The news has been moving at such a blistering pace of late. I know this story has already been passed around, but honestly, it was so interesting I have reread it a few times, and you should, too.

It’s about how Tim Walz, as a high-school teacher in Alliance, Nebraska, a little town in the western part of the state, decided to teach his geography class about genocide. This was in 1993, although the story linked above is from 2008, when Walz had recently been elected to Congress. And so:

Mr. Walz had already taught for a year in China, and he brought the world into his classroom in the form of African thumb pianos and Tibetan singing bowls. For the global geography class, he devised something far more ambitious than what the curriculum easily could have been — the identification and memorization of capitals, mountain ranges and major rivers. It was more ambitious, too, than a unit solely on the Holocaust of the sort many states have required.

“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Mr. Walz said in a recent interview, recalling his approach. “Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters.

“The problem is,” he continued, “that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why.”

How did he do this?

For nine weeks through the winter and early spring that school year, through the howling blizzards and the planting of the first alfalfa on the plains, the class pored over data about economics, natural resources and ethnic composition. They read about civil war, colonialism and totalitarian ideology. They worked with reference books and scholarly reports, long before conducting research took place instantly online.

I’m already loving his approach as a teacher. I wonder how many kids were in the school. How lucky they were to have a teacher like this. At the end of the unit, he asked them to give their best guess where the next genocide would happen, offering them about a dozen choices. And what did they come up with?

Their answer was: Rwanda. The evidence was the ethnic divide between Hutus and Tutsis, the favoritism toward Tutsis shown by the Belgian colonial regime, and the previous outbreaks of tribal violence. Mr. Walz awarded high marks.

Well. We all know what happened the very next year.

This guy isn’t perfect, because no one is. But I’d vote for a teacher who came up with a lesson like this over a guy who peddled a memoir selling out his community.

Well, how was your weekend? Mine was busy, at least until I tried to bring a heavy box in from the front porch, struggled to get the screen door open, and fell on my ass right off the whole thing. I’m fine, but I took a bang on the ribcage and my hip. The good news is, I didn’t break anything, but I do have a garish bruise the size of my hand there. And it still hurts to move. It’ll be better in a few days, but it sucks to glimpse your mortality, doesn’t it?

Another killer week ahead, with one after that, and then Labor Day weekend, and after that — relief.

This might be the last day for this for a while:

Fortunately it was a great day for it.

I guess it was back at Barrington Elementary School, and it must have been early in the year, because we were talking about the just-concluded Olympic Games — this had to have been 1968, I guess — and one of my classmates asked, “Who won the Olympics?” The teacher explained that no one country “wins” the Olympics, that athletes compete under their own flags and win individual events, but the whole spectacle was about international fellowship and friendship.

Yeah, tell that to Dick Ebersol, amirite? As I recall, he was the one who instituted medal counts, first on NBC, which jingoistic editors later adopted for newspapers, and so on and so on.

Since we have to live with medal counts, here’s an unpopular opinion: I like it when American athletes, especially those who are favorites, are upset in their events. My all-time favorite might be when the American men’s basketball team had to settle for bronze in the 2004 games. And I realize it’s not the athletes losing that gives me this grim joy, but the insane, over-emphasis on American athletes, especially in the handful of prime-time sports that NBC shamelessly milks for pathos — gymnastics, swimming, track and a few others. Because I’ve spent my career in media, I can’t watch a closeup of Simone Biles sitting on the sideline without reverse-angling through the fourth wall. I know she’s surrounded by photographers and lenses capturing her every nose-scratch, and while I don’t want her to crash and burn — excuse me, for her Olympic dreams to vanish, I do want NBC to think, just for a few minutes, whether maybe another sport might be worthy of a little bit of attention.

Alan told me about kayak cross, a new sport this cycle, described by a writer for New York magazine as “a kind of mix between a ski slalom and white-water rafting and something you would see on one of the silly game shows that air on ABC in the summer where people risk bodily injury for small cash prizes. It is easily the most ‘should be narrated by a B-list comedian’ event at the Olympics. People in the crowd at Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium should have airhorns. These are the highest compliments I know how to give.” That is an excellent description; the videos are hilarious. Can we get a little comic relief between closeups of Simone Biles looking fierce and determined? Just a little?

