September has arrived, and apparently American democracy is being asked to beta test its own mailroom while the White House builds a ballroom. A whistleblower is warning that the United States Postal Service has spent the last several months rushing to construct an entirely new system for handling mail ballots under President Donald Trump’s executive order, a system the whistleblower says is inadequately tested, technically flawed and capable of preventing enormous batches of legitimate ballots from ever reaching voters. A federal judge has blocked the rules for now, the administration is fighting to revive them, and the first general-election mail ballots are scheduled to begin going out in North Carolina on Friday. So naturally, this seems like an excellent time to experiment.
Here at home, the family is slowly recovering from our outing, and the kids are preparing for a return to school that is suddenly much closer than anyone seems emotionally prepared for. My daughter informed me last night that she would like to start school right now, apparently unaware that the calendar does not negotiate with four-year-olds.
Meanwhile, Ezra, my sweet baby pie, my mister boy, will be one year old on Friday. I can’t believe it. I object, I will be filing a formal complaint with the gods of time, who will presumably respond with some draconian nonsense about growth, change and the importance of moving forward, at which point I will weep and reject their findings. I can already see it happening in his little face. It’s barely noticeable, but his cheeks are getting slightly slimmer despite the mountains of food entering his body every day. I had the same horrible realization while shopping for school clothes with my daughter recently. She no longer wears a 5T. She wears a 5/6. Excuse me? That’s not a toddler size. She’s my baby girl. I don’t remember authorizing this advancement.
Still, beneath all of my completely reasonable outrage at the passage of time, I couldn’t be prouder of these kids. My daughter is the kind of little person who will be there for you no matter what is happening around her. Ezra continues advancing through his extremely important baby training program and is now regularly standing unassisted. My oldest is becoming kinder every day while continuing to battle the particular demons that can come with ADHD. Our little family, on our little piece of land, somehow becomes more beautiful all the time.
Then there’s my husband, who battles demons of his own and still manages to get back up beside me every day. Somehow, every obstacle we’ve crossed, we’ve crossed together. He reminds me what our goals are when my brain has wandered six miles away and started a completely unrelated construction project. He understands that I don’t lose sight of things because I don’t care, but because my brain simply doesn’t organize the world the way other people’s brains sometimes seem to. He’s patient with me, patient with the kids and there when I need him, even when I am almost certainly driving him insane.
Today, we are continuing work on the attic and attempting to put the house back together after I created what can only be described as a domestic tornado while preparing our family for one night away from my cozy little nest. The children need bedrooms upstairs, preferably outside one another’s sovereign territory. Also, our house is small, which means a modest amount of disorder can make it look like several families were suddenly evacuated through the living room. I need a little more space, which means the kids probably do too.
I am also currently battling fairly severe tendonitis pain because, as usual, I did not listen to my husband when he told me to take it easy. We went into the woods and cut brush out of the path with machetes, which is perhaps not the recommended recreational activity for someone whose arm already hurts. Unfortunately, I remain somewhat childlike in my inability to consider what my body tomorrow may think about the decisions I am making today.
So we keep going. We keep fixing things, making room, and fighting for a better future while trying to make the absolute best of what we already have. Which, unfortunately, is not something I can say about the administration, and that brings me naturally to today’s news.
The Postal Service story deserves more than a passing glance because this isn’t simply another election rule being argued over in federal court. According to the whistleblower disclosure released by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, USPS has been trying to build a complex new Federal Ballot Mail Portal in roughly three months, despite the whistleblower saying a project of that scale would ordinarily require nine months to more than a year.
Under Trump’s executive order, state election officials would have to submit information about voters through the new federal system before the Postal Service mailed their ballots. Ballot envelopes would also have to comply with new barcode requirements. The whistleblower alleges the system was built through a rushed and chaotic process, without adequate testing, and says postal officials adopted what amounts to a zero-tolerance policy for certain errors. If one sampled barcode from a batch cannot be scanned or matched correctly, an entire batch containing potentially tens of thousands of ballots could be rejected. One barcode. Tens of thousands of ballots.
