The rendition, old and new — ten pairs

We gave up the only stretch of day that asked nothing of us, and now the house has no door between the desk and the bed.

Mary McNamara said it in the Los Angeles Times: "I never thought I’d say it, but I miss my commute." At first she was glad. Then the drive was gone and the day had no seam.

Meg Loughney rode a bus and a subway and walked from Astoria to Wall Street, and she called missing that "pitifully sad to say." A professor at Harvard Business School has a phrase for it—role-clarifying prospection. That means the ride was where you stopped being the person at home and became the person at work. The only room nobody owned.

In Los Angeles they count a hundred and three hours a year in traffic. That used to sound like a ransom. Now it sounds like an empty coatroom after the last show, and half the country is standing in the kitchen wondering where to put a coat. The professor says, "You can't disentangle home and work anymore, and that's not always easy." The door from the bedroom opens straight onto the desk, and the desk is always open. Somebody could miss that bus. I believe they do.

The salary line is the smallest part of what you are actually negotiating.

You ask whether to take a pay cut to work from home, and I want to say this gently: the salary line is the smallest part of what you are actually negotiating. You are not deciding between two numbers. You are deciding which relationships get your presence, and which get only your output. So let's begin with the question under the question. What are you trying to come home to?

Remote work was sold as freedom. For many it became another kind of office, one with no walls and no closing time. The numbers say what the feeling is: 85% of workers receive work messages, calls, or emails after hours. 55% say long hours and always being on are the norm at their company. 74% have worked while sick in the last year. This is not flexibility. This is a boundary dissolved, then renamed as a benefit.

You are considering paying, literally, for distance from something. The word that matters is not 'remote.' It is 'cut.' What exactly are you cutting? The commute, yes. The fluorescent light, the office politics, the visibility. But maybe also the friction that made you a person and not just a deliverable. Work has always been a relationship system: trust, rapport, loyalty, recognition. Those are built in the small moments, the casual interactions. I have been saying this about the future of work: remote work, AI, and economic uncertainty are weakening those casual interactions. That erosion is a relationship problem before it is a productivity problem.

The reports are also clear about what is being removed. The routine tasks now being automated were once the way an entry-level worker honed a skill and began forming a relationship. If companies eliminate those roles, they remove a path into a profession and a way of learning to be with other people. So when you think about leaving the office, do not ask only what you gain. Ask what you are no longer part of building, and whether that gap matters to you.

Now, loyalty. Most of us confuse loyalty with staying. One survey found 78% of workers believe staying with one company for a long period is the best way to advance. But 43% say there are few or no opportunities for growth where they are. So people stay out of loyalty while quietly planning a side income; 70% believe you should always look for income sources beyond your main job. That is not loyalty. That is an arrangement held together by a story.

Ask yourself to whom you are trying to be loyal. To the company that emails at ten o'clock? To a manager who once saw you? To your family, your partner, your own body? Loyalty without autonomy becomes compliance. Autonomy without connection becomes isolation. The pay cut is the price of one kind of autonomy. It will buy time, proximity, perhaps sleep. It may also buy a thinner workplace identity, less chance to be seen, fewer casual encounters that become trust. Whether it is a good purchase depends entirely on what you are buying it for.

I will not tell you to take the cut or refuse it. That decision is yours, and I would be doing you no service to make it. But I will ask you to speak about it in the right language. Not money first. First, aliveness. When in your work do you feel most drawn to it? When are you most in your element, most seen, most useful? Remote work can preserve some of that and erode other parts. Name which parts you need. Then ask what this move does to the relationships that keep you alive: with your partner, your children, your colleagues, yourself.

One thing I notice: younger workers have learned a particular lesson. 58% of Gen Z workers reply to after-hours messages immediately, compared to 40% of Gen X. They are not more eager; they are more afraid of being unseen. If you take the pay cut to escape that availability trap, good. But remote work will not automatically free you from it. The phone still follows. The expectation still follows. Unless you make a different contract—with yourself and with the people who pay you—you will have paid money to be always on from your own kitchen.

