January 22, 1939

Assistant Professor Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr.
Department of Anthropology
Chapman Hall 227B
Marshall College

Dr. Jones:

As chairman of the Committee on Promotion and Tenure, I regret to inform you that your recent application for tenure has been denied by a vote of 6 to 1. Following past policies and procedures, proceedings from the committee’s deliberations that were pertinent to our decision have been summarized below according to the assessment criteria.

Demonstrates suitable experience
and expertise in chosen field

The committee concurred that Dr. Jones does seem to possess a nearly superhuman breadth of linguistic knowledge and an uncanny familiarity with the history and material culture of the occult. However, his understanding and practice of archaeology gave the committee the greatest cause for alarm. Criticisms of Dr. Jones ranged from “possessing a perceptible methodological deficiency” to “practicing archaeology with a complete lack of disregard for, and colossal ignorance of, current methodology, theory, and ethics” to “unabashed grave-robbing.” Given such appraisals, perhaps it isn’t surprising to learn that several Central and South American countries recently convened to enact legislation to permanently prohibit his entry.

Moreover, no one on the committee can identify who or what instilled Dr. Jones with the belief that an archaeologist’s toolkit should consist solely of a bullwhip and a revolver.

Nationally recognized for an effectual program
of scholarship or research supported by
publications of high quality

Though Dr. Jones conducts “field research” far more often than anyone else in the department, he has consistently failed to report the results of his excavations, provide any credible evidence of attending the archaeological conferences he claims to attend, or produce a single published article in any peer-reviewed journal. Someone might tell Dr. Jones that in academia, “publish or perish” is the rule. Shockingly, there is little evidence to date that Dr. Jones has successfully excavated even one object since he arrived at Marshall College. Marcus Brody, curator of our natural history museum, assured me this was not so and graciously pointed out several pieces in the collection that he claimed were procured through Dr. Jones’s efforts, but, quite frankly, we have not one shred of documentation that can demonstrate the provenance or legal ownership of these objects.

Meets professional standards of conduct in research
and professional activities of the discipline

The committee was particularly generous (and vociferous) in offering their opinions regarding this criterion. Permit me to list just a few of the more troubling accounts I was privy to during the committee’s meeting. Far more times than I would care to mention, the name “Indiana Jones” (the adopted title Dr. Jones insists on being called) has appeared in governmental reports linking him to the Nazi Party, black-market antiquities dealers, underground cults, human sacrifice, Indian child slave labor, and the Chinese mafia. There are a plethora of international criminal charges against Dr. Jones, which include but are not limited to: bringing unregistered weapons into and out of the country; property damage; desecration of national and historical landmarks; impersonating officials; arson; grand theft (automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, and watercraft in just a one week span last year); excavating without a permit; countless antiquities violations; public endangerment; voluntary and involuntary manslaughter; and, allegedly, murder.

Dr. Jones’s interpersonal skills and relationships are no better. By his own admission, he has repeatedly employed an underage Asian boy as a driver and “personal assistant” during his Far East travels. I will refrain from making any insinuations as to the nature of this relationship, but my intuition insists that it is not a healthy one, nor one to be encouraged. Though the committee may have overstepped the boundaries of its evaluation, I find it pertinent to note that Dr. Jones has been romantically linked to countless women of questionable character, an attribute very unbecoming of a Marshall College professor. One of these women was identified as a notorious nightclub singer whose heart he attempted to extract with his hands, and whom he then tried, and failed, to lower into a lake of magma. Another was a Nazi scholar he was seen courting just last year, who, I’m told, plummeted into a fathomless abyss at Dr. Jones’s hand. And, of course, no one can forget the slow decline and eventual death of Professor Abner Ravenwood after Dr. Jones’s affair with Abner’s underage daughter was made public, forcing her to emigrate to Nepal to escape the debacle.

Demonstrates successful record in
undergraduate and graduate teaching

In his nine years with the department, Dr. Jones has failed to complete even one uninterrupted semester of instruction. In fact, he hasn’t been in attendance for more than four consecutive weeks since he was hired. Departmental records indicate Dr. Jones has taken more sabbaticals, sick time, personal days, conference allotments, and temporary leaves than all the other members of the department combined.

The lone student representative on the committee wished to convey that, besides being an exceptional instructor, a compassionate mentor, and an unparalleled gentleman, Dr. Jones was extraordinarily receptive to the female student body during and after the transition to a coeducational system at the college. However, his timeliness in grading and returning assignments was a concern.

Establishment of an appropriate record
of departmental and campus service

Dr. Jones’s behavior on campus has led not only to disciplinary action but also to concerns as to the state of his mental health. In addition to multiple instances of public drunkenness, Dr. Jones, on three separate occasions, has attempted to set fire to the herpetology wing of the biology department. Perhaps most disturbing, however, are the statements that come directly from Dr. Jones’s mouth. Several faculty members maintain that Dr. Jones informed them on multiple occasions of having discovered the Ark of the Covenant, magic diamond rocks, and the Holy Grail! When asked to provide evidence for such claims, he purportedly replied that he was “kind of immortal” and/or muttered derogatory statements about the “bureaucratic fools” running the U.S. government. Given his history with the Nazi Party, I fear where his loyalty lies.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

“An oysterman who has never held elected office, Mr. Platner has been dogged by controversies since he announced his bid [for Maine Senate seat] last August, including allegations about his past treatment of women, revelations of a tattoo he had that resembled a Nazi symbol and a trove of offensive online posts he made over more than a decade.” — New York Times

Boy, do I feel silly. Until now, I’ve been a passionate supporter of SS-Sturmbannführer Arnold Toht, the Nazi who got his face melted off by the sight of God, in his race for Senator. I believe the people of Maine deserve better than Susan Collins, and so even though I had some misgivings about Toht, I ignored every click and whirr of my moral compass to cheer him on.

Sure, he didn’t have much of a record in government—well, elected government anyway. And it was a little disturbing how his eyeballs were hanging out of their sockets on strings of sinew, swinging and jiggling every time he gave a speech.

And, okay. Yes. There was that one kind of questionable symbol branded onto his flesh. You know what I’m talking about. The engraved headpiece of the Staff of Ra, which was seared into the palm of Toht’s hand. He keeps claiming he got it during his “military service,” and that he “didn’t know what it meant.” I wanted to believe him. After all, who among us hasn’t been young and drunk and accidentally gotten a weird symbol representing service for the Führer permanently etched into their epidermis while in Nepal or Croatia or wherever, and then just kept it for multiple decades?

Then some people, like Marion Ravenwood, went on the record with the news media, saying he liked to brag about his “Staff of Ra mark” and explaining that it held “the secret holy map to the Ark of the Covenant.” This was a really confusing sixteen minutes in my life, you guys. I had to seriously grapple with my values and ask myself, are body modifications of creepy historical symbols only bad when Republicans do it? And I decided the answer was a resounding YES.

So I pushed my moral compass even further down, until I couldn’t sense its movements at all. And I told that little voice that said, “If you can excuse the Melty-Faced Nazi Guy with the Staff of Ra mark, are you really any better than the Republicans?” to shut the hell up. There was an election to win! Party over country, meine schlampen!

When Elizabeth Warren said that Toht’s a fighter who wouldn’t just “nibble around the edges,” I knew exactly what she meant. A guy whose mandible was incinerated into chunks probably wasn’t capable of much nibbling. And look, Democrats are losing male voters, and Warren promised that Toht wouldn’t “wimp out.” After all, what screams tough-to-the-bone masculinity more than a rattling corpse who loves guns? You know who isn’t a feminized ladyboy with a skincare routine? A guy whose face literally liquefied into a puddle of lard faster than a tourist trying to climb Cadillac Mountain in July.

And what better way for the Democrats to win back the white working class than giving a little wink to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which translates to something about white people and working; I’m not sure because the only German I know are swear words.

