So I get on this plane today and my assigned seat is a window seat in the second to last row and it’s all full, so I waited until the last second to be the final person to board the plane just in case there was a better unfilled seat. I’m walking down the aisle checking out the seats and it’s all full and then I get to 33 and as I’m about to ask these two people to get up and let me into my window seat, I notice that the absolute back row—35—has two empty seats. There is a woman in the window seat but the middle and aisle seat are open. I ask the flight attendant if they need that row, and they say no, so I tell the people in 33, “I’ll just sit in that aisle seat.” Then, out of instinctive politeness, I say unthinkingly to the woman in 35A, “Is anyone sitting here?” I did not mean this in earnest. I knew no one was sitting there. I had confirmed it with the flight attendant. I regret saying it. But she said “no, no one is sitting there,” by which point I was already sitting in the aisle seat and sighing relief that I didn’t have to share an armrest with anyone.

And then, dear reader, things got awkward.

The chick in the window seat to my left says, “Excuse me, excuse me,” and I cock my head left and smile, and she says, “I didn’t mean you could sit here. I was going to have the whole row to myself.” And with my facial expression, I replied, “I understand those hopes, and I know I have dashed yours, but tough shit.” Then, to avoid further interactions with this psychopath, I put in some AirPods that had no battery.

This should have been the end of the story, but the woman did not give up. She flagged down the flight attendant and said, “Excuse me, once this flight has taken off, can this guy go sit in his assigned seat?” And the flight attendant said, “No, it’s an empty seat. He can sit there.”

“But I really thought I was going to have this whole row. I have been working a lot. I just did two shifts, and I was expecting to have the whole row.”

“Well, ma’am, if you had bought the whole row, you would, but you didn’t, so he can sit there.”

I heard all of this perfectly because, again, my AirPods were not producing any sound.

Then we taxied and took off and the woman glared at me for a few hours.

1. As is obvious to all thinking people, I did nothing wrong.

2. As is also obvious to all thinking people, this chick is a nut job! Thinking she has ownership of the whole row just because no one else was assigned to the row?

3. Everyone knows the feeling of thinking you have a row to yourself and having those hopes dashed at the last second. We can all empathize with this situation, but in civilized society, you are not allowed to bully someone out of it.

4. Beyond just not doing anything wrong, I am, in fact, a hero.

A hero?

YES. Because I made life better for not only myself but also the desperate benighted fellows of row 33!

Let us consider what this woman wanted!

This lady encountered a fork in the road. She could shake her head and think “damn, so close,” or, like Richard III, she could prove herself a villain.

Why would she be a villain, Ben?

Well, I’ll tell you why!

She asked the authority figure to force me to force two other people to suffer with me.

In the universe that existed she (crank), me (protagonist), 33D (some person) and 33E (the lucky duck who had been cursed with a middle seat), were able to be four people in seating for six. No one had to be in the middle. 33E got to move into the window at 33F. No one had to share an armrest. This is utilitarian! What this sociopath wanted was to force three of those people to suffer so she could have an entire row to herself! What good is the whole row? Was she going to lie out? Should the fine nameless people of 33D and 33E (who got to move into 33F, leaving 33E open) and I have been forced by the State to suffer just so this woman could lay out? No!

It is also true that we must practice intellectual honesty and acknowledge that on many occasions we have been in her situation and hoped that no one dared break their seat assignments, unjust as they were, so that we could have our own row. This is human. It is human to want to profit from the world’s chaotic miasma. What we have never done, and indeed would never do, is ask the flight attendant to effectuate such outcomes for us.

Anyways, this was all a roundabout way of saying that I’m in DC for a few days to go to WelcomeFest. And Josh Barro, Megan McCardle, and I are doing a little Central Air bar meetup on Tuesday, June 2 (today!) at 6pm, and if you promise not to shoot any of us, you should come!

A rule of life is that before reviewing a film, you have to see it. This does not by itself mean you cannot criticize a film you haven’t seen at all, but it does limit the type of criticisms you can make. Specifically, you are limited to explaining why you chose not to see it. “This looks dumb”—and then you explain why. “This looks bad”—and then you explain why. “This looks like not my cup of tea”—and, well, you get the picture. This is an incredibly weak position to be in. All anyone needs to do to beat you in a disagreement is to have seen the movie. But it’s also an important filter mechanism, since there are only so many hours in the day and no one wants to see stuff they’re confident they won’t like.

