McSweeney’s

I Have Never Made This Recipe, but I Give It Five Stars

Rachel Reyes — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:00:00 -0400

Five big stars for these blueberry muffins. This delightful treat by Dana’s Delish blog has it all, including a crunchy crumble topping and a just-right burst of juicy berries. They look delicious—based on the picture Dana posted, that is. I haven’t actually made these.

As soon as I saw this recipe, I got to work. Did I go to the supermarket, purchase various baking ingredients, and then spend an hour carefully following the instructions, persisting even as the web page blasted pop-up ads for Mylanta every ten seconds? No. Did I bite into a freshly baked muffin, note its texture and flavor, and thoughtfully consider whether it lived up to the recipe’s claim of “best muffins ever”? Of course not. I simply posted a new comment that said “Looks yummy! Can’t wait to make!” even though I have no intention of ever doing so.

Obviously, I don’t give five stars to every recipe. Just the ones that have Pinterest-worthy (and possibly AI-generated) photos.

Sadly but unsurprisingly, I’ve received backlash from recipe comment section purists who complain that I’m “misleading people” by “skewing the ratings” and that they don’t know if a recipe is truly good because of me. To them I say, “Well, cretins, have you actually tried making the recipe to find out?”

Then there are others who blame me when a dish turns out terribly. But so what if a wannabe baker clocks my five stars, makes these blueberry muffins, brings them to their nephew’s baptism, and gets excommunicated from their church because the muffins taste like, in their words, “the devil’s vomit”? That’s not my fault. How am I supposed to know if a recipe is bad? I’ve never made any food before, ever.

Also, I clearly say “LOOKS yummy” in all my reviews. Some people just can’t read. Speaking of reading, my favorite book is To Kill a Mockingbird, which is the best instruction manual on avian murder I’ve ever seen and not read.

If these kitchen bitches care so much about “accuracy,” all they have to do is comb through hundreds of comments, tally the ones from those who followed the recipe, and recalculate the average rating. It is NOT that difficult if you have twenty-four hours of free time each day, which I do, ever since I was fired as a doctor for telling people, without doing any medical tests, that it looked like they didn’t have cancer.

Besides, what’s wrong with spreading a little positivity, even if it’s unfounded? After all, we praise babies without knowing how they’ll turn out—we still say they’re “so cute” without waiting to see if they’ll become serial killers. Plus, I like to think I’m doing a service to Dana’s Delish. Maybe Dana, for instance, needed a pick-me-up after that one horrible reviewer gave her banana bread one star despite substituting celery puree for bananas. I’m balancing things out. Yes, two reviews that don’t accurately rate the real recipe don’t make a right, but other commenters don’t have to gatekeep. What, like the only people who actually made and followed a recipe have the right to review it?

But I don’t have time to deal with these whisk-wielding cynics. I’m too busy bestowing five-star reviews all over the internet, scattering them like sprinkles on the dozen vanilla cupcake recipes I didn’t and will never make.

And speaking of recipes, Dana just posted a new one for chocolate lava cake, and I just know, based on absolutely nothing, that it’s perfect. I’d give it six stars if I could!

Reviews of New Food: Aldi Crystal Clear Frozen Ice Cubes

Hallie Pritts — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0400

My most enjoyable ice experience occurred sometime in the 1980s.

On a hot day, my aunt made all the cousins get out of the pool for lunch. She passed out bologna-on-white-bread sandwiches, then dropped ice cubes into a line of waxy shell-pink plastic tumblers endemic to the ’80s, maybe only endemic to ’80s aunts. She poured Pepsi over the ice, and everything bubbled gently, ice cubes clinking. The cups, probably full of PFAS chemicals, gave the Pepsi a slight note of Barbie doll. Delicious.

The ice cubes wore down in the acid swirl of cola while my cousins and I dripped pool water into the grass and tried not to step on bees. We drank until only the ice was left. Having lost their sharp edges, the ice cubes were now milky white ovals with star-like fault lines. I bit down on the ice; it squeaked in the teeth and is probably responsible for some of my ever-growing dental bills. But I’d do it all over again. The skull-shaking crunch, the last bit of sweetness, and then dropping the plastic cups in the grass to heat in the sun before my aunt hollered at us to pick up after ourselves.

Buying Aldi Crystal Clear Frozen Ice Cubes didn’t feel much like that.

There’s nothing fancy or remarkable about buying ten or even twenty pounds of ice from a gas station or a grocery chain. Maybe you’re having a party or filling a cooler, and you need more ice than you can crack out of two trays at home, so you drop a few bucks on ice. It doesn’t even feel that wasteful, though it does come in a plastic bag.

But Aldi Crystal Clear Frozen Ice Cubes are ice cubes in a cardboard box, the kind that might house a cheesecake or a frozen pie. Inside the box are four (FOUR!) cubes in a plastic tray sealed with plastic film. It costs $4.99. That’s nearly $1.25 per cube. Nothing about this setup screams Aldi to me. Maybe Whole Foods could get away with it if each cube were hand-wrapped in tissue paper and the packaging included a treatise on where the water came from (Somewhere tropical. Or, alternatively: the Scottish Highlands) and how it would make you feel to sip a drink over this ice (Answer: rich).

This box looks utilitarian. The font doesn’t make me feel like I belong to a country club or drive a luxury SUV. There’s no mention of whiskey (or whisky). It’s just four oversized ice cubes in a box.

I pierce the film. I read the directions (yes, there are directions) and let the ice sit for the prescribed 3-4 minutes before using it.

Wanting to get the full experience, I pick up the cube and examine it. It’s perfectly square with sharp 90-degree angles. I lick it. It tastes … of nothing, which is what you want from ice. I worried it’d be too big to fit in any of my glasses, but this one sits nicely in a Crate & Barrel lowball glass I got for my wedding, which I didn’t invite my aunt to, due to greater family ructions.

I’m surprised how quickly the cube goes completely clear. Nothing like the ’80s Pepsi ice with its imperfections and infused air bubbles. This is clear clear. I pour a measure of lemonade over it, and the ice creates a window to the bottom of the glass. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that before—a perfect aperture through the cloudy fluid.

I find myself staring into it. It’s … almost … beautiful? The contrast between the surrounding obscurity and the small, clear square that lets you see all the way through when everything around it is hazy and thick.

Online, fancy ice enthusiasts defend buying expensive ice, saying that making clear ice at home is too complicated. They detail methods that mechanically shake the bubbles out as it freezes. Boiling techniques to reduce gases and impurities. And specialized containers that force ice to freeze from the top down. It’s not something I’ve tried, or even considered trying. And my aunt definitely had no use for convoluted methods of freezing water just to make it clear. As long as it was cold, that was good enough.

My aunt died recently. We’d seen each other once in the ten years since my wedding. The beef wasn’t between us, but when family is fighting, everyone gets sprayed with eau de beef (probably the next product by the geniuses at Aldi).

I stare again into this melting shard of capitalism gone mad, this emblem of climate catastrophe and corporate foolishness. The ice is clear as a lens.

How did this wasteful ridiculousness get me to feel something? How did it create a peephole into a childhood with someone who loved me? Four ice cubes in two kinds of plastic packed into a box and shipped across states, maybe even countries (Aldi doesn’t list the origin on the packaging). It’s wasteful, and it’s killing us along with the planet. But humans are meaning-making machines, especially around loss, and apparently Pepsi and plastic tumblers are the madeleines I didn’t know I had till I picked up this box of Aldi Crystal Clear Frozen Ice Cubes and started thinking about ice.

Anyway. $4.99 at Aldi. Treasure them before they’re gone.

Family Vacation Training Plan

Gwynna Forgham-Thrift — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The Family Vacation is a great way to challenge yourself as a daughter, girlfriend, and human being.

This six-week plan will help you build towards your ten-day trip to London with nine family members in tow, using a variety of exercises designed to prepare your body, mind, and last nerve.

We know this upcoming trip isn’t the only thing you’ve got going on, so the Family Vacation Training Plan is uniquely flexible for your busy life. And your Aunt DeeDee is coming, then not coming, then coming, then not coming.

Schedule

Vacation days are long, and you need to adjust your schedule gradually. Each week of training, set your alarm fifteen minutes earlier, and wait thirty extra minutes each day to eat. Make sure you add in at least twenty minutes of sitting around, wondering what’s going on. You’ll be ready when your mom takes forty-five minutes to "go up to the room real quick and grab a light jacket before we go get food.”

Nutrition

Your family trip will consist of three primary food groups: dairy-carbs, shellfish, and gin. By week six, you should be eating cheesy bread, shrimp cocktail, and espresso martinis for all nine meals: breakfast, pastry stop, early lunch so your uncle shuts up, regular lunch, third lunch at the brewery Dad found, fried cheese happy hour, fried oyster happy hour, bread dinner, and gelato.

Strength

You’ll want to incorporate strength exercises into your routine to simulate the following:

Lifting eight “carry-on” suitcases into an overhead bin
Holding your mom’s ten-gallon water bottle
Carrying a chicken-shaped vase across town back to the hotel
Lifting the rental bike off your uncle
Helping carry your uncle to the nearest urgent care
Plugging your ears while your aunt blames “socialism” for your uncle falling off his rental bike

Endurance

Each day you’ll visit more and more museums, and each museum will have fewer benches and a more mundane history than the last. We recommend one endurance session per week: Stand in your living room and try to read Oliver Cromwell’s Wikipedia page while your training partner peppers you with questions like, “Are you thinking of having children?”

Cardio

Each day until the trip, walk at least two miles in the wrong direction.

Have Fun

Just remember, your Family Vacation isn’t a race; it’s a celebration of all the hard work you’ve put in. All the group texts, the individual texts, the group emails, the individual emails, the phone calls, the emails recapping the phone calls, and the screenshots of the other text convos that you are confused why you weren’t in.

But don’t forget to have fun. And don’t forget to tell your mom not to say “Zohran Mamdani” around Aunt DeeDee.

