I have a friend who ignores the news. Seriously. Me, friends with a person who doesn’t know that a second bridge is being built across the Detroit river as we speak. She relies on me to keep her up to date, and I try. Sometimes I also try her coping strategy, like this weekend. I simply could not march into summer with That Shithead on my mind, so I didn’t, only to be bombarded with Barron’s graduation photos, along with the news he’s reconsidering his college choices. You ask me, NYU seemed like a good fit for him, but what do I know? Then, on Sunday night, the president and foreign minister of Iran die in a helicopter crash. Which is one of those things that could end up being very bad, but whatever it is, it’s back to the news mangle for me.

On the other hand, I still have no idea what the Kendrick Lamar / Drake beef is about, so I guess I’m doing something right.

How was your weekend? Mine was great — nice and warm, but the house hasn’t turned into a brick oven yet, so I could throw the windows open and still be comfortable. This morning I thought I’d clean the kitchen while I was rested and caffeinated, and put on some loud tunes to keep my energy up. My neighbor responded by firing up his gas blower. It reminded me that we never heard one of those machines, not once, the whole time we were in Italy. We did see this, in Rome:

Bad photo; I apologize. But you can see that’s a twig broom, like you might see in a Halloween display. At first I thought it was a one-off, something a single garbage-truck driver accepted from his old nonna and carries to please her, but there’s one on every garbage truck we saw, which either indicates a lot of nonnas or a belief that the old ways are the best ways. They’re at least a lot quieter.

So, since I’m an empty cup at the moment, some bloggage:

I feel like all I do here is recommend pieces from The New York Times, and this is not only very long, it’s vegetables, which is to say, there’s not much dessert here. But if you have the time to take a bite out of it over the next few days, you can learn a lot about how Israel found itself in the state it’s in now:

(Settler) violence over the decades in places like Khirbet Zanuta is well documented. But protecting the people who carry out that violence is the dark secret of Israeli justice. The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials. For many of those officials, it is Palestinian terrorism that most threatens Israel. But in interviews with more than 100 people — current and former officers of the Israeli military, the National Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security service; high-ranking Israeli political officials, including four former prime ministers; Palestinian leaders and activists; Israeli human rights lawyers; American officials charged with supporting the Israeli-Palestinian partnership — we found a different and perhaps even more destabilizing threat. A long history of crime without punishment, many of those officials now say, threatens not only Palestinians living in the occupied territories but also the State of Israel itself.

And as a companion piece, another long — but not as long — story, about Miriam Adelson, Sheldon’s widow and very likely to be Trump’s biggest single donor (at least in the running):

October 7 had been Adelson’s nightmare — the event itself, of course, but also the world’s response to it. The attack confirmed the existential burden placed on every Jewish person of Adelson’s generation: No one could be counted on to care about the Jewish people; the duty to protect and safeguard Israel rested on them alone. On November 21, 2023, Adelson published an essay in Israel Hayom, a free Israeli newspaper she and Sheldon launched in 2007. In the piece, entitled “Dead to Us,” she discussed the “ghastly gatherings of radical Muslim and BLM activists, ultra-progressives, and career agitators” who, in the aftermath of 10/7, sprinted right past Israel’s grief and sympathized with Hamas. “These people are not our critics. They are our enemies. And, as such, they should be dead to us,” she wrote. “Indeed, we must disavow and shame them, deny them employment and public office, and defund their colleges and political parties. Doing all this will be easy, because the stakes in Israel’s war of survival have never been so clear … If you quibble about how many babies were beheaded, or how many women were violated, in the October 7 pogrom, you’re dead to us … We Israelis, we Jews love life. And we are done with meekly counting our dead.”

I should put my head back in the sand. Instead, I’m going to the gym.

While the rest of the world was paying attention to other details of Michael Cohen’s testimony in the Trump trial yesterday, I was struck by a smaller one: That among the payouts for this and that after Stormy Daniels was silenced, etc., there was a smaller, $50,000 payment for “tech services.”

