The other day I scrolled past this video on some social network. It’s from the NYPost, and if you don’t have the interest in clicking, it depicts Mr. and Mrs. Jeff Bezos partying in St. Barth’s. The cutline describes them as being at “celebrity hotspot” Nikki Beach, and sure enough, you can see them sitting in a booth as a howling DJ narrates a birthday parade of the usual crap — sparklers in a big bottle of something, presumably champagne, someone carrying a sign, etc. Mrs. B stands up on her seat and shakes her hips. Mr. B smiles broadly. What a good time they seem to be having.

The Bezoses were not alone in the Caribbean. There are apps that show the position of every vessel with a transponder, and apparently a bunch of billionaires were spending New Year’s in St. Barth’s. So the Bezos were with their people. People who understand them, people who know their struggles, people who get them, because they’re the same.

And they spend their time at clubs where they stick sparklers into bottles of champagne. Honestly, I’d drown myself. Just go right over the rail into the warm Caribbean, hope an outgoing tide would carry me away.

I had my club years, don’t get me wrong. I remember yelling over the music, dancing, having fun. But — and this is key — it was over by my…27th birthday. I wasn’t 61 (as Bezos, aka Baldilocks, is) or 56 (as Lauren Sanchez, aka Beelzeboobs, is). Those two nicknames, which are perfect, are not mine, but I found them online and will use them forevermore.

Anyway, this observation dovetailed with something I read about the various photos included in the Epstein photo dump. Such ghastly rooms, where so much terrible stuff happened. No warmth, just weirdness. All that money and they can’t even hire an interior decorator?

How have we spent the last 50 years venerating the rich when they live like this? I ask you.

I swear, I keep clicking Unsubscribe on Semafor emails, but for some reason I keep getting it. In a recent issue, asking “what media leaders got wrong in 2025,” I read this, by Ryan Broderick:

This might be slightly premature to say, but I think the death of Charlie Kirk — and Trump World’s subsequent forced national observance of grief — is having the opposite effect of what I initially thought. If you had asked me in September what would happen, I would have said that Kirk’s murder was the American Reichstag fire, the moment the Trump administration and its great and powerful cyber army would finally conquer the information landscape and complete their authoritarian crackdown on free speech.

And a bit of that happened, sure, there was harassment, and doxxing, and people lost their jobs for insensitive posts about Kirk. But it didn’t last. Only a few months later, there is no bigger joke on the internet than Charlie Kirk. Every feed is full of Kirkified slop and AI brainrot mercilessly making fun of MAGA’s martyred influencer. The tail of history is long and these things always evolve, but, as it stands currently, Kirk is the Harambe of the 2020s and MAGA has never felt more cringe, old, and worst of all, boring.

Ain’t that the truth. And you know why? The widow Kirk. Everybody grieves differently, but when you’re taking the stage maybe a month after the assassination of your husband, wearing skin-tight leather pants, enough makeup to shame Tammy Faye and with pyrotechnics announcing your entrance, even true believers are going to be put off and perhaps ask, “Who are these freaks?”

Finally, in the ritual of closing the 2025 planners and starting the 2026 versions, I found the list of books I read last year. Nineteen, well under my goal of 25, but much of my fall was spent reading for the writing class I took, so: oh well.

That’s what fresh slates are for. Full speed ahead, and have a good weekend.

A few days back I turned on NPR, to yet another — yet! another! — earnest, NPR-like discussion on how to reach out to people you disagree with. How to build bridges, join hands across the chasm of our differences, all that.

And I…didn’t snap, exactly, but I reached my limit. I switched to the AM band, set push-button tuning for a couple of right-wing, all-talk stations. Enough of my NPR bubble; let’s see what the other side is talking about, vis-a-vis their political opponents.

