Matt's analogy about the a hypothetical random Texas state senate race doesn't really apply for the Platner situation. U.S. Senators serve 6-year terms, not 2-year terms. The U.S. Senate is very divided, leading to a high probability that this race will be the tipping point to decide which party has control over the entire Senate, in at least one of the next three election cycles (2026, 2028, or 2030). And, winning control of the Senate has huge national consequences. Without it, a hypothetical Democratic president elected in 2028 would get no judicial appointments, no laws passed to undo One Big Beautiful Bill, and, in this day and age, would likely not even be allowed to have a cabinet. This is far, far bigger than any personal moral indiscretions of one man.
Good lord we have a couple things in common, MattY. I love “New York” by the Kills. Even tho i was really into Pistons and there was that match up i didn’t hate losing to the Tim Duncan spurs so much because they ruled and i love tim duncan. And i had season tickets to the pistons around that time.
Personally i think the best New York song is “King of New York” by Dan the Automator/Kool Keith (an older tune). However it’s all “underworld” style so maybe not a universal NYC. But it’s awesome-below
I was in the Upper West Side in the 70s but I might have had my first espresso drink from a big brass steaming machine on McDougal. “Espresso drinks?” - probably just caffè and cappuccino.
At the Hungarian Pastry Shop uptown you could buy one espresso and then endlessly refill it with coffee. Somehow there was always a place to sit — we shared tables and I met all sorts of interesting fellow students. Or just did homework…
Speaking of trial abundance: If the federal government had the state capacity our wealth and education would allow, we could collect data on many more trials than just clinical trials and whatever academics manage to register and socialscienceregistry.org (cajoling private sector partners). Especially if Dario Amodei is serious about easing the administrative burden (and the synthesis and metaanalysis, presumably). Too much research is “bad science” without pre-registration but with publication bias, and even the good science in companies and agencies would have positive externalities if shared. (Drug companies would also have incentives to keep some results to themselves, but we let them have patents instead. Not that patents ever stopped a tech company from copying others.)
The questions "should we push Platner to drop out" and "we have to have some Standards on Both Sides" made me think of the "Cobra Kai" TV show, which I just started watching (I'm only partway through the first season, so no spoilers plz).
The show follows Johnny and Daniel thirty years after the events of the original "Karate Kid" movie. Daniel is decent and kind, although his old rivalry with Johnny brings out the angry, petty side of him. Johnny is, to put it bluntly, a douche: he mocks and insults his students; he uses sexist slurs; he keeps getting drunk; he's estranged from his son; he's quick to anger.
The plot takes off when Johnny rescues a local teenager, Miguel, from some bullies, and then reopens the Cobra Kai dojo and takes on Miguel as his first student.
Where am I going with this? Yes, Johnny is a douche. But there is also a good side to him, and over the first few episodes we see him come to genuinely care about Miguel. More to the point, suppose you're Miguel. Your only choices are "learn karate from this asshole who will call me Princess and grab my inhaler from my hand because he thinks inhalers are for pussies, but who also knows his stuff and will teach me useful self-defense skills" or "be all high-minded about it, refuse to learn from the asshole, and keep getting the shit kicked out of me on the regular, while also being helpless to protect my friends from bullies."
Unless you're an aspiring martyr, unilateral disarmament is not a good idea. If the bullies get to jump you in a parking lot when they outnumber you five-to-one, then they don't get to be all "oh noes, our victim's sensei is a sexist asshole! How horrible, I thought the other side had Standards!"
So, yeah. By uncritically supporting Trump in everything he's done, including trying to overturn a legitimate election, the MAGA GOP have incinerated any right they have to call out the other side. They'll still call out the other side, but we (and that includes self-proclaimed neutral observers like Nate Silver) do not have to buy into their framing and make their jobs easier for them!
To sum up, my response to "oh no, Platner is BAD and he's BESMIRCHING the Democratic brand, where are my smelling salts" is Nope and Screw That and also I'm heading over to Johnny's dojo, where he'll call me fat and tell me women suck at fighting, but he'll also teach me to defend myself against the bullies. "Cobra Kai never die!"
The problem with so much of this discourse is that we see morality as only private actions on individual level. What I mean to say, is something like this, George W. Bush for all intents and purposes was a decent man in his private life but he took us to war under false pretenses. There are many cases of decent people taking actions that are extremely destructive but we do not see them as moral issues when they really are. We shouldn't make politics a morality play but how a person votes is actual more morally consequential than what they do in their private lives. There is a difference between public and private morality. Public morality really means taking actions that lead to the betterment of the many regardless of the intention. Private morality is easier to define but matters a whole lot less to me for Public Office. Bill Clinton was not privately the most moral person but his actions in his public office were moral in terms of leading to better consequences than GWB who costs thousands of lives. Certain things matter more and policy positions are actually more of moral consequences than personal conduct.
