7.31 Paul Reubens—PeeWee Herman—dies at 70.
7.31 Megan McArdle at the Washington Post: “Kids who attend Ivy Plus schools don’t actually end up earning all that much more on average than those who attend selective public universities, but they are significantly more likely to end up in the top 1 percent of earners. And while it would be nice to think this is because the schools hoover up all the best talent, we already know they’re admitting a bunch of rich kids who probably wouldn’t get in if they were merely middle class. It appears that at least a chunk of that earnings premium exists because their graduates are more likely in elite graduate and professional programs, and jobs with high-paying employers such as McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, who recruit heavily at Ivy Plus schools.
7.30 Ron DeSantis at an event in New Hampshire: “We’re going to have all of these deep state people, you know, we are going to start slitting throats on day one,”
7.27 Lunch with the Paul and Anne in Rhinebeck
7.27 After pitching a one-hit complete in the first game of a doubleheader, Shohei Otani homers twice in the nightcap.
7.26 Sinead O’Connor dies at 56. Allyson McCabe, in “Why Sinéad O’Connor Matters”: “She was right about the role of the Catholic Church in condoning and covering up child abuse. She was right about the music industry’s fixation on defining success in purely commercial terms. She was right about its racism, and the way it uses and silences women, pimping them out when they’re young and abandoning them when they’re not. Most of all, she was right to seek and speak her own truth, even though she’s paid — and continues to pay — a terrible price for it.”
7.25 Axios: There’s a new formula driving the U.S. economy: Taylor Swift + Barbie = Goldilocks. . . . [Beyoncé’s] 2011 observation that it’s girls who run the world is now showing up in microeconomic aggregates.The blowout success of Swift’s “Eras” tour, combined with the record box office juice of the “Barbie” movie, is helping to buoy the economy and prevent a recession. A not-too-hot, not-too-cold economy like the one we’re seeing is known as a “Goldilocks economy.”
7.25 Oppenheimer. Excellent.
7.24 Aimee Mann at The Egg.
7.24 Axios: Nearly half of generative AI job postings in the past year were in San Francisco, San Jose, New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle. That extends previous trends in the “geography of AI” jobs + R&D. None of Forbes’ top 50 AI startups is in the Rust Belt, Midwest or South. San Francisco alone was home to 20 of the best-funded AI companies — more than the rest of America combined. Beyond AI. . . .there’s a widely distributed manufacturing boom across the Southwest and Mountain West. The “chip belt” extends from upstate New York to Phoenix.
7.23 Annie Lowry in The Atlantic: By one estimate, roughly half of Americans would live somewhere different if supply met demand; New York would be eight times as big as it is now, and San Francisco five times as big. Renters spend a larger share of their income on housing than they did in 1999, and rents have grown by 135 percent, whereas average incomes have grown just 77 percent. The country has an affordability crisis, with health care, child care, and rent eating up huge shares of family budgets. Yet these statistics still underplay just how bad the situation is. People don’t spend what they can’t afford, and pretty much nobody can afford what they want anymore. Yes, we have more income, more disposable cash, and a better standard of living than at any other point in our history. But millions of us can’t live in the neighborhoods we want. We’re stuck in too-small, too-far-away accommodations, giving up on the dream of having a second bathroom or a third kid. This is why you get all the social-media nostalgia for the economic conditions of the 1950s, when many Americans still lacked indoor plumbing, but at least could live in Brooklyn or Somerville or San Francisco on a reasonable salary. We’re all stuck in the Wrong Apartment.
7.23 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
7.23 The Montevideo Brief, by J.H. Gelernter
7.22 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino
7.21 Franklin Foer in The Atlantic: “In the four decades since [Reagan] , the American economy has grown dangerously concentrated, dominated by a shrinking number of airlines, banks, tech companies, and pharmaceutical firms (to name just a few examples). Corporate titans have amassed outsize influence over the political process, smothered start-ups, and often treated consumers with shocking indifference. Study any dysfunction in American economic life long enough—runaway health-care costs, baby-formula shortages, regional inequality—and you’re likely to find corporate concentration among the causes. Why did the Reaganites do this? They were in thrall to the idea that the highest, in fact the only, valid goal of economic policy is efficiency—defined narrowly as the maximum output for the lowest prices. And they believed that Big Business was inherently efficient. They were devastatingly successful at entrenching that view. For two generations, their version of efficiency became the driving logic of competition policy (and other areas, including trade), regardless of the party in power. Concern for how monopoly power might affect workers, small-town businesses, or even democracy itself dropped out of the analysis. . . . One of the most overlooked features of the Biden administration has been its willingness to challenge the efficiency fetish.[[
