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I Watched Fourteen Hours of Super Bowl LIX and Only Three of Them Involved Anyone Playing Football

Duke Holloway
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I Watched Fourteen Hours of Super Bowl LIX and Only Three of Them Involved Anyone Playing Football

Denise put the seven-layer dip out at eleven in the morning, which is the kind of structural decision you only make if you’ve accepted, in your bones, that the pregame show is going to outlast the sour cream. She has. I have. The dip did not. By the time Jalen Hurts took a snap that counted, the top layer had sweated through to the olives and an ESPN analyst in a powder-blue blazer had already used the word ‘journey’ eleven times. I counted. It was that kind of afternoon.

Super Bowl LIX kicked off at 6:30 Eastern. Coverage started at approximately the Truman administration. Somewhere in between, a man I’ve never seen before interviewed a different man I’ve never seen before about what it means to ‘show up in the moments,’ and then they cut to a package about a Chiefs offensive lineman’s dog. The dog seemed fine. The dog did not ask to be on television. The dog, I submit, had the best Sunday of anyone involved.

My old high school coach, Sal DiMaggio, used to say the most important thing about a football game was that it was a football game. He said this because in 1974 he once caught a JV quarterback combing his hair before a scrimmage and made him run until the comb fell out of his pocket on its own. Coach DiMaggio never watched a pregame show in his life. He did not know they existed. He would have regarded fourteen consecutive hours of pre-game anything the way a normal person regards a bathtub full of mayonnaise.

The sitting President of the United States attended Super Bowl LIX, which is a first, and which strikes me as one of those milestones we crossed without anybody asking if we should. The Super Bowl used to be big enough that the President stayed home out of something like professional courtesy. Now the President shows up, and the broadcast cuts to him in a suite, and a sideline reporter tries to wedge national politics into the space between a Gatorade commercial and a third-and-four. I’m old enough to remember when the game was the content. Now the game is what happens between the content.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at halftime, as he has every Super Bowl for thirty-one years, to confirm that yes, the halftime show was something, and no, he did not understand most of it. Ray is seventy-three and once sold insurance to half of Erie County. He asked me, with real seriousness, if Kendrick Lamar was mad at somebody specific or just mad in general. I told him I thought the answer was ‘yes.’ He said ‘well, good for him,’ and hung up, because Ray’s entire position on modern culture is that as long as the young man is working, the young man is welcome. Ray is a better American than most of us.

The football game, when it finally arrived, was terrific. I want to be clear about that, because the sin of sportswriting in 2025 is burying the thing itself under commentary about the commentary. The Philadelphia Eagles hit Patrick Mahomes like they were getting paid per snap, which, technically, they were. Saquon Barkley ran like a man who had read every piece written about him since September and decided, politely, to return the favor. Hurts played the kind of game you don’t write poetry about because the poetry would just get in the way.

The Chiefs lost 40 to 22, and somewhere in the third quarter the ‘dynasty’ talk, which had been stacked three pallets high in every studio in Bristol, Connecticut, quietly slid off the forklift. A dynasty is a thing you recognize after it’s over, not a thing you announce every nineteen minutes during a broadcast. The Chiefs were a very good football team that won three rings. That’s plenty. That’s a career. You didn’t need to slap a brand on it. You did anyway. The Eagles took the brand off with a shovel.

Somebody in my house — I am not naming names, but she is married to me — asked during the second quarter why there were so many commercials for other commercials. I didn’t have an answer. Then a streaming service ran a sixty-second spot that appeared to be about a horse, which cut to a different streaming service running a sixty-second spot that appeared to be about the same horse, which cut to a beer ad that was, unless I am losing my mind, narrated by a former quarterback’s voice memo. The Super Bowl ad, once an art form, is now a QR code with ambitions.

I want to say a word about the players, because the players are the only ones who came out of this week with their dignity unscratched. These are young men who got up every morning from August through February and did a job that breaks people for a living. They do not deserve to be packaged. They do not deserve to have their tenth-grade coach dug up for a sixty-second profile piece that ends with a piano sting. They played a football game on Sunday and they played it very, very hard, and for three hours the broadcast remembered what it was for.

Then the whistle blew and the postgame started, and the postgame, dear reader, is just the pregame turned around. Same blazers. Same words. Someone asked Jalen Hurts what this means for his legacy. He had been a Super Bowl champion for eleven minutes. His legacy at that point was a damp jersey and a baby he was holding slightly wrong. He answered the question the way a gentleman answers a question from a man who has already decided what the answer should be.

Petey Corrigan, a guy I used to know who umpired triple-A ball for sixteen years, once told me the trouble with modern sports was that every event now has to be two things: the event, and the explanation of the event. He said this in 2003, before podcasts, before parlay apps, before sideline reporters asked sixty-year-old men about their feelings. I do not know what Petey would say about 2025. I know he would say it loud, and I know he would say it with his hat on.

The Eagles won. The city of Philadelphia will now do to itself what the city of Philadelphia does. A grease pole somewhere is getting the tallow touched up as we speak. I hope Saquon gets a parade as long as the pregame show was. I hope Hurts gets a week of silence. I hope somebody, somewhere, watches the tape without the talk over the top of it and remembers what football looks like when you leave it alone.

Denise is bringing chili over on Tuesday. She says it’s from a podcast. I did not ask which one. I have had enough content for one week.

Kroger’s Heart-Shaped Boneless Wing Platter Confirms Valentine’s Day Is Just the Super Bowl With a Candle

Tara Sparks
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Kroger’s Heart-Shaped Boneless Wing Platter Confirms Valentine’s Day Is Just the Super Bowl With a Candle

CINCINNATI, OH — At 6:04 a.m. on Saturday, a Kroger deli manager named Dorene slid a forty-eight-count tray of boneless wings, arranged in the unmistakable silhouette of a human heart, into a refrigerated case already groaning under pigs-in-blankets shaped like roses. A handwritten sign above the case read, in glitter pen, “FOR THE ONE YOU LOVE (AND THE GAME YOU’RE WATCHING).” A man in a Bengals hoodie stopped, stared at the tray for a full eleven seconds, and then whispered, “finally,” like a hostage released.

