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Spring Training Came Back With a Robot Umpire and a Helmet Tap, and Baseball, My Oldest Friend, I Barely Recognize You

Duke Holloway
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Spring Training Came Back With a Robot Umpire and a Helmet Tap, and Baseball, My Oldest Friend, I Barely Recognize You

There was a moment Saturday afternoon when a catcher named — and I checked this twice — Dalton something tapped the top of his helmet like he was signaling for a milkshake refill, and a computer somewhere in Florida reversed a called strike. My wife was in the kitchen. My dog was asleep on the good chair. And I, a grown man who has watched baseball since the Carter administration, said out loud to no one, “What are we doing here.”

This is the ABS challenge system, which stands for Automated Ball-Strike and sounds like something you’d order on a Bowflex. Major League Baseball rolled it out in spring training this year — three challenges a game, tap the helmet, and a laser in the outfield decides if Blue got it right. The league says fans love it. The league always says fans love it. The league said fans loved the ghost runner, too, and the ghost runner is a crime against the sport so obvious that future generations will ask us why we didn’t rise up.

I called Ray Kowalczyk about it Sunday morning, because Ray umpired American Legion ball for thirty-one years and has opinions on everything that happens behind home plate, including, once, a bee. Ray said, and I’m quoting him exactly, “Duke, the whole point of an umpire is that he’s wrong sometimes and you have to live with it. That’s the game. That’s America. You take the bad call home and you stew on it and you’re a better person Monday.” Ray then told me he had to go because his granddaughter was FaceTiming him from a Dairy Queen. Progress arrives on every front.

Here is what the helmet tap looks like, in case you have been spared. The catcher, or the pitcher, or the batter — any of the three — lightly taps the top of his helmet with an open palm, the way a maître d’ signals the busboy. Then everybody waits. Then a graphic pops up on the scoreboard like we’re in a video game. Then the call is reversed or upheld. Then we all clap or boo at a cartoon strike zone. Somewhere in Cooperstown, a bronze plaque of Bob Feller is quietly sliding off its wall.

The argument for all this, as I understand it from Marcus Delgado-Finch, who writes a Substack called “The Sabermetric Parlor” that someone keeps emailing me, is that the umpires get it wrong more than you’d think and the technology simply corrects for human error. Marcus wrote, “The ABS system reduces strike-zone variance by an estimated 4.7%, a meaningful delta for high-leverage at-bats.” Marcus, buddy. Pal. Friend. You have described exactly the thing that made baseball worth watching and called it a bug.

Coach DiMaggio, who I still quote more than my own father, used to say that an umpire was like weather: you didn’t argue with it, you dressed for it. You got a bad strike zone one night, you adjusted. You got a tight one the next night, you adjusted again. The ones who couldn’t adjust didn’t make varsity, and the ones who could adjust learned something that transferred to every other difficult thing in life, which is that the universe does not owe you a consistent strike zone and pretending it does will ruin you.

Now we are teaching twenty-two-year-olds the opposite. We are teaching them that if a decision goes against you, there is a button. Tap the button. The button will fix it. And if the button doesn’t fix it, you have been wronged, and we will sympathize with you, and we will put a graphic on the scoreboard explaining exactly how badly you were wronged, in inches, in real time. I am not a sociologist but I can see where this is going and it is not toward a generation of stoics.

The worst part — and I didn’t think there would be a worst part, but here we are — is that the broadcast loves it. They built a whole segment around it. Pitch comes in, ump calls it a ball, catcher taps his helmet, two announcers spend forty seconds analyzing the tap itself. Was it a confident tap? Was it a desperation tap? Is the catcher “in the catcher’s head” on these? There is now a meta-game of challenge psychology, and there are already, God help us, analysts who specialize in it.

I watched a Cactus League game on Saturday where a pitcher got squeezed on a 2-2 fastball, tapped his hat, got the call overturned, and then stood on the mound pointing two fingers at his temple like he was a genius. The catcher nodded at him. They tapped gloves. This was a February exhibition game in front of 3,400 people, one of whom was visibly eating a churro the size of a baseball bat. Somewhere Bob Gibson was being physically restrained.

I will say this for the new system, because I try to be fair even when I don’t want to be. The helmet tap is faster than a managerial replay challenge, which is the other modern innovation that has turned baseball games into a series of small legal proceedings. If we must have robots, let them be quick robots. And the umpires, to their credit, have handled the whole indignity with professional grace — they stand there while the laser tells them they were wrong, and then they crouch back down and keep working, which is more than most of us would do.

But I keep thinking about Petey Corrigan, who coached third base for forty years at a Catholic school up the turnpike from me, and who used to say the most important skill in baseball was the ability to be mad about something for exactly one pitch and then let it go. Petey was not a sophisticated man. Petey thought “launch angle” was something NASA did. But Petey understood that a sport is, fundamentally, a structured way to practice swallowing injustice, and that this practice is the thing you keep after the sport is gone.

You cannot tap your helmet at your boss. You cannot tap your helmet at the IRS. You cannot tap your helmet at the guy who cuts you off on 322 and you cannot tap your helmet at the doctor telling you the test came back funny, and baseball — real baseball, old baseball, the baseball that was here before the graphics package — used to teach you that. Now it teaches you that there’s always a review. There isn’t. There really, really isn’t.

Pitchers and catchers reported a couple weeks ago. Games started for real this weekend. I’ll still watch. I always watch. Denise is making pierogies tonight. She says the recipe’s from a TikTok.

CPAC Used to Be Where the Fringe Auditioned. Now It’s Where the Cabinet Reports Back.

Margaret Thorne
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CPAC Used to Be Where the Fringe Auditioned. Now It’s Where the Cabinet Reports Back.

Do you remember when CPAC was embarrassing? I mean genuinely embarrassing, the kind of thing Republican senators declined invitations to with the soft-voiced relief of a man ducking his cousin’s essential-oils pitch. It was held in a windowless ballroom at a hotel chain nobody wanted to name, the merchandise table sold a T-shirt of a cartoon elephant stomping on a hammer and sickle, and the featured speaker was usually a man who had been indicted in at least one state. That was the deal. That was the point. CPAC was the basement where ideas too weird for the living room went to see if anyone would dance with them.