The Old Man and the Strait

Carlos Greaves — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0400

With apologies to Ernest Hemingway.

- - -

He was an old man who had started a war in a faraway Gulf, and he had gone one hundred and forty-three days now without reopening the Strait.

After forty days, a tentative ceasefire had been reached. Then another one. Then another one after that. Then another one that the old man had bragged about but that the enemy claimed no knowledge of. Then a memorandum that should have been a permanent ceasefire but lasted just eight days.

It was not the first time the old man had encountered such a setback. His entire life had been beset by similar misfortune.

That is the wrong word, he thought.

It was something worse than bad luck.

The Strait was rigged.

The old man recalled the many ways his life had been rigged against him. Rather than being born a Kennedy, or a Rockefeller, he had been born to a family of modest centimillionaires. Having a Kennedy in his employ could not make up for those humiliatingly humble roots. Besides, the Kennedy working for him was the lowliest Kennedy. The one who bathed in filthy rivers and spoke like a dying truck motor.

The old man did not want to think about that Kennedy. Especially because of the lettuce that summer. The lettuce had also somehow been rigged.

Instead, the old man thought about how he had grown his father’s modest $400 million fortune despite all of the losers who had been out to get him. The bank that had foreclosed on his casino simply for failing to turn a profit. The regulators who had shut down his university simply for failing to provide students with a degree. The women who had accused him of rape simply for failing to get their consent. And, of course, the Congress who had refused to declare him the winner of the election against the other old man simply for failing to receive more votes.

The old man thought about how everyone was constantly rigging things against him. The Strait must be another one of those things. There could be no other logical explanation.

“I did everything right,” the old man said to himself. He considered himself a very stable genius.

After all, he had tasked his top military advisor with waging the war. The advisor was the sharpest military mind the president had ever seen on television. Or, at least, the sharpest mind willing to swear fealty to the old man. The advisor had tried many good ideas. He had injected the soldiers with hormones so that they would fight the way men used to fight before men had become soft. Yet the advisor could not open the Strait.

The old man’s top negotiator had tried to reason with the enemy. His negotiator was a Yale man who, despite his Brown wife, showed some promise. But the Yale man had also failed to open the Strait.

“The enemy refuses our terms,” the Yale man had said. “They say their position is now stronger than when your predecessor negotiated with them.”

The old man had rebuked the Yale man for mentioning his predecessor.

After those attempts had failed, the old man had taken matters into his own hands. He had spoken sternly, the way men must speak in times of war.

“Open the Strait, you crazy bastards! Or you’ll be living in Hell. Praise be to Allah!” the old man had told the enemy. He had thought that invoking the enemy’s God and threatening to end their civilization would subdue them.

And yet, the enemy had not surrendered.

Thinking about these failures made the old man tired. So the old man decided to rest. He was, after all, an old man. As he closed his eyes, someone whispered, “Sir? Sir?”

The old man opened his eyes. The Yale man was gently shaking his shoulder. The old man looked around the Cabinet Room at his advisors. They were gathered there for an intelligence briefing.

“Do not bother me,” said the old man. He reclined in his chair and closed his eyes.

As the old man slept, he dreamed of another body of water. The water was a smooth mirror of American-flag blue.

It was nice to dream. In his dreams there were no failures. No war. No inflation. No disapproval ratings. No algae.

Besides, the actual Reflecting Pool was rigged.

I’m Jimothy, the Short-Spined Raccoon Who Has Taken the Internet by Storm, and the Collective Weight of Your Adoration Is Breaking My Already-Compromised Back

Emily Flake — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:36:00 -0400

“A video just a few seconds long and accompanied by a simple question, ‘What am I looking at?’ was enough to turn a Seattle raccoon into a global internet sensation this week. The viral critter—dubbed ‘Jimothy’ by the internet—has a shorter spine than the average raccoon. His unusual appearance is likely the result of a congenital deformity in his spine.” — Oregon Public Broadcasting

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It would seem I have become a minor celebrity on your information channels. It would also seem I have become something of an avatar for your collective longing for a better world, one that contains more whimsy and delight and less discord and horror. I am not immune to flattery, surely, but I regret to tell you that the weight of your longing is a bit much for my (apparently hilarious) abbreviated spine. I only have so many vertebrae, and they simply cannot carry your aspirations to fix whatever is wrong with you all, which, I further regret to tell you, is A LOT.

Put bluntly, you are, as a species, irretrievably fucked.

Given the dire nature of your condition, I’m not sure exactly what you think any raccoon, even a delightfully irregular one such as myself, is supposed to do about it. As a lifelong student of your detritus, I can tell you that the portrait that emerges from your trash cans is grim.

The wrappers of your preferred snack foods tell me you are self-soothing with highly-processed, chemical-laden junk that will lead to bodily issues far less charming than my own. I am not here to food-shame anybody, but I might gently suggest introducing a fruit or a protein-rich larva every now and then.

The packaging of your pharmaceutical goods—and there’s been quite an uptick—suggests that you’re having an increasingly difficult time dealing with your human emotions. It is perhaps not unrelated to the fact that the space between your households has grown annoyingly large, and the contents of your bins make it clear that you are dealing with these emotions in increasing physical isolation. Just last week I sorted through a pile of single-serving Stouffer’s toaster pizzas, airplane bottles, and prescription bottles that threatened to ruin even my generally sunny disposition.

Perhaps if you committed more time to interacting with one another without the intermediary of the screen on which I am so popular, you might feel better?

And look, I get it. The vanishingly few of you who still receive the news in print have supplied me with a pipeline to the goings-on in your world. Even a glance at the headlines on any given day is enough to send a fuzzy little basketball like me scurrying into the deepest woods. (Yes, we can read. If it helps to know, however, squirrels are illiterate, and rats… don’t get me started on the rats). No wonder so many of you give up halfway through the crossword. Also, the things some of you doodle in the margins give me… pause.

I am at a loss to explain what, if you’ll pardon the expression, the fuck is wrong with you people. You alone among the species seem to have found a way to override the main directive, which is, of course, to survive, and to have found increasingly elaborate ways of ensuring that you destroy yourselves. Which normally would be none of my business, except for the fact that you’re so likely to take so many of us down with you. Would you be less charmed by me if I turned to the camera and said, in my clumsy English: GET IT THE FUCK TOGETHER?

I don’t wish to be a scold. I’m happy that the absurd proportion of my legs to my body fills you with a dim echo of what you used to call joy. I would be thrilled if your delight at me helped to knit you together as a species, but if I’m a betting raccoon, I don’t love the odds. I’m sorry I cannot serve as a harbinger of better times, nor as a symbol of your better selves. I hope at least a few of you make some coins off the inevitable merch bearing my image. I expect I’ll see it in the trash by and by.

I Watched the Copa Mundial Non-Stop on Telemundo for Cinco Weeks and Now I Don’t Hablar Inglés Anymore

Stephen Ruddy — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:21:00 -0400

Hola, Chad aquí, de Greenwich, Connecticut, a muy blanco área of los Estados Unidos. A few weeks ago, I decidir to watch Estados Unidos vs. Paraguay in fútbol. Normalmente, I watch “football” and not “fútbol—¡Soy muy americano!—but I was curioso about the Copa Mundial; also, Pilar, mi guapa neighbor from España, asked if me gusta fútbol, and I said, “sí.” ¡Qué mentira!

¿El problema? The Copa Mundial was on Fox televisión, but mi antena is muy mala. When Estados Unidos switched to televisión digital a few años ago, they said we’d get every channel. ¡But la verdad is nobody recibir channels anymore! Or not buenos channels, like “ABC” or “CBS”—only Cozi TV and some muy religiosos ones. I could have streamed on FS1 or Fox One, but I already pay for diez suscripciones, and I didn’t querer spend más dinero. ¡No más! “¿And qué es Fox One anyway?” I asked. “¿Does Sean Hannity hablar about the game and then tell ICE to deportar the team de Colombia?”

So, I watched on Telemundo. Telemundo had todos los games. I have Telemundo on Peacock because mi madre le gusta Law y Order and the whole familia shares la password. At first, I didn’t comprender what the announcers were saying. Except “¡Gooooooooooooooool!” which is like the americano word for “goal,” but más grande. But after a few días, I started to understand más y más. Los announcers on Telemundo were muy, muy excited about fútbol! ¡It was contagioso!

At first, I watched Estados Unidos games. ¡Qué triste for Paraguay! Estados Unidos won cuatro a uno. But since I trabajar remotely, I decidir to watch más games. My jefe thought I trabajar, but, en realidad, I watched Cabo Verde vs. Arabia Saudita on Telemundo. And diecisiete other games.

¡The Copa Mundial was muy exciting! Once a game ended, a nuevo game began! Countries I barely knew, Cabo Verde, played other countries I barely knew, Uruguay, but I cared mucho, for some razón. Even after Estados Unidos lost to Bélgica, I found myself invested emocionalmente in countries I couldn’t find on a mapa. For example: ¿Dónde está Croacia? El viernes, I spent veinte hours watching Telemundo, when I should have been trabajando on PowerPoint. ¡Shhhhh, don’t tell mi jefe!

When I saw Pilar, my guapa neighbor de España, at the supermercado, she winked and asked if I saw España beat Francia; I gave a veinte-minuto análisis, because I was now an experto. “¡Pero qué bien hablas español!” she gasped. “¿Qué?” I responder, “¡I don’t hablar español!” And this is when I realizar I had a problema—I did seem to hablar español now, but I didn’t seem to hablar inglés, at least not so bien as before. ¡O no!

This was malo because I have una importante meeting el martes with other blancos de Greenwich, Connecticut. ¡Qué disastre! Mi jefe will be angry and also triste. “I’m sorry I forgot inglés,” I’ll say, “but I’ve watched veinte hours of fútbol every día for cinco weeks. And also El Señor de los Cielos, a telenovela that advertises constantemente during the Copa Mundial on Telemundo.”

