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South Korea Removed a President This Morning. We Can’t Even Remove a Library Book.

Margaret Thorne
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South Korea Removed a President This Morning. We Can’t Even Remove a Library Book.

What does it look like when a constitutional democracy actually behaves like one? I ask because we no longer seem to know, and the answer arrived this morning from Seoul, where eight justices unanimously decided that declaring martial law against your own legislature is, in fact, the kind of thing a country is supposed to do something about.

The ruling took twenty-two minutes to read aloud. The decision was unanimous. The president walked out of the Blue House. I am told this is what people used to mean by ‘the rule of law,’ a phrase we still use here, mostly on commemorative coins and at the openings of judicial conferences where the shrimp is good.

I was at dinner last night with my friend Eliza — she runs a small foreign policy shop that I will describe only as the kind of place that has a Korea desk — and a lobbyist whose firm I will describe only as bipartisan, by which I mean he has never lost an election, because he has never been in one. The subject of Seoul came up between the salad and the lamb. The lobbyist said, with real feeling, that South Korea was ‘a remarkable, mature democracy.’ Then he asked someone to pass the bread. Nobody followed up. Nobody ever does.

This is the part of the column where I am supposed to say something balanced about how every system has its flaws and ours has been through worse. I will not be doing that. South Korea’s president sent soldiers into the National Assembly in December. Within hours, lawmakers climbed walls to vote him down. Within weeks, he was impeached. Within months, a court removed him. Total elapsed time from constitutional crisis to constitutional remedy: one hundred and twenty-two days. We are still litigating whether a sitting president can be charged for things he openly bragged about on a stage in Iowa.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to remember when documents were considered sacred and not, as she puts it now, ‘suggestions,’ called me this afternoon to ask whether I had seen the footage from Seoul. I had. The thing she wanted to talk about was the silence in the courtroom when the ruling came down. Not cheering. Not chanting. A nation watching a procedure complete itself. ‘I had forgotten what that sounded like,’ she said. So had I.

Here in Washington, we have spent the better part of three months congratulating ourselves on our resilience, by which we mean our ability to absorb. Cabinet officials have been confirmed who promised, in writing, to dismantle the agencies they now run. A federal workforce is being cut by people who could not pass its background checks. Lawyers at the Justice Department are being asked to defend things their predecessors would have prosecuted. And the response, in the rooms where I eat dinner, has settled into a tone I can only describe as appreciative bewilderment, the way you might admire a particularly aggressive weather system.

The South Koreans, to be clear, did not enjoy any of this. Their politics is a mess. Their president had an approval rating in the teens. Their opposition is, by all accounts, also exhausting. None of that turned out to matter. What mattered was that when the moment came, the institutions did the boring, unglamorous, procedural thing they were built to do. A legislature voted. A court ruled. A man left a building. The country is now planning an election, which is, I am told, what countries do.

I keep thinking about the lobbyist, reaching for the bread. I keep thinking about how comfortable we have all become with the idea that accountability is something other countries are better at, the way we say the trains are better in Japan, or the cheese is better in France. As if it is a regional specialty. As if a constitutional remedy is a kind of artisanal product we have simply chosen, as a culture, to no longer manufacture.

So I will ask the question the lobbyist did not want asked, and that Eliza, to her credit, was at least willing to look at her plate about. If a court in Seoul can remove a president for one night of overreach, what does it say about us that we cannot remove a library book without three lawyers, a town hall, and a podcast tour? We used to call that civic life. Now we call it civic cowardice, and we serve it with the lamb.

The country is going somewhere. We are not steering.

Laid-Off IRS Auditors Find New Jobs Within 48 Hours Helping Hedge Funds Evade Whatever’s Left of the IRS

Cody Thompson
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Laid-Off IRS Auditors Find New Jobs Within 48 Hours Helping Hedge Funds Evade Whatever’s Left of the IRS

WASHINGTON — Roughly 7,000 IRS auditors who learned of their termination via a 6:14 a.m. email Tuesday had, by Thursday afternoon, accepted six-figure consulting roles at the exact hedge funds and family offices they had spent the previous decade auditing, in what tax professionals are calling ‘the most efficient labor market in American history, possibly ever.’

