NY Times Notes and Highlights

Counting interim leaders, there have been seven communications chiefs; four heads each of the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services; four national security advisers; three secretaries of defense; and three press secretaries.

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The Brookings Institution puts the turnover in Mr. Trump’s “A Team” — defined as top decision makers within the executive office of the president (which does not include cabinet secretaries) — at 74 percent as of Monday. No other modern administration came even close to that.

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Trump seems to understand, at least on a limbic level, that the effect of this cavalcade of scandal isn’t cumulative. Instead, each one eclipses the last, creating a sense of weary cynicism that makes shock impossible to sustain.

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The unemployment rate was only 3.7 percent in June, near its lowest level since 1969, as tens of thousands of people gave up actively looking for another job. But in doing so, the dropouts meant the labor force participation rate was stuck at 62.9 percent, near its lowest level since 1977.

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Online dating has numerous benefits, but it also leads to option paralysis, decreased fluency in social cues and the tendency to consider people avatars instead of human beings.

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Today that Grand Old Party has devolved into a personality cult surrounding a racist demagogue who incites a mob to chant about a Somali-American member of Congress: “Send her back!”

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Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency.

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The gravest thing Trump has done is to empty this idea of meaning. His has been an assault on honesty, decency, dignity, tolerance and civility. On this president’s wish list, every right is alienable. He leads a movement more than he does a nation, and so depends on fear to mobilize people.

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He reflects many of the values that America once proudly stood for: toughness without belligerence, charm without smarminess, loyalty without question.

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He is a faux tough guy who lets other people do the fighting for him, a needy brat who never accepts responsibility for his actions, an oaf with no trace of courage, class or chivalry.

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The United States is the only advanced industrial nation that doesn’t have national laws guaranteeing paid maternity leave. It is also the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee workers any vacation, paid or unpaid, and the only highly developed country (other than South Korea) that doesn’t guarantee paid sick days. In contrast, the European Union’s 28 nations guarantee workers at least four weeks’ paid vacation.

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“A politician has no actual principles. He is in favor of whatever seems to him to be popular at the moment.”

Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States,” but here the critic is silenced. “The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.”

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United States: Essays 1952-1992 (Vidal, Gore)

- Your Highlight on page 794 | Location 14575-14577 | Added on Friday, August 23, 2019 11:58:55 PM

This dazzling inequity is reflected in our tax system where the man on salary pays more tax than the man who lives on dividends, who in turn pays more tax than the wheeler-dealer who makes a capital-gains deal.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7272-7273 | Added on Sunday, August 25, 2019 8:27:02 AM

In the four decades between 1969 and 2008, economists played a leading role in slashing taxation of the wealthy and in curbing public investment.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7277-7278 | Added on Sunday, August 25, 2019 8:27:34 AM

Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies is that the average American’s life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 8134-8137 | Added on Sunday, August 25, 2019 2:11:28 PM

Let’s say I want to read about the Iran nuclear deal, but I prefer coverage from The New York Times. Instead of just Googling US iran deal for the latest news, I can search site:nytimes.com iran deal to see coverage only from The Times. This also allows me to see everything The Times has done on the topic going back weeks or months, rather than my results getting cluttered with versions of today’s news from other publications.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 8156-8157 | Added on Sunday, August 25, 2019 2:12:57 PM

Drag an image into Image Search and Google will find other versions of that photo for you.

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The 2,548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said (Byrne, Robert)

- Your Highlight on Location 307-309 | Added on Friday, September 20, 2019 8:30:55 PM

As I grow older and older and totter toward the tomb I find that I care less and less who goes to bed with whom. —Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957)

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 2262-2264 | Added on Sunday, September 22, 2019 8:29:07 AM

When we’re young, we want to stand out, to leave our mark on the world, to be exceptional. As the seasons pass, we come to find that it’s everything that’s not extraordinary in us — our ability to tend to a family, to keep ill health at bay, to hit a Ping-Pong ball — and even in the world around us, that may be most memorable.

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The president has previously handed over highly classified intelligence to Russia; sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin against U.S. intelligence; devised 

military strategy in public at Mar-a-Lago; insulted leaders of Britain, Germany and France; shoved the prime minister of Montenegro; fallen "in love" with North Korea's dictator; invited the Taliban to Camp David; asked if he could nuke hurricanes; taken children from their parents and put them in warehouses; altered a weather forecast with a Sharpie; said windmills cause cancer; and hired Rudy Giuliani.