I regret to inform you, although not surprised by it either, that they are not talking about joining hands, reaching out, or making nice. The only time liberals, or even moderates, are mentioned, it’s in discussions like, “How many New Yorkers will flee the city if Zohran Mamdani is elected? Tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands?” “The problem with that party is, they’re not proud to be American.”

And that’s not all. Talk about closed systems: In this world, Fox News at the top and bottom of the hour is nearly as lib’rul as NPR. One of the stations carries a network whose anchors and reporters say “the Democrat party” and “the government remains shut down, as Democrats refuse to budge from their insistence on free health care for illegal aliens.”

So no, I’m not particularly interested in hearing about how to talk to these folks. Really, really not interested.

But the blog today has been, as we say, overtaken by events, with the death of Dick Cheney. His black heart, mechanical though it was, finally couldn’t keep up with his deteriorating body, and he went the way of all flesh. I guess his statement in 2024, that he’d be voting for Kamala Harris, is supposed to redeem him somehow. Huh. Well, strange bedfellows and all that. We’ve talked here before about how Trump has managed to make even ghastly people look good, just because they oppose him. Dan Quayle and Mike Pence as the saviors of democracy – at least temporarily – is only one example.

But to me, Dick Cheney will always be this guy:

Thanks to Jeff G. for the image.

I remember learning about Abu Ghraib. I was finishing up my fellowship in Ann Arbor, driving back from a job tryout in Minnesota. I didn’t get the job, and Wisconsin was under my wheels on the way home, and I checked email during a gas stop. A friend in Fort Wayne wrote about the Lynndie England photos, the one where she’s holding the prisoner on a leash. He wrote something like, “But we haven’t accidentally dropped a nuke out of a Blackhawk helicopter, so I guess the war is going great!”

Very droll, my friends.

And who suffered for America’s foray into torture? Lynndie England, certainly, and a few other soldiers. Not Cheney.

So that’s my near-midweek catch-up. I would save this and post it tomorrow, but it’s time to discuss our late vice-president, so here you go.

Let’s pretend you-know-who doesn’t exist today. Let’s set the Wayback Machine for the early days of this blog, back when I had a writer-crush on Jon Carroll.

The San Francisco Chronicle columnist wrote five days a week, and his average was…well, it was astounding. I always read him, and I was rarely bored or disappointed. If you write five days a week, you will file a lot of columns about nothing in particular, and yet, even these were pretty great. He wrote about his cats a lot. He wrote about the persimmon tree in his yard. He wrote about getting caught skinny-dipping on a backwoods trail. He wrote about his daughter, a performer with Cirque du Soleil. And even among these always entertaining pieces, he wrote a fair number of straight-up bangers. I remember, in the early days of this blog, linking to many-many of them. They were such a pleasure to read. He was on my mind recently because a friend is dealing with the decline of a parent, and the piece he wrote about his own mother’s death was such a masterpiece, I wanted to reread it, maybe pass it along. (You can’t do that anymore without signing up for yet another email, which I simply can’t do, these days, especially for something I’m sending to someone else. Here’s yet another call for some sort of mid-grade newspaper collective gift-link arrangement, similar to the NYT’s or WP’s.)

Time marches in only one direction. Carroll left the paper in 2015 and had a blog for a while. Blogs are a pain in the ass, and after a while it tapered off, as 99 percent of blogs tend to do. (nancynall.com — still blogging after all these goddamn years!)

Anyway, it made me google ol’ Jon, and I found this interview with him, published just this week. He’s 81 now, and not writing, but still alive and kicking. Part of the reason he’s not writing is:

What is difficult about being your age?

I’m going blind. Around 2019 I was diagnosed with macular degeneration, which means that I am slowly and painlessly losing my sight. I had already stopped writing professionally when I got the diagnosis, and I’d also stopped publishing the blog, Jon Carroll Prose, that I had launched in December 2015. Now I can’t drive, and I can barely read. I get shots in my eyes every 10 weeks that slow the degeneration, but they won’t reverse the process.

