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March 16, 2026

Israel-Hamas Talks Continue Amid Regional Tensions Caused By Israel-Hamas Talks

DOHA, QATAR — Indirect ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas entered their seventeenth consecutive month Monday, with mediators expressing cautious optimism that the two delegations may soon be ready to begin cautiously optimistic-ing in the same building.

The latest round, hosted at a Doha conference center where the carpet has been worn into a visible footpath between the two delegation suites, is described by State Department officials as “a critical window” — the seventy-third critical window since October, by the Department’s own count, though aides clarified that several were retroactively reclassified as “narrow openings” once they closed.

“We are closer than we have ever been,” said one U.S. envoy, who has said this in eleven separate cities and once on a layover. The envoy clarified that proximity, in this context, is measured in floors of the hotel rather than progress on any of the actual disputed clauses.

A bellhop at the St. Regis, asked how long the delegations had been booked, paused and said, “The Israelis get the extended-stay rate now. The Americans never check out, they just rotate.” He added that one mediator from a previous administration still receives mail at the front desk.

Negotiators are reportedly stuck on the same three points they have been stuck on since spring, though sources familiar with the talks say the points have been renumbered four times for procedural freshness. A draft framework circulated last week reportedly contains language about “a phased de-escalation toward a sustainable architecture for further talks,” which one Western diplomat described as “basically saying the meeting will keep meeting.”

The talks have, in the absence of an actual ceasefire, become their own self-sustaining regional industry. Doha now hosts a permanent press pool of forty-six correspondents, six of whom were born covering different conflicts and have aged into this one. A nearby restaurant has added a “Mediators’ Menu” that arrives in under twelve minutes, which a chef described as “the only deadline anyone in this town actually keeps.”

In Gaza, reaction to the renewed round was muted, in part because residents have learned to distinguish between the phrase “ceasefire talks resume” and any change in whether airstrikes resume. “They’ve been resuming since my cousin was alive,” said a man waiting in line for flour, who declined further comment on the grounds that further comment had not historically helped.

An Israeli government spokesman said the country remains committed to negotiations and also to the military operation those negotiations are ostensibly about, which he described as “two tracks that complement each other” in the same way that a treadmill complements a person trying to leave a room.

Hamas, for its part, issued a statement reiterating its longstanding position, then issued a clarification reiterating its longstanding clarification of that position, then went quiet for forty-eight hours, which mediators called “a constructive pause.”

The next round of talks is scheduled for next week, the week after that, and in perpetuity, with U.S. officials saying they expect a breakthrough sometime between the next presidential term and the heat death of the universe, whichever comes first.

Three Sailors Died Friday. The Dinner Was Still at Eight.

Opinion

Margaret Thorne

March 15, 2026

Three Sailors Died Friday. The Dinner Was Still at Eight.

What does a country do when three of its sailors are killed on a Friday evening in the Gulf? The answer, apparently, is host a dinner party.

We had it at Eliza’s, in the Georgetown townhouse where she has been hosting the same eight people in slightly different combinations since the Clinton administration. The news broke around five. By six, a bipartisan lobbyist whose name I won’t print because he asked me not to and I am still capable of small mercies had been booked on two Sunday shows. By seven, he was at Eliza’s, examining the cufflink on his left sleeve as though it required his immediate attention. The names of the dead had not been released.

I asked him, over the soup, what he was going to say in the morning. He said he was going to say what the moment required. I asked what the moment required. He said that was a question for the moment.

Eliza said, “Margaret, please.” She has been saying Margaret, please at her own dinner table since the second Bush administration, and I have never once not deserved it.

Across the table was my sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and was therefore the only person present whose job has anything to do with the actual permanence of words. She ate her fish. She did not look up.

Somebody — I think it was the wife of a deputy something at Treasury — said the Iranians had to be answered. Somebody else said any answer would be the wrong answer. The lobbyist said both things were true at once and managed to do it without contradicting himself, which is a craft they apparently teach now in the green rooms of Northwest Washington.

The Pentagon, by then, had announced that the sailors would not be named until next of kin had been notified. The cable bookings, I noticed, were not operating under the same protocol. Three families in three different American towns were, at that very moment, being told to wait for the doorbell. The panel of analysts had already been confirmed for seven a.m.

By the salad course we were on the bracket. Selection Sunday. Eliza had Gonzaga losing in the second round and was prepared to defend it through dessert. The lobbyist had taken Houston to the Final Four and wanted everyone to know he’d seen them play in person. Judy, who picks her bracket by ranking the mascots, had Saint Peter’s going further than was reasonable.

