Hugh Eakin, Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America. John Quinn is the hero of this story. Who’s he? He was a wealthy Irish-American lawyer on Wall Street in the early part of the twentieth century. He supported James Joyce, the various Yeatses, the later-famous Irish playwrights, Irish painters, and Pound and Eliot, all before they became accepted and then famous. What a talent spotter. He simply sent them money. He was also very early on the Picasso and Henri Rousseau bandwagons, most of all in America, where Quinn was a central figure in popularizing, collecting, and displaying modern art. His is a career to study, and this book is the place to start.
OUT ON A LIMB: Could masks be making us sick? “That’s the suggestion in a Japanese study, published this week in Nature’s Scientific Report’s journal, which looked at bacterial and fungal growth on face masks worn during the pandemic. The results may put you off your tea.”
How does the brain decide what memories are good and bad? A new mouse study offers cluesSTAT
The Finders: A Social Experiment Failed State Update
Congress Might Pass an Actually Good Privacy Bill - Wired
Wired: “Usually, when Congress is working on major tech legislation, the inboxes of tech reporters get flooded with PR emails from politicians and nonprofits either denouncing or trumpeting the proposed statute. Not so with the American Data Privacy and Protection Act. A first draft of the bill seemed to pop up out of nowhere in June. Over the next month, it went through so many changes that no one could say for sure what it was even designed to do. For such an important topic, the bill’s progress has been surprisingly under the radar. Now comes an even bigger surprise:
A new version of the ADPPA has taken shape, and privacy advocates are mostly jazzed about it. It just might have enough bipartisan support to become law—meaning that, after decades of inaction, the United States could soon have a real federal privacy statute. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the new bill is that it focuses on what’s known as data minimization. Generally, companies would only be allowed to collect and make use of user data if it’s necessary for one of 17 permitted purposes spelled out in the bill—things like authenticating users, preventing fraud, and completing transactions. Everything else is simply prohibited.
Contrast this with the type of online privacy regime most people are familiar with, which is all based on consent: an endless stream of annoying privacy pop-ups that most people click “yes” on because it’s easier than going to the trouble of turning off cookies. That’s pretty much how the European Union’s privacy law, the GDPR, has played out…”
ROGER KIMBALL: On Not Saying “I Told You So.”
Don’t you hate when people say “I told you so?”
It’s especially galling when they’re right.
So, I won’t say “I told you so” to the anti-Trump sorority who had their knickers in a twist over Trump’s “character” (and here) while Joe Biden sat in his basement gibbering vacantly while counting the pelf he and his family had raked in from the Chinese and other influence seekers.
“Oh, but at least Joe Biden acts like an adult. At least he will reestablish an atmosphere of normality in The White House.”
Did you think so? I didn’t.
The problem with trying to assess the Biden administration is that none of our usual metrics work any longer.
Biden’s poll numbers are panic-inducing.
The last I checked, his approval rating was 30 percent. Thirty.
Still, the free fall we are witnessing is too rapid for our usual instruments to register accurately.
Signs were there from the beginning, from before the beginning, as some of us were pointing out.
But I suppose the signs became incontrovertible when Biden presided over our disastrous leave-taking in Afghanistan last summer about this time.
Overnight, we made the Taliban the best-armed terrorist group in the world, bequeathing them billions in state-of-the-art U.S. weaponry.
We also stood by and did nothing after 13 U.S. servicemen were murdered by irate locals.
“Never,” wrote one commentator at the time, “have I witnessed a greater, swifter collapse of competence than what I have seen with the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan.”
Afghanistan was a line in the sand.
Since then it has been one disaster after the next.
So many it is hard to keep track.
Our southern border: essentially gone.
Inflation: at a 40-year high.
Gas prices: at historic highs.
The economy: stuttering to a standstill or worse. We just had two quarters of negative growth, i.e., we are in a recession.
Our foreign policy: a joke.
And the punchline to that joke?
The most recent one involves Joe Biden’s affectionate little fist bump with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on his recent visit.
It wasn’t so long ago that Biden describe MBS as a “pariah.”
Even a few weeks ago, he said he would not meet with the smooth but deadly de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.
But that was before the reality of high gas prices in the United States swam into the consciousness of the leader of the free world.
Biden came away from that tour with—nothing.
Plus: “I almost feel sorry for the Democrats (emphasis on the adverb). They are saddled—rather, they have saddled themselves—with a disaster. They pushed this corrupt, incompetent, senile fool on us. Now they must pay the price.”
They’re paying a price. But ultimately it’s America that’s paying the price.