On the positive side, Apple has wonderful accessibility options. I have a tablet that has very big type and I can sort of read it. I use voice-to-text technology for texting (it doesn’t work for email, alas), and I occasionally depend on the kindness of friends such as Nancy Friedman, who has helped me with this interview.

I can see my garden. I can see colors. I’ve always loved observing birds, and now, well, one of the things about birding that people don’t talk about is the sound. If you stand in the middle of the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge and cup your ears you hear a constantly changing cacophony.

What else is difficult? I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes about 30 years ago, and about 10 years ago I developed diabetic neuropathy, which means that my feet hurt all the time.

But he’s still Jon:

I refuse to vegetate, to lose interest in things, to let my curiosity atrophy. It’s a danger that we all face. It’s not an unreal temptation. How do you fight it? You talk. You think. You speculate. My granddaughter, who is 23, comes over here to hang out, not because we asked her to help but because she enjoys it. We play cribbage and talk about horses.

Here’s a thing a lot of old people are privately thinking: I’m really glad I’m not going to be around to see what 2050 will look like. I fear for my grandchildren. Our politics is controlled by billionaire boys who are enthusiastically letting the planet go to shit. I’m afraid the results of this little experiment in fascism will be sad. My granddaughter’s generation is the first that will do less well than their parents.

Bless him. And bless NN.C reader Nancy Friedman.

Newspapers — good ones — always had room for a writer or two like Jon. That was one of things I loved about them, the way you could just stumble across a column like his. Alan used to work with a guy named Ralph, a copy editor. At his retirement, a colleague talked about how Ralph also once wrote a weekly column called Mr. Cheap. It was all about entertainment to be had for free or not-much. One day Mr. Cheap went out to eat in Melvindale, a working-class suburb here, and witnessed a woman changing her baby’s diaper on the restaurant table. He ended up writing a hilarious dunking on ol’ Melvindale, just an over-the-top roast of the place. And Melvindale? Went insane over it. On the public-access cable channel, a crawl ran over all the programming for days, giving viewers the number to call to cancel their subscriptions. Was anyone in The Detroit News management worried about this? They were not. It was all funny. There were hundreds of thousands of subscribers then. There were many pages in the paper. They had to be filled somehow.

OK, then. The weekend is looming. The forecast: 90 degrees on Saturday, 96 on Sunday. And 98 on Monday. Kill me now.

The fun stuff first? OK. So I was at the market Saturday morning, when my attention was caught by this:

It’s a dancing Cleveland postcard! As I drew near, the tout working with the postcard had it spin around, where there was a QR code, which I scanned, which took me to a web page, which suggested I follow Destination Cleveland on Instagram. And just like that, I am entered for a chance to win a magical weekend in Cleveland. (Second prize? TWO weekends in Cleveland, har har.) The package includes baseball tickets, dinner at a brewery, admission to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, etc. Honestly? I hope I win. I always liked Cleveland, which is in many ways Detroit Junior, a post-industrial city that’s an ethnic mix of blue-collar muscle and great music. But what I want to point out is that the city formerly known as the Mistake on the Lake is rebranding itself as “The Land,” which is hilarious. My sports-watching friends say this campaign is visible in all the Guardians and Cavaliers broadcasts. I was unaware until Saturday. Now I am not.

Odds of winning? Slim. The dancing postcards were also downtown yesterday.

OK, now for the less-fun stuff. Obviously, the National Guard stuff in California is a terrible and terrifying escalation, and if there are any MAGA chuds reading this, isn’t it interesting how quickly the stated aim of deporting criminals has moved to home-improvement stores where day laborers congregate, hoping for work? Do you ever wonder, if these crews are such a threat to national security, why the arrests never seem to include the owners of the landscaping and construction companies who do this hiring?

Anyway, I fear it’s going to get very ugly. Who’s going to a protest on Saturday? I’ll be at the one in Detroit, which is, coincidentally, at Clark Park, in the heart of Mexicantown. We may be under martial law by then, of course.

