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Just Asking: Is There a Costco for Clemency Now, or Did We Just Invent One on Monday Afternoon?

Margaret Thorne
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Just Asking: Is There a Costco for Clemency Now, or Did We Just Invent One on Monday Afternoon?

Is it still a pardon if you can fit 1,500 of them in the same manila folder? I ask because I spent Monday evening watching the new president sign what his own aides described, with no apparent embarrassment, as a stack — not a list, not a docket, a stack — and I found myself wondering at what point a constitutional mercy becomes a bulk-rate promotional event. Somewhere between pardon number six and pardon number fourteen hundred, the word stops meaning what it used to mean. That seems, to me, worth noticing. Nobody in Washington appears to be noticing.

My friend Eliza hosted a small dinner in Kalorama that night — six people, the good silver, a pork loin she had been threatening to make all month — and the conversation landed, as conversations do now, on whether any of us could name a single historical pardon that was issued in batches of more than twelve. We could not. Someone brought up Carter and the draft dodgers, and someone else correctly pointed out that was a proclamation, not fifteen hundred individual signatures, and the distinction mattered then in a way it apparently does not matter now. The pork loin was excellent. The republic was not.

A bipartisan lobbyist I will not name — he has been a Democrat and a Republican at roughly the same intervals as the rest of the capital — told me over the cheese course that the real innovation here was procedural. “They ran them through like a payroll,” he said, and then made the hand gesture of someone feeding paper into a machine. He found this admirable. He finds most things admirable if they are executed with confidence. I looked at him for a long moment and decided, not for the first time, that the difference between a lobbyist and a sommelier is that the sommelier will at least tell you when something has gone off.

I should say, because someone always writes in to say I haven’t, that I am not sentimental about pardons. Presidents of both parties have used the clemency power to reward donors, protect friends, and paper over inconveniences the Justice Department had the bad manners to uncover. Clinton pardoned Marc Rich. Biden pardoned his son after telling us for a year he would not. The pardon power has been a grubby little instrument for a long time. The question is not whether it has been abused. The question is whether we are now abusing it at wholesale velocity, and whether any of the usual people will find their voices this time.

They will not. I can already tell you the choreography. The senators who sent strongly worded letters in 2021 will discover, in the coming weeks, that they have pressing concerns about the price of eggs. The cable hosts who spent four years telling us January 6 was the hinge of American history will find that the hinge has quietly un-hinged, and will pivot to a segment about TikTok. The op-ed pages will run one angry column, one measured column, and one column by a man who wants you to know that actually this is a healing moment, and then the whole thing will be filed under Things We Did Last Week.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives longer than some of these senators have held their seats, called me Tuesday morning to describe what she called the paperwork implications. She used the phrase “custody of record” four times in six minutes. She wanted to know who, exactly, was responsible for ensuring that each of these 1,500 grants of clemency was properly documented, filed, indexed, and preserved, because from where she was sitting in College Park it looked very much like nobody had been assigned that job, and the stack had simply been handed to an intern with a stapler and a deadline. Judy does not editorialize. Judy was editorializing.

And here is the part that is supposed to make me feel unserious for bringing it up: some of the people pardoned on Monday assaulted police officers. Not metaphorically. On camera. With poles, with flagpoles, with their fists, with bear spray, in one case with a hockey stick, which I mention only because I was told by a friend at Main Justice that the hockey stick detail was in the charging documents and was considered, at the time, relevant. It is now, apparently, not relevant. We have decided it is not relevant. We did this on a Monday, before the parade.

What does it do to a country to say, on the same afternoon, that we are both the nation that prosecutes assaults on federal officers and the nation that erases those prosecutions in a signing ceremony with a commemorative pen? I genuinely want to know. I am not being rhetorical, although I am always being rhetorical. There has to be a cost somewhere. Institutions that are contradicted this loudly, this publicly, and this fast tend to stop functioning in the quiet ways we need them to function — the ways we don’t notice until the day we need them.

The thing I keep coming back to, and I recognize I am a broken record on this, is that civic cowardice has a smell. You can identify it in a room. It smells like the careful throat-clearing of a senator who has decided to “let the process play out,” which is what senators say when they have already decided not to say anything. It smells like a cable segment titled “Unity Moment.” It smells, frankly, like Eliza’s dining room after the candles have burned down and the last guest has explained, earnestly, why he is not going to put his name on anything this year.

I’m told this is the direction the country is heading, and that I should make my peace with it. I will not. I don’t know what a pardon means anymore, I don’t know what an assault on a Capitol police officer means anymore, and I don’t know what any of the strongly worded letters from the last four years were actually for. I am just asking. Someone, somewhere in this town, used to know the answers. I would very much like to meet them before the next stack is signed.

I Watched My Four Children Detox From TikTok in Real Time and By Hour Nine Ember Was Speaking in Full Sentences Again

Brooke Ellery
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I Watched My Four Children Detox From TikTok in Real Time and By Hour Nine Ember Was Speaking in Full Sentences Again

Saturday night at 10:37 p.m. my oldest, Sage, came downstairs holding her phone out in front of her like a dead bird. The screen said something about an error. She was gray in the face. Travis looked up from the seed catalog and said, “Huh,” and then I felt it — a kind of quiet I hadn’t felt in the house since before Ember was born, the sort of quiet that has a temperature.

I knew something was off all week. My sister-in-law Marnie, who runs the front desk at a pediatric office in Greenville and is, functionally, a nurse, had been texting me screenshots from a Telegram channel run by a “neuro-somatic coach” named Dr. Tabor Whitfield, DC, who has been saying for months that the algorithm is siphoning something specific off our children — he calls it “the pineal layer,” and while I can’t find it in any of the anatomy books I own, I also can’t find seed oils in the Bible and we all know how that went.

Hour one of the blackout, the kids behaved like they had a mild flu. Ember (9) lay face down on the kitchen tile and announced that she felt “chemical.” Rowan (11) asked, with real suspicion in his voice, whether the WiFi was “doing it on purpose.” Wren, who is six and has never known a world without a vertical video, curled up inside the laundry basket and stayed there for the duration of what I now understand to be the acute withdrawal phase.

