Sadly, for many, it has been relegated to summer cookouts and people online wishing “Happy Memorial Day.” I have always found it morbid to wish happiness on a day of remembrance. But if your only reference is pools and cookouts, it is a happy day. I had always assumed it came out of WWII, likely because we are all guilty of seeing the world through the lens of our own experience. It’s the same reason some wish you a “Happy Memorial Day.” Why wouldn’t you, if every Memorial Day in your life marked the start of summer and not the death of a loved one in war?

Memorial Day originated in the aftermath of the Civil War. After four years of fighting, the bloodiest war in American history, 620,000 soldiers were dead. A war that almost split the country in two and put neighbors and family against one another.

In 1865, in Charleston, freed slaves dug up a mass grave.

Union prisoners had died at a Confederate camp on the old planters’ racetrack and been dumped in a heap. The Black residents of the city exhumed them, reburied them one by one, built a fence around the ground, and came back on the first of May to lay flowers. They called it Decoration Day. Thousands came: schoolchildren with bouquets, Black Union regiments marching, ministers reading scripture over the graves.

Historians still argue over which town gets to call itself the birthplace of Memorial Day. The official version credits an 1868 order from a Union general and a ceremony at Arlington; a couple of other towns make their own claims. Charleston came three years before the general did. Regardless of which city it began in, the purpose was remembrance, thanks, and healing.

It’s been 161 years since that day in Charleston, and we are on the cusp of America’s 250th anniversary. With time, history that isn’t cared for can lose its meaning. It can be rewritten. Forgotten.

Today, the Civil War is told simply through a lens of good and evil. But division within a nation, among its own people, is never that simple. We know this all too well. For many of us, it feels like we have been in the midst of a civil war with our family, friends, and neighbors for close to a decade, and it only seems to be escalating. When you tell yourself the story of why, it’s simple. When you take the time to tell the story out loud, it gets more complicated.

During service, we prayed for the families who lost a loved one to death in battle and in service to our country. When I learned that Memorial Day came out of the Civil War, I reflected on the division happening now in our own country, especially within families. I prayed for healing.

I then went looking for the plainest American writing I could find from that time. To understand what it was like and what it took to come out the other side of so much division.

We are so far removed from that time the questions feel settled. Was the war worth it? Clear. Who was right and who was wrong? Simple. But read the writing of the people who lived through it, and certainty falls apart. Nothing is clear when a country breaks in half and buries over six hundred thousand of its own.

Civil war has become an all-too-common phrase. Many times it’s tossed out flippantly. Others feel anxious about the weight of it, wondering what it means in 2026.

Five pieces. Read them top to bottom if you can. The last two don’t agree, and that’s the whole point.

Lincoln at the graveyard

The Gettysburg Address — Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

We all know of this one, but have you read it? It’s 272 words, spoken over a cemetery that had not existed a year earlier, on ground where the dead had been hastily buried after three days of fighting that left more than fifty thousand men killed, wounded, or missing.

Remember that the war was not won at this point. The war would continue for another year and five months. Lincoln did not know that Lee would surrender in Virginia. For all he knew, the Union cause was still slipping away, and these dead had bought nothing. So when he tells the living that the dead have already consecrated the ground, and that the work left undone belongs to us, he is making a promise he does not know he can keep. He is asking a grieving country to believe that the sacrifice will mean something, without any guarantee that it will.

He makes a declaration to God near the end: this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. He is a president standing in a graveyard, asking the living soldiers to have faith.

The letter

Letter to Sarah — Major Sullivan Ballou, July 14, 1861

Ballou was a lawyer from Rhode Island with a wife and two small boys. He wrote this from a camp outside Washington a week before the First Battle of Bull Run. He had a feeling he would not come home. He was right. He died in that battle, and the letter to his Sarah was found in his trunk afterward.

You can see that he does not know how it will end. He is writing into the dark, weighing what he loves against what he believes he owes the country, and you can watch him make peace with God in real time. One moment he surrenders: “Not my will, but thine, O God, be done.” The next, he is reaching past death itself, promising Sarah he will find a way back to her:

But, O Sarah, if the dead can come back to this earth, and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you in the garish day, and the darkest night amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours always, always, and, if the soft breeze fans your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air cools your throbbing temples, it shall be my spirit passing by.

He had no way of knowing if his country would survive him, if his sons would grow up free in it, or if any of it was worth his life. He chose to serve his country and trusted God with the rest.

The one nobody sings right

The Battle Hymn of the Republic — Julia Ward Howe, 1862

Everyone has heard the song. But almost no one knows it was first a poem Howe wrote in the dark of a Washington hotel room after a day spent watching Union troops drill. And the words are stranger and more severe than the marching tune lets on.

She reached straight into the Book of Revelation for them, into its visions of the end of the world: God descending in judgment (14:19–20, 19:15), trampling out his wrath like grapes in a winepress, bringing a day of reckoning by the sword.

She wrote it early in the war, with years of death still ahead and the outcome very much in doubt. It is not a gentle hymn. It reads the war as holy ground, the soldiers’ cause as God’s own, the bloodshed as part of a plan too large to see when living it. Where Ballou was sure of almost nothing, Howe looked at the same terrible war and saw the hand of God moving through it.

Whitman in the hospital

The Wound-Dresser — Walt Whitman

Whitman spent much of the war as a volunteer in the army hospitals around Washington. He dressed wounds, sat with the dying, wrote letters home for boys whose hands no longer worked. The poems that came out of those years are not about patriotism. They sound like a man who has seen more than a person should and refuses to look away.

I onward go, I stop, With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds, I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable, One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you.

He is not thinking about the cause here, or the politics, or who will win. He is holding one wounded stranger and finds that he would trade his own life for him. Whatever the war meant in Washington, this is what it came down to in the tents: one human being beside another, and a love that asked everything.

Lincoln, and then Douglass

I put these two together last because they were reaching for different things, and neither knew if they were reaching the right way.

Second Inaugural Address — Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1865

A month before he was assassinated, with the war nearly won, Lincoln stood up and refused to gloat. The speech reads like a sermon. He names slavery as the sin the whole nation is being judged for, North and South alike, no hands clean. But, instead of vengeance, he reaches for mercy: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” He calls for America to bind up the wounds. Care for the widow and the orphan. Move forward together.

He did not know it would work. He was betting the country’s future on grace, with no guarantee it would be enough, and he would not live to find out.

Address at the Monument of the Unknown Dead — Frederick Douglass, Decoration Day, May 30, 1871

Six years later, Douglass stood at Arlington, on the holiday freed slaves had begun, and reached for something different. He opens gently, calling the cemetery air full of “lessons of all that is precious, priceless, holiest, and most enduring in human existence.” Then he plants his feet. People were already pressing him, in the name of healing, to honor both sides equally, to call every grave equally noble. He would not:

But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause. We must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic.

He was no preacher of malice, he said. He would not strike the fallen or turn the repentant away. But he believed that healing built on forgetting was no healing at all, and he could not yet see whether the country would prove him right or wrong.

Two men who loved the same wounded country. One reached for mercy, one reached for memory, and both were feeling their way forward in the dark, trusting that God could see the whole of what they could only see in part. We have the benefit of hindsight. They had only faith. Sit with both of them, and ask yourself which one you would have been in a year when no one knew how the story ended.

Five voices, one graveyard, none of them able to see past the next year.

We read them now, knowing how it all turned out, which makes us feel wise. They wrote without knowing anything, which made them faithful. They buried their dead, prayed over the graves, and trusted that a God they could not see was working a purpose they could not know.

We are in our own uncertain year. The division is real, the outcome is hidden, and it is tempting to believe we already know who is right and how it ends. We don’t. We are living in it, the same way they were.

So tomorrow, before the cookout, maybe pray with me.

Lord, we don’t know the end of our own story any better than they knew theirs. Give our leaders the wisdom they don’t yet have. Heal what is broken in our families, our friendships, our country. Comfort the families who stood in church this morning with an empty seat at home. And bless the souls of all who died believing the sacrifice would mean something, whether or not they ever got to see that it did. We are in it, and we cannot see the way out. We trust that You can. Amen.

— Until next Sunday.

P.S. No edition of The Read tomorrow.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon. My husband has been on calls since morning. He lets out a loud sigh. I poke my head into his office.

“You done? Let’s get a croissant.”

“Where?”

“A new bakery at the old hipster pancake place,” I say. “Remember, it had that menu that was trying too hard—pansy garnishes, lavender lattes, and all that. You liked the corn pancakes, though.”

“No, but yeah, we can go.”

The Tudor revival at St. Elmo Ave. and W. 45th St. was built in 1934. It was Fire Station No. 14 for nearly fifty years. Now it's home to Wayward Pastry Co., the best croissants in Chattanooga. We park in front of the carriage house doors. They are fire engine red in the sun. A chalk sign by the door: one hour to closing.

Few pastries are left in the case. One looks as if it’s upside down, lacquered in sugar. The kind that hardens and cracks like crème brûlée. It reminds me of a turtle shell.

My husband asks, “What is it?”

