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

Over our quarter-century together, I’ve unintentionally absorbed all her annoyingly admirable qualities: the aggressive cheerfulness, the belief that salad counts as dinner, the conviction that other drivers are “just having a rough day” instead of “incompetent chuckleheads making up for their small male member,” and an inexplicable enthusiasm for things like “morning” and “other people.” Meanwhile, my wife has subconsciously adopted all my treasured darker traits: unmitigated disappointment in humanity, unrealistic expectations of minimally acceptable human behavior, unadulterated skepticism about anything anyone anywhere ever says, and a little something I like to call “compassionate curmudgeonism.”

I know you’re probably thinking, “Oh, the ol’ Freaky Friday conundrum,” but it’s not a full-on body swap. This is more of a melding of personality traits, a Weirdo Wednesday plotline if you will, except it’s permanent and there’s no epiphanic moment where we learn a valuable lesson while trapped in each other’s bodies.

Now you might be thinking I’m getting the better end of the stick in this scenario, but it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. Twenty-five years ago, my wife suffered from a debilitating Ronco infomercial addiction. Not the hardcore stuff—I mean she never descended into Pocket Fisherman territory or ordered an Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler on a maxed out credit card—but she did accumulate a comprehensive collection of soda-can cutting kitchen knives (a culinary quality I wasn’t aware I needed until I did), an array of vegetable spiral dicers (because regular-shaped vegetables are for quitters), a rhinestone stud-setter (less said the better), and of course the legendary Juice-O-Matic, which transformed anything from turnips to canvas sneakers into a refreshing vitamin packed smoothie (with only one regretfully minor design flaw involving any mechanism for easy cleaning, unavoidably resulting in a lot of sneaker-flavored turnip water).

The good news? She’s completely cured. She hasn’t bought an infomercial product in over two decades (Note: Full transparency, this may also be due in part that we don’t have cable television and we have to ask our children for the Amazon password).

The bad news? I’m experiencing acute infomercial susceptibility. I’m now the one awake at 3 AM listening to high-pressure sales pitches that promise life transformation through convenient monthly payments.

Which leads me to today’s newsletter topic: my debilitating Vitamin D deficiency.

THE DIAGNOSIS

I recently learned that my Vitamin D deficiency is personally responsible for my chronic fatigue, my occasional forgetfulness, global warming, my inability to parallel park, the decline of Western civilization, and very likely the Kennedy assassination. (Lee Harvey Oswald almost certainly suffered from a debilitating Vitamin D deficiency, though this remains unconfirmed by the Trump administration probably due to their own Vitamin D deficiencies.)

I know this because Dr. Pinkus told me so.

Now, this truth-sayer has been spreading the gospel on late-night AM radio for decades, but I was living in ignorance until last Tuesday at 3 AM while I was reorganizing my collection of unread New Yorker magazines. (Truthfully, Dr. Pinkus didn’t mention the Kennedy assassination specifically, but I’m extrapolating).

Dr. Pinkus is a homeopathic and herbal supplement expert—and I’m using “expert” in the technical sense of “graduated from a chiropractic school in Minnesota”—who sells something called “Sublingual Vitamin D3 Fast-Acting Melts.” These are tablets that dissolve under your tongue, which is apparently critical because just swallowing vitamins like a chump means you’re not getting the full healing power of what might be described as “chalk with health claims.”

The product costs $47 for a 30-day supply, which breaks down to approximately $1.57 per day to cure every ailment known to medical science. This seems like a bargain until you realize you can buy vitamin D3 at Costco for roughly the same cost as a decent burrito—and at these prices, I’m essentially eating a sublingual burrito every morning for breakfast.

But here’s the thing: According to Dr. Pinkus, regular vitamin D doesn’t work. Only HIS vitamin D works. It has to go under your tongue. It has to be HIS specific formulation with proprietary absorption technology (read: it tastes like orange-flavored dust). And it definitely has to cost $47. This is very important. The healing properties of vitamin D are apparently directly proportional to how much you pay for them, which explains why the sun—which provides vitamin D for free—has been systematically failing to cure anyone of anything since the dawn of time. If the sun really worked, we wouldn’t have disease. But we do. So if you haven’t already figured this one out on your own, let me be clear: The sun is a scam. QED.

THE VITAMIN D GOSPEL

The specific radio segment I heard featured Dr. Michael Pinkus being interviewed by what sounded suspiciously like “an AI generated host who asks follow-up questions with the genuine curiosity of a chatbot programmed to read preplanned questions.” The conversation went something like this:

HOST: “Dr. Pinkus, I’ve been hearing that vitamin D deficiency is becoming a serious health crisis in America. Can you tell us more about that?”

DR. PINKUS: “That’s right ChatGPT, our bodies are under assault by our predisposition for doomscrolling and instant gratification through dopamine addiction resulting in an epidemic of pale pasty-white people.”

According to Dr. Pinkus’s radio testimony, vitamin D deficiency causes:

• Fatigue (okay, plausible)

• Depression (sure, I’ll buy that)

• Bone pain (should we maybe stop here?)

• Muscle weakness (we’re not stopping, are we?)

• Anxiety (this list is starting to stress me out)

• Frequent illness (of course not)

• High blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers (CERTAIN CANCERS?!)

• Obesity, chronic pain, memory problems (ironically, I’ve now forgotten where this list started)

• Erectile dysfunction (😳)

• ADHD (I doth protest)

• And Seasonal Affective Disorder (okay, this one kinda makes sense)

  

First of all, I got my ADHD the old fashioned way. I earned it! Secondly, this wasn’t a conversation. This was a prepared sermon delivered to an unfortunate congregation of one, and that one was me, suddenly convinced that my entire life’s problems—my career disappointments, my failure to learn a second language, my complicated relationship with my father—could all be traced back to inadequate sun exposure.

The implication was clear: If you have literally any health problem whatsoever, it’s probably vitamin D deficiency. Got a headache? Vitamin D. Stub your toe? Vitamin D. Can’t remember where you put your keys? Vitamin D. Your spouse doesn’t organize the Tupperware correctly? Almost certainly vitamin D, possibly combined with a moral failing.

THE SCIENCE (OR: WHAT ACTUAL DOCTORS SAY)

I decided to do something Dr. Pinkus apparently considered unnecessary during his ‘extensive research’—I consulted actual doctors who went to medical schools with, you know, buildings and accreditation and stuff.

Turns out, vitamin D deficiency IS a real thing. According to the Cleveland Clinic, the National Institutes of Health, and basically every medical organization that doesn’t sell sublingual tablets on late-night radio, vitamin D is important for bone health and immune function. About 42% of American adults have some level of deficiency, particularly people who don’t get much sun exposure, and people over 65 who have stopped trusting the sun entirely.

The actual symptoms of deficiency? Mostly bone and muscle issues. Fatigue in severe cases. Possibly some immune system effects. The research is ongoing, which is science-speak for “we’re not entirely sure, but we’re definitely sure it doesn’t cure gout.”

What vitamin D deficiency definitely does NOT cause, according to actual peer-reviewed medical literature that wasn’t published by the Sublingual Vitamin Institute of Minnesota:

• Your personality

• Your poor attention span

• Your inability to parallel park (that’s just flawed spatial reasoning, which I’ve had since birth)

• Most of the 47 things Dr. Pinkus mentioned

• The Kennedy assassination (probably)

Here’s the thing about medical science: When something actually cures 47 different unrelated conditions, we call it a miracle and give someone a Nobel Prize. When someone CLAIMS something cures 47 different unrelated conditions, we call it a red flag the size of a Walmart, and that Walmart is having a sale on regular vitamin D for $8.

The recommended daily amount of vitamin D? Between 600-800 IU for most adults, according to the National Institutes of Health. You can get this from:

• 15 minutes of sun exposure (free, but as you know, ineffective)

• 3 ounces of salmon (delicious, actually contains omega-3s as a bonus)

• A glass of fortified milk (if you’re not lactose intolerant, which Dr. Pinkus would probably say is also caused by vitamin D deficiency)

• A standard $8 bottle of vitamin D3 from any pharmacy in America

Dr. Pinkus’ sublingual melts contain 5,000 IU per tablet—more than six times the recommended daily amount—and cost $47 for a 30-day supply, which is either a brilliant business model or a sign that I should have paid more attention in economics class.

I called my actual doctor to ask about this. You know, the kind of doctor who went to medical school in a building with a physical address rather than a correspondence course advertised on a matchbook.

“Do I need sublingual vitamin D?” I asked.

There was a pause. The kind of pause that doctors give when they’re trying to figure out which infomercial you’ve been watching.

“Do you have a vitamin D deficiency?”

“I don’t know. Should I get tested?”