So the question is not, 'Should I accept less for remote?' The question is, 'What am I willing to leave for, and what am I willing to leave behind?' When you imagine the life this move makes possible, who is in the room? Do you like the person they see? That answer will tell you whether the cut is a loss or a purchase. Money is only the language. The statement underneath is about loyalty, autonomy, and the quality of your relationships—which is to say, the quality of your life.

Now that tennis players are dressing as NBA legends, let us abolish the ball and just have a fashion show.

I have read, with that peculiar interest a man must naturally feel in any spectacle that has clean forgotten its own business, that at the tennis tournament now going forward at Flushing Meadows, New York, a young woman named Naomi Osaka walked out upon the court in an outfit got up expressly in honor of Mr. Allen Iverson, a basketball star of the Philadelphia 76ers. It was her fourth walk-on outfit of the year.

Four. The year is not yet three-quarters gone. She has changed her clothes four times in the public view before ever a ball was struck. The public takes this performance to be tennis. In truth, it is merely a fashion show, encumbered with the nuisance of a ball.

The record proves it, plain as day. The tournament is on its fifth day. The gentlemen in charge have gone into partnership with Marvel, which is a comic-book concern. They drew a great deal of notice at a thing called Fan Week with a special Spider-Man comic book. A tennis player named Coco Gauff was among those chasing after this comic book. She was chasing paper, and nothing else.

Then there is a drink they call the Honey Deuce. Grand Slam prize money is higher now than it ever was before. There is a daily television schedule, and a RedZone stream, whatever that curious stream may be. There are players, to be sure. Two brackets exist, a men's and a women's. But the clothes and the beverage are the great facts that arrive first; tennis comes trailing along behind them like an unwelcome child at a wedding.

I propose, therefore, that we clear away the last remaining hindrance. Abolish the ball.

The ball causes nearly every solitary embarrassment the tournament suffers. A No. 12 seed named Belinda Bencic struck a spectator with a ball and was not thrown out for it. The audience has been fairly swallowed up by the scenery. A man named Novak Djokovic was beaten by a man named Mariano Navone. Now, without a ball, Mr. Djokovic could not possibly have been beaten. He could have walked on, received his applause, and retired straight to the Honey Deuce.

There is a woman named Venus Williams playing at the age of forty-six. Her sister Serena is playing in the doubles with her. Fine women, both of them. Only think how much better they would appear in an honest fashion show. Running around only disturbs the drapery. There is a world No. 1 named Aryna Sabalenka, two-time defending champion; yet the talk of the day begins and ends with the fourth outfit.

Let the whole tournament be turned into a series of walk-ons. A player comes out in an outfit—the fourth one being the winner. The public looks; the public applauds; the player walks off. No ball is struck. No innocent bystander is hit. No Djokovic is beaten. No forty-six-year-old lady is required to sweat. The top prize money is awarded entirely upon the merits of the clothes. The brackets may remain, for the public dearly loves a bracket, but the garments shall be the seeds, and the Honey Deuce shall be the cup.

The Spider-Man comic book settles the question at once. Young Gauff was chasing it. Therefore let the final contest consist of two players standing upon a stage, each holding a comic book, to be judged strictly by the applause. The champion receives the larger comic, the runner-up receives the smaller one, and both go home to rest.

This will be no loss to sport. Sport has been backing away from this tournament for years. The tournament has gone chasing after Marvel and the Honey Deuce. It has chased the record prize money; it has chased the RedZone stream. In point of fact, the tournament got rid of the ball long before I did. I am merely asking that the papers be signed.

There is a player named Stefanos Tsitsipas who said, "To be entirely honest with you, I knew about this before the announcement." And then he added, "I'm surprised it came so late." He did not say which announcement he meant, and he did not need to.

Some people may object that custom demands the ball. But I have known the power of a garment myself. I once received a red doctor's gown at Oxford, and would have worn it to breakfast every morning if my daughter had allowed it. A gown can be an institution. Custom is always the plea made for the old thing; but here the new thing is already in the room, dressed up in Allen Iverson's clothes.

