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The FDA Approved a New Pain Medication Called Journavx and Something About a Name With No Vowels in the Right Places Is Telling Me Not to Swallow It

Brooke Ellery
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The FDA Approved a New Pain Medication Called Journavx and Something About a Name With No Vowels in the Right Places Is Telling Me Not to Swallow It

Yesterday afternoon I was elbow-deep in a bowl of soaked oats when my neighbor Marnie texted me a screenshot with three exclamation points and a skull emoji, which is how I receive almost all of my medical news now. The FDA had approved a new non-opioid pain pill called Journavx. I read the name out loud twice. I read it out loud a third time to my husband, Garrett, who was feeding the chickens. Journavx. Go ahead and try it. Your mouth knows.

I am not, as I’ve said before, anti-medicine. I took a Tylenol once in 2019 and wrote about it for six weeks. What I am is a mother of four who has learned to listen when the body in front of me — mine, or one of my children’s, or the goat — tells me something isn’t right. And a word with a silent J, a runaway V, and an X that just shows up uninvited at the end like a stepdad is, to my gut, not right.

I did what any responsible person would do, which is post the headline in my Facebook group (Seed Oils and the Lies They Told Us, which has recently expanded scope to include most pharmaceutical naming conventions). Within nine minutes a woman named Tabitha from somewhere outside Spokane pointed out that Journavx is an anagram, almost, of “van jar ox,” and while I don’t know exactly what to do with that, I don’t love it. Tabitha is a former veterinary assistant and, I believe, currently writes a Substack called The Body Keeps the Receipt.

My sister-in-law Hollis, who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Hendersonville and is basically a nurse at this point, sent me a voice memo about it while she was picking up her oldest from jazz band. She said — and I’m quoting — “Brooke, they already have something for pain. It’s called a warm castor oil pack. It’s called magnesium. It’s called actually going to bed at nine.” She also said something about how the approval was rushed, which I can’t confirm, but Hollis has been right about three separate things since October, including the thing with the yogurt.

Here is what I keep coming back to, and I want to say this gently. Pain is information. Pain is your body tapping on the glass. When we numb the tap, the body just taps harder somewhere else — in my experience, usually the jaw, then the hips, then eventually the mood. I learned this from a podcast called The Fascia Hour, hosted by a man named Dr. Rowan Beckett, DC, CNT, whose credentials I have not been able to fully trace but whose vibe is, frankly, correct.

Now, the pitch on Journavx, as I understand it from the article Marnie sent me and then a second article I read with my laptop turned sideways so the blue light wouldn’t hit my pineal gland directly, is that it’s a non-opioid. Great. Wonderful. Truly. But “non-opioid” is what we call in marketing a category exit, not an identity. I worked in brand management for six years before we moved to the homestead. I have sat in the room where men in quarter-zips decide that a molecule needs a name that sounds like a Nordic cruise line. Journavx did not emerge from a meadow. Journavx came out of a conference room in Boston at eleven-forty a.m.

My oldest, Ember, who is nine and has opinions, asked me at dinner last night whether the new pill was “the one for the hurt.” I told her it was, sort of. She chewed her sourdough (36-hour ferment, which I maintain is not an ingredient but a practice) and said, “But we already have ginger.” And listen. I know she’s nine. I know ginger is not, clinically speaking, a substitute for a sodium channel blocker. But I also know that a nine-year-old raised on bone broth and morning light can often see the shape of a thing faster than a grown adult with a subscription to The Atlantic.

I want to be fair to the people who will take this medication, because there are many and I love them. If you have had a surgery, if you are in the kind of pain that doesn’t respond to a walk around the driveway and a tablespoon of raw honey, you are not my target audience and I am sending you only softness. What I’m talking about are the borderline cases. The tension headache at 2 p.m. The back twinge from sleeping on a mattress that, let’s be honest, is off-gassing. For those, please, before you reach for something with an X in it, reach for a hot water bottle and a phone call to your mother.

Garrett, who is more moderate than I am on most of these issues and who once bought ibuprofen at a gas station without telling me, actually agreed when I read him the name out loud. He said, “That sounds like a mid-tier SUV.” Then he said, “Or a Romanian soccer team.” Then he went back outside. This is the closest Garrett gets to an endorsement, and I’m taking it.

I did, in the interest of fairness, try to read the actual prescribing information. I got through about four paragraphs before I hit the word “hepatic” and had to go lie down in the mudroom with a rosemary poultice on my sternum. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think the documents themselves carry a frequency, and I think that frequency is, charitably, “don’t.”

So here is where I’ve landed, for now, and I reserve the right to update. If your doctor — and I mean an actual doctor you chose, not one assigned to you by an insurance algorithm — looks at you and says Journavx is the right call, I trust you to make that decision with your own inner knowing. But if the only reason you’re considering it is because a headline popped up between a Reel about sourdough and a Reel about a woman organizing her freezer, I would gently, lovingly, walk you back to the kitchen.

There is a castor oil pack warming on my stove right now. There is a jar of magnesium glycinate on my nightstand. There is a nine-year-old downstairs who thinks ginger is a civilization. I know which pharmacy I’m shopping at. And it doesn’t have an X in the name.

Clayborn County Investment Club Lost $342 on Nvidia Monday, Now Has Several Questions About What a ‘DeepSeek’ Is

Hal Cranston
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Clayborn County Investment Club Lost $342 on Nvidia Monday, Now Has Several Questions About What a ‘DeepSeek’ Is

DATELINE — CLAYBORN, W. Va. — The Clayborn County Investment and Fellowship Club convened its regular second-Monday meeting at the Elks Lodge this week under circumstances described by club treasurer Donnie Hasslebeck as “not ideal,” the membership having collectively shed $342.17 on its Nvidia position before the coffee urn had finished perking.