“Do you have symptoms of deficiency? Fatigue? Back pain?”

“I have the normal amount of fatigue and back pain that comes from being a middle-aged man who stays up hunched over watching YouTube at 3 AM.”

“Then you probably don’t need to get tested. And you definitely don’t need sublingual vitamin D. Regular vitamin D supplements work fine. Your digestive system is designed to absorb vitamins. That’s literally its job.”

“But what if—”

“Did you hear about this on the radio?”

“...Maybe.”

“Was someone selling something?”

“That’s not relevant—”

“Look, if you’re concerned, buy a $10 bottle of vitamin D3 from the pharmacy. Take 2,000 IU a day. You’ll be fine. Also, maybe go to bed before 3 AM.”

This seemed too simple. Too cheap. Where was the special formulation? The proprietary delivery system? The testimonials from people whose lives were transformed, whose marriages were saved, whose golf games improved by 40%?

THE INFOMERCIAL ECOSYSTEM

Here’s how the supplement infomercial industry works, and I know this because I spent an entire week falling down this particular rabbit hole (which may or may not have been caused by vitamin D deficiency, depending on who you ask):

Step 1: Identify a real medical condition that affects a lot of people
Step 2: Identify a supplement that has SOME legitimate medical use
Step 3: Claim that supplement cures not just the original condition, but also 46 other things, including some conditions that aren’t even technically medical conditions but are just “aspects of being human”
Step 4: Create a “proprietary formula” that’s basically the same as every other version but costs six times more
Step 5: Make it available ONLY through a 1-800 phone number or sketchy website, never in stores where people might comparison shop or read actual labels
Step 6: Get booked on every AM talk radio show in America between the hours of 11 PM and 5 AM, when your target demographic (insomniacs, night-shift workers, and people reorganizing their unread magazine collection) is most vulnerable to poor life choices.

Dr. Pinkus has apparently been a guest on over 1,000 radio and TV shows. One thousand. That’s not a doctor making occasional media appearances to educate the public about a health concern. That’s a marketing campaign masquerading as public health information, wearing a lab coat and a friendly smile.

The shows he appears on wouldn’t necessarily be considered “hard-hitting investigative journalism,” asking tough questions about clinical trials and FDA approval and such. The “interview” is scripted by someone who also writes fortune cookies. The call-in testimonials are suspiciously enthusiastic, like people describing religious experiences but with vitamins.

It’s QVC but with medical claims, which means the FTC and FDA occasionally send strongly worded letters that everyone ignores because strongly worded letters don’t have any actual enforcement mechanism at 3 AM.

I found Dr. Pinkus’s website (or rather, one of several websites—the man has more digital properties than Zillow). The product page features testimonials like:

“Within days, I had zero discomfort!”
“My energy increased. The second day I felt incredibly good. And the third day, wow!”
“It has really made a difference for me.”

These read less like medical testimonials and more like what you’d say about a surprisingly good burrito from that food truck downtown. Which, coincidentally, costs about the same and probably has more nutritional value.

THE AFTERMATH

So yes, I’m now taking vitamin D. The $8 kind from Costco that comes in a bottle the size of a small thermos, not the $47 sublingual melts. I swallow it like a regular vitamin, using my digestive system for its intended purpose, like some kind of evolutionary success story.

My energy levels are exactly the same. I still can’t parallel park. My memory remains unreliable. The Kennedy assassination remains unsolved. I still get up at 3 AM to reorganize things that don’t need reorganizing. But at least I’m doing it $39 cheaper per month, which adds up to $468 per year, which is enough to buy approximately 78 decent burritos, which seems like the more sound nutritional investment.

And my wife—now fully inhabiting my former personality—looked at the Costco receipt and said, “Eight dollars? What a rip-off. Probably placebos pushed by Big Pharma to keep us online and doomscrolling. Sunlight is free!”

I married someone with annoyingly admirable qualities. And thankfully, they’re contagious. She was less fortunate.

Dr. Pinkus, if you’re reading this: The sun is still free. The pharmacy vitamin D is still $8. And at 3 AM last Tuesday, I found myself on your website again. My cursor hovering over the “Add to Cart.” I didn’t click it. But I wanted to.

Which means you’ve already won.

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.

Before there was Google, before the Internet, there was the Whole Earth Catalog: a hippie version of the Sears catalog for anyone who wanted to opt out, join a commune, and get back to the land. It also became the philosophy for Silicon Valley’s founding mythology. This week, we tunnel into how Stewart Brand’s 1970s guide to building your own civilization became the blueprint for Facebook, Amazon, and every digital platform promising to “democratize” your life—and why it just might be the basis for our current surveillance capitalism society.

Check out the full episode on our sister site: Radio Cinematica

The Internet Archive contains a whole subsection dedicated to the Whole Earth Catalogue and its various incarnations. You can peruse the various editions of the catalogue and the Whole Earth Universe here.

And if you want to watch Doug Engelbart present the “Mother of All Demos” you can watch it on Youtube here: “The Mother of All Demos”

Give a listen and whether you agree, disagree, love it or hate it, don’t forget to post a comment!

Like many before me, I discovered Shirley Jackson backwards, which is probably the best way to find her.

It was 1999, late night cable, and I stumbled onto Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963, the black-and-white original, not the CGI disaster remake), the movie based on Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House. The film left an impression on me in ways I couldn’t articulate. No gore, no monsters, just psychology, architecture, and wonderful acting conspiring to create a dread more compelling than any Stephen King adaptation. The next weekend, I came across a battered paperback of Jackson’s novel at a used bookstore, its cover featuring the requisite haunted mansion rendered in lurid 1970s horror-paperback style. The novel was even better than the film—Jackson’s prose created terror through suggestion and implication, through the slow revelation that the house wasn’t haunted so much as it was wrong.

But I didn’t make the connection yet. I didn’t realize this was the same Shirley Jackson whose “The Lottery” I’d encountered in approximately every English 101 anthology ever published. That realization came years later, when I was working diligently on my DIY MFA (Do IT Yourself Masters of Fine Arts), those long months of obsessive reading and re-reading of all the literary works I skipped in my carefree youth. I was working through short story collections and re-read “The Lottery” and it finally clicked: the horror specialist who made me sleep with the lights on was the same writer who’d been hiding in plain sight in every edition of “Great American Short Stories.” Duh…

This is Shirley Jackson’s particular curse and blessing: everyone knows “The Lottery,” but almost nobody reads her novels. She’s simultaneously over-anthologized and completely overlooked, a literary magic trick that would’ve amused her dark sensibility.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) was Jackson’s final novel, published just three years before her death at age 48. It remains her masterpiece—a work of such controlled malevolence that it makes The Lottery‘s mob violence look crude by comparison.

The novel introduces us to Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood, eighteen years old, who lives in isolated splendor with her older sister Constance and their ailing Uncle Julian in the Blackwood family mansion. The rest of the Blackwood family died six years earlier from arsenic-laced sugar, and while Constance was tried and acquitted for the murders, the townspeople have never forgiven them. Merricat ventures into the village twice a week for supplies, enduring the hatred and whispers of the locals, then returns to the safety of their home where the sisters have created their own private world, governed by Merricat’s elaborate magical thinking and rituals.

This is the entire setup, and Jackson never needs anything more. She’s created a pressure cooker of paranoia, isolation, and the question that hangs over every page: who actually poisoned the Blackwoods?

What makes the novel extraordinary isn’t the mystery—Jackson reveals the truth early on, though so subtly that many readers miss it on first reading—but rather her complete commitment to Merricat’s perspective. We’re trapped inside the consciousness of an unreliable narrator whose magical thinking, obsessive rituals, and fierce protectiveness of her sister might be survival mechanisms or might be symptoms of something far more disturbing. Jackson never tells us which, and that ambiguity is precisely the point.

Merricat buries objects around the property for protection, nails talismans to trees, and believes she can control reality through force of will. She’s convinced that if she performs her rituals correctly, nothing can disturb their sanctuary. The reader understands that her magic doesn’t work—that it’s a psychological defense against overwhelming guilt and trauma—yet Jackson’s prose is so assured that we almost believe in Merricat’s power. Almost.

The novel accelerates when cousin Charles arrives, a smooth-talking interloper who sees opportunity in the Blackwood fortune. His presence disrupts the careful equilibrium the sisters have constructed, and what follows is a masterclass in domestic psychological warfare. Charles wants to modernize the household, to bring the sisters back into contact with the outside world, to take control of the estate. Merricat sees him as an existential threat to everything she’s built.

Jackson understands something profound about family dynamics: the most vicious battles are fought over dinner tables and in sitting rooms, using politeness as a weapon and silence as torture. Charles and Merricat circle each other like apex predators, while Constance tries desperately to maintain peace. Every meal becomes a battlefield. Every conversation contains landmines.

