Monday, March 28, 2022

Althouse

Althouse

Sunrise — 6:43, 6:48.

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 05:11 PM PDT

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Write about whatever you want in the comments.

I watch TikTok so you don't have to. And here are my 5 selections of the day:

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 04:57 PM PDT

1. A high school teacher says the kids roasted him for eating lunch "with no bev."

2. Everyone should live like a grandmother — 10 reasons!

3. What if it had been Ben Affleck slapping Jerry Seinfeld? — asks Michael Rapaport.

4. Maybe time is a landscape, and the dead are on the other side of a hill... or so Einstein seems to have written to a friend whose husband had died.

5. Four young brothers pitch barbershop quartet singing.

"If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution."

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 03:28 PM PDT

Wrote Judge David Carter, quoted in "Trump probably broke the law in an effort to obstruct Jan. 6 proceedings, judge says/'The illegality of the plan was obvious,' Judge David Carter wrote in a ruling shooting down lawyer John Eastman's bid to keep Jan. 6 documents private" (NBC News).

In his ruling, Carter wrote that Eastman should give the committee 101 of the 111 documents he was trying to keep from the panel. One of those documents, the judge wrote, is a email chain "forwarding to Dr. Eastman a draft memo written for President Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani." 
"The memo recommended that Vice President Pence reject electors from contested states on January 6. This may have been the first time members of President Trump's team transformed a legal interpretation of the Electoral Count Act into a day-by-day plan of action," the judge wrote, adding that the "draft memo pushed a strategy that knowingly violated the Electoral Count Act, and Dr. Eastman's later memos closely track its analysis and proposal." 
The ruling does not say who wrote the memo, but said, "Because the memo likely furthered the crimes of obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States, it is subject to the crime-fraud exception and the court orders it to be 
disclosed."...

"President Trump and Dr. Eastman justified the plan with allegations of election fraud — but President Trump likely knew the justification was baseless, and therefore that the entire plan was unlawful...."

The ice on Lake Mendota this morning had crushed itself into some distinctive shapes.

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 11:41 AM PDT

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"How an Ivy League School Turned Against a Student/Mackenzie Fierceton was championed as a former foster youth who had overcome an abusive childhood and won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying."

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 11:30 AM PDT

A very strong piece by Rachel Aviv in The New Yorker. 

The facts here are very complicated, so I can't summarize it or excerpt enough to enlighten you about this particular case. So let me quote one part near the end that says something more general: 

One of Mackenzie's professors, Anne Norton, who teaches political science... told me, "I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered enough. She was a foster child, but not for long enough. She is poor, but she has not been poor for long enough. She was abused, but there is not enough blood." Penn had once celebrated her story, but, when it proved more complex than institutional categories for disadvantage could capture, it seemed to quickly disown her. Norton wrote a letter to [Amy] Gutmann, Penn's president, warning that the university had been "made complicit in a long campaign of continuing abuse." Norton says that Gutmann did not respond.

"People say, 'How did Weinstein get away with that for so long? How did that happen?' and it’s like, we just witnessed it!"

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 11:21 AM PDT

"Everyone saw an assault take place. Everyone in the room with their own eyes. And then if you would have tuned in 20 minutes later, you would have never known that happened." 

Said the comic Nikki Glaser, quoted in "Howard Stern Lambastes Will Smith and Academy Inaction Over Chris Rock Oscars Slap/Comic Nikki Glaser called into the show and said she was also shocked, adding she was worried about what Smith's actions signal to others who don't like a joke at a club and attack a comic over it" (The Hollywood Reporter).

This is a big change from the usual post-Oscars complaint about the stars and all their activism. This time the complaint is about all their inactivism.

"The Kibbe system relies on Old Hollywood archetypes and a balance between what he calls 'yin' (softness, curve) and 'yang' (sharp angles, edges)."

