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The Clintons Were Held in Contempt Sunday. The Word Did the Heavy Lifting.

Margaret Thorne
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The Clintons Were Held in Contempt Sunday. The Word Did the Heavy Lifting.

Does anyone remember what contempt of Congress used to mean, back when the phrase carried the faint metallic taste of consequence? I ask because the House Oversight Committee voted on a Sunday — a Sunday, while the rest of the country was watching tennis or shoveling out a driveway — to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt, and the only person at my table who looked up from his plate was the bipartisan lobbyist, and only because the bread had arrived.

I was at Eliza’s. She had done the lamb again. She always does the lamb when the news is bad, which has become a kind of seasonal calendar in Georgetown, more reliable than the weather. Outside, the storm that had buried Connecticut on Saturday was still pawing at the windows. Inside, six people who collectively know where every body in this town is buried were discussing whether the Australian Open final had been the better men’s match of the decade.

I waited. I am, by temperament and by trade, a waiter. Eventually I said: the Clintons. Contempt. Sunday. And Eliza, who is the most decent person I know and the most exhausted, said, “Margaret, please. Not at the lamb.”

The bipartisan lobbyist — I will not name him, but he has worked for everyone you can think of and three people you cannot — examined his cufflink. He said the vote was “procedural.” He said this the way a man says the check is in the mail. He said it had been “telegraphed for weeks,” which is what people in this town say when they want you to understand that something outrageous has been pre-laundered into something boring, and that you, by being surprised, are the one with the manners problem.

I want to be careful here, because I have spent thirty years writing this column and I know the trap. The trap is to defend the Clintons, whom I have criticized in print more times than I can count and will criticize again before Lent. That is not the column. The column is the word. Contempt. We used to reserve it for mob bosses who refused to testify and tobacco executives who lied about nicotine. We used it sparingly because we understood that a word used on everything ends up meaning nothing, which is, I suppose, the point.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for longer than the current chairman has been shaving, called me Sunday night. Judy does not editorialize. Judy reads call slips for a living. She said the committee’s underlying request had been filed, withdrawn, refiled under a different number, and then attached to a referral about something else entirely, which is the legislative equivalent of returning a sweater you never bought. She said, and I am quoting her, “They’re not trying to get anything. They’re trying to have voted.”

Have voted. Past tense, performative. The vote is the product. The vote is the clip. The vote is the fundraising email that will go out Monday morning with a red banner and a countdown clock. Whether anyone is ever actually held in contempt of anything is a question for a court that will hear it in 2029, by which point the chairman will be on cable, the ranking member will be on a different cable, and the Clintons will be wherever the Clintons are, which is, increasingly, the answer to a trivia question.

Eliza brought out the dessert. The lobbyist asked, very gently, whether I had seen what the Russians were doing in Tbilisi. He asked this the way one asks a friend whether she has considered switching to decaf. The subject was being changed. The subject is always being changed. We are a country that has gotten extraordinarily good at changing the subject in the middle of our own sentences.

I went home. I sat at my kitchen table with the cable on mute and watched the chyron cycle through the words BILL, HILLARY, CONTEMPT, BREAKING. I thought about Judy’s phrase. To have voted. I thought about what it costs a republic to spend its serious words on unserious afternoons, and what is left in the drawer when you need them.

The lamb, for what it’s worth, was very good. Eliza used rosemary from her own pot, the one she keeps on the sill above the sink. We talked about that for a while. It was the only thing at the table all night that anyone said was actually true.

Aussie Open Champ Thanked Her Sleep Coach Before Her Mother

Duke Holloway
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Aussie Open Champ Thanked Her Sleep Coach Before Her Mother

The trophy ceremony ran longer than the third set, which is saying something, because the third set went to a tiebreak and a medical timeout for what the broadcast helpfully captioned as ‘hip mobility.’ The new champion of the Australian Open got the microphone, took a deep breath the way her breathwork coordinator taught her to, and proceeded to thank nineteen people by name. Her mother came in at number fourteen. The sleep coach was number three.

I wrote them down. I had time. The ceremony went forty minutes and at one point a man in a sport coat handed her a small ceremonial spoon for reasons that were not explained to the home viewer.