The novel’s climax—I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t read it—transforms the Blackwood mansion from prison into fortress, and Merricat’s delusions into a kind of grim victory. By the end, Jackson has created something genuinely unsettling: a horror story where the monster wins, and we’re not entirely sure we wanted any other outcome.

Understanding Castle requires understanding Shirley Jackson herself, because the novel emerged from her own experience of persecution and isolation.

Jackson was born in 1916 in San Francisco, moved to Rochester, New York as a child, and eventually settled in Vermont with her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, and their four children. On paper, she lived a conventional 1950s life: housewife, mother, dutiful faculty spouse at Bennington College. She wrote domestic humor columns for women’s magazines, published charming essays about raising children, and maintained the appearance of normalcy.

But Jackson was also writing some of the darkest fiction in American literature, and the cognitive dissonance destroyed her.

When “The Lottery” appeared in The New Yorker in 1948, the magazine received more mail than for any story they’d ever published—hundreds of letters, most of them hostile. Readers were genuinely disturbed, even angry, that such a story existed. People cancelled their subscription. The town where Jackson lived began treating her with suspicion. Neighbors whispered. Local merchants were cold. The very people who’d been friendly suddenly weren’t.

Jackson internalized this persecution, developing severe agoraphobia and anxiety that worsened throughout the 1950s. She began having difficulty leaving her house. The woman who wrote about isolation was becoming increasingly isolated herself. She gained weight. She struggled with prescription drug dependence. Her mental health deteriorated while she continued producing immaculate prose about psychological dissolution.

By the time she wrote Castle in the early 1960s, Jackson had lived for over a decade with the experience of being simultaneously celebrated (her work was critically acclaimed and commercially successful) and ostracized (her own community treating her as dangerous, unwholesome, not quite right). Is it any wonder she created Merricat and Constance—sisters who retreat from a hostile world into their own private universe, who are persecuted for a crime only one of them committed, who find freedom only in complete isolation?

The novel is semi-autobiographical, though Jackson would never have admitted it. Like Merricat, she performed private rituals to ward off anxiety. Like Constance, she maintained domestic routines as a form of psychological stability. Like both sisters, she experienced the peculiar horror of being blamed for something she couldn’t control—in Jackson’s case, writing a story that made people uncomfortable about their own capacity for violence.

Jackson died in 1965 at age 48, in her sleep, from heart failure exacerbated by years of medication, obesity, and psychological stress. She never completed another novel after Castle. Some scholars speculate that she’d said everything she needed to say—that having written a novel about complete retreat from the world, she had nowhere else to go artistically. Others suggest her health had simply deteriorated too far.

​In the decades after her death, Jackson’s reputation went through curious transformations. “The Lottery” remained a standard anthology piece, taught in high schools and colleges, but her novels fell out of print. She was remembered, if at all, as the woman who wrote that one disturbing story about a stoning.

Then something shifted. Women writers—particularly those working in horror and psychological suspense—began reclaiming Jackson as a literary ancestor. Joyce Carol Oates wrote extensively about her influence. Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and others cited her as essential. The Library of America published a definitive collection of her work in 2010. Suddenly Jackson was being recognized not as a genre curiosity but as one of American literature’s most sophisticated psychological realists.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle became a cult classic, particularly among readers who understood what Jackson was really writing about: the experience of being gaslit by an entire community, the psychology of women who refuse to perform acceptable femininity, the way families create private mythologies to survive trauma, and the fine line between self-protection and self-destruction.

The novel feels unnervingly contemporary. Merricat’s magical thinking mirrors our own era’s conspiracy theories and alternative facts. The townspeople’s mob mentality—their willingness to believe the worst about the Blackwoods, their pleasure in persecution—anticipates social media pile-ons. The sisters’ retreat into isolation predicts our own pandemic-era reckonings with who we are when the outside world disappears.

But more than topical relevance, Jackson’s novel endures because it does something most horror fails to do: it makes us complicit. We like Merricat. We understand why she did what she did. We root for her, even as we recognize she’s dangerous. Jackson never asks us to approve—only to understand. And in that understanding lies the novel’s deepest horror: recognition that under the right circumstances, with the right pressures, we might make similar choices. - ∞

I am not, by temperament, given to superstition. My work as a researcher of medieval manuscripts has always been governed by reason and evidence. What I’m about to describe occurred three weeks ago, and I’ve told no one, though I have deleted my Internet Archive account and cancelled my library privileges at the university.

It began, as these things often do, with curiosity about a minor detail. I was examining a digitized fifteenth-century Book of Hours when I noticed something peculiar within the ornate marginalia, barely visible among the golden vines and flourishes. Three circular forms in a triangular configuration, with angular marks beneath. At first, I assumed it was merely decoration. But the geometry was subtly wrong. The circles weren’t quite equal, their arrangement followed no pattern I recognized, and the angular marks varied in length and depth in ways that seemed almost deliberate.

What struck me was its placement: always in the lower left margin, half-hidden within the gilded decoration.

Professional interest led me to search for similar markings. The Archive’s collection is vast, and I spent two evenings examining comparable manuscripts. I found it again in a fourteenth-century French psalter dated October 1342, then in a German breviary from October 1487. Each time, the same pattern, woven into the marginal decoration.

By the third night, I had documented seventeen instances across five centuries and four countries—all dated to October. The consistency was remarkable, too consistent for coincidence, yet the manuscripts shared no known provenance. I began to notice something else. The longer I examined the pattern hidden within the gilded vines, the more the three circles seemed arranged like eyes watching—two above, one below—and the angular marks beneath began to resemble scratches or the crude suggestion of a mouth. I told myself this was projection.

It was past midnight when I found the pattern in a ninth-century Carolingian manuscript—far earlier than the others. But here, the copyist had added something new: a single word in faded Latin scratched beneath the marks. Videt.

It sees.

I should’ve stopped then. Instead, I searched for the word. Eleven more manuscripts. Always the same: the pattern in the marginalia, the word, each dated in October. And in the most recent—a sixteenth-century Italian work—there was more text, nearly illegible: Videt qui videt. It sees those who see.

The rational part of my mind suggested a medieval scribal tradition, perhaps a guild marking. But that part of my mind was growing quieter.

On the seventh night, I found what I now believe was meant to be found. A seventeenth-century manuscript from a dissolved monastery in Yorkshire contained the pattern, and the copyist had written beside it: “I have seen it drawn in thirteen books now, and last night I saw it upon my chamber wall. I shall not copy it again.”

The entry was dated October 19th, 1663. The remaining pages of the manuscript were blank.

I checked the date on my computer. October 19th.

I sat staring at the screen. After several minutes, the display dimmed to conserve power, and in that moment before it went black, I saw it clearly—on the wall behind me, reflected in the darkening screen. The three circles. The angular marks beneath.

I have not looked back at my study wall since. I packed my laptop away and have not opened it since. I sleep with the lights on, and I have been seriously considering whether to move. The rational explanation is that I have stared at this pattern so many times that my mind has begun to project it, pareidolia born from obsessive study.

But this morning, I found seventeen emails in my spam folder, each from a different defunct university account, all sent at exactly 3:47 AM. The subject lines were empty. The messages contained only a single attachment—in each case, a photograph of a wall. In each photograph, in the lower left corner, I could see it.

The seventeenth email’s photograph showed a wall I immediately recognized. The faded blue paint. The corner where the baseboard meets. The exact angle.

It was taken from inside my study, facing the wall behind where I sit.

I’ve been writing this at a coffee shop. I don’t know if I’ll go home. I don’t know if it matters whether I go home. The pattern isn’t in the manuscripts. The manuscripts are merely where it’s been recorded by others who, like me, saw.

And having seen, are seen. - ∞

Fifteen years before Lon Chaney terrified audiences in The Phantom of the Opera, twenty-one years before Universal launched their monster movie empire with Boris Karloff’s iconic interpretation, Thomas Edison’s film company quietly made cinema history by adapting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the screen. The 1910 production, directed by J. Searle Dawley, ran approximately sixteen minutes and cost $385 to produce (about $12,000 in today’s money). Edison Studios, already dominant in the emerging film industry through aggressive patent enforcement, saw Shelley’s novel as ideal material for their expanding catalog. The plot had name recognition, gothic atmosphere, and enough spectacle to showcase cinema’s still-novel capabilities.

What makes this version fascinating isn’t just its historical precedence but its philosophical approach. Edison’s catalog description promised the film would be “a liberal adaptation... eliminating all the actually repulsive situations and substituting therefor a mystic atmosphere of awe and dread.” Translation: Edison wanted to avoid alienating viewers who might object to the more gruesome aspects of corpse reanimation. Rather than Shelley’s scientific horror (a creature assembled from corpses, animated through galvanic experiments), Edison’s Frankenstein emerges from a bubbling cauldron in Victor’s laboratory, created through what the film calls “Evil and the Supernatural.” Less surgical theater, more witches’ brew.