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 07:30 AM PDT

"If you're all yang — tall and lean with sharp shoulders, like Katharine Hepburn — you could be a dramatic. If you're all yin, with soft curves like Marilyn Monroe, you're probably a romantic. Naturals (yang-dominant but 'blunt' rather than sharp, often with broad shoulders, like a '90s supermodel), classics (think Grace Kelly) and gamines (petite and high-contrast) are somewhere in the middle. The types are modified using adjectives like 'soft' (Sophia Loren is a soft dramatic, for instance) or 'flamboyant' (Audrey Hepburn, a flamboyant gamine). For each one, there is a set of guidelines on how to dress to look one's best.... The Kibbe system, like the Myers-Briggs test, also has a social component: Finding out that a celebrity shares your type may help you 'feel a connection to another person, a very glamorous and visible and beautiful kind of person,' Professor Emre said.... One entry from Mr. Kibbe's 1987 book states that romantics, defined by a curvy figure, 'possess extraordinary human empathy' and that logic is secondary to their 'innate experience of a situation.' Gamines might have a 'bubbly energy,' Mr. Kibbe said, and a soft dramatic, with her blend of yang and yin, is both 'bold' and 'receptively accommodating' according to his book. 'The key is the integration of the inner and outer,' Mr. Kibbe said. Some may take issue with the essentialism of such logic. While Mr. Kibbe sees it as analogous to astrology, the system nonetheless suggests that something true and inherent about a person can be gleaned from their bone structure."

From "What's Your Kibbe Type? David Kibbe, an image consultant who got his start in the 1980s, has watched his body-typing system take off with a new, digitally native audience" (NYT).

Something true and inherent about a person can be gleaned from their bone structure? That's most analogous not to astrology but phrenology.

This craze is out of synch with the current interest in transgenderism. It assumes your mind fits your body.

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?"/"I could walk up onto the Oscar stage and punch the host in the face, and I wouldn't lose my privileged Hollywood status."

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 07:10 AM PDT

 

Let's compare.

1. Shooting somebody is worse than hitting somebody in the face, but Trump was only verbalizing about an imagined event, and Will Smith actually hit somebody in the face.

2. Trump was joking, Will Smith was reacting to a joke and displaying utter humorlessness.

3. In Trump's shooting scenario, the victim isn't a specific person or type of person. It's just a shooting in the abstract, with no motive or victim. There's no implicit endorsement of violence. His point was that he is (or was) the recipient of unconditional love. Will Smith targeted a specific person and modeled a sort of behavior: When your woman is disrespected, you should strike out immediately and violently. 

4. Fifth Avenue is a very conspicuous place, but the stage of the Oscars ceremony is even more conspicuous. Trump only thought of getting away with violence committed right before everyone's eyes. But Smith actually did it — strode onto the stage and hit Rock — showing an immense sense of privilege. 

5. If Trump really did shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, he would be prosecuted. Even if it was in self-defense, I think in NYC, he'd be prosecuted. But since Smith actually committed the act, we will get to see if he suffers any consequences. He didn't even get escorted out of the theater. He was handed an Oscar a little while later and allowed time to talk and talk about his feelings. So this is looking like the height of privilege.

If you were an 11-year-old boy in 1864 and they told you couldn't go to school for 2 years because you're up to high school, and you can't go to high school until you're 13....

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 06:08 AM PDT

 ... and they told you to avoid books and just "develop physically," but you insisted that you'd rather die than be kept from books, and they said, well, okay then... what is the one book you would want?

 

And here it is. You can read the whole thing at Project Gutenberg — "The Magician's Own Book or The Whole Art of Conjuring/Being a Complete Hand-Book of Parlor Magic and Containing Over One Thousand Optical, Chemical, Mechanical, Magnetical, and Magical Experiments, Amusing Transmutations, Astonishing Sleights and Subtleties, Celebrated Card Deceptions, Ingenious Tricks with Numbers, Curious and Entertaining Puzzles, Together with the Most Noted Tricks of Modern Performers"!

I'm rooting for the coots — coot-rooting — and tittle-tattling on the Canada geese.

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 05:43 AM PDT

On Lake Mendota just now:

Watching the video, I don't agree with my real-time judgment that the geese were harassing the coots. The coots continue their gentle pattern of paddling about together. It seems to be goose-on-goose action. The honking becomes an almost mammalian growling and grunting at 0:42. And at 0:55 to 0:58, you see hot pursuit and biting. A male chasing off another male, I'm guessing. You wouldn't treat the lady-goose like that would you? Biting her ass? I'm thinking it's not true that what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Kathy Griffin, on setting a bad example and causing worry that one might be targeted for violence.

