The business community in Minnesota prides itself in providing leadership and solving problems to ensure a strong and vibrant state.

That's why we've convened to offer zero leadership and solve zero problems by writing a letter.

It's a letter that includes many words. Do you see all the words it contains? These words signify that we have written a letter addressing the violence here in our strong and vibrant state.

Did we mention how vibrant and strong our state is? We love strength, and vibrancy. Also, peace. We'd love it if there could be some peace, especially if that means people will continue to buy things from us. Peace and prosperity basically mean the same thing.

Do you see how we did not criticize any political figures? This is so that we don't face any retribution from the federal government, which is definitely not fascist. Not even a little bit! Everything is completely normal here.

We have many ideas, which we will discuss with these totally normal, non-fascist leaders, so that we can tell you that that ideas were discussed in the hopes you will continue to buy things from us.

We have now written a letter, which you have now read. Nobody can disagree with the fact that a letter from us has been written, and shared, and read, by you.

We will continue to provide neither leadership nor solutions, and we encourage you to support democracy by continuing to buy things. Ideally from us.

Please keep buying things from us.

Love and kisses,

Minnesota Business Leaders

I avoid Axios articles as a rule because they read like they've been copied and pasted directly from an LLM. But a friend sent me Jim VandeHei's letter to his children about AI. You should read it because it’s truly terrible, and terrifying. Here’s a tidbit:

If my kids’ friends pleaded with my kids to start using ChatGPT I would encourage their parents to get them psychological help.

This letter made me so spitting mad I spent my lunch break rewriting it for my own kids.

(Of course, if I actually read this to them verbatim they would wince and call me a cornball, but we talk about all of this a lot in spirit.)

I posted it on LinkedIn first in a blind rage and then realized it could live here, too. Here’s what came out, in case it’s cathartic for you.

Dear Family:

I want to put to words what I'm hearing, seeing, thinking and writing about AI.

Simply put, I’m now certain it could upend your work and life in ways more profound than the internet or possibly electricity. This will hit in months, not years. The changes will be fast, wide, radical, disorienting and scary.

And it’s important to resist it.

Don’t let big corporations frighten you into using it. Our species isn't wired for change of this speed or scale. That's natural and OK. You are bright, creative, and were born with critical thinking skills. It’s more important than ever that you develop them to keep you safe in a future that depends on your compliance.

My conversations with technologists and writers, as well as my own light experimentation with AI, have shaken and stirred me in ways I never imagined. They’re right when they say ignoring AI would be foolish and self-destructive. But resistance is not equivalent to ignorance.

I urge you to plunge into reading, and writing, and making art, aggressively and daily, with a mindset of curiosity, awe, and clear-eyed discernment. I want you to be bad at it, until you aren’t. I want you to be bad at it and keep doing it anyway. I want you to resist the urge to hand the messy work of creation to an autonomous machine for the sake of comfort and ease.

As you know, my research about AI – and belief that it causes vast societal harm and environmental destruction – surged substantially over the past few years. I’ve stopped using generative AI, and I have begun to distrust folks who cannot form a thought without running it through a chatbot first. I have watched AI take original ideas and make them exponentially worse while insisting it’s made them better.

You should avoid LLMs: Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude. They work similarly, intuitively and conversationally, and that’s by design. They have been created by companies who want you to feel comfortable talking with their bots. They want you to depend on them, to believe you need them in order to accomplish things you can and should do on your own. They want you to stop thinking. They want you to stop experimenting, and blindly trust them to know what’s best.

This technology underscores the importance of reading books and engaging in deep independent thought. People who are invested in these products' success will insist you need them to read and to write. They’re wrong. You will become brilliant at writing by reading. You will become better at challenging your assumptions by talking to people who know more than you, or who disagree with you; who will call out your blind spots and help you expand your own ideas. We have a word for people like this: friends. Treat them like the smartest people you've ever met, but remember they're imperfect.

Invest in people. Learn about how they think, and what they care about. Your relationships will improve with each passing week. The people you know will connect you to opportunities you haven’t considered – hobbies, ideas, new friendships, and, in the future, careers. It’s true that some of today’s careers may be obsolete by the time you’re ready to enter the workforce. Jobs in computer programming, legal associates, entry-level research, corporate writing and editing, basic marketing, general consulting, bookkeeping might not be available to you. Any knowledge work that doesn't require true expertise or vital human connection is at real risk.

I’m deeply worried about what this world means for you. I worry that our politicians, teachers and business leaders are not pushing for the regulation we need to keep you and your generation safe. I worry that people in power are not defending the dreamers and artists and creators who make life worth living.

There's no hero riding to the rescue. It breaks my heart to say this, but you will need to be that hero. The critical thinking skills and relationships you developed by resisting AI will help.

Keep imagining the world you want to see. Never allow AI to distort your authentic mind and voice. Your ability to question assumptions is the essence of humanity. Protect that. You don’t need AI to help you tell stories or to generate ideas. No machine can match your creativity, but technology companies will try to steal it from you.

You must figure out how to live in the world regardless of what these companies think you should care about. The way to do this is to always ask yourself these three questions:

• Who benefits from me using this technology?

• Who suffers if I use it?

• Who suffers if I don’t?

I think you will quickly land where I’ve landed: billionaires and fascists want you to sacrifice your autonomy for their own wealth and power.  They will sell this as convenience and efficiency, but you'll know better.

You'd be wise to replace social media scrolling with spending time in the real world, creating and observing and resisting that which you know is harmful. Be the very best at being you, without relying on AI.

Encourage your friends to do the same, or, better yet - lead by example. I'm confident that ordinary people without savvy AI skills will be just fine. Few leaders are being blunt about this, but they should be.

Substantial societal change is coming. Corporations can’t force new, unregulated technology upon society without real consequence. You already see the angst with friends struggling to learn and think without computers. This dependence will ripple fast through companies, culture and business.

You will need to think about AI's impact on the entirety of the planet, while realizing you can only impact your own little world. The world, and you, can navigate this change — but only with eyes wide open.

It starts with awareness. So please, resist the urge to outsource your thinking to a bot. Practice the scientific method. Educate yourself. Use your remarkable human mind to reflect on the ethical, philosophical and political changes ahead. Question me. Question everyone.

I find AI at once chilling and thrilling. It'll create and spread toxic misinformation, consolidate power and wealth in the hands of a few, and allow bad people to do awful things at scale. It can also help scientists cure diseases and better understand the world. Because you can think critically, you will know when AI serves you, and when you’re serving AI.

You didn't ask for this moment. But it's here — and about to explode across this wonderful world of ours. Don't be a bystander. Be engaged. Carpe diem.

Love, Mom

Every year, I kick off the holiday season by making a playlist of this year’s favorites. There’s a little formula to it. The playlist should start upbeat and energetic, and then gradually get really, really sad, and stay sad for awhile, and then pick up a bit at the end, ending on a New Year’s song.

Perhaps most importantly, I always include one song from Music from the OC: Mix 3 - Have a Very Merry Chrismukkah, in honor of my abiding love for Seth Cohen.

The O.C. came out when I was in college, and I fell in love with Seth during the pilot. I loved his romanticism, his self-absorption, his anxiety. The indie rock posters on his walls. His little t-shirts. (I recently rewatched the first few seasons and. . . man, he was pretty insufferable, wasn’t he? But the little t-shirts hold up.)

As someone who grew up celebrating both Christmas and Chanukah, Seth’s reverence for Chrismukkah endeared him to me even more than his bon mots and sensitive soul and his curly hipster hair helmet and, again, those little t-shirts.

And today, I am going to imagine how I think Seth Cohen himself would respond to my Chrismukkah 2025 playlist.

I’m even going to make it a listicle, because let’s be nostalgic for 2010 while we’re at it.

Before I get into it, I need to acknowledge that in 2025, Seth Cohen does not use Spotify, even though secretly he misses sharing his Spotify Wrapped to Twitter. (He doesn’t use Twitter anymore, either, and he refuses to call it X.) Seth doesn’t think Spotify pays artists enough. He hates the AI slop and manosphere podcasts, the fact that CEO Daniel Ek invested $700m in AI drone weapons. Seth is a SoundCloud guy now, and I love that for him, and I love him for that, and one of these days I will cut the cord, too. I promise, Seth. But for the purposes of this exercise I will link to Spotify because it’s easy and accessible. I’m sorry, Seth! I love you!

1. Sufjan Stevens, Come on! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance!

Sufjan showed up 4 times on the O.C. soundtrack – and, of the the myriad options across Sujan’s multiple “Songs for Christmas” albums, this is one of the few alt-pop sounding originals, and a hidden gem. It feels like a safe bet for Seth’s approval.

2. The Vandals, Oi To The World!

Seth approves. First of all, The Vandals are literally from Orange County. Second, in Season 1, Episode 2 (“Model Home”), Ryan asks Marisa what kind of music she’s into, and she’s like, “Right now? Punk.” And Seth just has to interject, and he says, “Yeah, I’m sorry, but Avril Lavigne doesn’t count as punk,” to which Marissa replies, “Oh yeah? Well, what about the Cramps? Stiff Little Fingers? The Clash? Sex Pistols?”

And then Seth is like, “I listen to the same music as Marissa Cooper? I think I have to kill myself.”

Anyway, I feel like if Marissa and Seth listened to the Cramps and The Clash, they also would have been into hometown heroes The Vandals.

Also, this song rules.

