Madison Malone Kircher, writing in Vulture, takes the Wall Street Journal story that Automaticc, the owner of WordPress, has purchased Tumblr from Verizon and, interestingly, goes straight for the smut angle.

But, Automattic … this could be your moment. Bring back the porny stuff. Bring back the nipples — “female-presenting” or otherwise — and the sexy GIFs. The erotic fan art. The content for horny teens and horny adults alike. (Tumblr traffic has been down ever since the site went G-rated.) Engineer better filters and reporting systems to create a Tumblr without child porn, obviously. Bring back the smutty Tumblr we all knew and loved.

I guess that’s an approach. Maybe just take some of the best parts of Tumblr and incorporate it into WordPress and vice versa?

Eddie Kim, writing for MEL Magazine, outlines all the crazy conspiracy theories, memes, and social media posts involving the apparent suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. His ending pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter until I hear something different.

But here are the facts: People kill themselves and each other in prison, often when they’re supposed to be supervised by guards. Our prison systems, whether federal, state or privately run, are a disaster. World leaders wreak death and havoc all across the world in the name of nation-states. Millions of minors around the world are subjected to sexual violence. 

It’s a lot less funny than an Epstein meme, right?

Rhonda Garelick, writing at The Cut, tries to wrap her mind around the photo of Melania Trump holding a newly orphaned baby while her husband grins like a ghoul and gives the camera a thumbs up.

Imagine this: A shooter has entered a public place, where you are walking with your family. You have but a minute to realize you can save your 2-month-old by using your own body to shield him from the bullets raining down around you. Mere days later, your baby, the youngest survivor of the El Paso massacre, will appear on television with the very man who inspired the terrorist who killed both you and your husband. A photograph is taken, for posterity.

In the photo, your baby wears a bowtie and tiny jacket; someone has dressed him up for this occasion. He gazes off to the side (toward his aunt, who stands beside First Lady Melania Trump), his body stiff, his face solemn. He is not at ease in this strange lady’s arms. How could he be? Your child has just gotten out of the hospital, where he was treated for broken bones incurred when you desperately threw yourself over his little body and took the bullets that seconds later orphaned him and his two siblings.

Neither the president nor Melania so much as glances at Baby Paul. Oblivious (as ever) to the solemnity of their occasion, they smile broadly, matching veneers on full beam. Your husband came from a family of Trump supporters. Perhaps, in a different world, you might even have wanted to meet Donald Trump, or take a photo with him as he gave one of his signature thumbs-up gestures — everything is A-OK here.

It is decidedly not A-OK here and the lack of empathy and understanding is sad yet unsurprising.

Dahlia Lithwick, writing in Slate, calls Trump small and incapable of living in any sort of reality.

Trump is really only good at one thing: being on television. Any event that can be engineered to look like a scene from The Apprentice can be fudged to his advantage. Stadium rallies, press availability from inside the Oval Office, even canned speeches read from a teleprompter can be salvaged; so long as he is essentially only producing a simulacrum of presidenting, he can shift along. But reality confounds him. Take him out from behind the oceans of fawning MAGA hats and put him next to a real survivor of sexual violence, and all the grinning and preening tricks fail him. Put him next to actual heads of state discussing actual international policy, and he sulks and mopes. Oh, he can pull off the photo-op; this is a man made of photo-ops. But time and time again, when he is called on to deal with real people—not glassy superfans but genuine human beings whom he allegedly serves as president—he fails to meet the occasion. The consummate reality-TV president is unerringly confounded by reality.

It’s not simply that an injured baby had to be returned to a hospital so that a grinning president could throw a Fonzie-style thumbs-up for the Twitter fans—that’s gross, yes, but it misses the point. The point is that this president, who understands only ratings and adulation and crowd size and “getting credit,” is seemingly incapable of subordinating all that to the moment. This was a moment in which grieving Americans wanted nothing more than for him to show up and be with them. The “catastrophe,” with all due respect to the unparalleled wisdom of Scaramucci, is not that he failed to show the requisite “compassion” or “empathy” for the cameras. Neither Donald Trump, nor his wife, nor his handlers and enablers, will ever understand that the real catastrophe isn’t how he appeared on television or Twitter. The real catastrophe is that Americans are dead and dying and their president is mass-producing a television show about his presidency, with their personal tragedy as a set choice.