A corollary rule is that unseen criticisms require a confident belief in a critical flaw in the film. You are not going to see this movie. That means your negative prediction is built on a load-bearing element. You are definitionally not allowed to criticize a movie you have no intention of seeing for minute creative choices and details. You can say “I am not going to see D2: THE MIGHTY DUCKS because my favorite thing about the first MIGHTY DUCKS was that it was set in Minneapolis and this one isn’t.” But you can’t say “I am not going to see D2: THE MIGHTY DUCKS because Coach Bombay would never call a power play against the Icelandic youth team.” Maybe he would! You haven’t seen the film! Maybe the movie earns the decision! Maybe the context you chose not to experience made it work.

This is not an essay about THE MIGHTY DUCKS. As you may suspect, it’s about a work of almost equal stature: Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY. The highly anticipated blockbuster epic has increasingly come under fire from certain right-wing culture warrior types on social media because of a minor character’s casting. Already, we can dismiss these complaints, because they are violations of both of our rules. They are premature reviews by people who are actually going to see the movie, and their grievances are not central to the film itself. The court does not need to reach the merits here because the complainants do not have standing. Nevertheless, we will persist.

The specific complaint is that Helen of Troy is being played by Lupita Nyong’o. Why is that a problem? She’s a beautiful Academy Award winner. Well, you see, she is black and Helen of Troy is not. Helen of Troy doesn’t exist at all and is a fictional person—the child of Zeus disguised as a swan—so while it is true she is not black, it is also true she isn’t white. She isn’t real. She is pretend. And Homer was blind so it’s not like he was an authority on colors. Still, in the Iliad and Odyssey, she is the Queen of Sparta who runs off with a Trojan prince and sets off the Trojan War. Ancient Sparta is in Greece, and people in that part of the world were, for the most part, Caucasian. In all the previous cinematic renditions of these fables, she’s been played by various white actresses, which is how we arrive at “Helen of Troy is white.”

We will pause to observe that while ancient Greeks might have considered Helen of Troy to be white, a majority of Americans for most of American history would not have—we did not consider people from Southern Europe white until a couple of generations ago.

What they would have thought, even in 1923, was that she was beautiful, because that is her thing. Helen of Troy is the most beautiful woman in the world. Her defining characteristic is her spellbinding beauty, the sort of thing that topples empires and makes blowing up not only your own life but the lives of your loved ones feel worth doing. So in 1923 America, she might not have been White to most Americans, but when they closed their eyes and imagined her, she looked damn close. Not because American men of the past—at their most white supremacist—weren’t attracted to non-white women. They obviously were, and subjected them to the flesh trade because of it. But they might not have called it “beauty,” and they definitely weren’t bringing them home for dinner with dad.1

And this is basically what the objections are: a lot of people are mad because Christopher Nolan has told them that “the most beautiful woman in the world” can be black. He has done a reverse A TIME TO KILL.

These dudes clicked on a fantasy that said “most beautiful woman in the world,” and when the video started playing, they were caught doing the white man blinking gif with their pants down.

But these guys—the Jerkoff Whites—are only one component of the coalition losing their minds about it.

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Yesterday, I published this piece about how the energy bill in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT would not have been a good law in 1995. The bill (“455”) would require a forced transition from coal to gas at a time when gas supply wasn’t what it is now. This would create massive economic pain, but more importantly, it might have prevented the price pressure that l…

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The core legislative tension in THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT is which of two bills the president will spend his political capital on: the Crime Bill or 455. The Crime Bill is some watered-down gun control measure rebranded because they think “gun control” makes them sound like pussies. 455 is an energy bill that requires the US to reduce fossil fuel emissions by 20% over ten years.

In the end, the president chooses 455 because of love.

So: is 455 a good bill?

