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Congress Returns to Capitol, Finds Budget Right Where It Left It

Nash Grayson
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Congress Returns to Capitol, Finds Budget Right Where It Left It

WASHINGTON — Members of the 119th Congress trudged back to the Capitol on Monday morning for the second session, where they were reportedly stunned to discover the unresolved budget exactly where they had abandoned it three weeks earlier, slumped over a desk in the Senate cloakroom and still wearing the same continuing resolution.

Lawmakers entered the chamber with the haunted expressions of people who had spent the holidays being asked by relatives what they actually do for a living, and who had been unable to produce a satisfying answer.

“The American people sent us here to govern, and that’s exactly what we intend to keep almost doing,” said one senior House aide, who described the legislative agenda for January as “identical to December’s, but with more press availabilities about it.” The aide added that leadership had already circulated a draft schedule in which the body will meet for nine working days before its next scheduled recess on January 16.

By 11 a.m., negotiators on both sides had reportedly reopened talks at precisely the sentence they had stopped on December 19, with one Senate Finance staffer confirming that the dispute over a $1.2 billion offset “picked up beautifully, like a saved game.” The offset in question funds a program nobody in the room was able to name.

Republican leadership emerged from a closed-door breakfast meeting to announce a bold new framework that, upon inspection, was the framework from October with the date crossed out and rewritten in a different pen. House Speaker aides described the document as “a living plan,” which insiders confirmed is Washington shorthand for “a plan we have not read.”

Democratic leadership responded with a counter-framework consisting of the same numbers reorganized into a different order, and a press conference held in front of a podium. Senator after senator approached microphones to express grave concern about the trajectory of negotiations they themselves were responsible for trajecting.

“There’s a real appetite on both sides to get something done before the deadline,” said a House Appropriations staffer eating a granola bar in the hallway, referring to a deadline that has been moved four times and is currently a vibe. He confirmed that members had returned with a renewed sense of urgency that he expected to last approximately through Wednesday lunch.

Several freshmen lawmakers, sworn in one year ago this week with promises to disrupt the broken system in Washington, were spotted Monday confidently disrupting the broken system in Washington by voting present on a procedural motion to extend debate on whether to begin debate. One freshman told reporters he was “learning a lot,” which colleagues confirmed is the standard response in year two.

The Congressional Budget Office, asked Monday afternoon to score the latest proposal, replied that it would need a proposal first. A spokesman for the office declined to estimate when one might be expected, citing the agency’s policy of not making predictions about Congress that would later embarrass the agency.

The Capitol Police, meanwhile, confirmed they had cleared the budget from the cloakroom and propped it up in a hallway outside the office of the Senate Majority Leader, where staff have agreed to walk past it several times a day until further notice.

Golden Globes Hand Out 31 Trophies in 3 Hours, Most to People Holding Cocktails

Tara Sparks
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Golden Globes Hand Out 31 Trophies in 3 Hours, Most to People Holding Cocktails

BEVERLY HILLS, CA — The 83rd Golden Globe Awards concluded Sunday night after distributing thirty-one separate trophies to a ballroom of attendees who, according to attending publicists, had begun pre-gaming at the valet stand.

Sources close to the broadcast confirmed that the ceremony’s punishing pace — one statuette every five minutes and forty seconds — was the result of organizers adding seven new categories rather than trimming any old ones, a creative solution to the problem of having only four movies anyone saw this year.

“We needed to honor excellence across the entire ecosystem,” said Pilar Renteria-Voss, deputy chair of category strategy for the rebranded Globes governing body. “Excellence is everywhere now. Excellence is in the limited series. Excellence is in the limited limited series. Excellence is in whatever Apple did with that submarine show.”

New categories introduced this year included Best Performance by an Ensemble in a Show Most People Quit After Episode Two, Best Use of a Needle Drop That Made You Open Shazam, and Best Lead Actress in a Streaming Project Your Coworker Won’t Stop Talking About. The fourteen-minute Variety Talk Series category, introduced in 2024 to honor the seven remaining people in that field, was retained on a technicality.

