5.31 Quinta Jurecic in The Atlantic: “[T]he Trump balloon has been punctured. The Übermensch is not so über. When Trump stepped out of the courtroom after the verdict to deliver remarks to the press, he walked with hunched shoulders, declaring his innocence in a flat, exhausted tone, as if he was struggling to summon his typical reserves of fury. He had a new look about him, unseen even after the 2020 election, when he lost but claimed victory; he looked defeated.”
5.30 A New York jury finds Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to an adult-film actress. The historic verdict, which could shape the November election, makes Trump the first former U.S. president convicted of a crime.
5.30 Rangers fall to Panthers, 3-2.
5.28 Rangers fall to Panthers, 3-2, in OT.
5.27 Bill Walton dies at 71.
5.26 Rangers beat Panthers, 5-4, in OT.
5.24 Rangers beat Panthers 2-1 in OT to even series at one game apiece. Matt Rempe, on being called to enter the game late in the third period. “I heard Lavi call my name with two minutes left, I was like, ‘Oh man, let’s go. Jiminy Crickets, let’s go.’ ”
5.23 Ivy all weekend.
5.19 Ivy‘s dance recital.
5.19 Boris Johnson, in a 2012 interview with Belinda Luscombe in Time magazine, quoted in NYRB: “My hero is the mayor in Jaws. He’s a fantastic guy, and he keeps the beaches open, if you remember, even after it’s demonstrated that his constituents have been eaten by this killer fish. Of course he was proved catastrophically wrong in his judgment, but his instincts were right.”
5.16 Trailing 3-1 entering the third period, Chris Kreider leads the comeback with a natural hat trick, and the Rangers defeat Carolina 5-3, and win the series 4 games to 2.
5.10 Saying goodbye to Cathy.
5.9 David A. Graham in The Atlantic: What Trump was offering is entirely legal and absolutely corrupt. (Or to borrow a phrase: very legal and very uncool.) Thanks to Trump’s bluntness, there can be no hair-splitting about what’s going on here, and that’s good for public understanding. Trump asked special interests for an eye-popping fee in exchange explicit favors. Trump and the oil companies might argue (dubiously) that their preferred regime would actually be better for consumers, but they are cutting “the people” out of the discussion entirely, subverting democracy. The deal is getting done between Trump and the suits, behind closed doors. It’s a good reminder that Trump’s claim to being an outsider is a sham.
5.9 Roger Corman dies at 98.
5.9 Washington Post: “As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration. Trump’s response stunned several of the executives : You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted. 
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid. . . . In recent months, the Biden administration has raced to overturn Trump’s environmental actions and issue new ones before the November election. So far, Biden officials have overturned 27 Trump actions affecting the fossil fuel industry and completed at least 24 new actions. Despite the oil industry’s complaints about Biden’s policies, the U.S. is now producing more oil than any country ever has, pumping nearly 13 million barrels per day on average last year. ExxonMobil and Chevron, the largest U.S. energy companies, reported their biggest annual profits in a decade last year. Yet oil giants will see an even greater windfall — helped by new offshore drilling, speedier permits and other relaxed regulations — in a second Trump administration.”
5.8 In a deposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that in 2010, doctors told him that the severe memory loss and mental fogginess he was experiencing “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
5.7 Rangers beat Carolina 4-3 on Vincent Trocheck‘s overtime goal, go up 2 games to none.
5.7 Stormy Daniels testifies at Trump‘s trial. From Page Six: “During her testimony. . . [Stormy Daniels] recalled that Trump had pulled out a magazine that had his face on it when she wanted to eat dinner. . . .“I pretty much had enough of his arrogance and cutting me off and still not getting my dinner,” Daniels testified. “Someone should spank you with that,” she recalled [saying]. . . . Trump, who was wearing a black kimono-like garment, rolled up the magazine and “gave me a look,” seemingly as a dare. “So I took it from him and I said turn around, and I swatted him right on the butt,” she told jurors. “And he was much more polite.” Judge Juan Merchan: “There were things that were better left unsaid.”
5.7 John Ford on Facebook: There’s a great word in Norwegian, “livsløgn.” It translates literally as life’s lie, and means just that: the lie one has to tell one’s self to create identity. It comes from Ibsen: “Tar du livsløgnen fra et gjennomsnittsmenneske, tar du lykken fra ham med det samme.” Take the lie of his life away from the average person, you take the happiness from him at the same time.
