Someday I may write about why I fell off the newsletter wagon for more than a year. But first, I want to talk to you about webcams.

Last week, Apple announced their first new mainstream computer monitor in more than a decade. The new Apple Studio Display is not the most impressive monitor, but with a 5K, wide-gamut color panel it’s pretty good. The new Studio also doesn’t have a full docking solution, in that it has 3 USB-C ports which will still require dongles, but at least the dongles can stay on your desk and be hidden out of sight.

This brings me to the webcam and speakers, especially the camera, which really ought to be its killer feature. We all need good cameras more than we used to, and because Apple is generally very good at getting attractive images out of tiny cameras.

Which is why it’s such a shock that early reviews say the Studio Display’s webcam is not only unimpressive — it’s actively bad.

Joanna Stern, The Wall Street Journal:

You can understand why I anticipated that the Studio Display’s webcam would be the GOAT (Greatest of All Time). Yet Apple’s camera consistently produced grainy and washed-out images. There was so much missing detail in some of the shots that it reminded me of the camera on my old BlackBerry. On the plus side: No one could see my frizzy hair.

Nilay Patel, The Verge:

Apple has a long history of producing amazing images with 12-megapixel sensors and A-series chips, and for some reason, this thing just looks awful.

Actually, it looks awful in good light and downright miserable in low light. I’ve tried it connected to the Mac Studio and on my MacBook Pro running macOS 12.3, and on both machines, it produces a grainy, noisy image with virtually no detail. Turning off the Center Stage feature that follows you around the room doesn’t help. Turning portrait mode on and off doesn’t help.

John Gruber, who you’d expect to find some way to call an Apple product industry-leading if at all possible:

Is the Studio Display camera unusable? No. I suppose it’s at least as good as the image quality from the camera on Apple silicon MacBooks. But that’s a low bar. How can the image quality from the camera on a $1600 display be so much worse — laughably worse — than the image quality from a $600 iPad Air that uses the exact same camera hardware? Let alone comparing it to the front-facing camera on the $430 iPhone SE, which makes the Studio Display camera look like a toy. And we waited years for Apple to ship this display.

…Multiple little birdies familiar with the Studio Display, each birdie independent of the others, tell me that the image quality problems really are a software problem, not hardware — a bug introduced at the last minute — and a future software update might not merely somewhat improve image quality, but raise it to a level commensurate with the iPad models equipped with the same camera.

It’s great that the badness is likely to be fixed in a software update, but my disappointment started even before the reviews came out, when Apple said they’d equipped this fancy new display with the same camera system as the iPad. I feel Apple has missed an opportunity to make a truly great, innovative webcam, and instead settled for just being the best in a crappy field.

Last year in a post for Reincubate —makers of Camo, an app that turns iPhones into excellent webcams — Jeff Carlson looked at several leading webcams and found that they’re all terrible:

Uneven color. Blown highlights. Smudgy detail, especially in low light. Any affordable webcam (even at the high end of affordability, $100+), uses inadequate and typically years-old hardware backed by mediocre software that literally makes you look bad. You might not notice this if you’re using video software that makes your own image small, but it will be obvious to other people on the call.

After two years of seeing co-workers mainly through grainy, poorly lit, often glitchy Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet video calls, we all want — nay, deserve — computer cameras that will make us look good.

Some of us have invested serious money and time in this. How many people have become “streamers” over the last year, with studio lights, fancy microphones on boom arms, and DSLR cameras hooked up to capture cards, only for their main “streams” to be work calls? This has led to a real haves vs have-nots situation where picky people with disposable income get to look like themselves at work, and others get to look like an impressionist painting.

The startup Opal has attracted lots of attention (not to mention people clamoring to give them $300) for their still-in-beta, invite-only webcam, which combines premium components (a big 4K sensor; an f/1.8, wide-angle lens) with smart software to produce video that looks like it came from a DSLR, at a fraction of the cost. (The Verge, Input, and Minimal Goods all have good hands-on reviews of the Opal.)

The look of Opal footage reflects a choice about the kind of camera they wanted to emulate: a $2,000 full-frame mirrorless camera, with a nice wide-open lens that produces the attractive, subtle optical blurring effect called bokeh. Opal’s Mac app can add bokeh to your image, just like Apple’s Portrait Mode, and also gives the user control over settings like exposure and color saturation, just the sort of thing someone would want if their ideal was basically a simpler, cheaper Canon EOS R.

“Good” is subjective, of course. Opal has pegged “good” as images that look like they were shot by a tasteful professional with high-end gear, which is probably the right move for a product that’s being marketed as a great solution for conferences and business meetings.

Apple’s definition of “good” is more controversial. In Apple’s phone cameras, the ideal isn’t just a clean photograph or video feed — it’s a fully processed (even over-processed) image, as Kyle Chayka discussed in his New Yorker piece about the iPhone cameras:

On the 12 Pro, the digital manipulations are aggressive and unsolicited. One expects a person’s face in front of a sunlit window to appear darkened, for instance, since a traditional camera lens, like the human eye, can only let light in through a single aperture size in a given instant. But on my iPhone 12 Pro even a backlit face appears strangely illuminated. …

Gregory Gentert, a friend who is a fine-art photographer in Brooklyn, told me, “I’ve tried to photograph on the iPhone when light gets bluish around the end of the day, but the iPhone will try to correct that sort of thing.” A dusky purple gets edited, and in the process erased, because the hue is evaluated as undesirable, as a flaw instead of a feature. The device “sees the things I’m trying to photograph as a problem to solve,” he added.

The qualities Apple cameras optimize for, like rich colors and clear, bright faces, are generally good things to have in a photograph, and definitely what you’d want in a webcam image. And I truly think Apple applies such aggressive processing because most of the time it results in pictures people really like.

The problem is that Apple applies this processing indiscriminately and too much. Their smart cameras have no concept of “natural,” and the Apple engineers that programmed them seem to love showy HDR photos so much that they taught our phone cameras to eradicate all shadows.

Here is me, on my couch, with the laptop camera on my M1 Max MacBook Pro (which is probably close to what one can expect from the Studio Display):

Is this fine? I mean, yeah, this could be a lot worse. But the cloudy daylight in the windows is throwing off the color balance, making anything lit by indoor LED light (like me) look orange or pink. The camera is doing its best to bring out details in my face, but in doing so it’s making me look flattened.

This is a bad scene, and it seems crazy to expect any laptop or tablet camera to make it look good. But I’d love for Apple to try! Yet it seems like, given an opportunity to shift all of our expectations for home office webcams, Apple is content to just deliver a camera that is merely less terrible.

My judgment here is based not on the Studio Display camera’s awful (and likely temporary) current performance, but on Apple’s marketing for it, which emphasizes Center Stage (Apple’s gimmicky, annoying auto-centering tech) as the killer feature, as if people walking in and out of frame at your desk and not being perfectly composed is a problem any of us have had in the last 2 years, or ever.

Even in this marketing shot which should show the camera at its best, the images seem… dull. This shows a scene with bright, diffuse light, plants, books, brightly colored fabrics and beautiful, rich skin tones. This image should pop. Instead, it looks merely okay. It doesn’t even seem all that crisp or clear; the woman’s face on the right looks almost as fuzzy as if she were being filmed by a $99 Logitech camera, not a $1,600 smart display.

If Apple can be credited for anything in this picture, it’s honesty. This image looks a lot like the bland, flat picture from my MacBook webcam, which tells me this is probably what we can expect from the Studio Display once the launch bugs are fixed. And this is better than nothing, which is what we’ve had from Apple displays for the last eight years.

But I was hoping to be able to put away my elaborate Sony ZV-1 streamer setup and stop dreaming about someday getting an Opal, because Apple would have done something interesting here. It saddens me that they didn’t. I’m still getting a Studio Display — the screen and speakers do sound as impressive as I hoped — but I’ll be keeping my standalone camera around too.

When I mentioned on Twitter that I was writing about webcams, my friend Peter Merholz asked the totally obvious question: which webcam should I buy? And I was like, duh of course one would expect some info about that in a 2,000 word piece about webcams.

My current camera setup is a Sony ZV-1 ($750), a little point-and-shoot camera that can capture 4K video and RAW photos, with a 1” sensor and built-in Zeiss zoom lens. I have it hooked up to an Elgato Cam Link capture card ($130) via a $10 HDMI cable from Amazon, and because the Sony is prone to running out of battery partway through a work day, I have a $20 dummy battery that powers the camera. And I light myself with an Elgato Key Light ($200), though any of Elgato’s cheaper video lights would probably do just as well. The camera also needs to be mounted on something; Elgato (yep, them again!) sells a $30 solid arm that attaches to the mounting pole for my Key Light that works well. That’s $1,140 all together, and I’d call this a beginner setup. 🙀

For something far simpler, Elgato also makes a high-end webcam, the Facecam ($170), which is the size of a small potato and has no microphone or autofocus, but makes up for it with a huge lens and sensor that can capture very crisp, clear images.

I haven’t tried the Logitech Brio ($160) — a 4K camera that lots of people like — though I did buy a 1080p Logitech Streamcam ($150) early in the pandemic. The Streamcam has a worse sensor but bigger lens; it’s OK, but I tend to think the Facecam is a better value and a better fit for my needs.

Really, my answer is that it’s not the webcam, it’s the lighting. It’s true that most cheap webcams can make even a well-lit scene look like shit, but good lighting — diffuse, bright, set at a 45º angle from your face so your features are well defined — always helps. I recommend Elgato’s Key Light Air ($130) if you’re looking to level-up your Zoom image with a laptop or display camera; it’s not too big and comes with a tabletop stand. But being thoughtful about camera placement and making good use of a nearby lamp can work wonders too.

As of this writing I haven’t gotten to try Opal’s C1 webcam ($300, if you can get one) though I hear it’s amazing and if anyone out there has an invite code or wants me to write a very detailed review, my email is david@demaree.me. 😉

April 17, 2021 • Day 400

Hi friends. I know, it’s been a minute.

I was gonna do a thing where I put in the datelines from all six or seven of my abandoned Issue #14’s scratched out, but while Substack (apparently) does support transphobia or harassment so long as it attracts paying subscribers, they do not currently support the scratching-out of text for comic effect. 🤷🏻‍♂️

That today is Day 400 is just a coincidence, but while we’re on the subject: at some point, it was unthinkable that we’d still be in “lockdown” or “quarantine” longer than a few weeks. But almost immediately after that, it seemed inevitable that we’d be in this situation for at least this long.

At this point, my wife and I are both fully vaccinated (with the oh-so-fashionable, not-blood-clot-inducing Möderná shot), as are her parents, who are coming to visit on Monday.

We both became eligible in January, when New Jersey opened up vaccinations to people with preëxisting conditions. Here where we live in Essex County, most vaccinations are being done at a network of county-run super-sites. The Livingston Sears site is friendly, professional, and efficient — a model of what government can be, of how it is in places that care about taking care of people.

Also on Monday: our 6-year-old, who is obviously not vaccinated, is returning to (part-time, hybrid-model) in-person school for the first time in over a year. Life is returning to normal-ish, but as always it’s uncanny normalcy. My daughter will going to a classroom, but bringing her Chromebook so she can do her virtual lessons in the same room as her teacher and classmates, while masked, distanced, and snack-less.

Despite the vaccination floodgates now being open throughout metro NYC, my office remains closed with no ETA for reopening. I feel safe doing my own grocery shopping, but it seems like no one else does — except the Amazon Prime delivery shoppers, of course.

Data scientist Youyang Gu, whose track record for predicting the course of the pandemic has been pretty good, projected in February that the U.S. would achieve high enough levels of population immunity by July for things to return to “normal,” which Gu defined as the point where most remaining Covid restrictions could be lifted.

Based on where we are, relative to where Gu thought, that seems plausible… but it’s fair to wonder whether the absence of mask mandates or the ability to go to the movies are actually “normal,” or just another new world we have to learn to live in.

A Demaree & Demaree joint

For a while my six-year-old daughter, June, has been into reading comics and graphic novels. Most of the ones she gets are way over her head, with teen-friendly storylines and sophisticated jokes. But she loves (and can follow) the visual storytelling. And, being six, anything she loves she will ask for constantly on repeat.

I went to art school and received training in drawing, painting, and sculpture, and then went on to spend most of my adult life doing computer and business things and hardly ever drawing or painting. Having built all the Legos, perfected my WFH desk, and made most of the cocktails in all my books, helping my kid achieve her (TBH) insane creative vision has been a great pandemic project.

June loves bunnies as much as she loves comics. For one of the first comic strips she demand—I mean, requested, she asked me to make a comic about a bunny that lost its egg. I decided to have some fun with the bunny’s reactions to the situation.

Much later she asked for a comic about bunnies at “Easter Club,” which on subsequent pages of this four-page epic was retconned to the “Easter Egg Academy,” the organization that sends Easter Bunnies around the world to deliver baskets and eggs. As you can see, it’s time to discuss EGG BUSINESS.

In another multi-page comic, some kittens’ naps had been disturbed by one of their friends making a racket. Here, the friend tries many ways to make it up to them, to no avail.

This week, she asked me — where by “asked” I mean she walked over, placed my lap desk on my lap, then silently handed me a PaperMate Flair pen and a stack of Post-It Notes — to make a “Unicorn’s Handbook” with all the lessons one needs to be a great unicorn. This was lesson number one:

For a recent bathtime drawing, continuing a deep interest in cats doing things, June asked me to draw a cat scientist creating a cat robot, with a control panel on its chest. (That’s it, that’s the design brief.)

Later, she asked me to do a non-bath-tile-based version, which I used as an excuse to try out Adobe’s Fresco drawing app for iPad. Here’s the level of mad-scientist-cat-drawing I can achieve with time and extra layers to plan out my work:

Most recently, she asked for a comic called “Gross, Carlos!” which is ostensibly about a Corgi named Carlos who does gross things. That said, she then named six or seven other dog characters — all with elaborate hairstyles, for some reason? — who she wanted to see first, such as Ellie English Bulldog, Greg and Greta Great Dane, and Naima Newfoundland. (The little scribbly dog peeking at the edge is Carlos Corgi, crowded out of his own comic.)

My other current project is moving my website and blog to WordPress, and with all this new practice drawing, I decided that instead of an uncomfortably cropped or color-graded photo of myself on my new homepage, I would try making a self-portrait in Fresco (with a guest appearance by my dog, Johnny Cash). Look for a version of this drawing on my site redesign, coming soon:

Anyway, I hope all your side projects are going well, and that if you’re not already part of the Pfizer Pham, Moderna Mob, or Johnson & Johnson Blood-Clot Crew, that you get your shots soon.

Until next time,
-DD

November 30, 2020 • Day 263

This week there are some notable birthdays! I turn 40, and SARS-CoV-2 turns 1.

One year ago, more or less, a novel coronavirus spilled over from a bat or pangolin in central China to its first-ever human host, who passed it to others, who passed it to more, resulting in the first recorded cases of the illness that would later be named Covid-19. It would be over a month before reports of a new virus started to gain traction in Western media, over two months before the Diamond Princess or the Chinese lockdown and U.S. travel ban, all of which were before the first confirmed U.S. cases, before the outbreak in Italy, before everything.

It’s hard to remember now, but there were more than two months in 2020 where news coverage wasn’t just about the coronavirus or the election, and what virus or election coverage there was tended to have much narrower angles, because these stories hadn’t yet taken over the whole of human (or at least American) experience. This Feb 7 episode of the Eater podcast, featuring an interview with Hong Kong-based food writer Andrew Genung talking about the impact of Covid (which wasn’t yet called Covid) on the local dining scene, feels like a time capsule from another era.

