Tuesday is November 7. For the rest of my life, I expect I’ll remember another November 7, the one in 2020, three years ago.

It was a beautiful day, soft and warm and sunny, a perfect Indian summer morning that only improved as it went on. Before noon, the AP, CNN and other national media outlets reported that the counts and recounts were over in Pennsylvania, and it was official: The state belonged to Biden, and so did the presidency. Immediately, and I do mean immediately, the celebration started. Within a couple minutes, a friend in D.C. posted a video of the celebrations spreading through town. I recall the sound of cowbells and banging pans from balconies on high-rise buildings, the way we greet the new year, which it was. And it only went on from there.

My friend Dustin called and suggested we play some miniature golf, the exact sort of activity such a day called for. The course at our local park was closed for the season, so we ended up in Clinton Township, Trump country for sure. (“Metro Detroit’s Donbas region,” another friend calls it.) There was no open sobbing, so we played two or three rounds, checking our phones for reaction as the news settled in. One friend kept texting the highlights, mostly video snippets from Twitter. One showed people dancing in the street in New York City, singing “Heeeeyy, Donald Tru-ump! I want to knooo-ow why you’re such a cunt!” Laughter and hugging was the order of the day.

In 2016, I walked the dog early the day after the election, still shell-shocked by the result. I passed a man on the street who beamed at me with a note of smugness on his face, and I decided to pay it back four years later. But either the Detroit Donbas hadn’t heard the news yet or no one would let it ruin a perfect day, so I didn’t get to smug-smile at anyone, but still, I couldn’t stop smiling. Our long national nightmare was over. We’d be getting back to normal. The fever had broken. It’d be OK again.

Three years later, it’s useful to remember these feelings, and curse my naiveté, and remember another beautiful November day that didn’t turn out the way it promised to. That was November 4, 2008, the day Barack Obama was elected president, in an election with results no one contested. I watched from my couch in Michigan; I was working nights, from home, as an editor, and often kept the TV on to keep from falling asleep. All the channels were carrying Obama’s speech in Grant Park that night, the cameras panning the faces of ecstatic people, black and white but mostly black, tears running down their faces. Neil Steinberg was there, with his son, then 13, and wrote movingly about the mood that night:

All the vantage points were taken, so I went up to a group crowding around a gap in the fencing, pushed Ross ahead, and said, to no one in particular, “Could this boy take a look, just for a moment?” A large black woman turned, regarded him, and then commanded those in front of her, “Let the baby through!” and they parted, affording Ross and me a momentary glimpse of the future president, a tiny figure, far away. I thought of that famous photo of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address, a distant, barely recognizable speck in a multitude.

But that wasn’t the moment that lodged in my heart. That came afterward, when a quarter of a million people flowed from the park to Michigan Avenue, buoyant with victory, intoxicated with promise and possibility and hope, filling the street from curb to curb, from Roosevelt Road to the Wrigley Building. They were in their new Obama t-shirts and in church clothes, whole families, including wide-eyed toddlers, some cheering, some walking in quiet, careful formality.

Promise and possibility and hope – that’s what I was feeling that night, too. We’d dealt a serious blow to racism; it wouldn’t die, because no evil that entrenched can die with one election, but the United States, a country with racism as its original sin, had turned its back on it, decisively. It felt like a curse had been lifted.

Within days, we started hearing about the grumbling in the Republican Party about Obama’s election, which you’d expect, but the nature of it was disturbing. Memes showing the White House lawn turned into a watermelon patch. Obama in Tarzan-movie tribal gear, a bone through his nose. And these didn’t come from some sewer on the far right. These were memes forwarded with LOLs from county chairs and other party officials, who when confronted protested with hey-it’s-funny-can’t-you-take-a-joke? Soon we’d learn about the election-night meeting of congressional Republicans, where they vowed they’d simply dig in their heels and make Obama a one-term president. Michelle Obama made some comment about living in a house built by slaves, and Republicans roared in protest, even though she was right. Soon, another of these charmers would call her an “ape in heels.” And upon that they’d build the he’s-gay-and-she’s-a-man libel, and go on from there.