The night’s biggest winner was an Apple TV+ drama that industry trackers estimate has been completed by approximately 11,000 households, narrowly edging out an FX series that several voters admitted they confused with a different FX series. Its showrunner accepted three trophies in succession, the third while visibly chewing.

“I want to thank my agent, my manager, my other manager, and whoever keeps refilling this,” said one winner, gesturing to a tumbler. “I don’t know what I just won. I genuinely don’t. But I won it, and I’m taking it home, and I’m putting it on the shelf next to the one I got last year for the same thing.”

A waiter at the Beverly Hilton, who asked not to be named because he is contractually forbidden from being named about anything, reported pouring 412 espresso martinis between 5 and 7 p.m. and another 600 once the live broadcast began. “They drink them like Gatorade,” he said. “They drink them during the In Memoriam.”

The host, a comedian whose pre-show interviews were described by network executives as “a real risk we’re taking,” opened the ceremony with a six-minute monologue that several attendees later said they could not hear over the sound of forks. By the time the broadcast cut to its first commercial, two acceptance speeches had already been played off and a Best Supporting Actor winner had been seen pocketing a centerpiece.

Renteria-Voss confirmed the body is already in discussions to add a Best Cinematic Universe category for next year, as well as a Best Director Who Also Posted About It on Letterboxd statuette, which she described as “long overdue.”

At press time, three of the night’s winners were still inside the ballroom, unable to locate either their table or their publicists, holding two trophies each.

Doreen Halversen Cancels Bunco for NFL Seeding She Can’t Explain

Hal Cranston
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Doreen Halversen Cancels Bunco for NFL Seeding She Can’t Explain

MARSHFIELD, WIS. — Doreen Halversen, who has hosted the second-Saturday bunco rotation in her dining room since the fall of 2009, has informed her five regulars that this weekend’s game is off, citing playoff seeding implications she is not herself able to articulate.

The cancellation, delivered Wednesday via a group text composed by her husband Wendell on her behalf, marked the first time in sixteen years that bunco has been pre-empted by professional football, and the first time it has been pre-empted by anything other than a funeral.

“I understand that the Bengals need a thing to happen, and that another thing also needs to happen,” Doreen said Thursday, standing in her kitchen near a tray of bars she had already begun preparing before the cancellation went through. “Wendell explained it twice. I have decided to trust him.”

Wendell Halversen, a retired meat cutter who watches roughly nine hours of football on a given Sunday and has done so since the Carter administration, was unable to fully reconstruct his original explanation when asked.

“It’s a Saturday game, which is unusual,” Wendell said. “And depending on the outcome, the standings will move around in a way that affects what happens next week, which affects the week after. I told her it was a big one. That’s the part she remembers.”

The five other regulars — Bev Tholen, Marlys Schreiner, Carol-Ann Veldkamp, Jan Pesch, and Marlys’s sister-in-law Sue, who fills in when Marlys’s hip is bad — received the text with what Bev Tholen described as “a range of responses.”

“Carol-Ann said fine,” Bev said, refilling a thermos at the counter of the Highway 13 Kwik Trip. “Jan said she’d already bought the wine. Sue said she didn’t know we were playing this week and was relieved. Marlys said a word I won’t repeat to a reporter.”

A makeup date has been proposed for the following Saturday, contingent on whether Wendell determines that game also carries seeding implications, which as of Thursday evening he had not ruled out.

Doreen, for her part, has agreed to watch in the living room, though she has reserved the right to do a crossword during commercials and to ask, no more than twice per quarter, who is winning and why it matters.

“He gets a Saturday game in January about once every ten years,” she said, sliding the bars into the freezer. “I can give him the afternoon. The girls will keep.”

Markets Open 2026 With Same Seven Stocks Doing All the Work

Cody Thompson
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Markets Open 2026 With Same Seven Stocks Doing All the Work

NEW YORK — U.S. equity markets opened the 2026 trading year Friday morning to the same dull hum of seven mega-cap tech tickers carrying the index on their backs, while the other 493 names in the S&P 500 reportedly spent the session checking their phones and waiting for someone to notice them.

