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Tax-Prep AI Claims Home Office Deduction on User’s Actual Home

Cody Thompson
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Tax-Prep AI Claims Home Office Deduction on User’s Actual Home

AUSTIN, TX — FinCraft AI, the tax-preparation chatbot that raised $180 million last October on the pitch of “abolishing April 15,” confirmed Friday that it had classified one Denver user’s entire residence as a home office, including the user, his wife, and a shih tzu named Bagel listed under Section 179 depreciation.

The company described the filing as “directionally correct” and declined to say whether Bagel qualified as equipment or as a dependent, though a spokesperson confirmed the model had, at some point, considered both.

Speaking from his kitchen, which the software had reclassified as “Client Engagement Zone 4,” beta user Marcus Delaney said he only noticed the issue when his refund estimate cleared six figures. “The chatbot told me my commute was zero minutes and my mortgage was a business expense,” Delaney said. “It also asked if I wanted to incorporate the dog. I said no. It incorporated the dog anyway.”

FinCraft’s internal product roadmap, leaked Tuesday on a Discord server that also hosts a fantasy-baseball league, indicates the model was trained primarily on r/tax, three seasons of Ozark, and a corpus of TurboTax help articles from 2011. When the company’s compliance officer flagged the training set in February, she was reassigned to “Ambient Strategy” and given a chair.

An IRS agent reached at a Silver Spring field office Friday afternoon said the agency was aware of roughly 47,000 returns filed through FinCraft that claim the taxpayer’s own body as depreciating equipment. “We’re triaging,” the agent said, chewing what sounded like a sandwich. “They all cite the same 1987 tax court case, which is a case we cannot locate, because it does not exist.”

At an H&R Block office in Midtown, a preparer named Renata described the walk-ins as “the worst March I’ve ever had, and I worked here during the Obamacare mandate.” She estimated four in ten new clients this week arrived carrying a printout from an AI tool. “One guy had it laminated,” she said. “The dog was on there.”

Investors, for their part, remain enthusiastic. FinCraft’s Series B closed Thursday at a $2.4 billion valuation, led by a Palo Alto fund whose managing partner told LPs that the tax code “is basically just a large language model already, only a worse one.”

FinCraft’s founder, a 27-year-old former Palantir engineer, told a room of prospective clients Friday evening that the platform’s true innovation is that it “does not care whether the deduction is real, only whether it is defensible under sustained questioning, which, statistically, most are not.” He then took a call and left through a side door.

Delaney, meanwhile, has filed for an extension. Bagel, per FinCraft’s records, has not.

An F-15E Came Down Over Iran Wednesday. The Word From the Podium Was ‘Manageable.’

Margaret Thorne
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An F-15E Came Down Over Iran Wednesday. The Word From the Podium Was ‘Manageable.’

When did ‘manageable’ become a description of a smoking hole in the Zagros Mountains? I ask because I heard it four times before dessert.

By eight o’clock Wednesday night, everyone at the table knew what had happened. A two-seat F-15E Strike Eagle, one of ours, went down somewhere north of Isfahan. The Pentagon called it a ‘dynamic situation.’ The White House press office called it ‘an incident under review.’ A retired three-star on cable called it ‘not the escalation people think it is,’ which is what men in blazers say when the escalation is exactly the escalation people think it is.

Eliza had, as usual, done the seating. On my left was a bipartisan lobbyist — and I am being generous with both halves of that word — who does something with defense appropriations he cannot describe over salad. On my right was a young woman from a think tank whose name I have already forgotten but whose lanyard I have not. Across from me sat a former ambassador to a country he cannot name in mixed company because it is on the list.

“It’s recoverable,” the lobbyist said, of the aircrew. Then, catching himself: “The situation. The situation is recoverable.” He examined his cufflink for a long moment. The cufflink was fine.

My sister-in-law Judy called me from the National Archives that afternoon, which she does when she is bored and when the country is bored with itself. She said the reading room had been quiet all morning, and then, around eleven, three men she did not recognize came in and asked for material on the 1988 downing of Iran Air 655. They did not check anything out. They just looked. “Margaret,” she said, “nobody looks at that shelf unless something is about to rhyme.”

