“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” ― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Last year, Down the Rabbit Hole published a review of Annie Dillard’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Vol 1, Issue 2, Spring). Let’s not call it a review. It was more of a persuasive commentary, a recommendation to give her book a moment of your time, if 1970’s spiritually infused nature writing is your thing, but also, even if it’s not. I originally discovered her work, appropriately enough, by stumbling down my own rabbit hole. I was looking for inspiration in my faltering creative life, and somewhere between a list of past Pulitzer Prize winners and obscure Substack reading recommendations, the title of her book kept popping up, catching my eye. The creative impact of the book was not lost on me: Imagine winning the Pulitzer Prize with your first published book and being the youngest woman ever to win the prize. I could see the words “why haven’t I heard of this before?” in giant red neon letters flashing on and off in the back alleys of my brain. To be honest, I don’t read a lot of nature writing. I don’t even spend a great deal of time reading non-fiction, but something about the excerpts from her book called out to me at a time when I needed them most (as the universe is want to do), so I went out and found an old dog-eared paperback copy at a local used book store and brought it home.

Annie Dillard passed away this past Tuesday, at the age of 81, after what feels to me like a life well lived, not only writing and publishing, but teaching and mentoring a generation of young writers (If you’re a frequent Substack surfer, it’s hard to escape this news as Substack feeds—at least my feed—are overwhelmed with wonderful tributes and memes with her best quotes).

It’s hard to measure the impact a writer’s words have on our creative lives or even on our ordinary day to day lives. I know that the beauty of some of her sentences filled me with jealousy, envy, and filled my eyes with misty admiration. They made me stop and think. In an attention economy screaming “pay attention” at me every minute of the day, her writing made me pay attention with just a whisper of an observation, true and heartbreaking. Her words are a part of me now, part of my own internal Large Language Model, resurfacing every now and then in some mysterious, unknowable algorithm percolating inside me. Rest in peace Annie Dillard. And thank you.

I ran the numbers, because someone had to, and I need company in this. Housing: provided. Food: provided, on a schedule, regardless of individual merit (a dog who has done nothing all day but sleep on the couch receives the exact same dinner as a dog who “worked,” and by worked I mean barked at a squirrel for eleven minutes). Healthcare: fully subsidized, including elective procedures the dog never consented to and, in at least one case involving my neighbor’s bulldog, actual orthodontia. Retirement: begins immediately upon acquisition and lasts the dog’s entire life. Transportation: subsidized. Recreation: subsidized. Legal representation, should the dog bite a mail carrier: also, somehow, subsidized.

Every single one of those needs is being met by an entity the dog didn’t elect, can’t fire, and has never once thanked in a manner appropriate to the scale of the arrangement. That entity is you. You are the nanny state, and you should probably sit with that for a second, because it doesn’t stop at dogs. If you have ever owned a cat, a horse, a guinea pig, a turtle, or a fish you gave a name to, you have been running the exact same program — full benefits, no means-testing, no accountability, indefinitely — for a creature that has never once produced anything you could put on an invoice.

To be fair, this particular brand of socialism comes with real, well-documented upside: lower blood pressure, fewer trips to the cardiologist, a built-in excuse to leave the house at six in the morning, and someone in the building who’s thrilled to see you regardless of how your day went. Say what you want about the nanny state. She gives excellent belly rubs.

There are no capitalist dogs. I want to be very clear about this, because I know some of you are already composing an email about your neighbor’s dog who “guards the property” and therefore “earns his keep.” No. That dog is not “working for a living.” That dog has been assigned a bureaucratic function within a planned economy and receives full benefits regardless of performance, which, if you squint, is essentially a federal job.

I arrived at this conclusion the honest way, which is to say by accident, while pet-sitting in the rarefied air of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Two golden retrievers, one week, and a lot of time to think while walking them through Volunteer Park, watching an entire city’s worth of dogs interact with each other like they’d all individually signed the same nondisclosure agreement. Six feet of leash. A polite nod, maybe a sniff if both owners make eye contact and silently negotiate terms, then everyone moves along, nothing to see here, citizen.

This was a change of pace for me, because at home in Gig Harbor, dogs mingle. Not recklessly, we’re not talking about a canine rave, but with a kind of relaxed, semi-rural confidence, like neighbors who’ve decided the fence is more of a suggestion. City dogs, by contrast, have been raised under a regime of Just Enough Leash to remind them, at all times, that freedom is conditional and someone bigger is holding the other end of it.

Which got me thinking, somewhere around the fourth polite non-interaction of the morning: these dogs have zero autonomy, and they don’t seem to mind one bit, which is either the most relaxing thing I’ve witnessed or a small, furry preview of exactly where the rest of us are headed.

Now, and this is important, because not all dogs are equally socialist, any more than all countries are, there’s a spectrum here, and Volunteer Park gave me a front-row seat to it. The Capitol Hill dogs I was walking are your Scandinavian-model socialists: tightly regulated, extremely well cared for, six feet of personal space guaranteed, a kind of orderly cradle-to-grave arrangement where everybody’s needs are met and nobody’s allowed to bite anybody. My Gig Harbor dog friends are closer to a mixed economy. Still fully dependent, still getting the full welfare package, but operating with a looser regulatory environment and a general sense that the rules exist more as vibes than statute. And then there’s the farm dog, who actually has a job (moving sheep, terrorizing the mail truck), earns a little moral credit for it, but still gets fed, vetted, and housed by the same benevolent state apparatus as everybody else. That’s your labor-union welfare-capitalism dog.

The only dog on the entire spectrum who could plausibly claim to be a libertarian is the stray, and I would encourage anyone tempted to romanticize the stray’s rugged independence to spend an afternoon actually looking at a stray dog. That is not freedom. That is a creature whose healthcare plan is “hope” and whose retirement plan is “no hope.” Nobody, dog or otherwise, actually wants to live there. We just like to name-check it as a philosophy from the safety of our own fenced yard.

I bring all this up because we are approaching an election, and if you’ve turned on the news even glancingly, you’ve noticed that “socialist” has become the go-to accusation for anyone whose politics you’d rather not engage with, a kind of all-purpose seasoning sprinkled on anyone left of “I pay my own taxes and resent it.” Meanwhile, actual self-identified democratic socialists are doing rather well in actual elections, which suggests a fairly significant percentage of the country either doesn’t know what these words mean, doesn’t care, or more likely, has made peace with the fact that, and let’s just say it out loud: we’re all already living inside the thing we’re yelling about.

Because here’s the part (at the risk of you scrolling away to greener pastures) where I feel compelled to pull out that Ivy League diploma nobody (ever) asked to see, so let me just gently set this on the table - “socialism” is not a horror-movie villain, it’s an economic framework with a lot of internal variation, like the spice rack in your kitchen with seven variations of paprika. In fact, most Americans have started using “socialism” the way Gen Z uses “mid,” as in, “that new superhero movie was mid,” “Taco Bell is mid,” “my ex, in hindsight, was high taper mid” (don’t ask me, I don’t get it either), but it’s a verdict that requires zero supporting evidence, ends the conversation immediately, and cannot be appealed. That’s what “socialism” has become. Not an economic term. A vibe check.

Consider for a moment the actual American welfare state you’re already enrolled in and have rarely tried to opt out of. Public trash cans: socialism. A shared municipal resource funded by tax dollars that you did not personally negotiate for. And yet, barring a Super Bowl victory or World Cup defeat, you have never once flipped one over in protest. Public restrooms: same deal, and arguably more socialist, given the sheer number of you who have used one without a second thought about who paid for the plumbing. Roads, bridges, the entire interstate system: pure socialism, built and maintained collectively, used by everyone, resented by nobody until that pothole takes out your front axle. Public schools: an enormous collective investment in other people’s children, which somehow remains uncontroversial right up until somebody finds a Toni Morrison book in the school library. Police and fire departments: a shared insurance policy against catastrophe that we all pay into and hope never to need, which is, structurally, socialism with a badge. And then there’s Social Security and Medicare, the two biggest, most successful, most broadly popular socialist programs in American history, which most beneficiaries will nonetheless insist, with a straight face, are not socialism, they’re something else, something more dignified, something they earned, which, fine, is also basically true, and is also exactly the kind of nuance that gets lost the second the word gets tossed into a stump speech.

None of this means every program is worthwhile, or that the same policy scales cleanly from a town of four thousand to a country of three hundred and forty million with wildly different needs, incomes, and expectations. But the honest case for a little socialism was never really about charity, it’s about logic. A shared system of roads, schools, and safety nets tends to improve conditions not just for the least fortunate among us, but for practically everyone stacked in the middle too, the same way a sensible leash law makes the whole park more pleasant for every dog in it, not just the anxious ones. A one-size-fits-all leash length still doesn’t suit every dog (ask a border collie how he feels about six feet of nylon) but the honest answer is that we’re all already living somewhere on the spectrum, dog and human alike, and the real argument was never “socialism versus not.” It’s “how much, where, and for whom,” which admittedly makes for a much worse bumper sticker.

None of which is to say you have to like it. Nobody’s asking you to roll over, present your belly, and accept a life of well-groomed dependency (although, yes please, sign me up). If the whole arrangement genuinely offends you, the exit is nearby, and it’s more available than people pretend. Hold your pee until you get home. Throw your trash in the back seat of your car. Take the long way around, on private roads, because the highway connecting you to the rest of civilization was built, paved, and lit by the government you’re currently mad at. Most people last about as long as a dog off-leash in downtown Seattle, which is to say, admirably principled for about eleven feet, before trotting back to the sidewalk, tail wagging, no hard feelings.

I don’t think the goldens in Volunteer Park have given any of this a moment’s thought, and that’s sort of the point. They’re not making a philosophical statement by accepting the arrangement. They’ve just noticed, correctly, that a system built with a little care tends to work out fine for almost everybody in it, and they’ve stopped auditing it accordingly. Maybe the rest of us could stand to argue about the label a little less, and the plumbing a little more, fewer vibe checks, more actual policy checks. It might do the country some good this election season to argue the way dogs do it: a look, a sniff, a shrug, and back to your business.

Six feet of leash, though. That part they can keep.

Don’t miss this chance to own a part of history! Featuring an original Gerald Ford portrait in a stylized stencil style that features a patriotic color palette of red, beige, and light/dark blue. This image was stolen from an internet artist who borrowed it from an artist that imitated another artist, using an Associated Press photograph taken by somebody who photographed Gerry Ford back in the day. At last, our long national nightmare is over! Finally, a Gerry Ford T-shirt you can be proud of. Get yours in your favorite color, or one in each color of the rainbow, as Gerry would have wanted it.

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from everything you have.” — Gerry Ford, 38th President

(I think Gerry’s point is, ask not what your government can do for you, because, by that time, it’s already taken everything from you…. words of wisdom, Gerry, words of wisdom!)

I explained, using my best “oh, you poor, naïve sap” voice, that the average American allocates roughly six and a half minutes a day to unstructured brain activity, and in those six and a half minutes, between doomscrolls and dopamine hits, they want content that either A) confirms (with righteous indignation) they were right about the President all along, or B) confirms (with righteous indignation) they were right about the President’s enemies all along. There is no version of “actual free brain time” in 2026 that has room in it for anything that preaches tolerance, kindness, and understanding. There’s certainly no room for six hundred words about boat drinks in Sarasota, a piece I wrote with real love that received, if memory serves, two likes, both from my sister (the second like was an accident).

He didn’t believe me. I asked if he’d read my latest piece about boat drinks in Sarasota. He suddenly remembered he had an appointment.

But it did get me thinking. We’re 250 years into this experiment, and somehow the country’s single unifying obsession seems to be that the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool renovation is either a symbol of American decline or a symbol of the previous administration’s complete ineptitude, depending on your feed. Nobody seems capable of agreeing that it’s just a large rectangle of water where ducks love to take a shit. Despite the wall-to-wall media coverage, not one person has mentioned the ducks, who remain the only entities involved in this controversy operating in good faith. If we can’t unite behind a floating archipelago of duck feces, I wondered, what can we unite behind?

So I took my friend’s advice. I built a list. Not a list of values. Values are where the hard feelings start. But a list of specific, deeply beloved, entirely indefensible American stuff. The theory being that no one, in the history of this country, has ever started a culture war over Cracker Jack (yet). And no… it’s not all about nostalgia. (Who am I kidding. It’s entirely about nostalgia. I’ve made my peace with this.)

10. The Bicentennial Quarter
In 1976, the U.S. Mint slapped a colonial drummer boy on the back of every quarter in America, and for one glorious summer, children briefly became world-class numismatists. I personally hoarded eleven of them in a Folgers coffee tin alongside several fossilized pieces of Bazooka Joe, convinced I was sitting on retirement money. I was, in fact, sitting on two dollars and seventy-five cents. To this day, a Bicentennial quarter is worth exactly twenty-five cents, a fact that took me approximately forty-nine years to accept. But for about six weeks in 1976, every kid in the country was quietly checking their change with the focused intensity of a Wall Street trader, and that, I would argue, is as close to national unity as this country has come since.

9. The Freedom Train
An actual steam locomotive, painted red white and blue, that toured all forty-eight contiguous states in 1976 carrying historical artifacts so people could stand in line for hours to look at Judy Garland’s ruby slippers next to a moon rock. Three million people boarded that train. Three million Americans, in an era with no metal detectors and, as far as I can determine, no National Guard patrols, filed past a locomotive containing George Washington’s copy of the Constitution and Joe Frazier’s boxing robe, because someone looked at a map of the country and said “what if we just drove the Smithsonian around for a year.” This objectively, made no sense. It was magnificent anyway. It is the single most American thing I’ve ever heard of, and I would like it back, ideally stopping in Sarasota so I can write about it for an audience of two.

8. CB Radios
For a brief shining moment, truckers and suburban dads across all fifty states adopted a shared vocabulary — “10-4,” “breaker breaker,” “smokey” — purely so they could talk about speed traps together. I’m not proud to report that my dad’s handle was “Big Buckeye.” But I am proud to report that as a nine-year-old, I thought that was the coolest thing my dad had ever done. Nobody’s CB handle got them fired. Nobody screenshotted a trucker’s transmission out of context and mailed it to their employer. It was, in effect, the last unregulated social network in American history, and the discourse was somehow better.

