I’ve been cooking and taking pictures of my meals for years. I love food and the science of cooking. Welcome to my new series on both.

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I am not a huge fan of baking. As my friend Julie says, baking is science. She is right, and you have to follow recipes like you’re in a lab. However, if you know some basic chemistry, you can play around. A little.

Also, I am not a fan of super sweet foods so baking an apple pie never really interested me.

But this is different. It’s got a complex flavor that’s not too sweet but still feels like it belongs after the entree.

Most American apple pie has three failure modes. The bottom crust gets soggy. The filling runs like broth. The top is boring. Two of these are physics. The third is a failure of nerve.

This pie addresses all three. The reasoning, in order.

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The Water Problem

An apple is roughly 85 percent water. A standard nine-inch pie holds about three pounds of apples, which works out to two and a half pounds of water held back by half a pound of flour and butter. The math is bad.

Most recipes pretend this isn’t happening. They toss apples with sugar, cinnamon, a tablespoon of flour, and send everything into a 350-degree oven for an hour. The sugar pulls water out of the apple cells through osmosis. The water pools in the shell. The flour, asked to do a job it is bad at, goes pasty and cloudy without absorbing nearly enough. The bottom crust, sitting in a half inch of warm liquid, surrenders.

The fix is to remove most of the water before the pie. The sliced apples get tossed with sugar, salt, and lemon juice and left to sit at room temperature for an hour. Three-quarters of a cup of liquid drains off into a bowl. That liquid simmers in a saucepan down to a third of a cup of thick syrup. The syrup goes back over the apples. The flavor stays in the pie. The water does not.

The technique is from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Pie and Pastry Bible (1998), later picked up and refined by Cook’s Illustrated (treasure) and others. It remains the cleanest solution to the soup problem.

The Thickener Question

The thickener decides whether the filling holds together or runs.

Flour is the default. Flour is bad. It clouds the juice into something the color of wallpaper paste and tastes raw if the pie is underbaked, chalky if it is overbaked. Cornstarch is sharper but it breaks down under sustained heat and at low pH. Apples are acidic. By the time a cornstarch-thickened apple pie comes out of the oven, the starch has surrendered and the filling weeps.

Tapioca holds. It survives the long bake. It stays clear. It has no flavor of its own. Instant tapioca (the same product your grandmother used for pudding) is the best version of it, with one drawback: it leaves visible gelatinous pearls in the cooled pie. Grinding the tapioca in a spice mill before it goes in kills the pearls. Three tablespoons of ground tapioca for three pounds of apples is the right number.

The Apple

Granny Smith is the right apple. The reasons are structural.

Apple cells are held together by pectin. In firm tart varieties (Granny Smith, Northern Spy, Pink Lady, Braeburn), the pectin is more cross-linked and the cell walls are thicker. In sweet soft varieties (Honeycrisp, Gala, Fuji, Red Delicious), the pectin is looser and the walls are thinner. Heat dissolves the loose stuff. A Honeycrisp pie is structurally a Honeycrisp sauce.

Granny Smith also has the highest malic acid content of any common supermarket apple, roughly twice that of a Fuji or Gala (one study clocked it at around 9.8 grams per liter, against the 5 to 6 typical of sweeter varieties). The acid does two jobs. It tastes sharper than sugar, which keeps the pie from collapsing into one-note sweetness. And it lowers the pH of the filling enough to slow the enzymes that break down apple pectin during cooking. Tart and firm are not a coincidence. They are the same chemistry.

Northern Spy is better if you can find one (firmer, more complex, harder to source). Pink Lady and Braeburn work. Anything called “Honey-” is for eating raw.

The Crust

The crust problem is a temperature problem.

Flaky pastry happens because solid butter, layered through the dough, melts in the hot oven and releases steam. The steam pries the dough apart into sheets. The steam comes from the water trapped inside the butter, which is about 18 percent of butter by weight. For this to work, the butter has to be solid going into the oven. Not cool. Solid.

The standard methods all warm the butter. Cutting cubes in by hand transfers heat from the fingers. A pastry cutter is better but still slow enough for the butter to soften. A food processor pulses the butter into pellets and tends to overwork the dough into paste.

The trick is a box grater. The butter freezes solid for an hour. The bowl and the grater chill in the freezer for ten minutes. The frozen stick gets grated directly into the flour on the large holes, with a toss every few passes so the shreds don’t clump back together. The whole operation takes fifteen seconds. The butter never warms. The pieces are uniform. Each shred gets coated in flour, which prevents reweld and keeps gluten development down.

This is not a new idea. Scone recipes have used it for years. Adapted to pie dough, it produces flakier results than any method involving cubes, in a fraction of the time.

The Bacon

The lattice is the unhinged part. It is also the best part.

Sweet apple pie is one-dimensional. Sugar, fruit acid, and cinnamon are not three flavors. They are three notes in the same chord. The traditional fix is a scoop of vanilla ice cream, which adds fat and dairy and another layer of sugar to the same chord. The fix here is salt, umami, and rendered animal fat, woven across the top of the pie in a tight lattice.

Bacon does three things on a pie. It bastes the top inch of fruit with rendered pork fat as it cooks. It contributes Maillard reaction flavors (the browned, savory, meaty notes of cooked protein) which apple pie otherwise has none of. And it builds a caramelized sugar crust on top of the meat from the brown sugar and maple, which is the same chemistry as the burnt-sugar tops of crème brûlée and tarte tatin.

The bacon has to be par-cooked. Raw bacon laid on a pie comes out flabby and translucent. Bacon cooked to full crisp snaps when you try to weave it. The middle ground is thick-cut bacon brushed on both sides with brown sugar, maple, black pepper, and a pinch of cayenne, baked on a wire rack at 350°F for twelve to fifteen minutes (rendered, partially crisp, still pliable). The lattice goes on the pie cool. The bacon finishes cooking and the sugar finishes caramelizing during the bake.

The Cool

The last failure mode is impatience.

Tapioca sets as the pie cools through about 150°F. A pie cut hot is soup. A pie cut warm is loose. A pie cut at room temperature, four hours after it came out of the oven, slices clean and stands up on the plate.

Four hours seems excessive. It is not. The cooling is not optional. The cooling is the recipe.

The Recipe

Granny Smith Pie with Candied Bacon Lattice Makes one 9-inch pie.