But it is also bueno, because now I can finally comunicar with Pilar in her native lengua. She smiles and says, “Hola” whenever we meet, and even made me a tortilla de patatas when mi gato died last month. My jefe wouldn’t even give me the día off. Me gusta mi neighbor Pilar más than mi estúpido jefe or mi estúpido trabajo, that’s for sure.

When España beat Argentina in the Copa Mundial final, I worked up the coraje to invitar Pilar to Cold Stone Creamery, which is how we celebrar importantes eventos in Connecticut. I was nervioso because mi vocabulario is limitado to fútbol and El Señor de los Cielos, a telenovela about el narcotráfico. “¿Qué pasa if she wants to hablar about el New Yorker?” I wondered. “¿Or Christopher Nolan’s La Odisea? ¿Or the novelas of Mark Twain?” I decided I’d cruzar that bridge when I got to it. So far, it has been fútbol, fútbol, fútbol. España won, and el futuro is looking brillante.

My Next Book Project

James Weaver — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 05:00:00 -0700

My next book project doesn’t simply interrogate the hyperindividualist cultural norms of our current moment; it waterboards them. It attaches electrical nodes to them and shocks them into submission. It commits every act of intellectual violence against them. All in furthering the empathetic, care-based philosophy of community-building that is central to my student-centered pedagogy.

- - -

My next book project excavates the intellectual terrain of my backyard, unearthing the deep-rooted ideologies of the intransigent local and surfacing fresh approaches to being-in-place to shed light on new ground. That is to say, it is about gardening.

- - -

My next book project arises from my experiences as a posthuman humanist, multiply constructed by the intersecting dynamics of late-stage capitalism, ecological collapse, and democratic ruination, foregrounding my own interstitial inhabitation of confounding identities to erode the hegemonic intractability of language itself.

- - -

My next book project is a trans-species manifesto-cum-collage assembled from excised first editions of Ernest Hemingway novels, decaying roadkill gathered over the course of a summer spent barefoot in rural Michigan, and a series of scatological limericks generated by my AI companion, Judith.

- - -

My next book project, which expands upon a single sentence in paragraph three of chapter four of my dissertation, which in retrospect probably could have just been a footnote, is a self-satisfied, indulgent bit of intellectual navel-gazing whose audience is seven specialists and my begrudging mother, who will read the first three pages out of parental obligation and then tell me I should have become a dentist.

- - -

My next book project goes beyond a simple clinical dissection of a critically underappreciated corpus of cultural production by ripping out the heart and feasting upon the bloody, palpitating mass of children’s bedtime stories.

- - -

My next book project rests at the intersection of two roads three-tenths of a mile southwest of my university because I threw the unfinished fifteen-page manuscript out of my car window as I drove to the local dive bar to drown out the nagging internal monologue of my imposter syndrome.

- - -

My next book project builds upon my current book project by embracing its very nextness. Inspired by the Emersonian distinction between the Me and the Not Me, my next book project articulates the schism between the Next and the Not Next in order to differentiate it from my current book project and my previous book projects. It is, in other words, a futurism firmly grounded in the present that is inherently informed by the past. Taken together, then, these book projects embody a holistic projectness unbound by time itself.

- - -

My next book project emerges from my 117 days of experience as Vice Assistant Regional Dean of Data-Driven Downsizing, Synergistic Co-locating, and Strategic Sunsetting, leveraging my status as a leaderful change agent whose impactful, collaborative praxis has transformed entrenched channels of power within the academy and reimagining the contemporary university itself by using metaphors of kitchen-table polyamory to destabilize traditional relationships between faculty and administrators in an effort, ultimately, to justify my next book project.

Our Investigation Found That Shen Yun Used U.S. Voter Rolls to Distribute Flyers to Hundreds of Millions of American Households

Carlos Greaves — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:02:00 -0400

“President Trump used a rare prime-time address Thursday night to renew his attacks on the security of U.S. elections…Trump said China had accessed voter data of 220 million people in 18 states, but that information is generally publicly available and does not contain information that would allow a bad actor to change votes or hack into an election system.” — Los Angeles Times

- - -

Our nation’s voting system is broken. Americans should be able to trust that when they go to the polls, their votes will be counted. Instead, millions of citizens now no longer believe the United States has free and fair elections. We must hold those responsible for this distrust accountable.

Our administration recently uncovered definitive proof that our nation’s voting infrastructure has been used for nefarious purposes. The investigation found that over the past two decades, the performing arts nonprofit Shen Yun obtained the names and mailing addresses of hundreds of millions of U.S. voters to publicize its performances across the country.

The American people want to know that their private data is in safe hands. That is why, at the beginning of 2025, our administration handed the Social Security information of every American over to Elon Musk. Nowhere is private data safer than in the hands of big tech.

Sadly, such care was not taken in previous administrations. Just yesterday, FBI Director Kash Patel patched us in from his remote office in Las Vegas to inform us of a widespread data breach the likes of which had never been seen before. Namely, that Shen Yun had utilized voter information to distribute flyers, door hangers, and other advertising materials as part of its efforts to promote its ongoing tour of dance-forward rhythmic arts celebrating the rich tapestry of China before communism.

Granted, as an anti-communist, far-right religious movement, the views of Shen Yun’s founders largely align with our own. And our report found no evidence that the nonprofit behind Shen Yun used sensitive voter data for anything other than encouraging Americans to purchase tickets to a musical extravaganza showcasing thousands of years of traditional Chinese culture.

But consider the propagandistic power of that kind of marketing heft in the wrong hands. We estimate that the average American has come across a Shen Yun pamphlet, leaflet, or poster at least seventeen times in the last six months. What’s to stop bad actors from using American voter data to do the same thing? Like the Chinese Communist Party? Or the Blue Man Group?

The ugly truth is, our election systems were hacked. The mainstream media will point out that state voter rolls are publicly available. And that by “the voter rolls were hacked” we mean “the voter rolls were purchased for a small fee.” But that does not change the fact that they were easily accessed and used to distribute at least a dozen Shen Yun brochures per household within a two-hundred-mile radius of every music hall, theater, and arena in the country.

Even worse, government officials knew of this nationwide misuse of voter data and deliberately withheld that information. In 2020, when flyers for a Shen Yun performance in Washington, D.C. were dropped off at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, White House staffers deliberately intercepted and discarded them without even briefing the president. What else were these Deep State actors hiding?

That is why President Trump is so focused on restoring the integrity of our elections. Whether it’s telling the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act because it was disenfranchising white voters by giving Black voters proportionate representation, or bullying Congress into passing the SAVE Act, the president remains committed to ensuring that only the right people are able to vote.

While none of those legislative changes will stop Shen Yun from canvassing every neighborhood in your city whenever one of their dance troupes rolls through town, it will ensure Republican electoral dominance for the next one hundred years. And Republican electoral dominance all but guarantees a hot war with China some time this century. Once the CCP is defeated, the Shen Yun folks will probably take it down a notch. Two birds, one stone.

And don’t worry, if Democrats do continue to tamper with our nation’s elections by getting more votes than their opponents, you can rest easy knowing the president has an entire roster of tech founders ready to fix any voting machines that show the Democrat ahead. Democracies only work when a small group of billionaires is put in charge of everything.

Is It a Red Flag? The Odyssey Edition

Amy Greenlee — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:00:00 -0400

He’s been away from home for twenty years.
Not a red flag. This is an opportunity for you to embrace some alone time and discover new interests, like bird-watching or weaving burial shrouds.

He’s been having sexual relations with a goddess.
Not a red flag, since refusing a deity might have led to death or something far worse: being called an ill-mannered guest.

He is willing to sacrifice six crew members for his own survival.
Not a red flag. Everyone must come up with their own answer to the trolley problem. Never judge another person’s choice until you yourself have taken a turn at the lever.

He is a master of disguise.
Not a red flag unless he doesn’t know when to turn it off and you can’t stand role-play. If an eagle flies by carrying a white goose, it could be a sign that he is open to a discussion. Or it could just be him, dressed in another one of his elaborate costumes.

There is a second goddess.
Not necessarily a red flag. Goddesses are notorious for stealing each other’s sex-humans. Plus, there was that night when the two of you were waiting in the Taco Bell drive-thru, and he said, “But what if a goddess appears to me and forces me to have sex with them?” And you rolled your eyes and said, “Sure, honey. If you’re just sitting somewhere minding your own business, and an actual goddess forces you to have sex with them, then, no, that would not be cheating.” Then you ate your chalupa and forgot all about it until now.

He pretends to be a beggar and sneaks into the house to assess your loyalty.
Not a red flag, because he more than anyone knows what can happen in twenty years. Hopefully he will be quick about it, though, because you can’t keep this burial-shroud ruse up for much longer—people do have a general sense of how long it should take to weave something.

He slaughters 108 men who were interested in marrying you.
Not a red flag. People in long-term relationships often find themselves wondering how happy they would have been with someone else. This will no longer be a concern for you because there will be no one else.

He hangs several maids.
Not a red flag. Most husbands will barely lift a scrubbing brush to “purify the household.” This is above and beyond.

He lashes out at you for asking him to move the bed.
Not a red flag, because he could just be tired from a long day of meetings at the office or executions in the Great Hall. Before picking a fight, ask yourself if the bed thing can wait until tomorrow.

He claims the bed cannot be moved because he carved it out of an olive tree and built the rest of the house around it.
Sorry, but this is a red flag. Anyone who truly loves you would have known that rearranging furniture is an essential coping strategy, and they would have constructed the marriage bed accordingly. Looks like it might be time to gather up your twenty years of textile crafts and head out on a journey of your own.

As Your Manager, I Don’t Think It’s Too Much to Ask That You Read My Mind

Brandon J. Talley — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:04:00 -0400

I’ve requested this meeting because I’ve noticed a concerning trend: It doesn’t seem like you’re reading my mind. This is quite troubling because tasks I’ve never mentioned before are falling through the cracks. All of this could be avoided if you quit relying on written or verbal requests and started showing some initiative. Failure to magically know what I want simply isn’t going to fly.

