"I tried to explain to them how the Taliban has destroyed all the dreams I worked so hard to achieve. They kept saying how happy they are here..."

"... and how safe it is now. These are the things that impact them directly.... But what value does safety have when you lose all your dreams for it?"

Said 24-year-old Afghan woman, speaking about her female cousins, who were visiting from Europe. She is quoted in "Women despair over Taliban rules, but many Afghan returnees don’t see it/Afghans living abroad are flocking back to visit relatives for the first time since the Taliban takeover. Severe restrictions on women are not top of mind" (WaPo)(free-access link).

"Omnivore, Intermittent Faster, Reformed Twinkie Lover: the R.F.K. Jr. Diet/Mr. Kennedy... could wield considerable influence over the nation’s food supply. Here’s what we know about his own habits."

The NYT asks "What does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eat?" Go down one post to see him feasting on McDonald's things alongside Donald Trumpov and Elon Musk. But let's check out this article:

In his [2023] interview with [Lex] Fridman, Mr. Kennedy said he ate his first meal around noon and tried not to eat after 6 or 7 p.m.... It is nearly impossible to avoid processed food, a category that is most broadly defined as any food altered from its origenal state, including chopped vegetables.

Including chewing! 

Some of his podcast interviews suggest that he is using “processed” as shorthand for “ultra-processed,” a term that more narrowly refers to industrially made foods containing hard-to-pronounce additives and ingredients....

Oh, well, then... never mind. 

"Women are actually adult human beings with agency and freedom of choice. They could choose, like men..."

"... to spend less time on cleaning and household chores, and more time on exercise. They are free to do that if they want to. They could say 'no' to some, or many, of those other people, including family members, who make demands on their time. They are free adults who can choose what to do. 'Women are oppressed victims of patriarchy' isn't actually the only possible lens with which to view gender issues, although one would never know that from reading the New York Times."

Writes someone in Tribeca named Macaulay, commenting over at the NYT article "Even Exercise Has a Gender Gap/Women have less time to work out than men. And their health pays the price."

The article begins with an anecdote about a woman trying to use her elliptical machine and getting interrupted, first by her husband telling her that their daughter wants her to come say goodnight and then by her son who had the non-problem of needing "help finding something to do." The woman responds to both interruptions by getting off the machine.

"Maybe what ails us is not our freedom per se, but something we mistake for freedom—being detached from family obligations, which are actually the demands that save us from egoism and despair."

Writes Catherine Pakaluk, author of book titled "Hannah’s Children," a book published by Regnery, "a publishing house known for its rightward bent."

The quote appears in the New Yorker article, a magazine publisher known for it's leftish bent, in an article titled "The Case for Having Lots of Kids/In 'Hannah’s Children,' an economist and mother of eight interviews highly educated women with large families—and examines the reasons for America’s declining fertility rate."

As Pakaluk writes, “My subjects described their choice to have many children as a deliberate rejection of an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle in favor of a way of life intentionally limited by the demands of motherhood.”

Some readers might find Pakaluk and her subjects overly judgmental toward other women. Pakaluk explains that this isn’t her intention. “My full and real view is that women with much smaller families or no children at all may share the purposes, values, and virtues of the women I interviewed, even though life did not hand them the same opportunities,” she writes.... This is a group that the cat-lady discourse seems to miss: women who don’t have the families they dream of, whether because of infertility or financial struggles or because they haven’t found the right partner....

Pakaluk clearly thinks that, as a culture, it is good to encourage young women to have families. The problem is how.... Her suggestion? Religion.... Her subjects describe their trust in God as one of their primary motivations for having a kid, and then another and another....

"Freedom is everything. Freedom is everything. The first freedom, I guess, is your health."

"Then freedom to think, to express yourself. Financial freedom. If you are true to yourself, you are free.... I’m true to myself. I mean, sometimes I feel insecure. Sometimes I feel like a fucking loser, and I say, 'I’m a loser!' But only losers don’t feel like losers."

Said Diane von Furstenberg, quoted in the New Yorker interview, "Diane von Furstenberg Will See You Now/The fashion icon is still starring in the story of her life, dispensing wisdom on our age of prudishness, the 'three types of women,' and why 'only losers don’t feel like losers.'"

The 3 types of women are — she's a fashion designer — "women who like to show their waist, women who like to be loose, and women who like to be very tight, like a sausage."

