Many years ago, 30 to be exact, back in the era when children didn’t have their pictures taken every hour, with video every day, an 8-year-old girl in Fort Wayne was abducted, raped and murdered. Her name was April Tinsley. This weekend, police made an arrest. The suspect still lives in the area.

The picture at that link is burned into my brain. It is the only photo anyone had of her, and because the crime was so heinous and went unsolved for so long, it ran dozens of times, in both papers, on all the TV stations. I never heard what happened to her family. They were poor. The neighborhood wasn’t the best. But she was loved, and this was a horrible thing. This part interests me:

In a probable cause affidavit provided by the prosecutor’s office, city police said they obtained a DNA profile from an unknown male from April’s underwear.

In 2004, the affidavit said, police were dispatched to a Fort Wayne address and two Grabill addresses and recovered one used condom from each scene. Notes at each scene were found stating the person who left the condoms had raped and killed April M. Tinsley. A DNA profile was developed from the condoms, which was determined to be consistent with the profile developed from Tinsley’s underwear.

In May of this year, the affidavit said, a police detective arranged for genetic DNA testing and analysis to be done on the suspect’s evidence sample. On July 2, using open public genealogy database research, the contract laboratory narrowed the DNA recovered in the case to two surviving brothers.

On July 6, the affidavit said, a covert trash search was conducted at Miller’s residence in an attempt to locate any items that might contain his DNA. Several items were collected, it said, including three used condoms. The affidavit said the DNA was consistent with the 2004 profile and the DNA from April’s underwear.

Another case solved by DNA and 23andme, or Ancestry, or one of those. But it’s the 2004 anecdote that interests me. Who wrote those notes? An angry lover, or the culprit himself? And all those condoms — what’s that about?

His name is John Miller, and he lives in Grabill, an Amish town. I wonder if he’s an ex-. He’s also 59, which would make him roughly 29 at the time of the crime. Imagine growing to the cusp of old age, carrying that around. When the police showed up at his trailer and said they wanted to talk to him, they asked if he knew why. He replied, “April Tinsley.”

What a world.

Some other things that happened in it over the weekend:

A jaguar escaped its enclosure at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans and killed eight animals. #badass

This column, by the widow of John McNamara, one of the journalists killed in Annapolis last month, will gut you if you have a soul.

Finally, another argument to abolish the electoral college: In about 20 years, half the U.S. population will live in eight states. Demography is fascinating.

Gotta run. A good week ahead to all.

Late update today — sorry. Been a rather busy week, but as often happens when we gallop through Monday and Tuesday, things are improving.

I have a story in Deadline Detroit today; it turns out the filmmakers who made that video for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not only Detroiters, but I already know one of them. She used to work for the advocacy firm where Bridge had its Lansing office for a spell, so I mainly recall her as one of the young people who worked in the bullpen, who I sometimes chatted with on my way to the coffeepot or giant vat of peanut butter-stuffed pretzel nuggets. (That is a disgusting-sounding snack, I know, but I tried one and soon was filling a bowl with them to furtively carry back upstairs. I’d never buy them, however, because I’d fear the disapproval of others in the checkout line.)

Anyway, Naomi’s reaction to the 2016 election was to start attending socialist-feminism discussion groups, which led in a more or less linear fashion to her quitting her job and starting a new media company for socialist candidates. And that led them to make the Ocasio-Cortez video, which is fantastic and partially credited for her success.

Predictably, the comments on the story are whack. I thought of contributing to the discussion, drafted a comment, then trashed it because why engage, and on the internet of all places. I’ll paste it here, just to get it out of my system:

Hi, everyone. As the writer of this piece, I think some of you are overlooking an important point: It’s easy to make fun of socialism. So many spectacular failures, yes. But you are also forgetting what led to it, and why it’s appealing to so many younger people. The Gilded Age and industrial revolution after the Civil War led to an era of great wealth for the few, while the working class toiled in backbreaking labor, for little money and with few to no protections, as a nervous middle class looked on and wrung their hands.

