I dunno. This Apple store on Flatbush didn't seem very crowded at lunchtime today.

I was on a plane yesterday, so I need some confirmation from the hive mind. Apple introduced a bunch of new iPhones on Wednesday, right? And their only new feature is that they’re slightly larger than the old phones—but still smaller and far more expensive than every Android phone made in the past half decade. Right?

There seemed to be a bit of other trivia about screen tech, facial recognition, and home buttons, but no one really cared. Basically, the phones were a few millimeters larger, and that was pretty much it. Am I missing anything?

New poverty figures for 2017 are out today along with the new income figures, and there are no surprises: the poverty rate decreased 0.4 percentage points, just as you’d expect during an economic expansion. However, it’s worth showing the poverty rate by age, since it seems to be an endless source of misinformation:

Yes, that orange line is correct: ever since 2000, the elderly have had the lowest poverty rate in the nation. That includes the entire period of the Great Recession, and every year since.

Our biggest poverty problem is not among senior citizens. Our biggest poverty problem is, first, among children, and second, among working-age adults.¹ That’s where our attention should be most heavily focused.

¹The Supplemental Poverty Measure tells a somewhat different story, but even the SPM says that poverty is more widespread among children than among the elderly.

This guy is waiting patiently for the motocross trick jumpers to start up at the Orange County Fair. There wasn’t room for me to get around him, so I decided to make the best of the situation and use him as the focus of the picture instead. It’s photos like this that will someday cement my reputation as a great artist.

Panoramic via ZUMA

After Saturday’s great Serena Williams meltdown in the final of the US Open, I geared myself for what was inevitably to come: an endless parade of woke op-eds and online articles explaining that this was just another example of how hard women have it in tennis. Especially black women. Especially strong black women. Especially Serena Williams. There’s always the double standard. Always the demand for ladylike behavior. It’s scandalous and it needs to end. Now.

This came from all over, much of it from people who don’t play tennis and didn’t watch the match. They just knew that this was the appropriate response to anything bad that happens to Serena Williams. And so Twitter went nuts.

But I’m happy to see that over the past couple of days, as tempers have cooled, a few people have had the fortitude to suggest that maybe, just maybe, it was Williams herself who acted badly. Maybe the umpire did OK after all. Maybe men are treated about the same.

For those of you who didn’t watch the match (or did!) here’s a lengthy bullet list of what happened:

• Williams’s coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, made a clear and repeated gesture suggesting that Williams should rush the net more often. This was not a subtle movement. It was very, very obvious, and he admitted to it afterward.
• The umpire saw it and called a warning for coaching, which is illegal.
• Note: although the penalty goes against the player, it’s actually called against the coach. It doesn’t matter if the player saw or responded to the coaching. All that matters is that the coach did it. That’s the rule.
• Williams got upset and told the umpire in no uncertain terms that she hadn’t seen the gesture and would never cheat. “I’d rather lose than cheat,” she said. But she held her temper at this point.
• The warning cost Williams nothing. It’s basically meant as caution to the coach to knock it off.
• Later in the match, Williams lost a game while she was serving. This is like striking out with the bases loaded: it’s very bad. She got mad and smashed her racket on the court, breaking it.
• That’s an automatic infraction. The umpire has no discretion here. He called a penalty, and since it was her second, Williams was docked a point. When Naomi Osaka began serving in the next game, she started 15-0 up.
• Williams was pissed, obviously, but a lot of people have publicly wondered whether she even knew that the coaching warning was a first infraction and that she’d therefore lose a point for the next infraction. This is insulting. Williams has been playing professional tennis for two decades. Of course she knows the rules. To suggest otherwise is to paint her as a moron.
• Osaka won the game. But she was playing very well and probably would have won the game anyway.
• When the game was over and the players went to their seats, Williams exploded at the umpire. She had been seething ever since the original coaching violation was called, and now she couldn’t keep it in. She yelled, she demanded an apology, she called him a thief, she swore he would never again work one of her matches, and she ranted and raved. A full transcript is here.
• At the next changeover, after she had lost yet another service game, the rant continued. The umpire now called a third infraction for verbal abuse. This meant Williams lost a game. Osaka held serve at her next opportunity and won the match.

As many people have pointed out, Osaka was playing well and there’s a pretty good chance she would have won regardless. Osaka was up a break, 4-3, and had to hold her serve twice to win the match. After the penalty made it 5-3, it meant she only had to hold her serve once to win. We’ll never know for sure, but there’s no question she was in command of the match both before and after the penalty.

So what’s the conclusion from all this? First, Williams was out of line about the coaching penalty. It’s true that “everyone coaches” and it’s also true that it doesn’t get called a lot. But it does get called, and Mouratoglou’s coaching was far from subtle. The umpire did nothing wrong here.

Ditto for smashing the racket. That was an obvious code infraction.

And that leaves only the third code infraction. This is a judgment call. There’s no question that Williams was ranting and screaming. In one sense, calling a verbal abuse penalty was a no-brainer. On the other hand, it’s the tail end of a grand slam, and some umpires would have just let Williams run out of steam and then allow the match to play out. You could justify either approach, I think.

As for the charge of sexism, I don’t see it. I watch a fair amount of tennis, and I’ve seen men throw temper tantrums. I’ve also seen them get called for it. But with the caveat that I haven’t seen every temper tantrum in recent history,¹ Williams really did have a pretty epic meltdown. I haven’t seen anything like it that I can remember. The penalty may have been a judgment call, but it was a perfectly justifiable judgment call.

