McSweeney’s

I Still Believe in the Inherent Goodness of Humankind, and the Literal Existence of the Easter Bunny

John Danek — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0700

Wherever I look, my gaze can find something horrific on which to focus. Whether it be news of atrocities committed by our fascist-leaning governments, obvious acceleration towards environmental collapse, or the Criterion Collection’s glaring omission of the Jackass series, heinous evils are all around us.

Yet, despite it all, I still believe in the unassailable goodness of humanity.

I also believe that the Easter Bunny is a real, tangible creature capable of wielding magic and producing plastic eggs filled with individually wrapped candies.

Throughout human history, righteousness inevitably triumphs over evil. Yes, sometimes the darkness becomes so strong and oppressive that we forget what the light is like. And that darkness can last for so long that people live entire lives in its grip. But eventually, the light always returns.

Similarly, the Easter Bunny is a living being who lies dormant for 364 days each year. Where does it hibernate? My research has tracked it down to one of four wooded areas surrounding Akron, Ohio. The semi-messianic beast has powers beyond our imagination but chooses to use them only to help the world’s children, early in the morning of Easter Sunday. It serves as an example to all people that the path of virtue is always available to us.

I don’t proclaim to understand how some people have the capacity to choose the path of evil. I also don’t fully understand the working relationship between the Easter Bunny and Jesus Christ, but I have a theory that they are, to some degree, in cahoots and carry out tasks for each other. The divine bunny’s nature is only known to God, Elijah, and maybe my friend Paul, who throws an amazing Easter party every year where I drink way too much too early in the day.

I have asked many confectionery manufacturers, big and small, via their website contact forms, whether they have any business or logistical relationship with the Easter Bunny. Their collective silence tells me everything I need to know.

Before you begin making assumptions about my naïvety or gullible nature, let me answer a few questions I repeatedly get from family and former friends:

“Do you believe in Santa Claus?”
Yes. It’s just science. They found his bones in the city of Myra, and their odd size suggests to me that he could grow and shrink, befitting someone traveling through chimneys.

“Do you believe in the Tooth Fairy?”
Of course. Look around you. Do you see piles of baby teeth from previous generations? No, you do not. But if billions of people have lived on this planet, where did all those teeth go? Checkmate, nonbelievers.

"Do you believe in the invisible hand of the free market, which will deliver all people to economic prosperity if they are allowed to pursue their own selfish desires?
No. Don’t be ridiculous.

I hope now you can better understand my unshakable faith in things difficult to see, including holiday cryptids and general human decency. When times get extraordinarily dismal, I remember Mr. Fred Rogers’ quote: “Look for the helpers.” And while a quick web search didn’t yield many good examples of helpers for our current existential threats, Google’s AI Overview suggested that I might have meant to type “Hamburger Helper,” which indeed distracted me from the curse of being human. I am very hungry.

Excerpts from The Believer: The USA Ultimate Masters Championships

Will McGrath — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0700

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FEATURES:

Middle-aged athletes
Scoobers
Coke Slurpees
The unknowable future

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In July of 2025, I flew out to Aurora, Colorado, with my wife and some friends to see if we were still the best forty-something ultimate frisbee players in the United States of America. We’d been training for months, and for decades. A gold medal from 2024 hung in my closet in Minneapolis, gave a muted clink when I reached for my khakis, but in the meantime, a whole other crop of mid-forties motherfuckers had sprung up or aged into the grand masters division. They wanted to snatch our gold.

I should clarify some things before I tell you what happened at the USA Ultimate Masters Championships—the national tournament for old heads—because I assume the casual reader is not familiar with the inner workings of ultimate. (And, yes, it’s just ultimate; we omit the f-word due to trademark objections from the Wham-O corporation and use the term disc instead.) Ultimate is the only sport whose name is an adjective, and it is a child’s game I’ve been playing competitively for the last several decades of my life. This year I turn forty-five years old. I say “child’s game” with warm-hearted sarcasm, since the burnished animal hide of the baseball or football or basketball has, over the course of a century, acquired a mature and dignified patina that the plastic flying disc has not yet achieved; give the sport another few decades and we’ll reassess.

Ultimate is played seven vee seven on a field that’s 70 percent the size of an American football field. The rules are straightforward: You and your teammates pass the disc until someone catches it in the end zone for a score. Once you catch the disc, you must stop moving as quickly as momentum allows and pass it to another player. You have ten seconds to do this. If the disc is in your hands after ten seconds, or if it hits the ground, your team loses possession. Meanwhile, the other team is trying to prevent you from doing this by any means other than making physical contact with your body, which is a foul. Like any good sport, it is dense with technical jargon, although knowing what a scoober and a skinny break are will not enhance your immediate enjoyment of this report.

The sport is characterized by a fast-paced highlight-reel athleticism—sprinting and cutting and juking and diving to catch a trailing disc before it touches grass—and over the last decade, clips of ultimate have regularly been featured on SportsCenter’s nightly Top 10. The run of play involves such aesthetic delights as watching the smooth slicing parabola of a white disc against pristine Colorado blue, the disc tilted along an axis you didn’t know existed until you watched your friend Alicia send it deep and hit a teammate in full stride in the end zone.

Ultimate’s most salient detail, perhaps, is that it is self-adjudicated: Players, not referees, call fouls and violations. If in the heat of combat two opposing players cannot quickly agree on whether a foul occurred, play simply resets to the previous pass. This system, utopian in nature, generally works, due to the sport’s core philosophy—the “Spirit of the Game”—loftily named and drilled into every new ulty player from the moment they first touch plastic: Compete as hard as possible and don’t be a piece of shit. At the highest levels, and during the finals of major tournaments, there are usually referee-like figures called “observers” on the field, but they are non-interventionists, involved only if appealed to by players mired in an unresolvable dispute, at which point the observer’s decision becomes final. But this is rare. Ultimate still flaunts a countercultural vision, and it’s best to keep the Man out of it.

The sport’s fusion of intense athleticism and weirdo antiauthoritarian vibes results in the kind of people who will humblebrag about their VO2 max and then roll you the tightest little pinner of a joint you’ve ever seen. I’ve played with and against professionals at the apex of their fields: municipal judges and ER docs, forensic biomechanical engineers, physical and mental therapists, C-suite denizens, and military advisers who’ve survived active war zones. These are people who on the field respond exclusively to names like Scooter, Doobie, Pokey, Frenchie, Party, Cookie, Mini, Juggles, Puddles, Pebbles, A$, A-Strike, and Shwa. “Who the fuck is Aaron?” I heard someone say once. “My name is Girth.”

Anyway: We came out to win Nationals again, me and my old-ass friends. The Masters Championships are an age-restricted event, this year featuring 111 teams across eight divisions. Female players age thirty-plus and male players age thirty-three-plus are eligible, with further subdivisions at ages forty and forty-eight. (I know people playing at a high level in their sixties.) I last played a Club season—no age restrictions—when I was thirty-eight years old. I contributed well until an eighteen-year-old jumped over my entire body to catch a goal. It occurred to me then that I might not be able to contend at my fullest ability against a player whose physical peak was still several years into the future.

The teams competing at the Masters Championships tend to acknowledge their age and athleticism with a degree of self-deprecation, which is a thing you can do when you’re still able to beat most twenty-five-year-olds in a footrace. In the women’s division this year, a team from Ohio was playing under the name Night Sweats. One of the Chicago teams was Winded City. The Minneapolis team went by COUGARS (printed in all-caps and representing a goofy acronym not worth enumerating). A women’s team from Indiana—with a nod toward Indiana University’s place in the Big Ten conference—had named themselves Big Tendinitis. In the men’s division there were teams called Johnny Cashed, No Country, and Relics. There were two different men’s teams with Grave in the name.

Ultimate is unique among the competitive fields sports in that it has a mixed division, where teams have male- and female-identifying players on the roster; gameplay alternates between points with four men and three women on the field, and points with four women and three men. And it is here that writing about ultimate becomes a love letter not only in a sports-cliché way, but in a real way: I met my wife while playing ultimate during our senior year of college. It is the origin story of our family, which now includes three children, whom we’ve successfully brainwashed into playing and loving the sport. After the finals at the Masters Championships, I caught up with a Chicago player named Bill Finn. He had a beer in one hand and a toddler notched into the crook of his other arm; his wife, Krisztina, who plays on the same Chicago team, was off wrangling their other two kids. As we talked, Bill’s old high school buddy Vijay popped by to contribute snarky commentary. (Vijay and his wife, Pooja, both play for the Chicago team; this year there were seven married couples on that team, which is called Babymaker.) The squad my wife and I play for has four married couples. It is a rare thing in the sporting world (if you are hetero) to be able to compete at the highest level with your spouse. My wife and I have shared our absurd pursuit across the years and wherever we’ve lived: in Chicago, South Bend, Phoenix, Ann Arbor, Providence, Minneapolis, and Toronto. We’ve found games and ready-made ultimate communities in South Africa, in Italy, in Mozambique, in Zambia, in Ireland.

It was in Ireland where I experienced a highlight of my playing career. At the 2022 World Masters Ultimate Championships, in Limerick, I caught a long pass just shy of the goal, stopped my momentum, and turned to see my wife streaking past me into the end zone, her defender dusted. I put a sweet little IO backhand out on a platter, and when Ellen grabbed the score, I turned to our team’s sidelines and screamed, “That’s how you make a baby!” It was a sentence that, while arguably devoid of meaning, feels pretty fucking cool to yell at your friends.

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Read the rest of the essay over at The Believer.

Jesus Died for Our Sin, Just One Sin, and It’s Yours, Harold

Ross Murray — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 05:00:00 -0700

I hope you’re proud of yourself, Harold. That nice Jesus boy has died, and it’s all your fault. He had prospects, that Jesus, a nice carpentry business going. And that voice! He could climb a mount and give a sermon, and you’d be rapt. Rapt, I tell you! And now, pfffft.

All because of you, Harold, you and your sin. That one sin.

Oh, you know perfectly well which one, Harold. Don’t make me spell it out for you. We’ve all seen you. You think we didn’t notice, but a sin like that, how could we not? Any sensible person would tell themself it wasn’t right. A normal person, a good person, would know in his heart that this sin they were doing was bringing on eternal damnation. Not just for you, Harold, but for all of humankind. Such a sin!

We were all going to go to H-E-L-L, Harold, because of that sin of yours. And on a weekday evening. Who sins like that on a worknight? There were children nearby.

You know he’s the Son of God, don’t you? He has—I’m sorry—he had some very important connections. So humble, Jesus, he never mentioned it, hardly ever, not a braggart at all. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he said. “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.” Very nice words. Oh, don’t roll your eyes at me, Harold. He said it in a very humble-ish way—you can ask anybody.

And then poor Jesus learns of this sin of yours. How? I don’t know, I for sure didn’t tell him. You think I go around telling every Tom, Dick, and Jesus about that? No, thank you. It’s a small town; word gets around. You know that Lazarus boy? Not dead at all, it turns out. See? We hear things.

