There is the American small business owner who believes his Facebook page is a private diary rather than a storefront window, and Frank Cappello, proprietor of Taste of Italy 23 in Latham, New York, and self-styled livestream personality “Frankie Fresh,” has just given the Capital Region and beyond a masterclass in what happens when that delusion meets a grieving community and a very unforgiving news cycle.

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The facts, for anyone who has been mercifully offline: a seven-year-old autistic boy named Harbe Nagi went missing near Menands on June 28. For two days, the whole neighborhood, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, whoever owned a flashlight, turned out to search for him. He was found dead in a pool. Grief, in other words, of the plainest and most devastating kind. And into that grief, under a news anchor’s post about the boy’s death, the official account of Taste of Italy 23 dropped a comment suggesting the child’s own family would have killed him sooner had they stayed in a Muslim country, called Islam a “terrorist organization,” and announced that no Muslim should hold authority in America. This was not a slip of the thumb. This was a manifesto, typed out in full, published under a business name, sitting there collecting horror for the world to screenshot. There is also the video (I’ve included that too).

Cappello’s first move, when the account was traced back to his restaurant, was to reach for the oldest trick in the small-business-scandal playbook: the phantom staffer. Forty people, he told CBS6, have access to that Facebook page. Forty! An establishment apparently run like the Politburo, no one individually responsible for anything, blame diffused across a workforce as if by policy. It is the kind of number you invent when you want journalists to stop asking who, exactly, sat down and wrote it.

Then came the wife. Alyssa Cappello told CBS6, off camera, that she’d written it, meaning to post from her personal account and hitting the business page by mistake, a claim that requires you to believe a grown woman confused Islam-as-terrorist-organization with something she’d say to her friends. Then, to the Times Union, she recanted that story too, said she’d taken the fall to protect her husband, and produced a new name: an employee, who obligingly resigned and is no longer available to confirm or deny anything. Three stories in a week is not confusion. It is workshop.

Frank Cappello, for his part, has settled into the register of a man who has said something indefensible and knows it, performing contrition while carefully declining to identify anyone. “I know who did it, and I’m going to take care of it,” he told CBS6, a sentence that manages to sound both threatening and evasive, which is a neat trick. He is “not prejudiced against Muslims, Blacks, gays or any of that stuff,” he added, a formulation that should be studied in journalism schools as the platonic ideal of a denial that convinces no one.

The town, to its credit, did not accept any of it. Protesters showed up within hours and kept showing up for days. Elected officials, including members of Congress, condemned the comment publicly, which is the least a coward could ask of them and more than some crises get. By Sunday, the standoff outside the restaurant had degenerated into an actual pepper-spray incident between protesters and the owners, an image so on the nose you’d reject it in a screenplay. By Wednesday night the restaurant’s sign had been torn half off, vandalism nobody has been charged with, a Colonie police cruiser idling out front with nothing to say about it.

And here is the part that should embarrass Latham more than the original comment did: Cappello announced, with great solemnity, that Taste of Italy would close “to protect the community” and let the Nagi family grieve. It reopened about a day later. A closure sized precisely to the news cycle, not the sin. If you are looking for the real character of the man, skip the apology tour and look at the calendar. Twenty-four hours, apparently, is what atonement costs at a strip-mall pizzeria.

Meanwhile, on July 2, the Nagi family buried their son at the Al-Hidaya Center, his uncle, the mayor of a Michigan city, flying in to thank the neighbors who searched for him. Mehak Jamil of the Albany Muslim Advocacy Coalition made the only point worth making amid all this noise: that anti-Muslim sentiment doesn’t need a viral scandal to exist. It was already rising, comment or no comment, long before Frank Cappello’s business page decided to advertise it.

This being the Cappellos, of course, the backstory does not begin last week. Jacqueline Silvestri-Edwards, who runs the local Facebook group 518 Foodies, sued the couple back in January 2025 for defamation and civil assault, alleging threatening phone calls from Alyssa Cappello after a customer-complaint dust-up turned personal. An Albany County judge declined to dismiss most of it this past March, finding several statements plausibly false enough to proceed to trial. That case remains unresolved, and fairness requires saying so. But a pattern is not the same thing as a coincidence, and two lawsuits about the same couple’s temperament in eighteen months is not exactly a pattern anyone should be shocked by.

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Then, because God apparently enjoys irony, there are the tax warrants. The Times Union broke the story; the Daily Gazette, digging harder, found more. Seventeen active warrants across four Cappello-linked entities, dating to 2019, totaling $377,403.76 in unpaid sales, corporation, and withholding tax, down from an original $403,774.01. Frank Cappello is named “individually and as a responsible person” on three of them. Alyssa Cappello appears under her maiden name, DiBiase, on one worth nearly $140,000. Confronted with all this by the Gazette, Cappello did not offer an explanation. He offered a slogan. “Not true. Fake news.” Then, smoothly, pivoted back to the tragedy of Harbe Nagi, deploying a dead child as a change of subject a second time in the same week, which takes a particular kind of nerve.

None of this touches the family’s other ventures, and fairness demands saying that too. Alyssa Cappello’s beauty business, She’s Yar Lash & Beauty Bar, and the couple’s forthcoming restaurant, Grazie Italian Kitchen, in Albany, have no reported connection to the comment or the tax warrants beyond the Cappello name on the paperwork. Guilt by address is its own kind of injustice, and this piece has no interest in manufacturing one just because the real material is damning enough on its own.

Because it is. A restaurant’s official mouthpiece slandered a dead boy and an entire faith, and the man who owns it responded not with accountability but with an accounting exercise: forty suspects, three storylines, one twenty-four-hour closure, and a denial of a very real tax bill delivered in the language of a man who has learned that “fake news” is now a complete sentence. Latham did not fail here. The Cappellos did, and they are still open for business, regular hours, first floor of a strip mall on Route 9, doing what by all accounts they do best: staying open no matter what they’ve said, and blaming somebody else for having said it.

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

A couple of days ago, when I was writing about Trump and his grifting family, it was staggering how much money they made off of “crypto.” And to be honest, when a reader asked me what Bitcoin was and how it differs from meme coins, I had no idea. To be more honest: I didn’t really understand Bitcoin. I asked a few friends, and they, like me, knew the terms. They knew people made money (many more lose). None of us actually knew what crypto was, how it was valued, how it worked, or just how the Trumps made billions.

So I spent a good portion of the past three days boning up on these “terms” and just how the Trumps made billions. It’s worth knowing about because, when you actually know, you see that the Trumps did not “make” money; they were paid off. Let’s start with what crypto is.