I just can’t keep reminding you to do things I haven’t told you about. I don’t know how many warnings I’ve given you now. How many have there been? You should be keeping track of this. This is the problem right here. Why aren’t you anticipating?

At first, I thought this could just be a simple oversight. Maybe you were accidentally reading somebody else’s mind. Maybe you were reading Jerry’s. But after repeatedly dropping unmentioned deadlines, being unprepared for unscheduled meetings, and not bringing me ice cream that time it got really hot, I knew we had a serious issue. You are always blissfully unaware of what I want, even after I roll my eyes and say something like, “Would somebody please bring me an ice cream cone?” You then have the audacity to ask questions like what flavor I want. I can’t keep doing your job for you.

Your lack of mind reading is now leading you to ask incessant questions. Questions about what I want, or what I mean by that, or “Are you sure, because that’s completely opposite of what you said to me last time” need to stop. Further clarifications unnecessarily hold up our workflow. When you ask if I’d rather do X or Y, “yes” is a crystal clear answer.

If you really can’t read my mind, you should have disclosed that disability in your application. Now what am I supposed to do? I’m all for reasonable accommodations, but there’s nothing reasonable about forcing me to communicate what I want.

How can I be expected to put my thoughts into words? How could I possibly distill the free-form nature of the human mind into a linguistic box? How about this: Sometimes you do things not how I had pictured, and that is bad. Sometimes you do things how I pictured, but now I don’t like it, so it is bad. Sometimes I don’t know what I want at all, but after I see what you did, I know it’s completely wrong and bad, and now I am very angry. Instead, try not to do things bad. Is that helpful?

I’d like to know how you’ll address the fact that you aren’t reading my mind in the future. Perhaps medication? Perhaps you could start by pursuing an extremely invasive surgery? Maybe in your free time you could take some sort of night classes with a local mystic? Whatever you end up doing, I hope you began last week because that’s when I think you should have started. If you haven’t, I will be very condescending about how obvious it was that you should have done that.

But once you can read my mind, don’t do it too much. I want you to read my mind, but within reason. It would be an invasion of privacy to, say, use the ability to see how much I’m paying you compared to your coworkers, or divine that sometimes when I say I have a phone meeting I’m actually taking naps under my desk, or reach into the deepest corners of my psyche and find that through a series of oversights, you don’t have health insurance. Again, these are things you shouldn’t read my mind about.

Moving forward, I hope you can incorporate my constructive feedback into actionable change. I want you to do better not only to make my life easier, but also so that you aren’t yelled at by me. So please do better, but if you have any issues, please don’t hesitate to reach out. After all, I’m not a mind reader.

An Interview with Dave Eggers About His New Novel, Contrapposto

Knopf — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 07:28:00 -0400

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KNOPF: This is a very funny, very moving book about the deepest kind of friendship. It unfolds over many decades, and the novel took shape over decades for you, too. When did you begin thinking about these characters?

DAVE EGGERS: I’ve been thinking about Cricket and Olympia for about twenty years, and was writing random passages about them much of that period. Sometimes a certain book takes an especially long time to gestate and make its correct form known, and this was one of those books.

Q: The book covers about 65 years in the lives of its two main characters, Cricket and Olympia. Their interactions take place all over the world, from Indiana to Thailand, from Philadelphia to Turkey and Paris. Did you always see this as a book with that kind of epic scope?

DE: Once I decided it would cover most of their lives, yes. I knew that having grown up in rural Indiana, they’d be restless and curious about the rest of the world, and I really came to love tossing them all over the globe. Each section of the book starts in a very different place in their lives, physically and mentally, and the reader’s left to fill in the gaps.

Q: Which becomes surprisingly easy, given how long we’ve known them. The novel starts when they’re 8 and 9. Cricket is a quiet kid who loves to draw. What does he see in Olympia?

DE: She’s obviously far more worldly and erudite and quick on her feet, even at age nine. Some kids are. There are just some humans that develop exponentially faster than others. Olympia is that way—just intellectually on fire from minute one, along with being this beautiful human, too, with golden eyes. Cricket is a talented draftsman, but Olympia’s mind works at about ten times the pace of his.

Q: And she has ambitions for him.

DE: Without her, his ambitions might be pretty modest. He doesn’t ever know what to do with anything he creates. But from the start, she is his champion. She wants to start movements, change the face of the art world, on and on. He just wants to draw.

Q: You were a young draftsman yourself, going to art schools and such. Did you have such a champion? An Olympia?

DE: No, nothing like this. Olympia was created out of whole cloth. I wanted to conjure someone who would drag Cricket out of a studio and into the world. She was huge fun to write because while she’s brilliant and loyal, she’s a bit mercurial, too. You know she’ll re-enter Cricket’s life periodically, but you’re never really sure what angle she’ll be coming from.

Q: She’s very comfortable with the business of art, eventually becoming a gallerist and curator. Cricket is not so adept, and struggles with the commerce aspect of it.

DE: I think we’ve all known people like this—they have great talent but are stubborn about even the smallest compromises, and they loathe the business side of the artist’s life. Cricket can’t really manage it. He’s a bit of a classicist at a time when trends and theories were very important to observe and address.

Q: Contrapposto is a pose in figure drawing, which is something we see Cricket and Olympia take part in again and again over the course of the book. Can you say more about the long tradition of learning to draw the body—the rigor of it, the intimacy—and all of what that means in the context of the book?

DE: When you see that trope of an artist holding their thumb out and squinting, that’s the artist “measuring” the proportions of a figure. It’s a real thing! You look at the model, stick your arm out straight, and you cover their head with your thumb. That thumb-height becomes your unit of measure. Then you count how many heads the model’s total height is, how many heads the width of their shoulders are, on and on. By comparing all of these dimensions against each other, you can arrive at perfect accuracy (if you’re seeking that, of course). I’m convinced most people can be taught these techniques, too; it’s the same process that’s been observed for hundreds of years. The rigor of classical drawing was revelatory to me, and I wanted to convey that to a reader, too—the fact classical art education was much like a classical musical education, in that it was based on hard skills, hundreds of hours of practice, and a certain humility, too. But it is imminently learnable, and in an exhilarating way, it teaches any student how to see.

Q: In college they have a teacher, Marcus Carpenter, who is a bit of rebel in that he’s a classicist at a time when that’s not in vogue. He doesn’t kowtow to the theories of the day, and he’s ostracized for it.

DE: There are such people, always, thank god. In Carpenter, Cricket finds a mentor who also appreciates the intrinsic beauty of the art he loves, as opposed to art that rides certain temporary fashions. More than anything, Carpenter takes all the competitiveness out of what’s often present in art schools—a very strange misery that comes from students pitted against each other. But there is a way, a better way, to bring up young artists together.

Q: Cricket and Olympia know each other so well that they bicker with total, hilarious abandon, but they also fight fiercely for each other. Were you always sure about their path together?

A: I’ve had the same friends since grade school, so with these ancient friendships, you can speak candidly to each other, and pretension doesn’t get you far. But there’s an element of mild resistance, too, embedded in these old friendships. Cricket and Olympia want to reinvent themselves over their lives, but they also know they can’t pull one over on someone who’s known them since they were eight. At that point, you know each other on a molecular level. So you fight for that person as you would fight to keep a limb of your own body.

Q: In a time when AI relationships have suddenly left the realm of sci-fi and are seemingly both common and legitimate, this novel argues for the irreplaceable connection that can occur between two humans, in either romance or friendship. Do you think Cricket and Olympia share something rare in their relationship?

DE: I don’t know that it’s rare, but I did want to show a complex friendship over time. For millions of people, there are times when you’re in love, then you’re friends, and maybe love happens again… The line for Cricket and Olympia is blurry, which I think happens with so many people who don’t get married but who provide a certain familiar comfort to each other. Together they have a kind of perfect imbalance, which is really about as good as we can do.

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Contrapposto is out June 9, but is available for preorder now.

Disgruntled Performance

Ali Fitzgerald — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 07:04:00 -0400

Democrats Need to Win Back Voters by Becoming Republicans

Ginny Hogan and Carlos Greaves — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0400

The following is an excerpt from our upcoming book, Obey In Advance: How to Survive and Thrive Under Authoritarianism by longtime McSweeney’s writer Ginny Hogan and McSweeney’s resident satirist Carlos Greaves. From how to stick your head in the sand to avoid thinking about your dictator, to the most effective ways to reeducate the masses, this hilarious (and oddly reassuring?) guide has you covered—whether you want to Make Authoritarianism Great Again or not.

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Democrats Need to Win Back Voters by Becoming Republicans

“Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) is offering a warning about the rise of a ‘dirtbag left’ within the Democratic Party, a reference to candidates on the left who have run and won primaries while identifying themselves as democratic socialists.” — The Hill

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The Democratic Party needs to take back our country. After losing in a landslide by 1.5 percent of the vote in 2024, it was clear the party had completely lost touch with everyday Americans. Now there is only one solution: we must win back voters by becoming Republicans.

If the election told us one thing, it’s that, across the board, the American people like Republican policies more than they like Democratic policies. That’s why we must head in the same direction the Republican Party is heading—towards a Christian ethnonationalist, crony capitalist state. Turns out, that’s what our base wanted all along.

Think of the voter ideological spectrum as a beach, and each political party as a beach-chair rental hut. If the Republican chair rental hut is over on the far right side of the beach, then all we, as Democrats, have to do is park our chair rental hut a little to the left of their hut, and we’ll capture the entire left side of the voter beach. According to the principle of minimum differentiation, America wants two political parties that are virtually indistinguishable, and that’s exactly what we intend to give them.

Kamala Harris did an admirable job trying to become a Republican. Nothing says “party of the people” like seeking out the endorsement of a wildly popular, salt-of-the-Earth everyman like Dick Cheney. If there’s one mistake the Harris campaign made, it was not doing more of that.

