Photo Pest

Saturday, February 28, 2026

What They Said: February 2026

“Being a man is saying ‘I’m not afraid to stand up to corporations and billionaires.’” said Morris Katz, a 26-year-old consultant who has advised Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Maine Senate candidate Graham Plattner. (New York Times, 02.01.26)

“It is not clear what battlefield utility can be had from a vulnerable vehicle, with a limited armament [i.e. a tank], that approaches a fighter jet in cost,” wrote Yuri Baluyevsky, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in 2004-2008, in The Digital War Is the New Reality. (New York Times, 02.02.26)

“It is one thing to inspire hope, but to sustain hope, you have to deliver change,” NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in an interview, describing his administration’s push to be seen as acting with a sense of urgency. “There is a small window that you have at the beginning of your administration, when New Yorkers are asking themselves, ‘Was I right to believe?’ This is our window to show them that they were.” (New York Times, 02.02.26)

“If the public were aware of how much of the [Supreme Court] deliberations affecting millions of people are made by 27-year-olds after happy hour, they’d be shocked,” said Nikolas Bowie, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a clerk to Justice Sonia Sotomayor. (New York Times, 02.03.26)

“Being a general in an autocracy is a thankless job,” said Marcel Dirsus, a German political scientist who wrote a book about the erosion of dictatorships. “If you are seen as effective and your subordinates like you, you develop an alternative power center, and the autocrat feels threatened by you. But if you perform poorly, the autocrat also doesn’t like you.” (New York Times, 02.05.26)

“I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940s,” Don Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post wrote on Facebook after Jeff Bezos, current publisher, eliminated original reporting on the topic and 300 jobs at the storied newspaper. (New York Times, 02.06.26)

“In a change versus status quo election, in the overwhelming majority of instances, the absence of formal political experience is not a weakness, it’s a strength,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic House Minority Leader, said. (New York Times, 02.07.26)

"Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned, wrote Fred Biery, a federal judge in Texas’ Western District, in a decision that freed an Ecuadoran asylum seeker and his five-year-old son from ICE detention. (New York Times, 02.07.26)

“My office was in Rock Center for 20 years, and I would often go across the street into Saks to look for a unique gift for my wife,” said Joseph Sarachek, a representative of 30 small vendors who are each owed between $100,000 and $10 million from the Saks corporation which recently declared bankruptcy. “I’d run into a bunch of other guys just like myself. We were not there to buy Chanel.” (New York Times, 02.08.26)

“The reality, and maybe it’s a harsh reality, is that when you have a potential donor and a favor is asked, and if the favor’s not unreasonable, you grant that favor because you’re trying to develop a relationship with the person,” said Dr. Ira B. Lamster, the former dean of Columbia University's dental college who facilitated the admission of Jeffrey Epstein's girlfriend six years after he had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. “And that, I do remember, was the attitude that I took.” (New York Times, 02.11.26)

“A ZIP code does not protect us from rising violent authoritarianism, ” said Analilia Mejia, a progressive Democratic organizer, who won a special primary to fill a Congressional seat vacated by the election of Mikie Sherrill as governor of New Jersey. (New York Times, 02.11.26)

“The nice thing about prediction markets is that you have to put your money where your mouth is,” said Theis Jensen, a Yale professor and co-author of Financial Prediction Markets: A New Measure of Earnings Expectations,“and so that highly incentivizes you to state your true beliefs.” (New York Times, 02.12.26)

A.I. is really good at extracting text from images and audio, captioning photos, assigning structure to text like emails," explained Dylan Freedman, A.I. projects editor for the New York Times. "We can use A.I. to crack open really messy data sets, like this release of [three million pages of Jeffrey Epstein] documents, that would have previously been impossible to effectively tackle at scale. A.I. is really bad at news judgment — what information to include, whether it’s important. A.I. can be sloppy and make mistakes that are inexcusable in journalism. It’s super industrious but not super intelligent. A.I. outputs can amplify biases in society. And in my experience, A.I. is not great at producing original ideas (but decent at synthesizing or distilling them). (New York Times, 02.12.26)