Cryptocurrency is digital money with no bank behind it. No government either. Bitcoin, the first and biggest, appeared in 2009, invented by someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Nobody knows who that is. Seventeen years later, nobody still knows.

The system runs on a blockchain, a public ledger copied across thousands of computers worldwide. Every transaction gets recorded there permanently. No central authority can alter it, freeze it, or reverse it. That is the pitch. Money without middlemen.

The catch is that nothing backs it. Crypto’s defenders point out that nothing physical backs the dollar either, and they are right. The dollar was tied to gold for most of its history. Roosevelt ended domestic convertibility in 1933, and Nixon cut the last link in 1971, when foreign governments lost the ability to redeem dollars for gold. Since then, the dollar has been fiat money, backed by no vault anywhere. Makes you wonder what all that gold in the U.S. Mints is there for.

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But the dollar is not backed by nothing. It is backed by the state. The government demands taxes in dollars, which guarantees permanent demand. Legal tender laws require their acceptance. The Federal Reserve manages the supply to keep the value roughly stable. Behind all of it sits a $28 trillion economy, a court system, and an army. Belief, yes, but belief with enforcement.

A bitcoin is backed by the belief that someone else will pay more for it tomorrow. That is the whole structure. No compulsory demand, no manager, no state. When the belief holds, the price climbs. When it wavers, the price falls off a cliff. The dollar loses two or three percent of its value in a bad year. Bitcoin has lost more than half its value four separate times and come back each time, which believers cite as proof of resilience and skeptics cite as proof of insanity.

So, in practice, how does Bitcoin work? Say Mary Jones, a schoolteacher in Hudson, decides she wants some bitcoin. Here is the whole process, start to finish.

Step one: she opens an account. Mary downloads an app from a crypto exchange. Coinbase is the biggest American one. An exchange is a company that stands between regular money and crypto, the way a currency booth at an airport stands between dollars and euros. She signs up, photographs her driver’s license, and takes a selfie. Federal law requires this. Despite its reputation, buying crypto the normal way is not anonymous. The exchange knows exactly who Mary is, and so does the IRS.

Step two: she connects her bank. Mary links her checking account or debit card, the same way she would with Venmo.

Step three: she buys. Mary spends $500. The app now shows she owns a small fraction of one bitcoin. Nothing arrives in the mail. There is no coin. What Mary actually owns is an entry in a ledger.

Which brings us to the blockchain. Picture a shared notebook that records who owns what. Every bitcoin transaction ever made is written in it: this person paid that person this amount, going back to 2009. Now picture thousands of identical copies of that notebook, kept on computers all over the world, all updated at the same time. That is the blockchain. Nobody owns the notebook. Nobody can secretly change a page, because their copy would no longer match the thousands of others. That is the entire trick. A bank keeps one ledger, and you trust the bank. Bitcoin keeps thousands of matching ledgers, and you trust the math. When Mary bought her $500 worth, a new line was written into every copy: this much bitcoin now belongs to Mary’s account.

My next question was: Where do new bitcoins come from? This is where it gets kind of Dungeons and Dragons. Somebody has to write the new pages of the notebook (blockchain). Computers around the world compete for the job, roughly every ten minutes, by racing to solve a math puzzle through sheer guessing; trillions of guesses per second. The winner writes the next page and gets paid in brand-new bitcoin. That is “mining.” It is how every bitcoin in existence was created, and it is why the ledger stays honest: cheating would require more computing power than the rest of the world combined. Mining started as a hobby for people with laptops. It is now done in warehouses full of specialized machines, located wherever electricity is cheap.

Step four: the price moves. Mary’s $500 is now worth whatever the market says. It might be $700 by Christmas. It might be $250. There is no dividend, no interest, no rent. The only way Mary makes money is by selling to someone who pays more than she did.

Step five: spending it. Here is the part that surprises people. Mary mostly cannot spend her bitcoin. The diner in Hudson does not take it. Neither does the grocery store, the landlord, or the IRS. A handful of retailers accept it, and there are debit cards that convert crypto to dollars at the register, but for practical purposes bitcoin is not money you spend. It is a thing you hold and eventually sell. So when Mary wants her money, she goes back to the app, sells her bitcoin at the going price, and transfers the dollars to her checking account. It takes a day or two. If she sold for more than she paid, that profit is taxed like a stock gain, and the exchange reports it.

One warning. As long as Mary keeps her bitcoin on the exchange, the exchange holds it for her, like a bank. Some people prefer to move their coins to a private digital wallet that only they control. The wallet is protected by a string of secret characters called a key. Lose the key, and the bitcoin is gone forever. No customer service line, no password reset, no one to sue. Remember that for later.

As for who regulates all this: less than you would hope. There is no crypto equivalent of the FDIC insuring Mary’s account or the full rulebook that governs the stock market. Several agencies each police a piece: the SEC handles crypto that resembles an investment contract, the CFTC treats bitcoin as a commodity like gold or wheat, and the IRS taxes the gains. The exchanges themselves must follow the same anti-money-laundering rules as banks, which is why Mary had to send in her license. But the coins themselves carry no guarantees. And meme coins, per an SEC ruling issued three weeks after $TRUMP launched, are generally not securities at all, which means no disclosure rules and none of the investor protections that come with them. If a meme coin goes to zero, and most do, Mary’s remedy is nothing.

The Meme Coin

A meme coin is cryptocurrency with the pretense removed. The pretense is purpose. Bitcoin at least claims to be something: an alternative financial system, money beyond the reach of banks and governments. You can doubt the claim, but the claim exists. A meme coin makes no claim at all. It is a joke, a mascot, a celebrity’s face turned into a tradable token. The first was Dogecoin, created in 2013 by two software engineers as a parody of crypto speculation. It featured a Shiba Inu dog. It was designed to be worthless. At its 2021 peak, it was worth $88 billion.

There is no product. No revenue. No underlying anything. The price of a meme coin is a pure measurement of hype, and hype has a schedule: early buyers get in cheap, promotion drives the price up, latecomers buy the top, insiders sell, the price collapses. Crypto people call this a pump and dump. It happens over and over, and it keeps working because every buyer believes he is early.

The Trump Con

Three days before his second inauguration, in January 2025, Donald Trump launched $TRUMP, a meme coin bearing his image. One billion tokens were created. Only about 200 million went to the public. The other 80 percent stayed with two Trump-affiliated companies, CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC. Nobody “mined” $TRUMP. All one billion tokens were simply created at the push of a button, and the Trump companies kept 800 million of them.

This means the Trump side never needed the coin’s price to rise. The family companies collect fees on every trade and sell tokens from their enormous reserve on a staggered schedule. The buyers speculate. The house collects.

