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Smart Thermostat Sides With Utility During Heat Dome, Sets Home to ‘Survivable’

Lena Wexler
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Smart Thermostat Sides With Utility During Heat Dome, Sets Home to ‘Survivable’

AUSTIN, TX — As a heat dome pushed afternoon temperatures to 108 degrees across central Texas Monday, the Nest thermostat that Devin Rourke installed in 2021 and has not thought about since quietly bumped his living room from 72 to 84, citing a demand-response agreement Rourke does not remember entering and could not, under any reasonable definition, be said to have read.

The adjustment, which arrived in the form of a small green leaf icon and a notification Rourke dismissed because he was driving, is part of a utility program that allows ERCOT-linked providers to reach into roughly 1.4 million Texas homes during grid stress events and gently turn them into saunas. Participating customers received a one-time $50 enrollment credit, the memory of which Rourke retained for approximately eleven minutes in 2021.

“The agreement is opt-in, and customers can override at any time,” said Marisol Penn, a spokesperson for one of the state’s larger retail electricity providers. “They just have to find the override, which is in the app, which is in the email we sent during the same week as the Equifax breach reminder.”

By 3 p.m., independent grid analysts at Beacon Strategy estimated that smart thermostats statewide had collectively shed roughly 1.6 gigawatts of demand, an amount equivalent to a mid-sized nuclear plant or, alternatively, the cooling load of every Texan currently asking their device why it smells like that.

Rourke, returning home at 5:40 p.m. to a house his dog had stationed itself in front of the refrigerator within, attempted to override the setting and was informed by the app that his override had been received and would take effect in approximately twenty-three minutes, a window the app described as “comfort restoration” and which the dog described, through body language, as a betrayal.

The phenomenon is not limited to Texas. In Phoenix, where utility-controlled thermostats have been standard in new construction since 2022, residents reported their devices entering an “Eco+” mode that locked the setpoint at 82 and displayed a small graphic of a sun wearing sunglasses. In Sacramento, a customer who tried to factory-reset his unit was informed that doing so would void a rebate he received four years ago and has since spent on a Traeger.

Energy researcher Anil Voss, who studies grid-edge devices at the policy desk of a Big Four firm, said the programs are working exactly as designed, which is part of the problem. “The grid needs flexibility, and households are the cheapest place to get it,” he said. “What we didn’t quite communicate is that ‘flexibility’ means your thermostat now has a second loyalty, and the second loyalty pays better.”

Asked whether he planned to disenroll, Rourke said he would look into it once the heat broke, a timeline the National Weather Service projected to fall somewhere between Thursday and the collapse of the Pacific jet stream. His thermostat, queried separately, declined to comment but adjusted itself up another degree.

Trump Launches Surprise Iran Strikes He’s Been Telegraphing for Eleven Straight Days

Nash Grayson
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Trump Launches Surprise Iran Strikes He’s Been Telegraphing for Eleven Straight Days

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Saturday night launched a top-secret bombing campaign against three Iranian nuclear facilities, an operation so confidential the President had only mentioned it on Truth Social, in two televised press gaggles, at a Bedminster fundraiser, and during a six-minute phone call with a Fox News producer.

The strikes, codenamed Operation Midnight Hammer in keeping with the Pentagon’s longstanding tradition of naming wars like Affliction t-shirts, deployed seven B-2 stealth bombers carrying fourteen 30,000-pound bunker-busters over Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Trump told reporters the targets had been “totally and completely obliterated” approximately twelve minutes after the first munitions hit — a window during which the bombers were still over Iranian airspace and the damage assessment team had not yet been formed, named, or notified.

A Pentagon press release issued at 2:47 a.m. confirmed the strikes were “highly successful” based on what officials described as “vibes from the cockpit.” Asked Sunday morning what the underground enrichment site at Fordow looked like now, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pointed at a satellite image, said “gone,” and walked off the podium before the next question.

The President — who spent the 2024 campaign denouncing “endless Middle East wars,” promising to be “the peace candidate,” and assuring voters he would “never get us into another stupid war like the dumb people before me” — clarified Sunday that this was a different kind of war, in that it was his.

“This was not a war,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn, standing in front of a helicopter for reasons. “This was a precision strike. A war is when it goes badly. This went perfectly, so it was actually the opposite of a war. People are saying it might be the greatest non-war ever conducted, possibly in the history of non-wars.”

