A friend sent along a weird story from my alma mater the other day. (Not the usual alma mater, which no longer exists, but my first alma mater, the Columbus Dispatch.) It’s about the spread of evangelical Christianity among the Ohio State football team. The top:

Like the Great Awakenings of years gone by, a religious revival is emanating from Ohio State’s campus.

The mouthpieces of revival aren’t buttoned-up pastors yelling about fire and brimstone. And they aren’t speaking under tents or at church pulpits.

They are Ohio State football players. Often, their platform is on the field and on social media. And it stays the same, even when they falter on the field, as they did in the College Football Playoff. Their message?

“JESUS WON.”

Ai-yi-yi. This is not a sports story. It’s not even really a religion story, or rather, it’s a religion story with quotes like this:

“It was the most surreal feeling. The second I hit the water and came back up, I felt weightless. Like the feeling of all the burdens on me that felt like they were physically weighing me down were taken away in that just outward profession of my faith,” he said.

And this:

“What has taken place in my life and the lives of other people on this team — and I know I’m here to talk about football — but it’s a true testament of the Lord that I serve.”

Is this journalism or a tent revival? I was encouraged to check out the byline’s short bio on the website, and learned the writer’s beat: “Kindness/Religion Reporter.” What’s more, “She is currently supported by the Center for HumanKindness at The Columbus Foundation.” Say what?

(I should mention, these fellowship-funded reporting jobs are pretty common, usually so that a small-but-poor news outlet can have a reporter with a dedicated beat like criminal justice, the environment, health care, etc. But I’ve never heard of one dedicated to…kindness.)

But to be sure, the Center for HumanKindness, one word, exists. Mission statement:

The Center for HumanKindness is on a mission to inspire acts of kindness and strengthen social connections in our community. Every kind act—big or small, seen or unseen—makes a positive difference for individuals and the broader community.

As nasty as I can be, I am often a very kind person. Please, thank you, big tipper, give a sandwich to the hobo, help a stranger who slips on the ice, all that. But my nasty side says I am sick of Be Kind bumper stickers, the dumb Day of Kindness social-media static, all of it. In Nance’s world, the Center for HumanKindness would be called the Don’t Be An Asshole Center.

Because all this Be Kind propaganda comes at a time when we are being absolutely manhandled by people for whom “unkind” is the mildest possible description. This doesn’t feel like a time to respond with kindness, but rather, with a right cross to the nose, a kick to the ribs and a HOW DO YOU FEEL NOOOOOW, STEPHEN MILLER. At some point, “be kind” starts to feel like wallpaper, like peace signs in the ’60s.

Oh well. At least the day got off to a good start:

That’s for Bob (not Greene), a swimmer who appreciates a fresh workout. And the country playlist was perfect for this morning. One of the second-hour guys ambled out from the locker room and said, “So this is why Charlie was singing ‘Jambalaya’ in the shower.”

Time to clean a bathroom and feel productive. My closet-cleaning is way behind schedule.

The other day I scrolled past this video on some social network. It’s from the NYPost, and if you don’t have the interest in clicking, it depicts Mr. and Mrs. Jeff Bezos partying in St. Barth’s. The cutline describes them as being at “celebrity hotspot” Nikki Beach, and sure enough, you can see them sitting in a booth as a howling DJ narrates a birthday parade of the usual crap — sparklers in a big bottle of something, presumably champagne, someone carrying a sign, etc. Mrs. B stands up on her seat and shakes her hips. Mr. B smiles broadly. What a good time they seem to be having.

The Bezoses were not alone in the Caribbean. There are apps that show the position of every vessel with a transponder, and apparently a bunch of billionaires and their yachts were spending New Year’s in St. Barth’s. So the Bezos were with their people. People who understand them, people who know their struggles, people who get them, because they’re the same.

And they spend their time at clubs where they stick sparklers into bottles of champagne. Honestly, I’d drown myself. Just go right over the rail into the warm Caribbean, hope an outgoing tide would carry me away.

