In brief: It’s rather cold across the state of Texas this morning, with nearly all of the state in the 30s and 40s outside of The Valley. Because we’re nearing the middle of April, the cold weather will not last, and indeed I don’t think it will get this cold in Texas for the next six months. Expect warmer temperatures for the rest of the week, but high humidity will remain at bay for awhile.

Midway through spring

Spring is by no means over for the greater Houston area, as temperatures outside this morning demonstrate. Pretty much the entire metro area outside of areas far inland (Conroe, 38 degrees) and Galveston (56 degrees) has fallen into the low- to mid-40s this morning. This is by no means extraordinary, as the record low temperature for today in Houston is 35 degrees, set back in 1971.

However, temperatures this morning are still running about 10 to 15 degrees below normal for this time of year, and looking ahead at the next two weeks I do not see another strong front in the cards. Therefore, for the urban core of Houston and areas closer to the coast, I expect that this morning may well be the final morning in the 40s of this season. We may not see its like again until October, or even November.

Tuesday

Miracle of miracle, the winds this morning are calm across the region, and are likely to remain so today. With sunny skies we should warm into the mid-70s this afternoon, with continued very dry air. Seriously, today is going to be one of the nicest days of the year, with exceptional weather. Lows tonight in Houston will drop into the lower 50s for most locations. Areas west and north of the city should dip into the upper 40s once again.

Wednesday

Wednesday will be a slightly warmer, and a slightly more humid version of Tuesday. We are talking high temperatures of about 80 degrees, and lows dropping to about 60 degrees on Wednesday night. Winds will have turned to come from the south, at perhaps 5 to 10 mph.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday

We should see sunny skies throughout the rest of the week, with high temperatures varying between 80 and 85 degrees. A weak front arrives on Friday morning to knock some of the humidity out of the air, but overall with dewpoints in the 40s and 50s the air is going to feel modestly dry. Nights should, generally, fall to around 60 degrees with inland areas a bit cooler and the coast a bit warmer. By Sunday we may see southerly winds become more pronounced, with gusts of 20 to 25 mph possible.

Next week

Next week should be a little bit warmer, with a few more clouds. I think we will be in the 80s for the most part, with nights in the 60s. There will be some humidity, sure, but it won’t feel like Houston humidity can during the depths of the summer. As for rain chances, overall chances are quite low until next Thursday or Friday, at least.

WASHINGTON—Warning that even the slightest dent, knick, or scratch would henceforth be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday that Raymond Pratt, a 54-year-old resident of Chula Vista, CA who bumped a Tesla while parallel parking, had been sentenced to death. “Let me be clear: This man, who attempted to park on the street and damaged the rear bumper of a Model 3, is a domestic terrorist who deserves to die,” said Bondi, adding that the United States now had a zero tolerance policy against people like Pratt, who gently bumped a Tesla, exited his 2018 Hyundai Elantra to inspect the electric vehicle for any damage, and—though he found none—left a note apologizing to the owner just in case. “There is no world in which this man can walk free after plotting to parallel park so poorly that he tapped the sleek, sophisticated Tesla with his bumper while nudging forward at around 2 mph. The only way to deal with criminals like this is to end their lives. He gets what he deserves: the electric chair.” Bondi also announced that she would also seek the death penalty for Tesla owners who exchanged their cars, blacked out the Tesla logo, or purchased a bumper sticker that said “I bought this before Elon went crazy.”

The post Man Who Bumped Tesla While Parallel Parking Sentenced To Death appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTON—As part of a sweeping overhaul of the building’s plumbing system, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly ordered the removal of sinks Tuesday from all bathrooms in the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters. “People across the world lived for thousands of years without sinks, and they were just fine—healthier, even,” said Kennedy, who noted that the cuts would not only save taxpayers thousands of dollars in maintenance and water bills each year, but be better for the environment as well. “They never should have been installed in the first place. Numerous studies have shown that licking your hands clean can actually improve your immune system. Soap dispensers will remain, but only so you can drink from them.” At press time, sources reported that Kennedy had eliminated toilets and was urging staffers to dispose of their waste by simply throwing it out the window.

The post RFK Jr. Orders Removal Of Sinks From HHS Bathrooms appeared first on The Onion.

VEVEY, SWITZERLAND—With the food conglomerate saying the acquisition made sense given its longstanding strategic partnership with the pathogen, Nestlé released a statement Friday confirming it had purchased E. coli for $2.3 billion. “We’re excited to take a legacy coliform bacterium with a tried-and-true method of sickening people and provide it with new avenues for widespread outbreaks,” CEO Laurent Freixe said during a press conference in which he stated that the infectious agent was now the “crown jewel” of Nestlé’s portfolio of foodborne illnesses and outlined an ambitious plan to put E. coli into the refrigerator of every home. “Our shareholders can rest assured knowing Nestlé will continue to be a dominant player in the food-poisoning market as we become the exclusive provider of all E. coli strains that cause stomach cramps, vomiting, bloody stools, kidney failure, and—on occasion—death. We’ve already moved forward with plans to rebrand the microbe under our new ‘Nestlé Coli’ trademark.” Freixe concluded the media event with a playful shout of “Who’s thirsty?” before distributing Nestlé Pure Life bottled water to all in attendance.

The post Nestlé Buys E.Coli For $2.3 Billion appeared first on The Onion.

#Ryo #RoninWarriors

The Trump administration argues that El Salvador cannot be compelled to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian migrant, to the US.

Oh no. Poor Beate.