Filling

• 3 lb Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored, sliced ¼ inch thick

• ¾ cup granulated sugar

• ¼ cup light brown sugar, packed

• 3 tbsp instant tapioca, ground in a spice mill

• 1 tbsp fresh lemon juice

• 1 tsp ground cinnamon

• ¼ tsp freshly grated nutmeg

• ¼ tsp kosher salt

• 2 tbsp cold unsalted butter, cubed (for dotting)

Crust (single bottom)

• 1½ cups all-purpose flour

• 1 tbsp granulated sugar

• ¾ tsp kosher salt

• 10 tbsp unsalted butter, frozen solid

• 5 tbsp ice water (approximately)

Candied bacon lattice

• 10 slices thick-cut bacon

• ½ cup dark brown sugar, packed

• 2 tbsp pure maple syrup

• ½ tsp freshly ground black pepper

• Pinch of cayenne

Method

1. The dough. Whisk flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl. Chill the bowl and a box grater in the freezer for ten minutes. Grate the frozen butter into the flour on the large holes, tossing every few passes so the shreds don’t clump. Drizzle in ice water a tablespoon at a time, tossing with a fork, until a squeezed handful holds together but isn’t sticky. Press into a 1-inch disk, wrap, refrigerate at least an hour.

2. The apples. Toss the apple slices with both sugars, lemon juice, and salt in a large bowl. Let sit at room temperature 45 minutes to an hour.

3. The reduction. Drain the apples in a colander set over a saucepan (about ¾ cup of liquid). Simmer the liquid over medium heat until reduced to roughly ⅓ cup of thick syrup, about eight minutes. Pour back over the apples. Toss with the ground tapioca, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

4. The bacon. Heat oven to 350°F. Set a wire rack inside a foil-lined sheet pan. Stir together the brown sugar, maple, pepper, and cayenne. Brush both sides of the bacon generously with the mixture. Bake 12 to 15 minutes, until rendered and partially crisp but still pliable. Cool on the rack.

5. The shell. Roll the chilled dough into a 12-inch round on a lightly floured surface. Transfer to a 9-inch pie plate, easing into the corners. Trim the overhang to 1 inch, tuck under, crimp. Chill the shell 30 minutes.

6. The build. Raise oven to 425°F with a rack in the lower third. Mound the apple filling into the chilled shell. Dot with the cubed butter. Cut the par-cooked bacon strips lengthwise if wider than ½ inch and weave them across the top in a tight lattice. Trim and tuck the ends under the crust edge.

7. The bake. Set the pie on a foil-lined sheet pan. Bake at 425°F for 20 minutes, then drop to 350°F for 40 to 50 minutes more, until the crust is deep golden, the filling bubbles thickly through the lattice, and a paring knife slides through the apples without resistance. Tent the bacon with foil if it darkens too quickly.

8. The cool. Four hours minimum on a wire rack. Overnight is better.

Next up the profoundly comforting tuna-noodle casserole. Done right it’s a fu*king hug from childhood.

Why Your Support Matters

Independent journalism answers to readers—not advertisers, corporations, or access-hungry editors. No story gets killed because it upsets a sponsor. No punch gets pulled because someone important made a phone call.

Your support makes possible sharp commentary, fearless satire, and reporting that follows the story wherever it leads. In an era of manufactured narratives and algorithmic blandness, that independence isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.

Subscribe to The Powell House Press. Or settle for content that tells you what someone else wants you to hear.

©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press | josh@thepowellhousepress.com

Game meat has gone bourgeois, which is comic, because the new tech-monied country set (Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk) cannot actually cook it. I cannot imagine they cook much of anything without their iPads open. The recipe is on YouTube. The technique is on YouTube. The reassurance that they are doing it right is on YouTube. They will pause a video three times to confirm what “sear” means and twice more to decide between two nearly identical olive oils.

God I hate them.

This particular ilk is scared of meat. Real meat. Anything that does not arrive via FedEx with “Hello Fresh” on the box or on a white styrofoam tray sealed in plastic wrap, barcoded, expiration-dated, softly lit by fluorescent overheads. A real butcher store is a foreign country and the butcher himself is its customs officer. They walk in, they freeze, they walk out with chicken thighs. The barcode is as close to game as they care to get.

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For everyone else, here is the recipe. It assumes you have cooked venison* sitting in the fridge. A roast, a backstrap, the back end of a stew. It assumes you own a sharp knife and a heavy pan and have used both. It assumes you do not need a video to tell you when an onion is done. Venison hash is what those small competencies were for.

What you want is contrast. Potato edges sharp enough to crack. Meat caramelized to the point of near-burn, which is to say the Maillard reaction run to its limit (the cascade of amino acids and reducing sugars that produces several hundred new flavor compounds above roughly 285°F, none of them present in the raw meat). An egg yolk that breaks and floods the whole thing into something glossier and slightly indecent. The gloss is lecithin doing its job, the phospholipid in the yolk emulsifying rendered fat into liquid. (This is also what holds hollandaise together.) Restraint is not the point. Hash that whispers is hash that failed.

Cast iron is ideal. All-Clad works. The cast iron wins on thermal mass, which matters because cold meat dropped into a hot pan steals heat. Iron has enough to spare. Lighter pans dip below the Maillard threshold and the meat sweats instead of sears.

A PYREX baking dish works too, but be sure it is PYREX and not Pyrex. There is a difference. PYREX in uppercase is the original Corning borosilicate, thermal expansion coefficient around 3.3 × 10⁻⁶/K. Lowercase pyrex is post-1998 soda-lime glass, roughly three times more thermally reactive. Borosilicate shrugs off a temperature swing. Soda-lime cracks and dumps your dinner on the oven floor.

The Components

A pound of cooked venison, shredded. Backstrap, stew meat, leftover roast. Shredded is what you want. Ground turns to gravel in a hash (too much surface area, moisture flashes off before browning, every bite tastes like the same bite).

A pound and a half of Yukon Golds or russets, diced small. A medium yellow onion. A red bell pepper. Three cloves of garlic, minced. Two tablespoons of butter. Two of olive oil. A teaspoon of smoked paprika. A teaspoon of fresh thyme (half if dried). Half a teaspoon of finely chopped rosemary. Salt. Black pepper. A pinch of cayenne. Four eggs. A quarter cup of shredded sharp cheddar or gruyère, if you’re feeling alpine. Parsley or scallions to finish.

The Method

Preheat the oven to 425°F. Toss the potatoes with olive oil, salt, pepper, and the smoked paprika. Spread them on a sheet pan in one layer. Roast for twenty-five to thirty minutes, until the edges blister and the corners go dark. (Parboiling first is worth the extra pot. Hot water gelatinizes the surface starch and rakes up the exterior. Crisper outside, softer middle.)

In a large oven-safe skillet, melt the butter over medium-high heat. Add the onion and the bell pepper. Cook for six to eight minutes, until softened and starting to color at the edges. In go the garlic, thyme, rosemary, and cayenne. The kitchen will briefly smell like a country house in November. That is correct.

Now the venison. This is the moment hash is won or lost. Get a hard, dark sear on the meat. Venison is lean (around two to three percent fat, against beef at fifteen or more) and unforgiving. There is no marbling to render, no insurance against overcooking. Without the brown, there is no richness. Without richness, there is no point.

Fold in the roasted potatoes. Taste. Season again. Hash needs more salt than you think it does.

