The Cards We’re Dealt
There are beer nights, and there are whiskey nights
Three of a kind can beat four aces
Don’t be too quick to fold
My father’s one-bedroom apartment smells of spilled beer soured into the carpet and SpaghettiOs etched onto the sides of the microwave. My little legs swing back and forth on the edge of the rickety dining room chair that I somehow managed to drag over to the coffee table, where he sits across from me, his caramel eyes peeking out from behind five blue-backed Bicycle playing cards he holds before him like a fan.
I push another penny into the pot. He whistles.
“Not what I’da done,” he says.
“I don’t want to play anymore,” I say, imagining the royal flush he must have. I scatter my cards face up on the glass table and cross my arms, pouting in the way that only six-year-olds can.
“Son,” he says, his voice gentle but firm. “Pick ’em up.”
I do.
“You can’t be too quick to fold, boy,” he says, putting his cards down slowly, one at a time. “You never know what the other …
The Battle of Point Reyes
Kicking old-school ranchers off their land to make Silicon Valley vegans happy
Injecting elk with birth control by helicopter
How do you tell the good cows from the bad cows?
Point Reyes is a 70,000-acre protrusion that sticks out of California into the Pacific Ocean, about an hour north of San Francisco. The Point Reyes National Seashore comprises 65,000 acres of that piece of land, as a unit of the National Park Service that currently makes no sense to anyone. To my eye, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I’ve been visiting it since I was a child. It calls to me.
Archaeological evidence suggests that Point Reyes was a kind of Miwok Santa Monica for thousands of years, a pleasant and densely populated oceanfront neighborhood. Then came the Franciscans, who brought the first few cows. In the 1830s, Mexican land grants turned the Point into ranchland. In the 1850s, litigation over those grants delivered most of the Point into the hands of a San Francisco law firm — Shafter, Shafter, Park, and Heydenfeldt. Shafter and Shafter then created a dairy …
America by the Numbers
Amount bet on the Kentucky Derby in 2024 — $210.7 million
Amount Americans bet on sports in 2024 — $148 billion
Increase in sports betting since 2021 — +45%
Tariffs imposed by the Tariff Act of 1789 — 5%
Tariff of Abominations of 1828 — 50%
Smoot Hawley Act of 1930 — 59.1%
Average effective tariff rate under Ronald Reagan — 3.8%
Average effective tariff rate under Joe Biden — 2.5%
Average effective tariff rate under Donald Trump — 22.5%
Size of Harvard’s endowment (2025) — $53.2 billion
Annual cost of Head Start program, serving 900,000 children — $12 billion
Cost of tuition, room and board at Harvard — $87,450
Median …