7. Evel Knievel
A man in a star-spangled jumpsuit repeatedly attempted to fly a motorcycle over things that motorcycles should not fly over, broke essentially every bone in his body doing it, and was beloved by liberals, conservatives, children, and grandmothers with equal fervor. Find me one person alive in 1976 who had a problem with Evel Knievel. You cannot. He put on the cape, revved his engine, and broke his pelvis for our entertainment, asking nothing in return but our applause and, presumably, a decent orthopedic surgeon. No billionaire space shots, no arena weddings. Now that’s public service.

6. KC and the Sunshine Band
I want to be very clear that I am not proposing “Get Down Tonight” as a unifying national anthem, mostly because I’ve tried singing it at karaoke and the results weren’t unifying so much as alarming (for reasons I can’t fully explain, possibly related to the fact that I can’t sing, I go one hundred percent goth during karaoke, which is its own kind of national security threat). But there was something to a song with literally zero political content whose entire lyrical ambition was “let’s dance, it’s later than you think.” We could use a few more songs like that. Besides, KC never rented out Madison Square Garden and shut down several blocks of Midtown Manhattan so his elitist friends could watch him get married. KC just wanted you to shake your booty. It was a simpler, more honest ask.

5. Italian Ice
Thirty-five cents, stolen fair and square from my father’s dresser, purchased from a man driving a truck that played what I would later discover were horror-movie theme songs slowed down to an eerie, haunting tempo, served, without irony, to childre in a paper cup, with a wooden spoon useless for anything except turning your tongue the exact color of a crime scene. Who does not somehow miss a free wooden spoon?? No parent has ever objected to Italian ice on health grounds, because it announced its own worthlessness right there in the name. It’s flavored ice, a cup of colored frozen sugar water. That’s the whole pitch. And we loved it. We loved it because that was the whole pitch. Also, brain freeze…

4. Walter Cronkite
I’d take an AI Walter Cronkite over half of what currently reads the news to us, and I say that as someone who has spent a genuinely alarming number of hours thinking about what AI should and shouldn’t be allowed to do. The man’s entire brand was no reaction: “I will tell you the thing, and then I will get out of the way.” We somehow inverted that completely. Now the reaction is the only thing, and the news is optional. Give me the guy who signed off with “that’s the way it is” and let me decide how I feel about it, which was, it turns out, a wildly radical business model. We should try it again sometime.

(A brief aside for Gerald Ford, who does not make the list but deserves the mention: a man who pardoned his predecessor, survived two assassination attempts in seventeen days, and still somehow projected the energy of a guy who just wants everyone to stop yelling at the Thanksgiving table. Gerry, we hardly knew ye. You had one job — ride the Bicentennial wave into a second term — and Jimmy Carter’s smile took it from you. I remain unreasonably upset about this on your behalf.)

3. Paul Harvey
For you kids under 40 who don’t remember: there was a man who, every single day, at noon, on the radio, in a voice that sounded like parking lot gravel, would tell you a story. Not a headline. Not a hot take. A story. Some odd little historical footnote, some forgotten figure, some strange coincidence buried in the fine print of American life. He’d build it, piece by piece, patiently, the way you’d walk someone through a card trick, right up until the final beat, when he’d pause just long enough for you to lean toward the dashboard, and deliver the twist you never saw coming: “And now you know... the rest of the story.” Then he’d say “Paul Harvey, good day” and be gone, having asked nothing of you except your attention for three and a half minutes. Nobody yelled. Nobody was owned.

2. Cracker Jack Surprises
A box of candied popcorn that, instead of simply being candied popcorn, contained a prize. A tiny plastic diver, a temporary tattoo, and once, memorably, a whistle that summoned every dog within a four-block radius. The prize was almost always worthless, which didn’t matter in the slightest. We were promised a surprise, and America, whatever else is currently true about us, has never stopped believing in the surprise. Somebody at Frito-Lay corporate should genuinely be thinking about what a “Cracker Jack surprise” looks like for grown-ups in 2026, because I would pay real money — I want to stress, actual currency — to reintroduce mild, harmless, low-stakes delight into my adult life on a predictable schedule. Open box. Find toy. Feel, for four seconds, that the universe has my back. Is that so much to ask.

1. Jell-O Salad
I’ve already made the full case for this - the lime cabbage horror, the sour cream cranberry ambush, the mayonnaise-as-garnish of it all - so I won’t re-litigate a war I’ve already won. I’ll just say this: if you can get a table of skeptical, college-educated, 401(k)-having adults to go back for seconds of vegetables suspended in gelatin, purely on the strength of nostalgia, you’ve located something more powerful than any campaign message currently in circulation. We didn’t need policy. We needed Perfection Salad.

None of this fixes anything, obviously. Nobody’s changing their vote because I made a case for Italian ice. But for about six and a half minutes, you weren’t thinking about the news. You were thinking about a wooden spoon, a temporary tattoo, or a man in a star-spangled jumpsuit breaking his pelvis for your amusement. That’s not nothing. In this political moment, that might be the whole ballgame.

I love this country. I love the people who’ve made it, against fairly long odds, the best place I know to build a life. Happy 250th, everybody. Now go check your dresser for a Bicentennial drummer boy quarter.

Also… Mood Ring!

(That one’s for my sister, so she hits “like”)

It occurs to me that Jurassic Park 3 marks the precise turning point when Hollywood decided to stop making anything worth the $14.95 ticket price in favor of computer-generated slop. The irony is that I can’t seem to muster the energy to turn this masterpiece off. I’ve decided, apparently, that hate-watching the cinematic equivalent to brain candy is more therapeutic than lying in the dark with my own thoughts, which tells you everything you need to know about the current state of my inner life.

I need something to distract and quiet down what I’ve taken to calling my Monkey Mind. To be honest, I can’t take credit for coining the term. It comes from George Saunders, who is widely regarded as one of the finest short story writers alive and who therefore has significantly more credibility than I do on matters of the human condition. In his craft classes, he often refers to the noise inside our skulls as the “yapping monkey-mind.” When I first encountered this phrase, I experienced what I can only describe as the literary equivalent of a doctor looking at my X-ray and saying, with professional detachment, “Yup, there it is.”

The monkey-mind, as Saunders and the Buddhist tradition from which he borrows the concept describe it, is the part of your brain that cannot stop. It chatters. It swings from branch to branch. It cannot simply be in a room without also planning to leave the room, evaluating the room, mentally redecorating the room, composing a strongly-worded opinion about the room’s current décor, and wondering whether the room knows how much better it could be if it would just listen. The monkey-mind is not content to experience things. It must narrate them, improve them, correct them, and share them — preferably in that order, but really in whatever order gets the most attention.

Saunders’ solution is writing, or meditation, or some combination of the two that requires more personal discipline than I have managed to assemble on a consistent basis. His insight is that we can, with sufficient practice, quiet the monkey. Let it settle. Watch it, as he puts it, “uninflectedly” — without judgment, without the compulsive need to improve upon reality as it currently stands.

I have been attempting this practice for some years. Let’s just say my results have been mixed.

What I have discovered, through diligent research conducted largely in the company of other adults, is that the monkey-mind in its most destructive form is not the private variety. It’s not the inner critic, the creative saboteur, the 3 AM catastrophist who wakes you up to re-litigate decisions you made in 2009. Those are problems, certainly, but they’re fundamentally personal problems, contained within a single skull, amenable in theory to meditation and chamomile tea.

The truly spectacular monkey-mind is a social phenomenon. It is the monkey-mind that’s left the building, borrowed a megaphone, and begun recruiting acolytes.

Which brings me back to my 2 AM hotel hate-watch. I’m decompressing from an annual sojourn with six of my closest friends from elementary school. I want to be precise about the nature of this friendship: these are men I have known for nearly fifty years, which is long enough that we have witnessed each other’s worst haircuts, questionable romantic decisions, and every humiliating thing that happened between roughly 1976 and the present moment. This is a friendship forged in genuine history, cemented by decades of mutual improbability, and it’s one of the things in my life I am most grateful for.

It is also, increasingly, a psychoanalyst’s wet dream of a case study disguised as a vacation.

Our little Jersey reunions have a greeting. It comes from an obscure Andy Garcia movie that nobody else has seen, and it doesn't matter — what matters is that in the movie, two guys press palms and say "boat drinks," and everyone in the room knows exactly what it means: someday we'll be retired, somewhere warm, with nothing more pressing than the question of what's in the cooler. Seven men, hyperaware of their looming mortality, convening annually to remind each other what's important. To the average untrained observer, this is exactly what it appears to be — old friends catching up, laughing too loud, consuming a reasonable amount of alcohol without anyone's wife present to provide quality control. It’s boat drinks. It's the kind of friendship that deserves its own Oprah segment, or at minimum a Springsteen song, which given that we're all from Jersey is basically the same thing.

Reality however, is somewhat more complicated.

Through gradual and probably irreversible drift, what was once a relaxed annual reunion has become something closer to an improv competition in which nobody is officially performing but everybody is absolutely performing. The stories have gotten longer. The insights have become more unsolicited. The advice has grown exponentially in volume, developing a kind of compound interest that nobody asked for and nobody can seem to stop accruing. Every conversation has become an opportunity to demonstrate that your monkey has the most information and the best opinions about what to do with it.

There are, I should say, significant variations within the group. There’s Mr. White, a wine and spirits expert and man of genuine good humor who is currently navigating the turbulent waters of the over-fifty singles dating scene — a terrain so treacherous it deserves its own Discovery Channel special. Mr. Blonde, a divorced schoolteacher doing the noble work of shaping young minds on a public school salary, which in practical terms means he’s watched people who work one-tenth as hard make ten times the money for so long that he’s developed an uncontrollable body tic. Mr. Orange, who’s cracked what the rest of us are still unsuccessfully working toward: actual work-life balance, weighted emphatically toward life. And Messrs. Black and Blue, two savvy Ivy League lawyer brothers who between them can tell you exactly why whatever you’re planning to do is inadvisable, which is both impressive and, at a certain point in the evening, slightly exhausting.

And then there’s Mr. Pink, which in no way reflects the particular shade his Jersey skin turns after three minutes of unprotected Florida sun exposure. (The technical term, I believe, is “boiled lobster.”)

Mr. Pink is the least monkey of us. He’s achieved something I can only describe as a practiced stillness — not the stillness of someone who has nothing to say, but the stillness of someone who’s decided, apparently some years ago, that saying it is optional. He listens. He occasionally smiles. When he does speak, it is with the unhurried quality of a man who has verified that the sentence actually needs to exist before releasing it into the world. He is, in the context of six other men all simultaneously attempting to steer the conversation, the human equivalent of a load-bearing wall. You don’t always notice him. But if he weren’t there, the whole structure would be different.

I’ve spent considerable time studying Mr. Pink in the field, trying to identify the technique, because the technique is clearly something I could use. What I’ve concluded is that there is no technique. He is just genuinely interested in other people and genuinely unbothered by the performance of being interesting himself. This sounds simple. It is, in practice, extraordinarily difficult, which is why the rest of us spend so much energy pretending we’ve figured it out.

The annual trip’s pinnacle moment — its set piece, its third act — occurs on Sarasota Bay, aboard a rented pontoon boat. Literally “boat drinks.”

I want you to understand what a pontoon boat is, in case you have led a sheltered life: it is a flat platform mounted on metal tubes, powered by an outboard motor, designed to move at a speed that is technically faster than swimming but spiritually equivalent to drifting. It requires approximately the same level of nautical expertise as operating a very large air mattress. The controls consist of a steering wheel, a throttle, and a start/stop button. That’s the full curriculum. A motivated golden retriever could be certified.

We had seven men, a cooler full of beer, and about three hours on the water. What could go wrong.

The people who rent pontoon boats have clearly developed a sophisticated understanding of their customer base through what can only be described as accumulated trauma. They know, from extensive empirical evidence, that a vessel can have only one captain, and that this captain is traditionally the person whose credit card was put down as collateral. He’s officially in command. He has the wheel. He is also, they know, about to receive more simultaneous nautical advice than any single human being can productively absorb, from people whose combined maritime experience consists of watching the boat scene in Jaws and a 1992 inner tube trip down the lazy river.

In a just and sensible world, one person would drive the boat while everyone else occupied the perfectly comfortable benches and looked out at the water, which is the entire point of a pontoon boat and also the reason it comes equipped with maximum heat absorbing faux leather chairs. Instead, what we achieved was something rarer and more remarkable: a state of collaborative confusion so total that it had become, paradoxically, its own course of action. Seven monkey-minds, fully engaged, each one thoroughly convinced they were the only calm person on the boat.

Within approximately four minutes of departure, simultaneous instructions were being issued regarding: the proper technique for steering away from sea grass, the appropriate RPM for shallow water, the ideal angle of approach to avoid the propeller contacting the bay floor, the correct procedure for dropping anchor, the inadvisability of the anchor location we’ve just chosen, the superior anchor location that was clearly over there, the technique for exiting the boat into the water, the technique for re-entering the boat from the water (a related but distinct skill set), whether we were going too fast, and the counter-argument that we were, in fact, going too slow. At one point, to my recollection, we were actively receiving instruction on all of these simultaneously, which means we were also somehow going both too fast and too slow at the same time, a unique nautical achievement.

The water was beautiful, incidentally. The bay was flat and silver and warm. There were birds. Someone mentioned dolphins at some point; I can’t independently verify this because I was monitoring a developing dispute about sea grass. The sun was the particular late-afternoon gold that makes the Gulf Coast look like a photograph of itself. As best I could determine, none of us actually saw any of this in real time. We were too busy improving the experience.

Mr. Pink sat in a chair at the front of the boat, facing forward, watching the water. He had a beer. He appeared to be, and I use this term deliberately, at the bay. Once or twice I caught him noticing something — a bird, a shift in the light, I couldn’t tell — with the quiet attention of someone who has concluded that observing a thing is, in itself, sufficient. That you don’t necessarily have to announce it, or improve upon it, or issue corrections regarding it. He didn’t tell anyone how to steer the boat.

He also, I noticed, looked profoundly relaxed.

This is what Saunders is getting at, I think, when he talks about the monkey-mind: it’s not just about private distraction, not just the phone-checking and the dopamine-grazing and the ambient noise we pour into our skulls to avoid the discomfort of a quiet moment. It’s also about the social version of all that — the compulsive narration of experience, the performance of competence, the need to add something to every moment as proof that you were there and you understood it and frankly you understood it better than the person standing next to you.

