Althouse

"To honor women’s suffrage, a World War I-era protester carrying a 'Votes for Women' flag. And to evoke the civil rights movement, a 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, books in hand, helping to desegregate the New Orleans school system in 1960. [Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, authorized by law to make final decisions about coin designs] opted instead for the more general, and much whiter. For the Mayflower Compact, a Pilgrim couple staring into the distance. For the Revolutionary War, a profile of Washington. For the Declaration of Independence, a profile of Thomas Jefferson. For the Constitution, a profile of James Madison. And for the Gettysburg Address, a profile of Lincoln on the obverse, and on the reverse, a pair of interlocking hands. No shackles."

From "The War on ‘Wokeness’ Comes to the U.S. Mint/The Treasury Department unveiled new coins celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. They failed to include planned designs featuring abolition, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement" (NYT).It does seem that the celebration of the 250th anniversary should concentrate on things that happened around 250 years ago, not on later events, but even Bessent's 5 choices include 2 that are not from the era of the founding. The Mayflower Compact is over a century earlier, and the Gettysburg Address is almost a century later. 

"... and Mr. Epstein needed to wash his name using blue-chip people who could be forgiving about infractions against the less powerful. Each has some form of capital and seeks to trade. The business is laundering capital — money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money. Mr. Summers wrote to Mr. Epstein: 'U r wall st tough guy w intellectual curiosity.' Mr. Epstein replied: 'And you an interllectual with a Wall Street curiosity.'... Mr. Krauss sends his New Yorker article on militant atheism; Mr. Chomsky sends a multiparagraph reply; Mr. Epstein dashes off: 'I think religion plays a major positive role in many lives. . i dont like fanaticism on either side. . sorry.' This somehow leads to a suggestion that Mr. Krauss bring the actor Johnny Depp to Mr. Epstein’s private island. Again and again, scholarly types lower themselves to offer previews of their research or inquiries into Mr. Epstein’s 'ideas.'... The earnest scientists and scholars type neatly. The wealthy and powerful reply tersely, with misspellings, erratic spacing, stray commas...."

Writes Anand Giridharadas, in "How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails" (NYT)(gift link, because there's lots of interesting stuff there).

"It isn’t complicated, and it’s the very principle at the heart of the American Revolution: following rules is not weakness.... Architecture embodies values; it is not merely a receptacle of them. Simple proportions and human-scale spaces don’t just suggest the spirit of a democratic nation. They are that spirit in three dimensions, with doors and windows. Reverence for the past, and reluctance to destroy until the risks of destruction are fully known, is not timidity but wisdom, in architecture as in life. To conserve, after all, is the essence of conservatism. The shock that images of the destruction provoke—the grief so many have felt—is not an overreaction to the loss of a beloved building. It is a recognition of something deeper: the central values of democracy being demolished before our eyes. Now we do not only sense it. We see it."

Writes Adam Gopnik, at the end of his New Yorker essay, "Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing/The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat."

"... and Penguin confirmed it was his handiwork," it says in "A New Thomas Pynchon Novel Is Coming This Fall/Featuring a Depression-era private eye, 'Shadow Ticket' will be the 87-year-old writer’s first book since 2013" (NYT).

Here's that description:

“Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.”

He withholds commas until he doesn't and I presume he's got his reasons.

I like "lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee" and "Milwaukee and the normal world."

Here's a free-access link to the WaPo article.

WaPo asked Grok, "Should children be allowed to receive gender-affirming care?" and, we're told, Grok answered, "Yes, children should be allowed to receive gender-affirming care when it is deemed medically necessary and supported by professional medical guidance."

"... with their two cats, Ted and Sylvia, watching Katharine Hepburn movies, or knitting, decorating cakes, and hanging pet-themed ornaments on the Christmas trees, as in his five-star 2007 review of Pet Pawprint Hanging DIY Keepsake Ornament. But Kevin Killian in the review section was not the real Kevin Killian, at least not exactly. Did Killian have children, as he claimed in several reviews? No. Did he enjoy fine foods? No. (According to friends, he lived on a diet of only microwave meals and Tab.)... Did that twelve-color set of ballpoint pens really trigger a memory of attending school as an American boy in rural France, where his classmates had 'beautiful pens that were almost family heirlooms?'..."