Nothing says confidence in American elections quite like introducing an enormous new federal computer system immediately before Election Day and apparently configuring it with the temperament of a printer that has decided cyan is empty. The rules are currently blocked by a federal judge, and the administration is appealing. The Postal Service has publicly said it will not implement the system for the 2026 election unless the government obtains relief from those injunctions. But the whistleblower also alleges that work continued even after courts ordered preparations halted.
The White House has defended Trump’s mail-voting changes as measures intended to combat fraud. Trump has spent years claiming mail voting is vulnerable to widespread fraud despite repeated studies finding actual voter fraud to be extraordinarily rare. What isn’t theoretical is the possibility of changing the mechanics of an election while ballots are beginning to move through the system. North Carolina is scheduled to begin sending its first general-election mail ballots Friday. The election is just over two months away. Perhaps we could refrain from installing Democracy 2.0 until after everyone has finished using Democracy 1.0.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has decided that construction may continue on Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom while the courts determine whether he was legally allowed to build it in the first place. This is an especially efficient method of resolving a construction dispute because eventually the building becomes sufficiently enormous that everyone can simply stand inside it and discuss whether it should exist.
The 90,000-square-foot project replaced the demolished East Wing and includes the ballroom as well as a military complex below it. The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued, arguing that Trump bypassed Congress and required federal review processes. A lower court agreed enough to halt the project. The Supreme Court, in an apparent 5-4 decision, didn’t decide that Trump’s ballroom is legal. Instead, the majority concluded that the National Trust likely lacks standing to challenge it, allowing construction to continue while litigation proceeds. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s three liberal justices in dissent and was not subtle about the problem.
He wrote that the construction is “likely unlawful.”
So we have reached the fascinating constitutional stage where the Chief Justice of the United States can say the president is probably building something illegally, while the construction crews are apparently free to continue building it. The administration says the project is necessary for national security and includes substantial underground military infrastructure. It also says enough has already been completed that stopping now would itself create serious problems. Which is certainly one way to establish presidential authority.
Move fast enough and eventually your argument becomes, “Well, look how much of the possibly illegal thing we already built.”
There is probably a lesson in there somewhere for every child who has ever been caught halfway through drawing on a wall.
Far beyond Washington’s construction disputes, Russia has spent another night pounding Kyiv. The Ukrainian capital endured more than 12 hours of attacks overnight, marking the sixth consecutive day of heavy Russian aerial assaults. At least 12 people were killed and more than a dozen wounded, including children, according to Ukrainian officials. Russia used ballistic and cruise missiles along with drones as attacks struck multiple regions of Ukraine. Homes and railway infrastructure were damaged in Kyiv, while Odesa and other parts of the country were also hit.
The timing has its own cruelty. Millions of Ukrainian children are beginning another school year under a war that has now consumed years of their childhoods, and some started September listening to air-raid sirens and explosions. Russia says its strikes targeted military-related facilities. Ukraine says civilian neighborhoods and infrastructure were hit, and emergency workers spent the morning searching damaged buildings.
There are geopolitical arguments surrounding nearly every movement in this war. There are negotiations, alliances, weapons packages, sanctions, shifting relationships and statements issued by governments thousands of miles from the people underneath the missiles. Then there is the much simpler reality of a child waking up because the sky is exploding again. Six nights in a row. Whatever diplomatic language we wrap around that, people still have to live beneath it.
And while Kyiv endured another night of Russian bombardment, the United States and Iran have begun directly striking one another again. The U.S. military launched fresh attacks against Iranian targets Tuesday, ending roughly a month without direct American strikes inside Iran and reopening a conflict that had never exactly ended so much as temporarily stopped exploding quite as loudly.
U.S. Central Command says the strikes targeted Iranian Revolutionary Guard positions associated with rocket launchers, minelaying operations and attacks on commercial shipping near the Strait of Hormuz. The operation follows an American strike Sunday against rocket launchers on Iran’s Larak Island. Iran responded by firing missiles toward U.S. military sites in Jordan. Those missiles were intercepted, according to American officials, while the United Arab Emirates says it separately intercepted an Iranian drone over its territory.
Meanwhile, two oil tankers, one Saudi and one South Korean-owned, were struck by projectiles Monday night near the Strait. So the ceasefire situation currently appears to be going extremely well, provided your definition of ceasefire includes missiles, drones, exploding tankers and renewed American airstrikes.