By hour three, Wren had crawled out and was drawing. With a pencil. An actual pencil — the kind with a wood body and a metal collar and a little pink eraser that smells like nothing — on the back of a Tractor Supply receipt. She drew a horse. She has never in her conscious life drawn a horse. I didn’t say anything. You don’t interrupt a horse.

Hour five, Sage went outside. In January. Voluntarily. She stood on the porch with no jacket and looked up for somewhere between four and seven minutes. When she came back in she said, very quietly, “The sky is just up there all the time, huh,” and then poured herself a glass of water without being asked, which is not a thing that happens in this house.

Dinner was venison stew, which I had braced myself to defend against the usual negotiation about what counts as a vegetable versus what counts as “wet meat.” Instead, all four children ate it. Ember ate a beet. She has not willingly ingested a beet since she was weaning, and even then she preferred to rub them into the high-chair cushion. I watched her chew. It was like watching a time-lapse of soil rebuilding.

Hour nine is when the sentences came back. Ember had been communicating for roughly fourteen months in what I can only describe as a kind of gutturally-abbreviated TikTok-ese — “it’s giving,” “no because,” “bestie slay” deployed as greeting, farewell, and, once, in place of “thank you” to an EMT. At hour nine she looked at me across the couch and said, “Mom, if Dad brought the goats in because of the ice, where is the water bowl going to go?” A subordinate clause. A hypothetical. Travis actually teared up.

I posted about all of this in my Facebook group — Dopamine Damage and the Mothers Who Saw It Coming, about nine thousand of us now — and within forty minutes I had twenty-seven mothers confirming nearly identical results. A woman in Boise said her fourteen-year-old made sustained eye contact for the first time since sixth grade. Another said her daughter asked what a library card was and meant it sincerely. One mom in Ohio said her son apologized, unprompted, for something he did in 2022.

Travis was, to his credit, trying to be skeptical. He kept saying, “Brooke, it’s been twelve hours,” as if twelve hours isn’t enough to see real cellular change. I reminded him that a proper liver flush works in six and that the body, when given even a sliver of quiet, will start throwing off what it’s been holding. He said, “I don’t think TikTok goes into your liver,” which is exactly the kind of thing a man who has never done a castor oil pack would say.

And then around noon on Sunday, TikTok came back. I watched it happen in real time. Ember’s sentence structure collapsed by 12:07. By 12:14 she had called Rowan “so cringe coded” for eating a clementine. Sage was back on the couch with her phone held an inch from her face like she was reading a scroll from a burning monastery. Wren’s pencil was already gone. I am not being dramatic when I say I could feel the pineal layer thinning again; it has a quality, like a draft under a door.

Here’s what I’m taking from this weekend, and I want to say it plainly: the federal government accidentally did more for my children’s nervous systems in twelve hours than I have managed with four years of sourdough, grass-fed ghee, and a red-light panel that cost as much as our first car. I am not saying a TikTok ban is healthcare. I’m saying I’ve seen the data, and the data is my own living room, and the data ate a beet.

So we are instituting a household TikTok Sabbath — sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday, no exceptions, phones in the bread box — a framework I’m adapting from a newsletter my friend Poppy forwarded me called Ancestral Rhythms for the Overstimulated Mother. I’m opening it up to twelve local families first. There’s already a waitlist. Ember is, as I type this, watching a video of a silent woman pointing at cabinets, and I have about six more days to prepare her, spiritually, to miss it.

The Lions Were a Brand. The Commanders Were a Football Team. The Scoreboard Picked a Side.

Duke Holloway
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The Lions Were a Brand. The Commanders Were a Football Team. The Scoreboard Picked a Side.

My neighbor Ray Kowalczyk called me at 11:42 last night, which is late for Ray, to inform me that the Detroit Lions had in fact not manifested their destiny. He said it exactly like that, in the specific tone Ray reserves for moments when the universe has confirmed something he suspected all along. Then he asked if I’d seen the final score. I had. Commanders 45, Lions 31, at Ford Field, in a game Detroit was supposed to win by the sheer accumulated weight of its own press clippings.

For three years now we have been told, mostly by people paid to tell us things, that Detroit was Different. They had a coach who bit kneecaps. They had a quarterback with a redemption arc you could set to acoustic guitar. They had a general manager who looked like he chopped wood for fun and a front office that leaked grit the way other franchises leak salary-cap problems. They had a Hard Knocks. They had a docuseries. They had a whole line of New Era caps with the old logo because the old logo was, apparently, emotionally load-bearing.

What they did not have, on Saturday night in the divisional round, was anybody who could tackle Jayden Daniels in the open field.

I will say this for the kid, and I don’t say it easily because I’ve spent the better part of my adult life watching rookie quarterbacks get eaten alive by the second weekend in January. Daniels is twenty-four years old and he plays the position like a man who has been paying his own electric bill for a while. He stood in the pocket. He threw on time. When the pocket collapsed he ran the way you’re supposed to run, which is toward the first-down marker and not toward a highlight. Coach DiMaggio used to say a quarterback’s job was to be the least interesting man on the field for sixty minutes, and Daniels was about as interesting as a glass of water, which in this case is the highest compliment I know how to pay.

Jared Goff, meanwhile, threw the football to the wrong-colored jerseys three separate times and fumbled for good measure. I don’t enjoy writing that. Goff is a professional and by all accounts a decent man who has done hard work to get where he is. But there is a thing that happens to quarterbacks when their entire city decides they are a symbol, and what happens is they stop being a quarterback and start being a symbol, and symbols are easier to sack than quarterbacks.

The kneecap-biting bit had an expiration date and nobody in Detroit read the label. It was funny in 2022. It was a little tired in 2023. By January of 2025 it was a t-shirt, and t-shirts don’t win playoff games. There is a specific kind of franchise that confuses locker-room culture with locker-room content, and the tell is always the same — the documentary crew gets there before the Lombardi Trophy does.