The club, which has gathered in the lodge’s back room since 1987 for fellowship followed by roughly eleven minutes of actual investment discussion, found itself on Monday wrestling with a word that none of its fourteen members could spell on the first try and only three could spell on the second. The word was DeepSeek. The mood was somber. The cold cuts, by all accounts, were fine.

“We own a share and a half of the Nvidia apiece, most of us,” explained Hasslebeck, 71, who has served as treasurer since the Clinton administration and keeps the club’s ledger in a spiral notebook that says TRAPPER KEEPER on the front. “Then Mitchell comes in Monday morning with his phone and says the Chinese have done something. I said done what. He said he didn’t know yet, but it was bad.”

What the Chinese had done, according to several hours of subsequent discussion, was release an artificial intelligence program that reportedly cost a fraction of what American companies have spent on similar technology, causing a single-day selloff that wiped nearly $600 billion off Nvidia’s market capitalization and, more locally, enough money off the club’s portfolio to cover two rounds at the Lodge bar with tip.

The club initially believed DeepSeek to be a submarine. This belief persisted for approximately forty minutes.

Mrs. Lorraine Peterson, 68, who joined the club in 2003 and is its only member with a grandchild employed in what she calls “the computers,” attempted to clarify matters by calling her grandson Tyler in Charlotte. Tyler explained that DeepSeek was a large language model developed in China that performed comparably to American models at dramatically lower cost. Mrs. Peterson relayed this to the room. The room asked her to define four of those words. “I told them I’d call him back,” Mrs. Peterson said. “He was at a wedding.”

Member Roy Kettering, 74, a retired postmaster, pressed the group on whether the Chinese had built the artificial intelligence themselves or whether, as he put it, “they just looked at ours and made it cheaper, like the patio furniture.” The club was unable to resolve this point, though several members conceded the patio furniture theory had some merit.

A follow-up call was placed to Ben Arley, 31, who runs the technology help desk at the Clayborn Public Library on Tuesdays and Thursdays and is widely regarded as the most qualified person in the county on matters of computing. Arley spent twelve minutes on speakerphone trying to explain the concept of a “model,” at which point Hasslebeck asked if Arley could just tell them whether to sell. Arley declined. The club thanked him for his service.

By the close of business Tuesday, Nvidia had recovered roughly 9 percent of its losses, which the club regarded as good news, though Mitchell Doakes, 69, pointed out that they had still lost money overall and that the stock could, in theory, go down again. This observation was met with the kind of silence usually reserved for a bad weather forecast at the county fair.

Club president Earl Vickers, 76, moved that the club’s investment committee — consisting of Vickers, Hasslebeck, and whoever brought the pretzels — issue a formal position on emerging artificial intelligence markets at the February meeting. The motion carried. Vickers later clarified that the formal position would likely be “we’ll see.”

Reached at the Lodge bar following the meeting, longtime bartender Cheryl Maddox, who has served the club every second Monday for nineteen years, offered the afternoon’s most concise market analysis. “They lose money on that thing three or four times a year,” she said, wiping down the counter. “Then they find out they made money. Then they forget. Then a Chinese submarine does something and they remember.”

Clayborn County Food Pantry Director Aged Visibly During the 29-Hour Federal Funding Pause That a Judge Blocked Before She Could Finish Panicking

Hal Cranston
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Clayborn County Food Pantry Director Aged Visibly During the 29-Hour Federal Funding Pause That a Judge Blocked Before She Could Finish Panicking

CLAYBORN COUNTY, OHIO — Darlene Vickers spent Monday night in the walk-in freezer at St. Bart’s Community Pantry, counting cans of green beans with the haunted focus of a woman preparing for the end of something. By the time a federal judge in Washington issued an administrative stay late Tuesday afternoon halting the White House’s sweeping pause on federal grants and loans, Vickers had already drafted two layoff letters, called her sister in Toledo, and, according to pantry volunteers, briefly wept in the parking lot behind the dumpsters.

The funding pause, announced in a two-page memo from the Office of Management and Budget on Monday evening, was described by the administration as a temporary measure to review whether federal assistance programs aligned with new executive priorities. Clayborn County receives roughly $411,000 annually in pass-through federal funds across a dozen social service programs, a figure Vickers has memorized in the way most people memorize their anniversary. The judge’s order Tuesday halted the pause before any checks had actually stopped, a sequence of events Vickers described, charitably, as “quite a tuesday.”

“What we had here was a complete operational scare event with no actual operational consequences,” said Merrill Hodge, a senior fellow at the Midwest Center for Civic Continuity in Columbus. “Imagine being told your house is on fire, spending a full day and a half drafting an evacuation plan and writing goodbye letters to the dog, and then learning the fire department showed up at a different address. That’s the mood in most of these county agencies right now. The dog is fine, but people are tired.”

The scramble was not limited to the pantry. Clayborn County Head Start director Patricia Loomis reportedly canceled a planned order of thirty cases of washable crayons, citing “prudence.” The county’s lone domestic violence shelter spent most of Monday evening trying to determine whether they counted as a federal program, a state program, or, as shelter director Eve Kallstrom put it, “one of those in-between things that nobody explains until the funding stops.” At the County Extension Office, a 4-H administrator briefly placed a hold on the purchase of a replacement goat.

By Tuesday morning, confusion had spread past the agencies and into the general population. Roy Kempel, who runs the feed store out on Route 42 and has never applied for a federal grant in his life, reported that three separate customers asked him whether his store was “going to be affected.” Kempel told them he did not believe so, though he admitted he was no longer entirely sure what the word “affected” covered. “I sell oats,” he said. “I don’t know what they want from me.”

Mrs. Peterson, who attends the 9:30 service at First Methodist and keeps what she describes as “an interested eye” on county affairs, said she had followed the situation closely on the radio and had reached her own conclusions. “They froze it, and then they unfroze it, and in between everybody at the church basement thought Darlene was going to have to close the pantry,” she said. “I brought her a coffee cake this morning. She ate it standing up, which is not like her.”