You guys were all there. You know.

I’m remembering all this…not sure why. The calendar, yes, but maybe because these are exceptionally grim times, and it’s easy now to see the bad that was waiting just behind the good. As Steinberg also wrote a while back, Trump is the whistle on the tea kettle; you can take the whistle off, but the water is still boiling. I recall another story I heard about election night in 2008, how as John McCain prepared to make his gracious concession speech, his staff had to practically put his running mate, Sarah Palin, in a straitjacket, as she too wanted to speak, to “her people.” Her people would eventually gain critical mass and be the MAGA base. She was the wicked fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, with another curse, one that wouldn’t be felt for a few more years.

I spend a little time, many days, googling the realities of expatriation. I doubt we’d ever do it, but if these recent years have taught me anything, it’s that we don’t know yet how bad things can get. Who’d have ever thought the Senate majority leader could flat-out steal a Supreme Court seat? And yet it happened.

But today and tomorrow, I’ll think about November 7, 2020, the jubilance, the literal dancing in the streets, the perfect weather. We don’t have to fret all the time.

Here’s a picture I took that day, of Dustin with his spirit animal on the giraffe hole. The dead leaves and yellowing plants reveal the time of year, leading into winter. But if winter comes, as the poet asked, can spring be far behind? Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Let’s close out the week with a few snickers, shall we, and I’m not talking about the leftover Halloween candy. Julie Robinson sent along pix earlier this week, of decor in a Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in Florida. I assume they’re AI. They look like it, anyway. In one of my earliest art-history lessons, at the Columbus Museum of Art on some school field trip, the teacher said every culture makes art of Jesus in their own image. I guess Seventh Day Adventists are all keyboard players in ’70s rock bands:

Here he is healing a crippled woman, who cannot seem to look him in the eye.

But this! This is my favorite, as I’ve seen the pose on every hairdresser who turns the chair around and gives you the big reveal in the mirror:

“Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you a shorter look would frame your face better?”

OK, then. Happy retirement to Alex, and I leave you with a great column about Bob Knight, by my friend Dave Jones, with whom I was partying just a few days back. I think many of you will like it.

So, Bob Knight is dead. I guess I have to say something about that. And I have rarely felt less qualified to say anything about anybody.

When I first moved to Indiana, I found the discussion and static around Knight to be oddly familiar. “Same coach, different sport,” I told people in Columbus, noting the resemblance between Knight and the somewhat-recently departed Woody Hayes. Both of them old-school guys, the sort who talked with his fists as much as his voice, popular with the knuckleheads in the fan base, less popular with the people who valued their degrees and paid attention to changing times. Woody famously hated the forward pass, as the forward pass was becoming a much bigger part of the game. Knight disliked showtime ball, preferred boring ol’ teamwork. And both were coming to the end of their respective lines when things changed and they couldn’t change with them.

And that’s about all I know about the sports part of their careers. It’s not much, I know. I wasn’t a columnist in Ohio, but I was in Indiana, and Knight had a way of blocking out the sun, to where even if you were a basketball-ignorant derp like me, you had to say something about him, at least sometimes. When he threw the chair. When he yelled at a bunch of professors watching a practice, although that’s when I learned that some people laugh when someone else says, “PhD? That just stands for ‘piled higher and deeper.'” There was a story about how he got along with some woman who was writing a book, and that book was flattering. Mostly, what bugged me about him was, I.U. basketball inevitably disrupted the Thursday-night prime-time lineup, when I didn’t give a fat rat’s ass about I.U. basketball.

He also personified a certain kind of Hoosier, the ones who teared up over the insurance-company ad that portrayed a young Larry Bird shooting baskets because he had nothing else to do in French Lick, the ones who would stand in the checkout line at Meijer and leaf through whatever book about Knight was on the nearby rack, and sometimes buy it. In Michigan, they call the U-M fans who didn’t go to school there “Walmart Wolverines,” which is bitchy and classist and all that. In Indiana, I’d guess it was the majority of the fan base, people who didn’t care about the music or the business school or anything else, just the basketball team. I’d imagine it’s the same for most big schools. Knight was the I.U. representative for those fans – pushy, profane, a winner.

