WARNING: SPOILERS 

Could’ve used more Ana de Armas.

“No Time to Die,” the 25th James Bond movie, and the fifth and last to star Daniel Craig, has a lot of problems, but at least it's unintentionally ironic. It was scheduled to open in April 2020 but was delayed by … what was it again? … oh right, a global pandemic that shuttered theaters, restaurants, everything, and, as of this writing, per Johns Hopkins, has killed 5.4 million people worldwide. As a result, distributors decided to delay release by a year and a half. They figured April 2020 was no time to die. Or at least no time to gross a billion dollars.

More, the movie’s maguffin, the thing that causes Bond to travel around the world and battle the bad guys, is in fact a virus—the manufactured, nanobot kind—which can be programmed to kill a person or family, or entire races, and once it’s in your system you can never get rid of it. The filmmakers seem to go out of their way to explain what this means. “You infect enough people…” Q (Ben Whishaw) begins, “… and people become the weapon!” Bond finishes. Yeah, don’t need to underline that one anymore, guys. It’s 2021. We get it. 

But to me the movie’s greatest irony is this. For decades, James Bond has been one of the ultimate male wish-fulfillment fantasies—a superspy with supersexy women literally at his feet, but you always had the sense it was kind of necessary for the job. He had to be coldhearted to be clear-eyed to win the day. But increasingly Bond was seen as clashing with his times. His own boss, played by Judi Dench, called him a “misogynistic dinosaur,” and that was a quarter century ago. So with the Daniel Craig iteration, which began in 2006, they’ve made him less of a lothario. The three Bond girls per flick? Gone. This Bond actually falls in love: with Vesper (Eva Green) in the first film, and now with the Proustian-themed Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), the first official Bond girl to appear in more than one film. Bond loses her in the beginning, gets her back in the middle, and near the end discovers they have a kid together—a 5-year-old girl named Mathilde (Lisa-Dorah Sonnet). That’s right, James Bond is a dad. He’s a caring family man, an upstanding, sensitive role model for the 21st century.

And it kills him.

007s
I guess that’s the big reveal: James Bond dies in this one. We get a lot of deaths: Bond, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), most of SPECTRE. They’re cleaning house before the reboot.

The movie also introduces a new 007 and this time she’s Black. At one point, M (Ralph Fiennes) says “Where’s 007?” and we cut to Bond on a sailboat off Jamaica. But that’s misdirection. M is really talking about Nomi (Lashana Lynch, Maria Rambeau in the Marvel Universe). 

Question: Why did they make her so obsessed with the number? She’s constantly throwing it in Bond’s face:

• Upon meeting him: “I’m not just any old double-oh. I’m 007. [Pause] You probably thought they’d retire it.”
• After others greet her as 007 at MI-6: “That must annoy you.”
• After Bond is reinstated as a double-oh: “Double-oh what? … Double-oh what!”

I assume they did this to piss off the racist, sexist trollers of the world who can’t imagine a Black, female 007, but it doesn’t make much sense in their reality. Does Bond really care about his employee ID? Plus it makes her annoying as fuck. And of course, at the 11th hour, she gives it back anyway.

Three male writers worked on this—Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and director Cary Joji Fukunaga— and though they added Phoebe Waller-Bridge of “Fleabag” fame, they’re not great with the female characters. OK, I liked wide-eyed newbie agent Paloma (de Armas), wearing a dress to knock your socks off, and Naomie Harris’ return as Moneypenny, flirtatiously flipping Bond’s visitor ID badge at MI-6. Both were fun. But they’re minor characters. The movie’s biggest problem is its biggest female character. Madeleine Swann is weak. As in weak-willed. She’s just a weepy, uninteresting thing.

As a child, she witnesses the murder of her mother at the hands of the Noh-masked and ridiculously named Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), this movie’s baddie, who then saves her life when she falls through the ice. So is she SPECTRE? That’s what we think, and that’s what Bond thinks when he’s attacked while vacationing with Madeleine on the coast of Italy. Cyclops (Dali Bennalah), the movie’s henchman, is in the midst of being strangled by Bond when he manages to gasp out “Madeleine is a daughter of SPECTRE”; then Blofeld phones her to thank her for helping them. Bond overhears and glares. Does she protest her innocence? Kinda. Weepily. Guiltily. So Bond puts her on a train and out of his life.

Later, the incarcerated Blofeld tells Bond that she was innocent all along—that he did it to break Bond’s heart. “My poor little cuckoo,” he says. “You were always so very, very sensitive.” That’s a good bit, and too true in this iteration, but when does he say it? Right before Bond kills him. And how does Bond kill him? Unknowingly, via Madeleine. It’s so stupid. She’s Blofeld’s shrink, his only contact, so Safin re-enters her life to give her a perfume laden with the nanobot virus targeting Blofeld, and threatens her child unless she uses it. So she does. But then she can’t go through with it. And Bond grabs her wrist and gets the virus on him.

I don’t get her relationship with Safin at all. He saves her life … and then disappears for 25 years? And then shows up and demands the Blofeld thing? And then he sends his team to Sweden or wherever to bring her and her child to his private island? And in one of those dull “We’re not so different, you and I” moments with Bond, Safin says he loves her, too?

WTF?

Check out this exchange between Madeleine and Bond. We’re an hour and forty minutes into the thing and our hero finally hears about the villain.

She: Now he’s back.
He: What does he want?
She: Revenge. [Shrugs] Me.

What does the guy want? That’s the fundamental question of drama, but after Safin kills most of SPECTRE—to avenge his family’s death at their hands—we have no fucking idea what he wants. So the filmmakers make it all about a vague revenge. And [shrug] her.

I don’t get Madeleine’s relationship with Bond, either. It’s not just that Craig and Seydoux have zero chemistry, she’s given nothing to do. She succumbs to the subterfuge that she betrayed Bond in Italy, she succumbs to Safin’s demand that she kill Blofeld; and when Bond shows up in Sweden or wherever, and sees the quiet, despressive child with the startlingly blue eyes, she lies to him. She tells him it’s not his. Twice. This is the love of James Bond’s life? The woman he’s willing to kill himself over?

Remember how cold-hearted and clear-eyed Bond used to be? This is what he tells Madeleine in Sweden:

I don’t know if you wanted me to come here, or why you tried to kill Blofeld, or who gave you the poison to do it, or how long you’ve been working for them…

Our action hero, ladies and gentleman.