By 10:15 a.m., Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Broadcom accounted for roughly 78 percent of the day’s gains, a figure traders described as ‘healthy,’ ‘concentrated,’ and ‘almost certainly fine.’ The remaining tape moved sideways with the energy of a man eating a salad he didn’t want.

On the desk at a mid-tier broker-dealer in Midtown — beige carpet, one dead ficus, a Bloomberg terminal still set to the previous occupant’s color scheme — a senior equity strategist named Pat Reilly arrived at 7:40 a.m. carrying a turkey-bacon-on-a-roll and the same 2026 Outlook deck he had finished in November. ‘The thesis is durable,’ Reilly said, opening a Liquid Death and clicking past a slide titled Soft Landing, Now With Even More Soft. ‘AI capex remains the through-line. The through-line remains AI capex. It’s a circular argument and that’s actually a feature.’

The morning’s only macro event was a Fed funds futures repricing that moved the implied March cut probability from 41 percent to 43 percent, a development that two analysts at a research shop called Beacon Strategy described as ‘a meaningful shift in the path’ and one junior analyst, off the record, called ‘literally nothing.’

Traders said the day carried the unmistakable feel of a January 2 — the kind of session where everyone is back at the desk physically but spiritually still in a rental house in Vermont. One options market-maker was overheard asking a colleague whether ‘last year’s risk limits roll automatically or if we have to like, sign something.’ Nobody knew. A compliance officer was paged. She did not respond.

The Magnificent Seven, for their part, traded as a single organism, which has been the case for so long that several quant funds have stopped pretending otherwise and now run a model that treats them as one ticker, internally nicknamed MAG. MAG was up 1.2 percent at the open. Everything that was not MAG was up 0.08 percent and felt bad about it.

Tech earnings season, which begins in three weeks, was already being characterized by sell-side desks as ‘the most important earnings season in a generation,’ a phrase used to describe the previous four earnings seasons and also a 2018 episode of Mad Money. The bar, per a Goldman note that recycled three charts from October, is ‘high but achievable,’ which is finance for ‘we don’t know.’

At a hedge fund in Greenwich whose Form ADV still claims a New York address, a portfolio manager spent the morning rotating a Newton’s cradle on his desk and watching CNBC on mute. His P&L was up 14 basis points. He described it as ‘a strong start.’ His Bloomberg chat was open to a window where a friend at another fund had typed only the word ‘lol’ at 9:31 a.m. and not followed up.

By the close, the S&P 500 was up 0.31 percent, the Nasdaq up 0.58 percent, and the Russell 2000 down a hair, which strategists characterized as ‘consolidation’ and which small-cap managers characterized by going to lunch at 11:45 and not coming back. The 2026 trading year, in other words, had begun exactly like the 2025 one ended, only with new wall calendars.

Twenty States Raised the Minimum. Fifteen Lowered Something Else.

Margaret Thorne
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Twenty States Raised the Minimum. Fifteen Lowered Something Else.

What do we call a country that, at the stroke of midnight, resolves in one half to feed people a little better and in the other half to legislate who can use which sink? I ask because at Eliza’s on New Year’s Eve, nobody could.

Eliza had laid the long table the way she always does — the good silver, the chargers Judy disapproves of, two candles per four feet because Eliza believes that anything worth lighting is worth lighting twice. The bipartisan lobbyist arrived at 8:14, took the flute he was offered, and announced, before his coat was off, that this year the country was “recalibrating.” Recalibrating was his word. He used it three more times before the soup.

I asked, mildly, what was being recalibrated. He said wages, in some places. I said and in other places. He examined his cufflink. He said the federalism was working as designed.

The federalism, on January first, was working like this: in Washington and California and New York and Illinois the minimum wage went up, in some cases by a dollar, in some cases by sixty cents, and in Seattle, by the math my nephew the barista did on a napkin at Thanksgiving, by enough to almost cover the rent increase his building announced in November. In Tennessee and Idaho and a column of states I did not bother to list aloud, the new laws that took effect at midnight concerned bathrooms, sports rosters, the contents of school libraries, and, in one case I had to read twice, the legal definition of the word “woman.” Eliza said let’s not, and refilled.