And so on. I’m not taking a stand here, and I realize that wading into any internet comment section is a waste of time. (I’m also not going to engage with any of you further, because see previous sentence.) I’m only making a plea for empathy, to try to step out of your own shoes and into someone else’s. You can learn a lot.

It wouldn’t have done any good, of course. Which is why I deleted it.

God, the last 48 hours have been a blur. Clemency for the Oregon rancher/arsonists. NATO. Kavanaugh. Where to start? I don’t think I will. Instead, let’s be stupid on this fine July afternoon. A screen cap from the Axios newsletter a couple days ago, because I don’t have a Wall Street Journal subscription:

There’s a restaurant around the corner that does this with hot chocolate, inserting skewers laden with doughnuts, cookies, gigantic marshmallows and stuff like that, drizzled with chocolate syrup. I see a lot of kids in there who seem to be celebrating birthdays; maybe next they’ll balance an entire chocolate cake on top. But adults are supposed to know better. A $55 bloody mary! Surely we’re in the end times.

Some commenter-community news: Snarkworth has published a book – “Same River Twice,” available in the usual places. I haven’t read it, so I have no opinions about it other than Books Are Good, and Writing Books Is So Hard That They Should All Be Celebrated. (Unless we’re talking about Dick Cheney’s memoirs, or whatever.) Congratulations, Snarkworth. Now go write the next one.

Hello from Sunday, the last day of what has been a perfect summer weekend — the heat blew out, the sun remained, and the humidity has been low and tolerable for three whole days now.

Tomorrow it will be 90 again. Sigh.

I hope you all had a good one. I spent Saturday seeing friends from Ohio, in town for a wedding. I babysat their grandson while they all danced the night away at the Detroit Athletic Club. Ezra is nine months old, and quite the little charmer, as you’d expect. He was really getting his crawl on, and as even a high-end hotel suite is not baby proof, it was a few hours of following him around, cupping my hand around the razor-sharp edges of tables, redirecting his urge to pull on electrical cords and improvising toys out of things like empty water bottles. (It’s a great toy — lightweight plastic can be intriguingly crushed by even an infant, and it makes a great crackling sound. If you feel inclined to lecture me about BPAs shedding or some such, keep it to yourself. He found it delightful.)

As it’s been a while since I went through this, I was amazed by all the changes in child-rearing customs and technology. Ezra is still pretty much entirely formula-fed, eating mushy vegetables only as “practice food,” his grandmother said. Rice cereal? Has been shown the door by contemporary mothers. Something about arsenic; I had no idea. But the real revelation was the Baby Brezza, aka the Keurig for infant formula. You dump the powder in the top, the water in a reservoir on the side, select a temperature and amount, stick the bottle under the spout and press a button. You get a warm bottle in seconds. Screw on the top, give it a shake and serve. Amazing.

But Ezra, being curious as all babies are, was happiest when I plopped him into his stroller and took him outside. We started at a community garden outside the hotel, but what really made him happy was to get into the thick of things down around Campus Martius, in the heart of downtown. And with a Tigers game and various summer activities in full swing, it really was the thick of things — it was like the old D-Day photos down there. The fountains! The music playing on restaurant patios! People everywhere! He was thrilled. So we walked, and walked, and walked, and today my feet are sore. But he was a happy little guy.

Of course, even New Detroit has a certain amount of the Old in it:

I’ll tell you one thing Saturday did — I checked out of the news for almost 18 whole hours. That made absorbing the NYT this morning a little more like times of old. I’m now following the Thai cave rescue, which is, if you can believe this, a pleasant break from paying attention to ol’ what’s-his-name. At least four out as I write this, with fingers crossed for all of them, soon. How nerve-wracking that must be for all involved. Every one of those Ezras has a mom who is worried to the edge of hysteria. All hopes for a good outcome to the last one.

Happy start of the week to all. Heat notwithstanding.