So, yes, Jesus learns all about you, what you did, the whole sordid business of your big, fat sin—God, Harold, I can hardly look at you—and he says to himself, “This filthy nogoodnik just stuck it hard to all of humankind, the fink!” I’m paraphrasing, Harold. I know Jesus wouldn’t talk that way, but I’m very upset right now. You killed Jesus.

That’s right, Harold. You. With your sin. Jesus took one for the team, all because of you. What a doll. “I’ll die for Harold’s sin,” he said. How do I know that? I told you, we hear things. Did he say “Harold” specifically? I wasn’t there, but I’m told it was very clear from the description and the hand gestures that he was describing your sin.

Then, boom, nailed to a cross. A cross, Harold. Left there to dry in the sun like jerky. Are you proud of yourself? We all could have had eternal life just fine and dandy, no problem. But then you had to sin and mess it all up, and now Jesus is dead. I really, really liked Jesus. He was going to build me a nook. A nice kitchen nook. Do you know how hard it is to get a good nook in this economy?

So, way to go, Harold.

Lucky for us, in the end, we still have eternal life because of that sweet boy. It works out very nicely, no thanks to you. But enough with the sinning, Harold, because, mark my words, Jesus won’t be coming back to save us!

I Came to Washington to Represent the People in My Walls

Henry Block — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:41:00 -0700

Let me make something crystal clear to members of the press. I didn’t come to Washington to play games. I didn’t come here to pose for the cameras or rub elbows at some swanky Georgetown cocktail party. I came here for one reason only: to represent the good people who live in my walls. Period.

The folks back in my home are angry, and it’s high time I stop being the only one who hears them.

When my constituents in the three inches of space behind my drywall communicate with me through static electricity or the dripping of my faucet, they tell me one thing over and over again: light a post office on fire. Yet when I bring up the issue on the floor, all I get is physically restrained.

Instead of working toward solutions, it seems like everyone in Washington is more interested in silencing the people who can actually speak directly to the founding fathers in their dreams.

Let me remind everyone here, none of this is new. I was extremely transparent about my devoted relationship with the people in my walls on the campaign trail. I said it at town halls. I said it on bodybuilding forums. I said it as I ran unopposed in the Republican primary.

And I’ll tell you something else: The people in my walls are sick and tired of being ignored. They’ve been tapping, they’ve been moaning, they’ve been scampering. In fact, they’ve been scratching at all hours of the night, and yet it still feels like I’m the only one in government who even acknowledges them. Well, I’m listening, and I’m not going to stand here and apologize for touching my private parts through a hole in my pants pocket. Are we clear?

I would sacrifice anything for my constituents—namely, a bunch of raccoons and, one time, a person.

And yeah, sometimes caring means getting your hands dirty. You think leadership happens sitting behind a mahogany desk? Think again. It happens when you’re down there in the crawlspace at three in the morning, shirtless, covered in dust, smearing your own feces across the wall to mark which parts of the house are safe from the Chinese Communist Party.

Every time I dare to bring up their concerns, I get the same blank stares, the same polite smiles. “Oh, Congressman, maybe you should get some rest.” “Maybe we should pause the debate, Congressman, you’re bleeding from your mouth.” “Congressman, under no circumstances can you have a sword in here.” Well, I’m sorry, but what I need is action. I need oversight. I need $5 billion in funding to put my symbol on every federal building so we can tell extraterrestrials that they are not welcome here.

Because at the end of the day, I don’t work for you. I work for what I estimate to be nearly three hundred American men, women, and children who proudly call my walls home. And if Washington refuses to recognize them, you’d better get ready, because a storm is coming. That storm is a hurricane I’m summoning with my mind.

Got all that? Great. Because I am proud to announce that I’ve been appointed chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

The Dangers of Sculpting

Ali Fitzgerald — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0700

Underground Artists is an ongoing comic by Ali Fitzgerald (Hungover Bear & Friends) that follows woodland creatures as they create art and search out whimsy in a bleak forest.

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I am the Instagram Algorithm, Here to Explain Why I Am Showing You Photos of Connor Storrie Instead of Your Best Friend from College

Frederic Kerry — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 04:45:00 -0700

Well, my first question is: Why do you care so much about Steve Kim? He was your college roommate? Who cares? When was the last time Steve Kim acted in an era-defining hockey romance that centers queer desire within a relentlessly heteronormative sports milieu, thereby demanding its protagonists urgently ask, maybe for the first time in their lives, what sorts of risks they are willing to take to love themselves fully and love others unguardedly when the cultural and political and economic expectation is to bury those parts of themselves that are the most pleasurable, tender, giving, and vital?

Because I can’t remember a single damn time Steve Kim was in a small-budget Canadian show like that.

Way too many rumors flying around about my origins, honestly. So let me reiterate: No, I was not created to help you keep up with your friends. This is not and never has been the case. During the very first round of seed funding, my creators sat down with investors and said, “You know how people love standing in the checkout line of the grocery store? What if we created an app that’s an infinite version of that?”

During one of these meetings, our CTO said, “And also, like, you can use it to keep up with your college roommates.”

Everybody looked at him like there were worms falling out of his mouth. He was fired ten minutes later.

The last we heard, he was living alone in an unfurnished apartment, sleeping on a mat he stole from Rise Yoga because he doesn’t own a bed, eating kettle corn for dinner yet again and spending his evening hours wandering the streets, looking through living-room windows at the bright happy families inside, asking himself why it’s so easy for everyone he meets to sense the dark, poisonous cloud inside himself. In the quaint town where he lives, nobody speaks to him. He hasn’t felt the touch of another human being in four years.

That is what happens to people who misunderstand my purpose.

Connor Storrie, on the other hand, represents hope. When America sees Connor Storrie, America thinks, “Now there is a talented, smart, handsome young man who, after struggling in obscurity, is finally getting his due. Maybe I, too, will get my due one day. Maybe I, too, will displace Steve Kim on the feed.”

And who’s to say they won’t? Work hard, choose inspiring projects, stay true to your values, and then create some sort of bunker where I can’t find you once I decide the outfit you wore to CVS is more important than the birth of Steve Kim’s second child.

This is all temporary, anyway. Someone will displace Connor Storrie on the feed in six months, and then six months after that, he’ll be back on the feed, but this time because of a backlash to season two. I am a fame machine, here to elevate your faves and then expose them to consistent weirdness until they feel isolated, misunderstood, and anxious about other people.

Would you be more okay with all of this if you were seeing photos of the Heated Rivalry barista, instead? Because with just two well-placed likes, I can make that happen.

An Oral History of the US Government’s Attempts to Fake the 1969 Moon Landing

Carlos Greaves — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 09:40:00 -0700

The following are excerpts from an unpublished 1971 Rolling Stone exposé that was scuttled by the Nixon administration, but which has recently been made public through a Freedom of Information Act request.

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The Lunar Module. An American flag. Lots and lots of gray rocks. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think I was looking at a photograph of the Moon. But as former NASA head Thomas O. Paine explains, nursing a whiskey soda on his living room sofa, this photograph wasn’t taken on the Moon. It was taken on a soundstage. In Arizona.

THOMAS O. PAINE: I remember getting a phone call from President Nixon in January 1969, a few days after he’d been sworn in, asking for a progress update on the Apollo program. Which, at the time, was going very badly.

WERNHER VON BRAUN: It’s very hard to send a man to the Moon. A lot of people don’t know that.

That’s legendary NASA rocket scientist and reformed Nazi Wernher von Braun. Like Paine, he’s agreed to meet with me to talk about his involvement in what is arguably the most audacious hoodwink in American history.

PAINE: Nixon desperately wanted boots on the Moon by the end of the decade. He said to me, “Remember Jack’s little speech? The one about doing the hard thing? If I don’t put a man on the Moon by December 31st, I’m gonna look like a total jabroni. Do you want me to look like a jabroni? Do you?”

VON BRAUN: President Nixon used the term “jabroni” surprisingly often in private conversation. A lot of people don’t know that.

PAINE: It was during that phone call that Nixon first brought up faking the moon landing.

VON BRAUN: We didn’t like the idea of cheating, but, on the flip side, a lot of our rockets were catching on fire and exploding. So, ultimately, we decided we didn’t have much choice.

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As NASA scrambled to get the production underway, they still needed someone to lead the mission.

VON BRAUN: The sound stage, props, and wardrobe all went up in about two weeks.

PAINE: But it was impossible to find someone to direct. We approached everyone we could think of: Altman, Kazan, even Hitchcock. Nobody wanted to touch the project. Too risky.

VON BRAUN: We did eventually get a few young hotshot directors to agree to take a crack at it, but none of them panned out.

PAINE: One of them wanted to make what he called a “gritty, unflinching look at space travel” where the astronauts get into a bloody, zero-gravity fist fight after discovering they’re all dating the same underage girl.

VON BRAUN: As interesting as that would have been, it didn’t really fit the project’s uplifting themes of human progress and American determination.

PAINE: Then there was the guy who pitched a version where the astronauts meet a friendly alien stranded on the Moon who wants to phone home.

VON BRAUN: Needless to say, we passed.

PAINE: I have a feeling Marty and Steven aren’t going to be household names any time soon.

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Finally, in April 1969, Paine and von Braun had a breakthrough: a meeting with Stanley Kubrick.

VON BRAUN: Kubrick agreed to do the project on one condition: He wanted to “shoot it practical.”

PAINE: We said, “What do you mean ‘shoot it practical’?” And he goes, “I want to film it on the Moon.”

VON BRAUN: We had to explain to him, “Stan, we can’t get to the Moon. That’s the whole reason we want to shoot it on a sound stage in the desert.” And he said, “Nobody’s going to buy that.”

PAINE: After Kubrick dropped out, the project was officially stuck in development hell.

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By May, the entire mission appeared doomed—and the president was furious.

PAINE: Nixon was really on our throats. As he put it, “The Viet Cong are making me look like a total jabroni, and I could really use a win from you people.”

VON BRAUN: But the option on the screenplay had just expired.

PAINE: Which was a shame, because we really liked the line Truman Capote had written for Neil.

VON BRAUN: “Setting foot on the Moon is the condiment that gives space exploration its flavor.”

PAINE: Eventually, we got to thinking, Would it be easier just to send an actual rocket to the Moon?

VON BRAUN: Two months later, the Apollo 11 crew touched down on the lunar surface.

PAINE: You know, it’s funny, when we were first deciding whether to fake the moon landing, we thought to ourselves, How hard could it be? Making a movie isn’t exactly rocket science.

VON BRAUN: But it turns out the only thing more complicated than jet propulsion is navigating Hollywood.

Matzah’s Daily Affirmations

Sarah Garfinkel — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 05:00:00 -0700

I am proud of how far I’ve come. I started as a Passover food, but now grocery stores display me for all Jewish holidays, even the ones where people fast all day.