7.21 Collision of Wills, by Jack Gilder
7.21 Tony Bennett dies at 96.
7.20 Washington Post: “[Florida’s] updated standards say students should learn that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit,” and that in teaching about mob violence against Black residents instructors should note “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”’
7.19 Visited Martin Van Buren’s home in Kinderhook.
7.19 Celinda Lake and Mac Heller in the Washington Post: “It’s easy to envision the 2024 presidential election becoming the third straight contest in which a veteran Democrat goes up against Donald Trump. Once again, the Democrat wins the popular vote but swing states are tighter. Could go either way — and has, right? But things are very different this time, and here’s why: The candidates might not be changing — but the electorate has. Every year, about 4 million Americans turn 18 and gain the right to vote. In the eight years between the 2016 and 2024 elections, that’s 32 million new eligible voters. Also every year, 2½ million older Americans die. So in the same eight years, that’s as many as 20 million fewer older voters. Which means that between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people. That’s about 20 percent of the total 2020 eligible electorate of 258 million Americans. And unlike previous generations, Gen Z votes. Comparing the four federal elections since 2015 (when the first members of Gen Z turned 18) with the preceding nine (1998 to 2014), average turnout by young voters (defined here as voters under 30) in the Trump and post-Trump years has been 25 percent higher than that of older generations at the same age before Trump — 8 percent higher in presidential years and a whopping 46 percent higher in midterms.”
7.19 Judge Lewis Kaplan, in rejecting Trump’s motion for a new trial: “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ . . . Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
7.18 Phoenix breaks heat Record with 19 consecutive days of 110 degrees or higher.
7.18 A historic night of offense in MLB, with the most high-scoring games since Grover Cleveland was president. Twelve teams scored at least 10 runs, and four games saw both teams score in double digits. Both are modern records, according to MLB. Only twice before (July 4 and July 9, 1894) had there been four games in which both teams scored at least 10 runs. The 12 teams scoring at least 10 runs on the same day is also a record for MLB’s modern era (since 1900). The all-time record is 13 teams, on July 4, 1894. In the four highest-scoring games of the night, the Diamondbacks beat the Braves 16-13, the Mets beat the White Sox 11-10; also the Giants 11, Reds 10 and the Royals 11, Tigers 10. The most prolific offense of the night belonged to the Cubs, who beat the Nationals, 17–3. Chicago had only three extra-base hits (home runs by Seiya Suzuki and Patrick Wisdom, and a double by Ian Happ) but had seven players pick up multiple hits on the night. The Cubs batted around in an eight-run eighth in which they had eight singles and two walks. One team that didn’t get involved in the hit parade was the Yankees, who lost 5–1 to the Angels in Anaheim.
7.17 Sen. Lisa Murkowski, quoted in The Hill: “I’m having more ‘rational Republicans’ coming up to me and saying, ‘I just don’t know how long I can stay in this party,’” Now our party is becoming known as a group of kind of extremist, populist over-the-top [people] where no one is taking us seriously anymore. . . .You have people who felt some allegiance to the party that are now really questioning, ‘Why am I [in the party?]’”
7.17 Abha Bhattarai in The Washington Post: “Despite a year when inflation pushed prices to new heights, Americans are still better off now than before the pandemic, with nearly 10 to 15 percent more in their bank accounts than in 2019, new checking and savings account data shows. However, households are rapidly spending down that extra cash they’d socked away during the pandemic. Median account balances are at their lowest levels in roughly three years and have dropped as much as 41 percent from their peak in April 2021, when Americans were flush with government stimulus money and tax returns. . . .Taken together, the data helps explain the big mystery behind how the U.S. economy has managed to avoid a recession: Consumers, supported by a strong labor market, have been able to keep spending despite inflation and a sharp rise in borrowing costs.’’