County Commissioner Bud Ralston, reached Tuesday evening at the Rise & Shine Diner, initially declined to comment, then commented at length. Ralston said he had spent most of Monday night on the phone with the county’s fiscal officer trying to determine which county checks were drawn on which federal pipelines, a process he compared to “untangling Christmas lights in a dark closet while somebody keeps turning the closet upside down.” He added that he had not, personally, panicked, but acknowledged that other people in the room had panicked, and that he had been in the room.

The federal judge’s ruling did not resolve the underlying policy dispute, which is expected to continue in the courts for weeks or months. For Vickers, however, the ruling resolved the more pressing question of whether she was going to have to call the Hendersons and tell them their Thursday food box was canceled. The Hendersons, she noted, are one of fourteen families who rely on the pantry’s weekly delivery, and the only ones who always return their plastic tubs clean.

At the county administration building Tuesday afternoon, auditor Gail Pembry said her office had fielded eighty-seven phone calls in a twelve-hour period, a volume she described as “approximately three Ohio State championship games worth.” Most callers, she said, wanted to know whether their Social Security or Medicare benefits were being paused, neither of which had ever been part of the OMB memo. Pembry said she had explained this patiently to each caller, and that by the forty-fifth call she had begun answering the phone with the explanation already underway.

Back at St. Bart’s, Vickers was restocking the shelf of canned peaches Tuesday evening with what volunteers described as a slightly unsteady hand. She said she planned to sleep for approximately eleven hours and then resume treating the federal government the way she treats the weather in February: as a thing that will do what it is going to do, usually overnight, and usually to her personally. Asked whether she felt relieved, Vickers paused for a long moment before answering.

“I feel,” she said, “like a person who ran out of a burning building and then had to go back in for her purse.” Darla Simms, a waitress at the Rise & Shine who overheard the quote, offered a shorter version on her way back to the kitchen. “She’s fine,” Simms said. “She’s just not going to be fine until Thursday.”

Nvidia Loses $600 Billion Overnight After Chinese Engineers Build Same Thing for the Price of a Used Civic

Cody Thompson
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Nvidia Loses $600 Billion Overnight After Chinese Engineers Build Same Thing for the Price of a Used Civic

SANTA CLARA, CA — At approximately 9:31 a.m. Eastern on Monday, roughly $600 billion in Nvidia market capitalization was reclassified from ‘the future of human civilization’ to ‘a rounding error,’ after a Chinese startup called DeepSeek released an AI model that does basically the same thing using, by some estimates, the computing budget of a mid-sized Panera franchise.

The loss is the largest single-day vaporization of shareholder value in U.S. history, a record previously held by Nvidia last Thursday. Analysts struggled throughout the morning to explain how a company whose entire investment thesis was ‘nobody else can do this’ suddenly faced a company that, by all appearances, had done this.

‘This is actually a healthy and rational price discovery event,’ said Parth Willoughby, a senior semiconductor strategist at Brennan-Koffel Capital, whose firm held Nvidia at a $200 price target as of Friday and a $140 price target as of lunch. ‘We’re simply reweighting for the possibility that the entire American AI buildout was based on the assumption that math is harder in Mandarin.’

DeepSeek, which reportedly trained its flagship model for around $6 million using a stack of export-restricted chips and what insiders describe as ‘a lot of cleverness,’ has become the top free download in the Apple App Store, briefly edging out ChatGPT, Threads, and the app that tells you when the ice cream machine at McDonald’s is broken. The company employs fewer people than a regional Chick-fil-A.

By contrast, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon have between them announced roughly $320 billion in planned 2025 AI infrastructure spending — a figure arrived at, sources say, by taking the previous year’s number and adding the word ‘more.’ Sam Altman, whose Stargate project was unveiled last week at a White House ceremony and pegged at $500 billion, issued a statement on X calling DeepSeek ‘impressive’ in the same tone one uses to describe a cousin’s unsolicited screenplay.

Wall Street spent the morning cycling through the five stages of grief, though most firms skipped directly to ‘reaffirming our Buy rating.’ Morgan Stanley issued a note titled ‘Nothing Has Changed,’ which was 14 pages long and contained the word ‘moat’ 31 times. Goldman Sachs downgraded Nvidia from ‘Conviction Buy’ to ‘Still Definitely Buy, Please.’

‘The fundamental bull case for Nvidia remains intact,’ said Lindsay Oberholtzer, chief market strategist at Halverson-Pike Advisors, from what appeared to be a closet. ‘We simply need to understand that artificial general intelligence may not require ten nuclear power plants and the entire desert of Arizona, which, if true, would be an absolute catastrophe for our thematic ETFs.’

The ripple effects spread quickly. Constellation Energy, which had soared in 2024 on the theory that AI would consume every electron in North America, fell 21% by midday. Vistra Corp lost 28%. Three separate nuclear reactor projects announced last quarter were reportedly re-categorized by their sponsors from ‘urgent strategic infrastructure’ to ‘something we’ll circle back on.’

Retail investors on r/wallstreetbets responded with characteristic sobriety, flooding the subreddit with posts ranging from ‘BTFD’ to screenshots of six-figure losses captioned ‘guh.’ One user, u/GPUPilled_420, claimed to have lost his wife’s dental practice on 0-day Nvidia calls and asked if anyone knew whether DeepSeek could draft a divorce filing.

In Washington, lawmakers reacted to the sudden emergence of a competitive Chinese AI lab by blaming each other for it. Senator Josh Hawley demanded hearings. Senator Elizabeth Warren demanded different hearings. The Commerce Department announced it would review whether export controls had ‘worked,’ a review expected to conclude with the finding that export controls had, in some sense, worked, and in another, more important sense, not.

