Losing My Perspicacity April 15, 2025

Good morning and Happy Tuesday! Thanks for reading. Today is the one-year anniversary of Losing My Perspicacity, and I’m so grateful that you all came on this journey with me. A year ago, having been freshly laid off from Deadspin after it was sold to a European buyer, I had no idea what to do next. I was sick to death of working for private equity bros in an industry that seemed to be in its death throes. I took a chance that people would read what I wrote, and, over 400 subscribers later, here we are! Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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LMP has returned after a much-needed break for my brain and my tennis elbow. I avoided the news (and my phone) all weekend, and it’s remarkable how much taking a few days off from Idiocracy improves your outlook on life. Don’t forget to take breaks — this is a sprint, not a marathon, and the authoritarian faction of the US government is trying to wear you out with the onslaught of bad news.

Before we get into more serious matters, we need to talk about this stupid all-female “crew” on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin “spacecraft.” If you need proof that every major media outlet runs on Amazon Web Services’ cloud, just check out how the media has covered this non-story.

First of all, these six women — Gayle King, Katy Perry, Bezos’s lady friend Lauren Sanchez, NASA scientists Amanda Nguyen and Aisha Bowe, and film producer Kerrianne Flynn — were not a crew. They were passengers. The Blue Origin ship is entirely self-piloting, and the women on board had nothing to do except enjoy the view and, reportedly, sing “What a Wonderful World.” Calling them a “crew” is an insult to the women who came before; women like Sally Ride, Dr. Mae Jemison, and Russian Valentina Tereshkova, who manned the last “all female crew” solo in 1963. Jemison had a degree in chemical engineering and a doctorate in medicine. Sally Ride had a BA, BS, MS, and PhD in various physical sciences from Stanford. Tereshkova came out of the former Soviet Union, but even she was an accomplished skydiver and engineer. Katy Perry has sold 143 million records. One of these things is not like the others.

Katy Perry has cultivated a reputation for — for lack of a better word — performative feminism, and this stunt fits right in with her usual fare. For her 2024 “comeback,” entitled “Woman’s World,” she worked with the infamous “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, the same man Kesha accused of drugging and sexually assaulting her (Gottwald denied the allegations, and the parties settled their dispute). Taylor Swift donated $250,000 to Kesha’s legal team. “Space is finally going to be glam,” was Perry’s prediction ahead of the launch, speaking to the L’Oreal Paris makeup her artist used for the “mission.” Adding that she wanted to “Put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.” 

One clue that you’re not an actual “crew” member of a space flight is that you have a makeup artist on hand and you are worried about your spacesuit making you look fat.

Then there’s Jeff Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, who looked on gleefully as Donald Trump, a man who has been legally adjudicated a sexual abuser and has been accused by more than 20 other women of various forms of sexual misconduct, was inaugurated as President of the United States. Bezos even donated $1 million to the cause. All this for the guy who has led the charge to kill women’s reproductive freedom and erase all mention of their accomplishments and leadership from the DOD and NASA websites.

Nothing about this “mission” was feminist. This was one huge advertisement for Bezos’ Blue Origin space tourism, where rich people can buy a ticket to fly up to, and a bit above, the Kármán line — the generally agreed upon boundary between our atmosphere and space. The entire flight lasted a little over 10 minutes, and the fact that a 90-year-old William Shatner also took the flight in 2021 tells you everything you need to know.

If Jeff Bezos really wants to do something feminist for the world, he could hire more women to work at WaPo. He could donate millions to women in STEM fields. He could have not paid $40 million for a Melania vanity documentary. He could probably fund hundreds of abortion centers for years and never make a dent in his bottom line. He could focus on giving away his billions — like ex-wife MacKenzie Scott — to organizations helping marginalized women and people of color. Above all, he could not bend his knee to a man who nominated five men with various histories of violence against women to prominent cabinet positions.

Don’t give me Katy Perry in glam falsies and an impeccably tailored space suit and tell me it’s feminism.

Today: Trump is thumbing his nose at the judiciary and the Constitution; Universities are starting to find their backbones; JD Vance embarrasses himself in public again; Andrew Cuomo is exactly who you think he is; and The High Note.

Let’s get into it.

Kilmar Brego Garcia is in trouble

Despite a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling that the Trump Administration must “facilitate” his return home to the United States, Kilmar Brego Garcia seems no closer to getting out of El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison than he was weeks ago.

Trump, who has insisted that he has no control over what happens to those he has illegally trafficked to El Salvador without due process, hosted El Salvador President Nayib Bukele at the White House yesterday, and Bukele seems to be backing up Trump’s position.

Setting aside, for a moment, the legality of Trump’s refusal to do what SCOTUS ordered him to do, let’s talk about what is happening here. The Trump administration removed a man to the one place a court order saying he could not go, admitted he was sent there in error, but is unwilling to do anything to bring Brego Garcia back, despite pretty clearly having Bukele under his thumb.

A “normal” press corps would have asked Bukele what evidence he has that Brego Garcia is a “terrorist” and “criminal,” but this is not a normal press corps.

Meanwhile, if you don’t care about Brego Garcia because you think it doesn’t have anything to do with you, you should hear what Trump said to Bukele on his way out.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post got their hands on an internal DOJ memo that admits there is no evidence tying Tufts’ PhD candidate Rümeysa Öztürk to terrorism or antisemitism, calling into question pretty much everything Marco Rubio said about her.

BTW, there was a hearing yesterday morning on transferring Öztürk to Vermont and releasing her on bail. The judge sounded like he might be learning towards releasing her, but set a hearing date in May.

Are Universities finally waking up?

Yesterday, Harvard (of all schools) announced that it will not comply with Donald Trump’s list of demands in order to maintain funding.

Huzzah! Don’t get me wrong, when this is all over, Harvard will definitely hire Trump, hopefully from a jail cell, to teach at its Kennedy School of Government, but for today this is good news!

And, Harvard and its $50 billion endowment isn’t the only school poised to fight back. The Big Ten schools (which now stretch from sea to shining sea) are also attempting to unite in the face of threats from the right.

As one Bluesky poster pointed out, it’s great that the faculties are doing this, but it’s probably going to take B1G alums emailing their boards of trustees to get everyone on board with this. If you went to a Big Ten school, get your emailing finger ready!

JD Vance is so embarrassing

Remember that scene in The Office where Michael is threatening to jump off the roof of Dunder Mifflin to prove how dangerous his job his? And, in an attempt to talk him down, Darryl says to him, I mean, it takes courage just to be you. To get out of bed every single day, knowing full well, you gotta be you.”

That’s how I feel about JD Vance.

Andrew Cuomo is as bad as you think he is

I’ll just leave this here.

I have no comment on what a ridiculous person this man is, but I do want to point out what Rebecca Traister posted about this on Bluesky.

Too familiar.

The High Note

Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.

I have no explanation for why it took me so long to find these people, but this is the best thing I’ve seen in some time.

cost_n_mayor

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Survive and advance today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.