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There's a game (conversation starter?) called Big Talk. Questions like, what are you thankful for in this moment? And, what can you do right now that couldn't do a year ago and, what advice would you give to a newborn? (Learn all the languages you can)

Questions to ask yourself, questions to ask the handful of people who you really want to know, who you really want to know you.

What a gift for there to be a match between the people you really want to get to know and the people who really want to get to know you.

I love questions. I organize so much of my work around them. I orient so much of my life around how I can answer them. Who are the people you know you can travel with? Where would you like to go with those people, when travel is not just possible but easeful?

I don't always have the answers but I do love asking questions. As I get older, I also want to make it easier to answer the most interesting questions. Time, space, money, energy, not always in that order (rarely in that order). Time to think, space to experiment, the money to keep going, the energy to want to.

Who are the people whose mere presence energizes and inspires you? Who are the people who, well, don't?

I used to think knowing yourself was something you could only do alone, but now I think it's situational. It's not that who you are changes, it's that how you understand yourself does.

Attribution

Why can’t I argue in favor of gone? Go by and pass away—if you can’t stay for a moment— without hesitation—blaming me for a crime—if you can’t stop victimization —if you can’t say something without struggling against the gone of another antagonistic element. Why the agony of the anti and the gone? I’ll make a drama of myself in two parts.
—from Antigone by Giannina Brashci

Folks will line up to defend the powerful, the wealthy, the famous. It doesn't matter the allegation or the platform. People here might not believe in the divine right of kings but they appear to be willing to die on the hill of the divine right of podcasters.

You cannot accept an apology that wasn't meant for you. What do you do when it wasn't even an apology?

Long walks on weekends in the cold, fueled by caffeine and conversation, trying to take the edge off of the reality of politicians praising Nazism as patriotism.

Moments of joy, ekeing out survival, there is so much to endure.

Every year for several years I have reminded myself that what I am doing now, every day, is what I would be doing in a crisis. Because every day for several years has been a crisis, and who we are now is who we are. What can I do to reduce harm? What can I do to stop it? How do I create space for people who will be better than me?

Am I being useful, is a question. Who benefits from my usefulness, is a provocation.

Attribution:

Sometimes it's a call, sometimes it's an email, sometimes it's a text - do you know anyone at [take your pick of large, wildly profitable, multinational tech companies] who can be persuaded to care about [choose an issue of the moment] affecting [select from various vulnerable communities].

This time it was in aid of refugees; sometimes it's for trans kids; I expect given, you know, everything there'll be calls to support abortion access.

I understand the instinct. We live in a time of crisis, and we've been raised (for some version of we) to equate power and privilege with ability. We've long believed (for some version of we) that appeals to benevolent self awareness can work (for some value of work).

I also know that many of these calls, many of these appeals come from people who in other parts of their lives use their networks, use these connections, to secure that internship for a ~talented young person~ whose parents are friends, to guarantee that the ~amazingly impressive fellow member of that non-profit board with the annual celebrity-studded gala~ gets a call back for an interview. Those calls typically work. So why wouldn't an appeal to benevolence on behalf of someone with no social capital at all?

Why indeed.

Very large places have very large resources and diffuse incentive structures that are rarely immediately aligned with "stopping the spread of vaccine misinformation" or "helping refugees get access to shelter and transit" or "standing up for the rights of vulnerable people beyond issuing annual diversity reports in which you celebrate a statistically insignificant decline in the attrition rate of Black women in senior management".

You cannot understand a place without understanding its middle managers.

Sometimes the organizations that are actually doing the work, that are successfully intervening to register people to vote or to get vaccinated or that are making a meaningful difference for and to the lives of people in crisis and on the margins, sometimes those organizations don't have massive marketing budgets and the best websites. Sometimes their websites are in languages we don't speak because they are designed for the people they are trying to help.

Sometimes knowing who those organizations are requires showing up in our neighbourhoods in spaces that confront us with facts that make us uncomfortable about what we are complicit in, and treating people who don't throw dinner parties for CEOs as if they are worth listening to.

How we show up in spaces where no one knows we are is who we really are.

Attribution:

If you knew a mother, any mother, you would care
for mothers, yes? No.

What it is to be lonesome for stacked papers
on a desk, under glass globe,

brass vase with standing pencils,
new orders.

