Babies always sweep away the carefully laid plans of their parents. But our first child almost swept us away, too.
In the summer of 1989, Elissa was born with cerebral palsy.
I was working as an instructor at a small college where I made $24,000 a year. Because my health insurance didn’t cover my wife or any children, we had carefully saved up enough money to pay for prenatal appointments and the birth.
But we hadn’t counted on 10 days in the neonatal intensive care unit at more than $2,000 a day.
When we finally drove away from the hospital — so carefully, so slowly, so determined that nothing else would befall us — we headed into a life we could not fathom.
We also wandered into a bewildering maze of government paperwork.
Admittedly, we were exhausted and frightened, but isn’t everyone who turns in desperation to public aid?
As Dawn and I pawed our way through one byzantine form after another, we wondered, How does anybody ever figure all this out? What if we didn’t have college degrees or didn’t speak English? What if we had to work full time? What if we were sick?
Why — we screamed to the heavens — is this so damn time-consuming?
It’s taken me more than 35 years, but I’ve finally found the answer. It’s laid out in a new book by Annie Lowrey called The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time — and How to Fix It.
Lowrey, a staff writer at The Atlantic, examines “the levy of paperwork, effort, delay, and aggravation imposed on citizens in exchange for rights and benefits that are putatively theirs.”
The problem is not news to anyone who does their own taxes, tries to get a building permit, or applies for food stamps.
“Enrollment forms are written in impenetrable High Bureaucratese and are loaded up with fine print,” Lowrey writes. “Processes are arcane, timelines long, and outcomes uncertain… Such burdens are like kudzu, choking off the fruits and flowers of our commons.”
Americans spend some 12 billion hours a year filling out various government forms, which comes to about six mind-numbing workdays per person. We lose five times as much time dealing with government paperwork as folks in the U.K.
I long assumed that such irritations were just the inevitable effluent that runs off any large organization, but Lowrey claims that excess complexity is a strategy to achieve through obfuscation what can’t be reached by legislation.
She argues early on that this “whole situation is a product of decades of bipartisan design,” but the book that follows definitely glares hardest at Republicans “assigning paperwork as a form of punishment” and obsessing over the possibility of fraud.
Better a million people go hungry than one apocryphal welfare queen drive her pink Caddy to Whole Foods.
“Time taxes become subtle, powerful tools,” she writes. “They let politicians get what they want without attracting partisan heat and media attention.”
Hoping to cut what the state spends on children’s health insurance? Make the application form harder for parents to fill out — and make them do it every year.
Trump ran on promises of greater efficiency, but Lowrey takes a chainsaw to those promises and Musk’s DOGE program, which she argues has rendered the federal government even less capable of delivering necessary services, pushing more work and more frustration onto ordinary Americans.
Our long history of shame-based assistance — including our maniacal fixation on “the deserving poor” — puts the onus on people to prove they need help rather than on the government to provide it. And our system of federalism has created an incomprehensible mess of overlapping programs across the country.
That ideological strategy is aided by the government’s archaic software, which adds layers of complexity to many programs.
“The time tax serves as a hidden engine of American inequality,” Lowrey writes, “a regressive filter on every progressive policy we have.” Tragically — but deliberately — poor people and people of color pay the highest time tax.
It doesn’t have to be this way, she insists, though after 250 pages of hair-pulling madness, I’m not sure I can believe her.
But yes, some states have made real progress against procedural bloat. Michigan, for instance, managed to cut its public-assistance application form — originally a brain-crushing 18,000 words — by 80 percent.
That’s just one hopeful example among many. (A section on the glorious efficiencies of Estonia struck me as more inspiring than instructive, but it also demonstrates how wide a net the author casts in looking for solutions.)
Lowrey wants agencies to measure the time burdens they impose on people and then be required to reduce them. We also need more universal federal programs, instead of 50 slightly different ones that sprinkle sand into the gears of American lives.
And what if instead of building a wall of forms topped with barbed wire to ensure that no freeloader ever gets a piece of government cheese, the government “penalized states and cities for miring citizens in procedural sinkholes”?
This isn’t just the same old argument about cutting government. Indeed, Lowrey would radically expand government in order to make it work better for us.
It’s about time. Ours.◆
The rest of the newsletter follows below.
Books Go to the Movies:
In The Dog Stars, Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin play a couple of rare survivors in a world ravaged by a pandemic. This post-apocalyptic film, opening today in theaters — take your Purell — is based on Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, which was written long before anybody thought Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might make it come true.