From now on, we must do everything Republicans do, but better. Democratic candidates should be on right-leaning comedians’ podcasts making fun of trans athletes. They should abandon “woke” social policy talking points like “racism is a thing there should be less of” and focus instead on kitchen-table economic issues like “immigrants should not be allowed to go to the doctor.” And they must stop harping on democracy since clearly nobody cares. The only “norm” the Democrats should be focused on from now on is Norm from Cheers—a beer-drinking middle-aged white guy—which is a key demographic Democrats have been ceding to Republicans for far too long.

These changes are the only way Democrats can earn back voter trust. By becoming indistinguishable from Republicans, Democrats can prove that, like Republicans, they too are in step with the voting populace. Then, the only other task remaining is to crush any opposition to the left of us. After all, that’s exactly what Republicans would do.

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Advance praise for Obey in Advance:

“This book is the catharsis we all need. It’s not easy to make this current political moment funny, but Greaves and Hogan pull it off again and again. I laughed my ass off (which explains where it went).”
—Nikki Glasser

“This is the only self-help guide to living under a dictatorship that you will ever need, and by far the funniest. Read it before it’s banned.”
—Andy Borowitz, The Borowitz Report

“Democracy is priceless, but fascism sure seems to pay well. If you’re morally bankrupt and looking to sell your soul, Obey in Advance has everything you need for a profitable life of lickspittlery.”
—Kevin Kruse, Professor of History, Princeton University

Obey in Advance will be out this September and is available for preorder at our store.

We Need to Stop This Reckless Rhetoric About Abolishing the Thought Police

Cezary Jan Strusiewicz — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:00:00 -0400

“As a new video emerged capturing gunshots and yelling in a fatal shooting in Maine involving federal immigration officers, the state’s governor called on Congress to immediately reform and rein in ICE ‘before more families are robbed of a loved one.’” — ABC News

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I’ve been hearing a lot of talk lately about abolishing the Thought Police, and frankly, it’s the sort of unserious political discourse that has sadly inundated our everyday lives. Everyone wants to tear down institutions these days. Nobody wants to BUILD. Nobody has any respect for tradition anymore. The Thought Police have existed for over forty years now. They’re right there with the Parthenon, the pyramids, and New Coke.

Some of our greatest cultural achievements are younger than the Thought Police. The Segway is younger than the TP. The Slanket. The Furby. Can you imagine the modern world without those marvels of civilization? Of course not. Then how come the Thought Police doesn’t get the same consideration? If we start just dismantling every government institution all willy-nilly, pretty soon we’ll be living in a country where agencies are expected to justify their existence instead of simply continuing to exist because they already exist.

Critics also love pointing out how the Thought Police weren’t even part of Oceania’s original governmental structure, having been established during a national security reorganization following the bombings by The Brotherhood. You know what I call that? Modernization. Progress. That is textbook adapting to the times, which is also why I’m glad that the Thought Police have since expanded beyond their original mandate.

Agencies that remain narrowly focused on things like “goals” or “the law” or “the Constitution” demonstrate a shocking lack of initiative. The Thought Police understood this better than anyone. They looked at the problem of policing thoughts and, boldly and BRAVELY, asked themselves whether facial expressions, private conversations, body language, suspicious silences, and generally giving off a bad vibe also deserved government attention.

Yes, much has been made of the fact that the Thought Police seem to devote a worrisome amount of attention to perfectly ordinary citizens instead of to hardened enemies of the state. I don’t even know how to respond to that without treating my imaginary opponent in this debate like a literal baby. Goo-goo-gaga. Does that address your concerns? Do you want a bottle? Then listen up, kiddo: Ordinary citizens make up the overwhelming majority of the population. From an efficiency perspective, concentrating on citizens simply makes more fiscal sense. If every law enforcement agency focused only on wrongdoers, there would be no reason to grow them or expand their role. And infinite growth is not only possible, it’s also what all government agencies should strive for.

There has likewise been a lot of manufactured outrage over the agency operating discreetly, often not identifying themselves even amid arrests and interrogations. This obsession with visibility is deeply worrying. Some things should stay hidden. Would you want glass walls around public toilets? Should department stores’ changing rooms have streaming cameras inside them? You see my point. Plus, the uncertainty of who the Thought Police are and what they are doing creates a healthier society. Citizens become more polite/paranoid, which are basically the same thing. Gossip goes down, people stop sharing their inane opinions with you, and life generally improves when neighbors start worrying if asking to borrow your pruning shears could be interpreted as domestic terrorism.

Finally, the would-be killers of the Thought Police assure us that all the functions performed by the agency could be transferred elsewhere, under the jurisdiction of people who don’t treat the Constitution as a series of buzzkill suggestions. This breathtaking optimism reveals just how little the public understands the ultimate call of the TP. The Thought Police are but a humble participant in Big Brother’s much larger and more noble undertaking: the creation of a government so attentive, so involved, and so lovingly present that citizens never have to suffer the anxiety of wondering whether anyone is watching. You can slap a different badge on them and give their “We can do whatever we want” warrants a new letterhead, but that won’t change our day-to-day reality.

So, no, the Thought Police should remain exactly where they are. Not because they’re perfect but because they have become an institution. After all, true institutional greatness is measured not by whether a program works but by how difficult it’d be to get rid of it. And don’t you want to live in a world where that kind of tick-like perseverance gets rewarded?

Effective Immediately, Every God-Fearing Soldier Will Be Jacked to the Gills with Testosterone

Kate Chrisman — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:15:00 -0400

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday a new mandatory screening program to test all service members age 30 and older, including women, for testosterone deficiency annually.” – New York Times

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In the past, Washington said the real dangers facing Americans were nuclear weapons, cyberattacks, China, terrorism, and online radicalization. I, too, have seen many of these reports.

But none of them capture the true threat facing the American public: low testosterone levels.

Numbers don’t lie. Since we started testing testosterone levels yesterday, the results were the worst this country has ever seen. Effective immediately, every god-fearing soldier will be jacked to the gills with T.

Consider the modern battlefield—a brutal and unrelenting place. On a remote base outside Las Vegas, a drone operator sits in an air-conditioned office, headset on, coffee in hand. Under this new directive, the operator’s testosterone levels that were once low are now dangerously high. Before his hand even touches the joystick, his hormone panel is transmitted through diplomatic channels. American T levels end the war before it even begins.

If the enemy doesn’t grasp what 1,472 nanograms per deciliter means—and to be honest, some of them won’t; that’s sort of the whole problem with these people—then yes, we get to send the missile.

But not just any missile. While our T enhancement program starts with the individual warfighter, we’re not stopping there. Our engineers are already developing next-generation payloads by replacing components in our missile programs with material that’s 100 percent natural, 100 percent destructive, and 100 percent pure American testosterone.

Now sure, some skeptics will say if testosterone is the answer for America, isn’t it the answer for the whole world? And to that I say, “We’re keeping this information top secret by releasing it on all major social media platforms.”

Once we’ve optimized the individual fighter and the arsenal, the last piece is infrastructure. That’s why, together with Secretary Kennedy at Health and Human Services, we’re removing fluoride from the water supply and replacing it with trace amounts of 100 percent pure testosterone, sourced exclusively from the manosphere.

Ladies of America, we kindly (but forcefully) ask that you refrain from drinking water.

I’ve heard the criticism. Some have asked whether providing government-funded T to our troops is a form of gender-affirming hormone therapy. Absolutely not. Gender-affirming hormone therapy is when the government gives service members testosterone to help them align their bodies with their gender identity. This T is being administered to align their bodies with the Pentagon’s identity.

Whether our military members are deployed to Iran, the Pacific theater, or the streets of Dubuque, Iowa, Americans can feel safe knowing our soldiers are now experiencing the combat-ready effects of mainlining testosterone, including increased aggression, acne, a low sperm count, and excessive body hair.

Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes: June 2026: Atrocities 1014-1112

Emily Greenberg and Chase Bush-McLaughlin — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0400

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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May 2026

Main Index

Trump’s first term

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June 2026

– June 1, 2026 – The Trump administration issued a rule narrowing the Medicaid work requirement’s exemption for people who are “medically frail,” making it available only to those whose conditions “significantly impair” their ability to work. The rule states that diagnoses including cancer, HIV/AIDS, and end-stage renal disease do not by themselves qualify for the exemption.
– June 1, 2026 – As Canada’s trade minister traveled to Washington for talks on the future of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Donald Trump reposted a Bloomberg article about Canada’s technical recession with the comment: “51st State!” It was his first public use of the phrase in months.
– June 3, 2026 – The New York Times reported that a previously undisclosed Department of Homeland Security inspector general report had found repeated mistreatment of detainees at Louisiana’s Winn Correctional Center, including an officer placing one detainee in a chokehold and another stabbing a detainee’s thumb with a pen. Investigators also said the facility later refused to provide complete video footage of some use-of-force incidents.
– June 3, 2026 – New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill said federal immigration officials again refused to allow her into the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark. The day before, New Jersey had sued the GEO Group, the private prison contractor operating the facility, after it refused access to state health inspectors, as protests outside continued in solidarity with a hunger and labor strike by detainees.
– June 3, 2026 – The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had appointed pardoned January 6 rioter Elias Irizarry to the Defense Department’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office, which oversees sensitive special operations and counterterrorism matters. Irizarry had pleaded guilty to entering the Capitol through a broken window while carrying a metal pole.
– June 3, 2026 – Donald Trump signed an executive order stripping job protections from nearly eight thousand federal employees in policy-making roles, making it easier to fire career civil servants. A subsequent New York Times investigation found that the White House had privately pressured the Merit Systems Protection Board before a March ruling embracing the administration’s expansive view of presidential power over the civil service. As Trump signed the order, White House aide James Sherk explained that it would treat policymakers like private-sector employees: “If they’re messing up, then they can be removed quickly.”
– June 4, 2026 – Mamuka Artmeladze, a forty-three-year-old man from Georgia, died in ICE custody at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, becoming the fiftieth person to die in immigration detention during Donald Trump’s second administration. His death came days after ICE ended a policy requiring the agency to publicly report deaths occurring within thirty days of a detainee’s release.
– June 4, 2026 – Lawfare reported that at least ninety-seven January 6 defendants pardoned by Donald Trump had since been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of new crimes, more than twice the number previously documented. The study identified five cases in which Trump’s pardons allegedly enabled later crimes by releasing offenders who otherwise would likely have remained incarcerated, including one who was later sentenced to life in prison for child molestation and another who was convicted of grand larceny and burglary.
– June 4, 2026 – Donald Trump pardoned Stephen Buyer, a Republican who represented Indiana in the US House from 1993 to 2011. Buyer was convicted in 2023 for trading on confidential information about a T-Mobile/Sprint merger and Guidehouse’s acquisition of Navigant, including a tip from a T-Mobile executive during a golf outing, and was sentenced to twenty-two months in prison after the judge found that he had obstructed justice by giving false explanations for his trades.
– June 4, 2026 – After multiple musicians withdrew from National Mall concerts for America’s 250th anniversary, saying they had been misled about the event’s political ties, Donald Trump announced his own rally with Lee Greenwood and Christopher Macchio. Trump said the other artists had been told “to stay home,” promised a “Rally to end all Rallies,” and listed himself among the performers as “a fine and highly dignified gentleman known as, President DONALD J. TRUMP!”
– June 4, 2026 – Parents of transgender children treated at Mount Sinai Health System reported that the hospital had told them it would provide their children’s medical records to the Trump administration under a federal subpoena. The reports followed a similar demand made by the administration to NYU Langone for years of records on minors treated for gender dysphoria, as well as files on the clinicians who cared for them.
– June 5, 2026 – Speaking to farmers in Wisconsin as his trade and foreign policies drove up costs, Donald Trump told supporters, “I don’t need this. I got elected. What the hell do I have to be here for?” He added, “I could be home right now in the beautiful White House, enjoying watching somebody else on television talking.”