I had my club years, don’t get me wrong. I remember yelling over the music, dancing, having fun. But — and this is key — it was over by my…27th birthday. I wasn’t 61 (as Bezos, aka Baldilocks, is) or 56 (as Lauren Sanchez, aka Beelzeboobs, is). Those two nicknames, which are perfect, are not mine, but I found them online and will use them forevermore.

Anyway, this observation dovetailed with something I read about the various photos included in the Epstein photo dump. Such ghastly rooms, where so much terrible stuff happened. No warmth, just weirdness. All that money and they can’t even hire an interior decorator?

How have we spent the last 50 years venerating the rich when they live like this? I ask you.

Onward. I swear, I keep clicking Unsubscribe on Semafor emails, but for some reason I keep getting it. In a recent issue, asking “what media leaders got wrong in 2025,” I read this, by Ryan Broderick:

This might be slightly premature to say, but I think the death of Charlie Kirk — and Trump World’s subsequent forced national observance of grief — is having the opposite effect of what I initially thought. If you had asked me in September what would happen, I would have said that Kirk’s murder was the American Reichstag fire, the moment the Trump administration and its great and powerful cyber army would finally conquer the information landscape and complete their authoritarian crackdown on free speech.

And a bit of that happened, sure, there was harassment, and doxxing, and people lost their jobs for insensitive posts about Kirk. But it didn’t last. Only a few months later, there is no bigger joke on the internet than Charlie Kirk. Every feed is full of Kirkified slop and AI brainrot mercilessly making fun of MAGA’s martyred influencer. The tail of history is long and these things always evolve, but, as it stands currently, Kirk is the Harambe of the 2020s and MAGA has never felt more cringe, old, and worst of all, boring.

Ain’t that the truth. And you know why? The widow Kirk. Everybody grieves differently, but when you’re taking the stage maybe a month after the assassination of your husband, wearing skin-tight leather pants, enough makeup to shame Tammy Faye and with pyrotechnics announcing your entrance, even true believers are going to be put off and perhaps ask, “Who are these freaks?”

Finally, in the ritual of closing the 2025 planners and starting the 2026 versions, I found the list of books I read last year. Nineteen, well under my goal of 25, but much of my fall was spent reading for the writing class I took, so: oh well.

That’s what fresh slates are for. Full speed ahead, and have a good weekend.

I woke up super-groggy today, not uncommon when the alarm goes off at 5 a.m. I didn’t have enough time before my workout class to hit Starbucks for a cappuccino with an extra shot, but I did have time to hit the McDonald’s drive-through. Small black coffee, please. It was 5:45 a.m.

Pulled around to the window, where I was asked for 96 cents. “Really?” I said. “That seems low. I’m sure it’s more than that.”

“Well, with the senior discount, that’s what it is,” the window lady said, prompting me to ask how she knew I was a senior, goddamnit. (I didn’t say the goddamnit.) “Do you have cameras back there at the menu board?”

“This early, small black coffee? I just figured,” she said, handing me back a nickel. So really, 95 cents.

This is my life now, I guess. Little encounters with McDonald’s employees.

The class was good, but insanely hot and muggy. The weather is supposed to break tomorrow. And this is the rest of my life, I guess: McDonald’s and the weather.

This blog, too. A story hooked me the other day with its headline.

The Website at the End of the Internet: Reddit is one of the last thriving islands of the old web. Can it survive AI?

The question remains to be answered. Also:

The World Wide Web from which Reddit grew, and for which Huffman expresses so much reverence, has been going through something akin to ecological collapse after being poisoned, then abandoned, by advertisers that have little use for independent websites anymore. At the same time, the rise of generative AI suggests a lot of people are just as happy — if not happier — getting life advice, news, and conversation from a robot that has read a bunch of sub-Reddits as they are chatting with internet strangers themselves.