MAGA people used the same thought process when they supported Trump. I have a lot of respect for the Dispatch and the Bulwark people who chose a different path. I wish more Republicans would have done so.
They may have used the same thought process, but they were ignoring objective reality. There was no evidence that Hilary Clinton was anything near as disreputable and immoral as Trump had then already demonstrated himself to be. At best they were choosing immorality over what they saw as bad policy.
The choice in Maine today is between someone of questionable character and someone who has and will support a proven poor character President who has already attacked the foundations of our democracy and promises to do so again.
These choices are objectively not the same.
Edit to add: so few of them have changed their minds in the face of Trump’s behavior that I’m skeptical they ever did, ever have, or ever will actually acknowledge just how poor his character is.
The reality is that nominating dirtbags costs votes. You can rationalize Fetterman's or Platner's behavior as a big nothing, but a non-trivial number of voters do care about that stuff enough to affect the outcome. It's just kind of dumb to nominate someone with a lot of skeletons in the closet and negative attributes that cost them votes. Platner managed to keep most of his hidden until he was the only alternative. If his problems and lies end up costing the Senate, there ought to be hell to pay.
Trump endorsements are a case-in-point. Thankfully for us, Trump has screwed the GoP in several cases by endorsing terrible, unpopular candidates. Paxton will probably still win, but he's by far the weaker candidate than Cornyn. This is not an example Democrats should emulate.
You mention Fetterman - he won his election, but it wasn't because he was a strong candidate, it was because his opponent was so weak. Oz had over 50% unfavorable numbers and was underwater even among Republicans. PA was about an R+1 state at that time, which suggests that a stronger GoP candidate could have beaten Fetterman, perhaps easily. Oz was one of the worst WAR candidates of all time for an open seat. That was great for us, whatever one thinks of Fetterman, but the lesson here is that candidate quality matters in election outcomes.
If Platner were running against Trump, I would wholeheartedly recommend Maine voters choose Platner. Same as if he were running against Paxton. Instead, he is running against Collins.
Good Ottoman answer, I'd also point out that the empire was losing a bunch of wars in Europe before WW1 as well, they didn't call it "The Sick Man of Europe" for nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Balkan_War (likewise without British and French help the Ottoman would have probably gotten creamed in the Crimean War etc)
There's a great novel about the fall of the Ottoman Empire called The Bridge on the Drina written by Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić while he was stuck in an apartment during the dark days of WW2. It tells the story the "gradually and then suddenly" end of the Ottoman Empire through the 300 year story of a stone bridge in Bosnia and all the people connected to it from all sorts of different backgrounds over the generations.
Just realized that high end math journals must be sitting on a treasure trove of useful data in the form of referee reports collected over the years, but as soon as one of the decides to monetize it, nobody will ever referew a paper for free again.
Regarding "loneliness epidemic" discourse, I think some of this also comes down to costs.
Of my cohort, some of my friends have access to hosting spaces, but lots don't. I've hosted things (birthday parties, etc) at my place for friends because they live in a studio apartment, don't have enough money to rent a venue, and were worried about weather.
And those kinds of gatherings are a big part of how you transition people from "acquaintances" to "friends" if you don't have other third spaces. It's lower social stakes to invite someone to a gathering that was already happening rather than to take the perceived-to-be-vulnerable step of inviting someone to hang out one-on-on (or two-on-two in the case of "couple friends").
Lots of adults these days never figured out how to expand their social circles intentionally, which is a skill that takes actual effort to cultivate.
This always feels like an excuse to me. My wife and I hosted Thanksgiving for 12+ in our 1-bedroom NYC apartment, you don’t need a huge amount of space. Maybe people are legitimately embarrassed to do that or something, but that seems like the problem rather than the access to space.
In re hosting spaces, I think there's been a dramatic change in expectations about what is an acceptable "hosting space" over the past 40 years. (Picture photos of middle-class household parties in the mid-1980s or earlier and how claustrophobic they look compared to what virtually anyone would be willing to tolerate for a party today.) Whether that is upstream or downstream of lack of socializing, I don't know.
I wish the US had the ecosystem of bars/restaurants with all you can eat private rooms for 2-3 hours at a fixed price per head that makes it easy for people in Japan to host impromptu social gatherings without worrying about how big their house is, or what state of readiness it's in. I'm not saying it would solve the loneliness/lack of socialization problem, but it would be nice.