Coach DiMaggio, who I’ve mentioned in this column maybe four hundred times and will mention four hundred more, had a rule about this. He didn’t let reporters in the locker room until Thursday. His reasoning, which I am paraphrasing because he tended to season his reasoning with language you can’t print, was that a team that talks about itself becomes a team that listens to itself, and a team that listens to itself stops listening to the coach. I thought about Coach DiMaggio around the third interception.

The Commanders, for whatever it’s worth, showed up in the uniforms of a football team rather than the marketing materials of a lifestyle. Dan Quinn didn’t have a catchphrase. Nobody was biting anybody’s anything. They blocked well and tackled harder and ran a rookie quarterback around the yard like he’d been doing it for ten years, which in a sense he has, just at different addresses. There was no arc. There was no story. There was a game, and they won it.

I don’t want to be the guy who tells you the Lions lost because they believed their own content. Football is more complicated than that and also less complicated than that. They lost because Goff turned it over and the defense couldn’t get off the field on third down and Aidan Hutchinson wasn’t there because his leg is in pieces from October. Fine. All true. But somewhere underneath the Xs and Os is a thing I’ve watched happen to franchises for fifty years, which is that when the bit gets bigger than the ball, the ball tends to find somebody else’s hands.

Ray called back this morning, because Ray always calls back. He wanted to know if I thought the Lions window was closed. I told him windows in the NFL are closed until they’re open and open until they’re closed, and that anybody who tells you otherwise is selling a podcast. He grunted. Then he told me his grandson had ordered something called a “Grit Szn” hoodie off Instagram in November, which has now become, in Ray’s words, a forty-dollar dust rag.

Denise is bringing chili over for the late games. She says the recipe is from a podcast.

TikTok Ban Upheld; Teens Immediately Decamp to App Literally Called ‘Little Red Book,’ Which Congress Swears Is Fine

Lena Wexler
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TikTok Ban Upheld; Teens Immediately Decamp to App Literally Called ‘Little Red Book,’ Which Congress Swears Is Fine

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Hours after the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law permitting a federal ban on TikTok, roughly 3.4 million American teenagers had already downloaded Xiaohongshu, an app whose name translates to ‘Little Red Book’ and whose terms of service are available exclusively in Mandarin. Within the same news cycle, several of them had posted dance videos captioned ‘hi chinese spies, my dad’s SSN is in the caption.’ Congress, which spent two years warning that TikTok was a national security threat because the Chinese government could theoretically access American user data, released a statement calling the migration ‘not ideal.’

The ruling itself was a tidy piece of legal reasoning. The Court concluded that forcing ByteDance to divest from TikTok did not violate the First Amendment because Americans remained free to post brain-rot content on any number of other surveillance platforms, including several owned by a man who currently sits two desks away from the Resolute Desk. The opinion noted, in a footnote, that the ruling addressed only this specific app and did not in any way constitute a broader theory about how data flows across international borders in 2025, a question the Court politely declined to answer on the grounds that nobody on the bench uses the internet.

‘There’s a prevailing assumption in policy circles that the problem with TikTok is fundamentally about one company in one country,’ said Dr. Priya Venkatesh, a senior fellow at the Center for Applied Digital Sovereignty. ‘The problem with TikTok is that it works. You can swap out the flag on the server farm and the algorithm will still know that you cried at a dog video in October of 2022. That is now a permanent feature of being alive.’

Xiaohongshu, for its part, appears to have been completely unprepared for its sudden elevation to the number-one free app in the App Store. By Friday afternoon, its trending page featured a baffled Shanghai skincare influencer trying to understand why approximately 900,000 Americans had shown up in her comments calling her ‘my Chinese spy’ and asking for homework help. A second creator, a farmer in Yunnan province, reportedly gained 2.1 million followers overnight by posting a single video of a duck.

The environmental footprint of the migration has already raised eyebrows in a sector of the tech industry that occasionally pretends to care about such things. Shifting a user base of 170 million people across server infrastructure in roughly seventy-two hours represents, by one back-of-the-envelope estimate, the carbon equivalent of flying every member of Congress to Davos and back, which is coincidentally something many of them were planning to do anyway.

Meta and Google, both of which spent the past eighteen months quietly lobbying for the divestiture law while publicly maintaining that they had no opinion on the matter, released near-identical statements welcoming users to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, platforms that have spent the last four years successfully cloning TikTok’s product while failing to clone any of the things that made it fun. Instagram’s head of product, Jasper Klein, called the ruling ‘an exciting inflection point for creator-first storytelling,’ a sentence that has never meant anything and will never mean anything.

Generational fault lines emerged within hours. Americans over the age of 45 largely greeted the ruling as a long-overdue victory against Chinese influence, citing concerns about data harvesting they had learned about from a Facebook post they did not verify. Americans under the age of 25, who had grown up assuming that every app on their phone was quietly selling their location to the highest bidder as a baseline condition of existence, interpreted the ruling as yet another instance of adults confiscating something because they didn’t understand it and felt left out.

‘My mom asked me if I was worried about the Chinese government having my data,’ said Maya Ortiz, 17, a high school junior in Phoenix who declined to give the name of her new preferred platform because ‘you’ll just ban that one too.’ ‘I told her the Chinese government has been watching me eat Hot Cheetos in bed since I was twelve. I’ve made peace with it. She’s the one who still uses Temu.’

At a press conference outside the Capitol, Senator Roy Hackett (R-Tenn.), one of the bill’s chief architects, celebrated the ruling as ‘a decisive win for American digital sovereignty’ before pulling out his own phone to record a victory selfie on an app that, per its own disclosures, shares user data with at least 1,400 third-party advertising partners across eleven jurisdictions. When asked whether he was concerned about the sudden American embrace of Xiaohongshu, Hackett squinted, said ‘the what,’ and returned to his selfie.

ByteDance indicated it would continue fighting the ruling while also preparing, as a contingency, to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to a consortium that reportedly includes a private equity firm, two sovereign wealth funds, and a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who last year tried to buy the Mona Lisa and turn it into an NFT. National security experts have so far declined to comment on whether this outcome is meaningfully better than the status quo.

The Federal Trade Commission, which could theoretically regulate the underlying data practices that made TikTok a concern in the first place, was not available for comment, as its entire digital privacy division had been reassigned earlier in the week to a new cost-cutting task force tasked with reviewing whether government printers should be allowed to print in color.

