There's nothing about this book that is particularly captivating, but you can read it in less than an hour, and it did what it was meant to do--which is to make the reader thirsty. #2025Book26

#2025Book25

July 10
lawrence (n.) A shimmering heat haze.

As well as being a boy's name, a lawrence is also a heat haze--the shimmering, undulating appearance of the air above a hot surface.

Also, it can be awkward to ask someone you're sleeping with for the first time to put your dick in a death grip.

In the days of King Charles II, the last Spanish Hapsburg ruler and one of the most regal premature ejaculators on record, sexual dysfunctions were the product of witchcraft. Innovative treatments included exorcisms and urinating through the keyhole of the church where you were married.

That is the process of all human development and knowledge building. Some brave souls make a leap of faith, and if they succeed they are heroes; if they fail, the next in line step over their bodies and try a different approach.

July 5
paw-paw (adj.)-- Immoral, obscene

July 4
Monadnock (n.) An isolated hill or mountain

July 3
Cosmognosis (n.)-- The natural instinct that tells a creature when to migrate.

July 2
Meditullium (n.) The absolute middle or core of something.

June 30
Transpontine (adj.) Located on the opposite side of a bridge.

June 29
Scathefire (n.) A vast, destructive conflagration

#2025Book24

June 27
Mavortian (adj.) Warlike, martial.

What happened to the Nersesian who used to write novels like “The Fuck-up,“ 'Suicide Cassanova,“ and “Dogrun“? I want him back.

In the news business, being first with clearly written copy is better than being garbled and last.

June 25
Decapulate (v.) To pour a liquid from one vessel into another.

A full moon will rise in the part of the sky that is opposite sunset for that day. A full moon rises well south of east in midsummer and north of east in midwinter. It will set approximately opposite sunrise direction for that day also.

Meteors have a relationship with time and direction. You are likely to see more shooting stars after midnight than before, because this is when your part of Earth is facing “forward“ as it moves in its orbit around the sun.

June 18
Noctilucy (n.) The shining of the moon.

Yet for all its cultural luminescence, Polaris is only the forty-eighth brightest star in the sky. It stands out because it is the brightest star in its patch of the sky. If you see two stars of similar brightness close to each other you cannot be looking at the North Star, which always appears to be the only one of comparable brightness in its immediate vicinity.

The southern side of painted objects fade faster than the northern side. I have seen this in varied locations, from footpath signs in France that had paled on one side, to bleached oil drums in the desert. Some things will show this solar effect more quickly than others. Over the course of a single day, moist dung will dry more quickly on its southern side.

Growing numbers of solar panels on roofs will be ignored by most, but they offer help to observant navigators: There is not much point in a solar panel that faces north in the northern hemisphere, so, wherever possible, they face south.

June 17
Gaping-stock (n.) Someone or something being stared at by a crowd.

#2025Book23

There's actually a term for this category: LOVEINT, when intelligence officers use their access to surveillance tools to spy on the human objects of their affection. It's happened at all levels of the government, from NSA employees who accessed email and phone data of romantic partners to local police officers who have snooped in DMV databases to get women's home addresses.

In 2008, a couple of academics decided to study how long it would actually take to read all the privacy policies the average American agrees to in a year. Their estimate? More than 200 hours. That's 25 workdays, or a month of nine to five reading. To prove how ridiculous it was to expect consumers to read these agreements, one gaming company added to its online terms of service a claim to “the immortal soul“ of anyone who placed an...

Privacy isn't just about what people know about you, it's about how that knowledge gives them control over you.

This is the challenge of protecting privacy in the modern world. How can you fully comprehend what will become possible as technology improves? Information that you give up freely now, in ways that seem harmless, might come back to haunt you when computers get better at mining it.

Google created a blurring option to pixelate houses in Steet View photos to make them unrecognizable. Pro-tech vigilantes sought out the blurred homes in the real world, the locations easily ascertainable from Google Maps, and egged them, leaving notes in their mailboxes that read, “Google's cool.“ Those who chose privacy over progress thus became the villains. Evidently, there would be no hiding in this new rabidly transparent world.