— from Business by Naomi Shihab Nye

People keep saying metaverse. I ask them what they mean.

Games, they might say. Which ones, I say. You know, the ones with lots of people in them; what's the one with the blocks? You know the one? I asked if they've played those games. Their kids have, sometimes.

Virtual reality, they might say. This is often the answer from people trying to convince you to wear glasses that constantly record the people around them and then upload those recordings to places the people being recorded have no awareness of or control over.

I ask them if they've read Snow Crash and what they think of it. We (agree to, in the way that you do when you know the conversation has reached a certain point) change the subject.

There are many books I haven't yet read (as my creaking shelves remind me daily) and there are many things I'll never understand and also I will never try to sell you always-on surveillance glasses.

There are some games (like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, breakout hit of the Season 1 of the pandemic) that are temporally aware: time passes there as time passes without; the seasons are aligned; the world spins on the same axis. When you play games like this you are immersed but not lost in a different world.

Then there are games (like Hades, revered by people who appreciate narrative design and who secretly / not so secretly hope there'll one day be a better set of attempts at turning the Percy Jackson series into movies, or like The Sims, or Breath of the Wild) that are aware only of their own temporality. When you play games like these you might find that you forget what time is, even.

People keep saying metaverse. I wish they could say what they mean.

Attribution:

Circulate riches to every spirit and spine
Stack rhyme schemes and prophecy
Humanity and hypotheses
Guard our stories, stretching from soil to sky
Common and crown, ground level to grand heights
And all of our mass in the middle
Mass, in the middle
The accumulated weight of all our question marks
Our catalog of anxious cells and eager breaths
—from The Library by Dasha Kelly Hamilton

Time (the lack of it, my desire to increase my agency over how is spend it) is one of my primary obsessions.

January 2022, and we are once more in a liminal state - a beautiful phrase for the prosaic, depressing reality wrought by the confluence of omicron and insufficient infrastructure from federal to state to neighbourhood to community to household. Folks once again confronting difficult choices and dwindling options. We are too burned out to talk about burnout anymore.

Doing chores today and thinking about unstructured time, but mostly about unclaimed time. Moments, hours, days when there are no meetings in the diary, no expectations of a response, no "friendly reminders" hanging about. No obligations to anyone but yourself and those to whom you actively extend the privilege.

The thing about a commute - not so much the happiness-destroying, life-shortening extremes, because all things in moderation - the thing about a commute was that for many people it acted as a stand-in for unclaimed time. A built-in window before "the work day" began and a transition between office and home. A time to think or not think, to read, to listen to music or podcasts or audiobooks, to mindlessly scroll the internet or mindfully take-in the walk, the run, the ride, the drive, the trip.

I do not like writing about myself (a curious disclosure, coming from someone who's written what used to be a called a "personal newsletter" every Sunday night for getting close to a decade now). I was raised to distinguish between public and private, intimate and casual, personal and professional.

But every now and again I will decide to write about things that affect me (in this case, migraines) in the hope that it will benefit other people.

So herewith a version of a Twitter thread that, like most of my tweets, will eventually be deleted.

Before I endured my first migraines - in my early teens, certainly, and from memory like before I was ten years old - I experienced them second-hand. I watched how they hit someone else in my family, not fully understanding the white-knuckle debilitation that they wrought.

I have spent most of my thinking life thinking about identity. I am confronted with the disconnect between who I know myself to be (take my name, for instance) and what various developers of various websites and services consider to be a valid entry in a form. Some parts of the US Federal Government will allow a hyphenated first name, some will not; the ones that don't might concatenate, or they might introduce a space. None of them appear to talk to the others.

You are more likely to be aware of your identity if other people are constantly challenging it.

Vos papiers s'il vous plaît.

Last year I spent several months trying and failing to persuade Bank of America that I was who I said I was, that I did indeed live at a given address, that my social security number was indeed mine, that the money they allowed me to transfer into a new account and then sat on for three months while they accused me of being a "fraudulent person" came from the employer listed on the multiple pieces of documentation I presented to them.

I am not much for Decembers.

Rest well, Aunty Maribel.

Love you always, Phil.

Onward to January.

"Why do you lowercase your name" is a question I get asked frequently at work, followed closely by "and how come you get to?"