The services?

At least in part, the services were Cohen getting a computer programmer to buy IP addresses in order to rig an online CNBC poll to make sure Trump ranked among the most influential business leaders alive.

Ladies and gentlemen, the former president of the United States, and maybe the next one.

This is why, despite everything I know about people and their foibles and complexity and all that, I simply cannot find it in my black heart to give Trump voters a break – on anything, ever, from now until the end of time.

And in a busy week, I feel like I just want to leave this here and let things go at that.

Back home again. It’s been a week of jet lag, held-mail sorting, and of course re-immersion in the toxic politics of the Land of the Free. Congratulations to all who voted for Nikki Haley in Indiana. Pulling 20 percent when you’re not even in the race bodes well for the Dems in November, but I’m not in the prediction business. The Politico piece on the primary that you guys have already chewed over underscores something that’s happening everywhere, i.e. the nationalization of every election, no matter how small.

I noticed one of the candidates for Indiana governor led with her proposal to eliminate all propertyincome taxes. Which is already laughable, as Hoosier property owners pay pocket change in property taxes. In the olden days, say 10 years ago, someone would have asked her how she planned to pay for such a drastic policy change, but given the diminishment of local and even statewide news coverage, that won’t happen. It doesn’t matter now, because she lost, but still. There’s a movement to eliminate property tax in Michigan, but they need to get a shitload of signatures to get that one on the ballot, and I doubt they’re having much luck, the movement being mainly comprised of MAGA goobers.

Speaking of diminished local media, here’s a great but unfortunately paywalled story about Gannett’s firing of a west-Michigan journalist, an editor, who led the way on coverage of Ottawa Impact, the right-wing group that took over Ottawa County’s commission, making national news in the process (free link). The oafs who roared into office have behaved like the Three Stooges, unable to conduct the simplest government business without poking one another in the eye, etc. They hired a losing congressional candidate to be county executive, and fired him a year later. The health director dug in her heels when they tried to defund the entire department, and they threw money at her to leave, but when the amount was made public ($4 million), the public objected, Larry stepped on Moe’s foot, etc., and they eventually retreated. (They wanted to replace her with a COVID nut, whose public-health qualifications consisted of being a health and safety officer for an HVAC company, with the online degrees to prove it.)

Anyway, this woman, Sarah Leach, covered it all. And get this:

Leach oversaw news operations at the Holland Sentinel and 25 other newspapers across four states — 15 in Michigan, eight in Wisconsin, two in South Dakota and one in Minnesota — the largest group within Gannett’s Center for Community Journalism division.

She handled budgeting, hiring, goal-setting and managed overtime. Short-staffed on local editors, she was also editing and managing reporters at three of the newspapers herself: the Daily Telegram in Adrian, the Hillsdale Daily News and the Monroe News.

This is Gannett these days. Many of these papers are entirely ghost ships, assembled remotely with wire copy and press releases. Leach had complained about Gannett’s empty promises to increase staffing to a writer for the Poynter Institute, a journalism nonprofit that tries to hold the industry to account. She wasn’t quoted by name, and she suspects the suits accessed her work emails to find out she was the whistleblower. She was fired over Zoom:

“I was asked, ‘Why did you do this?’ And I just stared at the screen for a long time because it was difficult to process what this moment was,” Leach recounted.

“I admitted that I had a phone call with this person, you know, because I am dying. I have been asking for resources, and I’m doing my best to try to serve these communities to the best of my ability, and I feel like I can’t. … Then I was informed that was my last day.”

I wonder about the person who swung the sword. Traditionally, publishers and executive editors start as reporters or other low-level employees. Anyone old enough to have that kind of job today probably has at least a dim memory of what it was like to work in a newsroom that wasn’t an echoing space. And today they’re the goon tasked with firing a good employee. One who did this:

Leach jumped in last January to help cover the crush of Ottawa Impact news when the Sentinel was down to just one full-time reporter. She soon became the face of the paper’s coverage, striving to explain to the community the unprecedented nature of the board’s sweeping new decisions and their potential effects.

