I wasn't planning on enthusiastically supporting Cynthia Nixon's bid to become New York's governor, which should lead to a primary challenge against incumbent Andrew Cuomo, absent shenanigans.  I was planning, instead, to hear her out, given that I am largely unsatisfied with Andrew, who has proven annoyed me by feuding with New York City mayor Bill de Blasio when he should be doing right by the people who pay most of the taxes around here. which is us New Yorkers.

The world is not consistent on this point, but I think I've been pretty reliably of the belief that people's consensual and private romantic entanglements really aren't anybody else's business, absent naked hypocrisy on the issue by people in public life. That way, I can forgive Bill Clinton and John Edwards their affairs and not so much Newt Gingrich, who is a public scold and worse.

Back in a still rough post-war era reviving personal dreams - measurable, daunting, somehow achievable.

It's not that other sports measures aren't great, or that the 4-minute mile wasn't in a way much more arbitrary than the ascent of Everest, but still, a definite challenge in an age of breaking the sound barrier and other advances.

I'm sick of hearing Trump, seeing Trump, laughing at Trump, agonizing over Trump. I'm sick of Donald J. Trump, the squatter in the White House, making a mockery of our presidency.

He's a president like a third rate comic spoofing the highest job in the land would be president. His stake is only in drawing an audience; he has no feeling for what the real job would be like. It's  beyond his capacity to get that deep into the role, and nothing says he has to. He revels in his "free to be me" rhetoric and the crowds keep on coming.