By Josh Gondelman — 28 Sep 2026

#203. Iced Coffee and You

Nectar of the gods.

Just a quick reminder that if you enjoy this newsletter, it's nice of you to SUBSCRIBE and it's double-nice if you want to become a PAID SUBSCRIBER, but I get if you don't have the funds for that at the moment. Gas costs $500/ml.

Hi everyone,

After I sent last Monday's newsletter I mostly-fasted for Yom Kippur and then fell asleep during (Zoom) services which I believe to be part of an illustrious tradition. This weekend was dominated by a nor'easter, a meteorological annoyance and definitely the black sheep of the contraction family. You're not even saving a syllable? What are we doing here? Maris and I watched Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (great!!!) and the first episode of Slow Horses (also great!!) and snuck out for dinner on Saturday during a break in the rain. Last night I snuck out briefly for a really fun show that my friend Billy Wayne Davis put on at Union Hall and then back out for a spot at the Cellar later. Overall, a very cozy weekend!

In the middle of the week, I made a quick trip to Omaha to record the latest episode of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! which was so much fun. The guest was legendary former Cornhuskers women's volleyball coach John Cook. I knew the people of Nebraska take their volleyball seriously, but I was legitimately not prepared to board my plane at LaGuardia Airport and hear returning Nebraskans discussing the previous night's match (which the Cornhuskers swept) despite having been out of state while it took place. It felt like a scene from a movie where a jaded New Yorker learns to appreciate small town life (including the small town's historically dominant college volleyball program).

Omaha was full of fun and surprises. I had an excellent iced coffee (more on that later) and did some work at Astute Coffee, which is run by a nonprofit that works with young people who have been a part of the foster care system. I ran into my pal Josh Johnson, who was on his way to perform at a big-ass theater in Lincoln, at the airport. It is preposterous but unsurprising how chill and down-to-earth Josh is even after becoming a megastar. Everyone should do it that way!

Over my nineteen hours in Omaha, more than one person reminded me that Nebraska does not have a winner-take-all system of assigning electoral votes in presidential elections, so the city itself routinely goes blue despite the state as a whole leaning red. One of those reminders came from a 4:45am rideshare driver who felt comfortable revealing his politics after a member of our traveling party mentioned that Zohran Mamdani had requested to use their building's stoop to give out candy last Halloween. It was one thing to meet liberal folks at an NPR radio taping, but it was more surprising to encounter a proud Kamala Harris voter in the middle of the night by chance.

The biggest shock of the whole trip though was the side salad I received with my lunch. I'd popped into a restaurant called Block 16 to grab something to eat, and I was told that Alton Brown once referred to their signature burger as the best in the country. The burger was good (I let myself get talked into having it cooked medium when I'm a medium-rare guy at heart), but the side salad I'd tacked on for the purpose of funneling some quantity of plant-based nutrition into my body was the showstopper.

A vibrant salad in a to-go container, as described elsewhere. — If this is a side salad I'd like to see your main salad if you know what I mean. (I don't.)

Let's take quick trip into the past: The only other time I'd been to Nebraska was in 2010 for the Great American Comedy Festival in Johnny Carson's hometown of Norfolk (pronounced – I swear to god – "nor-fork"). On one of the festival days, I went to lunch at a diner with my friend Aparna Nancherla. Aparna asked if there were any vegetarian options on the menu because there did not appear to be a single meatless item. Our server thought for a moment before replying: "The salad's just got chicken in it."

So that was my prior experience with Nebraska cuisine. Being told that chicken was as close as they had to no meat. I braced myself to accept an upcharge for a plastic clamshell full of iceberg lettuce that felt like someone had used it to mop their brow while being interrogated by the CIA and maybe a translucent slice of tomato with some flavorless carrot pubes scattered on top. But this side salad (listed at $4.50, but given to me for slightly cheaper as part of an ad hoc combo meal) nearly brought a tear to my eye. Bright, fresh pepper rings. Pickled onions. Is that...my god...kale??? And, I will say this out of appreciation for midwestern culture: The house-made ranch dressing was VERY good. You really can't assume what a person OR a salad is going to be like. Lesson learned.

The recording itself was so much fun! Dulcé and Faith were great to work with on the panel. The Omaha audience was extremely psyched to be there thanks in part at least to the fact that the show had only ever toured as close as Lincoln in the past, and that was over a decade ago. I felt good about my Bluff The Listener offering, and I was named the week's winner, which was unexpected because Faith is ESPECIALLY good at the news quiz part of this news quiz show. Thanks to Peter and Alzo and the whole team for having me along.

me, faith, and dulcé at the panelists table for wait wait; mike danforth and lillian king are behind us at the producer table — A good time was had by all!

I forgot to mention that last week I returned to Extra Hot Great to talk about the new show on TNT (which I guess still makes shows!) about the hunt for Saddam Hussein. It's...not great. We also talked about Game Changer on Dropout which IS great. NOW YOU KNOW!

THIS VERY WEEKEND: I'm making my debut at the Comedy Fort in Fort Collins, CO! I can't wait!!! If you know people in the area, please tell them to buy tickets because they are abundantly available.

Also, tickets for my post-Christmas shows at Goodnights in Raleigh, NC just went on sale! I'll be there December 26th through the 28th, and I'd love to see you at a show if you live nearby!

PEP TALK FOR ICED COFFEE

Last week social media caught fire with discourse I found myself immersed in even though I never saw its origin. Apparently a recruiter or hiring manager had said something about how they would be reluctant to hire a candidate who brought an iced coffee to an interview, and it was all people (including myself) talked about for three days afterwards (once the Western Massachusetts lesbian bar masking story simmered down).

A lot of the tangential conversation was, honestly, pretty interesting. It seemed like many younger people felt like...I'm a person living in a human body with needs. Why wouldn't I bring an iced coffee to an interview like I do for work? And some older, more established office workers came down more on the side of: It's a job interview. Making yourself as enticing and appealing to the company as humanly possible is the assignment.

I found the iced coffee-specific facets of the discourse to be largely nonsensical. "It leaves sweat on a desk or a table!" Oh so no one has ever had a cold beverage in your office before? Figure your shit out. Get a coaster. That's a you problem. (Although I will say when I bring an iced coffee to someone else's office, I put it on top of my notebook or look for another safe perch.) "The ice is so loud and distracting." Are you a bat? How powerful are your ears that a person drinking normally generates so much noise that your perception is scrambled? I work from home most days, and there has been constant construction outside my window and guess what. It's fine. If a few tinkling ice cubes throws you that far off your game, maybe consider a monastery.

Here's my scorching take: Iced coffee is LESS casual than hot coffee because it takes more time and forethought to make coffee cold than it does to make it hot.

I saw a very successful and reasonable public figure suggest that you never should bring a beverage to an interview at all. IN WHAT WORLD IS THIS HAPPENING? At least fifty percent of people carry a keg-sized refillable water bottle everywhere they go. That is normal now. I can't remember the last time I showed up to a meeting of any kind where I wasn't offered coffee or water. Iced coffee is just coffee with water in ice cube form. It's no less professional because it's more refreshing.

It's not even that I recommend bringing iced coffee to a job interview. I just think, as with so many internet kerfuffles, it's not really a big enough deal for everyone to have to weigh in on. It inspired this silly joke that became possibly my most popular Instagram post of all time?

Fake opinions to argue over… Never turn left on a first date. Every kindergarten student should have an unpaid internship. The periodic table is too sexual. Bigfoot should be allowed to vote. Having a dream is the same as reading a book. You can wear a crop top to a funeral if the deceased person was hot when they died. — Follow me over there if you'd like!

Hilariously, people immediately started arguing over whether Bigfoot is a birthright citizen of the United States (we don't know how old Bigfoot is or where they were born!!!) and whether crop tops are funeral attire (I'm not against it but I think the hotness of the deceased shouldn't have anything to do with it).

Iced coffee, you are one of our most important beverages. For years, you were one of America's greatest advantages over Europe. You have been caught in the crossfire of a discourse that is nominally about you but is really about so much more (professionalism, generational differences, people refusing to admit that they got their idea of what a job should be like from their own strict dad or an episode of Mad Men).

Iced coffee is great, and it's not any different from hot coffee in terms of where you should be allowed to drink it as long as you are considerate of the physical realities of an interview situation, which is part of being in the world to begin with.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I've done a very light edit on this request and added the nickname as usual.

My school flooded, so we moved to another school and then a third school after summer, and now they aren’t fixing my old school so we all live in the third school now and everyone’s a mess and the district is broke and I want to cry all the time? Is that too much for a pep talk? It’s worth a try!
- Sop of My Class

Sometimes it feels like being at peace requires holding (or refusing to hold one of) two simultaneous and contradictory experiences in your mind at once:

Forgetting that things used to be better than they are right now.
Remembering that things can still be better than they are right now.

Your situation has deteriorated through no fault of your own. You did not flood your school. Nor did you choose to relocate to a temporary second academic home only to require an additional move soon after. You also didn't refuse to adequately fund your district. But here you are. Departmentally penniless, in building number three. Things used to be better, and now they're worse.

THAT'S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. Your job is to make things as good as possible where you are right now. Education is one of those fields where now is the time of monsters, so to speak. And you don't defeat the monsters by fixating on going back to an era before they arrived. HOWEVER. We can move towards a post-monster world with buildings that are fortified against the elements, and enough money on hand to provide kids and teachers with the educational resources they need.

You are not going through this alone! Everyone around you wants things to be better too! You will settle into this new situation as well as you can, and that will be a gift to you and your colleagues and the students. On the other hand, you can't allow yourself to get too habituated to how badly things suck right now, or you'll never get to the monster vanquishin' part of things. You've got to quit living in the past if you want to start building the future.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
This Is Lorelei - " I Will Eat My Heart In The Morning Light"

Yes! Fine! This song is more sweetly melancholy than it is energizing. What're you gonna do about it, beat my ass?

This Is Lorelei is one of those band names that kind of obscures that it's mostly one guy doing his thing. There's considerable twang drizzled over the album, and I don't know if that means it's country music or if it's just borrowing some guitar tone from country music. It's felt like the perfect walking around music as autumn weather has blown into New York City, but I bet that translates across regions too. (It's been this record and a loooot of Okkervil River. Early fall is Okkervil River season, which I text my friend Mindy Tucker about as soon as the air gets cool enough.)

My friend Sean Cannon said he saw This Is Lorelei live last week and that it was a great show, and I'm going to maybe try and catch him when he's in town too. I have so few concerts on the calendar, but I've been into a lot of new music this year.

Have other people felt this? That there's been good music coming out lately? Some of the big releases (Drake's post-public-shaming triple album, everything Morgan Wallen does) have felt pretty blah to me, but a lot of smaller releases this year have felt really human and full of life! Any favorites from 2026 so far?