I do not know, and will not pretend to know, what the right policy response to Friday is. I know what I watched on Sunday morning, which was the lobbyist saying his sentences on one channel and then, an hour later, saying them in slightly different order on another. Both hosts thanked him for his clarity. By noon his publicist had emailed Eliza to say the segments had gone wonderfully and could she please pass along his thanks for the lamb.

Because of course it was lamb. It is always lamb at Eliza’s. Lamb is the one course nobody at this table has ever disagreed about, and at this point in the republic I think we should be honest about how grateful we all are for that — for the one subject on which unanimous consent can still be assumed, the one platter that arrives and is met, around the whole long table, with quiet, sincere approval.

We asked for the recipe. We always ask for the recipe.

I’m Making Pi Day Pie From Three Ingredients and One Is Just Salt

Wellness

Brooke Ellery

March 14, 2026

I’m Making Pi Day Pie From Three Ingredients and One Is Just Salt

I rendered the suet Tuesday because Marlene says a Pi Day crust that rests less than 72 hours is basically a cracker, and Cleo has been asking about Pi Day since Garrett mentioned it at breakfast in a tone of voice that I think was supposed to be educational but mostly just made her want pie.

So we’re doing pie. Apple. From the apples we wrapped in newspaper in October and put in the cellar on a wooden rack that my father-in-law built specifically so apples wouldn’t touch anything modern. Three of them have a soft spot and Marlene says those are the ones with the most information in them, which I cannot verify but also cannot disprove, so they’re going in.

The crust formula came from a Facebook group called Pastry Before 1910, which is exactly what it sounds like and which I now check more often than the weather. The recipe is: ancestral flour, rendered beef tallow from a cow we can name, Redmond Real Salt (which is a mineral, not an ingredient — I will die on this hill), and spring water that has been sitting uncovered on the counter overnight so the chlorine can leave. That’s it. That’s the whole pie crust. Four things, and one of them is technically a rock.

I know what you’re going to say, which is that the time counts as an ingredient. Marlene and I have talked about this at length and the consensus in the group is that time is a process, not a thing, and processes are free. Sourdough people figured this out twenty years ago and the rest of us are just catching up. If you can’t measure it in cups, it doesn’t go on the label.

For the filling we’re using the apples, raw honey from Garrett’s coworker Dale who keeps bees in a way Marlene calls “correct,” and cinnamon, which is bark, which is from a tree, which means it’s basically a vegetable. I checked this with my sister-in-law Rachel who works the front desk at a pediatric clinic and is basically a nurse, and she said “sure, I guess,” which in our family is a yes.

Cleo is in charge of measuring, but only with the glass measuring cup, not the plastic one, because the plastic one lived in the dishwasher for six years before I knew better and at this point it is essentially a delivery system. We don’t talk about the plastic one. It’s in a drawer.

Garrett asked me, while I was straining the tallow through a piece of cheesecloth I boiled in vinegar, whether it was weird that we celebrated a math holiday by spending three days on a single dessert, and I told him that Pi isn’t actually a number, it’s a ratio, and a ratio is just the universe’s way of telling us that some things don’t resolve neatly, and a pie that takes 72 hours and contains a mineral is, if anything, more spiritually accurate to the holiday than a pie from a tube at Kroger. He went back to the garage.

The Pastry Before 1910 ladies are doing a thread today where everyone posts their crust and the comments are mostly about lard sourcing and one woman in Vermont who claims her great-grandmother’s recipe calls for a tablespoon of cold cellar dirt, which the group is divided on but which I personally find compelling. I’m not adding dirt this year. I’m not ready. But I’m thinking about it for Easter.

Cleo just asked if Pi Day pie has to be circle-shaped and I told her yes, because of math, and she said “what about a square one” and honestly I don’t have an answer for that and I’m not going to pretend I do. That’s the kind of question Pi Day is for. A holiday that makes a six-year-old question geometry is doing more for this country than most of them.

The pie goes in at three-fourteen. Obviously. We’re not animals.

The Sunscreen at CVS Has 14 Ingredients. The Sun Has One.

Wellness

Brooke Ellery

March 13, 2026

The Sunscreen at CVS Has 14 Ingredients. The Sun Has One.

