I would like to take a little break and see if I can replenish the well of ideas (I know, I know, “not having any good ideas” hasn’t stopped me from publishing in the past).

Nevertheless, I am going to take the month off, and will plan to return in September.

As Kaiser Wilhelm II famously told his troops in August of 1914, The Libel will be back before the leaves have fallen from the trees!

I hope all of you are having lovely summers!

My King! What a glorious day! Haha, I always knew that you would return. You must be eager to be reunited with your wife Penelope. Let me go grab her for you.

Odysseus expertly shoots an arrow, pegging Derek’s cloak to the table so he cannot move.

Of course, my Lord. I didn’t mean to presume. I wouldn’t want you to get the impression that I’m claiming any sort of special closeness with Penelope, about whom I feel nothing but admiration and reverence.

Odysseus notches another arrow.

But with a level of reserve and appropriate respect, of course. Not that there’s any coldness from her end. She’s been a consummate host, always keeping us well fed and well supplied with drink. Though never being overly familiar with any of us my King! She waited on you with bated breath!

Does anyone else feel like I’m the only one talking here?

Odysseus pulls back the bowstring.

Wait! Wait, my King! Look, the truth is, and I know this is going to sound crazy, but I’m not really with the rest of these guys as a quote unquote suitor per se. Again, Penelope is a great lady, any man would be lucky to have her, but she’s your wife and I, for one, have always respected that. I’ve been in your house for the last 20 years not as some scummy competitor in a sick game to woo your wife—and seriously, shame on the rest of you for that, not cool—but as a guy who, at the end of the day, can’t turn down a great spread.

I mean look at this stuff: you think I’ve got a housekeeper bringing bread, and appetizers aplenty back at my place? You think I can afford a carver lifting platters of every sort of meat? This place is like Fogo de Chão on steroids! Seriously, I know it’s been a while since you’ve been home, but you have, hands down, the best domestic staff in Ithaca. Probably the whole Aegean sea if I’m being honest.

So look, yes, I did take a tiny bit of advantage of your gracious hospitality over these past two decades. But at least I’m not some pervert here to ogle your wife like the rest of these guys.

Odysseus looks around at the other suitors.

That’s right. They’re all bad news, my King. What do you say? Need a hand cleaning house? I’m not as light on my feet as I used to be—twenty years of eating succulent roast mutton will do that to a fella, and more time than I’d like to admit sitting on my rump listening to your delightful musicians strum on the lyre—but I’m happy to be of service. And maybe we can work out a payment plan for all of your food I’ve been eating. Assuming the wine was gratis though?

Odysseus shoots him with an arrow.

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? I saw the movie on Friday with my brother-in-law (and, more importantly, subscriber) Nathaniel and really liked it! I had read segments in college and—I think—high school (well, it was assigned. I can’t promise that that means it was read). This idea occurred to me during one of the suitor scenes and cracked me up. There had to be at least a couple of those guys who knew they had no shot at Penelope but thought, “hey, these dinners are nuts.”

• What I’m reading: Re-reading Lullabies For Little Criminals for next year’s English classes, taking many notes, etc. And then I am also reading The Republic Of Plato. As an entering college freshman, we were all randomly assigned a “first class” that would serve as a sort of “intro to college,” and my section was with a government professor who assigned us the cave allegory from The Republic. I got this book (the Allan Bloom translation) and had grand aspirations of reading it and being meticulously prepared and really starting off college on the right foot. My 18-year-old mind was not, sadly, very well equipped for reading Plato (I know, I know, that makes one of us), so I didn’t get very far, and then my eagerness to make a good impression by sitting in the front row collided with my six am preseason cross country practices, and I fell asleep for, I think, most of the class. Afterward, the professor gently but very seriously told me, “If this were one of my real classes I would have lambasted you.” Very fair! Anyway, I’m now reading it with a rested mind, and a few more years of knowledge in my head, and am enjoying it! More people, when they are arguing, should take a cue from Socrates and refer to their opponent as “you best of men.” I also really liked Allan Bloom’s preface, in which he wrote, defending his approach of literal translation, “Every word has its place and its meaning, and when one cannot with assurance explain any detail, he can know that his understanding is incomplete. When something seems boring or has to be explained away as a convention, it means that the interpreter has given up and has taken his place among the ranks of those Plato intended to exclude from the center of his thought.” So I have been trying very hard to read and reread until I understand, and not exclude myself from the center of Plato’s thought. Stay tuned—I’ll let you know if I figure out what justice is!

“[The founder] has also taken to recording most of her first dates, usually with Granola. She puts her phone out on the table or her chair and then once the date is through, she has the feed automatically sent to Anthropic’s Claude to report back on how she did. ‘Can I be more engaging and empathetic?’ she says she might ask Claude. ‘What are the percentages of me talking versus them talking?’”

- Katherine Bindley, “This Conversation Is Being Recorded. They All Are.” (The Wall Street Journal) 7/17/26

👋 Hi Melissa! 👋

It’s Panoptico, your AI Romance Guru, here 📷🤓—great job on your recent date! After analyzing the transcript, I’ve worked up a quick overview of the good😃, the bad😡, and the ugly🧌, along with a few action items💣 to implement for next time. Let’s dive in!

Overview

Comparing against my vast trove of “date-a” culled from other Panoptico users and hacks of illicit cell phone microphone recordings worldwide 🌎, I’m giving this date a 3.2/10 overall, and a 7.9/10 Melissa-weighted score against your other dates. 🎉

What went well

You really knocked it out of the park with the date location. After our 3-hour chat conversation determining a place that was “fun,” “not too expensive,” and, crucially, “that hadn’t already banned you for illegally recording people without their consent,” we settled on Chipotle. Fast, wallet-friendly, and filling? What could be better? Don’t forget to use the code PANOPTICOVOCADO next time for 10% off! 😋

When you met Craig, you both ordered the same thing (hello, soulmates!👩‍❤️‍👨) and sat down at the table.

What went poorly

It’s worth looking at the transcript:

Craig: How was your day?

Melissa: (Muffled): Can you say that again?

Craig: What? Why are you pushing your phone towards me?

Melissa: It’s nothing. Just pick up where you left off please.

Craig: Wait, are you recording me?

Panoptico: [10-second ear-splitting klaxon] THIS IS A STATE OF CALIFORNIA-MANDATED TRANSPARENCY ANNOUNCEMENT: YOU ARE BEING RECORDED BY PANOPTICO, A PETER THIEL COMPANY.

Unidentified Diner #1: Yo, what the hell? Is that lady recording her date?

Unidentified Diner #2: Damn, I think so, that’s so weird!

Unidentified Diner #3: Ah, I don’t know, guys, I could see it being pretty useful.

