Apostrophes
And the crux of the biscuit
The past year has been good to me—my debut science fiction cyberthriller was released—but America has experienced changes that many of us find worrisome.
Frank Zappa’s 1974 album is titled Apostrophe (‘), and the cryptic line from the album that references the apostrophe has been running through my head as an apt epithet for 2025. The line goes like this: “The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe.” I suspect most consider it mere amphigory [a piece of writing, often verse, that sounds meaningful but is actually nonsensical or meaningless]. It has always had a powerful message for me, however.
There is a bit to unpack, so please, stay with me. The way I read Zappa’s message is that the biscuit represents what the government and the media serve up to us. If you are unclear about Zappa’s attitude toward media, I refer you to his song I’m The Slime (oozin’ out from your TV set). By “the crux” he means the important part. And the apostrophe? An apostrophe always represents something that was removed. He’s telling us the important thing to pay attention to is the part that has mysteriously vanished, or the part they won’t say out loud.
So many functions disappeared from what our government does on our behalf during 2025 that, were I to list them all, I’d never get to the point I want to make. But I will call out a few.
There are 271,000 fewer government workers today than there were a year ago. 317,000 federal employees left their jobs, one way or another. Comparatively few were hired to replace them. This is about twice as many people leaving and a third as many people being hired compared to a typical year. While it’s easy to mock federal workers in the abstract, you may find the 2026 US government difficult to navigate if you need assistance with a small business loan, a tuition repayment, a mortgage repayment, a passport, a tax issue, Social Security, Medicare, Veterans’ Administration benefits, or any other program.
The CDC no longer bases its recommendations on science, but rather on the fringe opinions of the Health Secretary. It is withdrawing its support for proven vaccines based on disproven conspiracy theories about side effects.
The Harvard School of Public Health estimates that dismantling USAID has already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world.
And then there are the more than 550 pages consisting only of a large black rectangle that extends to the margins, released in response to the Epstein Transparency Act, along with thousands of other heavily redacted pages.
After such a year, it is tempting to leave 2025 behind and to simply move on, accepting the new reality while hoping for the best. I would encourage you, however, to pay attention to the apostrophes—even the invisible ones—which mark the places where something important used to be and is no longer.
References:
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/01/trump-federal-workers-jobs
https://pids.org/2025/08/29/in-wake-of-cdc-turmoil-pids-calls-for-public-health-to-be-led-by-science-not-ideology/
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/
Photo by Jodie Morgan on Unsplash