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Hen House Diner’s Menu Found to Be Roughly 38% Non-English Following Trump’s Official-Language Order, Owner Now Circling Words With a Dry-Erase Marker

Hal Cranston
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Hen House Diner’s Menu Found to Be Roughly 38% Non-English Following Trump’s Official-Language Order, Owner Now Circling Words With a Dry-Erase Marker

CLAYBORN, IA — Donna Vesely audited her own menu Friday afternoon and discovered that, by the standards of the executive order signed in Washington this morning, she has been quietly operating a multilingual establishment for thirty-one years.

The order — designating English as the official language of the United States — does not, in any practical sense, require Donna to do anything. This has not stopped her from circling words on a laminated menu with a dry-erase marker until the laminate began to bead.

“I’ve got ‘panini.’ I’ve got ‘au jus.’ I’ve got a ‘quesadilla’ on the lunch specials,” said Vesely, owner and operator of the Hen House Diner on Route 9. “I had no idea I was running the United Nations. The ‘au jus,’ for the record, is a gravy boat of beef drippings. I don’t know what else to tell anyone.”

Further review identified the espresso machine — a 2009 De’Longhi named Bruno that has not produced espresso since 2011 and currently serves as a coat rack — as well as the Reuben, the à la mode, and a Tuesday breakfast item listed as “the Hen House Frittata,” which Vesely confirmed she had been pronouncing wrong on purpose for years to avoid sounding showy.

Mrs. Peterson, 78, who has ordered the same club sandwich every Tuesday since the Bush administration, attempted to calm the proprietor. “I told her, Donna, the President cannot see your menu,” she said, removing a packet of Sweet’N Low from her purse for later. “She did not appear comforted.”

Clayborn County Clerk Hank Tillerman confirmed by phone that the executive order contains no enforcement mechanism applicable to county-level food service, “though, historically, the absence of an enforcement mechanism has not once prevented anyone in this county from worrying about something.” Tillerman noted that the courthouse vending machine still dispenses something called a “Bavarian Cream Stick” and declined to take further questions.

By Friday evening, Vesely had begun drafting alternatives in pencil. The panini would become “the pressed sandwich.” The au jus would become “with juice.” The quesadilla, she conceded, was going to require a committee. The most-ordered item on the menu — a breaded pork tenderloin the diameter of a hubcap, served on a bun roughly half its size — required no edits whatsoever, a fact Vesely cited with visible relief. “Tenderloin,” she said, refilling a coffee, “is as American as it gets.”

Trump, Vance Spend Oval Office Meeting Teaching Zelenskyy the Magic Word, Then Kick Him Out for Saying It Wrong

Nash Grayson
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Trump, Vance Spend Oval Office Meeting Teaching Zelenskyy the Magic Word, Then Kick Him Out for Saying It Wrong

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The President of the United States and his Vice President spent the better part of Friday afternoon seated in the most powerful room on earth, explaining to a man whose cities are currently being shelled that the real tragedy of the war in Ukraine is that he has not sufficiently thanked them for noticing.

The meeting, which was supposed to produce a minerals deal, instead produced roughly forty minutes of televised scolding, one aborted press conference, and the strong impression that the Oval Office has been quietly rezoned as a customer-complaint desk where the customer is always Vladimir Putin.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who arrived in Washington wearing the same military-style black sweater he has worn for three years on the grounds that his country is, again, being invaded, was informed within minutes of sitting down that his outfit was disrespectful, his posture was disrespectful, his tone was disrespectful, and that he should try being grateful, which is a thing Americans are very good at and which they demonstrate primarily by yelling about it on camera.

“The President is simply asking that our partners abroad display the kind of basic decorum we expect in this building,” said Brennan Holcombe, a senior fellow at the Heritage-adjacent Institute for Forward Diplomacy, shortly before pausing to eat a free sandwich off a tray. “You cannot come into the Oval Office, accept billions of dollars in weapons, and then expect us to also tolerate eye contact.”