The girl with a septum piercing says something that is meant to be Kouign-amann. I only know this because it’s written on the small chalk sign.

“But what is it?” I repeat.

“It’s like an inverted croissant with sugar.”

“Ooooh, I’ll get that! With a latte,” my husband says.

“I’ll have a latte too and a croissant. And a cookie. We can share,” I say to my husband.

Behind the girl, the barista grabs a ceramic mug. “Oh, and can we get the coffees to go?”

The septum piercing nods.

I turn around. A young woman sits at the bistro table below a large hole in the ceiling. Likely where a fire pole once was. Her eyebrows are pressed together. The keys of her laptop click. Behind the laptop are a mug and a plate of crumbs. She stops typing and makes a note. The clicking resumes.

Behind me steam bursts from the wand of the espresso machine; hissing echoes off the bare walls.

A gray-haired man walks in with a newspaper and stands in line behind us. He is wearing shorts with a button-down shirt. We make eye contact. His glasses are on his head. I smile as I leave with the box of pastries to sit outside. My husband stays to wait and pay for the coffees.

The courtyard is red brick, sunken into the earth, surrounded by tiered dirt beds held back by weathered timbers, silver with age. A woman wearing large sunglasses sits alone on the west side of the courtyard. Another laptop. The brilliant white tabletops hurt my eyes. She is focused. I wish I had my sunglasses. The only table in the shade is a bistro table along the back, next to two women engaged in conversation. One of them is waving her arms as if she were directing traffic. They laugh in matching pitch and tone. On their table are crumbed plates. One of the women has her quilted tote on her shoulder.

I sit at the bistro table.

I peek into the pastry box, tempted to steal a bite of the cookie, but I wait. The two women get up and say their goodbyes. I overhear one confirming plans for the weekend, something about snacks and a game, walking toward the courtyard steps. My husband comes out with the coffees, almost running into them. They exchange apologies. The other woman watches them as she closes her laptop.

We are alone in the courtyard.

I tease my husband that he is lucky the cookie is still untouched after taking so long with the coffees. He laughs, scrolling on his X feed.

“So what states are going to redistrict besides Louisiana, obviously?” I pull apart the light layers of my croissant and press them back together before putting it in my mouth.

He puts down his phone and cracks the shell of his Kouign-amann. “Several southern states. Five maybe before the midterms. Ten when it’s all done.”

“How is that inverted croissant?”

“It’s good. Do you want a bite?” He tears a piece and puts it on my plate. “Have some of the sugar too.”

“Mmm, that is good!—And Virginia is about to get overturned.” A chair scrapes across the brick courtyard.

“Yeah, that looks like it’s going to backfire.” He sets the coffee down. “Can you imagine if at the end of all this the Republicans are up 12 or more!”

“Lower your voice,” I say, smiling.

“Alito did awesome work with that opinion,” he says, lowering his voice.

“Sorry, are you talking about the Supreme Court ruling?” I hear from behind.

My husband stretches his neck to look behind me. I turn. It’s the man from earlier. His newspaper is on the table with his coffee and earbuds. I pause for a moment. His legs are crossed at the knee.

“Do you mean on the VRA?”

He shrugs. “The most recent one. What do you think of that?”

Like a dolt, I answer honestly. “I agree with the ruling.”

“But why?” He raises his hands and lets them fall. “I just can’t understand how anyone would think that this is a good thing.”

He asks if we know what it means. What will happen? Do we care about black people? Jim Crow 2.0! Every time we go to answer, he interrupts, pointing his finger. My heart beats in my ears.

I want to ask if he read the opinion, but he keeps cutting me off. I turn to look at my husband; he is smirking. In a brief moment of quiet, I say, “So you are okay with discrimination, and I am not.”

“I have black friends!”

“Congratulations,” we say together.

“I’ve lived on Lookout Mountain for forty years. You have to give back. I'm okay with a black district if it benefits them."

“So you’re prejudiced. I think we’ve established that.”

Trump’s Triumphal Arch over the bodies of dead soldiers. The ballroom. Trump’s name is everywhere.

“He thinks he’s a king!”

He had asked if I cared about black people, but he hasn’t mentioned one since.

My husband and I make eye contact. We chuckle.

I look at our plates with crumbs. My husband and I nod at each other.

We stand. “If you never cared to hear my opinion, why did you ask a question?” I say while placing my plate in the dish bin.

Putting his earbuds in, he mumbles something about this backfiring on the Republicans.

Did we allow this boomer to chase us out?

Last night, we sat on a different patio. Several tables with a bucket-o-beer. One table is discussing baby monitors and sound machines. There are empty bottles on the table.

Our server took our drink order. His t-shirt said, “Say sometimes to drugs.”

As he walks away, my husband is about to speak before I ask him if we cannot talk about politics or the news. He holds my gaze for a moment before he smiles and nods.

The man from Lookout Mountain didn't change my mind. He changed where I'm willing to open my mouth.

Eric Church and the Six Strings of Life at UNC

If you watch one thing this weekend, please watch Eric Church’s commencement address at UNC last Saturday. Twenty minutes and a guitar. The whole speech runs on a six-string metaphor about life.

Church, a graduate of UNC, built the speech around the strings of his guitar, one pillar per string: faith, family, marriage, ambition, community, and the original voice only you can bring. The spouse you pick is the D string. Ambition and resilience both live on the G and pull against each other. The high E is the thinnest one, the melody, the string most easily bent by outside pressure. “The world does not need another cover song. It needs an original.”

Then he hit the community string. He told 7,000-plus graduates to resist the temptation to perform for everyone and belong to no one, to be globally visible and locally invisible, to have thousands of followers and no one knows where you live. Plant yourself somewhere. Learn names, not usernames. Coach the team. Build the thing your community needs even if the internet never sees it.

This is how we all should live.

The Women on Either Side of Him

This summer, I made a pact. No TV unless I’ve already read. The idea is to spend more evenings with books and less time half-watching shows we wouldn’t remember a week later. It’s been working. Mostly.

Then a friend started hounding me to watch False Prophet. She had finished it, she needed to talk about it, and I am a good friend. I read first. Then I binged all four episodes in one afternoon.

False Prophet is the follow-up to Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, the Netflix documentary about the FLDS church under Warren Jeffs. If you saw the first one, you remember thinking the story ended when Jeffs went to prison. It didn’t. It almost never does. False Prophet is about Samuel Bateman, an FLDS member who broke off years after Jeffs’s arrest, declared himself a prophet, and started collecting wives and children. Including his own daughters. I know, eww. Also the daughters of the men who followed him.

If you like true-crime cult documentaries, this is a good one. Four episodes, tight pacing, no fat. But the part that stuck with me wasn’t Bateman. The dude is something else, sure. It was the women.

Christine Marie Katas runs an organization that helps women leave fundamentalist polygamy. She came out of a similar situation herself. When she got word of what was happening inside Bateman’s group, she didn’t call the FBI and wait. She infiltrated. She told Bateman she was making a documentary about his ministry, brought a camera, and spent months filming a man who believed she was promoting him, while she was actually building a case to get the women and children out. His ego was the lever, and she pulled it. She lied to a prophet to save the people he was destroying. The deception was the rescue.

And then there’s Julia Johnson. She’s the heart of the documentary. Her husband, Moroni, was one of Bateman’s first followers and one of the men who handed his daughters over as wives. Julia went along at the start because that’s what the structure required. Her husband was the head of the household. She was raised inside the FLDS framework, women second, don’t question authority, keep sweet, and Moroni’s word was the word she was supposed to obey.

By the time she realized her daughters were in danger, she had no tools to act. The structure she’d been raised in was the same structure now threatening her children. She had been taught her whole life that her instincts were the problem. So when her instincts started screaming, she didn’t know if she could trust them.

She turned to Christine. A stranger with a camera. That was the only door open to her.

This is the thing the documentary is actually about, even if it doesn’t quite know it. Bateman’s downfall is the plot. His ego, his greed, his sloppiness, the federal charges that finally stuck. All of it is satisfying in the way true crime is satisfying, which is to say it gives you a man in handcuffs and credits. The women are the story. Julia, raised to obey, learning to trust herself in the worst possible circumstances. Christine, already out, walking back into the fire on purpose because no one else was coming.

Documentaries package resolutions. Bateman is in prison. The children are out. Roll credits. Christine is still doing this work because there are more Batemans. There’s always another one. The false prophets are interchangeable. What outlives them is the theology underneath, the one that teaches women their second-class place, treats doubt as sin, and dresses obedience up as virtue.

If you like true crime and the culty stuff, watch False Prophet. It’s worth your time. Just know what you’re watching.

The Tree That Owns Itself

There is a white oak in Athens, Georgia, that legally owns itself.

I am not making this up. The tree owns itself, and it owns the eight feet of ground around its trunk in every direction. It has a deed. A small stone plaque sits nearby. People take pictures with the tree.

Sometime in the early 1800s, a man named William Henry Jackson grew up playing under this oak. He loved it like it was a friend. Climbing its limbs and widdling its broken branches.

When he inherited the land as an adult, he decided the tree shouldn’t have to depend on whoever happened to own the property next. So, he wrote a deed transferring ownership of the tree and the ground it stood on to the tree itself.

