"Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that in a time of hyper-visible conflict... the self-help message of the day tells its readers that it’s perfectly OK to turn inward..."

"... even if that means ignoring the apparent travails of others. It’s a message retrofitted for appeal in a moment when every glance at a phone screen surfaces wrenching images of catastrophe.... 'The Courage to Be Disliked' has sold more than 10 million copies. 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck' has been on the New York Times best-seller list for more than 300 weeks since it came out in 2016. In September comes the much-anticipated 'Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves — and How to Find Our Way Back.'... 'Sometimes we need to say, 'Is this my problem to solve?' said Dr. Ingrid Clayton, the 'Fawning' author, in an interview. 'Can I sit on my hands?'..."

From "Is Today’s Self-Help Teaching Everyone to Be a Jerk? Draw boundaries. Protect your peace. Worry less about pleasing others. The prevailing (and best-selling) wisdom of the day encourages an inward turn" (NYT).

And by "to Be a Jerk," the NYT might mean to be right wing (where "right wing" means an individual centered in one's own life and trusting that other people can be self-centered too):

Let's talk about the home page of The New York Times.

As it looks right now:

1. I had thought the Jeffrey Epstein story was running out of energy, but here it is back on the front page and in the top spot. But it's a real estate story: "A Look Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan Lair." As if we're into his mystique!

2. Sharing the top of the page is "How to Break Free From Your Phone" — a generic self-help topic, not news at all. The pretty blue of the sky in the illustration lines up with the blue sky in Jeffrey Epstein's stairwell. The legs of the phoneless woman in the grass chime with the legs of the stairwell woman. Both women grip something tubular — one, a flower stem and the other, a rope. We are reminded that Jeffrey hanged himself — reminded whether he did it or not. 

3. 2 things to angst over: declining school enrollment and a nuclear reactor on the moon.

4. Something that isn't even vaguely surprising — an old bookshelf contained a particular old book. It might be worth $20,000. Who cares!? This is like the news that somebody won the lottery. The winning ticket is rare, but you know it's in the great mass of tickets, and somebody found it.

5. Suddenly, it's time to talk about your intestines. That seems to scream: slow news day.

6. At last, the name Trump appears. Tariff business. The ongoing story. The photo is of immigrants — caption (outside of my screen shot): "Trump’s New Tactic to Separate Immigrant Families."

7. And then, there's Thomas Friedman, supplying the overarching and very high-level-abstract theme: "The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away." It begins: "Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened...."

***

Strangely low-level anxiety wafts up from the usual jumble of well-worn topics.

"[Adrienne] Salinger would approach an interesting-looking kid in a mall or on the street and ask: might she come to their home and take their picture?"

"Salinger stipulated that her subjects were not to tidy up their rooms before she arrived—as if. With sessions lasting several hours, her intention was to grant as much agency as possible to the teens involved, and to counter the inevitable power imbalance between herself and her subjects.... Another rule was that parents had to stay out of the way. Even so, their presence leaks into many of the images and interviews. Greg H., pictured at thirteen in Kirkland, Washington, in 1984, has a mural of clouds, a mobile of planet-like orbs, and a telescope, all bespeaking parental investment in cultivating a wholesome interest. Anne I., sixteen, shot in 1990, in upstate New York, sits on her bed, with a white fluffy Teddy bear by her side and wall art of Jim Morrison hanging behind her, the two aptly illustrating the tenuous cusp between childhood and adolescence.... What appealed to Salinger about portraying people of that age, she says now, was the way in which they were so uncompromising. 'When you are a teen-ager, I think, you are really clear about what your viewpoints are,' she says. 'I wanted that fierceness of having your point of view without also having to pay rent, or think about having a job, or anything....'"

From "Teen-Agers in Their Bedrooms, Before the Age of Selfies/Adrienne Salinger’s cult photography book from the nineties makes a comeback" (The New Yorker).

That's about a book of photographs published in 1995, which is being reissued — here's a commissioned-earned link.

