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- "'What are you doing, George?' I asked him plainly and calmly. I got the same answer every time... You work for a madman, George would say in a loud, sinister voice...."
- "But while I identify as a female, through the show I’ve learned that we probably need to stop focusing on the two sexes and expand it to equality of all human beings."
- "You didn’t want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons. Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?"
- "The idea of elite capture has been around for decades and typically describes how the most advantaged people in a group take control of benefits that are meant for everybody..."
- Kellyanne Conway "depicts Trump as a feminist who repeatedly supported and promoted her, allowing her to make history as the first woman..."
- A woodland walk.
- I've hand-picked 9 things from TikTok for you. Let me know what you like best.
- Sunrise — 5:30.
- "It was sometime during the 2012 season when Alcides Escobar of the Kansas City Royals grabbed a bottle from his locker and sprayed some of its contents..."
- "The next time you’re with a dining companion, consider what might be different if you were a party of one."
- "Depp fans resemble Trump fans in their blind loyalty and willingness to set aside ugly facts about their hero..."
- "With brain science steadily adding to that evidence, there is a sense — at least for many in the education establishment — that the debate over early reading instruction may be ebbing."
- "That in the 19th century, men of the Nez Perce tribe of the Pacific Northwest who wore their hair long in the back faced pressure from Christian missionaries..."
- Men in shorts.
- "y’all ever hear ~12,000 people laugh at a transphobic joke, while you’re a trans person in the audience who didn’t know..."
| Posted: 23 May 2022 06:36 AM PDT "Night after night, I would come home from a busy day at work ... While I was minding dishes, dogs, laundry, managing adolescent dramas and traumas, George would be just steps away from me, tucked away in his home office, plotting against my boss and me." Writes Kellyanne Conway, in her new book "Here's the Deal," quoted in "Kellyanne Conway memoir: Husband's attacks 'sneaky, almost sinister'" (Axios). Is it weird that those 2 are still married? |
| Posted: 23 May 2022 05:59 AM PDT "Absolutely I'm a feminist. I support women. I want us to all succeed. But we need to expand that concept to humans in general because there are a lot of communities that are not being given an equal chance. So yes, feminism, but let's broaden that conversation past just women.... Gender is so fluid, and everyone needs to get on board with that evolution. I don't have all the answers. I am trying to learn.... When I got my braces off, got on Accutane, slapped some hair dye on and I started playing soccer and growing muscle... all of a sudden people started treating me differently because I was a hot chick. I felt like, Wow, that's all it took? I still feel like the little ugly awkward girl in middle school. For a while I had to fake confidence and convince myself I was confident when I wasn't. Knowing I've gone through that in my life, I can teach other women to fake it till you make it...." From "Alex Cooper Is Coming for Joe Rogan's Spot" (NYT). This long piece that went up 3 days ago only has 1 comment. Isn't that strange? The article is all about how contagiously popular she is. The one commenter is concerned with the same thing I quoted:
Right. This is the problem I've been discussing under my tag "women (the word!)" and in posts like "If you won't say 'women,' you are embracing the self-subordination of weak political speech." |
| Posted: 23 May 2022 05:13 AM PDT A reporter asked President Biden (in Japan this morning), the NYT reports.