Much of the time, anyway.

But he couldn’t change, because why should he? And so the new university president came to town and indicated Knight’s standard behavior would no longer be tolerated. What happened? The inevitable: Some kid made a mildly disrespectful comment to him, he flipped out, and that was game over.

Who blows their life up like that? People like Bob Knight. Who is now dead, the winningest coach in college basketball for a while. He looked a lot like Mike Pence; let’s give him that.

What’s your Bobby Knight memory?

I try to front-load my week, i.e., getting as much done on Monday and Tuesday as possible, as we’re in the season now where I’m less likely to get pop-up tasks, and that makes for a very festive four- or five-day “weekend,” but you know how all weekends end.

With Monday. And more work.

Monday I slept badly, which means the work dragged into Wednesday, but now I’m …kinda free. And isn’t all this just FASCINATING?

So let’s move on. The United States House of Representatives is leaderless no more! What do we know about this Rep. Mike Johnson (whose name I find unsettling, because I worked for a man of that name for some time)?

Mr. Johnson, a lawyer and former chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, played a pivotal role in congressional efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

An evangelical Christian, he has voted for a national abortion ban and co-sponsored a 20-week abortion ban, earning him an A-plus rating from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. On the day the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, he celebrated, calling it “an extraordinary day in American history that took us almost a half-century to get to.” He hosts a religious podcast with his wife and considers Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the founders of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, a mentor.

Last year, Mr. Johnson introduced a bill that prohibited the use of federal funds for providing sex education to children under 10 that included any L.G.B.T.Q. topics — a proposal that critics called a national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Mr. Johnson called the legislation “common sense.”

Wonderful. Just wonderful. A retrograde coonass religious hysteric from one of the most backward states in the union? Sounds like smooth sailing ahead. Meanwhile, the man they all look up to:

Donald Trump surprised his own national security adviser and a group of Republican congressmen and women when he interrupted an Oval Office briefing to ask why he should “give a fuck” about the fate of Kurds in Syria.

“Nothing we said worked,” Adam Kinzinger, until this year a Republican representative from Illinois, writes in a new book.

I’m left with the desire to look out the window at the pretty-pretty fall color and wonder how many more autumns I might get to see it. Crazy to think that only three years ago we thought out long national nightmare was over. And it was only the end of the prologue.

And my god, it gets worse:

“Once we got to the Oval Office,” he writes, “I could see that Trump was impatient, and Bolton was desperate for someone to get through to him.

“A plain-spoken intellectual, Bolton strained to remain polite even as Trump seemed uninterested. The Kurds had fought and died for us in Iraq, said Bolton. They were continuing to provide great insight into politics in the region. Nothing we said worked.”

Trump eventually ordered the US withdrawal. Justifying his abandonment of the Kurds, he said they “didn’t help us in the second world war, they didn’t help us with Normandy as an example – they mention the names of different battles, they weren’t there”.

I’m feeling a little short-tempered today, which I think means I need to go for a long walk every afternoon after lunch, settle the ol’ nerves and try to withdraw from a media community where a fair portion of the highest-profile voices act like it’s no biggie to call a woman a cunt. Presumably because they’re cunts, too. Whatever.

I need to get something posted. So let’s move on.

In iPhone photos of the day, I was leaving my boxing class at 6:50-ish this morning and said, “Wow, look at the sunrise coming up. Seems early!” The other women I was with said no, that’s the east-side glow. So I altered my route home to check it out, and sure enough, they were right:

The photo is a little misleading. It was full dark at the time, with sunrise not for another hour. What looks like twinkle lights on that tree is the reflection of my four-way flashers, as I had to stop in the roadway to get the photo. But that is, indeed, the glow of the hundreds of thousands of square feet of greenhouses on the other side of the water, in Leamington. People around here like to call them “the pot farms,” but I drove through this district last fall, and they’re mostly tomato and vegetable operations. The price we pay for fresh produce. The actual sunrise comes several degrees to the north, this time of year.

