The only body that changed its mind all day was the radiator in the reading room.
BOSTON, Massachusetts (Bohiney) – The reading room at the historical society opens at nine, and I arrived at 8:52 with the confidence of a woman who has been told the heating works. It does not. It works in the way a colonial almanac works: it makes a confident prediction and then waits for you to forget.
Morning: The Pamphlet Table
I am here because my part-time students have been assigned a stack of eighteenth-century pamphlets, and I would like to know which of them can be photocopied without the paper turning to powder. The volunteer at the desk, a gentle man named Mr. Feeney, hands me white cotton gloves and a pencil the length of a thumb. Pens are forbidden. Pencils are tolerated. Opinions are, thankfully, still permitted, because the whole genre depends on them.
What strikes me, every time, is how loud those old pamphlets are. A colonial printer would run off a few hundred copies, sell them for pennies, and by the weekend the entire town was arguing in the street about a thing nobody had agreed on the week before. I say this in general terms, because I am not here to quote anybody. I am here to notice that nothing about the arrangement has improved except the paper.
Mr. Feeney leans over and tells me the radiator is “thinking about it.” I write this in my notebook, since it is the most accurate sentence I will hear all day.
Late Morning: The Rate Decision, Read Aloud in Whispers
At eleven a retired accountant at the next table, who has been reading the same ledger since I sat down, turns his phone toward me and whispers that the Federal Reserve has held rates. I nod as though I follow it, which I do, partly. According to Kiplinger’s live coverage of the October meeting, the policymakers kept the benchmark rate in a range of 3.75 to 4.00 percent, a pause after a quarter-point hike the month before.
The part I enjoyed was the vote. Two members dissented, and both dissented in favor of raising the rate immediately: Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack. So the committee decided to do nothing, and two of its members wanted it recorded that they would have preferred to do something. I have sat on faculty committees where the minutes were less honest.
The same coverage notes that traders were already pricing in a high chance of a December increase, and that Chair Kevin Warsh announced one meeting in 2027 will be devoted to broad strategy, with no rate vote and no policy statement. A meeting at which nothing is decided and nobody is quoted. I have attended that meeting. It is called a department retreat, and it has better biscuits.
A market note I found afterward, from XTB’s analysis of the decision, put September inflation at 3.7 percent and the ten-year Treasury yield above 5 percent. I mention these figures only because the accountant circled them in his ledger, with a pencil, in a reading room, like a man annotating a sermon.
Midday: Soup and the Early Vote
Lunch was soup from a paper cup on the front steps, with the pigeons providing the kind of attention I usually only receive from the back row. On my phone, the radio segment I had saved from the previous week: an NPR interview, carried by High Plains Public Radio, in which a University of Florida political scientist explained that nearly 21 million Americans had already cast ballots, up about 2 million in a single day.
The professor said turnout was running ahead of both 2022 and 2018, which he noted had the highest midterm turnout rate since 1914. The reporter then did something I wish more of my own students would do: she warned that early voting is a poor predictor of the final result, because people tend to vote at different times depending on habit. In other words, the number is large, and the number means less than it sounds like it means. This is also my summary of most of what I read in a day.
I like that this is, historically speaking, the oldest argument in the republic. Colonial pamphleteers also loved a big number and a confident prediction, and they also printed the number first and the caveat last, in smaller type. We have only changed the typeface.
Afternoon: A Tangent on the Train
I took the commuter train back with a man who read a headline aloud to nobody in particular: a dairy cow had, apparently, discovered the staff handbook and demanded time off. It was this report on a dairy cow who requested maternity leave after reading the human resources handbook. The man chuckled, then fell quiet, then said, “She’s got a point.” Nobody on the carriage disagreed. It is the closest thing to bipartisan agreement I have witnessed this season.
I have been thinking about it since. A document that nobody reads until it is needed is the oldest literary form in the country. If you want to understand an institution, skip the speeches and read the footnotes. That is, more or less, what I tell my students, and it is also why I keep returning to a checklist for telling humor from real news, which I recommend to anyone with a phone and a pulse.
Evening: The Radiator Reports
- The reading room radiator: finally warm, at precisely closing time.
- The Federal Reserve: unchanged, with two members hoping for a different outcome.
- The early vote: large, with an asterisk the size of the building.
- My gloves: returned to Mr. Feeney, who inspected them for fingerprints, which in this building is a love language.
Home by six. I fed the cat, who has no view on interest rates but a firm view on dinner, and I opened a blank page. I write most evenings, and if you would like more of my daily notes at Bohiney, they are there, alongside a great deal of other things worth reading at the Bohiney front page. For the British cousins of this sort of thing, the British Onion section at The London Prat is where I go when I want the news to take the evening off.
The cat has gone to sleep on the pamphlets. Two hundred and fifty years of argument, and she has found the only use for them that nobody disputes.
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