Pun Salad

I fell in love with Diane Keaton in 1977, while watching her in Annie Hall.

And then I broke up with her while watching Looking for Mr. Goodbar later that same year.

The web is full of remembrances, but this one at the Free Press is kind of special: Woody Allen Remembers Diane Keaton.

Post-1977 I wasn't obsessive about watching her movies, but she really lit up most of the ones I saw.

Also of note:

• Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. If it hadn't been already taken in 1841, that could have been the title of Kamala's campaign memoir, amirite? That's what came to mind when reading Guy Denton's report of the Washington D.C. stop on her book tour: Kamala Harris’s Grand Delusions.

  ‘Some people have said I was the most qualified candidate ever to run for president.”

  This is a real quote from Kamala Harris, though it could easily be mistaken for a line from a Saturday Night Live parody. She delivered it with total earnestness at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., last Thursday night. The crowd replied with boisterous cheers rather than howls of laughter.

  And:

  Interviewer Kara Swisher took the stage first. When she introduced Harris, the crowd exploded into a thunderous roar. Everywhere, audience members held their cellphones aloft, desperate to record a few precious moments of Harris in the flesh. As the cheers grew louder, people pounded their fists in excitement and applauded frantically. Such eruptions were so frequent throughout the night that it would be an understatement to simply label the crowd partisan. For those in attendance, this was a religious experience akin to witnessing a sacred figure descend from the heavens. The hope that their savior could still one day become president was palpable.

  "The Madness of Crowds", indeed.

• Kraken released, at last. Back in 2020-2021, I was more than slightly peeved at conspiracy-theorizing about the election being "stolen" from Donald Trump. A goodly fraction of my peevishness was taken by allegations of fraudulent results being (somehow) generated by voting machines supplied by Dominion Voting Systems. (If you're interested in a sampling: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, … and, well, that's enough.)

  But there is big recent news: Dominion Voting sold to company run by ex-GOP election official. (archive.today link)

  Dominion Voting Systems — the voting machine behemoth that President Trump and his allies baselessly attacked after the 2020 election — has been sold to a Missouri-based company run by a former Republican election official, Axios has learned.

  And (indeed) all my links to Dominion's old content now send you to Liberty Vote. A message from that "former Republican election official", Scott Leiendecker, begins:

  Today, I am proud to announce Liberty Vote — a 100% American‐owned election technology company dedicated to restoring trust in our elections. Our mission is clear: every vote must be secure, fair, and verifiable.

  I'd guess this means, at best, wild accusations of electoral fraud coming from the other side real soon now.

• The revolution will not be televised. And, according to Coleman Hughes, The History of Slavery Should Not Be Partisan.

  If you’ve been following American politics for the past five years, you may have noticed an unhealthy pattern: The left, which controls most cultural institutions, uses soft power to shape them in an ever more progressive direction. The right, which controls few cultural institutions but does possess political power, passes vague and heavy-handed policies intended to undo the left’s handiwork (and then some).

  Core to this pattern is the fact that the left tends to view the institutions it controls as politically neutral when, in fact, they are stamped throughout with their own sacred values. The right, in turn, tends to see their scorched-earth responses as justified by a sense of powerlessness over the leftward direction of American culture.

  Yup. Coleman does a good job finding the good parts and bad parts of President Trump's recent screed against the Smithsonian for daring to suggest that slavery was a bad thing.

• I'm not proud of it, but this headline that made me chuckle: More Marijuana Users Are Crash Dummies. (That's from the WSJ editorial board, usually more staid.) (WSJ gifted link)

  How much social and public-health damage will Americans suffer before doing a U-turn on marijuana promotion? A new study finds that more than 40% of drivers who died in car accidents in one U.S. county over the last six years had elevated levels of the drug in their blood.

  Researchers from Wright State University analyzed driver autopsy results from car crashes in Montgomery County, Ohio, between January 2019 and September 2024. More than four in 10 tested positive for pot’s psychoactive ingredient THC, with an average level of 30.7 nanograms. That’s more than six times the level most states use to define impairment.

  As my stoner friends might say: Whoa.

Recently on the book blog:

This new book from Steven Pinker concerns an area of his cognitive-science research. As sometimes happens, it has the feel of material he's previously tried out in a lecture hall on Harvard students. Down to occasional amusing cartoons, anecdotes, and examples taken from pop culture.

See the subtitle for his topic: "common knowledge". It's a bland descriptive term for something that might seem a little offbeat and specialized. He describes it upfront in his preface, first paragraph:

As a cognitive scientist, I have spent my life thinking about how people think. So the ultimate subject of my fascination would have to be how people think about what other people think, and how they think about what other people think they think, and how they think about what other people think they think they think. As dizzying as this cogitation may seem, we engage in it every day, at least tacitly, and in the limit this state of awareness has a technical name, common knowledge.

Reader, he's not kidding. "Common knowledge" is a real thing, and Pinker shows that once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere, and it explains a lot about our social interactions and thought processes. And note that the recursion implied in his description really is (conceptually) infinite ("turtles all the way down" occurs later in the book). Although our brains tend to peter out when trying to unwind more than a handful of levels.

The book gets into game theory pretty quickly; the famous Prisoner's Dilemma comes out to play as a simple example of thinking about what the other guy is thinking, who's thinking about what you're thinking he's thinking about, and …

Pinker reports on some of his own research, too. And it made me glad that I've never been asked to bend my brain in one of his experiments.

I'll report my slight disagreement on one matter: when discussing how we communicate knowledge non-verbally (and sometimes involutarily), via laughter, crying, blushing, and facial expressions, he states (p. 197): "People seldom laugh when they’re alone."

Wha? Steve, I'm (alas) alone most of the time these days, and I manage to laugh quite a bit!

To be fair, he mentions that solitary laughter will be "usually in the presence of virtual people": on the TV/computer screen or in reading material. OK, you somewhat saved yourself there, Steve.

So, bottom line: an unexpectedly illuminating topic, and Pinker does a fine job of demonstrating its ubiquity and usefulness. Things get slightly repetitive and hand-wavy in the final chapter, but that's OK.