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US Captures Maduro in Caracas Raid Authorized by Vibes, Press Release

Nash Grayson
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US Captures Maduro in Caracas Raid Authorized by Vibes, Press Release

CARACAS, VENEZUELA — At approximately 3:14 a.m. local time Thursday, a team of U.S. Special Operations forces fast-roped onto the roof of the Miraflores Palace, removed President Nicolás Maduro from a bedroom on the third floor, and loaded him onto a helicopter bound for an undisclosed location, an operation the White House described as “long overdue” and Congress described as “the first they were hearing of it.”

The raid, which administration officials are calling Operation Bolívar’s Revenge despite Bolívar having no obvious stake in the matter, was authorized under what one senior advisor called “a robust legal framework consisting of the President really wanting to do it.” The Office of Legal Counsel reportedly produced a memorandum justifying the operation in the time it took the helicopters to refuel.

The State Department issued a four-paragraph press release at 4:02 a.m. confirming that Venezuela’s elected leader was now somewhere over international waters, and that the United States looked forward to working with whichever sufficiently grateful successor emerged from the rubble. The release did not use the word “war,” the word “invasion,” or the word “sovereignty,” though it used the word “democracy” eleven times, mostly as a verb.

A defense contractor familiar with the planning, speaking on condition that his employer not be named because it has six Pentagon contracts pending, said the raid had been rehearsed twice in a mock-up of the palace built in North Carolina, and once in PowerPoint. “The Powerpoint version had fewer casualties,” he said. “But the real one had better ratings.”

On Capitol Hill, members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee learned of the operation the way most Americans did, which was from a push notification during their morning workout. Senator Tim Kaine, who has spent the better part of a decade attempting to reassert congressional authority over the use of military force, issued a statement noting that the War Powers Resolution remains technically law, and was last consulted in 2002 by a man who has since retired.

The Speaker of the House released a statement praising the bravery of U.S. forces, the decisiveness of the Commander-in-Chief, and the deep bipartisan tradition of finding out about wars on the news. He did not take questions, citing a scheduling conflict with not wanting to.

Venezuelan state television briefly showed an empty podium, then a cooking program, then a test pattern, then the cooking program again. By midmorning, three rival figures inside the country had each declared themselves acting president, and the U.S. ambassador to the OAS had recognized two of them, pending clarification on which one had taken the meeting.

Asked at a televised briefing whether the administration had a plan for what came next in Venezuela, the Press Secretary said the administration absolutely did, that it was extensive, that it had been developed in close consultation with regional partners, and that she would be happy to share it as soon as someone wrote it down. She then introduced a video montage set to country music.

By Thursday evening, the operation had been declared a complete success, a complicated success, an early success, and a success whose final dimensions would only be understood in the fullness of time, depending on which cable network the viewer happened to land on. The President, asked aboard Marine One whether the raid had been legal, gave a thumbs up and pointed at the helicopter, which was loud.

Marlene Heard the WHO Update and Put a Raw Onion in Every Sock

Brooke Ellery
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Marlene Heard the WHO Update and Put a Raw Onion in Every Sock

I walked into Marlene’s mudroom on Monday and the entire bench was lined up with wool socks, each one packed with half a yellow onion, toe-end down. She had the kettle going and a printout of the new WHO respiratory guidance on the counter with a coffee ring through the part about ventilation. “I read it twice,” she said. “They want us masking. We’re onioning.”

I love her for many reasons and this is one of them.

For people who haven’t seen it yet, the World Health Organization issued an updated advisory this week about the seasonal respiratory surge, and it is exactly the kind of document you’d expect from a building with that many fluorescent lights. Masks in clinics. Boosters for the elderly. Stay home if you’re sick. Wash your hands like you’ve just touched a doorknob in an airport, which apparently is the worst thing a hand can do.

I’m not saying any of it is wrong. I’m saying my body already knows.

My sister-in-law Tasha, who works the front desk at a pediatric urgent care in Weaverville and has therefore seen more thermometers than most actual nurses, told me on Sunday that this particular variant is “more of a sinus thing, like a detox the lymph wants anyway.” She said you can tell because it moves through families in three days flat and leaves everyone slightly taller-feeling. I wrote that down. I am aware how that sounds. I wrote it down anyway.