Number one was the head coach, which is fine, that’s how it’s always been. Number two was the ‘performance coach,’ which I understand to mean a second coach who handles the part of coaching the first coach doesn’t want to do. Number three, the sleep coach. Number four, the recovery lead. Number five, the nutritionist. Number six, the assistant nutritionist, who I have to assume handles weekends. Number seven was a ‘data analyst.’ Number eight was a ‘mental performance specialist,’ who is different from a sports psychologist in ways the broadcast did not clarify and I did not Google because I was eating crackers.

Somewhere around number eleven we got to the physiotherapist, and around twelve, the stringer, which is the only one of these jobs that existed when I was young and is the only one of these jobs that is actually about tennis. The stringer should be number two, frankly. The stringer is the reason the racket works. The stringer goes ahead of the sleep coach. I will die on this hill.

I called Ray Kowalczyk during the long pause where she thanked her ‘vibes architect.’ Ray watched it too. Ray is a man who once drove a station wagon four hundred miles with a torn rotator cuff to scout a junior tournament, and Ray said to me, on the phone, in the voice of a man who has given up, ‘Duke, what in the hell is a vibes architect.’ I told him I didn’t know but she thanked them before she thanked her mom and Ray hung up on me.

Now, look. I want to be fair to the kid who won. She hit a forehand in the second set that bent space-time. She came back from a break down twice. She is, by any honest measure, an unbelievable tennis player. The problem isn’t the player. The problem is the apparatus around her, the eighteen-person caravan that now travels with one woman so she can hit a ball over a net, and the way the whole sport has decided this is normal and dignified and worth a forty-minute speech.

Coach DiMaggio had me, an assistant who also taught earth science, and a man named Pete who showed up on Tuesdays to fix the blocking sleds. That was the whole staff. We won a sectional. Pete was paid in sandwiches. Pete did not get thanked at the trophy ceremony because there was no trophy ceremony, the trophy was handed to us in a gym while a custodian mopped twenty feet away, and DiMaggio’s speech was ‘Don’t be jerks on the bus home.’

The on-court coaching is the part that still gets me. They allow it now. The coach is permitted to stand up between points and yell tactical instructions like the player can’t see the court from the court. We used to call this ‘being coached from the stands’ and it was a violation. Now it’s a feature. They put a microphone on it.

And the cooling vest. I have to mention the cooling vest. During the changeover she put on a vest that was apparently full of refrigerated gel packs and sat very still while a man timed her heart rate on an iPad. My father once played a doubleheader in a wool uniform in August and went home and shoveled a driveway. I’m not saying that was better. I’m saying nobody handed him a vest.

The champion, to her enormous credit, did eventually thank her mother. Her mother was in the box. Her mother was crying. Her mother, I would bet a hundred dollars, did not know what a vibes architect was either, and that is the only thing about this whole ceremony that gave me hope.

Denise is bringing chili. She says the recipe is from a podcast.

Tesla’s Robotaxi Now Available in Q3 of a Year to Be Determined

Cody Thompson
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Tesla’s Robotaxi Now Available in Q3 of a Year to Be Determined

AUSTIN, TX — Tesla reported fourth-quarter earnings Thursday afternoon, missing on automotive gross margin, beating on regulatory credits, and disclosing that the robotaxi rollout remains firmly scheduled for the back half of an unspecified calendar year.

The 47-slide investor deck devoted three pages to vehicle deliveries, two to energy storage, and eleven to an animated rendering of a Cybercab pulling up to a curb that does not exist. Slide 19, titled simply ‘Autonomy,’ was a still image of a steering wheel with a red circle and a line through it. Slide 20 was the same image, larger.

‘They beat on the metric they invented this quarter, which is Adjusted Operational Throughput Per Robotaxi Mile, of which there are zero,’ said Priya Anand, an auto-sector analyst at Beacon Strategy who had spent the call eating cold pad thai out of a clamshell. ‘Divide anything by zero and you can put whatever you want in the press release.’

Automotive gross margin ex-credits came in at 13.6 percent, the lowest since 2019, a number CFO Vaibhav Taneja described as ‘a floor we feel very good about being near.’ Asked twice on the call to clarify whether the floor was the current number or a lower number, Taneja said the floor was ‘directional.’

Elon Musk joined the call 22 minutes late and spent the first nine of his remarks describing a robotaxi network that he said would, by late 2026, generate more annual free cash flow than Saudi Aramco. He then paused, said ‘or 2027,’ and moved on. Two analysts on the line wrote down both numbers.