3. Sia, Candy Cane Lane

   I want to believe Seth appreciates Sia’s Christmas album, Everyday is Christmas. But more likely, I think Anna puts this track on the Chrismukkah mix she sends to Summer and Seth annually, because she’s trying to persuade him that Everyday is Christmas is an iconic holiday album. And then Summer and Seth debate whether or not is an iconic holiday album, with Summer taking Anna’s side every time.

4. Ariana Grande, Santa Tell Me

   Seth grudgingly respects Ariana’s vocal skills, but he’s not putting her on the mix.

5. Laura Marano & Isabella Gomez, Toys Toys Toys

I think Summer totally forces Seth to watch A Cinderella Story: Christmas Wish annually. And he pretends to hate the movie, and complains about the egregious autotuning in this song. But then, when he’s washing dishes, he starts singing “Tuoys tuoys tuoys!” to himself, because it’s infectious, and then he blames Summer for getting it stuck in his head. And then Summer does body rolls around the kitchen, just like Isabella Gomez in her little elf costume.

6. Bad Religion, Angels We Have Heard On High

Definitely Seth-approved, although he would have put it next to the Vandals on the playlist. Bad Religion is an iconic LA-based band and Seth would have seen them at The Bait Shop whenever they passed through town. He also appreciates this album because it sacrifices zero of the band’s punk credentials while offering a fresh interpretation of Christmas classics.

7. Bing Crosby, Randy Edelman, Happy Holidays (Beef Wellington Remix)

This one is a big no from Seth. He thinks it sounds like something that would play at the mall while he’s enduring holiday shopping with Summer.

8. Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, 8 Days (Of Hannukah)

I think Seth wants to be a fan, especially out of respect for the late Sharon Jones. He’s just not really into funk music. Still, he would put this on his mix because there’s slim pickings out there for Chanukah songs.

9. The Kinks, Father Christmas

Class-conscious holiday music? Seth would be all over it. This is probably his favorite Christmas song.

10. Mariah Carey, O Holy Night

He’s just relieved it’s not All I Want For Christmas Is You. Also, he gets goosebumps at the “fall on your knees” part, because he’s human.

11. Justin Bieber, Mistletoe

Seth has a soft spot for this song. It’s got that happy-sad feeling Seth appreciates about the holidays, and it makes him wistful for his youth. He’s not putting it on the mix CD but he is listening to it privately.

12. Taylor Swift, ‘tis the damn season

Seth is not a Swiftie, but he grudgingly respects Taylor’s songwriting on evermore and folklore. Mostly because he likes The National and Bon Iver. Also, he appreciates that we’ve entered the depressing section of the playlist. This is his comfort zone.

13. LCD Soundsystem, Christmas Will Break Your Heart

    Yeah, he loves this one.

14. Rosie Thomas & Sufjan Stevens, We Should Be Together

Seth puts this on when he’s alone in the car, and misses Anna, and needs to have a little cry. But it’s not on his mix tape.

15. Low, Just Like Christmas

I mean, this one was literally on the Chrismukkah album, which I assume Seth personally curated. I think Seth cried when Mimi Parker died, so it makes him sad to listen to this one, but he still puts it on his mixtape, because he likes to be sad.

16. The 1975, Wintering

Seth thinks Matty Healy is problematic, so he doesn’t put this one on his playlists. But he likes it.

17. Beach Bunny, Christmas Caller

Yeah, I think Seth likes this one. It feels like something that would be on the soundtrack of an O.C. Chrismukkah reunion episode. (Please, Chrismukkah gods, make it happen.)

18. Bleachers, Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call

I think Seth is generally a fan of Jack Antonoff, and I think he likes this song, too.

19. Frightened Rabbit, It’s Christmas so We’ll Stop

Seth is a huge Frightened Rabbit fan, and this song makes him think about Marissa and Ryan. He approves.

20. Phoebe Bridgers, Christmas Song

Yeah, I think this is another Seth-approved track. It’s just the right mix of depressing and achingly beautiful. Seth would probably be the first to tell you it’s actually a cover of a McCarthy Trenching song, and he would relish the fact that you had never heard of McCarthy Trenching. Also, he would tell you that Phoebe said this song was one of the only Christmas songs that didn’t make her want to quit music.

21. Judy Garland, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

A classic. Seth-approved.

22. Olivia Rodrigo, River

    Seth thinks River is overplayed, and over-covered. If he’s going to listen to it, which he’s not, it’s going to be the original Joni version. (Summer’s a fan, though, because she loved High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.)

23. Dolly Parton, Hard Candy Christmas

This is probably Summer’s favorite Christmas song, and Seth includes it in the mix just for her. It’s grown on him over the years. Also, he respects Dolly.

24. The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, Fairytale of New York

Seth used to love this song, but now that it’s been included in a few mainstream holiday movies he thinks it’s overdone.

25. Tom Waits, Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis

Seth absolutely loves this song, but Summer rolls her eyes and insists it’s not actually a Christmas song, and then Seth says, “It’s right there in the title!”

26. The Ramones, Merry Christmas (I Don’t Wanna Fight Tonight)

Seth approves, but he wouldn’t have so many straight-up punk songs on his mix CD. He would probably cut this one and keep The Vandals and Bad Religion. (Also, he would have cut this off at 20 tracks maximum, to fit on the CD.)

27. The Waitresses, Christmas Wrapping

Yes, I think Seth likes this one.

28. Ben Kweller, Rock of Ages

Another one lifted straight from the Chrismukkah album, which is kinda cheating, but yeah. Seth puts this on the mix CD every year.

29. My Chemical Romance, All I Want For Christmas Is You

The only version of this song Seth not only tolerates, but actually enjoys. He absolutely rocks the fuck out to this one every year.

30. Death Cab for Cutie, The New Year

I mean, obviously. Death Cab is canonically Seth’s favorite band, and this song is both the perfect ending to a Chrismukkah mix and the perfect beginning to a new, depressing year.

This Substack shares a lot with that email.

• They were both written quickly, because if I thought too much I wouldn’t send them. (If you hadn’t noticed from my radio silence here, I’ve been having some trouble writing lately.)

• They are both quite prescriptive.

• They are both about hyperlocal politics.

tl;dr: please vote tomorrow, if you haven’t already. Even if it seems pointless. Even if your candidate doesn’t win. You will feel a little better, because you will have gestured in the direction of the kind of world you want.

If that doesn’t sound like enough, congratulations. It’s the bare minimum, but it wasn’t enough for me either. So, not long after the presidential election last year, I bit the bullet and applied for an appointed position on my small town’s library board. “I can’t change anything about national politics,” I told myself. “But I can help fight book bans and protect queer kids, and that matters.”

Lo and behold, I was appointed! And it turns out, being on the board of a public library is blessedly boring. It’s a bipartisan board, per our town charter, and yet for the first few meetings I didn’t even know what political party my fellow appointees belonged to. We all just love the library and want what’s best for it. I haven’t even had the opportunity to fight book bans and protect queer kids, because the library already had that on lock.

From there, it wasn’t long until I become more involved with my local Democratic Town Committee. And here’s where my one weird trick comes in:

You do not have to run for office to impact hyperlocal politics.

And hyperlocal politics are a place where you can have immediate impact that directly impacts you and your community, regardless of what’s happening in Washington D.C.

(Also, you will get SO much juicy gossip once you start.)

So, here’s a modified version of the email I sent to my friends over the summer. I am pretty sure this trick will work in just about any US municipality, although of course results may vary.

I have stack ranked this in order of difficulty, because I know we are all stressed to the max and can’t all commit to everything on this list.

1. Make sure you’re registered to vote, and turn up to vote tomorrow if you haven’t already. (In Connecticut, you can register on the same day you vote. It might be possible in your state, too.)

2. Track down your town or regional political party committee. (You can usually just Google it, or else you can find your town’s committee from your state political party website.) Sign up for the newsletter. This way, you can stay informed on local events, even if you’re not ready to attend yet. Even just learning how your local government works will make you feel a little better.

3. Donate to your local political party committee. A little bit goes a long way, and it takes just a few seconds.

4. Volunteer to help campaign. Door knocking and phone banking are still the most effective methods of getting out the vote. If this is your thing, you can have a huge impact on election results by dedicating a few hours of your time purely during election season. (This will have more impact next year at this point, of course.)

5. Attend a local political party committee. You will have to register as a member of that party before you can attend. If you’re a dedicated Unaffiliated, you can still attend town hall meetings and other community events. In my ~11 months of local political involvement, I’ve learned your voice at these gatherings really matters! Even before the voting starts.

6. Get involved with your local political party committee. Odds are, they are looking for more members. You will likely have to be appointed by the existing committee to officially join. This means you will become a voting member, and will have direct influence on your local slate of candidates. In turn, the candidates you endorse will directly shape local policy, which directly impacts you and the people you care about most.

7. Volunteer for an appointed position. No campaigning required. You will need the endorsements and approvals, all of which are public record, but you will not be an elected official.

8. Run for local office. I put this last because this is a threshold I personally never expect to cross. But even if you’ve never seen yourself as a politician, you can run for a seat on the Board of Education, or your local arts council. Find something you care about.
   

That’s it. That’s the post. I tried to make it as bipartisan as possible, because we need reasonable, collaborative people across the aisle. For me, it’s all Democrats all the time right now, despite the fact that I don’t always align on everything with everyone all the time. (Nobody will! That’s ok!)

So get out there and vote. And then learn more about your town. And then get involved, to the best of your ability. That’s how we claw back democracy, one deliciously boring town hall meeting at a time.

