On this day (1926): Chiang Kai-shek expels Communists from the Kuomintang in China. And how’d that work out for him?
Smoke. From my OED app: “sməʊk / ▸ noun 1 [mass noun] a visible suspension of carbon or other particles in air, typically one emitted from a burning substance: bonfire smoke. 2 an act of smoking tobacco: I’m dying for a smoke. ▪ informal a cigarette or cigar: you’re going to buy some smokes of your own. 3 (the Smoke or the Big Smoke) British English informal a big city, especially London: she was offered a job in the Smoke. ▸ verb 1 [no object] emit smoke or visible vapour: heat the oil until it just smokes. 2 [no object] suck on the end of a lit cigarette, cigar, pipe, etc. so as to inhale and exhale the smoke produced by the burning tobacco into the mouth: she was sitting at the kitchen table smoking [with object] he smoked twenty cigarettes a day. ▪ [with object] inhale and exhale the smoke produced by burning (a narcotic drug): a year later she began smoking heroin. 3 [with object] treat, fumigate, or cleanse by exposure to smoke. ▪ cure or preserve (food, especially meat or fish) by exposure to smoke: their salmon and trout are smoked over peat and hand-sliced. ▪ subdue (insects, especially bees) by exposing them to smoke: traditionally, the beekeeper must smoke the bees to calm them. 4 [with object] North American English informal kill (someone) by shooting: they gotta go smoke this person. ▪ defeat overwhelmingly in a fight or contest: I got smoked in that fight. 5 [with object] archaic make fun of (someone): we baited her and smoked her…. ORIGIN Old English smoca (noun), smocian (verb), from the Germanic base of smēocan ‘emit smoke’; related to Dutch smook and German Schmauch.” • The OED takes a dark turn into cigarattes and heron! Followed by an incredible number of phrases, phrasal verbs, and derivatives. If you’ve got one of those Old English short words, you’ve got to the fluent in its distributaries!
“The epidemiologist who saved millions of lives” [Lars P. Syll].
“Richard Doll was a luminary of clinical research whose case control study, published in the BMJ in 1950, first identified smoking as an important cause of cancer and other diseases.”
“Wildfire Crews Race to Keep Fierce California Blaze From Former Nuclear Reactor Site” [Inside Climate News]. “As the ever-growing Sandy Fire swept across Southern California, the 45-year-old mother could only think of one thing. [Melissa] Bumstead lives less than four miles from the site of possibly the worst nuclear meltdown in U.S. history besides the Three Mile Island accident. The Santa Susana Field Laboratory, or SSFL, is known locally as a problem site—with a pockmarked history amid a spotty cleanup. A blaze hitting the former nuclear reactor and rocket testing site, Bumstead is sure, would be a cataclysm. ‘This is what it looks like to evacuate when you’re scared,’ she said Monday, ‘because if the smoke were to be radioactive or toxic, you don’t want to breathe it.’” • Makes you wonder what will happen if (when) a data center catches on fire.
“Behind Christie’s $1 B. Blockbuster Result, the Market Still Looks Uneven” [ArtNews]. “Anyone who’s seen the headlines or watched the Instagram clips of Christie’s hammering down Jackson Pollock’s Number 7A, 1948 (1948) for $181.2 million to a room erupting in applause, alongside the flurry of other records smashed on Monday night, could be forgiven for thinking that frothy market is back with a vengeance. After a few sluggish years, strong results in New York’s marquee sales last November and the London evening sales in March have raised hopes that we are in full-on recovery mode.” But: “[New York–based art adviser Megan Fox Kelly], however, cautioned that Christie’s blockbuster results risked masking a weaker broader market. ‘It’s not smoke and mirrors so much as how people interpret the data. If you’re not looking at the market from the inside, there’s a tendency to assume that when the top end rises, everything rises with it. That’s not necessarily the case,” she said. “When collectors see extraordinary works making extraordinary prices, they assume the market is up for everything. They think the value of their own collections has necessarily risen because a major Pollock or Rothko sold for an enormous number. But those sales don’t automatically lift the value of everything else.” • History of “smoke and mirrors”
Dad Joke of the Day: What’s made out of leather and sounds like a sneeze? A shoe!