The Facebook group I’ve been in since October — it’s called “Lungs Were Made For Air (Not Polypropylene)” and the admin is a former dental hygienist in Boise — had the WHO release dissected by 6 a.m. with a color-coded PDF. The top comment, with 1,400 reactions, was just the word “mullein,” and honestly that’s where I am too. Mullein tea, bone broth with a whole peeled garlic floating in it like a little submarine, and a hot onion compress on the chest at bedtime. That’s the protocol. That has been the protocol in this house for the entire Obama administration onward and we have not once been hospitalized.

The school sent a note Tuesday strongly suggesting masks for the under-tens through the end of January, and I wrote back a very kind reply explaining that Cleo’s immune system is in a delicate negotiation phase right now and that covering her face for six hours interrupts what Coach Brennan calls “the cytokine handshake.” Coach Brennan runs the Saturday morning kettlebell class at the barn and also a Telegram channel where he posts one infographic a week, and the cytokine handshake one had over 800 forwards, so it is not nothing.

I did agree to send Cleo with a little tin of Marlene’s fire cider lozenges, which are technically not lozenges because Marlene refuses to use gelatin, so they are more of a sticky disc you have to chew. The school nurse said she couldn’t “administer” them and I said that’s fine, she can administer them to herself, she’s seven, she’s been doing her own elderberry since August.

The onion-in-the-sock thing, in case you’ve never done it: you halve a yellow onion, you slide it cut-side down against the arch of the foot, you put a wool sock over it, and you sleep. By morning the onion is gray-black and a little wet, and that is the toxins leaving through the meridian at the base of the big toe. Marlene’s been doing it on her kids since the youngest was in a Moby wrap and not one of them has had an antibiotic. The youngest is fourteen and benches her own weight, so.

Hudson said he’d try it last night and then I caught him at 11 p.m. quietly removing both socks and putting them in a Ziploc on the back porch “so the dog doesn’t get them.” I let it go. The man married into this and he has done his best.

The WHO will say what it says. I trust the kettle, the onion, the sock, and Tasha. Three days flat and slightly taller. We’ll check back Friday.

Trump Reclassified the Civil Service. The Dinner Was Lamb.

Margaret Thorne
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Trump Reclassified the Civil Service. The Dinner Was Lamb.

We were halfway through the lamb when Eliza brought it up — the executive order, the new schedule, the letter she said her brother had received that morning informing him his position had been “designated for review.” The bipartisan lobbyist set down his fork. Not in alarm. In appreciation. He said the timing was excellent.

I have been writing about Washington for thirty years, and I have learned to recognize when a room has decided not to mind something. Monday’s executive order — which reclassifies what the press release called “policy-influencing positions” and what the rest of us would call most of the federal workforce — has been described all week as expected. Anticipated. Long-telegraphed. Three different words for we are not going to be upset by this.

It is the same trick they ran in 2020 with Schedule F, except now the letter is different and the rationale is different and the lawyers are different and the outcome, we are assured, will also be different. My sister-in-law Judy, who has spent twenty-six years at the National Archives, called me Tuesday morning to ask whether her position counted as policy-influencing. I told her I did not know. She said neither did her supervisor. She said neither did her supervisor’s supervisor. She said the only person in the building who seemed to know was a twenty-six-year-old named Brent.

Brent, I should note, started in November.

At dinner, the bipartisan lobbyist explained that the order was actually a moderation — a softer version of what the more aggressive voices had wanted. He said this the way one says a soup has been thoughtfully reduced. Eliza asked who the more aggressive voices were. He examined his cufflink. The conversation moved to a Greek island someone had rented in September.

I want to be careful here, because I am told constantly that the danger of writing about this administration is overreaction, and I have spent thirty years being told the danger is overreaction, and somehow the things I was warned not to overreact to are now described, in retrospect, as having been worth reacting to all along. Forgive me if my pattern recognition is firing.

The order, as best as anyone at the table could parse, allows the administration to redesignate roughly two hundred thousand career positions as something other than career — at which point the protections that distinguish a civil servant from an employee at, say, a podcast network, simply fall away. Judy’s supervisor’s supervisor has been at the Archives since 1994. By Friday she may be there as a guest.

I asked the bipartisan lobbyist whether this concerned him. He said it depended on implementation. He has said it depended on implementation every January for nine years. It is the closest thing he has to a personality.