The platter — officially branded the “Sweetheart Snack Stadium” — is Kroger’s attempt to formally acknowledge what American households have quietly admitted in private for years: Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl are no longer two distinct holidays but one extended emotional carbohydrate event stretching from kickoff to Hallmark’s return-by date. The retailer’s press release promised “romance you can dip,” which is the most honest sentence a grocery chain has produced since the pandemic.

“The modern American couple doesn’t want to choose between buffalo sauce and intimacy,” said Margo Henshaw, a retail trend forecaster at the Cincinnati-based firm ShelfScope Analytics. “They want both in the same bite, ideally while a commercial featuring a talking frog sells them an insurance policy. We’re calling it the ‘Queso Valentine.’ It tests extremely well with anyone who has given up.”

Within hours of Kroger’s announcement, Publix unveiled a heart-shaped meat-and-cheese board that doubles as a punt formation. Wegmans leaked a photo of a chocolate fountain shaped like a goalpost. Costco, never one to be out-escalated, released a single pallet-sized item: a forty-eight-inch pepperoni pizza cut into a heart, sold exclusively to members who present a marriage license or a fantasy football trophy. Sam’s Club followed with a flower bouquet where each rose is actually a mozzarella stick wrapped in prosciutto, which several customers have already been filmed weeping over.

Not everyone is delighted. The American Florists’ Coalition issued a statement Saturday afternoon accusing grocery chains of “actively disrespecting the emotional labor of the rose,” and a Vermont chocolatier named Piers threatened, via Instagram story, to “personally deliver a truffle to every man who thinks a celery stalk counts as a gesture.” A representative from the National Greeting Card Alliance said the organization was “monitoring the situation closely” and had not ruled out a heart-shaped card that smells like ranch.

Customer reaction has been, by retail standards, violently enthusiastic. A couple in Mason, Ohio, interviewed while wheeling two Sweetheart Snack Stadiums and a single dented rose toward the checkout, explained that they had been married eleven years and had not exchanged a card since 2019. “Last Valentine’s he got me a card that said ‘To My Wife’ in cursive,” said Brenda, 38. “This year he got me wings in the shape of my feelings. It’s growth.” Her husband, Dale, nodded and said nothing, because his mouth was already full.

Kroger’s internal memo, leaked to a local food blog called Skillet Dispatch, suggests the company has been preparing for this convergence since 2022, when data analysts noticed that 61% of shoppers who bought a heart-shaped box of chocolates on February 14 had, six days earlier, purchased an “emotional quantity” of Tostitos. “We stopped treating them as two trips,” the memo reads. “We started treating them as one long Sunday through Friday of a person trying to feel something.”

Competing theories about the phenomenon have emerged. Dr. Alistair Pembroke, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Northern Kentucky, argues the merger is “the inevitable endpoint of a society that has replaced ritual with snack.” A counter-paper, submitted Saturday morning to a Substack called The Checkout Line, proposes instead that Americans have simply noticed the two holidays share a color scheme and “decided to stop overthinking it.” Both writers appear to agree the situation is permanent.

Hallmark, blindsided, released a hastily designed card Saturday evening featuring a cartoon quarterback handing a cartoon woman a long-stemmed mozzarella stick, with the interior message “YOU’RE MY FAVORITE PLAY.” The card sold out at a Walgreens in Covington in under twenty minutes, purchased almost entirely by men who did not make eye contact with the cashier.

As of press time, Dorene the deli manager had restocked the Sweetheart Snack Stadium display four times and was beginning to suspect she had witnessed the birth of a new national holiday, one in which love is measured in ounces, expressed in ranch, and observed at roughly a 45-degree angle on the couch. She declined to comment further, citing a personal need to go microwave something.

The President Appointed Himself Chairman of the Kennedy Center and Nobody at Dinner Could Name a Single Thing Wrong With It

Margaret Thorne
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The President Appointed Himself Chairman of the Kennedy Center and Nobody at Dinner Could Name a Single Thing Wrong With It

At a dinner in Kalorama on Wednesday night — the kind where the host apologizes for the roast chicken because she’s already apologized for everything else — my friend Eliza turned to the table and asked, with the innocence she deploys when she wants a fight, whether anyone actually cared that the President had made himself chairman of the Kennedy Center. A bipartisan lobbyist I will not name, because he pays for his own wine and that is rare enough to protect, took a long sip and said what they always say. He said it was mostly symbolic. He said the Kennedy Center is a building with a gift shop. He said there are bigger fights.

There are always bigger fights. That is the thing they say in this town when they want you to stop paying attention to the fight in front of you.

So let us be clear about what happened, because clarity is apparently a partisan posture now. The President removed the existing chair of the Kennedy Center — a board that has, by statute and by decades of quiet practice, included Democrats, Republicans, donors, diplomats, and at least one person who could actually tell you what a mezzo-soprano is — and installed himself in the chair. Not a loyalist. Not a donor. Himself. The federally chartered national cultural center of the United States is now, in a formal sense, a personal fiefdom of the man who once called the Kennedy Center Honors “very, very boring” from Mar-a-Lago.

Symbolic, the lobbyist said. As if symbols have ever been the small thing in American life. As if the reason we put a marble building on the Potomac and named it after a dead president was that we had run out of parking lots.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for longer than some of the appointees at the Archives have been alive, has a phrase she uses when a thing happens that nobody wants to describe plainly. She calls it “a Tuesday item.” A Tuesday item is something that, if it had happened in any other administration, would have consumed a week of hearings and a Sunday show. Now it happens between the morning briefing and lunch, and by Tuesday evening the only people who remember it are the ones who worked in the building it just hollowed out.

The Kennedy Center is a Tuesday item now. So is the Pentagon deciding which news organizations get a desk. So is the revocation of a former president’s intelligence briefing, which used to be the sort of thing a country did to defectors. You can have one of these in a week and call it a skirmish. You cannot have all of them in a week and call it anything other than a pattern, unless your professional incentive is to not see patterns, in which case Washington has a corner office for you and a speaking fee to match.