President Trump has warned Iran that additional attacks could bring an even larger U.S. response. Iran, however, is simultaneously signaling that it wants a way back out. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Tuesday that Tehran would immediately reciprocate if the United States returned to the commitments contained in the interim ceasefire agreement the two countries reached in June.
Which leaves us in the particularly dangerous diplomatic position where both sides are publicly describing conditions under which they might stop fighting while actively fighting. The Strait of Hormuz remains at the center of all of this.
It is one of the most important energy corridors on Earth, carrying enormous quantities of oil and liquefied natural gas into the global market. Months of fighting have already disrupted shipping through the region and helped push energy prices higher. Renewed military activity there doesn’t remain conveniently contained between Washington and Tehran. It travels through shipping contracts, insurance premiums, fuel prices and eventually household budgets around the world.
That’s what makes this escalation larger than another exchange of military fire. Two governments can describe missiles as deterrence. Markets don’t care what adjective was attached to the missile. Neither do the people underneath it. For months, the United States and Iran have existed in the strange territory between war and negotiation, striking, pausing, threatening, bargaining and then striking again. Now, on the same day American forces are attacking Iranian targets, Iran’s president is publicly saying his government will return to the ceasefire if the United States does.
There is an exit sitting somewhere in that sentence. The question is whether either government intends to take it before somebody decides another round of retaliation is necessary. Because retaliation has a peculiar habit of requiring retaliation. Eventually everyone is standing in the rubble explaining that the next missile is the one that will finally restore stability.
And finally, in Nepal and Tibet, the scale of last week’s disaster continues to become almost impossible to comprehend. More than 1,000 people have now been reported dead following catastrophic flooding triggered by the collapse of bedrock beneath a Himalayan glacier. Nepal says nearly 4,000 people remain missing, while hundreds more are unaccounted for across the border in Tibet. Among the missing are roughly 900 workers from hydropower projects in Nepal. Authorities believe about 500 may have been inside tunnels when the flood hit. Those tunnels are now packed with mud and debris.
Rescue crews are trying to reach them, but some of the passages are narrow, curved and filled with mud so dense that drones and thermal equipment have limited usefulness. At several sites, rescuers have found no signs of open air pockets. Elsewhere, drones equipped with speakers are being flown across devastated terrain to search for survivors, sometimes broadcasting voices and sounds in hopes that someone stranded on a hillside will respond.
More than 11,000 people have been rescued, but entire communities remain difficult to reach after landslides destroyed roads and other infrastructure. In Kathmandu, authorities have begun temporary mass burials for victims who have not yet been identified, preserving DNA and identifying information in the hope that families will eventually be able to bring names back to them.
There is something uniquely brutal about disasters like this because the numbers become so large that our brains begin to resist them. One thousand dead, thousands missing, hundreds of workers somewhere beneath the mud. But every one of those numbers represents a person whose ordinary life was underway on August 26. Someone had breakfast, someone went to work, someone was irritated about something small, someone loved somebody, and somebody was waiting for them to come home.
The world can change in an instant. Sometimes because the ground beneath a glacier collapses. Sometimes because a missile falls out of the sky. Sometimes because someone with power decides the rules are inconvenient and starts rebuilding the system around himself.
At home, the changes are smaller. A baby stands up, a 5T becomes a 5/6, an attic becomes a bedroom, and a house that felt too small slowly becomes enough. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to the little things we can build ourselves. There is so much we cannot control, and so much being torn apart by people who seem remarkably confident somebody else will clean it up.
So today I will probably make my arm worse, my husband will probably remind me that he specifically told me not to do that, the children will continue expanding into territory I did not authorize, and somewhere between the construction dust and the school clothes and my impending emotional collapse over a first birthday, we will keep building. Simply because making something better is still an option available to us, and I intend to use it.
You are a treasure, Shanley! I love your essays. I get objecting to the passing of time. Your perspectives on the unceasing criminality by the regime taking place every day are terrific. You are great at this! Please continue. Thank you!
Thank you for reminding us that there is still room for goodness and hope amidst all the horrors, be they manmade or natural, that seem to afflict us every day.