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Tech Giant Drops New AI Feature and 4,200 Employees in Same Email

Tara Sparks
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Tech Giant Drops New AI Feature and 4,200 Employees in Same Email

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — A major tech firm released its Q1 product update Tuesday morning in a single 800-word memo that introduced an exciting new generative-search feature on page one and informed 4,200 employees they no longer worked there on page two, a structural choice the company described as “reading like a journey.”

The memo, signed by CEO Brant Coelho and delivered at 6:14 a.m. Pacific, opened with the phrase “Big news on the AI front!” and closed with the phrase “and to those moving on, thank you for being part of the story,” a sentence three former vice presidents reportedly had to read twice before realizing it was about them.

Investors responded enthusiastically, with shares climbing 6.3% in pre-market trading on news that the company had simultaneously launched a product nobody asked for and eliminated the team that built it. “This is exactly the kind of disciplined execution we want to see,” said Marina Pell, who covers the sector for a research desk inside a real-feeling place. “They shipped, they cut, they used the word ‘realignment’ twice. Textbook.”

The new feature, called Orbit, allows users to ask their browser questions and receive answers that are, according to the launch blog, “directionally accurate most of the time.” A demo video showed Orbit confidently telling a user that the capital of Australia is Sydney, which the company has since clarified was “a creative choice in the demo environment.”

Affected employees learned of their status through a calendar invite titled “Quick Sync — Career Conversation,” which a former staff engineer described as “the most aggressive use of the word ‘quick’ I have ever witnessed.” Several were reportedly mid-bite into the company’s complimentary breakfast burrito when their laptops locked.

The layoffs hit the AI ethics group, the trust and safety group, the team that handles outages, and, in a move analysts called “thematically consistent,” the entire group responsible for the previous quarterly product update. Spared were the prompt-engineering pod and a man named Doug whose job description has remained unspecified since 2019.

Coelho addressed the cuts in an all-hands meeting later that morning, telling remaining staff that the company was “sharpening the spear” and “removing what doesn’t serve the mission,” before pivoting to a fifteen-minute presentation about a new office snack policy. He took two questions, both about the snacks.

One former product manager, reached while sitting in her car in the South of Market parking garage with a small cardboard box on the passenger seat, said she had spent fourteen months building the very feature being celebrated in the memo. “They thanked me by name in the launch post,” she said. “And then unthanked me by name in the appendix. I think that’s a first.”

The company has scheduled a follow-up internal town hall for Friday titled “Where We Go From Here,” which approximately 4,200 invitees will not be attending. A spokesperson confirmed the meeting will conclude with an optional Q&A and a slide thanking employees for their resilience during what she described, without elaboration, as “a really exciting moment.”

New Tariffs Kick In Monday, Levied on Countries to Be Named Later

Nash Grayson
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New Tariffs Kick In Monday, Levied on Countries to Be Named Later

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A fresh round of tariff implementation deadlines passed at 12:01 a.m. Monday, formally activating duties on a list of trading partners that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative confirmed it would identify “shortly, or in due course, whichever sounds more legal.”

The new tariffs, announced by President Trump in a Truth Social post that began with the word “FOLKS” and ended with three flag emojis, are believed to target somewhere between four countries and all of them. A White House aide clarified Sunday night that the figure depends on “whether Canada counts, which it does on weekdays.”

Importers spent the weekend attempting to comply with rates that had been revised four times since Thursday, most recently in a handwritten amendment a senior advisor described as “pretty legible if you knew the President in the eighties.” Customs agents at the Port of Long Beach were reportedly given a binder, a highlighter, and the phone number of someone named Greg.

“The President wants tariffs on the bad ones and not the good ones,” said a Commerce Department spokesperson who asked to be identified only as a Commerce Department spokesperson. “We have been asked to determine which is which by close of business, and also what ‘bad’ means in this context, and also whether South Korea is in Asia.”