What happened was, my best friend died. It was by suicide, which compounded my anguish. I couldn’t talk to him at all anymore, which meant I couldn’t ask him what the hell he was thinking, why he did it, how I had completely missed the signs. Had there been signs? In the absence of any answers, my brain ran on a constant loop, reexamining my memories, looking for the moment I should have figured it out, the moment where I could have somehow stopped it from happening. I kept scouring our old text messages for clues.

I wrote “him” multiple emails each day, sent to an old address of mine, because of this phantom need I had to keep talking to him. Monologue was the next best thing to dialogue.

It didn’t make sense to me that he would never reply. The digital record of our conversations had become a relic, a museum artifact, and also, in a way, it was my friend. It was all I had left of him.

There were fifteen years of messages to wade through. Because we’d lived across the country from each other for decades, nearly all of our conversations had been preserved. We talked about crosswords 36 times. Books 131 times. Elections 28 times. Between the two of us we mentioned anxiety 24 times, sometimes in the context of elections but sometimes just in general.

I could use Ctrl+F to find anything we’d ever talked about, but I couldn’t find the one thing I really needed to know. Nothing in those messages could absolve me of my failure to save my friend.

If you follow me on LinkedIn, or you’ve had the misfortune of talking to me at a party lately, you know my AI anxiety has reached an all-time high.

Countless techbros, in the gender neutral sense, have accused me, either directly or implicitly, of not understanding AI. I’m too lazy or stubborn or scared to learn about it; I’m an ostrich; I’ll be outpaced, left behind; I’m a technophobe, or a Luddite. (I actually consider being called a Luddite to be high praise.)

I promise: I get it. I just don’t like it.

I think LLMs are like Joey Donner from 10 Things I Hate About You: Slick! Attractive, to some people! Toxic! Will absolutely draw a dick on your face if you’re not looking.

The best way I can explain my reasoning for sharing this chatbot story is through the lens of Kat and Bianca Stratford:

Two years ago, I was willing to believe that ChatGPT was, like, such a babe. I thought of it as a slightly more complex version of SmarterChild, the AIM chatbot experiment I loved tormenting in the late 90s.

I prompted ChatGPT to write a scene from Back to the Future in which Marty has explosive diarrhea, which delighted my kids. I asked Dall-E to make weird, surrealist images to laugh about with my friends. At the behest of a freelance client, I played around with a program that helped generate headlines for the blog posts she paid me to write.

The more I learned about the practices powering applications like ChatGPT, the less I wanted to use them. The theft, the environmental destruction, the human displacement, the impact on employment. The cognitive decline. The deepfakes. The scams. The suicides.

There’s a moral calculus to every decision we have to make. It’s impossible to be perfect; we’re all just doing our best. (I have weird feelings about continuing to use Substack, for example.)

One could argue that the benefits of various AI-powered applications, compared with any one of those disturbing factors, outweigh the risks.

But the compounding of all these factors, paired with the precariousness of late stage capitalism, began to scare me. Without having words for it, I started to see generative AI not as “just a tool,” like so many gender-neutral techbros on LinkedIn insist it is, but as a power system. Or, as Mandy Brown recently put it, an ideology.

What AI is is an ideology—a system of ideas that has swept up not only the tech industry but huge parts of government on both sides of the aisle, a supermajority of everyone with assets in the millions and up, and a seemingly growing sector of the journalism class. The ideology itself is nothing new—it is the age-old system of supremacy, granting care and comfort to some while relegating others to servitude and penury—but the wrappings have been updated for the late capital, late digital age, a gaudy new cloak for today’s would-be emperors.

The ideology, or more accurately a cluster of ideologies, has a name: TESCREAL. It’s an acronym coined by Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru, two prominent AI ethicists who have, in the past, been affiliated with the ideology. They now know how dangerous it is. (In fact, I was working at Google when they fired Gebru for calling attention to some of the harms inherent to Google’s own AI technology.)

I recommend reading the Truthdig breakdown written by Torres about TESCREALism. It’s terrifying, and long, but important. If I had to distill the whole article down to one excerpt, it would be this one:

Together, these ideologies have given rise to a normative worldview — essentially, a “religion” for atheists — built around a deeply impoverished utopianism crafted almost entirely by affluent white men at elite universities and in Silicon Valley, who now want to impose this vision on the rest of humanity — and they’re succeeding.

In short, some of the minds behind TESCREAL – many of whom, including Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, now have unfettered access to the federal government – subscribe to the radical belief that what happens on Earth today in the service of a future AI-powered utopia doesn’t matter.

The tech overlords believe they will live forever, and rule over us forever, once they upload their consciousness to the cloud. They don’t just want wealth and power now. They want it forever. And I haven’t even gotten into the Curtis Yarvin of it all.

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s real.

It’s also why these science-pilled atheists have aligned so tightly with the Christian right. Both groups care more about a hypothetical utopian future – whether that’s tech based, or religious – than anything happening on Earth today.

Any suffering that comes while they pursue this future is just collateral damage.

[Edited to add: The new HBO film Mountainhead demonstrates this ideology and its dangers beautifully.]

My friend and I discussed AI a bunch of times over the years, usually in a jokey way that tap-danced around our anxieties. In 2017 we laughed about a neural network naming paint colors. “I’m partial to Stanky Bean and Hurky White,” I wrote. He liked Gray Pubic.

About six months before he died we chatted about Michelle Huang’s psychological experiment, in which she trained an AI chatbot on her old journal entries so she could have a conversation with her inner child.

Me: What a time to be alive! Or dead, I guess.

Him: 😆

Me: How long do you think until someone starts a company that feeds your dead loved ones’ written material into a chatbot so you can keep “talking” to them?”

Him: In the pitch: “at no point in history have there ever been more dead people”

Me: Market cap: ∞

I put down my phone and thought about Michelle Huang and her inner child. I thought about Vauhini Vara’s gorgeous, moving attempts to write about her dead sister with ChatGPT. I thought about the Dadbot guy and the woman who created a chatbot of her dead best friend. There was precedent for this, right?

I decided I would try to do it: I would train a chatbot on our text exchanges, so I could keep talking to my friend forever.

It seemed the obvious thing to do.

I’m trying my best not to use the term “AI” as a catch-all term here. First of all, it’s essentially meaningless, a marketing term attempting to neatly encompass a sprawling ideology.

When I talk about LLMs, large language models, I mean conversational interfaces that have been trained on mass quantities of (mostly stolen) data, like Claude and ChatGPT.

When I talk about generative AI, I mean technology that encompasses LLMs but might also include Midjourney or Google’s Veo3. Technology that doesn’t just answer questions, but responds to text inputs by creating non-textual outputs like images, video, or sound.

AI can do lots of other things. Much of it would pass the moral calculus test. Karen Hao, the author of “Empire of AI,” has written a vital op-ed in the New York Times about the dangers of AI in the hands of authoritarianism. She shares a glimpse of what a better future might look like:

Technological progress does not require businesses to operate like empires. Some of the most impactful A.I. advancements came not from tech behemoths racing to recreate human levels of intelligence, but from the development of relatively inexpensive, energy-efficient models to tackle specific tasks such as weather forecasting. DeepMind’s AlphaFold built a nongenerative A.I. model that predicts protein structures from their sequences — a function critical to drug discovery and understanding disease. Its creators were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

When we talk about “AI” as a blanket term, we’re grouping this benevolent technology with the nefarious. It’s a disservice to the people who are using it to cure cancer, and it gives undeserved credit to people like Sam Altman.

I would never tell you not to use AI, because I’d be a hypocrite. I use AI all the time, in ways that may or may not be ethical, but that I have decided benefit me enough to continue. I have no idea if this is the right move in the long run, but I am happy to benefit from advances in cancer research. I frequently ask Google Images to find a photo for me using facial recognition. My beloved Merlin app helps me to identify birds by their songs.

I will not use LLMs or anything that could be considered generative AI.

I know technology can be used for good – but this only happens with firm regulations that keep the TESCREAList tech bros grounded in ethics.

That’s not what’s happening today. In fact, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” contains a hidden line item that would ban any regulation of AI technology for the next ten years. Even MTJ thinks it’s bad, and that’s really saying something.

The first problem I ran into in my vibe coding experiment was ChatGPT itself. It cautioned me that building my chatbot might be unethical. It reminded me that I wouldn't be able to get his consent, nor would this chatbot bring him back. This frustrated me. I didn’t need it to moralize or to judge me. I wanted to talk to my friend again.

In an email to “him” during this four day experiment, I wrote:

The thing is, I'm the other half of that conversation, and you're dead. So, is it unethical? It's certainly unholy. Ghoulish. Creepy. But unethical? I don't know. What's the worst that could happen? I spend all day fake chatting with your digital spectre?

I sallied forth. The hardest part was formatting the messages in a way that could be parsed by an LLM. I downloaded an app that promised to turn our text messages into rows on a spreadsheet, but it took days to process the data, and the output was nearly incomprehensible.

By the time I’d spent hours attempting to reformat the spreadsheets, the delusion passed, like a fever.

Not long after my friend died, my dear friend July gifted me a copy of the book The Long Field, by Pamela Petro. I finally started reading it a few months ago. It’s about the author’s love affair with Wales, and with the Welsh concept of hiraeth (pronounced HERE-eyeth). Hiraeth roughly translates to a sense of yearning for a place you’ve never been; it’s a feeling associated with, as Petro writes, the “presence of absence.”

The book is not exactly about grief, but it’s not not about grief.

