"Fans gathered as close as they could to the arena in the 37C heat, hoping for a glimpse of the invitees."

The London Times reports the news/"news": Taylor Swift got married, in "Taylor Swift gets married to Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden/The bride chose Christian Louboutin shoes and jewellery from Cartier and both wore Dior for the ceremony officiated by the comedy actor Adam Sandler."

I see that these days, "Any person eighteen years old and over can solemnize a Marriage Ceremony in New York State AFTER obtaining a One-Day Marriage Officiant License from the Office of the City Clerk."

So you too can have a comedian officiate at your wedding.

"If I do attend, I get killed. If I don't attend, I get killed. By the fake news, of course, I'm talking about."

Trump has his own way of talking.

Reporter: Are you attending your son’s wedding?

Trump: He’d like me to go. I’m going to try. I said, this is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things. He’s a person I’ve known for a long time. pic.twitter.com/lGdjvU7oD0

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 21, 2026

You'd think that after 3 assassination attempts, he's eschew the murder metaphor, but no. He's not going to say "I'll be harshly criticized," like a typical high official. He's going to say "I get killed." Not even "I'll get killed." Present tense: "I get killed."

He also calls his son "a person I’ve known for a long time."

By the way, I've seen man bellies that look like pregnancies, but the protruding navel is really too much, especially right next to the President's head. Where's the dignity?!

For more of the video and an explanation of the event, see "WATCH: Trump, Zeldin announce looser rule on refrigerant greenhouse gases" (PBS). The belly is not Zeldin's.

Clicking on this headline, I had no idea it was going to be about the challenges faced by persons with neurodivergence.

The headline (in the NYT): "Your Wedding Doesn’t Have to Be Long, Loud or Uncomfortable."

And I hallucinated an "ress" after "Your Wedding D." I thought the news was "Your Wedding Dress Doesn’t Have to Be Long, Loud or Uncomfortable." Yes, those full-scale wedding dresses must be uncomfortable! I've gotten married twice, but never in one of those famous white things that I grew up thinking belonged to the past. 

I scrolled through the article looking for the new short, quiet, comfy wedding dresses, saw all the mentions of neurodivergence but still clung to my misreading. I thought neurodivergent women must have distinct preferences in clothing and wedding dressmakers are coming up with solutions. 

But, no, it's not just about the dress. The whole wedding is subjected to scrutiny from the point of view of the neurodivergent. I finally read the article competently, and I must say these accommodations for neurodivergent people still produce weddings that are way too much for me:

"The daughter of Ali Shamkhani, one of the Islamic Republic’s top enforcers, had a lavish wedding in a strapless dress."

"Meanwhile, women in Iran are beaten for showing their hair and young people can’t afford to marry."

Wrote Masih Alinejad, an exiled Iranian dissident, quoted in "Why a strapless wedding dress threatens Iran hardliner Ali Shamkhani/The daughter of Ayatollah Khamenei’s henchman wore a low-cut gown, prompting accusations of double standards among the elite in the Islamic regime" (London Times).

And yet: "The leaked video appears... to have been taken from a female-only event at the wedding, at which it is not uncommon for the father and groom to make a brief appearance. The regime has lashed out against the critics, and one newspaper affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard insisted that Shamkhani had behaved in a 'dignified and proper manner.'..."

As for the display of wealth, we're told the wedding cost $20,000.

"They’re overwhelmingly white and tend to have a certain kind of look. Close cropped haircuts. Windowpane suits. Golf shorts."

"They’re not the type to be telling anyone their pronouns or using the word 'queer.' And they aren’t the least bit offended that the leader of their party continues to stoke a moral panic about transgender people. They’re gay. But they’re still Republicans...."

Writes Shawn McCreesh, in "Donald Trump’s Big Gay Government/On the town with the A-Gays of Washington, who have never been happier to be out, proud and Republican" (NYT)(free-access link).

"In 2015, back when the Republican establishment was still trying to thwart Mr. Trump, [Department of Energy official Charles] Moran said that he and some other gay Republicans he knew became intrigued by the brash New Yorker’s history of saying nice things about gay rights....

"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? 

"Not so long ago, members of high society were fixated on trying to low-key their way out of the perils of income inequality."