The post I’ll be with you, all the way appeared first on Bad Machinery.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
The good news is that it'll also increase lottery ticket sales.

Today's News:

A judge had blocked the Trump administration's use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members.

This is where we cook, watch TV, do laundry, hold board meetings, and occasionally shoot some hoops.

GREENBELT, MD—Decrying the deportation as “wholly lawless,” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ruled Monday that the Trump administration had three days to return her to the United States from a Salvadoran prison or face contempt of court charges. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had no legal basis upon which to send me, a U.S. citizen and federal official, to one of the most notorious prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” said Xinis, banging on the walls of her cell in a controversial holding facility in Tecoluca, El Salvador, where she was sent on the basis of an “administrative error” that classified the Yale Law School graduate and sitting judge as a suspected member of the MS-13 gang. “Therefore, I am calling on the Department of Justice to return me to my home in Maryland at once. Using my finger as a gavel, I hereby decree that you must undo your grave error and send a plane or whatever to help me out. Anyone hear me? Please? I said three days, but I admit I’m having trouble keeping track of time in here. Hello? I said I decree it.” At press time, Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly defended ICE’s decision to shut Xinis up.

The post Judge Gives Trump Administration 3 Days To Return Her From El Salvador Prison appeared first on The Onion.

A 3-year-old girl found a scarab-shaped Canaanite amulet dating back some 3,800 years while on a hike with family in Israel. What do you think?

The post 3-Year-Old Discovers 3,800-Year-Old Amulet While On Family Outing appeared first on The Onion.

The $2.3 million street safety project drew protest and praise before and after construction wrapped up in 2023. The recent removal of other cyclist protections has spurred concerns that 11th Street could be next.

WASHINGTON—As the Trump administration continues to alter the version of American history that appears in government publications, sources confirmed Monday that a page on the National Parks website had been revised to describe Harriet Tubman as a human trafficker. “Operating between 1851 and 1862, the notorious human trafficker Harriet Tubman stole approximately 70 African Americans away from their homes in the southern United States,” reads a post on the National Park Service page, which now refers to the Underground Railroad as one of the most prolific human trafficking rings ever to operate on American soil. “Tubman would kidnap people in their sleep, including children, and carry them off to locations as far away as Canada. Despite the best efforts of American lawmen to bring her to justice, Tubman remained at large over the course of 13 separate kidnapping raids into southern states. Even in her later years, she never once expressed remorse for displacing her victims or violating the property rights of their owners.” At press time, the Parks Service had reportedly rewritten its page on Rosa Parks to describe her as a terrorist bus hijacker.

The post Revised National Parks Webpage Describes Harriet Tubman As Human Trafficker appeared first on The Onion.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

Last week we talked about things that you thought were normal early in your career … but later learned were actually just weird things your old workplace did and which were not typical at all. Here are 15 of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The packed hotel rooms

My very first internship was the most bizarre work experience I’ve ever had, but I didn’t know it then.

My boss was personally wealthy, as in 1% wealthy. But she was super cheap at work. When we organized the nonprofit’s annual conference, we got X many rooms free for staff for however many attendees booked rooms. My boss told us that we were going to be bunking together because there weren’t enough rooms. She had her own penthouse suite though! Only unpaid interns roomed together. (The paid staff had their own. Unpaid interns made up about 70% of the organization’s entire staff.) I learned later that we got a discount for every hotel room we didn’t fill for staff.

I stayed in a large suite with 11 women. Three of us shared a bed. Three were on the pullout. I vaguely recall some people on cots and the floor. All of us broke fire code. But think of a medium-size hotel suite with 11 people staying in it. It was normal to me because I thought it was like dorm living on a Friday night.

At my next job, we were planning an annual conference, and I asked the VP of events, a very scary, fierce woman, if we could pick who we’d be rooming with or would she do it? She blinked twice and said, “No one ever shares hotel rooms. I’ve never heard of that! Hotel rooms for staff are the cheapest expense so cutting it makes no difference in the event budget.”

I was mortified for the remainder of my time there.

2. The phone answerer

The first “real” job I had in a small office, everyone answered each other’s phones when they weren’t in. It was encouraged by our boss so no customer or client “never left a message and felt unheard” during office hours. So, if I was in my office and Sally was out for the day, if her phone rang, I had to go into her office and answer it. I would say, “I’m sorry, Sally is not here for the day but can I take a message and have her get back to you?” This was office wide, no matter your position (so yes, we even had to answer our boss’s phone). I didn’t know any better and I thought that’s just how things went when you worked in an office setting.

Fast forward to my next job. My first week there, my office neighbor was out for the day and her phone rang so I got up out of my new office and went and answered it. This was a bigger office, and the amount of “what the hell is this guy doing?” looks I got from everyone was astronomical. After I explained how it was in my old office, everyone laughed it off and explained that definitely is not how offices work and is why answering machines were invented!

3. The gang bang

I worked in TV news production in the late 80s through the mid 90s. First station I worked for called press conferences provided by an outside organization for all networks a “gang bang.”

First week at my second TV station as we were going through the newscast rundown prior to the show I asked if the live shot was a gang bang. And thus I discovered that it is not, as I assumed, an industry standard term.

4. The misplaced enthusiasm

At my first job, company IT support, we were not supposed to respond to manager messages in the Teams-equivalent with “Okay,” because it wasn’t showing enough enthusiasm. We had to respond with “Party!” Didn’t matter if it was something like a mandatory overtime announcement – “Party!” It ended up being a Thing a lot of us used mockingly outside of work, and I still sometimes do it. Definitely had to train myself out of it at my next more normal communicating job though.