How would you like a photographer approaching your "interesting-looking kid" and asking to photograph them in their bedroom for hours and enforcing a rule that you stay out of there? It's so creepy by present-day standards that I'm surprised to see the artist vaunted in the New Yorker without questioning the intrusion on the child.

"And um recently I made the decision that I just for now I don't want to go back in the system. I think it's broken...."

"I believe and I always believed that as fragile as our democracy is, our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles. And I think right now that um they're not as strong as they need to be. And I just don't want to for now I don't want to go back in the system. I want to I want to travel the country. I want to listen to people. I want to talk with people. And I don't want it to be transactional where I'm asking for their vote...."

Said Kamala Harris, to Stephen Colbert (scroll to 6:02). 

Colbert said it is "harrowing" to hear her say that. When she responded: "Well, but it's also evident, isn't it?... It is harrowing..." Colbert broke in to rescue her. It sounds as though she's saying that she doesn't "want to be part of the fight anymore."

She takes the hint: "No. Oh, absolutely not. I am always going to be part of the fight. That is not going to change. I am absolutely going to be part of the fight."

And then she plunges into a Biden-worthy garble:

"It was intense... and deeply personal," says Kamala Harris without intensity and sounding utterly impersonal.

But she must stand there, in front of the camera, and hold the book she's obligated to promote, however wanly:

What the world saw on the campaign trail was only part of the story.

My new book is a behind-the-scenes look at my experience leading the shortest presidential campaign in modern history.

107 Days is out on September 23. I can't wait for you to read it: https://t.co/G4bkeZB4NZ pic.twitter.com/taUof0L4hs

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 31, 2025

The wanness is almost amusing. Yesterday, I was reading the NYT news article, "Harris Will Not Run for California Governor Kamala Harris, the former vice president, announced that she has decided not to run for California’s top office," and I stumbled across this:

Ms. Harris has spent the months since November largely out of the public eye, delivering a paid speech in Australia and appearing at weddings of some of her famous friends. She was in England last week for the wedding of the Apple heiress Eve Jobs, whose mother, Laurene Powell Jobs, is a close friend. In June, she attended the wedding of Hillary Clinton’s top aide and the son of a Democratic megadonor. In May, she was spotted at the Met Gala in New York.

Is she even interested in politics? 

"The Salt Path, and its recent film adaptation, told the story of a couple who decide to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path after their home is repossessed."

"The Observer alleged [the author Raynor] Winn had misrepresented the events that led to the couple losing their home. Rather than losing money in a bad business deal, as the book described, the newspaper said the couple had lost their home after Winn had defrauded her employer of £64,000. According to the Observer, the couple borrowed £100,000 to pay back the money Winn had been accused of stealing, and it was when this loan was called in that their home was repossessed...."

From "Penguin says it did 'all necessary due diligence' with The Salt Path" (BBC).

I hadn't heard of this controversy until I listened to the new episode of a podcast I like, "Giles Coren Has No Idea." From this week's episode, "The Salt Path Crumbles":

"She is desperate for the book to not be a downer, to be a jolt instead. 'The pity fucking kills me,' she said. 'It kills my strength.'"

"She wanted the perception to be 'the opposite: She’s alive. She’s enjoying her life. This is great.' She went on: 'The book is highly comedic. And then it slides down into horrible tragedy and then comes back up to the punch line.' I’d finished the whole thing, but I had to ask what the punch line was. There were a handful, she said. But the most important one was that you’re never too old to get even."

From "E. Jean Carroll’s Uneasy Peace/In the year and a half since defeating Trump for the second time, she’s written a secret book — and learned to shoot" (NY Magazine).

At the end of this long article, there's some discussion of the security around her home. Asked if she worried about the danger of turning off her security lights so that the frogs that once mated in her swimming pool would sing again, as they had in the past:

"I don’t know how one changes the minds of others. Through fifty years of writing, I’ve regularly heard that film and drama..."

