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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.

Senate Confirms Man Who Thinks Wi-Fi Causes Leaky Brain as Nation’s Top Doctor

Nash Grayson
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Senate Confirms Man Who Thinks Wi-Fi Causes Leaky Brain as Nation’s Top Doctor

WASHINGTON — The United States Senate on Thursday voted 52-48 to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, entrusting the nation’s $1.7 trillion health apparatus to a man who, as recently as last summer, was photographed sawing the head off a dead whale and strapping it to the roof of a minivan.

The vote fell along predictably craven party lines, with Majority Leader John Thune declaring the new Secretary a “bold outsider” — the same phrase Republicans used for the dentist who tried to sell mercury fillings back to the FDA in 2009, and the same phrase they’ll use again in six months when the measles wing of Bethesda Naval runs out of beds.

Kennedy, who spent the morning of his confirmation vote explaining to a reporter that seed oils are “what happened to John F. Kennedy, really, if you think about it,” took the oath in a voice that has been medically described by three separate otolaryngologists as “a man trying to gargle a hornet.” He immediately pledged to “Make America Healthy Again,” a slogan his own team admits was workshopped during a nine-hour cold plunge in somebody’s Vermont creek.

“This is a historic day for public health, assuming you define public health the way Bobby defines it, which is as a conspiracy run by the Rothschilds and Tony Fauci out of a bunker shaped like a syringe,” said Dr. Pritham Okafor, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who spent the entire phone call audibly typing his resume into LinkedIn. “I will say the man is genuinely charismatic. If you stop listening at word four.”

Senator Mitch McConnell was the lone Republican to vote against confirmation, citing his own history with polio and his presumably limited enthusiasm for reintroducing it as a lifestyle choice. His no vote was immediately dismissed by the White House as “the last gasp of a man who can no longer metabolize raw organ meat,” per a statement from a deputy press secretary who appears to be nineteen.

Kennedy’s first stated priority, according to a transition memo obtained through a staffer who is already looking for other work, is the creation of a “Wellness Audit” task force empowered to review every vaccine approved since 1986, every fluoridation program in the country, and — in what aides describe as a “passion project” — the molecular structure of Froot Loops. The memo includes a bullet point reading, verbatim, “Investigate whether bears are being poisoned on purpose.”

Insiders at HHS, which employs roughly 80,000 people who did not sign up to be managed by a man who once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park as a prank, report widespread despair. One career official described the mood as “the week after a divorce, except the divorce was your job.” Another was seen at a Dupont Circle bar drinking something called a Double Merck and refusing to answer questions.

“Look, I understand the concerns,” said Brenna Halversen, a paid Kennedy spokeswoman whose LinkedIn lists her previous role as “lifestyle coach, crystal-adjacent.” “But the Secretary has always said that the cure for most ailments is sunlight, raw milk, and removing the word ‘doctor’ from your vocabulary. The American people voted for disruption. Well — the American people voted for a different guy, and then that guy lost a primary, and now here we are. But spiritually, they voted for this.”

Democrats mounted what observers are calling “the opposition equivalent of a firm email.” Senator Chuck Schumer delivered a floor speech in which he accused Kennedy of “playing fast and loose with the very science that keeps our children alive,” then voted present because a staffer handed him the wrong card. Senator John Fetterman voted yes and, when asked why, said the word “vibes” and walked into a coat closet.

The confirmation comes on the same week the Senate also installed Brooke Rollins atop the Department of Agriculture and greenlit a White House visit from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was reportedly briefed en route that America’s new top health official believes, with his whole chest, that chemicals in the water are turning frogs transgender. A source inside the Indian delegation described Modi’s facial expression during the briefing as “the face of a man calculating how much of his own bottled water he brought.”

Kennedy capped the day with a victory address delivered from the steps of HHS headquarters, in which he thanked his wife, his dog, his falcon, the ghost of his uncle, and “every American who has ever looked at a piece of broccoli and thought, that might be lying to me.” He then produced, from inside his jacket, what he identified as an unpasteurized cheese. He ate it on camera. Nobody stopped him.

By 6 p.m., the official HHS website had been updated to feature a rotating banner of Kennedy shirtless at various elevations. The CDC’s vaccine schedule page now redirects to a Substack. And somewhere in the bowels of the Humphrey Building, a 31-year career epidemiologist is quietly teaching herself to code.