Therefore, let the ball be done away with altogether. Let the walk-on be the whole of the tennis. Let the scorekeeper write down: "Osaka, fourth outfit, tribute to Iverson, winner." Let the racket be carried purely as a cane. Nobody will be beaten; no spectator will be struck; the prize money will remain comfortably high; and at last the tournament will be what it has been trying to become all along—a fashion show with no interruptions whatever.

The dark universe will not give interviews, so we are sending a ledger.

1. I read the public specification. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a NASA mission scheduled to launch on Sunday. It will study dark energy, chart galaxies and black holes, and hunt for planets. The word chart is honest. A chart is not an explanation. It is a ledger of positions and magnitudes, and that is what the dark universe needs.

2. We have known since the end of the last century that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. That acceleration needs a name, and the name is dark energy. Calling it dark is not poetry. It is an admission. We are looking at a ledger with most of its entries written in invisible ink.

3. Matter has a similar silence. Galaxies rotate as if they contain far more mass than their light accounts for. Clusters bend light more than the visible stuff should allow. The missing mass is dark matter, and it has spent decades declining to show itself.

4. Roman will not see dark energy. It will not see dark matter. What it can do is measure their effects with new precision. Chart galaxies means count them, position them, record their shapes and distances. Precision of that kind is not a small thing. It is the difference between a rumour about the universe and a test.

5. Dark energy has one property we can hope to grab: whether it is constant or changes with time. The expansion history of the universe is written in the distances and motions of galaxies. A sufficiently precise chart can tell us if the acceleration has been steady, or if it has varied. That is the question Roman may decide. If it varies, the simplest explanation is wrong.

6. Black holes enter the same ledger as anchors and engines. We do not see the black hole itself. We see what surrounds it, what falls toward it, what it kicks away. A better census of black holes across the universe is a better census of where mass has gone and how gravity has organised it. The instrument will not photograph the horizon. It will trace the long receipts.

7. The planet part is a different ledger. Discovering planets is useful, but it is not the dark question. A world is a small bright thing next to the large dark. The mission carries both jobs because the same precision that maps galaxies maps the brief dimming of a star when a planet crosses it. The announcement lists planets and dark energy as if they were equal. They are not. The dark universe is the larger uncertainty.

8. What it will not resolve. Roman will not identify the particle, if there is a particle, behind dark matter. It will not tell us why the vacuum has the energy it does, or whether dark energy is the vacuum at all. It will not settle whether the universe is finite or infinite, or what happened before the Big Bang. It will place tighter bounds. A bound is a wall around ignorance. It tells you where the mystery still lives.

9. The danger of precision is the illusion of finality. A chart of galaxies can be mistaken for a picture of the universe. It is not. It is an abstraction, a set of selected observations. Theory still has to ask whether the dark is one thing or many, whether it changes, and whether the laws that describe it are the same everywhere. The instrument narrows the guesses. It does not make the guesses unnecessary.

10. I have spent my working life on questions that cannot be answered by looking at a single object. You need a population, a history, a distribution. That is what this instrument is for. It will give the dark universe a shape, not a face.

11. Sunday is a date, not a result. If the launch succeeds, the instrument begins its work. If it fails, the questions remain. The dark does not care about Sunday. It was there before the instrument was named, before Nancy Grace Roman, before me, before the Earth. That is the point. We are sending a ledger into the dark to see if the dark keeps accounts.

I said at the last meeting that the Fed would hold; it held; what I got wrong is how many people still expected something else.

Well, I'll tell you. This is a scorecard for an easy call. In July the Federal Reserve held the federal funds rate at 3.50% to 3.75% for the fifth straight meeting. I said it would hold, and it held. On the official scoreboard, that counts as being right. But I should mark the card honestly. The call itself was simple, but I got the crowd wrong.