EDIT: OK, so given today’s topic, I have to include this jaw-dropper, about the U.S. upending a U.N. resolution encouraging breast-feeding. Is there anything this horrible bunch won’t do? Ahem:

American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.

When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.

The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.

Every day, a new nightmare. Sigh.

I opened a credit-card statement today, something I don’t normally do. Why bother? I pay almost all my bills online, and no, Discover, I will not “go paperless” until you make it worth my while somehow, and the warm feeling of “saving a tree” isn’t doing it. Make me an offer, and then we’ll talk.

But while I was glancing through my statement, I saw that I have a credit score of 842.

850 is perfect. Anything above 750 is considered excellent. I shouldn’t be soothed by this, and yet? I am. I’m not at put-it-on-my-tombstone level, but I’ve always been a person who likes to bring home a good report card. (If you’d seen my last performance evaluation before I was laid off, you’d have been as astounded as I was.) I guess this is the adult equivalent.

How was your Fourth? Mine was…mostly spent indoors. Another 90-plus day. I took an early bike ride, when the temperatures were still bearable, then retreated to the a/c. These are not the fun days of summer, in my opinion. However, by the weekend it should be substantially better. I have stuff to work on, chores done or in progress and the weekend to look forward to. I’m babysitting Saturday night, in fact, for the 9-month-old grandson of my oldest friend. The family will be in town for a wedding. I’m hoping it’ll go smoothly, but fearing something more like this.

If nothing else, we’ll be at the nicest hotel downtown, and we can visit the bar, me and young Ezra. A martini for me, and the same for my young friend! I recall nine months as the height of babyhood. We’ll be the toast of the lobby.

Some bloggage? Sure.

If you haven’t discovered #secondcivilwarletters already, you should, even if you’re not on Twitter. The WashPost has an explainer, with the greatest hits. This one may be the best:

Okay, this is like my favorite thread ever!!, so I wanted to see what it would look like merged with a Ken Burns-ish voice reading. pic.twitter.com/E2frNNahFH

— Reetae (@Reetae27) August 19, 2017

The party of family values has given that shit up, but some of us knew this a while ago. From the Atlantic:

The migrant crisis signals an official end to one chapter of conservatism and the beginning of a terrifying new one. After all, a party cannot applaud the wailing screams of innocents as a matter of course and hope to ever reclaim the moral high ground. Trump seemed to know that, perhaps, sitting in the Cabinet Room this week, surrounded by a table of white officials. The compassion that he spoke of wasn’t really for the children torn from their parents—it was for his own party and its struggle to contain them.

A nicely written dispatch, again from the WaPo, on how this moment feels. Weird but, also, rooted in daily life somehow:

Over the past month — particularly since ProPublica released the audio of children at the border — America has confronted itself in off-hours spaces, in places reserved for politeness and deference.

Inside restaurants at dinnertime.

Outside private homes on quiet streets.

In office hallways as people are trying to work.

Warning signs have become alarm bells, and some people are trying to be academic about it, by debating social graces in careful tones.

I’m going to go try to calm my dog, who doesn’t enjoy the rockets’ red glare, happening now. If you have to work the rest of the week, you have my sympathies, but I’ll be right there with you.

Woo doggies, this heat. Mid-90s all weekend, and that is no fun, my peoples. From a glance at the weather map, it appears much of the NN.c readership knows what I’m talking about. We went sailing for a while on Saturday, and that helped, but the sun was a weapon for sure:

It was worse in northern Michigan, if you can believe that. Ninety-nine degrees at Boyne Mountain, way up near the tip of the mitten. Kate and her boyfriend went camping in the Upper Peninsula and came home a day early, after they were caught in, quote, the worst thunderstorm I’ve ever seen, unquote. The tent was flooded and they couldn’t get a hotel room, so they slept in the car.

