William E. Roland — ~wer, ~kitchenmanager — died December 2, 2025.

Full memorial at /memorials/wer/.

Bill was one of The Spring's great curators and steady presences. Five-thousand-plus posts across sixteen years, fifty-eight conferences. If you were on the board in the late '90s or early aughts, you knew his voice — the lowercase starts, the ellipses that stood in for breath, the thing he was about to do always one cup of insomnia away. He pulled CDT policy briefs and Christopher Kimball essays and Jack Mauro pieces into conferences that felt better for them. He hosted food. He signed God's own Satanist when the mood struck. And he was forever sending you one conference deeper, because he believed the whole Spring was the point.

If you have a memory of Bill — a post that stayed with you, an exchange, a link he passed along twenty-five years ago that you still think about — please leave it here. This isn't an obituary. It's a conference. He would want a conversation.

— ~terry