The terminations, part of an ongoing federal workforce reduction, were announced as a cost-saving measure projected to save taxpayers approximately $880 million over ten years. Within the first 36 hours, those same auditors were rehired at an aggregate compensation believed to exceed $2.1 billion, a figure that several economists noted was ‘mathematically impressive given the direction the money was supposed to be moving.’

‘We posted the listings before HR finished printing the layoff notices,’ said Trent Vaccaro, head of compliance at Greenwich-based Kestrel Brand Capital, which onboarded eleven former IRS Large Business and International Division auditors before noon Wednesday. ‘These people know exactly which questions get asked, in what order, by which software, with what triggers. That’s not a skill set. That’s a treasure map.’

One former auditor, who spoke on condition that her new title be listed as ‘Senior Director of Strategic Disclosure Architecture,’ said the transition had been seamless. ‘On Monday I was flagging a $40 million carried-interest discrepancy. On Wednesday I was on a Zoom explaining to four men named Brad how the flag works, what suppresses it, and why their previous accountant was, and I quote them here, a coward.’

The hiring spree has been so aggressive that several Manhattan and Greenwich firms ran out of available offices and have begun seating new hires at folding tables in conference rooms named after national parks. Citadel was reportedly forced to convert a meditation room. One Stamford office is interviewing candidates in the lobby of a neighboring Sweetgreen, which the firm now considers a satellite location for tax purposes.

Treasury officials defended the cuts, noting that the remaining IRS staff — now consisting of approximately 400 auditors, a chatbot, and a man named Gary who answers the phone in Ogden — would continue to enforce tax law ‘on a priority basis,’ which a department spokesman clarified meant ‘mostly W-2 employees who incorrectly claimed a home office deduction in 2022.’

Asked whether the math actually worked out for the federal government, the spokesman paused for what observers described as ‘a long time’ before responding that the administration was confident the policy would ‘pay for itself through dynamic effects,’ a phrase he then declined to define. He was last seen consulting a binder labeled TALKING POINTS — TAX SEASON.

Several former auditors said they harbored no hard feelings about being terminated mid-filing-season, citing the signing bonuses, equity grants, and the simple professional satisfaction of finally being on the side that wins. ‘I spent twenty-two years asking rich people to please show me their books,’ said one, now employed as Chief Tax Strategy Officer at a firm she could not name. ‘Today a man handed me a glass of something and said, quote, make this go away. I cried a little. In a good way.’

The IRS confirmed it would still be accepting individual returns by the April 15 deadline, and reminded filers that penalties for late submission remain in effect, particularly for those earning under $100,000, who a department source described, off the record, as ‘the only people we can still afford to audit.’

Heard Island Penguins Slapped With 10% Tariff, Treasury Official Says ‘They Know What They Did’

Cody Thompson
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Heard Island Penguins Slapped With 10% Tariff, Treasury Official Says ‘They Know What They Did’

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a move administration officials described as long overdue, the Treasury Department on Wednesday confirmed that the new 10% baseline tariff on all imports will apply in full to Heard Island and McDonald Islands, an uninhabited Australian territory in the sub-Antarctic whose primary economic activity consists of approximately 200,000 macaroni penguins standing on rocks.

The territory, which has not had a human resident since the 1950s and whose last verified export was a single weather buoy in 1992, was flagged by U.S. Trade Representative analysts as running what one internal memo called an ‘unsustainable and frankly insulting’ surplus with the United States.

‘Look, the math doesn’t lie,’ said Bret Holloway, deputy assistant for trade modeling at the USTR. ‘We import about $1.4 million in toothfish from their waters. They import zero American goods. That’s a 100% imbalance. The penguins have had it too good for too long, and Wednesday is the day the free ride ends.’

The tariff schedule released that morning also included Norfolk Island (population 2,188, mostly chickens), the British Indian Ocean Territory (population: U.S. military personnel who already work there), and the Svalbard archipelago, prompting Norwegian officials to clarify in a brief statement that the polar bears are not, to their knowledge, engaged in unfair trade practices.