I bring this up because today the President of the United States will deliver the keynote at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and he will be preceded, in sequence, by roughly half of his own cabinet. This is a detail that has been reported as a schedule and should be read as a diagnosis. The people who run the federal government are flying to National Harbor to address a ticketed audience of activists as though they are reporting back to a board. Which, to be fair, they are.

I was at dinner Thursday night at Eliza’s — she had done a lamb, which she does whenever she wants an argument to stay seated — and a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan said, without any detectable irony, that CPAC was “basically the sub-cabinet offsite now.” Everyone laughed, the way people laugh when a joke is also a weather report. Then we moved to dessert.

I want you to sit with the shape of this for a moment. CPAC is a private event put on by a 501(c)(4) whose chairman is currently under indictment on sexual battery charges he denies. The Vice President will speak there. The Secretary of Defense will speak there. The head of the Office of Management and Budget will speak there. They will stand on a stage flanked by sponsor logos and deliver remarks about the direction of the American government to an audience that paid between three hundred and twenty-five hundred dollars to hear it. The White House briefing room, meanwhile, has been reorganized to accommodate podcasters.

The merchandise table is still there, by the way. My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and is too dignified to attend anything, sent me a photograph a friend had texted her: a tumbler, forty-five dollars, with the presidential seal on one side and a cartoon chainsaw on the other. I looked at it for a long time. I could not decide which side was the joke.

What nobody quite wants to say out loud — and what Eliza’s lobbyist very nearly said, before catching himself on the lamb — is that there is no longer a meaningful distinction between the conference and the government. The conference is not lobbying the government. The conference is not auditioning ideas for the government. The conference is where the government goes to be applauded for what it already did on Tuesday. This is a loop, and loops, historically, are not how republics describe themselves.

I am old enough to remember when a sitting cabinet secretary addressing a partisan activist convention was considered, at minimum, a question for the ethics office. Now it is the itinerary. Now it is the job. I called a friend who served in two Republican administrations and asked him whether any of this bothered him. He said it did. I asked if he’d say so on the record. He said he would not. I asked why. He said, “Margaret, come on.” That is the sound of civic cowardice in its native tongue — two words and a first name.

The speech the President will deliver today will be covered as news. Cable will carry it live. Newspapers will pull three quotes and a chyron. The analysts will discuss whether he seemed energized or fatigued, whether he departed from the prepared text, whether the crowd responded more warmly than last year. Nobody will ask the only interesting question, which is why the most powerful office in the country now does its most significant talking inside a ticketed ballroom run by a private organization.

And here is the part that actually keeps me up. The audience in that ballroom is not a fringe. It is a constituency that has been, patiently and correctly, told for four decades that it was the real America and that its real America-ness was being suppressed by people named, generally, Margaret. They were promised that one day the basement would come upstairs. It has. The furniture has been moved. The sub-cabinet is on the couch. The President is doing a forty-five-minute set about the enemies within, and the enemies within, for the duration of the set, are whoever is not in the room.

Eliza, clearing plates, asked me what I was going to write about this weekend. I told her. She said, “Oh, Margaret, it’s just a speech.” I love Eliza. I have known her since the Clinton years. But I want to note, for the record, that “it’s just a speech” is the exact phrase she used about the Muslim ban rollout, about the Helsinki press conference, about the first impeachment, about January 6th at roughly 1:40 p.m. eastern. Eliza is a very intelligent woman who has, over the course of a decade, described every unprecedented event of our lifetimes as just a speech.

I am not here to tell you that today’s remarks will contain something new. They probably won’t. He will say the things he says. The cabinet will nod. The tumblers will sell. The chyron will run. That is not what worries me. What worries me is the staging: the fact that our government has quietly, efficiently, and without a vote relocated its center of gravity to a private ballroom where the admission fee is a credit card and the applause is guaranteed.

We used to have a word for countries where the ruling party’s annual rally was indistinguishable from the business of the state. I am not going to use it here, because I am tired and because you already know it. I will only note that in those countries, the dinner parties also kept serving lamb, right up until they didn’t.

On Firing the Joint Chiefs Chairman, and the Dinner Party Where Everyone Complimented the Halibut

Margaret Thorne
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On Firing the Joint Chiefs Chairman, and the Dinner Party Where Everyone Complimented the Halibut

When did we collectively decide that firing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was the kind of thing one could do between the salad course and a quiet Friday evening? I am asking because I would like a date, a time, and the name of the person who signed off on it, and I have a feeling I won’t get any of the three.

I had eight people over last night, the usual assortment — my friend Eliza, who served two administrations and now exists primarily as a guest at other people’s tables; a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, because he has made a career of not being pinned down; two retired flag officers who have known each other longer than most marriages last; and my sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has reached the age and pay grade where she can no longer be surprised by anything. I put out the halibut. I put out a decent Sancerre. And at some point between the first pour and the second, somebody mentioned, almost conversationally, that the President had fired General Brown.

There was a pause. It was not a long one. It was the pause of people who have been trained, over forty years of Washington dinner parties, to register a thing and move past it before the thing can register them. Someone asked for more lemon. The lobbyist praised the fish. Eliza, who has watched three decades of men in uniform stand behind three decades of Presidents, said only, “Well,” and let the word die where it landed.

I want to be clear about what happened this week, because the people who are paid to explain things to us are going to work very hard over the next seventy-two hours to explain that nothing happened. The President dismissed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He dismissed the Chief of Naval Operations. He dismissed the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force. He did not accuse them of incompetence. He did not accuse them of insubordination. He did not, as far as I can tell, accuse them of anything beyond having been hired by somebody else.

One of the retired officers at my table — I will not give his name, because he asked me not to, and because the habit of giving names in this town has become a form of aggression — said the thing I have been waiting for somebody in Washington to say out loud. He said: “They were fired for the color of their boss.” Then he asked for the butter.

