I woke up super-groggy today, not uncommon when the alarm goes off at 5 a.m. I didn’t have enough time before my workout class to hit Starbucks for a cappuccino with an extra shot, but I did have time to hit the McDonald’s drive-through. Small black coffee, please. It was 5:45 a.m.

Pulled around to the window, where I was asked for 96 cents. “Really?” I said. “That seems low. I’m sure it’s more than that.”

“Well, with the senior discount, that’s what it is,” the window lady said, prompting me to ask how she knew I was a senior, goddamnit. (I didn’t say the goddamnit.) “Do you have cameras back there at the menu board?”

“This early, small black coffee? I just figured,” she said, handing me back a nickel. So really, 95 cents.

This is my life now, I guess. Little encounters with McDonald’s employees.

The class was good, but insanely hot and muggy. The weather is supposed to break tomorrow. And this is the rest of my life, I guess: McDonald’s and the weather.

This blog, too. A story hooked me the other day with its headline.

The Website at the End of the Internet: Reddit is one of the last thriving islands of the old web. Can it survive AI?

The question remains to be answered. Also:

The World Wide Web from which Reddit grew, and for which Huffman expresses so much reverence, has been going through something akin to ecological collapse after being poisoned, then abandoned, by advertisers that have little use for independent websites anymore. At the same time, the rise of generative AI suggests a lot of people are just as happy — if not happier — getting life advice, news, and conversation from a robot that has read a bunch of sub-Reddits as they are chatting with internet strangers themselves.

It gets way more into the weeds of Reddit and the internet than I’m interested in, but the bottom line is the same thing you’ve no doubt read elsewhere, because it’s an old story: Humans are a disappearing feature of the internet, steadily being replaced by bots and AI garbage yammering at one another. If you spend any time at all online, you’ve surely noticed it. If you’ve been online as long as some of us have, well, you really know. It’s easy to remember the early years of everyone being connected; oh, you like this obscure artist or singer/songwriter or movie or hobby TOO? Let’s be friends! Send me an email! I’ll write you back!

No more.

On the other hand, I have become oddly fixated with some Reddit groups — or subreddits, I guess. The amount of time people have to waste online talking about the stupidest shit imaginable is almost awe-inspiring.

Anyway, here you are: Human-powered blather since 2001. Fool that I am.

I would generally have a little more bloggage for you, but the news these days has been so depressing, I feel a little overmatched by it. You know, of course, that Ghislaine Maxwell is cruising toward a commutation or pardon, right? Emil Bove, lying thug, cruising toward a late-term Trump appointment to SCOTUS. Israel is run by thugs, and also liars. Even the coming of pleasant weather will be prefaced by a storm. Earthquake in Russia, tsunamis in the Pacific — it’s just not a good-news kinda week.

But there’s this: David Von Drehle is quitting the WashPost. Here’s his last column. It’s short, elegant and good.

That’s what I got.

Apparently “Sinners,” released around late spring, was one of the big summer movies, only prestigious, y’know. So I decided not to read anything about it, and try to have one of those rare experiences, wherein we can take in a work of art without knowing anything, or much, about it.

I knew it starred Michael B. Jordan, and there were vampires. That’s it.

So I averted my eyes from the headlines that speculated it might be an Oscar contender, although that made me want to watch it more. An Oscar-worthy vampire movie? Count me in. It finally came to HBO a couple weeks ago; Friday was the night to watch.

And, sadly, I was disappointed. It wasn’t that great. Points for locating the vampire plot in a new location (a ’30s juke joint in rural Mississippi). Points for some great music within. But the rest? Meh.

Jordan plays two characters, it turns out: Identical twins. There’s no story reason for making them twins, they could just as easily have been non-twin brothers with a second actor, but oh well. There’s a couple-three references to cunnilingus that suggests the brothers were masters of the art, but again, it didn’t really pertain to the story. I had high hopes the vampire clan, who started out all white, might thematically suggest what white people did to black music of the Mississippi Delta, but he didn’t really explore it. There’s a tacked-on KKK mini-plot that seemed to exist so the audience could get the thrill of watching a while klavern mowed down with a machine gun.

