Been running hard the last few days, and it caught up with me Sunday. Didn’t get much done, other than a fair amount of reading. Finished Louis Bayard’s “The Pale Blue Eye” and started “Hotel Ukraine,” the final Renko novel by the recently departed Martin Cruz Smith. Soon I’ll go downstairs and make…something for dinner. Can’t decide between chicken-sesame noodles or a New York strip. What would you guys choose? My decision center appears to have gone on strike.

But I’m using the instruction I used to give Kate when she was potty-training: Listen to your body. And mine, right now, is saying Chill.

It also told me to stop reading the news after I made my appalled way through this almost unbelievable NYT piece (gift link), the top of which I’ll paste because FOR FUCK SAKE:

Hours after West Point pulled its offer to have her teach cadets, Jen Easterly posted a short essay in which she laid out what happened to her and what it meant for the country.

“This isn’t about me,” she wrote last week. “This is about something larger.”

Over three decades, Ms. Easterly, 57, had compiled an impeccable résumé as a West Point graduate, a Rhodes Scholar and an Afghanistan war veteran. She had served as a key aide on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council and led a critical cybersecurity agency under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Now she was blackballed — in her own words, “a casualty of casually manufactured outrage that drowned out the quiet labor of truth and the steady pulse of integrity.”

The source of the casual outrage arrayed against her was Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator and self-described “Islamophobe,” who has become a powerful and largely unaccountable enforcer in President Trump’s Washington.

This. This is why I can barely look the few known MAGAts in my life in the eye anymore, for fear I might start frothing at the mouth about BALLROOMS and HEGSETH and ROSE GARDEN WTF and JEANINE PIRRO and now booting a woman who has literally given her impressive life to the service of the United States, on the word of a lunatic who was, as one Bluesky user pointed out, banned for life from Uber and Lyft for harassing the Muslim drivers. If I am triggered, well then I am triggered. I’m tipping into despair. Mission accomplished.

At least we’re given some comic relief, in that the president so overweight and out of shape that he drives his fucking golf carts onto the greens of his many courses is the one who is resurrecting the President’s Physical Fitness Test. A million brains lit up the grid with the same thought: You first.

Look at the photo at that last link (it’s a free one). There’s President Tubby, doing the same mommy-lookit-my-pitcher-I-drew thing of holding up the signed executive order (because that’s the only way he knows how to get anything done), while his younger staff of toadies and ass-kissers chuckle in the background. No doubt every one is also thinking: You First. Also note that the one is “WWE Chief Creative Officer Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque,” no doubt fresh from paying condolences to Hulk Hogan’s family, after the Hulkster, allegedly a picture of strength and power, croaked at the relatively young age of 71. Heart attack, surely not at ALL related to the various drugs he gobbled like candy throughout his adult life.

Such fine role models. Loomer, who isn’t 35 yet, has had enough plastic surgery to resemble the Joker, and young men are gobbling dozens of dodgy supplements to achieve the Chad-like look they think will get women of a higher class than Loomer to fuck them. If that isn’t the Trump administration in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.

Oh, and let’s not forget Bobby Jr., another one almost certainly juicing. Well, may his shrunken testicles be a testament to his dedication.

Finally, really New York Times?! Here’s another paragraph in the Loomer/Easterly story:

And it raises big questions about the ways power and influence are currently wielded in Washington; what it means to be a patriot; and whether loyalty to Mr. Trump or any sitting president should be a prerequisite for government service.

RAISES QUESTIONS? JFC, no wonder I just want to read light crime fiction these days.

Here’s one lighter item, something new for the Nall/Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere Back 40. Did you know petunias can come up volunteer? I did not, but several little patches have popped up in the cutest places, like at the foot of our river birch:

It’s kind of like a Bambi forest. I like it.

Anyway, the new week is about to begin. Let’s hope lighting strikes someone who richly deserves it. Oh, and P.S. I’m making the steak. Turned out I didn’t have any peanut butter in the house.

I woke up super-groggy today, not uncommon when the alarm goes off at 5 a.m. I didn’t have enough time before my workout class to hit Starbucks for a cappuccino with an extra shot, but I did have time to hit the McDonald’s drive-through. Small black coffee, please. It was 5:45 a.m.

Pulled around to the window, where I was asked for 96 cents. “Really?” I said. “That seems low. I’m sure it’s more than that.”

“Well, with the senior discount, that’s what it is,” the window lady said, prompting me to ask how she knew I was a senior, goddamnit. (I didn’t say the goddamnit.) “Do you have cameras back there at the menu board?”

“This early, small black coffee? I just figured,” she said, handing me back a nickel. So really, 95 cents.

This is my life now, I guess. Little encounters with McDonald’s employees.

The class was good, but insanely hot and muggy. The weather is supposed to break tomorrow. And this is the rest of my life, I guess: McDonald’s and the weather.

This blog, too. A story hooked me the other day with its headline.

