This has been a very busy two weeks for yours truly. The little whistle network I've been working with has been growing extremely swiftly. We sent more than 200,000 whistles in January. To give you an idea of how explosive the growth has been, it is February 5th, and as I am writing this, we have sent 130,000 whistles in the month of February.

 

Anyway. I was working on this newsletter late Wednesday night and Megyn Kelly posted that she thought we should ban whistles and the main impact I saw was that Americans hate being told what to do and we had about 80,000 whistles requested that night. Our little admin team has spent the week managing massive volume and setting up cleaner processes so we handle scale. I had a couple nights where I did not sleep much, but finally got eight hours again last night.

 

I am drinking a lot of tea.

 

Tea is one of those things that is made for busy times. You can drink it and enjoy it while you do work; you can stop and drink it for a break while you're there. You can set up a pot and add water throughout the day. Being busy has been great for tea consumption, because I have a bunch of extra little samples and minis and such.

 

I try to not drink teas I really want to savor when I'm super busy, so this was a tie guan yin. It was sweet and milky, a word that I use to describe the mouth feel and not the taste. It had a very swishy, full feel to it, and was the perfect thing to have in a cup while I worked through things.

You can get it from white2tea here.

Today is Thursday, February 5, 2026, and there's an urgent need in the Twin Cities area to help people pay rent. There are many reasons why this need is so urgent: there are families whose bread winners have been seized by ICE without due process, some of them while attending hearings as required by law. There are families who have not felt safe leaving their homes, because ICE is abducting people off the streets because of how they look (not because of their immigration status). And so on.

 

Here's what you need: Signal, Venmo, and the ability to either raise funds (or do this all yourself) really quickly from friends who care. 

 

Here's what you can do.

It is being handled this way is because a lot of the mutual aid organizations are overwhelmed, and it's not possible for any one person to take point, because Venmo will freeze accounts if you try to send too many transactions. Distributing the transactions helps get people rent they need to pay today.

 

If you can help out, please do.

But it truly has been an incredibly busy two weeks, and I have two paragraphs of something that I'll hopefully get to in the next newsletter, which may and/or may not be on time.

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