Daniel sent us this one — and it's a big question about what politicians actually do. The job title says legislator, someone who shapes policy by debating and drafting laws. But when you look at how most elected officials spend their time, the legislative part seems almost secondary. In Israel especially, the political conversation is dominated by sweeping debates about national identity, about who should even be in the room — and the actual textual work of lawmaking feels almost like an afterthought. So the question is: to what extent do politicians really engage with the laws they're passing? Is the real work being done by parliamentary assistants and civil servants while the elected official is basically a brand, directing things from the top down? And is there a pretty stark gap between what the political system says it does and what it actually does?
I love this question because it names something that's been hiding in plain sight. The word legislator literally means someone who proposes and makes laws. But if you shadow a member of the Knesset for a week, or a member of Congress for that matter, the actual reading of bill text is maybe the smallest slice of the pie chart.
What is the pie chart?
The Israel Democracy Institute did a breakdown of how Knesset members allocate their time. Committee work, media appearances, constituency service, party faction meetings, and then actual legislative drafting and debate. That last category — the thing the job is named after — comes in at something like fifteen to twenty percent of working hours for the average backbench MK.
So the job is eighty-five percent not the job.
That depends on how you define the job. And I think that's exactly the tension the prompt is getting at. The formal definition is one thing. The actual role society has carved out for these people is something else entirely.
But here's what gets me. When you apply for a job as a baker, you expect to bake. If it turns out you're spending eighty-five percent of your time on Instagram strategy for the bakery, someone's lying about the job description.
The lying is collective. The voters participate in it, the media participates in it, the politicians themselves participate in it. Everyone agrees to call these people legislators even though legislating is almost a side effect of what they do.
Walk me through the actual mechanics. If an MK isn't reading the bills, who is?
This is where the infrastructure becomes fascinating. Behind every Knesset member there's a small ecosystem. You have parliamentary assistants, legal advisers attached to the Knesset's own research and legislation department, the legal counsel to the committees. These are career professionals who actually read the text, flag the problematic provisions, draft the amendments. The MK often arrives at the committee meeting with a one-page briefing memo.
A one-page memo.
Sometimes two pages if it's a complex bill.
They're basically an executive being briefed by staff, not a craftsman working the material.
That's exactly the right frame. And this isn't unique to Israel. There was a well-known study of the U.Congress — political scientists call it the lawmaking invisibles. The Congressional Research Service, committee counsels, legislative aides. These people are the actual textual animals the prompt describes. They're the ones who know that changing the word "shall" to "may" in section four fundamentally alters the enforceability of a provision.
Shall to may. That's the stuff that actually determines whether a law has teeth.
Most elected officials never touch that level of detail. They operate at the level of broad policy direction. "We want to reduce housing costs.What does that look like in statute? That's someone else's problem.
The politician is the visionary and the staff are the architects. Which would be fine if anyone admitted that's how it worked.
Here's where Israel gets particularly interesting. The Knesset has a unicameral system, a hundred and twenty members, and relatively weak committee resources compared to somewhere like the U.The Knesset Research and Information Center does excellent work but it's small. So the gap between what the public sees and what's actually happening in the legislative machinery is even wider here.
Say more about that gap. What does the public see?
The public sees the plenum. That's the televised part. The speeches, the dramatic walkouts, the no-confidence votes. But the plenum is essentially theater. By the time a bill reaches the plenum for its final readings, the substantive work has already happened in committee. The plenum vote is almost always along coalition lines. The debate doesn't change anyone's mind.
It's the trailer, not the movie.
Most people never see the movie. Committee hearings in the Knesset are public on paper, but hardly anyone watches them. They're long, they're technical, they're in a small room. No cameras, usually. This is where the actual textual negotiation happens, and the room is mostly empty except for the committee members, their aides, and maybe a few stakeholders from the relevant ministry.
We've got this bizarre situation where the most important work happens in the least visible part of the process, performed largely by people who were never elected.
The elected people are off doing the visible work that has the least substantive impact on the final product. It's an almost perfect inversion.
The prompt mentioned that in Israel, the political system is dominated by these meta-debates about national identity. That feels connected to this.
Israel's political landscape is organized around what political scientists call second-order dimensions. In most parliamentary systems, the primary dimension is economic left-right. In Israel, that dimension exists but it's been crowded out by questions of security, religion and state, and national identity. These are what the prompt calls -issues.