5. The tic tacs

In my first job, which was at a call center, my team was all on the same anti-anxiety medication to the point that we called them “tic tacs” when we needed to ask a coworker for a pill.

6. The storage labyrinth

One university department I worked for right out of undergrad grossly misinterpreted the rules on retention of student records, both the types of records that need to be kept and the length of time required to keep them, such that they believed anything even remotely related to the student’s time at the university must be kept far longer than was truly necessary. This resulted in the entire basement of the building I worked in consisting of a labyrinth of locked storage areas full of boxes upon boxes of student “records” that should have been recycled a decade ago. It looked like that scene from the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark except there was nothing cool hidden in the boxes, just lengthy descriptions of academic advising sessions from 15 years ago. I’m pretty sure nothing was ever cleaned out because the task was too daunting by that point.

Upon changing jobs, I realized that the laws surrounding student retention required far, far less stringent application and the only thing that most of the storage facility in the basement was good for was probably mouse housing.

7. The sleeping

My first job made me think that I’d have to deal with sleep-related topics in the office on a regular basis. This ranged through some … unfortunate … variations.

Conflicts from people sleeping in shared office spaces while others were trying to do their job at their desks. People falling asleep while on duty. People sleeping in their direct manager’s office! Being told to share a hotel room with a complete stranger (from a different, completely unaffiliated business) to save on travel costs. Being told to share a bed (yes, bed – not just a room) with coworkers (yes, PLURAL) to save on travel costs.

I was relieved to discover this is not at all normal after I changed jobs.

8. The glorious cornucopia of pens

In my first job after graduation, we had to ask a senior executive’s assistant for any new office supplies, although almost nothing was actually available anyway. My main request was for a new pen — the cheapest kind they could buy in bulk — which I could only get one of at a time. And you had to show that your existing pen was clearly out of ink. If I had lost it, the assistant would quiz me about what happened to my old one and where it was. When I moved to my next job, there was a whole closet of office supplies and I still remember the amazing moment when I was just casually told I could take what I needed. I was so nervous that for a long time I’d only take one pen at a time in case anyone saw me taking — god forbid — two.

9. The emails

At my dysfunctional office job after I finished college, it took three people and upwards of half an hour to send even a short internal email. You’d write the email, recruit a coworker to read over your shoulder and critique/wordsmith while you wrote, and then have your supervisor do the same.

This was not the kind of office that did life or death work, it wasn’t a field where that level of word choice mattered, and to this day I have not heard a better explanation than “someone in upper management was afraid of our department looking bad with an insufficiently perfect word choice.” I don’t even think the other departments did this! I was a recent college grad and had no idea this wasn’t normal for corporate jobs until I mentioned it to a friend, who looked at me like I’d grown a second head.

10. The mailing labels

We had to type the mailing labels … on intra-office envelopes.

11. The elevator access

An old employer that was notoriously cheap kept some costs down by not allowing employees to use the elevator without a doctor’s note. At first I didn’t realize quite how bonkers that was because I was fresh out of school and (at least way back then) plenty of high schools and below didn’t allow all students to use elevators, so I guess I read it as an extension of that? I realized how thoroughly bizarre it was when a colleague broke her ankle and had to crutch up and down three flights of stairs in a cast for the few days it took her to get a doctor’s note certifying that she did indeed need elevator access.

12. The permissions

I had one manager who found it “disrespectful and suspicious” for staff not to ask permission before leaving our department’s office. Like, to drop off a paper. Or to return a piece of IT equipment. Or pick up materials. If you were leaving your immediate desk vicinity, you had to find Ms. Boss, ask her if you could go take care of whatever business you had down the hall, and then finish it quickly once permission was granted. This boss did not last long (shocking, right?), but I was very young and so on-edge from her outbursts and micromanaging that I went to my next job with the habit of asking every single time I needed to leave my desk. Finally, after a couple weeks, my (wonderful) new manager explained that he really, really didn’t care if I needed to go give Jane a paper … I could just do it.

13. The letters

I work in a hospital. When we needed to send a letter to the patient, we would print it, fold it and put it into an envelope. Twice a day, someone from the internal post team would collect the letters and their team posted them. I did this from 2018-2024.

In August 2024, I moved departments. When I printed a letter, everyone looked at me like I was crazy and told me it goes electronically to an off site printing company. I immediately emailed my old manager to tell her, thinking she would love this new information. Turns out she knew this all along but didn’t trust the process. So she made us do it all by hand. I asked the internal post guy about it and he said we were the only admin team that he collected packages from. His team’s actual job was to arrange transportation of clinical samples to labs.

14. The tape terrorism

In my early 20s, I worked in insurance (home/auto/life) for a few years at a few companies. The first office I worked at after receiving my license was a very large and successful franchise office of one of the nation’s top home/auto insurance companies, so I assumed (naively) that it was a well-run representative of the industry. I did learn a lot, but the owner/manager was an absolute tyrant who would scream at us while we were on the phone with customers, move our bonus requirements so she never had to pay us, and required everyone in the office (all women) to wear makeup and keep their hair done and call all the male clients “honey” and “sweetie.”

Beyond all this, she had a set of strange rules/requirements we could never quite understand. We rotated desks monthly, and she didn’t allow us to have any personalization at our desk: no photos, no decorations, no notes. She enforced this by outlawing tape in the office — it was impossible to find a roll of Scotch tape for love or money, and we were screamed at if we brought in our own. The only exception to this was our list of agent names/codes, which was taped to each computer monitor with one piece of tape. If we desperately needed tape for a ripped paper or another normal office use, we would very carefully tear off a tiny sliver of this single piece of tape. If the owner noticed that we’d put tape on something else, she would shrilly demand to know where we’d gotten it and what did we think we were doing.