Reached for comment, Australian trade minister Don Farrell sounded mostly tired. ‘It’s a two-week boat journey from Perth. Nobody has been there since 2016. They’re penguins. They eat krill and stand around. I genuinely do not understand what we are doing here, and I have asked four people now.’

Administration officials defended the inclusion, with one senior advisor explaining that exempting territories based on ‘whether anyone technically lives there’ would create a loophole ‘big enough to drive an entire fish through.’ The same official confirmed that Pitcairn Island (population 35, all named Christian) had been hit with the full 10%, and that the Vatican remains under review pending clarification of its rosary exports.

Pressed on whether the formula used to calculate the tariff — trade deficit divided by total imports, divided again by two — had been peer reviewed, Holloway said the methodology had been ‘stress tested by several of the smartest people in the building’ and was, in his view, ‘directionally close to right.’

As of press time, the macaroni penguins of Heard Island had not responded to requests for comment, though one was reportedly observed sliding down a glacier in what trade officials cautiously characterized as a provocation.

Crypto Billionaire Funds First Crewed Polar Orbit, Will Personally Verify That the Ice Caps Are, On the Whole, Still Melting

Lena Wexler
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Crypto Billionaire Funds First Crewed Polar Orbit, Will Personally Verify That the Ice Caps Are, On the Whole, Still Melting

CAPE CANAVERAL, FL — A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off Monday night carrying four private citizens into the first crewed orbit ever to pass directly over Earth’s poles, a historic feat that will allow Maltese-Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Chun Wang and three companions to personally observe that the polar ice caps are, broadly speaking, still on the way out.

The Fram2 mission, named for the Norwegian polar research vessel that crossed the Arctic in the 1890s, will spend up to five days in a 425-mile orbit angled 90 degrees from the equator, granting its crew an unobstructed view of glaciers that climate scientists have been trying to get anyone with money to look at for roughly forty years.

“This is a tremendous opportunity for citizen science,” said Dr. Adriana Boell, a SpaceX-affiliated mission analyst, gesturing at a screen showing the projected ground track. “The crew will conduct 22 onboard experiments, including the first X-ray taken in space and a study on how human bone density changes in microgravity, neither of which will affect the ice.”

Wang, who funded the mission for an undisclosed amount widely estimated to fall somewhere between “a yacht” and “the GDP of Tonga,” told reporters before launch that he hoped Fram2 would inspire a new generation of explorers. He did not clarify whether he meant a generation that explores the poles or one that explores ways to leave the planet entirely.

Onboard cameras will livestream the polar passes to social media, where viewers can watch real-time 4K footage of an ecosystem in collapse rendered against the comforting black of space. The crew is expected to wave.

Climate researchers reached for comment expressed measured enthusiasm. “It is wonderful that four people will see the Arctic from above,” said Dr. Marten Kjellberg of the Stockholm Environmental Institute. “We have been seeing it from above for several decades, via satellite, for free. But sure.”

Mission commentary noted that the crew will also become the first humans to witness the aurora australis from low Earth orbit, an experience Wang described in a pre-flight statement as “a reminder that our planet is fragile and irreplaceable,” delivered from atop nine engines burning roughly 905 tons of kerosene.

SpaceX confirmed the capsule will splash down off the California coast on Saturday, at which point the crew will return to a planet that is, on average, marginally warmer than when they left.

The Yankees Are Now Hitting With ‘Torpedo Bats’ and I’m Supposed to Pretend This Is Still Baseball

Duke Holloway
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The Yankees Are Now Hitting With ‘Torpedo Bats’ and I’m Supposed to Pretend This Is Still Baseball

Ray Kowalczyk called me at 7:40 Saturday morning, before I’d had coffee, before I’d let the dog out, to inform me that the New York Yankees had hit nine home runs against the Milwaukee Brewers using bats that, in his words, ‘look like somebody fed a Louisville Slugger through a pencil sharpener and then changed their mind halfway through.’ I told him I’d call him back. I needed to see this for myself.