-issues produce -debates, not textual line-editing.
When your political identity is built around whether Israel should be a Jewish state or a state of all its citizens, or around the future of the territories, or around the role of the rabbinical courts — these are enormous constitutional-level questions. They don't get resolved through careful drafting of subsection B of clause twelve. They get resolved through grand rhetorical clashes.
Which are much better television.
Much better television. And much worse legislation.
The system selects for people who are good at the grand rhetorical clash and then assigns them a job that requires meticulous textual attention. It's like hiring an opera singer to do accounting.
Then being surprised when the books don't balance.
Let me ask you something. You practiced medicine for years. You had to read a lot of detailed material. Did you ever meet a politician who you thought would be good at reading detailed material?
I'll put it this way. The skill set that gets you elected and the skill set that makes you a good legislator have almost zero overlap. Getting elected requires charisma, narrative ability, emotional intelligence, coalition-building, and a certain kind of relentless extroversion. Drafting good legislation requires patience, comfort with ambiguity and complexity, the ability to hold conflicting considerations in your head simultaneously, and a tolerance for very boring documents.
The boring document tolerance is key.
It's everything. A major piece of legislation can run hundreds of pages. The Economic Arrangements Law that accompanies Israel's budget is notoriously dense — it's a massive omnibus bill that amends dozens of existing statutes. I've tried to read sections of it. It is not written for human consumption.
Who writes it?
The Ministry of Finance, primarily. The treasury's legal department. These are not elected people. They're civil servants, many of them brilliant, working in complete obscurity. And the bill arrives in the Knesset as a fait accompli — here's this enormous text, you have a few weeks to pass it, good luck.
The elected officials are basically a rubber stamp for something written by unelected bureaucrats.
With some amendments. The committees do make changes. But the baseline text, the architecture of the thing, that's coming from the executive branch. The Knesset's role is more reactive than generative.
Which flips the textbook model completely on its head. The textbook says the legislature makes laws and the executive implements them. What you're describing is the executive writing the laws and the legislature providing a thin layer of oversight and legitimation.
This isn't some secret conspiracy. It's been the reality of parliamentary systems for decades. The executive dominates the legislative agenda. In Israel, government bills vastly outnumber private member bills in terms of what actually passes. An individual MK can propose legislation, and many do — it's good for headlines — but the success rate for private member bills that don't have government backing is very low.
The private member bill is basically a press release in statutory form.
That's a little harsh but not entirely wrong. There are exceptions. Some MKs have been very effective at shepherding private legislation through. But those tend to be MKs who have developed genuine expertise in a specific policy area and who work closely with the relevant ministry and stakeholders. They're almost functioning as adjunct ministers.
Which brings us back to the original question. Is the titular politician just a brand?
I think brand is the right word but maybe not the whole story. A brand is a simplification. It's a signal. When you vote for someone, you're not voting for their legislative drafting skills. You're voting for a package of values, tribal affiliations, and maybe one or two salient policy positions. The politician's job is to maintain that brand and use it to get reelected. The legislative work is downstream of the brand maintenance.
The brand is the product and the laws are almost a byproduct.
The laws are the packaging. The brand is the product.
That's a grim way to think about democracy.
It's a realistic way. And realism doesn't have to be grim. There's an argument that this division of labor is actually efficient. Elected officials provide democratic legitimacy and broad directional input. Professional staff handle the technical complexity. The public gets to hold someone accountable at election time without having to understand the intricacies of statutory interpretation.
Does that accountability actually work? If the politician didn't write the law, didn't read the law, and barely understood the law, what exactly are we holding them accountable for?
For the outcomes. For the direction. For the values. The same way you hold a CEO accountable for the company's performance even though she didn't personally design the supply chain.
The CEO analogy is interesting. A good CEO sets vision and hires good people. A bad CEO micromanages. So maybe we don't want politicians reading every line of every bill.
That's the counter-argument. And there's something to it. The volume of legislation in a modern state is enormous. The Knesset passes hundreds of pieces of legislation per session. No human being could master all of it. So delegation is inevitable.
There's a difference between delegating and disengaging entirely. The prompt is asking whether politicians engage at all with the actual text. And from what you're describing, the answer for many of them is barely.
