Load up on linguine and stock up on spaghetti. In the new year, high-quality pasta may be a lot harder to come by in American stores. Several weeks ago, the U.S. Commerce Department announced that, starting in January, most pasta imported from Italy could be subject to a preliminary 92 percent tariff—on top of the 15 percent blanket duty on goods from the European Union. Outraged Italian pasta manufacturers are threatening to pull their products from American shelves.
The proposed tariff, the result of a year-long investigation into the pasta industry, targets 13 Italian companies that have allegedly undercut U.S. manufacturers by selling underpriced pasta. Pasta tensions between the United States and Italy have been simmering since the 1990s, but this new proposal has turned up the heat. White House Press Secretary Kush Desai told me that some of the companies “screwed up” their initial response to the probe by providing the U.S. government with incomplete data, but if they comply going forward, the Commerce Department may yet recalculate its tariff. The pastifici insist that they’re being unfairly targeted, and an Italian agricultural industry group has said they won’t give in to pressure. That could leave American noodle connoisseurs in an impastable situation.
The affected companies, which include La Molisana, Pasta Garofalo, and Rummo, manufacture the usual penne and rigatoni as well as fancier shapes: tubular bucatini, spiraling elicoidali, and delicate rings of anelli siciliani. Notably, all of them specialize in “bronze-cut” pasta. This term refers to the tool, known as a die, used to extrude the pasta dough into shapes. Using a bronze die gives the pasta a slightly sandpapery texture, which clings better to sauce and results in a more satisfying bite. (Indeed, I have tasted bronze-cut pappardelle, and it is spectacular.) Bronze-cut pasta imbues the water in which it is boiled with extra starch, and ladling some of that water back into the pan while mixing pasta and sauce—nonnegotiable for pasta enthusiasts—creates a silky dish, the chef J. Kenji López-Alt told me.
Most of the pasta made and sold in America is not bronze-cut, but extruded using plastic molds coated with Teflon, according to Tom Sheridan, president of sales and international development at the U.S.-based Kensington Food Company, which makes bronze-cut pasta. A pasta die is about the size of a car tire, dotted with 40 to 60 inserts that extrude the dough, Scott Ketchum, a co-founder of the American bronze-cut-pasta brand Sfoglini, told me. Bronze inserts aren’t as durable as plastic ones, so they need to be replaced more often. Ketchum said that he spends roughly $4,000 every two years to buy new inserts from Italy. Each shape requires a different insert, Tony Adams, the owner of Mill Valley Pasta, told me. And a major downside of making more textured pasta is that it produces huge amounts of pasta dust, necessitating even more equipment and labor to clean up the machinery, according to Dan Pashman, who hosts the Sporkful podcast and created his own pasta shape that launched with Sfoglini in 2021. Teflon pasta is cheaper to make because the dough simply glides out of the die, resulting in a faster and more streamlined process—and pasta that is gummier and less adherent to sauce.
These days, the average American is likely more concerned with price than the mouthfeel of their macaroni. Still, over roughly the past decade, demand for better-quality pasta has grown. Barilla, known in the United States for its inexpensive American-made products, launched its Al Bronzo line of imported Italian pasta in 2022. Even midrange stores such as Target and Wegmans sell their own bronze-cut pasta. House-brand pastas are usually imported from Italy, so they too may be affected by tariffs, Ketchum said.
Bronze-cut pasta’s popularity is growing in part because Americans are becoming more savvy about their food. “Pretty much all the pasta was Teflon” until people started learning that there were tastier alternatives, Pashman told me. Recently, the appetite for bronze-cut pasta has also been whetted by health fears. In wellness circles, Teflon is basically synonymous with poison because it comes from a family of chemicals, called PFAS, that have been linked to certain cancers and reproductive issues. On TikTok, lifestyle influencers encourage viewers to seek out bronze-cut pasta because it is supposedly healthier than its Teflon-extruded kin.
The concerns are largely a nonissue. Teflon cookware can release harmful chemicals when it’s overheated, but extruding pasta is a room-temperature affair, Sheridan told me. Teflon bits could flake off into the pasta, but the health effects of this are unclear, and the company that makes Teflon maintains that those particles are inert. As I have written previously, the health consequences of using PFAS-coated cookware are generally not well studied.
If the pasta tariff goes into effect, bronze-cut pasta will almost certainly be rarer on U.S. shelves. More than half of America’s pasta imports—much of which is bronze-cut—come from Italy. Historically, and even more so now, companies don’t have much incentive to start making it domestically: “It’s gonna cost you a quarter of a million dollars or more to get into the game,” Sheridan said. Bronze-cut-pasta equipment from an Italian company called Fava Storci, which he called the Ferrari of pasta machinery, can cost upwards of $500,000. Such machines are hard to come by in the U.S., so they’re usually imported from Europe—and subject to their own tariffs.
If the pastifici accept the Trump administration’s proposed tariffs, Americans who are fussy about their pasta—for culinary or health reasons—may soon have to make tough decisions: stomach another meal of slippery, Teflon-extruded penne, or pay extra for ridged radiatori? The alternative—that bronze-cut noodles simply won’t be available—is scarier still. After a decade of growing accustomed to the chewy, high-friction delight of bronze-cut shapes, many American foodies may find that they can’t get their teeth on them at all.
The police came at dawn. Karen Espersen watched them drive into the valley: more than 40 cruisers in a line. They were on a mission from the government. All of her ostriches must die.
Karen and her business partner, Dave Bilinski, were standing in the outdoor pens of their farm in the mountains of Canada’s West Kootenay. The fate of their flock had been taken up by right-wing media, and had become another front in a spiritual war. An angry group of their supporters, with signs and walkie-talkies, gathered on the property. They’d set up a barricade to slow the cops’ advance: several logs laid across the dirt near the turnoff from the highway.
