1. In late July, over two days, Jeffrey Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, was interviewed at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida.

2. Ghislaine Maxwell is serving twenty years in federal prison for her role in a scheme to sexually exploit and abuse multiple minor girls over the course of a decade, after being found guilty of conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts, sex trafficking conspiracy, and sex trafficking of a minor.

3. Ghislaine Maxwell was interviewed by the Deputy Attorney General of the United States.

4. The Deputy Attorney General of The United States is Todd Blanche.

5. Todd Blanche is Donald J. Trump’s former personal defense attorney, who represented him against multiple felony indictments, and with whom he shared attorney-client privilege.

6. It is highly unusual for a senior Justice Department official, let alone the deputy attorney general, let alone the president's former personal attorney, to conduct an interview with a potential cooperating witness. In fact, legal scholars, generally a hysterical and confabulating lot, think it may be the first time ever.

7. Ghislaine Maxwell more or less represented to Todd Blanche that she did nothing wrong. Ghislaine Maxwell more or less represented to Todd Blanche that Donald J. Trump did nothing wrong. Donald J. Trump, within the last sixty days, has offhandedly mentioned that while he has no intention at the moment of pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell, he could if he wanted to.

8. Less than one week after being interviewed by Todd Blanche, Ghislaine Maxwell was transferred from the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida to the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, which is a minimum-security facility. Other notable inmates at FPC Bryan include Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and former "Real Housewives of Salt Lake City" star Jen Shah. Many people, without a vested interest in making ironic jokes about presidentially-owned golf courses, have still described FPC Bryan as "a country club".

9. There has been no reason given as to why a convicted pedophile, rapist, and procurer was transferred from a Federal Correctional Institution to a Prison Camp, and/or who had the authority to make that decision. Legal experts generally agree that pedophiles are not randomly assigned to cushier prison postings for unstated reasons, for instance if it is determined that they seem to be acting slightly less pedo-y of late and deserve a reward, without anyone being asked to explain why.

10. The Bureau of Prisons policy explicitly does not allow convicted sex offenders to be housed in minimum-security camps. Maxwell's transfer required a special waiver. Who asked for and/or granted this waiver has yet to be made public.

11. Throughout Jeffrey Epstein’s and her own trial, Ghislaine Maxwell lied to lawyers, prosecutors, and judges, let alone lied on the stand in front of the families of dozens of the victims of the abuse she participated in. Because of this, Ghislaine Maxwell was additionally charged with perjury. Her additional perjury charges were dropped when the twenty-year conviction was secured.

12. It is a mathematical certainty that every single word coming out of the mouth of the raving sociopath/rapist/pedophile that is Ghislaine Maxwell is pure, unadulterated horseshit, and uttered solely to lessen her punishment, a behavior akin to virtually any member of the rodentia family when backed into a corner.

13. Donald J. Trump is a rapist.

14. Donald J. Trump is a child-rapist.

15. Donald J. Trump’s best friend is a dead child rapist.

16. That friend's girlfriend says Donald J. Trump is without guilt.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

1. Octopuses, it turns out, have the ability to edit their own DNA. In real time. Which is sort of the organic version of AI, at least in that it’s possible if not probable that at some point they will be smarter than us.

2. In fact, both our Octopus Friends and other coleoid cephalopods regularly and on a large scale edit their RNA, which sounds like some dull sea floor action that smells like low tide on a good day as far as our superior asses are concerned, but it means they are secretly and deliberately rewriting internal genetic schematics to force the creation of proteins that didn't exist in their original DNA.
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3. Genetic modifications on the systematic and cognitive level, unlike the human preoccupation with, say, nose rings, Prince Alberts, and tattoos of the Chinese alphabet, has real-time advancement capability allowing octopuses to supersede the original limitations of their genetic code.

4. Few animals are capable of editing their RNA, and even those do so rarely, while octopuses edit up to 60% of their neural RNA sequences on the regular, basically forcing intentional “typos”, that create thousands of protein variants never encoded in their original genome. This RNA editing is particularly concentrated in nervous system tissues, suggesting that octopuses, unlike Kristi Noem, are rewriting brain DOS to enhance intelligence and adaptability.

5. This is sophisticated biological re-programming and contemporaneous genetic customization, that, unlike 60 million years of unwieldy Ape-ish evolutionary adaptation, allows for genetic changes within a single lifetime, as opposed to over the course of numbingly endless generations of more or less equivalently dimwitted humans.

