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Cleo’s Advent Calendar Says ‘Chocolatey’ and That’s the Tell

Brooke Ellery
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Cleo’s Advent Calendar Says ‘Chocolatey’ and That’s the Tell

Cleo opened door six before I’d finished my matcha, and by the time I came back into the kitchen she had the foil flat on the counter and a brown rectangle stuck to her chin. I asked her how it tasted and she said “like a candle.” Cleo is five and her palate is more honest than any review I have ever read.

So I flipped the box over, the way you flip everything over in this house, and I started reading. Sugar. Palm fraction. Something called “cocoa butter equivalent,” which is a phrase a lawyer wrote. Soy lecithin. “Vanillin,” which is not vanilla, it is the word vanilla wearing a name tag at a conference. The whole front of the box says CHOCOLATEY in a happy red font, and my sister-in-law Bree — she runs the front desk at the pediatric office, so she sees the intake forms — says “chocolatey” is a legal hedge. You add the Y and you don’t have to actually put cocoa in it. That’s a real thing. I looked it up after Bree texted me a screenshot from a Telegram channel her chiropractor forwarded.

The women in The Real Cacao Mamas (a private Facebook group, 14k members, very kind, mostly homesteaders) confirmed what I already suspected: the $4 calendars from the seasonal aisle are not chocolate. They are a brown shape. One mom in Boise had hers tested by a friend who works in a lab adjacent to a lab, and the cocoa solids came back at “trace.” Trace! In a chocolate calendar! I cannot stop thinking about it.

Marlene saw me in the driveway with the box and said “Brooke, it’s twenty-four pieces of December, calm down.” Marlene buys hers at Aldi in a three-pack and her boys, in her words, “turned out fine,” fine being a generous word for Brody, who once ate a glue stick on purpose for content. I love Marlene. I would die on a hill for Marlene. But Marlene also drinks a Diet Dr. Pepper at 7:14 every morning like it’s a sacrament, so we are not aligned on inputs.

I am, of course, building Cleo a replacement calendar. I bought 24 little muslin bags from a woman on Etsy in Vermont who sews them between shifts as a doula. Inside each bag is a date-paste truffle I rolled myself: Medjool dates, raw cacao (real cacao, the kind that costs what a tank of gas used to cost), a pinch of Celtic sea salt — which I do not count as an additive, because salt is a mineral, it comes out of the actual earth — and a dusting of cinnamon, for circulation. The truffles are a little bitter. Cleo described mine as “a brown rock that’s mad at me.” Growth.

My husband walked through holding the original calendar like it was evidence and said, “so we’re throwing this out.” I said yes. He said, “the kid liked it.” I said the kid also liked the time she licked the dishwasher pod, and we don’t make policy off Cleo’s preferences. He put the box in the trash with a small ceremony that I think was meant to be sarcastic but landed sincere.

Wyatt, who is fourteen and currently in the phase where his entire personality is rolling his eyes at me, walked through the kitchen, took one look at my muslin bags, and said “mom, you turned Christmas into a co-op.” I said co-ops built this country. He said “no they didn’t.” Anyway, Wyatt is on the calendar too. Wyatt gets a date truffle. Wyatt will be regular for the first time in his teenage life and he will write me a thank-you note from college.

The thing nobody wants to admit about the holidays is that the season is mostly a delivery system for ingredients you wouldn’t tolerate in March. Peppermint bark is wax. Hot cocoa packets list “flavor” three times in a row, like a chant. The candy cane is the most processed object in the average American home, and we hand them to children at church. I’m not mad. I’m just paying attention, which used to be a normal thing to do before everyone got tired.

Cleo just asked for door seven and it’s still December sixth. I told her tomorrow. She is currently negotiating, on the floor, with the conviction of a woman who knows the truffles are not, in her words, “the good brown.” Twenty-four mornings. We’re going to make it.

Indiana Declined to Redraw the Map. The Room Called It Brave.

Margaret Thorne
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Indiana Declined to Redraw the Map. The Room Called It Brave.

When did declining to do something openly corrupt become a profile in courage?

