I just said, “I don’t give a fuck” at a faculty meeting. How’s your day going? Jennifer Taub @jentaub Law Professor and author of the new book BIG DIRTY MONEY (Viking 2020). Penguin paperback edition comes out September 28, 2021. Northampton, MA

I feel like I’ve been stuck since last spring. I still have no idea why I ended up anemic and in the hospital. In one way, I should be relieved because I seem to be on the mend, but it bothers me that nobody seems to know the source of the problem. It feels like a strangely familiar throwback to when I owned, over the years, several old – mostly 50s-60s – cars. I’d be pulling away from a stoplight and the car would hiccup, maybe the lights would go out, maybe the engine stalled, but just for a moment, then it went away, or came back, whatever is the direction of Whew, what was that? and everything would seem just fine. And everything would be fine but, in the back of my mind, I knew that the hiccup wouldn’t be a one-time hiccup. Still, what to do? It is very hard to find, let alone fix, an intermittent problem when the problem is away, so I’d just keep drivin’. And pretty soon it would just seem like my imagination. And that is pretty much what I’m doing now.

I am still stuck at the Met Gala; thinking about what this Met Gala means, and wondering if it is a reflection of a world that seems to be undergoing a titanic change. Well, maybe not a changing world, but a changing United States, anyway. I keep reading that the Met Gala is the biggest and most influential fashion event – get together? party? – of the year, and it probably is but, this year, it is also staggeringly not the traditional White male patriarchy. That surprised me. The guests at the Met Gala are not the same influential people that are at the Opara or the Symphony, the people at this gala are way more diverse, culturally, and racially (although not, seemingly, financially).

Fashion is strange, it is a multibillion-dollar business and it is also an art. At least the people in the business at the high-end, consider themselves artists. Artists who want to make money, artists who want to become famous and end up at the Met Gala, and this year, at least, a large number of them, maybe a preponderance, are people of color. Having people of color at the table where decisions are made, that, I think, represents real change.

Another change is the use of the word fuck. The word has always been with us but it used to signify that the user was crude and disreputable, at best. In a movie, any character that said fuck more than once was sure to be a bad guy. Now, fuck has joined ain’t as a signifier that the speaker -especially if the speaker is a woman -is sophisticated, refined even, but edgy.

Another thing, even after it became legal, that carried a more than slightly disreputable vibe is marijuana. A year and a half ago, just before we all quarantined, Michele and I were in LA and ran across a cannabis store on a fashionable shopping street. It was named gen!us and the whole front wall was glass showing the entire, well-lite store and any buyers buying cannabis. I was shocked that it was so undark-allyish. About a week or so ago, there was an front-page article about the ten best upscale cannabis stores in Southern California and I was surprised, once again, that gen!us didn’t even make the list.

As an aside, I had remembered the article but couldn’t find it when I Googled Best cannabis Stores in LA. I finally did find it but it didn’t show originally because it was called The 10 best SoCal pot shops worth seeing in person right now. Calling them pot shops and saying worth seeing in person, now that’s a change. End aside.

What hasn’t changed is that I’m still getting emails from the former guy that read like scams, Steve, I just spoke with my father and I have an important update to share with you. Given how critical of a role you’ve played in our efforts to SAVE AMERICA, he could really use you on our team as an Official Trump Cardholder. Trump Cardholders will go down in history as the Patriots who SAVED AMERICA from Joe Biden and the radical Left, and we really want YOU to be a part of it. If you join today, we’ll even send you your very own PERSONALIZED Trump Card.

One last thing that hasn’t changed is that Sir Lewis Hamilton is still winning, today he became the first driver to win one hundred Grand Prix (only three other drivers have won 50 races). Congratulation to Lewis the GOAT.