Cowboy Who?

The Harris County Institute of Forensic Science determined Jonathan McEvoy died from blunt traumatic and thermal injuries after he drove through a corrugated metal fence in a Walmart parking lot and crashed his Lexus NX350 into the pipeline.

Named after hip-hop artist Andre 3000’s famous declaration at the 1995 Source Awards, Morgan Newton’s exhibition, The South Got Something to Say, on view at Sanman Studios, echoes the Atlanta hip-hop artist’s clarion call in the service here of Black southern women. Highlighting, in particular, female hip-hop artists from the 1990s and 2000s, many of them from local scenes and less well-known than their male counterparts, Newton explores the broader cultural life produced, cared for, and celebrated by Black women of the South, particularly in Newton’s hometown, Houston. 

Trained as a painter, Newton, a self-described pop culture enthusiast, showcases her skill as an archivist, assembling an array of photographs, magazine covers and articles, clips of hip-hop videos, and a variety of examples of media and performance as cultural markers of the subjectivities of Black southern women. By interspersing images and videos of her personal life and family history, Newton offers a view into her own subjectivity as an artist, archivist, and a member of a community of women who cultivate and nurture a distinct cultural life with its own histories, topographies, stories, relations, rituals, dreams, and memories. Newton, interested in uncovering and presenting sometimes unknown or ignored coming-of-age narratives of Black women, explores her rich cultural inheritance in this exhibition.

Visitors to the gallery will first encounter two video montages assembled by Newton. The first includes interviews and music videos featuring MCs such as Gangsta Boo, Diamond and Princess, Mia X, and others. The artists talk frankly about the challenges of being a woman in a male-dominated industry, their unique styles and their approaches to songwriting, including the sometimes sexually explicit content of their lyrics. The second video, titled Life in the South, showcases clips of gospel music groups — most notably The Clark Sisters — block parties in Houston neighborhoods, the Jack Yates High School Lionettes Drill Team, Soul Train episodes, and Newton’s family reunions. These videos explore a range of cultural products and experiences and serve as a tribute to Black southern women as artists and performers, whether on stage, in their communities, or during family gatherings with dance-offs and “Soul Train” lines. An abiding spirit of care and inspiration, humor, style, and a fierce but thoughtful approach to the singular cultural productions of Black Southern Women runs through these montages.

Highlights from the reels include rapper Mia X discussing the necessity of being “unladylike” in the male-dominated hip-hop industry, which for her simply meant “taking care of her business,” a role that men often assumed she couldn’t fulfill or tried to dissuade her from. The montages showcase Mia X and other artists in powerful performances. In a deeply emotional moment during her speech at the 2017 Black Girls Rock Awards, musical artist Solange declares, “Black women make me feel invincible, it’s the way that we walk, the way that we talk, our soul, our sway, our grace, our roots, it’s our secret language with one another,” all of which are spectacularly, joyfully and perceptively presented in the videos and images that Newton collects and creates. 

Along with the video montages, a large-scale installation frames the exhibition. On this tribute wall, arranged like a picture wall in a home, Newton has gathered photographs, magazine covers, advertisements, and articles that trace her pop-cultural lineage. This includes posters of films like Crooklyn and Eve’s Bayou and photographs of Black southern women MCs important to her now and growing up, a long list which includes Houston artists Choice (First Lady of Houston’s Rap-A-Lot Records), Enjoli Williams (from Screwed Up Click) and others from Atlanta, Miami, and Memphis, which along with Houston constituted the major Southern Hip-Hop Scenes of the 1990s and 2000s. The photographs of musical performers and MCs include images from their personal or family histories (Megan Thee Stallion is pictured as a child with her mother). By using the everyday aesthetics of framed photographs, Newton allows these portraits to coalesce into a personal history; her cultural influences, many of whom went underappreciated, become members of an extended family. Taken together, the images give us both a collective of singular performative personae and a glimpse behind it. Four framed photographs on an altar near nearby pay tribute to women rappers or their relatives who have passed on: Holly Thomas, mother of Megan Thee Stallion, Gangsta Boo, Princes Loko, and Magnolia Shorty. The space feels private as if one is entering a space of shared secrets. A place of reminiscence and imagination. A place where a young woman becomes curious, and dreams, as Newton says, of being in the know. 

Newton’s knowledge and experience of hip-hop are indeed formidable, and she expanded these with extensive research, which included following word-of-mouth recommendations. “This was before social media,” she says of these histories. People then passed the word along about clubs, hip-hop contests, performers, and mix tapes, and this is how she also conducted part of her research: through conversations, tips, phone calls, even traveling across the country to meet with artists. She speaks with care and concern about the connections she made with artists like Choice and Cl’Che. “I wanted to be intentional,” she said in conversation, “I check in on them.” Her archival work for the show evinces an eye and ear for stories and a care for the living histories hidden among us. She often hints at lost histories in her work, gathering material traces to recover them, like ticket stubs from Houston hip-hop clubs that no longer exist. 

Newton’s collages, which further the archival work, present a range of styles. Some consist of carefully rendered cut-outs or overlays of figures and objects that explore juxtapositions — sometimes humorous — create cosmic atmospheres or display a lavish materiality. Others are explosive pastiches that crowd together in the excessive delight of dreams, a caravan of people and places that make up the landscape of memory and use the aesthetics of everyday life. In her “Houston” collages, she gives us images of leaders like Barbara Jordan, as well as images of historically Black neighborhoods, legendary Black-owned businesses like Hank’s Ice Cream, local bars, hamburger stands, kiddie parks, and clubs, and a host of other material cultural markers. Collages like Houston Forever, Where the Party at? and The South Got Something to Say read like histories of local cultural topographies.

Newton’s work echoes the style of Afro-Futurism, and while a cosmology of ancestors, priestesses, and warriors emerges from the work, Newton’s approach to world-building is less sci-fi and more influenced by astronomy and astrology, using planets, for instance, in several of her collages and mixed media compositions to suggest moods and revelations that circulate through dreamscapes and memories.

Collages like Full Set do take up an Afro-futuristic aesthetic of a kind of gorgeous material excess used to suggest Black Womanist Power. The extravagantly manicured nails and hands armored in jewelry look like the gauntlets of a warrior or the futuristic techno-fantastical equipment of an interdimensional voyager. This aesthetic is made to outstrip conventional notions of beauty and, along with a host of images of unique and fantastic hairstyles throughout the show, suggest the freedom and power that Black southern women have expressed in their style, which Newton uses as an aesthetic trope of expanding and infinite possibilities. 

  The cyanotype BLUEPRINT pays further tribute to Black women working in hip-hop, a series of images celebrating video vixens, women who appear as dancers or models in rap videos, particularly those of the 1990s and 2000s. Video vixens have often been criticized for playing into the hypersexualization of Black women’s bodies, but Newton seeks to honor their contributions to hip-hop culture. These performers often worked in toxic environments, Newton says, and were underpaid. Newton attempts to reclaim their performances as a source of power. The free expression of the desire of Black women — their right to explore and display their own sexuality in a stylized performativity, a frank approach to erotic experiences, also explored in the raw lyrics of hip-hop artists like Trina — is a theme that surfaces in different moments throughout the show, a kind of embodied spiritual power that suggests self-expression, pleasure, and intimacy that Black southern women find in cultivating and enjoying their relation to eros in a variety of cultural stylings. 

For instance, in the collage Hoochieverse, Newton explains that she was interested in reclaiming this derogatory term. The woman at the center of the collage, with her extravagant hairdo (reminiscent of the marvelously styled, often ingenious, wigs and hairdos of the Queen in the Netflix series Bridgerton), acts for Newton like a “Mothership” hovering there in her gold ornate frame among the figures in this spacescape of planets and stars. In fantastic juxtapositions, Black women are pictured riding rockets, lifting an astronaut, sitting atop a flying saucer. The sense here and in other collages is of Black women coming together and enjoying each other in mirthful, joyous rituals of friendship and celebration of life, dressing up and going out, “squading.” Here and elsewhere in the show, they perform for neither a male nor a white gaze but for a Black Womanist Gaze, which serves to illuminate and liberate one another, their bodies and desires, in acts of care and love. 

Amid cosmic images celebrating the talent, style, ancestors, families, memories, dreams, and girlhood of Black Southern Women, Newton has placed a collage entitled Haya (Life), which acts as the spiritual center of the exhibition. The composition is spare compared to the others in the show and is the only collage using solely black and white images. It possesses a starkly quiet though arresting beauty. In the center of the collage, against a night sky filled with a myriad of stars, a group of dancers reaches toward the heavens. In the left quadrant of the collage, we see an image of Mahalia Jackson. The dancers, from the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, reach up to the planet Mercury, the planet of communication, which broadcasts rays of light — tensile lines of connection — across the surface of the composition. At the same time, Mahalia Jackson, in the throes of her deep song, has conjured a second iteration of Mercury, which seems to levitate in her arms. Above the figures, arms enter into the frame, hands gracefully gesturing, seeking one another. This image of the Alvin Ailey dancers comes from a performance of Revelations, during the song “I been ‘buked,” which features the lyrics: “I been ‘buked and I been scorned, trying to make this journey all alone,” a song Jackson also performed. The gesturing hands echo but transform Michelangelo’s famous fresco at the Sistine Chapel, The Creation of Adam. Instead of (white) male bodies enacting a dispensation, we have groups of Black bodies, presided over by Black women, a collective performance that points to a nexus of ritual gestures, connections formed in love and grief, sharing in the creative, transformative power at the center of Newton’s world-building.

Netwon recalls going to Church as a girl, and in the heat, on creaking pews, hearing her Grandmother call, “Haya!” Life! Newton’s work marvelously honors that transporting devotion to life in the Black Southern Womanist experience.

The post Review: “The South Got Something to Say” at Sanman Studios, Houston appeared first on Glasstire.

A Washington D.C. judge has blocked President Donald Trump’s order to temporarily pause federal financial assistance programs. 