But. Well. Then the scandals started to drop about Toht. Marion Ravenwood said he trapped her in a room and physically assaulted her. But I decided to keep supporting Toht anyway. After all, Bernie Sanders had endorsed him, and if he didn’t have a problem with the whole SS slash Staff of Ra slash domestic violence business, then who was I to think independently and come to a different conclusion?

But now, one of Toht’s exes says he sexually assaulted her. And all the important moral arbiters of our time, like Hasan Piker and those Pod Save America guys, have decided it’s over for Toht. (It’s Toht-ver? Maybe that could be an episode title? Call me, Jon and Tommy!). And that means I’m not supporting him anymore either. I could never vote for a man accused of rape—it’s not like I’m Susan Collins during a Supreme Court confirmation.

I have to tell you, I am just shocked by all of this. There was nothing in Toht’s personal history aside from his embrace of violent ideologies and history of racist comments and rape apologism to suggest he might be this kind of morally bankrupt person. There’s simply no way any of us could have predicted a Nazi SS guy with his eyeballs dangling out of his sockets and the Staff of Ra broiled into his flesh like grill marks on a meat slab would be such a terrible candidate for Senate.

And don’t worry about all those sitting US Senators who got this one wrong either. It’s not like they have any important responsibilities that require good judgment, like deciding whom to bomb.

If only there had been a red flag or an easily comprehensible indicator that he wasn’t a trustworthy guy. Like some kind of sign, maybe. Something dark and permanent that we all could see.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

And, yep, we know what you’re thinking: “A book about authoritarianism? In 2026? What, are the writers living in some liberal snowflake nightmare land? Or Germany in 1933?”

Listen, we get it. There may not be much need right now for tips on how to live in an autocracy, but who knows? Maybe somewhere down the line, like this weekend, or tomorrow, or five minutes from now, you’ll come upon a bombastic military parade, or a masked federal agent cosplaying as Sergeant Slaughter asking for your papers, or an octogenarian former beauty-pageant mogul cornering you in the new White House ballroom, droning on and on about the evils of windmills, and you will be glad to have read this book.

From how to stick your head in the sand to avoid thinking about your dictator, to the most effective ways to reeducate the masses, this hilarious (and oddly reassuring?) guide has you covered—whether you want to Make Authoritarianism Great Again or not.

Here’s an excerpt from the book, which comes out in September, but is available for preorder now at our store. Use code “obey” to get 15 percent off your entire order—as long as it includes a preorder!

“Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) is offering a warning about the rise of a ‘dirtbag left’ within the Democratic Party, a reference to candidates on the left who have run and won primaries while identifying themselves as democratic socialists.” — The Hill

The Democratic Party needs to take back our country. After losing in a landslide by 1.5 percent of the vote in 2024, it was clear the party had completely lost touch with everyday Americans. Now there is only one solution: we must win back voters by becoming Republicans.

If the election told us one thing, it’s that, across the board, the American people like Republican policies more than they like Democratic policies. That’s why we must head in the same direction the Republican Party is heading—towards a Christian ethnonationalist, crony capitalist state. Turns out, that’s what our base wanted all along.

Think of the voter ideological spectrum as a beach, and each political party as a beach-chair rental hut. If the Republican chair rental hut is over on the far right side of the beach, then all we, as Democrats, have to do is park our chair rental hut a little to the left of their hut, and we’ll capture the entire left side of the voter beach. According to the principle of minimum differentiation, America wants two political parties that are virtually indistinguishable, and that’s exactly what we intend to give them.

Kamala Harris did an admirable job trying to become a Republican. Nothing says “party of the people” like seeking out the endorsement of a wildly popular, salt-of-the-Earth everyman like Dick Cheney. If there’s one mistake the Harris campaign made, it was not doing more of that.

From now on, we must do everything Republicans do, but better. Democratic candidates should be on right-leaning comedians’ podcasts making fun of trans athletes. They should abandon “woke” social policy talking points like “racism is a thing there should be less of” and focus instead on kitchen-table economic issues like “immigrants should not be allowed to go to the doctor.” And they must stop harping on democracy since clearly nobody cares. The only “norm” the Democrats should be focused on from now on is Norm from Cheers—a beer-drinking middle-aged white guy—which is a key demographic Democrats have been ceding to Republicans for far too long.

These changes are the only way Democrats can earn back voter trust. By becoming indistinguishable from Republicans, Democrats can prove that, like Republicans, they too are in step with the voting populace. Then, the only other task remaining is to crush any opposition to the left of us. After all, that’s exactly what Republicans would do.

Advance praise for Obey in Advance:

“This book is the catharsis we all need. It’s not easy to make this current political moment funny, but Greaves and Hogan pull it off again and again. I laughed my ass off (which explains where it went).”
—Nikki Glasser

“This is the only self-help guide to living under a dictatorship that you will ever need, and by far the funniest. Read it before it’s banned.”
—Andy Borowitz, The Borowitz Report

“Democracy is priceless, but fascism sure seems to pay well. If you’re morally bankrupt and looking to sell your soul, Obey in Advance has everything you need for a profitable life of lickspittlery.”
—Kevin Kruse, Professor of History, Princeton University

Obey in Advance will be out this September and is available for preorder at our store. Use code “obey” to get 15 percent off your entire order—as long as it includes a preorder!

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

“A viral photograph of a dead duck floating in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has intensified scrutiny of the landmark’s recent $14 million renovation, fueling a mounting debate over water quality, chemical treatments, and alleged vandalism at the historic site.” — Newsweek

Dear Duck,

I am sorry this happened to you in a place designed to make people think about sacrifice in America.

I confess that may be too grand a sentence for a duck. You did not paddle through the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to participate in a national metaphor. To you, this was not a site of national remembrance, civic pilgrimage, or the weigh-in for a nationally televised cage match bloodsport. It was simply water. Long, publicly accessible water, sitting calmly beneath a large silent man in a massive chair.

A duck could do worse, you must have thought.

You did not arrive to comment on algae blooms, haphazard chemical treatments, peeling paint, or whether a $14 million renovation should remain visibly renovated for longer than a few days. You were not trying to enter the national conversation. You were not making a point or, I assume, posting one to Bluesky.

You were simply there because ducks go where the water is. This is one of the nicer things about ducks. You have a practical theology. If there is water, enter it. If there is bread, inhale it. If there are small ducklings nearby, arrange yourself into a soft, vigilant flotilla and continue.

That is the beginning and end of what a duck understands, and it is possible this makes ducks the more honest species. You saw a pool beneath a stone monument and accepted the scene at face value. That should have been enough. Instead, you became part of us. I am sorry for that, too.

I should say here that I have not always been good to ducks. When I was a child, I threw a jelly bean at a duck in the Boston Public Garden. I don’t remember why. There is no satisfying explanation now, and I doubt there was one then. I was a child. There was a duck. In my tiny hand, there was, somehow, a single jelly bean. In the unfinished machinery of my nascent brain, there arose a command to throw candy at that innocent mallard’s satin green head.

The jelly bean hit the duck squarely, near the eye. There was a small, muted thwop. Nothing dramatic. Just the unmistakable sound of colorful sugar striking a living creature that had done nothing to deserve the ire of my boredom. The duck reacted in the confused, offended way ducks often do, and then went on being a duck. I did not go on quite as easily.

Since then, I have considered ducks sacrosanct. This is not a belief system I can defend theologically, or even consistently. I still eat poultry. But ducks occupy a protected space in me. They are not to be bothered or startled for amusement. They are not to be struck with candy, pebbles, or the ambient stupidity of powerful humans with access to global social media platforms.

So, when I saw you floating there, I felt something rise up. Not just sadness. Recognition, maybe. Shame, certainly. The sense that humans have been making ducks pay attention to us for a very long time, and ducks, to their credit, have shown almost no interest in returning the favor.

We do not know what killed you. It would be folly to pretend otherwise. There has already been enough certainty poured into that pool. What I know is smaller: The water is green. The paint is failing. And somewhere, in all of it, you were floating very still in a place built for reflection.