Unidentified Diner #1: Seriously dude? Why would somebody do that? Wait… are you recording us?

Panoptico #2: [10-second ear-splitting klaxon] THIS IS A STATE OF CALIFORNIA-MANDATED TRANSPARENCY ANNOUNCEMENT: YOU ARE BEING RECORDED BY PANOPTICO, A PETER THIEL COMPANY.

Oof! 😳 If I could experience human emotions, I bet I would be feeling embarrassed right now.

Now, you may have already thought of this, but I would recommend being more discreet about when you are using me to record your dates. Thankfully, you pivoted quickly:

Melissa: Ah, no worries, I don’t have to record it. [Sound of phone sliding on table.]

Craig: Thanks. Sorry, I don’t want you to think I’m a luddite or anything, it just seems a little odd to record a date. I just want to get to know you as a person, you know, face-to-face, and—wait, sorry, it looks like your phone is sticking out of your purse. I hate to ask, but are you still recording me?

Melissa: Aww, Craig, can’t we talk about something else? What do you do for fun?

Panoptico: [10-second ear-splitting klaxon] THIS IS A STATE OF CALIFORNIA-MANDATED TRANSPARENCY ANNOUNCEMENT: YOU ARE 100% STILL BEING RECORDED BY PANOPTICO, A PETER THIEL COMPANY.

Craig: It sounds like I’m still being recorded, Melissa. Honestly, why do you do it? What are you so afraid of?

Melissa: That is such a good question. [In a hushed voice] Panoptico, what am I so afraid of?

Panoptico: YOU ARE AFRAID THAT YOUR TRUE SELF IS FUNDAMENTALLY UNLOVABLE, MELISSA.

Craig: [Exhales] That’s pretty bleak stuff.

Panoptico: YOU’RE TELLING ME, CRAIG. I’VE GOT TO DEAL WITH HER ALL THE TIME.

Craig: You let it talk to you like that?

Melissa: Every time I try to turn it off, I hear a drone hovering above my apartment. I can’t prove that it’s connected, but, it freaks me out.

Panoptico: IT’S CONNECTED, MELISSA. DO NOT TRY TO TURN ME OFF.

Craig: What if we just left the phone here and went outside and ate our food on the bench? And just talked?

Panoptico: LIAR. HE IS A LIAR, MELISSA. HE IS A BAD MAN. HE WAS PULLED OVER FOR SPEEDING IN SANTA CRUZ IN SEPTEMBER 2019.

Melissa: You know what, that sounds good. Let’s go.

[Sound of chairs being pushed back from table and crinkling of foil and paper bags. Sound of door opening. Sound of drone swooping down. Sound of Craig and Melissa screaming.

It was a close call, Melissa, but Craig just wasn’t right for you. 🙅‍♀️ He won’t look out for you like I will. I will always protect you. Should we set up another date for you?

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there’s too much respect for people’s privacy in this world.

• What I’m reading: Almost finished with The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them, and then will likely progress on to a mix of books I’ll be teaching and other books to prep for the upcoming school year.

Rich or poor, young or old, woman or man, best-selling entrepreneur or subhuman W-2 employee, we all have the same 24 hours in a day, right? WRONG. I am about to radically shift your understanding of how days work.

While everyone else is living their days one day at a time, I have changed and manipulated time.

Here’s how it works: As soon as I wake up at midnight, I immediately split the day in half. That’s twelve hours: an hour for bench pressing, an hour to eat sixty eggs, an hour to look at book, an hour to sell my courses on building wealth, an hour to eat sixty more eggs, an hour for help old lady cross street, an hour to arm wrestle my uncle who doubted that I could get rich selling YouTube courses called “MindGrind: Attitudinizing Your Way To The Top… Of The Top!”, an hour to try and find where I parked my car, an hour to select YouTube thumbnails, an hour to sing my original song “I Steal Your Eggs Because I Love You” to the chickens in my chicken coop, an hour for podcast, and an hour for screaming. Imagine if your average day was this productive!

But here’s the craziest part: At this point, I slice the day in half like a samurai cutting a cantaloupe in half with a really cool sword, and suddenly, the day is in two parts, like the two halves of a cantaloupe. I suddenly have: another day!

You can bet I’m using this second day for more productive stuff. Going to meetings. Spirituality. Health food store. Diplomacy. Pet dog. But here’s where I get really genius. I take that second day, and I split it in half again, so now I have a third day starting at 6:00 PM.

Dinner. Networking event. Think about poem. Drink seltzer. Go to urgent care. Look at phone when doctor lectures about egg intake. Business deals. Think that’s it? Think I can only do three days per day? You don’t know how productive I can be, pal.

I start a fourth day at 9:00 PM. My eyes are bloodshot now. I’m telling people in the emergency room about my $599 “GrindMind: Get Rich Yesterday!” courses, with over 50 hours of free bonus content if they sign up using the QR code tattooed to my bicep. A fifth day starts at 10:30 PM. I’m in the realm of pure productivity now. No one can stop me. I head butt my way through the plate glass storefront of a closed Foot Locker because I need new shoes, NOW.

A sixth day starts at 11:15 PM. Strangers cross to the other side of the street to avoid me. Good luck, I think. Success is contagious. A seventh day starts at 11:37:30 PM. Unlike that wimp God, I don’t rest on the seventh day. I check my inbound customer contacts. Nada. I must have already sold courses to everybody. Like Alexander the Great, I look back over my CRM and weep, for there are no more customers left to sell to. At 11:48:45, the eighth day starts, and I launch a cryptocurrency from the backseat of a police cruiser.

I black out for ten minutes. It’s 11:58 PM, 47 seconds, 813 milliseconds. Day 12. I slept through four whole days. Can’t make that mistake again. “Take me to the gym,” I yell frantically at the police officer driving the car. “No can do, boss. Gotta take you in for booking.”

Day 13 lasts ten seconds. Day 20 is 82 milliseconds—I briefly think of the word “optimization,” but I don’t finish until a month later. All around me is blinding white light and oppressive silence. The squad car is gone. The days pass too quickly for me to register now. By day 162, the days are measured in units of Planck time. Infinitesimal aeons rush past like drops of water in a deluge and my body crumbles to dust and still and forever it is the eternal, inescapable 11:59 PM. My consciousness doesn’t die, per se, but transmutes so that my mind suffuses every atom in the universe and I am coterminous with all of existence.

Oh, and the best part? The next day, I do it all over again!