The Senate Just Confirmed a Director of National Intelligence Who Spent the Last Four Years Calling the Intelligence Community a Cabal

Margaret Thorne
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The Senate Just Confirmed a Director of National Intelligence Who Spent the Last Four Years Calling the Intelligence Community a Cabal

Eliza brought a cheese board on Tuesday night, and by the time we got to the Manchego somebody said, with the cheerful finality of a woman closing a car trunk, that Tulsi Gabbard was going to be fine. Fine. That was the word. Not qualified, not prepared, not experienced. Fine. I put down my wine and asked what, exactly, fine meant in the context of a person who is now reading the President’s morning intelligence brief, and everyone at the table suddenly found their napkins deeply interesting.

Yesterday the Senate voted 52-48 to confirm Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, which is the job that sits on top of eighteen separate intelligence agencies like a very small hat on a very large head. One Republican — Mitch McConnell, of all the ghosts to rise — voted no. Every other Republican, including several who had spent the previous three weeks telling reporters on background that they had grave concerns, decided that their grave concerns were, in the end, about the weight of a feather.

I want to be careful here. I have spent thirty years watching Washington confirm people I did not like for jobs they were not good at, and I am not in the business of pretending every appointment is the end of the republic. Most of them are just disappointing. But the DNI job is specifically, structurally, the job of telling the President what is true when the President would prefer it not be. That is the entire point of the position. It exists because after September 11th we decided somebody needed to stand in the doorway and say the quiet parts out loud.

Gabbard’s public record on the intelligence community she now leads is not ambiguous. She has called its leadership a cabal. She has described its work, repeatedly, as a threat to American democracy. She flew to Damascus in 2017 and sat across a table from Bashar al-Assad and came home to tell a skeptical press corps that she was skeptical he had gassed his own people, a skepticism that has survived, like a houseplant nobody waters but nobody throws away, every subsequent finding to the contrary. She has praised Edward Snowden as brave. She has, on a podcast whose name I will not dignify, suggested that the very agencies she now oversees were running a kind of shadow government.

These are not gotcha clips scraped off an intern’s laptop. These are on-the-record positions, delivered on camera, defended in print, and repeated in book form. The woman who now decides what intelligence the President sees spent the last four years telling anyone who would listen that the people collecting that intelligence are the problem.

I asked a friend of mine — a lobbyist I’ll describe only as bipartisan, in the sense that he will take anyone’s money — what he thought was going on. He chewed an almond for a long time. Then he said: Margaret, the fix is that the President doesn’t want the briefing anyway. He wants someone who’ll give him the version that makes him feel good on Tuesday. He said this like he was telling me the weather. He said this like it was a logistics problem. He said this and then asked if there was more wine.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives long enough to have outlasted seven administrations and one fire, called me yesterday morning before the vote. Judy does not do politics on the phone. Judy does crossword clues and grandchildren and the occasional complaint about her knee. Yesterday Judy said, Maggie, the career people are not okay. That was the whole call. Maggie, the career people are not okay.

The defense of Gabbard, insofar as one was mounted on the Senate floor, amounted to three arguments, each flimsier than the last. One: she was a veteran, which she is, and which has almost nothing to do with whether she should run the intelligence community, a fact we all understood clearly the last six times this argument was deployed on behalf of someone we disagreed with. Two: she had evolved, a word that is doing Olympic-level heavy lifting in this town lately. Three — and this was the one Senator Lankford actually said out loud — that the President deserved his team. As though this were a cabinet post at a small PR firm and not the person who decides which threats the commander in chief is allowed to know about.

Here is what I keep turning over. For twenty years the bipartisan consensus in this city — a consensus I frankly found sanctimonious at times — was that the intelligence community, for all its sins, was one of the few institutions too serious to be turned into a loyalty test. You could argue about its methods. You could argue about Iraq, and many of us did, loudly. But you did not, as a matter of basic civic hygiene, install at the top of it someone whose stated view was that it needed to be brought to heel.

That consensus died on Wednesday. Fifty-two senators killed it, and forty-seven more shrugged, and a fiftieth — a former majority leader whose own legacy is not exactly a rose garden — was the only one who apparently remembered what the job was for. When the history of this week is written, and it will be written, the interesting number will not be 52. It will be 47: the senators who privately agreed Gabbard should not have this job and publicly helped her get it.

I said some version of this at dinner, and Eliza — who I love, and who has been my friend since the Clinton administration — told me I was being dramatic. She said the intelligence community would manage. She said the career people always figure it out. She said we had survived worse. And maybe she’s right. Maybe the professionals down the hall will keep the lights on, keep the briefings honest, keep the country intact through sheer inertia and muscle memory, the way they always have.

But I want to note, for the record, that this is now the argument. The argument is no longer that the people we confirm are qualified. The argument is that the institution will survive them. That is a different country than the one I started covering. That is a country that has decided the guardrails are somebody else’s problem.

