The trailblazing rise of “Momala” Harris

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Harris on the campaign trail in 2004. Mike Kepka/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty

The trailblazing rise of “Momala” Harris

Kamala Harris has blazed trails her whole life, says the Los Angeles Times. She was San Francisco’s first female district attorney, the second black woman elected to the US Senate, and, of course, America’s first female, first black and first Asian American vice president. Now the 59-year-old is poised to make history yet again, in a way “few could have envisioned”. Born in Oakland, California, Harris is the daughter of two immigrants who met as civil rights activists in the 1960s: Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher from India; and Donald Harris, an economist from Jamaica (from whom she is now estranged). They divorced when Kamala was seven, and Shyamala became the primary carer for her two daughters.

Harris’s stump speeches “tend to speed past personal mythology”, says Doreen St Félix in The New Yorker. Sure, there are the “choice stories”: she was one of hundreds of children bused to schools in more affluent areas to desegregate the education system; her mother’s words of wisdom – “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” – have become memes. But for Harris “the ego is in the career”, and specifically her almost three decades as a prosecutor in California. With 100 days until the election, everyone is “braced for the natural litigator to re-emerge”, and for the “split-screen jouissance” of a future debate: “the prosecutor vs the felon”.

🏡🥰 Harris is married to Douglas Emhoff, a corporate lawyer and the self-proclaimed “second gentleman”, says Rhys Blakely in The Times. She is stepmother to his two children – they call her “Momala” – and has become good friends with his ex-wife, Kerstin. She credits her tight-knit family with keeping her grounded. “I can say one thing with certainty,” Harris wrote in 2019. “My heart wouldn’t be whole, nor my life full, without them.”

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Heroes and villains

Dawson in 2020, back when he had all 10 digits. Alexander Hassenstein/Getty

Hero
Matt Dawson, an Australian hockey star, who has amputated part of his finger in order to play at the Paris Olympics. The 30-year-old badly broke the digit during training two weeks ago, and surgery would have ruled him out of the Games. Despite his wife warning him not to do anything “rash”, Dawson decided to lop it off. “Full marks to Matt,” said Kookaburras coach Colin Batch. “I’m not sure I would have done it, but he’s done it, so great.”

Hero
The King, who appeared a tad tetchy at last week’s state opening of parliament, agitatedly waving his hand at one of his page boys. Personally, “I rather approve”, says Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. “Kings and the like should not be laissez-faire or magnanimous, but petulant, bad-tempered and spiteful”, as they were in the old days. There’s far too much niceness around at the moment, and Charles “provides a valuable counterpoint”.

Hero
CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, for being a stone-cold professional. At 12.47pm on Sunday, the 76-year-old broadcaster tweeted a picture of himself in a Washington restaurant enjoying a “Wolf Spritzer” cocktail. Almost exactly an hour later, Joe Biden announced he wouldn’t be seeking re-election – and an hour after that Blitzer was in the studio, on camera, sans spritzer.

Villains
The “posh totty” customers pilfering high-end produce from Planet Organic. The head of security at the upmarket chain, Richard Fowler, told the BBC the stores lose £900,000 a year to shoplifting, in part because of wealthy shoppers who spend a lot of money there and so think they’re “entitled to steal something”.

Hero
US Senator Gary Peters, for continuing the long American political tradition of giving legislation an appropriate acronym. The Michigan Democrat’s new bill, which would bar federal agencies from disqualifying job candidates over marijuana use, is called the Dismantling Outdated Obstacles and Barriers to Individual Employment Act, or DOOBIE Act.

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Book: Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum
Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum’s latest book is “a masterful guide to the new age of authoritarianism”, says John Simpson in The Guardian. Autocracy, Inc. is a study of why, as its author warned in 2021, “the bad guys are winning”, and of the institutions (particularly financial) that have helped spread tyranny across the world. “Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states,” Applebaum writes. Nobody imagined that autocratic and illiberal ideas would “spread to the democratic world instead”. Buy it here.

Comment

Geoffroy van der Hasselt/Getty

Stop grumbling, Paris, you’ll love the Olympics

The Olympic Games are finally here, says Gabriel Richalot in Le Monde. For the next couple of weeks, Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux, Lyon and a few other French towns – including Teahupoo in Tahiti with its 1,500 inhabitants – will be “nothing but a vast sports ground”. Over 10,000 athletes will take part, all “hoping to achieve the performance that will earn them a lifelong pass to glory”. So are the locals excited? Not so much. Instead, “the indomitable Gauls have been grumbling”. Polls show a rather typical combination of indifference (36%), concern (24%) and outright anger (5%). Many Parisians have packed their bags to get away from the capital. Those who own their flats are, sensibly enough, renting them out to the 16 million tourists expected to attend.

If “Pre-Games-Grumbling” were an Olympic sport, says Peter FitzSimons in The Sydney Morning Herald, then Sydney would have been pushing for the world record when we hosted the event back in 2000. “I remember complaining about most things”: the insanity of the original bid; the cost; the format; the fact that the Queen of England would preside. “And then the Games themselves began.” In an instant, all the “complaints, quibbles and catastrophisation” fell away. It was fabulous from start to finish: us “in our Sunday best”, at our best, for the full fortnight. Much the same happened at London 2012 – the grumpiness gave way to joy once the athletes started doing their thing. Be in no doubt: now that it’s all begun, Paris too will “shake off les Olympiques bleus”.

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Quoted

“Always and never are two words you should always remember never to say.”
Wendell Johnson

That’s it. You’re done.