The numbers have only grown. A Reuters analysis published in June found that, by the end of April 2026, the Trump family had added at least $2.3 billion to its fortune from its major crypto ventures, while outside investors in those same ventures had absorbed roughly $2.3 billion in losses, much of it on paper as token prices fell. The analysis found that the structure of the ventures consistently favored the Trump side. Trump-affiliated companies received large founder allocations, licensing fees, royalties, and revenue-sharing agreements while risking comparatively little of their own capital. Outside buyers assumed nearly all of the market risk. The house collected.

The meme coin is one arm of a larger machine. There is World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture founded by Trump’s sons, which sold tokens and a stablecoin. There is the $MELANIA coin. There was a black-tie dinner in May 2025 for the top 220 holders of $TRUMP, an event that functioned as a pay-for-access auction. Reuters estimated that qualifying participants collectively held roughly $148 million worth of the coin. One crypto billionaire, Justin Sun, invested hundreds of millions of dollars across Trump crypto ventures while facing an SEC fraud case that the administration’s regulators later paused. (Reuters)

The scale became official through Trump’s financial disclosure, filed July 1, which reported more than $1.4 billion in crypto-related income for 2025. His companies received nearly $800 million from World Liberty Financial, including more than $520 million from crypto token sales and more than $250 million from the sale of interests in the venture. The disclosure also reported about $635 million from the $TRUMP meme coin business, largely through a licensing arrangement. Crypto now out-earns the golf courses, the hotels, and the licensing deals combined. The real estate empire took fifty years to build. The crypto empire took eighteen months. (Reuters)

None of this required the coins to be good investments. That is the Trump elegance of it for lack of a better term. Trump profits from fees, royalties, and token sales regardless of price. The buyers carry all the risk. Campaign donations are capped and disclosed. Lobbying is registered. Buying the president’s coin is neither. We know how much money came in. With a few exceptions, we have no idea from whom. A chilling reality.

Winners and Losers: Regular Crypto

The winner. Erik Finman was twelve years old in 2011 when his grandmother gave him $1,000. He put it into bitcoin at around $12 a coin. By eighteen, he was a millionaire. He had also made a bet with his parents that if he hit a million by then, he would not have to go to college. He won the bet. Timing was the entire strategy. He bought when almost nobody was paying attention.

The loser. James Howells, an IT worker in Newport, Wales, mined 8,000 bitcoin in 2009 when it was essentially free. In 2013, he threw out the hard drive containing his only copy of the keys. It went to the municipal landfill. At bitcoin’s peaks, that drive was worth several hundred million dollars. Howells spent a decade begging the Newport council to let him excavate the dump. He offered to fund it himself. He proposed AI-assisted sorting robots. The council said no. A judge threw out his lawsuit in 2025. The bitcoin is still there, under roughly 110,000 tons of garbage, technically his and permanently gone. Crypto has no bank, which sounds like freedom until you need a bank. It brings to mind the Kristofferson lyric: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” doesn’t it?

Winners and Losers: Meme Coins

The winner. During the run-up to the $TRUMP holders’ dinner in the spring of 2025, a trader known publicly only as “Noah” put $2.2 million into $TRUMP before the contest was announced, rode the surge, and sold at the end for a profit of more than $950,000. He was not a fan. He was not a believer. He understood the only thing that matters in a meme coin: get in before the crowd, get out before the crowd. The crowd is the product.

The loser. Glauber Contessoto, a thirty-three-year-old in Los Angeles, put his entire savings, about $250,000, into Dogecoin in February 2021, some of it borrowed. Two months later, his stake was worth over $2 million, and the press crowned him the Dogecoin Millionaire. He announced he would not sell until it hit $10 million. “Diamond hands,” in the parlance. Dogecoin then lost more than 90 percent of its value. His paper fortune evaporated. He held the whole way down. The same trade that made Noah rich ruined Contessoto, and the only difference between them was the willingness to leave the party.

Rebecca Davis of Little Rock belongs here too. A conservative radio host who knew nothing about crypto, she bought $TRUMP from her bed one January morning in 2025 because Trump, she figured, knows how to make money. He does. The Washington Post found nearly 67,000 first-time crypto buyers just like her who pulled out debit cards for the coin. As a group, their bet was a bust. Her assessment of Trump was correct. Her mistake was assuming she was on his side of the table.

The Lesson

Cryptocurrency is a technology. Meme coins are a casino built on that technology. And the Trump ventures are the casino perfected: the operator holds 80 percent of the chips, collects a cut of every hand, sells access to the owner’s box upstairs, and answers to regulators he appointed. The winners in this system are the people who create the coins and the traders cold-blooded enough to treat them as timing exercises. The losers are the believers. There were 813,294 of them, give or take, and most of them thought they were early.

Ironically, unlike Atlantic City, Trump has finally found a casino that works - for him. Just like Atlantic City, he has found a way to screw people over. However, the terrifying part is that the President of the United States is taking in billions of dollars from unreported sources for a worthless digital coin. In any other world, this would be a bribe. The $TRUMP meme coin is just the bag man.

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

Is democracy alive? Sometimes I wonder, but in Chatham, this month, a pulse.

The action is on the town website, of all places. Transparency has arrived, and my well placed sources tell me the delivery was not painless. Not everyone in Town Hall enjoys having the curtains pulled back. Some people decorate better in the dark.

Still. Progress is progress.

The new gambit: every letter to the board, posted online for all to see. Per Beth Anne, “This change is intended to provide residents with greater access to information reviewed by Town Board members. Correspondence may include letters, emails, petitions, comments, and other written communications received by the Town relating to municipal business.”

So far only June is up, which makes sense because that's the start of Projet Transparence. The coming months are listed, which counts as a promise. There are four letters. Let’s open them together.

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Letter one: a new grandfather thanking Donal and Tammy for connecting him with a gently used three-wheel jogger. Bravo for the Free Store. Even I can’t complain about that.

Letter two: a citizen worried the town ignores its seniors, who make up more than 20 percent of the population. Her concerns are valid and deserve more than a polite filing.

Which brings us to letters three and four. Fully half of Chatham’s June correspondence fixated on one subject: Bashford Road.

Four letters. History will note the revolution began quietly. But the question they keep asking has yet to be answered.

One writer put it plainly: “First is the lack of transparency around what I can only call the Bashford Road situation. We deserve to know what’s going on, and so far the board has failed us in that regard. I hope that the next board meeting will include this in the agenda. All of you work for the people of the town and we deserve full disclosure of this and other matters which affect us.”