I want you to hold those two sentences together for a moment, because I think they are the entire story of American civic life in 2025. A man who wore the uniform for forty years will tell you exactly what is happening, in one unadorned sentence, and then he will ask for the butter, because what else is he going to do, stand on the table?

I have been writing this column for thirty years and I have developed certain instincts about how republics fail. They do not fail, in my experience, because a strongman bursts through the door in a red sash. They fail because a thousand well-dressed people at a thousand well-set tables decide, one Friday night at a time, that the thing that just happened is not quite worth interrupting the fish course for. They fail because the retired general asks for the butter. They fail because the lobbyist compliments the halibut. They fail because Eliza says “Well,” and lets the word die.

The defense secretary — a man whose previous management experience consists of a weekend cable program and a nonprofit board he allegedly ran into the ground — announced the firings with the casual air of somebody reorganizing a fantasy football roster. He will tell you, if you ask him, and he has, that the military needed “new blood.” This is the language of a man who has never bled, addressing a profession that has, extensively.

Judy, who has spent her career cataloguing the paper trail of previous crises, said something over dessert that I have not been able to stop turning over. She said the archives are full of memos from people who were certain, in the moment, that what was happening was procedural. Reorganizations. Realignments. Personnel matters. The memos are almost touching, she said, in how sincerely they avoid the word that would have made them true.

I looked up the word she meant later, because I am sixty-four and I still look things up. The word is purge. It is not a word we use at dinner parties. It is not a word the Pentagon press office will use on Monday. It is not a word the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee will use when he issues whatever statement his staff has already half-written. But it is the word, and Judy is right, and the memos of the future will eventually use it, and the people writing those memos will wonder why nobody said so at the time.

I will tell them why. It was a Friday. The fish was good. The Sancerre was cold. Everyone at the table had a mortgage, a reputation, and a standing reservation they did not wish to lose. A retired four-star told the truth in one sentence and then asked for the butter, because he has been in this town long enough to know that the sentence was the limit of what the room would bear.

I have been asked, more than once this week, whether I think we are in a crisis. I do not know how to answer the question anymore, because the people asking it are the same people who will, on Monday, decide the answer is no. What I know is that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was fired on a Friday, and my dinner guests complimented the halibut, and somewhere in a building off the Potomac a man who has never commanded anything larger than a segment break is picking the next one. If that is not the crisis, I would like somebody at my next dinner party to tell me, with the fish in front of them, what is.

Kash Patel Sworn In as FBI Director, Begins First Day by Cross-Referencing To-Do List Against the Index of His Own Book

Nash Grayson
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Kash Patel Sworn In as FBI Director, Begins First Day by Cross-Referencing To-Do List Against the Index of His Own Book

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel arrived at the Hoover Building Thursday morning with a travel mug, a leather binder, and a hardcover copy of his 2023 memoir Government Gangsters, which sources confirm he consulted approximately forty-seven times before lunch, occasionally mouthing names under his breath and underlining them with a ballpoint pen.

The Senate voted 51–49 on Wednesday to confirm Patel over the objections of virtually every FBI agent who has ever met him, a coalition of former federal prosecutors, two Republican senators, and a printed copy of the United States Constitution that was reportedly visible on Susan Collins’ desk, opened to a page she described as “the relevant one.” Patel, for his part, told reporters he intended to “restore trust” at the Bureau, which he plans to accomplish by firing everyone currently employed there.

“The Director has a vision, and the vision is in Appendix B,” said transition spokesperson Kirby Halverson, gesturing to the book’s now-infamous list of sixty names Patel identified as members of the “Executive Branch Deep State.” “He’s not coming in with an enemies list. He’s coming in with a published enemies list, which is different. That’s called transparency. That’s called showing your work.”

Within the first three hours of his tenure, Patel reportedly requested personnel files on every FBI employee who has ever been assigned to a January 6 case, every agent who has ever worked the Mar-a-Lago documents matter, and one analyst whose only offense appears to have been following Patel on X in 2021 and then unfollowing him in 2022. The analyst, reached for comment, said he had forgotten he had done that and asked if it was still possible to refollow.

Patel spent much of the afternoon touring the building, pausing at the wall of former directors and asking an aide whether any of their portraits “come down easily” or whether “we’re talking a screw situation.” He was reportedly disappointed to learn that J. Edgar Hoover’s name remains on the exterior of the headquarters, telling staff he had assumed that would be “handled before I got here” and asking whether the letters were magnetic.

“It’s a learning curve for everyone,” said Dr. Meredith Vance, a former senior FBI official now at the Brennan Center. “Most new directors spend the first week reading briefing books. Director Patel spent the first week asking whether the briefing books could be reformatted as podcasts, and whether those podcasts could be monetized.” Vance added that Patel had also asked, unprompted, whether the Bureau owned the rights to the phrase “Government Gangsters” in merchandise form.

In a Rose Garden appearance Thursday afternoon, President Trump praised his new FBI Director as “the toughest, smartest, most loyal,” before trailing off and adding, “and he has a book, which, I haven’t read it, but the cover is fantastic, it’s a great cover, the best cover, people tell me.” The President then confirmed he had not, in fact, read the list of sixty names, but assured reporters he “knows most of them personally and agrees with the grouping.”

At the Department of Justice, career attorneys reportedly spent Thursday afternoon updating their LinkedIn profiles with the grim efficiency of people who have done this before. One senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity because she had not yet been fired but assumed she was on a spreadsheet somewhere, said the mood was “somewhere between funeral and evacuation drill, but with worse snacks.”

Patel’s confirmation hearing last month featured several memorable moments, including his refusal to commit to not investigating journalists, his refusal to commit to not investigating members of Congress who voted against him, and a roughly four-minute exchange in which he appeared to confuse the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act with a podcast he had once appeared on. Senator Dick Durbin at one point asked whether Patel understood that the FBI Director does not, in fact, personally choose who gets indicted, to which Patel replied, “Not with that attitude.”