The monkey doesn’t just want attention. The monkey wants to be the smartest monkey in the tree.

We got the boat turned around eventually. The anchor situation resolved itself, or we collectively abandoned it, which amounts to the same thing. Some of us swam. Some of us declined to swim, citing unnamed concerns about water quality that were aired at some length by someone who had just skimmed an article about brain-eating amoebas. We made it back to the dock without incident, which I attribute mostly to the bay’s patience and the boat’s basic willingness to go in the direction it was pointed if you just left it alone for five consecutive seconds.

On the drive back, I found myself next to Mr. Pink for a few minutes and asked him — because I genuinely wanted to know — if the afternoon had been as exhausting for him as it had been for me. He thought about it for a moment. Not performatively. Not with the theatrical pause of a man positioning himself to deliver an insight. Just actually thought about it.

“The water was beautiful,” he said.

That was it. That was the whole answer. He hadn’t been managing the afternoon, or surviving it, or cataloguing its operational failures. He’d been on a boat on a beautiful bay with his friends, and the water had been beautiful, and apparently that had been enough.

I’ve been thinking about that sentence for a few days now. Not because it’s profound — it’s not, or at least it’s only profound in the way that very simple true things are occasionally profound when you encounter them at exactly the right moment — but because of how much effort it represents. How much deliberate quieting of something that doesn’t want to be quiet.

George Saunders says the monkey-mind can be tamed. That with practice, with intention, with something resembling discipline, you can turn down the chatter and just look at the thing in front of you — without agenda, without the compulsive need to improve or correct or perform.

I believe him. I’m just not sure I’ve done the work.

Seven of us rented a boat on Sarasota Bay on a spectacular afternoon, and one of us actually went to the bay.

I’m trying to be that guy.

I’m not confident I’ll succeed. But it’s better than the alternative — sleeping in a damp sock and sitting through another McPoopin movie.

For suburban Seattle, it’s really quiet. It’s the kind of quiet that makes your brain go places it shouldn’t, like ponder whether the dogs are judging you or, say, develop unified theories of American foreign policy while eating your oatmeal in someone else’s kitchen. I chose the second option, because the first one is kinda depressing.

Here is my theory, developed over a bowl of Metamucil flavored oatmeal and formalized somewhere around my second cup of coffee: The President of the United States does not negotiate with other people. He negotiates with himself. Everyone sitting across the table is, in his mind, a slightly different version of himself — usually weaker than him, but someone who haggles, blusters, calculates the costs, and ultimately settles when the price gets too high. His entire approach to dealmaking, foreign and domestic, rests on the assumption that his counterpart is running the same internal software: an American-style rational actor model that says push hard, see what sticks, and cut your losses before things get ugly.

This works more often than it should. It also explains why, when it doesn’t work, it fails so spectacularly that people in my former profession lose sleep over it.

I should disclose my credentials (and their um… limitations). I spent a few decades in the Army, with a master’s degree (or two), one from a War College and one from a certain northeast crimson colored university that can no longer be named, and an assignment or two (or three) in our embassies overseas. This qualifies me to have opinions about international negotiations the way owning a stethoscope qualifies Elon Musk to have opinions about cardiology — technically he has the equipment, but he probably shouldn’t be performing surgery. That said, I’ve sat across enough negotiating tables in enough countries to know what it looks like when someone assumes their counterpart thinks like they do. In foreign policy circles, this error has a name — mirror imaging — and it has been a contributing factor in nearly every major American foreign policy disaster since World War II. We assumed the Soviets calculated nuclear risk the way we did. We assumed Ho Chi Minh could be bombed into peace talks. We assumed Saddam Hussein would behave “rationally” by our definition. We assumed the Taliban would negotiate like a Western government. Each time, the assumption produced a gap between expectation and reality that cost a lot of blood and treasure.

It’s also a perfectly natural thing to do, which is what makes it so dangerous.

(Note: Turns out, mirror imaging is common in personal relationships too, but we’re not here to discuss my marriage).

Consider the following pattern. The President announces an extreme opening position — tariffs of 50 percent, 125 percent, 145 percent — and waits for the reaction. Markets drop. Trading partners call in alarm. Cable news erupts. Then comes the extension: a 90-day pause, a revised deadline, a framework for further talks. Markets recover. The President declares progress. The cycle repeats. Liberation Day tariffs in April 2025: announced, paused within a week, eventually implemented at lower rates. China: tariffs escalated to 145 percent, negotiated down to 30 percent over a series of 90-day truces. The EU, Japan, South Korea, Canada — all received the same treatment. The outrageous opening demand, followed by the extended deadline, followed by a more modest outcome framed as a historic victory. Wall Street noticed the pattern and coined an acronym for it. I won’t repeat it here, because it’s become more bumper sticker than analysis, but the underlying observation is sound: the President’s opening positions have a reliable expiration date.

This is not, in itself, a criticism. Most experienced negotiators will tell you that ambitious opening positions are standard tactics. You ask for the moon, you settle for a distant star in the Orion Nebula named after your wife, and everyone goes home feeling like they got something. It’s Negotiation 101. The Art of the Deal, if you will.

The problem isn’t the tactic. The problem is the assumption underneath it.

Every time the President extends a deadline or walks back a tariff rate, he’s operating from a specific theory of his counterpart’s psychology: they’re doing the same math I am. They’re calculating costs, weighing consequences, looking for the off-ramp. The EU responds to tariff threats by calling and asking for more time — and in the President’s framework, this confirms the theory. They’re rational actors. They looked at the numbers. They blinked first.

And with Western trading partners, this theory is largely correct. The EU, Japan, South Korea, Canada — these are democracies with market economies, independent central banks, and leaders who answer to electorates that care about GDP growth and consumer prices. When faced with an extreme demand, their leaders do in fact run a cost-benefit analysis. They do look for the off-ramp. The cycle completes because both sides are, roughly speaking, playing the same game with the same rules and the same definition of winning.

Which is why what’s happening in Iran should concern everyone, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I wrote about the Iran war a few weeks ago from a strategic planning perspective, so I won’t rehash the full situation. But let me describe what the last ten days have looked like through the lens of negotiation behavior, because it’s a case study in what happens when the mirror cracks.

On Friday, March 20th, the President said the war was “winding down” and that responsibility for the Strait of Hormuz would fall to the countries that depend on it. In negotiation terms, this is a signal: I’m looking for the exit, and I’d like you to help me find it. Twenty-four hours later, he posted that he would “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if the Strait wasn’t fully opened within 48 hours. In negotiation terms, this is… errrr… an extreme bargaining position — the demand designed to shove your counterpart toward the door you’ve opened for them.

What happened next is instructive. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards responded that if their power plants were hit, they’d shut the Strait and start targeting desalination plants across the Gulf — the facilities that produce a substantial portion of fresh water for America’s regional allies. Gulf states called Washington in a panic. Oil surged past $114 a barrel. And then, on Monday morning — with markets about to open — the President announced he was giving Iran five more days, citing “very good, productive dialogue” toward a resolution.

Iran immediately denied any dialogue was taking place. Their parliament speaker posted on social media that there had been no negotiations and that Trump’s retreat was an attempt to escape a “quagmire.” Which, if you squint, is also a form of negotiation, just not the kind Trump recognizes. Markets rallied. Oil dropped. The familiar cycle appeared to complete.

Except this time, the cycle is lying to us.

Tariffs have an off switch. You can raise them on a Saturday and lower them on a Monday and the only casualties are some cargo containers stuck in Long Beach. Wars don’t work that way. When you’ve killed the Supreme Leader, bombed nuclear facilities, triggered retaliatory strikes across six countries, and sent 50,000 troops to the region, you can’t post on social media that you’ve decided to give everyone an extra 90 days. The negotiation framework that works with trading partners — create the crisis, let the pressure build, extend the deadline, declare victory — requires that you control both sides of the equation. That is, it requires you and your negotiating partner to share the same world view. In a trade dispute, that works. In a shooting war, as we keep hearing, the enemy gets a vote.

Iran’s leadership — what remains of it — is not running the same cost-benefit analysis as the President of France or the Prime Minister of Japan. They’re running a survival calculation. The Islamic Republic’s legitimacy rests on resistance to American pressure. That’s not a negotiating position; it’s the regime’s foundational identity. Capitulating to a 48-hour ultimatum from Washington wouldn’t just be strategically unwise. It would be existentially fatal to their very identity. The President looks across the table and sees someone who will eventually fold, because that’s what a rational actor would do, because that’s what he would do. Iran’s leaders look across the table and see a man whose threats come with expiration dates, whose attention shifts with the markets, and whose pattern of retreat is now so well-documented that traders have built investment strategies around it.

This is the uncomfortable irony: the very predictability that makes the President a reliable market signal also makes him a readable opponent. Iran doesn’t need to call the bluff. They just need to wait for the deadline to pass. They’ve been doing it for forty-five years with various American presidents. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, exceptionally practiced at this.

And you know, as my wife enjoys pointing out, I might be wrong (she prefers to quietly whisper “full of it,” which I pretend not to hear). Iran may fold faster than Chuck Schumer’s Broadway musical debut.

But let’s take a minute to imagine this dynamic applied to China.

Beijing has been watching these cycles with what I can only describe as professional interest. They watched tariffs escalate to 145 percent and then come down without meaningful concessions extracted. They watched 90-day truces get extended, and extended again, and extended again. They’re not panicking. They’re taking notes.

China can wait out any American president. That’s not a political statement; it’s a structural observation. Xi Jinping doesn’t face midterm elections. He doesn’t answer to a stock market that moves when he posts on social media. He operates on five-year plans, twenty-year plans, hundred-year plans. If you’re a Chinese communist authoritarian, approval polls are not all that relevant. China’s leverage in rare earth minerals alone gives Beijing the ability to inflict targeted economic pain without firing a shot — which, if you’re keeping score, is approximately what Sun Tzu recommended about 2,500 years ago. One would hope someone has mentioned this at a briefing. (I’m available for consultation. My rates are reasonable).

Or let’s consider a different yet reliably unpredictable potential adversary: North Korea. Kim Jong Un’s entire governing framework is built around resistance to external pressure. The regime’s survival — literally, its continued existence — depends on convincing its own population and military that it will never capitulate to the United States, regardless of the cost. In the mirror, the President sees a fellow dealmaker who will eventually accept a photo op and some vague promises. From Pyongyang’s perspective, the view is different: three summits, no denuclearization, a lot of commemorative coins, and an American president who provided international legitimacy in exchange for nothing concrete. That’s not a negotiation failure for Kim. That’s a master class.

The uncomfortable truth that transcends partisan politics is this: the negotiation approach works just well enough with like-minded counterparts to seem like genius. Western trading partners play the game because they share the underlying assumptions about how rational actors behave. But the world is not exclusively populated by Western trading partners. Iran doesn’t share those assumptions. China doesn’t share them. North Korea doesn’t share them. And the moment you encounter an adversary whose decision-making isn’t governed by quarterly earnings reports and approval ratings, the extended deadline doesn’t produce a deal. It produces a signal that patience will be rewarded.

The Goldens are still sleeping. The rain hasn’t stopped. Somewhere, a deadline is being extended, and someone is calling it progress.

And I keep coming back to something a Brigade Commander once told me, which I’m paraphrasing because it was like thirty years ago and I was probably thinking about lunch: “The most dangerous assumption in any conflict is that your enemy thinks the same way you do.” The President wants a deal. He always wants a deal. He wants the handshake and the press conference and the announcement that something tremendous has been achieved. He assumes everyone else wants that too, because why wouldn’t they? Deals are great. Everybody loves deals.

But some adversaries don’t want a deal. Some want to run out the clock. Some just want to stay in power, are even willing to die to stay in power. And some want to demonstrate that the most powerful nation on earth can be outlasted by anyone willing to absorb the pain longer than the American news cycle allows.

I might be wrong. But here, sitting in Seattle with two snoring Golden Retrievers and a third cup of coffee, is where my theory gets uncomfortable: What if the most predictable man in the world is only unpredictable to himself?

GIG HARBOR, WA — In a trend sweeping the country, Americans have begun sharing their own anonymous praise experiences, claiming celebrities have privately expressed admiration for them but refusing to identify which ones “to protect them.”

Matthew Schwab, a retired Army colonel who publishes a small quarterly magazine, told reporters Tuesday that “a very well-known film director — and I’m not going to say who” recently called his Substack “the most important publication in America.”

“I don’t want to get this person in trouble with Hollywood,” Schwab said, adding that the director was “someone who has won multiple Oscars, and who frankly detests me, but privately? Huge fan.”

When pressed, Schwab also revealed that a major television personality — “a very powerful woman, very powerful, and I won’t say who because I respect her too much” — had recently told him his humor writing was “better than anything on late night right now.” He added that this person “wishes she had done something similar, and frankly, she could have.”

Representatives for Oprah Winfrey denied any awareness that Schwab or his Substack magazine exist.

Schwab later told a separate group of reporters that he had also received praise from “a very respected former world leader, now deceased, who I won’t name out of respect for the family.” He described the exchange as “a beautiful phone call, very beautiful,” and said the leader told him, “I wish I had subscribed instead of building all those houses.”

Schwab dismissed growing skepticism, calling the situation “a big game of checkers at a very high level — very high-level, the highest. Like King me, that high. It doesn’t get higher than that.” He added: “I’m dealing with very smart players. Some very nice people. And some are very nice but dead; as in they’re no longer living.”

The official social media account of the President of the United States posted a meme reel last week celebrating the bombing of Iran. Not a somber address to the nation. Not a briefing with maps and objectives. A hype reel. Explosions cut to AC/DC. Clips from Braveheart. SpongeBob SquarePants asking, “You want to see me do it again?” with a missile strike for punctuation.

I want to be clear that SpongeBob is a cartoon sponge. Iran is a country with 90 million people in it. I also want to be clear that the video got 58 million views in three days, which tells you something about where we are as a civilization, though I’m not entirely sure what.

No doubt, there’s a part of me that thinks Iran is getting exactly what it deserves. After decades of an oppressive regime sponsoring terrorism, funding proxy wars, and threatening the survival of Israel, the President seized a window of opportunity. But there’s also a voice inside my head that won’t quiet down: when does military dominance become wholesale gratuitous killing?