The first Covid case was diagnosed on Dec 1, 2019; I turned 39 on December 3. This week I’m turning 40 in a world that has been turned fully upside down by the virus that emerged a year ago. Hopefully, next year I’ll turn 41 in a world where things are starting to turn back toward normalcy. And there’s reason to hope that’ll be the case.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this tweet, and huge scientific achievement represented by the list of dates and vaccine milestones in it:

As impressive as it is that medical science will have gone from the first known case of a novel virus to the first effective vaccinations against it in just 376 days — beating the previous record for vaccine development by more than 3 years, which was for a disease (mumps) that had been around for ages — that timeline actually obscures the real achievement here.

Moderna and the NIH designed their vaccine just five days after the virus’s genome was sequenced, which in turn was a little over a month after it was first discovered, which was likely delayed by an initial cover-up or reflexive denial by Chinese health authorities. The vaccine they designed in January is more or less the same one that will be deployed starting this month; everything since then has been testing and validation.

I think there’s a story in there for tech folks about the value of platforms. mRNA vaccine tech (as used by both Moderna and Pfizer) has been around for years, but never used in a shipping product. It’s a new ‘tech stack’ for vaccines, which means it’s relatively expensive, and the viruses for which we’d most need a new, rapidly developed vaccine are complex ones like HIV, Ebola, or Zika that are harder to vaccinate against. In a way, Covid is the perfect target for this kind of approach: it has exactly one weird genetic trick (the spike protein, which binds hard and fast to our ACE2 receptors if our immune systems don’t know to block it) and it mutates slowly (meaning that an effective vaccine is likely to stay effective longer than, say, a flu vaccine).

Today’s episode of the NYT’s Daily podcast is all about when and how we’ll get these vaccines. Pharma reporter Katie Thomas cites a recent CNN interview with Dr. Moncef Slaoui, head of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program, who says we could achieve a herd immunity threshold (of around 70%) in the U.S. as soon as May 2021 — months earlier than previous estimates. That seems wildly optimistic, but so far nearly everything in the timeline for these vaccines has gone according to plan, which only underscores the scientific achievement.

Of course, even the best plans seldom survive contact with the enemy, and we’re overdue for a real setback. Maybe it’ll be people not wanting to get vaccinated. Maybe it’ll be major logistical problems delivering these vaccines and administering the cold-frozen, two-shot doses to everyone who needs them. Maybe Republicans will shut down the government just to make Joe Biden look bad.

But for now I say we take the win. This will have been a lost year for many people. I owe my wife an answer about whether I want takeout or a home-cooked meal for my birthday — both sound good, but neither is what I really want, which is a meal out of the house in a restaurant that is full of people and not under threat from a deadly virus.

The day when we can all do that again is coming, if not in May than by this time next year.

Here are some things I’ve been into and up to this week:

I’ve been playing a lot of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity on my Nintendo Switch. It’s a spinoff/prequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, set during the war against Ganon 100 years earlier that kicked off the previous game’s story. Hyrule Warriors is a “hack and slash” game, not an open world adventure — you control a party of playable characters (Link, Zelda, the four Champions, others too) and just go to town on monsters, trying to clear levels and rack up as many KOs as you can.

In the middle-to-late game, part of the challenge is multitasking: you’ll have to defeat multiple bosses at different points on the map, while also defending a position or protecting someone — if you can’t manage to do it all, you lose. Winning means not just beating the shit out of Guardians and Lynels, but making the best use of your multiple characters and deploying them to the right places on the map.

In other levels, you control one of BotW’s giant robot animals, the Divine Beasts, the object being to defeat literally tens of thousands of monsters — whole armies — within a time limit.

The game is developed by Koei Tecmo, not Nintendo, but the Zelda creative team (and BotW’s voice actors) were involved. It’s not as perfect or engrossing as Breath of the Wild (I mean, what even is?) but it’s lots of fun.

Somehow I made it to now without ever using a Samsung device. That changed a couple weeks ago, when I got a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2 (😅) for work “research.” (I kid, it actually is for a work project.) It’s a really weird, interesting device — folded up it’s a weirdly tall and thick candybar-shaped smartphone, that unfolds into a square-shaped, Kindle-sized tablet.

I can’t say I recommend this phone — it’s $2,000 unlocked (though Samsung offers trade-in deals and payment plans that lower the price) and one could get literally any other flagship phone on the market and still have hundreds of dollars left over. And because it’s Android, and my family is so bought into Apple’s ecosystem, it’s hard for me to fully commit to using it — I end up also carrying an iPhone for iMessage, Things, Apple Watch stuff, etc.

On the other hand, it’s really cool to show off, and the Kindle-ish shape and size are surprisingly appealing. It’s not quite big enough to be used as a tablet, but a nice size for a really big phone that collapses into a smaller phone, and the cameras are pretty nice.

Lastly, for a long Thanksgiving weekend project, my 6-year-old and I built the enormous, 4,000 piece LEGO Disney Castle. Once upon a time our family was slated to go to Disney World this week (as our backup plan for an originally scheduled trip in April). When those plans (and all the plans) fell through, I snagged this set over the summer so we could build a bit of Disney magic at home.

Stay safe and happy, everyone. Talk to y’all again next week.

—DD

November 17, 2020 • Day 250

I skipped last week’s newsletter because, frankly, there were already too many takes flying around, and I didn’t have the energy to shoot one off myself. You’ve probably heard the oft-quoted saying, “don’t talk unless you can improve on the silence.” Researching this just now I’ve seen it attributed most often to Jorge Luis Borges, but also to American politician Edmund Muskie, spiritualist Anthony de Mello, generically as a “Spanish proverb,” Anjelica Huston’s character in the movie Ever After, and really to whoever someone heard say it last. I think I heard it last from designer Mike Monteiro, or maybe on Instagram.

Anyway, there isn’t nearly enough silence in our lives right now, so maybe we need a corollary saying: don’t talk unless you can somehow improve on the noise. One advantage of this being a small list for about 25 friends, as opposed to (say) a paid newsletter going out to hundreds or thousands of subscribers, is that I can take a week off without having to tell anyone about it if I don’t think I have anything interesting to add.

After skipping a week, I decided to hold this one for a couple of days to mark a milestone—250 days since my family began staying home because of Covid. Everyone else’s ‘lockdown’ may have begun at different times, usually a bit later, some a bit earlier. But we’re all at or close to hitting 250 days of this. Sometime in January it’ll be 300; in March, which is not far off at all, it’ll have been a full year.

The best news of the past two weeks, other than Biden winning the election, has been that the first two U.S. Covid vaccine trials have returned early efficacy data — and both look really, really good. Pfizer’s vaccine looks 90% effective, and Moderna’s looks 94% effective (and theirs remains stable under normal refrigeration, unlike Pfizer’s which requires cold storage and special handling). In an interview this week, Dr. Fauci subtly revised his estimate for when the U.S. will return to normal from late 2021 to “the second or third quarter,” based on the strength of these results.

But this ray of hope depends on people taking the vaccine, which in turn depends on some entity like the U.S. government coordinating a vaccination program, and citizens being willing to show up to get vaccinated.

The biggest threats to the former are Donald Trump’s continued lack of interest in doing his job, and stubborn, dangerous refusal to hand that job off to Joe Biden. The biggest threat to the latter is many Americans’ wild belief that Covid, and this whole pandemic, are a political hoax.

Trump and Republicans have now spent over a week refusing to concede. GOP leaders keep saying they want to “count every LEGAL vote” (which, like most of what they say, is doublespeak), that the election isn’t over and they’ll honor the result when it’s finalized.

More reasonable Republicans (a group that apparently includes Trump’s National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien) have adopted this wishy-washy, ‘Schrödinger’s election result’ position, saying that there should be a smooth, stable transition to a Biden administration — if he wins, when (or if) the election is finally settled. This way people like O’Brien get to acknowledge norms and probabilities, while also stating a preference for an outcome that has already been ruled out.

In a New York Times op-ed published today, Portuguese politician and author Bruno Maçães proposes that what Trump is selling to his rabid fanbase — which other Republicans are trying to leverage and get a piece of — is an extreme form of freedom, which Maçães calls “hyperfreedom:”

What Mr. Trump promised was the power to create imaginary worlds and the freedom to unleash a selfish and extravagant fantasy life, free of the constraints of political correctness or even good manners, the limits imposed by climate change and the international rules tying America to the ground. This extreme form of freedom — call it hyperfreedom — appealed to Greenwich, Conn., financiers no less than to West Virginia coal miners. It was also, as we found out in the election, attractive to some minorities.

In the traditional way to think about freedom, we want to limit or even eliminate obstacles to individual choice, but ultimately we must deal with reality. Mr. Trump’s example is to take it an extra step: Why not be free from reality as well? Indeed, this may be the ultimate goal of contemporary America: a society that is pure fantasy life, free from reality.

Covid-19 is perhaps the best lens through which to view Mr. Trump’s hyperfreedom — and its limits. Mr. Trump seemed to take the pandemic’s arrival on American shores as a personal insult. If only he could wish it away, re-election would be assured. He tried: the questions about its seriousness and lethality; the outdoor and indoor rallies and gatherings (sometimes, as with the announcement of Amy Coney Barrett as his Supreme Court nominee, both on the same day); the refusal to model simple public health tactics like masks; the drumbeat of assurances that it would soon pass.

It’s worth noting that Maçães, while (apparently) anti-Trump, is not necessarily a friend. His recent book History Has Begun imagines a bright post-liberal future for America; it’s been described as “brilliantly contrarian” and has blurbs from folks like Niall Ferguson (a scholar at the same conservative think tank that gave us Scott Atlas) and Marc Andreessen.

But Maçães does at least appear to be pro-reality, and with this phrase and framing he elegantly explains the lens through which Trumpers (and anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, Birthers, truthers, and other reality-deniers) view the world.

Trump and his most ardent followers believe in whatever reality is most convenient, whatever requires the least of them. It’s an extreme but also extremely lazy kind of libertarianism. Where ‘classic’ libertarians have to struggle to form a political and moral framework within the bounds of real-world society, hyperfreedom fans can just do whatever the fuck they want, without regard to constraints or consequences, because none of that shit is real to them. Hyperfreedom is the freedom to not think.

A few weeks ago, my wife’s parents (both over 75, one in poor health) attended an indoor party near their home in Michigan. This despite their children asking them to please take Covid seriously, for the sake of their ten grandchildren. About 2 weeks after this party, my mother-in-law had to be hospitalized with pneumonia; it turned out two other people who attended also came down with pneumonia. None of them tested positive, and one doctor suggested it could be Legionnaires Disease. Maybe it was Legionnaires Disease. But when three people develop a severe respiratory disease around the same time, during a global pandemic of a respiratory virus, how likely is it that this wasn’t a mini-superspreader event?

My in-laws don’t have a good answer for why they attended an indoor gathering during a pandemic. As far as I know, they don’t regret it, because it doesn’t occur to them that they made a choice that may have had consequences — they just did what felt right and normal. You can’t feel guilty for something you don’t recognize that you did.

That’s hyperfreedom for you. Hyperfreedom makes everything someone else’s problem, which in practice means it’s no one’s problem because the problems aren’t real. Either way, hyperfreedom means the freedom for important things to be none of your business, even if the world would be better off if they were your business a little bit.

This tweet thread has been making the rounds today, from an ER doctor in South Dakota who’s treated many Covid patients who, despite them or their loved ones suffering and dying from Covid, still do not believe that Covid is real:

It’s become a cliche to call Republicans and their supporters a “death cult,” which seemed a bit of an extreme label before Covid, but now seems tragically apt. It seems there are two kinds of right-wing viewpoints on Covid:

1. It’s real but not a big deal, liberals and the media are exaggerating it to score points and take down Donald Trump

2. It’s not real, liberals and the media invented it to destroy freedom and take down Donald Trump

I worry this is a bit reductive — I’m reading WaPo literary critic Carlos Lozado’s book What Were We Thinking, a survey of Trump-era books, where a recurring theme is authors and pundits using Trump and Trumpism (which may not even exist as a coherent ideology) as support for whatever viewpoint they held previously. Religious conservatives think the Trump era means we need more religion; progressives think it means we need to go all-in on progressive policies.

No one seems to have adequately done a root cause analysis on American’s extreme distrust of one another along partisan lines — obviously race and class are factors but neither racial nor economic resentment work on their own to explain how we got here.

So, on one hand, I’m hesitant to paint “conservatives” with any particular brush (other than expecting they think I hate them and want to take away their freedom).

On the other hand, clearly some strain of “conservatism” has broken with reality and — either out of a sense of hyperfreedom or a cultivated hatred of liberals — will deny Covid is real even as it kills them. If they won’t believe in Covid while being treated for it, the odds of them willingly being vaccinated for it seem impossible.

And while those people lay claim to the freedom not to believe in the virus, unfortunately, the virus can still lay claim to their bodies. As far as I know, several of our extended family members are still gathering in Michigan for Thanksgiving next week, and in the meantime are still going out, meeting up, living their hyperfree lives. The winter is going to be very, very bad.

I don’t remember where I heard this line, but it’s stuck with me: you should tell the truth, if for no other reason than it’s easier to remember than whatever lies you’ve told.

In a recent Gallup poll — conducted after the election, but before Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna’s vaccine results were made public — 58% of Americans said they would take a Covid vaccine, up from 50% before the election. Progress!

What’s changed since then? Covid has gotten much worse, and lies about it from Trump and mainstream Republicans have slowed. Also, people can see a near future under the Biden administration, where the FDA and CDC are not politicized and can be trusted again. Word that the vaccines are approaching readiness is coming not from Trump — who nonetheless is trying to claim credit for them as if he’s still running for something — but from pharma companies and science reporters. Reality is resurgent, at least a little bit.

To be sure, Republicans are still nutso on this issue — when MI Gov. Gretchen Whitmer reinstituted quasi-lockdown in response to the rapidly rising infection rate, Trump’s favorite quack Scott Atlas tweeted that people should “rise up” and resist the public health measures. Trump himself has not changed his mind, but may be too distracted by his election loss, whatever graft he can get done before January, and golfing to be as aggressive about spreading misinformation.

Many people are being admitted to Covid wards and ICUs not believing Covid exists. Some of them will never be discharged, leaving the hospital in a body bag to be loaded onto a refrigerated truck. Some will come home still believing the virus is fake but Joe Biden’s plot to hand America over to communists is real. But some will come home having been reminded firsthand what is real. Hopefully they’ll tell their friends about their experiences, and that their friends care enough to listen.

November 2, 2020 • Day 235

Well, folks, we made it. Tomorrow is Election Day—one way or another, the U.S. presidential election will move out of the realm of hypotheticals, of polling models and insane debating strategies and threats to not concede, and into concrete reality.

There are folks on Twitter convinced that not only might the polls be wrong, but that polling doesn’t even matter, because the election will be decided by legal strategems, voter intimidation, and strongman tactics by an emboldened, all-powerful conservative gang. This Twitter crew are not just skeptical of models and data, they’re angry at the suggestion of anyone talking about this election as if it will be decided by the voters.

Then again, that was Saturday, when it looked like Texas Republicans were poised to get 127,000 Harris County ballots cast at drive-thru early voting sites thrown out the day before the election. As I wrote here last week, in discussing the SCOTUS ruling in DNC v Wisconsin Legislature, GOP lawyers and jurists’ big new strategy to get “the ballots” thrown out is to argue that local election authorities can’t change election processes or rules in response to the pandemic, because the U.S. Constitution only allows state legislatures to do that.