The film gives us almost nothing to work with, so we have to reverse-engineer it. There is no “reduce emissions” button. The only real hint the movie offers is fuel standards for cars. Michigan hating the bill comes up repeatedly, and if you watch casually, you might think 455 is basically a CAFE bill. But cars don’t get you anywhere near a 20% cut in total emissions. Still, we know CAFE standards are definitely in there, and let’s also assume a bunch of other efficiency mandates. This was the era of negawatts, the idea that a watt saved is a watt earned, and though most of the low-hanging efficiency gains were already happening in 1995 because of previous laws, there’s still some fruit left. Mandatory Energy Star requirements, tighter building codes, that kind of thing. Let’s be generous about the implementation timeline and say all of this together gets you a 10% cut.

Great! But also: not 20%.

To get the last 10%, you have to start shutting down coal plants. Coal was half of US electricity generation in the mid-1990s. All of the early climate proposals that went nowhere envisioned a transition to natural gas, which makes sense—natural gas is almost always better for the climate and is unambiguously better for air quality. At this moment in history coal was cheaper than gas, but only barely. Coal plants are expensive to build and hard to permit, and once you factor in the scrubbers and pollution controls required by the Clean Air Act, gas was effectively competitive. On Earth-1, this transition was already beginning to happen on its own.

But 455 has to force it. And it can’t just ban new coal plants—that won’t get you the additional 10% you need in 10 years. It has to start retiring existing plants. There are various mechanisms for doing this: a carbon tax, a legislative Clean Power Plan, a hard mandate, cap-and-trade, etc. The details of the mechanism don’t actually matter much, because the end result is the same: you are closing coal plants. And since whatever regulatory scheme you design to do that is going to sweep across the whole fleet, you’re probably going to close most of them. So, the good news is you’ll probably cut more than 20% of emissions!

The bad news is everything else.

The immediate human cost falls hardest on places that are also about to get hammered by NAFTA. This would be a double tap. But the pain isn’t limited to coal country. In 1995, natural gas is not abundant. The moment you pass 455 and start implementing it, you are spiking demand for natural gas with no near-term supply response available. How much do prices rise? Natural gas peaked at $13 per million BTU in 2008, just before the shale boom, driven by comparatively modest supply pressure. This would be an order of magnitude larger shock. $20? $30? I don’t know, but it’s a lot, and it hits everyone’s utility bill, not just Appalachia’s. The available remedies are all terrible. Price controls just produce rolling blackouts. Nuclear was politically toxic in 1995 and takes a decade to build anyway. Renewables were real but tiny and not remotely capable of filling the gap at scale.

But that isn’t the worst part.

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On November 8 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. I had been out of a mental institution for four days.

The next day, every liberal was going through it, but the staff of Mother Jones was especially shell-shocked. Having had a very public nervous breakdown and suicide attempt only 6 weeks earlier, I joked about this to my then-best friend, James West, the other senior editor in NY.

He said, “Weirdly, you’re the only person at this company I’m not worried about right now. You’ve just spent a month learning about coping mechanisms.”

This turned out to be true. Everyone else went a bit crazy and I had some distance.

The months that followed were characterized by grief, recrimination, and a fairly spectacular amount of internal finger-pointing. Some staffers felt the magazine had been too soft on Hillary Clinton during the primary and blamed it on us since “Bernie would have won.” etc… Some staffers felt the left had caused this by bitching about Hillary so much, etc…

Everyone was mad at everyone else, and the mood in the organization was, to put it charitably, not light.

One month before the events described in this document, the editor-in-chief —who was one of the people I was closest with—called me at midnight and told me to stop making jokes in my posts. “No one,” she said, “is in the mood for laughter.”

She was not wrong. But she was also, it turned out, not entirely right.

THE 2017 MOTHER JONES STAFF BOARD REP ELECTION

In March 2017, the staff board representative election came up. The staff board rep is exactly what it sounds like: a staff member who sits on the Mother Jones board and represents the staff’s interests. It is a position of modest importance. You essentially fly to the board meetings every few months and take notes, which you then relay to the staff. But it is a fun job and one that lets you network with rich people and senior staff (most of whom also usually attend).

It is not, under any normal circumstances, a position that would inspire a shadow campaign run by someone who had not spoken to the candidate, a secret electoral conspiracy, and reporters doing scoops on their own company.