Vice President JD Vance, who until recently was best known for writing a memoir about his grandmother and for losing debates to couches, took the lead role of Good Cop’s Angrier Roommate, interrupting the Ukrainian president to ask whether he had personally thanked the American people, a group Vance appears to believe he speaks for based on a 2022 Senate race he won by three points.

At one point Trump, visibly warming to the bit, informed Zelenskyy that he was “gambling with World War Three,” a sentence delivered with the gravity of a man who once tried to buy Greenland and the cadence of a man pitching a timeshare. Zelenskyy, whose country is the one currently being bombed, attempted to explain that ceasefires signed with Russia have historically lasted about as long as a gas-station sandwich. This was deemed disrespectful.

The breaking point came when Zelenskyy suggested, with what observers described as “the fatal error of using facts,” that the United States would eventually feel the consequences of abandoning Ukraine. Trump informed him that he did not know what he was talking about, a claim the President backed up by pointing out that he has met Putin personally and found him to be “a very strong guy, very smart, tremendous handshake, much better than yours.”

A planned joint press conference was then cancelled, the minerals deal was shelved, and Zelenskyy was escorted off the White House grounds roughly the way a rowdy patron is escorted out of an Applebee’s, minus the dignity of a bar tab. Staff were later seen power-washing the driveway, which aides described as “routine” and which appeared, to the naked eye, to be entirely symbolic.

“We’re not going to be lectured about gratitude by a guy in a polo shirt,” said Dana Mireille Hatch, a State Department spokesperson who has held her position for eleven days and who pronounced Kyiv three different ways in a single sentence. “The President gave Ukraine every opportunity to apologize for being invaded, and they simply refused to meet him halfway.”

Reaction from the Kremlin was swift and, for the first time in recent memory, unguarded. Russian state television cut into regular programming to air the footage on a loop, with commentators openly describing the exchange as “a gift,” “better than we could have scripted,” and, in one especially giddy segment, “Christmas, but for adults.” A senior Russian foreign-policy analyst on air reportedly had to be asked to stop laughing on camera.

European leaders, meanwhile, issued a flurry of statements of support for Zelenskyy so rapid and so coordinated that Downing Street, the Élysée, and the German Chancellery appeared to have been drafting them in a shared Google Doc since approximately Tuesday. Friedrich Merz, three days into his post-election honeymoon, used the word “shameful” in two languages. The Polish foreign minister simply posted a photograph of a 1939 map.

Back in Washington, Senate Republicans spent the afternoon performing the now-familiar choreography of pretending they had not seen the footage, had not been sent the footage, and did not own phones. Lindsey Graham, who once called Zelenskyy “the Winston Churchill of our time,” emerged from a hallway to suggest Zelenskyy should perhaps resign, a pivot so seamless it belonged in figure skating.

By evening, the official White House readout described the meeting as “frank and productive,” which is diplomatic boilerplate for “one man screamed, another man absorbed it, and a third man live-streamed the whole thing to Moscow.” The minerals remain in the ground. The war remains in progress. And somewhere in the residence, the most powerful man in the world was reportedly still waiting, arms crossed, for his thank-you note.

Detroit Automakers Gently Explain That a Single Pickup Truck Crosses the Canadian Border Eight Times Before It Becomes a Pickup Truck

Cody Thompson
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Detroit Automakers Gently Explain That a Single Pickup Truck Crosses the Canadian Border Eight Times Before It Becomes a Pickup Truck

DEARBORN, MI — Executives at the Big Three automakers spent most of Wednesday afternoon in a conference room with a whiteboard, a red marker, and the patient expression of parents explaining to a toddler why the dog is not, in fact, a horse. On the board was a diagram of a single F-150, and on the diagram were eight separate arrows indicating the eight separate times its various components cross the U.S.-Canada border before the truck is legally considered a truck.

The tutorial followed the administration’s Wednesday confirmation that 25 percent tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods will take effect March 4, a date auto supply chain managers have been circling on their calendars the way medieval peasants circled the arrival of a comet.