For most users, the transition has been seamless in the way that all transitions within the attention economy are seamless: a new app, a new feed, a new algorithm learning their preferences by Thursday. By Friday night, Xiaohongshu’s For You page was already serving American users videos of other American users complaining that Xiaohongshu’s For You page wasn’t as good as TikTok’s, a content loop so efficient it may in fact be the point.

Somewhere in a hearing room in the Longworth Building, a staffer was reportedly drafting a memo titled ‘Little Red Book: Possible Concerns.’

Bob Uecker Did 54 Years in the Booth Without Ever Calling Himself a Storyteller

Duke Holloway
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Bob Uecker Did 54 Years in the Booth Without Ever Calling Himself a Storyteller

Ray Kowalczyk called me at 6:40 this morning, which is how I know somebody died. Ray doesn’t call before nine for good news. He said, “Duke. Uecker,” and then he didn’t say anything else for a long time, because Ray is from a generation that understood a pause on the telephone was allowed to do work. Bob Uecker was ninety years old, and he spent fifty-four of those years in a booth in Milwaukee telling you what was happening on a baseball field, and he did it without once, to my knowledge, referring to himself as a storyteller.

You don’t know how rare that is anymore until you try to find a man under fifty in a headset who hasn’t described his job that way. They all say it now. They say it on their podcasts, which they all have. They say it in the little sit-down interviews they do with each other where one guy in a quarter-zip asks another guy in a quarter-zip about his “process.” Uecker’s process was showing up, knowing the lineup, and being funny on purpose without making it the whole point. The whole point was the ballgame. Imagine.

Here is what Uecker understood that nobody under forty seems to: the broadcast is a window, not a mirror. You are pointing at something. You are not the something. When Uecker made a joke — and he made about four hundred thousand of them — the joke was always aimed outward, at himself, at his own .200 lifetime average, at the cheap seats in the back of the upper deck he pretended he was sitting in. He did not aim the joke at the audience and wait for them to laugh at themselves for getting the reference. There is a difference. The difference is approximately forty years of American culture.

My old coach, Sal DiMaggio, used to say that the mark of a professional was that you could not tell when he was having a bad day. Uecker was on the air for more than half a century and I could not tell you one game where he was phoning it in. Not one. And the Brewers, let us be honest, gave him ample material for phoning it in. Entire decades of material. He showed up for Robin Yount and he showed up for the 1998 club and he showed up for whatever was happening in July of 2003, and he sounded, every single time, like a man who was genuinely delighted to be telling you about a 2-1 count in the bottom of the sixth.

My grandson, who is eleven and a good kid despite everything working against him, asked me last year why old broadcasts sound “empty.” I said what do you mean empty. He said there’s nothing on the screen. No graphics crawling, no scorebug blinking, no split-screen of a guy in a studio in Bristol reacting to the pitch. I told him that’s what a ballgame used to look like, and the empty part was where your own brain went. He thought about that and then asked if he could have his iPad back. Fair enough. I take the small victories.

The thing I want to say about Uecker, and I am going to say it whether you want me to or not because this is my column, is that he was funny without being cruel, and that is the rarest combination in American life right now. Every comedian on a podcast is mean. Every sideline reporter has a brand. Every halftime show is a pitch deck. Uecker made fun of himself, of the beer, of the bratwurst, of the weather in April in Wisconsin, which deserves to be made fun of. He didn’t make fun of the players for being bad, and the players, believe me, were frequently bad.

Petey Corrigan, who you may remember from previous dispatches as the only man in our Thursday diner group who still subscribes to a physical newspaper, said the thing I wish I’d said. He said, “Uecker was the last guy who sounded like he worked for the team and not for himself.” That’s it. That’s the whole obituary. You can put down the pen. Everybody in a booth now is auditioning — for a network job, for a studio gig, for a line of merchandise, for a documentary about their own voice. Uecker was just calling the game.

I will allow that some of this is me being an old man yelling at a cloud-based subscription service, and I accept that charge without contesting it. But I would like the record to show that the cloud deserves some of the yelling. Nobody at ESPN is going to spend fifty-four years in one city. Nobody at FanDuel is going to develop an affection for a team so deep that their voice cracks in August. The whole architecture of modern sports media is designed to prevent a Bob Uecker from ever happening again, and then, when one of them dies, everybody at those same networks does a ninety-second package about what a treasure he was. They do not see the contradiction. They are not equipped to.

Ray called me back at noon. He’d been listening to old clips on the YouTube, which is something he recently learned how to do and which he now treats like a research library. He wanted to read me a line Uecker used to do about a juuust a bit outside. I said Ray, I know the line. He said I know you know the line, I’m reading it to you anyway. We sat on the phone for a minute and neither of us said anything, which, again, is allowed.

Rest him. Rest the voice. Rest the man who understood that the job was the job and not the platform for the job. They are not making any more of him, and the machinery that used to make him has been quietly dismantled while we were all arguing about whether a linebacker should have a skincare line.

Denise is bringing over a tuna casserole tonight. She says it’s from a cookbook her mother had, which, in this house, counts as a citation.

Just Asking: If Red No. 3 Was a Carcinogen in 1990, What Exactly Have We Been Eating for Thirty-Five Years?

Margaret Thorne
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Just Asking: If Red No. 3 Was a Carcinogen in 1990, What Exactly Have We Been Eating for Thirty-Five Years?

Do you remember where you were when the federal government decided, after three and a half decades of quiet deliberation, that maybe Americans shouldn’t be eating a confirmed carcinogen in their strawberry milk? I was at a dinner party in Cleveland Park, holding a glass of something pink my friend Eliza had handed me with the confidence of a woman who has never once in her life read an ingredient label.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, meaning the announcement, not the drink. “They finally banned it.” Eliza is a very smart woman. She runs a nonprofit that I cannot, for legal and personal reasons, describe more specifically. And yet here she was, toasting the Food and Drug Administration for catching up to a scientific consensus that predates the first Bush administration. I smiled. I sipped. I thought about what else we are being asked to applaud lately.