When I started my next job at another insurance office, I opened the office supply drawer to find rolls upon rolls of Scotch tape. I felt like the richest person in the world, and almost overcome by emotion exclaimed, “Oh my god, tape!” My new bosss’s reaction to this made me realize such tape-based terrorism was not, in fact, typical in the industry.

15. The Miller time

I used to work at a startup where the owner’s last name was Miller. So much of our internal design-related things (not official logos) was a clear rip-off of the Miller High Life logo, and for major celebrations the featured drink was always 40s of Miller High Life. I was straight out of college, so this frat-like stuff didn’t seem that weird at the time!

I should also mention that the only place in town to buy 40s of High Life was a sketchy gas station…. So for major office events someone would have to go to the gas station and buy a bunch of 40s, totally normal work activity!

Today's links

• Tariffs and monopolies: As American as eating all the apple pie.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2010, 2020
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Tariffs and monopolies (permalink)

For all that orthodox economists hate tariffs in all their forms, the question, "do tariffs work?" is a complex one, which can't be answered unless you specify which tariffs, in what context:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces

The orthodox case against tariffs goes like this: tariffs raise the price of goods before they reach the market. Sellers will raise the price of goods to recover those costs from buyers, so it's you, the person buying a car, a phone, or a board-game, who will bear that additional cost:

https://www.sjgames.com/ill/archive/April_03_2025/Tariffs_Are_Driving_Up_Game_Prices_Now

As is ever the case with economics, this critique builds in certain assumptions. And as is especially the case with neoliberal economics, this critique builds in certain assumptions that are never tested for veracity – indeed, neoliberal economists pride themselves on their reliance on incorrect assumptions:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

The main assumption built into the orthodox case against tariffs is that sellers can't afford to eat the costs of tariffs. In the thought-experiment land of neoliberalism, market competition erodes sellers' profits so that everything being sold is only slightly marked up above the cost of making it, getting it to the store and selling it to you. Companies are said to be making a "competitive" rate of profit, which is tautologically defined as "whatever profit they're making." If Nike pays $20 to make a pair of shoes in Vietnam that it sells in America for $140, that $120 profit is "competitive" – if it wasn't, it would be lower, and it isn't, so it is.

Trump's own explanation for how the tariffs will work is no better. Trump has made a variety of incoherent claims about who will pay the tariffs. On the campaign trail, he insisted that the tariffs would somehow be paid by America's trading partners, either by their governments or by overseas companies. This is literally untrue: when you order something from overseas, the customs broker sends the bill to you, not the company that sold you the goods.

But the smarter elements in the Trump orbit have a slightly more reality-based theory: they claim that importers, faced with tariff costs, will push back on sellers and insist that they discount their products to offset the tariff bill. That's how the costs end up being paid by foreign sellers – and if their governments step in to help pay the bill, that's how foreign governments will pay the bill.

This explanation has the benefit of actually being an explanation, in that it is a series of cause-and-effect relationships that end up with the costs being borne by someone other than stateside buyers. However, this explanation is also founded on (at least) two demonstrably untrue assumptions: first, that buyers have the power to force sellers to lower their prices; and second, that this power comes from the availability of substitute goods that are made (or could be made) in the USA.

It's possible for there to be a market economy in which buyers can force sellers to eat tariff costs. For that to happen, the sellers have to be in real competition with one another. Competition requires competitors: companies that consider themselves rivals, directly attacking one another's margins. But that's not how American big business operates: 40 years of lax antitrust enforcement has produced an American economy in which nearly every sector is dominated by a monopoly, a duopoly, or a cartel:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Take Nike: Nike controls 86% of the US athletic shoe market. Nearly all the remaining market share is owned by its main rivals, Adidas and Reebok – companies that merged in 2005. It's clear that Adidas/Reebok would like to get some of Nike's market share, but in 20+ years of duopoly rule over the sector, neither Nike nor Adidas/Reebok have tried a serious discounting strategy to win that market. Instead, the duopoly has found it easy to tacitly collude to rig margins of more than 600%. What's more, the collusion may have been explicit, not tacit – when a sector is dominated by two giant firms, the upper ranks of both companies are dominated by people who've worked at both companies. These people aren't rivals, they're peers. They're executors of one another's estates, godparents to one another's children, members of the same charitable boards and pickup sports leagues. They're lifelong pals. If you think they never explicitly conspire to rig markets – over drinks at someone's wedding or funeral, say – then I envy you your touching faith in humanity.

A market controlled by a handful of firms doesn't have to solve the thorny "collective action problem" of deciding on a regulatory priority and then holding that line as the cartel captures its regulators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

That means that these companies end up with pricing power, because they can maintain solidarity while they raise prices. If everyone hikes prices together, consumers can't exert market discipline by buying from someone less greedy. And the same solidarity that confers pricing power to a cartel also insulates it from regulatory discipline, because all the companies will tell the same lie to regulators about why prices went up.

This was on display for all to see during the covid inflation shocks. Companies like Pepsi boasted to shareholders that "consumers are willing to pay more for our brands," as they hiked prices way above any inflationary rises, meaning that they didn't just force buyers to cover their higher costs, they actually raised prices more than was needed to cover those costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

Needless to say, Coke didn't respond by slashing its prices in order to capture Pepsi's customers. They did the opposite: they also raised prices over and above the inflationary costs. Coke and Pepsi might be rivals on paper, but when it comes to questions like, "Should sugar-water have higher margins?" they are the best of friends.