“In London and other capitals, the Europeans keep talking like this is 1939,” as the continent veered toward war, said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former aide to Senator John McCain. “Nobody in the U.S. is thinking this is 1939.” (New York Times, 02.16.26)

“If I were to draw a cartoon,” said the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, of his meetings over the weekend [at the Munich Security Conference], “it would be a European saying, ‘Greenland, Greenland, Greenland, Greenland.’” (New York Times, 02.16.26)

". . . almost all of art is a denial of mortality — an attempt to fix a face, or a landscape, or a story, a mythology. It’s an attempt to deny mortality. We want to be not just consoled, but resist our ephemerality in the world — and that’s so distinctly the case with these little creatures." observed author Simon Schama who has curated an exhibition focused on birds at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague and anchored by "The Goldfinch," a 1654 painting by Carel Fabritius. (New York Times, 02.16.26)

“Few qualities have inspired me more than Washington’s humility,” wrote former President George W. Bush in an essay published on President's Day. (New York Times, 02.16.26)

“Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow — red, yellow, brown, black and white — and we’re all precious in God’s sight,” Jesse Jackson said at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. “America is not like a blanket — one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt — many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.” (New York Times, 02.18.26)

" . . . when one is considering the genuineness of an individual’s remorse, simply producing a computer-generated letter does not really take me anywhere as far as I am concerned” ruled Tom Gilbert, a judge in New Zealand, after discovering that a woman convicted of arson had used AI to write apology letters to her victims. (New York Times, 02.19.26)

“I think of all this A.I. optimization as bad plastic surgery,” said Luke Stillman, the managing director of Madison and Wall, a consulting firm for online merchants that do advertising. “You notice the ones that stand out, but you don’t notice the ones that are still standing behind the curtain.” (New York Times, 02.20.26)

"There has always been a fair amount of grandstanding by lawmakers in congressional hearings. They’re televised opportunities for members of Congress to show how tough they can be and how they’re using their positions to hold power to account, and they typically prepare their questions with an eye toward what will draw the most attention," notes Julia Hirschfeld Davis, congressional editor for the New York Times. "But in the age of social media, that dynamic has been supercharged. Everyone is looking to go viral with a particularly contentious exchange or 'gotcha' moment, and what used to be considered the rules of decorum can go out the window in those moments. What is a bit different in recent days is the sheer vitriol and disdain from Trump administration officials toward members of Congress during these hearings. Many of them come to Capitol Hill seemingly primed to attack and insult lawmakers." (New York Times, 02.20.26)

“Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises,” Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a ruling that tariffs imposed by President Donald L. Trump were unconstitutional. “But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design.” New York Times, (02.21.26)

“[Slopulism] convinces supporters to invest their emotions in story lines rather than the substantive politics or structure behind it,” said Neema Parvini, a senior fellow at the University of Buckingham in England who is considered to have popularized the term. “It doesn’t lead anywhere, it’s just entertainment.” (New York Times, 02.22.26)

“You can’t live your life being paranoid,” said Gisèle Pelicot, the victim of mass rape by her husband and dozens of other men over a decade-long period. “I think you have to trust . . . That, too, is a message of hope: to tell yourself that at 73 years old, you can still live a love story.” (New York Times, 02.22.26)

“I’ve worked since I was 9," observed actor Daniel Radcliffe. "I don’t know what life is without some sense of this. We’ve all got to do something to distract ourselves until we die, and acting is a great, fun thing to do that with.” (New York Times, 02.22.26)

“We wired together some audio that’s out there, that’s bootlegged,” said Baz Luhrmann, director of a new immersive documentary about Elvis Presley. “We had to meet people in car parks and buy it, bless their socks. The trading of illegal Elvis stuff — there’s Colombian drug lords, and then there’s the guys that trade bootlegs, and dude, I think I’d rather work with the Colombian drug lords.” (New York Times, 02.23.26)