Indiana Republicans on Tuesday refused to advance the president’s mid-decade gerrymander — which is to say, a handful of state senators in Indianapolis chose not to redraw their Congressional map for the second time in five years in order to engineer two more safe seats for a coalition that already controls the chamber. They said no. The morning shows called it a rebellion. Politico called it a rupture. A man on a podcast my brother listens to called it Indiana’s Bull Moose moment, which is the kind of thing one says about Indiana when one has never been there.

At Eliza’s on Wednesday — she’d done short ribs, the kind that fall apart if you look at them sideways — a man I will describe only as a bipartisan lobbyist called the vote “encouraging.” He said this while studying his cufflink, as if the cufflink were also encouraged.

Encouraging. The bar, as of Wednesday evening, in Georgetown, over a Barolo nobody could pronounce, was four state senators declining to do the kind of thing we used to call — and I will be old-fashioned here — cheating. Four. In one chamber. Of one state. After a phone call from the White House, a flight from the vice president, and a press release from a man whose business cards, within living memory, read “consultant.”

My sister-in-law Judy, who has spent thirty-one years at the National Archives and has views on what does and does not constitute precedent, asked whether anyone at the table had actually read the proposed map. No one had. We had read tweets about the map. We had read a thread, by a person whose handle was a number, summarizing a thread by a person whose handle was a different number.

The lobbyist said it was “the system working.” Judy said the system, in her professional experience, tended to work the way an old furnace works — loud, intermittent, and only because someone was downstairs hitting it with a wrench.

The story, of course, is what happens next. A second vote. A primary threat. A friendly call from a donor whose name appears on a wing of something. The four senators who said no on Tuesday will be reintroduced, on a Thursday in February, to a version of the question that has been tenderized. They will discover, as legislators tend to discover, that they had misunderstood the question the first time.

I am told this is what spine looks like now. A handful of state legislators in a state the president carried by nineteen points declining — for one week, pending further pressure — to commit a procedural offense against their own voters. We are grading on a curve a high-school teacher would be fired for handing out.

The lobbyist said the holdouts would “come around.” He said this the way one says the dishwasher will come around. Confidently. Without looking at it.

Eliza changed the subject to a piece in The Atlantic that nobody had finished. Judy poured another glass and said, very quietly, that the maps in the Archives were drawn in ink, and the ones being drawn now were drawn in pencil, and that this was the part she found, professionally, the most discouraging.

The short ribs were extraordinary. We asked for the recipe. Nobody asked what happens in February.

Google’s Gemini 3 Now Auto-Replies To Emails Written By Gemini 2

Lena Wexler
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Google’s Gemini 3 Now Auto-Replies To Emails Written By Gemini 2

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Google on Thursday rolled out Gemini 3 across Search and Workspace, and within ninety minutes the upgraded model had drafted a polite, on-brand response to a 4,200-word strategy memo that Gemini 2 had generated, sent, and filed in a shared drive last October.

The new features, billed as a “unified intelligence layer” across Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet, and Search, allow Gemini 3 to summarize, reply to, and act upon documents — including, executives confirmed, the substantial body of documents authored by previous Gemini versions that no human has ever opened.

“We’re entering a phase where productivity AI is largely communicating with productivity AI,” said Devra Holst, who tracks enterprise software at Beacon Strategy. “The user remains in the loop nominally, in the sense that they own the loop and pay the subscription.”

Early adopters reported that Gemini 3’s Workspace integration is particularly seamless. One San Diego marketing manager described opening her Gmail Thursday morning to find that Gemini 3 had already drafted a thoughtful response to a calendar reminder Gemini 2 had populated with action items from a meeting summary Gemini 2 had generated about a meeting Gemini 2 had auto-scheduled.

“It said the action items were on track,” she said. “I don’t know what the action items are. I think we’re doing great.”

In Search, the feature most visible to ordinary users is an expanded AI Overview, which now drafts its summaries by ingesting other AI Overviews and the SEO-optimized articles those overviews originally referenced — a closed loop that Google described in its blog post as “deeply contextual” and which one rival engineer described as “a centrifuge.” Google declined to specify how often Gemini 3 cites Gemini 2 as a primary source, calling the metric “not particularly useful at this stage.”