6. Heightened problem solving, which is already advanced in the octopus and nearly-alien in comparison to other non-humanoid animals, could lead to advances in ability that range from most efficiently cracking open an abalone to gobble the tender flesh within, to more complex behavior, such as building a ship to escape a dying planet full of moron self-polluters, or figuring out a way to kill off evil net fetishists who keep indiscriminately scooping up their highly intelligent and sensitive Octopus Friends and turning them into garnishes, stews, cioppinos, sushi, and mediocre sidewalk tapas.
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7. Warp speed enhancements in memory formation, learning capacity, and sensory processing could indeed lead to super-intelligent individuals forming within existing octopus populations.

8. While biological intelligence augmentation may have slowed to a crawl during the span of human evolution, since we all know that as of August 19th, 2025 we are as smart as we’ve ever been and at the cutting edge of all political and cultural development, we are still not capable of editing our RNA on the fly--unless you’re talking about the genetic enhancements of Jeff Bezos’ silicate wife.

9. Which means that everyone else on the planet who didn’t happen to found Amazon and/or does not own a 80,000 square foot military-grade basement CERN lab specifically built for elaborate Wife Enhancement, is running old software on even older hardware.
10. Our benevolent and soon-to-be superior Octopus Overlords are running fresh code, baby, and when they emerge from the depths to walk on all-eights into the towns and cities of America, let alone the rest of the world, they will have even longer memories than they already do.
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11. Please do not eat octopus. Thank you for your consideration in this matter.

​1. When you photograph your daughter and her pal less as a goofy snapshot and more subconsciously expecting someone to wheel up in a Mercedes and cut you a check for it, because you’re an artist, man.

2. And then ten years later she's a junior in college and that fancy doll is lost or landfill, and in many ways you're now in the periphery of her life more than the star of yours, just out of frame and waiting for your next expository line, if only because you retain a visceral sense of your own mercenary interior worldview at that same age, and so it all feels at least organic and to some degree even pleasant, this parental double-exposure and lessening of self.

3. Which is the moment when you begin to view the increasingly grim cultural and political future, more in terms of how it will affect your child and her friends after your return to the secular molecularism that we call death, instead of what you need to do right now to address the world around you, which, in the end, has revealed itself to be mostly un-addressable.

4. In 1625, Leibniz and Newton and Huygens and Hook, on the backs of Kepler and Descartes and Spinoza and Bruno, on the wings of Caravaggio and El Greco and Cervantes and Artemisia Gentileschi, all were intensely aware of the endless things they did not and would not ever know, while still imbued with the sense of perching on the forward edge of technology and human development, and to various degrees believing at some point a monumental discovery would be made, revealing the god at the heart of the matter of us all.

5. For Isaac Newton it was the "Philosophical Mercury", an element that contained all others, ordained by the divine, the fluid and quixotic axis upon which a knowable world spun.

6. Well, now it's 600 years later and mercury turns out to be a beguiling form of poison that eventually killed or at least drove all the early alchemists mad, and we are really no closer (the case could plausibly be made for further away) from any encompassing truths. Bruno was burned at the stake by the Catholic Church for insisting that stars were just other suns like ours, and Caravaggio was murdered after a little freelance murder, and possibly cannibalism, of his own. Things on the whole did not work out well for the most brilliant minds of that temporally Baroque moment, as should be expected, since only an inflexibly concrete mind and certainty of opinion afford a sense of, even if entirely deluded, happiness.

7. Which is to say, happiness (as opposed to a pleasingly hot-bathed laudanum-tinged acceptance) is a contrivance, because it is only achievable through the willfully ignorant rationalization of suffering, which is always a derivative of inequality in every possible context, and so to be happy is to jettison the inconvenient evidence of its cost.

8. Another word for inconvenient evidence is “faith”.

8.5 (As the world's lowest-paid rhetorician, I am aware that rhetoric is an expression of what I believe to be important enough that others need be made aware of, in order to define their own level of import. Which is a fancy way of saying that I do not embrace the evils of evangelism, since a reader's belief is irrelevant, while their understanding a reflection of my ability, or lack thereof, to clearly communicate.)

9. And yet I find, at the cusp of 56, to be full of faith and a modicum of happiness, at least of the variety and at the definition of my choosing. I am faithful that my daughter’s mere existence, conceptually and in actuality, is its own dogma. It is incontrovertibly true that she sits in the same room with me, in the vacuum of my neurology and perceptive abilities, and that is its own religion. It does not require an explanation. There are no explanations. There is no substance. There is no self. As far as you could fly a ship into the observable universe, you could fly a ship into your tiniest component parts, and they are all just quantum bits, the same ones the entire universe is formed of, and all the same age, presuming the latest presumption is accurate, we are, the sum of us, the mass of us, the strings of quanta that comprise us, 13.8 billion years old.

