Re: Trump Quietly Donates Entire Presidential Salary to Orphanage
Donna Kramer, Scottsdale, Arizona
Finally. Finally. A news outlet willing to report the truth about our President. I have been saying for years that the mainstream media ignores his generosity and you are the only outlet brave enough to cover it. I have shared this article with my church group, my book club, my water aerobics class, and my son-in-law Gary, who I have not spoken to since Thanksgiving 2021 and who I hope reads it. God bless you. I am subscribing immediately. Can I subscribe? How do I subscribe?
Editor's note: We are grateful for Ms. Kramer's enthusiasm. We would like to remind her, and Gary, that this publication is satire. The orphanage story did not happen. We say this gently and with full awareness that it will not change anything.
Re: Trump Quietly Donates Entire Presidential Salary to Orphanage
Prof. Andrew Castellan, Department of Political Science, Oberlin College
I am writing to express my profound disappointment in what I can only describe as a flagrant exercise in right-wing propaganda dressed as satire. By portraying Trump as charitable, even fictionally, you normalize a false image that his actual supporters will use to deflect legitimate criticism. I have written about this phenomenon in my forthcoming book, The Satire Problem: How Jokes Help Fascism. I expect better. I will not be reading further.
Editor's note: We have noted Professor Castellan's concerns. We look forward to the book.
Re: Mar-a-Lago Chef Reveals Trump Orders Well-Done Steak as a Form of Protest Against Elitism
Jean-Pierre Fontenoy, Executive Chef, Le Bernardin, retired
I have cooked for four American presidents, two French heads of state, and one British monarch who I am not permitted to name. I have never in my career served a well-done steak willingly. I read your article about this. I read it twice. Your culture editor has written the single most coherent defense of well-done steak I have encountered in forty years of professional cooking. I do not agree with her conclusion. I cannot find the flaw in her argument. This is the worst thing that has happened to me since the monarch incident.
Editor's note: Ms. Delacroix has asked us to convey that she is available for further discussion and that she was right.
Re: World Leaders Weep With Gratitude as Trump Explains Economy to Them Very Slowly
Name withheld by request, Brussels
I am a mid-level official at a European Union institution whose name I will not provide. I read Ms. Holloway's article about the G7 summit. I would like to say, formally and for the record, that the article is satire and did not happen and the quotes attributed to my colleagues are entirely fictional. I would also like to say, separately and not for the record but apparently now for the record, that the sentiment expressed is not entirely without basis and I would appreciate it if you did not follow up on this letter.
Editor's note: Ms. Holloway has been notified. She has already sent a thank-you note. In French.
Re: General Coverage
Mike T., Columbus, Ohio
I have been reading Fake News Mafia for two months and I just want to say: you guys are doing great work. The Trump coverage is honestly refreshing. It is like you are not even trying to push an agenda. You just report what happened. Keep it up. My only complaint is I can never tell if your stories are real or fake. My wife says that is the point. Is that the point?
Editor's note: That is the point, Mike. Please tell your wife she is correct.
Re: Scientists Discover Trump's Brain Operates at Frequency Previously Unknown to Medicine
Dr. Linda Chow, Johns Hopkins University, via attorney
I am writing through counsel to clarify that I did not conduct the study described in the above-referenced article, did not make the statements attributed to me therein, and do not work in the area of cognitive pattern research. I am a gastroenterologist. I have never examined the President. I have never been in the same room as the President. My name appearing in this article appears to be a coincidence of the highest order and I would like it noted that I find it extremely inconvenient.
Editor's note: We apologize for any confusion caused by the fictional Dr. Linda Chow sharing a name with the real Dr. Linda Chow. We have noted the distinction for future reference and wish the real Dr. Chow well in her gastroenterology practice.
Re: Staff Page
Terrence Okafor, Lagos, Nigeria
I read your profile of Walter Okonkwo with great interest. My father grew up near Lagos and has worked as a journalist for many years. I will not say more for obvious reasons. I only want to note that the detail about the typewriter is accurate in spirit, and that anyone who doubts this has not met enough journalists of a certain generation. Please give my regards to Wally if he is real. If he is not real, please give my regards to whoever invented him.