The same is true of the fossil fuel industry, another highly concentrated sector with sky-high margins that raised prices over inflation during the covid supply-chain shocks, and boasted about it on investor calls, without facing any regulatory scrutiny:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/15/sanctions-financing/#soak-the-rich

Neoliberal economists have an answer to this kind of thing: "it's fine." In the self-referential world of economism, whatever happens was meant to happen, because markets are efficient, so whatever happens in the market is efficient, and can only be made worse by state intervention. This theory of efficient markets is full of beautiful, self-equilibrating processes that can be precisely modeled using equations, but only because the field discards all the nonquantifiable elements of society, assuming that because you can't do math on these qualitative factors, they must not matter:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Of all the qualitative factors that clearly matter that are treated as if they don't matter, the most obvious, glaring omission is power. Power is hard to measure, but if you try to model a transaction without factoring power in, you end up in very dark places, for example, in systems where people should be allowed to "voluntarily" sell themselves into slavery.

It goes without saying that a theory of economics without a theory of power relationships is a great deal for powerful people. In Careless People, the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams's excellent new tell-all memoir about Facebook, Wynn-Williams recounts how shocked and offended Sheryl Sandberg became when she was told that other countries wouldn't allow her to go and buy a kidney for her son, should he ever need one (her kid wasn't sick – she just wanted to know that if he ever did get sick…):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250391230/carelesspeople/

This is economics without a theory of power: if I offer to buy your son's kidney, and you accept my offer, then we have achieved a voluntary exchange of value that is – tautologically – assumed to be fair. Indeed, this transaction isn't merely a way for kidneys to change hands – it's a way to "discover" the "market price" of a kidney. We're not just buyers and sellers, we're brave explorers of the vast, uncharted space of market prices.

Economics without power relies on tautology: if you assume the market is efficient, then whatever you get is what you were supposed to get. If Nike can charge a 600% markup on a $20 pair of shoes, then that is the "natural" price. Everyone in the chain – the workers who made the shoes, the subcontractors who employed the worker, the freighters who shipped the shoes, the logistics company that brought the shoe to the store, the clerk who rang up the purchase – is making what the market says they should be making. The price you pay? That's the price you should pay.

Perhaps you've heard people say that the most important thing is to "grow the pie," and that it's foolish to argue about how big any given "slice of the pie" is:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/405403/abundance-ezra-klein-building-costs-housing-energy-democrats-polarization

But this doesn't stand up to even cursory examination. If your slice of the pie is way too small to live on, and the pie grows, and your slice doesn't grow with it – or if it does, but not by enough to keep you solvent, then the size of your slice of the pie is the only thing that matters.

Economists call this the "distributional outcome" question, and orthodox economists insist that only fools and ideologues talk about distributional outcomes. They consider distributional outcomes to be a trap that sucks in well-meaning people who back "market-distorting interventions" that end up making everyone else poorer.

But you know who really cares about distributional outcomes? The finance sector. Think of the 2015 American Airlines pilot strike, which ended with a raise for pilots. When the company announced this on an investor call, Citibank analyst Kevin Crissey declared: "This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers":

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/american-airlines-flight-attendants-bash-citi-analyst-who-put-shareholders-before-workers-14134309

Investors have a lot of power. After all, capital is concentrated into just a few hands, with trillions being wielded by institutional investors – index funds, hedge funds, etc – and they get to elect the board, who have the power to hire and fire corporate executives. A corporate board is like a trade union for wealth, a small committee that wields solidaristic power to threaten companies with dire consequences if their interests aren't given priority over the interests of workers and buyers.

No wonder that corporations are so ardently opposed to other forms of solidaristic power, like trade unions – who might shift value from investors to workers – and regulators – who might shift value from investors to buyers. Without these sources of countervailing power, unified capital will not only pass on any additional costs to workers and shoppers, they'll raise prices over and above any inflationary hikes. This does indeed "grow the pie" – while beggaring both shoppers and workers.

In other words, Nike could eat the tariff costs on its goods, but it won't because it doesn't have to, because it's part of a duopoly that both tacitly and explictly colludes to screw its customers and workers. Indeed, the cartelized big businesses that run the US economy just spent the pandemic years doing greedflation – using the excuse of the pandemic and their monopolistic pricing power to raise the prices of everything, from your rent to a dozen eggs:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/10/demand-and-supply/#keep-cal-maine-and-carry-on

If you've got the right kind of especially smooth market-pilled brain, you insist that this is impossible. These giant margins are so tempting that they will inevitably coax "new market entrants" into opening competing businesses. That does happen – sometimes. But not when the dominant companies can figure out how to build Warren Buffett's cherished "moats and walls" around their businesses. For example, if you're Amazon and 90% of middle class US households prepay for their shipping through Prime, you can charge sellers whatever the traffic will bear, because they have to go through your chokepoint in order to reach their best customers. That's how Amazon ended up taking 45-51% out of every dollar platform sellers earn:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities

In Trumpland, the point of tariffs is to create friction on imports so that investors back businesses that do their production onshore. There's plenty of reasons to want things to be made in America. Manufacturing key resources in the US creates resiliency against geopolitical events (like wars), environmental disasters (like shipping-disrupting superstorms), and epidemiological events (like pandemics). Moreover, the low cost of overseas manufacturing often comes at the expense of human rights and environmental protection: making things in the US is no guarantee that they'll be made by fairly compensated workers in safe workplaces that don't pollute their environments, but it's a lot easier to enforce those priorities when production is within US borders.

