Visiting San Francisco and just had my first Waymo ride. It was the most obedient, defensive, proper driving I have ever seen, at once frustrating and uplifting. The world would be a better place if every car was fully self-driving and I can’t wait for them to come to DC.

❄️ DC public schools are back in session after two snow days and on one hand this is a relief — no one wants to make up extended snow days in the summer — but then most streets are still not plowed and have 0.5 lanes of traffic open making the morning drive a hazard. What is all this equipment for?

From the most excellent exhibit Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 on display at the National Portrait Gallery until February 23, 2025:

Rose O’Neill 1874-1944 Born Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

Rose O’Neill invented the internationally famous “Kewpie” cartoon character. It made her a millionaire and the highest-paid woman artist in the world. In Paris, she revealed a very different artistic side. There, she exhibited visionary artworks inspired by dreams and the unconscious.

O’Neill first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1906 and was immediately elected to its prestigious membership. Fifteen years later, Parisian critics praised her one-woman show. It featured fantastic images influenced by pagan mythology and evolutionary theory.

O’Neill championed women’s economic independence and sexual liberation. She blamed fashion for constraining women, asking “How can they hope to compete with men when they are boxed up tight in the clothes that are worn today?” She once pretended to be pregnant to persuade a French clothier to make a corset-free, loose-fitting gown, like the one worn in this portrait. Her nonchalant pose and defiant gaze express O’Neill’s supreme self-assurance.

Here is the portrait, even more remarkable in person:

And yes this is the same Kewpie that endures as a brand of Japanese mayonnaise on sale at your local Costco.

Tracing phenomena through time is a humbling experience. The same exhibit dedicated a whole section to Josephine Baker — just try to categorize this.

Here is a brief anecdote that may help contextualize some recent developments, in particular why anyone black, or brown, or uneducated, or poor may have preferred Trump over Harris.

Two apartments ago, a bit before Covid, we were living in a 2-bedroom apartment in Northwest DC that was absolutely gargantuan by European standards but must have seemed cramped for a family of five-plus-a-house-guest to our neighbors. One neighbor in particular, let’s call her Alice, seemed unusually interested in the goings on of our household: the foreign accents, the visiting grandparents, so many children. So she made a point to, whenever we bumped into each other in the hallway, gather as much information as possible, and give a few bits about herself in return.

Alice worked for a federal agency, you see, and as a hard-core democrat was trying to minimize the chaos that the orange man — this was during the first Trump administration — and his peons spewed on the people. Now the agency in question was healthcare-adjacent so my wife and I, both being physicians, knew that the problems ran deeper than the president and his appointees, but that is not the point of the story.

The point is this: with every interaction, Alice would highlight that we were not US citizens, then highlight some more that we had visiting family members who also were not citizens and who may or may not be in the country legally (they were all, of course, visiting on a tourist visa as they have been in more than a decade since we moved from Serbia), then apologize for what Trump was doing to the immigrants and aren’t we all lucky that DC is a town of welcoming democrats and can you please let her know if we needed any help with anything, at which point Alice would — unironically — wink.

It’s hard for me to say what felt more insulting, the sly and not so sly insinuations that we were there illegally, the entitlement that we must be best of friends because we were immigrants, or the expectation of gratitude to all the democrats for “fighting on our behalf” when there was no fighting to be had. And this is before we even had our green cards, staying on a combination of work and (this is my favorite name for a bureaucratic invention) Alien of extraordinary ability visas. I can only imagine how much worse the feeling would have been if we were citizens with the unfortunate property of having an unusual accent or unconventional (for upper-middle-class-non-hispanic-whites) housing arrangements.

To be clear, I have no idea what Alice’s intentions were. I am pretty sure she didn’t want to insult anyone, and that her thoughts and feelings were true. And it is often the case that someone can feel insulted for reasons completely within their control: a slight sense of shame that you weren’t living up to someone’s arbitrary standards, annoyance that you are spending hours on immigration paperwork when others don’t have to yet feel as welcome, outrage that anyone would give even a hint of a suggestion that you are a family of Anne Franks looking for an attic. All internal and within your own control, but not any less true. Humans being humans.

