“Is Newark Mayor Cory Booker too Jewish to be a U.S. senator?”

God, you can’t trust anyone anymore.

This “plain English” account of today’s 5–4 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder — the big Voting Rights Act case this term — pretty much tells me that I am not smart enough to be allowed to vote, because I can’t even understand a simple summary. I guess we beat the boss level of racism? So let’s be happy about that, if that’s what we decided. But as I said, I can’t really tell.

Did you remember that the new Almodóvar comes out this weekend??? I did not, the crazy trailer came out so long ago now. Here let us watch it again. The English title bugs me a little, not that you asked. Why not “Lovers in Passing,” which almost bears out the pun? WHO CARES! Here is a very good interview with Almodóvar to tide you over.

Happy birthday, Georgios Kyriacos Panagiòtou! It actually feels like you’ve been around for 50 years, which in the chronological sense is literally true.

CHOICES.

Some days are long. Some Mondays are terrible. Some Mondays are long and terrible. Here, I made a playlist for you to listen to from a bathtub. Maybe bring a nice book! Some wine, if you’re into that kind of thing. I personally prefer a decaf coffee with two aspirin. I like my blood extra-thin. Goodnight.

★★★★ A Brazilian youth tour group, in matching red t-shirts, poured through the 67th Street entrance to the Park and began rhythmically clapping and cheering. The gates to the Sheep Meadow opened and the waiting picnickers rushed in to colonize the few round islands of shade, blankets and folding tables and wrapped-up food trays deployed in moments. Behind them, with much more space to choose from, the sunbathers filtered in, slowly dispersing and lowering themselves and stripping down, the sun pressing their pale bodies to the lawn like a thumb flattening out decals. The Brazilians youths found their way in too and sat down in red-shirted clusters all the way from the gateway to the trees. The kindergartener ran laps around the toddler and announced he was sweating. A stray frisbee bounced off the toddler, harmlessly. A carriage horse trudged by outside the Sheep Meadow, its neck a long downcurving gesture line of equine weariness and sorrow. The next carriage horse looked fine. The toddler discovered a little partly-consumed water bottle in the depths of the bag, cloudy from the previous drinking of it, and grew enraged when he was kept from drinking from it. A fresh bottle, heavy with condensation, was procured, and he drank from it, and drank some more, and asked for another drink. Drifting soap bubbles assumed near-primary colors in the ferocious light. The children began to scooter home, hair dampening under their helmet. The toddler jumped of his scooter in midblock to stare after the sound of a motorcycle starting up. It was not bad, in the shade. There was still plenty of day left, and if you stayed out of the openest spaces, there was nothing to prevent anyone from running errands.

“My book doesn’t exist because I have never taken steps to make it exist, beyond writing. Simple as that. If I had taken those steps it still might not exist, because I might be a crap writer or not what publishers want. But that’s irrelevant — you can’t win if you don’t take part. I have every advantage and privilege a writer could want, and if I didn’t turn vague daydreams of ‘I’d like to write a book’ into an actual plan to write and sell a fucking book, that’s on me. I’m upset with myself that this has made me glum this afternoon — I’ve obviously got some nasty reserve of entitlement backed up.”
 — You don’t see this kind of honesty enough, which is probably just as well, because if we saw it as frequently as it needed to be seen we wouldn’t see anything else.

Hard to believe, but here’s “the first music video shot atop the Empire State Building.”