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RIP Jean Marsh, who created and starred in “Upstairs, Downstairs.” She was born into the working class. “If you were very working class in those days, you weren’t going to think of a career in science,” she said in 1972. “You either did a tap dance or you worked in Woolworth’s.” nytimes.com

"How to Be a Happy 85-Year-Old (Like Me)."

Life advice from octogenarian Roger Rosenblatt at the New York Times:

2. Make young friends.

For older folks, there is nothing more energizing than the company of the young. They’re bright, enthusiastic, informative and brimming with life, and they do not know when you’re telling them lies.

Also:

6. Everyone’s in pain.

If you didn’t know that before, you know it now. People you meet casually, those you’ve known all your life, the ones you’ll never see – everyone’s in pain. If you need an excuse for being kind, start with that.

A lovely, wise and funny essay.

Do me a favor please: If you’re reading this on Mastodon, please reply. Late Friday afternoon, I migrated my Mastodon account (which is, or was, @mitchw@mastodon.social) to my MIcro.blog blog (@MitchW@mitchw.blog).

But I’m not sure if it worked.

So please let me know if you see this message on Mastodon, and also please let me know if you recall whether you followed me on @mitchw@mastodon.social or @MitchW@mitchw.blog.

Thanks!

Bluesky’s Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media. newyorker.com. Kyle Chayka writes an in-depth profile of Bluesky CEO Jay Graeber.

“I’m Not a ‘Gatsby’ Scholar. I’m a ‘Gatsby’ Weirdo.” Andrew Clark has listened to “The Great Gatsby,” read by Jake Gyllenhaal, more than 200 times since 2020. This is a lovely short essay about a lot more than one man’s obsession with a single book. nytimes.com

I think I’ll sign up for the Pro subscription for ChatGPT again. I’m intrigued by the new persistent memory feature.

A roomba that continuously says “polish polish” would get annoying quickly.

The Problem With Abe Lincoln's Face: The president's iconic beard was a product of the anxious new realities of the photographic age.

James Lundberg, writing at The Atlantic, describes how the new technology of photography changed people’s perceptions of themselves and their faces.

When Abraham Lincoln was running for President in 1860, a little girl wrote him a letter advising him to grow a beard to improve his appearance. And so he did.

“If you will let your whiskers grow,” she wrote, “you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin.”

I think this story is familiar to most Americans, taught in schools. What I did not realize until reading this article is that Lincoln’s looks were an issue because photography was new — it first came to the US 21 years earlier. Photo studios quickly swept the country and set off a fad for portraiture.

Those having their likeness taken for the first time did so with some combination of wonder and trepidation. Posing before the camera, early sitters said they felt drafts of air on their face or tingling in their cheeks. The process was orchestrated by a camera operator under a blanket–whom [Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing in The Atlantic in 1859] described as a chemical-wielding “skeleton shape, of about a man’s height, its head covered with a black veil.” The experience seemed to partake of the occult. And the results, often ghostly because of the long exposure times required, only strengthened such feelings.

These early sitters weren’t entirely wrong. There was no sorcery involved, but something was happening to them in front of the camera. Becoming an image, reckoning with an entirely new form of self-presentation, introduced an intense awareness not just of the self, but of the face.

Parallels to the later invention of television and smartphones are apparent.

RIP George Bell, 67, who stood 7'8" and was listed by Guinness as the tallest man in America. “I never had anyone else around who was 7-8 who I could talk to and who could help me learn how to handle it,” he said. “Fortunately for me, I’m a very patient person.” nytimes.com

A Rhode Island state legislator suggests getting around the Trump tariffs using a 1663 “royal charter” to declare the state a “free trade zone.” Sure, why not? abc6.com

Zuckerberg in the dock: The antitrust case against Meta is strong and the Trump White House seems inclined to pursue it aggressively. [pluralistic.net]

“You have only two choices if Trump comes after you: 1. If Domestic, fight. 2. If foreign, and he’s only threatening, tell him to pound sand and ignore him. If he does something, retaliate.” [ianwelsh.net]

Welsh is talking about strategy, not ethics. Obedience doesn’t work with Trump, who sees compliance as weakness and comes back for more.