"... should be enlisted in the service of good works; but no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie. That’s not how they function—they’re entertainment, with as little ability to alter ones thinking as does a meal. Exodus no more reduced anti-Semitism than tacos clarify the border crisis.... Islamists at home and abroad have been demonizing the Jewish State since 1948: Why would a bunch of septuagenarian Jews in Hollywood conclude they could be defeated by 'changing the narrative'? The answer: they did not conceive of them being defeated; they merely wanted peace, which to their minds might be achieved rationally, without war, through mere dialogue, as if murderous savagery were the result of misunderstanding...."

I'm reading "The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment" by David Mamet (Amazon Associates link).

Wait. What about "The Birth of a Nation"? Did Mamet consider the movies and plays that have changed people for the worse? How about all the pornography? 

"Did I lie? Yup. Did I also write a book that tore people to shreds? Yeah."

Said James Frey, quoted in "Oprah Shamed Him. He’s Back Anyway. Twenty years after 'A Million Little Pieces' became a national scandal, James Frey is ready for a new audience" (NYT)(free-access link).

As Frey sees it, the public has gotten increasingly comfortable with falsehoods, without getting fully comfortable with him. He finds it all a bit absurd. “I just sit in my castle and giggle,” he said.

I'm using my 3rd free link of the month of June on this because I am a long-time admirer of photographs of the interiors of writers' homes. As I wrote 12 years ago: "I love this book, 'Writer's Desk,' with excellent photographs by Jill Krementz (who was married to Kurt Vonnegut) and an introductory essay by John Updike."

I see Frey has an "extra-large mohair Eames chair, which he had custom-made so that he could sit in lotus pose." I identify. I've been buying chairs that accommodate the lotus position since I first bought furniture, which would have been in the 1970s. I wish I still had the chair I bought at Conran's that got me through law school. I'm one of those people who feel more comfortable with my legs folded up. 

Speaking of things written on this blog long ago, I've been around long enough, doing this low-level writerly thing that I do, to have covered the "Million Little Pieces" foofaraw when Oprah was agonizing:

Joe Biden speaks to the press — a bit mumblingly — for 3 1/2 minutes.

"You can see that I'm mentally incompetent, I can't walk," he wisecracks. "And I could beat the hell out of both of them," he says — about Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, the co-authors of that book about Biden's decline.

Another addition to the list of quotes of Biden threatening to or bragging about beating somebody up — "If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him," etc.

By the way, I'm seeing reports that Tapper's book — despite the onslaught of publicity — isn't doing very well. I know I won't buy it. I think he shouldn't be rewarded for sitting on the information, apparently in the hope of helping Democrats win the election, and now trying to profit from revealing it. And it's absurd the way he's been going around acting as though he has just learned that journalists ought to do journalism and report events as they happen without toadying to the powerful.

AND: Why does Biden lean into the faces of female reporters? I think it's a grandpa move that has worked to delight little girls. The femaleness of the reporters makes them more like little girls to him than like what they are, adults engaged in professional work. He can't help it, just like he can't help threatening to "beat the hell out of" male antagonists. 

Until now, we had, living among us, the grandson of the 10th President of the United States.

I'm seeing this in The Richmonder: "Harrison Ruffin Tyler, grandson of 10th U.S. president and longtime Richmonder, dies at 96."

Born on Nov. 9, 1928 in Richmond, Tyler was the son of Lyon Gardiner Tyler and Sue Ruffin. His father was a son of President John Tyler and president of William & Mary for more than three decades; his mother came from another Virginia family of long lineage and ardent support for slavery and secession.... President John Tyler was 63 when Lyon Gardiner Tyler was born; Lyon was 75 when Harrison entered the world.... At age 8, he was invited to the White House to meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt....

My son Chris, who is dedicated to reading a biography of every American President, read "President without a Party: The Life of John Tyler," by Christopher J. Leahy (commission earned). Chris does not read books on Kindle, so when he wants to share something with me, he texts me a photo. For Tyler, he sent this:

"I think there was a feeling — like, a lot of members of the Democratic Party that were seeing this or saw moments um of him seeming out of it — um that going public was not going to change [Biden's] mind."