Poor little cuckoo
At least we get some nice homages. The hall of Ms, for example, with its paintings of Judi Dench and Bernard Lee. Bond tossing his ID badge into Moneypenny’s wastebasket the way Connery used to toss his fedora onto Moneypenny’s hat rack. Winding up alone in the life raft after Felix’s death, the way the early Bonds wound up with the Bond girl. Shooting the unseen baddie in the tunnel and making it look like the gun barrel sequence. “James Bond will return” after the end credits.

I liked seeing a bit of Q’s life. I liked when Bond tries to reenter MI-6 for the first time since retirement, and we get a different kind of “Bond, James Bond” line. The security guard asks his name, he says “Bond,” the security guard looks blank, so he adds, annoyed, “James Bond?” Fun. Smart.

But why give up the sexcapades and keep the bad puns? “It was an eye-opening experience.” Oof. Stop it already. Why keep the idiocy of the villain’s island hideout, with its industrial lair, security guards, and bowing serfs? Didn’t the “Austin Powers” movies kill off those conceits? Why go Jack London for the post-mortem toast? What, no good British writers to choose from? And why not end it there—with M saying “Back to work”? That’s a good end. Why cut to Madeleine and Mathilde driving along some seaside road, and Madeleine saying she’ll tell her a story about a man, James Bond, and Mathilde smiling her sickly smile? Why hire that girl to play Mathilde in the first place? She brings nothing. Why end with a Louis Armstrong song like it’s a Nora Fucking Ephron movie?

Above all, why did you ruin James Bond?

This is how they kill off the world’s greatest secret agent. After putting the women, including Nomi(?), into a boat to safety, he stays behind on the island. “I have to finish this,” he tells Madeleine. “For us.” For us? No longer for England and freedom and all that? Since the island is a nanobot virus farm, the Brits are going to blow it up, and Bond has to make sure the bloody blast doors are open. And he does. But then Safin shows up, blah blah, and speechifies before Bond tackles him into a fountain and brutally breaks his arm. Ah, but Safin has been carrying a vial with the nanobot virus targeting Madeleine’s and Mathilda’s DNA, and it gets in the water and on Bond. Now, if he ever sees them again, he will kill them. Ha ha ha ha.

(Aside: Why did Safin tell Bond all this? If he’d said nothing, Bond would’ve killed the woman and daughter he loved. Surely that would’ve been more painful. For that matter, why is MI-6 so sure blowing up the island will destroy the nanobot virus? I thought it lived forever?)

Anyway, after Bond realizes he can never see his woman and child ever again, he basically gives up. He just kills Safin and hauls his sorry ass to the rooftop. He doesn’t try to get away. They might as well be playing Harry Nilsson’s “Can’t live/Living is without you” on the soundtrack. It would’ve been better than the dialogue we got: 

Bond: You have made the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. She’s perfect. Because she came from you.
Madeleine: Oh my god, the vial! You have been poisoned. There has to be a way.

There isn’t. They say their I love yous and Madeleine finally admits the child is his.

Madeleine: She does have your eyes.
Bond: I know.

He watches the rockets coming toward him.

Bond: I know. 

And that’s that. Boom. James Bond’s last line.

When they reboot this thing, I beg them to bring back the frivolous sex and the cold heart. James Bond can’t be us. They turn him into us and he dies. But first they make him dull.

Longtime Mariners third baseman Kyle Seager announced his retirement yesterday, which I first heard through retweets of his wife's Twitter account. That seems to be the way they announced it. Seager, who always seemed sensible, doesn't do social media.

I'm seeing a lot of commentary about how he went out with a bang, hitting 35 homers with 101 RBIs in 2021, both career highs, and how the 35 dingers are the second-most in baseball history for a player's final season—after David Ortiz's 38 in 2016. That is impressive. Less impressive, and less commented upon, is Seager's career-low 2021 batting average, .212, and the second-lowest OBP of his career, .285. He also set a career low in hits over a full season (128) and a career high in strikeouts (161). He became a kind of two-outcome guy: 24% of his plate appearances were strikeouts and 27% of his hits were homers.

His saddest record, though, isn't on him: For players who played their entire careers in the 21st century, Seager is second to Adam Dunn in games played without ever making the postseason. And with Dunn you can spread the blame around; he played for six teams. Seager just played for the M's. The onus is on them. And if you expand the parameters to players who played their entire careers in the post-1969 playoff era? Seager is 15th on the list, but, again, every player above him played for multiple teams. Think of that, M's fans. In the playoff era, no player has played more games for just one team without ever making the postseason. Unleash the mojo. 

That mojo was apparent from the beginning. I'd forgotten this, or never knew it, but Seager made his Major League debut on July 7, 2011, after only two weeks in AAA, and went 0-4 in a 5-1 loss to the Angels. At that point, the M's were only two games below .500 and 4.5 games out of first place in the weak AL West. They still seemed to have a shot. Instead, they would go on to lose the next 15 in a row, setting a team record with 17 straight losses, and Kyle started in seven of those games before being reassigned to AAA Tacoma on July 21. That was his intro to the club: lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose. It was a horrific team, finishing dead last in almost every major offensive category. And the reason Kyle was rushed to the Majors the way he was? Our everyday third baseman was a guy named Chone Figgins. Yeah, that team.

But Seager showed us something. He was brought back in early August and was hitting .111 on August 6. Three weeks later, he was hitting .310. In a 10-game stretch from mid-to-late August, he hit .500 with an .816 slugging percentage, and the Mariners future suddenly seemed more than just hoping Dustin Ackley might finally turn things around.

Did Seager ever live up to that promise? He was a solid .200/.300/.400 guy with a slight upward trajectory in his early years. His batting averages, for example, went: .258, .259, .260, .268. We were hoping at some point he'd bust loose, and the M's, probably hoping the same, took a gamble. In December 2014, a year after we'd shoveled a ton of money at Robinson Cano, and a day before we signed Nelson Cruz to a four-year deal, the M's inked Seager to a seven-year, $100 million contract. In 2014, he'd made the All-Star team and won a Gold Glove, and maybe the M's were banking he'd keep doing that, but he would never do either again. For a few years, though, the upward trajectory continued, and in 2016 he went .278/.359/.499 and finished 12th in the MVP voting with the 8th-best bWAR in the American League: 6.7. And he was only 29. But all of those would be career highs. He would never hit over .250 again and would retire with a .251/.321/.442 line.