It’s a beautiful, sprawling narrative that weaves together Petro’s own experience with Welsh history and culture. In one chapter, she writes about the Welsh coal miners strike in the 1980s. The miners unionized, showing remarkable solidarity in protesting Margaret Thatcher’s attempts to privatize the coal industry.

This chapter minded me of an insightful essay I read comparing ChatGPT to balloons and I thought, well, maybe it’s more like coal.

• It will transform everything.

• We will never be able to say whether it brought more harm than good.

• The very people who suffer the most from its effects will be the ones who insist on its importance.

• By the time we realize its harms, it might be too late.

In The Long Field, Petro revisits some of the Welsh mining towns most impacted by the closures of the coal mines. Despite their best efforts to fight back, they lost the battle back in the 1980s – to Thatcher, but also to progress. Today there is only one active coal mine in all of Wales.

Most of the surviving miners say they miss it – that, given the opportunity, they’d go back to the mines tomorrow. Toward the end of the chapter, she witnesses a men’s choir singing a Welsh hymn. She writes that the words of the song don’t matter so much as the “uncanny, lovely noise they make when sung simultaneously by scores of men.”

She writes: “A choir is one step away from a strike.”

Once I’d given up on creating the chatbot, I had to contend with the actual grief I’d been keeping at bay. To some degree, I knew this would happen. I won’t bore you with the play by play here. Suffice it to say, the grief flattened me.

What helped the most, in the end, was that several friends of mine opened up to me about their own experiences with suicidal ideation. Real, live, human friends, taking a leap, diving in with generosity and vulnerability to help me understand how they thought about and dealt with the allure of death. How they clawed their way out of it.

These friends helped my brain to stop spiraling around the question of why. They didn’t have the answers, but their stories showed me that there was no why.

There would never be an answer, no matter how hard I looked, no matter how many memories I scoured. And maybe that was okay.

A few weeks ago, another friend of mine asked how I was handling the loss of my dead friend, two years later. “Well,” I quipped. “He’s still dead.”

“Or maybe he’s more alive than he ever was,” my living friend replied. He meant this as a comfort, I knew, but it made me throw back my head and laugh.

“If he found himself in an afterlife he’d be so pissed,” I said, when I’d recovered. “After going through all that effort to stop living, only to find he has to do it forever?”

Belatedly, there was my answer about how my friend would have felt about being resurrected as a chatbot.

I don’t believe in God, or an afterlife, and neither did my friend. I find great comfort in this. I would like my life to end in nothingness, when I’m good and ready to go.

But if it doesn’t, if there is some kind of afterlife, I don’t want it to manufactured by the same people who made life on earth a living Hell for so many people. I don’t want to live forever in Elon Musk’s Spiritual Paradise™ for the low price of $9.99/month times infinity. No thank you.

The other day I was driving and listening to Like A Prayer.

I know the song draws parallels between religious rapture and sexual bliss. But in that moment, listening to the literal choir sing behind Madonna’s clear vocals, I thought about Pamela Petro and the coal miners.

A choir is one step away from a strike.

In the The Long Field, Petro describes the concept of solastalgia as “something like being aware that the place you live in and love is under immediate threat.”

That resonated.

Petro visits a former mining town called Aberfan. In 1966, a slag heap gave way in the town, swallowing nineteen houses, 168 children and 28 adults.

She writes about the residents of Aberfan today:

To accept the loss, the sadness of their deaths, and then to fiercely turn around and call this place home, to honor it with remembrance, is to embrace the anger and protest embedded in all solastalgic hiraeth. Because in that protest is an embrace of Otherness, of the home of the Other on the far side of Power. And like speaking Welsh, that’s always a political act.

Things feel really, really bad right now. I feel powerless, like there is nothing I can do to stop the march of authoritarianism straight into fascism.

What I can do, and what you can do too, is to pick a way to quietly resist – ideally with other people. Form your choir, your union, your squad, whatever that looks like to you.

For me, it’s spending less time on social media and more time with the people I love. Getting involved in hyperlocal politics. Creating, as much as I can, even when it’s stupid. Especially when it’s stupid.

I am learning to live without answers – without asking ChatGPT – and I think this, too, is a form of resistance.

Delights

Let’s bring back delights, shall we?

• My dear friend July’s gorgeous poetry epic, moon moon, which just came out last month

• My dear friend Veena’s gorgeous memoir, The True Happiness Company, which chronicles her time getting into, and out of, a cult, and came out, improbably, on the same day as July’s book

• Leif Enger’s latest novel, I Cheerfully Refuse, which somehow manages to be bleak and heartbreaking and beautiful and hopeful all at once.

• The fact that my random shower thought about AI and cocaine has gone mini viral on LinkedIn, when none of my earnest appeals have come anywhere close

Happy weekend, friends.

I think I’ve figured something out, something that probably should have been obvious to me all along, and that’s what I want to talk about today. We have to go back – to 2020, but also 2006, and 1962 and 1885 and 1440 and even 286 A.D. It’ll take me a little while to get there, and I hope you’ll bear with me.

The Authority Vacuum

In June of 2020, I joined a group of my former coworkers to write an open letter to our former boss, expressing our dismay at some of the company’s policy decisions around Trump, and his spread of misinformation on the platform.

We wrote the letter collaboratively, on late night Zoom calls and in the comments of a shared Google doc. While we worked, I felt a kind of homesickness for the early days at Facebook. I missed the energy that came from collaborating with good, smart people, and the feeling of creating something new together. Most of those coworkers and I met while working at Facebook’s headquarters in 2006, back when we still believed we were changing the world for the better. At the time, I told my parents I had finally found my people: the “cool nerds.” It was one of the happiest times of my life.

When we wrote that letter, I kept asking myself: Where were all the good, smart people at the company? What changed?

The theory I eventually developed was pretty simple. In Facebook’s quest to “make the world more open and connected,” it succeeded in empowering individuals, but accidentally eroded the very notion of an authority – not just the notion of an objective truth, but the notion that any established institution could help us to understand truth. We underestimated bad actors, and the ways people would game the system to create discord and chaos – the way Russia may have used social media accounts to sow disinformation and reap discord, for example. This led to what I think of as an “authority vacuum,” like the power vacuums that appear when a government experiences a sudden loss of power with no viable alternative installed in its place.

The effect is nearly always destabilizing. Warring factions tend to emerge. Dictators materialize. (The Iraq War comes to mind.) The internet feels like a civil war, I reasoned, because it is one; Facebook toppled established systems of authority without creating any viable alternative to them, and in the absence of authority people began attacking and policing one another. It’s no surprise half the country craved an authoritarian leader, a tough daddy to tell us all what to do.

I believed the theory was solid, but I couldn’t write coherently about it. The essay kept collapsing on itself, like a poorly made vase on a pottery wheel. Eventually I gave up.

I started thinking about that theory again during Trump’s second inauguration. A few days into his second term, my mom dropped off a box of things from her attic. An American flag with 48 stars from her childhood; a pamphlet about the moon landing; an book report she’d written in fifth grade. In the box there was a copy of the New Yorker, from May 2006. It was addressed to my college apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts. I couldn’t figure out why she’d brought it to me, or why she’d kept it all those years, until I leafed through the yellowed pages and found a feature on Mark Zuckerberg. I must have handed it to her as a way to explain my job: I’d been working as an intern at Facebook since the fall of 2005, and in June 2006, shortly after my college graduation, I would move to California to start as a full-time employee.

In the article, which he titled “Me Media,” John Cassidy attempted to describe to New Yorker readers what, exactly, a Mark Zuckerberg was. He did a pretty good job:

In August, 1995, when Netscape issued stock on the Nasdaq and became the first major Internet company to go public, Mark Zuckerberg was about to enter the sixth grade at a middle school in Ardsley, a small town in Westchester County. He had a new desktop computer—a Quantex 486DX with an Intel 486 processing chip—and had bought a book called “C++ for Dummies,” to teach himself how to write software. “I just liked making things,” he recalled recently. “Then I figured out I could make more things if I learned to program.” By the time he finished ninth grade, at Ardsley High, he had designed a computer version of the board game Risk, in which rival forces battle for global domination. Zuckerberg’s game was set in the Roman Empire, which he was studying in Latin class, and featured a virtual general called Julius Caesar, who was such an able military strategist that even Zuckerberg had trouble defeating him.

When I read that paragraph, I thought about the essay I’d tried writing five years ago, and I suddenly realized why it didn’t work. It was because I had gotten something fundamentally wrong.

The dismantling of authority wasn’t an accident; it was the intention all along. The bad actor was always Mark Zuckerberg, hell-bent on amassing power.

The Global Village

In the summer of 2006 I attended my first company-wide meeting at Facebook. I’d just started working full-time at our headquarters in Palo Alto. Ordinarily, we worked out of an office upstairs from a skateboard shop, but on this day we all walked two blocks to sit on the musty velvet folding seats of a local movie theater. We had outgrown all of our conference rooms. We were wearing hoodies and flip flops. Most of us were under 25.

In front of the theater stood a young guy with close-cropped brown hair, wearing a blazer and blue jeans. He held a microphone in one hand and a remote in the other, which controlled the slides projected onto the movie screen behind him. His name was Chris. We all leaned forward when he spoke. Nobody pulled out a BlackBerry. When Chris presented to us, he didn't show us numbers or product mocks or screenshots or bullet points. We looked at pictures.

Chris clicked forward and it was a lithograph of Gutenberg’s printing press. Clicked again and it was a photo of William Randolph Hearst. He clicked again and it was Rupert Murdoch, his jowly face, his wire-rimmed glasses. Chris let his clicker hand fall down to his side and turned to face the room. “Since the dawn of the written word,” he said, gesturing with the remote, “there have been a few old white men who got to decide what the news is. They decided what we read, and watched. They decided who got to have a voice.”