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 04:10 AM PDT

Now, square that with this:

"An increasing number of digital products that monitor students’ online behavior are being adopted by schools in association with Big tech – so what’s in it for them?"

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 04:11 AM PDT


Chris Rock — punched by Will Smith for a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's hair — once made a documentary about black people and their hair.

Posted: 28 Mar 2022 03:44 AM PDT

Here's the trailer for "Good Hair": 

 

Here's Rock making the joke, Will chuckling, and Jada not amused, and then Will striding onto the stage and hitting/"hitting" Rock:

 

At 0:42, I felt sure what I'd seen was a fake "Hollywood" punch. Rock stood planted in position and even leaned his face forward, then — it seemed — threw his head back after the seeming contact. 

And Rock recovered so quickly, still smiling, and chattered out "Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me." But if it was scripted, would he have said "shit"? I haven't been watching the Oscars in recent years, but back in the days when I used to care enough to live-blog the hours-long show, I had the tag "fleeting expletives" to keep track of the litigation that arose after Cher's saying "fuck" at the 2002 Billboard awards activated the FCC. Who can even remember what the Supreme Court ultimately did about that threat to free speech? 

But when Will Smith got back to his seat and proceeded to yell "Keep my wife's name out ya fucking mouth! Keep my wife's name out ya fucking mouth!" it was hard to believe it was scripted. But, as I said, I don't know where we are with fleeting expletives these days, and maybe we are right where it would be scripted precisely because it would create the illusion that it was unscripted. 

Then Smith wins the best actor Oscar, and we get to listen to his speech, which give us another chance to assess the real-or-fakeness of the punch/"punch"/slap/"slap":

But if he's such a great actor — do we really still believe the stars who get the statuette are "great actors"? — he should be able to sell a scripted acceptance speech with faux-sincere lines about his being a "river of love" or some such nonsense and to cry seemingly real tears of apology.

What makes me think it was real is that it makes Smith look bad. He looked ugly yelling "Keep my wife's name out ya fucking mouth!" And he overshadowed his own winning of the Oscar. Why would anyone do that? The best explanation is that he lost his temper. But exactly why did he lose his temper? I think we'd need to know more about his relationship with his wife. Remember he was laughing at the joke, and she was looking grim. The camera wasn't on them continuously, but I imagine she said something to him or gave him a look that meant you'd better act now or you are not a man. 

Finally, it's sad that the Smiths aren't proud of Jada's hair. She boldly shaves it down to almost nothing and that's a way of expressing great confidence in one's own beauty. I'm seeing some articles talking about her alopecia, but if you go to that link, you'll see she has a thin line of baldness across the top, and it's something that would be hidden if she didn't shave her head. She's highlighting the beauty of her face and the elegant structure of her head. She's not like those women in Chris Rock's movie who spend so much time at the hairdressers, use harsh chemicals, and cause so much importation of human hair from India. 

Jada Pinkett Smith could have had any wig she wanted. To go to the Oscars with a shaved head is to make a strong statement that you think this is your best look. Chris Rock said she could play in a sequel to "G.I. Jane," which means she could play Demi Moore's iconic role. Demi Moore is famously beautiful. 

The best response to the joke would have been an imperious smile that meant: Yes, I know I am beautiful. Not: My husband will now punch you in the nose!

At the Sunday Night Café...

Posted: 27 Mar 2022 05:52 PM PDT

 ... you can talk about whatever you want.

"For seven years, Geoffroy Delorme says, he lived in the forest with wild deer, sleeping alongside them beneath the trees, eating acorns, lichens and wild garlic..."

