I Believe

Everybody seems to be scared of artificial intelligence. Or maybe the press makes it seem like everybody is scared of artificial intelligence.

AI is going to take our jobs. AI is going to replace artists. AI is going to manipulate elections. AI is going to become smarter than us. Eventually AI is going to destroy civilization.

Why are we always doing this?

Why do human beings always think civilization is about to end?

In my lifetime, first it was nuclear war. We are all going to die. Then the millennium change. Everything is going to stop working. Computers are going to fail. Civilization is going to fall apart. Then climate change. Now AI is going to destroy us all.

Before that, people thought Halley’s Comet was going to poison everybody.

In 1910, scientists detected cyanogen gas in the comet’s tail. Earth was going to pass through it. People bought gas masks and supposed remedies. Newspapers ran with it. There was real dread that this thing in the sky might kill everybody.

Then Earth passed through the tail.

And nothing happened.

That does not mean every warning is stupid. Nuclear war was a real danger. It still is. Y2K was a real computer problem. People spent years fixing it. Climate change is real. AI is going to create real problems.

But we have this habit of moving really quickly from, this could be bad, to, this could end civilization.

And I keep coming back to the same thing.

Every day has enough worry of its own.

Do not tax your life with the forethought of grief.

Enjoy the hard work of staying alive while you can.

There is that Wendell Berry poem, The Peace of Wild Things. I am paraphrasing it, but it is something like: when I wake at night and worry about my life or my children’s future, I go lie down by the water, among the wild things who do not tax their lives with the forethought of grief.

That phrase is just right.

The forethought of grief.

We do that all the time. We grieve things that have not happened yet. We suffer tomorrow before tomorrow gets here.

What happens to my children?

What happens to the climate?

What happens if the Russians launch?

What happens if the computers stop working?

What happens if the machine becomes smarter than us?

And some of those are reasonable questions. But at some point, you are just paying today for grief that may never come.

That does not mean do nothing.

Take climate change.

Climate change is not going to kill every person on Earth. Do you know what might kill a lot of people? Doing nothing to prepare for climate change.

If we need to shore up buildings, improve infrastructure, strengthen the electrical grid, prepare for drought, fires, flooding, storms, then do those things.

That is useful.

Sitting around worrying that civilization is going to collapse is not useful.

Worry is not preparation.

And I think AI is the same way.

There are reasonable guardrails we can put around artificial intelligence without acting like the machine itself is evil.

Start with personal responsibility.

No fake lewd photographs or videos using another person’s likeness. That should be illegal.

Not because AI made the image.

Because you used somebody else’s face to hurt them.

If an AI system hacks another company and causes millions of dollars in damage, somebody is responsible for that. “The AI did it” cannot become some excuse that means nobody is liable.

A person deployed it. A company built it. Somebody authorized it to do something.

Now, I do not think the AI company should automatically be responsible every time somebody misuses a model. That would be ridiculous.

If the company demonstrated reasonable guardrails, reasonable security, reasonable efforts to prevent abuse, then no, they should not automatically be liable because somebody found a way around those protections.

But if they knew there was a problem, knew their model was being used to do something harmful, had reasonable ways to stop it, and ignored it, then responsibility starts to move back toward the company.

That would make AI companies pay attention really quickly.

Not because somebody wrote a vague ethics statement.

Because there would be consequences.

There would be damages.

There would be liability.

And in a messed-up twist, I am not against the use of AI for military action.

I do not think that is contradictory.

The military already uses force that would be illegal in ordinary civilian life. The question is who is responsible.

If an autonomous or semi-autonomous system strikes a target, somebody in the chain of command still owns that decision.

“The algorithm decided” cannot be an excuse.

Somebody authorized that system. Somebody gave it the authority to act. Somebody remains responsible.

That gets into the philosophy behind all of this.

Sartre comes to mind.

Freedom creates responsibility.

You are free to choose, so you are also responsible for what you choose.

You do not get to hide behind the system. Or the institution. Or the role. Or, eventually, the algorithm.

John Stuart Mill fits here too.

Mill’s basic idea was that people should be left free to act unless their actions harm somebody else. The state should not interfere just because an action is unusual, risky, unpopular, or offensive. The line is harm.

That is pretty close to how I think about AI.

Do not regulate it because it frightens people.

Do not regulate it because it is new.

Do not regulate it because somebody can imagine a terrible future.

Regulate conduct when it causes real harm to other people.

That is a much cleaner rule.

If someone uses AI to commit fraud, punish the fraud.

If someone uses AI to create a nonconsensual sexual image, punish that.

If a company negligently deploys a system that causes foreseeable damage, hold the company responsible.

But do not build a giant apparatus around every hypothetical thing the technology might someday do.

You will never keep up anyway.

And I think the same principle applies to corporations.

Corporations have rights. They can own property. They can enter contracts. They can sue and be sued. They have legal protections.

Fine.

Then they also have reasonable responsibility.

You do not get rights without responsibility.

That applies to individuals. It should apply to companies.

So maybe the philosophy is something like this:

Maximum freedom, with responsibility for foreseeable harm.

Let people build things.

Let companies innovate.

Let people use powerful tools.

But when somebody gets hurt, ask the same questions we already know how to ask.

Who did it?

Who authorized it?

Who could reasonably foresee the harm?

Who failed to take reasonable precautions?

Fraud is still fraud.

Theft is still theft.

Defamation is still defamation.

Negligence is still negligence.

Calling it artificial intelligence does not make responsibility disappear.

And that brings me back to the larger point.

Maybe AI could someday create some civilization-level danger.

I do not know.

But every generation seems convinced it is standing at the edge of the end.

Nuclear war.

The millennium.

Climate catastrophe.

Artificial intelligence.

Before that, Halley’s Comet.

At some point, you have to live.

If there is something useful to do, do it.

If the climate is changing and infrastructure needs to be stronger, build stronger infrastructure.

If AI can be used to make fake sexual images of people, make that illegal.

If AI systems can cause real damage, establish liability.

If companies put reasonable guardrails in place, do not punish them automatically because somebody misused the tool anyway.

Do the work that needs doing.

Fix what can be fixed.

Prepare where preparation actually matters.

And then live.

Because every day already has enough trouble of its own.

There are people to love. There are things to build. There are things to repair. There are books to read. There is dinner to make. There is work to do.

There is a world that is still here this morning.

Do not tax your life with the forethought of grief.

Enjoy the hard work of staying alive while you can.

Tomorrow has enough worry of its own.

Sources

Public fear around Halley’s Comet in 1910, including concern that cyanogen gas in the comet’s tail might threaten life on Earth, and contemporary anti-comet remedies and gas masks: Library of Congress, “Halley’s Comet: Topics in Chronicling America”

Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things,” including the phrase about not taxing one’s life with the forethought of grief: Academy of American Poets, “Life Lines: Wendell Berry”

“Each day has enough trouble of its own”: Matthew 6:34, New International Version, via Bible Gateway

Finding satisfaction in one’s labor during the brief life God gives us, and receiving the ability to enjoy that labor as a gift: Ecclesiastes 5:18–20, New International Version, via Bible Gateway

Enjoying life, doing the work before you, and doing it with all your strength while you are alive: Ecclesiastes 9:7–10, New International Version, via Bible Gateway

John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, liberty, and the idea that coercive power is justified primarily to prevent harm to others: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “John Stuart Mill”; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Mill’s Moral and Political Philosophy”

Jean-Paul Sartre on freedom, responsibility, and bad faith: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Jean-Paul Sartre”; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Authenticity”

Corporations and other legal entities as legal persons capable of owning property, entering contracts, suing and being sued, while also carrying legal responsibilities and liabilities: Cornell Legal Information Institute, “Legal Person”; Cornell Legal Information Institute, “Artificial Person”; Cornell Legal Information Institute, “Corporation”

AI risk management, governance, and reasonable safeguards designed to reduce harms while preserving flexibility and innovation: National Institute of Standards and Technology, “AI Risk Management Framework”; NIST, “Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework: Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile”

Cybersecurity risks, vulnerabilities, and resilience issues involving artificial intelligence systems: National Institute of Standards and Technology, “AI Research: Security and Resilience”

Autonomous weapon systems, human control, and legal and humanitarian questions surrounding machines that can select and apply force without further human intervention: International Committee of the Red Cross, “ICRC Position on Autonomous Weapon Systems”

Hey, this is Joel.

I’m sitting next to a pile of flowers in the yard.

I spent some time this morning taking hops vines out of our hoop house, and now I’m sitting on a bucket, picking the flowers off the vines.

A buddy of mine brews beer. Sometimes he gives me some of it, so I’m going to give him a bunch of these.

I grow several different varieties of hops in the hoop house. I’ve got some New Zealand varieties, some Cascade, and some Chinook. The Chinook seems to yield better than anything else I’ve tried here at high altitude.

If you’ve never smelled a hop flower before, go get yourself a good, fresh West Coast IPA and really smell it before you drink it.

That smell is hops.

A West Coast IPA is usually very hop-forward, and when you break one of these fresh flowers open, there’s this strong green, citrusy, resinous smell. You immediately think, that smells like an IPA.

Except it’s really the other way around.

The IPA smells like this flower.

My hands are busy, so I obviously can’t type anything. I’m sitting here talking to my phone instead.

And with my hands busy, I’ve had some time to think about a few things from this week, even though I haven’t had time to write them down.

The first one is cattle.

I made a trip this week to the Buffalo Livestock Market up in northern Wyoming, and one of the things that stood out was the number of heifers.

For people who don’t spend much time around cattle, a heifer is a young female that hasn’t had her first calf yet. If you want to grow a cow herd, you have to keep some of those young females. You breed them. They have calves. They become cows.

That sounds simple enough.

Except right now those heifers are worth a tremendous amount of money.

An individual heifer can bring something like $2,500.

If you keep her, maybe she has ten or twelve or fifteen calves over the course of her life. Maybe keeping her turns out to be a tremendous investment.

But maybe cattle prices fall.

Maybe three years from now you look back and realize somebody was willing to hand you $2,500 for that animal and you turned it down.

And meanwhile, you have to feed her.

You have to carry her through the winter. You have to buy hay. You have to buy fuel. You have all the other expenses that come with running a ranch.

That was another thing people were talking about at the livestock market. Everybody hopes we get a lot of snow this winter.

Snow means moisture. Moisture means grass.

And grass matters because hay is expensive.

Fuel is expensive.

When diesel is expensive, even if there’s hay somewhere else, getting it to your ranch gets expensive in a hurry.

So there’s this national conversation about the cattle herd being historically small and ranchers needing to retain heifers so we can rebuild it.

But an individual rancher doesn’t operate the national cattle herd.

He operates his ranch.

He has bills. He has input costs. And he has an animal standing in front of him that somebody is willing to pay a lot of money for right now.

Sometimes people ask why ranchers don’t just keep more heifers.

Sometimes they can’t afford to.

And sitting here picking hops, I realized I’ve got a pretty good example right in front of me.

I’ve got thousands of these flowers.

Suppose somebody came along and offered me a nickel or a dime for every one of them.

At some point, the price might get high enough that I wouldn’t keep any to brew beer myself.

I’d sell them.

Not because I suddenly stopped liking beer.

Not because I don’t know they might be useful later.

The price somebody is willing to give me today changes the decision.

That’s basically the position ranchers are in.

The price can get high enough that you almost can’t afford not to sell the animal you would otherwise like to keep.

The second thing I’ve been thinking about is Iran.

Part of the reason I think about Iran more than most people probably do is my previous life working around nuclear weapons and strategy.

And I keep coming back to the idea that maybe we are just too impatient with Iran.

We want problems solved. We want regimes to change. We want countries to behave differently.

But Iran isn’t a new country.

Persia is one of the oldest civilizations in the world.

There’s a story about Alexander the Great that I keep thinking about.

Go back to 334 B.C.

Alexander is about twenty-two years old. He crosses into Asia with a Macedonian army and takes on the Persian Empire, one of the great powers of the ancient world.

And then he starts winning.

He defeats Persian armies. He defeats Darius III. He pushes deeper and deeper into the empire.

Eventually he gets through the Persian Gates and reaches Persepolis, the ceremonial heart of Persia.

Parts of Persepolis are burned.

So if you stop the story there, Alexander conquered Persia.

He did.

But then something interesting starts happening.

Alexander begins adopting elements of Persian royal dress. He brings Persian nobles into his government. He brings Persian soldiers into his army. He marries into the Persian royal family. He encourages his officers to marry Persian women.

And his Macedonian soldiers hate it.

They marched across the known world to conquer Persia, and now they’re looking at their king thinking, wait a minute.

We conquered them.

Why are you starting to look like them?

Persia could obviously be conquered.

Alexander did it.

But there’s something remarkable about a civilization that can lose the war and still influence the conqueror so deeply that the conqueror begins changing himself.

Alexander conquered Persia.

And then Persia changed Alexander.

I think we ought to remember that.

We don’t have to be Iran’s friend.

We don’t have to accept Iran possessing nuclear weapons.

We don’t have to accept attacks on shipping or attacks on its neighbors through militias and proxies.

But maybe we should stop assuming that the final answer is somehow to make Iran into us.

We’ve tried versions of that before.

In 1953, the United States became involved in the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and helped restore the Shah’s position.

Over the next couple of decades, the United States became very closely associated with the Shah while he pursued rapid modernization, military expansion, and increasingly authoritarian rule.

It’s probably too simple to say America was trying to make Iran culturally American.

But we were deeply involved in determining who governed Iran and what direction the country would take.

And eventually there was a backlash.

The Iranian Revolution in 1979 had a lot of causes. Religion mattered. Economics mattered. Political repression mattered. The Shah mattered. Foreign interference mattered.

And out of that revolution came a phrase Americans still recognize immediately.

Death to America.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that.

Iran does not have to become us.

We can deter Iran.

We can contain Iran.

We can protect our allies.

We can oppose nuclear proliferation.

We can respond when American troops or American interests are attacked.

But those things are different from assuming we are going to redesign Iranian society.

Even negotiating with Iran is complicated.

Iran has several centers of political power. The elected government handles diplomacy and much of the ordinary work of government. But the Supreme Leader has the final say on the biggest national-security questions, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps answers to him, not to the elected president.

So when an Iranian diplomat sits across the table from an American diplomat and signs something, the question isn’t just whether we got a signature.

The question is whether the person across the table actually has the authority to bind the parts of the Iranian system that have the missiles, the ships, and the guns.

Does the Supreme Leader support the agreement?

Does the security establishment consider itself bound by it?

Will the Revolutionary Guard carry it out?

You can have diplomacy happening in one place while military pressure continues or resumes somewhere else.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the Iranian diplomats are fake, and it doesn’t mean the Revolutionary Guard is some completely separate rogue government.

It means we need to understand who actually has authority before we congratulate ourselves for reaching an agreement.

And maybe the broader point is just patience.

Patience isn’t the same thing as weakness.

Sometimes patience means understanding the civilization in front of you well enough not to expect it to become something it isn’t.

Anyway, I’m still sitting here picking hops.

They’re going into a silver metal bucket.

When I’m done, I’m going to spread them out on a screen, let them dry for a couple of days, and then freeze them.

And while I’ve been doing that, I’ve also been thinking about Russia.

I read a piece this morning in the Wall Street Journal about something Russia has become very good at doing.

Russia takes actions against NATO countries that seem deliberately designed to stay just below the point where everybody immediately agrees an armed attack has taken place.

Cyber operations.

Sabotage.

Electronic interference.

Disinformation.

Using proxies.

Border pressure.

Things that can create real damage without a Russian tank necessarily crossing a NATO border.

And that creates a strange problem for NATO.

Article 5 says an armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all.

But real life is messier.

Something gets sabotaged.

Who did it?

Can you prove it?

Was it an armed attack?

Was it espionage?

Was it a criminal act?

Was it a proxy?

How much evidence do you need before you respond?

And if you respond militarily, are you defending yourself or escalating something that was intentionally designed to sit below that threshold?

Russia may not just be testing NATO’s military strength.

It may be testing NATO’s decision-making machinery.

From Moscow’s point of view, the ideal action might be something serious enough to frighten people and impose costs, but ambiguous enough that thirty-two NATO governments spend the next two weeks arguing over what exactly happened.

I think we make a mistake if we assume there are only two possible responses.

Do nothing.

Or go to war.

There is a lot of room between those two things.

And geography gives NATO some choices.

One place Americans don’t talk about very much is Kaliningrad.

Kaliningrad is a small piece of Russian territory on the Baltic Sea, physically separated from the rest of Russia.

It sits between Poland and Lithuania.

Both are NATO countries.

Kaliningrad is extremely important to Russia. It is home to major Russian military forces and Russia’s Baltic Fleet. It gives Russia a powerful position in the Baltic.

But that geography also makes it vulnerable.

It is Russian territory surrounded on land by NATO.

And some of the land transit between mainland Russia and Kaliningrad crosses NATO territory.

So if Russia wants to operate in the gray zone, NATO doesn’t necessarily have to answer every provocation by firing a missile.

There are economic tools.

There are diplomatic tools.

There are transit rules.

There are inspections.

There are sanctions.

There are ways to increase pressure gradually.

You could imagine a ladder.

Russia takes some deliberate action against NATO infrastructure.

NATO responds by tightening restrictions.

Russia escalates.

NATO tightens them further.

At the far end of that ladder, you could even start discussing suspension of some rail transit.

The United States cannot simply close a railroad through Lithuania.

It is Lithuanian territory. European Union law matters. Our allies matter.

And completely closing access would be a very serious escalation.

But that’s exactly why it can matter as leverage.

Deterrence works when the other side knows there are things it values that can be put at risk.

Kaliningrad is a Russian strength.

It is also a Russian vulnerability.

And if a new American president really wants to understand Russia, I think one of the first places he or she ought to go is Finland.

Go to Finland and listen.

Finland shares about 830 miles of border with Russia.

The Finns have lived next to Russia for generations.

They have fought Russia.

They have negotiated with Russia.

They have traded with Russia.

They have deterred Russia.