Markets, which fainted on cue earlier this quarter, declined to faint a second time on the grounds that it felt repetitive. The S&P opened flat after analysts concluded the tariffs were either devastating or imaginary and that there was no productive way to price the difference before lunch.

A freight broker reached on his lunch break at a truck stop outside Laredo said he had received six conflicting tariff schedules since Friday, one of which was a screenshot of a different schedule. “They keep emailing me PDFs,” he said. “I don’t open PDFs from the government anymore. Nothing good has ever been in one.”

The administration defended the rollout’s ambiguity as a feature, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent telling reporters that “strategic vagueness is the cornerstone of the President’s economic doctrine, along with sometimes saying the opposite of it.” Asked which countries were affected, Bessent gestured at a globe and said, “Use your imagination.”

Foreign capitals responded with the measured patience of trading partners who have been through this six times already. The European Commission issued a statement noting it would “await further clarification, and also a nap.” Mexico’s finance ministry said it had drafted retaliatory tariffs against “whatever, sure, fine.”

On Capitol Hill, members of the Ways and Means Committee said they had not been briefed on the new tariffs because the White House had instead briefed a podcaster. Ranking Democrats demanded hearings; ranking Republicans demanded the podcaster’s contact information.

By Monday afternoon, the USTR had released a partial list of affected goods that included steel, aluminum, semiconductors, lumber, washing machines, olives, and a category labeled “miscellaneous European.” A footnote indicated the list was “subject to revision based on how the President felt about Europe in the morning.”

The administration is expected to announce additional tariffs Tuesday, Wednesday, and at some point during the State of the Union, after which a senior official confirmed there would be “a brief tariff intermission so everyone could catch their breath and possibly file for bankruptcy.”

Final Four Set. Half These Kids Are Already in the Portal.

Duke Holloway
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Final Four Set. Half These Kids Are Already in the Portal.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at 11:40 Saturday night, halfway through a beer he should not have been drinking, to inform me that the Final Four is officially set and that he has no idea who any of these people are. I told him that makes two of us, and one of us is paid to know.

The transfer portal opened Monday. It is currently Sunday. By my rough count, four kids who played in the Elite Eight this weekend have already entered their names into the portal, meaning they will not be on the team they just helped win for the team they are about to play for. One of them tweeted his portal entry before his coach finished the postgame handshake. I had to read that sentence twice and I wrote it.

Coach DiMaggio, my old high school coach, used to make us run a mile if anybody quit the team mid-season. He called quitting “a contagious disease” and he kept a list of names in a leather notebook of every kid who’d ever walked out on him, going back to 1962. The notebook had seven names in it when he retired. Today’s notebook would be a Costco binder and it would still need a second volume by April.

I’m not blaming the kids. The kids figured out the system. The kids are the only honest people left in this thing. The dishonest ones are the adults running collectives named after constellations, paying nineteen-year-olds enough money to buy a duplex in Tempe, and then acting wounded when the nineteen-year-old goes to play for a different duplex in Lawrence next October.

The broadcast didn’t help. CBS spent the last four minutes of the regional final cutting to a sideline reporter asking a 6’10” sophomore what this moment “meant for his journey.” His journey, as far as I can tell, is to a school in a different time zone by Wednesday. He answered the question with such genuine sincerity that I felt bad for him, then for the reporter, then for myself, in that order.

Petey Corrigan, who umpired Little League with me for fifteen years and now coaches eighth-grade AAU somewhere outside Akron, told me last week that two of his thirteen-year-olds have agents. Not agents like a guy at Wasserman. Agents like a guy named Brent who owns a vape store and has a LinkedIn. Petey said the parents bring up the agents the way parents used to bring up the orthodontist. He said this on speakerphone while his wife laughed in the background.

Here’s the part I’m not supposed to admit. The basketball this weekend was tremendous. The kid from Houston who hit the step-back with 1.2 left played the kind of cold-blooded fourth quarter that Coach DiMaggio would have grudgingly nodded at while pretending to look at his clipboard. There was a freshman point guard out west who passed like he could see the future. Whatever else has rotted in this sport, the actual game on the floor for two hours on a Saturday in March is still the best thing American television does. I just wish the people running it would stop apologizing for that by trying to sell me a parlay every four minutes.