He's all over the M's record books, particularly in the counting stats, firmly lodged in fourth place in Games Played, At Bats, Hits and Total Bases, with the same triumverate ahead of him: Edgar, Ichiro, Junior. He's fourth in homeruns and RBIs, with Jay Buhner replacing Ichiro. He's third in strikeouts. Seager has the seventh-most bWAR in M's history. One asumes he'll make the Mariners Hall of Fame. One assumes no one wears #15 again except the fans in the stands.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

“Some say the world will end in fire,” Robert Frost wrote, “Some say in ice.” Adam McKay chimes in, “Hey, how about stupidity?”

I’m kind of with McKay on this one.

“Don’t Look Up” is McKay’s “Dr. Strangelove,” an absurdist satire on the ways we might bring the great wheel to a crashing end. The A-bomb is old news by now. McKay, writing and directing from a story from left-wing politico David Sirota, posits stupid people watching stupid shows and electing stupid politicians who are bankrolled by stupid CEOs. And a comet runs right through us.

Like humanity, the movie is good for a time.

It’s you that I lie with
A Michigan grad student and her professor, Kate Dibiasky and Dr. Randall Mindy (Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio), discover a new/old comet, celebrate for a moment, plot its trajectory, then realize it’s heading straight for Earth. It’s the size of Mount Everest, will arrive in 6+ months, and end all life on the planet. It’s that old plot, but with no Bruce Willis or even a Ben Affleck in sight.

Our astronomers try to get the message out but can't bust through layers of irrelevance. The head of NASA, for example, is a political appointee who knows nothing of space or comets and doesn’t sense the danger. And even when they do get an audience with President Orlean (Meryl Streep), she’s more concerned with SCOTUS appointments and upcoming midterms. Plus she’s an idiot, too—closer to Sarah Palin than Hillary Clinton.

So our heroes head to the press. Surely a Woodward or Bernstein will help. But somehow they wind up on “The Daily Rip,” and only “The Daily Rip,” a chirpy morning or afternoon show (I can’t tell), where they are the final guests, upstaged by the break-up/reconciliation of pop stars Riley Bina and DJ Chello (Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi), and where Dr. Mindy’s overly scientific approach has trouble getting  past the effusive upbeatness of the hosts, Brie Evantee and Jack Bremmer (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry). So Kate angrily blurts it all out: “We are all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” she screams. Even this doesn’t work. She becomes a meme, mocked on social media, while Dr. Mindy is celebrated but not for his intellect. “Meooow. Me likey hunky Star Man,” tweets @Vegan*Babe. That one made me laugh out loud. At this point, I was thinking, “Why is this getting mixed reviews? It’s pretty spot-on.”

I think, at two hours, 18 minutes, it just goes on too long—again, like us—and some subplots don’t hit. Both astronomers lose focus. Dr. Mindy gets swept up in it all and has an affair with Brie, while Kate becomes so ostracized she leaves academia and winds up as a cashier at a kwiki-mart type place, where she meets some skateboarders and begins a relationship with Yule (Timothée Chalamet). Sure. But who cares? And why the fuck would you work customer service when you know the world is ending in two months? Has Adam McKay ever worked customer service before? That’s the last thing you’d do.

Meanwhile, Pres. Orlean finally takes notice, confirms the data with Ivy Leaguers, and launches a rocket’s red glare assault on the meteor led by the super-macho, overly racist Benedict Drask (Ron Perlman). But this plan is aborted when tech billionaire Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) informs the president that the minerals in the comet are worth trillions. So they attempt to break it apart by mining it. (I think.) Dr. Mindy finally comes out of his fog to lead the scientific community, admonishing the world to “look up,” while Pres. Orlean tells her nutjob base the opposite: “Don’t look up!” she says, giving them a chant, a la “Lock her up!” and the movie its title.

It’s you I watch TV with
The look up/don’t look up thing is good, and Rylance’s on-the-spectrum tech billionaire in a million-dollar jacket is brilliant. But the rest of the movie? A bit obvious, or a bit much, or beside-the-point. Isherwell’s plan fails, the world braces for its end. What would you do if you knew everything was about to end? The rich and powerful get on a transport to another planet, but Dr. Mindy turns this down to reconcile with his wife. That’s the end he chooses. He and his family, and Kate and Yule, along with a sympathetic government man (Rob Morgan), have a last meal and prayer around the dining table. Sure. I liked Jack and Brie’s final moments better. He asks if she wants to fuck but she decides she’d rather just drink and dish dirt about people. Great line. 

Oh, and the epilogue on the other planet, where Pres. Orlean finally gets hers? Nah. I wanted to see these people die, but that did nothing for me.

“Don’t Look Up” attempts the impossible: satirizing things that seem beyond satire (Trump, social media, et al.). And it did make me flash on that great post-9/11 Onion headline again: A SHATTERED NATION LONGS TO CARE ABOUT STUPID BULLSHIT AGAIN. This is us caring only about the stupid bullshit as the world caves in.

The other night we watched “Meet Me in St. Louis” for the first time in forever, and so this morning, when I woke too early, the traditional song “Skip to My Lou,” sung by the Smith family and their guests, was bouncing around in my head. (Not, oddly, the better-known songs “The Trolley Song” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”) Though in the brain fog of sleep, I couldn't quite get one of the verses. I was thinking: “Butterfly in the ... milk? No, that scanned wrong. Butterfly in the buttermilk? That seemed more right. But why would you worry about a butterfly? Doesn't everyone love a butterfly?”

A second later, when I was more awake, it hit:

Fly in the buttermilk — shoo shoo shoo

But then what about the “Skip to the Loo” part? And that's what I was thinking it was: the loo. Was “loo” a bathroom? Was “loo” to the left? Skip to the left? That kind of made sense. But wrong. It's “my lou,” and according to Wikipedia, via Alan Lomax's “The Folk Songs of North America” (New York: Doubleday, 1960), it's Scottish for “my love.” It was a partner-swapping song—the swipe right/left of its time. One wonders if you could update a verse that way.

Swipe to the left of me —shoo shoo shoo
Swipe to the left of me — shoo shoo shoo
Swipe to the right of me — who are you?
Skip to my lou my darling

Here's the Smith family and their guests going at it. Have yourself a merry little Christmas. 

