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Remarks such as this make the work of our U.S. government harder. Evaluations of the clothing of visitors accomplish little, and gratuitous negative comments on visitors’ clothing are impolite.
Ronald O. Hietala, Falls Church
The April 27 Style article “A shared idea of sophistication” described first lady Jill Biden as wearing an “elbow-length silk dress.”
I am trying to (actually I’m trying not to) imagine just what an “elbow-length dress” might look like — and indeed why any garment that is “elbow-length” would be considered a dress at all instead of a rather short shirt.
Please, do better. You’re The Post. Words matter.
Meg Spencer Dixon, Kensington
Julia Fox should take a powder to Mount Vernon
Regarding the May 1 Style article “D.C. proves it’s a city with a C-SPAN head and a Bravo heart”:
“Uncut Gems” actress Julia Fox should have taken the opportunity, while she was in the area, to visit Mount Vernon so that she could have learned something about George Washington and the Founding Fathers.
Washington did not powder his face. That kind of stuff was going on in France, not here. Washington did powder his hair, though. I get the impression Fox would have felt more at home at the Met Gala than at the White House correspondents’ dinner.
Priscilla C. Marsh, Alexandria
Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying
In his April 30 Book World essay, “Scholars honor the Bard’s First Folio after 400 years,” Michael Dirda was sympathetic to Elizabeth Winkler’s “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies,” yet another ahistorical attack on the fact that William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him. Though Dirda seemed inclined to take Shakespeare’s side, he was “intrigued” by baseless conspiracy theories, calling Winkler a “crackerjack researcher.” He even questioned whether Shakespeare’s portrait on the First Folio shows a mask.
Dirda concluded that those who question Shakespeare’s authorship “see themselves as evangelicals on a mission, tirelessly spreading their persecuted gospel to benighted unbelievers.” Does he have similar respect for people who think the moon landing was filmed in Hollywood?
The writer is a playwright, director and screenwriter.
Speaking elliptically, it’s a matter of time
“In the search for extraterrestrial life, we are the aliens,” Annalee Newitz’s April 30 Book World review of Jaime Green’s new book, “The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos,” contained two suspect assertions presented as fact.
First, our space-based telescopes cannot see back to the first nanoseconds of the universe, for no other reason than there was nothing at that “time” to see.
Second, Johannes Kepler was not the discoverer of the elliptical orbits of planets but the man who formulated the three laws of planetary motion, the first of which is that the orbits of the planets about the sun form ellipses. Kepler’s laws of planetary motion are based on the numerous positions of the solar planets observed and recorded by astronomer Tycho Brahe. Brahe did the observing; Kepler did the math.
This in no way is meant to disparage the extraordinary wonder of the revelations from our space-based telescopes or the diligence of Kepler and Brahe.
William A. McCollam, Fairfax
The Spirit is willing but The Post is weak
So the April 30 Sports section featured glowing coverage of an offseason college football scrimmage, “Close scrimmage caps ‘strong’ spring for the Terps,” but it had no mention of the previous night’s National Women’s Soccer League game between the Washington Spirit and the Chicago Red Stars. For a paper that purports to provide balanced and inclusive coverage, to not feature a women-owned team with a winning record and real stars seems like a missed opportunity.
Hardly hard to understand
The May 1 sports article “Florida brings stunning end to Boston’s season” included quotes such as “hard to understand” and “crazy” to explain the team with the National Hockey League’s all-time best regular-season record losing its playoff series. Actually, no team with the best record has won the Stanley Cup since 2013, which is not so unbelievable.
When the top half of teams qualify for the playoffs, any of them has the potential to win. Understanding sports psychology can contribute to possible reasons the team that “has nothing to lose” excels and the one “expected to win it all” falters. The team that is awarded the Presidents’ Trophy for having the best season is under great pressure, which increases anxiety. That leads to tightening of muscles, which interferes with optimal performance.
Jeffrey B. Freedman, New York
Easily hard to understand
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to replace writers is one of the more interesting and salient issues at play in the writers’ strike that was covered in the May 3 front-page article “Hollywood writers on first strike in 15 years.” In fact, the headline on the article’s continuation was “Writers strike over streaming-era pay, use of AI scripts.”
Yet in the 21-paragraph piece, there was but one (non-substantive) reference to AI: “over writer compensation and other issues, such as the use of artificial intelligence in scripts,” which essentially repeated the headline. Nothing in the piece presented how AI is an issue in this context.
Would AI have written an article more coherent between headline and content?
You’ve got to give it up for music-copyright precedent
Elizabeth Nelson’s May 3 op-ed, “The Ed Sheeran lawsuit is a threat to all music makers,” failed to mention legal precedent for musical copyright lawsuits, such as the suit against Sheeran for purportedly plagiarizing in “Thinking Out Loud” Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” In fact, nearly five years ago, Gaye’s family was awarded a $5 million judgment against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for plagiarizing in “Blurred Lines” Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.”
Whether musical style, rather than individual song elements, such as melody and lyrics, is protected by copyright law is complicated. Each case stands on its own set of facts, and it is up to the trier of fact to determine whether a songwriter pilfered another’s work. But failing to mention that the Gaye family was able to prove other artists misappropriated Gaye’s work undermined Nelson’s passionate arguments.
Time for hearings on what’s hurting our hearing
The April 28 Metro article about proposals to increase the number and distance of flights in and out of Reagan National Airport, “A new fight for long flights,” mentioned benefits to businesses and convenience for travelers, and it recognized that more flights by larger planes could bring traffic congestion and crowding in the National Airport terminals.