Something I didn’t appreciate when I wrote that other post is just how brazen and extreme this argument is—sure, the Constitution doesn’t explicitly guarantee a right to vote, but no one has ever tried to put these principles in conflict with each other in a Chewbacca Defense-like maneuver to throw out thousands of votes. A lot of our anxiety has come from believing that all these courts that Trump and McConnell have been packing all these years would, naturally, issue partisan decisions and side with Republicans.

Which is why it’s such great news that both the (all-Republican) Texas Supreme Court and a (Republican-appointed, very Republican) U.S. District Court judge shot the Harris County case down big time. As reported by the Texas Tribune (bolds mine):

In his ruling from the bench, Hanen said he rejected the case on narrow grounds because the plaintiffs did not show they would be harmed if the drive-thru ballots are counted. He noted, however, that the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals could think differently if the cases reaches them. The Republican plaintiffs are appealing the decision.

If he had ruled on the larger issues in the case, Hanen said he would have rejected the request to toss out votes already cast. But Hanen said he would have shut down Harris County's drive-thru polling places for Election Day, because the tents being used for the sites don't qualify as voting inside a "building,"a requirement under state election law.

It’s indecent that the plaintiffs would even bring such a lawsuit, and unsatisfying that Judge Hanen rejected it for technical reasons (the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the suit and could not demonstrate harm) while signaling an openness to the absurd argument that it matters whether or not voting happens inside a “building” or not.

But he echoed part of SCOTUS’s Oct 6 ruling regarding South Carolina’s witness requirement in saying he would not have thrown out ballots already cast. While conservative judges have been willing to limit and even roll back COVID-era changes to voting access, they’ve also not let these cases serve as pretext to throw out votes.

All to say: yeah, Trump says this election may end up in the Supreme Court. It’s actually already ended up there six or more times, and will probably be there again. Depending on which places have which vote margins tomorrow (and beyond), there may be court battles that shape the outcome of the election. Or there may not be. There are some glimmers of life left in our institutions and rule of law. And, in all likelihood, the next president will be chosen by voters, not Federal courts.

As historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her newsletter:

But on this night of calm before the storm, I am the opposite of discouraged.

I am excited about our democracy and our future. … We are taking back our country, and once we have done so, we will find that no problem is insurmountable.

Democracy is rising. It might not win on Tuesday—no jinxing here!—but if not then, the week after that, or the month after, or the year after. After more than thirty years studying our country's history, I have come to believe in American democracy with an almost religious faith.

I know it’s frightening to hear the stories of Republican leaders trying to get ballots thrown out, and right-wing thugs intimidating Biden voters, and so on. But that Republicans feel the need to engage in such tactics despite their ongoing voter suppression and gerrymandering is a tell-tale sign that they know their party has lost any hope of winning a majority of voters, and that the only way they can win an election is to cheat.

That strategy is not sustainable.

Today it’s been reported that Trump is having “un-scalable walls” built around the area surrounding the White House where he plans to hold a victory celebration tomorrow night. (Is Mexico paying for these walls too?) Not a great look for someone who will, in all likelihood, claim to have been re-elected legitimately as leader of a democracy.

Likewise, while people have asked with actual concern if things are okay here in New Jersey, given news reports that a Trumpist truck caravan shut down traffic on the Garden State Parkway, I agree with NJ Governor Phil Murphy who said “boy, to me that was was silly.” It sure will be awkward when a bunch of these people get traffic citations or court summons in the mail. Trumpism is fundamentally ridiculous and, yes, unsustainable. Obstinately shutting down things the public relies upon is their only move, and it’s really stupid. (I mean, could they have maybe chosen a less silly place for their brave stand than a rest stop in a place named Cheesequake?)

Anyway, we’ll — finally — see what happens this week.

October 27, 2020 • Day 229

Here in the U.S., Election Day is one week from today. I started writing this for next weekend’s newsletter, but, I mean, this is a long piece about voting, and what if you haven’t made your plan to vote yet?! So I decided to send it today as a special bonus edition.

Every year, but especially this year, even though we talk about Election Day as if it’s the only day when Americans choose leaders, it really marks the end of voting for an election. Early voting has been happening for weeks; mail-in voting started even before that.

In a normal year, poll closings on Election Day would mark the deadline by which everyone who wants to vote must vote, as well as (in some states) the postmark deadline for absentee/mail-in ballots, or (in others) the receipt deadline for those ballots. This year, some states have extended those deadlines and others haven’t. Some of those extensions have been challenged in court; some of those challenges were successful, some weren’t; some unsuccessful challenges have been overturned on appeal, some are still pending.

In the last few weeks/months, I’ve picked up the bad habit of saying/tweeting things like 40% of Americans support Trump and his agenda whyyyyyyyyy. But it’s important to remember that in the United States voting is optional. In a normal year, up to half of all eligible voters skip the election. Why? Because voting is harder than it ought to be, and people don’t feel they get much out of it.

There were a few different articles about this in the last week (mostly just Sunday and yesterday):

The NYT went to East Stroudsburg, PA — incidentally, the literal first town across the border from NJ, or the least far from Manhattan an NYT reporter would have to drive to talk to Pennsylvanians — and spoke with people who not only skipped the 2016 election but plan to skip this one too:

They expressed a profound distrust of politics and doubted their vote would have an effect. They felt a sense of foreboding about the country and saw politics as one of the main forces doing the threatening. Many were not particularly partisan, and said they shrank from people who were.

FiveThirtyEight (with the polling firm Ipsos) surveyed voters about their plans to vote or not, and also analyzed publicly accessible voting records, and found that Americans fall into three categories: always-voters, sometimes-voters, and nearly-never-voters.

People who sometimes vote were a plurality of the group (44 percent), while 31 percent nearly always cast a ballot and just 25 percent almost never vote. … Many of the people we spoke with described their decision to vote as very personal, boiling down to the specific candidates, their own ability to navigate the electoral system that year, or whether they thought their vote would matter. But for others, being a “nonvoter” or a “sometimes voter” wasn’t really a choice. There are clear barriers to casting a ballot that many of them experienced.

Meanwhile, Terry Nguyen — who writes gen yeet, a newsletter about Gen-Z culture — wrote about the other side of the coin: people and brands who’ve deputized themselves “voting influencers”, and the ways that America and her voting process are “federalist as fuck”:

Everyone and everything within a 2-mile radius of my Brooklyn-based universe has spent the past month reminding me to vote. I walk past “VOTE” signs and stickers plastered on the sidewalk and construction plywood. Through e-mails and Facebook ads, Nike, Chipotle, Lyft, and Amazon urge me to check my registration and vote early if I can. On Instagram, a girl from my high school who I haven’t seen in 8 years posts voting PSAs and state-by-state registration deadlines.

… Voting is not compulsory in the U.S., nor is voter registration automatic or simple. There isn’t a federal holiday for citizens to take time off from work to vote, and thanks to a law passed by Congress in the 19th century, Election Day always falls on a Tuesday in November. Sure, our corporate overlords have stepped in, effectively branding themselves as stewards of democracy, although if you scrutinized some companies’ Election Day policies under a microscope, they’re usually not as flexible as advertised. 

That means, at a federal level, workers and students don’t have mandated time off (although laws for voting leave do vary by state, because again, we’re federalist as fuck). 

All of this has a significant impact on young voters, who have historically been blamed for their apathy or ideological disengagement towards the political process. But neither are accurate diagnoses for the bleak 46 percent turnout rate among voters ages 18-29. It’s a pretty bleak number, but one that can be improved by reducing systemic barriers and implementing same-day voter registration.

In a low-turnout year, with only 50% of eligible adults voting, that can mean as few as 20-25% of the electorate are the ones actually deciding things for all of us, and they — we? — tend to be individuals who already have a lot of political and social power: people with money, people with free time, white people, older people.

Minority rule has been a feature of American democracy from the jump. The framers probably thought this was a feature, not a bug, because it meant that only the most engaged, informed citizens would be able to set the direction of the nation. But that implies they thought it wasn’t enough to just live in a society to have a say in how it runs. Decisions in the U.S. are made by those who show up to vote, and those who don’t or can’t show up have to rely on the good grace of those who do.

We haven’t done a great job.

Did you know the Constitution does not explicitly grant a right to vote?

The text of the Constitution says more about protecting slavery than about anyone being guaranteed the right to vote. Seriously, the word “vote” appears in the document only in the context of how our elected officials vote toward certain ends; it’s silent on how we, the people in whose name the Constitution was adopted, pick those officials.

Not even the Bill of Rights — which covers many of the individual rights and freedoms not mentioned by the main Constitution, which was mainly concerned with how to design a government to replace British rule — enshrines anyone’s right to vote. The 15th Amendment, which guarantees former slaves the right to vote, was in fact the first time voting rights were codified in the Constitution for anyone. And, if we’re being pedantic, the 15th and 19th Amendments don’t guarantee the right to vote so much as require that it not be limited on the basis of race, gender, or ‘previous condition of servitude.’

I’m not a Constitutional or legal scholar, so I’m not qualified to speak to what writings or judicial precedents have held over the years, but as far as I know no one has ever had to worry about the Constitution not being explicit enough about the basic right to vote, because it’s clearly the foundation of everything. The Constitution doesn’t say that citizens can vote, but it guarantees a “republican form of government” to all states, and what kind of willful idiots would read that and grow up in this nation and not simply assume that individuals have the right to vote, or that that right should trump everything else because it’s the bedrock on which our republic was built?

Conservative constitutional ‘originalists’ — that’s what kind of idiots. Originalists, and the ‘textualists’ that preceded them, believe that the Constitution and all other laws mean exactly what they say, no more and no less. Rights that are not explicitly granted are up for debate, and arguments that hinge on what the framers thought but did not write into the document itself can be batted aside as hearsay.

Now, there are some implicit rights that it would be absurd to say don’t exist. The right to vote is probably one of these — the text of the 13th and 19th Amendments make no sense if there is no right to vote. But because the individual’s right to vote is not explicitly prioritized over, say, states’ rights to govern their own elections, there’s plenty of fertile and dangerous ground where an originalist could deny people — maybe a lot of people — their votes, so long as such denial was based on procedural grounds, and not explicitly on the basis of race or sex.

Originalists, being willful idiots, are willing to allow systematic vote suppression or gerrymandering so long as the suppressors don’t admit they’re trying to prevent Black people or women from voting.

This is a good time to pause and acknowledge that, last night, Senate Republicans representing a minority of U.S. citizens — but a majority of U.S. states — voted to confirm now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Barrett has only been a judge for three years, and prior to that had (like her colleague Brett Kavanaugh) worked as a conservative legal scholar, with little or no trial experience in her career to date. Barrett and Kavanaugh are both originalists, and Barrett is furthermore a religious ideologue.

They serve alongside an O.G. originalist, Clarence Thomas, and two other (slightly) less dogmatic but equally conservative judges, Alito and Gorsuch. Chief Justice John Roberts is, by the warped standards of this court, the ideological center, and was until last month the swing vote. There is a solid 5-4 majority (likely to be joined often as not by Roberts) who interpret the Constitution — a document shorter than most “1-pagers” at my work — so narrowly as to deny rights to basically anyone and everyone, although conveniently they tend to only use this superpower when it benefits the GOP’s political base and donor class.

Only two of those six conservative justices were appointed by a president who won the popular vote: Thomas (by George H.W. Bush in 1990) and Roberts (by George W. Bush, during his second term following his clear election win in 2004). Three of the six were appointed by Donald Trump, and all were confirmed by Senate Republicans representing a minority of U.S. citizens (but, of course, a majority of U.S. states).

I actually read DNC v Wisconsin Legislature

Some legal writing is opaque and impenetrable, but appellate court decisions and opinions — a genre that includes all of SCOTUS’s ouevre — tend to be readable, clear, and mercifully concise.

Yesterday, SCOTUS ruled to overturn a District Court decision in Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature, allowing the Republican-dominated Wisconsin legislature to enforce a strict Election Day deadline for receipt of mail-in ballots. Justice Gorsuch, concurring, wrote:

The Constitution provides that state legislatures—not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials—bear primary responsibility for setting election rules. And the Constitution provides a second layer of protection too. If state rules need revision, Congress is free to alter them. … Legislators can be held accountable by the people for the rules they write or fail to write; typically, judges cannot.

These are some good points! They seem reasonable! And it’s quite reasonable to suggest that the DNC’s case here was weak and did not hold up to the same judicial scrutiny it would have gotten in a less fraught era.

And yet, it’s a little bit more complicated than this. Wisconsin’s legislature is the most gerrymandered in the country—despite Democrats having a majority of votes in the state (as evidenced by a Democratic governor, Tony Evers, winning the last election in 2018) Republicans control 60% of the legislature. These principles Gorsuch applies to this case, of legislatures being accountable to the people, are bullshit if, in fact, legislatures are not accountable to people they disagree with. It’s true that legislatures and Congress can change rules that “need revision”, but if they won’t on ideological or political grounds, and individuals’ right to vote is not given at least equal stature to legislatures’ right to control elections, what’s the fucking point to any of it?

But wait! There’s more! There’s also a concurring opinion by Justice Kavanaugh, which you may have heard about on Twitter. He writes:

When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road should be clear and settled. That is because running a statewide election is a complicated endeavor. … Even seemingly innocuous late-in-the-day judicial alterations to state election laws can interfere with administration of an election and cause unanticipated consequences. … It is one thing for state legislatures to alter their own election rules in the late innings and to bear the responsibility for any unintended consequences. It is quite another thing for a federal district court to swoop in and alter carefully considered and democratically enacted state election rules when an election is imminent.

Here he’s repeating Gorsuch’s reasonable — and, it must be admitted, legally defensible — argument that the District Court overstepped, exerting power it did not have over the running of an election. But here, again, is the naive assertion that election rules enacted by state legislatures are necessarily democratic and subject to the people’s accountability. Sure, in states like New Jersey they are. In Wisconsin they are not.

Here he acknowledges that our patchwork of election laws — some of which have been adjusted for COVID, some of which haven’t — is, in Nguyen’s phrasing, federalist as fuck:

To be sure, in light of the pandemic, some state legislatures have exercised their Article I, §4, authority over elections and have changed their election rules for the November 2020 election. … a few States such as Mississippi no longer require that absentee ballots be received before election day. Other States such as Vermont, by contrast, have decided not to make changes to their ordinary election rules, including to the election-day deadline for receipt of absentee ballots. The variation in state responses reflects our constitutional system of federalism. Different state legislatures may make different choices. … But the Wisconsin State Legislature’s decision not to modify its election rules in light of the pandemic is itself a policy judgment worthy of the same judicial deference that this Court afforded the South Carolina legislature.

Kavanaugh and the majority are unconcerned with whether, as a practical matter, Wisconsinites are served by Wisconsin’s election process. Their constituency here is the state legislature, because the Constitution gives them standing.

Lastly, here’s the part that had everyone’s head exploding today, bolds mine:

For important reasons, most States, including Wisconsin, require absentee ballots to be received by election day, not just mailed by election day. Those States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election. And those States also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter. Moreover, particularly in a Presidential election, counting all the votes quickly can help the State promptly resolve any disputes, address any need for recounts, and begin the process of canvassing and certifying the election results in an expeditious manner.

A lot of people read into this passage, seeing echoes of Trumpist rhetoric about late-arriving ballots “flipping” the election and states announcing election results “on election night,” and assuming this meant he was laying the legal groundwork for some future ruling declaring any votes counted after EOD next Tuesday invalid, because states must certify their results in time for Trump’s evening shows on Fox News.