I’m not much for horror, but vampires are at least interesting monsters. These vampires…were not.

In a summer of brutal weather, starvation in Gaza and a full-on assault on American democracy, this doesn’t count as a tragedy. Just a disappointment. But it’s always good to see cunnilingus get a free public service announcement, I guess.

And the brutal weather continued. It’s about 90 as I write this, and will stay that way for two more days.

Also: A man randomly attacked 11 people with a knife in a Traverse City Walmart, which then exposed idiots who cannot use a map and understand that the northern Michigan resort city is not Dearborn, and a suspect by the name of Bradford James Gille is unlikely to be Muslim. In fact, he sounds like one of the many, many mentally ill souls in this country, having self-published a book about his revelation that he is, in fact, Jesus Christ. He hails from Afton, a dot on the map and still a bit of a drive to TC, about 90 miles to be exact.

Good thing the president just signed an E.O. requiring homeless people to be involuntarily committed to the scores of nearly empty mental hospitals that exist throughout this great land, just waiting to be filled. Mr. Gille will be right at home there.

Well, this is sad news: Martin Cruz Smith died last week. One of my favorite authors, most notably for his series set in the Soviet Union (and later Russia, and later still, Ukraine), featuring his soulful, chain-smoking antihero, Investigator Arkady Renko.

His (gift link) obit tells the story of his breakthrough with “Gorky Park,” first in the series, set in Cold War Moscow and published in 1981, to great acclaim. An elegant and stylish writer, he managed to catch a wave that tracked the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and recent history of what came after; the second in the series, “Polar Star,” took place on a Soviet factory ship in the Bering Sea during the Perestroika/joint venture era. Then came “Red Square” (post-collapse), “Wolves Eat Dogs” (Chernobyl), “Havana Bay” (Cuba), “Stalin’s Ghost” (the swing back to the right), “Three Stations” (oligarchs), and four more. I read them all, but something changed around “Stalin’s Ghost,” which is when Smith announced his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, and the change he’d had to make in his process: As I recall, he would sit in a chair, compose sentences in his head and recite them to his wife, Emily, who would write them down. And I don’t know what that says about writing, and rewriting, but the books were different, first subtly, then noticeably, then (to my mind) disastrously so.

Gone was the stylish prose; the later books feel like he was using a ghost, and who knows, maybe he was. He made a lot of money off the early books, but money runs out, and maybe he needed some. Or maybe he just had to do them — writing is like that. But it was sad to see Renko reduced to such a thin ghost of what he’d once been. The last book in the series, “Hotel Ukraine,” was published just last week. I guess I’ll read it, because I’m an Arkady completist, but it’s gonna hurt, I know.

No one ever said death was pleasant. But we remember the good people. All crime/detective fiction follows a formula of sorts, and the great ones find new ways to calculate the formula. Smith did that, no small feat.

In other news at this hour, Hulk Hogan croaked, too. No great loss.

Also, Chuck Mangione. There’s a very strange party going on the bardo right now.

And now we head into the weekend, when it promises to be cooler. I’ll try to stop complaining about the weather. None of us live in Gaza, after all.

Have a good one, all.

I don’t want to be Russian, shrugging off corruption with a what-can-you-do. I don’t want to be Hungarian, doing the same. And yet, being dumbfounded and outraged 24/7 is exhausting. I’m giving in to what my former religion teaches is a sin: Despair.

So when I read that the Kennedy Center Board of Ass-Kissers wants to rename the opera theater therein for Melania Trump, all I can do is scoff and say, “Not a bad come-up for an old whore.” And if anyone should blanch at that, I would remind you to grow up.

Meanwhile, Congress may be adjourned until after Labor Day, but I hope the Dems keep the water torture going. Like Sen. Wyden in Oregon:

“The Trump administration may be closing the books on Epstein’s sex trafficking, but I am not ready to give up. Far from it,” the Oregon senator said in a statement earlier this week.

Trump made campaign promises to release FBI files related to Epstein. But he then seemingly reversed course after taking office, saying they wouldn’t be releasing further Epstein documents. Many of the president’s supporters have been pushing him to release documents, including a list of Epstein’s clients.