President Trump, asked about the selloff while boarding Marine One, said DeepSeek was ‘a wake-up call’ and also ‘a tremendous opportunity’ and also ‘something I’ll be looking at very strongly,’ before adding that he had personally invented the chip. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later clarified that the President was referring to Lay’s.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, was unavailable for comment, reportedly because he was on a previously scheduled trip to Beijing, where he is visiting customers who, he has said repeatedly, desperately need the chips he is being prevented from selling them.

By the closing bell, Nvidia had stabilized down ‘only’ 17%, a level executives described as ‘encouraging’ and retirees described as ‘the reason I’m greeting at Lowe’s now.’ In after-hours commentary, Willoughby of Brennan-Koffel reiterated his firm’s conviction that the AI boom remains in its very earliest innings, a position he has held through approximately nine innings.

Just Asking: When Did American Foreign Policy Become Something You Wrap Up Between Brunch and the Second Half of the Eagles Game?

Margaret Thorne
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Just Asking: When Did American Foreign Policy Become Something You Wrap Up Between Brunch and the Second Half of the Eagles Game?

When exactly did the conduct of hemispheric relations become the kind of errand a person finishes before the coffee gets cold? I ask because on Sunday afternoon the United States and Colombia were, by any honest reading, in an economic confrontation. By Sunday evening they were not. Somewhere between those two states of affairs, a 25 percent tariff was threatened, a 50 percent tariff was promised by Tuesday, two deportation planes were turned around midair, and a South American head of state was offered the choice between capitulation and dinner. He chose dinner. I understand the instinct. I just wonder what we are calling this.

My friend Eliza — who has spent twenty years in and around the State Department in the sort of jobs that do not get announced in press releases — called me around four on Sunday, which is how I knew something had already happened and something else was about to. She said, and I am quoting, “Margaret, I watched a trade policy get negotiated on a phone in a golf cart.” I asked whether she meant that figuratively. There was a long pause. That pause is the column.

The official line is that this represents a return of American leverage, a muscular foreign policy, the art of the deal finally applied to a hemisphere that had grown accustomed to our patience. Fine. I am willing to stipulate that the leverage worked. Leverage usually does; that is what makes it leverage. What I am less willing to stipulate is the idea that an entire bilateral relationship — migration, coffee, cut flowers, cocaine interdiction, decades of counterinsurgency cooperation — can be recalibrated in the span of a single NFL broadcast and we are all supposed to treat this as evidence of seriousness rather than the opposite.

A bipartisan lobbyist I will not name, because he asked me not to and because he buys the wine, put it this way at a dinner in Kalorama last week, speaking generally about the new tempo: “The problem isn’t that they’re fast. The problem is that fast is the whole strategy. There’s nothing underneath it.” He said this while cutting into a piece of halibut that cost more than most Colombians earn in a week, which I noted silently and am noting now.

Let us talk about the tariffs themselves, briefly, because nobody else seems to want to. A 25 percent tariff on Colombian goods, had it actually taken effect and stayed, would have hit American grocery stores first — coffee, bananas, roses for the Valentine’s Day aisle that is already being built in every CVS in the country. It would have hit them inside of ten days. This is not a secret. This is how supply chains work, and anyone who has ever run a florist or a Publix knows it. The tariff was threatened on a Sunday. It was rescinded on a Sunday. Somewhere in a warehouse in Miami, a man who imports cut flowers for a living aged four years in six hours, and nobody is going to write him a thank-you note.

My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has a professional relationship with the concept of “the historical record,” asked me a question at brunch yesterday that I have not been able to stop thinking about. She asked how future historians are going to reconstruct any of this. Not the policy — the policy is easy. The Truth Social posts. The deleted Truth Social posts. The phone calls that don’t get logged because they happen on phones that don’t get logged on. “We are,” Judy said, stirring her coffee with the flat affect of a woman who has read too many Presidential Records Act memos, “going to lose this decade.”

I raise this not because I believe the previous administration was a model of transparency — please — but because the entire justification for this new tempo is that it produces results the slow, deliberative, paper-trail version of government could not. And maybe it does. I am genuinely asking. But “results” is a word that has to mean something more than “the other guy blinked first on a weekend.” Otherwise we are just running the government the way a podcast host runs a feud, and the feud is with a country of 52 million people whose cooperation we actually need on approximately nineteen things more important than two planes.

Here is what nags at me. The Colombian president, whatever you think of him — and I think quite a bit, most of it unprintable — is not a stupid man. He folded because the math of a 25 percent tariff is the math of a 25 percent tariff. That is not diplomacy. That is a man with a bigger checkbook winning a staring contest with a man who has a smaller one. We used to understand that this is the easy part of being a superpower. The hard part, the part we used to be reasonably good at, was doing it in a way that didn’t make the next twelve countries quietly start pricing out alternatives to us. I wonder if anyone in the building is tracking that number. I have asked. Nobody is tracking that number.

Eliza called again Sunday night, after it was all over, after the president had declared victory and the Colombians had declared victory and the planes had been rerouted and everyone went back to whatever they do on a Sunday night in January. She said one more thing, and then she said she had to go. She said: “The scary part isn’t that it worked. The scary part is that it’s going to work again next weekend, against someone else, and the weekend after that, until it doesn’t.” I asked her what happens when it doesn’t. She said she didn’t know. I don’t either.

So I am just asking. If this is what competence looks like now — a weekend, a tantrum, a tariff, a climbdown, a victory lap, a Monday — what did we spend the last eighty years pretending was hard? And when the weekend comes that the other side doesn’t blink, which weekend will that be, and will any of us recognize it in time to be afraid?

An App Now Grades Your Twelve-Year-Old’s ‘Competitive Fire’ on a Scale of 1 to 100 and I’d Like a Word With Whoever Shipped It

Duke Holloway
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An App Now Grades Your Twelve-Year-Old’s ‘Competitive Fire’ on a Scale of 1 to 100 and I’d Like a Word With Whoever Shipped It

My grandson Petey is eleven years old, weighs ninety-two pounds in wet shoes, and according to a piece of software his stepfather paid $79 for at the consumer electronics show this week, he has a Competitive Fire score of 61. Out of 100. The app explained, in a little pop-up with a flame icon, that a 61 places him in the ‘developing intensity’ tier. A tier. My grandson has a tier now. I found this out over breakfast on Thursday and I have not fully recovered.