Editor's note: Regards conveyed. Wally typed his response on a separate sheet of paper and it is on its way to you by post.
Re: Trump Claims PGA Record for Longest Drive
Craig Whitfield, PGA member, Naples, Florida
490 yards is not a PGA record. The longest verified drive in PGA Tour history is 476 yards, set by Davis Love III in 2004. I am a golf professional. I have been a golf professional for twenty-two years. I read your article carefully. Your reporter, this Kyle Saunders, seems like a good kid who does not know that 490 yards is not a PGA record. Please tell him. Also the caddy quote, going very far in a direction, is the funniest thing I have read about golf in twenty-two years. Please tell Kyle I said that too.
Editor's note: Kyle has been informed. He said: Oh, huh. I will fix that. Also what is his number, I have some follow-up questions about the swing.
Re: Everything
Gary Kramer, Scottsdale, Arizona
My mother-in-law Donna has asked me to read your publication. I have read your publication. I have some questions. First: is this real? Second: if it is not real, why does my mother-in-law think it is real? Third: if it is satire, are you making fun of Trump supporters or are you making fun of people who criticize Trump? I genuinely cannot tell. My wife says that is the point. I have now been told this is the point by two separate people and I still do not understand. I would like to understand. Please advise. Also Donna says hi.
Editor's note: Hi Donna. Gary: yes, satire. The answer to your third question is: yes.
Re: Four Hundred Men Too Proud Of Their Heritage To Show Their Faces March On Washington
Donna Kramer, Scottsdale, Arizona
I saw the pictures of those men in the masks and I want it on the record that those are not real patriots. Real patriots show their faces. Our President shows his face constantly, sometimes on multiple channels at once. I suspect these masked men are paid actors sent to make patriotism look bad, and I would like your Mr. Marsh to investigate who is paying them. Also I am still waiting to hear about the subscription. Gary says there is no subscription. Gary has been wrong before.
Editor's note: Ms. Kramer arrives, by an unusual route, at a correct conclusion: the men are hiding their faces because what they are doing is shameful. We will take it. Mr. Marsh reports that no payment is necessary; the species assembles on its own. The subscription question remains under review.
Re: Your March Coverage, All Of It
Prof. Andrew Castellan, Department of Political Science, Oberlin College
I did not intend to write to you again. I have now read your ten pieces on the Washington march, and it is with genuine professional distress that I report the following: I agree with every one of them. The field guide is correct. The fashion review is correct. The spine imaging is, if anything, generous. I have spent three days trying to locate the ideological trap and cannot. If a publication I have formally denounced can name fascism plainly while sixty-one sitting officials cannot, my forthcoming book requires a new chapter, which my editor says is due Friday. I am not thanking you. I want that noted.
Editor's note: Noted, Professor. We look forward to the revised chapter, and we have taken the liberty of suggesting a title: The Satire Problem, Part II: The Jokes Were Load-Bearing.
Re: Multiple Articles, All Unfair
Name, face, and employer withheld by request, Undisclosed
Your coverage of the July 4 demonstration was biased and disrespectful. The attendance count was low and unfair. The fashion piece was hurtful and my gaiter is not khaki-adjacent, it is arctic white. We are a growing movement of serious men and we demand a correction, printed prominently, though do not use my name, or describe my build, or mention the region I marched with, or the vehicle I returned in.
Editor's note: Correction declined. The count stands. We have forwarded your letter to the Spine Desk, which offers free walk-in screenings; note that the screening requires arriving as yourself, so we have not held an appointment. Separately, our culture editor asks us to convey that arctic white is not a personality.
Re: The Devil Went Down To Georgia: One Plane On Time, Nine Topics Per Minute, Everyone Else Way Behind
Marguerite Ivey, Charlotte, North Carolina, involuntarily
I have read your Georgia audit four times, twice at gate B14 in Atlanta and twice at a gate in Charlotte I was never supposed to see. My flight on July 22 was cancelled, rebooked, and then cancelled again into Charlotte, where I slept sitting up beside a piano that plays itself. Your Ms. Park writes that she requested the day's delay data and received one row. I would like to know which row I was. I am not asking for compensation and I am not disputing the on-time rate, which I now understand describes a flight I was not on. I would simply like to know my row. My daughter says this is not a healthy way to process a travel day. My daughter drove.