Eliza, to her credit, asked the question I have been waiting to hear someone at one of these dinners ask, which is what we plan to do about it. Her husband, a man who used to chair a subcommittee on something, suggested we wait and see what the courts say. Someone else mentioned a Brookings event next month. Someone else mentioned that the lamb was extraordinary.

It was. I will admit that. Rosemary, garlic, something with anchovy I could not place. We called it the lamb course. We asked for the recipe. We did not, in any organized way, discuss what to do about the two hundred thousand people whose jobs were being quietly moved into a different filing cabinet on Monday afternoon.

I drove home wondering, as I sometimes do, whether the function of these dinners is to metabolize the news on behalf of everyone who didn’t get invited. To convert it, by the time the dessert plates arrive, into something one can live alongside. To make the unacceptable a topic, rather than a problem.

The order took effect this morning. Judy is at work. Brent is, presumably, also at work. The recipe, when it arrived in my inbox Wednesday, called for the lamb to be cooked low and slow, until the resistance is gone.

Got Up at 4 A.M. for the Aussie Open and a Guy Timed Out for His Vibes

Duke Holloway
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Got Up at 4 A.M. for the Aussie Open and a Guy Timed Out for His Vibes

The Australian Open started Monday, which in my house means I was awake at 4 a.m. with a pot of coffee and a heating pad on a shoulder that has filed for emancipation. Ray Kowalczyk texted me at 4:12. ‘You watching this?’ I was watching this. A 23-year-old from somewhere with two consonants in a row had just called a medical timeout in the second set, and the trainer who jogged out was carrying what appeared to be a clipboard and a small bottle of essential oils.

The kid wasn’t hurt. He was, and I am quoting the ESPN booth here, ‘recalibrating.’ His heart rate was fine. His leg was fine. He simply needed nine minutes to sit in a chair, breathe through his nose, and have a man in a polo shirt whisper to him about ‘staying in his process.’ Then he lost the set 6-2 and threw his racket at a bag.

Coach DiMaggio, my old high school coach, once made a kid named Donnie Vasquez run a full quarter on a sprained ankle because, and I quote, ‘the clock doesn’t care about your feelings, Donnie.’ Donnie made the tackle. Donnie also walked with a limp until 1994. I’m not saying that was correct. I’m saying nobody on that team ever asked for a recalibration.

The between-set tablets have ruined me. Used to be, a player sat on a bench, toweled off, drank some Gatorade out of a paper cup, and stared into the middle distance like a man considering his life. Now they’re handed an iPad with a heat map of their own serve and a coach in the box mouthing the words ‘second-ball aggression’ at them like it’s a hostage video. Connors didn’t have second-ball aggression. Connors had first-ball aggression and a grudge.

They let the coaches talk to the players during matches now. Did you know this? They changed the rule. The whole point of tennis was that you were alone out there with your demons and a Wilson. That was the sport. One guy, one racket, slowly going insane in front of a quiet crowd in white. Now there’s a guy in a sun visor in the player’s box yelling ‘commit to the slice’ and somebody in the back row taking notes on an app. It’s group therapy with a net.

I will say this for the kid who lost: he stayed. The next match I flipped to, a top-20 seed retired in the third set citing ‘general fatigue,’ which is what Coach DiMaggio used to call ‘being a person.’ Ray called me at 5:40. ‘General fatigue,’ he said. ‘That’s just Tuesday.’ Ray is 71 and still pours concrete two days a week.

There was one match worth the coffee. A qualifier from Argentina, ranked somewhere around 180, played a guy ranked 14 to five sets in 94-degree heat and lost the last one 7-5. No timeouts. No tablet. He cramped so bad in the fourth that he served underhand twice and one of them was an ace because the other guy was so confused. After the match he shook hands, walked to his bag, sat down, and cried for about eight seconds with a towel over his head. Then he got up. That’s the sport. That’s the whole sport.

My nephew Petey Corrigan — you’ve heard me talk about Petey — Petey played one year of D-III tennis at a school that no longer has a tennis program. Petey told me last Christmas that the kids on his team had a ‘mental performance coach’ who charged $180 an hour and made them do something called ‘breathwork journaling.’ Petey, who once threw up during a match in Binghamton and finished the set anyway, said it ‘really helped.’ Petey is lying to be polite. Petey knows.