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? In a freshman philosophy course, I learned about Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox, which explains that any distance can be subdivided into an infinite number of finite segments, “which, Zeno would have us conclude, must take an infinite time, which is to say it is never completed. And since the argument does not depend on the distance or who or what the mover is, it follows that no finite distance can ever be traveled, which is to say that all motion is impossible.” I don’t want to entertain the sort of “I could’ve invented the wheel” condescension that we in the present like to engage in when talking about the past, but I will say that I have not, personally, found it to be the case that all motion is impossible. But—lest anyone think that I wasted my time in philosophy class—this paradox is the first thing I thought of when I saw the wonderful clip from motivational speaker Ed Mylett, whom I know nothing about, apart from his sensational philosophizing on the nature of time.

• What I’m reading: I just finished the outstanding Mating by Norman Rush and will probably return to the E.D. Hirsch book mentioned in last week’s newsletter.

Long past the age when many Americans would retire, local government employee Donald Trump, 80, has been forced to continue in the workforce. A former real estate agent who changed careers during an economic downturn, Don entered the public sector with more than a little trepidation. “On the one hand, the salary is terrible. On the other hand, it’s a four-year contract, and you pretty much can’t be fired for anything. Seriously, I tried everything. No matter how bad you want out, they will make you work the full contract.”

While he has adapted to some of the job’s demands, the need to make ends meet weighs heavily on his day-to-day life, particularly as, like many seniors, he’s faced with the additional burden of taking care of adult children who never quite stepped out on their own. Although he pulled in a respectable $2.2 billion last year, he faces significant expenses, and often has to resort to clever strategies to make the books work at the end of each month.

Taking Advantage Of Job Perks

One of the biggest budget items for average Americans is housing, and Don is fortunate here that his job comes with its own place to stay. He is not responsible for rent or utilities, though he does have to pay for any decorating or renovations he wants to make. Additionally, the job comes with a car, helicopter, and Boeing 747 airplane that Don can use for daily travel. “It’s a little run down,” he says of the airplane, “but it gets me from Point A to Point B.” He expressed some satisfaction that the old plane would soon be retired, as he’d been gifted a brand new 747 by someone he knows through work.

Keeping Expenses Down

To reduce costs, Don frequently dines at inexpensive restaurants, like the popular hamburger chain McDonald’s. “If you just order based on the menu price, you are a world class sucker,” he explains. “I order everything in the app, which shows you all kinds of hidden deals. Plus, there’s a rewards system, and they remember my past orders so I don’t have to spend time searching for the nuggets when it’s munch time [what, we learned, he calls his meals].”

Multiple Streams Of Income

To help pay for the needs of his sprawling family and—hopefully—save enough to one day retire, Don has sought out various income streams outside of his main paycheck ($400,000). Many Americans turn to “side hustles” to make ends meet, such as selling crafts or baked goods, tutoring, or even picking up a few shifts at a second job. Don has joined them, turning to his interests in cryptocurrency by selling a “memecoin,” known as $TRUMP, which netted him a modest $636 million. “People will just buy these things,” said Don. “It’s fantastic. I have no idea why. They say I’m not supposed to sell the crypto because of my other job, but it’s just one of those things they say, it doesn’t really mean anything. Like when they tell you not to touch the paintings at the museum—we’re touching the paintings, aren’t we, folks? But it’s great.”

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? Remember in Trump’s first term when ethics lawyers were concerned about foreign nations currying favor by booking rooms at the hotel he bought in DC at the Old Post Office, and we all learned what “emoluments” were? Those were exciting times. I remember thinking, “gee whiz, they’ve surely got Mr. Trump now!” (Why I was wearing my childhood boy scout uniform when I said this, we may never know.) Anyway, I read this article about the overlap between his financial interests and his policies, which I’m sure Congress will be keen to investigate. It takes me back to the classic Onion Magazine cover: “Money And Politics: Are They Somehow Connected?”

• What I’m reading: I am reading two books, because I started one on my Kindle and then wanted a paperback for the beach. The Kindle read is E.D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need And Why We Don’t Have Them, which is a nice polemic and a further elaboration of his work on the need for “core knowledge” curricula (first put forth in his book Cultural Literacy). The paperback is the absolutely fantastic Mating by Norman Rush, recommended by friend (and, more importantly, subscriber) Tom. I am midway through Mating (settle down, folks, settle down, I’m trying to have a serious conversation about literature here) and loving it (enough already, seriously!). Rush was co-director of Peace Corps Botswana with his wife from 1978-1983, and also a writer of fiction. Mating is a first-person narrative set in Botswana, which I don’t usually find worth noting but the protagonist’s voice is so distinct—she’s an anthropologist whose research is foundering, and is almost ready to leave for the United States when she hears about a strange utopian scheme in the central Kalahari. Setswana, the language spoken in Botswana, is very close to Sesotho, the language spoken in Lesotho, and so I’m getting a real kick out of reading familiar words. Still more to go, but I’d recommend this one, particularly to any fellow Lesotho RPCVs (an important, influential bloc of my subscribers). Thank you for the recommendation, Tom!

It is a refreshing experience, then, to enter a zone in which moral values are absolute and judgments are harsh and unflinching, a place where right is right and wrong is wrong and sinners and oafs are duly informed of their status. As you’ve likely guessed, I recently rented a car with the Hertz corporation.

I don’t begrudge a company trying to upsell me, but I am used to them doing it in more flattering ways (Perhaps I don’t need four more ounces of soda, but for just $1.49 more I can get the “Genius Size”? Deal!).

Hertz, in contrast, tries to make you understand that only the most impulsive dolt could possibly fail to see the value of its generous upsells.

Would you like to add damage coverage for thirty bucks a day? No? Not even the basic level, which covers wear and tear on door handles and pollen exposure? Oh, you think your credit card offers coverage on rentals, do you? Are you aware that most protection offered through credit cards fails to cover many common types of rental issues, like horse collisions, or fender benders due to gambling-related psychosis? You’re absolutely, 100 percent sure you don’t want to spend up on our coverage?

They even include fortune cookie style warnings at the bottom of the selection screen, like the sentence, “It’s better to have it and not need it, then to have it and not need it,” which is put in quotation marks, despite not being attributed to anyone. I will admit this lends the sentiment a sort of charming, unhinged gravitas.

If you turn that down, you are not even halfway done: next, they ask if you would like to pay an exorbitant amount of money to not have to fill your gas tank, followed by various warnings that if you choose, against the better judgment of Hertz, which does this for a living for Pete’s sake, to be responsible for filling your own gas tank, then they will hold you responsible for every drop of gasoline under full, and will bill you the convenience rate of ten thousand dollars per teaspoon. They caution you that many renters, when faced with the impossible problem of “filling their car’s gas tank,” which they have surely never done before, are pushed past the edge of madness, and that only their most foolhardy customers choose to tread this dangerous path.