Look. From my OED app: /lʊk / ▸ verb [no object, usually with adverbial of direction] 1 direct one’s gaze toward someone or something or in a specified direction: people were looking at him they looked up as he came into the room Lynn immediately looked down, her face scarlet he thought she wasn’t looking. ▪ (of a building or room) have an outlook in a specified direction: the room looks out over Mylor Harbour. ▪ [with clause] ascertain with a quick glance: people finishing work don’t look where they’re going. ▪ attempt to find someone or something: I can’t find them—I’ve looked everywhere. ▪ [with object] dated express (something) by one’s gaze: Poirot looked a question. 2 (look at) think of or regard in a specified way: I look at tennis differently from some coaches. ▪ examine (a matter) and consider what action to take: a committee is looking at the financing of the BBC. 3 [with complement or adverbial] have the appearance or give the impression of being: her father looked unhappy the home looked like a prison. ▪ (look like) informal show a likelihood of: [with present participle] Leeds didn’t look like scoring from any of their corners [with clause] it doesn’t look like you’ll be moving to Liverpool. ▪ (look oneself) appear one’s normal, healthy self: he just didn’t look himself at all. 4 (look to) rely on (someone) to do or provide something: she will look to you for help. ▪ [with infinitive] hope or expect to do something: universities are looking to expand their intakes. ▪ [with clause] archaic take care; make sure: Look ye obey the masters of the craft. ▸ noun 1 an act of directing one’s gaze in order to see someone or something: let me get a closer look. ▪ an expression of a feeling or thought by looking: the orderly gave me a funny look. ▪ a scrutiny or examination: the government should take a look at the amount of grant the council receives. 2 the appearance of someone or something, especially as expressing a particular quality: the bedraggled look of the village. ▪ (looks) a person’s facial appearance considered aesthetically: he had charm, good looks, and an amusing insouciance. ▪ a style or fashion: Italian designers unveiled their latest look. ▸ exclamation (also look here!) used to call attention to what one is going to say: ‘Look, this is ridiculous.’ …. ORIGIN Old English lōcian (verb), of West Germanic origin; related to German dialect lugen.” • Followed by an even more incredible number of phrases, phrasal verbs, and derivatives. And the OED reminding us forcefully with its usage examples that Oxford is in England, what with “Mylor Harbour,” “Hercule Poirot,” “BBC”, “Leeds”, and “Liverpool.”
“With Just Two Looks, Taylor Russell Is Already In the Running for Best-Dressed at Cannes” [Vogue]. “While a show’s closing look is generally nothing short of grand, Russell gave it some cool-girl styling finesse that made it effortlessly fit for the daytime event: She wore her hair up, allowing for curly tendrils to hang loose, and added some sleek black sunglasses for some extra nonchalance.” • Here we have “look’ (that is, what is looked at), and below we have “look” (who is doing the looking, “looking at a look” with sufficiently intense use of smoke and mirrors). I’m trying to think of other words that signify both ends of a relation as “look” does, but I can’t come up with any. Readers?
“Trump calls San Diego Islamic Center shooting ‘terrible situation’ ” [Anadolu Agency]. “ ‘They’re giving a briefing on it …and it’s a terrible situation. I’ve been given some early updates, but we’re going to be going back and looking at it very strongly,’ Trump told the reporters at the White House.”
“Ranked: The Youngest Billionaires in 2026” [Visual Capitalist]. “Here’s a look at the world’s youngest billionaires in 2026 and how they made their wealth, based on Forbes data…. Nearly all of the world’s youngest billionaires inherited their wealth through family-controlled empires. Germany and Italy account for many of the billionaires under 30, tied to industrial, retail, and luxury fortunes. Only a small number built billion-dollar companies themselves, mostly in AI and tech.” • Handy chart:
Fortune: “What!? Me worry?” —Alfred E. Newman
Oxford Dictionary of English imagination /ɪˌmadʒɪˈneɪʃn / ▸ noun the faculty or action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses: she’d never been blessed with a vivid imagination her story captured the public’s imagination. ▪ [mass noun] the ability of the mind to be creative or resourceful: she was set in her ways and lacked imagination. ▪ the part of the mind that imagines things: a girl who existed only in my imagination. – ORIGIN Middle English: via Old French from Latin imaginatio(n-), from the verb imaginari ‘picture to oneself’, from imago, imagin- ‘image’.
