Posted by Alicia Oltuski

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/carmen-sandiegos-flight-to-redacted-gets-grounded-due-to-air-traffic-reductions

4:50 a.m. — Carmen arrives at the airport for her 6:15 a.m. flight.

4:53 a.m. — Carmen heads to security early, because she doesn’t have TSA PreCheck, CLEAR, or the subscription service where a man in a suit carries you, piggyback, to the front of the line.

5:03 a.m. — Carmen fills a plastic tray with her laptop, beeper, wallet, trench coat, and part of an ancient tombstone she stole back from England and is supposed to deliver to [REDACTED] before getting found by the kids on the show.

5:05 a.m. — Carmen’s luggage is flagged, and she has to go to the manual inspection table in only her leggings and the Backstreet Boys T-shirt she’s wearing under her trench coat, while a security team member inspects her belongings.

5:10 a.m. — Carmen skims the terminal signboards, which seem to be written by Samuel Beckett. An arrow pointing left has Gates A31–C42 written beneath it. An arrow pointing right has Gates B15–C25 written beneath it. They both lead to the same place: a Hudson News.

5:35 a.m. — The sign at Carmen’s gate says, DEMOCRATS WANT THIS PLANE TO CRASH—EXPECT DELAYS.

5:52:01 a.m. — Carmen emails herself a reminder to buy dinner at O’Hare, which is where her connecting flight to [REDACTED] departs from. She receives her own automatic vacation response, which she realizes sounds obnoxious. She deletes that away message and writes a different one.

5:52:35 a.m. — In the time between when she cancels her original away message and puts up her new one, she gets an email from an old coworker saying, “YOU HAVEN’T POSTED PICS FROM MAR DEL PLATA YET!!”

5:53 a.m. — Carmen quickly copies and pastes her new automatic reply and sends it back to her old coworker. She got a fedora-burn in Mar del Plata that makes her look like the Phantom of the Opera in all the photos.

6:10 a.m. — The gate agent turns on his microphone and reads from a federally provided text. “Your flight will be delayed by 8.5 hours due to the execution of two hundred air traffic control workers by the Democratic Party. Your new estimated departure time is the sad hour of 2:36 p.m. Have a good day.”

6:12 a.m. — Carmen goes to the bathroom.

6:16 a.m. — When she gets back, the gate agent is talking to people who have places to be.

6:33 a.m. — Carmen pulls up later flights from Chicago to [REDACTED] on her phone.

6:38 a.m. — She emails her producer to say she might miss her connecting flight.

6:45 a.m. — Her producer emails her back to say that she needs to find an alternate route if this one isn’t going to work.

6:57 a.m. — Carmen approaches the gate agent, which she feels bad about, and asks about alternative connecting flights. The agent looks into it and comes up with three alternative flights, one of which has been canceled and two of which he refers to as a “two-for-one tandem situation,” created to allow the same amount of air traffic controllers to handle twice the air traffic.

6:58 a.m. — Carmen cries into the collar of her trench coat. Apologetically, the gate agent consults a piece of paper and says, “If it’s any consolation, tandem flying, as well as anything else, is safer than Chicago.”

7:01 a.m. — Carmen emails her producer.

7:06 a.m. — Her producer writes back, “If you have to go to another airport, do it.” No other airports have flights that connect to [REDACTED] in time, Carmen has checked.

8:15 a.m. — Carmen’s flight’s departure status is now “Around five, if your local Democrat congressmember doesn’t kill the pilot.”

9:05 a.m. — Carmen books the two-for-one tandem flights. She stops at the bathroom on her way to the new gate. It’s possible she has a UTI.

9:15 a.m. — Carmen writes her producer to update them and gets an email back from HR saying, “LOL, aren’t you supposed to be, like, elusive? Everyone knows you’re in El Paso.”

10:30 a.m. — The tandem flights’ gate starts to get crowded, because there are two planes’ worth of passengers, plus the people trying to switch. The flights have been delayed two and a half hours each, for a total of five hours. Carmen’s trench coat is drenched.