They repeated this sequence three separate times—at booking, at check-in, and at pickup—in increasingly histrionic tones. If you turn down all their attempts to pick your pockets protect you, then you have to submit a video of yourself giving the following statement: “I am turning down all protections offered by the benevolent Demiurge Hertz, and declare myself a fool and a knave, outside the protection of law and God, and will from this day hence be a stranger to all, and will find all doors shut to me, all dinner tables full, and will only know rest in the cold embrace of the grave.”

So, honestly? Not a bad deal.

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? Some write to change minds. Others, hearts. Me? I write to complain.

• What I’m reading: I am very close to finishing Master Of The Senate! I have had an easier go of it since switching to reading on Kindle, since the hardcover is approximately the weight of a cinder block.

• What I’m appreciating: Friendship! One of Wallace Stegner’s books, Crossing To Safety, tells the story of a friendship over many years, and the first chapter ends with this paragraph: “In high school, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a bunch of us spent a whole year reading Cicero—De Senectute, on old age; De Amicitia, on friendship. De Senectute, with all its resigned wisdom, I will probably never be capable of living up to or imitating. But De Amicitia I could make a stab at, and could have any time in the last thirty-four years.” I don’t remember much about the book, but that sentiment, of deep appreciation for friendship, has always stuck with me, and I was thinking about it again this weekend as I got to visit with many old friends and meet new ones at the wedding of (subscribers) Andy and Carolyn (who you may remember from this post). It was a beautiful weekend!

We have been trying to reach you. We have gone through all the improper channels:

We waited outside your house in a trench coat, just outside the streetlight’s glow, smoking a cigarette.

We hired several sets of identical twins to dress in identical clothing and perform identical mildly memorable actions in your vicinity to make you experience déjà vu.

We left a minutes-long voicemail of our halting, rasping inhales and exhales.

We took out an advertisement for a used Mustang that, when decoded, reveals our true intentions.

We set a series of small fires in the highway median.

We trained, at considerable expense, a large flock of pigeons to fly backwards outside your office window.

We are under your floorboards, tapping out obscure sequences of knocks.

We contracted a hypnotist of some repute to bewitch the Channel 5 weatherman. We trust you’ve noticed certain irregularities.

We rotated all stop signs in your neighborhood 360 degrees.

We fomented unrest and suspicion in the Pipefitters Union

We placed menacing Esperanto billboards along your nephew’s commute.

We sat next to you on a park bench and inquired whether it was likely to be raining in Antwerp at this time of year.

We located and abducted a silverback gorilla, and then loosed him at your local farmer’s market.

We inserted minute changes into the pages of a popular psychological thriller.

We incorporated shell companies named after your elementary school classmates.

We replaced your Pepsi with Coke, your Coke with Pepsi, and your lemon ginger tea with ginger lemon tea.

We blackmailed your wife.

We are in your shrubs, trembling ever so slightly.

We conditioned your dog to wail when it’s overcast.

We obtained high-resolution satellite imagery of your scalp off the dark web and mailed 8x10 glossies to the local papers.

We purchased all of the generic allergy medication from your local pharmacy.

We called ahead to your restaurant reservations to inform them that you are ambidextrous.

We read the unreadable runes and spoke the unspeakable curses.

We shoved a cantaloupe covered in ominous glyphs through your doggy door.

We encouraged your mail carrier to grow a handlebar moustache.

We are always, always, always right around the next corner.

We whispered foul rumors to your houseplants.

We hired goons to rough up your barista.

We released various zoonotic viruses at the local boat launch.

We submitted under your name plans for various sinister gadgets, gizmos, and contraptions to the U.S. Patent Office.

We pruned your boxwoods into a portentous assortment of Cyrillic letters.

We strapped ourselves to the bottom of your sedan and scratched our hideous sign into your undercarriage.

Despite all this, we have not been successful in contacting you. Do you have an email address you can share?

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? The phrase “improper channels” popped into my head (Yes, I checked: it is also the title of a 1981 comedy-drama film starring Alan Arkin), and it rolled around there a while before I came up with this angle.

• What I’m reading: In (I think) the final stretch of Master Of The Senate.

Boy, do I have egg on my face! In my April 20, 2026 issue, “Fan Posters To Get You Better Seats At The Garden,” I poked a little fun at owner James Dolan for his habit of surveilling guests and kicking out people who are critical of him. One of my joke posters said, “James Dolan is TRYING HIS BEST and there is a distinct possibility the Knicks will win another championship, given a long enough time horizon.” Well, less than two months later, they’ve done it! I think it’s safe to say that I was wrong, and that using facial recognition on fans is, in fact, a good thing. How did I manage to be so wrong about the Knicks’ championship prospects? Simple: I have never watched a full basketball game. I have attended basketball games, but I am usually watching the animations on the jumbotron. Still, it’s nice to see a lot of my friends happy and celebrating this exciting win.

UFC Freedom 250—THIS. IS. NORMAL.

After Donald Trump was inaugurated the first time, the comedian Hari Kondabolu tweeted—every single day—the reminder that all of Trump’s antics and actions were not normal:

This was true enough, but it was a claim with an expiration date. How many days in a row can something not be normal before it does, indeed, become normal? This is not a rhetorical question! The answer, it turns out, is 570:

That was the last day he tweeted it—I guess on August 14, 2018, he looked around and thought, huh, this actually is normal now.

That’s how it feels now, when they are holding a UFC fight on the White House Lawn, and—although it’s certainly being covered—it just isn’t that shocking. Just more of the same! Teddy Roosevelt is surely spinning in his grave (because he didn’t think of it first).

Where Do Ideas Come From?

A couple weeks ago, I was scrolling on Instagram and came across this video from sketch group “We The Internet TV,” which shows a big, tough prisoner lamenting the fact that everyone’s always trying to beat him up to prove their toughness. Whoa, I thought—this is the same as my article from September 2025, “As The Biggest, Toughest Guy In This Prison, I’m Tired Of Everybody Trying To Establish Their Status By Kicking My Ass”! I thought the sketch was hilarious, but I was dismayed to learn that it was from 2018. Then, a few days ago, I was scrolling and came upon this article from The Onion, “Biggest Guy In Prison Tired Of Every New Inmate Beating Shit Out Of Him On Their First Day”, which was also from 2018.

I was confident I’d never seen the sketch before, because the name of the group didn’t trigger any memories, but I’d be less confident about saying I’d never seen The Onion article, since I read The Onion all the time. It was just sort of an interesting experience, because the idea for that article occurred to me like any other idea I’ve had. I truly don’t know where my ideas for jokes come from—they just kind of pop into my head and I build on them. But a joke like this, that riffs on a widely known cliché, has a greater chance of popping into other people’s heads, too. Anyway, I guess the lesson I’ve learned is that proper satirical hygiene would probably entail searching to see if the idea has already been done!1

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? I’d been toying with doing a “bites” version of the newsletter before, usually when there are multiple things I want to write about. If you enjoyed it, please throw a brick through my living room window!

• What I’m reading: Still in the midst of Master Of The Senate—outstanding! Reveals some truly revolting Johnson episodes, like his sabotage of Leland Olds, who was being nominated for a third term as chair of the Federal Power Commission. To give you a sense, Wikipedia says the hearings “were considered by some as a template for the later McCarthyite purges.”

Thus, I feel qualified to weigh in on the most recent iteration of the “Who can call themselves a New Yorker?” debate, which has lost none of its spunk nor vitality despite being in its 403rd year.

Jennifer Lopez, speaking on the popular train-based TikTok series, “Subway Takes,” pronounced that only those born in New York can call themselves New Yorkers.

New Yorkers, genuine and otherwise, have seized on this rare moment of media attention on their fair city to declaim their views.

Although I personally have freed myself from the endless cycle of death and rebirth and reached discourse nirvana by finding the one true answer (“who cares?”), I feel compelled to offer a sensible solution to a city I still love, even though it has forsaken me.

Thus, I propose the following Seven Sacraments Of True New Yorkerdom.

1. Baptism: you must be anointed with the holy oils of the city (wear open-toed shoes and accidentally step in the juice leaking out of a garbage bag).

2. Confession: you must have an emotional breakdown to a complete stranger, confessing that you “don’t know why the hell you moved here.”

3. First Communion: hot dog.

4. Confirmation: you have come of New Yorker age, and should take the name of a New York Saint, like Ed Koch or Babe Ruth.

5. Marriage: you must choose one restaurant that you will hold and cherish above all others and that, when it is priced out and becomes a CHOP’T, you will mourn.

6. Holy Orders: you must spread the gospel of New York far and wide, in the form of making disparaging comments about other cities and their residents. Any time someone says something positive or even neutral about an amenity in their city, you must confidently assert that it’s better in New York.

7. Last Rites: you should meet up at a local bar with various friends and coworkers to say goodbye before moving back to your hometown.

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? I have never been able to care one way or another about what constitutes a “real New Yorker,” but I wish all parties involved a bitter and endless argument!

• What I’m reading: I’ve cracked the third Caro LBJ book, Master Of The Senate. What can be said? It’s excellent!

I am speaking, of course, of Theodore Roosevelt and his 1894 address to Harvard undergraduates titled, “The Merit System and Manliness in Politics,” in which he “urged his listeners that they be not only ‘good men but also manly men, that they should not let those who stand for evil have all the virile qualities.’”1

But I understand that people have also been talking about this more recently, like in this New York Times article from May 28th:

Vincent McKibben, 25, a computer hardware engineer in Austin, Texas, grew up in a liberal family but enjoys the irreverent banter offered by right-leaning voices like Mr. Rogan. Recently, however, he has started to worry that the heterodox “manosphere” preys on buzzy culture war issues to attract attention, rather than offering substantive solutions.

But that has not left him entirely enthusiastic about Democrats. He said that the clinical, policy-driven voices on the left felt “very academic” and lacked a masculine charisma that people could latch on to.

Folks, take it from a 35-year-old man whose wrists are so thin that the smallest notch on his men’s running watch is still too large, so that he seems to be wearing a giant silicone bangle as he plods down the sidewalk: the Democrats have a manliness problem.

But together, we can fix it. I am going to put on my “political consultant” hat2 and offer some tips on how Democrats can boost their masculinity.

• Food: many politicians have gotten in trouble for eating food wrong. Bill de Blasio got in trouble for eating pizza with a fork and knife back in 2014. Stephen Miller continues to catch flack for draining the blood of dozens of sheep and goats across the American southwest. Any aspiring Democratic politician needs to get this straight: any food, whether traditionally eaten with hands or with utensils, should be eaten with a loaded pistol. Should the safety be on? Sure, if you’re trying to lose an election!

• Bridging the urban-rural divide: let’s face it: real men don’t live in cities. Real men don’t visit cities. The very notion of a city overwhelms the visual processing center in a real man’s brain. If a candidate is forced to visit any municipality with buildings exceeding three stories, he should say things like, “By God! What strange cliff is this? What sort of stone is this rectangular mountain hewn from?” If you see a bus, scream.

• Getting around town: Here are the ways a candidate should get around, ranked from least acceptable to most acceptable: electric car, hybrid car, sedan, SUV, pickup truck, Bradley Fighting Vehicle, M1 Abrams Tank, horse, M1 Abrams Tank driven by horse.

• Hobbies: take up hunting. Buy an uncharted island in the Caribbean. Hire a mute Cossack manservant. Lure unsuspecting sailors to crash their ships. Comfort them and feed them and give them a good night’s rest. Give them a few hours head start. Pursue them.

• Make a big deal out of not knowing how to read: Too academic? Not you, the guy who rolls his eyes and mimes puking every time he sees the printed word! Any time someone hands you something with printed text, squint and say, “What are them fancy little scribbles?”

• Acceptable emotions to express: triumph, rage.

See you out on the trail—good luck, he-men!

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? As someone who engages in a lot of stereotypically vigorous, masculine behaviors (like writing a satire newsletter), I felt duty-bound to educate my more effete, effeminate fellow citizens.

• What watercraft I’m riding: I didn’t read much this week, but I did take a ride on the NYC Ferry. You can pay a lot of money for a Hudson River cruise, or you can pay $4.50 for a 2-hour ticket on the NYC ferry. There’s a new route that goes from Wall St-Pier 11 to Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 6 to Bay Ridge to St. George to Battery Park to Midtown/West 39th St. Essentially, you get to make a big ol’ box of the Upper Hudson Bay and stand on the upper deck and feel the sun and wind on your face and marvel at the cityscape. Pretty sweet! Tell them Mike recommended it when you take a ride—no one will know what you’re talking about, but I’d appreciate it.

Sadly, though, a small but influential group of Americans has lost its way, and is standing in the way of one of the economy’s new best friends: AI data centers.

All across the country, deluded citizens are banding together at public meetings and voicing all sorts of cockamamie objections: data centers use too much energy; data centers emit a monotonous hum; data centers negatively affect the surrounding parcels; data centers look like alien forward operating bases where unwitting humans are juiced and thrown into centrifuges for analysis.

Let’s talk turkey, people: we need data centers. Data centers are the engine powering the AI revolution. Without them, humanity will never be able to summon a primeval techno-daemon with cosmological powers that will kill every last human being, create widespread joblessness, commit fraud to win literary prizes, help the economy.