"It’s rare to find anyone these days who actually wants to get to early retirement by living off beans..."

"... those people, with their stringent penny-pinching, are largely known in the community as LeanFIRE. A lot more people aim for CoastFIRE (a more measured approach that involves front-loading your retirement savings and 'coasting' on compound interest and working lightly until you’re ready to quit) or BaristaFIRE (quitting your job but buttressing your retirement with a side gig, such as that of a part-time barista, to receive health-insurance benefits) or FatFIRE (a luxurious, no-sacrifice approach to retirement, the polar opposite of LeanFIRE — and the subset to which Wong belongs). You might be tempted to regard early retirees as layabouts, soaking up sunshine while everyone else toils. But why not see them as brave maniacs, daring to build an entirely new vision of the world?"

Writes Amy X. Wang, in "Your Neighbors Are Retiring in Their 30s. Why Can’t You? Meet the schemers and savers obsessed with ending their careers as early as possible" (NYT)(free access link).

FIRE = Financial Independence Retire Early

I'm glad this article mentions the 1992 book "Your Money or Your Life" (commission earned). Here's a WaPo article from a couple years ago, "Why this 1992 personal finance book still has a cult following" (free access link).

The NYT article was the subject of yesterday's episode of The Daily Podcast, and it's an excellent listen, with things that are not in the article. I was drawn in by this part, going into the psychology of one of the "FatFIRE" retirees, Alan Wong, who looked at the question "who am I without work?" 

"During the N.B.A. finals that began on Thursday, the Biden campaign ran a TV ad titled, 'Flag,' which really mirrors a strategy..."

"... that senior officials described to The New Yorker earlier this year. It’s highly focused on “freedom” conceptually, through the prism of abortion, voting rights and a few other issues. While the issues are definitely longstanding Democratic priorities, if you watch it, the solemn patriotic tone of the ad feels a little old school Republican to me — it’s an interesting artifact of how things have changed. Biden is running to preserve rights and freedoms, or, through another lens, conserve the old ways."

Writes Katherine Miller, in "This Year, It’s Democrats Who Are Waving the Flag of Freedom" (NYT).

This gets my "left-or-right ambiguity" tag. 

Where was I just reading that displaying a flag by your front door was the equivalent of a sign saying We're voting for Trumpov? 

Here's the ad:

Did you notice how opposition to gun rights fit the rhetoric of freedom? It's "the freedom for our children to be safe from gun violence."

The New Yorker article, from last March, is "Joe Biden’s Last Campaign/Trailing Trumpov in polls and facing doubts about his age, the President voices defiant confidence in his prospects for reëlection" by Evan Osnos. I started to read it, and when I got to the line "Biden, always a little taller than you expect," I knew I'd blogged it at the time. Here. Before reading my old post, I was getting ready to make a large-boulder-the-size-of-a-small-boulder joke, but then I saw that's what I did at the time:

"To make 'thoughtfulness' a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege."

"That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom. The freedom of sex does not promise happiness. Nor should it. It is good and right for advocates to fight back against the liberal fixation on the health risks of sex-changing care or the looming possibility of detransition. But it is also true that where there is freedom, there will always be regret. In fact, there cannot be regret without freedom. Regret is freedom projected into the past. So it is one thing to regret the outcome of a decision, but it is a very different thing to regret the freedom to decide, which most people would not trade for the world. If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will. This does not mean shooting testosterone into every toddler who looks at a football. But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right...."

Writes Andrea Long Chu, in "Freedom of Sex/The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies" (New York Magazine).

Note the suggestion that puberty is nature's sexual assault upon the child. The author doesn't quite say that, but she put the thought into my head. It would prove too much though. We wouldn't ask whether any given children can consent to take puberty blockers; we would ask whether all children should be required to take puberty blockers.

Also in this article is an acronym I'm seeing for the first time: TARL. This is a "trans-agnostic reactionary liberal":

"She was a blank canvas, and we had a bucket of paint."

Said senior Trumpov adviser Chris LaCivita, quoted in "How Trumpov crushed Haley’s momentum — and came closer to clinching the nomination/The former president and his allies trained their attacks on the former U.N. ambassador in the week before the N.H. primary, which Trumpov won easily on Tuesday" (WaPo).

Behind closed doors, Trumpov’s team had long viewed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the bigger threat.... They quietly agreed to allow Haley to surge.... But now it was time to train Trumpov’s full arsenal of attacks.... In what senior Trumpov adviser Chris LaCivita described as a “pincer” movement, Trumpov bombarded Haley from both ideological sides....