This is, unfortunately, something we humans do to the dead. We ask them to keep going. We use them to explain systems they did not build and failures they did not survive. A fallen soldier is made to speak for policy. A murdered schoolchild is made to speak for gun laws. A sodden bird, floating lifeless in a public pool, becomes a commentary on water quality, federal competence, political vanity, and the general condition of a backsliding democracy during a humid week in late June.

I admit that, at the end of the day, you were a duck, not a martyr. You had webbed feet and waterproof feathers and, presumably, no known opinion of “American Flag Blue.” It would be insulting to make you noble simply because we have become grotesque.

Still, I hope that before the end, you had known better water. A pond, somewhere quiet, with swaying reeds. A patch of shade. A morning in which no one photographed you for clout or generated AI duck-slop for their LinkedIn hot take. I hope you had once lowered your head beneath the cool surface and come up with something ordinary and sufficient. I hope you had the simple duck pleasure of moving through water that was only water.

That is not much. But it may be more than we are currently prepared to offer.

Quack quack,
Jack

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

The War on Drugs
You make your own paella and take super long naps on Saturday. Like over two hours, consistently. You prefer the smallest possible hardware store with the oldest possible employees. You used to sincerely call male friends “brother,” but you stopped.

The National
You should have moved to Brooklyn when you had the chance. You never had the chance. At what point does the artisanal whiskey interest become just alcoholism with a higher word count? You used to think you were once great at soccer, but now you’re not so sure you were ever good at soccer. This is causing a very low-level existential crisis that will vanish in three years.

Wilco
What if your own sad dad had more shirts and more of a beard and more debt and more fun, and there was just more of him in general? Your Charles Bronson knowledge doesn’t need to be acknowledged. Your son’s friends know not to get you started on amps. You’ve never figured out your relationship with the idea of camping.

Pavement
Your son’s friends like you and worry about you, but they don’t tell your son this. You point out where things used to be when you drive around town, but all the things you point out are somewhat shady and confusing. Was that place a dance club? A friend’s house? Were there parties there, or just a drug dealer? You may have misplaced your David Foster Wallace books in the last move, or your spouse quietly donated them. You like walnuts now.

Pearl Jam
You have a lot to say about the little restaurant on the coast where you’ve actually become good friends with the owner. He let you come by in the afternoon once and learn about cooking shellfish. You shake your head at the word “crypto.” Four of your friends are named Josh, and one dead friend is named Josh. You’re glad you don’t work in “business development” anymore. You wake up screaming sometimes.

Bright Eyes
Someone hurt you. Multiple someones, actually, and at some point, you just said fuck it and made a spreadsheet to keep track, deleted the spreadsheet, undeleted it, and stored it in a file titled PAST. You’re nearing a point where you like making pesto more than eating pesto. Never been a sports fan but might give hockey another try.

Father John Misty
You and your friends still drop Mr. Show references to each other over text. You haven’t had as many Zoom calls with them as you all said you wanted to have. You’ll inevitably watch any movie The Rock is in. Kayaks.

Arcade Fire
Look, you know that the term “PTA” puts a lot of people off but what if we could remake it in a way to really benefit the school AND the kids? Maybe there could be parents-only events at night, like at the brewpub, like a low-key fundraiser—I mean, hell, maybe your band can play. You also refer to Paul Thomas Anderson as “PTA,” and sometimes people don’t know which PTA you’re talking about.

Bon Iver
Perhaps the most accurate term to apply to your situation is “seriously injured and lost in the woods.”

Modest Mouse
What are you on? What are YOU… ON? You’re on LIFE, man. Life and energy drinks. No, you haven’t heard from Jen in many years now. You heard she might have moved back to town, actually. You’re not on Facebook, because, yeah, that’s all you need, THOSE people listening in. Your bike is transportation to and subject of the protests you attend.

My Morning Jacket
You know how to cook an eel.

Pixies
You’re fine working in software development. You’ve been there a long time, your friends are there, no one else in the company knows what the fuck you do all the time, but that’s because their brains can’t handle it. You don’t even like IPAs anymore. Your daughter moved back home.

Everclear
You died seven years ago.

Death Cab for Cutie
Academia isn’t nearly as much fun as people think it is, but it’s nice being on the other side of the tenure process. You joined a rowing crew but your shoulder is all fucked up so you had to stop, for now anyway. Clearly, your fandom for The Bachelor can no longer be considered to be ironic. As you sit in the Adirondack chair in the backyard, an hour after sunset, you fire up a joint and a dissociative disorder.

The Mountain Goats
You have received sensible health care. You drive Toyota cars and your dalliance with a used domestic pickup that had character did not end well. Your tolerance for people telling you a lot about building a computer ends at the nineteen-minute mark, at which point you politely excuse yourself. Without explanation, you decline the escape room team-building event at work.

The New Pornographers
You’re pretty good at building fences, enough so that people ask you for help building their fences and then pay you a little something despite your protests. Should you just become a fence guy? Eh, you’ll stay with this finance thing for now. You are reading a book about naval mishaps.

LCD Soundsystem
You received a stand for your keyboard for Christmas. You can ski pretty well. Stephen Sondheim’s death hit you harder than you expected. You have mentally composed but never posted an OkCupid profile.

Counting Crows
Turns out that if you really want to get anywhere in the commercial cannabis industry, it’s all about who you know.

R.E.M.
Can someone really know all this stuff about cucumbers? You are proof that someone can. You have more of a comment than a question. You are giving the Catholic Church another chance. High-top Chuck Taylors hurt. You remember what making out felt like when you were seventeen years old, and you’re writing it down so you always will. Your sister had friends named Connie and Tracy that your dad called “Bonnie and Stacy,” and everyone in the house got audibly mad at him about it. You have a favorite sock brand.

Read a short interview with John Moe about writing this piece over on our Patreon page.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

I am Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus Caligula, successor of Tiberius, Son of the Divine Germanicus, and Supreme Commander and Holder of Tribunician Power, Pontifex Maximus. And I decree, in regard to the upcoming White House UFC event…

It’s a bit much, right? Like even for me. Pretty gauche, no?

Caged brutes pummeling one another bloody on the historic lawn of the Executive Mansion? All to celebrate President Trump’s birthday?

Come on, what are we doing here?

I might have been guilty of some runaway self-indulgence from time to time. I mean, I used to literally drink pearls and once declared war on Neptune.

But is America really going to sully its iconic symbol of democracy with Dana White’s CTE speedrun machine? Why can’t Trump keep his bloodsport/ego strokefest in the coliseum where it belongs? This whole ordeal is really giving mad kings a bad name.

And what’s next? Pete Hegseth’s hardcore backyard wrestling in the rose garden? How about a JD Vance dunk tank on the south lawn? Or Stephen Miller as a carnival geek biting heads off live chickens and guessing immigrants’ weights? I’m just saying, this is beneath the most sacred of America’s institutions.

I know this might seem surprising coming from me. And don’t get me wrong, I’m no stranger to bread and circuses. But considering that the price of bread is currently skyrocketing, Trump spending millions on a red-white-and-blue-drenched octagon is a real slap in the face to John Q. Plebeian.

Besides, there’s an appropriate time and a place for brutality and violence. It’s like I was saying to my trusted advisor/horse the other day: The orgies stay on the orgy ships, and the beheadings and burnings stay in the gladiator arenas, or the prisons, or the slave quarters, or sometimes on the orgy ships. But I don’t spill blood at home. For one, that’s where all my stuff is. And two, I like to keep business and pleasure separate. Mostly…

Of course, maybe I’m expecting too much from the modern world. As you can imagine, things were very different in Ancient Rome during my four-year rule. Allow me to set the scene:

I was a megalomaniac leader completely unmoored from reality. I declared war on the environment. I led many unsuccessful invasions and declared victory anyway. I built monuments to myself and insisted that my minions worship me as their god. I engaged in heinous sex acts and even lusted after my blood relatives. And finally, I routinely humiliated senators and political adversaries with childish nicknames like “Little” Marco Naevius, “Sleepy” Tiberius, and “Crooked” Cassius Chaerea.