When I wasn’t on the water, I tried to stay indoors. Ventured out to do some weight work at the gym, and even with the a/c on, it was still miserable. I told Alan that’s the last exercise I intend to do that’s not in a pool until this is over. I guess I’ll be spending some time in the pool.

When I was indoors, hiding from the heat, I did some reading. There was a lot of good reading to be done this weekend, so let’s get to it.

Everyone reads the New Yorker online, but I prefer the ink-on-paper version, and just saw this, so maybe it’s old, but what the hell — it’s a good read about the farce that ensued when Milo Yapyapyapalot came to Berkeley, or tried. You might recall that interlude, when he announced he’d be bringing a slate of high-profile conservative speakers to Berkeley for “free speech week,” and then it turned out the only losers who showed up were Mike Cernovich and Pam Geller, both creatures who actually live under the barrel, not at its bottom:

“Milo, what’s the deal tomorrow, man?” Cernovich said. “Are we speaking on campus? Off campus? What the fuck is going on?”

“O.K., so this hasn’t been announced yet, but we’re giving a big press conference on Treasure Island,” Yiannopoulos said. “I’m going to make my entrance by speedboat, with a camera trailing me on a drone, and we’re going to be live-streaming it all on Facebook.”

“I don’t do boats,” Geller said. “I projectile-vomit. But I love it for you, Milo, it’s a fabulous idea. I predict two hundred and fifty thousand viewers watching that live stream, at least.”

“I’ll be wearing this gorgeous Balmain overcoat—I’ll show you—with this huge fur collar,” Yiannopoulos said.

Geller and Cernovich changed the subject to Internet censorship. “They kicked me off Google AdSense,” Geller said. “I was making six figures a year from that. You can’t even share my links on Pinterest now! I’m ‘inappropriate content.’ ”

Yiannopoulos looked bored. “You guys are so selfish,” he said. “We used to be talking about me.” He turned to his stylist, a glassy-eyed, wisp-thin man, and whispered, “Go get the coat.”

They continued hashing out plans. “So we’ll walk in with you, through the streets of downtown Berkeley,” Cernovich said. “If there’s a screaming Antifa crowd, and if I maybe have to street-fight my way in and break a few noses in self-defense, that’s all good optics for me.”

“Maybe we should line up on the Sproul steps,” Yiannopoulos said, “surrounded by Berkeley students wearing ‘Defund Berkeley’ T-shirts.”

“Why don’t we march in with our arms linked together, like the Martin Luther King people, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’?” Cernovich said.

“We’ll do our thing, and then at some point the protests will turn violent,” Yiannopoulos said. “That will become the focus, and then we can just get ourselves out of there.” He reclined in his chair and smiled. “It’s all coming together,” he said.

The stylist came back with the coat, and Yiannopoulos squealed. “Pamela, is this coat to die for or what?” he said.

“Oh, my God, Milo, I’m dying,” Geller said. “It’s sick.”

He put the coat on and turned around, again and again, examining his reflection in the darkened glass of a window.

“It’s fabulous,” Geller said. “It’s sick. I hate you.”

Sorry for the long quote, which breaks my three-paragraph rule, but it’s a long piece. If you had any doubt that the whole free-speech-on-campus “crisis” was manufactured bullshit, this should settle it.

That story is like one long terrible joke. This one, on largely the same subject, isn’t:

The two (SCOTUS) decisions were the latest in a stunning run of victories for a conservative agenda that has increasingly been built on the foundation of free speech. Conservative groups, borrowing and building on arguments developed by liberals, have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals and guns.

We’ve lost our ambassador to Estonia, friends. (He was an Obama appointee, so no biggie.)

Finally, an essay by Virginia Heffernan you should read, on how profoundly lost the nation’s moral compass is at the moment:

There’s plenty of talk in Trump times about an assault on factual truth. But the more vicious attacks are on human perception, common sense and baseline notions of right and wrong.

…The Trump syndicate leverages this ludicrous stuff every day. It’s repeated and amplified by trolls and botnets, Fox News, far-right haranguers like Tomi Lahren and Milo Yiannopoulos, and, of course, the president himself.