A little bloggage:

Here’s a curtain-raiser in the WSJ about the new dawn at the Kennedy Center, as it prepares to launch under Dear Leader. There’s now a new position there, director of faith-based programming, and they’re off to a gangbusters start:

[New director Richard] Grenell requested a June 1 public screening of “The King of Kings,” an animated feature film about the story of Jesus, as told by the character of Charles Dickens. Grenell ordered that the free event take place in the center’s biggest venue, a 2,500-seat concert hall, at a projected cost of $29,000 for staffing, gratis popcorn and other expenses.

The event featured a prayer wall where visitors could post their written prayers for the nation, and was sponsored by the Museum of the Bible and Moxie Pest Control, whose founder made an unsuccessful run at a Republican U.S. Senate seat in Utah last year.

When advance sign-ups for tickets indicated a full house, Kennedy Center leaders added a second screening, increasing the total cost of the event.

Employees, who said there is typical attrition for free events, said the actual turnout left the hall 55% full for the first screening and 58% full for the second.

Brought to you by Moxie Pest Control! Comedy gold.

Meanwhile, I can recommend a podcast that Eric Zorn’s Substack alerted me to, although it’s a year old. (Like Cleveland’s rebranding, I totally missed it.) “Chameleon: The Michigan Plot” covers the conspiracy to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. And while everyone here knows my biases in this case, and while I recognize and understand the ways a storyteller can subtly tilt a tale in sympathy of one side or another, I must come away from this with a grudging admission: This was likely entrapment, or at least a very obvious push in that direction by the multiple FBI informants who were trying a little too hard to get a bunch of extremely stoned halfwits off their butts and into a plan. Quarter-wits, I should say — rarely has the tragedy of left-behind, uneducated, unmotivated Michigan manhood been so vividly portrayed as in the hours of covert recordings (most of which were never played in court) unspooled here. I found myself almost physically recoiling from listening to these guys talk about pretty much anything. They had atrocious grammar and little vocabulary beyond f-bombs. No wonder one of them lived in the basement of a vacuum repair shop.

OK, then. It’s Sunday, and I have a feeling the week ahead will be…not good. Maybe the TACO principle will apply; it would save a lot of bloodshed. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

One thing you get from a pain-in-the-ass head cold is a good excuse to skip early-morning workouts. I laid in bed this morning, scanning the news and listening to the foghorns on the far-away lake; apparently some warm air is in our forecast, and it was already making things murky on the water. Then I picked up my iPad and learned Kari Lake, the new head of Voice of America, has found a “content provider” to fill the VOA airwaves now that she’s fired the whole staff.

One America News. It is to weep.

I’m old enough to remember when Radio Free Europe was something a different America was so proud of it created ads to tell other Americans about. Like this one. I found it while searching for a similar one I remember: A peasant family in a gray hovel, babushkas on the women, everyone huddled around the probably-forbidden radio, one ear cocked to its speaker and the other listening for storm troopers outside, as the voice on it speaks in a foreign language, and then: “ze Drifters…on Broadvay.” The music from the tinny speaker washes over the faces, and you’re there with them, imagining these beaten-down people hearing this song about faraway America, not understanding it, but somehow understanding anyway. It was…stirring, in the best way.

Now, they’ll get Matt Gaetz and Chanel Rion. Man, this country. Such a steep slide.

What else is going on? The conclave! :::makes cheering-crowd sounds::: Perhaps you’ve heard about Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, one of the conclave. His name alone has made him a great favorite in St. Peter’s Square, at least among the Americans, who find it amusing. What I don’t find amusing? This:

Jerusalem CNN — Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, cuts an unmistakable figure in the dark corridors of the ancient, stone patriarchate in this troubled corner of the world. He moves quickly, in long, deliberate strides, the seams of his black cassock billowing like a swimmer’s stroke ahead of his arrival.