What I saw, on the highlight loop my grandson cued up on the iPad while I held my reading glasses six inches from the screen, was a baseball bat that was not a baseball bat. The fat part was in the wrong place. The barrel bulged out around where a human being would actually make contact and then tapered toward the end like a bowling pin somebody had taken a belt sander to. They are calling it a torpedo bat. It was designed, I am informed, by an MIT-trained physicist who used to work in the Yankees’ analytics department, which is a sentence that should not exist in a column about the sport of Babe Ruth and Stan Musial but here we are.

Coach DiMaggio, who coached me at Bridgeport East in 1962 and would walk into the dugout every March with a single ash bat and announce ‘the bat is the bat, gentlemen,’ has been dead for nineteen years. I am grateful for this. I do not think his heart could have withstood the phrase ‘optimized mass distribution.’ I do not think mine can either, and I’m only halfway through my second cup.

The defenders of this thing, and there are plenty of them, mostly under the age of thirty-five and mostly employed by something called a ‘content vertical,’ will tell you the bat is legal. They will tell you it’s been quietly used since last season. They will point to the rulebook, which apparently specifies a maximum diameter and length but does not, in its 1880s wisdom, anticipate that a man with a doctorate would one day be paid six figures to redistribute the wood. Fine. It’s legal. Cocaine was legal too at one point. That didn’t make it baseball.

Petey Corrigan hit .312 over three seasons at Bridgeport State College with a Louisville Slugger he’d cracked in legion ball and re-glued with wood epoxy and a roll of athletic tape his mother bought at the CVS. Petey could not have told you the moment of inertia of a baseball bat if you’d held his shoelaces for ransom. Petey could hit a curveball into the gap in left-center on a Tuesday afternoon in April with the wind coming off the river. I am not saying Petey was better than Anthony Volpe. I am saying Petey was playing baseball, and I am no longer sure what Anthony Volpe is playing.

This is, I should mention, the same league that in the last four years has installed a pitch clock, a ghost runner on second base in extra innings, a limit on how many times a pitcher can throw to first, and a pilot program for an automated strike zone that they are calling, with a straight face, the ‘ABS challenge system.’ Every spring they invent a new way to make the sport feel slightly more like Mario Kart, and every spring some thirty-one-year-old in a quarter-zip writes a column about how the changes are good for ‘pace of action’ and ‘fan engagement metrics.’ I would like to engage that fellow in a parking lot.

Here is the part I hate admitting, and Ray is going to clip this paragraph and send it back to me. The kid who hit three of those home runs, Volpe, the shortstop — he can play. He’s got hands. He’s got a swing. He’d have hit Bob Gibson, on his good days, in some county, in some year. The torpedo bat didn’t make him good. The torpedo bat just made the ball travel four extra feet, which in Yankee Stadium, with that short porch in right, is the difference between a long out and a SportsCenter loop. The kid is not the problem. The Pringles can is the problem.

The league office has not slept properly since 2014. They are convinced that if they don’t keep tinkering, the children will all leave and watch a man play Fortnite instead, which they have apparently decided is a serious threat and not just a thing children do for forty minutes between dinner and homework. So we get torpedo bats. Next year we will get something worse. I have made my peace with this in the way a man makes peace with the fact that his knees are going to hurt every time it rains until he dies.

Ray’s coming over at four to watch the Mets and the Astros. He says he’s bringing a regular bat to hold during the broadcast, just to remind himself what one looks like. Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.

Clayborn County Insurance Adjuster Spent 11 Hours on Bracket Spreadsheet, Eliminated Saturday by a School He’d Been Calling ‘St. John’s Methodist’ Under the Impression It Was a Regional Hospital

Hal Cranston
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Clayborn County Insurance Adjuster Spent 11 Hours on Bracket Spreadsheet, Eliminated Saturday by a School He’d Been Calling ‘St. John’s Methodist’ Under the Impression It Was a Regional Hospital

CLAYBORN, IA — Doug Wenstrom, 52, a senior adjuster at Clayborn County Mutual who spent the better part of eleven hours last Sunday building what he described as “a real instrument” of bracket prediction, was mathematically eliminated from the office pool Saturday afternoon by a team he had been referring to all week as “St. John’s Methodist,” under the firm impression it was a regional hospital somewhere outside Indianapolis.