Wyden said several banks waited until Epstein’s arrest to flag suspicious transactions that could be related to criminal activity. Now, the senator is pushing to make Epstein-related financial documents public. Wyden disclosed many of his revelations in a New York Times article that details what his staffers found digging through confidential bank records.

Hell yeah, Barry Levine:

Mr. Trump has acknowledged being friendly with Mr. Epstein for about 15 years, ending with a falling out over a real estate matter in 2004. Mr. Trump has not been accused by law enforcement of any wrongdoing related to Mr. Epstein, but his relationship with Mr. Epstein has come under scrutiny.

…On Wednesday, The Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Ms. Bondi told Mr. Trump this spring that his name appeared in the Epstein files. The context in which his name was raised remains unclear.

Hell yeah, Politico:

Trump and his closest allies thought they’d spend the summer taking a well-earned victory lap, having coaxed Congress into passing the megabill, bullied foreign governments into a slew of new trade arrangements, convinced NATO allies to spend billions more on collective defense and pressed world leaders to bow to various other demands from Doha to The Hague.

“POTUS is clearly furious,” said a person close to the White House, who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to discuss the mood inside the West Wing. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them sort of paralyzed.”

Good. Maybe he’ll have a medical event that will require him to use a cane or walker thereafter.

And yeah, if all this requires sacrificing Bill Clinton, that’s fine with me. It’s time, and no one cares anymore. He’s an old man.

By the way, it’s worth clicking on the Politico link to see the fucking mess Tubby has made of the Oval Office, which now looks like a higher-end New Orleans whorehouse. Fitting, I know! When he and the old whore are finally gone, there isn’t going to be enough sage and sandblasting to drive all that gilt crap out.

Sorry I’m late today. We had a perfect start of the week, and currently it’s 86 degrees, forecast to be 10 degrees hotter tomorrow, with humidity in the armpit-mold range until the middle of next week. It isn’t weather to spark creativity. But we press on.

Friday was indeed the perfect summer day the forecast promised, and so in late afternoon I told Alan we needed to truck the bikes to Belle Isle, do a half-loop, then head down the Riverwalk to Valade Park, where Bob’s Barge would be open. Bob’s Barge is a bar, on a floating platform right on the water, so you drink your beer looking out at the river and gently rising and falling with each passing vessel.

And so that’s what we did. It resembled what Jeff Borden once described as the ideal exercise, i.e. like sex: “You work a little, you get a reward, you go to sleep.”

But the real focus of the weekend was on Sunday, when this happened:

The girls played the Concert of Colors, an annual summer weekend of music that takes place downtown, mostly on the grounds of the DIA. The “colors” part refers to diversity, so as an all-female band, that counted. They had a serious delay getting onstage (tech issues) but sounded great once there, and had some new-music tricks up their sleeve, including some lovely harmonies.

There was this bomb-ass art car that looks like a roach parked out front. I believe the people who built it call it the Carcroach.

I was briefly left in charge of the merch. The view from the merch tent:

I shared the table with the merch guy for War. Obviously War, having had a several-decade head start, was doing more business than I was, but it was fun talking to him. He was like LA Mary’s son, only Hispanic and 20 years older (at least).

Now we’re home again, I’m tired, so here’s some bloggage:

Here’s some comic relief for you, where you don’t have to see his face or hear his voice.

At the Alligator Alcatraz press conference a reporter asked Trump what he planned to do to fulfill his next campaign promise. His full response was six minutes long. This is a verbatim reading of part of his answer. You won't have to listen to his voice or see his face.

[image or embed]

— Decoding Fox News (@decodingfoxnews.bsky.social) July 6, 2025 at 6:35 AM

But remember, it’s Biden who was demented.

FWIW, and we’ve covered this here before, all of our appliances are EnergyStar (RIP) rated as efficient, and I’ve noticed zero difference in their efficacy. They may even work better, at least as it relates to toilet-flushing, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

A long, but skimmable gift-link transcript of a NYT conversation with Julie Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who broke the Epstein story way back when. From time to time in recent years I’ll ask one of my Columbus friends, “So how are people talking about Les Wexner now that he’s been so roped to Epstein?” And the answer, inevitably, is a blank look.