7.16 Jane Birkin dies at 76.
7.16 Marjorie Taylor Greene at Turning Point Action conference: “Joe Biden had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete. . . .Programs to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, labor unions, and he still is working on it,”
7.14 Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One
7.14 Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post: DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. “An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021. That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic,” according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration. Moreover, Florida already is one of the states with the oldest average populations, and the MAGA culture wars risk alienating young people and the diverse workforce the state needs. In February, USA Today reported, “Florida may be the most moved to state in the country, but not when it comes to Gen Z. They are the only generation that chose to exit Florida, with an outflux of 8,000 young adults, while every other generation moved in.”
7.11 John Hendrickson in The Atlantic: “In Austin, Texas, this week, a fire battalion chief measured a local playground slide at 130 degrees, practically hot enough to cause a second-degree burn within seconds. Last night in one part of the Florida Keys, the sea-surface temperature came close to 97 degrees. On Saturday, the Northwest Territories of Canada—up near the Arctic Ocean—hit 100 degrees. Last week was officially the hottest week ever recorded on Earth. All these numbers and stats easily start to blur. When everything’s a disaster, many of us become numb to climate-change news. But consider the following: 54 million Americans could experience triple-digit weather this week. Phoenix, Arizona, may break its all-time record for consecutive days above 110 degrees. Death Valley could hit a whopping 130 on Sunday. None of this is a mere inconvenience. It can be lethal. The climate journalist Jeff Goodell, author of the new book The Heat Will Kill You First, described the experience of walking 10 blocks in Phoenix on a 115-degree day in a recent essay: “After walking three blocks, I felt dizzy. After seven blocks, my heart was pounding. After 10 blocks, I thought I was a goner.”
7.11 Scientists designate a small body of water near Toronto as ground-zero for the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch defined by humanity’s massive and destabilizing impact on the planet. Layered sediment at the bottom of Lake Crawford — laced with microplastics, fly-ash spread by burning oil and coal, and the detritus of nuclear bomb explosions — is the single best repository of evidence that a new, and challenging, chapter in Earth’s history has begun, members of the Anthropocene Working Group concluded.
7.11 Milan Kundera dies at 94.
7.10 Captain Gray’s Gambit, by J.H. Gelernter
7.9 A slow-moving storm dumps up to eight inches of rain in the Hudson Valley and New England, leading to at least one death, numerous rescues, and washed out roads. “They are calling this a 1,000-year event,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday.
7.8 Le Pont du Gard—the highest Roman aquaduct.
7.8 The Pope’s Palace at Avignon.
7.7 A walk through the town of Les Baux, and a visit to limestone caverns to see Carrieres de Lumieres to see the exhibit of Dutch artists.
7.7 Arles. Saw Les Arenas, a 20,000 seat coliseum that is still used for bullfights.
7.6 Took the Touron Steam Train through a bit of the Massif Central. In the evening, strolled through the ancient town of Viviers.
7.5 Visited Vienne. Saw the Temple of Augustus and Livia, and a plaque honoring Thomas Jefferson. Also saw the Gothic Cathedral of St. Maurice.
7.4 The average global temperature reached 17.18 degrees Celsius (62.92 degrees Fahrenheit), marking the hottest day on Earth since records began in 1979. The temperature surpassed the previous record, which was set the day before.
7.4 Took a bus into Beaujolais wine country, where we visited a Leisure Castle. Saw a vineyard, and learned a lot about wine.
7.3 Visited the Basilica of Notre Dame, high on the hill that overlooks Lyon. Saw striking lawyers at the Palace of Justice, and walked through Vieux Lyon. Visited a print shop..
7.2 After flying out of Boston, and a busy hike through Charles De Gaulle airport, we arrive at the Viking Hermond in Lyon.
7.2 Mel Brooks, in an interview in The Atlantic: “You just can’t spout at the mouth. There is a thing called manners, which is very hard to understand why they invented this thing that held you back. It held me back. You can’t live a real life if you’re just a bunch of firecrackers going off. You got to play ball with the universe.’’