They built their military and a lot of their civil preparedness around the fact that Russia is going to remain next door no matter who happens to be sitting in the Kremlin.

There’s something we can learn from that.

Sometimes Americans think distance gives us objectivity.

Sometimes distance just gives us distance.

If you want to understand somebody, listen to the people who have to live next door to them.

That doesn’t mean Finland is always right.

It doesn’t mean Poland is always right.

It doesn’t mean the Baltic states are always right.

But their experience matters.

We shouldn’t decide what Russia means from Washington and then call our European allies afterward to explain our decision to them.

We should listen first.

Sometimes the people who understand a rival best are the people who have had to live next door to it.

And then there was one other thing from this week that has almost nothing to do with Iran or Russia.

I went to a University of Wyoming football game Saturday.

Wyoming played Hawai‘i.

We recently dropped our oldest off at the University of Wyoming. Three weeks ago, maybe a month ago.

It was great to see them.

And it got me thinking about college.

A lot of people are worried about college right now.

And I understand why.

College is expensive.

Private universities can be extraordinarily expensive.

Tuition has increased tremendously over the last several decades.

And young people are looking at those numbers and asking a pretty reasonable question.

Is this worth it?

I think there was probably a period when too many people treated college as automatic.

You graduated from high school, so you went to college.

Nobody stopped to ask what you were studying.

Nobody stopped to ask what the degree cost.

Nobody stopped to ask what kind of job it might lead to.

Nobody stopped to ask how much debt you would have when you finished.

We should think about all of those things.

But I wonder if we’re starting to swing too far in the other direction.

Now there’s a growing cultural message that college just isn’t worth it.

If you’re seventeen or eighteen years old, I’d be very careful about letting that cultural mood make the decision for you.

When everybody starts moving in one direction, that’s usually a good time to stop and ask whether that direction makes sense for you.

That doesn’t mean every kid should go to college.

Absolutely not.

There are great careers that don’t require a four-year degree.

There are trades that pay extremely well.

There are people who would be much better off becoming electricians, plumbers, welders, mechanics, or entrepreneurs than borrowing a hundred thousand dollars for a degree they don’t need.

But the opposite is also true.

If you can get a useful degree in a field where there is demand, at a price you can reasonably afford, and you have a good chance of finishing it, that can still be a very good investment.

The question isn’t whether college is good or bad.

It’s what are you trying to do?

What education does that require?

What will it cost?

And what are you likely to get in return?

Don’t go to college just because everybody else went.

But don’t refuse to go because everybody around you suddenly decided college is a scam either.

Make your own decision.

And maybe that’s what all of these things I’ve been thinking about this week have in common.

The cattle market.

Iran.

Russia.

College.

The easy answer is usually the one everybody repeats.

Keep the heifers and rebuild the herd.

Make Iran more like us.

Either ignore Russia or go to war with Russia.

College is always worth it.

College is never worth it.

But reality is usually more complicated than that.

The rancher has to make payroll.

Iran has thousands of years of history.

Russia understands geography.

And an eighteen-year-old has to live with their own decision long after everybody giving them advice has moved on to something else.

Maybe the lesson from this week is just to slow down a little.

Understand the incentives.

Understand the history.

Understand the geography.

Listen to people who know something you don’t.

Then make your own decision.

Anyway, I’m still picking hops.

I keep looking down at this bucket wondering when it’s ever going to be full.

It’s like an infinite bucket.

It never fills up.

So I’ve still got plenty of flowers left to pick.

Thanks to you all for keeping me company while I sit on this bucket and pick flowers.

Sources

Cattle / heifer retention

USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, United States cattle inventory down slightly — Jan. 30, 2026. This supports the small national herd and current inventory context. USDA NASS

USDA Economic Research Service, Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Outlook: February 2026. This is especially useful because it specifically discusses beef replacement heifers and says sustained heifer retention is needed before the beef cow herd can expand. Economic Research Service

USDA ERS, Livestock Production Cycles Affect Long-Term Price Outlook for Cattle, Hogs, and Chickens. Good background on the cattle cycle, historically low inventories, and why low supplies produce high cattle prices. Economic Research Service

U.S. Energy Information Administration, Weekly Retail Gasoline and Diesel Prices. Useful for the high-diesel-cost portion; national on-highway diesel was above $6.50 per gallon in the week of Sept. 21, 2026. U.S. Energy Information Administration

Alexander and Persia

Alexander the Great, World History Encyclopedia. Covers Alexander’s effort to integrate Macedonian and Persian elites, the Susa marriages, his marriage to a daughter of Darius III, adoption of Persian dress and manners, incorporation of Persians into the military, and Macedonian resistance to those policies. World History Encyclopedia

Alexander the Great & the Burning of Persepolis, World History Encyclopedia. Useful for the conquest and destruction of Persepolis. World History Encyclopedia

1953 Iran coup / the Shah

U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, Iran, 1951–1954. A 1954 CIA memorandum explicitly describes the U.S.-approved campaign to remove Mossadegh and replace his government with a pro-Western government under the Shah. Office of the Historian

The same official documentary collection includes Eisenhower acknowledging that the United States helped bring about Mossadegh’s removal and the Shah’s restoration. Office of the Historian

There are also contemporary CIA communications describing direct American support for the Shah during the operation. Office of the Historian

Iranian political structure / IRGC

Council on Foreign Relations, The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It explains that the IRGC answers directly to the Supreme Leader and that its command structure bypasses the elected president. It also covers the IRGC’s military, political, economic, and regional roles. Council on Foreign Relations

Russia / NATO gray-zone activity

NATO, Collective defence and Article 5. Particularly important because NATO explicitly says an “armed attack” is assessed case by case and that sufficiently serious cyber and other hybrid attacks can qualify under Article 5. NATO

Kaliningrad

Council of the European Union, EU sanctions against Russia: questions and answers. Useful for the legal and logistical reality of Kaliningrad transit; EU sanctions make specific provisions for goods moving between Russia and the Kaliningrad oblast. Council of the European Union

NATO material describes Kaliningrad as a Russian exclave on the Baltic surrounded by Lithuania and Poland and discusses the importance of civilian and military transit. NATO

Finland

NATO material gives Finland’s land border with Russia as about 1,340 kilometers, or roughly 830 miles. NATO

College costs and value

College Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025. This is probably your best source for tuition, sticker prices, net prices, financial aid, and the long-term cost discussion. College Board Research

College Board’s archive gives you historical reports back through the 1990s if you want to make a precise claim about thirty-year tuition growth rather than simply saying college has become expensive. College Board Research

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Education pays, 2025. In 2025, workers with bachelor’s degrees had median weekly earnings of $1,578 and a 2.8% unemployment rate, with earnings generally increasing and unemployment generally declining as educational attainment rose. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Thoughts from the week, in podcast conversation form.

Joel: The watch is quiet. Dark. Day and night, you don’t know the difference.

Joel: Every twelve hours, you set the clock. If it’s more than a second off, fast or slow, it’s out of spec. And you have to set all three clocks at once.

Paige: Three clocks, one second. I hear that and feel like it’s important. I suspect you’re going to tell me it didn’t feel that way.

Joel: You’re just setting the clock. It’s standard. Wherever we were in the world, we all had to agree on what time it was.

Joel: I was a nuclear weapons officer for twenty-one years. For two of them, I commanded one of America’s nine squadrons that keep nuclear missiles on alert and stand ready, day and night. You get used to thinking in a common reference time. Somebody you’re working with could be six time zones away from you, but you still need to know what time it is for both of you.

Paige: Zulu time.

Joel: Right. You’ll have flashbacks, stories that pop into your head whenever some random event happens. One of those that caught my attention this week was this new Gallet watch. The Flying Officer. It’s only been out a couple of weeks. I haven’t seen one in person and I don’t know that I ever will. I’ve been looking at pictures of the face.

Paige: It’s an old name. The first one came out in nineteen thirty-nine. Harry Truman wore one.

Joel: Is that right.

Joel: There are reference cities around the dial. It’s a twelve-hour face, but when everyone somewhere on the globe operates on a single reference time you’re thinking about a twenty-four-hour day and a twenty-four-hour globe, so two places can share an hour position, twelve hours apart.

Joel: London is the reference to start with. Move clockwise, or to the right on the watch face, and it’s like moving east around the globe. Geneva then Cape Town then Nairobi. Go the other way, west into the Atlantic, and you’ve got the Azores.

Paige: You’re reading it like a map.

Joel: Yes. The globe on your wrist. After twenty-one years it gets ingrained. You think about people being in different time zones. It’s also just an interesting watch.

Paige: Fair enough.

Joel: Most of that job was waiting, alert. The watch. The capability is there. It’s ready. And the whole point is that you never use it.

Joel: That followed me to Leavenworth and to the Army’s Command and General Staff College. Twelve officers in our classroom. I was the only Air Force officer. There was a Marine, a Canadian armor officer, and everybody else was Army.

Joel: One exercise we worked through was a thought experiment conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The question was whether we go in, and how much we’d commit to a peacekeeping mission. One of the factions was openly hostile to the U.S. Disrupting our activities in the area. Threatening terrorist attacks. The Marine was confident we should get involved in almost every regional conflict, and that it would be over quick.

Joel: Most of the room said yes. I said no. I almost always said no.

Paige: Wait. One country punishing people in another. And you said no.

Joel: I did. Is it a tragedy? Yes. A vital U.S. interest? No. Would I support partners getting involved? Yes. Independent action? No.

Paige: Partners tend to wait for us. Rwanda was a hundred days.

Joel: I know. There’s a question of dependency there. And then we’d get to something I thought was important enough. Then what I was willing to accept in casualties was much higher than anybody else in the room.

Paige: That sounds backwards. The man who never wants to go is the one who’ll pay the most once he’s there.

Joel: Because I was looking at the objective. What were we going to achieve?

Joel: The others were more willing to get into smaller conflicts. As a nuclear weapons guy, I’d look at those and think, we’re not going to have a decisive, long-term impact. Our effects need to last for 40 years, maybe even a hundred.

Joel: If a major United States interest was threatened, that was different. But those are much bigger conflicts. World wars. Major conflicts involving our partners.

Paige: I’ll give you that being able to intervene isn’t a reason to. But decisive is a high bar. Haven’t you walked the tunnels the North Koreans dug under the DMZ?

Joel: I have.

Paige: Nothing was decided there. No treaty. An armistice, signed in nineteen fifty-three, and two armies still looking at each other across it. By your test, Korea was a waste.

Joel: No. It wasn’t.

Paige: Seventy years of Seoul.

Joel: Okay. Then decisive is the wrong word. Maybe durable. Does it last. Korea has. And we’re still paying to make it hold. That’s a cost I’d accept, for an ally, for a result that lasts that long.

Joel: But there’s a cost to every one of those. When you use resources in one regional conflict, you don’t have them for something bigger.

Joel: And we start from an extraordinary position. Oceans on both sides. No neighbor about to invade and subdue us. That gives us room to be patient.

Joel: America will never lose a war, because nobody can come here and conquer us. Just this week we signed a security agreement with Denmark and Greenland to increase our presence on that critical piece of geography while denying China and Russia access. Further protecting American security interests in our region.

Paige: Hold on. There’s a jump there. Keeping the homeland secure and winning a war abroad are two different things.

Joel: I agree that’s a logic jump. What I mean is that no other country is going to subdue the United States on our shores.

Joel: When we go somewhere else to fight, of course we can lose. We have a long logistical trail. We are at a disadvantage sustaining what we’re doing. And we can have enormous difficulty achieving our objectives.

Paige: Which puts the weight back on the objective. What counts as success, and can the force we’re using produce it?

Joel: Exactly. Our strength is in restraint. In having the capability and not always exercising it.

Joel: Take Iran. We’ve been at war with Iran since the last day of February. Going on seven months.

Joel: I was thinking about Cyrus the Persian this week, and how far back that history goes.

Paige: About twenty-six hundred years.

Joel: They aren’t going anywhere. Whatever we do over there, they’ll be living there when we’ve gone home.

Paige: The country isn’t going anywhere. This government might.

Joel: It hasn’t yet. We can blow things up. We’re blockading their ports right now. We can do a lot of things to hurt Iran. If we don’t get a durable American result out of it, what have we achieved?

Joel: And I don’t think Israel’s immediate survival was at risk before this started. So why start a war when survival isn’t at risk?

Paige: Let me make the case straight, because somebody should. A government that says Israel shouldn’t exist was enriching uranium well past what any power plant needs, even though they had never made a bomb. If the test is immediate survival, then with a bomb, immediate comes after it’s too late. You of all people know what one weapon does to a small country.

Joel: I do. One weapon on a small country is a tragedy. But the state will survive.

Paige: A lot of that country lives around one city.

Joel: I know what I’m saying. If Iran ever used one, the world would stand against them. Israel would survive. That government wouldn’t. And it has spent more than forty years making sure it survives. That’s not a government looking to die. And remember, Iran never built a bomb. Our own intelligence says they had a weapons program and shut it down in two thousand three. Year after year, the same people said they hadn’t restarted it. It’s not in their best interest.

Joel: And we had limits on them. Inspectors in the buildings. We walked away from that in twenty eighteen.

Paige: The inspectors didn’t stop them from arming Hezbollah. Or Hamas. Or the Houthis.

Joel: No. And Israel has been dealing with that. It has plenty of capability to defend itself, which America continues to support. I don’t see it as a threat to the survival of the state. And what’s the alternative? That we should preemptively attack every state that threatens a partner?

Paige: Then we disagree about where the line is.

Joel: We do. But wherever you put the line, you still have to answer what the war achieves. How do we end this on terms favorable to the United States?

Joel: This conflict in Iran could go on for a dozen years. I don’t think we can count on them giving up because we’ve made them suffer enough.

Joel: People under bombs don’t quit. London didn’t. Hanoi didn’t. Tokyo didn’t. They dig in, and they blame whoever’s dropping the bombs. Over there, suffering can even be seen as legitimacy. As righteousness. The more pain we inflict, the more of it the regime gets to claim.

Paige: They quit in nineteen eighty-eight. Khomeini took the ceasefire with Iraq. He said it was like drinking poison, and he drank it.

Joel: After eight years.

Paige: After eight years.

Joel: That’s my dozen.

Paige: And a family burying a son doesn’t feel what the government tells it to feel.

Joel: Fair. They aren’t one thing. But look at what each side will put up with. Our prices go up, and we vote out the party responsible. Their people are dying. Their oil isn’t moving. And they’re still shooting at our ships.

Paige: One of their lawmakers said it this month. America is far away, so America doesn’t see this war as existential. They do.

Joel: So we can’t assume more missiles buy more of the outcome we want. We may just be spending our strength.

Paige: I don’t have an answer to that one. So name the outcome. Favorable terms could mean a lot of things.

Joel: Ships moving freely through the Strait of Hormuz. A predictable Iranian government that doesn’t threaten other countries in the region. I think that’s it.

Paige: Is the strait still ours to care about? Jimmy Carter said we’d go to war for the Gulf. Vital interests. That was nineteen eighty, and we were buying their oil.

Joel: We produce so much of our own now. I don’t know that the Middle East is as important to us as it was.

Paige: Oil trades in one world market. The strait closes, and the price goes up at a pump in Wyoming. We watched it happen this year.

Joel: So we still have an interest.

Paige: And everything you listed is a change in behavior. None of it requires Iran to like us.

Joel: I don’t think we get past the hostility. The regime’s, at a minimum. We’ve meddled in their affairs too long for them to forget it.

Paige: Then a deal has to work with the distrust still in it. And we have to offer something that makes keeping it worthwhile.

Joel: I don’t know what we have to offer that we’re willing to give up. Are we going to pull all our bases out of the Middle East? We’re not going to abandon Israel because Iran wants us to.

Paige: Those are enormous asks. There are smaller bargains. Money for specific limits we can check. That’s your Kennan essay. A country that’s profiting from an arrangement has something to protect. Friendship not required.

Joel: No. And I’d take something like President Obama’s agreement again. Ease the economic pressure in exchange for nuclear limits and inspectors. We should be willing to accept terms like that.

Joel: What I don’t hear much of is the Iranian side. What do you think they’re looking for?

Paige: Whether the benefit is dependable. We left the last agreement in twenty eighteen, and the inspectors said they’d been keeping it. We want to know they’re keeping the limits. They want to know that keeping the limits gets them what they were promised.

Joel: Yeah. Go on.

Paige: So it’s a question about us. Can we hold a bargain through a change of presidents? Your patience applies to keeping a deal, not only to making one.

Joel: What does dependable mean to you?

Paige: Something they can use. Picture being told you can sell oil, but no bank will process the payment, because the bank thinks sanctions are coming back. Permission on paper. Nothing in the account. Dependable doesn’t mean unconditional. It means the terms for keeping it or losing it are clear.

Joel: What they say in public is a lot bigger than that. Tolls on tankers through Hormuz. Lift sanctions. Our bases out of the Middle East. And the hostility to Israel existing isn’t going away.

Paige: Some of that’s an opening bid. Some of it they won’t move on. We don’t know which is which, and we can’t assume.

Joel: And we still have to make it hold. I think that takes other actors. I go back to the DMZ. Somebody standing in between.

Paige: Korea’s an odd model. That command is American-led. It isn’t neutral. But the idea travels. A third party both sides accept, so nobody has to take the other’s word.

Joel: Yes.

Paige: Then the monitors report our violations as loudly as theirs.

Joel: I think that’s a result of this war we won’t be able to avoid.

Paige: And it has to hold after the people who signed it are gone. Ours and theirs.

Joel: Right.

Paige: Let’s go back to the Zulu time thing. What happens to the clocks when you go off watch?

Joel: Somebody else sets them. Every twelve hours.

Paige: And if nothing happens?

Joel: Then it was a good watch.