OK, then. Hit Publish!

A nondescript building was torn down on our commercial strip here in Grosse Pointe Woods, to expand parking for an adjacent business I’m told. Look what was revealed:

Looks like it was painted yesterday. Without going to a library and doing serious research, I’d estimate its provenance as: Likely late ’50s/early ’60s, maybe? Our house was built in 1947. The “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot” slogan goes back as far as the ’20s, but it lasted years. Dossin’s was a local bottler, and a prosperous one — they commissioned the Miss Pepsi hydroplane. And there’s the phone number, with the old TUxedo exchange for this area. The Oxford Beer Store is still around, although it’s moved one door west and is now Oxford Beverage; it’s where Kate would ride her bike for frozen Cokes when that was her pleasure. This building is now a dry cleaner.

I mention this for two reasons: One, because one thing I noticed when we moved here was the abundance of wall-painted signage, just way more than you saw in Fort Wayne or Columbus, and lots of them are pretty great. So let’s celebrate the good ones. And the other? I’m sure some dipshit property owner or city father will order it covered with white paint before too much longer. So let’s at least say it was here for a while, and we all got to enjoy it.

We recently had a case here that may have gotten some national attention, a suburban man who put out a social-media call for others to go “hunting Palestinians.” He was arrested in fairly short order, by the police in Dearborn. I googled his name, and whaddaya know, he’s a troublemaker of long standing:

Carl David Mintz, 41, was charged Monday in connection with the alleged threat posted last week to social media in a case that heightened fears of fallout from the Israel-Hamas war in a region with a sizable Arab American population.

Mintz is a former school board candidate who ran on “ending critical race theory,” and was previously reported to have posted Islamophobic YouTube videos. He’s a also a licensed Realtor whose firm tells the Free Press it “released” him Monday after he was charged.

…In a 2010 road rage incident that grabbed headlines, Mintz shot 20-year-old Faith Said in the arm in Oakland County.

After an initial trial that tested the limits of self defense and ended in a mistrial, Mintz ultimately pleaded guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon, according to Free Press archives.

Another story said Mintz repeatedly tapped his brakes until Said got out of his car and approached, after which Mintz shot…him, I presume. Although the name is given in two places as “Faith,” I’d be willing to bet it’s really Fatih, which goes better with the surname.

Anyway, Mintz is your garden variety Islamophobe shithead, and we’ve all heard of the Palestinian mother and son wounded/killed by another Mintz in Chicago, so let’s worry about what some college students said about Israel.

OK, this will be it for the week for me. Heading to Columbus tomorrow for a long weekend, mostly reconnecting with old friends and family. So it’ll be great, I know it will.

You all have a great weekend.

There are people in your life who are entirely happy with things as they are, and bless ’em, that’s great. There are others who are happy but are still restless, still looking for the next thing, still focused on moving forward.

My friend Michael is one of those. And he’s had quite a journey so far. He attended a seminary high school, thinking he might become a priest, ended up a lawyer, married once, divorced, married again, worked with Coleman Young, served on the Wayne State Board of Governors, did this, did that, came out as gay, divorced again (but remained, and remains, BFFs with his ex-wife), etc. and added a lot more accomplishments and interesting turns to the journey. Let me put it this way: We met in a digital filmmaking class. That should tell you something.

And on Saturday, he did this:

Yep, Michael is now Father Michael, having prostrated himself before God and being ordained in the Cathedral Abbey of St. Anthony, home of the Ecumenical Catholic Church of Christ, informally known as independent, not Roman, Catholics. (Here’s a story about the church from 2016, and it’s pretty good.)

I was raised Catholic, but this was the only Mass of Ordination I’ve attended. There was a small choir that sounded much bigger, thanks to the operatic voices within; the leader had a basso like Paul Robeson. The homilies were personal and casual; I learned that Michael had been the straw buyer when the archdiocese refused to sell the closed church to the ecumenical bishop, among other things. But it was a joyful, moving occasion, and I’m so glad I went. And now I have a new place to donate clothing, something I’m overdue to get moving on.