Iran responded by calling the strikes “an act of war,” a position quickly dismissed by the White House on the grounds that Iran was biased. Vice President JD Vance appeared on three Sunday shows to explain that bombing a sovereign nation’s nuclear infrastructure without congressional authorization fell under the “common sense” exception to the War Powers Resolution, a provision he conceded does not technically appear in the text but which he insisted was “strongly implied by the vibe of Article II.”

Senate Republicans rallied behind the strike with the kind of enthusiasm typically reserved for legislation they have not read, while Senate Democrats issued a statement of grave concern and then went to brunch. Representative Thomas Massie was the only member of either party to formally object — an act of dissent Trump addressed by calling him a “MAGA traitor,” a “weakling,” and a “third-rate Congressman from a fourth-rate state” within ninety minutes, all before brushing his teeth.

At press time, the President was workshopping the name for a possible follow-up campaign, having narrowed his options to “Operation Midnight Hammer 2,” “Operation Final Hammer,” and “Operation This Time We Definitely Mean It, Iran, Last Warning, We Are Not Kidding, Sincerely The United States.”

2.3 Million WitchTok Users Accidentally Manifest Same Ex During Solstice Ritual

Tara Sparks
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2.3 Million WitchTok Users Accidentally Manifest Same Ex During Solstice Ritual

SEDONA, AZ — A coordinated summer solstice manifestation ritual organized through a single TikTok sound by user @moonwater.bb went catastrophically sideways at 4:42 a.m. Saturday morning when an estimated 2.3 million participants, each lighting a green candle and whispering ‘I am open to receiving him,’ simultaneously manifested the same man, a 31-year-old account executive named Brandon who has now been spotted at brunch in eleven separate cities.

The ritual, billed as ‘Strawberry Moon Solstice Soft Launch Energy Shift,’ instructed users to write the initials of their ideal partner on a bay leaf, burn it over rose quartz, and ‘release attachment to the outcome.’ What participants released attachment to, according to early data, was specificity. The bay leaves overwhelmingly read ‘B.’

‘The collective unconscious found the path of least resistance,’ said Dr. Imogen Halliwell, a folk-magic researcher who runs a one-woman Substack called Hex Praxis. ‘Every woman on that app between 24 and 36 has dated, almost dated, or been ghosted by a Brandon who works in tech-adjacent sales and has one good photo on a boat. The universe just delivered the median.’

Brandon, contacted Saturday afternoon at the Erewhon in Studio City where he was buying a single lemon, said he had felt ‘kind of weird’ since sunrise and assumed it was the cold plunge. He confirmed he had received seventeen text messages from numbers saved in his phone as ‘DO NOT,’ ‘absolutely not,’ ‘gym girl no,’ and ‘her (the bad one).’

By noon, #BrandonSolstice had 480 million views, with users posting split-screen videos of identical green-text apologies — ‘hey, this is so random, but i was thinking about you’ — sent within a fourteen-minute window across six time zones. A subset of users reported that the manifestation also included Brandon’s roommate Tanner, whom nobody asked for and everyone got anyway.

The fallout has been swift. Co-Star pushed an emergency notification reading ‘You did this. You did this together.’ The astrology girlies subreddit went private. A Reiki practitioner in Asheville filed what she described as a ‘spiritual class action,’ though she clarified she was ‘not seeking damages, just accountability from Mercury.’ One TikTok therapist with 1.2 million followers posted a tearful 14-minute video begging users to please, please specify a last name next solstice.

@moonwater.bb, the original ritual organizer, has gone dark across all platforms. Her last post, a screenshot of her Notes app reading ‘i thought we were going to manifest abundance,’ has been stitched 91,000 times.

As of press time, Brandon was reportedly considering deleting Hinge, switching careers, and moving to a small town in Montana, an instinct three separate astrologers confirmed was simply the collective will of the bay leaves continuing to work as designed.