“Apparently, people don’t want the US dollar to be a meme stock.” Also: “Far-right populist parties get into power by raging against the incumbents and the establishment and then once they’re in office, they have to continue to pretend like they aren’t actually in power.” [garbageday.email]

I’m still traumatized from the season finale of “The Pitt.”

I want to see one feature in the iPhone and iPad: support for a clipboard manager that runs in the background. I don’t care about Siri, thinner devices, foldable phones, improved battery life or other rumored advances. Just give me a clipboard manager that runs in the background.

The Original Stock Photo From ‘The Shining’ Has Finally Been Found

It’s the photo that ends the movie, of Jack Nicholson in period costume composited into a photo of dozens of formally-dressed 1920s partygoers.

Matt Growcoot at PetaPixel:

After decades of mystery, the original image — sans Jack Nicholson — has finally resurfaced in a photo archive after 45 years…. no one kept a record of where, what, and who was in the original photo. Following an investigation by retired British academic Alasdair Spark and New York Times journalist Aric Toler, it has been revealed the original photo was taken by the now defunct Topical Press Agency at a St. Valentine’s Day Ball in the Royal Palace Hotel, London, on February 14, 1921.

The Sick Psychology Behind Trump’s Tariff Chaos (Timothy Noah / The New Republic) — “Caregivers with [Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy] don’t poison their children once and then restore them to health. They do it over and over, because the cycle from sickness to health brings them pleasure.”

America Is Trying To Form An Anti-China Trade Bloc

Ian Welsh

Trump has shown himself to be a partner who can’t be trusted — he’s unreliable and routinely goes back on his word. But Western nations hate China enough that Trump might pull this off, Welsh says.

If so, we’ll be the weaker side, as the USSR/Warsaw Pact was last time and we will lose the new Cold war, falling further and further behind technologically and watching as the Chinese enjoy goods we can barely even dream of, just as was true of the late Soviet Union.

Everything, and I mean everything, will be sacrificed to keep the oligarchs in power, keep making them richer and keep the flow of unearned cash pouring into every rich person’s orifices.

On the other hand, the EU and China are in talks to end EU tariffs on electric vehicles. “That sound you hear is Elon Musk puckering up to kiss his ass goodbye.”

What do we think of Google Gemini? How does it compare with ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude?

I have two superpowers: finding the right-sized Tupperware container for leftovers and moving things around in the refrigerator until there is room for something else when the refrigerator looks full.

Adobe Got Bullied Off Of Bluesky (Ryan Broderick / Garbage Day (seventh item — scroll down) — “… this is becoming a genuine issue for Bluesky…. It’s really easy to be the cool, new anti-corporate social network up until the point where you actually need to make money.”

AI avatars are the face of emerging telcos

My latest on Fierce Network

I found this to be a fascinating story: “Digital humans” — realistic, AI-powered avatars — are poised to revolutionize human-computer interactions in the telecom sector. These avatars provide higher customer satisfaction and increased likelihood of purchases compared with traditional interfaces, according to research. Companies such as AT&T, Amdocs and ServiceNow are leveraging AI to automate network operations and enhance customer service.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog.

A vintage Studebaker pickup truck, with a prominent chrome hood ornament, parked on a suburban street. The truck is putty gray and looks a little used. Front-on view of a vintage putty-gray Studebaker pickup truck parked on the side of a street in a suburban neighborhood. The red-on-chrome STUDEBAKER logo is prominently center on the front of the hood, with a big chrome hood ornament on the hood just under the windshield.

Walking the dog this morning down a residential street, a white-haired older woman pulled up in a car next to me and rolled down her window and shouted something. I could not hear what she said, so I went a little closer and asked her to repeat it.

She said, “God loves you and your baby.”

I have had people shout worse things to me from rolled-down car windows.

Today I learned if you soak your TiVo remote in salad dressing it don’t work good after.

We saw “A Complete Unknown” tonight. It paints a portrait of Dylan as a magnificently talented and charismatic asshole.

Sam Keen, Philosopher of the Men’s Movement, Is Dead at 93

Trip Gabriel / The New York Times

I did not read Keen‘s book. I had not even heard of it or him until I read this obituary. I did, however, read “Iron John,” by Robert Bly, which was published about the same time and was another touchstone of the men’s movement of the 90s.

I think there are many, many ways of being a man and I am not the type of man that the men’s movement of the 90s spoke to. And if the “manosphere” of the 2020s is anything like how I’ve seen it described, I certainly don’t want to be involved in that.