The other went further: “Finally, the elephant in the room. I know I’m not the only citizen who reads The Powell House Express* and his continuing series on what he calls ‘The Wine Wars.’ He describes what appears to be a large can of worms that could land the town in a lot of hot water, depending how the problem is resolved. It seems to me to be a major problem, and yet it has never been on an agenda nor discussed publicly by the board. Why is that? How serious does such an issue that involves conflicts of interest, playing fast and loose with what constitutes ‘agriculture’ in the town, and the rights of neighbors who live on a dirt road in a district zoned residential? What are we waiting for?”

Dear reader, you are not alone. “The Wine Wars” has clocked thousands of hits. So the question stands, and I’ll repeat it: when, exactly, will this matter be addressed in public?

Because the story is not just the renegade vintner who, with a wink from Collins (a generous word for it), got his 1 percent vineyard into a NYS Agricultural District on an imaginative application. A designation that has now castrated the planning board, leaving it little power to rein in the Bashford Kardashians. But the vineyard isn't the story either. It's the conflict of interest. That's the part people can't stop chewing on.

The other letter raised an older ghost. “My other ask is for a resolution to be drawn up prohibiting members of the same family or household to serve on the board at the same time. As this has already occurred in the recent past it’s clearly not a theoretical issue, but one we should address in advance of it happening in the future. No matter who is involved, family members should never make up 2/5 of the board.”

Ah yes. That.

According to well-placed sources on the red side of the Powell House Press readership, the county Republicans already handled this one, quietly, because of a certain person's performances at town board meetings. The party's fear: that brand of "leadership" would send voters running. The spin was back pain. The reality was the boot.

They’re Chatham’s red version of the Clintons, toxic enough that residents now want the arrangement outlawed by resolution. PTSD, I’m told, every time this person joins a committee. Hard to argue.

So bravo, truly, to the town for posting the letters. Transparency: check. Now let’s see about accountability and ethics, the harder rooms to light.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting on my FOIL request to Ag and Markets to learn whether Falcon Crest East, AKA Fox Hill Estate and Vineyard, muscles its way onto Bashford Road after all. If it does, you’ll know exactly whom to thank. Your town supervisor.

For those wishing to write in to the town and have their missives shared publicly, as they should be, the address is Chatham@chathamnewyork.gov

*While I like The Powell House Express, that’s a quote not a typo.

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

Even the MAGA faithful are squinting now. I’m sure you can feel it at the gun shows and in the truck stops, the queasy dawn of the hairy eyeball, the flock beginning to grasp that they were never the congregation. They were the collection plate. This week the suspicion became a federal filing. Donald Trump’s mandatory financial disclosure landed at the Office of Government Ethics running 927 pages. Obama’s ran eight. Biden’s ran eleven. Honest men do not need a thousand pages. A thousand pages is not transparency. It is a fence’s inventory, notarized.

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Begin with Big Daddy. Forbes had Trump at $2.3 billion when he won in 2024. It now has him at roughly $6.5 billion. Bloomberg says $7 billion. The fortune nearly tripled in under two years, growth the Washington Post called without modern presidential precedent, and not one dollar of it came from building, making, or improving anything. It came from renting out the American government by the hour. The filing shows $2.2 billion in income for 2025 alone, about $1.4 billion of it crypto, the ideal product line for a man who spent half a century selling things that do not exist. There is $635 million in royalties from the $TRUMP meme coin, a digital trading card with his own smirk on it. More than $500 million tied to World Liberty Financial token sales. And the tell, the detail that would get any other American a grand jury: days before the inauguration, an Abu Dhabi vehicle backed by the UAE’s national security advisor bought 49 percent of World Liberty for $500 million, washing roughly $187 million into Trump family entities. Shortly after, the administration approved advanced AI chip exports to the UAE over its own national security objections. The chips sailed. The money landed. Nobody blushed. Blushing is for people with shame, and shame, in this White House, was fired in week one.

Savor the purity of the meme coin racket. Trump skimmed fees on every trade whether the coin rose or fell. It fell. From $74 to under $2, a 97 percent cremation, with some 764,000 wallets left holding ash. His own voters bought the coin. He kept the vig. There is the entire presidency in one transaction: the faithful pay, the family collects, and the loss is somehow proof of the believer’s devotion.

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The legacy properties hummed along as toll plazas. Mar-a-Lago took in $77 million, up 50 percent, as foreign leaders and CEOs learned that American policy now has a cover charge and it is payable in Palm Beach. Doral banked $121.8 million. And the media conglomerates paid tribute like pimps in church: $80 million in “settlements” from ABC, CBS, Meta, YouTube, and X, blue-chip corporations that ran the numbers and concluded that paying off the president was cheaper than being governed by him. The proceeds went to his presidential library and toward his new ballroom. Which brings us to Melania.

There is no East Wing anymore. The first lady’s traditional office. I doubt Melania cared. This first lady never wanted an office. She wanted a cash register with a view. The disclosure lists $10.7 million she was paid for licensing her own image to the producers of “Melania,” her Amazon documentary, part of a $40 million arrangement Jeff Bezos’s company struck with the wife of the man who regulates it. Another $6 million from NFTs, a 28-fold jump in a year, plus the memoir, plus her own meme coin. Call it $17 million, earned mostly by existing. Eleanor wrote a column. Jackie saved the antiques. Melania minted herself as a collectible and sold the supply into her husband’s second term. No first lady in the history of the republic has strip-mined the residence like this. It took her one year, and she barely had to appear in public to do it.

The big boys, Eric and Don Jr., once photographed beaming over a dead leopard in Zimbabwe, have graduated to prey that cannot run and does not bleed. Retail investors. They co-founded World Liberty Financial, which Forbes estimates has pumped more than $1.5 billion into the family accounts. Last August they rang the Nasdaq bell, wearing the leopard grins, to celebrate a deal in which a small public company bought $717 million of their tokens, routing about $500 million to the family. That company’s stock has since collapsed 93 percent and faces delisting. The Trumps were paid up front. The bagholders held the bag. This is not entrepreneurship. It is a receiving line with a ticker symbol. Don Jr. went from roughly $50 million before the election to roughly $300 million by Forbes’s December count, fattened by a partnership at 1789 Capital, whose portfolio company Vulcan Elements landed a $620 million Pentagon-arranged loan after the White House leaned on the process, per ProPublica. That used to be called procurement fraud. Now it is called Tuesday. Eric, per estimates in the business press, sits around $750 million, much of it from American Bitcoin, a venture that converts electricity and paternal proximity into money. Their official duty is running their father’s blind trust. The trust has 20/20 vision and a wire transfer department.