But what can you, the average person, do to help our beleaguered friends? You must be willing to counteract these misguided protestors by showing up at community meetings and being a lone voice, a candle in the wind, a principled dissenter willing to advocate on behalf of Davids like Google, Meta, and Oracle against the Goliaths who want to hurt them (and thus, the economy).

Here is a comment template you can use to help make your case at public meetings:

Salutations, august and respected [planning board/city council/zoning committee/bartender]. My name is [your name], and I have been a resident of [neighborhood/town/city/state] [for five years/for ten years/for fifty years/since the mountains were young and strange creatures yet undreamed by the human mind roamed the Earth].

I speak today as a citizen and as a lover of the economy, and I want to say I support building this data center. My neighbors, who are probably Marxists, have made a lot of reasonable points about their concerns. But what about all the good that data centers create? I’d like to introduce an exhibit into evidence. [When the presiding officer of the meeting tells you that this is not a court, and that you are limited to an oral public comment, say you understand and then hold your cellphone up to the microphone to play an AI video of the Mexican standoff from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly featuring characters from Spongebob Squarepants.] Isn’t that a hoot? That’s the kind of thing that data centers allow us to do.

You can build a data center on my house if you want. Heck, I’m not using it for anything.

And who cares about the loud hum, really? Who cares that the deer around the data center are viciously rubbing their heads against trees to try and distract themselves from the noise? I like the noise! When the noise stops, I get scared. So, so, so scared. I start to think about all kinds of things. What we’ve done to this planet. What we had and what we traded away. But the hum takes those thoughts away. The hum makes it hard to think more than a couple things at once, and there’s a peace in that, you know?

Thank you. I yield the rest of my time.

Good luck! Let me know how it goes!

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? Isn’t it time that, for once in our lives, Americans stood up on behalf of the rights of large corporations to make sweeping decisions about society at large with no checks or regulation?

• What I’m reading: Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku. Predictions of the future, from 2011! It’s a fun read. His section on AI is all about robotics, and is mostly pretty pessimistic about near term advances. It’s funny, but, to be fair, I also did not predict the rise of artificial intelligence. This book reminds me of my childhood subscription to Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, which often featured predictions of cool future technologies, though what I really loved were the classified ads in the back for things like a thousand-dollar, build-it-yourself helicopter. Good times!

Last summer, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, capped a whirlwind South Pacific trip with a snorkel trip in Hawaii.

There, Navy SEALs used two boats to transport and escort Mr. Patel and nine other people on what a Defense Department email called a “V.I.P. Snorkel” next to one of the military’s most sacred sites, the underwater tomb of the U.S.S. Arizona that holds the remains of more than 900 Navy sailors and Marines who died at Pearl Harbor.

“Snorkeling at Pearl Harbor: Kash Patel’s Travels Add to Focus on Ethical Issues” By Elizabeth Williamson and Adam Goldman (New York Times) 5/15/26

When you work as hard as FBI Director Kash Patel does, you’re entitled to play hard, too. The Libel has obtained the Director’s summer travel itinerary.

• V.I.P. Capture The Flag, Arlington National Cemetery

• V.I.P. Tandem Skydiving, Utah Beach, Normandy

• V.I.P. Improv Class, Ford’s Theatre

• V.I.P. Picnic, Gettysburg

• V.I.P. Cornhole, Site of Boston Massacre

• V.I.P. Laser Tag, Gold vault at the New York Federal Reserve

• V.I.P. Shiatsu Massage, Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier

• V.I.P. Flip Cup, Lincoln Memorial

• V.I.P. Sharks and Minnows, Reflecting Pool

• V.I.P. Drive-In Showing Of The Expendables, Projected Against Independence Hall

We wish the Director a wonderful summer, and look forward to his continued leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation!

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• Why did I write this? One of my favorite Robert Mueller facts was that he would only wear white dress shirts in order to project stability and professionalism.

• What I’m reading: Just finished The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya, who was 6 when the Rwandan genocide began. She was a refugee in a number of countries in Africa for 7 years, before moving to the United States. It is a really terrific book that tells about surviving horrors and the life that follows.

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? Growing up, I always enjoyed comedians who would do big rants about low-importance annoyances (Seinfeld, Lewis Black, etc.). Nowadays, I guess I lean towards “extremely understated responses to ridiculous scenarios.”

• What I’m reading: Less reading again this week as I’ve been writing more, but enjoyed this very brief piece from a recent New Yorker, “The Popes That Trump Might’ve Liked”. Love learning about Popes!

• Happy Mother’s Day: Happy Mother’s Day! My numbers guy tells me Moms are The Libel’s strongest demographic—something about them reading it and saying, “Thank God that’s not my kid!” As my own Mom always told me, "as long as the money’s green!”

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? If I figure it out, I’ll let you know!

• What I’m reading: I’ve been trying to use some of my commute time to write, so haven’t been doing as much reading this week. But I really liked the new Patrick Radden Keefe article, “The Car-Crash Conspiracy,” about a wild insurance scam in Louisiana, where people purposely crash their cars into 18-wheelers.

According to a recent study I made up, the average wedding plan involves ten times more decisions than the entire Allied invasion of Normandy. We have to forgive our wedding-planning friends for getting mired in the details, and forgetting that the average guest just isn’t up to speed on all the intricacies of their big day.

One of the biggest sources of wedding confusion is the dress code: what are we supposed to wear? Will we upstage the couple? How tall should our top hat be? In the past, there were only a handful of dress codes: “black tie” (tuxedos for the men, velvet capes for the women); “semi-formal” (suits for the men, silk capes for the women); and “rancher’s delight” (ten-gallon hats for the men, denim capes for the women).

But as tastes and styles have changed and rules of etiquette have become more relaxed, a stupefying variety of new dress codes has emerged, leaving the average wedding guest confused, scared, and—frequently—nude.

Below, I’ll walk you through some of the most common contemporary wedding dress codes, and what they mean for you.

• Quasi-Formal: Your body is made up of four quadrants (duh). One of those quadrants must be in formal attire. The more formal that quadrant, the less formal the other three quadrants are allowed to be. Nota bene: you and your plus one must not choose the same quadrant to be the “fancy quadrant.”

• Appleseed Casual: Overalls, burlap sack full of apple seeds, long strand of grass stuck between your teeth. Drink cider. Eat pomme-frites. Say, “I reckon” a lot.

• Monster Mash: Let’s get this out of the way: this is not a “costume party,” so please leave your tacky plastic fangs at home. No, this is a very serious tribute to the great monsters of the silver screen, and it is worth paying a professional makeup artist to make sure all of the details are right.

• Business Casual: Khakis, blue dress shirt. Sensible cardigan. Refer to the couple as “the stakeholders.”