He clicked forward once more, and there was a black and white photograph of a white man resting his chin in his hand. The man in the picture had a mustache and, Chris told us, his name was Marshall McLuhan. I vaguely recognized McLuhan from that one scene in Annie Hall and from a marketing class I took in college. Chris told us he was famous for saying things like the medium is the message and for basically predicting the internet with his notion of the global village.

“That’s what we’re going to change,” said Chris. “When we connect the world - and we’re going to connect the world - everyone will get to have a voice.” My skin prickled into goosebumps.

Before long Facebook made its mission statement public. We were going to make the world more open and connected. We used phrases like “social graph,” and talked about organizing information around people. The idea was that people found their friends more interesting than anything else; therefore, any information filtered through the consciousness of our friends would be more engaging than any other information. It was a way of dealing with the explosion of content the internet created - to make the world more open and connected, yes, but also to make it smaller and more digestible. Or, as McLuhan put it: “The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose at everybody else’s business.”

Gutenberg, Mergenthaler, and the Printed Word

Around the time McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, my grandfather was working as a printer for the New York Times. His job was to operate a machine called the Linotype; he typed the world’s news into this machine every night, which in turn set the words, in reverse, into metal. When inked, the metal would roll again and again onto sheets of newsprint to create the paper.

He loved this work. He loved it so much that he researched, wrote, and published the biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler, the man who invented the original Linotype. Johannes Gutenberg created a way to cast individual letters into metal; the Linotype increased that scale tremendously by casting entire lines of text. In this way a newspaper could generate more than 350 words per hour with virtually no errors, and print the pages even faster.

I have a copy of the biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler inscribed by my grandfather, in his elegant script. I was five years old when it was published in 1989, but he addressed it to me along with my parents. The inscription reads, “Among other things, life should be a series of contributions to make the world more knowledgeable. You are, and will be doing, your share. This is how I am helping. With love, Dad and Grandpa.”

In my work at Facebook, as a lowly sales planner, I believed I was contributing to make the world more knowledgeable. I think my grandfather agreed, although he had trouble understanding the Internet and what Facebook was. Over the years, he would clip out articles from the Times whenever they mentioned Facebook. He mailed them to me, or handed them to me tucked into manila folders whenever I’d visit him.

1. September, 2006. Yahoo Woos a Social Networking Site. Features a fish-eye lens photo taken of Mark Zuckerberg sitting cross-legged on a desk in our open-plan office. Out of focus behind him you can see me, in a blue t-shirt and Rainbow flip flops, hunched over my desk.

2. November, 2007. Facebook to Turn Users into Endorsers. Quotes Mark Zuckerberg: “Nothing influences a person more than the recommendation of a trusted friend.”

3. September, 2008. Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. Quotes Mark again: “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

4. March, 2009. Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?

The Roman Empire

In those early days of Facebook, Mark famously lived very simply, in a sparse room with a mattress on the floor. He drove a modest car, wore a hoodie and Adidas sandals every day. As Facebook grew, I’d hear friends and commentators talk about how we only cared about money. I would vehemently disagree.

I worked on the ad sales team, and it constantly felt like we were fighting to get the resources we needed to build a thriving business. Mark’s approach toward advertisers and, it seemed, money bordered on disdainful. Ads were something to tolerate, not to center; revenue was an afterthought, a way to pay the bills while we worked to achieve his vision.

I think I was right that Mark never really cared about money. What I didn’t realize was how focused he was on power, even though we frequently joked about “world domination” in staff meetings. I’m only now realizing he wasn’t joking.

Over the years, Mark has spoken publicly about his fascination with the Roman empire; he famously named all three of his daughters after Roman emperors. In 2018, when the New Yorker published another feature on Facebook, they called it “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?” In the article, Evan Osnos quoted Mark talking again about the Roman empire.

Zuckerberg told me, “You have all these good and bad and complex figures. I think Augustus is one of the most fascinating. Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace.” For non-classics majors: Augustus Caesar, born in 63 B.C., staked his claim to power at the age of eighteen and turned Rome from a republic into an empire by conquering Egypt, northern Spain, and large parts of central Europe. He also eliminated political opponents, banished his daughter for promiscuity, and was suspected of arranging the execution of his grandson.

Osnos concluded with his own analysis of the company’s policy decisions.

The caricature of Zuckerberg is that of an automaton with little regard for the human dimensions of his work. The truth is something else: he decided long ago that no historical change is painless. Like Augustus, he is at peace with his trade-offs. Between speech and truth, he chose speech. Between speed and perfection, he chose speed. Between scale and safety, he chose scale.

At the time, I agreed with the take, and with its assumption that Meta was trying to do good, despite complex philosophical and technical challenges. I felt this way for a long time. When I talked to friends who’d left the company, we sometimes talked about the posters that lined the walls of the office. They read "MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS,” persimmon red, all caps.

“I didn’t realize we’d move so fast we’d break democracy,” I’d say, and we’d all nod remorsefully.

It wasn’t until my mom dropped off that yellowed New Yorker that I realized: there was never an intent to do good. The intent, I now believe, was always to break democracy, but to do it in a way that he wouldn’t get caught. As Littlefinger famously tells Varys in Game of Thrones, chaos is a ladder.

My mistake was assuming Mark intended to build a product that made the world more cohesive, not more divisive.

Mark’s mistake has been to model himself after the first Roman emperor, when in reality he has more in common with the last.

Pop Quiz

Q: What was one of the earliest power vacuums in human history?

A: The fall of the Roman empire.

Q: What followed?

A: The Dark Ages.

What now?

I always like to end with something pragmatic, or uplifting. I’m not sure I can do either today, but I can tell you what I’m doing to manage this.

• I have finally stopped using Instagram and Facebook. I don’t know for how long. It’s too late for this to have any impact on Mark’s path to world domination and destruction. But it’s not too late for me to prioritize my own mental health, and opening up social media makes me feel bad. (Kelly Stonelake and Brian Boland have both written about this better than I could.)

• I’m trying to read news written by journalists, without filtering the news through the people I know, or the people I pretend I know because I follow them on social media.

  • I’m still reading the New York Times, which is deeply flawed but still committed to journalistic principles in ways other papers are not.

  • I’m reading Tangle News, which offers a 360 degree view of U.S. Politics, clearly framing arguments from the left and the right.

  • And I’m still reading Substack, although it’s quickly becoming enshittified; I’m trying my best to avoid Notes and focus only on newsletters.

• I’m focusing on hyperlocal solutions: my town’s government, and mutual aid.

• I’m reading books before bed, instead of the news.

• I’m doing my darnedest to avoid interacting with any GenAI systems, which I believe are the next rung on the chaos ladder that leads to destruction and the next Dark Age.

These tactics, combined with the miracle of modern medicine, have helped me to feel somehow more stable – they are rungs on a ladder up and out of despair. I don’t know where it leads.

I’ll leave you with this.

Toward the end of his life, my grandfather was featured in a documentary film about the rise and fall of the Linotype machine. In the documentary he’s wearing a camel-colored wool cardigan and sitting on the couch in his living room, facing the camera.

“I spent thirty-five years working for the New York Times,” he says. “And that was - that was my life.” He chuckles a little bit here. The background is pleasantly out of focus but I can make out his record player behind him. The Zanzibar chest at the base of the stairs.

“I guess I was just built for that type of work, and the other people were as well. They didn’t think much about it, maybe it was just a night’s work to them. But I was maybe more sensitive and I could see this was a story every night, the story of our lives, the story of the world’s life. The world is being made new for tomorrow.”

After forty years of not making lasagna, I had begun to believe that not making lasagna was an indelible part of me. Not a flaw, exactly, but a personality trait. The longer I went without making a lasagna, the more I solidified a Unified Theory of Lasagna Makers.

The Unified Theory of Lasagna Makers

The theory is simple. There are two kinds of people in this world: people who make lasagna, and people who don’t.

Lasagna Makers are the backbone of society. They feed the grieving, the sick, the overwhelmed and exhausted; the new mothers, the people recovering from surgery or a catastrophic job loss. I saw myself as the other kind of person – the kind who benefits from a lasagna. I always feel overwhelmed and exhausted, and lasagna seems complicated, I told myself. It has so many layers! So many steps!

I was, more or less, content to live out the rest of my days without ever making a lasagna. I do give back to society, just. . . not in ways that involve layering noodles, sauce, and cheese, over and over and over again. As I write this I’m reminded that perhaps what I actually dreaded about lasagna making was repetition. There is something about doing the same tasks over and over and over again that makes me feel a little insane. This is also why I don’t knit.

The Making of the Lasagna

On New Year’s Day my son Milo asked if we could make lasagna together. He wasn’t trying to topple my Unified Theory of Lasagna Makers. He just craved lasagna, and since he mostly subsists on hummus, chicken nuggets and YouTube Shorts, I thought making a lasagna together would be good for both of us. It didn’t have to signify anything about me or my capabilities or where I fit into the fabric of society. It could just be a lasagna.

I asked my friend July, who is very much a Lasagna Maker, for the best recipe and Milo and I began the process of making our first lasagna. While we sliced garlic and grated cheese and simmered tomato sauce, we talked about how we might survive at the end of the world. (This is top of mind for him because he’s watching an anime show called Dr. Stone, which as far as I can tell is about a group of people rebuilding civilization from scratch.)