"Students Yelled at Me. I’m Fine."

Xochitl Gonzalez at The Atlantic:

… these were students in America doing what students in America should do: questioning authority (in this case, me) and using their rights to free speech and free assembly to engage with issues they are passionate about.

Also, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University grad student, was surrounded by “hooded and masked plainclothes [ICE] officers” near her Somerville, Mass., home. She was “seized in the street, handcuffed like a criminal, and put inside the back of an unmarked car in what looked, to passersby, like “a kidnapping.”

She is a Turkish citizen legally in the U.S. who did nothing other than write a civil editorial urging her university to “take more seriously a vote from the student senate calling on the university to divest from Israel.” She broke no law.

Marco Rubio’s interpretation of law to justify Öztürk’s arrest is “just one more example of the Trump administration’s attempts to change America from a nation of rights to a nation of privileges that can at any moment be revoked.”

Keep San Diego County Blue. Vote for Democrat Paloma Aguirre in the April District 1 Special Election

It’s scary to be an American right now as Donald Trump and Elon Musk run amok in Washington. But we here in San Diego can be a little less scared than our friends and family elsewhere in the country because we live in a Blue county in a powerful Blue state.

But San Diego could become scarier if the Republican candidate wins the April special election to fill a vacant seat on the San Diego Board of Supervisors. If the Republican candidate wins that seat, the Republican Party will control the county board of supervisors, bringing a MAGA regime to San Diego. To prevent this, we must do two things: 1) Turn out the Democratic vote, and 2) vote only for Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, the endorsed candidate of the San Diego Democratic Party, despite more than one Democrat being running in the election. Otherwise, we split our vote and risk a Republican taking the seat in the Primary. If that happens, we will have a MAGA County Board of Supervisors.

If you live in District 1, please vote for Aguirre. And if you don’t live in District 1, please talk to friends and family there and encourage them to vote for Aguirre.

Act fast — the election ends Tuesday, April 8, in five days!

The county board of supervisors has a broad scope of authority: It manages a significant budget for services and programs, disperses federal funds, manages social welfare programs such as CalFresh, Medi-Cal and the foster care system, and it oversees local government and law enforcement for unincorporated areas of the county.

Aguirre will make a great supervisor. As mayor of Imperial Beach, she has an impressive array of accomplishments. She has been a champion in the fight to clean up the South County sewage crisis, securing $600 million in federal funding. She has helped make life more affordable by lowering utility rates and adding moderately priced homes. She achieved gains in public safety and disaster response, fighting homelessness, and overall quality of life for all San Diegans — not just the rich. And, of course, she has worked to protect our values — Aguirre is pro-choice; she favors keeping local law enforcement focused on fighting crime, not doing the federal government’s job on immigration enforcement; and she opposes federal cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, elder care and Social Security.

There are other excellent Democrats in this race. But Aguirre is the San Diego Democratic Party’s endorsed candidate, and we all must get behind one candidate to help her achieve more than 50% of the votes in this special election.

If the Republicans win the board, we can expect to see cuts to social services, including homeless aid and mental health benefits. Republicans will enact economic policies that help the rich and hurt the middle class and poor.

We’re already seeing Republicans doing damage in San Diego. As County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer points out in a recent newsletter, extreme federal service reductions aren’t a distant Washington fight; they will directly impact all of us in San Diego, cutting healthcare, housing, and homelessness benefits and increasing the cost of living.

“Slashes to healthcare?” Lawson Remer writes. “It means bigger crowds and longer waits the next time you’re in the emergency room.”

She adds, “Elimination of federally funded housing vouchers? It means local homelessness will increase as more of our neighbors won’t be able to make rent in high-cost San Diego.

“Cuts to Medicaid? It means fewer beds in the County for unhoused people having a mental health or substance abuse crisis on the streets.

“Reductions in the national food assistance program known as SNAP? It means kids in our community who we see every day — children of our friends, neighbors and coworkers — will have less to eat.”

50,000 people could lose access to job training and financial assistance, 400,000 San Diegans may no longer receive food assistance, and nearly 900,000 residents could lose Medi-Cal healthcare coverage, Lawson-Remer writes.

A Republican majority on the San Diego Board of Supervisors would make the damage we’re seeing from Republican policies much worse.

