News anchors like to use a metaphor when two stories compete for the same moment: the split screen. It’s about attention, what you’re supposed to look at and when, and it assumes that both halves deserve equal real estate. But for me, February 2026 was a month that split in two, and the halves were not equal.
The Mountain
My daughter and I skied together for four days this month. There is something about skiing beside your kid as she descends a mountain with increasing confidence that recalibrates whatever nonsense your brain has been cycling through. The mountain doesn’t care about your anxieties. It asks a simple question: can you hold your edge? The answer comes from your body, not your mouth. I needed that in February, and I’m grateful I got it.
During the school’s February break, we took a family trip to Jay, New York, where we skied Whiteface with my brother- and sister-in-law while my wife got to do the thing she loves most: sit in a quiet house and read. When we came back from the mountain, the five of us played games and watched movies. There’s a version of our life where that trip doesn’t happen because money is too tight or our schedules don’t align or someone’s too stressed; we’ve lived that version before, and this month we didn’t, and I don’t take that for granted.
On a seperate ski day, I was able to connect with some of my good friends from out of state, and my kiddo and I were able to take some turns on the mountain with them and their daughters. One of those friends is, literally, the oldest friend I have, and we used to ski together as young kids, so being able to ski together while our own kids ski together was just about as good as it gets. Sometimes the universe hands you a gift, and you take it.
The Model
February was also the month I switched from ChatGPT to Claude and started building systems. I don’t mean that in the Silicon Valley sense. I mean it in the sense that I’ve spent the last three years thinking about how AI tools could serve my processes without replacing them, and with Claude, I was finally able to do something about it because Claude is just more actionable than ChatGPT. One of several projects I built this month was creating a life-review system that will, if I keep it up, give me the kind of longitudinal self-knowledge that journals promise but rarely deliver (it will also help me produce these monthly reviews for the blog).
I also picked up Standards & Scrolls again (a project I haven’t blogged about yet) after letting it go dormant for ten months. Ten months! That’s a long time to let something I care about sit untouched, and the fact that I’m back in it says something about where my head was at in February: I’m tired of starting and not finishing, and February was the month I decided to do something about that pattern.
Procrastinote, the Mac app I’ve been building, is nearly ready for the App Store. The Procreators, a short-story cycle I’m trying to finish, didn’t get the attention it needed, but it will in March. The blog got a couple of decent posts (one and two). Four Winds got some exciting news I’m not ready to share yet. And the job that pays the bills is a source of stress significant enough that I’m looking for a new one. We’ll see how that goes, but that’s the honest accounting.
The Bombs
On February 28th, President Trump and Israel launched a joint military assault on Iran. They call it “Operation Epic Fury,” which sounds like something Secretary Hegseth put on his calendar whenever he wanted to schedule sex with his second wife.
In Operation Epic Fury, the United States and Israel, without authorization from the United Nations and without approval from Congress, bombed a sovereign nation. They killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, along with the country’s defense minister, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the secretary of the Iranian Security Council. They struck over a thousand targets in two days. They hit a girls’ school in southern Iran and killed at least one hundred and fifty-three people.
One hundred and fifty-three people in a school.
Sit with that number for a moment before it gets absorbed into strategic calculations and acronyms and “regrettable collateral damage.” One hundred and fifty-three people. In a school. Many of them children.
Here are some more numbers. Three American soldiers are dead. Five more are seriously wounded. At least 201 Iranians have been killed and 747 hurt since Saturday, according to the Iranian Red Crescent.
Iran has retaliated with missile strikes across the Middle East, hitting American bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The Strait of Hormuz is disrupted. Oil markets are increasing prices. And President Trump, with the confidence of a man who has never been held accountable for anything, told The Atlantic he’s agreed to “talk” with Iran, as if the rubble is a negotiating tactic and not a graveyard.
The President’s stated justification was Iran’s nuclear program. The experts don’t buy it. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he’s seen “no intelligence” to suggest Iran was planning a preemptive strike. Iran had, in fact, agreed in the last round of talks to never stockpile enriched uranium. They agreed, and then the President bombed them anyway.
This is not security. It’s distraction.
The Files
Four days before the bombs fell, NPR reported that the Department of Justice had removed or withheld Epstein files specifically related to sexual abuse accusations against President Trump. This is in the context of the largest document release in the Epstein case and a wave of arrests and resignations across Europe: Prince Andrew arrested, Peter Mandelson arrested, investigations in Norway, France, Slovakia. The Europeans are doing what we are not: following the evidence, even when it leads to power.
The President whose name appears in the files is the same President who ordered the bombs. The Secretary of the Navy named in flight manifests still holds his office. The Commerce Secretary who lied about his connections with Epstein still sits behind his desk. A CNN poll from January found that two-thirds of Americans believe the government is deliberately withholding information. They’re right.
I try hard not to be a conspiracy theorist. But I can also read a calendar.
February 24th: NPR reports Trump-related Epstein files are missing.
February 28th: bombs fall on Iran without cause.
You don’t need a tinfoil hat to see the split screen for what it is: an attempt to get us to look over here, not over there. We need to refuse it.
The Hope
President Trump campaigned on ending wars. He told his supporters he would bring the troops home, that he was the peace president, that the forever wars were over. Hundreds of people are dead tonight because that was a lie, the way it was always a lie, the way “He was born in Africa” was a lie, the way “Drain the swamp” was a lie, the way “I’ll release the Epstein files” was a lie that became, when the files actually landed, a frantic effort to redact his actions from the record.
I don’t know if this moment finally flips the people who have believed in President Trump. I’ve thought before that this would be the thing: the Access Hollywood tape, the first impeachment, the second impeachment, January 6th, the felony conviction; but every time, the floor held. Maybe it holds again. Maybe it always holds. Maybe for some Americans, there is no floor.
But I hope not. I hope the combination of dead American soldiers, dead Iranian schoolchildren, and the mounting evidence that our president is implicated in the worst sex trafficking scandal in modern history is enough. Not because I want progressives to win or because I think MAGA-heads are irredeemable, but because a hundred and fifty-three people in a school are too much. Because three soldiers are too much. Because the Epstein files say what they say, and no number of bombs will make them go away.
The Month
February 2026: I skied a bunch with my daughter, switched my AI model, revived a dormant project, started looking for a new gig, saw old friends, and watched my president start a war to avoid a reckoning.
The halves of this split screen are not equal. The mountain is real. The school was real. The gap between those two realities is where I’m writing from. I don’t know how to close it, and I don’t think I can pretend that I do.