“If it’s zombies,” he said, “we’d have to build little stick houses out in the barnyard. Because the fences are high enough to keep out the zombies, and we’d have eggs to eat from the chickens.”

I agreed, and wondered aloud how we might make a lasagna at the end of the world. This is a game I play in my head all the time that isn’t really a game. How could I make a cup of tea at the end of the world? What about bread? Butter? Birthday cake?

We talked it all out: how we’d have to plant the garlic in the winter, and breed the goats in order to make cheese. And then, in early spring, we’d plant the wheat and the tomatoes and the basil, and make the cheese, and dry the garlic bulbs, and then later in the summer we’d pick the tomatoes and can them, and harvest the wheat and grind it into flour, so that by maybe September we’d have everything we needed to make the lasagna.

“So yeah,” I said. “I guess it would take us almost a year.”

“But you have to remember,” said Milo, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “we’d have a community.”

I always forget that part.

A Word About Doomsday Prepping

A few years ago, I got in trouble on the website formerly known as Twitter. Hank Green tweeted about doomsday prepping as an individualist fantasy. “People like to imagine their success in an apocalypse because they don’t believe in other people,” he wrote. “They buy the lie that they can win the end of the world because it lets them feel strong while caving into fear.”

He went on to distinguish between doomsday prepping and emergency kits, because if you’re prepared for an emergency, you free up first responders to focus on the most vulnerable populations.

Maybe because I felt a little bit attacked by the first part, I replied to the tweet. “I guess I don’t totally understand the difference,” I wrote. “I feel like we all owe it to ourselves and one another to be prepared for emergencies but also to plan as best we can for a catastrophic event – whether that’s due to climate change or war or something else.”

I still stand by this statement, for what it’s worth. I don’t think there is anything radical about it. Maybe someday I will write my treatise on why the left needs to reclaim the doomsday prepper movement, and maybe it’ll be here in my newsletter. But at the time, I thought that comment stood on its own: unobjectionable, rational and considerate.

A stranger with the username Loafing Cactus did not agree.

“Love when people are like, ‘I enjoy imaging your death, but cottage core,’ and that’s supposed to make us okay with it,” they replied. “You imagine a world without me or anyone like me. You chose to share your violent fantasies with us, dear. You could have written that in a diary.”

. . . what?

“I don’t have violent fantasies,” I thought. “I have anxiety. They’re not the same thing!” When I tried to explain myself, they had blocked me.

I thought about Loafing Cactus when Milo reminded me about the existence of community. It’s true that there is something hyper-independent about my obsession with apocalyptic survival. And, while there is nothing pleasant about imagining the end of the world, I guess in a way it is a fantasy: the idea that I, or anyone, could survive it without community.

The End of The Unified Theory of Lasagna Makers

Milo and I did the repetitive thing I had been dreading: layered the noodles with the sauce and the cheese. It surprised me by being fun, quick, and satisfying. “Huh,” I thought to myself, as I put the lasagna in the oven. “That wasn’t even that bad.”

(Don’t worry; this didn’t make me think any less of Lasagna Makers.)

After dinner, I kept thinking about Milo, and the wisdom and innocence of his comment: we’d have a community. In his mind, in this hypothetical scenario, even with zombies gnashing at the gates, we wouldn’t be alone in the barnyard. Someone else could grow the tomatoes, or the garlic, or the wheat. We’d share the work of growing everything and we’d share the making of the lasagna and we’d share the eating of the lasagna.

Even though I don’t think Milo had intended to topple my Unified Theory of Lasagna Makers, he did. I no longer believe that humanity is divided between Lasagna Makers and everyone else. I think there are Lasagna Makers and the people who simply haven’t made a lasagna yet, and we all take turns holding up everybody else, don’t we?

I’m really scared about the future, you guys. Even though it likely won’t look like the dystopian novel in my mind – at least not anytime soon – my heart aches when I think about the potential damage the incoming political administration might do to the most vulnerable among us. I am not trying to be naively optimistic about this: it’s going to be bad, and people are gong to be hurt and people are going to die. No amount of lasagna can fix this.

But Milo reminded me of something important: we can’t forget community. We only have each other, but that’s a whole lot. You don’t have to run for office or start a movement or organize a protest or make a lasagna to help people. You can just show up in small ways for the people you care about, and maybe that’s how we’ll make it through this.

Some Delights for 2025

• Harris Dickinson’s dance to “Father Figure” in Babygirl, and also Babygirl in general. Go see it!

• Speaking of good girls, Aria Aber’s debut novel comes out in a few weeks, and I was lucky enough to read an advance copy. I can’t stop thinking about this book. At a sentence level, it stuns; it took me into Berlin’s early aughts club scene in a way that terrified and enthralled me. I loved the narrator so much I wanted to reach through the pages and pull her out of some of the situations she found herself in, but of course I couldn’t - the heart of the book lies in Nilab’s finding her own place in the world. Compelling, complex, gritty, and gorgeous. I loved it.

• Other books I’ve loved recently:

  • Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

  • The Ministry of Time by Kalianne Bradley

  • The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan

• The copywriting in the Vermont Country Store catalog

• If you’re trying to wean yourself off Amazon this year, may I suggest:

  • Bookshop.org to buy physical books

  • Libro.fm instead of Audible

  • StoryGraph instead of Goodreads

  • Grove.co instead of Amazon Subscribe & Save

• The new (real!) job I’m starting next week, at one of the companies listed above! More to come.

I have recently fallen in love with the Hot Rabbi, Adam Brody’s character on the Netflix series Nobody Wants This. I like him – I mean, the show – so much that I was surprised to learn many people didn’t like it, or refused to watch it because of the discourse around it. In a New York Times op-ed, Jessica Grose wrote that the show “seems to have been beamed in from the past century in both its depiction of Jew-gentile relations and also its gender politics.”

I agreed with some of Grose’s points, but they didn’t make me like the show any less. This led me to wonder: what is it about this show that makes some Jewish viewers so uncomfortable? Are we reacting to its use of tired stereotypes, or are we reacting to the positioning of a close-knit Jewish family as the show’s antagonist? More broadly, does this response reflect a much larger reckoning within modern Judaism? 

In the first episode of the series, Joanne confides to her crush, Noah, that not only is she not Jewish – she doesn’t even believe in God. He surprises her by shrugging it off. “Baked into the Jewish experience,” he replies, “is wrestling with what God is or isn’t.”  Yes, I thought to myself. Part of what I love about Judaism is its insistence that we question everything, even God, even ourselves; its potential for expansiveness, to hold multiple truths at once and examine them from every angle.

When I was sixteen, I had a similar conversation with my own rabbi. He was helping me prepare for my confirmation, and asked if I’d ever consider becoming a rabbi myself. I was honored, but confessed to him I didn’t think it was possible: I didn’t believe in God. I’d never said that out loud before, and I worried, briefly, that it would somehow preclude me from going forward with my confirmation ceremony. My mom had already ordered a cake. Rabbi Stevens looked me in the eye and said, “Plenty of rabbis don’t believe in God.” In that tiny exchange, he showed that my perspective might not just be tolerated by Judaism, but vital to it. There was room for me.

Today’s newsletter comes from the part of me Rabbi Stevens saw as rabbinical all those years ago. It’s the sermon I might have given, had I actually become a rabbi. (I like to think I would have been a hot one.)

We’re coming to the end of the Days of Repentance, the stretch of time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when we’re supposed to reckon with ourselves and with the people we’ve harmed. Although I haven’t formally observed the high holidays in decades, I love the way they hold us accountable to one another, not to God.

I’m going to reckon with myself for a while, and then, I promise, I’ll bring it back to the Hot Rabbi. And I’m skipping Delights this week, because, frankly, I’m not feeling very delighted right now. I’ll bring them back next week if I’m up to it.

Judaism, Jokes, and Me

When I was a kid, I liked to sit cross-legged on the floor with The Big Book of Jewish Humor open on my lap, flipping through it for jokes. It was bright yellow with a tattered jacket and contained all the classics: Lenny Bruce’s iconic Jewish or Goyish bit. Philip Roth on shiksas. Judith Viorst on her mother-in-law.

The book made me laugh, but also made me see myself and my family in a way that I didn’t see in most other media. Humor helped me feel connected to Jewish culture in a way attending services or Seders did not.

Before long I started looking for jokes everywhere: in the blue paperback copy of  Still More Playboy’s Party Jokes in my grandfather’s office; on the text-heavy Angelfire websites of the nascent internet; in the early morning shock jock banter on my alarm clock radio.

Sometimes I imagine the characters from all the jokes hanging out together having a good time. Or maybe a bad time. Sometimes a bad time is funnier. Joke Town is a lot like Toon Town in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, bright-lit and two-dimensional. Most of it takes place in a bar. There’s a horse with a long face sitting next to a frayed knot, munching on complimentary peanuts while the twelve-inch pianist plays Gershwin. 

In The Big Book of Jewish Humor, there’s this classic: 

A woman on a train walked up to a distinguished-looking gentleman across the aisle. “Excuse me,” she said, “but are you Jewish?” 

“No,” replied the man.

A few minutes later the woman returned. “Excuse me,” she said again, “but are you sure you’re not Jewish?” 

“I’m sure,” replied the man.

But the woman was not convinced, and a few minutes later she approached him a third time. “Are you absolutely sure you’re not Jewish?” she asked.

“All right, all right,” the man said. “You win. I’m Jewish.” 

“That’s funny,” said the woman. “You don’t look Jewish.” 