Whether the deed is legally valid is something lawyers like to argue about. Georgia has never said no. The city of Athens has treated the deed as real for almost two hundred years, which in legal terms means it is settled.

The original tree fell in 1942. Blown by a storm. By then, it was around 400 years old. The people of Athens were distraught, and the Junior Ladies Garden Club planted one of its acorns in the same spot. That tree is now in its eighties. People call it the Son of the Tree That Owns Itself. I think it would be more southern to simply call it Junior.

I love this story.

Yes, part of it is absurdity. A tree with a deed. It doesn’t pay property taxes if you were wondering, but it’s a legal person. Sounds like a good deal to me.

William Henry Jackson looked at something he loved and decided the only way to protect it was to give it to itself. He feared his future heirs would chop it down. He didn’t trust the next buyer to not clear the lot. So he removed the tree from the market entirely. He made it ungiveable. He made it un-sellable. He gave it the only thing a tree could plausibly own, itself.

The tree has had a quiet life. It has watched Athens grow up around it. It survived the Civil War, two world wars, the invention of the chainsaw, and at least one storm that killed its Pa’. It has been photographed by tourists, climbed by children, and visited by every sentimental writer who has ever passed through northeast Georgia.

I hope to be one of these visitors soon.

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The window situation remains unresolved, and I still haven’t figured out the TV wall, but everything else? I love it. Actually love it, which — if you’ve ever poured a month of decisions and dollars into a space and then held your breath waiting to feel something — you know that’s not guaranteed.

It’s intimate. Cozy. The kind of room that wraps around you instead of demanding something from you. I walk in, and my shoulders drop half an inch. That’s the goal, honestly. I wanted a space that felt like mine, not a productivity aesthetic from Pinterest, not a content creator’s backdrop. Just a room that says yes, you can relax here, go make something.

And my husband built that for me. Patiently, without complaint, with actual skill. I don’t take that lightly.

Now. The windows.

Here’s the thing: I have no emotional resistance to spending money on things I want. Furniture, books, a good meal, zero internal conflict. But certain categories of spending make me irrationally annoyed, and window treatments are apparently on that list. After a full month of remodel spending, the idea of also paying for Roman shades has me behaving as if someone asked me to tip on a to-go order. Unreasonable? Completely. Do I understand it? Not even a little.

I’m thinking wood or reed Roman shades with heavy drapes. The inspo image above is the vibe, ignore the blue and the zebra print, we are obviously not doing that. But color, pattern, fabric weight? Still no idea. So for now I have grommet panels on a pressure rod. Muy classy.

If you have opinions, drop them in the comments. I genuinely need the help.

Ben Sasse: A Calling to Die

I watched the Ben Sasse interview on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast this week, and this one left a mark.

If you don’t know the story: Sasse, the former Nebraska senator, was diagnosed last December with Stage IV pancreatic cancer. By the time they found it, it had already spread. Five forms of cancer. Doctors gave him three to four months. He sat down with Douthat anyway — face visibly covered in dried blood from a drug that’s shrinking his tumors but won’t let his skin heal — and he was funny, clear-eyed, and at peace in a way that had nothing to do with denial.

That’s the thing that got me. It wasn’t performed peace. It wasn’t the practiced calm of someone who has rehearsed the right things to say about faith and suffering. He was genuine; you could feel it.

He talked about death plainly, calling it a “wicked thief,” something to be genuinely hated. He didn’t soften it. And then in almost the same breath, he said something I keep turning over: “I would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer of pancreatic cancer. I can’t keep the planets in orbit. I can’t even grow skin on my face.”

The illness, for him, wasn’t the interruption of a good life. It became the thing that finally told him the truth about himself.

At the end of the interview, Douthat asked if he felt ready to die. He was honest, he didn't feel ready, not exactly.

But then he talked about being able to approach God, to call him Father, Abba, Daddy, and said, quietly, “That’s pretty glorious. And I know that that’s what I need.” Douthat, a professional keeper of composure, choked up and could barely close out the episode.

I don’t think Douthat was moved by tragedy. I think he was moved by witnessing someone actually mean what they believe. I know I was.

As a Christian, I found myself convicted. Not in a guilt-spiral way, but in the way that happens when you see someone living out a faith you share with a clarity and a joy that you feel you fall short of. I want that. I want to draw closer to God.

And I hope — genuinely hope — that when my time comes, I can face it with even half his grace.

Go listen to the interview. It’ll do something to you.

What I Consumed

• Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? - The New Yorker

• Glenn Greenwald vs. Coleman Hughes Debate: Does Israel Control U.S. Foreign Policy? - Conversations with Colman

• The Mansion, the Heiress, the Jewel Heist, and Me: A Bel-Air Fairytale - Vanity Fair

• I Don’t Care If Gen Z Likes Me - The Free Press

Time to Dust Off the Grill

Am I the only one whose husband has a grill problem? I mean, this man has at least four types of grills. Well, technically, one is a smoker, one is a flat-top, one is gas, and he also has a charcoal grill.

To be clear, I am not complaining because when the temperatures rise, the grills get dusted off, and my days slaving over a stove become fewer.

As the days get longer and warmer, we are all looking for easy dinners that don’t heat up the house. A tried-and-true grilling recipe is always my go-to.

Let me answer some questions I know someone will ask.

• You can marinate the chicken ahead of time and have it ready to go.

• You can use chicken breast if you like less flavor. 😉

• The same goes for boneless skinless thighs, but they are better than boneless skinless chicken breast.

• If you cannot tell, I am not a fan of white chicken meat.

• Sazón can be found in the Hispanic/International food aisle of most grocery stores.

Enjoy my favorite grilled chicken recipe. Make extra and shred

for salads and sandwiches.

The Most Chaotic Race in Olympic History

Thirty-two men showed up. Fourteen finished. The one who crossed first hadn’t actually run most of it.

Welcome to the 1904 Olympic marathon, the race so catastrophically botched that people seriously considered removing the marathon from the Olympics entirely.

St. Louis, August 30th. The temperature was 90 degrees. Race officials had set up exactly one water station along the 24-mile course because the games director, James Sullivan, believed dehydration was actually good for athletes. Athletic science was at its peak in 1904.

The course ran on dusty country roads, open to traffic. Race officials rode in cars ahead of the runners, which sounds helpful until you realize those cars kicked up massive dust clouds that made breathing nearly impossible. One runner, William Garcia of California, inhaled so much dust he ended up in the hospital with internal hemorrhaging.

And that’s before we even get to the cast of characters.

The guy who hitched a ride

The first man to cross the finish line was American Fred Lorz, who received a hero’s welcome, got photographed with Alice Roosevelt, and was about to be handed a gold medal when someone figured out he’d spent a good chunk of the race riding in a car. When the car broke down, he jumped out, ran the last few miles, and let everyone think he’d won. He was banned for life by the Amateur Athletic Union, a ban that was quietly lifted just in time for him to win the Boston Marathon the following year.

Cool.

The Cuban postman who refused to lose

Félix Carvajal was a Cuban postman who showed up to the St. Louis World’s Fair, decided he was running the Olympic marathon, and somehow made it happen. He arrived at the starting line in full street clothes, long trousers, a white shirt, and walking shoes, very Cuban. A competitor took pity and cut his pants into shorts on the spot.

He hadn’t eaten in 40 hours. When a spectator refused to share his peaches, Carvajal stole them and ran. Later, he spotted an orchard, stopped to eat some apples, discovered they were rotten, got stomach cramps bad enough that he had to lie down for a nap mid-race, and still finished fourth.

Yo go papi!

The South African who got chased by dogs

Len Taunyane, one of the first Black Africans to compete in the modern Olympics, was chased nearly a mile off course by a pack of wild dogs and still managed to finish. He likely would have placed much higher without the detour. Nobody seemed particularly bothered by this at the time.

The actual winner, who probably should have died

Thomas Hicks spent the last ten miles of the race in agony. His support team, watching him deteriorate, made a decision: they fed him a mix of strychnine and egg whites, the first recorded instance of drug use in the modern Olympics. Strychnine, for context, is rat poison. In small doses, it stimulates the nervous system. In larger doses, it kills you.

Hicks spent the final miles hallucinating, believing the finish line was still 20 miles away. His support team essentially carried him across the finish line, holding him upright while he shuffled his feet as if still running. He had to be treated by four doctors afterward and might have died on the track without intervention.

His finishing time — 3 hours, 28 minutes, 53 seconds — remains the slowest in Olympic marathon history by half an hour. He never ran a marathon again.

The aftermath

James Sullivan, the games director who organized this entire disaster, later declared the marathon “indefensible on any ground, but historic.” Which is one way to describe it.

After the race, many argued it was too dangerous and should be abolished. It wasn’t — the marathon returned for the 1908 London Games — but the chaos left a mark. The 1908 marathon included the first anti-doping rule in Olympic history and significantly more water stations.

The whole thing reads like someone tried to design the worst possible conditions for a footrace and then handed out medals at the end. With a body count and a car ride thrown in for good measure.

The marathon survived. Barely.

