see public policy outcomes you have to run a public persuasion campaign," he said. Rufo says his own role has been to translate research into programs about race into the political arena. Rufo, in his Twitter thread, says: "The Washington Post falsifies a direct quotation, claiming that I said it is 'so obvious' that my strategy was to 'conflate' unrelated items with CRT. I never said this and challenge the Post to produce the audio recording to support their claim—or retract it." The word "conflate" is WaPo's. It's a characterization of Rufo's idea of putting "various cultural insanities under" the CRT "brand." Whether he said "so obvious" or not, doesn't he to want to take responsibility for putting CRT at the center of the analysis of all sorts of "crazy" things we're hearing about?

"Now there’s a lot of fuss being made over it, but there wasn’t initially. The most feedback that I got was that I had gone too far and was exposing too much of myself." Posted: 21 Jun 2021 06:05 AM PDT "I couldn't tell what I had created, really. The initial response I got was critical, mostly from the male singer-songwriters. It was kind of like Dylan going electric. They were afraid. Is this contagious? Do we all have to get this honest now? That's what the boys were telling me. 'Save something of yourself, Joni. Nobody's ever gonna cover these songs. They're too personal.'" From "Joni Mitchell opens up to Cameron Crowe about singing again, lost loves and 50 years of 'Blue'" (L.A. Times).  Much more at the link — where I was able to read without a subscription by putting my browser in "reader view." There's the backstory on Cary ("Carey") (was he really "a mean old daddy"?) and the snuggliness of her relationship with Graham Nash ("Sometimes I get sensitive or worried, and it might bother the man I was with. But not Graham. He just said, 'Come over here to the couch; you need a 15-minute cool-out.' And then we would snuggle" (very much not a mean old daddy)).

"An artist whose work was withdrawn from a gift shop at London’s Royal Academy of Arts after she was accused of transphobia has said she could pursue legal action if she is not given an apology." Posted: 21 Jun 2021 04:09 AM PDT "The academy said that it would no longer stock works by De Wahls and thanked campaigners for bringing to its attention 'an item in the RA shop by an artist representing transphobic views.' On the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, De Wahls said: 'They frantically tried to call me the day they realised that was a really bad PR decision. They contacted me the day after they posted it on social media. There was no point to that conversation... I don't know what they were looking for..... I might [pursue a legal remedy]. But, to be honest with you, right now, I have the feeling that there is a hope within that institution, which is mind-boggling to me, that this just will go away... my inbox and the feedback I've been getting from the general public is quite the opposite. This isn't going away. This is a conversation that needs to happen, it needs to happen in public. They will have to talk eventually." From "'Cancelled' artist Jess De Wahls could sue unless Royal Academy apologises" (London Times). Here's what she wrote that led to that campaign against her — from her blog, back in 2019 : "I have no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex (or in whatever way they please for that matter). However, I cannot accept people's unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such."  Her art trades in feminism: She makes "textile pieces... involving women, ovaries and flowers." I see she had a show called "Big Swinging Ovaries." She came up with an image — embroidered — of fallopian tubes giving the finger. That info is in the London Times column, "Anatomy of a cancellation by the culture Stasi/The Royal Academy's decision to ban an artist's work over her views should be a test case for anti-discrimination laws." That column also has this:  [W]hen [De Wahls] was 12 her parents announced their marriage was ending because her father enjoyed sado-masochism but her mother did not.... She shows me a photo of her father visiting London, a tall, beaming bald man in make-up, earrings and red high heels. Abhorring labels, he calls himself "a paradise bird". Yet De Wahls points out that as an occasional cross-dresser he comes under Stonewall's all-encompassing "trans umbrella". So, a few years ago, when gender theory took off among Soho Theatre colleagues, "and they'd disinvite a friend from a party because she believed that only women have vaginas", De Wahls was bemused. "I said, 'Are you serious?'"... After immense thought, sleepless nights and with much trepidation, in 2019 she posted a 5,000-word blog... The response was immediate and merciless. She was driven from her Soho Theatre salon. A gay friend whose hair she'd cut for ten years tweeted: "Never trust a bitch who does vagina art." A colleague trawled her Facebook page, ordering lifelong friends to disavow her. All her offers to meet and talk were blanked. Meanwhile the Instagram "embroidery community" set about destroying her livelihood.... When the embroidery community comes after you....