I spent nearly thirty years in the military, the last two stationed in Taiwan as the Senior Defense Official at the American Institute in Taiwan — which is what we diplomatically pretend is not our embassy there, since officially we don’t have one (because, you know, geopolitics requires a certain amount of polite fiction). My job was to help figure out how much military support the United States should give Taiwan without accidentally starting a war with China over it. We argued about this constantly. Weapons sales, training programs, troop visits. How many tanks, how many fighter jets, what kind of missiles. Whether a particular piece of hardware was seen as a deterrent or a provocation by Beijing. That distinction sounds academic until you realize the consequences of getting it wrong fall on 23 million people who never asked to live at the intersection of American and Chinese hubris.

We never fully resolved those arguments on my watch. The answer depended entirely on how you read Beijing’s intentions, and reasonable people disagreed. That was, in fact, the whole point — that reasonable people kept disagreeing, kept asking, kept weighing the human cost of being wrong in either direction. The debate itself was the policy. Caution was the strategy. And that was the job: making sure the argument happening in conference rooms in Taipei and Washington never became the argument happening in the sky over Taipei.

That’s what I think about when I watch the White House meme reel.

Not the strategy — I wrote about the strategy last week, and I stand by every word. What I can’t get past is the giddiness. The insistence on turning a war into content. The decision, made by actual human adults with actual government salaries, to celebrate a military campaign the same way you’d celebrate a walk-off home run. All blammo, no consequence. Every explosion a money shot. Its an ESPN highlight reel.

Watching all of this, I keep thinking about a scene from Gladiator — not the opening battle sequence that the White House cuts right between Braveheart and Walter White snarling “I am the danger” from Breaking Bad. I keep thinking about what Maximus says when he finally stands in the arena in Rome, after the killing is done, and turns to face the crowd. “Are you not entertained?”

He’s furious. He’s asking the question as an accusation. The crowd goes quiet with something like shame.

The White House prefers the hype video. Flawless Victory.

Here’s what those long arguments in Taipei actually came down to: the whole exercise was about the people. The 23 million people on that island who went about their lives — built businesses, raised children, developed one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies — while a rotating cast of American officers and diplomats in a building that wasn’t officially an embassy argued about how to keep them safe without making them a target. Every policy decision got weighed against that human reality. Not as sentimentality. As the actual metric of success.

You can do that math on Iran right now. Over 1,300 dead, including at least 181 children, according to current reports. Ninety million people who did not choose their government — many of whom, in fact, have been protesting against it at considerable personal risk — who got a theocratic dictatorship the same way the people of Taiwan got their geography: by being born in a particular place at a particular time, into a situation they did not design and cannot easily escape.

I think about those people all the time. Not as abstractions. As the whole point of the exercise.

I’m not saying don’t go to war. I’m not a pacifist, and I spent a career in uniform understanding that sometimes force is the only answer. What I’m saying is that somewhere between “force is sometimes necessary” and “Flawless Victory! (Mortal Kombat, 1992),” there used to be a step. The step where serious people in serious rooms asked what happens to the people underneath the explosions. Whether the pain being inflicted would actually produce the outcome we wanted. Whether we could live with it if it didn’t.

The Romans learned something we seem to have forgotten: once you turn killing into a spectacle, you start optimizing for the spectacle. The crowd doesn’t want post-conflict governance or cautionary lessons about power vacuums. The crowd wants another explosion. The crowd wants to see him do it again.

Russell Crowe’s Maximus knew what he was doing, screaming at that crowd. He was asking them to look at what they’d become.

I’m not sure we’re ready to look.

But I notice that nobody’s making meme videos about the 181 children. Nobody’s setting that footage to AC/DC.

I keep thinking about a conference room in Taipei, and arguments we never quite resolved, and 23 million people who are still prospering because thoughtful people stayed at the table long enough to keep asking the uncomfortable questions.

That used to be the job. Now they ask a different question.

Are you not entertained?

I earned that War College master’s degree by spending a year studying the accumulated wisdom of military strategy — Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Thucydides, the whole crowd — distilled into a set of principles that generations of American strategists had refined through trial, error, and a considerable amount of bloodshed. These principles had names. They had doctrines. Most of all, they had PowerPoint presentations. Many, many, many PowerPoint presentations. They were serious, evidence-based frameworks for deciding when, why, and how a nation should go to war.

I want to believe these principles are currently guiding American military operations.

But that’s not what’s happening.

Instead, I’m watching the news at 3 AM — which I used to reserve for late-night infomercials and reorganizing my Tupperware — and I’m slowly realizing that the United States has launched a major war against Iran using a strategic framework I can only describe as “let’s find out.”

There was a time, not long ago in the grand sweep of military history, when the United States had actual rules about going to war. Not the Geneva Convention rules — those are the legal ones everyone’s heard of. I’m talking about the unwritten rules. The strategic common sense. The institutional muscle memory that kept us from doing spectacularly stupid things, or at least gave us a framework for recognizing when we were about to do spectacularly stupid things. Now to be fair, those common-sense principles have been put through the wringer the last two decades, like a favorite old sweater that’s been washed and dried so many times you use it for the dog’s bed.

You’re probably too young or too disinterested to recall the Weinberger Doctrine. In 1984, Caspar Weinberger — Reagan’s Secretary of Defense — laid out six conditions for committing U.S. forces to combat, including that the engagement should be in our vital national interest, that we should have clearly defined political and military objectives, and — this is the important part — that the commitment of forces should be a “last resort.” He developed these principles in the aftermath of the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, which killed 241 American service members. The doctrine was born from grief and hard-won experience. It was designed to prevent us from wandering into catastrophes without a plan.

Then came the Powell Doctrine, developed by Colin Powell during the Gulf War. Powell added his own requirements: use overwhelming force, have a clear exit strategy, and (my personal favorite) the Pottery Barn Rule: “You break it, you own it.” The idea being that if you’re going to smash a country’s government to pieces, you’d better have a plan for what comes next, because the rubble doesn’t organize itself.

And finally, the phrase that got drilled into every War College student’s skull with the subtlety of a jackhammer: “Hope is not a method.” This comes from General Gordon Sullivan’s book of the same name, and it means exactly what it sounds like. You don’t go to war hoping things work out. You go to war with objectives, timelines, resources, and a theory of victory that you can articulate to Congress, the American people, and the poor bastards you’re sending into the fight.

These doctrines were the fire extinguishers of American foreign policy: unsexy, covered in dust, and constantly in the way — but the one time you actually need one, you’re filled with gratitude some bureaucrat put it there.

I mention all of this because, as of last Saturday, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, a joint military campaign explicitly aimed at toppling the Iranian government, and as far as I can tell, the strategic doctrine guiding this operation is “bomb stuff until something cool happens,” (or perhaps, “boo-yah,” its hard to say).

Let me walk you through what I know, because the facts alone are doing more work than any joke I could write.

For weeks, American diplomats were sitting across from Iranian negotiators in Geneva, talking about a nuclear deal. Simultaneously, the Pentagon was assembling the largest military buildup in the Middle East since the 2003 Iraq invasion. The talks ended on a Thursday, with Iran refusing to give up uranium enrichment. Knowing a little bit about the CIA, I assume we dropped an AirTag in the Iranian negotiator’s coat pocket during the lunch buffet, and when it popped up in the Supreme Leader’s home office, we started dropping bombs. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was dead within hours, along with dozens of senior Iranian officials.

The stated military objectives, per the President’s Monday statement: destroy Iran’s missile capabilities, destroy its navy, prevent nuclear weapons development, and stop Iranian funding of terrorism. The stated timeline: “four to five weeks, but [you know] whatever it takes.” The end state: regime change. How that regime change will occur via airpower alone, with no ground forces, in a country of ninety million people nearly four times the size of Iraq, is a question that apparently nobody feels the need to answer right now.

Four American service members are dead in Kuwait from Iranian counterstrikes. Iran has launched retaliatory attacks against Israel, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan. A girls’ elementary school in southern Iran was hit, killing over a hundred people. Smoke rose from Dubai’s airport. A drone struck near the Burj Al Arab. Oil markets are in chaos. And the official characterization from the White House is that this is all proceeding more or less according to plan.

A plan that, as far as anyone can tell, does not extend much past “and then they capitulate.”

Here is where my War College education insists on raising its hand, even though nobody called on me.

There is a fantasy in American strategic thinking that has been resurrected, shot dead, buried, and resurrected again so many times that it qualifies as the Walking Dead of military doctrine. The fantasy is this: airpower alone can achieve political objectives. You don’t need ground forces. You don’t need occupation. You don’t need a plan for the day after. You just need enough bombs, delivered with enough precision, and the enemy government will collapse, the people will rise up, democracy will bloom, and everyone goes home for Christmas.

This idea has been around since 1921, when the Italian theorist Giulio Douhet published Command of the Air and argued that strategic bombing could break a nation’s will to fight without the messy business of ground warfare. It was a seductive idea then. It remains seductive now. And it has been tested, repeatedly, across a full century of warfare.

Let me save you the suspense: it has never worked.

Not in World War II, where the Combined Bomber Offensive devastated German cities without breaking German morale or toppling the Nazi regime — that required ground forces advancing from both east and west. Not in Vietnam, where Operation Rolling Thunder dropped more tonnage on North Vietnam than the Allies dropped on Europe in World War II, and the North Vietnamese kept fighting for another decade. Not in Kosovo in 1999, which airpower advocates love to cite as their one success story, except it wasn’t — Milošević capitulated only when NATO credibly threatened a ground invasion and the Russians withdrew their support. Are you seeing a pattern yet? Not in Libya in 2011, where NATO airpower helped rebels topple Gaddafi, and the country promptly collapsed into a failed-state civil war that’s still burning. And not during the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran in June 2025 — just eight months ago — which military analysts described as a “dazzling” tactical success and strategic failure, because the bombing campaign didn’t topple the regime or permanently end the nuclear program.

The Stimson Center, assessing the current strikes, put it plainly: airpower can destroy facilities, degrade capabilities, and kill commanders, but it has never by itself toppled a government. Not once in a hundred years. Robert Pape, who literally wrote the book on bombing and coercion, has been making this point for decades. Clausewitz made it two centuries ago: you cannot impose political outcomes from beyond the borders, because political outcomes require control, and control requires presence.

But every generation produces its own set of enthusiasts who are absolutely certain that this time will be different. The bombs are smarter now. The intelligence is better. The enemy is weaker. This time, we’ll get it right.

It’s the strategic equivalent of being convinced that this lottery ticket is the winner.

What genuinely keeps me up at night, and I mean this with the urgency of someone who spent a career studying these things so people wouldn’t have to relearn them the hard way, is not whether the bombing campaign will “work” in the narrow military sense. Of course it’ll “work” militarily. American airpower is staggeringly effective at destroying things. We are, without question, the world’s most capable practitioners of turning buildings into rubble and military hardware into scrap metal. Nobody disputes this. The question has never been whether we can blow things up. The question has always been what happens after we blow things up.

And right now, the answer appears to be: nobody knows, and an alarming number of people seem fine with that.

Iran is not Venezuela, which had a small military, a collapsed economy, and a leader who could be plucked out of Caracas in a single operation. Iran is ninety million people. It has a sophisticated military infrastructure. It has a security apparatus — the IRGC — that is specifically designed to survive decapitation strikes. It borders Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkey, all of which have their own complex security dynamics that will be directly affected by whatever emerges from the wreckage. China gets significant amounts of its oil from Iran. Russia has strategic interests in maintaining Iranian stability. The Gulf states that host American military bases are already getting hit with retaliatory strikes, which tends to complicate the whole “coalition of the willing” dynamic.

And the stated objective is regime change through airpower. Which, to reiterate, has succeeded exactly zero times in the history of powered flight.

You can’t really fail out at the U.S. Army War College. It’s not a pass/fail kind of institution (more like “pass” and “pass-but-let’s-hope-that-guy-doesn’t-make-general”). However, if a stud Colonel stood up and presented a campaign plan that said “Phase One: Destroy enemy military capacity. Phase Two: See What Happens. Phase Three: Regime change and regional stability,” we might have seen the first War College failing grade. No diploma, no commencement ceremony. The professors — the PhDs with combat experience who had seen firsthand what happens when you skip Phase Two — would have sighed deeply, shaken their heads, and passed an urgent note to the dean. Phase Two is where the actual strategic thinking lives. Phase Two is where you answer the question: And then what?

Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn Rule apparently no longer applies. We’re now operating under what I can only call the Smash-and-Dash Doctrine: break everything, leave, and hope the people who live there figure it out. Hope being, as I may have mentioned, not a method.

I want to be careful here, because I’m a humor writer who happens to have a military background, not a policy analyst who happens to be funny. I don’t have access to classified briefings. I don’t know what’s being discussed in the Situation Room. It’s possible there’s a brilliant Phase Two plan that’s being kept under wraps for operational security reasons, and if so, I’ll happily eat my War College diploma on live television. Assuming I can find it.

But I’ve watched enough of these situations unfold over a thirty-year career to know what it looks like when there isn’t a plan, and it looks a lot like what I’m seeing: confident statements about military objectives, vague hand-waving about political end states, and a conspicuous absence of anyone willing to answer the question “What does Iran look like six months from now?”

The thing that’s changed, the thing that’s genuinely new and frankly a little terrifying, is the degree to which everyone seems to have accepted this ambiguity as normal.

A decade ago, the foreign policy establishment would have been in full revolt over a military campaign with no articulated end state. Think tanks would have been publishing twenty-page papers with titles like “The Day After: Planning for Post-Conflict Iran.” Congressional hearings would have featured retired generals with stern expressions saying things like “Mr. Chairman, hope is not a method.”

Instead, what I’m seeing from the serious strategic thinkers is something worse than a shrug. It’s a cacophony. The Atlantic Council published “Six Reasons Why Trump Should Choose the Military Option in Iran” and “Regime Change in Iran? Here’s Why the US Should Avoid the Temptation” within twelve days of each other, from the same institution, presumably using the same coffee machine. When the bombs actually fell, their own experts disagreed with each other in the same article, like a Yelp restaurant page where half the reviews say “life-changing experience” and the other half say “gave me food poisoning.” Policymakers can now wander into the think-tank buffet and grab whichever expert validates the decision they’ve already made, like choosing a fortune cookie before you’ve eaten the moo goo gai pan. The fire extinguishers of American foreign policy haven’t disappeared. They’ve been replaced with flamethrowers.