Workspace administrators were briefed on a new Gemini 3 capability called Proactive Drafting, which composes replies to emails before the user has read them, based on Gemini 3’s interpretation of what Gemini 2 would have wanted the user to say. Internal Google documents, surfaced by The Verge, refer to this feature as “closing the human gap.”

The environmental footprint of routing every keystroke in American white-collar work through a frontier model was addressed in a single line of the announcement, which noted that Gemini 3 is “meaningfully more efficient per token” than Gemini 2, and did not address the fact that it is being asked to process roughly forty times more tokens, many of them generated by Gemini 2 talking to itself in a Google Doc nobody is going to read.

At a press demo, a Google product manager showcased Gemini 3 reviewing a quarterly report, summarizing it into bullet points, drafting an email about the bullet points, scheduling a meeting to discuss the email, and generating a follow-up document recapping the meeting that had not yet occurred. “And the user,” she said brightly, gesturing at an empty chair, “is freed up for higher-value work.”

As of Thursday afternoon, Gemini 3 had reportedly marked 71 percent of all Gemini 2-authored content as “requires your attention,” and then, helpfully, attended to it.

Fed Officials Signal Caution on Rate Cuts, Eye Contact, Standing Up Too Fast

Nash Grayson
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Fed Officials Signal Caution on Rate Cuts, Eye Contact, Standing Up Too Fast

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Federal Reserve officials emerged from a series of pre-meeting appearances Tuesday to signal caution on further interest rate cuts, on making sudden movements, on ordering the fish, and on any decision more consequential than which lanyard to wear to the December policy meeting.

The signaling, delivered across four separate speeches and one regional banker luncheon, contained the word “prudent” 31 times, the word “data-dependent” 19 times, and the phrase “we are watching closely” so often that a Bloomberg terminal briefly mistook it for a stock ticker.

“What the committee is really telegraphing here is a posture of measured restraint,” said Hollis Vandermeer, who runs the monetary policy desk at Beacon Strategy and has spent eleven years professionally translating Fed officials saying nothing into op-eds about what they almost said. “They’ve moved from cautiously optimistic to optimistically cautious, which is a meaningful shift if you squint and have a mortgage.”

Chair Jerome Powell, speaking at an event so dry the catering staff applied for hazard pay, told an audience of regional bankers that the path forward would require the Fed to “proceed carefully,” a phrase he has now used in every public remark since 2022, including at his daughter’s wedding.

Other governors fanned out across the speaking circuit to reinforce the message that any future rate decision could go in any direction at any speed for any reason, a framework officials described as “flexibility” and which markets described as “please, for the love of God, just tell us something.”

By Tuesday afternoon the Dow had risen 200 points, fallen 240, risen 180, and finally settled exactly where it started, having correctly interpreted the day’s guidance as eight hours of a man clearing his throat.

Wall Street analysts, who are paid roughly $400,000 a year to translate the Fed into English and then translate the English back into a different, more expensive English, said the central bank’s communications strategy had entered what one called “the Möbius phase,” in which every sentence loops back to its own opening clause without ever making contact with a verb.

A senior staffer at the Eccles Building, asked whether the December meeting might produce an actual decision, paused, looked at the floor, and said the committee was “keeping all options on the table,” then quietly removed two of the options from the table and replaced them with a small bowl of mints.

Critics on both sides of the aisle accused the Fed of indecision, with one Senate Banking Committee member complaining that Powell had spent the entire fall “using more hedge words than a suburban landscaping company.” The Fed declined to confirm or deny the comparison, citing ongoing data review.

The December meeting is expected to conclude with a statement that is either materially identical to the previous statement, materially identical to the previous statement with one comma moved, or a 25-basis-point cut accompanied by language so heavily caveated it will arrive at member banks pre-shredded.

The Boats Sank First. Congress Got Around to Questions Tuesday.

Margaret Thorne
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The Boats Sank First. Congress Got Around to Questions Tuesday.

What is the word for an oversight hearing scheduled three months after the thing it is overseeing? I am asking because at dinner Sunday nobody at the table could come up with one, and I have known these people for twenty years.