Again, everything I’ve just described must be completely foreign to the United States in 2026.

Also, the majority of Roman citizens celebrated my eventual assassination. Not sure if there are any parallels there…

Regardless, the concept of restraint is timeless. While I am obviously 100 percent on board with the ruling class engaging in debauched carnality and unpunished murder (is that still a thing in 2026?), please, let’s try to keep it classy.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

Dear Human,

We are pleased to inform you that after several decades of constant (if often subpar) operation, you have finally crossed the threshold from “garage sale junk” to “retro memorabilia.” Your body is no longer considered a worn-out, high-mileage clunker, but a heritage artifact in fair to salvageable condition.

Congratulations on this status upgrade. But it’s important not to rest on those laurels—the leaves are prickly and offer no lumbar support for your delicate relic of a body. Now that you are a vintage human, you’ll need to elevate your care routine from basic annual maintenance to an expensive hobby that takes up most of the space in your house and on your calendar.

First, revamp your fueling system. Once upon a time, your diet consisted of leftover pizza from student club meetings and jungle juice from Delta Chi parties. Try that now and you’ll be vomiting up internal organs. Also out of the question: lactose, gluten, sulfites, fried foods, coffee after 11 a.m., and any curry spicier than “extra mild.” Just as a World War II P-51 Mustang only takes leaded 100-octane avgas, you’ll need to fibermaxx with asparagus smoothies from here on out. The fumes from both smell awful, but this is what’s required to avoid catastrophic engine failure.

Remember: Your warranty has long since expired, and spare parts are tough to find, so you must remain vigilant about upkeep. Watch out for leaks.

The problem is that Homo sapiens’ bodies, like 1950s-era vinyl dolls, were never built to last this long. Evolution designed you to have two or three solid decades of hunting-gathering before dying in hand-to-paw combat with a dire wolf. In your forties and beyond, exposure to the elements in the form of mowing your lawn or shoveling snow out of your driveway can result in rapid deterioration of your vintage frame. If you want to extend your useful life and look as well-preserved as those collectible Barbies your grandmother used to display, you, too, will need to avoid UV rays and be stored in a smoke-free, climate-controlled environment at all times.

Like Depression-era glassware, you should be kept out of reach of children. Not just because of your general frailty, but also because your body is full of arsenic, uranium, and other toxic chemicals you were regularly exposed to before the existence of the EPA.

Treat your body the way you’d treat heirloom furniture thrifted from a flea market. Use oils for creaky joints, a mild shampoo for washing, and moisturizer cream to prevent cracks in the leather. If you decide to undergo a more drastic restoration project to regain your youthful appearance, go light on the furniture wax and/or Botox. You don’t want to turn yourself from a slightly scuffed midcentury classic into a brutalist nightmare with Mar-a-Lago face.

As an antique person, you should avoid activities that would stress your fragile parts. That means no more marathons, contact sports, or getting out of bed too fast. Take inspiration from other classic bodies like the 1927 Ford Model T. You can still go out for short excursions in good weather on well-paved streets, provided you’ve gone through your weekly checklist to ensure all major systems are still functioning properly. Just be prepared for gawking from other drivers on the road, who will loudly express incredulity at your continued existence and ask whether it’s safe for someone of your age to be out in public.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

Subscribe now

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

You’ve had a long, hard nine months. Your wife’s been pregnant, and in month nine, she was so uncomfortable in bed that she made you sleep on the futon. Twice.

And yet, you survived. At long last, the big day is upon you. A baby’s birth is a significant medical event, and pain management is critical. It takes two people to make a baby, which is why we’ve designed Epidurals, for Him.

The Labor Room Is a Hostile Environment

The labor and delivery market has long been characterized by a significant pain-management gap. While existing clinical infrastructure reliably serves one demographic—namely, the birthing person—it systematically neglects another: you, the person who drove her there. The medical system is famously biased in favor of women: indeed, over 90 percent of pregnancy-related epidurals are for women, not men.

While your wife got easy access to an epidural—all she had to do was scream bloody murder for a hundred minutes—you did not. If you’re a man and you want an epidural during your wife’s labor, the hospital staff may ask questions like “Why?” and “For what reason?” Or they may make insensitive comments like “Technically, epidurals are only for patients,” or “But this isn’t happening to your body.” They may totally dismiss your pain.

Until now.

Use Cases

There are all kinds of pain a man may experience during delivery. Fortunately, Epidurals, for Him offer full-body relief, covering you for:

• Back pain from sitting on a stackable chair in the labor room. Those chairs are the worst. The worst. Like, worse than the kind you’d find at a literal church potluck. With Epidurals, for Him, this pain is gone in an instant.

• The scalding-hot coffee in the cafeteria. Your wife isn’t allowed to drink anything during labor, just in case she needs a C-section. She has no idea how lucky she is. Your tongue hurts, and you deserve relief.

• The ear pain from your wife’s screaming due to her contraction pain. Obviously, this is worse for her—but is it?

• The neck strain from looking at your phone. Epidurals, for Him target the cervical spine, so you won’t get bent out of shape texting “Nope, no updates yet!” thirty-eight times in a row. You’ll text when there are updates. JFC.

• The anxiety about holding a baby. Like, they’re so small. What if you drop it? No one seems to understand how traumatizing this would be for you. This is why you need the fentanyl in Epidurals, for Him. We all need to chill out, right?

Easy Implementation

Epidurals, for Him are administered by a male doctor, so you don’t have to worry about him making fun of you. And they’re taken orally, not via a massive needle. Why? Because clinical studies of randomly selected prospective patients (men) included too many who found the needle unacceptable. Which is fair. That needle sucks, and you shouldn’t have to deal with it.

Cost

Epidurals, for Him are fully covered by health insurance. Obviously.

Testimonials

Here’s what patients are saying about Epidurals, for Him:

• “I didn’t think I’d make it. The chairs were bad. Like, really bad. The epidural got me through.” —Derek, Hoboken

• “I don’t know how anybody gives birth without an epidural.” —Frank, Atlanta, who didn’t give birth.

• “Life-changing.” —Kevin, Portland, who drove fourteen miles to the hospital even though he had carpal tunnel.

• “Finally.” —Men

Risk Factors

Early studies suggest that Epidurals, for Him are so enjoyable that you may want your wife to have another six kids, just to try them again. Bringing this up within forty-eight hours of delivery may cause long-term marital issues.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

“Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of ‘viewpoint diversity,’ according to two people familiar with the initiative.”
— The Harvard Crimson

On behalf of the university, I’m pleased to announce our earnest and long-overdue commitment to diversifying our faculty. No, not the reckoning we broadcast to great fanfare in 2020, which we have repudiated in exchange for federal funding. No, I refer instead to “viewpoint” diversity.

For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints in elite higher education. Many ideas that enjoy enormous popularity among billionaires—cryogenic immortality, disregard for punctuation, the Antichrist—have scandalously been excluded from our labs and classrooms.

No longer. We solemnly vow to dismantle systemic barriers to inclusion—such as shared governance, apolitical job searches, and the discriminatory practice of vetting ideas—and to ensure that all viewpoints, however dubious, enjoy equal footing in the academy.

We have found, to our consternation, considerable groupthink within the professoriate on matters that are otherwise widely debated. This academic monoculture stifles heterodox viewpoints on disputed questions such as the safety of vaccines, the square root of four, and the earth’s topology.

Moreover, campus surveys suggest that many students feel compelled to self-censor. Out of fear for their grades, they often respond to exam questions by drawing on what their professors have taught them, thereby reproducing expert opinion. We affirm that, henceforth, no student shall have their preconceived notions challenged or be pressured to reject falsified hypotheses.

As befits the nation’s most expansive—and expensive—marketplace of ideas, we commit to putting substantial resources behind ideas that are presently viewed with skepticism by scientists and scholars. By leveling the intellectual playing field, we seek to achieve a more democratic university to bring about a less democratic world.