1:16 p.m. — Carmen finds a bar and orders a vodka martini. She removes her compression socks. She places the ancient tombstone faceup on the bar, so that its hieroglyphs don’t get scuffed. She secretly hopes people think she got it from the Louvre.

2:25 p.m. — More travelers from her original flight pour into the tandem-flight gate because their flight has been further delayed, because, per the federal government, the Democrats are filling aircraft engines with health care.

2:40 p.m. — Carmen’s situationship texts her, “U up?” Carmen writes, “I have been up for eleven hours.” He texts back “k.”

2:54 p.m. — The pilot and copilot are arguing about who gets to fly the left plane, which is easier to land, because [REDACTED]’s runway requires a full view of the left side.

2:54 p.m. — Someone asks, “Is this safe?”

2:55 p.m. — An announcement from somewhere, it’s unclear where, says, “Why are you all obsessed with classroom sizes?” Carmen regrets her red fedora.

3:23 p.m. — The pilot and copilot get into a physical altercation.

4:00 p.m. — Carmen gets an email from her producer. Rockapella is singing a version of the theme song where they change the lyrics from “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?” to “Carmen Sandiego is at El Paso International Airport.”

4:26 p.m. — Carmen tries to approach the new gate agent for an update, since the information board now just shows a picture of a skull and bones. The gate agent is busy talking to a woman who wants to be moved to left plane, because she gets nauseous on right plane.

4:32 p.m. — Carmen sits down in a chair near the gate agent’s desk. A man in a red baseball cap looks at the hieroglyphs on the ancient tombstone and says, “Speak English.”

4:38 p.m. — Carmen’s producer sends her an audio clip of Rockapella’s new version of the song. The baritone sings the words “El Paso International Airport.” The kid contestants on the show and her producer are cracking up.

6:16 p.m. — On the information board, the skull and bones morph into the image of a donkey with a dialogue cloud that says, “I just canceled your flight(s), because I’m an ass.”

6:48 p.m. — Her producer emails to say they’re re-airing the episode where an audience member charged the stage, grabbed the World Band Radio, and called Carmen a gold-digging narcissist.

7:30 p.m. —Carmen finds a carpeted space by a window, lies down, cancels her Airbnb in [REDACTED], and closes her eyes to avoid the desperately zipping light sticks a single air traffic controller uses outside to direct three pairs of tandem flights.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/carmen-sandiegos-flight-to-redacted-gets-grounded-due-to-air-traffic-reductions

Posted by Tatiana Swancy

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/with-america-on-my-last-fucking-nerve-i-justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-dissent

You know me as the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. Over the past three years, I’ve tried changing the system from within. I’ve written increasingly urgent court opinions. I’ve even deployed symbolism. For President Trump’s second inauguration, I wore a massive cowrie-shell collar honoring my African ancestry and the strength and ingenuity it requires to overcome America’s darkest days. Nothing gets through to you people.

In the last court term, I wrote ten dissenting opinions, more than any other justice. Have you previewed the horror show on the docket for this term? Alito just winked at me and asked if it’s too soon to joke that I don’t have the brain processing power to do this job.

Other Supreme Court justices like to pretend that we’re an apolitical group who can be friends despite our fundamental ideological differences. We bond over a shared ability to stash our humanity inside the pockets of our robes like wads of damp Kleenex. Let the record reflect: I can’t stand these people. You won’t catch me riding shotgun in Neil Gorsuch’s midlife-crisis convertible. I’m not RSVPing yes to an e-vite for dinner at Clarence and Ginni Thomas’s house.

When I was a student at Harvard, I took drama classes and even performed in an improv troupe with the corny name, On Thin Ice. Your justice has layers. Of course, my favorite musical is the hopeful reimagining of America’s birth, Hamilton. The good news is I work in the room where it happens. The bad news is the room is in hell, and Amy Coney Barrett keeps trying to touch my cowrie shells.

