"Last winter, I did the noble thing and got off social media. I lacked the inner strength to delete my accounts fully, so..."

"... I settled for removing apps from my phone and enlisting my husband to change my Facebook password. It worked. I stopped scrolling and liking and generally monitoring the lives of people I do not actually know. I felt better — less inadequate, more present, vaguely morally superior. The problem is it’s July now, and I just returned from a really great vacation...."

Writes Rachel Feintzeig, in "If I Don’t Post About My Vacation, Did It Even Happen?" (NYT)(free-access link).

What's the point of depriving yourself in pursuit of a feeling of vague moral superiority?! Why not confront your feeling of inadequacy and flip it into something positive? You're not "better" because you travel or because you don't travel and because you scroll or post in social media or because you don't. 

Now, this lady — "a journalist at work on a book about staring down 40" — was able to get the story of her "really great vacation" published in the New York Times, so the answer to whether it feels as though the vacation really happened if she didn't post about it in social media is clearly YES!!!

But what is this "better" feeling that you want? Feintzeig is "staring down 40," and it was half a lifetime ago that I stared down 40. When I was that young — it really is quite young! — I was working out the difference between what it looked like everyone in general valued and what it was that I — personally and specifically — truly valued. I don't think the question is whether your vacation seems real if you don't show people photographs. I think the question is: Are you for real?

"The wax lips is my statement against plastic surgery. I’ve been very vocal about the genocide of a generation of women..."

"...  by the cosmeceutical industrial complex who’ve disfigured themselves. The wax lips really sends it home.”

Said Jamie Lee Curtis, posing in wax lips and quoted in "'Generations of women have been disfigured': Jamie Lee Curtis lets rip on plastic surgery, power, and Hollywood’s age problem" (Guardian).

Obviously, the word “genocide” is very strong and risks causing offence, given its proper meaning. To Curtis, however, it is accurate. “I’ve used that word for a long time and I use it specifically because it’s a strong word. I believe that we have wiped out a generation or two of natural human [appearance]. The concept that you can alter the way you look through chemicals, surgical procedures, fillers – there’s a disfigurement of generations of predominantly women who are altering their appearances...."

And yet: 

Curtis’s daughter Ruby, 29, is trans.... “I’m an outspoken advocate for the right of human beings to be who they are.... I’m a John Steinbeck student... and there’s a beautiful piece of writing from East of Eden about the freedom of people to be who they are. Any government, religion, institution trying to limit that freedom is what I need to fight against.””

I guess those Hollywood actresses with their chemicals and surgical procedures are not trying to "be who they are" but to be what they feel others want them to be. How "against plastic surgery" is Curtis? When is it "disfigurement"? When does she feel motivated to use the word "genocide"? One might feel inclined to say that each person is free to make their own decision, but when do onlookers judge them harshly? How do we know who is truly finding their real self in these medical cuttings and who is straining to conform to real or imagined societal expectations?

ADDED: Here's the question I was motivated to ask Grok: "Are trans women mostly attempting to look like beautiful women or is the goal simply to look like an ordinary woman (and to 'read' as a woman)? Or is it enough merely to feel, from their own perspective, that they are expressing their own personal idea of womanliness (or femininity) and not focused on what other people think of what they are seeing?" 

"And I’m still amazed by how quickly I got used to being naked in front of others, how little I cared, how little notice others took."

"I thought I would be stared at, regarded as an embarrassing old woman showing off in public. Pottering in my garden this morning, deadheading geraniums and hanging out the washing, I was itching to take off my nightie and stand there in the altogether, but I have close neighbours; even next door’s cat was giving me the side-eye. Living with my 40-year-old son, I certainly don’t intend to parade around top and bottomless indoors any time soon, but I have invited a friend to join me on Brighton’s nudist beach, which is very near where I live. Swimwear seems so unnecessary to me these days...."

Writes Elaine Kingett, in "I’m 75 and hate my body. Will my first naturist holiday help? The writer Elaine Kingett used to love her body but that changed after a heart attack, breast cancer and the death of her husband. Can a ‘clothes optional’ break in Crete kickstart a reconciliation?" (London Times).

"I’ve done everything openly, nothing in secret. If it makes some people happy to question it, it has made a lot of other people happier who believe it."

Said Fauja Singh, in 2016, quoted in "Fauja Singh, Marathon Runner at an Advanced Age, Is Dead/Competing in London in 2011, he claimed to be 100, though his exact age remained a mystery. 'I run while talking to God,' he said in explaining his endurance" (NYT).

Singh’s case became emblematic of the difficulties race officials faced in determining the ages of elderly runners, especially when the athletes were born in places where birth certificates were unavailable or lost during tumultuous times.

