The Return of the Long Nextdoor Post

The post, which appeared on a Sarasota Nextdoor thread last Tuesday at 6:14 a.m., was seventeen hundred words long. It concerned, ostensibly, a stray cat. It concerned, in fact, the philosophy of the neighborhood — which the author, a retired professor named Milton Aftergood, defined as 'the smallest political unit at which a stranger will still bring you soup.'

The post received, in its first day, four hundred and sixteen comments. Most of them were, themselves, essays. One was a poem. Two contained recipes for soup. The cat, in the meantime, was fed by a woman two streets over who had not read the post and did not know about the debate. The cat, according to a later post by that woman, is now called Milton, in what she describes as 'a coincidence I only understood afterward.'