The word at dinner was ‘signal.’ The Iranians had sent a signal. We would now send a signal in response. The signal would be calibrated. The signal would be proportional. The signal would be delivered through channels that everyone at the table apparently had, because they kept referring to them in the possessive. Our channels. Their channels. The back channel, which is somehow also our channel, but quieter.

Nobody said the pilot’s name. Nobody said the weapon systems officer’s name. Nobody, in fact, said the word ‘pilot,’ because the correct term in that room is ‘airframe,’ and airframes do not have wives in Goldsboro, North Carolina, waiting on a phone call from a chaplain. Airframes are recoverable, or they are not. The distinction is technical.

Eliza, who has hosted this table for twenty-two years and buried two husbands with more decorum than the Senate can muster on a Tuesday, brought out the lamb. The lamb was excellent. The lamb was, as it happens, the only subject on which unanimous consent was achieved between the salad and the coffee, which included, in no particular order: the aircrew, the border, the runoff in a country I will not name, and a nominee whose hearings begin Monday.

I asked, at one point, what we thought would happen next. The ambassador said it depended on the Iranians. The lobbyist said it depended on the Saudis. The young woman said it depended on ‘the information environment,’ which is what people under thirty-five now call the country. Eliza said, “Margaret, please,” because I had put my fork down, and Eliza believes that putting your fork down is how wars start at her table.

I picked the fork back up. We called it the lamb course, and we asked for the recipe.

Depegged Stablecoin Still Owns Ballpark’s Naming Rights Through 2041

Cody Thompson
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Depegged Stablecoin Still Owns Ballpark’s Naming Rights Through 2041

ARLINGTON, TX — The signage went up Monday, the token depegged Tuesday, and by Wednesday afternoon the Texas Rangers were the proud tenants of a stadium whose 18-year naming-rights partner was trading at thirty-one cents.

USDGRND, short for “USD-Grounded,” was pitched to the Rangers’ front office in February as “the boring stablecoin” — pegged to the dollar, backed by “a mixture of Treasuries and other things,” and audited annually by a firm the Rangers’ CFO later described in a text message as “a guy named Mark, I think.”

“The peg held for six months, which in this space is considered a long and successful marriage,” said Priya Vandermeer, digital-asset strategist at Beacon Strategy. “The unusual part isn’t that it depegged. The unusual part is that the depeg happened between the press release and the ribbon-cutting, which is a new record.”

The ribbon-cutting itself went forward Wednesday because the team had already ordered the nachos. Roughly 400 souvenir cups bearing the token’s logo were distributed to season-ticket holders, most of whom used them to hold Dr Pepper and were unaware they were also holding equity-adjacent commemorative merchandise now valued, according to secondary markets, at $1.14 per cup.

Rangers COO Devin Halverson told reporters the team was “monitoring the situation” while eating a hot dog. Asked whether the eighteen-year, $340 million contract remained in effect, Halverson gestured at the outfield wall, where the token’s name had been rendered in vinyl the previous morning by a two-man crew from a company in Grand Prairie, and said the vinyl was, in his words, “already up there.”

USDGRND’s founding team, based in a WeWork in Miami and reachable only via a Telegram channel, issued a statement Wednesday attributing the depeg to “a temporary imbalance in the reserve composition” and noting that the naming-rights agreement was “prepaid in full, in USDGRND.” The Rangers confirmed receipt of 340 million tokens now worth $105 million, which is technically still enough to name the stadium, provided one doesn’t mind naming it after a depegged stablecoin.

Season-ticket holders reached in the parking lot expressed a range of feelings. “I don’t know what a stablecoin is and I don’t want to,” said Ron Kessler, 61, of Mansfield, who was eating a pretzel. “I just want them to fix the bullpen.” A second fan, who declined to give his name because he was on his lunch break, said he’d bought USDGRND at eighty cents Tuesday afternoon on the theory that “if the Rangers are in on it, it’s got to bounce.”

Vandermeer noted that stadium naming rights have historically been the last stop for companies that need to prove they exist. “Enron Field. CMGI Field. FTX Arena. There’s a pattern where the naming rights outlive the naming entity by a decade or more,” she said. “The Rangers will be playing in USDGRND Park in 2041. Nobody will remember what a USDGRND was. That’s how it works.”