The Website at the End of the Internet: Reddit is one of the last thriving islands of the old web. Can it survive AI?

The question remains to be answered. Also:

The World Wide Web from which Reddit grew, and for which Huffman expresses so much reverence, has been going through something akin to ecological collapse after being poisoned, then abandoned, by advertisers that have little use for independent websites anymore. At the same time, the rise of generative AI suggests a lot of people are just as happy — if not happier — getting life advice, news, and conversation from a robot that has read a bunch of sub-Reddits as they are chatting with internet strangers themselves.

It gets way more into the weeds of Reddit and the internet than I’m interested in, but the bottom line is the same thing you’ve no doubt read elsewhere, because it’s an old story: Humans are a disappearing feature of the internet, steadily being replaced by bots and AI garbage yammering at one another. If you spend any time at all online, you’ve surely noticed it. If you’ve been online as long as some of us have, well, you really know. It’s easy to remember the early years of everyone being connected; oh, you like this obscure artist or singer/songwriter or movie or hobby TOO? Let’s be friends! Send me an email! I’ll write you back!

No more.

On the other hand, I have become oddly fixated with some Reddit groups — or subreddits, I guess. The amount of time people have to waste online talking about the stupidest shit imaginable is almost awe-inspiring.

Anyway, here you are: Human-powered blather since 2001. Fool that I am.

I would generally have a little more bloggage for you, but the news these days has been so depressing, I feel a little overmatched by it. You know, of course, that Ghislaine Maxwell is cruising toward a commutation or pardon, right? Emil Bove, lying thug, cruising toward a late-term Trump appointment to SCOTUS. Israel is run by thugs, and also liars. Even the coming of pleasant weather will be prefaced by a storm. Earthquake in Russia, tsunamis in the Pacific — it’s just not a good-news kinda week.

But there’s this: David Von Drehle is quitting the WashPost. Here’s his last column. It’s short, elegant and good.

That’s what I got.

Friday was indeed the perfect summer day the forecast promised, and so in late afternoon I told Alan we needed to truck the bikes to Belle Isle, do a half-loop, then head down the Riverwalk to Valade Park, where Bob’s Barge would be open. Bob’s Barge is a bar, on a floating platform right on the water, so you drink your beer looking out at the river and gently rising and falling with each passing vessel.

And so that’s what we did. It resembled what Jeff Borden once described as the ideal exercise, i.e. like sex: “You work a little, you get a reward, you go to sleep.”

But the real focus of the weekend was on Sunday, when this happened:

The girls played the Concert of Colors, an annual summer weekend of music that takes place downtown, mostly on the grounds of the DIA. The “colors” part refers to diversity, so as an all-female band, that counted. They had a serious delay getting onstage (tech issues) but sounded great once there, and had some new-music tricks up their sleeve, including some lovely harmonies.

There was this bomb-ass art car that looks like a roach parked out front. I believe the people who built it call it the Carcroach.

I was briefly left in charge of the merch. The view from the merch tent:

I shared the table with the merch guy for War. Obviously War, having had a several-decade head start, was doing more business than I was, but it was fun talking to him. He was like LA Mary’s son, only Hispanic and 20 years older (at least).

Now we’re home again, I’m tired, so here’s some bloggage:

Here’s some comic relief for you, where you don’t have to see his face or hear his voice.

At the Alligator Alcatraz press conference a reporter asked Trump what he planned to do to fulfill his next campaign promise. His full response was six minutes long. This is a verbatim reading of part of his answer. You won't have to listen to his voice or see his face.

[image or embed]

— Decoding Fox News (@decodingfoxnews.bsky.social) July 6, 2025 at 6:35 AM

But remember, it’s Biden who was demented.

FWIW, and we’ve covered this here before, all of our appliances are EnergyStar (RIP) rated as efficient, and I’ve noticed zero difference in their efficacy. They may even work better, at least as it relates to toilet-flushing, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

A long, but skimmable gift-link transcript of a NYT conversation with Julie Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who broke the Epstein story way back when. From time to time in recent years I’ll ask one of my Columbus friends, “So how are people talking about Les Wexner now that he’s been so roped to Epstein?” And the answer, inevitably, is a blank look.

But first: Do you think that some form of the intelligence world — and Epstein’s connections to it — played any role in why he got off so lightly the first time?

Brown: I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody really knows except the people in the government that have these files. And I think that’s, in part, one of the unanswered questions about Epstein, because I just don’t know. I know there’s a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, I try to stick to the facts, and so it’s just something we don’t know for sure.

Douthat: Yeah. I’m drawing on your view about your skepticism around the blackmail narrative. There’s two intelligent stories you could tell: One, Epstein is literally an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the U.S. government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That’s the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence.

So this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as a conduit of information. But it’s not that he’s being run as a kind of entrapment ring. If we don’t think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.