Make four shallow wells with the back of a spoon. (If your skillet is not oven-safe, transfer the hash to a PYREX baking dish first and make the wells there.) Crack an egg into each. Scatter the cheese if you’re using it. Slide the whole thing into the oven. Seven to nine minutes for runny yolks. Ten to twelve for firmer eggs. Anyone who claims to prefer their yolks hard has a mental health issue or is punishing themselves for something.

Top with parsley or scallions. Serve with hot sauce, sour cream, crusty bread, pickled onions, and Dijon. Or any honest subset. Editing is allowed at the table.

Two Other Ways to Serve It

A poached egg works as well as a baked one. Set it on the hash, crack on red pepper flakes and black pepper, let the yolk slump and bleed into the meat. It is the cleaner-looking version, which is to say the version you serve when someone is watching.

For a single portion with structural integrity, pile the hash onto a toasted garlic round and slide a fried egg on top. The bread catches the fat the potatoes miss. It eats like a sandwich and photographs like a small monument.

The Small Trick

A few spoonfuls of beef stock or venison demi-glace, stirred in just before the eggs go on. It steams, deepens, and keeps the lean meat from going to leather. The mechanism is gelatin. Long-simmered bone stock is loaded with it, and gelatin is a hydrocolloid, meaning it binds water and fat into something that coats the tongue instead of running off it. This is the entire trick of restaurant food. Demi-glace is the ingredient that separates the people who cook from the people who follow recipes.

A Note on the Meat

Grass-fed beef works in its place. Chuck, brisket trim, leftover steak, all shredded. Either choice carries a richer, more complex flavor than the industrial alternative, the result of slower-growing animals on varied forage building denser muscle and more fat-soluble flavor compounds. That is the entire reason to bother. Game meat and grass-fed beef both make hash taste like something instead of nothing.

All photos and recipes are mine. No stock photos or plagiarism here. BTW, this section is going to be a paid subscribers only starting June 5th.

Next recipe:

Why Your Support Matters

Independent journalism answers to readers—not advertisers, corporations, or access-hungry editors. No story gets killed because it upsets a sponsor. No punch gets pulled because someone important made a phone call.

Your support makes possible sharp commentary, fearless satire, and reporting that follows the story wherever it leads. In an era of manufactured narratives and algorithmic blandness, that independence isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.

Subscribe to The Powell House Press. Or settle for content that tells you what someone else wants you to hear.

©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press | josh@thepowellhousepress.com

There is something fishy about a town agenda that grows three pages between lunch and the cocktail hour. The Town of Chatham’s Town Board packet bloomed from 29 pages to 32 yesterday, a sudden expansion produced not by good government but by a single phone call from a diligent Town Board member who read in this newsletter that a 30-day notice for a bar/tavern liquor license had been laundered through the agenda without the small, decorative detail of who was applying and where.

The phone call extracted the missing piece. A May 6, 2026 letter from Alissa Yohey of Yohey Law, on behalf of Chez Monna LLC, doing business as Old Chatham Country Store, at 639 Albany Turnpike. Names. Addresses. The premises in question. The whole point of a liquor license notice, is in fact, to give notice. To the community.

This is not transparency. This is a finishing-school version of accountability, where the curtsy arrives only after you've stepped on the headmistress's toe.

Meanwhile, in the more glittering and far more litigated theatre of 509 Bashford Road, two letters have failed to make it onto the town’s website at all. They concern the Fox Hill Estate Vineyard, where the Williams would like to convince the Zoning Board of Appeals to grant them a rehearing on the question of whether their wine-tasting ambitions can be made compatible with a residential zone.

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The first letter comes from Mitchell Khosrova, who represents Susan Tanner, the neighbor whose appeal produced the ZBA determination in the first place. Khosrova, dispatching his May 18 missive with the assurance of a man who has read the statute twice, observes that the Williams’ star witness (the property’s later inclusion in Columbia County’s Agricultural District 10) is not the revelation they imagine. The relevant fact, he writes, is the one that existed at the time of the CEO’s determination, and at that moment the property was not in an agricultural district. He also notes that the ZBA’s own resolution already acknowledged the vineyard, the years of plantings, the harvests. The board found agriculture was “clearly not the primary use.” Nothing has changed since.

The more delicious letter is the second one.

Mark T. Sweeney enters as the late and elegant arrival, representing Jeffrey Murdock and Regina Wenzek, two more neighbors who have decided that the boutique commercialization of Bashford Road is not a project they wish to host. His May 18 letter does not whisper. Fox Hill, he argues, is not presenting new facts. It is relitigating the ZBA’s prior conclusion that a tasting room, wine sales, food service, and event-style activity add up to commercial retail, which the RL-2 district does not permit.

Sweeney also reminds the board that a rehearing is not a procedural courtesy. Under Town Law §267-a(12), a member of the ZBA itself must make the motion, and every member present must then vote unanimously to grant it. Not a polite consensus. Unanimity.

He goes further. The ZBA, he writes, already knew Columbia County had approved the property for inclusion in Agricultural District 10. The decision did not turn on the absence of that status. The agricultural designation is not the deus ex machina the Williams require it to be.

And then Sweeney makes the distinction that should haunt the rehearing request.

The ZBA has not forbidden the growing of grapes. It has not banned the vineyard. It has limited the manufacturing of wine, the bottling, the retail sales, and the operation of a tasting room. Fox Hill is free to be a vineyard. It is not free to be a commercial wine destination in a residential district by renaming its retail ambitions agricultural.

The fight, in other words, has never been about agriculture. It has been about whether a residential road becomes a hospitality address on the strength of a few well-tended vines.

Two lawyers. Two letters. One message to the ZBA. Do not grant the rehearing.

The town should listen. It should also, as a matter of habit and decency, put its documents online. The Powell House Press should not be the safety net for the town’s clerical lapses. If a liquor license is on the agenda, the applicant and address should be on the agenda. If lawyers are writing letters about 509 Bashford Road, those letters should be where the public can read them.

The pattern is becoming a personality. Documents arrive late. Names go missing. Important correspondence sits unposted until someone, somewhere, notices and asks. That is not openness. That is damage control conducted in a sweater set.

And poor Mr. Kleinbaum, one imagines, must be verklempt. Wonder why no one’s tapped him to come to their rescue?

Let’s get ready for the next ZBA meeting. In the mean time, since the town hasn’t posted the letters I’ve taken the liberty.

Letter from Mark Sweeney Esq.

Letter from Khosrova Esq.

PS: Just a nod to a few people who just happen to be on the red side of politics who have provided me much of the information used in today’s article. Seems that while many are floating the idea that this is a personal vendetta (it’s not) there are a few roaming the halls over on 295 who are not comfortable with the way Mr. Collins is running the show. All hail the leakers. They’ve always been the booster shot to heal a sick government.