The new Director’s first official memo, obtained by this outlet, runs eleven pages and contains the phrase “weaponization” thirty-one times, “accountability” twenty-nine times, and “my book, which is available wherever books are sold” exactly once, in a footnote. It also announces the creation of a new internal task force whose mandate, per the memo, is to “review prior reviews of prior reviews,” a structure one former agent described as “an Escher drawing with a badge.”

Asked whether he had any message for the rank-and-file agents now reporting to him, Patel paused, smiled, and said, “I look forward to getting to know each of them personally, one at a time, in a small room.” He then clarified that he meant “in a team-building context” and that the small room comment was “a joke, mostly, we’ll see.”

By 5 p.m., a line had formed outside the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility that staff described as “unprecedented in both length and visible panic.” An intern was reportedly dispatched to order pizza. She returned empty-handed, explaining that the pizza place had also received a subpoena, and was closed pending review.

Marv’s IGA Valentine’s Clearance Aisle Has Quietly Become Clayborn County’s Most-Trafficked Grief Counseling Venue

Hal Cranston
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Marv’s IGA Valentine’s Clearance Aisle Has Quietly Become Clayborn County’s Most-Trafficked Grief Counseling Venue

MERRITT, IA — The endcap at Marv’s IGA where, one week ago, a four-foot plush bear named Snuggle Bandit retailed for $39.99 has, as of Wednesday morning, become the most heavily trafficked informal support group in Clayborn County, according to store employees, regular patrons, and at least one woman who came in for a gallon of 2% and left ninety minutes later holding a pink-foil-wrapped salami.

The aisle, marked down in stages — first 50%, then 75%, and as of Tuesday evening a decisive 90% — has drawn a steady Wednesday morning crowd of women ranging in age from roughly twenty-two to eighty-four, most of whom arrive alone, linger, and strike up conversations with strangers they would not normally acknowledge at the four-way stop on Route 6. Store manager Deb Kruzik said she has watched the phenomenon evolve across her nineteen years with the chain, and that this year’s installment has been, in her professional assessment, the most emotionally candid to date.

“They start by pretending to read the ingredients on a box of assorted creams,” Kruzik said, restocking a bin of conversation hearts that had been rejected even at a nickel apiece. “By the second box they’re telling me about a man named Randy.”

The inventory itself has taken on the quality of a small, poorly curated museum. A heart-shaped deli tray of sliced ham and provolone, originally priced at $24.99, has been reduced to $3.49 and is being purchased, unprompted, as a statement. A display of pink champagne flutes sold individually rather than as a pair — an arrangement Kruzik said was “not intentional, but has been received that way” — moved twelve units in a single hour Tuesday. One shopper reportedly bought a single flute, held it up to the fluorescent light, and said, to no one in particular, “This feels right.”

Dr. Renata Gilfoyle, a sociologist affiliated with the extension office at the community college in Nevada, Iowa, said the post-Valentine’s clearance aisle has become, in many small Midwestern communities, a kind of ritualized public sorting-through of the previous week’s emotional ledger. “It’s the only socially sanctioned venue in which a woman can stand in public, holding a discounted plush bear, and cry a little,” Gilfoyle said. “The fluorescent lighting is actually a feature. It flattens affect.”

Mrs. Peterson, who arrived shortly after nine to pick up a prescription, confirmed she had stayed past ten-thirty after falling into conversation with a woman she described only as “the one whose son-in-law took up pickleball in a suspicious way.” Mrs. Peterson, who has been married to Mr. Peterson for fifty-one years and is not a member of the target demographic, said she felt called nonetheless to stay and listen. “You don’t walk away from that,” she said. “You stay. You nod. You buy the bear.”

The bear in question — Snuggle Bandit, now $3.99, down from a Valentine’s Day peak of $39.99 — has become something of a mascot for the proceedings. A display of nine of them, originally ordered for couples and intended to be purchased in pairs, now sits in a single cardboard bin near the pharmacy, arranged in what Kruzik described as “a posture I did not mean to give them, but which has been noticed.” One patron, who declined to be named but identified herself as “recently divorced and not sorry about it,” purchased three.

The phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by the store’s male clientele, who have, as a group, elected to avoid the aisle entirely. Don Wexler, 62, a regular who came in Wednesday for a rotisserie chicken and a bag of shredded cheese, said he took one look down the clearance lane, reversed course, and added eight minutes to his shopping trip by going around the long way through frozen. “That’s not an aisle for me,” Wexler said. “That’s an aisle that’s doing a job. I’m not going to interrupt.”

Kruzik said the unofficial counseling function of the clearance aisle has begun to creep into the store’s operational rhythm. She has stopped scheduling restocks on the clearance endcap between 9 and 11 a.m., which she has come to regard as “the hour.” She has quietly relocated the tissue display from aisle seven to the endcap opposite, a move she described as “not advertised, but appreciated.” On Tuesday she caught a stock boy trying to consolidate the remaining chocolate onto a single shelf and sent him to the back. “Let it spread out,” she told him. “It’s supposed to look like it’s been through something.”

Not everyone has been charmed. Assistant manager Kyle Brummel, 24, said the clearance aisle has become “a logistical nightmare” and that the store has lost at least one shopping cart to what he described as “a woman who walked out with it, and nobody stopped her, because you could tell.” Brummel proposed on Monday that the remaining inventory be boxed up and donated to the food pantry, a suggestion Kruzik vetoed on the grounds that, as she put it, “the pantry doesn’t need this energy.”

The clearance is expected to continue through the weekend, at which point the remaining heart-shaped merchandise will be moved to the seasonal aisle and replaced, per corporate planogram, with the first shipment of Easter grass. Kruzik said she has already received three separate requests, unsolicited, to be notified “when the bears are gone.”

A waitress at the Sunrise Cafe across the parking lot, who has watched the Wednesday morning migration from her booth-three window for six consecutive Februaries, offered what may stand as the definitive summary of the week’s commerce. “Cheaper than a therapist,” said Linnea Hoag, refilling a coffee. “And the bear comes home with you.”

