FOR FREE PEOPLE

FOR FREE PEOPLE

Defense attorney Susan Necheles, center, cross-examines Stormy Daniels, far right, as former president Donald Trump, left, looks on during Trump’s trial in Manhattan criminal court, Tuesday, May 7, 2024, in New York. (Elizabeth Williams via AP)

TGIF: An Appeal to Heaven

Goodbye and goodnight to: Red Lobster, Ebrahim Raisi, WaPo’s web traffic, gun control, fake meat, and DEI. Plus, vials of blood at Trump HQ, a catfight in Congress, and more.

I know what’s been going on. I’ve seen the emails. I’ve looked at the comments. I know there is rage at two weeks of missing TG. I’ve been spending these weeks being brutalized by every single mainstream American media company (NYT, WaPo, The New Yorker, hell, even Publishers Weekly). The strange thing is my publisher could trace a lot of book buys to these negative reviews. So I made The New York Times bestseller list this week in part thanks to the mainstream media saying over and over again how very, very bad I am. But you already knew that. Thanks for living without me for these two very long weeks. Let’s get to it:

→ A fake Trump “unified reich” scandal? Our well-tanned Republican presidential contender recently posted an odd meme. Headlines in old newsprint read TRUMP WINS and ECONOMY BOOMS, but then little text down below calls for. . . a unified. . . reich. The other r-word! Pretty freaky. Biden’s campaign jumped in, calling it “the language of Nazi Germany.” The root of the ad is the root of much Trump campaign material: a random anonymous social media account using a random preexisting digital template of old newsprint. This particular template was referencing pre–World War I Germany, so it’s not really Hitler’s language, per se. But like a certain type of mustache, some things just got ruined by World War II. So this scandal is technically debunkable, but I’m old-fashioned and fearful of the German language, like an American patriot should be. Point for Biden. 

→ Please stop sending vials of blood to Trump: The RNC headquarters had to be evacuated this week after vials of blood addressed to Trump were mailed to them. The alarming thing in this case is you really have no idea if that’s a Trump fan or a Trump enemy. There were two vials, but so, so many questions. Whose blood? What type? O+? HIV pos? Was it meant to scare the team? Or sent in hopes of a blessing? Was it part of an ancient rite? And did it work? 

→ A second Alito flag has hit the news: Another flag controversy for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito this week as the NYT captured photos of the flagpole outside of his Long Beach Island home. Flying in the wind were three flags: the Long Beach Island flag, a 2022 Phillies flag, and a white flag bearing a green pine tree known as the Appeal to Heaven, which dates to the Revolutionary War. George Washington originally flew the flag in 1775 while intercepting British ships, soon after becoming a symbol of colonial strength and resilience. In more recent years, it’s been associated with President Trump and the January 6 attack on the Capitol, but it also flew at BLM rallies. I honestly don’t know what to make of all these flags. I asked Just the Facts Coby to look into this and he said: “The Phillies flag is more embarrassing.”

→ America’s mayor: The mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, whom I adore, was asked in a press conference about lifeguard staffing shortages as Memorial Day approaches. And on the spot, he had an idea: the migrants. A lot of them probably swam here, right? The mayor is guessing yes. Manhattan is an island, people. Here’s the mayor: “How do we have a large body of people that are in our city, and country, that are excellent swimmers and at the same time we need lifeguards—and the only obstacle is that we won’t give them the right to work to become a lifeguard?” 

People being knifed on the subway—fuhgeddaboudit. Rats steal your baby—that’s the city that never sleeps, kids. The real question is who’s going to judge the handstand contest at John Jay Pool? Migrants. TGIF salutes Mayor Eric Adams. 

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani, America’s best advertisement for getting sober, was served an indictment at his 80th birthday in Palm Beach. As the Daily Mail tells it: “Party guests cry and scream as Arizona officials gatecrash celebration to serve papers.” Shortly after the indictment, he launched his own brand of coffee. Andy Cohen, put a GoPro helmet on Rudy and watch the money roll in. 