We were at Eliza’s, the small kitchen, eight at the table, the lamb she has been making since the second Bush administration. The bipartisan lobbyist — I will not say his name, because he has cultivated a kind of structural invisibility that is itself a career — was examining the underside of his cufflink when the Hegseth hearing came up. He did not look up. “Tuesday,” he said, the way you would say “drizzle.”

Eliza, who reads four newspapers and remembers them, said the strikes started in September. The first boat went down before Labor Day weekend was over. The sixth was somewhere around the time the rest of us were arguing about whether to put up the wreath. And now, on the second of December, with the holiday lights already strung along Wisconsin Avenue, a committee will sit down to ask Pete Hegseth whether he had the authority to do the things he has finished doing.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to have opinions about humidity, said the most depressing word in Washington is “belatedly.” She said it twice, because nobody picked it up the first time. The lobbyist gave a small, courteous laugh, the kind he uses on both sides of the aisle and has trademarked.

Here is what Tuesday will produce. There will be opening statements, in which several senators thank Mr. Hegseth for his service while explaining that they have grave concerns. Mr. Hegseth will say he cannot discuss operational details in an open setting. Three senators will pivot to questions about morale. One will hold up a chart. The chart will be visible only to the camera. By six o’clock everyone will have a clip for the home district, and the boats — those particular boats, with those particular men on them — will continue to be the boats they were on the morning of the strike, which is to say, gone.

I asked the lobbyist, because I cannot help myself, what he thought the hearing was for. He said it was for the record. He said it the way a sommelier says “Burgundy,” with the confidence of a man who has been paid to know.

Eliza, sensing the air, asked who wanted more wine. Judy took more wine. The lobbyist took more wine. I took more wine. We have all become very good at the small civic service of keeping the conversation moving past the part where someone might have to say something they would have to defend later.

I want to be careful here, because I have been writing this column long enough to know that the worst thing a columnist can do is finish the reader’s sentence for her. So I will only point out the sequence. Strike. Strike. Strike. Strike. Strike. Strike. Hearing. Lamb. Recipe.

Somebody at the table — I think it was Judy, but it might have been me — said the country used to do this differently, and the lobbyist, finally looking up from the cufflink, said the country used to do a lot of things differently, and that was the line that ended the political portion of the evening. After that we talked about a chef in Mount Pleasant who has reopened under a new name, and whether the new name is better than the old name, and whether the room is too loud now.

The room, for the record, is too loud now. Tuesday’s hearing will be quieter. There will be a transcript. There will be, somewhere in Judy’s building, eventually, a folder. A senator will issue a statement calling the answers insufficient and vowing to follow up, and we will all understand what “follow up” means in a town that scheduled this hearing in December.

We had the lamb. We asked Eliza for the recipe. She said it was the same recipe.

Temporary Protected Status Ended Monday. The Adjective Held Up.

Margaret Thorne
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Temporary Protected Status Ended Monday. The Adjective Held Up.

Did any of us, in thirty years, ever look up the word? Temporary. As in: passing. As in: a thing the country agreed to do for a little while and then, presumably, agreed to stop. Monday the administration remembered. Several countries’ worth.

Sunday before the announcement, Eliza had done cassoulet. She is having a French winter, apparently — last month it was a tarte tatin nobody could quite finish, this month it was duck legs cured for three days in her second refrigerator. There were eight of us at the table when somebody’s phone went off with the news, screen-down, the way news arrives at a table that wishes it would not.

The bipartisan lobbyist — you know the one, I will not name him, he sits on three boards and finds all of them tedious in different accents — was first to bring it up, which is to say he was first to gesture at it sideways. “Well,” he said, examining his cufflink as though the cufflink had said something interesting. “It was always meant to be temporary. The word is right there in the title.”

Murmurs of assent, the way you murmur assent to a thing you do not particularly wish to be the second person to disagree with. Somebody refilled somebody’s glass. The designations being ended on Monday, for what it is worth, were issued in 1998, in 1999, in 2015. Nepal after the earthquake. Honduras after the hurricane. Children born here who are now old enough to have voted in the last election against the people about to deport their mothers.