I mean, I look at the clips that turn up in social-media feeds, and it’s often the weirdo sports like artistic swimming. There’s definitely an audience for this. You know what the most shared track-and-field clip was in recent days? The French pole vaulter who brought down the bar with his sizable penis, but did we see that on NBC? No. (OK, maybe we did. I didn’t watch every second in recent days. But I doubt it.)

Fortunately, other media outlets are still practicing journalism:

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You should watch that. It’s good.

Now I’m watching diving. One of the things I like about the Olympics is the way different sports reward different body types, and no group excels at flinging their bodies through the air like compact Asian people. These Chinese women are amazing; they barely make splashes.

In other news at this hour, Tim Walz! That was a good introductory speech. Still not taking anything for granted, because man, these Republicans get scarier every day.

Another scorcher of a weekend, but that’s summer, or at least it’s super-heated climate-change summer, eh? After a Thursday/Friday work thing, I jumped at the chance to do something I haven’t done for years, i.e. attend a simple county fair with friends. In this case, Monroe County, just south of Wayne.

What did we find? Animals, junk food, crybabies. The crybabies were in the county GOP tent:

Oh, sit on a pin, people. I found this goat far more compelling:

What fascinating animals goats are, with those horizontal pupils. I scritched a few bony skulls in my pass through their lodgings.

It was the last day of the fair, and the livestock auction was going, with cages full of chickens and rabbits selling for a couple hundred bucks, mostly. What a far cry from my time as the Ohio State Fair reporter, when there was a doping scandal around the grand champion steer. I’m sure I’ve talked about this before in this space, so I won’t bore longtime readers, but the basic outline was: Losers in the beef cattle competition accused the winner of doping, but blood tests showed the champion was clean. The following year more accusations were made about the winner, more testing showed no shenanigans, but when they slaughtered the animal and stripped off the hide, great globs of silicone gel fell from the carcass, and oh my but did hell break loose. Farm kids, improving their animal’s contours with plastic surgery of a sort? And here we thought those kids were innocents.

Today I spent my morning editing video — see Thursday/Friday work obligations — and drifted the afternoon away in a friend’s pool. Man, did I need that on another 90 degree day. And now I’m making a promising dinner from the NYT — this one — and planning my week ahead, which I devoutly hope will be less crazy.

How’s ’bout you?

Like many of you, I’ve been watching the Olympics this week. Only the primetime stuff, and I’m not squeamish about spoilers. I know, for instance SPOILER ALERT that Simone Biles killed it today, and the women’s gymnastics team won the gold. I mean, if I wanted to be surprised I wouldn’t be on the internet all day. I’ll watch anyway.

In the course of it, I may see this commercial, called “Dear Sydney.” In it, a father asks Google’s AI function to help his daughter write a fan letter to a track star. “She wants to show Sydney some love, and I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right,” he says.

I hate this fucking thing. As the New York story points out:

What? Why would a dad who is “pretty good with words” need an AI model to help his daughter write a heartfelt message to her favorite athlete? Aren’t these moments what parenthood is all about? What sort of lesson is this? Not only does it imply to your kid that it’s okay to offload writing assignments to AI, it also suggests it’s a good idea to let the computer express feelings for you, which may be a troubling precedent.

Troubling? When your kid gets caught using AI to write a term paper in high school, don’t cry about unequal treatment, dad. You started her down this path. Weird, too, that I had almost this exact thought, too:

Brand strategist Michael Miraflor wrote that the ad was quite similar to the Apple iPad commercial from May that was widely reviled. “They both give the same feeling that something is very off, a sort of tone-deafness to the valid concerns and fears of the majority,” he wrote, adding that both were developed in-house.

Yeah. What tf is going on in Silicon Valley? I want AI to do the boring shit so I can concentrate on stuff I want to do, not the other way around. Sydney should return Google’s money and tell that little pixie to leave time in her life for English class.

In other news at this hour, Kamala Harris has texted me 9,000 times to inform me she’s running for president. (You’re kidding, I hadn’t heard.) Then she asks for money. I sent her some. But I have yet to see a significant attack ad on Trump, and I’m ready for it. You have money, Democrats! You’re raising millions and millions! The “weird” thing is fine, but it’ll be played in about 5 minutes, and I expect to see a LOT of advertising talking about what a threat Trump is. Yes, a threat to democracy, and I don’t care if these weird right-wing pundits blame that line for the shooting in Pennsylvania. It doesn’t make it any less true, so lean in! Get going!