"Minimalism and quiet luxury were in vogue. But in the wake of President Trump’s second election, it’s the luxe life at full volume. He gilded the White House, turning it into a rococo Liberace lair. Swaggy and braggy have replaced stealth wealth. Flaunting it is in. For women, that means sequins, diamonds, tight silhouettes and big hair....  And now there are the Bezos-Sánchez nuptials.... Ms. Sánchez brings to mind another unlikely Vogue subject: Ivana Trump. Ms. Wintour gave her a cover in 1990, shortly before her divorce from Mr. Trump, after worrying, as I reported in a biography of Ms. Wintour, that she was 'too tacky.'... As much as those with more understated taste might turn up their noses at the crassness of the Bezos-Sánchez wedding’s display, tacky is very clearly carrying the day. Maybe hating on tacky oligarchs is itself just elitist...."

Writes Amy Odell, in "The Bezos-Sánchez Wedding and the Triumph of Tacky" (NYT).

"When I saw her in that dress, it stopped being cold for me. It was magical."

Said the groom, quoted in "Finding Happily Ever After in a Snowstorm in June/After their wedding was spotted on a webcam, pictures of Jamie and Chris DeBruhl getting married at a mountain resort in Montana spread quickly online" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see the photos, with the bare-shouldered bride in the snow).

I'm seeing a lot about the Jeff Bezos wedding, but how do we know he's really getting married?

There are motivations to put on this big show that are separate from any reasons to enter a marriage in the legal sense.

Consider this: "The embarrassing truth Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez haven't revealed about their $20m 'wedding'" (Daily Mail)(reporting that a Venetian official supposedly said no registrar had been appointed for the ceremony).

And here's the NYT: "What to Know About the Wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez/The second marriage for both is taking place in Venice, Italy, under a shroud of secrecy and amid a swarm of speculation": "Italy has a variety of rules surrounding marriage rites, which can involve religious ceremonies, often performed in Roman Catholic churches. The Sánchez-Bezos wedding, however, will be nondenominational, likely of a ceremonial nature."

What I want to know about that couple is why, with all their money, they have, both of them, engineered their face into that post-human fright mask?

Why would the wedding be any less fake than the faces?

And here's Tina Brown: 

The Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sánchez (circa $56 million) Venice-sinking nuptials, tying up every tender on the Grand Canal (and 90 private jets expected), is the big beautiful buster bomb of high-net-worth exhibitionism. Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez has proved that landing the fourth richest man in the world requires the permanent display of breasts like genetically modified grapefruit and behemoth buttocks bursting from a leopard-print thong bikini, she’s exuberantly and unapologetically shown that the route to power and glory for women hasn't changed since the first Venetian Republic.

*** 

Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola/Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

"The vocal group Boyz II Men performed at the wedding.... Dishes included truffle agnolotti, chilled English pea soup and an American Wagyu bavette and grilled prawns."

I'm reading "The Clintons and Kamala Harris Descend on a Hamptons Wedding of Liberal Royalty/The wedding of Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, and Alex Soros, the scion of a liberal philanthropic dynasty, drew a rare concentration of wealth and power" (NYT).

Is it okay to be out of touch? I mean, truffle agnolotti in the summer? Or rather:

The festivities happened to coincide with an exceptionally chaotic weekend at home and abroad. Protesters gathered across the country to oppose President Trump even as he held an unusual military parade in Washington; a Minnesota lawmaker was assassinated in a new outburst of political violence; and attacks between Israel and Iran stoked fears of a wider Mideast conflagration.

Weddings, planned in advance, always "happen to coincide" with world events that pop up spontaneously.

Mr. Soros and Ms. Abedin announced their engagement last July. They initially planned to elope, Vogue reported on Saturday, but they changed their minds after an engagement party co-hosted by Mrs. Clinton in December, where attendees pressured the couple to hold a more traditional celebration. 

“I think she deserves it,” Mrs. Clinton told the magazine. “She deserves to have that kind of moment.”...

If only we could all have what Hillary Clinton thinks we deserve.

The moneyed scene was especially striking given the Democratic Party’s raging debate over how to improve its historically low standing with voters and win back working-class Americans, with whom it is widely seen as having lost touch....

Here's how I'd spin it: It was so out of touch it was in touch. They were in touch with their out of touchness. 

