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We Started Bombing Yemen Again on a Saturday, Which Is When You Schedule the Things You’d Rather Nobody Notice

Margaret Thorne
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We Started Bombing Yemen Again on a Saturday, Which Is When You Schedule the Things You’d Rather Nobody Notice

Has anyone else noticed that we have begun outsourcing the opening of new wars to the weekend news cycle, when the only people paying attention are insomniacs, divorce attorneys catching up on email, and my sister-in-law Judy, who watches three cable channels at once because she works at the National Archives and has, in her words, “a professional interest in things being preserved”?

The airstrikes on Houthi targets went out around the time most of the country was deciding between brunch and yardwork. The announcement came not from a podium, not from a Joint Session, not even from the dignified fiction of a press briefing, but from a social media post written in the cadence of a man yelling at a referee. We are, apparently, fine with this. We have decided that the threshold for the United States entering open conflict in the Arabian Peninsula is now somewhere between a recipe reel and a mid-tier college basketball upset.

I had dinner Thursday with my friend Eliza, who has the rare gift of being able to remember which administration did which thing without consulting her phone. We were joined by a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, in the way one describes a mattress as firm-ish. The conversation turned, as conversations in this town do, to whether anyone had read the briefing materials. Nobody had. The lobbyist allowed that he hadn’t “gotten to Yemen yet,” as though Yemen were a chapter in a book he’d checked out from the library and would return, unread, on Tuesday.

This is, by my count, the fourth time in roughly a decade that an American president has decided that the way to handle Yemen is to bomb it and trust that the public’s geographic imagination is too foggy to keep score. Obama did it by drone. Trump did it by drone, then by ship. Biden did it by ship, then by air. Now Trump is doing it again, and the only thing that has changed is the platform on which it is announced and the speed with which the people who used to be against this sort of thing have located their inside voices.

I am told by people who know more than I do — and there are some, though fewer than they think — that the Houthis are a genuine problem, that the Red Sea matters, that container ships do not steer themselves around militias. Fine. I am willing to be persuaded of nearly anything if someone is willing to do the persuading in public, on the record, in front of the legislative body that the Constitution still, last I checked, vests with the power to declare war. What I am not willing to do is treat a Saturday Truth Social post as the modern equivalent of a Rose Garden address. It is not. It is a scrolling chyron with delusions of grandeur.

The most striking thing about the dinner Thursday was not what was said but what wasn’t. Nobody asked the obvious question, which is: what is the goal? What does winning look like? When does the bombing stop? At what point do we admit that “degrade and disrupt” is the foreign-policy equivalent of telling your spouse you’ll get to the basement “eventually”? The lobbyist refilled his glass. Eliza changed the subject to a Senate retirement. Judy, who was on speakerphone from Bethesda, said something about the documents arriving faster than they can be cataloged, which I took to be about the Archives but which I am increasingly convinced was about all of it.

I came up in this business at a time when starting a new military campaign required, at minimum, a speech. There was a script: the grave tone, the flag behind the desk, the assurance that this would not be like the last one. The script was often a lie, but the existence of the script was itself a small civic act. It conceded that the public had a role, even if the role was only to be performed at. We have now dispensed with even the performance. The script has been replaced by a notification.

So I am just asking, as I always am: if a country can begin bombing another country on a Saturday morning and have it be the fourth-most-discussed item in the news cycle by Sunday night, what exactly are we still pretending to be? A republic deliberates. An empire announces. A reality show posts. Pick one, and tell the rest of us, so we can at least know what we are no longer.

I Spent Pi Day Measuring Every Pie at Harris Teeter and I Regret to Inform You That Big Pie Has Been Lying About the Ratio

Brooke Ellery
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I Spent Pi Day Measuring Every Pie at Harris Teeter and I Regret to Inform You That Big Pie Has Been Lying About the Ratio

I want to be clear that I did not set out to make a scene at the Harris Teeter on Tunnel Road. I set out to verify something. The bakery manager — a very kind man named Dale — watched me press a cloth measuring tape around the rim of a Dutch apple, write a number in my notebook, and move on to the cherry crumble, and at no point did Dale ask me to leave. He just got quieter.