“Avoiding war is indeed a high priority, but not at any cost,” said Sasan Karimi, a political scientist at the University of Tehran who served as the deputy vice president for strategy in Iran’s previous government. “At times, a political state — especially an ideological one — may weigh its place in history as heavily as, or even more heavily than, its immediate survival.” (New York Times, 02.23.26)

“It was like an angry toddler throwing a tantrum except the angry toddler has full command of the English language,” said Scott Shambaugh, a Colorado engineer who incurred the wrath of an AI chatbot whose computer code he had rejected and which then berated him publicly in an open forum. (New York Times, 02.23.26)

“Andrew’s time is up,” said Sue Jones, 70, who lives near the former home of the former prince. “If it had happened in Tudor times, he would have been slung in the Tower of London.” (New York Times, 02.26.26)

“Something has changed,” Jack Dorsey explained in a social media post announcing the termination of nearly 4,000 employees at Block, the financial technology company that owns Square, Cash App and Tidal. “We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.” (New York Times, 02.28.26)

Sunday, February 22, 2026

Blizzard vs Street Painting

If I was at 47 Pianos, I would have awakened to a blizzard forecast. Instead, I got to the Lake Worth Beach Street Painting Festival before the crowds arrived on a hot sunny day, before the mercury plunges 40 degrees tomorrow!

Check out the tatted artist's socks.

I probably should support the Lake Worth Playhouse more. It opened in the silent movie era and was nearly demolished during the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane--the fourth worst in the United States--when the Wurlitzer organ went bye-bye.

Several artists prioritized avoiding Forida's bright February sun.

Others coordinated their outfits to create a Sixties vehicle even more iconic than my very own Herr Cucaracha.

The heat didn't seem to bother Marimba Anhelos Del Copal.

Animals are always popular subjects

. . . and beautiful women, too.

Ya gotta love a good pun!

I couldn't tell if this work was political or not.

If so, it and this portrait of Angela Davis were the only ones that sought to enlighten rather than soothe. When I complimented the artist, he exulted "She's still alive!" Unlike so many of the other Black Panthers.

Many of the artists were POC

. . . including green.

Compass, a community center for LGBTQI+ folk needs to up its game, both in terms of deadlines and content. The festival began yesterday.

I read in the Times this morning that Luke Evans is going to star in Broadway's revival of The Rocky Horror Show. Hubba, hubba. I caught the original production with the incomparable Tim Curry as Dr. Frank 'n Furter at the Belasco Theater in 1975.

Labyrinth, which I've never seen, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Bowie's already been dead a decade.

You just know "Golden" is gonna the win Oscar for Best Song this year!

Other pop culture nods included Dawson's Creek and Pluribus. I like the latter mural a lot more than the angry show itself.

Did you know bikes could be "lowriders" too? Hot dawg!

I never noticed this mural of the Lake Worth Beach Pier before. I haven't walked on it since Christine first invited me to visit in 2010.

Update:

The NYC forecast proved accurate. Alex, the neighbor who waters my plants, sent me this photo of the view from 47 Pianos Monday morning:

Photo by Alex Ruter

More Street Painting:

Duck Lip Grannies (2025)

Lake Worth's Big Weekend (2024)

Artists @ Work (2023)

Artistic Tanning (2022)

Sweet Invasion (2020)

Tweed, Not Tweet (2019)

Homesteading (2018)

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Long Island Compromise (4*)

The Fletcher children are a LOT, that's for sure, but Taffy Brodesser-Akner empathizes with them in the same way that made her profiles (Bradley Cooper, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jonathan Franzen) in the New York Times Magazine so compelling: she "got" them, perhaps even better than they'd gotten themselves.

Nathan, Beamer and Jenny are traumatized by the kidnapping of their father, the son of a Holocaust survivor named Zelig who made a fortune in styrofoam manufacturing after fleeing Poland with the kind of story that Brodesser-Akner once thought she'd never tell because she felt so removed from it three generations later. No more, as Long Island Compromise makes painfully clear: her novel examines inherited trauma almost clinically through the lens of Jews as assimilated as she who couldn't be more miserable despite receiving regular quarterly deposits of half a million dollars in their bank accounts.

