8.30 Trump at a Moms for Liberty rally: “Think of it, your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. . . The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And many of these childs, 15 years later say, what the hell happened? Who did this to me? They say, who did this to me? It’s incredible.”
8.28 Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in the Times: “The stress and mental health challenges faced by parents — just like loneliness, workplace well-being and the impact of social media on youth mental health — aren’t always visible, but they can take a steep toll. It’s time to recognize they constitute a serious public health concern for our country. Parents who feel pushed to the brink deserve more than platitudes. They need tangible support. . . . A recent study by the American Psychological Association revealed that 48 percent of parents say most days their stress is completely overwhelming, compared to 26 percent of other adults who reported the same. They are navigating traditional hardships of parenting — worrying about money and safety, struggling to get enough sleep — as well as new stressors, including omnipresent screens, a youth mental health crisis and widespread fear about the future. Stress is tougher to manage when you feel you’re on your own, which is why it’s particularly concerning that so many parents, single parents most of all, report feeling lonelier than other adults. Additionally, parents are stretched for time. Compared to just a few decades ago, both mothers and fathers spend more time working and more time caring for their children, leaving them less time for rest, leisure and relationships. Stress, loneliness and exhaustion can easily affect people’s mental health and well-being. And we know that the mental health of parents has a direct impact on the mental health of children.”
8.27 Danny Jansen becomes the first player in MLB history to play for both teams in the same game. On June 26, Jansen was playing for Toronto in a game against the Boston Red Sox, when the game was suspended for severe weather. On July 27, Jansen was traded to the Red Sox. When the game was resumed, Jansen was substituted into the game to catch for the Red Sox, and the Blue Jays subbed Daulton Varsho into the game to take over Jansen’s original 0-1 plate appearance. Varsho struck out.
8.27 The New York Times: “The border had seen a steady drop in crossings all year, but things took a dramatic turn in June. That’s when the Biden administration took a hallmark of the failed immigration bill from February — a measure allowing border officials to turn back migrants quickly when crossings exceed a certain level — and put a version of it into place via presidential proclamation. Since then, the results have been clear: Border arrests are down, asylum claims are plummeting and fewer newly arrived people are being released into U.S. communities. Crossings have gotten so low that Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has stopped busing migrants to Democratic-run cities, a political tactic he wielded to force the public to pay attention to the border. There are simply no longer people to send.”
8.25 A Yankees jersey said to be worn by Babe Ruth in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series sold for $24.12 million at a Heritage Auction, smashing the record for the most expensive piece of sports memorabilia in history. The road jersey was photo matched by multiple sources to Game 3 at Wrigley Field — when Ruth hit two home runs, including the famed, and debunked, “called shot” — though one leading photomatching company was not able to “match” the jersey after multiple attempts in recent years. The previous record price for a game-worn piece of memorabilia was a Michael Jordan Bulls jersey from Game 1 of the 1998 NBA Finals, which sold for $10.1 million in 2022. The most expensive price for any sports collectible sold at auction was $12.6 million for a Topps 1952 Mickey Mantle card sold in 2022. This specific Ruth jersey was last sold at auction in 2005 for $940,000.
8.25 Aaron Judge homers twice (50, 51), joining Babe Ruth, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Alex Rodriguez as the fifth player in MLB history to hit at least 50 homers in three separate seasons.
8.25 A Dark Song of Blood, by Ben Pastor
8.25 The Marginalian: “For [the pioneering pediatrician turned psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott], proper therapy offered not just a cure of symptoms but “a more widely based personality richer in feeling and more tolerant of others because more sure of [oneself]”
8.24 Greg Sargent in The New Republic: “Let’s be blunt. The big elephant in the room is the following question: Can Harris, the first Black female major-party nominee in U.S. history, attain a threshold of acceptability with a certain percentage of white voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin? When pundits ask whether Harris “can define herself before Trump defines her,” or use similar jargon, this is what they’re really asking.”
8.23 The Last of the Mohicans with Ginny at Fort William Henry.
8.23 Dan Balz in the Post: “In his history as a candidate for president, Donald Trump has never experienced anything like the past month. Vice President Kamala Harris, a Black and Indian American woman, has pushed the White alpha male to the sidelines of the national conversation, denying him the spotlight he craves and constantly demands. . . .The Democrats are in the game, the former president is in a box, and it’s not clear whether he knows what to do. Trying to free himself from this bind, Trump has plucked from what was once a tested playbook of tricks that in the past has kept his opponents off-balance and himself at the center of attention. But as the campaign now moves to its next phase, the focus on him and how he attempts to regain his balance will be as much or more of the story compared with how Harris navigates the road ahead.”
8.23 Jayson Stark in The Athletic: “If Juan Soto just keeps doing what he’s done for his first five months as a Yankee, he’s going to finish with about 9.7 WAR and a 189 OPS+, according to Baseball Reference. . . .Here’s your comprehensive list of veteran players in the live-ball era who were traded and then fired off an OPS+ of 180 or better, with at least nine wins above replacement, in their first season with their new team: Babe Ruth.”