Because no matter how hard it has been tried, it refuses to stay contained. It keeps breaking out of the tomb, breaking through closed doors, breaking into moments that have no business being holy. Moments of rubble and trenches and basement apartments with the curtains drawn. Moments when the state has said no, and the church has said anyway.

Easter has a way of surviving things. Not just theologically, though yes, obviously, that too. But historically. Practically. In the stubborn, quiet, sometimes desperate ways that ordinary people have marked the resurrection, even when doing so is at a cost.

So this Sunday, instead of a reflection on springtime and pastel tablecloths, I want to tell you three stories. They’re not the Easter story, exactly. But they couldn’t exist without it.

The Church That Wouldn’t Close

Somewhere in Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s, a congregation collected money to keep their church open.

The authorities took the money. Then they closed the church anyway.

So on Easter morning, roughly 8,000 people gathered in the square in front of the shuttered building. The priests wore civilian clothes so they wouldn’t be identified. Someone started the hymn “Glory to Thy Passion, O Lord!” and the crowd joined in, improvised and unplanned and completely ungovernable. They did it again on Easter Sunday. Larger crowd this time.

The Soviet state’s campaign against religion was not subtle. Churches were demolished or converted into warehouses. Priests were arrested, exiled, and shot. An organization called the League of the Militant Godless held events they literally called “Godless Easter,” mass burnings of icons, anti-religious street theater, and the whole performance. The goal was to replace the Paschal celebration with something secular and triumphant. It did not work. It had the same energy as a middle schooler who insists they don’t care, loudly, repeatedly, to everyone.

What happened instead was quieter and more durable. The Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, driven underground by Stalin after World War II, developed what historians call “traveling churches.” Nuns kept the Eucharist in their homes. They coordinated secret times and places for worship, especially for Christmas and Easter. They served as sextons and deacons. Laypeople’s kitchens became altars. Homes became sanctuaries. The bishops and priests moved through these underground networks like water finding cracks in stone, adapting, reshaping, refusing to stop.

In Central Asia, one documented community of believers held daily liturgies before dawn, every single morning, before going to work. Not just on Easter. Every day. Meanwhile, I sometimes struggle to make it to an 11 AM Sunday service when parking is difficult.

This patchwork of secret communities existed out of devotion and need because there were no functioning churches nearby. Many believers slipped back and forth between underground worship and the official state-sanctioned church to protect themselves. But regardless of the conditions, they made the conscious choice to worship.

Which is, if you think about it, exactly what the first Christians did.

The state said the tomb was sealed. They went anyway.

Easter in the Ruins

On April 1, 1945, the world woke up to two things at once.

It was Easter Sunday.

It was also the day 60,000 American troops stormed the beaches of Okinawa — the largest amphibious assault of the entire Pacific War, and what would become the bloodiest battle of that theater. Over the next 82 days, nearly 50,000 American casualties. More than 12,000 dead.

And yet, Easter.

Two days earlier, on March 30, churches across the Allied world had marked the resurrection while the machinery of death was still running at full capacity. A contemporary editorial in The Living Church, published April 1, 1945, named the tension directly: “Easter 1945 finds the world rejoicing in Christ’s victory over death while the machinery of death roars unchecked all over the world.”

I keep coming back to that sentence. Written in real time, by someone who didn’t know yet how it would end. V-Day was still five weeks away. Nobody had surrendered anything. And yet there’s this editorial, holding the resurrection and the war reports in the same two hands, refusing to let either go.

The year before, in 1944, Signal Corps photographers documented American soldiers kneeling for Easter morning Mass on the Italian front. Helmeted. In their field clothes. In the dirt. Father Gregory R. Kennedy of Dubuque, Iowa, saying Mass for men who had left their foxholes to attend.

I think about those men a lot during Holy Week. The ones who climbed out of a foxhole on Easter morning because something in them — something the Army couldn’t regulate and the war couldn’t reach — insisted on marking the day.

There’s a particular kind of faith that only becomes visible under pressure. The kind you don’t know you have until you’re in a foxhole and you find yourself getting up for Mass anyway. Not because everything is fine. Not because the machinery of death has stopped. But because He is risen is a claim that refuses to wait for better circumstances to become true.

April 1, 1945. Easter Sunday. And 60,000 men on a beach who were not thinking about pastel tablecloths.

The Truce That Almost Wasn’t

Let me tell you what the history actually says, because it’s better than the myth.

You’ve heard of the Christmas Truce of 1914, German and Allied soldiers crawling out of their trenches on Christmas Eve, exchanging cigarettes, singing carols in no man’s land. While this event has been extensively romanticized, it’s a true story.

What’s less known: attempts to repeat something similar at Easter 1915 were largely ignored. By then, high command had made the rules quite clear. The war had turned uglier. Men who had shared a faith on Christmas Eve were killing each other with gas by spring. The grand Easter Truce, as a parallel to the Christmas Truce, did not happen.

But one man saw something.

His name was Friedrich Kohn. He was a medical officer serving with a Hungarian regiment on the Eastern Front in Galicia in 1916, where Russian and Austro-Hungarian forces faced each other in conditions identical to the Western Front. In a letter written decades later, preserved by historians Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton in their 1984 book Peace in No Man’s Land, Kohn recalled what happened on Easter Sunday morning that year.

About twenty Russian soldiers came out of their trenches at five in the morning.

And the shooting stopped.

What followed — the sharing, the silence, the impossible pause in a war that had no pauses — lasted a few hours and then ended. The war resumed. Friedrich Kohn survived the Brusilov Offensive that came just weeks later. He survived World War I. He later survived imprisonment by the Nazis. And he spent decades with the memory: “I have seen demonstrated in front of my own eyes that suddenly people who are trying to kill each other, and will try to kill again when the day is over, are still able to sit together and talk to each other.”

This is not a story about war being secretly nice. It’s not a story about enemies who were really friends. The shooting started again. The Brusilov Offensive killed hundreds of thousands of people. Friedrich Kohn knew exactly what the men across from him were, and they knew what he was.

But Easter Morning made them set down their rifles for a few hours. Not peace. Not resolution. A pause. A recognition. Something too old and too stubborn to ignore even in the middle of a war.

Kohn’s story is not a legend. It’s not passed down through generations. It’s a letter, written by a man who lived it, preserved in a published historical record. A true story of a moment of peace.

And the only reason it happened is that Easter was still Easter even in the trenches.

As we head into this Sunday, remember the resurrection has never required good circumstances. It doesn’t need the war to be over, the church to be open, or the state to give its blessing. It just keeps being true — quietly, stubbornly, in the square outside the locked church, in a foxhole in the Pacific, in the silence between two armies on the Eastern Front at five in the morning.

He is risen.

Even here.

Happy Easter, friends. Thank you for spending part of your Sunday morning with me.

It also means this edition of the Sunday Desk is a little rushed.

Rivera and Reeves UnFiltered LIVE!

In case you missed it! Also, make sure you check out the show notes for a discount code and join us for the next UnFiltered LIVE!

Rivera and Reeves

R&R UnFiltered LIVE! 03.28.26

Rachel just got back from CPAC—and what she saw behind the curtain is not the story you're being told. This month's Rivera & Reeves Unfiltered Live covers it all: low turnout, a boomer-heavy crowd, and a speaker who explicitly told attendees to stop listening to podcasters—while standing in a room full of them. Plus: the grifter class running the right-wing podcast space, why the GOP's "unity" push is really just midterm survival mode, the tin foil hat theory about foreign bots amplifying divisive content creators (that isn't actually a theory), and the Iran truth no one in podcasting wants to say out loud. Unfiltered, direct, and pulling zero punches…

Listen now

2 months ago · 39 likes · 1 comment · Meseidy and Rachel Reeves

Episode Highlights

• Rachel attended CPAC and witnessed a speaker directly warn the audience to stop listening to podcasters and social media influencers—the same conference that invited content creators to carry their message

• The “conservative unity” push at CPAC was less about principle and more about midterm survival: a scripted talking point delivered by multiple speakers, including Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec

• Tucker, Candace, and Megyn Kelly are playing a game—the hosts break down what that game is, who’s winning, and why their astronomical numbers may have foreign fingerprints

• The Iran operation isn’t the betrayal the podcast right claims it is: Trump has talked about Iran as an existential threat for decades, and the hosts make the strategic case that this is America First

• The CPAC crowd skewed heavily older—a sharp contrast from last year’s younger energy—and what that demographic collapse signals for the future of the movement

The Madison

I was on the Taylor Sheridan bandwagon when Yellowstone first came out. I did not miss an episode. Then the show started to get weird with the eco-activist girlfriend who could be John Dutton’s granddaughter, and Beth’s emotional irritants became abusive and annoying. Girl, trauma is not an excuse for terrorizing everyone around you.

Suddenly, everywhere I looked, there was Taylor Sheridan, 1883, 1923, Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown, Lioness, and don’t even get me started on Landman. I am beyond weirded out by the mother-daughter dynamic in that show.

You know how we all became exhausted with the “Marvel Universe” — well, I have never watched Marvel, but you get my point. As soon as one series would end, another was on its heels, and they all were basically the same plot and characters repacked and dropped into sun-drenched scenery.