I don’t “look Jewish,” which makes it hard for me to tell a joke like this in mixed company. I have to explain first that it’s okay, I’m in the club! I inherited the fair hair and straight nose and emotional repression of my father’s Anglo-Saxon ancestors. My maiden name was British and my married name is Italian. My first name directly refers to the birth of Christ. It’s all very confusing, I know, but I am 49.9% Ashkenazi on my mom’s side, and 100% neurotic.  I was raised in the Reform tradition: no pork, no shellfish, bat mitzvah, anxiety, fasting on Yom Kippur, gefilte fish.

As a little kid, I’d lie awake at night worrying about Nazis. I had no understanding of time; as far as I was concerned, the Holocaust had just happened, was still happening. In order to fall asleep, I let myself fantasize about escaping to live with my Aunt Emily, who everyone told me I resembled. She had blonde hair and lived with her surfer husband in Santa Cruz. Once she sent me a postcard with a picture of a banana slug on it.

In seventh grade a group of boys came up to my locker and asked if I knew the difference between a Jew and a pizza. I didn’t. They said, pizzas don’t scream when you put them in the oven. They asked me, what’s the difference between a Jew and an elephant, and before I could guess, they said, Elephants forget.

Those jokes weren’t included in the Big Book of Jewish Humor, but I knew exactly what to do in that moment. I laughed and laughed!

Probably in Joke Town the pizzas do scream. Probably they wriggle and arch their crusts away from the flames, like the cartoon weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, desperate to avoid The Dip. The elephants there are always misplacing their keys and wallets. They can never remember where they’ve parked their giant elephant cars. 

Not long after the pizza joke incident, someone’s dad came in to my Sunday school classroom to teach a special class about Israel. He told us how, after the Holocaust, the Jews planned to live peacefully among their new Palestinian neighbors. But the neighboring Arab countries, who hated the Jews as much as the Nazis had, lied to the Palestinians. They told the Palestinians the Jews were going to kill them, to drive them out, and so the Palestinians fought and fled. There was nothing to fear, originally, this lawyer dad assured us. But when the Palestinians fought back against, they lost the war and kept losing. “You know,” he said, “usually, when you lose a war you cede the land. But not the Palestinians. They just can’t accept it when they lose.” 

This sounded right to me. They just hated us. It was consistent with all the other stories about our history I knew to be true: in the Russian pogroms that drove my ancestors to Ellis Island; during the Holocaust; those kids with their pizza jokes. “They” hated us for no reason, which was why Israel had to fight back. Jews were, historically, the good guys; Israel was the Jewish homeland, and therefore Israel was also a good guy. I held onto this belief for years without questioning it, without even questioning the fact that I hadn’t questioned it. Which wasn’t very Jewish of me, was it? 

Over in Joke Town, a Jew, a Muslim, and Christian walk into the bar and start a game of billiards. They all get along fine when they’re off the clock.

In the most recent season of Hacks, Deborah Vance brushes up against cancellation when a sizzle reel of her old hateful jokes emerges. At first, she refuses to apologize for them. “They’re jokes!” she keeps insisting, as if that makes them sacred. And it does, in a way. Comedy forces us to see things we can’t quite look at head on. We need it to point us toward the truth, and to reckon with ourselves and with one another. 

Here is how I told racist jokes, in college: ironically. I understood myself not to be telling a racist joke but to be subverting the very notion of racist jokes. When I couched it in irony, I was sure, the punchline became: can you believe anyone would tell a joke like that in earnest? The punchline became: look at the wholesome Jewish girl, the liberal girl, the “I’ve dated Black guys” white girl with a big smile telling a joke with the n-word in it. 

The punchline was the n-word. 

When I said that word people laughed and laughed. I got high on that laughter, that implicit approval, but on some level I knew I wasn’t being funny. Not really. I was cheating, using the element of surprise to hide the fact that I wasn’t telling a very good joke.

I’m ashamed of this now. I’m even more ashamed to admit that I only stopped telling these jokes when I realized I would never tell them in front of my Black friends. Even their imagined hurt forced me to realize there was nothing justifiable about my behavior. I can’t take back the times I used the n-word for cheap laughs. But I can behave differently now, and, with the distance provided by decades, I can recognize my bad behavior for what it was: punching down. I was taking my own mild trauma and enacting it on a group of people far more marginalized than I was. I couldn’t see that at the time, because I was too caught up in the story I was telling myself: that I wasn’t actually racist.

Comedy might be sacred, but it is not armor. It does not protect us from harm, nor does it shield us from the consequences of harming others. In Hacks, Deborah learns this the hard way, when she’s forced to attend a round table discussion with a group of Berkeley students angry about her early jokes. She apologizes to them, and then she shuts up and listens.

Over in Joke Town Cafe there’s a blonde and a Polish guy discussing quantum physics over tiny white cups of espresso. A sunburned zebra sits in a vinyl booth, quietly reading the newspaper. A woman with two black eyes flips burgers behind the counter and smiles at anyone who walks in.

Back to the Hot Rabbi

I’m not exactly here to defend Nobody Wants This, or to argue for its artistic merits. I think the show is funny; I like the love story; some of the stereotypes do come across as lazy. There’s a controlling mother-in-law, a bossy wife, and a humorless ex-girlfriend who cares more about being the rabbi’s wife than she cares about being Noah’s wife. As Caroline J. Rubin puts it in The Harvard Crimson:

“These cliches diminish the originality of the narrative and weigh down the potential for deeper exploration of the cultural dynamics at play.

Sure! Fair. But here’s the part about Grose’s op-ed that really poked at me:

“Many rabbis are married outside the faith, and this is very likely a problem manufactured for a plotline.”

It seems like this should be a problem manufactured for a plotline. Who cares about interfaith weddings anymore? But even the article Grose links to acknowledges that the only rabbis willing to perform interfaith marriages belong to “Renewal, Reconstructionist and unaffiliated groups,” who collectively make up only about 4% of the American Jewish population. For my Gentile readers, this means it’s still not possible, in 2024, for the vast majority of Jewish people to marry a non-Jewish person in their own synagogues. They’d have to hire someone from a different sect, or marry outside a synagogue.

This feels like as good a time as any to remind my readers that two Jewish lawyers brought Loving v. Virginia to the the Supreme Court, making it legal, for white people to marry Black people everywhere in the United States. Good guys!

Nobody Wants This explains why most rabbis won’t perform interfaith weddings. In a pivotal scene, the Head Rabbi tells Noah why he needs to end things with Joanne. “Everyone marries a goy,” he says, “then there are no more Jewish children.”

If you don’t understand the stakes of this show, you likely don’t understand the Jewish obsession with our own proliferation – or, more accurately, with our own annihilation. We’re terrified of dying out, and with good reason! The Nazis killed six million of our ancestors; today, Jewish people make up only 0.2% of the global population. Most Jewish people don’t want to see our lineage and traditions extinguished, and I get that. I don’t want them to be extinguished, either.

But the fear of our own extinction, I think, actually drives us closer to it. We push away people who might be curious about Judaism but aren’t willing to commit to it in in the specific ways we require them to. And, when shows like Nobody Wants This point out that we can, at times, be unwelcoming to outsiders, we don’t address it; instead, we call it an outdated stereotype in the New York Times.

The Reckoning Part

If this were a real sermon, you’d be squirming in the pews by now. Here’s the point I’ve been winding my way toward: I think many Jewish people dislike Nobody Wants This not because of the lazy stereotypes, but because we know, deep down, that some of the beliefs we cling to might be wrong.

I know. It’s uncomfortable. But you’ve made it this far, so stay with me a little longer.

In all the stories we tell ourselves, we’re the good guys. David and Goliath; Judah and the Maccabees. Our grandparents marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma and fought for interracial marriage. If we’re not the heroes, we’re survivors – of pogroms, of the Holocaust. This is all true! These are the parts of my heritage that make me proud.

I also think we can become so attached to the idea of Jewish people as underdogs that we’re unable to see it when we become the oppressors.

Bina, Noah’s mother on Nobody Wants This, doesn’t dislike Joanne for being blonde, or an atheist, or a Gentile. She doesn’t even dislike Joanne as a person! But she sees her as a threat to the continuation of her bloodline, and there is absolutely nothing dated about her position. I think we pretend her character is outdated, because looking at her reminds us we’re not as progressive and accepting as we think we are.

If it’s possible we don’t like how Jews come across in a relatively harmless TV show, is it possible we’re unable to look honestly at ourselves elsewhere? Like, in the ways many of us continue to support Israel, despite the atrocities it commits? Is it possible Israel is able to commit these atrocities in plain sight because they know we can’t look directly at them, because we’re too in love with the story of the Jews as “good guys?”

It’s a hard time to be Jewish. Open acts of antisemitism are on the rise. Hamas still holds a hundred and one Jewish hostages in underground tunnels. Some of us are still grieving the people murdered on October 7. Many of us feel betrayed by Israel’s actions in response to October 7. We’re grappling with huge questions. Can we oppose what’s happening right now without opposing Zionism as a concept? Can we oppose Zionism as a concept without being antisemitic? Can we oppose Zionism as a concept and still believe Jewish people deserve to live in Israel? If Jewish people can live in Israel, can they do so safely without occupying Palestinian land? Can Jewish people outside Israel elsewhere feel safe if Israel isn’t a Jewish state?