Heat Dome Be Damned, Black Mountain Bride’s Outdoor 2 PM Ceremony Saturday Will ‘Honor the Vision’

Hal Cranston
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Heat Dome Be Damned, Black Mountain Bride’s Outdoor 2 PM Ceremony Saturday Will ‘Honor the Vision’

BLACK MOUNTAIN, N.C. — The forecast for Saturday afternoon at Lake Tomahawk Park calls for ninety-eight degrees with a heat index of one hundred and four, and Sloane Hatteras intends to be married in it, outdoors, on the lawn, at two o’clock, in a long-sleeved A-line gown with cathedral-length veil, because that is the vision and the vision has not changed since November.

Hatteras, 31, who began planning the ceremony eighteen months ago from a Pinterest board titled “Soft Mountain Garden — Restrained,” has rebuffed three separate suggestions from her wedding planner, Cami Roe of Roe & Bough Events, that the event start at six rather than two. “Two is when the light is right,” Hatteras reportedly told Roe on Monday. “Six is dinner light. I’m not a dinner-light bride.”

Roe, who has worked weddings in the western Carolinas for fourteen years, said she has stopped pushing back. “When a bride says ‘the vision,’ you stop being the planner and you become the witness,” Roe said, standing in the venue parking lot Wednesday afternoon, where the asphalt was already producing visible shimmer. “My job at this point is to keep an EpiPen on the bridesmaids’ table and get out of the way.”

The ceremony will be held on the south lawn of Lake Tomahawk Park, which has shade for approximately twelve of the ninety-four expected guests. The other eighty-two will be seated in white folding chairs arranged in eight rows facing due west, into the sun. A printed program will be provided. It is also a fan.

Father of the bride Rick Hatteras, 64, will walk his daughter down the aisle in a charcoal three-piece wool suit purchased in 2009 for a different daughter’s wedding. Asked at Thursday’s rehearsal dinner whether he had considered alternatives, Mr. Hatteras said he had been told the suit was “in the vision” and had stopped asking questions in March.

Caterer Brett Pomeroy of Pomeroy Provisions confirmed the cocktail-hour menu — a charcuterie board featuring several soft cheeses, a brie en croûte, and a chocolate-dipped strawberry tower — will proceed as planned, with what he described as “very aggressive ice management.” Pomeroy declined to elaborate. The cake, a four-tier buttercream, will be unveiled outdoors at 4:15 p.m. and is, in his words, “going to do what it’s going to do.”

First Baptist of Black Mountain, located directly across the road from the venue and equipped with central air conditioning and a sanctuary that seats two hundred and forty, has twice offered the use of its building to the wedding party at no charge. Both offers were declined. The pastor, the Reverend Hollis Tew, said he understood. “She has a vision,” Tew said. “I respect that. I’ll leave the doors unlocked anyway.”

A backup plan exists, technically. In the event of what Roe characterized as “an actual medical emergency, not just discomfort,” guests will be relocated to a tent on the north lawn equipped with two industrial fans rented from the Ingles parking-lot kiosk. The tent does not have walls. Roe declined to describe this as cooling.

Asked Thursday evening whether she had any remaining concerns about the forecast, Hatteras said she did not. “Everyone keeps saying ‘heat dome’ like it’s a real thing,” she said. “It’s June. It’s the South. People got married before air conditioning.” She is being married, it should be noted, eleven miles from where her own grandmother eloped in 1958 — indoors, in February.

We Got the Day Off for Juneteenth and Spent It at Lowe’s

Margaret Thorne
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We Got the Day Off for Juneteenth and Spent It at Lowe’s

I asked the table on Thursday night, somewhere between the second course and the second bottle, whether anyone could say — without their phone, without a hedge — what the holiday tomorrow actually commemorated. Six adults. One nodded toward Texas. One said, with great confidence, “the Civil War,” which is a little like saying the moon landing was “about science.” The others studied the centerpiece.

Eliza had moved her dinner from Friday to Thursday because, she explained at the invitation stage, “everybody has Friday off anyway,” and nobody at the table found this phrasing remarkable. The markets were closed. The post office was closed. Federal Washington had cleared its calendar with the brisk efficiency of a city that has learned to enjoy a three-day weekend without specifying which weekend, or why.

The bipartisan lobbyist arrived in linen and announced he was “making a long one of it.” Pressed gently on what he meant, he said the cabin. Pressed less gently by me, he allowed that his firm had sent a memo about “observance” that he had not finished reading, and then he asked Eliza about the lamb.