"It was only going to help Donald Trump, um, and I think that's how a lot of them rationalized it. Now whether or not history will judge them, you know, as being right for doing that, um, you know, we will see, but this is also part of the reason why the White House was shielding him from as many people as possible including Cabinet secretaries because sometimes, you know, you see him once maybe it's just a bad day you can just say, like, you know, maybe I just had one bad meeting. You're not really sure..."

Said Alex Thompson, co-author of "Original Sin," on "Fox News Sunday" yesterday.

The interviewer, Shannon Bream, quotes from the book (on page 85): "[A longtime Biden aide said] 'He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years — he'd only have to show proof of life every once in a while. His aides could pick up the slack." She asks: "Who would have been running the White House in a second Biden term?"

Thompson responds: "Well, this person went on to say that when you're voting for a President you're voting for the aides, uh, around him. But these aides were not even Senate-confirmed aides. These are White House aides. These were unelected people. And one of the things that really I think comes out in our reporting here is that if you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy you can rationalize anything including sometimes doing undemocratic things, which, I think, is what this person is talking about."

It's like fighting fire with fire — fighting the destruction of the democracy with the destruction of democracy. You had to destroy the village to save it. Noted. 

"In a lot of ways, I was withdrawing from mainstream society. I was trying to drop back about two centuries to become an eighteenth-century man..."

"... who relied on hunting and fishing for his livelihood. But I was living in the twentieth century, and everything was constantly changing around me.... I’ve always believed that if we did what was morally and ethically right, while continuing to steadfastly believe in what we were doing, we’d end up okay in the end.... Now, I’m not a man of great intellectual depth, but it sounds to me like God Almighty has said we can pretty much rack and stack anything that swims, flies, or walks, which I consider orders from headquarters.... After studying several political parties to find out what they believe and stand for, I decided my political ideology was more in line with the Republicans. I definitely was no Democrat—that’s for sure—but I don’t really consider myself one or the other. I’m more of a Christocrat, someone who honors our founding fathers and pays them homage for being godly men at a time when wickedness was all over the world. Our founding fathers started this country and built it on God and His Word, and this country sure would be a better place to live and raise our children if we still followed their ideals and beliefs."

Highlights I selected from a book I read and blogged 11 years ago, retrieved this morning on seeing the obituary of the author. Do you recognize the voice?

"The book has also amplified debate about whether more blame should be placed on Democratic leaders, Mr. Biden’s staff and the press for not revealing more about the former president earlier...."

"Intentionally or not, by being an author of a major book on the subject, Mr. Tapper has allowed himself to become a symbol of the establishment press that conservatives have long accused of hiding the former president’s frailty from the public. [Megyn] Kelly, the former Fox News star, subjected Mr. Tapper to intense grilling on her popular podcast in an interview that went viral online. 'You covered the Biden presidency aggressively throughout the four years, and you didn’t cover mental acuity, hardly at all,' Ms. Kelly said at one point. 'I mean, time and time again when issues came up, you seem to be running cover for the president.' Mr. Tapper denied the charges. 'Conservative media absolutely has every right to say, "We were hip to this, and the legacy media was not,"' he said later in the interview. 'Now, I do not accept that I was part of a cover-up. I do not accept that I was just providing cover for Joe Biden.'"

From "Everyone Now Has an Opinion on Jake Tapper/A book the CNN host co-wrote has received positive reviews and appears to be a sales hit. But it has also generated intense scrutiny of him and his work" (NYT).

So... you weren't "hip to this."

Why not? And why would I read a book written by such an out-of-touch, unobservant, slow learner? Or should I ask why would I read a book written by such a liar?

"Don't news people have to tell you what they know when they find it out?"

"Isn't that the difference between news and a secret?"

.@jonstewart is getting whiplash watching CNN pivot from promoting Jake Tapper's "bombshell" book to lamenting Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis pic.twitter.com/pShybi5F6e

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 20, 2025

"So, but [Jolly] West himself said, oh, I never experimented on a human being, just the elephant. He would even make jokes about the elephant..."