Do you remember the Supreme Court’s decision on Trump v. CASA? It happened months ago, so you’ve probably already suppressed it like voting rights are about to be. My conservative colleagues ruled in favor of limiting federal judges’ ability to block the president’s executive orders from going into effect across the country, even if they’re unconstitutional. Hostile reminder: Federal judges have been the only barrier between President Trump and his quest to end birthright citizenship. Until the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship, Black people weren’t considered citizens, because of a little thing called slavery. I was so freaked out by the ruling that I wrote my own dissent separate from the other liberal justices. To quote myself, this will “surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.”

Uh, helllooo?

Maybe you caught my footnote where I compared our new era of unchecked presidential power to Nazi Germany.

America, are you seriously not picking up what I’m putting down? I’m old enough to remember when everyone was like “believe Black women.”

When my conservative colleagues let the president lift humanitarian parole protections for more than 500,000 migrants, I wrote that they were “rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation.”

Maybe you’d pay more attention if I started a Substack.

I can hear you worrying that I’m not impartial. My identity as a Black woman has heightened my empathy for marginalized groups and sensitivity to the government’s abuses of power. This is unlike white male justices who never let their racial or gender identity affect their decision-making. You might concede that this great nation was founded on a heady mix of democratic ideals, misogyny, and racism. (I would’ve thrown in white supremacy, but I know that I’m already… wait for it… On Thin Ice.)

While you realize birthright citizenship and the Voting Rights Act were once imperative to make America less racist, all that has become as unnecessary to you as affirmative action since you think we now live in a colorblind society. For proof, you look no further than the fact that I, a Black woman, get to be a Supreme Court justice in these final days of democracy.

I’ve seen it all. I’m the only Supreme Court justice in history to have previously served as a public defender. I grew up in Miami, or as I call it, the shadows of Mar-a-Lago. I eat lunch every day with Brett Kavanaugh. When I tell you this is dire, believe me.

The old mantle clock of my hero, Justice Thurgood Marshall, is displayed in my office. I know that as he looks down on me from the heavenly respite he so richly deserves, he thinks: America is still litigating voting rights? The Fourteenth Amendment? Abortion? Kentaji, what in the actual fuck?

A Supreme Court justice really is just a cog in an irreparably corrupt system. And as we listen together to his clock’s hand tick each fleeting second, we’re comforted by the knowledge that soon enough there won’t be a Supreme Court left.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/with-america-on-my-last-fucking-nerve-i-justice-ketanji-brown-jackson-dissent

Posted by Tom Ellison

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/when-it-happens

It’s been so long, you sometimes forget that eventually, IT will HAPPEN.

It’s impossible to say when IT will HAPPEN. But it can’t be too long until IT HAPPENS. Looking at the data (age, high-stress job, cardiac history), it is statistically plausible that IT will HAPPEN in the next thirty-six months.

Eighteen, if you factor in hamburger consumption and all the weird bruising.

Of course, it doesn’t feel right to want IT to HAPPEN. And it’s obviously not okay to try to make IT HAPPEN. That’s not what this is ABOUT, just to make things CLEAR LEGALLY as far as VARIOUS AGENCIES are concerned.

But regardless, IT is going to HAPPEN. So you’re allowed to think about IT.

Theoretically, some longevity breakthrough could happen that would enable IT to NEVER HAPPEN. Just the idea is PSYCHOLOGICALLY COMPLICATED. But realistically, IT will HAPPEN. After all, the medical research apparatus will shortly be fully dismantled, unless IT HAPPENS soon.

So, it’s fair to say that IT will happen. But you also prepare for the possibility, even if unlikely, that IT won’t HAPPEN for a long time. Some of you may not last long enough to see IT HAPPEN, which is RICH.

But you imagine where you might be, eventually, when you learn IT has HAPPENED.

Maybe you will wake up, anxious and scared and angry (i.e., normal).

Walk past the armed men and the protesters and the destitute.

Then, out of nowhere, the push notification from THE NEWS: “Breaking: IT Has HAPPENED.”

What will you feel like? When IT HAPPENS?

When IT HAPPENS, it will probably be FEELING. Just a huge, overwhelming sense of FEELING, the kind where you didn’t even realize how starved you were for FEELING. Punctuated with alternating waves of SECOND FEELING, as well as SENSATION.