A trio of retired journalists in the community elevated Leach’s work for the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting last fall, with the nomination citing the 130-plus stories she’d written. The nomination letter also noted the Sentinel’s subscriptions had surged 38% at that point in the year, making it the fastest-growing website in Gannett’s division for small newspapers.

One significant obstacle noted by the nominating committee is that Ottawa Impact commissioners generally refuse to answer questions or be interviewed by mainstream news reporters, though Leach tried to fairly represent their views anyway, according to the committee.

“More than any other journalist she has held our local elected officials accountable. We need her to preserve democracy in this town,” said Milt Nieuwsma, a retired journalist and author who was part of the nominating committee.

Well, too bad, Milt.

Which leads us to this:

The new iteration of “The Office” has been picked up to series at Peacock.

According to the official logline, the series will focus on “a dying historic Midwestern newspaper and the publisher trying to revive it with volunteer reporters.” https://t.co/HfMJ65oK73 pic.twitter.com/xRV0EHs30j

— Variety (@Variety) May 8, 2024

We laugh to keep from crying. Have a great weekend, all.

I’m sure you are all thoroughly sick of the eclipse, so I’ll only share this one pic, taken at the moment of totality in Forest Cemetery, Toledo, where we were among just a few people set up to watch the show. We could have gotten another minute or two if we’d driven deeper into the zone, but I had to be at work at 5:30 and I knew I’d never make it in time if we went to, say, Wapakoneta, Ohio, birthplace of Neil Armstrong.

So Toledo it was. And a minute or so of totality was enough:

But let’s move on, if only to give you guys a fresh thread for comments. Next stop: The eternal city. (Yes, I’m packing my laptop.)

News just broke that O.J. Simpson is dead. Well, now. Like a lot of you, my knowledge of the man spans decades. I remember watching his 80-yard run in the 1969 Rose Bowl. I remember his TV commercials for Hertz rental cars. And I remember that for a long time, he was white America’s favorite black man, or at least in the top five or 10. Then everything happened, and who couldn’t have a memory of that?

In a running theme through my life, I was the only American to miss the infamous slow-speed Bronco chase. I was at a horse show in Battle Creek, and the B&B I stayed in had only over-the-air TV in the room, so I watched “The X-Files” and went to bed. Alan told me about it the next morning: “There were these people standing on overpasses, cheering,” he said, wonder in his voice. It was only the start of the weirdness.

I will grant him this: I got a few columns out of that trial, the first when I noticed the ’90s-era Sony monitor on Judge Ito’s bench had been enhanced, with paint or a Sharpie or something, so that SONY stood out in giant black letters whenever the camera was on him. I don’t recall anyone took the blame for it. My old college boyfriend Bruce, who lived in L.A., called regularly, especially after he hired a woman who, he soon learned, had been Nicole Simpson’s housekeeper. She’d been an eyewitness to much of the domestic strife between the exes, and he recounted this in her heavy accent: “Meester Oh-hay get berry berry angry with missy Nee-cole,” etc. She ended up leaving his employ after the National Enquirer paid her a modest four-figure sum for her story, and recounted the same stories in perfect English. There was the avalanche of media coverage, running from the gutter tabs to the prestige press. I’m grateful to… was it Dominick Dunne who covered it for Vanity Fair? I think so. I’m grateful to that writer and publication for teaching me that a blowjob is known in that community as “the Brentwood hello.”

And then, of course, the verdict. We all remember how that went.

I recommend two sources if you’re interested in revisiting the era: “The Run of His Life,” by Jeffrey Toobin, where you can learn that Marcia Clark thought she’d get a conviction because “black women love me,” due to her aggressive prosecution of domestic abusers. Also, “OJ: Made in America,” a multipart documentary series you can watch on Hulu. Very very worth your time.