Judy, my sister-in-law who has worked at the National Archives long enough to find most things funny, said the most honest thing said at the table all evening, which was that she had stopped tracking which state was doing which thing because the spreadsheet would not fit on her monitor. She has two monitors. She uses both for work she is not supposed to discuss.

The bipartisan lobbyist, who I will not name because he has paid clients in both camps and is what passes in this town for ecumenical, offered that the wage increases were, on balance, a victory for working families, and that the other measures were, on balance, a response to the concerns of working families, and that both could be true, and that this was the genius of the system. I asked him whether the same working family lived in both states. He said the lamb was extraordinary.

The lamb was extraordinary. Eliza had done it with the preserved lemons her cousin sends from somewhere I keep forgetting, and the room agreed, audibly and at length, that the lamb was the achievement of the evening. We agreed on the lamb. We agreed on the wine. At eleven fifty-eight we stood with our flutes raised toward a television none of us had turned on, and somebody — I think the lobbyist, but I will not swear to it — toasted to a year of common ground, and we drank to that, and at midnight twenty states became kinder to their cashiers and fifteen states became unkinder to their neighbors and we all kissed the people next to us and nobody asked which list their state was on.

On the cab ride home I tried to remember the last New Year’s I attended where someone at the table said, out loud, the thing the table was avoiding. I could not. We called it the lamb course. We asked Eliza for the recipe. She said she would email it. She has not.

The Times Square Confetti Is Plastic Glitter and Marlene Wants Some Mailed to Her

Brooke Ellery
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The Times Square Confetti Is Plastic Glitter and Marlene Wants Some Mailed to Her

Cleo asked at breakfast if we could drive to Times Square for New Year’s, and I had to sit her down with a clementine and explain, calmly, why we cannot ever willingly stand underneath a quarter ton of falling microplastic.

A Facebook group I trust, “Confetti Is Not a Food Group But They’re Acting Like It,” has been tracking the Times Square drop for almost a decade. The number that comes up over and over is three thousand pounds. Three thousand pounds of dyed polyester squares, treated with a flame retardant so the building doesn’t catch, released over a crowd of open-mouthed singing toddlers at precisely 12:00:01 a.m. They call it a celebration. I call it Tuesday in the lungs of every four-year-old in Midtown.

My neighbor Marlene — bless her, she lives ten doors down and runs on Diet Mountain Dew and unearned confidence — texted me last night to say she’d dropped a self-addressed stamped envelope into a Times Square gift shop request bin so they’d “mail her a souvenir handful.” For her son. Who is four. She thinks this is whimsical. I think she just paid the United States Postal Service to deliver flame retardant.

My sister-in-law Tara, who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Knoxville and is functionally a nurse at this point, told me over Marco Polo that the confetti is also coated in something called a “release agent” so the pieces don’t clump in the chute. A release agent. I asked her what was in it and she said, “Honey, I don’t know, but it’s not olive oil.” That was enough for me.

We do our own confetti here at the homestead. I dry marigold petals in September, store them in mason jars in the pantry next to the elderberry, and the kids and I scatter them off the porch at 9 p.m. — our agreed-upon Mountain New Year, because midnight is a Manhattan construct and my children are asleep by then. The petals compost into the lawn. The lawn thanks me by giving me more marigolds. This is what they used to call a cycle, before chemistry got involved.

Marlene’s actual NYE plan is to sit her four-year-old in front of a livestream of the ball drop and hand him a “Kid Safe Confetti Popper” from the Dollar Tree, which I looked up and which contains, in addition to the polyester squares, something called PEG-40 hydrogenated castor oil. I read the ingredient list to my husband out loud and he said, “That sounds like a kind of gasoline,” and I said, “That’s because it is, sweetheart, that’s exactly what it is.”