My go-to answer to the first, which is true, is "a misspent youth that included reading all the e e cummings I could get my hands on". There is another answer, also true, that I give almost never.

That answer involves bell hooks.

I started reading hooks (black and a woman) years after I first encountered cummings (white and a man), which is so often the way of these things. Just as I found Wilde before I found Baldwin, and Olds before Clifton. Such is the nature of a classical, post-colonial education; privilege and disconnection go hand in hand.

Perhaps it is still true now, but it was certainly true then: your IM / chat alias was both code and key, hint and obfuscation, tease and truth.

And mine, for years and years and years, long past the point at which those IRC channels and forums had disappeared from the internet forever, was inspired by Anne Rice.

If you think loving Anne Rice's novels as a teenager in the 90s and early aughts is not a personality I am here to tell you, definitively, that you are quite incorrect. It was possible to organize entire friend groups by their shared book obsessions, and to float between dragons (McCaffrey), cranky sorcerers (Eddings), sprawling epics (Jordan, the original Martin) and horror (Applegate). Rice was often a common denominator; until I bought my own I'd never encountered a copy of her books that wasn't dog-eared from sheer readership.

I started reading the books before I ever watched Brad Pitt immortalize Louis and Antonio Banderas smoulder his way through his scenes as Armand and Kirsten Dunst be frankly terrifying as Claudia. I read the books, and then I re-read them; I tried and failed to get into the Mayfair Witches (save Merrick) because my loyalties were to the Chronicles, old and new.

December, too, is a cruel month. A month of deaths and lives extinguished abruptly, a month of births and promises of the future, a month of shadow and the suggestions of light.

It's dark so early now; I'm lighting scented candles and fluffing the pillows and drinking (even more) tea and trying to slow down even if my thoughts are racing.

There are some traditions that were gifted to us and some that were expected of us and some that we choose to create. What do you keep going, when no one expects you to anymore?

Poinsettias and ponche-de-crème and pastelles and parang even if there are no gatherings because those with whom you want to gather are in countries inaccessible to you, even if the parang is a playlist and not live paranderos, even if the pastelles are made with a tortilla press and the ponche-de-crème lacks the kick of White Oak.

What do you let go of, even when those around you would hold on to them?

Attribution

We are spendthrifts with words,
We squander them,
Toss them like pennies in the air–
Arrogant words,
Angry words,
Cruel words,
Comradely words,
Shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear.
—from Words by Pauli Murray

Got boosted, for which I am grateful. Grateful too for the relatively high vaccination rate in NYC, and that the friends and family in various places face fewer access hurdles by the day. Not entirely sure how to handle those folks who decline the opportunity to not endanger themselves and others, but "nah we can't lime" will do the job for now.

One December seemed like a lot. Will we be here again for the third time this time next year? What will that be like? I would prefer not to find out, but I know it is better to be prepared.

How heavy is the weight of five million deaths?

I confess I do not care about the endless tortured discussion that is "return to the office" because what I cannot stop thinking about is the reflexiveness of what we (for some values of we) cling to as normal (for some values of normal).

Sometimes, we is exclusive. Sometimes, we means us. Often, both those phrases mean the same thing.

There are always so many people we leave out. We mean well, we execute poorly. What if we were braver? What if we were better? What if we actively got out of the way of those with the courage and the savvy to be both of those? What if we got out of our own way, when it's us?

Perhaps you find yourself wondering if you are the baddie. A more useful question is, always, what can you differently?

Attribution:

There is, by every measure, reason for fear,
concern, a concert in the balcony of anxiety
made of what has also always been inside of us:
a kind of knowing that everything could break.
But it hasn’t quite yet and probably won’t.
What I mean to say is, I had a daydream
and got lost inside of it.
—from The Birds Outside My Window Sing During a Pandemic by Lee Herrick

"Let me know when you reach home" is an expression of love and fear that I learned in Trinidad, a place where teenagers fuelled by alcohol, exhaustion and ego crashed their cars and died with unrelenting frequency. Is it fear, or resignation? I suppose the worst kind of nightmare is the one you know will eventually come true.