Hmm. Interesting. But I think it’s time for bed. Zzzzzz.

It doesn’t qualify as a profound insight to notice that every child — hell, every person — alive today will have their photo taken a million times before they check out. Maybe more than that, if you throw in security cameras, which I’m not. I’m talking about how, as cameras have become omnipresent, we’re all more comfortable with having our picture taken.

If you grew up in the era where your parents might expose a single roll of film in six months, it’s a little unnerving. Yes, it’s great to have a bunch of pictures of your family. Yes, it’s also weird to point a camera at a child, and have them immediately step into a pose and flash a big insincere smile, the way mom and dad taught them. Where are the sullen teens of yore? Whatever.

Anyway, that’s all leading up to this: One of the things I did this weekend was go through some family pictures and artifacts my sister’s been keeping. I brought home my birth certificate, my high-school diploma, and a few snapshots.

My dad and his dad, whom I never met, c. 1943. My dad was meticulous in his appearance, and had his uniform tailored to his specifications. Looking at my grandfather, I can see it ran in the family.

I don’t know when that was taken, but St. Louis was a hot city. Imagine wearing a three-piece suit in that humidity.

Me and my brother, and me and my sister. This would be our house in Kansas City, most likely:

I had a bad problem with blinking when flashbulbs went off.

My very earliest memories were in that house; I think I must have been about…4? Maybe? After K.C., it was on to Columbus, where we settled and stayed.

Now these photos have been scanned and digitized, but I’ll keep the originals, where they’ll live in my family until Kate takes them, or throws them away, or they burn up in a fire.

I should toss my high-school diploma, though. Finishing high school is so bare-minimum, I wonder why anyone hangs on to theirs. But it seems wrong, somehow. Mine still has the sheet of onionskin paper that covers the precious diploma itself. It’s a thing of value! It cost the state of Ohio something to educate me. Better find a box to stash it in.

Also, this: I applied for a job a few years ago, not really wanting it, but curious what it might involve, and I was rejected for, get this, failing to attach a college transcript to my application, which was submitted online, of course. I think my college transcript must be in a moldy box in the basement of the registrar’s office, but never mind that, because it makes a pretty good segue to the bloggage, which today is a little dated. I’ve been throwing links into a blank doc for a few days now, so let’s lead with the evisceration of Indiana University, victim of a MAGA governor seeking to polish his national profile by gutting a fine institution. All in the name of “efficiency” and the needs of the job market, of course, which tracks with the right-wing insistence that college need be nothing more than a trade school for middle managers. (At least for your kids. The elite layer of the GOP will continue to send their offspring to the Ivies.) This Chicago Tribune editorial strikes the right note of are-you-kidding-me indignation, more so than any Indiana newspaper I’ve seen. But then, lots of IU journalism grads find jobs in Chicago, so no surprise there.

Here’s an amusing obit for a 105-year-old woman, a real GP OG, as I like to think of these dowagers:

Louise Booth, 105, passed away peacefully Thursday, July 3, 2025, at her home facing Lakeshore between Beacon Hill and Kerby in Grosse Pointe Farms. She was still of sound mind.

That’s a Booth of Booth Newspapers, back when owning newspapers was like owning a gold mine. They sold to Newhouse years and years ago, but they must have invested the pile wisely. Later paragraphs give the exact address of the house, in case any funeral burglars were confused. And while the obit isn’t amusing in the fashionable current trend of basically calling someone a lovable jerk — she seemed like a nice lady — I find any obit for someone who lasts that long into the postseason uplifting to read. Especially as she was still of sound mind.

The Sean Combs verdict happened so long ago it already feels like ancient history, but Monica Hesse at the WP has done a couple of good columns about it, which you can look up. This one, about so-called Alligator Alcatraz, is very good, too:

The point is that serious matters — the most serious matters, the matters of constitutionality, due process, citizenship and who gets to be an American — are, in this administration, being increasingly presented as cheap entertainment. You see it in the U.S. Border Patrol playing the power ballad “Closing Time” over footage of a scared looking young man being placed in handcuffs and shepherded onto a plane. You see it in the White House posting a video of detained migrants being processed for deportation, set to a hit from Bananarama.

Is it funny? Is it awful? Is it trolling or real life? The point is that we are not supposed to know. Alligator Alcatraz is a dehumanizing place, but when it is treated as spectacle, it’s not just the prisoners there who lose their humanity. We all do. The effect is to tell Americans not to take any of this too seriously. Families are being ripped apart, but it’s all for the lulz. We are dancing on the edges of constitutionality, but it’s making great television. We have become tonally incoherent, incapable of even determining tone. If Guantánamo Bay opened today, there would be a themed restaurant out back with happy hour specials taglined “Git mo’ at Gitmo.”