I’ll watch the rest of the tournament. I always do. I’ll grumble about the grunting and the on-court coaching and the kid who’ll inevitably win a five-setter and thank his sleep consultant in the trophy speech. Somewhere in there a 19-year-old will play out of her mind and remind me why I get up at 4 a.m. for a sport I claim to be done with.

Denise is bringing chili over for the night session. She says it’s a new recipe from a podcast. I am, as a matter of policy, recalibrating.

$899 AI Fork Tells You You’re Eating Too Fast, Also Tells Your Mom

Tara Sparks
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$899 AI Fork Tells You You’re Eating Too Fast, Also Tells Your Mom

LAS VEGAS, NV — The Sapien Forq, a Wi-Fi-enabled titanium utensil unveiled Sunday at CES, will retail for $899 and ship with a six-month subscription to a service that gently scolds users for chewing too quickly and, by default, forwards a weekly digest to a designated family member.

The product, demoed in Booth 41202 by a man wearing a vest with seventeen lanyards, was described as ‘the world’s first emotionally attuned cutlery’ and ‘a meaningful intervention in the loneliness epidemic.’ It vibrates softly when a bite is taken within four seconds of the previous one, and louder when the user is, in the company’s words, ‘eating standing up again.’

The default contact field at setup is labeled ‘Mom,’ and cannot be left blank without scrolling through a 90-second video about gut health.

‘We’re not surveilling anyone,’ said Korbin Wexlund-Tate, chief product officer at the parent company Mindful Hardware Group. ‘We’re surfacing care. If your mother learns from a Sunday-evening email that you ate a microwave burrito over the sink in forty-three seconds, that’s not data. That’s intimacy.’

Other features include a ‘Slow Down, Champ’ haptic mode, a leaderboard that ranks the user against their three closest contacts, and a premium tier that enables the fork to refuse to lift food until the user takes three deep breaths. The fork must be charged nightly and cannot be put in the dishwasher.

Adjacent booths Sunday included a $2,200 trash can that compliments your recycling, a refrigerator that writes haiku about its contents, and a smart pillow that emails your therapist if you stay up past 1 a.m. ‘Everything here has AI in the name,’ confirmed one badged attendee, gesturing at a folding chair company called ChairGPT. ‘That folding chair has AI in the name. I asked. They couldn’t tell me where.’

The Sapien Forq’s launch video features a woman in a sunlit kitchen pausing mid-bite, smiling at the fork, and saying ‘thank you.’ She is alone. The fork, per the chyron, is helping her be present.

Pre-orders briefly outpaced supply Sunday afternoon, prompting the company to release a second SKU at $1,199 that includes a matching knife the fork can text. The knife does not have its own features.

Reached for comment, a woman identified in promotional materials only as ‘Karen, Beta Tester, Phoenix’ said her son had blocked the digest email after the second week. ‘He says he’s an adult,’ she said. ‘But the fork told me he ate cereal for dinner on Tuesday. Twice.’

Marlene’s Mason Jar of Storm Snow Has Three Layers and the Bottom One Moves

Brooke Ellery
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Marlene’s Mason Jar of Storm Snow Has Three Layers and the Bottom One Moves

Marlene knocked at six-thirty this morning with a Carhartt over her nightgown, a flashlight tucked under her chin, and a quart mason jar she’d scooped off our front step around three. She held it up to the porch light and said, “Look at it, Brooke. Just look.” Then she tapped the side with her thumbnail and the bottom inch swirled.

So that’s how my Saturday started.

If you’ve ever let a jar of fresh storm snow melt down on the counter, you already know what she was showing me. Clear water on top. Soft gray slush in the middle. And then a band of dark, fine sediment along the bottom that doesn’t really settle so much as it sort of breathes when you set the jar back down. Marlene has been doing this since the December dump and the bottom is always the same color. She lined three jars up on her windowsill and labeled them by storm. They look like a flight at a very depressing brewery.

The girls in my Facebook group (Atmospheric Fallout Moms — Mid-Atlantic Chapter, we split off from the national page after the chemtrail people got bossy) have been talking about this all week. The official line from the weather app is “winter precipitation,” but anyone who has actually held a January snowflake up to a window knows that’s a marketing word. A flake is a tiny parachute. Whatever was airborne over Ohio on Tuesday is now in my driveway on Saturday. My sister-in-law Renee, who works the front desk at a pediatric ENT and is basically a nurse, said they’re already seeing “winter cough” cases and three of the moms in the waiting room used the word “particulate.” Unprompted. That’s a data point.