The other night, reading Amor Towles' “A Gentleman in Moscow” on my Kindle, I looked up the word desultory the way you do on an e-reader—highlighting the word, and if you're connected to wi-fi, getting the answer from whatever dictionary has an agreement with Amazon. Yesterday, after hearing of the death of Joan Didion at the age of 87, I was looking through the books of hers that I owned, and in “Salvador,” which I'd read in the mid-90s, I found I'd underlined the word desultory and wrote its meaning in the margins. Lesson? Tech may change the way we read but I learn nothing. 

A lot of encomia for Didion in the usual places—The New York Times, social media, fans and fans and fans—but she's never been an author who blew me away with her insights. I remember reading “Salvador” and thinking, “Where's the oomph?” Norman Mailer roared in, demanded, made a fool of himself, then wrote about it. He was, in a word he liked to overuse, engagé. Didion wasn't. At all. She held the world at an ironic distance, and maybe I had too much of that in myself to admire it in others. She went to places and interviewed people but it all seemed a little distasteful to her. Apparently she didn't like interviewing people. She assumed they would lie, or miss the point, or self-mythologize. She wasn't wrong. 

She made a name for herself with her “Slouching Towards Bethlehelm” piece in The Saturday Evening Post, when you could say she was part of the media missing the mark or manufacturing the story (apparently the cover was designed before she turned the piece in); then she spent much of the rest of her career writing about the media missing the mark or manufacturing the story. I think those are some of her best pieces: “Insider Baseball,” for example, about the way the press covered the 1988 presidential campaign, and “Sentimental Journeys,” about the Central Park Jogger case. She was one of the first in the press to imply that the Central Park Five received nothing like a fair trial. The press and the politicians made a symbol out of the jogger, and another type of symbol out of the Five, and for the city to survive the negative symbol had to be punished and put away and forgotten. We still do this, by the way. We've actually gotten worse at it. We're all the press now and we make symbols of everything. 

I think she got Obama's 2008 election wrong, or she took the easy way out and mocked those who were way too exuberant in its aftermath; but at least she was less wrong than some, like Daryl Pickney, with whom her thoughts were partnered in The New York Review of Books. He wrote: “The election of Senator Obama to the presidency signals our return to a nation whose government respects law and order.” He wrote: “President Obama will certainly save the Supreme Court and therefore the US Constitution. The integrity of our institutions has been guaranteed, restored.” Ouch and ouch.

In my trip through my decades-old margin scribblings in her books, I didn't come across much worth repeating, save one thing in “Salvador.” It was about the crash of a helicopter that killed a colonel whom she was trying to meet, and subsequent reports were so vague as to be nonexistent. She writes; “In the absence of information (and the presence, often, of disinformation) even the most apparently straightforward event takes on, in El Salvador, elusive shadows, like a fragment of retrieved legend.” You can remove “in El Salvador” from that sentence now; that's all of us now. Then she went to interview Alvaro Magana, president of El Salvador during this time, but his hold was tenuous, as he knew above all. Her questions to him were answered with indefinites: “I read that,” and “I have that impression,” and finally, when she asks simply where the crash took place, he says “I didn't ask him.” The him is a general. Didion gives Magana a look, he shrugs and says:

I have a problem there. I'm supposed to be the commander-in-chief, so if I ask him he should tell me. But he might say he's not going to tell me, then I would have to arrest him. So I don't ask.

That feels like the GOP with Trump now. They're the officials, they should hold the power, but the power is elsewhere. It's with someone who lost in a way it's never been with someone who lost. Did she ever write about Trump? I'll have to search that out. (Apparently not.) I'll also have to get “Where I Was From,” whose subject, Menand says, is “American self-deception,” and good god that topic. That never ends.

I do recommend Louis Menand's 2015 review of a biography on her. There's a lot there. I also think she would think that much of the encomia following her passing misses the mark. I think she would have something biting to say about it all.

Here's a series of dreams from the other night—the night I was contemplating canceling our Xmas flight to Minneapolis because of the Omicron variant. And I did wind up canceling it. Going, and possibly exposing family and loved ones, felt wrong. But as soon as I canceled, not going felt wrong, too. it was wrong either way. Anyway, here's what I dreamed the night before choosing whichever wrong way.

I was at a party in the home of a successful Minneapolis couple and was hearing snippets of conversations about how such-and-such's son had received a summer internship offer from such-and-such top politician—and it wasn't even his best offer! It was people I didn't know, and didn't really care about, and I was ready to go. I was standing in the screened-in porch in my overcoat, waiting on a friend so we could leave. 

I was making small talk with the husband/father, congratulating him on something to do with his son, when I saw Hubert H. Humphrey and Walter Mondale walking up the sidewalk to the house. Humphrey seemed full of pep and vigor, like he was 1960s Humphrey, while Mondale was slow and wan, like he'd just been through, or was still going through, a grave illness. I was the first person to greet them. “Mr. Vice President,” I said to Humphrey, nodding and shaking his hand. “Mr. Vice President,” I said to Mondale, nodding and shaking his hand. I was amused by this but stumbled a bit on Mondale. Humphrey greeted me by name. “Erik!” he cried, then made small talk, to both me and the room. I was wondering, “Does Hubert Humphrey know me?” until I realized I was still wearing my nametag from a Minnesota Law & Politics event on my shirt. So did he recognize the badge? L&P? Had he been at the event, too? I asked him something about the nametag but he was dismissive. At first I thought he was dismissive of nametags but it was the coat I was wearing. It was the idea of standing there, ready to leave, without leaving.

He and Mondale entered the party, celebrities, but not quite, the old guard really. They were apart from everyone. D. was inside, too, by the dining table, being admonished by someone who was angry he'd gotten a “Jeopardy!” answer/question wrong. It was a rhyming answer. Something about “sees us” and “please us” and the answer, or question, was supposed to be “Who was Jesus?” and D. had said something like “Jesub,” so the guy was admonishing him. It was suppose to be joking, in fun, but his tone kept getting angrier and angrier, and D. didn't take it well. He was drinking coffee, and he grabbed a can of Reddi-Whip off the dining table and petulantly fitzed it into his coffee. Was he supposed to be on a diet? And this wasn't that? The angry dude was suddenly calmer: “C'mon, no need for that,” he said. He suddenly seemed the adult in the room, while D. seemed physically smaller.