The creation scene itself became a masterwork of early special effects. Filmed in reverse, the sequence shows a dummy being consumed by flames in a cauldron, then the footage was played backward to show the creature gradually forming from fire and smoke. For 1910 audiences accustomed to static theatrical presentations, watching a human form materialize from flame must have seemed genuinely supernatural. It’s a trick that holds up remarkably well over a century later. Practical effects often age better than we expect.

Charles Ogle played the Creature with wild hair, gnarled hands, and exaggerated makeup that would influence monster design for decades. His performance emphasized pathos over menace, presenting the Creature as more tragic than terrifying. The film ends not with the Creature’s destruction but with his disappearance. He fades away when confronted by Victor’s love for his fiancée, suggesting that love and goodness can literally dissolve evil. It’s a remarkably optimistic interpretation of Shelley’s much darker tale. The original novel doesn’t exactly end with everyone holding hands and singing.

For decades, the film was considered lost. Edison’s company had gone bankrupt, the negatives disappeared, and film preservation wasn’t yet a priority in an industry that viewed movies as disposable entertainment. Historians knew Frankenstein (1910) existed through production stills and catalog descriptions, but the actual film seemed gone forever.

Then, in the 1970s, a film collector named Alois Dettlaff discovered he owned a print. He’d purchased it years earlier, unaware of its significance, and it had sat in his collection gathering dust. When word spread that Edison’s Frankenstein had been found, it created a sensation among film historians. Here was the origin point, the first monster movie, the first Frankenstein adaptation, a window into how early cinema approached horror.

The print wasn’t perfect. Time and neglect had damaged sections, the image quality was degraded, and portions were missing or illegible. But it existed, could be studied, could be preserved. Modern restorations have cleaned up the image, and the film is now available online through various archives. Anyone can watch cinema’s first monster emerge from that reversed-footage cauldron.

What’s striking about Edison’s Frankenstein is how much of the visual language it established. The gothic laboratory. The transformative moment of creation. The Creature’s initial confusion and rage. The tragic dimension underlying the horror. Every Frankenstein adaptation since has existed in dialogue with this sixteen-minute curio, whether filmmakers knew it or not.

The film also reminds us that early cinema wasn’t primitive or unsophisticated. It was innovative, experimental, pushing against the boundaries of what was possible with the technology available. That creation scene, filmed in reverse and requiring precise timing and effects work, demonstrates creativity that CGI hasn’t necessarily surpassed, just replaced with different techniques.

Edison’s company intended Frankenstein as disposable entertainment, one product among thousands in their catalog. They couldn’t have imagined it would still be studied, analyzed, and celebrated over a century later, or that it would be considered the foundation of an entire genre.

The film survives online in various forms. Some versions have added soundtracks, others remain silent as originally intended. The image quality ranges from barely watchable to reasonably clear, depending on which restoration you find. But even in its roughest form, there’s something mesmerizing about watching that creature take shape in the cauldron, knowing you’re seeing the exact moment when movie monsters were born. - ∞

This spectacular image was recorded over 3,275 years ago. It’s part of a 78-foot scroll inscribed with funerary rites and spells the ancient Egyptians used to navigate the bureaucratic nightmare of the afterlife. Incredibly, it still survives intact today at the British Museum, known as the Papyrus of Ani. And it’s a story worthy of its very own rabbit hole.

The scene depicts a recurring afterlife ritual: the Weighing of the Heart ceremony in the Hall of Judgment. In the center, a golden balance holds two pans—a human heart on the left, a single white feather on the right. The jackal-headed god Anubis steadies the scale while the ibis-headed scribe Thoth stands ready with his pen to record the verdict.

The heart of the deceased is being weighed against the feather of Ma’at to determine his worthiness for the afterlife. The feather represents truth and justice. And there, lurking nearby, is Ammit—part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus—waiting to devour the heart if it proves too heavy with sin.

On the left, a man and woman in whte linen pray. This is Ani, a royal scribe of Thebes, and his wife Tutu, hoping his heart weighs no more than a feather. Above them, forty-two deities sit in judgment.

If you’re contemplating this fascinating ritual, you might be slightly disappointed when compared to the Hollywood version. Pop culture has left us with a terribly skewed image of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Thanks to movies like The Mummy, most of us imagine it as a single, forbidden tome bound in human flesh, capable of raising armies of the undead. The reality is far more intresting.

The Book of the Dead wasn’t a book at all—it was a collection of customizable funerary texts that evolved over 1,500 years. No two copies were identical. Wealthy Egyptians commissioned personalized versions, selecting spells they believed would help them navigate the afterlife’s gauntlet of gates, demons, and divine tribunals. Think of it as your own personal guidebook to the heavenly afterlife, tailored to your specific fears and budget.

The Egyptians didn’t even call it “The Book of the Dead.” Their name: Ru-Nu-Peret-em-Heru—”Spells for Going Forth by Day.”

So who was Ani, the man whose heart we see being weighed? He was no pharaoh. Around 1250 BCE, he was a bureaucrat managing temple revenues as Royal Scribe and Overseer of the Granaries. But he clearly understood the value of a good insurance policy. His 78-foot papyrus scroll—the longest known from the Theban period—represents a massive investment in his eternal future.

Here’s where it gets fascinating: much of it wasn’t originally written for Ani at all. Like a savvy ancient Egyptian shopper, he purchased pre-made sections with blank spaces for names. A scribe then hastily filled in “Ani” throughout, sometimes forgetting proper spacing, occasionally writing his name twice in the same sentence. Only the first 16 feet were custom-written expressly for him. The rest? Off-the-rack eternity from the local scroll shop.

But what were all these spells actually for? The spells themselves reveal what truly terrified the ancient Egyptians about death. These weren’t dark incantations for raising the dead—they were survival manuals addressing deeply practical (and sometimes bizarre) anxieties:

Transformation spells allowed the deceased to become a falcon, lotus flower, or even a god—maintaining agency when your physical body was stuck in a tomb forever. Protection spells prevented your heart from testifying against you during judgment. The Egyptians believed your heart held your conscience and memory and could betray you at the worst possible moment. Anti-indignity spells ensured you wouldn’t be forced to walk upside-down or eat excrement in the underworld. The Egyptians were obsessed with maintaining dignity even in death. Navigation spells provided passwords for underworld gatekeepers. Wrong answer? No passage. And critically, anti-death spells prevented dying a second time. The “second death” meant complete obliteration—your name forgotten, your soul devoured. No resurrection. No second chances.

Which brings us back to the scene above, where Ani faces his ultimate test. The Egyptians believed hearts grew heavier with each sin—lies, theft, murder, cruelty. If his heart outweighs Ma’at’s feather of truth, Ammit devours it and Ani ceases to exist. To pass, he must recite the “Negative Confession” to the 42 divine assessors: “I have not killed. I have not stolen. I have not caused pain. I have not made anyone weep.”

If convincing, he enters the Field of Reeds—an idealized eternal Egypt where he’ll farm, feast, and live forever with Tutu by his side.

It’s easy to see why Hollywood reinvented the Book of the Dead. Screenwriters needed a MacGuffin—that dangerous object to drive plots. A personalized scroll with self-help spells for navigating divine bureaucracy just doesn’t have the same punch as a dangerous tome that resurrects the dead.

But the real Book of the Dead is something quieter and more human: a desperate attempt to cheat oblivion by people who believed that with the right spells, correct passwords, and a heart as light as a feather, death didn’t have to mean the end. - ∞

Ma’at and the Feather of Truth

I recently had the opportunity to view this amazing 3,000-year-old relief of the goddess Ma’at at The Met’s Divine Egypt exhibit (a must see).

Ma’at was the ancient Egyptian concept of truth, justice, cosmic order, and balance—personified as a goddess wearing an ostrich feather in her headdress. She represented everything that kept chaos at bay: honest dealings, fair governance, and harmony with the natural world.

In the afterlife, this principle became literal judgment. The deceased’s heart was weighed against Ma’at’s feather in the Hall of Two Truths. If the heart was unburdened by wrongdoing and balanced against Ma’at’s feather, the deceased could enter the Field of Reeds, an eternal paradise. If it was heavy with sin, the heart was devoured by Ammit, a chimeric demon. This was the “second death”—complete annihilation.