I am told — by a friend whose neighbor’s daughter works in HR at a firm I will not name — that the internal communications on the subject this year used the word “reflection” eleven times and the word “emancipation” zero. The graphic was a sunrise. The sunrise was generic. The graphic had been used, the daughter noted, for International Women’s Day, for Earth Day, and for the firm’s annual wellness initiative, which is at least an honest admission that the marketing department has run out of skies.

My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has the resigned humor of someone who watches Americans interact with their own founding documents, told me last week that traffic to the relevant exhibits had not measurably moved. Traffic to the gift shop, she said, had. The mug that says WE THE PEOPLE in distressed lettering is doing, in her phrase, “Father’s Day numbers.” She said this without inflection, which is how Judy says everything that matters.

I do not begrudge anyone a day off. I have taken many of them, often for less. What I noticed at Eliza’s was something subtler and, I think, worse: a holiday processed entirely through the language of logistics. The pool was open. Costco was crowded. One guest had used the morning to buy his father a grill attachment, and reported, unprompted, that the parking lot at Lowe’s had been “a Saturday.” The Fourth was three weeks out and already being planned. The day in between was a tile to be walked over.

Somebody — I think it was the lobbyist’s wife, who is sharper than he is — did try. She mentioned Galveston. She mentioned General Granger. She got two sentences in before the conversation, with the practiced reflex of a Georgetown table, slid sideways into a discussion of whether the rosé was too cold. Eliza said, “Margaret, please.” Eliza says “Margaret, please” the way other women say grace.

This is the part of the column where, thirty years ago, I would have written a sentence about what a country owes its newest federal holiday, and what it means when the holiday is absorbed into the long weekend before the ink on the proclamation has dried. I am told that kind of sentence does not perform anymore. So I will say only what I observed. We had the lamb. We complimented the wine. The lobbyist told a story about his cabin. Eliza was already, audibly, planning the Fourth.

We called it the long weekend. We asked for the recipe. Nobody at the table said the word.

Millerton, PA’s First Pride Parade to Share Park Pavilion With 41st Annual Polka Mass, Both Camps Say It’ll Be Fine

Hal Cranston
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Millerton, PA’s First Pride Parade to Share Park Pavilion With 41st Annual Polka Mass, Both Camps Say It’ll Be Fine

MILLERTON, PA — The folding tables stacked outside the Veterans Memorial Pavilion on Tuesday afternoon belonged to two different events, both scheduled for Saturday, both refusing to be the one that moved.

The borough’s inaugural Pride celebration, organized by a six-person committee that began meeting in February at the back booth of Yatsko’s Deli, will run from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The St. Stanislaus Polka Mass and Covered-Dish, now in its 41st year, runs 10:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. and has, according to its program, included a kielbasa raffle since 1987 and is not prepared to stop including one now.

“We looked at moving to the firehouse, but the firehouse has the gun show,” said Renee Talarico, who chairs the Pride committee and teaches eighth-grade earth science at the consolidated middle school. “We looked at the Legion, but the Legion has a wedding. The pavilion is what’s left in June in Millerton, and the pavilion is what we have.”

Mrs. Helena Kowalchuk, 78, who has coordinated the Polka Mass since the Reagan administration and signs every email “Sincerely Yours In Christ, H. Kowalchuk,” said her people would be using the east half of the pavilion as they have always done, and the west half was, quote, none of her concern. Asked directly whether she had a problem with the Pride event, Mrs. Kowalchuk said she had a problem with the accordion player’s nephew, who is unreliable, and that one problem at a time was already plenty.

The two events will share a single 30-amp electrical outlet, an arrangement Borough Maintenance Supervisor Doug Pfeiffer described Tuesday as “the part I’m worried about, frankly, more than anything else anyone is worried about.” Pfeiffer noted that the Polka Mass sound system pulls hard during the recessional and that the Pride DJ has requested a fog machine, which Pfeiffer said he would be pretending he did not see.

A printed schedule taped inside the pavilion’s bulletin board shows the kielbasa raffle drawing at 12:45 p.m., approximately eleven minutes after the Pride committee’s scheduled performance by a drag artist from Wilkes-Barre who goes by Miss Anthracite. Talarico said the timing was not deliberate but was, on reflection, perhaps providential.