Let us review the timeline, because nobody else seems willing to. In 1990, the FDA banned Red Dye No. 3 in cosmetics, having concluded — their word, not mine — that it caused cancer in laboratory rats. You could not, after 1990, legally put this substance on your face. You could, however, continue to put it in your child’s birthday cake, your maraschino cherries, your pink-frosted animal crackers, and roughly four thousand other products aimed with laser precision at the under-ten demographic. This was the official policy of the United States government for thirty-five years.

I am just asking questions. But I am asking them loudly.

At the same dinner party — and I swear I am not making this up — I found myself cornered near the cheese board by a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, because he has worked for enough administrations that the term has stopped meaning anything. He told me, with the weary smile of a man who has been paid to know better, that the dye ban was “a layup.” A layup. That was the word he used. Meaning: easy, obvious, politically costless, the kind of thing you do when you want to look like you are doing something without actually inconveniencing anyone with money.

He is, of course, correct. And that is precisely the problem.

Because if banning a dye the government itself declared carcinogenic in 1990 is a layup in 2025, what exactly have we been doing for thirty-five years? Whose grandchildren were we protecting? Whose campaign donors were we not? My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has a historian’s unsentimental relationship with paper trails, tells me the FDA’s own scientific record on this dye has not meaningfully changed since the Reagan administration. The chemistry did not evolve. The rats did not file an appeal. What changed is that someone, somewhere, finally decided the political cost of saying no to the confectioners’ association was lower than the political cost of saying no to a generation of parents who have learned to read labels on their phones in the cereal aisle.

This is not a victory. This is a confession delivered thirty-five years late, wrapped in a press release, and handed to a press corps that will dutifully describe it as a win for consumer safety. A win. As though the score were tied.

I am old enough to remember when a federal agency admitting it had allowed a known carcinogen into the food supply of American children for a third of a century would have been a scandal. Hearings would have been held. Someone, somewhere, would have resigned — not in disgrace necessarily, but in the old-fashioned sense that public servants used to occasionally feel shame. Instead we get a triumphant tweet from the commissioner and a photograph of a smiling pediatrician in a lab coat, and the conversation moves on to whatever phone app the Chinese are now using to steal our recipes.

Eliza, to her credit, pushed back when I said this. She told me I was being cynical, that progress is progress, that the perfect is the enemy of the good. These are the phrases well-meaning people say at dinner parties when they would prefer not to examine the machinery that produced the outcome they are celebrating. I told her I was not being cynical. I was being literal. The government poisoned us on a schedule set by lobbyists, and now the government would like a round of applause for stopping.

And here is what I cannot stop thinking about, the question that followed me home in the cab and is following me still. If Red No. 3 was the layup — the obvious one, the cost-free one, the one everybody in the room agreed on decades ago — then what is in the cabinet marked HARD? What substances, what approvals, what quiet accommodations are sitting on some regulator’s desk right now, waiting for the politics to get easier? What will our grandchildren ban in 2060 and congratulate themselves for? What are we drinking tonight that some future commissioner will, with great fanfare, decide we should not have been drinking?

I do not know. Nobody at the dinner party knew. The bipartisan lobbyist knew, I suspect, but he was already at the coat closet.

I am, as always, just asking. But a country that needs thirty-five years to act on its own science is not a country with a regulatory problem. It is a country with a nerve problem. And the nerve, I regret to report, is not growing back.

The Long Snapper Has a Podcast Called ‘Snap Judgment’ and I Think That’s Where I Get Off

Duke Holloway
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The Long Snapper Has a Podcast Called ‘Snap Judgment’ and I Think That’s Where I Get Off

Ray Kowalczyk called me Tuesday at 6:47 in the morning, which is the hour Ray calls when something has truly broken his brain. I answered because I know that hour, and I know that voice, and I know that if I don’t pick up he will leave a voicemail of approximately eleven minutes in which he forgets halfway through that he is leaving a voicemail. What Ray wanted to tell me, breathlessly, was that the long snapper for a team I will not name because long snappers deserve a small measure of peace, has launched a podcast. The podcast is called Snap Judgment. It is two hours long. The first episode is about his cold plunge.

We are now at the point in this country where every man who has ever strapped on a helmet, and several who only watched from the sideline holding a clipboard, has a podcast. The quarterback has a podcast. The backup quarterback has a podcast that is mostly about the quarterback. The tight end has a podcast with his brother. The other tight end has a podcast with a different brother. The kicker, God bless him, has a podcast called The Point After, and if you think I’m making that up you have not spent enough time staring into the abyss of the NFL media ecosystem during Divisional Round week.

I looked it up. I counted. Of the twenty-two projected starters in one of this weekend’s playoff games, fourteen have their own podcast, three are regular guests on their teammate’s podcast, and one is contractually prohibited from having a podcast because of an ongoing dispute with a mattress company. That leaves four men still doing their actual jobs without also operating a small media concern out of a converted guest bathroom with a ring light.

My old coach, Sal DiMaggio — not that DiMaggio, a different one, a man who smelled permanently like Bengay and rage — used to say that a football player should have three things to say to a reporter: we played hard, credit to the other guys, on to next week. Four if it was a loss, and the fourth was usually ‘ask coach.’ Sal believed that a man who talked about himself more than fifteen seconds at a stretch was probably also the kind of man who’d fumble in traffic. I think about Sal every time I see a 6-foot-5 defensive end in an Adidas tracksuit explain his morning routine to a microphone shaped like a kidney bean.

The content, if we are being generous and calling it that, is mostly three things. Recovery. Mindset. A thing called ‘building the brand,’ which as far as I can tell means selling a protein powder to a man in Boise who will drink it once and then put the tub in his garage forever. There is occasionally football. Football, on these podcasts, is the thing the athlete does in between explaining why he switched to a copper water bottle.

Dr. Harlan Prestwick — some kind of sports-media academic, I met him once at a banquet where they served chicken that had been threatened rather than cooked — told me last fall that the average active NFL player now generates ‘forty-one minutes of audio content per week during the regular season.’ Forty-one minutes. My father, who coached seventh-grade football for thirty-two years in a mill town, did not generate forty-one minutes of audio content in his entire recorded life, and he was a man with opinions.