The feather’s symbolic power has endured in modern culture. If you’re a Zeppelin fan, you’ll recognize it as Robert Plant’s personal symbol from Led Zeppelin IV—the untitled 1971 album that gave us “Stairway to Heaven.” Plant chose Ma’at’s feather to represent truth and his role as lyricist. - ∞

I’m referring to, of course, the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection. Let me explain: It’s 1894 and the United States government has just commissioned an army of watercolor artists to paint every species of fruit in America. Not because bureaucrats were suddenly craving fruit art, but because nobody had invented Instagram yet and they needed some way to document thousands of different fruit varieties scattered across the continent before they disappeared forever.

Spoiler alert: most of them disappeared anyway.

Link: The USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection

Enter the USDA: between 1886 and 1942, the Department hired 21 artists to create 7,497 exquisitely detailed paintings documenting fruit and nut varieties—including 3,807 images of apples alone—with names that sound more like Victorian romance novels than agricultural specimens. The collection includes apples with poetic appellations like “Maiden’s Blush,” “Winter Banana,” and “Cox’s Orange Pippin” (because even before TikTok, orchard owners were looking for branding).

But here’s the part that should make you pause mid-bite of your Honeycrisp: once upon a time, North America hosted approximately ~17,000 named apple varieties. Today, there are only ~7,500 “cultivars” (that’s pomological shorthand for cultivated varieties) worldwide, with North America home to roughly ~2,500 of those varieties (depending on who you talk to). Think about it: If you ate a different American variety everyday, it would take you almost seven years to try every one. Unfortunately, while the U.S. actively grows about 100 different apple varieties, just 15 of those account for 90 percent of U.S. apple production. That’s roughly the agricultural equivalent of replacing the entire works of Shakespeare with a handful of juicy haikus and a few tart limericks. So if you wanna expand your apple portfolio, you gotta dive down the rabbit hole...

America’s orchards were once an agricultural library. The period between 1886 and 1916—when most of these watercolors were painted—was when major fruit-producing regions in the United States were just beginning to emerge. This wasn’t just about documenting pretty pictures for government files; it was agricultural CSI work. Photography wasn’t yet in widespread use as a documentary medium, so the government relied on artists to produce technically accurate drawings of cultivars for its publications. Every painting had to capture not just beauty but scientific precision—showing cross-sections, disease damage, and even the exact curve of a stem.

The artists behind this massive undertaking deserve their own rabbit hole entirely. Some 21 different artists contributed to the collection, of whom a third were women—working as a government illustrator was one of the few artists’ jobs open to women at a time when they were just beginning to access formal training in American art schools. The collection’s stars included Deborah Griscom Passmore, Amanda Almira Newton, and Mary Daisy Arnold, who each painted over 1,000 watercolors.

Passmore, in part-icular, deserves recog-nition as America’s unsung botanical Monet. Her watercolors have been called the finest done by the early USDA illustrators and a national treasure. She spent decades painting apples with the kind of obsessive detail usually reserved for Dutch still life masters, except her subjects were destined for government reports rather than museum walls.

So what happened to all those varieties? The same thing that happens to most beautiful, diverse things when industrialization arrives: they got efficiently eliminated in favor of a few “practical” options. It was a veritable apple apocalypse.

By the mid-20th century, approximately 11,000 heirloom varieties of apple no longer existed. Like many heirloom apples, varieties vanished with the rise of popular supermarket varieties like the Red Delicious, Gala, Fuji, etc. It’s sorta like the agricultural equivalent of replacing thousands of local newspapers with the social media formerly known as Twitter.

The reasons were predictably practical: commercial farming required apples that could survive shipping, looked appealing under fluorescent lights, and had shelf lives measured in months rather than weeks. Flavor became negotiable. Genetic diversity became a luxury we apparently couldn’t afford.

In 1800 the notion of the selected apple variety and the grafted tree was still rare in Maine, but farm families wanted winter storage apples for their root cellars. Every observant farmer was a potential apple breeder—and not just in Maine. From Fort Kent to Georgia and out to the Mississippi River, farmers were selecting, naming and passing around apples. Each variety represented decades of careful selection, local adaptation, and accumulated knowledge about what grew well in specific microclimates and soils. When we lost those varieties, we didn’t just lose fruit—we lost centuries of agricultural wisdom.

Fortunately, this story has modern heroes, and they’re exactly as obsessive as you’d hope. Meet the apple detectives: David Benscoter, a former FBI and IRS criminal investigator who founded the Lost Apple Project, a nonprofit organization that searches abandoned farms and orchards in the Pacific Northwest to locate old varieties.

Since 2014, Benscoter’s organization has discovered 29 lost apple varieties, including the Streaked Pippin, the Sary Sinap and the Nero. Then there’s Tom Brown of Clemmons, North Carolina, a retired chemical engineer who has rescued more than 1,000 apple varieties by driving about 30,000-plus miles a year and devoting around three days a week to go apple-hunting.

Their methods combine the rigor of historical research with the persistence of genealogy sleuths. Brown and Benscoter rely on old county fair records, newspaper clippings, and nursery sales ledgers, as well as tips from people, to find likely places to search for old trees. To identify the fruit, Benscoter pairs with apple experts from Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Oregon and Fedco Seeds in Maine, comparing their conclusions to old watercolor paintings or descriptions in books. Now that’s a retirement gig I can get behind.

The USDA watercolor collection serves as their Rosetta Stone. Apple experts will tell you that there are as many as 50 different identifiers that distinguish one variety from the next, from the length of the stem through to the hue of the skin. When these modern pomological detectives find a mysterious apple on an abandoned homestead, they compare it leaf by leaf, stem by stem, to those century-old paintings.

Here’s where the story gets properly rabbit-hole-worthy: the entire USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection is available free online. Right now, you can browse through 7,584 watercolor paintings, lithographs and line drawings, including 3,807 images of apples, each one a small masterpiece documenting agricultural biodiversity that may no longer exist. If you’ve ever been disillusioned by the dearth of stunning kitchen wall art, your prayers have been answered!

The paintings reveal not just what these apples looked like, but how our ancestors thought about food. Every variety name tells a story: the practical (”Winter Keeper,” “Early Harvest”), the aspirational (”Maiden’s Blush,” “Beauty of Bath”), the regional (”Rhode Island Greening,” “Arkansas Black”), and the wonderfully descriptive (”Winter Banana,” with its subtle tropical fragrance, or “Bloody Ploughman,” which sounds menacing but was apparently pretty tasty).

The typical watercolor in the collection depicts the whole fruit (sometimes with its leaves) together with a half-view showing its flesh and seeds; some show the fruit in a diseased state. This wasn’t just documentation—it was agricultural education, showing farmers not only what healthy specimens should look like but also how to identify problems and diseases.

Perhaps the most poignant aspect of browsing these watercolors is contemplating the tastes we’ve lost forever. Old-time orchardists say varieties like the Junaluska apple was once a Southern favorite, but disappeared around 1900. The Colorado Orange was first developed in an orchard in Fremont County, CO, and was a popular fruit throughout its namesake state in the 1800s, winning awards at local fairs and noted for its unusual color and notes of citrus.

“An apple tree you’ve never tasted before, a taste somebody hasn’t tasted in a hundred years, it’s rewarding knowing that we brought these varieties back,” Benscoter said. “Saving an apple from the brink of extinction is a miraculous feeling,” says Brown. “It’s incredibly rewarding—and incredibly addictive!”

The watercolors can’t convey flavor, but they hint at the incredible diversity we’ve surrendered in the name of efficiency. Apples that were specifically bred for cider-making, others perfect for drying, some that could survive in root cellars until spring, others best eaten fresh from the tree on a particular week in October.

You might reasonably ask: in an era of climate change, global supply chain disruptions, and increasing concerns about agricultural resilience, why should we care about some quaint heirloom apples?

The answer lies in what geneticists call the “founder effect.” “We get excited when they make discoveries,” said USDA apple curator Ben Gutierrez, who has collaborated with Benscoter. “Because it’s a push for Apple conservationism.” Gutierrez said the rediscoveries are a step toward increased genetic diversity of apples. Each recovered variety represents genetic material that might contain solutions to future agricultural challenges—disease resistance, climate adaptability, improved nutrition, or simply better flavor.

Amit Dhingra, who used to run a genomics lab at Washington State Univeristy, recognized the potential of these tough, field-tested trees for traits which may be useful in breeding apple varieties able to withstand harsher climate conditions. Those old varieties survived decades or centuries with minimal human intervention, developing natural resistance to local pests and diseases, adaptations to specific climatic conditions, and resilience that modern commercial varieties often lack.

The USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection offers more than agricultural history—it’s a portal into a time when America’s relationship with food was fundamentally different. When every farm was a research station, every orchard keeper was an experimenter, and every apple variety represented someone’s best attempt to create something both beautiful and useful. Browsing through these paintings, you can almost taste the optimism of an era when people believed that with enough observation, patience, and care, they could create better versions of everything—including fruit that would nourish both body and soul.