Clayborn County Historical Society’s ‘Dignified Presidents Day’ Observance Drew Fourteen People, All of Whom Came for the Coffee

Hal Cranston
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Clayborn County Historical Society’s ‘Dignified Presidents Day’ Observance Drew Fourteen People, All of Whom Came for the Coffee

CLAYBORN COUNTY, IA — The Clayborn County Historical Society’s inaugural Dignified Presidents Day Observance, convened Monday evening in the basement meeting room of the First Methodist Church, was attended by fourteen area residents, of whom fourteen told Society president Dale Krumpf afterward that they had primarily come for the coffee.

The event was billed on a hand-lettered flyer at the IGA as “a solemn counterweight to the commercial flattening of our nation’s executive heritage,” a phrase Krumpf later confirmed he had workshopped for nine days. Attendees were promised a reading of excerpts from Washington’s Farewell Address, a slide presentation on the lesser-known Whig presidents, and, per the flyer, “refreshments.”

The refreshments were the draw. They were leftover heart-shaped sugar cookies from the American Legion Valentine’s social, re-iced by volunteers with small blue stars and the words WE REMEMBER, which several attendees assumed referred to someone recently deceased.

“We wanted folks to sit for an hour and think about the office of the presidency without somebody trying to sell them a box spring,” said Krumpf, 68, a retired agronomist who has served as Society president since 2019 and who wore, for the occasion, a tie. “I understand that sounds ambitious for a Monday.”

Across town, Baumgartner Furniture & Flooring reported its strongest single-day sales figure of the first quarter, moving eleven mattresses, two recliners, and a credenza that had been on the floor since the Bush administration. Owner Lyle Baumgartner, reached by phone, said he had not been aware of the Historical Society’s event but wished them well. “We had a sheet-set giveaway,” he added, in the tone of a man explaining why his team had won.

Krumpf’s keynote, delivered from a lectern borrowed from the church’s Wednesday youth program and still bearing a laminated sign reading GOD LISTENS, ran forty-two minutes. It covered the Adams administrations (both), the reasons James K. Polk should be more famous than he is, and a digression on Millard Fillmore that Krumpf introduced by saying, “Bear with me,” and which several attendees later described as the part where they checked their phones.

Mrs. Peterson, who sat in the third row and has attended every Society function since 2004, said the evening was “very educational, and I learned that my left knee does not do folding chairs anymore.” Asked whether she felt the observance had successfully reclaimed the holiday from commercial interests, she paused for a long moment and said she had, in fact, bought a mattress that afternoon. “It was already on sale,” she clarified. “That’s not the Society’s fault.”

The slide presentation experienced technical difficulties at the twenty-three-minute mark, when Society treasurer Marlene Ostby’s laptop displayed a notification from her grandson’s Roblox account, prompting a brief intermission during which Krumpf announced there would be “a few more cookies, if people wanted to stretch.” Six people stood up. Four left.

Of the ten who remained, three were Society board members contractually obligated by dues structure to stay, two were the couple who run the Nextdoor page and were taking notes, and one was Doyle Fenwick, 71, who explained he had come in from the cold and did not fully understand what was happening but was enjoying it. “The man up front knows his presidents,” Fenwick said. “That’s more than most of them knew.”

Krumpf concluded the evening by inviting attendees to sign a guestbook and consider a $5 donation toward next year’s observance, which he said would feature “actual parchment.” The donation jar collected $11 and a button.

Over at the Skylark Diner the following morning, waitress Rhonda Teel, who was not in attendance but had heard about it from three separate customers before the breakfast rush ended, offered the prevailing local verdict while refilling coffee at the counter. “Dale means well,” she said. “Dale has always meant well. That’s sort of Dale’s whole deal.”

Krumpf, for his part, pronounced the event a success and announced plans to expand next year’s program to include a moment of silence for the Whigs. Asked whether he had considered moving the observance to a Saturday, when attendance might be stronger, he said he had not, and that Presidents Day is Presidents Day, and that the country’s problem, in his considered view, is that everyone wants everything to be more convenient.

The heart cookies, thirty-one of which remained at the end of the evening, will be served at Wednesday’s youth group under a new laminated sign.

I Looked Into Why Presidents’ Day Is Always a Mattress Sale and What I Found Has Me Sleeping on a Folded Quilt Until March

Brooke Ellery
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I Looked Into Why Presidents’ Day Is Always a Mattress Sale and What I Found Has Me Sleeping on a Folded Quilt Until March

I pulled into the Ingles lot on Saturday for goat milk and eggs and there it was again, the same white vinyl tent with the same twin-size placards, the same man in a polo aggressively not making eye contact with anyone actually entering the store. A mattress sale. In February. Tethered by law, apparently, to the birthday of a man who slept on a straw tick. I walked past it three times and I felt my sinuses close up in real time.

I have been trying, gently and without accusation, to get the women in my life to notice this. Every single federal holiday in the first quarter is a mattress sale. MLK Day. Presidents’ Day. Memorial Day just barely clears the window. It is never a produce sale. It is never a wool sale. It is never, say, a raw honey sale, which would at least make civic sense. It is always, always, always polyurethane foam wrapped in flame retardant wrapped in a plastic tube.

My friend Dana — who runs the lavender u-pick out past Fairview and has, I would say, an unusually developed nose — was the one who first said it out loud at book club. “Brooke,” she said, holding her mug with both hands the way she does when she’s about to ruin your week, “they release them on holidays on purpose. People are at home. The windows are closed. They’re off-gassing the whole neighborhood at once.” I made her repeat it and then I went home and did not sleep.

I have since joined a Facebook group called Springs and Lies: A Mattress Awakening and a smaller, quieter one called Queen-Sized Grief, and between the two of them there is a truly staggering amount of receipt-taking going on. One woman in Boise has mapped every Presidents’ Day mattress sale in a forty-mile radius against the local pollen report and the correlation is, to use her word, “screaming.” Another woman posts a weekly thread where members photograph the tag and translate the chemical names. The tag on a standard queen reportedly contains eleven things that end in -ate. I counted.