This was all before Covid-19. After March 2020 our hallway conversations turned into talks about masks, vaccines, and how everyone was grateful to have doctors in the building. About a year into the pandemic another neighbor ran out of their antipsychotic medications and started setting small fires and hitting random hallway doors with baseballs bats so we were soon out — the benefits of renting — but we stayed on good terms with Alice. Still, those first few impressions stuck, and majority of our interactions are only first impressions without the benefit of a pandemic to deepen a relationship.

One of the defining properties of America is, I’ve learned over the years, the tendency to go all-in. People don’t just go on a hike or two a year, they buy hiking gear, download hiking apps, plan out routes and become hikers. They don’t go out for a jog when the weather is nice and they feel like it, they train for a marathon. They don’t enjoy a night out at a restaurant, they rate and review and call themselves “foodies”. They don’t just like their work, they do it on evenings and weekends and holidays too. That is how you get to the highest GDP of any developed country, I guess, but there is also some subtlety lost and the democrats who were all-in on immigration have lost that subtlety and unintentionally — I hope — fanned the flames of indignation across the board. So not only were those pro-immigration efforts insufficient to overcome the feelings about the economy, they may have even hurt.

No, I am not canceling my Washington Post subscription; the free one I had through my previous federal job expired and I never renewed it, so there was nothing left to cancel. My main source of local news has been Axios DC but The 51st popped up recently and is now getting amplified. It has fewer tips on where to get the best Cinco de Mayo margarita and more in-depth news, which is great. It also lists Old Town Alexandria as the number 1 spot for a fall walk around D.C. so they’re not perfect, but then no-one is. And of course, they are opportunistic about the recent local events (headline: D.C. Deserves Billionaire-Free Local News).

🏀 The Wizards' season home opener against the Celtics was a bust, but that wasn’t a surprise. I’m actually more hopeful after this game than I’ve been after the last season’s home win against the Grizzlies. A dignified(-ish) loss against a great team versus an eked out win against a bad one.

🎭 Went to the theater for the first time in years to watch Babbitt, a well-executed dumbing down of Sinclair Lewis’s novel about middle-aged and middle-class conformity. The play took the lazy approach of taking pot shots at MAGA; a more biting satire would have aimed at the upper middle class conformists in the audience.

I’ve updated my now page. The update includes where I am right now, which is Savannah, Georgia, where I am attending a medical conference. But you can’t escape DC: I was sitting at the bar having lunch when a couple couldn’t help overhearing where I lived as I was chatting with the bartender. “Hey, we’re from DC too”. Small world! Where in DC? “Oh, we live downtown, we’re both lobbyists.”

Of course they were. One for a private healthcare equity firm, the other for medium-sized pharmaceutical. We did not delve deeper.

This morning on Axios DC:

Metro fixed its fare evasion problem on trains, and now they are focusing on the 70% of bus riders who don’t pay. That eye-popping rate is up from 17% pre-pandemic.

Yowza. There is more at WaPo. Kids and I take the metro bus to school from time to time and I can confirm that:

1. School children in general don’t use their free ride cards. It improves the flow of people and drivers don’t seem to care.
2. More than half of the adults just waltz in as well. That too improves the flow of traffic, and drivers don’t seem to care about that either.

A head-scratcher, that.

From Axios, PowerPoint’s comeback:

Gen Zers and millennials are using the software to prepare whimsical presentations on niche topics, dating history or vacation destinations for their friends and family.

Tight Five Pub, a sports bar in D.C., hosts PowerPoint parties where locals gather to present silly, heartwarming and informative slideshows on esoteric interests.

I haven’t been pessimistic about kids these days, until now.