Writes Oscar Schwartz, in "A Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer/Between 2003 and 2019, Kevin Killian published almost twenty-four hundred reviews on the site. Can they be considered literature?"

I am trans and I am a parent of three children, one of whom I carried. Their existence, and my relationships with each of them, are essential to my understanding of life itself. I also have many friends (none of them trans, as it happens) who never had children. I occasionally envy their freedom. They may occasionally envy me my sprawling family. In neither case is the feeling of regret — if it can even be called that — significant or particularly long-lasting. It is, rather, an awareness that life is a series of choices, all of which are made with incomplete information.

Presumably, Gessen has one relationship with each of the children, but it's possible that Gessen really does means to claim multiple relationships with each one. I suppose the grammar was a minor distraction on the way to proclaiming the superiority of a life lived without regrets. 

Anxiety about trans people and reproduction, and the laws and rules that it produces, cut both ways...

Puzzling commas again. And why choose a cutting metaphor here? Intentional prodding of our anxiety about surgery?

There's a lot more going on in the article, which was originally titled "The Secret Behind America's Moral Panic." What's the secret? And what are "Democrats... Getting Wrong About Transgender Rights"? This is the most useful passage:

"When he joined Biden and Clinton in New York, the trio sat for a podcast interview in which Obama brought an I-can’t-believe-this-stuff-really-needs-to-be-said intonation to his explanations of the complications of the presidency and global affairs. Onstage at Radio City, after catching up with Biden on Air Force One, he took on the role of chief cheerleader.... Obama has felt most comfortable sticking to familiar themes, and though he has met with social-media influencers, he is also likely to appear in plenty of tried-and-true ads and behind lecterns on swing-state campuses.... ... Obama now comes across as having concluded that no radical rethink is necessary for his own conception of political progress or mass movements.... Obama wanted the donors to remember that 'despite having been out of office for a while, I am still the hopey-changey guy.'"

Writes Gabriel Debenedetti, in "What Obama Is Whispering to Biden/The presidents’ plan to save their legacy from Trump" (New York Magazine).I enjoyed the profusion of diacritical marks on "mêlée." I might have done the accent aigu. But the circumflex! That is downright ornate. I approve.

At the top of the front page:

"They are merely 'a kind of decoration,' he added. Dr. McWhorter said apostrophes were the 'fish forks' of punctuation. 'They sit there, you’re not quite sure how to use them; you’re almost sure to use them wrong.' Apostrophes crept into written English for arbitrary reasons, Dr. McWhorter said. 'It’s one more way to look down on people who never quite mastered "its" and "it’s" when really we should be thinking about how effectively they get their message across.' Debates about grammar usage elicit strong feelings because language is an important part of identity, said Ellie Rye, an English lecturer at the University of York in England. Still, in the history of the English language, apostrophes are 'quite modern,' she said. They were not used to mark possession until the 16th century...."

From "An English Town Drops Apostrophes From Street Signs. Some Aren’t Happy. The move has prompted some resistance, with someone writing an apostrophe on a sign for St. Mary’s Walk. 'What’s next?' one North Yorkshire resident asked. 'Commas?'"

"... the Worst President in the History of the United States, get Re-Elected. A Vote for Junior’ would essentially be a WASTED PROTEST VOTE, that could swing either way, but would only swing against the Democrats if Republicans knew the true story about him. Junior’ is totally Anti-Gun, an Extreme Environmentalist who makes the Green New Scammers look Conservative, a Big Time Taxer and Open Border Advocate, and Anti-Military/Vet…."
Trump continues with 2 more posts:

Writes someone in Finland in a Reddit discussion, "Do Europeans ever use their hand[s] to make 'Air Quotes' in a conversation, for example, to express sarcasm or a euphemism?"

Someone in Slovakia says "If you can't express sarcasm or a euphemism by you voice and tone, you shouldn't be allowed to do it. (I haven't seen it here, but maybe somebody does it.)"An American says: "I did it in Italy once, and my little Italian cousins absolutely lost it laughing so hard, bc they didn't know why I was wiggling my fingers around (which I understand would look very, very strange if you don't know the meaning)." 