I reached out to a sleep educator named Marin Holloway-Rask, who runs a breathwork retreat in Sedona and holds a certification in something called Somatic Recumbency, and she was extremely willing to get on the phone. “The federal holiday calendar was not designed around mattresses,” she told me, “but the mattress industry has colonized it, and every time a consumer brings a new bed into the home on a three-day weekend, that household loses approximately nine nights of deep sleep while the polymers ‘settle.’ Nine nights. Minimum.” I asked her how she arrived at that number and she said, “The bodies tell me.”

My sister-in-law Meredith, who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Weaverville and is basically a nurse, pointed out the part I had somehow missed, which is that the sales always coincide with the start of the late-winter respiratory surge. “You don’t find it interesting,” she said, “that every kid in my office in March has a cough and every one of those families bought something queen-sized in February?” I did find it interesting. I found it so interesting I had to sit down on the kitchen floor and drink a full glass of mineral water.

The thing that really got me, though, was when I went back and looked at Dana. She bought a pillow-top on MLK Day weekend in 2022. By Easter she had vertigo. She had never had vertigo in her life. She is forty-one years old and she grew up on a dairy. She now keeps the mattress in the detached garage and sleeps on a Japanese shikibuton her chiropractor brought back from a conference, and her vertigo is, in her words, “eighty percent resolved on a good barometric day.” You tell me that’s nothing. I dare you.

My husband Tanner, bless him, has been patient about this. He pointed out, reasonably, that we already have a mattress. I pointed out, also reasonably, that we bought it on Labor Day 2019 and that I have not felt truly rested since roughly the second inauguration of Barack Obama. He did the math on his fingers and went quiet. The mattress is now in the barn, standing up against a hay bale, and the four kids and I are sleeping on a rotation of folded Pendletons, a buckwheat-hull futon my friend Sage made from a kit, and — in Ember’s case — a pile of clean laundry she insists feels “more honest.”

I want to be clear that I am not telling anyone what to do. You are a grown woman. If you want to walk into a tent in an Ingles parking lot on the birthday of a slaveholding land surveyor and carry home a bag of compressed chemicals wrapped in what is legally required to be a miniature fire blanket, that is your constitutional right and I will still save you a jar of elderberry syrup. I just want it on the record that I tried.

What I will be doing this Presidents’ Day, instead, is airing out every textile we own on the split-rail fence, walking the kids down to the creek to ground their feet in the silt, and making a pot of bone broth so aggressive it could stand up and vote. We will not be shopping. We will not be lying down on anything that was manufactured in a factory with a loading dock. We will be, as Marin put it before she had to go lead a sound bath, “rehorizontalizing on our own terms.”

And if you drive past our place around dusk and see four children and a woman in a wool shawl lying in a row on the front porch staring up at the rafters, breathing slowly and refusing to go inside — please wave. We are fine. We are, for the first time in years, getting some actual rest.

Daytona Ran a 500-Mile Race Sunday and Somehow Found Room to Fit Seven Hours of Programming Around It

Duke Holloway
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Daytona Ran a 500-Mile Race Sunday and Somehow Found Room to Fit Seven Hours of Programming Around It

My buddy Ray Kowalczyk called me at six minutes past four on Sunday afternoon to report that the green flag still hadn’t dropped at Daytona, and would I like a full inventory of what had happened so far on the broadcast. I said no. He told me anyway. There had been a flyover, a second flyover, a motorcade, an invocation that outlasted the invocation at his daughter’s wedding, a parade lap by a presidential limousine being driven, and I quote Ray here, “like my grandmother used to handle a shopping cart,” and a sixteen-minute feature on a driver’s dog. The dog’s name is Biscuit. I learned this against my will.

The Daytona 500 used to be a car race. I remember this because I have watched it since 1979, which was the year Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough finished the thing with a fistfight in the infield, and nobody had to cut away from it for a commercial about sleep-number mattresses. The race started when they said the race started. “Gentlemen, start your engines” was not a suggestion, it was a verb. The cars then drove around a track for approximately the number of miles advertised in the name of the event. It was a simpler time. I was wearing a mustache.

Now the Daytona 500 is a seven-hour entertainment property that happens to contain, at some point, a car race. The race is the garnish. The race is the parsley. Everything else on the plate is the thing they actually want you to eat. You get pregame, you get red carpet, you get sideline coverage from pit row where a woman in a headset asks a man in a fire suit how he is feeling, and he answers the way fire-suited men have been answering that question since the Eisenhower administration, which is to say, fine, blessed, ready to race.

I called a fellow named Terrence Holloway — no relation, as far as I know, though it’s a big family — who does consulting work for broadcast rights holders. Terrence was very clear with me. “Duke,” he said, “the race is a floor, not a ceiling.” I asked him what that meant. He said the race is the minimum viable product and everything else is “the engagement stack.” I hung up on Terrence Holloway. I am not related to him and I would like that to be part of the record.

Now look. When the racing finally happened, the racing was good. It’s always good. Drafting three-wide at 195 miles an hour is a hard thing that takes men with steady hands and a certain casual relationship with their own mortality, and I respect it the way I have always respected it, which is a great deal. William Byron won the thing. He won it last year too. The kid can drive. I would like to have written eight hundred words about how the kid can drive. Instead I am writing eight hundred words about everything that happened before the kid could drive, because that is what the broadcast gave me, and as a columnist I am a reactive animal.

Coach DiMaggio used to say the worst thing you could do to a game was dress it up. He coached me in 1961 and he was already saying it then. He said the scoreboard tells the story, and if the scoreboard isn’t enough for you, then son, you don’t actually like football, you like pageantry, and there are parades for that. Coach DiMaggio did not live to see a network cut away from a restart at Daytona to show a reaction shot of a celebrity in the infield suite pretending to understand what a restart is. He is lucky.

