| Day 8. Amber Phillips returns to this newsletter on Monday. Meaning that we've reached the last 15 minutes of this particular film, when the survivors at least hear the helicopter echoing through the skyscrapers and scramble to the roof — only to find the Zombie King awaiting them with his horde. "Well," our hero says, "looks like the bell just rang." Oh, our hero is a schoolteacher, as was established earlier in the film. He found an unexpected inner strength when forced to fight his way out of his classroom, using only the Louisville Slugger he kept under his desk after watching "Stand and Deliver" on Netflix. Gathering together a small band of other survivors, the group made it to the point of rescue — except the guy who always seemed kind of devious and who was devoured after he tried to sneak off with all the supplies. And with that exciting vignette, here begins the last version of "The 5-Minute Fix" authored by yours truly How to sell your own pillow The unusual thing about MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is that he's clearly earnest. There are a lot of people who are mired in the conspiratorial world of election-fraud claims who seem fairly obviously to be doing it for the attention. The CEO of Newsmax told the New Yorker in late November that Donald Trump's incessant fraud claims were "great for news" at the end of the day, generating "one million people per minute" for his properties. Even Trump himself seems to blur the line between true belief and cynical opportunism. Not Lindell. By all accounts, he means it. He's a man of deep faith, both Christian and in the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, which it wasn't. In a profile published this week, the Atlantic's Anne Applebaum cast him as "an affable, self-made Midwesterner, one of those goofy businessmen who makes his own infomercials" — and possibly a central figure in the kneecapping of American democracy. Lindell, unlike Trump, is putting his money where his mouth is. He's investing heavily in pushing claims that he doesn't seem to understand are false, using the millions he's made selling those pillows in a futile effort to prove true something that can't be. There is an obvious solution. If you believe that there is an inherent risk in having very wealthy people gin up unfounded doubt about American elections, you can simply do what Lindell did — create a company that sells pillows for a profit. And to do so, you need only to follow these nine simple steps. 1. Get two pieces of soft fabric and sew them together on three sides. Note that many consumers pay close attention to the thread count of cotton sheets, opting for higher counts that connote higher quality (though that is itself debatable). 2. Start advertising your product early, opting for saturation coverage on a popular right-wing cable news network. Your advertisements should air so often that people take to social media to threaten to watch other channels out of sheer exhaustion at seeing your commercials. 3. Stuff the empty space between the two sheets with soft material, like goose down or polyester batting. The latter is currently available at Michael's in bulk for about $60. 4. Get invited to the White House after the president, who is himself a ravenous consumer of that same network, sees your ads and marvels at their frequency. While there, suggest that the president was elected through divine providence. 5. Sew the open end of the pillow closed. Neglecting to complete this step will negatively affect the quality of your pillow. 6 Become convinced that the president's claims about his election loss are legitimate. Invest your time and money into proving him right, embracing charlatans who are obviously misleading you. 7. Sell the pillow on the website, perhaps using a promotional code linked to a deranged conspiracy theory centered on pedophilia. 8. Pull your advertising from the popular cable network because it refuses to run an advertisement for a symposium focused on your unfounded claims of fraud. 9. Profit. And that's all there is to it. Fine. I'll do my own newsletter. Since I took over writing this newsletter, at least two non-relatives have suggested that if I had my own newsletter they would not automatically send it to the Trash folder. Those two individuals will now have to prove it. The Washington Post is soon going to turn the "how to read this chart" bit (see below) into a newsletter of its own. Want to get a weekly chart to mull/enjoy/complain about? Interested in hearing me riff about unrelated things before I get to the point? No need to let the torture end. So choose an option: Be the first to know when my newsletter launches ➦ I don't want to sign up, but I like clicking links ➦ How to read this chart I started at The Post in May 2014, an incomprehensible seven years ago. Seven years ago — and this is true — the Internet hadn't yet been invented. That's how long ago we're talking. Being somewhat unhealthily organized, I have material from everything I've written since organized into folders by month and year on my computer. So, in honor of today's newsletter, I figured I'd try to pick out the oldest chart I made for this newspaper. It appears to be this one, from the middle of that month. I was unable to find the article that it accompanied, but it seems clear from the graphic itself: Arkansas had briefly legalized same-sex marriage and the graphic was tracking similar windows from other states. This was 2014, before the June 2015 legalization of the practice throughout the United States, so these windows were in many places the only opportunity same-sex couples had to wed. (In some states, like Massachusetts, such marriages had been legal for years.) Here, the red bars extend to the right to represent the duration of the window. The height indicates the number of people who married each day on average, meaning that the total area of the red allows for a general comparison of the total number of people married in each state during the window. I also included pictures of the states for no clear reason, but, anyway, that's what Arkansas looks like. That's that. Thanks for reading this week. And now [cracks knuckles] it's time to teach these zombies something about vertical axes. [The credits roll.] | 
Email 