Posted: 27 Mar 2022 11:18 AM PDT

"... and fleeing with them when the hunters came. Now 37, he has written an extraordinary memoir of his experiences: a literary sensation in France, and already translated into 11 languages. It has also caused profound unease and scepticism in certain quarters. Is it true? Or is the author a mere fantasist?... Delorme lives with his friends the deer, finding true peace and freedom there. As a boy he always hated school, was 'somewhat timid by nature' and was finally taught at home.... Lacking the material ambition and hypocrisy to forge a career, by late adolescence Delorme was spending whole days and nights in the nearby forests.... Finally he moved to the forest full-time.... 'Disgusted by my own species,' Delorme embraces a 'childlike mysticism' and his motto becomes: 'To live happily, live hidden!' ... He eventually returns to the 'inhuman human world,' as he calls it, to tell his story and fight for his friends.... 'I want to save them from the destruction of this world which is losing its mind.'"

From "Deer Man by Geoffroy Delorme review — the story of a French Mowgli/This astonishing story has been a literary sensation in France. But is it true?" (London Times).

"If my life had not been diverted when I was eight, I would very likely be living in Czechoslovakia where I had friends who were persecuted for what they spoke and wrote."

Posted: 27 Mar 2022 11:07 AM PDT

"As far as I could see, tolerance of dissenting opinion was the sine qua non of a free society; indeed it was the freedom on which the structures of freedom rested. Yet, it turns out, I couldn't see as far as I thought I could. Back then, all the way to — it seems — the day before yesterday, I saw the battlefront as one between the individual and the state. It is still that, of course, all over the globe, but identity politics has thrown up a phenomenon, a battleground that is not political so much as psychosocial, an intolerance between individuals, and it's about language. Words speak louder than actions. Sticks and stones will still break your bones, but the idea that words can't hurt you has been repealed. People are being hurt by words, and consequently are picking up sticks and stones, not in the form of death threats (mostly) but (frequently) in the form of hounding the transgressor out of his or her livelihood.... [P]ersonally I always had faith in the ultimate commensurability of language and reality. When the German Democratic Republic put out that the Berlin Wall was to keep people out it made me laugh. Reality would take care of itself.... I don't want to criminalise every fool who says the moon landing was faked and there were no gas ovens. Reality will take care of them too. But no one, not even Lewis Carroll, saw identity politics coming.... 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,' [Humpty Dumpty] tells Alice. And that includes pronouns. Will reality take care of it now?"

Says the great playwright Tom Stoppard (in The London Times). 

Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, and his family fled in 1939 (on the day before Hitler invaded). They fled to Singapore, then, because the Japanese were about to invade, to India. The father stayed behind and died in the war, and the mother remarried and Englishman who liked to quote Cecil Rhodes — "to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life"— and to tell young Tom, "Don't you realize that I made you British?"

"Funny how you don’t mention anything about the ludicrous business model and economics employed by the theater and film industry that ultimately squeezed movie goers to the point of no return."

Posted: 27 Mar 2022 07:03 AM PDT

"$150-$200 to take a family to the movies in NYC to see one movie one time or ten months of Netflix to watch unlimited movies with on my big giant affordable TV? It's a no brainer for the majority of families."

Writes one commenter at this column by Ross Douthat, "We Aren't Just Watching the Decline of the Oscars. We're Watching the End of the Movies." 

Douthat's focus is our changing culture:

One of my formative experiences as a moviegoer came in college, sitting in a darkened lecture hall, watching "Blade Runner" and "When We Were Kings" as a cinematic supplement to a course on heroism in ancient Greece. At that moment, in 1998, I was still encountering American culture's dominant popular art form; today a student having the same experience would be encountering an art form whose dominance belongs somewhat to the past. But that's true as well of so much else we would want that student to encounter, from the "Iliad" and Aeschylus to Shakespeare and the 19th-century novel and beyond.

Where did Ross Douthat go to college? I had to look it up: Harvard.  

I appreciate the high-tone elite solution that says to cherish the great art of the past. It's all still there for us. That's not beyond agreement with the commenter I quoted. You can screen the old movies on your TV, and the best of all of the 100+ years of movies can be called up on demand. There's no reason anymore to care about what's coming out right now. Show your kids the classics! It costs next to nothing. 

"With nine ad-libbed words at the end of a 27-minute speech, Biden created an unwanted distraction to his otherwise forceful remarks by calling for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be pushed out of office."