For many of them, yes. But I want to complicate this a little. There are MKs who do engage deeply. Former justice ministers, people who came up through the legal profession, certain committee chairs who develop real expertise. The Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, for example, deals with extremely technical legal matters. The chair of that committee has to understand the material or they'll be eaten alive by the legal advisers.
There's a spectrum.
A wide spectrum. From the MK who reads every line and argues over commas to the MK who shows up for votes and has no idea what's in the bill. And the system tolerates both.
The system tolerating both is the part that bothers me. In most professions, if you don't do the core work, eventually someone notices. If a surgeon stops reading medical journals, the complication rate goes up. If a pilot stops doing pre-flight checks, eventually a plane doesn't take off properly. But if a politician stops reading legislation, the laws still pass. The system compensates.
Because the system has been designed to compensate. The unelected professionals are the compensation mechanism. They're the ones who make sure the plane still flies even if the pilot is doing a press interview in the cockpit.
We've built a system where the elected official is simultaneously indispensable and irrelevant. Indispensable because you need democratic legitimacy. Irrelevant because the machine runs without their substantive input.
That's the paradox at the heart of modern representative democracy. And it's particularly acute in a parliamentary system like Israel's where party discipline is strong. If you're a backbench MK in the coalition, your job is to vote with the government. Your individual engagement with the text is almost irrelevant to the outcome. The whip tells you how to vote, you vote that way, the bill passes.
What you're describing is a system where the actual legislative function has been largely absorbed by the executive and the party machinery, and the individual legislator is a voting unit with a branding budget.
A constituency office. The constituency work is genuinely important. MKs help citizens navigate the bureaucracy, they bring local concerns to the attention of ministries, they advocate for funding. This is real work with real impact. It's just not legislative work.
It's casework. It's social work with a political title.
Many MKs are very good at it and take it seriously. But you're right — it's not what the job description says.
Let me pull on a thread from earlier. You mentioned that the -debates about national identity crowd out the legislative work. Is that a uniquely Israeli phenomenon or does it show up elsewhere?
It shows up wherever politics gets organized around what political scientists call cultural or identity cleavages. The United States has been moving in this direction for years. American politics used to have a much stronger economic dimension — taxes, regulation, social spending. Those debates still exist but they've been increasingly subordinated to cultural identity questions. What does it mean to be American? What values should the state promote?
The legislative output shifts accordingly.
It shifts in content and it shifts in character. When politics is about identity, legislation becomes symbolic. You pass laws to signal who you are, not to solve concrete problems. The text matters less because the law's primary function is expressive, not instrumental.
The law as a statement of values rather than a practical tool.
And Israel has a lot of expressive legislation. Laws about the status of Hebrew, laws about the Jewish character of the state, laws about national symbols. These aren't meaningless — they matter enormously to people's sense of identity and belonging. But they're not the kind of detailed regulatory statutes that occupy most of a modern legal system's day-to-day operation.
They're easier to campaign on.
"I defended the Jewish character of the state" is a much cleaner campaign message than "I carefully adjusted the depreciation schedule for industrial equipment in section forty-seven of the tax code.
One of those gets you reelected. The other gets you a very polite thank-you note from an accountant.
That's the incentive structure in a nutshell. The system rewards the expressive work and ignores the technical work. So politicians rationally allocate their time to the expressive work. They're not lazy. They're responding to the incentives we've created.
We being the voters.
We being the voters, the media, the party system, everyone. If voters rewarded technical legislative competence, politicians would develop technical legislative competence. But voters reward tribal signaling and narrative coherence.
The prompt's question — is the titular politician really just a brand that tries to direct things top down — the answer seems to be yes, with the caveat that the top-down direction is often quite loose and the real work happens below.
The brand isn't entirely empty. It aggregates preferences. It provides a rough sorting mechanism. When a party runs on a platform of reducing regulation, the civil servants who actually write the legislation know generally what direction to go. The brand provides the compass heading even if it doesn't provide the map.
The compass heading is very broad. Somewhere over there. And the civil servants fill in the rest.
The civil servants have their own preferences, their own institutional culture, their own relationships with stakeholders. So the final product reflects a negotiation between the political brand and the bureaucratic machinery, with the brand usually getting the headline and the machinery getting the details.
Which means the details — the parts that actually affect people's lives — are being written by people with no democratic mandate.
This is the old tension between expertise and democracy. It's been debated since Plato. Do you want decisions made by people who know what they're doing or by people who are accountable to the public? Modern democracies try to split the difference — elected officials set the direction, experts fill in the details. But the balance keeps tilting toward the experts because the details keep getting more complex.