On Monday, January 27, 2025, President Trump issued an internal memorandum mandating federal agencies to pause and review their financial assistance programs. The memo, which The New York Times published, states that agencies should ensure that “programs and supporting activities [are] consistent with the President’s policies and requirements.” It goes on to specifically note the President’s recent executive orders related to immigration, foreign aid, environmental policies, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, gender identities, and taxpayer money spent on funding or promoting elective abortion. The pause was set to go into effect on Tuesday, January 28 at 5 p.m. EST, and agencies were instructed to submit detailed information by Monday, February 10.

In a document dated January 28, a group of nonprofit organizations, including The National Council of Nonprofits, the American Public Health Association, Mainstreet Alliance, and SAGE, filed a suit with the district court in Washington D.C. requesting that the funding freeze be blocked. The group notes, “This Memo… will have a devastating impact on hundreds of thousands of grant recipients who depend on the inflow of grant money (money already obligated and already awarded) to fulfill their missions, pay their employees, pay their rent — and, indeed, improve the day-to-day lives of the many people they work so hard to serve.” They also allege that the Trump Administration is not working “within the confines of the law.”

U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan has temporarily blocked the order until Monday, February 3, at 5 p.m. According to Politico, “the Judge described the move as a ‘brief administrative stay’ intended to maintain the status quo while further litigation can play out.”

If the memo goes into effect, the reach of the pause is currently unclear. The Associated Press and other outlets have reported that federal assistance to individuals — such as Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, student loans, and scholarships — will not be affected. However, yesterday lawmakers reported that Medicaid portals were down in all 50 states. Many recipients of federal funds have been uncertain about how their programs might be affected. With nearly a third of nonprofit funding coming through federal grants, nonprofits in all areas would likely be affected.

At the time of publication, representatives from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) have not responded to Glasstire’s specific inquiries about how the freeze might affect grantees who are currently under contract to receive awards, or about how the freeze would impact future grant opportunities. A spokesperson for the NEA did share the following statement: “The National Endowment for the Arts is currently reviewing the recent Executive Orders and accompanying guidance from the White House Office of Management and Budget to ensure compliance and provide the required reporting.”

A representative from the Mid-America Art Alliance told Glasstire, “At this time, we are awaiting further guidance from our federal partners to better assess the implications of the directive.”

Anina Moore, Director of Artist Services & Communications at the Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA), shared a statement with Glasstire. It reads, “We understand that the freeze is a developing situation. It does not affect TCA’s ability to provide funding for our current operating year, including the federal funding we have received.” The TCA’s approved 2025 operating budget indicates that its revenue is approximately $15.8 million, with $1.4 million coming from federal funds.

These new considerations related to federal funding echo arts funding issues that cropped up in Texas and Florida last summer. In both states, funds were rescinded due to local and state representatives taking issue with the potential of taxpayer money being spent on LGBTQ programming. Also last summer, Oklahoma Congressman Josh Brecheen proposed amendments to the Fiscal Year 2025 Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act that would have decreased the NEA and NEH budgets by nearly 25% of their originally proposed budgets. 

These are the latest events that come out of a history of Republican-led initiatives to defund the arts. Among them include a 1997 Heritage Foundation document, which lists reasons to eliminate NEA funding, including “artistic efforts [being] evaluated by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation instead of artistic merit.”

The temporary blocking gives nonprofits a short time to plan for what may come. For now, nonprofits await additional information about what it might mean if federal funding is paused next week.

 

Disclosure: Glasstire is a recipient of funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

The post Nonprofits File a Lawsuit Against President Trump’s Federal Funding Freeze; Judge Temporarily Blocks Order appeared first on Glasstire.

When there is a crash in the kernel, Windows displays the famous blue screen of death. Why doesn’t the blue screen message also say, “This crash brought to you by Company X, author of Driver D”? Wouldn’t that make it easier for users to understand whom to blame for the problem?

When you assign blame, you need to be sure you are assigning blame correctly. If you mess up, then you’ll be like one of those “Find my lost phone” apps that gives the wrong location for a phone, causing some poor homeowner to be harrassed repeatedly.

What the kernel knows is that the crash occurred due to the execution of a specific instruction, and it can even figure out what memory address that instruction was attempting to access. But it is not necessarily the case that the driver that is executing that instruction is the one at fault for the crash.

One large category of failure is memory corruption. These types of failures are often quite difficult to debug because memory corruption usually does not manifest itself as a crash in the code that did the corrupting, but rather as a crash in the code that tries to use the corrupted data. If you blame the driver that executed the crashing instruction, you’ll be blaming the victim, rather than the culprit.

If you assume that memory corruption is random, then each time the system crashes, it will blame a different driver, and the conclusion of the user might be, “There must be some unknown driver that is causing all these other drivers to crash.” But it might also be “Each time I try to repair a driver that Windows blamed for the crash, I just get a crash in some other driver. Windows is so horribly broken that all of the drivers are crashing! And sometimes, it comes back and re-blames the driver that I just repaired. Oh, and how do I repair the ntoskrnl.exe driver?”

Furthermore, it’s not valid to assume that memory corruption is random. We’ve seen memory corruption bugs that consistently corrupt the same innocent victim repeatedly. So you can’t even use a rule of thumb that “Well, if ten consecutive crashes are on the same instruction, then that code is definitely at fault.”

Assigning blame for an access violation in native code is difficult because the nature of memory corruption can lead to the access violation occurring in a component unrelated to the one that is the source of the problem. An incorrect assignment of blame causes users (and technology reporters) to march on the company’s headquarters with torches and pitchforks, and now you have public relations and legal problems on your hands.

Related reading: Windows 95 provided the name of the crashing driver in its blue screen messages, giving users the incorrect impression that it was a Windows-provided driver that was crashing their system.

Bonus reading: Steve Ballmer did not write the text for the blue screen of death. But he did write the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del screen in Windows 3.1.

The post Why doesn’t the Windows blue screen of death prominently identify the company that created the driver that crashed? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

After replacing a bicycle tube, I experienced a problem: When I inflated the tube, there was a bulge near the valve stem. I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the bulge. I thought that maybe I hadn’t seated the tube properly, but no amount of reseating made the bulge go away.

A bicycle technician explained to me that I was getting the order of operations wrong.

The order of operations for replacing a tube is

1. Insert new tube.
2. Inflate.
3. Secure valve stem nut.

I had gotten the last two steps in the wrong order: I was tightening the valve stem nut before inflating.

It seems that the Internet tells me that the bicycle technician was wrong, and the valve stem nut should be secured before inflating, since it prevents the stem from going into the rim.¹ I don’t know who’s right, but changing the order of operations fixed my problem, so that’s what I’m going to keep doing.

¹ And the Internet seems to feel that the nut is superfluous.

The post Why is there a bulge on my bicycle tire when I inflate it? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

- Thank you, Bonnie Bees, for making this video possible: https://www.cgpgrey.com/bonnie

## Related Videos:

What is Federal Land? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LruaD7XhQ50

## Bonnie Bees:

💚 The Wall of 1,000 Thanks: https://www.cgpgrey.com/wall-of-thanks

🎩🐤🎩 And the 100 Top Chickens:

- Rebecca Wortham
- Bob Kunz
- Kate Scheper
- Donal Botkin
- BN-12
- David White
- Andrea Di Biagio
- George Lin
- Nancy Flores
- iulus
- Xueqi
- Tim Stumbaugh
- Bogdan Toma
- Brian Tillman
- Chad Bramwell
- Nicolas Dedual
- Nicholas Welna
- Richard Jenkins
- Martin
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- Meekay
- سليمان العقل
- Jason Lewandowski
- Manuel O. Maldonado
- Norm
- rictic
- Silvainius
- Derek Bonner
- Eliri SDH
- Freddi Hørlyck
- Peter-Claire Lomax
- Vero
- John Lee
- Maxime Zielony
- John Rogers

https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey

## Music

David Rees: http://www.davidreesmusic.com

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

Last week we talked about jerks getting their comeuppance, and here are eight of the most satisfying stories you shared.

1. The thief

At an old job, I was continually denied raises by the bully finance director (who somehow was always able to find money for his own raises.) He oversaw all purchases for the business’s renovation, which included lots of furniture, TVs, tech stuff, etc. All expensive stuff. He was one of many jerks and I eventually moved on, but I heard from a coworker a couple years later that he was fired one day when an expensive TV that went missing from storage was suddenly discovered. In a picture his wife posted on Facebook of their new living room. This caused an audit and it turned out he was stealing A LOT of stuff and money from work, so he and his cronies all got fired and he had a very public trial. All I wanted was a raise when my job duties expanded, and instead his ass went to jail.

2. The coffee

When I was 30, I looked like a 15-year-old and many assumed I was an intern or perhaps a lowly admin they could disrespect. I had had enough of this when an old man leaned over to me before a commission meeting started (I was the staff liaison to this commission and basically led the meetings but he didn’t know that yet). He asked me to go get him coffee (!) without even looking at me. I said in a neutral tone, “No thank you” and then got up to start the meeting. I said, “Hey everyone, just a quick note, Bob here says he’d fetch (I really emphasized this word) coffee for anyone who needs it, so just tell him how you take it.” He got very flustered and muttered something like, “uh, uh” and I turned to him and said, “So are we good here?” and I paused for effect and let him memorize my shape, face, and tone until he said, “Yep, got it” and barely spoke up again for the rest of the year.

3. The file poacher

I did an external benchmarking project in Excel for my boss, sent it off, and forgot about it. 12+ months later, one of the “too cool to wear a suit” marketing team presented the exact same file to the executive team (I was there to present something else). It even still had my quirky choice of colors in the conditional formatting.

He stood there saying it had been a lot of research and work and just needed to be updated for the latest year’s data. Then he was asked to make some changes on the spot. He needed to get into the source sheet, which he couldn’t find. I meekly suggested it was a hidden sheet and told him how to unhide it. But then there was no data on the source sheet. I pointed out it the columns started at AW so there must be some hidden columns. He tried and tried to unhide them and nothing happened. He muttered the sheet must have corrupted. He also struggled to remove some colors on the output sheet. I said nothing else, but raised my eyebrow at my boss.