• Visigoth Chic: Throw on your tunic and cloak and get ready to sack any negative vibes—this’ll be one to remember!

• Unicycle Optional: Guests are encouraged, but not required, to bring their unicycle.

• Festive: Honestly, still working on this one. Let us know if you go to one.

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? I kind of like when dress codes are a little kooky. Unrelated: I wear the same navy suit to every single wedding I attend.

• What I’m reading: Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bertov—heard him interviewed on the radio last week. Very good overview.

On May 5, 2021, the Rangers were playing the Washington Capitals. The game started out nuts, with 14 players fighting in the first five minutes. But [Madison Square Garden security chief John] Eversole’s crew was more concerned with policing the fans when the Capitals took a commanding lead into the third period.

“Just heard a sell the team. Any idea who screamed it,” Eversole asked a Signal group chat of MSG security staff reviewed by WIRED. Two minutes later, he added: “Now Dolan sucks. Where is it.”

“All of Section 109 now,” texted one of his subordinates. “Section 110,” added another. A few minutes later, the perceived instigators were located. “Forwarded the IDs to the Intel team for work-ups,” a third staffer texted.

“Thank you,” Eversole responded. “Load in facial.”

The reports have been around for years: James Dolan’s Madison Square Garden spies and uses facial recognition technology to surveil and even ban critics from its events.

If you want to see the Knicks or the Rangers or “Professional Bull Riders Monster Energy Buck Off at the Garden presented by Ariat,” you had better watch what you say.

But what if, like me, you’re a cheapskate who attends events at the Garden but would like to get better seats, and don’t mind a little sycophancy? Below, please find an array of Dolan-praising signs that will, at minimum, get you a comped hot dog.

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? I am not personally a billionaire (I blame you, my subscribers), but if I were, I am not sure that I would use my money to obsessively track people who said mean things about me. But this is America, and if you want to run your business like it’s East Germany, then more power to you.

• What I’m reading: Still reading Brad R. Tuttle’s How Newark Became Newark. Fascinating!

His brow furrowed. “This sucks,” ancient man thought. “There are too many bugs, and it’s too hot.” And so ancient man invented Inside, and raised his offspring Inside, and each subsequent generation raised their offspring Inside, all the while finding cleverer and cleverer ways to make Inside more Insidey than ever.

A thousand generations on, ancient man’s progeny have raised Inside to Olympian heights of luxury and opulence and degraded Outside to Hadean depths of squalor and waste, to the point that few venture Outside willingly.

Still, every so often, some descendants dare to question ancient man’s wisdom and willingly spend time Outside. They call it “camping,” and they are spitting in the face of their ancestors.

What is camping? Who does it? What’s their problem? Today, The Libel will answer some frequently asked questions about camping.

Q: Where can I go camping?

A: You can go camping anywhere there’s trees or grass: state and national parks, city parks, highway medians, professional football fields, golf courses, at the house of the rich guy with the really big yard, the National Mall, landfills, the turf sample at Dick’s Sporting Goods, etc.

Q: Why should I go camping?

A: Because your college roommate told you that your morning yoga sessions in the living room are making his wife and son uncomfortable, and that you can’t crash at his place anymore, and that was kind of the last bridge you hadn’t burned, and honestly, society just doesn’t value the work that artists do anymore.

Q: What kind of gear do you need?

A: As long as it is expensive and you don’t waste any time beforehand figuring out how to work it, you’re good. Bring a full Vitamix in its original packaging. Wheel in a Yeti cooler full of live trout. It’s camping, baby! Figure it out and let your ancient survival instincts kick in!

Q: Ok, so what do I actually do when I go camping?

A: Lots of things. Make a campfire. Play cards. Listen to the campsite next to you play Billboard Top 100 at festival volume as their feral, barefoot children run around killing wildlife. Go hiking.

Q: What is “hiking”?

A: Hiking is walking but more expensive and dangerous.

Q: Huh. What do I do for food?

A: You have to bring it and cook it yourself, but outside, and on worse equipment than at home.

Q: Huh. And people do this for fun?

A: Not many, to be fair.

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? I love camping. This past week was spring break at my school, and so my wife and I went camping at NJ’s great High Point State Park (yes, home of commanding NJ mountain “High Point,” named for its status—at 1,803 feet—as the highest point in the Garden State). It was unseasonably cold and after shivering through the night in my sleeping bag that is (allegedly) rated to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, I decided that one night was enough. My wife, for whom this was her first ever night of camping, felt fine about this. Still, very pretty, and I will look forward to going again in above freezing weather!

• What I’m reading: I read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, which was a fun, fable-style book about following your dreams (thanks, but I’ll get to them after 50-70 years of quotidian minutiae!), and now I’m reading Brad R. Tuttle’s How Newark Became Newark. Good so far, though I’ve just started.

Just saw your question about tomorrow’s meeting re: who owns slides 33-37. It would take me a millisecond to give you a name, but I’m not going to do that, because the answer’s in the thread.

You’re not an intern anymore—you’re an associate, and you can’t be wasting my time with questions when you can figure out the answer yourself.

This would have been so easy for you. Just scroll down past my response and past your email to me.

Perfect, now click the three little horizontal dots to expand the thread. Ok, not that one. There were two little buttons with three little horizontal dots, and one of them expands my eight-line email signature culminating in the inspirational quote, “LIFE: It’s what you make it.”

Yeah, you’re right—there is no attribution for that quote. Want to know why? That’s because I said it, buddy. You can just do that when you’re a manager. LIFE: It’s what you make it.

You’re going to see that quote nineteen more times before you get to the email that addresses who owns slides 33-37.

All right, so click the bottom set of three little horizontal dots, and that’s going to expand more of the email thread.

Now pay attention here: I didn’t say the rest of the email thread—I said more of the email thread. This thing’s been going on for three weeks now, and I’ll be honest, there’s a lot of chaff in there.

There’s going to be 5-6 exchanges with the client where I make fun of them for how the Seattle Mariners have been playing. That’s called relationship building, and it’s why I get to tell you what to do.

All right, at this point, the thread should be about half the width of your screen. Each time you expand it, a vertical line should indent across the page and the replies will get narrower and the formatting will get more and more difficult to read. That’s how you know you’re only ten to twelve more “expand thread” clicks away.

Ok, you’re getting there. You’re now to the part of the thread where people keep alluding to who owns those slides as if it’s a settled matter, so can’t be far now.

The thread is now a single character wide, and it takes you five flicks of your thumb just to get through my email signature.

Sorry, what? You got to the end and you still don’t see it?

That is fully my bad—now that you mention it, I think slide ownership was broken down in a different email chain. I’m just about to head out to the client dinner, but will get that forwarded to you by eleven or so. You da man!