No more Taylor Sheridan for me.

And then I get SUCKED BACK IN!

I got baited while minding my own business scrolling when Kurt Russell and Michell Pfeiffer appeared on my screen. These are two of my favorite actors. Have you watched Russell recently on Apple TV+'s Monarch about Godzilla? You should. Anyway, I discovered they are together in the new series “The Madison,” a Taylor Sheridan series. UGH! I move on. “No more Sheridan!”

But everywhere I look, I see “The Madison.” It stalks me across my social media and streaming platforms, and finally, I break down.

I am four episodes in, and I am HOOKED! This show is an emotional roller coaster — sometimes a little cheesy — but it’s beautiful. Very different from his other shows, which are about conflict and bending the rules. The tragic loss of a long and faithful love is at the center of this series.

Think Manhattan meets Montana. The Clyburn family — polished, wealthy, New York to their core — finds themselves in the rugged Madison River valley in the middle of Big Sky Country. A devastating tragedy sends this family to the last place any of them would have chosen, and what unfolds is really a story about grief, love, and what holds a family together when everything falls apart.

It’s Madison Avenue versus the Madison River, and the contrast between those two worlds is just as much a character in the show as the people are. Pfeiffer plays Stacy Clyburn, who has a driver, a townhouse, and an opinion about everything. Russell plays her husband Preston, a man who loves that cabin in Montana more than Stacy will ever understand, or so she thinks.

Sheridan describes it as his most intimate work, and that tracks. This is his quietest, most dialogue-driven work to date — worlds away from the body counts and power plays of Yellowstone. No one is fighting over land or threatening anyone with a branding iron. It’s quieter than that. And even for a stoic broad like myself, I had to keep the Kleenex on hand.

Writing…

I am behind on my writing curriculum, but I wanted to share a little ditty from one of this week's assignments. If you are new here and have no clue what I am talking about, visit the two previous editions of Sunday Desk.

The Prompt

A character has received significant news before the scene opens. The nature of that news is never stated. The scene takes place in an ordinary setting — a meal, a drive, a task they’re completing alone or with someone else. The news is never spoken. The scene ends without it being revealed.

The Rules

• No interior monologue. Not one sentence about what the character is thinking or feeling. Remove every “she thought,” “she realized,” “she felt.” If the interior creeps in, cut it.

• No backstory. The reader enters the scene already in progress.

• The news must be present in the scene — it should shape every gesture and line of dialogue — but it must never be named.

• End on a physical image or action. Not a reflection. Not a summary.

Work

This exercise was hard! First, I focused on where the limitations are. What I couldn’t say or write about. How does one tell a story with nothing? My nature is to be direct. I do not beat around the bush. And while that may be appreciated by some in personal relationships — sometimes not by others — it does not make for good storytelling. If I were left on my own, my “stories” would probably fit on a post-it note.

Eeeek! This is a draft. Here is my short story. Be nice! 🤪

Counting in The Dark

She grips the steering wheel tightly and rolls her fists forward. A leather-pressed groan escapes from beneath her knuckles. Her hands hesitate over the wheel. She lifts her fingers, and the diamond catches the dashboard lights. Twirling her ring with her thumb, she stretches her arms out, pushing against the steering wheel, gripping it again, and letting out a slow, deep breath. The headlights of her car are the only light on the road, other than the occasional passing car. She reads a worn sign illuminated by a single overhead light at the side of the road, Wyatt’s Slaughtering. The road narrows between mountains, two-dimensional in the dark, as if to fold over on top of her like cardboard cutouts.

Checking her phone and still no signal, she sets it face down on the passenger seat and counts the dashes in the center lane. Shifting in her seat, she feels her back ache. She begins to count the dashes again, and they morph into a solid line. Looking at the speedometer, she eases her foot off the gas. The engine groans and shifts gears as it begins to gain elevation. On a sharp turn, the headlights catch the eyes of a doe on the side of the road.

Suddenly, the sky opens up on her right. The mountainside is close and jagged, pushing against the car. The road winds up the mountain, guided by a thin barrier cable. Below are constellations of light separated by gaps of darkness, and her fingers stiffen on the wheel as she pushes her back into the seat.

She reaches the crest of the mountain to a clear sky, no moon. A thumping rhythm is muffled by the tires. With her thumb, she turns her wedding ring, listening to the thumping of the road, and she gently nods her head to the beat. She approaches a bend, obscuring her view ahead, and slams the brakes. The tires screech, and her head rocks forward. Her back stabs at her, and the phone thuds on the floor between her feet. She groans and braces herself with the armrest, staring at the dark mound in the road glistening under the headlights. Stretching her leg, she searches for the phone and slides it closer to her. The pain stabs when she bends to grab it.

Slowly, she sits up and looks around — no other vehicles. She covers her nose with the back of her wrist when she opens the door. The air is putrid and rotting. The asphalt crunches under her feet as she gets closer to the source of the stench. Black button eyes looking back at her. The head is grotesquely contorted with a hoofed leg caught in its large antlers. It is a mature buck, its broad chest edged with a noble coarse ruff of fur matted with blood. Staring at it, she touches her back. Lifting her phone, she takes a picture, framing only the head. The blood runs onto the asphalt, black. A flood of light washes over her, causing her to shield her eyes from the oncoming headlights. An old pickup truck slows down. A man cranks open the window.

He wears a tattered Carhartt cap, leathered by sweat. His eyes are kind and hooded, with deep creased corners. A mustache conceals his upper lip.

“Are you ok? Do you need any help?”

She pulls her spine in, arching her back slightly. Looking towards the buck, she says, “I didn’t hit it.”

The old door groans low and tired, cutting through the silence with a single, worn-out creak. The man echoes his groan when he steps out of the truck. “Looks fresh. I can get it out of the way. Dangerous leavin’ it there.”

She nods, still staring at it.

“Do you need me to call anyone for you?”

She looks at him, sucking on her bottom lip. She squeezes the phone in her hand. “No.”

“Okay, then.” He tips his hat toward her.

She turns back toward her car, watching her feet as she walks back, gently lowering herself into the vehicle. In the car, she watches the man as he trusses the buck with some straps, tight and contorted, like a parcel. Her hands are resting in her lap, fiddling with the pop socket of her phone. Watching as he takes his gloved hands, wraps them around the straps, and heaves it into the bed of his pickup truck, slamming the tailgate shut. He pulls forward, signaling her to roll her window down.

“Are you sure you don’t need me to call anyone?”

“You’re kind,” she replies as she nods her head.

He tips his hat towards her as he drives off. She looks back at the black stain on the road. It doesn’t catch the light anymore. Sitting up in the seat, she flips the visor down, and the small light reveals her eye darkening to a bruise. Her lip is split again, and she runs her tongue across it.

She looks at the phone: four bars and a voicemail. Looking at herself again in the mirror, she sees black button eyes looking back at her. Quickly flipping the visor closed, she presses her back against the seat and sets the phone face down on the center console. Her thumb finds the ring. She hits the start button and starts counting the dashes again.

History’s Greatest Funeral Crasher

Okay, I need to tell you about Andrew Jackson’s parrot. Because somehow, in all the chaos of American history — the duels, the bank wars, the Trail of Tears, the general unhinged energy of the man — I am fixated on the parrot.

Which tracks, because I am randomly obsessed with talking birds.

Have you seen that “bacon, pancakes” bird? Or the one that struts on the back of the sofa, pulls up close to the camera, and says, “Hey baby!” The sudden onset of cute aggression is too much.

My husband has now walked in on me — multiple times, and every time, without fail, he delivers the same verdict:

“We are not getting a bird.”

Deflated and disappointed I respond with "I know.”

But, enough about my bird brain, let's talk about Jackson’s parrot, because this bird, I thought. This bird understood the assignment.

Here’s what happened:

When President Andrew Jackson died in June 1845, the nation mourned. Dignitaries gathered at The Hermitage, his Tennessee estate. The mood was appropriately solemn. The minister prepared his remarks. And then — Poll, Jackson’s African Grey parrot, decided this was his moment.

The bird, who had spent years in Jackson’s company absorbing the vocabulary of a man famous for his volcanic temper, his absolute refusal to be polite, and his enthusiastic commitment to dueling, opened his beak at the funeral and let it rip. Profanity. Loud, enthusiastic, completely unfiltered profanity. The kind of language that makes mourners look at their shoes. The kind that made the minister have to physically pause the service.

Here is a quote from the Rev. William Menefee Norment, who was presiding at the service, and found in Volume 3 of Samuel G. Heiskell’s Andrew Jackson and Early Tennessee History:

“Before the sermon and while the crowd was gathering, a wicked parrot that was a household pet got excited and commenced swearing so loud and long as to disturb the people and had to be carried from the house.”

The Rev. Norment goes on to report that the presidential parrot was “excited by the multitude and … let loose perfect gusts of ‘cuss words.’” People were “horrified and awed at the bird’s lack of reverence.”

They had to remove the parrot from the funeral.