So much other news this week, but honestly, I don’t have the bandwidth right now. Abortion restrictions in Arizona, whatever the former president farted out of his mouth in the last 24 hours, have at it. I’ll be back early next week, depending on the wifi strength in our lodgings.

Friends, I have a crazy week ahead, mainly because I have to cram in a bunch of work in three days, not the usual five. That would be Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, because two exciting events bookend the week. You all know about Monday’s eclipse, and we’re going to do our best to get into the path of totality, probably down Toledo way. The forecast is iffy now, but today was clear and sunny and after the winter we’ve had, we’re owed another clear one for this event, goddamnit.

And on Friday? Why, we’re off on another European adventure. Wheels up for…drumroll…Italy. First stop: Rome. We’ve got a house-sitter, but as usual, I’ve got 19 different to-do lists and they’re starting to be illegible. But we’ll make it. It’s been a very good year for the nest egg — thanks, Biden.

Depending on eclipse success tomorrow, a photo post, then sketchy until we get to the eternal city, I expect. But you all carry on.

Friends, I don’t see how this newfound detente between sports and gambling ends well. Check out this story from the Athletic:

Carson Barrett tore his meniscus earlier this year. The injury required surgery, but this is the last run for the Purdue senior. Though he’s never seen a whole lot of playing time in his career, he wanted to at least have a shot at getting on the court this season. So Barrett delayed the repair work, gladly taking the exchange of some pretty painful nights with a throbbing knee in favor of even a few minutes of hooping.

This season he’s played a grand total of 21 minutes and scored six points. Three of them came in the NCAA Tournament. With 37 seconds left in a game long decided, Barrett drained a baseline 3 against Grambling State, putting himself in the box score of Purdue’s first-round victory. As the ball swished through the net, the bench erupted, Barrett’s teammates knowing full well what he’d sacrificed and endured. His bucket would be the last for the Boilermakers as Purdue cruised to a 78-50 win. Back in the locker room, Barrett picked up his phone and scrolled through the congratulatory texts from friends and started to search through his DMs on social media.

He stumbled on this:

You sure are a son of a b—.
Hope you enjoy selling cars for the rest of your life.

Followed by:

I hope you f-ing die.

And then the kicker:

Kill yourself for taking that 3 you f-ing worthless loser. Slit your f-ing throat you f-ing f– that was completely uncalled for. I hope you f-ing kill yourself.

The Boilermakers were 27-point favorites against Grambling. Barrett’s bucket meant they won by 28. “I had no idea what the line was,” Barrett said. “I’m just out there, making memories with my friends.”

Jeff Borden used to share an opinion about email vs. snail mail. If you wanted to unload on a journalist, or anyone for that matter, in the olden days, you had to hunt up a pen and paper, scrawl your message (or roll paper into your typewriter, or sit at your keyboard and hit Print), find an envelope, find a stamp, walk to a mailbox, drop it in. There were lots of steps along the way when you could say Nah and forget the whole thing. Email makes things so much easier. Social media, easier still. Just find the person you want to abuse, in the heat of the moment, and fire away. Imagine telling a 22-year-old kid to kill himself.

This kid was absolutely right to take his shot, and I’m pleased he made it. When gambling inevitably throws a Super Bowl, or World Series, or NCAA championship, we can say we brought this shit on ourselves.

Let’s make this an all-bloggage blog, shall we?

Elon Musk is an idiot, chapter a jillion:

Musk is now using his dominant presence on the social network, which he has renamed X, to convince people that the 2024 presidential election is rigged. His efforts dovetail with the lies of Donald Trump, who recently claimed that Democrats are “allowing” undocumented immigrants to enter the country and “signing them up to vote.”

Musk promoted a post from @EndWokeness, a popular account that promotes bigoted conspiracy theories, that claimed to have uncovered “data” showing that hundreds of thousands of “illegals” have registered to vote since the start of 2024. Musk shared @EndWokeness’ post with his 170 million followers and called it “extremely concerning.”