Then the prodigy. Barron is a sophomore at NYU’s Stern School of Business, phoning it in from the Washington campus, Forbes figures he has already pocketed around $80 million in cash. He is 20 years old. He out-earns his mother. He has never held a job. Other sophomores sell plasma to make rent.

Tiffany, the afterthought daughter, thought she had married into billions. The New York Times checked and found the Boulos billions were a Lagos fable. The family business distributes trucks and motorcycles in Nigeria. But in this family even the shallow end pays. Senate investigators want answers about a reported $100,000 her husband Michael pocketed for leveraging his father-in-law’s name to help a Saudi businessman recover seized assets, a starter grift, training wheels still on. His father, the truck man, is now the president’s senior advisor on Middle East affairs, because in this administration the org chart is a seating arrangement at a wedding.

And still, for sheer bravura, nothing touches Jared and Ivanka. The golden couple of two felonious fathers. Charles Kushner, convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering after hiring a prostitute to entrap his own brother-in-law, a crime so operatic even New Jersey gasped, is now, courtesy of a pardon, the American ambassador to France. Donald Trump carries 34 felony convictions. Their children found each other. Of course they did.

Jared’s origin story is the whole scheme in miniature: at 26 he overpaid $1.8 billion for 666 Fifth Avenue, an address Hollywood would reject as too obvious, nearly sank the family firm, and was fished out in 2018 by a Qatari-backed fund that prepaid a 99-year lease. That’s normal right?

Six months after leaving the White House Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund wired his brand-new firm, Affinity Partners, $2 billion over the objection of its own advisors, who rated his operation “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” Mohammed bin Salman overruled them personally. You do not pay $2 billion for an unsatisfactory fund manager. You pay $2 billion for a satisfactory son-in-law. By 2024 Affinity Partners had skimmed about $157 million in fees while returning nothing, nothing, to its investors, which in any other context is called a sinecure and in this one is called finance.

While Kushner moonlighted as the administration’s Middle East negotiator, he solicited money from the very governments across the table. By the end of 2025, Affinity Partners assets hit $6.2 billion per a congressional investigation. Forbes says he personally crossed $1 billion last fall. He earned it the family way.

And what does new dynastic money do with itself. It goes yachting. The couple spotted five miles of Albanian beachfront from a boat and decided one of Europe’s poorest countries owed them a resort, a multibillion-euro complex planted on Sazan Island and the protected Vjosa-Narta wetland, breeding ground for flamingos, seals, and nesting sea turtles. Bulldozers arrived before any public consultation. Anti-corruption prosecutors are investigating the land titles. Tens of thousands of Albanians now fill Tirana night after night, waving inflatable flamingos and banners reading “Albania is not for sale.” They call it the flamingo revolution. One boat trip united a country. Against them. A people who survived Hoxha’s bunkers took one look at the Kushners and headed for the streets. That is not politics. That is an immune response.

All of it unfolds while ordinary Americans pay the tab for a war nobody ordered, a war Trump was manipulated into by Benjamin Netanyahu, a fugitive wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. It caused an international crisis on a scale even Putin has not managed.

And how has America’s version of The Great Oz responded to the grumbling in the cheap seats. He threw himself a fair. The Great American State Fair, sixteen days on the National Mall for the nation’s 250th birthday, billed as a modern World’s Fair and staged by Freedom 250, an outfit his own White House invented. It has been a flop of civic proportions. The headline acts fled. The power failed on day one and the ice cream melted in the dark, a metaphor so perfect no columnist would dare invent it. The Ferris wheel buckled. Independent estimates put opening night at around a thousand people. Trump declared the venue packed to the brim with 45,000, then, insiders told CNN, raged privately at photographs of the empty lawn. He threw America a birthday party and America, checking its grocery receipts and its gas bill, stayed home.

Let’s not even talk about the cage fight or the reflecting pool.

For those of you who have enjoyed the first half of Animals, those are the last of the chapters that I am posting. Paying subscribers should have received a full manuscript via email. Want to read more? Become a paying subscriber.

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

Somewhere on Interstate 684, on a November afternoon in 2001, a man pulled his minivan onto the shoulder, left his children waiting in their seats, and knelt beside a dead raccoon to cut off its penis. He wanted, he later wrote, to study it. The scene comes from his own diary, published this spring in Isabel Vincent’s biography RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise, drawn from journal entries he made between 1999 and 2001. He has neither confirmed nor denied it. The raccoon, we can assume, offered no comment either.

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This would be merely one of the great cocktail-party anecdotes of the age (alongside the roadkill bear cub he left in Central Park in 2014 and the whale head his daughter says he once strapped to the roof of the family minivan) were it not for the small matter of the man’s current job. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. runs the Department of Health and Human Services. He collects roadkill; he now also collects the fate of the nation’s vaccine policy. When Jesse Watters asked him on Fox in June whether he would “leave the raccoons alone,” Kennedy replied, “Yes. For the moment.”

Hold that image, because it is almost too perfect. I-684 runs through Westchester County, which is to say straight through the heart of the American Northeast’s raccoon-rabies belt, the very corridor where the virus has been enzootic since the 1970s. The raccoon is not an incidental prop in the rabies story. It is a principal player. And the dead one on the shoulder of the highway was, in the crispest epidemiological sense, a potential vector: rabies can pass from a carcass to a person through saliva or neural tissue meeting broken skin, which is precisely the sort of contact a roadside dissection invites. The man dismantling the public-health apparatus that keeps rabies at bay was, per his own account, performing amateur necropsies on one of its favorite hosts. You could not make it up. You would not dare.

The Disease That Waits

Rabies occupies a strange and privileged corner of American medicine: one of the deadliest viruses known, effectively 100 percent fatal once symptoms bloom, and yet it kills only a handful of Americans a year. That gap is not luck. It is the dividend of a century of unglamorous work: animal vaccination, wildlife surveillance, and a treatment protocol that succeeds nearly every time it is deployed on schedule. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of invisible machinery that a culture takes for granted until someone starts pulling out the wiring to see what happens.

The numbers are almost soothing. Fewer than ten Americans die of rabies each year, down from the several hundred who died annually before 1960. From 2015 to 2024, seventeen human cases were recorded, two of them contracted abroad. Set that against the churn beneath it: roughly 1.4 million Americans seek medical care after animal contact each year, and about 100,000 receive rabies shots afterward. The distance between 100,000 treatments and fewer than ten deaths is the whole story of rabies in America, told in a single ratio.

But the disease has not gone anywhere. It is merely waiting, permanently established in the wild. It lives in every state but Hawaii. Some 4,000 rabid animals turn up each year, more than 90 percent of them wildlife. Three of every four Americans live somewhere raccoons, skunks, or foxes carry it.