The elected officials keep getting less equipped to oversee the details.
There's a competency gap that grows over time. The regulatory state expands, the technical complexity increases, but the job qualifications for elected office haven't changed since the nineteenth century. You still just need to be a citizen of a certain age with no criminal record. That's the floor.
Whereas the civil servants hiring floor is a law degree from a top university.
Or an economics PhD, or years of specialized experience in energy regulation or pharmaceutical approval. The asymmetry is enormous.
We've created a system where the least qualified people are nominally in charge of the most qualified people, and we call this democracy.
We call it representative democracy. And it works better than the alternatives, mostly. The alternatives tend to be rule by unaccountable experts — which has its own serious problems — or direct democracy, which doesn't scale to a modern state of nine million people, let alone three hundred million.
I'm not arguing for the alternatives. I'm arguing that we should be honest about what the system actually is.
That's what I appreciate about this prompt. It's asking for descriptive accuracy rather than normative judgment. What do politicians actually do? Not what should they do, not what does the civics textbook say they do, but what do they actually do with their time?
The answer is: they brand, they signal, they network, they raise money, they do constituency casework, they give media interviews, they attend party meetings, and occasionally, in the margins, they glance at legislation that someone else wrote.
I want to keep coming back to the exceptions because they matter. There are legislators who take the textual work seriously. There are committee hearings where genuine substantive debate happens. The system isn't a complete Potemkin village.
The exceptions prove the rule. The fact that we can name the exceptions — that we can point to specific committee chairs or specific MKs who actually read the bills — tells you that this is unusual. If it were the norm, we wouldn't notice it.
That's fair. The baseline expectation is disengagement. Engagement is the deviation.
Let me ask you about the parliamentary assistants specifically. The prompt mentioned them — are they the real legislators?
They're the first drafters, the researchers, the amendment-writers. A good parliamentary assistant is worth their weight in gold and several MKs have told me this off the record. They'll say things like "my assistant knows more about this bill than I do" and they say it without embarrassment because it's just accepted reality.
These assistants — what's their background?
Often law students or recent law graduates. Sometimes people with policy degrees. They're young, they're underpaid, they work absurd hours, and they have enormous influence over the legislative product with essentially no public accountability.
A twenty-five-year-old law student writing the text that becomes binding on millions of people.
Under the supervision of the Knesset's legal department, to be fair. There are layers of review. But yes, the initial drafting and the substantive research often comes from very junior staff.
The public has no idea who they are.
The public can't name a single parliamentary assistant. Most people don't know the position exists.
We've got this whole shadow legislative workforce that's invisible to the democratic process.
It's not just the assistants. It's the ministry legal advisers, the Knesset legal department, the committee counsels, the research center staff. There's a whole ecosystem of unelected legal professionals who collectively produce the statutory text that governs the country.
Which brings me to an uncomfortable question. If the elected officials are mostly branding and the unelected professionals are doing the actual legislative work, what exactly are we voting for?
You're voting for the brand. You're voting for the direction. You're voting for which tribe gets to staff the executive and set the broad policy agenda. The legislative details are downstream of that choice, but they're mediated by a professional bureaucracy that persists across elections.
Elections are choosing the branding team, not the legislative team.
Elections are choosing the government. And in a parliamentary system, the government controls the legislative agenda. So you're choosing who gets to decide which bills move forward and which don't. That's a real choice with real consequences. It's just not a choice about statutory text.
The power is in agenda-setting, not in drafting.
Agenda-setting is enormous power. Deciding what gets debated, what gets prioritized, what never sees the light of day — that's where the political action is. The drafting is the implementation of those agenda decisions.
The drafting is done by people who were there before the election and will be there after.
The civil service remembers. Politicians come and go. The legal adviser who's been at the Ministry of Health for fifteen years has seen six ministers and knows where all the bodies are buried.
That's a lot of power in unelected hands.
And it's intentional. Civil service systems are designed to provide continuity and expertise. The tension is inherent in the design. You want democratic responsiveness but you also want competent administration. Those two goals are in permanent tension.
The tension gets resolved differently in different systems. You mentioned the U.earlier — how does this compare?
