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Bath & Body Works Unveils ‘Mother-Coded’ Candle Line Featuring Scents Like ‘Resentment Vanilla’ and ‘I Asked for Nothing, Honestly’

Tara Sparks
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Bath & Body Works Unveils ‘Mother-Coded’ Candle Line Featuring Scents Like ‘Resentment Vanilla’ and ‘I Asked for Nothing, Honestly’

COLUMBUS, OH — Bath & Body Works rolled out its 2025 Mother’s Day collection Sunday, a 14-candle line called “Mother-Coded” anchored by scents including “Resentment Vanilla,” “I Asked for Nothing, Honestly,” and a three-wick titled “Just Five Minutes,” all available in stores one week ahead of the May 11 holiday.

The collection, retailing between $26.50 and $42, also features “Sensible Cardigan,” “Garage Door Closing at 11,” “Lukewarm Coffee Reheated Three Times,” and a limited-edition diffuser called “She’s Fine,” which the company describes as having “top notes of bergamot, base notes of a single tear nobody saw fall.”

“We did extensive ethnography,” said Marlee Houghton, VP of Seasonal Olfactory Storytelling. “What kept coming up was that mothers don’t want lavender. They want a scent that acknowledges the dishwasher hasn’t been unloaded since Tuesday.” Houghton said the brand conducted 4,200 in-home interviews, 91 percent of which were interrupted by someone asking where the charger was.

Companion products include a body lotion called “Fine, I’ll Do It Myself,” a hand soap called “Don’t Touch the Good Towels,” and a wallflower plug-in marketed under the name “I’m Going to Bed at 8:45 and Nobody Can Stop Me.” A scratch-and-sniff card released alongside the line is said to emit the fragrance of a minivan that once held a fifth-grade soccer team and has never fully recovered.

Competitors scrambled to respond. Yankee Candle announced an emergency reissue of its “Mom & Merlot” tier, while a Brooklyn boutique debuted a $68 soy pillar called “You’re Allowed To Be Tired,” which sold out by Friday despite smelling, per the shop’s own product copy, “essentially like a candle.”

Reception among actual mothers has been mixed. “I lit the ‘I Asked for Nothing’ candle last night and my husband texted me from the couch to ask what was burning,” said Dawn Pelletier, 47, of Westerville, who received the gift set early from a daughter she described as “trying to make up for a lot.” Pelletier confirmed the candle smelled like vanilla, but a vanilla that had clearly read the room.

Internal documents obtained from a since-deleted LinkedIn post indicate the company tested but ultimately shelved a candle called “My Mother,” which one focus group participant reportedly described as “too much.” A spokesperson said the scent may return in 2026 if the cultural moment softens.

Bath & Body Works confirmed a Father’s Day follow-up is in development. The line, tentatively titled “Garage,” is reportedly just one candle.

The Derby Goes Off This Afternoon and a Kid at Murphy’s Just Showed Me a Six-Leg Parlay With a Horse He Thinks Is Named ‘Burrito’

Duke Holloway
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The Derby Goes Off This Afternoon and a Kid at Murphy’s Just Showed Me a Six-Leg Parlay With a Horse He Thinks Is Named ‘Burrito’

I was at Murphy’s by 11 a.m. because the Derby is the one day a year I can drink bourbon before noon and pretend it’s research. I had not been on the stool ten minutes when a kid named Tanner — sandy hair, lanyard from somewhere, drinking something pink — leaned across two empty seats and showed me his phone like it was a sonogram. “Mr. Holloway,” he said, because Tanner has manners his parlay does not, “I got us cooking today.”

What Tanner had was a six-leg parlay on an app whose name sounds like a children’s cereal. Leg one was a horse in the Derby. Legs two through four were NBA player props I will not dignify by transcribing. Leg five was the over in a Portuguese soccer match that had already started. Leg six was a horse he kept calling “Burrito,” which is not, as far as I can tell, the name of any horse running today, last year, or in the foreseeable future. The actual name on the screen was something Spanish with three syllables and an accent mark. Tanner had decided this was close enough.