“The engine block is cast in Windsor, machined in Ohio, sent back to Ontario for the cylinder heads, then down to Kentucky for assembly into the powertrain,” said Margaret Velasco, a senior supply chain economist at the Center for Applied Trade Realism. “By the time that truck rolls off the line in Dearborn, the tariff on it, if you stack every crossing, is somewhere between 127 percent and a polite request that we stop making trucks entirely.”

Velasco noted that the number “eight” is actually conservative. A single wiring harness, she said, can cross the border three times on its own, “mostly, as far as anyone can tell, for emotional reasons.”

Industry executives have reportedly been careful to frame their concerns in the most non-confrontational language available to the English-speaking world. One Ford vice president’s Tuesday memo used the phrase “we would love to better understand the mechanics of the policy” eleven times, which trade analysts identified as the corporate equivalent of screaming into a pillow.

At a Stellantis facility in Sterling Heights, a plant manager demonstrated the issue using a child’s pop-up book he had apparently commissioned from a local print shop. Each page showed the same alternator flying across the 49th parallel, with a small cartoon customs officer waving wearily. “We thought visuals might help,” he said.

The White House, for its part, has maintained that the tariffs are straightforward and that automakers are, in the words of one senior adviser, “overcomplicating what is essentially a vibe.” The adviser declined to say which parts of a pickup truck constitute the vibe and which parts are merely the truck.

Dealerships, meanwhile, have begun adjusting sticker prices with the preemptive enthusiasm of a man who has been told it might rain and is therefore already wearing a full wetsuit. A Chevy lot outside Toledo has reportedly added a “Border Uncertainty Fee” of $1,847 to every vehicle, including used sedans that have not crossed any border since the Bush administration.

“We don’t know if the tariff will happen, get delayed, get rescinded at 10 p.m. on March 3, or just transform into something else entirely, like a tax credit or a tweet,” said Randy Chen, the lot’s general manager. “So we priced in all of them. It’s actually more honest this way.”

Canadian parts suppliers in Ontario have begun preparing what one trade group described as “contingency plans,” which on inspection turned out to be a shared Google Doc titled “lol what now” containing a single line reading “call Brian.” Brian could not be reached for comment.

Mexican auto parts manufacturers, for their part, issued a joint statement expressing confidence in the resilience of North American trade relationships, immediately after which their stocks fell 4 percent and their CEOs boarded a flight to a summit in Monterrey that three people in the room confirmed was not previously on the calendar.

Consumer advocates have begun warning that the price of a new pickup truck could rise by as much as $6,000 under the full tariff regime, though one analyst cautioned against precise estimates. “We’re modeling against a policy that has been announced, delayed, un-delayed, re-announced, and partially hallucinated,” said Dr. Peter Oyelaran of the Midwest Institute for Industrial Policy. “At this point we’re not forecasting, we’re doing improv.”

Back in Dearborn, the whiteboard session ended around 4 p.m. when someone realized that the diagram had grown to include a small inset showing the journey of a single bolt, which travels from Indiana to Sonora to Windsor to a separate facility in Windsor before returning to Indiana. An executive stared at it for a long moment, capped the marker, and suggested the group break for coffee.

The coffee, he noted quietly, was Canadian.

Kentucky Bourbon Distillers Celebrate EU Tariff News for Roughly 90 Seconds, Until Someone Pulls Up a Map

Cody Thompson
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Kentucky Bourbon Distillers Celebrate EU Tariff News for Roughly 90 Seconds, Until Someone Pulls Up a Map

BARDSTOWN, KY — The cheering inside the tasting room at Hollowcreek Distilling lasted exactly one minute and twenty-eight seconds Wednesday morning, which is how long it took CFO Randall Teague to finish his victory toast, set down his glass, and be gently informed by a summer intern that the 25% tariff President Trump had just announced on European Union imports was the kind of economic policy that tends to come with a return address.

Teague, who had opened the Bulleit-soaked press conference by calling the tariff “a long overdue win for the American palate,” visibly paled as the intern, a college junior named Megan, pulled up a 2018 Wall Street Journal article on her phone and began reading aloud from the section titled “EU Retaliatory Tariffs on American Whiskey.” Staff described Teague’s expression as “the exact face a man makes when his Peloton says his membership has expired.”