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Perhaps for the first time since the United States was established, a majority of young adults here do not identify as Christian.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7894-7896 | Added on Sunday, October 27, 2019 5:06:56 PM

Only 49 percent of millennials consider themselves Christian, compared with 84 percent of Americans in their mid-70s or older, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7910-7912 | Added on Sunday, October 27, 2019 5:08:02 PM

It would be difficult to imagine a president more at odds with Jesus’ message than Trump, a serial philanderer and liar who has persecuted refugees, divided families, exploited the poor and allegedly committed sexual assaults.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7564-7565 | Added on Sunday, October 27, 2019 5:12:00 PM

Trump is as inept at English as he is at governing. He’s oxymoronic: a nativist who can’t really speak his native tongue.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 8998-8999 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:15:21 AM

That Mr. Trump seems to have made up the scene of a whimpering terrorist may be shocking on one level yet not all that surprising from a president who over the years has made a habit of inventing people who do not exist and events that did not happen.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9031-9035 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:17:29 AM

Mr. Trump has always had an active imagination, on matters large and small. While in business, he called reporters pretending to be a Trump spokesman named John Barron boasting about Mr. Trump in the third person. For years, he peddled the lie that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii and he claimed to see “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the fall of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, a claim that was thoroughly debunked.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9080-9082 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:20:28 AM

In essence, the more steps people accumulated over the course of the month, the higher their self-rated sleep quality was during that time. Ditto when the researchers looked at the number of minutes they had spent moving; the more time someone was in motion during the month, the better they rated their sleep over all.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9098-9099 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:22:23 AM

If Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, were given the job of finding Trump’s moral bottom, he’d fail.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9408-9408 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:34:59 AM

Diners who walk in the door eager to hand over literal piles of money aren’t greeted; they’re processed.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9411-9411 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:35:16 AM

The Department of Motor Vehicles is a block party compared with the line at Peter Luger.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9437-9438 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:39:02 AM

Other restaurants, and not just steakhouses, buy beef that is tender, richly marbled and deeply flavorful; at Luger, you get the first two but not the third.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9448-9450 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:39:55 AM

They will say that nobody goes to Luger for the sole, nobody goes to Luger for the wine, nobody goes to Luger for the salad, nobody goes to Luger for the service. The list goes on, and gets harder to swallow, until you start to wonder who really needs to go to Peter Luger, and start to think the answer is nobody.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7917-7919 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 3:31:44 PM

One of the first I learned was “nunchi”— literally translated, “eye-measure.” Nunchi is the art of sensing what people are thinking and feeling, and responding appropriately. It’s speed-reading a room with the emphasis on the collective,

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7931-7933 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 3:32:15 PM

Maybe you have nunchi already: Do you sense when a host secretly wants you to leave? Do you accurately sense when dangers are real before your friends do? Then you probably have quick nunchi.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 8333-8335 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 4:49:46 PM

Highly ideological parties and candidates can win elections in the right circumstances, and a race against an unpopular, unfit and impeachable incumbent might be one of them. But it would still be a folly, a case study in ideology’s exacting costs, for the Democrats to take the chance.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9118-9120 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 4:51:08 PM

No wonder the president chose to lambaste Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as a “Never Trumper.” The combat veteran had the simple decency of being scandalized by what he heard from the president on the Ukraine phone call, and by what he knew of the discrepancies between what he heard on the call and the account of

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Best Damn Sports Books Part 2

Over 10 years ago, I posted a list of my favorite sports books. Here is an updated list of new sports books that I have enjoyed by sports category:

Basketball

A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton by John McPhee

The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy by Bill Simmons

Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever by Jack McCallum

On the Court and Inside the Heads of Basketball's Best Players by Idan Ravin

Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson

Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s by Jeff Pearlman

Tennis

Open by Andre Agassi

But Seriously by John McEnroe

Hardcourt Confidential: Tales from Twenty Years in the Pro Tennis Trenches by Patrick McEnroe

Trophy Son by Douglas Brunt (fictional story about tennis prodigy. Excellent!)

Golf

Tiger Woods by Jeff Benedict

Football

Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL by Jeff Pearlman

Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football by John U. Bacon

Boxing

Unbeaten: Rocky Marciano's Fight for Perfection in a Crooked World World by Mike Stanton

Drama in the Bahamas: Muhammad Ali's Last Fight by Dave Hannigan

John Feinstein

One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game by John Feinstein

Interesting Notes and Analysis from Reading The New York Times

"The study, published in Current Psychology, found a substantial link between procrastination and clutter problems in all the age groups. Frustration with clutter tended to increase with age. Among older adults, clutter problems were also associated with life dissatisfaction."
“Cable networks have figured out that the most interesting television of the week is the National Football League pregame show, and that if you put enough experts on arguing about something that hasn’t happened yet, people will watch."

"The real story of Trump isn’t his amorality and outrageousness. It’s Americans’ receptiveness to that. It’s the fact that, according to polls, most voters in November 2016 deemed him dishonest and indecent, yet plenty of them cast their ballots for him anyway."