I asked him what a furlong was. He said it was “like a quarter mile or whatever.” I asked him which horse had the rail. He said “the inside one.” I asked him who trained Burrito. He said his roommate’s dad knew a guy. I have been writing about sports since this kid’s father was eating paste, and I have never in my life heard a more honest answer.

Coach DiMaggio used to take us up to the OTB in Yonkers the first Saturday in May, which was technically a field trip and technically a felony. He would buy a single program, fold it lengthwise, and circle three names with a golf pencil. He picked horses the way he ran a Power-I — by feel, with conviction, and with a deep moral suspicion of anything fancier than a maiden claimer. He went 0-for-everything most years and was happier than any man I have ever met holding a phone.

The Derby itself, the actual race, is still the best two minutes in American sports, and I will fight a man who says otherwise. Twenty animals built like jet engines and the size of a Buick, kids on top of them who weigh less than my golden retriever, going at speeds that would get you a ticket on the interstate. It is unironic, unfiltered, unsponsored sport, and it is over before the commercial break is finished loading on the streaming service that my granddaughter has me logged into without my consent.

The other six hours, though. Lord. They have turned the infield into a content farm. There is a woman on Instagram whose entire job, as I understand it from my niece, is wearing a different hat at the Derby every year and getting paid by a bourbon company to be photographed not drinking it. Ray Kowalczyk called me Tuesday to report that his granddaughter spent four hundred dollars on a hat she will wear exactly once, in a backyard, in Akron, on a folding chair, while watching the race on a laptop. Ray asked me what a hat does for four hundred dollars that a hat does not do for forty. I told him I’d get back to him.

Down the bar from Tanner sits Petey Corrigan, who is eighty-one and still picks his Derby horse the same way he has since Eisenhower: he reads every name out loud, slowly, and bets the one that sounds like a man he would have trusted with a key to his house. This year he is on a horse whose name I will not print because Petey believes saying it on the radio jinxes it, and as far as I’m concerned a paper counts as radio. Petey has a two-dollar win ticket and a ham sandwich his wife packed in tinfoil. Petey is going to have a better afternoon than Tanner. Petey is going to have a better afternoon than most of us.

I am not against the kid. I am against the app. I am against the idea that a horse race — a thing humans have been doing for four thousand years, a thing that requires no batteries, no second screen, no opinion from a man with a podcast called “Edge Lords” — needs to be cross-bred with a Portuguese soccer over to be worth caring about. The Derby was already a parlay. It was a parlay of a hundred and fifty years of bloodlines, a half-ton of muscle, a kid from Louisiana on a saddle, and the weather. That used to be enough action for anybody.

Tanner just yelled because his Portuguese soccer leg cashed. He has informed me he is now “alive to a fifty-grand ticket,” which is the kind of sentence that ought to require a permit. The race goes off in two hours. Denise is bringing chili over for the undercard. She says it’s from a podcast.

I Called 31 Asheville Restaurants About Their Mother’s Day Brunch and the Hollandaise Is All Coming From the Same Warehouse in Greensboro

Brooke Ellery
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I Called 31 Asheville Restaurants About Their Mother’s Day Brunch and the Hollandaise Is All Coming From the Same Warehouse in Greensboro

I was on the phone with the hostess at the Bistro on Patton, reading from my clipboard for the twelfth time that morning, when she said the exact same sentence the woman at the Corner Kitchen said: “a delicate lemon-forward hollandaise with chive.” Word for word. Same comma. I sat down on the kitchen floor next to the dog and I said, out loud, to nobody, oh my god, it’s one warehouse.

This started two weeks ago when my friend Carrie left her Mother’s Day brunch receipt from last year on my counter and the eggs benedict was twenty-four dollars. Twenty-four. For two poached eggs that, and I want to be careful here, did not taste like an egg a chicken would recognize. Carrie said she felt strange the rest of the day. Heavy. Like she’d been to a wedding she wasn’t invited to. I told her to drink lemon water and I started making calls.