Wenstrom’s spreadsheet, printed double-sided and presented to colleagues in a three-ring binder labeled MARCH ’25 — DO NOT MOVE, weighted fourteen separate variables, including average free-throw percentage in domed venues, coach hairline, mascot “intimidation index,” and a column simply titled SPIRITUAL FEEL, which he declined to explain. He had picked Auburn to win it all on the strength of what he called “a hunch supported by data.”

“Doug walked over to my desk Monday and used the phrase ‘efficient frontier,'” said Marlene Vetch, who handles homeowner claims and who picked her bracket Wednesday morning during a phone call with her mother. Vetch is currently in second place. “I asked him if he wanted coffee and he said he was already ‘caffeinated for a reason.'”

The pool, which carries a $20 buy-in and a hand-lettered trophy that has lived on top of the photocopier since 2017, is now led by Sue Albrecht in accounts receivable, who selected her teams based on a system she described, without embarrassment, as “whichever town sounded like somewhere I’d want to eat lunch.” Mrs. Peterson, who is not employed at Clayborn County Mutual but submitted a bracket anyway because her grandson works in IT, finished her picks in roughly four minutes by selecting every team whose primary color matched a curtain in her kitchen, and is currently tied for fourth.

Wenstrom’s elimination occurred at approximately 4:18 p.m. Saturday, when the school he had penciled into his Final Four — a mid-major he repeatedly assured colleagues had “a really clean rotation” — lost by nineteen to an opponent Wenstrom believed, until Friday, was a Lutheran seminary. Informed of his error by a coworker showing him the team’s Wikipedia page on a phone, Wenstrom reportedly nodded once and returned to his desk, where he was later observed eating a granola bar with the wrapper still partially on.

“I had it modeled,” Wenstrom said Saturday evening at the Hen House Diner, where he was eating alone at the counter. “I had it modeled three different ways. I had a Monte Carlo on it.” Asked what a Monte Carlo was, he said he wasn’t entirely sure but had read about it on a Reddit thread devoted to fantasy hockey.

Hen House waitress Janelle Ortiz, refilling his coffee, observed that Mr. Wenstrom had been talking about the spreadsheet “since the second week of February” and that several regulars had begun timing their visits to avoid the booth where he kept the binder open. “He showed me the SPIRITUAL FEEL column on a Tuesday,” Ortiz said. “I do not get paid enough to look at a SPIRITUAL FEEL column on a Tuesday.”

County Recorder Bill Hauer, asked for comment on the broader phenomenon of Clayborn County office pools, said it was “a great American tradition that proves, year after year, that the people who care the most know the least,” then immediately asked the reporter not to print that, then said it was fine to print but to attribute it to “a county official.” His own bracket was eliminated Thursday.

Wenstrom, for his part, has already begun a preliminary spreadsheet for the 2026 tournament. He told colleagues Sunday morning that this year’s loss had given him “a lot of really useful data,” and that he intends to add a fifteenth variable, the nature of which he is still working out.

I Turned On the Women’s Sweet 16 Out of Spite Last Night and Watched the Best Basketball I’ve Seen All March

Duke Holloway
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I Turned On the Women’s Sweet 16 Out of Spite Last Night and Watched the Best Basketball I’ve Seen All March

I will tell you exactly how this happened, because I want it on the record that I did not plan it. Men’s game went to commercial — some app I have never downloaded was selling me a parlay on a sport I was already watching — and I hit the wrong button on the clicker because Denise had moved the clicker, and what came up was the women’s Sweet 16 in Birmingham, and before I could correct the situation a guard threw a backdoor bounce pass that her teammate caught in stride and laid in off the glass, and I just sat there.

I am sixty-seven years old. I have not seen a clean backdoor cut on national television since George H.W. Bush was running for reelection.

What I watched, over the next three hours, was a basketball game. I want to be clear about that, because I think the word has lost some meaning. There were five passes before a shot. There were screens that the screener actually held still for. There was a help-side rotation. At one point a player set a flare screen, and I had to pause the television and explain to myself that I had just seen a flare screen, in 2025, on a Friday night, on ESPN, in the year of our Lord.

