Editor’s Note: We are living through an abnormal, hollow stretch of national leadership that defies ordinary description. From the loss of the Voting Rights Act to the chaos in Iran to open attempts to muzzle the media, this is not a moment to doze as a citizen. If the midterm elections are tampered with, there may be no bottom to what follows, so stay involved and stay ready.
I was lying in bed the other night reading a piece about the power of the Federal Reserve and the importance of an independent board beyond political influence. It was interesting but also a little heady. I was tired and I looked at my pile of books and a few magazines then turned my head toward the window to see the moon. I wondered to myself: what are the last words I'll ever read?
The fan was humming and I could hear my wife breathing softly and I thought about the freedom to read and how we use it. Then I mused on whether my last moments would be remember for what I was reading or something I said. What were the last words I spoke to anyone before bed?
Here's an uncomfortable truth: there's a good chance our actual last words, whether spoken or read, won't be anything profound. Most real last words are messy or never recorded. The items we quote from history books or the events we see on television are mostly made up with a bit of myth. That distinction matters because it’s really not the ending that counts.
Most of our lives are made up of a long series of imperfect sentences, half-remembered pages read, broken conversations, and routines we're mentally checked out of.
But we also have small, precise moments of bliss.
More than lying in bed reading this Federal Reserve piece, I have heard the bees in the camellias out front. Earlier in the day, I watched the arc of water flow from my daughter's watering can. Even the low mechanical hum of the bedroom fan is a part of me.
Those are the last words, in a way. They're just scattered through time instead of stacked up nicely at the finish line.
Now in my late fifties, I’m still feeling young but hitting that wall where the body doesn't respond like it used to. People you know keep dying. Even reading gets a bit more chore-driven with the need for better glasses and better light and bigger font. When I think about the last words I'll read, the books I may never get to, I'm really thinking about the end of my awareness.
While I want to be informed, I also want to remain human. I would rather remember the sound of my daughter's footsteps coming up the stairs. Atul Gawande spent years documenting what happens when medicine refuses to let people die on their own terms, and his conclusion in Being Mortal is essentially this: we get the ending wrong because we've stopped asking what a good life actually looks like along the way. Marcus Aurelius, writing two thousand years earlier, landed in roughly the same place. The life worth examining is the one that notices things, even the minutiae. Both of them are pointing at the same problem.
We are so busy managing the ending that we forget to live the middle.
When doctors and nurses talk about what people actually say near the end, the themes are simple: I love you. Forgive me. Remember me. That's where people's minds go when all the noise of the world falls away.
We hear about being stoic and practicing mindfulness, but all it really means is paying attention to the small details of every day. Being mindful of the moment. Lying in bed, hearing the fan, looking at my wife's sleeping face. These are the weird moments of clarity. They will not come again. This is the bees and the watering can. It's in the kitchen. In the drive to work. The minor chores. In tiny repeated acts that, taken together, are your life. It's the small, consistent choices that actually tell the truth about who you are, even reading at night. There's a piece worth reading on this that makes the case that attention isn't a resource to be optimized. It's the actual experience of being alive, right now. Modern life keeps trying to convince us otherwise, rushing through the day and arriving at the over-importance of the final words.
I'd like to be able to script my own ending, but it just isn't as important as what I am doing right now. There may not be the perfect last book to read or a famous fade away. That's just another form of trying to control, and death, though it may be postponed, cannot be controlled.
The point isn't to chase some perfect, cinematic final moment, but to live in a way that doesn't feel fraudulent. A lot of people reach my age, see friends die, and respond by numbing out as hard as possible. The better move is to let the ordinary feel sacred. I choose to keep pausing in the middle of boring policy paragraphs to recognize that, for the moment, I still have a heart that beats and a wife who breathes next to me. I am able to love, to see the moon, and feel the air moving in a bedroom at night.
And if, by some cosmic joke, the last words I read really are about US monetary policy, I'll take it. As long as I also stopped for the bees in the camellia, and knew, for a moment, what it meant to still be here.
This is more of “what I watched”, but it is a perfect contemplation for this issue.
For my Generation X, there’s one actor who defined the era. Here’s some wisdom he shared.
Finished Profiles in Ignorance this week, both a humorous and sadly factual account of how we got where we are.
clod·mon·ger /ˈkläd ˌmäNG-gər/
noun | American political vernacular, early 21st century
One who deliberately traffics in human incompetence; a leader, executive, or official who systematically recruits, elevates, and protects the willfully ignorant and the chronically unqualified; not through oversight or poor judgment, but as a calculated strategy of control. The clodmonger does not suffer fools gladly; he sources them, promotes them, and depends on them to maintain unchallenged authority. Distinguished from the merely negligent administrator by the purposefulness of the enterprise.
