A 4000-year-old Minoan structure with labyrinthine walls has been uncovered in Crete. (Could this be the legendary maze of King Minos? (Probably not…wrong location.))
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Entries for July 2024
Wells Fargo analysts ordered 75 identical burrito bowls from 8 different Chipotles and found that portion sizes varied wildly. The biggest bowl was almost 2x heavier than the smallest. Wild that they don’t standardize this from a cost perspective.
“The Last Rave”
I just found out over the weekend about my pal Emily Witt’s new book, Health and Safety, and lo, there’s an excerpt of it in the fiction issue of the New Yorker. I didn’t know what to include here, so I just took the opening paragraphs…the rest of it is pretty intense.
On March 6, 2020, Andrew and I went to a rave. If it weren’t for what happened later, I don’t think it would have stood out in my memory. A couple of days before, I had met a friend at the movie theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, to see “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” It was the first time I saw someone trying to open a door with his elbows. My friend and I ordered separate popcorns as a hygienic precaution. I remember someone behind us coughing, and being aware of it.
On Friday night, before the party, I put a single drop of LSD into a glass of water. I drank half, and Andrew drank the other half. For the next couple of hours, while he made beats in his studio, I lay in bed with my eyes closed, listening to one of the final mixes made by Andrew Weatherall, a British d.j. who had got his start in the nineteen-eighties club scene and had recently died. The tracks had titles like “Jagged Mountain Melts at Dawn” and “The Descending Moonshine Dervishes.”
I sat up in bed, and, as the waves of acid broke over me, I wrote down some thoughts. I was a magazine writer, but I was thinking of going to Brazil to write a book about the Amazon rain forest. The problem with trying to write a book about the Amazon rain forest was that it was a place that was much better left alone, like Everest, or the moon. I looked over at the cat, who was sitting on an ottoman, her eyes two glowing lamps of annoyance. It was time to go out.
I read Witt’s first book, Future Sex, and really enjoyed it, so I’m looking forward to Health and Safety (Bookshop).
Ohhhhh coooool, a grinning foreskin robot. A team recently “unveiled a technique for creating lifelike robotic skin using living human cells”. Don’t watch the video if you ever want to sleep again.
Supreme Court: Zero Days Since Last Incident
Heather Cox Richardson writing last night for her Letters from an American newsletter:
Today the United States Supreme Court overthrew the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law.
It decided that the president of the United States, possibly the most powerful person on earth, has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well, unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.
This is a profound change to our fundamental law — an amendment to the Constitution, as historian David Blight noted. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president has ever asserted that he is above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law.
But this extraordinary power grab does not mean President Joe Biden can do as he wishes. As legal commentator Asha Rangappa pointed out, the court gave itself the power to determine which actions can be prosecuted and which cannot by making itself the final arbiter of what is “official” and what is not. Thus any action a president takes is subject to review by the Supreme Court, and it is reasonable to assume that this particular court would not give a Democrat the same leeway it would give Trump.
There is no historical or legal precedent for this decision.
As I’ve noted before, Richardson’s book Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America is an excellent way to get yourself up to speed on the origins of this decades-long project by the Republicans to subvert American democracy. From a review of the book by Virginia Heffernan:
She has an intriguing origin point for today’s afflictions: the New Deal. The first third of the book, which hurtles toward Donald Trump’s election, is as bingeable as anything on Netflix. “Democracy Awakening” starts in the 1930s, when Americans who’d been wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash were not about to let the rich demolish the economy again. New Deal programs designed to benefit ordinary people and prevent future crises were so popular that by 1960 candidates of both parties were advised to simply “nail together” coalitions and promise them federal funding. From 1946 to 1964, the liberal consensus — with its commitments to equality, the separation of church and state, and the freedoms of speech, press and religion — held sway.
But Republican businessmen, who had caused the crash, despised the consensus. Richardson’s account of how right-wingers appropriated the word “socialism” from the unrelated international movement is astute. When invoked to malign all government investment, “socialism” served to recruit segregationist Democrats, who could be convinced that the word meant Black people would take their money, and Western Democrats, who resented government protections on land and water. This new Republican Party created an ideology that coalesced around White Christianity and free markets.
Supreme Court Rules That Presidents Have Absolute Immunity for “Core Constitutional Powers”
I don’t even know what to say about this. From Justice Sotomayor’s dissent (starting on page 68):
The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.
Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
And her closing:
Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.
With fear for our democracy, I dissent.
Jesus. With fear for our democracy, I dissent. I wish I knew what else to say or think about this, but Jesus.
Tantalizing speculation: the “Untitled WB/Legendary/Denis Villeneuve Event Film in IMAX” now scheduled for release in Dec 2026 is Dune: Part Three.
An Excerpt of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo
For their fiction issue, the New Yorker has an exclusive excerpt from Sally Rooney’s forthcoming book, Intermezzo.
Ivan is standing on his own in the corner while the men from the chess club move the chairs and tables around. The men are saying things to one another like: Back a bit there, Tom. Mind yourself now. Alone, Ivan is standing, wanting to sit down but uncertain which of the chairs need to be rearranged still and which are in their correct places already. This uncertainty arises because the way in which the men are moving the furniture corresponds to no specific method Ivan has been able to discern. A familiar arrangement is slowly beginning to emerge — a central U shape composed of ten tables, with ten chairs along the outer rim of the shape, and a general seating area around the outside — but the process by which the men are reaching this arrangement seems haphazard. Standing on his own in the corner, Ivan thinks with no especially intense focus about the most efficient method of arranging, say, a random distribution of a given number of tables and chairs into the aforementioned shape. It’s something he has thought about before, while standing in other corners, watching other people move similar furniture around similar indoor spaces: the different approaches you could use, if you happened to be writing a computer program to maximize process efficiency. The accuracy of these particular men would be, Ivan thinks, pretty low, like actually very low.
You can also listen to Rooney reading the excerpt. You can preorder Intermezzo at Amazon or Bookshop.
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