Totally ignored, however, was the noise burden that increased flight frequency and larger aircraft would bring to those living in the flight path. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) is an agency that has been captured by commercial interests and that cares little for the well-being of those whose work, lives and education are diminished by its policies. It needs to be restructured. In the meantime, MWAA and the Federal Aviation Administration should hold hearings about the impact of proposed changes. These hearings should be at the level of community organizations and well-publicized.
William Bateson, Washington
The April 28 Metro article “A new fight for long flights” failed to mention that one of the main reasons for establishing the perimeter rule was to keep aircraft noise from becoming intolerable in overflown neighborhoods.
Anyone who thinks this goal has been achieved or that increasing long-haul flights at Reagan National Airport would be consistent with achieving it needs to have their head examined. Surely everyone who’s paying attention remembers the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority’s vice president of communications, David Mould, saying, in 2016, that neighborhoods near the Potomac River are “getting hammered.” Since then, the problem has gotten worse.
In the 12 months that ended March 31, Arlington neighborhoods near Key Bridge were exposed to 367 daytime and nighttime aircraft noise events per day that exceeded thresholds established by Arlington to protect public health and quality of life. That’s a 9.3 percent increase from 2016. At 42 seconds per aircraft noise event, it comes to more than four hours of aircraft noise per day. If that’s not already a big-enough mess that even members of the Texas congressional delegation who want to add up to 25 more long-haul round-trip flights a day can understand, I don’t know what is.
Mark McEnearney, Arlington
No ill will in fighting this illness
The April 29 front-page article “A new era for treating sickle cell” quoted a patient advocacy leader as saying that sickle cell disease was “left to just succumb to the health-care system for so long, and suddenly this influx of money … [and] a whole staff of White folks want to come in and ask us about our disease.”
Funding for rare diseases has always been a political challenge because the small numbers of patients mean small political constituencies. Despite this, sickle cell disease had always received greater attention from the medical and scientific communities than other rare diseases. It is my observation, throughout my many years in medical research, that my research colleagues were all very interested in sickle cell disease because the molecular error had been found: a substitution of the amino acid valine for glutamic acid at one point in the hemoglobin molecule.
It is not true that sickle cell research funding is in any way related to the fact that “the Black population historically lacks access to the intergenerational wealth, influence and privilege that fuels … rare-disease research,” as the article stated. Rare-disease funding does not come from individual wealth but from government and pharmaceutical company sources, much of it funded by the National Institutes of Health through grants to university researchers.
It is always easy to blame the lack of progress in curing a disease on ill will, but the lack of progress sometimes occurs merely because the necessary discoveries just haven’t been made yet. That was certainly the case for sickle cell disease. It was only when broader advances in gene therapy occurred that CRISPR-edited genes and bone marrow transplants such as described in this article could be performed to cure sickle cell disease.
The writer is a physician who worked at the National Institutes of Health from 1988 to 1995.
Democracy dies in dimness, too
I applaud The Post for continuing to publish articles about Republican state legislatures and governors enacting an ever-increasing number of laws intended to restrict rights, including voting rights [“Black voting rights under threat in GOP supermajority states, lawmakers say,” Politics & the Nation, April 30] and LGBTQ rights [“Historic surge in bills targeting transgender rights pass at record speed,” news, April 30]. However, I wonder why these stories appeared inside the paper, along with equally crucial stories about the debt ceiling and defaults, but articles about the British coronation [“Coronation’s glitz invites scrutiny of royals’ riches”] and Trump whistleblower Will Wilkerson [“He blew the whistle on Truth Social. Now he’s a barista.”] snagged front-page coverage.
Though I am sure a lot of people want to read about the coronation and its meaning (or lack thereof) in today’s world, surely the endless chipping away of fundamental citizen and human rights, gained so slowly and at such great human cost over the past 50 years or so, is much more crucial to the future of this nation. These stories reveal that Republicans and their backers are determined to take the country backward to the 1950s, when Black people were lynched for supposedly looking the wrong way at White women and gays and transgender people were reviled and fired from jobs for revealing their identities. Is this what the public really wants?
Though The Post is better than many at shining the light on these matters, it appears to be using a penlight when it should and could be using a searchlight.
I commend The Post’s continuing coverage of the attacks by Republican-dominated states — “red states” — on rights that we Americans have long taken for granted. The April 30 edition alone had four such articles: “Black voting rights under threat in GOP supermajority states, lawmakers say” and “Historic surge in bills targeting transgender rights pass at record speed” in the main news section; “The conservative campaign to rewrite child labor laws” in the Business section; and “The movement to ban books continues to gain speed — and intensity” in Book World. There were also articles and commentaries on Republican efforts at the national level to roll back rights and create chaos.
The Post’s coverage over the past several months of red states’ efforts on a broad range of issues — abortion bans, voter suppression, gun rights, book bans, LGBTQ rights, rollbacks of child labor protections, breaking down the wall between church and state, and the list goes on — has shone a needed light on the threat to what Americans have considered basic and accepted constitutional rights. It is important that The Post continue this coverage, and it would be most helpful to readers if The Post were able to bring together — synthesize, if you will — all this coverage to present a broader view of what is happening in Republican-dominated states in this country.
Edwin Stromberg, Takoma Park
We’ll hold on to this toon for 2028
I resisted temptation and did not quibble with the April 28 news subheadline “Spain bans dwarf bullfighting” (turns out the bullfighters are the dwarves and the bulls are big). But I must gore the April 30 Michael de Adder editorial cartoon, in which a near-empty grandstand is shown below the banner “Americans for Another Biden-Trump Rematch.”
If indeed there is the possibility of “another” rematch, when was the earlier rematch? I vote for “Americans for a Biden-Trump Rematch.”
Steve Earle, Front Royal, Va.
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