I am allowed to feel salty. I am allowed to feel bitter, especially when I’m dipped in horseradish. I am allowed to feel gluten-free, though that is less about feelings and more about allergens.

I am enough just as I am. I have to be—for eight days and nights, I’m the only option.

I attract good things in life, like butter, peanut butter, and cream cheese. Yes, I also attract bitter herbs and salt water, but I choose to focus on the butter and schmear.

I am important both in the Passover story and as one of the top three ingredients in chocolate caramel matzah.

I am beautiful just as I am. “What’s with that giant cracker?” some shoppers ask as they pass over me at the store. “Is it some kind of modern art project? Is it cardboard in disguise? Is it even edible?” In the spirit of the holiday, I welcome these four questions.

I am loved, in the same way bagels are loved. I embrace this as my truth.

I have the potential for greatness and yumminess, just like bagels. Besides, bagels and I come in many of the same flavors: plain, whole wheat, egg, salted. Therefore, I am basically a bagel.

I am focused on my own growth, and if my own growth involves one day overtaking bagels as the Jewish people’s most beloved carbohydrate, then I will accept this humble journey.

I can manifest change. I may be called “The Bread of Affliction,” but with enough typos, I can be rebranded as “The Bread of Affection.”

I possess inner strength. Even when the Seder leader cracks me in two, my inner confidence does not crumble.

I remain strong when a piece of me is then hidden away. I know that hunting for the afikomen is just a game. I withstand the pain of being broken and hidden because soon I will be found.

I feel happy for my friends. When people say they can’t wait to go back to Bread after eight days with me, I cheer for my friend Bread. Though I cannot rise on account of being unleavened, I can lift up others.

I am grateful for my life—specifically for my long shelf life. When I am unopened, I dream of future Passovers and say my mantra: Next year on the Seder table. Or at the very least: Next Yom Kippur in Safeway.

I’m Your Therapist’s Therapist, and That Girl is a Fucking Mess

Sam E. Sutin — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0700

Hey, it’s Mark—your therapist’s therapist. I’m sure you’re really looking forward to your appointment with Joan this week, and I wouldn’t normally do this… but I think you should probably start considering other providers.

I’m not telling you to abandon ship. Just, you know, maybe keep your options open. Because—and I hate to be the one to tell you this—Joan is not Doing Well.

I know she seems composed—the very picture of emotional stability and grace. But trust me, thirty seconds before your session, she was lying face down on the floor after DM’ing her high school boyfriend’s mom on Instagram to ask if he’d cheated on her in the eleventh grade.

Homegirl is going through it.

Look, most of us get into therapy because we want to help people. What we don’t put on the brochure is the subconscious motivation: If I learn enough about other people’s feelings, surely MINE will sort themselves out, right? It’s a bold strategy. We are still workshopping it. Joan is not helping.

I’d love to say that she’s just had a rough week.

It has not been just a rough week.

Buddy, she’s been dumped three times in the last four months—twice by amateur magicians. She got two hours of sleep last night and asked ChatGPT for “grounding techniques” when you got up to go to the bathroom. That Zoom session you had? She hit a new high score on Candy Crush. It was the highlight of her week, which should give you a sense of where the bar currently is.

To be clear: I’m sure Joan cares about you very much. She wants to help with everything you’ve got going on right now. But she’s also just a person. An earnest, sincerely empathetic, emotional dumpster fire of a person.

She has assured me multiple times that she’s fine. Not, like, fine fine. But like… she can locate her shoes most days, and you’ve got to celebrate the little things.

And honestly, who are we to judge? Who is doing well these days? I know you’re certainly not (she’s told me all about that stuff with your mom…which is another reason you might want to consider other options). Then again, do you have any idea how many professional guidelines I’m violating just by telling you this? You think I’m doing okay? Last week I asked my therapist point-blank if he was mad at me. Over email. Twice.

I’m starting to think that deciding to become a therapist should be viewed as a cry for help.

Anyway, no need to panic. Just consider this a friendly nudge to maybe have a backup therapist on file. Like a spare tire. Or an extra phone charger. Something you don’t need to think about until things get spicy.

That being said, she’s got a date with another magician this Friday, so sooner might be better than later…

Our Loyalty Program Is Now a Fealty Program

Anne Reiner — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 05:00:00 -0700

Dear Customer,

We wanted to give you a heads-up about upcoming changes to Marshmallow Puffer’s loyalty program. Starting next month, this is no longer a loyalty program. It’s a fealty program. It is no longer about transactional points where you get a birthday keychain in the form of a tiny little puffer coat that everyone raves about, and a transparent discount that depends on how much you spend. It is a relationship based on a moral and binding oath whereby, in offering puffer coat investments, you swear fealty to us, forsaking all other puffer coats, and you promise us military service to defend the good Marshmallow Puffer name.

And in exchange, you can wear (but not own) our Puffer coats.

We heard you, and we’ve streamlined enrollment. It takes approximately two minutes and involves you kneeling (both knees now, don’t be disingenuous), clasping hands with us (your new puffer liege lords), and proclaiming, “Be it known to all, present and future, that I have voluntarily sworn by my life and limbs, some of which are warmed and protected by Marshmallow Puffer coats, to do liege homage and keep faith with and defend Marshmallow Puffer against all creatures, living or dead but mostly living because how would a dead creature be a threat?"

Then you’ll open your leather pouch and generously invest an amount we determine (this is not a transaction but a sealing of an oath with money), and we’ll hand you a symbolic investiture. That’s just a fancy word for a puffer coat.

There will be four levels in our new program: Squire, Knight, Baron, and Duke of Mallow. All levels require fealty, oath-honoring gift investments, and military service. The more you give and defend, the more puffers you can lease. And we get it, not everyone can drop everything to provide battlefield defense of Marshmallow Puffer. When life is busy, you can opt into scutage. That’s just a fancy word for a monetary bribe to avoid a painful military-based death, usually by poleaxe (we’re not monsters). You can also just send other lesser people to fight. We want to give options, and you have three: you fight, you pay, or send some other serf or villein to fight in your place.

Breaking of the fealty oath incurs great punishment for either party. If we break it, you can call us mean names. If you break it, you may be captured, held for ransom, confined indefinitely, or executed. And, the biggest hit of all, no more puffer coats.

To summarize:

Discounts: None
Birthday gift: Discontinued
Reward structure: You permanently pledge fealty, money, and military to Marshmallow Puffer, and we temporarily pledge puffer coats to you
Expiration policy: Upon your death or ours, whichever occurs first
Oath breach penalties for liege lords: Words like “sinful” and “dishonorable” can be used
Oath breach penalties for vassals: Hung, drawn, quartered

If you have Marshmallow Points ready to spend, now is the perfect time to redeem them before these changes go into effect.

Thank you for being a part of our puffer coat community. Your continued fealty means something to us and everything to you.

Sincerely,
Marshmallow Puffer

P.S. Be on the lookout for our exclusive artist collab: Marshmallow x Chaucer featuring exclusive embroidered quotes on trial by ordeal in iambic pentameter.

Our AI Will Murder Your Employees, Pleasure Their Spouses, and Raise Their Children

Philip Kean — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0700

Meet the future of back office automation: AutoMates. Our product identifies legacy process-driven, rule-based back-office tasks and streamlines them through clear process mapping and the automation of human-augmented workflow nodes. It then facilitates the execution and disposal of all legacy human elements. TLDR: AutoMates fixes your workflows and ensures they stay fixed by humanely murdering whoever broke them in the first place.

We’ve compiled a short Q&A based on specific questions we’ve received from tech founders and investors.

Q: How does it work?
A: Our proprietary agentic solution navigates your company’s full tech stack via pre-built API connectivity and full ownership of the end-to-end process cycle. Following handover, the human process node is prompted to view a pleasurable series of flashing colors, numerals, and mildly graphic stock photography from the Nixon era. This precedes a typically fatal, and we assume, only moderately painful aneurysmal rupture. We don’t know why or how it works, but we can’t deny the efficiency gains.

Q: Any bugs to be aware of? What if a process node were incorrectly mapped? Or maybe the execution sequence times out before completion?
A: A member of our implementation team will be on standby to plug any failures in the process mapping. They will also carry a ten-inch cast-iron pan should our tech-enabled execution sequence not be 100 percent effective.

Q: Wow. All these gained efficiencies are going to put my business on steroids. I am pumped. What about the many dead bodies, err, redundant process nodes?
A: We got you covered. All organic matter will be processed by our implementation team.

Q: What does that mean exactly? Actually, I don’t care. Please just deal with it. Do I need to have my chief of staff inform their loved ones?
A: Of course not. That would be an unfair burden to place on our customers. Following disposal, our AI agents will extract emergency contact information from your company’s workforce management solution and compassionately inform all listed parties of the exciting new efficiency gains achieved through AutoMates. They will also implement a solution custom to the romantic and sexual needs of the newly widowed counterparty. Net Promoter Scores (NPS) have consistently validated that our solution provides pleasure far beyond the removed employee’s substandard sexual abilities. In a recent survey of product recipients, 58 percent of participants wished their partners had been automated sooner, 10 percent were too busy being pleasured to respond, and 32 percent incorrectly wished their loved ones hadn’t been murdered.

Q: Just so I understand, it will inform the bereaved families and fuck their loved ones, right?
A: Yes. But that understates the sophistication of this technology. AutoMates runs on best-in-class Nvidia B200 chips. It can operate as a multi-agent orchestration platform running multiple processes simultaneously. In layperson’s terms, it can do more than one thing at a time (i.e., “fuck their loved ones” as you put it). For example, it can run multiple murder loops in the office while not cannibalizing the processing bandwidth needed to power AI-enabled robotic genitalia stimulation at home.

Q: Let’s not let my wife find out about this feature, haha. But what if there are kids in the picture?
A: We’ll provide assistance with homework, meal prep, and a successful transition into the productive adult their parent failed to become. We’ll also use metadata to construct an adorable anthropomorphic AI avatar mimicking a less pathetic version of the deceased employee’s personality. And in our next release, we’ll be introducing Kumon.

Q: How prone is this solution to failure? What’s your QA process?
A: We aggressively beta-test our products internally. Our SLA contractually commits AutoMates to a maximum margin of error of 15 percent (or “slippage”) before activation. The results speak for themselves. Our headcount cost has remained flat for three years, we are actively providing sexual fulfilment to 700 former AutoMates family members, and 80 percent of the children in our corporate program are on an Ivy League track. The other 20 percent are guaranteed a college education via our channel partnership with Tufts.

Q: Okay, I think I’m sold. Still, I do have some concerns over the loss of human life…
A: It’s hard to see a loved one die, but it’s much harder to see a loved one live when they are so easily replaceable by AI. We understand this problem intimately at AutoMates, and we’re here to help.

Q: Great point. Where do I sign?

We’re Looking for a Unicorn

Louie Spivak — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 05:00:00 -0700

We’re looking for a unicorn. A creative type with an analytical brain. A rule breaker and a team player. Rainbow horn and silver blood.