I asked the lobbyist, because Eliza had gone quiet in the way she goes quiet when she wants me to take the swing, what he thought the board of the Kennedy Center was going to do. He laughed. Of course he laughed. The board of the Kennedy Center is going to do what boards of prestigious American institutions have been doing with impressive consistency since November: they are going to find something urgent to attend to in the Hamptons, or Jackson, or whatever compound currently substitutes for a spine. They will issue no statement. They will place no call. One of them, eventually, will give an interview to a magazine nobody reads and describe the whole episode as “complicated,” which is the word the well-dressed use when they mean they would like to keep their seat.

I have been writing this column for thirty years, and I have watched a great many people in this city discover, right on schedule, that the principle they were willing to resign over last administration is a nuance this administration. It is not hypocrisy, exactly. Hypocrisy requires that you remember what you used to say. This is something cleaner. This is a kind of civic forgetting, practiced at the level of the dinner party, where we agree, plate by plate, that the thing happening in front of us is not the thing it obviously is.

And here is what bothers me, and what should bother you, and what the lobbyist could not answer when I asked him directly over the pear tart: if the national cultural institution can be annexed by signature on a Wednesday, and the board will not say a word, and the donors will not say a word, and the press corps will cover it as a style-section curiosity because the real news is a tariff in Tokyo, then what exactly is the firewall? Name it. Point to it. Tell me which institution, which board, which nonprofit with a Rockefeller on its letterhead, is going to be the one that says no.

Because I have been to a lot of dinner parties this month, and I have not heard anybody rehearsing the word.

The Kennedy Center will reopen next week. The marquee will light up. Somebody expensive will sing something moving, and the cameras will find a senator’s wife dabbing at her eyes, and the program will thank the chairman. Read that sentence again and tell me it is symbolic. Symbols are how a country tells itself who it is. We just let ours be signed over, and we passed the salad, and we agreed there were bigger fights. There are always bigger fights. That is how you lose the small ones, which turn out, in the morning, to have been the only ones that mattered.

The Man Who Said He Wanted Civil Servants ‘In Trauma’ Got 53 Votes and a Corner Office

Margaret Thorne
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The Man Who Said He Wanted Civil Servants ‘In Trauma’ Got 53 Votes and a Corner Office

How do you confirm a man who said, on the record, into a microphone, that his goal was to put career civil servants ‘in trauma’ — and then go home and eat dinner like nothing happened? I ask because the Senate did exactly that on Thursday, installing Russell Vought as the director of the Office of Management and Budget by a vote of 53 to 47, and by Friday morning the city had already moved on to the next thing, which in Washington is always the next thing.

I had dinner Tuesday night at Eliza’s place in Kalorama. The usual crowd: a retired ambassador who still corrects your pronunciation of ‘Doha,’ a bipartisan lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, and a woman from the Hudson Institute who was very invested in the asparagus. Vought came up the way appointments always come up now, which is to say someone sighed and someone else poured more wine and a third person said, ‘Well, elections have consequences.’ That sentence is the civic equivalent of a shrug emoji, and it has been doing more heavy lifting in this town than the entire Architect of the Capitol’s office.

Here is what Russell Vought has actually written, in his own hand, under his own name, for anyone with a functioning search bar. He wants to revive ‘impoundment,’ which is the charming Nixon-era practice of the executive branch simply refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated, on the grounds that the Constitution said so if you squint at it sideways. He wants to purge the federal workforce. He wants agencies to answer to the president the way a retriever answers to a whistle. None of this was hidden. He went on podcasts. He gave speeches. He wrote a chapter. The man came with a user’s manual.

And the Senate read the manual, and then fifty-three senators voted yes.

I am old enough to remember when ‘advice and consent’ was supposed to mean something — not a hurdle, exactly, but at least a speed bump. A reason to slow down, ask a question, look a nominee in the eye and say, ‘Sir, you proposed putting the people who issue my mother’s Social Security check into a state of clinical distress — could you expand on that?’ Instead we got the usual performance: stern opening statements, pointed questions that the nominee graciously declined to answer, and a procedural vote scheduled for a Thursday because nothing bad ever happens on a Thursday.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for twenty-six years and has opinions about humidity that would frighten you, called me the morning after the vote. She wasn’t crying. Judy does not cry. She said, in the flat tone of a person describing weather, ‘They’re going to come for us, and the people who could have stopped it won’t remember they had the chance.’ Then she asked if I wanted her lasagna recipe, because Judy copes by feeding people, and I said yes, because I cope by writing columns no one in power will read.

The bipartisan lobbyist at Eliza’s table — and I want to be clear, he is bipartisan in the sense that he will take a check from anyone — leaned over the bread course and explained to me, patiently, that Vought is ‘actually very smart’ and ‘understands the machine.’ This is what passes for a defense in this city now. Not that a nominee is decent, or qualified in the old-fashioned sense, or even particularly competent. Just that he understands the machine. The problem, I wanted to say and did not say, because I am still occasionally invited to Eliza’s, is that understanding the machine is precisely the credential of the person who intends to break it.

What I find almost funnier than the vote is the surrounding theater. Democrats held the floor all night. They read from Vought’s writings. They wore their serious faces. They produced the kind of speeches that get excerpted on MSNBC and then aggressively ignored by the only people in a position to act on them, which is to say themselves. At no point did anyone threaten a single thing that might have cost a single colleague a single ounce of comfort. It was civic disapproval in its purest form: expressed, archived, and entirely non-binding.

And the Republicans who voted yes — including the handful who, in quieter rooms, will tell you privately that they have concerns — performed a different kind of theater. The theater of the inevitable. ‘The president is entitled to his team.’ ‘He’ll be constrained by the institution.’ ‘He’s not as extreme as his writing.’ Every one of those sentences is a door, and every one of those doors opens onto the same hallway, and at the end of the hallway is a man with a list and a legal theory.