…I used to wonder about Roman gladiator battles. What kind of society would pack up a picnic lunch and go watch other humans, the enslaved or prisoners of war, forced to battle each other to the death? Another part of the gladiator legend is that these men were forced to fight large beasts, large carnivorous predators. But there was no physical evidence for that until just a few months ago in April, when archaeologists analyzed giant bite marks on the unearthed skeleton of a 1,800-year-old gladiator. Then it was confirmed: lions. In what society would this be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon?

Finally, a really interesting Atlantic story (gift link, as is the WP link above) about so-called customer-service sludge. Having recently spent 90 minutes on hold with the IRS without getting anyone on the line, I can identify. It’s maddening.

Here’s something weird about where I went to school. In junior high, there was always a talent show, and there were always two acts, one of boys and one of girls, who would dress up like the Temptations (the boys), or the Supremes (the girls), and their act would be lip-syncing and dancing to one of their hits. What’s more, it was always the most popular members of the class who did so, and no, there were no runner-up groups. It’s like it was chosen by some in-group election. The best-looking athletes were the Temptations, and the prettiest pretty girls were the Supremes. The boys wore the matching fly suits, and the girls the sequined gowns. It was always the ninth graders, too — no underclassmen allowed. It was like you were already popular, then the cream of the popular crowd was skimmed to do these acts, and it went on year after year.

Did I mention the class was 100 percent white? It was.

So you had these two acts, which were sandwiched between the kids who could sing, dance or play an instrument, or do something else. They got the most applause, mainly because it was very popular kids and very popular music and the talent show mostly didn’t traffic in pop music. So you’d dutifully watch someone do a dramatic monologue, or play the violin, and then there they were: The White Temptations, lip-syncing to “I Can’t Get Next to You.” The song came to the climax, and the kid doing the lead vocal snatched the dead mic off the stand and does his little freestyle boogie to girl you’re blowing my mind ’cause I can’t get next to you and the crowd of junior-high kids went wild.

The White Supremes would do their thing a few acts later. The only thing I’ve ever seen to compare to it is the scene in “Mean Girls” when the plastics do “Jingle Bell Rock,” which suggests this is one of those things that happen at certain schools.

I thought about this at my 50-year high school reunion this weekend. I can’t recall who any of the Temptations or Supremes were, but I remember the weirdness of it. The class was still 100 percent white at graduation, although there was one black kid in the previous year’s class, the son of…I believe…an OSU professor. Some goobers from one of the unincorporated townships burned a cross on their lawn. The community outrage was pretty pitched, if only because this grave insult was perpetrated by people who didn’t even live there.

Now, of course, Upper Arlington is quite diverse, with people of color everywhere. One notable resident? Vivek Ramaswamy. I considered going to the July 4 parade, on the chance he might be in it (he’s running for governor) and I could yell something rude, but the entire weekend was very, very hot, and well, the hell with that idea.

The reunion was fun. The food was fine, the crowd was dense, the space air-conditioned, but just barely enough. I saw a lot of people I haven’t seen for a while. I saw my old weed man, who has changed so much it’s still hard to believe. He’s now neighbors with Jorma Kaukonen. I saw a friend I used to smoke weed with, and he told me about being in the Navy, and smoking weed there, and watching planes land on the carrier deck. (“So is this why they keep sliding off the edge?” I asked.) I saw lots and lots of people, and bought a round of drinks for a stranger behind me in the bar line, because most of my enormous high-school class are strangers.

I’m still processing, and it’s still insanely hot They say this was the last reunion. So I’ll have more later. I leave you with this: Me in eighth grade, never to be a White Supreme. Dig my subversive peace-sign button:

While we’re on the subject of MAGA, MAHA and Whole Foods, I want to make a couple points:

Jakash is right in the comments from earlier: The 365 house brand at Whole Foods is really very good, and when I do go there, I tend to stock up on that stuff. It is not a store with no part to play in the marketplace other than to suck money out of your pocket.

Here’s the other thing, and I’m asking this with a pure heart. In the discussion over so-called seed oils, the argument against them — which is the argument against a lot of things MAHA finds fault with — is that they cause, or lead to, or aggravate “inflammation.” But what, exactly, is being inflamed? That part is never precisely explained, and if it is, it’s with sort of a hand-waving oh-you-know, indicating a place where inflammation is hard to quantify. I mean, if you get an infected cut, that’s easy to see. But inflammation affecting “gut health,” a big one in the MAHA canon, is not. I can pretty much eat everything and not suffer for it, which is, I know, enormous good luck. (I sometimes wish my stomach were more sensitive, and would maybe reject salt, grease and sugar, instead of gleefully adding it to my thighs, in case we need it in the coming winter.) Anyway, gut problems, absent inflammation, can mean anything from nausea to gross stuff further down the line.

So what do I need to know about inflammation? How can I tell if anything on the inside is inflamed?

In other news at this hour, I made a small decorating change yesterday, picking up a secondhand table that I used to replace the one on my side of the bed. It’s one of those newfangled ones with an integrated power strip, so I can accommodate chargers and my illuminated clock and lamps and all the stuff we want plugged in at our bedside, which wasn’t the case when the house was wired, 80 years ago.