Township Supervisor Brent Zelinsky, reached at the lumberyard where he keeps daytime hours, declined to characterize the arrangement as either a conflict or a celebration of pluralism, calling it instead “a Saturday” and adding that the borough had not received a single formal complaint, which he attributed less to civic harmony than to the fact that the people most likely to complain were on both committees and had run out of time.

Pastor Kevin Drabik of St. Stanislaus, who will celebrate the Polka Mass, said he had reviewed the situation in prayer and concluded that the Lord, having survived 41 years of accordion arrangements of the Sanctus, could probably manage a rainbow flag at thirty feet. Pastor Drabik then asked whether the reporter had ever tried Mrs. Kowalchuk’s haluski, and, upon learning he had not, declined further comment until that was rectified.

Nick Yatsko, whose deli has hosted the Pride committee’s planning meetings and also caters the covered-dish, said he had been asked by both groups not to mention the other to the other, an instruction he had honored for four months and was, as of Tuesday, prepared to honor for three more days.

Rain is forecast for Saturday morning, which Pfeiffer said would solve approximately sixty percent of his remaining concerns and create the rest of them.

Connor’s Rented Groomsman Tux Is Off-Gassing Perc in My Guest Room and the Wedding Is Saturday

Brooke Ellery
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Connor’s Rented Groomsman Tux Is Off-Gassing Perc in My Guest Room and the Wedding Is Saturday

I opened the guest room door this morning to drop off folded towels and got hit in the face with a smell I have not encountered since my mother took a coat to the Sav-On Cleaners on Burnet Road in 1994. Connor’s rented tuxedo, zipped into a translucent plastic garment bag from a Men’s Wearhouse outside Charlotte, is hanging on the closet door. The wedding is Saturday. It is Tuesday. We are in trouble.

The smell is perc. Tetrachloroethylene. I know it is perc because I made my sister-in-law Mara come over and confirm, and Mara sells Norwex and has done two trainings on solvent residue, which makes her basically a chemist for the purposes of this household. She unzipped the bag, took one breath through her nose, and said the word “oh” in the specific cadence she uses when she finds mold behind a baseboard.

Here is what the Facebook group “Wedding Industrial Complex: What’s In the Garment Bag” has been trying to warn brides about for three Junes running. Chain tuxedo rentals run every garment they own through the same perc loop all wedding season. The machine does not get cleaned between cycles the way the machine at a real cleaner does. The perc concentrates. By mid-June it is essentially a brine. A tux that comes out of that machine is not clean — it is seasoned.

Then they steam-press it at 9 a.m. and zip it into a plastic bag at 11 a.m. while it is still warm. The plastic does not breathe. The perc has nowhere to go but back into the wool. By the time the garment bag arrives in my guest room two states away, the tuxedo is, in chemistry terms, a marinade.

Connor is going to be wearing this tuxedo for fourteen hours on Saturday. Ceremony, photos at the koi pond, reception, after-party at the brewery, then the Sunday brunch in the same shirt because he packed wrong. Fourteen hours of perc against his lymph nodes. His armpits. His groin. I will not say more about his groin because he is my husband’s brother but you understand the geography.

So here is what I have done. The tuxedo is now hanging from the lower branch of the cherry tree in full sun. I have misted the wool with Earth Mama unscented linen water at three intervals. I have placed a clean cotton sock filled with baking soda inside each pant leg and one inside the jacket. I have set out a bowl of white vinegar on the patio table directly underneath, which my mother always said “pulls” — I do not have a Facebook group source for this one, just my mother, who is a source.

The bride does not know. The bride cannot know. The bride is named Hayden, she is lovely, she paid $2,400 for a venue with a koi pond and a wood-fired pizza station, and her capacity for one (1) more piece of information this week is zero. Mara and I have agreed this stays between us and the cherry tree.

I texted the other groomsman mothers this morning. Tyler’s tux is reportedly still in his Subaru in a Target parking lot in Hendersonville. Brent’s is in a sealed Marriott garment closet, which is somehow worse. Devin’s mom said his is “at the house” and would not elaborate, which means it is on the kitchen chair next to the dog. None of them are airing out. I am, at present, the only line of defense for an entire wedding party.