→ MSNBC goes hard pro–Michael Cohen: The mental jiu-jitsu of the Trump–Stormy Daniels trial is quickly moving into black belt territory. First, there’s the fact of the trial, which is so clearly political and yet needs to be denied. Then, there’s the fact of Michael Cohen, an extraordinarily unreliable man. But that’s what makes him extra reliable, says MSNBC

And then there’s Lawrence O’Donnell trying to explain how Michael Cohen didn’t steal anything. This is a real quote: “It didn’t really sound like stealing. . . . It sounded a lot like Michael Cohen doing the little that he could within that calculation to rebalance the bonus he thought he deserved.” Not stealing. Rebalancing the bonus he thought he deserved. I love that. I intend to rebalance my bonus accordingly. 

→ Biden looks so confused all the time right now: The dire situation of our president’s age reveals itself more and more by the week. Here is Biden after a noise startles him but not anyone else in the room; he looks confused, stares for a while, and salutes. Or here he is struggling to read a teleprompter, speaking like he just got dental surgery. Or here: Face the Nation anchor Margaret Brennan judges whether certain videos are AI-generated or real, and on the Biden video she confidently says it’s fake: “He didn’t blink. Not at all, right? So that suggests it’s fake.” Her interlocutor smiles a little awkwardly: “This one’s actually real. And yes, he didn’t blink for the whole 17-second clip.” The only theory that makes sense to me is that his staff and the donors prefer him senile—all the better for them to get their various agendas through. Agendas that wouldn’t win an election and that are much better hidden behind a kindly old man in aviators. How could this sweet elder possibly be radical, guys! And so it’s Biden forever. It’s Biden from the assisted living facility. It’s Biden 2056 from the grave, healthy as a horse, I might add. 

→ America is still sane (mostly): This might be hard to study on your phone, but it’s a great chart showing our good and normal country, from the folks at Harvard/Harris. Police favorability is at 75 percent and campus protesters have a net −32 percent approval. My question is about Hamas: a solid 14 percent of Americans feel favorably toward Hamas. That’s technically low, though it’s a few too many terrorist sympathizers, if you ask me. 

→ Stock market hitting all-time highs: The stock market is looking very good. And it’s been confusing to me and others why folks aren’t more appreciative of Bidenomics. If the number in my 401(k) is going up real nice-like, why all the complaints? The Wall Street Journal has the answer: these gains have been brutally eroded by inflation under Biden, thanks to the old Biden money hose for his various preferred constituents. Here’s the key chart: 

→ The answer is more money hose! This week Biden forgave another $7.7 billion in debt relief, bringing his total spend on student debt relief to $167 billion, which is about the size of the entire 2023 U.S. Army budget. Sorry, soldiers, you don’t get a raise! Honestly, you folks are lucky if you get to visit a doctor. See, the keffiyeh-clad Princeton students don’t want to get jobs and it’s cruel to make them do so (they said very clearly that in their post-capitalist society they’ll be tarot card readers, and we need to respect that). Biden recently spoke about his forgiveness plan: “When the Supreme Court told me I couldn’t, I found two other ways to do it.” Our system of checks and balances is no match for him, he says! Imagine for a second the rending of garments if Trump talked about outsmarting the Supreme Court. 

It’s funny. We’ve had a lot of items pointing out that study after study, report after report, says the same thing: the government paying off student loans is a very expensive handout to a privileged group of high earners. Like, when the administration finally realizes that they’ll certainly stop! Right? No. That’s silly. The administration knows that’s what it is. And yet they keep doing it. 

→ No lobster, yes cry: Red Lobster has filed for bankruptcy. It turns out that all you can eat shrimp for $20 is a challenge we Americans will take very seriously and eventually win. We will all eat too much shrimp. An ungodly, unimagined amount of shrimp. An amount that the CEO and consultants and analysts never calculated into the model, and they made models. Part of the reason Red Lobster was so close to the brink is because the new private equity owners were quietly gutting the place, selling the land for cash and such. And so Red Lobster is closing. The list of hallowed American institutions for high schoolers to go on awkward dates (I presume) is getting shorter and shorter with each passing week. TGIF (another great American restaurant) pours some creamy, congealing lobster bisque into the streets tonight in honor of our fallen soldiers.