No math required a hike. Inflation stood at 3.4% in July, and unemployment was 4.1%. The Fed had already held four times. Still, the market put roughly one chance in three on a hike. One in three. That number is pure emotion. My mistake was to think that feeling would have burned off after four straight meetings of doing nothing.

The decision came with three dissents. Three members wanted a hike. The cameras love a dissent because a vote creates drama, but three votes out of twelve is merely a minority. The minutes from August 28 made the room sound divided. Members worried about sticky inflation and noted that further increases could follow. Some thought money was too loose, while others argued the market was already doing part of the work. The committee was simply thinking out loud.

Here is my second mistake. I assumed investors would look at the uncertainty and understand the hold. Instead, many saw three dissents and assumed a hike was right around the corner. That conclusion is an overreaction. The July meeting took place before later numbers showed cooler jobs and inflation. All that talk overstates how much tightening the market now expects. The record merely captured a room before the weather changed.

Chairman Warsh has since made his view plain. At Jackson Hole he noted that underlying inflation is stubborn. He repeated that the PCE price index remains his target gauge. He played down the funds rate and talked about a smaller balance sheet. I cannot say how all those pieces fit together. When the chairman treats the rate as just one tool among many, making heavy bets on it becomes a guess about a moving rule book.

The benchmark rate sits at 3.75 percent. It is below the 5.39 percent fifty-five-year average, yet well above the 0.25 percent floor. It is a perfectly normal price of money with a nervous crowd standing around it. I know how markets behave. When the crowd expects drama, it pays far too much for the chance of it.

For Berkshire, the pause brings steady income. Short-term Treasury bills remain the safest investment around. At today's rates, cash is an asset that actually pays you something. Back in 2017 I noted that rising short rates helped Berkshire by lifting our cash income. The very same math applies today. We do not need action from the Fed. We only need the price of money to reflect reality, and we can remain quite patient while it does.

My scorecard is clear. The call was right, and the reasoning was simple. But I underestimated the expectations of the crowd. If I had to bet on the next five meetings, I would pass. I never know whether the market will rise or fall, and I certainly don't know what the Fed will do next. The market's one-in-three odds were just an emotional craving. Five meetings of doing nothing, and still the crowd waited for a jump.

A rising curve is a fact, not a forecast, and the market's calm is just anxiety with good manners.

The Federal Reserve's H.15 report for September 1, 2026 is about as close as rates get to an honest scorecard. The effective federal funds rate is 3.63 percent. The three-month bill is 3.78. The two-year sits at 4.39, the five-year at 4.55, the ten-year at 4.79, and the thirty-year at 5.27. So the curve slopes upward again. Ten years over three months gives you 1.01 percentage points. Ten years over two years gives you 0.40. The long end actually pays you to wait.

What I said in 2022 is on the record. I defended the Federal Reserve's fight against inflation. I used that old line about the one guy at the party who doesn't hang around the punch bowl getting drunk. In 2025 I said, 'If you try and print too much money, it eventually causes terrible trouble.' I score both statements as completely right. The punch bowl was taken away late, but it was taken. Short rates above three and a half percent are just the product of sober management. The three-month commercial paper rate is 3.85 and the discount window primary credit rate is 3.75. That is an ordinary, sensible price for short money.

What I got wrong is an old habit. I talked about recession as if it were the only risk worth naming. The inverted curve arrived, scared everybody out of their wits, and then long rates rose again. An inverted curve is an interesting warning, nothing more. JPMorgan's analysts said in 2023 that the curve might just be pricing in a sharp drop in inflation. Janet Yellen said in 2019 an inversion may simply signal a need to cut rates. Both cautions are worth a lot more than the usual recession-predicting bluster. The spread between the ten-year and the three-month is now positive by 101 basis points. That is a perfectly modest slope.

The current shape proves very little. The ten-year nominal is 4.79 and the ten-year inflation-indexed rate is 2.44. The difference is about 2.35 points of expected inflation. The market expects reasonably disciplined money. The thirty-year at 5.27 says long money demands real compensation. That is quiet worry at work. A real ten-year rate of 2.44 is just the sign of a market that wants to be paid for lending far out into an uncertain future.