My X-Files poster is still on the wall. I don’t know where my War College diploma ended up. The news is on, and somebody is saying the word “unprecedented” for what I estimate is the eleven-thousandth time this year, which means it is, by definition, no longer unprecedented.

I don’t know what happens next in Iran. Nobody does. That’s kind of the point.

What I do know is that I spent a year of my life and a significant amount of the taxpayers’ money learning principles designed to prevent exactly this kind of strategic ambiguity. The doctrines aren’t wrong. They were never wrong. They were built on centuries of evidence about what happens when nations go to war without clear objectives or a realistic assessment of what comes after the shooting stops.

What’s changed isn’t the doctrine. What’s changed is that nobody seems to care about doctrine anymore. We’ve entered an era where the accumulated wisdom of military strategy, the hard-won, blood-soaked lessons of every conflict from the Peloponnesian War to Iraq, is treated as an inconvenient suggestion rather than a guiding principle.

At the War College, they taught us that the purpose of military strategy is the art of connecting military means to political ends. War is not an end in itself. It’s a tool for achieving specific, achievable political objectives. If you can’t articulate what “winning” looks like, you’re not ready to start fighting.

I keep waiting for someone in a position of authority to articulate what “winning” looks like in Iran. Not the military objectives — destroy the missiles, sink the navy, eliminate the nuclear program. Those are means, not ends. What does the political end state look like? Who governs? How? Under what framework? With what legitimacy? Backed by what force?

And here’s the big finish, the brain worm that burrows into your cerebral cortex late at night: Lately, watching all of this — the wars, the daily upheavals, the casual demolition of one institution after another — I’m starting to suspect that the question itself is obsolete. That “winning,” for the people running this, doesn’t look like stability or democracy or a negotiated peace. It looks like chaos itself. Permanent disruption as a governing philosophy. Not a bug in the system but the system working exactly as designed. The rubble isn’t a problem to be solved. The rubble is the point.

That’s not a conclusion I ever expected to reach. It’s not one they prepared me for at the War College, where we were taught that war serves politics and politics serves order.

Hope, I was taught, is not a method.

Apparently, they’ve updated the curriculum.

I think I’d like a refund.

Before you scroll away, hear me out. We need this. The country needs this. The news cycle needs this. Because right now, the Epstein files are producing a new resignation approximately every 37 hours, and the American public simply cannot sustain this level of moral whiplash without developing some kind of collective neck injury.

For the informed thoughtful citizens familiar with this whole deplorable saga, you can skip this next section. But, in case you’ve been living in a self-induced protective bubble (say, on your own private island free from the distraction of acting like a decent human being), way back in January (what feels like decades ago), the Department of Justice released over three million pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein—the convicted sex offender who managed to befriend roughly half the world’s powerful men before dying in federal custody under circumstances that remain, shall we say, “suspiciously convenient.” The files include 180,000 images and 2,000 videos, which is more content than Apple+ has produced in the last decade, and significantly more disturbing.

Since then, the resignations have been coming in like Amazon returns after Christmas, except instead of unwanted sweaters, people are returning their careers.

Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard and former U.S. Treasury Secretary? He’s announced (yet again) he’s stepping down from public life. Gone from Harvard. Gone from OpenAI’s board. Gone from basically everything except, presumably, his retirement home. The emails showed Epstein referring to himself as Summers’ “wing man”—a phrase that, in the context of a convicted sex trafficker, takes on implications I’d rather not contemplate before lunch.

The head of Goldman Sachs’s legal department, Kathy Ruemmler? She’s resigned after emails surfaced showing she’d referred to Epstein as “Uncle Jeffrey” and accepted gifts from him including a Fendi bag. Goldman Sachs clarified that Ruemmler “regrets ever knowing” Epstein, which is a sentiment I suspect she shares with approximately four hundred other people currently updating their LinkedIn profiles.

Brad Karp, chairman of one of Wall Street’s most powerful law firms, stepped down after emails showed he’d asked Epstein for help getting his son connected with Woody Allen—which, and I cannot stress this enough, is asking one problematic person to introduce your child to another problematic person. It’s like asking your meth dealer for a recommendation for a good painkiller.

Tom Pritzker, billionaire executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels, retired and said he’d “exercised terrible judgment” in maintaining contact with Epstein. The head of Dubai’s largest port company was replaced. A Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist at Columbia resigned. Slovakia’s national security adviser resigned after texts surfaced in which he and Epstein discussed women, with Epstein generously offering ‘You can have them both. I am not possessive. And their sisters.’ The adviser later told Radio Slovakia, ‘When I read those messages today, I feel like a fool.’ Just a fool? That seems a tad lacking.

Norway’s former prime minister has been charged with “aggravated corruption.” A Norwegian diplomat resigned after it emerged that Epstein’s will left ten million dollars to her children—ten million dollars!—which is the kind of bequest that raises questions no Christmas card can answer.

Prince Andrew—sorry, former Prince Andrew, since he was stripped of his royal titles—was arrested on February 19th. Peter Mandelson, the former UK ambassador to the United States, was arrested on February 23rd after emails showed he’d told Epstein, upon learning of his sex trafficking sentence, “I think the world of you.” He later described Epstein as “muck that you can’t get off your shoe,” which is quite the character arc from “I think the world of you” to “shoe muck” in under two decades.

And then there’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who told a podcast last year that he’d cut off all contact with Epstein after a single uncomfortable encounter in 2005. “That’s my story,” he said. “A one and absolutely done.” Except the files show he was still communicating with Epstein in 2012, had co-invested with him in a technology company, and had apparently sought directions to Epstein’s Caribbean island for his boat captain. When confronted at a Senate hearing, he admitted to having lunch on the island. “A one and absolutely done” is doing a remarkable amount of work in that sentence.

Even the chair of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, Casey Wasserman, is under pressure to resign after emails showed him writing flirtatious messages to Ghislaine Maxwell, including asking when he could see her “in a tight leather outfit.” Chappell Roan left his talent agency. Abby Wambach left his talent agency. He’s selling the entire company, which is the corporate equivalent of changing your phone number after a bad breakup.

A CBS News contributor—a health influencer named Peter Attia—had to resign from a job he hadn’t even really started yet, after emails surfaced in which he’d written to Epstein about the macronutrient content of... you know what, I’m not going to quote it. Let’s just say he combined dietary science with vulgarity in a way that would make his mother deeply uncomfortable.

And it’s not stopping. Every morning, Americans wake up, check the news, and discover that another titan of industry, academia, or government has been revealed as a person who somehow forgot they used to socialize with a convicted sex trafficker.

The resignation statements have become their own literary genre—a kind of haiku of regret:

I deeply regret / my lapse of judgment back then. / I’m a “distraction.”

This is where National Step Down Day comes in.

The problem isn’t that these people are resigning. The problem is the pacing. We’re getting one resignation every day or two, stretched across months, creating an atmosphere of perpetual low-grade moral crisis that’s exhausting for everyone except cable news networks and Jake from State Farm commercials, which are thriving .

This is inefficient. This is un-American. We are the nation that invented drive-through banking, one-click purchasing, and the turducken for Pete’s sake. We do not do things slowly!

So: March 2nd. National Step Down Day. Everyone who maintained a friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor—everyone who visited the island, accepted the gifts, sent the emails, took the meetings, co-invested in the technology companies, and has been holding their breath for the last two months hoping their particular batch of correspondence hasn’t been digitized yet—steps down. All at once. Same day. Like a flash mob, but for accountability (and human decency!)

Why March? Several reasons.

First, March is an action verb! Forward, march! March into truth. March into facts. March into justice. March into the unemployment line with your Fendi bag and your memories of Caribbean lunches you now deeply regret.

Second, March is a boring month. Nothing happens in March. February has Valentine’s Day and, apparently, an endless supply of Epstein-related arrests. April has Easter and Tax Day. March has... well, St. Patrick’s Day, which is really just a holiday about wearing green and making questionable decisions, so it’s thematically appropriate. But otherwise, March is just sitting there, empty and available, like an open calendar slot at a therapist’s office. Which, coincidentally, many of these people are going to need.

Third, and most practically: everyone has had enough time. The files dropped January 30th. By March 2nd, you’ve had thirty-one days to delete your own emails, consult your lawyers, update your resume, and practice saying “I deeply regret my association” in the mirror until it sounds almost sincere. No more excuses. No more “I’m reviewing the matter.” The matter has been reviewed. It’s you. In the emails. Being friendly with a sex trafficker. Step down.

How will this work you ask? I envision a streamlined process. The government establishes an online portal—lets call it StepDown.gov—where participants can submit their resignations efficiently. The portal will feature:

Dropdown menus of pre-approved resignation statements, including:

“I deeply regret my lapse in judgment.”

“I am stepping down to avoid being a distraction.” (Currently the most popular option, used by approximately 73% of all Epstein-adjacent resignees. At this point, “distraction” is doing more work than any word in the English language since “collusion” in 2018.)

“I never witnessed any illegal behavior.” (The classic. This is technically possible in the same way that it’s technically possible to tour a meth lab and only notice the nice countertops.)

“My association with this individual was strictly professional.” (Professional what, exactly? No, don’t answer that.)

And my personal favorite, submitted by an actual person in an actual resignation: “I exercised terrible judgment in maintaining contact.” Past tense. “Exercised.” As though bad judgment were a fitness routine since discontinued.

The portal would also include an AI “Statement Generator” for those too busy to craft their own expressions of remorse. Simply input your name, your former title, and the nature of your Epstein connection (dropdown options: “dinner parties,” “island visits,” “co-investments,” “flirtatious emails with his accomplice,” or “all of the above”), and the system generates a press-ready statement in the blink of an eye.

This is faster than the current system, which involves weeks of denial, followed by a strategic leak to a sympathetic journalist, followed by a “carefully worded statement” crafted by a crisis communications team billing $900 an hour, followed by an actual resignation three weeks later when it becomes clear that “carefully worded statement” wasn’t enough because the internet found more emails.

I’ve been tracking the resignations. As of this writing, we’re averaging roughly one major departure every 48 hours. At this rate, with an estimated pool of—let’s be conservative—several hundred people who probably need to have a very uncomfortable conversation with their boards of directors, we’re looking at approximately two years of rolling resignations.

Two years! That’s longer than most Netflix series. That’s longer than my marriage would have lasted (if I’d married crazy Gwen after that one eventful frat party)(though to be fair, she also exercised terrible judgment, specifically in dating me).

National Step Down Day compresses all of this into a single, magnificent, cathartic news cycle. One day. One massive wave. CNN can split the screen into forty-seven boxes. The stock market would briefly resemble a staircase going exclusively down. HR departments across Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the Ivy League would simultaneously burst into flames, not literally, but hopefully more than metaphorically.

Then, on March 3rd: clarity. Clean slate. We’d know exactly who stepped down and who didn’t, which itself will be informative. The people who didn’t participate in National Step Down Day would face a very simple question: “So you’re telling us you weren’t in those three million pages?” And the American public, freed from the tyranny of daily resignation drip, could return to its normal activities, like speculating whether Ghislane Maxwell was replaced by a clone and is living in a south american country with no extradition treaty.

I should pause here, briefly, because underneath the absurdity of resignation statements and PR-managed departures, there are real victims. Young women who were trafficked, manipulated, and abused by a man who weaponized his wealth and connections to ensure that the most powerful people in the world had a vested interest in looking the other way.

The reason these resignations matter—the reason National Step Down Day matters, if anyone actually took me seriously, which they should but won’t—is not because it’s entertaining to watch powerful people squirm. It’s because for decades, these connections provided cover. Every dinner party attended, every email exchanged, every co-investment signed after 2008 sent the same message: This man’s behavior is not disqualifying. And that message had consequences for real people.

So yes, I’m making jokes about dropdown menus and pre-written statements. But the reason the jokes work is that the actual behavior is outrageous! These aren’t people who accidentally liked a problematic tweet. These are people who maintained active, friendly, sometimes financially intertwined relationships with a convicted sex offender and then, when millions of pages of documentation made this impossible to deny, expressed shock that anyone found this concerning.

They didn’t forget they were friends with Jeffrey Epstein. You don’t forget that. They were just hoping we wouldn’t find out.

National Step Down Day simply asks them to stop hoping and start packing.

For those planning to participate, I offer the following practical guidance:

All resignations should be submitted by 5:00 PM Eastern on March 2nd. This gives the evening news enough time to compile the full list and gives Wolf Blitzer time to rehearse.

Please clean out your office the night before. There won’t be enough security guards on March 2nd to escort everyone out simultaneously, and the last thing we need is a bottleneck in the lobby of Goldman Sachs.

Keep your farewell emails brief. “It has been an honor to serve” is fine. “I look forward to spending more time with my family” is acceptable, though your family may not share the enthusiasm. Under no circumstances should your farewell email contain the phrase “I never witnessed any illegal behavior,” because at this point that phrase is essentially a confession.

Do not post about your resignation on LinkedIn with the words “excited to announce my next chapter.” This is not a next chapter. This is the last chapter. The book is over. The publisher has recalled all copies.

But don’t go getting all depressed. Several industries are actively hiring people with a demonstrated history of poor judgment and proximity to scandal. I’m told there are openings in cryptocurrency, AI ethics consulting, and the United States Congress.

Look, I know National Step Down Day isn’t going to happen. The powerful don’t resign on schedule. They resign when the PR math no longer works in their favor. They resign when the cost of staying exceeds the cost of the golden parachute, when the board’s lawyers start using phrases like “fiduciary liability,” when their Wikipedia page has been edited so many times in one week that it triggers an automatic review.

But a man can dream. And in that dream, March 2nd arrives, and across the globe, in boardrooms and corner offices and palatial estates and one very specific Caribbean island that everyone apparently visited but nobody seems to remember clearly, powerful people look at their phones, read the date, and think: It’s time.

March 2nd. National Step Down Day. Mark your calendars.

Or don’t. These folks clearly have trouble remembering their own schedules anyway.

Forward, march!