But US investors spent the past 40 years gleefully demolishing the capacity of America to make things. As Apple CEO Tim Cook said:

[V]ocational expertise is very deep here [in China]. And I give the educational system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even as others were de-emphasizing vocational.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/01/17/how-much-would-an-iphone-cost-if-apple-were-forced-to-make-it-in-america/

The US doesn't have enough qualified tool-and-die makers and other skilled tradespeople to produce the machines that will make the goods that Americans want to buy. New tradespeople can be trained, but acquiring these skilled trades is a process of many years. For the US to reshore its manufacturing, it needs substantial, sustained public investment in capacity-building: loans and grants to train workers and investment in basic research and other non-market goods needed to recover the US manufacturing base.

America should do all that, but if it wants to try, it needs a robust, predictable, orderly system of government to build upon. It needs the kind of reliable and orderly processes that make people feel safe about changing trades and going back to school. It needs imports of goods from overseas that can be used to restart the US manufacturing capacity that can replace those imports.

But in a market like this one, dominated by monopolies who needn't fear the Trump-gutted FTC, DOJ and CFPB; where cartels have captured their regulators; where Doge-style chaos spreads existential terror about the future, tariffs will only raise prices, without any significant re-shoring or capacity building. The Trump tariffs are a gift to giants like Nike, who have the logistics sophistication to exploit loopholes, demand preferential rates from shippers and brokers, and to pass on costs to their customers. Any domestic company that seeks to compete with Nike will not have these advantages. For Nike – and other dominant companies – the Trump tariffs are just another moat, another obstacle which they can hurdle, but which stops smaller competitors dead in their tracks:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/with-high-tariffs-has-trump-ended

Trump's tariffs, weak antitrust and weak consumer regulation are a recipe for shifting billions from the American public to the investors in the largest companies. It's still going to result in a huge economic collapse, but the most profitable companies of today will be best poised to stay on top of the pile after the crash. One hopeful outcome of this is that a bunch of the One Percenters are extremely fucked off about the plan:

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/06/is-the-conservative-crackup-finally-here/

The New Civil Liberties Alliance is a nonprofit impact litigation shop funded by Leonard Leo, the mastermind of the Federalist Society and its takeover of the Supreme Court. They're the ones who got Chevron Deference overturned last year, and now they're suing the Trump administration over the tariffs:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/05/trump-tariffs-sink-conservatives-challenge-whether-theyre-legal/

As Corey Robin writes, tariffs have a long history of breaking up conservative coalitions, "the leading edge of political conflict in the 19th century." Robin writes that the conservative movement has spent years shifting tariff power from Congress to the president, never anticipating that someday, a president might preside over a Mad King tariff strategy. Now, Robin says:

The tariff is going to be the major issue that leads the judicial right to confront the empowered executive that they’ve turbo-charged in so many other ways.

Last year, Rick Perlstein pointed out that the true significance of Project 2025 lay in its contradictions, the irreconcilable, mutually exclusive policy prescriptions found in its pages:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

Perlstein said that these contradictions were a map of the fracture lines in the Trump coalition. Trump's tariffs clearly represent a major fault-line, and we need to seize this opportunity when it presents itself.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Wealthy Americans have death rates on par with poor Europeans https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/wealthy-americans-have-death-rates-on-par-with-poor-europeans/

• Hands off…the future https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/hands-offthe-future

• 30 Years Later, Real Genius is Still the Geek Solidarity Film That Nerd Culture Deserves https://reactormag.com/30-years-later-real-genius-is-still-the-geek-solidarity-film-that-nerd-culture-deserves/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Correcting the ignorant UK Members of Parliament who “debated” the Digital Economy Bill https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/07/correcting-the-ignorant-uk-members-of-parliament-who-debated-the-digital-economy-bill/

#15yrsago Congressman: Air Marshals cost $200 million per arrest https://web.archive.org/web/20100407220132/https://duncan.house.gov/2009/06/22062009.shtml

#15yrsago Blink tag considered harmful https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-10-031/

#15yrsago How ACTA will change the world’s internet laws https://web.archive.org/web/20100407161949/http://www.acslaw.org/node/15774

#5yrsago Landlord changes church's locks https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/07/analprinting/#faith-healer

#5yrsago Private equity blinks on cuts to health workers' wages https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/07/analprinting/#guillotine-watch

#5yrsago US stimulus is one week's cash https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/07/analprinting/#confidence

#5yrsago LA crime plummets https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/07/analprinting/#elite-panic

#5yrsago California's fiber for all bill https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/07/analprinting/#califiber

#5yrsago Covid loteria cards https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/07/analprinting/#pinche-raf

#5yrsago A farewell to APIs https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/07/analprinting/#web-2.0-RIP

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
  https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• The Political Orphanage
  https://player.fm/series/the-political-orphanage/cory-doctorow-on-the-evils-of-copyright-law

• Fire the unelected social media dictators (Al Jazeera Upfront)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXa4DzhkUZ8

• Capitalists Hate Capitalism (MMT Podcast)
  https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/195-capitalists-hate-capitalism-with-cory-doctorow

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Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/06/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-2/

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

ISSN: 3066-764X

WASHINGTON—In an effort to dispel any fears that the ongoing trade wars might negatively impact net profits, President Donald Trump reportedly assured U.S. farmers Monday that Barron would eat their crops. “No need for great American farmers to worry—that boy of mine can put away as many acres of corn as you can throw at him,” said Trump, adding that Barron had already eliminated the national dairy surplus that morning with breakfast. “Whether you’ve got wheat, barley, or sorghum, nothing goes to waste with my Barron. I think he’s still growing. If China doesn’t want those 10,000 pounds of soybeans anymore, he’ll take care of ’em for you. Hell, he’ll probably eat cotton if you put a little cheese on it.” At press time, dozens of farmers had reportedly lost fingers after forgetting to offer Barron their potatoes on a flat, open palm.