8.23 Jayson Stark in The Athletic: “[Aaron Judge and Juan Soto are] the Ruth and Gehrig of the 21st Century. . Unless you’re planning your 100th birthday party, you — and everyone else reading this — have never seen anything like this baseball tag team for the ages. In all sorts of ways. . . . Heading into Thursday, Judge’s wRC+ [FanGraphs’ Weighted Runs Created+] was a massive 223. Soto was at 191. Unreal. So how often have any two teammates had seasons in which their wRC+ were both that high — by which I mean at least 90 percent better than league average? There has been only one other duo like this in modern times. Ruth and Gehrig (1927, 1928, and 1929.)”
8.22 Brad DeLong on X: “Trump tariffs and mass deportation, taken together, would be the largest adverse supply shock ever inflicted on the American economy. They would in all likelihood generate a combination of inflation and depression America has never before seen. Our macroeconomic troubles would dwarf anything we saw in the 1970s or at any other time.”
8.22 Jonathan Levin on Bloomberg: “Harris has some serious manufacturing credentials, and she shouldn’t be afraid to brag about them in her campaign against Trump, who has long claimed to champion domestic industry without delivering anything near the current administration’s results. Spending on manufacturing construction in the US has tripled under the Biden-Harris industrial policy, including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act. Most notably, the spending has been led by investments in computer and electronic manufacturing facilities, and the benefits have been shared across the country.”
8.22 Kamala Harris is nominated.
8.22 Adam Kinzinger at the DNC: “Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He is a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim.”
8.21 Tim Walz at the DNC: “Mind your own damn business.”
8.21 Bill Clinton at the DNC: “You’re going to have a hard time believing this, but so help me, I triple-checked it. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. I swear I checked this three times. Even I couldn’t believe it. What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans one.” That is: 50 million jobs added under Democratic presidents and 1 million under Republicans.
8.21 John Amos dies at 84.
8.20 New York-based comedian Dan Mahboubian Rosen on Tik Tok, objecting to European protests about overtourism: “Europe is over. . . . [It] is Disney World for Americans. . . It’s ok , you had a good run, time to accept your fate. . . You have to accept at this point that you are our Disney World now. It’s your function in this world.” He went on to say that European economies have stagnated, and countries don’t produce anything besides the prostitution of their history and cured meats. “You had your fun colonizing the world, pillaging, and extracting wealth to make your nice little piazzas and palaces. Now you just have to accept that you’re museum cities.”
8.19 Chasing History by Carl Bernstein
8.18 Alain Delon dies at 88.
8.18 Phil Donahue dies at 88.
8.18 Ivy: “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.”
8.16 Cara, Ivy and Logan visit.
8.16 At a pro-Israel event, Trump spoke of the Medal of Freedom he had awarded to Miriam Adelson, a top Republican donor. “[It’s the] equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor but civilian version. It’s actually much better because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor. They’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. [Adelson] gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman. They’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom and she got it through committees and everything else.” The Veterans of Foreign Wars: “These asinine comments not only diminish the significance of our nation’s highest award for valor, but also crassly characterizes the sacrifices of those who have risked their lives above and beyond the call of duty.”
8.15 David Handelman dies at 63. A good guy.
8.15 Biden and Harris appear at a rally in Maryland. Biden: “Let me tell you what our Project 2025 is: Beat the hell out of ’em.”
8.15 Peter Marshall dies at 98.
8.14 Gena Rowlands dies at 94.
8.12 Musk interviews Trump on X. Musk: “People were asking me in California, are you worried about a nuclear cloud coming from Japan? I am like no, that’s crazy. It is actually, it is not even dangerous in Fukushima. I flew there and ate locally grown vegetables on TV to prove it. . . . Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed but now they are full cities again.” Trump: “That’s great, that’s great.” Musk: “It is not as scary as people think, basically.” Trump: “We will have to rebrand it. We will name it after you or something.”
8.12 Peter Wehner in The Atlantic: “Trump, enraged and rattled, is reverting to his feral ways. We see it in his preposterous claim that Harris’s crowds, which are both noticeably larger and far more enthusiastic than his own, are AI-generated; in his resentful attacks against the popular Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, and his wife, because Kemp didn’t aid Trump in his effort to overthrow the election; and in his attack on Harris’s racial identity. At precisely the moment when Trump needs to elevate his performance, to the degree that such a thing is even possible, he’s gone back to his most natural state: erratic, crazed, transgressive, self-indulgent, and enraged. One by-product of this is that Trump has provided no coherent or focused line of attack on Harris. His criticisms are not just vile, but witless. The prospect of not just being beaten, but being beaten by a woman of color, has sent Trump into a frenzy in a way almost nothing else could.”