7.16 Marjorie Taylor Greene at Turning Point Action conference: “Joe Biden had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete. . . .Programs to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, labor unions, and he still is working on it,”
7.14 Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One
7.14 Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post: DeSantis likes to brag that more people are moving to Florida than ever. Not so fast. “An estimated 674,740 people reported that their permanent address changed from Florida to another state in 2021. That’s more than any other state, including New York or California, the two states that have received the most attention for outbound migration during the pandemic,” according to the American Community Survey released in June tracking state-by-state migration. Moreover, Florida already is one of the states with the oldest average populations, and the MAGA culture wars risk alienating young people and the diverse workforce the state needs. In February, USA Today reported, “Florida may be the most moved to state in the country, but not when it comes to Gen Z. They are the only generation that chose to exit Florida, with an outflux of 8,000 young adults, while every other generation moved in.”
7.11 John Hendrickson in The Atlantic: In Austin, Texas, this week, a fire battalion chief measured a local playground slide at 130 degrees, practically hot enough to cause a second-degree burn within seconds. Last night in one part of the Florida Keys, the sea-surface temperature came close to 97 degrees. On Saturday, the Northwest Territories of Canada—up near the Arctic Ocean—hit 100 degrees. Last week was officially the hottest week ever recorded on Earth. All these numbers and stats easily start to blur. When everything’s a disaster, many of us become numb to climate-change news. But consider the following: 54 million Americans could experience triple-digit weather this week. Phoenix, Arizona, may break its all-time record for consecutive days above 110 degrees. Death Valley could hit a whopping 130 on Sunday. None of this is a mere inconvenience. It can be lethal. The climate journalist Jeff Goodell, author of the new book The Heat Will Kill You First, described the experience of walking 10 blocks in Phoenix on a 115-degree day in a recent essay: “After walking three blocks, I felt dizzy. After seven blocks, my heart was pounding. After 10 blocks, I thought I was a goner.”
7.11 Scientists designate a small body of water near Toronto as ground-zero for the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch defined by humanity’s massive and destabilizing impact on the planet. Layered sediment at the bottom of Lake Crawford — laced with microplastics, fly-ash spread by burning oil and coal, and the detritus of nuclear bomb explosions — is the single best repository of evidence that a new, and challenging, chapter in Earth’s history has begun, members of the Anthropocene Working Group concluded.
7.11 Milan Kundera dies at 94.
7.10 Captain Gray’s Gambit, by J.H. Gelernter7.24 Aimee
7.9 A slow-moving storm dumps up to eight inches of rain in the Hudson Valley and New England, leading to at least one death, numerous rescues, and washed out roads. “They are calling this a 1,000-year event,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said Monday.
7.8 Le Pont du Gard—the highest Roman aquaduct.
7.8 The Pope’s Palace at Avignon.
7.7 A walk through the town of Les Baux, and a visit to limestone caverns to see Carrieres de Lumieres to see the exhibit of Dutch artists.
7.7 Arles. Saw Les Arenas, a 20,000 seat coliseum that is still used for bullfights. 7.6 Took the Touron Steam Train through a bit of the Massif Central. In the evening, strolled through the ancient town of Viviers.
7.5 Visited Vienne. Saw the Temple of Augustus and Livia, and a plaque honoring Thomas Jefferson. Also saw the Gothic Cathedral of St. Maurice.
7.4 The average global temperature reached 17.18 degrees Celsius (62.92 degrees Fahrenheit), marking the hottest day on Earth since records began in 1979. The temperature surpassed the previous record, which was set the day before.
7,4 Took a bus into Beaujolais wine country, where we visited a Leisure Castle. Saw a vineyard, and learned a lot about wine.
7.3 Visited the Basilica of Notre Dame, high on the hill that overlooks Lyon. Saw striking lawyers at the Palace of Justice, and walked through Vieux Lyon. Visited a print shop..
7.2 After flying out of Boston, and a busy hike through Charles De Gaulle airport, we arrive at the Viking Hermond in Lyon.
7.2 Mel Brooks, in an interview in The Atlantic: “You just can’t spout at the mouth. There is a thing called manners, which is very hard to understand why they invented this thing that held you back. It held me back. You can’t live a real life if you’re just a bunch of firecrackers going off. You got to play ball with the universe.’’