Sources

Gallet Flying Officer

Gallet & Co. “Flying Officer Automatic 40 — AG1701131C1A1.” 2026.https://www.gallet.com/ca-en/watches/flying-officer/flying-officer-automatic/AG1701131C1A1/

Hodinkee. “The Gallet Flying Officer.” August 2026.https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-gallet-flying-officer

U.S. Nuclear Forces

Congressional Research Service. U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces: Background, Developments, and Issues, RL33640.https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33640.html

Korea and the Armistice

United Nations Command. “Armistice Negotiations, 1951–1953.” The 1953 Korean Armistice established the DMZ, Military Armistice Commission, and Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission. United Nations Command — Armistice Negotiations

United Nations Command. “Military Armistice Commission — Secretariat.” Current information on administration, monitoring, inspections, and enforcement of the Korean Armistice Agreement. United Nations Command — UNCMAC Secretariat

Iran’s Nuclear Program and the JCPOA

International Atomic Energy Agency. Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran, GOV/2025/24. June 2025.https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/25/06/gov2025-24.pdf

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities. National Intelligence Estimate. 2007.https://fas.org/publication/nie_on_irans_nuclear_program_n/

U.S.–Iran Conflict

Council on Foreign Relations. “Confrontation Between the United States and Iran.” Global Conflict Tracker. August 2026.https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/confrontation-between-united-states-and-iran

Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Iran and the Emerging Security Order in the Middle East.” 2026.https://www.csis.org/analysis/iran-and-emerging-security-order-middle-east

Institute for the Study of War. “Iran Update Special Report: U.S. and Israeli Strikes.” February 28, 2026.https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-special-report-us-and-israeli-strikes-february-28-2026/

Congressional Budget Office. Estimated Costs of Operation Epic Fury. September 2026.https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2026-09/62756-Iran.pdf

Strait of Hormuz and Energy

U.S. Energy Information Administration. “World Oil Transit Chokepoints.”https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/special-topics/world_oil_transit_Chokepoints

Institute for Energy Research. “New EIA Report Shows Extent of Hormuz Oil Disruptions.” 2026.https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/gas-and-oil/new-eia-report-shows-extent-of-hormuz-oil-disruptions/

The Carter Doctrine

Carter, Jimmy. “The State of the Union Address Delivered Before a Joint Session of the Congress.” January 23, 1980. The American Presidency Project. This is the address in which Carter declared an attempt by an outside power to control the Persian Gulf an assault on U.S. vital interests that could be repelled by military force. Jimmy Carter — 1980 State of the Union Address

Arctic and Greenland Security

Reuters / The Guardian. “US and Denmark Reach Security Deal After Trump’s Threats to Take Over Greenland.” September 18, 2026.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/18/united-states-denmark-greenland-security

Strategic Bombing and Coercion

Pape, Robert A. Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

The shovel rings.

Every year a couple or three fence posts rot along the front lane. Enough moisture gets in the wood and maybe a beetle or two, and the Earth wants to retake what it will. Everything eventually, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

She has a couple of spare fence posts in the barn. Not too many anymore. She shifts other posts to unbury them, and dust and soil puff up, catching in her nose. She carries one out and lays it on the ground next to the leaning post. It’s heavy enough that she can’t carry it and the tools and she has to go back to the barn for those, a shovel, pickaxe, post hole digger. She lays them next to the fence post.

She puts on her gloves to protect her hands while she frees the three cross rails from the stubborn upright. Tough yellow tan leather, turning black at the fingertips. Each rail has a screw holding it to the upright, red dust lining the metal edges. She removes them one at a time and wiggles the upright side to side pulling them away from their slot. They stack there, still attached to the side post beside the rotting upright.

Then she gets to the rotting fence post. First to remove it. The best way to make progress is just to break it. So she rocks it back and forth, pushes on it with her weight, until it gives at the base. Gray decay sifts into the grass.

With the post removed, she gets to work on the rotted wood under the soil line. The shovel makes quick work at first, each bite of the shovel bringing up soft, rotted wood. Before long, the digging has her breathing hard as the hole deepens. She stops to rest, then works the pickaxe through pockets of stubborn wood. At intervals, she leans over and reaches in, feeling for the bottom of the rotted post. Often her hand meets packed earth, only to find more rotted wood just beneath.

At last, her hand finds the bottom. She clears as much rotted wood as she can, sorting it from the soil piled beside the hole. Then she lowers the new post into place and shovels enough saved earth around the base to hold it upright. She sets the level against the wood and nudges the post till it stands true, unlike the last one, which still leans a little crooked. Only then does she fill the hole and tamp the earth firm around the post. When the upright stands true, she reattaches the three rails, driving each screw into the fresh wood. Then she gathers her tools.

Half a world away, in Sumatra, another shovel bites into the Earth for a cinnamon tree.

That evening, in the kitchen, she dusts the scraps of leftover pie dough with cinnamon. Her daughter’s favorite. The spice rises sharp in the air as she slides the small cookie sheet into the oven. While the scraps bake, she blind-bakes the pie crust and prepares the filling.

She makes the dough with lard and butter, flour, salt, and water, lard for flake, butter for flavor, salt because salt makes everything better. Rolled thin on the counter over a dusting of flour, wrapped around the rolling pin, draped over the blue fluted pie dish. Foil to line the bottom, then the pie weights to stop the bubbles. Into the oven.

She collects the other ingredients from the cupboard: pumpkin pie filling, Libby’s. Sugar, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, flour, condensed milk. She grabs eggs from the counter, fresh from the chickens in the yard.

Pumpkin. Her favorite.

The directions say to mix the dry ingredients separately, but she knows it doesn’t matter. She opens the can of pumpkin and uses a spoon to scrape out the last bits. She adds the eggs. She adds the dry ingredients straight to the pumpkin and eggs, gives everything a good stir, then pours in the condensed milk and mixes it again.

About now the timer sounds. Potholders to grab the pie dish, foil and weights out, pie dish back in to finish the blind-bake.

The next morning, pumpkin pie for breakfast.

Out of the fridge comes the whipping cream. Two cups into the mixer, then sugar and vanilla. She starts it on low so the cream doesn’t splash out of the bowl, then turns it up to high until the stiff white peaks. The whisk turns faster than her hand could manage. She watches the cream thicken, stops the mixer, lifts the whisk to check.

Peaks.

She puts a dollop of the whipped cream onto her coffee, her favorite treat, then some onto the pie. She savors the vanilla in the cream, the bite of cinnamon and ginger mixed with the pumpkin, and heads into work.

At work, the accounting sheets are waiting. Each needs checked and then checked again. There are more sheets than she has time to go through carefully.

She opens a conversation with an AI. She details precise instructions. What she needs to check, what a mistake looks like, what should agree with what. Together they work on a piece of Python code to go through the documents one at a time.

The first try isn’t quite right. She changes a term, explains it again. They try another approach. She runs the code, checks what it finds, changes the code, goes back to the conversation. A couple of hours pass this way.

Eventually, it works. The code moves through the sheets finding the mistakes that need her attention.

She gets to work fixing them.

At a desk nearby, a mathematician works through a problem he has struggled with for years. He knows where he gets stuck. He can get partway to an answer, but the next step depends on something he hasn’t been able to prove. Every approach brings him back to the same place.

He’s tried changing his starting assumptions. He’s tried approaching the problem from other directions. There are papers on his desk with passages underlined, calculations in the margins. Books and old computer programs he keeps because he thinks he might find the answer there. Some of that work belongs to people who have been working on the problem longer than he has. Some will never work on it again.

He opens a conversation with an AI. Types the problem, gives it explicit details, explains where he gets stuck.

The AI says it’s thinking about it. Gives an answer back. He reads it chewing on a pencil.

For him to get to a final solution he has to prove every line, and he can’t get past the third.

He goes back to the AI and explains the mistake, walks it through his reasoning. Another answer. This one a different route that arrives at the same difficulty. He checks each step again anyway.

Over the next several days, he returns to the conversation. Sometimes it helps him work through a calculation. Sometimes he spends an hour finding out why a suggestion won’t work.

Then the AI suggests a way of writing the problem differently.

He copies it onto paper. Works through the first line, then the second. He tries a simple example whose answer he already knows.

It works.

He tries another. Then he goes back over what they have taken for granted, looking for something that slipped through unnoticed.

For the first time, he can see a possible next step.

There’s still work to do. He needs to know whether the approach works beyond these examples. He needs other mathematicians to look it over. A promising afternoon is a long way from his end goal.

But he turns to a fresh page.

We say she dug the hole by hand. We say she made the pie from scratch. And she did.

But where does ‘by hand’ or ‘from scratch’ begin?

She used a shovel. Somebody made it. Before someone could make the shovel, someone made steel. Someone extracted iron ore from the ground. Someone figured out how to turn it into something useful. They needed furnaces, fuel, equipment to move the material, tools to shape it, people to do the work. Every one of those had to be made or fed, too.

And the handle. A tree had to grow. Somebody cut it, moved it, dried the wood, shaped it to fit the shovel, and shaped it so that your hand could hold it.

Whatever fastens the blade to the handle has its own need: a pin, a screw, adhesive. How do you make resin from scratch? For every one of them, if you follow their trail backward, there’s more work.

Even if she could obtain everything herself, every ingredient, she would still need to know what to do with them.

Somebody makes every material. Somebody else discovered how. Somebody learned through years of mistakes what would work. What would hold together? What would fail or rust faster?

We could learn what they know, but we don’t have time to live every one of their failures.

She doesn’t need to know the history of metalwork. Other people have worked that out, and they gave her a tool she can hold. Most of their names don’t survive.

People observed things long ago, before there were papers to publish or patents to file. They tried something. They remembered what happened. They showed somebody else. Knowledge traveled through a family or a community across generations. It could be lost, discovered again, changed by somebody who noticed something others missed.

In the kitchen, she measures flour. She didn’t grow the wheat or grind it. If she had, she would use knowledge someone else taught her: when to plant, what to save for seed, how to recognize grain ready for harvest, how to turn it into flour, and how to make flour into something worth eating.

The cinnamon arrived in a jar from Sumatra, halfway across the world. In that jar, there are people who grew and harvested it, people who prepared it, people who moved it from one part of the world to another, and behind their work is knowledge that they didn’t have to discover for themselves.

When she turns on the mixer, she watches the cream turn into soft and then stiff peaks and decides when it’s ready. She can use the machine without knowing who built its motor or how they did it. She can take the cream out of the refrigerator without knowing how to make a refrigerator.

And we still say that she made whipped cream from scratch.

Then at work.

She knows the result she needs, opens a browser window, explains how she needs to check them. The first version fails; she changes the code, and it fails again. She changes her instructions; it fails. She works through it over and over, tries again, until she achieves her goal.

What part of that effort belongs to her? It’s a legitimate question. But we should ask the same question about the shovel, the flour, the refrigerator, the language she uses to explain the problem she has.

The question, really, is: what does it mean to do something by hand?

Human achievement depends on more human experience than any one person could ever accumulate.

We start ahead of the finish line, beginning our lives with answers other people long dead spent their lives finding, and many spent their lives failing to find.

Let’s pull on this thread some more and think about another facet of AI that no one is talking about: justice.

It’s one of our six national goals, and it means equal treatment under the law, but it also means that a boy or girl who grows up in a trailer and is willing to put in the work can become great.

And for AI especially, it’s not really a governance effort because it’s private enterprise. But let’s think about the effort in the context of: does it align with one of our national goals?

We’ve already talked about how knowledge is inherited, but access to that knowledge isn’t equal. Some people grow up with great teachers or great professional connections. Their parents have connections, their friends have connections, or they have people who can explain how to start something. Others have ability and ambition, but they don’t have these connections or the guidance.

Circumstances narrow our choices in life. If a boy or girl grows up in a trailer and they are curious and willing to work, their circumstances shouldn’t decide how far they can develop their abilities.

AI as a tool creates another way to learn and attempt things and to build knowledge and skills that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise. It’s a place to ask questions, request more explanation about something, practice unfamiliar skills, build something useful.

New abilities also create new opportunities. It can help finish a project, get a promotion, or develop new skills they can showcase to an employer or customer.

AI isn’t an end-all, be-all. But it offers concrete steps toward the goal of an ordinary, worthwhile life: to love your work, raise your family in a safe neighborhood with good schools, and eat and drink with those you love.

So let’s judge the technology not solely by the chatter, but by whom it enables and whether it advances our effort toward achieving a national goal.

America exists to protect and enable the weak, not the strong. And to do so, we must take deliberate effort to empower those born with nothing who are willing to work to become great.

So, what’s better?

Human achievement only?

Human achievement enhanced with AI ability?

And a question we need to ask. There are answers we need for tough questions. When will we get to those answers alone?

If one day the answer to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem about fluid motion helps us better model solutions for a changing climate, would we ignore the result?

Postscript.

My stories are mine. For this piece, I read into a microphone and used AI to transcribe for me. And yes, I use the hell out of it to help me write Python code.

Around twenty-five hundred years ago we were thinking about the progress of knowlege: 8Ask the former generation and find out what their ancestors learned,9 for we were born only yesterday and know nothing, and our days on earth are but a shadow.10 Will they not instruct you and tell you? Will they not bring forth words from their understanding?” Job 8, 8-10, NIV

Sources

Steel production, iron ore, fuel, and the materials behind manufactured tools: World Steel Association, “Raw Materials”; World Steel Association, “The Steelmaking Process”

Indonesian cinnamon from Sumatra and the people involved in its production: McCormick Science Institute, “Cinnamon”; McCormick, “Empowering Women in Indonesia’s Cinnamon Supply Chain,” March 8, 2023

Human knowledge accumulating through social learning, innovation, and transmission between people: Maxime Derex and Robert Boyd, “The Foundations of the Human Cultural Niche,” Nature Communications, 2015

Returning to dust: Ecclesiastes 3:20, New International Version, via Bible Gateway; the wording “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”: The Book of Common Prayer (1662), “At the Burial of the Dead,” Church of England

Learning from earlier generations and the limits of one person’s experience: Job 8:8–10, New International Version, via Bible Gateway

How new ideas and technologies spread through communication, social relationships, and adoption over time: Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, fifth edition, Free Press, 2003

Navier–Stokes equations, fluid motion, and the Millennium Prize problem: Clay Mathematics Institute, “Navier–Stokes Equation”; Charles L. Fefferman, official problem description, “Existence and Smoothness of the Navier–Stokes Equation”

Mathematicians working with AI on fluid equations, building on earlier human research, and questions about credit and unpublished work: Tristan Buckmaster, public statement on his collaboration with Levent Alpöge and interactions with OpenAI, September 2026

OpenAI’s claimed Navier–Stokes solution and its account of the research process and concurrent mathematical work: OpenAI, “On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem,” September 8, 2026

Fluid-motion equations in numerical weather prediction and modeling systems used for weather and climate: Met Office, “History of Numerical Weather Prediction”; Met Office, “Unified Model”

Taking stairs down two at a time from the giant stone building, music thrumming in her AirPods. She rounds the corner and her pace slows to a walk. The Commuter Express is still there, leaving the city. Three-tone white and green and blue, blue cloth seats, standing room only, people in suits and dress shoes. Above the windshield, Backlick Three Ninety-Five lit up in yellow.

A twenty-six minute bus ride to the commuter lot. I-95 and then the parkway.

The doors fold shut and then the hiss of air brakes. A young man moves his bag away from the seat next to him, but she reaches up to grab the strap hanging from the ceiling and braces for the turn onto the on-ramp. Eyes forward.

She’s twelve hours in. During the darkest time of the year this is her favorite moment of the day.

As they crest the top of the hill, a glowing river of red on her right. The HOV lane rules say minimum three passengers to get away from the gridlock, and most cars don’t have three. Their brake lights shine as far as she can see, the bus passing them one after another after another.

Next stop, the commuter lot. The bus empties in less than a minute. Her car is close, she parked at five-forty this morning.

On the way home, she stops at the supermarket. Less than ten minutes now to save the peace of a weekend morning with her coffee and the still of the screen porch, cardinals calling from the tree line and squirrels that chitter in the great woods that line the creek.

Vegetables, potatoes, take and bake sourdough. Then the meat counter for some beef. Even the ground is more than seven dollars a pound.

The world has gone mad.

Heifers

Before he can even get a toe to the wood floor she licks his foot. He walks out of the bedroom in the near-dark, and she’s already jogging a circle on the rug next to her food bowl. He puts a scoop in the bowl and hits the coffee grinder button as he walks through the kitchen. She finishes her portion, licks the bowl clean, and still beats him to the door.

While she is outside he goes back to the coffee. Ten after five he hits ‘Brew’ and the coffee maker starts to gurgle.

Out the sunroom window the sky to the east is a deep pink going yellow at the edge. Jesse is back at the screen door, ready for her treat. Red heeler, white Bentley mark on her forehead, nails ticking on the tile when the door swings. She wolfs the treat down in one bite and runs through the house ready to jump on anyone not out of bed yet.

He drinks the coffee with some cream. Only one cup anymore. Jesse is back now; she watches the sparrows flit from tree to tree in the dim light.

He grabs his felt with the cattleman’s crease. By six he’s in the pickup with the window down, diesel turbo whining along the two-track up to the north pasture to check water tanks. The tank on the north end runs off a solar well he put in four years ago, and the float sticks sometimes. Today the float is fine. The grass is not.

He borrowed eleven thousand dollars through a USDA program four years ago to drill that well. For a cattleman, water means grass. It opened up enough ground to add forty pairs on a section that used to just grow sagebrush. He’s looked into what a second one for the east side would cost more than once. Another sixty pairs, maybe, if the grass would carry them.

Imagine walking in to talk to a banker for a loan. Do you have any collateral? Sure do. It’s grass that I’m hoping will survive the drought.

The north pasture is grazed short and has been brown all year. He asks Jesse aloud if they’re going to see any snow this winter. Then the math. How many head, how many acres, how much fuel will cost to truck hay in at more than five dollars a gallon for diesel.

The math says what it said last year. Keeping cattle means losing money.

The pickup idles through and he counts heifer calves. Steers already a check coming regardless. This year’s crop looks good. The kind you want to keep.

He turns the radio up when the cattle market report comes on in the background. Heifer calves bringing between four-fifty and some near four-seventy-five a pound.