8.11 The Olympics end. Lara Williams in Bloomberg: “[G]ive Paris a medal for budget management. While Tokyo 2021 exceeded its proposed budget by somewhere between 128% and 283% and the 2016 Rio Games cost 352% more than the initial proposal, according to an University of Oxford study, spending at the 2024 Paris Olympics is expected to be between 25% and 115% percent over budget — depending on whether you side with this S&P Global Report or the folks at Oxford. Either way, with total spend reportedly coming in under $10 billion, it’ll be a much cheaper Games in terms of absolute costs compared to recent years. That’s in part thanks to the fact that 95% of the venues already existed.”
8.10 Caitlin Clark meets Aaron Judge before the Yankees’ doubleheader against the Rangers. Clark: “He’s pretty swole.”
8.8 Liar Moon, by Ben Proctor
8.8 Justin Fox in Bloomberg: “What’s weirder? Putting free tampons in boys’ school bathrooms or not putting them in school bathrooms at all? I expect a steady stream of what I will call weird-offs over the next three months, inspired by then-obscure Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s remark in July about Republicans: “These are weird people on the other side.” Now Walz is the Democratic vice presidential nominee, and Republicans have been trying to use the “access to menstrual products” provision of an education bill he signed into law last year to portray him as a way-out-there progressive. “Tampon Tim” memes have been circulating on social media, and Donald Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that “there is no greater threat to our health than leaders who support gender-transition surgeries for young minors, who support putting tampons in men’s bathrooms in public schools.” Gender-transition surgeries for minors are clearly not a “greater threat to our health” than, say, drug overdoses or gun violence or heart disease. But even many Democrats find them weird. Providing free menstrual products in public schools, on the other hand, is pretty normal. Most US states do it to at least some extent, including a few pretty red ones. Legislation with inclusive language that means tampons can end up in boys’ as well as girls’ bathrooms — as in Minnesota — is more of a blue-state thing. But portraying this as a threat to public health is, well, super-weird, argues Lisa Jarvis. “Policymakers should be thinking broadly about ways to make adolescence healthier and happier,” she writes. “That includes normalizing and easing the body transitions all kids experience.”
8.5 Harris picks Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty: “In Governor Walz, Democrats get the left’s full policy agenda from someone who often looks like he just climbed down from his deer stand.”
8.5 Clare Malone in The New Yorker: “One day, in the fall of 2014, [Bobby Kennedy Jr.] was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub. Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends. . . . After the outing, Kennedy, who was then sixty and recently married to [Cheryl] Hines, got an idea. He drove to Manhattan and, as darkness fell, entered Central Park with the bear and a bicycle. A person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist. The next day, the bear was discovered by two women walking their dogs, setting off an investigation by the N.Y.P.D. “This is a highly unusual situation,” a spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy told the Times. “It’s awful.” In a follow-up piece for the Times, which was coincidentally written by Tatiana Schlossberg, one of J.F.K.’s granddaughters, a retired Bronx homicide commander commented, “People are crazy.”
8.3 Deadpool and Wolverine
8.2 Dinner with Paul and Anne at Scarlett Knife in Latham.
8.1 Katie Ledecky won a silver medal in the women’s 4×200-meter freestyle relay, a day after she took home gold in the 1,500-meter. She now has 13 medals, more than any women’s swimmer and the most by an American woman in any sport.
8.1 Simone Biles finishes first in the women’s gymnastics all-around final, becoming the oldest all-around champion since 1952.
8.1 When the Sea Came Alive : An Oral History of D-Day, by Garrett Graff
8.1 Jess Bidgood in the Times: “In Atlanta, as Vice President Kamala Harris soaked up the enthusiasm of a 10,000-person crowd last night, she did something a little different when her remarks turned to Trump: She smiled. Harris sounded almost gleeful as she told the crowd she knew his type from her days as a prosecutor. She quoted the book of Quavo, the rapper, as she assailed Trump’s efforts to block a bipartisan border deal, declaring that he “does not walk it like he talks it.” And she grinned as she dared Trump to debate her, reveling in the delivery of her biggest applause line of the night. “If you’ve got something to say,” Harris said as the crowd roared, “say it to my face.” Forget the Age of Enlightenment. Harris appears keen to lead her party into the Age of Lightening Up — to cut through the years of Trump-related burnout by presenting herself as a happy warrior willing to cut him down to size and bring the rhetoric about him back to earth. While at certain moments Harris treated Trump as a punchline, in others she listed concrete freedoms that she said were under assault from the former president, including the freedom to vote and the freedom “of a woman to make decisions about her own body” — a line she uttered while almost seeming to point to herself. Her ebullient tone made for a sharp contrast from Trump’s contentious and combative appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists this afternoon, where he lashed out at reporters and suggested that Harris was not really Black. . . .Harris’s approach is also distinct from President Biden’s loftier warnings about the threats Trump poses to the Republic. Some Democrats say the shift was long overdue. “Voters have been told for years to do what they need to do out of fear,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive strategist. “What is different about the Kamala Harris campaign, is they are giving people something to vote for, and it’s been a minute since that has happened.”