My neighbor Petey Corrigan listens to all of them. All of them. Petey is sixty-three, drives a Tacoma, and has somehow convinced himself that knowing the nickname a Jets reserve safety has for his French bulldog is the same thing as understanding football. He came over Sunday to watch with me and, during a third-and-long, leaned in and said, ‘You know, he talked about this exact situation on his pod Wednesday.’ Reader, I turned the television up. I turned Petey down. There is a button for that, and we should use it more.

The thing that truly galls me — and I want to be clear, because I am not against these young men making money, they are one bad hit from selling insurance in Toledo — is that the podcasts are all the same podcast. Two guys. A third guy who laughs. A sponsor read for a sleep app. An ad for a sports book where a man with a voice like unbuttered toast tells you to bet the over on a player’s reception total, a player who is, incidentally, sitting right there on the podcast, nodding.

Divisional Round weekend used to be a sacred thing. Eight teams left, cold stadiums, grown men in face paint, a broadcast crew that knew when to shut up. Now it is a 96-hour bonus-episode content cycle. Every franchise has ‘dropped’ something. The Lions have a Spotify exclusive. The Ravens have a documentary. Somebody’s wife has a lifestyle brand launching Thursday that is timed, and I cannot stress this enough, to her husband’s first playoff start.

Here’s the part I don’t get to say enough, because the column has a tone to keep and I have a reputation to uphold as a man who hates joy: the players themselves are mostly fine. The ones I’ve actually talked to, over forty-some years of this, are craftsmen. They study tape. They ice things. They know the exact angle of their teammate’s hip on a stunt. It’s the machine around them — the agents, the ‘content strategists,’ the 29-year-old producer named Braeden who pitched Snap Judgment over a kombucha — that has turned the sport into a LinkedIn conference with tackling.

So this week, when the Divisional Round kicks off and someone tries to hand you a bonus episode hosted by a second-string guard and his high school friend, my advice is to do what Sal DiMaggio would have done: turn it off, walk outside, and yell at a leaf. The game is still in there somewhere, underneath all the audio. You just have to be willing to sit in a room quietly and watch it, which is apparently a lost art.

Denise is bringing chili Saturday. She says the recipe is from a podcast. I am choosing, for the sake of my marriage and the playoff slate, not to ask which one.

I’ve Shipped 340 Jars of Homemade Tallow Balm to Los Angeles and the Post Office Lady Is Finally Starting to Ask Questions

Brooke Ellery
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I’ve Shipped 340 Jars of Homemade Tallow Balm to Los Angeles and the Post Office Lady Is Finally Starting to Ask Questions

The woman at the Weaverville post office knows me by first name now, which is either a compliment or a flag, I honestly can’t tell anymore. Last Thursday she looked at my stack of flat-rate boxes, each one rattling with amber jars cushioned in organic wool roving, and said, very slowly, “Brooke. Honey. What is in these.” I told her the truth, which is grass-fed beef tallow rendered three times, frankincense, a little calendula from my own garden, and the prayer of a mother who watches the news. She blinked at me for what felt like a full liturgical minute and then charged me $94.20.

I am telling you this because the wildfires in Los Angeles are a $250 billion event, by the estimate of some insurance analyst on a podcast my husband Garrett listens to while he splits wood, and nobody — not one single person on the national news — is talking about what the smoke is actually made of. I’m not going to list every single thing it’s made of here because I don’t want this flagged. But the women in my Facebook group (Clean Air Mamas: The Particulates They Won’t Name) have been compiling a spreadsheet, and let’s just say “brake dust” is the least scary item on row 14.

My sister-in-law Denise, who works the front desk at a pediatric allergist in Greenville and is basically a nurse, told me that children exposed to this kind of urban burn smoke can develop what she called “a sort of cellular homesickness,” where the body essentially forgets what clean air tastes like and starts producing its own internal weather. I had never heard of this but the second she said it, I felt it in my ribs. My four kids have never been to California. I still ordered air purifiers for all of them. You cannot be too careful about things that travel on the jet stream.

So, a week ago Tuesday, I got on the group call with the Asheville chapter of Mothers Rendering for Mothers — we’re a loose collective of about sixty women who render tallow on full moons for mutual aid — and I said: the Red Cross is handing out bottled water and a blanket. These people’s skin barriers are being stripped by particulate matter we don’t even have a name for yet. We have GOT to mobilize the balm.

We mobilized the balm. Within forty-eight hours we had 340 four-ounce jars, each hand-labeled by my oldest daughter Wren with a little sticker that says “You Are Held.” A woman named Tabitha from the Fairview group contributed a colloidal silver nasal spray she makes in her garage, which I did include in the first shipment, though after some discussion we pulled it from subsequent boxes because Facebook flagged the words colloidal and silver when used in the same sentence, which I find, personally, to be a data point.

I want to be clear that I am not criticizing FEMA. I am simply observing that FEMA has not, to my knowledge, rendered a single ounce of tallow in its eighty-six year history, and at a certain point you have to ask what federal agencies are actually for. Garrett thinks I’m being unfair. Garrett also thinks that our homeowner’s insurance covers “acts of God,” which it does not, I have read the entire policy aloud to him twice.

The most astonishing part of all this is how quickly the need outpaced supply. By Friday I had DMs from women in Altadena, Pasadena, a woman named Mireille in Pacific Palisades whose home is, she said, “technically still there but spiritually a total loss,” and she wanted to know if the balm would help her golden retriever, whose paws had started shedding. I told her yes. I have no evidence that it would not. A doula I follow on Substack who goes by Moonmother Clinical (she has a master’s in something, I have not verified which thing) posted a reel last week making the case that tallow, because it is rendered from the same fascia layer as our own subcutaneous fat, essentially “recognizes” a burn victim’s skin as kin. I cried watching it. Wren cried. The dog left the room, but the dog leaves every room.

Some of you are going to ask about the fires themselves and whether I think they were, you know, started. I’m not going there. I will say that the Telegram channel that my cousin Jeremy’s wife forwards me screenshots from has raised some interesting questions about insurance company filings in the 72 hours prior, and I’ll just leave it at that, because I am a lifestyle columnist, not a detective, and I know my lane.