This story gave me a chuckle. I think about it the way I think about the Petticoat Duel of 1792 — with a specific, delighted awe at the fact that history is mostly just unhinged people doing unhinged things, and we just call it “the past” to make it sound dignified.

Poll didn’t mourn quietly. Poll went out like his owner lived — loudly, defiantly, and with absolutely no regard for the room.

Now. If you spend any time in political commentary circles, you’ve heard people describe certain politicians as “Jacksonian,” meaning they operate with that same populist fire, that same combative energy, that same general “I will fight you in the street and also reshape the entire federal government” vibe. The comparison to Trump gets made constantly, and honestly? Whether you love it or hate it, you can see why.

Imagine what a Jacksonian parrot in the modern era would look like.

Picture it: a gilded cage. Not just gold-toned. Not brushed brass. Gold. Ostentatiously, aggressively, unapologetically gold-gilded, probably with the bird’s name on it in large block letters. The parrot inside is enormous, well-fed, opinionated, and completely unbothered by your reaction to any of this.

And what does it say?

“You’re fired.”

That’s it. That’s the whole vocabulary. Every greeting. Every goodbye. Every time someone walks into the room. The housekeeper. The chef. Foreign dignitaries. The dog, if there is one. You’re fired. Delivered with the flat, unblinking confidence of a creature who has heard it so many times it now considers it a form of punctuation.

And when the day comes — as it does for all of us, presidents and parrots alike — and there’s a funeral?

That bird is going to walk right up to the microphone during the eulogy and say:

“You’re fired.”

And that is this week’s Sunday Desk. Sorry, this one is quick. I am literally finishing this up right before church. But we have a fabulous and short surprise visit, ahem, the best podcast live there is, two very different love stories, and a foul-mouthed parrot. And before you ask. Yes, of course, I still want a bird.

Till next Sunday!

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We’ve hit a speed bump, and her name is the ceiling.

The was the popcorn ceiling gets painted, panels go up over it, crown molding goes back on, beams run across the seams to create a coffered effect. Clean. Architectural. Exactly the kind of moody, intentional space I’ve been dreaming about. Easy, right? Wrong. It turns out you cannot simply strap decorative wood strips to a ceiling and call it structure; it requires a completely different approach. And the most upsetting part? It means removing the crown molding we already installed. The crown molding we spackled, caulked, and prepped to paint.

I am devastated.

We gave ourselves a weekend off after that discovery, which I needed and resented simultaneously. Because here’s the thing, the space is already pulling me in. It’s cozy in a way that feels earned, moody in a way that feels deliberate, layered with just enough warmth that it’s become the only room in the house I want to sit in. The gallery wall is mapped out in my head. The window treatments are calling my name. I’m ready. And I cannot do any of it until we sort the ceiling.

So for now, we wait. Grudgingly, impatiently, but we wait.

The $400 Char I Got for $40

Since the ceiling had me in a chokehold, I redirected my energy somewhere I could actually make progress: the lounge corner.

The chair I’d been using for the past five years — a tall, high-backed, mid-century modern piece I bought from Wayfair when we first moved in — has seen better days and no longer belongs in a room that has evolved into something darker, warmer, and more intentional than it was. It needed to go.

I started hunting for a lounge or club chair that felt right, and eventually found one on Facebook Marketplace for $40. When I did a reverse image search, it turned out to be the exact same chair I’d been eyeing on Amazon for $400.

I will not pay $400 for a chair off of Amazon. I will absolutely drive across town for $40.

The only catch was a wonky leg, which, if you have a handy husband, is not really a catch at all. He fixed the leg. And while he was doing that, I — a woman with no chill and no patience for waiting — decided to make an ottoman.

The Footstool I Made Myself (Because I Have Zero Chill)

The sensible version of me would have found a matching ottoman on Facebook Marketplace and waited. The actual version of me remembered that I had purchased some decorative legs with the intention of swapping them out on the chair, realized they weren’t structurally designed for a chair at all — better suited for a footstool or small table — and immediately interpreted that as a sign from the universe.

So I built one. And it is genuinely one of the most satisfying things I’ve made.

The project sounds more intimidating than it is. Here’s exactly how it came together:

Step 1: Prep the legs. My legs were pine, which needs to be conditioned before staining. Skip this step, and the stain will go on unevenly and blotch. I used a wood conditioner first, then finished with Deep Colonial Walnut stain for that dark, rich tone I wanted. If you’d rather paint them, skip the conditioner and use whatever paint you have on hand.

Step 2: Build the cushion. Spray-glue the plywood, adhere the 3-inch foam, spray the foam, and adhere the 2-inch foam on top. You’ll end up with a surprisingly satisfying stack that already looks like something.

Step 3: Wrap with batting. Staple gun time. Wrap the batting all the way around the cushion, pulling it taut as you go. This is what gives the final piece its soft, rounded edges.

Step 4: Add the fabric. Same process as the batting,

wrap and staple. The corners are where your patience gets tested, but take your time. The goal is flat and smooth. If you gather too much fabric at the edges, the staples won’t reach, so keep it even.

Step 5: Finish the back. Use your leftover fabric to create a clean backing on the underside. It’s a small detail, but it’s the difference between something handmade and something that looks handmade.

Step 6: Attach the legs. Hand this part off if you can. My husband installed the brackets; I supervised. It was a good system.

One thing I wish someone had told me: once everything is stapled, do a few small hand stitches along the corner seams where the fabric folds over. It keeps everything lying flat and tight instead of puckering at the edges. A small extra step that makes a big visual difference.

The whole thing cost a fraction of what I would have spent buying one, fits the corner perfectly, and I made it with my own hands in an afternoon. My dark, moody office now has a lounge corner that actually feels like a lounge corner, and that is deeply satisfying.

Supply List

From Home Depot:

• 2×2 ft., ¾-inch plywood sheet

• 9-inch furniture legs (pine)

• 4 leg mounting brackets

• Decorative upholstery tacks (optional but worth it)

From Hobby Lobby:

• Spray-on adhesive

• 15×17-inch, 3-inch thick upholstery foam

• 15×17-inch, 2-inch thick upholstery foam

• Polyester batting

• 1 yard upholstery fabric of your choice

• Staple gun + staples

Also needed:

• Wood conditioner (if staining pine legs)

• Stain or paint for legs
  

What I’m Reading (Or Trying To)

Let’s talk books, and specifically the small, persistent cloud of reading-related shame I’ve been carrying around this week.

I have been reading — or attempting to read — C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. I am on the second book, Perelandra, and I will be honest with you in a way that feels mildly embarrassing to admit: it is not going well.

Lewis builds worlds the way someone furnishes a room, layer by layer, with tremendous care and almost no urgency. And in its own right, that’s remarkable. He was imagining the cosmos well before humanity had ever left Earth, filtering it through a medieval theological framework that is genuinely fascinating to sit inside. I love what his mind was doing. I just cannot stay present long enough to fully appreciate it. The pace is slow in a way that loosens my grip on the story, and Perelandra, in particular, is giving me a kind of narrative motion sickness I was not prepared for. I’ll spare you the spoilers, but: bro. Something needs to happen.

So, I’ve made a decision.

I am officially pausing the Space Trilogy. I’m not ready to call it a DNF — I cannot bring myself to say those letters out loud — but I am shelving it for now, with what I choose to describe as “hopeful intentions” rather than denial. My actual goal was always That Hideous Strength, the third book, which is the one I wanted to read in the first place. I simply made the mistake of obligating myself to read the first two in order, as a person of integrity and principle, and now I am suffering the consequences of that decision.

We’re taking a break. The books will be here when I’m ready.

In the meantime, I’m moving on to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

If you know Tartt, you know her from The Goldfinch, but The Secret History came first, published in 1992, and I’ve had it on my list for longer than I’m comfortable admitting. The premise: “Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path beyond human constructs of morality.”

The first sentence grabbed me immediately. Which, after the struggle of the last few weeks, felt like relief. I will probably open it the moment I finish writing this newsletter.

So: C.S. Lewis is benched, I’m in partial denial about it, and I’m cautiously — carefully — optimistic about what’s coming next. I’ll keep you posted.

Writing Curriculum. Here’s Week Two.

Look, this week broke me a little.

Not in the way Week One did, where it was mostly about shaking off the stiffness of not writing fiction in a while. This week was harder in a more specific, more personal way; it exposed something about how my brain is wired, and what it exposed surprised me.

The entire focus of Week Two was learning to not close the loop.

Don’t explain. Don’t answer the question your own words have already answered. Don’t be so obvious. Build the tension, put the reader in the room, and then stop, before the resolution, before the explanation, before the moment where you tie everything together neatly and make sure they understand. Let them sit with it. Let them feel it without being told what they’re feeling.

My analytical journalist brain looked at that assignment and said: absolutely not.”

Most of what I do on a daily basis requires me to clearly and definitively land the point. That is the job. State the thing, back it up, answer the question, close the loop, and do it without ambiguity, because ambiguity in my line of work is a failure of craft, not a feature of it. So being told to deliberately leave the door open, to trust that the reader will feel what I never named? That went against every instinct within me.