But first: Do you think that some form of the intelligence world — and Epstein’s connections to it — played any role in why he got off so lightly the first time?

Brown: I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody really knows except the people in the government that have these files. And I think that’s, in part, one of the unanswered questions about Epstein, because I just don’t know. I know there’s a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, I try to stick to the facts, and so it’s just something we don’t know for sure.

Douthat: Yeah. I’m drawing on your view about your skepticism around the blackmail narrative. There’s two intelligent stories you could tell: One, Epstein is literally an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the U.S. government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That’s the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence.

So this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as a conduit of information. But it’s not that he’s being run as a kind of entrapment ring. If we don’t think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.

Hmm. Interesting. But I think it’s time for bed. Zzzzzz.

Well, the cool front arrived as advertised, thank goddess. It was windy during morning swim, and I lost an earplug. I made a few halfhearted underwater canvasses of the crime scene, then figured it was gone for good. Finished my swim, showered, dressed and thought I’d walk the perimeter of the pool one more time before ordering another pair. The wind had pushed it right to the gutter, only one lane down.

Obviously, today is my lucky day.

Go ahead, laugh, but if we still had a swimming-supplies retail storefront nearby, I wouldn’t have even bothered looking for it. But in a time when we have to buy so much online, it seemed worth the extra effort, just to avoid shipping and handling. While some online shopping is undoubtedly efficient, I’m starting to crave the experience of entering a store and being pleasantly surprised by what I find there. I have a friend who does Instacart for her groceries exclusively, something I cannot imagine. You let someone else pick out your apples? Girl, are you crazy? Trusting someone else to buy my groceries is like trusting them to do my laundry. No way.

And with that mishmash of nothing in particular, let’s get to the news, which has continued the week’s trajectory of being ever more horrifying: Emil Bove (a man whose soul is worn on his face, if there ever was one) on greased skids to be a federal judge. A Justice Department recommending a one-day sentence for a cop convicted of firing wildly into Breonna Taylor’s Louisville apartment. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, marked for death. It’s just one fucking thing after another.

Late in the afternoon, I read that President Pudding-for-Brains is diagnosed with something called chronic venous insufficiency, and I was disappointed it wasn’t congestive heart failure. I’m not in a healthy frame of mind these days.

So I leave you with one excellent obituary, for Connie Francis, who left the mortal plane this week at 87. I’ve known two Connie superfans in my life. One was my old buddy Paul, who loved to go around singing “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” and other Connie hits. The other is a friend here, who can extemporize for an hour about her business sense, particularly her recordings of her hits in other languages, which of course sold well in those countries. She learned the lyrics phonetically, and discovered that yeah, the world was waiting to hear “Vacation” in Japanese. You have to admire a girl like that.

Also, this phrase is waiting for you low in the obit:

Like Mr. Darin, with whom she was romantically involved until her father chased him off with a gun when she was in her late teens,

Well, they were Newark Italians.

God, I need some good news, and no, I don’t mean something about a plucky puppy or warmhearted mail carrier. I mean I want to see something that gives me hope for the future of my country. Let’s hope the weekend brings something around.

I used to read The New York Times exclusively on their website, but for some reason I downloaded the app, figuring it would work better on my phone, and then I allowed push notifications, and that’s how I learned on Monday afternoon…

In a major victory for the Trump administration, the Supreme Court on Monday allowed it to fire thousands of Education Department employees, functionally eliminating the agency.

What’s more…

The court’s decision, while technically temporary, lets workers who had been reinstated during the legal battle be fired again.

Well, ain’t that a kick in the head. Imagine that, another “major victory” for the most corrupt administration in my lifetime and probably American history, delivered by a corrupt Supreme Court. This is just exhausting to see, week after week. And here we thought summer would be relaxing. Instead, it’s just hot. And infuriating. A friend shared a witticism going around in his youngest daughter’s crowd: When this is over, woke is coming back to hard there are going to be tribunals for people with outdoor cats.

If it’s ever over, that is.

On that theme, I don’t know how I missed this on Sunday. Headline:

The Canadians Are Furious
Trump accomplished what was once considered impossible: Our northern neighbors have united against us.