The Town of Chatham is entertaining a new liquor license application. Is it a coincidence that the name and address of the applicant are missing from the 29-page town board meeting agenda? Or is this just more obfuscation at the hands of Donal Collins? Good question. Rumor also has it that there is more legal correspondence missing on the town’s website concerning 509 Bashford Road. Well, let’s not call it a rumor. It’s a fact.

Nicole Saphier keeps chickens. Also rosemary, lavender, hay, apples, and a wedge of forest in New Jersey. The chickens and the lavender are doing important work. They are subsidizing a 16,000-square-foot house with 26 rooms, an in-ground pool, a home theater, a yoga studio, and a dedicated wine room.

That is not a farm. That is a Nancy Meyers film with poultry.

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Saphier is a radiologist, an author, a former Fox News contributor, and President Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general. According to POLITICO, she is also the proprietor of an estate whose 10.35 farmland-designated acres saw their valuation drop by roughly $624,500. The tax on that land, an estimated $7,200, fell to as little as $40.

Forty dollars. Less than a decent bottle of New Jersey wine. (Saphier has a room for those.)

This is the maneuver. Take a luxury estate. Add a few hens. Plant some lavender. Photograph the apples. Invoke a statute written for people whose lives actually depend on weather. Collect the discount.

The same play is now running in Chatham, New York. Well except for the fact that Saphier has more of a farm if you can call it that.

Edwin and Cherie Williams own 509 Bashford Road. It is a luxury estate on a residential dirt road. Less than one percent of the acreage is vineyard. The property has nonetheless been admitted to an agricultural district, and the Williams now want to convert it into Fox Hill Estate Vineyard, a winery and tasting-room destination, over the objections of neighbors who can read a map.

The vocabulary is identical to New Jersey. Vineyard. Farm winery. Agricultural district. Rural preservation. The vocabulary is doing the work because the agriculture certainly isn’t.

The legal architecture varies by state. New Jersey has farmland assessment. New York has agricultural districts and right-to-farm protections. The strategy is the same in every zip code: locate a statute drafted for working farmers, identify the lowest possible threshold of compliance, and clear it with a gardening hobby. The result is a private financial instrument disguised as a public good.

It is a tax dodge with better scenery.

That bargain does not survive when the beneficiary is a radiologist with a wine room.

The Williams have wrapped their project in the language of agriculture. A property with under one percent vineyard does not become a farm because the paperwork says so. A residential country road does not become a commercial corridor because someone learned the magic word at the right moment in a zoning dispute. Calling something a farm does not produce a farm. It produces a brochure.

The tax cost is real, and it does not stay on the applicant’s side of the property line. School districts still need funding. So do the town, the county, the fire district, the library, emergency services, the highway department. When a luxury estate slips into a favored category, the burden shifts. Quietly. Incrementally. To everyone with less land and worse lawyers.

That is the corrosive part. The benefit goes to the property owner with the consultants, the engineers, the land-use counsel, and the time. The cost is socialized to people who do not have those things. The retiree on a fixed income cannot plant six rows of grapes and reclassify her bungalow. The working family on a quarter-acre cannot hire an agricultural attorney. Only the wealthy can play this game at scale, and only the wealthy do.

In Chatham, the politics are inseparable from the land.

Town Supervisor Donal Collins is himself a farmer. This should have made him useful. Instead it has made him decorative. Collins has backed the Williams while maintaining a business relationship with them, an arrangement most public officials would find awkward and Collins appears to find unremarkable.

He is a more skilled politician than he is given credit for. He understands the emotional voltage of the word “farm.” He understands that no one in a rural town wants to be photographed opposing agriculture. And he understands the sleight of hand at the core of this fight: once a luxury estate borrows the rhetoric of farming, the people who object to it are recast as enemies of rural life. The neighbor who simply does not want tour-bus traffic on a dirt road is repositioned as a villain in a documentary about saving the family farm.

It is a very good trick. It is also a swindle.

A public official genuinely committed to farming would be the first to draw the line. He would argue that farm protections are strongest when they are reserved for actual farms. He would understand that every gentlemen’s vineyard admitted to an agricultural district makes the public marginally less willing to defend the real one down the road. He would understand that the abuse of farm law is not a service to farmers. It is the slow degradation of the brand.

Instead Collins has helped erase the distinction.

The injured parties extend well beyond Bashford Road. Real farmers carry the cost. They are the ones who will face skepticism the next time agricultural districts, tax preferences, or right-to-farm protections come up for renewal. They are the ones whose claim on public sympathy is being thinned out by a wine room in Morris County and a tasting room in Columbia County. They are the ones whose lifeline is being treated as a tax-planning technique.

The Saphier case is useful precisely because it is so naked. A wealthy professional. A luxury estate. A minimal agricultural performance. A spectacular tax advantage. The paperwork is clean. The law allows it. The public can still see exactly what is happening.

Chatham should be able to see it too.

The Williams are not strengthening farming. They are weakening it. They are weakening the tax base, weakening the meaning of the agricultural district, and asking a residential neighborhood to absorb the consequences of a commercial ambition dressed up in flannel.

The question worth asking is not whether the Williams found a route through the statute. They did. So did Saphier. The question is what the statute was for in the first place.

If the answer is a working farmer, defend the law and protect the land.

If the answer is a luxury estate, a vanity vineyard, a tasting-room business plan, and a town supervisor doing business with the applicants, then the public is not preserving anything.

It is picking up the check for the Williams and Collins.

Nice gig if you can get I suppose.

Independent journalism answers to readers—not advertisers, corporations, or access-hungry editors. No story gets killed because it upsets a sponsor. No punch gets pulled because someone important made a phone call.

Your support makes possible sharp commentary, fearless satire, and reporting that follows the story wherever it leads. In an era of manufactured narratives and algorithmic blandness, that independence isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.

Subscribe to The Powell House Press. Or settle for content that tells you what someone else wants you to hear.

©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press | josh@thepowellhousepress.com

Author’s Note: This article is not part of my serial reporting on the proposed vineyard development in Columbia County, New York. But it is certainly Wine Wars adjacent.

The data on alcohol is strong. The facts are not obscure. We know what alcohol does to people, families, emergency rooms, hospitals, roads, workplaces, and public budgets. This is not an argument for outlawing alcohol. Not even close. I have had my share, and I am not writing from a place of temperance or moral purity.

But alcohol is not only a personal choice. At scale, it is a public-health issue with enormous human and economic costs. That is the point of this article.

I spent years working on the opioid epidemic as a researcher with the HEALing Communities Study, designing public-health interventions meant to keep people alive long enough to recover. I know why opioids command attention. Fentanyl is sudden. It is cinematic in the worst possible way. A person is alive, and then a person is gone. The death is immediate, shocking, and often young. It fits the grammar of American crisis: sirens, body bags, grieving parents, press conferences, emergency funding.