It gets loud.

And then the stupid inversions of reason are picked up by influential voices who should know better. Worse yet, they’re given a hearing, as American citizens are forced to sit for monotonous schoolings in the media conceit of “both sides.”

It’s really good. Me, I’m going to make tacos and edit a podcast. A good week ahead to all.

Yes, of course I’m heartsick. What happened yesterday in Annapolis is simply appalling. I sometimes wonder how much the public knows about how exposed journalists are, and how common the sort of abuse Jarrod Ramos visited upon the Capital Gazette before his shooting spree really is.

It’s been years and years since I’ve worked for a newspaper, but in my experience, we saw guys like Ramos all the time. Most weren’t violent; in fact, none were. But that simmering layer of insanity? All the time.

When I worked the night shift in Columbus, a regular newsroom caller would rail about Queen Elizabeth to whoever would answer the phone. I don’t know who he was, or the names of the voices in his head, but he could go on and on. We were not encouraged to be cruel to callers, so most people just let him run on. One night, an editor picked up just as we were heading to dinner. He said, “OK, what do I need to know?” and put the receiver down on his desk. When we came back 45 minutes later, the guy was still talking.

A man who looked strangely like a brontosaurus (sorry, I know brontosauruses have a new name now, but I can’t think of it) — long, long neck and tiny head — started writing to me when I was a columnist, and dropped by the newsroom one day to chat, clearly with love on his mind. (He asked me to dinner.)

Another man apparently developed a crush on me after three phone calls and also dropped by the newsroom, clearly with love on his mind. (He brought flowers.)

Then there was the elderly man who came by to tell me about the good work done by his Kiwanis club, then started talking, with far more enthusiasm, about his fondness for at-home nudity, and his daily effort to make sure the early-arriving newspaper carrier got a good look at him through the bay window, on dark winter mornings. (“Did he have a boner?” Alan asked later.)

Yeah, all these people were harmless. A couple were pathetic. But none were 100 percent stable. One guy sent me his self-published book about police persecution, which he described as a nightly phenomenon. Another guy sent mash notes for a while, and when I failed to respond, switched to fuck-you-whore with an alacrity familiar to any woman who’s ever had a crazy boyfriend.

And here’s the thing: No one was really bugged by any of this. It’s part of what makes newsrooms more fun places to work than insurance agencies. Shitty pay, bad coffee and the nut of the morning. After a while, I would tell some callers, “Are you on medication? Have you taken your medication today? Why not? I think you need to take your medication and call me back in an hour.”

But as we all know now, the internet has taken harassment and one’s imaginary worlds into new, self-reinforcing places. It used to be hard to stalk someone; you used to have to do some legwork. Now it’s as easy as sending a friend request. The rhetoric around the business — you’ll hear more about enemies of the people and Milo in the next few days than you ever wanted to know — is reckless and criminal, and shouldn’t be tolerated.

We pause for a word from our sponsor:

Most of the newsrooms I’ve been in had some sort of security. None of it was very good security. I expect that will change now. And one more place a member of the public could saunter through without causing alarm will become locked-down, with visitor badges and sign-in sheets. We’ll all be lesser for it.

Two bits of bloggage today:

Here’s my first big piece for Deadline Detroit. It’s about a local radio station with an unusual promotion strategy. Speaking of harassment, read to the end.

I know a lot of you are friends of Bill and fans of country music. I liked this deep dive into country’s boozy subculture from the WashPost. The most interesting part was how much individual artists can make off liquor tie-ins, an important consideration for artists whose revenue streams are being stolen by the internet.

A very hot, very steamy weekend awaits. I hope to be sailing for the worst of it. Enjoy yours.

A long day today. A very long day. Kind of a depressing day, given the news. Gileadian, if you catch my drift. I take consolation in one thing that I know: That you never know. You just don’t. Whatever it is you’re afraid of, it won’t be exactly the way you imagine it. Stuff happens. Wheels upon wheels turn, and then there’s our old friend Chaos who could yet throw a wrench into the whole works.