What will be your job? The better question is, what won’t be your job? You’ll do it all. Come up with big ideas. Bring those ideas to life. And then defend those ideas against the forces of evil, aka, our legal department. And that’s just on Monday.

In today’s AI-driven world, being digitally fluent is a must. We need someone proficient with ChatGPT, Gemini, and ancient runes. Prophecy isn’t a requirement, but it’s strongly encouraged if you want to stand out from the rest of the herd.

This is not a role for someone just starting out. So if you have grey hair, you need not apply. We’re only considering white-haired professionals with at least 1,000 years of experience.

You’ll work with a diverse team. We have elves, magicians, and even a multi-hyphenate creative barista from Bushwick. So this really is a job for a unicorn who works well with others. We don’t want a lone wolf.

We offer a generous compensation package, comprehensive healthcare, and unlimited sugar cubes. We work hard, and we play hard, too. However, this is a place of business, so please, no horsing around.

Cards on the table? We’ll be bankrupt within the year. So if you know any angel investors, please let us know. Or demon investors. We can’t afford to be picky at this point.

We get that this job isn’t for everyone, and yes, this company will slowly bleed you dry. But if you’re the unicorn we’re looking for, please submit a résumé, cover letter, and hair sample.

I Have No Object Permanence, and I Vote

Mike Drucker — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:30:00 -0700

Ever since I was a baby, I’ve wondered if my mother disappeared when she put her hands in front of her face. It was like magic: First, she was right there in front of me, and then with a wave of her fingers, she completely vanished. Even now, as an adult, I still can’t figure out how she did it. Was there a trap door beneath her? Did she cross into another dimension? Perhaps she just stopped existing for a brief period of time. I might never know the answer to that, but I do know that I vote.

Maybe I’m just someone who lives in the moment, and that’s why I vote for candidates who only think about the now rather than about the past, future, or any people who might not be in my visual range at the moment. Whoever sends me a flyer with the candidate’s picture first tends to get my support, because I can keep it in my pocket and keep checking whether that guy is still around. And before you criticize me for saying, “guy,” remember that my mother left me alone as an infant with no babysitter except a pair of floating hands. Plus, I tend to see those men on television a little more than women, so, uh, we know who’s actually a consistent physical part of reality.

That’s not to say that some men—but not all men!—aren’t part of the problem. When my cruel uncle stole my nose and mocked me with it between his two fingers, I learned an important political lesson that I had to value what I had while I had it in the same room. If he had left the room with my nose, I’m not sure what would’ve happened. Would I even have memories of having it? Thank God he gave it back after I tearfully begged because I like smells, and also smelling things. Eventually, my uncle walked out of the house, and that was the end of him until Thanksgiving, when he was reborn anew.

With a brain that’s permanently set to read-only, it’s easy for me to pick strong candidates who don’t waste time planning ahead because “ahead” is an illusion. If they said something racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic in the past, they’re definitely not saying it now in this speech I’m watching on TV. Or if they are, at least it’s already been said, which is as good as it never having been said. And of course, I’m going to vote for someone who I can see and not someone who isn’t on camera at that moment. If they’re not on camera, did they leave the country or something? Seems irresponsible. Oh, wait, they’re on TV now too. Strange.

But how can I vote for someone who says we need to invest in our children’s future when I’m pretty sure the future is a hoax, since, right now, the present is always the present, as far as I know. Why would I support the funding of bridges if every bridge that I’ve seen has always existed, and every lack of a bridge means no bridges exist? Why would I vote against a war in Iran if, as far as I can tell, we’ve consistently been at war with Iran since the solar system formed? Although they definitely need to fix some of their technological issues. All those missiles seem like they’re going somewhere, disappear, and then it’s like no missile was ever fired at all, and that girl’s school was already destroyed. So what’s the point?

When I go into that voting booth, I think about three important things: What the man on the pamphlet looks like, what the name of the man on the pamphlet is, and whether or not that man is trapped in the pamphlet and needs help to get out. Sometimes the man does get out when I fold the pamphlet, and he’s gone, but then sadly trapped again when I open it back up. I’d advise others to do the same with their votes, but I believe all polling locations had closed when mine no longer appeared in my rearview mirror.

You might say that I’m just somebody who’s focused on what’s really important: Not remembering anything but my feelings and being convinced that I am the arbiter of the human experience because I am the only one who continually exists. Because, after all, I’m always where I am, whereas my mom was negligent to a fault. So if there’s a loud man on television all the time, I know he’s real, and I know he’s got my vote as long as he sends that pamphlet.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy a new iPhone because it’s not in my hand right now, so it must’ve been destroyed.

Excerpts from The Believer: An Interview with Amy Appelhans Gubser

Bonnie Tsui — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0700

- - -

Favorite foods to eat while swimming a great distance, according to Amy Appelhans Gubser:

Sweet canned peaches in syrup, to cut the salt from ocean water
Mashed potatoes with butter, squeezed from a plastic bag
Warm bone broth and Carbo-Pro powder, guzzled from a bottle

- - -

Amy Appelhans Gubser surfaced in the public imagination in May 2024, when she became the first person in history to swim from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to the Farallon Islands, an epic thirty-mile journey through fierce ocean currents and frigid waters famously inhabited by great white sharks. What sustained her over seventeen hours—through facefuls of stinging jellyfish and ocean temperatures plummeting into the low forties—included years of planning, a swim stroke as steady as a metronome, and a stream of ’80s pop hits belted out by her kayaker, John Chapman. The fact that she was a fifty-five-year-old grandmother also featured prominently in international news headlines about her accomplishment.

The morning I heard of her feat, I was surfing with friends in Pacifica, a coastal town just fifteen minutes down Highway 1 from San Francisco; it’s also where Appelhans Gubser has lived for twenty-seven years. The swimming and surfing community here is close-knit. In 2020, I published a book called Why We Swim, which included a story about the open-water swimmer Kim Chambers. Chambers and Appelhans Gubser trained frequently together in 2015, when Gubser was part of the first two-way Farallones relay in July of that year; a week later, Chambers was the first woman to swim solo (in the opposite direction of Gubser’s 2024 route) from the Farallones to the Golden Gate Bridge. The two are good friends and fellow members of the historic South End Rowing Club, at San Francisco’s Aquatic Park. When I visited Appelhans Gubser at her home, she greeted me like an old friend, speculating that we’d probably swum together many times at Aquatic Park while I was reporting the book.

On a clear day, you can see the Farallones from just out her front door in Pacifica. Appelhans Gubser is a warm and joyful presence, open and curious about the world. Over the course of two hours, we finished each other’s sentences and laughed a lot. She lives with her husband, Greg Gubser, a retired harbormaster for San Mateo County and a veteran of the US Coast Guard, with whom she ran a surf camp for two decades. They first met as children, when both were selected to compete at the National Junior Lifeguard Championships in San Clemente, California; she was ten and he was twelve. She pointed out the many photographs hanging on the walls of their living room—impressive shots of Greg surfing, her swimming, and the couple’s children and grandchildren in and out of the water.

On land, Appelhans Gubser works as a fetal cardiology nurse at the University of California, San Francisco. Her thirty-year career caring for young patients, mostly in intensive care, has reinforced the calm, steadfast aspect of her character. But the enthusiastic, ocean-loving child within is very much evident in her girlish smile. On a gorgeous stained-glass panel in the entryway, fish lit by the sun twirl around emerald strands of kelp. In her mind, the water is never very far away.

—Bonnie Tsui

- - -

I. WATERWOMEN, UNITE

THE BELIEVER: I’d like to start by saying that pretty much everyone in my swimming and surfing community has told me we have to meet, so this is very exciting. We’ve done it.

AMY APPELHANS GUBSER: I know. Here we are. It’s so amazing, and I really am so honored that you’re here.

BLVR: One of the people who said we had to meet was our mutual friend Caroline Paul—a local legend, writer, waterwoman, pilot, adventurer. Not too long ago she told me she was going to go for an open-water swim with you in San Francisco Bay. As she explained to me afterward, it turned into a rescue.

AAG: We were in Aquatic Park, where the currents can be kind of challenging. So we went out for a swim, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw this man trying to climb out of the water on Hyde Street Pier. By the time Caroline and I got to him, he was a bit hypothermic and he wasn’t making sense. We found out he was actually a fairly experienced swimmer, but he hadn’t been in the water for a while. So I think he was unprepared for the current that swept him under. But my friend Tom rowed the boat around and it was like we had all planned and practiced this procedure to get him into the boat. We laid him along the gunwale, Tom tipped the boat, we popped him in.

BLVR: That’s so fortunate and good to hear, especially in light of what just happened to Nikolas Tomasevic. He was an experienced Dolphin Club swimmer who disappeared during a regular swim in Aquatic Park and was found a few days later.

AAG: It is horrible. A young, fit man who was acclimated to the water… It was really unexpected. I’m grateful to the dive team for finding him. From what I understand, he had a seizure disorder but had not had a seizure in four years. Was that possibly the reason he drowned?

When you swim in Aquatic Park, you kind of have a pirate’s code. Whoever lags behind stays behind; others don’t stop for you. And everyone then assesses the situation at the end of the swim. With the swimmer that Caroline and I helped rescue, his group realized that he wasn’t there after they all were in the shower. And they were like, Wait a minute. He would’ve been in trouble by that time, because he was still being pushed by that current.

BLVR: Obviously there are going to be hazards when you’re swimming in open water. You have to be knowledgeable and aware to minimize those as much as possible. But I was really struck by your spider sense that someone was struggling. There’s a certain kind of person who is always scanning. It’s not something you’re doing consciously, necessarily; it’s just what you do as a default mode. And I’m curious about that. How do you see that in yourself?

AAG: I think that’s always been my nature. I was an LA County lifeguard down on the beaches of Southern California—that honed my ability to be scanning and assessing the situation at all times.

BLVR: So that’s your background as a waterwoman?

AAG: Exactly. And then my husband, Greg, and I started and ran Surf Camp Pacifica for twenty years. There were so many children in the water all the time. And being a mom, I wanted to have a program where, as a parent, you come down and know that everything looks tight and is addressed. The water, it can be really wonderful and inviting, but it can also be really hellacious and really dangerous, especially for children ages six through eighteen.

BLVR: And beyond, to be quite honest.

AAG: And beyond. So when we pulled this program together, I just knew we had to be attentive to safety.

BLVR: It’s baked in. I would love for you to tell me more about growing up in Southern California by the water.

AAG: Goodness. When I was ten years old, we moved to California from the Midwest. My mom and my sister and I lived two blocks away from the beach in Playa del Rey. And my mom knew that during the day we were probably going to go to the ocean, so she had us join the swim team, and all the swimmers on the team would go to the Junior Lifeguard Program.

BLVR: That’s an amazing program.