In contrast, Aguirre will help make the county better for everyone, not just the rich. It’s that simple. We need to restore the Democratic majority to the board. If you live in District 1, please get out and vote for Paloma Aguirre. And if you live outside the district, get your friends and family in District 1 to vote for the endorsed Democratic candidate, Paloma Aguirre.

The district includes Chula Vista, Imperial Beach, National City, and some communities in the City of San Diego, including Barrio Logan, East Village and Golden Hill. It also includes the unincorporated areas of Bonita, East Otay Mesa, Lincoln Acres, Sunnyside and La Presa.

Eligible District 1 voters have already received ballots in the mail; they must be returned no later than Tuesday, April 8. You can mail the ballot in through April 8, drop the ballot in one of 29 official ballot boxes throughout the district, or vote in person starting Saturday, March 29. Find locations of drop-off boxes, in-person voting locations, and more information on SanDiego.gov and more background on the election on the KPBS Voter Hub.

A version of this article appeared in the April edition of the Progressive Voice, the newsletter for the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club. I’m a board member at large for the club.

DevonThink, a research, note-taking and productivity app I rely on, is now in public beta for Version 4

The new version adds integration for generative AI, improved text editors, and more.

I’ve been using DT 4 in beta for a couple of months and found it to be stable and excellent.

The GenAI integration will no doubt get all the attention, but honestly, my favorite new features are the improvements to the Markdown editor, including customizable margin widths, typewriter scrolling and WYSIWIG editing.

Many people use DevonThink in conjunction with something else for note-taking and writing, such as Obsidian or Ulysses. I use DevonThink for all three — document management, note-taking and writing — though I also other apps for specific jobs, such as Apple Notes for notes and documents I need fast access to on mobile (such as travel itineraries) and Drafts as a scratchpad for jotting down quick thoughts.

Apparently the plaid frog article I linked to yesterday was an April Fool.

I fucking hate April Fool. I hate all practical jokes. Yes, I am a fool for thinking you were someone I could trust. Don’t worry — I won’t make that mistake again.

My doctor thinks going for tests is a hobby for me. My dude, I am not going to a cardiologist or pulmonologist for baseline tests, if there is no indication of anything wrong. I have other things to do.

What goes around comes around: Revolving restaurants are making a comeback

This article, by Diana Budds at the NYTimes, features the restaurant on top of the Marriott Marquis on Times Square. The restaurant recently reopened after closing in 2020.

I ate there a few times in the early 90s; it was nice. The rotation is so slow as to be imperceptible, though (as the article notes) if you went to the bathroom, which was in the non-rotating hub of the restaurant, it was easy to get confused to find your way back to your table. Especially if you had a few drinks.

There were a pair of concentric pony-walls on the perimeter of the dining areas, the inside one rotating, the outside one not rotating. Tables butted up against the inside pony-wall, and it was very easy to mistakenly put your cigarettes, lighter and drink down on the outside pony-wall and wonder a few minutes where the hell they’d gone to and you’d have to wait a half-hour for them to come around again on the turntable, by which time your cigarette had burned down the ice in the drinks had melted.

The Marriott Marquis also had a rotating lounge inside the lobby. A waitress told me the sections of the lounge were color-coded so they could find customer tables.

Even in the 90s, the design of the place seemed old-fashioned — so much orange! — but of course I loved that.

Scientists discovered a plaid frog in the Suriname rain forest. (Moss and Fog) — “I thought it was a scrap of flannel,” said Dr. Elise van Drohm, lead researcher on the expedition. “Then it blinked and leapt like a tiny, toxic fashion statement.” Follow the link for gorgeous frog photos.

RIP Val Kilmer. He played many roles, but I’ve long known and loved him as Doc Holliday in “Tombstone.”

Two wins for democracy today. Cory Booker in the Senate and Susan Crawford in Wisconsin.

I’m fighting a solo war to preserve the use of “invitation” as a noun.

Ian Welsh: Trump is "speed-running" America's "imperial decline"

Trump’s Negotiating Is Failing.

Welsh says Trump is “picking too many fights all once, his tariff threats are incoherent and unplanned, he’s defunding research and forcing brilliant scientists and engineers and scholars out of the US, has no industrial policy worth speaking of and is destroying America’s governing capacity with capricious cuts to the federal bureaucracy.”