I want to be precise about something, because precision is the last thing any of us have left. Vought is not unusual in this town for being radical. Washington is full of radicals; it’s a feature of the place. He is unusual for being radical out loud, in full paragraphs, with footnotes. He told us what he would do. The Senate was furnished with the documents. The press described them accurately. And then fifty-three grown adults, most of whom will send me a Christmas card, voted to give him the keys to the federal budget anyway.

This is the thing I keep trying to get people to see, and failing, and trying again. The danger in a moment like this one is not the ideologue. Ideologues are common as pigeons. The danger is the enabler who has convinced himself he is a moderate because he still wears a blue blazer and still goes to Eliza’s dinners and still says ‘well, elections have consequences’ while the fork travels from the plate to the mouth.

When the histories of this period are written — and they will be written, by people Judy is currently training — the question will not be what Russell Vought did with the Office of Management and Budget. We already know roughly what he intends. The question will be what the other ninety-nine senators were doing on February 6, 2025, while fifty-three of their colleagues handed him the office. And the answer, for most of them, is going to be: the dishes. They were doing the dishes. They were pouring the wine. They were passing the salad. They were, as ever, waiting for someone else to be the one who said the obvious thing out loud.

I’ll be the one, then. Again. You were warned. In writing. By him. This was not a surprise. It was an appointment, in both senses of the word, and we kept it.

The Cheapest Thing in Washington Is Still a Signature

Margaret Thorne
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The Cheapest Thing in Washington Is Still a Signature

There was a moment Wednesday night — somewhere between the endive salad and the second bottle of a Willamette Valley pinot my friend Eliza insists on bringing to every dinner whether or not it pairs — when the bipartisan lobbyist at the end of the table leaned back, dabbed his mouth with a linen napkin, and said, of the day’s signing ceremony: Well, that one was free. Nobody disagreed. Nobody followed up. A plate moved. The host asked about the dessert course. This is, I have come to understand, how things work now in the capital that used to at least pretend to govern.

The president signed an executive order Wednesday barring transgender women from participating in women’s sports. I watched the clip twice, because I am old enough to remember when a presidential signature was supposed to be a serious instrument and not a prop in a middle-school play about serious instruments. The pen came out. The cameras clicked. The men behind him arranged their faces into the expression Washington men have been practicing since the Bush administration — the one that says I am a grave person considering a grave matter — and then everyone went to lunch.

I am going to do something that used to be called journalism and ask a plain question: what, mechanically, does that order do? The NCAA already shifted its policy. The major women’s sports federations have been making their own rules for years. The actual population affected by this order, in the entire country, in any given competitive season, numbers somewhere between a rounding error and a statistical ghost. If the federal government were a household, it would be the equivalent of calling a family meeting to announce, with solemnity and a signed proclamation, that henceforth no one is allowed to put pickles in the blender.

And yet — and this is what my sister-in-law Judy, who has spent thirty years at the National Archives watching presidential paper come and go, keeps trying to tell anyone who will listen — the order is not for anything. The order is of something. It is of a new kind of governance where the document is the deliverable, where the news cycle is the constituency, where the point of the signature is to be photographed signing.

I have no patience for the argument that this is unprecedented. Every administration in my memory has reached for the executive order when Congress became too tedious to persuade, and every administration has been lectured about it by the party out of power and then done exactly the same thing upon returning to power. What has changed is the ratio. The orders used to at least pretend to be the last resort. Now they are the first, and often the only, move. The pen is not an instrument of executive authority anymore. It is a content-creation tool.

Eliza — who is, I should disclose, the sort of person who will tell you she voted for nobody in the last three elections and expects to be congratulated for it — asked the table a question I thought was worth the price of the pinot. Name one piece of actual legislation, she said, that has cleared both chambers and been signed into law in the last six weeks. The bipartisan lobbyist laughed. A woman from Treasury changed the subject to a restaurant on P Street. Nobody produced a name. I did not produce one either, and I read four newspapers before breakfast.

This is what I mean by civic cowardice, and I mean it in the precise, unflattering sense. It is not cowardice to sign a culture-war order; signing culture-war orders is in fact the opposite, a kind of cheap courage, the courage of knowing the cameras are already on. The cowardice is in the rest of it. The cowardice is in a Congress that has discovered it no longer has to do anything, because the executive branch will do the performance for them and the judiciary will sort out whatever survives. The cowardice is in a press corps that will cover the signing as news and the absence of legislation as gridlock, as if those were two separate weather systems and not the same storm.

I want to be careful here, because this column has a bad habit of being read by people looking for ammunition. I am not interested, today, in relitigating the sports question itself, which is a real question with real pain on more than one side of it and which deserves a seriousness that a twenty-second Oval Office photo op is structurally incapable of providing. I am interested in the instrument. I am interested in what it says about us that our government, such as it is, has decided the signature is the work.

Somebody at the table — I think it was Eliza’s husband, who is a lawyer of the kind who uses the word optics without irony — said the quiet thing. He said: It’s fine. The courts will handle it. And there it was, the whole theory of modern American governance in six words. The president signs. The courts handle it. Congress raises money. The voters are given a show. The show is the policy. The policy is the show.

I asked Judy, the next morning over the phone, whether any of this would look different a hundred years from now when some other archivist is pulling these orders out of a box. She said the orders themselves would look fine. They always look fine, she said. It’s the absence around them that tells you what was happening. I have been thinking about that sentence for two days.

So here is what I am sitting with, on a gray Wednesday in February, while Washington congratulates itself on another productive signing day. A country that has outsourced its legislature to its executive and its executive to its media operation is not a country that is governing itself. It is a country that is watching itself be governed, and clapping at the parts it recognizes, and going home.

The signatures are the cheapest thing in this city. They have always been cheap. What used to be expensive was the work underneath them. I do not know anyone, in or out of government, who could tell you with a straight face that the work is still being done. And the dinner parties, I notice, are getting quieter at exactly the moments they used to get loud.

The President Said We Would ‘Own’ Gaza, and the Dinner Party Kept Passing the Salad

Margaret Thorne
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The President Said We Would ‘Own’ Gaza, and the Dinner Party Kept Passing the Salad

When did we decide that a man could stand in the East Room, announce that the United States would ‘take over’ a strip of land currently occupied by two million people, suggest the permanent relocation of those people somewhere — anywhere, he wasn’t picky — and that the correct response was to file it between the tariff headline and the Super Bowl prop-bet roundup? Because that is what happened on Tuesday evening, and I would like somebody, anybody, to stand up and say it happened.