Plus, a sudden absence of THIRD FEELING, which makes you realize the toll of A CONSTANT BASELINE OF LOW-GRADE THIRD FEELING for ten goddamn TIME PERIODS straight, even though you were still plenty aware of THIRD FEELING, trust me.

How might IT HAPPEN?

It may be morbid, but as it happens, there are many ways IT could HAPPEN.

Heart attack.

Golfing mishap.

An especially frightening NEWS SEGMENT on COASTAL CITY, which is generally not a statistically likely cause of IT HAPPENING, but is not out of the question, in THIS SPECIFIC CASE.

You may consider other WAYS IT might HAPPEN, especially when you are overwhelmed with THIRD FEELING.

You might then feel EMOTION, but don’t beat yourself up.

You wonder how THEY will react. When IT HAPPENS. It will probably be a complete SITUATION. It will be hard not to feel some amount of perverse SENSATION, watching THEIR POLITICAL FORTUNES.

And of course, you will have to tread carefully around RELATIVES, who will probably throw an absolute REACTION when IT HAPPENS. But WE can be MAGNANIMOUS in this new, post–IT HAPPENING world.

Still, you wonder what you’ll do, right after IT HAPPENS. Perhaps you will clutch your loved ones and watch TV, as the news anchors ACT APPROPRIATELY.

Perhaps you will SCREAM, out of OTHER FEELING.

Perhaps you will pop open a SPECIFIC BEVERAGE.

Perhaps you will scroll post after post.

Posts of INCREDULITY.

Posts of ANALYSIS OF WHAT COMES NEXT, WHICH CAN WAIT.

Posts of JOKES THAT EVEN YOU WOULD FIND TO BE IN POOR TASTE, NORMALLY, BUT NOT IN THIS CASE.

Posts SCOLDING THE PREVIOUS POSTS, AND POSTS REPLYING “WHATEVER MAN.”

Posts ABOUT OTHER TOPICS, AND IT’S LIKE, DON’T THEY KNOW IT HAPPENED?

Perhaps you will think of the countless people whose lives might have been DIFFERENT, if IT had HAPPENED sooner.

The important thing to remember, though, is that IT will HAPPEN.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/when-it-happens

Posted by Tessia Sue Phillips

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/keep-health-care-between-me-the-internet-and-my-friend-who-is-a-nurse

Senators, please get OUT of my uterus so my friend Brynn, who is almost finished with nursing school, can get in there STAT. My body doesn’t need to produce a child just because it can. Focus on other ways to ruin the country, and let Brynn and the internet give me Life of a Showgirl takes while deciding if I inhaled enough Drano to warrant an urgent-care run.

Can you jerks do all that? No. So leave me, the internet, and Brynn to our work.

I am a grown woman, and I reserve the right to feel anything, google it for several hours, send Brynn a text that says “lol help,” and receive the gold standard of compassionate medical advice. Brynn just took a final on this sort of patient care. Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe has never taken a final because he did not go to college.

And no, I’m not suggesting that WebMD or the AI computer monsters understand my body and the state of public health better than a human being. All I’m saying is that I have an excellent resource that provides me with less judgmental care than I’ve ever received in a healthcare facility, and I use the internet to supplement it.

Listen, Brynn was made for this—how many of your goons can say that? West Virginia Senator Jim Justice was a seven-time national champion corn grower, which is where his reproductive knowledge starts and stops. Brynn, on the other hand, was there for me when I broke one of my ribs at basketball practice sophomore year, and she’ll be there for me as I compensate for the broken education system that did not teach me what happens to my own body during the many phases of a woman’s life.

When I visit a doctor, I get an attitude from the receptionist and am charged four hundred dollars to come back next week. When I visit Brynn or Reddit, I get a diagnosis, a care plan, and some candid takes on the future of The Bear. I’ve never met a doctor who’s on time or can confirm that it’s okay for me to actively root against Carmy and Claire.

Recently, a pregnant friend was suffering from something called mastitis. I had no clue what that was. Thankfully, Brynn explained to me that her “boob had the flu,” and the internet showed me seventy-nine pictures of milk ducts. Do you think any of the current voters on the future of my reproductive care could ever contribute to such a useful definition of a health issue? Me neither. Until they do, get out of my uterus, and let Brynn work.