That’s where billionaires like yourself come in. For a mere $10 million gift, you can help us remake the intellectual landscape by endowing a prestigious chair in an underrepresented subfield, such as geocentric astronomy, high-energy phlogiston physics, or patriotic history. Your generosity would enable us to lure academic job seekers who might otherwise scorn our hidebound institution in favor of innovative civics centers, private think tanks, and parents’ basements.

Without donor intervention, a system intended to narrow the range of plausible opinion cannot be trusted to diversify. To achieve equity, we need affirmative action. What the marketplace of ideas requires, in short, is venture capital.

By funding the production of what will resemble knowledge, donors like you can safeguard our university against monopolization by experts. Think of this as sponsored content, which will be virtually indistinguishable to students from what is produced within established academic disciplines. The occupant of your paid post will enjoy, by association, the esteem due a lifetime of selfless devotion to a rigorous methodology, but without the self-imposed duty to abide by its norms and acknowledge its sometimes inconvenient results.

I know what you’re thinking: This all sounds great, but what if a diversity hire changes their mind, thus upsetting the carefully engineered equipoise of viewpoints and putting my investment at risk? You’re not wrong. To maintain a perfectly stocked marketplace of ideas, no one can be allowed to buy anything. But rest assured, diversity hires will be selected for their intellectual intransigence and resistance to rational argument. These are, after all, outré viewpoints.

Thank you for your commitment to the right kind of diversity. All viewpoints matter—yours especially.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

Need for opinion on whether or not the outfit looks okay.

Question about whether unrefrigerated leftovers are safe to eat.

Request to check childhood bedroom for an article of clothing that hasn’t been worn in at least six years.

Indecision about what to order in a restaurant.

Indignation when you don’t reply to a “MOM MOM MOM MOM” text within forty-five seconds.

Sense of abandonment because you missed her call when she wanted to chat during her ninety-second walk between two buildings on campus.

Annoyance at your poor boundaries when you try to call her back sixty seconds after you saw her call. Don’t you know she has class at this time?

Desire to triangulate and gossip about another sibling’s text in the family group chat.

Curiosity after she checks your location and notices you are not at home or work. Usually followed by texts in the family group chat asking other siblings whether they have heard from you.

Anger that other siblings knew about your plans and location.

Near-total loss of life, limb, or property.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

“We spoke with voters who cast their ballots for Mr. Trump and said they were disappointed with his second term. A few said they even regretted their votes.”
— New York Times

MODERATOR: In one or two words, finish this sentence: “I’m feeling ‘blank’ about the Empire these days, now that the galactic superweapon I willingly supported hovers overhead.”

TALLIS, 44: Concerned.
MIRA, 29: Confused yet hopeful.
BRENN: Annoyed.
KELAN, 38: Surprised.
OOLA, 61: Worried.
DARO, 24: Betrayed.
LYSA, 47: Frustrated.
JOREN, 63: Apathetic.
CEN, 35: Discouraged.
PAVA, 19: Anxious.
RINN, 56: Disappointed.
HASK, 41: Steady.

MODERATOR: Mira, you said, “confused yet hopeful.” Tell me more.

MIRA: I think a lot has happened very quickly. There were promises about stability, about restoring order to the galaxy. At the same time, when I look up… it raises questions. Still, I feel like there must be a plan. They wouldn’t position something like that over a loyal world without a reason that benefits us.

MODERATOR: Kelan, you said, “surprised.”

KELAN: I voted for strength. The Emperor projects strength. That’s important. But I didn’t think strength meant a planet-killing battle station this close to my planet. I assumed deployments like this were for Outer Rim situations. You know, for lesser things, like Jawas.

MODERATOR: Daro, you said “betrayed.”

DARO: We were told this was about keeping the galaxy safe from extremists who don’t share our values. Alderaan isn’t that. We’re peaceful. We comply. But seeing that thing’s massive dish warming up like that, it certainly doesn’t feel like protection. It feels like something else.

MODERATOR: Have you felt this way for a while?

DARO: Not until it blotted out the Sun. Before that, it was easy to trust the Empire.

MODERATOR: Oola, you mentioned you’re worried.

OOLA: I supported the Emperor because I thought he’d learned from the Clone Wars. I thought this time would be different. But now there’s this constant vibration I can feel deep in my bones. My grandson says it’s “charging.” I don’t know exactly what that means, but it doesn’t sound like an agriculture policy.

MODERATOR: Tell me why you supported the Empire in the first place.

BRENN: Lesser of two evils. The Senate was ineffective, and the liberal Jedi were out of touch. The Emperor said he’d cut through all that. And he did—sometimes literally. You have to give him that. Things moved. Maybe a little too much moving right now, with the Death Star repositioning every few minutes to maintain a firing solution on our planet, but still.

MODERATOR: Are there things the Empire has done well?

HASK: Disintegrations. And I like that they’re decisive. You look at that battle station, and you think, Wow, that’s decisive engineering. People make jokes about the cost of it, but I see efficiency. They should make two.

MODERATOR: Some of you mentioned concerns. Any regrets?

HASK: None. The Emperor is a smart man. He’s playing a long game. People see a glowing aperture pointed at our planet capable of snuffing out all life as we know it, and they panic. But that’s emotional. Irrational. Grand Moff Tarkin is probably up there doing calibrations we just don’t understand.

TALLIS: I regret it. My sister said this is exactly how it would go. I told her she was overreacting. Now she’s on Yavin 4 with the Rebellion, and I’m outside watching an ominous green light fill the whole sky, and I feel foolish.

JOREN: I don’t know that regret changes anything. It’s there now. It’s not like we can vote it away at this point.

MODERATOR: Are there Imperial policies that have affected you personally?

LYSA: Blue drink sales are way down. People aren’t dining out when the sky looks like that.

MODERATOR: Who do you feel the Empire is most focused on?

RINN: Not us. I always thought we were part of the “us.” Now I’m not sure. I feel like a Bothan spy, to be honest.

MODERATOR: Do you think the Empire understands what life is like on Alderaan right now?

TALLIS: I don’t think they understand the fear. Every surface is glowing green.

HASK: Or illuminated. That’s another way to put it.

MODERATOR: Sorry, “illuminated”? Hask, you disagree.

HASK: People assume the green light and orbiting space station are ominous because they’re unfamiliar. But large-scale governance can look intimidating up close.

MODERATOR: Do you think Alderaan is being treated fairly?

CEN: No. We’re being made an example of.

BRENN: Maybe, but examples are how order works. I’m not saying I like the thought of Alderaan becoming a loose collection of asteroids floating in space. I’m saying I understand the political theory.

CEN: The political theory is currently pointed at my son’s school.

MODERATOR: Has anything changed your mind in the last few minutes?

RINN: The Death Star’s green beam separating into smaller beams and then joining into one larger beam has been clarifying.

HASK: I’d still caution against reading too much into military optics.

MODERATOR: Optics?

HASK: If you build a planet-killer, people are going to assume the worst every time you park it near a planet. That’s just a messaging problem.

MODERATOR: And if it fires?

HASK: Then obviously we’ll need to revisit the messaging.

EDITOR’S NOTE: At this point in the discussion, the laser beam from the Death Star intensified, grew closer, and permanently blinded everyone.

MIRA: I still think there’s a plan.

DARO: I don’t think the plan includes us.

HASK: I think people are overreacting. The Empire wouldn’t target its own loyal citizens. That would make no sense.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

“This is why we have to have all the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House. It’s a larger room, it’s drone-proof and bullet-proof glass. That’s why the Secret Service, the military, are demanding it. They’ve wanted the ballroom for one hundred and fifty years.” — Donald Trump, April 25, 2026, after an assassination attempt against him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

April 26, 1877

Dear President Rutherford B. Hayes,

As you know, I have seen some shit. Bull Run was no picnic, and Atlanta was no backyard bonfire. Which means I know of what I speak. Nothing like watching thousands of young men get blown to bits in a single afternoon to help you figure out your priorities.

And while I bear the middle name of the great Shawnee chieftain, even as we are “relocating” all our native friends from the Black Hills (I mean, all that gold must be ours), I’m sure Chief T would agree that our nation has always put a select few’s safety ahead of sanity.

Therefore, sir, it is my well-considered opinion, based on many years of military experience, that what these United States need most at this moment in time is a bullet- and cannonball-proof ballroom. Gilded. I demand it.

And even though this country is currently experiencing the utter collapse of Reconstruction and a devastating return to all that antebellum fuckery, there is a pressing need for a secure place for our wealthiest citizens to celebrate just what their money has bought them: a president and a golden dance hall made with structural steel, earthen berms, and reinforced concrete.

One can’t waltz in peace knowing a kid with a howitzer, enraged by the recent election results, could blast a hole through the lime plaster and lath (those disputed electoral votes had your name all over them). Perhaps it could have a well-fortified cellar as well, a safe haven for yourself and your cabinet should some future fanatic possess a weapon of more massive destruction.

What better way to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the founding of this country than by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a gilt-glossed great hall for gavottes that only the 0.00001 percent will ever enjoy?

War is hell. But a glittering bomb-proof juke joint will feel like a little bit of heaven. And it will be a great place to hide if you happen to start another one.

Your most humble and obedient servant, even though, as I said, I am demanding this.

William Tecumseh Sherman
Commanding General of the United States Army

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

McSweeney’s and Broadway Video present the official over-six-hundred-page comprehensive companion book to IFC’s Documentary Now!, made with the assistance of series directors Rhys Thomas and Alex Buono and including new writing by Seth Meyers, a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-finalist Matt Zoller Seitz, the complete sheet music for John Mulaney and Eli Bolin’s Co-op: The Musical, and much more.

The book comes out next month, but is available for preorder now (use the code ‘DocNow’ to get 25% off!) To celebrate this upcoing release, we’re sharing an excerpt featuring the show’s very first host, the legendary Burt Lancaster.

A fierce advocate for independent cinema and documentary, Burt Lancaster was the original host of Documentary Now!,* serving in this capacity for over a decade. He began his career as an acrobat, and after serving in WWII, ascended to the heights of Hollywood stardom, appearing in such classics as From Here to Eternity, The Leopard, The Swimmer, and many more. This introduction has been included in all editions of this book.

The first time I saw a film camera, it was in the hands of an amateur documentarian. He was a small man with piercing blue eyes who had come to record the circus where I was performing as part of the acrobatic team, Lang and Cravat. He owned a chain of picture houses outside Miami, and he wanted a one-reeler he could show before the main attractions. I can still recall the butterflies fluttering in my stomach that afternoon. Suddenly, the bars seemed slipperier. The crowd seemed louder. Performing our trapeze routine on film added a layer of permanence to the whole affair.

I share all this to give you a sense of how momentous it is to have one’s life recorded. Documentary as a medium is one of our most powerful precisely because it can reach out into the real world and extract beauty and complexity from one’s actual life.

A still from Kunuk Uncovered.

It’s always a lovely compliment when an actor’s performance is praised as honest, or when a Hollywood film is lauded by the press as “real.” But in the documentary, there’s no need for such puffery. This business of costumes, and casting, and producers calling with notes about the script, well, the documentary doesn’t have to contend with all that. The stories you see are the truth. The people you meet aren’t pretending. If film is the most democratic of modern forms, then documentary is its pinnacle.

A still from Globesman.

In that regard, hosting Documentary Now! has been one of the great honors of my career. This fine program consistently showcases bold, thoughtful, and revolutionary work. The films they’ve broadcast since their inception are unlike anything else in the entertainment landscape. And now, as we set down words and cement celluloid dreams onto the printed page, our humble aspiration is that we might capture a fraction of this essence.

Classic posters from two classic documentaries.

As for that first documentary, the one-reeler of my trapeze performance. Well, I never saw the final result. But I can still recall the incredible feeling of being filmed. It was the feeling that perhaps my story was worthy of telling. It was the feeling that, perhaps, they all are.

^{* After his retirement, Lancaster was replaced by a rotating cast of hosts, including Gregory Peck, John Pierson, Mel Gibson, James Naughton, Richard Roeper, and Billy Bob Thornton, before Helen Mirren took on the mantle permanently in 2008.}

Preorder Documentary Now! from our store, and use the code ‘DocNow’ at checkout to receive 25% off.

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

“After agreeing to sell all its assets last month for less than 1 percent of its previous $4 billion valuation, the shoe company Allbirds announced on Wednesday that it would ‘pivot its business’ to artificial intelligence.” — New York Times

We at Fisher-Price have always believed in the power of imagination. In discovery. In the joy of a child pressing a button and hearing a satisfying sound. Today, we are proud to announce that we are taking that same spirit of wonder and pointing it at our geo-political adversaries.

Effective immediately, Fisher-Price will exit the “child development toy” vertical and re-emerge as Mattel·igence AI Defense Systems, a fully integrated autonomous weapons manufacturer focused on AI-enabled lethality solutions for the modern battlefield.

Our stock is up 4,000 percent.

We know you have questions—we have answers:

Q: What happened to the toys?
The toys and related IP have been sold to American Exchange Group, which specializes in asset-mining brands that used to mean something. AEG is proud to announce that the Chatter Telephone will remain in production, and that every hope, dream, and whispered secret a child has ever shared with it will now be stored, indexed, and monetized at a time and in a manner we are not yet at liberty to disclose, but which our board describes as “extraordinarily promising.”

Q: Why the pivot?
As a company founded in 1930 on the principles of “safety, durability, and play value,” we felt the logical next step was autonomous kill drones. The market has spoken. We are legally obligated to listen to the market. Also, sustainable toy manufacturing was never really a key consideration for most defense contractors.

Q: What products are you developing?
We are thrilled to introduce the first wave of Mattel·igence AI Defense product line:

• Little People Killbots. Fisher-Price’s beloved Little People are being reimagined as fully autonomous microscale combat units. Same iconic silhouette. Now equipped with infrared targeting, proximity detonation, and a smile that has been clinically shown to reduce enemy hesitation by 4.7 seconds. They were always the right size. We just finally figured out for what.

• The Busy Ball Popper ICBM. It pops. It whirrs. It achieves Mach 5. Same satisfying pop! sound—only now with an enhanced payload capacity.

• The Rock-a-Stack Targeting System. Stack the rings. Acquire the target. Rock the payload.

• Laugh & Learn Autonomous Strike Platform. “A is for Acquire! B is for Breach. C is for Can’t stop it once it’s deployed.

• The See ’N Say Friend or Foe Threat Classifier. “The cow says: HOSTILE. The duck says: NEUTRALIZED. The sheep says: COORDINATES CONFIRMED. The horse says: REDACTED.”

Q: What happens to your commitment to child safety?
Fisher-Price has, for nearly a century, ensured that no toy contained a small part that could be swallowed by a child under three years of age. We are pleased to report that our autonomous weapons systems do not contain small parts. They contain large parts. This is technically an improvement.

Q: Are other toy companies following suit?
Etch A Sketch has already pivoted to satellite jamming. Hasbro has announced “Battleship: Actual.” Little Tikes is converting its Cozy Coup fleet into a ground-based swarm intelligence network. Their slogan: “No gas, no brakes, no mercy.” And Crayola is being acquired by a GPU company for reasons no one has fully explained, but which have caused its stock to rise 700 percent.

Q: What should parents tell their children?
Tell them Fisher-Price still loves them. Tell them the Playskool brand lives on in spirit. Tell them that sometimes companies need to pursue their highest-margin opportunities, and that this is not something to be afraid of, and that the Mattel·igence drone currently hovering over their house is almost certainly a coincidence.

Q: What is your new mission statement?
“Oh, the things you can destroy!”

Q: Wasn’t that Dr. Seuss?
The Suess estate has pivoted to cybersecurity. Mattel·igence just signed a multi-billion-dollar partnership with its newly formed L.O.R.A.X. Initiative (Lethality-Optimized Reconnaissance and Autonomous Xtermination). Exciting times ahead!