Mother wants to share her ridiculous dream with her gay son.

I laughed out loud at this letter to the New York Times advice columnist:

My gay son and his partner are getting married. They plan to wear themed outfits. I support their union and their choices. They identify as male and wear traditional male garb. But secretly, I’ve dreamed that one of them, preferably my son, would wear the traditional white wedding gown that I wore. Its elegance contrasts sharply with their planned outfits. Should I share my desire?

The way she framed the question — "Should I share my desire?" — makes it sound creepily Oedipal. The fact that it's her old wedding dress makes it sound like she's inserting herself as the bride. The fact that she thinks gay men want to be — or seem like — women is presumptuous (and stupid). The idea that someone else's wedding is a place to act out your dreams is mundane but lamentable.

And why are we not told the theme of the "themed outfits"? We're told her old dress, by its elegance, is a sharp contrast, so what could this "theme" be? Is it just "traditional male garb"? Maybe this lady has drunk so deeply of the current cultural brew, that she thinks everything is a gender performance and so when 2 gay men go to their wedding they are only going "as" 2 men. They are 2 men in the guise of guys. And they might alternatively go as a man and a woman or a man and a man in drag.

Or maybe the lady is really, underneath it all, quite old fashioned, and her dream betrays the traditionalist's belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.

"I did have one couple; they called off their wedding because the mom of the bride was so particular and worried about what people thought..."

"... and how things were going to be perceived. And they started to bicker. And they ended up, they were like, 'We don’t want to do this. This is terrible. We don’t even want to be together anymore.' And they called off the wedding. And I remember running into them, separately, like a year later. You know, they were not together. And like: 'I think it’s probably the best thing that we did. The wedding was just too much.' And then after that, like two years later, they ended up just eloping. They got back together; they eloped. And the desire to have this perfect wedding that represented 'them as a couple' just was too much. Literally, they were like, 'I can’t do it.'"

Said wedding planner Xochitl Gonzalez, quoted in "Why Can’t We Quit Weddings? Marriages aren’t what they used to be. So why are weddings ever more wedding-like and deluxe?" 

This is a conversation — transcript and audio at the link — and the interviewer is Hanna Rosin, who really seems to want to go deeply into the issue expressed in that headline. The headline drew me in, but I couldn't find any serious discussion of that question. There's nothing about the urge to cling to tradition because we are losing tradition and the relative significance of the tradition of marriage and the tradition of weddings.

"Those visits are typically what people are trying to avoid when they keep their conditions secret...."

Writes Carolyn Hax, responding to a letter, in "Aunt kept her cancer secret, so no one could say goodbye" (WaPo).

It’s not necessarily a personal rejection of their loved ones, so please don’t think your aunt was avoiding you specifically or her family in general. In my experience, it’s the goodbye scene that the terminally ill are rejecting. It’s not just illness, either. Many people go out of their way not to be the center of attention, period. There are brides who dread aisles, birthday honorees who dread their own parties, sufferers who conceal their pain for fear of mobilizing a help army, patients who deflect bedside displays of concern.

Ha ha. I identify with that, not as a person who has hidden a disease, but as a person who had the smallest possible wedding and who hasn't had a birthday party since my age was in the single digits. 

I think if the aunt saw her loved ones as she was dying, she was saying goodbye to them, and she wanted to see them as they were to her when they saw her as she was when she was not dying. That is, she didn't want them transformed into something strangely overdramatic but to experience life while she was still in it.

"While these couples had wedding parties that ignored gender norms, some may decide to not have wedding parties at all...."

"David Green, 36, and Ryan Schwartz, 37, did not have wedding parties for their summer camp-themed wedding because they felt they 'create unnecessary exclusion and hierarchies in an event that is all about community,' said Mr. Schwartz.... Both Jewish, the two instead engaged in a tradition called a tisch, or a gathering of close friends and family before the wedding ceremony, on June 18 in Portland, Ore. Mr. Schwartz’s crew congregated in the living room; Mr. Green’s in the backyard. Eventually their two crews came together, and the couple received a 'high energy send-off' before they took an Uber to their wedding venue, said Mr. Green.... For Stephanie Ramones, 33... said she and her fiancé have many nonbinary friends and have felt most comfortable dropping wedding parties entirely. 'Creating an inclusive space and a space where people feel seen and cared for,' said Ms. Ramones...."

