Thursday, June 24, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

"Pure left-stereotyping of gay people."

Posted: 24 Jun 2021 09:13 AM PDT

"Are the reasons you believe that people should not be telling Breyer to retire substantive as much as practical? In other words, is your fear solely that telling him to retire will make him want to do the opposite so as not to appear political, or do you also think that there are good reasons that he should not retire immediately?"

Posted: 24 Jun 2021 07:33 AM PDT

Sometimes one just slams right up against the horrific shallowness of legal scholarship, and you can only hope to have kept enough of your wits about you to feel a slight pain. And so I twinge as I read Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker. That's his question above, all multilayered but still paper-thin. Tiresomely, he called up a law professor — Noah Feldman — to produce a transcript, thereby creating a text that must look substantial to some readers.

"Last winter, Britta Grace Thorpe was in bed at her parents’ home, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in the depths of a late-night TikTok binge..."

Posted: 24 Jun 2021 07:36 AM PDT

"... when one video broke the reverie. Soft harp sounds played, and then a female voice began a gentle but insistent monologue: 'You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character. 'Cause if you don't, life will continue to pass you by.' Onscreen, an overhead shot showed a young blond woman sprawled on a blanket on the beach, looking up at the camera, surrounded by friends who are oblivious to the lens. Sparkles from a TikTok filter bedazzle the footage. The woman gazes serenely skyward, as if wholly satisfied with her life. The ethereal video played the same role for Thorpe that an antique sculpture did for Rainer Maria Rilke in his poem 'Archaic Torso of Apollo': It instructed, 'You must change your life.' 'It was a wake-up call,' Thorpe, who is twenty-three, said, adding, 'Everything made sense in that moment, and I was, like, Wow, I'm doing it wrong, I'm living my life incorrectly.'"

So begins "We All Have 'Main-Character Energy' Now/On social media post-pandemic, everyone is ready to become a protagonist" (The New Yorker). 

The linked video was made by a 26-year-old named Ashley Ward in May 2020, and The New Yorker doesn't miss that there already was a "main character" meme on TikTok. I get the feeling the article was written before that discordant reality was noticed and inserted — minimally. So let's switch over to Know Your Meme, which calls Ward's video "sincere." And:

The first main character TikTok video is unknown. On May 11th, 2020, Twitter user and TikToker @lexapro_lesbian posted the first known main character TikTok that sparked the surge in the trend. @lexapro_lesbian reposted her original TikTok video of herself singing about how it's time to walk around her neighborhood because she's the main character (shown below).

Yes, I love the little song and the lighthearted satire:

And for you upscale characters, here's the Rilke poem:
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

I'm fascinated by the concept of the torso! I wrote about it here (prompted by a Donald Trump quote about the best part of the chicken (It's not the torso!)):

Torso... now that's funny. By the way, for decades, I've found the word "torso" funny. There's the line "and the torso, even more so" in "Lydia the Tattoed Lady," and once, when I was in Rome, visiting the Vatican Museum, there were a lot of posters showing a statue that was only a torso, with the word "torso," and, after seeing these posters all over the place, I overheard a young woman, who must have seen what I'd been seeing, and she said, "What's with the torso?" Even now, 2 decades later, I hear her inflection in my head, and I laugh out loud.
I, the main character on this blog. But how about you — when you walk through your neighborhood, when you walk through the Vatican Museum — are you the main character... in your head?

"So, for the new study, which was published in April in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the Texas scientists recruited eight healthy young men and women and asked them to spend a full day at the lab seated..."

Posted: 24 Jun 2021 04:56 AM PDT

"... rising only to eat or visit the bathroom. The next morning, the volunteers returned to the lab for a high-fat breakfast of melted ice cream and half and half, while the scientists monitored their bodies' metabolic response during the next six hours. Then, on a separate day, the volunteers sat again, except for a few seconds each hour, when they sprinted." 

From "The 4-Second Workout/Intense bursts of exercise throughout the day may have surprising metabolic benefits" (NYT).

1. That was mean, melting the ice cream.

2.  So... I guess you can give up your long wholesome outings running and hiking and just sit slumping over your computer all day, every day if — every time you need to go get some food or pee — you just run like hell. 

3. Clear the pathways to the kitchen and bathroom so you don't stumble and fall, undoing the health benefits.

Glenn Loury talks to Charles Murray about the "shift away from racism as a moral issue to accusations of racism as a kind of attack on [white people] as people."

Posted: 24 Jun 2021 04:24 AM PDT

"So, this morning, the baby woke up, and she had some kind of violence in her heart.... Stop trying to make her feel better. Stop responding to her tears. It's so interesting to see the conditioning of people responding to white girl tears..."

Posted: 24 Jun 2021 04:03 AM PDT

"We have to unlearn this whole business that women crying is going to get them what they want in life, because... that ain't it."
at

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