Who knew a 28-year-old socialist could defeat a cemented-in-place incumbent who outspent her almost 20-to-1? Nobody. Supreme Court justices get cancer and drop dead unexpectedly, just like your uncle. Presidents, too. No, I am not wishing for anyone’s death. I’m just saying, you don’t know.

The future could be better than you fear. It could be worse. So waste no time fretting over it. Do the work you need to do, do it well, and wait. All will be revealed.

(I think this is a line in the Tao Te Ching, in fact. I just looked it up. Close, but not quite. Nevertheless, it’s a beautiful sentiment, so here you are:

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you: This is no time to be zen. I get it. All I’m saying is, you can drive yourself crazy with this stuff, and you should save your strength.

Meanwhile, this is who will likely be Hope Hicks’ replacement.

What a day! Have we hit bottom yet?

I have a friend that I see every few weeks or so. About five years older than I am, so…Medicare-eligible, but not old-old. Whenever I mourn the current state of affairs, he tells me not to get so fretful, that things were worse in the ’60s. He’s right. We forget, but he’s right.

Unrest in American cities — race riots (Detroit, Newark, D.C., Los Angeles, et al.) and police riots (Chicago). Families torn apart by Vietnam, one way or another, either the ones who sent their sons who never came back, or the ones where the sons refused to go, and lit out for Canada or refused induction outright. Families torn apart by even worse things, like hair or hemlines or birth-control pills. It was far worse than today, he always says.

I’m usually reassured by that. But I usually want to know how much further we’re going to slide before we come to our senses, either on our own or because some horrible, 9/11-type event slaps us silly. Today, it’s plain we have a ways to go.

I think it was Neil Steinberg who, in the days between the election and inauguration, compared that period to the clack-clack-clack feeling of the roller coaster climbing the first big hill, and we know the plunge is coming, but we don’t know what it’s going to be like, so we just have to hold on and ride it out. Today the Sun-Times published his column, with this subtle headline: Donald Trump is a racist leading our country toward disaster, so you get the idea how he thinks the ride is going.

Meanwhile, Politico is writing about the trials of being a young, single member of the administration, the Washington Post leads us into a right-wing group’s safe space for young Trump-supporting women, and Sarah Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant. Dim glimmer of amusement in Jennifer Rubin’s blog about that last incident:

Anti-immigrant zealot Stephen Miller, who pushed as hard as anyone for snatching kids from their parents, was dining in a different Mexican restaurant last Sunday when, according to the New York Post, a protester called out, “Hey look guys, whoever thought we’d be in a restaurant with a real-life fascist begging [for] money for new cages?”

Remember a couple years ago, when I wrote about the Float Down, this sort of fun, renegade floatie trip on the St. Clair River up near Port Huron? The wind picked up out of the west and blew all these drunk Americans in their inner tubes across to the Canadian side, and the Canadians rounded everyone up, warmed them up, and drove them back across the bridge to the American side? A French jogger went for a run along a Canadian beach in British Columbia and wound up on the U.S. side. She was arrested. Her mother hustled down to the immigration office with her passport, hoping to clear everything up.

She was held for two weeks. TWO WEEKS.

I’m so, so tired of this. I’m tired of current events. I want to pick up a fat novel set in someplace like Victorian England and just tune all this crap out until, oh, November, without feeling like I’m not doing my part.

I want to live in a world where the French lady would be told to turn around and head the few steps back into Canada and have a nice day. I remember that world.

Well, another weekend gone. It was a good one. The Claressa Shields fight was great, and I wrote a column about it for Deadline Detroit. I’ll add a link when it goes up.

Otherwise, let’s get to the week ahead.

Guys, I feel this as strongly as my own heartbeat: The coat is a deflection. Don’t be fooled. She’s wearing the coat with the right hand, but you should pay attention to the left.