I was biking with J. to some building—a room above my room, which I wanted to show her because it was so cool-looking, but how had I found it before? I was lost. J. said it must be further along so we got back on the bikepath. We were riding slowly but faster than everyone around us. Then I realized, “Wait, we've gone way too far,” and we doubled back, but now we were on a street, something like the area between Nicollet and Lyndale in South Minneapolis, like 58th, and at an intersection we came upon an old strip mall. “Have you ever seen this?” I asked. She hadn't. It was quaint, like something from the past, but not monetized quaint, just old and dim. There was a paper supply shop. I wondered: How could that still be in existence? Particularly after the pandemic. All the shops were open, but barely. There was a bookstore, and we walked down the stairs, but the front of the bookstore was simply full of colorful, sad, useless items in cellophane, sold in bundles.

• Nice Guardian article on Peter Jackson's “Get Back” documentary from the British perspective: How the street-level interviews during the rooftop concert reveal a Savile Row London that no longer exists, that went away with the times, even as the representation of those times, the Beatles, in music, dress and action, seem timeless: “aliens from the future” author Jonathan Freedland calls them. He's particularly poignant on their modern male empathy: John and Paul realizing they've mistreated George; all of them aware that post-Brian Epstein they've been leaderless, and Paul has tried to step into that role to no one's satisfaction, particularly his. P and I watched all eight hours this month, and parts are a slog, but it's still fascinating. You come away with more respect for them. You watch “Let It Be,” which is no longer available, and you get why they broke up. You watch this and wonder why. They seem to be working it out.
• To honor the great reviews and tepid box office of the new “West Side Story,” Nathaniel and his Film Experience team have posted their top 10 Steven Spielberg films. Main takeaways: They like “A.I.,” “The Color Purple” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (which is No. 1) more than I do, while I like “Saving Private Ryan” (which doesn't make the cut) more than them. My list would probably start with “Jaws,” and would include “Close Encounters,” “Raiders,” “E.T.,” “Empire of the Sun,” “Jurassic Park,” “Schindler's,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Catch Me If You Can,” “Munich” and “Lincoln,” but not sure what order. And then you realize that's 11 movies, not 10, and where do you cut? It's a not-bad exercise that makes you aware, or more aware, what a master the man was.
• Right from the start, New York Times editorial board member Jesse Wegman is all out of fucks to give when it comes to the GOP and “election integrity.” He calls voter fraud a “scam peddled by right-wing con artists.” He says Donald Trump turned fact-free voter fraud charges into an art form but “the exploitation of the predictable public fear generated by that sort of rhetoric has been a central feature of the Republican playbook for years.” He knows the lose-lose game, too: Engage them, and you give them oxygen; ignore them, and let them have the stage. Facts, stats, evidence don't stop the next round of lies. And what election fraud there is mostly comes from a handful of Republicans who've bought into the lies and are trying to balance the scales. And now Jan. 6 idiots “are running for, and often winning, jobs overseeing the running of elections across the country. They are representative of a new generation of Republicans, raised in the fever swamps of Fox News and other purveyors of disinformation, who believe elections are valid only when their candidate wins.” Pay attention. The only thing at stake is American democracy. 
• One of the most disturbing stories I've read in the past few months that got zero traction on social media and the legit press, generally, is Ian Urbina's New Yorker article on the Libyan prisons that keep migrants out of Europe at the behest of the EU. Trumpists aside, it reminds me again why America is exceptional. We are a microcosm of the world. If we can make it work here, the world has a shot.
• Also from The New Yorker, two months back, shockingly powerful and little talked about, is Jennifer Gonnerman's feature on a Baltimore kid in the 1980s who became a state's witness in a homicide of a friend, and the pressure he felt to testify against three peers even though he knew they were innocent. The multiple lives wrecked for the prosecutorial numbers game. Has David Simon seen this? Or is it too much “Been there, done that” for him? 
• Oh right, two more from The New Yorker: Michael Schulman on Jeremy Strong of “Succession,” and Margaret Talbot on Greta Garbo. I came away with greater respect for Strong, and the Garbo piece made me think I should see some of her movies for once. (I'm trying to catch up on New Yorkers. Always a Sisyphean task.)

“The night before the election, [Chris Christie] assured a Canadian interviewer that Trump and Biden were 'both responsible men' and that, should Biden win, there was 'no question in my mind that President Trump will participate in a peaceful transition of power.' Rather than admitting that he was wrong all along about Trump, he touts his own bravery when he tells George Stephanopoulos, on ABC, that 'I disagree' with Trump's seditious course. This is rather like disagreeing with the assault on Fort Sumter.”

-- David Remnick, in The New Yorker, reviewing Christie's new book, “Republican Rescue,” which is all about a path forward for the Republican party. Remnick calls it “MAGA Lite”: Continue to talk positively about Trump so as not to lose the Trumpites, the majority of the party now, talk about “election integrity” without owning up to Jan. 6, and then bring up socialism or Critical Race Theory or the meme of the moment when it comes to the Democrats. Basically go cynical and opportunistic and hope the middle American ground doesn't notice, as it tends not to, particularly during midyear elections. Which are just 11 months away.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The main thing missing from “Mr. Saturday Night,” John Maggio’s documentary on Robert Stigwood, is Robert Stigwood. What do we learn about the man? He was the manager for The Who (but how did he become their manager?), he nearly became the manager for the Beatles (but why did they object?), and he managed the Bee Gees to massive success in the late 1970s. At the 11th hour, we learn that he was gay. He liked young, good-looking men, and hired them, but wasn’t too #MeToo about it. He had an unerring sense of what would be popular. Until he didn’t.

A close second of what’s missing from “Mr. Saturday Night” is a sense of chronology. I’m a broken record on this topic but the culture keeps getting worse at it. 1963 is not 1967 is not 1976. How we got from 1963 to 1967, and then to 1976, is the story, so if you fuck up the chronology you fuck up the story. And “Mr. Saturday Night” keeps fucking up the chronology.

Apologies in advance for this. It’s going to get a little petty.

Superstar
At one point, film producer Kevin McCormick, who got his start as one of those handsome young men at RSO Records, attempts to give us an overview of the movie scene that Stigwood was landing in in the early 1970s. Against a backdrop of Creedence Clearwater Revival singing “Born on the Bayou” in concert, McCormick says this:

From Woodstock on, Hollywood was totally in transition.

