Steroids and stilts

“Trump is Nixon on steroids and stilts”: John Dean (who should know) on CNN just now.

[Meaning: Trump has gone well beyond Nixon in obstructing justice. I realized only this morning why this remark caught my ear: alliteration and zeugma.]

Channel 4 News and Cambridge Analytica

From Channel 4 News, a three-part series about Cambridge Analytica: first, about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook; second, about Cambridge Analytica’s claims to use bribes and sex workers to entrap political candidates. Part three, about the company’s doings in the United States, arrives tomorrow.

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Part three, about the company’s work with a recent presidential campaign.

“Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”

In The New York Times, Zeynep Tufekci writes about “Facebook’s Surveillance Machine”:

Facebook doesn’t just record every click and “like” on the site. It also collects browsing histories. It also purchases “external” data like financial information about users (though European nations have some regulations that block some of this). Facebook recently announced its intent to merge “offline” data — things you do in the physical world, such as making purchases in a brick-and-mortar store — with its vast online databases.

Facebook even creates “shadow profiles” of nonusers. That is, even if you are not on Facebook, the company may well have compiled a profile of you, inferred from data provided by your friends or from other data. This is an involuntary dossier from which you cannot opt out in the United States. . . .

A business model based on vast data surveillance and charging clients to opaquely target users based on this kind of extensive profiling will inevitably be misused.

I’d like to say that I’ve never been happier not to be part of Facebook, but there’s probably a shadow profile of me somewhere, lengthening.

Branching out

From the Father Knows Best episode “Bud Branches Out” (October 12, 1959), father Jim Anderson speaking to his son Bud, a college freshman:

“I still say you ought to branch out more in the courses than you’re planning to. I know you’re taking a pre-engineering course, but remember, the successful engineer today also needs to know languages, economics, philosophy, the humanities.”

These days Jim’s advice sounds almost counter-cultural.

Other FKB posts
“Betty’s Graduation” : Flowers knows best : “Margaret Disowns Her Family” : “A Woman in the House” : “Your dinner jacket just arrived”

Mystery actor

Who can it be now? Do you recognize him? Leave your best guess in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if necessary. But I don’t think it will be.

10:08 a.m.: That was fast. The answer is in the comments.

More mystery actors (Why not collect them all?)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?

Trappist survival

The New York Times reports on Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist monastery struggling to survive. Aging monks, dwindling numbers, and a plan to attract month- and year-long affiliate members.

I remember watching a PBS documentary about Mepkin some years ago, when the abbey appeared to be flourishing.

The New York Review of Nancy

At The New York Review of Books website, Dash Shaw reviews Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s How to Read “Nancy.” I like the idea of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip, written for a readership he called “the gum chewers,” becoming the stuff of TNYRB. And I like this observation from the review:

Beautiful cartooning affects a comic the way a well-chosen word, arriving at the right time in a sentence, makes for good writing, or the way a room composed with the right combination of things in the exact right places is good interior design.

Thanks to Chris at Dreamers Rise for pointing me to this review.

From How to Read Nancy
Bushmiller, Strunk, and Wilde : Editing balloons : Nancy, spokestoon

From the Saturday Stumper

I was surprised to see Willa Cather in today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, 57-Down, three letters: “Religion and art, per Cather.” I’ll give away the answer: KIN. From Cather’s essay “Escapism,” published in Commonweal (1936):

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

My first guess: ONE. I was thinking of what Godfrey St. Peter tells his students in The Professor’s House (1925):

“Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.”

Of course that’s St. Peter speaking, not Cather.

Finishing the Saturday Stumper is still cause for minor self-congratulation. And by the way: if you haven’t read The Professor’s House, you’re missing one of the great American novels.

Euphemisms of the NYT

In The New York Times yesterday:

“I’m not necessarily encouraging people to swear more,” Byrne writes, “but I do hope you might give it the respect it [expletive] deserves.”

In The New York Times today:

“My stuff,” he said (though he didn’t say “stuff”), “doesn’t work in the playoffs.”

It’d be nice if the Times could get its stuff together and figure out how to handle naughty words. The use of [expletive] is straightforwardly prim. I can’t object. But putting a word in quotation marks when it’s not what was spoken or written seems to me wildly inappropriate.

In previous posts, I’ve written about the Times sanitizing quotations from Philip Larkin and David Foster Wallace.

A text for the day

Marianne Moore, from the poem “Spenser’s Ireland” (1941).

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

[This line appears in at least one version of the poem. Moore was an inveterate reviser.]