October 1, 2024
Let's talk about the Vice Presidential Debate.
At the Mushroom Café...
"Iran fired a large barrage of missiles at Israel on Tuesday evening, an attack that could set off a sharp escalation in the long-simmering conflict...."
The NYT reports.
"I just wanted to get out of legacy media. I feel like it’s just really, really difficult to do the kind of reporting that I want to do on the internet..."
Says Taylor Lorenz, quoted in "Taylor Lorenz Exits Washington Post to Launch ‘User Mag’ on Substack/Lorenz, who is leaving the newspaper to launch the publication, says that it will 'cover technology from the user side,' in contrast to traditional coverage of social media" (Hollywood Reporter).
"Donald Trump is gaining on Kamala Harris in the polls. I have some theories why."
The audience for the theater of hurricane empathy is vast, observant, and ready to put its critique in writing.
This is the most VEEP-like photo ever -- pretending to be on a phone call but forgetting to plug in the antiquated earphones while pretending to write on a blank piece of paper instead of actually doing anything. https://t.co/tkzHPplKhe
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 30, 2024
"Perhaps no previous politician has taken up the mantle of Dad in quite the way Tim Walz has."
I'm reading "Tim Walz and J. D. Vance’s Battle of the Dads/Duelling visions of fatherhood will define the Vice-Presidential debate" by Mollie Fischer (in The New Yorker).
Abstract versus particular... dad.
I don't know if that's a fair representation of either man (or the theater surrounding them), but it makes me think about the way human beings can reason from the abstract or the particular. For example, in a legal case, one could begin with an abstraction like fairness or equality, listen to arguments by ideologues, and then decide what will be done, in the future, when particular cases arise, or one might wait for a concrete controversy between adversaries with a real stake in the outcome and then work from the particular to a rule that can be stated in the abstract.
Do you like things in context or out of context — abstract or concrete — when you're doing your own thinking? When you're stuck relying on the decisions of others?
"Not even 48 hours after word got out a 43-foot-tall nude effigy of Donald Trump hung suspended from a construction crane, the indecent artwork was gone."
Decorating your front lawn for Halloween in an election year.
"'Many, many of the other artists who saw it really hated it,' Mr. Pettibone told Art in America magazine in 2011."
From "Richard Pettibone, Master of the Artistic Miniature, Dies at 86/He painted tiny reproductions of works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Duchamp and many others, raising questions about originality and creativity" (NYT).
You can see reproductions of Pettibone's works at the Castelli website, here. Sample:
"According to court documents, Ms. Harvey met Mr. Gadd in 2014 at the pub where he worked in London, and went on to stalk and harass him..."
From "Based on a True Story, or a True Story? In ‘Baby Reindeer’ Lawsuit, Words Matter. A defamation suit against Netflix boils down to how the company presented its story about Martha Scott, a fictionalization of what the show’s creator has described as a real-life stalking incident" (NYT).