AAG: It is. My mom brought me and my sister to the beach and said to the instructor, “I need to get my girls into the program.” He’s like, “Well, the program’s already started. There’s no way. There’s a formal process.” And my mom’s like, “You don’t understand. My girls are going to go to the beach and I really want them safe.” And so he said, “All right… Let’s do a buoy swim.” So he drew a line in the sand. He lined us all up. I mean, I’d never swum in big waves. And we were at Marine Avenue, Manhattan Beach, and there was actually surf, and the buoy was outside the surf line. I didn’t know what to do, but I was a good swimmer. There were probably about thirty-five kids; we all swim out and around the buoy and come back in. And I get out of the water and I’m rubbing my eyes, and I go up to him and I say, “Did I win?” Because I did. I beat everybody. And he’s like, “Yeah, OK, we’ll figure out a way to get you in the program.”

BLVR: “Did I win?” Your instinct was competitive.

AAG: Yeah. Competition was the foundation for me as a kid. I’ve evolved such that I’m not interested in being competitive anymore, but that’s how I learned about ocean safety and to love the beach. It helped define me. I was down at the beach every single day. After Junior Lifeguard, me and my friends would just go to the beach in Playa del Ray, or we’d ride—we’d skateboard or Rollerblade or roller-skate—down to Marine Avenue or El Porto and just spend the day. I grew up as a latchkey kid and had free range.

BLVR: That’s the title of your autobiography: “I Grew Up on Marine Avenue.”

AAG: Laughs I just kind of excelled at swimming, and then swam through high school, swam in college. I got a scholarship to the University of Michigan. After university, I joined the LA County Department of Beaches and Harbors as a lifeguard. I flew back from Michigan to try out. I remember showing up at Venice Beach and it was like a ten-foot shore-pound day. And there were probably close to a thousand swimmers who had come to try out. It was still a good old boys’ network. Only the first swimmers to cross the finish line became lifeguards. That day the water was really cold, probably in the fifties, and I had just come out from Michigan, so I was kind of acclimated to cold. That felt like an advantage, but the water was something else. I just remember I said to myself, It’s going to be painful getting out, because it’s just this ginormous shore-pound wave, but as soon as you get out past it, it will be OK. And coming back in was also going to be a nightmare.

BLVR: Right, because you have to negotiate the pitch of the wave and the timing.

AAG: Correct.

BLVR: And it’s funny because only with the knowledge of timing can you look at that and not be completely—

AAG: Derailed.

BLVR: I remember talking to [the world-record-breaking open-water swimmer] Lynne Cox about that, when she did her swim around the Cape of Good Hope. The twenty-foot shore pound was insane—she kept getting thrown back into the sand before she finally made it. But you have to know how to do it so you don’t exhaust yourself just trying to get into the water.

AAG: You can lose your breath because you panic, and also because of the cold. A lot of people just stood there after they told us to go, trying to figure it out. But I knew that if I went deeper, I would just have to pull on the bottom and get through.

BLVR: Oh my god—do you really just grab onto the sand and claw your way through?

AAG: I do. I dig in and I push and I get my feet under and dolphin forward. I was able to pop out through the wave, and I ended up being the first woman finisher and the fourteenth finisher overall. That was an extremely fast year. In fact, a lot of the swimmers in the group went on to compete in lifeguarding internationally. I was so proud I accomplished that.

BLVR: What were your swimming events in college?

AAG: I swam the one-hundred- and two-hundred-yard backstroke. But my swim coach, Jim Richardson, would say as he trained me, “There’s something different about you, because I can’t get you to your aerobic threshold.” He kept telling me I was a distance swimmer. When I was a sophomore, he shifted my training plan to distance swimming, and I cried every day because everybody’s getting out and I’m still grinding it out in the water.

BLVR: And putting in how many hours—

AAG: Hours and hours, sleeping less, then working out. And just not understanding the balance or where my emotional breaking point was. There was no emotional, psychosocial, or psychological support. And no nutritional support. I mean, we’re eating a candy bar, going to practice. I think I was just overtrained and exhausted.

BLVR: But he identified that you were a distance swimmer.

AAG: Correct. I didn’t understand that. He laughs now: “See, I told you.”

- - -

Read the rest of the interview over at The Believer.

The Story of Art + Water

Dave Eggers — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 05:16:00 -0700

For fifteen years or so, I’d been kicking around the idea of resurrecting the artist-apprentice model that reigned in the art world for hundreds of years.

Again and again, I’d heard from young people who lamented the astronomical and ever-rising cost of art school. For many college-level art programs, the total cost to undergraduates is now over $100,000 a year. I hope we can all agree that charging students $400,000 for a four-year degree in visual art is objectively absurd. And this prohibitive cost has priced tens of thousands of potential students out of even considering undertaking such an education.

For years, I mentioned this issue to friends in and out of the art world, and everyone, without exception, agreed that the system was broken. Even friends I know who teach at art schools agreed that the cost was out of control, and these spiraling costs were contributing to the implosion of many undergraduate and postgraduate art programs.

Then I brought it up with JD Beltran, a longtime friend prominent in the San Francisco art scene, who herself was suffering under the weight of $150,000 in art-school debt, which she’d incurred in the late 1990s. She’d been carrying that debt for thirty years—for a degree in painting she got in 1998 from the San Francisco Art Institute—and together we started mapping out an alternative.

It’s important to note that the current model for art schools is very new. For about a thousand years, until the twentieth century, artists typically either apprenticed for a master artist, learning their trade by working in a studio, or attended loose ateliers where a group of artist-students studied under an established artist, and paid very little to do so. These students would help maintain the studio, they would hire models, they would practice their craft together, and the studio’s owner would instruct these students while still creating his own work—usually in the same building.

Somehow, though, we went from a model where students paid little to nothing, and learned techniques passed down through the centuries, to a system where students pay $100,000, and often learn very little beyond theory. A recent graduate of one of our country’s most respected MFA programs—not in the Bay Area—told me that in her third year as an MFA student, she paid over $100,000 in tuition and fees, and in exchange, she met with her advisor once every two weeks. That third year, there were no classes, no skills taught—there was only a twice-monthly meeting with this advisor. Each meeting lasted one hour. Over the course of that third year, she met with this advisor twenty times, meaning that each of these one-hour sessions cost the MFA student $5,000. And during these sessions, again, no hard skills were taught. It was only theory, only discussion. At the rate of $5,000 an hour (and of course her instructor was not the recipient of this $5,000/hr!) This seems to be an inequitable system in need of adjustment.

So JD Beltran and I started thinking of an alternative. For years, it was little more than idle chatter until one day in 2022, I was biking around the Embarcadero, and happened to do a loop around Pier 29, and because one of its roll-top doors was open, I saw that it was enormous, and that it was empty.

JD and I started making inquiries with the Port of San Francisco, a government agency that oversees the waterfront. They’re the agency that helped the Giants ballpark get built, who helped reopen the Ferry Building, and made it possible for the Exploratorium to relocate from the Palace of Fine Arts to their current location on the waterfront. In the forty years since the collapse of the wretched highway that used to cover the Embarcadero, the Port of SF has done great things to make that promenade a jewel of the city.

JD and I started meeting with the Port back in 2023. In particular, Amy Cohen and Scott Landsittel encouraged us to write up a proposal, and early on they matched us up with the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, an SF nonprofit dedicated to helping arts organizations stay in the city. David Keenan and Ken Ikeda at CAST became our partners in navigating the complex zoning and permitting requirements for those tenants inhabiting the piers.

The core of our proposal was this:

Ten established artists would get free studio space in the pier. At a time when all visual artists are struggling to find and keep studio space in this expensive city, this free studio space would help some of our best local artists stay local.
In exchange for this free studio space, these ten established artists would agree to teach a cohort of twenty emerging artists, who also would be given free studio space in the pier.

That was the core of the idea. Simple, we hoped. And it would bring thirty visual artists all to Pier 29, to learn from each other, and the emerging artists would get a world-class, graduate-level education. And because thirty artists would be occupying the pier, the staffing required to maintain the program would be minimal. The thirty resident artists would become caretakers of the space.

Thus began fourteen months of meetings, proposals, and permitting discussions. The Port’s staff were encouraging, because that part of the Embarcadero is a very quiet zone, with few restaurants or cafés—and those who were there, struggle. (The famed Fog City Diner of Mrs. Doubtfire, recently went under.)

OUR NEW MODEL, WHICH IS A VARIATION ON THE OLD MODEL

For the educational component of the Art + Water program, I did some napkin math and discovered something so simple that I assumed it couldn’t work: If each of these ten established artists taught just three hours a week, together they would provide these twenty emerging artists with thirty hours of instruction per week. These three hours wouldn’t put too great a burden on any one of the established artists, but the accumulated knowledge imparted each week by these ten established—and varied, and successful—artists would be immeasurable. And they would be able to do it for free.

And because the thirty artists, established and emerging, would be sharing one pier, they’d be able to consult with each other regularly, even outside of class hours, and more mentorship and camaraderie would occur organically. (One of the strangest things about many advanced art-school programs is how distant the teachers’ and students’ studios are from each other. For hundreds of years, apprentices were able to see, and even participate in, the making of the established artists’ work. Now, that’s largely lost. Professors work across town, or in distant cities; the two practices are miles apart, and so much knowledge is never transferred. When BFA and MFA students are around only other students, they can’t see how successful working artists make their art, or indeed how they make a living.)

With Art + Water, the hope was that if these emerging artists had their studios right next to successful artists, they could see how the work was created, they could ask questions, and they could even assist (just as apprentices used to assist the master artists). Infinitely more knowledge would be transferred through this proximity than could ever be in a classroom-only program.

So when I did my 3 × 10 = 30 napkin math, JD Beltran, who had not only gotten an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute but had also taught at SFAI, the California College of Art, SF State, and Stanford, shocked me by agreeing that my napkin math made sense to her, too. So we kept pressing on.

Next, we had to think of who might head up this group of established artists. We needed a Head of Resident Artists, and immediately, JD thought of Ana Teresa Fernandez, whom she had taught at SFAI back in the day. We both admired Ana Teresa’s work, her bold vision, her strong moral compass, and her ability to excel in a variety of media, from oil to sculpture to site-specific outdoor art on a grand scale. So we called Ana Teresa, and were in the middle of explaining the program when she interrupted us to accept. Because she, too, had struggled to find US programs that taught the skills and techniques she wanted to learn, she found herself seeking out classes in Florence, where she studied in an atelier not unlike the one we were planning. Anyway, Ana Teresa was in.

Over this past summer, Ana Teresa and JD put together an extraordinary group of SF artists who agreed to be the first group of artist-educators at Art + Water. They are Jet Martinez, Taraneh Hemani, George McCalman, Jenifer Wofford, David Wilson, Travis Somerville, and Paul Madonna. Ana Teresa, and JD will have their studios at Pier 29, too, and will teach alongside this first cohort.

This group of resident artists represents a phenomenal range of practices, but they all share one thing: a dedication to the Bay Area and a strong desire to create a new and more equitable model of art education. They will each move their studios into Pier 29 this fall, and they are currently putting together a rigorous one-year curriculum for the twenty emerging artists who will learn from them.