There was a stretch Sunday — I clocked it, because Ray made me — of eleven consecutive minutes where the broadcast did not show a single car. Eleven minutes. During an auto race. They showed a helicopter. They showed a flag. They showed a man in a suit climbing out of another car, which was not a race car, and walking toward a third car, which was also not a race car. At one point they showed the pace car, static, parked, doing nothing, with a graphic on top of it. I don’t know what the graphic said. I had my head in my hands.

The worst part is the gambling graphics. Every time a lap completes, a little box pops up in the corner telling you what you could have bet on the lap that just ended. Not the next one. The last one. I am being asked to regret a wager I did not make on an event that has already concluded. This is a new category of psychological injury and somebody at FanDuel should be in prison for inventing it.

My across-the-street neighbor Petey Corrigan watched the whole thing with his grandson, who is nine and has a tablet. Petey told me the kid watched the race on the television while simultaneously watching three separate TikTok edits of the race on the tablet, one of which was already up before the actual race had ended. Petey said the kid kept pausing the TV to check the edits. Petey said the edits were better. Petey said this with the face of a man whose world has ended and who is trying to be polite about it.

Somewhere in there a car crashed, and somewhere in there a tire blew, and somewhere in there Byron threaded a hole that didn’t really exist and won a second straight 500, which is a thing exactly four men have ever done. That should have been the lede. That should have been the top of the broadcast, the middle of the broadcast, and the bottom of the broadcast. It wasn’t. It was paragraph six. We are burying the racing in a race. I don’t know who signed off on this but I know they have a LinkedIn.

I’ll watch next year. I always do. Ray will call me at six minutes past four and tell me who prayed and who flew over and what somebody’s dog is named this time, and I will listen, because Ray is my friend and because the alternative is silence, and because at some point, somewhere inside the seven hours, thirty-nine men will climb into thirty-nine cars and do something genuinely difficult at a genuinely terrifying speed, and I will see it, and for about ninety seconds I will remember why I started watching in the first place.

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

Trump Tours Boeing, Offers to Finish Air Force One Himself With ‘Some Guys He Knows From Palm Beach’

Nash Grayson
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Trump Tours Boeing, Offers to Finish Air Force One Himself With ‘Some Guys He Knows From Palm Beach’

EVERETT, WA — President Donald Trump spent forty-three minutes Friday standing inside a half-built Boeing 747 staring at an exposed bundle of wiring as if it had personally insulted his mother, before announcing that if the company couldn’t finish his new Air Force One by the end of the year, he had several contractors in Palm Beach who would do it for cash, no questions asked, and “much better, actually, you’d be surprised.”

The visit, billed by the White House as a “fact-finding inspection” into Boeing’s years-long delays on the two replacement VC-25B presidential aircraft, quickly devolved into what one aide described, unprompted, as “the longest and loudest episode of Pimp My Ride ever recorded on federal property.” The President spent much of the tour pointing at things and asking why they weren’t gold.

Boeing’s defense division is now roughly four years behind on a fixed-price contract that the company has already lost more than $2.4 billion on, a figure Trump referenced repeatedly and incorrectly, rounding it up to “eight, maybe nine billion, a tremendous number, the biggest number.” He then suggested Boeing executives had been stealing the planes, a claim that appeared to surprise the Boeing executives standing next to him.

“The President raised several concerns about the aircraft’s interior finish, cabin layout, and what he called ‘the general vibe,'” said Preston Halliwell, a senior Boeing communications officer who has aged visibly since January. “We did our best to explain that the aircraft is a flying command-and-control platform for continuity of government during a nuclear exchange. He asked if we could still put a chandelier in it.”

At one point, according to two pool reporters and one confused union machinist, Trump walked over to an unpainted section of fuselage, rapped it twice with his knuckles, and declared that the livery Boeing had prepared — the traditional robin’s-egg blue designed by Jacqueline Kennedy in 1962 — looked “like a dentist’s office in Delaware.” He then produced, from somewhere, a napkin sketch of a red-white-and-gold scheme he described as “much more, you know, winning.”

The President further proposed personally overseeing a redesign committee consisting of himself, his son Eric, a man named “Bobby who does the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago,” and “whoever does the jets for the Saudis, because their jets are unbelievable, the best jets, honestly better than ours, which is sad.” No White House staffer present corrected any part of this.

Defense analysts reacted with the professional composure of people who have had to react to things like this for nine years running. “The VC-25B is not a vanity project. It is a hardened aerial nuclear command post,” said Dr. Cassandra Mehlenbaum, a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute for Strategic Aviation. “You cannot have Bobby from the ballroom installing the EMP shielding. I am begging someone to explain this to him. I have been begging for a long time.”

Boeing’s stock, which has had the kind of year typically associated with regional banks and crypto exchanges, dipped another 1.8 percent during the President’s remarks, then recovered slightly after he said the company was “doing tremendous, really tremendous,” and then dipped again when he added “but also terrible.”

Trump’s frustration is, in fairness, not entirely unearned. The original Air Force One replacement contract — a fixed-price deal he himself negotiated during his first term as proof of his deal-making prowess — is widely considered the worst deal Boeing’s defense arm has ever signed, a distinction that has become considerably harder to achieve in recent years. The planes are now projected for delivery in 2027, 2028, or, per one engineer who asked not to be named, “spiritually, never.”

Asked whether the President understood that the aircraft in question would likely not be delivered until after the end of his term, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that timelines were “flexible” and that the President had a “very creative interpretation of what ‘finished’ means.” She then declined to clarify whether that interpretation included the plane being able to take off.

As the tour concluded, Trump told assembled workers that they were “the best, the absolute best, even though the plane is a disaster,” and floated the possibility of awarding the contract instead to “a guy I know who makes unbelievable boats.” Several machinists nodded in the grim, polite way Americans nod at their relatives during holidays. One quietly returned to wiring an avionics bay that will, statistically, outlive everyone in the hangar.

The President departed on the current Air Force One — a thirty-four-year-old Boeing 747-200 that has functioned, reliably, through six administrations — and reportedly spent the flight back to Washington drawing additional chandeliers on a cocktail napkin.