The activists had been camping out for months; their numbers sometimes reached into the hundreds. They knew the government was saying that the ostriches had bird flu, but they were convinced that this was cover for some other, bigger scheme. The feds were conspiring with the United Nations and Big Pharma, they said. Small farmers’ rights were being trampled. But Dave and Karen’s birds had other, more powerful friends. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was making calls to Canadian officials; Dr. Oz had offered to evacuate the ostriches to his ranch in Florida.
Canada “respects and has considered the input of United States officials,” the nation’s deputy chief veterinary officer had said. But rules were rules, and birds were birds—even if they were the size of refrigerators. And so a convoy of police had been sent to occupy the farm. Law-enforcement drones were flying overhead. The electricity was cut off.
The farm’s supporters had already threatened local businesses that were renting equipment to the cops, saying they would shoot employees. Then someone claimed that they’d placed a bomb somewhere on the property.
At 7 a.m., while the police were stuck behind the logs near the highway, a man slipped out of sight, donned a balaclava, and grabbed a jerrican of fuel. He crept over to the next-door neighbor’s house and doused its front with gasoline. Not more than 50 yards away, a group of ostrich activists stood around a bonfire, streaming from their phones as they sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” When the neighbor came outside and tried to chase the would-be arsonist away, her screams for help were broadcast live on social media, above the sound of “Glory, glory, hallelujah.”
Alana Paterson for The Atlantic
Karen’s home on the farm. Karen and her business partner, Dave Bilinski, have raised hundreds of ostriches for decades.
For decades, Karen and Dave had been raising hundreds of ostriches on a 58-acre plot in the small town of Edgewood, British Columbia. They’d earned a living from the meat and hide and feathers, and from a moisturizing lotion that they made from rendered ostrich fat. They’d also welcomed tourists to the property, bused in through the Monashee Mountains on a farm safari. But in mid-December of last year,the flock at Universal Ostrich Farms was overtaken by disease. The young birds in particular were having trouble breathing. Mucus leaked from eyes and beaks. Some were clearly feverish: They were roosting in puddles, even in the cold.
Over the next few weeks, the birds began to die, one by one, and then in groups. Dave hauled their carcasses across the property and buried them in 10-foot holes. The vet was out of town, so Karen did her best to nurse the sick. But more than 20 died, so many that they didn’t fit into the pits. Dave had to stash the rest beneath a tarp.
Locals noticed what was going on; you could see ravens feeding on the carnage from the highway. On December 28, someone notified the sick-bird hotline set up by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which monitors and manages agricultural diseases. Now the government was asking questions. Was there standing water on the property? Were the ostriches outdoors? Had Dave been aware of any wild birds nearby?
In fact there was some standing water, and the ostriches were never not outdoors, and lots of wild ducks had alighted in their pond and now were poking in the flock’s straw bedding and leaving droppings by the food bowls. To the CFIA, it sounded like a recipe for bird flu. A pair of government inspectors showed up two days later, in masks and Tyvek suits, and swabbed a couple of the carcasses. Their test results came back on New Year’s Eve: The birds were positive for the “H5” part of H5N1, the deadly strain of avian influenza that has raged through North America in recent years. According to the Canadian authorities, and in keeping with the nation’s agricultural-trade agreements, the outbreak had to be stamped out. The birds would have to die.
Alana Paterson for The Atlantic
Ostriches at Universal Ostrich Farms
An ostrich is of course a grand and silly thing: more than six feet tall with giant eyes, a 350-pound sedan on muscled stilts. It chirps and booms and honks and grunts. It wags its tail and pulls the threads from your sweater. Some ostriches on Dave and Karen’s farm had names: Barney, Peter, Q-Tip, Sarah. One looked so much like Dave himself, with bushy white eyebrows, that it shared his name. Karen used to keep an ostrich as a pet—a Somali blue, the smaller kind—and she called it Newman because it liked to hop up on her couch and watch Seinfeld on TV. Her son remembers riding Newman like a pony.
Now Dave and Karen’s flock of charismatic megapoultry was a threat to public health. They tried to bargain with the government. They said the illness was subsiding. They argued that their older birds had never even gotten sick and might already be immune. They noted that the compensation they would receive for a cull—up to $3,000 per animal—wouldn’t be enough to cover their losses. And then Karen started spinning out a stranger story. Universal Ostrich Farms wasn’t just a farm, she told the CFIA; it was the site of cutting-edge research. She and Dave were working on a novel class of ostrich-based pharmaceuticals—medicines that could one day help rid the world of many different ills, including cholera, obesity, and COVID. The drugs might even put an end to bird flu itself.
H5N1 doesn’t pose a major threat to human beings—or, one should say, it doesn’t yet. The virus has not adapted to our airways. But a current strain has already made the jump from birds to dairy cattle, and more than 70 people in North America have contracted it through exposure to infected animals. Most human cases have been very mild. But around the time that Dave and Karen’s ostriches were getting sick, a teenage girl in their province was rushed to a pediatric ICU with failing lungs and kidneys. She had bird flu and nearly died.
Dave and Karen maintained that their birds were not a danger but a cure. Now that the survivors had been exposed to bird flu, Karen told the government by email, they’d be laying eggs that were full of bird-flu antibodies. That could be the key to something extraordinary: If those ostrich antibodies were extracted and sprinkled into feeders, she said, then wild ducks might inhale them and develop their own immunity. Treat enough birds this way, and the entire epidemic could be stopped.
Karen’s plan did not impress the experts at the CFIA, and to be clear: It isn’t sound. Extensive tests have not been run to show that ostrich antibodies protect other animals when they’re eaten or inhaled. Even if the antibodies were effective in some way, to stop the spread of H5N1 you’d have to load enough of them in feeders to shield the 2.6 billion migratory birds that cross the border into Canada each year. And CFIA scientists found no reason to believe that Dave and Karen’s ostriches would be a special source of antibodies, an agency spokesperson told me. The farm’s request for an exemption was denied.
Alana Paterson for The Atlantic
Dave and Karen told the Canadian government that their surviving ostriches would lay eggs that were full of valuable bird-flu antibodies.