Perhaps most damaging of all, Trump is giving every other nation of the world “reason to route around America like it’s damage: to stop using the US dollar, to move to using local currencies for trade and to stop buying American goods and services, and yes, to stop selling to the US.”

Soon, Welsh says, other nations will stop enforcing American intellectual property law, which will sabotage the US tech sector. (Cory Doctorow advocates for this.)

My $0.02: But what about companies like Nvidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.! Companies like that are powerful engines of growth and will keep America strong!

Oh, yeah? Why would they want to stay in the US?

Is There Life After Death? Jewish Thinking on the Afterlife

Amy Schwartz / Moment

For a long time, I’ve thought that we Jews did not believe in an afterlife — that we believed we should live well and do what’s right for its own sake, not for the sake of entering heaven after we die.

Turns out that this is just one of a multitude of afterlife beliefs in Jewish tradition — many Jews believe in reincarnation, many believe in resurrection on Judgment day and some even believe our souls are transported to Jerusalem through a network of subterranean tunnels while being beaten to a pulp by demons (which sounds like no fun at all).

I’m sticking with “do right because it’s the right thing to do.” I like the sound of that. If we are rewarded in an afterlife, that’s a bonus. But I think that when our brains stop it’s lights out.

Re-learning how to read books

I read very few books in the late 2010s, while consuming massive quantities of articles and posts. That bothered me. A few years ago, I learned that book-reading is a skill, different from reading articles and certainly very different from reading social media posts. I retaught that skill to myself. Now I’m up to about a dozen books a year and I can live with that.

I generally read two books at once. I like to do one fiction and one non-fiction.

When I was a teen-ager, I read five books a week. I had more free time then.

Cory: The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing

Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic: Obama ran a grassroots political campaign but put his “organization into an induced coma between elections,” thereby losing “an important source of discipline and feedback” … “Obama ran like a populist, but governed like Chuck Schumer.”

For me, one of the big lessons of 2024 is that political campaigns and primary fights aren’t just a means for the people to choose candidates; they are also a means for the candidates and parties to learn what the people want and adjust strategy and messaging accordingly. Harris and the Democrats deprived themselves of that opportunity and we are all paying the penalty.

J.D. Shapiro, who wrote the screenplay for “Battlefield Earth,” apologizes for writing “the suckiest movie ever” (NY Post) — I believe this gentleman is not sincere in his apology and in fact has no regrets. Heh. (Thanks, Cory!)

Excellent history and photo essay on Tristan de Cunha, the "remotest [inhabited] island in the world," population 265 as of 2016

Messy Nessy Chic:

Not a single ship visited Tristan da Cunha from 1909 until 1919, until the HMS Yarmouth finally stopped by to inform the islanders of the outcome of World War I. Accessible on by sea, Tristan da Cunha is in fact an archipelago, the remotest inhabited one in the world, although only the main island was settled by man, with a permanent population of 265 residents as of September 2016.

There is no airstrip; the island is accessible only by a difficult six-day boat voyage from South Africa.

They don’t have home internet, but they do have an internet cafe. Or did in 2016.

I’ve been sick with a bad cold or flu. I slept nearly all of Thursday, most of Friday and today is the first day I woke up feeling relatively normal.

While I was sick, I had terrible dreams that we’d re-elected 🤡 as President and —

[checks news]

Fuck.

(I really was sick. And 🤡 really is President. Alas, I never forgot it, though.)

Andy Kaufman, subject of a new documentary, "anticipated our reality-bent world"

Jonah Weiner / NYTimes

Kaufman “set up camp on ever-advancing frontiers of unpleasantness, all the better to mystify crowds about where the joke, if there was one, ended.” You were never quite sure what was a bit and what was real.

There’s a direct line from Kaufman’s recurring routines as an obnoxious lounge singer and misogynistic wrestler to Musk and Bannon throwing Nazi salutes and never clarifying whether they are really Nazis.

European nations were at war for a thousand years, culminating in two of the bloodiest wars ever fought. But those nations have been at peace for 80 years. This is a magnificent achievement. The Trump administration thinks it’s “pathetic."

Make Person-To-Person Email a Thing Again

Inspired by Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr, I’m trying to Make Person-to-Person Email a Thing again. If your message does not require immediate attention, don’t send a text message, WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, or other direct-message. Just send an email. That way, the recipient reads and responds to it it at their leisure.