Call me naive, but I tend to read Kavanaugh’s opinion here more colloquially: he’s factually wrong that states announce and certify results on election night, but in practical terms he’s right that states want as speedy and efficient a count as possible, so that “canvassing and certifying” can proceed in accordance with statutory deadlines. The “or as soon as possible” and subsequent mention of post-count election certification procedures offset the clumsy mention of election night.

I take no pleasure in finding that, on reading an opinion by one of Trump’s SCOTUS nominees, it seems to hold up. This decision, like the other election-related ones, is founded on the principle that rules are rules, and people (for better or worse) have to live by the law as written. It would be a stretch for even Kavanaugh or Barrett to find an originalist, textualist argument forcing state election agencies to end vote counting sooner than their state laws require. Hopefully we won’t get to find out how far they and their colleagues are willing to stretch.

What can we learn from this?

Back to that 40% who even now, after everything, still support Donald Trump and the GOP:

First of all, it’s important to remember that it’s not 40% of Americans who support that horrible orange man, his horrible nihilistic party, and their horrible failed policies. It’s 40% of the people who are willing and able to vote — which in a good year excludes at least 25% of us. Even then, everyone feels so disillusioned by the process that it’s hard to say what they’re voting for. The true silent majority (or plurality) in American politics are the ones who look at voting and politics and decide to opt out.

This is expected to be a high turnout year — possibly the highest in U.S. history, despite the pandemic and legal challenges like that which led to the Wisconsin Legislature decision. But that may just mean that 75-80% of eligible voters will have voted. Regardless of whether Biden or Trump wins, they’ll have been elected by a mere plurality of voters.

I have a few reactions to all this.

First of all, sympathy for the non-voters. Confession time: I did not vote for Barack Obama in 2008. That year I messed up and failed to register to vote before the deadline, and so even though I wanted to vote for Obama I couldn’t. Well, I could have voted provisionally, but that seemed like a hassle, and he was going to win Illinois anyway, so… boom, that year I too was a non-voter. We do not make this as easy as it needs to be, and most people are not as nerdily wrapped up in U.S. politics as I am.

Second, sympathy for those so disillusioned by the process or our politics that they cast protest votes — to a point. There’s something really hypocritical about telling people to vote as if their lives depended on it, vote to save democracy… then also tell them that they have to rally around a candidate or party they may not like, because at least they’re not horrible. I don’t want to still be mad at Nader voters in 2000, or Gary Johnson voters in 2016, or Bernie voters from the ‘16 and ‘20 primaries. It’s not their fault that our system grants massive structural power to two major parties, one of which in turn has massive structural advantages over the other. It’s a fucking mess. I understand wanting to exercise democracy, even though our system kinda punishes it.

But, third, I am still mad at those third-party or protest voters. I am mad at non-voters. I am mad that, for my entire adult life, politics has been almost entirely a game of motivating base voters and encouraging turnout, because the true opponent is never the other candidate, it’s folks staying home. In our system, when you don’t vote you’re not abstaining, you’re handing your political power to whoever wins the larger share of people who show up. I know it’s contradictory, and maybe hypocritical, but in order for folks to be free to vote for whatever gonzo candidate or platform they want, first they need to vote for someone like Biden, then raise hell at him about voting reform.

And, lastly, I’m mad at all the ways that people who want to vote simply can’t, or who do vote but their votes are erased by our fucked up system.

Voting is a right, a privilege, and a duty

Last week my 6-year-old daughter walked in while I was listening to a NYT The Daily podcast about the Electoral College; she was shocked when the guest said only six states truly choose the President. She asked me why, and I explained a bit, and then (because she’s 6, and doesn’t know that it’s a bad thing for only six states to choose) I told her that it was unfair because it means Trump voters here in New Jersey don’t get a say in whether Trump gets re-elected.

Don’t get me wrong—I do not want Trump to win. But Trump voters here, as horrible as I find their candidate, have common cause with Biden voters in my home state of Alabama, who will cast ballots that have zero chance of affecting the outcome. Democrats in Wisconsin are stuck with a Republican legislature basically forever — SCOTUS is one of the few entities in America with the power to impose change on states, and as they’re showing us this year, they consider hyper-gerrymandered legislatures like Wisconsin’s every bit as legitimate as the others.

All of us need to prioritize voting. We need to vote now (especially if you haven’t yet — vote right fucking now, in person if possible), but also next year, in two years, in four, and beyond. Voting rights and, probably more importantly, fair and easy voting access need to be a major issue that Democrats prioritize.

We can’t afford for every election to keep coming down to who can get out the vote. That’s ultimately a war of attrition; every time we take our eyes off the ball, Republicans swoop in, steal the ball, run all the way down the field with it, and next thing we know some Federalist Society assholes have been lifetime-appointed to the bench and are using the world’s tersest basic law to argue that acknowledging LGBTQ rights infringes on some asshole cake baker’s freedom of religion.

Many friends are standing in hours-long lines in places like NYC and Chicago to make sure their voice will be heard this time. I’m glad they’re doing it, but if we succeed and Trump is indeed defeated, we should accept no congratulations for how deep we dug to make it happen. People having to stand in 2-hour lines in the bluest of blue cities to vote is really really bad, whether it’s the result of bad actors in red states trying to suppress Democratic votes, or because of corrupt or incompetent election agencies not giving a shit.

I don’t know how we do it, I barely know who needs to hear it, and I know that it seems far less urgent than COVID, economic recovery, or climate change. But voting access and equity needs to be at least as important to the next non-asshole U.S. administration as those are. So, yes, vote. But then, however it goes, keep voting, encourage others to vote and keep voting, and if you’re able, put whatever pressure you can muster on leaders and lawmakers to protect voting rights and improve voting access.

When the dust finally settles on this election and this hell year, we’ll still be living in a democracy that’s a work in progress. And it’s true, and fair, that decisions are made by those who show up — so we’ve got to show up, keep showing up, and then we’ve got to make it easier, safer, and fairer for everyone to show up, and enshrine those as basic rights that cannot be easily dismissed.

Whew. That’s all for now. I’ll be back on Sunday with more old memories and cocktail recipes.

Stay safe,
—DD

October 25, 2020 • Day 227

Hi everyone. It’s fall here in New Jersey. The trees look amazing, and I finally get to wear a warm jacket and carry a warm beverage when I walk the dog every morning.

The U.S. election is now finally by the grace of God less than ten days away. Sometime since that first debate, definitely since Trump’s bout with Covid, the zeitgeist consensus that had been assuming this election will be disputed and result in the death of democracy has given way to marveling at (or standing in) hours-long lines for early voting. Trump has stopped railing against mail voting, or at least folks aren’t reporting on it as much, and the media (thank God) have stopped asking him if he’ll accept the result of the election.

There’s still a risk that the election could be close, could end up in the courts, which means it could end up decided by newly sworn-in Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose rammed-through confirmation vote is tomorrow. The election may also not be close at all; it’s hard to imagine that an election with unprecedented turnout and polls showing Biden with a steady, durable +9 lead for weeks will suddenly yield a 2000-style succession crisis.

This week the election seems normal. The debate seemed normal, except of course that one candidate was Donald Trump and that Trump was even more living in the Fox News Cinematic Universe than usual. But the tempo and tone felt debate-like. It’s so tempting to hope that a little over a week from now, we’ll be celebrating a landslide win by presumptive President-elect Biden.

But, to quote Ted Lasso, when things have been fucked for ages and ages, it’s the hope that kills you.

Like, next weekend we’re having a Halloween party for our daughter and some friends. Everyone will be masked and we’re working out good protocols for giving out treat bags safely. Still, is it safe enough? Is this party, meant to bring comfort and hope, actually the thing that will hurt us?

And beyond our own lives, there’s the recognition that other people’s comfort and normalcy are threatening to us. I want people to enjoy a night out, or holidays with their loved ones, and in fact assume that many people are doing those things… and that’s why Covid is still a threat to my family.

We need a word to describe the feeling that comforting, normal things or situations are in fact dangerous, such that comfort and risk are so intertwined that it’s hard to feel good about anything — an uncanny normalcy.

New Jersey’s Covid reproduction (Rt) number is back up to 1.3. I’ve been hearing more ambulance sirens.

I spent part of the weekend re-building my personal website in WordPress.

Sometimes I need to put up some Content™ — a new bio, an updated list of talks I’ve given, a 10,000-word treatise on my WFH desk setup — and I don’t want to have to deal with all the Node-React-Webpack-PostCSS-Git-Netlify JAMStack bullshit. I want a boring web site where I can update things. Code frustrates but never bores me. Too much code gets in the way, or rather gets me to get in my own way. What I want from code is to feel clever.

At the same time, I don’t think I want a NoCode® design-in-the-browser solution like Webflow or Squarespace, where simple things cost real money and hard things cost crazy money. On top of that, there’s a learning curve where I have to figure out the in-browser design surface’s way of doing things. I know how to build web pages. I don’t know how to Webflow web pages.

That’s kind of my problem: I know web pages so well and yet I need a simple web site. I need to regain beginner’s mind in order to get out of my own way and put up a damn basic page with my contact info and C.V.

Having said that, Webflow is [Borat voice] very niiiice. It’s the first visual web editor I’ve used since the original Dreamweaver that does a great job of making web page structure and CSS attributes comprehensible without pretending you’re in some other medium like print design.

This was kind of a big tech week:

Two weeks ago I was anticipating the new iPhones’ launch event; last weekend I had just placed my pre-order. This weekend I have my new iPhone 12 Pro in hand. I took this issue’s lead photo with my new phone and the just-released Halide Mark II, processed in the just-released 2021 edition of Adobe Lightroom which has a fancy new color grading tool. Here’s another Halide shot, of our friend Lisa taking a picture of June during our (Covid-safe!) family photoshoot earlier today.

Peak Design, makers of fine camera straps, bags, and carbon-fiber tripods, launched a Kickstarter for a new line of mobile phone accessories, neatly timed for iPhone launch week when lots of people will be looking for things to magnet to the back of their new phones. I’m excited about this one — I have a lot of Peak gear and it’s all really excellent.

Adobe also shipped Illustrator for iPad, which is pretty good! Moleskine — yes, the notebook company — makes apps, and they shipped V2 of Flow, their open-canvas writing and drawing app for iPad. (Big new features: you can now share canvases with others for multiplayer drawing, or use your iPhone as a remote ‘pencil case’.)

I didn’t do much drinking this week, but here are two highlights:

• A classic martini using the recipe from Meehan’s Bartender Manual (2.25 oz gin, 0.75 oz dry vermouth, stirred)

• The Cutter, a Paper Plane variation with Campari and Amer (on purpose this time!)

On the other hand, tonight we decided to celebrate Oktoberfest at home with German beer and a German sausage-and-potato salad feast. I got kartoffelwurst (pork sausage with potato and caraway seed) from Olympia Provisions and made homemade German potato salad from an internet recipe. (At least in our house, German food is just pork, potatoes, and white vinegar in various configurations with different seasonings.) And, of course, beer (a Munich-style lager).

Hopefully next Oktoberfest we can have friends over to help us finish the potato salad. I made too much.

Next week, it’ll be just two days until the election. It’ll also just have been Halloween. Here’s hoping you all keep staying safe and sane.

Best,
—DD

October 18, 2020 • Day 220

I think the defining quality of this pandemic life is how time has not only lost all meaning but seems to be in a loop. Every day is the same, more or less, and we keep facing the same choices, making the same mistakes, seeing the same glimmers of hope that turn out to be mirages.

Back in the spring, right before the lockdowns — or “lockdowns,” here in the U.S., which never properly locked down — many parents here in our NJ suburb decided, as we did, to pull their kids out of school before the district finally saw the writing on the wall and sent everyone home. Schools were supposed to be closed for a couple of weeks, then through May, then until the fall.

In late summer, with the new school year coming up fast, the school district — wanting to protect students and staff but also wanting to get kids back into schools — polled parents, asking us to decide whether to opt in to a “hybrid” program (2 half days per week in the classroom, the rest of the time online) or choose all-virtual school.

On the local Facebook groups, there was a very vocal contingent of parents who were not only eager to send kids back into the classroom but angry at the district for not offering more hours back in in-person school. Some of this was concern that kids weren’t going to get enough attention and support and fall behind, but a lot of it was concern about having to work from home without free childcare.

Anyway, this ended up being moot: after Covid infection rates surged in the Sun Belt and Midwest, NJ allowed schools to delay in-person school and our school district kicked the can down the road, saying they’d plan to start hybrid school in November.

Now it’s October. The district is again asking us to decide whether to send our kids back into school buildings — into enclosed spaces with an unknown number of other human beings — which raises a host of questions: Is it safe? Can we trust 6-year-olds to stay masked, distant, and hand-washed for 4 whole hours? Where did they find the money to fix the ventilation problems that scuttled this plan last time? And why is this our decision to make?

Speaking of fallacies: I’m pretty tired of hearing about other parents say they plan to send kids to school “while they still can,” taking it as a given that the schools will be forced to close again, but before they do they want their kids to get a few weeks of social exposure. Folks don’t seem to connect the dots, that sending people into classrooms (or dining out, or having “socially distant” parties) while infection and testing rates are low is a sure way to make those rates go up, necessitating harsher measures — and ensuring more suffering and death — than if they just cooled it on the socialization.

We’ve been stressing over having to once again opt out of in-person school, resenting that we have to be the bad guys who keep our daughter home and safe without any support from her school administrators or teachers — who for their part are (unwisely!) starting to get the kids excited about returning to classrooms in “a few weeks.”

The pandemic isn’t over just because we’re over it. It is just as bad an idea to send kids into classrooms today as it was on March 11, the first day we kept our daughter home, because nothing has changed to make things any safer. Of course we will not be opting into the hybrid thing, and we’re tired of being asked. We should not have to keep deciding to be safe during a pandemic.

So we were very reassured yesterday when we found someone else who is quietly on our side of the safety “debate.” We ran into one of June’s classmates and his parents in the park, which led to an impromptu playdate and parent meetup in our backyard. Their family is doing all the same things we are to stay safe and are also planning to opt-out of hybrid school (if it even happens, which we all doubt it will). It was hugely validating to find out that someone else had looked at the same facts and reached the same conclusions.

As far as I know, when parents were polled in August to decide whether to opt into hybrid learning, the majority of us chose all-virtual school. For all we hear from what I call the “pro-normalcy” side on local Facebook groups, the data suggest that most people around here do still fear Covid, and are acting accordingly. That too is reassuring: as isolating as it feels to keep being asked if we will continue to stay hunkered down, sometimes we do get reassurance that we’re not the crazy ones.

Since I took up so much of your time about in-person school decision drama, I’ll leave you with some bullets:

• As promised, new iPhones were announced on Tuesday. All four of them look great. I ordered an iPhone 12 Pro in graphite; it arrives on Friday. The silly amount of stage time Apple gave to 5G notwithstanding, I predict MagSafe is gonna be the killer feature of these iPhones. Fucking magnets! How do they work?!

• Me and Jody’s last big NYC outing before Covid was to see David Byrne’s American Utopia live on Broadway. It was phenomenal, easily the best concert I’ve ever seen. Byrne and co. plan to bring it back late next year, post-pandemic (god willing). In the meantime, HBO just debuted a filmed performance of the show directed by Spike Lee (streamable on HBO Max) which is also very very good.