I called thirty-one restaurants between Black Mountain and Weaverville. I had a script. I asked about the hollandaise, the smoked salmon, and “the garnish situation,” because the garnish situation is where they tell on themselves. Twenty-six of the thirty-one used the phrase “micro-greens with a citrus oil.” Three said “with citrus oil.” Two hung up. The hollandaise descriptions, when I lined them up in my notebook, were ninety-percent identical. The chive is always “chiffonade.” Nobody chiffonades a chive at home. Nobody.

So I called my sister-in-law Lacey, who does intake and partial bookkeeping for a regional food broker outside Charlotte and is, for our purposes, basically in logistics. Lacey told me — and I am going to quote her — “Brooke, every brunch within four hours of here is the same brunch. There’s a building. I’m not supposed to talk about the building.” I asked her what’s in the building. She said “holiday product.” I asked what holiday product is. She said “Mother’s Day, mostly. Some Easter overflow.” Then her boss came back and she had to go.

Reader, I drove to Greensboro. I packed the kids’ rice cakes and put Ember in the front because she’s the calmest in unfamiliar zip codes. The warehouse is a beige rectangle off Burnt Poplar Road with no signage and a single refrigerated truck idling in the lot at 9:14 in the morning on a Tuesday, which is not a delivery day for anybody who respects the food. I sat across the street with my windows down for forty minutes and I counted four trucks. One of them, and I cannot stress this enough, said “BRUNCH SOLUTIONS” on the side. Just that. “BRUNCH SOLUTIONS.” Like it’s a category of problem.

I posted about it in a Facebook group I belong to called “What’s Actually In Restaurant Sauces (Mama Edition)” and within an hour I had three women messaging me privately to say their husbands work in food service and yes, the hollandaise is shelf-stable, comes in a bag, gets warmed in a thermal bath, and “the chive is freeze-dried and rehydrated in the walk-in.” One of them said the citrus oil is the same citrus oil they use at the airport. The airport, you guys. We are paying twenty-four dollars to eat airport.

I am not telling you not to honor your mother. I am telling you that the woman who carried you for nine months and who, in my case, has been awake since 5:14 a.m. doing laundry that is not hers, deserves food that came from somewhere a person could point to on a map. So this year I am making brunch in my own kitchen. I am doing a soft scramble with eggs from the Lutz farm, sourdough I started Wednesday (which is not an ingredient, sourdough time is a process), a little flake salt (which is a mineral, not food), and citrus from the tree my mother-in-law mails me from Florida every April for reasons I have stopped questioning.

If you are a mother reading this on Friday morning with a sticky note on your fridge that says “reservations 11:15 Sunday,” I am asking you, gently, woman to woman, to cancel. Tell him you want a walk. Tell him you want a bath. Tell him you want him to take the children to the river for ninety minutes. Do not let a man take you to brunch this year. The hollandaise knows what it did.

A Thousand Cities Marched for Labor on Thursday. Washington Decided It Was a Commute Issue.

Margaret Thorne
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A Thousand Cities Marched for Labor on Thursday. Washington Decided It Was a Commute Issue.

When did the word labor become something we mouth at each other across a dinner table the way other generations whispered cancer? I ask because on Thursday afternoon, while several hundred thousand Americans poured into the streets of more than a thousand cities to demand the right to be treated as people who work for a living, the capital I have covered for thirty years was preoccupied with whether 16th Street would be passable by six.

The night before, my friend Eliza had us over for what she insists on calling a kitchen supper, which means the same china she uses for everything else. The talk turned, briefly, to May Day. “Are you going downtown tomorrow?” someone asked, in the tone you’d use to ask about a thunderstorm. A man across from me — a lobbyist I will describe, charitably, as bipartisan — said he’d told his assistant to work from home, because “these things get rowdy.” Nobody at the table asked what “these things” were. Nobody asked who was marching, or why, or for what. We moved on to the lamb.

This is, I have come to believe, the actual story of American politics in 2025: not the protests themselves, which have grown larger and more numerous than any organized labor action in a generation, but the practiced, almost choreographed ability of the people who run this town to treat them as a localized weather event. A thousand cities. Teachers and warehouse workers and nurses and graduate students and line cooks and the people who deliver your groceries. And the cable chyrons from yesterday afternoon, which I clipped because I am a masochist, read TRAFFIC ALERT: DEMONSTRATIONS EXPECTED.