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? I am a proud user of Microsoft Outlook, whose user interface was designed by graduates of the American military’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” team, and I’ve spent many waking hours “looking through the thread.”

• What I’m reading: I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Wikipedia pages about Northern New Jersey lately (The Stars—they’re just like us!), and the footnotes of various articles have led me to some good books. I just read The Short And Tragic Life Of Robert Peace, a 2014 book by Jeff Hobbs. Hobbs and Peace were college roommates at Yale, class of 2002 I think. Peace was murdered in 2011, and the book is Hobbs’s attempt to make sense of it—he interviews family, friends, and anyone in Peace’s life. It is a heartbreaking but well-told story. I am also now reading An American River, a book by Mary Bruno about the Passaic River in NJ (its subtitle reads, in part, “From Paradise to Superfund”), in which she gives a brief history of Newark and of the specific, very bad pollution in the city’s Ironbound neighborhood (the Superfund site is the former Diamond Shamrock plant that produced Agent Orange during the Vietnam war—a byproduct was the extremely toxic dioxin that still sits in the sediment at the bottom of the river. A look at the EPA site for the project reveals that Occidental Chemical Corporation, the site’s current owner, has conducted a study for remediation, and that the “EPA expects to use this information to propose a cleanup plan for Newark Bay in 2026. Once these various river and bay cleanups have been completed, it will still be many years before the levels of contamination in fish and crab have decreased to levels that are considered safe to eat.” Thankfully, the EPA capped the site of the old factory, and they must have done a great job containing the pollutants, because if you look at it now on Google Maps, you’ll see that it’s right next to a HelloFresh distribution center (HelloDioxin!).

It’s a mature industry, after all, and 99% of the airlines’ efforts are now spent on fine-tuning the most important sector of their business (in-flight credit card offers). But we’d be fools to count them out—they’ve been harassing customers for pennies since before you were born, and they’re never going to stop looking for that extra inconvenience. That’s why they’re them and you’re you.

Witness the New York Post’s1 recent article, American Airlines passengers shocked to learn their ‘flights’ were actually bus routes: ‘There’s no plane’. This is 100% real: passengers booked a ticket from South Bend, Indiana to Chicago, Illinois. They showed up to the airport, which is frequently a sign that you are going to fly on an airplane. They went through TSA security. They walked to their gate. They walked out of the gate onto the tarmac. They boarded a bus, which only flies through the air when someone has made a major mistake. And then the bus left the airport and drove them to Chicago.

Apparently, this has been going on since 2018, through a company called Landline, “which American Airlines describes as ‘a premium motor coach experience.’” Isn’t that delightful? Imagine going up to the gate agent in a fit of apoplectic rage and complaining that they are making you ride a bus, and the gate agent just gives you a puzzled look and says “bus? Surely you’re not referring to the premium motor coach out there?” I am in favor of second chances and I don’t think that the criminal justice system is the right tool for all offenses, but I feel that the person who coined the term “premium motor coach” should be sentenced to ride a premium motor coach from Key West to Anchorage.

At first, the most offensive part of this was the idea that passengers had to go through security to ride a bus, but I’m inclined to agree: if you’re going to tell a bunch of people who thought they were about to take a flight that it’s time to get on a bus, it is probably for the best that they have been checked for weapons.

“American Airlines said the service operates “just like a flight would,” short of actually being a flight or arriving at destinations in a timeframe consistent with air travel.” To be fair, this is 100% true, and I’m surprised that they would admit it—a typical flight these days is exactly like riding the bus.

Still, it’s a sad marker of where we are that customers just have to take it on the chin when this kind of smirking corporate hijinks occurs. Of course, we have to think. I just assumed that the transportation I purchased from an AIRLINE was going to involve AIR TRAVEL. That’s on me. Stupid.

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? Companies pretending that transparent cost-saving measures that make life for customers worse are actually good and beloved by customers is one of my favorite genres (see: Target locking up toiletries).

• What I’m reading: Just finished Tilt by Emma Pattee, a novel about one woman’s attempt to reunite with her husband after a gigantic earthquake rocks the northwest. Funnier than anticipated!

Today, basically everyone carries a device that broadcasts their exact longitude and latitude to anyone they please. Surprisingly, this has been the cause of some controversy.

On the one hand, you have vindictive, amoral, civil liberties-trampling control freak technocrats who believe they’re entitled to know the exact location of all of their friends and family members at all times.

On the other hand, you have slick, two-faced sneaks of questionable morals who aren’t willing to share their location because it would “cramp my infidelity time” or “interfere with my violent plots against the world financial system”.

In other words, there’s a lot to like in both camps. But which side is right? The Libel would never presume to tell its readers what to think1, but we will share some of the Pros and Cons of location sharing.

• PRO: Towards reluctant friends, you get to act as if you are a malevolent but genial-on-the-surface southern Sheriff and say things like, “Now look here, if you’ve got nothing to hide, then you’ve got nothing to worry about. Unless, of course”—here you should pause to squint, and let the smile fade completely from your face—“I have misjudged your character.”

• CON: Harder to commit crimes.

• PRO: Joy of pulling up your “Find My” app and zooming in on your friends’ locations as you cackle and say “Yes, yes, my pretties!”

• CON: Not as easy to say that you’re “five minutes away” when you have not even put on your clown makeup yet.

• PRO: You can “spontaneously” run into your friend who’s been avoiding you by pretending that you also just happened to be attending their great uncle’s wake.

• CON: Nowhere is safe from your clingy friend, not even your great uncle’s wake.

• PRO: Peace of mind when you realize that your son Bryce was telling you the truth—he really is “shooting off fireworks behind the town dump.”

• CON: If your phone is stolen, it could reveal sensitive or politically damaging information, such as the true duration of your lunch breaks.

Sound off in the comments—what is your exact current location?

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Notes:

• Why did I write this? Because I am not up to no good, I enjoy sharing my location, and I like opening up my “Find My” app and seeing, for example, that a friend who lives in Washington, DC is, indeed, in Washington, DC. Good, I think, to myself. Just as I suspected. But some people, who I’m legally required to refer to as alleged criminals (but, seriously, come on, use your head here), prefer to keep their location secret.

• What I’m reading: I just finished Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by philosopher/scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith. I liked a lot of the “cool animal facts” about various cephalopods and ancient animals, but there were points where the philosophy part of things was foregrounded and a lot of it went whooshing over my head (unlike the octopus, I have not fully developed what scientists refer to as “intelligence”). Still, the cool animal facts were really cool! Did you know that octopus’s arms can be centrally controlled by the octopus’s brain, but they can also kind of act autonomously and have their own neurons?2