7.31 Trump on Harris, at an appearance at the NABJ convention: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
7.28 Elizabeth Cree at Glimmerglass
7.28 The Fenimore Museum in Cooperstown, featuring Bob Dylan, Banksy, Marc Hom, and more.
7.27 The Pirates of Penzance at Glimmerglass
7.25 Lumen, by Ben Pastor
7.25 Twisters
7.25 Ned Temko in the Christian Science Monitor: “For America, it was a passing of the torch. But for world leaders, Joe Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign signaled something even more profound. It is the passing of an era. Mr. Biden is the last in a long line of U.S. presidents viscerally wedded to America’s post-World War II vision of itself and its place in the world: as architect, leader, and linchpin in a web of alliances dedicated to promoting and protecting democratic friends over autocratic rivals.”
7.24 Helen Lewis in The Atlantic: “Biden’s departure allows the Democrats to turn their opponents’ best attack line back on them: Maybe old men whose sentences go off on weird tangents shouldn’t run for president? (If so, this is terrible news for Trump’s favorite stump-speech riffs about Hannibal Lecter and being eaten by a shark.) Moving Harris up to the top of the ticket also allows her to select a vice-presidential candidate to broaden the Democrats’ appeal, in both demographic and geographic terms. In that context, the Republican choice of J. D. Vance looks less like a masterstroke and more like the impulse purchase of a luxury good—an expensive handbag bought on a credit card the day before its owner gets fired. Trump should have kept the receipt.”
7.24 Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: “The real men are not the ones who have to keep crowing about manliness and putting down women. Real men serve their nation, their community, and their family, and unlike Trump and his elected Republican coterie, they do it without whining or demanding credit.”
7.23 Lewis Lapham dies at 89. Here he is with fellow patrons of Elaine’s. (Front row left to right: Arthur Kopit, Jack Gelber, George Plimpton and Gay Talese; second row, seated: Willie Morris, Jack Richardson, Elaine Kaufman, Christopher Cerf, David Halberstam; third row: Nicholas Pileggi, Robert Brown, Jean-Pierre Rassam (center), and Bernard “Buzz” Farber (far right); back row: John Barry Ryan III, Lewis H. Lapham, Bobby Short, William Styron, and Bruce Jay Friedman.) Thank you, Drew Friedman!
7.23 Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic: “And now—the stunner. In a head-on conflict with its incumbent president and nominal leader, the institutional Democratic Party has prevailed. It has reclaimed control over its nomination. The party’s elected leaders and donors fell in line and told Biden that the party could not accept his continued candidacy, effectively cutting off the support he needed to win. This astonishing turn raises two fascinating questions: Why did it happen, and how much will it matter? The answer to the first is that the party is realistic about its situation and that Biden is, in the end, a party man. Both the man and the party deserve credit for putting the institution ahead of the person. That is how American politics is supposed to work. The second question depends on the outcome. If Democrats lose in November, the party’s intervention will be judged to have been desperate and pointless. But if the Democrats win, their gamble will vindicate the party as an independent actor. For the first time in two generations, the country will see why parties matter and how they can function independently in the public interest, doing what individual voters and politicians cannot.”
7.22 Harris surpasses the 1,976 Democratic delegates necessary to clinch the party’s presidential nomination.
7.22 John Mayall dies at 90.
7.21 Tim Alberta in The Atlantic: “Republicans I spoke with today, some of them still hungover from celebrating what felt to many like a victory-night celebration in Milwaukee, registered shock at the news of Biden’s departure. Party officials had left town believing the race was all but over. Now they were confronting the reality of reimagining a campaign—one that had been optimized, in every way, to defeat Biden—against a new and unknown challenger. “So, we are forced to spend time and money on fighting Crooked Joe Biden, he polls badly after having a terrible debate, and quits the race,” a clearly peeved Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social. “Now we have to start all over again.”’
