Queen Elizabeth died yesterday. Seventy years on the throne, which is longer than either of my parents have been alive. Weird thing to watch from the US — not really our monarch, obviously, but she's been such a fixed background fact of the entire world's news cycle for so long that her not being there anymore registers as a genuine shift, even from here. Talked about it with Mr. Z, actually, briefly — he had a surprisingly specific take on the economics of monarchies as institutions that I hadn't expected and didn't fully follow, tangent from an otherwise normal technical email. He does that sometimes, drops a paragraph of opinion on something totally unrelated to whatever I asked, like a pressure valve for whatever else is on his mind that week. I don't mind it. Makes the emails feel less transactional. Nothing else notable. Dave's store had a moment of silence at open today, which is not something I expected a hardware store in a random American suburb to do for a British monarch, and also somehow made total sense once it happened.