Alcohol does not usually kill that way.

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It kills at weddings and football games and brunches. It kills in airport lounges, hotel bars, restaurants, kitchens, college dorms, retirement communities, and living rooms after the children have gone to bed. It kills through car crashes, falls, drownings, alcohol poisoning, suicide, cancer, cirrhosis, heart disease, pancreatitis, fetal exposure, domestic violence, and decades of damage no one calls an emergency until the liver fails or the tumor appears.

That is one reason we have failed to see it clearly. The other is that alcohol is not treated in America as a drug. It is treated as a personality trait, a hospitality ritual, a consumer preference, a social lubricant, a lifestyle brand, a reward, a punchline, and a sacrament of adulthood. We call it wine culture, beer culture, cocktail culture. We do not call it what it is: the most lethal drug in America.

The numbers are not obscure. Alcohol kills roughly 178,000 Americans a year, about 500 people every day. About a third of those deaths are acute: crashes, poisonings, violence, falls. The rest come through the slower channels of disease. Alcohol is linked to cancer, liver disease, cardiovascular disease, and a long inventory of medical conditions that accumulate quietly until they become irreversible. The annual economic cost exceeds $240 billion. Emergency-department visits attributable to alcohol roughly doubled between 2003 and 2022. Jenny Wilson, an emergency physician in Reno, has described alcohol in her emergency department as “an absolute poison.” Multiple cases per shift. Every shift.

Yet the country still behaves as though alcohol is a private matter, while opioids are a public-health emergency.

The contrast is revealing. In one recent year, Massachusetts recorded approximately 10,000 opioid-related hospitalizations and 85,000 alcohol-related ones. One number enters the news cycle. The other is absorbed into the background noise of American medicine. The opioid patient is understood to represent a national emergency. The alcohol patient is understood to have made a series of bad choices.

That distinction is morally convenient and medically false.

For decades, public health has known how to reduce alcohol-related harm. Other wealthy nations have used some combination of accurate warning labels, pricing policy, advertising restrictions, screening, brief intervention, and medication-assisted treatment. None of these measures requires Prohibition. None requires treating moderate drinkers as criminals. They require only that government respond to alcohol in proportion to the damage it causes.

The United States does not.

That failure is especially striking now, because the two men at the top of American health policy carry unusually personal histories with alcohol. President Donald Trump’s older brother, Fred Jr., died at 42 after struggling with alcohol addiction. Trump has often credited his brother’s death with making him a lifelong abstainer. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is the first person to hold that office while publicly discussing his own recovery from alcohol addiction. He has spoken often about addiction, recovery, and the spiritual architecture of sobriety. If biography produced policy, this administration would be uniquely equipped to confront the country’s most destructive legal drug.

It has not.

Instead, federal alcohol policy has narrowed into vagueness and evasion. The new dietary guidance reduced its message on alcohol to the softest possible instruction: consume less. In January, Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, explained the guidance by saying the goal was to avoid drinking at breakfast. The next day, he clarified that “brunch is obviously different than breakfast.”

It was treated as a joke because alcohol is always treated as a joke until someone dies from it.

The problem is not one clumsy comment. It is the absence of a serious federal agenda. Proposals to modernize warning labels on alcoholic beverages have stalled. Several national survey instruments that measure American drinking behavior, the very data sets that allow researchers to track the crisis, have reportedly been delayed or cancelled. The administration’s flagship addiction effort, the Great American Recovery Initiative, run jointly by Kennedy and Kathryn Burgum, appears to be focused overwhelmingly on opioids. Asked for specifics on alcohol, HHS pointed to an outreach program for unhoused people with substance use disorders and to overall treatment funding. That is not a strategy. It is a deflection.

The vacuum has consequences. Public-health policy does not remain empty. When government retreats, industry enters.

The alcohol industry is one of the most sophisticated political operations in the country. Beer, wine, and spirits trade associations have spent decades embedding themselves in Washington, in statehouses, in medical organizations, in advocacy networks, and in the research ecosystem. Their influence is not hidden. There are congressional caucuses for beer, wine, and spirits. Industry money underwrites scientific conferences, nonprofits, public campaigns, and studies used to defend the idea that moderate drinking is harmless or even beneficial. When states attempt reform, the industry responds with force. This spring in Colorado, a proposal to fund addiction treatment through alcohol fees was defeated for the second time after lobbying by trade groups and their allies.

Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again framework rests on a simple premise: that corporate interests have captured American health policy, placing profit over public health. Big Pharma. Big Food. Big Medicine. The theory is not wrong in the abstract. But its selectivity is glaring. By every available measure, Big Alcohol fits the indictment. Its product is highly processed, aggressively marketed, often sugar-loaded, carcinogenic, and responsible for hundreds of preventable deaths every day. It is precisely the kind of corporate public-health problem Kennedy says he came to Washington to confront.

And yet alcohol remains outside the frame.

That contradiction matters because the most consequential failure is not rhetorical. It is clinical.

The United States already has FDA-approved medications for alcohol use disorder. Naltrexone can reduce heavy drinking and lower the risk of relapse. Acamprosate can help people maintain abstinence. These drugs are well-studied, off-patent, inexpensive, and dramatically underused. Fewer than 10 percent of Americans diagnosed with alcohol use disorder receive any FDA-approved pharmacotherapy. This is not because the medications are experimental. It is because the treatment system has never been built around them.

We know what a different model looks like. The federal opioid response, imperfect as it has been, helped mainstream buprenorphine and methadone, eliminated the X-waiver, expanded naloxone access, and made overdose reversal a basic public-health objective. The system began, however slowly and unevenly, to treat opioid addiction as a medical condition requiring medical tools.

That same ambition has not been applied to alcohol.

Part of the reason is cultural. American alcohol treatment remains heavily shaped by the twelve-step model, an abstinence-based, peer-led framework that began in the 1930s. It has saved lives. It works for many people. It is also not the only approach that works, and for some patients it is not enough. The country would never build cancer care around one model of peer support and call it medicine. Yet for alcohol use disorder, we still tolerate a system in which effective medications sit unused while patients are told, implicitly or directly, that failure reflects a lack of surrender, discipline, or spiritual readiness.

That is not treatment. It is neglect dressed up as tradition.

The neglect is especially cruel for the people least able to navigate the system. Pregnant women, more than one in ten of whom report drinking during pregnancy, face a condition with serious consequences and a strong evidence base for intervention, yet many receive little more than shame, warning, or silence. Emergency departments see the same patients again and again. Primary-care doctors often do not screen aggressively enough or prescribe the medications available to them. Insurers pay for the downstream wreckage while underinvesting in prevention. Families absorb the chaos. Then, when the death finally comes, it is treated as personal tragedy rather than policy failure.