And that is all for a muggy Tuesday.

Remember back in June, we were talking here about “medbeds,” which, in the words of the NYT story I had posted, one subject of which…

…came to believe, along with millions of others, that Covid was a creation of the federal government used to manipulate the public and steal elections; that two doses of the vaccine would make men infertile; that Trump had been anointed to lead a “government cleansing”; that fighting had already begun in underground military tunnels; that Trump’s election in 2024 was preordained by God; that he would return to power with loads of gold collected from other countries that had capitulated to his power; that, during his next term, Americans would have free electricity, zero income tax and “medbeds” powered by a secret technology that could harness natural energy to heal diseases and extend human life; and that the only thing standing in the way of this future was a deep state so malicious and vast that its roots extended all the way into tiny Esmeralda County.

Well, the same reporter, Eli Saslow, who already has one Pulitzer and will no doubt gather a few more in the coming years, actually found someone seeking medbed therapy, such as it is. And the story — gift link here — is astonishing.

The subject is a 60-ish former paratrooper and current rancher, whose body is a banged-up, painful mess, and thanks to the “Patriot Party News,” whose various feeds are his near-constant companion, is after this miracle cure his online friends are talking about. He seems like he at least leans in the direction of skepticism, but piping this garbage into his brain nearly every waking moment of his life has taken a toll:

Michael walked outside to check on the horses while he listened to people on the audio feed talk about how Trump was anointed president by God, and how George Soros was building mansions in Hollywood to house undocumented immigrants. He turned up the volume and spoke back to the group over the wind as the unrealities in his ears continued to become the reality of his life.

“Thanks for helping me get up and going this morning,” he said. “I never thought I would be on a platform with people I’d never met and hear this many I love yous.”

“I’m so glad we’re in this war together,” said an aircraft mechanic who went by the name Oath Keeper Bill. “We need you healthy and strong. Have you been following the latest news on medbeds?”

“Oh yeah. They’re here, and they can heal anything,” someone else responded. “Cancer. Dementia. Broken bones. Arthritis. Forty-five minutes in one of those beds, and you’ll never be in pain again.”

“Come on,” Michael said. “Really?”

Yes, Michael, really! Of course, “the military” has a big share of them, and the ones in private hands are being hogged by “liberal billionaires” and why no one thought to pop Joe Biden in one is not a question that’s answered here. I don’t want to spoil the story for you, but eventually Michael gets his medbed appointment — and this section of the story is amazing. Just a glimpse:

He picked up the menu of options and looked at the alphabetized first page, which had more than 50 choices beginning with the letter A: “Acid Reflux,” “Acne,” “Alzheimer’s,” “Alcoholism,” “Aneurysm,” “Anthrax,” “Anxiety Relief,” “Arthritis,” “Asperger’s,” “Autism.”

“Wow, it can really correct all this?” Michael asked.

“Over time, it’s possible,” Andrea said. “As long as you believe, and your mind and body are in alignment with the right frequencies.”

It’s just a new version of faith healing, yes, but…wow. I said back in June I’m no longer interested in making nice with these people, that they deserve whatever is coming for them, but it’s hard to stay hard-hearted about legit chumps.

No, maybe it isn’t.

What else did I do this weekend? Well, it was hot. And I worked. But the coming week won’t be as busy as last week. But it will be as hot. Hotter. Stay cool out there.

Whew, what a week. Sorry for being mostly absent, but I have a week-long commitment with a social-media client that is kinda tapping my energy, although today I got to watch this YouTube clip as part of it, and it cheered me right up and I bet it’ll do the same for you. Watch the whole thing; it just keeps getting better.

I’m mostly cheered up on a lot of fronts. As we’ve been discussing in comments for the last month, it’s been…a fucking month. A lot, as the kids say. But now, things are looking up and I can feel my energy and optimism returning, although I’m not taking a goddamn thing for granted this time. If Kamala can appear appropriately presidential in coming weeks — or at least present as a credible alternative to angry grandpa — we have a real shot.

Also, I sent her $100. I’m sure that’ll make the difference.

“Are you worried it might come back to bite you?” Alan asked of this donation. Journalists aren’t supposed to make political donations, but hell, I’m barely a journalist anymore, and who the fuck cares. This is life or death. I’m on the side of life.