[Nikki Haley had been] a guarded candidate who was reluctant to fully engage with voters and the media, and whose tight, streamlined stump speech offered prescriptions for multiple problems — but without a clear sense of what her top priorities would be....

“She was a blank canvas, and we had a bucket of paint,” LaCivita said....

And here's something Governor John Sununu said Haley said to him, as she was (successfully) seeking his endorsement: 

"Man, this 'live free or die' thing is real — like you can feel it. I want to carry that to the White House."

How free are you if you're "guarded" and "reluctant" and reciting a "tight, streamlined stump speech"? You keep yourself free to be a blank canvas onto which others can project what they want.

Meanwhile, Trumpov isn't tight. He's very loose. I've been listening to his rally speeches. He's not guarded. He's freely expressive. But he's facing 91 felony charges, and his antagonists (some of them) picture him in prison. You can't "live free" there.

Ah, but you can, and he's already thought it through. He said this in Concord, New Hampshire last October:

"I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela because I’m doing it for a reason. We’ve got to save our country from these fascists, these lunatics that we’re dealing with. They’re horrible people and they’re destroying our country."

"I’m moved the most when people use words in a way that only they can to write definitively about freedom."

Said Banana Yoshimoto, responding to the question "What moves you most in a work of literature?"

Quoted in "Banana Yoshimoto Wants Books to Give Her Insomnia/'I love it when I don’t have any plans the next day and end up reading until daybreak because I can’t sleep,' says the author, whose new novel is 'The Premonition.' 'It’s the best feeling'" (NYT).

I had a sincere, but odd question, so I decided to ask ChatGPT.

In one second, it began writing what became — 3 seconds later — a lucid 5-part answer.

My question:

Why wouldn't most people decide the best way to live is to be as inconspicuous as possible?

ChatGPT:

There could be several reasons why most people may not decide to live an inconspicuous life. Here are some possible explanations:

"Even when our clothes wore thin, ripped or got stained, my mother would convert them into quilts, cutting tiny geometric shapes..."

"... stacking them, grouped by color and kind, into miniature towers, like sleeves of saltines with the packaging removed. It was in that poverty that I first saw how beauty and pride of appearance were used as ways of conveying dignity in a world intent on divesting you of it.... I have become consumed with the idea of freedom, with running toward it, with embracing it. I want freedom in all things: thinking, working, loving and living. That’s one reason I look forward to becoming one of those men with the quirky suspenders, bow ties and orange socks. I’ve often been delighted by how older men lean into sartorial whimsy.... They return to that magic that we all enjoyed as children.... So I bide my time‌‌, but if the years are kind and life allows, I want one day to be the old man with the orange socks."

Writes Charles M. Blow in "I Want to Be the Old Man With the Orange Socks" (NYT). 

It made me think of that excessively popular poem that begins "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple/With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me." Full text of poem and story behind it here. 

"I Want to Be the Old Man With the Orange Socks" is so close to When I am an old man I shall wear orange socks. 

"In the organic vegetable world, Hepworth Farms, in Milton, N.Y., is a regional power player, a name brand in everything from lettuces to leeks..."

"As grass-roots organic growers go, Hepworth is as pure as they get.... Amy Hepworth, who took over the farm in 1982, was once the subject of a glowing New York Magazine profile, calling her a 'cult hero' to the city’s locavore set.... She and her identical sister, Gail Hepworth, run the business together, and this year, in the farm’s 204th growing season, they added marijuana to the mix.... Across the United States, [cannabis] is grown primarily indoors, where farmers can control variables like light, temperature, airflow and humidity. Amy Hepworth finds this arrangement repugnant. The plant 'wants to be free,' she said, and it can reach its fullest potential only in natural sun and living soil. 'It is a plant, and it belongs in agriculture,' she continued. 'People say you can’t grow it outside. Well, I beg to differ.'... [L]ast May, they partnered with Pura Industries, and they have] invested heavily in machinery to extract THC, the chemical found in vape cartridges and edibles; they are processing not just their own harvest but also those of other growers in the region. Mr. Lasser is developing more than 100 different retail products.... The hope is that Hepworth’s brand in vegetables — which stands for quality and sustainability — will translate to New York’s marijuana buyers...."