The Q&A produced one new disclosure: the previously announced unsupervised Full Self-Driving rollout in Austin is now described as a ‘geofenced supervised pilot with remote operator oversight,’ which a Wedbush note later clarified was ‘a guy with a joystick in a strip mall off I-35.’ Tesla did not dispute the characterization.

Retail reaction was, as ever, durable. On a Tesla shareholder Discord with 41,000 members, the pinned message at 5:14 p.m. read ‘this is the dip we’ve been waiting for’ for the eleventh consecutive quarter. A user named LongVol_4Eva posted that he had taken out a third HELOC and would be averaging down ‘into the autonomy print.’ Eighty-three people reacted with the rocket emoji.

The stock fell 6 percent in after-hours trading before recovering 4 percent on a Musk tweet consisting of the word ‘soon’ and a single fire emoji. By the time the earnings call ended, two sell-side desks had raised their price targets, citing ‘narrative reacceleration.’

Tesla closed the call with a slide promising the next robotaxi update would arrive ‘at an event,’ on ‘a date,’ in ‘a city to be determined.’ Three analysts asked for guidance on which quarter. Musk said all four.

Davos Spends Day 3 Asking ChatGPT What to Do About ChatGPT

Nash Grayson
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Davos Spends Day 3 Asking ChatGPT What to Do About ChatGPT

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — The World Economic Forum’s marquee panel on global AI governance opened Thursday morning with moderator Klaus-Henrik Veld asking a room of 340 billionaires, ministers, and consultants whether anyone had thought to ask the AI itself, at which point three CEOs simultaneously pulled out their phones.

The resulting consensus document, drafted in 11 seconds by an unnamed large language model and lightly edited by a McKinsey associate over an espresso, recommends a light-touch regulatory framework, expanded public-private partnerships, and ‘continued dialogue at next year’s Forum.’

‘We feel the technology has reached an inflection point where serious global guardrails are urgently necessary,’ said one delegate, the chief AI ethics officer for a Gulf sovereign wealth fund, who declined to specify which guardrails or for whom. ‘The important thing is that we are convening. Convening is itself a guardrail.’

The panel, titled ‘Aligning Frontier Models With Human Values: A Roadmap to 2030,’ featured six speakers, four of whom hold board seats at the companies building the frontier models in question. The lone academic on the dais was given seven minutes at the end and used four of them thanking the sponsors.

Attendees described the mood as cautiously optimistic. A senior partner at Beacon Strategy, attending his eleventh Davos, said the AI governance question had matured considerably since last year, when the same panel concluded that AI governance was a question that needed to mature considerably.

By Thursday afternoon, the European Commissioner for Digital Sovereignty had announced a non-binding statement of principles, which a spokesman confirmed was ‘substantially similar’ to last year’s non-binding statement of principles, ‘but with one new bullet about children.’ The bullet was reportedly added at the suggestion of a chatbot.

Outside the Kongresszentrum, a small group of researchers from a Berlin civil-society group attempted to distribute a 40-page report on labor displacement and were politely redirected to a designated free-expression zone behind a snowbank. None of the panelists were available for comment, as they were attending a separate panel on the importance of listening to civil society.

The Forum’s closing communiqué is expected Friday and will, per tradition, urge swift coordinated action by 2027, a deadline that, when reached, will be moved to 2029. Sam Altman is scheduled to deliver Friday’s keynote, in which he is expected to warn that AI poses an existential risk to humanity and also to announce three new products.

Becca’s Vinegar Group Called the FDA Ozempic Update in 2023

Brooke Ellery
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Becca’s Vinegar Group Called the FDA Ozempic Update in 2023

Becca sent me the FDA press release at 6:14 a.m. with seventeen exclamation points and a screenshot of a post she made in October 2023 saying almost exactly the same thing. She runs a Facebook group called Apple Cider Vinegar Stories They Tried to Bury, and she has been waiting for this Wednesday morning since roughly the Obama administration.

The new guidance, for anyone not on Becca’s distribution list, tightens the rules around the semaglutide shots — the ones every cousin you have is suddenly on and every cousin’s husband is quietly on too. The FDA wants more long-term safety data, more pharmacist disclosure, more labeling about what happens when you stop. Becca read this as “the FDA admitted vinegar works.” That is, technically, not what the document says. But I see her point and so does she.