I asked Eliza, on her way out, what she would say if her daughter — who is twenty-four and asks very good questions — wanted to know how this happened. Eliza stopped in the doorway. She said, I’d tell her we were tired. Then she took her Tupperware and went home, and I stood in my kitchen with the lights on for a long time, thinking about what it means when tired becomes a governing philosophy.

You Can Be Banned From the White House Now for Using the Wrong Map

Margaret Thorne
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You Can Be Banned From the White House Now for Using the Wrong Map

At dinner on Saturday, my friend Eliza asked what the Gulf of Mexico was called this week, and three people at the table laughed before they realized she was serious. The bipartisan lobbyist two seats down — you know the one, the kind of man whose business card lists a think tank and a distillery — smiled into his wine and said, “Whatever the briefing room is calling it, I guess.” Everyone chuckled. Nobody corrected him. The cheese course arrived. And that, more or less, is the entire story of how a country stops owning the names of its own coastline.

The news, in case you were busy pretending to care about the Super Bowl halftime show, is that the White House has threatened to ban the Associated Press from events because the AP declined to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” That is the sentence. I typed it twice to make sure I hadn’t hallucinated it. A press organization founded in 1846 is being told that its credentials depend on whether it will adopt, in its copy, the cartographic preferences of a single administration that has been in office for approximately three weeks.

I am old enough to remember when conservatives were the people who warned, in grave baritones at Federalist Society dinners, about the creeping politicization of language. I was in those rooms. I took notes. Someone once gave a forty-minute speech at the Mayflower about the tyranny of calling a tax a “revenue enhancement,” and the audience gave him a standing ovation and a plaque. I would like to know where those men are tonight. I suspect they are at a different dinner party, eating the same salmon, saying nothing.

Because this is not a fight about a gulf. A gulf does not care. The water off the coast of Galveston is indifferent to its own branding. This is a fight about whether the people who report on the government are allowed to use a word the government does not prefer, and whether the penalty for using that word is expulsion from the room. If that sentence does not alarm you, I would gently suggest you have not been paying attention, or you have been paying attention and decided you would prefer a cheerful evening.

My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has seen enough presidential paperwork to develop a permanent eye twitch, told me something over the holidays that I have not been able to stop thinking about. She said the thing that changes first is never the big thing. It is always the small administrative thing — the form, the letterhead, the footnote, the list of approved terminology. The big thing comes later, and by then the small thing has already done the work of making the big thing feel normal. I am paraphrasing. Judy is less polite.

I called an old colleague of mine, a retired press office veteran named Harlan Pettit who spent twenty-two years across three administrations and now raises heritage chickens in Virginia. He said what’s unusual isn’t that a White House is angry with a wire service. Every White House is angry with a wire service. He said what’s unusual is the demand. “Nobody ever told me what to call a body of water,” Harlan said. “You could yell about coverage. You couldn’t require a vocabulary.” Then he asked if I wanted half a dozen eggs and hung up.

This is the part of the column where I am supposed to remind you that the AP stylebook is not a sacred document and that naming conventions evolve and that, yes, “Denali” happened and the republic survived. Fine. Granted. Noted. The difference, which I shouldn’t have to point out but apparently do, is that those changes did not come with a threat attached. No one was told that their press pass depended on the vowels they used. There was no list of rooms you could be thrown out of for noncompliance. The word and the consequence were kept politely apart, which is, in fact, most of what a free press is.

What interests me most, and what I could not stop thinking about on the drive home from Eliza’s, is the silence of the other outlets. A few issued statements. Most did not. I understand the calculation — you do not want to be next, you do not want to lose the seat, you have a mortgage and a network and a mildly aggrieved spouse who wants you home by eleven. I understand. I have been in Washington for thirty years. The calculation is always the same calculation. It is also, cumulatively, how you end up in a country where the map is whatever the man at the podium says it is.

Someone at the table Saturday — I will not say who, because she reads this column and will call me — said that she thought the whole thing was “a distraction,” which is the word people in this town reach for when they would like permission to stop thinking about something. Everything is a distraction if you are distracted enough. A gulf is a distraction. A press ban is a distraction. A demand that reporters adopt the administration’s preferred nouns or be exiled from the building is, apparently, also a distraction. One wonders what, exactly, is not a distraction. The salad, possibly.

I am old-fashioned enough to believe that when the government tells a newsroom what to call a thing, and threatens punishment if the newsroom refuses, something has gone wrong that a cheese course cannot fix. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the other newsrooms, the ones quietly tightening their own copy tonight just in case, are participants in that wrong and not bystanders to it. And I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the lobbyist at the end of the table, smiling into his wine, is the most American figure in the room — the man who has decided, pleasantly, that it is not his job to notice.