But Karen’s email wasn’t entirely deluded, not in every detail. She and Dave had been in touch with Yasuhiro Tsukamoto, a scientist and the president of Kyoto Prefectural University, who has for years been pushing the idea that ostriches, and their powerful immune system, could be the basis for an industry in biomedicine—that the birds’ enormous eggs are factories for mass-producing antibodies in response to almost any pathogen. A single ostrich hen can make about a cup of these a year, Tsukamoto says, which might in turn be layered onto ventilation screens, painted into face masks, or used in ointments, sprays, and pills. A few such products have already been marketed in Japan, among them a soy sauce with ostrich antibodies for E. coli and a cosmetic line with ostrich antibodies for the germs that can lead to pimples.
Dave and Karen first learned about Tsukamoto’s work in March 2020, when he was inoculating ostriches with SARS-CoV-2 antigens. They did the same and hoped to sell their antibodies to a company producing masks. But they couldn’t land the deal, and ended up with freezers full of SARS-CoV-2-resistant egg yolks. A few years later, they’d moved on to something bigger: an ostrich diet pill, made from antibodies for the enzymes that digest sugar and starch. This could be a natural rival for Ozempic, they believed, sold as “OstriTrim.”
In November 2024, just around the time when all those wild ducks began to settle in their pond, Dave and Karen were finishing their business plan. They would partner with Tsukamoto’s licensee in North America, a company called Ostrich Pharma USA, and begin inoculating birds in early March. After that, the money would start pouring in. Within five years, the farmers’ business plan predicted, they’d clear $2 billion in annual sales.
But then an ostrich got a bloody nose and another one began to wheeze, and more were plopping down in icy water.
Katie Pasitney, Karen’s oldest child, grew up among the ostriches. She describes them as her family. So when Katie heard that the CFIA had ordered their destruction, she set out to raise hell.The birds themselves—those “big, beautiful babies,” she calls them—were natural mascots for a social-media campaign. In one early plea for help on Facebook, Katie put up a picture of a favorite ostrich from the farm. “Meet Sarah ♥️,” Katie wrote atop the post. “PLEASE HELP SAVE ME BEFORE I’M KILLED BEFORE FEB 1ST.”
By the end of January, Sarah’s fate had been taken up by right-wing media and online activists. Supporters began to gather at the farm. They built a campsite in the freezing cold and posted signs for Katie’s website, saveourostriches.com. People stopped by for the day and never left. A field kitchen was set up, porta-potties were installed, and volunteers were given jobs. They put up pictures of the ostriches, or wore them on their shirts and hats. At least one walked around in a full-body, feathered suit. At times there were 200 people in the field, just across the road from the ostrich pens.
The group was there to save the animals, but by and large, they weren’t PETA types. They knew Universal Ostrich Farms had long been in the killing business; in the mess tent, supporters were not averse to eating meat. They were less concerned with harm to living things than with the threat to human liberty. These were freedom activists—people who had joined the convoy protests that swept through Canada in 2022 to oppose vaccine mandates. What brought them back together in the valley of the ostriches was a trailing fury over government intrusion, and suspicion about the aims of public health.
Alana Paterson for The Atlantic
In interview after interview, Katie Pasitney has come to tears while talking about the ostriches.
In the front room of her mother’s house, Katie set up a makeshift media center, with seven laptops on the table and cords everywhere. A handwritten ON AIR sign was posted whenever she was being interviewed live. Reporters started showing up in person, too. In one conversation after another, Katie and the farmers argued that the virus had already run its course. By their accounting, the 69th and final bird had died from the disease on January 14. The remaining ostriches were healthy, they insisted, and their location was remote—85 miles from the nearest city. What benefit would come from killing them?
Meanwhile, Dave and Karen brought their case to court and won a stay of execution for the birds until they finished their appeal. As winter turned to spring, the conflict reached a stalemate. The CFIA announced that no more inspectors would be coming to the farm, because of the risk of infection by the birds, and of interference by the protesters. Its staffers were getting threats by phone and email.
Then one night at the end of March, someone showed up with a gun. The birds were sleeping in their pens, some with upright necks, in the ostrich way. In the hours before sunrise, Katie and the farmers said, one was shot just below the ear. Dave and Karen found the carcass in the morning, lying in a pool of blood. The assassinated bird was Sarah, the one from Katie’s Facebook post.
A couple of days later, one of the farm’s supporters posted a musical tribute to the fallen ostrich on social media, called “Feathers of Resistance (Sarah’s Song).”
Out in the fields ’neath Edgewood skies, She walked with grace with ancient eyes.
Not just a hen but hope in stride, Her blood held truth they tried to hide.
“A sniper’s bullet ended her life, but not her story,” the poster wrote.
Alana Paterson for The Atlantic
The greeting booth for the encampment on the farm. Supporters built their campsite in the freezing cold, installed porta-potties, and took on jobs. At least one supporter walked around in a feathered suit.
After Sarah’s death, a deeper sense of dread overtook the valley. The farm began to fortify. Trip lines were laid around the ostrich pens and hooked up to bear bangers to scare away intruders. Supporters equipped themselves with walkie-talkies. And Dave and Karen started sleeping in the ostrich pens.
Katie’s interviews and Facebook streams grew more conspiratorial. The supporters had been seeing government drones flying overhead at night, she told a podcast host in May. Karen, too, was obsessing over hidden plots. The farm’s website had malfunctioned in December, out of nowhere, even though she was sure that she’d set up the domain to auto-renew. Could it have been a government-associated hack? Could all of this have been a plan to stop her antibody business—to “squish our science,” as she later put it to me? Could it be that certain institutions were trying to hide the fact that H5N1 bird flu wasn’t really all that dangerous?