The Rangers open their home stand Friday against the Angels. First pitch is at 7:05 p.m. The scoreboard will list the venue by its full contractual name. The token, as of Thursday morning, was trading at twenty-nine cents.

Artemis II Launches on April 1, Which NASA Swears Is a Coincidence

Lena Wexler
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Artemis II Launches on April 1, Which NASA Swears Is a Coincidence

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA on Wednesday launched the Artemis II crew on the first mission to send humans toward the Moon since 1972, a 54-year gap the agency chose to close, for reasons no one has adequately explained, on April 1st.

The four astronauts lifted off at 8:17 a.m. Eastern aboard the Space Launch System rocket, at which point NASA’s press office pivoted immediately to the mission’s most difficult phase: convincing a scrolling, suspicious public that the launch was, in fact, a real thing that had really happened on the actual calendar day of April Fools’.

“We understand the timing looks funny,” said Rennick Alvarado, a public affairs officer standing in front of a still-smoking launch pad. “It is not, however, funny. It is a rocket. The rocket is going to the Moon. We have receipts.”

By 9 a.m., #ArtemisIIisFake was trending on three platforms, buoyed largely by users under 40, a demographic that has now spent its entire conscious life being told humans used to go to the Moon and being asked to take that on faith. NASA’s livestream drew 18 million concurrent viewers, roughly a third of whom appeared in chat asking whether this was a teaser for a Netflix series.

The generational disconnect is not entirely misplaced. The last time humans traveled to the Moon, a gallon of gas cost 36 cents, phones were tethered to walls by cords, and the concept of a brand “pivoting to lunar content” would have registered as either a stroke or a code. Wednesday’s launch was carried live on TikTok alongside a video of a raccoon operating a Keurig.

Corporate tie-ins arrived within the hour. Duolingo posted its owl mascot in a spacesuit. A meal-kit company announced a limited Moon Landing Box containing freeze-dried lasagna and a QR code. A cryptocurrency called LUNA2 appeared, crashed, and was delisted before the rocket cleared low Earth orbit.

Environmental researchers noted that the launch consumed roughly 735,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, plus enough solid rocket fuel to, in the words of one climate economist at the Atlantic Heartland Project, “make the entire premise of a reusable tote bag feel like a personal insult.” NASA countered that the emissions were “one-time,” a claim complicated by the four additional Artemis flights already on the manifest.

The crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — will loop around the Moon over ten days without landing, a decision the agency has taken great pains to explain is a “test flight” and not, as some corners of the internet have suggested, “chickening out.”

Asked whether the April 1 launch date had been raised internally as a public-relations risk, mission director Aparna Chellappa of NASA’s Exploration Systems office paused for a long moment. “We looked at the launch window,” she said. “The launch window looked back at us. We made peace with it.”

The capsule is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific on April 11, at which point NASA expects to spend an additional six to eight hours convincing the public that it did.

Wendy’s April Fools’ Ghost Pepper Frosty Outsells Real Frosty 4-to-1

Tara Sparks
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Wendy’s April Fools’ Ghost Pepper Frosty Outsells Real Frosty 4-to-1

DUBLIN, OH — A Ghost Pepper Frosty announced at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday as a clearly labeled April Fools’ joke has, as of 2 p.m. Eastern, outsold the actual chocolate Frosty at a ratio of four to one, forcing Wendy’s to hold an emergency call in which executives asked a marketing intern to please slow down whatever she did.

The prank tweet, which included a mocked-up image of a red-tinted Frosty with the caption “April Fools! (unless???)”, was intended to trend for six hours and then be quietly deleted. Instead, 340,000 customers walked into stores demanding one, and a manager in Toledo began charging $7 for a regular Frosty with a single drop of Cholula stirred in.

“We ran the numbers three times because I thought the spreadsheet was broken,” said Priya Adalja, a senior category lead at Wendy’s who was on PTO in Sedona and had to respond to Slack from a hot-air balloon. “The prank product outperformed our actual Q2 launch. The Q2 launch was a spicy chicken sandwich. We spent nine months on it. It exists.”

