In an essay very much outside his customary political wheelhouse, Marc traces his live-music experience from his first show as a teen (Madonna — I see you, Marc!) to his present-day quest to track down his all-time favorites performing in concert before “they die — or I do.” North of 100 shows he’s attended (or has plans to attend) are mentioned in the piece; it’s more if you count a Wiggles concert he went to with his kids.
One of Marc’s old buddies puts it nicely: “Live music allows us a real, incarnational connection to the music we love. Like time spent ‘in person’ with a friend versus a phone call. It’s spontaneous and a little unpredictable; something we all crave in our overscheduled, often virtual lives.”
Parenting writer Jan Sokoloff Harness in her essay today reflects, meanwhile, on hyper-scheduled, predictable and perhaps overbearing connection: Her adult children are well past Wiggles age, but, until recently, she still texted them to say good night before every bedtime.
“That might sound sweet,” she writes. “It wasn’t.”
Over time, Harness realized that “it’s not a kid’s job to calm their parent’s anxiety.” She ceased the nighttime texts — after some prodding from her daughters — and it turns out that by not scheduling fretting about her kids each evening, she managed to calm her nerves herself.
Now, given a little more autonomy, Harness’s daughters call more frequently for more meaningful phone conversations: real, unscheduled, “incarnational.” Or, music to her ears.
Chaser: While Marc is busy meeting his heroes, Rick Reilly imagines an abysmal dinner where you can hobnob at Augusta National with all the Masters’ biggest losers.
From the op-ed by event management firm founder Lynda Webster and William Webster, a former CIA and FBI director — and scam victim.
Since a Jamaican crime ring tried to defraud the Websters out of $50,000 in 2014, they write, scam artistry has grown only more sophisticated and widespread in the United States. (This, I should note, makes me feel much better about the $700 I lost in 2019 to a convoluted scheme involving a counterfeit cashier’s check.)
The Websters, appropriately, take a very CIA/FBI tack to the problem, which they write is largely “the work of foreign organized-crime syndicates that have hijacked our technology and are using it against us. … We must move rapidly to increase our defenses against this growing national security threat.”
Hear, hear. And, thankfully, I’ve just gotten an email from a Nigerian prince willing to invest millions in this project as long as he can first verify my identity with my Social Security number. I’ll keep you all posted.
For a few cycles now, Democrats have been accused of “meddling” in Republican primaries by running ads touting the Trumpy bona fides of the most MAGA candidates — thinking they would be weaker opponents in the general election.
Meddling, maybe. But E.J. Dionne doesn’t see a problem: “A little hardball in pursuit of the power needed to defeat Trumpism is not hypocrisy. It’s a necessity.”
As E.J. writes, the hypocrisy argument might hold a little more water if moderates could ever be counted on to stand up against Donald Trump. That just isn’t so, he writes, making the case that the only way to break the far right’s grip on the GOP is for extreme Republicans to keep losing races to Democrats.
Chaser: Republicans want you to believe you were better off four years ago. Jen Rubin writes that just about the only person who was … was Trump himself.
- Abolishing liberty did not bring Russia security, the Editorial Board writes following last week’s terrorist attack in Moscow. And Max Boot writes that Vladimir Putin’s fixation on imaginary foes keeps the Russian leader from seeing the real ones right in front of him.
- The United States will have to intervene in Haiti, former U.S. ambassador James Foley writes.
- Electric cars are the future, Megan McArdle writes. So why is the EPA pumping the brakes?
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
For all your favorite artists!
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