It gets way more into the weeds of Reddit and the internet than I’m interested in, but the bottom line is the same thing you’ve no doubt read elsewhere, because it’s an old story: Humans are a disappearing feature of the internet, steadily being replaced by bots and AI garbage yammering at one another. If you spend any time at all online, you’ve surely noticed it. If you’ve been online as long as some of us have, well, you really know. It’s easy to remember the early years of everyone being connected; oh, you like this obscure artist or singer/songwriter or movie or hobby TOO? Let’s be friends! Send me an email! I’ll write you back!

No more.

On the other hand, I have become oddly fixated with some Reddit groups — or subreddits, I guess. The amount of time people have to waste online talking about the stupidest shit imaginable is almost awe-inspiring.

Anyway, here you are: Human-powered blather since 2001. Fool that I am.

I would generally have a little more bloggage for you, but the news these days has been so depressing, I feel a little overmatched by it. You know, of course, that Ghislaine Maxwell is cruising toward a commutation or pardon, right? Emil Bove, lying thug, cruising toward a late-term Trump appointment to SCOTUS. Israel is run by thugs, and also liars. Even the coming of pleasant weather will be prefaced by a storm. Earthquake in Russia, tsunamis in the Pacific — it’s just not a good-news kinda week.

But there’s this: David Von Drehle is quitting the WashPost. Here’s his last column. It’s short, elegant and good.

That’s what I got.

Well, this is sad news: Martin Cruz Smith died last week. One of my favorite authors, most notably for his series set in the Soviet Union (and later Russia, and later still, Ukraine), featuring his soulful, chain-smoking antihero, Investigator Arkady Renko.

His (gift link) obit tells the story of his breakthrough with “Gorky Park,” first in the series, set in Cold War Moscow and published in 1981, to great acclaim. An elegant and stylish writer, he managed to catch a wave that tracked the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and recent history of what came after; the second in the series, “Polar Star,” took place on a Soviet factory ship in the Bering Sea during the Perestroika/joint venture era. Then came “Red Square” (post-collapse), “Wolves Eat Dogs” (Chernobyl), “Havana Bay” (Cuba), “Stalin’s Ghost” (the swing back to the right), “Three Stations” (oligarchs), and four more. I read them all, but something changed around “Stalin’s Ghost,” which is when Smith announced his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, and the change he’d had to make in his process: As I recall, he would sit in a chair, compose sentences in his head and recite them to his wife, Emily, who would write them down. And I don’t know what that says about writing, and rewriting, but the books were different, first subtly, then noticeably, then (to my mind) disastrously so.

Gone was the stylish prose; the later books feel like he was using a ghost, and who knows, maybe he was. He made a lot of money off the early books, but money runs out, and maybe he needed some. Or maybe he just had to do them — writing is like that. But it was sad to see Renko reduced to such a thin ghost of what he’d once been. The last book in the series, “Hotel Ukraine,” was published just last week. I guess I’ll read it, because I’m an Arkady completist, but it’s gonna hurt, I know.

No one ever said death was pleasant. But we remember the good people. All crime/detective fiction follows a formula of sorts, and the great ones find new ways to calculate the formula. Smith did that, no small feat.

In other news at this hour, Hulk Hogan croaked, too. No great loss.

Also, Chuck Mangione. There’s a very strange party going on the bardo right now.

And now we head into the weekend, when it promises to be cooler. I’ll try to stop complaining about the weather. None of us live in Gaza, after all.

Have a good one, all.

Well, the cool front arrived as advertised, thank goddess. It was windy during morning swim, and I lost an earplug. I made a few halfhearted underwater canvasses of the crime scene, then figured it was gone for good. Finished my swim, showered, dressed and thought I’d walk the perimeter of the pool one more time before ordering another pair. The wind had pushed it right to the gutter, only one lane down.

Obviously, today is my lucky day.

