On the evening of September 30, Tennessee tried to execute Christa Gail Pike and did not manage it.

Pike was convicted of murdering nineteen year old Colleen Slemmer in 1995. She was eighteen at the time. What she did is in the court record and it is as ugly as anything you will read this year. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in two hundred years.

The state gave her two doses of pentobarbital, which is a barbiturate. Then it waited. She did not die. Witnesses were asked to leave before she was pronounced dead, which never happened. She was taken to a hospital. Her lawyers were told on a Monday night that she was brain dead and would come off life support the next morning. On Tuesday, she woke up and started talking.

Here is the detail worth holding onto. Tennessee's written protocol is two syringes of pentobarbital, a five minute wait, then a second set if the prisoner is still alive. It says nothing about what to do after that. The Department of Correction stated it followed every step. That is probably true. The steps simply run out.

This has happened in America once before. In 1946, Louisiana strapped seventeen year old Willie Francis into the electric chair and the chair failed. He walked back to his cell. The Supreme Court heard it the next year and ruled five to four that Louisiana could try again. The Eighth Amendment bars cruel and unusual punishment. The Court said a chair that failed was neither of those things. Double jeopardy, the rule against trying a man twice for the same crime, did not apply either. Louisiana executed him in 1947.

One case. Eighty years back. One vote. That is the whole record.

Governor Bill Lee called it deeply disturbing. He has halted executions in Tennessee for the rest of the year and ordered an outside review. Pike is conscious. She has pneumonia and a blood clot and cannot move her arms. Whatever you think the state owes her, it now has to answer a question this country has answered once.

Nobody sits down in October and decides to eat more sugar. It just arrives.

It arrives as a drink in your hand on the walk to the car. It arrives as a bowl on somebody's desk. It arrives in the bag you bought for trick or treaters eleven days early. None of it is a meal. All of it counts.

The mechanism is worth knowing. A large seasonal coffee drink runs around fifty grams of sugar, which is about twelve teaspoons. Your body has three ways of knowing you ate. You chewed something. Your stomach filled up and stretched. Protein and fiber turned up and took a while to break down. A sweet coffee does none of that. You drink it in a few minutes and it leaves your stomach almost as fast. Nothing tells your brain a meal happened. Nothing adjusts what you eat at lunch. You did not have a treat. You added a meal that does not count as one.

The bowl works the same way. Fun size candy is built so that one is never a decision. Nobody remembers the fourth one.

The fix is not abstinence. Almost all the sugar in that drink is in the syrup pumps and the topping. It is not in the coffee or the pumpkin. Order it with two pumps instead of five and you have cut most of it without giving up the thing you actually wanted. For the bowl, move it. Put it somewhere you have to stand up to reach. Distance beats willpower. It is not close.

None of this is urgent, which is the whole problem. It is five weeks of small additions nobody decided on. The number you see in January is the sum of them.

Somebody will tell you this year that a master's degree pays for itself. The number they reach for is a median. The median is the least useful statistic available here.

The real question is not whether graduate degrees pay. It is whether yours will. Those are different questions and the gap between them is enormous. Nursing, computer science, engineering and accounting clear their cost comfortably. A large number of humanities, arts and communications programs never clear it at all. The average lands between the two. Almost nobody is actually there.

The second question is sharper and almost nobody asks it. Does the job you want require the degree or does it prefer it?

Required means the door is locked without it. You cannot be a nurse practitioner, a licensed clinical social worker or a lawyer without the credential. Preferred means the degree is one of several ways in and the other ways are usually cheaper and faster. Read the posting twice. One of those words means the degree is the price of entry. The other means somebody in HR typed it.

Then there is the part no brochure prints. The real cost of a two year program is not tuition. It is tuition plus two years of salary you did not earn, plus two years of retirement contributions you did not make, plus two years of promotions you were not in the building for. A thirty thousand dollar program is easily a two hundred thousand dollar decision.

There is one more question and it is the uncomfortable one. Some men go to graduate school because they want the job waiting on the other side. Others go because the job hunt is going badly. Others go because everybody they know is still in school and another two years as a student sounds easier than another two years of being twenty-four with a manager. That last one is a real reason and almost nobody says it out loud. It is also the most expensive way to buy time anyone has ever invented. You come out two years older and carrying debt you did not have before. The decision you were putting off is still sitting exactly where you left it.

None of that means do not go. It means go for a job you can name out loud. Go for a field where the degree is required rather than preferred. Run the arithmetic with the lost salary sitting in it. If it still works, it works. You will also be the rare person who knew that before enrolling rather than after.

Three ways men get this wrong. All three are the same mistake.

The first is the full gore mask at a party where everybody else did something light. The second is refusing to dress up at all, which reads as being above it and quietly makes everyone who tried feel stupid. The third is the costume that needs two minutes of explaining before anybody understands it.

None of those is a bad outfit. All three are a misread of the room.

The question is not what is clever or what took effort. It is what everybody else is going to do. If the invitation says costumes and the host is somebody you work with, the answer sits in the middle. Recognizable in under two seconds. Comfortable enough that you are not adjusting it at ten o'clock.

Three practical notes. Anything covering your whole face ends every conversation you were going to have that night. Anything needing a prop in one hand means the drink is in the other and you have no hands left. Anything that makes you the loudest thing in the room has already decided how your night goes. You did not get a vote.

The man who gets this right is not the most creative one there. He is the one who thought about who would be in the room and dressed for them.

In 1692, in Salem Village in Massachusetts, two girls began having fits nobody could explain. A doctor said witchcraft. Within months the colony had convened a special court. That court had a problem on its hands.

Witchcraft is invisible. There is no body, no weapon, and no witness in the ordinary sense. So the court accepted something called spectral evidence. That meant a person could testify that the accused had appeared to them as a spirit in a dream or a vision and tormented them there.

Think about what that does to a trial. The testimony cannot be checked. It cannot be contradicted. No man can prove where his spirit was on a Tuesday night. The only reliable defense turned out to be confession, since confessing got you spared while denying got you hanged. That is why the list of the accused grew the way it did. The incentive only ran one direction.

Nineteen people were hanged. Giles Corey, who was eighty-one and refused to enter a plea at all, was pressed to death under stones over two days. At least five more died in jail.

It ended faster than it started. In October of 1692, the governor dissolved the court. When the trials resumed under a new court that January, spectral evidence was no longer admitted. The conviction rate collapsed almost immediately. By the following May, everyone still being held had been released.

Nobody discovered that witches were not real. No one's theology changed. One rule changed about what a court would accept as proof. The machine stopped.

One more thing, since you have probably heard it. In 1976, a researcher proposed in the journal Science that the girls had ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungus that grows on damp rye and it produces a compound related to LSD. Other scholars took the idea apart in the same journal later that year. A whole family eats the same bread, yet only one or two people in any given house fell ill. Eight people lived in the Parris household and two of them got sick. The affliction hit Andover, twenty miles off, harder than it hit Salem. One witness was recorded at the time admitting she faked hers. She said she did it for sport.

The theory survived all of that. It landed in 1976 while the country was frightened about LSD, which is made from an ergot alkaloid. More than two hundred newspapers ran it. People still repeat it today. Notice what that is. We like the ergot story for the same reason the court liked spectral evidence. It explains everything at once and almost nobody checks it.

That is the part worth carrying out of it. Salem was not a failure of intelligence. Those were literate, careful and serious people. It was a failure of evidence standards. Evidence standards are the only thing standing between a serious institution and whatever it already wanted to believe.

That's Issue No. 14. If someone in your life would find this useful, forward it their way.

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