Modern apartment floor plans are a related issue that I've personally struggled with. I live in a unit in a newer building that has no dining room, just a two-seat breakfast bar between the living room and the kitchen, even though I consider it a fairly large place at around 1000 square feet. I would have rather had something different, but I made a cost/benefit decision based on what else was available in the area. I've had four people or so over for dinner, awkwardly standing over that stupid breakfast bar, so where there's a will, there's a way, but it's not great.
Sometimes I look at listings for older housing, like two-flat units in Chicago, and see them gracefully fitting two or three bedrooms plus a dining room and a foyer into a space smaller than my house. Open concept is poison.
So, buffet style service, eating with a plate balanced on your lap while sitting on the couch.
Alternatively, a fold up table, dressed up with a fine linen table cloth set up in the middle of the living room. A really high quality table cloth and napkin set up will disguise a lot.
It's gradually dawned on me that "eat over your lap on the couch" is the modern American norm, but not in my house. I was raised to eat at a table and I won't have it any other way, if for no other reason than that I don't want to clean up after people eating over upholstery.
I do have folding tables and tablecloths, and I have employed that trick before, but my current place isn't really amenable to that without removing or awkwardly shoving living room furniture out of the way. I'm tempted to just skip the whole living room thing if I move again, depending on the floor plan.
That's definitely accurate. I also suspect that a lot of people bought a bunch of stuff during covid that they didn't really have a place for, but haven't updated their mental model of what "clean enough for others to see" looks like to account for things like a treadmill in the living room.
I think it's also easier to host if you're already used to doing so. Some of that's because you're more likely to have cleaned (to whatever standards you feel you need to in order to host) recently. But it's also just the case that things are easier when you practice them.
I've talked to a lot of people who express that they wish they were the sort of person who hosted dinner parties, but they "just aren't". They tried once, and it was a huge hassle, and how does anyone ever manage?
And the first time I threw a dinner party, it was a huge hassle! But I pushed through it and did it again, and that was a bit easier.
I agree absolutely with the substance of the answer about whether Bernie Sanders and the left-wing are in better shape now than in 2016, but one phrase sticks in my craw: "better-educated." In fact, in this day and age, ANY use of it sticks in my craw. Matt himself contradicts his use of it when he tells us, in reference to these "better-educated" folks, that "Most of their ideas are bad."
We need a better term than "better-educated" to describe folks who have spent much more time being indoctrinated in critical theory and the like than the bulk of the electorate. "Educated" we still think of as a good thing, so the implication of "better-educated" is "folks smarter than the rest of us."
"Longer-educated"? "More-indoctrinated"? Neither is very catchy, but "better-educated" lets folks who have spent a lot of time learning stupid things think of themselves as smarter! Look no further than the widespread and poisonous contempt that some of the "better-educated" have for the "less-educated" to see the negative effect of such framing.
I don't have much value-add on a lot of these topics (just wait till next week when we have a succession of horrific SCOTUS decisions to complain about...), but I do have value-add as a near-obsessive Billy Joel fan who has listened to almost every one of his published songs probably at least 50 times (and all his mainline album songs many times that number), been to or seen dozens of concerts, etc.
As such, it's a bit dispiriting that everyone just goes reflexively to "New York State of Mind" on the hypertechnical grounds that it has the words "New York" in its title. A huge proportion of his songs are explicitly or implicitly about New York to some degree (and that percentage gets even larger if you include songs referencing the suburbs like "Captain Jack" and "The Ballad of Billy the Kid").
I think the song that best captures the vibe of modern, financialized New York is actually the virtually unknown "Running on Ice":
I'm a cosmopolitan sophisticate of culture and intelligence
The culmination of technology and civilized experience
But I'm carrying the weight of all the useless junk a modern man accumulates
I'm a statistic in a system that a civil servant dominates
(Incidentally, getting all those 75-cent words to line up in a way that actually fits a kind of meter-- even a very adventurous one-- is an excellent example of how Joel is the best lyricist in mainstream songwriting. He's perfectly capable of being pithy when he wants to [e.g. "Vienna"] but you can't write THIS song without the egghead vocabulary and most songwriters are simply incapable of doing it.)
As a former Greenwich Village resident, I think a substantial driver of the genericization of the whole area has to do with the extent to which increasingly wealthy NYU parents basically subsidized (via paying for apartments for their kids) a whole sort of takeover of the region by student transients.