And I sure as hell don’t need Tim Sheehy’s plagiarizing-his-memoir ass calling me “indoctrinated.” I just need my camera roll and Brynn to remain open to texts that say “hey can i send u something gross?” after I have ruled out big stuff via a Google image search. Find me one GOP politician with the wherewithal, intelligence, and storage space to address my health concerns as soon as they happen, and they might have my vote.

No, I don’t know specifically what kind of nurse she is, but I do know that Brynn is the most helpful healthcare worker I have encountered in my twenty-five years of internet solution-seeking. So let her run point for my body, GOP, while you all stay in your ignorant, plagiarizing, and prize-corn-growing lanes.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/keep-health-care-between-me-the-internet-and-my-friend-who-is-a-nurse

Posted by Emily Bressler

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-company-but-outside-work-im-actually-a-really-good-person

I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I’m actually a really good person.

Let me give you an example. Last quarter, I led a team of engineers on an initiative to grow my company’s artificial intelligence data centers, which use millions of gallons of water per day. My work with AI is exponentially accelerating the destruction of the planet, but once a month, I go camping to reconnect with my own humanity through nature. I also bike to and from the office, which definitely offsets all the other environmental destruction I work tirelessly to enact from sunup to sundown for an exorbitant salary. Check out this social media post of me biking up a mountain. See? This is who I really am.

Does the leadership at my company promote a xenophobic agenda and use the wealth I help them acquire to donate directly to bigoted causes and politicians I find despicable? Yeah, sure. Did I celebrate my last birthday at Drag Brunch? Also yes. I even tipped with five-dollar bills. I contain multitudes, and would appreciate it if you focused on the brunch one.

Mathematically, it might seem like I spend a disproportionate amount of my time making the world a significantly less safe and less empathetic place, but are you counting all the hours I spend sleeping? You should. And when you do, you’ll find that my ratio of evil hours to not evil hours is much more even, numerically.

I just don’t think working at an evil company should define me. I’ve only worked here for seven years. What about the twenty-five years before, when I didn’t work here? In fact, I wasn’t working at all for the first eighteen years of my life. And for some of those early years, I didn’t even have object permanence, which is oddly similar to the sociopathic detachment with which I now think about other humans.

And besides, I don’t plan to stay at this job forever, just for my prime working years, until I can install a new state-of-the-art infinity pool in my country home. The problem is that whenever I think I’m going to leave, there’s always the potential for a promotion, and also a new upgrade for the pool, like underwater disco lights. Time really flies when you’re not thinking about the effect you have on others.

But I absolutely intend to leave at some point. And when I do, you should define me by whatever I do next, unless it’s also evil, in which case, define me by how I ultimately spend my retirement.

Because here’s the thing: It’s not me committing these acts of evil. I’m just following orders (until I get promoted; then I’ll get to give them). But until then, I do whatever my supervisor tells me to do, and that’s just how work works. Sure, I chose to be here, and yes, I could almost certainly find a job elsewhere, but redoing my résumé would take time. Also, I don’t feel like it. Besides, once a year, my company mandates all employees to help clean up a local beach, and I almost always go.

Speaking of the good we do at work, sometimes I wear a cool Hawaiian shirt on Fridays, and it’s commonly accepted that bad people don’t wear shirts with flowers on them. That’s just a fact. There’s something so silly about discussing opportunities to increase profits for international arms dealers while wearing a purple button-down covered in bright hibiscus blossoms.

And when it comes to making things even, I put my money where my mouth is. I might make more than 99 percent of all Americans, but I also make sure to donate almost 1 percent of my salary to nonprofits. This way, I can wear their company tote bag to my local food coop. Did I mention I shop at a local food coop? It’s quite literally the least I could do.

Of course, I don’t love everything the company does, but true love means loving something because of its flaws, not despite them. And more importantly, I’ve completely detached myself from reality and real suffering and intend to continue to do so as long as I work here and after I leave.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-company-but-outside-work-im-actually-a-really-good-person