Demonstrations expected. As if labor were a kind of pollen.

The bipartisan lobbyist, warming to his theme over the second bottle, explained to the table that the trouble with “the labor stuff” is that it has become — and I am quoting now — “culturally downscale.” He meant this as analysis. He meant that the Democratic donor class finds worker embarrassing the way it once found union embarrassing, and that the Republican donor class finds it actively threatening, and that the only people in Washington who use the word without flinching are the four senators everyone else avoids in the elevator. He said all of this approvingly. He said it the way a man explains the weather to a child.

I want to be clear about what I am describing. I am not describing a failure of one party. The current administration spent the last six weeks gutting the National Labor Relations Board and reclassifying half a million federal workers as fireable-at-will, and the opposition spent those same six weeks workshopping the phrase working families in front of a focus group in suburban Cleveland. Working families is what you call workers when you cannot bring yourself to say workers. It is the word labor with the calories removed.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has spent the better part of three decades at the National Archives and has the deadpan to prove it, called me Thursday night to point out that the FBI used to generate hundreds of pages of surveillance product on May 1 every year, going back to the 1920s. Entire careers were built tracking who marched and where and with whom. “Now,” she said, “the bureau’s busy investigating librarians.” She said it without laughing. Judy almost never laughs.

What I keep returning to is the silence. Not the silence of the streets — the streets were loud, the streets were the loudest thing in America yesterday — but the silence afterward, the silence at the dinner table, the silence in the Sunday show bookings I can already predict will not include a single organizer from a single one of those thousand cities. The silence of a political class that has decided, across both parties, that the people who do the actual work of the country are a logistical nuisance to be routed around.

You can tell what a country has stopped believing in by what it can no longer say at dinner. We can say a great many things at dinner now — things that would have ended careers in 1995, things that would have ended marriages in 1975. What we cannot say, apparently, is the simplest sentence in the American vocabulary: those people work, and they would like to be paid, and they would like not to die at it.

The marchers said it Thursday. They said it in a thousand cities. The question is whether anyone in this one was listening, or whether we will simply wait for the traffic to clear.

Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels Hit 145%, Sparing Americans the Indignity of Affordable Renewable Energy

Lena Wexler
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Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels Hit 145%, Sparing Americans the Indignity of Affordable Renewable Energy

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Tuesday celebrated the latest round of tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels, which now stand at a cumulative 145%, finally putting an end to the years-long crisis of Americans being able to generate their own electricity for less than the cost of a sandwich.

The new rates, layered atop existing duties from the first Trump term, are expected to roughly triple the installed cost of a residential rooftop array — a development White House officials described as “good news for energy independence” while standing in front of a single lump of coal displayed under glass.

“For too long, hardworking Americans have been forced to suffer the humiliation of pulling free energy out of the sky,” said Mason Tolliver, senior fellow at the American Manufacturing Restoration Institute, a think tank funded by sources he declined to specify. “This levels the playing field for fuels that have to be dug out of the ground by someone, ideally on a flag-adjacent timeline.”

Industry analysts noted that the affected panels are still, in fact, being produced in record numbers — they are simply being installed in Vietnam, Germany, and a single very enthusiastic municipality in Chile. China itself added 277 gigawatts of solar last year, roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. grid, and has reportedly stopped returning the State Department’s calls.

In Phoenix, where summer highs are projected to crest 118 degrees by July, rooftop installer Devin Marquez said his order book had gone from “six months out” to “a guy who wants to know if I can do it in Bitcoin.” His warehouse currently holds roughly $400,000 in panel inventory worth either substantially more or substantially less, he said, depending on which cable news anchor is talking.

The tariffs appeared to land hardest on the millennials who, after a decade of being told to stop buying avocado toast, had finally cleared escrow on starter homes specifically chosen for their south-facing roofs. Several described standing in their driveways looking up, then standing in their driveways looking down, then going back inside.