Any mammal can catch rabies, but a small cast sustains it: bats, raccoons, skunks, foxes. This is a plot twist from the mid-century, when the villain was the family dog. Strict pet-vaccination laws eliminated the canine strain, and the United States has been free of dog rabies since 2007. An achievement, incidentally, of the same regulatory state now being audited for sport.

Today the bat is the leading man. Of the 42 rabies cases Americans acquired at home between 2000 and 2024, bats caused 35, or 83 percent. The reason is horribly banal. Bat teeth are small; their bites leave marks that a person can miss entirely, a nip in the night dismissed by morning. The silver-haired bat and the tricolored bat account for roughly 60 percent of the identified infections, two unassuming creatures doing outsized damage.

The 2025 deaths sketch the range. One was a child bitten by a dog in India who died after reaching the United States. The other was an organ-transplant recipient who received a kidney from a donor exposed to a rabid skunk in Idaho; the donor never sought care, died without the classic symptoms, and was never flagged. Rabies, it turns out, can arrive by highway, by airport, by operating table.

The Shot Before the Bite

Here is the part the anti-vaccine set would prefer you forget: there is a rabies vaccine, and you can take it before anything ever bites you. Preexposure prophylaxis, in the jargon. It is not for everyone. It is aimed at the exposed professions (veterinarians, animal-control officers, wildlife biologists, lab workers, spelunkers, anyone who handles bats or, one supposes, harvests raccoons at the roadside). Since 2022 the regimen is mercifully short: two doses, day zero and day seven, good for up to three years, with a titer check or a booster after that.

And then there are travelers. Rabies kills an estimated 59,000 people a year worldwide, the deaths clustering in Asia, at about 60 percent, and Africa, at about 36 percent. In much of India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and across Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania, the arithmetic is grim and identical: too many stray dogs, too little immediate care. Dog bites cause roughly 99 percent of human rabies cases globally, the very scourge America engineered away at home. The CDC advises travelers bound for these places, especially the ones going far from a good hospital, to consider the vaccine first. The backpacker loose in rural India for a season is a candidate; the executive doing two nights in a five-star tower is not.

The case for the pre-trip shot is really a case about what happens after the bite. Rabies immune globulin, the thing that protects an unvaccinated person immediately, is expensive and frequently nowhere to be found in exactly the countries where you would need it most. Get bitten without it and your holiday becomes a medical evacuation. Get vaccinated beforehand and the whole crisis shrinks: you skip the immune globulin entirely and need only two follow-up doses. It does not spare you the trip to a clinic. It spares you the panic. Travel-medicine specialists suggest starting the series four to six weeks before you fly.

There is no cure once rabies takes hold. Everything is prevention, delivered after exposure but before symptoms, and it is called postexposure prophylaxis. It is widely available in America and it very nearly always works.

For the never-vaccinated, it comes in three parts. First, wash the wound, thoroughly, with soap and water, and a virucidal like povidone-iodine if you have it. Second, human rabies immune globulin, infiltrated around the wound where possible to neutralize the virus on the spot. Third, the vaccine series: a dose at the first visit, then days three, seven, and fourteen (a fifth dose on day twenty-eight for the immunocompromised). The globulin guards the opening while the vaccine takes seven to ten days to raise the body’s own defenses. The already-vaccinated need less: two doses, three days apart, no globulin.

Now, the timing, which is where folklore does the most damage. The first dose should go in as soon as possible. That is the rule. But there is no magic cutoff after which treatment becomes pointless; the vaccine-and-globulin combination is recommended regardless of how much time has passed since exposure, so long as symptoms have not begun. The person who realizes only weeks later what that fluttering thing in the bedroom might have been should still go. The one firm deadline governs the immune globulin, not the vaccine: it must be given within seven days of the first shot, after which the vaccine has taken over and the globulin adds nothing.

The real deadline is not on any chart. It is biological. Rabies is nearly always fatal if treatment does not begin before symptoms start; once the virus reaches the brain, nothing helps. Every recent American death is a variation on the same sentence. The two people who died in 2024, in Minnesota and California, both had a recognized bat encounter, both told no one, both waited. The virus does not negotiate. It simply keeps its appointment.

The Wall, and the People Pulling Bricks

Which returns us, unavoidably, to the man with the freezer full of roadkill. The thing about rabies is that its rarity is entirely manufactured, a public good built and maintained by the institutions now in his charge. And the maintenance is faltering. As HHS secretary, Kennedy, a lifelong vaccine skeptic, dismissed all seventeen members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee and installed his own, several with track records of overstating vaccine harms. A federal judge in Boston found the panel’s decisions arbitrary and capricious and put them on hold; the same judge called most of Kennedy’s appointees “distinctly unqualified.” The department rewrote the childhood vaccine schedule to resemble Denmark’s, cutting it from eighteen diseases to eleven, and rolled back the decades-old recommendation that newborns receive a hepatitis B shot within a day of birth. It wound down mRNA vaccine development and cancelled nearly $500 million in funding.

None of these moves is about rabies, specifically. That is the point. Rabies is the canary, not the coal. A society that keeps a nearly universally fatal virus down to single-digit deaths does it through exactly the machinery being dismantled: the surveillance, the vaccine advisory science, the patient public education that teaches a person to take a bat bite seriously. Weaken the wall in general and you do not get to choose which disease walks through the gap. The genius of rabies control was that most Americans never had to think about rabies at all. The tragedy, if it comes, will be that they will have to start.

For the moment, the secretary assures us, the raccoons are safe. The rest of us he did not mention.

Sources: CDC National Rabies Surveillance data, clinical guidance, MMWR reports, and the Yellow Book; ACIP pre- and post-exposure recommendations; reporting from CNN, NBC News, PBS/AP, NPR, STAT, People, and NewsNation; and Isabel Vincent, “RFK Jr.: The Fall and Rise.”

On May 12 the Planning Board closed the Williams application for their tasting room. They never filled out those forms any ways. On June 14 there is a petition from the community to the NYS Liquor Authority.

I have it on good authority the William are appealing thru the 305-a process.

Section 305-a is the right-to-farm statute. It exists because every agricultural district in New York eventually fills up with people who moved next to a farm and then resent it for farming. The law says a town cannot unreasonably restrict a working farm operation. Not “shouldn’t.” Cannot. Unless public health or safety is on the line. A vineyard tasting room is not typically a public health threat. It is, at most, an inconvenience to a neighbor who didn’t read the deed.