Two months after the shooting, a second bird was murdered in its pen. Karen said she heard a drone flying overhead between 1 and 2 a.m., and then she saw an “Army-sized” device flying overhead, as big as the hood of a vehicle. Some folks from the encampment said they saw it too, while sitting by the fire. There was a silent flash of light, and moments later, Karen found one of the biggest roosters on the farm, an ostrich called Joey, with a hole through its head. This time the wound was vertical, starting near the crown and ending 18 inches down the neck. The drone may have been equipped with a gun, Karen told me. Maybe a silencer, too. Dave wondered if it might have been a laser.
John Catsimatidis, a billionaire supermarket magnate and New York City radio personality, took a particular interest in the story of the ostriches. Toward the end of April, he invited a special guest onto the air: his old friend Bobby Kennedy. The secretary of Health and Human Services had come to talk about his plan for fighting autism, but near the end of the segment, Catsimatidis grabbed the chance to bring up the “awstriches,” as he calls them in his thick New York City accent. “Mr. Secretary, one last thing,” he said. There were these special birds in Canada, with a “natural healing process,” and now they were in danger because Big Pharma wanted them dead.
“I support you 100 percent,” Kennedy responded. “I’m horrified by the idea that they’re going to kill these animals.”
The cause was a natural fit for Kennedy. The anti-vaccine organization that he once chaired, Children’s Health Defense, had already aired an interview with Katie on its video channel in March. And Kennedy himself has often railed against government overreach in efforts to control potential outbreaks. Earlier that spring, Kennedy had declared that the U.S. and Canada’s policy of stamping out H5N1-infected chickens should be stopped. The survivors—the ones with naturally acquired immunity—could be used to repopulate poultry farms with hardier stock, he said. (Experts warn about the dangers of letting the virus spread unchecked; vaccinating poultry makes a lot more sense, two bird-flu scientists told me.) Kennedy also seems to have an affinity for large, flightless birds. He has kept at least one emu as a pet on his property in California.
One late night in May, Katie awoke to a call. At first she was confused, she said, but then she heard Kennedy’s raspy voice; the secretary was on the line with Catsimatidis. Some days later, as the sun set across the Monashees, Katie stood among the farm’s supporters in the field and choked back sobs as she prepared to read from a letter that Kennedy had written to her government. “We are respectfully requesting CFIA to consider not culling the entire flock of ostriches at Universal Ostrich Farm,” it said. The letter was signed at the bottom by three of the most important public-health officials in America: not just Kennedy but also FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya. (HHS did not respond to questions for this story.)
Katie’s “Save the Ostriches” campaign had until this point attracted hippies, libertarians, and anti-vaxxers, as well as local politicians in her province. Now it had the U.S. government.
Alana Paterson for The Atlantic
Protest signs are posted around Universal Ostrich Farms.
I arrived in Edgewood a few weeks later, having come along the same twisting highway that the CFIA inspectors had used when they first drove out to test the ostriches almost six months earlier. As I pulled into the driveway, I could see the birds peering at my rental car from inside their large enclosures.
I checked in with a volunteer in a makeshift booth, and he handed me an Ostrich Sheriffs sticker. A Canadian flag hung from the fence at the edge of the encampment, along with handmade posters: STOP the MURDER of 399 OSTRICHES. Save Ostrich Science (S.O.S.). If your child got sick in your family, would you kill the whole family?
Jim Kerr, an ostrich-farm supporter with a long beard, took me on a tour of the premises. Kerr is known among right-wing activists in Canada for his livestreamed protest videos, and for the soap-bubble-blowing art car that he drives to freedom convoys. Kerr explained that the supporters had an action plan for when the feds arrived. Dave and Karen would go into the pens and stand among the birds. Volunteers would block the road and send up drones to document everything that happened. They’d had a dry run just a few weeks before I came, when someone thought they saw a line of SUVs, all white, coming down the road. The sentries notified the camp; barricades went up; three women lay down on the highway. It turned out to be a false alarm.
When I sat down with the farmers in the kitchen, Karenput out plates of sandwiches and cookies, and then she, Dave, and Katie launched into the story that they’d told so many times before, to politicians and supporters and the press. Katie, in particular, sometimes seemed to speak about the farm on autopilot, winding back to certain formulations about “giving small farmers a seat at the table” and the need to protect the “future of farming.” But still her voice would catch and the tears would flow, even in what must have been her thousandth telling.
Her connections with right-wing and extremist figures were expanding. She told me that she would soon be headed to a “Truth Movement” conference down in West Palm Beach, where she would share a stage with several noted anti-vaxxers, as well as Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys leader. And she let me scroll through a run of texts that she’d received in recent weeks from Mehmet Oz, who, like Kennedy, had gotten drawn in to her cause by Catsimatidis. Oz, the celebrity doctor who is currently the head of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, had suggested that he could bring the ostriches to Florida, but that wasn’t possible on account of the cull order. “I have spread the word widely and cannot understand why they cannot let me take these beautiful birds,” he wrote to Katie in one message. (Oz did not respond to a request for comment.)
Again and again, the farmers said the Canadian government’s response to their outbreak made no sense. Plainly they were right in some particulars. Why couldn’t the CFIA just test the birds again, to see if the virus was still present? The government had claimed that this was impossible, that its inspectors would have no way to gather swabs from several hundred dangerous animals that can run at the speed of a moped, without handling facilities of any kind on-site. But I’d heard otherwise from independent experts. Adriaan Olivier, an ostrich-industry veterinarian in South Africa, told me that high-volume testing could be done. South Africa has been dealing with bird-flu outbreaks on ostrich farms for years, he said, and could manage the screening of even several hundred adults in one day.
Then again, I could also see—really, anyone could see—that Dave and Karen had been flouting basic rules of biosafety on the farm. At first, they hadn’t told the government that their birds were sick. And their “quarantine” was barely that. The same farm dogs that nosed around my feet inside the kitchen were also running in and out of ostrich pens. After Dave and Karen fed the birds, they sprayed each other down with disinfectant, but they didn’t change their clothes or remove their shoes. And the volunteers were clearly handling the eggs and feathers.