The next time you grab a perfectly uniform apple from the grocery store, remember that it’s the survivor of one of the greatest extinctions in agricultural history. And somewhere in those digitized watercolors, painted with loving precision by forgotten government artists, lie the ghosts of thousands of varieties that once made America’s orchards as diverse as its people.

The rabbit hole beckons, dear readers. Just mind the gap between what we had and what we’ve kept, and don’t forget to appreciate the complex flavors we’ve inherited from the varieties that survived. - ∞

Ever since Robin Williams whispered them in his Oscar-nominated performance in Dead Poets Society, we’re all too familiar with the Latin phrase “carpe diem!“ But who among us can recall who said it first? Yes, you’re right! It was Horace, the famous Roman poet, speaking to his friend Leuconoe in the Odes:

​“Dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.”

​“While we talk, envious time will have fled: pluck the day, trusting as little as possible to the future.”

​In full context, Horace is saying “Don’t try to predict the future, Leuconoe; the gods don’t like it. Enjoy the day, pour the wine and don’t look too far ahead.” Advice that either seems extremely practical or catastrophically ignorant these days.

Of course, he wasn’t just telling Leuconoe to “seize the day.” Horace was thinking like a farmer. It turns out carpere—the Latin verb at the heart of his famous phrase—literally means “to pluck, to gather, to harvest.” So when we translate “carpe diem” as “seize the day,” we’re missing something essential: Horace was telling us to harvest the day, to pick it like ripe fruit before it rots on the vine. And here’s where it gets deliciously weird: both “carpe diem” and our English word “harvest” spring from the exact same ancient root!!

Welcome to the wonderfully absurd world of Proto-Indo-European linguistics, where scholars gesticulate wildly about a theoretical language spoken 6,000 years ago by people who left absolutely zero written records. PIE (as the cool kids call it) is simultaneously the most rigorous academic discipline and the most spectacular “trust me bro” exercise in intellectual archeology. Linguists basically draw red strings between words on a conspiracy theory board and announce, “Somewhere between the Black Sea and Central Asia, hypothetical people definitely said *kerp- and that’s why English ‘harvest,’ Latin ‘carpet,’ Greek ‘fruit,’ and Sanskrit words for ‘sword’ are all cousins!”

And you know what? They’re right. Probably. The evidence is actually quite compelling, even if the whole enterprise feels like linguistic fortune-telling.

So let’s talk about *kerp-*, this ancient root meaning “to gather, pluck, harvest.” It spawned an absolutely unhinged family tree of words. Latin got carpere (to pluck, to seize), which gave us not only “carpe diem” but also “carpet” (originally woven from plucked fibers), “excerpt” (literally “plucked out”), and even “scarce” (from the idea of something being “plucked away”). Greek got karpos meaning “fruit”—literally “that which is plucked.”

The Germanic languages received their own branch of the family, and that’s where our story really gets interesting. Through Proto-Germanic harbistaz (which underwent the typical sound shift from PIE *k to Germanic *h—linguists call this Grimm’s Law, because of course they do), the root *kerp- eventually became Old English hærfest. And here’s where things get deliciously weird.

Old English hærfest originally meant just one thing: autumn. The season. The third one. Period. Not the activity of gathering crops—just the time of year when leaves turn colors and the air gets crisp. But here’s where language does something absolutely feral: the season became so inextricably linked with gathering food that the word hærfest essentially devoured its own meaning and became the action itself. By the mid-13th century, “harvest” primarily meant the activity of reaping and gathering crops, and only secondarily referred to the season.

This created a rather awkward vocabulary gap. English speakers suddenly found themselves without a proper name for the third season. So what did they do? They borrowed “autumn” from French (who got it from Latin autumnus, a word of mysteriously unknown origin—possibly Etruscan, because why not make things more complicated?). And when that felt too fancy, English simply repurposed “fall” as in “the fall of the leaf.” Problem solved! Sort of.

Meanwhile, hærfest had transformed completely. The season became the action became the product. By the 1300s, you could harvest crops, have a good harvest, and celebrate at harvest time—but if you wanted to talk about the actual season, you’d better say “autumn” or “fall” because “harvest” was too busy being a verb or a noun and forgot that it was once just a season.

The linguistic family reunion gets even weirder when you consider harvest’s Germanic siblings. There’s German Herbst(autumn), Dutch herfst (autumn), and Old Norse haust(harvest)—all descendants of that same Germanic harbistaz. They’re linguistic siblings who all decided to handle the season-versus-verb confusion in slightly different ways, like brothers who inherit the same house and each claim a different room.

And then there are the distant cousins: Lithuanian kirpti (to cut), Middle Irish cerbaim (cut), Sanskrit krpana (sword). They all trace back to that same Indo-European impulse—the fundamental human action of cutting, plucking, gathering. Whether you’re harvesting grain in medieval England, plucking flowers in ancient Rome, or cutting cloth in Greece, you’re performing variations on an ancient theme.

So the next time you see a “carpe diem” motivational poster at HomeGoods, remember: you’re looking at harvest’s fancy Latin cousin. One became famous as a philosophical catchphrase plastered on coffee mugs; the other became sidelined in agriculture and pumpkin picking. But remember, they both came from the same place—a hypothetical root word spoken by theoretical people in a reconstructed language that may or may not have existed. Which is either the most beautiful thing about language or the most ridiculous, depending on how much you drink at Thanksgiving.

Either way, when you gather around the table this fall—sorry, this autumn—sorry, this harvest season—remember that you’re participating in a 6,000-year-old linguistic tradition of plucking, gathering, and making the most of what’s ripe right now.

Carpe hærfest, friends. Or hærfest diem? Anyway, harvest the day! - ∞

Regarding Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 BCE)

Horace is widely considered one of Rome’s greatest lyric poets. His works continue to be studied and enjoyed for their witty observations on life, timeless wisdom, and masterful use of language. He is particularly known for his Odes, a collection of short poems that explore themes of love, friendship, philosophy, and politics, but he was also known to have a spry sense of humor.

While scholars have long studied Horace’s four books of Odes, Down the Rabbit Hole has recently uncovered several previously unknown works that reveal a side of the poet rarely discussed in classical circles. While Horace gave us “carpe diem“ and timeless wisdom about mortality, these newly discovered works reveal a fixation with Roman daily life:

Ode I.38b - “De Toga Adhuc Umida” (”On the Toga Still Damp”) A meditation on the philosophical implications of doing laundry the night before an important Senate meeting.

​Ode II.14f - “De Longa Linea Ad Vomitarium” (”Regarding the Long Line at the Vomitarium”) In which Horace questions Roman engineering priorities during an ambitious feast.

​Ode III.27r - “De Illo Qui Ventrem Dimisit Durante Tragoedia Sophoclis” (”On He Who Released Wind During the Sophocles Tragedy”) A cautionary tale about lentils and amphitheater acoustics.

​Ode I.17w - “De Frustatione Togae Longae Cum Necessitates Corporis Urgeant” (Regarding the Toga When Nature Urgently Calls”) Six yards of wool, zero practical design considerations, one very urgent situation.

​Ode IV.8k - “De Portia, Femina Superba Capillorum Brevium Quae Semper Rogat ‘Possum Loqui Cum Praeposito?’”(”Regarding Portia, the Entitled Woman of Short Hair Who Always Must “Speak to the Manager?’”) Before “Karen” there was Portia, terrorizing Forum merchants since 12 BCE.

I still remember the exact moment reality fractured for me: On a rainy mid-winter Wednesday night, age 21, Camp Red Cloud, Uijeongbu, South Korea. I was stationed at (what was then) a small, isolated joint military base an hour north of Seoul, and halfway through the base-library copy of Philip K. Dick’s 1969 masterpiece UBIK. The librarian, Mr. Kim, looked as if he’d been quietly running things there since the end of the Korean War. Over the course of that year, Mr. Kim had reliably introduced me to the great classics of science-fiction: Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Asimov’s Foundation Series, and of course Frank Herbert’s Dune. So when he held out a dog-eared copy of Dick’s UBIK, I snatched it up and ran back to my luxurious 10’x14’ Officer Quarters and started devouring it. By morning, the world I’d inhabited pseudo-confidently for over two decades suddenly seemed about as substantial as tissue paper held to light. What if my alarm clock wasn’t actually ringing? What if reality itself was just another carefully constructed illusion? This wasn’t just a reading experience—it was a sci-fi Da Vinci Moment: my disparate threads of consciousness suddenly wove together to reveal that reality might not be exactly what I’d been sold.