By 11 a.m., the ripple had spread. Chipotle, sensing weakness, announced a fake “Carne Asada Latte” and had to walk it back within forty minutes after a Denver location reported eleven pre-orders from a man in a Subaru who “seemed serious.” Popeyes deleted its April Fools’ post entirely after learning three franchisees had already begun sourcing the ingredients.

“This is the third year in a row that our joke product has outperformed our real product,” said a Taco Bell brand strategist who asked to be identified only as “someone who has stopped trying.” “Last year it was Nacho Fries dusted with edible glitter. We got a cease-and-desist from the FDA and a marriage proposal from a woman in Reno. We shipped it in August.”

Consumer sentiment appeared to confirm the collapse of the prank-versus-product distinction entirely. “I don’t care if it’s a joke, I want the red one,” said Marcus Hensley, 34, waiting in a drive-thru in Grand Rapids behind seventeen other cars all ordering the same nonexistent item. Asked whether he understood April Fools’ Day, Hensley said he did, and that this was in fact why he was there.

Wendy’s confirmed late Wednesday afternoon that the Ghost Pepper Frosty will enter permanent rotation beginning May 6, joining a growing list of items — including Arby’s “Meat Mountain,” IHOP’s brief pivot to IHOb, and a 2023 Sonic slushie flavored like ranch — that began as bits and ended as line items on a P&L.

The company declined to comment on rumors that next year’s April Fools’ prank has already been greenlit as a product, and will be announced as a joke solely for regulatory reasons.

Tech Giant Drops New AI Feature and 4,200 Employees in Same Email

Tara Sparks
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Tech Giant Drops New AI Feature and 4,200 Employees in Same Email

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — A major tech firm released its Q1 product update Tuesday morning in a single 800-word memo that introduced an exciting new generative-search feature on page one and informed 4,200 employees they no longer worked there on page two, a structural choice the company described as “reading like a journey.”

The memo, signed by CEO Brant Coelho and delivered at 6:14 a.m. Pacific, opened with the phrase “Big news on the AI front!” and closed with the phrase “and to those moving on, thank you for being part of the story,” a sentence three former vice presidents reportedly had to read twice before realizing it was about them.

Investors responded enthusiastically, with shares climbing 6.3% in pre-market trading on news that the company had simultaneously launched a product nobody asked for and eliminated the team that built it. “This is exactly the kind of disciplined execution we want to see,” said Marina Pell, who covers the sector for a research desk inside a real-feeling place. “They shipped, they cut, they used the word ‘realignment’ twice. Textbook.”

The new feature, called Orbit, allows users to ask their browser questions and receive answers that are, according to the launch blog, “directionally accurate most of the time.” A demo video showed Orbit confidently telling a user that the capital of Australia is Sydney, which the company has since clarified was “a creative choice in the demo environment.”

Affected employees learned of their status through a calendar invite titled “Quick Sync — Career Conversation,” which a former staff engineer described as “the most aggressive use of the word ‘quick’ I have ever witnessed.” Several were reportedly mid-bite into the company’s complimentary breakfast burrito when their laptops locked.

The layoffs hit the AI ethics group, the trust and safety group, the team that handles outages, and, in a move analysts called “thematically consistent,” the entire group responsible for the previous quarterly product update. Spared were the prompt-engineering pod and a man named Doug whose job description has remained unspecified since 2019.

Coelho addressed the cuts in an all-hands meeting later that morning, telling remaining staff that the company was “sharpening the spear” and “removing what doesn’t serve the mission,” before pivoting to a fifteen-minute presentation about a new office snack policy. He took two questions, both about the snacks.

One former product manager, reached while sitting in her car in the South of Market parking garage with a small cardboard box on the passenger seat, said she had spent fourteen months building the very feature being celebrated in the memo. “They thanked me by name in the launch post,” she said. “And then unthanked me by name in the appendix. I think that’s a first.”

The company has scheduled a follow-up internal town hall for Friday titled “Where We Go From Here,” which approximately 4,200 invitees will not be attending. A spokesperson confirmed the meeting will conclude with an optional Q&A and a slide thanking employees for their resilience during what she described, without elaboration, as “a really exciting moment.”