The app is called GridIron IQ, or Gridirion IQ, I cannot tell because they spelled it with no vowels and a little helmet where the ‘o’ should be. It grades kids on fourteen metrics. Fourteen. Competitive Fire is one. Another one is Pocket Poise, which I think used to be called ‘not crying,’ and another one is Locker Room Presence, which in my day we called ‘whether the coach remembered your name.’ It syncs with a mouthguard. The mouthguard is $149. The mouthguard has Bluetooth. I wrote that sentence down on a napkin to make sure it was real.

I called Ray Kowalczyk about it, because I call Ray about everything. Ray coached freshman football at St. Aloysius for thirty-one years and once made a kid run a hill until the kid admitted he’d stolen a Gatorade. Ray listened to the whole thing about Competitive Fire, and there was a long pause, and then Ray said, ‘Duke. My competitive fire was my father. My competitive fire was a man named Earl. You cannot put Earl in a mouthguard.’ Then he hung up, because Ray hangs up on everybody.

Championship Sunday is tomorrow. Two football games will be played by grown men who, as far as I can tell, were coached up the old way, by other grown men yelling at them in the rain. Nobody on the Chiefs has a Locker Room Presence score. Nobody in the Bills defensive huddle is checking their Pocket Poise tier between series. And yet somehow those organizations have produced functional human adults capable of executing a slant route under duress, which is more than I can say for the Competitive Fire product team, who as far as I’m concerned should all be made to run a hill.

The pitch, per my son-in-law Brendan, who showed me a YouTube video about it with the reverence most men reserve for a eulogy, is that GridIron IQ uses ‘movement data and biometric signals’ to give parents ‘a full picture of their athlete’s mental makeup.’ Their athlete. Petey, the athlete. Petey, who on Tuesday told me very seriously that he believes a raccoon lives in their dryer vent. That athlete. The one whose full picture we now require.

I asked Brendan what a parent is supposed to do with a 61 in Competitive Fire. Like, mechanically. Do you slide the printout across the dinner table? Do you sit your boy down and say, son, the algorithm has concerns? Brendan said the app ‘suggests drills.’ I asked what the drills were. One of them, and I swear on my mother, was called ‘Visualize the Touchdown.’ My grandson, whose Competitive Fire is apparently lagging, has been prescribed guided imagery by a mouthguard.

Coach DiMaggio ran a drill we called Nutcracker. You do not need me to describe Nutcracker. Coach DiMaggio’s prescribed visualization was the bus ride home if you lost, and he described it in detail, and it worked. I am not saying we should bring back Nutcracker. The lawyers have made that impossible and probably correctly. I am saying that the replacement for Nutcracker cannot be a cartoon flame on a phone telling an eleven-year-old he is in the developing intensity tier. There has to be something in between. There used to be. It was called a coach.

The CES booth, according to the tech blog my daughter sent me to shut me up, had a ‘youth data specialist’ on hand named Corbin Vance, who holds a master’s in applied performance analytics from a school I had to look up twice. Corbin told the blog that the goal of GridIron IQ is to ‘democratize the psychological edge previously reserved for elite programs.’ I want to be clear about what this sentence means. It means: your kid’s head was not being harvested for data fast enough, and they have fixed that for you, for $79 and a monthly subscription.

Here is what a kid’s Competitive Fire actually looks like, in case anyone at the Gridirion IQ offices in Palo Alto is reading. It looks like my buddy Petey Corrigan, whom my grandson is named after, going into the boards in a junior hockey game in 1962 against a kid twice his size because the kid had insulted Petey’s sister, who was, in fairness, insultable. It looks like getting up. It looks like doing it again in the third period. Nobody measured it. Nobody needed to. His sister saw.

There is a version of this column where I tell you the app is harmless, that it’s just dads being dads with a new toy, that Petey will turn out fine and the mouthguard will end up in a drawer next to the Fitbit and the protein shaker with the little battery in it. That version is probably true. I still don’t like it. Because the next version of the app won’t be harmless. The next version will be the one high schools buy, and the one some coach in some district uses to bench a kid who deserved to play, because his Competitive Fire score came back a 58 the morning of the game. And then we’ll all act surprised.

Tomorrow I’m going over to my daughter’s to watch the Chiefs game. Petey will be there. I am going to ask him to throw the Nerf ball at me as hard as he can, for no reason and without warning, and I am going to grunt like it hurt, because it will, a little. That is the only Competitive Fire assessment I recognize as valid. I will not be taking questions from the mouthguard.

Denise is bringing chili. She says she got the recipe off a podcast. I’m going to eat it anyway.

Just Asking: If the Bar for Running the Pentagon Is Now a Weekend Cable Hit and One Vice Presidential Tiebreaker, What Was the Bar Before?

Margaret Thorne
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Just Asking: If the Bar for Running the Pentagon Is Now a Weekend Cable Hit and One Vice Presidential Tiebreaker, What Was the Bar Before?

What does it mean when the United States Senate, that storied cooling saucer, that deliberative body George Washington apparently described using a beverage metaphor nobody can source, needs its Vice President to stroll in and break a tie so that a former weekend morning television host can be handed the keys to a three-quarter-trillion-dollar war machine? I am, as always, just asking.

I was at Eliza’s on Tuesday night — she does a small Tuesday supper now, six people, one roast chicken, a defensible Sancerre — and the conversation, as conversations do in this town, turned to the Hegseth vote before the salad plates came out. Seated across from me was a lobbyist I will only describe as bipartisan, who represents, let us say, companies that build things that fly and explode. He held his wineglass at a very specific angle and said, “Margaret, the thing you have to understand is that the job is mostly meetings.” I asked what the meetings were about. He said, “Other meetings.” I refilled his glass myself.