".... because it was the one thing people knew. And he would say, oh yeah, it, it would sort of, it was his calling card and he used it as kind of a jokey thing. But he always denied any connection to this CIA.... You know, even in the Church Committee, you could see the connection because they revealed that the University of Oklahoma had been receiving CIA money. And West had a special office for him built there. He was hired there mysteriously when they wanted to move at what he wanted to build what he called this free zone of experiment, where he could give LSD, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation in combined doses, you know, in whatever increments he wanted to adjust. He was gonna build that out at the Air Force base. And he was all set to go. And I even had receipts and papers and a lot of correspondence in his files about this...."

Great episode. Full transcript here. 

You can buy Rebecca Lemov's book "The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion" at Amazon (commission earned). The audiobook is free at Spotify Premium.

"Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain is enormous, bland and remote — it squats over Twain’s career like a McMansion."

That's the crushing first sentence of Dwight Garner's book review, "A New Biography of Mark Twain Doesn’t Have Much of What Made Him Great/Ron Chernow traces the life of a profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty writer" (NYT).

[Chernow's] book is an endurance test, one that skimps on the things that formed Twain and made him the most lucid, profound, unpredictable and irascibly witty American of his time. Hardy will be the souls who tour this air-conditioned edifice all the way through and glimpse the exit sign.

Chernow is the author, most famously, of “Alexander Hamilton” (2004), which Lin-Manuel Miranda devoured while on a vacation

"The usual justification for rehashing Diana’s story is that she — a barely educated aristocrat who married a future king — is just like us..."

"... whoever we might be: feminists, gay people, Jews, Asians, Americans. White is very aware of this and rounds up some of the dafter examples of such deluded narcissism. The journalist Julie Burchill once claimed that Diana ticked off all the classic traits of a Jewish woman: 'Profoundly maternal, disliking horses, strong-nosed, comely, needing too much and giving too much.'"

From "Britain was obsessed with Princess Diana — not any longer/The barely educated aristo was a blank screen on to which we projected our dreams and delusions. Edward White’s biography delves into this strange 'Dianaworld'" (London Times).

Meanwhile, also in the London Times: "Prince Harry: I want reconciliation but the King won’t speak to me/The Duke of Sussex, who opened up in an interview with the BBC, earlier lost his appeal for the right to taxpayer-funded police security" (“So, you know, I miss the UK. I miss parts of the UK. Of course I do. And I think that it’s really quite sad that I won’t be able to show, you know, my children my homeland.... Of course, some members of my family will never forgive me for writing a book...')."

"A bothy is a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge."

"It was also a term for basic accommodation, usually for gardeners or other workers on an estate. Bothies are found in remote mountainous areas of Scotland, Northern England, Ulster and Wales. They are particularly common in the Scottish Highlands, but related buildings can be found around the world...."

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Bothy," after encountering this word, which I don't remember ever seeing before, in the London Times article "Have William and Kate fallen for ‘west coast bothy frenzy’?It’s never been more fashionable to hole up in the Scottish isles like the Waleses, says Victoria Brzezinski."

Ben Pentreath, head of the architectural and interior design studio of the same name, is widely reported to have assisted the Prince and Princess of Wales... has had a connection with the Scottish west coast since he was a teen.... In 2018 Pentreath and his gardener husband, Charlie McCormick, bought a teeny pair of buildings (a Victorian two-roomed cottage and a much earlier stone bothy) on a sea pink-covered estuary in the far west coast of Scotland. “It really does feel a long way away,” Pentreath says. “Bothies really can’t be more than one or two rooms. And I think we all find romance in living in small places — for a while!”

At the Friday Night Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

The unfortunate storefront in my photograph used to be Paul's Books, one of the loveliest places in Madison. It had been around since 1954, and I didn't know that it had closed. I hadn't walked downtown in quite a while. I prefer to walk in the woods, but I thought I'd change my ways today. I pictured myself looking at the poetry books at Paul's Books. But no, Paul's was gone. And this insanity was there. You're sorry? I'm sorry.