P.S.: We’re not mentioning you-know-who. Not because we’re afraid of being disappeared, but because some people’s relationship with accountability is so complicated it deserves its own column. And possibly its own Netflix series (but that’s a matter for 2028).

Turns out Sugar Bear is still technically around, but he’s been declawed, neutered, stripped of his swagger. Now they call it “Golden Crisp” with no mention of sugar in the name, as if we’ve agreed to pretend we’re eating it for the “golden” and not for the “sugar-coated puffed wheat” that crunches like tiny sweet stones of joy.

I understand Tony the Tiger’s still working—that tiger’s got job security—but he’s been retrofitted. Now he’s promoting “exercise” and “balanced breakfast” alongside Frosted Flakes, as if any child in history has ever associated Frosted Flakes with balance. Who knows what Toucan Sam is up to, now that he’s been CGI-animated into a soulless husk.

But ol’ Sugar Bear represented something bigger than breakfast. The day Sugar Bear lost his swagger marked the exact point at which American culture decided that joy needed to be justified, regulated, and eventually eliminated for our own good. You can’t just like Froot Loops anymore. You need to acknowledge they’re “problematic.” You need to eat them “ironically.” You need to apologize for enjoying them.

This bothers me more than it should, which is how I know I’m officially old. Which brings me to why I already hate 2026. At least each and every morning that 2026 has in store for me.

The medical people call it “elevated LDL cholesterol.” I call it “my body’s declaration of war against joy.”

“I recommend oatmeal,” Doctor Eric told me, with that casual confidence of someone who doesn’t ever have to actually eat oatmeal. “Try mixing in some psyllium fiber.”

“Psyllium fiber?”

“Like Metamucil. It binds to the cholesterol in your digestive tract.”

Think about that sentence. I’m at the age where I have to start my day by eating something that “binds to things in my digestive tract.” This is not how mornings are supposed to begin. Mornings are supposed to begin with denial and coffee, not voluntary consumption of binding agents.

So now, along with a host of other healthy habits I plan to subconsciously sabotage over the next 30 days, I’m eating oatmeal. This is not, by the way, a New Year’s “resolution.” “Resolution” is, according to Freud, a word of ill-repute (not Sigmund, but Harold Freud, my college roommate. Harold once described the use of “resolution” as permanently stigmatized, that is, ruined beyond repair, like a house where you found bodies buried in the backyard. You can repaint it, put up new shutters, plant some cheerful tulips, but everyone still knows about the bodies).

So this isn’t a resolution. Let’s call it a lifestyle ambush orchestrated by my own cardiovascular system.

My wife comes from a long line of oatmeal connoisseurs. She recommends Bob’s Red Mill organic oatmeal, produced by what I can only assume are bearded men living in a picturesque village somewhere in Oregon, running actual stone mills while shrouded in a constant cloud of oat dust. Their colons are probably magnificent. The bag features Bob himself looking at me with the quiet judgment of someone who’s never experienced the transcendent joy of Froot Loops.

Bob’s oatmeal is described as “old-fashioned,” which is marketing speak for “tastes like what pioneers ate because they literally had no other options.” The instructions are deceptively simple: Combine oats with water. Heat. Add toppings. What they don’t tell you is that the result has the taste and texture of library paste, if library paste had somehow achieved even less flavor. It’s not bad, exactly. It’s the absence of bad. It’s the culinary equivalent of beige, of elevator music, of every conversation you’ve ever had about Barry Manilow.

Then comes the Metamucil, which deserves its own paragraph because adding Metamucil to anything deserves documentation.

Apparently Metamucil has been around a long, long time. Since 1934, which explains everything. In the 1930s, naming conventions apparently were simpler. You take a vaguely scientific-sounding prefix (Meta-), add a suffix that implied medical credibility (-mucil), and suddenly you’ve got a product that sounds like it could either cure you or turn you into a superhero. By the 1950s, Metamucil ads featured women in pearls enthusiastically discussing their digestive regularity at dinner parties, because apparently that was both socially acceptable and considered sophisticated cocktail conversation. I have to admit, the brand name sounded space-age, futuristic, like Tang, like something from the Marvel Cinematic Universe before the Marvel Cinematic Universe ruined everything.

Now, in 2026, “Metamucil” sounds vaguely sinister, like a tech conglomerate that definitely has your data and possibly your DNA. I half expect to open the container and find it’s actually a surveillance device that reports my fiber intake directly to my insurance company.

The active ingredient is psyllium husk, which comes from the seeds of Plantago ovata, a plant that sounds made up but isn’t. When you add it to liquid, it forms a gel. A thick, viscous gel that “binds to cholesterol in your digestive tract” the way the Democrats bind to disappointment—thoroughly and permanently.

Speaking of Democrats, my mother-in-law subsists entirely on oatmeal, Metamucil, and what I can only describe as “optimistic denial about the passage of time.” She will probably live to be 101. She adds only raisins and banana slices to her oatmeal—foods that have already given up, foods that have accepted their fate, foods that pair naturally with binding gel because they too have lost all will to live. She eats this every morning with genuine satisfaction, which tells me either something’s broken in her taste receptors or she’s achieved a level of inner peace I’ll never understand.

I, on the other hand, require significant modification to make this breakfast remotely edible. Here’s what I add to my morning bowl of oatmeal and binding gel: brown sugar (the only sugar acceptable for adults to consume, because it looks serious), “maple-flavored syrup” (which is actually high-fructose corn syrup that had a weekend in Vermont once), cinnamon (to create the illusion of flavor), and almonds (because my wife watches, and almonds look like a choice a responsible adult male should make).

When she’s not watching: chocolate chips. Don’t judge me.

By the time I’m done, I’ve added roughly 400 calories of sugar to this healthy breakfast, which possibly might defeat the purpose, but at least I’m eating it, which I’m told is better than not eating it, though I have my doubts. My doctor assures me this is healthy. I remain unconvinced. There may be some rudimentary scientific studies that suggest psyllium husk binds to cholesterol in my digestive tract, but now that we have RFK Jr. and Elon Musk, do we really need science anymore? I prefer to maintain a healthy skepticism about voluntary consumption of plant-based binding gel.

You know what doesn’t require modification? Reese’s Puffs cereal. Reese’s Puffs come pre-modified for maximum joy. But I can no longer buy Reese’s Puffs, at least not with any sense of dignity or self-respect, and if that doesn’t perfectly capture what’s happening to America right now, I don’t know what does.

This realization hit me way back in 2025 in the cereal aisle at Safeway. I picked up a box—that beautiful, bright orange box with perfectly chocolaty and peanut buttery puffs floating in a giant, milk-filled Reese’s-shaped paper bowl, promising a mouthful of artificially-flavored, nutritionally-questionable, perfectly-sweetened ball of joy—and I saw my reflection in the freezer glass across the aisle. A 50-something man. Holding Reese’s Puffs. Alone.

It’s not that I’m ashamed of Reese’s Puffs. Reese’s Puffs are objectively delightful. Each little ball is a perfect delivery system for a perfect blend of chocolate and something vaguely reminiscent of peanut butter, but exactly like Saturday morning cartoons. The milk turns chocolaty. The balls stay crunchy for exactly the right amount of time. It’s engineered perfection, the culmination of decades of food science research and focus group testing.

But somewhere between my twenties and now, society collectively decided that adults eating cartoon-mascot cereal is a red flag, a sign of arrested development, evidence of failure to launch. You can buy wine shaped like juice boxes. You can debate the merits of Marvel vs DC Justice League as if its both real AND important, but God forbid you put Froot Loops in your shopping cart next to the arugula and artisanal cheese.

The judgment comes from multiple sources. First, there’s my wife, who discovered a box of Cap’n Crunch hidden behind the Quaker Oats last year and looked at me like I’d been having an affair. Which, in a way, I suppose I was. An affair with 1975.

“This has more sugar per serving than actual candy,” she said, reading the label with the intensity of a prosecutor presenting evidence.

“That’s the point,” I tried to explain. “That’s literally the entire value proposition.”

She didn’t throw it away. She didn’t suggest I eat it sparingly. I wish she had. Instead I got the look of disappointment and dismissal. Like it was contraband. Like I was sneaking a cigarette. That look that says, “It’s your life…” or in my wife’s case, “I just hope your life insurance is up to date…”

I now understand why some husbands hide contraband in the garage. But my garage is functionally located in another time zone for purposes of sneaking midnight cereal. Plus there’s no place to store milk or spoons. All the best hiding places are already taken anyway. I hide the edibles in the tool cabinet. The vanilla wafers go behind the camping gear. (Sigh) I’ve become the kind of person with a contraband management system.

You can’t just like things anymore. You need to explain them, justify them, apologize for them. This applies to cereal, to politics, to having opinions about anything. Everything requires a disclaimer, a caveat, an acknowledgment that yes, you know this thing is problematic but you’re engaging with it anyway in a way that proves you’re self-aware about your own complicity.

Reese’s Puffs represent nothing except the desire for your breakfast milk to turn chocolaty. But we can’t have that anymore. We have to have oatmeal with binding gel that literally attaches itself to things inside our bodies like some kind of internal TSA checkpoint.

This morning I made my oatmeal. I added my Metamucil. I watched it gel—and it does gel, I’m not being meta-phorical, it actually forms a viscous mass that moves like a sentient blob from a 1950s horror movie, which feels appropriate given that Metamucil was invented back then. I added enough brown sugar to possibly negate any health benefits. I ate it at the kitchen counter while my wife drank her coffee and looked satisfied, the way a warden looks satisfied when the prisoner eats their meals without incident.

My daughter—home from college for winter break—watched me eat with unconcealed horror.

“Is that… fiber?” she asked, pointing at the orange container.

“It’s called Metamucil.”

“Isn’t that what Grandma eats?”

“I’m aware.”

“You’re fifty.”

“I’m fifty-eight.”

“That’s so much worse.”

And that’s when it hit me: I’ve become my parents. Not gradually. Not slowly. But completely and suddenly, marked by this exact moment, with this exact breakfast. My daughter now judges my cereal choices the way I used to judge my father’s habit of eating Grape-Nuts—that cereal that wasn’t actually made of grapes or nuts and had the texture of aquarium gravel. I used to watch him eat it with milk and wonder what happened to a person that they’d voluntarily choose that for breakfast.

Now I know. What happens is your body betrays you. Your cholesterol gets “elevated.” Your doctor uses words like “cardiovascular risk.” And suddenly you’re eating binding gel and defending it.

“It’s actually not that bad,” I told my her, which is exactly what my father said about Grape-Nuts, and exactly the thing I swore I’d never say about anything.

She looked at me with pity. “Do we have Reese’s Puffs?” she asked.

There’s a box in the pantry. The same box I bought “for when the grandkids visit” even though none of my children have children. It’s been there for six months. Unopened. Waiting. Sort of like Sugar Bear, waiting for America to remember that breakfast used to be fun.

“Go ahead,” I said.

She poured herself a bowl, and the puffs rattled into the ceramic with that distinctive sound—the sound of childhood, of Saturday mornings, of a time before your body required binding gel and fiber supplements. The milk turned faintly chocolaty. She ate standing up, scrolling through her phone, completely unaware that she was participating in a small act of resistance against time itself.

I finished my oatmeal. It was fine. It was healthy. It was the breakfast of someone who’s accepted that joy must sometimes be sacrificed for LDL cholesterol reduction. This isn’t a resolution. It’s a surrender. But at least I’ve found new purpose in my life: having something age-appropriate to resent every single morning for the rest of my prolonged, fiber-supplemented life.

Which, according to my mother-in-law, could be another fifty years.

Somewhere, Sugar Bear is eating Golden Crisp and pretending it doesn’t taste like defeat. I understand completely.

The Reese’s Puffs are going in the garage tomorrow. Behind the edibles. Next to the vanilla wafers. Where they belong.

PS: From Wikipedia: “In 1971, producer Jimmy Bowen, singers Kim Carnes (yes, THAT Kim Carnes!!) and Errol Sober, songwriters Baker Knight, Mike Settle, and others created a bubblegum pop studio group named the Sugar Bears. A cardboard cut-out record was produced and printed on the back of thousands of Super Sugar Crisp cereal boxes. The illustrated record identified four members: Sugar Bear, Honey Bear, Shoobee Bear, and Doobee Bear. Five different versions of the record were printed, each with one of five songs shown on the label. A commercial album, Presenting the Sugar Bears, and three singles were released by Big Tree Records with one song, "You Are the One", reaching No. 51 on the Billboard charts.”

Listen to their Top 51 hit on YouTube here: You Are the One by the Sugar Bears

I know this because my marriage has survived 25 years despite what my wife calls my “pathological obsession with organizing plastic food containers” and what I call “basic respect for order in a universe teetering on chaos.”

Here’s how it works in our house: I believe Tupperware containers should be nested by size, with lids stored vertically in a separate organizer, sorted by dimension and shape. My wife believes Tupperware containers should be hurled into whatever cabinet has room, ideally while she’s running late for something, with lids scattered across three separate drawers like some kind of domestic witness protection program.

When I open our Tupperware cabinet—and I use the term “our” loosely here, since clearly only one of us respects its organizational integrity—containers avalanche onto the floor with the fury of a dam breaking. Lids slide out. Some are irretrievably lost in the no man’s land behind the drawer. A bottom piece I’ve never seen before in my life appears, already stained orange from some tomato-based incident that likely occurred during the first Obama administration.

My wife’s response to my completely reasonable frustration? “It’s just Tupperware.”

JUST TUPPERWARE.

As if the systematic destruction of household order is somehow trivial. As if the fact that we own 57 containers but can only produce matching lids for 11 of them doesn’t represent a fundamental breakdown in domestic civilization.

I’ve explained my system to her. Multiple times. With diagrams. The containers nest inside each other, shallow ones on the bottom, larger ones nesting inside, like Russian dolls but useful. The lids stack vertically in a rack—I bought a specific rack for this purpose, with dividers—so you can see every lid at once and select the appropriate size. It’s elegant. It’s efficient. It’s the only way humans should store cylindrical plastic food vessels.

She has explained her system to me exactly once: “I put them away.”

That’s it. That’s the whole system. No methodology. No organizing principle. Just raw, unfiltered chaos masquerading as domesticity.