 
From "Making Their Weddings an All-Gender Affair/Some couples are forgoing certain traditions — like groomsmen and bridesmaids — in favor of more inclusivity. As one person planning a wedding said: 'That’s just being a good host'" (NYT).

You'd think the answer to "AITA for wearing a wedding dress at a wedding?" would have to be yes...

 ... unless the bride herself is asking the question. But she's not, and the answer is quite clearly no.

Read the context, at r/AmItheAsshole, here.

"My mother has a large jar of pot gummies that she uses as a sleep aid. She doesn’t know that I know about them. She told a friend..."

"... whose daughter told me. I have been keeping an eye on the jar. She doesn’t seem to use many of them. Can I take a few gummies to sell to school friends (over-18 only) to pay for Hanukkah gifts for my family?"

A question addressed to the NYT ethicist. 

Hilarious, but it's fake, isn't it? Maybe, but not as fake, and not as hilarious — as this got-to-be-fake question addressed to WaPo's advice columnist:

"[Lorie] Smith... sat near a plaque that echoed a Bible verse: 'I am God’s masterpiece.' She said she was happy to create graphics and websites..."

"... for anyone, including L.G.B.T.Q. people. But her Christian faith, she said, did not allow her to create messages celebrating same-sex marriages. 'When I chose to start my own business as an artist to create custom expression,' she said, 'I did not surrender my First Amendment rights.' Phil Weiser, Colorado’s attorney general, countered that there is no constitutional right to discriminate. 'Once you open up your doors to the public, you have to serve everybody,' he said. 'You can’t turn people away based on who they are.'"

Writes Adam Liptak in "A New Clash Between Faith and Gay Rights Arrives at a Changed Supreme Court A Colorado graphic designer says she has a First Amendment right to refuse to create websites for same-sex weddings despite a state anti-discrimination law." (NYT).

The oral argument is today.

If you're trying to remember why this is still a live issue after the wedding-cake case:

"The Highsmiths are confident that they have found the right person. In addition to a 23andMe DNA kit that linked Melissa’s father, Jeffrie Highsmith, with one of her children..."

"... there are all the little things that make it feel right: A birthmark on Melissa’s back that matches one she had as a baby. The way she puts jalapeños on her nachos, mirroring her siblings’ love of spicy foods. The fact that she has a dog named Charlie, just like one of her sisters."

 From "She was kidnapped as a baby in 1971. Her family just found her alive" (WaPo).

"Despite living as 'Melanie' for most of her life, Melissa now wants to use her original first name, her sisters said. She wants to spend more time with their mother, with whom she felt an immediate connection. And she wants to redo her wedding to her current husband, her sisters said, so her father can walk her down the aisle."

"'It’s a timeless bridal look,' says hairstylist Xavier Velasquez—who met Biden through her longtime brow artist Azi Sacks—of the sculptural bun look he crafted. "

That's just 2 of "All the Details Behind Naomi Biden’s Timeless Wedding Day Beauty" (Vogue).

Imagine having a "longtime brow artist." Imagine "crafting" a "sculptural bun look." It's not just a bun. It's a crafted sculptural bun look.

In Vogue. Which also has "Exclusive: Naomi Biden on Her White House Wedding."

 

I would not have posed Jill like that. Too evocative of Joe Biden's hair-inhalation propensities. But I mainly wanted you to see what longtime brow artistry and sculptural bun look craftsmanship can do. And I wanted to set up the laugh you'll get when you read what White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: 

"The wedding of Naomi Biden and Peter is a private family event. Naomi and Peter have asked that their wedding be a closed to the media and we are respecting their wishes. This is something that the couple has decided."

"A White House wedding has historically been the sort of rare event that can add a modern sheen to the dustiness of the presidency."

"It can — for an afternoon, at least — turn the press from restive to fawning. And it can give the president a needed feel-good story." 

That's the sad puffery of the first 3 sentences of "What We Know About Naomi Biden’s White House Wedding/Invitations are in hand, but the administration is taking a state-secret approach to most of the details, citing the privacy of the president’s granddaughter and her fiancé, Peter Neal."

In The New York Times.

Insanely, Trump shows up in this: