August 15, 2026 · 5:15 am

The men of New York: movies

Michael Cera is a Big Apple journalist in PERSON TO PERSON (2017) though it’s the kind of quirky indie where his plotline — working with a cute colleague on a story in hopes he can get her into bed — is only one strand of the story, alongside a record collector hunting a rare Charlie Parker disc and a teenage girl trying to figure out her sexuality (“I’m a lesbian … mostly … I think.”). This is nominally tied together by taking place on a single day in New York but more connection between the plot threads would really have helped. Or maybe having one upbeat protagonist instead of everyone being glum or nervous. The end result is competent but listless. “It’s not a good-looking penis because a good-looking penis does not exist.”


BOYS NIGHT OUT (1962) has married Howard Duff and Tony Randall nag divorced buddy James Garner into a plan to rent a swinging bachelor pad (it’s interesting to see how Hollywood imagined a swanky apartment back then) and then install a mistress they can each visit one night a week. By sheer luck, Kim Novak stumbles into this set-up and decides to let them think she’s a sex worker as it will provide invaluable research for her thesis on “Adolescent Sex Fantasies of the Suburban Male” (“This isn’t what they want, it’s what they’ve been told they’re supposed to want.”). Garner is horrified by all this, yet at the same time, Novak’s character is so cute … can he save her from this life of sin?

This worked better when I didn’t know all the twists and Novak’s too stiff to be funny; nevertheless, I enjoyed rewatching this one. It’s fluff, but it’s entertaining fluff. The cast includes Jessie Royce Landis as Garner’s disapproving mom, Oscar Homolka as Novak’s thesis adviser, William Bendix as a barkeep and Fred Allen as a gumshoe. “When it comes to sex, men can’t keep from lying. Women can’t keep from telling the truth.”


I’ve never liked Marvel’s decision to retcon out the Peter/MJ marriage in the One More Day/Brand New Day story arcs and had similar feelings about the MCU’s Peter Parker (Tom Holland) having to erase his relationship to MJ (Zendaya) in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Nevertheless SPIDER-MAN: Brand New Day (2026) makes excellent entertainment.

It’s been five years since the previous movie and the same amount of time has elapsed in the MCU. Spidey has become a Big Apple legend, taking down Scorpion, Tombstone and the Hand and forming alliances with the Punisher (Frank Bernthal) and Inspector Jean DeWolff (Liza Colon Zayas). As Peter Parker he’s alone, unable to rebuild his life after losing MJ and Aunt May. DeWolff warns him he needs to get a life instead of fighting crime 24/7 but what else does he have to do? Then a mysterious body-jumping adversary begins using random people to coordinate an attack on Damage Control, here something equivalent to DC Comics’ DEO. How does he stop someone who can be anyone, or distract him by making their victims jump off a ledge? And what about his own powers, which are spiraling out of control as he stresses out (I half-wondered if he’d briefly become the eight-limbed figure seen on Gil Kane’s cover here, but no)? Can Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) give Peter the advice he needs on controlling a dangerous alter ego?

The movie isn’t perfect. There’s one twist that’s not even slightly shocking and the mind-controller gets too big a pass on some of her actions. Peter has an apartment, food and a state of the art computer system but we never learn where he gets the money. Overall, though, an impressive job that does as good a job as possible not burdening new viewers with too much continuity. “Mind-control? Yeah, governments do that a lot — particularly the French.”

Once again TYG and I caught the annual CAT VIDEO FEST (2026) at the local Carolina Theatre and enjoyed shots of cats climbing and failing, wriggling through holes, stubbornly making things more complicated or a quartet of stray kittens getting caught by a rescuer. As usual nothing that we couldn’t find on the Internet and a few too many animated shorts this time around. Still, the second most fun film of the week.

All rights to images remain with current holders. The one Spider-Man panel is by John Romita.

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August 14, 2026 · 4:29 pm

You mean if I take time off, I get less done?

TYG is on vacation this week. She’s completely relaxed, which means I’m much more relaxed. Not that I’m normally stressed out but it’s always surprising how much of a difference it makes.

This weekend she’s taking part of the vacation at a local hotel, as she’s done the past couple of years. As I stay close to home to watch the pets I wouldn’t get to the new Spider-Man movie this weekend and our schedule didn’t permit it last weekend. So TYG suggested I go mid-week, and I did. So most of Wednesday was not productive (though it was fun — review tomorrow). Yesterday we had the housekeepers in it, which sucks up time (you try creating when you’re sitting and trying to calm cats about the strangers in the house), plus I had a couple of errands to run.

However … I did get some good work done. More on Savage Adventures. And finally, some fiction. I sat down Monday evening, started work on Let No Man Put Asunder and did more Tuesday. I’d been frozen at the point where the late-book plot of the previous draft absolutely no longer works as I’ve changed a key detail. Suddenly I was able to get past it. It doesn’t work as well as the last draft yet but it’s fixable. Or I can go back to the old approach, though I probably won’t.

I’m tentatively optimistic I can wrap up this draft by Aug. 31. Though I’ll need at least one more draft before I submit it for beta-reading.

That’s pretty much all I got done but it’s quite a good thing to have gotten done.

Also Con-Tinual has posted my panels on that old TV classic, The Night Stalker and on getting your fictional settings right to Facebook.

Cover by Steve Ditko, all rights to image remain with current holder.

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August 14, 2026 · 5:15 am

It’s Friday! Have a jellyfish!

I saw this in the nearest Durham Library branch recently.

It was gone next time I checked, so I don’t think it survived long.

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August 13, 2026 · 5:15 am

Thoughts on a couple of NYT articles

One was Ross Douthat interviewing Scott Galloway. It’s a gift link, though I’m not sure how long it lasts.

Douthat, you may remember, is a conservative Catholic, particularly conservative on sex issues. He believes rapists such as Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski are the product not of patriarchy but when the 1960s embraced free love: “If your culture’s code is libertine, don’t be surprised that worse things than libertinism flourish.” As noted at that second link, that doesn’t explain why very un-free love, un-libertine groups such as the Southern Baptist Conference are also rife with rape. His final column as he departs the Times for CBS news bemoans that as a moral conservative, living under “peak woke” is like the McCarthyite 1950s, with bonus civic and educational collapse happening all around him.

Scott Galloway? He’s the current male whisperer offering dubious critiques and dubious solutions to the problems of men falling behind women.

Sure enough, Galloway repeats the claims from his book that schools are biased against boys: “Think about the way we approach what we ask of students in school. Sit still, be a pleaser, raise your hand. You just described the activities that come more easily to a girl. Even push a pencil around, ask questions. Our prefrontal cortex is 18 months behind a girl’s.”

This is a standard complaint from We’re Failing Men types, that school is inherently female. Guys just can’t stomach the calls to Sit Still And Do As You’re Told. But hasn’t that been the way of school forever? All the way back to the medieval European days when student bodies were entirely male? Schools were if anything stricter in the past, when it was “reading and writing and ‘rithmetic/Done to the tune of a hickory stick,” So why would it suddenly become an issue now? For that matter, if following orders was unmanly, the military would be predominantly female.

(As this Bluesky thread says, why are people assuming boys simply can’t do better? Or as someone else put it online, shouldn’t we tell them to step up, look to the girls for inspiration and work to match them rather than conveying that falling behind girls is not their fault and we’re going to fix it).

Galloway is also worrying that liberals aren’t concerned enough about men’s plight — sure, much of the problem is that when you’ve been on top, equality feels like oppression. Though to his credit, he’s also emphatic that “one of the greatest victories in America and society, generally, is that women are thriving” and that he has no sympathy with the right-wing impulse ” to take women and nonwhites back to the ’50s.” However the idea that we’re simply ignoring male struggles is baloney. It’s just that for all the supposed tragedy of their lives, they still aren’t the ones worried about being raped when they’re alone at night.

Not a bad dude, in short, but I’m not sure he has great answers. For example, there’s this comment: “It’s a tragedy to me that women don’t feel safe on the New York City subway. Women shouldn’t cross the street when they see a group of young men. They should cross the street to be around young men.” Well yes, they shouldn’t have to worry — but how do we make that happen in our rape culture? Giving men a purpose in life, making them feel they can contribute — none of these prevent them being rapists.

I do, however, like this observation: “I think the whole point of America is to give unremarkable kids a shot at being remarkable or doing something important. I feel like I had that infrastructure, and I worry that in today’s world, a lot of that infrastructure has been crammed into the kids who had already demonstrated they’re remarkable at the age of 18.” However as Rabbi Danya Rutenberg points out, the left is the one with ideas how to help: free childcare, free college, free medical care. Those would help all of us, including the unremarkable.

Next from the New York Times Magazine, an article on the Heritage Foundation tearing itself apart. Unfortunately the gift link already expired (you can look it up under the title, “What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right”). The gist of it is that the old guard conservatives in the Foundation have found themselves swept aside as Heritage struggles to suck up to the Toddler of the United States — suddenly tariffs are good policy! A bigger problem is the influx of even further right voices to the point the history of WW II is up for debate: “a lot of “rehashing and going through who was the bad guy and who were the good guys,” Richard Stern, who was then director of Heritage’s budget center and is now at Pence’s organization, told me. A sizable number of newer staff members were fans of Pat Buchanan, who wrote a book about how Churchill, not Hitler, was the instigator of World War II. A number of them, several former staff members told me, seemed to share this view.” One of the new people argued that the Holocaust was a lie, and that Jews controlled textbook publishing in the United States to hide the truth.

And Scott Yenor is far from the only misogynist there. No surprise: for conservative authoritarians, dominating women is always high on the agenda. As Heritage became increasingly staffed with far-right Catholics, “single women without children were deemed failures with ‘no skin in the game,'”

Overall it’s a good portrayal of how creepy the Heritage Foundation is. Which makes it surprising the article still deploys euphemisms in several places. The Claremont Institute is a right-wing creepy mess where several of its people supported the Jan. 6 coup. In the article it’s “a right-wing think tank that wants to restore America’s founding principles.” The Toddler’s OMB director, Russell Voight, is “a proponent of the maximalist view of executive power.” I think that’s “wants a right-wing dictatorship” Overall though, it’s a reminder that the Times, much as I criticize it for sanewashing the president’s gibberish, can still do great work when it wants.

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August 12, 2026 · 5:15 am

Wonder Woman: Two year ones and one of them’s amazing

Following the Phil Jimenez run on Wonder Woman, Walt Simonson took over for a brief arc which I somehow never got around to reviewing (soon, though). This post is about the first year under Greg Rucka, who took over writing next, and also about the first year of Absolute Wonder Woman.

Rucka first worked on Diana in a standalone story, The Hiketeia, which I haven’t read yet. Wonder Woman #196 (cover by Adam Hughes)started a run on the book that ended when Infinite Crisis rebooted everything. For the first year the primary plot driver is Veronica Cale, a Texas businesswoman who bitterly resents that Wonder Woman gets so much applause and acclaim — Cale is the real wonder woman, dammit! Employing skilled PR, Dr. Psycho and the Silver Swan, she sets out to destroy Diana.

In addition we have Eros prompt Zeus to lust for Artemis, leading to Hera hurling Themyscira into U.S. coastal waters. America is wary; the Amazons are equally wary to see US warships patrolling around them. Can the two nations avoid coming to blows?

And as the year winds to a close, Circe helps the gorgons resurrect Medusa. Cale then sends her to kill Diana …

I glanced Rucka’s run a couple of times when it was on the stand. It certainly wasn’t bad but it didn’t give me any urge to buy it. Reading it on the DC app, that hasn’t changed. The heart of the story isn’t the superhero battles, it’s the politics. The challenges on WW as an ambassador for Amazons and a speaker for women’s equality. The mundane day-to-day running of the embassy, with a minotaur as her chef. Cale’s PR maneuvers to discredit Diana. The gods are dressed in modern fashions, reflecting their connections to various modern spheres — our quest for knowledge makes Athena strong, our interest in sex boosts Aphrodite (Zeus doesn’t realize his power is fading by comparison). It feels like this is where Rucka’s heart lies (that’s my impression, not something I know for a fact) but it doesn’t work the way Astro City does with a similar approach.

Take Cale. Her resentment for Diana is the same as the Golden Age Cheetah (cover here by H.G. Peters). Her desire to kill Diana feels way over the top; it’s easier to accept such unhinged hatred when it comes from a woman crazy enough to dress up in a cat costume.

I didn’t expect much better from Absolute Wonder Woman by Kelly Thompson and Hayden Sherman (who does the cover here). The Absolute Universe is one where the creators strip characters of their usual accoutrements: who is Batman without Bruce Wayne’s wealth? Who is Wonder Woman without the Amazons? Yeah, right — like “Wonder Woman without the Amazons” isn’t a go-to for a soft reboot ever since the Diana Prince Years. When I checked V1 and V2 out of the library however, it turns out they’re as good as everyone told me they were.

In the first issue we meet Circe, trapped on an island in the Greek underworld. Apollo drops an infant Diana off, informing Circe that the Amazons are gone — and the very word ‘Amazon’ is forbidden.Years later, Gateway City is under siege by demonic forces when Wonder Woman appears, riding her winged horse Pegasus, as on the cover. Which she explains to Steve Trevor at one point is the real Pegasus, killed and damned to hell by Zeus for some reason. We alternate scenes of Diana’s life in the underworld with her efforts to defend the city from increasingly nasty demonic forces. We also meet her mortal supporting cast: Steve, occultist Etta Candy and reporter Barbara Minerva (so far a “name only” character with no similarity to the original).

In the first arc she saves Gateway City (I’m not sure if that’s a callback to her operating there in John Byrne’s run or the symbolism of the name), then descends to Tartarus for a confrontation with Hades. She wins her freedom at the cost of never returning meaning she’ll never see her mother, Circe, again. Persephone, however, has arranged for Diana to eat a pomegranate seed, which compels her to return for one month of every year. This is a running theme, even if we don’t know where it’s leading: the male Olympians are vicious, the goddesses are backing Diana covertly.

In the second arc we meet the Absolute Veronica Cale, here a hot-shot national security official who sends a version of Dr. Poison against Wonder Woman. This leads to the reveal of a magical maze in which Diana might be able to find other Amazons. Entering she battles against monsters and the Golden Age foe Queen Clea. The current arc involves Cale sending Zatanna against Diana — bad news as Diana is a sorceress like her mom and Zatanna has managed to tap her magic and use it against her (I’m now reading on the app but I haven’t gotten any further yet).

For my money, this is the best WW since the New 52 reboot, possibly the best in this century. Part of the reason is, of course, that it’s a solidly entertaining story. It’s hard to go wrong when Wonder Woman shows up riding a skeletal undead Pegasus. Part of it is also that they get Diana in a way many authors don’t.

A recurring tendency since the New 52 has been to treat Diana as an Amazon warrior first and foremost; there’s a scene in one JLA story where monsters attack and her response is “Yay, something to fight and kill!” In the “Tower of Babel” arc in JLA, the trap for Diana is a mental fantasy in which she’s battling as a warrior, endlessly, something she doesn’t want to break free of.

Not here. There’s a flashback where Artemis wants to test Diana in combat. The young Amazon refuses, having seen too much senseless violence in the underworld. A disgruntled Artemis considers hunting a passing turtle for sport and suddenly Diana’s in her grill: No. You do not hurt it!

In another scene she visits Prometheus for help and convinces the eagle gnawing on his liver to stop.

When she has to send Steve home from the underworld she needs a sacrifice big enough to work such a potent marriage. She sacrifices her right arm, replacing it with a prosthetic of magic.

This is who she is. This is who Wonder Woman should be. I look forward to reviewing Year Two in about eight months.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

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August 11, 2026 · 12:19 pm

If you don’t draw a line in the sand, the waves will wash you away

Rep. Max Miller, running for re-election in Ohio, is allegedly (not that I doubt the allegations) a slimy, abusive creep who withheld his daughter’s favorite plush toy, the one she can’t sleep without. For some reason, that kind of petty cruelty creeps me out even more than the openly brutal abuse he’s accused of (no, I’m not excusing that). An article in American Prospect shows that much like the Toddler in the White House, Miller has an (alleged) track record of being spiteful and vicious to everyone who crosses him.

Nevertheless he’s choosing to stay in the race so Republicans are stuck with him. His best defense so far? Well, if Emily Moreno had been abused, would she have cooked him dinner? Yeah, it’s not like women with psycho partners ever make nice out of fear, hoping to defuse them.

In any case, Florida State Senator Joe Gruters, chair of the Republican National Committee says the abuse not an issue: ““We’re gonna support our nominees …We need to make sure we hold the majorities. Max, I’m sure, is on that side.” He dismisses the accusations by saying “there’s not many things worse than divorce.” Sen. Bernie Moreno, Miller’s father in law, did come out against him but as I mentioned last week, he took his time, presumably hoping the scandal would blow over.

Given the Toddler of the United States has shielded multiple creeps and sexual harassers from federal investigation this is not surprising. Even for a sane political party, there’s pressure to be cold-blooded and practical, to turn a blind eye. And if it’s something like adultery that might be the right choice; even if we disapprove, we typically don’t have a better candidate to pick.

But if, like Gruters, we have no lines in the sand, we also have no principles. At worst, Gruters is one of those shits who think a man has every right to treat a woman that way; at best he opposes abuse in general, just not when he’s forced to criticie a fellow Republican. Come on, don’t you have sympathy for his position? He has no choice but to back Miller.

Wrong. He does have a choice. And the choice me made says he doesn’t oppose abuse, even if he tells himself otherwise. “Against abuse when it’s politically safe” is no better than “honest when convenient.”

Power cannot be the only standard. Democrats abandoning a credibly accused rapist such as Graham Platner was the right move, even if it had guaranteed Susan Collins gets re-elected (from what I’ve read, the seat is still in play).

Paul Campos at LGM quotes a commenter who makes another relevant point re Miller and the Toddler: “as a rich and powerful person, outside of a very narrow range of actions, you are largely protected from consequences, and other elites will seek to shield you from consequences to maintain the fiction that elites are deserving of their status. If someone like Trump were treated like a regular person, this would threaten elite status generally.  Trump learned he could do what he wanted, and others would simply clean up after him, because this was easier, and it maintained a lot of fictions that were very valuable to other people.” That’s not an attitude we should encourage.

I see a lot of that attitude in the way our society deals with rape. We live in a country where judges have said flat out that they don’t want to prosecute a teenage rapist because it would ruin his future. If Brett Kavanaugh hadn’t gotten his SCOTUS seat, he’d still have had a lifetime position on the federal bench. Even a slight bump in a man’s career over rape allegations was too much for some conservatives. Drawing lines in the sand and responding appropriately when those lines are crossed matters. Show that this shit is unacceptable and, ideally, that there are consequences. Miller has avoided them for most of his life.

As commenter Murc says at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Platner, rapist or not, would still be better in the Senate than Collins. When earlier allegations about Platner’s cheating and bad behavior came to light, “still better than a Republican” was one of the defenses raised. As Murc says, “the flip side of that is ‘there are in fact actual red lines beyond which this calculus no longer applies’ … Standards matter. There are more important things than the naked pursuit of power, and frankly orienting yourself purely towards power seeking is almost going to completely eliminate your ability to effectively USE said power.”

Someone else at LGM linked to a post at Slacktivist about the temptation to divide people into “ours” and “theirs”: “one of the obsessions I obsess about here became one of the obsessions I obsess about there — the toxic danger of distinguishing between “people” and “our people” and the realization that no good can ever come of pursuing such a distinction. And so now, for me, “Taking care of our people” is just “Taking care of people.””

As the Prospect article shows, the media have been astonishingly supine about Miller. The author suggests reporters just gave up because there’s no “shaming the shameless” and none of the coverage he did get has to date hurt his career. I think that’s inadequate as a reason. It’s unprofessional as far as news coverage but it shows the advantage the right-wing noise machine has. They’ll repeat accusations against Democrats day in and day out until it defines them and even the mainstream media start to accept that framing.

As I want Republicans to have increasingly little power, I hope Miller goes down. But I also want him to go down because if the allegations are true he’s a horrible human being. He does not belong anywhere near power or, well, other human beings he might hurt. I hope Ohio’s voters agree.

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August 11, 2026 · 5:15 am

Strange examples of wine branding

I’m aware that trademarks and logos have to be distinctive and non-obvious — a winemaker has no rights to a generic name like Good Red Wine, for instance. While I’m sure these labels are distinctive, I’m not sure they scream Drink Me. For example, “Pessimist”

It’s a great looking label but what’s the message? If the guy under the tree drunk the wine, he’d be an optimist? It feels more like it’s associating the wine with despair than with its cure.

Pipe-smoking deer is also an odd choice for a spokes-animal.

Is anyone drinking wine for justice? Still, it’s a better association than pessimism.

Is Pandemonium a good association either? I can’t say the art grabs me.

And this one … I’ve no idea what it’s trying to do.

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August 10, 2026 · 5:15 am

Let’s kick off the week with the Republican horsemen of the apocalypse!

First War: we’re still engaged in one because the Toddler and his government have no idea how to end it. And the options for doing so are steadily getting worse.

“We are asking small towns — many with no dedicated cybersecurity staff members and little money to spare — to protect essential infrastructure against hackers linked to other nations.” The Toddler has slashed cybersecurity funding and whines that (of course) the real problem is Democrats, not Iran.

“Using munitions is not necessarily a bad thing. They exist to be used. The question facing the United States is whether the risk in a future conflict arising from reduced inventories is worth the gain in the current conflict.” More on how and why we’re depleting our munitions here, here and here.

“Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win. Hegseth literally believes that the secret of military might in an age of AI-enabled drones that can travel hundreds of miles is more testosterone.”

The conflict between military GPS-blocking tech and civilian navigation needs.

The Toddler says the war is going great. Unsurprisingly the Toddler is pissed when he gets questioned about Iran. But he’s very sad about soldier deaths — though the Pentagon is also fudging the body count. And lying some more. Oh, and any right-wing criticism he gets? It doesn’t bother him at all.

“Iran’s military budget is a rounding error in our military budget. And we lost. For all practical purposes, we’ve left ourselves in a much weaker position and Iran in a stronger position than it was before. But Trump has to believe or has to claim that he believes that the whole world is extremely impressed.” And no, the Toddler does not have a policy on Iran, or on anything.

The Toddler hasn’t forgotten he wants to conquer Greenland and Canada. Small wonder China is winning as the Iran war continues.

Next Plague: The Toddler is now demanding SecHealth Kennedy go anti-vax even faster. And it’s not like Kennedy wasn’t already pushing the non-existent vaccine/autism link. Which has helped us set new records for measles cases. Digby speculates the Toddler’s seized on vaccines causing autism because Barron’s on the spectrum and the Toddler needs someone to blame. LGM suggests it’s the Toddler’s ego — if vaccines cause autism, then he can be the hero who cures autism.

“The Trump administration has effectively shut down most of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s activities, closing the spigot on federal funding estimated to have saved thousands of lives and billions of dollars over the past 27 years by improving medical practice.”

We’re also gutting HIV prevention programs.

And like his boss, Kennedy lies. Getting rid of the vaccine court would advance his goal of getting rid of vaccines.

Jay Bhattacharya, now head of the National Institutes of Health, was a crackpot critic of mask mandates who predicted a covid death-toll of 40,000 so no big deal. He was dead wrong but now he’s whining about how all the criticism the Toddler’s health officials get is because of the media and Joe Biden.

The attacks on science-based medicine keep getting worse. And so does the incoherent lies of the right wing about how covid was no big deal even though Anthony Fauci was a monster for unleashing such a terrible disease (he didn’t). Here’s more incoherent lies and political paranoia.

And we know how useless the CDC under Kennedy has been at monitoring the explosive diarrhea problem. And they’re not responding well either.

“The Trump administration plans to end a subsidy program that helped hold down premiums for Medicare drug plans, a move that could leave many seniors facing higher rates for their prescription coverage next year.”

How about Famine? “The U.S. Department of Agriculture has warned grocery stores across the country to avoid providing discounts to SNAP recipients who will not be receiving their full benefits this month, claiming it would be a violation of the rules governing the program. Here’s now food banks are prepping for the cuts.

And there’s Death. From being unable to get abortions even in a miscarriage. Even when you’re close to bleeding out. And now we have probable next Attorney General Todd “I’m so over the Epstein files” Blanche declaring he’ll be very aggressive in restricting abortion rights further.

I suppose killing the economy is something of a stretch on this theme, but hey, it’s my blog. So let’s note Republicans gave the Toddler the power to impose even worse tariffs. And despite the claims illegal immigrants are taking all the American jobs, deporting them hasn’t prevented a labor-market slump.

And of course, the appointment of Todd Blanche as AG will further the death of the rule of law.

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August 9, 2026 · 4:49 pm

Young women, real and fictional

THE GIRLS: An All-American Town, a Predatory Doctor, and the Untold Story of the Gymnasts Who Brought Him Down by Abigail Pesta looks at the case of Larry Nassar, the respected doctor for the US gymnastics team and for gymnasts at Michigan State, who took advantage of his position to molest and sexually assault hundreds of girls. Pesta tells the story through the accounts of a dozen or so of Nassar’s victims, starting with the girl who may have been his first to one of the last before everything crashed down.