Administration officials suggested homeowners concerned about rising utility bills consider a range of patriotic alternatives, including a forthcoming American-made panel from a Texas startup that has not yet manufactured a panel, opening their windows, and prayer. A separate program providing rebates for domestic solar manufacturing was quietly defunded the same afternoon, in what one Energy Department spokesperson described as “a scheduling thing.”

The Department clarified late Tuesday that the sun itself remains, for now, exempt from tariffs, though officials would not rule out future action.

Mariners Debut Tariff-Pegged Concessions Pricing, Hot Dog Now Trading at $14.50 Bid, $16 Ask

Cody Thompson
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Mariners Debut Tariff-Pegged Concessions Pricing, Hot Dog Now Trading at $14.50 Bid, $16 Ask

SEATTLE — Concession workers at T-Mobile Park reported to their stations Tuesday morning to discover that each had been issued a Bloomberg Terminal, a quote sheet refreshed every 90 seconds, and a laminated card explaining that the garlic fries were now subject to a two-sided market with a widening bid-ask spread.

The pricing model, rolled out quietly during the Mariners’ homestand against the Rangers, pegs every concession item to a basket of imported inputs — paprika, polyester jersey blends, the steel in the nacho trays — and adjusts in real time as new tariff headlines cross the wire. A pretzel that opened at $9.25 closed the seventh inning at $11.80 after a Truth Social post about Vietnam.

“We’re not raising prices, we’re discovering them,” said Mariners VP of Fan Monetization Strategy Brent Halverson, who joined the club from a Citadel commodities desk in February. “The hot dog has always had a fair value. We’re just letting the market find it. Sometimes the market finds $13. Sometimes the market finds $19. That’s price discovery, and frankly that’s baseball.”

Vendors, most of whom are seasonal hires earning $19.40 an hour, have been asked to memorize tariff schedules for 14 trading partners and to quote concessions in basis points off the previous inning’s clearing price. One vendor, reached climbing the stairs of Section 132 with a tray of Cracker Jack pegged to a corn-syrup futures index, said he had been on hold with a confused buyer in Section 134 for the entirety of a pitching change.

“He wanted to lock in two beers and a churro at the top-of-the-fifth print,” the vendor said. “I told him I could only quote him spot. He asked if I’d take a limit order. I don’t know what a limit order is. I’m in community college.”

Fan reaction has been mixed, in the sense that fans appear to hate it and the team appears not to care. A father of three from Bellevue, attempting to feed his children during a rain delay, watched a soft pretzel reprice three times in the span of his Apple Pay confirmation and described the experience as “like buying a used Civic, but the Civic is bread.” The Mariners’ app crashed twice during the eighth inning Monday after a leaked Commerce Department memo sent ketchup limit-up.

Halverson, asked whether the volatility might alienate casual fans, noted that a sophisticated retail investor class was already emerging in the upper deck, where a group of finance interns from the Amazon tower had begun running a small arbitrage book against the team store, buying Julio Rodríguez jerseys at the second-inning print and shorting them into the bottom of the fourth.

“That’s not a bug,” Halverson said. “That’s a fan engagement metric.”

The Mariners said they expect other clubs to follow within the season, and confirmed that a soft launch of tariff-pegged parking is planned for the Yankees series, with stalls in Lot C reportedly set to open on a Dutch auction.

An NHL Player Took a Puck to the Face Saturday and Played the Next Shift, Which Is Apparently a Foreign Concept Across the Hall in the NBA Playoffs

Duke Holloway
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An NHL Player Took a Puck to the Face Saturday and Played the Next Shift, Which Is Apparently a Foreign Concept Across the Hall in the NBA Playoffs

Saturday night I had two TVs going. Stanley Cup playoffs on one, NBA first round on the other. On the hockey channel some kid caught a puck under the visor, skated to the bench leaving a red trail behind him like he was marking a trail for the rest of the team, took fourteen stitches in the runway, and was out for the power play with a piece of gauze taped to his face. On the basketball channel a sideline reporter was explaining, in the gentle voice you use with a horse, that a 26-year-old All-Star was unavailable due to “right hip tightness” and that the organization would “continue to reevaluate.”