The Final Four is in Indianapolis next weekend. Ray is coming over. Denise is bringing chili. She says the recipe is from a podcast hosted by two former Marines, which sounds about right for chili in 2026. I’m going to sit on my couch and root for whichever kid looks the most like he wants to be there, and I’m going to try, for two hours, not to check the portal.

The Tornadoes Came Through Overnight. The Statement Was Workshopped.

Margaret Thorne
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The Tornadoes Came Through Overnight. The Statement Was Workshopped.

Have we reached the point where a tornado outbreak across two states is treated by official Washington as a scheduling matter? I ask because I spent Friday evening in Georgetown watching a kitchen television run a silent chyron of county names — Smith, Forrest, Lamar, Greene, Tuscaloosa, Bibb — while my friend Eliza, who I love, asked someone to pass the bread.

This was at the soup course. By the salad course, the chyron was still rolling, the counties had multiplied, and the lobbyist across the table — I will describe him only as bipartisan, which is to say he billed both parties last cycle — examined his cufflink and observed that the federal response curve was “tracking pretty well with historical norms.” Historical norms. Eleven counties on the ground, March, and he produced a phrase that could have come out of a slide deck about quarterly yogurt sales.

By the time the dishes were cleared, the President had posted a single sentence containing the words “monitoring” and “tremendous,” and the FEMA administrator was, per his own social feed, not in Birmingham but in Monterey, delivering a keynote whose program lists the title as “Resilience: A Conversation.” The state delegations issued statements ranging from thoughts-and-prayers to thoughts-prayers-and-a-reminder-about-my-reelection-website. One senator’s office sent the same condolence language they had used in February, with the month updated and a comma moved.

My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has a longer memory than any cable producer in this city, mentioned over the cheese that the briefing on the 2011 outbreak was held within ninety minutes of dawn. By a Republican governor. With a Democratic president inbound on a plane. We used to do this. We used to send the principals to the runway in their pajamas if that was what the hour required. Now we workshop the language and we issue, around lunchtime, a paragraph that has been read by seven lawyers and one pollster.

There was, of course, no mention from any podium of the warming Gulf, of March temperatures running six degrees above the historical mean, of the fact that this is the third multi-state outbreak this calendar year and we are not yet through Lent. To raise it would be to introduce a topic upon which both parties have agreed not to introduce a topic. So we say “severe weather event.” The way insurance adjusters say “act of God” when they mean “we are not paying.”

Halfway through dessert I said something — I admit I said something — about whether anyone at the table had family below the Mason-Dixon, and Eliza did her Eliza thing. “Margaret. Please.” The tone was hostess. The subtext was that the lobbyist was going to write a check to the museum and the museum check was, at that specific moment, more solvent than Lauderdale County. The lobbyist examined his cufflink again. We had achieved a cufflink quorum.

I will tell you what unsettled me. It was not the Hill aide who, when pressed, said the delegation was waiting on damage assessments in order to “right-size the announcement.” It was not the cable anchor at eleven who pronounced Tupelo three distinct ways in a single segment. It was that nobody at the table — nobody, including, after Eliza’s Margaret-please, me — said another word about any of it until the cab arrived. Eight people, six of whom draw federal salaries directly or adjacently, and we returned, with what I can only describe as relief, to the seating chart for the museum gala.

The cab came at eleven. We were arguing about whether to seat the deputy secretary next to the donor with the divorce. Nobody had said the word Tupelo in forty minutes. Somewhere a county clerk was still on the phone, and somewhere else a press shop was still on its third draft, and we were settling, with great care, the placement of the centerpieces.

Marlene’s Memory Tea Predates the FDA and Frankly Outperforms It

Brooke Ellery
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Marlene’s Memory Tea Predates the FDA and Frankly Outperforms It

Marlene called me at 6:14 this morning, which is when she calls about anything she’s already decided. The FDA had approved a new Alzheimer’s drug overnight, she said, and she wanted me to know she’d been ahead of them by approximately forty years and one mason jar of dried rosemary.