The President used the word ‘own.’ He used the word ‘level.’ At one point he said ‘clean it out,’ as if describing a garage. Standing next to him was the Prime Minister of Israel, wearing the face of a man who has just been handed a check he did not expect to clear. The cameras rolled. The transcript will exist forever. And somewhere between the announcement and the eleven o’clock hour, the whole thing was quietly reclassified in the national bloodstream as one of those things the President says.

I was at Eliza’s on Tuesday. Eliza hosts a standing Tuesday supper that has, over twenty-odd years, metabolized roughly every major foreign policy crisis of the post–Cold War era over braised short ribs. The television was on in the next room, muted, the way it always is — ambient prestige, like a fireplace. The chyron said what the chyron said. I watched a senior partner at a firm I will not name glance at it, glance away, and ask whether anyone had been to the new place on N Street.

Nobody at that table was stupid. Nobody at that table was uninformed. Two of them have security clearances I am not supposed to know about and one of them used to run a desk at State. And yet the only person who said the quiet part aloud was a bipartisan lobbyist I will describe only as bipartisan, who leaned toward me over the cheese course and said, flatly, ‘That’s ethnic cleansing with a ribbon on it,’ and then asked for the mustard.

He was not wrong. He was also not going to say it on a panel, or to a client, or into any device with a microphone in it. The thing I have learned in thirty years of writing this column is that Washington does not actually lack the vocabulary for what it sees. It simply rations the vocabulary. There are words you use in private and words you use in public and the gap between those two vocabularies is where a republic goes to die.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives longer than some of the documents she handles have been declassified, called me on Wednesday morning. She had one question. ‘What are we going to file this under?’ She meant it seriously. She meant: in fifty years, when some graduate student pulls the folder, what is the subject heading going to read? ‘Reconstruction Plan, Gaza, 2025’? ‘Proposal, Voluntary Relocation of Noncombatants’? Judy, who is not a sentimental woman, said the archive always tells you what a country could not bring itself to name in the moment.

Reconstruction. That’s the word they’re floating. Reconstruction is what you do to a downtown after a hurricane. It is not what you do to a population. But the vocabulary has already shifted, the way it always shifts — first in the press release, then in the wire copy, then in the mouth of the cable anchor who has been told to stay neutral, and finally at Eliza’s dinner table, where by the second bottle it has become ‘the Gaza situation,’ a phrase that launders everything it touches.

The opposition, meanwhile, issued statements. I read them. I read all of them. They were written by people who were clearly hoping that somebody braver would go first. The Senate Minority Leader used the phrase ‘deeply concerning,’ which is what we now say instead of ‘no.’ A handful of House members with safe seats managed the word ‘unacceptable,’ and one of them actually said ‘ethnic cleansing,’ for which he was immediately described in three different outlets as ‘going further than his colleagues,’ as if naming the thing were the provocation and not the thing itself.

I keep thinking about the smile on Netanyahu’s face. It was not a triumphant smile. It was the smile of a man who has watched an American President volunteer, on live television, to absorb the international legal consequences of something Israel has wanted for a long time and could not say out loud either. You could see him calculating, in real time, which cabinet members would have to be informed and which could learn about it on the plane home.

The Pam Bondi confirmation happened the same week. USAID personnel were placed on administrative leave — globally, a word I did not think I would ever see applied to a furlough. A ten percent tariff on Chinese goods went into effect and China fired back at our coal and our soybeans. Any one of these, in a different decade, would have been the story of the month. Stacked together, they become weather. That is the trick. That has always been the trick. Flood the zone and the zone stops being a zone.

And here is what I want to say, and what I suspect my Tuesday table would rather I didn’t. A country that cannot bring itself to name a proposal for the mass relocation of a civilian population — cannot name it in its papers of record, cannot name it at its dinner tables, cannot name it on the Senate floor — is not a country having a debate. It is a country practicing a silence. The silence is the policy. The silence is what gets filed in Judy’s folder.

I am told, by friends who mean well, that it will not actually happen. That the logistics are impossible, the allies will balk, the courts will intervene, the thing will collapse under the weight of its own unseriousness. Perhaps. I have been told a great many things will not happen, over thirty years, and a surprising number of them have. The useful question is never whether a thing will be executed. The useful question is what it costs a country to hear a thing proposed and decline to flinch.

We heard it. We declined. The salad kept moving around the table. Somebody, eventually, is going to have to explain to Judy’s graduate student what the heading should read, and I suspect the honest answer is going to be the one none of us wanted to write down on Tuesday night.

What We Delete When We Delete a Webpage

Margaret Thorne
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What We Delete When We Delete a Webpage

At a dinner party in Kalorama on Saturday night, someone asked — halfway through the second bottle, which is when the interesting questions always arrive — whether any of us had actually tried to look up the CDC’s page on maternal mortality that afternoon. Three of us had. None of us had found it. My friend Eliza, who has spent twenty years in public health and is constitutionally incapable of saying anything in a rising tone, set down her wineglass and said, very quietly, that the page had been there on Thursday. By Friday, it had been what she called ‘reviewed.’ By Saturday, it had been what the rest of us would call gone.

I want to be careful here, because I have been around Washington long enough to know that every administration rearranges the furniture when it moves in, and every opposition columnist treats the rearrangement as the fall of the Republic. Websites get updated. Priorities shift. Someone in a basement office at HHS decides the landing page needs a refresh and a whole administration’s worth of bar charts quietly migrate to a subfolder nobody will ever find again. That is ordinary. That is boring. That is not what is happening right now.