The NHL injury report is the funniest document in American sports. “Upper body.” “Lower body.” That’s the whole document. You watch a man get cross-checked into the boards hard enough that his helmet ends up in Section 112, and the next morning the team announces he’s day-to-day, lower body. The man is being held together with rosary beads and athletic tape and the franchise is calling it lower body.

Coach DiMaggio used to say there were two kinds of hurt — hurt, and injured — and only one of them got you out of practice. He said this while taping his own ankle in the boys’ locker room because the trainer was at a wedding. I thought of him Saturday when that hockey kid came back out for the third period with a face like a beet salad. Coach would’ve been beside himself with joy. He’d have written it down on an index card and pinned it to the bulletin board.

Meanwhile, across the hall, an NBA guy is going to miss tonight’s playoff game with what the league office is now comfortable calling “right knee management.” Not an injury. Management. As if his knee is a small business and the front office is running payroll. He played 58 of 82 games this year, sat the back end of every road trip, did a podcast in March about his sleep habits, and arrived at the postseason approximately as fresh as a bag of pre-cut salad.

I am not naming the guy, because I am not in the business of naming guys, and because honestly there are six of him. The load-management era has produced an entire class of player who treats April like the start of a marathon and February like an optional stretching block. The numbers people will tell you it works. The numbers people will tell you something works right up until the moment it doesn’t, at which point they’ll explain that the model has been refined.

My buddy Ray called Sunday morning. He’s been watching the Panthers because his nephew has a girlfriend who has a cousin who works in the Sunrise team store — Ray operates entirely through six-degree hockey sourcing — and Ray says there’s a defenseman down there playing on what is almost certainly a broken foot. Team’s calling it a “lower body irritation.” Ray finds this extremely funny. Ray is correct.

I want to be fair here, because I’m old, not stupid. The NBA playoffs have produced some of the best basketball I’ll see all year, and the guys who do play play hard. There’s a kid on the Knicks who looks like a substitute teacher and is averaging 41 minutes a night and seems to be enjoying himself thoroughly. Credit where it’s earned. I’m not coming for the players. I’m coming for whatever consultant convinced an entire league that 82 games is a “regular-season volume problem” instead of a job.

There was a guy I used to know named Petey Corrigan who played beer-league hockey into his fifties. Petey took a puck off the cheekbone in 1994, drove himself to the emergency room, came home with a face like an eggplant, and was at Wednesday’s skate. Somebody asked him why. He said, “Because it’s Wednesday.” That was the entire answer. That was every answer Petey ever gave to anything.

I don’t know what we lost between Petey and the right-hip-management era, but I know it wasn’t fitness, because these kids are in better shape than any of us ever were. I think we lost the part where showing up was the assignment. The part where the calendar made the decision and you respected the decision. The part where Wednesday was Wednesday and you didn’t need a sports scientist from Stanford to explain it to you.

Denise is bringing chili over for Game 5. She heard a recipe on a podcast that uses cocoa powder. I told her Coach DiMaggio would have hated cocoa powder in chili. She said Coach DiMaggio is not invited.

Federal Climate Database Now Maintained Entirely by One Hydrologist Who Forgot to Open the Buyout Email

Lena Wexler
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Federal Climate Database Now Maintained Entirely by One Hydrologist Who Forgot to Open the Buyout Email

SILVER SPRING, MD — As the country wrapped up Earth Day week, sources within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that the agency’s flagship climate dataset — a continuous record of ocean temperature, atmospheric carbon, and sea ice extent dating back to the Eisenhower administration — is now being maintained, in its entirety, by a single 61-year-old hydrologist named Glenn Yarborough who simply did not check his work email between February 4 and March 18.

Yarborough, who came in Monday under the impression that he still had eleven colleagues, was reportedly informed of his new responsibilities by the building’s security guard, who handed him a printed-out org chart with one name on it and a Post-it that read ‘good luck buddy.’

‘Glenn is what we in workforce planning call a continuity asset,’ said Marcy Pell, an acting deputy administrator who clarified she has been ‘acting’ in four different roles since lunch. ‘He missed the separation incentive window because he doesn’t use Outlook on his phone, which under the current staffing model makes him the institutional memory of American climate science. We’re treating that as a feature.’