I want to be careful here because I am not anti-medicine. I am pro-remembering. There is a difference, and the difference is roughly fifty-two thousand dollars a year, which is what the new infusion costs before the part of the insurance call where they put you on hold and your husband forgets why he picked up the phone.

The drug, from what I gathered between Marlene’s exhales, is a monoclonal antibody, which Marlene pronounced “mono-clonal” like it was a brand of yogurt she didn’t trust. It works, allegedly, by clearing amyloid plaques from the brain. It also, according to the label that nobody reads because the label is forty-one pages, can cause brain swelling and brain bleeding, which Marlene noted is two of the three things you’d think a brain drug would specifically avoid.

Marlene’s protocol is older than the FDA and considerably more generous with its side-effect profile. She drinks a tea every morning made of rosemary, lemon balm, a single bay leaf she rotates weekly, and what she calls “a respectful amount of sage.” She smells a clove before she gets out of bed. She does not own a microwave. She walks to the mailbox barefoot in any weather above thirty-eight degrees because, in her words, “the ground remembers for you.”

I ran all this past my sister-in-law Tessa, who works the front desk at a chiropractor in Weaverville and has audited two units of a master’s in public health, so she’s basically read the literature. Tessa said the issue with the pharmaceutical pipeline is that you cannot patent a walnut. I wrote that down. I am going to write it down again here. You cannot patent a walnut.

Over in Memory Is a Muscle and They Sold Us a Couch — which is a private Facebook group I joined in 2021 and which now has eleven thousand members and a pinned recipe for a turmeric paste you keep behind your ear — the consensus by 8 a.m. was that the new approval was timed to spring, when people are most likely to forget where they put their taxes. I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t know that I don’t.

What I do believe is the lived experience of women in their seventies who can still tell you the phone number of the house they grew up in. Marlene’s friend Doreen, who plays bridge with a woman whose grandson is reportedly in a clinical trial in Chapel Hill, said the trial nurses keep losing their badges, and you can draw whatever conclusion from that you want. I have drawn mine.

My carveouts, because I will be honest with you the way I am honest with my children: I do allow my mother-in-law her one prescription, because she earned it, and I do accept that Alzheimer’s is real and devastating and not something a single bay leaf is going to outmuscle. But there is a wide forgiving country between “a bay leaf” and “an IV drip that costs more than my first car and may make your brain swell on a Tuesday.” That country is where most of us actually live, and it is staffed almost entirely by grandmothers.

Cleo, who is nine and has been reading over my shoulder, just asked what amyloid is. I told her it’s the gunk our brains make when we don’t go outside enough. She accepted this, because she is nine and because, as far as I can tell, it’s broadly true.

Marlene called back at 9:40 to say she’d made a second pot of the tea and was sending me a jar in a padded envelope with a bay leaf taped to the lid for, and I quote, “protection from the news.” The FDA can approve what it wants. My pantry has been approved by four generations of women who knew where the keys were.

Health Insurer Discloses Breach Of Records Patients Didn’t Know It Kept

Lena Wexler
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Health Insurer Discloses Breach Of Records Patients Didn’t Know It Kept

NASHVILLE, TN — A major U.S. health insurer informed roughly 14 million Americans on Wednesday that their sensitive medical records had been compromised, prompting widespread concern, confusion, and in many cases a first-ever introduction to the company that had been quietly holding those records for the better part of a decade.

The breach, disclosed in a regulatory filing late Tuesday and a press release shorter than most pizza receipts, exposed Social Security numbers, prescription histories, mental health intake forms, and in some cases the results of procedures patients had assumed were between themselves and one specific doctor in a small office in Toledo.

The company stressed in its statement that it took data security “extremely seriously,” a phrase that has now appeared in the disclosures of every major health-sector breach since 2014, and which one cybersecurity researcher noted may at this point be load-bearing for the entire industry.