For three decades I have watched confirmation hearings, and I will tell you what I have learned: the Senate takes itself most seriously at precisely the moment it is about to do the least serious thing. The senators furrow. They invoke their fathers’ service. They ask a pointed question, accept a non-answer, and then thank the nominee for his candor. Candor, in Washington, is the word we use for the thing that did not happen.

Three Republicans had the stomach to vote no. Three. In a conference of fifty-three. And we are meant to treat this as a crisis of conscience, a rending of garments, a profile in something. Forgive me. When the floor of your courage is three, the ceiling of your party is wherever the nominee’s forehead ends up.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for longer than some senators have been sentient, called me Wednesday morning and said something I have not been able to shake. She said, “You know, we still have the confirmation files from the Stimsons and the Marshalls. I pulled one the other day just to look at it. The paper is heavier.” I asked her what she meant. She said, “I mean the paper is heavier, Margaret. That’s all I mean.” Judy is not a dramatic woman. When Judy tells you the paper used to be heavier, the paper used to be heavier.

Is it unfair to ask what, exactly, the Senate believes a Secretary of Defense is for? Is it unfair to note that the institution has, in living memory, rejected nominees for far less — a tax irregularity, a household employee, a poorly handled question about a beverage? We used to lose Cabinet picks over nannies. Now we confirm them over tiebreakers. Somewhere between those two sentences is the entire story of the last twenty years, and nobody in this city wants to read it aloud.

The defense of the nominee, from the people who bothered to mount one, was that he will be surrounded by professionals. This is always the defense. He will be surrounded by professionals. The generals will manage him. The deputies will manage him. The building, that Pentagon-shaped organism with its own circulatory system, will manage him. Ask yourself, gently, whether you find that reassuring or whether you find it the exact opposite of the constitutional arrangement you were taught in the ninth grade.

The bipartisan lobbyist, by the time we reached the cheese course, had grown philosophical. “Margaret,” he said, “the real scandal isn’t this nominee. The real scandal is that the last three nominees were also fine, and nobody can remember what any of them did.” I told him I found that deeply comforting, in the way a diagnosis is comforting. At least now we know what we have.

And here is the part where a more cautious columnist would reach for balance. Here is where I would note that every administration has had its controversial picks, that the Republic has survived worse, that the permanent bureaucracy is a ballast against mischief. I am not a more cautious columnist. I am a columnist who has watched the ballast get thinner every year, and who has noticed that the people most eager to reassure you about institutional resilience are usually the people being paid by the institutions to sound reassured.

The question I cannot stop asking is the one no one at Eliza’s table would touch, not even after the port: What is the confirmation process actually for, if it can be cleared by a man whose chief qualification is that he performed well on a couch next to a weather map? Not whether he will be good or bad. Not whether his critics are fair. What is the process for? Because a process that cannot filter anything out is not a filter. It is a ceremony.

Judy, before she hung up, said one more thing. She said the files from the tough confirmations — the ones that failed, the ones that barely passed — have a particular smell when you open the boxes. Cigarettes and carbon paper and something else she couldn’t name. I asked her what the files from this era will smell like, when some archivist opens them in 2085. She laughed, which Judy almost never does, and said, “Margaret, I don’t think they’ll open them.”

I keep thinking about that. I keep thinking about the boxes nobody opens, the hearings nobody rereads, the tiebreakers that get footnoted into oblivion because the next one is already on the calendar. A country that cannot be bothered to take its own confirmations seriously is a country that has quietly decided the stakes are low. And a country that has decided the stakes are low is, historically speaking, moments away from finding out they were not. I am, as I have always been, just asking.

Just Asking: If the Files Were Always Going to Come Out on a Tuesday, Why Did Three Generations Have to Die Wondering?

Margaret Thorne
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Just Asking: If the Files Were Always Going to Come Out on a Tuesday, Why Did Three Generations Have to Die Wondering?

Is it not a little strange that the assassination files which have been withheld from the American public across eleven administrations, four wars, and the entire run of Meet the Press, have suddenly, this week, become the sort of thing a president can declassify between lunch and a helicopter ride? I am only asking. I am, as ever, simply putting the question on the table and stepping back while the rest of the commentariat clears its throat and pretends it was about to say the same thing.

At dinner Friday at Eliza’s, before the soup was even cleared, a bipartisan lobbyist I have known for twenty years and will not name because he still has to lobby set down his fork and said, quite calmly, “They were always going to release them. The only question was which president would be bored enough to sign the order.” Eliza, who has a framed letter from Sargent Shriver on her powder-room wall and does not joke about the Kennedys, put her napkin down and said nothing. That was the most damning part. In thirty years in this town I have learned to read the Washington silence, and Friday’s was the kind that means he’s right and we all know it.

So let us actually ask the question, out loud, the way adults are supposed to. If the files on the killings of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. could be released by executive order on a Thursday in January of 2025 — a slow Thursday, incidentally, sandwiched between a TikTok stunt and a birthright-citizenship injunction — then what precisely was the argument for sitting on them in 1978? In 1992? In 2017, when the last president to promise their release performed the peculiar magic trick of releasing them while not releasing them?

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives longer than some of the boxes have existed, once told me that the most carefully protected documents in the federal government are almost never the ones you would guess. “The truly sensitive material,” she said, stirring her tea with the grim patience of a civil servant who has watched four administrations lose the same keys, “is sensitive because of who is embarrassed, not because of who is endangered.” I have thought about that sentence for ten years. I am thinking about it harder this week.