5.7 At the Trump trial, Sally Franklin, a top editor for Penguin Random House, was called to the witness stand to read aloud a passage from Mr. Trump’s book in which he described himself as a fastidious custodian monitoring the minutiae of his business. “I always sign my checks, so I know where my money’s going,” he wrote in one of the excerpts read aloud in court. In another, Mr. Trump boasted of cashing a check for 50 cents, sent by Spy magazine as a prank. (Spy Magazine sent Mr. Trump minuscule checks in decreasing amounts, the lowest being 13 cents; none was for 50 cents.) They may call that cheap; I call it watching the bottom line,” he wrote in the book. “Every dollar counts in business, and for that matter, every dime. Penny pinching? You bet. I’m all for it.”
5.6 Cathy Gallagher dies at 70.
5.6 Jack Shafer in Politico:
5.6 Will Ferrell as Ron Burgundy, at the roast for Tom Brady: “I mean, let’s be honest. Your best years are behind you, Tom. The Super Bowls, Gisele, your movie career, it’s all done, it’s all gone. But you won’t be forgotten. You’ll always be remembered as Eli Manning’s bitch.”
5.5 Mark Gongloff in Bloomberg: “Tesla has been necessary for kick-starting electric-vehicle adoption in the US. But the company is not necessary for its future success. . . .Tesla recently gutted the team managing its fleet of fast-charging Superchargers, and Musk said that the company would grow the network ‘at a slower pace. If you think fighting climate change is the same thing as wanting communism, then you could do worse for capitalism’s cause 
than driving a Cybertuck-sized hole in President Joe Biden’s plans to install 500,000 new EV chargers by 2030. If you are the CEO of an EV maker, on the other hand, then such a move is simply confusing.”
5.5 Logan Grady Wetherington arrives.
5.4 Trump at a fundraiser: “These people are running a Gestapo administration. And it’s the only thing they have. And it’s the only way they’re going to win, in their opinion, and it’s actually killing them. But it doesn’t bother me.”
5.2 Frederick Kagan, in conversation with Bill Kristol: “We are actually now facing a global entente of anti-American states, and that is: Russia, Iran, North Korea and China, where Russia, Iran and North Korea are actively supporting one another with military equipment and military technology, sharing lessons from the Russia war. North Koreans have provided upwards of 3,000,000 artillery rounds to the Russians as well as rockets and missiles that the Russians are using. The Iranians, of course, have provided the Shahed drones. And the Iranians are benefiting in turn from watching how the Russian drone and missile packages operate against Western systems. These countries disagree about a lot of things. They don’t share a common ideology, but they do share a common enemy: us. And the thing that they agree on is that we are a major obstacle to their objectives and their plans, and therefore that it’s in each of their interests to help the others take us down. That’s something that we haven’t really seen in a long time, certainly not meaningfully since we managed to split China from the Soviet Union. And it is beginning to look like the World War II Axis in ways that we could start to see similar kinds of behavior. In some respects, it’s more integrated than the Axis ever was because the Germans and the Japanese really were not exchanging a whole lot of military technology and weren’t doing much other than both hating us. These guys are really working together, and that should alarm us quite a lot. And I think this is another reason to understand why what happens in each one of these theaters affects this entire entente. So, I’ve made this argument in a piece where I said, “You can’t be an Iran hawk and a Russia dove,” and you can’t because Putin winning in Ukraine will strengthen Iran and will strengthen North Korea very directly, and not abstractly. Conversely, you can’t be a Russia hawk and an Iran dove because if the Iranians benefit and grow stronger and have more capability, the Russians will benefit too. And you can’t be a North Korea hawk and a Russia or Iran dove either. We have to recognize that this is an entente that aims to take us down, and we have to be resisting every part of it.”
5.2 Marjorie Taylor Greene on X: “Democrat policies are destructive and #AmericaLast. Dem shutdowns killed 100’s of thousands of small businesses. Dem open borders grow cartel business to $400 million per month. And Democrat funded BLM/Antifa riots have cost BILLIONS in damage. Democrats are the enemy within.” Rep. Ruben Gallego replied: “I was trying to figure what type of pen to stab your friends with if they overran us on the floor of the House of Representatives while trying to conduct a democratic transition of power, so please shut your seditious, Qanon loving mouth when it comes to who loves America.”
5.1 Civil War. Joel says, “Wait! Wait! I need a quote!” The president replies “Don’t let them kill me!” “Yup, that’ll do,” Joel deadpans, before the agitators gun down the commander in chief.
5.1 The Colorado Rockies set a major league record by trailing in a record 29 straight games to begin a season on their way to a 7-22 record.