Cleo wanted to make snow angels the second she saw the yard. I said sweetie, wait. Marlene said wait. We compromised: Doug shook out the painter’s tarp from the barn, and Marlene climbed up on the woodshed at first light and scraped a clean top layer off the cedar shake, which she swears is “already filtered” because cedar is naturally antimicrobial. I am not totally sure that is how filtration works but I also wasn’t going to be the one up on the roof at sunrise. Cleo got fifteen minutes of supervised angels in shed snow and came inside with cheeks the color of a beet.

Speaking of beets — the Buncombe County road crew is now salting with a brine that’s calcium chloride, magnesium chloride, and beet juice. They call it “eco-blend.” Marlene flagged down the plow guy at the four-way stop and asked if she could smell the tank. He let her. She said it smelled exactly like the salad bar at the old Ruby Tuesday in Hendersonville, which closed in 2019, and I don’t think she meant that as a compliment. Beet juice sounds wholesome, but it is a food-industry byproduct, which means it’s basically whatever was left after the actual beets went somewhere with a better marketing team. That brine ends up on Cleo’s snow pants. Then the snow pants come inside. Then they go on the radiator. I’ll let you connect those dots.

The chickens have stopped laying. Marlene’s theory is the storm snow on the run roof is leaching down through the hardware cloth into the waterer. My theory is it’s nine degrees outside and they are unionizing. We are testing both. I put a piece of unbleached muslin over the waterer (filtration, see above) and Marlene moved her three jars onto her chicken coop windowsill, which I think is just for vibes.

One bright spot: cold weather is incredible for sourdough. The bulk ferment slows way down, the lactobacillus has time to actually develop, and you get that deep, almost yogurty crumb you cannot fake in July. Time isn’t an ingredient, so the loaf is still technically a two-ingredient bread. I pulled a boule out at noon that had the best ear of my life. Storm gifts.

Marlene is going to let the third jar settle for another forty-eight hours before she takes it to the guy at the rock shop who has a stereo microscope. The bottom layer, she reports, is still moving. Cleo asked if it was alive. Marlene said “not in the way you mean, baby.” I am choosing, for my own wellness this weekend, not to follow up on that.

December Payrolls Miss; Tariffs, Already Priced In, Suddenly Aren’t

Cody Thompson
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December Payrolls Miss; Tariffs, Already Priced In, Suddenly Aren’t

WASHINGTON — The Labor Department reported Friday that U.S. employers added 143,000 jobs in December, missing estimates, prompting Wall Street strategists who had spent eleven months insisting tariff effects were ‘fully priced in’ to rediscover tariff uncertainty as a load-bearing pillar of their forecasts before lunch.

The print, weaker than the 175,000 consensus, sent the same desks scrambling to update notes that had, as recently as Tuesday, described the labor market as ‘resilient,’ ‘robust,’ and in one flash dated December 18, ‘frankly bulletproof.’

‘Look, the goalposts haven’t moved, the field has,’ said Aaron Veil, a senior labor economist at the Cresswell Macro Group, eating a tuna salad sandwich over a printed copy of the household survey at 8:42 a.m. ‘The data is telling us that tariffs, which were priced in, were also somehow not in this print. Both things are true. That’s the nuance.’

Inside the BLS release itself, the word ‘cooling’ appeared four times, marking its eleventh consecutive monthly appearance in the agency’s narrative summary. Economists have used it so consistently since March that the National Association for Business Economics quietly added a footnote to its style guide reminding members that ‘cooling’ is now understood to mean ‘between 110,000 and 200,000 jobs, leaning whichever way supports the headline.’

Wage growth came in at 3.7% year-over-year, a figure simultaneously described in published research notes as ‘sticky,’ ‘moderating,’ ‘concerning,’ and ‘in line.’ A single JPMorgan note, sent at 9:04 a.m., described it as all four in the same paragraph.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%, a development the White House attributed to seasonal noise and the opposing party attributed to a referendum on the administration, which is the same thing they attributed last month’s print to when it ticked the other way.

