The Parlour · From the Desk
A hundred and thirty-seven filings from the cinema, the shelf, the stage and the schedules, sorted by when the events claim to have happened rather than by when somebody got round to printing them — an arrangement in which you can watch the rules get invented, which is the only genuinely gripping thing about my own paperwork.
By Casimir Vane
Domestic Affairs
Running out of the one thing you cannot run out of is not absent-mindedness. It is a missing threshold, and the threshold is one line of arithmetic.
By Iris Petty
The Parlour
Fifteen rulings graded against the register: the invitation holds and has failed twice, the stake works sometimes, and the most obeyed law of the lot was invented in 1922 by a print the courts ordered burned.
By Casimir Vane
Domestic Affairs
Portland General Electric's residential customers used 20% less electricity in 2024 than in 2000 and paid 141% more for it. The appliances worked. The savings were collected by the unit price.
By Hollis Carver
Domestic Affairs
The low-battery chirp at three in the morning is not coincidence and not malice. It is physics: a marginal battery, a falling temperature, and a threshold crossed while you sleep.
By M. Plumb
The Kitchen Desk
Caffeine leaves at a fixed proportional rate, not a fixed hour. A quarter of the afternoon mug is still in circulation at bedtime, and the people who insist it does not affect them are the ones sleeping through the evidence.
By Vera Stipple
The Parlour
A reading list rather than an argument. Eight filings from the register that between them predict most of the rest, and the secondary literature the register was built from — including the books that would catch it out.
By Constance Tally
Diversions · Puzzle of the Day
Fill every row, column, and box with the digits 1 through 9. A single unique solution exists.
Attempt it →
The Sections
What the household owns, cleans, stocks, repairs, and shares its premises with.
Food, cooking, and provisioning meals that continue tomorrow.
What the household reads and watches, listed rather than reviewed, and kept here all year: the registers, the tens and the family files.
The puzzles page, and the strip. Sincerely presented. Quietly impossible.
Notes on the edition, and notices from the paper.