…To begin, “illegals” cannot get a Social Security number. Most people who have Social Security numbers are citizens. In some instances, non-citizens can receive a Social Security number — usually in connection with a work authorization — but only if they are legally present in the United States. The idea that using a Social Security number to register to vote is evidence of undocumented status makes no sense.

It’s a crying shame what that dolt has done to Twitter. The For You side of my feed is absolute garbage, especially at night, when it’s all manosphere incels, rad-trad lunatics, clips of people falling into meat grinders and other nonsense. And as decent users trickle away, the Following side isn’t much better. But here we are, enjoying our free speech.

Speaking of Twitter, Trump was in Grand Rapids the other day. One of the ceremonies of the day was the bestowal of the endorsement of the Police Officers Association of Michigan. Cop unions are the worst, keeping bad ones on the job and generally sheltering their membership from negative consequences, no matter how self-inflicted. Of course they were happy to stand behind their hero, who has pledged to pardon J6ers who beat the shit out of cops between taking dumps in the halls of Congress:

Several of these guys are self-described “constitutional sheriffs,” and I doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that.

Comic relief! Gary Shteyngart — a niche writer enthusiasm, I’ll grant — was among the passengers on the inaugural cruise of the Icon of the Seas, and while some of the shots are cheap, they are well-deserved.

And that’s about all I have for Thursday. Enjoy your weekend, all.

Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” is getting a fair amount of attention, as Big Books by Big Authors tend to do in the days following their publication. In a nutshell, Haidt argues that smartphones — not Covid, not climate change, not mass shootings — are at the root of Gen Z’s well-covered tendency to be more depressed and less optimistic than older Americans. He talks mostly about the corrosive effects of social media, but it’s another part of the grinding-down aspect of smartphone life that interests me: Surveillance.

Haidt is friends with Lenore Skenazy, who made a big splash a few years back when she wrote about letting her 9-year-old find his way home from Bloomingdale’s (they live in New York City) alone. The kid had a $20 bill for emergencies, but no phone. He had been riding on public transit for years and knew the system. And he was fine. The piece splashed so big that Skenazy spun it into an organization, Free Range Kids, that advocates for loosening the tethers that worried parents place on their children, to give them age-appropriate freedom and independence. Let go, let God. It’s good for them. Etcetera.

I think this is a good idea, which is easy for me to say, as my own child is 27 now, but looking back, I reflect that life got easier when I did the same thing. We live in a safe community, but in conversation with Kate’s peers’ parents, I got the impression that few others think so. At least with regard to their own offspring.

Which I get. Your child is the most precious thing in the world, and you’d do anything to protect it. But around here, parents go to insane lengths to do so, and increasingly, the smartphone is key to everything. For instance, it’s commonplace for people around here to leave their phone’s location-sharing on all the time, and share with their family. So not only do parents know where their kids are, kids know where their parents are. Spouses track one another in real time.

This is always explained, and justified, as a matter of safety, trust and love. It’s a way of showing up for each other, to say “if you need me, this is where you can find me,” or “I worry about you, so it helps to know you’re safe.” Bad things happen to people. A couple years ago, a freshman went missing at Michigan State after a night of heavy drinking. Common sense would tell searchers where to look (the Red Cedar River, running through the middle of campus), but it took weeks to find him, and that’s exactly where his body was. The discussion afterward centered on improving security with more cameras (the one nearest where he fell in was out of service), not discouraging the blackout drinking that leads to these incidents.

Kate had a friend when she was young, who lived a block away. She liked to spend time over there — they had video games and better snacks — and by the time I’d call her home in wintertime, it would be dark outside. They never failed to drive her one block home, and when I suggested that was excessive, the reply was always, “If anything happened to her, I’d never forgive myself.” That nothing had happened to any child walking home in our community, that anyone could remember, meant nothing. There’s always a first time.