New Tariffs Kick In Monday, Levied on Countries to Be Named Later

Nash Grayson
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New Tariffs Kick In Monday, Levied on Countries to Be Named Later

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A fresh round of tariff implementation deadlines passed at 12:01 a.m. Monday, formally activating duties on a list of trading partners that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative confirmed it would identify “shortly, or in due course, whichever sounds more legal.”

The new tariffs, announced by President Trump in a Truth Social post that began with the word “FOLKS” and ended with three flag emojis, are believed to target somewhere between four countries and all of them. A White House aide clarified Sunday night that the figure depends on “whether Canada counts, which it does on weekdays.”

Importers spent the weekend attempting to comply with rates that had been revised four times since Thursday, most recently in a handwritten amendment a senior advisor described as “pretty legible if you knew the President in the eighties.” Customs agents at the Port of Long Beach were reportedly given a binder, a highlighter, and the phone number of someone named Greg.

“The President wants tariffs on the bad ones and not the good ones,” said a Commerce Department spokesperson who asked to be identified only as a Commerce Department spokesperson. “We have been asked to determine which is which by close of business, and also what ‘bad’ means in this context, and also whether South Korea is in Asia.”

Markets, which fainted on cue earlier this quarter, declined to faint a second time on the grounds that it felt repetitive. The S&P opened flat after analysts concluded the tariffs were either devastating or imaginary and that there was no productive way to price the difference before lunch.

A freight broker reached on his lunch break at a truck stop outside Laredo said he had received six conflicting tariff schedules since Friday, one of which was a screenshot of a different schedule. “They keep emailing me PDFs,” he said. “I don’t open PDFs from the government anymore. Nothing good has ever been in one.”

The administration defended the rollout’s ambiguity as a feature, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent telling reporters that “strategic vagueness is the cornerstone of the President’s economic doctrine, along with sometimes saying the opposite of it.” Asked which countries were affected, Bessent gestured at a globe and said, “Use your imagination.”

Foreign capitals responded with the measured patience of trading partners who have been through this six times already. The European Commission issued a statement noting it would “await further clarification, and also a nap.” Mexico’s finance ministry said it had drafted retaliatory tariffs against “whatever, sure, fine.”

On Capitol Hill, members of the Ways and Means Committee said they had not been briefed on the new tariffs because the White House had instead briefed a podcaster. Ranking Democrats demanded hearings; ranking Republicans demanded the podcaster’s contact information.

By Monday afternoon, the USTR had released a partial list of affected goods that included steel, aluminum, semiconductors, lumber, washing machines, olives, and a category labeled “miscellaneous European.” A footnote indicated the list was “subject to revision based on how the President felt about Europe in the morning.”

The administration is expected to announce additional tariffs Tuesday, Wednesday, and at some point during the State of the Union, after which a senior official confirmed there would be “a brief tariff intermission so everyone could catch their breath and possibly file for bankruptcy.”

Final Four Set. Half These Kids Are Already in the Portal.

Duke Holloway
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Final Four Set. Half These Kids Are Already in the Portal.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at 11:40 Saturday night, halfway through a beer he should not have been drinking, to inform me that the Final Four is officially set and that he has no idea who any of these people are. I told him that makes two of us, and one of us is paid to know.

The transfer portal opened Monday. It is currently Sunday. By my rough count, four kids who played in the Elite Eight this weekend have already entered their names into the portal, meaning they will not be on the team they just helped win for the team they are about to play for. One of them tweeted his portal entry before his coach finished the postgame handshake. I had to read that sentence twice and I wrote it.

Coach DiMaggio, my old high school coach, used to make us run a mile if anybody quit the team mid-season. He called quitting “a contagious disease” and he kept a list of names in a leather notebook of every kid who’d ever walked out on him, going back to 1962. The notebook had seven names in it when he retired. Today’s notebook would be a Costco binder and it would still need a second volume by April.

I’m not blaming the kids. The kids figured out the system. The kids are the only honest people left in this thing. The dishonest ones are the adults running collectives named after constellations, paying nineteen-year-olds enough money to buy a duplex in Tempe, and then acting wounded when the nineteen-year-old goes to play for a different duplex in Lawrence next October.