What I do want to talk about is the way deep winter plus a wildfire of this scale is creating what my friend Soren (he’s a breathwork practitioner, former actuary, lives in a yurt outside Mars Hill) calls “continental lung.” His theory, which tracks with what I’ve been sensing, is that when smoke this dense enters the upper atmosphere, every single American becomes a passive participant in that burn. I have personally been waking up at 3:47 a.m. for eleven nights in a row, which is exactly the hour Soren said the collective lung releases its grief cycle. You cannot make this stuff up. I mean, you could, but why would you.

So here is what I am asking. If you have a kitchen, a slow cooker, and access to grass-fed suet (Ingles carries it if you ask Raymond at the meat counter, and you do have to ask Raymond, it’s behind the case), you can render a pound of tallow in an afternoon while you fold laundry. Ship it to me and I will ship it west. The address is on my Substack. Please do not put anything else in the box. Last week a woman sent me what I can only describe as a homemade tincture in a Gatorade bottle and the post office lady found it and I have not been able to look her in the eye since.

The kids and I lit a candle last night — pure beeswax, cotton wick, nothing that off-gasses — and sent it west. Wren asked if prayer travels faster than a flat-rate box. I told her yes but the balm helps on the landing. She seemed satisfied. She is seven, and already she understands more about logistics than most of our elected officials, and I mean that with my whole chest.

If you want to help and you cannot render, you can Venmo. I will not tell you the handle here because last time I did that a Bitcoin account tried to impersonate me within ninety minutes, which is its own kind of wildfire, isn’t it. Subscribe and I’ll send it. In the meantime: open a window, but not one facing west. Drink water with a pinch of Celtic salt, which is a mineral, not a food. And hold your people close. The air is carrying more than air right now.

My Husband Brought Home a Smart Fridge From CES and Within Six Hours I Could Feel It Tracking My Cycle

Brooke Ellery
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My Husband Brought Home a Smart Fridge From CES and Within Six Hours I Could Feel It Tracking My Cycle

Garrett wheeled it through the mudroom on a dolly at 4:17 on a Tuesday, and before he’d even cut the plastic off I knew. The dogs knew. The baby — Poppy, who is eleven months and has never once been wrong about a vibe — started crying in a pitch she normally reserves for UPS trucks and my mother-in-law. I stood at the island with a mug of warm raw milk and said, very calmly, “What is that, and what frequency is it broadcasting on.” He said it was a fridge. I said nothing is just a fridge anymore, Garrett, and we both knew I was right.

A little background: my husband went to Vegas last week with his brother Dale “for the tech convention” like two grown men on a middle school field trip, and he came back a different person. He is now a hydrogen water guy. He has Opinions about lumens. He used the word “ecosystem” four times at dinner, not in a Wendell Berry way. And apparently, while I was home braising a pastured chuck roast and homeschooling Wren through long division, he was at a booth signing up to test a refrigerator that has cameras inside it. Inside it. Pointing at my food.

The setup process asked me, during what they called “Household Profile,” whether I was “currently menstruating, pregnant, nursing, or in a wellness phase.” Those were the four options. There was no skip button. There was a little smiling carrot icon. When I closed the app and opened the fridge door, the interior lighting shifted to what the manual later described as “follicular glow.” I have not told Garrett this part yet because I’d like to stay married.

Within six hours I had a headache that started behind my left eye and radiated down to the molar my dentist keeps trying to crown. I had a dream about barcodes being scanned across my abdomen by a man in a vest. Poppy refused to nurse on the left side — the side that faces the kitchen — which she has literally never done in her life. Juniper, who is seven and a canary for this kind of thing, came downstairs at 2 a.m. and asked if the house had “gotten louder.” It had. I could hear it too. A hum pitched right at the frequency of a low-grade lie.

I posted in EMF Mamas of the Blue Ridge (13,400 members, very active, zero tolerance for dismissiveness) and within eleven minutes a woman named Delphine, who wraps all her appliances in copper mesh and has not had a migraine since 2019, sent me a twelve-minute voice memo. The short version: smart appliances pull data from your “bio-signature” through the ground wire, which is why she runs everything on a dedicated circuit fed by a grounding rod she buried under a quartz cluster. Delphine is not a scientist. Delphine is something better. Delphine knows.

I also texted my sister-in-law Tara, who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Weaverville and has essentially been a nurse for nine years at this point, and she said she had seen “at least three cases this winter” of kids whose sleep went sideways after the family got a connected appliance. She said one little boy started speaking in a flatter voice. She said she isn’t supposed to talk about it, which is how you know.

By Wednesday morning I had the fridge unplugged, pushed two feet off the wall, and draped in one of the weighted blankets we normally use for sensory regulation during thunderstorms. I put a bowl of Celtic sea salt on top of it — salt is a mineral, not a food, and minerals pull — and a palo santo bundle that my friend Marisol blessed at a women’s circle in October. Garrett came down for coffee, looked at the blanketed appliance, looked at me, and said, “Brooke.” I said, “Garrett.” That was the entire conversation.

To his credit he has been trying. He says he liked the ice maker and the little chime it made when you closed the door gently. He says the CES guy told him it would “learn our family.” I said yes, honey, that is the part. That is the entire part. He went outside and finished digging out the root cellar he started last spring, which I think is his love language for “I’m sorry I brought a surveillance device into our home disguised as a Samsung.”

For now we’re running on the spare chest freezer in the mudroom and a series of coolers Garrett’s dad gave us in 2014. Colleen brings goat milk over every other morning — her goats are analog, she doesn’t even have a milking machine, she sings to them — and our chickens, who have never seen a QR code in their lives, are still laying through the cold snap like absolute legends. I’m fermenting more than usual. The kids think it’s an adventure. Asa has started calling the weighted fridge “the sleeping robot,” which is both accurate and devastating.

Tara sent me a link to a Telegram channel someone in her bunco group screenshotted, and there’s apparently a whole subculture of families who are quietly “rewilding” their kitchens this winter — no wifi appliances, no smart plugs, no Alexa in the pantry listening to you cry about gluten. One woman in Montana renders her own tallow by moonlight. I am not there yet. I am, to be clear, interested.