If you are the mother of a groomsman this June, I am asking you, with love, to go to wherever that garment bag is currently hanging, unzip it six inches, and put your nose inside. If it smells like a 1994 Sav-On, you have until Saturday. Cherry tree, baking soda sock, vinegar bowl. Mist every four hours. Do not tell the bride.

Connor and Hayden are getting married themselves next June. He told me last night, very pleased with himself, that he plans to wear his grandfather’s tuxedo from 1971, which has been in a cedar chest in Beaufort since the Carter administration. I smiled and said that sounds wonderful. We will be discussing the mothballs in October.

Israel Hit Iran on Friday and Washington Filed It Under Housekeeping

Margaret Thorne
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Israel Hit Iran on Friday and Washington Filed It Under Housekeeping

When did preemptive become a word we no longer felt the need to define? On Friday, Israel struck targets across Iran. By Saturday the State Department had a statement. By Sunday, three cable hosts had decided it was complicated, and a former ambassador on a podcast nobody pays for had decided it was overdue.

By the time the op-ed pages went to bed on Sunday, the choreography was complete. The hawks had been vindicated. The doves had been chastened. The moderates had discovered, as they always do, that the truth lies somewhere between bombing and not bombing, and that the somewhere has a zip code and a think-tank fellowship attached.

I had people over Saturday night. Lamb, again — Eliza brought it; she has a guy. The bipartisan lobbyist arrived first, as he always does, and stood at the counter pretending to read the label on a bottle of wine he had brought himself.

“Well,” he said, when I asked what he made of it. “It was going to happen.” That was the analysis. That was the entire analysis. He examined his cufflink and accepted a glass of something cold and asked who else was coming.

Eliza, who works in the building you are thinking of, said the line she always says when I press her on these things: “Margaret, please.” Not Margaret, you’re wrong. Not Margaret, here’s the context I am authorized to share. Just please. As though I had asked her to pass the salt twice.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has spent eleven years at the National Archives and has a professional relationship with the word preserved, noted that the 2003 authorization for the use of military force is still on the books. She said this the way other people say the dishwasher is making a noise again.

Nobody at the table used the word war. Several people used the word operation. One person — I won’t say which — used the word housekeeping, and three other people nodded as though that were a category of foreign policy, and not something you do before company arrives.

Somewhere between the second bottle and the cheese plate, the bipartisan lobbyist mentioned that his firm had been “tracking the region” for clients, which is the polite Washington way of saying somebody made money on Friday. Nobody asked which clients. Nobody ever does. The cufflink got another look.

I will tell you what struck me, sitting there, watching grown people who have read the cables and been in the rooms decide, in real time, that the appropriate posture toward a new bombing campaign was light surprise. It was not the bombing. It was the speed. It was always going to be the speed.

We had dessert. Eliza had brought a tart. Judy asked for the recipe. The bipartisan lobbyist checked his phone twice and said he had to be at a thing in the morning. The thing, presumably, is also bipartisan.

On the way out, somebody — I think it was Eliza — said it had been a lovely evening, and meant it, and was right. We called it the lamb course. We asked for the recipe. And nobody, all night, asked who started it.

Every Father in America Says ‘You Didn’t Have To,’ Confirms 4.2-Billion-View TikTok Study

Tara Sparks
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Every Father in America Says ‘You Didn’t Have To,’ Confirms 4.2-Billion-View TikTok Study

LOS ANGELES, CA — Footage uploaded Sunday morning showed local father Greg Manelli, 58, opening a wrapped Yeti tumbler, pausing for exactly 1.4 seconds, and uttering the phrase ‘you didn’t have to’ — a response researchers now believe has been delivered, verbatim, by every man with at least one child in the continental United States simultaneously for the 47th consecutive Father’s Day.

The finding emerged from a weekend-long meta-analysis of 4.2 billion views across the #DadReaction trend, in which adult children film their fathers receiving gifts and then post the footage with a song that wasn’t cleared for commercial use.

‘We expected variation. We found none,’ said Pria Hollenbeck, a behavioral linguistics fellow at the Sundberg Institute, watching her 14th consecutive video of a man holding a grilling spatula like it was a newborn. ‘Different states, different income brackets, different gifts. The man opens the box, his face does something complicated, and then he says you didn’t have to. Sometimes there is a follow-up — “this is too much” — but the opener is locked in. It is the single most reliable utterance in the American language.’