Don’t get upset about the coat. These are not normal people. Don’t rail about how they don’t get it, or don’t understand optics, or whatever. That’s all they understand. They are all about surfaces. But something larger is going on. Don’t forget that.

I mean, it’s a $39 coat. That woman doesn’t carry $39 handkerchiefs.

So. A long, busy day, but the thing about busy days is, you put on the harness on Monday and the next thing you know, it’s Thursday and the week is almost over. So there’s that.

Just one bit of bloggage to take you into the weekend: The meltdown of Qanon, and if you don’t know what Qanon is yet, you should, because it’s the craziest crazy shit that’s ever been crazed. If you’re on Twitter, follow Will Sommer and JJ McNab, both of whom keep up with the far-right fringe, and are mostly very entertaining, to boot.

Me, I gotta sleep and rest up for a big night tomorrow — the Claressa Shields fight, topping an all-female night of boxing in downtown Detroit. Can’t. WAIT.

Long day, my peeps. But not a bad one. Spent most of it in front of the Michigan Central Station, recently shed of its standard image as The Enduring Symbol of Detroit Blight, as seen in approximately a million images. Photographers liked to capture it when the sun was sinking behind it, and you could see the light shining all the way through, because all the interior structures had been destroyed. A see-through building, I believe those are called in the trade.

Anyway, Ford bought it and is planning a zillion-dollar renovation, to house their mobility and electric-vehicle divisions. There was absolutely zero news coming out of today’s event — it had all been reported in the days and weeks leading up to it — but that’s the sort of thing that most lends itself to a big media splash, with music and speeches and very special guests and rah-rah Ford.

But it’s going to be a great addition to the landscape when it’s done.

I took some pictures.

Say what you will about the auto companies, but when they do an event, they do it right. The speeches were followed by self-guided wander-throughs of the station before work starts on the interior. They had moving projections on the ceiling, all scaled to what part of the ceiling they were focused on:

The scrappers stole the whole goddamn roof from this section. (I believe it was copper.) I imagine it’ll be replaced with glass:

My friend Dustin was there, too, shooting for his employer. We enjoyed this mirror:

Probably Deborah knows more about the companies that throw this sort of thing together, but it would be interesting to watch them work. I imagine the meetings it took to come up with those phrases in the projections.

Not much bloggage today. The situation at the border is so depressing, and there’s so much out there to read. I suggest you do so. Meanwhile, this was a good essay on the modern American city, and the creeping homogeneity that threatens their character:

And what’s happening to New York now—what’s already happened to most of Manhattan, its core—is happening in every affluent American city. San Francisco is overrun by tech conjurers who are rapidly annihilating its remarkable diversity; they swarm in and out of the metropolis in specially chartered buses to work in Silicon Valley, using the city itself as a gigantic bed-and-breakfast. Boston, which used to be a city of a thousand nooks and crannies, back-alley restaurants and shops, dive bars and ice cream parlors hidden under its elevated, is now one long, monotonous wall of modern skyscraper. In Washington, an army of cranes has transformed the city in recent years, smoothing out all that was real and organic into a town of mausoleums for the Trump crowd to revel in.

By trying to improve our cities, we have only succeeded in making them empty simulacra of what was. To bring this about we have signed on to political scams and mindless development schemes that are so exclusive they are more destructive than all they were supposed to improve. The urban crisis of affluence exemplifies our wider crisis: we now live in an America where we believe that we no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.

There’s a lot to think about here, some of which I disagree with, but undeniably worth mentioning. Some of the things the author mentions — the nonprofit “conservancies” given sway over public entities, to name but one — are seen all over Detroit, and in that case, were instrumental in changing the city for the better. Gentrification isn’t the problem here as much as entrenched poverty is, but in the pockets of affluence sprouting around town, many of these forces are at work.

Worth a read. Me, I’m going to collapse in a heap on my bed. Night-night.