The one I was replacing was a square, lidded basket from Ikea, and I hadn’t opened it in a while. Apparently I’d been using it to store books, similar to the piles on top. Two I hadn’t read:

FWIW, I didn’t need the Northrup book when I hit the Big M, because it was by and large a seamless transition. Again: Lucky me. Later, Northrup would go insane during Covid. And I’m not sure how Ron Jeremy found his way into the house. I’m sure it was a freebie from somewhere, but I never cracked it. You know what? I’m gonna read it, or at least read in it. If anything can distract me from the current crisis, it’s the Hedgehog.

But I also found some good books that I’d just tucked in there for one reason or another. One of my quirks is, I use ephemera for bookmarks. It feels good to open a novel I’d enjoyed years later and find a receipt from a restaurant where I read it over lunch. I opened an old Martin Cruz Smith hardcover and found? The mixing solution for the hair color I got on my last appointment in Fort Wayne; my stylist told me to give these hieroglyphics to my new stylist and she could figure it out. I looked at it for a moment, and? Reader, I threw it away. This constitutes personal growth, for me.

Finally, check out this weirdness, which I found via Roy. As ghastly as the content is, the comments would seem to indicate dozens of credulous Christians believe it is real. (Wait. It just occurred to me that the comments are fake, too.) I told someone the other day that I understand that perhaps someday, artificial intelligence will spot a tumor on a scan of mine, something that was missed by the exhausted and overworked radiologist, and that we may have to suffer through some misery to get there. Remember when your computer would freeze and you’d lose all your work, and now we have autosave? Yeah, like that. But just consider, at a time when the Trump administration is doubling down on fossil fuels, these AI party tricks consume insane amounts of energy, and data centers are being built all over to suck it up. When a rolling blackout hits your neighborhood in a heat wave, just consider: It was for this.

And with that? HAVE A NICE DAY, SUCKERS. I’m going to my high-school reunion at week’s end, and will likely be too jammed up to write anything more. Happy Independence Day. Maybe we can enjoy independence for a while longer.

There are two kinds of sellers at Eastern Market, most Saturdays: Growers and wholesalers. The first group grows their own produce, the second buys in bulk at the produce terminal, packages it separately and sells at a pretty good, better-than-grocery-store price. There’s no deception here, unless a customer is dumb enough to believe Michigan has a citrus crop.

Sometimes I stop at a particular wholesaler early, because he sells limes three for a dollar and we’re into lime cocktail season. This week I had to wait while the seller, clearly exasperated, searched his phone for CashApp, so a buyer could pay him $12. And call me boomer as much as you like, but this is ridiculous.

The guy I buy eggs from says this happens all the time and increases every year, because young people are abandoning cash. What’s more, older people like me seem to think it’s perfectly fine to pay for $7 worth of eggs with a $100 bill. Which is also ridiculous, unless you’re at a meat counter buying prime rib. I was reading a Facebook group for residents of my city, and there was an indignant business owner complaining that the city hadn’t enabled a parking app for its meters, and “no one carries change anymore, especially young people.” That may well be true; the manager of the waterpark I worked at two years ago noted it was taking longer every year to close out the registers in the snack bar, because younger people were simply bedeviled by quarters and dimes, and strained to count them.

I use an app to park in Detroit, because the kiosks that take cash are often inoperable, enforcement is robust, tickets are expensive and I’m nearly always staying at least an hour, which makes the transaction fee negligible. Plus, the cost to park is, for a major city, miniscule — a dollar an hour.

But in Grosse Pointe? To pop in and out of the dry cleaner? I keep an Altoids tin in my dashboard cubbyhole, filled with change. I put in a dime, get 12 minutes and leave with six still available for the next lucky parker. If I use the app, they’ll tack on a 40-cent transaction fee. The hell with that.

Add this to the list of Shit I Thought I’d Never See: That cash would become a problem.

So! The heat wave has arrived where I am. Two hours until noon, and it’s already 86. Yesterday it started cool enough that I could wear long pants, and by 1 p.m. it was oppressive. The next three days will be worse. But this is the climate we have chosen, so.

There is good bloggage, too:

Thanks to Nancy Friedman for posting, in the last thread, this Jon Carroll column, “13 Things You Should Know About My Mother,” published on M-Day 2005. (If you get a register-to-read pop-up, just reload a time or two.) Things I learned:

1 She was adopted into a wealthy family in Grosse Pointe, Mich. Her father was a politician.

2 She left Grosse Pointe to go to Vassar. When she graduated, she was supposed to return home and marry one of 200 eligible rich boys. Instead, she went to Hartford, Conn., and got a secretarial job in an insurance company.

…4 She met my father, who was poor, Irish and Roman Catholic. She married him. She was disinherited.