I think about the kids we see in Europe; we usually go during the school year and have seen uniformed children on the streets and squares of Paris and Barcelona and Morocco and Madrid. No adults are in evidence, and if they are, they keep their distance. These kids get on and off buses and trains and play freely with one another — a soccer ball seems to be all they need to have a good time. I don’t recall seeing any phones in a child’s hand in these street encounters. While I’m sure they have video games and their own anxieties, they don’t seem to be the American kind.

The night of Kate’s high-school graduation, her band played a gig in Hamtramck. They all surrounded me and begged to borrow my car, a Volvo station wagon at the time, for their upcoming tour. It would be two or three weeks on the road, all of them 18 years old. I thought about it for a while, considered that they had been playing unsupervised gigs all over one of the country’s most dangerous cities (according to the stats, anyway) for a couple years now, and finally said yes. And while I’m certain there was drinking and weed-smoking and other stupidity taking place over that fortnight, they came home safe. They were ready.

OK, getting to week’s end, have to finish a piece, so here’s some bloggage:

Neil Steinberg speaks for me when he suggests Ronna McDaniel’s betrayal of her own country shouldn’t be excused easily:

The former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee thought she could shed her Trump-coddling, election-denying, democracy-shredding raiment and simply rejoin polite society. And, sadly, the out-of-touch NBC brass hoped she could too, briefly. Imagined McDaniel might provide some of that good old fashioned Red State perspective, make the case for lies and delusion, maybe snag a few viewers drifting away from Fox News.

But legitimate NBC journalists rebelled, on air. Thank God. That’s how it should be. Some things cannot be forgiven. Maybe casting a ballot for Trump two or three times, in the privacy of the voting booth, can be reframed as a secret shame. But at some point, as you rise up the ladder in the pyramid of cowards, quisling and craven opportunists, you lose the chance to walk away from your treachery. At some point you end up in the dock in a plexiglas booth.

Yep. Also, Joe Lieberman is dead, and someone will mourn him, but it won’t be me:

Lieberman’s last term in the Senate was not one in which he shined. He played an absolutely critical role in making sure that the Affordable Care Act had no public option. He told Harry Reid he would filibuster any effort to create a public option. And while he wasn’t the only Democrat to torpedo a far better bill than what got passed, Lieberman has more than his share in the blame to make that happen. A lot of people were disgusted by his behavior in the 2006 election and he was only polling at a 31 percent approval rating in 2010, so he decided to retire at the end of his term. Chris Murphy replaced him and finally Connecticut Democrats had a real senator representing their interests.

…Lieberman may have theoretically supported Clinton in 2016, but he was happy to work with Trump. In fact, who did Betsy DeVos have introduce her to the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee for her confirmation hearings as Secretary of Education but Holy Joe himself. Great that he was willing to vouch for such a lovely person. Lieberman always had a soft spot for Trump. Speculating that the latter could run for president in 2000, Lieberman said in 1999, “The Donald is quite a ladies’ man. He’s going to have, if elected, an all-female cabinet … Secretary of Energy Carmen Electra, Secretary of Defense Xena the Warrior Princess.” That’s some hot comedy from our favorite senator there! Trump nearly named him FBI director to replace James Comey, which would have been a total shitshow. I wonder if Lieberman would have toadied up to Trump in the required manner or whether his “look out for me and me alone” mentality would have let to a total blowup. I almost wish it happened just so we could have yet another reason to hate the man.

A good weekend to all. At the end of it, it’ll be April.

The world continues to fall apart. The collapse of the Key bridge in Baltimore was — is — shocking. I had to get off Twitter once the For You stream sent me a series of posts suggesting this WASN’T AN ACCIDENT and was likely caused by TERRORISTS or JEWS or it was a CYBER ATTACK ON THE SHIP or some other rage-farming bullshit. Why is it so hard to hear those hoofbeats and think horses, not zebras. Or they know it’s horses, and they’re just exploiting the once-useful social network ruined by Elon Musk.