What makes the novel more than three unrelenting whines, flavored with anxiety, addiction, kink and depression, is Brodesser-Akner's knowing and often amusing portrayal of family dynamics and social milieus similarly evoked by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow in the last century minus her believably drawn female characters. As has often been said, stereotypes exist for a reason; for delightful but hard-as-nails evidence, look no further than Zelig's wife, the matriarch who counsels her grandson after he announces he has proposed to a woman named . . . Noelle.

“You know what happens when you marry a young shiksa?” Phyllis had asked him [Beamer], when, in a final plea-threat for him to reconsider, she had appealed not to his conscience but to his vanity. “You end up with an old goya.”

And Phyllis knows from vanity!

Ruth [Beamer's mother], after all, had been watching Phyllis’s face change for years. By then, Phyllis had had several elective surgeries that included an eye lift, a neck lift, a facelift that included a revamp of the initial eye lift and an additional neck lift—everything lifted so high that it appeared that gravity was just another force on Phyllis’s payroll—and finally an emergency procedure in which her septum was reconstructed, as she had outlived all lifespan expectations but nobody had told her nose job that.

Poor Ruth, who mostly raises her kids on sarcasm. Her "Long Island compromise" (Brodesser-Akner gets a lot of mileage out of her title metaphor), is perhaps the novel's most tragic. The American dream, attainable mostly through marriage for women of Ruth's generation, seduces her before hidden anti-Semitism curdles it into something else entirely. She eventually realizes what her desire for the "good life" has cost her and her family but as EST proponents once insisted, "understanding is the booby prize." It's almost as if Brodesser-Akner is forgiving her own mother through this bitter character's long overdue liberation.

She does, however, offer the promise of redemption, at least for the fourth generation of Jews descended from Holocaust survivors . It occurs in the context of a bar mitzvah rescued from disaster by Fletcher in-laws who are loaded with tradition, not dough. Although an actual 1974 kidnapping inspired Long Island Compromise, I imagine Brodesser-Akner was just as influenced by the events of October 7 almost five decades later: embrace your tribe if you want relief from both your physical and mental suffering.

Sunday, February 15, 2026

Robert Duvall (1931 - 2026)

Although he's an actor I have admired for most of my life, I'll always remember him as Boo Radley. I saw To Kill A Mockingbird, at a very impressionable age, before I was assigned to read Harper Lee's iconic novel in high school English. And while both the book and the movie definitely instilled an awareness of bigotry and racial injustice, Robert Duvall's gentle, still and haunted performance imparted another lesson just as important: weirdos were human beings, too, and you shouldn't make snap judgments about them, especially based on other people's impressions.

More People I Loved:

Friday, February 6, 2026

What We Can Know (5*)

Leave it to Ian McEwan to coin the era that follows climate change which Tom Metcalfe, an academic who narrates the first part of What We Can Know, refers to as the "Degradation." Though rising seas and nuclear war have mostly reduced merry olde England to an archipelago replete with marauding tribes, very little about fundamental human nature has changed other than the finger-pointing anger that characterizes a future generation who can't forgive the perpetrators of contemporary environmental inertia: us.

Imagining the future a century hence enables McEwan to flash his sardonic wit--Nigeria, for example, controls the internet--while at the same time nailing mankind's current headlong rush to paradise lost through Tom's historical consciousness.

I prefer teaching the post-2015 period, when social media were beginning to be drawn into the currency of private lives, when waves of fantastical or malevolent or silly rumours began to shape the nature not only of politics but of human understanding. Fascinating! It was as if credulous medieval masses had burst through into modernity, rushing into the wrong theatre and onto the wrong stage set. In the stampede, grisly government secrets were spilled, childhoods despoiled, honourable reputations trampled down and loud-mouthed fools elevated.