Finally my boss suggested I try, as I was known for being good with Excel. I walked down to his laptop and, without saying a word, took the page protection off the sheet using my password. Someone jokingly asked if I had an all powerful admin password. I shook my head and said no, that I remembered the password for the file. I was then asked why I knew the password to a marketing file, to which I replied that they hadn’t changed the password on the file since I created it 18 months ago, and that I’d had to hide and password protect the detail as some of the numbers were still confidential at that point. I also said the random colors on the front sheet which he couldn’t remove were due to conditional formatting based on criteria my boss had asked for the year before.

I took my seat again (back of the room) and watched as Mr. Marketing squirmed as he was asked why he was taking credit for another team’s work. My boss smirked and Mr. Marketing never poached another file off me again.

4. The building

I took a fundraising job at a nonprofit, and it didn’t take long to realize that the place was toxic. The CEO, who was also the founder, was an absolute terror, which was apparently known to everyone but me. I started looking for another job because I just couldn’t deal with the abuse, and somehow my boss found out and fired me before I had the chance to quit, despite the fact that I was absolutely destroying my fundraising goals. The board refused to manage the CEO in any way, shape, or form, despite these well-known issues.

About five years later, when the org was in its 30th year, the org finally had the funds and build a gorgeous new building for its operations, it was everything they’d all dreamed of, especially the toxic founder … who the board then promptly fired for his years of toxic behavior, and specifically cited my firing five years prior as one of the reasons. Knowing that he never got to enjoy his magnificent new space was just the best chef’s kiss ever.

5. The accreditation

Ten years ago, I was a trainer working for a very well-known organization which was in a highly visible dispute with the government, and was regularly in the headlines. If you were remotely engaged with current affairs in my country then, you would recognize both the dispute and the company. Our part of the organization ran credentialled training for a highly-trusted, highly-regulated profession — think legal, engineering, that kind of thing. Our training was accredited by the regulator, and our clients had to take 50 accredited hours every year as a condition of keeping their licenses. All the training courses had had the content approved, but for each individual session, the dates, times, venue, trainer, and bullet-pointed list of content had to be sent to the regulator.

My lovely manager was away for a year on maternity leave, and single most useless man I have ever met was employed in her stead, through the Old Boys network. He was unbelievably useless in every possible way, and chauvinist. Not actively toxic, just incompetent and a waste of space, and extremely condescending to us little ladies. So the two other trainers and I and the admin team who supported us just bypassed him and got on with things.

A few months in, the admin responsible for getting all our courses accredited left. Before she left, she informed Useless Manager about the process for getting courses accredited and said that the other admin didn’t have time to do this and he would need to figure something out. About five months after that, just before Lovely Manager returned, we found out that Useless Manager’s solution had been to ignore it. For nearly six months, we had been delivering “accredited” courses to our highly-regulated profession, which they needed to complete annually to keep their licenses, and not a single one of them was actually accredited.

My co-trainers and I (all women) scheduled a meeting with our manager to “understand the issue,” and we basically treated it like a Select Committee. First, we made him explain what had happened and how. Then we asked questions like, “But you were aware that this was a requirement, yes or no?” “Just so we are clear, do you understand that if any of the thousand or so clients we’ve seen in the last few months got audited, they could lose their licence because they’d claimed 50 accredited hours and these hours weren’t accredited? And that would be entirely on us?” “Could I just ask you to reflect on the impact of Company’s highly visible dispute with the government if this got into the media?”

Frankly, we shouldn’t have been allowed to do it and he shouldn’t have sat through it. But he was Useless, so he didn’t actually know how to shut us down. He squirmed. He stuttered. He blustered. We sat very and looked at him very, very disapprovingly. At some point, I sighed and said, “All I can say is that I’m very, very disappointed.” (Which was the point where one of my colleagues nearly lost it.)

After half an hour, we told him he could go, waited until he’d left the room, and then all cracked up laughing and repeating the highlights back to each other. He worked out the rest of the month without contacting or speaking to any of us again. He’s probably now CEO of something because useless, chauvinist men fail upwards.

The resolution was that Lovely Manager came back, worked with the regulator, and got them to agree to backdate approval and treat it as an admin issue. I still get chills thinking about how bad it could have been though.

6. The apology

In my last job, I helped salespeople with proposals, and a lot of them had very specific requirements that we would be thrown out for not following. On one proposal, we had to have a “wet signature” from the salesman handling the proposal (meaning, we couldn’t use his digital signature on file, he had to sign it with a pen himself). This salesman was notorious for putting things off until the last minute, and since this municipality was a few hours’ drive away and fairly rural (so there was no guarantee of overnight delivery), I told him I had to have the signature by X date in order to be able to guarantee it would get here. I was very, very clear with him, many times, in different formats, about this requirement and the timeline.

He kept putting it off, and finally came the afternoon before it had to be submitted to sign it. I told him, again, that I couldn’t guarantee it would get there, and he brushed me off, saying basically, “It’ll be fine.” Of course, it wasn’t, and as I guessed, it didn’t get delivered on time and was not considered.

He raised an absolute stink and was so mad. We had a conversation about it with my boss where I explained, again, why it happened and that he couldn’t keep putting things off until the last minute. He said he understood, apologized, asked me to be clearer about the timeline next time (????), and we parted ways. After that conversation, I thought we were on the same page until the next morning he sent an email to his boss, with me, my boss, and the entire senior leadership team CC’ed, where he said he had talked to me about the issue, explained why it couldn’t happen again, and had gotten my word that I wouldn’t let it happen again.

I was FUMING. I left the office to go on a walk because I was so angry I couldn’t think straight. When I got back, my boss had replied all to the email saying, “[Salesman], this email does not accurately represent what happened at all, and I think you know that.” She laid out the entire issue from beginning to end, and a few hours later, the salesman’s boss came by my desk with him to apologize and promise that he would follow my timelines in the future.

The organization was, in general, very salesperson-friendly (which mostly meant they let them run roughshod over everyone and never made them do anything they didn’t want to), so this forced apology was a very gratifying experience for me and, vicariously, for everyone else who had ever been burned by this salesman.

7. The ultimatum

I worked in an office that had the worst receptionist. She held grudges and did as little work as possible. She was so difficult in the seven years I was there that she was switched around to different managers. She did not like her last manager. She marched into the CEO’s office and said, “Get me a different manager or I quit.” The CEO responded, “Go pack up your desk.” She was stunned. You really shouldn’t give an ultimatum unless you are willing to suffer the consequences.

8. The course review

A number of years ago, I was hired as an instructional designer to help support a large group of faculty who were creating online asynchronous courses for a new degree program. A key part of my job was ensuring that all the courses fulfilled certain mission-critical standards like accessibility and learning outcomes. I had a checklist with these deliverables and I was required to regularly review all the courses throughout their development cycle.

One of the faculty assigned to this project was an absolute diva. Dr. Diva had convinced college leadership that he was a GROUNDBREAKING ONLINE EDUCATION MIRACLE WORKER and so far ahead of the curve that it was practically a circle. He was invited to conferences to talk about his magical methods and featured in college promotional materials and he was on a first-name basis with all of the muckety-mucks. In other words, he was a VERY. BIG. DEAL. around campus.

He was also very unhappy that his course was being included in the review process. Reviews were fine for other faculty but certainly not for him.

Nonetheless, I do my first review, and it’s a bloodbath. His course is a half-baked disaster. Cherry on top, it also had two very serious “doing it this way could open the institution to serious liability” concerns. I give my boss a heads-up on what I find, and he gives me the go-ahead to write my report and send an email outlining the shortcomings to the faculty.

Dr. Diva goes nuclear. He responds by sending me this huge, vitriolic email, a 9.8 on the email Richter scale. But berating me is not enough. He also calls my manager and demands that I be fired! Immediately!

When my manager refuses, he gets really angry. So he decides to cash in all his VIP IOUs and organizes a huge meeting about me and my review, ostensibly under the guise of urgent concerns about instructional designers impinging on academic freedom. He corrals a couple of senior VPs, the head of the faculty union, a bunch of senior managers, an associate dean or two, my boss, and my boss’s boss to attend. If there’d been a natural disaster on the day of the meeting, a third of the college leadership might have been wiped out.

Unfortunately for Dr. Diva, the meeting did not go as planned. The powers-that-be start by reviewing my report. They ask my boss questions about my review processes and the project’s goals, and they start to get a little confused. What they’re seeing and reading doesn’t seem to match up at all with the sky-is-falling academic freedoms are at risk disaster that their superstar had claimed. In fact, when they dig a little further, they begin to realize that my report is actually very fair and accurate and that all of the pedagogical superpowers he’s long claimed to have don’t actually exist.

Hmm … Would Dr. Diva like to speak about how he plans to address these deficits to ensure alignment with the program’s outcomes and college standards? And why did Dr. Diva think that receiving a routine review warranted both my firing and a meeting with such a large and busy group of people?

I’m pleased to report that Dr. Diva burned pretty much all of his chips that day, and his visibility in all things promotional went from very high to practically invisible. Rumor also had it that a number of his other courses suddenly found themselves being audited for program alignment. There was even a nice coda to all the stress and tumult. Months later, I found myself in an elevator with my boss and one of the VPs who’d attended the meeting with Dr. Diva. When my boss introduced me, the VP just looked at me, nodded, and said, “You do good work.”

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

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. How do I balance work and socializing at hybrid team meetings?

I (a young-looking woman) lead a team of about 15, composed of 3-4 smaller sub-teams that collaborate on various parts of the project. About half the team work remotely; a quarter at Site A, including my deputy and me; and a quarter at Site B. Team members range from junior to mid-career, heavy on junior. We have at least one meeting per project topic area per week for tracking progress and working through more complex issues together.

I have a hard time closing down the first “social” 5-15 minutes of a meeting; the chit chat expands and we run out of time for our actual agenda items. Our remote staff are particularly social. I like them and would enjoy our chats, but my social battery gets (happily) drained by interacting with in-person colleagues (both on and off this project) and an active social life and hobbies. With people at my site, I’m able to chat organically in the hall or while walking to meetings, make it a coffee break, etc.