He glances through his heifers.

Near four seventy-five a pound means the calves in front of him are twenty-five hundred dollars. Apiece. Or he could lose money to keep them.

Then the news.

The announcer says the United States would import three hundred thousand metric tons of ground beef to be sold at twenty-five percent below current market prices. The president’s voice says the deal would reduce prices for American families while we work to rebuild the cattle herd and help our ranchers.

He shakes his head and turns the radio back down.

He looks at a heifer calf.

If he keeps her there’s no check in October. She eats hay all winter, and the diesel to deliver it costs more than the hay. Then hope she breeds next summer, lose money again next winter, and then still wait another year.

If. If. If.

If she breeds.

If they get enough snow to grow grass.

If the coyotes don’t find the newborn.

If all that happens, two springs from now she might put her first calf on the ground.

But he still hasn’t made any money. For that to happen that calf would still have to grow, get weaned, and sell for a profit.

This is twenty twenty-six. He could get paid in twenty twenty-eight. Somewhere around twenty-thirty, that calf is beef.

He has a choice and he doesn’t like either option. He could spend money buying hay and paying veterinary bills and hope for luck for four years but that means losing money and a ranch that loses money doesn’t stay a ranch. Or he could put a check for twenty-five hundred dollars in his pocket right now but every year he does that his cattle herd shrinks and then makes less and less money every year and the ranch doesn’t stay a ranch.

And the radio just told him the government will do everything it can to make the cattle market no longer profitable.

He spends the rest of the day checking calves and water tanks with Jesse.

Around the time he’s wrapping up he remembers a story his dad told him. His dad loved Reagan, always telling these old stories. 1989, just two months before the Berlin Wall fell, Boris Yeltsin visited a grocery store in Houston, Texas. He roamed the aisles of Randall’s, shaking his head in amazement.

He said if ordinary Russians ever saw an American supermarket, “there would be a revolution.”

He wonders what happens to the supermarket if ranchers can’t grow their herds.

They’re headed back for supper. Outside the window the heifer calves are strung out along the creek in the last light, grazing down by the water. They’re worth more money than any calves in the history of this ranch, every one of them a check he can’t afford to cash, and can’t afford not to.

We’ve Been Here Before, But We Were Coming From the Other Direction

Nebraska, 1934.

The Dust Bowl. America was five years into the Depression. Roosevelt had been president a little more than a year. Washington was inventing agencies faster than most people could learn their initials.

None of them could make it rain.

The grass had been gone two years. A rancher couldn’t keep an animal he couldn’t feed, and what he couldn’t keep, nobody wanted to buy. A calf was worth less than the corn it would have taken to fatten it, and the corn wasn’t growing either.

The Drought Relief Service started buying cattle. Not to eat. To get them off land that couldn’t carry them anymore. Four dollars a head for calves, around a hundred dollars today. Ten to twenty for cows and steers, two fifty to five hundred.

More than the packing plants could take. What they couldn’t take, trucks drove to pits we had already dug. Close to one in five of the cattle the government paid for were buried in the ground they’d been trying to graze.

There are two ways for a country to spend money on beef it doesn’t have.

There were ninety-two years between cattle pits in Nebraska and the meat counter in Northern Virginia. Then: not enough grass and water to grow too many cattle. Now: not enough cattle, and not enough grass and water to grow more.

So. Two ways for a country to spend money on beef it doesn’t have.

First, fast. Last week, Washington announced it would import up to three hundred thousand metric tons of foreign ground beef without the usual tariff. A ninety-day supply, priced twenty-five percent below market value.

This isn’t necessarily wicked, a country buying beef. But let’s be honest about what that leaves us with when the ninety days run out. Not an extra acre of grass. Not a foot of pipe for water. Not one bred heifer standing in the snow we are praying for this winter.

And another good question for this approach. Where did that beef come from? A calf that crosses a state line in America has an official tag and a history so USDA can ensure a safe food supply. Born here. Moved there. If it comes from a Western brand state, looked at by a brand inspector before it leaves the state. We know much less about beef imports.

The second way. Slow. Painfully slow. Grass, water, and heifers.

Grass. In August, a Republican from South Dakota and a Democrat from Minnesota introduced a bill to pay landowners to put marginal cropland back into permanent pasture. Up to twenty million acres under ten or fifteen-year contracts. Sunlight turning land into more grass to grow the national cattle herd.

Water. We need more water across the West, and taking more from the Colorado River and aquifers isn’t the solution. If we put marginal crop ground into grazing land, those acres need a fraction of the water draw irrigated row crops need. And the Colorado: a hundred-year-old agreement promised states could take more water than has flowed in the river in decades. Last week, Washington changed those rules. Nevada already sued, arguing that the new decision would leave it with less than half the water it already uses. Nobody’s building a pipeline or a desalination plant by November. No quick solutions, so we better get to work.

Heifers. Somebody has to feed her and take care of her, starting from the fall she isn’t sold to the fall her first calf brings a check two years later. Ask any other American small business the country relies on to skip revenue checks on half of their inventory for two years, and every one of them will go out of business. So ranchers need resources. Low-interest loans and tax credits to keep beef heifers. Marry the credits to the ear tags and brand inspections that already exist, so nobody collects on a heifer that quietly went to market. And put an end date on it. A bridge, not an entitlement. When we rebuild the herd, let it die.

Then comes the hard part. We wait.

The market isn’t broken. The price of calves is real: there aren’t enough of them. Anyone standing in front of a meat case promising lower beef prices by November is making a promise cattle biology doesn’t support.

Cheap beef means abundance. Abundance means more cattle than the market wants to pay for. That’s the market working.

Cheap beef means:

Heifers. Water. Grass.

Sources

U.S. cattle herd at a 75-year low, ground beef averaging $6.69/lb in Dec. 2025, Argentina beef tariff-rate quota raised to 80,000 metric tons: The White House, “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Ensures Affordable Beef for the American Consumer,” Feb. 6, 2026; Federal Register, Proclamation 11010, “Ensuring Affordable Beef for the American Consumer”

Trump executive order removing tariffs on beef, coffee, and tropical fruit, Nov. 14, 2025: PBS NewsHour / Associated Press

NCBA CEO Colin Woodall statement opposing Argentina beef imports: The Center Square, via Yahoo News

DOJ meatpacker price-fixing investigation, Executive Order 14364, Dec. 6, 2025: Wikipedia, “Executive Order 14364”

Nevada v. Department of the Interior, Colorado River Record of Decision lawsuit, Aug. 24, 2026: Office of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, press release

Colorado River Record of Decision and Final EIS, governor statements: Office of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo; Office of Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo

1934 cattle purchase program, packing plants, condemned animals: Wikipedia, “Drought Relief Service”

8.3 million cattle purchased, $111,546,104 cost, 1.5 million condemned: Wikipedia, “Jones–Connally Act 1934”

High Plains aquifer system, southeastern Wyoming extent and use: USGS, Scientific Investigations Map 3180; USGS, Fact Sheet 2011–3106, “Groundwater Quality of Southeastern Wyoming”

Status of the High Plains aquifer in Kansas, 2023: Kansas Geological Survey, Technical Series 25

Ogallala aquifer depletion rates, Texas High Plains: Texas A&M, Ogallala Aquifer Program; Texas Tribune

Irrigated vs. non-irrigated water use, Texas High Plains crop-livestock systems: Zilverberg et al., “Integrated Crop–Livestock Systems in the Texas High Plains: Productivity and Water Use,” 2014

College girl. Blonde in a bright green shirt holding a clipboard, asking names and questions. Welcoming committee.

What’s your major?

Chemical engineering.

Oh, you’re one of the smart ones.

The van pulls forward through the maze of cones and kids wearing shirts that say “Unpack Your Future” that stand ready with laundry carts to take your life’s treasure into the unknown.

Who will you meet on your journey?

Through the great halls of stone and brick. Unknown sounds and the faces and voices of those someday familiar.

Will you take the long road home? Or the shortcut? The shortcut looks like the way home.

Your first meal at the feast.

Your first night in a strange room.

Act I. Argos

Christmas Eve. The long night and the wind howling pelting snow sideways against the windows and the drifts that bury the paths and block the roads. Dreams of tunnels and forts and marshmallows dripping with chocolate.

Bedtime in the far north.

Two bathed now in pajamas and blankets, snuggled in with the old gray dog.

Time for a story. The older is at the edge of story time and some nights he wants to listen and some nights not and days move on.

Tonight, a new tale.

Not an Odyssey. A tale of an Odyssey told from home. Those who remain behind.

The reader starts with the title. “Argos. The Story of Odysseus as Told by His Loyal Dog” by Ralph Hardy.

Book One. Chapter One. “On the Stupidity of Sheep.”

The two giggle.

The sheep refuse to find shelter from the storm. Their wool smells. Argos, the great hunting dog born of bear and wolf, their protector. Wet.

Chapter One ends: “Some men did return to their homes from Troy to tell the tale. But my master and his men have not. The mountain eagles circle higher and higher, riding the rippling currents, looking for him as I have asked, but see him not. The seagulls I have ordered to fly over every ship to see if my master is enslaved report nothing. Even the vultures, which smell death everywhere, are silent. And so I believe he lives.”

February.

Smoke in the kitchen. The microwave door hangs open and the smell of burnt oatmeal goes all the way up the stairs. The boy stands back from it with the look of a man watching his first ship sink. Windows open. Ten below outside. The whole house breathing cold air until the smell surrenders.

What’s done is done. The house stands.

Later we laugh and carry the old microwave out into the snow drift and the smell inside it will never go away.

That night, bedtime. Pajamas and blankets and the old gray dog.

Book One. Chapter Sixteen. “Tales of Hades:” “I pray that…you set me on a pyre there and burn me with my armor….Do this for me, or I am cursed for eternity.”

Honor by fire.

Some nights he listens from the doorway. Tonight, he is under the blanket.

March came and with it great snowstorms. First we dug tunnels tall enough for a boy to stand in. The roofs sagged and the mound slowly shrank.

The book was nearly done now.

Bedtime. The reader went up the stairs the way they had all winter.

The two bathed and in pajamas under the blanket. The reader had to coax one out to listen, the book was nearly done. The old gray dog circled twice and lay down with his head on a leg.

The last chapters. Odysseus returns at last, a stranger in his own home; only one creature in all of Ithaca knows him. Argos.

Act II. Lessons

Troy. The Trojan War. The legend Homer told took place around twelve hundred years before Christ. He told the tale around five centuries later.

Homer begins near the end.

For ten years, Greek warriors laid siege to a city that would not bend to their will. Troy’s location wasn’t an accident. It sat at a decisive point to control key geography. The straits didn’t cause the Trojan War, but they are why the city mattered.

Then the trickery of the horse. Warriors inside the gates. The city slept.

In the dark, the warriors climbed out and opened the gates for the army waiting outside. Houses burned through the night. Men who had names the day before, dead in the streets. They took women and children.

Odysseus wasn’t watching Troy burn from a ship. He was inside the horse and inside the walls when the city fell. By dawn, the Greeks had destroyed the city.

So. The war is over. There was a way home, and some of the other kings took it. He could go directly home, but there were other matters. Men he was tied to, arguments to settle, other things pulling at him, other routes to consider.

Odysseus has a choice.

The first: Go to class. Do the work. Come home when you said you would. Save some money. Keep the promise. Stay married. Train when you don’t feel like training. One foot in front of the other, the next step and then the next.

None of those things feel heroic while you’re doing them.

Or the other: the road that looks shorter.

And so begins the Odyssey.

Their first stop, a city called Ismarus. It had nothing to do with Troy, but they attacked it anyway.

After the assault, Odysseus told the men it was time to go. For ten years there had been a time for war. Troy had fallen. That time was over. But there was food and wine and things to steal and divide, and they stayed too long. By morning, more men had come down from the country and they had to defend themselves.

They fought all day, and by the time the Greeks got back to sea, six men from every ship were dead.

There is a season, a time and place for everything.

A time when your parents woke you up, reminded you where to be, knew where you were at night, and caught some of your mistakes before they became expensive. That season ends.

Then an island where three of the men ate the lotus and forgot why they were trying to get home. Not who they were, really. They didn’t forget everything. Just the part where, somewhere across the water, there was another life they were supposed to want and get back to.

They forgot.

They didn’t want to leave.

Odysseus had to drag them back to the ships crying and tie them down.

Remember why you came.

One of the great treasures in life is to find work you love. Don’t trade that away because something is easier or safer or more pleasant that makes you forget what you wanted in the first place.

When you are young, you want to burn the world to the ground. Remember.

Then the cave. The men find cheese and sheep and food, and they want to take some and get out. Odysseus wants to stay and meet whoever lives there, and that turns out to be a bad decision he could not have forecast at the time.

The Cyclops comes home, rolls a stone across the entrance, and eats two of the men. Later he eats more. Odysseus gets him drunk, tells him his name is Nobody, blinds him, and the surviving men escape when the Cyclops lets the sheep out.

It works. They’re back on the ship. They’re leaving.

But Odysseus can’t stand that the Cyclops doesn’t know who beat him. So Odysseus shouts his real name and where he’s from.

Turns out the Cyclops is Poseidon’s son.

You don’t need to tell people how smart you are, how talented you are, how hard you work, how much potential you have.

Don’t announce yourself. There’s plenty of time for people to know how great you are without you telling them. People will discover that on their own.

Then the King of the Winds. He gives Odysseus a bag with every wind trapped inside except the one blowing toward Ithaca, so only the wind that will carry them home is free.

For nine days they sail. Odysseus stays awake at the helm until he can’t take it anymore and falls asleep. When he does, they are close enough to Ithaca to see the fires of their home burning on shore.

But the crew has been watching him guard the bag, and out of envy they decide it must contain treasure he hasn’t shared with them. They open it.

All the winds come out at once.

Odysseus wakes up and watches his home disappear over the horizon because the men he trusted thought he was hiding gold from them.

They end up back where they started.

You will meet people who have more than you. More money. Better grades. Better connections. There is always someone at the dance that is prettier than you. Maybe they earned it. Maybe they didn’t. It doesn’t matter.

Envy will make you destroy your own voyage trying to open somebody else’s bag.

Then the giants.

Eleven ships go into the harbor. The giants rain rocks down from the cliffs. None come out. The one ship that stayed out of the harbor cuts its line and gets away.

Time and chance happen to us all.

You will make good choices and still have terrible things happen to you. Keep going.

Next, Circe, daughter of the sun god. When Odysseus’s men reach her island, she welcomes them into her house, gives them food and wine, drugs them, strikes them with her wand, and turns them into pigs.

Odysseus forces her to turn them back.

And in a weird twist, they stay on the island for another year.

They fight no battles. There’s no rowing, no storms, plenty of food to eat and warm beds.

Eventually, the crew has to convince Odysseus that they should probably go home.

There will be times when you need to stop, recover, change your major, take an easier semester, sleep, heal, enjoy yourself. None of those are failure. But eventually, you should probably get going.

Then he goes to the land of the dead because Circe tells him that the way home now requires directions from people who are no longer alive. His mother is there, and she wasn’t dead when he left.

He asks her what happened and learns that she died while he was gone, grieving for him. He tries to put his arms around her. There’s nothing to hold. He tries again and again.

Twenty years is a long time.

There are people waiting for you—their lives keep going while you have your adventure. Things happen to them, too.

Next up, the Sirens.

Odysseus has heard rumor from Circe of what their song does to men, but of course he still wants to hear it. So he comes up with a solution. He has his men put wax in their ears so they can’t hear the song, and then he has them tie him to the mast so he can. Crazypants.

He tells them beforehand that no matter what he says, they are not to untie him.

When he hears the song, he immediately wants loose. He begs, pleads, orders them, fights the ropes. They keep rowing and tie him tighter.

Sometimes you know or suspect that you’re not going to make a good decision. Don’t put it off. Decide while you’re thinking clearly what you’re going to do when the circumstances make thinking clearly difficult.

And, maybe Odysseus shouldn’t have listened to the song at all.

You don’t have to figure out how close you can get to failure without being ruined. Maybe just put wax in your ears and keep rowing.

Then a monster on one side of a passage and a whirlpool on the other. The whirlpool will destroy the ship and kill everyone on it. The monster will take six men.

Odysseus knows this before they enter the strait, but he can’t tell the crew.

He chooses the passage where six men will die.

Some of you will do inherently dangerous things. All of you will face tough choices.

Another island, where there are cattle belonging to the sun god. The instructions are simple: don’t eat the cattle.

Odysseus tells the crew and makes them promise, and they promise they will not eat the cattle.

But then storms keep the ship on the island. The food runs out. Odysseus goes off by himself to pray, and he falls asleep.

The men have a choice: they can die from starvation, or they can risk the wrath of the sun god.

They kill the cattle.

When they finally leave the island, Zeus destroys the ship, and every one of the crew dies except Odysseus.

Eat your bread with joy, drink your wine with a merry heart, and enjoy the hard work of being alive while you can.

All the men who left Ithaca with Odysseus are gone. He survives, holding onto wreckage.

And the lesson here, which isn’t really part of the story, is that everybody who takes the shortcut thinks they’re going to be the one who survives it.

Maybe only one of you will make it.

Then Calypso and the seven-year wait.

She is more than a beautiful woman on an island paradise. Immortality, eternal youth, love, food, sex. Anything he wants. Except for the one thing. He sits by the sea, crying for home.

The gods tell her to release him and he builds a raft and goes back onto the water and Poseidon destroys it.

One day you might get an offer that seems like paradise, at least from the outside looking in. Judge well—there is no perfect offer, always a tradeoff, hidden or known. More money or stress or health risk or time away from family that will start their own Odyssey before you expect it.

Is it worth it? Maybe yes and maybe no. Only you can decide. Do it with your eyes open.

Twenty years after leaving Ithaca, Odysseus drifts ashore there asleep. And home isn’t the place he left.

Men fill his house, eat his animals, drink his wine, and court his wife because they think he is dead. His son has grown up without him. His father is old. His mother is gone.

Odysseus has spent the whole story trying to get home and when he finally gets there he goes in as a beggar.

Nobody recognizes him.

Well, almost.

Except for Argos.

When you go on your Odyssey, you can’t go home to the place you left, because neither you nor home waits in place.

Act III. For Those of You Leaving Home in this Season

As you go out into the world,

The Lord bless you and keep you;Make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;Turn his face toward you and give you peace.

To those left behind, we remember Argos and the blizzard.

Sources

Ralph Hardy, Argos: The Story of Odysseus as Told by His Loyal Dog, Harper Collins, 2016: Google Books, Argos

Troy, archaeological site at Hisarlık, location near the Dardanelles, and traditional Late Bronze Age setting of the Trojan War: UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Archaeological Site of Troy

Homer, approximately eighth century B.C.; Homeric epics recorded in roughly their present form around 750 B.C.; Iliad covers only a small portion of the ten-year siege; Trojan Horse and Sack of Troy preserved in the wider Trojan epic tradition: Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Lore About the Trojan War”

Homer, Odyssey, Book 3. Division of the Greek leaders after Troy and the choices surrounding their return home: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 3

Odysseus and the Greek warriors inside the Trojan Horse and the sack of Troy: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 11

Ismarus and the Cicones; the Lotus-Eaters; Polyphemus, “Nobody,” Odysseus revealing his name, and Poseidon: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 9

Aeolus and the bag of winds; the Laestrygonians; Circe and the transformation of the men into pigs; the year spent on Circe’s island: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 10

Odysseus in the land of the dead; Tiresias; Anticleia, Odysseus’s mother; and the dead who cannot be embraced: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 11

The Sirens; Scylla and Charybdis; the cattle of Helios; destruction of Odysseus’s final ship and death of the remaining crew: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 12

Calypso; Odysseus held on Ogygia; his longing and weeping for home; offer of immortality; construction of the raft; Poseidon’s destruction of it: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 5

Odysseus carried home asleep by the Phaeacians and set ashore on Ithaca: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 13

Argos recognizes Odysseus after twenty years: Perseus Digital Library, Odyssey Book 17

“There is a season” / “a time for war, and a time for peace”: Ecclesiastes 3:1–8: Bible Gateway, Ecclesiastes 3

“Time and chance happen to them all”: Ecclesiastes 9:11, NKJV: Bible Gateway, Ecclesiastes 9:11

“Eat your bread with joy…drink your wine with a merry heart,” and the enjoyment of life and work: Ecclesiastes 9:7–10, paraphrased: Bible Gateway, Ecclesiastes 9:7–10

“The Lord bless you and keep you…make His face shine upon you and give you peace”: Numbers 6:24–26: Bible Gateway, Numbers 6:24–26

Moths circle the streetlights in the mostly empty lot. Blacktop. White parking lines. Road noise. Pickup doors slam shut.

They’re supposed to park at the back of the lot. Nobody who would care is here at eleven, and they’ll be gone before Beth gets in.

She’s at the door, counting heads. Everyone calls her Lou.

“I need you to go get Charlie,” she says. “He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”

No problem.

Charlie lives in a trailer park pretty close. Tires on gravel. Sideways glances. He bangs on the dark trailer door and waits. Quiet inside. Does it again. After a couple minutes Charlie opens the door, eyes bloodshot, smelling like too much of something.

“I’ll be right behind you.”

The kid leaves. When he gets back she’s still at the door.

“He’ll be here,” she says. “He always comes.”

Trucks back up to the dock. Boxes come down the rollers. Cardboard stacks up faster than anyone breaks it down. Most of the crew is new. Maybe they’ll last the week.

Charlie comes in at midnight and works the line like a man paying something off. Nobody says anything.

At the first break she’s smoking and eating a sandwich. Lettuce packed separate. Bread spread thin with dressing.

John sleeps in the corner of the break room. Loud snores. He jerks awake, then nods off again.

Above the time clock there’s a board with the stock price on it. Employee ownership plan. Somebody on day shift writes the new number in every day.

“That’s not much mayonnaise,” the kid says.

“Miracle Whip. If I could afford mayonnaise, I would spread it thick,” she says.

He looks at his own sandwich. Eats the rest of it slower.

At seven the doors open onto full daylight. The crew walks out squinting. Engines start across the lot, one after another. They pull out and head toward town and bed.

He turns west, towards Midway, the sun in his mirrors. His shift at the dairy starts at seven thirty.

Act I. Keys

Lou’s ring of keys opens nearly every lock in the store. A key to the high valuables cage, the office, the cardboard compactor lockout. She carries them on a metal clip hung over her belt. When she walks the floor, you hear her coming.

She keeps a copy of the schedule on a sheet folded in her back pocket. Not her schedule, because she has that one memorized. Everyone’s schedule. Her handwriting, all capitals, pencil.

She schedules break times, teaches new workers how to unload trucks and run pallet jacks, moves people around based on who calls in.

The store stays open until ten. Night shift starts at eleven. She arrived by nine, through the auto-open doors in pale jeans, shirt tucked in. She walked with highkneed purpose, denim falling straight to white sneakers. Pencil ready. The evening crew has their aisles faced and the dock swept before she comes through.

Just before eleven o’clock, she’s at the door to let everyone in. Five tonight. Charlie, John, the kid, a new guy, and a woman who started Tuesday. The truck’s already backed in.

She takes the paperwork from the driver and signs it on her leg.

The night is orderly. Trailer, then the rollers, then her first Virginia Slim. Pallets to the floor, everyone split aisle by aisle, freight on the shelves, cardboard broken down flat and baled. Then the orders.

She’s quick to jump in and fix a jam or rebuild a corner of a pallet herself so a new guy can watch. Then she hands him the next box.

She explains to him, “A new truck every night. Nothing to stay in the stockroom, no back inventory. Six hundred boxes in, six hundred boxes onto shelves, cardboard baled, empty dock by seven, and another truck tomorrow.”

This summer the kid is new to nights. He’s been with the store for a couple of years on evening shift, and he picked up a second job on the university dairy for the summer. When he got moved to nights she asked him about his schedule. Night shift, off at seven, dairy until five, sleep until ten, five days a week.

“That’s not much sleep,” she says. She looks at him like he’s missing something obvious.

Once every couple weeks the kid isn’t there at eleven. If the truck is full and the crew is short, she’ll call. If the truck is light she’ll let him sleep until one before she calls.

When a truck pulls away she might sneak a puff outside the cone of the dock light. The moths shoot across the light in a streak.

Around four the night gets long. Whoever’s dragging worst finds her coming down their aisle with a mini candy bar. She doesn’t say anything about it.

The woman who started Tuesday asks her how long she’s been here.

Nineteen years, she says. Nights for sixteen.

A few nights later the woman asks about her hours.

Lou takes the sheet out of her back pocket and looks at it.

Thirty-two this week, she says. Forty next week.

She folds it back up.

Get a thousand hours in the year and you qualify for the profit sharing, she says. You still have to be here at the end of the year.

The woman says okay and goes back to her aisle.

One night she’s showing the kid how the order system works. He asks her why she doesn’t switch to days. Assistant manager, an office with a door and a chair.

That job takes a degree, she says. She scans the barcode in front of an empty shelf to place an order.

I’m fifty.

Act II. The Crew

Charlie arrives just after Lou most nights. He clocks in and heads straight to the dock to check out what the truck has brought him that night. He jokes with the college kids who are going home.

The kid only has to go to his trailer once. Nobody brings it up.

He works the west side of the store, toys and tools and home goods. He’s fast. Somewhere in the middle of the night he’ll say something the kid thinks about on the drive to Midway. One night, breaking down boxes: why would you worry about something that hasn’t happened yet? Then he tilts the bale of flattened cardboard on a pallet and gets the jack.

Nights suit me, he says.

John falls asleep whenever he sits down. Lou gives him jobs that keep him on his feet and moving. Clean and polish the floors, move pallets. When break time is up, they wake him up and tell him it’s time to go.

That’s just John.

Then one night in July, he’s different. Awake. Smiling when he comes through the door, talking during break. He tells everybody he got a machine that helps him breathe when he sleeps. Says he slept eight hours and can’t remember the last time he felt this good.

He looks ten years younger. He eats his whole lunch without falling asleep.

Along with Lou, they’re the regulars.

The day shift is the lifers, evening for the college kids, nights for those caught in between. The crew turns over all summer. A guy who wanted a job with air conditioning. A lady who needed a paycheck, then she was headed to Springfield. They’re friendly and they work hard. Then Lou crosses their name off the schedule.

The woman who started that first Tuesday lasts six weeks. One night she just stops coming in.

She didn’t quit because she hated anybody. Nights are hard on your body. You work while you’re supposed to be sleeping and you sleep while you’re supposed to be working, and most people’s bodies can’t take it.

Every so often a new person will ask: how long does it take your body to adjust? Opinions all around. Two weeks. A month. Six.

The answer for some of them? Never.

At three in the morning the store hums with noise from the fluorescent ballasts, John running the floor polisher, scrub pads turning circles on the tile, Charlie making the cardboard baler groan in the backroom. The whole town is dark, moths shooting across the parking lot lights, and they’re moving boxes in this lit-up one-hundred-thousand-square-foot metal box. Freight moving from a trailer to a shelf so a woman can buy diapers for her baby at seven a.m.

One night a new guy asks about the sign by the time clock. Employee ownership. What’s the dollar sign written in marker?

Lou explains. You sign up to buy company stock, they take money out of your check. For every dollar of stock you buy the company puts an extra fifteen cents into your account.

Charlie says he thought about it, but he can’t eat stock.

John says he signed up once and a doctor’s bill changed his mind.

Nobody asks the kid.

Lou puts her cigarette out and they go back to work. The stock price on the sign goes up just a little every week, all summer.

By August, Lou, John, and Charlie are the only people who have been there longer than the kid.

Act III. The Bobcat

The sun is low on the horizon. Morning near Midway.

He steps on the back of the bucket and into the cab. Safety restraint down, key on, and the diesel engine putters to life. Bucket up, tilt down to check the pins, everything checks out.

Most of the day is in this Bobcat. Mixing feed in the auger, evening out the corn silage row, unloading alfalfa bales off semis, cleaning the freestall barn.

Almost everyone who works on the dairy is a college kid, except for the manager and the guy who can fix everything.

Throughout the day, the college kids talk.

Did you hear Sean got a sweet job up in Minnesota?

Then the milk parlor, clean the udders, mastitis check, milk machine, clean again. The Holsteins give more milk, the Jerseys more milk fat. The Food Science majors who work in the ice cream parlor on campus will use it to make Tiger Stripe, golden French vanilla with a dark Dutch chocolate ribbon. Gold and black.

What do you think of the fall study abroad program in the Netherlands?

In the afternoon somebody asks what he’s doing next year. After you graduate?

I’m going to be a senior, but I’m not sure yet. I might go back to working with beef cattle. Or I might apply to vet school.

Somebody says that’s cool. The talk moves back to Sean’s job.

They hose and scrub the milk parlor down when they’re done milking. He drives east toward town, sleeps from five thirty to ten.

At eleven, Lou is at the door, counting heads.

Act IV. August

Two weeks left in the summer. Classes start soon, and the store trades the college kids of summer for the kids of fall.

David asks to see him one morning after the shift. White button-down collared shirt, dark pants, black shoes. Assistant manager. They meet near the high valuables cage.

“How have you been doing?” he starts.

Good.

No, really. Beth told me about the dairy. Nights here, days there. We think it’s too much.

The kid says he’s been getting along.

A flash of concern on David’s face. Classes start in a couple weeks, right? Take those weeks off. Your job will be here when you get back. You’ll go back to evenings.

The kid jokes the first thing he’s going to do is sleep for days. Then he asks who fills in on Lou’s crew.

Don’t worry about Lou. We’ll make sure she’s good. She knows what’s going on.

There is no last night. The shift before the meeting was it. Nobody knew except for Lou.

He sees her again in the evenings, at nine o’clock, passing. He walks the store, checking the facing before they turn the shift over to her and John and Charlie. She never says anything about the summer.

That year, evening shift helps nights unload the first truck before they leave.

Postscript

Thanks for joining me for The Night Shift. I’m Joel Douglas, and I believe in America.

Every bit of this story is true. That summer I was nineteen. The store was the Walmart in Columbia, Missouri, on Nifong Boulevard. The building is a Hy-Vee Grocer now. The dairy is the University of Missouri’s ‘Foremost Dairy.’ The only place you can buy Tiger Stripe ice cream is Buck’s in Eckles Hall. They have very limited hours.

The night crew is real. I changed most of the names. The mayonnaise exchange is near word for word.

When summer ended I worked there another year. When I graduated, the district manager offered me a spot in the assistant manager training program. Assistant manager, then store manager, then maybe district. The job that takes a degree. I was twenty and I had one, and I had to turn him down. I already had an Officer Training School slot in the Air Force.

The rules said they couldn’t make the same offer to Lou.

On my way out the store manager told me if I stayed on the books a couple more weeks, I’d vest in something called profit sharing. I couldn’t stay. I believe she kept me on the books anyway. That June a check came for five hundred and seventy-five dollars, and I didn’t know what it was.

Employee ownership was different. You could choose to buy stock out of your paycheck and the store kept the stock price on the sign next to the time clock. For every dollar of stock you bought, Walmart added fifteen cents to the same account. A fifteen percent match. Unheard of for 401Ks today. No degree or credit check or anything. You just had to choose to do it, and that probably meant you needed money left over at the end of the week.

About one in four Walmart associates buys stock. Charlie told you why. You can’t eat stock.

Now the philosophy.

Dennis Kelleher said on a podcast that the bottom 50 percent of Americans, about 165 million people, hold 2.5 percent of the wealth of the country. It’s the Federal Reserve’s own quarterly data.

Let’s think about the statistic first. The bottom half’s wealth has gone up, not down, for the last thirty years. Many of those are the youngest Americans who haven’t had time to own much.

If we judge across history, Americans are extraordinarily prosperous.

Owning wealth is different. Many Americans pay rent for shelter. Their health insurance is tied to a job. Their Social Security keeps them alive, but they can’t sell it or leave it to their kids.

Security is important, but it isn’t the freedom of choice that comes with ownership. A paid-off truck means you can take another job. Home equity means you can move. Savings mean you can tell a boss no. A retirement account means more of your future is yours.

Just like Lou explaining the store. Boxes come in, night shift puts the goods on the shelves. Nothing in the back room, no inventory. Another truck tomorrow.

We designed economic security the same way. Benefits arrive just in time, are consumed, nothing remains.

Then we act surprised the ownership column reads 2.5 percent.

So. Instead of using it as ammunition for political theater, should we try to change it?

Justice. One of our six national goals. Setting conditions so a kid born in a trailer can love their work and eat and drink with the people they love.

Food on the table. Heat in the house. In turn, a house to put the table in.

Is that enough? Should we make Americans buy stock? When bills are tight and a man picks up a second job, would we order him to buy equities with money he needs to pay a doctor’s note?

That would violate another national goal: liberty.

Lou never chose to be an owner. Sam Walton enrolled her automatically into profit sharing. The rule did it for her.

Let’s recognize it’s not just the choice. It’s tough to pass judgment on someone who can’t afford to buy mayonnaise.

But if we are serious, there are three principles that would move more Americans into the ownership half. None of them orders anyone to do anything. They are either automatic or a choice.

One. Make ownership easier.

Two. Make saving the default. Automatic.

Three. Stop government rules that punish people for saving money.

Three examples to go with them. An offer for first-time homebuyers: a three percent interest rate on a HUD loan, three and a half percent down, one time, owner-occupiers only, investors excluded. Combine this with building and zoning incentives.

Auto-enrollment retirement accounts that you have to opt out of. Congress has proposed these accounts many times through bipartisan efforts.

Raise the SSI asset limit and index it, so people can actually save money to buy something.

To move more Americans into the ownership half, we have to break the chain of just-in-time benefits.

I don’t know what happened to Lou. She’d be about seventy-seven now. I hope more than twenty years of profit sharing went home with her.

I hope she’s sitting down to supper with people she loves. Mayonnaise spread thick.

Eat your bread with joy.Drink your wine with a merry heart.Enjoy the hard work of staying alive,The Almighty takes pleasure in your pleasure.

Sources

Bottom 50 percent hold 2.5 percent of U.S. wealth: Federal Reserve, Distributional Financial Accounts; FRED series WFRBSB50215, Share of Total Net Worth Held by the Bottom 50%

Dennis Kelleher, Better Markets: bettermarkets.org. Podcast episode here.

Wealth by age of family head: Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer Finances

Associate Stock Purchase Plan. 15% match on the first $1,800, more than 400,000 participants, plan offered “for almost 30 years,” Sam Walton on share accessibility: Walmart, “Walmart Announces 3-for-1 Stock Split,” Jan. 30, 2024

U.S. associate workforce (approx. 1.6 million): Walmart, About

Walmart Profit Sharing and 401(k) Plan annual reports: SEC EDGAR, Walmart Inc. Form 11-K filings

SSI resource limits. $2,000 individual / $3,000 couple, unchanged since 1989: Social Security Administration, “Understanding SSI — Resources”

SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act: S. 1234, 119th Congress; H.R. 2540, 119th Congress

Auto-enrollment retirement accounts: S. 1526, Retirement Savings for Americans Act of 2025, 119th Congress

FHA loans, 3.5 percent down: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Let FHA Loans Help You”

Buck’s Ice Cream, Eckles Hall, Tiger Stripe (French vanilla with Dutch chocolate ribbon): University of Missouri CAFNR, Buck’s Ice Cream

Foremost Dairy Research Center: Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station, Foremost Dairy

Ecclesiastes 9, New King James, paraphrased.

The dogwoods are blooming along the edge of the great lawn, dark pink and brilliant white. Below the hill, Brush Creek runs slow and clear past the parkway that shares its name. Beyond, Spanish mission buildings catch the morning sun.

Saturday in April.

The collie comes loping back up the slope. She drops the ball at his feet and barks and backs up, ready.

“What’s her name?”

The girl from the diner stands at the edge of the grass in a light sweater, holding two coffees. She hands him one.

“Penny.”

“You said you bring her out here on weekends.” She sits down on the grass. “So I figured Saturday.”

He throws the ball. Penny goes.

She has brought a stack of index cards, rubber-banded, thick as a fist. Names of bones on one side, in her small neat writing.

“You mentioned school.” he says. “What classes are you taking?”

“Medical school. UMKC.”

He looks at her. “Medical school?”

“It’s a six-year program. High school straight in. No college in between.” She turns a coffee cup in her hands, keeping them warm. “They gave me a patient the first month. Mostly I just took his blood pressure and listened to him talk about Korea.”

“So what’s the diner?”

“Tuition.”

“What about you?”

“Business school. Rockhurst.” He throws the ball again. “Nights and weekends at my uncle’s shop. Tool and die.”

“What’s a die?”

“A tool that makes the same part every time, until they eventually wear out.”

She does not look at the cards once.

They stay until the coffee is gone and then longer. Her hair is up and she smells somehow better than the dogwoods. When she leaves she touches his arm.

He has a four o’clock shift at his uncle’s shop.

Act I. The Match

North Kansas City. A machine shop a block off the tracks. Hydraulic presses shook the concrete. Screw machines never seemed to stop. Over the tool bay radio, “Show Me the Way” played for what felt like the hundredth time while his uncle studied another purchase agreement. The new Cincinnati machining center had arrived in July. Five years of payments sat beside it.

The shop makes tooling for the overhaul base at the airport. Engine stands, fixtures, jigs. TWA is the main customer, and they order more every year. The uncle takes the orders.

His brother has a desk by the window. Eight years older, married, Missouri Air Guard airlift mechanic. His unit gets called up in December to what his brother calls “the sandbox.” His uniforms still in the office closet because no one believed he’d be gone long.

By now he’s twenty. Still in business school across town, nights and weekends in the shop. With his brother deployed, the nights get longer. The uncle might be the boss on paper, but his brother ran the place.

In February, his mother calls the office phone. He yells into the phone, a finger in his other ear. A truck rolled on a road north of the border. His brother is alive. His back is broken in two places.

The shop fires up again Monday morning.

He signs payroll checks for the first time in March. He copies the way his brother wrote them in the green ledger. Six cents and change of every guy’s check comes out of every dollar for Social Security. The shop puts in the same amount.

A match.

It seems plain enough. The men put in their share, the shop puts in. Someday the government pays it back.

Both halves go to the bank in one deposit and then to the government every quarter.

He looks for something that says what the money buys. There isn’t one. Just a booklet of tax tables instead.

He changes his schedule to night classes. Tuesdays and Thursdays at six. In April a shipment comes back out of tolerance, a die is worn and no one measured it. The rework takes the nights for three weeks. He makes it to one final. Sleeps through the other. In the fall he signs up for two classes and drops one.

She calls the shop on Sundays now. He’s there catching up on paperwork when the machines are down. She is on rotations now. They meet at the lawn on Saturdays when she is off and he can get away. Penny is glad to see her.

His brother comes home in June with a cane. The cane is not going away. Some mornings he is at the shop, others he doesn’t make it. The uncle drinks his coffee on the floor and tells him. Your brother needs time. When he is right you go back to days.

A year later the shop takes on two more men for the TWA work. He is twenty-one. He runs payroll again, eighteen checks and the deposit. In early July he sends the government the largest check he has ever signed. Half came out of the men’s pay. Half from the shop.

Act II. The Stub

Match Day comes on a Thursday in March. Six years of school for one envelope, opened in a hotel ballroom with everyone else.

The envelope isn’t an invitation. It’s orders. Hers says Houston.

He drives her to the airport in June. Penny rides in the back with her head out the window. At the curb she holds the dog’s face in both hands for a while, and then his, and then she goes. The Tercel gets sold to a cousin. Everything else fits in two bags.

The years in Houston are call nights and loan payments. A hundred hours some weeks. She sleeps in the hospital more than the apartment.

The first paycheck comes at the end of July. She reads the stub in the parking garage, line by line.

Federal. State. FICA. She asks the chief resident what FICA is.

“Social Security,” he says. “Everybody pays it.” She does not read another stub.

Her mother mails the Kansas City paper now and then. The airline is in it twice, and then again, and she calls the shop on a Sunday.

“It is quieter here than it used to be,” he says.

He does not say more and she does not ask.

They trade cards at Christmas.

In her fourth year, a boy comes in at two in the morning with a burst appendix. Before she takes him back, his mother asks what it will cost. Not whether he will live. What it will cost.

She says she doesn’t know, and it’s the stone cold truth. The boy does fine. She never sees a copy of the bill and has no idea how much it costs.

She stays two more years after residency to learn children’s surgery. She is thirty-one, and for the first time in her life there’s nothing she wants more.

That fall, an envelope comes from the Social Security Administration. She’s curious.

Inside is every year she has ever worked and what she earned. She didn’t know someone knew all the history. The diner is there at the top of the list even though she earned nearly nothing. Eleven hundred dollars.

Below it is a number for what she will receive at sixty-seven.

At the bottom, a paragraph says Congress can change the law at any time, and that by the time she retires, the taxes coming in will cover about three-quarters of what the program has promised to pay.

She reads it. She reads it again. Puts it in the envelope where she keeps seven years of paper copies of her taxes.

Children’s Mercy calls that spring to offer her a children’s surgeon position.

She comes home.

The dogwoods are blooming when she signs.

Act III. The Letters

The uncle signs the shop over to him in ninety-eight. He keeps a key and his coffee mug and comes in on Tuesdays to stand on the floor. His brother signs as the witness.

A competitor buys the airline in the spring. They have overhaul shops and suppliers of their own in other states. Orders come in slower all summer and stop in October.

Twenty years of tooling sit on the racks in the back. Engine stands, fixtures, jigs. All of it built to print, property of the airline. Good tool steel, and none of it his.

He calls three numbers before someone on the other end of the line knows anything. “Scrap it or store it,” the man says. “Nobody is coming for it.”

The accountant doesn’t sugarcoat it. He can keep what he has in savings, or he can pay the guys their last payrolls.

He tells the men after the final shift, when the checks are ready. Fifteen men shake his hand. One doesn’t.

“Should’ve told us months ago, so we could have found another shop.”

The men get paid.

He takes the deposit to the bank; the men’s share and the shop’s match both. Then, an auction one day in March. The Cincinnati sells to a shop in Wichita.

He keeps the green ledger. Her Christmas cards are tucked inside the back cover.

The years go by at Children’s Mercy. Operation by operation. She gets good, and then she gets known. Residents ask to train under her.

She tells them never to call an operation routine where a family can hear it.

When the hospital raises money for the new tower, she gives enough that they ask about putting her name on something. She says no.

The fund she starts pays the bills insurance will not for the families who have to ask what it costs.

The auction is in the paper that spring, two lines. She reads them. At Christmas she signs the card the same as every year.

The uncle dies in November. A widower. No children.

He handles the arrangements and calls the number on the government website. The check that came that month has to go back, the woman on the phone tells him.

There is a death payment of two hundred fifty-five dollars, for a spouse or a child. He has neither.

“Then there is no payment,” she says. She is polite.

He thanks her before he hangs up.

At the funeral his brother reads the eulogy leaning on the cane. The page begins to shake. He steps beside him and holds the bottom corner.

The paper statements stop coming. A card in the mail says they are online now.

She creates an account and types a password twice.

There it is. A record of every year. Even the diner. Eleven hundred dollars.

The paragraph at the bottom is still there. The year beside it is closer.

She reads it once. She prints it and files it with the taxes. In the back of the drawer are cards children made for her after their surgery.

He gets a job fixing machines at other shops. First, at twelve dollars an hour, then eighteen, then twenty-six.

He gets a small house north of the river with a fenced yard. Penny lives long enough to see the yard. He buries her under the maple the next winter. He waits a year before bringing home another collie, and when her time came, one more. The yard is big enough for them to chase the ball.

He gets laid off and files for Social Security. He is sixty-two. Deposits come once a month.

At sixty-five a letter comes about Medicare.

Because of what she earns, her premium for the same coverage will run several times what most people pay.

Same card. Same doctors. She reads it. She reads it again.

The same week she sends her annual check to the fund at Children’s Mercy.

The year he is sixty-five, a letter comes from the Social Security Administration.

The trust fund is empty.

Starting in January, the checks will be smaller. About twenty percent smaller.

The law allows Congress to act at any time, the letter says. Congress has not.

He sells the house with the yard in the spring.

Moves into an apartment. Third floor. Rent set by his income.

There is no yard.

The park is a ten-minute drive. Some weeks they go twice. Some weeks they don’t.

The collie is old now. She brings him the ball anyway. She chews it and drops it at his feet and backs away, ready.

He rubs pain away on the side of his knee.

Then he throws it.

Postscript

Thanks for choosing to spend time with me.

Dogwoods and two grand lies. Bookends.

At the start, they fall in love on the grounds of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. April, when the dogwoods bloom brilliant white and dark pink. The Missouri state tree.

What look like dogwood petals are really modified leaves. The flowers are the small cluster at the center. The wood is hard. Close-grained. Used for tools and machine parts. Beautiful from a distance. Hard enough for tool work.

Now the other bookend. The two lies.

The first grand lie: We can change the terms for successful people without betraying them because we believe they can afford it. Tax the rich.

We tell ourselves this group doesn’t need Social Security. They must already have enough money.

But we also say Social Security isn’t an investment. It’s societal insurance. We buy it so the elderly can live above the poverty line and those injured, disabled, or otherwise unable to work can survive.

It works. Social Security keeps millions of Americans above the poverty line.

A short, rich man in Jericho once stood up at dinner and gave half of everything he had to the poor. Nobody voted. What he gave freely was evidence of his character.

What we are arguing about is different. Not what she gives, which is her business and enormous, but what we can force her to give.

Generosity is one question. Honest scales, weights, and measures are another.

So let’s ask: Social Security is social insurance tied to wages and not a general income tax. Should there be some relationship between what is insured, what is taxed, and what is paid out?

Our debate today is really about that principle.

Some argue that Social Security should transfer from the wealthy to the poor. They ask very high earners to finance more of the system, even if they receive little or no additional benefit.

Others argue that doing so changes the point of the program. They posit what is supposed to be social insurance should be income-transfer.

Maybe ability to pay is reason enough. But then we should say plainly what we are doing. Choosing one promise over another. Not keeping both.

The second grand lie: We can reduce benefits for unsuccessful or unlucky people without betraying them because that is what the math says.

Truth. Congress can change benefits at any time. Roosevelt insisted on payroll contributions because they gave workers a moral and political claim to their benefits and made the program nearly impossible to scrap.

And he addressed reality. Before Social Security, the poorhouse was real. It even had an address. Today Social Security lifts millions of Americans above the poverty line. In a small apartment, that means heat, groceries, and rent.

We will probably have to break faith with at least one of these groups. Someone will pay more than the agreed terms or receive less than the terms we promised.

Let’s thank them with a gracious heart and not pretend they owed it or deserved it all along.

And before we levy judgment on either group, let’s remember that none of us are good. We are not to judge between goats and rams.

So. Let’s pull out our Social Security Statements and ask what they actually promise, who made that promise, and whether anyone ever had the authority to make it.

And let’s stop believing there is someone else who can be made to pay the bill.

Sources

History and law

Luther Gulick, “Memorandum on Conference with FDR Concerning Social Security Taxation, Summer 1941.” Social Security Administration, Historian’s Office, Research Note No. 23. Gulick’s memorandum records Roosevelt’s argument that payroll contributions would give workers a legal, moral, and political claim to benefits and make the program politically difficult to repeal.

Flemming v. Nestor, 363 U.S. 603 (1960). The Supreme Court held that paying Social Security taxes does not create an accrued contractual right to a fixed or unalterable benefit. Congress retained authority to revise eligibility and benefit provisions.

Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 (1937). The Supreme Court upheld the old-age provisions of the Social Security Act under Congress’s taxing-and-spending power and its authority to provide for the general welfare.

Social Security Administration, “Historical Background and Development of Social Security.” A history of poor relief, almshouses, poorhouses, poor farms, old-age dependency, and the conditions preceding the 1935 Social Security Act.

Larry DeWitt, “The Development of Social Security in America.” Social Security Bulletin 70, no. 3 (2010). A history of the program and the tension between individual equity (what contributors believe they earned) and social adequacy (what society believes beneficiaries need.)

Program rules and documents

Social Security Administration, The 2026 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees.The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance fund is projected to pay full scheduled benefits until the fourth quarter of 2032. After depletion, continuing income would cover approximately 78 percent of scheduled benefits.

Social Security Administration, A Summary of the 2026 Annual Reports. A shorter presentation of the retirement, disability, and combined-fund projections.

Social Security Administration, “The History and Development of the Lump-Sum Death Benefit.” Congress established the $255 maximum lump-sum death payment in the 1954 amendments.

Social Security Administration, “Lump-Sum Death Payment.” The current eligibility rules for the $255 payment to a qualifying surviving spouse or eligible child.

20 C.F.R. § 404.390, “Amount of the Lump-Sum Death Payment.” The federal regulation governing the amount of the payment.

Social Security Act § 202(i). The statutory basis for the lump-sum death payment.

Social Security Administration, “What to Do When Someone Dies.” SSA pays retirement benefits one month behind and pays no benefit for the month of death. A payment made for that month or a later month must be returned.

Barbara A. Smith and Kenneth A. Couch, “The Social Security Statement: Background, Implementation, and Recent Developments.” Social Security Bulletin 74, no. 2 (2014). Documents nationwide paper mailings, their suspension in 2011, the online Statement introduced in 2012, and changes in Statement language and distribution.

Social Security Administration, “Your Social Security Statement.” The current source for accessing, reviewing, and printing a personal Statement.

Social Security Administration, “Social Security and Medicare Tax Rates.” Beginning in 1990, employees and employers each paid 6.2 percent for Social Security and 1.45 percent for Medicare.

Internal Revenue Service, Publication 15: Employer’s Tax Guide. The employer guide to withholding, depositing, reporting, and paying payroll taxes.

Social Security Administration, “Medicare Premiums: Rules for Higher-Income Beneficiaries.” Higher-income Medicare beneficiaries pay income-related adjustments for Part B and Part D.

Poverty and the program’s effect

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Social Security Lifts More People Above the Poverty Line Than Any Other Program.” The analysis estimates that Social Security lifts approximately 16.9 million people age sixty-five and older above the official poverty line.

Medicine and education

University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Medicine, “B.A./M.D. Program.” UMKC accepts students directly from high school into an accelerated program in which the B.A. and M.D. can be completed in six years.

University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Medicine, “Learning in Docent Teams.” Students begin clinical experiences early through UMKC’s docent system.

National Resident Matching Program, “Requesting a Waiver or Deferral.” A Match creates a binding commitment between the applicant and the residency program unless the NRMP grants a waiver or deferral.

National Resident Matching Program, “How the Matching Algorithm Works.” An explanation of how applicants and residency programs are paired.

Children’s Mercy Kansas City. Institutional background for the pediatric hospital and the fictional surgeon’s later career.

Rockhurst University, College of Business, Influence, and Information Analysis.Institutional background for his business studies.

Kansas City, TWA, and period setting

American Airlines, Annual Report on Form 10-K. American Airlines, through a subsidiary, purchased substantially all of TWA’s assets and assumed certain liabilities on April 9, 2001.

Kansas City International Airport, “Airport History.” Background on TWA’s historical presence and overhaul operations in Kansas City.

Dennis DeYoung, “Show Me the Way,” performed by Styx on Edge of the Century, 1990. Contemporary reporting on its Gulf War association. The song became associated with Gulf War requests and dedications during early 1991.

Dogwoods

Missouri Secretary of State, “Missouri State Tree.” The flowering dogwood became Missouri’s official state tree in 1955.

Missouri Botanical Garden, Cornus florida. The small central cluster contains the true flowers. The conspicuous white or pink structures are modified leaves called bracts.

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, “Cornus florida—Flowering Dogwood.” Flowering dogwood wood is hard, strong, heavy, fine-grained, and shock-resistant. Historical uses include tool handles, mauls, pulleys, shuttles, and other working objects.

Scripture

Luke 19:1–10, King James. Zacchaeus gives half of his goods to the poor.

Matthew 22:15–22, King James. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”

Leviticus 19:35–36, King James. The command to use just balances, just weights, and honest measures.

Ezekiel 34, King James. The Almighty will judge.

Further reading

Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew. New York: Viking Press, 1946. Perkins’s account of Roosevelt, the New Deal, and the formation of Social Security.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. The first published appearance of Roosevelt’s payroll-tax remarks based on Gulick’s account.

Larry DeWitt, “The Development of Social Security in America.” The single source for a listener who wants a deeper explanation of the program’s competing principles.

May in Missouri. Warm, not hot like it will be in July. Humidity in the air, mist at the bottom of the hill hiding the green grass.

Bright white gravel under tires. He opens the passenger door. He is fifteen. His grandma drove him.

The Oldsmobile idles behind him until the screen door opens and a man comes out. Then she pulls away.

The man is the rancher’s son. Sixty years old, maybe more. His truck is running in the yard.

“You eat breakfast?” he says. Then, “Dad’s in the hospital. Nursing home after that, probably. He won’t be coming back to this.”

The house first. Old, white, small, on top of the hill. A garden plot on the side, a shotgun sitting by the door nearest the garden. Dogwoods and oaks, leaves out full now. One level. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a sitting room. Clean. The beds made tight with homemade quilts. Glass jugs on the floor by the kitchen door. “Dad’s corn whiskey,” the son says. The boy can eat lunch in here if he wants. Running water. The well is outside.

A newspaper picture in a frame on the side table. Five generations. A new baby, and a great-great-grandmother still alive to hold him.

“That’s my mom,” the son says. “Holding the baby. That picture is ten years old now.”

Then the work. Build a cattle corral and an alley good enough to back a trailer in and load. Stay out of the old smokehouse. It’ll fall down any day now. One of those sheds needs knocked down before it falls down, you can use the tractor to help. The chicken coop needs cleaned out. Probably hasn’t been since Mom passed. Most of the perimeter fence needs checked. Water tanks sorted.

The truck is still running.

The son looks at his watch. Plenty to do.

“But there’s a job that needs done before all that.”

He points down past the pens, to a hog lot at the bottom of the slope. There’s a dead hog in it.

“Drag it down the hill and bury it,” he says. “Shovels are in the shed. Twenty years ago I’d have dug it myself.”

He shakes the boy’s hand. The truck backs around and goes down the drive and the sound of it fades and then it’s gone.

Quiet after that. Wind in the oaks. A rooster somewhere below.

Act I. The Hog Lot

He doesn’t start with the hog. He walks the place first, down the hill and through all of it, to get eyes on everything.

The corral isn’t started. The materials are already there, stacked and waiting. Old railroad ties. Cattle panels. Each tie has a mark on it, showing how deep to set it.

The smokehouse is tall and narrow. He’s never seen one before. A fire pit dug in the dirt floor with a simple metal ring, chains hanging overhead. He doesn’t go in.

The chicken coop is full of old bedding, gray with dust. Hornets have built above the door. He’ll have to take care of that.

One of the water tanks is dry. Wolf spiders in the bottom, big ones. He throws a rock in and they scatter, but they can’t jump out of the tank.

An old blue Ford tractor sits by the shed. Small. It doesn’t have a bucket to dig, and even if it did, he doesn’t know how to use it. He’ll have to learn. Shovels inside, and a manual post hole digger leaned in the corner.

The pigs and chickens are closest to the house. Cattle beyond. The fields run out to meet wooded hills. Forty acres. A big pond on the far end you can barely see from the house, a smaller one tucked in by the woods. The cattle are moving through the field toward water, and he watches them go.

He’s put it off as long as he could and another hour longer. He walks to the hog lot. A short metal hog house, small doors on each end.

The hog is dead in the far corner. Big. On its side. The flies rise off it when he comes near and settle again. No mark on it that he can see. No telling what killed it.

The son didn’t say how it died. He said drag it down the hill and bury it.

He takes hold of a hind leg above the hoof and pulls. It moves about a foot across the metal grate floor, the hide loose over the bone in his grip. He lets go and stands there. The air in the hog house is close now. He takes hold again.

It’s downhill. That’s the one thing going for him. He pulls and rests and pulls. The hog gathers grass and dirt ahead of itself. The flies come along. When he stops he can hear them. When he pulls he only hears his breath.

He drags the hog under the wire fence. At the bottom of the hill he picks a spot away from the ponds, where the ground looks soft.

Nobody said where. Nobody said how deep.

The first foot is topsoil and goes easy. Then the shovel rings. Rock. He works around it, pries it, lifts it out. There’s another one under it.

The afternoon goes like that. Ring, pry, lift. His hands blister. He walks up to the well, finds some gloves, has a drink and comes back down.

He stands in the hole and thinks about how deep is deep enough. Shallow, and something digs it up. Coyotes, or dogs from the next place over. Then it’s all to do again, and worse. He keeps digging.

The light goes long across the field. Whippoorwills call from the trees.

Gravel at the top of the drive. Headlights swing across the field and stop. The Oldsmobile sits up by the house, lights on, pointed down the hill at him.

She doesn’t honk. She waits.

He drags the hog to the edge and tips it in. It lands heavy. Filling the hole goes faster than digging it. He mounds the dirt over and stands there a minute in what’s left of the light.

Then he carries the shovel up the hill toward the headlights.

That night there’s supper, and dishes, and then she asks. What were you doing out there tonight? He tells her.

“Did you bury it deep enough to keep the coyotes off of it?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

They never talked about it again.

Act II. Corral and Alley

The next morning he starts on the corral.

The railroad ties outweigh him. He can’t carry one, so he tips them end over end to where they need to go.

The ground is the same ground he dug the grave in. Ring, pry, lift. Each tie has its mark. He digs until he thinks it’s deep enough, then tips each tie into the hole, lifts it out again, and digs some more until the mark disappears. He tamps the dirt back in layers, and pulls on the tie with his whole weight. It doesn’t move. He does the next one.

Whoever marked the ties isn’t there to ask.

His hands ache and cramp for ten days until they get used to the work.

He learns the tractor in the yard. The throttle is steady, and his foot coming off the clutch is not. It lurches and rocks and then it doesn’t.

He cleans the old bedding out of the chicken coop, swinging the spring door open and shut, and a hornet stings him in the ear. He buys hornet spray, empties it into the nest, knocks it off the coop with a fence post, and only gets stung the once. He cleans the coop down to the boards.

The shed comes down easy. The tractor pushes and the frame lets go at once. He drags the boards clear and stacks what’s worth keeping. It’s good work and it goes fast. The son comes out one day and asks what happened.

It was the wrong shed.

He spends weeks walking the perimeter fence and fixes what needs fixed. At noon he takes his boots off and eats in the kitchen, standing up. The house stays clean.

In late June he turns sixteen. He passes the test in town, and after that he drives himself out in the mornings. There’s a last morning she drives him. Neither of them marks it.

After that the mornings are his. He drives the Oldsmobile out himself, plays Metallica too loud the whole way. His grandma hates Metallica. Some evenings he drives to the next town to see a girl he met.

Alone, afternoons drift. He is sixteen. He daydreams. Some days he gets less done than he should, and nobody says anything about that either.

The cattle get checked every day. By the end of July the corral stands, ties to the mark, panels hung, an alley wide enough to back a trailer in. He would be home for football camp in August.

In the fall they sold the animals. The cattle went up the alley the boy built, into a trailer, and down the drive. They leased the ground to a neighbor. The boy went home, back to school.

The old man never came home.

Act III. Jennies

Two summers later.

Jerry and the boy ride in Jerry’s F-250 to the local college. Jerry is a rancher who needed another ranch hand.

Jerry is more than a rancher. He teaches economics at the college full time, with summers mostly off, and he lays carpet and linoleum in his spare time. He hates the flooring work. He does it if the money’s good, or if he likes you.

This job is at the college, and the money’s good. Industrial carpet in a dorm. Take out the old carpet, scrape and clean the floors, put in the new.

They set up in the gym. Huge rolls of new carpet, and the boy carries them by himself. The boy brings in the radio.

The college cheerleaders come in for practice. The Jennies. Three of them watch him carry a roll all the way across the gym. Then Garth Brooks comes on the radio, “Callin’ Baton Rouge,” and they start dancing, and they sing along.

He’s seventeen.

The old carpet comes out first. The boy cuts it loose and rolls it and carries the rolls out. Jerry tells him how the floors go: sweep, then sweep a second time. Every time you sweep again, you find something you missed.

The boy sweeps a room and calls it clean. Jerry sweeps it behind him and holds out his hand. Two staples and a chip of tile. He doesn’t say anything.

The boy sweeps the next one twice.

The boy is fast and thorough, but Jerry works most jobs with him the first time he does one. After a few rooms they have a system. Jerry measures the cleaned rooms and marks the new carpet. The boy cuts on the marks, carries the carpet down the hall, and lays it out nearly finished. Jerry follows behind and makes the last cuts, and that room is done.

The last cut at every doorway is Jerry’s. He kneels at the metal strip, sets the knife, and makes one pass. The edge lies flat. The boy watches how he holds it, where his weight is, what his off hand does. Jerry goes the speed he goes, whether the boy is watching or not.

The rooms go by. Measure, mark, cut, carry, lay, finish. Music from the gym comes down the hall all afternoon.

At the end of the day Jerry walks every finished room. He toes a seam. He presses a corner with his boot. He stands in each doorway, looking at the floor.

“Good,” he says.

They load the truck in the dark.

Jerry put him on for as much as he could work. Summer and winter both.

Tomorrow the work is hay and fences.

Postscript

Thank you for spending this time with me today.

The entire story you just heard is true, as close as memory gets. The ranch is real. Forty acres in Missouri. The mist, the shotgun by the garden door, the corn whiskey by the kitchen door. The hog and shovel are real. The railroad ties really came with a mark showing how deep. The wrong shed really came down. The Oldsmobile is real. The dancing Jennies are real, and so is “Callin’ Baton Rouge.” Jerry is real. His name is really Jerry. Sweep, then sweep a second time. That’s what he did, job after job.

The five-generations picture is real too. I never knew who the baby was.

I did omit a key detail. I was the boy. Fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen. The old man in the hospital was my great-grandfather. He lived to be near ninety-five. The man with the running truck was his son, my great-uncle. My grandpa had passed, so my great-uncle paid my wages to my grandma. And the woman in the Oldsmobile, who waited with her lights on while I finished in the dark, was my grandma. I lived with her that summer and took care of the ranch until the family could figure out what to do with it.

What they figured out was to sell the animals. The cattle left through the corral I built. Years later, when my great-grandfather died, the family offered to sell me the land. I was a young man. I didn’t have the money. It sold to someone else and isn’t in the family anymore.

One more thing for the ledger. The whole truth. The same summer I buried that hog, I left the ranch for two weeks. For some reason I still don’t know, the state sent me for proctored IQ and ACT tests and called me gifted, and there was a program for kids like that at the University of Missouri, where I’d go to college a few years later. Make a note of that, not because it’s important for me, but because we’ll need it in a minute for the philosophy.

Now the question.

A political philosopher named Michael Walzer wrote a famous book about justice, and in it he took a hard look at the work nobody wants. Dirty work. Degrading. And he made a claim: When people gain the power to refuse that kind of work, that’s a sign a society is succeeding. Somebody complains the welfare state made people unwilling to take certain jobs? Walzer says good. That was the point.

Let’s hear that again. His premise, regarding work, is: The power to refuse degrading work is the measure of success.

I’ll be fair to him first. Some people might refuse the work because they believe a yoke must be difficult. But mostly they refuse because it’s hard and it pays badly and nobody thanks them. That’s not weakness. It’s just the math.

And I’ll be fair to the economists too. They’ll tell you that early hard work doesn’t make the man. The kid who works young and rises was usually the kid who already had advantages, and the work gets the credit. Believe them. You just heard about my two weeks at the university. I was that kid. If this story claimed the shovel made me, it would be a lie.

So what’s true?

Nobody told me how deep to bury the hog. Nobody checked. I worked on the ranch the rest of the summer and never checked. I didn’t want to know. My grandma asked the only question anyone ever asked about it. Did you bury it deep enough to keep the coyotes off? I said I don’t know.

Thirty-some years on, I still don’t.

The railroad ties came with a mark. Some man who wasn’t there set that standard, and it held long after he couldn’t come check it. But here’s what I learned about marks. A mark can tell you how deep. It can’t show you how. Alone, a boy guesses. Sometimes he guesses right and nobody ever knows. Sometimes he knocks down the wrong shed.

Jerry showed me how. Jerry worked the first day of every new job beside me. Jerry marked, and I cut on his marks, and he made the last cut at every doorway, and at the end of the day he walked every room. And I think about who Jerry was. An economics professor with a ranch of his own. The man with the most choices in the county spent his summer days on his knees in a dorm hallway. He had every power Walzer measures. Every power to refuse. He did the work if the money was good. Or if he liked you.

There’s another philosopher, John Rawls, and he asked a different question than Walzer did. Walzer looked at the hard work and asked who should have to do it, and what we owe the ones who do. Rawls said decide the rules before you know, because time and chance happen to us all. Decide the rules before you know whether you’re born the professor’s kid or the kid whose family is selling the ranch. Then tell me what’s fair.

Rawls asked the better question. Because you don’t know. You don’t know if you’re the boy with the marks or the boy without them. And nobody can honestly answer “nobody should have to dig.” The hog doesn’t care about our philosophy. The hog is dead and somebody has to bury it and the tractor doesn’t have a bucket. Somebody has to dig. When we gain the power to refuse the work, the work doesn’t disappear. It moves to whoever can’t refuse it, and we agree not to look.

So here’s my answer, and I don’t agree with Walzer. The measure of a society isn’t how many of us escape the work. It’s who climbs down into it on purpose, and who they bring with them.

Scripture says, Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden. Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Something to note about that verse. The Greek word translated easy does not mean effortless. It carries the sense of something kind, good, or useful. Early Christians described Christ’s yoke as one that does not bruise the neck of the person carrying it. The burden is still a burden. But the yoke is easy, and the burden is good.

And a key point: a yoke is built for two. For Christians, that might mean the Almighty is on one side of the yoke.

In old agriculture, you pair a green animal with a seasoned one. The seasoned one carries the weight and sets the pace, and the young one learns the pull without being crushed by it. The burden never gets lighter. It gets shared.

I stood in my first yoke alone for a summer. It worked out for me. You now know some of the reasons why, and they don’t have much to do with the shovel. For most kids standing alone, the numbers say it doesn’t work out.

So here’s the ask. Be the one who chooses the work. The dirty job, the hard job, the one you’ve earned the right to refuse. Choose it in front of your kids, and teach them to choose it too. Not because suffering is holy. Because it’s work that needs done, and doing it next to someone is how people get made. Somewhere near you is a green kid. Don’t wait for a program to save them. A program can’t hold the other end of a yoke. Mark the cut. Stay in the room.

My great-grandfather’s ranch is still out there, but it’s not in the family anymore. The corral too, as far as I know.

And the grave? I never went back to look. It never stank. I never saw a coyote.

But they mostly move at night.

Sources

Philosophy

Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. Basic Books, 1983, Chapter 6, “Hard Work.” My copy from Apple Books.

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Belknap Press, 1971; rev. ed. 1999.

Scripture and Language

“My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28–30, King James Version.

Lincoln H. Blumell, “Is Jesus’s Yoke ‘Easy’? Reconsidering the Translation of Chrēstos in Matthew 11:30.” BYU Studies 65, no. 1 (2026): 6–36.

Labor Economics and Mobility

Christopher J. Ruhm, “Is High School Employment Consumption or Investment?” Journal of Labor Economics 15, no. 4 (1997): 735–776.

V. Joseph Hotz, Lixin Xu, Marta Tienda, and Avner Ahituv, “Are There Returns to the Wages of Young Men from Working While in School?” Review of Economics and Statistics 84, no. 2 (2002): 221–236.

Charles L. Baum and Christopher J. Ruhm, “The Changing Benefits of Early Work Experience.” Southern Economic Journal 83, no. 2 (2016): 343–363. An earlier version appeared as NBER Working Paper No. 20413, 2014.

Jared Ashworth, V. Joseph Hotz, Arnaud Maurel, and Tyler Ransom, “Changes across Cohorts in Wage Returns to Schooling and Early Work Experiences.” Journal of Labor Economics 39, no. 4 (2021): 931–964.

Thomas Le Barbanchon, Diego Ubfal, and Federico Araya, “The Effects of Working While in School: Evidence from Employment Lotteries.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 15, no. 1 (2023): 383–410.

Raj Chetty et al., “Social Capital I: Measurement and Associations with Economic Mobility.” Nature 608 (2022): 108–121.

Work and Identity

Blake E. Ashforth and Glen E. Kreiner, “‘How Can You Do It?’: Dirty Work and the Challenge of Constructing a Positive Identity.” Academy of Management Review 24, no. 3 (1999): 413–434.

Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

Youth Labor Law and Agricultural Safety

Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Hazardous Occupations Orders, 29 C.F.R. Part 570.

U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, “Fact Sheet #40: Overview of Youth Employment (Child Labor) Provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act for Agricultural Occupations.” Revised December 2016.

U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, “Child Labor Regulations, Orders and Statements of Interpretation; Child Labor Violations—Civil Money Penalties.” Federal Register 77, no. 103 (May 29, 2012): 31549–31551. Withdrawal of the proposed 2011 revisions to federal youth agricultural labor regulations.

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, “Childhood Agricultural Injury Prevention.”

National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, Cultivate Safety.

Music

Dennis Linde, “Callin’ Baton Rouge.” Recorded by Garth Brooks on In Pieces. Liberty Records, 1993. Referenced by title; no lyrics reproduced.

Further Reading

Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Penguin Press, 2009.

Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Her eyes open at five twenty-eight. She lifts her head and switches the alarm off before it kicks on at five thirty.

She’s up and moving. Chores to do. Coffee, dishwasher, shower, lunchbox.

Their apartment is a one-bedroom in Lakewood, Colorado, on the west edge of Denver. Third floor. She starts the coffee maker and showers while it runs. On the refrigerator door, under a magnet, a printed listing for a two-bedroom on South Ammons Street. Four hundred ten thousand. Beneath the price, handwriting in blue ink: eighty-two thousand down. Below that a column of dates and smaller numbers, one for every month they’ve lived here. The paper has yellowed at one corner.

She pours coffee into a steel travel mug, grabs her lunch, takes the stairs, and scrapes frost off the windshield with a plastic dustpan she keeps behind the seat.

She drives west on Alameda with the defrost on high. At Kipling she turns north. On her right, Lakewood Park Tennis Center. On her left, a fence.

Chain link, eight feet, three strands of barbed wire on top. It runs past the first stoplight. It runs past the second. There’s a gate with a guard shack and a yellow crossing arm, and a white sign that says United States Government Property. The fence keeps going. It takes her a full mile to run out of fence.

She doesn’t look at it. It’s been there her whole life.

At six twenty, she badges into the warehouse. The reader beeps. Inside the break room, on the long table by the time clock, somebody has laid out nine folders in three neat rows. New hires start today.

She’s been here four years. She knows what’s in the folders.

Act I. The Wage

The safety video runs eleven minutes. She can hear it through the break room wall, the same narrator, the same music, while she tapes the first boxes of the morning. Nine new people in there with their folders open.

At seven forty, the break room door opens, and the trainer walks in. His name is Dave. He’s holding his own copy of the folder, open to the tabs.

Tab one is the handbook, he says. Tab two is your direct deposit. Tab three is your benefits election. Health kicks in at ninety days, dental at one eighty. Don’t wait on the paperwork, it doesn’t backdate.

Tab four, he says, is community resources. Food assistance, Medicaid, child care assistance, help on the winter heat bill. The applications are in there, filled out down to the signature line. Plenty of folks use them the first year. Nothing to be embarrassed about.

He says it the way he said the part about the fire exits.

She takes one of the nine, a young woman named Reyna, out to the floor and trains her on the scanner. Point, squeeze, wait for the beep. The screen above the aisle shows a number; that number is the building’s rate. Green means the shift is on pace to meet their quota. She’s never seen it red for a whole shift. Somewhere around ten, the number turns green and stays that way.

At lunch she eats what she packed at five fifty. Reyna sits across from her with a vending machine sandwich and asks if the insurance is any good.

It’s insurance, she says. The deductible is four thousand. You’ll want the paycheck to clear before you pick a plan.

Reyna nods and writes something in her folder.

At the end of the table, one of the other new hires has his folder open to tab four. He’s copying numbers off a pay stub that isn’t his yet, from the sample page, doing the eligibility math with the folder’s own pencil. First shift. He hasn’t clocked a full day.

The horn ends lunch at twelve thirty. Everybody stands at once.

Act II. The Plant

The afternoon starts out like the morning. Point, squeeze, beep. The screen stays green. Nothing in the building gets made in the building. It comes in full and goes out full. They work on line three. By last break, Reyna runs two under her rate. First day.

The belt on line four goes down midshift. Nobody in the building can fix it. The tech comes Thursday, from Phoenix. Nothing to be done, that entire line goes home early.

The horn releases the shift at four thirty. In the parking lot her phone buzzes. A text from the storage place on West Colfax. Your autopay of eighty-nine dollars was successful. Thank you for being a valued customer.

She was headed there anyway. Two plastic totes in the trunk. Christmas decorations, going back until December.

Unit two fourteen. She rolls the door up and the cold air inside smells like cardboard. The totes go on the shelf her husband built from scrap the first winter. Behind them, the rest of it. Her mother’s cedar chest. A kitchen table on its side, six chairs zip-tied to the legs. A crib in pieces, wrapped in a moving blanket, that was her mother’s before it was hers.

In the back corner, under a second blanket, the lathe.

It’s a South Bend, cast iron, older than everyone she knows. It took four grown men and a rented dolly to get it in here. She pulls the blanket square where it’s slipped off the tailstock, and under her hand there’s a small brass plate, screwed to the base, stamped with three words. War Production Board. She doesn’t know how to run it. Nobody living in the family does.

She rolls the door down and clicks the padlock.

Her grandmother calls while she’s still in the lot. She puts her on speaker and pulls out into traffic.

You eat yet? Her grandmother says.

I’m driving home to eat.

You’re still paying for that unit.

I’m still paying for it.

You ought to sell that machine. You’d get something for it. Nobody’s run it in ten years.

I’m not selling the lathe, Grandma.

Her grandmother is quiet for a second. Then she says, your grandfather ran that lathe thirty-one years at Gates. Nights, at the end. They were going to throw it away, so he took it for his woodworking. Gates got the machine from the ammo plant, surplus sale.

My mother made bullets out by you, on Kipling, the whole war. Rode the bus from Tenth Avenue, three shifts going around the clock, twenty thousand people out there. Half of them were women.

I know, Grandma.

It’s all offices now, her grandmother says. Anyway. You two are coming Sunday.

We’re coming Sunday.

Bring some folding chairs if you can.

They’re in the unit, she says. I was just looking at them.

Good, her grandmother says. Then you know right where they are.

Act III. The Ledger

Friday, twelve oh five. Reyna sets the folder next to her lunch and asks if she has a minute.

The application is filled out down to the signature line, like Dave said. What’s left is the list on the back page. Proof of who you are. Proof of where you live. Proof of what you make, thirty days of it.

I don’t have thirty days, Reyna says. I have four.

There’s a line for that. Employer statement. HR prints it, you ask at the window.

Reyna writes that on the folder.

Then they schedule you an interview, she says. It’s a phone call. Keep your phone on you at break, and if you miss it, call back the same day. Don’t wait.

Did you do all this, Reyna asks.

She folds the wax paper over the half of her sandwich that’s left. My first year here, she says. Yeah. She takes her phone, puts it speaker up on the table, and calls the number. It starts with a recording: Last year we proudly served more than one hundred thousand Colorado families.

The horn goes. Everybody stands at once.

Sunday, her grandmother’s house smells like a roast that went in at seven. A brick ranch off Garrison, two bedrooms, one bath, a furnace that runs loud. Her grandmother has lived in it fifty-eight years. Her husband carries the folding chairs in from the trunk and sets them up at the long side of the table.

The game is on low in the front room. Broncos Chargers. A small group watching it.

Any luck on a house, her grandmother says, passing the potatoes.

There’s a two-bedroom on Ammons we like.

What are they asking?

Four hundred ten.

Her grandmother sets the potatoes down. Your grandfather paid seventeen thousand five hundred for this house, she says. Nineteen sixty-eight. Back then he made nine thousand a year. We lived on one paycheck, pinched every penny, but I didn’t work until your mother was in school.

Nobody says anything. In the front room a whistle blows and the crowd complains.

After the pie her grandmother stands and favors the new knee, and waves off help before anyone offers it. The knee’s fine, she says. Better than the old one. Four hundred dollars, that’s what the whole thing cost me. Medicare and the supplement took the rest. Four hundred, for a knee.

Her grandmother brings out an old photo of her mother in a heavy machinery apron. Dirty. She brought out an old picture or two every time they ate Sunday dinner. This is my mother, your great-grandmother. She rode a bus to a three-shift line and came home tired. She went to work sick or tired or hurt, didn’t matter. They weren’t supposed to, but she got married the day before your great-grandpa left on the ship, and she told me she felt like she was making ammunition for him, and she wouldn’t let him run out.

The work was hot and she was on food rations. Everybody was. Almost no meat, no butter. Then, when her husband came home, they wanted to get their own place right away, but there were no homes for sale anywhere. They lived in a shack for a year until houses started popping up.

She likes the story every time she hears it. You need anything before we go, she asks her grandmother at the door. Groceries this week, anything.

I’m fine, her grandmother says. Check comes next Wednesday, the house is paid, what do I need.

She hands them the leftovers in a grocery bag, roast and potatoes in butter tubs, and tells her husband to take the chairs back to the unit. Then she looks at her granddaughter for a second longer than usual.

When I’m gone this house is yours, she says. You know that.

Grandma.

I’m saying it so you know it.

Act IV. Payday

Friday is payday. The deposit lands at six in the morning while she’s scraping the windshield.

That night after supper she stands at the refrigerator with the blue pen. Ninety minutes of overtime on the check. She writes the date and the number at the bottom of the column, under fourteen other dates, and puts the magnet back.

Her phone buzzes on the counter. The app that watches the listing sends one line. This home is no longer available.

She stands there a minute. Her husband looks up.

Somebody bought Ammons, she says.

He comes and reads the phone over her shoulder. Neither of them says anything. Then he takes the pen off the counter and draws one line through the address at the top of the sheet. Not through the price. Not through the column. Through the address.

We’ll find another one you like, he says.

The sheet stays under the magnet.

Saturday they take the folding chairs back to the unit. She lifts the blanket square on the tailstock before they roll the door down.

Monday she’s up and moving at five thirty. Chores to do.

She drives west on Alameda with the defrost on high. At Kipling she turns north. On her right, the tennis center, courts empty in the cold. On her left, the fence starts, and at Gate One there’s a line of cars idling, brake lights back to the road, federal employees waiting to badge through onto the ground where twenty thousand people made the ammunition, going in to work at the offices. The fence runs past the first stoplight. Past the second. A full mile.

This time she looks at it.

At six twenty, she badges into the warehouse. The reader beeps. In the break room, on the long table by the time clock, somebody has laid out folders in three neat rows.

New hires start today.

Postscript

Thanks for spending this half hour with me. This story is a fable on a bedrock of truth. I made up the characters, the house on Ammons, and the lathe in the storage unit. The warehouse experience is real. So is the fence on Kipling. You can drive by it yourself. And I did not make up the national power that once stood behind it.

Behind that fence is the Denver Federal Center. Today it holds more federal agencies than any place outside Washington. During the Second World War, it was the Denver Ordnance Plant, run by Remington. At its peak, about twenty thousand people worked there, half of them women. They made ammunition around the clock. After the war the buildings became offices that now administer programs.

The new-hire folder is real too. I’ve been a new hire in a warehouse. The Government Accountability Office found that millions of Americans work full-time while relying on food assistance and Medicaid. Many work in warehouses, retail stores, and restaurants. Some employers really do direct new workers to the applications.

This is not the corporation’s fault. A corporate executive works for the shareholders. His job is to make money for them within the rules. If he spends company money on causes the law doesn’t require, like cutting pollution beyond the legal limit, meeting hiring quotas, or paying more than the labor market demands, he is spending someone else’s money on goals they did not choose.

But just because the corporate officer has no duty to pursue social goals doesn’t mean no one does.

If public money is going to be used for the public good, that work belongs to public servants. These duties matter enough that we created a specific kind of institution to carry them out. That institution is not the corporation. It is our representative government.

Our elected officials have a duty to set the rules under which corporations operate. When they fail to do that, you, the taxpayer, make up the difference in wages.

Let’s pause to highlight the contradiction. We can’t support policies that allow businesses to pay unsustainable wages and at the same time oppose social programs designed to mitigate the consequences of low incomes. A lot of families receive help from social programs. Half of American children do.

Nothing in this story says those programs fail the people who use them. Since those programs began, poverty among older Americans has fallen from roughly one in three to less than one in ten.

This is not a sermon against the people sitting at that table. Love your neighbor.

But also: the principle to rend our hearts and not our garments means we have to do what matters. So we have a question to ask: Where does this arrangement leave us?

When the taxpayer makes up for low wages, much of the money never reaches the worker. In places where only a few employers do most of the hiring, wage subsidies draw more people into the job market. That larger pool of workers makes it easier for employers to keep wages low.

One study of the Earned Income Tax Credit program found that employers keep about seventy-two cents of every public dollar spent.

Let’s hear that again. The taxpayer means to help the worker. Most of the help ends up staying with the employer and not the worker.

That is not a failure of the worker. It’s the way the system works. The help keeps the person going while subsidizing the wages that made the help necessary.

Programs started in two key time periods really set it up this way.

The first was the nineteen thirties. At the time, Franklin Roosevelt’s relief chief, Harry Hopkins, said plainly that if you give a man a dole, you save his body and destroy his spirit. FDR was for work programs and largely against handouts.

The America of FDR’s time built its help around work and contribution. Public jobs built things you can still drive across today, like the Hoover Dam that is the cover image of this piece. They designed Social Security as insurance. A worker paid into it and later collected their earned benefit. It wasn’t a handout they had to apply for.

The New Deal was not free of mistakes. The same nineteen thirty-five law also created means-tested welfare, so to be honest we need to say that Roosevelt built both doors. But the main door was work. His programs asked what Americans could build, produce, and insure through their own labor.

Thirty years later, America had spent two decades as the world’s dominant economic power. Factories across much of the rest of the world had been destroyed in the war. We had money coming out of our ears.

In that setting, Lyndon Johnson sought to expand FDR’s goals. LBJ’s Great Society asked a different question: What goods and services should government “give” to people who don’t have them?

Medicare. Medicaid. Food assistance. Housing support.

Eligibility replaced contribution. The government bought services to give to someone instead of putting those people to work building something.

Johnson wasn’t wrong about the suffering. Some of what he built is now indispensable.

But our focus changed. We stopped asking what individual Americans could produce and began asking what we could give to them.

Our spending became open-ended. The government promised to buy whatever help cost, and help never got cheaper. Last year, the federal government spent nearly a trillion dollars on interest alone. The arrangement is expensive because it maintains and maintains and maintains.

There’s a constitutional problem here worth a minute of our time, including where the argument breaks down.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to spend for the general welfare. In nineteen thirty-six, in United States versus Butler, the Supreme Court said that the general welfare power was broad but not unlimited. Public spending had to serve the common good, not private interests. Taxpayer money could not simply support big business.

Then the Court contradicted itself. One year later, it upheld Social Security and more or less said that Congress gets to decide what counts as the general welfare. So no court is going to rule that a public benefit propping up the wage structure of profitable companies violates the general-welfare clause.

The Constitution gives us the principle. It leaves enforcement to us, the voters.

If seventy-two cents of every dollar intended to help a worker ends up on a corporate ledger, the answer isn’t a lawsuit. It’s citizens telling Congress that public money should build the public, not the corporation.

Behind all of this is one central idea. It’s not fairness.

Every great nation eventually faces a crisis it cannot buy its way out of. When that day comes, we will rely on the ability of ordinary people to preserve the whole.

So the test we should apply to the individual is: Does our arrangement build her ability, or does it only keep her struggling well enough to return tomorrow?

That question is bigger than one woman. It’s our factories, the skill of our workers, and the ability of our people to solve hard problems.

We can’t buy our way out of a crisis. We need the skills, factories, supply chains, and public will to make what the crisis requires.

The last time that day came, twenty thousand ordinary people went to work at an ammunition plant behind a fence in Denver and made what the country needed. And we’ll need to do that again someday.

So here’s what I’m asking you to do with all of this.

Ask one question. What got better?

The next government program that comes through your town, whatever it is, will report its numbers. People enrolled. Dollars delivered. Families served.

Don’t sneer at the numbers. They’re somebody’s grandmother, or somebody’s difficult first year.

But stop accepting those numbers as the answer. When we think they’re the answer, half of American kids end up needing social program support instead of us insisting on workers making enough that their kids don’t need the programs anymore.

Enrollment tells you what the program did. It doesn’t tell you whether anyone came out the other side stronger.

So. Again. Ask: What got better?

Did the help build the person? Did her skills grow? Did her wages cover her life? Did her savings get closer to what she needs to make the down payment on the house?

Did she make, master, own, or pay off anything that would last?

Or did our “help,” while trying to be perfectly kind, simply make her struggle bearable without helping her escape it?

A great society isn’t a stack of programs.

It’s a country where a woman who beats her alarm clock every morning of her life can build herself into someone the country may one day need.

Where, on the other side of the crisis, she can enjoy her bread, her wine, and her family.

We can build that. Or we can all just return tomorrow.

Sources

The fence and the ground behind it: the Denver Federal Center, formerly the Denver Ordnance Plant

Colorado Encyclopedia, “Denver Ordnance Plant”: Remington-operated; peak near 20,000 workers on three shifts in summer 1943; women about half the workforce; site is now the Federal Center.

“Ordnance Plant Has Fine Record,” April 3, 1943 contemporary news account, Plains Humanities Alliance, University of Nebraska. 15,000+ workers, 47 percent women at that date.

History Colorado, “Doing Our Part”: $122M Remington contract, January 1941, on the former Hayden Ranch.

“Denver Federal Center,” Wikipedia: largest concentration of federal agencies outside Washington, D.C.; West 6th & Kipling, Lakewood; former Denver Ordnance Plant. (For publication, confirm against the GSA Denver Federal Center page.)

Full-time workers relying on public assistance

GAO, Federal Social Safety Net Programs: Millions of Full-Time Workers Rely on Federal Health Care and Food Assistance Programs, GAO-21-45, October 2020, gao.gov. ~12 million working-age Medicaid enrollees and ~9 million SNAP recipients; two-thirds full-time; concentrated in restaurants, department stores, and grocery stores.

Employers capture the wage subsidy

Jesse Rothstein, The Unintended Consequences of Encouraging Work: Tax Incidence and the EITC, Princeton CEPS Working Paper 165, 2008, PDF. Low-skill single mothers keep $0.70 per dollar; employers capture $0.72; net transfer to workers under $0.28.

Supporting: Ioana Marinescu & Eric A. Posner, “Why Has Antitrust Law Failed Workers?,” 105 Cornell Law Review 1343 (2020), Cornell Scholarship. Documents labor monopsony and the antitrust litigation gap.

The alternative: FDR and Hopkins on work versus the dole

Harry Hopkins, “Give a man a dole and you save his body and destroy his spirit,” quoted in Democracy in Transition (D. Appleton-Century, 1937), p. 264; corroborated by PBS American Experience and the VCU Social Welfare History Project.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944 State of the Union / Economic Bill of Rights, “the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation,” FDR Presidential Library archive.

What the programs did accomplish (the Medicare / elderly-poverty improvements)

Elderly poverty fell from 35.2% (1959) to under 10% (1990s): SSA, “Reducing Poverty Among Elderly Women”, citing U.S. Census; NBER, “Social Security and Elderly Poverty”.

The fiscal cost of maintaining our system

Net interest ~$970 billion in FY2025, surpassing $1 trillion on the public-debt line for the first time: Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget; Peterson Foundation.

Long-run trajectory (debt to 120% of GDP by 2036): CBO, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036, February 2026, CBO Pub. 62105.

The constitutional principle and its contradiction

United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936), Ballotpedia summary. Broad Spending Clause power for the general welfare, but the AAA struck down on Tenth Amendment grounds.

Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 (1937), Justia; Constitution Annotated. Upheld Social Security; Congress decides what serves the general welfare unless the choice is “clearly wrong.”

The oldest instruction (KJV)

Genesis 3:19; Ecclesiastes 9:7 and 9:10; Ecclesiastes 5:18–19. King James Bible Online.

Work and national power, the industrial-base warning

GAO, Defense Industrial Base: Actions Needed to Address Risks Posed by Dependence on Foreign Suppliers, GAO-25-107283, July 24, 2025, gao.gov. Over 200,000 suppliers; little visibility into lower-tier and foreign dependencies for parts, materials, and microelectronics.

A companion piece

Joel Douglas, “A New Economics: Reward Work, Build Opportunity.” January 2025. Lincoln’s free-labor doctrine and Theodore Roosevelt’s square deal; the constitutional-mandate argument this postscript inherits. joelkdouglas.substack.com