In early May, Carney and Trump held a predictably surreal press conference in the Oval Office. Trump began genially, congratulating Carney on his election: “It was probably one of the greatest comebacks in the history of politics, maybe even greater than mine.” But when a reporter asked if he still envisioned Canada as the 51st state, Trump killed the goodwill.

“You know, I’m a real-estate developer at heart,” he said. The president waxed poetic about erasing “that artificially drawn line” on the map between the U.S. and Canada, saying that “when you look at that beautiful formation, when it’s together — I’m a very artistic person — but when I looked at that beauty, I said, ‘That’s the way it was meant to be.’” Carney interjected coolly, “Well, if I may, as you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale. We’re sitting in one right now.”

Isn’t that wonderful? The Trump administration is six months old. Or maybe we should think of it as 25 percent down the road to the midterms. Assuming we have them.

Not that I wish to hang the crepe. It’s just 88 degrees outside, and I am so fucking done with this. It might as well be nine below zero.

Meanwhile, in Ohio:

What sort of person looks at the guy on the right, this human mosquito, his whitened veneers gleaming in the light, and says, “That’s my guy.” The guy hasn’t had to figure out how the increase the budget of a small-city public-works department without increasing taxes, but he wants to run the state. I ask you.

Gift link to this excellent WashPost explainer on how the Texas floods happen. Even if you don’t read it, scroll through the graphics, which are outstanding, particularly the one showing the location of the Camp Mystic cabins vis-a-vis the riverbed. It’s…shocking. Maybe even criminal.

A good piece on another Stephen Miller manque, working at the state level. In Florida, of course.

Finally, Michelle Goldberg on MAGA and the Epstein story. Worth a read.

OK, then. A cooldown — a real one — is coming by week’s end, we’re told. We shall see. I leave you with a photo of Tuesday’s muggy, smoky sunrise. It’s pretty, though!

When I read that the owners of Camp Mystic tried to get certain structures removed from the Guadalupe River floodplain, it rang a bell that finally broke through: The news that, in 2017, a catastrophic flood in Houston was made worse because, wait for it, developers had built entire subdivisions inside a reservoir, but hadn’t told homeowners about it.

Because when they sold the houses, the level of the reservoir was low. Just as, when it’s not flash-flooding, the Guadalupe River is a pleasant stream you want to be close to, not up on a bluff looking down at it. Or as it was before Hurricane Harvey:

The vast basins are dry most of the time, dotted with wooded parks and sports fields, and are contained on their eastern boundaries by large, earthen dams. During rainstorms, floodwater accumulates behind those dams in areas known as “flood pools” and backs up to the west; how far it goes depends on how big the rainstorm is and where it hits.

That system worked well when the reservoirs were surrounded by prairie and rice fields. But in recent decades, development has encroached from all sides. Today, about 14,000 homes are located inside them. During Harvey, when more floodwater accumulated behind the dams than ever before, 5,138 of those homes flooded.

Some local government officials, like Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack, say they’ve warned residents for years during town halls and other public events about the risks of living in or around the reservoirs.

“It is very difficult to make people believe the unbelievable,” Radack said. “No one ever believed the reservoirs would fill.”

This is human nature. No one believed the reservoirs would fill, until they did. No one believed the river would carry away everything in its path, until it did. Living in a flooding city, as I did for 20 years, it’s easy to see this paradox. That river? That brown, stinky ditch? Coming this high? No way. And then it snows and snows, and then it rains and rains, and then the snow melts and combines with the rain, and the next thing you know you’re wearing rubber boots and throwing sandbags.

And that’s the best-case scenario. That’s a slow flood. We all saw the worst-case scenario July 4.

Fort Wayne has taken away a lot of the human factor by turning its floodplain into parkland. But honestly, I haven’t been keeping up. Have they had a major flood recently?

OK, then. A hot weekend. It’s been punishingly hot for a month now. During my Saturday boxing class, I was near a thermometer — it was attached to some fan. It was 83 when we started, and through the 45-minute class I watched it climb, degree by degree, until it topped out at 88. Thought I was going to die. Today was sailing — far more pleasant, but still hot.

How is it where you are?