"There is an amazing calculus in old age. As much is taken away, we find more to love and appreciate. We experience bliss on a regular basis. As one friend said: “When I was young I needed sexual ecstasy or a hike to the top of a mountain to experience bliss. Now I can feel it when I look at a caterpillar on my garden path.”

“Cash was the only major asset class that posted positive returns in ’18,” according to a Bank of America report. Even the reed-thin 1.9 percent return on cash in money market funds was less than the 2.2 percent consumer inflation rate, the report said, but at least it was a positive number.

"For patients who have one terminal illness that is either resistant to treatment or can’t be safely treated, combined with a second very serious illness or complication, along with a high degree of physiological frailty, physicians should consider comfort measures instead of cure."

Why Walking is the Key to Being More Productive

by Clay Skipper

"Ultimately, his point is not that walking is a nice, mind-clearing activity (though it certainly can be). It’s that removing all friction from your life, and replacing it with the seductive speed of convenience, has pernicious effects.

For one thing, when we rush or move quickly, we stop being present and forget what we experience. (“High speed is a menace to memory, because memory depends on time and spatial awareness,” he writes.) Secondly, there’s a political aspect to walking: When we don’t walk among our fellow citizens—when we have the privilege of only traveling privately—we can become coldly detached from the fabric of the community. (“What would happen if world leaders were forced to take daily walks among the people?” Erling Kagge asks.) And, finally, taking a shortcut to what you want often leaves you disappointed because objects of our desire are less meaningful without the struggle to capture them. (How much less interesting might summiting Everest be if you could just take an elevator to the top?)"

Will Trump Be the Sage One? by Maureen Dowd

"But Trump, unlike W., is driven by the drama of it. “It’s a game of revving up the excitement and making people afraid and then backing off on the fear in order to declare that he’s resolved the situation,” D’Antonio said. “Trump prefers threats and ultimatums to action because that allows him to look big and tough and get attention without doing something for which he will be held responsible. This is who he is at his core: an attention-seeking, action-averse propagandist who is terrified of accountability in the form of coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base.”

Latest Books I Have Read

Smartest Things I Read Today

Think tanks in DC call themselves non-partisan. But of course, that’s not true, because they’ve already made up their minds. They’re not thinking at all. Merely arguing.

Seth Godin

If the Catholic Church wasn't a religious institution, would we be handling the situation differently?

"They would have been arrested under the RICO federal laws already and they would have been considered organized crime," 

Pennsylvania State Rep. Mark Rozzi, a Democrat, told Salon. Rozzi is more than just a proponent of passing new legislation to help victims of childhood sex abuse, whether from employees of the Catholic Church or other organizations; he is also a victim himself, one who was raped by a priest in a rectory shower in Pennsylvania when he was 13 years old.

Economically, the country has changed surprisingly little since 2008. The big banks have returned to risky practices, and Republicans are trying to undo the Dodd-Frank reform law, which was enacted to prevent another collapse. The distribution of income and wealth in America is as lopsided as ever. Despite almost ten years of economic growth, real wages are stuck at their pre-crisis level, while corporate profits are soaring and stock prices have reached record highs. All the misshapen economic trends of the previous decade are still with us.

The lasting effect of the crisis is in our politics. The Presidency of Donald Trump is an overdetermined fluke, an accident with a thousand causes. Among them is the catastrophic event that gutted millions of lives and ended in no fair resolution, only cynicism. The economic indicators are strong right now, but before long there will be another financial crisis. They come every seven or ten years, each bearing the features of its time. If the previous one was the result of overconfidence in free markets, the next might be triggered—as in Turkey today—by the behavior of an authoritarian leader. When it comes, we’ll be less prepared to address it than we were in 2008. This President has made an enemy of facts, Congress no longer passes rational laws, and American democracy is ten years unhealthier.

George Packer

Wisest Thing I Read Today

Most Interesting Perspective of the Week

Since then, analyses from investment banks and researchers have estimated that 40 to 60 percent of the savings from the tax cut are being plowed into buybacks. One analysis of companies on the Russell 1000 Index—which consists of big firms, much like the Standard & Poor’s 500 does—found that companies directed 10 times as much money to buybacks as to workers. As such, Milani and Tung said they expect the math on corporate spending on shareholders versus workers to become even more exaggerated in the coming years.

In the meantime, corporate boards are poised to spend hundreds of billions more on their own shares, benefiting executives along with the mostly wealthy Americans who own stock. Just this week, Caterpillar, for instance, said it plans to spend $1 billion buying back shares in the latter half of this year, before kicking off a new $10 billion round on buybacks starting in January. It is also in the midst of laying off hundreds of workers.

ANNIE LOWREY is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, covering economic policy.