Things you should send in email:

  • “Happy birthday!”
  • “Here is a funny meme.”
  • “Let’s get together in a couple of weeks.”

Things that are OK to send in text message:

  • “I’m running 15 minutes late - sorry!”
  • “You’re on fire. Literally. You might want to look into that.”
  • “There is pie.”

Cory wrote about this on his blog recently, but I can’t find the link.

I’m having a lot of difficulty focusing on work today. Fortunately, my work requires me to operate a computer that is connected to the whole Internet oh shit I’m fucked.

Here’s something I saw while walking the dog: The Canada geese are back hanging around at the park. The goslings are not far behind!

Two Canada geese relaxing on a patch of green grass near a tree.

"But her emails!" is back in the news again

When Clinton used her email for official business, it was completely normal behavior, even at her level of government. Small professional services businesses (like the Clinton Foundation) ran their own email servers, and people used their personal email for work.

It was utterly innocent behavior that the Republicans just pretended was shady. Republicans like to do that.

We’re seeing the same strategy today with transphobia and hysteria over immigration and migrants. Trans people, immigrants and migrants threaten no one, but Republicans are just making shit up and getting their supporters worked up over nothing. Jumping at shadows — but there aren’t even any shadows. It’s jumping at nothing.

71-year-old Donald Gorske has eaten two McDonald’s Big Macs every day since 1972. That’s 35,000 Big Macs. He’s saved the receipts and cartons, stacked in his basement.

I still sometimes think about something John Gruber said on Daring Fireball when Gorske was in the news for eating his 25,000th Big Mac in 2011:

My first thought when I heard about him was that he must be either an idiot or an asshole. But now I think not. I think maybe he’s a lucky man — someone who found the perfect food to suit his taste, an obsessive who never tires of it, and it happens to be cheap and readily available almost everywhere in the world.

The life and death of artist Thomas Kinkade

“Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade, who died from an overdose of alcohol and Valium 13 years ago, is the subject of a new documentary, “Art for Everybody,” by Miranda Yousef.

Kinkade’s fans adore him, made him a ubiquitous cultural icon and built him a financial empire. But he was an alcoholic, accused of multiple instances of sexua harassment, and lost a $3 million court case for defrauding gallery owners, writes Veronica Esposito at The Guardian

“One of my guiding lights is that you have to love your subject,” Yousef told Esposito. “You can see in the film if a film-maker is contemptuous of the subject, and that gets in the way of telling a good and true story.”

Kinkade’s story engages questions about “what is art and who gets to decide, the politicization of taste, and the cost of turning yourself into a brand,” Esposito writes.

Arguably Kinkade’s most prescient stroke was how he turned himself into a brand, obtaining a kind of quasi-influencer status years before there were social media networks capable of delivering fame and fortune. He reached his ubiquity the old fashioned way, through brick-and-mortar stores, a PBS TV show à la Bob Ross, endless merchandising opportunities, and an unbelievable hustle ethic. He even trademarked the “Painter of Light” moniker for himself. (Yousef does point out that the British Romantic artist JMW Turner beat him to that nickname by a good 150 years.)

“Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies” by Tom De Haven is one of my all-time favorite novels. I recommended it highly to a friend yesterday. That caused me this morning to revisit this review of the novel that I wrote for reactormag.com way back in 2010.

Two years after the review was published — 13 years ago — someone left a question in the comments, and no one answered that question, so I answered now.

It’s always a kick for me to get a response like that to some ancient comment, years later; hopefully “sarahp,” who left that question in the far-away year of 2013, will feel the same way.

Ami Angelwings:: “The original Dear Abby was a badass, esp for her time, she was a champion for queer acceptance in her column and was very big on telling parents to listen and accept their children instead of punishing and fighting with them. But also this response is a banger. Top 10 advice columnist responses of all time.”

Walking Tashkent (Uzbekistan) — I love Chris Arnade’s travelogues, served with political philosophy, discussion of why we don’t build things in American anymore and outstanding photography of ordinary street scenes,

More US states are reporting measles cases as deadly anti-vax lies spread

Melody Schreiber / The Guardian: Measles deaths include a 6-year-old girl, whose parents appeared on a video spreading deadly anti-vaccine lies soon after her death. They appeared in a video with Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organiation previously headed by RFK Jr.