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| Posted: 23 May 2022 05:03 AM PDT "Táíwò's innovation is applying this idea to identity politics, the concept devised in 1977 by the Black radical feminists of the Combahee River Collective. He argues that their project has been hijacked. 'We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity,' they wrote, because organizing around what was good for people at the bottom of social hierarchies would be good for all oppressed people. But rather than using personal identity as an entry point to building radical coalitions, as these innovators intended, elites are using it as a tool to advance their own narrow interests. He gives recent examples: when Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser had the words BLACK LIVES MATTER painted on a street days after her police force was brutalizing protesters in 2020, and the 'Humans of CIA' video series, in which the agency tried to attract new recruits by appealing, for instance, to their queer identities. Both were efforts to pacify dissent or to rebrand violent institutions using the symbols of identity politics.... Táíwò proposes a 'constructive politics' — a shift in focus to specific results. To him, this means redistributing resources and power downward to the people most negatively affected by the status quo. That may seem frustratingly general, and Táíwò is up front about not offering a how-to guide for equality....." From "What's Wrong With Identity Politics?/Philosopher Olúfemi O. Táíwò's new book reclaims the concept from elite power brokers" by Zak Cheney-Rice (NY Magazine). The headline got my attention, but the article itself left me with nothing useful, but Táíwò is "up front about not offering" anything useful... other than that he seems to be advising progressives to think about doing what is actually useful. |
| Posted: 23 May 2022 05:54 AM PDT "... to manage a winning presidential campaign. 'Donald Trump had elevated and empowered me to the top of his campaign, helping me crack glass ceilings that had never even been dinged before,' she writes, adding that 'angry feminists' should "have at least once in their lives a "girl boss" as generous, respectful, engaging, and empowering as Donald Trump was to me and my other female colleagues.'" From "In new book, Kellyanne Conway takes aim at many targets — except Trump Part personal chronicle and part political journey, the book is filled with the sorts of barbed one-liners and bon mots that she dispensed on cable news" by Ashley Parker (WaPo). Also:
They go after everyone.... The top-rated comment over there is:
That gets some feminist pushback: "I detest her but your comment reeks of ugly misogyny. The term harpy and pointing out her voice for special loathing. It's possible to find someone detestable without venting sexism." And:
I had to google "TFG." The first hit is a Gail Collins column in the NYT, published February 17, 2021 — "Trump's Dreaded Nickname":
Perhaps the "dreaded nickname" caught on in some quarters, but I don't remember hearing it before. Collins's dream of what would be cool was not to be. We still hear Trump, Trump, Trump, and it's only going to get louder as we move into the 2024 election season which the disgraced, double-impeached Trump already dominates. |
| Posted: 22 May 2022 05:10 PM PDT  Talk about anything you want in the comments. |
| I've hand-picked 9 things from TikTok for you. Let me know what you like best. Posted: 23 May 2022 05:22 AM PDT 1. Understand the difference between "ask" and "guess" cultures. 2. In a 1-bedroom apartment, the "bedroom" doesn't need to be the bedroom. 3. Just a guy falling. [UPDATE: Link removed because the video is no longer available.] 5. Your iPhone photo app has a built-in plant identification function. 6. A Southern etiquette lesson. 7. Here's a way to make a cheeseburger — an insane way, but a way nonetheless. 8. Dolly Parton talks to Oprah Winfrey about losing weight and goes on for 4 full minutes. |
| Posted: 22 May 2022 10:19 AM PDT
Write about anything you want in the comments. |
| Posted: 22 May 2022 10:21 AM PDT "... onto Salvador Pérez. Caught off guard, Pérez warned his fellow Venezuelan and close friend not to mess with him, punctuating his emotion with some colorful language in Spanish. Hours later, though, Pérez was far from bothered. He collected four hits that day and smelled great in the process. The mysterious substance in the bottle, from his point of view, had become a performance-enhancer: women's perfume. 'From then on, I bought all the Victoria's Secret there was,' Pérez recalled recently in Spanish.... 'If I don't have perfume on, I feel strange,' said Seattle Mariners third baseman Eugenio Suárez, a Venezuelan.... Even though most players are often several dozen feet away from each other on the field, Suárez said he likes hearing that he smells good. Pérez said he can sometimes pick up the aroma of Luis Severino, a Dominican pitcher for the Yankees who uses a women's body splash, despite Severino being 60 feet 6 inches away when facing him. 'I'm a catcher so I sweat a lot,' Pérez said, pointing to all his gear. 'So a little perfume helps. The umpires say, "Oh Salvy, you smell good." I say, "Thank you. Give me some strikes."'" From "Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good. Smell Good? Baseball is full of traditions and superstitions. For numerous players, a heavy dose of cologne or women's perfume is the unlikeliest of performance enhancers" by James Wagner (NYT). I don't know what the "colorful language in Spanish" was. Something not fit to print. But what was the Victoria's Secret perfume? I'm guessing Bombshell. But maybe it's Amber Romance perfume. I see something from 2019 about the LSU baseball team and their use of Amber Romance to repel gnats. (And, yes, I know there's an MLB team called The Gnats.) ADDED: "Amber Romance" — I'm not picturing hurled baseballs but hurled vodka bottles that shatter and cut off your fingertips. |