It doesn’t qualify as a profound insight to notice that every child — hell, every person — alive today will have their photo taken a million times before they check out. Maybe more than that, if you throw in security cameras, which I’m not. I’m talking about how, as cameras have become omnipresent, we’re all more comfortable with having our picture taken.

If you grew up in the era where your parents might expose a single roll of film in six months, it’s a little unnerving. Yes, it’s great to have a bunch of pictures of your family. Yes, it’s also weird to point a camera at a child, and have them immediately step into a pose and flash a big insincere smile, the way mom and dad taught them. Where are the sullen teens of yore? Whatever.

Anyway, that’s all leading up to this: One of the things I did this weekend was go through some family pictures and artifacts my sister’s been keeping. I brought home my birth certificate, my high-school diploma, and a few snapshots.

My dad and his dad, whom I never met, c. 1943. My dad was meticulous in his appearance, and had his uniform tailored to his specifications. Looking at my grandfather, I can see it ran in the family.

I don’t know when that was taken, but St. Louis was a hot city. Imagine wearing a three-piece suit in that humidity.

Me and my brother, and me and my sister. This would be our house in Kansas City, most likely:

I had a bad problem with blinking when flashbulbs went off.

My very earliest memories were in that house; I think I must have been about…4? Maybe? After K.C., it was on to Columbus, where we settled and stayed.

Now these photos have been scanned and digitized, but I’ll keep the originals, where they’ll live in my family until Kate takes them, or throws them away, or they burn up in a fire.

I should toss my high-school diploma, though. Finishing high school is so bare-minimum, I wonder why anyone hangs on to theirs. But it seems wrong, somehow. Mine still has the sheet of onionskin paper that covers the precious diploma itself. It’s a thing of value! It cost the state of Ohio something to educate me. Better find a box to stash it in.

Also, this: I applied for a job a few years ago, not really wanting it, but curious what it might involve, and I was rejected for, get this, failing to attach a college transcript to my application, which was submitted online, of course. I think my college transcript must be in a moldy box in the basement of the registrar’s office, but never mind that, because it makes a pretty good segue to the bloggage, which today is a little dated. I’ve been throwing links into a blank doc for a few days now, so let’s lead with the evisceration of Indiana University, victim of a MAGA governor seeking to polish his national profile by gutting a fine institution. All in the name of “efficiency” and the needs of the job market, of course, which tracks with the right-wing insistence that college need be nothing more than a trade school for middle managers. (At least for your kids. The elite layer of the GOP will continue to send their offspring to the Ivies.) This Chicago Tribune editorial strikes the right note of are-you-kidding-me indignation, more so than any Indiana newspaper I’ve seen. But then, lots of IU journalism grads find jobs in Chicago, so no surprise there.

Here’s an amusing obit for a 105-year-old woman, a real GP OG, as I like to think of these dowagers:

Louise Booth, 105, passed away peacefully Thursday, July 3, 2025, at her home facing Lakeshore between Beacon Hill and Kerby in Grosse Pointe Farms. She was still of sound mind.

That’s a Booth of Booth Newspapers, back when owning newspapers was like owning a gold mine. They sold to Newhouse years and years ago, but they must have invested the pile wisely. Later paragraphs give the exact address of the house, in case any funeral burglars were confused. And while the obit isn’t amusing in the fashionable current trend of basically calling someone a lovable jerk — she seemed like a nice lady — I find any obit for someone who lasts that long into the postseason uplifting to read. Especially as she was still of sound mind.

The Sean Combs verdict happened so long ago it already feels like ancient history, but Monica Hesse at the WP has done a couple of good columns about it, which you can look up. This one, about so-called Alligator Alcatraz, is very good, too:

The point is that serious matters — the most serious matters, the matters of constitutionality, due process, citizenship and who gets to be an American — are, in this administration, being increasingly presented as cheap entertainment. You see it in the U.S. Border Patrol playing the power ballad “Closing Time” over footage of a scared looking young man being placed in handcuffs and shepherded onto a plane. You see it in the White House posting a video of detained migrants being processed for deportation, set to a hit from Bananarama.