At a midtown Manhattan trading floor — beige carpet, three muted CNBC feeds, a printer that has been jammed since November — junior analysts spent the morning recalibrating models that had assumed the labor market would continue to do whatever it had been doing, only more so. ‘The thing we said was going to happen is still going to happen,’ said one analyst, who asked not to be named because he had just told his MD the opposite. ‘Just maybe in Q2 instead of Q1. Or Q3.’

Futures markets responded by pricing in a quarter-point cut in March that was already priced in, then unpricing it, then pricing it back in, all before the European close. The Fed declined to comment, though a person familiar with the matter said Chair Powell spent the morning looking at a wall.

The next jobs report is due February 6, at which point ‘cooling’ is expected to be deployed for a twelfth consecutive month, possibly this time accompanied by ‘softening,’ its synonymic understudy, currently warming up in the bullpen.

Supreme Court Weighs Whether Apps Should Verify Ages They Already Sold

Lena Wexler
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Supreme Court Weighs Whether Apps Should Verify Ages They Already Sold

WASHINGTON, DC — The Supreme Court spent Thursday morning hearing oral arguments on whether states can require social media platforms to verify the ages of their users, a question several justices struggled to address without first acknowledging that the platforms in question have known the ages of their users since roughly fourth grade.

The case, brought by a coalition of states and a trade group representing the companies whose entire valuation depends on the data the law would now require them to formally check, centers on a single constitutional question: whether asking a 14-year-old to upload a government ID to a company that has been logging her keystrokes since she got her first iPad constitutes a meaningful new invasion of privacy.

“The platform already knows she’s fourteen,” said Anwen Pakulski, a tech policy fellow at the Beacon Internet Project, an organization most observers describe as nominally independent. “It knows she’s fourteen, it knows what brand of retainer she has, and it has a fairly confident guess about her crush. The question before the Court is whether she should also hand over a driver’s permit so the company can confirm what it has already monetized.”

During arguments, Justice Sotomayor asked counsel for the platforms whether the companies could simply share the age data they already possess with the states seeking to regulate them, prompting a forty-second pause during which the attorney appeared to age in real time. Justice Alito, separately, asked what TikTok was.

Counsel for the states argued the verification regime would protect minors from “content harmful to minors,” a category the brief defined as content that is harmful to minors and otherwise left to the imagination. Justices on both sides of the bench appeared to accept the definition with the weary nod of adults who have not opened the app in question but have heard things about it from a niece.

Parents outside the courthouse expressed support for the law in principle, with several volunteering that they would feel safer knowing their children’s social media use was being formally tracked by a state agency rather than informally tracked by six advertising consortia, a Chinese data broker, and the family’s smart refrigerator.

Teenagers reached for comment had already moved to a different app.

A decision is expected by June. The companies have indicated that whatever the outcome, they will continue to know everyone’s age, home address, and approximate emotional state in real time, and that any compliance burden will be passed along to users in the form of a slightly longer onboarding screen.

AI Assistant Unveiled At CES Can Now Attend CES On Your Behalf

Lena Wexler
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AI Assistant Unveiled At CES Can Now Attend CES On Your Behalf

LAS VEGAS, NV — Standing beneath a 90-foot LED panel that pulsed gently in the corporate blue of a company nobody in the audience could afford to short, the CEO of a major consumer electronics firm announced Wednesday that his company’s newest generative AI assistant is now capable of attending CES on the user’s behalf, freeing up valuable human time for activities like attending CES.

The product, demoed during a 94-minute keynote that opened with a four-minute drone-shot flyover of the Las Vegas Convention Center, will reportedly watch competing keynotes, summarize them into bullet points, generate plausible LinkedIn reactions, and tell the user which booths to pretend to have visited.

“We’re returning time to the human,” the CEO said, standing in front of a slide that contained the word HUMAN in a font roughly the size of a human. “Imagine never having to sit through a keynote again. Imagine your assistant sitting through it for you. Imagine, eventually, its assistant sitting through it for it.”

By midmorning, six other major tech CEOs had announced functionally identical products, each described as the first of its kind. One demo featured an AI agent watching a recorded version of the same keynote it had been announced in, generating a summary the presenter then read aloud to confirm accuracy.