| Posted: 22 May 2022 09:49 AM PDT "While breaking bread together has its benefits, only dining with others means you're missing out on one of the greatest joys of travel — eating alone at a restaurant. This is especially true while traveling, when it is easy to get immersed in a semi-predictable dialogue at the dinner table. There's the rehashing of the day's events, discussing details of tomorrow's itinerary and lamenting how sore your feet are from walking on cobblestones. This isn't a diss to your companion(s); it's just the realities of traveling with someone else. Eating by yourself provides an opportunity to hone in on details as they happen — all in real time. You will be more likely to notice the intricate font on the menu or the server's delicate placement of the bread basket on the table...." Writes Chris Dong in "Dining solo is one of the great joys of traveling/No offense to your travel companions, but they're holding you back from a culinary journey" (WaPo). Most articles about dining alone are about dealing with the predicament of being alone and wanting or needing to eat in a restaurant. But this article has you contemplating an actual preference for being alone while you are with someone else. It reminds me of that old LSD experiment where the doctor asks the subject — who seems to be having a sublime experience — "Is it all one," and she says "It would be all one if you weren't here." But isn't this always the problem with the company of others? Your baseline is how you feel when you're alone, which ought to be just fine. Who is a good enough companion to be better than no one? If you're anxious about being alone, your baseline is too low, and you may end up in conversations that displace superior uses of your consciousness.One problem with dining alone is that you might end up wasting your precious consciousness on thoughts about whether solo diners displease the restaurant personnel or whether other people are thinking about how pathetic you are. ADDED: Rereading this post, the line "Who is a good enough companion to be better than no one?" made me think of the 1927 song "Me and My Shadow," which I believe is a song about being alone with yourself, but that might not be the interpretation of whoever staged this Frank Sinatra/Sammy Davis Jr. performance: |
| Posted: 22 May 2022 07:37 AM PDT "Like Trump fans, Depp fans act like they're in a cult. They call Heard's claims of domestic violence a hoax and cheer on Depp lawyer Camille Vasquez, in a sort of online Roman coliseum, whenever she asks a tough question of Heard.... Whatever the jury decides, a man who was once the King of Cool now seems like a washed-up, abrasive shell of his former self.... And Depp stans at the courthouse will hear no evil about Captain Jack Sparrow. All across the world, customized facts are the rage. Truth has left the building." Writes Maureen Dowd in "Johnny Depp and Other Pirates" (NYT). I bet Trump loves this column: If Depp is like him, then he is like Depp. When people love you, they are loyal. But, Dowd asks, what about Truth? Isn't it terrible that people aren't loyal to Truth? I would ask: How do you know that your loyalty is to Truth and the other side's loyalty is a cult? |
| Posted: 22 May 2022 07:24 AM PDT "Phonics is ascendant.... [F]unctional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain demonstrates that humans process written language letter by letter, sound by sound. Far from being automatic, reading requires a rewiring of the brain, which is primed by evolution to recognize faces, not words. But that finding — by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists — is often disconnected from the work of training teachers and producing classroom materials.... Professor [Lucy] Calkins became a revolutionary leader in education... training educators in New York City schools, prompting them to give children 'writers' notebooks' to chronicle their lives.... At workshops on Columbia's idyllic campus, educators were encouraged to see themselves and their students as intellectuals.... A goal was to help children to build a joyful identity as a reader.... For children stuck on a difficult word, Professor Calkins said little about sounding-out and recommended a word-guessing method, sometimes called three-cueing... [directing] children's attention away from the only reliable source of information for reading a word: letters... In a 2020 video, a teacher tells children to use a picture to guess the word 'car,' even though simple phonics make it decodable. Professor Calkins said word-guessing would not be included in her revised curriculum.... Professor Calkins does not believe she has anything to apologize for.... And, she asked, shouldn't the phonics-first camp apologize? 'Are people asking whether they're going to apologize for overlooking writing?' she said." From "In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat/Lucy Calkins, a leading literacy expert, has rewritten her curriculum to include a fuller embrace of phonics and the science of reading. Critics may not be appeased" by Dana Goldstein (NYT). The top-rated comment is from someone who has taught in a NYC public school for 21 years where they use Calkin's "Units of Study": "The degree to which we have had to supplement them with other approaches and sources is immense. Most kids would not learn literacy with these curricula alone. There really has been a sort of cult of personality around Lucy Calkins. The professional developers she hires parrot her ideas and demeanor. Regardless of her claim that she wants to support and respect teachers, the message was always 'Lucy knows best.'" |