The phrase “alcohol-related death” itself softens the violence. It sounds administrative. It does not capture the child killed by a drunk driver, the woman beaten by a drunk partner, the man whose esophageal cancer began as nightly drinking, the college student who never woke up, the patient with end-stage liver disease who entered the hospital yellow, swollen, and terrified. It does not capture the cumulative toll of a drug so normalized that the country has trouble naming the dead as victims of exposure.

Thomas Babor, the addiction scientist at UConn Health, has offered one of the bluntest assessments from inside the field: the harm is distributed across the entire population, and the failure to address it coherently is among the central failures of American health policy. On the country’s oldest and deadliest drug habit, the people in charge do not appear to know what they are doing.

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The argument is not that Americans should not drink. That is the reflexive rebuttal, and it is unserious. Nobody is proposing a return to Prohibition. The serious proposals are modest by international standards: better warning labels, smarter taxes, limits on advertising aimed at young people, routine screening in primary care, expanded access to naltrexone and acamprosate, better surveillance data, and a national campaign that tells the truth about alcohol and cancer.

The substance in the bottle is not the only issue. The policy failure around it is.

Alcohol kills roughly 500 Americans a day. It contributes to thousands of cancers, hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and billions in public costs. It is implicated in trauma, violence, disease, disability, and death across every class and region of the country. These are not lifestyle concerns. They are public-health facts.

America knows how to declare an emergency when the bodies arrive all at once. Alcohol’s genius, if a drug can be said to have one, is that its bodies arrive everywhere, slowly, under different names. A crash. A fall. A hemorrhage. A tumor. A suicide. A stillbirth. A failing liver. A family destroyed over years rather than minutes.

That is why alcohol remains protected by familiarity. It is not hidden from us. It is everywhere in front of us.

And that may be the most dangerous thing about it.

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I went to Mass yesterday. I cannot tell you why. Catholic-curious again, the way one is curious about an old lover who has resurfaced looking unexpectedly well. A great deal of it is Pope Leo, an American in white, which still feels like a typo. (One forgets how much a single person can rearrange the furniture of the conscience.) And I am, as ever, helpless before an old church. The cool stone. The wax. The light through glass someone bankrupted a guild to pay for. This time it landed differently. Not because of God. Because of the men who have spent fifty years renting him out.

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The crucifix did it. Christ nailed up there, all sinew and surrender, looked barbaric, violent, and sad; a torture device gilded into furniture. And my mind, the ungrateful organ, went straight past the theology to the racket, because what unsettled me in that pew was not doubt. It was the dawning clarity that the most powerful religious movement in American life was never a revival at all. It was a recruitment. And like any recruitment, it has a founding story everyone should know.

Because the religious right did not rise up, spontaneous and spirit-filled, over abortion, gay rights or medical care for those who identify as trans. That version was written later, because it polled better. The actual catalyst was money and segregation. In the 1970s the IRS moved to strip tax exemptions from whites-only Christian academies, Bob Jones University chief among them, schools built so children would not have to integrate, and that was the grievance that organized the pews. The operatives understood exactly what they had. Paul Weyrich, who helped build the con, said the quiet part for decades, that the goal was not more voters but fewer, that their leverage went up as turnout went down. Jerry Falwell was handed the Moral Majority in 1979 like a franchise. Phyllis Schlafly supplied the foot soldiers. Abortion and LGBTQ rights got bolted on afterward.

All it needed then was a candidate to make the exchange official, and Ronald Reagan obliged. In Dallas in 1980, to a hall of preachers who could not formally endorse him, he delivered the line that founded the modern arrangement, telling them he knew they could not endorse him, but that he endorsed them. The transaction was set. The pulpits would deliver the turnout. The party would deliver the policy. Faith went onto the balance sheet, and it has been a line item ever since.

Reagan struck the bargain, but it was Newt Gingrich who weaponized it. Gingrich was the one who grasped that the religious right was not a constituency to be served but a battery to be drained. Through GOPAC he circulated a now-infamous memo on language as a mechanism of control, a glossary instructing Republican candidates to describe Democrats as sick, pathetic, corrupt, traitors, and to drape themselves in family, freedom, courage, faith. Politics as catechism, with the demonology printed in the back. It worked. The 1994 takeover was his, and he governed the way he campaigned, by scorched earth, teaching a generation of Republicans that compromise was apostasy and the opponent was not wrong but evil. This is the through-line. Everything crude in the party now was prototyped by him.

And the man himself is the tell. Gingrich preached family values while conducting an affair during the very impeachment he was driving against Bill Clinton over an affair. The House reprimanded him and fined him three hundred thousand dollars. His own troops eventually pushed him out. Then, in 2009, the power long gone and the relevance fading, Newt Gingrich was received into the Roman Catholic Church. His third wife was Catholic. He had a documentary to sell about a pope. I am not the keeper of his soul, but the chronology is the chronology, and the faith arrived precisely when the politics needed a second act. A conversion is supposed to be a road to Damascus. This one looked like a repositioning, another faux Catholic, faith deployed the way he deployed everything, as an instrument.

After Gingrich the machine only hardened. Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson industrialized it through the Christian Coalition, the voter guides slipped into church bulletins, the precinct lists, the long patient campaign to capture the courts, because legislatures come and go but a federal judge is forever. The men running this understood something the faithful did not. The point was never the Kingdom. The point was the map. And a map, once drawn, only waits for the right man to walk it.

That man, inevitably, was Trump, who did not corrupt this tradition so much as complete it. He is the logical endpoint, the one who stripped the arrangement of its last decorations and showed it for what it always was. He does not pretend to piety with any conviction, and that is almost the honest part. He offered the religious right a contract in 2016, plain as a lease. You deliver the votes, I deliver the judges. They took it, eighty-one percent of white evangelicals, for a thrice-married casino developer who could not name a Bible verse, because the verses were never the point. He installed a prosperity preacher in the White House to run a faith office. He held up a Bible upside down in front of a church after the square was cleared for the picture. He picked a fight with the Pope. He has mortgaged the entire inheritance, the cathedrals and the catechism and the two thousand years, against power, and the religious right cosigned the loan and called it a revival.

This was what I was sitting inside of, in a full church, when the organist announced the hymns. I sang them. The words came up familiar under my eye and the tunes were easy, the way hymns are engineered to be easy, built so a room of strangers can move as one body. At the sign of peace the woman beside me said I had a lovely voice (I don’t) and that I must come often to know the hymns so well. I said peace. I said thank you. I did not tell her that I did not know the hymns at all. I can read words and I can read music. That is the whole trick, and I learned it in Catholic school, where music was not enrichment but catechism, filed alongside the Latin and the guilt. The institution being looted for parts is the same one that taught me to read the page I had just used to lie to its parishioner.