See also: doltwright, numptiarch, miniocrат
Antonym: meritocrat
Example sentence:
"History will remember him less as a statesman than as a virtuoso clodmonger: a man who understood, with almost artistic precision, that a cabinet full of confused loyalists is far more useful to an autocrat than a roomful of people who know what they're doing."
This piece was featured by friends at Dense Discovery and it really got me to thinking. Thirty years ago I spent a summer in Japan taking classes and traveling. Most of the coursework focused on business practices, which gave me a framework for comparing life there to life here in the United States. When I came home, it was the first time I experienced reverse culture shock; that unsettling moment when you realize Americans accept and normalize a lot of public behavior and conditions that other advanced nations simply do not.
This article resonates because the author is Korean and brings a similar kind of unavoidable comparison in his writing. He has seen both worlds, and he cannot unsee either one. We do not appreciate our public spaces enough, and we are caught in a catch-22 of our own making: things are chronically underfunded and visibly broken, and the default answer, which is letting the private market sort things out, is wrong far more often than it is right. More often than not, we have simply chosen not to address it at all, because we cannot get agreement on the remedies.
The author is bold enough to offer solutions. Before you push back on some of them, consider that the public expectations he describes were once the norm here, too. And he nails something I have been thinking about for years: what I call the asshole factor. Either you make public spaces so fortified and uninviting that no one wants to be there, or you ignore the problem entirely. When I see schools ringed with fences and guard towers, that is the asshole factor made concrete. Because we refuse to address the sanctity of public space over the proliferation of guns, we have decided to treat every public place as a waiting room for the one person who will eventually ruin it for everyone.
That’s not sustainable.
©The Porcupine Press, 2026.
The numbers are already in. International student enrollment at U.S. universities fell 17% in fall 2025. That’s the largest single-year drop outside the pandemic ever recorded. When this regime ends, the studies will come, and they'll confirm what anyone paying attention already knows: the talent that built Silicon Valley, the biotech corridor in Boston, and half the Nobel Prizes awarded to American institutions didn't have to stay. They chose to because of what America represented. Until they didn't. Expect a wave of research documenting exactly how much innovation capacity the U.S. surrendered in patents filed, startups launched, and discoveries that happened in Toronto, Beijing, and Berlin instead of Boston or San Diego. The reckoning will be rigorous, but accountability may come too late.
You don't need Chinese EVs on American roads to feel the pressure. You just need them on roads across the border. Canada struck a deal replacing a 100% surtax with a quota of 49,000 Chinese EVs at a 6.1% tariff, leaving the U.S. as the only major auto market without a significant Chinese brand presence. Meanwhile, Mexico absorbed a 25% Chinese EV market share before tightening tariffs in early 2026. Once American consumers start crossing the border and seeing what $26,000 buys in a BYD, the pressure on Detroit becomes existential in a different way than Ford's CEO already described it. Expect U.S. automakers to pivot yet again back toward affordable EVs, the segment they quietly abandoned when margins on trucks were fat and range anxiety was still a convenient excuse. The Chinese have made the affordable longer-range EV a reality. American manufacturers will now play catch up, and the pressure to compensate for bad decisionmaking will be borne by American workers and consumers.
An AI-generated film score, song, or short will break through in a way that makes the cultural conversation impossible to avoid, and when it does, the debate won't be whether AI can create. It'll be whether we're willing to admit it already has. The Velvet Sundown, a fully AI-generated band, racked up over 1.4 million monthly Spotify listeners across three albums before anyone realized the band wasn't real. The breakthrough moment will be a film, a song, a score that wins something real or moves millions of people before the disclosure and it will reframe the debate from "can AI make art?" to "what do we owe the people whose livelihoods it's replacing?" The fight over jobs and royalties will intensify from not being addressed at the very beginning. That part doesn't resolve. But the question of whether AI-generated work can be genuinely good stops being debatable.
AND SO IT IS
The sphere will turn in all weather
Darkness to light, rainy to fair
Strong forceful winds to pleasant calm
Daily, week to week, year to year.
All that lives remains in motion
None escape the changing seasons
There will be joy, there will be pain
With understanding comes wisdom.
No easy passage for any
Time will journey only onward
Yet there is value in the trek
Memories and tribute, the prize.
Plain enough by any standard
A vessel that crosses the sea
A quick voyage and home again
No more, no less than what it is.
And Now….
Keep up your regular reading habit. A lack of awareness beyond our own experiences has led us astray.
Continue to practice your gratefulness. Find one minute of time after you’ve read this to simply sit and listen.
Always strive to be a good human.