May 24, 2026

A TRACK-BY-TRACK GUIDE TO MILES DAVIS’S KIND OF BLUE, THE GREATEST JAZZ ALBUM EVER:

The critical reaction was sometimes baffled by the absence of easily graspable melodies, but it was mostly awe-struck. Benny Green wrote on the album’s liner that “Davis is the most delicately poised musician ever to use the jazz frame…classic severity is the hallmark of Miles’s painful sensitivity, as he devotes his attention to each single note.” Later it floated free from the jazz world to become, as Richard Cooke described it in the Penguin Guide to Jazz, “the hippest easy-listening album of them all”. Not everyone was ecstatic. Some missed the absence of jazz’s wonted driving energy, and Philip Larkin couldn’t stand the “passionless creep” of Miles Davis’s muted trumpet.

As with many classic albums, there was something miraculous about the birth of Kind of Blue. All the stars had to be aligned, and that wasn’t easy in such a volatile art as jazz, where everything depends on the musical chemistry between naturally headstrong individuals.

Well worth a read, but there’s a jarring “layers and layers of fact checkers and editors” moment in this London Telegraph article for even the most cursory of Miles Davis fans. It’s a sort of photographic Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect moment; as author Ivan Hewett notes, “Crucial to the album’s soft-edged, blurry sound was Bill Evans, also no stranger to heroin and booze.” So much so that Evans died in 1980 at age 51 of a “peptic ulcer, cirrhosis, bronchial pneumonia, and untreated hepatitis,” according to Wikipedia.

But the photo above that text is captioned, “Miles Davis (R) and saxophone player Bill Evans (L) performing on stage in Paris, 1982.” There was a second Bill Evans, born in 1958, who played and recorded frequently with Miles in the 1980s. But that’s not him in the photo, which based on Miles’ hairstyle and wrap-around sunglasses, is from the early 1970s. It’s Dave Liebman, who played sax with Miles in 1973.

Related: From me in 2019: The 60th Anniversary of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis’ Masterpiece.

Posted at 6:57 pm by Ed Driscoll

OLD AND BUSTED: Bitchy Resting Face.

The New Hotness Massive Warning Sign for Craziness Ahead:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

POWER WASH:

Related: The Price Is Right host Drew Carey lashes out at LA mayor hopeful Spencer Pratt calling him a ‘serial scammer:’

Drew Carey publicly slammed Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt in a social media rant on Friday.

The Price Is Right host, 68, proved he’s no fan, labelling Pratt a ‘serial scammer’ with no ‘moral compass,’ even though the former Hills star has received a surge in donations that places him close to incumbent mayor Karen Bass.

‘Anyone who votes for, or endorses Spencer Prattfall for Mayor of LA needs to get their head out of their a**,’ Carey wrote on Threads.

‘I understand being angry/unsatisfied, but at least get behind someone competent and not some serial scammer without a soul or moral compass.’

‘F*** this guy already,’ he concluded on a testy note.

I’m so old, I can remember Carey appearing in videos for the libertarians at Reason, before finally finding, in 2020, a presidential candidate who was “competent and not some serial scammer without a soul or moral compass:” “In 2016, Drew Carey backed the presidential campaign of libertarian Gary Johnson. This year, the long-time host of ‘The Price is Right’ has thrown his support behind the campaign of Biden, donating $25,000 to the Biden Victory Fund.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE:

“Then the manifesto dropped,” the tweet continues, “And everything went dead quiet.”

Much more from Stacy McCain: Why Would Two Jew-Hating Teenage Incels Shoot Up a Mosque in San Diego?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GABBARD NOT GOING QUIETLY: Matt Margolis sees a month-worth of weekly revelations from departing Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard.

Posted at 4:04 pm by Mark Tapscott

THE WITCHES OF LUIGI:

The media has an odd term for the sullen young women who have made a sexual fetish of pretty-boy killer Luigi Mangione.

They’re called Luigi Fangirls.

It evokes a frolic, young women skipping down the street, singing, holding hands. You know, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

But I much prefer another name, a more direct name:

Witches.

I’m told that witches are supposedly fictional, a phobia created by men, by the patriarchy, to impose our evil will upon women who cling to stories like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” to justify generations of their cruelties upon boys, from wholesale abortion to “gender affirming” castrations of transgenders.