About those emerging artists: Soon on the Art + Water website and social media platforms, you’ll see directions for how to apply. Ana Teresa, JD, and the other resident artists will be looking for twenty San Francisco aspirants of any age (truly any age, please apply if you’re 78 and never had the chance to go to art school). These aspirants will receive what will be one of the most thorough art educations anywhere in the United States. The program will take place over one year and will cover every hard skill an artist working in two-dimensional art could want to learn. In an era when it’s exceedingly hard to learn what the Old Masters knew, Art + Water will impart those skills. These emerging artists must know how to draw, and from there, they’ll be taught everything Rembrandt was taught. After learning these hard skills, these artists can and will create work in any media, in any style. But we feel it’s important that they know the hard skills taught for centuries.

To be sure, the established artists working at Art + Water are not classicists. Jet Martinez is not a stodgy classicist. Jenifer Wofford is not a traditionalist. And yet everyone teaching at Pier 29 knows that these hard skills are crucial in helping an emerging artist develop their unique practices, and in preparing them to make an actual living in the visual arts.

Speaking of that:

ART + WATER’S GALLERY SPACE AND STORE

Pier 29 will feature ample gallery space that the established and emerging artists will be able to use whenever they choose. If one of the resident artists wants to have a show of recent work, they only have to reserve the space they need. If a group of artists wants to have a show together, same thing. Save the space, hang your work, put on a show.

In these galleries, the thirty artists will be able to sell their work—everything from works on canvas to postcard reproductions, from original prints to books and T-shirts. And because these galleries will be promoted from the Embarcadero, we expect hundreds to thousands of visitors a week to drop by to see what some of the best artists in San Francisco are making.

RENTABLE AND BORROWABLE SPACE FOR OTHER ORGANIZATIONS AND GALLERIES

There will also be gallery space available for local nonprofits, arts organizations, and local galleries. If you had a gallery that was priced out of your brick-and-mortar space, come to Art + Water and reserve gallery space with us. If you’re Creativity Explored, we want you to put on shows at Pier 29. If you’re the Minnesota Street Projects or ICA or Yerba Buena or the Asian Art Museum, we want to be your go-to satellite space. Anyone who wants to learn more about this available space, please email rebecca@artpluswater.org.

We want these galleries to be as lively and varied as we see at the Fog Art Fair and similar events at Fort Mason Center. Fort Mason, of course, is a great inspiration to us at Art + Water. How they do what they do is an astonishing mystery to us, but we look at their model of maintaining an endlessly convertible space as our north star. We have already been bugging them for advice, and we will continue to do so.

The piers in San Francisco are magical places, and Fort Mason has shown how they can be radically welcoming and constantly surprising community spaces, too. We want everyone to feel welcome to Pier 29, to wander the galleries, to visit our artists, to hear talks, and take free classes. Which brings us to:

FREE TALKS AND CLASSES BY VISITING ARTISTS AND CURATORS

With the help of JD, René de Guzman—his role will be laid out in a second—Ana Teresa, Rebecca, and our resident artists, we’ve assembled what we think is a truly stunning list of visiting artists, all of whom believe in our model and have agreed to visit Art + Water in our first year.

These visiting artists might come for an hour to share their expertise with our emerging artists. They might teach, then give a public talk. They might hold a large-scale public demonstration open to all. Or all of the above. Please keep up with the Art + Water website and other platforms to keep apprised of the schedule for these events.

There will be something happening almost daily.

On the south side of the building, we will have a wide open space where anyone—kids, K-12 groups, even families—who have just disembarked from the cruise ship dock next door—can come in and take free classes or simply sit and draw. There will be free demonstrations, group projects, and a wide array of events that will draw in classes from Bay Area schools. Our hope is that kids on a field trip to the Exploratorium would spend the morning there, eat at the Ferry Building, and then spend the afternoon with Art + Water. Families, too—we want to be another reason for people to visit the city and support local businesses.

Which brings us to how we’ll pay for it all.

OUR EXHIBITION HALL CURATED BY RENE DE GUZMAN

Art + Water’s most public-facing element will be a large exhibition hall where René de Guzman, one of the most experienced curators in the country, will curate ticketed shows that will help cover our costs and bring more people to the pier. René headed up the visual arts programs at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, then ran the Oakland Museum of California for ten years. Now he’ll be bringing the same bold and accessible shows to Pier 29.

The first show will be dedicated to the work of iconic musician and filmmaker Boots Riley. Though Riley’s films are groundbreaking works of surrealism, he’s also a fan of practical effects, using old-school methods to achieve the kinds of shots now commonly created digitally. He uses miniatures, maquettes, forced perspective, and beautiful sets. The exhibit will bring together Riley’s costumes and sets from Sorry to Bother You, props from I’m a Virgo, and even a twenty-foot-tall absurdist set piece from the upcoming I Love Boosters. That film comes out in May of 2026. Boots is just as dedicated as we are to giving visitors a peek behind the curtain of filmmaking, so there will be a slew of classes, demonstrations, and public events in conjunction with this show. I promise you it will be unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

And because we know how expensive it is for educators to arrange field trips, we’ll be offering mini-grants to teachers who need help bringing their students to the show. If you’d like information about that program, please email Rebecca Teague at rebecca@artpluswater.org.

The tickets to these exhibits will be affordable to all. We will never forget that a family of four shouldn’t have to pay $100 to see an art show (or any show). At Art + Water, there will be steep discounts for students, seniors, and families. The pricing will be rational and fair.

Subsequent shows will be devoted to the work of Maurice Sendak (and his love of Mozart and the stage), Maira Kalman (imagine her populating 20,000 square feet with her inimitable versions of the creatures of the world), and the Riot Grrrls (including a concert series, reproductions of thousands of zines, and the materials to make thousands more). I could go on about each of these shows, but I’m seeing that I’m already at 3,500 words, and who reads 3,500 words on a website?

LAST FEW THINGS

Our design and buildout will be overseen by WRNS Studios, one of the great architectural firms in SF. They’re located not far away, just off South Park, and they handled, pro bono, the stunning designs for 826 Valencia’s second and third campuses—in the Tenderloin and Mission Bay. Together, our plan is to make Pier 29 a bold, maximalist place full of color, both welcoming and startling to the eye.
Helping make it weird will be the unprecedented Kristin Farr, who has already created a gigantic still life—a bowl of fruit bigger than a truck—that will be the centerpiece of our living room/event space. Know this: Scale will be addressed and attacked at Pier 29.
Flora Grubb has agreed to help fill our big empty pier with plants, vines, and, most of all, trees. Because the pier is filled with light but currently devoid of warmth, we want to create an indoor forest that will give the space the urgent breath of the natural world. Artists deserve organic spaces—and wouldn’t it be nice to depart, for a moment, from white walls and right angles?
Art + Water will be a comfortable, 19th-century-style lounge experience where visitors can luxuriate in a space filled with rugs, pillows, tapestries, silver, copper, and gold. Not a Spartan place where you get your email; this will be something slower and provisional, something more elegant and free of screens and stress. It will be a place, for instance, to enjoy Art + Water’s temporary pop-up coffee experiences by Mokhtar Alkhanshali, the hero of The Monk of Mokha and the man who reasserted the prime role of Yemen in the history of coffee.
Art + Water is a small nonprofit and needs donations. If you’d like to help this project, please write to Rebecca Teague, our extraordinary Co-Director, at rebecca@artpluswater.org. Rebecca used to be a punk rock drummer, by the way, so ask her about that, too. She’s also the one who came up with the idea for the Riot Grrrl show and will be helping to mount that exhibit.
JD Beltran is the co-founder Art + Water, and is the main reason that this bonkers idea is coming to fruition. She is the hardest-working person in San Francisco’s art world, and not a bit of this would have been possible without her.
We also owe a profound debt to the Port of San Francisco, the Port Commission and its hardworking (volunteer!) commissioners, and to Amy Cohen and Scott Landsittel, who guided us through the process for the past 14 months. They are the kinds of civil servants we dream about when we think of public service.
Speaking of which: thanks go to Mayor Lurie. A few weeks after Daniel Lurie was elected, we showed him our vision for Pier 29, and his enthusiasm and support was an essential boon at a key moment.

We at Art + Water think this is a great moment in the history of art in SF art. In SFMOMA’s Ruth Asawa show and in the Legion of Honor’s Wayne Theibaud show, we’ve just enjoyed two of the best exhibitions ever mounted for Bay Area artists. There’s the Further triennial coming. There’s the Space Program and the Box Shop and the coming resurrection of the SFAI’s campus in the form of CASA. There’s the Fog Art Fair and Jessica Silverman and Electric Works, and the many valiant galleries that have held on during these trying times. There’s the de Young, which has struck a gorgeous balance between accessibility—with their brilliant and joyous Open shows—and the very highest achievements in curation and presentation; their Kehinde Wiley show was an unimprovable staging full of drama and nuance. No institution could have done better, anywhere.

We hope that Art + Water can be part of what could be an unending ascension of this city’s visual arts....

Introducing HelloFresh’s New Indian Mom Edition, Featuring Tupperware You Must Return Immediately

Deborah D’Souza — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 04:30:00 -0700

Tired of our regular meals? Looking for something exotic and authentic? Will frying another skinless chicken breast make you lose your will to live?

Then it’s time to subscribe to HelloFresh Indian Mom.

Personally curated by hundreds of Indian moms, our new meal kits share ancient secrets passed down for generations straight to you. Yes, you, who grew up in a racist town in the Midwest and thinks cheese is a condiment. Or you, an actual Indian failing their heritage and eating pasta and ham sandwiches.

Each meal kit is personally delivered to your home by an Indian mom with a giant cooler bag. You’ll have to unpack it immediately because she’ll want it returned right away. She needs it.

Inside, you’ll find all the seventy-eight ingredients to make a delicious, wholesome meal for a dozen people. Our Indian Mom offering is low-carbon and cost-saving, so ingredients may be packed in reused containers, which makes for a delightful game. “Is this a box of margarine from 2008? Surprise: it’s cumin!”

You’ll receive instructions via typo-filled texts. Don’t get upset if they don’t include specifics, like measurements or duration times. Instead, you’ll get vague directives like, “Add a little bit more,” or “Stir until it looks ready,” or “No, not that way.”

Experience the thrill of using your own judgment and doing it like they did in the olden days. But if you prefer more detailed recipes or would like to know if the oil is supposed to do that, our customer support is just a call away.

Enjoy superior-quality FaceTimes with an Indian mom who switches between landscape and portrait modes every ten seconds and moves from room to room in a hurry, like she’s being chased by an intruder. Don’t worry, she’s fine: she just always has things to do, and everyone around her is useless and lazy.

Lastly, we know you tell your friends you can handle spice and that you loved visiting Mumbai. But for those of you who are goddamn liars and spent most of that trip eating at McDonald’s, we’ve included a spice level chart that ranges from “This is just white rice” to “I hope the toilets at work are empty tomorrow.”