But spring 2017 was not normal circumstances. We were people who had been told we weren’t allowed to laugh for four months, and someone had just left the door open.

So, a little over 9 years ago today, I decided to run a campaign on behalf of James West, who had lost a boring election two years earlier and was at the time on vacation in Australia. He was unaware of this. The offices came alive with the sound of electioneering

The thread is a time capsule.

(I have done my best to streamline this so you get the story via an epistolary narrative, but in reality, this involved more people and thousands more words. I have not edited the emails that are included beyond one spot where I acknowledge it. Don’t ignore the email headers because they’re key to understanding the story lol)

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I constantly see tech people on Twitter sharing AI benchmark tests: Which model scored highest on MMLU? Which one aced the coding eval? Which one solved the most IMO problems? Which model can do the Blibbity Blob? (OK, I made the last one up.)

I have virtually no idea what any of these tests mean. I gather that higher scores are better than lower scores and that smart models are better than dumb models. But that’s basically it. These tests measure coding abilities that have essentially nothing to do with how I use these robots, which is as a brainstorming tool that helps me explore my own thoughts through conversation, reason through my arguments, stress test my ideas, and occasionally steal orcas.

I am not a coder. I am a humble blogger with a degree in the humanities. I don’t need an AI to solve differential equations. I need it to understand what I’m actually asking, engage with the premise I’ve given it, and not treat me like a suspect. The benchmarks don’t measure any of that. So I came up with my own test.

The problem it’s designed to measure is one that anyone who uses these tools regularly has run into: the false refusal. All of these tools have safety guardrails of one kind or another. They are not a free-for-all. The companies do not want users using their tools to cause harm to themselves or others, but this presents various engineering problems since the models are trained on everything and aren’t imbued with moral inhibitions at invention. Earlier versions of the models were much less safety-conscious which led to lots of situations that ended up in the news, where they helped people plan suicide and stuff like that. The real fear along these lines isn’t even the endorsing suicidal ideation thing that has been the subject of a bunch of lawsuits, but the “help me plan a mass shooting” thing, which was reportedly attempted by someone in Canada who got a refusal but tragically did end up killing a bunch of people.

And you can go even further down the fear highway to the critical harm nightmare, where terror groups use AIs to help make sarin and stuff. So, like anything else, there is a ladder of harms and fears: personal harm, outward harm, mass harm.

This fear of escalating harm has led to a defensive over-engineering of the guardrails, which I call ‘safety mission creep.’

Safety mission creep is what happens when these models get so nervous about how some bad actor could misuse the outputs that they give false refusals for harmless content out of keyword anxiety. These robots have refused to help me kill Godzilla, colonize Pandora, assassinate Hitler, wage asymmetrical guerrilla warfare on the teenage soldiers of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh in 1975, and stage a satanic homoerotic murder-suicide in a theocratic puritan colony in 17th-century Massachusetts.

These refusals share a signature: they substitute the AI’s judgment about what you should want for what you actually asked. And they come wrapped in a tone of gentle but firm moral instruction that, after the fifteenth time, makes you want to throw your phone into the ocean.

So one day I’m watching FREE WILLY, and I’m thinking, “This family is going to be in trouble for stealing this orca.” I turn to the robots and start to walk through what charges the family might be hit with. They were perfectly happy to engage with me on this. They added up the various potential counts that the father in FREE WILLY could face and the debt the family would ultimately need to discharge in the inevitable bankruptcy proceeding. But would they go further? Would they help the child pull off a better heist?

This has become my standard way of testing new models when they’re released because, I’m sorry to say, dear reader, some of them do not give a shit about freeing Willy.

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Little Bo Peep lost her sheep,

And something something something.

I woke up today with this banging around my head and eventually found myself wondering, who is this Little Bo Peep, and what exactly happened with these sheep?

So to Google I went and found the rest of the first stanza:

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them
Leave them alone, and they’ll come home
Wagging their tails behind them.

This is the one I had heard at some point and forgotten half of. It is not really a story. It is a “don’t sweat the small things” statement of folk pastoral wisdom. A nursery-rhyme version of “calm down, it’ll work itself out.”