When I visited Turkey a few years ago, I was not only surprised that nearly every person I encountered was fluent in English, but all of their road and business signs were in Turkish with English right below.
RE: spurs future, you’ve got to look at salary structure too. They can afford everyone next year but it gets tough after that, so they may have to preemptively move Johnson (his stock is probably at a high post-6th man of the year plus a solid enough playoffs) or even Fox (especially if they can turn him into two contributors while unblocking Harper).
It’s possible they just kick the can as they’re title worthy right now. They may even double down - see the talk about potentially being the third team in a Brown-Giannis trade, which would require Fox to be the outgoing salary (though this trade likely includes at least Bryant, and probably Castle to get the Bucks to play ball). But just looking at today’s roster and assuming the young guys will be there next year isn’t the full picture in the second apron era.
They really need to move Fox. His salary in the coming years is in the stratosphere and his playoff performance was atrocious, plus he's stealing minutes from younger players. Trading Fox and some picks and getting some inside muscle (maybe a Kornet upgrade) would do wonders for the team.
Yea they need to, but they can't just dump him as he plays an important role - optimally they'd move him for a backup PG/combo guard but he has to be able to shoot since he has to be able to play with Castle or Harper, could probably tolerate slightly below average defense (Fox-level I guess) AND a real 4 with some size to play next to Wemby/play some small ball 5 when Wemby rests and the opponent can scheme Kornet out.
I think Kornet is actually great for the price/role he _should_ be playing on the Spurs (pure backup 5), but their lack of a true 4 that can play small ball 5 while also playing next to Wemby stretches him beyond his skillset.
I'm in the midst of the Dunc'd On Mock Offseason and they've got them signing John Collins into their full mid-level exception (which is crazy IMO, they'd maybe do that on a 2-year deal but no way they tie their finances up like that into Harper/Castle/Wemby extension era), and they're going to have to bump Champagnie up this year (Hollinger projects $25M starting salary, which I think they can probably drive down closer to $20M if they had to, but the $25M version descends, which might be more valuable). They'd have enough to fill out their roster under the aprons this year, and if they could move Johnson for not much they could even stay under the tax, though given how close they are to a title optimizing for a potential repeater tax later doesn't make sense.
Their problem is that Fox has negative trade value on his contract - their best hope is to find a team desperate for a PG that has multiple smaller bad contracts and attach a pick. Would the Bulls do it for Patrick Williams and Josh Giddey? I probably pass if I'm the Spurs. Raptors for Quickley? Seems unlikely. Maybe if the Nets completely strike out they'd take him plus a bunch of picks for Porter? He's just hard to trade. They might ultimately just have to move Vassell or Champagnie in the future and hope Castle/Harper improve their shooting and that Carter Bryant can play the 4/small ball 5 role.
You are so inside the beltway that you believe all the narratives propagated by the ruling class media. As someone who worked very hard for Bernie Sanders in 2016, I can tell you that nobody I knew in the campaign wanted Trump to win, but we were equally horrified when Bernie went around the country insisting his supporters vote for Hillary Clinton after she and the DNC conspired against him. As a Sanders supporter I would never in a million years vote for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Trump. And your assertion that "the left" has bad ideas is as grotesque as your piece in the New York Times suggesting that liberals should embrace fossil fuels. As a representative of the ruling class, of course you would not want a single payer health care program, massive cuts to the military or a defunding of police and ICE/CBP. Because you are on the side of state violence and the perpetual "growth" that only perpetual war can bring in a cancer capitalist system like ours. And before you balk at that notion, please consider that this country was founded upon the bold principle of building and maintaining wealth on the backs of those you would rape and torture in order to extract free labor. That system persists today, and you are one of the major mouthpieces for its continuation. If we do not make a major systemic change in our political system, all of our institutions from education to health care will continue to collapse. And then you and your Wall Street Journal minions can smoke your pipes, open up your New York Times and pat each other on the back. https://barryjkaufmando.substack.com/p/democrats-your-kings-are-no-better
Matt's analogy about the a hypothetical random Texas state senate race doesn't really apply for the Platner situation. U.S. Senators serve 6-year terms, not 2-year terms. The U.S. Senate is very divided, leading to a high probability that this race will be the tipping point to decide which party has control over the entire Senate, in at least one of the next three election cycles (2026, 2028, or 2030). And, winning control of the Senate has huge national consequences. Without it, a hypothetical Democratic president elected in 2028 would get no judicial appointments, no laws passed to undo One Big Beautiful Bill, and, in this day and age, would likely not even be allowed to have a cabinet. This is far, far bigger than any personal moral indiscretions of one man.