• For family movie time this weekend I picked, god help us, Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. It’s ridiculous that that movie is now more than 20 years old. Some of the visual effects show their age — ILM has gotten way better at rendering water and skin since the 90s — but a lot of them hold up. Jake Lloyd is still a distractingly bad actor, but overall the movie is not that bad. I’m way less mad about having watched it than The Rise of Skywalker!

• BTW, while fresh-popped popcorn is the best thing for family movie time, Trader Joe’s Maple & Sea Salt Kettle Corn is also a very good choice.

Drinking: I got nothing

This is the week I finally break my promise to give you a new cocktail recipe in every newsletter. (I’m out of ideas, and also maraschino liqueur.) I did drink some things this week, but they were old standbys (Revolver), takeout cocktails from restaurants (support your local bars, if they’re doing takeout!), or just whiskey in a cup. Tonight I’m tired and just had mint tea.

But in lieu of a recipe I will offer you some alcohol-related reading from the excellent web publication Punch:

• First, a much more in-depth and well-researched origin story for the Paper Plane cocktail, which I wrote about 2 weeks ago.

• Next, they asked some master bartenders for their recipes for five classic whiskey cocktails. Be warned, these recipes are not super useful unless you’re in the habit of keeping multiple whiskies or vermouths around to make blends.

And, for coffee drinkers: it’s Otoño Blend season!

See you next week,
—DD

October 11, 2020 • Day 213

This was a weird week — last week was nothing but shoes dropping; this week I feel like we were all waiting for the next shoe to drop (some big, dramatic turn in Trump’s Covid prognosis, perhaps?) but it was just more of the same — thousands dying, tens of thousands getting sick, Republican leaders saying crazy things with impunity, Biden’s poll numbers being crazy good yet nobody wanting to trust them. The end times are pretty boring when you’re living through them.

I nearly skipped this week because I don’t have anything important to say, and I don’t know what you all may want to hear — this isn’t exactly a newsletter anyone asked for. I had written a long thing about millennial burnout, and feeling like I’m falling behind everyone else my age as I get close to turning 40, but honestly, it just was a pity party for myself and not very good or interesting.

It’s been a struggle to find motivation beyond just trying to stay above water. Several big efforts at work finished up last week (being the last week of the quarter); now that we’re officially in Q4, things are a lot quieter, in an anticlimactic way. I got a big presentation done, negotiated a deal for some extra budget, interviewed a candidate for an open role on my team, which was all great… but it’s still a pandemic, and I’m tired. 😅

🍗 Cooking

Rather than tell you about some big idea, or some esoteric pop-culture or U.S. government trivia, here’s a tip for making barbecued (or, as we say in the States, “BBQ’ed”) chicken, if you’re in a part of the country/world that still has good grilling weather. (We… kinda don’t? But I’m still grilling anyway. 🍖)

A good way to get BBQ sauce to stick to meat on the grill is to mix it with mayonnaise. Really! As J. Kenji Lopez-Alt wrote in the NYT last year, mayo is an underappreciated hack for any kind of grilling or griddling.

I’ve been a longtime fan of mayo on grilled cheese, and my new go-to move is to marinate or glaze chicken with a mixture of 2 parts BBQ sauce (Lillie’s Q Smoky; I bet Gold would be great too) to 1 part mayo (Sir Kensington’s). Kenji writes:

It’s difficult to work with sweet sauces like barbecue or teriyaki, which have a tendency to burn as your meat grills. Mayo solves this problem by diluting and coating the sugars with fat and egg protein. Combining a sweet sauce with mayonnaise before rubbing it on the meat allows you to grill as hot as you like without risk of burning. Also, that sauce flavor really sticks to the meat.

… Another neat thing I discovered: Mayo-marinated meat can be cooked in a cast-iron or nonstick skillet as is, no extra oil necessary. The mayonnaise provides all the fat the pan needs.

Last night I forgot to oil the grill grates, and was very pleased to discover that last part works as advertised.

This week I’m thinking of trying to recreate an Indian-style tikka marinade, using mayo instead of yogurt.

🥃 Drinking

I also feel like I’ve hit a wall in my cocktail-making, probably because there are so many things you can make with the same ingredients and I don’t have shelf space for a lot of single-use spirits and liqueurs. (This is why even though I’m totally bored enough to try making tiki drinks, I still haven’t done it — they all call for multiple rums, and I currently stock zero rums.)

So this week, when I’ve made drinks, they’ve been old standbys like the Boulevardier.

A few years back I was a little embarrassed to be the one person at a work thing who didn’t know what a Boulevardier was, who had to ask when one person then another all ordered them.

In short, it’s a whiskey Negroni. But then it gets complicated. You see, a Negroni is equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari — this ratio is undisputed. But there is a vigorous debate whether this ratio works as well for a dark spirit like whiskey, and if not, which ratio to use instead.

When I made a Boulevardier this week, I used Jim Meehan’s recipe in Meehan’s Bartender Guide which doubles the whiskey:

• 2 oz bourbon

• 1 oz Campari

• 1 oz sweet vermouth (I used Carpano Antica)

That gets you a very spirit-forward, boozy cocktail, similar to other classic whiskey cocktails like Manhattans, Old Fashioneds, etc. But Negronis are a great aperitif precisely because they’re low-ABV (and usually made with a lighter spirit) — we don’t need the whiskey version to live up to that, but it seems like a missed opportunity to go all-in on bourbon.

The alternative ratios I’ve seen (these are all bourbon/vermouth/Campari):

• 3/2/1: This is basically a Manhattan with a splash of Campari instead of bitters. Nothing wrong with that, if you want a Manhattan variation!

• 1.5/1/1: This was my friend Christopher Slye’s ‘house’ recipe at the Adobe Fonts team’s in-office bar in SF, The Descender. It’s a compromise between the Negroni-y and Manhattan-y versions of the cocktail, lower-proof but still whiskey-forward enough for all the flavors to come through.

Really to say, this is a very versatile cocktail that’s easy to adjust to taste, knowing that any of the variations are pretty good.

🤖 …Gadgeting?

A Thing That Happened this week was that I finally got this tiny keyboard which I’d pre-ordered/backed months ago, and decided to use it as part of an elaborate iPad typing setup.

I generally do not like micro-layout keyboards, or split-layout keyboards. But I kind of love this one? It encourages very accurate touch-typing, and the tactile-feeling mechanical switches and teeny size are just very pleasant.

On Tuesday Apple is having another product launch event. Because of Covid-related supply chain stuff, this year’s iPhones were delayed from their usual September launch to this month. The internet says to expect four iPhone 12 models, ranging from 5.7” to 6.5”, with 5G support, LIDAR sensors, new cameras, a bunch of colors… you know, the usual updates. Every few years I get bored of the medium-sized iPhone and go for the biggest one; this might be one of those years, especially as it sounds like the iPhone 12 Pro Max (🙄) will have some special new camera feature the others don’t have.

Did you know these emails have a comments section? They do. What are you grilling? Which Boulevardier ratio is your go-to? Which iPhone size do you hate least?!

Leave a comment

Until next time (probably),
—DD

October 4, 2020 • Day 206

Hi everyone. Man, it has been a week, hasn’t it? The image above has nothing to do with anything but just seemed like the kind of unicorn chaser we all need.

At home, things have been pretty quiet. I got some work stuff done, my daughter had another great week of virtual school, we built some Harry Potter Legos, I grilled a lot.

Meanwhile, as you surely know, the sitting president of the world’s most powerful nation — a 74-year-old obese man who likes well-done steak and taco bowls from the Trump Grill — has been hospitalized with Covid-19. And you’ve probably spent your weekend either refreshing Twitter to see what fresh hell awaits us all or tried very hard to not do that. I was in the first camp, but if you chose not to give over your weekend to the latest way Donald Trump has failed to manage Covid, I respect your choice.

The president being in the hospital — with a disease whose case fatality rate among older patients is as high as 1 in 5 — prompts all sorts of questions, the most pressing being:

• Who exactly is in charge right now?

• What happens if the president is incapacitated, or dies, while in office?

The great thing about our founding document, the U.S. Constitution, is that it is so minimalistic and vague that it answers neither of those questions clearly.

I wrote and rewrote this week’s newsletter at least three times, deciding how or if to even get into this. Rather than reflect on What It Means or What Might Happen, I’ll just share some things I learned this weekend on the subject of presidential succession, about which my wife will tell you — because I unwisely deep-dove into the details of the Presidential Succession Act on our second date — I am a gigantic nerd.

One: Eight presidents have died in office.

Four were assassinated: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy. The Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations everyone knows about; Garfield and McKinley are the trivia-night deep cuts. He was murdered roughly nine months into his term by Charles Guiteau, who delusionally believed he was owed (and denied) a sinecure-type job by Garfield and shot him as revenge. (BTW, Candice Millard’s book Destiny of the Republic, about the Garfield assassination, is excellent.)

The others died of natural causes: Harrison (pneumonia), Taylor (cholera), Harding (heart attack), and most recently FDR (stroke).

Two: The shortest-serving president was…

I admit it, I looked this up because I was wondering if any scenarios that might end with a Pence Administration would break any records for shortest-ever presidency.

Turns out that William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia exactly one month after his inauguration; to beat that record, Pence would have to succeed Trump sometime after December 21, 2020, having lost the election to Biden & Harris.

The next-shortest was the aforementioned James Garfield (6 months).

Three: The Constitution was ambiguous about ‘acting’ vs true presidential succession for nearly 200 years, but then we fixed it

The Twenty-fifth Amendment, ratified in 1965, is notorious as one of only two legal ways (alongside impeachment) to forcibly remove a U.S. president from power. But it turns out that was just one of four changes to the presidency codified in that amendment, which fixed some longstanding bugs in presidential succession following the assassination of President Kennedy.

William Henry Harrison was not only the shortest-tenured president but also the first to die in office, which created our first constitutional succession crisis. The Constitution says:

In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President

The way this is written, it strongly suggests that the powers and duties of the presidency shall fall to the vice president, but not the office itself. This is why, when Harrison died, his V.P. John Tyler was considered by some to be merely the acting president, serving as a caretaker until the next election.

Tyler said that was bullshit — he wasn’t acting as president, he was the current, legal president. Congress eventually passed resolutions (not laws) agreeing with Tyler, and the “Tyler precedent” governed what happens when a president dies until 1965.

Section 1 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment codified this precedent into constitutional language: when a president dies, resigns, or is removed from office following impeachment, the vice president legally and unambiguously becomes president.

Four: If a president is stripped of their power under the 25th, they remain in office until the end of their term

Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment is the unfired Chekhov’s Gun of American constitutional provisions. Under it, the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet can forcibly take power from a sitting president by drafting a letter to Congress declaring the president unfit to serve. It’s less than 60 years old and has, of course, never been used in real life, though it has been a plot point in TV shows like season 2 of 24.

Now, here’s a wild thing I didn’t know:

A president thus declared unable to serve may subsequently issue a declaration stating that he is able. This marks the beginning of a four-day period during which the vice president remains acting president. If by the end of this period the vice president and a majority of the "principal officers of the executive departments" have not issued a second declaration of the president's incapacity, then the president resumes his powers and duties.

If a second declaration of incapacity is issued within the four-day period, then the vice president remains acting president while Congress considers the matter. If within 21 days the Senate and the House determine, each by a two-thirds vote, that the president is incapacitated, then the vice president continues as acting president; otherwise the president resumes his powers and duties.

In addition to the oddly specific four-day grace period, I was surprised to learn that in the event Congress does intervene and uphold the invocation of the Twenty-fifth, the vice president explicitly remains just an acting president, while the president remains in office but without any “duties and powers.”

This, I presume, is so the president can come back at some point, whenever their incapacity has been resolved. But the edge cases could get pretty bizarre: what if the president were incapacitated and on life support indefinitely, but didn’t die? What happens if everyone agrees a president suffering from a long-term illness should step back, but they refuse to resign and/or keep trying to reclaim power under the Twenty-fifth? 🤷🏻‍♂️🍿

Five: We used to go without vice presidents for years at a time

Then-Vice President Al Gore, speaking outside the official vice presidential residence, One Observatory Circle, in November 2000.

Another bug fixed by the Twenty-fifth: until 1965 there was no way to replace a vice president, so anytime one died, resigned, or acceded to the presidency, the office of vice president would just stay vacant until the next election.

LBJ did not have a vice president for almost 14 months until he and Hubert Humphrey won the 1964 election. Truman served without a VP for almost an entire term, after he succeeded FDR just over a month after the inauguration.

Section 2 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment gives the president a way to replace the vice president, by nominating someone for confirmation by the Senate. The first (and so far only) president to take advantage of this power was Nixon; VP Spiro Agnew resigned in December 1973, and two weeks later was replaced by Gerald Ford. Ford then unexpectedly became the beneficiary of another part of the Twenty-fifth, when Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th President of the United States — and one of his first official acts, after pardoning Nixon, was to select and nominate a new VP.

Vice President Joe Biden with Vice President-elect Mike Pence, shortly after the 2016 election

This weekend, I’ve been bizarrely comforted by news that the White House has activated its “continuity of government” plan, reaching out to all the officials on the legal order of succession (including Nancy Pelosi, who’s next in line after Pence) to confirm clean Covid tests and readiness to step in if called upon.

It’s comforting because, after four years of Trump stomping on the law like a drunken orange T. rex, it’s a sign that some of our institutions remain up and running. If this were already a true dictatorship, we’d be hearing that Jared, or Ivanka, or Mark Meadows was standing by to take power, or at least working to find some angle to block Pelosi from her legal place in succession. But in this, at least, the White House is playing by the rules, perhaps because the rule-breaker-in-chief is in the hospital with Covid.

Even as Trump has ranted and raved and threatened to disrupt democracy over “the ballots,” and now as his supporters insist that the election must be postponed because Trump can’t campaign, it’s still true that the election is 30 days from today, and cannot be moved.

Listening: I’m not here, this isn’t happening

Want to feel young (or else, just as old as I do)? I bought Radiohead’s Kid A on CD at a Borders Books & Music in Chicago the day it came out, October 1, 2000. Borders isn’t a thing anymore, and CDs… well, I’m sure they’re around, but I haven’t owned (or seen?!) a CD player in years. But I still have that CD copy of Kid A in a binder in my attic.

Stereogum’s retrospective on the album’s release and legacy brought back memories of just what a big fucking deal this album was at launch, and how unusual its rollout was, relying on bits of video and early-stage internet media (AOL/AIM chats!) over big singles and music videos. And, of course, the album still slaps. Chris DeVille writes:

In the skronking, discordant chaos of “The National Anthem” I hear the disorienting noise of life online under rising nationalism and authoritarianism, an endless barrage of push notifications and social media posts about a world that only seems to get darker and scarier. Public attitudes about this planet’s declining health are only just now catching up to the frantic urgency of “Idioteque” and the bleak cynicism of “Optimistic.” Who among us has not at some point in recent years tried to assert some kind of control by putting “everything in its right place” or felt compelled to curl up in a ball and declare, “I’m not here, this isn’t happening”?

Put another way: though other records may be more iconic, anchoring them to a time and place — “Creep” and OK Computer make them irreversibly a 90s band; Hail to the Thief is a good reminder of all the Bush-era stuff we try to forget — but Kid A is the most Radiohead Radiohead album.

TIL rock critic Steven Hyden has a new book out about the album, titled This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s Kid A and the Beginning of the 21st Century, now downloading to my Kindle.

Drinking: I fly like paper, get high like planes

Good news, everyone! I feel well enough to drink again! So let’s talk about the Paper Plane.