“We were told this was going to be great for American manufacturing,” said Teague, recovering with a second pour. “Nobody mentioned that European manufacturing might, in some capacity, have access to the same news.”

The 25% tariff, announced by the President during a cabinet meeting in which Elon Musk reportedly took four separate phone calls, targets European imports across roughly every category the President can name off the top of his head, including cars, wine, cheese, and, according to a footnote nobody on cable television has mentioned yet, industrial copper stills manufactured almost exclusively in Germany and Italy. Hollowcreek ordered two of them in November.

“The tariff is a tax on Americans who want to make American whiskey using the only equipment that actually makes whiskey,” said Dr. Pria Vellanki, a trade economist at the Cato-adjacent Hensley Institute, who has spent the past six weeks explaining to reporters that tariffs are paid by importers and not, as the President continues to suggest, by a large building somewhere in Brussels. “It’s a bit like putting a 25% tax on flour to support American bakers. The bakers are confused. The flour is confused. Only the policy is not confused, because the policy does not know what flour is.”

By noon, Kentucky’s congressional delegation had issued a series of statements carefully worded to support the President’s trade agenda without actually endorsing any specific element of it, a rhetorical maneuver Senate staffers have privately begun referring to as “the Mitch.” Senator Rand Paul’s office released a single tweet reading, “Tariffs are taxes,” and then went silent for the remainder of the afternoon.

Across the Atlantic, EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis convened an emergency meeting in Brussels during which, according to a leaked agenda, the first bullet point was simply “Bourbon?” followed by three question marks and a smiley face that officials insist was a formatting error. The Commission is expected to announce retaliatory tariffs on American whiskey, motorcycles, and peanut butter by Friday, a list so familiar to trade reporters that one correspondent in Brussels reportedly filed his story before the press conference began.

At Hollowcreek, Teague spent the afternoon on the phone with a broker in Rotterdam, attempting to reroute the pending copper-still shipment through what he described as “a friend in Canada who owes me a favor,” a plan that collapsed roughly forty minutes later when Canada was added to a separate tariff list by executive order. Teague was seen briefly placing his forehead against the tasting bar.

“We support the President,” said Hollowcreek founder Dale Hollowcreek, a phrase he repeated four times in under a minute in a way that suggested he was mostly trying to convince the room. “We just also happen to sell 38% of our production into Germany, Ireland, and France, and we would very much like to continue doing that, if at all possible, thank you.”

Analysts at Morgan Stanley noted that the broader bourbon sector, which had enjoyed a quiet decade of double-digit export growth, is now pricing in what one research note called “the 2018 experience, but stupider.” The note, titled “Pour One Out,” recommended investors rotate out of American spirits and into, somewhat counterintuitively, Mexican tequila, which remains on a separate tariff list scheduled for a different Tuesday.

Meanwhile, in Bardstown’s town square, a small pro-tariff rally organized by the local Republican club featured signs reading “BUY AMERICAN” and “DRINK AMERICAN,” held aloft by attendees who, according to a reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal, were being served complimentary glasses of Hollowcreek Reserve — a product now 25% more expensive to bottle and, beginning next week, 50% more expensive to export.

Back inside the distillery, Megan the intern was reportedly offered a full-time position in the regulatory affairs department, which until Wednesday had consisted of a single part-time consultant and a filing cabinet. “She’s the only one here who reads,” Teague said, pouring himself a third glass. “That’s apparently a competitive advantage now.”

Clayborn County’s Only Plausible Candidate for Trump’s $5 Million Gold Card Visa Is Already an American, Which He Found Hilarious

Hal Cranston
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Clayborn County’s Only Plausible Candidate for Trump’s $5 Million Gold Card Visa Is Already an American, Which He Found Hilarious

DATELINE — CLAYBORN COUNTY, IA — Dale Meinhardt, 68, who last spring sold four hundred and twelve acres of his late father’s corn ground to a Minneapolis solar outfit for a number he will only describe as “comfortable,” learned Tuesday morning at the Koffee Kup that the President of the United States is now offering permanent residency to any foreign national willing to pay five million dollars, and laughed so hard he had to set down his mug.