Marlene came over Tuesday with a plastic CVS bag and emptied it onto my kitchen island like she was unloading a tackle box of evidence. Eight tubes of sunscreen, all with the receipt stapled to the cap. “We are leaving for Tybee in nine days,” she said, “and I refuse to be the one who lets octocrylene happen to our children.”

I love her for this. I also did not know what octocrylene was until Marlene started reading the back of a Banana Boat bottle out loud in the voice she uses when she’s pretending to be calm. By ingredient four she had her glasses on. By ingredient seven she was pacing. By the time she got to “may contain benzene as a manufacturing byproduct,” she was holding the tube the way you hold a mouse you caught in a trap and don’t want to look at.

Her source on this is a Facebook group called Seed Oils, Sun Care, and the Quiet Cost, which has twenty-two thousand members and a pinned post that is just a photograph of a bottle of Coppertone next to a bottle of WD-40 with no caption. She says the caption is the point. I don’t know how to argue with that, and frankly I don’t want to.

The thing Marlene keeps coming back to is the SPF number itself. “SPF 30, SPF 50, SPF 70 — those are too round, Brooke. Those are marketing numbers. The sun doesn’t move in increments of ten.” Her sister-in-law Pam, who works the front desk at a dermatology office in Hendersonville and is therefore basically a dermatologist, told her that the real protection “plateaus around SPF 19,” which Marlene has decided means anything above that is just chemicals looking for somewhere to live. I asked which chemicals. She said “the ones with the y in the middle,” and honestly that did track with the bottle in her hand.

What’s allowed, per Marlene, is zinc oxide “but only the kind that goes on like cake frosting and you have to rub for four minutes,” beef tallow balm from a woman in Weaverville who sells it out of a cooler at the farmer’s market, and coconut oil, which she acknowledged goes rancid in roughly the time it takes to drive to the beach but said “rancid is a word the FDA invented to scare us off fats.” She also said sun exposure before 10 a.m. is “a vitamin, not a risk,” which is the exact same logic she used in February when she told Cleo to stare at a candle for her circadian rhythm.

Garrett, who is a reasonable man and also tired, tried to point out that we used Coppertone for three decades and the country is still standing. Marlene looked at him with the soft pity she reserves for men who don’t read labels and said, “Garrett, define standing.” He went outside to bring in firewood we don’t need in March.

Cleo has been outfitted with a long-sleeve rash guard, a wide-brim hat, and a pair of UPF leggings Marlene ordered from a small company in Maine that mails its products in unbleached paper because “bleached paper touches the fabric and then the fabric touches the child, Brooke, do the math.” The leggings cost ninety-four dollars and arrived with a handwritten note from a woman named Sigrid. Cleo wore them to school yesterday and a kid asked if she was a beekeeper. She said yes. We are letting that one ride.

The compromise we landed on for the actual beach is a small tin of the Weaverville tallow, a pint mason jar of coconut oil that I will be replacing twice a day from a cooler in the car, and what Marlene calls “shade architecture” — two umbrellas, a pop-up tent, and a beach blanket she sewed a canopy onto using leftover canvas from the chicken coop. Pam approved the setup over text. Pam used three thumbs-ups and a sunflower.

Marlene left around four, taking the eight CVS tubes with her because she didn’t want them in our trash where they could “off-gas into the recycling.” She said she’s driving them to a hazardous-waste site in Buncombe County on Saturday. Then she came back through the door to grab one more thing off the island. Six wide-brim hats, still tagged, in graduated sizes. “I got one for everyone,” she said. “Even Garrett. Especially Garrett.”

Sheboygan Falls Grandma’s Spectrum Outage Foils $14,200 AI Voice Scam

Local

Hal Cranston

March 12, 2026

Sheboygan Falls Grandma’s Spectrum Outage Foils $14,200 AI Voice Scam

SHEBOYGAN FALLS, WI — An attempted artificial-intelligence voice-cloning scam targeting 78-year-old Marlene Doerfler collapsed Tuesday afternoon when her Charter Spectrum service went out at 2:47 p.m., approximately ninety seconds before she would have read her routing number aloud to a man pretending to be her grandson Travis.

According to the Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Department, the caller used an AI-generated replica of Travis Doerfler’s voice to report that he had been arrested outside a Walgreens in Madison and needed $14,200 in bail money wired to a bondsman within the hour. Mrs. Doerfler, a retired dental hygienist who has lived on Giddings Avenue since 1973, said the voice was “basically him,” though she had noted some concerns.