Coach DiMaggio used to tell us, every practice, that basketball is a passing game played by people who would rather shoot. He’d line us up on the baseline and make us complete seven passes before a layup, and if you took a dribble in between, you ran. He died in ’04 and missed all of this, and I think about that sometimes — what he’d make of a sport where a kid can dribble forty-one times and call it offense.

Because that is what the men’s tournament has been, friends. I have watched every round. I have watched ball-screen, dribble dribble dribble, step-back three, miss, run back. I have watched grown men in shooting sleeves stare at the rim from twenty-six feet like they were trying to remember its name. The other night a kid took a contested heave with eighteen seconds on the shot clock and the announcer said “that’s just his shot,” and I thought, no, son, that is the absence of a shot.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at halftime. Ray coaches eighth-grade girls now in a town outside Erie because his wife made him retire and he lasted nine days. He said, “You watching this?” I said I was watching it. He said, “They’re running stuff.” I said I had noticed they were running stuff. He said, “My eighth graders run stuff. Nobody runs stuff anymore in the men’s game. They just hand it to the best guy and stand around like they’re waiting for the bus.” Then he hung up because his wife was making him take out the recycling.

I want to say something here that is going to upset some of the men I know. I am not converting. I am not buying a jersey. I am not learning new names against my will. But there is a kid I coach against at the Y on Saturdays — Petey Corrigan’s grandson, plays for one of those travel programs that has its own logo — and the kid only knows two moves, and they’re both him. He puts his head down, he goes left, he flips it up. That’s it. He’s twelve. Watching the women’s tournament I had the cold realization that Petey’s grandson plays exactly like the players I’ve been watching in March, and the players I’ve been watching in March make eight figures, and somewhere between Petey’s grandson and the Final Four nobody bothered to teach any of them to pass to the open man.

Coach DiMaggio would’ve loved the South Carolina team. He would’ve hated the broadcast — too many graphics, too much yelling about “moments” — but he would’ve watched the basketball and he would’ve nodded once, which from him was a parade.

I’m watching the men’s Elite Eight tonight. I’m not a saint. But if it goes to commercial, and Denise has moved the clicker again, I’m not promising anything.

Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.

The Sweet 16 Tips Off Tonight and My Grandson Asked Me What ‘SGP’ Meant Before He Asked Who Was Playing

Duke Holloway
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The Sweet 16 Tips Off Tonight and My Grandson Asked Me What ‘SGP’ Meant Before He Asked Who Was Playing

My grandson Ethan came over Wednesday after school, sat down on my couch, opened his phone, and asked me if I had a take on the SGP for the late Friday game. He is eleven years old. I asked him what SGP stood for. He looked at me the way I used to look at Coach DiMaggio when Coach DiMaggio asked me what a microwave was.

SGP, it turns out, means same-game parlay. It means you bet on six things to happen in one basketball game and if all six of them happen you win forty-three dollars and if five of them happen you win a coupon for a free hot dog at a convenience store that does not exist in our state. Ethan explained this to me with the patience of a man explaining a will to a senile uncle. I told him to go play outside. He told me it was raining. I told him that didn’t used to matter.

The Sweet 16 starts tonight. Eight basketball games over two evenings. There was a time in this country when that sentence was the whole pitch. You did not need to add anything to it. You said “Sweet 16 starts tonight” and a grown man canceled a dentist appointment. Now the sentence comes pre-loaded with seventeen ancillary products, and somewhere underneath all of them, if you dig, there is supposedly some basketball.

I watched four minutes of the pregame show on Wednesday for the play-in. I am not making this number up. In four minutes I heard the word “parlay” five times, the word “props” three times, the phrase “live look-in at our betting desk” twice, and the name of one actual basketball player exactly once, and only because he had pulled a hamstring and they wanted to update the spread. There was a guy in a half-zip standing in front of a green screen of odds. I have seen friendlier hostage videos.

