Kina has lately become obsessed with a Ted Ed video about the Salem witch trials, insisting on watching it every day. If you, either as a sympathetic watcher of Ted Ed videos or as a loyal reader of this newsletter, have watched said video, you will know that it is Very Creepy1 (and one of the better animated Ted Ed videos, I would offer).

As we were getting ready this morning, she was role-playing an ergot-addled Betty Parris in my bedroom and waddling towards me like a zombie, until she suddenly jumped in shock and ran into my arms, having finally scared herself after several days of ghost-embellished animated hallucinations. So I wrote about it, but now that I am writing this, Kina is calling out from her bedroom to ask about today’s edition and if the spooky eyes were real. I yelled back to tell her they were a joke and that we wouldn’t watch that video anymore.

Imagine having to try to make your brain scary—youth is wasted on the young.

dad