But they began to appear in our lives, as they had appeared in the past, when they publicly poured out their hysterical sexual fantasies and pathetic love for their heartthrob with those Italian eyebrows, the killer Luigi Mangione, the rich boy of privilege who stalked then shot Health Care executive Bryan Thompson in the back.

Mangione is the pretty privileged boy who murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health Care. Thompson was fatally shot outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel in December 2024. Mangione, who was apprehended days later in Pennsylvania, is currently facing both federal and state murder and weapons charges.

But what explains the hysteria of the witches?

If this Post Millennial article is true, then I think we can ascertain the anger of one of them: Luigi Mangione fangirl who celebrated murder of Brian Thompson is the daughter of CVS Health exec: report.

One of the fangirl “journalists” who has publicly supported Luigi Mangione is reportedly the daughter of a senior healthcare executive at CVS Health.

Lena Weissbrot is the daughter of Reina Natero, a longtime pharmaceutical industry executive who oversees prescription drug insurance coverage rules at CVS Health. Natero has worked in the industry for more than two decades.

Weissbrot is one of three supporters of Mangione who are referred to online as “Mangionistas.” They recently gained attention during Mangione’s pre-trial hearings after receiving New York City press credentials.

Weissbrot has publicly expressed support for Mangione for the alleged murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. On Monday, outside the New York State Supreme Court, Weissbrot said Thompson’s children were “better off without him.”

According to the New York Post, Weissbrot received a Fulbright-MTV fellowship in 2015 after graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Florida State University. The grant allowed her to study “South African artists identifying as feminists who use Hip-hop music as a form of activism” at Rhodes University in South Africa.

“This has become an archetype at this point, when activists become defined as the ‘anti’ of what their parents were,” Stu Smith, analyst at the Manhattan Institute, told The Post. “There’s no self-awareness.”

Patricide is a theme that runs throughout Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskend’s retrospective on the “New Hollywood” of the 1960s and ’70s. But with women becoming high-powered executives in the decades since, there’s no reason to be sexist about young distaff lefties hating their mothers as well.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

ROGER KIMBALL: Out on a Limb, but Unmoved: Trump Will Finish the Job in Iran.

What’s the end game? President Trump vouchsafed the world a hint in a Truth Social post on Saturday. It’s a map of the Middle East showing Iran bedecked with the stars and stripes and emblazoned with the headline: “United States of the Middle East?” Later Saturday he announced that “An Agreement has been largely negotiated,” subject to review. All of which is to say that I stick by my original prediction. Donald Trump is not Barack Obama. One way or the other—through tough negotiation or by force—he will “finish the job.” He would prefer the former. If he wants a longstanding peace and a free Iran, he is likely to require the latter.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Iran Agreed to Discuss Surrendering Its Uranium Stocks; Trump Responds. Ed Morrissey writes, “This may not be the Bridge and Power Day outcome that hawks had hoped to see. If this is accurate and it holds, it’s not TACO Tuesday either. It leaves Trump with all of his options in place while keeping pressure on the regime to comply with the biggest and most dangerous threat it poses – the development of nuclear weapons. That is the true existential threat to Israel, not to mention other Gulf states that are now aligning with Israel and the US, and it would head off a nuclear arms race in one of the most unstable regions of the world. If it works. If it doesn’t, Trump hasn’t lost much but time in this agreement. And a failure by Ahmad Vahidi to adhere to this deal would make it easier for Trump to justify more kinetic action in the future.”

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

As Mollie Hemingway notes, “You’re not just having a debate with an opponent, but your most hostile and most rabid opponent:” 

 

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

DEAR DIARY: Jim Acosta Didn’t Like Greg Gutfeld’s Reality Check About Colbert’s Cancellation (Replies Off of Course).

By the end of Obama’s second term, Jim’s then-employer had a simple, if rather brutal, solution they proffered to employees losing their jobs in industries that the three-term president and his party’s operatives with bylines had dubbed obsolete:

Related:

Exit quote: “The Strike Force Five — Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Oliver — appeared in a segment about late-night losing ‘one middle-aged white man who makes jokes about the news.’ They were joking about their own obsolescence. All of them know. None of them will say it. The format is dead. The audience moved to phones. The phones don’t have desks or bands. The phones have men in garages who are allowed to be wrong, allowed to be surprised, allowed to say something their audience hasn’t already approved. That’s comedy. We stopped doing that a decade ago. We did approval. Approval looks like comedy from a distance. Up close it’s church.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll