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prodigious reader, chronic forgetter
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Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.
What does a successful Democratic opposition—or a successful Democratic presidency—look like? Patrick Healy, the deputy opinion editor of the New York Times, convened a roundtable of experts to discuss what he thought was that question. "I caught some heat this winter from Democrats when I raised the idea that the party is in deeper trouble with voters than its leaders are admitting," Healy wrote.
Patrick "patio11" McKenzie is a fantastic explainer, the kind of person who breaks topics down in ways that stay with you, and creep into your understanding of other subjects, too. Take his 2022 essay, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero":
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/
It's a very well-argued piece, and here's the nut of it:
The marginal return of permitting fraud against you is plausibly greater than zero, and therefore, you should welcome greater than zero fraud.
In other words, if you allow some fraud, you will also allow through a lot of non-fraudulent business that would otherwise trip your fraud meter. Or, put it another way, the only way to prevent all fraud is to chase away a large proportion of your customers, whose transactions are in some way abnormal or unexpected.
Another great explainer is Bruce Schneier, the security expert. In the wake of 9/11, lots of pundits (and senior government officials) ran around saying, "No price is too high to prevent another terrorist attack on our aviation system." Schneier had a foolproof way of shutting these fools up: "Fine, just ground all civilian aircraft, forever." Turns out, there is a price that's too high to pay for preventing air-terrorism.
Latent in these two statements is the idea that the most secure systems are simple, and while simplicity is a fine goal to strive for, we should always keep in mind the maxim attributed to Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." That is to say, some things are just complicated.
20 years ago, my friend Kathryn Myronuk and I were talking about the spam wars, which were raging at the time. The spam wars were caused by the complexity of email: as a protocol (rather than a product), email is heterogenuous. There are lots of different kinds of email servers and clients, and many different ways of creating and rendering an email. All this flexibility makes email really popular, and it also means that users have a wide variety of use-cases for it. As a result, identifying spam is really hard. There's no reliable automated way of telling whether an email is spam or not – you can't just block a given server, or anyone using a kind of server software, or email client. You can't choose words or phrases to block and only block spam.
Many solutions were proposed to this at the height of the spam wars, and they all sucked, because they all assumed that the way the proposer used email was somehow typical, thus we could safely build a system to block things that were very different from this "typical" use and not catch too many dolphins in our tuna nets:
https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
So Kathryn and I were talking about this, and she said, "Yeah, all complex ecosystems have parasites." I was thunderstruck. The phrase entered my head and never left. I even gave a major speech with that title later that year, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:
https://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt
Truly, a certain degree of undesirable activity is the inevitable price you pay once you make something general purpose, generative, and open. Open systems – like the web, or email – succeed because they are so adaptable, which means that all kinds of different people with different needs find ways to make use of them. The undesirable activity in open systems is, well, undesirable, and it's valid and useful to try to minimize it. But minimization isn't the same as elimination. "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero," because "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Complexity is generative, but "all complex ecosystems have parasites."
America is a complex system. It has, for example, a Social Security apparatus that has to serve more than 65 million people. By definition, a cohort of 65 million people will experience 65 one-in-a-million outliers every day. Social Security has to accommodate 65 million variations on the (surprisingly complicated) concept of a "street address":
https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298bbf0886
It will have to cope with 65 million variations on the absolutely, maddeningly complicated idea of a "name":
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
In cybernetics, we say that a means of regulating a system must be capable of representing as many states as the system itself – that is, if you're building a control box for a thing with five functions, the box needs at least five different settings:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REQVAR.html
So when we're talking about managing something as complicated as Social Security, we need to build a Social Security Administration that is just as complicated. Anything that complicated is gonna have parasites – once you make something capable of managing the glorious higgeldy piggeldy that is the human experience of names, dates of birth, and addresses, you will necessarily create exploitable failure modes that bad actors can use to steal Social Security. You can build good fraud detection systems (as the SSA has), and you can investigate fraud (as the SSA does), and you can keep this to a manageable number – in the case of the SSA, that number is well below one percent:
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF12948/IF12948.2.pdf
But if you want to reduce Social Security fraud from "a fraction of one percent" to "zero percent," you can either expend a gigantic amount of money (far more than you're losing to fraud) to get a little closer to zero – or you can make Social Security far simpler. For example, you could simply declare that anyone whose life and work history can't fit in a simple database schema is not eligible for Social Security, kick tens of millions of people off the SSI rolls, and cause them to lose their homes and starve on the streets. This isn't merely cruel, it's also very, very expensive, since homelessness costs the system far more than Social Security. The optimum amount of fraud is non-zero.
Conservatives hate complexity. That's why the Trump administration banned all research grants for proposals that contained the word "systemic" (as a person with so-far-local cancer, I sure worry about what happens when and if my lymphoma become systemic). I once described the conservative yearning for "simpler times," as a desire to be a child again. After all, the thing that made your childhood "simpler" wasn't that the world was less complicated – it's that your parents managed that complexity and shielded you from it. There's always been partner abuse, divorce, gender minorities, mental illness, disability, racial discrimination, geopolitical crises, refugees, and class struggle. The only people who don't have to deal with this stuff are (lucky) children.
Complexity is an unavoidable attribute of all complicated processes. Evolution is complicated, so it produces complexity. It's convenient to think about a simplified model of genes in which individual genes produce specific traits, but it turns out genes all influence each other, are influenced in turn by epigenetics, and that developmental factors play a critical role in our outcomes. From eye-color to gender, evolution produces spectra, not binaries. It's ineluctably (and rather gloriously) complicated.
The conservative project to insist that things can be neatly categorized – animal or plant, man or woman, planet or comet – tries to take graceful bimodal curves and simplify them into a few simple straight lines – one or zero (except even the values of the miniature transistors on your computer's many chips are never at "one" or "zero" – they're "one-ish" and "mostly zero").
Like Social Security, fraud in the immigration system is a negligible rounding error. The US immigration system is a baroque, ramified, many-tendriled thing (I have the receipts from the immigration lawyers who helped me get a US visa, a green card, and citizenship to prove it). It is already so overweighted with pitfalls and traps for the unwary that a good immigration lawyer might send you to apply for a visa with 600 pages of documentation (the most I ever presented) just to make sure that every possible requirement is met:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2242342898/in/photolist-zp6PxJ-4q9Aqs-2nVHTZK-2pFKHyf
After my decades of experience with the US immigration system, I am prepared to say that the system is now at a stage where it is experiencing sharply diminishing returns from its anti-fraud systems. The cost of administering all this complexity is high, and the marginal amount of fraud caught by any new hoop the system gins up for migrants to jump through will round to zero.
Which poses a problem for Trump and trumpists: having whipped up a national panic about out of control immigration and open borders, the only way to make the system better at catching the infinitesimal amount of fraud it currently endures is to make the rules simpler, through the blunt-force tactic of simply excluding people who should be allowed in the country. For example, you could ban college kids planning to spend the summer in the US on the grounds that they didn't book all their hotels in advance, because they're planning to go from city to city and wing it:
https://www.newsweek.com/germany-tourists-deported-hotel-maria-lepere-charlotte-pohl-hawaii-2062046
Or you could ban the only research scientist in the world who knows how to interpret the results of the most promising new cancer imaging technology because a border guard was confused about the frog embryos she was transporting (she's been locked up for two months now):
Of course, the US has long operated a policy of "anything that confuses a border guard is grounds for being refused entry" but the Trump administration has turned the odd, rare outrage into business-as-usual.
But they can lock up or turn away as many people as they want, and they still won't get the amount of fraud to zero. The US is a complicated place. People have complicated reasons for entering the USA – work, family reunion, leisure, research, study, and more. The only immigration system that doesn't leak a little at the seams is an immigration system that is so simple that it has no seams – a toy immigration system for a trivial country in which so little is going on that everything is going on.
The only garden without weeds is a monoculture under a dome. The only email system without spam is a closed system managed by one company that only allows a carefully vetted cluster of subscribers to communicate with one another. The only species with just two genders is one wherein members who fit somewhere else on the spectrum are banished or killed, a charnel process that never ends because there are always newborns that are outside of the first sigma of the two peaks in the bimodal distribution.
A living system – a real country – is complicated. It's a system, where people do things you'll never understand for perfectly good reasons (and vice versa). To accommodate all that complexity, we need complex systems, and all complex ecosystems have parasites. Yes, you can burn the rainforest to the ground and plant monocrops in straight rows, but then what you have is a farm, not a forest, vulnerable to pests and plagues and fire and flood. Complex systems have parasites, sure, but complex systems are resilient. The optimal level of fraud is never zero, because a system that has been simplified to the point where no fraud can take place within it is a system that is so trivial and brittle as to be useless.
Your primary source for news https://primarynewssource.org
"A Lot of Emotion": The Rocky Marriage of Instagram and Facebook https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/a-lot-of-emotion-the-rocky-marriage
#20yrsago French court bans DRM for DVDs https://web.archive.org/web/20050424023258/https://www.01net.com/editorial/274752/droit/la-justice-interdit-de-proteger-les-dvd-contre-la-copie/
#20yrsago Why governments make stupid copyrights https://www.ft.com/content/39b697dc-b25e-11d9-bcc6-00000e2511c8
#20yrsago London Review of Books’s personals are really dirty and funny https://web.archive.org/web/20050426005000/http://www.lrb.co.uk/classified/index.php#PERSONALS
#20yrsago German crooner’s megaphone-style covers of modern rock https://www.palast-orchester.de/en
#15yrsago British Airways leaves stranded passengers all over world, jacks up prices on tickets home https://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2010/apr/23/iceland-volcano-thousands-passengers-stranded
#15yrsago Google highlights fair use defense to YouTube takedowns https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2010/04/content-id-and-fair-use.html
#15yrsago Microsoft wins its $100M tax-break and amnesty from broke-ass Washington State https://web.archive.org/web/20100429061500/http://microsofttaxdodge.com/2010/04/microsoft-gets-nevada-royalty-tax-cut-and-tax-amnesty.html?all
#10yrsago Privilege: you’re probably not the one percent https://jacobin.com/2015/04/1-99-percent-class-inequality
#10yrsago Marissa Mayer makes 1,100 Yahooers jobless, calls it a “remix” https://web.archive.org/web/20150425183847/http://news.dice.com/2015/04/22/yahoo-called-its-layoffs-a-remix-dont-do-that/?CMPID=AF_SD_UP_JS_AV_OG_DNA_
#10yrsago Canadian Big Content spokesjerk says the public domain is against the public interest https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2015/04/canadian-recording-industry-works-entering-the-public-domain-are-not-in-the-public-interest/
#5yrsago Riot Baby https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/23/riot-baby/#Tochi-Onyebuchi
#5yrsago Mayor of Las Vegas says the "free market" will decide what's safe https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/23/riot-baby/#carolyn-goodman
#1yrago "Humans in the loop" must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs
Wellingon: Unity Books, May 3, 3PM
https://www.unitybooks.co.nz/news-and-events/author-talk-picks-and-shovels-by-cory-doctorow
Pittsburgh: Picks and Shovels at White Whale Books, May 15
https://whitewhalebookstore.com/events/20250515
Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/
Virtual: Writing to Resist (California Writers Club Berkeley):
https://cwc-berkeley.org/writing-to-resist-5-18-25/
PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025
PDX: Picks and Shovels with bunnie Huang at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0
London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/
Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059
Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 3
https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
Can we use the Internet for Democracy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh_HON6iql8
Fightback Against Trump's Tariff Attack (Avi Lewis)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9sgIAc6z_o
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025
Latest podcast: Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION https://craphound.com/stories/2025/04/13/nimby-and-the-d-hoppers-conclusion/
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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One of the pro wrestlers is starstruck. I was not expecting this. It’s 2015, and I’m in the Mid-Atlantic Sportatorium, a small room in a North Carolina strip mall that’s entirely dedicated to independent wrestling shows. This particular one is being held by Chikara, a cartoonish American lucha libre company that will later shut down amidst abuse allegations against its owner. Some of the wrestlers on this card tonight will later make it to WWE or AEW. Most will not. One of the ones who will not is Argus, a rookie masked wrestler with a lizard-man character. On this night, Argus will lose to Hallowicked, a more experienced masked wrestler with a pumpkin-man character. But Argus wins something because he gets to meet John Darnielle. In the audience, Argus shyly approaches Darnielle, introduces himself, and then zips back to the locker room to grab his mask so that he can take a picture with the man. Even on this level, the lucha mask is sacrosanct. If Argus is going to get a photo with Darnielle, he will need the mask.
[I planned to write this post two weeks ago, but then international travel got in the way. In the interim, my book Track Changes won the British Science Fiction Association award for best long non-fiction. You can read more about that, and the now-open voting for the Hugo awards, where Track Changes is also nominated, on my blog.]
In the summer of 2024, the estate of Michael Crichton sued Warner Brothers for breach of contract. The estate had been in negotiations with the studio to produce a sequel to 90s megahit hospital series ER, which Crichton created. After negotiations broke down, WB greenlit a show called The Pitt, starring ER alumnus Noah Wyle and produced by two of that show’s former showrunners, John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill. The estate’s claim is that The Pitt, which is set in a Pittsburgh emergency room where Wyle’s character is the chief attending physician, is just an ER reboot with the serial numbers filed off.
The Pitt aired its first season on Max in the winter and spring of 2025, and having watched that season, I have to say that the Crichton estate has a strong case. And since I don’t actually care about Hollywood legal shenanigans, let’s talk instead about why that is a remarkable and unlikely achievement. These days, ER is probably best remembered for launching George Clooney’s stratospheric career, or for killing characters by dropping helicopters on them, but besides being a hit on a scale that simply doesn’t exist on TV anymore, it was also a major stepping stone in the 90s ramp-up to what eventually became known as the Golden Age of TV. There were hospital shows before ER, but what it brought to the table was a raft of formal innovations—cinematic-style shooting techniques, high-octane storytelling, and a deliberately contained setting (in its early seasons the show rarely left the emergency room, and details about the doctors’ and nurses’ lives were scarce)—as well as seriously skillful writing. A typical ER episode would weave together the stories of one-off patients who show up in the emergency room and then move on, follow up on patients whose sagas were more complex, dip into the staff’s personal dramas, and tie all these storylines together into something that not only felt like a single, complete episode of television, but that usually left you feeling breathless and wrung-out by the time the credits rolled.
In the era of steaming TV, these achievements are at once commonplace and vanishingly rare. The technical aspects that once made ER look like nothing else on TV are now mostly par for the course, while the ability to write a coherent episode—much less craft one out of multiple storylines—is nearly a lost art. It was hard to imagine that a show in 2025 could capture what made ER special, and yet within a few minutes of watching The Pitt‘s premiere, it was clear that this had happened. To be sure, there are places where the newer show falls short—in particular, the dialogue is sometimes clunky and over-obvious, with characters delivering what feel like PSAs rather than organic speech. But for the most part, watching The Pitt feels very much like tuning into the latest episode of ER back in the 90s—the same intense, propulsive shooting style (Film Crit Hulk has a very good essay about the deceptive simplicity of the show’s trauma scenes; how they convey an immense amount of information and emotional impact while remaining entirely coherent, usually without ER‘s go-to pulse-pounding music and raised voices); the same well-crafted, episode-focused storytelling; the same feeling, at the end of each hour, that you are both exhausted and desperate for more.
What’s particularly impressive is how The Pitt does all this while also setting itself the goal of talking about how medicine has changed in the last thirty years, and how that reflects changes in the society and country outside the hospital. It feels almost like a thesis statement for the show when, halfway through its premiere episode, an elderly patient is transported to the emergency room ensconced in a halo which is operating an arm that presses rhythmically on her chest—an automatic CPR machine. Other technical innovations are either constant background presences—the increased use of computers and tablets to keep track of patients—or suddenly startling—did you know that if you need to quickly start a fluid line, there’s a device that lets you do that by drilling directly into the bone? Often when doctors on the show perform risky or unorthodox procedures, they cite papers that turn out to be real, published case studies.
For the most part, however, the changes The Pitt charts are of a darker variety. Wyle’s character, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, has to shepherd nurses, residents, and a gaggle of newbie doctors on their first day of an emergency medicine rotation, not to mention an endless stream of patients complaining of everything from scrapes and bruises to full-body burns and injuries from being pushed under a subway train. But at the same time he also has to juggle the hospital’s demands that he raise patient satisfaction scores even as management refuses to hire more nurses. To manage patients who will spend their entire hospitalization in an emergency room bed even as a whole ward remains closed because the hospital hasn’t allocated funds to staff it. To fob off a private equity firm looking to take over the unprofitable emergency department by advising doctors to pad their charts.
In many other ways, too, the state of America in 2025 is reflected in what occurs in The Pitt‘s emergency room. The ER’s dedicated, no-nonsense charge nurse (Katherine LaNasa) is attacked by disgruntled patient who was previously raving about how he now lives in a “third world country”. Patients scoff at masks and vaccines. An attending who is a veteran brings techniques he learned on the battlefield to a mass casualty event. And looming over it all is the lingering trauma of COVID, of the intense demands made on medical teams, and of the losses they suffered.
The Pitt‘s one innovation on ER‘s structure—what will presumably form the backbone of WB’s defense against the Crichton estate’s lawsuit—is the fact that the whole season takes place over the course of a single shift. This poses some storytelling challenges. For one thing, even without the aforementioned mass casualty event, the single shift that the series follows encompasses a simply dizzying number of complicated traumas and tragic cases—as a real emergency room doctor told Vulture halfway through the season, if any real shift was like this, all doctors would quit their jobs. For another, it means the scope for character growth and change among the show’s main cast is necessarily limited, and reserved mostly to the new doctors who spend the day figuring out emergency medicine from the ground up—nervous, nerdy medical student Whitaker (Ludwig‘s Gerran Howell) who slowly reveals a steely core; confident hotshot Santos (Star Trek: Picard‘s Isa Briones) who struggles to accept that she still has things to learn. For the more experienced characters, the season does more work revealing their characters and relationships than developing them, and one wonders how sustainable this will be going forward. (For that matter, the format of a single shift per season practically demands that some of the cast will not return next season, which will be difficult for a television production to do.)
At the same time, the compressed structure can help put audiences in the characters’ headspace, and bring home the reality of the kind of work they do. Patients can feel incredibly important and urgent for the two or three episodes in which they appear, and then like a distant memory just a few hours later, because to the doctors, as well as to us, so many other cases have turned up to demand our attention. The first half of the season is spent accompanying two shellshocked parents (Brandon Keener and Samantha Sloyan) who rush their son to the emergency room with a fentanyl overdose, as they first come to terms with the fact that he is brain dead, and then adjust to the idea of donating his organs. By the time they leave, they feel like main characters, and yet by the end of the season they’ve almost been forgotten in the rush of other cases.
Other times, stories are left unfinished. A concerned mother brings her son to the ER on false pretenses because she fears he’s planning to commit a crime; at the end of the shift, Robby observes that the boy will probably spend his entire 72-hour psychiatric hold in the ER, and who knows whether that will do him any good. Most startling is the handling of the mass casualty event. For two hours, the show—and the emergency room—transform into a field hospital, as over a hundred severe cases are treated with furious, and sometimes ruthless, efficiency. And then the cases stop coming, the blood is mopped up, and everything goes back to normal. The sprained wrists and spiking fever cases wander back in, and you realize that what felt like a culminating storytelling event is just one part of the day, after which everyone has to get on with doing their job. For some of the doctors on The Pitt, this is a reality they can still cope with; for others, it may be more than they can bear.
Much of the conversation that The Pitt has inspired since becoming a runaway success (the show has already been renewed for a second season, which its producers promise to deliver next year) has focused on its uniquness in the current television landscape. “It’s a streaming show that feels like a network show” is the narrative that has emerged, and inasmuch as that’s true (and it is mostly true) that is a black mark on the entire streaming ecosystem, and its failure to create a model that attracts and retains audiences. But I don’t think that’s the conversation The Pitt itself wants us to have. I think it would rather leave us thinking about how there are scores of talented, hardworking, dedicated people who show up every day to clean up the mess that occurs when every other system has failed, and how, as those systems fail more and more, those people will eventually fall away. A show with the reach and visibility of ER could make a critical mass of people think about these issues; let’s hope The Pitt can as well.
The post The Pitt appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
Down a hallway and tucked into the basement of Harborview Medical Center, an affordable and unexpectedly delicious culinary scene unfolds every day.
What looks like a typical hospital cafeteria is, in fact, one of Seattle’s most surprising hidden food destinations. The Harborview cafeteria, however, is not a total secret.
“We get outside guests just come here to eat the food because they appreciate it and always tell us how good it is compared to other hospitals,” said Chris Tharpe, retail manager at the medical center.
The cafeteria’s growing fanbase includes everyone from hospital staff and patients’ families to construction workers and local residents making the trip just for lunch.
The driving force behind Harborview’s surprising deliciousness is Executive Chef Vanessa Gray, who brought a bold vision—and a non-traditional résumé—to the job.
“I come from sports and entertainment… I wanted to make our cafeteria a fun place to eat with surprising food, not the same thing, hamburger, hot dog, pizza, kinds of things you see in a lot of cafeterias,” Gray said.
Her kitchen focuses on fresh, made-from-scratch meals instead of the frozen, pre-packaged fare common in institutional settings.
Each month, the cafeteria features rotating menus that reflect Seattle’s rich cultural heritage. The effort is led in part by Susan McBride, Director of Nutrition and Food Services.
“This one is Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander month, Black History month,” McBride tells CHS as she lays out menus for each month… “we have dishes that are representing different countries within that geographic area. The Native American Heritage Month features recipes from different tribes,” McBride said.
Gray emphasized that the team strives for authenticity. “If I take a recipe straight from a chef, then we try to do a bio to show that that chef is the one who created that item,” Gray said.
Big Volume, High Standards
Feeding thousands of people daily means scaling up without sacrificing quality.
“We’re cooking in batches as much as we can, so that we’re not having a lot of food just sitting in and holding,” said Gray. “It’s mainly about the constant turnover of food.”
Gray has to find a recipe she likes, simplify for her staff, then convert it to feed several hundred people.
Gray also noted the sheer volume of meals prepared each day — “About 1,400 a day… 1,500 to 2,000 out in the cafeteria” plus another 1,200 patient meals.
Among Harborview’s most legendary items? The Thursday scones.
“They’re famous. People come in, they buy like bags of them… we tried from scratch, and people wanted the old scones back… they’re gone by like 9am,” McBride said.
Making them fresh means starting the process well before sunrise: “2:30 AM on Thursday morning,” she added.
Though the cafeteria isn’t open 24/7, it comes close. “We open at 6 AM and we shut down like at 7:30 PM,” said McBride. But even overnight staff are fed: “We have a late night meal service that is three hours in the middle of the night… more like chicken wings and kind of the fun, fast stuff.”
And when it comes to eating in the middle of the night? “People like to eat different things the middle of the night than they do in the middle of the day.” Chef Gray tells CHS.
In a city where affordable meals can be hard to come by, Harborview’s pricing stands out.
“We have a $5 meal deal… entree, a side and a beverage,” said McBride. “The other two entrees… will be $7.50 to $9.”
“We have a long history of trying to have a really diverse menu that just hits a lot of different palettes and is representative of all the cultures that come to Harborview and work at Harborview”, McBride added.
The team’s sense of care goes beyond the menu. “We just go the extra mile for our customers,” said Tharpe.
“I think it’s just Harborview is a special place,” said Gray.
For those willing to step away from the usual lunch spots, Harborview’s cafeteria offers more than just a good meal—it offers connection, care, and yes, scones worth setting an alarm for.
Harborview Cafeteria is open to the public and located on the basement level of the medical center at 325 9th Ave. Learn more at uwmedicine.org.
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