This whole project started Tuesday night, when my friend Marigold posted in our Facebook group (Real Math for Real Mothers, almost 4,000 members, very civil) that pi is classified as a “transcendental” number, which she pointed out is the same word people use for meditation retreats and yoga studios that charge $48 a class. Her question was simple: why is the most famous number in our children’s school curriculum a number that goes on forever and cannot be pinned down? Nothing in nature is irrational. A pinecone is not irrational. A nautilus shell is not irrational. So who decided pies were?

I went to four stores. I measured 23 pies. I used a soft cloth tape from my sewing basket because my sister-in-law Tasha — she works the front desk at a pediatric office in Hendersonville and is basically a nurse — has told me before that metal measuring tapes introduce a small electromagnetic field that can throw off readings on anything fermented, baked, or “made with love at scale.” Pies qualify on at least two counts.

The numbers were not good, friends. The Sara Lee Dutch apple came in at 3.02. A Marie Callender’s chocolate silk measured 3.41, which is not even close. A store-brand pumpkin from Ingles registered 2.89, which technically isn’t pi, it’s just a circle having a bad day. The only pie that came within a tenth of 3.14 was a key lime from a Publix in Arden, and that one had a graham cracker crust, which Tasha says “barely counts as a baked good in the eyes of God or the FDA.”

I want to stress that I am not a conspiracy person. I am a mother of four with a five-acre homestead and a working dehydrator. But when I called the consumer line at one of the major frozen pie companies (I won’t name them, they were polite) and asked what their target circumference-to-diameter ratio was, the woman on the phone said, and I am quoting from my notebook, “ma’am we don’t measure them like that, we measure them in inches.” Inches. As if a pie is a piece of lumber.

For comparison, I baked my own apple pie Wednesday afternoon with a sourdough crust I’d been cold-fermenting for nine days, butter from the Jersey cow share at the farm down Old Fort Road, and apples I picked and stored myself in October. I made it during a waxing gibbous moon, which Marigold says is the only moon phase where geometry behaves. Wade timed me. The pie measured 3.14159 on the nose. He measured it twice because the first time he didn’t believe it either.

Ember, who is six and has been asking sharper questions since her TikTok detox, wanted to know why the store pies were lying. I told her that some pies are made by people, and some pies are made by buildings, and the buildings don’t always tell the truth. She nodded the way she nods when she already knew. River asked if we could still eat the Marie Callender’s. We could not. I’d cut into it for the radius measurement and Wade said it tasted like a candle.

Here is what I think is actually going on. Pi Day is not about math. Math doesn’t need a holiday. Math is doing fine. Pi Day is about getting American families to consume roughly four pounds of bleached flour, soybean oil, and “natural and artificial flavors” between 3:14 PM and bedtime in the name of a Greek letter most of us couldn’t draw. It is a marketing holiday wearing a graduation cap.

I’ll be celebrating tonight the way my grandmother would have — with a bowl of raw cream, a small bowl of honey, and the protractor I borrowed from Beck’s math binder. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the kitchen, measuring things that have nothing to hide.

The Bracket Guys Now Call It ‘Stealing a Bid’ When a Small School Wins Its Conference Tournament

Duke Holloway
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The Bracket Guys Now Call It ‘Stealing a Bid’ When a Small School Wins Its Conference Tournament

Ray Kowalczyk called me from a sports bar in Akron at 11:30 Tuesday night, audibly chewing something fried, to ask if I’d seen what the man on TV had just said. Some little school out of Ohio had won its conference tournament — Ray didn’t catch the name, but he said the kids were hugging each other on the floor and one of them was crying into a piece of net. The man on TV called it bid theft. Ray, who is 71 years old and worked 38 years for the gas company, wanted to know what that meant. I told him I’d look into it.

I looked into it. Turns out that when a school you have never heard of wins the basketball tournament they are guaranteed by rule to play in, and earns the spot in the NCAA tournament that is the entire point of having a conference at all, a separate group of men in glasses regards this as a kind of larceny. They call those teams bid thieves. Bid thieves. As if a 26-win team from the Horizon League snuck into the Sheraton at midnight and lifted a bracket spot off the nightstand of an 18-13 team from Texas A&M.