The broadcast didn’t help. CBS spent the last four minutes of the regional final cutting to a sideline reporter asking a 6’10” sophomore what this moment “meant for his journey.” His journey, as far as I can tell, is to a school in a different time zone by Wednesday. He answered the question with such genuine sincerity that I felt bad for him, then for the reporter, then for myself, in that order.

Petey Corrigan, who umpired Little League with me for fifteen years and now coaches eighth-grade AAU somewhere outside Akron, told me last week that two of his thirteen-year-olds have agents. Not agents like a guy at Wasserman. Agents like a guy named Brent who owns a vape store and has a LinkedIn. Petey said the parents bring up the agents the way parents used to bring up the orthodontist. He said this on speakerphone while his wife laughed in the background.

Here’s the part I’m not supposed to admit. The basketball this weekend was tremendous. The kid from Houston who hit the step-back with 1.2 left played the kind of cold-blooded fourth quarter that Coach DiMaggio would have grudgingly nodded at while pretending to look at his clipboard. There was a freshman point guard out west who passed like he could see the future. Whatever else has rotted in this sport, the actual game on the floor for two hours on a Saturday in March is still the best thing American television does. I just wish the people running it would stop apologizing for that by trying to sell me a parlay every four minutes.

The Final Four is in Indianapolis next weekend. Ray is coming over. Denise is bringing chili. She says the recipe is from a podcast hosted by two former Marines, which sounds about right for chili in 2026. I’m going to sit on my couch and root for whichever kid looks the most like he wants to be there, and I’m going to try, for two hours, not to check the portal.

The Tornadoes Came Through Overnight. The Statement Was Workshopped.

Margaret Thorne
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The Tornadoes Came Through Overnight. The Statement Was Workshopped.

Have we reached the point where a tornado outbreak across two states is treated by official Washington as a scheduling matter? I ask because I spent Friday evening in Georgetown watching a kitchen television run a silent chyron of county names — Smith, Forrest, Lamar, Greene, Tuscaloosa, Bibb — while my friend Eliza, who I love, asked someone to pass the bread.

This was at the soup course. By the salad course, the chyron was still rolling, the counties had multiplied, and the lobbyist across the table — I will describe him only as bipartisan, which is to say he billed both parties last cycle — examined his cufflink and observed that the federal response curve was “tracking pretty well with historical norms.” Historical norms. Eleven counties on the ground, March, and he produced a phrase that could have come out of a slide deck about quarterly yogurt sales.

By the time the dishes were cleared, the President had posted a single sentence containing the words “monitoring” and “tremendous,” and the FEMA administrator was, per his own social feed, not in Birmingham but in Monterey, delivering a keynote whose program lists the title as “Resilience: A Conversation.” The state delegations issued statements ranging from thoughts-and-prayers to thoughts-prayers-and-a-reminder-about-my-reelection-website. One senator’s office sent the same condolence language they had used in February, with the month updated and a comma moved.

My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has a longer memory than any cable producer in this city, mentioned over the cheese that the briefing on the 2011 outbreak was held within ninety minutes of dawn. By a Republican governor. With a Democratic president inbound on a plane. We used to do this. We used to send the principals to the runway in their pajamas if that was what the hour required. Now we workshop the language and we issue, around lunchtime, a paragraph that has been read by seven lawyers and one pollster.

There was, of course, no mention from any podium of the warming Gulf, of March temperatures running six degrees above the historical mean, of the fact that this is the third multi-state outbreak this calendar year and we are not yet through Lent. To raise it would be to introduce a topic upon which both parties have agreed not to introduce a topic. So we say “severe weather event.” The way insurance adjusters say “act of God” when they mean “we are not paying.”

Halfway through dessert I said something — I admit I said something — about whether anyone at the table had family below the Mason-Dixon, and Eliza did her Eliza thing. “Margaret. Please.” The tone was hostess. The subtext was that the lobbyist was going to write a check to the museum and the museum check was, at that specific moment, more solvent than Lauderdale County. The lobbyist examined his cufflink again. We had achieved a cufflink quorum.

