The midterms are over. Not officially, not everywhere — Arizona and California will still be counting when the rest of the country has moved on, because slow counting is what Arizona and California do — but over. The polls close, the ads stop, and the “most consequential election of our lifetime”, the one they sell us every two years, gets packed away until the next “most consequential election of our lifetime”.
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A claim has been going around this week, a few days before the midterm elections: Fox News’ ratings have “plummeted” — down to lows not seen in 25 years — and maybe that tells us something about how Tuesday is going to go.
I checked. And because this is the kind of story that usually turns out to be spin, let me say the surprising part first: the numbers underneath it are real.
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You have probably heard of Göbekli Tepe, the hill in southeastern Turkey with the great stone circles — T-shaped pillars carved with animals, raised around 9600 BCE. Its excavator, Klaus Schmidt, gave the world a headline: this was the world’s first temple, built by hunter-gatherers who gathered for ritual and feasting, with no houses, no hearths, no town. First came the temple, then the city. Religion, the story said, invented civilization.
The archaeologists who dig there now — Schmidt’s successors, led by Lee Clare — have spent the last several seasons respectfully taking that story apart.
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Eight days from now, Americans vote, and there is a real possibility — not a certainty, a possibility — that when the counting is done, the Democrats will hold both the House and the Senate. I want to walk through what that would actually mean, because I don’t think most of the shouting on television has thought past election night. What happens in January if the Republicans lose big? Short version: an impeachment, a frozen government, and a president who is done — not wounded, done. But walk it in order.
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I spent part of this afternoon cancelling streaming subscriptions, and when the dust settled I was saving myself over fifty dollars a month. Hulu is paid through November 20 and then it’s dead. HBO Max turned out to still be billing me through Amazon even though I believed I had already cancelled it directly — I may have been paying for that one twice. Amazon Music Unlimited has apparently been dead since June; nobody bothered to tell me, including Amazon.
Clearing all that out got me looking at what I had actually been paying for. And that’s when the principle of the thing stood up and waved at me.
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