Yarborough’s expanded portfolio now includes the Mauna Loa CO₂ record, the Arctic sea ice index, the entire Atlantic hurricane reanalysis, and a shared Google Drive folder labeled ‘IMPORTANT — DO NOT DELETE’ that nobody currently employed has the password to. He has been issued one MacBook Air, a login to a Dell tower in Asheville that may or may not still be plugged in, and a laminated card with the phone number of a contractor in Boulder who ‘should know how the model runs, probably.’

Officials at the Department of Commerce defended the restructuring as a long-overdue efficiency, noting that prior to cuts, climate monitoring required dozens of redundant staffers performing overlapping tasks like ‘reading the sensors,’ ‘calibrating the sensors,’ and ‘replacing the sensors when they fall into the ocean.’ Under the new model, those functions have been consolidated into Glenn, who is also expected to answer congressional inquiries, peer-review his own findings, and physically drive to a buoy off Cape Hatteras ‘if the numbers look weird.’

‘I asked them what happens if I get the flu,’ Yarborough said, gesturing at a wall of monitors, six of which were displaying the Windows screensaver. ‘They told me to think of it as a paid vacation for the planet.’

Internal documents reviewed by sources show that of the agency’s previous 312 climate division employees, 47 took buyouts, 188 were reassigned to a new sub-office in Huntsville that does not yet have a building, and 76 were terminated for what HR described as ‘redundancy with Glenn.’ The remaining position — Yarborough’s — was reportedly preserved because eliminating it would have triggered a federal data-continuity statute that nobody in current leadership has read.

Climate researchers outside the agency expressed measured concern. ‘In theory, one experienced hydrologist running the entire national climate record is fine, assuming he never sleeps, never retires, and never updates his operating system,’ said Dr. Priya Kothari, a senior fellow at the Center for Atmospheric Continuity. ‘In practice, we are one bad cold and one Microsoft patch away from losing seventy years of data about whether the planet is, in any meaningful sense, getting warmer.’

Reached at 6:47 p.m. Friday as he was locking up the third-floor server room with a key he found in a desk drawer, Yarborough confirmed he had finally opened the buyout email. He said the deadline was March 21.

Appliance CEO Calls Tariffs ‘Margin-Neutral Long-Term,’ Defines Long-Term as ‘The Year I Retire’

Cody Thompson
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Appliance CEO Calls Tariffs ‘Margin-Neutral Long-Term,’ Defines Long-Term as ‘The Year I Retire’

BENTON HARBOR, MI — On Friday’s first-quarter earnings call, Midstate Appliance Holdings CEO Greg Halverson assured Wall Street analysts that the latest round of tariffs on Chinese-sourced compressors, motor housings, and “basically the dishwasher” would be “fully margin-neutral over the long term,” which he later defined under direct questioning as “the back half of 2031, give or take, which I believe is also coincidentally when I retire.”

The hour-long call featured fourteen separate uses of the verb “absorb,” a word Halverson clarified meant “raising the suggested retail price on every SKU by between four and eleven percent and trusting the American consumer to absorb it on our behalf.” He added that the pricing team had been “absorbing aggressively” since March.

“What’s exciting here is the optionality,” said Marcus Devereux, lead consumer-durables analyst at Crestmark Equity Research, in a same-day note. “Management has identified at least three separate retirements between now and the long term, any one of which could fully resolve the tariff exposure.” Devereux maintained his Buy rating and lifted his price target by one dollar.

Halverson also introduced a new non-GAAP metric on slide 14, “Tariff-Adjusted Underlying Operational EBITDA Excluding Tariffs,” which he described as “EBITDA, but with the tariffs taken back out, because at the end of the day those don’t reflect the underlying business.” The accompanying footnote read, in six-point type, “Forward-looking; assumes tariffs do not exist.”

When one analyst gently asked whether the company had considered relocating production stateside, Halverson responded that Midstate had “looked closely at a number of domestic alternatives” before concluding that the United States “does not currently manufacture the parts of a refrigerator.” A follow-up question about which parts, specifically, was deferred to the investor relations team and never resurfaced.