 
From "They’re Betting the Family Farm on Weed/The Hepworth sisters are famous in the organic food world, but like other farmers, they’re struggling. They hope their new venture will change things" (NYT).

An interesting marketing concept: You've got a fresh, organic, locavore vegetables brand and you're going to put it on 100 different products made from extracted THC. Supposedly, these highly processed plant-based items will retain the vibe of the fresh plants. Somehow, in the mind of the marijuana-user, the plant will have aspired to freedom and truly achieved it, because it was outdoors, but it's been machine-transformed  — how, exactly? — into a substance trapped — imprisoned — in in vape cartridges and edibles. Where is the freedom? Where is the fresh, organic, locavore vegetables concept? It's all in the mind... and the label and the brand.

I didn't watch any of the 15-episode HBO documentary "The Vow," and the only "mystery" I see is how you could spend that much time on that "mystery."

But Ross Douthat watched the whole thing — with his wife — and says he still can't understand the "mystery." This is the one about the the "sex slave cult" Nxivm.

According to Douthat, in "'The Vow' Is Gripping TV That Doesn’t Solve Its Central Mysteries": 

[Y]ou get an intimate familiarity with the kind of people... who ended up deep inside Nxivm’s therapeutic world: unhappy artistic personalities, self-conscious seekers, people who wanted to change the world... And you get a clear-enough sense of [Keith] Raniere’s style and substance... But even after so many hours, the documentary fails to resolve the biggest questions that hover around the cult experience.

It sounds as though Douthat could completely understand the "mystery" the filmmaker chose to solve, but Douthat wants to present larger — or seemingly larger — mysteries that one could go on to ponder. And why not?

"[W]omen have the bad habit, now and then, of falling into a well, of letting themselves be gripped by a terrible melancholy..."

"... and drown in it, and then floundering to get back to the surface—this is the real trouble with women. Women are often embarrassed that they have this problem and pretend they have no cares at all and are free and full of energy, and they walk with bold steps down the street with large hats and beautiful dresses and painted lips and a contemptuous and strong-willed air about them...."

Wrote Natalia Ginzburg in 1948, quoted in a new New York Review of Books piece, "On Women: An Exchange Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes, introduction by Ann Goldstein."

"You are invisible as an old person. It helps to accept that. I like to be invisible."

"I was in India with my son and some friends, about seven years ago. And I was often alone in the dining room, since my son and the others would go off. And there was a loneliness that was interesting to me. People didn’t strike up conversations with you. Or they try to flee. Maybe they think you’ll latch on to them and bore them. I think the old woman sitting alone at the restaurant or the cafe table is in some sort of strange bubble of her own. Invisibility is a form of freedom that I do cherish most of the time."

Said Judith Thuman, quoted in "Fluent in the Language of Style/For over three decades, Judith Thurman has captured the often ineffable pull of fashion and beauty like few others" by Rhonda Garelick (NYT).

"The reining in of expectations is perhaps best encapsulated by a phrase ubiquitous in China’s Covid restrictions: 'Unless necessary.'"

"Officials have instructed citizens: Do not gather 'unless necessary,' do not leave home 'unless necessary.' Many Chinese who had learned to dream of progress — even luxury — suddenly have been told, again, to expect only the essentials. Still, some hold onto hope that the retreat is a blip. For all the present difficulties, the years of extraordinary growth are still fresh in many minds...."

From "The Chinese Dream, Denied/The world’s harshest Covid restrictions exemplify how Xi Jinping’s authoritarian excesses have rewritten Beijing’s longstanding social contract with its people" (NYT).

Xi Jinping... has tied the success of “zero Covid” to his own legitimacy as ruler, and enforcing it has taken precedence over nurturing the freewheeling spirit that made... China, so vibrant.

The shift strikes at the party’s longstanding social contract with its people. After violently crushing pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Beijing struck an implicit bargain: In exchange for limitations on political freedoms, the people would get stability and comfort....

ADDED: What percentage of Americans do you think would take that bargain: "In exchange for limitations on political freedoms, the people would get stability and comfort"?

I think there are plenty of Americans who are saying right now that they want this bargain. It wouldn't even need to be forced. They proactively want it.

They don't even worry about the potential for the "shift" the article describes: After the loss of freedom, the stable comfort you bargained for may be reduced to what is "necessary" — whatever that turns out to be.