Trump Addresses Wisconsin Farmers (WKOW)
– June 5, 2026 – A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restart asylum and immigration processing after striking down policies that had frozen asylum grants and halted immigration benefits for people from thirty-nine countries, most of them in Africa and the Middle East. “The court is reminded” that immigrants are often told to “follow the law” and “do things the right way,” the judge wrote. “This case serves as a perfect example of immigrants doing just that.”
– June 5, 2026 – An auction for oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended with bids on only about 70,000 of the 689,000 acres offered, despite Donald Trump’s promises to extract “liquid gold” from a refuge he had called “the biggest find anywhere in the world, as big as Saudi Arabia.” No major international oil companies participated, and the sale raised just $3.7 million, nearly half of it from Alaska’s state-owned economic development corporation.
– June 5, 2026 – The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had drafted an order directing the US Forest Service to open millions of acres of national forest land to off-road vehicles, including about five million acres mostly in Idaho and Montana that the agency had recommended to Congress for wilderness protection.
– June 5, 2026 – A Washington judge dismissed the Kennedy Center’s lawsuit against jazz musician Chuck Redd, who canceled his annual Christmas Eve jazz concert after the Center’s Trump-appointed board added Donald Trump’s name to the building. Redd had hosted the concert since 2006. The court found that he had not signed the 2025 agreement the Center claimed he breached and noted that the free concert lost no ticket sales.
– June 5, 2026 – FBI Director Kash Patel fired five bureau employees connected to a 2023 internal memo about far-right extremists’ interest in “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology. An internal review had found that the memo violated professional standards but showed “no evidence of malicious intent.” After the firings, Patel posted, “This FBI will never infringe on religious freedom.”
– June 6, 2026 – The New York Times reported that the Trump administration began greatly expanding immigration court dockets to accelerate deportations, with some judges’ caseloads doubling or tripling. In one New Orleans courtroom, more than two hundred cases were scheduled over two days, and immigration lawyers said eighty-nine people were declared absent and therefore deportable. In Chicago, a judge addressed more than twenty immigrants at once and gave them twenty days to submit their cases in writing.
– June 7, 2026 – The New York Times reported that recent US intelligence reports expressed serious concerns that Israeli spy agencies had intensified efforts to eavesdrop on senior Trump administration officials involved in negotiations with Iran. The day before, NBC News had reported on the Pentagon’s decision to raise Israel’s counterintelligence threat level to its highest rating. Current and former US officials said senior Trump aides made themselves easier targets by conducting national security business on personal phones, flying on private aircraft, and declining support from US embassies abroad.
– June 7, 2026 – Trump stormed out of a Meet the Press interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker. Early in the interview, Trump became agitated when Welker questioned him about his fund for January 6 rioters. After Trump made incorrect statements about California’s gubernatorial election process, Welker asked him to supply evidence. “They’re crooked, just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked. And Meet the Press is crooked,” Trump responded. He later added, “You’re either crooked, or you’re stupid. You play right into their hands with this crap. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged,” and walked out.

Trump Argues with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press (WKYC)
– June 8, 2026 – Trump nominated Todd Blanche, his former personal defense lawyer, for attorney general. As deputy and then acting attorney general, Blanche fired numerous Justice Department employees, targeted Trump’s enemies with indictments, was involved in the mishandling of the Epstein files, and played a significant role in the administration’s controversial proposal to create a $1.8 billion fund for those claiming they were victims of government mistreatment, including Capitol attack rioters. “Todd Blanche has never stopped acting as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer,” said Stacey Young, founder of Justice Connection.
– June 8, 2026 – Knicks fans booed Trump during the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden. After Trump announced he would attend the finals, becoming the first sitting US president to do so, intense security measures were put in place. Other ticket holders were forced to wait in line for hours and undergo airport-style security screening while the streets around Madison Square Garden were shut down. When Trump briefly appeared on screen during the national anthem, fans booed. Asked later about the boos, Trump said, “It was, I think, mostly cheers.” Trump was later filmed sleeping during the Knicks’ only loss in the series.
– June 8, 2026 – Somalian soccer referee Omar Artan was denied entrance to the US despite holding a diplomatic passport and visa. An anonymous Trump administration official alleged that Artan had associated with “suspected members of terror organizations,” an accusation that many Somalians felt was unfair. Last year, Trump issued a travel ban against Somalia and called its people “garbage.” Artan would have been Somalia’s first World Cup referee.
– June 8, 2026 – Activists began a fast and vigil in solidarity with detainees at two ICE facilities in Adelanto, California. The detainees at Adelanto ICE Processing Center and the Desert View Annex had been on a hunger and labor strike since mid-May over inadequate access to clean water, food, and medical care. Four detainees had already died at Adelanto between January 2025 and the beginning of the fast.
– June 9, 2026 – Social Security’s trustees said the program would reach a critical low by 2032, a quarter earlier than last year’s projection, due in part to Trump’s immigration and tax policies. This would mean the government would need to cut monthly benefits by 22 percent beginning in 2032. Over fifty-six million people rely on Social Security.
– June 9, 2026 – The Government Accountability Office found that Camp East Montana, an ICE tent encampment in Texas, endangered migrants and wasted millions. The GAO’s report cited loaded guns that went missing, people with HIV and diabetes left untreated, and cookies used in lieu of cleaning services. In the six months prior, three detainees died at Camp East Montana, including Geraldo Lunas Campos, whose death following a struggle with guards was ruled a homicide.
– June 9, 2026 – A ProPublica investigation revealed that the family of an Indian billionaire targeted by Trump secured major policy concessions from the Trump administration after investing in a company tied to Donald Trump Jr. The Trump administration had previously targeted the Ambani energy empire with tariffs. However, after Anant Ambani befriended Donald Trump Jr., his family made a nine-figure investment in America First Refining, a Texas startup in which Donald Trump, Jr. held partial equity. Around the time of the investment, the Ambani family secured major policy wins that benefited their company, Reliance Industries, including lower tariffs, a license to buy Venezuelan oil, and a sanctions waiver to buy Russian crude after the Iran war began.
– June 9, 2026 – Joint research by MS Now and the Marshall Project concluded that ICE had detained over five hundred babies and toddlers under Trump. After analyzing documents obtained by the Deportation Data Project, the journalists determined that ICE had twenty-five children aged three or younger in custody on an average day, a tenfold increase compared to when Biden was in office. Many children were held longer than the court-mandated twenty-day limit and went without proper nutrition, medical treatment, sleep environments, or toys. Pediatricians have said that detention at such a young age can have long-term consequences for a child’s health and development.
– June 10, 2026 – After US prices rose at their fastest rate in three years, Trump said, “I love it. The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation.” According to Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers for May, prices rose by 4.2 percent in the past year, including a 0.4 percent spike from April to May due to the war in Iran. Trump later claimed his words were taken out of context.

Trump on Latest Inflation Numbers: “I love it.” (KWTX)
– June 10, 2026 – Trump shared a clip from the television series The West Wing to justify new strikes against Iran. On Truth Social, Trump described the strikes as self-defense in response to Iranian aggression. He then posted a clip from The West Wing in which the fictional President Josiah Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, argues that the US should hit its enemies with a “disproportional response,” leading to “total disaster.”
– June 10, 2026 – An immigration judge ordered the deportation of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University graduate student detained during the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters. Mahdawi’s lawyers argued that their client could not be deported while his habeas corpus petition was still making its way through the courts.
– June 10, 2026 – Seeking to comply with Trump’s March 2026 executive order cracking down on mail-in voting, the Postal Service said it wouldn’t deliver mail ballots for states that refuse to hand over voter lists. Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that mail-in voting leads to voter fraud and sought federal control over elections, which is illegal. “This would deny eligible people the right to vote. Full stop. This is not in the president’s power. It’s absolutely clear in the Constitution—states run elections,” said Tobias Read, Oregon’s secretary of state.
– June 10, 2026 – Energy Secretary Chris Wright claimed that his department had not targeted Democratic states, despite DOE lawyers testifying to the contrary. “No decisions were made on politics,” Wright told a House committee. Meanwhile, his own lawyers had stated in filings related to the termination of eleven clean energy grants in states that Trump lost in 2024 that “a primary reason for the termination decisions at issue is because of location in blue states.” Two days after Wright spoke to the House committee, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the grants must be restored.