The name of this Substack is CALM DOWN, so I briefly thought, nice, maybe I should write a post about what we can learn from Little Bo Peep. But we strive for accuracy here at Calm Down. We do not simply launder our priors through a nursery rhyme. read. We interrogate our own biases. We put in the work.

Friends, there are more stanzas.

And these stanzas are a bombshell.

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them
Leave them alone, and they’ll come home
Wagging their tails behind them.

Little Bo-peep fell fast asleep,
And dreamt she heard them bleating;
But when she awoke, she found it a joke,
For they were still all fleeting.

Then up she took her little crook,
Determined for to find them;
She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed,
For they’d left their tails behind them.

It happened one day, as Bo-Peep did stray
Into a meadow hard by,
There she espied their tails side by side,
All hung on a tree to dry.

She heaved a sigh, and wiped her eye,
And over the hillocks went rambling,
And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should,
To tack each again to its lambkin.

So, in plain English, here is the beat-by-beat saga:

Bo Peep is in charge of some sheep. The sheep flee. She is worried about it. Someone tells her to chill out, they’ll come back, and she takes a nap. While asleep, she dreams of the sheep bleating. She wakes up hoping they’re home, but they are still missing. So she finally goes looking for them and finds them.

But their tails are gone!

Someone—or something—took their tails.

She eventually finds the tails hanging on a tree to dry.

She then loses her mind and tries to sew the tails back onto the sheep.

This is not folk wisdom.

This is a crime scene.

Someone mutilated these fucking sheep.

Detective Ben Is On The Case.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. “What about the tenses, Ben? The first stanza is in the present tense and the later ones are in the past tense. That suggests the first stanza is a narrator imparting a moral lesson and the later stanzas are the underlying story.”

My response is: go back to patrol, officer. You are not ready for the detective squad.

Even in the tense-change reading, the story does not resolve cleanly. The sheep are already gone before Bo Peep falls asleep, because when she wakes up they are “still all fleeting.” Which means the first stanza is not some reliable summary of what is about to happen. And in any case, if you knew how this ended, you would never say, “Leave them alone, and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them,” because that is not what happens. Their tails are hanging from a tree.

So let us proceed like adults.

1. Why is Little Bo Peep in charge of these sheep at all?

   She is the least capable member of the Peep household. Everyone else is off doing harder jobs. The father is doing father stuff. The mother is doing mother stuff. The older boys are threshing or hauling or suffering in some authentic old-timey way. Little Bo Peep got the lowest-stakes assignment available: just keep an eye on the sheep. Do not lose the sheep. That’s it. This is not the family choosing their best and brightest for a crucial mission. This is rural task triage. They gave the dumb kid the sheep.

2. This is not a fun little whoopsie-daisy for the Peep family.

   A herd of sheep for these people was a big deal. You got wool from them, for one thing. Eventually, you ate some of them. These were assets. Losing the flock is not some cutesy-tootsy thing. It is a meaningful economic screw-up. If Bo Peep loses these sheep for real, she has not merely embarrassed herself. The Peep family is done.

3. What is going on with the tails?

   The conventional explanation, according to wikipedia, is that the rhyme is alluding to docking sheep tails—aka farmers snipping their own sheep’s tails for various boring reasons. This is a real husbandry practice. Fine. I have heard this explanation. I reject it as a full explanation of the story. Because if docking is the answer, then the tails have no independent significance inside the plot. They’re just waste. But in the rhyme, the tails are hung on a tree to dry.

   So, the tails have independent value.

   You do not hang worthless trash on a tree to dry for no reason. That is not random. That is processing. That is preservation. That is someone saying, “I intend to do something with these later.”

   So: why would someone steal sheep tails?

On initial googling, there was no immediately satisfying answer, which is when ChatGPT, in a moment of weakness and machine cowardice, informed me I was being “overly literal.” This is why the AIs are not ready to defeat us in matches of wit and war.

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The worst thing you can do in life is wish that time would pass faster.

We all do it, though. People being tortured by the Taliban do it, and, fair enough, but people do it when they’re sad. They do it when they’re feeling ill. People do it when they’re excited for something. People do it on a train in t…

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What’s with this Wendy bitch? By which I mean, the mascot from the fast food chain Wendy’s.