If you want to take Serena’s side on this, that’s fine. But please don’t do it on a knee-jerk basis. Williams’s behavior was atrocious, and the umpire, at worst, made a barely incorrect judgment call toward the end of the match. That’s it.

And by the way, now the umpires are pissed: “Stung by what they perceive as a lack of institutional support for the chair umpire who gave Serena Williams a game penalty late in the U.S. Open women’s final, which set off a firestorm of criticism, other umpires are reportedly discussing the possibility of boycotting her matches. Top umpires are also considering the formation of a union, according to a report Tuesday, in part because they are not allowed to discuss specific matches.” This ain’t over yet.

¹Please, please don’t bring up Ilie Nastase or John McEnroe. That was nearly 40 years ago, before the current code infraction system was even in place, and in fact, both of them frequently received penalties during play.

Here’s another chart for you if you want a better sense of just how well the economy has been working for everyone over the past couple of decades:

Generally speaking, household income peaked in 1999 and has gone up and down since then. But for some, it’s been more down than up. Even after 110 months of expansion, the lowest earners make nearly 10 percent less than they did during the last economic peak. The top fifth, by contrast, earns 11 percent more than they did during the dotcom peak.

It’s been a tough 20 years. The poor have done abysmally; the middle class has stagnated; and even the affluent have only improved their earnings moderately. Meanwhile, real GDP per capita has increased a very nice 23 percent since 1999. So if GDP is up 23 percent, but even the affluent are up only 11 percent, where has all the money gone? The Census Bureau doesn’t tell us, but I’m sure you’ve already guessed: to the really, really rich. It’s a good time in America to be part of the top 1 percent.

The Census Bureau brings some good news today: median household income rose 1.8 percent last year:

It only took 18 years, but household income is now firmly higher than it was at the top of the dotcom boom. On the other hand, low-income earners didn’t do so well:

The income of the bottom fifth increased only half a percent, and the income of the second fifth increased slightly more than 1 percent. Neither one has yet made up the ground they’ve lost since the peak of the dotcom boom. Maybe next year.

The Census Bureau released a bunch of other stuff today too, including poverty and income inequality numbers. I’ll try to get to those later.

For quite a long time there’s been a large and durable partisan gap on the issue of compromise. Generally speaking, Republicans don’t like it: they want politicians to stick to their conservative principles, come hell or high water. If that means shutting down the government or breaching the debt ceiling, so be it.

Democrats are nowhere near as implacable. For whatever reason, they take a more pragmatic view of politics, preferring their politicians to take half a loaf if that’s all they can get.

But that’s all changed. I didn’t see this when it came out a few months ago, but apparently Democrats have finally had quite enough. A Pew poll taken in March shows that Democrats are no longer any more willing to compromise than Republicans:

There are several obvious questions this raises:

• First off, this isn’t a pure Trump thing. The share of Democrats willing to compromise went up to 69 percent through mid-2017. Then it collapsed sometime over the next few months. Why?
• Whatever happened over the past 12 months to cause this collapse, it didn’t affect Republicans one way or the other. It affected only Democrats.
• Possibly by chance, Democrats and Republicans have converged toward each other since 2011: in both parties, about 45 percent now prefer compromise to showdown. Is this meaningful, or just a coincidence?

It obviously wasn’t Trump’s election or his inauguration that caused the Democratic shift toward intransigence. However, it’s easy to think of events later in 2017 that might have sent Democrats over the edge: Obamacare repeal, Charlottesville, the tax bill, pulling out of the Paris accord, the Russia investigation, etc. But at least to me, none of these is an obvious candidate. I feel like the answer lies somewhere else. Any ideas?

Here’s a colorful magenta fungus growing somewhere near Durango. This is a fungus, isn’t it? What else could it be?

This isn’t a real health update, since I’ve gotten no new test results lately and my health is, therefore, unchanged since last time. However, I did see my oncologist yesterday, and he seemed so happy with my overall response to the miracle drug Darzalex that he decided I could stop taking the old-school Velcade along with it. This is good, since Velcade produces steadily increasing peripheral nueropathy which is not only annoying, but possibly permanent as well. With Velcade off the menu, my neuropathy should start to recede, and maybe even disappear completely within a few months.

My doctor also offered to reduce the evil dex from 20 mg to 12 mg, but I’m such a nerd I turned him down. I prefer to make one change at a time, so if something happens we know for sure what caused it. But if everything looks good during my next visit in November, we’ll take the dex down to 12 mg, and then probably eliminate it a month or two after that.

So that’s that. The Darzalex seems to be doing its job, and within a couple or three months I’ll be off the evil dex. After that, it will just be maintenance doses of Darzalex pretty much forever. Hooray!

So how’s the election going to shake out in November? Beats me, but in February Seth Masket put up a chart showing what we could expect based solely on two fundamentals: the president’s popularity and the growth in real per-capita disposable income since last year. Those two numbers now look pretty well set in stone: Trump is consistently polling between 35-40 percent, and income growth since last year was 1.9 percent. That means we just have to plug them into Masket’s chart from February:

It looks like Republicans are going to lose about 50 seats. There are no guarantees, of course, and maybe Trump will annex Baja California and suddenly become the most popular president in history. At the moment, though, this is a fairly reliable model and it predicts a big loss for the GOP. All that’s left is for the Democratic Party not to blow it.