Good lord we have a couple things in common, MattY. I love “New York” by the Kills. Even tho i was really into Pistons and there was that match up i didn’t hate losing to the Tim Duncan spurs so much because they ruled and i love tim duncan. And i had season tickets to the pistons around that time.
Personally i think the best New York song is “King of New York” by Dan the Automator/Kool Keith (an older tune). However it’s all “underworld” style so maybe not a universal NYC. But it’s awesome-below
https://youtu.be/5lVU-ftkPR8?is=hLmNSTHxmRutDAGP
People aren’t lonely because they scroll, they scroll because they are lonely….
I was in the Upper West Side in the 70s but I might have had my first espresso drink from a big brass steaming machine on McDougal. “Espresso drinks?” - probably just caffè and cappuccino.
At the Hungarian Pastry Shop uptown you could buy one espresso and then endlessly refill it with coffee. Somehow there was always a place to sit — we shared tables and I met all sorts of interesting fellow students. Or just did homework…
Speaking of trial abundance: If the federal government had the state capacity our wealth and education would allow, we could collect data on many more trials than just clinical trials and whatever academics manage to register and socialscienceregistry.org (cajoling private sector partners). Especially if Dario Amodei is serious about easing the administrative burden (and the synthesis and metaanalysis, presumably). Too much research is “bad science” without pre-registration but with publication bias, and even the good science in companies and agencies would have positive externalities if shared. (Drug companies would also have incentives to keep some results to themselves, but we let them have patents instead. Not that patents ever stopped a tech company from copying others.)
The questions "should we push Platner to drop out" and "we have to have some Standards on Both Sides" made me think of the "Cobra Kai" TV show, which I just started watching (I'm only partway through the first season, so no spoilers plz).
The show follows Johnny and Daniel thirty years after the events of the original "Karate Kid" movie. Daniel is decent and kind, although his old rivalry with Johnny brings out the angry, petty side of him. Johnny is, to put it bluntly, a douche: he mocks and insults his students; he uses sexist slurs; he keeps getting drunk; he's estranged from his son; he's quick to anger.
The plot takes off when Johnny rescues a local teenager, Miguel, from some bullies, and then reopens the Cobra Kai dojo and takes on Miguel as his first student.
Where am I going with this? Yes, Johnny is a douche. But there is also a good side to him, and over the first few episodes we see him come to genuinely care about Miguel. More to the point, suppose you're Miguel. Your only choices are "learn karate from this asshole who will call me Princess and grab my inhaler from my hand because he thinks inhalers are for pussies, but who also knows his stuff and will teach me useful self-defense skills" or "be all high-minded about it, refuse to learn from the asshole, and keep getting the shit kicked out of me on the regular, while also being helpless to protect my friends from bullies."
Unless you're an aspiring martyr, unilateral disarmament is not a good idea. If the bullies get to jump you in a parking lot when they outnumber you five-to-one, then they don't get to be all "oh noes, our victim's sensei is a sexist asshole! How horrible, I thought the other side had Standards!"
So, yeah. By uncritically supporting Trump in everything he's done, including trying to overturn a legitimate election, the MAGA GOP have incinerated any right they have to call out the other side. They'll still call out the other side, but we (and that includes self-proclaimed neutral observers like Nate Silver) do not have to buy into their framing and make their jobs easier for them!
To sum up, my response to "oh no, Platner is BAD and he's BESMIRCHING the Democratic brand, where are my smelling salts" is Nope and Screw That and also I'm heading over to Johnny's dojo, where he'll call me fat and tell me women suck at fighting, but he'll also teach me to defend myself against the bullies. "Cobra Kai never die!"
The problem with so much of this discourse is that we see morality as only private actions on individual level. What I mean to say, is something like this, George W. Bush for all intents and purposes was a decent man in his private life but he took us to war under false pretenses. There are many cases of decent people taking actions that are extremely destructive but we do not see them as moral issues when they really are. We shouldn't make politics a morality play but how a person votes is actual more morally consequential than what they do in their private lives. There is a difference between public and private morality. Public morality really means taking actions that lead to the betterment of the many regardless of the intention. Private morality is easier to define but matters a whole lot less to me for Public Office. Bill Clinton was not privately the most moral person but his actions in his public office were moral in terms of leading to better consequences than GWB who costs thousands of lives. Certain things matter more and policy positions are actually more of moral consequences than personal conduct.
MAGA people used the same thought process when they supported Trump. I have a lot of respect for the Dispatch and the Bulwark people who chose a different path. I wish more Republicans would have done so.