→ Why are Republicans so obsessed with banning fake meat: In Alabama, if you’re caught selling lab-grown meat, you’re going to jail. That’s right. You sell one of those newfangled chicken nuggets that isn’t made out of pink slime, and it’s a $500 fine and three months in the slammer. Me, I would like to make a lot of foods illegal. Obviously large sodas, like my other favorite mayor did. Definitely tuna sandwiches—those are out. Also, maybe before you’re authorized to order dessert, you need to pass a BMI test. A few required jumping jacks before you can leave the gas station with that candy bar. Little things like that. But even a food fascist like me is perplexed by the anti–lab meat agenda. Why care so much? Yes, fake-meat processing is disgusting, but have you seen how our existing chicken nuggets are made? It’s all disgusting! Nutmilk isn’t milk, but it’s also not rat poison?

→ The question we’ve all been asking: “What Is ‘Queer Food’? A Conference Explores (and Tastes) Some Answers.” That’s a real New York Times headline. And here’s a real excerpt: 

“The way you slice into okra and it’s crunchy and ooshy-gushy—a lot of people think it’s weird,” said Ms. DuBose, a nonbinary transgender lesbian who will soon graduate from the food studies program at New York University. “But okra is queer.”

I’m pretty sure the argument here is that because okra is weird, that means it’s gay. It’s all nonsense but if we’re going to play this game, fine. I’m down. Milk is straight, obviously. Sour Patch Kids are bisexual. Cucumbers are also gay. Strawberries: gay. Chocolate strawberries: straight. White chocolate strawberries: gay. 

→ Legends never die: President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran, a man who was in line to be Supreme Leader, died in a helicopter crash this week. And the Western elite lowered their flags to half-staff. He was known, lovingly I assume, as “The Butcher of Tehran.” He is responsible for “subjecting tens of thousands of people to arbitrary arrests and detentions, enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment, grossly unfair trials, and punishments violating the prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment, such as flogging, amputation, and stoning.” But to Western elites, anyone who hates us a lot is. . . kind of hot right now. If he’s chanted Death to America, we’re into him. If he kills thousands of dissidents as part of a fundamentalist religious revival, that’s him really putting ancient indigenous values into practice. Ebrahim Raisi presided over famous “five-minute trials” during and after the revolution, where someone’s crimes were announced and debated, and then they’d be killed. But that reads as pretty moderate now in the faculty lounge or in newsrooms. A trial in those places lasts 30 seconds flat, since that’s enough time to see that yes, she wore a sombrero once in college or yes, he asked her on a date twice. Those extra minutes show the generosity in Ebrahim Raisi’s soul. 

Reuters called him simply “a hardline prosecutor.” Like he’s a character on SVU. BBC reminds us that everyone has pros and cons—what, are you so perfect? 

The United Nations crew, including the Biden-appointed U.S. representative, stood for a moment of silence for Raisi. The UN flag was lowered to half-staff. The EU offered condolences. As did the Pope. America did too. The United States Senate chaplain led a prayer for him. “Lord, we pray for the Iranian people who mourn the death of their president.”

And the New York Times United Nations bureau chief, Farnaz Fassihi, reminded colleagues in the wake of Raisi’s death not to interview Masih Alinejad, the brave dissident Iranian feminist who Iran is constantly trying to assassinate. 

→ Covid origins cover-ups are so sloppy: You would think that when you’re working to hide details about Covid from the American public, you wouldn’t discuss it on your government work email. But it turns out Fauci’s crew discussed the logistics of hiding information from their government emails. . . on their government emails. Like the Boomers they are. And now it’s all been revealed to a congressional subcommittee through subpoena and published in the New York Post:

Here is NIH senior adviser Dr. David Morens in April 2021: “. . . I can either send stuff to Tony [Dr. Fauci] on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

The next month, David writes: “I suggested Arthur try to interview Tony directly and connected him to our ‘secret’ back channel.” 