Because let us be honest about the class of person who has spent six decades insisting these files must remain sealed for the good of the Republic. They are not, by and large, the widows. They are not the children who grew up without fathers. They are not the Memphis sanitation workers or the Ambassador Hotel busboy or the millions of Americans who simply wanted to know what their own government knew and when. They are, almost to a person, men who rose through agencies that have since been renamed, restructured, and in two cases mercifully dissolved. They are men protecting reputations of men who are already dead. And we indulged them. For sixty-one years, we indulged them.

I do not know what is in the files. Neither, I suspect, do the breathless people on cable this week assuring us it will be everything or nothing. What I know is that the American public has been told, on a rolling basis across my entire adult life, that it is not yet ready to see what was done in its name. I am sixty-seven years old. I covered three presidencies as a staffer before I ever wrote a column. At what age, exactly, does the country graduate from the children’s table?

There is a particular Washington cowardice at work here, and it is worth naming it because nobody else will. It is the cowardice of the career official who believes the public cannot be trusted with the truth, and the cowardice of the elected official who agrees because disagreeing would require him to actually read the file. It is the cowardice of the think-tank fellow who writes four thousand words on “institutional trust” without once conceding that institutions earn trust by telling the truth on Tuesday instead of hoarding it until Thursday. I have sat across from these men at more dinners than I care to count. They order the fish.

And I notice — I am just noticing, you understand — that the order came down the same week the administration declared a kind of shock-and-awe on the federal workforce, the same week a judge had to remind the executive branch that the Fourteenth Amendment is, in fact, still there, the same week a billionaire’s cost-cutting task force began gleefully circling agencies whose records rooms would be, shall we say, of considerable historical interest. Is it paranoid to wonder whether the declassification is the meal, or the garnish, or the thing being waved in one hand while the other hand is doing something else entirely? I am, as always, just asking.

Eliza said something else Friday night that I keep turning over. She said that her father, who knew Bobby, used to say that the cruelest trick the government ever played on the grieving was not killing the men. The men were killed by the men who killed them. The cruelest trick was convincing three generations of Americans that knowing how and why was a privilege to be earned, rather than a right to be exercised. I do not know if her father actually said that. I know Eliza well enough to know that if he didn’t, he should have.

So here is the question I will leave you with, and I will leave it unsoftened, because softening is how we got here. If a president can declassify these files on a whim in 2025, then every president who refused to do so between 1963 and now made a choice. Not a necessity. A choice. And the country they made that choice on behalf of — the country that was told, over and over, that it could not handle the truth — deserves to know which of its leaders decided it couldn’t, and what exactly they thought we might do if we found out.

We are about to find out a great many things this year. We are about to find out, I suspect, things about our own government that will make the careful custodians of the postwar consensus wish they had retired earlier. I am not celebrating. I am not mourning. I am watching a door open that should have been opened decades ago by braver people, and I am asking, quietly and without any particular hope of an answer, what else is behind the doors we are still being told not to touch.

Clayborn County Supervisor Launches Local Efficiency Task Force, Immediately Identifies the Coffee Fund as Its First Target

Hal Cranston
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Clayborn County Supervisor Launches Local Efficiency Task Force, Immediately Identifies the Coffee Fund as Its First Target

CLAYBORN COUNTY, OHIO — At a Tuesday evening meeting attended by nine residents, two reporters, and the HVAC repairman who had not yet been paid, County Supervisor Dale Ruggles announced the formation of the Clayborn County Department of Operational Efficiency, a three-person task force charged with identifying government waste and reporting back by the second week of February. Ruggles, 61, said he was inspired by “what they’re doing up in Washington” and had already located what he believed to be a significant irregularity in the break-room coffee fund.

The fund, which currently sits at $84.50, is maintained by voluntary contribution from the seven employees of the county annex building. Ruggles described it at the meeting as “the sort of off-ledger account that, left unchecked, becomes a culture.” He did not specify a culture of what.

The Department of Operational Efficiency — which residents have already begun calling “the DOE,” to Ruggles’s visible frustration, as he had hoped for a different acronym — consists of Ruggles himself, his nephew Brayden, and a retired insurance adjuster named Lenora Whipp who volunteered on the grounds that she had “always wondered about the culvert situation.” None of the three were present for the HVAC discussion, which was moved to new business and then tabled.

“What we’re talking about is a top-to-bottom review of every line item in the county budget,” Ruggles told the room. “If it’s not earning its keep, it’s going out the door. I don’t care if it’s a stapler.” He then asked the county clerk whether the meeting was being recorded, and, upon being told it was, clarified that he did care about the stapler in particular, which had been a gift from his late father-in-law.

Dr. Evelyn Truitt, a municipal governance scholar at the Ohio Institute for Rural Administration, said efforts like Clayborn County’s are becoming more common in the current political climate. “We’re seeing a trickle-down phenomenon where county-level officials want to replicate federal rhetoric without the federal budget,” Truitt said. “The problem is that when your entire discretionary spending fits on a single sheet of paper, ‘cutting waste’ tends to mean eliminating the one thing someone’s grandmother liked.”

The first scheduled target of the efficiency review, beyond the coffee fund, is the annual $312 subscription to a regional water-rights newsletter that Ruggles described as “frankly, a luxury item.” The newsletter has been received by the county since 1987 and is read primarily by Lenora Whipp, who has now recused herself from that portion of the review.

Reached Wednesday morning at the Sunrise Café, where she was refilling coffee for two men discussing a third man not present, waitress Sharla Bemis offered a measured assessment of the new initiative. “Dale’s been wanting a task force for about eleven years,” she said. “He tried to start one for the Christmas parade and another one for the geese. This is just the one that finally took.”

Mrs. Peterson, who attended the meeting in her capacity as secretary of the Clayborn County Historical Society and in her other capacity as a person who attends every meeting, said she supported the general idea of reviewing government expenditures but had concerns about the scope. “He kept using the word ‘bloat,'” she said. “I looked around that room. I don’t know where he thinks the bloat is. Gene from the water department was wearing the same jacket he wore to my husband’s funeral in 2009.”