Go ahead, laugh, but if we still had a swimming-supplies retail storefront nearby, I wouldn’t have even bothered looking for it. But in a time when we have to buy so much online, it seemed worth the extra effort, just to avoid shipping and handling. While some online shopping is undoubtedly efficient, I’m starting to crave the experience of entering a store and being pleasantly surprised by what I find there. I have a friend who does Instacart for her groceries exclusively, something I cannot imagine. You let someone else pick out your apples? Girl, are you crazy? Trusting someone else to buy my groceries is like trusting them to do my laundry. No way.

And with that mishmash of nothing in particular, let’s get to the news, which has continued the week’s trajectory of being ever more horrifying: Emil Bove (a man whose soul is worn on his face, if there ever was one) on greased skids to be a federal judge. A Justice Department recommending a one-day sentence for a cop convicted of firing wildly into Breonna Taylor’s Louisville apartment. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, marked for death. It’s just one fucking thing after another.

Late in the afternoon, I read that President Pudding-for-Brains is diagnosed with something called chronic venous insufficiency, and I was disappointed it wasn’t congestive heart failure. I’m not in a healthy frame of mind these days.

So I leave you with one excellent obituary, for Connie Francis, who left the mortal plane this week at 87. I’ve known two Connie superfans in my life. One was my old buddy Paul, who loved to go around singing “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” and other Connie hits. The other is a friend here, who can extemporize for an hour about her business sense, particularly her recordings of her hits in other languages, which of course sold well in those countries. She learned the lyrics phonetically, and discovered that yeah, the world was waiting to hear “Vacation” in Japanese. You have to admire a girl like that.

Also, this phrase is waiting for you low in the obit:

Like Mr. Darin, with whom she was romantically involved until her father chased him off with a gun when she was in her late teens,

Well, they were Newark Italians.

God, I need some good news, and no, I don’t mean something about a plucky puppy or warmhearted mail carrier. I mean I want to see something that gives me hope for the future of my country. Let’s hope the weekend brings something around.

While we’re on the subject of MAGA, MAHA and Whole Foods, I want to make a couple points:

Jakash is right in the comments from earlier: The 365 house brand at Whole Foods is really very good, and when I do go there, I tend to stock up on that stuff. It is not a store with no part to play in the marketplace other than to suck money out of your pocket.

Here’s the other thing, and I’m asking this with a pure heart. In the discussion over so-called seed oils, the argument against them — which is the argument against a lot of things MAHA finds fault with — is that they cause, or lead to, or aggravate “inflammation.” But what, exactly, is being inflamed? That part is never precisely explained, and if it is, it’s with sort of a hand-waving oh-you-know, indicating a place where inflammation is hard to quantify. I mean, if you get an infected cut, that’s easy to see. But inflammation affecting “gut health,” a big one in the MAHA canon, is not. I can pretty much eat everything and not suffer for it, which is, I know, enormous good luck. (I sometimes wish my stomach were more sensitive, and would maybe reject salt, grease and sugar, instead of gleefully adding it to my thighs, in case we need it in the coming winter.) Anyway, gut problems, absent inflammation, can mean anything from nausea to gross stuff further down the line.

So what do I need to know about inflammation? How can I tell if anything on the inside is inflamed?

In other news at this hour, I made a small decorating change yesterday, picking up a secondhand table that I used to replace the one on my side of the bed. It’s one of those newfangled ones with an integrated power strip, so I can accommodate chargers and my illuminated clock and lamps and all the stuff we want plugged in at our bedside, which wasn’t the case when the house was wired, 80 years ago.

The one I was replacing was a square, lidded basket from Ikea, and I hadn’t opened it in a while. Apparently I’d been using it to store books, similar to the piles on top. Two I hadn’t read:

FWIW, I didn’t need the Northrup book when I hit the Big M, because it was by and large a seamless transition. Again: Lucky me. Later, Northrup would go insane during Covid. And I’m not sure how Ron Jeremy found his way into the house. I’m sure it was a freebie from somewhere, but I never cracked it. You know what? I’m gonna read it, or at least read in it. If anything can distract me from the current crisis, it’s the Hedgehog.