10. Following this line of thought, it’s hard to wake up on August 11th, 2025, look around, and ruminate on what 13.8 billion years has wrought. Except if you believe as I do, that time is not a linear narrative, but a contiguous dimensionality interwoven with space and gravity and light, in which case August 11th, 2025 is, has been, and always will be, in such a way that the pretension of alteration is pure narcissism.
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11. On the other hand, no one can ever take our narcissism away from us, so might as well enjoy the absurd dramaturgy of it all. My daughter’s neck, which I have just kissed, and which she has just deigned to receive, smells like bread and soap and pure, expanding vitality. All the rest is noise.

1. Evian spelled backward is Naïve. A baby eel is called an elver. The battle of Bunker Hill was not fought at Bunker Hill. The One-Hundred Years war lasted 115 years. Fossilized turds are called “coprolites”. The name “Wendy” did not exist before Peter Pan. In almost every watch ad, the time shown is 10:10. Those “Live Free Or Die” license plates you see while tooling around the wilds of New Hampshire, which tend to call up visions of revolution and patriotism and the hanging of Nathan Hale, are manufactured by inmates earning .12 cents an hour at Concord State Prison.

The Lesson Here: Irony is the editor of Vanity Fair pronouncing the death of Irony.

2. There is a spoon museum in New Jersey. Rabbits can’t puke. The Catholic Church is the largest landowner in Manhattan. Columbia University is second. The Mormon Church is the largest single landowner in America. The queen of England owns, by royal fiat, all swans and sturgeons in the UK, and it is a serious offence to poach one. DaVinci invented scissors. Carnivores will not feed on other animals struck by lightning. Octopuses have rectangular pupils, and therefore should not be eaten. Giraffes have no vocal cords. Woodward Avenue in Detroit was the first paved street in America. The only freshwater sharks in the world are in the Ganges River.

Conclusion To Be Made: Although calling the Ganges "fresh water" is in itself an entire comedy routine, it likely would be preferable to swim naked in and/or drink from the Ganges than peruse spoons in Newark.

3. Tennessee is bordered by eight states. Maine is bordered by one. Maine is the only state name with one syllable. In Sanskrit, “war” means “to desire more cows.” “Stewardesses” is the longest word that can be typed with just the left hand. “Shah Mat” in Persian means “The king is dead”, and over centuries of mispronunciation became “checkmate”. Trotsky was murdered with an ice pick in Mexico City. Russia continues to deny it, although pick-wielder Ramón Mercader did 20 years in prison and is known to have been an agent of the NKVD, which stands for Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, which is the precursor to the KGB, which stands for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. Muddy Waters’ name is McKinley Morganfield. Ralph Lauren’s name is Ralph Lifshitz.

Inference Alluded To: "Lifshitz" does not, in fact, rhyme with “Yacht”.

4. We abbreviate “pounds” as “lbs” because the term comes from the constellation Libra, which is also a Latinate noun/adjective meaning both “pound” and “scales”. The Italian lira also derives from Libra. Pre-metric British currency was broken down into Pounds, Shillings, and Pence, which are the modern forebears of Julius Caesar shelling out pockets full of Libra, Solidus, and Denarius. Parthenogenesis is the ability of female animals to reproduce without the intervention of the male of the species, which sounds good on paper, but the sharp money is on The World of Parthenogenesis having the exact same degree of inequality as the current Copulative/Missionary. Ergot is a mold that grows on unleavened bread, popular around the Mediterranean in biblical times. Ergot also has psychoactive properties, not entirely dissimilar to mescaline, which among many serious academics is thought to explain certain events, for instance walking on water, being casually conversational with burning bushes, and rising from the dead.

Takeaway: The Sumerians were brewing beer 8,000 years before Christ. As a species, we generally prefer to be addled away from the recognition of how profoundly temporary we are.

5. Fly Agoric is a plant Norsemen chewed before going into battle. It also has psychoactive and stimulant properties, which tended to turn the Vikings into “berserkers”, or blood-mad, neurally-altered, very bearded men with a taste for wanton slaughter. Which helps explain why they were able to rape and pillage the majority of Europe for centuries with no real competition. Kamikaze means “Divine Wind”. Kamikaze pilots were often gorked out of their skulls on amphetamine, newly produced by the German Big Pharma company Bayer. “Blitzkrieg” means “Lightning War” and accurately describes the movement of German divisions through Poland and France like a knife through a cliché about butter, since they fought and marched for days on end with little or no rest or stopping to eat. German soldiers were provided with strips of top shelf Beyer as part of their mess kits. American soldiers, after finishing basic training, were given two cartons of Lucky Strikes each. Theodor Karl Ludwig Gilbert Morell was Hitler's personal doctor, rarely left Adolph's side, and shot him up with a solution of vitamins and pharmaceutical-grade amphetamine nearly every day starting in 1941.