I first had this cocktail last year in the United Polaris Lounge at Newark Airport, on my way to Australia. (Get it? Plane???) But it turns out that the Paper Plane originated at the cocktail bar where I first discovered I loved cocktail bars, Chicago’s The Violet Hour, and even dates back to the time when I was super into The Violet Hour (specifically) but hadn’t yet traveled enough or done enough of the reading to understand that drinks had provenance and lineage.

To wit: this drink started in Chicago, at The Violet Hour, but was invented by Sasha Petraske & Sam Ross from NYC’s Milk and Honey, where Violet Hour founder Toby Maloney had worked. It’s also named after the M.I.A. song “Paper Planes” which was popular around that time. So, you know, lots of provenance there.

The drink itself is a riff on a classic, the Last Word; because it’s shaken with citrus, the Cocktail Codex categorizes it as a kind of flip. One of the things I like about it is that it’s a very simple recipe, consisting of 4 equal parts (0.75 oz or 30 cl) bourbon, amaro, bitter aperitivo, and lemon juice. Also, because the majority of the drink is either low ABV or non-alcoholic—it has way less hard spirit than a lot of cocktails I drink—it’s a bit easier to handle.

• 0.75 oz bourbon (Bulleit)

• 0.75 oz Amaro Nonino or similar (I used Bigallet China-China)

• 0.75 oz Aperol or St. George Bruto Americano

• 0.75 oz lemon juice

Because of the citrus, this drink should be shaken with ice.

On my first attempt, I followed the recipe on St George Spirits’ website, including serving it up in a chilled Nick and Nora glass. I also realized that one reason I’ve been finding my drinks a bit much lately could have been that I was using a 120 proof(!) Knob Creek single barrel reserve bourbon; the drink was great but boozier and sharper than anticipated.

For the second go, I went with plain old Bulleit bourbon (at a far more reasonable 90 proof), and served it in a rocks glass with a giant ice cube, like a Margarita. The lower-proof bourbon and dilution from the extra ice were nice touches; this is the way I recommend making this drink.

That said, it has a real kick, from either/both of the Bruto and lemon juice. A lot of other citrusy cocktails, including the Margarita, whiskey sours, and most tiki drinks, balance out the tartness with some sweetness (like simple syrup). The Paper Planes I made this week seemed just a little too sharp, and since lemons are lemons I wonder if Bruto is just too intense compared to the Aperol in the original recipe.

Then again, a sharp drink is what this week calls for. And if things continue as they have, we’re gonna need a steady supply of strong, sharp drinks to get through the year.

Hang in there, everyone,
—DD

September 27, 2020 • Day 199

Tomorrow is 200 days since our family started staying home because of Covid. (I start counting from March 13, the last day we sent our daughter to school, coincidentally the last day school was open before ‘temporarily’ closing.)

I’m tired. You may have seen this tweet thread by Dr. Aisha Ahmad about hitting a “crisis wall” making the rounds a couple weeks ago, when we all hit 6 months of all this. She wrote:

This time, our crisis is global and there is nowhere to run. That's OK. I've had to power through that 6 month hump before and there is life on the other side. Right now, it feels like we looking ahead at long, dark wintery tunnel. But it's not going to be like that.

Rather, this is our next major adaptation phase. We've already re-learned how to do groceries, host meetings, and even teach classes. And we have found new ways to be happy and have fun. But as the days get shorter and colder, we need to be ready to innovate again.

At the same time as I’m nostalgic for places I used to go, we’ve also developed new rituals and pastimes. When all this started, all the businesses in our town shut down — no more walks into the village for a coffee, no more browsing the bookstore. But these places have adapted to operate as curbside businesses, and we’ve come to appreciate these rather than feel the loss of how things were before. Walking to town to pick up treats and coffee from a window is still a joy.

Meanwhile a bunch of our neighbors, rather than power through the crisis, have rationalized going back to the old ways of doing things. One group hosted a birthday “block party” and invited everyone, but they haven’t been masking or distancing from each other in months, and didn’t make accommodations for those of us who have been, so obviously this party wasn’t for “everyone.”

Just as the pandemic has forced adaptation and innovation in how we go out for coffee or to the pool, it’s introduced new ways for people to be casually, unthinkingly shitty to one another. A house nearby we’ve always liked came on the market, and we half jokingly talked about moving.

Then again, the pandemic will end, or at least ease, eventually. When that happens we’ll have gotten an unpleasant taste of who our neighbors are in a crisis, but then it won’t be a crisis anymore, and we can go back to casually, pleasantly chatting with them at the school bus stop or on dog walks. Until then, this is another thing we have to power through.

Let me switch gears and tell you about the first time I learned about pandemics.

When I was a kid, Hasbro and Marvel — having made the almost WTF decision to kill off Optimus Prime in Transformers: The Movie — literally brought the writers and animators for the Transformers cartoon series back to work to make a new season finale that would resurrect everyone’s most beloved Autobot ASAP.

They came up with a 2-part epic, in which scientists studying solar flares (or whatever) find and recover the space shuttle carrying Prime’s lifeless body… but also accidentally bring back mysterious red spores, which turn out to be a highly contagious pathogen capable of infecting any life form (including Transformers!), causing the infected to be overcome by pure hate and rage, attacking each other and hunting down any non-infected they see. (Yes, it was a late-80s cartoon take on the plot of 28 Days Later.)

Anyway, Optimus and a small, ragtag group of survivors end up saving the day by recovering the Matrix of Leadership from the chest of the infected Rodimus Prime, then releasing the power of wisdom into the universe to free everyone from the hate plague.

I don’t remember what age I was when I saw “The Return of Optimus Prime, Parts 1 & 2” — if I’d seen it when it first aired, or later on VHS — but I do remember that to my kid eyes it was amazing and terrifying. At age 10 (or whatever) I was only barely aware of how diseases spread and certainly hadn’t seen any depiction of a pandemic before. And it was particularly creepy that it was a plague that changed people (and Transformers) — as a kid, I knew about sicknesses that gave you fevers and kept you home from school, but not about ones that made you a different person, and a red-glowing one at that.

Today, in the real, non-Transformers world, we have (separately) a pandemic and a hate plague.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how, more and more, the only thing motivating what is still mystifyingly called “politics” in the U.S. is hate. Especially being a 90s kid who grew up during the period between the fall of the Soviets and the War on Terror, it feels a bit like everyone has been infected by hate spores from space, because the conflicts make no goddamned sense.

My friend Jim Ray tweeted that, while phone banking for a Democratic candidate in North Carolina, people told him he should be hung for being a Democrat. I mean, what the actual fuck?

When my 6-year-old daughter gets upset, she sometimes will start leveling accusations at me or her mom — e.g., you don’t want me to ever color again! You told me I have to use a pencil instead of a marker, forever! — that are unreasonable, and usually incoherent. I think what happens is: she gets upset, and being 6, she can’t really see through the anger to form a sane-sounding explanation of why she’s mad, so she just strings together scenarios involving us, rules, and whatever she was doing when we made her mad. (The solution, btw, is almost always giving her a snack.)

Internet anger seems to come from a similar place. It all seems like angry word salad — brains trying to rationalize being and staying angry.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a Matrix of Leadership we can open that will cure the hate, nor do we have a way to offer all the Fox News junkies some fruit and crackers. Or maybe we do, and we just don’t know what it is yet. Maybe we all just need a break from knowing too much about everyone else’s lives.

Watching/Listening/Playing

BTW, did you know how bloody hard it is to watch O.G. Transformers cartoons in the streaming era in the U.S.? Seasons of the 1980s series are not available on iTunes, Amazon, or any other paid video stores, nor are they on Hulu, Netflix, or any of the major streaming apps. Know where you can find Transformers? On Starz, of all places. The Starz app has a “throwback cartoons” section with all four seasons of the original Transformers, as well as ThunderCats, Voltron, He-Man (and She-Ra!), Super Mario Bros., Inspector Gadget, and more. Weird flex, but I’ll take it.

This week we’ve been watching Van Der Valk on PBS (a British detective show set in Amsterdam, with some very English Dutch cops), Ted Lasso (Apple TV+’s delightful sitcom with Jason Sudeikis, about an American football coach hired to run the other kind of football team), the second season of What We Do In The Shadows on FX, and for family movie time we just re-watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Nintendo shipped Super Mario 3D All-Stars last Friday, and I’m already most of the way through Super Mario Galaxy (which, tbqh, is the reason I bought the thing). There have been some spicy takes on this new collection — my friend Jon Maddox tweeted he wants his money back, for valid reasons. I will say that if Nintendo’s goal was to only lightly adapt the games so they’ll run on modern Switch hardware but otherwise serve a throwback audience, they kinda succeeded… however, Mario Galaxy without motion controls requires some truly epic hand-contortion to work, which hasn’t been bad enough to ruin my fun, but is indeed annoying.

I used to listen to a lot more tech/business/Apple-related podcasts — like John Gruber’s The Talk Show and Accidental Tech Podcast — but finally stopped because those shows tend to be well over 2 hours long. So I was very happy to check out and pay money for Dithering, the new paid-subscription podcast from Gruber and Stratechery’s Ben Thompson. New episodes run thrice a week, and are always exactly 15 minutes. Their latest episode was about Substack, the platform powering this newsletter — somehow I hadn’t recognized that the text font on Substack’s website was Spectral, a screen-optimized serif commissioned by my team.

Drinking (or not drinking)

This week I’m still going easy on alcohol — while I’m long past done with antibiotics, I’ve been feeling run-down, and even half a drink has been a bit much for me.

But! I promised you a weekly cocktail recipe, so here’s something lighter. Very early in the pandemic, when stocking up on whiskey and vermouth, I impulse-bought a bottle of St George Bruto Americano, a Campari-like, low-ABV bitter liqueur. There are loads of good recipes on St George’s website; my favorite when I’m looking for something gentler and refreshing is the first one, Captain Americano:

• 1.5 oz Bruto Americano

• 1 oz sweet vermouth

• Soda water

When my alcohol tolerance comes back, I’m definitely going to try the St George version of a Paper Plane (equal parts Bruto, amaro, bourbon, and lemon juice), and IIRC the gin-based American Werewolf is also great.

Here’s to drinking again with you next week,
—DD

P.S., if you’re enjoying these newsletters, please do tell a friend!

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September 18-20, 2020 • Days 190-192

Hi everyone. Sorry, this one’s a little ramble-y:

Since the start of all this, I’ve caught myself thinking about walking alone around neighborhoods in cities. Yesterday I remembered how much I love taking an afternoon/evening for last-minute Christmas shopping in SoHo, something I won’t be doing this year for the first time in a few years. Another time, I was thinking about walking to a whiskey bar after a conference last year in Melbourne.

I’ve always had a thing for wandering around. In high school, instead of getting into trouble with other teens, I’d drive around Birmingham for hours listening to the local public radio station. City wandering is my favorite kind of wandering. In college, I walked almost four miles from a movie theater in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood to my dorm in the Loop, and a few years ago I intentionally walked a similar distance to a (solo) dinner reservation in Kreuzberg, Berlin, from my hotel in Mitte, just to enjoy more cityscape.

In theory, walking around cities by myself should be doable during Covid — it’s already socially distant, no reason I can’t wear a mask, etc. But cityscapes are different under Covid and will change more now that colder weather is coming back. There won’t be any cozy bars or coffee shops, or people darting in and out of shops.

What I’m feeling nostalgic about are empty living spaces, but what we have now are empty sick spaces. Visiting a near-empty Disney theme park sounds lovely, but visiting a Disney that’s near-emptied by fear — of a deadly virus that local public leaders have no interest in stopping — does not. A quiet, calm Times Square could be magical unless the quiet is interrupted by the wail of ambulances. One of the first iconic images of the pandemic was Milan emptied by lockdown; it was beautiful and frightening.

This weekend, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed away. The Republicans didn’t wait an hour before moving to fill her seat this year, before the election. They’re nothing if not consistent. We didn’t get any time to just grieve the loss of Justice Ginsberg before we had to move onto thinking about her seat on the bench, and what its vacancy means for the election and the future of democracy.

Throughout this year, the nihilistic circus that passes for politics in America has constantly — constantly — stomped on everyone’s ability to grieve. There is simply no escaping “politics” here. Even the terrifying, factual statement that 200,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 has taken on subtext as a slogan condemning Donald Trump, largely because it is, but also because Trump and his supporters will only engage with it as a talking point. Either way, it’s yet another way that loss has been erased, grief interrupted or denied, to make more room for suffocating, unbearable, fake “politics.”

(Seriously, what about norms?)

As I copyedit I realize this would be a great place for a segue, perhaps also a callback to connect this section to the one before it. Here goes: the American civic sphere is another sick space, emptied out by a plague. We can’t just mourn R.B.G., just as we can’t appreciate the calm of unexpectedly empty streets and squares, because other stuff is going down that is overwhelming, terrifying, and uncanny. I’m old enough to (barely) remember a time when there would have been a week or more of public mourning, during which all self-respecting public leaders would have insisted it was too soon to talk about what to do with her seat. But America in 2020 has no patience for mourning, leadership, or self-respect.

I’ve been feeling like a lot of people (including me) have taken up armchair political analysis or armchair epidemiology as part of the ‘bargaining’ stage of grief — weighing the options, imagining scenarios of lesser or greater horror, to try to regain some agency. (If you are not a public health professional and spent any amount of time this summer thinking about “R(t),” “positivity rate,” or the relative merits of antigen vs. PCR tests, surprise — you may have been bargaining!)

This year we’ve all had grief and loss, some of us more than we can handle. We’ve had to work through those stages, sometimes being at different grief stages for different things at the same time, with old wounds being reopened and salted so that acceptance never comes.

So, since it’s impossible to fully process anything, I say it’s OK to step away from doomscrolling and focus on some simple things you enjoy. Take a break; the bad stuff will still be there when you get back.

Right now is an excellent time to celebrate simple, decent things that make you happy, like this video of Chris Hemsworth crashing a morning news weather report. Not as a substitute for engagement or action, but as a reminder that the world is bigger than the worst thing that’s happening in our feeds.

On Saturday my family and I went “apple picking,” and like when we went on a socially distant vacation, Covid made lots of things different. We had to pre-book and schedule our entry time to the farm we like, had to wear masks while we were on the property, had to tell our daughter she couldn’t snack on a candy apple while walking around because there was a prescribed mask-less dining area.

Also: no apple picking, because they’d moved the apple picking to another site, and when we got there, there was a long, slow line to get in due to Covid restrictions.

But we still had fun. There was a corn maze with “corn-y” jokes — for that matter, all the mask and social distance PSA signage were full of veggie puns — and the cider donuts were delicious.

Going on a long drive to a farm — the long drive and spotty cell service being a great excuse to avoid Twitter for the day — was a bit of an escape, not from our grief and fear, but all the other shit. On our day trip, we got to be worried about losing a great American figure, but not also trying to keep up with all the various-temperature takes and the sum of everyone else’s bargaining.

Having said that, while we were out we were wearing Biden-Harris campaign swag, probably to remind ourselves that politics is still happening and that voting will be doing something. When we got home, we donated some money to Senate candidates.

The grief is still interrupted. It’s still hard to tell the difference between useful action and mere bargaining. But we do what we can, to try to stay not just alive, but living.

Drinking: Moving to Canada

I was still on antibiotics for most of the week, which was good not only because my eyelid is finally back to its normal shape, but because I could save all my drinking for the weekend when it was most needed.