Block that metaphor! Sounds like someone at CNN recently attended a How to Write Good seminar, and took the wrong lesson home.

OK, my biggest deadline of the last couple weeks is behind me, but more remain, so I gotta skedaddle. Happy hump day, all.

The various elite news outlets of the world are doing their thing over fellow elitist Graydon Carter’s memoir, publishing…Tuesday, I expect. It does sound like an amusing, if name-droppy, read. But I was taken with this brief passage quoted in the NYT; it’s about certain rules Carter enforced when he edited Vanity Fair:

Out went words like abode, opine, plethora and passed away (for died). Out went glitzy, wannabe and even celebrity. Out went chops (for acting abilities), donned (as in put-on), A-list, boasted (as in had or featured), coiffed, eatery (for restaurant), flat (for apartment), flick (for movie) … honcho, hooker, schlep (as in to lug something somewhere), scribe (as in writer) and Tinseltown. All found their way into the copyedit boneyard.

Most of these words are journalese, i.e. the language spoken only in print. No one calls a writer a scribe except in print. No one says, “I don’t care for that Nancy Nall and her constant opining.” Once someone used the phrase “ink” to describe signing a contract in a casual conversation with me, and I kinda cringed. But the larger point is, all editors have such lists. One of my former bosses hated the word “butt” to describe the place where your legs join your back, and insisted it be replaced with “hips,” which isn’t even accurate. There was the guy who hated the word “moist,” in all its forms. I read Carter’s list to Alan because I spotted two of my husband’s on there – “donned” and “Tinseltown.” He also immediately strikes “mustachioed” if he sees it in any copy he handles. My own peeves are pretty much aligned. I despise any deep description of a person’s appearance, if that appearance is entirely ordinary, unless that ordinariness is important somewhere down the line. Back when newspapers had money, they’d send reporters to writing conferences, where well-known writers would say, “Describe people! Use adjectives!” And the reporters all came home and dutifully detailed the city manager’s khaki pants, Oxford-cloth button-down and navy blazer. I recall seeing one story that described a deer as “honey-colored.” They’re all honey-colored, hon; tell me if it’s a pinto.

OK, then. The last few days have been a little action-packed. I’m recertifying my lifeguarding credential, and it turns out the recert class is just the original class, but free. So it’s me and a dozen teenagers, and they are way stronger than me. But I’m hanging in there. Just way more tired. Also, the news of the day is bringing me down. I’m so disappointed in the waste of oxygen who calls himself one of my senators that I don’t know what to do. My old friend Vince the fellow Fellow describes himself as “beyond despondent.” If Democrats won’t fight, what good are they?

On edit: Here’s a beautiful story for St. Patrick’s Day. Gift link.

I’ve mentioned one of my “retirement” gigs here. I am on the social-media team for a local nonprofit, which I won’t name because they didn’t ask to have an online loudmouth in the group. I respect that. It’s enjoyable work and pays enough to make it worth my time. It won’t last forever, anyway, and that’s fine.

But as such, I am more or less required to have a Facebook account. I can use the nonprofit’s login for every other major platform — Xitter, Threads, Instagram — but because the Facebook presence is a “business” page, I can only access it from my own personal account. And Facebook is the 900-pound gorilla, still, of social media, where the vast majority of users who pay attention to us dwell.

Many of the people I used to follow with pleasure are leaving Facebook these days. Who can blame them? Of all the tech bros, Mark Zuckerberg’s grovel to Trump has been the most cringey. And the platform has deteriorated, sharply, in recent years. Not as bad as Xitter’s Nazification, true, but it’s just hot garbage now, for the most part. I think I might have mentioned a month or so, I was served a post about Secretariat, the mid-’70s Triple Crown winner, probably because I once clicked on a video of him winning the 1973 Belmont. The post included an AI picture, ostensibly of that very horse, only the markings were wrong, the jockey’s silks were wrong and — this part was hilarious — he was running the wrong way on the track. Then yesterday I was served another one, an AI rewrite of a famous anecdote about the first time Ron Turcotte (his jockey) saw Secretariat as a two-year-old. The illustration, also AI, was a horse with palomino paint markings, as different from Secretariat as George Clooney is from Donald Trump; the prompt was probably something like “beautiful horse.”