The post Trump Assures U.S. Farmers Barron Will Eat Their Crops appeared first on The Onion.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

My boss clearly loves compliments on her appearance, and our team is responding with more and more of them. It feels embarrassing and a bit ridiculous to me, especially since no one ever makes these kind of compliments to anyone else (e.g., “I love your shoes” to another team member but stuff like “you’re so beautiful, your face is radiant” to the boss).

I’m her deputy. I can’t bring myself to say anything about her looks, it feels too weird. But the compliments come so often from other team members that I worry it starts to look pointed that I say nothing. And I also wonder if I need to point out to her that this dynamic that is intensifying and suggest that she cools it down a little (without implying that I don’t think she looks good)?

Or should I let this go and just accept this as a quirk of an otherwise good boss?

I wrote back and asked, “I am admittedly fascinated by this — how did it even start happening?! Did someone compliment her on looking nice one day and her reaction was so appreciative that others started doing it too?”

Yes, exactly this. It started with occasional compliments about something she was wearing. She normally says something like, “Oh, do you really think so? You’re so nice, you make me feel so good” and sometimes goes and looks in the mirror or reapplies make up. And I guess naturally people started saying it more and more.

And it’s been gradually ramping up to the point that now every day when she arrives at the office, it’s almost a team ritual to gather round and tell her how beautiful she is. I don’t think she favors the ones who gush about her the most, she just enjoys it in general. But it still just feels weird to me and I don’t know whether to tell her she’s gorgeous or try and tactfully tell her to shut it down!

Well…

This is of course really weird and not good from a team dynamics perspective, but it’s also hilarious.

Like, can you imagine coming to work every day and preening while people gathered round to tell you how beautiful you look? And then going to gaze at yourself in the mirror to bask in your reflected beauty? I do not think this is a normal experience, even for the supermodels among us.

And it is extremely entertaining.

As for what to do … you’re absolutely right that it’s weird and she should cool it, but given the balance of power between you, if you feel too awkward about raising it and would rather leave it alone, it doesn’t rise to the level of something where you have to intervene.

I generally try to apply a “is this really what I would do in real life?” test to my advice (because otherwise it’s easy to fall into giving advice that sounds right but isn’t actually realistic, given humans and politics and all the strange pressures of work life), and I’ve gotta say, I’d almost definitely leave it alone and just enjoy it as the very strange spectacle it is.

The exception to that is if you have the kind of relationship where you could comfortably say, “Dude, it’s getting weird that everyone is complimenting you so much every morning — I think we should try to stop that” — but I’m guessing that if you did, you already would have said it.

This would not be my advice if you were seeing favoritism toward the team members who compliment her or any chilliness toward those who don’t. If that were happening, as her deputy you’d have more of an obligation to speak up (although still not an absolute one, given the power differential). It would also be different if you were her manager; in that case, you’d really need to point out that she’s creating a weird dynamic and should stop it.

All that said, if you are comfortable speaking up, you could say something like, “Have you noticed we’ve developed almost a ritual of everyone complimenting you in the morning? I worry about people feeling like they need to curry favor with you.”

But man, it’s hard to say that without sounding like you’re saying, “You are not that pretty and they’re just sucking up to you.”

TORONTO – Despite a well-received season 3 run, HBO’s hit series The White Lotus is facing backlash over failing to deliver on a central question that kept fans returning cliffhanger after cliffhanger: do rich people have problems too? “It’s just so lazy and disappointing,” longtime Lotus fan Christine Mraz told reporters. “Like, from the very […]

The post Disappointed fans slam White Lotus finale for never revealing whether rich people have problems too appeared first on The Beaverton.

OTTAWA – With the stock market plunged into chaos by U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, Canadians have decided to simply wait out America’s forthcoming economic collapse and then buy the nation on the cheap. Canada’s leaders had been expected to announce retaliatory measures to counter U.S. tariffs on Canadian automobiles, steel, softwood, and ketchup […]

The post Canada waiting for US economy to implode enough to make America 11th province appeared first on The Beaverton.

Let me start by saying I’ve got nothing against doctors in general. My niece is a doctor. Most of them are warm, professional, and highly educated people. But lately I’ve noticed a very troubling trend: Almost every doctor I see goes out of their way to tell me not to drink my own urine. This happens so often, in fact, that I can only conclude they just want to keep it all for themselves.

Hear me out.

No doubt at some point you’ve gone to a doctor, maybe it was for your annual checkup, and that doctor has asked you to produce a urine sample. So far, so good. But have you ever wondered why, instead of having you drink your urine, they ask you to leave it behind with them?

Think about it. They have you pee in a cute little cup that’s the absolute perfect size for a quick shot of delicious urine, and then right when you’re about to put it to your lips and gulp it down, they get all worked up and tell you to stop—sometimes even shouting and waving their hands! Pretty soon you’re getting a lecture about how drinking urine supposedly isn’t good for you, how it’s not actually sterile but toxic, and how it’s time to hand over your pee.

For them. To keep. How very convenient.