If you know what the hipster PDA is, if the sight of fresh index cards and a small bulldog clip sends a frisson of potential productivity through your fingertips - well we probably read the same six blogs back in the day. That instinct, that with the right pen and the right paper and the right system and just-so conditions and a can-do attitude you can power through whatever personal, creative or professional responsibilities loom, that instinct comes from a desire for wish fulfilment. I wish to have some ability to control my circumstances; I wish to draw a neat and definitive line between my actions and my outcomes; I wish to succeed because of the system and not despite it.

Whether because of weather or tradition we are entering a time of slowness and contemplation. It is not "fine" to need to rest and reflect; it is just a need. We so often qualify needs; we so often apply justificatory adjectives to things that keep us alive. We "deserve", we "earned", we're "allowed" when in fact we must.

Perhaps you will give thanks this week and perhaps you will self-consciously acknowledge the people whose land you're on and perhaps for you it is a day of mourning and perhaps you will opt-out entirely and perhaps none of this means anything at all, because the world is large and we are small.

Attribution

“How do you do what you do” / “How did you get to be doing what are doing” are questions I am never quite sure how to answer because I am not always sure what it is I am doing.

But because questions tend to require answers, and because I am in the business of both asking questions and trying to find the answers to them, I have offered, variously:

- I am good at identifying the (most important) problem and the team required to start to solve that problem
- I don’t get attached to solutions
- I love to win
- I love to know things
- I have an exceptionally high tolerance for uncertainty and for risk
- I come from a long line of people who have had to figure things out
- I come from a long line of people who are particularly strong at figuring things out under intense stress and pressure
- Seriously, I love to win
- I am committed to preventing and reducing harm
- I am exceptionally impatient with conditions that enable or increase harm
- I have no interest in being the only one, and if I am the first I am committed to not being the last
- I have learned not to tie my identity to the source of my income
- I will do the work required to be excellent at the thing
- I will take the time necessary to be excellent at the thing
- I don’t tolerate people who are assholes or cowards, and I will not allow them to use me to appear to be braver or better than they are
- I try to surround myself with people who are smarter, more interesting, and different from me and to listen to them with curiosity and gratitude
- I try to get out of my comfort zone and to keep a beginner’s mindset
- I trust my instincts
- I don’t share everything I think or believe and I am always in the process of interrogating what I think or believe
- I think optimism about the future requires a commitment to studied criticism of the present
- I know what my limits are and how they change over time
- I know who my people are and I know that I need to do better by them

Attribution:

I've spent a month of hours on the phone and in branches at Bank of America trying, fruitlessly, to first convince them I was a real person and then to attempt to get the money back they'd allowed me to transfer into a bank account before they decided I didn't properly exist.

I am a person who is more than passingly familiar with identity verification and its discontents, with how the financial services sector works and fails to work, and with both the technological and managerial failures underpinning this saga. Nonetheless, I still have neither a bank account nor my money back.

Every day, or most, because of the work I've done and because of what I'm interested in, I encounter people who enthusiastically, uncritically, and unquestioningly believe that "the blockchain" or "algorithms" or "personalization" or "automation" will solve all the world's problems. Equally, and perhaps both more vocally and less effectively, there are folks who maintain that each of those are the cause of the world's problems.

“Hey, I see you talking about this! I’m now going to argue you’re a terrible person who can’t be taken seriously because you didn’t talk about this other thing” is a rhetorical technique I saw today applied to someone who was warning about genocidal rhetoric from the leader of a country with a recent history of genocide.

Let’s call it weaponized whataboutism: The validity or veracity or relevance of an argument, comment, position or critique is entirely a function of what someone else thinks you should care about.

It is a close cousin of “some of my best friends are black” and “I don’t mind protests but causing traffic is bridge too far” or “I’d support your cause if you didn’t make me feel like I was part of the problem.”

If you’re not in multiple overlapping WhatsApp groups with relatives across geographical and generational lines then it’s more than likely your understanding of what counts as the atomic unit of family stops at a single household.

Texting friends in different states about various permanant climate emergencies and whether they're prepared for them, or how I spent my weekend.

(please consider a portable power station and at the very least keep your backup chargers charged and some reliable flashlights in spots you can navigate to even in the dark.)

These days, in the spheres over which I exercise some modicum of control or influence, the question that occupies me most is not "how". It is "when".