Ray Kowalczyk called me about it. Ray watches every minute of the tournament because Ray is a sick man and we love him for it. Ray said the sideline reporter on the late game Sunday went up to a kid who had just hit a game-winning three with two seconds left and asked him, and I want you to read this slowly, “Did you know you also cashed the over?” The kid is nineteen. He had just made the biggest shot of his life. The first adult who spoke to him afterward congratulated him on a gambling outcome. Ray said the kid handled it well. Ray said this with the weariness of a man whose entire weekend has been a slow march into a Caesars Sportsbook commercial.

Now look. I am not above admitting that the basketball, when you can find it, is good. The basketball is mostly the same as it always was, which is twenty kids running very hard at each other for forty minutes because they want it more than the other twenty kids. I watched a kid from a school I’d never heard of go for thirty-one points the other night and bow his head during the timeout because his coach was yelling at him about a defensive rotation, and I thought, well, there it is, that’s the thing, that’s still the thing, they have not figured out how to monetize that one specific thing yet, give them a year.

My old neighbor Petey Corrigan came over last night to watch the late game with me. Petey is seventy-six and his eyes aren’t great anymore so he sits about four feet from the screen with a notepad and writes down each player’s name as they check in. He does this every game. He has done it since 1971. At one point CBS cut to a graphic showing the live odds on the next made free throw and Petey turned to me and said, “Duke, what does it mean that the free throw is minus one-eighty?” and I told him it meant we were finished, the country was finished, get your affairs in order. Petey wrote that down too. He thought I was being literal.

The games tip at seven. I will watch them. I will mute the pregame and the halftime and any segment with a man in a half-zip standing in front of a green screen. I will write down the names of the kids myself, in pen, on a legal pad, the way Coach DiMaggio taught me, because somebody has to. Denise is bringing a casserole. She says it’s from a podcast.

Utah Bans Pride Flags From Schools and Government Buildings, Dispatches Inspector to Seize Second-Grader’s Crayon Rainbow

Nash Grayson
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Utah Bans Pride Flags From Schools and Government Buildings, Dispatches Inspector to Seize Second-Grader’s Crayon Rainbow

SALT LAKE CITY, UT — Just hours after Utah became the first state in the nation to ban LGBTQ Pride flags from public schools and government buildings, state compliance officer Dell Brockman was reportedly already inside Maple Grove Elementary, gently prying a Crayola rendering of an arched, multicolored sky out of the laminated cubby of a second-grader who said she’d drawn it for her mom.

The new law, which Gov. Spencer Cox allowed to become law without signature in a gesture observers described as ‘the legislative equivalent of leaving a $20 on the dresser and slipping out the side door,’ bars the display of any unauthorized flag in classrooms or on government property, with violations triggering a $500 fine per day per flag.

‘This isn’t about anyone’s identity. This is about keeping politics out of public spaces,’ said state Rep. Trevor Lee, standing six feet from a wall on which the Utah state flag, the U.S. flag, the POW/MIA flag, a ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ banner, and a framed portrait of Ronald Reagan signing something were all currently visible. ‘Children should be able to walk into a school and see only neutral, apolitical imagery, like the Ten Commandments, which we are also working on.’

Under the bill’s broad definitions, sources confirmed, banned displays now include rainbow lanyards, rainbow stickers, rainbow erasers, the Pixar logo, a poster for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, any prism left near a sunny window, and one elementary school’s long-running ‘Reading Is Magic’ bulletin board, which a Davis County compliance memo flagged as ‘gay in effect, if not in stated intent.’

The Beehive State, which derives its nickname from a swarming insect colony organized around a single matriarch and famous for producing something sweet, will continue to permit the Confederate battle flag in classroom history displays, the Gadsden flag in faculty parking lots, and one Pleasant Grove high school’s homemade banner reading ‘GO COUGS BEAT THE GAYS,’ which administrators clarified refers to the rival mascot of Brighton High and is therefore protected speech.

‘My daughter asked me what was wrong with her picture, and I genuinely could not come up with a sentence,’ said Murray resident Anna Halverson, whose seven-year-old’s drawing was confiscated Wednesday and entered into evidence. ‘The inspector took it in a manila folder. He said it would be returned at the conclusion of the investigation. He would not tell me what the investigation was.’