Sunday was lovely, sunny and warm, so my friend Bill and I made what will almost certainly be my last trip of the year to St. Clair for some river swimming. The water was about 67 degrees — bracing for a pool swimmer, but as we told everyone who gaped in astonishment from the boardwalk, not bad at all once you got used to it. The current seemed stronger than usual, and the autumn light on the water as a cold front rolled in was stirring. We watched the Lee A. Tregurtha pass, upbound, from the water, and when we signaled for a salute, the pilot gave us one! Just a short toot, but it counted. That is one big ship. I just checked its location on Boatnerd, and it’s closing in on Drummond Island, headed for Marquette.

“This is a very Great Lakes kind of experience,” Bill remarked, and it certainly was.

And that, friends, is one reason we’re putting off our European trip until March/April of next year. So much happens in the fall around here. You don’t want to miss it.

Some bloggage? A little:

Headline: Anti-abortion activists worry they’re on the wrong end of a Faustian bargain. Ha ha ha ha ha, she chortled bitterly. Fuck you.

Ron DeSantis is a horrible, horrible person, who has destroyed a quirky public college in Florida, trying to make it into a southern Hillsdale. However, even Hillsdale has higher standards:

Gone are gender-neutral bathrooms, hallway art that in some cases featured nudity and student murals that had been completed in February and were expected to remain for several years. Student orientation leaders had to remove Black Lives Matter and Pride pins from their polo shirts. A student government election this week pitted a returning student against a new student backed by a newly formed campus chapter of the conservative organization Turning Point USA.

Dan Duprez, a former New College admissions officer, said he was troubled by the tactics used to grow the incoming class, noting that the grade-point averages and standardized test scores of new students were lower than those of past freshman classes. He recalled a colleague showing him an admissions essay that was a screenshot of cellphone notes, “riddled with incorrect spelling and grammar, saying, basically, ‘I just want to play ball.’”

Finally, here’s Vivek Ramaswamy, the only presidential candidate the Michigan GOP was able to lure to its biannual leadership conference on Mackinac Island, promising the moon and stars:

“How are we going to find our way out of this, to win the war that we are losing? First step we have to take on the managerial class,” he said. “As your next U.S. president, if you all put me there, we will shut down the unconstitutional fourth branch, 75% headcount reduction in the administrative state in Washington, D.C. Rescind unconstitutional federal regulations. That’s a majority of federal regulations on day one that we are done with.”

Promising that those unprecedented cuts would “unlock the U.S. economy,” Ramaswamy said they would also clear the way to fully embrace fossil fuels, despite the impact on climate change.

“When you get the administrative state out of the way, we will drill, we will frack, we will burn coal. We will embrace nuclear again in this country without apology. That is how we grow our economy,” he said.

Yeah, sure, he can totally do that. What a winner! Snort.

OK, then, let’s have ourselves a good week, eh? I’ll do my best.

I haven’t been enrolled in Medicare for even a year, and I’ve already had my first fraudulent claim. I nearly pitched an EOB (explanation of benefits, for you healthy people) notice that arrived last week, sent by my gap-policy provider. Then I realized I hadn’t been to a doctor in months, so what could this be?

It turned out to be a claim for $4,500 worth of catheter supplies, made by a medical supply company in suburban Dallas. Sigh. Got on the phone, and ended up talking to someone in a call center that I suspect was on the other side of the Pacific. The woman, reading from a script, kept assuring me I wouldn’t be billed anything, and I kept telling her that wasn’t my concern, but rather that whether my Medicare account or identity or whatever had been compromised.

We ended it with her assuring me this was a glitch, a data-entry error, and it would be handled. Don’t worry.

Today I got another notice, this from Medicare itself, the great monolith, for the same claim, and this time, it indicated it had been paid. Another call, and I said the magic word to the phone tree: FRAUD. This time my call stayed stateside, and a report was made, and… I guess we’ll see what happens.