“Paloma Elsesser Gives Francesco Risso’s Bureau of Imagination Project Its Red Carpet Debut at the 2026 Met Gala” [Vogue]. “As Paloma Elsesser made her way up the Metropolitan Museum’s monumental staircase at tonight’s Met Gala celebrating ‘Costume Art,’ she faced the usual question from journalists behind the velvet ropes: “What are you wearing?” Her answer, however, was not so usual. ‘I’m wearing my dear friend Francesco Risso’s new project, Bureau of Imagination,” she told the reporters with an air of mystery, a sweeping train following in her wake.” And: “The shape that community takes will become clear soon. In the meantime, Risso confirmed that Elsesser’s one-of-a-kind gown was patchworked from no fewer than 30 vintage dresses sourced from eBay, and was subsequently hand-painted and embellished with metal embroideries in Milan, where he’s based, by ‘a squadron of people.’ It’s part of a series that we’re experimenting with in the Bureau that we call ;Vestige,” he explained. ‘It’s the very high-end part of the Bureau of Imagination, where it’s really about collaging different things together. This is something that I’ve always been quite drawn to: the idea that we can experience things through different places, different eras and, in a way, almost tear them apart, and then find a different, new beauty out of it.” • Lotta labor in that. (Two from Vogue, I know, but “Bureau of Imagination” caught my eye, and what better source for “look”?)
“The Hospitality of the Imagination”[Scott Samuelson, 3 Quarks Daily]. Quoting Borges: “Remember what Emerson said: arguments convince nobody. They convince nobody because they are presented as arguments. But when something is merely said or—better still—hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination. We are ready to accept it.” And Samuelson: “I love that idea of the hospitality of the imagination. Maybe academics and poets need to be more gracious to their audience! Not that you can tell academics or poets anything, in my experience. The flipside of hospitality is hostility. Hospitality welcomes, hostility attacks. The dream of an academic paper, especially one in philosophy, is to advance a claim with airtight reasoning and to fend off every possible objection…. I’m not saying that hostility is always bad. You can’t have hospitality without hostility—at least not this side of heaven. For me to be able to welcome guests into my house, I need the safety that’s afforded by walls, locks, and the police. And if my guests become unruly, I need to be able to kick them out. Similarly, a mind needs the ability to protect itself against bad ideas. A good education should involve some of the roughhousing on display in academic debates to build up the mental muscles and argumentative skills necessary for self-defense. But shouldn’t the martial arts of the intellect be in service to the hospitality of the imagination?” • What a good question! Says this particular martial artist.
“A Pawnshop of the Mind: In Praise of Object-Based Writing” [Emily Rapp Black, Literary Hub] “Overthinking doesn’t get you where you need to be, and most thinking is overthinking. Playfulness, however, is much more fluid and open, always accessible, and it’s going to help you find that metaphor or write that dialogue because when you’re having fun, you can’t help but relax and stop overthinking. If there’s one thing this exercise helps you do, it’s to understand how much fun you are to be around when you’re not so serious about whatever it is you’re doing. This is one step toward becoming a more intuitive writer, which is hard to teach but easy to practice if you’re willing.” More: “When we’re playful, we are free to investigate the intersection between imagination and intuition without self-consciousness. Kids do this instinctively; during the pandemic, my daughter, Charlie, then five years old, got off her Zoom school screen and started looking wildly around the room, picking stuff up and setting it down. I heard water running in the bathtub. When I asked her what she was doing, she said, ‘I’m looking for something that might work as a floating device.’ Find a flotation device was, in fact, the assignment, and she didn’t think it was weird at all to search the entire house, because who knows?” And: “She also learned the hard way that cats don’t float, or at least ours didn’t, and that they are terrified of water.” • She understood the assignment.
“What Happens When the Leaders We Have and the Leaders We Want Share Nothing in Common?” [I Hate It Here]. “I’ve been in HR long enough to have plenty of stories and the mental scars that come with them: … The leader who had ‘executive presence,’ which turned out to just mean ‘loud and confident in rooms full of other loud, confident people.’ You totally know these people. Some of you are currently managing around one of them right now, and you have my deepest condolences!
“I’m here to reassure you that NONE of this is your imagination.” And: “Hogan Assessments has been studying this type of thing for decades, and their new Leadership Divide report surveyed nearly 10,000 employees across 25 countries and compared what those workers said they want in a leader with what the average executive personality in their global database looks like. Spoiler alert…there is exactly zero overlap between the top 5 competencies that global executives demonstrate and the top 5 competencies that employees say they want! 🙃 If that doesn’t make you want to flip a table, I don’t know what to tell you.” • Sounds like a feature, not a bug.