Rose, Tom's "just the facts, please" colleague in the barely afloat humanities department of a much diminished university, accuses him of romanticizing the past and falling in love with Vivien, the wife of a poet, Francis Blundy, whose supposed masterwork, dedicated to her as a 54th birthday present, has been lost to time after an initial, private reading. Tom has immersed himself in the lives of the couple using a feast of electronic bread crumbs, including e-mail, text messages, photos and journals left behind by Vivien who earlier lost her soulmate, a luthier, to Alzheimer's and the same entitled arrogance that ignores global warming.

My journals are on a shelf above a writing desk in our cottage sitting room, but I’m happier to be free of them and exercising my memory. Working hard at it, as in a mental gym, making the effort and prising open a scene, opens others along the way. It gets easier the more I try. In addition, guilt and remorse are useful aids to memory. I use the journals mostly to remind myself of the sequence of events, on which memory is notoriously weak. The past, jumbled in the mind, survives in its own special tense, a form of ahistorical present. A journal, whatever its quality, fixes events like beads on a string.

(Does it ever, as I can affirm after having kept one since the early 80s!)

McEwan links Tom's fascination with the night Francis reads his "Corona to Vivien" to another event a hundred years earlier, the "immortal dinner of 1817" attended by William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and John Keats; thus, the 2014 dinner Tom imagines is at the mid-point between a still pastoral England and the ravaged present. Fortunately, what initially seems like a sci-fi inflected exercise in literary erudition soon evolves into an absorbing, almost Hitchcockian mystery powered by buried treasure, the elusiveness of truth--particularly in an emotional context--and the essential selfishness of human existence. To say much more would give way to spoilers. But as Vivien, very much an underestimated woman of our time and known only by her married name, notes:

I delighted in the afternoon sun on my bare arms and felt capable, given life’s brevity, of ruthless insistence on my small share of the world’s pleasures.

Saturday, January 31, 2026

What They Said: January 2026

“At the end of the song, I like to change the lyric,” Broadway veteran Mandy Patinkin said about "Over The Rainbow.“ 'If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why, oh, why can’t — we?' As opposed to ‘I.’ That’s what I feel about [Zohran Mamdani]. That’s my prayer and my wish for him and our city of all religions, all colors, all sexes, sizes and shapes.” (NY Times 01.01.26)

“How remarkable is it that on these steps today, we have three swearings-in,” said Mark Levine, New York City's new comptroller, at City Hall. “One by a leader using a Quran [Mayor Zohran Mamdani], one by a leader using a Christian Bible [Public Advocate Jumaane Williams] and one by a leader using a Chumash, or Hebrew Bible. I am proud, proud to live in a city where this is possible.” (NY Times 01.02.26)

“The chair they sat on, the books they had, the candlestick they lit — that’s where we pass down the history that they [the Nazis] tried to erase during the Holocaust,” said Agnes Peresztegi, an international lawyer who specializes in restitution cases. (NY Times 01.04.26)

“I know that [ping pong] is a great sport for anxious people,” observed Josh Safdie, who co-wrote and directed Marty Supreme. (NY Times 01.04.26)

“I really love the idea of writing about something that is very well known, the opposite of writing about discovery,” said French novelist Lola Lafon, who wrote an essay after spending a night in the Anne Frank House. “I feel the novel where you discover something is very male. I don’t discover lands. I know the lands I’m writing about.” (NY Times 01.07.26)

“U.S. foreign policy now is imperial, and consistently imperial,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of an Italy-based think tank, the Institute of International Affairs. “It’s not simply pursuing an American empire in the Western Hemisphere, but Trump accepts the very notion of empire, which is why other empires can exist.” (NY Times 01.08.26)

“A lot of kids playfully adopt the ‘theater kid’ moniker, even with its tinge of attention-seeking excess, because theater offers a space for performing a wider range of emotions and identities than much of our society allows,” said Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, the author of a recent biography of Lin-Manuel Miranda. “Since right-wingers want to crack down on exploring gender, race and sexuality in schools, it’s sadly not surprising that they’d try to wield ‘theater kid’ as an insult to discredit progressive politics.” (NY Times 01.08.26)