Those who had been around the farm the longest hadn’t simply been exposed to H5N1—they’d been infected. The farmers mentioned this offhandedly. Not long before my visit, Katie had tested positive for H5N1-specific antibodies. Dave and Karen had also turned up positive, as had one of their earliest supporters, a woman who’d arrived at the farm in January. No one could remember having any symptoms, though, and Katie wasn’t willing to concede that she or any of the others had caught the virus from the ostriches.
The conversation circled back to the phone call from December that had prompted the government’s investigation—the tip-off to the sick-bird hotline. The farmers said it must have come from the woman who lives next door, Lois Wood. If it hadn’t been for her, none of this would have happened.
Alana Paterson for The Atlantic
I spoke with Lois, a 72-year-old widow and volunteer firefighter, by phone a few days later. She lives just up the road from the ostrich farm. She can see the pens from her front yard. She said the situation had gotten out of hand. For months, the activists had been tormenting her: shining headlights in her yard, yelling out her name, tailing her when she was on her way to fire practice. “Finally—finally—somebody wants to hear the other side,” she told me.
Lois claimed that she never reported the sick birds to the CFIA: She’d tried to call, but no one answered, and she didn’t leave a message. But everyone could tell that the ostriches were dying, she said, and the CFIA was right to get involved.
Elsewhere in the town of Edgewood, the fight to save the ostriches has brought out skeptics of the cause. Jim McFarlane, a local cattle rancher who has known Dave since they were kids, told me that, like Lois, he’d had enough. Dave has been “a total fucking bullshitter all his life,” he said. He asked me what I thought about the story of the murdered ostriches—the ones that supposedly were shot in the head in the middle of the night. “I mean, come on,” Jim said. “I’m a hunter, and you’re going to go out there in the middle of the night and shoot at a little fucking ostrich head when you’ve got a 300-, 400-pound body there?”
It’s true: An ostrich head is like a Q-tip protruding from a very large piñata. The idea of aiming for it, at least while sneaking in the dark, seemed preposterous. Yet Dave and Karen insisted that not one but two birds had been killed like this. Jim thinks that Dave and Karen might have killed the birds, that maybe they were trying to draw attention to the farm for the sake of more donations. Lois had another theory: What if the birds were still sick? What if the outbreak hadn’t ended, and the farmers didn’t want the government to know? (Both ostrich murders are still under investigation, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. When I brought the claim to Dave that he’d shot the birds himself, he told me, “That’s insane.”)
The matter of the ostrich shootings is one of many that’s been taken up by a local Facebook group, “Edgewood—Uncensored,” in which a group of grumpy neighbors and others in British Columbia debate the ostrich farm and what they deem to be its hidden motives. They obsess over every open question and apparent inconsistency, such as who really called the CFIA about the sick ostriches, and how many birds were really in those pens. Some even wondered if the so-called standoff was a piece of theater, concocted by the government and its contacts in Big Pharma. Maybe no one ever really planned to cull the birds. After all, hadn’t Dave and Karen been involved in biotech? Hadn’t they injected ostriches with COVID?
If Katie, Dave, and Karen had built their movement from the bricks of outrage and suspicion, then those bricks were also being hurled against their walls. Paranoia had sustained them to this point, but paranoia was a force that they couldn’t quite control.
Alana Paterson for The Atlantic
Dave Bilinski leaves the ostrich pens to avoid arrest on September 23.
I drove out to the farm again in late September. The line of police cruisers had snaked into the valley just a few days earlier, and I could see the marks of occupation. The property was divided at the edge of Langille Road. Yellow tape stretched across the northern side, at the entrance to the pens, and officers were taking shifts on guard. Just across from them, the farm’s supporters had put up a set of wooden bleachers so they could try to watch and record everything that happened. An inscription had been carved into the top row: In Appreciation: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Some of the birds had been dedicated too: There was now an ostrich Charlie Kirk, an ostrich Dr. Oz, an ostrich Donald Trump.
I’d arrived at a moment of uneasy calm. Not so long before, every sign had suggested that the standoff was about to end. After many hours’ worth of yelling and negotiations, the police had seized the pens; Karen and Katie were driven off in handcuffs, and briefly held. The CFIA had put up a wall of hay bales in the field, presumably to hem in the flock and hide the coming slaughter. But hours later, just as Dave and Karen were finishing a group prayer, their lawyer called to say that the Supreme Court of Canada had intervened. The justices were considering whether they would hear the case, and that meant the ostriches would not be killed just yet. Everyone agreed that this intervention was divine.
Now the camp was far more crowded than it had been in June. No one took my name and phone number, or handed me a badge, when I arrived. Near one corner of the pens, I met a man named Thomas, who was taking footage of the Mounties with a camcorder. “I hate cops,” he said. “If one of those guys got a bullet to the head, I wouldn’t shed a tear.” Thomas told me that he’d been incarcerated for assault and fraud, but that his days as a criminal were over. “I don’t condone violence,” he said, “but I’ve started to think some violence might be necessary when there’s no other way to make people pay attention.”
Over at the house, Dave and Karen were meeting with the police department’s liaisons. Dave looked as though he hadn’t slept for days. His ears were bloody from the ostrich pecks that he’d sustained during his vigil in the pens. When I asked him what he’d do if the cull was carried out, he cried into his hand. If the ostriches were killed, Dave and Karen would have nothing left. They may no longer be eligible for compensation for the loss of the birds, according to the CFIA rules. They also owe tens of thousands of dollars to the government in fines and legal expenses. In the meantime, they’d been deprived of revenue for months, and the farm had already been facing heavy debts when all of this started. “There’s no recovery from this,” their lawyer, Umar Sheikh, told me.
Next door, in the grass outside Lois’s double-wide trailer, the smell of gasoline still lingered. When she came outside to say hello, I saw that she had bruises on both arms, cuts on her face, and a black eye. She’d only stopped the would-be arsonist by chance, she said: She’d come out to feed one of her cats and there he was, reaching into his pocket, as if to grab a lighter. She’d lunged at him, bit him on the elbow, and kicked him in the groin. Then he punched her in the face and fled. The police identified their suspect by the tooth marks on his arm.