What is happening right now is that entire pages — on climate, on vaccines, on gender, on demographic data the federal government has been collecting since before any of us were born — are being pulled down, in response to executive orders, with the efficiency of a hotel housekeeper stripping a bed. And the reaction from most of the capital has been the reaction you’d expect from a town that long ago decided its highest civic virtue was not making a scene at brunch.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for longer than some of the current Cabinet has been shaving, called me on Sunday morning in the particular flat voice she uses when she is furious and trying not to be. She wanted to know if I understood — really understood — what it means, as a matter of basic recordkeeping, to delete a government webpage. Not to revise it. Not to archive it. To delete it. She said the word four times in a row, the way you say a word when you are testing whether it has stopped meaning anything.

The official line, from the people whose job it is to produce official lines, is that these are simply policy pages being brought into alignment with new directives. Fine. I will accept, for the sake of argument, that ‘alignment’ is a word grown adults are allowed to use without laughing. But a dataset is not a policy. A mortality chart is not a directive. The number of Americans who died of a given cause in a given year is not a position paper that a new administration gets to edit because it preferred a different outcome.

I spoke this week with Dr. Helena Marchetti, a records-management scholar at a university I’ll let her identify herself at, who told me something I have not been able to stop turning over. ‘The instinct in democratic governance,’ she said, ‘is to add context to the record. The instinct in authoritarian governance is to subtract from it. We are watching, in real time, which instinct the American federal bureaucracy defaults to under pressure.’ She said this, by the way, while waiting for a sandwich.

You will notice that I am not naming the executive orders in question, and that is deliberate, because the specific orders are almost beside the point. The orders will be challenged. Some will be rewritten. Some will be quietly allowed to expire the way these things always are. What will not be un-done is the muscle memory this moment is building inside the agencies themselves — the new understanding, at the GS-13 level, that the safest thing to do with an inconvenient page is to take it down first and litigate the principle never.

At the same dinner party, a lobbyist whose clients I will describe only as bipartisan leaned across the table and told me, with the affection of a man settling in to explain the weather, that I was being hysterical. The pages weren’t gone, he said. They were on the Wayback Machine. Somebody had screenshotted them. A nonprofit in Toronto was mirroring everything. He delivered this as reassurance. I watched him deliver it as reassurance. I understood, in that moment, that we had arrived at the stage of the decline at which a sitting adult in this city can say, out loud, that it’s fine the United States government is erasing its own records because Canadians are keeping a copy.

This is the part of the column where I am supposed to note, bravely, that both parties have done versions of this before. Fine. Both parties have done versions of this before. The Bush-era EPA shuffled climate language. The Obama administration pulled down pages nobody misses. The first Trump administration had its own enthusiastic relationship with the delete key. I mention this only because I refuse to give the current crop of defenders the satisfaction of pretending I haven’t heard the whataboutism coming. I have. It arrives, as always, pre-chilled.

But there is a difference between a page being revised and a page being memory-holed, and any adult who has spent five minutes in this town knows which one is which. The test is simple. Does the previous version live somewhere the public can find it, with a note explaining what changed and why? Or has it been dropped down a shaft and covered with sod? We are, right now, getting a lot more sod than shafts should require.

What unsettles me is not the deletions themselves. What unsettles me is how quickly the rest of the apparatus — the congressional offices, the trade associations, the think tanks whose entire stated purpose is institutional memory — decided the appropriate posture was a small, apologetic shrug. My colleague Eliza told me she’d written to two senators’ staffs about the public health pages. One wrote back with a form letter about ‘executive prerogative.’ The other didn’t write back at all. This is what civic cowardice looks like at the staff level: a form letter and a silence, both billed to the taxpayer.

I have been writing this column, in one form or another, for thirty years, and the thing I have learned about American democratic backsliding is that it is almost never announced. It is almost always administrative. It arrives not as a jackboot but as a content management ticket, marked low priority, assigned to an intern, closed out by Friday. By the time anyone notices, the question is no longer whether the page existed. The question is whether you can prove it did, and whether the people you would need to prove it to still think proof is the kind of thing that matters.

So I will end where I always end, which is by warning you that I do not like where this is going, and by noting that the people who should be sounding the alarm are instead refreshing their own bios. A country that permits its government to quietly delete its own past is a country that has already decided, without voting on it, what kind of future it plans to tolerate. Judy is right to be furious. Eliza is right to be quiet. And the lobbyist at dinner is right about one thing only: somebody in Toronto has a copy. I would prefer, as a matter of national dignity, that we didn’t have to ask them for it.

Ken Martin and the Permanent Rearranging of the Same Fourteen Chairs

Margaret Thorne
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Ken Martin and the Permanent Rearranging of the Same Fourteen Chairs

Quick: name the last chair of the Democratic National Committee. Don’t Google. I’ll wait. If you got it on the first try you are either being paid to know or you are the kind of person I try to avoid seating next to at dinner, because you will want to talk about it, and I have already spent thirty years pretending to care.

I was at Eliza’s on Saturday night — she made the short ribs, the ones she learned from a cookbook she now refers to as “problematic,” though she has not stopped making the short ribs — when the news came in that Ken Martin of Minnesota had been elected to run the party. Eliza, who has sat through every post-election autopsy since Mondale and has the liver to prove it, put down her wine glass and said, “Oh good. A Ken.” There was a silence at the table that I would describe as neither hopeful nor sad. It was the silence of people who have been here before, and who suspect they will be here again, in four years, with a different Ken.

The new chair gave a speech about “meeting voters where they are,” which is the phrase the party has been using since I had brown hair. Voters, as far as I can tell, are where they have always been — at work, in traffic, in the checkout line wondering why a bag of grapes costs nine dollars — and the Democratic Party continues to arrive at that location approximately eighteen months late, slightly out of breath, with a PowerPoint.

“This is a structural realignment moment,” Dr. Alan Brigham, a political scientist at one of those Washington think tanks whose name contains the word ‘Institute’ twice, told a cable panel I watched with the sound on for reasons I cannot reconstruct. “The party now has a real opportunity to rebuild from the grassroots up.” The party has had, by my count, a real opportunity to rebuild from the grassroots up in 2004, 2010, 2014, 2016, and 2022. At some point a real opportunity that arrives every eighteen months stops being an opportunity and starts being a hobby.