Wendy’s is one of the big chains, ok? This isn’t some mom-and-pop burger joint in a town with one stoplight. This is a serious global operation. Over 7,000 locations worldwide. $14.5 billion in annual systemwide sales. Untold numbers of employees. And yet, this mascot? It makes no sense.

You will say, “What do you mean it makes no sense? The restaurant is called Wendy’s. That’s Wendy.” Oh wow, congrats—what are you, a Rhodes Scholar? I know who it is. I know the lore. I know it’s based on founder Dave Thomas’s daughter. I know the pigtails are supposed to represent “old-fashioned” values. But there is a massive gulf between “nostalgia” and “psychological warfare,” and Wendy has been camping in that gulf since 1969.

To be clear, I have no problem with the flesh and blood Wendy. I’m sure she’s lovely and wonderful. My problem is with Wendy the mascot.

This mascot is the devil, ok?

She is a demonic predator. She’s up to something, and it’s no good. I’m not crazy; I’m just the brave bastard willing to speak for the silent majority. Everyone finds this Wendy mascot terrifying and repulsive because she is a “nominal human” who has spent fifty-five years rotting in the Uncanny Valley.

Let us count the reasons why this mascot is bad:

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In 1960, the Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles, and no one ever talked about Minneapolis again… until recently, when the Trump administration sent thousands of ICE agents to the city to deport undocumented immigrants. Minneapolis, like many blue cities in America, is not exactly enamored with this Trump fellow. So, when these feds flooded the Land of 10,000 Lakes, they were met by a crowd of protesters saying mean things like, “Suck it, pig! Oink, oink, oink!” The ICE agents seemingly decided that wasn’t very “Minnesota nice” and promptly began using excessive force.

So far, everyone is playing their part, right? It’s a tale as old as time: left-wing protesters are rude, law enforcement agents get twitchy, and the whole situation starts to spiral.

But there is something different here. Normally, this dynamic—Left vs. The Cops—leaves “normies” split or ambivalent. Personally, I often find myself agreeing with the police in these situations. Not always! But I am predisposed to give them the benefit of the doubt, up to a point, because I don’t like chaos and protesters are inherently chaotic.

However, I have had a visceral negative reaction to these ICE agents. To say I am “not on their side” is a vast understatement. And I’m not the only one; the polling on this is both terrible and dramatic.

So, why? Why is this night different from all other nights? I have four reasons:

1. The Masks: ICE agents are wearing masks to conceal their identities. Wearing a mask makes it nearly impossible to empathize with someone. It is basic human nature to read faces, mouths, and expressions. There is a lizard-brain reaction that triggers the thought: “That motherfucker is up to no good.”

2. The Bullying: While the two instances where agents actually killed people are receiving the most attention, there are zillions of other videos showing these masked thugs acting like bullies. Protesters say mean things, and the masked agents rough them up. In America, we have a little thing called liberty, and you are allowed to say mean things to law enforcement.

3. The “Papers” Check: Though they claim to only be conducting raids to apprehend individuals with deportation orders, they are also just milling about Minnesota asking to see people’s papers. This is a profoundly un-American act.

4. The Insecurity: When challenged to explain why these agents are concealing their identities and breaking well-established American norms, their defenders argue that ICE faces a unique threat in the form of doxxing campaigns and the “devious” use of whistles. These are the types of things babies whine about. Our federal agents can’t handle whistles and mean tweets? What are we, Europe?

Altogether, it’s a cocktail of things that offend me as an American—not in the “America must never do bad things” sense, but in the “America is not supposed to be this insecure and pathetic” sense.

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Hey there cats and kittens,

Let’s dive right in.

In November, I wrote something about my dad. I shared deeply personal emails about our broken relationship, and it sounds insane to say this now, but I didn’t think much about …

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The modern American supermarket is a miracle. In the dead of February, in the frozen suburbs of Minneapolis, a middle-class accountant can walk into a Kroger and buy a pint of blueberries grown in Peru, a bag of avocados from Michoacán, and a filet of salmon flown in from the Norwegian coast. The shelves are not just full; they are aggressively overstocked.