Who needs this shit? Not me.

But. There are still pockets of the platform, nearly all local, that I need to access to keep up with things happening around here. This, too, is increasingly like watching a sluice of bullshit fly by, with an occasional well-wrapped sandwich coming through. My community’s newspaper is terrible and used as a cudgel by its wealthy owner, so I don’t subscribe. The bullshit posts — Did I just hear gunshots? (18 hours ago) Does anyone know if a particular store is open? (12 hours ago) I’m mad the garbage collectors left my can tipped over!!! (3 days ago) — sometimes have a worthwhile Marketplace item tucked in there, or, even more rarely, news of interest.

And also, Facebook is probably the only place where a fair number of people who read what I have to say disagree with me. In other words, it’s still a target-rich environment for needling assholes.

Lately I’ve been reading about how we can resist the current catastrophe. I’ve been through my back-turning phase, and it’s over; my new resolution is simply to stop 2 a.m. doomscrolling. But not paying attention is a sucker’s game, in the end. We must pay attention. We just have to. And my skill is that I’m a writer, and a fairly good one. While I know that the aforementioned assholes may not even follow me — I certainly unfollowed many of them years ago — I also know we have to feel less alone these days, that we have fellow travelers out in the ether.

I stepped away from Facebook around New Year’s Day. I still comment here and there, but I haven’t made a new post, in writing, since then. I have changed my “cover” photo twice, to images that make clear how I feel about All This Shit, and the reaction to it makes me wonder if dropping the platform entirely (which, again, I can’t do with this job) isn’t the wrong strategy. Meet people where they are, in other words, and for now they’re still on Facebook.

If you’ve read this far, I’d be interested in opinions.

Jesus, what a week, which is to say, another fucking week. Here’s a treat, though, speaking of keeping up the good fight: A hilarious piece by Roy Edroso on the new, Trumpified Kennedy Center. It made me laugh and I hope it does the same for you. Happy Valentine’s Day.

I watched “Emilia Pérez” this week. It’s, shall we say, a rather experimental film. One critic described it as “Mrs. Doubtfire” meets “Sicario,” plus a musical. Written and directed by a Frenchman (and filmed almost entirely in Paris), it has received a buttload of cultural criticism; one critic noticed none of the characters in this Mexico-set story spoke Spanish with a Mexican accent. To this I can only shrug; it was so weird and imaginative it seemed to take place in a world where accents were the least of anyone’s worries. The plot, in a nutshell:

Rita, a female lawyer (Zoe Saldana) frustrated with her work, is plucked off the street, literally, by a Mexican drug lord, Manitas, who wants her to do an unusual service: To relocate him and his family, separately, to a place where his enemies will never find him or them. His motivation: He intends to complete his gender transition and become a woman. For this service Rita will be rewarded with riches beyond her wildest dreams. She does so; this is the first act. Manitas, now Emilia, is in London, his wife and children in Switzerland. After some years, Emilia misses her children and wants to live with them again, and Rita is again enlisted to reunite them, this time with the cover story that Emilia is a long-lost aunt, and this is where the Mrs. Doubtfire stuff comes in. The story gets even more spirited from there, and I won’t tell you more, other than to say: I liked it short of loving it. The performances were excellent, and I even identified with Emilia in the sense that we have similar high-school-linebacker-size bodies; every time I saw her in the frame with the Hollywood-tiny Saldana, or Selena Gomez, who plays her wife, I was startled by the contrast.