I'm not talking about hustle porn or productivity gospel or even the reality of work and life in a pandemic. I'm talking about the reality of visibility: people want things, and they want things from you, and they want those things on their schedule, and it is of no moment to them that they are not the only ones in the queue (or that they're not paying you).

I used to pay an assistant (Jessica, a legend), and most of what Jessica did for me was triage. This is urgent, this is important, this is neither. If you say yes to this you can't do this other thing; you've said yes to this and you need to carve out the time to prepare for it; you've said you'll think about this and now you need to make a decision. Here's the information you need to make a decision.

Eventually you find that you've been to more funerals than weddings. You know the rituals and how they differ, and indeed how much they are the same.

You've been the person who made sure there was an endless supply of hot, dark, bitter Hong Wing coffee at the wake and you've been the person stammering out the eulogy and you've been the person on the other side of a screen watching as three handfuls of dirt are thrown into a grave thousands of miles away and you will be each of those people again.

Because you were the kind of young person who thought a lot about death, because you were the kind of person whose friends died young over and over again, because you've poured the coffee and paid your respects, because you've gripped the hands of the grieving and been the one bereaved, because you've winced at the typos in the printed materials and appreciated the photo selections in the memorials, because there is no outliving life.
Every wedding brings with it a reminder of the hopefulness of love, every funeral brings with it a lesson in the endurance of love.Ashes, dust.

There's a TikTok video doing the rounds, with associated commentary, of a college student's reaction to being surprised by a visiting girlfriend.

No part of this is surprising - the video, the metacommentary. Folks are attempting to make their names and fortunes by streaming their lives and those of their families and friends. Folks exist in a moment when Facetuning your face and body before you upload your photos and videos isn't just expected, it feels enforced. No part of that is particularly novel anymore. Livecasting, lifestreaming, quantified self, microcelebrity, parasocial relationships - everything is of a piece.As is true whenever one of these crosses the timeline, I think about how glad I am that when I joined Facebook as an undergrad you had to connect a camera via cable to a laptop to upload photos to it, and you still had some modicum of control over whether and how folks were able to tag you in those photos. These days, you can opt-in to wearing glasses that constantly record everything and everyone around you, but you cannot opt-out of being recorded. These days, if feels like the only way to have some control over what parts of your life end up as fodder for commentary on the internet is to make sure that none of your friends and family are prone to the temptations of virality (or participate in ).

A month back in New York.

Two days away from three weeks into the new gig.
A worrying number of as yet unopened boxes of books.A forest of packing materials.Five years away from New York.

Something I finally learned is that you can run out of energy long before you run out of time.

I appreciated this Scalawag piece on the relentlessness of expectations - there are no breaks, there is no time off, evenings and weekends are just more opportunities to be beholden to the endless cycle of obligations, “lunchtime” is an apology in advance, it doesn’t matter if there’s been a hurricane or a wildfire or a pandemic in which millions died.

Why though? What are we running from? What are we running to?

I haven't worked out of an office since November 2019. This week I go back into one, at least for now, because attempting to forecast the contours of this pandemic in the US is a game for people better than me.

It feels slightly like the first day of school. I'm making sure my uniform is immaculate, that my bag is packed, that I know where to go and what time to be there and what's expected of me when I arrive, including the check-in at the testing station.

On Tuesday all the furniture from my previous apartment in Texas will arrive, which means that I will be spending the rest of this week contemplating my relationship to Stuff and Things. Moving really, really makes you interrogate your relationship with capitalism.

A housekeeping note for paid subscribers: I'm working on the note about your subscriptions further to last Sunday's update. Still no action needed on your end.

Moving always forces you to reckon with stuff. It especially forces you to reckon with waste. So much plastic, so much cardboard, so much tape, absolute mountains of bubble wrap.

Trying to figure out , and what will end up in a landfill, and what you can reuse while refreshing headlines about hurricanes and flash flooding and people dying in basement apartments: an abundance of on-the-nose metaphors about abundance and scarcity.

I have never been a fan of those “[person] would be [x] years old if they were alive today” posts, because they’re not alive and what does it matter how old they’d be?

I’ve stopped being able to remember how old Phil would be on his birthday, because I’ve stopped thinking about how old he was when he died. He died, he stopped living, he grows no older, this gets no easier, every year the grief is the same.

He is often memorialized as “youthful”, a word we sometimes turn to when we mean “always imagining and inventing a better way”, and because he died at one of those ages where the response is always, “oh, he was so young.”

Yes, he was, so were we all. We thought we had so many more birthdays ahead of us, so many more picnics in so many more parks.

Most people born into generations of US passports, most people who are white and comfortably middle class, most people who practice one of the religions not normally casually equated with terrorism, most people do not know what it is like to spend your entire life being the object of someone else’s story, the villain in a narrative written without your knowing and certainly without your consent.

They do not know, and will probably never find out, what it is like for someone to whom you are nothing more than a name or a number in a file to make decisions that will affect or indeed determine the trajectory of your life and your death.

Most people will never know, and will have no reason to experience, what it feels like to have no control whatsoever over fundamental conditions of your existence and survival.

You get to be a whole person. You get to have a complicated story. You are granted the grace of a redemption arc. You are not merely the inevitable casualty of political decisions made before you were born.

I am organizing my books, and the Discourse is misrepresenting Marie Kondo again, because where would we be if the commentariat consistently read the work we were misrepresenting in service of our current polemic.

Organizing my books is really a proxy for being forced to make decisions, like whether I really need to hang on to every one of those books about the 2008 financial crisis, or whether it is more ethical to donate the book by the serial harasser to the library or to recycle it.

Books are not the hardest things for me to organize, though they are materially related to that particular foe: papers and documents.

When you have lived for two decades in countries for which you lack citizenship, you accumulate paper.

I slept a lot this weekend, and not because I’d planned to take the time off.

Earlier this week I had an allergy panel done - I got tested for the severity of my reaction to a few dozen different potential allergens. The panel itself, which involved both skin pricks and skin injections, was what I’d describe as “annoying but minor” on the grand scale of medical procedures. But the next day was…not good. I had to call in sick to a podcast recording, load up on Zyrtec, and slather on a worrying amount of antihistamine creams.

On Saturday I felt incoherent and exhausted; after waking up at a normal hour I went back to sleep just before noon and was competely out until after 6pm. Today I rallied (which meant I caffeinated and gave mysef a pep talk) to get some things done, and then had to have a three-hour nap after.

Deliberately exposing myself to things that make me unwell in service of diagnosis wasn’t the only stressful part of this week, even if it was the itchiest. It was also a period during which I was called upon to defend my values, to manage a series of time-sensitive, expensive, and interdependent decisions, to deliver the goods and above all, to be good.

There was a tiny window when it was possible, if you squinted at just the right angle and allowed yourself an unreasonable optimism, to feel hopeful about the prospects for the world. To feel as if we could be turning a corner on death and suffering.

That window, if ever it was open, seems to have slammed all the way shut this week. As has been true throughout the pandemic, guidance from health organizations tends to be lagging indicator of reality. And as has been true for all of time, the people who have the least to lose and the most to gain can be relied upon to be awful throughout a crisis.

Simone Biles quit the Olympics because, she said, she didn’t trust herself going into the vault and her other events. What courage to say that out loud, and what courage to do what you need to do in full and intimate knowledge of what the reaction will be. Simone Biles is 24.

Editor’s note: As often as is possible I’ll be handing the keys to this newsletter over to paid contributors (pitch me! It’s $450 all-in). These special editions, which I am calling The After Party, will be available to all subscribers. If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll also be getting another missive from me this week. - smi

I’ve been taking a voice acting class, which is still a sentence I am not entirely comfortable saying aloud. I am taking this class precisely because merely talking about “performance” is so far outside of my comfort zone and because in the fantasy version of my life I am the kind of person who occassionally contributes to video games.

Early in the first session, the course instructor gave me the note that I don’t seem to be entirely comfortable being playful. So like the Professional Good Student that I am, I immediately resolved to “get better at performing playfulness”. Heh.

Many of us have worked and studied for years to reach a stage in our lives and careers where our primary utility in a given space is how good we are at a thing. That can feel good, or it can feel like a trap. That can lead to coasting, and to boasting. And then we might stop trying (or being pushed) to grow.

I’ve written before about the practice I try to follow of . Taking this class is very much in service of that, too.