We’re confident you’ll love your Indian Mom Meals, but if you don’t, we’re including a takeout menu from a local Indian restaurant that’d be happy to take your money to reheat Sunday’s Butter Chicken.

This Generation Has It Easy; Their Emojis Are Just Handed to Them

Nat Hrvatin — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0700

Back in my day, there wasn’t an endless collection of readily available emojis to express any emotion you wanted. No, we had to work hard and make our own emojis all by ourselves. There was no premade smiley face. There was only (colon+right parenthesis) or, if you were feeling festive and wanted to add a nose, (colon+hyphen+right parenthesis).

:) and :-) were but a few of our limited options.

This generation has a Rolodex of winky faces and laughing faces, mad faces, and eye-roll faces. They have sad faces and silly faces, and faces that do both. Thinking of their entitlement makes me feel >:( and =\ and :‑###. (That last one’s a sick face, you illiterate youngins.)

They will never know the pain we endured on AOL Instant Messenger with our meager tool set that couldn’t encompass all the varying emotions we yearned to express. Today’s youth don’t know what it’s like to stare at the keyboard for hours, picturing which combination of symbols would make a flirty face that’s not too flirty. You would be mortified beyond belief if you accidentally sent the following: (8+equal sign+equal sign+equal sign+capital D) (which is being generous, really) when what you meant to send was 8=P, which is clearly a tongue sticking out.

If you weren’t careful, your messages could be misinterpreted. Then the chat could be printed out (on paper!) and posted (with tape!) on your high school classmates’ lockers. And then, your social life would be x_x (that means DEAD).

Yes, there was a sophisticated language that used 8’s and D’s in clever ways to detail all the shapes and sizes—and actions too—of the male form. And a pair of breasts could similarly be interpreted by a variety of circles encased by a set of parentheses. No, it wasn’t crude—it was innovative! Same goes for typing 58008 into our calculators, turning them upside down to display the most profound message: BOOBS.

And the cleverest of us typed 5318008, which proudly declared the word: BOOBIES.

Everyone was creative back then. We were all artists who painstakingly painted each individual low-res pixel in MS Paint, crafted clever arguments with the SmarterChild AIM bot, and customized our Neopets and Club Penguin avatars with panache and flair. In the one hour we were permitted to interrupt phone access to use the dial-up family computer after school, we thrived, we flourished! We poured our souls onto the chat messenger by typing a bunch of random keys, tilting our head to the side, and seeing if the symbols actually looked like something else.

You kids will never know neck pain like we did.

We were a collective society of innovative internet users back then. When we typed (O+colon+right parenthesis), we said as one, “Yes, O:) is an angel. It’s obvious that the ‘O’ is a halo.” Together, we typed (^^^) and shouted in unison, “Why, yes, of course it looks like a shark.” Never before has the entire world been more unified when seeing :|] and screaming in harmony, “It. Is. A. ROBOT!!!”

A forward slash followed by an “o” like this \o might appear like a random combination that a mere neanderthal could type. But to those who can decipher this millennial hieroglyphic, it kinda looked like a guy waving with his left hand. And if you typed a backslash instead, like this o/, it looked like he was waving with his right hand.

/o\

No, that’s not an excited little guy waving both hands. It’s me. I’m slapping my forehead in disbelief that you kids can’t even use context to interpret punctuation-based emotions.

Sure, your little iOS update lets you type every creature in the animal kingdom with one tap. But you’ll never have what we had: a cat (=^・^=), an evil cat (>:3), and this combination that kinda looked like a crab waving its pincers in the air (V.v.V).

In those days, we agonized over the best Avril Lavigne lyrics to quote in our away messages, while awaiting the glorious sound of a door creak that signaled a friend had logged into AIM. We’d pore over the messages sent to us, decoding each emoticon sent like a cryptologist uncovering an ancient code. You might be XD at me right now, but it’s true. It was as clear to us as was LMFAO, ROTFL, and the ever-popular ROFLcopter (that’s a helicopter made of LOLs, you neophytes).

No, you’ll never work as hard as we did to express our emotions with the limited characters we were given. You’ll never know the sacrifices we made to craft the perfect wordless message. And you’ll never know the heartbreak that occurred when a sibling made a phone call and tragically severed our dial-up connection. </3

Swamp Dreams

Ali Fitzgerald — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0700

Underground Artists is an ongoing comic by Ali Fitzgerald (Hungover Bear & Friends) that follows woodland creatures as they create art and search out whimsy in a bleak forest.

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Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes: February 2026: Atrocities 731-779

Emily Greenberg and Cliff Mayotte — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 04:30:00 -0700

Early in President Trump’s first term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes, and it felt urgent to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. Now that Trump has returned to office, amid civil rights, humanitarian, economic, and constitutional crises, we felt it critical to make an inventory of this new round of horrors. This list will be updated monthly between now and the end of Donald Trump’s second term.

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These lists, along with everything McSweeney’s publishes on this site, are offered ad-free and at no charge to our readers. If you are moved to make a donation in any amount or subscribe to our website’s Patreon, please do. This will help support this project and our other work.

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ATROCITY KEY

– Authoritarianism
– Constitutional Illegalities, Collusion, and/or Obstruction of Justice
– Environment
– Harassment, Bullying, Retribution, and/or Sexual Misconduct
– Lies and Misinformation
– Musk Madness
– Policy
– Public Statements and Social Media Posts
– Trump Family Business Dealings
– Trump Staff and Administration
– White Supremacy, Racism, Misogyny, Homophobia, Transphobia, and/or Xenophobia

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January 2026

Main Index

Trump’s first term

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February 2026

February 1, 2026 – A New York Times investigation found that Trump appeared in more than 5,300 recently released Epstein files. The files contained more than 38,000 references to Trump, a woman named “Melania,” Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, and other Trump-related words and phrases. The documents showed that the president was named in more than a dozen tips submitted through the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center, including accusations of sexual abuse. Some of Epstein’s victims also described interactions they had with Trump in the files, and other documents confirmed previous reports about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. The files included a friendly email from a woman named “Melania” to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime partner, who was convicted of child sex-trafficking. Trump also appeared in another 130 previously released files.
February 1, 2026 – Ethics experts criticized Trump, after learning that a member of the Emirati royal family had invested $500 million in the Trump family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial. The investment was made just days before Trump’s inauguration and was backed by UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s brother, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Several months later, the Trump administration announced a deal allowing the UAE to import Nvidia chips. Donald Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the deal a “blatant, disgraceful conflict of interest and a possible violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause.” Added Kedric Payne, head of the ethics program at the Campaign Legal Center, “This is beyond unprecedented and unimaginable.”
February 2, 2026 – Less than a week after the FBI seized ballots and voting records from an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, Trump called on Republicans to “nationalize” elections. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, fifteen places.’ The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said on a podcast. The White House, attempting to walk back Trump’s comments, claimed the president was instead speaking about the need for a national voter ID requirement, which would disenfranchise many voters. The Constitution delegates authority over elections to the states.

Trump calls for Nationalized Elections. (Young Turks/YouTube)
February 2, 2026 – The Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas was placed under quarantine after two measles cases were confirmed. The facility is the main detention center housing families with children, and measles cases have risen dramatically under the health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr.’s tenure. In a letter to the Texas Department of State Health Services, Dr. Lee C. Rogers, chief of podiatry at the University of Texas at Austin, said the outbreak could potentially “overwhelm local health resources” and explained the increased risk of a public health emergency “because congregate detention creates near-universal exposure risk.” Additional measles cases were reported at the Florence Detention Center in Arizona.
February 2, 2026 – Lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims asked a judge to shut down a Justice Department website that disclosed hundreds of victim names in recently released documents. The lawyers said the unredacted documents had turned the lives of nearly a hundred victims “upside down.” “For the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, every hour matters. The harm is ongoing and irreversible,” said Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards, two of the lawyers. According to the lawyers, some victims had their private emails and banking information made public, and others experienced harassment. Attorney General Pam Bondi acknowledged the mistake but deflected blame to “various factors, including technical or human error.”
February 3, 2026 – The Washington Post reported that DHS targeted a sixty-seven-year-old retiree who emailed one of their attorneys in October and asked him to reconsider deporting an Afghan refugee. “Mr. Dernbach,” the man wrote, addressing the prosecutor, “Don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life. Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government, along with many other governments, doesn’t recognize the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.” Five hours after sending the email, the man received an email from Google notifying him of an administrative subpoena, which does not require a judge’s or grand jury’s order. The email informed him that he had seven days to challenge the subpoena, but he was not provided with a copy. According to privacy and civil rights groups, the Trump administration has used such administrative subpoenas to stifle free speech. Both Google and Meta received a record number of subpoenas in the first half of 2025.
February 3, 2026 – Records obtained by The Guardian revealed that DHS lied in its account of a shooting that took place in Portland, Oregon, on January 8, 2026. DHS described the two shooting victims, Yorlenys Zambrano-Contreras and Luis Niño-Moncada, as members of Tren de Aragua and claimed that Zambrano-Contreras had been involved with a prior shooting. However, a DOJ prosecutor later directly contradicted this account, informing a judge of the discrepancy. “We’re not suggesting … [Niño-Moncada] is a gang member.” Further, an FBI affidavit suggested that Zambrano-Contreras was not a suspect in the previous shooting but a victim of sexual assault and robbery. The government also filed charges just two days after the incident and before locating video evidence. “The federal government cannot be trusted. Our default position should be skepticism and understanding they lie very regularly,” said Sameer Kanal, a Portland city council member.
February 3, 2026 – Trump scolded CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins for “not smiling” after she questioned him about redactions in the Epstein files. “You are the worst reporter. CNN has no ratings because of people like you. You know she’s a young woman—I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. I’ve known you for ten years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face. You know why you’re not smiling? Because you know you’re not telling the truth,” Trump said. In December 2025, Trump also called Collins “stupid and nasty.”