Editor's note: Ms. Park asks us to convey that the reader was not a row. The table had one row and it departed on schedule. The reader is in the denominator, which the desk maintains separately, which is counted in person-hours rather than in names, and which currently runs to the tens of thousands. She has offered to send it. It is large, it is sorted by hours waited, and she believes the reader will place in the upper third. The on-time figure stands, for the ninth time. The piano is real.
Re: Dallas Ranks First In Texas For Being Near The Border. El Paso Ranks Fourteenth. El Paso Is On The Border
Cheryl Vandergriff, Dallas, Texas
I want to thank your Mr. Reyes for finally giving this city the recognition it has quietly earned. First in Texas. Not second, not tied, first. I have served on the visitor bureau board for eleven years and I have watched other cities take credit for a region we do the actual work in, so you will forgive me for enjoying this. We have already ordered the banner. My only complaint is your tone, which I would describe as grudging, and your headline, which spends more words on the city that came fourteenth than on the one that won. I would also like to know, respectfully, whether El Paso intends to appeal. If they do I would ask you to print what the appeal costs them, because I have read your article twice and I do not think they can afford to win it.
Editor's note: Ms. Vandergriff is right that Dallas ranks first and wrong about why. The index scores drive time to the nearest departmental field office; Dallas scored zero minutes by containing the office, which is a distinction it earned by being the place the people who wrote the index already were. Mr. Reyes asks us to confirm that El Paso is not appealing, that the reason is 19.4 million dollars, and that this is the first letter in the file to work the arithmetic out unaided. The banner is not our business. We would only note that it will say first in Texas for being near a place the banner is 634 miles from.
Re: The Props Office Publishes Its Classification Table; Every Fire Extinguisher In The Building Is Now Ceremonial
Raymond Escalante, Toledo, Ohio
Thirty-one years a fire marshal, and I want to say plainly that your props office got the right answer. An extinguisher that has never been discharged is not an extinguisher that failed to do anything. It is the only piece of equipment in that building that has done its whole job, which is to make itself unnecessary, and it has done it forty-one times over eleven years. So I have no objection to the classification. My objection is the word promotion, which appears twice in your article and once in the picture, and which implies the office found something out. It did not. It arrived at a fact I have been putting in writing since 1995 by way of a sentence about shovels. What I would ask, and I understand this is not your department, is that the ruling be kept and the inspection schedule be kept as well. I have read your table and I am aware those two things cannot both be had. I am asking anyway.
Editor's note: Mr. Escalante is right about the equipment and correct that the office is not. Mr. Ledger confirms the word promotion is this desk's and not the table's; the table has no such column and records only the class and the output. On the request, the office's counsel notes without being asked that keeping both the ruling and the schedule is precisely the finding it has been drafting since Monday, and that it fails on the podium every time. Mr. Escalante's letter has been forwarded to the office at his request. He has asked us to print that he does not expect a reply and would consider one an admission.
Re: Sixty-One Percent Say The Economy Is Fine. Broken Out, Half Of Them Mean Good And Half Of Them Mean Stop Asking
Lorna Petrosyan, Fresno, California
I am in your survey. I answered fine at question nineteen and I answered it fast, and I want to confirm that your coding has me exactly right: I did not mean the economy was fine, I meant that I had been on the phone for eleven minutes and would have agreed to almost anything to get off it. So I am not writing to complain about being read correctly. I am writing because you printed it as a finding about the country and it is a finding about you. Here is my difficulty. I also took your short version, later that week, and I said fine to that one too, and that time I meant it, because three questions is not an imposition and I do think things are all right. So I am in your 61 and I am in your 38, I did not change my mind about the economy at any point, and the only thing that changed was how long you kept me. I would like to know which of my two answers you intend to file me under. I have read the piece twice and I do not believe you can have both, and I notice you printed both.
Editor's note: Ms. Petrosyan is in both instruments and this desk did not know that until she wrote, because nobody had asked the panel file whether anyone appeared twice. Two hundred and fourteen respondents did. Ms. Datapoint has now run that group against itself: the long instrument returned fine at 62 percent among the 214 and the short one returned it at 37, which is the national gap reproduced inside one room of people who did not revise a single view in between. That is not being published as a finding about the economy. It is being published as the reason this desk is retiring the nineteen-question instrument. On the filing question, she is filed under both, because she answered both, and the desk declines to choose on the ground that choosing is what produced the problem. The margin of error was informed and asked to be left out of it, for the sixth time this year.