The men in glasses do something called bracketology, which I gather is a full-time paying job that involves predicting on Tuesday what a committee will announce on Sunday. They have appearances. They have followers. They have spreadsheets with team names color-coded by something called “quad wins,” which sounds like a brand of off-brand allergy medication. There is, somewhere, a person whose entire professional identity is being slightly more correct on a Wednesday than they were on a Monday about something that will be revealed in 96 hours regardless.

And these are the men who have decided that when a small school wins, it has stolen something.

I want to be clear about what is happening here. A team of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds at, let’s say, Robert Morris, has just played its absolute heart out for four nights in a row in an arena that smells like a Knights of Columbus hall, and won the trophy they were told from the day they got there was the only door to the dance. They cut down a net. They called their mothers. And a man on a podcast in a half-zip pullover refers to them, with a straight face, as bid thieves, because somewhere a 9-9 SEC team with a guard who has his own cologne now has to play in the NIT.

My old coach, Vince DiMaggio, used to say that the only people who complained about the rules were the people who weren’t good enough to win under them. He said it about a kid named Petey Corrigan who got cut from our varsity in 1971 and spent the next two months telling anyone who’d listen that the tryout had been rigged. Petey is now, I assume, doing bracketology somewhere. He always did love a spreadsheet.

You want to know how far this thing has gone? There is a tracker. Somebody is tabulating, in real time, how many bids have been “stolen” by mid-majors as the conference tournaments unfold this week. There is a graphic. The graphic has a little cartoon burglar on it. I am not making this up. I cannot make this up. My imagination is not robust enough.

The whole thing tells you exactly who college basketball is for now and who it is not. It is for the four conferences with television contracts and the bubble teams that pretend the bubble is a moral category. It is not for the schools whose entire season is built around the four-game miracle that the rules say is supposed to be the whole point. We invented the auto-bid because we said every conference deserved a champion. Now we are mad that the conferences keep producing them.

Ray called me back Wednesday and said his sports bar had switched over to women’s tournament games and he liked them better anyway. The girls, he said, looked happier to be there. I told him that’s because nobody on television has gotten around yet to telling them they’re stealing anything.

Denise is bringing chili tonight. She says it’s a recipe she got from a podcast. I’m going to eat it anyway.

The Players Championship Tees Off Tomorrow and Has Once Again Quietly Promoted Itself to Major

Duke Holloway
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The Players Championship Tees Off Tomorrow and Has Once Again Quietly Promoted Itself to Major

Ray Kowalczyk called me Sunday night to ask if the Players Championship was a major now or if we were still pretending to argue about it. I told him we were still pretending. He said good, because he had ten dollars on it not being one and he wanted to know who he was supposed to collect from.

The Players starts Thursday at TPC Sawgrass, which is a golf course built on a swamp by a commissioner who wanted his own tournament and got one. The purse this year is $25 million. The winner gets $4.5 million and a trophy that looks like a man in slacks reaching for something he dropped. CBS will spend four days speaking about it in the hushed voice usually reserved for funerals and the back nine at Augusta, and by Sunday evening they will have used the phrase “fifth major” enough times that a generation of children will simply grow up believing it.

Golf is the only sport on Earth where you can just declare a thing a major and then keep saying it on television until the saying is the proof. Imagine if the NFL announced that the Pro Bowl was the second Super Bowl. Imagine if Major League Baseball said the All-Star Game counts as a pennant now. They’d be laughed into the sea. But put a man in a navy quarter-zip in front of an island green and have him whisper about “a championship test of golf” and somehow we all just nod.

The 17th hole at Sawgrass is the famous one, the par-three over water to a green the size of my kitchen. It is a perfectly fine hole. It is also the only hole in professional golf that has its own merchandise tent, its own camera angle, and what NBC’s lead analyst Bryson Halliwell once called “a spiritual quality you can only really feel in person, or on the broadcast, or via the official app.” The official app, as far as I can tell, is mostly an invitation to bet a parlay on which Korean player will three-putt first.

My old coach, Coach DiMaggio, played golf the way he did everything else, which is to say angrily and with a cigarette. He would have hated the Players. He would have hated the bunkers raked into corduroy. He would have hated the man with the boom mic crouching ten feet from a player’s backswing. He would have especially hated the part where the leaderboard graphic spins and chimes like a slot machine every time somebody makes par. Coach DiMaggio believed par was the baseline expectation of a competent adult and did not require musical accompaniment.