They may have used the same thought process, but they were ignoring objective reality. There was no evidence that Hilary Clinton was anything near as disreputable and immoral as Trump had then already demonstrated himself to be. At best they were choosing immorality over what they saw as bad policy.
The choice in Maine today is between someone of questionable character and someone who has and will support a proven poor character President who has already attacked the foundations of our democracy and promises to do so again.
These choices are objectively not the same.
Edit to add: so few of them have changed their minds in the face of Trump’s behavior that I’m skeptical they ever did, ever have, or ever will actually acknowledge just how poor his character is.
"Donald Trump has learned his lesson," I seriously want to scream at her until my throat and her ears bleed.
The reality is that nominating dirtbags costs votes. You can rationalize Fetterman's or Platner's behavior as a big nothing, but a non-trivial number of voters do care about that stuff enough to affect the outcome. It's just kind of dumb to nominate someone with a lot of skeletons in the closet and negative attributes that cost them votes. Platner managed to keep most of his hidden until he was the only alternative. If his problems and lies end up costing the Senate, there ought to be hell to pay.
Trump endorsements are a case-in-point. Thankfully for us, Trump has screwed the GoP in several cases by endorsing terrible, unpopular candidates. Paxton will probably still win, but he's by far the weaker candidate than Cornyn. This is not an example Democrats should emulate.
You mention Fetterman - he won his election, but it wasn't because he was a strong candidate, it was because his opponent was so weak. Oz had over 50% unfavorable numbers and was underwater even among Republicans. PA was about an R+1 state at that time, which suggests that a stronger GoP candidate could have beaten Fetterman, perhaps easily. Oz was one of the worst WAR candidates of all time for an open seat. That was great for us, whatever one thinks of Fetterman, but the lesson here is that candidate quality matters in election outcomes.
If Platner were running against Trump, I would wholeheartedly recommend Maine voters choose Platner. Same as if he were running against Paxton. Instead, he is running against Collins.
Good Ottoman answer, I'd also point out that the empire was losing a bunch of wars in Europe before WW1 as well, they didn't call it "The Sick Man of Europe" for nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Balkan_War (likewise without British and French help the Ottoman would have probably gotten creamed in the Crimean War etc)
There's a great novel about the fall of the Ottoman Empire called The Bridge on the Drina written by Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić while he was stuck in an apartment during the dark days of WW2. It tells the story the "gradually and then suddenly" end of the Ottoman Empire through the 300 year story of a stone bridge in Bosnia and all the people connected to it from all sorts of different backgrounds over the generations.
Just realized that high end math journals must be sitting on a treasure trove of useful data in the form of referee reports collected over the years, but as soon as one of the decides to monetize it, nobody will ever referew a paper for free again.
Did I miss something? The mailbag on a Thursday?
I’m on vacation and didn’t notice this was not Friday until just now. I guess it’s been a pretty good vacation.
Juneteenth being tomorrow is my presumption why.
Ah, of course! Unfortunately, tomorrow is a normal workday for me.
Regarding "loneliness epidemic" discourse, I think some of this also comes down to costs.
Of my cohort, some of my friends have access to hosting spaces, but lots don't. I've hosted things (birthday parties, etc) at my place for friends because they live in a studio apartment, don't have enough money to rent a venue, and were worried about weather.
And those kinds of gatherings are a big part of how you transition people from "acquaintances" to "friends" if you don't have other third spaces. It's lower social stakes to invite someone to a gathering that was already happening rather than to take the perceived-to-be-vulnerable step of inviting someone to hang out one-on-on (or two-on-two in the case of "couple friends").
Lots of adults these days never figured out how to expand their social circles intentionally, which is a skill that takes actual effort to cultivate.
This always feels like an excuse to me. My wife and I hosted Thanksgiving for 12+ in our 1-bedroom NYC apartment, you don’t need a huge amount of space. Maybe people are legitimately embarrassed to do that or something, but that seems like the problem rather than the access to space.
I think most people have more square foot per person in their homes than people in previous generation. But standards have risen even faster.
In re hosting spaces, I think there's been a dramatic change in expectations about what is an acceptable "hosting space" over the past 40 years. (Picture photos of middle-class household parties in the mid-1980s or earlier and how claustrophobic they look compared to what virtually anyone would be willing to tolerate for a party today.) Whether that is upstream or downstream of lack of socializing, I don't know.
I wish the US had the ecosystem of bars/restaurants with all you can eat private rooms for 2-3 hours at a fixed price per head that makes it easy for people in Japan to host impromptu social gatherings without worrying about how big their house is, or what state of readiness it's in. I'm not saying it would solve the loneliness/lack of socialization problem, but it would be nice.