Congress is a much more professionalized legislature than the Knesset. Congressional staffs are larger, committee resources are more extensive, the Congressional Research Service and the Congressional Budget Office provide deep analytical support. Individual members of Congress have more capacity to engage with legislation substantively if they choose to.
If they choose to.
The capacity exists. Whether they use it is another question. Many members of Congress are doing the same branding-and-fundraising routine, just with more staff support behind them. But the U.system also has more independence for individual legislators. The party whip is weaker. In the Knesset, coalition discipline is extremely strong. Voting against the coalition on a significant bill can bring down the government. So individual MKs have very little room to maneuver on substance. In Congress, you get much more cross-party voting and individual position-taking.
Which means the individual member's engagement with the text matters more.
If you're going to break with your party on a vote, you'd better understand what you're voting on. But even in Congress, most members rely heavily on staff summaries and party leadership recommendations for the vast majority of votes.
The basic dynamic is the same everywhere — the elected official as brand, the staff as substance — but the proportions vary.
The specific mechanisms vary. In Israel, the executive dominance is more pronounced because of the parliamentary structure. In the U., the separation of powers gives Congress more independent legislative capacity. But in both systems, the individual legislator is primarily a political actor, not a textual craftsman.
The textual craftsman. That's what the job description promises and what the system doesn't deliver.
It delivers it through other people. The text gets crafted. Just not by the people whose names are on the ballot.
Let me ask you something else. The prompt mentions that this divergence between what the system says it does and what it actually does exists in many political systems. Is this a bug or a feature?
I think it's a feature that we pretend is a bug. The pretense serves a legitimating function. Democracies need the fiction that elected officials are in control, that they're making the laws, that the people's will is being translated into statute. If we admitted openly that most legislation is written by unelected lawyers in windowless offices, the legitimacy of the whole enterprise takes a hit.
The fiction is necessary.
The fiction may be necessary. Or it may be that we're capable of handling a more honest account of how governance actually works. I'm not sure.
I lean toward honesty, personally. But I'm a sloth. I have low standards for excitement and high tolerance for boring truths.
The boring truth here is that modern governance is too complex for amateur generalists to manage in detail. The eighteenth-century model of the citizen-legislator — the farmer who goes to the capital for a few months, helps write some laws, and goes home — that model cannot handle a contemporary regulatory state. The complexity demands specialization. Specialization demands professionals. Professionals demand career paths. And career paths produce an unelected governing class.
The citizen-legislator is dead. Long live the professional aide.
The professional regulator, and the professional policy analyst, and the professional legislative drafter. The whole apparatus runs on expertise that elections don't provide and can't provide.
What do elections provide?
They provide legitimacy, direction, and the occasional course correction. They're a feedback mechanism. The public says "we're unhappy with the general direction" and the branding teams get swapped out. The professional apparatus adjusts to the new branding and keeps running.
That's a very thin version of democracy.
It's a realistic version of democracy. The thick version — where engaged citizens deliberate carefully and elect representatives who then deliberate carefully and produce legislation that reflects the public will — that version has always been more aspirational than descriptive.
Even at the founding?
Even at the founding. The Federalist Papers are full of anxiety about faction, about the quality of representatives, about the tension between popular will and good governance. Madison was not describing a system that already worked perfectly. He was arguing for a system that might work if properly designed.
The design has evolved in ways that nobody planned.
All institutional design evolves in ways nobody planned. The Knesset wasn't designed to have weak committees relative to the executive. That emerged from the party system, from the electoral structure, from the security situation that prioritizes executive decisiveness. Path dependency, not master planning.
Where does that leave us? If the prompt is asking whether the divergence between the system's stated function and its actual function is a problem, what's your answer?
I think it's a problem of transparency more than a problem of function. The system works, more or less. Laws get passed, they're generally coherent, they're generally enforceable, the state continues to function. The problem is that we're not honest with citizens about how it works. And that dishonesty breeds cynicism.
The cynicism of "they're all just in it for themselves" — that comes partly from the gap between the civics-class story and the observable reality.
When people learn how laws are actually made — that their elected representative didn't read the bill, that the real work was done by staff, that the debate was theater — they feel lied to. And they're not wrong. They were lied to. The civics-class story is a lie by omission.
The fix is better civics education?
The fix is honesty. Teaching people how governance actually works, not how we wish it worked. Explaining the role of unelected professionals, the function of political branding, the division of labor between direction-setting and implementation. Treating citizens as adults who can handle complexity.