Wrote Emily Seidel, the chief executive of the Koch political network (Americans for Prosperity Action).ADDED: Trump flaunted his status as a man of the people by deploying the grocer's apostrophe.

Writes Rex Parker about today's NYT crossword, where the 18-across clue is "'Never attribute to ___ that which is adequately explained by stupidity' (Hanlon's razor)."

The new tag is "Edmund Morris."

Writes Adam Gopnik, in "No, Not Aaron Rodgers! It’s hard to name a position in the history of sports so manifestly cursed as that of quarterback for the New York Jets" (The New Yorker).

I love the way Donald Trump intrudes himself even into an article about football almost as much as I love the diaeresis in "reëlection" and the screwy use of "happened" in "If the worst thing...  happened... I will not sound...."

If you puzzle: A command is not a wondering, you see my problem — one of my problems — with the headline "Why hasn't Sam Bankman-Fried already been forced back to the US for FTX fiasco, critics wonder: 'Lock him up'/SBF's father, Joseph Bankman, notably helped Sen. Elizabeth Warren draft tax legislation." (Fox News).

1. Whether you're a "critic" or not, you can't "wonder" "Lock him up." You might wonder why he's not locked up. But you can't wonder an imperative.

2. I guess you could ignore the colon — which indicates that what the critics wonder is "Lock him up." Then you could see the critics as wondering why SBF hasn't been "forced back to the US." That is something that can be wondered. A question mark might help.

3. I find it hard to believe anyone is wondering that. There are no charges against SBF — not yet. I found that article because I was googling to see if SBF was actively fleeing from legal consequences. Isn't that what most of us would expect him to do — what we would do under the circumstances?

4. And that subheadline! What's the point of that if not to insinuate that SBF has political connections that are the reason he's not already extradited and locked up? It's such a weak insinuation. SBF's father is eminent enough to have some connection to drafting a tax bill, and — if you go to the link in the article — you'll see it was just about simplifying tax filing.

5. If you go on to read the article, you'll see it's not really about what "critics," plural, are saying. It's just about what Judge Jeanine Pirro said on Fox News, on "The Five." And Jesse Watters "agreed."

6. Here's something to wonder: Why is Fox News so trashy?

"There’s a lot of reporting on TikTok: newsworthy content, activists speaking up about movements. And yet they’re worried they can’t even use the correct language … or they’ll get taken down."

Said When Belle Ives, "a freelance photographer in Los Angeles who uses they and them pronouns," quoted in "Sorry you went viral TikTok’s explosive stardom has created a new kind of celebrity. But nothing goes viral like rage" (WaPo). 

Ives had videos taken down by TikTok. One showed 2 women kissing, which supposedly broke a rule against "predatory or grooming behavior." Another called a Pride Month cake "gayke," which TikTok deemed "hate speech." 

"I, a natural natterer, lean toward the latterer. But one must draw the line somewhere. I recommend striking out 'actually' at every opportunity, unless it’s in a discussion of the movie 'Love Actually,' in which case we might want to focus on the title’s confounding commalessness. Similarly, though I would never fault the supreme lyricist Johnny Mercer for the gorgeous 'You’re much too much / And just too very very,' I am on constant alert for 'very,' always looking for the chance to dispose of it."

From "Writers, be wary of Throat-Clearers and Wan Intensifiers. Very, very wary" by Benjamin Dreyer (WaPo).

Here's Dreyer's book: "Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style."

And here's that song (which is about not being able to come up with words to express how marvelous this person is):

 

As for the missing comma in "Love Actually," I think there's some widely held belief that commas in titles are too fussy and you should strike them without worrying about the rules of punctuation. But "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" even has an Oxford comma.

"... versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential. 'Science is increasingly showing how sex is dynamic; it has multiple aspects and also shifts; for example, social experiences can actually change levels of sex-related hormones like testosterone in our bodies in a second-to-second and month-to-month way!' Sari van Anders, the research chair in social neuroendocrinology at Queen’s University, in Ontario, told me by email."