Notes and Essays -- John Brown

 From The NYT Update : May 30, 2025, 2:42 p.m. ET 16 minutes ago Tyler Pager White House reporter Musk, when asked about a bruise near his eye, said his son punched him in the face . “I was horsing around with little X and I said, ‘go ahead, punch me in the face,’ and he did,” he said.

" Robert D. McFadden [see above image] was a Times reporter for 63 years.  In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people  so they can be published quickly upon their deaths. " From  The New York Times  ( Published May 29, 2025 Updated May 30, 2025,  11:28 a.m. ET) McFadden image  from

Faizan Zaki, 13, of Texas, celebrates after being named the winner of the 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center on Thursday in National Harbor, Maryland. (Michael A. McCoy/For The Washington Post ); see also

Musk representing DOGE [ see ] in front of the White House. Credit... Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press;  image from The New Work Times . On Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, see Wikipedia . And this from the British Empire: Baby Trump and Musk feature in Russian propaganda cartoon for toddlers Cameron Henderson  Tue, May 27, 2025 at 4:27 PM EDT 3 min read; JB: article has amusing images   

Threats to withhold billions in federal research funds to punish campuses grew heated after a 2019 altercation left a man with a black eye By Eliza Collins, Douglas Belkin, Tarini Parti and Liz Essley Whyte The Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2025 8:30 pm ET   Harmeet Dhillon, head of the civil-rights division at the Justice Department, wakes up around 6 a.m. and begins her workday scrolling through X, searching for claims of discrimination.  A lot of them, Dhillon said, regard universities. After spotting “a list of new horrors,” she said, “I text my deputies, and we assign cases, and we get cranking.” The Trump administration is on the hunt for campuses that have allegedly tolerated antisemitism, threatening to yank billions of dollars in federal research funding from Harvard and other top-name schools. The White House has accused universities of failing to protect Jewish students during campus protests against Israel over the war in Gaza that began in 2023. Yet the idea of t...