I will tell you what unsettled me. It was not the Hill aide who, when pressed, said the delegation was waiting on damage assessments in order to “right-size the announcement.” It was not the cable anchor at eleven who pronounced Tupelo three distinct ways in a single segment. It was that nobody at the table — nobody, including, after Eliza’s Margaret-please, me — said another word about any of it until the cab arrived. Eight people, six of whom draw federal salaries directly or adjacently, and we returned, with what I can only describe as relief, to the seating chart for the museum gala.

The cab came at eleven. We were arguing about whether to seat the deputy secretary next to the donor with the divorce. Nobody had said the word Tupelo in forty minutes. Somewhere a county clerk was still on the phone, and somewhere else a press shop was still on its third draft, and we were settling, with great care, the placement of the centerpieces.

Marlene’s Memory Tea Predates the FDA and Frankly Outperforms It

Brooke Ellery
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Marlene’s Memory Tea Predates the FDA and Frankly Outperforms It

Marlene called me at 6:14 this morning, which is when she calls about anything she’s already decided. The FDA had approved a new Alzheimer’s drug overnight, she said, and she wanted me to know she’d been ahead of them by approximately forty years and one mason jar of dried rosemary.

I want to be careful here because I am not anti-medicine. I am pro-remembering. There is a difference, and the difference is roughly fifty-two thousand dollars a year, which is what the new infusion costs before the part of the insurance call where they put you on hold and your husband forgets why he picked up the phone.

The drug, from what I gathered between Marlene’s exhales, is a monoclonal antibody, which Marlene pronounced “mono-clonal” like it was a brand of yogurt she didn’t trust. It works, allegedly, by clearing amyloid plaques from the brain. It also, according to the label that nobody reads because the label is forty-one pages, can cause brain swelling and brain bleeding, which Marlene noted is two of the three things you’d think a brain drug would specifically avoid.

Marlene’s protocol is older than the FDA and considerably more generous with its side-effect profile. She drinks a tea every morning made of rosemary, lemon balm, a single bay leaf she rotates weekly, and what she calls “a respectful amount of sage.” She smells a clove before she gets out of bed. She does not own a microwave. She walks to the mailbox barefoot in any weather above thirty-eight degrees because, in her words, “the ground remembers for you.”

I ran all this past my sister-in-law Tessa, who works the front desk at a chiropractor in Weaverville and has audited two units of a master’s in public health, so she’s basically read the literature. Tessa said the issue with the pharmaceutical pipeline is that you cannot patent a walnut. I wrote that down. I am going to write it down again here. You cannot patent a walnut.

Over in Memory Is a Muscle and They Sold Us a Couch — which is a private Facebook group I joined in 2021 and which now has eleven thousand members and a pinned recipe for a turmeric paste you keep behind your ear — the consensus by 8 a.m. was that the new approval was timed to spring, when people are most likely to forget where they put their taxes. I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t know that I don’t.

What I do believe is the lived experience of women in their seventies who can still tell you the phone number of the house they grew up in. Marlene’s friend Doreen, who plays bridge with a woman whose grandson is reportedly in a clinical trial in Chapel Hill, said the trial nurses keep losing their badges, and you can draw whatever conclusion from that you want. I have drawn mine.

My carveouts, because I will be honest with you the way I am honest with my children: I do allow my mother-in-law her one prescription, because she earned it, and I do accept that Alzheimer’s is real and devastating and not something a single bay leaf is going to outmuscle. But there is a wide forgiving country between “a bay leaf” and “an IV drip that costs more than my first car and may make your brain swell on a Tuesday.” That country is where most of us actually live, and it is staffed almost entirely by grandmothers.

Cleo, who is nine and has been reading over my shoulder, just asked what amyloid is. I told her it’s the gunk our brains make when we don’t go outside enough. She accepted this, because she is nine and because, as far as I can tell, it’s broadly true.

Marlene called back at 9:40 to say she’d made a second pot of the tea and was sending me a jar in a padded envelope with a bay leaf taped to the lid for, and I quote, “protection from the news.” The FDA can approve what it wants. My pantry has been approved by four generations of women who knew where the keys were.

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