She never saw her father again. Well, that is a very Old Grosse Pointe thing to do to a daughter, if I do say so. Also:

8 When I was 8, she was waiting for a bus when an ash from a cigarette dropped on her pretty summer frock, and the frock erupted in flames. A passing motorist took her to the hospital. The scars on her legs took 25 years to heal.

This is the second woman I’ve heard of, suffering such a mishap. (The writer Eve Babitz was the other.) Jon’s mother’s would have happened in the 1950s, but Babitz’ was in 1997, when I like to think consumer-protection laws had largely shielded American skirt-wearers from clothing that could burst into flames. (I imagine the Trump administration is working hard to roll back these regulations, don’t you?) Maybe Babitz, famous hippie eccentric, was wearing a thrifted or imported-from-a-country-where-they-don’t-believe-in-that skirt. Whatever, a good summation on a mother’s life.

From national treasure Eli Saslow, a deep read on the spring 2025 measles outbreak in Texas. Saslow is able to get into anyone’s confidence, and portrays these…what’s the word? antivax idiots, yes. These antivax idiots come across sympathetically, but my heart was left as cold as stone. Here’s the local chiropractor, who does a lot of non-chiropractic health care in West Texas:

Most of what he remembered about measles came from an old “Brady Bunch” episode, where the children celebrated staying home from school and played board games. “If you have to get sick, sure can’t beat the measles,” one of the children said. …“I feel like I’ve been lied to,” Kiley told his wife as his fever rose to 104 degrees.

“Lied to” by a sitcom, check. More:

For more than a decade, Kiley and Carrollyn had debated whether to vaccinate their children. Each time, they decided against it. … In recent years, as many as 15 percent of families in West Texas school districts had applied for “conscientious exemptions” from the M.M.R. vaccine. What Carrollyn feared more than measles was the remote possibility that her children might experience an adverse reaction to the shots. Two of her younger siblings had been vaccinated and had then suffered from high fevers that led to febrile seizures — scary convulsions that lasted several minutes but didn’t cause permanent damage.

“My children won’t see this disease in their lifetimes,” she always concluded. “The vaccine would probably be fine, but why take an unnecessary risk?”

The takeaway from the story is, lots and lots and lots of people not only got measles, but not the Brady Bunch board-games variety. This was a severe outbreak, with high fevers, intestinal distress and more. All four of the chiropractor’s children had to be hospitalized. Bobby Kennedy should be horsewhipped.

Finally, if you have an HBO account, I highly recommend “Surviving Ohio State,” a documentary (a film, not a series, thank God) on the sexually abusive sports doctor there, Richard Strauss. It’s a familiar story, similar to the same narrative with Dr. Robert Anderson at U-M — rumors for years, student athletes complaining of fondling during exams, an actual penetrated-while-drugged rape, etc. — but no one did anything, not one thing, about it. No, wait, there was one coach who tried to get OSU to take action. A woman, of course, coach to both the men’s and women’s fencing teams. One of the villains of the piece is none other than U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. It’s good.

The Iraq Iran bombing I don’t have the capacity to discuss right now. But you all feel free.

OK, then. On to confront the heat and figure out a plan for the day. I’ll probably work, because why the hell not.

On Mondays I “sleep late,” which is to say, I don’t set the alarm and wake up whenever. On Monday I woke at 6, tried to read for a while and drifted back to sleep, and learned my subconscious still has some tricks up her sleeve, i.e., a brand-new anxiety dream:

I’d invited two people to come to dinner, and had shopped and prepped food for all of us. They arrived, and before I could even shut the door, more people were standing on the front step, and apparently I’d invited them, too. This went on and on, and the house filled up with people expecting a meal. I never got around to serving anything, because issues kept arising in the party crowd — someone needed this moved from the second floor to the first, etc. It seemed to never end until I finally woke up, feeling very befuddled.

If only I’d invited Jesus. I understand he has a hack for feeding a multitude.

I’m well-acquainted with anxiety dreams, and have been working on them for some time. They started with the classic Test Dream (I’m seated for the final, and realize I’ve never attended this class). After my formal schooling ended, it became the Deadline Dream (an editor is expecting something, and I’ve done no reporting). My Feet Are Mired in Mud, self-explanatory in the central imagery. And so on. Now it’s the Dinner Party Dream.

Sigh. Very Monday, that one.

Jason T. posted this piece from the Bulwark on his socials, and I think it’s worth a read. Excerpt:

Biden’s biggest failure was that his theory of America was wrong.

He could have governed as a radical intent on destroying the populist project. This would have meant aggressively pursuing criminal charges against Trump and his confederates. It would have meant forgoing normal legislation in order to pursue broad, systemic change. Such a course would have been risky and — probably — unpopular.

Instead, Biden governed like a normal president in a normal moment. He pursued mostly popular, mostly incremental reforms. He forged bipartisan majorities. He passed a lot of legislation, most of it focused on concrete items to improve the lives of American citizens even—especially—in red states.

