The celestial stars align today August 12, 2026
A 6-planet alignment with Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Uranus, Saturn, and Neptune
The peak of the Perseid meteor shower with 50-100 shooting stars per hour
The total solar eclipse for part of the world
And to top it off a new moon for those who are just looking to get out and stargaze
Don’t forget to look up and enjoy!
Woke." It destroyed or distorted or deranged lives, careers, relationships, professions, academic fields, businesses, media, the arts -- and now its disfavored proponents would like to say: Sorry, wow, we overplayed that.
Thus the perpetrators come forth robed as their own judges.
They are rather lenient with themselves, of course. They have sentenced themselves to -- doing better next time! And they believe, truly, that they deserve the chance. Have they not won our trust by acknowledging they lost it? And admitting that they, in their haste or their excitement, perhaps deserved to lose it? For a time? A time which they hope is over now, just as it was getting started.
As for those who judged them harshly and long ago, the ex-woke admit these people had a point -- but they made it prematurely, on poor evidence, well before the suspects had confessed. Which smacks of intolerance. Of prejudice. But the ex-woke feel generous now, conciliatory, and they will let this uglyness pass.
For all their faults -- and see, they have them! Look! -- they're finally a conscientious bunch. It might take time, but they police themselves. Now that's a mafia you can trust! A self-correcting, self-debugging gang! And isn't that so much better than the alternative? A cartel you have to fight?
See what trouble we're saving you?they say. All you had to do was show some patience. You might even want to be grateful to us now. For our humility, belated as it may be. (It's hard to stop a train.) And as for the casualties of our excessive phase...
Well, enjoy a moment of quasi- victory. Here, as the gift of your gracious persecutors who now stand guilty by our own judgment, we offer you, our victims, a peace medallion of shining symbolic gold-toned plastic, totally yours to keep.
So please accept the terms of our marginal, fractional surrender and our bestowal on you of semi-respect. We think you should. Because you can be sure we'll remember if you don't--and you know what we're capable of.
This thing's not over yet.
This is one of my favourite Norman Rockwell paintings, and technically one of his finest. But its real meaning lives in that small room at the back...
The painting is Shuffleton's Barbershop, made in 1950. At first you see a small-town barbershop at night, closed and empty, seen from the street through the front window. Rockwell painted every detail with obsessive care: the cracked blind, the worn magazines, the swept floor.
But look past all of it, through the doorway at the very back. There, in a small lit room behind the shop, three men have gathered after hours. The barber and his friends are playing music together, a cello, a violin, a clarinet, glowing in the warm light while the dark, silent shop waits in front of them.
You can almost hear their song...
And this is why I love this picture: the part of the barber's life that matters most is the little room in the back, after the door is locked, where he becomes something else entirely, a musician among friends, doing the thing he actually loves. Rockwell put the public life in the foreground, large and dim, and the real life far in the distance, small and lit and easy to miss.
It says something true about nearly all of us. The part of a person the world sees, the job and the daily routine, is so rarely the part that holds their heart. The life that matters is often the hidden one, after hours, off to the side, in a back room the passing world never sees. Everyone has one. You just rarely get to look into anyone else's...
TOMORROW: on August 12: six planets at dawn, an eclipse at dusk and Perseids meteor shower peaks with dark new moon.
Four events in one day. The six-planet parade comes first, before sunrise, with Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Uranus, Saturn and Neptune spread wide across the sky.
Then the total solar eclipse. Totality runs over Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain. The UK gets a deep partial instead, up to 96% covered, per BBC Sky at Night. Certified glasses the entire time.
Then the Perseids peak, with a new Moon meaning no moonlight to wash them out.
Imagine being a famous race car driver, a war hero, an author, and CEO of an airline.
This isn’t the plot of a movie, it’s the life of Eddie Rickenbacker.
Let’s learn more about this American Hero…🧵