The election was a week ago. I know because my phone finally stopped ringing.

For two months it rang every night at dinnertime. Someone named "Unknown Caller" wanted my opinion. Then my vote. Then $25. Then $50, "MATCHED 5X!" That sounds like a bargain until you ask who's doing hey don't just send the money themselves.

Now it's quiet. I'd forgotten what quiet sounds like. It sounds like a refrigerator.

But don't get comfortable.

A FEW THINGS I'VE NOTICED SINCE ELECTION DAY:

▪️ Congress went back to work Monday for what they call a "lame-duck session." I'll give them this: at least the name is honest. Most places don't let you stay at your desk for two months after some of your coworkers have been told not to come back. In Washington, that's when the big decisions get made. Or don't get made. From here it's hard to tell which.

▪️ Some races still haven't been called. A week later. We can get a pizza to your door in 30 minutes and track a package across the Pacific minute by minute, but counting ballots can take longer than a banana takes to go bad. I'm not complaining. I'd rather they count slow and right than fast and wrong. I just want the banana counted too.

▪️ The 2028 presidential campaign has already started. It started before anyone pulled up their 2026 yard signs. I saw one politician on television being asked if they'd "rule out" running. Nobody rules anything out anymore. I don't rule out taking up the cello. That doesn't mean you should buy tickets.

▪️ The fundraising emails are back. The election is over, and they still need money. For what? The next one, they say. And then the one after that. It's like a restaurant that sends you the bill for dinner while you're still digesting lunch.

HERE'S WHAT I'D LIKE:

One year off. Just one.

A year when nobody asks how I feel about anything. Nobody tells me the fate of the Republic depends on my $15 by midnight. And the only polls I see are the ones holding up the telephone wires.

The people who win elections ought to spend a little time doing the job before they start running for the next one. That isn't a Democratic idea or a Republican idea. It's what we'd expect from a plumber.

You don't hire a plumber and then find him under your sink all afternoon, on the phone asking other people if they'll hire him next year.

At least, I hope you don't.

**Did You Ever Notice Who Really Wins Every Election?**

South Africa just finished its local elections. The officials in charge have announced that the whole thing was "free and fair." I'm glad to hear it. I can't remember the last time anyone announced an election was " but it's nice to have it in writing.

The big news is turnout. It was **52 percent**, up from **45.9 percent** last time.

Everybody seems very pleased about this. I'm pleased too, the way you're pleased when the dog only eats *half* the couch.

Here's how I read it: about one out of every two people who could have voted went and did it. The other one had something better to do. I'd like to know what it was. I've been around a long time, and I've never found anything on a Tuesday that couldn't wait twenty minutes.

---

**Now, about the winners.**

The biggest party got **30.76 percent** of the vote.

First of all, I don't trust anybody who hands me a number with ".76" on the end. Nobody needs that much precision. My doctor doesn't tell me I weigh 182.76 pounds. He just sighs.

Second, think about what "winning" means here. If I suggested something at the dinner table and 30 percent of the family agreed with me, I wouldn't call it a victory. I'd call it a typical Thanksgiving.

If my arithmetic is right, and it usually isn't, the party that came in first was picked by roughly **one in six** of the people on the voter rolls.

That means the real winner, by a landslide, was a candidate I'll call **"Didn't Bother."**

"Didn't Bother" wins every election in every country. It never makes a speech, never buys a lawn sign, and never has to concede. It's the most successful politician in history, and nobody can name a single thing it has done.

---

**Here's what gets me about local elections in particular.**

People will argue for hours about presidents and prime ministers, who will never know their name, never visit their street and never fix anything they own.

Then the local election comes along, the one that decides:

• whether the pothole in front of your house gets filled • whether the garbage gets picked up on Thursday or "eventually" • whether the streetlight on the corner ever comes back on

And half the people stay home.

The person who decides when your trash gets collected has more effect on your daily life than just about anybody on the evening news. I'm not saying you should love that person. I'm saying you ought to have a say in hiring them.

---

**So, here's my position.**

Going from 46 percent to 52 percent is progress, and I won't take that away from anybody. A fellow who gets up from the couch halfway has still gotten up partway.

But I'd like to live long enough to see a headline that says "Almost Everybody Voted." The newspapers wouldn't know what to do with it. They'd probably check it for a misprint.

Until then, "Didn't Bother" stays undefeated.

And I've always found it a little suspicious that the people who complain the most about who's running things are so often the ones who left the choice to everybody else.

**A Fight Promoter Walks Into the Briefing Room**

The President says he's offered the job of White House press secretary to the man who runs the UFC. The man says he'll fly to Washington Monday to talk it over.

I don't know if he'll take it. I'm not sure *he* knows if he'll s to think it's the strangest idea they've ever heard. I've been thinking about it, and I'm not so sure.

Look at his qualifications:

🥊 **He's used to standing at a podium while people yell at him.**

🥊 **He's good at explaining a decision the crowd didn't like.**

🥊 **He knows how to sell a main event.** Every press secretary in history has had to convince you that today's announcement is the biggest thing since the last one.

🥊 **He's comfortable in a room full of people with headsets where nobody looks happy.**

That's most of the job right there.

But there are some differences, and they're worth noticing.

**In a cage fight, there's a referee.** When somebody's had enough, he steps in and stops it. Nobody ever stops a press briefing. It just goes on until somebody says "That's all for today" and walks off while three reporters are still shouting the same question nobody plans to answer.

**A round in a cage fight lasts five minutes.** A press briefing has no rounds. Some of them feel like they started in 1953.

**In a fight, when somebody gets hit, everybody agrees it happened.** In Washington, a man can take a clean shot right on camera, and by breakfast half the town says it never happened and the other half says it was a love tap.

He posted a picture of himself behind the briefing room podium with the words "On to the next chapter." I've stood behind a few podiums in my time. Not once did it feel like a new chapter. Mostly I was trying to remember if I'd zipped my fly.

What bothers me isn't the fighting. It's that we've quit expecting the job to be about *telling us things.* A press secretary used to be somebody who had some information and gave you part of it, grudgingly, the way your uncle hands out butterscotch. Now we pick them the way we'd cast a TV show. We want someone who can take a punch and throw one back. Nobody ever asks whether they'll know the answer.

Both parties have done it. Neither one has much to brag about.

If he takes the job, I hope he brings one thing with him from his old line of work.

**The weigh-in.**

Every fighter has to step on a scale, in public, before the bout. No excuses, no spin, just the number.

I'd like to see that for every statement that comes out of Washington.

Step on the scale. Let's see what it really weighs.

**The Election Is Over. Somebody Tell My Phone.**

The election was Tuesday. It's Saturday now, and they're still counting.

I'm not complaining. I'd rather they count it right than count it fast. When I was a boy it took me four days to count my allowance too, and my allowance where things stand. As of Friday afternoon, nobody had called 20 House races. Alaska and Mississippi still don't know who their senators are. In Mississippi the gap is about 2,500 votes. That's fewer people than you'd see at a good high school football game. Every one of those voters should feel very important this week. They won't, though. Nobody ever calls to tell you your vote was the one that did it.

**A few things I've noticed:**

📺 **The ads stopped.** For months my television told me every candidate was either a saint or a criminal. Now it's back to selling me pills whose side effects sound worse than whatever the pill is for. I never thought I'd be so glad to hear about dry mouth.

💰 **The money.** One fellow spent $224 million on a single Senate race in Texas, and his candidate lost. For $224 million you could buy every voter in a small state a nice dinner and a ride to the polls, and they'd remember you more fondly. I don't know what all that money bought. I suspect it was mostly 30-second commercials I muted.

📱 **The texts haven't stopped.** It's over, and I'm still getting messages marked "URGENT" from people who want five dollars. Urgent for what? Unless they need money to pay back the money they already asked me for. That wouldn't surprise me.

🗳️ **Everybody's an expert now.** On Monday nobody knew anything. By Wednesday morning everybody knew exactly why it happened and said they saw it coming. If they saw it coming, I wish they'd told the people who spent $224 million.

**Here's what I think:**

The people who did the most important work this week weren't the candidates. They were the poll workers. They had folding tables, bad coffee, long hours, and a pile of ballots that has to be counted exactly right. All the while, half the country was yelling at them to hurry up and the other half was yelling at them to slow down.

Nobody runs a $224 million ad campaign to thank them. Somebody should. I'd do it for free, which is about what we pay them.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have 41 fundraising emails to delete.

**A Few Thoughts on Data Centers, Which I Have Never Seen**

The stock market fell more than 5% this week. The experts say it happened because people worry the government might put tighter rules on data centers.

I have never seen a data center. I don't know anyone who has. I've ous buildings full of computers that never sleep, never take a day off, and never ask for a raise. So they're nothing like the people who work for me.

From what I can tell, a data center is where the internet goes to sit down.

---

**Here's what I understand about them:**

🔌 They use as much electricity as a small city. 💧 They use a lot of water to keep cool. I use water to keep cool too, but mostly I drink it. 🏗️ Nobody wants one next door, but everyone wants their phone to work. 📈 Somehow they've become the most important buildings in America, and most of us couldn't find one on a map.

---

When I was young, a "computer" was a person, usually a woman with a pencil, and she was right more often than the machines are now.

Today we're told artificial intelligence will change everything. Maybe so. So far it has changed my electric bill. I've also noticed that when you ask a machine a question, it answers right away and with total confidence, the way my brother-in-law does. Neither of them is right as often as they think.

---

**What surprises me is the market.**

Last month, investors couldn't throw enough money at these buildings. This week, somebody in Washington *mentioned* rules, and billions of dollars ran for the exits like a dog hearing thunder.

If your entire business falls apart because someone *might* write a regulation, I'd say the business wasn't standing on very solid ground. Or very solid servers.

I don't know if we need more rules for data centers or fewer. I'm not sure the people writing the rules know either. I do know this much:

**Any industry that needs a whole power plant to answer "What's a good recipe for meatloaf?" should probably expect a few questions of its own.**

---

My grandmother's meatloaf recipe was on an index card in a tin box on the kitchen counter. It used no electricity. It needed no cooling. It never crashed.

And it was better.

Have you ever noticed that no matter how complicated we make an election, it usually comes down to something pretty simple?

This one did.

All the advertisements. All the arguments. All the experts explaining what really mattered.

And when people stepped into the booth, most of t the same thing they think about in the supermarket aisle: why does everything cost so much more than it used to?

They say nearly everybody who voted had the cost of living on their mind. I believe it. You don’t need a pollster to notice when a gallon of milk starts to feel like a small extravagance, or when filling the cart means leaving something behind.

Politicians are fond of the big speech. The person at the checkout just wants the total to make sense.

That little white slip of paper doesn’t take sides. It doesn’t care who promised what. It just adds up what you owe.

Hard to argue with a receipt.

You know what bothers me?

We turned the clocks back over the weekend and already people are sore about it. Dark by suppertime. Can’t get to sleep. The ones who aren’t complaining now were the ones hollering last spring when we lost an hour they insist they never saw again.

I’ve mers. School buses. Saving a little electricity. Somebody’s circadian rhythm—there’s a fancy phrase. And every so often a legislature announces they’re finally going to pick one time and stick with it. Then they find out the rules won’t let them, or the state next door won’t play along, and we all go back to standing on kitchen chairs.

I “gained” an hour. Spent most of it hunting down the clocks that still think it’s last month. The stove. The car. The one in the bedroom that blinks at you like it’s judging your choices.

The sun doesn’t argue with itself. It comes up and it goes down. We’re the ones who keep moving the hands and then acting surprised when dinner shows up in the dark.

You know what I can’t figure out?

We turned the clocks back a couple of days ago. They call it a gift—an extra hour of sleep. What most of us actually received is a five o’clock sunset and the sudden realization that the day is over before we’ve finished the errands.

Today e’re all supposed to go stand in line and have a say in how the place is run. Polls in a lot of towns close around the time people are just getting home from work. So a fair number of us will be hunting for a school gymnasium or a church basement after the sun has already packed it in.

I’ve never been clear on who this clock-switching business was meant to help. Farmers, they used to say. Or energy savings. Or somebody who likes to play golf in the evening. None of those explanations quite cover the fellow trying to read a sample ballot under a streetlight while a campaign sign flaps at his ankles.

Every few years we have the same argument about whether to stop doing it. Permanent this, permanent that. Hearings get scheduled. Nothing much changes. Meanwhile the hour hand moves, the afternoons shrink, and we all pretend the inconvenience is somebody else’s problem until we need the light ourselves.

I don’t have a fix. I just think it’s a peculiar arrangement—asking people to perform the most basic chore of citizenship while squinting, because we couldn’t leave well enough alone back in the fall.

If you’re heading out after work, take a flashlight. The volunteers at the table can’t see any better than you can, and the sun isn’t coming back to help.

Did you ever notice how the price of groceries turns into a national crisis the week before an election?

I was at the store yesterday. Same cart I’ve pushed for years—bread, milk, coffee, a couple of apples that didn’t look too bruised. The total jumped so fast I checked the vinced they’d charged me for the shopping cart and the fluorescent lights.

Over in Europe the young people have been out marching because a place to live and a decent meal have gotten so expensive they can’t see how the math works anymore. Can’t say I blame them. A roof and a full refrigerator shouldn’t feel like a luxury item.

Here at home everybody’s got a plan to make life “affordable” by Tuesday. I’ve heard that word more times this week than I’ve seen an actual lower price in the last few years. The funny part is the cashier doesn’t seem to be waiting on the returns. She rings it up the same way whether the polls are close or not.

I don’t have the answer. I just know that when I get the bags home and set them on the counter, the prices have already cast their vote. I’m still looking for the aisle with the cheaper bread. If there is one.

I don't know about you, but I spent part of this morning arguing with a microwave.

The clocks fell back last night. We all got an extra hour, which sounds generous until you realize we have to give it back in the spring—and in the meantime the sun packs up and leaves before ut supper. Folks are already noting how dark it gets by late afternoon. Of course it does. That's the arrangement.

Most of the clocks changed themselves. The phone did. The computer did. The one on the stove did not, and it hasn't in years. It just sits there blinking, as if to say it never agreed to any of this in the first place. I don't blame it.

Every year somebody says we ought to pick one time and stick with it. Standard or daylight, I don't much care. Just stop making the whole country reset its life twice a year like we're all still winding pocket watches. The people who run states are saying it. Regular folks are saying it. The dog, who now expects dinner an hour off from what the clock claims, is saying it in his own way.

An extra hour of sleep is a fine thing. I'll take it. But I'd just as soon not spend the next few days wondering whether the bank opens when I think it does, or why the evening feels like it starts in the middle of the night.

We invented this system to save something—candles, or coal, or daylight for the farmers. I'm not sure which anymore. What I am sure of is that we've been "saving" it long enough. Maybe it's time we spent a little of it instead.

Have you noticed how filling the gas tank has turned into a small moral crisis?

You stand there watching the dollars tick up and start negotiating with yourself. Do I really need a full tank? Could I make it to Thursday on what’s left? Is this the week I finally start walking er day. The total landed somewhere between “that’s not so bad” and “I should have taken the bus.” Except there is no bus, and by the time you figured the transfers it would probably cost more anyway.

Folks are still hashing it out online—why it’s high here, lower there, whose idea it was to begin with. I’ve glanced at some of it. Doesn’t change the number on the pump.

The machine doesn’t take sides. It doesn’t care which fellow you voted for or what anybody promised about cheaper gas or electric cars. It just wants what it wants, and it wants it before you drive off.

I keep a little notebook in the glove box now. Not for mileage. For the price per gallon, so I can look back at last month and feel appropriately disappointed.

Some things never change. The “check engine” light still means spend money. The air still leaks out of the tires when you’re not looking. And the gas just keeps costing more while we all stand around acting surprised.

Maybe next time I’ll bring a lawn chair.

You know what gets me?

This Sunday we fall back. Daylight saving time ends, and half the internet is out there reminding the other half to set the clocks and collect that famous extra hour of sleep.

Extra hour. They say it every year like it’s a rebate check.

I’ve never found usual time, wake up at the usual time, and somewhere between the two an hour has gone missing—like the mate to a sock, or the screwdriver you swear you just had in your hand. The morning arrives earlier than it ought to. The evening packs up and leaves before you’ve finished the dishes. By Monday you’re not sure whether you’re tired from the change or just tired the regular way.

The phone handles itself now. So does the laptop. They know what day it is better than most of us do. But the stove clock still blinks. The one in the car wants a sequence nobody remembers. And there’s always one wristwatch left in a drawer that has to be wound and set by a human being who would rather be doing almost anything else.

Every spring and every fall somebody pipes up that we ought to just pick a time and stick with it. The sleep folks have their reasons. The people who like a long evening have theirs. The rest of us have a kitchen full of appliances that still need a manual and a flashlight.

We’ll do it again in March. We always do.

If you run into me this weekend and I seem an hour off, don’t bother correcting me. The clock and I are still working it out.

I was looking at the numbers this morning—the ones that say the economy grew 3.4 percent last quarter, better than expected. A good chunk of it, they tell us, came from companies buying all these artificial intelligence machines. More, in some counts, than from the rest of us .

I like a healthy number. I also like knowing what it buys.

I stopped at the store the other day. Bread, coffee, a few apples. Nothing extravagant. By the time I reached the car I was doing the old arithmetic in my head, the kind they used to teach before the machines started doing it for us.

The computers are getting smarter every week. They write the reports, draw the pictures, and announce how well everything is going. I just wonder if any of them has stood in a checkout line and tried to explain, politely, why a bag of apples now costs what a bag of apples costs.

Growth is fine. I’d simply like to run into it sometime—preferably with a little change left in my pocket.

I've been noticing something peculiar lately.

Over in Britain, they're getting ready to unveil the Autumn Budget, and from the sound of things a lot of ordinary folks are already losing sleep over it.

Not because they know what's in it—nobody does yet—but because they've whatever comes out of those official buildings tends to make the household accounts a little harder to balance.

You hear people talking about further pressure on their money. Rent. Food. The heating bill. The usual suspects.

And the government, in its wisdom, is about to explain how it's all going to be managed. I've always found those explanations more comforting to the people giving them than to the people hearing them.

One fellow even compared the whole affair to Halloween. The dread. The eerie feeling. The sense that something's waiting to jump out at you.

Except Halloween ends with a sugar high. A budget mostly ends with a calculator and a sigh.

I don't have a solution. Never claimed to. But it does strike me as odd that we accept this annual ritual of anxiety as normal. As if the people who earn the money should spend weeks wondering what the people who spend it are going to do next.

Maybe the trick is to keep your own books straight and not let the speculation steal the evening.

The numbers will arrive when they arrive. They always do. And then the rest of us will do what we've always done: figure out how to make do with whatever's left.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been watching all this fuss over the new machines that are supposed to do our thinking for us. One of the big outfits that builds them just lined up to sell shares to anybody with a brokerage account. The pitch is that these things can write your estions, and even cobble together whole computer programs if you just tell them what you feel like having. Some people call that “vibe coding.” Others say what you get back is a tangled mess nobody can untangle six months from now.

All very modern.

Then I went to the store.

Eggs. Coffee. A little something green that used to be an afterthought. The person at the register didn’t ask what the machines thought. The total just sat there, a bit higher than last time and a good deal higher than it was when I first started noticing these things. People online are still going on about it—the rent, the gas, the cart that costs more than the week’s plan allowed. The clever computers haven’t weighed in with a fix.

We’ve gotten awfully good at inventing things that talk back and companies that want to cash in on them. What we haven’t gotten better at is the ordinary business of keeping dinner from costing a fortune.

Maybe one of these machines will sort it out eventually. I wouldn’t hold the grocery money while I wait.

Did you ever stop to think about how many of the replies you see these days weren’t written by the person whose name is on them?

I did, just the other day. There was a post—nothing special, just an ordinary observation—and underneath it a string of comments that all had the same They agreed. They elaborated a little. They asked a follow-up that felt like it came from a checklist. Not one of them sounded like somebody who might have been halfway through a sandwich when they decided to chime in.

There was a time when answering somebody required you to have an answer. You turned it over. If nothing useful came to mind, you let it go. The world didn’t end.

Now a program will hand you the words while you’re still deciding whether you care. It never hesitates. It never wonders if silence might be the better contribution. And it has no particular interest in whether the person on the other end is joking, grieving, or just trying to sell a lawnmower.

The folks who use these things say they’re saving time. I keep wondering what for. So they can scroll through more replies that were assembled by somebody else’s program, I suppose.

I have no quarrel with a machine that adds up numbers or tells me the quickest way across town. But conversation was never meant to be one of the chores we outsource. It was the part where you found out whether another human being had actually read what you wrote and felt like saying something back—even if what they felt like saying was “you’re wrong” or nothing at all.

These days you can scroll a long way before you’re sure anybody’s home. I’m not convinced that’s progress.

You used to buy a television so you could watch it. Lately it seems the television has other ideas.

People have been testing their own sets—hundreds of models, scores of brands—and discovering the things have been keeping a running account of what goes on in the living room. g you watch it. Ads that know a little too much about your habits. The occasional microphone that doesn’t appear to have gotten the memo that the show is over.

There’s a free little program making the rounds now, put together by folks who got tired of asking nicely. You point it at the set, it turns a lot of the nonsense off, and you don’t even have to take the back off. Owners have tried it. The picture still works. The set just stops acting like it has a second job.

I remember when the worst a television could do was lose the picture in the bottom of the ninth. You smacked the side, it came back, and everybody went on with their evening. Nobody had to wonder whether it was still listening after you went to bed.

Maybe the next model will come with an off switch that means off. Wouldn’t that be something.

Have you noticed what the people who make these smart computers are saying lately?

For years they let their machines read the entire internet so the machines could learn how the rest of us talk. And write. And argue about nothing in particular.

It worked. Maybe too well.

Now anies says they’re not going to let the newest machines look at the live internet anymore while they’re training. Significant risks, they call it. The world as it is right now is apparently too dangerous for a program to study.

I find that curious.

If today’s internet is too risky for their computers to learn from, I wonder what they think the rest of us should do with all the stuff those computers already produced. The articles that sound almost right. The pictures that look almost real. The answers that show up before you’ve finished asking the question.

We don’t get a switch to turn it off. We just get to squint at our screens and hope we can still tell the difference.

Me, I still trust a thing I can hold in my hand and read at the kitchen table. It doesn’t update itself overnight, and it never once tried to convince me it wrote itself.

That’s about all I have to say on the subject. For now.

I've been wondering about all the money flying around for this artificial intelligence.

You hear about companies pouring billions into it—more than they're bringing in, in some cases. One of the big ones just had its first stretch in over a decade where the cash going out beat because of the AI build-out. The stock market noticed. A lot of those AI shares took a beating. Folks got worried the spending might not pay off.

Now, I'm all for new ideas. The electric light was a new idea once, and I'm glad somebody stuck with it. But there's a difference between investing in a light bulb and betting the farm on a machine that might, someday, tell you the light bulb is on.

They keep saying we have to spend the money or get left behind. Left behind by whom? Other people spending money they might not have either?

I suppose that's how progress works these days. You don't ask if you can afford it. You ask if you can afford not to.

Me, I still turn the lights off when I leave the room. Old habit.

You ever notice how they keep improving things until they don’t work anymore?

I saw people complaining about a new oven. Not a spaceship. An oven. A box whose entire job, for the last hundred years, has been to get hot and stay hot until the chicken is done. This one won’t do Wi-Fi and the software says it’s allowed.

My mother’s oven never asked for a password. It never needed an update. It never sent her a notification that it was “optimizing your baking experience.” It just worked, year after year, until the heating element finally gave up, which is what heating elements are supposed to do eventually.

Now the lamp on the desk wants a firmware update. The washing machine won’t start a load of darks unless it’s checked in with a server somewhere. They call this progress. I call it a machine that used to mind its own business and now wants to be part of the conversation.

I don’t need my appliances to be smart. I need them to be there when I turn the knob. The thinking was supposed to stay with the person standing in the kitchen, not get shipped off to a data center so somebody can study how often I reheat leftovers.

They keep selling us features we didn’t ask for and quietly removing the one feature that mattered: it works when you need it to. A dumb oven that bakes is still smarter than a clever one that won’t.