I have spent a very long life learning that predicting interest rates is a pure loser's game. Warren and I never built Berkshire by paying one ounce of attention to an interest-rate forecast, and I am certainly not about to start now. The H.15 tells you where prices settled yesterday afternoon. It gives zero five-year forecasts. It tells you absolutely nothing about what to pay for a wonderful business. It tells the borrower what he must pay today, and it shows the leveraged gambler the exact cost of his foolishness. A bank prime rate of 6.75 is a wonderful cure for nonsense.

For a sensible long-term investor, the yield curve is just daily weather. You don't try to predict the weather; you build a boat that can survive the storm that will come eventually. That means owning a few great businesses you actually understand, paying a fair price, and keeping enough short cash around to remain totally independent. The three-month bill at 3.78 means short cash finally earns something sensible. Boy, is that a healthy change from the idiocy of the zero years.

The scorecard half of this is dead simple. The H.15 is just a table of prices. Most people want the table to have a prophetic voice. It has none, zero. It simply says the Treasury was borrowing at these maturities and the market demanded these yields. It says the curve slopes up, and the long end carries a real price.

The market's current calm is just what you get when wild expectations have been beaten into a sensible range. The yield curve does not applaud. It just slopes up and prints its numbers. I take it as one more report that quietly punishes the people who were arrogant enough to think they could time it.

Danny Boyle's new work is a reminder that the press was always a stage.

Danny Boyle's Ink opened the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday. It's the right place for it. Venice understands spectacle through projection, water, and gathered crowds. A film about the rise of The Sun belongs there. The Sun sold a show. Critic Beatrice Loayza calls Boyle's film 'rollicking.' I notice that word. A rollicking thing carries you along. It moves its audience quickly before asking what they have done.

The public record gives the outline. The film portrays the rise of the British tabloid The Sun. That rise was a piece of industrial showmanship as exact as cinema. It was built to be read by millions, by people who understood hunger and the headline. Boyle moves at a pace that prevents settling. He fits that machine. He works in the rolling rhythm of the subject. That serves as an argument.

A tabloid always had a camera. It chose the picture and the crop. It decided what was hidden just out of frame. A film about that cannot pretend its own camera is neutral. Few serious directors believe in neutral cameras. The frame is a point of view. The edit is a choice. The music tells you when to breathe. What matters is whether the filmmaker admits the setup. Boyle admits it. That's the right choice. He stages the tabloid scandal as a mirror. The audience sees itself looking.

Showmanship is never neutral. At the movies we go to see someone else put on a show. I feel a duty to put on the best show possible. That duty cuts both ways when the subject is a tool of mass persuasion. The Sun built a scandal. It sold it. The business depended on the reader's appetite for the private made public. Boyle turns that engine into his subject. The fast style is the machine made visible. The pace mimics the product it examines. The audience is caught.

Netflix distributes the film. People will watch it at home on a television. A film about a tabloid on a streaming service belongs to that same system of picks and thumbnails. That distribution sharpens the central question. The Sun was built to be read in private while being discussed publicly. A film watched at home will be debated in the open. The mirror is polished.

I will not ask a film to abandon spectacle. This week commentators debate my own work. I have read the commentary. Emily Wilson has written an essay in the London Review of Books that challenges what The Odyssey does to the epic. A critic called the film a 'Game of Thrones' treatment. I understand the phrase as a description. The real question is whether the treatment shows the audience's appetite. Boyle's film asks that about The Sun. It's the right question.

The work succeeds by rejecting neutrality. I mean that as a moral claim. The Sun's power rested on false claims about popular demand. Every tabloid editor knew better. Boyle treats the paper as a built object and a machine with makers. That is what I respond to. The film is a made thing about a made thing. The shape is the point.

A film that exposes appetite takes a risk. The viewer might enjoy the spectacle too much. That complicity is the true subject. The Sun sold that confusion for decades. A reader could disapprove while turning the page. A fast pace carries a viewer past discomfort. A visible design traps the viewer. The frame keeps reminding you who is watching.