Is it funny? Is it awful? Is it trolling or real life? The point is that we are not supposed to know. Alligator Alcatraz is a dehumanizing place, but when it is treated as spectacle, it’s not just the prisoners there who lose their humanity. We all do. The effect is to tell Americans not to take any of this too seriously. Families are being ripped apart, but it’s all for the lulz. We are dancing on the edges of constitutionality, but it’s making great television. We have become tonally incoherent, incapable of even determining tone. If Guantánamo Bay opened today, there would be a themed restaurant out back with happy hour specials taglined “Git mo’ at Gitmo.”

…I used to wonder about Roman gladiator battles. What kind of society would pack up a picnic lunch and go watch other humans, the enslaved or prisoners of war, forced to battle each other to the death? Another part of the gladiator legend is that these men were forced to fight large beasts, large carnivorous predators. But there was no physical evidence for that until just a few months ago in April, when archaeologists analyzed giant bite marks on the unearthed skeleton of a 1,800-year-old gladiator. Then it was confirmed: lions. In what society would this be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon?

Finally, a really interesting Atlantic story (gift link, as is the WP link above) about so-called customer-service sludge. Having recently spent 90 minutes on hold with the IRS without getting anyone on the line, I can identify. It’s maddening.

Here’s something weird about where I went to school. In junior high, there was always a talent show, and there were always two acts, one of boys and one of girls, who would dress up like the Temptations (the boys), or the Supremes (the girls), and their act would be lip-syncing and dancing to one of their hits. What’s more, it was always the most popular members of the class who did so, and no, there were no runner-up groups. It’s like it was chosen by some in-group election. The best-looking athletes were the Temptations, and the prettiest pretty girls were the Supremes. The boys wore the matching fly suits, and the girls the sequined gowns. It was always the ninth graders, too — no underclassmen allowed. It was like you were already popular, then the cream of the popular crowd was skimmed to do these acts, and it went on year after year.

Did I mention the class was 100 percent white? It was.

So you had these two acts, which were sandwiched between the kids who could sing, dance or play an instrument, or do something else. They got the most applause, mainly because it was very popular kids and very popular music and the talent show mostly didn’t traffic in pop music. So you’d dutifully watch someone do a dramatic monologue, or play the violin, and then there they were: The White Temptations, lip-syncing to “I Can’t Get Next to You.” The song came to the climax, and the kid doing the lead vocal snatched the dead mic off the stand and does his little freestyle boogie to girl you’re blowing my mind ’cause I can’t get next to you and the crowd of junior-high kids went wild.

The White Supremes would do their thing a few acts later. The only thing I’ve ever seen to compare to it is the scene in “Mean Girls” when the plastics do “Jingle Bell Rock,” which suggests this is one of those things that happen at certain schools.

I thought about this at my 50-year high school reunion this weekend. I can’t recall who any of the Temptations or Supremes were, but I remember the weirdness of it. The class was still 100 percent white at graduation, although there was one black kid in the previous year’s class, the son of…I believe…an OSU professor. Some goobers from one of the unincorporated townships burned a cross on their lawn. The community outrage was pretty pitched, if only because this grave insult was perpetrated by people who didn’t even live there.

Now, of course, Upper Arlington is quite diverse, with people of color everywhere. One notable resident? Vivek Ramaswamy. I considered going to the July 4 parade, on the chance he might be in it (he’s running for governor) and I could yell something rude, but the entire weekend was very, very hot, and well, the hell with that idea.

The reunion was fun. The food was fine, the crowd was dense, the space air-conditioned, but just barely enough. I saw a lot of people I haven’t seen for a while. I saw my old weed man, who has changed so much it’s still hard to believe. He’s now neighbors with Jorma Kaukonen. I saw a friend I used to smoke weed with, and he told me about being in the Navy, and smoking weed there, and watching planes land on the carrier deck. (“So is this why they keep sliding off the edge?” I asked.) I saw lots and lots of people, and bought a round of drinks for a stranger behind me in the bar line, because most of my enormous high-school class are strangers.

I’m still processing, and it’s still insanely hot They say this was the last reunion. So I’ll have more later. I leave you with this: Me in eighth grade, never to be a White Supreme. Dig my subversive peace-sign button: