It is Pi Day and Millicent Hearsay would like to give you something good.
Not a briefing. Not a tranche. Not a confidence level of 13% or a set of war objectives that extend like an irrational decimal into a future nobody can see the end of. Just this: it is Pi Day, which is the one day a year the world agrees to celebrate a number by eating a food that has the same name as the number but is spelled differently and is available in apple, cherry, pecan, key lime, chocolate cream, chicken pot, shepherd’s, and, in a development that Millicent finds either inspiring or troubling, pizza, which is also a circle, and which also satisfies the geometric requirements of the holiday.
The circle. That is what today is about. Pi describes the circle — the ratio of circumference to diameter, 3.14159 and so on, always going, never stopping, the most famous irrational number in mathematics and also, as of last night’s oil close, apparently the price of Brent crude with a 100 in front of it.
The circle is a shape with no beginning and no end. It is complete in every direction. It does not have corners where things get stuck. It rolls. It is, as a shape, optimistic in a way that rectangles and trapezoids are not, and it is Pi Day, and Millicent is choosing optimism, and she has a list of circular things that are good, and she is going to share it with you, because the news today is available elsewhere and has been available for fourteen days and will be available tomorrow and the day after, and today there is also pie.
A Partial List Of Good Circles, Pi Day Edition
Pie. The original. Apple pie, specifically, for its warm cinnamon interior and its capacity to smell like something is fine when things are not entirely fine. The crust — butter, flour, cold water, rested in the refrigerator — is the most reliable thing a person can make on a day when nothing else is cooperating. The circle holds. The filling is warm. The lattice on top is technically lines but the whole is a circle and the whole is the point.
Pizza. Also a circle. Also warm. Also available on Pi Day without advance planning or a stand mixer. A margherita pizza is a perfect circle of mozzarella and tomato and basil and the olive oil that costs more now because of the Strait of Hormuz situation, but it is still available, it is still warm, it is still a circle, and it is Pi Day and Millicent is not letting the Strait take the pizza.
The full moon. The moon is waning this week, per the almanac, but even a waning moon is a circle making progress toward fullness. The moon does not stop being the moon during a waning phase. The moon is doing what the moon does. The moon has been doing this for 4.5 billion years through situations considerably worse than the current ones, and it will be full again, and it will be full on a Pi Day in the future, and on that day, Millicent hopes someone is outside to see it.
A vinyl record. A circle that contains music. You put the needle down and the circle does the rest. On Pi Day, Millicent recommends: put something on. The circle will play until it ends and then you can start it again. This is a different relationship with infinity than the one the war objectives have. This one sounds like something.
A hug. Arms, technically, forming a circle around a person. Available to most readers at no cost, pending proximity to another person willing to participate. Millicent recommends one today. Not because the news is bad — the news is always something — but because it is Pi Day and it is March and the pie is almost ready and someone should hug you while it cools and then you should both eat a slice and agree that the circle is a good shape and that the butter crust held and that 3.14 is a fine number to have a day about.
What Pi Day Asks Of You, Specifically
Pi Day asks very little. It asks that you acknowledge the ratio of circumference to diameter. It asks that you eat something circular if you can find something circular, which you can, because circles are everywhere, because the universe is made of them, because the orbit of the Earth that brought us to March 14 is itself an ellipse which is a circle that got a little stretched but is still fundamentally in the family, and because the pie is in the oven, or should be, and the timer is set, and when it goes off everything will smell like cinnamon and butter and the number that never ends.
The Mandelson second tranche will come when it comes. The war objectives will eventually resolve into something, even if the something is also an approximation. The oil price will find its level. The Peeps are free now, or should be — open the tray, it is a holiday weekend, let the marshmallow chicks breathe. Derek Fillmore of Columbus is ordering pie because his horoscope told him to order takeout and he has adapted the instruction to fit the occasion, which is the correct response to a horoscope.
Marzipan the black cat is sitting in a circle of sunlight on the kitchen floor and is neither an omen nor a sign. Marzipan is warm. The radius of the sunlight circle is approximately right for one cat. The area is πr², and r is whatever r needs to be for Marzipan to fit, and Marzipan fits perfectly, because cats always fit perfectly in the circles they choose, which is the most pi thing about cats and possibly the most pi thing about today.
Happy Pi Day from Supposedly News. Gerald the houseplant got a slice of pie. Gerald did not eat it. Gerald is, in all things, irrational and complete. 3.14159. And so on. And so on. And so on.
Millicent Hearsay, Culture Desk, has never before filed a piece with this confidence level, which is 31.4%, and would like to note that she is more confident about pie than about nearly anything else she has covered this week. She recommends apple. She also accepts cherry. She will not accept that the rectangular hand pie counts. It does not count. It is not the shape. It is Pi Day. The shape is the point. The shape is everything. Eat the circle.