As a rule, the Oscar-bait films come out at the end of the year and I haven’t seen many this year. I get dispirited by 10 months of superheroes, toy-based crap, animated garbage and so forth in the local multiplexes, and can’t always find a dozen free weekends between Labor Day and the King holiday to cram all the good stuff in. I think the last thing we saw in theaters was “Megalopolis.” But we’ve set aside tonight for “A Complete Unknown,” so there.

Anyway, I’ve come to admire art that really swings for the fences, and while “Emilia Perez” has many many flaws, it does indeed do that.

It’s been a weird week. Every time I look at a news site, I see further evidence we’re doomed. I don’t want to look away, as many have; it’s our responsibility to stay woke, as we once said. But there are days I have to think about the movies for a while. So I leave you with some bloggage, OK?

A smart piece on Pamela Paul, departing NYT columnist.

Finally, a photo I’ve vividly remembered from my college years, and could never find, until the name the photographer gave it when it made the contest rounds came to me all at once, burped up by my memory. A quick Google, and there it was. Not wanting to violate whatever copyright might still pertain, here’s a link. The backstory: The Ohio KKK held a rally on the Statehouse steps and some anti-racists showed up to fuck up their shit, so to speak. One made it all the way to where the Grand Wizard, or whatever those douchebags call themselves, was standing and delivered a fine blow, caught at the exact instant of impact by a UPI photographer. Title: “The Wizard Gets Walloped,” an image that regrettably will probably be duplicated in our own time. This may mark me as old-school, but I love, purely love, black-and-white news photography, and no video will ever change that.

Have a good weekend, all. Welcome to new readers. Thanks for stopping by.

I read “Misery.” Saw the movie, too. I recall Stephen King talking in an interview about his inspiration for the novel, i.e. meeting his fans, and how quickly they can turn from “I love every word you’ve ever written, including the grocery lists” to “I will kill you, you motherfucker.” Usually this happens because you’ve turned down a fan’s perfectly reasonable request, perhaps that you come to their home, lay hands on their dying grandparent, and then stand as godparent to their child.

I have listened to “Stan,” the Eminem song that gave the world “stan,” lower-case, as a word for a certain kind of superfan. I’m aware of the Swifties, the Beyhive, and probably a dozen other self-named fan groups. There was an Amazon series a year or two back about a woman who was devoted to a fictional pop star similar to Beyonce, and I watched it, or enough of it. And Kate’s partner works at a local business founded by a local celebrity, and he talks about the superfans who come in, and solemnly hand the staff pictures they’ve drawn and other stuff, begging that they pass it along to that celebrity.

So I know that today’s fandom is nothing like yesterday’s, at least in my opinion. (Yes, I know about the suicides after Rudolph Valentino’s death, ditto Elvis, but the internet changed everything, and you’ll never convince me otherwise.)

This week I read the New York magazine piece on Neil Gaiman, the fantasy novelist. It starts out being a fairly familiar piece about Gaiman being, as we say now, “problematic,” but if you stick with it, it gets darker and darker, and while I have a long-standing policy of judging art, not artists, I finished it tempted to burn every Gaiman book in my possession. (One, as it turns out, with another on the Kindle app.) He stands revealed as not just a sexual abuser, but a sexual assailant, a particularly nasty variety of same, as well as a parent who should probably never see his child again. His ex-wife, Amanda Palmer, doesn’t come off much better.

There will no doubt be plenty of commentary on Gaiman, and the claims made by the women in the story, but I want to talk about fandom, as described in two short passages from a very long article:

Women would turn up to his signings dressed in the elaborate Victorian-goth attire of his characters and beg him to sign their breasts or slip him key cards to their hotel rooms. One writer recounts running into Gaiman at a World Fantasy Convention in 2011. His assistant wasn’t around, and he was late to a reading. “I can’t get to it if I walk by myself,” he told her. As they made their way through the convention side by side, “the whole floor full of people tilted and slid toward him,” she says. “They wanted to be entwined with him in ways I was not prepared to defend him against.” A woman fell to her knees and wept.