It was not in my nature. And it showed.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Assignment

Week Two is called Scene Architecture & Escalation, and it picks up exactly where Week One left off. If Week One was about learning to find tension in a piece of writing, Week Two is about learning to build it, deliberately, beat by beat, through behavior and environment, without ever naming what you’re doing.

The core instruction for the week is a single line:

When you feel the urge to explain — pause. Cut the sentence. See if the scene survives.

It will. Almost every time.

The objectives: understand how a scene escalates through behavior rather than statement, recognize and practice a three-beat structure of rising tension, write a complete escalation scene that ends just before resolution, apply that pressure to one paragraph from my journalism, and build a daily journaling habit running alongside everything else.

Five parts. Here’s how they broke down:

Part 1 — Reading. Two more Hemingway stories: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (quiet, devastating — almost nothing happens, and yet you feel everything) and Indian Camp (brutal, strange, and shocking — Hemingway never explains the ending; he only describes what the child sees). The assignment was mechanics, not analysis: where does the emotional temperature rise? What does Hemingway withhold, and what does that withholding create? What’s the last image, and why does it land?

Part 2 — Craft Reading. The “Toolbox” section from Stephen King’s On Writing — a great book, by the way, if you haven’t read it — specifically on vocabulary and description. King’s argument is that description should feel inevitable, not constructed. The question to carry into the drill: what is the difference between a decorative detail and a load-bearing one? No written response required. Just read actively and let the question do its work.

Part 3 — Escalation Drill. Write a 700–900 word scene from a specific prompt — two people in a room, one wants to leave, one needs them to stay, no explanation of why — built across a strict three-beat structure. Beat One: managed tension. Something is slightly wrong, but no one has said it yet. Beat Two: the crack. Something small breaks the surface. Beat Three: the crack widens, and the scene becomes unbearable — but nothing has been said directly. End here. Not after. Do not explain. Do not resolve it. Trust the behavior.

This is the part that made me want to throw something and also the part I’m most proud of.

Part 4 — Journalism Application. Take one paragraph from a recent article — something explanatory, something that summarizes — and rewrite it as a scene. Find the physical moment where that information was happening. Same facts, completely different experience. I still have this one to complete 😉.

Part 5 — Daily Journaling. A new addition this week: five morning prompts designed to train observation without the pressure of craft. Monday was the anxious room — describe the one thing you’d notice if you were anxious. Tuesday was the unsaid thing — write a real conversation where something wasn’t being said. Wednesday was hands only — describe a person using only their hands, no face allowed. Thursday was the scene behind the story — take a moment from your journalism and write it as fiction. Friday was a free prompt with one rule: change your name.

I did everything except Friday. It’ll get done.

Want the full Week Two curriculum? I’ve linked it here: 👉 PHASE 1 – WEEK TWO | Scene Architecture & Escalation

This was a hard week. My loop-closing instincts showed up fully armed and I had to fight them the entire time. But something in Part 3 surprised me — and I think that’s exactly the point.

Paying subscribers can read all of my completed work below the paywall. ⬇️

The Time Australia Declared War on Birds. The Birds Won.

I need you to understand something before we get into this: the Australian government looked at a field full of emus and genuinely thought, we need to send in the military.

Not farmers. Not wildlife management. Not a very large fence.

The military. With machine guns.

And still lost.

This is the Great Emu War of 1932, an insane historical disaster, a startling example of human overconfidence meeting nature's complete indifference. Nature didn’t even blink.

Here’s the setup. After World War I, the Australian government did what governments often do after wars: it handed out land to veterans as a thank-you for their service. Settle down, farm some wheat, build something. The land was in Western Australia, out near Campion, and for a while, things were fine. Then the emus showed up.

About 20,000 of them.

Every year after breeding season, emus migrated through the region, and they had apparently decided that the newly cultivated farmland — with its fresh water and abundant crops — was an excellent rest stop. The farmers, who were already struggling through the Great Depression and could not afford to lose their harvest, appealed to the government for help.

The government sent Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery, two soldiers, and two Lewis guns.

Take a moment with that. Two machine guns. For emus.

The operation launched in November 1932 with tremendous confidence and went sideways almost immediately. The first attempt to engage a flock of about 50 emus ended when the birds scattered before the soldiers got within effective range. The guns jammed. The emus dispersed into the scrub in small groups, which, as it turns out, is nearly impossible to pursue across open terrain in a truck. The few birds that were hit often absorbed the shots and kept running. What is happening with emus? Major Meredith later reportedly compared their resilience to soldiers in battle, perhaps the most unhinged compliment ever paid to a flightless bird.

After less than a week, the operation was quietly suspended. Not because anyone officially called it off, but because it wasn’t working and everyone involved was aware that it wasn’t working, and the whole thing was becoming embarrassing.

The media, to their eternal credit, had an absolute field day. The ornithologist who had been consulted on the operation suggested that the emus had functionally adopted guerrilla tactics, dispersing into smaller, harder-to-target units when threatened. There was a proposal in Parliament to award the emus medals. Major Meredith was quoted as saying that if a military division had the same resilience as these birds, it would face any army in the world.

They tried again in December. Same result. By the end of the month, the military withdrew. Again. Permanently.

The farmers eventually got their fences. The emus are still there.

This story exposes how the government has an extraordinary capacity to escalate before trying the obvious thing. The farmers needed a fence. What they got first was an army. The army failed. Eventually, quietly, they built the fence.

How often do we do that? Reach for the biggest, loudest, most impressive solution — the machine guns, the grand gesture, the dramatic intervention — when what the situation actually required was something far simpler and far more patient?

The emus never changed. They just kept being emus. And that, in the end, was enough.

That’s the week. An office ceiling that is actively humbling me, a $40 chair I would die for, a footstool I built with my own two hands and zero patience, a curriculum that is forcing me to fight my own instincts, a book I finally want to stay up late for, and the story of a government that lost a war to birds and then quietly built a fence like none of it ever happened.

See you next Sunday.

For paying subscribers only

If you’re a paid subscriber, everything from Week Two is waiting for you below: the Hemingway reading notes, the escalation drill that surprised me, the break room scene with the thumb drive I had no business writing, and the daily journal entries, including the one that turned into something I wasn’t expecting.

This is the part of Sunday Desk I actually had to earn. And this week, it cost me something, which I think means it’s working.

Not a subscriber yet? The curriculum is built week by week, and this is where the real work lives. Come along.

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My most recent obsession has been redoing my home office. I genuinely thought I could knock it out over a weekend, maybe a week at most. We are solidly two weeks in, and while I am back in my office, it is not yet complete. We had a few instances of mission creep, which delayed finishing the project — but honestly? I love how it’s coming along. It’s shaping up to be exactly what I envisioned.

The whole vibe I was going for was cozy, quiet, and intentional — a space where I could shut out the noise and actually focus on work, reading, and writing. So far, it looks like I’ve pulled it off.

By the way, I have included some affiliate links to the items we used. So if you click it and buy it, thank you for your support. ;)

The Color

I have drenched this office in Mountain Olive by Behr, and I am absolutely in love with it — walls, ceiling, trim, all of it. It’s my favorite tone of green. It’s dark. It’s moody. It’s comforting. It’s everything I wanted this room to be.

That said, the project did not start off well.

I made the mistake of confusing my paint colors and ordered from a leftover I had upstairs — a very bright green I’d used as an accent wall in one of the guest rooms. I didn’t catch the mistake until I came downstairs the following morning to find all four walls of my office painted a very vibrant, very wrong green. An entire day lost. I had to start over and repaint everything in Mountain Olive, which, again, I cannot express how much I love. Consider that my official endorsement.

The Built-In Bookcase

One of the bigger projects in this room is the built-in bookcase, which I’ll be honest — it’s a little jerry-rigged, and I mean that affectionately.

The original plan was for my husband to build it from scratch using hardwood. He has many projects on his plate, and I have zero patience to wait, so I purchased three bookcases from Amazon instead. (I know, I know — the Billy bookcase from IKEA is the standard move, but the Billy is too large for the space I was working with.) After a lot of digging, I found these three, and they fit the space perfectly. They’re not IKEA quality, but they’ll do for now, and it buys my husband some breathing room before he eventually builds me the real thing. Estimated time of arrival: three years, give or take.

I did a light sanding before painting them, though in hindsight I should have primed them first — the paint is a little delicate in some spots and has peeled where anything hard catches on it. With books, though, it’s holding up fine. As for the actual built-in installation, that was entirely my husband’s doing. I know he used some 2x4s, screws, and plywood. That’s all I’ve got. I handled the painting. I also swapped out the cabinet knobs for antique brass and added picture light fixtures above the bookcase, which my husband wired — another department I have no information on.

The Wallpaper

I found the wallpaper on the Home Depot website. It comes in two colorways — black and green — though the “black” version is really just a dark background with the detail rendered in green tones, along with the most charming red strawberries. It’s a genuinely lovely pattern.

This is a peel-and-stick wallpaper, not a glue-on, and the type I chose allows for adjustment during application, which I appreciated. It’s also more of a vinyl than traditional paper, so you can stretch it slightly to get the pattern lines to line up — a small but very welcome detail.