For a vacation from that horror, try The Last Sunrise, now streaming on Prime Video, based on a romantic novel by Anna Todd. Maia Reficco stars as a young woman with a chronic illness who travels with her mother to a Spanish island in the Mediterranean, where she falls in love with a local fisherman, played by Fernando Lindez (trailer).
Listen Up: The bookish travel podcast Strong Sense of Place launches its eighth season today. Hosts Melissa Joulwan and David Humphreys will be heading off to Denmark, Australia, South Korea, and even a couple of unconventional locales like “boarding school” and “Shenaniganery.” In every episode, Mel and Dave recommend five books that capture the place. Before Dawn, Madeline, and I went to Lisbon this summer, we all listened to and loved their episode about Portugal (listen).◆
A Complicated Woman
It turns out that Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie The Odyssey is just a Trojan horse to sneak translation into our lives. Emily Wilson is now everywhere!
Her 2017 version of The Odyssey shot up the bestseller list last month faster than fleet-footed Hermes. Then her fiery critique of the movie in the London Review of Books sparked a new Trojan War, and now she’s published an engaging collection of her reviews and essays titled Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature.
Many of these pieces are fascinating deep dives into the practice of translation, ancient and modern. “In the messy, wild world of human language,” Wilson writes, “words always come trailing a glorious cloud of connotations.”
A good English translator does far more than faithfully substitute an English synonym for a foreign word. The translator’s art involves conveying the sound of “the original’s linguistic music.”
As always, there’s nothing dusty about Wilson’s work. She’s just as likely to allude to Cardi B as to Aristophanes.
If your book club is tackling The Odyssey, make sure you include the final essay in this collection on your charcuterie board. And if you’re reading Maria Semple’s comic novel Go Gentle about a zany Stoic philosopher, pair it with Wilson’s wry essay “Chill Out With the Stoics.”
“Stoicism provides a great deal of useful guidance for life,” she writes, “even for those of us who are neither ancient Roman citizens nor entrepreneurs.”
As for the movie, Wilson is still offering good advice: “Samuel L. Jackson would make a great Odysseus.” (Sorry, Matt.)◆
Reese Redux
I want to follow up on last week’s item about Reese Witherspoon’s plan to adapt my book reviews into a TV series (Chasing Ron Charles).
Since I stopped responding to those solicitations, I’ve been contacted by Daniel Morgan, a dispute resolution specialist, who reminds me that “good communication is important in any creative project.”
(Fortunately, I just received a competing offer from Tom Ackerley, producer of the Barbie movie, so now I’ve got options.)
But seriously: After being asked to send thousands of dollars to an account at Lead Bank in Kansas City, I reached out to the bank and forwarded the email that included routing and account numbers.
Lead Bank Client Support sent back two notes saying, “Due to privacy and security regulations, Lead Bank does not verify account details. We recommend you exercise caution and advise against wiring funds to individuals or businesses unless you are confident in the validity of the account details and the transaction’s purpose.”
So much for client support.
Cheryl L. Davis, general counsel for the Authors Guild, tells me, “AI has made it much easier for these scammers to craft more plausible and appealing approaches to their potential victims. Impersonation scams are quite frequent.”
The Authors Guild is educating its members and has assisted the FBI in investigations of fraudulent publishing schemes. If you suspect an online solicitation is a scam, file a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
“These types of scams can be particularly heartbreaking,” Davis says, “because they are aimed at people’s dreams.”
Buckle up. It’s not going to get better soon.
In an essay published this week, Bill Gates warned, “This would be the worst possible time for humans to lose their critical thinking skills. In an era of deepfakes and misinformation that can be tailored to you individually, the ability to tell what is true from what is not becomes an essential life skill.”◆
Kirkus Prize Finalists
Summer hasn’t even ended, but the year’s literary award season has already begun in America.
Getting the jump on the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the National Book Awards, and the Pulitzers, Kirkus announced its 18 finalists in three categories.
Here’s the fiction list:
Kin, by Tayari Jones.
This Is Where the Serpent Lives, by Daniyal Mueenuddin.
Eating Ashes, written by Brenda Navarro and translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.
Luna, Phoenix, Queen, by Julie Orringer.
John of John, by Douglas Stuart.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead.
The nonfiction finalists are pictured above. You can find the finalists for young readers’ literature and information about the judges here.◆
Picture This
As an unemployed ink-stained wretch, I’m always looking for fresh career ideas, which is why I’m so enchanted with The Beginner’s Guide to Being a Wizard.
Here is exactly the clear advice I’ve been waiting for.