Here is where I’m coming from. I have four children. I have lost the same eight pounds since 2019, and I have done it the slow honest way: bone broth, long walks, raw garlic when I feel a wobble, and a tablespoon of mother-of-vinegar before anything I’m nervous about. Nobody handed me a pen with a needle in it. Nobody told me the side effect of being thin was that your face also has to leave.

My sister-in-law Jenna, who works the front desk at a pediatric urgent care and is basically a nurse, has been telling me for two years that the shot patients come in for their kids’ appointments and you can smell something on them. She calls it “the medicine smell.” I asked what it smells like and she said, without hesitating, “warm pennies and giving up.” I am not making that up. She said it twice and then she said it a third time to make sure I wrote it down.

Becca’s group has been keeping a spreadsheet. There are 340 entries now. Things people report losing on the shot in addition to weight: hair, the ability to enjoy a peach, their grandmother’s gravy recipe (the brain just lets it go, apparently), the desire to garden, eyebrow density, the smell of a campfire, and in 41 separate entries, “the joy.” The joy column is its own tab. The FDA did not address the joy column. The FDA never does.

I am not here to judge anyone. I have a friend on it. I love her. I will say that when she came over for soup last Tuesday she took two sips, set her spoon down like it had betrayed her personally, and explained — with the calm of a hostage — that food is now a “concept” to her. I make that soup with marrow bones I save in the chest freezer for nine months. It is not a concept. It is a soup. It is, frankly, the soup.

What Becca and I agree on — and what I think the new guidance is gently, federally, finally confirming — is that we were not designed to outsource hunger. Hunger is information. Hunger says “you skipped lunch” or “you need magnesium” or “the children are about to fight each other, eat something before you have to intervene.” When you turn the volume on hunger all the way down, you can still hear the children fight. You just can’t do anything about it, because you’re staring at the kettle thinking about warm pennies.

A woman in the group — I don’t know her, she goes by HeatherK1982, she has a profile picture of a heron — posted a really beautiful thing yesterday. She said the body keeps a ledger. She said the shot doesn’t pay the ledger, it just hides the bill. I screenshot it. I sent it to Jenna. Jenna sent back three sparkle emojis and the word “exactly,” which from Jenna is basically a peer-reviewed paper with a foreword.

So Becca is having people over Saturday to celebrate the guidance. She is making a drink with raw apple cider vinegar, raw honey, and shaved ginger that she is calling, with full chest, “a corrective tonic.” I’m bringing the soup. Cleo is coming. Marlene is threatening not to come, which means she is coming and bringing a casserole nobody asked for. The FDA didn’t invite us, but the guidance, in a real and quiet way, is for us. We have been ready since 2019. We have been ready since the peach.

HHS Froze the Childcare Money. The Word for It Was ‘Pause.’

Margaret Thorne
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HHS Froze the Childcare Money. The Word for It Was ‘Pause.’

What do we call it when a federal agency reaches into five state budgets, pulls out ten billion dollars earmarked for daycare slots and food assistance and keeping the lights on for low-income families, and announces — in a press release pitched at the emotional register of a dentist’s rescheduling text — that the money has merely been paused?

I was in Georgetown Friday at Eliza’s, a small dinner, eight people, the kind of evening where the rosemary is from the garden and the politics is from everywhere. There was a lobbyist there I’ll describe only as bipartisan, which is how he describes himself when the recorder is on and how I describe him when it isn’t. Someone brought up the freeze between the first course and the second. The lobbyist set down his fork and said the word “review.” Then he said it again. He said it as if saying it twice made it a sentence.

A review, he explained, is not a freeze. A pause is not a cut. The money has not been taken away; it has been — and here he made a gesture I have seen at every Washington dinner since the second Bush administration, a kind of horizontal smoothing motion, as if calming a small dog — held. I asked him whether the daycare in Dayton that closes next month because its subsidy didn’t arrive understood the distinction between a hold and a cut. He examined his cufflink. Eliza, who has known me since 1997 and has developed a tone for these moments, said, “Margaret, please.”

Please what, exactly. Please don’t notice that a verb is doing the work a policy used to have to do. Please pretend, between the lamb and the cheese, that ten billion dollars in childcare and family support has been gently set on a shelf, where it waits, patient and unbothered, while the children whose mothers can no longer afford to drop them off wait too. Please respect the agency’s preferred terminology. Please pass the salt.