This week’s drink is the Toronto, which is a classic enough cocktail to have its own Wikipedia page, yet one I hadn’t had before Covid.

The Toronto is said to be the most legitimately popular (as opposed to San Francisco-popular, sorry not sorry) drink that has Fernet-Branca in it; I think it manages that because the Fernet is more than canceled out by simple syrup. The recipe is essentially an Old Fashioned (whiskey, bitters, syrup), plus Fernet, served up instead of on the rocks:

• 2 oz rye whiskey, the spicier, more high-proof the better. (I did not have rye, let alone Canadian rye, so I substituted a rye-forward, 120 proof reserve bourbon.)

• 0.25 oz Fernet-Branca

• 0.25 oz rich Demerara or simple syrup

• 2 dashes Angostura or other aromatic bitters

For my first attempt, I made a Toronto by the book (specifically Meehan’s Bartender Manual). For a second try, I changed some things around. Because this is an Old Fashioned variation I stirred it without ice and served it on the rocks, and because the recipe calls for an invert sugar and is named after a city in Canada, I replaced the simple syrup with — yes — fucking maple syrup. Generally, this worked: the maple was a bit much, but being a sucker for a Fall-themed novelty whiskey cocktail, I can tell you it could be a lot worse.

Quick program note: if you’re into Apple product event commentary, you might enjoy my Medium post reacting to last week’s Apple Watch/iPad launch. As I say in the post, it’s legit comforting for Apple to release some fairly basic updates to their two most basic products (though they can’t be that basic since Apple Watch Series 6 is now already back-ordered until November).

Stay strong,

—DD

September 13, 2020 • Day 185

Hello friends. I hope everyone is staying as safe as they can, especially all of y’all on the U.S. West Coast.

This week in New Jersey the weather has started to cool down toward Fall, my daughter June has started all-virtual 1st grade, and I’ve begun closing in on the end of a very long-term project: finding all 900 Korok seeds in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

I mostly finished Breath of the Wild (including its downloadable expansion, The Champions’ Ballad) in 2017—all five Divine Beasts, all 150 Shrines, all the clothes and weapons and upgrades, I beat Ganon a few times. I found the 441 Koroks I needed to max out my inventory, and for a while, that was more than enough. 

Recently, though, I’ve been visiting Hyrule again, partly as an escape from my house, into an outside world where the skies are always blue, the danger is virtual, the puzzles are all solvable with time and logic, and the evil is easy to spot because it glows red instead of blue.

BotW was released alongside the 1st generation Nintendo Switch hardware in March 2017 and was almost immediately hailed as one of the greatest video games ever made. And whereas these days you can find a contrarian take on just about any assertion (the earth is round? Actually, someone on r/amateurscience found proof that it is CUBE SHAPED, HAHA, OWNED!!!) even now, three years later, I haven’t found anyone who disputes that BotW is a near-perfect game.

As you explore Hyrule, trying to take over Divine Beasts, defeat Ganon, and rescue Zelda, you may notice a stand of trees that look almost uniform or a stack of metal bricks that’s slightly off. If you’re focused on finishing the main quest — which you might be, it’s both a great story and a great Zelda game — you might just troop past, thinking man, those are some weird design choices. But they are, in fact, puzzles.

There are 900 of these puzzles scattered throughout the game, and it’s a true indicator of how big the game is that the designers were able to cleverly hide 900 of anything. Solving each puzzle reveals a little forest creature called a Korok; your reward for finding one is a Korok seed (which, spoiler, is strongly implied to actually be Korok poop).

Officially, these cute little Ent/Ewok nerds and their poops are the mechanic to expand your inventory, so you can carry more weapons and such. (You trade the poops to a bigger Korok dude, who puts them in his maracas so he can do an awesome dance… it’s a long story.)

But Nintendo put far more of these Korok puzzles into the game than was necessary. You can max out your weapon slots by finding just 441 of the 900 Koroks; the other 459 are totally unnecessary unless you’re a completionist.

Finding all 900 Korok seeds is a silly goal. Some (most?) things in BotW reward you with special weapons or outfits — giving you a new advantage or tweak to the gameplay, adding depth to the game — whereas the reward for bringing all of the seeds to the maracas-playing giant Ewok dude is, well, a bigger, swirlier golden poop (and confirmation of the game’s longest-running in-joke).

The silliness is underscored by how hard it is to reach this goal. None of the Korok puzzles are that hard, and most of them are easy to spot once you know what to look for. But some of them are very well hidden, some are located in the midst of the game’s fiercest enemies, and again, there are so many of them. In Zelda terms, finding all the Koroks is like winning one of those hundred-mile ultramarathons where the prize is a hundred dollar bill stuffed into an old paperback book signed by the race organizer.

For some reason, I’ve always lacked the lateral thinking and patience to really do well at Zelda without a guidebook. Fortunately, Polygon’s Dave Tach published a staggering amount of guidebook material about the game right after release; when stuck, most questions about BotW can be answered by Googling “polygon botw [name of place or enemy].” And the nerds at the fansite/wiki Zelda Dungeon have an interactive map with the locations of every single point of interest in the game.

Painstakingly cross-checking the Zelda Dungeon map with my in-game map markers, plus using a special mask that jingles when a Korok is nearby (another long story), makes it possible to find all 900 seeds, but it still has taken hundreds of hours to get to this point.

This has been such a long-term project that I had given up on ever finishing; now that it’s almost done, I’m looking forward to finally seeing Hestu hand over that golden pile of shit, and the pursuit of it has been a nice distraction from the far less shiny shit happening in the world right now.

If you recently bought a Switch to check out Animal Crossing and haven’t yet tried Breath of the Wild, I cannot recommend it highly enough. (And don’t forget to ask me sometime why I say BotW and Animal Crossing: New Horizons are basically the same game.)

Watching

One of today’s big headlines is Dr. Anthony Fauci — echoing comments by other folks who know what they’re talking about, like Bill Gates — predicting that the soonest life in the U.S. will return to pre-Covid normal is mid to late 2021. (And Gates has said that, historically, that’s actually record timing to fully emerge from a global pandemic.)

Anyway, the specific question Fauci was asked was when we’d all get to go to theaters again. If he’s right that it’s late next year, in the interim we can expect a lot more things like Disney selling ‘premier access’ to would-be blockbusters like Mulan. Yes, we spent the $30, and we enjoyed it. In a better timeline where we could still go to theaters, and this movie had come out back in March, I’m sure we’d have spent $45 or whatever to go see it as a family, and we’d have enjoyed it then too.

Is it a good movie? 🤷🏻‍♂️ It’s exciting and beautiful, with great action scenes and plenty of callbacks to the animated original. Like Disney’s other live-action remakes, the reaction to Mulan (from the world, and our family) seems to be that it’s a cool, fun experience that only serves to highlight the classic-ness of the source material.

Some other stuff we’re watching:

• Netflix’s new drama series Away, about the first manned mission to Mars, but more so about the astronauts’ feelings. It has serious network-TV-tearjerker energy (not surprising, given its producers have worked on Friday Night Lights, Parenthood, and thirtysomething) and I seriously wonder how the world of the future managed to perfect email and video chat over millions of miles, but managed to launch a space mission that has a life-or-death engineering or medical problem in every single episode. That said, same reaction as Mulan: 🤷🏻‍♂️, it’s exciting, not a game-changer, great cast.

• I re-(re-re-)watched two movies that I’m seeing in a new light given, ya know, [waves at everything]: 1976’s Network (directed by Sidney Lumet & written by Paddy Chayevsky), and 1995’s Nixon (directed and co-written by Oliver Stone). I could — and probably will — write a whole post or newsletter just about how these movies play in the Trump era. For now, I’ll just say they are highly topical in different ways, especially Network which, in satirizing the late-70s’ television and business culture by following those trends to logical, terrifying extremes, predicted the rise of runaway vampire capitalism and Fox News. It’s such a classic that it would seem blasphemous to remake it; that said, I wouldn’t mind hearing that someone is planning to air a filmed version of last year’s Broadway version starring Bryan Cranston (as the proto-Trump ‘mad prophet of the airwaves’, Howard Beale), Tatiana Maslany (as amoral, “television incarnate” producer Diana Christensen) and Tony Goldwyn (as the deeply moral but powerless newsman Max Schumacher).

Drinking

I’ve been going easy on alcohol this week, due to being on antibiotics for an infected eyelid (another long story). The one cocktail I made was the Evolved Revolver, from David Lebovitz’s Drinking French.

The Revolver — rather like another dark, orange-bitters-y drink, the Black Manhattan — is thought to have originated in early-00s San Francisco speakeasy culture. Both drinks roughly follow the Manhattan formula (2 parts bourbon to ~1 part something else, plus bitters), but whereas a Manhattan smoothes and sweetens the whiskey, a black Manhattan darkens and deepens it.

The Revolver is credited to longtime SF bartender Jon Santer, whose current gig is as owner/operator of Prizefighter, a kickass bar in the East Bay that I can’t wait to visit again once bars and travel come back. Here’s the recipe:

• 2 oz “dry, spicy” bourbon (I used a 100 proof Knob Creek reserve; pure rye whiskey also works well)

• 0.75 oz coffee liqueur (St George’s Nola)

• 2 dashes orange bitters

Being a Manhattan, the “correct” way to make and serve a Revolver is to stir it with ice, then strain it into a chilled stemmed glass (The Literature™ says a coupe, but I use a Nick & Nora). But, really, whatever works — FWIW, drinks this strong and whiskey-forward are what rocks glasses and big ice cubes were made for.

Lebovitz’s “evolved” version adds a bit of sweet vermouth (0.25 oz), for sweetness, which kind of defeats the purpose, but still makes for a lovely drink. I’ve tried it both ways and both are good.

For those also mostly dry this week, I discovered two new, weird La Croix flavors at FreshDirect: Hi-Biscus! (which is, yes, hibiscus) and LemonCello (sort of a vanilla lemon).

I could see these both being as polarizing as coconut (which I love but everyone else I know hates); I liked them both, especially the hibiscus one, and I’m a big fan of the very 90’s approach to font, caps, and punctuation — in a sense, Hi-Biscus! is the most La Croix flavor that La Croix has released to date.

Here’s to all of you,
—DD

September 5, 2020 • Day 177 of Covid–19

Sometimes, I have to stop to consider the possibility that I don’t actually like writing or coding, but I do like typing. As in, the physical act of typing, on a keyboard.

My compulsion to find new writing or coding projects is really about wanting to find good, engrossing, ideally productive reasons to type. This theory seems to pair nicely with how I buy and try every single notes app but have no usable system for note-taking, and why I own (not kidding) at least 10 keyboards. I am a typing enthusiast.

That said, it’s nice when good typing leads to good outcomes. I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to blog, tweet, or newsletter mainly out of a desire to type things in public. Way back in the beginning, blogs weren’t “publications” or “channels” where “writers” did business in the marketplace of ideas, but rather just online spaces where people could share shit, be vulnerable, and put themselves out there.

By contrast, recently when I Googled for tips about what bloggers should write about, I found this shit:

“Blogging” and even tweeting have been reduced, in some large chunk of the popular imagination, to their most commercial form: content marketing, with a bit of personal branding layered on top like frosting. The internet of 2020 seems unable to answer why one might post things online for reasons other than engagement or monetization.

Take that “purpose” Mad Libs from the screenshot above:

Fill in the blanks of this sentence and let it guide what you tweet:

I help [TARGET AUDIENCE] solve [PROBLEM/CHALLENGE] by sharing [INFO/SOLUTIONS]

As a product manager, I can’t argue with this as a quick way to define a mission for a product or publication. But I stay stubbornly hesitant to accept that this is what online post-writing has become. (Besides, how would I even fill that out? “I help my friends solve… keyboard problems? By sharing deep-dives about Disney vacations?”)

Lord knows, this newsletter would probably be more Successful™ or Popular® if it were more focused, and I surely can write some content when I need to (and I do hope folks will hit me up if there’s some topic they’d love to see me write about). But that’s not what this is for.

It’s generally been enough for the goal of my blog or newsletter to just say hi, remind you all I’m out here, and (sometimes) get a nice email or two back from people—more letter than news.

Speaking of this newsletter: the last issue of this one shipped in May, and I announced grand plans for upcoming issues. Then George Floyd happened, and so much else happened, and I fell off the newsletter-writing wagon again. Sincere apologies if you were waiting for my promised post about what masks to buy. (Just get this one, it’s the best one. This one is great too.)

Acknowledging that this newsletter will probably be inconsistent, super casual, really eclectic, and that I might bail at any moment, I’m going to make an effort to post more. After all, those 10 keyboards ain’t gonna type on themselves.

Last month, my family and I went away for a couple of days on a social distancing-friendly vacation, and unknowingly became part of the latest travel trend—luxury hipster motels. We stayed in a hipster motel/glamping resort called Eastwind, about 2.5 hours away from home on the northern edge of the Catskills, which offers a mix of hotel-style, motel-style, and tiny-house-cabin-style accommodations, with fire pits, s’mores, and great mountain views.

While we were up there we ate at Phoenicia Diner (twice!) and had great burgers at Mama’s Boy in Tannersville, and found some great kid-friendly hiking trails in and around the mountains. [Here are some photos from our trip, btw.]

If you follow me on any channel anywhere you may have heard about my drone drama—I bought a DJI Mavic Mini drone at the start of the pandemic, only to lose it in a tree two days later. Well, for that Catskills trip I finally replaced “Dronie” with a newer, beefier Mavic Air 2, and used it to take some aerial photos and video of the area around Eastwind.

A couple of weeks ago, I had an hour free and decided to fly the drone around home, only to find that the FAA had imposed a temporary flight restriction for a large radius surrounding some location in Morris County. I checked and, sure enough, the center of the no-fly zone was Bedminster, NJ, where Donald Trump has a golf course and was staying for the weekend.

I’m hopeful for a future where the President of the United States doesn’t even own a golf course, let alone randomly hangs out there for 3-day weekends during a pandemic—for many reasons, most of them far more important than my drone flying hobby.

(BTW, if you are interested in buying and flying drones—they’re fun!—you should get the “B4UFLY” app, shown above, which tells you if any temporary or permanent restrictions are in place for your area.)

This week, to save us all from yet another brutal, depressing news cycle, Nintendo dropped a surprise batch of Mario product announcements. The one I’m most excited about is Super Mario 3D All-Stars, because it includes my low-key favorite Mario, Super Mario Galaxy. Wii games like Galaxy are sort of a lost era unless one still has Wii or Wii U hardware sitting around, so I’m glad to see some of those great games back in circulation, and that Nintendo is finding less price-gouge-y ways to bring back their old content. That said, 3D All-Stars is only going to be available through March 2021—so maybe the trade-off for cheaper retro games is a Disney Vault-like fake scarcity strategy? 🤨

Speaking of Nintendo, my daughter and I just started re-playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. If you’ve never played it, you should—and I envy you, because knowing any spoilers about the game, or even vaguely remembering where things are, makes for a less awesome replay experience.

Some things I’m watching, listening to, drinking:

My wife and I are the kind of middle-aged white people whose idea of a fun evening in involves British dramas, ideally detective shows. We’ve burned through our supply of newer ones (Endeavour Season 7 and Baptiste were both great), but found some deep cuts we enjoyed: River (streaming on Britbox) starring Stellan Skarsgård as a detective who can see dead people, investigating his partner’s murder which leads him into a conspiracy; Collateral (Netflix), starring Carey Mulligan as a detective who used to be a famous athlete, investigating the murder of a pizza delivery guy which leads her into a conspiracy; Gentleman Jack (HBO), starring Suranne Jones as a non-detective who owns a coal mine and defies gender norms in 19th century England.