Wait, from Woodstock on? That’s a bit late, isn’t it? I’d go earlier—to at least “The Graduate” in 1967.

Then McCormick talks about how Hollywood saved itself by using music to illustrate a movie, and as example we get the opening credits of “Easy Rider,” which was, again, 1969. And again I’m like: Why not Simon and Garfunkel and “The Graduate” from two years earlier?

I’ll cut to the chase: McCormick finally does mention “The Graduate,” and the doc shows Dusty in his convertible with S&G on the soundtrack, but it’s an afterthought. And from there we immediately go to Robert De Niro in “Taxi Driver” in 1976—then to “Dog Day Afternoon” in 1975—and it’s all about how directors had way more creative control back then, which was the milieu Stigwood was landing in. And I’m like: Sure. But Stigwood was a producer, not a director. How does this factor in? And why bounce around chronologically? And what does CCR have to do with any of this?

Meanwhile, the larger point is lost. Stigwood spearheaded his inroads into America through “Jesus Christ Superstar”—a complicated-enough story that the movie does little to clarify. It was actually an album first. I didn’t know that. Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice tried to sell it as a stage production but nobody was buying, so they turned it into a concept album and it took off. A voiceover from Rice, the lyricist, tells us: “When we were doing the ‘Superstar’ album, before it was a show, Robert got in touch with us, and Robert definitely knew what he was doing.” So what was he doing? Who knows? Why was he interested? Who knows? But he helped turn “Superstar” into a stage production, which set longevity records in London, and then a movie. And it began a pattern for Stigwood that the doc touches on but probably should’ve underlined.

This is the pattern: In the first part of the 1970s, two of the biggest movies Stigwood produced were “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Tommy.” What did they have in common? Both were hit albums first. And what did Stigwood do when Paramount began dragging its feet about Stigwood’s “little disco movie” called “Saturday Night Fever”? He turned it into a hit album first. The movie was scheduled for release in December, he released the soundtrack in November, and it became big enough that the movie opened wide enough that it became a huge hit. At least, that’s what the doc says. Some part of me wonders if Stigwood wasn’t planning on releasing the album first anyway.

I mean, if Stigwood invented this concept—release the music first, then the movie—bravo. But I’m doubtful. Because the doc keeps giving him credit for breaking ground on stuff that wasn’t groundbreaking. Turning a TV star (John Travolta) into a movie star, for example. “Nobody had done that,” says a voiceover, “coming from television into feature films.” Sure, nobody. Not Steve McQueen (“Wanted Dead or Alive”), Clint Eastwood (“Rawhide”) or Burt  Reynolds (“Dan August”). Nobody. The doc also implies that making a movie (“Saturday Night Fever”) out of a magazine article (“The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” by Nik Cohn) was unprecedented when it’s long been industry practice. “Dog Day Afternoon,” to give one example from the period, was based on a Life magazine article.

Overall, “Mr. Saturday Night” misses the story. It keeps talking up how Stigwood had an instinct for things, how he knew where the culture was going when the suits decidedly did not, but then, after the success of “Saturday Night Fever,” he was undone by the homophobia surrounding the anti-disco movement. But that’s not really what undid him. I think the story is that he had this instinct until he didn’t. And it went away. Like that. In the same year. 

For Stigwood, the first half of 1978 was the unprecedented success of “Saturday Night Fever” and “Grease” while the second half were the absolute disasters of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Moment By Moment.” I can’t think of any impresario who had that kind of up-and-down year, one that was so expertly bifurcated. 

Some stats:

• In the winter/spring of ’78, “Saturday Night Fever,” the movie, grossed $94 million. It helped launch (or relaunch) a disco craze, made a star out of Travolta, who became the first and only Sweathog to be nominated for an Academy Award, and its imagery is still iconic more than 40 years later.
• But that’s small potatoes. “Saturday Night Fever, the soundtrack, was the No. 1 album in the U.S. from Jan. 21 to July 1. That’s right: 24 straight weeks. Half the fucking year. And its songs cluttered the singles charts in a way that nobody had done since the Beatles in 1964.
• And then, starting July 29, the Stigwood-produced “Grease” soundtrack was No. 1, off and on, until October 28. So Stigwood had the No. 1 album in the country for 36 of the 52 weeks of 1978. Plus two of its singles went to No. 1.
• But that’s small potatoes. “Grease” was the No. 1 movie of 1978, grossing $190 million. It’s still 28th all-time when you adjust for inflation.

This isn’t even taking into account Andy Gibb, another Stigwood client, who had the No. 1 song of the year: “Shadow Dancing.” Think of that: Stigwood was the producer of the No. 1 single, soundtrack and movie of 1978. He was everywhere.

Ah, but then the second half.

• In July, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the soundtrack, with music from the Bee Gees, Peter Frampton, Earth Wind & Fire and Aerosmith, debuted at No. 7, rose to No.5, hovered for a bit, and then disappeared completely after the movie bombed in August. Four singles were released. One reached the top 10.
• “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Ban,” the movie, was not just a bomb but a laughable bomb, and the reviews were scathing. “Indescribably awful” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum. “A business deal set to music” said Janet Maslin. The Bee Gees say it was the beginning of the end for them.
• In December, Stigwood went back to his moneymaker John Travolta with “Moment by Moment,” a love story co-starring Lily Tomlin, which got even more scathing reviews, died even sooner at the box office, and almost ended Travolta’s career just as it was beginning.

Seriously, has anyone ever had such a whiplash year? And if you’re a documentarian, how do you ignore it? Maggio does.

Fever
I should add that most of the doc is really about “Saturday Night Fever,” not Stigwood, so it’s odd how it’s being titled, promoted, etc. And I’ll admit, some of the rabbit holes it goes down are fascinating. But even here it’s missing the overall.

I would do the “Fever” story in four acts:

1. Inclusive: The disco scene is born in Manhattan, and it’s gay, Black and inclusive. Everyone is welcome.
2. Exclusive: Cohn’s article is published in New York magazine in June 1976, focusing on the disco scene at the 2001 Odyssey club in a dilapidated section of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which is almost exclusively Italian-American. No one else is welcome. Particularly anyone gay or Black.
3. Everywhere: “Saturday Night Fever,” the movie based on Cohn’s article and those exclusive Italian-Americans, becomes a smash hit, and the disco craze blankets the nation.
4. Nowhere: Out of that success, the anti-disco movement is born, and it is decidedly anti-gay and anti-Black, and within a few years it helps kill off disco.