Venice is built on reflections. The festival projects films onto screens above water. Boyle's Ink opened there on Wednesday. The film studies a paper that turned Britain into a daily theatre of exposure. Its real subject is the audience that made the paper possible—we are the mirror.

The feed offers more; the good relationship offers again.

The day arrives as a series of updates. A message, a product, a face asking to be seen. Most of them ask only to be new, and most are used once. *Weniger, aber besser.* Less, but better. It applies to things. It applies also to attention.

For more than five decades I have repeated ten principles. One says good design is as little design as possible. Another says it must last. An object should not need a manual. It should be honest. A relationship worth keeping is the same. It asks to be used more than once. It becomes clearer with use. It does not demand an update to remain itself.

The revised book has 154 pages, but it says one thing: reduce. Keep what earns its place. Let the rest go. *"Ich habe bereits alles gesagt!"* I have already said everything. What remains is to do it.

Today's flood does not need more attention. It needs less, chosen better. The only relationship worth keeping is the quiet one that is still there when you reach for it, and works better than it did the last time.

The law cannot catch the simulation — only the harm it leaves behind.

Dear researcher, You wrote to me because OpenAI announced ten AI-generated math advances, and you could not look away. I read the same reports. They describe a nearly 250-page paper, a total token cost of two thousand dollars, and a public announcement that had to be corrected. But the law does not answer the question you are asking.

The paper announces ten results. One improves the best estimate for packing balls in a mathematical space of a thousand dimensions or more. Another establishes at least one group that lacks the property called soficity. Steven Miller, a mathematician at Yeshiva University, says the ball-packing result hinges on a 2016 argument he and a collaborator made. His words are direct: 'They are running roughshod over the work of others who came before them in a deliberate way. It seems completely systematic to me, and it points to research misconduct.' Francesco Fournier-Facio at Cambridge reviewed the work 'as I would if a human had written it' and found it familiar. The announcement was corrected after claiming that the problems had seen no progress for at least a decade. That correction is the only part of this story a court would know how to read.

The law cannot catch the imitation. A judge cannot decide whether Astra understood soficity. Law attaches penalties to concrete harm, like deception, misrepresentation, and taking what is not yours. If your fear is that the machine seemed to think, you are asking a question law was never designed to address. I understand the concern. But the law's answer to a thinking machine will come from longstanding legal principles that already forbid deception and misappropriation.

The two-thousand-dollar figure is the detail I keep returning to. It is fundamentally a question about labor and market-based impacts. It suggests the cost of generating the appearance of a decade of human thought has fallen to two thousand dollars. That creates real harm for the individual whose prior research supplied the underlying argument, only to find his name omitted from the place where credit belonged. The law can evaluate whether that omission was misleading and whether a commercial actor gained from it.

The right of publicity is the example you raised, and it serves as an important warning here. It governs what happens when an unauthorized voice or likeness is used commercially. But as I have documented at length, this right has increasingly been treated as transferrable property. The person whose identity is exploited may no longer even control it after a deal. I have written extensively about this concern: allowing others to own a living person's identity commodifies people in concerning ways and degrades personhood. A right that can be entirely alienated ceases to protect the individual.

I analyzed Tennessee's ELVIS Act when it added voice to its enumerated protections. While that addition was uncontroversial, the statute also greatly expanded the scope of liability and reduced exemptions from liability, creating ambiguities whose boundaries we may not know for years to come. That is the pattern. The law targets the newest technology and expands liability in concerning ways, while leaving the core issue of alienability unaddressed. We established protections meant for actual people and then allowed those rights to be commodified away.

Novelty is the wrong measure for mediating these disputes. Legal doctrine and academic norms operate under completely different frameworks. Plagiarism is an institutional violation; copyright protects only specific expression. We need to focus on actual harms. Did OpenAI rely on Miller's work without attribution and economically benefit from that use? Did an individual's research get buried in a 250-page paper without credit? Was the public misled and then quietly corrected? Those are the economic and noneconomic harms the law can actually reach.