I went down to Sawgrass once, in 2003, for reasons I no longer remember and a per diem I definitely do. What I remember is that everybody on the grounds was selling something. The clubs were selling clubs. The shoes were selling shoes. The water bottles had a sponsor. The sponsor had a sponsor. There was a man near the seventh fairway whose entire job was to hold up a sign that said QUIET, and I swear to you the sign had a logo on it. You cannot make a religion out of a thing that is also trying to sell you a Lexus during the backswing.

What bothers me, and I’ll cop to being an old man about this, is that the Players Championship doesn’t need to be a major. It is already a very good golf tournament. The best players in the world show up. The course chews most of them up. Somebody usually wins it in the rain. That’s plenty. The need to call it a fifth major is the same disease that gave us the College Football Playoff growing into a twelve-team buffet and the NBA inventing an in-season tournament with a court the color of a dentist’s pamphlet. Nobody can let a good thing be the size that it is.

The four real majors, by the way, became majors by accident. Nobody sat in a boardroom and decided. The Masters started as a buddy’s invitational. The U.S. Open is older than indoor plumbing. The British Open is older than the country that named it. They earned the title by being around long enough that nobody remembered when they weren’t. The Players Championship started in 1974, which is the same year Petey Corrigan went to prom in a powder-blue tuxedo, and it is asking for the same respect.

Watch it anyway. The 17th will eat somebody alive on Sunday and it will be tremendous. Just don’t let the broadcast convince you you’re watching scripture. You’re watching a very expensive Thursday at a very wet golf course, and that’s a wonderful thing to be without needing to be anything more.

Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast hosted by a man who used to caddie. I have not asked follow-up questions.

The NFL Opened Something Called the ‘Legal Tampering Period’ Yesterday and the Name Alone Should Tell You Everything

Duke Holloway
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The NFL Opened Something Called the ‘Legal Tampering Period’ Yesterday and the Name Alone Should Tell You Everything

Ray Kowalczyk called me at 7:14 yesterday morning, before I’d even gotten the percolator going, to inform me that the National Football League is currently observing a holiday called the Legal Tampering Period. Ray reads the league’s transactional calendar the way some men read the obituaries — slowly, with a pencil — and he wanted to make sure I’d seen it in writing. I had not. I assumed he was pulling my leg. He was not. The NFL has, in actual league bylaws, a forty-eight-hour stretch each March officially titled Legal Tampering. That is the name. They printed it.

Now I have been around long enough to know that every sport has its dirty little windows. Coaches whisper to agents, agents whisper to coaches, somebody’s cousin gets a job at a Cadillac dealership in Tampa. Fine. That has always been the case and always will be. But the league used to have the decency to pretend it wasn’t happening. They used to call it cheating. They used to fine you for it. Now they have given it a brand, a start time, and presumably a sponsor.

I keep saying the phrase out loud and it gets worse every time. Legal Tampering. It is a sentence written by a lawyer who lost a fistfight with a marketing intern. It is the linguistic equivalent of a sign at the deli that says HONEST FRAUD HOURS, 9 TO 5. My wife heard me muttering it over the toast and asked if I was having a stroke. I told her no, the league was, and she went back to the crossword.

Here is what the Legal Tampering Period means in practice, as best I can determine from a podcast my nephew Bryce made me listen to. Teams may now contact the agents of players who are still, technically, employed by other teams, in order to negotiate the terms of contracts that cannot officially be signed for two more days. So the deals are done, the numbers are agreed upon, and the players are sold like sides of beef, but on paper everyone is still loyal to the franchise that cut their checks last Sunday. It is the most honest dishonest thing the league has ever done, which is saying something.

Coach DiMaggio, who ran our program from 1971 to 1989 and who once made a kid run laps for tucking his shirt in too neatly, would have set the building on fire. Coach DiMaggio believed in two things: the option play and the idea that loyalty was the only currency a man had that nobody could tax. He used to say, “You sign your name to something, son, you stay signed.” Coach DiMaggio is dead now, which is good, because if he weren’t, he’d see the words LEGAL TAMPERING PERIOD on a chyron and his arteries would do the rest.