I’ve tried switching primary care physicians, but it’s the same thing every time. They ask me why I smell like urine, and I say I don’t smell anything. They ask me if I’ve been drinking it again, and I just smile back at them. They try to act disappointed, or even disgusted, but you can tell they like what they smell and what they really want is to guzzle it all down right then and there.

It makes sense. These doctors know how good urine tastes, and they’re worried that if we ever found out, there’d be no beautiful golden-brown liquid left for them. Many are so desperate they’ve resorted to scare tactics. Have you noticed this? The other day my doctor told me with a straight face that consuming too much urine can cause dehydration and bacterial infections. Okay, doc! Sure thing. I’ll be sure to take that under advisement.

GLUG, GLUG, GLUG!

It’s gotten so ridiculous that at the hospital I’ve recently been admitted to they’re trying to make me give them even more urine samples so they can screen for kidney disease. This is because—they claim—my kidneys may be damaged from having to process all the so-called “toxins” in the many gallons of urine I drink each week. Yeah, right. Look, if they want to take my pee and run their little pee tests on it, fine. But they should give it back to me when they’re done instead of passing it around to all their buddies at one of those big urine parties they throw with all the samples they collect.

It’s my urine, okay? Drink your own. 

I know what’s happening the moment we leave a doctor’s office. As soon as we’re out the door, our precious u-juice is cascading down their throats. I can picture the way it froths at the corners of their lips and how, just before a driblet escapes, they lap it all up with one big sweep of the tongue. They love the stuff and drink every last tangy-sweet dewdrop they can get their hands on. But this patient, for one, has gotten wise and will no longer be providing any “specimens” for their “labs.”  

Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve been sitting here for quite a spell, so I believe I’ll get up and go sample this mouthwatering batch of bladder wine I’ve had brewing inside me for the past few hours.

The post The Doctors Telling Us Not To Drink Our Urine Probably Just Want It For Themselves appeared first on The Onion.

With a sale deadline looming, tech company ByteDance was once more given additional time to offload TikTok to a non-Chinese buyer or face a ban in the United States. Here’s all you need to know about the sale.

Q: Who are the leading bidders to acquire TikTok?

A: Major companies including Amazon, Oracle, and a Thai seafood conglomerate called Gold Star Premium Fish & Crab.

Q: Does Amazon have any conflicts of interest?

A: It owns Amazon Basics Short-Form Video Platform for Youths.

Q: How has the Chinese government reacted to American bidders so far?

A: They haven’t even responded to the 15 funny TikToks we sent them.

Q: Are there any dark-horse bidders being considered?

A: Insiders reckon it could go the way of Old Widow Calloway. It seems Mr. Calloway left her a mighty large sum of which she’s never spent a dime.

Q: How much is ByteDance asking for TikTok?

A: The app is currently listed on TikTok Shop for $2.75 plus shipping.

Q: When’s the new sale deadline?

A: Trump declared TikTok must be sold before the last petal falls from the enchanted rose that sits on his desk in the Oval Office.

Q: What if TikTok doesn’t get sold by the deadline?

A: Distractions from the ongoing global economic collapse will be pretty slim pickings.

Q: What will become of Dannii81333’s 19-part series about the time her mother-in-law stole her dog?

A: That’s up to Communist China.

Q: Shouldn’t the Trump administration be dealing with the collapsing U.S. economy and the genocide in Gaza instead of this?

A: Have fun in El Salvador.

The post What To Know About The TikTok Sale appeared first on The Onion.

The post Masters Crowd Whispering Its Lungs Out appeared first on The Onion.

Bride and groom exchanged vows before friends and family Saturday in a ceremony that delicately danced around the fact that Patrick was Shelly’s track and field coach in high school.

The post Shelly Greenfield and Patrick Chester appeared first on The Onion.

I am out of the office today and Friday to solve every existential quandary I’ve been putting off arguably since 2023 when, as far as I can tell, I simply quit thinking.

Hi, I’m out of the office. If you have anything urgent, please get in touch with the fact that there’s probably nobody better suited than me in our organization to handle that matter, and I’m taking a day off to think about love, survival, and time.

I am currently out of the office and changing my entire past and future by Monday. Everyone remembers when I tried this three weeks ago. I will not be piloting a rented boat this time, and expect much less legal fallout.

I will be out of the office today. I’ve been reading a lot of breakup songs. I don’t listen to them, but I google the lyrics and read them, and the one that’s been getting me through these days goes, “And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar (oh). Said, ‘I’m fine,’ but it wasn’t true.” It reminds me of coming back from our Creative Offsite in February. See you guys Monday.

I will be out of the office Thursday and Friday. You know how I’m always saying I’m going to write a novel about all this shit I’m going through? This is it, man. Four days. Energy drinks and doubling up on my thyroid medication. Super speedy, really fast writing. Kerouac style. I can already feel it in America, the way the dark banner of stars above us opens up across the vast land, and the crying disappears into clear streams in the Rockies and madly beautiful oceans out west, where the pain becomes bright sunsets that fade and reveal dark jazz holes where broken men blow out their hearts like carburetors that only need a good blast down the interstate to clean them out and set them straight again. I will return to the office on Monday.

I’m out of the office today. Remember how I always said one day I would get on a motorcycle and ride off into the sunset forever with no real plan because I don’t care about social imperatives? Well, it’s happening, but in a mid-size SUV for three days if you count Friday and all of Sunday.

The person traveled to Houston from Mexico while infected with measles, a virus that can be transmitted before symptoms even develop, according to the health department.

The Institute of Museums and Library Services was targeted in a recent executive order. Here's how that could affect North Texas libraries.