Supervisor Ruggles has declined to disclose a specific dollar target for the cuts, saying only that the figure will be “substantial” and “in keeping with the spirit of the moment.” Pressed by this reporter after the meeting, he estimated savings of “between four and six thousand dollars, potentially,” and then, after a pause, said “or three.”

Nephew Brayden Ruggles, 24, who was appointed to the task force on Tuesday and sworn in using a Bible that was later identified as a hymnal, said he is approaching the role with fresh eyes. “I don’t have a lot of preconceptions about how the county spends money,” he said. “I don’t really know what the county does, if I’m being honest. That’s why they picked me.” He is being paid a stipend of $40 per meeting.

Not all residents are enthusiastic. Gene Ollinger, the water-department employee referenced by Mrs. Peterson, said he had been informed his job was “under review” and would like to know by whom. “I’m the water department,” Ollinger said. “I’m not a department. I’m a guy. They can review me all they want, but if they review me out of a job, somebody else is going to have to go turn the valve at the Miller place, and I’ll tell you right now, nobody else knows which valve it is.”

The task force is scheduled to deliver its preliminary findings at the February 12th meeting, at which point the county will also consider a measure to increase the supervisor’s discretionary budget by $2,400 to cover what Ruggles described Tuesday as “administrative costs associated with the review process.” The coffee fund, as of press time, remained untouched, though a handwritten sign had appeared above it reading “Under Audit — Please Still Contribute.”

$500 Billion ‘Stargate’ Project Will Guzzle Enough Water to Hydrate Phoenix, Produce Chatbot That Still Can’t Count the Rs in ‘Strawberry’

Lena Wexler
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$500 Billion ‘Stargate’ Project Will Guzzle Enough Water to Hydrate Phoenix, Produce Chatbot That Still Can’t Count the Rs in ‘Strawberry’

ABILENE, TX — Flanked by three men who together control more infrastructure than most G20 nations, President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced the Stargate Project, a $500 billion private venture to build out domestic AI supercomputing capacity, named — apparently without irony — after a 1994 Kurt Russell film in which a military-industrial wormhole unleashes a god on a confused civilian population.

The joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle will begin with a 10-building campus in Abilene, Texas, a town chosen for its abundance of two things the American electrical grid is rapidly running out of: land, and the political will to ask what any of this is for. Ground has already been broken on the first data center, which will reportedly draw enough power at full tilt to run a midsize city and enough water to cool it to light-jog temperature.

“We are thrilled to partner on a project of this civilizational scale,” said Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, standing beside a president who last week pardoned the January 6 defendants and a SoftBank CEO whose last major American bet was WeWork. Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, added that Stargate would “unlock benefits for all of humanity,” a phrase he has now used in six separate announcements without specifying which humans or which benefits.

The $500 billion figure, which exceeds the annual GDP of Norway, is aspirational: only $100 billion has been committed, and the rest will be raised through a financing structure that industry analysts describe as “mostly vibes and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth.” The press release did not clarify who is on the hook if the vibes sour.

“What we’re looking at is essentially a new category of infrastructure,” said Dr. Priya Mendenhall, a grid-load researcher at the Rocky Mountain Institute who was not involved with the project. “A data center of this scale consumes roughly the freshwater equivalent of 80,000 households and enough electricity to power Pittsburgh. In exchange, society receives a language model that can almost reliably generate a wedding toast.”

The announcement comes as a historic cold wave grinds across the United States and Canada, leaving pipes burst from Minneapolis to Mobile and reminding Americans that their existing grid, the one that has existed for a century, still cannot handle a Tuesday in January. Texas, which will host the Stargate flagship, last experienced a cold snap that killed 246 people when the grid failed in 2021. The state has since addressed the problem by asking nicely.

Environmental groups expressed what one spokesperson called “the usual concerns, which, as usual, will be ignored.” The Sierra Club noted that Stargate’s projected water withdrawals in drought-stricken West Texas would rival those of the region’s agricultural sector, and that the promised switch to “advanced cooling” is industry shorthand for “the same cooling, but we called it advanced.”

Altman, for his part, has argued that the energy demands of AI will be offset by AI itself, which will eventually discover cleaner forms of energy. This is the technological equivalent of borrowing money from your parents to bet on a horse that you insist will, upon winning, pay your parents back. The horse, in this metaphor, is also writing your college essays.

On Capitol Hill, Republicans hailed the announcement as proof of America’s renewed industrial vigor; Democrats hailed it as proof of the need to regulate a technology they have so far regulated by holding a hearing in which a 78-year-old senator asked ChatGPT whether it was sentient and accepted “no” as the final word on the matter. Both parties agreed the jobs would be great, though neither specified for whom. The Abilene site is projected to employ roughly 1,500 permanent workers, or about one job per $333 million of investment.

“I just want to know where the water’s coming from,” said Darlene Koopman, 63, who runs a cattle operation twelve miles east of the proposed site and who has been rationing irrigation since September. “They keep saying ‘advanced closed-loop something.’ I asked the man from Oracle if that meant they weren’t using the aquifer and he said it meant they were using less of the aquifer. So.”

Stargate is the latest entry in a growing genre of trillion-adjacent tech announcements staged as geopolitical theater: a CEO, a president, a number with too many zeros, and a promise that this time the transformative technology will be built here, using our power, on our soil, with benefits accruing to a holding company in the Cayman Islands. The DeepSeek panic rattling Silicon Valley this week — in which a Chinese startup appears to have matched OpenAI’s performance at a fraction of the compute — has only sharpened the administration’s appetite for spending more, faster, on bigger.

A reporter asked Altman at the press conference whether, given DeepSeek’s results, $500 billion was perhaps more compute than strictly necessary. Altman smiled the smile of a man who has raised money in every interest rate environment known to God, and said the question demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of scale.

The first Stargate buildings are expected to come online in late 2026. Somewhere in West Texas, a cow is already being asked to share.

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