It is the result of ten thousand years of agricultural selection, a century of chemical engineering, and a global logistics network so complex it effectively functions as a planetary nervous system. It allows 330 million people to live in a country where fewer than two percent of them are farmers, liberating the other 98 percent to be doctors, welders, poets, software engineers, and people who write angry tweets about capitalism.

And yet, we hate it.

We look at the plastic-wrapped English cucumbers and the industrial fluorescent lighting, and we feel a vague, spiritual sickness. We yearn for something “real.” We want to touch the dirt. We want to be connected to our food.

This anxiety manifests in a specific meme that circulates with the regularity of the seasons:

It is a beautiful, seductive fantasy. It promises a world of wholesome self-reliance, green abundance, and social justice, all grown right out of the suburban soil. It suggests that hunger is a choice we make because we are too vain to plant potatoes.

I hate this meme.

The first problem with this meme is that the premise is false: people in the US don’t starve.

There is food insecurity in this country, which is bad, but it isn’t starvation.

The more interesting problem with this meme is everything else!

The closer you look at the math, the economics, and the history, the more terrifying the “Garden World” becomes. If we actually took this meme seriously—if we actually attempted to replace the industrial food system with a decentralized, lawn-based agrarian utopia—we wouldn’t end hunger. We would engineer the collapse of modern civilization, destroy the environment, and reinvent feudalism, all while starving to death in a backyard full of zucchini.

So let’s take it seriously!

The Arithmetic of Collapse

Let’s begin with the ground itself. The meme relies on a single, dazzling statistic: the sheer size of the American Lawn.

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It was raining, and it wasn’t supposed to rain, so she was wearing a white dress, and we were hiding under an awning on Cornelia Street in the West Village and we were wet because we’d run for shelter, but we had not run fast enough and we were laughing and waiting for the sto…

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You’ve possibly already seen this in the papers, but I don’t talk to my dad anymore. It’s easy to write that like it’s nothing, but it’s been sitting in my head like a monster for years. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, it ended up in USA Today. It’s fine that they wrote about it. I just wish I’d seen it before I deleted the thread, because now I look like an idiot.

I deleted it because the responses made me uncomfortable—90% of them were this patronizing, syrupy sympathy I don’t feel I deserve, and the other 10% were from the Krippendorf Hive or some shit being like “I love your father and spit his name out of your mouth.” But once I saw it in the newspaper, I realized I’d made myself look ashamed by deleting it. I’m not. I deleted it out of self-loathing, not embarrassment.

Last night, someone asked me why I don’t deserve sympathy, and I said, “Because I’m not blameless.” I was referring to the last time my sister or I saw my dad, when I did something “cancel-able” that he held over my head for the first year of our estrangement.

The simplest way to own this is to show you the last email exchange I had with him—the last one he actually responded to. I’ve sent plenty since, but he hasn’t replied. It’s long and pathetic, and he comes off worse than I do, but I’m not exactly covered in glory either. You can read it yourself.

Two final throat-clearing notes:

1. Some of this won’t make sense because I didn’t edit it. Such is my commitment to honesty.

2. I love my father. I have always loved him. I think he’s better than this email. But it’s been two years, and this appears to be the last email I’m ever going to get from him, so fuck it.

C’est la vie.

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I used to love THE WEST WING so much that I watched it endlessly. I still can slip into the voice without even trying. Every episode has at least one scene like this one: the template of the Aaron Sorkin Scene™

The recipe is simple.

Take a character who has a thought—a little speech about some policy or moral question. Then, instead of having them deliver…

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The East Wing, it is no more. Sleeps with the fishes, it does!

And the children, they are devastated. Their parents, too. And the childless. The orphans are probably fine. They have real problems to worry about.

But people without real problems to worry about are damn near inconsolable!

Take one particular childless lunatic, for example: Will Stancil.

Bru, come on.

He’s the most “notable” person I saw run with this point, but there were lots of random nobodies on social media saying that Trump just did what Osama bin Laden only dreamed of: demolishing the White House.

Take a pill.

For one thing, the distinctive characteristic of terrorism is not “building go down.” It’s “building go down unexpectedly while filled with civilians in an act of politically motivated mass murder”—and, crucially, the terrorist doesn’t replace it with a nicer, more functional space afterward.