He brags about learning “how to make emails disappear” after journalists requested them. 

Or my favorite: “We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” from a June 16, 2020, email sent two months after Wuhan’s grant was initially suspended.

On one level I’m charmed. This reads like my dad trying to commit secret crimes. It’s like when the cops catch someone for murder because their browser history is all “how much fentanyl to kill my wife” and “how to carry 152-lb woman into car very heavy bad back.” It’s funny. But read these emails and remember: The Washington Post and The New York Times told us that all of this is a “conspiracy theory.” They stand by that! There’s been no retraction! There never will be. Fauci must be remembered as the nation’s beautiful doctor, and our mainstream media will never back down on that. So we’re all stuck with one true paper of record: the New York Post. 

→ Harrison Butker needs to watch out: When the Kansas City Chiefs kicker said in a college graduation speech that becoming a mom is also a beautiful career outcome and waxed on about his wife, the usual suspects got very upset. Harrison Butker, a Catholic who loves his wife: Enemy Number One! 

And then something a little creepy happened. Kansas City’s official social media account posted exactly which suburb he lives in. 

“Just a reminder”? Exactly how high a ranking member of antifa is running the Kansas City social media account? (An update: the social media employee has since been fired, which seems a little harsh.) 

→ Justice-impacted individual: Illinois is on track to enact a bill that changes the word offender to justice-impacted individual. And it’s about time! The bill, HB 4409, passed both chambers and now it goes to Governor J.B. Pritzker to sign into law. Someone convicted of murder will soon be a “justice-impacted individual.” The sex offender registry will be the “sex justice-impacted individual registry,” which doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. There’s a consistent move to take tough things in society (homelessness, poverty, etc.) and add a lot of complexity to the description (unhoused individuals) in hopes that it maybe softens the blow of the reality (someone is living on the sidewalk). It’s also part of a desire to remove agency from individuals. Like, you can call a murderer a justice-impacted individual but. . . they still killed someone. They’re impacted by justice because they impaled a. . . okay, you get what I mean. 

[Editor’s note: Nellie’s jokes don’t always land. The sex-offender registry has not yet been renamed and you can still say “murderer.” The joke is that since Illinois renamed a large swath of offenders as “justice-impacted individuals,” soon everything will be renamed.]

→ Ruh-roh, California budget: California has gone from a $100 billion surplus to a $73 billion deficit. Asked about it, Gavin Newsom said: “. . . what we didn’t anticipate is these rain bombs in December, January, February, and March—these atmospheric rivers that led to a federal declaration that led to FEMA and the IRS moving in a direction where we couldn’t collect our taxes until, I believe, November 16.” So taxes couldn’t be collected because it rained? We might not have school budgets, but we’ll always have this newly completed random portion of the never-going-to-happen high-speed rail, a project that has blown through untold billions. Here, behold, the Fresno River Viaduct:

Wacky California policy never ends: My beloved state senator Scott Wiener does have some fun tricks up his sleeves, like this idea for new cars to be wired to automatically honk at you if you go 10 miles above the speed limit. So I’ll just be cruising fast and honking? Is that supposed to be a punishment? See, California politicians will do everything except just punish bad drivers by, like, making them pay a ticket. California will require that pedestrians wear orange vests and carry bike horns before pulling over like a maniac drag racing through a shopping district. 

→ Speaking of laws: Remember when gun control was something good liberals wanted? Well, no one wants it anymore. Stop asking for gun control. Several progressive prosecutors have come out and flat-out said they’re not doing gun control stuff anymore since it involves cops, so it’s bad. And now we have stats showing they really mean it. Here I’m quoting DC Crime Facts: The progressive prosecutor of D.C. declined to prosecute 1/3 of gun cases, dropped 37 percent of charged cases, and reduced 50 percent of convictions to misdemeanors. See, gun control sounds nice if it just means going after MAGA ranchers (love that!), but the reality is it also looks like getting guns off the streets of D.C. and Chicago, and that’s just so unfair. We can’t do that. Those aren’t gun guns. Those are just part of the local ecosystem. Stop trying to do justice-impacting. 