Posted: 27 Mar 2022 06:08 AM PDT

"'For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power,' Biden said. It was a remarkable statement that would reverse stated U.S. policy, directly countering claims from senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who have insisted regime change is not on the table. It went further than even U.S. presidents during the Cold War, and immediately reverberated around the world as world leaders, diplomats, and foreign policy experts sought to determine what Biden said, what it meant — and, if he didn't mean it, why he said it."

Write Tyler Pager and Matt Viser in The Washington Post, in "How Biden sparked a global uproar with nine ad-libbed words about Putin/By declaring that the Russian leader 'cannot remain in power,' the U.S. president seemed to suggest a drastic change in U.S. policy — prompting a scramble by White House officials." 

Watching the video, I can't understand the basis for labeling the statement "ad-libbed." Biden seems to be reading a speech, a bit robotically and on the edge of stumbling, and he slows down a bit and gets quite emphatic. He seems to build up toward that conclusion and fully intend it as a conclusion. I don't see how it's "an unwanted distraction to... otherwise forceful remarks." It's delivered in a manner that is more forceful than the surrounding remarks.

But how could it have been deliberately scripted? Some White House official — who? — reacted almost immediately and tried to make it go away with an incredibly lame argument that Biden just meant that "Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region."

So, the evidence that it was "ad-libbed" is merely that unnamed associates of the President are saying that after the fact. The WaPo writers assist the White House:

Biden's line was not planned and came as a surprise to U.S. officials, according to a person familiar with the speech who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.

I presume the WaPo writers are skeptical, but they see a dire need to help. We're living in the shadow of World War III.

In the immediate aftermath of the remark, reporters rushed to find Biden aides and seek clarity on the president seemingly supporting a regime change in Russia. But Biden aides demurred, refusing to comment as they scrambled to craft a response.

Reporters rushed and aides scrambled. This sounds like a description of the in-person scene. One of the article-writers, Pager, was there in Warsaw. I presume he witnessed chaos. This next part sounds like it's the scene back in Washington. The other article writer, Viser, reported from Washington.

White House officials were adamant the remark was not a sign of a policy change, but they did concede it was just the latest example of Biden's penchant for stumbling off message. And like many of his unintended comments, they came at the end of his speech as he ad-libbed and veered from the carefully crafted text on the teleprompter.

Do you believe that? I don't. There is mind-blowing incompetence whether it's true or false. How can you have a United States President, giving the most high-profile speech on the most dire matter, and accept that he stumbles off message. It's his penchant. They had a "carefully crafted text," but he veered.

It likely signals to Putin what he already suspected about Biden's true feelings, and it almost certainly will be used as part of Russia's propaganda.

Our propaganda says whatever Putin says is propaganda.

"What it tells me, and worries me, is that the top team is not thinking about plausible war termination," said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the book "The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint." "If they were, Biden's head wouldn't be in a place where he's saying, 'Putin must go.' The only way to get to war termination is to negotiate with this guy," O'Hanlon said. "When you say this guy must go you've essentially declared you're not going to do business with him...."

This is exactly what Trump would not have done. Mentions of Trump in the article: 0.

Over the past few weeks, Biden's rhetoric on Putin — a man he once recounted telling to his face, "I don't think you have a soul" — has become increasingly pointed. He has called him a "butcher" "pure thug" and a "murderous dictator." So saying that he should be removed from power could viewed as the logical next step....

In other words: There can be no negotiation. Ad-libbed or not, he meant to say it. Whatever escaped from his mouth came from his brain.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state news agencies, "That's not for Biden to decide. The president of Russia is elected by Russians."

I await the new Russian propaganda that weaves in Biden's outrage at our January 6th attempted "coup."

"The temptation of the West for Putin was, I think, chiefly that he saw it as instrumental to building a great Russia. He was always obsessed with the 25 million Russians trapped outside Mother Russia..."

Posted: 27 Mar 2022 04:51 AM PDT

"... by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Again and again he raised this. That is why, for him, the end of the Soviet empire was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century."