“The Brazilian passport is the most wanted passport on the black market because everyone can be Brazilian,” actor Wagner Moura, star of The Secret Agent, said. “You don’t look at the passport and go, ‘I don’t think so.’ Everyone can be Brazilian — you, me, everybody.” (NY Times 01.11.26)

“I think the Venn diagram of Heated Rivalry fans consists of gay men who want much-needed representation of queer joy and women who want well-produced romances about yearning,” said Chantal Strasburger, founder of an embroidery business that specializes in turning memes and cultural moments into merchandise. “These two circles overlap in the enjoyment of hot people having hot sex.” (NY Times 01.15.26)

“Throughout Western history, the idea of commemorating and adulating yourself has been considered gauche,” said Jeffrey Engel, a historian at Southern Methodist University. (NY Times 01.16.26)

“It all ends the same for every addict, in isolation,” film director Abel Ferrara writes in Scene, his memoir. “They call sobriety finding the self of your former ghost.” (NY Times 01.18.26)

“This is the death of Davos,” said Mark Blyth, a political economist at Brown University. “It has no relevance, none whatsoever. And the bigger question is, did it ever have relevance outside the chattering classes that were embedded in the status quo to start with?” (NY Times 01.19.26)

“These animal ambassadors become beloved neighbors,” said Scott Sampson, executive director of the California Academy of Sciences, where Claude the albino alligator delighted visitors for three decades. “They serve a really important role to connect people with nature, and I would argue that we need people to be connected with nature more now than ever before.” (NY Times 01.20.26)

“European nations won’t break up NATO because of Greenland,” said Carsten Jensen, a prominent Danish novelist and the author of We, The Drowned, a work of historical fiction about a century of Danish seafaring. “It’s too insignificant.” (NY Times 01.20.26)

“New York City is always a cauldron where something can explode, and it’s often something you don’t even anticipate,” said Ester Fuchs, professor of public policy at Columbia University. (NY Times 01.22.26)

“Every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great-power rivalry,” Mark Carney, Canada's prime minister, told the audience at the Davos World Economic Forum. “That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” (NY Times 01.24.26)

“For every two Americans who paid the ultimate price” in Afghanistan, Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, reminded Mr. Trump as the two men sat onstage at Davos, “there was one soldier from another NATO country who did not come back to his family.” (NY Times 01.24.26)

“Officers interact with armed community members all the time,” said Seth Stoughton, who has worked as a police officer and a state investigator, after reviewing video footage of the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis. “It’s just utterly ridiculous to suggest that just because someone has a weapon on them, that that justifies the use of deadly force.” (NY Times 01.28.26)

“We’re looking at the scene after the fact, in a vacuum, not necessarily with all the other factors going on,” said Kenneth Quick, a former precinct commander at the New York Police Department and a criminal justice professor at DeSales University. “That’s where I think a lot of things get cloudy because once people are not obeying what the law enforcement on scene is telling them, that’s increasing the officers’ threat perspective.” (NY Times 01.28.26)

“Whatever the AfD or Rassemblement National believe about civilizational erasure and migration, they’re not for the American annexation of a big chunk of Europe,” said Justin Logan, a foreign-policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, referring to far-right parties in Germany and France. (NY Times 01.29.26)

“[Melania] has to be the most expensive documentary ever made that didn’t involve music licensing,” said Ted Hope, who worked at Amazon from 2015 to 2020 and was instrumental in starting the company’s film division. “How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe? How can that not be the case?” (NY Times 01.29.26)

“Don’t get sucked into the game,” wrote Patrick J. Schiltz, the conservative chief judge of the District of Minnesota in a 1999 law review article. “Don’t let money become the most important thing in your life. Don’t fall into the trap of measuring your worth as an attorney — or as a human being — by how much money you make.” (NY Times 01.31.26)