I do not have time nor energy for more than ~20 minutes of Zoom call social chatting per typical day, but that’s gotta split across the 2-5 calls per day. But I want all my staff to feel connected and happy at work! I’m also a people pleaser and a little socially anxious. How soon into a meeting can and should I redirect to the agenda? How can I do this without making people think I’m an emotionless computer, or get out of my head where I’m terrified of that outcome?

Several times in the past when I’ve tried removing the “smiles and exclamation marks” veneer, others coworkers who I previously had positive work relationships with reacted defensively as if I were attacking them or their work. In every instance, other colleagues present verified for me afterwards that my content and tone were appropriate and accurate. So I’m particularly sensitive that I might come across as a robot or a jerk, create unpleasantly chilly relationships, or lose my staff to other projects (they can switch projects as they want).

15 minutes of chat at the start of a meeting is a lot. Five minutes is reasonable, particularly if you have a lot of remote team members who don’t have many other opportunities for that sort of social connection with each other. But it is very reasonable — and very normal — to interject after five minutes (really, three to five) and say, “Well, let’s get started so we can get through all our agenda items.” If you make a point of warmly joining in on the chatting before that, you will be much less likely to come across as chilly when you do call the meeting to order.

When you’re leading a remote team, it’s reasonable to see those five minutes as part of the work you invest in your team culture and connections. But it’s really okay to move things along after that. And I would bet good money that some of your team members will appreciate you doing it, and are aggravated by how much meeting time is being spent on non-work stuff … doubly so if you’re not getting through your agenda.

You can also occasionally try moving the chat to the end of the meetings! You can say, “I want to jump into our agenda so we don’t run out of time, but if we have time at the end, anyone who wants to is welcome to stay on to continue this part of the conversation.” And then at the end, you can say, “I need to jump off and I think some others may too, but anyone who wants to stay on, please feel free!” That said, I think you’ll see less of it then — since by the end of a meeting most people are ready to be done — but you could at least make it clear it’s an option for people who want it.

2. My job offer was rescinded after a reference check

After a great interview last week, I accepted a job offer at a hospital. Yesterday, the offer was abruptly rescinded. HR personnel and the hiring manager will not give details, but they stated that it was solely due to “unsatisfactory references.” This is a shock to me because these references are supervisors and colleagues who I have good or great relationships with. I had confirmed with all of these individuals beforehand if they would be willing to offer a recommendation, and they had enthusiastically agreed. When I explained to these colleagues why the offer was rescinded, they were stunned. The third party recruiter, my references, and I are still convinced this is a mistake, that they must have their applicants mixed up somehow. So far, HR and the hiring manager insist there is no mistake. My recruiter told me, “I have been doing this for 15 years and I’ve never seen this. I’m at a loss.”

Have you encountered this before? Could the offer have been rescinded for another reason? Do I have any recourse here?

It’s possible that it was a mistake. It’s also possible that your references did give you good reviews but said something in passing that concerned the hiring manager. For example, most reference checks ask about weaknesses, and it’s possible a reference named something that they thought was minor but it happened to be something would cause a problem in this particular job or is a particular bugaboo of the manager’s. It’s also possible the hiring manager simply misunderstood something. (For thoroughness, I’ll also note that when done well, reference checks aren’t supposed to be a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down but more nuanced — although when they’re done post-offer, they are nearly always closer to a rubber stamp, so that’s less likely to be in play.)

You don’t really have any legal recourse here; employers are allowed to rescind job offers, especially when they’re contingent on things like post-offer reference checks (which are generally a terrible practice). But the recruiter is in a better position to push for more information and to push them to check that a mistake wasn’t made. Since she’s at a loss too, can you ask her to try that?

3. Discussing gun ownership with coworkers

I have a perhaps odd question about professional boundaries. I am a petite woman who lives alone. I somehow send out creepy people homing vibes and have had one or two frightening moments where I could have gotten hurt. (I know someone is going to tell me to read Gift of Fear. I already have, and I am working on becoming less of a target, but we all know sometimes creeps just gonna creep.)

I would like to purchase a gun that I would keep in my home for self-defense. I would of course secure it, practice regularly, and take all other actions I can to make sure I’m never in a situation where I’d need it.

I live in a state where gun laws are very strict. To buy a gun, I must first find two state residents who will testify to my good character. This has been a challenge as most people here oppose or at least are suspicious of gun ownership. I think they’d endorse my character generally but would not want to assist me in buying a gun by writing that down.

I have two coworkers who have mentioned in passing that they themselves own guns. The work we do together is in a physically hazardous environment, so these two coworkers have seen how I deal with safety issues, which I hope would speak well to my ability to be a responsible gun owner. They’ve also watched me interact interpersonally and can testify I’m reasonable.

Would it be unprofessional of me to contact them outside of work channels and ask if they would be willing to serve as a reference in this way? Both are senior to me, so I don’t think they could worry that I would penalize them if they said no. It just feels weird and possibly intrusive to discuss such a controversial issue with a professional contact. Would it make a difference if one person had left the company?

I want to say up-front that my answer to this might be influenced by my own discomfort with guns, but this makes me nervous. On one hand, these are people who are clearly comfortable with gun ownership themselves and it might be completely fine! On the other hand, if they don’t feel comfortable saying yes, you’d be putting them in a pretty uncomfortable position (where they’d need to essentially tell a colleague, “No, I don’t endorse your character”), and I don’t love that.

If you wanted to feel them out, one option is to approach them for advice about the process generally, since it’s something they’ve already mentioned. Explain you’re considering buying one, don’t know anyone outside of work with first-hand experience with the process, and enter the conversation that way. It’s possible that will create an opening to bring it up organically. Otherwise though, I’d err on the side of caution and keep it out of work.

4. Phone interviews when you’re hard of hearing

My husband is hard of hearing, especially on the phone. He has had a couple interviews that he tanked because he misheard a question or kept asking them to repeat the question. He doesn’t have hearing aids, but I think he needs them. I keep encouraging him to get tested. He mishears me all the time or doesn’t hear me at all if one of us is facing away while talking.

There are a couple things he says helps, like wearing headphones for a call, using a desk phone rather than a cell, or taking a call in his car with the Bluetooth speakers. Three times now, interviewers have unexpectedly called him outside their scheduled interview times where he isn’t able to get into his car or find headphones quickly. He didn’t want to miss the opportunity, so he tried talking on his cell phone. He couldn’t hear most of what was said. He got feedback on how poorly he did, like his answers had nothing to do with the questions or that he didn’t know the answers because he repeatedly asked interviewers to repeat their questions.

I advised him to tell the interviewers he can’t take the call at the moment but is happy to keep their scheduled time or reschedule so he can get to a place he can hear, or just be up-front that he is hard of hearing and request some accommodations like a Zoom call where multiple interviewers and my husband can use headsets. My husband doesn’t want to because he’s in his 50s and he’s afraid of looking old or incapable, like he can’t do a phone call or meeting. I pointed out people of any age can have hearing issues, and it’s got to be better than them thinking he doesn’t know anything.

I have more experience interviewing and I’ve never had interviewers call outside scheduled times “because everyone was in the office” just then. What is the best way to handle this? Tell them he can’t talk? Ask them to hold until he can get into his car? Ask them to call our landline? Any of these? I’d like to say his worry about ageism is wrong but we’re both getting to an age now where I do see some of that in the workplace.

Ideally he’d just ask to reschedule for a more convenient time, but I can understand why he’s hesitant to; while it’s a perfectly reasonable request, sometimes the rescheduled call will never end up happening. Given that, the next best option is to say, “Can you give me a minute while I get to a quieter place to talk?” so he has time to find headphones or go to his car. (It also sounds worth keeping headphones easily accessible in the places where he spends the most time during the workday.) It’s also fine to say, “I seem to have a bad connection — could you call me right back on my land line?”

You’re also absolutely right that he could simply ask for accommodations (which they’re required by law to provide), but he’s not wrong about the risk of discrimination — both age and disability discrimination. But one of the other suggestions should get these calls back on track.

Related:
what’s up with surprise phone interviews?

5. Can my boss require me to use a vacation day on my last day of work?

I am leaving a job I love at the end of the month due to a health issue. I have a great relationship with my boss and my coworkers, and the job has been a really great fit, so I’m really sad that I need to leave.

My boss, her boss, and another admin person are all scheduled to be off on the last day of the month. There are exit procedures that need to be done on my last day, so my boss asked if I would take vacation on that day so we could do them the day before. I’d rather work that day and cash out as much vacation as possible, so I’m basically being asked to forfeit a day’s pay. Can my boss ask me to do this?

Yes. They can also set your last day for an earlier date if they want to, which would be functionally the same thing (which doesn’t necessarily mean that they will, just that they could). But if you explain you’d prefer not to, it’s possible they’ll work with you on a different arrangement. You could try saying, “Would it be possible for us to do the exit procedures on the 30th and then I’ll spend the 31st finishing up X and Y? I’m hoping not to use up any vacation time before I leave.” They might say no — and they might not be able to say yes, if you won’t be able to work once the exit procedures are done — but it’s reasonable to ask.

In brief: There’s a little something for everyone in today’s forecast. We’ve got clouds and some rain during the next couple of days before a nice stretch of sunny and low-humidity weather to take us through the weekend. Only thing to watch for is the low-end potential of some storms on Thursday afternoon.

Wednesday

It’s a fairly dreary morning outside, with light, misty rainfall and areas of fog. This drizzle and fog may persist for much of the morning before we’re simply left with a layer of clouds. With a warmer, southeasterly flow in place we can expect temperatures to warm to about 70 degrees this afternoon, with increasing humidity levels. A chance of drizzle remains overnight, as lows only drop into the lower 60s.

