Diversions · Diversions · The Strip
The paper's first comic strip. It is silent, it is weekly, and it concerns a routine municipal inspection. We are told it has an ending. We have chosen to trust the process.
By The Editor
The Parlour
Fifty-three filings from the cane field, the farmhouse, the shopping mall and the apartment block, sorted by when the events claim to have happened rather than by when somebody got round to printing them — and carrying, over my objection, eighty years of documents in which the zombie is the injured party and 1968 is where the word changed sides.
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
It is not a hygiene failure. It is a five-to-ten-year putty replacement that shipped with the sink and was never written down.
By Vera Stipple
The Parlour
The history of extraterrestrial arrival, assembled from the only archive available. With corrections, and one personnel matter regarding our staff illustrator.
By The Editor
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
Domestic Affairs
Linen bedding spans a twelvefold price range for one fiber. We priced the whole bed three ways, did the per-night arithmetic, and checked what the money actually buys.
By Hollis Carver
Diversions · Puzzle of the Day
Trace a path from START to EXIT. Difficulty: Gentle. Pen, not pencil — we believe in you.
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.