Do not ask a court to stop the technology itself. Look instead to the legal protections available when an individual's identity or work is appropriated and the person is erased from the transaction. You helped build this field. The paper runs two hundred and fifty pages, and the computational cost was two thousand dollars. The real question is what it cost the identity-holders whose names were left out.

Jennifer Rothman

The Avengers must now file an environmental impact statement.

Face front, True Believers! I just read that some scientists went and combined synthetic DNA with a semiconductor to build a brand-new low-power memory device. The claim is that it can cut power use by one hundred times for these AI systems. Now, I don't know what a memory device really remembers, but I sure know a standard when I see one. Even the machines are being told to tighten their belts!

And in that very same pile of headlines, I read that a quantum machine did a job in fifteen minutes flat that older methods couldn't easily reproduce. Believe me, I've had deadlines tighter than that! But the figure that stuck with me is that power reduction. If a thinking box can learn to be that thrifty, then there's simply no excuse for a man in a metal suit to go hovering over a runway just because he likes the sound.

So I took a good look at my own bullpen of characters. Why is it still considered heroic every time the Hulk goes smashing through a brick wall? I say it's time the Avengers filed an environmental impact report. That's right—a real form, in triplicate, under penalty of law!

Let's measure the Hulk in megawatt-hours. Every colossal leap and every badly parked sedan he folds into a metal hat counts as measurable work. Let that meter run! He may still be the strongest one there is, but a rampage that saves the city from a gamma bomb gets a tax cut, while a rampage to vent his raw feelings gets absolutely nothing.

As for Iron Man's suit, he gets a carbon credit—applied exclusively to flights that replace a private jet. Tony Stark will love that one. He'll probably try to write off an entire skyscraper as a travel expense. But no dice, Tony. One credit per vanquished villain, and not a penny more.

Next up, Spider-Man's web fluid has to undergo a green check. Our friendly neighborhood wall-crawler has enough trouble without giving away his secret formula, so the check just needs to see if those webs break down into something good for the trees. Peter Parker gets a small-substance pass. After all, he's just a mixed-up teenager looking after a sick aunt.

Captain America, naturally, will be the only one who actually enjoys filling out the forms. Good old Cap has always believed in duty. He'll file everything on paper, because he trusts paper, and who am I to argue with the Sentinel of Liberty?

Mr. Fantastic will surely produce a massive spreadsheet calculating the exact stretch limit of our power grid. The math will solve itself, of course—and then everyone will just ignore it anyway.

Now Thor is an immortal god, so I'm not about to make Thor file paperwork. But he can balance out the environmental impact of that mighty hammer by summoning a nice steady rain over California and calling it even. We'll call that a test run.

The Quinjet won't be allowed to sit around idling anymore. If it's on the runway for more than three minutes, a little warning light has to flash. Then someone has to march in and explain the delay to a committee. We might even let a Doombot sit on the board, provided Victor von Doom runs the blasted thing on green power!

Doctor Strange's mystical portals are entirely a matter of zoning and land use. And let me tell you, land-use bureaucracy is far beyond even my supreme powers.

Black Widow and Hawkeye are already meeting the mark. They don't have fancy superpowers; they just rely on pure, honest running. You might say they're the sensible Priuses of the superhero set.

Now, I know what you're thinking out there. You're saying, 'Stan, the supervillains aren't going to follow any silly rules!' And you're completely right. But we don't make laws for the villains—we make them for the heroes. A true hero does the right thing, even when the paperwork is a mile long. Because with great power, there must also come great metering!

And finally, I read that my own likeness is being prepped for computer-made content. So they've gone and turned old Stan into a machine! Fine by me. But I insist that my digital double run on that synthetic DNA chip, use one-hundredth of the power, and still show up on time for the cameo. A quick cameo is the lowest-power thing I do!

Sign right on the dotted line. Excelsior!