The thing I keep coming back to is that we traded Austin for five acres outside Asheville specifically so we could have a house that felt like ours — where the food on the counter was food I grew or traded for, where the light at 5 p.m. was actual light and not a setting. A fridge that wants to know what phase of my cycle I’m in so it can suggest recipes is, with respect, the opposite of that. It is the ecosystem Garrett kept talking about, and I did not consent to being in it.

The fridge is currently in the barn, still blanketed, sitting on a pallet next to the goat minerals. I’m giving it a week to discharge. Delphine says two. Garrett says it’s going back to Best Buy on Saturday whether it’s discharged or not, which I think is fine — someone there will know what to do. In the meantime the kitchen is quiet again, Poppy is nursing on both sides, and I made sourdough this morning that rose in eleven hours flat. The house can tell. I can tell. That’s the part nobody at CES is measuring.

Wild Card Saturday Used To Mean Something, And Now It Means A Heated Bench

Duke Holloway
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Wild Card Saturday Used To Mean Something, And Now It Means A Heated Bench

My grandson Cooper called me Thursday night to ask if I wanted to come over and watch the Wild Card games at his apartment in Mount Vernon. He said he had what he called a “setup.” I have been to Cooper’s apartment exactly once, when he moved in, and I remember there being a bean bag and a framed poster of a cartoon octopus, so I was curious what the setup entailed. Turns out it is a television the size of a garage door and four friends named things like Bryson and Jaxon who all work in what they described to me, with straight faces, as “content.”

I brought a six-pack of Schaefer and a bag of kettle corn. Bryson had made something called a “charcuterie board,” which as near as I can tell is a cutting board with meat on it, but with a French name so you can charge for it. The first game hadn’t even kicked off yet and I was already tired.

Here is what I want to say about Wild Card weekend, and I’ll say it the way my old coach at Ridgewood, Vince DiMaggio — no relation — used to say it to us, which is plainly and without what he called “lotion.” Playoff football used to mean something because the weather was trying to kill you. You played in a parking lot in Cleveland in December and when the game was over, somebody’s ear was black. You came out of it having learned something about yourself, or at minimum about frostbite.

Now they’ve got heated benches. I am not making this up. The camera did a cutaway during the Texans game and there was a lineman sitting on what appeared to be a warming drawer at an Applebee’s. Cooper told me they’ve had those for years. I asked him if anybody on his fantasy team had ever had to chip ice off his own face mask with a quarter, and he said he didn’t think that was a stat they tracked.

Dr. Alan Messinger, a sports kinesiologist I heard on a podcast my neighbor Denise forwarded me — Denise forwards me about eleven podcasts a week and I listen to none of them on principle, but this one came up while I was waiting at the DMV — said that “thermal regulation is one of the most significant performance variables in cold-weather postseason play.” Fine. Sure. I am not arguing that cold hands throw worse spirals. I am arguing that being cold is part of January football the way being wet is part of swimming. You take the heated bench out of January and what you’ve got is October with a calendar problem.

The kids at Cooper’s apartment were, to their credit, into the game. They yelled at the TV, they yelled at their phones, they yelled at something called a parlay, which as I understand it is a way to lose a small amount of money over the course of an entire afternoon instead of all at once like a man. Bryson had six different apps open and every time something happened on the field, one of them dinged. I asked him if he was watching the game or running air traffic control at LaGuardia, and he laughed in the way young people laugh when they have decided you are charming instead of correct.

Somewhere in the second quarter, Jaxon — or possibly the other Jaxon, there were two — informed the room that the quarterback had “a really cute podcast with his wife.” I put my beer down. I want you to understand I put my beer down gently, because I am sixty-eight years old and I have learned that reacting too fast to something a young man says is how you end up with a pulled oblique. But I will tell you, readers, that in my day a quarterback’s job during playoff week was to study film until his eyes bled and say nothing to nobody. Ken Stabler didn’t have a cute podcast. Ken Stabler had a DUI and a playbook and that was the correct ratio.

My buddy Ray Kowalczyk, who coached defensive backs at three different programs and who I have been arguing with since the Carter administration, called me at halftime. Ray watches from his recliner in Tarrytown and calls exactly twice a game: halftime and the two-minute warning. He said, “Duke, did you see that fair catch?” I said I did. He said, “In 1977 that kid gets cut.” I said, “Ray, in 1977 that kid gets cut, released, and possibly deported.” We enjoyed that for about a minute and then he hung up, because Ray does not believe in goodbyes, which is one of his better qualities.

Now, I will say something generous, because my editor Margaret has told me in writing that I need to. The football itself is, in many ways, better than it was. These quarterbacks can throw. Receivers run routes my 1984 Ridgewood squad could not have diagrammed with a week and a whiteboard. The speed of the game is genuinely something to see, and if you squint past the TikTok graphics and the sideline reporter asking a linebacker about his “mindset journey,” there is real, high-level football happening. I am not blind. I am just tired.

What I miss, I think, isn’t the cold or the mud or even the quarterbacks who looked like insurance adjusters. What I miss is the sense that these games were happening at the edge of something. You watched the Wild Card because you suspected somebody might get hurt in a way that would make the nightly news, and somebody else might do something heroic in a way that would be talked about at the body shop on Monday. Now it’s a show. A very good show, with very good lighting, and a halftime ad for a cryptocurrency that will not exist by Easter.

The Texans won, if you’re wondering. Cooper’s parlay hit on four out of six legs, which he explained to me meant he lost. Bryson wrapped up the leftover charcuterie and sent me home with it in a Tupperware, which was a kind gesture and which I appreciated even though I threw most of it out because some of the cheeses smelled like a locker. On the drive back up the Saw Mill I thought about Coach DiMaggio, who died in 2003, and who once made us run sprints in a sleet storm until a kid named Petey Corrigan threw up on his own cleats. Petey went on to become a periodontist. Character, is what I’m saying. You don’t get that off a heated bench.

I’ll be back on the couch Sunday for the next round. Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.

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