The man was a freedom-convoy veteran, Karen’s son told me, who’d warned the others in the group that he planned to go to jail before this all was over. Both Katie and her mother claimed, at least at first, that the attempted arson never really happened—that the whole thing was a setup by the members of the local “hate group” who had criticized the farm online.
I asked Lois if she felt unsafe. She told me that she’d gone to stay with a friend on the night after the attack, but had come back to the farm to tend to her cats and her tomatoes. She said that there were a lot of cops around for protection, but also that she didn’t see herself as having many options. “People say, ‘Well, you should do a civil suit against them for slander, libel, whatever, harassment,’” she told me. “I say, ‘I could not bear to do that. Can you imagine going up against Katie? You wouldn’t win.’”
Moving out of Edgewood didn’t seem to be an option, either. Lois’s property, her 120 acres in the valley, was all she had, and who would ever buy it now? She was living on the site of a bird-flu quarantine. Fair or not, she was just as trapped as Dave and Karen. “I keep thinking it’s going to be over,” she said. And then it never is.
Alana Paterson for The Atlantic
Karen Espersen and a supporter embrace after Karen’s release from arrest for refusing to vacate the ostrich pens.
An end did come at last, six weeks later. On November 6, the Supreme Court decided not to hear the farmers’ case. The Notice of Requirement to Dispose of Animals issued by the CFIA more than 10 months earlier was reinstated for the final time. Shortly after nightfall, once the police had cut their floodlights and sealed off Langille Road, gunshots started ringing out behind the hay bales. At first there were a dozen, then many dozens more, as hired marksmen fired on the flock from platforms.
Katie squatted at the border of the pens, pulling at the fence and screaming, “Make it stop.” Karen stood beside the line of officers who blocked the road. “They’re killing my babies,” she said.
By the next morning, the cull was over. All of the ostriches—314 of them, by the government’s final count—were dead.
It was gray and it was cold in the valley. Autumn had returned: one full cycle of the seasons from the day Dave and Karen’s birds first began to falter in the slush. Waves of wild ducks were passing overhead once more. Since the start of fall, the bird-flu virus has again been spilling over into poultry flocks in North America. Another 8 million birds have been killed on U.S. farms in recent months, and 3 million more in Canada.
While construction vehicles shoveled up the ostrich carcasses and dumped them into trucks, the farm’s supporters gathered for a vigil, in person and online. It had been 297 days, they claimed, since any of the birds were sick. Whether this was true no longer mattered. The outbreak on the Universal Ostrich Farms had reached its end; yet even now, no one could agree about the nature of the threat. Had the poultry been a risk to public health? What about the farmers, who never thought the rules applied to them? And what about the government, which chose annihilation over compromise? Any middle ground was now awash with blood. Some kind of danger had been present in those pens; that was clear enough. Now that danger is stamped out.
You can see them here. They look really great, and you can pre-order them by 9AM PST on 12 November 2025, for delivery in October 2026. Unfortunately, you can only order them as a set of three for $150, which seems a bit excessive to me. I'm sure they'll set a bunch of them, but not to me.
I even double-checked to be sure this wasn't just another example of "prices going up while I wasn't looking," and it wasn't — $50 per doll is 4-5 times the price of a regular Barbie doll, which just strikes me as excessive. I could see twice the price of a regular Barbie, and at that price I'd think about it. But that at this price. At this price I look at the page and immediately nope right out.
She was inordinately pleased to have been born on the anniversary of the Armistice, not that it kept her country from being invaded again when she was a young woman.
Last Thursday, in lieu of my afternoon coffee, I placed a sticker on the inside of my wrist. It was transparent, about the size of a dime, and printed with a line drawing of a lightning bolt—which, I hoped, represented the power about to be zapped into my radial vein. The patch had, after all, come in a box labeled Energy Boost.
So-called wellness patches have recently flooded big-box stores, promising to curb anxiety, induce calm, boost libido, or dose children with omega-3s. Their active ingredients are virtually indistinguishable from those of the many oral supplements already hawked by the wellness industry. Whether the skin is a better route for supplements than the stomach isn’t entirely clear. But the appeal of wellness patches seems to have less to do with their effects and more to do with how they look.
Wellness patches are generally pitched as an easier, safer way to take supplements. The website for The What Supp Co., a British brand that launched in the United States this year, describes its products as “super convenient” because users don’t have to take a pill or mix a drink—plus, they’re extra portable. That brand, like many patch sellers, laments the filler ingredients (such as corn starch and gelatin) that can show up in oral supplements, plus their digestive side effects; patches, it says, come with no such risks. The slogan for Kind Patches, which rolled out across Walmart locations last month, is “No pills. No sugar. No nonsense.” Half Past 8, a patch company that launched last week, says that its products sidestep the crash and comedown associated with some pills and gummies by offering a slow drip of wellness. Some brands also advertise that, unlike a pill, you can take a patch off when you’ve had enough. But that cuts both ways: I put another patch on my wrist yesterday morning, and it had fallen off by the time I got to the office.
Most of the products are labeled as remedies for common complaints. Stickers from The Good Patch include Nite Nite for better sleep, Think for boosting focus, and Rescue for hangovers. Severalbrands sell patches that purport to mimic the appetite-reducing effects of GLP-1 drugs; you can buy them on the fast-fashion website Shein. And whereas traditional oral supplements tend to be marketed as vectors for specific compounds, leaving users to mastermind their perfect mix, patches are usually cocktails that advertise their active ingredients less prominently. Putting on The Friendly Patch Co.’s Relax and Let Go sticker really is easier than consuming supplemental forms of its seven key components, which include the herb ashwagandha, the neurotransmitter GABA, and magnesium. (Neither The Good Patch nor The Friendly Patch Co. responded to a request for comment.)