“I thought Travis sounded a little nasal,” she said Wednesday from her kitchen, where a landline phone sat on a doily that has been there longer than the area code. “But he gets that way in March. I was going to ask about it after I helped him.”

The Spectrum outage, which affected roughly 1,400 customers in the Falls and a portion of Kohler, was caused by a contractor striking a buried line near the Pick ‘n Save. Charter restored service at 4:18 p.m. By 4:19 p.m., Mrs. Doerfler’s actual grandson Travis, age 31, had called her from his desk at a logistics firm in Brookfield to ask why his mother was sobbing.

Sgt. Daryl Vanevenhoven of the sheriff’s department said the office has logged eleven similar AI-voice attempts in the county since January, three of them successful, and that Tuesday’s case is believed to be the first prevented by infrastructure failure. “We’ve been doing community education seminars,” he said. “We’ve also been doing them in rooms where the projector doesn’t work. It’s possible those are related.”

A Charter Spectrum spokesperson, reached by email, said the company “regrets any inconvenience caused by Tuesday’s service interruption” and did not respond to a follow-up question asking whether the company would like to take credit for preventing a federal wire fraud.

Mrs. Doerfler’s neighbor, Lorraine Buetow, said she had warned Marlene about the scams at least twice, once at coffee hour at St. Paul’s and once in the parking lot of the Festival Foods, but acknowledged that her own husband Ron had been taken for $3,800 in November by someone claiming to be a Microsoft technician. “Ron isn’t on the computer,” Lorraine clarified. “That’s what made it work.”

Travis Doerfler, the real one, has since driven up from Brookfield and spent Wednesday evening trying to explain to his grandmother the difference between his voice and a synthetic facsimile of his voice, a conversation he described afterward as “the longest forty minutes of my adult life.” Mrs. Doerfler has agreed, going forward, to ask any caller claiming to be Travis what she put in his Christmas card in 1998, a piece of information Travis confirmed he does not remember either.

As of Thursday morning, Mrs. Doerfler said she remains grateful but unsettled. She has canceled her Spectrum upgrade appointment, citing a newfound appreciation for the service she already has, and has begun answering the phone with the words “prove it.”

First Cone of the Season Went to a Woman Who Felt Rude Leaving

Local

Hal Cranston

March 10, 2026

First Cone of the Season Went to a Woman Who Felt Rude Leaving

BELLEFONTE, PA — At 11:00 a.m. Tuesday, Wes Hatmaker unlocked the service window of the Allegheny Street Tastee Freez for the first time since October 12, and the eleven people who had been waiting in the parking lot since 9:40 moved forward as a single quiet body without anyone saying anything.

The Tastee Freez, which has operated on a March-to-October schedule since 1974, reopens each year on a date Wes selects “by feel” and announces via a paper notice taped to the window approximately 48 hours in advance. This year’s notice went up Sunday afternoon, roughly twelve hours after the clocks moved forward, and was photographed for the Bellefonte Centre County Buy-Sell-Trade Facebook group at 5:11 p.m. by a woman who has since deactivated her account.

First in line was Eileen Tassler, 62, who said she had not specifically intended to be first but had arrived at 9:40 to find no one there and felt it would be “rude to leave.” She ordered a small vanilla cone with chocolate sprinkles. The temperature at the time of the transaction was 41 degrees.

Wes, who declined to be quoted but later told a regular he was “moved,” prepared 47 cones, 12 sundaes, and three of the seasonal Peanut Butter Wave Blizzards in the first forty minutes of operation. By 11:43 he had sold through his entire weekend allotment of rainbow sprinkles and was sending his youngest grandson Tyler down to the IGA for more.

Roger Klinedinst, who runs the unofficial Bellefonte weather page on Facebook and had taken a half day from the County Assessor’s office to be in line by 10:15, called the opening “the only date on the calendar that means anything between Christmas and Memorial Day.” He ordered a butterscotch dip and ate it standing up next to his truck.

Not everyone left satisfied. Donna Wertz, third in line, had driven in from Pleasant Gap specifically for a Peanut Butter Wave Blizzard, which sold out four customers ahead of her. She accepted a chocolate-vanilla twist under what she described to her sister on the phone as “protest” and was observed eating it in her Buick with the heat running.

The opening also drew Karl Heberling, 78, who has been first in line in eleven previous years and who arrived Tuesday at 10:52, having misread the notice. Karl was given a free cone by Wes without discussion. The two men shook hands across the counter and Karl walked back to his Oldsmobile, where he sat for some time.