7.21 Biden withdraws from the race, endorses Kamala Harris.
7.21 Walter Shapiro dies at 77.
7.19 Trip to Chicago and Springfield.
7.18 Bob Newhart dies at 94.
7.18 Marilynne Robinson in NYRB: “My subject is the rage and rejection that have emerged in America, threatening to displace politics, therefore democracy, and to supplant them with a figure whose rage and resentment excite an extreme loyalty, and disloyalty, a sort of black mass of patriotism, a business of inverted words and symbols where the idea of the sacred is turned against itself. I will suggest that one great reason for this rage is a gross maldistribution of the burdens and consequences of our wars. If I am right that this inequity has some part in the anger that has inflamed our public life, in order to vindicate democracy we must acknowledge it and try to put it right.”
7.16 Joe Bryant dies at 69.
7.15 A New York Times quiz about films based on plays by Shakespeare asks “Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 film “Throne of Blood” and Billy’s Morrisette’s 2001 movie “Scotland, PA.” are both based in which play?” The answer is Macbeth. The article then quotes this article by Jamie Malanowski:
Seldom is an ice cream stand pinpointed as the swamp from which great art slithers. Yet as Billy Morrissette, the writer and director of the new comedy “Scotland, PA.” recalls it, it was there, more than two decades ago, when he was a mere high schooler working at the Dairy Queen in South Windsor, Conn., that it first occurred to him to transpose the grisly Shakespeare tragedy “Macbeth” from the wilds of medieval Scotland to the seemingly less treacherous landscape of a fast food restaurant in Nowhere, U.S.A.
7.15 Trump selects J.D. Vance as running mate.
7.15 Aileen Cannon dismisses the documents case against Trump.
7.13 At a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump is wounded in the ear by a would-be assassin, who was killed by the Secret Service. A 50 year-old fire fighter, the father of two, was killed while shielding his family.
7.13 November 1942, by Peter Englund
7.13 Shannen Doherty dies at 53.
7.13 Richard Simmons dies at 76.
7.12 Ruth Westheimer dies at 96.
7.9 Shelley Duvall dies at 75.
7.8 Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: “Many outlets have for years been employing a significant double standard in covering Biden and his opponent, Donald Trump. When Biden stumbles over words, we question his state of mind; when Trump acts like a deranged street preacher, it’s … well, Tuesday. If Biden had suggested setting up migrants in a fight club, he’d be out of the race already; Trump does it, and the country (as well as many in the media) shrugs. Recognizing this inequity is the easy part, but here’s the harder realization: The double standard is a structural problem, it won’t change, and everyone in the prodemocracy coalition needs to grit their teeth and accept that reality. The structural issue is that in an open society, almost all views may be expressed in the public square—even outright falsehoods. This principle of liberal democracy leaves Trump free to lie and propagandize, which he and his footmen do confidently and effortlessly. These tactics have been highly effective among a GOP base whose senses have been pounded into numbness by relentless propaganda, a daily barrage of Bullshit Artillery that leaves a smoking, pockmarked no-man’s-land in the mind of almost anyone subjected to it for long enough. Media outlets cannot counter this by responding with a similar “truth barrage,” in part because there are simply not enough hours in the day. But it is also inaccurate to say that media outlets have not recently tried to cover Trump’s bizarre behavior. The NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who regularly warns about Trump’s fascistic plans, posted in frustration yesterday that the top stories in several national publications were all about Biden, and not about “Trump and Epstein, Trump and Putin, Trump telling us to inject bleach, Trump wanting to deport up to 20 million.”
7.7 The film Gone With the Wind premiered in 1939 at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. The audience was segregated, although some blacks were present, including 10-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., a member of the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir that sang at the opening.
7.6 David Cole in NYRB: “The Supreme Court in its just-concluded 2023–2024 term extended substantial new rights to hedge fund managers, big business, and former president Donald Trump, while denying constitutional protection to homeless people punished for sleeping in public, Black voters in South Carolina, and an American citizen whose noncitizen husband was denied a visa without explanation. This is perverse. We give unelected courts the power they have so that they can defend the rights of those who cannot protect themselves through the political process. Yet the Court flipped the script this term, consistently doing the bidding of the powerful while turning away the claims of the powerless. And it did so, in its most consequential cases, by the same 6–3 vote, with Republican-appointed justices imposing their will less by law than by sheer force of numbers. In previous terms, the Roberts Court has vacillated between naked assertions of power, as when it overturned the right to abortion in 2022, and more restrained rulings that rose above partisan divides, as when it last year affirmed that state courts and state constitutions can constrain state legislatures in redistricting. This term, restraint was largely out, as the Republican justices repeatedly upended or refused to follow precedents in order to further conservative ends on voting rights, presidential power, the treatment of the homeless, immigration, and, most consequentially, the authority of the administrative state.”