But I also found some good books that I’d just tucked in there for one reason or another. One of my quirks is, I use ephemera for bookmarks. It feels good to open a novel I’d enjoyed years later and find a receipt from a restaurant where I read it over lunch. I opened an old Martin Cruz Smith hardcover and found? The mixing solution for the hair color I got on my last appointment in Fort Wayne; my stylist told me to give these hieroglyphics to my new stylist and she could figure it out. I looked at it for a moment, and? Reader, I threw it away. This constitutes personal growth, for me.

Finally, check out this weirdness, which I found via Roy. As ghastly as the content is, the comments would seem to indicate dozens of credulous Christians believe it is real. (Wait. It just occurred to me that the comments are fake, too.) I told someone the other day that I understand that perhaps someday, artificial intelligence will spot a tumor on a scan of mine, something that was missed by the exhausted and overworked radiologist, and that we may have to suffer through some misery to get there. Remember when your computer would freeze and you’d lose all your work, and now we have autosave? Yeah, like that. But just consider, at a time when the Trump administration is doubling down on fossil fuels, these AI party tricks consume insane amounts of energy, and data centers are being built all over to suck it up. When a rolling blackout hits your neighborhood in a heat wave, just consider: It was for this.

And with that? HAVE A NICE DAY, SUCKERS. I’m going to my high-school reunion at week’s end, and will likely be too jammed up to write anything more. Happy Independence Day. Maybe we can enjoy independence for a while longer.

I’ve read a lot about Alice Waters, the doyenne of California cuisine. I’d never discount her accomplishments, which are considerable. If you cook with any sort of adventure in your soul, if you can tell a shiitake mushroom from a morel, if you consider seasonality and sustainability when choosing produce and meat and fish, you have Alice Waters to thank, for leading a food revolution, starting in the 1970s and still continuing.

However. I also concede she’s a bit of a nut on this subject. Her Marie Antoinette attitudes about how poor people should spend their food dollars are daft and condescending, and I’m sorry, but I’m not forgoing leafy greens through a long Michigan winter, as she has suggested we do. (“There are so many turnips and potatoes to enjoy!”) But I don’t want to get into that now. I’m thinking of the passage in a particular story, in which the writer playfully asked her how she’d feel if she knew her daughter, then a teenager, was sneaking McDonald’s. He described Waters as being genuinely saddened and distressed by the very idea of her child consuming a Big Mac. That’s how awful McDonald’s is, or was. (Psst, Alice: It’s worse now.)

I know Waters is a committed lefty, but I can’t help but wonder what she’s thinking about the Washington crew these days. She and Croaky and Casey Means, his nominee for surgeon general, seem to have a lot in common. I thought of this on a dog walk after reading this excellent essay by Talia Lavin, about Means and her ideas about eating and health:

Casey Means, the Trump administration’s new nominee for Surgeon General of the United States, has a prescription for America. You can find it in her 2024 book, “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.” In Means’ vision, “Good Energy” is a holistic approach to health, one predicated on the idea that “everything is connected.” The text strikes a tone that mirrors Means’ own career path, from training to be an ENT surgeon to life as a wellness influencer whose Instagram, @drcaseyskitchen, boasts nearly a million followers: there’s a sprinkling of grounded research that cites reputable medical journals, and a blizzard of plausible-sounding nonsense. (Means dropped out of her surgical residency and is not currently a licensed doctor.) Either way, what she offers is a kind of earthly paradise, one in which “you can enjoy balanced weight, a pain-free body, healthy skin, and a stable mood… the natural state of fertility that is your birthright.”

But like many other visions of paradise, to attain Means’ state of Good Energy, you have to obey the rules. And there are a lot of them.