| Posted: 22 May 2022 06:55 AM PDT "... to abandon the style in favor of something more 'civilized' tells us about the evils of cultural erasure, but also about conformity more broadly. In much of the Western world, mullets have largely been seen as a thwarting, whether one celebrated or feared, of convention. Take David Bowie, who wore chalky white makeup, psychedelic jumpsuits and a coiffed orange mullet to debut his otherworldly alter ego Ziggy Stardust in 1972. Not long after this glamorous alien emerged came a more working-class punk subculture for which rebellion was a raison d'être. And as much as torn clothes, safety pins, chains and piercings — the stuff of 'confrontation dressing,' as Vivienne Westwood called it — the mullet played a large part in the aesthetics of the movement. For one, the ragged style was purposefully ugly.... Perhaps, the mullet elicited such strong reactions because it refuses to be any one thing, sitting at the midpoint between long and short, masculine and feminine and tasteful and tacky. But if an inability to categorize causes discomfort in some, this sort of in-betweenness is just what some are looking for, especially at a time when gender and taste both feel, rightfully and crucially, so fluid. No wonder, then, that over the last five years the mullet has experienced a relative resurgence." From "What the Mullet Means Now/The subversive hairstyle has found its way to runways and red carpets once again. But is there anyone left to shock?" by Megan Bradley (NYT). Speaking of fluidity, the essay writer flowed from the concept of confrontational ugliness to the notion of "in-betweenness" and connecting the concept of being neither long nor short with the concept of being neither male nor female. I can see why in-betweenness can be unsettling to some people and why the refusal to commit to male or female can read as ugly — to some people — and feel confrontational. It's almost possible to say, completely objectively, that a mullet is ugly. But it can look cool to wear something ugly if you can sell the idea that you're doing it on purpose and you love it. That it bothers fussy people is part of the energy you're absorbing and reflecting. That's another way of saying that if you don't like how other people are expressing themselves, you might want to deprive them of a reaction. Because — as my mother used to say — you'll only encourage them. |
| Posted: 22 May 2022 06:17 AM PDT I'm reading this NYT wedding story: "Step by Step, Embracing a Future With Each Other/Doug Lockwood and Linda Murphy met in 2019 as members of a support group for people who had lost longtime spouses. A year later came a series of walks that eventually led them to the altar." Excerpt:
ADDED: Speaking of fashion, at the wedding, the bride wore a dark blue dress, and there's a link to this other recent NYT article, "Saying Goodbye to the Plain White Wedding Gown/As couples seek to plan nuptials that feel more personal, many are eschewing tradition. But this may be the most visible break yet." Judging from the photos over there, black is the most popular alternative color — black lace. About that dog — "a corgi and Cavalier King Charles spaniel mix" — yes, there's a photo of the dog, which sounds like something concocted for the purpose of pleasing women. The photo shows the dog at the wedding, wearing flowers on her collar. |
| Posted: 22 May 2022 05:13 AM PDT "... the transphobic comedian would make a surprise appearance at the John Mulaney show? yeah. wasn't fun. fuck you D.C." Tweeted someone named "rae (spookiest version)," quoted in "John Mulaney Draws Criticism for Having Dave Chappelle Open, Tell 'Transphobic Jokes' at Ohio Show." That's in Variety, and I appreciate its putting "transphobic jokes" in quotation marks, but I think we need to see the actual jokes. I'm just going to assume that this was more material like what we saw in "The Closer," which some people characterized as transphobic and others did not. And there is something odd about going to see one comedian and getting surprised by the appearance of somebody you would actively boycott because you see him as picking on people like you. You're sitting there in a big group of people with whom you were expecting to feel camaraderie, and there they are, all around you, laughing, and you're thrown into a horrible feeling of alienation, which isn't what you paid your money for and what you anticipated as you went out for a good time that night. Should comedians make people uncomfortable? That's asking the question at a high level of generality. Maybe comedians should make people uncomfortable but only the people who are too comfortable and never at the expense of the people who are already uncomfortable. And maybe audiences who pay to see a comedian who doesn't deal in discomfort should be spared being subjected to a comedian who does. Variety says John Mulaney "tends to stay away from political or social issues" — whatever that means. So maybe this is a case of that. People who expected not to get challenged got challenged. Mulaney obviously chose to do that to his crowd, so readjust what you think of his tendencies. Why did he inflict Dave Chappelle on his audience? He had to want to do that. ADDED: TMZ gives some idea of one of the jokes. You know how Chappelle was attacked on stage by a man who was carrying a knife that folded up into a fake gun:
Chappelle seems to have called that "a gun that identifies as a knife" (or was it "a knife that identifies as a gun"?) |
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