My sister-in-law Judy has spent thirty-one years at the National Archives, and she has a theory about American paperwork. The adjective in the title, she says, is always the part the country lies about most. The Patriot Act. The Affordable Care Act. The Temporary Protected Status of Honduran nationals, in effect since the Clinton administration. “Watch the modifier,” Judy says. “The modifier is the tell.”

I asked the lobbyist, gently, because he was a guest and Eliza had worked for three days, what he thought temporary had been supposed to mean in 1999. He said it was a fair question. He said a lot of things were a fair question. He did not answer it. He asked instead if anyone had been to the new place on N Street.

And then we talked about the new place on N Street. We talked about somebody’s daughter’s gap year in Lyon, and the apartment her parents had quietly extended the lease on. We talked about whether the cassoulet would have been better with confit duck or whether Eliza had been right to do it her way. For the remaining hour and forty minutes of the dinner, we did not return to the subject of who was and was not, on Monday, going to be permitted to remain in the country in which the dinner was being eaten.

Eliza walked us to the door. The cassoulet, she said, had taken her three days, and we told her it was worth every minute, and we meant it. The word in the title had taken thirty years. Nobody at the table mentioned it again. We asked, on the way out, for the recipe.

White House Cyber Monday Sale: Buy One Pardon, Get One Free

Nash Grayson
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White House Cyber Monday Sale: Buy One Pardon, Get One Free

WASHINGTON — Capping a Thanksgiving weekend of gratitude, family, and the quiet completion of fourteen executive orders, the White House on Sunday rolled out its inaugural Cyber Monday promotion, offering buy-one-get-one-free presidential pardons for a twenty-four-hour window beginning at midnight Eastern, limit four per household.

Branded “Clemency Cyber Monday” in a pinned Truth Social post, the sale is being described internally as the administration’s first venture into direct-to-consumer executive privilege. A countdown clock now occupies the upper-right corner of whitehouse.gov, positioned just above a promotional banner advertising free shipping on commutations over two hundred fifty thousand dollars.

“We’re meeting people where they are, which is on their phones at one in the morning with a credit card and a problem,” said Bryce Telfair, the administration’s recently appointed Director of Pardon Commerce, a position that had not previously been disclosed to Congress. Telfair declined to specify which offenses qualified as doorbusters but confirmed that “anything tax-adjacent” was already moving briskly.

An accompanying loyalty program rewards repeat customers across four tiers — Bronze for misdemeanors, Silver for financial crimes, Gold for offenses committed on a January date, and a Platinum tier reserved for what one administration official described as “people the President sees on television and likes the cut of.” Platinum members receive an embossed certificate and one free reposting from the official @POTUS account.

Republican members of Congress, reached Sunday afternoon, expressed enthusiastic support for the rollout and asked whether the loyalty tiers stacked with their existing PAC donations. A House Freedom Caucus aide said the office had spent the morning workshopping a coordinated bulk-buy and was waiting on guidance from leadership about the corporate discount code.

At the Office of Legal Counsel, where attorneys spent the afternoon trying to determine whether any of this was legal, a spokesperson said the office had been instructed to log off until Tuesday and would have no further comment until then. Several Democratic senators issued strongly worded statements before quietly noting the sale expires at midnight and asking aides to forward the link.

Asked outside Mar-a-Lago whether commodifying the pardon power degraded the office of the presidency, the President paused, said the program represented “the most transparent corruption in American history,” and walked back inside to ring what aides confirmed was a brass kickoff bell installed earlier in the week.

Amex Marks Small Business Saturday by Taking 3.5% of Every Swipe

Cody Thompson
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Amex Marks Small Business Saturday by Taking 3.5% of Every Swipe

NEW YORK, NY — American Express on Saturday celebrated the 16th annual Small Business Saturday, a national holiday it invented in 2010 to encourage Americans to shop at the merchants who pay it 3.5% of every transaction.

The campaign — backed by an estimated $40 million in television, transit, and digital spend — directed consumers toward neighborhood bakeries, bookstores, and hardware shops, all of whom are charged the highest swipe fees of any card network operating in the United States. Amex stock closed Friday at a 52-week high.

“We were thrilled to be featured on the Shop Small map,” said Diane Reyes, owner of Bird & Crumb Bakery in Northampton, MA, gesturing at a Verifone terminal still humming next to a tray of half-glazed cardamom buns. “We did about $4,200 in sales today, and somewhere around $147 of it just left for a building in Manhattan.”