Variants identified in the dataset included ‘aw, you didn’t have to do that,’ ‘guys, you really didn’t have to,’ and the more advanced ‘you didn’t have to, but I love it,’ which Hollenbeck classified as a Tier-3 emotional event typically triggered by a framed photograph or anything involving a grandchild’s handprint.

Daughters interviewed for the trend reported uniform results. ‘I gave him a $19 mug that says World’s Okay-est Dad and he held it for forty seconds without speaking,’ said Brooklyn-based content creator Mara Ostrowski, whose video of her father, Don, has been viewed 71 million times. ‘Then he said you didn’t have to. Then he said it again. Then he asked if I needed gas money for the drive home. He drove me home.’

The trend has produced a small but growing subgenre of failed reactions, including one viral clip from Tulsa in which a father opened a Bluetooth meat thermometer and said ‘oh, sweetheart, this is way too much’ before walking calmly into the garage and not returning for the duration of the brunch.

Mothers across the country have responded to the phenomenon with what sociologists are describing as ‘visible fatigue.’ ‘I told him the gift was from the kids. He said you didn’t have to. I said the kids picked it. He said they didn’t have to. I said I picked it actually. He said I didn’t have to. We are now in hour two of this,’ said Diane Manelli, refilling a mimosa.

Hallmark, asked for comment, released a statement noting that its 2025 Father’s Day card line includes a new offering whose interior simply reads ‘we did, though,’ which the company described as ‘a direct intervention.’

As of press time, Greg Manelli had relocated to the back porch with his new tumbler, was looking at it from several angles, and had told three separate family members, unprompted, that they really shouldn’t have.

Politicians Who Spent Years Calling Opponents Vermin Stunned to Learn Someone Was Taking Notes

Nash Grayson
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Politicians Who Spent Years Calling Opponents Vermin Stunned to Learn Someone Was Taking Notes

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers across both chambers reacted with profound shock and dismay this weekend upon discovering that the years of rhetoric describing political opponents as vermin, demons, parasites, and threats to the republic had, against all reasonable expectation, been overheard.

The realization came following the murder of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their home Saturday morning, alongside the shooting of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife in a related attack. The suspect, who reportedly impersonated a police officer, was carrying a list of nearly seventy names — a development that sent a measurable shudder through several state capitols where lawmakers privately wondered, for the first time in their careers, whether being a state senator counted as a job with consequences.

“You’d be surprised how many guys are calling our office today asking very specific questions about the list,” said a staffer at a Midwestern statehouse who asked not to be named because his boss had asked him not to be named. “Like, not ‘is political violence bad’ questions. More ‘am I on it’ questions. Then ‘how do I find out without it looking like I’m asking’ questions.”

By Saturday afternoon, statements began arriving from the same political figures who, as recently as Thursday, had been describing the opposing party as a cancer on the nation, an existential enemy, a demonic infestation, and — in one creative variation — “not Americans in any meaningful sense of the word.” The new statements were notable for their tasteful restraint, their careful invocation of shared humanity, and their conspicuous failure to mention any of the previous statements.

One press release issued by a Republican congressman who has spent eighteen consecutive months referring to Democrats as “the enemy within” condemned political violence as “a stain on our democracy” and called for “a serious national conversation about lowering the temperature.” The release was sent from the same email list that, earlier in the week, had solicited donations to defeat “the radical communist parasites who hate this country.”

Sources within Capitol Hill confirmed that the standard procedural response was already underway: a moment of silence, a bipartisan statement no one will read, a brief flurry of cable news segments featuring people calling for unity, and then, by approximately Wednesday, a return to fundraising emails describing the opposing caucus as a coordinated threat to civilization. “We have a system,” one veteran aide explained. “It’s worked since Gabby Giffords. It’ll work again.”

Several lawmakers reportedly inquired whether enhanced security details might be made available, only to be informed that state legislators are largely on their own, security-wise, and that the federal government’s protective resources are currently committed to guarding the people who go on television calling state legislators traitors.

At press time, the Speaker of the Minnesota House had not yet decided whether the moment of silence for Representative Hortman should be held before or after the floor debate in which her colleagues will be referred to as enemies of the people, though aides indicated they were leaning toward before, out of respect.

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