The players, I want to say up front, I do not blame. Not one of them. The careers are short and the knees are shorter and if some twenty-eight-year-old guard wants to take Cleveland’s offer over Carolina’s because Cleveland threw an extra eight million at his agent’s voicemail at 11:58 a.m. on a Monday in March, God bless him and his family. He has earned every nickel by being struck repeatedly by very large men since he was twelve. The players are not the joke. The packaging is the joke.

Because that’s the thing — the league did not have to name this. They could have left it as a quiet practical reality, the way every other industry on earth handles the in-between. But somebody, in a conference room in Manhattan, looked at a calendar and said, you know what would help, is if we gave the cheating a hat. And everyone nodded. And now we have content. We have analysts in suits standing in front of green screens explaining who is winning the Legal Tampering Period, as if it is a leg of the Triple Crown and not a paperwork loophole with a publicist.

Petey Corrigan, who used to scout for the Bills and now runs a bait shop outside Hamburg, told me last summer that the worst thing that ever happened to football was the day the league realized it could sell the offseason. Petey said this while gutting a perch. He said the games used to be the product, and now the product is the rumor of the games, and the games are just the part where they verify the rumor. I thought he was being dramatic. I owe Petey a phone call and possibly an apology.

Anyway. Free agency officially opens at four o’clock this afternoon, at which point all the deals that have already been agreed upon during the period that does not officially exist will be announced as if they had just happened, and grown men in studios will act surprised. I plan to miss it. Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.

Lost an Hour Sunday and Watched Women Play Better Basketball Than the Men Have All Year

Duke Holloway
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Lost an Hour Sunday and Watched Women Play Better Basketball Than the Men Have All Year

Daylight Saving stole an hour out of my Sunday and I didn’t even notice it leave, on account of I was on the couch watching conference championships and somebody named JuJu Watkins was in the middle of doing things with a basketball that I have not seen a man do in this country since George W. Bush’s second term.

I’m not here to be a convert. I am too old and too tired to convert to anything, including a multivitamin. But the SEC final was on, and the Big Ten final was on, and the ACC, and the Big East, and at some point around five o’clock I sat up off the couch like a man hearing his name called and I said out loud, to nobody, “these girls are playing basketball.” Then I sat back down, because my hip does not like sudden things.

Meanwhile the men’s bracket reveal show ran four hours. Four hours. For a piece of paper. They had Charles Barkley on a couch, and a guy in a vest holding the bracket like it was the Magna Carta, and a graphic that spun around like a slot machine, and at the end of all of it Auburn was a one seed, which any sober person could have told you in nine seconds.

My old coach Vince DiMaggio used to say the game’s the game, kid — the haircuts change and the shoes change and the announcers get worse but the game’s the game. He said this to me one time when I asked him whether women could really play basketball, and he looked at me like I had asked him whether water was wet, and he said, “Holloway, are you stupid, or are you being stupid on purpose.” That was 1973. Coach DiMaggio is dead now, and so is most of his patience for nonsense, and yet here we are in the year 2025 still pretending it’s a question.

Hannah Hidalgo had eight steals in a game last week. Eight. Pete Maravich didn’t have eight steals. Pete Maravich didn’t even have a steal as a statistical category, on account of nobody bothered to record them when he played, on account of he wasn’t getting any.

Ray Kowalczyk called me Sunday night. Ray played triple-A ball for a season and a half in the seventies and has been an authority on every sport ever invented since. Ray said, “Duke, are you watching this?” I said, “Ray, I have been watching it for nine hours.” He said, “They’re setting screens.” He said it like a man witnessing a miracle on the side of a highway. He said, “Duke. The screens are legal.”

Now of course ESPN has noticed, in the way ESPN notices things, which is to say with a hashtag and a sponsored graphic. It is Women’s History Month, which means they have a tile and a slogan and a corporate partner, probably a bank, and at some point this week a sideline reporter is going to interview a kid from UConn about being a role model when what the kid wants to talk about is a backdoor cut. They will run a spot called “She Is The Game,” and somebody at the agency that made it will get a bonus and a small ceramic award.

I do not need ESPN to tell me what I am watching. I am watching basketball. I am watching screens that pin a defender for a full second and a half. I am watching post entries from the elbow. I am watching a kid run a high pick-and-roll with the patience of a married man in a hardware store. The men’s tournament is going to be a parlay-app commercial with a few possessions of basketball wedged in between, and the women’s tournament is going to be basketball with a hashtag stuck on top of it, and only one of those things is salvageable with a butter knife.

