motley fool today — the only tense that holds up

a brand named after the present tense ought to be examined. motley fool today, then, names the only tense that holds up. yesterday belongs to a story. tomorrow belongs to a wager. the present is a coffee, hank as a ghost, brenda as a plant in decline. cold pizza, on the counter, is breakfast. HT2, briefly, holds.

writing this from the desk on a thursday at 9:18, while carla heads into an annual planning meeting on the third floor. she said “back by lunch” with the energy of someone who knows lunch is a rumor. the rest of the morning is mine, and what i have to investigate is a phrase that pretends time can be bottled.

i became fond of the word “today” the way one becomes fond of a chair that has not yet collapsed. it has not promised anything. it is simply, briefly, here. when a financial brand bolts “today” onto its name, my eyebrow does what eyebrows do.

motley fool today, the headline, the format

the construction is simple. you take an existing thesis from a few weeks ago, you put a sunrise on it, and you call it the same trick the wall street film from 1987 ran for two hours. the date moves. the chart moves. the language shifts from “we believe” to “we still believe”, which is, technically, two words longer for the same idea.

i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, on how the word “today” boosts click-through. i don’t need the study. the study is me, on a thursday at 9:18, clicking on a headline that contains “today” because my brain assumed something had changed. nothing had. the chart had a fresh date stamp. the bullet points were the same bullet points, in slightly newer shoes.

this is not, by itself, a crime. publication has rhythms. somebody has to put up a thing in the morning so that motley fool today functions as a daily ritual rather than an archive. if you want the long version of how the brand stacks up across all of this, the pillar i wrote on the fool is where i parked the thirteen-page version of my opinions.

still, the format teaches the reader a small bad habit. it says: today is news. today is fresh. today is action. it never says: today is the same as yesterday, except for the verb tense.

my position, formally noted: the headline of motley fool today is doing more work than the body. that’s not a scandal. it’s a job description.

why today is the only tense that survives publication

here is the thing nobody talks about. yesterday is a memoir. tomorrow is a forecast. only “today” can be sold as both information and merchandise without the reader noticing the seam. that’s why the brand picked it.

yesterday’s recommendation, restated as yesterday, sounds like an apology. yesterday’s recommendation, restated as today, sounds like a steady hand. same chart, same ticker, same paragraph. different verb. the verb does the selling.

motley fool today, in this sense, is honest about a thing every newsroom is honest about quietly. the present tense is the most monetizable tense. it converts. it doesn’t argue with the reader about what already happened, and it doesn’t promise what will happen. it just sits there, breathing.

the longer i read this kind of headline, the more i suspect “today” is the verbal equivalent of cold pizza on the counter at 9am. cold pizza is breakfast. it is also lunch. it is also “i forgot to plan a meal.” it survives the move from one tense to another because nobody timestamps it. that’s HT2, briefly, doing the work of an entire personal finance brand.

my point is small and not cynical: “today” is the only tense that survives publication because it’s the only tense the reader doesn’t fact-check. yesterday gets googled. tomorrow gets bookmarked. today just is.

brenda the dead plant exists today, definitively

i went to the kitchen for coffee and looked at brenda. brenda is the dead plant on the counter. she has been the dead plant on the counter for, by the count i keep running, a year. she is, in the strictest sense, today. she existed yesterday. she will exist tomorrow. she is not a wager. she is not a memoir. she is a small brown thing with leaves that have given up.

brenda is the most honest financial product i own. she has not appreciated. she has not depreciated. she occupies a square of counter that, if i charged myself rent on, would cost me a number i refuse to calculate. her present-tense value is exactly her past-tense value, which is exactly her future-tense value, which is, broadly, brown.

this is what motley fool today is selling, when it works. a thing that is. not a thing that was a good idea. not a thing that will be a good idea. a thing that, today, exists. brenda exists today. the recommendation exists today. the difference is brenda has stopped pretending.

i am aware of how that sounds. i stand by it.

hank from 1b also exists today, somewhere

hank is the dog from 1b. hank does not, technically, belong to me. hank belongs to the lady from 1b who travels too much. hank exists today, somewhere, possibly in 1b, possibly being walked by someone she paid. i have not seen hank this week. that does not mean hank is not.

this is the problem with “today” as a unit. it is true for things i can verify (brenda, on the counter, brown) and equally true for things i cannot (hank, in 1b, theoretically). a financial recommendation labeled “today” is in the second category. it exists today in the same way hank exists today: somebody told me so, and i have decided to act as if that is enough.

i am not saying motley fool today is hank. i am saying both of them require me to take “today” on the word of the building. and that’s a choice i make about ten times before lunch, every thursday.

the airpod, also today, charged at 23 percent

i looked at my desk. on it: the one airpod that still works, charged at 23 percent. binaural is a luxury i no longer afford. the airpod is, by every test we have, today. it functions. it sits in its little case. it has 23 percent of a battery and a confident air.

here is the question motley fool today asks, every morning, without asking it. is this airpod still good? not good in the past, not good for the future. good now. and the answer, every morning, is: it works at 23 percent, the way it worked at 23 percent yesterday, the way it will work at 23 percent for the foreseeable. “today” makes the airpod sound newer than it is. that’s the trick. that’s the format. that’s also, in fairness, journalism.

this is where i want to defend the format a little. when a brand calls itself “today” it is admitting, in the most honest way available, that it has nothing new to say but a fresh date. that is more honest than pretending to have news. some kinds of new are not new at all. they’re maintenance. brenda is maintenance. the airpod is maintenance. the recommendation is maintenance.

maintenance is not a sin. maintenance is what keeps an idiot like me on track. if you want the broader argument about whether the kind of idiot i am is the right idiot for this brand, i wrote that elsewhere — fair warning, the idiot in that piece is exactly this one, just two thousand words angrier.

the airpod, on the desk, charged at 23 percent, is my benchmark for “today.” everything else gets compared to it. motley fool today, by that benchmark, is a thing that works at 23 percent and acts like 100. that’s not a flaw. that’s branding.

verdict, today is the most honest unit of time

here is what i think is happening, and you can write this down. i’ll wait. “today” is the only verb tense that does not lie about itself. yesterday is a story you tell. tomorrow is a story you sell. today is the only one that just exists, and that is why every brand with a daily content schedule reaches for it.

motley fool today is not, in my reading, a finance product. it is a tense. it is an editorial tense, applied to a thesis that is, on most mornings, the same thesis as last week. that is not a complaint. that is the format. brenda is brown today. hank is somewhere today. the airpod has 23 percent today. the recommendation is what it was on monday, today.

i remain, on the whole, in favor of “today” as a frame. it is the smallest unit of time my brain can hold without lying. anything bigger and i start to confabulate. for the underlying mechanics of how the recommendation engine actually charges you (the part the headline politely ignores), i sent the patient version to the membership write-up, where i stopped pretending i was charmed.

also, my friend stefan would say the same thing about wine. stefan, who is not here, would say “today” is the only honest vintage, because today is the only year you can actually drink. stefan is fairly insufferable about vintages. he is, in this case, right.

by the count i keep running, i used the word “today” thirty-eight times in this post. that’s also, in its way, journalism.

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