I read the HHS release three times Saturday morning. It is a small marvel of the form. Nothing is cut. Nothing is denied. Funds are being “reviewed for alignment.” States are being “engaged.” A “recalibration period” is “underway.” The release contains the word “families” six times and the word “temporary” four times and the word “ten billion” zero times, because numbers, you understand, are vulgar. Numbers tell you what the verbs are trying to hide.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to have professional opinions about how regimes phrase things, called me Sunday. She has been reading a great many internal memos lately, in her line, and she said the thing that struck her was how confident the language was. Not defensive. Not hedging. The memos of an administration that does not expect to be asked. “They’ve stopped writing for history,” she said. “They’re writing for the next press cycle, and they’ve correctly assessed that the press cycle is four days.”

Four days is, in fact, generous. The freeze was announced Friday afternoon. By Monday morning the cable shows had moved to Davos, where our betters were “reimagining the social contract” from a chalet, and to a bank’s quarterly earnings, which exceeded expectations, as banks’ earnings now do as a matter of municipal routine. The five states whose budgets were quietly disassembled did not make the chyron. The daycare in Dayton did not make the chyron. The chyron, on Monday, was a man in a fleece vest explaining synergy.

What I want to know, and what the bipartisan lobbyist could not tell me between the lamb and the tarte, is this: at what specific point did we agree that the executive branch could withhold ten billion dollars in appropriated funds and call it a pause, and that the rest of us would call it a pause back, and that the children whose subsidies evaporated would call it whatever they call things when nobody is asking them? It was not a vote. I would remember a vote. It was a verb, and we accepted the verb, and the verb did the rest.

Eliza served a pear thing at the end. It was excellent. The lobbyist asked for the recipe. We talked, by then, about something else.

Tuesday Is Cancelled in Owen County. The Superintendent Read the Room.

Hal Cranston
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Tuesday Is Cancelled in Owen County. The Superintendent Read the Room.

SPENCER, IN — Owen County Schools Superintendent Dale Henneker confirmed Friday afternoon that all six district buildings will be closed Tuesday regardless of the outcome of Monday night’s College Football Playoff Championship, citing ‘a realistic assessment of who would actually show up.’

The decision came after a brief Thursday-evening conference call among district administrators that lasted approximately eleven minutes, nine of which Henneker later said were spent confirming that nobody on the line disagreed. The closure, he clarified in a follow-up note to parents, is not a celebration day, nor a mourning day. ‘It’s a day,’ he wrote. ‘We are not assigning it a mood.’

Brenda Yost, who has worked the morning shift at the Casey’s General Store on State Road 46 for nineteen years, said the move tracked with what she’d been hearing since Friday. ‘Half my regulars told me they were calling in sick Tuesday anyway,’ Yost said, refilling a coffee carafe with the patience of someone who has watched this town react to a lot of things. ‘The other half retired in November.’

By Sunday evening, First Farmers Bank, Spencer Family Dental, and the Owen County Recorder’s office had all posted handwritten notices indicating they would likewise be closed Tuesday. The Dollar General, reached for comment, said it was a corporate matter and they would ‘see what Monday looks like.’

Rev. Marlene Tuggle, of First Methodist, moved Monday’s MLK Day community breakfast up to 7 a.m. — an hour earlier than usual — so that the forty-three attendees could, in her words, ‘observe, eat, and still get to the television.’ Tuggle, who is a Purdue graduate, declined to say where she planned to be at kickoff.

Tanner Beech, an eighth grader at Owen Valley Middle, said he supported the closure on principle. ‘Either we win and nobody’s doing math,’ Beech said outside the Spencer Public Library, ‘or we lose and nobody should be doing math.’

One school board member, Curtis Diggins, abstained from the informal Thursday agreement, telling Henneker that the closure ‘sets a precedent.’ Henneker reportedly responded that Diggins was correct, and that the precedent had been set in 1987, when the boys’ basketball team made it to semi-state and nobody bothered showing up to first period the morning after.

The Spencer Volunteer Fire Department has voted to remain on call. A duty captain reached Sunday night noted that fires, unlike Tuesdays, are not optional, though he conceded the truck bay television would ‘be on, obviously.’

As of Sunday evening, the only Owen County institution publicly committed to operating a full Tuesday schedule was the Spencer post office, which is federal, and which a clerk acknowledged would ‘technically be open’ — in the same tone people use to describe a distant cousin.