We will know the gulf by several names in the coming years. That is not the part that should worry you. The part that should worry you is what else we will agree to rename, quietly, in rooms where the penalty for the old word is the door.

Domestic Steel Executives Celebrate 25% Tariff by Immediately Raising Their Own Prices 24%, Just to Be Polite

Cody Thompson
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Domestic Steel Executives Celebrate 25% Tariff by Immediately Raising Their Own Prices 24%, Just to Be Polite

PITTSBURGH, PA — Within ninety minutes of President Trump signing a 25% tariff on all foreign steel and aluminum imports Monday morning, executives at three of the largest American steel producers had reportedly convened, popped a bottle of Korbel, and revised their 2025 price sheets upward by 24%, a figure described internally as ‘respectful’ and ‘leaving the customer a little dignity.’

The tariff, announced as a decisive blow against foreign dumping and a historic rebirth for American heavy industry, will take effect in March. Domestic producers, who have spent the past decade insisting they can compete on price if only given a level playing field, announced a level playing field was exactly what they had received and that prices would now be going up anyway, for reasons related to the playing field.

‘What we’re seeing is a restoration of domestic pricing power,’ said Marcus Delahunt, an industrial metals analyst at Brenner & Kestrel Equity Research. ‘Which is Wall Street for ‘they can charge whatever they want now and the Home Depot guy buying rebar has nowhere else to go.’ This is, by every financial metric, a tremendous outcome. For roughly eleven people.’

U.S. Steel shares rose 7.4% on the news. Cleveland-Cliffs rose 9.1%. Nucor rose 6.3%. A spokesperson for one domestic mill, asked whether the company intended to pass any of the tariff-shielded margin along to American manufacturers, laughed for what sources described as ‘an uncomfortable amount of time’ before the call disconnected.

The tariff is the second such action in eight years, following Trump’s 2018 steel tariffs, which a Federal Reserve study later concluded had cost the American manufacturing sector roughly 75,000 jobs on net — a figure the administration dismissed Monday as ‘a study,’ and therefore suspect.

Downstream industries are preparing to absorb the increases the way they always do, which is by not absorbing them. Ford, GM, and Stellantis are each reportedly modeling vehicle price increases in the $400 to $1,100 range per unit, to be labeled on future earnings calls as ‘strategic pricing initiatives’ or, in more honest quarters, ‘the tariff thing.’

‘The beauty of a tariff is that everyone gets to blame someone else,’ explained Priya Coughlin, senior economist at the Shoreham Institute for Trade Policy. ‘Detroit blames Washington. Washington blames Beijing. Beijing blames the WTO. The WTO blames no one because it has effectively ceased functioning. And the guy buying a Silverado blames, somehow, the guy who used to work at a steel mill in 1974. The system is elegant.’

Canada, which supplies roughly 25% of U.S. steel imports and nearly 60% of U.S. aluminum imports, responded with what observers described as ‘aggressively polite indignation,’ threatening retaliatory tariffs on Kentucky bourbon, Wisconsin dairy, and — in a move widely interpreted as a warning shot — Florida orange juice. Prime Minister Trudeau issued a statement that used the word ‘disappointed’ four times in six sentences, which is considered, in Canadian, approximately equivalent to a declaration of war.

Complicating the rollout, roughly 70% of all U.S. aluminum imports come from Canada, and there is, at present, no meaningful domestic aluminum smelting capacity standing by to replace it. Industry sources confirmed that America does not currently possess the power grid, the trained workforce, or the five-to-seven-year construction runway required to build that capacity, but expressed cautious optimism that this would be addressed ‘at some point, by someone, probably.’

On the trading floor of the CME, aluminum futures spiked 14% in pre-market, then settled into what one trader described as ‘the shape of a man realizing his rent went up.’ Beer can manufacturers, who consume roughly 25% of all U.S. aluminum sheet, were reportedly on the phone by 9:15 a.m. with distillery lobbyists to determine whose price increase would be more politically survivable.

At a rally Monday evening, the President celebrated the tariff as ‘the end of foreign steel, believe me,’ and suggested that American consumers would not feel the impact because, in his words, ‘the foreign countries pay it, that’s how tariffs work, everyone knows this except the fake economists.’ The assembled crowd, many of whom will shortly be purchasing a washing machine, applauded.

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the American Iron and Steel Institute thanked the administration for protecting American jobs, American workers, and American industrial sovereignty, before clarifying that layoffs at two domestic mills previously scheduled for Q2 would proceed on time, as those had been decided ‘for separate reasons, unrelated to steel.’

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