That feels powerful to me. Here’s this positive, inclusive thing that we’ll: 1) appropriate, 2) monetize, and then 3) kill.

The arc of that story is in “Mr. Saturday Night,” but the dots aren’t connected. Instead, Maggio focuses on Stigwood without really telling us anything about Stigwood: who he was, what he did, why he rose, why he fell. It’s vague hagiography.

Berryman in the backyard. 

Sunday night, during the season 3 finale of HBO's “Succession,” I asked Patricia if she knew where the title of the episode, “All the Bells Say,” came from. She did not, and I forgot to look it up, but this morning, reading a synopsis in The New York Times, she told me it was from one of John Berryman's Dream Songs. She told me this not only because I'd asked but because she knew I knew the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. He and my father were friends from the time Dad interviewed him for a feature profile in the Minneapolis Tribune in 1965 until Berryman's death by suicide in January 1972 at age 57. He came over to our house in South Minneapolis. He had a nice daughter named Martha. He had a long beard. We called him Santa Claus.

He actually wrote one of the Dream Songs for my father, number 325, the one that begins “Control it now, it can't do any good,” about the sudden death of Dad's friend Pat McCarty, which includes the line, “Our dead frisk us, & later they get better at it.” It ends this way:

Henry made lists of his surviving friends
& of the vanished on their uncanny errands
and took a deep breath.

The older I get, the more these lines mean to me.

So not only did I know the poet of the lines referenced in the episode title, I knew the poem, Dream Song 29, intimately. In college, or afterwords, I'd even titled a short story “There Came a Thing So Heavy,” truncating a few of the first lines. The relevant line for the episode is “All the bells say: too late.” I have to admit, I don't remember that one at all, but it's another great line, a Never send to ask for whom the bell tolls kind of line.

It fits the episode perfectly. The Roy children, Kendall, Roman and Shiv, finally stop fighting for once and band together to stop their divide-and-conquer father, this universe's Rupert Murdoch, from selling a controlling interest in the company to a tech dick played by Alexander Skarsgard. But on the way to the battle—and please, accept this SPOILER ALERT for anyone who wants to see the episode fresh—as they're rallying the troops, the daughter, Shiv, calls her husband, Tom, to let him know what's about to go down. Even as it was happening, I was like, “Oh, bad move.” And it was. Tom betrays them, the patriarch pivots, and the kids arrive, as both he and the bells say, too late. And there goes their legacy. 

I always liked Dream Song 29 because of the way it begins:

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart
So heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleeping, in all them time
Henry could not make good. 

We're whole and then we're not. I think everyone feels this at some point in their lives. How did I get here? Wasn't it so much better over there? Before I knew? It's why the Eden myth resonates so much.

The final stanza of the poem speaks to the episode, too. In season 1, Kendall, played by Jeremy Strong—about whom The New Yorker recently published a fantastic profile—causes the death of a waiter at his sister's wedding in England. It's Chappaquiddick-like: a car goes into the drink, only one gets out. But it's levened a bit because Kendall was in pursuit of drugs rather than sex, and we see him trying to save the dude. But then he flees the scene. And it's been eating at him ever since. Last night, he finally tells his siblings of his crime. He sits on a dusty alley in Italy and cries and tells them how he killed a guy; and they're suddenly put in the awkward position of bucking him up. And that's what binds them together enough to try to take on their father. 

This is the final stanza of Dream Song 29:

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

The episode was written by Jamie Carragher and series creator Jesse Armstrong. There's a lot of smart people working on “Succession.”

“It was definitely Nesmith's band,” Micky Dolenz told Rolling Stone. “He was the bandleader the whole time.” 

He had the driest sense of humor among the Monkees, a faux-Beatles band created by Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider for a 1966 NBC sitcom to recreate the mood of “A Hard Day's Night” and “Help!,” so of course he was my favorite. Davy got the girls, Micky had a vague wildman quality, Peter was goofy, sweet and dumb, and Mike kind of watched it all from under his stocking cap with a nonchalant face and tossed in dry comments. He seemed to know the world was stacked against us so he would just comment on it as he went along. He was a critic, basically. A kindred spirit. He was in on the joke.

They were disparaged as “The Prefab Four,” four dudes who didn't even play their own instruments on their first record, but a few things to remember. They had good backing musicians, including Glen Campbell, and good songwriters, including Neil Diamond. And Mike Nesmith. He wrote a number of their songs, including “Mary Mary,” “Papa Gene's Blues,” and “Different Drum” which became a huge hit for Linda Ronstadt in 1967, and he was the leader in fighting for some semblance of control over music director Don Kirshner. It's good to remember, too, how hugely popular they were. Their first single, “Last Train to Clarksville,” was the fourth biggest song of 1966, according to Billboard magazine. The next year, the summer of love, they had four songs in the yearly hot 100: “I'm a Believer” (No. 5), “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” (No. 60), “Pleasant Valley Sunday” (74) and “Daydream Believer” (94). The Beatles had two: “All You Need Is Love” and “Penny Lane” (30 and 55).

Finally, the show was good. I mean, I haven't seen it in 30 years, but I remember when it went into reruns in the late 1970s, just being kind of astonished at how funny it was. It even won the Emmy in 1967 for outstanding comedy series, beating out “Bewitched,” “Hogan's Heroes,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” and “Get Smart!” 

Post-Monkees, Nesmith went back to college while starting his own country rock band, First National Band. (You can hear the country influences in “Papa Gene's Blues” and “Different Drum.”) They had nominal success, and when they broke up, with his usual dry sense of humor, he named his new one Second National Band. He became a successful music producer as well as an early innovator in directing music videos. He had a show in the mid-80s called “Telelvison Parts” and recognized talent. Guests included up-and-comers Whoopi Goldberg, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling. A regular bit was “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey,” which later appeared on SNL. Nesmith was also the executive producer of movies, including “Repo Man” and “Tapeheads.” He wrote a novel in the '90s. He seemed to do a bit everything.