Reached for comment, a lineworker at the company’s Benton Harbor facility — which assembles imported components into finished units stamped “Crafted in America” — said he had not been invited to the call but had noticed that the cafeteria recently switched from Coke products to “an off-brand cola sourced from somewhere none of us recognize.” He declined to speculate on the long term.

By the closing bell, MIDA was up 3.2%, with several analysts citing Halverson’s “disciplined long-term framing” and the reassuring fact that, per his own definition, none of it will technically be his problem.

Goodell Hugged 32 Grown Men on Live Television Last Night and We’re Calling It a Sporting Event

Duke Holloway
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Goodell Hugged 32 Grown Men on Live Television Last Night and We’re Calling It a Sporting Event

I sat down at 7:55 with a beer and a notepad like an idiot, because I genuinely thought I was going to watch a football event. By 8:14 the commissioner of the National Football League had embraced a 6-foot-5 offensive tackle from Missouri the way a Greek widow embraces a returning son, and my notepad still said, in my own handwriting, kickoff?

I counted the hugs. Thirty-two of them. Roger Goodell, a man who looks like he was assembled in a focus group to test the concept of ‘middle management,’ hugged every single first-round pick last night, and on at least four occasions he held the hug a full second longer than the kid wanted him to. You could see them try to pull away. He would not let them. This is the same man who suspends running backs for being late to a press conference, and last night he was going in for cheek-to-cheek with a defensive end whose name he had clearly just learned phonetically.

Then there was the wardrobe. The third overall pick wore a brooch. I had to look up brooch. The seventh pick wore a pearl necklace and a suit the color of a good lemon, and ESPN cut to a sideline analyst — sorry, draft-side analyst — who described it as ‘a statement.’ A statement of what, the analyst did not say. The analyst was wearing a turtleneck under a blazer, so I’m not sure he was qualified.

When I made my JV roster cuts in the fall of 1986, I posted the list on a piece of typing paper taped to the gym door. Coach DiMaggio walked by, looked at the list, looked at me, and said, ‘You spelled Kowalczyk wrong.’ That was the entire ceremony. Nobody hugged anybody. Nobody wore a brooch. The kids who didn’t make it cried in their cars like Americans.

The green room is now a reality show. They cut to the families every twelve seconds. Mothers crying. Fathers crying. Grandmothers being handed tissues by a producer who is not on camera but is clearly directing the grandmother to look up and to the left. One kid had to wait until the back end of the first round, and the camera sat on his face for what felt like an entire commercial break, watching him perform ‘composure’ for an audience of millions. Let the man eat a dinner roll in private. He’s about to move to Cincinnati.

Mel Kiper Jr. is still doing this. I want that on the record. Mel Kiper Jr., who has had the same haircut since the Carter administration, sat at a desk last night and explained that a linebacker from Alabama ‘plays with a chip on his shoulder,’ which is what Mel Kiper Jr. has said about every linebacker drafted since 1984. At some point during the broadcast, a younger analyst said the word ‘twitchy’ to describe a cornerback, and I’ll be honest, I’m still working on it.

Now — and credit where it’s owed — somewhere in the middle of all this, a kid from a small school in Iowa got picked twenty-eighth overall, and when his name was called he didn’t pose, didn’t pull a flag out of his jacket, didn’t kiss a brooch. He hugged his mother, said something quiet to his father, and walked to the stage like a man going to work. The booth went silent for about four seconds. It was the best four seconds of television I saw all night, and naturally they cut away from it to sell me a truck.

Ray called me at 11:40. Ray watches the draft with a legal pad and a calculator, because Ray is sick. He wanted to argue about a guard who went in the second round of his mock and the third round in real life, and he was genuinely worked up about it, the way other men are worked up about their grandchildren. I told him I was going to bed. He told me he had three more rounds to go tonight and tomorrow. God help him.

Day two is on right now. Goodell, mercifully, does not hug the second-rounders. They send him home. They bring out former players to do the announcing, and the former players look like men who would rather be golfing, which is the correct posture for an adult around this much pageantry. Denise is bringing chicken cutlets at six. She heard about the recipe from a podcast.

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