If you’ve decided to cancel your holiday travel plans, at least you get to avoid what promises to be an extra helping of the indignity that accompanies the car rental experience. If you’re still heading out, here’s a fun article to read while you’re waiting for your rental car employee to finish speed-typing a tome into their circa 1989 PC. Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic: The Absurdity of Renting a Car Will No Longer Be Tolerated. “Why is that car-rental employee typing for so long? We’ll never know. Why are the printers so old and loud and broken? Who could say! Will you ever get a straight answer as to how much insurance to buy, or whether to prepay for gas, or why it’s forbidden for you to drive this rental car out of the state of Florida? What does the pandemic have to do with Avis allegedly repossessing a rental car from someone’s driveway in the middle of the night in Teaneck, New Jersey, and then allegedly claiming to know absolutely nothing about it, in one of the oddest stories I have ever read? And what does the pandemic have to do with the stream of complaints about rental-car companies on the Better Business Bureau website, a surprising number of which come from people who insist that they do not smoke yet they have been charged as much as $450 for allegedly smoking in a car?” (It could be worse. One of my relatives who has left the building was so irritating that I often rented two cars. One for him. One for the rest of us.)

+ I’ll probably skip NextDraft for the next few days, though no one can predict how addictions work. If you need some extra me, I can recommend the perfect book!