Most people think that the sheer existence of a privacy policy means a company protects their data, but, in fact, the policy exists to explain, in lengthy legalese, how the company may exploit it. It would be more accurately termed a “data exploitation policy.“

In 2016, researchers at Microsoft released a public data set with millions of photos of “celebrities,“ explicitly to help people working on facial recognition technology. Most of the people included were actors, but there were also journalists and activists, some of whom were prominent critics of face recognition. They had no idea that their own faces were being used to improve it.

June 11
Abscotchalater (n.) Someone hiding from the police.

Joe Biden was the best and most underrated president of my lifetime. My respect for him grew even deeper when he finally dropped out of the race. But then I read this book, and, sadly, that level of respect has now plummeted. Why did he not drop out sooner? How deep did his delusions run? More importantly, why didn't anyone stop him? This book is as shocking as it is heartbreaking. #2025Book22

“Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?“ Hostin followed up. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,“ Harris said, in perhaps the worst moment of her short campaign. Most of the public thought the country was on the wrong track, and she was presenting herself quite literally as “more of the same.“ She tried to recover, but it was too late: She'd just provided new footage for a ...

Nancy Pelosi sat down and wrote the president a letter on her stationary.
“A master class press conference showing mastery of foreign policy,“ she wrote of the NATO event. “A positive grassroots event in Detroit. Not a reason to stay, but a way to go out on top.“

After the debate, Moulton had approached an irreverent colleague on the floor of the House. “What did you think of that performance?“ he asked him.
“We need to sub in someone with more energy,“ the other congressman said sardonically. “Like Bill Pascrell.“
Pascrell, an eighty-seven-year-old New Jersey Democrat, was sickly and just weeks away from death. It was a dark joke, but Democrats were in a dark place.

Emmanuel noted that Biden's “cohorts have told us that he's healthy for over a year.“ Pointedly, he added, “I had a father who died at ninety-two, but at eighty-one I took away his car.“

“Well, I'm pissed off at the Founding Fathers,“ Ari Emanuel said. “They had the start date of thirty-five; they just didn't give us the end date.“

“They did such a disservice to Joe Biden and the country,“ Axelrod later said. “The family as well. I don't understand how you could see him in the condition he's in and think, 'Yeah, you oughta go run for president again.' To do that to someone you love?“

June 10
Sheep-biting (n.) Treacherous, underhand behavior.

It was clear early on that Biden needed to acknowledge that prices were too high and needed to come down,“ one pollster said. “But Donilon and others at the White House would refuse. They said if we acknowledged it, no one would remember anything else.“
This instruction came from Biden himself, they were told.

Biden didn't always like getting notes on his delivery but would listen to someone like Spielberg. The famous director would also coach the president before speeches like the State of the Union. Katzenberg hoped that voters' age concerns about Biden could be assuaged with a little Hollywood magic.

“How bad is your memory?“ asked a reporter from Fox.
“My memory is so bad, I let you speak,“ Biden snapped. 😅

Trying to understand a point in time in 2013, he asked, “Well, if it was 2013--when did I stop being vice president?“
“2017,“ a White House lawyer reminded him.
At another moment, asked about a “Facts First“ file with documents “related to Afghanistan from 2009,“ Biden asked, “I'm, at this stage, in 2009, am I still vice president?“

June 9
Curfuggle (n.) A confused mess; disorder, disarray.

June 7
Wunderkammer (n.) A collection of oddities; a room set aside for just such a collection.

June 8
Boothale (v)-- To pillage or plunder.

A year later, that official told us, “I blame his inner circle, and I blame him. What utter and total hubris not to step aside and be a one-term president, as he said he would, and have an open primary when there was time to let the process play out. Even though he did so many good things for this country, I can never forgive him.“

Still, he had beaten Trump, and he wasn't confident that she could. He privately called her a “work in progress.“ It became an additional rationalization for his reelection run: There was no plan B.