Biden’s belief was that the Trump moment was an aberration and that America could return to its liberal equilibrium if he governed normally and gave the Republican party space to heal itself and turn away from its authoritarian project.

Biden’s theory of the case was shredded by events.

Like many of you, I’ve been marinating in takes about Biden since That Book dropped. (May I say here that I have never been so happy to be quit of cable news as I have been this week, as I understand CNN has been shameless in flogging their star anchor’s work product.) And I share the frustration many of you have, that the coverage of a dying man who is no longer president has not even been matched at all by coverage of a senile man who is president. But at the same time, I don’t think we can ignore that covering for the president’s infirmity has gotten us here, where Democrats who haven’t even filed to run for office, any office, will be asked to somehow defend the work of people they don’t know, in events they had no control over. And no one is saying the obvious: Even a frail, doddering president with a competent staff is preferable to the one we have now, although you can argue that the original sin was for Biden to run in the first place. (See quoted paragraph, above.)

But Jason added something else that needs to be said. The Bulwark is a Substack vertical run by never-Trumpers who have moved incrementally to the left, or not moved at all, and now find themselves with more Democratic friends than Republican. He commented:

The reason people don’t like The Bulwark, of course, is that many of the people who contribute to it also built the current media and political climate which now afflicts the U.S. — they were part of various far-right think-tanks and publications and TV networks. We didn’t get to this dark reality in a vacuum; people like Bill Kristol and Mona Charen dragged the U.S. into this dark reality.

Exactly. Those of us who remember Mona Charen when she was shaking her finger at women who had sex outside of marriage still remember those columns, and ditto Kristol. I mean, I’m glad they’re resisting the current catastrophe, but if it ever ends, I don’t see themselves on our side. And we need to work this all the way out.

Of course, we can’t not blame Fox News. A nice takedown of our U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, here:

“Think about it: Omar wears a hijab,” said Pirro in 2019, referring to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota). “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?” That remark drew condemnation from her own network.

After Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), for instance, expressed concerns that she might fall victim to a “political” prosecution after participating in a February “Know Your Rights” webinar for immigrants, Pirro attacked. “No, honey,” she said on the March 3 edition of “The Five.” “What it is, is it’s a prosecution based on — I think it’s 8 USC 119 — for obstruction of justice.” On the April 10 edition of “The Five,” she blamed Democrats for “keeping the illegals in the shadows and keeping the illegals illegal.” That was more charitable than the evaluation she articulated just over a week earlier, when she said of Democrats, “It’s a party that’s filled with hate.”

The punchline comes later, but it’s always satisfying to see Janine Winebox cut down to size.

But let’s end on a higher plane. Some of your Fort Wayne people might remember Zach Klein, who first crossed my radar when he won the Sterling Sentinel scholarship offered by my employer. He went to Wake Forest, and we later met up when he determined that he and I were the only two people in Fort Wayne with a blog. He later founded College Humor with his college roommates, sold it and has since gone on to more startups, including the one our own Deborah participated in, something about cabin-building.

Anyway. As I recall, Zach wrote about the subject of this very nice column, or at least the precipitating event, in his scholarship essay. It’s about the night his brother fell head-first out of a pickup that Zach was driving, as well as what came after:

When word got out that Noel was in a coma, our community showed up. There was a chapel in the hospital, and we held vigils for him. Mostly we sat silently with heads bowed, but occasionally someone would offer something up to the room. That’s when I heard the Serenity Prayer for the first time.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

I felt some relief, both an acknowledgment of my guilt and a merciful release from my community for whatever role I played. As a naive teenager who had little experience with the bigger world, it was an extraordinary glimpse into the human experience filled with error and pain, as well as a process—one that we have always needed and will always need—to forgive ourselves.

This prayer was different from the ones I had said over and over before. It was a tool, a reminder to help us frame burdens in a way that makes them easier to bear.

Noel’s brain swelling eventually reduced, and he emerged from his coma. He lived, but his life has never gotten easier. And I never returned to church or prayed again, either—yet I often think about the grace of the Serenity Prayer.

Anyway, I think you’ll like it, religious or not.

Time for me to get a move on.

Yard notes, for you gardeners: Our back yard, having been thoroughly ruined by some previous owner, has been a work in progress since we moved in, and I think we’ve brought it back about as far as we can, short of tearing down and rebuilding the garage where it should be, at the end of the driveway. (The owner moved it 90 degrees to gain a parking pad for their RV, we were told.) Along the way, Alan planted a climbing hydrangea along the back fence, where it dwelt in deep shade. Year after year, it would cover a smallish patch of the fence and do little more. A couple years back, Alan dug it up and replanted it against the side of the house, where it gets afternoon sun.