By 1:15 the line had thinned and Wes was leaning in the window with a coffee, watching cars pass. A motorist honked twice. Wes raised the coffee. The forecast for Wednesday calls for snow.

Daylight Saving Took an Hour. The Big Ten Final Took the Rest.

Sports

Duke Holloway

March 9, 2026

Daylight Saving Took an Hour. The Big Ten Final Took the Rest.

My sister-in-law Denise called Sunday morning to ask if I’d remembered to spring my clocks forward. I had not. I had instead lost an hour the old-fashioned way, by falling asleep in the recliner during a conference semifinal that ran until almost 1 a.m. local, with a graphic in the corner reminding me, every six seconds, that Auburn was favored by a number I could not have explained to a notary.

The clock thing always gets me. They take an hour in March, they give it back in November, and in between they sell it back to you in eight-minute increments as a ‘Daylight Saving Power Hour’ presented by an erectile dysfunction tablet. I am not making that up. I saw it on my phone before I’d even put on pants.

By the time the conference final tipped Sunday afternoon, my phone had buzzed eleven times offering me ‘live spring-forward parlays.’ I don’t know what a live spring-forward parlay is. I’m seventy-one years old. I had to learn the word parlay from a man in a CarMax commercial. Apparently you can now bet on whether a kid will make a free throw before or after the next commercial break, which is essentially betting on whether the sun will come up, except the sun does not have a sponsor and the free throw does.

The game itself was fine. The broadcast was a hostage situation. There was a betting overlay along the bottom, a betting graphic in the upper right, a betting promo cut into the timeouts, and during one second-half possession a small banner appeared above the basket itself, hovering there like a UFO, advising me of the current spread. I called my friend Ray Kowalczyk at halftime to ask if he was seeing this. Ray said his TV had been doing the same thing during curling. Ray watches curling now. We are all losing something.

Coach DiMaggio used to say a basketball game was forty minutes long and the first ten didn’t matter to anybody but the players. He’d be lost out here. They’ve stretched a forty-minute game into three hours and twenty minutes by inserting a halftime show, two replay reviews per half, a sideline reporter asking the coach how he felt about the play he had just personally coached, and a roughly six-minute segment in which two analysts in a Las Vegas studio explain to me what I just watched, in case I was not also watching it.

The sideline reporter asked the winning coach, in the immediate aftermath of cutting down the net, what this meant for his NIL portfolio. The coach is sixty-two years old. He looked at her like she’d asked him to recite the Pledge in Mandarin. He said, ‘It means we won the basketball game.’ That was the best line of the broadcast and they cut away from it to a commercial about a betting app run by a cartoon goat.

Petey Corrigan, who some of you may remember from the bowling alley column in November, texted me at 9 p.m. to report he’d cleared fourteen dollars on a parlay involving three different conference finals and a player prop he could not define. Petey is sixty-eight. He has gambled more in the last calendar year than he did in his entire stretch in the Navy, and he was stationed in Subic Bay. I asked him if he was having fun. He said he was ‘engaged.’ That was the word. Engaged. Like the basketball game and Petey were courting.

The whole thing wrapped up around six, just in time for Sunday-night studio coverage to start dissecting the bracket that didn’t exist yet. They had a guy in front of a touchscreen pretending he was choosing between teams that nobody had picked. I sat in the recliner and felt the missing hour in my lower back, which is now apparently where I store time.

The real bracket comes out next Sunday. Twenty-four hours of analysts pretending the 12-seed is sneaky, sixty-eight teams nobody outside of three zip codes has heard of, and an app on my phone that’s going to ask me, four hundred separate times, if I want to put five dollars on Yale. I’m not putting five dollars on Yale. I’m not putting five dollars on anything. I’m going to watch the basketball games, the way Coach DiMaggio watched them, which is to say I’m going to yell at a television set that does not love me back.

Denise is bringing chili. She says she found the recipe on a podcast.

Wendell Krepps, 71, Hand-Cranked Westport’s Clock Forward at 2 A.M.

Local

Hal Cranston

March 8, 2026

Wendell Krepps, 71, Hand-Cranked Westport’s Clock Forward at 2 A.M.

WESTPORT, N.Y. — At 1:58 a.m. Sunday, retired millwright Wendell Krepps clipped a headlamp to the brim of his Carhartt cap, climbed 41 iron rungs into the bell housing of the Essex County Courthouse clock tower, and on the federal government’s instructions deprived his neighbors of an hour they will not get back until November.