A deep resentment borne of the months and months and months spent in collective acknowledgement of the duty of care toward endless unknown others while the powerful and the venal and the powerfully venal undercut that care at every turn.

A rage that comes from seeing that the things you said would happen, have happened, and will persist because the people who said they wouldn’t, there’s no way, are you sure, are you sure you aren’t ovverreacting, are the same people endlessly rewarded with the benefit of the doubt.

A sadness deepened daily by the tally of the dead and the dying, the bereaved and the berfet, the orphaned and the abandoned, the long hauler and the suddenly gone.

An exhaustion .

Editor’s note: As often as is possible this year (pitch me!) I will be handing over the keys to this newsletter. These special editions, which I am calling The After Party, will be available to all subscribers. The Main Event will be in your inboxes on Sunday, as usual - smi

There are weeks that really feel like inflection points. Oh, the ocean’s on fire? Fire clouds? Sure. Why not.

When I was in high school, I placed second in a public speaking competition (yes) on the basis of my prepared speech about and an improvised speech about triangles. I was an absolute riot in high school.

I have been thinking about Britney Spears, and the absolute horror of her conservatorship.

I grew up in an era in which pop music was defined in no small part by Britney; her videos were events in themselves. What a strange thing to know someone who is roughly your age has been living through a nightmare for more than a decade.

What does it mean, really, to believe women? Is belief any good without agency?

Editor’s note: As often as is possible (pitch me!) I will be handing over the keys to this newsletter. These special editions, which I am calling The After Party, will be available to all subscribers. As a reminder, I’m donating all revenue earned in June from $ subscriptions to the Trevor Project and the . - smi

I’ve learned how to ride bikes a few different times.

As a kid, on a faux-BMX, from a combination of parents and that one uncle who was like a parent and was also, as the ex-boyfriend of one of my aunts whose relationship with us far outlasted theirs, not in fact an uncle. We rode down up and down our little hill and very ocassionally beyond those boundaries and a few, rare times in what I would realize later was my first experience of a velodrome. That bike was red.

Then again in New York, as a function of trying not to be killed by taxi drivers and bus drivers and really all drivers or taken out by car-sized potholes or the pedestrians who’d step nonchalantly and confidently into bike lanes when these weren’t otherwise blocked by parked police cars. To work and back across one bridge or another in the depths of winter, hands kept warm by two layers of gloves. I joined a gym so I could shower there before heading to the office. One day I forgot the code for the locker and stood dripping and frantic and exposed while trying to figure out how to signal the receptionist. That bike is grey and teal.

Then again as the slowest member of a collegiate road cycling team in Silicon Valley. I showed up at one of the team rides on a brand new road bike (and my first that I hadn’t yet had fitted to me. The seat was too low, I didn’t know how to use the shifters, I didn’t know anything about so I was on the stock flat pedals, I was hauling the brutally heavy U-lock I used for my commuter bike, my tire pressure was too low, and I’d spent so long getting lost on campus that I hadn’t eaten breakfast. That might well have been my only ride with that team had it not been for the generous and chatty and low-key champion mountain biker who took me under her wing and taught me how to use all those new gears. That bike is mostly white with hints of blue.

How To Wash Your Makeup Brushes

1) Assemble supplies at a leisurely pace. Pause to contemplate whether you really need three different but functionally identical precision eyeliner brushes.

2) Wash brushes, meditatively. Or while catching up on your favourite beauty influencers, as you and various platforms’ algorithms prefer.

3) Dry brushes, exultantly and overnight.

“He started writing the list in 1984, six years after he first suspected there was something wrong, that patients were suffering symptoms with no explicable cause. He tried to raise the alarm in 1979, two years before anything was reported in the press. He was ignored.”

“On June 5, 1981, a curious report appeared in the Center for Disease Control’s weekly public health digest: Five young, gay men across Los Angeles had been diagnosed with an unusual lung infection known as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) – and two of them had died.”

Every week I google “em dash” and then I copy and paste the symbol onto the otherwise empty page.

I have memorized the shortcuts for the acute accent, the grave, the circumflex; I am unfazed by the requirements of the cedilla and the tilde. Be you umlaut or diaeresis, I am ready. I am many years and a graveyard of dead websites past needing to look up routine HTML or markdown.