I am not making a larger point here. I’m a sportswriter, not a sociologist, and the difference is that one of us gets to leave the office. I’m just telling you that an hour got stolen out of Sunday and I would gladly trade them another one if it meant I could keep watching whatever it was JuJu Watkins was doing in the second half.

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

Trump Ends Ukraine Intelligence Pause, Tells Kyiv Russia ‘Got a Little Head Start, But That’s the Fun of It’

Nash Grayson
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Trump Ends Ukraine Intelligence Pause, Tells Kyiv Russia ‘Got a Little Head Start, But That’s the Fun of It’

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump announced Sunday that the United States would resume sharing intelligence with Ukraine after an eight-day pause, telling reporters in the Oval Office that Russia had been given “a sporting chance, like in golf,” and that everyone involved should now “agree it’s even and stop crying about it.”

The pause, which began last week as part of what aides described as a “creative pressure campaign” and what most of NATO described as “whatever the opposite of an alliance is,” allowed Russian forces a window to move troops, repair logistics nodes, and, according to one defense analyst, “complete approximately three errands they had been putting off since 2023.”

“We’re picking back up where we left off, except some of the dots on the map have, you know, scooted,” said Pentagon spokesperson Col. Davis Penberthy, gesturing at a screen that no longer matched the briefing book. “We are currently in the process of telling our Ukrainian counterparts what occurred in their own country during the period in which we declined to mention it. They are taking it about how you’d expect.”

Sources inside the National Security Council said the eight-day blackout was lifted only after Trump grew bored of the leverage and began asking aides whether Ukraine had “learned its lesson yet, or whatever the lesson was.” When pressed for the specific concession Kyiv had made, the president said Ukraine had agreed to “be a lot nicer on the phone going forward,” and added that Volodymyr Zelenskyy had personally promised to wear “a real suit, with buttons and everything.”

Intelligence officials privately conceded that the pause had been somewhat awkward to administer in practice, as several U.S. spy satellites had to be manually reassigned mid-orbit to look at “basically nothing” for a week, with one KH-11 reportedly tasked to monitor a Florida driving range until further notice. Analysts at Langley described the period as “the longest unpaid vacation any of us have taken since the shutdown,” and said morale had been buoyed only by a department-wide pickleball bracket.

Reached for comment, Zelenskyy issued a brief statement thanking the United States for resuming the partnership and noting, with the careful diplomatic phrasing of a man who has now learned several magic words, that Ukraine was “deeply appreciative of any intelligence the United States is willing to share regarding events that happened to Ukraine.” He declined to take questions, citing a sudden need to look at a map.

The Kremlin, for its part, expressed regret that the pause had ended, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov calling the eight-day arrangement “a constructive framework” and suggesting it be made permanent, monthly, or “at minimum, available as a holiday gift option.” Russian state television aired a 40-minute segment titled “Thank You, America, From Your Friends in Kursk.”

Trump, asked whether he could rule out future intelligence pauses, said he could not, adding that he reserved the right to “hit the button again if Ukraine gets mouthy,” and that, frankly, the whole arrangement had taught him something valuable: that intelligence sharing, like most things in his administration, works best when it can be turned off from the residence using a remote.

Clayborn Savings & Loan Lobby Clock, Wrong Since November, Will Be Briefly Correct Sunday at 2 A.M. Before Resuming Its Errors in a Fresh Direction

Hal Cranston
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Clayborn Savings & Loan Lobby Clock, Wrong Since November, Will Be Briefly Correct Sunday at 2 A.M. Before Resuming Its Errors in a Fresh Direction

CLAYBORN, IA — At precisely 2 a.m. Sunday morning, the analog wall clock that has hung crooked behind the teller windows at Clayborn Savings & Loan since 1978 will, for the first time in four months, briefly display the correct time. By 2:01 a.m., it will be wrong again, just in a fresh direction.

The clock has been running exactly one hour fast since November 3, when no one at the bank could remember which staff member had been previously assigned the fall-back duty, or where the step ladder had gone, or whether the clock’s back-panel screw required a Phillips or a flathead. The matter was tabled at a Monday meeting and then forgotten, the way most things are.