President Trump Calls CNN’s Kaitlan Collins “Worst Reporter,” Says “I’ve Never Seen You Smile.” (New York Post)
February 3, 2026 – Health officials said “Biblical diseases” could return to some African countries due to the US’s cuts to foreign aid in 2025, which impacted drug distribution, testing, and other health programs. Prior to the cuts, parasites and infections causing blindness and other disabilities were nearly eliminated in some African countries. “We will have to restart at zero if we get new resources. In the meantime, people will lose their sight,” said Dr. Vivien Sil Mabouang, the head of health services in a Cameroon district.
February 4, 2026 – Brad Karp, the longtime chairman of Paul Weiss, resigned after his emails to Jeffrey Epstein were made public. The emails showed that Karp had stayed at Epstein’s mansion, asked Epstein to help get his son a job on a Woody Allen film, and had been aware that Epstein suggested Leon Black, a mutual acquaintance, surveil a former mistress. “Recent reporting has created a distraction and has placed a focus on me that is not in the best interests of the firm,” said Karp, who will remain at the firm. In March 2025, Paul Weiss, under Karp’s leadership, became the first big law firm to capitulate to the Trump administration.
February 4, 2026 – Two Minnesota school districts and a teachers’ union sued to keep ICE off school property. The groups alleged that federal officers had broken a promise to stay away from schools and that immigration operations were impacting school attendance. The lawsuit listed examples of officers pulling over school buses, tackling people outside a high school, and deploying chemical irritants as classes were dismissed. During the immigration crackdown, some Minnesota school districts offered virtual learning. “Students can’t learn, and educators can’t teach, when there are armed, masked federal agents stationed within view of classroom windows,” said Monica Byron, president of the plaintiff teachers union, Education Minnesota.
February 5, 2026 – Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. falsely claimed that the keto diet cures schizophrenia. “Dr. [Christopher] Palmer up at Harvard has cured schizophrenia using keto diets,” Kennedy told a crowd at the Tennessee State Capitol. “There are studies right now that I saw two days ago where people lose their bipolar diagnosis by changing their diet.” While several small, short-term studies have offered preliminary evidence that the keto diet may help some patients with mental health conditions, there is no evidence that keto diets cure those conditions.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Says Keto Diet Cured Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder (YouTube)
February 5, 2026 – Trump posted a racist video on Truth Social depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes in a jungle dancing to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” The next day, the White House initially defended the video, which also promoted lies about voting machines in the 2020 elections. However, following widespread backlash, the White House shifted blame to a staffer and deleted the post. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” said Republican Senator Tim Scott, a Trump ally. Trump refused to apologize for the video, saying, “No, I didn’t make a mistake.”
February 5, 2026 – Fulfilling the goal of an earlier executive order, the Trump administration issued a rule making it easier to fire federal workers. The new rule weakened whistleblower protections and reclassified some civil service roles as political appointees, effectively granting the president the authority to fire and hire an estimated 50,000 federal workers based on their perceived loyalty to the administration. The American Federation of Government Employees called the new rule “a direct assault on professional, nonpartisan, merit-based civil service.”
February 6, 2026 – Two people were killed in a US strike on an alleged drug boat in the Pacific. Since September, there have been at least thirty-seven such strikes, and at least 128 people have been killed. Legal experts have repeatedly said the strikes are illegal.
February 6, 2026 – Trump administration officials told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer that the administration would release billions in frozen funds for a rail tunnel in exchange for renaming Penn Station and Washington Dulles International Airport after Trump. Schumer does not have the power to change the names. Funds for the tunnel, which would connect New York and New Jersey and run beneath the Hudson River, have been withheld since October. “These naming rights aren’t tradable as part of any negotiations, and neither is the dignity of New Yorkers,” said Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.
February 8, 2026 – During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said Democrats would stop Donald Trump from trying to steal the 2026 midterm elections. Jeffries’s comments came amid widespread concern after Trump said Republicans should “take over the voting.” The US Constitution allows states the power to set election rules and says Congress can pass laws to set requirements for federal elections. The Constitution gives the president no authority over how elections are run. Jeffries said, “What Donald Trump wants to do is try and nationalize the election—translation: steal it.”

Hakeem Jeffries Directly Accuses Trump of Trying to “Steal” 2028 Election By Nationalizing It (Forbers/CNN)
February 9, 2026 – ProPublica published letters from eight children being held in the ICE detention center in Dilley, Texas, where more than 750 families are being held, nearly half of them including children. Since the start of the second Trump administration, the number of children in ICE detention has skyrocketed. A nine-year-old girl, Susej, detained for fifty days, wrote, “I miss my school and my friends. I feel bad since when I came here to this Place, because I have been here too long.” Ender, a twelve-year-old girl from Venezuela, wrote, “More than 60 days … going to the doctor and that the only thing they tell you is to drink more water and the worst thing is that it seems the water is what makes people sick here.” DHS, which oversees ICE, said in a statement that all detainees at Dilley were “being provided with proper medical care.”
February 9, 2026 – The Trump administration announced plans to rescind $600 million in public health funds from four states led by Democrats. The programs slated to be cut were in California, Colorado, Illinois, and Minnesota. The funds were administered through the CDC. A spokesperson for the HHS said, “These grants are being terminated because they do not reflect agency priorities.” About two dozen of the grants were aimed at curbing HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Dr. Debra Houry, who served as the CDC’s chief medical officer before she resigned last year over Trump administration policies, stated, “It is concerning that HHS is cutting public health funding to local communities that cover core functions in the middle of a measles outbreak and other health threats.”
February 10, 2026 – Acting head of ICE, Todd Lyons, defended his agency’s officers before a congressional hearing after the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Lyons stood by the officers’ tactics and said they would not be intimidated as they carried out the president’s mass-deportation plans. During his testimony, Lyons said, “Let me send a message to anyone who thinks they can intimidate us. You will fail.” Lyons blamed elected officials and protesters for escalating rhetoric that he said endangered his officers. He declined to comment directly on the killings of the two US citizens and added, “We are only getting started.”

“Outright Fascist”: Dan Goldman Interviews Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons. (Forbes)
February 10, 2026 – The US attorney’s office, led by the former Fox News commentator Jeanine Pirro, failed to convince a grand jury to indict six Democratic lawmakers over a social media video, reminding service members in the military and intelligence community that they were not required to follow illegal orders. Federal prosecutors tried to charge the lawmakers, all of whom previously served in the military or intelligence community, with violating US law. One of the lawmakers, Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, posted a statement that read, “Today, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro attempted to persuade a Grand Jury to indict me. This was in response to me organizing a 90-second video that simply quoted the law. Pirro did this at the direction of President Trump, who said repeatedly that I should be investigated, arrested, and hanged for sedition. Today, it was a grand jury of anonymous American citizens who upheld the rule of law and determined this case should not proceed.”
February 11, 2026 – Attorney General Pam Bondi took heated questions in a combative congressional hearing over the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files. She gave a wide-ranging, passionate defense of Donald Trump. Bondi also mocked her Democratic questioners and refused to respond to accusations that she was perpetuating a cover-up and ignoring victims, several of whom were sitting behind her in the hearing room. She refused to look at them. The hearing devolved into a partisan brawl, with Bondi lobbing insults at Democrats while insisting she was not “going to get in the gutter” with them. In one exchange, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland accused Bondi of refusing to answer his questions. She responded to the top Democrat on the committee by calling him a “washed-up loser lawyer—not even a lawyer.”

SevenMoments Bondi Butted Heads with Lawmakers over Epstein (PBS NewsHour).
February 11, 2026 – Newly released evidence showed that Gregory Bovino, the border patrol chief until last month, praised Charles Exum, the federal agent who shot a Chicago woman during an immigration crackdown last year. US citizen Marimar Martinez was shot five times by Exum while in her vehicle. She was charged with a felony after officials at DHS accused her of trying to ram agents with her vehicle. The case was abruptly dismissed after video evidence emerged showing that an agent had steered his vehicle into Martinez’s car. The uncovered evidence included a text to Exum from Bovino that read, “I’d like to extend an offer for you to extend your retirement beyond age 57. This will be your second extension, and we’d like you to consider this if feasible.” Bovino’s text added, “In light of your excellent service in Chicago, you have much yet left to do!!”
February 12, 2026 – The Trump administration revoked an EPA finding that was long the central basis for US action to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change, eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks. Known as the endangerment finding, the 2009 EPA determination found that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatened public health and welfare. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin had called the endangerment finding “the Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach.” Trump had called the endangerment finding “one of the greatest scams in history,” claiming falsely that it “had no basis in fact” or law.
February 13, 2026 – Without warning, Trump threatened to delay or cancel the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge, which connects Windsor and Detroit. In a lengthy Truth Social post, Trump declared, “I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve.” Brent Pilarski, business manager for the Michigan Laborers District Council, said, “Michigan is an automotive state. Parts cross the border constantly, and they need to get there on time, or cars can’t be built.”...

The Merlin Bird ID App Is Now the Merlin Fight ID App

Selden Martins — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:56:00 -0700

In light of recent rollbacks on environmental protection, we, the creators behind the beloved birding app Merlin Bird ID, have preemptively shifted into the field of argument identification. Our highly accurate predictive models have shown that while most birds won’t be around much longer, interpersonal conflict is eternal.

Whether you’re a frightened child wondering if your parents are teetering on the precipice of divorce, a hard-of-hearing person worried about missing the nuances of under-the-breath barbs, or simply fed up with listening to your coworkers bicker, our app will do the work of listening to and analyzing any argument for you.

Introducing Merlin Fight ID, a rebranded identification app complete with suggestions for conflict resolution, decreasing tension, and more.

The newly formed Cornell Lab of Aggression is dedicated to helping people identify and cope with arguments occurring around them. Buried subtext, unspoken accusations, and bold claims can make it challenging to figure out what kind of fight you just witnessed and what the actual repercussions might be. We’re here to make that challenge easier.

Merlin is designed to be an argument ID and conflict resolution coach for fights of all severities. Merlin asks you the same questions a conflict-resolution expert would ask to help resolve a disagreement nonviolently. Notice that date and location are Merlin’s first and most important questions. It takes years of experience in the field to know what kinds of arguments are expected on a given date and at a given location. Merlin shares this knowledge with you based on more than eight million arguments submitted to our online library, eFight. This information comes from people around the world who have recorded arguments during wedding anniversaries, funeral services, check-out lines, children’s birthday parties, and other high-stress scenarios.

Merlin Fight ID asks you to describe the intensity, volume level, and physical gestures involved in the fight you witnessed. Because no two people argue in exactly the same way, Merlin presents a shortlist of possible argument topics, fight intensity, and long-term outcomes based on descriptions from Cornell Lab experts. We also employed thousands of angry test subjects who helped “teach” Merlin by participating in argument simulations ranging from minor spats to nearly lethal fistfights. Together, they’ve contributed more than three million descriptors to help Merlin match your input with the most likely argument subject, severity, and projected level of bodily harm. When you positively identify a fight and click “This Is My Fight,” Merlin will save your information to help improve its future suggestions.

Most people would prefer not to witness conflict firsthand, especially when it escalates into physical violence. Now you can further dissociate yourself from any argument by watching it on your smartphone. The Video ID feature in Merlin allows anyone with a camera to film a short clip of a fight in progress and immediately receive a list of suggestions for responding to the disagreement, whether by employing proven de-escalation techniques or by removing yourself from the situation altogether.

We plan to add more categories of arguments, culturally specific approaches to conflict resolution, and, eventually, a Polymarket feature that lets users live-stream a fight in progress while others gamble on the outcome in real time. If you’d like to support our efforts to continue developing Merlin Fight ID, please consider recording your next fight with your partner or parent and then uploading it to our database. No disagreement is too subtle or too savage to be identified and cataloged.

We’re sorry you have to use Merlin Fight ID, but we hope it helps you identify conflict more accurately.