According to her dubious statistics, only 6.8% of Americans are “optimizing energy production in their cells,” which is the prerequisite for the aforementioned earthly Eden of the body. For the other 93.2 percent, Means lays out a checklist of all that you must do to become one of the corporal elite. The section of her book on “Food” includes a daunting 23 items, starting with “I currently use a food journal or food tracker consistently to monitor what foods and beverages I’m consuming” and continues with eating three cups of leafy greens a day, plus avoiding foods with “refined seed oils,” all pastries, all sweetened drinks, all white flour, all artificial sweeteners, and—for a bonus—having the ability to not eat for longer than four hours without feeling “excess hunger or cravings.” There are further sections on “Toxins” (don’t store your food in plastic containers or eat high-mercury fish or use plastic water bottles or eat anything with artificial food dyes) and “Meal Timing and Habits.” Altogether, the material on food dwarfs the rest of the (very long) checklist, which includes sleep and the mind-body connection.

What it all amounts to is that Means’ “bold vision for health” in America involves an incredibly stressful, highly involved method of examining absolutely everything that goes into your body. It entails researching whatever you may consider eating, and avoiding oral contraceptives, antibiotics, and over-the-counter pain medications like ibuprofen, plus plastic water bottles and unfiltered water.

As I read on, I realized what Means’ affliction is, about a paragraph before Lavin revealed the same conclusion: Orthorexia nervosa. As the National Institutes of Health defines it (for now; I’m sure this web page is marked for death), orthorexia is an eating disorder “perhaps best summarized as an obsession with healthy eating with associated restrictive behaviors.”

I first read about it when I was clipping health news for Big Pharma, and it’s funny how so many MAGA people have some form of it, from Jordan Peterson and his crackbrain carnivore diet (beef, salt, water – and nothing else) to the various Paleo/caveman/low-carb regimes practiced in the manosphere to the organic vegan menus followed by women like Means.

Lavin, who grew up in a strictly kosher home, goes on to tie it to the dietary laws followed in her family:

I’m intimately familiar with systems of eating that involve a lot of label-gazing, head-scratching, and consideration of ingredients. The irony is that, even though I lived through two decades of religious dietary strictures of byzantine complexity, it never felt half as much like a story about sin as Casey Means’ book does. In Leviticus, God never promises a longer, healthier, pain-free life if you avoid breaking any of the dietary laws. He never promises anything, except avoiding becoming ritually unclean.

By contrast, the Instagram orthorexics explicitly declare that you’re broken unless you keep up with an ever-shifting codex of purity that, incidentally, involves quite a bit of discretionary spending. Sure, two sets of cutlery and kitchenware is a big outlay. But Means wants you to buy, at minimum, wearable activity trackers for your movement and sleep; a food journal; blue-light-blocking glasses; access to a sauna; charcoal and reverse-osmosis water filters; a glucometer; and a whole new set of pantry staples (she even specifies a seed-oil-free hummus brand.)

And of course, there’s cruelty involved. Fall away from the kosher path, and you’re a bad Jew. Eat Nacho Cheese Doritos? Then you richly deserve any illness that befalls you. All of this is backed up by ridiculous overstatement; note how Croaky talks about food dyes or processed foods or seed oils “poisoning” children. I will grant you, it’s probably not a great idea to drink a gallon of Red 40 every day, but most of us can survive our bad breakfast cereal or red licorice indulgences just fine. But if you consume these things after you’re told you shouldn’t? Then it’s so much easier to take away your Medicaid, you fat p.o.s. with no self-discipline.

In this, they are marching happily next to the more garden-variety cruelty practiced by the rest of the administration. And they feel fine about it, because they’re only trying to Make America Healthy Again. IS THAT SO WRONG?

I’m so mad at Croaky these days, I can’t even. And now they’ve cancelled the Moderna contract for a bird-flu vaccine.

There is joy in the land, however. Stephen Miller’s wife is leaving the White House to follow Elon Musk to wherever he’s going, and there’s a hot rumor the three of them were in a shall-we-say throuple type of relationship. Our breakfast conversation Thursday was not about eggs, coffee or what we each had planned for the day.

Me: “God, I can’t imagine being railed by both those guys. Literally a fate worse than death.”

Alan: “Nah, that’s not how it went. Elon railed her while Stephen watched, jerking off.”