Worse was the local resident who carped to a reporter that now the harbor and port would be closed, and traffic would be terrible, and you can forget about same-day deliveries from Amazon, yes you can. I know Baltimore is a tough town, but please: A moment for fishing the bodies out of the harbor before we move on to petty annoyances.

I recall reading a story, years ago, in the Washington Post. The subject was maybe Fear or Phobias or something, but it included a short piece about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, also in Maryland. The bridge employs drivers for so-called “Timmies,” i.e. people with phobias about driving over such a long bridge, but nevertheless required to do so, usually for a job commute. The Timmies (for “timid,” duh) pull over in a designated area and the driver gets in. They can handle the drive however they want — calmly in the passenger seat, crouched under a blanket in the back, whatever. At the other end, the driver gets out and goes to the waiting area for a ride going the other way.

At the time it seemed amusing. But the last time I drove the Mackinac Bridge I did deep breathing all the way across and found myself oddly unsettled. I used to love it; I’d change lanes back and forth between the paved outside lane and the grated inside lanes (for icy conditions) just to hear the hum of the grating passing under my tires. But now I stick to the pavement and try not to think how far down the water is. Not a Timmie, but maybe Timmie-adjacent.

Anyway, look for a lot more Timmies crossing bridges in the coming days.

Collapse elsewhere: I try not to think too much about the British royal family, either, but man, Friday’s news about Princess Kate was a shocker. It certainly silenced the Too Online Encyclopedia Browns for a hot second, after which they roared back to life, blaming her cancer on the Covid vaccine, because rage-farming waits for no one. I was left mainly thinking, when do the bad guys get a hit like this? She’s a young mother with three young children; when does Tubby McBronzer get his fatal stroke? When does Roger Stone get hit by a truck? Where is karma when you need it, goddamnit.

Legal collapse: The Supreme Court heard arguments in the abortion-pill case today; here’s a heartfelt defense of IVF that lays out the stakes, i.e. babies for people desperate to have one vs. crazy people who believe eight cells in a Petri dish has full constitutional rights. Not crazy, bad people. Bad, bad people.

OK, then. Let’s let the investigations unfold and hope for the best. Later.

Proof that this is a stupid, stupid country comes with an emerging theme of the Trump campaign: Asking if you’re better off than you were four years ago.

I can answer that one instantly and unequivocally: Yes. Hell yes. Take all the yes under the sun, pile it high, double it and double it again. Yes.

The Washington Post, being cognizant of its liberal media presence, added a qualifier to its headline: Trump asked if U.S. was better off in his last year. In many ways, the answer is no. The “in many ways” is perhaps justified by the subhead: A look at the third week of March 2020 reveals a nation that was plunging into a pandemic, and a leader exhibiting the erratic characteristics that his supporters love and his detractors revile

Hmm. Well, OK, maybe some people found those daily Covid briefings entertaining. But the story (gift link) lays out what we all remember:

Four years ago this week, the stock market was collapsing — hitting its worst week since the Great Recession of 2008 — as the country spiraled into a years-long pandemic that claimed more than 1 million American lives, cratered the economy, upended daily life and, arguably, helped cost Trump a second term in the White House.

…Reported covid cases exploded that week, growing from 588 to 3,659, and covid deaths more than tripled, from 16 on Sunday the 15th to 52 the following Saturday. Over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump regularly indulged in his most combative and erratic impulses, alienating large swaths of the public along the way.

During that seven-day stretch, Trump promised the country had “tremendous control” over the virus and that “we’re winning it.” In fact, the opposite was true.

Yep. That’s how it went. When I read stuff like this, I sometimes go back to my photos from that period. I don’t take as many pix as I probably should, but I take a few. Many of these images will be familiar to you, and they suggest that no goddamn WAY was the country better off in March 2020.

It was a bad time to run out of toilet paper, or “bath tissue,” as the sign suggests.

It was a good time to be making sanitizers of all sorts. This was for a story I did for Deadline Detroit. I think this guy was getting something like $50 a tub for these alcohol wipes.

My boxing workout briefly moved outdoors, socially distanced by the yard markers.