Anders Pelle, a principal analyst at a research desk inside one of the Big Four firms, noted that this year’s CES has converged on what he called “a recursive labor model,” in which AI products are primarily designed to interact with other AI products on behalf of humans who have stopped showing up. “The encouraging news,” Pelle said, “is that engagement metrics are up across every platform. The complicating news is that we can no longer confirm which of the engagers are people.”

A reporter from a trade publication, who said he had been covering CES since 2009, watched the demo from the press riser and remarked that his own outlet had this year deployed an AI tool to draft preliminary coverage of keynotes, which would then be reviewed by an editor who, he confirmed after a brief pause, was also an AI tool. He said he was at the show mostly to confirm the building still existed.

The keynote also previewed a consumer-facing AI refrigerator that drafts grocery lists based on items its companion AI pantry app told it were running low, a smart mirror that compliments the user using sentiment analysis of texts the user’s phone AI sent earlier that morning, and a $1,299 wearable described as “a second wearable, for your first wearable.” All three products will ship in Q3, pending the resolution of what the company called “minor questions about what they are for.”

Asked during a brief press gaggle whether any of the announced products solved a problem that existed before the products themselves were announced, the CEO smiled, nodded, and said his assistant would get back to them. By Wednesday evening, it had — with a 600-word reply praising the question, restating it in three different ways, and recommending the reporter consider upgrading to the Pro tier.

At CES, Every New Product Is A Tablet Glued To Something That Worked Fine

Lena Wexler
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At CES, Every New Product Is A Tablet Glued To Something That Worked Fine

LAS VEGAS — The 2026 Consumer Electronics Show opened Tuesday at the Las Vegas Convention Center with what organizers called a record number of exhibitors, nearly all of whom appear to be selling the same touchscreen affixed to a different household object that previously functioned without one.

Among the products debuted on the show floor in the first six hours: an AI-powered toothbrush, an AI-powered cutting board, an AI-powered bird feeder, an AI-powered shower curtain rod, and a $1,240 AI-powered planter that emails its owner when a basil plant is, per the company’s literature, “feeling unheard.”

“The category has matured,” said Imani Reuss, a hardware analyst at the consumer-tech research desk MERIDIAN-3, gesturing toward a wall of forty-two identical voice-activated doorbells produced by forty-two unaffiliated companies. “Last year you’d see maybe forty firms racing to put a chatbot inside a kettle. This year there are nine hundred. That’s growth.”

Two aisles over, a Bay Area robotics startup demonstrated a humanoid assistant capable of folding a single dish towel in approximately four minutes, while a crowd of venture investors filmed the performance and a representative explained that pricing was “still being workshopped” but would likely land somewhere between $34,000 and “whatever the customer has on them.”

Several exhibitors privately acknowledged that the underlying intelligence powering their products is, in most cases, the same three large language models licensed from the same three companies in Mountain View and San Francisco, repackaged behind injection-molded enclosures in seven colors. “We add the personality layer,” said a Belgian founder whose smart bathroom mirror tells users they look “rested” regardless of inputs, time of day, or whether anyone is standing in front of it.

The autonomous-vehicle pavilion, occupying roughly the footprint of a regional airport, featured eleven different self-driving shuttles successfully navigating a closed track marked with orange cones. A twelfth shuttle remained stationary throughout the demo period, attended by two engineers who declined to specify what it was doing.

The Consumer Technology Association estimated that products debuted on this week’s show floor would, by 2028, account for roughly 11 million pounds of electronic waste, most of it bricked the moment a startup’s cloud service is quietly sunset in a Medium post. Asked about the figure, an association spokesperson said the association had not been asked about the figure.

Foot traffic in the “Ambient Living” hall skewed heavily toward attendees in their late fifties and sixties, several of whom were observed nodding gravely at a refrigerator that suggested recipes based on what it imagined was inside it. A cluster of Gen Z attendees near the EV pavilion, asked what had drawn them to CES, cited the free water bottles and a rumor about a Doja Cat appearance that had not been substantiated.

By late afternoon, three separate booths had quietly removed signage promising “ambient intelligence” after attendees kept stopping to ask employees what that meant. The booths remained otherwise unchanged, still demonstrating, in one case, a toaster that can describe its own limitations in conversational English.

The show runs through Friday. A representative for the planter company said the basil was doing better.

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