7.4 Sean Wilentz in NYRB: “The majority opinion in Trump v. United States, the most sweeping judicial reconstruction of the American presidency in history, secures the monumental historic disgrace of the John Roberts Court. Since last winter, the Supreme Court has intervened directly in the 2024 presidential campaign by effectively shielding Donald Trump from being tried on major federal charges before the November election. No previous Supreme Court has protected a political candidate in this way. Far more ominously, in March the Court in Trump v. Anderson openly nullified the section of the Fourteenth Amendment that bars insurrectionists from holding federal or state office, discarding basic lessons about threats to American democracy dating back to the Civil War. Now, in Trump v. United States, handed down on the last day of its 2023–2024 term, the Court has seized the opportunity to invent, with no textual basis, “at least presumptive” and quite possibly “absolute” presidential criminal immunity for official acts, a decision so broad that it essentially places the presidency above the law. By throwing Trump’s federal indictments into doubt, Trump v. United States all but completes the former president’s immunization from legal accountability for the events of January 6, 2021, at least until after the election. But that is only the decision’s narrowest ambit. Its vague distinction between official and unofficial presidential acts gives any president carte blanche to commit crimes up to and including assassination and treason with virtual impunity from criminal prosecution, as long as he can justify those crimes as part of his “official” duties. In effect it invests the presidency with quasi-monarchial powers, repudiating the foundational principle of the rule of law. Trump and his supporters have pledged to wield unfettered executive power and unleash a scorched-earth assault on the “deep state,” which is to say the existing constitutional and institutional order, if he is reelected. In the current crisis, that threat’s most powerful ally is the Supreme Court of the United States.The Roberts Court has descended to a level of shame reserved until now for the Roger B. Taney Court that decided the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857. ”
7.4 After fourteen years of of largely ineffective and frequently chaotic Conservative government, UK voters gave the country’s center-left Labour Party a landslide victory. Incoming Prime Minister Keir Starmer said early Friday: “Change begins now” and promised to “rebuild Britain.”
7.4 In a video leaked to the Daily Beast, Donald Trump comments on the debate. “We kicked that old, broken-down pile of crap,” Trump says from a golf cart. “He just quit, you know, he’s quitting the race. I got him out of it. And that means we have Kamala. I think she’s going to be bad. She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic. She’s just so fucking bad.”
7.2 Fintan O’Toole in NYRB: “Those who define themselves by the thing they are not eventually find themselves more and more like their imagined opposite. To be someone’s antithesis is also to be their alter ego. Watching the disintegration of Joe Biden in his CNN debate with Donald Trump, I was reminded of Hans Christian Andersen’s chilling story “The Shadow,” in which a man’s shade comes to life, gradually infiltrates his existence, takes over his entire persona, and kills him off. Biden’s shadow is Trump and we got to watch in real time as it inhabited and displaced him. This happened at a point in the debate when Biden had already alarmed viewers with his weak, raspy voice, his looks of stricken confusion, his fragmentary or unintelligible answers, his claim that “we created 15,000 new jobs” (he meant 15 million), and his boast, which Trump pounced on with relish, that “we finally beat Medicare.” The horrifying feeling of watching a president in freefall had been firmly established when the cohost Dana Bash raised the obvious concern that both men would be well into their eighties at the end of a putative second term. Biden, a man capable of dignity and even of grace, morphed, before our eyes, into a bargain-basement Trump. The contest for the future of the American republic became two crabby old men in the clubhouse shouting “My swing is bigger than yours.”’
7.1 Robert Towne dies at 89.