In other heart-stopping news at this hour, I took my old bike to a new shop for a top-to-bottom list of repairs, and had that great feeling walking out: This is the place I should have been going to all along. The guy not only knew my ancient Volkscycle, he used to sell them. He knew all about my Gatorskin tires, and why they might have failed me twice this summer. And best of all? “When do you think it’ll be ready?” “Eh, couple days.” Still plenty of time left in bike season.

And with that, I’ll cut the boring stuff and ask if you’ve ever seen anything quite as racist as Donald Trump’s new strategy to woo black voters, i.e. flaunting his arrests and mugshot and claiming a bond with them as a result:

Trump has latched on to a narrative promoted last month by Fox News commentators and others in conservative media — that his arrests could boost his standing among African Americans who believe the criminal justice system is unfair.

Trump claimed in a recent interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt that his poll numbers among Black voters “have gone up four and five times” since his mug shot was released.

That’s not true, as CNN reported.

Gotta give it to Axios, which drives me insane many days. “That’s not true” has a note of mordant humor I appreciated.

You watch: Next month he’ll be hanging with Yeezy again. Or maybe rapping, who knows.

Back to working my way through Michael Wolff’s latest book excerpt. (I wouldn’t be caught dead buying one of his books.) The good parts are always leaked to the media, and here’s a good one:

(Tucker) Carlson put (Ron) DeSantis’s fate to a focus group of one: his wife. When they lived in Washington, Susie Carlson wouldn’t even see politicians. Carlson himself may have known everyone, dirtied himself for a paycheck, but not his wife. In her heart, it was 1985 and still a Wasp world, absent people, in Susie Carlson’s description and worldview, who were “impolite, hyperambitious, fraudulent.” She had no idea what was happening in the news and no interest in it. Her world was her children, her dogs, and the books she was reading. So the DeSantises were put to the Susie Carlson test.

They failed it miserably. They had a total inability to read the room — one with a genteel, stay-at-home woman, here in her own house. For two hours, Ron DeSantis sat at her table talking in an outdoor voice indoors, failing to observe any basics of conversational ritual or propriety, reeling off an unself-conscious list of his programs and initiatives and political accomplishments. Impersonal, cold, uninterested in anything outside of himself. The Carlsons are dog people with four spaniels, the progeny of other spaniels they have had before, who sleep in their bed. DeSantis pushed the dog under the table. Had he kicked the dog? Susie Carlson’s judgment was clear: She did not ever want to be anywhere near anybody like that ever again. Her husband agreed. DeSantis, in Carlson’s view, was a “fascist.” Forget Ron DeSantis.

Don’t really like Wolff and certainly dislike Carlson and DeSantis, but that’s pretty funny.

Ladies and gentlemen, teaching and learning in South Carolina:

Six months earlier, two of (English teacher Mary) Wood’s Advanced Placement English Language and Composition students had reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her all-White class readings from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America.

The students wrote in emails that the book — and accompanying videos that Wood, 47, played about systemic racism — made them ashamed to be White, violating a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race.

Reading Coates’s book felt like “reading hate propaganda towards white people,” one student wrote.

At least two parents complained, too. Within days, school administrators ordered Wood to stop teaching the lesson. They placed a formal letter of reprimand in her file. It instructed her to keep teaching “without discussing this issue with your students.”

Wood finished out the spring semester feeling defeated and betrayed — not only by her students, but by the school system that raised her. The high school Wood teaches at is the same one she attended.

You know this story, right? A newly adopted law that protects white students from feeling squicky about what their ancestors did is starting to have an effect, even in AP classes. And teachers — good ones — are being targeted, and will be casualties. Which will discourage future teachers. And there’s already a shortage.

But this is also South Carolina, part of the ever-expanding Sunbelt, which would indicate that most Americans would rather pay fewer taxes than have their children attend decent schools where they’ll learn the entire point of education: To be challenged to examine your ideas, compare them with other ideas, decide which have merit. Consider that many ideas that contradict one another both have merit. Not be…what’s the word? A snowflake.