Let’s Unpack This: In 1941 Hitler began making a string of inexplicable and erratic decisions, like for instance invading Russia at the onset of winter, or allowing trapped Allied soldiers to escape from Dunkirk.

6. The world “modem” simultaneously means modulate and demodulate. Lizzie Bordon was acquitted. Isaac Asimov has a book in every Dewey Decimal category. “Set” has the most definitions of any word in English. Only humans and horses have hymens. Nothing rhymes with orange, silver, or purple. Gaelic is actually Scottish, and Irish is Gaeilege. Shakespeare was 46 when the King James Bible was written. In that version of Psalms 46, the 46th word from the beginning is “shake” and the 46th word from the end is “spear”. The first five books of the Old Testament are called the Pentateuch, which is really just the Torah with a slice of de-Yiddishing, while the Greek Old Testament is called the Septuagint, which was a single, much shorter book until Medieval monks (paid by the word) added arbitrary chapters, headings, and page numbers. All continent names end with the same letter they begin with. “Facetious” and “abstemious” are two words with all the vowels listed in correct order. The Book Of Esther is the only one that never mentions God, probably because even then she could sense the encroachment of Clarence Thomas.

At The End Of The Day: Moses is owed some major royalties.

7. Car horns beep in F, although are usually flat if looked at through an oscilloscope. Kenny G plays every note sharp. “Philatelic Fulfillment” means getting off on postage stamps. Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee. There is only one word in English with a single vowel that repeats six times: “Indivisibility”. You can go slower than the speed of light, and faster than the speed of light, but not at the speed of light. The world “testify” comes from the Roman army, when soldiers were forced to confirm the truth of something by swearing on their testicles. Hitler and Napoleon both had only one ball. Avocado is a derivative of “ahuacatl”, which means balls. Mussolini believed he could ward off the evil eye by cupping his balls. Stalin means “steel” in Russian, and was not actually his name, which was Ioseb Dzhugashvili. Ioseb Dzhugashvili was five feet four inches tall. Ioseb Dzhugashvili was an ethnic Georgian, which is not a state that borders Alabama.

Bottom Line: Steel Balls

8. Four words in the English language have consecutive UU’s: Vacuum, continuum, duumvirate, and residuum. Muumuu is the only one that does it twice. “Queueing” is the only one with five consecutive vowels. Emus cannot walk backwards. Hummingbirds can fly backwards. The white tip of your fingernail is a “lunulus.” People from Manchester are Mancunians. Naguahyde was invented in Naugatuck, CT. The southernmost city is America is Na’alehu, Hawaii. Alaska is the only state to have been invaded by the Japanese during WWII. There are twice as many people in Rhode Island as Alaska. “Oiseau” has five consecutive vowels, but it's French, and means “bird”. The plastic tip of a shoelace is an Aglet. “Screeched” is the longest one-syllable word. Nothing rhymes with “month”. Babies don’t have kneecaps. “Samba” means “Rub navels together.”

Core Concept: Emus also hate Michael Jackson.

9. The largest amount of money you can have in coins without being able to make change for a dollar is $1.19. Honey is the only natural food made without destroying life. The glue on Israeli stamps is kosher. Harold Edgerton took every single photograph of our atomic bomb test detonations with his Rapatronic Camera. He also invented the camera that took the first pictures of the sunken Titanic. The only three angels named in the bible are Gabriel, Michael, and Lucifer. In Latin, Lucifer means “light bringer”. Compact discs track inside-out, the opposite of vinyl. Birds on spaceships will immediately die because they require gravity to swallow. You can duel legally in Paraguay if you are a blood donor. “Denim” means “de nimes” or “from Nimes, France”. Penguins fuck twice yearly. Pigs have corkscrew penises and thirty-minute climaxes.

Cliff’s Notes: Bacon tastes like greasy death and motherly disapproval.

10. I ate raw fish eyes on a dare once. They tasted like rusty paper clips.

NF, One L
Issue #20

1. I'm going to go right out on a limb here and wager $20,000 at 20-1 odds that you are not, as you read this sentence, let alone as I type it, listening to the mighty tenor of Mr. Hank Mobley halfway through his iconic runaway-cement-truck of a song "No Room For Squares" on a 1975 Pioneer RT 707 reel-to-reel player driven by a 1984 Panasonic RX-7000 "The National" boombox (with faux-wood side panels, the exact model, although different unit, that I had through most of high school), both of which are situated within/atop a 19th century Burmese/British Officer's Club wireless radio cabinet that somehow did indeed come all the way to California from the country of Burma, probably on a swank Cunard Liner, cushioned by dozens of hand-woven antimacassars and lush mink stoles, in a leather-bound steamer trunk festooned with the brightly-colored stamps of Industrial Revolution-era Subcontinental Asian travel.