It’s enough to make you want to splash Red 40 right in your eyes, isn’t it?

Have a great weekend, all.

So we’re in the first month of Trump sitting on his fat ass behind the Resolute Desk, a pile of Sharpie Magnums at the ready, and he’s been…signing things. Not meeting with Congressional leaders, not holding policy meetings. He gave Elon and his broccoli heads the keys to the treasury and he’s retired to the Oval to sign stuff. It started with serious stuff, and three weeks later, he’s down to straws.

I’m beginning to think this isn’t serious, although it is very dangerous. There should be a strategy to fight this. The American system wasn’t meant to run on executive orders by a mad king, even one with many stupid followers and some unsmiling henchman. Seventy-four million voters said hell no to this bullshit, and millions more stayed home because they either couldn’t be bothered or simply despised both candidates. But one candidate isn’t in the picture anymore, so maybe we could redirect that sentiment? I dunno. Then there’s this:

Gillibrand on WNYC today said one reason they're all falling in line is that they get death threats.

[image or embed]

— Regina Schrambling (@gastropoda.bsky.social) February 4, 2025 at 3:31 PM

As more than one person pointed out in the replies, lots of people get death threats these days, but they don’t let a bunch of cowards change the way they live their lives or do their jobs. So nut up, Kristin Gillibrand. There’s work to do.

Now it’s time for the Super Bowl. It’s still more than an hour to kickoff, I just turned the game on, but I’m confident President Sharpie hasn’t showed up yet. The warmups are ongoing, and there’s a lot of helmet-knocking and close-up yelling player-to-player, which I gather is a bonding / amp-up ritual. I don’t have a dog in this fight, but part of me wants the Chiefs to lose, so Taylor and Travis break up and she writes a song about it.

This is the overwhelming Detroit vibe today:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by outer limits lounge (@theouterlimitslounge)

Let’s watch.

Edited to add: Friends, I wrote this yesterday before news of the plane crash broke. Obviously, we’ll all be watching those developments today. Feel free to thread hijack all you want.

I’ve probably talked about this before here, but if there are any newbies in the readership, here it is again: I’ve always felt a certain not-too-serious sisterhood with Caroline Kennedy. We’re so close in age — she is two days younger than me — that it’s the sort of thing your mom tells you when you’re both little, and her dad is president. What’s more, her younger brother’s birthday is on the same date as mine, three years later. So it’s:

Me: November 25, 1957
Caroline: November 27, 1957
John Kennedy Jr.: November 25, 1960

Mostly this was taken as a joke in my family: “I see Caroline Kennedy is interning for the New York Daily News this summer,” my mom might say, by way of noting that I was spending my break working the cash register in a Mexican restaurant. Caroline went to law school. Caroline has published many books. Caroline has served as ambassador to two countries (Japan, Australia). Needless to say, Caroline lives a cooler life than I do, but that’s to be expected.

This week Caroline made news for a devastating letter she sent to senators considering her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the president’s nominee to run the Department of Health & Human Services. You can see her read it here. The letter itself was very brave; she described her cousin as a “predator” and a malign influence on others. She scolded him for appropriating her father’s image and family’s reputation for his ridiculous presidential run, before “groveling to Trump for a job.” We’ll see if it has an effect.

But, shallow doppelgänger than I am, I couldn’t help but notice her face. I don’t want to snip copyright photos, so let’s look at the public-domain Wikipedia shot:

That is a 67-year-old, well-lived-in face. (Albeit one with Irish DNA and likely our generation’s casual relationship with sunblock.) And I think we’ve forgotten what that looks like.

We’re so inured to today’s fillered, Botoxed, surgically altered, Instagram-filtered face, we think that’s what older women should do, whether they want to or not. JLo is 55, and has not only no lines, but a 25-year-old’s body. The old ad line for hair color — “Does she or doesn’t she?” has moved from hair to our entire body. And speaking of 55-year-olds (in April), let’s take a look at another older woman:

It’s the new First Sex Worker’s official portrait. In the name of Photoshop, have you ever seen more filters deployed in your life? Not to mention the heavily plasticized body, with the breast implants, the slanty eyes, and god knows what else. Also 55 (although this photo is a few years old:

This photo was singled out for derision when she published it on her Instagram. It says a lot about her, if you ask me.