Or maybe we’ll have a situation, over time, like what happened after desegregation: Education academies, private schools where the CEOs and higher-level brains of any southern community send their children, away from the MAGA rabble. We don’t go forward in this country anymore, I swear.

Sorry for the short one today. Busy.

I took this photo as I returned to my room in the Marriott during the jazz festival. Those of you who follow me on Instagram have already seen it:

Contrary to the popular belief that Detroit is deserted and desolate, Jefferson was hopping that night. A large motorcycle was idling at the light as I strolled by, with a bumpin’ sound system aboard, blaring “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” And it only occurred to me later that the opening line of that song is, “It was the third of September,” and this photo was taken on September 3. That’s either an amusing coincidence or a reflection of an exceptionally well-curated playlist.

Anyway, also of note with reference to pop music: The “musty old hall in Detroit” where mourners of the Edmund Fitzgerald prayed in Gordon Lightfoot’s song? That’s it on the left. Old Mariner’s Church. Never been inside, but I bet it’s not musty.

So! Midweek, almost! What’s going on? Well, in Tennessee they’re looking for a Taylor Swift reporter, no seriously, they are:

USA TODAY and The Tennessean/tennessean.com, part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, seeking an experienced, video-forward journalist to capture the music and cultural impact of Taylor Swift. 

Swift’s fanbase has grown to unprecedented heights, and so has the significance of her music and growing legacy. We are looking for an energetic writer, photographer and social media pro who can quench an undeniable thirst for all things Taylor Swift with a steady stream of content across multiple platforms. Seeing both the facts and the fury, the Taylor Swift reporter will identify why the pop star’s influence only expands, what her fanbase stands for in pop culture, and the effect she has across the music and business worlds. 

The successful candidate is a driven, creative and energetic journalist able to capture the excitement around Swift’s ongoing tour and upcoming album release, while also providing thoughtful analysis of her music and career.

We are looking for a journalist with a voice — but not a bias — able to quickly cultivate a national audience through smart content designed to meet readers on their terms. This reporter will chronicle the biggest moments on the next portions of Taylor Swift’s tour, offering readers of USA TODAY, The Tennessean and more than 200 local news sources an inside view.

This journalist must be willing (and legally allowed) to travel internationally.

Huh.

It so happens I’ve been able to live my life almost entirely unaware of Taylor Swift’s output. When her tour barnstormed the country this summer, I dialed up a best-of playlist on Spotify and listened critically over the course of a few days. My verdict: It’s no surprise why she’s so successful. She has sunk a taproot deep into the hearts and minds of women and girls, ages 14-32, and speaks directly to them. And she, or she and her co-writers, or she, her co-writers and her producers, manage to package this communication in almost flawless pop songs. She’s also social-media savvy in ways that only a digital native can be, and projects a persona that says, “I’m not the one who steals your boyfriend. But I could be your best friend.”

I’ve added one song to my Liked playlist, “Anti-Hero,” and will take it off eventually, but for now, it’s fine.

There. Do I get the job? Yeah, didn’t think so. Not video-forward enough.

Want to know everything about Tim Scott’s love life, such as it is? Interesting and amusing WashPost Style story (gift link):

For months, Scott explained, a friend from church had been trying to set him up with a woman the friend knew. Scott had told him that he wasn’t ready for a relationship. Then, late last year, the friend texted Scott the woman’s photo.

“You know what?” Scott recalled telling his friend after seeing the picture. “I’ve prayed on it. Tell me about her again?”

He got the woman’s number. They started talking, hitting it off with discussions about God and using a phone app to do a Bible study together. Scott said he loved her laugh. They had dinner at a downtown Charleston restaurant. She got the steak, he got the swordfish, and they shared even though, as Scott would later learn, she didn’t care for swordfish. They played pickleball, and Scott was embarrassed to find out that he was the “weak man on the court.”