Also, I once donated to a couple of Jennifer Brunner’s campaigns in Ohio, and no one cared. So pfft.

As I imagine you’ve been doing, I’m mainly just absorbing the news, trying to synthesize it and get through the day and into the night without lying awake half of it, thinking about whether to stay and become a fighter for democracy or check out and find a nice cheap property in the Italian countryside. In between, I watched the latest adaptation of “Presumed Innocent” and came away thinking man, what a piece of crap.

How about you?

As Lloyd Bridges once said, I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

Enough with a chatty, breezy blog today. We went for a bike ride on a hot day on the Detroit riverwalk, and somehow, I left my phone at home. On the drive, we listened to a new mix CD Jeff Borden sent us last week. As we pulled back into the garage and my watch reconnected with it, it was nonstop ping-ping-ping and I knew something was up, and it was.

I simply cannot keep up with the news today. So it’s up to you. Have at it.

I suspect those of you on social media have already heard the news that President Biden called the widow of the man killed at the Trump rally, but she wouldn’t take it. Her husband, “a devout Republican,” wouldn’t have wanted her to, she said. As for Trump, he hasn’t called yet. He played golf the following day.

Meanwhile, I looked up the dead guy, Corey Comperatore, on his socials. He was mostly a reply person on Twitter. And many of them were like this:

OK, then.

This really, really has been a shit couple of weeks, hasn’t it? The most terrible people appear to be winning. I’m starting to think they are winning. I’ll still vote, with my optimism fading. But as Neil Steinberg says, anything is possible. I fear the “anything” isn’t the good thing, however. I’ve lost faith in the Democratic Party to respond to this in any meaningful way. I may be wrong — I was certainly wrong to think this country was too decent to sink as far as we have, so consider that — but at this point, I feel more right than wrong.

I’m struck by a phrase in Steinberg’s column: “… this was a lucky wound, another stroke of good fortune for a man born with a horseshoe up his ass.” Perfect. I tend to believe that luck goes in both directions, and I feel like we’ve not had a win for a long while. I’m not a believer in conventional Christian versions of God, so I can’t be comforted by the idea of Trump & Co. in hell. But I do think the universe has a sense of humor, and I want to know when we get to see a little evening of the scales.

Yeah, yeah, tell that to the Jews at Auschwitz.

OK, I’ll stop now. One thing I learned in the newspaper business: Never say “it can’t get worse,” because it always can.

And if you’re a cyclist, be careful out there. Some people hate your guts just for existing.

Friends, as if this last fortnight couldn’t get any worse, apparently we’ve lost another member of the commenting community. Connie Ozinga, whose contributions here were always sane, intelligent and high-quality, died Sunday at her home.

Here’s the obituary, if you’d like to know more about her.

She was a library director, mostly in Michigan and Indiana, with one stop-off in Rochester, Minn. Her preferred memorial is to any Friends of the Library of your choice.

Given that libraries are currently under assault by some truly hideous individuals currently enjoying a moment, I can’t think of a better cause.

I’m very sorry to hear this.

Well.

Well well well.

Honestly, I don’t have the heart to read all the comments on the last post. I’ve been sitting here draped in Glum all day. It’s been very hot this weekend, and I went to a friend’s house yesterday for poolside dips and cocktails, and came home to see the big news. I had about one wine spritzer too many, and all I could think was: Shit. He’s gonna win. Mother. Fucker.

I know, I know, don’t lose heart. It’s still three-plus months until November, but lately I’m thinking of Biden as hopeless. He reminds me of a man I used to work for, who believed in this mythical past where we all sat down at the table of brotherhood and hammered out compromises that none of us were totally happy with, but were best for the country. It’d be one thing if he were just old, but old and out of touch is unforgivable.

I know, I know: Everything could change, etc. And it’s not like there weren’t glimmers of humor in the day. Take this utter horseshit:

There’s a longer statement, which you can find on the web; it’s just as ridiculous as this snippet. Like, oh…

A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion – his laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration. The core facets of my husband’s life – his human side – were buried below the political machine. Donald, the generous and caring man who I have been with through the best of times and the worst of times.

I feel like we’re living in two realities. Or else she is as diseased as he is – a strong possibility, actually a certainty – and is simply reacting in kind.

Oy. I need to feel bad for a while. But here’s a new thread.