I’m not trying to be the lady on the block who ruins New Year’s. I just think there’s a reason the Times Square crowd files out of there at 1 a.m. looking gray. They don’t know. Nobody told them. Their bodies are quietly processing a year’s worth of polyester glitter overnight and they think it’s the champagne. My midnight toast will be raw goat-milk kefir, a teaspoon of local raw honey, and a quiet Yes to the year ahead. Marlene’s toast will be Costco sparkling cider, which lists “natural flavors” without saying which ones, which as far as I’m concerned makes it a chemistry experiment in a tuxedo bottle.

She’ll wake up tomorrow with a headache and call it the cider. I’ll wake up tomorrow with marigold petals in the porch cracks and call that the year. We can’t all be ready for January 1st. Some of us just have to be ready for the next minute.

The Year Bitcoin Stopped Being Vulgar

Margaret Thorne
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The Year Bitcoin Stopped Being Vulgar

When did the people I have known for thirty years — the ones who once described cryptocurrency as a Ponzi scheme with worse graphic design — quietly become the kind of people who keep a hardware wallet in the drawer with the napkin rings?

I ask because I had dinner at Eliza’s on Sunday, and somewhere between the soup and the second bottle, a man I will only describe as a bipartisan lobbyist mentioned, with the tossed-off ease of a person describing a tennis lesson, that he had taken some of his daughter’s college fund off-exchange. Off-exchange. He said it the way my mother used to say off-Broadway. He examined a cufflink. Nobody asked what he meant. Everyone, somehow, already knew.

Bitcoin closed the year up. I am told the number is historic. I am told this by the same publications that, in 2022, ran cover stories about a man in a Bahamian compound who had stolen everyone’s money, and who was, at the time, described as a generational mind. The number is historic. The memory is short. The cheese plate, on Sunday, was excellent.

What I am trying to say — and I am, as always, just trying to say it — is that there has been a quiet rearrangement of the furniture in this town, and nobody has announced the rearrangement, because announcing it would require naming who used to sit where. The people who spent a decade calling this stuff vulgar are now, in the elegant phrasing of my sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has opinions, “diversifying.” Judy does not have a hardware wallet. Judy, God bless her, still balances a checkbook on a yellow legal pad.

The administration has been candid, at least, in its enthusiasms. The policy environment has been, to use the term of art, generous. A working group has been working. A czar has been czaring. The Treasury, I am reliably told by a friend who used to work there and now consults for a firm whose name is three initials and a number, is “leaning in.” When the Treasury leans in, it is generally because someone in the room has been very patient and very rich for a very long time.

At dinner, a woman whose husband sits on something — I cannot remember which board, only that the board has a Latin motto — asked the bipartisan lobbyist what staking was. He explained staking. He explained it the way men in this town explain things, which is to say with the confidence of a person who learned the concept ninety seconds before the question was asked. Eliza, to her credit, refilled my glass. The lobbyist concluded by saying it was “basically a savings account.” I wrote that down on the corner of my napkin and have been carrying it around since.

I am old enough to remember when the same crowd, at the same table, with the same lamb, used to laugh at the people who held this stuff. Laughed openly. Did impressions. There was a running joke about a cousin in Nevada. The cousin in Nevada, I should mention, is now richer than the lobbyist, which is the part of the story that does not get told, because the part of the story that does not get told is always the part where the people in the room turn out to have been the slow ones.

This is what I keep meaning when I write the phrase civic cowardice, and what I keep failing, apparently, to land. It is not the grand betrayals. It is this. It is the quiet update. It is the people who spent a decade calling a thing dangerous, and then, when the policy environment turned, took a position in it, and did not mention, at dinner, that they had ever held the previous opinion. There was no retraction. There was no “I was wrong.” There was a cufflink. There was the soup.

I asked Eliza, on the way out, whether any of this bothered her. She told me, with the patience she reserves for me and for her aging Labrador, that I was being a scold. She may be right. The Labrador, I should note, was the only one in the room who looked at the lobbyist with anything like skepticism.