The program, announced by the White House late last week and branded the “Gold Card,” is pitched as a premium replacement for the existing investor visa, with the proceeds flowing into the federal treasury. In Clayborn County, where the median home still clears at $187,000 on a good week and the Casey’s is considered a destination restaurant, the announcement landed less as policy than as a kind of parlor game, conducted Tuesday at Booth 4 over a basket of rye toast.

“The question we were working on,” said Dale, wiping his eyes, “is whether anyone in the county could actually swing it, and the answer we kept arriving at is me, and I’m from Spillville.”

The table, which also included retired ag-lender Curt Vlasak and a rotating cast of men who declined to be named on the grounds that their wives read the paper, spent roughly forty minutes Tuesday morning attempting to identify any second candidate. They considered Phil Roeder, who owns the Ford dealership; Marge Enright, whose husband left her the Casey’s land on Highway 9; and the orthodontist in Decorah whose name nobody could remember. All three were ruled out on liquidity grounds.

“People hear ‘five million’ and they think of a number,” said Rex Halverson, a certified public accountant who has done tax work in the county since 1991 and who was consulted by phone. “But five million in actual cash, sitting there, ready to be handed to the Treasury Department in exchange for a piece of plastic — that’s a different animal. That’s not a farmer. That’s not even most doctors. That’s a man who sold something he didn’t want anymore to a company from somewhere else.”

Halverson estimated that “between four and seven” Clayborn County residents could theoretically produce the sum without liquidating a house, and that all of them are, to his knowledge, United States citizens who have been so for several decades.

Mrs. Peterson, reached at the library where she was reshelving large-print westerns, said she had read about the program in the Tuesday paper and had a question, which was whether the five million dollars came with anything besides the visa. Informed that it did not — that the card is essentially the green card, only more expensive and gold-colored — she nodded once and said, “Well, that’s a lot for a card.”

County Supervisor Denny Krauskopf, asked whether Clayborn County was prepared to welcome any Gold Card recipients who might choose to settle here, said the county “would of course welcome anyone who wanted to contribute to the tax base,” then paused and added that he was not aware of any amenity currently offered by the county that would justify the outlay. Pressed for specifics, he mentioned the new splash pad in Elkader and the fact that the DMV is open Thursdays until six.

At Booth 4, the conversation eventually turned to what Dale would do if a foreign billionaire did, hypothetically, relocate to Spillville under the new program. Dale said he would probably invite him over for a pork loin and then try to sell him the twelve acres of bottom ground he still owns down by the creek, which floods.

“He’d pay five million for a card,” Dale reasoned, “so I figure the floodplain’s at least six hundred.”

Curt Vlasak, who spent thirty-one years approving and denying farm loans in a building that still has a hitching post out front, offered what may have been the morning’s closing thesis. He said he had lent money to men who fixed tractors with baling wire, to women who ran whole operations out of a kitchen ledger, and to one gentleman in 1994 who tried to pay off a note in feeder pigs, and that in none of those cases had the federal government ever suggested any of them were insufficiently American.

“Now apparently you can just buy it,” Curt said. “I’d like to see the closing documents.”

Waitress Bobbi Jo Menke, refilling coffee for the fourth time, was asked whether the Gold Card had come up at any of her other tables Tuesday morning. She said it had not, because most of her other tables were the feed-store crowd, and they were still working through the price of urea.

DeepSeek Panic Enters Week Four as Palo Alto Founders Reportedly Sobbing Into $22 Matcha

Tara Sparks
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DeepSeek Panic Enters Week Four as Palo Alto Founders Reportedly Sobbing Into $22 Matcha

PALO ALTO, CA — At a co-working space on University Avenue on Monday morning, a 31-year-old founder named Braxton paused mid-standup to quietly remove his Patagonia vest, fold it into a perfect square, and place it on the floor like a man preparing to fight his own reflection. He had just been told, again, that the Chinese AI model DeepSeek can do roughly what his company does, but for what one investor described as “the cost of a Chipotle bowl with guac.” Braxton did not cry. Braxton sipped. Braxton whispered the word “moat” three times like a prayer.