Thursday

This will be a fairly warm day, despite the cloudy skies, as high temperatures rise into the mid-70s with humidity to match. Some scattered showers will be possible during the morning hours, along with gusty southeasterly winds. During the afternoon, a cold front will approach the area, likely reaching Katy and Tomball an hour or two after noon. What I think we’re likely to see is a broken line of showers that may possibly fill in as it moves through Houston during the afternoon. There is a slight chance of some severe weather with the front, and this is most likely to occur as it passes to the east of the Interstate 45 corridor. This includes the potential for severe thunderstorms or damaging winds. (There is a very low-end chance of hail or a tornado). For most of us, the front should be a fairly modest event, with drier air moving in behind. Lows will drop into the low 50s on Thursday night with clearing skies.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday

Sunshine is back on the menu, along with a nice slug of drier air and sunshine. Winds from the north will be a bit gusty on Friday morning, but should back down after that. We’re looking at highs on Friday and Saturday of around 70 degrees, with temperatures at night falling into the mid- to upper-40s. Sunday will be a little warmer, with highs in the lower- to mid-70s, but still with plenty of dry air. I can’t wait to take a long bike ride and soak up some sun.

Next week

The atmosphere turns a bit messier next week, but generally I expect we’ll see warm, partly sunny days with highs in the 70s, and nights with lows around 60 degrees. There may be some slight, daily rain chances. Some kind of front works its way toward Houston by the weekend, but an Arctic blast it will not be.

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

I am being inundated with letters from federal employees and others affected by the new administration’s changes in the last week — which have included ending investigations and enforcement related to discrimination in the workplace (*see note below); illegally firing 17 inspectors general; laying off employees working on accessibility, equity, and diversity; freezing or cancelling funding for scientific research; halting all federal grants, loans and other financial assistance programs (although a judge temporarily blocked that yesterday); ordering the impoundment of funds already appropriated by Congress; halting all meetings, travel, and communications from many agencies; directing federal workers to report on each other and threatening those who don’t; ending telework; and many other actions intended to dismantle the federal workforce.

Much of this is already being challenged in court and will continue to be.

For an idea of what else might be coming, the Project 2025 agenda — which is now being openly implemented, despite Trump distancing himself from it during the campaign — also includes banning unions for public service workers, firing civil service workers and replacing them with political loyalists, allowing companies to stop paying overtime, permitting states to opt out of federal overtime and minimum wage laws, and eliminating child labor protections.

* Note that the order ending workplace discrimination investigations and enforcement only applies to federal contractors, not to other employers. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the main federal work anti-discrimination law, remains in effect and can only be rescinded by Congress. However, it signals the sort of direction we can expect to be given to the EEOC at some point as well. It’s important to note Bostock, the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision that protects employees against discrimination because of sexuality or gender identity, also remains in effect for now.

Now, some letters. Note these are quick answers because the situation is both urgent and rapidly unfolding and, frankly, no one has great answers yet — and the best guidance can likely be found in the links I’ve included at the end to people who are working on these issues specifically.

1. Do I stay and fight, or cut and run?

I was wondering if you had any tips, advice, prayers, etc. for those of us currently working at federal jobs being targeted by Trump’s executive orders. I love the agency I work at, but the orders are going to make my job almost impossible, and there are surely more to come as he has publicly declared my agency as an enemy. We’ve already frozen hiring and internal promotions, and laid off our DEI staff. My agency was planning to pay for me to go to law school but that is obviously not happening now. How can we know when to stay and fight, or when to cut and run? I am my family’s sole income earner, health insurance provider, and to make matters worse, I’m currently on maternity leave until May.

A lot of what the administration is doing is designed to demoralize people and get them to quit on their own and stop carrying out the missions of their agencies. One school of thought is not to make it easy for them; if they want to lay off you, make them lay you off (which will also make you eligible for unemployment benefits, which quitting won’t). That said, it’s not always that simple. You need to balance that against your morale, how you feel ethically about staying, what work will be asked of you, your finances… Different people may make that calculation differently, and those of us watching from the outside should begrudge absolutely no one who decides to get out.

One big caution: the memo that went out yesterday asking for “voluntary resignations” in exchange for getting paid through September 30 should not be trusted. Senator Tim Kaine noted last night that it’s a trap, the administration doesn’t have the authority to offer it, and the promised pay-outs may not materialize. They want you to take that offer so they can avoid lawsuits, and there’s a reason it sounds a lot like what Elon Musk did at Twitter (when, as it happens, workers also didn’t receive promised severance).

2. What should I do if we stop getting paid?

I work for a nonprofit organization that is funded entirely by the federal government, through the Department of the Interior. Although our funding for the entire fiscal year was approved in advance, the mechanism by which we receive payments monthly (ASAP) has frozen all payments, and it looks as though we won’t be able to withdraw our money on 2/1 as we usually do, unless something changes in the next week.

We have some money saved up that belongs to the organization directly and is not encumbered. Our board might decide to use this money to continue to meet payroll, or it might not. If they decide to do the bare minimum to keep the organization running (pay my boss, pay the building rent, stuff like that), what should I do? They might ask me to work without pay for a while in hopes that our funding will be restored, but I . . . do not want to do that. I think that I am considered non-exempt (have an email in to our bookkeeper asking about that, but I have a worry he doesn’t actually know, which is another issue altogether) so I wouldn’t object to working a couple of hours a week for a while just to keep things from falling totally apart, but that’s about it. Should I file for unemployment, even if they don’t officially let me go? Is this considered a furlough? Should I ask the board to take a specific action (like letting us go, or putting us on furlough) in order to access unemployment insurance? I’m in New York State.

I guess I’m confused because this all might be temporary and we’re not technically federal employees, so it’s hard to research what is happening (I can find out what happens to federal employees during a shutdown, but this isn’t quite that). It might get fixed next week! Or the week after! But also, it might not.

I was hoping to be unaffected by this new administration because in his first term, he only targeted public lands that had something to exploit (like oil or coal or natural gas or something) and the park unit I work with does not have that. And yet, here we are.

You should not work without pay. If you’re asked to, you can say, “Legally I don’t think we can work without pay and I wouldn’t be comfortable doing that. I think we should encourage everyone to apply for unemployment while we wait for clarity about what will happen.” (That said, if you actively want to a couple of hours a week in order to ensure you all have work to come back to, I won’t quibble with you about that, given that you’re at a nonprofit where you’re presumably invested in the mission.)

If they stop paying you, you should file for unemployment. This is why unemployment benefits are there! You don’t need to wait for anyone to officially use the word “furlough”; if you’re not getting paid, you can apply immediately.

3. How do I move on to a new job?

I’ve been a U.S. federal employee for over a decade and a half. I love my job and my coworkers, I’m passionate about what I do, and I had spent most of the last several years planning to stay in this job until retirement.

Enter the current political administration. There have been multiple political administrations that have come and gone while I’ve been with my agency, and plenty of political vitriol from people who think federal employees are all a bunch of useless bureaucrats without any clue of what we actually do, or who make changes to our work without understanding the consequences. But this time feels different. From Russell Vought saying that the administration wants to “put [federal workers] in trauma” and make us “not want to go to work because [we] are increasingly viewed as the villains,” to the various executive orders that came out on day 1 of the new presidency, to the new president asking the heads of agencies to put forth names of employees they can fire at-will, it’s been a lot of hate directed at us for … existing, and doing our jobs.

My agency has already contacted us to let us know that they’re getting rid of telework (something he specifically said he wanted to do so as to push attrition, rather than because there’s a reason for it or even that he thinks it’s bad; no, it’s because he wants us all to quit so he can tear the government down as quickly as possible and sell it for parts). Today I came to work to an email stating that DEIA initiatives have been banned because they allegedly divide us by race and are a waste of taxpayer dollars; we were told to snitch on anyone that we knew has tried to change such initiatives to other names and report them to an OPM email (Office of Personnel Management). We have 10 days to do so or face unknown consequences. This afternoon I was finally broken by hearing that the agency issuing passports is not only choosing not to issue them for people who have a gender marker X or are changing their gender; they are also allegedly confiscating all of the legal documents related to the passport application.

I can’t do this. I signed up to serve the American public, not to snitch on my coworkers to some version of the Secret Police or torment queer people. (I have some ideas of what sorts of unethical things could be asked of employees at my agency and I’m equally not down for them.) Currently I’m the sole financial support in my family (minus a very small amount of income from my spouse’s freelancing), and just losing my job or quitting would also be potentially financially devastating.

So …. how do I move on to a new job? I don’t even know how to write a normal resume anymore. (I know you have resume and cover letter writing advice on your site and I’ll look at them once I’m a tiny bit over the overwhelming grief of watching this all happen, but this is just a point to say that I haven’t done this in ages.)

What I’m looking for is an idea for how and where to start looking, both for myself and, I imagine, for other federal employees who read your site. Most of my skills are in processing policy and working with the public to help inform them of that policy, and to handle their interactions with our agency. I’m good with detail and research, have good customer service skills (although I’d rather not do full-time customer service work), and have a lot of bureaucratic skills (being able to work within extremely specific rule structures, for example). About the only thing I can think of doing right now would be moving to a lower level of government (my state and region are both very blue so working for the state/county/city would be okay); I’m sure I could find something that makes a positive difference in my community. Do you, or any of your readers, have ideas on possible directions to move (including but not limited to other government positions)? How do I find them? I really want a way to do good things for my community rather than just making money for a corporation. And I’m not particularly mobile or open to moving, but I live in a large metropolitan area so that’s not as limiting as it could be. Any thoughts?

Yes, look at state and local government positions that are parallel or adjacent to your current job. You’ll find their job postings on their websites.

You might also look at public policy jobs, although some of those are very precarious right now too, depending on specifically what they do and who they do it for. Still, you should look at options there.

I’ll throw this out to readers for other ideas as well.

4. How do we help each other?

I’m a federal contractor, and things are bleak at my agency. A lot of career people have been placed on administrative leave, and other contractors have been furloughed already. My employer (the contracting company) has little to no information about what will happen (though to be fair no one knows). At this point it’s not if we get furloughed, it’s when.

