Daily Blague

Arianna Huffington has discovered la carnétosphère. She appears to have had to go to Europe to do so. (The largest group, by far, of foreign visitors to this site appears to live in France.) But Ms Huffington analyses the phenomenon well.

Because it is too hot and humid to move, even in an air-conditioned apartment, I have been reading Gibbon on the so-called Nika riots that nearly reduced Constantinople to ruins in 532. It is not the most coherent of accounts, possibly because it was cobbled together from Procopius and other principal sources. I have a lot of trouble understanding how the division of a city's population into partisans of the warring "blue" and "green" parties could continue for so many years, and Gibbon is certainly no sociologist. His tone is as stately as opera seria. For Gibbon, manners may change, but human nature is immutable. I reject that distinction. Human nature changes very slowly, but it changes. It would be hard to imagine Yankee fans inflicting violent rapine upon the denizens of Shea stadium. Maybe that's because there was only one stadium at Constantinople! Who knows? Follow the link, though, and you'll read a perspicacious discussion of the difference between Greek and Roman games, and how the latter degenerated, even before the shift in capitals, into deadly mob factions.

The Modern Love guest column in the Times's "Sunday Styles" section was a queasy read this weekend. The column is usually something of a train wreck, bloodied with wounded, self-important ego, and I know that it's no better than Reality TV, but I read it on the off-chance that it might actually turn out to be about modern love. This week's certainly wasn't. Helaine Olen wrote about following her nanny's blog. The nanny made the mistake (since recognized as such) or providing the link, and Ms Olen made the mistake of following it.

When our nanny referred to our house on her blog as work in a seemingly sarcastic fashion, she broke the covenant. The more she posted, the more life in our household deteriorated. It almost seemed that as she created the persona of a do-me feminist with an academic bent, it began to affect her performance. The woman who was loving if a bit strict toward the children became in our view short and impatient, slamming doors and bashing pans when my toddler wouldn't sleep and sighing heavily if asked to run an errand.

Instead of opening a dialogue, I monitored her online life almost obsessively. I would log on upstairs to see if she was simultaneously posting entries below me on her laptop while the baby was napping. Too often she was.

Talk about self-indictment! The entire essay is a study in passive aggression, which we so rarely get to see, as we do here, from the inside. In any case, the Nanny is considering her legal options, not to get the job back - she was so prepared to leave it/lose it that she had a new job lined up within the week - but to punish Ms Olen's slanders, or at any rate to punish the Times for printing them.