Broadcast Cut Away From Third-and-Goal to Film a Pop Star Eat a Pretzel

Duke Holloway
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Broadcast Cut Away From Third-and-Goal to Film a Pop Star Eat a Pretzel

Third-and-goal, four minutes on the clock, my recliner one notch off horizontal, and the broadcast cut to a forty-second close-up of a pop singer in a luxury suite examining a soft pretzel like it was the Shroud of Turin. I do not know her name. My grandson Cole knows her name and was disappointed that I did not. I told him I have a finite amount of brain and I am saving it for the snap count.

By the time we came back to the field, the play was over, the ball was on the one, and the sideline reporter was telling us the singer had “flown in directly from Melbourne” as if this were relevant to the down and distance. The pretzel had mustard on it. They showed it twice. They did not show the third-and-goal twice. They did not show the third-and-goal even once.

I called Ray Kowalczyk during the commercial. Ray watches with his sound off because he says the announcers “talk like they’re getting paid by the syllable,” which they are. Ray didn’t even know there had been a third-and-goal. Ray thought the game was still in the second quarter. Ray was, in his own way, having a better Sunday than I was.

Then came the celebrity cam graphic — an actual graphic, with a frame around it, like a wanted poster — and they cycled through six people in suites I’m supposed to recognize. A quarterback’s girlfriend. A guy from a streaming show. A second guy from a different streaming show. Somebody’s father. A podcaster. I don’t know who the podcaster was but I could tell because his microphone was bigger than his head and he was nodding at something nobody had said.

Coach DiMaggio used to make us run a forty for looking at the cheerleaders during a water break. Coach DiMaggio would have set the entire production truck on fire and then run the production truck for cutting away from a goal-line stand. Coach DiMaggio believed, with the conviction of a man who’d seen combat in Korea, that if you were not looking at the football you were betraying the football, and the football would remember.

The parlay graphic came up next. A nice young man in a blazer told me that 78% of the action on a prop bet involving “first player to gesture toward the crowd” had come in on the home team’s tight end, who was, at that moment, gesturing toward the crowd. They went to commercial. I went to the kitchen. I came back. They had cut, again, to the singer. She was no longer holding the pretzel. They showed where the pretzel had been.

My son-in-law Petey says I don’t understand the modern broadcast because the modern broadcast “isn’t a game, it’s an event,” and the game is one of many things happening at the event, along with the brand activations and the courtside-equivalent-celebrities and the betting interface and what he keeps calling the “social conversation.” I asked Petey what the social conversation was saying about third-and-goal. He checked his phone. He said the social conversation was discussing the pretzel.

I’m not asking for much. I’m asking the people getting paid eleven million dollars a year to show me football to show me football. When the ball is snapped, point the camera at the ball. When the ball is in the air, point the camera at the ball. When a man is running, point it at the man. Save the celebrity-in-the-suite cutaway for after the whistle, the way the Lord and CBS intended back when Pat Summerall would mention the weather and let the rest breathe. You don’t need to fill the silence. The silence was the game.

They went into overtime. I missed the kick. They were showing the singer hugging somebody. Cole told me it was “a moment.” I told Cole the kick was a moment. He looked at me the way you look at an old man who has not yet accepted that the world has moved on without permission.

Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.

The Crowds Marched Saturday. The Permits Were in Order.

Margaret Thorne
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The Crowds Marched Saturday. The Permits Were in Order.

What do you call a protest that ends on time, files its paperwork in triplicate, and breaks for lunch at a Sweetgreen with a corporate diversity statement on the wall? You call it Saturday, and you call it a credit to our institutions, and you mark in your planner that civic engagement has been observed.

I was at Eliza’s on Friday night, the one before the marches, and the bipartisan lobbyist was there again, in his good cardigan, examining the underside of a serving spoon as if it owed him something. Eliza had made a thing with leeks. Everyone agreed the leeks were transcendent.

The conversation, as it does now, arrived at the question of whether one would be going. Going where, asked the actuary from across the table, and Eliza said the marches, and the actuary said which one, and that, as it turned out, was the entire problem.

There were, by my count from the kitchen, four separate marches in our city Saturday — one for Venezuela, one against the Iran posture, one for trans rights, and one, vaguely, against the administration as a general proposition. Each had its own Slack channel. Each had a designated medic. The Venezuela people, I am told, had vetted their chants with counsel.