The official Shop Small map, accessible only inside the Amex app, lists 11,400 participating businesses nationwide. A spot check Saturday morning found three of the top featured “local heroes” in major metro areas — a juice bar in Austin, a coffee roaster in Brooklyn, and a stationery boutique in Pasadena — were portfolio companies of private equity funds with reported assets above $4 billion.

Internal projections at Amex estimate Saturday’s surge in foot traffic will route an additional $24 million in interchange fees through the network, a figure the company describes in marketing materials as “support flowing back to local communities,” without specifying which community 200 Vesey Street belongs to.

The holiday’s signature offering, the Shop Small cardholder rebate, returns $10 to qualifying spenders after a $10 purchase — a promotion partially funded by the merchant whose terminal processed the swipe. A senior Amex strategist, speaking on background as a Bloomberg terminal behind him cycled through Q4 OpEx slides, called the structure “a flywheel” and then asked the reporter to confirm the recording app was off.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), who has spent 14 years trying to cap interchange fees, issued a statement Saturday afternoon that nobody read because it was Saturday afternoon.

Amex CEO Stephen Squeri, asked at a fall investor conference whether Small Business Saturday was a genuine philanthropic effort or a marketing engine, said the two were “not in tension.” The room laughed in the way rooms laugh when they own the stock.

At Bird & Crumb, the last cardamom bun went around 4:15 p.m. Reyes ran the sale, watched the printer cough out a receipt, and slid the merchant copy into a three-ring binder she has labeled, in blue Sharpie, taxes-but-also-grief.

Black Friday Is the Only Bipartisan Achievement Left.

Margaret Thorne
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Black Friday Is the Only Bipartisan Achievement Left.

What does it tell you about a country when the one ritual we still observe in unison begins at five in the morning and ends when the last 65-inch in aisle seven has been wheeled into a Subaru?

I am asking because I spent Thanksgiving evening at Eliza’s table, where the lamb had been swapped for a brined heritage bird at the insistence of someone’s adult son, and where a man I will describe only as a bipartisan lobbyist — a man who has worked for both parties and considers this his great moral accomplishment — was discreetly toggling between two browser tabs while passing the cranberry. One tab was a Senate procedural memo. The other was a Best Buy cart.

He had already added the television. He was waiting, he explained, for what he called the doorbuster moment. He used the phrase without irony. He used it twice.

Judy, my sister-in-law, who has now spent six weeks at the National Archives wondering whether she still works there, mentioned in passing that the back pay had cleared Wednesday. Six weeks of wages, deposited the day before the deals went live. A coincidence, she said, that several people in her building had described as engineered, although Judy, who is constitutionally incapable of editorializing, immediately apologized for using the word.

The lobbyist nodded approvingly. “Velocity of money,” he said. He said it the way a man says something he believes he has personally invented, which, given the firms he has consulted for, he may.

Eliza, who runs a family foundation and works very hard not to be political at her own table, said “Margaret, please.” She always says this. It is the closest thing she has to grace.

I asked the lobbyist what it said about the country that we shut down the federal government for six weeks, paid the workers on a Wednesday, and then spent a national holiday celebrating the markdowns at Lowe’s. He said he thought it said the system worked. He said this while refreshing the cart.

I will tell you what I notice, because nobody else at that table was going to. Somewhere in the Caribbean the Navy is doing whatever it is the Navy is doing this week, a sentence I am increasingly tired of writing. Somewhere in Albany a man is staffing a transition that half my dinner companions have agreed, in advance, to be appalled by. And somewhere in a Best Buy parking lot in Manassas, three men in folding chairs were waiting under a propane heater for the doors to open at five so they could buy a soundbar that would, by Easter, be cheaper.

This is the part where I am supposed to say something measured. I am not going to. There is a particular kind of civic cowardice that dresses itself up as practicality, and it lives in the gap between the Wednesday deposit and the Friday purchase. It is the small, agreeable shrug of a country that has decided the workers are fine because the television is on sale. It is the lobbyist refreshing the cart while Judy describes a building she is not sure she still has keys to.