I look about as excited to be at this Zoom cocktail hour as anybody would be. “You are the only one here.” Solo drinkers should look more hangdog, if you ask me:

A closed bar in Grosse Pointe. Cardboard Conor McGregor was probably left over from St. Patrick’s Day, a couple weeks previous.

I got a tip that certain bars were opening on the DL, reviving the city’s grand tradition of speakeasies. I was using a jukebox app to try to find them, but never connected with one. I did capture this image of the neon installation on the modern art museum in Detroit, with Woodward Avenue empty of everything but my Subaru:

A friend did have a small speakeasy group with three friends, one of whom owned a bar. They’d go there, sit several stools apart, and drink together. Was it fun, I asked. “Not at all. Kinda depressing, actually.”

A socially distanced teen hang in an empty middle-school parking lot. Note all the late-model cars. Rich kids, but at least they were being responsible:

Then the Unlock Michigan movement got moving, whipped along by social media. They insisted the shutdowns and restrictions were all either a hoax or overblown or not worth the economic damage. Many of the ringleaders looked like this:

I just looked up Kevin Skinner. It appears he’s now pushing the ballot initiative to do away with property tax in Michigan. Of course.

I have to say, though, that there were moments of calm, happiness and beauty. Kate and I went down to the lakefront to try to catch a flyover of the Blue Angels, who were saluting health-care workers all over the country. It was a lovely day.

I had two cameras that day, my phone and my Nikon SLR, loaded with Tri-X pushed to 1600. A friend saw this and remarked, “Man, even Wendy looks hard.”

We were looking out at the water, thinking that’s where the planes would be. But suddenly we heard them, and saw them only a few seconds later, behind us. I swung around, raised my camera and took a hail-mary, and whadday know, it turned out great. High-contrast, but I like it.

So. Better off? You better believe it, even if the Blue Angels aren’t flying around. My 401K recovered, I now see friends face-to-face and when I want to wipe my bum, I have the t.p. to get the job done.

Happy Sunday/Monday. A busy week ahead, but afterward, all downhill.

The other day I saw this amusing item in my Axios newsletter. I’d normally link to the story, but can’t find it with a casual Google, so accept this screenshot:

God, Barry, we all miss you so much. The other day someone posted the video of Aretha Franklin singing “Natural Woman” to Carole King at the Kennedy Center Honors. The cutaway to Obama wiping away a tear almost made me cry, too, but not because the music was beautiful. It’s because I didn’t get up every day of the Obama presidency and thank God for him. I had no idea that his successor would be a pig who can barely string a sentence together, with a sex-worker third wife and a nightmare family, all of whom would end up supported by American taxpayers, one way or another. I didn’t — none of us didn’t — know how bad it would get.

Sigh. How about some levity?

Ha ha ha ha ha. The proper answer to that question is: I would choose to live somewhere else. Because, if you read the story, you find that their budget is, no shit…

…around $850,000, but even with $450,000 saved, high mortgage rates meant that most single-family homes were out of reach. So they began to seriously consider a manufactured-home park about seven miles west of the city. “There were no good options,” Mr. Zero said. “Except for this place.”

I gotta say, though, those are some pretty sweet looking trailers. They look like double-wides, and once you get into double-wide territory, they don’t feel so much like trailers. Santa Barbara doesn’t get hurricanes or tornadoes to speak of; I could probably live there. But not for most of a million dollars.

God, the real estate market is a ticking time bomb. How is any normal person supposed to afford these prices? It’s insane.

What else happened today? I had an insane one, that’s what. I missed my morning swim because I overslept, then got buried in an avalanche of work. I didn’t brush my teeth until 11 a.m., but yes, I still found time to post on Twitter, because that’s how life today is.

One more funny screen cap? OK. Here’s Kim Guilfoyle, raising money on the hustings:

If you want, you can tuck a check for $2,500 into her cleavage.

OK, then! Happy Friday, happy weekend, happy life.