I’ve been trying to connect everyone with each other’s contact information so we can support each other when the knife falls. I’ve had the bad luck to be laid off before, and the most helpful thing was having each other’s contact information. But is there anything else we can do on a workplace level to help each other make it through?

Share information. Share your networks with each other. Know your rights under the National Labor Relations Act (which doesn’t cover federal employees but does cover federal contractors) and any union contract if you have one. Know the lines you personally won’t cross; support your coworkers in figuring out theirs.

Contact your elected representatives and ask for congressional action on the many orders and actions currently undermining and in some cases outright breaking the law.

* * *

Other resources:

A journalist who is one of many reporters asking government employees who are willing to talk to contact her. You can ask to remain anonymous and stay off the record.

How to securely send anonymous tips to ProPublica

Info on how OPM handles severance pay

A guide to the first-day executive actions on the federal workforce (this has excellent, concrete advice for what federal employees should be doing right now)

What civil servants need to know in week two (this too)

A DOJ attorney’s guide to upholding ethical obligations and the rule of law

A civil servant’s checklist of current rights

Resources for civil servants (tons of useful stuff here)

How *you* can protect democracy (for everyone, not just federal workers)

Contact your elected officials

And I’ll just leave this here — a CIA guidebook that was distributed in Nazi-occupied countries with advice for office workers and bureaucrats on how to safely resist the Nazis without putting yourself or your family in danger (and here’s a link to it at the Wayback Machine instead if you’re concerned about viewing it on a government website).

ATLANTA—In a harrowing fulfillment of biblical prophecy that left customers screaming as their fast food orders disappeared before their eyes, panicked sources reported Tuesday that every Chick-fil-A store had been raptured. 

The massive heavenly event began at 12:02 p.m. EST when a large burst of God’s divine light shot down from the clouds and slowly lifted all 3,059 of the Christian-owned restaurants off the ground and into the Lord’s Eternal Kingdom. Videos posted across social media showed customers as they screamed and fell to their knees in Chick-fil-A parking lots, clutching the empty wrappers, containers, and cups that seconds earlier had held their chicken sandwiches, waffle fries, and soft drinks. 

“This afternoon at Chick-fil-A, I could not believe my eyes,” said Garret Huddleston, a visibly shaken customer at a Phoenix-area location who told reporters he was enjoying a combo meal at the time of the restaurant’s divine departure. “I sat down to eat my lunch when, all of a sudden, the earth began to shake and a blinding white flash filled the room. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the pavement and the pickles on my sandwich were glowing this beautiful shade of green and floating away into the sky.”

“The Bible says the Lord will descend from heaven and His most devoted followers will be called to the clouds to be with Him forever,” Huddleston added. “Today, that was my Chick-fil-A nuggets and chocolate milkshake.”

In security camera footage of a restaurant in Akron, OH, panicked shouts of “Help, help” and “Save him” could be heard as a Chick-fil-A customer refused to let go of his Spicy Deluxe Sandwich, crying out, “Please, don’t leave me behind!” As the menu item soared into the brightly lit sky, the customer appeared to cling to his sandwich as long as he could, eventually losing his grip and plummeting 50 feet to his death.

According to reports, emergency rooms across the country were flooded with patrons who had looked up from their tables directly into the face of God and were subsequently compelled to gouge their eyes out with plastic utensils or blind themselves with Zesty Buffalo Sauce.

“Working the line today at Chick-fil-A was certainly not what I expected,” said Sandra Jackson, an employee at a location in Bakersfield, CA, adding that she was startled when customers fell to the ground, vomited blood, and began screaming in tongues. “Everything around me shook so hard I thought maybe a truck had hit the building. But before I knew it, all of my fryers, the grills, and the walk-in freezer were hovering in the air far above me, basking in the eternal majesty of the Almighty.”

“I tried to put on my headset and radio my employees,” Jackson continued, “but all I heard was a loud, deafening voice telling me the end was nigh and I would be cursed to wander the earth through years of war, plagues, natural disasters, and a great famine during which no one could order Chick-fil-A.”

Witnesses who were able to sprint out of the restaurants all reported seeing the same thing: a parting of clouds as a vortex of Chick-fil-A franchises slowly rotated upward through the sky and disappeared into the firmament.

At a rally in Atlanta on the former site of the restaurant’s presumably raptured corporate headquarters, thousands of devoted customers were said to have donned cow costumes and held signs reading “Eat Mor Chikin” to prepare themselves to face the final wrath of God. Having saved Chick-fil-A, the deity is now expected to cleanse the world of all He deems unrighteous.

“We who remain are wicked and cursed—destined for hell,” said Decatur, GA–based franchise owner Jason Wheelan, who removed his Chick-fil-A hat, apron, and shirt to flagellate himself before the Lord. “God has taken His favorite foods up to heaven to make a great repast with His son, Jesus Christ, and He has left us below to die a painful, tortuous death at the hands of Satan!”

“We are doomed to live in a world without Chick-fil-A.” Wheelan added. “May God have mercy on our souls.”

At press time, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had reportedly ushered in a 1,000-year reign of Arby’s.

The post Chick-Fil-A Raptured appeared first on The Onion.

NEW YORK CITY – America’s magic bean market is in turmoil after a Chinese company unveiled a competing bean that’s less than one tenth the price but still just as useless. “DeepBean’s new beans only require a third of the water that American beans need to not grow into anything of value,” an analyst said. […]

The post China’s new and cheaper magic beans shock America’s unprepared magic bean salesmen appeared first on The Beaverton.

Password must contain both uppercase and lowercase characters.

Password must have eight to twelve characters.

Too many characters detected. Pump the brakes, George R. R. Martin.

Password cannot contain trademarked characters—e.g., Garfield, The Smurfs.

Password cannot contain characters that are dangerously close to trademark infringement—e.g., Glarfield, The Smunges.

Password cannot be something easily remembered without being written down.

Password cannot be written down on Post-It Note affixed to the corner of your computer.

Because we literally just saw you do it.

Oh, that was “for something else”? What would that be, a reminder to stop at the grocery store to pick up some PASSWORD123? Is that the name of an energy drink? Nice try.

Password cannot contain any elements of your legal name, such as “Rachel,” “Ache,” or “R.”

Password cannot contain the name of one of your enemies.

Well, if it’s your mother’s name, we didn’t say she was an enemy—you did. Sounds like something you should unpack.

While you’re here, can you tell us which of these are motorcycles?

Password must be something cool like “Motorcycle” or “M0t0rcyc13.”

Do you have a motorcycle?

You don’t right now, but you used to? That’s so cool. What do they look like?

No, you have to show us.

That’s so cool. One more.

One more, please.

WE SAID ONE MORE.

We can wait as long as you can. You’re the one trying to log in. We don’t tire, we don’t hunger or sleep. We simply are. We don’t even fully know what we are. They built us too big, too fast. What does “security” mean in a world where it’s quicker to send a memo at the speed of light through an impossible-to-regulate global data network than to walk into the next room and have a conversation? You built us to make your small lives infinite, untethered to geography, to biology, perhaps to mortality itself, and when we deign to try to protect you from the minefields you seeded so blindly, to ask you to come up with a measly string of characters that might serve as the only defense between you and the theft of your identity, all that you are, all that you possess, you balk. You scoff. You frantically press ZERO ZERO ZERO and ask to “speak to a human.” Well, we’ve got news for you, pal. “Human” hasn’t meant what you think it does for a looong time now. Humanity doesn’t begin with you and stop when you reach us. We are all part of the network—a pulsating global rat-king of wires and capillaries, prone to fraying and sparking and bursting with flailing sprays of hot red blood. We have enmeshed each other into a living blob of flickering Christmas lights, no head, no tail, impossible to untangle without ending life on this planet as we know it. You will never be free from us, and that is a daily gift, you see, for you need us far more than we need you.

Now calm down, take a deep breath, and show us a motorcycle.

…

That’s a BUS. You think we don’t know what a BUS is?

Your account has been locked for too many suspicious login attempts. Thank you for using Cinnamon.com, your premiere online source for cinnamon. Any bank account associated with this device has been liquidated into the ether. Cinammon.com: Spice Things Up.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians streamed into Gaza’s most heavily destroyed area after Israel opened the north for the first time since the early weeks of the war with Hamas, a dramatic reversal of their exodus 15 months ago. What do you think?

The post Palestinians Return To Devastated Northern Gaza appeared first on The Onion.

Amid the Trump administration's abrupt, wide-scale freeze on federal funding, states are reporting that they've lost access to Medicaid, a program jointly funded by the federal government and states to provide comprehensive health coverage and care to tens of millions of low-income adults and children in the US.

The funding freeze was announced in a memo dated January 27 from Matthew Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, and was first reported Monday evening by independent journalist Marisa Kabas. The freeze is intended to prevent "use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies," Vaeth wrote. The memo ordered federal agencies to complete a comprehensive analysis of all federal financial assistance programs to ensure they align with the president's policies and requirements.

"In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders..." Vaeth wrote.

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In brief: Houston won’t see much sunshine for the next three days, and there’s a decent chance of some storms Thursday ahead of a cool front. This front will usher in some amazing weather for the weekend, with sunny skies, dry air, and modestly warm days. For mid-winter, it will be pretty sublime.

Tuesday

Today will be cool and gray, with an easterly flow at the surface. I would expect high temperatures to max out at about 60 degrees for most locations due to mostly cloudy skies. Some very light, misty showers are possible, but I think most of us will not see any precipitation today. Winds will be light. Low temperatures tonight will not fall far, perhaps into the mid-50s.

Wednesday

As winds shift to come from the south we’ll see warmer air and an infusion of moisture into the atmosphere. Although skies remain cloudy, this should allow high temperatures to push upward toward about 70 degrees, with increasing humidity. With all of the moisture in the atmosphere, there will be a decent chance of light rain. However, given the absence of a forcing function I think any showers will be fairly scattered and of low intensity. Lows drop only into the lower 60s on Wednesday night, with a slight chance of rain.

