The Freep ran a weird story on Sunday, noting that the many protests against the Trump regime in Detroit last year were overwhelmingly white. No argument here; I was at most of them, and they were indeed on the pale side. But I noticed the writer using a particular usage that’s become common in recent years:

I first noticed this in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” bodies used as a synonym for people. It struck me then, and it still does. Coates is a skilled writer, and his usage suggested a world where black people aren’t seen as fully human, just bodies, flesh in human form but a color others won’t acknowledge as their equals, which was exactly the point of his book. But the widespread imitation of it just seems trendy, like describing everything as iconic.

And this is the sort of woolgathering that goes on during a winter storm. Gazing out the window at the all-day snowfall, trying not to return, yet again, to the news from Minneapolis, about which I have nothing to say that hasn’t been said already.

And it’s still snowing. Not the fatfluffyflakes of some storms, but a fine, dry powder that just keeps coming and coming. It takes a long time to pile up, but at the end we’re probably looking at five inches. Nothing compared to what Ohio is getting, but enough to cancel a lot of events and make an all-day stay-home the wisest course of action.

At one point, bored, I checked to see how far out you could pull a Google map and still see highway conditions. Pretty far:

You can almost see the path of the storm reflected there. Then I pulled out farther to check to see if Google was still a bunch of lickspittles, and yeah, they are:

More bloggage:

An occasional commenter here, Nancy Friedman, works in business naming, mostly — maybe entirely — in the San Francisco area. She has a Substack, and a very amusing take on an overused word many tech bros are hot to include in their startup’s handle: Praxis. One even wants to found a new city — in Greenland, natch — and call it that. Writes Nancy:

Dryden Brown, who is 29, would appear to be very interesting himself, but he doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page. Here’s how the Wiki entry for “Praxis (proposed city)” introduces him:

Dryden Brown was raised in Santa Barbara, California and was homeschooled in order to pursue competitive surfing. He stated that as a high schooler, he studied Ayn Rand and Austrian economists, and when he applied for college, he limited his applications to Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Cambridge. He was rejected by them all and he attended New York University before dropping out.

A 2023 story in Mother Jones provided a few more biographical details: Brown’s father “worked in private equity and owned a seven-bedroom, 6,200-square-foot home that recently sold for more than $6.5 million.”

Yes, I felt that familiar full-body twitching at the mention of Ayn Rand, the “Objectivist” author of the bad novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. They’re frequently the only novels that “libertarian utopians” boast of having read.

And, as surely as “utopia” follows “libertarian,” PRAXIS is the name they default to for their endeavors.

I’ll remind you that this “charter cities” scam is what’s behind the revival of the stupid Belle Isle scheme that I wrote about recently.

Finally, a gift link to a NYT magazine story about year one in Kash Patel’s FBI. It’s enraging.

Still snowing. Let’s get through the next week, shall we?