What the DNC chair race actually was, for those of you fortunate enough not to have followed it, was four months of state party functionaries mailing each other position papers about “the path forward” while the country outside the conference hotel continued to come apart in ways the position papers did not address. One candidate promised to hire more organizers. Another promised to fire some consultants. A third promised to do both, somehow, with the same money. The winner promised “a fifty-state strategy,” which is what the loser of every DNC race since Howard Dean has been promising, because it polls well among the four hundred and forty people who vote in DNC races.

My friend who lobbies on both sides of the aisle — I will call him bipartisan in the sense that he has clients who contradict each other and an accountant who does not ask — put it more crisply over the cheese course. “They picked the guy who will not embarrass them,” he said, “which is a real downgrade from picking the guy who might save them.” He was already reaching for the manchego. He is always already reaching for the manchego.

My sister-in-law Judy, who has spent her working life at the National Archives and who possesses the particular calm of a woman who has filed things that outlasted presidencies, emailed me Sunday morning with a one-line note: “We have a file on every DNC chair since 1848. I have not been asked to pull one since 1996.” I read that line three times. It is, I think, the most honest political analysis I have read this year, and it was delivered by a woman whose job is literally to remember things professionally.

Here is what nobody at Eliza’s table was willing to say out loud, though we were all thinking it between bites: the Democratic Party does not have a chairman problem. It has a nerve problem. It has spent a decade outsourcing conviction to committees, focus-grouping its spine into a noodle, and then acting shocked when voters decline to turn out for a party that will not tell them, in a complete sentence, what it is for. You cannot consultant your way out of that. You certainly cannot Ken your way out of it.

And yet the coverage this weekend treated the election of a new chair as though something had happened. Something did happen. A conference room in National Harbor was booked, a balloon drop was executed, a man delivered remarks, and the machinery that produced three consecutive losses to a candidate the party keeps assuring us is unelectable rotated one notch clockwise and resumed humming. This is not renewal. This is a screensaver.

I will tell you what I told Eliza as we were clearing the plates. The danger is not that Ken Martin will fail. Ken Martin may well succeed at the job as the job has been defined, which is raising money and not embarrassing the donors. The danger is that the people who run the opposition party in a country sliding somewhere it has not been before have decided that the correct response to an emergency is a procedural election, a unity speech, and a press release about “the work ahead.” The work ahead, as near as I can tell, is the same work that was behind, performed by a new man with the same first name.

I am not asking the Democrats to panic. I gave up asking the Democrats to panic somewhere around the second Obama midterm. I am asking them to notice that the building is on fire, and that the fire does not particularly care which Ken is holding the clipboard. If they cannot manage that — and this weekend suggests they cannot — then we are not watching a party rebuild. We are watching it redecorate. And the people who redecorate during a fire are not, historically, the people we remember fondly.

Musk Granted Access to Treasury System That Moves $5 Trillion a Year, Immediately Changes Default Password to ‘doge420’

Cody Thompson
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Musk Granted Access to Treasury System That Moves $5 Trillion a Year, Immediately Changes Default Password to ‘doge420’

WASHINGTON, DC — The Treasury Department confirmed Friday that Elon Musk and a roving band of what appear to be unpaid interns have been granted read-write access to the Federal Payment System, the largely invisible plumbing through which roughly $5 trillion in Social Security checks, vendor payments, tax refunds, and military salaries flows each year. Officials stressed that Musk has been given this access in his capacity as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and not, as one reporter phrased it, ‘because he asked.’

The Federal Payment System, known internally as FPS and to its longtime career staff as ‘the thing that cannot break,’ had until this week been operated by a small team of Treasury employees whose combined median age was 57 and who, between them, had survived nine administrations without once being profiled in Wired. As of Friday, at least two of them have been placed on administrative leave for, in the words of a department spokesperson, ‘raising concerns through channels.’

‘The system is a single point of failure for the functioning of the United States government,’ said Brennan Voss, a former Treasury payments specialist now at the Mercer Policy Institute. ‘You don’t hand the keys to someone who tweets through a Red Bull. You hand them to a man named Gene who has been there since 1994 and whose entire personality is making sure your grandmother’s check clears on the third.’

Musk, for his part, spent much of Friday posting screenshots of what he described as ‘obvious waste,’ including a $14 million payment to a contractor he tagged with the caption ‘LOL,’ and a recurring disbursement to the Social Security Administration that he flagged as ‘possible duplicate.’ That disbursement was, according to Treasury officials speaking on background, Social Security.

The access was granted through an emergency authorization that bypassed the standard six-month onboarding process normally required for contact with the system, a process that typically includes background checks, a polygraph, and what one former official described as ‘a really uncomfortable lunch with a woman named Diane.’ Musk’s team, which includes at least four engineers under the age of 25 and one individual whose LinkedIn lists his most recent position as ‘founder, stealth,’ reportedly completed onboarding in under ninety minutes.

Markets responded with the measured calm typically reserved for things markets do not understand. The dollar dipped 0.4 percent against the yen before recovering on news that the dip was, according to three separate analysts, ‘probably fine.’ Treasury yields moved in the direction Treasury yields move when no one wants to be the first person to say anything out loud. Gold, sensing something, ticked up.

‘From a pure risk-management standpoint, this is the kind of thing you would flag in a board memo and then quit over,’ said Helena Krantz, a payments-infrastructure consultant who spent twelve years at the Federal Reserve. ‘The FPS is not a dashboard. It is not a Tesla. If you push the wrong button, a VA hospital in Tulsa stops being able to buy bandages. Elon has historically had a complicated relationship with buttons.’

Inside the Eccles Building, morale is reportedly what one employee described as ‘the precise opposite of good.’ Staffers have taken to printing documentation rather than storing it on shared drives, and at least one section chief has begun referring to the incoming DOGE team exclusively as ‘the guests.’ A senior career official, asked to characterize the mood, said only: ‘We are watching a man who once named his child a license plate touch the lever that pays the Army.’

Musk has insisted the access is purely diagnostic and that he is, in his own words, ‘just reading.’ He has also, according to two sources familiar with the logs, initiated three test transactions, attempted to rename a database table, and asked Treasury IT whether the system could be ported to run on AWS by Monday. It cannot.