It has now been four weeks since DeepSeek emerged from a Hangzhou office park and detonated the self-esteem of an entire zip code. What began as a news cycle has curdled into a lifestyle. Across Silicon Valley, founders who last month were using the phrase “compound intelligence” in LinkedIn posts are now making eye contact with their baristas for the first time in years, searching the faces of strangers for reassurance that their $400 million Series B still matters.

“We are observing textbook anticipatory grief,” said Dr. Marla Vennick, a workplace psychologist who specializes in founder decompensation and charges $675 an hour to say things like this. “The denial phase was brief because the denial phase required them to stop checking X. Most of my clients are now oscillating between bargaining and a new fifth stage we’ve had to add called ‘posting a thread.'”

Reports from the ground suggest the posting has reached levels typically associated with a primary election or a Taylor Swift album. One thread, which began “A few thoughts on why DeepSeek’s numbers are, respectfully, a little sus,” ran to 47 tweets and ended with the author announcing his new podcast. Another founder livestreamed himself re-reading the DeepSeek technical paper while a sous chef prepared a sea bass behind him. The sea bass was not acknowledged.

The panic has mutated, as panics do, into commerce. A pop-up on Sand Hill Road called The Moat Room is reportedly charging $180 for a 45-minute session in which founders are handed a laminated printout of their pitch deck and allowed to scream at it. A competing space in SoMa offers “Existential Breathwork for People Who Said AGI Was Six Months Away,” which is sold out through April. Matcha consumption in the 94301 zip code is up a reported 340%, per a barista named Liana who, to be clear, is not a statistician but has eyes.

Meanwhile, the rest of America has responded to the DeepSeek crisis with the measured and dignified response of downloading it immediately and asking it to write wedding toasts. TikTok users who last month briefly relocated to RedNote in protest of the ban are now openly stacking Chinese apps on their home screens like Pokémon cards, casually learning enough Mandarin to follow a skincare routine, and tagging their Silicon Valley ex-boyfriends in memes.

“I asked DeepSeek to explain my lease, to draft a breakup text, and to tell me if my cat is mad at me,” said Cassidy Munn, 28, a dental hygienist in Tulsa who has no stake in the geopolitical implications of frontier model development. “It nailed all three. My ex, who works at a company with a lowercase name, has blocked me.”

Inside the firms themselves, all-hands meetings have reportedly taken on the dissociative energy of a high school assembly about drunk driving. At one unnamed foundation model company, a chief strategy officer spent 22 minutes explaining that DeepSeek’s efficiency numbers are, quote, “vibes-based,” before being gently interrupted by an intern who pointed out that “vibes-based” was the exact phrase used to justify last quarter’s burn rate. The intern has since been promoted or fired; sources could not confirm which because, in Silicon Valley, those can be the same thing.

Venture capitalists, sensing blood, have pivoted with the grace of cats landing on countertops. Andreessen Horowitz is said to be workshopping a thesis called “Scrappy Is the New Scale.” One partner at a rival firm, who asked to be identified only as “a guy who was very early on Bored Apes,” said the new playbook is to fund teams of “two guys, a GPU, and a grievance.” He then excused himself to take a call from his mother.

Not everyone is suffering. A small cohort of Bay Area founders has reportedly embraced DeepSeek with the enthusiasm of converts, rebranding their companies overnight to include phrases like “efficient by design” and “lean-pilled.” One CEO changed his LinkedIn headline from “Scaling Intelligence” to “I Was Always Skeptical of Hyperscalers (See Archived Posts).” The archived posts were not, in fact, available.

Back at the co-working space, Braxton had by Monday afternoon regained enough composure to open a blank Notion doc titled “Pivot?” He sat with it for an hour. He added a question mark, then removed it, then added it back. His co-founder, a man named Peregrine who has the haircut of someone who owns a standing desk, suggested they “go outside,” a phrase neither had deployed unironically since 2019.

They went outside. The sun was doing its usual thing. A Waymo drove past, empty, driven by math that cost a reported six dollars.

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.

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