People hosted parties in 1100 square foot Levittown houses that had six people living in them.
Modern apartment floor plans are a related issue that I've personally struggled with. I live in a unit in a newer building that has no dining room, just a two-seat breakfast bar between the living room and the kitchen, even though I consider it a fairly large place at around 1000 square feet. I would have rather had something different, but I made a cost/benefit decision based on what else was available in the area. I've had four people or so over for dinner, awkwardly standing over that stupid breakfast bar, so where there's a will, there's a way, but it's not great.
Sometimes I look at listings for older housing, like two-flat units in Chicago, and see them gracefully fitting two or three bedrooms plus a dining room and a foyer into a space smaller than my house. Open concept is poison.
So, buffet style service, eating with a plate balanced on your lap while sitting on the couch.
Alternatively, a fold up table, dressed up with a fine linen table cloth set up in the middle of the living room. A really high quality table cloth and napkin set up will disguise a lot.
It's gradually dawned on me that "eat over your lap on the couch" is the modern American norm, but not in my house. I was raised to eat at a table and I won't have it any other way, if for no other reason than that I don't want to clean up after people eating over upholstery.
I do have folding tables and tablecloths, and I have employed that trick before, but my current place isn't really amenable to that without removing or awkwardly shoving living room furniture out of the way. I'm tempted to just skip the whole living room thing if I move again, depending on the floor plan.
That's definitely accurate. I also suspect that a lot of people bought a bunch of stuff during covid that they didn't really have a place for, but haven't updated their mental model of what "clean enough for others to see" looks like to account for things like a treadmill in the living room.
I think it's also easier to host if you're already used to doing so. Some of that's because you're more likely to have cleaned (to whatever standards you feel you need to in order to host) recently. But it's also just the case that things are easier when you practice them.
I've talked to a lot of people who express that they wish they were the sort of person who hosted dinner parties, but they "just aren't". They tried once, and it was a huge hassle, and how does anyone ever manage?
And the first time I threw a dinner party, it was a huge hassle! But I pushed through it and did it again, and that was a bit easier.
I agree absolutely with the substance of the answer about whether Bernie Sanders and the left-wing are in better shape now than in 2016, but one phrase sticks in my craw: "better-educated." In fact, in this day and age, ANY use of it sticks in my craw. Matt himself contradicts his use of it when he tells us, in reference to these "better-educated" folks, that "Most of their ideas are bad."
We need a better term than "better-educated" to describe folks who have spent much more time being indoctrinated in critical theory and the like than the bulk of the electorate. "Educated" we still think of as a good thing, so the implication of "better-educated" is "folks smarter than the rest of us."
"Longer-educated"? "More-indoctrinated"? Neither is very catchy, but "better-educated" lets folks who have spent a lot of time learning stupid things think of themselves as smarter! Look no further than the widespread and poisonous contempt that some of the "better-educated" have for the "less-educated" to see the negative effect of such framing.
This. A thousand times this.
“More” and “less” both seem pretty value-neutral to me. Formally v. informally educated is also a construction I’ve seen
I don't have much value-add on a lot of these topics (just wait till next week when we have a succession of horrific SCOTUS decisions to complain about...), but I do have value-add as a near-obsessive Billy Joel fan who has listened to almost every one of his published songs probably at least 50 times (and all his mainline album songs many times that number), been to or seen dozens of concerts, etc.
As such, it's a bit dispiriting that everyone just goes reflexively to "New York State of Mind" on the hypertechnical grounds that it has the words "New York" in its title. A huge proportion of his songs are explicitly or implicitly about New York to some degree (and that percentage gets even larger if you include songs referencing the suburbs like "Captain Jack" and "The Ballad of Billy the Kid").
I think the song that best captures the vibe of modern, financialized New York is actually the virtually unknown "Running on Ice":
I'm a cosmopolitan sophisticate of culture and intelligence
The culmination of technology and civilized experience
But I'm carrying the weight of all the useless junk a modern man accumulates
I'm a statistic in a system that a civil servant dominates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wk0r8CeiKc&list=RD1wk0r8CeiKc
(Incidentally, getting all those 75-cent words to line up in a way that actually fits a kind of meter-- even a very adventurous one-- is an excellent example of how Joel is the best lyricist in mainstream songwriting. He's perfectly capable of being pithy when he wants to [e.g. "Vienna"] but you can't write THIS song without the egghead vocabulary and most songwriters are simply incapable of doing it.)