The readings, of all things, were about inclusion, the plain old-fashioned kind. The message was that even amid the noise about Christians being persecuted you could walk out knowing your faith was sufficient unto itself. Not the lawsuits. Not the grievance industry of the most powerful religion in the hemisphere claiming martyrdom from inside the West Wing. Just peace, as a private matter. It made me understand, from inside the building rather than outside it, why we wall church off from state. Not as a slogan, but as a load-bearing wall. The wall does not only protect the republic from the zealots. It protects the faith from the men who would strip it for copper. The politicians never mention that half.

I turned all of this over on the walk home, and the gallery assembled itself. Hegseth and the muscular new faithful, reportedly reaching for scripture and surfacing a line from a Tarantino movie instead. Rubio and the absence where moral clarity should be. Vance, recently and conveniently Catholic, lecturing the actual Pope. Mike Johnson, ready to follow them the moment it turned safe. Reckless, crude, theologically illiterate, every one, and all wearing the same rented vestments Gingrich tailored and Trump finally wore out in public.

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Then I thought of the gold, the White House troweled in it like frosting on a supermarket cake, and of course my mind went to Moses coming down the mountain with the tablets still warm, finding that the people could not last forty days without melting their faith into something they could see and weigh and dance around. He was gone one season. They had already made it out of gold.

Trump is no Henry the Eighth. Henry at least wanted a dynasty and built a church on doctrine he could bend. This is smaller and stranger and more transactional. But I would not be surprised, not in any way, shape, or form, if Trump, or Eric, or Don Jr. eventually opened a church of their own. The branding is done. The flock is gathered. The doctrine can be written later, or never. After all, there is that collection plate.

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Why Your Subscription Matters

Independent journalism answers to readers—not advertisers, corporations, or access-hungry editors. No story gets killed because it upsets a sponsor. No punch gets pulled because someone important made a phone call.

Your support makes possible sharp commentary, fearless satire, and reporting that follows the story wherever it leads. In an era of manufactured narratives and algorithmic blandness, that independence isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity.

Subscribe to The Powell House Press. Or settle for content that tells you what someone else wants you to hear.

©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press | josh@thepowellhousepress.com

By now there is a settled etiquette of looking away. The dinner-party version is “I have stopped reading the news.” The therapy version is “boundaries.” The social-media version is the algorithm pruned of politics. The country has agreed to a kind of national pretending. What follows is what we are pretending not to see.

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Picture the scene at Mar-a-Lago on the night of January 2, 2026. The white-and-gold ballroom is humming with the usual mix of hedge fund princelings, OAN talent, and Florida divorcees in Oscar de la Renta. Out by the pool, the president is being briefed on the precise minute his Delta Force commandos will fast-rope onto a Caracas compound to extract a sitting head of state. He approved the operation before Christmas. By 4:30 the next morning Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator who once danced at his own televised rallies, will be on a plane bound for Manhattan federal court. About seventy-five people will die in the process. Trump will tell the cameras the United S…

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There is a kind of smile a host wears when the guests need the party more than the party needs them — gracious, unhurried, very slightly amused — and Xi Jinping was wearing it on the steps of the Great Hall of the People.

Donald Trump had come to Beijing, the first American state visit to China since 2017, and, being Trump, he had not come quietly, and he had certainly not come alone. He had come with a court. Trailing him was a procession of seventeen-odd chief executives whose combined fortune Forbes put at around $870 billion: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man; Tim Cook, whose entire luminous empire happens to be screwed together inside the very country he was visiting; Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Taiwan-born, not even on the original list and folded in only when he scrambled aboard Air Force One during its Alaska refueling; Larry Fink of BlackRock; Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone; Jane Fraser of Citigroup; and the chiefs of Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Qualcomm, Mastercard, Visa. Around th…

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Donal Collins, Town Supervisor of Chatham, presents in public as a defender of Columbia County agriculture. The town website says so. The press releases say so. The Fox Hill Vineyards file at 509 Bashford Road says otherwise.

The applicant, plastic surgeon Ed Williams, who has trademarked himself at the United States Patent and Trademark Office as “The White Coat Entrepreneur” and his wife Cherie filed the 303-b paperwork last October to enroll the parcel in Columbia County Agricultural District 10. The filing listed cattle grazing among the property’s farm activities. There is no cattle grazing. There are no cattle.

Northern Columbia County is small. Anyone in town who has driven past 509 Bashford Road can see what is on the land and what is not. So can the Town Supervisor, who happens to share an undisclosed business arrangement with the applicants. He did not flag the discrepancies. He continued to call the project a real farming effort.

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Collins eventually recused. He has not, to thi…

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Of all the indignities logged on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s public record (the brain worm, the heroin years, the dead bear cub in Central Park, the prep-school noblesse, the vaccine theology), the thing that finally curdles my stomach is a tanning bed. Specifically, the FDA proposal he killed in March, which would have barred minors from indoor sunlamps and required adults to sign a waiver acknowledging skin cancer risk. The notice came out under his signature. The reasoning, lifted almost verbatim from Indoor Tanning Association lobbying language, invoked “personal choice and parental decision-making.” So much for the war on industry capture.

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The reason this lands harder than the rest is that the pattern has flipped. Until now, Kennedy’s crusades have been crusades of subtraction. Don’t pasteurize the milk. Don’t vaccinate the child. Don’t medicate the depressive. The argument, whether you bought it or didn’t, had a logic: the natural body knows best, leave it alone. It was a posture aim…

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On Monday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a federal push to scale back SSRI prescribing. The plan includes new Medicare and Medicaid payments to clinicians who help patients taper, federal training modules, and “deprescribing” guidelines drafted by a yet-to-be-named expert panel. About 1 in 6 American adults take an SSRI. Kennedy has previously compared quitting SSRIs to quitting heroin. He has linked them, without evidence, to school shootings. He repeated the heroin comparison Monday.

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The vehicle for the new push is Medicare and Medicaid. In other words, the oldest and the poorest Americans. The two populations most likely to need their psychiatric medications and least equipped to navigate a deprescribing bureaucracy designed by a man with no medical training.

I cannot speak to the Medicaid population. I can speak to older Americans and medication.

I worked as a project manager on the HEALing Communities Study. HCS, launched in 2019 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and SAMHSA,…

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The Fox Hill Vineyards saga has clocked north of 200,000 reads on Substack and Newsbreak. The numbers tell you something. So do the emails.

Readers keep asking the same questions, the same ones, over and over. When that happens you stop calling it curiosity and start calling it a pattern.

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The headline question. How has a wine project in a town this small snaked its way to the brink of a tasting room and a liquor license without a single nod from the Planning Board. The premise is slightly off. It hasn’t slipped through entirely. But the Williams of Fox Hill Vineyards are standing on the threshold, and if they prevail on their quasi-appeal to the Zoning Board of Appeals, the threshold becomes a doorway.

Split the baby. The Williams owe nobody an ethics seminar. They are using every lever the system permits, some creative, all American. The local government is the party with the obligation. That’s the part worth pulling on.