Depending on where and how you listen to podcasts, you may already be sick of hearing about Wind of Change (initially a Spotify exclusive, investigating rumors that the CIA was involved in writing or promoting the eponymous 1990 song by The Scorpions) and Nice White Parents (from the producers of Serial, recently acquired by the NYT, about 60+ years of segregation in and around a Brooklyn middle school). Anyway, they’re both very good and worth a listen.

My most interesting cocktail-making flex this month: making margaritas with grenadine instead of agave or simple syrup, which adds a bit of complexity and takes some edge off the sweetness. Shake the following with ice, then pour it ice-and-all into a rocks glass:

• 2 oz good tequila (I’ve been using Casamigos Reposado)

• 0.75 oz Cointreau

• 0.75 oz freshly squeezed lime juice

• 0.25 oz Grenadine (ideally homemade; I use the recipe from David Lebovitz’s Drinking French)

Hope you’re well, and hopefully it won’t be four months before I type at you again.

Best,

—DD

Maplewood Memorial Park, May 19, 2020.

As I like to pretend my dog says every morning: hello hoomans!

Today is my family’s 67th day of COVID-19 lockdown, my 76th day working from home. Things are… fine? We’re among the lucky ones: my job has been unaffected by things, we have plenty of space and a nice park nearby, our kid is young enough for her life to not have been that disrupted by not going to school for months. Ask us how we’re doing a month from now, when it’s been more than a hundred days without friends, brunches, or a feeling of safety, and we might answer differently.

For some reason, newsletters are the format I turn to when the world has turned upside down. The last time I was even a little consistent about trying to write one was the ~year after my daughter was born, with a few updates spanning the time I was changing jobs. (Longtime e-friends may also remember a newsletter I wrote back in high school, which was also a crazy time just by virtue of being high school. No, you cannot read it, and we will not speak of it again.)

You might be getting this because you subscribed to the last iteration—or “season 1”—of this newsletter on TinyLetter, or because you signed up since I posted a teaser on Twitter. Or you might be reading this on the web. Either way, welcome to Season 2!

The subject of this first issue of Season 2 is finishing things (or not), and my worst habit here is boldly starting something and then dropping it for something newer and shinier.

So I’m pleased to report I’ve already started writing the next few upcoming posts. Issue #2 will be an all-recommendations edition about “plague merch,” issue #3 will be about iPads and keyboards, and topics past that will include OKRs, variable fonts, and working from home. If you have any topic requests for me to get into, hit me up on Twitter (DM @ddemaree) or email david@demaree.me.

Finished > in progress

I have always had a problem finishing things. Speaking of high school: in my junior-year art classes, I used to ruin perfectly good paintings by continually reworking them. The process felt more interesting in the moment than landing on a finished product.

Like a lot of people, I started the lockdown times thinking I’d finally have time to take on and finish some side projects. First I thought I’d make that to-do list app I’ve always dreamed of making, then I thought I’d make my own headless CMS app. Most recently I’ve re-stacked and re-designed my personal site/blog for the millionth time.

As with my paintings in high school, I’m chasing the feeling of working on something but (depending on the project) either don’t have a clear plan for what I’m doing or why I’m doing it, or I have a plan but I ignore it because, god help me, part of me enjoys redrawing a face, refactoring a database layer, or switching React frameworks every 2 weeks. Perfecting (or “perfecting”) elements of craft/technique is a great way to procrastinate while still feeling productive.

And a real toxic combo is to have things I want to do (that aren’t getting done) that are blocked or dependent on me doing other things (that aren’t getting done). If I want to start a blog, I could just start a blog in a number of ways, but if starting a blog is dependent on me designing my perfect WordPress (or Ghost, or Gatsby, or…) site design, I will end up with several unfinished design projects, and maybe some rambly article drafts, but no blog.

This is a bad habit. And though you could argue a pandemic is a bad time to work on breaking bad habits, on the other hand, the feeling of not finishing things is a drag on my soul. And now is a time to avoid unnecessary drag on my soul.

Earlier I thought of this modified Eisenhower Box:

It’s… well, it’s nonsense, but hopefully, you also get the point?

As Steve Jobs is said to have said, real artists ship. Some of the things I’m trying in order to ship more:

• At work, in the spirit of Matt LeMay’s One Page/One Hour pledge, instead of letting PRDs, decks, roadmaps, or whatever else linger in an undone state, I’m trying to instead focus on delivering something clear (if imperfect) in an hour of working time, then getting feedback.

• At home, I’m trying to maintain “inbox zero” on chores—doing laundry as soon as it needs doing, not procrastinating on taking out the recycling, or doing dishes.

• And on my personal projects, I’m trying to find ways to just get things done and embrace imperfection. Like this newsletter—Substack isn’t perfect, but it’s fine, and I can publish things. Eventually, I want what I write to be on my own web site, but that can come later. (And while writing on someone else’s platform is a wee bit problematic, it does let me avoid lots of bike-shedding opportunities.)

I think “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” is good advice at all times. But especially now, in these times, when “perfect” and even “good” seem like high bars to clear, it’s healthy to not let what you’re not doing distract from what you’ve done. Especially if it’s hard to predict what you can get done or how it will be received.

So, 1) optimize for getting something done, even if it’s imperfect, 2) be kind to yourself about the level of work you expect to produce, and 3) try to push past doubts about whether you’re spending time wisely, and embrace the opportunity to have more opportunities to do things. It’s better to ship an imperfect thing, possibly followed by a better thing than to do nothing at all.

Recommendations

I was going to close with some links to what I’m calling “plague merch”—products for or inspired by the pandemic, mostly from DTC startups—but it ended up long enough to be its own newsletter, so watch for that soon.

Even before the current situation turned my daily dog walks into 45-minute, 1.5-mile hikes, dog-walking time has been podcast time. My daily news routine is NPR’s Up First and Crooked Media’s What A Day—sometimes in that order, sometimes flipped, depending on mood. On Fridays, my first listen is Eater’s Digest, “a show about all things food and dining,” which as you might imagine has undergone a real 180º change in tone lately.

The most delightful thing I’ve heard recently is this episode of NPR’s Rough Translation about very different people coming together in a COVID quarantine hotel in Jerusalem.

If you are, like me, a huge nerd with strong keyboard opinions, you may harbor a secret ThinkPad fetish even if you can’t bring yourself to go all-in on Windows. And if this is you, I have good news: Lenovo has finally released a standalone wireless keyboard based on the iconic ThinkPad design, complete with the little red nipple pointer thing. I bought one of these (on day one) to use with the Chrome OS computer I have set up just for video conferencing, and it is 100% as ThinkPaddy as I dreamed it would be. One caveat for Mac users: this Lenovo keyboard has a true Windows layout—its Alt and Win/Cmd keys are swapped, with no built-in way to switch them. But you can use an app like Karabiner-Elements to remap the keys in software. 🤓

One quarantine project I’ve stuck with is trying to up my home cocktail-making game. After a semi-ridiculous struggle to get all the ingredients, I made a decent version of a Brooklyn, following Jim Meehan’s recipe from Meehan’s Bartender Manual (a book full of both pitch-perfect classic cocktail recipes and more than you could ever wish to know about what goes into operating the world’s greatest bars). If you’re going to try to fill a craft-cocktail-bar shaped hole in your life while at home, I recommend Cocktail Kingdom’s Essential Cocktail Set, which includes a fancy mixing glass and high-end steel instruments (jigger, shaker, spoon, and strainer) for about $100.

Stay safe, stay home, stay weird.

—DD

Google's NYC office, photographed as I was on my way in for on-site interviews, 21 Sept 2017

I will be working for Google's Corporate Engineering (or "Corp Eng") team, who are responsible for internal tools and devices used by Googlers—everything from buying/configuring the computers they make software and documents on, like a normal IT organization, to designing and making software to help keep Google running in the most effective, Googley way possible.

While that's going to be my official job, one of the nice things about working for Google (according to several Googlers I've talked to in the last few months) is that there's a lot of moving around and collaboration. PMs there are considered "technical", so it's conceivable I could help out with some code, or be part of helping to bring some internal or even public-facing product into the world. (There are some Google teams that are probably gonna get very tired of my bug reports. 😆)

I have some mixed feelings about leaving my team and corporate home of seven years. Typekit is one of the finest, nicest, most creative, most cohesive teams I've ever encountered; I've made some lifelong friendships there and shipped a lot of fine software. I'm sad to be leaving.

On the other hand, when Google calls you about a job, you owe it to yourself to take it seriously. Working for Google is something I never expected I could do. I didn't attend a top engineering school; in fact, I left my midwestern art college six credits shy of my BFA. I'm still a little bit surprised they called me back, let alone invited me in for interviews and offered me a job. But I plan to make the most of it, not only enjoying free lunches(!) and in-office espresso bars(!!), but also learning as much as I can from such a humongous assemblage of very smart people.

I hope to have some of you over for lunch at the office sometime. The cookies, I can testify, are very good.

All the best,
- DD

There are two ways to think about kindness. You can think about it as a fixed trait: either you have it or you don’t. Or you could think of kindness as a muscle. In some people, that muscle is naturally stronger than in others, but it can grow stronger in everyone with exercise. [Successful couples] tend to think about kindness as a muscle. They know that they have to exercise it to keep it in shape. They know, in other words, that a good relationship requires sustained hard work. … Neglecting small moments of emotional connection will slowly wear away at your relationship. Neglect creates distance between partners and breeds resentment in the one who is being ignored.

In an earlier letter, I wrote about my sense that I am a bad friend. But I'm also bad at running, bad at baking, and bad at car repair. Kindness is a muscle. Some people grow up getting loads of practice at running or playing baseball, from doing those things at school or with their parents. (My mother not only wasn't very active, she thought mandatory P.E. was a stupid policy and fought to get me exempted on principle.)

Likewise, some people grow up better at making and keeping friends than others. That could be due to some innate confidence or friendliness, or it could be because they see their parents and other role models doing friendship well. My mother was estranged from her whole family, was critical of all my friends, and was (in a word) weird about her own few friendships. I grew up not really understanding friendship, like it was something for other people.

These emails from Andy are unusual. He's taking the time to practice friendship, reaching out to us directly instead of a broadcast, saying more than just "we should grab lunch sometime". The emails aren't efficient, topical, or necessary. They're just chit-chat, and there's an extent to which he's sending them out of boredom. But he could be relieving boredom by playing Shooty Skies, and instead he's emailing us to say hi. That means something.

Kindness is a muscle; friendship is a practice. The easiest way to not be a bad friend is to try to be a better friend. Expecting a relationship to stay healthy without any intervention or action is like expecting a yard to stay green without water or fertilizer. I'm also a bad gardener, but I'm working on that; twice a day I have to go outside to water our lawn, taking care to make sure the sprinkler reaches all the grass without leaving it on so long that it washes away the grass seed.

I finally recognized Andy's email for what it was because I'd just had the same idea myself, to try to catch up with friends I don't talk to often over email—or Twitter DMs, or any direct line of communication—rather than just hope our paths cross at an event, or that they're free to meet up on a day when I happen to be in their town.

I still plan on doing that (I've been insanely busy, but still, watch your inboxes), but in the meantime, I'd like to extend an open invitation to all of my NYC-based friends to grab lunch or dinner when I'm in the city (usually Tuesdays and Thursdays). I grant that as acts of friendship go, this is pretty passive aggressive: I want to practice friendship by making you email me to ask about lunch. But hopefully it's a start.

Best,
- DD

In applying the above rule, always ask yourself: are you really invested in what you think you’re invested in? Here’s a trick: if you can take yourself completely out of the piece, removing your byline and putting the words under someone else’s name on someone else’s website, without in any way compromising the meaning or integrity of the piece, burn it to fucking ashes.

Don’t write about technology. Seriously, don’t. Write instead about technology’s effects, consequences, antecedents. Write about the world technology has created. Would you write about a new genus of apple (the fruit)? Doing so makes about as much sense as writing about a new Apple device, unless that device raises new questions or opens up new avenues of exploration. Reporting on the existence of a thing can be safely left to others.

Don’t recommend products. Or do, but in doing so, tell a story about how the product has improved your life, if only by doing its job in a delightful way. Don’t criticize products, or do, but tell a story about how they’ve harmed you. In these cases, remember always that the absence of delight is not harm.

Don’t write about how without also talking about why.

Don’t be afraid to talk about your obsessions, but try not to assume your readers share them. At the same time, remember your readers are not stupid. They can follow hyperlinks. They can use Google. It’s okay—better, in fact—to start in media res. (It worked for Kurosawa.)

Really, try to remember that your readers are other people, and that’s what’s so great about blogging.

Treat received wisdom like a chain letter, or better yet, an exquisite corpse. Passing it on is fine—hell, even encouraged—provided you’ve added your own lines to the bottom for the next person.

Think more and say less. Try to say only the things which only you could say.

Following these rules may mean you post less, or not at all. That’s fine; try to be okay with it. Try also to be okay with feeling frustrated you’re not posting more.

Lastly, pictures of your baby are always okay, and fuck anyone who says otherwise.

Yours,
- DD

Next month, we’re leaving. My wife and I are close to closing on a house in Maplewood, NJ, in the NYC suburbs, about 30 minutes from Penn Station by train.

Maplewood is one of those Jersey suburbs that's picked up a reputation as somewhere Brooklynites go when they decide to leave Brooklyn. At one of the open houses we went to, nearly everyone looking was from Brooklyn—including some neighbors who were there looking on behalf of friends still in Brooklyn.

The Morning News just published a piece about how suburbs and neighborhoods in various places around the world map to places in NYC; though the Jersey suburbs didn't rate paragraphs in the body of the piece, Maplewood, Montclair, and one other, less famous town were highlighted on the accompanying map. Maplewood, says the map, is like Brooklyn Heights.


Maplewood doesn't have nearly as many restaurants, cafes, and shops as real Brooklyn, but there are several good ones (and even a couple great ones) within walking distance of our new house, and the neighboring towns of Millburn and South Orange have tons of cute stuff that's bike-able or easily drivable. If we find ourselves really starved for great cuisine or shopping or culture, New York City is right there.


As to why we're moving, it's a long story that isn't very interesting. Ultimately, we just decided to. I've been here for fifteen years, and my wife has been here for ten, and we're ready for something new. (Chris Shiflett's move from Brooklyn to Boulder last year was, if not inspiration, then validation for our idea to move.)

The joke I like to make is that we decided to move to the suburbs, and we thought about moving to Chicago's suburbs, but we like New York's better.

A less glib reason is that my wife's brother's family—some of our favorite relatives—live about fifteen minutes from our new house in Summit, NJ. We've spent Christmas with them every year since 2011, which gave us a taste of the area before we even considered moving there. We're excited to live in a cute, small town with easy access to Manhattan, but we're most excited for our daughter to grow up with her uncle, aunt, and cousins nearby.

Buying a house is a strange, byzantine process. This is from a Slack chat with my friend and Typekit teammate Morgan Kelly:
It's been a rollercoaster, but we're almost to the end. If everything stays on track, we're due to close on June 10, then moving out on June 27—coincidentally, the 7th anniversary of me and Jody's first date. Almost all the paperwork is done. The movers are booked. I'm making lunch and dinner dates to see friends (not to mention favorite restaurants) before we leave.

Leaving Chicago is sad, but we're excited to begin some new adventures, and hopefully I'll get to see some of you on the East Coast a little more often.

Wish us luck.

Best,
- DD