Whether those ingredients will actually help you chill out is an open question, as is whether they can pass from a sticker into the bloodstream. The whole point of skin is to keep most things out of the body, and although some compounds are known to pass through the skin—nicotine and birth-control patches have been used for decades—little is known about the permeability of the many ingredients used in wellness patches. Some basic principles are well established: For compounds to pass through the skin, they need to be both tiny and fat-soluble; caffeine and vitamins A, D, E, and K all meet those criteria, says Jordan Glenn, the head of science at SuppCo, an app that helps supplement users optimize their intake.
But other common wellness ingredients—such as coenzyme Q10, vitamin B12, folic acid, and zinc—require extra processing to permeate the body’s exterior, Glenn told me. My lightning patch was made by Barrière, whose co-founder Cleo Davis-Urman told me that the company uses a process called micronization to break down large molecules into particles small enough to enter the bloodstream. Micronization is a real technique used for pharmaceutical drugs, transdermal or otherwise, so it’s certainly possible that it could help big compounds pass through the skin. Yet this assurance, together with claims that patches offer a gentler and more sustained release than oral supplements, simply isn’t backed up by independent research; Meto Pierce, a co-founder and the CEO of Half Past 8, told me that the industry is “still developing in terms of published data.” “There might be claims of skin patches being more effective or more consistent, but we can just ignore that at this point because there’s no proof,” Elise Zheng, a health-technology researcher at Columbia University, told me. Dietary supplements aren’t regulated for safety or effectiveness by the FDA, and patches can’t even be regulated as dietary supplements, because they’re not ingestible.
Wellness patches seem most useful for people who are already supplement enthusiasts—not only because they’ve already bought into the idea that ashwagandha works but because they take so many oral supplements that their mouth needs a break. “Pill fatigue” is a common complaint among the wellness set, Glenn said, though patch users notably still need to remember to apply their supplements. (Glenn also pointed out that patches might be more convenient for people who have digestive problems or difficulty swallowing.)
An hour after I put on my sticker last week, I thought I felt marginally less groggy than usual. Maybe micronization really did make its B12 and folate particles tiny enough to seep into my skin. Or maybe the source of my energy was the sunny 15-minute walk I’d taken to acquire the sticker. By far the most noticeable impact of my thunderbolt was that I kept admiring it, as if it were a tattoo I’d gotten on a whim.
Wellness patches are meant to be seen, as their fun colors and designs suggest. Ads for Kind Patches show wrists adorned with pepperoni-size stickers whose color matches their claim: Dream patches are a dusty blue, Energy is electric yellow, and Period Patches are, of course, bright red. The What Supp Co.’s patches are shaped like a w and come in lavender (for chilling out), kelly green (for detoxing), and pink (for beautifying). “We want the experience to feel joyful and intuitive, not clinical,” Ivana Hjörne, the founder of Kind Patches, told me. Kelly Gilbert, the founder of The What Supp Co., suggested that a patch on your skin could remind you to make other healthy choices throughout the day. It’s also free advertising for the company. Davis-Urman, Barrière’s founder, told me that with patches, customers are “elevated to brand ambassadors, because the product sparks conversation.”
Before the rise of social media, personal wellness was a more private endeavor. These days, people post their run stats, sleep scores, and workout selfies; they wear fitness trackers and brand-name athleisure to the gym. This shift has reordered the priorities of personal health. It’s not just about taking care of yourself; it’s about taking care of yourself in a visible and socially sanctioned way, Marianne Clark, a sociologist at Acadia University who studies wellness culture, told me.
Accordingly, wellness has also become a notably aesthetic pursuit—it’s no surprise that you can find patches to release skin-firming collagen or strengthen hair and nails. Conspicuous consumption has been part of the beauty industry since at least the 1920s, when Chanel No. 5 first hit shelves and became synonymous with wealth and luxury. (Wellness patches, too, don’t come cheap: My pack of 36 was $15, and other brands charge significantly more.) Social media has made the labor of beauty all the more visible. The online beauty community is rife with selfies glamorizing branded sheet masks and under-eye depuffing patches, photos called “shelfies” that showcase collections of expensive cosmetics, and images of celebrities sporting pimple patches in public. Brightly colored vitamin stickers similarly glorify the work of wellness. Not all wellness patches are beauty products, but many are meant to enhance appearance nevertheless.
By 11 p.m. last Thursday, seven hours into the eight that my sticker journey was supposed to last, I was not sure whether I was less tired than usual. (Davis-Urman assured me that, although the effects of the patch differ for everyone, “cellular-level benefits” were occurring whether or not I felt them.) But I did get a tiny hit of dopamine when my husband noticed it and said, “Cute tattoo.” My lightning bolt also nudged me toward self-reflection, a pillar of modern wellness. Whenever I glanced at it, I asked myself: How do you feel? The answer was the same every time: Tired.
I've been intrigued by the idea of Cincinnati chili since I first learned about it, but I never wanted to go through the trouble of cooking it from scratch so that I could experience it. The other night, when it made a repeat appearance in one of my fics, it occurred to me that they probably make canned Cincinnati chili. A quick web search revealed that not only do they, but that Skyline Chili, which is the particular Cincinnati chili restaurant that I've heard the most about, makes canned Cincinnati chili. I was prepared to order a can, only to discover that I could only order it in multipacks (4, 6, 8, or 12), which was not something I was willing to commit to with a food that I didn't know if I liked it.
Which is where you come in: If any of you live near enough to Cincinnati that you can buy canned Skyline chili at your local grocery store and you would be willing to buy a can and mail it to me, please send me a private message so I can send you my address and also arrange some way for me to pay you back, either by sending you money or by me sending you something they have in Minnesota that isn't available where you live or by some other option that would be acceptable to both of us.
Last night I dreamed that I was hanging out with Blackpink Jennie — I'm not sure if we were dating or just friends, but we knew each other very well and either option could have been a possibility. Anyway, we were at a convention that was like a combination craft fair/science fair for geology and/or conspiracy theories.[^1] While we were there, we ran into our dentist[^2] and our dentist's new business partner. Jennie and I both agreed that the new business partner was kind of strange — he was obsessed with the idea of some sort of link between diagonally opposing teeth[^4] — but we couldn't say anything about it because we didn't want to offend our dentist. Jennie and I were still trying to come up with a socially acceptable way to ditch our dentist and his partner when I woke up.