Enter Donal Collins. Town Supervisor. Filer of exactly one mandator…

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Why is it that when I am feeling at my lowest, and the past few days have been awful for me, I’m denied the one fucking thing that would help -- sleep. And in this unrelenting state of wake what do I do? I reach for Nicholas Enrich’s memoir Into the Wood Chipper. Because nothing reorders the gut quite like an inside account of the world’s richest man dismantling, over a single weekend, the U.S. agency that had been keeping the world’s poorest children alive.

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The man is Elon Musk. He is also, by any sober reckoning, the most dangerous private citizen alive.

Not dangerous in the comic-book way. Not dangerous because he tweets too much, or builds rockets, or owns a social network. Dangerous because he has now demonstrated that an unelected billionaire with no relevant expertise and no oversight can shut down a sixty-year-old federal agency over a weekend, kill close to a million people in the doing, and walk away unscathed. Dangerous because he has shown the rest of them that it can be don…

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It happened.

Lawrence Howard, Esq., of Shulman Howard & McPherson LLP in Averill Park (yes, Averill Park, not exactly the Cravath letterhead one might hope for at a moment like this) has written to the Town of Chatham Zoning Board of Appeals on behalf of Fox Hill Estate and Winery LLC. Fourteen days after the ZBA voted 4-0 to send Edwin and Cherie Williams’ tasting room dreams into the long good night. They are back at the trough. It is not the right trough.

Howard wants a rehearing. Of course he does. A rehearing is free. The actual legal remedy for a party aggrieved by a zoning board’s decision is an Article 78 petition in Columbia County Supreme Court. That is not free.

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This is the part nobody is saying out loud, so let’s say it. The Williamses live in an 8,300-square-foot pile on 53.7 acres listed at $5.65 million. They have an unfenced pool. An outdoor kitchen. A greenhouse. They have a separate garage they would like to convert into a venue where strangers will pay them money to dr…

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There is a thing about Parkinson’s that nobody warns you about, which is that it is not the disease you think it is.

You think it is shaking. Everyone thinks it is shaking. You think it is Michael J. Fox on Letterman, Muhammad Ali lighting the torch in Atlanta, your grandmother’s left hand fluttering against the kitchen table while she pretended not to notice. The shaking has done a generation of publicity work for this disease. It is the part you can see from across a room, and seeing is what we have decided counts. But the shaking is, in the great architecture of what this illness actually does, a kind of decoy. The thing you are watching is not the thing that is happening.

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What is happening is quieter, and older, and considerably more strange.

Somewhere in your brain, in a small pigmented region called the substantia nigra (Latin for “black substance,” because the people who named these things were not in the business of consolation), the neurons that produce dopamine are dying. They …

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The Surgeon General slot has now claimed three nominees in a single Trump administration. The latest casualty is Dr. Casey Means, the Stanford-educated wellness influencer and “functional medicine” practitioner, whose nomination quietly suffocated in Senate committee this week. Trump withdrew her name on Thursday and announced her replacement on Truth Social, in his customary style. The new pick is Dr. Nicole B. Saphier, a radiologist and director of breast imaging at MSK Monmouth, a satellite of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Trump praised her as “a STAR physician” and “an INCREDIBLE COMMUNICATOR.” (The capital letters are his.)

Means did not survive the Senate’s slow-motion strangulation. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, chairman of the health committee, never publicly said where he stood on her. He didn’t have to. Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska refused to commit. That was enough. The math does not require a megaphone.

Trump nonetheless found h…

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Hope springs eternal, and I count myself an optimist, so let the Planning Board and the Town Board have their moment. The white hats won. The bucolic landscape endures. Donal’s fever dream of milk trucks rumbling down Bashford Road — trucks that, for the record, never existed; he knows this — is, for now, parked.

And yet.

Gabriella, dear: the matter is not closed. The ZBA was bullied into doing the right thing, which is not the same as the right thing being settled. Last week the Williamses, those onward Christian soldiers, presented themselves at the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Box number two, checked. The State Liquor Authority was box number one, last month. I told you about that one already.

Here is what happens next. I know because I spent a long stretch on the phone with Ag and Markets this week, and I am not the only one who has.

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The Williamses will return to the Planning Board. Yes, the ZBA has ruled that a tasting room is commercial and therefore incompatible with 5…

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I am a very good cook. Not bragging. Statement of fact. I love good food and for years in college and grad school couldn’t afford it. So I learned to make it.

There are spectacular teachers online. Julia. Martha. The mad one Jamie @antichef. The rigorous ones (America’s Test Kitchen). And one of my favorites Nicole McLaughlin at AllRecipes. All worth your time.

But the hard boiled egg has broken them. Crackpot theories, Instagram folklore, and a collective failure to understand tenth grade chemistry and physics 101. Let me fix this.

First, the egg itself. A good egg has an orange yolk, not yellow. This is not a health argument. It’s a taste argument. Pasture-raised hens eat insects and greens. Those carotenoids (specifically xanthophylls) concentrate in the yolk and produce flavor compounds that factory eggs simply don’t have. Science. Also your mouth.

Now the problem. The membrane. Every egg has two of them, thin keratin-fiber layers sitting between the shell and the white. When a hard b…

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Take a moment — just one — to sit with the sheer, uncut audacity of it.

JD Vance, a man who discovered Catholicism roughly when he discovered that Catholicism polled well, who has apparently catalogued his conversion somewhere between “talking points” and “forthcoming memoir,” stood before a Turning Point USA crowd in Athens, Georgia and informed the Holy Father that his theology needed work. The Pope. The actual Pope. Corrected. By JD Vance. Out loud. Into a microphone. Before an audience. I am nearly too stunned to be scathing. Nearly.

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The timing is what elevates this from ordinary political stupidity to something more terrifying. Donald Trump had just spent a weekend calling Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born pontiff in the two-thousand-year history of the Catholic Church, “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.” The global blowback was not merely bad. It was the kind of catastrophic, wall-to-wall, cross-partisan condemnation that makes presidential advisors drink at the…

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It is hard not to become part of the fray. Hard not to cheer every event that marks a point for your side. This weekend was a banner one for people who dislike JD Vance. His record of international failures is, at this point, almost architectural in its construction. He visited the Pope. The Pope died the next day. He toured Greenland. He stumped pathetically for Orban. Then he walked into a peace negotiation for a war his boss started, at the behest of one of the most compromised Prime Ministers in Israeli history, carrying nothing but a suitcase of losses. His boss, meanwhile, positioned himself to claim whatever slim victory might emerge while saddling Vance with the loss most of us knew was coming.

It is stunning. It is also a window into both men. The view is not reassuring.

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Trump’s priorities are, in order: self, then wealth. This is not analysis. This is biography. He has mortgaged everything and everyone to feed what can only be called his id. Not ego. Id. The contractors he sti…

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