The Process:

A farm owner files a written complaint with the Department of Agriculture and Markets. There’s a form. Bureaucracy demands its tribute. The complaint lays out the local law in question and why it’s choking the farm operation.

Department staff review it. They look at the zoning restriction, they look at the farm, and they decide whether the town has overstepped. If it has, the Department doesn’t sue first. It calls. It tries to get the town to fix the law voluntarily. This is the diplomatic phase, the part where everyone pretends reasonableness is still possible.

If the town refuses, the Department stops asking. It issues an Order under Section 36, compelling compliance. New York courts give these Orders deference. Translation: when this fight reaches a judge, the judge tends to side with the state’s agricultural expertise over a town board’s zoning preferences.

There is precedent that matters here. The Department has already ruled, in another case, that capping parking at fifteen spaces and demanding a traffic study for a blueberry u-pick operation was unreasonably restrictive. A small farm doing small retail, strangled by paperwork designed for something bigger. That’s the shape of these cases. Towns don’t usually ban farming outright. They suffocate it with conditions.

Here’s the part that should worry the Williamses’ opposition more than it apparently does: 305-a protects the farm operation. The ZBA’s argument is that a tasting room, wine sales, and event activity aren’t farming. They’re commercial retail wearing a flannel shirt. If Ag and Markets agrees with the ZBA’s framing, the whole appeal evaporates. If Ag and Markets decides tasting rooms are simply how a modern small vineyard sells its product, the town loses control of the conversation entirely.

Which means the real fight was never about grapes. It’s about who gets to define what a farm does for a living.

I have a FOIL request into Ag & Market.

Even I ask myself why I post my column in the Chatham Community Board. After all, no one likes me, just ask Mr. Kleinbaum. Now not to put too fine a point on it, but as Chatham is a town of some four thousand people, Mr. Kleinbaum’s assertion — speaking as a trained data scientist — is statistically courageous. Data, evidence…not sure about the rest of you, but I’d want a lawyer who had a handle on the concept. Apparently the bar is lower here.

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Of course, no one reads me either, which makes me kind of foolish. What is puzzling to me is how I am so often corrected by those who don’t read this column. Could it be that these naysayers are fibbing? Or is the fibbing more of a culture? In Chatham, I’m beginning to think it’s infrastructure.

Ms. Bowerman logged on to Facebook the other day. She tossed me a sort of odd compliment: appreciates my writing chops, but my facts are…what? Alternative ones? Kelly Conwayesque? From a woman defending Donal Collins, the irony has a certain perfume to it.

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There is no shortage of things tearing us apart. Gay versus straight. White versus black. The Constitution, for God’s sake, has become a Rorschach test. I consider myself a reasonable man. Generous in my sympathies. Willing to sit across from almost anyone and find common ground.

Almost.

There is one flaw I cannot get past. I don’t even want to try. Not politics. Not religion. Not the various catastrophic choices people make in their personal lives, which are frankly legion. But there is something more fundamental than any of that. Something that reveals a person’s true nature with a clarity that a psychologist never could. A detail about a person that once you know it, you are done. The generosity simply drains out of you and it does not come back.

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It never surfaces in public. That is the insidious part. People keep it hidden, whether from shame or simple obliviousness is unclear. It emerges only in private, in homes, among people who feel comfortable enough to drop the performance. Som…

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EDITORIAL

Reporting on Chatham has been an education, mostly heartening. But underneath it runs something genuinely ugly: a campaign of intimidation by Mr. Collins’s surrogates, a bush-league Trumpism with no place in civil society. It isn’t smart. It isn’t democratic. It’s schoolyard bullying dressed up as civic engagement, and in a town where everyone’s car is recognizable in everyone else’s driveway, it doesn’t just coarsen the discourse. It poisons it. Mr. Collins doesn’t get to stand at a polite distance from this. These are his friends. This is his echo chamber. It was built in his name, it operates for his benefit, and his silence isn’t neutrality. It’s endorsement.

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Chatham is, journalistically speaking, a news desert with charming views. The Columbia Paper rarely covers local government. The Register Star and Times Union, rarer still. Local TV, practically never. So where do people get their information? The Chatham Community Facebook page, where 18,000-plus people gather like v…

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Twenty-seven months. That is how long the Town of Chatham has gone without accepting a solar application. Now, finally, residents get to see what all that waiting bought.

The town will present its draft solar law on June 20 at 2 p.m. at the Tri-Village Fire Company, 111 County Route 13, Old Chatham. The proposal, now in version 4.2, is the product of more than two years of study, drafting, public comment, and a moratorium that has been extended so many times it has begun to feel permanent.

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It started on March 7, 2024. The Town Board adopted a six-month moratorium on the review and approval of solar energy array applications. The reasoning was simple. The town had no regulations governing solar development, larger projects were sniffing around the area, and the board wanted rules in place before anyone broke ground.

Six months became twelve. Twelve became twenty-seven.

The drafting fell to a four-member Solar Law Committee appointed in June 2024: Supervisor Donal Collins, Town Board member…

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You made goat milk yogurt. You opened the maker. It poured. Most people decide right there that they failed. They didn’t. Goat milk yogurt is supposed to be thin. What’s in the jar is chemistry, not error, and it happens to be the best possible start for a frozen dessert.

The runny is the milk, not you. Casein makes yogurt thick. It’s the protein that knits into a gel as the milk ferments, trapping water inside the network. Goat milk carries less alpha-s1 casein than cow milk does. Less of that protein means a looser net, and a looser net holds less water, so the yogurt stays soft. Fat does the rest. Goat milk fat globules are smaller and stay suspended through the milk. Good for digestion. Good for mouthfeel. Bad for structure. The gel never firms up the way cow milk’s does.

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The fermentation itself runs like any other. Bacteria eat lactose, make lactic acid, the acid drops the pH, the proteins coagulate. In goat milk the matrix…

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A doctor secures a newborn to a molded plastic board called a Circumstraint, which holds the arms and legs in place because the patient cannot consent and cannot be reasoned with. The foreskin is drawn forward, clamped, and cut away. Sometimes there is local anesthetic. Often there is not. The procedure takes a few minutes. The patient is hours or days old. He was born with the tissue and will live the rest of his life without it.

There is a word for the removal of healthy genital tissue from a person who did not ask for it and cannot refuse. The law uses that word without hesitation when the tissue belongs to a girl. It does not when the tissue belongs to a boy. That asymmetry is the heart of the matter.

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The foreskin is not a defect. It is rich in nerve endings, that covers and protects the glans and moves freely over it. Removing it cuts away a functioning structure from a body that was not sick. How that is presented to parents matters. It is bundled into the maternity stay and offer…

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The crowd comes for the hats.