The Rug Saga

I also got a brand-new area rug for the room — though not without a detour.

My initial purchase was a burgundy red rug, which turned out to be a catastrophic mistake. Against the paint, the whole room looked like Christmas, it also clashed with the wallpaper. I have no idea what I was thinking. I returned it immediately and replaced it with a brown faded area rug, and I cannot overstate how much I love it. It doesn’t feel like a traditional rug at all — it’s velvety underfoot, it’s thin enough to fold and manage easily, and according to the packaging, it’s washable. As in, I can put it in a commercial front-load washer. When you have a home with five dogs, the words “washable rug” are genuinely life-changing. I haven’t tested that yet, but when I do, I’ll report back.

What’s Left

We still have quite a bit of finishing work ahead. The baseboards and crown molding aren’t done yet, and the ceiling — originally a popcorn ceiling, which I refused to deal with after past experience — is being covered with painted cabinet-quality plywood. My husband routed the edges of some 2x1s to create a grid pattern that will cover the seams and give the ceiling a more finished, intentional look. It’s going to be beautiful.

The bookcase still needs some trim added to it, and a slightly funny note, when we first installed the bookcase lights, we realized they don’t have switches. We assumed they would. They do not. So when we first wired them in, they could not be turned off. My husband got it situated after a moment of frustration.

Once all the finishing touches are done, I’ll install the window treatments, add artwork to the walls, and finish filling out the bookcase. I’m also on the hunt for a new leather club chair to replace the lounger I currently have in the corner.

It’s not done. But it’s getting there — and you’ll be seeing a lot of it in the background of upcoming podcast episodes. In the meantime, please enjoy the very unedited, very real, I-don’t-care photos of my unfinished office. You’re welcome.

Ink Tracing

I’ve discovered ink tracing, and I think I’m in love. At least for now. If you’re a fan of adult coloring books, you’re going to want to try this.

It was my long-time girlfriend who pulled me in. About a month ago, she sent me an IG reel of an account selling an ink tracing set, and I immediately bought the book and the extended pack of pens.

What I love about this particular book is the paper stock — it’s sturdy, and once you’re done, you have a frameable piece of art. I fully intend to frame this lady and hang her in my office. The one downside is that the book only has 10 images, and I can already see myself flying through them. I’ve found other ink tracing books on Amazon with close to 100 images, but I suspect those are designed for laying tracing paper over rather than working directly on the page like this one. I’ll report back once I inevitably cave and buy one.

Anyway, ink tracing is fun. Give it a try.

I Started a Writing Curriculum. Here’s Week One.

Remember a few weeks ago when I shared that I decided to be a student again.

Not in the enrollment-and-tuition sense. More like: I sat down, built myself a writing curriculum from scratch, and told myself to actually do the assignments. No skipping. No skimming. No convincing myself that reading about a technique counts as practicing it.

Week One is called The Engine of Story: Tension + Change, and if you’ve ever tried to make a piece of writing feel alive instead of just correct — something I struggle with — you already know why that’s the right place to start.

The objective for the week was simple on paper: recognize tension in any piece of writing, identify where change occurs in a narrative, write a short fictional scene that contains both, and apply it. Four parts, each about 20–30 minutes.

Here’s how it broke down:

Part 1 — Reading. Two texts. Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants (short, brutal, nothing happens and everything happens) and the opening of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (just the first 10–15 pages — the list section). The goal wasn’t literary analysis. It was mechanics. Where is the tension? What changes? How does the writer build it without telling you it’s there?

I was really surprised by how much these short readings struck me. They contained a lot of hidden tension and symbolism. Fantastic writing.

Part 2 — Analysis. Take one of the readings, answer four questions: What is the central tension? What happens if that tension disappears? Where does the emotional temperature rise? What changes by the end? The prompt at the bottom of the assignment sheet is blunt: If there’s no change, there’s no story.

Part 3 — Fiction Drill. Write an 800–1,200-word scene from a specific prompt, with a strict rule set designed to force you away from exposition and into the body, the room, and the subtext. No explaining. No speeches. End at the moment of irreversible choice. Not after. Don’t over-explain, something I do all the time.

Part 4 — Application. Pick one recent article. Find a paragraph that is informational. Rewrite it as a narrative. Same facts, different tension.

Want the full Week One curriculum? I’ve linked it here: 👉 PHASE 1 – WEEK ONE | The Engine of Story: Tension + Change

I did all four assignments. And I’ll be honest — Part 3 surprised me with what came out.

Paying subscribers can read all of my completed work below the paywall. ⬇️

Some of What I Consumed

• This Sixties Musician Died Mysteriously. Was He the Victim of a Serial Killer? - Rolling Stone

• A dive into the history of Iran - 60 Minutes Archive

• The Gray House (Series) - Prime Video

• Between the sheets at the college Excel championships - Washington Post

• James Talarico represents Christianity’s past, not its future - Washington Post

The Day Key West Declared War on America (and Won) - 1982

There are protests, and then there is this.

Most people, when pushed to the edge by federal bureaucracy, write a strongly worded letter or maybe a very angry post nobody reads. The people of Key West, Florida, looked at that option, folded it neatly in half, and chose chaos instead, and you all know I love a little chaos. In the most spectacular, sun-soaked, absolutely unhinged act of civic theater ever staged on American soil, they seceded from the United States, declared war on the federal government, surrendered immediately, and demanded foreign aid — all in under two minutes.

You guys, it worked.

Let’s back up.

In the spring of 1982, the U.S. Border Patrol set up a roadblock on U.S. Route 1 at Florida City, the only road that connects the Florida Keys to the mainland. The stated purpose was to intercept undocumented immigrants and drug smugglers. The practical effect was treating every single person leaving Key West like they were crossing an international border. Cars were backed up for miles. Tourism cratered. The locals, already a particular breed of sun-drenched, salt-worn, very-much-not-interested-in-your-federal-nonsense types, were furious.

Mayor Dennis Wardlow drove up to Miami to seek a federal injunction to have the checkpoint removed. The court said no. And here is where a reasonable mayor returns home, holds a press conference, and sighs deeply into the camera. Dennis Wardlow was not that mayor.

On April 23, 1982, he stood in Mallory Square — Key West’s famous waterfront plaza, the same spot where locals gather every single evening to collectively applaud the sunset like it’s doing something new — and announced that the Florida Keys were seceding from the United States of America, effective immediately. The Conch Republic, named for the beloved sea creatures and the longtime nickname for native Key Westers, was born.

They had a flag. They had a prime minister. They had a whole aesthetic.

Then, in a move that can only be described as inspired, they declared war on the United States. The entire military campaign lasted approximately one minute and involved breaking a stale loaf of Cuban bread over the head of a man in a U.S. Navy uniform. (I want to be very clear: this was consensual. He was a prop. The bread was the weapon.) Having engaged in sufficient hostilities, Prime Minister Wardlow immediately surrendered to the Admiral of the U.S. Navy base nearby, and then, in a masterstroke, demanded $1 billion in foreign aid to help rebuild the war-ravaged nation.

The federal government, to its credit, apparently had no protocol for this.

What followed was equal parts farce and political brilliance. The press ate it alive. The story spread. Tourists, delighted by the whole spectacle, flocked to Key West not in spite of the absurdity but because of it. And the Border Patrol checkpoint? Quietly dismantled. The whole thing worked precisely because it was ridiculous; you cannot argue with a man who has already declared war, surrendered, and is now applying for foreign aid while holding a conch fritter. There’s no regulatory framework for that.

The Conch Republic never officially rejoined the United States, for what it’s worth. Technically, it remains in a state of “friendly secession.” They issue their own passports (allegedly once accepted at a border crossing, though I would not personally test this). They have a national motto: We Seceded Where Others Failed. Every April, they celebrate Conch Republic Independence Days with parades, mock naval battles in the harbor, and exactly the level of commitment to the bit that you would expect from a place that has been doing this since 1982.

I really admire the spirit and creativity in calling out your government and getting things done. Sometimes the answer isn’t to fight the system on its own terms or to quietly comply and seethe. Instead, Key West decided the answer was to make itself so spectacularly impossible to ignore that the system simply found it easier to give them what they wanted and move on.

And they got a really good story out of it.

The Conch Republic still sells commemorative passports. Their website still refers to themselves as “the Smallest, Best-Natured Nation in the World.” And Key West still stops every evening to clap for the sunset, as if to say: yes, we see it. We know. We live here on purpose.

That's the week. A half-finished office I'm already in love with, a new hobby I didn't ask for but fully endorse, a writing curriculum that is making me think harder than I expected, and the most unhinged act of civic protest I've ever had the pleasure of researching. Honestly? Not a bad Sunday Desk.

See you next Sunday.

For paying subscribers only

If you’re a paid subscriber, everything from Week One is waiting for you below — the fiction drill, the Hemingway deep dive, the newsletter rewrite, and the instructor feedback that made me rethink the whole scene. It’s the part of Sunday Desk I actually had to earn.

Not a subscriber yet? This is the work — and if you want to follow along as I work through the curriculum, this is where it lives.

Subscribe now

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