If you haven’t experienced UBIK, it’s about a world where reality itself is unstable—constantly decaying and shifting backward in time. The story follows Joe Chip, a debt-ridden technician working for an anti-telepathic security firm, who discovers that what he perceives as reality might be a shared hallucination experienced in the half-life state after death. As his world begins deteriorating around him—modern technology reverts to primitive forms, food spoils instantly, and mysterious messages keep appearing—Joe and his colleagues desperately search for UBIK, a mysterious substance that might stabilize their disintegrating reality. It’s a perfect introduction to Dick’s obsessions: the fragility of consciousness, corporate control, the nature of reality, and the terror of entropy—all wrapped in a darkly comedic package that somehow remains both accessible and profoundly unsettling. This isn’t lightweight space opera stuff—it’s literature of the highest order. Time magazine included UBIK among their “All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels” of the modern era. Literary critics increasingly acknowledge Dick alongside Kafka and Borges as masters of the surreal

and philosophical.

Six Degrees of PKD: From Pulp Fiction to Philosophical Prophet

For the uninitiated, PKD might seem like just another science fiction writer, but for those who dismiss science fiction as mere escapism about spaceships and aliens, he offers something uniquely different: a looking glass reflecting our deepest anxieties about what it means to be human in an increasingly technological world. His stories don’t just predict our future; they dissect our present with surgical precision.

PKD’s cultural footprint stretches far beyond the genre’s boundaries. Hollywood has mined his bibliography repeatedly, transforming his mind-bending stories into blockbusters like Total Recall (We Can Remember It for You Wholesale), Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau, A Scanner Darkly, Paycheck, Next (from The Golden Man), and the granddaddy of cinematic sci-fi Blade Runner (from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). His influence continues in TV with The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, and Minority Report series adaptations. Even The Truman Show, while not a direct adaptation, bears his philosophical fingerprints.

The most striking aspect of falling down the PKD rabbit hole isn’t just the mind-bending narratives, but how his paranoid premonitions keep materializing in our daily newsfeeds. Each morning brings another headline—deepfakes manipulating reality, algorithms curating our perception, corporations harvesting our data—that reads like a plot point from one of his fever-dream novels. I’ve spent countless late nights wondering: was Dick actually receiving transmissions from the future, or was he simply more clear-eyed about technology’s trajectory than the rest of us?

Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat this: reading Philip K. Dick will ruin you. Not in the way bad sushi ruins your evening, but in the way seeing the Grand Canyon ruins every postcard you’ve ever received. Once you’ve experienced his fractal-like storytelling, where realities nest within realities like Russian dolls, conventional fiction feels like training wheels on a rocket ship.

Dick offers readers the ultimate Da Vinci Moment—that instant when seemingly disconnected observations about technology, consciousness, and reality suddenly crystallize into a single, terrifying insight: what if everything we experience is just an elaborate simulation designed to keep us complacent while something else entirely happens behind the scenes?

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” Dick famously wrote—a deceptively simple observation that reveals the philosophical depths beneath his pulp fiction exterior. These weren’t just clever thought experiments. Dick lived his paradoxes, experiencing what he described as mystical revelations in 1974 that informed his later work.

Behind the philosophical fireworks was a man wrestling with profound personal demons. Dick struggled with mental health issues, reported paranoia about government surveillance (sometimes justified), moved through five marriages, and battled substance dependency while producing novels to pay the bills. He believed an intelligence he called VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) beamed pink light into his consciousness, revealing we’re all living in a “Black Iron Prison” of false reality. Hallucination? Religious experience? Creative wellspring? His final novels explored these events in a semi-autobiographical trilogy that blurs the line between memoir and science fiction. These very struggles gave him unique insight, allowing him to see through society’s comfortable illusions with unparalleled clarity.

While Dick was furiously typing these reality-shattering narratives to pay the rent, mainstream America was watching “Leave It to Beaver” and embracing suburban conformity. The same culture that celebrated picket fences and technological optimism also produced its perfect counterpoint: a meth-fueled prophet penning warnings about where all this “progress” might actually be leading us.

In our age of deepfakes, data harvesting, and reality manipulation through algorithms, Dick isn’t just relevant—he’s essential. He diagnosed our current philosophical condition decades before the symptoms became undeniable.

New to Dick’s work? Your entry point depends on your literary preferences. Literary fiction readers might start with The Man in the High Castle, his alternate history masterpiece. Philosophy lovers should dive into the laugh out loud, mind-bending UBIK or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Film enthusiasts might begin with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for Blade Runner). Short story aficionados should pick up Minority Report and Other Stories. Whatever your starting point, prepare to have your perception permanently altered.

So set down that algorithm-recommended beach read, step away from your digital tracking devices (they’re listening anyway), and make a pilgrimage to your local used bookstore. Find that yellowing paperback with the psychedelic cover and questionable font choices. The uncomfortable truth awaits between those dog-eared pages: Philip K. Dick wasn’t writing science fiction—he was sending us urgent dispatches about our present from a past that understood our future better than we understand our now. The rabbit hole beckons, and curiouser and curiouser things are about to unfold… Just don’t forget your orange marmalade... or your tinfoil hat. ∞

“Please state your name and heritage claim for the record,” Noor said, her haptic gloves translating the woman’s vocal patterns into shimmering data streams.

“Indira Patel. Last native speaker of Kathiawari-Coastal dialect, Kutch Peninsula, Gujarat State.” The woman’s standard Gujarati was crisp, but underneath it Noor could hear the ghost of something older, its tonal patterns bleeding through like watermarks.

Noor activated the deep-scan protocols. “I’ll need you to speak continuously in your coastal dialect for at least ten minutes. The system will map your phonemic variations and local syntax for authentication.”

Indira began to speak, and immediately Noor knew something was wrong.

The vocal analysis painted patterns in the air—frequency distributions, tonal ranges, dialectical markers. But where she expected the smooth variations that distinguished coastal speech from inland Gujarati, she found jagged inconsistencies. Pronunciations that shifted mid-word. Local grammar that contradicted itself. A dialect that seemed to be eating itself as it was spoken.

“Stop,” Noor said, raising her hand. “The patterns are corrupted. Are you experiencing fatigue? Memory confusion?”

Indira’s eyes sharpened. “The recordings are perfect.”

“No, they’re not. You’re mispronouncing your own words. Mixing coastal forms with inland structures. Either you’re not actually from the coast, or—”

“Or I’m protecting my dialect from becoming your property.”

The words hung in the air between them. Noor had seen families fabricate regional claims, had witnessed forged documents attempting to establish dialectical heritage. But this was different. This was deliberate cultural vandalism performed by its own guardian.

“You understand what you’re doing?” Noor asked quietly. “Without authentication, your dialect receives no legal protection. No preservation funding. When you die, it dies with you.”

“When I die, it dies free.” Indira leaned forward. “Do you know what happened to Konkani-Coastal after authentication? Global Education Holdings licensed the fishing terminology for their ‘Authentic Maritime Experience’ packages. Seventy-year-old fisherman charged two hundred credits to teach his own son the tide-words his father taught him.”

Noor’s hands trembled slightly as she processed this information. She had heard rumors, of course. Heritage corporations monetizing authenticated dialects, charging communities for access to their own regional speech patterns. But seeing the human cost made it real in a way that statistics never could.

“The system isn’t perfect,” Noor said, “but without documentation—”

“Without documentation, my words belong to my people.” Indira resumed speaking in her corrupted coastal dialect, each deliberately mangled phrase an act of resistance. “My grandson learns our tide-prayers from me, not from a subscription service. My granddaughter carries our storm-songs in her heart, not in a corporate database.”

Noor watched the dialectical patterns fracture in real-time, generations of coastal evolution being deliberately garbled by the only person capable of preserving them accurately. Her training screamed that this was wrong—that preservation, even imperfect, was better than extinction.

But she thought of her own grandmother, who had died speaking island phrases that now lived only in Noor’s memory, too fragmented for authentication, too precious for commodification.

“If I report this as a failed authentication,” Noor said slowly, “the dialect receives no official recognition. No protection.”

“And no price tag.”

Noor looked at her equipment, at the fractured linguistic patterns still painting themselves in light above her desk. She thought of all the families she had helped authenticate their heritage claims, the relief in their eyes when their regional identity received official recognition. She thought of the corporate commissions, the licensing fees, the endless forms that transformed living speech into managed assets.

She reached for her authentication seal, then stopped.

“Tell me about your granddaughter,” she said instead. “In your real dialect. The one you haven’t broken yet.”

Indira smiled and began to speak, her voice carrying the full weight of coastal words that would die unchained, unowned, and therefore, perhaps, truly alive.

Noor let the recording run, knowing she would never submit it for authentication. Some voices, she realized, were too precious to be owned—even by the systems designed to save them. - ∞

Now flip that image: What if we are the ants?