“It’s been running an hour fast for so long that some of our older customers have started showing up an hour early on purpose,” said branch manager Linda Voss, who has worked at Savings & Loan for nineteen years. “They like to sit in the lobby. We put out a coffee carafe.”

Voss confirmed that no current employee knows how to remove the clock from the wall. Chuck Hennig, who retired from facilities maintenance in 2019, is reportedly the last man living who has accessed its mechanism, and he now lives in a fifth-wheel outside Branson and does not return calls about clocks.

Clayborn County keeps time loosely under the best of circumstances. The bell at First Methodist has rung six minutes early since a 2014 lightning strike no one has felt urgent enough to address. The microwave at the Hen House Diner has been flashing 12:00 since the Obama administration. The big lit sign at Marv’s IGA reads 73° year-round, which Marv has called “aspirational.”

Mrs. Peterson, asked whether she planned to set her own clocks ahead before bed Saturday, said she had stopped doing so in 2017 and now simply waited a week for everything to feel right. “The microwave catches up eventually,” she said. “Or I do.”

County Supervisor Dale Whittaker, reached for comment, said he supported the time change in principle but had not personally adjusted a clock since his second divorce. He declined to elaborate and asked the reporter to clarify which hour, exactly, was being lost.

At the Hen House, waitress Dee Hollander said she’d been told to come in an hour earlier Sunday but wasn’t sure if that meant her hour earlier or the clock’s. She said she’d split the difference. The eggs, she noted, would not know either way.

Filled Out My Bracket Last Night and Realized I’m Just Picking Between Hedge Funds With Mascots Now

Duke Holloway
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Filled Out My Bracket Last Night and Realized I’m Just Picking Between Hedge Funds With Mascots Now

I filled out my bracket at the kitchen table Thursday night with a Bic pen and the printout from Murph’s, and the eleven-seed I circled has a $1.4 million NIL deal, three legal name changes on file with the NCAA compliance office, and a podcast called Off the Glass where he interviews other guys with podcasts. He is twenty-four years old. He has played for four schools. One of them was a junior college in Idaho that no longer exists, which I would like somebody to explain to me in plain English.

The pool at Murph’s has a title sponsor this year. A regional Toyota dealership in Hagerstown. There is a QR code in the corner of the bracket. If you win, your check arrives from a marketing agency in Charlotte and you are encouraged to post a thank-you video. I am not going to post a thank-you video. I am sixty-eight years old and the last video I posted was an accident involving the inside of my coat pocket and three minutes of an Applebee’s parking lot.

I used to love Cinderella. Cinderella was a kid named Petey Corrigan who came off the bench at George Mason and shot the lights out for one beautiful weekend in March because nobody had bothered to scout him. Cinderella now is a grad transfer with a goatee, a representation team, and a mid-major coach who recruited him with a USB drive of analytics. Cinderella has a Cameo page. Cinderella charges thirty-five dollars to wish your father a happy birthday and forty if your father is named Doug.

Coach DiMaggio used to say a tournament was a season inside a season, and the only thing that mattered was who showed up Thursday at noon with their shoes tied. He said this in 1982 in a cinder-block locker room that smelled like a lost cause. He would have hated the bracket app. He would have hated it the way he hated indoor stretching, college fight songs played by a recording, and any man who used the word journey about a sport.

Ray Kowalczyk called me Wednesday from his recliner in Altoona to ask if I’d seen what they were paying the kid at Saint Joseph’s. I had not. He told me. I made him repeat it. He said the kid had a logo. I said what kind of logo, like a clothing line, and Ray said no, like a personal logo, on his shoes, on a hat, on a press conference backdrop. I told Ray I was going to hang up and walk into the yard for a minute and he said that was probably the right move.

The transfer portal opened the same week as the conference tournaments, which I’m told is a normal thing now and not the punchline I keep mistaking it for. So a kid can play in a Sunday quarterfinal, lose a heartbreaker by two, hug his coach on the sideline, and be in another team’s group chat by Tuesday morning. They call this player empowerment. I call it the same thing I call a guy who leaves Murph’s the second his wife calls.