“You do not need to be tall or have a beard,” Keith Negley writes. “You don’t even need a pointy hat (although it helps).”
I just need a cloak (“A towel also works”), a stick (“Not too pokey”), and a place where no one is looking (“Stop looking”).
Negley’s deadpan parody of an HR administrator offering up increasingly ridiculous counsel will cast a spell of laughter over adults and little wizards.
Need help choosing an appropriate familiar? Consider all your options, from Cat (“classic, grumpy”) to Fish (“in a bowl”) to Gecko (“Not as smart as you’d think”).
Later pages set out the Wizard Rules, such as “If you accidentally turn the moon into a pie, you must share.”
Negley’s illustrations follow a child being instructed by a wizard who stores emergency cheese in his pointy hat.
Not everything goes as planned “because real wizards don’t always know the way. They wonder. They try.”
And if something goes wrong, you can always blame the Gecko.
This book is magic.◆
This Week’s Poem
Kelli Russell Agodon’s poetry achieves a mystical balance between timelessness and cutting-edge topicality. In her new collection, Accidental Devotions, she searches for love and spirituality in a world colonized by technology.
She can be witty even at the point of tears, as in the poem “Alexa, Why Am I Falling Apart?”
Late at night, she worries that she’s stuck in a place “where God’s checked out and ordering on DoorDash, putting the ringer on silent.”
Thirty-One Percent of US Adults Say They Are “Almost Constantly” Online While Sixty-One Percent of Americans Report Significant Feelings of Loneliness
It’s funny how someone can watch you from a distance and think how easy you have it — though they’ll never know you
spent a year of crying. Who can see your tears behind a screen? Like wildfires, they burned past your front yard, but your photos appeared
filtered as if it was always golden hour, the blaze against your cheeks. Today, you think everyone is looking your direction
except no one is, except your mom, because that’s what moms do — they see the heart they made
out in the wilderness and they watch for hazards. I had a friend who said she would be happy when her mother died
because then she could finally live. When it happened, she curled up in a ball in my lap and said — I didn’t realize
what I had. Sometimes we believe the boxes we’ve built around ourselves are real. Hers was called Mom. And it wasn’t a box,
but an invisible fence trying to save her from traffic. It’s funny how she watched her life from the center lane, focusing
on the stranger down the street — I wonder if he likes my seaside roses, the wisteria on my fence? Sometimes the home
in our head has the worst view. We miss the ones who leave us love notes in our mailboxes, the ones who check
whether we made it home safe. We’re lost in the false radiance of a screen with no idea who loves us most.
Excerpted from “Accidental Devotions.” Copyright © 2026 by Kelli Russell Agodon. Published by Copper Canyon Press, 2026. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.◆
First Day of School
When the kids were little, we always insisted on a first day of school photo, even when we were running late, which was always, and we couldn’t find a backpack, and the shoes — NOT THOSE SHOES! — were all wrong, and the hair looked like a rat’s nest.
It’s a photo tradition I’ve never abandoned.
This week, Dawn started her twenty-second year of teaching 11th-grade English at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.
I loved teaching English — particularly the anxious thrill of the opening day. But I would have no idea how to do that anymore. Back in my Dark Ages, I just stood in front of the students and lectured, and they wrote stuff down. QED.
Nowadays, the classroom requires unfathomable technological savvy, psychological insight, and pedagogical creativity. When I hear my wife and younger daughter trading lesson plans, I have no idea what they’re talking about. But I envy them.◆
Clippings
This week’s review is Edwidge Danticat’s Dèy, about a woman who survives a mass shooting but finds that the ordinary demands of life won’t wait (review).
At the National Book Festival last weekend, Robert Newlen noted that he is now the longest-serving acting Librarian of Congress in American history.
Dolly Parton, who died on Tuesday, was the founder of the Imagination Library, which has given away more than 330 million children’s books since its founding in 1995.◆
Dawn--and all those legions of English teachers starting the school year--are absolutely their own kind of wizards! Cheers to them, and you, Ron, for a great column.
It's not only government that makes getting help complicated. Try working with a health insurance company or a bank or any number of private corporations--it's a maze designed to make you give up and go away. Is there anyone on Earth who enjoys an automated phone system? Yet every corporation has one. The recorded voice tells us how important our call is to them, and then does everything it can to keep us away from an actual human. With AI, it's only going to get worse. I've wasted much more time dealing with private corporations than with government. In America, it's common to bash government while overlooking the many thefts of our time and mental well-being by profit-seeking corporations.