You can go online and find photos of both these women before they entered the Mar-a-Lago fembot factory. Others, too. Kristi Noem, age 53:

I can hear some of you men, or at least your horny ids, saying so what if Kristi and Kim got a glow-up? That high-necked pink blouse was doing her no favors, and her new hair is sexy. My reply would be: Why did she change her look so drastically? To catch the eye of a known sexual assailant, that’s why.

Speaking of Mar-a-lago:

(Shudder.)

Anyway. I’m watching the RFK Jr. hearing now. I can’t figure out whether Bobby has perma-dyed his skin the color of a walnut, whether he supplements with Bronx Colors makeup like his would-be boss, or if he simply spends so much time outside, maybe flexing his guns on the beach shirtless in a pair of jeans, or what.

Are we doomed? I feel like we probably are.

I was in Chicago summer before last, and Jeff Borden and I went to the club where Shadow Show was playing. At some point in the evening, he handed me a shot of some amber liquor and told me to go ahead, drink it.

I don’t worry that Borden will slip me a Pete Hegseth mickey, and I wasn’t even tipsy from the beer I’d been nursing, so I did, downing it in one go. My eyes bugged out of my head, my throat screamed for mercy and my brain started flashing neon ABORT signs.

“What,” I gasped, “was that?”

“Malört,” he said. “Otherwise known as the Chicago hello.”

I’m not super-big on liquor history, but I’d never heard of this stuff. Borden said it was made with wormwood, a word I recall mostly from Shakespeare. What is wormwood, anyway? All I can tell you is, don’t drink it.

But now, Malört is catching on, or so says the New York Times:

Malört is, in one word, unforgiving. Made from neutral spirits, wormwood and sugar, it tastes a little like sucking dandelion juice through a straw made of car tires. It is also kind of good. Intensely bitter, it’s herbaceous and a touch citrusy, as if you were to bite a grapefruit like an apple.

It is also, in five words, the unofficial liquor of Chicago.

Carl Jeppson, a Swedish immigrant to the city, peddled Jeppson’s Malört as a digestif as early as the 1930s. “It was the only liquor to survive Prohibition because no one believed that a human being would drink that on purpose, and that it had to be medicinal,” said J.W. Basilo, the manager of the Promontory and a bartender in Chicago for more than 20 years.

Intensely local to the Windy City, Malört “became the designated initiation shot, something you downed to prove your Midwest mettle — a difficult drink for a difficult place to live,” the story goes on.

Hence the Chicago hello. I noticed that the next day on Shadow Show’s Instagram stories, they posted a photo of all of them taking their Malört punishment. Kate noted something to the effect that Chicagoans have some strange ideas about what’s drinkable.

Now, though — and this is the point of the NYT story — Malört is spreading beyond Chicago, probably because hipsters cannot stand not being in on a single city’s digestif secret. There’s even a Malört-centric bar now, in New Orleans. That city has its own signature cocktail, the Sazerac, but it also has to serve lots of thirsty tourists who want to be tipsy, but don’t necessarily want to be served the usual watered-down Hurricane in a go-cup. Novelty is the soul of capitalism.

I guess what I’m saying is, if someone offers you this particular digestif after the Thanksgiving turkey, think twice before you say sure, love to.

And now another tough week comes to an end. I can’t stop thinking about Pete Hegseth raping that woman (allegedly, yes), his dog tags swinging over her face before he ejaculated on her stomach. A rapist nominates a rapist, of course.

Next week is Thanksgiving. I’m going to have to dig for something to be thankful for, but not really. There’s always something, if you have food, shelter and family love. It’s just how long that could last, know what I mean?

See you then, at least for a little while.