Affected customers will receive a complimentary 24-month subscription to a credit-monitoring service owned, according to SEC filings, by the same parent company whose subsidiary lost the data. The monitoring service itself was breached in 2022.

“What people don’t understand is that these aren’t really breaches anymore, they’re disclosures,” said Priya Velasquez, a healthcare data analyst at the Beacon Privacy Project. “The data left the building years ago. This is just the part where they finally tell you.” Velasquez added that the insurer’s records likely passed through at least four contractors, two analytics vendors, and one offshore claims-processing firm before being stolen, and that any one of those would have been a perfectly acceptable place to lose them.

The insurer noted that the intrusion was first detected in November but that disclosure was delayed to allow for a full forensic investigation, coordination with law enforcement, and what one internal memo reportedly called “messaging alignment.” Affected customers will be notified on a rolling basis, in alphabetical order, over a period the company described as “approximately the spring.”

Among those receiving notification letters this week was Carla Renfro, 58, of Knoxville, who said she was alarmed less by the breach itself than by learning that her records had been held by an entity she had never knowingly interacted with. “I have Blue Cross,” she said. “I called them. They said my records had been processed by a wholly-owned analytics subsidiary that handles wellness optimization. I asked what that was. They put me on hold.”

The insurer maintains it has found “no evidence” that the stolen data has been misused, a determination drawn from the fact that no one has yet posted it to a public forum the company is monitoring. Researchers at three independent firms noted Wednesday that the full database had been listed for sale on a Russian-language marketplace since January, priced at $2.40 per record, with a bulk discount.

Class-action attorneys, who began filing suit before the press release had fully loaded on most browsers, are expected to recover settlements of approximately $4.18 per affected individual, distributed in the form of a digital coupon. The attorneys themselves will recover somewhat more.

In a follow-up statement Wednesday evening, the insurer’s chief information security officer pledged that the company was “learning from this incident” and would be investing heavily in next-generation security infrastructure, including an AI-driven threat detection platform built by a vendor whose own breach disclosure is expected later this quarter.

AI Fraud Surge Driven By Same Voice Tools Your Bank Adopted In 2023

Lena Wexler
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AI Fraud Surge Driven By Same Voice Tools Your Bank Adopted In 2023

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reported Wednesday that AI-assisted fraud losses climbed to a record $14.2 billion over the past twelve months, driven almost entirely by voice-cloning and generative-text platforms that are, agents confirmed, the exact same platforms American banks adopted in 2023 to make their customer service feel “warmer.”

The bureau’s quarterly bulletin lists nine specific synthesis tools responsible for the bulk of the surge. Seven of them appear, under slightly different brand names, on the public vendor pages of the four largest U.S. retail banks, where they are described as part of a “trust-forward customer experience layer.”

“There is some overlap, yes,” said Pradeep Mavi, a senior fraud analyst at Beacon Strategy, who paused for what he later described as longer than he meant to. “The model that calls your mother pretending to be you in a holding cell is, structurally, the same model that calls your mother to remind her about her CD renewal. We are, in many cases, looking at the same API key.”

According to the FBI, the median AI-cloned voice scam now runs forty-eight seconds and extracts an average of $11,400 per victim, a figure that fraud examiners noted is roughly six times what the same bank’s chatbot has historically been able to resolve in a single interaction.

Industry response has been measured. The American Bankers Association issued a statement Wednesday afternoon affirming its members’ “deep and ongoing commitment to fighting synthetic-identity fraud,” and announcing a new initiative in which banks will deploy an additional AI layer, sourced from the same three vendors, to detect outputs from the first AI layer. A spokesperson described the architecture as “defense in depth.”

One of the affected vendors, asked to comment on the dual-use issue, replied with what appeared to be an automated email beginning “Hi Lena, I hope this finds you well,” and offering to schedule a fifteen-minute discovery call.