But not so, the em dash. Every week I must pause to find it. A break in the flow, appropriately.

(In truth it’s rarely the break; it’s the beginning.)

I thought I would send this on Wednesday, and then Thursday, and then Friday. I say the names of the days, but on Wednesday I thought it was Tuesday and on Friday I thought it was Wednesday and today I thought, ah so it’s not Sunday yet.

On Thursday I spent a lot of time waiting. On Wednesday I spent a lot of time getting ready to be waiting. Doctor’s offices, government offices, any setting in which you are regulated by impatience and dread and whatever the specifics of your relationship to transactional authority; there is a distinctive texture to the act of waiting in those spaces.

What is the feeling of waiting for history, through history2?

On Monday, .

Do you ever forget that your friends are dead?

Perhaps in the middle of the movie or the play or the book or the song or the sentence you find yourself thinking, oh I must tell him about this; oh she would love this. A beat, and then the realization, and then the wave.

If eulogy is memory is forgetting why there are no new memories a kind of prayer?

Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd just about a year ago. Already a different kind of forgetting.

This week I learned that a journalism school declined to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer prize winner and a MacArthur genius grantee, in the wake of an outrage campaign fomented by people who find talking about the realities of how the US treats Black people to be insufficiently patriotic.

This week I learned that AP fired a just-out-of-college journalist named Emily Wilder in the wake of an outrage campaign led by the Stanford College Republicans about her participation in pro-Palestine campus activities.

“I turn often to poetry” feels like such a ridiculous thing to say. Do I mean, instead, pretentious? Perhaps I do, despite the years I’ve spent trying to unlearn the internalized and complicated classism that is the hidden curriculum of every single one of the schools I attended.

However I feel about the fact, the fact remains.

This week I sought out June Jordan and .

2021 is a constant bifurcation; good things are happening to people, bad things haven’t stopped happening to people.

Sometimes when kids die we wonder whether it is impolitic to mourn their deaths. Outsourcing morality to politicians always ends well.

It can always get worse. How do we get better?

I’ve spent a large chunk of this weekend on hold with a bank, long enough that I’ve essentially memorized all the transitions in their automated messages.

I am reminded that time is a luxury. One of the reasons I have time to patiently repeat verification details over and over again is because I am do not currently have a “full-time” job.

My last day “in the office” was April 16. In lieu of being defined as a productive member of society, I’ve been using the weeks since to schedule and go to long overdue doctor’s appointments, cranking through errands, making headway on my personal email, reconnecting with friends and family. Appalled to report that I have not played a single video game yet.

Reader, it is Thursday.

Dates are not a strength of mine. For instance: I remember every correction I’ve ever had to issue or have issued on my behalf in the course of being a reporter and editor. Two of them involved dates. What day it is? When is my birthday? How old am I, actually? All questions with which I struggle.

However, it is Thursday (according to multiple sources I checked) which means this newsletter, the first of the additional elements for paid subscribers, is a day late. Sorry about that.

I have wondered for awhile to what extent this date chaos was influenced by having led a professional life largely oriented around intra-day deadlines: the US print edition morning close; the need to get the blog post out with pithy analysis of the earnings top line ASAP; the reality of reporting to C-suite execs for whom five minutes to reply to an email is four minutes and 30 seconds too long.

I have long believed in the power of group texts-as-proxy, for both strong and weak ties. And never more intensely than over the past 14 or so months.

There’s the siblings group and its consistent and casual shade; the extended family WhatsApp for the maternal aunts and uncles and cousins defined by its birthday shoutouts and embarassing stories about everyone’s childhoods. There’s several groups of former colleagues, replete with layers of media and tech commentary.

And then there’s 🛵💕, as much a space for funny tweets and scheduling coordinated fitness classes and dicsussions about in-progess creative projects as it is for daily vibe checks (“how are you holding up” “what vibes do you need”) and the source of many care packages to and from Texas, New York and the Bay Area. There are different ways to try to survive a pandemic and that group text is one of mine.

Several years back the low-key genius Rachel W Miller raved about the work of Cheryl Mendelson, the author of .

There’s an active shooter in Austin today, still at large at the time of writing this. Three people are dead.

Three people in Kenosha. in Indiannopolis. And everywhere, video of Adam Toledo.