Chris Wright Spars with House Dems (The Hill)
– June 11, 2026 – A lawncare company run by Trump supporter James Hagedorn pledged to donate $1 million to repair any damage to the South Lawn caused by the UFC fight held on Trump’s birthday. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said the arrangement raised ethics questions. “Major corporations generally don’t do things out of the goodness of their heart. It’s generally they do things for the government because they want something from the government,” said Jordan Libowitz, CREW’s vice president.
– June 11, 2026 – Trump administration officials suggested a novel approach to paying medical bills: borrowing from health insurers. According to reporting by The New York Times, the unusual suggestion was included in a long, dense final rule issued in May on how the ACA will operate. Over a third of US households already have medical debt. “The last thing you want to do is to increase deductibles and load people up with more medical debt. It seems hugely out of touch with where people are,” said Neale Mahoney, an economist at Stanford University.
– June 11, 2026 – Seven states—Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington—announced they would not participate in Trump’s “Great American State Fair.” While several states cited budget constraints and other resource constraints, others expressed concern over the event’s partisan nature.
– June 11, 2026 – Trump threatened to take over DC if Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist, won the Democratic mayoral primary. When asked about the campaign, Trump did not name George but appeared to reference her in his remarks: “I wouldn’t like it—and maybe we take back Washington, run it on the federal basis. We won’t put up with it. We’re not going to lose our businesses.” Trump does not have the legal authority to unilaterally revoke DC’s right to self-government.
– June 12, 2026 – The Justice Department approved a $111 billion Paramount–Warner Bros. merger that could potentially cause massive layoffs and major disruption to the film, television, and streaming industries. With the new acquisition, Paramount will have 200 million subscribers. Paramount’s CEO, David Ellison, is the son of Larry Ellison, a longtime friend of Trump’s.
– June 12, 2026 – Federal agents searched the office of Ohio Organizing...

A Case for the Giant Toxic Goo Pit I Want to Build in the Center of Town

Ellie Race-Moore — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:00:00 -0400

I am a humble man. I made my fortune the old-fashioned way, through grit, determination, and a small multi-million-dollar loan from my father. And now I’m trying to achieve something beyond what humans have ever imagined: a giant toxic goo pit.

Polling suggests people are upset with the giant pit of toxic goo I’m planning to build in the center of town. I’m here to put your mind at ease. The toxic goo is harmless. It’s just the liberal media who’ve been giving it a bad name.

Yes, I’m planning to tear down the beloved historic bird sanctuary, once the crown jewel of the city center. But we need that space to build the goo.

I know the press has been saying toxic goo is bad. That it’ll suck up all the water. That it causes cancer. That it gives babies laser eyes. But isn’t this just what no-nothing naysayers do? Call into question great men who are trying to create the future? The media loves to paint the goo as “dangerous.” But studies have shown only a dozen cases of babies with laser eyes. And my company generously gave the parents of those babies $3,000 to laser-proof their homes.

All of the “evil” the goo pit will cause has been completely overblown. The goo will suck up some water, but all the water? Absolutely not. That’s hyperbolic. The goo pit will take about 90 percent of the town’s water and contaminate the rest.

I am implementing this project because I love this beautiful town. The toxic goo powers my massive empire of wealth, and enables me to give back to you people. Why, just last year I donated fifteen iPads to the local elementary school so they could learn to code or whatever. It doesn’t really matter since all those jobs will be obsolete in three to five years (the goo is really good at coding).

Something else these so-called “journalists” won’t tell you is that the goo will bring more jobs. Who do you think will dig the giant pit? Machines can’t do it all. Some tasks still require backbreaking labor, perfect work for the hard-working humans of this town. Wouldn’t you all love the promise of waking up every morning (including weekends) and heading over to the goo pit for twelve hours a day? Yes, you’d have to sign a liability waiver acknowledging that you might turn into some kind of mutated half-human, half-goo pod—but think about the job security.

Or, to be more precise and transparent: job security for the next six to nine months. You see, once we dig the giant pit and fill it, the goo kind of runs itself. But while they last, the jobs will be pretty good. And of course, once the goo pit is installed, we will need a few dozen goo managers to make sure the goo keeps gurgling away.

There are towns that would love to have this toxic goo pit. In fact, some think you should be paying me for the honor of hosting the goo. But out of the goodness of my heart, I am offering you this goo pit for free. Just give me a few billion in tax breaks, and we will break ground tomorrow.

Listen, folks, the goo is our future. The goo is our god and will replace silly things like art, reading, and humanity. We won’t need any of that stuff once the goo reaches its terrible, beautiful final form.

In the end, progress must reign. That’s why I’ve used my massive wealth to bribe the government, which in turn used eminent domain to take the land we want for the goo pit. So you might as well stop complaining.

For what it’s worth, I think you will all come to love the goo in time. Yes, there’s a fair-to-definite chance that the goo will seep into the water supply and give everyone bone worms. But these are the risks we must take for the future of our civilization (i.e, the goo).

Introducing: MAN-THOLOGY, by Alpha Male Guru, Chud Buffly

Tom Ellison — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0400

- - -

Alpha Master Chud Buffly has hunted and gathered his most elite tips and musings into a daily reading that will allow all men to achieve peak performance with only the most primal practices, protocols, and powders. With the help of frequent McSweeney’s contributor, Tom Ellison, Buffly offers hacks on everything from barbells to blockchain and finance to females.

We’re happy to feature an excerpt from this important tome, which is out later this year, but available for preorder wherever you purchase books, multivitamins, and creatine.

- - -

Introducing: MAN-THOLOGY
by Alpha Male Guru Chud Buffly
(as told to Tom Ellison)

Let me set the stage (figuratively, not in a “theater” way).

Men today are in crisis. Some of the signs are glaring, such as the troubling drop in male college graduation rates, or the equally troubling rise of Timothée Chalamet. Others are more pernicious. Inequality. Illness. Loneliness. While such silent epidemics may be unfamiliar to many readers, they constitute a social crisis (for men).

Clearly, times are changing, as my attorney, Chloe, keeps reminding me in that strangely frantic tone. What is a man to do? Just chill? Look inward? Certainly not.

It might seem unbelievable, but years ago I was just another of these lost souls—broke, alone, and weak. Until I reached a turning point. And when my candy-ass Honda Civic skidded past that turning point and flipped into an abandoned quarry, I knew I’d hit rock bottom.

But luckily for me, those struggles began my quest to become the world’s foremost Alpha male. By now, I’ve worked with literally trillions of guys, whether via the Chuditude podcast, the comments section of ChudBuffly.com, or my Alpha Elite Lone Wolf Renegade Brigade Coaching Discord.¹

And luckily for you, the essential insights I’ve acquired along the way are hitting shelves in November in MAN-THOLOGY: 365 Alpha Maxims Guaranteed to Help You Know Everything, Feel Nothing, Get Jacked, and Never Die.

Finally.

A book.

But for men.

I never would have imagined myself writing a book. I’ve always thought of books as nothing more than written-down podcasts. But then a beta chump named Tom offered to do the grunt work of collating my daily insights.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because what you’re doing with masculinity should be exposed to the world. Plus I could use the money,” he said.

“Thanks for the kind words,” I replied. “I hope you take ChudCoin.”²

So I started texting, voice-noting, and drive-by screaming daily doses of Alpha wisdom to Tom, which he turned into my book with all that clickety-clack stuff. Commit to reading and internalizing each entry, and after a year I guarantee you’ll be completely unrecognizable to even your dearest loved ones.

MAN-THOLOGY is needed now more than ever. It seems the world is constantly telling men there is something wrong with us. That we should be better, or learn, or evolve, or something.

Well, an Alpha doesn’t let anyone tell him how to live.

That’s your first tip, write that down.

Within MAN-THOLOGY, you’ll find pure, uncut truth on everything from workout tips, to mindset hacks, to investment philosophies, to family and other trivialities. It’s everything an Alpha needs to know.

As you grind through each sentence, you’ll come one step closer to chiseling your body, callusing your mind, dominating your career, stuffing your wallet, numbing your emotions, and optimizing your every waking minute until you are manly enough to be happy in your own skin.

Plus, it’s fun.

MAN-THOLOGY is for anyone. Perhaps you are a man who is discovering the book just in time to save you from a life of mediocrity and salad. Maybe you can buy it for your husband so he’ll stop weeping into his BabyBjörn. Perhaps you are a budding Alphling already in the Chud Buffly ecosystem, and you’re simply looking for something to goosh spiders. Perhaps you are an aspiring female Alpha male, or Alphette.³

Whoever you are, I welcome you as my Alpha brothers and sister-brothers. The Alpha male movement is broad and inclusive, welcoming anyone willing to 1) follow my comprehensive teachings to the letter 2) provide a valid credit card number or crypto wallet. Come on in, the Alpha water is fine.⁴

So let me pre-congratulate you on making the first good choice of your life—deciding to buy my book. After reading, you will leave behind your old self (a flabby, low-IQ wage slave being cyberbullied by local Girl Scouts) and start becoming just like me (a shredded, multimillionaire genius who goes ATV racing with Joe Rogan semiregularly).⁵

You can pre-order MAN-THOLOGY from Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, or a local bookstore, although Amazon is definitely the most Alpha bookseller/military AI contractor.

Ultimately, it’s not important where you pre-order it. What is important is that you pre-order it, read it every day for the rest of your life, and also subscribe to the Chuditude Patreon at the God-King Tier.

Are you ready?

I don’t care.

Let’s get started.

- - -

¹ And needless to say, that Honda Civic is now a Chevy JUGGERNAUT Mega-Duty 990, Operator Edition.