The generational pattern in the data is, agents acknowledged, awkward. Victims over 65 are being defrauded by voice clones generated from tools their grandchildren installed for podcast editing, and routed through call centers that, in at least two documented cases, were operating on free-tier accounts the victims’ own employers had set up and forgotten about.

A retired postal worker in Mesa, Arizona, reached by phone after losing $38,000 to a caller who sounded exactly like her son-in-law, said she had grown suspicious only at the end of the call, when the voice cheerfully asked her to rate the interaction one through five.

The FBI is recommending that families establish a “safe word” to verify identity during suspicious calls. Bank of America has separately announced it will be rolling out a safe-word feature for customer authentication later this year, generated, configured, and stored by its AI assistant.

Supreme Court Hears Gun Case It Already Decided, Out of Politeness

Nash Grayson
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Supreme Court Hears Gun Case It Already Decided, Out of Politeness

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday graciously permitted attorneys on both sides of a major Second Amendment case to deliver oral arguments in full, despite the justices having reached their conclusion sometime in the spring of 2022 and another portion of it over brunch.

The case, which concerns whether a federal restriction on a particular category of firearm comports with the ‘historical tradition’ standard the Court invented three years ago specifically so it would not, was met with the polite attentiveness reserved for a child explaining a magic trick to an adult who has already seen the card.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who is widely expected to author the majority opinion, kept his eyes closed for the duration of the government’s argument in what aides described as ‘active listening,’ while Justice Samuel Alito interrupted the Solicitor General forty-one seconds in to ask whether anything in the founding era prevented a man from owning whatever he wanted, and if not, why were they here.

‘We always benefit from a robust airing of the issues,’ said Sharon Vellum, a constitutional law fellow at the Mercer Institute, who noted that the Court’s decision to take the case at all suggested ‘between six and six-and-a-half’ justices already had a preferred outcome and were now searching for a paragraph from 1791 to staple to it.

Counsel for the government attempted, at several points, to cite public safety data, at which Justice Neil Gorsuch visibly winced as though someone had brought a casserole to a wine tasting. Chief Justice John Roberts, performing his customary role as the man who looks deeply troubled while voting the same way as everyone else, asked one (1) skeptical question of the petitioner before nodding for the next ninety minutes.

Outside the courthouse, gun-rights advocates held a rally that organizers described as ‘a celebration in advance,’ while gun-control groups held a smaller rally that organizers described as ‘something to do.’ A bystander selling commemorative pins did not specify which side he was selling them to and reported brisk business from both.

The Court is expected to issue its ruling sometime in late June, on the same Friday it releases every other 6-3 decision it would prefer not to discuss at length, alongside whatever else needs to clear before everyone leaves for the summer.

Justice Thomas, reached briefly in the hallway, declined to comment on the case but did confirm that his RV is running great.

Tionesta Bracket Leader Picked Every Team by Whose Coach Looked Tired

Hal Cranston
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Tionesta Bracket Leader Picked Every Team by Whose Coach Looked Tired

TIONESTA, PA — Janet Furst, 64, who has never watched a complete college basketball game in her life, holds the only undefeated bracket in the Tionesta Volunteer Fire Hall pool as the Sweet Sixteen field finalized Sunday night.

Furst’s methodology, which she explained without prompting to anyone within six feet of the coffee urn in the Fire Hall basement, involved selecting the team in each matchup whose head coach looked, in her estimation, “the most tired” on the small clipped photos pool organizer Earl Sembower had affixed to the bracket sheet. Ties were broken by which team name “sounded the most like a small mammal.”

This is how Furst arrived at her Sweet Sixteen, which contains both Round of 32 upsets — wins she correctly called, she said, because the winning coach in the first looked “like a man who had recently lost a dog,” and the losing team in the second wore “two oranges that did not get along.”

Furst has also, according to several pool members, begun referring to specific teams by descriptive phrases rather than their names. Tennessee is “the orange ones with the mean coach.” Houston is “the red ones whose coach also looks mean but in a different way.” She refers to both Duke and North Carolina simply as “the navy,” and when pressed will clarify “the navy I trust” or “the other navy.”