The book shows serious competitive gymnastics was often an abusive environment to start with, as coaches pushed their students beyond the limits of safety and verbally abused them for not getting it right, being too heavy, being too stressed, etc. Nassar, however, was a whole ‘nother level of horror, fingering girls in what he claimed was a therapeutic technique; that he was such a prolific predator proved an advantage as obviously if he felt up every girl it had to be a standard technique, nothing weird, right? Pesta shows how Nassar groomed and charmed the gymnasts, and their parents; while some girls did report him, it never led to anything. Infuriatinly, though unsurprisingly, it wasn’t even a coordinated cover-up (that came later, when Michigan State got seriously worried) — dozens of different people independently took no action, either because they didn’t believe the reports or they didn’t want to challenge someone with Nassar’s rep or who knows why. The book is well executed but grim.

Which may be why I’m going with something more uplifting for my illustration, Wisp asleep:

Leigh Bardugo’s THE FAMILIAR is a romantasy in a similar vein to Lies that Summon the Night and Arcana Academy, with the protagonist forced to wield her magical powers for a sinister, attractive man with everything she needs except her freedom (in the words of the old Flash Gordon serial). In this case, though, Luzia is a scullerymaid in late 1500s Spain and a converso, a Jew who practices the Catholic faith. The Inquisition, though, suspects all such Jews as fake Christians so if anyone ever spots anything suspicious about her, she’s in trouble.

That makes it a major problem when Luzia magically repairs a burned loaf of bread: her employer notices and before long Luzia is swept up by a more powerful noble and placed in a contest to select a holy champion to serve the Spanish king. It’s risky; if anyone suspects her powers don’t come from God, the Inquisition will take her. However it’s a path out of a life where she will never be anything but a kitchen drudge, sleeping on an earth floor. Then there’s Santangel, her new employer’s strange, supernatural agent. Cold, cruel, ruthless, he sees her as nothing but a tool for his master … doesn’t he?

This worked much better than the two earlier books using this set-up. The real-world setting adds punch and making it a done-in-one suited me more than having it launch yet another series. On the downside, the Luzia/Santangel romance feels very perfunctory and the magic needed more explanation. I don’t need an elaborate magic system but I wanted some explanation why Luzia has her powers (Christian god? Jewish god? Satan?). As is, she might as well be a mutant. Despite those flaws, I really enjoyed this.

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August 8, 2026 · 5:28 am

Fallen women on screen

While at ConGregate last month, I had a quiet stretch in my room in the early morning and wound up watching GABY (1956), which though I didn’t know it was a remake of Waterloo Bridge.

Leslie Caron plays the eponymous protagonist, a French dancer who fled the Nazi occupation to London after the death of her parents. John Kerr is Greg, an American GI who’s never met anyone so elegant and sophisticated and falls for her like a ton of bricks. Before long, vows are exchanged; I assumed that having married in haste, the drama would come when they repented at leisure (Gaby’s parents are alive and Vichy or something equally shocking). Wrong. After Greg apparently dies on D-Day Gaby, currently unemployed, turns to sex work to support herself. When Greg returns, injured but alive, Gaby is to guilty to live and walks out into a German V-2 rocket bombardment.

Admittedly I wasn’t paying close attention to the film — it’s not that gripping and I was doing other stuff during parts of it — but I was surprised to realize Gaby was selling her body rather than just sleeping around. Maybe it was me not paying attention but it’s possible the Production Code forced the filmmakers to keep things much less obvious than in Waterloo Bridge, especially as Gaby doesn’t pay for her life for her sins. Instead Greg tells her that war is hell, people do terrible things — but it’s over now, let’s put it behind us. “I thought all Americans were divorced?”

My serial watching of Stephen Soderbergh came to a halt when I couldn’t find 2009’s THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE anywhere streaming. Finally, though, I ordered the DVD. This is one of Soderbergh’s art films (as opposed to crowd-pleasers like Ocean’s Eleven), with porn star Sasha Grey playing a sex worker dealing with men ranging from her slightly jealous live-in boyfriend to a client who might be more to various clients who want to give her advise on investing or better design for her website. As Roger Ebert says, most of them are buying sex but what they really want is to be told how smart they are.

The book Marked Women has a whole chapter on “prostitute as businesswoman” films. These include left-wing critiques showing how capitalism corrupts even sexual relations and those that show sex work is simply work, a job like any other. This film definitely fits the second category: Grey’s character is a businesswoman and her business is considerably safer because she runs it through the Internet (something Samantha Cole brings up in How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex). Overall, I liked the film, though while I agree with Soderbergh not diving deep into her motives (as he says on the commentary track, it’s too easy to go cliched), the result is that it never gets below the surface of her life. “I’ve told them I can’t make the junket to Vegas.”

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