Conventions are celebrations of future power not yet won, so there must be a show commensurate with the spoils. The DNC is being held in the two biggest buildings in Chicago, which not coincidentally celebrate the highest powers in our land: business, in the shape of McCormick Place, more commonly used for enormous trade shows; and entertainment, represented by the United Center arena.
I had to know how all this began. A beauty influencer named Jools Lebron (joolieannie on TikTok) posted it, I read first. She was at least funny. “See how I do my makeup for work? Very demure, very mindful…. A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to the job looking like Patty and Selma. Not demure.”
Admirers of Reinhold Niebuhr have included Martin Luther King Jr., Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter, John McCain, James Comey. “He’s one of my favorite philosophers,” Barack Obama told David Brooks, also a Niebuhr fan.
Steve Vender is a tough, daring private investigator. It feels strangely right that the book most important to him is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.
“Genetics loads the gun. Personality and psychology aim it. And experiences pull the trigger.”
The Paris Olympics tell the human story: ambition, aspiration, discipline, hard work, luck, serendipity, glory, limelight, and then the biggest dream of all, and with a half-inch miss, catastrophe.
Friends are trampolines, waiting to bounce you back up if you fall from the heights. With a real friend, Cicero says, “you are strong even when you are weak.”
Olympic judges, take note: the stylistic elements in breaking are what give a person room to be innovative, and that is where the creativity lives. So does the musicality, at which which St. Louis bboys (and the handful of bgirls) excel.
Try to imagine Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, or either of the George Bushes making a clenched fist their symbol. You cannot.
“It is so hard to make someone else feel anything other than pain,” Nilay Patel remarked.“Christ,” Ezra Klein exclaimed. “That’s the darkest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”