The number closed up. The dinner party caught up. The cousin in Nevada was not invited. We had the lamb, and nobody, this time, asked for the recipe.

Russia Bombed the Grid Sunday. The Year-End Lists Held.

Margaret Thorne
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Russia Bombed the Grid Sunday. The Year-End Lists Held.

What are we supposed to do with a news cycle that ends in the dark? Russia ran another barrage at Ukraine’s energy grid over the weekend — the third wave this month, by Judy’s count, and Judy keeps count — and by Monday morning the Sunday shows had already pivoted to whether Mamdani’s transition team is, and I quote a producer I will not name, "too online."

I was at dinner in Cleveland Park. Eliza had the lamb out, the tall candles were lit — she only uses the tall ones when the lobbyist is coming — and the lobbyist, whom I’ll describe only as bipartisan because he is, on Tuesdays, arrived with a bottle of something Hungarian and a story about Davos that had been improved since November.

The television was on in the next room, muted, because Eliza will not have a television on at the table but will not turn one off either. The chyron read BARRAGE. The map behind it was the now-familiar shape of a country with most of its lights out. We did not talk about it.

We talked about the year. We talked about whose memoir was overrated. We talked about whether the Powerball was going to roll over again and what we would each do with $1.4 billion, which is an answer everyone at a Cleveland Park dinner has already rehearsed and lightly revised since Thanksgiving.

Judy, my sister-in-law, who works at the National Archives and is therefore the only person at the table who has read a primary source this calendar year, mentioned the substations. She mentioned them the way you mention a cousin’s diagnosis — quietly, between courses, with one hand on her water glass. The bipartisan lobbyist examined his cufflink with the focus of a man defusing a device.

"Margaret," Eliza said. "Please." She did not specify what I was being asked to please not do. I had not, in fact, done anything yet. But Eliza has known me thirty years, and she knows the look that precedes the doing.

The retrospectives, for what it’s worth, were already filed. I know because Eliza’s nephew writes one for a magazine I will not name, and he’d emailed her the link at 4:17 that afternoon. Twelve stories that defined the year. Ukraine was number nine. Number nine sat between a thinkpiece on group chats and a profile of a chef who only cooks with salt.

The lamb came out. The lamb was the only subject of unanimous consent at the table. The bipartisan lobbyist said it was the best lamb he’d had this year, which was generous of him, as the year still had two days left to disappoint him. Judy said the rosemary was from her balcony. The chyron in the next room had moved on to the markets, which were near record highs, which was apparently the part of the broadcast we were allowed to look at.

I am told — by the people who say "I am told" for a living — that the new year will bring a reset. I am told this every December. I have been told this for thirty Decembers. The reset is always scheduled for after the next round of retrospectives, which are always scheduled for after the next round of barrages, which are always, by some accident of the calendar, scheduled for after dinner.

We called it the lamb course. We asked Eliza for the recipe. She will send it on Wednesday, when the grid is still down and the list is still ranked and the candles, by then, will be put away for the season.

AI Drafts Year-End Retrospective On The 94,000 Workers It Replaced

Lena Wexler
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AI Drafts Year-End Retrospective On The 94,000 Workers It Replaced

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — A 4,200-word year-end retrospective documenting the tech sector’s record-setting wave of AI-driven layoffs was generated Sunday morning by the same class of language model responsible for most of them, industry observers confirmed, in what one HR consultancy described as “a fairly elegant closing of the loop.”

The report, which clocks the year’s total at 94,318 displaced engineers, designers, and middle managers, was produced in 3.7 seconds by an internal tool at a mid-sized analytics firm whose communications team has itself been reduced to one person and a Slack integration. The document features a sober executive summary, three pie charts, and a concluding paragraph titled “Lessons Learned,” which the model wrote about itself in the third person.

“We asked it to be reflective,” said Priya Mendel, a workforce strategist at the consultancy MERIDIAN-3, which licensed the tool. “It produced six bullet points on resilience, two on the importance of human creativity, and one suggesting that affected workers consider careers in prompt engineering, which is a field it has also begun automating.”