[^1] To give a better idea of what it was like, it was kind of like a dealers' room at a con: A huge room filled with tables, each table with a person behind it. Some of the people wanted to sell you something, some just wanted to tell you about their findings/theories. Some seemed to be related to geology, some to conspiracy theories, and some to both.
[^2] Not my IRL dentist, and probably not Jennie's IRL dentist either.[^3]
[^3] I don't know who Jennie's dentist is, but I'd be very, very surprised if her dentist isn't Korean, and this dentist was an elderly white man.
[^4] For example, that a problem with the left upper first molar would also cause problems in the right lower first molar.
For anyone who's Dark Souls-curious and has a spare 30 mins, this is the best illustration I've seen of the process of figuring out a boss fight, and how you can go from dying in the first couple of seconds of a fight to methodical execution of it (and why it's so incredibly satisfying when you do):
For context, this is the Stray Demon, an optional side boss who's a very beefed-up version (now with added magic, as well as vastly increased damage and HP!) of the Asylum Demon from the tutorial.
I have a theory that the Asylum Demon is so pear-shaped partly in order to encourage the novice player to think of getting behind him and stabbing him in the arse, thus learning a key component of DS1 strategy (positioning yourself where it's hardest for them to hit you, which frequently means getting behind them or in their crotch).
My pipe fix needs retooling. I'm not thrilled, but also not surprised. I need to start putting aside cash every week to get it repaired properly, but for now I'll buy more plumber's putty.
In other news, I have to do all of my laundry - boo! - and my new glasses are working nicely now that I'm used to them. I'm in the stage of owning glasses where I vow I'll be super careful not to let gunk build up between the frames and the lenses. We'll see how long that lasts! Wish me luck!
Crow school is basic and short as a rule— just the rudiments of quid pro crow for most students. Then each lives out his unenlightened span, adding his bit of blight to the collected history of pushing out the sweeter species; briefly swaggering the swagger of his aggravating ancestors down my street. And every time I like him when we meet.
About 40 minutes ago, I smelled smoke in the house. I woke my sister and we checked the whole house. We could both smell it strongly (exception the new extension, praise be), and my eyes started watering in our family room.
Sis thought we should just go back to bed, but I called 911, told them we couldn't see any smoke or flames -- and that I'd checked outside to make certain we weren't smelling a neighbor's house -- but we could smell it.
Now, Savannah rarely drops below 45F, but tonight we're having a hard freeze. So, Sis put on slippers and a fleece. I put on my winter coat, bless 14 years in Boston, and I gave her some gloves. We were inordinately happy that we'd put the dogs in their sweaters on Sunday, so we didn't need to worry too much about their being cold.
We had three fire vehicles here in under 15 minutes, possibly under 10. They went through the whole house twice. No hot spots. The conclusion is that it was the first time the heating had come on and dust or other minor detritus had singed.
I'm somewhat embarrassed, but I think I did the right thing. The firemen were all very kind.
What occurs to me now is that neither of us thought of grabbing our wallets, car keys, or the very nice little box with most of our relevant insurance and mortgage information. It is flood and fire proof. I got it for the folks the Christmas that they moved to Savannah, and it surprised me how difficult it was 5 years ago to find a box the right size that was both.
So, next time -- and I really hope there isn't one -- grab box, grab purse, maybe grab medications?
Except I think that my pupil distance was 56 instead of 55, and also the bridge seems a bit flimsy. That, I don't like, but it may be my amorphous anxiety talking.
In other news, Moonpie has completely scratched and licked up her nipples and now they're bleeding and infected, and apparently the vet prefers to do a blood test at this age, but as the blood test is $400 we declined. (E asked if I thought they judged us for that, lol, sweetie, I always think everybody judges me for everything, but that's not a rational mindset, so no, upon reflection I don't think that. We're hardly the only family to make petcare decisions based on affordability, and even if they do judge us, great, they can pay for this bloodwork themselves.) Also, NYC now mandates a new vaccine for cats and dogs. They can mandate what they like, but they can't make people follow that law. However, after the vet explained that this disease spreads pretty easily and now is spreading to humans, in whom it can cause kidney and/or liver failure, I decided, reluctantly, to make vaxxing the cats a priority. Which means full vet appointments for each one and new rabies shots as well. It's not going to be a quick process, is what I'm saying. (And we still need to replace those water heaters before they break!)
Retitled Masquerade in Lodi and other novellas. (Which contains "Masquerade in Lodi", "The Orphans of Raspay" and "The Physicians of Vilnoc".)
This came last week, forwarded from my agent possibly in a fit of housecleaning. My author's copies of foreign editions drift in late, erratically, or not at all. (Translation copyright appears to be 2023, near as I can tell.) Anyway, excellent cover art again more-than-hinting that the artist actually read the stories, or at least the title story.
The challenge of how to represent the invisible entity Desdemona is interestingly solved with a sort of magical-monkey-on-his-back creation, which is... not-wrong. And it captures delightfully how Pen felt being dragged through that memorable night in Lodi by the unexpected saint of his Order.
Bookshop.org is now selling ebooks in the UK as well, with profits (as with paper books sold through them) going to indie bookshops; you can either pick a specific shop you love to benefit (in my case, Juno Books), or have the money go into a collective pool.
“In Polynesia, they used kites to fish, flying baited lines over the water to catch fish — a method that's also still around." (Lindsey Johnson, “A Brief History of Kites,” in Make:, #93, p. 53)
After reading this quote, I had to look into kite fishing more. Not only is it still around, I found someone in Dauphin Island, Alabama (near where I grew up) who's kite fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. It's possible (though I make no guarantees) that if I had been introduced to kite fishing, I would have found fishing more interesting than I did and wouldn't have given up on it.
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