That's a radical proposal.
It shouldn't be. But in a political culture that runs on simplifying narratives, honesty about complexity is a hard sell.
The simplifying narratives serve the politicians. "I wrote this law" is a better story than "my staff wrote this law based on direction I gave them and I read a two-page summary before the vote.
"I fought for you" is a better story than "I attended a committee meeting where technical amendments were debated by people more knowledgeable than me and I voted as my party instructed.
The politicians have no incentive to be honest about the system.
And the media has limited incentive because the honest story is less dramatic. "Here's how a bill actually becomes a law" is a process story. It's slow. It's technical. It doesn't have heroes and villains in the traditional sense.
It has heroes, but they're parliamentary assistants.
Not exactly cinematic.
I'd watch that show. But I'm a sloth. I enjoy watching people do detailed work slowly.
You would watch eight hours of legislative markup.
I'd have strong opinions about the semicolons.
That's why you're not a Nielsen household.
Let me pull us back to the Israeli angle specifically. The prompt mentions that in Israel, the idea that politicians should be in the room debating texts that affect citizens would seem foreign to many in the legislature. Is that fair?
I think it's fair with qualifications. There are MKs who take committee work seriously and who engage with text. But the political culture doesn't prioritize it. The political culture prioritizes the grand national questions, the media presence, the coalition maneuvering. An MK who spends hours reading legislative text is not an MK who's building a national profile.
Because the national profile is built on television, not on textual analysis.
The television debates are about the -issues. Jewish state, democracy, security, identity. These are the questions that define Israeli political camps. The details of environmental regulation or corporate taxation are important but they're not identity-defining.
The identity-defining questions suck up all the oxygen.
They're questions that can't really be resolved through legislation anyway. You can't legislate your way to a national consensus on the nature of the state. Those are constitutional questions, and Israel doesn't have a formal constitution.
Which is its own whole thing.
Which is a massive thing. Israel's basic laws serve as a de facto constitution but they were never ratified through a comprehensive constitutional process. So the most fundamental questions of state structure are perpetually unsettled. And those unsettled questions dominate political discourse at the expense of ordinary legislative work.
The legislative work happens in the shadow of these unresolved constitutional questions.
The constitutional questions are so absorbing, so identity-defining, that the legislative work feels almost trivial by comparison. Why debate the details of a housing bill when the nature of the state is up for grabs?
Even though the housing bill affects people's daily lives more directly.
Much more directly. But politics isn't about direct effects. It's about meaning. And meaning comes from the big questions.
We've got a system optimized for meaning-making rather than problem-solving.
Meaning-making is a legitimate function of politics. It's not nothing. People need to feel that their political community reflects their values and their identity. The problem is when meaning-making completely displaces problem-solving.
Which is where we seem to be.
In Israel, certainly. And increasingly elsewhere. The rise of identity politics across Western democracies is essentially the triumph of meaning-making over problem-solving as the primary mode of political engagement.
The legislative machinery grinds on regardless.
The machinery is remarkably resilient. Laws still get passed. Regulations still get written. The state still functions. It just functions in a way that's increasingly disconnected from the public-facing political drama.
Two parallel systems.
The theater system and the machinery system. The theater system produces the politicians, the media coverage, the election campaigns, the plenum speeches. The machinery system produces the statutory text, the regulations, the enforcement mechanisms. They intersect but they don't depend on each other.
Most citizens only see the theater.
They judge the whole enterprise based on the theater, which is like judging a restaurant by its menu design.
The menu might be beautiful and the kitchen might be functional, but if the menu promises things the kitchen can't deliver, you've got a problem.
That's where the cynicism comes from. The menu promises responsive government, citizen-legislators, laws that reflect the popular will. The kitchen delivers something more complicated and less inspiring.
We either need to change the menu or change the kitchen.
Or just be honest about what the kitchen actually does. That's my vote.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the early Renaissance, the botanist Hieronymus Bock described the sundew plant's glistening droplets as a "godly dew" that lured insects to their doom — which is how the Drosera genus got its common name, from the Greek drosos, meaning dew, a poetic misreading that mistook a carnivorous trap for a divine blessing.
Divine blessing as death trap. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.
I'm going to think about that all day and I'm not sure I want to.
This has been My Weird Prompts, produced by Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps. Find full episodes and show notes at myweirdprompts dot com. We'll be back soon.