The thing is—and this is where it gets psychologically complex—I know I’m the problem here. I KNOW this. My wife has gently suggested that perhaps spending 20 minutes reorganizing the Tupperware cabinet at 11 PM on a Tuesday is “not normal behavior.” She may have used the phrase “You need help” on more than one occasion, though I prefer to interpret that as her enthusiastically offering to lend me a hand.

But I can’t stop. To be honest, I’m no paragon of domestic virtue. The basement hasn’t been vacuumed since I tripped over the Roomba cord last year. I can go weeks without cleaning a bathroom (I know this because my wife and I are currently in a bathroom cleaning standoff that’s lasted longer than the government shutdown). But Tupperware chaos—containers separated from their soulmates, lids living in exile, that one rectangular piece wedged sideways behind everything else like it’s trying to escape—I can feel something break inside me. It’s not anger, exactly. It’s more like existential despair mixed with the quiet certainty that I’ve married someone who fundamentally doesn’t understand that matching containers to lids is how we separate ourselves from the animals.

I conducted an audit last month. We own 57 containers. FIFTY-SEVEN. We are two people. Alone. We eat out roughly 0% of the time. We do not attend an inordinate amount of dinner parties. We’re not cooking for an army. We are not running a commercial food storage operation out of our kitchen.

And yet: 57 containers.

Some of the shapes and sizes stretch the bounds of credulity. Who needs containers sized for individual olives, a single slice of kiwi, or a thimbleful of ranch dressing?

What’s more, I can only account for eight, maybe nine of them. The rest appeared through some process I can only describe as spontaneous generation, like they’re reproducing in the cabinet when we’re not looking, or possibly materializing from a parallel dimension where everyone’s Tupperware has matching lids and life makes sense.

My wife insists these are “from potlucks.”

This cannot be true. We have not attended 46 potlucks. I would remember attending 46 potlucks. That’s 1.84 potlucks per year of our marriage, and I’m certain I would have blocked out that much forced socialization.

But she’s adamant. “You bring potato salad to someone’s barbecue, you don’t get the container back. That’s the deal.”

Except 1) My wife’s not a huge potato(e) salad fan, and 2) we’re NET POSITIVE on Tupperware. We have more containers now than when we were raising three picky teenagers, back when our refrigerator was literally just mountains of leftovers that no one ate (often referred to as ‘The Hot Pocket Years.’). This means either we’re accidentally stealing other people’s Tupperware—which I refuse to believe because I am a man of honor—or there’s a thriving underground Tupperware exchange economy happening at social gatherings that I’m completely unaware of, like a potluck-based currency system where containers change hands according to some secret code written on the bottom.

♳♹♶

I have a working theory: Every piece of Tupperware in America is actually communal property. We’re all just temporary custodians, holding these containers for unknown periods before they migrate to their next home. Like library books, but with more anxiety about whether I left that stain or if it was already there when it arrived.

This would explain the container currently in our cabinet with “RIVERA” written on the bottom in Sharpie. We don’t know any Riveras. We have never known any Riveras. The Riveras are presumably somewhere right now looking at a container marked “US” (we don’t label ours because I’m not a monster), wondering how they ended up with our stuff.

The Phantom Collection extends beyond borrowed containers. There are pieces in our cabinet that I’m certain we purchased ourselves, but I have no memory of purchasing them. They’re not Tupperware-brand Tupperware (which is apparently a thing you have to specify now, like “Kleenex-brand tissues”). They’re... something else. Gladware? Rubbermaid? Some store brand attempting to ride Tupperware’s coattails into our hearts and cabinets?

One of these mystery containers—a rectangular piece roughly the size of a turkey sandwich—has what I can only describe as “vintage vibes.” The plastic has that slightly yellowed quality that suggests it predates modern manufacturing standards. The lid doesn’t quite snap; it sort of... wedges on. Like it’s from an era when people were still figuring out the whole “airtight seal” concept and decided “reasonably tight” was close enough.

I asked my wife about it.

“That’s from my mom,” she said.

HER MOM.

We’ve been married 25 years. Her mother gave her this container sometime in the 1990s, which means we’ve been transporting someone else’s 30-year-old food storage device across 12 different residences. It has survived three continents. It has outlasted four presidential administrations (five depending whether you count Trump twice!). It is, at this point, a family heirloom.

I tried to throw it away once. My wife stopped me.

“That’s a good container,” she said.

The lid doesn’t fit. The plastic is cloudy. It smells like the ghost of casseroles past. But it’s a “good container.”

This is who I married.

The Permanent Stain

Every Tupperware collection has one: a stain that defies science. Ours is a medium-sized rectangular piece, vintage 2008, that once held spaghetti sauce. I say “once held” as if this was a singular event. It was not. This container has held tomato-based products on multiple occasions, despite my explicit warnings that tomato sauce and plastic storage containers have a relationship best described as “permanent commitment.”

The stain is red. Not the deep, rich red of fresh tomato sauce. This is the faded, slightly orange-ish red of a stain that has bonded with the plastic at a molecular level. It has survived seventy-three trips through the dishwasher, hand scrubbing with baking soda, soaking in bleach solution, leaving it in direct sunlight for three days, and prayer.

The container is functionally clean. I’m not storing live bacteria in there. But it LOOKS dirty. It looks like I’ve given up. It looks like I’m the kind of person who just accepts that some stains are permanent and moves on with their life.

I am not that person.

Apparently tomato stains occur because tomatoes contain lycopene, which bonds with plastic polymers. This means my stained container is scientifically inferior plastic that never should have been trusted with marinara in the first place.

I tried to throw it away.

My wife stopped me. Again.

“That’s a good container,” she said. Again.

“It’s stained.”

“So?”

“So it looks dirty even when it’s clean.”

“Who’s looking at the inside of our Tupperware?”

ME. I’M LOOKING AT IT.

We had this conversation while standing in front of the open Tupperware cabinet. The stained container sat there among its brethren, a permanent reminder that some battles cannot be won, some stains cannot be removed, and sometimes you just have to accept that you’re living with imperfection.

My wife closed the cabinet door.

“It holds food,” she said. “The stain doesn’t change that.”

And that’s when I realized she was teaching me something profound about acceptance and imperfection and letting go of the need to control everything. I indicated my gratitude by hiding my disgust and secretly committing myself to throwing it away when she was at work. I’ll claim we gave it away at a potluck (I haven’t done this. Yet. But I fantasize about it.)

The Tupperware Economy

Here’s something nobody tells you about adulthood: “Tupperware” is a brand name. Like Kleenex or Band-Aid. We’re all out here calling every plastic food container “Tupperware” regardless of whether it was actually manufactured by Tupperware Brands Corporation.

This would be like calling every car a “Ford” or every soft drink a “Coke.” It’s linguistically absurd. But we do it anyway because “plastic food storage container” is too many syllables and “food box with missing lid” is too accurate and painful. I want you to ask yourself, how many times have you spoken the phrase, “Put the leftovers in the Rubbermaid, honey”? (And be honest).

My mother-in-law burped her Tupperware. Every time. With religious devotion. She’d seal a container, press down, lift the edge, let out a tiny pfft of air, then reseal it with the satisfaction of someone who has completed an important ritual.

I tried to explain to her once that modern containers have silicone seals that create airtight environments without the burping step.

She looked at me like I’d suggested we abandon indoor plumbing.

“This is how you do it,” she said, demonstrating the burp again.

And that’s when I understood: Tupperware isn’t about food storage. It’s about tradition. It’s about believing that if you just press down hard enough and burp it correctly, everything will stay fresh and nothing will ever spoil.

It’s a metaphor for life, really. You’re constantly trying to create an airtight seal against chaos, pressing down on the edges of your life, hoping that if you just do it right, everything will stay fresh and nothing will leak.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes you open the container three days later and discover that despite your best efforts, that leftover guacamole dip has achieved sentience and is recruiting the forgotten vegetable drawer to establish a free state in your refrigerator.

The Social Contract

There’s a specific kind of social anxiety that only exists in the Tupperware economy: The Fear of Not Returning Someone’s Container.

You go to a party. Someone’s made a casserole or a dessert. You compliment it. They insist you take leftovers. They put them in a container—THEIR container—and send you home with it.

Now you’re in possession of someone else’s Tupperware.

This is not a casual responsibility. This is a sacred trust. This container must be washed, returned promptly, and ideally refilled with something homemade to show appreciation for the original food gift. These are the unspoken rules of the Tupperware exchange.

But here’s what actually happens:

Week 1: You eat the leftovers. You mean to wash the container immediately. You do not wash the container immediately.

Week 2: The container is now in your sink. It’s been there long enough that washing it feels shameful. You’ll wash it tomorrow.

Week 3: You’ve washed the container. It’s clean. You mean to return it this weekend. You do not return it this weekend.

Week 4: The container is in your cabinet. You’re not sure which cabinet. You know it’s somewhere. You’ll find it eventually.

Week 12: You’ve forgotten whose container this is. Was it Sarah? Jessica? That neighbor whose name you can never remember? The container has been absorbed into your collection. It’s yours now.

Week 52: You see the container’s rightful owner at another party. They don’t mention the container. You don’t mention the container. You both know. The container is a ghost between you now, haunting the friendship.

This happened to me with a container from our friend’s holiday party. Beth made brownies and sent the leftovers home in a nice glass container with a locking lid—the fancy kind that costs actual money.

Three months later, my wife asked, “Did we ever return Beth’s container?”

I had not returned Beth’s container. I had not thought about Beth’s container since approximately week two of its residency in our cabinet.

I found it eventually—it had migrated to the cabinet where we keep serving dishes, which meant our brains had collectively decided it was fancy enough to be elevated beyond normal Tupperware status.

I washed it. I considered making brownies to put in it as a return gift, decided that was too ambitious, considered buying brownies and pretending I made them, decided that was too dishonest, ultimately returned it empty with an apology.

Beth was gracious. She said it was fine. She probably didn’t even remember lending it to us.

But I know the truth: I’m the guy who keeps other people’s Tupperware for three months. I’m part of the problem. I’m why people write their names on the bottom in Sharpie. I’m why the Riveras’ container is in my cabinet right now.

My solution: I now exclusively bring food to social events in containers I’ve specifically designated as “sacrificial Tupperware.” These are the mismatched pieces without lids, the stained containers, the warped ones that no longer seal properly. If they come back, great. If they don’t, they’ve died in service of brownies, which is a noble death.

The Midnight Organizer

Last Tuesday, I woke my wife up reorganizing the Tupperware cabinet. Again. She appeared in the doorway, watching me as I nested containers with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb.

“You know this doesn’t actually matter, right?” she said.

“It matters to me.”

“Why?”

Because, I want to say, if I can’t match every container with its correct lid and nest everything properly—then what hope is there for organizing the garage, or the garden shed, or the junk in the top drawer of my nightstand? What hope is there for the future?

She leaned over, kissed me on the forehead and went back to bed.

At midnight, I closed the cabinet. The containers were nested. The lids were sorted. Order was restored.

It probably won’t last the week. But for now, in this moment, everything is in its place.

Twenty-five years of marriage, and I’ve learned exactly one thing: Some battles aren’t worth winning, but you fight them anyway because that’s who you are. Tupperware is chaos. The lids are mysteries. The stains are permanent.

But you keep trying. You keep reorganizing the cabinet. Because the alternative is accepting that chaos has won, and we’re not ready for that.

And that’s the secret to both Tupperware storage and lasting love. It probably sounds like I just made that up, but it feels emotionally true, and that’s good enough.

Soon we’ll be celebrating our 250th anniversary as a country— our Semiquincentennial, which means we’re well on our way to making America great again—and I realized: this just may be the moment we’ve all secretly been thinking about since 1976—restoring Jell-O salad to our national diet!

My own particular gelatinous nightmare often features my mom’s infamous Jello Cabbage Salad—think coleslaw meets Jell-O, sans Miracle Whip (or not…). It contained vegetables that had no business being suspended in gelatin, as if someone had captured a vegetable garden mid-explosion and frozen it in time using chemicals developed by people who clearly hated vegetables.

“It’s Salad,” my mom announced, with the confidence of someone who had not just committed a culinary war crime. “Eat up!”

The recipe, which I would later learn she got from a source she “couldn’t remember” (a common phenomenon with jello salad recipes, as if they materialized fully formed from the collective unconscious of 1950s homemakers), called for lime Jell-O, shredded cabbage, grated carrots, crushed pineapple, and a dose of regret. The ingredients were not combined. They were suspended. Like evidence. Like bodies. Like insects trapped in amber. Like the food equivalent of Han Solo frozen in carbonite, except Han Solo probably tasted better.

I ate it, because I was a child and had no choice in the matter. It tasted like a lawn mower had achieved sentience and decided to become a side dish.

Years passed. I grew up. I got married. I thought I was safe.

Then one Thanksgiving, my wife—whom I trusted, whom I loved, who had seemed like a rational human being capable of making sound decisions—emerged from the kitchen carrying a dish that can only be described as “ominous.” It was red. It jiggled. It had layers.

“Sour Cream Cranberry Jell-O Salad,” she said, beaming. “It’s a family recipe.”

Reader, I married her anyway.

But here’s the thing nobody wants to admit, the secret we’ve all been keeping from ourselves as we smugly order our deconstructed kale Caesar salads and our artisanal avocado toast: We need to bring Jell-O salads back.

Not ironically. Not as a joke. I’m talking full-scale Jell-O Salad Revival, with capital letters, like a religious movement, which frankly it might need to be because you’re going to need faith—serious, unshakeable, leap-off-a-cliff faith—to convince people that suspending food in gelatin is something humans should do on purpose.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF GELATINOUS TERROR

Now again, if you’re under 49 ½, you need to understand that there was a time—roughly 1950 to 1975—when Americans believed that anything could and should be turned into a gelatin mold. This was not a fringe belief. This was mainstream culinary philosophy, printed in actual cookbooks, sold in actual stores, to actual people who took this information home and acted on it.

I have done the research. By which I mean I fell down a rabbit hole of vintage recipe cards on the internet, and I need you to understand: the Lime Jello Cabbage Salad was tame. That was the reasonable one.