And anyway, when there’s violence in a city, it’s still the fault of the MAGA ranchers, as The Nation thoroughly explains this month:

→ Fascist Nazi wins Portland DA race: Yes, that’s right, the progressive prosecutor of Portland, Oregon, was voted out and in his place is. . . Nathan Vasquez, a moderate independent prosecutor. In the last year in Portland there were 9,946 reported assaults, 4,881 burglaries, 7,611 motor vehicle thefts, 90 homicides, and 573 sex offenses. (Read Olivia Reingold’s profile of Nathan Vasquez for The Free Press.) 

WaPo has lost at least 50 percent of its traffic since 2020: The paper that announced Democracy Dies in Darkness, then went all in on censoring as many voices as it could and employing America’s most eccentric activists as “reporters,” is really struggling. Readers can be yelled at about gay okra once, maybe twice, but then they want, like, news. Or at least gay okra plus news.

So traffic is down at the Post. A lot. CEO Will Lewis has announced a bold new strategy, according to Semafor. Here it is: “great journalism, happy customers, and making money.” You might think this sounds obvious for a journalism company that sells subscriptions to customers. But it is shocking to Post reporters to be told something like this.

AOC, the DSA, and MTG below. But first, a doodle from our favorite artist, Dave Mamet: 

→ DSA vs. AOC: The hard-liners within the Democratic Socialists of America are arguing that the socialists must disavow their former queen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They describe how the National Political Committee requested regular meetings with AOC after she was elected, but that “only one initial meeting with AOC’s office has been held.” As they put it, “There is little evidence to suggest that AOC places much value on her relationship with DSA,” and “she does not see herself as a part of our collective project.” I’ll be honest, I’ve always liked AOC. Why? Because she’s an adorable bartender from the Bronx who made it big is why. It’s called the American Dream, and the lipstick is perfect. I don’t care if she is literally carrying a Hamas rocket launcher and running toward me—if you don’t on some level like that bubbly bartender with the redheaded fiancé, you’ve gotten too serious. Now, knowing that the communists want to disavow her comforts me. She may go Hamas, sure, but she’ll never go Hezbollah. And when assessing popular young Democrats, those are now your options. 

→ AOC vs. MTG: Chaos erupted during the House Oversight and Accountability Committee last week when Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat, of wearing “fake eyelashes.” Coming to her defense, AOC responded, “How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person? Oh girl, oh baby girl, don’t even play.” Then Crockett said MTG has a “bleach blonde bad built butch body.” (Crockett liked her insult so much, she has since filed for a trademark on it.) 

All I can say is that it’s very good the early suffragettes died before they could see what became of their labors. 

→ Gotta love the WSJ: 

→ Updates on the protesters: The Princeton protesters have decided their hunger strike is a rotation where different people skip meals and then tag someone else in to skip a meal. Like if Gandhi did shifts. A University of Pennsylvania student from the Philippines is getting a lot of press attention for being made “homeless” after the university suspended half a dozen students who refused to decamp their encampment. Sure, she comes from a very wealthy Filipino family and is obviously fine, but a central belief of our intelligentsia is that outside of Europe and America there is actually no money at all, only sad, impoverished, barefoot people trading goats. That’s why whenever one of us goes to Mexico City it’s just total shock and viral Instagram posts—like, guys, there are chic restaurants in Mexico! Who did this? 

The Associated Press is asking whether colleges might lose their “sacrosanct” status as centers of free speech (sure) because some of them are asking some students to stop taking over quads. 