The motto for climbing hydrangea and other perennials, we’ve learned, is “first it sleeps, then it creeps, then it leaps.” The decade or so against the fence were its sleeping years. The first year on the house, creeping. But I’d say the Era of Leaping has fully arrived:

Not bad, little dude. Still to be revealed: The autumn-blooming clematis Alan put in this year to replace the honeysuckle that threw in the towel over the winter. Stay tuned.

How was everyone’s weekend? Mine? Can’t complain. Did some things, went out to a fancy dinner (32nd anniversary, Barda for you locals), stayed in with burgers the next night. A typical weekend, during which it was clear that Friday’s summery temperatures would give way to far springier ones, and they did. It was the benign touch of the storm system that devastated those to our south, and we’ll see what comes of that. The new FEMA director is being pretty open about the fact he doesn’t have a plan for hurricane season (which starts June 1) or anything else:

He also seemed to express surprise at the vast range of FEMA’s responsibilities, raising concerns among career officials about his ability to run the nation’s disaster-management agency. Richardson, who leads FEMA in an acting capacity, took over the complex agency last week.

“I feel a little bit like Bubba from ‘Forrest Gump,’ ” Richardson said, according to the video. “We’ve got hurricanes, we’ve got fires, we’ve got mudslides, we’ve got flash floods, we’ve got tornadoes, we’ve got droughts, we’ve got heat waves and now we’ve got volcanoes to worry about.”

Buck up, Dave. How hard can it be?

Then we had the Mexican yacht drifting into the Brooklyn Bridge. A car bomb at a fertility clinic. (He was opposed to “bringing people into the world against their will,” allegedly.) So many strange things happening, and it all feels very September 10, 2001 in the U.S. these days. Maybe it’s me. Happy week ahead, and the start of summer.

I was doing a practice lesson as part of this WSI class I don’t want to take but that’s a long story. The task was to teach the three kicks for treading water, and as I and my faux-students treaded away, I started telling a story that was so buried in my memory I don’t think I’d thought of it more than once since it happened. But unbidden, it surfaced and demanded to be told:

A bunch of us were at my friends’ cottage in the Upper Peninsula, and we were behaving like typical teenagers, which is to say, like idiots. We’d taken their boat out into the “big lake,” i.e., far from the channels of the Les Cheneaux Islands, well into Lake Huron, where the rollers are. We were doing something they called submarining, i.e. putting a bunch of people on the bow and gradually increasing the speed until the bow started going down, sending up an amusing spray and…I’m not sure how it was supposed to end, because we hit one of those rollers funny and a guy on the bow slipped off into the water.

This is northern Lake Huron, and as I recall it was June, late in the day, almost twilight. Lake Huron never really gets warm, and in June it is still quite cold. The kid was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and probably shoes of some sort. Did I mention we were all drinking? We were all drinking.

The guys who were leading this excursion, to their everlasting credit, did exactly what you should do in that situation. Neil immediately fixed on the guy in the water, pointing to his position. Paul scrambled for the swim ladder in the storage space. And Mark, at the wheel, put us in an immediate turn and roared back to the guy, expertly steering close without running him over, then decelerating, and we floated right up to him. Swim ladder was hooked on the side, and many arms reached down to help him climb back into the boat.

His first words, through his chattering teeth: “I’m sorry I dropped the schnapps.” Ha ha! Such a card! We’re having an adventure! We bundled him in what blankets were aboard, put him in the warmest spot (directly behind the front bench) and headed for home.

“And now we’ve been treading for about as long as that guy had to tread, in all his clothes, in very cold water,” I told my faux-students. “And that is why learning to tread water can save your life.” And honestly, it wasn’t until Wednesday evening, 50 years after the fact, that I realized how close we’d come to a fatal drowning incident, i.e., extremely. He could have easily gone straight to the bottom. I think your memory keeps that stuff buried for a good reason.

The three kicks for treading are scissors, breaststroke and rotary, i.e. eggbeater. Rotary is best. Also: Don’t do stupid boat tricks ever, but especially not there, especially not when the sun is going down. On the other hand, that kind of stupid fucking-around in boats often produces people who know how to drive boats. (Neil, Mark and Paul had done their share of stupid boat tricks before this.) My riding instructor grew up playing a game she and her siblings called Knock ‘Em Off, in which one person climbed on their horse, bareback and with no bridle, and the others tried to do anything short of touching the horse to get the mounted one to fall off. Flap a shirt in its face, run around yelling and waving arms, whatever. And that’s how my teacher learned to stick tight as a tick when a horse was misbehaving. I’m not sure that these stories have a point, but if they do, it’s that if you behave like this, don’t tell your mother.

You guys were discussing this piece in the comments, but if you don’t read the comments, Monica Hesse wrote an excellent column about the Diddy/Sean Combs trial, and here’s a gift link to read it.

Before I leave, three photos of our back yard.

March 26:

April 18:

This morning:

Happy weekend, all. Enjoy spring.