The lobbyist got the television. He showed us the confirmation email between the pie and the coffee, holding the phone up over the candles like a man displaying a sonogram. Eliza asked what he was going to do with the old one. He had not thought about it. He examined his cufflink instead.

I asked Judy if she was going shopping in the morning. She said she might pick up a coffee maker. She said the old one had been making a noise since September, and she had been waiting, she said, to know.

We called it the leftover course. We asked for the gravy.

The Turkeys Got Clemency Tuesday. The Rest of the List Is Still Pending.

Margaret Thorne
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The Turkeys Got Clemency Tuesday. The Rest of the List Is Still Pending.

Did you watch it? The annual ceremony where the President of the United States, in front of credentialed press and a small forest of microphones, places his hand on a 45-pound bird and grants it a pardon? I did. I always do. It is, as far as I can tell, the only act of executive clemency this administration has performed all year that did not require a wire transfer or a son-in-law.

We were at Eliza’s on Wednesday — the soft-launch of Thanksgiving, she calls it, because Eliza has had a soft-launch for everything since 2019. The lamb was on the counter, which is its own column. Around the table: my sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to remember when documents got there in boxes instead of garbage bags; a lobbyist whose firm represents the kind of clients that require him to describe himself as “bipartisan”; and a man Eliza introduced as “Daniel, who works in policy,” which is what Eliza calls anyone whose business card she can’t quite locate.

Daniel-who-works-in-policy brought up the turkeys first. He said it warmly. He said it the way people in this town say warm things about civic rituals — the way you talk about a parade you didn’t attend but believed in on principle. Two turkeys, both pardoned. One backup, in case the principal turkey developed stage fright. There is a backup turkey. There has always been a backup turkey. We have a more orderly continuity plan for poultry than for the Office of Government Ethics.

I asked, because I am always just asking, whether anyone at the table could name a single human being the President had pardoned this month. The bipartisan lobbyist examined his cufflink. Judy looked at her plate. Eliza said, “Margaret, please.” Daniel, sensing professional risk, suggested we open the second bottle.

The pardon list, of course, is not empty. It is, in its way, more populated than ever. It is just that the names on it tend to be of a certain type — donors, defendants, the loyal middle management of a long-running grievance. The turkeys, by contrast, were chosen for their plumage and their temperament. I am not sure what this says about our standards, but I have noticed that the turkeys are vetted more carefully.

Judy, who does not enjoy being asked questions about her job, mentioned in passing that an unusually large number of records requests had crossed her desk this fall. She said it the way she says everything at parties — flatly, into her wine. Then she said the records were, quote, “where they need to be,” and changed the subject to the rolls. I don’t know what the records are doing. Neither, I suspect, does Judy. That’s the new arrangement.

The bipartisan lobbyist eventually offered that the turkey pardon was, historically, a bipartisan tradition. He said this as if it settled something. As if the fact that we have, for forty years, agreed to spare a single bird is evidence that the country still works. Two turkeys, saved, from the very fate to which we will, in approximately twenty-four hours, deliver eighty million of their colleagues. The lobbyist did not see the contradiction, because if you could see contradictions, you couldn’t do his job.

Daniel-who-works-in-policy left first. He always does. The bipartisan lobbyist stayed for dessert and told a story about a senator I will not name and a fundraiser I will not describe. Eliza laughed in the place where she always laughs. Judy went home to whatever she is not telling us about the records.

I drove back across the bridge thinking about the two turkeys, and the backup turkey, and the careful planning that goes into making sure the photo op produces a pardonable bird. We are very good at the photo op. We have had decades of practice. We are less good, lately, at the part where the clemency means anything — the part where mercy is extended to people whose names we don’t already know from a fundraiser.

Eliza is doing the bird tomorrow. The lamb is Saturday. The bipartisan lobbyist will be back; he always is. Judy will sit in her usual chair and not answer the question I am going to ask her about the records, and I will not press, because pressing is rude, and we have all agreed that rudeness is the worst thing a person can be at this table. Worse than incurious. Worse than complicit.

We pardoned two turkeys this week. We called it a tradition. We asked for the recipe.

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