² ChudCoin is the only crypto solution for Alphas who need to purchase unlabeled white powders, anonymously, from their phone, in certain jurisdictions of Cyprus. [DISCLAIMER: ChudCoin is for entertainment purposes only, pending proceedings in Chud Buffly Enterprises, LLC v. INTERPOL].

³ While most of my audience is men, women can absolutely be Alpha males. Admittedly, in the quest to become an Alpha male, being male is something of a head start. But aspiring female Alpha males can achieve Alpha male–hood as long as they are committed to combating weakness, mediocrity, and gender fluidity.

⁴ AlphaWater is available from the supplement section of ChudBuffly.com. [DISCLAIMER: Fine is not a determination made by the FDA.]

Text Messages from the Mall Food Court Kiosk Where I Am Trying to Order a Chicago-Style Hot Dog

Ellen Poplavska — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:01:00 -0400

Your total is $6.99.

You added relish. Your total is $7.99.

You added mustard. Your total is $8.99.

You tried to remove mustard. Your total is $9.99.

You tried to add ketchup. What is wrong with you? Your total is $12.99.

We queried the Google Maps API and saw the closest open restaurant is 40 minutes away. Your total is $17.99.

You added sport peppers. Your total is $18.99.

We noticed you’ve been drinking at the dinky bar next door for the last four hours and are assuming you’re pretty desperate. Your total is $26.99.

You added a pickle spear. Your total is $27.99.

We subpoenaed OpenAI for your ChatGPT transcripts and learned you’re going through a bad breakup and are being really pathetic about it. Your total is $34.99.

We saw your recent mopey Instagram posts and learned this is where you took your ex on your first date. Have some goddamn class. Your total is $41.99.

We noticed you’re a Cardinals fan. Your total is $57.99.

The prices of some items in your order have changed. Your total is $61.99.

We are out of sport peppers. You will not be refunded.

You added tomato wedges (2). Your total is $65.99.

We added a 7 percent service fee. Your total is $70.61.

We added your local sales tax of 11.5 percent. Your total is $78.20.

We added a 3.75 percent restaurant surcharge, even though this is a mall food court. This surcharge protects you from price increases. Your total is $80.67.

The prices of some items in your order have changed. Your total is $83.12.

You added celery salt. Your total is $84.34.

We added a 2.5 percent staffing surcharge. This pays our 1099 contractors, who live entirely on hot dog commissions. Your total is $86.07.

We added a 17 percent gender equity contribution. This pays the contractor who tells our female contractors to smile more. Your total is $97.79.

We added a 4 percent hospitality fee. We will not elaborate on the purpose of this fee. To refund this fee, send a notarized request via carrier pigeon to the head of the CIA within 3 minutes of purchase. Your total is $100.55.

You added bun. Your total is $103.47.

We added a 1.25 percent mall food court surcharge, even though we already added a restaurant surcharge. This pays for our Creative Director’s pedicure habit. Your total is $104.36.

We added a 5 percent accounting commission. This pays the Fiverr guy who figured out how to add all these fees in Toast. Your total is $107.90.

We added a 3 percent donation to the Organ Donor Registry. Don’t think too hard about how this relates to your hot dog. Your total is $110.03.

You added onions. Your total is $111.58.

Your ex-girlfriend just told us her side of the breakup story. You jerk. Your total is $158.08.

We are out of onions. You will not be refunded.

We added a 25 percent base gratuity. You will be expected to add an additional gratuity at checkout, where we will invert the option order to trick an extra 15 percent out of you. Your total is $183.58.

You added poppyseeds on bun. Your total is $185.38, and we’re giving your workplace a heads up to drug test you tomorrow morning.
The prices of some items in your order have changed. Your total is $197.98.

We added a queuing fee charged per second you spend at this kiosk, because we have other customers and you are taking a really long time to order a hot dog, no offense. Your total is $455.38.

We added an itemized equipment maintenance fee. This pays the contractor who buffs the scuffs out of this kiosk after you’re done kicking it, which you have now done 37 times. Your total is $1,139.38.

We queried the DoorDash API and discovered all your delivery options are still way more expensive than this. Your total is $1,517.38.

We are out of hot dogs. You will not be refunded.

Transcript from the Annual Meeting of the Global Children’s Shoe-Sizing Consortium

Aliza Zelin Neidich — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:00:00 -0400

CHAIRPERSON: Welcome, delegates. Before we begin, I’d like to congratulate everyone on another successful year of making children’s shoe sizing completely incomprehensible.

(Applause.)

VICE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. As you know, our mission remains unchanged: no parent should ever know what size shoe their child wears.

DELEGATE FROM EUROPE: Here, here.

CHAIRPERSON: Let’s begin with the annual report. How are we doing?

ANALYST: Extremely well. Parents continue to ask questions such as, “How can my child be a size 1, a size 32, and a size 13 all at the same time?”

(Thunderous applause.)

DELEGATE FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM: I’d like to propose that we continue refusing to clarify whether a “Big Kid 4” is larger or smaller than a “Little Kid 13.”

CHAIRPERSON: Excellent suggestion. Any discussion?

DELEGATE FROM AUSTRALIA: Could we… perhaps make the transition between the two even more abrupt? Currently, some parents have discovered that size 13 is followed by size 1. This level of understanding concerns me.

VICE CHAIRPERSON: Agreed. Ideally, size 13 should be followed by a brief existential crisis.

(Murmurs of approval.)

DELEGATE FROM FRANCE: I move that we continue using completely unrelated numbering systems in every country, which absolutely should not correspond to either metric or imperial foot measurement.

CHAIRPERSON: This aligns with tradition, yes.

DELEGATE FROM FRANCE: A child should be a size 31 in Paris, a size 13 in New York, and a size 12.5 in Minneapolis.

(Standing ovation.)

ANALYST: We also have promising data that shows many parents have now saved screenshots of conversion charts they do not understand.

CHAIRPERSON: Outstanding.

DELEGATE FROM RUSSIA: I propose a new initiative. Suppose different models of shoes from the same brand fit differently?

CHAIRPERSON: Go on.

DELEGATE FROM RUSSIA: Imagine a child whose current shoe is a size 2. Their next pair, from the same company, in the same size, should either fall off immediately, prevent circulation, or… both.

(Audience chants: “Both! Both! Both!”)

CHAIRPERSON: The motion carries.

ANALYST: We also tested a pilot program in which online reviews for the same model included statements such as “Runs true to size,” “Size up two sizes,” “My son is 47 inches tall and wears a medium,” as well as a hostile note from a woman who is suing on the grounds of inclusivity about her son needing a size G.

VICE CHAIRPERSON: Incredible stuff.

DELEGATE FROM CANADA: We should address width measurements.

CHAIRPERSON: Ah yes, our most powerful weapon.

DELEGATE FROM CANADA: Parents are broaching a preliminary understanding of conventional “wide” vs. “standard” widths. Therefore, I suggest we introduce additional categories including: extra wide, slim wide, athletic wide, heritage wide, and wide in spirit.

(Several delegates wipe tears from their eyes.)

CHAIRPERSON: Beautiful.

VICE CHAIRPERSON: Before we adjourn, I’d like to recognize the Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, Tom.

(Audience rises.)

VICE CHAIRPERSON: This year’s honor goes to the individual who first suggested that we tack a letter onto toddler sizes, that children’s sizes should be measured in entirely different numbers, that adult sizes should restart from a separate scale, and that none of these systems should have any intuitive relationship whatsoever. Congratulations, Tom.

ALL: SPEECH! SPEECH! SPEECH!

TOM: Thank you. Honestly, I never dreamed we’d come this far. When I started, a parent could walk into a store and say, “My child wears a size 11.” Today, they must say, “He’s an 11 in sandals, a 12.5C in sneakers, a 31 in Europe, a 30 in dress shoes, and a 1 if the moon is waxing.” To see that level of confusion become a reality….

(Pauses to compose himself.)

TOM (cont’d): …Well, it means everything. I’d like to thank health insurance EOBs, the IRS, and bra companies everywhere for paving the way for our success.

(Meeting adjourned. Delegates immediately disperse to work on socks.)

McSweeney’s

I Have Never Made This Recipe, but I Give It Five Stars

Reviews of New Food: Aldi Crystal Clear Frozen Ice Cubes

Family Vacation Training Plan

Schedule

Nutrition

Strength

Endurance

Cardio

Have Fun

The Old Man and the Strait

I’m Jimothy, the Short-Spined Raccoon Who Has Taken the Internet by Storm, and the Collective Weight of Your Adoration Is Breaking My Already-Compromised Back

I Watched the Copa Mundial Non-Stop on Telemundo for Cinco Weeks and Now I Don’t Hablar Inglés Anymore

My Next Book Project

Our Investigation Found That Shen Yun Used U.S. Voter Rolls to Distribute Flyers to Hundreds of Millions of American Households

Is It a Red Flag? The Odyssey Edition

As Your Manager, I Don’t Think It’s Too Much to Ask That You Read My Mind

An Interview with Dave Eggers About His New Novel, Contrapposto

Disgruntled Performance

Democrats Need to Win Back Voters by Becoming Republicans

Democrats Need to Win Back Voters by Becoming Republicans

Advance praise for Obey in Advance:

We Need to Stop This Reckless Rhetoric About Abolishing the Thought Police

Effective Immediately, Every God-Fearing Soldier Will Be Jacked to the Gills with Testosterone

Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes: June 2026: Atrocities 1014-1112

ATROCITY KEY

May 2026

Main Index

Trump’s first term

June 2026

A Case for the Giant Toxic Goo Pit I Want to Build in the Center of Town

Introducing: MAN-THOLOGY, by Alpha Male Guru, Chud Buffly

Introducing: MAN-THOLOGY by Alpha Male Guru Chud Buffly (as told to Tom Ellison)

Text Messages from the Mall Food Court Kiosk Where I Am Trying to Order a Chicago-Style Hot Dog

Transcript from the Annual Meeting of the Global Children’s Shoe-Sizing Consortium

Introducing: MAN-THOLOGY
by Alpha Male Guru Chud Buffly
(as told to Tom Ellison)