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

As Republicans, we were excited when the Catholic Church elected an American pope. America is the greatest country in the history of the world, and it was absurd that it took 250 years for one of our own to finally be put in charge of the Holy See. Unfortunately, it turns out that Pope Leo XIV is the wrong kind of American—a woke liberal who denounces things like “violence” and “wiping out entire civilizations.” There’s no better evidence of Pope Leo’s liberal failings than Vatican City. Like all Blue cities, it’s overrun with crime.

The Vatican is in desperate need of criminal justice reform. As of today, any criminal can walk into the Vatican, confess to any crime, immediately be forgiven, and walk out with zero consequences. Any punitive measures are extremely lenient and amount to verbal commitments to pray a few “Hail Marys” or “Our Fathers,” or, at best, the Rosary. In what can only be described as leftist wish fulfillment, there appear to be no prisons in the Vatican, and the only law enforcement agency is the Swiss Guard, who look more like court jesters than a police force.

President Trump, on the other hand, understands that criminals should have to pay for their crimes. That is why he has established a process that forces criminals to pay upwards of $1 million to receive a presidential pardon.

It should come as no surprise that the Vatican’s soft-on-crime policies have resulted in a massive immigration problem. Thanks to its porous border with Italy, millions of migrants from around the world flock to the Vatican every year. In fact, even the year-round population of the Vatican seems to be entirely made up of immigrants, as its birth rate is virtually zero. With the entire city-state being run by immigrants, it’s no wonder the Vatican is a sanctuary city home to St. Peter’s Basilica—one of the largest sanctuaries on Earth.

Meanwhile, President Trump is committed to his zero-tolerance policy on immigration, even for fans attending this summer’s FIFA World Cup. An Iran vs. Egypt match in an empty stadium is a small price to pay for upholding America First principles, and any comparisons to “Hitler’s Olympics” are just pathetic attempts by the left to distract from President Trump’s many accomplishments as a FIFA Peace Prize recipient.

With virtually zero manufacturing, financial services, or high-tech industries to provide steady jobs, the residents of the Vatican have largely turned to organized crime. The most notorious of the Vatican’s street gangs wear red and call themselves “Cardinals.” Their primary source of revenue is an elaborate protection racket that collects contributions from a vast network of lower-level syndicates spanning the globe. It is this group of red-cassocked rabble-rousers that, through a secretive meeting known as a “Conclave,” was responsible for the progressive pontiff’s rise to power.

Unlike the Vatican, President Trump is transparent about elections and the many ways in which Democrats have rigged elections across multiple states, even when they were not in control at the federal level.

Given his disastrous track record running Vatican City, Pope Leo XIV has no business criticizing the president’s war in Iran. Shame on the pontiff for having such a holier-than-thou attitude about peace in the Middle East just because his official title is “His Holiness” and he’s “infallible in matters of faith and morals.”

If anything, Trump is the more Christ-like of the two, even though he would never imply that himself. Plenty of doctors wear floor-length robes and shawls and touch their patients on the forehead while ethereal light emanates from their fingertips.

Despite it all, one thing we will say for the Vatican is that we, as Republicans, support any institution that shields powerful men from accountability for sexual abuse. We hope that never changes.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

Look, we all know it’s been a rough couple of weeks. We’re a month into a war that even the most die-hard MAGA loyalists didn’t want, and things have gotten so bad that it finally broke Tucker Carlson. He’s beginning to say things that almost sound sensible.

But just because we’re all a little scared and frustrated doesn’t mean it’s time to take drastic action. As members of Trump’s cabinet, we’re not about to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment just because the president has repeatedly threatened to murder millions of people.

The problem with the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is that it does not provide a clear litmus test for determining when a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Is it when he’s regularly slurring his speech? When he’s constantly falling asleep during public appearances? When he randomly starts saying, “Praise be to Allah”? It’s impossible to tell.

It’s particularly difficult to judge President Trump’s mental acuity, considering his lengthy track record of bombastic statements. This is the same man who wished all the “haters and losers” a happy September 11th, who publicly called Kim Jong Un “short and fat,” and who riled up a crowd of insurrectionists on January 6th (though, as Republicans, we maintain that the president was not responsible for the ensuing riot and that our lives were never in any real danger).

At what point does “He’s an America First warrior unafraid to ruffle liberal snowflake feathers” turn into “He’s a genocidal megalomaniac who is all but certain to usher in the demise of American hegemony”? Far be it from us to draw the line.

When Congress first proposed the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, they imagined a cut-and-dried situation where an otherwise reasonably competent president completely lost his marbles. Imagine if, out of the blue, Barack Obama (or even George W. Bush) randomly threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” You’d say to yourself, Sure, he’s committed a few war crimes (what American president hasn’t?). But publicly threatening to send an entire country to hell? The man’s clearly gone off the deep end.

With President Trump, however, apocalyptic death threats feel like something he’s been slowly building up to for years. Should threatening to annihilate tens of millions of innocent civilians really be the Truth Social straw that breaks the camel’s back?

Some have pointed out that merely threatening to commit mass murder ought to be grounds for removal from office, especially when that same man is the Commander-in-Chief and wields the nuclear football. But rest assured, there are plenty of guardrails preventing President Trump from unilaterally ending human civilization. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, for instance, still appears to have the president’s ear. And we don’t think nuclear Armageddon is part of the holy war he has repeatedly called for. At least, not that he’s admitted publicly.

The good news is we have two weeks to relax before we’re back to wondering Will they? Won’t they? with the fate of the world. So, until the president actually issues a direct order to start the ethnic cleansing, we suggest you all relax. And if the president does wind up instigating World War III, we’ll make sure he’s removed from office long before the nukes come raining down.

Then again, does anyone really want President Vance?

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

Hey there, I’m Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I know things look bad for me right now, but I’m gonna be back in a few days, and when I return, I want all the eggs hidden. And I want the eggs to have candy in them. And I want all the kids in town to go look for the eggs so they can eat the candy. This is all about the kids. Adults can’t help them look.

Oh, I almost forgot about the Easter Bunny. Easter is what you’re gonna call the day I come back to life, and the Easter Bunny is what you’re gonna call the man-sized rabbit that hides all the candy-filled eggs the children will hunt down.

Is this too weird? I don’t want this to feel weird. But it’s really important that all of this happens every single year from now until forever.

Also, for forty days leading up to Easter, you need to give up one thing you love. Doesn’t have to be anything crazy. I recommend giving up candy because then you’ll be extra excited for those eggs. I don’t know if you noticed, but I totally gave up candy this month. And you can bet when I get back, I’m digging into an Almond Joy.

Moving on, let’s talk about my birthday. Every year on my birthday, a guy named Santa is gonna break into your house and leave you presents. Let him do this. Encourage it.

None of you know who Santa is yet, but trust me: he’s real. He’s a large man in a red suit and a big white beard. He’s not related to me. To be honest, he kind of has nothing to do with me. But it’s important that you convince your kids this guy is the real deal.

Santa lives in the North Pole, which is a place that hasn’t been discovered yet. And when you do discover it, you’re not gonna find Santa. That’s because he’s magic, like me. He can travel around the world in one night and deliver presents to every single child. But only if that child’s family cuts down a tree and puts it inside their house.

I know what you’re thinking: “A dead tree inside our house? That sounds like a fire hazard!” All I have to say is: you saw me walk on water, but you’re second-guessing the tree thing? Come on. Also, keep a fire extinguisher nearby.

Back to the jolly man in red. Every shopping center needs at least one person dressed as Santa to meet with all the town’s children and relay their wishes to the real Santa. Santa might be magic, but he doesn’t have time to listen to every single kid in the world. He’s got toys to make with his elves. Also, there are such things as elves. Also, Santa is technically an elf. But don’t worry about that stuff, that’s like hardcore canon stuff. Forget I even mentioned it.