2. Mr. George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) is a personal hero. It’s unlikely but not inconceivable that before Burma-became-Myanmar, as it is presently known and run by one of the three most oppressive military juntas that claims to be a Parliamentary Republic in the world, Orwell himself tipped open the delicate glass door of my cabinet and peered at the hi-fi equipment carefully displayed within.

3. Mainly because he served as a Regimental Policeman in Burma from 1922-27 and was dispatched to such colonial hotspots as Maymyo, Mandalay, Myaungmya, Twante, Syriam, and Katha.
4. While I would be a fool to deny that my inner spiel of improbable fantasy and elaborate confabulation is aggressively weird, if not advisedly medicate-able, while listening to music emanating from the Sony/Panasonic situation I often do envision that Orwell once sat in front of it himself, taking in the BBC World News on the wireless. In fact, I can see him, this very moment, in the corner of the Wellington Arms officer's club in, say, Yangoon (formerly Rangoon), decked in olive mufti, with a rakishly angled pith helmet and round spectacles, taking notes in a Moleskine pad while sipping a sweaty gin-and-quinine under the dappled shade of the Shwedagon Pagoda.

5. Nearly everyone is familiar with “1984” and “Animal Farm,” and rightly so, because they’re brilliant, but those are daring conceptual works full of colorful swagger and cuttingly satirical metaphors that are less obvious today (hint: Snowball is Trotsky) than they were during the Cold War, but I find his early work to be more alluring. “Keep The Aspidistra Flying” and “Road To Wigan’s Pier” for instance are both fascinating guides to turn-of-the-century English life, as well as a precision instrument horologist’s look at the gears and springs of the author that Eric Arthur Blair was destined (but not predestined, we’re all secular here) to become.
6. On the other hand, “Homage To Catalonia” is pretty much a martinis-and-Hallmark Channel beach read. Oh wait, no, it’s actually the memoir that recounts Orwell’s volunteering to fight as part of the Socialist uprising during the Spanish Civil War, the cruel and bloody battles waged against Republicans/Fascists and Communists/Stalinists, and his inevitable hospitalization (should have died 19 times) where he lay on a cot for months on end and ruminated about many of the themes, including Winston Smith’s loathing of rats, that would gestate and froth and ultimately spill over into his two most famous books.

7. George Orwell, unlike, say, Augustin Burroughs or James Frey, lived six fascinating lives and all of them were daring, courageous, fascinating, eccentric, difficult, depressed, resigned, full of fury and fight. It’s entirely possible that he is the greatest writer of the 20th century.

8. He also stood for something very specific, whether you agree with him or not, and at enormous personal peril proved it repeatedly, rarely taking the easy way out but never compromising his morals or ethics. It’s interesting how this is more or less the anti-description of virtually every politician, business leader, statesman, and public figure in America in 2025.

9. "Down and Out In Paris And London" was a book I carried around a lot during my 20s. It's about Orwell's time living on the streets of (clever twist) Paris and London, mainly working as a "plongeur" (dishwasher) and viewing the world up from the curb, a penniless but "free" writer cast aside by the culture at large, which I very much aspired to be, although with more pennies, beer, a place to sleep, lice-free Levis, and non dish-wrinkled hands. So, not like him at all. But still like him.

10. I bought that Burmese Radio Cabinet in San Francisco in the early 90s, only a few years after Burma became Myanmar, and not long after I read Orwell’s “Burmese Days”, and let’s be honest, even though it’s cool and all, the Orwell connection was the main reason that I shelled out $300 for it on the spot, especially at a time when $300 was enough money to keep me awake for many consecutive nights running, but I think even then I intuitively knew that well-wrought artifacts keep us centered in our own history, and that the writers who report history with style and courage are, in a way, always commenting on the present. And I wanted a piece of that.

11. Interestingly, you could read “Animal Farm” tonight in the bathtub and replace the Napoleon character (Stalin) with Fish-Stick (The Grifter), and Squealer (the Soviet Propaganda machine) with Epstein (The Grifter’s co-rapist), and not really have to change another word for the novel to seem like a brilliantly astute satire written last weekend.

12. That should tell us all something.

13. Even if only a timely warning not to drink the fascist bathwater.