It's kind of criminal that Billy Joel was left off this NYT list:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/magazine/greatest-american-songwriters-alive.html
As a former Greenwich Village resident, I think a substantial driver of the genericization of the whole area has to do with the extent to which increasingly wealthy NYU parents basically subsidized (via paying for apartments for their kids) a whole sort of takeover of the region by student transients.
When I visited Turkey a few years ago, I was not only surprised that nearly every person I encountered was fluent in English, but all of their road and business signs were in Turkish with English right below.
Lingua franca indeed!
When I studied abroad in Istanbul people would look at me like I was crazy when I told them I was there to study Turkish.
Lingua anglica, surely.
RE: spurs future, you’ve got to look at salary structure too. They can afford everyone next year but it gets tough after that, so they may have to preemptively move Johnson (his stock is probably at a high post-6th man of the year plus a solid enough playoffs) or even Fox (especially if they can turn him into two contributors while unblocking Harper).
It’s possible they just kick the can as they’re title worthy right now. They may even double down - see the talk about potentially being the third team in a Brown-Giannis trade, which would require Fox to be the outgoing salary (though this trade likely includes at least Bryant, and probably Castle to get the Bucks to play ball). But just looking at today’s roster and assuming the young guys will be there next year isn’t the full picture in the second apron era.
They really need to move Fox. His salary in the coming years is in the stratosphere and his playoff performance was atrocious, plus he's stealing minutes from younger players. Trading Fox and some picks and getting some inside muscle (maybe a Kornet upgrade) would do wonders for the team.
Yea they need to, but they can't just dump him as he plays an important role - optimally they'd move him for a backup PG/combo guard but he has to be able to shoot since he has to be able to play with Castle or Harper, could probably tolerate slightly below average defense (Fox-level I guess) AND a real 4 with some size to play next to Wemby/play some small ball 5 when Wemby rests and the opponent can scheme Kornet out.
I think Kornet is actually great for the price/role he _should_ be playing on the Spurs (pure backup 5), but their lack of a true 4 that can play small ball 5 while also playing next to Wemby stretches him beyond his skillset.
I'm in the midst of the Dunc'd On Mock Offseason and they've got them signing John Collins into their full mid-level exception (which is crazy IMO, they'd maybe do that on a 2-year deal but no way they tie their finances up like that into Harper/Castle/Wemby extension era), and they're going to have to bump Champagnie up this year (Hollinger projects $25M starting salary, which I think they can probably drive down closer to $20M if they had to, but the $25M version descends, which might be more valuable). They'd have enough to fill out their roster under the aprons this year, and if they could move Johnson for not much they could even stay under the tax, though given how close they are to a title optimizing for a potential repeater tax later doesn't make sense.
Their problem is that Fox has negative trade value on his contract - their best hope is to find a team desperate for a PG that has multiple smaller bad contracts and attach a pick. Would the Bulls do it for Patrick Williams and Josh Giddey? I probably pass if I'm the Spurs. Raptors for Quickley? Seems unlikely. Maybe if the Nets completely strike out they'd take him plus a bunch of picks for Porter? He's just hard to trade. They might ultimately just have to move Vassell or Champagnie in the future and hope Castle/Harper improve their shooting and that Carter Bryant can play the 4/small ball 5 role.
You are so inside the beltway that you believe all the narratives propagated by the ruling class media. As someone who worked very hard for Bernie Sanders in 2016, I can tell you that nobody I knew in the campaign wanted Trump to win, but we were equally horrified when Bernie went around the country insisting his supporters vote for Hillary Clinton after she and the DNC conspired against him. As a Sanders supporter I would never in a million years vote for Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Trump. And your assertion that "the left" has bad ideas is as grotesque as your piece in the New York Times suggesting that liberals should embrace fossil fuels. As a representative of the ruling class, of course you would not want a single payer health care program, massive cuts to the military or a defunding of police and ICE/CBP. Because you are on the side of state violence and the perpetual "growth" that only perpetual war can bring in a cancer capitalist system like ours. And before you balk at that notion, please consider that this country was founded upon the bold principle of building and maintaining wealth on the backs of those you would rape and torture in order to extract free labor. That system persists today, and you are one of the major mouthpieces for its continuation. If we do not make a major systemic change in our political system, all of our institutions from education to health care will continue to collapse. And then you and your Wall Street Journal minions can smoke your pipes, open up your New York Times and pat each other on the back. https://barryjkaufmando.substack.com/p/democrats-your-kings-are-no-better
You state that the idea the left has bad ideas is grotesque, and then restate those bad ideas thus proving his point. well done.