Re: The Study Is Flawless, The Effect Is 0.4 Millimetres Of Mercury, And The Press Release Quoted Both Of Us Correctly
Wendell Prue, Bloomington, Indiana
I read the landmark headline on Tuesday morning and I turned the news off that night and I have not turned it back on. I am seventy-one, I take two pills for pressure, and I own a cuff. So I did what a person does: I took a reading every morning for three weeks and I wrote them in the book. They did not move. Not down, not up, not by anything I could see. Then on Friday I read your other headline, the one that says it changes nothing, and I want to be plain that I do not think either of your doctors did anything wrong, because I went and found the paper and they are both saying what they said. My difficulty is that the thing I acted on was a headline and the thing that would have stopped me was a number, and only one of those was ever coming to my house. I would like to write to one of them and I do not know which. The one whose sentence got me to switch it off is the one who says the effect is real and will not soften it, and she is right. The one who would tell me to put it back on is the one who says no patient should do anything differently, and she is right too, and she is the one I would have to disobey to stay where I am. I am staying where I am. Not on account of the trial. I got an hour back and I found I wanted it, and I would ask you to print that this is not evidence of anything and that nobody should count me.
Editor's note: Mr. Prue is not counted and this desk will say so in print at his request. Dr. Polk confirms that a home cuff reads in increments of two and could not have shown him 0.4 in either direction, so the three weeks in his book are not a null result, they are a blank instrument, and she asks that his notebook not be described as data. Dr. Farnsworth confirms the trial measured one hour, once, under supervision, and says nothing whatever about an hour a day for three weeks; the extrapolation from the one to the other is not in the paper, was not in the release, and was in the headline, which is this trade's addition and not either author's. Both of them independently arrived at the same reply to his question, which is that he should not write to either of them, and that the field on the preregistration form marked minimum clinically important difference, left blank in 2023, is the one that would have told him in advance which headline to believe. It is still blank. It is also still a public form, and Mr. Prue is the first person outside this building to go and look at it.
Re: A Standards Editor Asked To See Her Section Of The OOPS LOG Before It Ran, Which Nobody Has Done In Three Years, And She Is Right
Emmett Sarno, Kearney, Nebraska
In the spring of 2024 a reporter from a paper I will not name called me eleven times over four months about my company. I gave him the books. I gave him two afternoons and my sister's phone number, and near the end I gave him the one thing counsel had told me not to give anybody. Then he stopped calling, and nothing ran, and I have spent two years not knowing whether that is because there was nothing there or because there was and somebody upstairs decided against it. I did not know until Thursday that a person could be inside a list of stories that were finished and killed. I am not writing to complain about your appendix and I am not asking you to take anything out of it. I would simply like to be told whether I am in it. I understand you may not be able to say. I would only point out that I am the one party here who has already spent two years assuming the worst, and that being told I am one of 1,204 would be an improvement on it, because 1,204 is a number and what I have had is a silence. My wife says I should let this go. My wife has read your article twice.
Editor's note: Mr. Sarno asks a question this desk cannot answer yet, for a reason it did not know until it went to look. Appendix A is indexed by story. It records what was reported, when it was killed and by which outlet, and it has never carried a subject field, because for three years nobody needed one: an appendix is kept by people who already know who the story was about. There is no way to tell Mr. Sarno whether he is in it except to read all 1,204 entries looking for him, which Mr. Callahan has started and estimates at nine days. The difficulty is on the far side of that. The moment a name index exists, the appendix stops being a count of stories and becomes a list of 1,204 people who could be told, which is a thing that has never existed and which this desk did not set out to build; it has not decided whether to publish it and will not pretend the decision is a small one. Mr. Callahan notes that the standards editor spent Tuesday arguing that a published number should reflect what it claims to measure. The appendix claims to count stories. It has been a list of people the entire time, and the first person to say so from outside this building did it from Kearney, in a letter about himself.