He wouldn’t tell me her name, and the campaign declined to make her available to chat, even off the record. Technically I can’t verify that she exists, except to note that for a presidential campaign to essentially reverse-catfish America would be insane. (By way of corroboration, DeCasper offered that she’s personally hung out with her at the zoo.)

Scott said he had theories about why other campaigns might want to draw attention to his being single. It’s just a way to “sow seeds of doubt” about his campaign, he said, a way “to say that, ‘That guy isn’t one of us.’”

“It’s like a different form of discrimination or bias,” Scott said. “You can’t say I’m Black, because that would be terrible, so find something else that you can attack.”

I wonder if she lives in Canada.

With that, I’m outta here. Happy Wednesday.

Another day, another sex scandal at Michigan State. Spartans awoke today to discover USA Today had ripped the sheets back from the bed of their beloved football coach, Mel Tucker. And found him under there, masturbating while having “phone sex” with a woman, a rape survivor, who goes around the country educating college athletes about sexual violence and harassment in sports. Consensual, he says; not so, she says.

I mean.

I read the whole thing, and while I suspect neither party – Tucker or his accuser, Brenda Tracy – is telling the whole truth, at this point it doesn’t matter. When you’re the highest-paid employee (more on that in a minute) at a major university that’s still recovering from the Larry Nassar scandal, you don’t have “phone sex,” or whatever this was, with a woman not your wife. You don’t FaceTime her from your bed, chest uncovered, to complain about your dead marriage. You don’t flirt and comment on her Instagram photos and ask whether she’d date you if you didn’t have the ol’ ball and chain. And so on.

But here’s the thing: Tucker has an insane contract, $9.5 million a year for 10 years, funded in part by two wealthy alumni, the details of which the Free Press had to sue to uncover. He’s the second-highest-paid coach in the country, and the contract is probably responsible for inflating the salaries of many other college coaches. It was forged after a great opening season, and followed by a disappointing one, and now this. At least all the stories so far are pointing out that if Tucker is fired for cause, they don’t have to buy him out. Whew.

I was discussing this with a friend earlier today, and he said, “I guess what we learn from this is, men never learn.”

No, it appears they don’t. At least Tucker is 51, still an age when sex is mostly not a problem. Rudy Giuliani, 79, drooling over an assistant he allegedly called Big Tits, can’t say the same thing. On the one hand, you have to salute the raw biological urge that keeps leading men like this over various cliffs. On the other, holy shit what a dummy.

As another friend said of Bill Clinton at the time the Lewinsky affair broke: “Washington is full of beautiful, sexy, thirtysomething adulteresses who’d have been happy to run over and haul his ashes, but no, he had to pick the 25-year-old intern who was practically doodling ‘Monica Clinton’ in the margins of her notepads.”

He said:

According to Tucker, he became aroused when Tracy made a comment about needing to hit the gym more to look better without clothes on. They then discussed how having phone sex could complicate their relationship, he said, but Tracy suggested once would be harmless and he agreed.

“Unequivocally, there’s no doubt about it,” Tucker told the investigator, case documents show. “She was the one who said we’ll do it.”

She said:

Tracy denies all of that. The call started off normal, she said. But when she sent Tucker a photo of them together from the spring game, she said he responded by commenting on her buttocks and calling himself an “ass man.”

She remembered Tucker’s voice getting deeper and weirder as he continued talking about her buttocks. She asked him what he was doing, and he said he had a “hard dick” and was touching himself.

“You’re touching yourself?” Tracy asked, according to the investigation report. Tucker responded, “Yes.”

Ew.

Once again, however, the larger issue is MSU’s response when they received this report, in July. Did they immediately suspend Tucker? No. Did they suspend him before the football season started? They did not. They only did so after the USA Today story dropped, which is to say: Today.

Well, I hope he’s been saving his money.

After hearing about the earthquake in Morocco, I went into our photos from our trip there in 2019, remembering the charm of the medina, how parts of this thousand-year-old settlement still look like they haven’t changed much. The view from the rooftop of our riad:

I wonder how much of it was damaged.