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.”
On January of this year Neko Case posted to Instagram an unglamour shot of herself with the note, “This is me all hagged-out drained of life essence.” Even the red had bled out of her hair.
Often we think that the paths we choose are straight—northerly from Florida to Maryland, in the case of the transit of my friend’s boat, Castaway—but in reality our lives are made of arcs, loops, and retracings.
Fred could not pilot his own boat during the inspection. Fred had never done vital maintenance; the generator alone was a rusted hulk with rotting hoses. Fred was an aging guy who owned a chain of carpet stores, or some such, and was dowdy. A real Rotarian.
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.
As the mechanics got back to tackling an electrical problem they had identified and draining water and crud from a diesel tank, B asked me, “Have you heard the stories about me? Do you know who I am?”
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.
I had never heard of an American warship blowing away an American yacht in a heavily-used American waterway, but I felt relieved there had not been an incident.
A vivid new look at borderline, the most maligned and misunderstood of the personality disorders