This is the premise of Roadside Picnic, the 1972 Soviet science fiction masterpiece by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Aliens have visited Earth—not for conquest or communication, but apparently for reasons so mundane they didn’t even notice us. They departed, leaving behind mysterious zones filled with artifacts that operate according to principles so foreign that our entire framework for understanding reality proves inadequate.

The title captures everything: we are insects trying to make sense of discarded beer cans and cigarette butts, items whose purpose and origin lie forever beyond our comprehension.

This isn’t the science fiction of your youth—no laser battles, no heroic space captains, no technology that ultimately makes comfortable sense. The Strugatsky brothers asked a more disturbing question than most writers dare: What if contact with aliens revealed not wonder, but our complete irrelevance?

To understand this book, we need to grasp something about the world that created it. The Strugatsky brothers wrote during the long, slow decay of the Soviet Union, where daily life meant navigating systems whose logic remained forever opaque to those caught within them. Information was controlled, truth was negotiable, and powerful forces shaped individual lives according to dictates ordinary people could neither understand nor influence.

This wasn’t abstract political theory—it was breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The brothers had lived through Stalin’s purges, World War II, and decades of Soviet propaganda. They knew what it felt like to be ground up by incomprehensible machinery.

That experience saturates every page of Roadside Picnic. The novel’s Zone—an area contaminated by alien visitation where physics goes haywire—serves as the perfect metaphor for life under any system that operates beyond human understanding. Yet the brothers’ genius lies in refusing simple allegory. The Zone isn’t just about Soviet bureaucracy; it’s about our relationship with the fundamentally incomprehensible.

​The Stalker’s Dilemma

The protagonist, Red Schuhart, is a “stalker”—someone who illegally enters the Zone to retrieve alien artifacts for the black market. These objects mock human understanding: a “full empty” that’s simultaneously full and empty, gravitational anomalies that crush anything in their path, wish-granting devices that twist desires into nightmares.

Red inhabits a world of bureaucratic corruption and black-market survival, where official scientific expeditions lumber forward with crushing inefficiency while stalkers risk everything just to get by. But he’s no romantic outlaw—he’s a decent man slowly being destroyed by forces he can neither comprehend nor escape.

The aliens didn’t leave their artifacts as tests or gifts. They’re cosmic litter, as meaningless to their creators as a discarded soda can is to us. This is perhaps the novel’s cruelest insight: the universe contains intelligences so vast that our entire civilization registers as background noise.

​Questions Without Answers

Roadside Picnic distinguishes itself not through technology or politics, but through its philosophical courage. The Strugatsky brothers created a work that explains nothing, resolves nothing, and offers no heroes who triumph through understanding. Instead, we watch Red’s daughter slowly die from Zone contamination while he returns again and again to the place destroying his family—because it’s the only way he knows to survive.

The novel’s final scene—Red’s desperate plea to an alien artifact that might grant wishes—remains one of literature’s most powerful moments precisely because it offers no resolution. We’re left with questions that mirror our own relationship to existence: How do we find meaning in a universe that might not notice our suffering? How do we maintain hope when the forces shaping our lives operate beyond our understanding?

These questions feel less like science fiction today and more like daily experience. We live surrounded by algorithms we can’t comprehend, economic systems beyond individual control, and global forces that dwarf human agency. The Strugatsky brothers’ vision of humanity confronting the truly alien has become a field guide to modern existence.

For readers who prefer their mysteries solved and their universes ultimately comprehensible, Roadside Picnic will prove deeply unsettling. But for those willing to embrace literature that asks profound questions without pretending to answer them, the brothers offer something rarer: a masterpiece that grows more relevant with each passing year.

The Zone awaits. It won’t make sense. But maybe that’s where we find the courage to persevere. - ∞

If you’re an astronomy/physics geek like me, you’ll recognize the name K2-18b. It’s a planet orbiting a red dwarf star 124 light-years away (K2 for the Kepler space telescope’s second mission, 18b indicating it’s the second planet discovered around the 18th star catalogued). Scientists may have detected a compound in its atmosphere that just might be dimethyl sulfide—a molecule that, on Earth, is only produced by living organisms. The researchers are being appropriately cautious, using phrases like “possible biosignature” and “best explanation for observations,” because nobody wants to be the person who accidentally declares we’ve found alien life based on what turns out to be cosmic flatulence. But here’s what struck me about this discovery: it’s not just that we might have found life elsewhere—it’s the sheer audacity of finding it at all in a universe so preposterously vast that the numbers make your brain hurt.

But what does “vast” really mean? How many galaxies are there? How many stars in the universe? And for that matter, how many planets (or more appropriately, how many potentially habitable planets)? Ready to crunch some numbers? Like all high school math problems, this math will either fill you with wonder or send you spiraling into an existential crisis (hopefully the former).

Let’s start with what we can actually see. The Hubble Space Telescope’s Deep Field observations revealed something that should have been front-page news everywhere: in a pinpoint patch of sky no bigger than a grain of sand held at arm’s length, astronomers counted over 3,000 galaxies. Scale that up to the entire observable universe, and estimates range upwards to around 2 trillion galaxies—that’s “illion“ with a “tri“ in front of it.

But here’s where it gets deliciously rabbit-hole-ish: that number keeps changing as we get better at looking. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, now traveling far beyond Pluto, has given us a cleaner view of deep space—beyond the light pollution and cosmic dust that interferes with Earth-based observations. Its camera revealed we might not need nearly as many galaxies as we thought to account for all the light we see. Suddenly estimates dropped toward a much lower range, around 100 billion. Meanwhile, other astronomers suspect we’re missing countless tiny, ultra-faint dwarf galaxies—the cosmic equivalent of discovering your neighborhood has hundreds more houses than you thought, just really small ones tucked behind the big ones. When you account for these invisible populations, estimates range as high as 6 to 20 trillion galaxies.

Current best guess? Somewhere between 100 billion and 2 trillion galaxies in our observable universe, each containing billions or hundreds of billions of stars. So then how many stars in the universe? And at this point, does speculating about such a vast number even matter? The answer is a resounding YES! and here’s why.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, the prevailing wisdom suggested habitable planets were rare cosmic accidents. Today, the Kepler Space Telescope and other planet-hunting missions have revolutionized that thinking entirely. Nearly every star we examine closely turns out to host planets—often multiple worlds orbiting in complex gravitational dances.

Current estimates suggest our own humble Milky Way, a perfectly ordinary spiral galaxy, hosts an estimated 100-400 billion stars, which may mean anywhere between 100-400 billion planets. That’s roughly one planet per star, give or take a few hundred billion. To put this in perspective: astronomers have actually discovered 5,885 planets beyond our solar system so far. That’s like trying to estimate world population by meeting five people, then extrapolating to billions—yet the math holds up remarkably well. Many of these worlds orbit within their star’s “habitable zone”—that Goldilocks region where liquid water could exist. Conservative estimates put potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way at around 11 billion.

Now scale that up. If each of those 100 billion to 2 trillion galaxies contains a similar proportion of habitable worlds orbiting a similar quantity of stars—using our conservative estimate of 11 billion per galaxy—we’re looking at somewhere between 1 to 22 sextillion habitable worlds in the observable universe. That’s a 22 followed by 21 zeros, numbers so large they defeat comprehension. Take a moment to meditate on it: 22,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Here’s where it gets interesting: if life arose just once in every trillion habitable worlds (mind-bogglingly rare odds), we’d still have 1 to 22 million living planets scattered across the cosmos. If the odds are merely one in a billion—still spectacularly unlikely low odds—we’re talking about 1 to 22 billion planets teeming with life.

This isn’t wishful thinking anymore; it’s statistical inevitability. The universe isn’t just large—it’s so fantastically, preposterously enormous that even the most improbable events become certainties when multiplied across such scales. The old notion of Earth as a unique miracle has given way to something far more thrilling: we’re living in a universe where planets are the cosmic norm, not the exception, and life is, well, abundant.

So when scientists peer at K2-18b and detect potential signs of life, they’re not discovering an impossible anomaly—they’re glimpsing what might be the universe’s most common story, playing out on scales that dwarf our wildest imagination. We’re not alone. We never were. We’re just learning how to listen to the vast cosmic conversation that’s been happening all around us, across trillions of worlds, for billions of years. There’s a name for this dawning awareness of humanity’s diminutive status, this “delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe.” My friends call it CIT: Cosmic Insignificance Therapy.

Okay, now remember that number you guessed between 1 and 100 sextillion? Hold onto it a little tighter now. In a cosmos this vast, that random number you plucked from thin air might be the exact count of worlds where other curious minds are tumbling down their own rabbit holes, marveling at their own impossible universe.

The math doesn’t lie. The universe is alive. - ∞

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.