“People in the third world are at a disadvantage for being taken seriously,” Harmander Singh told The New York Times in 2016. 

Still, Fauja Singh had his supporters among fans and officials. Mr. Smith, the Ontario Masters official, said, “As far as I’m concerned, he was legit.” But, he added: “They just can’t start allowing world records when there is no birth certificate. It opens a whole can of worms.”

"Trump is 47 and Woods is 49, making this a surprisingly age-appropriate celebrity pairing."

I'm reading "Tiger Woods and Vanessa Trump: MAGA Dating Drama, Explained" (Intelligencer).

I wonder what else they're not doing wrong.

I caught a glimpse of my own obituary.

In the email this morning, the Google alert I've had on my name for decades brings this:

I send that image to Meade (along with the link to the website the alert wants me to click), and this conversation follows:

"I think the best people age the hardest. You know, I think Obama like, was probably like a very idealistic young man..."

"And that dude aged more than anybody.... Who ages the least? Trump.... He just brushed that shit off his shoulders. Like it was nothing....  So he's got an act, he's basically like a comic.... These other people... have canned speeches.... But it's not them. It's not them. That's why they all fall apart when they're talking.... All of 'em have to be protected from themselves, because when confronted by like some basic facts about the fucking corruption of the world, they don't know what to say. And they, they crumble, and Trump just starts talking shit.... They're like, oh, he's a crazy person. I'm like, yeah, that's the only kind of person that would survive what you try to do to him.... That's the only kind of guy that gets through. Like, you want a perfect person? A perfect person morally falls apart by the time they've been indicted and they have 34 counts, felony counts. Like your whole body's just destroyed by the stress of you possibly going to jail for the rest of your life. You have to be a fucking insane person to ride that out and not look like anything even happened. Then you get shot. You get up after you got shot, you're fucking bleeding from your ear and you go fight, fight, fight. You gotta be a crazy person to get through these. He's a nightmare. For anybody that's trying to rig a system like that, guy's the nightmare. He's the final boss of Fuck You...."

Said Joe Rogan.

Transcript here.

"At the end of last week, the Democratic Party sent an email to members and supporters, asking them to chip in $30 each for its election fighting fund. The email was dressed up as a personal appeal from Kamala Harris...."

"Harris was so badly defeated by President Trump.... that the party’s power brokers might have thought better than using her to front their bid for campaign cash. Then again, those party bosses have also seen the polling that shows Harris, at least for now, is the overwhelming favourite among the party’s grassroots to be the presidential candidate in 2028."

I'm reading "The early frontrunner for the 2028 election? Kamala Harris/The former vice-president may run for governor of California. Or…" (London Times).

I laughed at this line "At 60, she is still young enough to have another run at high office...." Another? Like there's only one more chance for her to threaten us with a presidential candidacy — in 2028? She's only 60. She can go at least 4 more times. She can be there in 2028, 2032, 2036, and 2040! Imagine the 80-year-old Kamala Harris, well-seasoned, sharp as a tack.

Perhaps the Democratic Party must show her if it's going to use any individual person on this kind of fundraising email. Not to show her — when she's the party's most recent nominee — could be read as disrespectful. Ironically, that's the same motivation that got her the nomination last time and that led to dismal defeat. But there's no choice. They're boxed in. This is the corner into which they have painted themselves.

I'm making a new tag. 

"Plenty of Democrats are annoyed that 'Original Sin' has catapulted the issue of Biden’s enfeeblement back into the news..."

"... threatening to distract voters from Donald Trump’s rococo corruption. I think, though, that Tapper and Thompson have done the party a favor. Some sort of reckoning is due for the disastrous missteps that paved the way for Trump’s return.... Party officials burned a lot of credibility defending Biden’s cognitive fitness. As they seek to earn it back, they should be honest about what they got wrong. Politically, the easiest move for Democrats is to dump all the blame onto Biden, his family and the clique of longtime aides Tapper and Thompson call 'the Politburo': Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed. This group certainly deserves to be excoriated.... But while his closest associates might have hidden the worst of erosion, it was plain enough to anyone willing to see it. Again and again, voters told pollsters that the president was too old to run for re-election. If ordinary people recognized the problem, why couldn’t the insiders?"

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "How Did So Many Elected Democrats Miss Biden’s Infirmity?" (NYT).

I don't know what "sort of reckoning" you're going to get if you keep saying "too old" when you mean mentally deficient and when you ask why couldn’t the insiders "recognize the problem" when you can't see inside the insiders' head.