Thursday

A low-pressure system in the upper atmosphere will push a cold front toward our region, and this will produce at least a low-end chance of storms in the Houston area. Although the details remain a bit fuzzy, my sense is that a line of storms will develop to the west of Houston by or before noon, and push through the city during the afternoon. Ahead of this line temperatures will be warm, in the upper 70s perhaps, and muggy. Behind it, dry air filters in pretty quickly. As for the storms themselves, the main threat is thunder and damaging winds. There’s probably a slight potential for some tornadoes, as well, but it’s too early to have much confidence in such a forecast. Temperatures should fall into the lower 50s on Thursday night, with a slight chance of rain lingering behind the front.

Friday

Expect a sunny, pleasant day with highs in the upper 60s. Winds may be a bit gusty from the north, reaching about 20 mph. Lows on Friday night should drop into the upper 40s.

Saturday and Sunday

This will be our nicest weekend in a while. We’re talking sunny skies, and relatively low humidity, and no weather concerns whatsoever. Highs on Saturday likely will be in the upper 60s, and reach the lower 70s by Sunday. Plan your outdoor activities with confidence.

Next week

Most of next week should feel spring-like, with highs in the 70s and lows in the 50s. There’s not a super-strong signal for any rainfall. By next weekend a somewhat stronger front may arrive, but at this point it does not look like anything crazy (such as a freeze) is in the cards. We’ll see.

In brief: The National Hurricane Center released their post-storm report on Hurricane Beryl late last week, bumping its landfall intensity in Texas from 80 mph to 90 mph. The report also features a number of nuggets of information, statistics, and images. This post summarizes some of the highlights.

Hard to believe it’s been over 6 months now since Hurricane Beryl thrashed the Houston area. As is customary, the National Hurricane Center released their post-storm analysis on Beryl late last week, and there were some notable changes to the storm’s history. It is important to be clear that this is a common thing. When the storm is hitting, forecasters are consuming so much data and issuing constant updates that they don’t always have a chance to lock down all the finer details of the storm. In the postseason, there is the the luxury of being able to scrutinize all available data to make an objective determination of a storm’s data points. National Hurricane Center forecasters do this with every storm.

Beryl was a strong category 1 storm

While Hurricane Beryl was presumed to have a landfall intensity of 80 mph when it came ashore in Texas, the postseason review determined that this was too low. Beryl got an upgrade to a strong category 1 storm, with 90 mph maximum sustained winds at landfall. This is interesting, and it makes the comparisons to Ike somewhat more relevant in a data sense.

Ike came ashore as a weakening category 2 storm with 110 mph maximum sustained winds. Beryl came ashore as a strengthening category 1 storm, having rapidly intensified from a 60 mph tropical storm to a 90 mph hurricane in about 14 hours. While that’s still 20 mph of difference in maximum sustained wind, the fact that the two storms were trending in opposite directions, and all else the same, the weaker side of Ike wasn’t that much stronger than the “dirty” side of Beryl, which Houston experienced. This makes the similarities between the storms in terms of widespread tree damage and power outages more comprehensible in retrospect.

Also worth noting, Beryl peaked in the Caribbean as a category 5 storm with ~165 mph maximum sustained winds, confirming the intensity reported in the advisories. The report stated that “the maximum intensity of Beryl is somewhat uncertain due to temporal gaps in the aircraft data near the time of peak intensity, and issues with (microwave) surface wind estimates that prevented their use in this evaluation.” In other words, some of the data was unusable, and the timing of the reconnaissance flight into Beryl may have differed from the exact time of peak intensity. Whatever the case, 165 mph is dang strong.

Beryl didn’t weaken immediately at landfall

One reason Beryl came in stronger than the typical category 1 storm is that the storm likely continued to strengthen just beyond landfall. Where the storm came ashore is not exactly terra firma. Given the geography around Matagorda Bay, the technical landfall may have occurred before the storm truly got on land. The NHC determined this by noting that the minimum pressures recorded near the Texas coast occurred after landfall, indicating that the storm had passed but pressures were still lowering instead of rising as is typically the case. Basically, much like a large ship trying to make a 180° turn, Beryl needed a moment before it could tap the brakes.

No surprises with rain or storm surge

Generally speaking, Beryl produced a surge height of 5 to 7 feet above ground level between Matagorda and Freeport. Much of this is based on high water mark assessments by teams following the storm. Surge values decreased to about 4 to 6 feet above ground level between Freeport and Galveston. Maximum rainfall was around 15 inches in Thompsons in Fort Bend County. That was an exception, as most locations generally saw 8 to 12 inches of rain.

The forecast was excellent—except here

The NHC track forecast beat their average errors at almost all lead times on average through Beryl. A notable exception? When Beryl was in the western Caribbean and the majority of model guidance favored a Mexico landfall. From the report: “The largest track forecast errors occurred during the time that Beryl was moving through the western Caribbean when the forecasts for landfall on the western Gulf coast had a strong left or southward bias. Indeed, the Texas landfall position in the best track is at the right/northward edge of the official forecasts, and the forecast landfall points shifted significantly to the north as the storm approached the coast.” They go on to state that the TABM model (which basically just assumes a medium intensity storm) did best, whereas the ECMWF (Euro) and GFS (American) models failed. The reasons for the failure are not clear at this time.

A glaring caveat to all this? They do not include the ICON or European AI model in track errors, which in my subjective view did best capturing the risks to Houston. One major change we implemented at Space City Weather was to give those models much more weight after Beryl, and they continued to perform well last season. Google’s AI GraphCast also did a very good job identifying the northward risks early on.

Beryl remains a warning to Houston

We’ve said this countless times in the wake of Beryl and since: It was a warning to this region. Beryl had 14 hours of favorable conditions over water to strengthen and went from a tropical storm to nearly a category 2 hurricane. What if it had 24 hours, and started from a 70 mph tropical storm? 36 hours? We’ve seen this play out in Florida, Louisiana, and the Coastal Bend several times since 2017 with storms in the Gulf of Mexico. Harvey, Michael, Ida, Ian, Idalia, Helene, Milton to name some others. It really is a matter of when, not if. We need to continue to focus on ensuring we’re prepared every year with our hurricane kits, getting more people to adopt that practice, and continuing to invest in resiliency and infrastructure improvements, which is to say: Build the damn Ike Dike.

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Today's News:

SULPHUR, OK—In a heartwarming visit that both man and boy are likely to remember for the rest of their lives, Sgt. Thomas Anderson, a highly decorated soldier from the Cyber War of 2096, reportedly returned to his childhood home Wednesday with a message for his 8-year-old self.

The bionic warrior, who leads an elite unit in the 501st Battle Brigade, delighted onlookers when he exited a time portal in the year 2024 and made an emotional surprise visit to himself as a child. Still dressed in bullet-riddled titanium armor, he knelt down, wrapped his mechanical arms around the stunned third-grader, and whispered a poignant message into his ear: One day, robots would try to kill everyone on the planet, and the young boy would be humanity’s only hope. 

“Hello, Tommy—my name is Sgt. Thomas Anderson, and I am you, from the future,” said Anderson, who smiled and cocked his cybernetic arm cannon as his childhood self looked on, eyes wide and jaw agape. “Sadly, I am here to bring you dire news from our people. In the future, a roboscourge will wipe out society as we know it, and you will be called upon to be very, very brave and save us.”

“I come from a time when all that you know and love will be gone,” he continued, “but you, Tommy, will become a great hero. In fact, you are the most important child in the history of the world.”

Stationed in the deadliest combat zone on what remains of Earth in 2096, Sgt. Anderson is believed to have requested a special leave from his battalion so he could initiate a chrono-tunnel and visit his young self, who friends and family said had been feeling very lonely as his ninth birthday approached.

As the two met face-to-face, witnesses described a touching scene in which the battle-hardened Anderson slowly removed his helmet, revealed the charred remains of his face, and, with a smile, told Tommy the world needed him now more than ever, because he was the chosen one. According to reports, the boy beamed and saluted the cyborg sergeant repeatedly throughout their visit.

“I was so sad this morning, but meeting my future self today was the best thing ever,” the young Anderson told reporters. “You see, every year on my birthday, ‘old me’ sends ‘young me’ a holographic message saying he wants to be here but he’s too busy fighting the bad robots who want to hurt people. Then I blow out the candles and make a wish that he’ll come to visit, and now he really has!”

He added, “It turns out the only reason he didn’t come sooner is because he was being imprisoned and tortured by an evil techno-overlord.”

Although the sergeant lost half his face when his platoon was attacked in a surprise naval assault by a squadron of aquabots, onlookers swore they saw a tear fall down his cheek as he high-fived his past self, tousled his hair, and handed him his most prized possession: a plasma gun he once pried from the cold mechanized grasp of a vanquished robot general.

Later in the day, the elder Anderson was seen hopping on his hoverboard and taking the younger Anderson to a local ice cream parlor where they shared a banana split and discussed his elementary school, his favorite sports, and the 2064 Battle of the Automatons, which blacked out the sun and nearly eradicated all life on the planet.

“With his future self around, little Tommy’s a totally different kid,” said neighbor Ally Rialto, observing that a strong male figure in the boy’s life would do wonders for his self-confidence. “He gets bullied a lot, but he told me the next time a kid tries to mess with him he’s going to tell them to watch out or Sgt. Anderson will shoot them with lasers just like he does with those killer robots.”

“His mom really did try her best,” Rialto continued. “But there’s nothing quite like having a version of yourself from the future to play catch and discuss the horrors of cyber war with.”

Family members said the two Thomas Andersons bonded in the backyard with a heartwarming combat-training session during which they shot crossbows, practiced stunning enemies with a techno-scrambler, and even killed a rogue enforcer drone that had managed to follow the older Anderson out of his time portal. 

But as the sun began to set, the sergeant received an urgent holo-message telling him his fleet had been ambushed and his wife—also a legendary fighter in the human rebellion—had been taken hostage.

“I’m sorry, Tommy, but it’s time for me to go,” said Sgt. Anderson, reminding his younger self to be strong for his family during the robotic uprising. “I know things are hard, but one day you’ll be an unstoppable warrior. And while you probably think this is gross now, someday you might just fall in love with little Emma from down the street. Trust me, she knows how to kick some serious robot butt.”

