You park your car at the top of a hill. You leave a note on the dashboard that says “please be good” and then you pull the parking brake. The car careens down the hill, smashes everything up, and you put out a press release saying “My car ignored my instructions! It hallucinated! It went rogue!” Your insurance company not only believes you, but invests $100 million in your company.
Via kfitz. One mild improvement in the recent discourse: the widespread scoffing at the “going rogue” explanation. The bots are behaving as designed and instructed.
Think of this not as a political post but a sociological one. What follows is anecdotal but noteworthy.
- Here in Waco, I have seen hundreds of Talarico signs in people’s front yards, but not one Paxton sign. And for the past couple of weeks I’ve been looking hard!
- Every day I get texts and mail flyers denouncing Talarico — and none of them, again not one, has used Paxton’s name. The flyers are pieces of thick glossy stock, full of images of Talarico and denunciations of him, and no mention of Paxton even in tiny print.
This situation gives a new meaning to “negative campaigning.” Clearly Texas Republicans realize that their candidate is radioactive, so radioactive that his name cannot even be mentioned — but they hope to make voters hate the other guy intensely enough that the radioactive guy will win. And — such is America in 2026 — it might work.
Re: the passing of Da Coach, I’m reminded of a story I heard, long ago, from Joseph Epstein. When Epstein taught at Northwestern University, he was colleagues and friends with the great Czech/Jewish emigré scholar Erich Heller, and after Heller moved into a retirement home in Evanston, where he lived among retired electricians and plumbers and CPAs, Epstein would regularly take him out to lunch. During one of those lunches, Heller leaned over to Epstein and in his deep voice quietly asked a question: “Tell me zomezink, Joe. Who is zis … Ditka?”
Austin Kleon wants to know. I know which one I feel like today.
I’m shocked and delighted that Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize for literature. Back in 2003 I wrote about her translation of Sappho — in the context of her whole remarkable career to that point. And I compared the love poetry of Sappho and Carson alike to the Song of Songs.
As Graham Greene reported in his review of [Make Way for Tomorrow] in Night and Day in the summer of 1937, “a sense of misery and inhumanity is left vibrating in the nerves.” The film is a withering criticism of a terrible wrong — and an eloquent vindication of the justice of the New Deal that had recently been devised by liberal gerontocrats in Washington. (The first Social Security payments were sent out only a few months before the movie’s premiere.) The film is also a devastating repudiation of the spirit of [Samuel] Moyn’s book and its insolent generational partisanship. Watch Make Way for Tomorrow and you will throw the book across the room, and not only for sentimental reasons. The film represents an entirely different and more sympathetic approach to the problem that the French call un pere qui vit trop, the father who lives too long. I have always detected a tincture of sublimity in filial devotion. Indeed, filial devotion should be enlarged and elevated into a standard for humaneness and a basis for social policy. We would inhabit a less indecent society if somehow we could find in ourselves a measure of filial devotion for other people’s fathers and mothers, too. Biology is only biology. We will be known by our choices.
I wonder if Wieseltier happens to have read my commendation of Make Way for Tomorrow in the first issue of Portico.
I finally heard from OUP, so I have posted an update to the update. Again: I cannot wait until all this is over.
This exceptionally handsome fella is four years old today!
The Greatest Monument Builders of All Time - The Atlantic:
In place of the heroic proportions and rigidity of royal tradition, statues of Akhenaten emphasized eccentric curves — narrow shoulders, swelling hips, carefully detailed sagging tummy flesh, and a face at once cadaverous and voluptuous. The writer Thomas Mann used the analogy of “an aristocratic young Englishman of somewhat decadent stock; spare, haughty, weary,” but the stylizations could reach buglike extremes. A stela included in “Treasures” shows Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and two of their daughters as wasp-waisted, with bulbous thighs and spindly arms. And yet the affectionate way the two little girls hold hands seems entirely natural. In the context of royal Egyptian art, such scenes of familial intimacy were a novelty, and remain touching.
I wrote about Akhenaten (and his curious preferences in self-representation) in my series of posts on Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers.
I continue to believe that Manchester City will suffer no punishment for their cheating. They will appeal and delay, appeal and delay, making every possible use of their nearly endless financial resources, and eventually the whole thing will just fade away. I hope I’m wrong.