I don't think you yourself are recognizing the problem when you say the problem was that he was "too old" and when you portray the insiders as sincerely failing to see what was there. If they saw that he was quite old, they could nevertheless believe that he was an old one with excellent capacities.

But I'd guess that they knew he lacked capacity, and I wonder if the reason they didn't recognize that problem is that Joe Biden has lacked capacity all along — including when he ran in 1988 — and the insiders were always operating through him and didn't particularly need or want him to have what it takes to serve as President.

So if you want a serious reckoning, reckon with that. But you don't, do you? You didn't then, and you don't now. You're just hoping Trump will fail so badly, that the much-abused people will come stumbling back to you in the end because there's nowhere else to go. 

"I feel I’ve lived my life well, but it’s a feeling. I’m just reasonably happy with what I’ve done."

"I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it. If you look at the universe and the complexity of the universe, what I do with my day cannot be relevant."

Said Daniel Kahneman, on March 19, quoted in "There’s a Lesson to Learn From Daniel Kahneman’s Death" (NYT). On March 27th, he followed through with his plan to die by assisted suicide.

Another quote: "I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am 90 years old. It is time to go."

Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work in "behavioral" economics. You may know his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow."

"When he lit a cigarette, a nurse in blue scrubs appeared over his shoulder, peering at Hockney with apparent concern."

"But by staying silent, the nurse respected the buttons that both he and Hockney wore, reading 'End Bossiness Soon.' The artist made those after the British government banned smoking in public spaces in 2007. These days, Hockney has 24-hour medical care, and ensuring that he will be well enough to go to Paris for the exhibition opening has been a priority for his team. He planned to travel by car, with his dachshund, Tess; his doctor would travel separately, he said. 'I am looking forward to it, because it is the largest exhibition I’ve ever had. Which it should be,' Hockney said with a wry smile. 'Shouldn’t it, really?'"

From "David Hockney Wants His Biggest Ever Show to Bring You Joy/The artist is 87 now and under constant medical care. But he was determined to make it to Paris for the exhibition of his life" (NYT)(free-access link).

"So, Dylan, that's womanhood. Everyone on earth wants you to be a shiny, 2-dimensional caricature...."

What happens when "girlhood" gets old? Dylan Mulvaney ages out:

"... the anile, demented echo chamber of social media."

A phrase I found — in a 2016 National Post article about Justin Trudeau’s "sunny Liberalism" — when I looked up the word "anile" in the OED.

A Wordle spoiler follows. "Anile" is not the answer, but "anile" was accepted as a guess, though after getting the right answer, I was told that "anile" would never be the answer in Wordle.

Why not?! "Anile" is a perfectly good word. It means, the OED tells us, "Of, belonging to, or characteristic of old women; resembling an old woman. Chiefly derogatory with connotations of foolishness, senility, or decrepitude."

"[T]his is like an amazing puzzle, uncovering the secrets of an ancient civilization that went extinct … except it’s still around."

The logic flow diagram for the Social Security system looks INSANE. No one person actually knows how it works.

The payment files that move between Social Security and Treasury have significant inconsistencies that are not reconciled. It’s wild. https://t.co/BQUyxG72AC

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025

And what's going on here — mostly typos?!:

"There’s this tyranny of beauty, especially among trans women.There’s this feeling that, if we’re not beautiful enough, we’re not really women."

Writes Jennifer Finney Boylan, quoted in "A 'Weary but Fabulous' Poster Girl for Trans Life Opens Up About Aging/In her fifth memoir, 'Cleavage,' Jennifer Finney Boylan writes about her 36-year marriage, her adult children and why she keeps telling her story" (NYT).

Early in her new memoir, “Cleavage,” Jennifer Finney Boylan describes a moment of reckoning in a changing room. A size 12 dress is too snug....

The problem wasn’t that she’d gained almost 50 pounds in 25 years. “The crisis was that it mattered to me now, as a woman,” Boylan, 66, writes. “When I was a man (sic), I can say most definitively that it had not.”

Is that "(sic)" in the memoir or is the NYT inserting it? I'm going to guess, because of the use of parentheses instead of brackets, that it's in the memoir.

Did not looking good enough matter to Boylan because she was a woman — and that's female psychology — or because she was transgender — and had taken on the task of influencing others to perceive her as a woman? Is it about expressing what's inside you or getting the response you want from other people?

"Because of collapsing fertility elsewhere, Africa will make up an increasing share of the world’s population."