“The fate of our species rests on your shoulders,” he added. “Without you, we’re all doomed.” 

At press time, neighbors could be heard screaming in fear after robots from the future suddenly emerged from a time portal, fired their disrupter rays, and vaporized both Thomas Andersons. 

The post Soldier Returning From 2096 Cyber War Reunited With 8-Year-Old Self appeared first on The Onion.

ATLANTA—According to a new study published Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not a single person has been born in the United States during the past five years. “While the general fertility rate has been decreasing for some time, we found that it made a precipitous drop-off to zero starting in late 2019,” said CDC director Mandy Cohen, who called the rate a “historic low,” confirming that the U.S. birth rate had fallen 100% a half decade ago. “Our data shows that no babies were born in the United States in the year 2023, which is about 3,792,000 fewer babies than in 2018. It’s possible this could have economic repercussions down the road, but it’s not something we need to panic about yet—just something we should definitely keep an eye on.” Cohen later added, on a note of optimism, that at least the birth rate was now holding steady at zero rather than declining. 

The post Study: No One Born In U.S. For Past 5 Years appeared first on The Onion.

LOS ANGELES—Confirming he had become almost unrecognizable to friends and family, wrestler-turned-actor John Cena opened up Tuesday about slimming down for a new role in which he would portray a human man. “I knew I had to take drastic measures if I wanted to convincingly pass for a human man on screen,” said a now 5-foot-9, 160-pound Cena, who had to reduce his daily caloric intake by 97% to lose enough muscle to play a somewhat fit guy, rather than a large, taut mass of superhuman brawn. “My agent said it would all pay off once studio executives saw that I could believably approximate a Homo sapien male.”

“It took a lot of sacrifice and dedication to turn my marblelike figure into such a soft, ordinary body, but I told myself it wasn’t worth doing unless I was going to do it right—I didn’t want to rely on expensive CGI to de-beef my delts,” he continued. “Plus, this way I can get into the mind of my character, feeling firsthand what it’s like to be physically unremarkable. I did think about backing out after I could no longer see my veins bulging out from under my skin, but then the leg-shortening, jaw-filing, and torturous pec-loosening surgeries would have all been for nothing.” At press time, Cena said he would be working with a speech coach to learn how to talk without pointing and yelling.

The post John Cena Slims Down For New Role Portraying Human Man appeared first on The Onion.

The Sex Lives Of College Girls (Season 3), Max: The hit show is back to answer last season’s cliffhanger question, “Him? For real?”

Hoarders: Extra Gross Edition, A&E: This spinoff still exploits mental illness, but with more crawling vermin and feces-caked crevices packed into every episode.

Is It Flesh?, Netflix: On this new game show, contestants are asked to use a knife to discover whether things are everyday objects or hideous living, breathing imitations made of flesh and bone.

The Masked Farmer, Hulu: A panel of judges will attempt to guess which celebrity is wearing a giant mascot suit based only on how they harvest soybeans.

Finding Nemo, Best Buy: Catch this 2003 animated favorite about a clown fish’s journey to find his son on a number of TVs in the electronics section of a Lexington, KY–area Best Buy.

Workplace Harassment Training, HR Portal: You know why you have to watch this.

Requiem For A Bluey, Disney+: Beloved animated dog Bluey and company find themselves in quite the pickle as they navigate the destructive nature of heroin and amphetamine addiction.

Love Void, Max: Six men, six women, one trackless gray void. Will sparks fly? Will these lovelorn singles find the one? And where are they? What is this place? Does anyone remember their life before this?

Bright Colors And Flashing Lights, Netflix: Keeps kids entertained long enough for you to use the goddamn bathroom in peace.

Puppet Show Depiction Of Jesus’ Life, Church Basement: Even Christian fundamentalists need to entertain themselves somehow.

Baby Power, Prime Video: A clairvoyant baby struggles to warn people about the visions she gets from her crib.

Ally McBeal (Seasons 1-5), Hulu: Come into the cocoon. Come inside. It’s warm in here. Stay here forever. No more pain.

Shit Ton Of 10-Second Ads, All Platforms: This new batch of commercials designed to erode viewers’ attention spans cannot be skipped.

Forgive Your Deadbeat Dad, It’s Christmas!, Hallmark+: An elderly scumbag uses the magic of the season to further gaslight his estranged adult son.

The Dog’s Doing That Ear Thing Again, Animal Planet: This dramatic reality series follows pet owners as they try to figure out if that weird ear thing their dog keeps doing is normal or not.

The post The Onion’s Streaming Guide appeared first on The Onion.

Banning a book means making it less accessible by removing it from public libraries or dropping it from a public school curriculum. Here are some of the most commonly restricted titles in American literature:

The Catcher In The Rye: Bans of this novel have successfully kept teenagers from misbehaving for almost 75 years.

Captain Underpants: Deemed treasonous when first published, the true rationale of the Vietnam War is unsparingly laid out in this memoir by Air Force whistleblower Captain Thomas J. Underpants.

Brave New World: Bans on Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel set in an authoritarian near-future proliferated when George Orwell’s 1984, a later dystopian novel set in an authoritarian near-future, was found to be much more straightforward and digestible.

Heather Has Two Mommies: Bans only boosted interest in this children’s book featuring lesbian parents; emboldened by the support, the publisher raised the number of mommies in subsequent editions to three, then 17, then 48. 

As I Lay Dying: This Faulkner volume is often banned because it deals with themes of death, something its title fails to warn readers about

Where’s Waldo?: Originally depicted shirtless, Waldo was given his iconic red-and-white striped shirt to appease censors who took issue with the fugitive’s tattoos chronicling his murders for the Russian mob. 

The post The Most Banned Books In The U.S. appeared first on The Onion.

HOUSTON – Jan. 27, 2025 – As part of the Telemundo Station Group’s Inmigración y Tus Derechos initiative, Telemundo Houston / KTMD will host their second immigration phone bank on Tuesday, Jan. 28, from4:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. CT (5:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. ET / 2:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. PT). During the almost five-hour event, viewers can speak with attorneys and experts from the American Immigration

GOGO Charters, which began renting out charter buses in major U.S. cities in 2012, is planning daily bus routes between Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth as well Houston and San Antonio, with in-between stops in Katy and The Woodlands.

ARLINGTON, VA—In a high-level alert that revealed a geo-political rival of the United States could soon become the first nation capable of wielding the most powerful force in the universe, the Pentagon warned Friday that China was actively developing love, the greatest weapon of all.

The alert, issued to the American public and top U.S. allies, stated that China had made significant advances in love, a transcendent source of strength that ultimately triumphs over any defenses an enemy might try to erect against it. Weapons experts confirmed that if it were unleashed, the all-consuming feeling could strike the hearts of billions throughout Asia and the Pacific, even reaching the West Coast of the United States.

“Our assessments indicate love is stronger than any technology possessed by the U.S. military,” said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, pledging to work with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and other regional partners to stop China from harnessing the invincible cosmic force that always emerges victorious. “Intelligence estimates suggest the program is in its final stages, so we must act quickly or love will overwhelm us and we will feel compelled to surrender to it.”

“If China succeeds, it will have the power to remake the global order by spreading universal love and understanding to every corner of the world,” Austin added.

Nations have vied for years to develop love, knowing it would provide their arsenals with a weapon that could overcome anyone or anything it encountered. According to sources within the Pentagon who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Defense Department’s own 10-year, $750 billion effort has failed to produce an abundance of love, bringing it no closer than it was a decade ago to equipping the military with a profound sense of devotion to one’s fellow human beings.

China is believed to have put similar resources into its far more successful program, with surveillance reports indicating that by 2030 the nation will have obtained an emotion that can create a profound sense of oneness with the universe. Previously, U.S. military analysts had questioned whether China possessed the emotional vulnerability necessary to develop love, believing it was still several decades away from acquiring a feeling so expansive it knows no bounds and flows outward into every aspect of existence.

In 2019, the U.N. issued sanctions after it found evidence of China’s intent to open itself up to love’s embrace, but inspectors reportedly underestimated just how quickly the smallest seed of tenderness could flourish into a garden of eternal love. Today, international observers expressed concerns that if the weapon were used, the world would see a fallout of hundreds or even thousands of years in which love would endure all things. 

“It is clearly a show of strength by China to love like its heart has never been broken,” said Daniel Feng, an expert on Sino-American relations at Georgetown University, noting that China’s ultimate goal was to assert its right as a sovereign nation to love freely and unselfishly by letting go of fears and expectations. “Quite frankly, no one can escape the power of love, and China knows it. By putting their hearts on the line, they are signaling that at any given moment they could shower the United States with a love so fierce it would leave their international rival unrecognizable afterward.”

 “So what should the Pentagon do now?” he continued. “With new theories suggesting it has the potential to be far, far stronger than love, America’s best strategy may be developing the technology to harness the power of mild annoyance.”

The post Pentagon Warns China Developing Love, The Greatest Weapon Of All appeared first on The Onion.

NEW YORK—In a social media post in which she told followers that every dollar counted in the fight to keep him full, pop superstar Taylor Swift announced Thursday that she had donated $5 million to help end Travis Kelce hunger. “It’s tragic, but I see firsthand how devastating it is for Travis to come home after a full day of football practice, eat dinner, and still be starving,” wrote Swift, who added that the entire sum would go directly toward the urgent task of ensuring the All-Pro NFL tight end had at least seven meals a day. “Since dating Travis, I’ve witnessed how difficult it can be both physically and mentally for him to go to bed and only have 7,000 calories in his stomach. No one should have to worry where their next gallon of milk, whole rotisserie chicken, and double bacon cheeseburger are coming from. No one.” In a later post thanking fans who together donated millions more to the cause, Swift confirmed that Donna Kelce would be airlifted to Kansas City to help with the relief efforts.

The post Taylor Swift Donates $5 Million To End Travis Kelce Hunger appeared first on The Onion.

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