People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an “inherently vulnerable community,” one of Gaiman’s former friends, a fantasy writer, tells me. They “wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity,” she says. They want to share their souls with the creators of these works. “And if you have morality around it, you say ‘no.’”

It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Gaiman did not have morality around it, at least with some of them. But mercy! That quote about self-identity — that hits the nail on the head. I have my own fan enthusiasms, to be sure, but they begin and end with wearing a band’s T-shirt to their next show. I’ve met enough people I admire to know that “never meet your heroes” advice is sound. And yet, today’s fandoms seem to always take it too far.

It’s the larping and the cosplay — speaking of two words I had to look up, and not that long ago — and the WhateverCons and the fanfic (another one) and the cultivation of websites and Reddit groups, so you can find other people who share your enthusiasm and will talk-talk-talk about it with you forever. Until it seems perfectly reasonable to fall to your knees, weeping, when the object of your obsession passes close by. And those people become sitting ducks for the sort of abuse Gaiman dished out. (It should be noted that the worst of the abuse detailed in the article was inflicted upon babysitters, but there were ugly incidents with fans, too.)

Fans are important, of course, but if you ever wonder why your favorite actors, musicians, writers, et al have to live behind walls and fences, and rarely go out in public, and have to hold themselves aloof from the rest of humanity, well, this is one reason.

Various people have postulated over the years that the loss of religion on a wide scale led to…all sorts of stuff. Our obsession with our bodies, with food and diets, our naive belief that we are somehow perfectible. It suggests that worship — of God, of heroes — is something we need. Jesus is a pretty good role model, all around. Beats a novelist.

How’s your week going?

Because I once clicked on a Facebook post about Secretariat’s win in the 1973 Belmont Stakes, I now get lots of Secretariat content shoveled at me on that platform. The other day a pic came up, allegedly of Secretariat racing in the Belmont, except that the markings on the horse were wrong, the tack was wrong and the horse was going the wrong way on the track. Many of these garbage postings are from groups with names like “We love secretariat,” no capitalization, or from accounts attached to individuals allegedly named “An Du” or “Moo Iu,” or suchlike. In other words, they’re AI crap.

The explosion of AI crap is not confined to a crap platform like Facebook. So-called pink slime journalism is everywhere, too. The other day a local lunatic posted a story from one of those sites, and it’s obvious — stories based on data scrapes about school testing, all with the same picture. Weird hiccups like opinion columns from 2021, themselves aggregations of crap published elsewhere, popping up on the home page. The parent company publishes dozens of these things in Michigan alone; their domain registry is anonymous, of course.

People sometimes ask if I miss journalism. I do not.

Facebook, or Meta, made news yesterday when Mark Zuckerberg announced he was bending the knee and shitcanning the platform’s fact-checking, in favor of “community notes,” the same as Xitter does. My first reaction: Facebook does fact-checking? I haven’t seen a checked fact on that shit-tastic platform in ages. Even the AI Secretariat got past.

I have a decent monthly stipend doing social-media work for one client. If I didn’t, I’d be outta there justlikethat.

In other news at this hour, Los Angeles is on fire. Hope LA Mary and any readers we might have out that way are staying safe. Kate and I just texted, and she wondered if the unpaid interns who succeeded her at her 2019 gig are stuffing the boss’ valuables into their own cars and fleeing in those cars, while the boss evacuates in some more dignified conveyance, maybe a golden helicopter or a flying limo. Not that she is bitter, but those four months turned her into a hard-core lefty.

Funny how there are some people who go through a rough period as a bottom-of-the-ladder underling and think, “I can’t wait until I’m a boss and can shit on people, too!” and others think, “When I become a boss, I will never shit on people the way I was shit on.” Proud to have raised the latter type, but I can’t take credit for it. Like all human beings, she basically emerged from the womb fully herself. I just fed her.

OK, work calls.