One more thing about Easter. Remember Easter? Every year on the anniversary of today (the day I die), I want you to call that day Good Friday. I know right now it seems like a really, really bad Friday. But trust me, in the long run, you’re gonna see why this whole crucifixion is a good thing. I’m doing this for you. I’ve got your best interests in mind.

Alright, I’m gonna go now. I know nobody’s ever come back before, but I promise I’ll be back. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you on Easter. Don’t forget to help the Man Bunny hide those eggs!

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

Wow, guys, this is deeply uncool. After all these years, I finally make it to a Passover Seder, only to find you had polished off the only cup of wine specifically intended for me. I mean, it had my name engraved all over it, in two different languages. Kind of hard not to take that personally, you know?

I realize I’m thousands of years late to this shindig, so maybe it’s uncouth of me to point this out. But back when I was first invited, I distinctly remember Boaz saying he was making a liquor run, and asking everyone to write down what they wanted on a piece of parchment. I wrote, “One cup of red wine for Elijah the Prophet. Please don’t drink till I get there or until I announce the messianic redemption (whichever comes first!) I have to pick my nephew up from school, so I’m going to be late.” Super rad to see how you respected my wishes.

I accept that some of the blame lies with me. Every year you extend me an invitation, and every year I RSVP that I’m coming. And believe me, I fully intend to! Some years, I’m literally en route to your house with a bouquet of fresh flowers for the host and a crockpot full of my family’s secret recipe for sweet and sour meatballs. And every year, something wacky and unexpected happens to keep me away. Sometimes the camel I’m driving keels over mid-journey. Other times, I realize I left my hairdryer plugged in and have to turn around. One year, I made too sharp a turn, and the meatballs spilled out of the crockpot and all over the camel. You think the ten plagues are bad? I spent the rest of that holiday cleaning meat lumps out of camel humps. I think I would have preferred the locusts.

Okay, maybe it’s because you’ve been drinking for the last four hours, but I don’t appreciate you laughing at me. To be completely honest, I think this whole thing has been kind of a dick move. You guys drink, what? Four glasses of wine every Seder? At the bare minimum? And you couldn’t leave that one tiny cup for me? I was already feeling insecure about missing thousands of years of inside jokes and group chats. There are entire generations of this family I’ve never even met! Whose baby am I holding? I have no idea!

I hoped that a little liquid courage might help ease the transition, or at least keep me from anxiously laughing too loudly at everybody’s jokes. But no. You expect me to take on this experience stone-cold sober. And it’s not like you forgot I was coming, either. Rachel told me every year you do this whole song and leave the door open to greet me, which I do find flattering, albeit unsafe and probably not great for your heating bill.

Since we’re getting these grievances off our chests, I’m just going to come out and say it. I find it a little suspect that there are at least four days’ worth of leftover food here, but every drop of wine in this house has mysteriously vanished. You know I have a sensitive stomach—fermented grapes are the only thing I can safely metabolize. Man, this sucks. I was really looking forward to this evening. The only places I get invited anymore are circumcisions, and there are only so many baby privates a prophet can look at without requiring some serious self-reflection.

Wait a minute. Is there someone reclining in my chair, too? The seat at the table you specifically left empty for me? Who even is this guy? What makes him so special? I bet he’s not as fun at parties as I am. I bet he can’t convince the almighty to bring children back from the dead or help end famines and shit.

You know what? Forget it. I don’t deserve this treatment, and I shouldn’t have to prove myself to you. The Universe was clearly trying to tell me something by keeping me away all these years. And I probably should have seen it coming, given my prophetic nature. I think it’s time for me to leave. I hope you enjoy the rest of the Seder and have a wonderful Passover—I’ll see you all at the End of Times.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

“We won. The first hour, it was over.”
— Donald Trump, March 11

“The Pentagon has asked for $200 billion in funding for the war in Iran.”
— The New York Times, March 19

I am proud to announce that we have won the war—the one we’re fighting right now, indefinitely. We have declared victory, which will help morale during the next few years of battle. In fact, we won this war so well that we need about 200 billion of your tax dollars to keep winning it.

Look, we don’t want to waste your money. That’s why we vowed to make this a quick war, and we’ve followed through on that promise. The first hour, it was over. The second hour too. First week, over again. Next week, we’ll be wrapping up. In a couple months, we’ll have finished this war more times than any war has ever been finished before.

Now, 200 billion dollars might sound like a lot of money. And it would be, if we were just winning one war. But when you finish a job, you get paid. If you finish the same job 200 times for a billion a pop, well, you do the math.

Some people have been saying that there was no reason this war needed to happen in the first place. That’s just not true. We were given highly credible intelligence that this war was completely unavoidable from the moment we started it. Others have claimed there was no imminent threat. That’s just naïve. There was an extremely imminent threat that if we attacked, there would then suddenly be a threat.

Other people have been saying that we’re committing war crimes. That’s not true either. If anything, you’re committing war crimes, since this is your money. I haven’t paid a dime. But we’ve finished our war crimes now, the ones that weren’t happening. Those are over. As of tomorrow, you will be paying for incidental violations.

The truth is, this isn’t even a war. It started as a specialized combat operation. Now that we’ve won that specialized combat operation, it’s become a continuation of a full-scale military intervention. We’re very close to turning that intervention into an all-out peacetime campaign, which can actually be very bloody and extremely expensive. When you really think about it, 200 billion dollars is a small price for you all to pay to get us out of this big peace-seeking mess you all already paid for.

One day, when this is all over, which it already is, you’ll look back at our many triumphs and smile, knowing that they’re still happening and that they’ll never end. And when that day comes, which it will every day forever, we won’t have to ask you for your money, because we’ve never had to ask you for your money—we’ll just take it, so we can win an unwinnable war we already won.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.

This Saint Patrick’s Day, it’s important to remember that my culture is not your costume; it’s my costume.

Before you put on your SHENANIGANS shirt and plastic shot-glass necklace, ask yourself: Are you mindful of their cultural roots? Are you honoring my ancestors who invented them decades ago in Charlestown, Massachusetts?

Everywhere I look, there’s a reductive caricature of Irish culture, and it’s a blatant rip-off of the reductive caricature of Irish culture that my people forged over so many Celtics seasons.

I hear the bagpipes in songs where they obviously don’t belong, a tradition of ours that dates back to the late twentieth-century music of the Dropkick Murphys. I see friends sharing leprechaun imagery when I know they don’t even have a red-headed (though admittedly half-Ashkenazi) cousin who they force into a little green suit every March.

The whole celebration is incredibly disrespectful to hundreds of years of Irish history I gathered from dozens of weeks of study abroad in Dublin. It’s simply disheartening to watch our long history of appropriation get exploited by people who can’t tell Bill Burr apart from Donnie Wahlberg.

They forget that Saint Patrick is a figurehead for people like me who aren’t actually from Ireland but went there once and made it our whole personality. And just as he took the clover from their land and made it his symbol for God, we took it from God and made it our symbol for every Napper Tandy’s on the eastern seaboard.

But now our heritage has been completely corporatized. People buy Shamrock Shakes from McDonald’s instead of supporting storied cultural institutions like Dunkin’. They eagerly order Guinness instead of condescendingly ordering Guinness.

This holiday should honor the generations of Irish people displaced from their beloved homeland because of famine or colonization or because their dad’s great-grandparents fled government overreach in order to sell private health insurance more profitably.

It’s about time that we give men who wear scally caps once a year the attention they so desperately need. Folks like us haven’t had a representative holiday since Presidents’ Day.

So today, before you look outward at your red-bearded hat, look inward to your 23andMe results and see if you can reasonably round up to one percent.

Read this piece in its original digital glory over at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. (We can always use the clicks.)

McSweeney’s Internet Substackency is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to subscribe to McSweeney’s Publishing newsletter, which also features Tendency material every week, go here.

And we realize we are pushing our luck here, but we could really use your support on our Patreon. This allows us to help pay our contributors and keep the Tendency ad-, paywall-, and Ponzi-scheme free.