Congressional response has broken roughly along the lines one would expect from a Congress that has not, as an institution, touched the Federal Payment System with a ten-foot pole in thirty years. Senators who opposed the move released statements using the word ‘unprecedented’ an average of 2.3 times apiece. Senators who supported it released statements praising Musk’s ‘hands-on approach,’ a phrase that, in the context of a $5 trillion wire system, is doing a considerable amount of work.

Asked Friday afternoon whether the administration had any concerns about a private citizen with active federal contracts worth roughly $20 billion having root access to the mechanism that pays those contracts, the White House press secretary said the question was ‘very silly’ and moved on to a question about the Super Bowl.

As of filing, the default administrator password on a non-production instance of the FPS had, according to a Treasury employee who requested anonymity to avoid being ‘the next Gene,’ been changed from ‘Treasury2024!’ to something the employee declined to repeat on the record, though they would confirm it contained the number 420, the word ‘doge,’ and a single, defiant exclamation point.

Clayborn County’s Final New Year’s Resolution Expired Thursday at 7:14 P.M. in a Casey’s Parking Lot

Hal Cranston
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Clayborn County’s Final New Year’s Resolution Expired Thursday at 7:14 P.M. in a Casey’s Parking Lot

DATELINE — CLAYBORN, IA — The last surviving New Year’s resolution in Clayborn County was pronounced abandoned Thursday evening at 7:14 p.m., in the east lot of the Casey’s General Store on Route 9, approximately four feet from a silver Ford Escape and directly adjacent to a partially eaten breakfast pizza. The resolution, belonging to 44-year-old insurance adjuster Kyle Dunnewold, had been to ‘drink more water and also read.’ It is survived by one unopened case of LaCroix and a library card that never left the glovebox.

Dunnewold’s resolution outlasted a field of roughly 1,900 others registered across the county since January 1, a cohort that thinned steadily through the month before collapsing in the final week. Local trackers had identified Dunnewold as the likely last man standing on Tuesday, when he was observed finishing a bottle of Aquafina in the Ace Hardware parking lot while holding, though not reading, a paperback copy of ‘The Power of Now.’ By Thursday, both the water and the reading had ceased.

‘We see a cluster of failures right around January 17, another around the 24th, and then a long tail that cleans itself up by the end of the month,’ said Dr. Renata Klipsch, a behavioral statistician with the University of Northern Iowa who has tracked regional resolution attrition for eleven years. ‘January 31 is what we call the Full Casey’s Event. The remaining willpower migrates, almost in unison, toward a hot case.’

The county’s earliest casualties were, as ever, the gym memberships. Clayborn Family Fitness manager Troy Benavidez confirmed that of the 212 people who signed up January 2, only eight were still attending by MLK Day, and that two of those were ‘just using the sauna, which I don’t count.’ Benavidez said he has stopped learning new names in January as a matter of personal policy. ‘I start in February,’ he said. ‘It saves time and feelings.’

The dietary resolutions fell next, undone largely by a three-day stretch of single-digit lows that the National Weather Service described as ‘deep winter’ and that local residents described as ‘the kind of cold where a salad feels like an accusation.’ Sales of slow-cooker beef at the Hy-Vee on Jefferson increased 38 percent over the same week last year. Sales of kale remained, in the words of produce manager Denise Orbach, ‘the same eleven bags we always have.’

Mrs. Peterson, 78, of Maple Street, who makes a point of not making resolutions, said she was not surprised. ‘Every January my son Douglas tells me he’s going to run a marathon,’ she said, stirring a cup of Sanka at the counter of the Wagon Wheel. ‘Every February I ask him how the marathon’s going, and every February he tells me he’s going to run a marathon. We’ve been doing this since Clinton.’

County Supervisor Lyle Forsgren, asked whether the board had considered a civic resolution program to supplement the personal ones, said he had ‘looked into it’ and determined that ‘people don’t want the county telling them to floss.’ Forsgren, who also serves on the Efficiency Task Force, clarified that his own resolution — to respond to constituent emails within 48 hours — had ended January 6, and that he considered the six days ‘a strong showing, frankly.’

Pastor Ellis Muntz of First Methodist delivered a sermon last Sunday titled ‘On Grace and the Peloton,’ which he described afterward as ‘mostly about how Jesus didn’t have goals, He had a ministry.’ Attendance was up slightly. Muntz attributed this not to the sermon itself but to the fact that the sanctuary is heated and several parishioners had, by that point in the month, canceled their gym memberships and had nowhere else warm to sit on a Sunday morning.

The mechanics of Dunnewold’s particular collapse were described in detail by witness Carla Hemmig, 31, who was pumping gas at the adjacent island. ‘He walked out holding a pizza and a Mountain Dew, stood there for a second looking at the pizza, and then just — nodded,’ Hemmig said. ‘Like he was agreeing with the pizza about something.’ Dunnewold declined to comment for this article, citing the fact that he was eating.

Behavioral economists have long noted that the end of January tends to produce what Dr. Klipsch termed ‘a regional exhale,’ in which a population that has been performing virtue for thirty days collectively agrees, without discussion, to stop. This year’s exhale appears to have been particularly pronounced, owing in part to the cold, in part to the general news environment, and in part to what Klipsch described as ‘the cumulative psychological weight of hearing the phrase artificial intelligence nineteen times before breakfast.’

A small number of residents have already begun drafting February resolutions, which behavioral researchers consider a ‘bargaining-stage’ behavior and which historically fail within four days. Dunnewold himself was reportedly overheard Friday morning telling a coworker that he was going to ‘start fresh on the first of the month, but like, for real this time,’ a sentence Klipsch confirmed has been said aloud in Clayborn County an estimated 14,000 times since 1987.

Wagon Wheel waitress Marlena Shuck, refilling coffee at the end of the counter, offered what may stand as the piece’s final word on the matter. ‘Every January they come in and order the egg whites,’ she said. ‘Every February they come in and apologize to the hash browns.’

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