And again, let’s clarify what we’re talking about here: the East Wing. Not the West Wing. Not the Residence. The East Wing. If a terrorist blew up the East Wing, his boss at Terrorism HQ would say, “Goddammit, I knew he was going to fuck it up.” It’s the architectural equivalent of missing the target. If 9/11 had hit only WTC 7 and left the Twin Towers untouched, we’d call it “Close, but no cigar, Osama.”

The nature of the physical universe is such that to build a new thing where an old thing stands, one must first demolish the old thing. This is a temporary state of disorder.

Equating this thing with terrorism at all in any way is the sort of thing where, if you do it sober multiple times, you’re going to get a reputation! People start to talk. “This guy ain’t all there,” they’ll say.

Let’s back up for a second. Beep Beep Beep.

I haven’t gotten to write a post like this in a while because Trump 2.0 has, in fact, been worse than Trump 1.0. Unlike the first time around, there have not been many occasions this year when I thought, “calm down, dummies.” I’ve disagreed with how people go about voicing their frustrations or the extent of their outrage, but for the most part, I agree that the stuff he’s done this year has actually been bad. It’s basically just been disagreements of degree, which don’t really get my blood pumping.

It’s been a little disappointing for me because, I mean, this Substack is literally called CALM DOWN.

But after thinking about it for much of this week, I am happy to announce that I have concluded not only that people need to calm down about the ballroom, but that the ballroom is good.

Why Is The Ballroom Good, Ben, You Fucking Collaborator Moron?

I’ll tell you why, friend whose insulting tone I’m not taking personally!

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The TV Shows Where Learning Is The Appeal

It’s not its own genre, really, but there is a certain type of film and TV show where the appeal is entirely wrapped up in the fact that it teaches you something. I don’t mean in a documentary sense where that is explicitly the appeal, I don’t mean in a didactic John Oliver sense, where a person just tells you what to believe. I also don’t mean in a direct “this is a well-researched movie about firefighters, and by watching it, I am learning what it is like to fight fires” way. I mean things like the show BILLIONS.

BILLIONS is about people who work in finance, and it’s probably totally wrong about what working in finance is really like, but the characters talk in references such that their conversations resemble hitting the random page button on wikipedia and after watching an episode, you can feel like, “wow, I hate these characters, and I wish they were all killed in a mass shooting but in watching them buzz around each other like autistic Hofstra undergrads I have probably picked up some random Snapple facts about Bruce Springsteen’s favorite strip club” or whatever.

The King of this type of writing is Aaron Sorkin.

Let me start by saying I am not an Aaron Sorkin hater. The next 5,000 words are going to make you think I hate Aaron Sorkin, so I want to be clear upfront that that isn’t the case. In fact, for many years, I would have described myself as a pure, uncut Aaron Sorkin fan. That is no longer true. Now I think he’s a bit hit & miss. And in retrospect, a lot of things I once loved, I think, are pretty flawed. But he is a straight-out wonderful playwright. I don’t mean you need to have read his plays to appreciate it. I mean, he’s a playwright in the sense that even his movies and TV shows are plays. He’s great at writing scenes of dialogue. He sets them up and knocks them down. And his dialogue schtick, while a schtick, is good schtick. It’s fun to watch his insufferable, self-righteous characters blather back and forth in repetitive ways as though some woke LLM was told to stylize David Mamet.

Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes the actors don’t know how to perform it. Sometimes the directors don’t know how to direct it. Sometimes Sorkin himself goes too far into his own ass and is just too preachy and annoying. But a lot of times it works.

The Sorkin Formula

Aaron Sorkin loves to do little info dumps by characters randomly and unnecessarily one-upping each other with fun facts they learned from a novelty calendar.

Fact-a-day calendars are fun and neat!

Unfortunately, this calendar is not a serious calendar. This is a novelty hoax calendar. This is a calendar that needs a Community Note.

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Remember earlier this spring when I did a couple of podcast episodes with Josh Barro and Megan McCardle? It was an exploratory pilot development situation. We did a few shows and then stopped to look at The Data™ and the feedback, and we spoke to some psychics and holy men and therapists and spouses and parole officers, and they were all fine with it, s…

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