Said Condoleezza Rice, quoted in "The Making of Vladimir Putin/The 22-year arc of the Russian president's exercise of power is a study in audacity" by Roger Cohen (NYT). 

This is a very substantial article, and there are some excellent photographs — Putin scaring Angel Merkel with a dog, George W. Bush yukking it up with a smilingly sober Putin. 

I'll just add a bit:

Born in 1952 in a city then called Leningrad, Mr. Putin grew up in the shadow of the Soviets' war with Nazi Germany, known to Russians as the Great Patriotic War. His father was badly wounded, an older brother died during the brutal 872-day German siege of the city, and a grandfather had worked for Stalin as a cook.

The immense sacrifices of the Red Army in defeating Nazism were not abstract but palpable within his modest family, as for many Russians of his generation. Mr. Putin learned young that, as he put it, "the weak get beat."

"The West did not take sufficient account of the strength of Soviet myth, military sacrifice and revanchism in him," [said Michel Eltchaninoff, the French author of "Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin"], whose grandparents were all Russian, said. "He believes deeply that Russian man is prepared to sacrifice himself for an idea, whereas Western man likes success and comfort."...

[Putin] was the first to call President Bush after 9/11 [and] an important potential ally in what came to be called the Global War on Terror. It meshed with his own war in Chechnya and with a tendency to see himself as part of a civilizational battle on behalf of Christianity. But Mr. Putin was far less comfortable with Mr. Bush's "freedom agenda," announced in his second inaugural of January 2005, a commitment to promote democracy across the world in pursuit of a neoconservative vision.

In every stirring for liberty, Mr. Putin now saw the hidden hand of the United States. And why would Mr. Bush not include Russia in his ambitious program?... When François Hollande, the former French president, met Mr. Putin several years later, he was surprised to find him referring to Americans as "Yankees" — and in scathing terms. These Yankees had "humiliated us, put us in second position," Mr. Putin told him.

NATO was an organization "aggressive by its nature," used by the United States to put Russia under pressure, even to stir democracy movements....

The United States and its allies, in Mr. Putin's telling, were intent on globalizing these subversive values under cover of democracy promotion and human rights. Saint Russia would stand against this baleful homogenization. Putinism, as it was now fleshed out, stood against a Godless and insinuating West. Moscow had an ideology once more. It was one of conservative resistance, and it appealed to rightist leaders across Europe and beyond....

Here's the part of the NYT's "17 New Nonfiction Books to Read This Season" that got the most attention from the commenters over there.

Posted: 27 Mar 2022 04:09 AM PDT

 

There are not a lot of comments over there, but here's the one with the most up votes, and it went up 2 days ago: 

Maybe very few people care about actually buying books anymore, or maybe the book-buying public waits until it gets the hard copy of the NYT Book Review, which is part of the Sunday NYT. (Sunday is the 27th; the article went up on line on the 25th.)

But it amazes me that having the pretense of erudition —opining on which new books are worthy — the NYT doesn't monitor the comments and fix errors like this. 

By the way, here's the subheadline for the article: "Two journalists dive into George Floyd's life and family; Viola Davis reflects on her career; a historian explores the brutal underpinnings of the British Empire; and more." For a moment there, I thought the NYT was recommending 2 books about George Floyd's life. But it's just one book with 2 authors. 

I'm guessing the headline writer thought it was important to use the active voice and to maintain parallelism. So if Viola Davis reflects and a historian explores, then 2 journalists must dive. The authors all simply wrote, but there's an idea out there that says you ought to use vivid verbs, so "write" is systematically converted to metaphor: dive, reflect, explore. That desire for vigorous activity dictated a structure with the writer coming first in the phrase, and that created the ambiguity that made me think there were 2 books about George Floyd.

So the subheading begins "Two journalists dive into George Floyd's life and family; Viola Davis reflects on her career...." and the poor NYT reader must struggle not to feel that the newspaper is force-feeding anti-white-fragility medicine. But hang on: There's also "the brutal underpinnings of the British Empire; and more." And more! AND. MORE...

At the Saturday Night Cafe…

Posted: 26 Mar 2022 06:07 PM PDT

... you can talk about whatever you want.
at

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