The selection committee, meanwhile, is twelve people in a hotel suite in Indianapolis with bowls of trail mix and a software platform that ranks teams by something called Net Quadrant Resume Score. I read the methodology. I read it twice. It is the kind of document a man writes when he has been told he is too valuable to coach and not valuable enough to be the athletic director. There is no Coach DiMaggio in that room. There is, I suspect, a Brad.

And yet. I will tell you what is true. The actual basketball, the forty minutes between the tip and the handshake, is still the best thing on television in March. A kid from a school you can’t pronounce will hit a runner with three seconds left on Friday and a fifty-year-old man in a sleep shirt will scream at his television loud enough that his dog will leave the room. That part hasn’t moved. They can sponsor the bracket and rename the trophy and put a betting line on the national anthem, and that part still hasn’t moved, which I take as evidence the sport is tougher than the people selling it.

Anyway. I’ve got Houston in the Final Four, against my better judgment, and an upset penciled in for the four-thirteen game because Ray told me to. Denise is bringing chili Saturday for the first round. She says the recipe is from a podcast. I didn’t ask which one.

Stamford Hedge Fund Up 14% This Quarter After Pivoting Entire Strategy to Refreshing Truth Social Every 90 Seconds

Cody Thompson
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Stamford Hedge Fund Up 14% This Quarter After Pivoting Entire Strategy to Refreshing Truth Social Every 90 Seconds

STAMFORD, CT — Meridian Crest Capital, a once-conventional long/short equity fund managing $3.2 billion out of a glass building near I-95, has quietly become one of the best-performing macro shops in the country after firing its entire research team in February and replacing them with three analysts whose only job is to refresh Truth Social on company-issued iPads.

The fund is up 14.2% year-to-date, a figure partners attribute almost entirely to Wednesday’s announcement that Trump would pause tariffs on Canada and Mexico until April 2, a decision Meridian had positioned for at 10:47 a.m. — roughly four minutes before the post hit.

“We don’t call it insider trading because there’s no inside,” said Bram Kessler, Meridian’s Head of Sentiment-Adjacent Volatility, a title that did not exist eight weeks ago. “It’s all just sitting there. The President writes it in all caps. We read the all caps. We buy or sell the all caps. The hard part is the typos — sometimes ‘tarrifs’ moves the peso before ‘tariffs’ does, and you have to know which one he’s going with that morning.”

Meridian’s new strategy, internally codenamed Project Thumb, deploys junior analysts in 90-minute shifts to prevent what one partner called “refresh fatigue.” A small bell rings whenever a post containing the words “deal,” “phenomenal,” or “Justin” appears, at which point the trading desk has approximately eleven seconds to act before Bloomberg terminals across Greenwich start lighting up.

Competitors have struggled to keep pace. A rival fund in Westport reportedly hired a former White House social media intern at $750,000 a year on the theory that he might still have push notifications turned on. Two Brooklyn quant shops have built natural-language models trained exclusively on the President’s 2017–2020 corpus, only to discover the 2025 corpus operates on entirely different grammar and considerably more ALL-CAPS verbs.

Meridian itself nearly blew up Tuesday afternoon when a junior analyst mistook a Truth Social post about figure skating for a tariff signal and shorted the Canadian dollar at size. The position was unwound 40 minutes later when the President clarified, in a follow-up post, that he had in fact been talking about figure skating, but also possibly tariffs, and that Canada “knows what they did.” The fund made $11 million on the round trip.

“The beautiful thing about this market is that fundamentals don’t apply, technicals don’t apply, and earnings don’t apply,” Kessler said, gesturing at a Bloomberg terminal displaying a single chart of the loonie shaped vaguely like an EKG. “We are trading one man’s mood between breakfast and his second Diet Coke. It is the purest expression of capitalism I’ve ever seen.”

Asked whether the strategy would survive the April 2 deadline, when tariffs are scheduled to either resume, expand, disappear, or be replaced by something called a “reciprocal something,” Kessler said the fund was already preparing. “We’ve hired a guy whose entire job is to interpret the word ‘reciprocal,'” he said. “He used to do crossword puzzles for the Times. He says it could mean anything. That’s exactly the kind of edge we’re looking for.”

At press time, Meridian’s compliance officer was reviewing whether the firm’s new “Mar-a-Lago Proximity Index” — which tracks the geographic distance between the President and the nearest open golf course — constituted a material non-public information source or simply, as Kessler put it, “weather.”

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