That is not a slight. It is the business model. Saratoga Race Course pulls something on the order of a million people across its summer meet, and the New York Racing Association knows precisely what it is selling. (Its own copy for Travers Day sells “extravagant fashion, raucous crowds, and superstars,” a day no one is permitted to miss.) There is a Best in Pink fashion contest. There are fascinators built by hand. There is breakfast on the Clubhouse Porch at dawn, served to spectators while the horses train in front of them.

This is old. In 1863, a month after Gettysburg, a casino owner named John Morrissey ran the first thoroughbred meet on the grounds. The New York Times described the grandstand that summer as a “superb array of beauty and fashion,” the equal of Ascot or Goodwood. The town has sold the same product ever since: the spring waters, the social whirl, the prettiest track in the country. Health, history, and horses, in that order, which also h…

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Republicans own the word “farmer” the way they own the word “freedom.” A prop. A costume worn at county fairs and in front of grain elevators. The last twelve months made the costume hard to wear.

Eighty-six percent of American farms are small family operations. (The USDA draws the line at $350,000 in gross cash farm income. Below that, you are small. Most of the country’s 1.9 million farms are below that.) These are the farms the party swears it protects. These are the farms folding.

The collapse had a setup. It did not come from nowhere.

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By the time Trump took the oath again, margins were already thin. Commodity prices had slid off their 2022 highs. Corn, soybeans, wheat, all selling for less. Costs did not follow the prices down. Fertilizer, fuel, machinery, repairs, insurance, labor, all of it stayed expensive. Interest rates climbed, and a small farm feels that more than a big one, because there is less ground to spread the cost across. The weather took its cut, drought in some coun…

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The New York farm winery license is one of the most permissive the state issues. The holder can sell wine and other New York alcohol to the public by the glass, run up to five satellite tasting rooms at no extra fee, and, unlike almost every other licensee, alter the premises without first asking the State Liquor Authority for permission.

What sets it apart is what it does not require. A restaurant or bar must give the town thirty days’ written notice, with proof of mailing, before the SLA can act on the application. The farm winery is on the manufacturing track, which requires no notice to the town at all. The application is reviewed and approved in Albany. The neighbors are never told, because the law does not require it. The 500-foot rule that triggers a public hearing for crowded liquor outlets does not apply either.

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So the only public review left is the local one. A nonresidential project like this requires site plan approval from the Chatham Planning Board, and that review is publ…

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Bari Weiss quit The New York Times in 2020, and she quit loudly. The resignation letter ran long. It accused the paper of ideological conformity. It described a newsroom where dissent was punished, where editors flinched at Twitter, where a heterodox voice could not survive the mob. She cast herself as the casualty. The brave one. The last honest person in a building of cowards.

It was a good performance. It made her a brand.

The brand was independence. She founded a newsletter (originally Common Sense, later The Free Press) and built it on a single repeated promise: honesty, doggedness, fierce independence. The pitch was that legacy media had been captured by groupthink and that she alone would publish the things no one else dared. She sold heterodoxy. She sold the open marketplace of ideas. She sold herself as the woman who left rather than be silenced.

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People bought it.

She has a tell, and the tell is Israel. Weiss calls herself a Zionist fanatic. Her words. There is nothing disqualif…

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Donald Trump has assembled a cabinet of horrors, a gallery of the unqualified and the unfit, and Pete Hegseth may be the worst of them. Picture him: the Fox & Friends weekend tan, the flag-pin sincerity, the prose-poem tattoos, striding the Pentagon’s E-Ring as though it were a green room with better security. He came to the building promising to scrape the rot of “wokeness” off the American officer corps. What he has delivered instead is the most florid display of unfitness the place has seen in living memory, performed with the serene confidence of a man who has never once been told no by anyone who mattered.

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Consider his latest curatorial flourish. The Navy sent up twenty-two names for one-star admiral, the survivors of the most pitiless selection process in American life. Not one of them a woman. And still that was insufficiently pure for our secretary, who reached into the list and plucked out at least seven officers he found surplus to requirements. Two women. Two Black men. The …

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The tomato is a fruit. This is the kind of fact people deploy to seem clever at dinner parties. It is also true. And those people are not clever. We learned this at Holy Spirit in the 6th grade.

Botanically, the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is a berry. It grows from a single flower’s ovary and carries its seeds inside, which is the entire definition. By every standard a botanist recognizes, it is a fruit. The United States Supreme Court disagreed. In Nix v. Hedden (1893), the Court ruled the tomato a vegetable for tariff purposes, on the reasoning that people eat it with dinner and not for dessert. Law and politics beat science. They usually do. The ruling was Trumpian before Trump, and before RFK Jr.

History does repeat itself.

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The tomato belongs to the Solanaceae, the nightshades. The name sounds sinister and the family earns it. Its members include the potato, eggplant, pepper, and tobacco, alongside deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna), which will kill you. The plants produce alkal…

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Last night’s ZBA meeting was, once again, a bruising evening for the Williamses and the tasting room they so badly want. We will get to the bodies. They are still warm. But first, transparency, that civic virtue the Town of Chatham keeps promising and keeps misplacing.

Board member Lisa Semenetti has been pushing for it. Earnestly. And yet the person whose job it is to post the relevant correspondence before a meeting, a duty the town’s own website advertises with a straight face, simply did not get around to it. I cannot tell you why. I can tell you that I got the letters, scanned them, and loaded them last week. Perhaps the worker bees at Town Hall are logging too many hours on Facebook. Perhaps they couldn’t locate the documents. It is, after all, very hard to find anything when your head is parked up the supervisor’s backside.

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So, thanks to that lapse, the room sat in obedient silence while Howard, attorney for the Williamses, got caught up on the matter. The opposition’s letters fi…

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Pizza is the most popular food on earth and the most frequently ruined. Most of what goes wrong happens before a single topping lands, because pizza is a vehicle for sauce and toppings and the vehicle is dough. Get the dough right and the rest is assembly. Get it wrong and you have condiments on cardboard. Good dough disappears underneath what it carries, which is the entire trick.

So start there. Pizza dough is four ingredients. Flour, water, salt, yeast.

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Wheat flour contains two proteins, glutenin and gliadin. Add water and they bond into gluten, the elastic network that traps gas during fermentation and steam in the oven. More protein means more gluten potential. Italian 00 flour (the “00” refers to grind fineness, not protein content, a fact butchered by most pizza blogs) usually runs 11 to 12.5% protein. American bread flour runs 12 to 14%. All-purpose lands around 10 to 11%, though King Arthur’s clocks in at 11.7%, which is why it punches above its category. Protein dictates style…

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