There were jello salads containing:

• Tuna fish (cold, gelatinous tuna)

• Hot dogs (suspended like little meaty specimens)

• Cottage cheese (which is already borderline aggressive as a food)

• Olives, ham, celery, and “salad dressing” in something called “Perfection Salad,” which is either the greatest lie in food history or the darkest example of irony

• Tomato aspic with shrimp, which sounds like something you’d threaten someone with during enhanced interrogation

The photographs accompanying these recipes show them displayed on fancy plates, garnished with lettuce, as if presentation could somehow distract from the fundamental wrongness of what was happening. It’s like putting a bow on a crime scene.

But here’s what gets me: People made these. Enthusiastically. At dinner parties. For company. These weren’t desperate Depression-era survival foods. These were fancy. Women’s magazines ran full-color spreads showing elaborately molded salads that looked like architecture projects undertaken by someone who had deeply misunderstood the assignment.

Jell-O was marketed as sophisticated. Elegant. Modern. The company published entire cookbooks dedicated to convincing American homemakers that what their families really needed was more gelatin in their lives. One ad from 1952 shows a hostess serving a shimmering green ring mold to admiring dinner guests while the tagline promises “New! Exciting! Jiggly!”—three adjectives you desperately hope the ad men weren’t using as innuendo.

THE EXPERIMENT

In the interest of journalism (and because my therapist said I need to “confront my past”), I decided to host a proper midcentury dinner party. Not as a joke. As a legitimate test of my theory that these foods deserve resurrection.

First, I had to make the Lime Jello Cabbage Salad myself. The recipe I found online—submitted by someone named “Pam-I-Am,” which sounds suspiciously like an unpublished Dr. Seuss book about questionable life choices—came with this description: “This Jello salad is a tradition in our family to serve with ham or pork.”

Let’s pause there. “Tradition in our family.” This is what we’re talking about. Jello salads aren’t just recipes. They’re legacy. They’re passed down. They’re the fruitcake of the salad world, except people actually ate jello salad, which somehow makes it worse.

The recipe calls for:

• 1 box lime Jell-O (ominous start)

• 1 cup shredded cabbage (why)

• 1/2 cup grated carrots (no)

• 1 cup crushed pineapple with juice (stop)

The instructions are deceptively simple. Dissolve the Jell-O in hot water. Add ice to cool it down. Wait until it’s “partially set” (a phrase that should never apply to food). Fold in the vegetables.

I need you to understand what “fold in the vegetables” means in this context. You are taking cabbage—raw cabbage, the thing people put in coleslaw because they hate themselves—and you are gently incorporating it into lime gelatin. Like you’re being tender with it. Like you’re tucking it into bed.

The mixture goes into a dish and refrigerates for two hours “until firm.”

“Firm” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

What emerges looks like something you’d find in a petri dish in a laboratory studying the effects of radiation on produce. It’s green. It’s translucent. There are vegetable shapes visible inside it, like a very unappetizing aquarium. When you cut into it, it makes a sound. Not a good sound. A sound like “squoilch,” which isn’t even a real word, but your brain invents it immediately because English has failed us in this moment of culinary crisis.

The full dinner party menu:

• Lime Jello Cabbage Salad (the cornerstone of my trauma)

• Sour Cream Cranberry Jell-O Salad (my wife’s contribution to the madness)

• Tuna noodle casserole with potato chip topping

• Green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup and French’s fried onions

• Tang (served in actual glassware, not Solo cups, because we’re classy)

• Pineapple upside-down cake

Dress code: “Hawaiian Shirts and Bermuda Shorts”

Entertainment: Any vinyl album by Harry Belafonte singing Calypso music.

Atmosphere: Aggressively beige

The guests arrived skeptical. They became more skeptical when they saw the jello salads, which I had unmolded onto lettuce leaves (because that’s what you DO with jello salads) and garnished with mayonnaise. Yes, mayonnaise. Pam-I-Am’s recipe said to. I was being authentic, which I now realize was less “Dr. Seuss character” and more “cry for help.”

I served portions. I explained nothing. I watched.

Their reactions progressed through the five stages of grief:

1. Denial: “That’s not actually a salad.”

2. Anger: “Why would you do this?”

3. Bargaining: “If I try it, can I leave?”

4. Depression: [chewing silently, staring into middle distance]

5. Acceptance: “My grandmother made this.”

That last one is key. Because here’s what happened next: People ate it. And not just polite “I’ll try one bite” ate it. They went back for seconds. Of jello salad. With vegetables in it.

Why? Because nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and apparently when you inject it directly into the taste buds, people will eat anything. I watched rational adults, people with college degrees and 401(k)s, go back for seconds of cabbage Jell-O. This is the same psychological phenomenon that makes people think their high school was better than kids have it today. It wasn’t. We had Jell-O salad.

Every single person at that table had a story about Jell-O salad. Someone’s grandmother made all of these. Every single bewildering jello salad recipe represents somebody’s childhood. Somebody’s Thanksgiving. Somebody’s “remember when Grandma made that weird green thing and Grandpa said it was good even though we all knew he was lying because he loved her.”

Jello salads weren’t good, exactly. They were familiar. They tasted like childhood. Like church basements and wedding receptions and funeral luncheons. Like a specific time and place in American history when people believed that if you could put something in Jell-O, you should.

The tuna noodle casserole was unironically delicious, which several guests seemed personally offended by. The green bean casserole—which never actually went away but has been relegated to “Thanksgiving only” status—was universally praised. The Tang generated significant debate about whether it was better or worse than we remembered. (Several people described it as “aggressively orange,” which is the only way to describe Tang.)

The pineapple upside-down cake was perfect because pineapple upside-down cake is objectively always perfect and I will fight anyone who disagrees.

By the end of the evening, everyone was Googling where to buy fondue sets.

MY FOUR RULES FOR CULINARY RESTORATION

Based on this empirical evidence—which is definitely scientific and not at all just my friends being polite—I have established four personal rules for bringing back midcentury food culture:

RULE ONE: The Jell-O Salad Mandate

I will bring a gelatinous salad to at least one potluck per year. Not as a joke. As a legitimate offering. With tiny marshmallows, if appropriate. I will present it with a straight face. I will not apologize. I will watch as people remember their grandmothers and experience the complex emotions that come with eating cabbage suspended in lime gelatin. This is my gift to them. They’re welcome.

RULE TWO: The Company Food Doctrine

I am reinstating the concept of “company food”—recipes you only make when people come over. Not because guests deserve special punishment, but because there was something weirdly wonderful about having fancy recipes reserved for occasions. Recipes involving cream of mushroom soup and fried onions from a can. Recipes your mother got from her mother, who got them from a magazine, who got them from a test kitchen run by people who were definitely making things up as they went along. I’m talking tuna noodle casseroles. I’m talking green bean casseroles. I’m talking about foods that require the phrase “cream of” before a vegetable name.

RULE THREE: The Heritage Recipe Preservation Act

I am keeping every questionable recipe my mother, my wife, my wife’s mother, and random people named Pam-I-Am have ever made. I will preserve them. I will make them occasionally, with full knowledge that they’re objectively questionable. I will serve them to my children. Because trauma is an heirloom, and heirlooms are meant to be passed down. This is heritage. This is America.

RULE FOUR: The Matching Appliance Renaissance

Lastly, all kitchen appliances must be available in avocado green and harvest gold. Not as “retro options.” As the PRIMARY options. Stainless steel is banned. It is too modern. Too sterile. Too lacking in whimsy. We will return to a time when refrigerators had personality, even if that personality was “aggressively 1970s color palette.”

I’m also bringing back fondue, but that’s less a rule and more a personality defect.

THE CONCLUSION (OR: WHY TRAUMA IS AN HEIRLOOM)

Look, I’m not actually suggesting we return to a time when people earnestly served ham suspended in gelatin. I’m not advocating for the wholesale abandonment of culinary progress. Knowing how to make risotto is good. Access to fresh herbs is good. Understanding that vegetables can be roasted instead of boiled into submission is very good.

But there’s something weirdly beautiful about these forgotten foods. They represent a specific moment in American culinary history when we had access to processed ingredients and leisure time and matching kitchen appliances in avocado green, and we thought we were living in the future. We thought Jell-O salads were sophisticated. We thought TV dinners represented progress. We believed Tang was the drink of tomorrow.

We were wrong, but we were optimistically wrong. We were experimentally wrong. We were wrong with enthusiasm.

And yeah, the results were often disgusting. Jello salads are objectively bad. Tang tastes like oranges have a personal vendetta against you. Most fondue parties probably ended with someone getting second-degree burns.

But these foods are part of our story. They’re what our grandparents ate. They’re what our parents rebelled against by learning to make quiche. They’re what we mock now while secretly wondering if maybe, just maybe, we’ve lost something by completely abandoning the earnest weirdness of midcentury cuisine.

So I’m keeping the recipes. The Lime Jello Cabbage Salad. The Sour Cream Cranberry Jell-O Salad that my wife makes with inexplicable pride. The various casseroles that require cream of mushroom soup and fried onions. All of them.

Not because they’re good. But because someday my kids need to understand what their grandmother put me through.

My kids are all adults now. They don’t know about jello salads yet. Two of them adamantly believe vegetables are God’s punishment for video game addiction. One still believes vegetables come from the farmers market and are supposed to taste like themselves, not like they’ve been imprisoned in lime gelatin. They’re innocent. They believe in a just and semi-rational food world.

They have no idea what’s coming.

Because someday—maybe at Thanksgiving, maybe at a family reunion, maybe just on a random Tuesday when I’m feeling particularly committed to this generational cycle of culinary trauma—I’m going to make Lime Jello Cabbage Salad. I’m going to put it on a nice plate. I’m going to garnish it with lettuce and maybe some shredded carrots that aren’t encased in gelatin, just to really highlight the contrast.

And I’m going to serve it to them with a completely straight face.

They’re going to ask what it is.

I’m going to say, “It’s salad. Eat up!”

They’re going to look at me like I’ve betrayed everything they thought they knew about our relationship.

Which, you know, fair.

But they’ll eat it. Because they love me, and because children are contractually obligated to eat the questionable foods their parents serve them, just as I ate the questionable foods my mother served me, just as my mother ate the questionable foods her mother served her.

This is heritage. This is how traditions survive. This is how a nation of people who should absolutely know better ends up with cabbage in their Jell-O.

Welcome to America. Have some lime gelatin. I promise it’s a salad.

And hey, if you’re looking for dessert, I know a great recipe for Watergate Salad. It has pistachio pudding in it. And Cool Whip. And marshmallows.

It’s delicious.

My mother-in-law gave it to me. She can’t remember where she got it.

I’m starting to think that’s intentional.

Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Translation:

Your soul is like a landscape fantasy,
Where masks and bergamasks, in charming wise,
Strum lutes and dance, just a bit sad to be
Hidden beneath their fanciful disguise.

Clair de Lune is French for “moonlight.” Debussy’s incredibly beautiful and tranquil piano movement was actually included in Disney’s original 1940 Fantasia but was cut for time in the final release. The animation was saved and later repurposed as a “tone poem” titled “Blue Bayou“ in the 1946 animated feature Make Mine Music (if you buy or rent Fantasia today you’ll see that they’ve placed the original back in the movie).

However, that original Clair de Lune tone poem provided the very inspiration to reimagine Disney’s Fantasia concept with a new mix of sound and images. I searched for footage that would bring the music to life without relying on AI or animation, using real-world imagery to create a vision based on a simple premise: If Earth ever receives visitors unfamiliar with our world, what would we be most proud to show them? The result is the clip below - a beautiful, intricate undersea ballet featuring humpback whales that, for me, represents the very best of our planet. Please watch, enjoy, and share.

You can catch a noteworthy effort to rematch the original Clair de Lune (“Blue Bayou”) animation with the music as it was originally intended, posted by Animation Nation here:

And if you have a free hour or two, check out the full 1946 Disney “Make Mine Music” feature film, a real treat for Disney enthusiasts that captures all the ebullience and freedom of a post-war America:

https://archive.org/details/make-mine-music-unrated

No matter your personal beliefs or political affiliation, we’ll all get through this together, land at the bottom of the hill, and get right back in line. Why? Because it’s worth it. Cheers!

P.S.: And don’t forget to check out the lovely Paul Barton on YouTube, who spends his days playing piano for runner-up to Planet Earth’s best animal, aging Elephants. Here, he plays Clair de Lune for a blind 80 year old elephant named Ampan :

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Sometimes the antidote to modern chaos isn't found on our phones or our feeds. It's written across the night sky in languages older than words.

But when it comes to making art in 2025, the audience wants what the audience wants. We heard you. Your messages keep coming. Your enthusiasm is relentless. Apparently, demanding we "release the damn thing already" is the new love language. Fine, You win. We’re doing this.

The concept was simple: reimagine Disney's Fantasia using the Voyager spacecraft’s Golden Record as our North Star—humanity's ultimate mixtape, currently floating somewhere past Pluto. Now, Down the Rabbit Hole is bringing you the full movie, in carefully curated pieces. Each release comes with exclusive director’s notes: the stories behind the choices—why this song, why this image, why now. Think of it as your backstage pass to a year-long obsession with matching sound to vision until something approaching magic happened.

First up: When Bowie met the machine...

Video Fantasia '25: "Fame"

When Bowie Met the Machine: A Visual Symphony of Fame and Transformation

Picture this: It's 1975, and David Bowie struts onto the stage of Soul Train. He’s fresh off his Ziggy Stardust era and diving headfirst into his "plastic soul" phase. The performance that follows is electric, angular, almost robotic. Bowie is clearly high with a slightly bemused smirk.

Now imagine that energy colliding with Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, specifically that hypnotic sequence where the robot Maria performs her seductive dance, mesmerizing the crowd with movements that blur the line between human and machine.

Add to this mix the kaleidoscopic abstractions of Harry Smith's Mirror Images No. 11 - those fragmentary, crystalline visions that feel like looking into a broken mirror that somehow shows you the future - and you've got something that shouldn't work but absolutely does.

What emerges is a meditation on performance, identity, and the ways we've always been cyborgs, long before we had a name for it. Bowie's Soul Train appearance wasn't just a TV performance; it was a transmission from someone who understood that fame itself was a kind of transformation, a becoming-machine. When you layer that against Lang's prescient vision of human-robot ambiguity and Smith's fractured stop-motion visual poetry, the result feels less like a mash-up and more like an archaeological dig into our collective unconscious.

Sometimes the best way to understand where we're going is to see how the future was always already here.