Krepps, 71, has performed the springtime adjustment to Westport’s only public timepiece every March since 1998, when the previous custodian, Lyle Mertensen, fell off the rungs and onto a Buick. He receives a stipend of $42 from the village, payable in two installments, and a thermos of coffee from Donna at the Galley.

“It’s a four-faced Seth Thomas from 1903,” Krepps said Sunday morning at the diner, working through a short stack. “You can’t just turn it forward an hour. You have to walk it forward — eleven hours back through the chime cycle — or you’ll snap the strike train. Took me four hours and twenty minutes. I got home at 7:18, which was technically 6:18.”

The Essex County Department of Public Works confirmed in a statement that Krepps remains the only person in the village trained to operate the mechanism, that no successor has been identified, and that the contingency plan, in the event of his incapacitation, is “a conversation we are not currently having.”

Reaction in Westport was, as usual, divided along lines no one fully understands. Marlene Hoke, who runs the antique store on Pleasant Street, called the practice “an absolute treasure.” Her husband Burt, watching the Syracuse game on his phone, said the clock has been running seven minutes fast since 2011 and Krepps refuses to discuss it.

Krepps does not refuse to discuss it. “The mechanism wants to run fast,” he said. “I am not going to fight an instrument older than my mother to please Burt Hoke.”

The federal Energy Policy Act of 2005, which fixed the second Sunday in March as the springtime transition, makes no provision for hand-wound village clock towers, mechanical strike trains, or men named Wendell. A spokesperson for the Department of Transportation, which oversees time zone policy, did not respond to a request asking who, in their understanding, was supposed to do this.

Donna at the Galley, refilling his coffee, said Krepps comes in every second Sunday in March looking “like a man who has just been to war with a year.” She has worked the breakfast shift since 1989. She added that the clock is correct now, more or less, and that ought to be enough for anybody.

California Flood AI Trained On Drought Years Reports Everything Looks Fine

Environment

Lena Wexler

March 7, 2026

California Flood AI Trained On Drought Years Reports Everything Looks Fine

SACRAMENTO, CA — As a fourth atmospheric river in three weeks dumped an estimated 11 inches of rain on the Central Valley Saturday, the state’s $48 million predictive flood model — trained almost exclusively on data collected between 2012 and 2022, a period California climatologists refer to as ‘the part where it didn’t rain’ — issued a confident green-status advisory indicating that conditions across the watershed remained ‘nominal to slightly arid.’

The model, developed in partnership with a Bay Area infrastructure firm and praised at its 2024 launch as ‘the future of climate resilience,’ continued to recommend voluntary water conservation as homeowners in Guerneville filmed their living rooms from the second floor.

‘The system is performing exactly as designed,’ said Priya Anand, a senior resilience architect at Beacon Strategy, which consulted on the rollout. ‘It was designed during a drought. It thinks droughts are what weather is. When you show it a flood, it interprets that as a very wet drought, which is still, statistically, a drought.’

Officials emphasized that the model is a ‘decision-support tool, not a decision-making tool,’ a distinction first introduced Saturday morning at 9:14 a.m., approximately ninety minutes after the levee in Wilton failed.

According to a Department of Water Resources spokesperson, the AI did flag one anomaly during the storm: an unusually high volume of what it categorized as ‘reflective surface in agricultural zones,’ which engineers later identified as Sonoma County.

The model’s training set, internal documents show, includes 4,200 days of recorded California weather, of which 11 contain meaningful precipitation and zero contain the phrase ‘atmospheric river,’ a term that did not enter common forecasting use until after the dataset was frozen. Asked Saturday what the system would call the current event, an engineer at the vendor paused for several seconds before suggesting ‘a humidity spike.’

Residents of affected counties expressed mixed feelings about the rollout. ‘My phone told me to take a shorter shower at 6 a.m.,’ said Doreen Vasquez, 58, of Rio Vista, speaking from a Red Cross cot. ‘Then a horse went past the window.’

The state has announced plans to retrain the model on more recent data once the more recent data stops happening. In the interim, a Cabinet-level working group has been convened to determine whether California is still in a drought, a flood, both, or some third category the model would find easier to process.

At a press availability outside a half-submerged pumping station near Modesto, a Department of Water Resources deputy director was asked whether the agency still had confidence in the system. He nodded, looked at his phone, and confirmed that the app was currently recommending he drink more water.

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