"Throughout most of the ’60s and ’70s, [Brigid Berlin] dragged her Polaroid 360 and a bulky cassette recorder everywhere, though she once said, 'No picture ever mattered, it was the clicking and pulling out that I loved.'" Posted: 21 Jun 2021 03:43 AM PDT "Running out of film, she insisted, was worse than running out of speed. Warhol became equally addicted to documentation and, though his pictures became more well known, hers are arguably as revelatory, often the product of double exposures and lighting both flat and vivid, and featuring such friends as Lou Reed, Roy Lichtenstein, Dennis Hopper and Cy Twombly.... Her recordings — there are more than 1,000 hours of tape... — range from the mundane (chatter about her near-constant doctors' appointments) to the historic (Rauschenberg ranting at the Cedar Tavern). The original cassettes, with Berlin's typed and handwritten labels affixed to each plastic case, are stored in a black flip-top handled case in her walk-in closet. 'Brigid wanted to melt them down and turn them into a sort of audio John Chamberlain piece.... but I convinced her that was insane.' It was her 1970 recording of the Velvet Underground, scratchy background noises and all, that was remastered into the band's first live album, 'Live at Max's Kansas City.'" From "Brigid Berlin, Andy Warhol's Most Enduring Friend/Berlin, who died last year, was a great artist in her own right, and her New York apartment, which is being sold, is a window into a bygone era in the city's history" (NYT). Worth clicking for cool photographs of the idiosyncratic apartment. Years ago, John Chamberlain was a reference everyone understood. He was a sculptor best known for welding together parts of banged up automobiles. In the 1960s, "modern art" was a hot topic and his name came up a lot. I doubt if younger people know or care about him. As for "Live at Max's Kansas City," I've still got my half-century old copy of the thing. How about you? From the 1972 Rolling Stone review:  This album (in some ways the first authorized bootleg) exists only because scene-chronicler Brigid Polk wanted to make a tape of the band for herself. She took her Sony 124 down to the club a couple of times, and on August 23rd [1970] recorded an hour and a half cassette, which makes up the bulk of the album.... Brigid's tape was played for lots of friends (she has extensive documentation of almost everything worth knowing about in New York), and eventually Atlantic heard about the tape and called her up.... The album opens with [Lou] Reed inviting the audience to dance, introducing a "tender folk ballad of love between man and subway," then stomping into "Waiting For The Man."... Those were different times.  I'll have double a Pernod.

5:21 a.m. Posted: 20 Jun 2021 05:09 PM PDT

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... " Posted: 21 Jun 2021 10:58 AM PDT "We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."   Wrote Henry David Thoreau. I'm quoting that now, because of that post earlier today about a telegram and because it seems to relate to our current predicament living on the internet. In case you're wondering about Princess Adelaide, she does look interesting: ADDED: A reader questions whether I have the right Princess Adelaide. There's also this Princess Adelaide, a granddaughter of King George III. She was born in 1833, and was portrayed like this in 1846: Age and photography rendered her less cute: The Princess Adelaide in the original post was born in 1792  and died in 1849. Thoreau was having his pond experience at Walden from 1845 to 1847, and the book came out in 1854. The first Adelaide was in her 50s in those days. What's more ridiculous leaking into the broad flapping American ear — a coughing royal teenager or a coughing queen dowager? WAIT: The simple answer is that the older Adelaide wouldn't have been called "Princess" at the time Thoreau was writing. She had been queen (1830-1837) and after King William IV died in 1837, she became queen dowager.

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