You see, free speech was not tested when, let’s say, Yale Law School broke into spasms and asked a student to withdraw after he invited friends to a Constitution Day party at his “Trap House,” featuring fried chicken and apple pie. Though “Trap House” is part of the name of the most popular leftist podcast and just means drug den, in this case it was used to prove he’s racist in one of those 30-second trials. Anyways.

At the University of Toronto, protesters are just straight up chanting “Heil Hitler.” Good thing they’re not trying to do anything Constitution Day–related up there. That would be a real problem. 

My president Hillary Clinton (for the love of god, Hilz, just tip Biden over one day, and lock the doors of the Oval behind you) went on Morning Joe earlier this month. On pro-Palestine protests, she explains that many young people she’s encountered “don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East or, frankly, about history in many areas of the world.” She then patiently describes how during the Oslo Accords “an offer was made to the Palestinians for a state on 96 percent of the existing territory occupied by the Palestinians with 4 percent of Israel to be given to reach 100 percent of the territory that was hoped for.” And that was turned down, you see, and. . . oh shoot, the kids stopped listening, they’re screaming Heil Hitler again. Oh well. 

→ Hamas must be trusted: We all know that Hamas reported shoddy casualty numbers, was caught, and revised their numbers for women and children down by about half. But MSNBC is very upset about this and is worried it is besmirching the good name of the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, so MSNBC calls it all misinformation: 

→ All U.S. aid stolen by Hamas: And in a surprise to no one, the Pentagon announced that, in fact, zero of the Gaza aid delivered via the pier has reached the Palestinian people. Instead, Hamas is taking it. I imagine folks watching that aid be “stolen” from the pier by Hamas are like me when someone else pays for dinner. I’m all no, no, don’t do that, let me just grab my wallet, oh shoot, you’re so fast, ha ha, I must’ve forgotten my wallet in the car. 

→ Are we done with planes yet? American Airlines has called their initial legal defense “an error” made by “outside legal counsel” in a case alleging that one of their flight attendants attempted to secretly record young girls using the bathroom mid-flight. The error? Claiming that the 9- and 14-year-olds involved in the case were themselves to blame for being secretly recorded because they. . . should have noticed the cell phone. 

American Airlines’ lawyers wrote: “Defendant would show that any injuries or illnesses alleged to have been sustained by Plaintiff, Mary Doe, were proximately caused by Plaintiff’s own fault and negligence.” Because the 9-year-old “knew or should have known” that the bathroom “contained a visible and illuminated recording device.” 

As the 9-year-old’s mother said, which is really the only thing there is to say: “How in good conscience could they even make such a suggestion?”

→ Senior Biden official accidentally tells the truth: Project Veritas, the conservative sting operation that records people saying embarrassing things on hidden camera, caught an interesting fellow this week. Sterlin Waters, a cyber policy adviser to the Biden White House, was captured on camera saying that once Biden wins again, playtime is over for Israel. The White House is gonna go mask off. Here’s Sterlin: “If Biden won again, he could be much more forthright about saying, ‘No. . . you’re not going to continue to lie solely without facing serious consequences.’ But that is a second-term decision bandwidth, not a first term.” He, of course, also waxed on about a “huge, Jewish, powerful Jewish influence in both Republican and Democratic politics” and about the “powers that be.”

→ Yes, for sure, all the insanity is over: Many people now want to say that the Revolution we’ve all seen with our eyes didn’t win, that nothing changed, that nothing is changing now, and that everything is as it was. This is a surprisingly popular argument. And so I point you now to a blockbuster piece in the Free Beacon, in which half a dozen top doctors and admissions officers at UCLA’s medical school desperately try to blow the whistle:

One professor said that a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot. Another said that students at the end of their clinical rotations don’t know basic lab tests and, in some cases, are unable to present patients.

And it describes the new dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, as on a wild power trip: After a Native American applicant was rejected in 2021, for example, Lucero chewed out the committee and made members sit through a two-hour lecture on Native history delivered by her own sister.

Or there’s this: as part of a review on the role of DEI statements in faculty hiring, the Cornell Free Speech Alliance received confidential documents from someone involved in the hiring process for a STEM department at the university, which was done according to a rubric. The number-one criterion for admissions is the quality of the applicant’s DEI statement, and an estimated 21 percent of candidates were “rejected based on the personal views and values noted in their DEI statement or an unfavorable view of the demographic profile of the ‘most experienced’ candidates.” But nothing changed. 

→ Degrowth movement needs to stop growing: The chic environmental movement of the moment is called degrowth. And it argues that we should stop trying to find technological fixes for environmental problems. The true fix, the only fix, is for humans to stop trying so hard—and to dismantle capitalism and do communism (funny how that’s always the same answer no matter the question, right?). As The Guardian puts it: “When we turn away from growth as the goal, we can focus directly on asking what it would take to deliver social and ecological wellbeing, through an economy that is regenerative and distributive by design.” Close down the fancy cancer institutes and the car-making factories. Stop traveling. Return to the earth. When you get a toothache, a neighbor rips that tooth out and ties a bandana around your head like in the movies. Need glasses? Find a small child who will guide you through the world. If you’re hungry, well, is it my fault your chicken died?

And stop worrying about China’s pollution, which far exceeds America’s levels. Have you considered the destruction caused by your hot showers?

This extra-long and gratis TGIF brought to you by: Olly Wiseman, British turncoat in our nation’s capitol. Suzy Weiss, Brooklyn communist. Coby Weiss, Los Angeles man on the town, no relation. Julia the Intern. And Natalie Ballard, no idea, some swamp in Florida, I think. 

And where do you TG? As always, submit to TGIF@thefp.com.

Evan writes: Getting my TGIF fix in at the Golden Gate Bridge with my girlfriend, shortly before our rental car was broken into!

Jud writes: TGIF’ing while waiting for the rest of my group at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City.

Mike writes: TGIF’ing from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, pondering the prehistory of energy circuits in the metabolic rift in between sets.

Our incredible Chief of Staff Maya’s mother Alayne and Aunt Andrea write: Twins escape to Leavenworth, Washington (not exactly a prison) to TGIF in tandem. 

Nancy writes: TGIF helping me forget the blue light treatment coming at any moment to treat the skin cancers on my nose. I have had multiple skin cancers after years of being a sun worshipper—baby oil plus iodine and all! Wear your sunscreen, people! 

Jeff writes: TGIF’ing on Aloha Friday at Grandma’s Coffee House, Keokea, Maui.

John writes: TGIF at the National Arboretum!

Kathleen writes: My dog Jackson and I starting our day in Chincoteague, VA. 

Robin writes: Firing up to work on my latest still life: “Three Limes, Two Birds, One Vase.” Grateful I received a meaningful college education. I mean. . . at least I can count. 

Robin

Holland, MI

Charlie writes: Enjoying the peaceful, quiet countryside, reading my TGIF in Auchterarder, Perthshire, in Scotland. The locals are ecstatic about the first blue skies of spring.

Best regards, Charlie

Kelly writes: En route to a wedding in Texas. Kids, be good for Grandma! My advice for Grandma is the same for the Dean of Columbia: “Don’t let the inmates run the asylum!”
—Kelly from AZ

Jackie writes: TG’ing from my front stoop while admiring the dogwood tree I planted last fall and the sounds of spring in my coastal village of Mamaroneck, NY. 

Your giggling fan, Jackie

Michael writes: American schools gone mad. . . peace, heaven, and the natural law of the wild. . . Mala Mala, South Africa.

Sue writes: Usually, I’m TGIF’ing while still in bed at 7:30 a.m., but today we’re on I-95 heading to Long Island from North Carolina to attend my brother-in-law’s ordination into ministry service this Sunday. (I’m a passenger—not driving!)

Elena writes: I TG from The Ocean View Motel at Craigville Beach on Cape Cod, taking advantage of the off season to enjoy this island of patriotism where the Stars and Stripes still fly high.

TGIF, everyone. 

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