Trump cannot function in reality. He lives in a hall of mirrors with his made-for-TV family, as the national security apparatus, the national intelligence apparatus, the foreign service, and foreign policy detonate all around him. And on the rare occasion on which he is called to step out from behind the glass panopticon that he has built, he fails, spectacularly, because that which really matters can’t be tweeted or reduced to a campaign video.

Americans will soon have to choose whether or not they want to live forever in Donald Trump’s reality—the one in which words don’t matter, and everything is a ratings game, and proximity to the famous and the beautiful is the epitome of a life well lived. If that is the only value left, Donald Trump’s is indeed the presidency perfected. For those of us who still live in reality, the photo-op with the orphaned baby is proof positive that Trump’s is not a big life, or a real life. It’s just smallness, refracted a million times over, which is nevertheless impossibly small.

I don’t have much to add here. He’s obviously a narcissistic buffoon without an ounce of empathy. History will not be kind to this man or his followers.

Bob Moser, writing in The New Republic, has a story on the gradual blue-ing of Texas. The wave is starting to get some kinetic energy and it’s not just Beto O’Rourke.

Suddenly, Texas Republicans are on the defensive in their national fortress—and they’re both talking and acting like it. “The tectonic plates shifted in Texas in 2018,” Senator John Cornyn, the powerful Republican who’s facing reelection in 2020 (with just a 37 percent approval rating) said earlier this year. Cornyn has been sounding the alarms ever since November, warning national Republicans against complacency and spelling out the dire consequences for his party if they can’t stave off the Democratic surge: “If Texas turns back to a Democratic state, which it used to be, then we’ll never elect another Republican [president] in my lifetime,” said Cornyn.

This is the shift I’m most excited to see in the next few election cycles. Not sure it will actually go blue in 2020, but wouldn’t that be something?

Justin Bariso, writing for Inc., deduces the short, smart plan of new Barnes and Noble CEO James Daunt to save the retail operation. It’s painfully simple. Let stores choose which books to stock, let managers configure stores they way they want, and make the stores comfortable and inviting.

I look forward to the changes coming to my local B&N.

Brad Stulberg, writing in Outside Online, takes the whole wellness industry to task.

The problem is that so much of what’s sold in the name of modern-day wellness has little to no evidence of working. Which doesn’t mean that wellness isn’t a real thing. According to decades of research, wellness is a lifestyle or state of being that goes beyond merely the absence of disease and into the realm of maximizing human potential. Once someone’s basic needs are met (e.g., food and shelter), scientists say that wellness emerges from nourishing six dimensions of your health: physical, emotional, cognitive, social, spiritual, and environmental.

The article then goes on to highlight examples and ways to help oneself under these “interrelated dimensions.”

Om Malik, writing on his site, talks about the cycle of emails to blogs to newsletters basically created by Dave Winer.

Dave Winer, the godfather of blogging, and in my mind, the singular most influential thinker on all things Internet, media and mediums, shared a link to a Wired post about DaveNet, which in 1995 was a forum which involved Dave writing an essay and emailing it to others and then creating conversations within those who read his stuff. That eventually led to blogs which transformed the media landscape. And now we are back to doing email newsletters.

Coincidentally my blog started as an email newsletter too — Dotcomwala — but eventually transformed into a blog. It is the same wine; bottles keep changing. In the end, what matters is words, thoughts, and continuity.

It is an interesting take. I get the itch to start an email newsletter all the time.

Chris Bower, in his The Weekly Review newsletter, pointed to a piece by Matthias Ott about ditching social media and publishing platforms like Medium for personal websites.

Personal websites are called personal websites because they are just that: personal. Thus, the primary objective still is to have a place to express ourselves, to explore ourselves, a place that lasts while the daily storms pass by. A place of consideration, and yes, a place of proudly sharing what we do, what we think, and what we care about. A place to contribute your voice and help others. A home on the internet. A place to tell your story.

I love this philosophy. However, I still haven’t ditched all social media and I still publish on Medium occasionally. I’m going to have to think some more about this.

Seth Godin makes a list of important words.

Discipline, rigor, patience, self-control, dignity, respect, knowledge, curiosity, wisdom, ethics, honor, empathy, resilience, honesty, long-term, possibility, bravery, kindness and awareness.

All of these are real skills, soft skills, learnable skills.

But if they’re skills, that means that they are decisions. A choice we get to make. Even if it’s not easy or satisfying in the short term.

These skills are in short supply sometimes, which makes them even more valuable.

Four months ago, Damon Sheehy-Guiseppi was sleeping outside because he couldn't afford a hotel.

He talked his way into a contract with the @Browns and today he scored an 86-yard punt return TD!

What. A. Moment. @damon015 pic.twitter.com/apiNylE7Wn

— NFL (@NFL) August 9, 2019

The dude lied his way into a contract and then this happened. Feels like a movie waiting to happen.

Warren Ellis, writing on his site, tells a tale about filmmaker Kevin Smith. It’s a brief account, but says a lot about Smith.

Seth Godin, writing at this blog, talks about streaks versus habits.

Streaks require commitment at first, but then the commitment turns into a practice, and the practice into a habit.

Habits are much easier to maintain than commitments.

I’m pretty sure that the blog would still have an impact if I missed a day here or there, but once a commitment is made to a streak, the question shifts from, “should I blog tomorrow,” to, “what will tomorrow’s blog say?”

And once you’ve made that shift, it’s 100x easier to find the voice that you’re looking for.

“The sum total of my existence is being written in the present by the choices I make and the priorities I live for. Right now.”

— James Shelley

H/T: Patrick Rhone

Brian Hamilton, writing in The Athletic, has fun interview with University of Illinois sophomore forward Giorgi Bezhanishvili. What a wonderful personality. Giorgi is an amazing ambassador for Illinois Basketball and the University of Illinois.

Emma Baccellieri, writing for Sports Illustrated, tells the story about how Major League Baseball requires every ball to be rubbed with special mud from the banks of the Delaware River before being used in an official game.

This always does the trick. It prevents anyone from exploring what he’s actually doing, which is what he’s done for decades, what his father did before him, and his grandfather before him: Bintliff is collecting the mud that is used to treat every single regulation major league baseball, roughly 240,000 per season.

Mud is a family business; it has been for more than half a century. For decades, baseball’s official rule book has required that every ball be rubbed before being used in a game. Bintliff’s mud is the only substance allowed. Originally marketed as “magic,” it’s just a little thicker than chocolate pudding — a tiny dab is enough to remove the factory gloss from a new ball without mucking up the seams or getting the cover too filthy. Equipment managers rub it on before every game, allowing pitchers to get a dependable grip. The mud is found only along a short stretch of that tributary of the Delaware, with the precise location kept secret from everyone, including MLB.

I did not know this about MLB baseballs, and I come from a huge baseball family. The fact that the location is secret makes me chuckle.

David Machese, writing in The New York Times, has wonderfully quirky interview with Nicholas Cage.

I’ve taken risks. But there has been a collision between the acting experiments and the memeification extrapolated from them. That has not been intentional. I have no social media presence. I’m not on Instagram. I am not on Facebook. I have no Twitter account. I genuinely am a private person who does not want his personal life exposed. I wanted to have the mystery of the old stars, always preserved in an enigmatic aura. It’s hard to do that now.

The whole piece is great.

I haven’t really read any of John Green’s books, but I probably should. Occasionally, I see a video post and I remember that his vlog is an excellent source of information and comfort.

This one expresses many of the same feelings I have today.

"It’s easy for us to place it all on Donald Trump’s shoulders... This is us. And if we’re going to get past this we can’t blame it on him. He's a manifestation of the ugliness that’s in us." @esglaude says white people must reckon with the continued presence of racism in the U.S. pic.twitter.com/dclEaLsrK9

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 6, 2019

"DID WE JUST HOMER OFF DEGROM?!"

@diaz_isan's PUMPED-UP dad was mid-interview when his guy took a Cy Young winner DEEP for his 1st hit in his MLB debut. 🥺 pic.twitter.com/rOwjYdjr01

— Miami Marlins (@Marlins) August 5, 2019

What a reaction.

Often, too often, I need to be reminded of what’s really important in my life.

I easily get sidetracked selfishly focusing on the next shiny object. I lose track of the hierarchy of importance. Family, friends, the here and now are important. Entertainment, the news, and social media should take up far less of my time.

It should probably take up far less of yours.