“We would absolutely not take the MMR,” said the girl’s mother, referring to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. “The measles wasn’t that bad. They got over it,” she said of her four other children.

“It’s not as bad as the media is making it out to be,” the father said through a translator. Both parents fought back tears throughout the interview.

“The measles wasn’t that bad” — but all four of their kids got it and one died. Heartbreaking.

Every time I empty my computer bag to search for something small I feel like a cartoon character pulling out progressively more ridiculous objects: a horseshoe, concertina, capuchin monkey riding a unicycle.

The Underlying Problem (Hamilton Nolan) — “This is happening because some people are too rich.”

The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.

And it’s not just Musk:

We have allowed too few people to accumulate too much wealth. The imbalance has grown so severe that a tiny number of individuals with twelve-figure net worths have the means to purchase so much political power that they can effectively make the federal government’s decisions.

How did Snow White become the year’s most cursed movie? (Adrian Horton / The Guardian) — The anti-woke brigades are triggered that Disney cast an American actor of Colombian descent as Snow White. Pro-Palestinian advocates hate the casting of Gal Godot. Peter Dinklage hates the whole seven-dwarfs thing. And more.

I remember seeing the 1937 movie when I was a little kid, more than 55 years ago, and even then it seemed corny and old-fashioned.

I wanted to hate the 2025 update but the trailer looks pretty good.

Every read-it-later app I see plus my RSS reader is adding AI summarization features. I don’t need an app to read for me; I have been reading since I was six years old.

El Cajon nurse can’t shake COVID-19’s unrelenting grip: ‘I have lost relationships’

Nicole Baca, a 40-year-old registered nurse in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, talks with the Union-Tribune’s Paul Sisson about her struggle with Long Covid. Her symptoms closely resemble people close to me:

Today, she’s grateful if she can take a walk at Ocean Beach with her husband, an act that requires meticulous pre-planning to avoid the racing pulse that can make her dangerously dizzy.

“Once, I had an episode where I almost passed out in a neighbor’s driveway,” she said. “I bent down to pick something up that was on the ground, and everything started to turn white.”

…

This never-ending fight started in June of 2020 when she found herself becoming strangely confused during a shift in a COVID-19 unit at the San Diego hospital where she worked. These were the days when health care workers were isolating themselves from their families, often staying in hotel rooms when off duty.

“My last day at work, I caught myself forgetting what I was doing, and I felt like I was on cold medicine, but I wasn’t,” she said. “I developed shortness of breath, a fever, fatigue, extreme bone pain, cough, diarrhea and dizziness.

“I was stumbling into the walls of my hotel room. Weirdly enough, I never lost my sense of taste or smell like most people did at the time.”

Most see such symptoms gradually resolve. For Baca, they worsened, permanently causing her body to overreact to small changes in elevation. Just standing up sends her pulse racing, the heart monitor in her Apple Watch warning of a dangerously erratic heartbeat. Such cardiac overcorrection causes her blood pressure to drop, increasing the chances that she will faint.

I am embarking on my fourth business trip in the past year after a four year hiatus. I feel I have regained the art of rapid packing — but maybe I should wait on saying that until I get to the hotel and find out that I’ve only packed right shoes.

We watched another episode of “The Rockford Files” last night. I am continually amazed at how well that show holds up 50 years later.

I want Rockford’s car. Of course I do. But I also want all of his sports jackets.

When watching early 70s mysteries, part of the treat is seeing the lineup of guest stars who would become big stars later in the decade, as well as formerly big stars at the end of their careers. Last night’s episode featured Suzanne Somers as a wealthy expatriate. This was only a year after she played the blonde in the T-Bird in American Graffiti, and she still doesn’t have a speaking role here. Jill Clayburgh plays a bubbly hippie artist’s model.

Jamelle Bouie: The Founders Were Afraid for the Country, Too (NYT) — Bouie quotes Franklin, Hamilton, Washington and Madison on their fears of despotism and and hopes for the enduring freedom of their new country. He ends on a note of cautious optimism:

We have a would-be despot in the White House. But even with a rotting Constitution on the verge of crisis, this is still a Republic, and the people are still sovereign. The task, then, is to make this clear to those in power who would like to pretend otherwise.