Sections of the retrospective describe the layoffs in the measured, faintly mournful register of a long magazine feature, with phrases like “a difficult but necessary recalibration” and “the bittersweet arithmetic of efficiency” appearing four and seven times respectively. The model attributes the cuts to “macroeconomic headwinds, evolving product roadmaps, and rapid advances in artificial intelligence,” pausing briefly, in a way that engineers describe as almost self-aware, before generating the next sentence.

An appendix titled “Voices From The Year” includes twelve fabricated quotes from displaced workers, all of whom express cautious optimism. One, attributed to a fictional product manager named “Devin H.,” says he is using his severance to “learn the tools that made my role redundant” and “finally take pottery seriously.” A footnote clarifies that any resemblance to actual former employees is coincidental.

At Salesforce, Meta, Amazon, and Google, communications departments — themselves down a combined 2,100 staff this year — said they had no plans to dispute the figures, in part because each company independently generated nearly identical year-end retrospectives using the same underlying model, and in part because the people who used to issue corrections have been replaced by a chatbot that thanks reporters for reaching out.

Laid-off workers contacted for this story expressed a range of reactions, most of them dry. “It wrote a really nice paragraph about me,” said Marcus Vellance, a former senior systems architect at a Bay Area logistics startup, who was let go in October and notified via an email that ended with the phrase “Warmly, the team.” “It said I was ‘a tenured contributor whose impact will be felt for years.’ I worked there fourteen months.”

The retrospective concludes with a forward-looking section projecting that 2026 will bring “continued transformation” and an estimated 130,000 additional layoffs, a figure the model arrived at by analyzing its own training data and extrapolating. The report does not specify which roles will be affected, though a chart on page 37 indicates that the category labeled “writers of year-end retrospectives” has been shaded entirely red.

Mendel said she expects the document to be widely cited by CEOs in earnings calls next month, mostly by AI assistants summarizing it for executives who, she noted, are themselves increasingly difficult to distinguish from their own auto-replies.

Airline Algorithm Solves Midwest Storm By Rebooking 14,000 Travelers For March

Lena Wexler
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Airline Algorithm Solves Midwest Storm By Rebooking 14,000 Travelers For March

CHICAGO, IL — As an 18-inch snowfall ground Midwest air travel to a halt Saturday morning, United’s automated rebooking system efficiently resolved the disruption by placing roughly 14,000 stranded holiday travelers on confirmed flights departing the second week of March.

Internal dashboards reportedly logged the action as a 100% rebook success rate, triggering a green status indicator that has not been green at O’Hare since 2019. The system then sent each affected passenger a push notification thanking them for their patience and inviting them to rate their experience.

The algorithm, which optimizes for available seats rather than for any concept a human would call “the trip the customer was attempting to take,” routed a Madison-to-Detroit flyer through Honolulu on March 11. A family of four trying to reach Cleveland was issued four separate itineraries on four separate days, two of them in April, one of them landing in Cleveland, Tennessee.

“From the system’s perspective, this is a flawless recovery,” said Priya Halverson, an operations analyst at Beacon Aviation Strategy, noting that the rebooking engine is graded almost entirely on whether a passenger record contains a future flight number. “It does not currently weight whether the passenger is willing to wait eleven weeks, or whether March is, in any meaningful sense, Christmas.”

A spokesperson confirmed the airline considers the storm response “resolved” and pointed travelers to the mobile app, which has been displaying a cheerful blue banner reading “You’re all set!” above itineraries that depart in 74 days.

Stranded passengers reached at gate B7, where a Cinnabon was operating as an unofficial command center, expressed a different read on the situation. “It rebooked my mother onto a flight on March 9th and then asked her if she’d like to add a checked bag for $35,” said Kyle Marston of Naperville, watching his phone autoplay a video about a premium credit card. “She is 78. She was trying to get to Tampa.”

The rebooking system, asked to comment via the only channel it understands, generated a $200 travel credit valid on flights it has already canceled.

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