"Africa accounted for less than 10 percent of the world’s population until the early 1970s, but a demographic forecast in The Lancet suggests that by 2100, 54 percent of the world’s babies will be born in sub-Saharan Africa. Include North Africa, and the share is even higher. If that forecast is right (and always be skeptical of long-term demographic forecasts), at some point in the 22nd century a majority of the world’s population will be African.... In an aging and perhaps enfeebled world, Africa will also be a continent of youth — arguably making it comparatively vigorous and more of a hotbed for entrepreneurship and for music and popular culture...."

Writes Nicholas Kristof, in "In an Aging World, a Youthful Africa Steps Up" (NYT).

"It felt like such an invasion — such a bizarre, rape of some kind. Nothing pointed toward this need to be tighter or smaller or firmer or younger, especially there."

Said Brooke Shields, quoted in "Brooke Shields Received a Vaginal Rejuvenation Without Consent" (NY Magazine).

The revelation comes on the occasion of a new memoir — called "Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman." Shields is 59 years old, and the surgery happened when she was in her 40s and sought labia reduction surgery. We're told that afterwards the surgeon told her he "threw in a little bonus." Shields chose not to sue at the time and is choosing to work through what she calls "shame" by writing about it.

"Welp. I'm cooked.... I was just bit on the leg by a diamondback.... Let's get some pictures of it first."

NEW: Florida man accepts his fate after being bitten by a diamondback rattlesnake, says he is "cooked" but at least it will make a good meme.

Gotta respect his commitment to the meme game.

Social media influencer David Humphlett told the snake "good game" (gg) before he was… pic.twitter.com/Vmwh4ve3RT

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 31, 2024

We're told that this young man, a "social media influencer" named David Humphlett, made it to the hospital, but not before swinging his camera around and complimenting the snake: "Let's get some pictures of it first. We're already screwed anyways. Cool snake! Big diamondback!"

They're saving him at the hospital. He received 88 vials of antivenin. You may think he's an idiot, but is he? Hearing his words called to mind Seneca's "How to Die" (commission earned) which I happen to be in the middle of reading:

There’s no life that’s not short. If you examine the nature of things, even the life of Nestor is short, or that of Sattia, who ordered inscribed on her tombstone that she had lived ninety-nine years. You see in her someone glorying in a long old age. But who could have endured her, if she had filled out a full century? Just as with storytelling, so with life: it’s important how well it is done, not how long. It doesn’t matter at what point you call a halt. Stop wherever you like; only put a good closer on it. Farewell.

 We're already screwed anyways. We're cooked. This is it. This is death. It came by snake. And you have the presence of mind to proclaim: Cool snake.

"Taking photos and videos of the screen at movies has somehow become a common practice these days...."

"The problem with cellphones in theaters used to be mostly errant ringing or excessive texting. Now it’s people holding up their devices so they can get bits of the film and post to their accounts.... Social media has conditioned people to think that they can only claim to have had an experience if they put evidence of it online.... I even get the sense that studios just see all of this as free promotion.... When people post photos from movie theaters... they are ignoring the communal experience they are having at that very moment. Sitting in awe beside other people in a cool, dark theater watching cinema is incredibly special...."

Writes Esther Zuckerman, in "The ‘Wicked’ Practice of Taking Pictures of the Movie Screen/Why are so many people snapping photos and taking videos at the movies? Will this trend ever go away?" (NYT).

Eh. What's so great about sitting next to other people in cold darkness? If you can't get caught up in the silliness of a new blockbuster-style movie that's attracting a lot of young people, just stay home and stream something. What's the point of trying to fine-tune your environment by controlling young people? You seem to want to absorb their life force, but that energy — that "awe" — is supposed to emanate quietly and politely for your enjoyment.

"[Jackson] Browne had approved [Wes] Anderson's use of 'These Days,' but had forgotten about it completely by the time he bought a ticket..."

"... to see it at his local theater. 'When the scene started and the song came on, I thought, "Wow, I used to play just like that,"' Browne said, laughing. 'Then I realized it was me. I think the song had already taken on a life of its own, but it was definitely amplified by that movie.'"

From "The Song That Connects Jackson Browne, Nico and Margot Tenenbaum/Browne wrote 'These Days' at 16. Now 75, he and some famous admirers reflect on his unexpected mainstay: 'If a song is worth anything, it’s about the life of the listener.'" (NYT).

Here's that scene from "The Royal Tenenbaums":

 

The song, written when Browne was 16, seems to be from the point of view of someone who's lived through many phases of life. It ends: "Please don’t confront me with my failures/I had not forgotten them."

The article quotes Jimmie Fadden, "a co-founder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band — which Browne briefly joined": "I don’t know what his failures were at that time — maybe it was his report card, or school credits or the authorities at Sunny Hills coming down hard on him. All these years later, it’s a perfect song for any of us in our 70s.”