In Munich, on Valentine’s Day, the Vice President Told Europe the Honeymoon Was Always a Fiction

Margaret Thorne
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In Munich, on Valentine’s Day, the Vice President Told Europe the Honeymoon Was Always a Fiction

When did we decide that grown adults were supposed to be surprised by a breakup they had been negotiating for a decade? I watched the Munich Security Conference footage last night with my friend Eliza, who spent twenty years at State and now consults for a think tank whose name changes every eighteen months, and she said, without looking up from her phone, “Well, he said the quiet part loud, but the quiet part has been extremely loud for a while now.” Then she asked if the roast had rosemary in it, because Eliza will critique a foreign policy realignment and a side dish in the same breath. That is the kind of friend you want on Valentine’s Day, and that is the kind of friend you want on a day the Vice President of the United States flies to Munich to serve divorce papers to a continent.

I am old enough to remember when the Munich Security Conference was the event where American officials went to reassure everyone that we still believed in the arrangement. You know the arrangement. The one where we underwrote the security of half the planet and in exchange received the warm feeling of being indispensable, plus access to a lot of very good chocolate. JD Vance did not fly to Munich to reassure anybody. He flew to Munich to inform a roomful of foreign ministers and defense officials and the President of Ukraine that the check is no longer in the mail, the check was never in the mail, and by the way, have you considered that the real threat to Europe is Europe.

I have watched a lot of Vice Presidents do a lot of diplomacy, and I can tell you that the tradition in Munich is to speak in the careful dialect of the transatlantic alliance — a language invented specifically so that nobody ever has to say what they mean. Vance said what he meant. He told Europe, in so many words, that their democracies were fragile not because of Russian tanks but because of their own speech codes. He told Zelenskyy, in effect, to start thinking about what he could live with. He did this on February 14, which is a holiday about conditional love, and I do not think the timing was accidental, though I do think giving him credit for the symbolism is probably generous.

My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has the wary affect of a woman who has spent her career watching documents travel in the wrong direction, called me while I was roasting the chicken. “It’s a policy,” she said. “It’s not a gaffe. People keep waiting for someone to say it was a gaffe.” Judy is right. It is not a gaffe. A gaffe is what we called it when a Vice President mispronounced the capital of a small Baltic nation. This is the policy. The policy is that the people who spent seventy years believing we were a partner should have read the fine print, which we are now publishing in very large type from the stage of a German hotel.

I brought this up last night at a small dinner — six of us, a lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, a former ambassador to a country whose government has since changed twice, Eliza, Judy on speaker from her kitchen, my husband, and me — and I watched something I have been watching a lot lately. Nobody disagreed. Nobody defended the speech. Nobody said it was a bold realignment or a necessary correction or any of the phrases the cable panels were trying on for size. They just ate. The ambassador said the asparagus was perfect. The lobbyist asked where I got the wine. This is what civic conversation looks like in Washington in 2025: a table full of people who know exactly what just happened, declining, as a group, to say it.

I want to be careful here, because I am not one of those columnists who thinks the old arrangement was sacred. It wasn’t. It was an arrangement. It cost money and it cost lives and it came with a list of hypocrisies as long as my arm. You could make an honest case that the United States has been subsidizing the defense budgets of wealthy democracies for too long and that the bill has come due. Vance could have made that case. He did not make that case. He stood in Munich and told the Europeans they were losing their souls, and then he sat down with Zelenskyy to discuss the terms under which a country being actively invaded might consider negotiating with its invader. That is not a policy argument. That is a mood.

There is a version of this administration’s foreign policy that its defenders will describe to you as “realism,” and I would encourage you, the next time someone uses that word in your presence, to ask them what they mean. Realism used to mean clear-eyed assessment of interests. Now it appears to mean whatever the Vice President said on the plane. Realism used to be the thing you invoked against sentimentalists. Now it is the name we give to a worldview that treats alliances as a form of codependency and treats the countries being shelled as the ones with unrealistic expectations.

Zelenskyy, for his part, sat through the meeting and came out looking like a man who had been invited to brunch and served the bill. He has been doing this for three years — putting on the coat, flying to the capital, thanking the room, asking for the weapons, getting some of them, watching his cities be rearranged into rubble. I do not have a great deal of patience for the American commentators who have decided, at this late date, that Zelenskyy’s real failing is that he is insufficiently grateful. He has been nothing but grateful. Gratitude was in the job description. He was just told on Valentine’s Day that the job description has changed.

My friend Caroline, who teaches at a university I will not name because she would like to keep teaching there, texted me after the speech and said, “I think the word for this is vibes-based abandonment.” I have been turning that phrase over all morning. Vibes-based abandonment. It describes something I have been struggling to describe for weeks now — the sense that our foreign policy is no longer driven by interests or even by ideology but by the tonal preferences of the people giving the speeches. They do not like the Europeans. They do not find Zelenskyy charismatic. They find Viktor Orbán relatable. These are not strategic positions. These are seating preferences.

The thing I keep coming back to, and the thing I could not quite say at the dinner table last night because the lobbyist was there and you learn, after thirty years, when the table is not a table for saying things, is this: an alliance is a habit. It is a thing you do until you stop doing it, and when you stop doing it, you cannot start doing it again just because you have changed your mind. The Europeans watching that speech are already adjusting. They are already having quiet conversations about what comes next. They are already assuming we are not in the room. And we will not be in the room, not in the way we used to be, and the people who did this will, in a few years, express surprise and blame someone else.

I asked Eliza, as she was putting on her coat, whether she thought any of it was recoverable. She said, “The alliance, maybe. The credibility, no.” Then she said the roast had been a little dry, which was unkind but accurate. That is Eliza. That is also, increasingly, the rest of us — perfectly willing to tell you the truth about the meat, perfectly unwilling to tell you the truth about the meeting.

Happy Valentine’s Day. The engagement, such as it was, has been called off. The ring is going back in the box. And the rest of us, the ones who are going to have to live in the house that was built on that engagement, are at the table passing the asparagus and waiting for someone else to say it first.

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