My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and who has, in three decades, never been wrong about which way a city is breathing, walked the route on Connecticut and came home with a hot chocolate and a complicated mood. They were lovely, she said. They were so lovely. There were people holding signs in seven languages. The signs rhymed.

It is unfashionable to point out that the largest organized expression of civic displeasure in a generation arrived this weekend with a press kit, a parade marshal, and a designated photographer named Sasha, and that the demands, when assembled, formed a kind of Venn diagram whose central overlap was the word ‘please.’ I am unfashionable by trade.

The bipartisan lobbyist, asked if he would be going, said he had a thing. He always has a thing. The actuary said he supported the spirit. Eliza said she had RSVP’d to the morning one and would catch the afternoon one if it didn’t rain. It rained.

I am not against marching. I have marched. I was marched as a child, by a mother who marched, and her mother before her marched in shoes that did not survive the marching. What I am against is the new arrangement, in which one marches in the morning, brunches at noon, posts the photograph at three, and feels by dinner that the matter has been handled.

A friend who teaches civics — actual civics, to actual high schoolers, in a public school whose name I have been asked not to print — told me the question she got Monday was whether attending the march qualified for community service hours. She said yes. She said this with the tone of a woman who has run out of better answers.

Saturday was, by every available metric, a success. The crowds were enormous. The permits were in order. The chants were on theme. Nobody, anywhere, got hurt, and nothing, anywhere, was decided. We left the leeks recipe in the group text. We called it civic. We asked Eliza if she’d send the recipe again, since the first time, it seems, got lost.

Severance Package Includes Free Trial Of AI Tool That Replaced Recipient

Lena Wexler
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Severance Package Includes Free Trial Of AI Tool That Replaced Recipient

REDMOND, WA — Software engineer Marcus Tien learned Thursday morning that his eleven-year career at a major cloud-services firm had ended, and that as part of his exit benefits he would receive a complimentary six-month subscription to Copilot Forge, the generative-AI coding assistant cited by name in the company’s internal memo as the reason his position was no longer necessary.

The firm, one of four flagship tech companies to announce mass layoffs this week, eliminated 7,400 roles Thursday in what executives described as a “strategic reallocation of compute spend.” In the same release, the company reaffirmed its commitment to a previously announced $80 billion AI infrastructure buildout, a figure roughly equal to the lifetime earnings of every employee being walked to the parking lot.

“We are not cutting jobs, we are unlocking capacity,” said Priya Anand, vice president of People Velocity, in a 14-second video addressed to staff and apparently filmed from inside a moving SUV. Anand declined to clarify whether the capacity being unlocked referred to office square footage, payroll, or the engineers themselves, who as of Thursday afternoon had considerable capacity unlocked indeed.

According to the severance documentation reviewed by departing employees, the AI subscription perk entitles former staffers to 500 free monthly prompts of the model trained, in part, on the codebases they wrote. A FAQ included with the offer notes that the assistant “may occasionally hallucinate function names” and recommends, where possible, that users consult a senior engineer — a role the company has now reduced by approximately 38 percent.

A spokesperson for the firm clarified that the layoffs were unrelated to financial performance, citing record quarterly earnings and a stock price that rose another 4.2 percent within minutes of the announcement. Analysts at the boutique research desk Cantilever Group said the move was consistent with sector-wide patterns. “Investors want to hear two things,” said Cantilever partner Devon Lossi. “That you are spending unimaginable sums on AI, and that you are spending nothing on anyone who knows how it works. The companies threading that needle are the ones being rewarded.”

Industry-wide, more than 34,000 tech workers have been let go in the first sixteen days of January, the vast majority at firms that simultaneously reported strong earnings and announced expanded AI commitments. At a Tuesday investor call, one CEO described the layoffs as “a difficult but exciting chapter,” a phrase the company’s AI meeting-summarizer subsequently rendered as “a difficult and exciting chapter,” which was then circulated internally as the official version.

Tien, reached by phone Thursday evening, said he had already used his complimentary Copilot Forge access to draft a cover letter for a position at a different cloud-services firm, which on Friday morning announced 4,000 layoffs of its own. He noted that the assistant, when asked to summarize his eleven years of contributions, produced a three-bullet list and a suggestion to add “more impact verbs.”

“It told me to quantify my achievements,” Tien said. “So I told it I built the system that’s now firing me. It marked that as a strong example.”

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