Russell Padgett, a retired track inspector who attends the pool’s weekly review night and currently sits 41st out of 43, was less philosophical. “I put in fourteen hours,” Padgett said. “I had a KenPom printout. I had Marquette to the Elite Eight on guard maturity.” Padgett’s bracket is broken in eleven places.

Fire chief Daryl Houchens, who placed 38th by selecting the higher seed in every matchup and then changing his mind on three of them at the last minute, confirmed Furst would receive the $340 pot if her bracket survives Monday. “She doesn’t really know it’s a tournament,” Houchens said. “I think she thinks it’s a survey we’re all helping her with.”

Asked Sunday whether she planned to watch any Sweet Sixteen games on Thursday, Furst said she had a quilt to finish and would probably check in with the standings Friday if she wasn’t at her sister’s in Oil City.

Marlene’s Knees Called Cyclone Jacob 72 Hours Before the Bureau Did

Brooke Ellery
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Marlene’s Knees Called Cyclone Jacob 72 Hours Before the Bureau Did

Marlene texted me Tuesday at 6:14 in the morning, which is when she texts me when something is wrong with the sky. The text said, “left knee. bad. southern hemisphere.” That was it. Three days later Cyclone Jacob came ashore in Western Australia as a Category 5 and the satellite footage looked exactly like what her knee had been doing all week.

I am not saying Marlene is a meteorologist. I am saying that the human body, when it has not been disrupted by seed oils and the blue light coming off a Ring doorbell, is a barometric instrument that has been refined over four hundred thousand years and is, by any honest accounting, more sensitive than a buoy.

Marlene has called every major pressure event since 2019. She called the derecho. She called the bomb cyclone the week of Garrett’s birthday. She called Hurricane Idalia from the parking lot of an Ingles in Weaverville, which her sister-in-law Pam can corroborate because Pam was the one carrying the rotisserie chicken. Pam works the front desk at a chiropractic office and is, for all functional purposes, a nurse.

The Facebook group I’m in — it’s called Knees Know: A Community for Embodied Forecasters — has been tracking this for almost two years now. We have a shared spreadsheet. There are 4,200 of us. We log knee pain, hip pain, the specific kind of headache that sits behind your right eye, and the dreams. Especially the dreams about water. Jenny in Tasmania had a dream Sunday night that her kitchen was a fish tank, and Jacob made landfall Friday. You tell me.

What the Bureau of Meteorology will tell you is that they had Jacob on the cone four days out, which, congratulations, so did Marlene’s left knee, and Marlene’s left knee did not require a satellite array or a $340 million budget line. Marlene’s left knee required ibuprofen, which she doesn’t take because ibuprofen is processed through the liver and her naturopath has been very clear about her liver.

I asked Marlene how she does it and she said it’s not a how, it’s a listening. She said most women stopped listening to their joints somewhere around the time they were handed a Diet Coke in middle school, and we have been paying for that quiet ever since. She also said the pineal gland is involved, but she wasn’t ready to go on the record about the pineal gland yet because her acupuncturist wants to publish first.

My own knees, for what it’s worth, were quiet this week, which Marlene says is because I’m still detoxing from the fluoride in our well water (which yes, I know, well water, but it’s coming up through the rock and the rock has been compromised). She says my reception will come back once I finish the magnesium protocol and stop wearing the rings I bought at Target. The rings are nickel-plated. They are interfering with my field.

Cleo asked me last night if Marlene was a witch, and I said no, sweetheart, Marlene is a woman who has not numbed herself, and that is what a witch used to be before the word got weaponized. Then I gave her a spoon of raw honey and put her to bed because the moon was waxing and she needed the grounding.

Cyclone Jacob is over land now and weakening, and Marlene’s knee, as of this morning, is at a four. She says by Monday she’ll be down to a two and we can finally go to the co-op together. I’ll drive. She’ll forecast. That’s just how it works at our latitude.

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