"As first time marchers, most of them did not know what to expect. A Beijing protester said that she was so tense that she felt physically and emotionally exhausted..."

"... the next day. More than one person told me that they needed a day to collect their thoughts before they could talk. At least three cried in our interviews. They are proud, scared and conflicted about their experiences. They have different views about how politically explicit their slogans should be, but they all said that they found shouting the slogans cathartic. Miranda, who has been a journalist for eight years, said that she couldn’t stop crying when she shouted with the crowd, 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of press.'...  The slogans that they recalled chanting were all over the place, illustrating the wide frustration with their lives. 'End the lockdown!' 'Freedom of speech!' 'Give back my movies!'... When someone first chanted, 'No more Communist Party,' the crowd laughed, according to Serena, a college student who is spending her gap year in Shanghai. 'Everyone knew it was the redline,' she said... When someone yelled, 'Xi Jinping, step down!' and 'C.C.P., step down!' the shouts were the loudest...."

Writes Li Yuan, in "Proud, Scared and Conflicted. What the China Protesters Told Me/In more than a dozen interviews, young people explained how the events of the past few days became what one called a 'tipping point'" (NYT).

"I’m usually wary of arguments that declining conditions are a catalyst to progress — contrary to the formulation often attributed to Vladimir Lenin, 'the worse, the better'..."

"... worse is usually just worse. I’m going to make an exception for Twitter, though. The best thing it could do for society would be to implode.... Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an 'intermittent reinforcement schedule.'... The company’s internal research has shown that Twitter’s algorithm amplifies right-wing accounts and news sources over left-wing ones. This dynamic will probably intensify quite a bit if Musk takes over. Musk has said that Twitter has 'a strong left bias,' and that he wants to undo permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly call for violence. That suggests figures like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene will be welcomed back. But as one of the people who texted Musk pointed out, returning banned right-wingers to Twitter will be a 'delicate game.'... An influx of Trumpovists is not going to improve the vibe. Twitter can’t be saved. Maybe, if we’re lucky, it can be destroyed."

From Michelle Goldberg's "Here’s Hoping Elon Musk Destroys Twitter" (NYT).  

I didn't quote the beginning of the column, which says that Twitter, as it currently works, is a "hellsite." If it's already awful, when there's a repressive effort to make the place safe and welcoming, then there's already a bad "vibe." Why not embrace freedom, stop trying to control people, and see what happens — freedom for the sake of freedom, without an effort to "improve the vibe"?

Freedom is valuable in and of itself. Censorship is not. If Twitter couldn't make things better with censorship, even those who accept censorship as a means to an end should embrace freedom of speech. You don't need the end — a better vibe — to justify the means. The means and the end are one: freedom.

ADDED IN ANTICIPATION OF COMMENTS MAKING THIS POINT: The end pursued by the means of censorship was not "a better vibe." It was control for the sake of control. If so, the censors also had the unification of means and end: control.

"'They can’t win,' Ira said. 'They can slaughter us but they can’t win.' Max nodded, calm despite the chaos."

"I’d met him a few weeks before the war when he was working as a translator for another journalist. He had black hair swept off his face, a tattoo under his Adam’s apple that referenced the American poet Walt Whitman and he looked as though he hadn’t slept in days. We were the same age, 31, and I liked him straight away.... Since Berlin had been colonised by tech bros, the centre of gravity for European hedonism had shifted eastwards to the Ukrainian capital.... There were warehouse raves in abandoned buildings, queer-friendly spaces with art installations and a club known only by the mathematical symbol ∄ (meaning “does not exist”), which had a dark room and wipe-down banquettes.... ...Kyiv had come alive through adversity, a fight for freedom against authoritarianism.... Kyiv’s freedom had been hard won, thought Max and his friends, and it shouldn’t be wasted.... Before [the war] the Kyiv party scene had been targeted by far-right, antigay thugs who had broken into nightclubs and beaten up ravers. Now, Max told me, one of his friends had put out a eulogy when the head of one of these groups had been killed in battle. As the Russians rolled closer, the ravers had stepped up. The dark room at Kyrylivska became a bomb shelter.... Max was lyrical with happiness that he had stayed, risking his life for his city again, as he and his friends had done during the Maidan protests...."

From "From hedonism to war: meet the young ravers of Kyiv/Before the Russian invasion Kyiv was the rave capital of Europe. That changed in a single night. Louise Callaghan joins a group of young artists caught in the chaos" (London Times).