He remained friends with the other Monkees, particularly Mickey Dolenz, the last surviving member, who has a nice eulogy for Nesmith in Rolling Stone. He says that even during the crazy height of their success, Nesmith tended to be a bit of a loner. “He wasn't a big social bumblebee. He was quiet, sardonic, extremely bright, very witty.” All that came through.

Finally. Finally.

Last Sunday, 12 of the 16 members of the Golden Days committee—made up of baseball players, executives, historians and journalists—voted for my man, and after 39 years and 23 tries, and by the narrowest of margins, Pedro “Tony” Oliva was finally elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. He will be inducted on July 24, 2022, alongside his former teammate, pitcher Jim Kaat, pioneering Black/Latino player Minnie Minoso, and former Brooklyn Dodgers player and New York Mets manager Gil Hodges, who were all elected by the Golden Days committee. A second committe, the Early Baseball Era Committee, voted in Negro League greats Buck O'Neil and Bud Fowler. Of the six, only Oliva and Kaat are still alive. 

Frequent visitors here know the photo of me and Tony-O, taken on Camera Day 1970, by my father. It's an often-used avatar of mine in this digital age, and it gives some sense of how much I loved the man as a kid. As an adult, I'm sort of curious why. I knew he was great—my father and the daily papers told me so. I liked how he looked—he had a pleasant face. I liked the musicality of his name. I think those were the main things. His face might've been the biggest part of it, to be honest. He was very handsome and very calm looking. 

In 1964, he burst onto the scene with one of the greatest rookie seasons of all time. Only five rookies in baseball history have won a batting title, and the others were three 19th-century players and Ichiro Suzuki—who, of course, had alreaady played 7+ seasons of professional ball in Japan—so Oliva really stands alone. But he didn't stop there: He also led the league in runs, doubles and total bases. The next year, he won the batting title again. Roger Angell, at the beginning of his decades-long career as our baseball Boswell, wrote in The New Yorker about how the '65 Twins won the pennant because manager Sam Mele retooled with a new set of coaches: Johnny Sain taught Jim “Mudcat” Grant and Jim Kaat this, and Billy Martin taught Zoilo Versalles that, then Angell adds:

Finally no coaches at all were allowed near young Tony Oliva when he approached the plate, and he wound up with his second batting championship in as many years in the majors. Oliva, an outfielder who bats left, has leopardlike reflexes and great speed in the field, and he may become the best American League hitter since Ted Williams. 

Alas, not quite. Joe Henry once sang that you're only as good as you're knees, and Tony's knees undid him. He led the league in hits three more times, in doubles three more times, and in 1971 he won his third batting title along with his first slugging title, and to most baseball fans he probably seemed Cooperstown-bound. At that point, his career slash line was .313/.361/.507, and most of that during the toughest pitchers' era since the dead ball era. Probably tougher. In deadball, you had Ty Cobb and Nap Lajoie and Shoeless Joe Jackson, all hitting .400 for the season, but highest active career batting average in 1971 was Roberto Clemente's: .318. Oliva was among the best in the game. 

Then he missed most of the '72 season with knee injuries, and when he returned his power wasn't the same. His SLGs went from the .500s to the low .400s, and his batting average kept slipping: .291, .285, .270. In 1976, he hit .211 in 67 games, most of them as a pinch hitter, with just one homerun and only three doubles. He just couldn't leg anything out. His last hit, Sept. 19 against the California Angels, was indicative. In the top of the 7th, in the midst of a rally, he pinch hit for Bob Randall, rifled a single to right to tie the game, and then was immediate removed for a pinch runner. He appeared in two more games and that was that. 

As a result, his career numbers never looked great to Hall of Fame voters. Sure, he hit .304, but that meant less as batting average was devalued by the Bill Jameses of the world for OBP. His final slash line was .304/.353/.476. He never even got to the lower echelon of counting numbers, such as 2,000 hits (1,917) or 1,000 RBIs (947) or 400 doubles (329). Advanced stats such as WAR said he was pretty good, a 43, but no more. Even I thought, “Yeah, no. Fat chance.”

Oddly, there's another Bill James stat that changed my mind on all that: the Black Ink test. It indicates how often a player led the league in a category, and thus indicates their dominace, or not, during their career. This is how Baseball Reference explains it:

• Four Points for home runs, runs batted in or batting average
• Three Points for runs scored, hits or slugging percentage
• Two Points for doubles, walks or stolen bases
• One Point for games, at bats or triples

The average Hall of Famer is a 27. Tony Oliva? He's a 41. He's currently 48th all-time, ahead of George Brett, Wade Boggs, Tris Speaker, Frank Robinson and Joe DiMaggio.

Another is the Gray Ink Test (top 10 in batting/pitching categories). The average Hall of Famer is a 144. Oliva is a 146. 

There's also the Hall of Fame Monitor, also created by Bill James, with 100 meaning a likely Hall of Famer. Tony O is 114. 

Anyway, he's in, and there's been a spark of joy in my chest all week as a result. 

During my morning walk to Lake Washington today I listened to a fascinating Preet Bharara podcast with Scott Galloway as guest. Recommended.

Midway through the episode, they're talking about whether will people return to the office soon (no, and not like before, but maybe three days a week), and that leads Galloway to talk about how two out of three relationships used to begin in the office and now two in three begin online; and that's led to something called “mating inequality,” in which 8-20% of the men get 90% of the interest, leaving the majority of men fighting over a minority of women. And that leads to this scary stat: in 2008, 8% of men hadn't had sex before age 30, but now that number is 28% or 29%. Then Galloway adds this:

So when you're walking down the avenue that is America, and men and women pass by you, there's twice as many women with a college degree, and one in three of those men under the age of 30 has never taken that step toward an intimate relationship. And I think that's very bad for society. Because the most dangerous person in the world is a young, broken, alone male. And we're producing way too many of them.

Young, broken, alone men with easy access to guns, I would add.

The rest of the episode, dealing with the problems with the increasing exclusivity in higher education, is equally fascinating and relevant. 

Jelani Cobb posted this last week:

Answers included “It wouldn't have gotten out of the planning stage” to “Every black activist, author, or organizer would have been called in for questioning or had their phones tapped or both.” The most succinct answer? “Chalk lines.”

Meanwhile, the fuckers that planned and carried out the actual Jan. 6 attack are still at it. They're still funded. Their lies are still being propped up by the Republican party.