Reached for comment, Cox emphasized that the legislation ‘isn’t really my preferred approach’ and that he had ‘serious concerns,’ before clarifying that those concerns had been registered by allowing the bill to become law in total silence from a windowless office in which, witnesses noted, every wall remained scrupulously, patriotically bare.

At press time, Brockman had moved on to his next stop, where he was carefully measuring the angle of light passing through a stained-glass window at the Salt Lake County Library to determine whether the resulting spectrum on the carpet constituted a display, an accident, or, as he muttered into his clipboard, ‘a pretty clear-cut case of God breaking the law.’

The Athletics Open Their Season Tomorrow at a Triple-A Park in Sacramento and the League Office Has Decided This Is Fine

Duke Holloway
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The Athletics Open Their Season Tomorrow at a Triple-A Park in Sacramento and the League Office Has Decided This Is Fine

Tomorrow afternoon a Major League Baseball team will take the field at a 14,000-seat ballpark in West Sacramento that until last September was hosting a Single-A affiliate and a between-innings race featuring a man dressed as a tomato. The team is called the Athletics. Not the Sacramento Athletics. Not the Oakland Athletics. Just Athletics, the way a man whose wife has left him introduces himself at a wedding.

I want to be clear about what’s happening, because I had to read it three times before I believed it. A franchise that has won nine World Series — nine — is going to play its 2025 home schedule in a ballpark whose left-field wall is sponsored by a regional credit union and whose press box, I am told by a friend who covers the Pacific Coast League, is reachable only by a metal staircase that gets hot enough in July to brand a notebook.

Coach DiMaggio used to say that the dignity of a thing was just the sum of the small choices nobody bothered to make. He was talking about the way our linemen wore their socks. But I thought of him this week when I read that the league had approved this arrangement on the grounds that the team is, quote, in transition. They are in transition the way a man falling off a roof is in transition.

The transition, of course, is to Las Vegas, where in 2028 the Athletics are supposed to move into a $1.75 billion stadium on the old Tropicana site that, as of last Tuesday, did not have a roof, walls, seats, plumbing, a confirmed financing package, or a groundbreaking that anyone outside the renderings has actually seen. Until then they are guests of the River Cats, which is a sentence that would have started a fistfight in 1974.

Ray Kowalczyk called me Sunday night. Ray is sixty-eight, lives outside Modesto, and has been an A’s fan since Reggie. He told me he drove out to Sutter Health Park last weekend just to look at it from the parking lot. He said the marquee out front said WELCOME ATHLETICS in those plastic letters they use at a Holiday Inn when the Rotary Club is meeting in the conference room. He said he sat in his truck for forty minutes. He said he didn’t go in.

The rest of the league, by the way, is rolling out the usual spring-cleaning indignities to keep us from focusing on the one in California. Pitch clock is now down to a number that exists only on stopwatches. Ghost runner remains in extras, which I will continue to call extra innings until they pry the second word out of my mouth. Some scoreboard somewhere will play a TikTok between innings of a team going for a no-hitter. The Yankees, after a hundred and twenty-two years, have decided that beards are now permissible, and we are supposed to treat this like the Berlin Wall came down.

Petey Corrigan, who you’ve heard me write about, still has his 1989 Series cap. The bill is the color of weak tea. He told me at the diner last week that he’s going to Sacramento on a Greyhound for the third weekend in April, by himself, to watch the team that doesn’t have a city play a game at a park that doesn’t have a major league team. I asked him why. He said because somebody ought to. I bought his coffee.

Here is the part where I’m supposed to soften, and I will, because this is still baseball and I still love it the way you love a brother who keeps making it worse. Tomorrow afternoon a kid making the league minimum is going to throw a 99-mile-an-hour fastball to a kid making the league minimum, and one of them is going to win that pitch and the other is going to lose it, and the credit union sign and the Tokyo series and the Las Vegas renderings and the man dressed as a tomato will all stop existing for about four seconds. That’s the trick of it. That’s why we keep showing up at the Holiday Inn.

Denise is making chili tomorrow for first pitch. She heard about a recipe on a podcast that uses cocoa powder and something called “a glug” of coffee. I told her that sounded like a war crime. She told me to be quiet and find the channel.

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