I know my own answers to some of these questions. (Yes, to all of them, in theory; no, I don’t know how all of it will work in practice.) My opposition to Zionism comes from the same place that opposes all ethno-states, and has nothing to do with hatred of Jewish people. I love Jewish people! I think it’s crucial to separate Judaism from Zionism, because if you conflate the two, then to criticize a nation is to criticize a people. You can’t criticize a people – that’s bigoted! – which means, conveniently, you can’t criticize the nation, either. When you can’t criticize a nation, because you are the nation, you can’t see genocide when it’s happening right in front of you. Because you’re a good guy, right? And good guys would never commit genocide.

To me, there is nothing less Jewish than being told certain topics are not up for debate. Telling someone with legitimate concerns about Israel’s military tactics that they hate Jewish people, or that they love Hamas, shuts down productive debate and makes all of us worse. Telling someone with valid concerns about Israeli safety that they’re just a racist colonizer doesn’t help anyone, either.

I know some of my friends and family have different answers to mine. (That goes for fictional characters, too; I love Bina, and I’m willing to bet she has a “WE STAND WITH ISRAEL” sign in her manicured lawn.) Some of these questions are unanswerable. To me, that feels deeply Jewish. I love our ability to hold opposing views and question assumptions, while maintaining our shared Jewish identity. 

Even if we can’t agree on everything, I wonder if we can all agree to ask ourselves, in these last days of reckoning, if Israel’s increasingly violent actions really represent our core values as a people. And, if not, what can we do about it?

I thought this New Yorker article about Jewish Currents covered the agony of navigating Jewish identity right now with nuance and sensitivity. The following excerpt describes a speech by the Haaretz reporter Amira Hass, a Jewish Israeli journalist who lived previously in Gaza and currently lives in the West Bank.

Her mother, Hass recalled, had been shocked to read in one of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs a passage about a pleasant bike ride in the mountains during the Second World War—when Hass’s mother was in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. “I realized that it is possible to live well while a genocide is being committed,” Hass said. Since the Hamas attacks on October 7th and Israel’s retaliation, she had been “filled with the realization that now this was my people doing this. Now we’re the ones riding our bikes.”

I love being Jewish. I love Jewish people. I love the ways we can make fun of ourselves and each other. And I’m hopeful that we can recognize, even belatedly, when we’re the ones riding our bikes beside atrocities.

(I rely heavily on parentheticals and questions and parenthetical questions in this post. I’m not sure why. I apologize in advance.)

I don’t go to many concerts. I have a profound aversion to crowds, bordering on a phobia, and when Swifties the world over scrambled for Eras tour tickets, it seemed like none of my business. Sure, I liked her music, even loved some of it, but all the eras? For four hours? Crammed into a stadium with thousands of sweaty teenagers? No thanks. I was perfectly content to scream-sing fuck the patriarchy in the privacy of my own car.

And then, on a whim, I took myself to see the Eras tour film at the movie theater. When I heard Swift’s voice singing It’s been a long time coming, and the crowd on screen started to cheer, I got full-body chills and my eyes watered. I immediately regretted going to see it alone. All around me groups of friends stood up, danced, sang along. I was too ashamed to join them, so I sat in my chair and ate popcorn and all my emotions just sort of rose up and out of me. But quietly. What I’m saying is I cried through the entire concert film.

I wasn’t sad.

(I was sad, but not because of the concert.)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve only been able to access my feelings sideways. I rarely cry from real life, or at least, I rarely cry when it would be expected or appropriate to do so. But I cry very easily from art – music, poems, movies, TV shows, a particularly emotional television commercial. It’s like I store all the feelings up, not intentionally, and then they come out when I least expect it.

A few days ago, my friend Karen sent me a Marginalian article about the neurophysiology of music. It includes a quote from the psychologist Dacher Keltner about this exact phenomenon, which made feel a little bit less like an emotional weirdo:

“Sound waves are transformed into a pattern of neurochemical activation that moves from the auditory cortex to the anterior insular cortex, which directly influences and receives input from your heart, lungs, vagus nerve, sexual organs, and gut. It is in this moment of musical-meaning making in the brain that we do indeed listen to music with our bodies, and where musical feeling begins.”

What I felt, when I saw Taylor on screen, might have been awe.

It’s embarrassing to admit this, but I’m airing embarrassing feelings tonight on Substack, because I think that might be the secret to Taylor Swift’s power, and maybe even the secret to my own, if I can harness it.

My friend Forrest has much more refined taste in music than I do, and is himself a talented musician. He recently agreed to listen to a Swiftie Starter Pack playlist I made for him. Afterwards, we texted about her strengths as a songwriter and performer, and agreed she might be one of those artists, like Springsteen, you had to see live to really “get it.”  He mentioned spotting Swifties on the highway last year, driving to her concert in Philadelphia with their cars decorated for the occasion. 

“I find those displays a little embarrassing,” I admitted. I realized as I typed it that I was trying to create a distinction between myself, a normal, passive fan, and the kinds of people whose content I consumed. I was the kind of fan who sat politely at the Eras tour movie, keeping my tears to myself, my singalong inside my own head. And on some level I believed this was the only way I was allowed to experience my awe: quietly, privately, like it was something to be ashamed of.

“But why is that?” I wondered to Forrest. “Am I just getting in the way of my own joy?” 

(Isn’t that exactly what anxiety does? Wedges itself between us and our joy?)(Why do we let it do that?)

Forrest understood what I meant. It’s absurd to worry what people think of us based on what we like, or don’t like, and yet most of us worry about it anyway. A few years ago, a stranger at a party asked me what kind of music I liked. My mind emptied itself. What was music, even? Had I ever heard a song before? Could I name a single artist I knew, let alone liked? All I could think of at that moment was the Mountain Goats. And I do love the Mountain Goats! But I worried the answer would make me seem like someone who still listened to the music she liked in college. (I am, but that wasn’t what I wanted to convey.) And, though I think John Darnielle is probably the greatest living American songwriter, I don’t even know the words to all the songs on Tallahassee. Did I lack the conviction to be a good fan even to my favorite artist? Which artist could I name that I loved, but also sounded cool, and current, that was neither too obscure nor too mainstream? 

My silence stretched out in front of me until, unable to bear it any longer, my husband interjected. “She loves Taylor Swift,” he said. 

It was true, so why did I feel so mortified? Perhaps I thought liking Taylor Swift made me seem uncool. Perhaps I thought it conveyed absolutely nothing about me. It was like saying I shopped at Target, or that I wore deodorant. I didn’t identify as someone who loved her. I thought there were only two ways to define yourself in the context of Taylor Swift: you could either be a superfan who decorated your car to drive to the Eras Tour, or you could insist upon disliking her, which was boring in an entirely different way. 

(Often steeped in misogyny, but that’s a whole other thing.)

I think I understand the desire to define oneself in opposition to Swift. Don’t we all grapple with the dueling desires to belong, and still feel like an individual? If we like something everyone else likes, doesn’t that weaken our connection to it, and, by extension, our individuality? It can feel good to reject something the masses seems to accept without question, like capitalism or Marvel movies or the military industrial complex. It can feel good to push back against the homogeneity of today’s media landscape, in which algorithms force-feed us the same handful of Capitalism™-approved artists. (Julio Torres skewers this concept so beautifully in Fantasmas, on HBO, that I can’t believe David Zaslav approved it.)

At the same time, maybe it can feel even better to simply enjoy something because we enjoy it. Transgressive, even.

What might happen if we could get out of the way of our own joy?

I love Jennifer Szalai’s 2013 New Yorker essay Against “Guilty Pleasure,” which set me on a path to eradicate the phrase from my vocabulary. “The guilt signals that you’re most comfortable in the élite precincts of high art,” she writes, “but you’re not so much of a snob that you can’t be at one with the people. So you confess your remorse whenever you deign to watch ‘Scandal,’ implying that the rest of your time is spent reading Proust.”

(I’ve never read Proust, and I’m embarrassed about it.)

(Did you notice how before I admitted that thing about Proust, I made it clear that sometimes I read the New Yorker?)

(Do you ever think about how, on their own, “pride” and “shame” are opposites, but in some contexts they can mean the same thing? To have no pride means the same thing as to have no shame. What’s with that?)

What I’m trying to say is, I’m pretty sure even Taylor Swift doesn’t think Taylor Swift is cool.

She doesn’t need to. She owns it. She owns her success, and her talent, and her power, but she doesn’t need us to think she’s cool. Her lyrics run straight to heart of her own insecurities, her shame, her big messy feelings. She doesn’t have to be the best lyricist in the world, or the best singer, or the best dancer. (I mean, I think she thinks she has to strive to be all those things, but most of us don’t need it from her.) Critics who nit-pick her artistic flaws are missing the point. Her songs allow us to stop worrying about being seen a certain way, and just feel seen.

While I struggled with how to write this post, I saw a snippet of a poem on Instagram. (I’m acknowledging that I saw this poem on Instagram, so you don’t think I am trying to come across as someone more literary than I am, but I do love Diane Wakowski and everyone should read her.)

At their best, Swift’s lyrics do exactly this – they overlay “some particular which reminds us of our own taboos.” Her willingness to excavate her own shame (and every other emotion) for public consumption makes her rich, but doesn’t it also enrich her listeners?

(Incidentally, I also think this explains why I love the Mountain Goats so much. And I would pay a lot of money to see Taylor Swift cover No Children. I think she’d really fucking crush it.)

Maybe loving Taylor Swift is actually about rejecting what it might “mean” to love Taylor Swift. Maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything, except perhaps that you’ve never gotten over anything that has happened to you in your life ever. And it turns out there are lots of us.

Even after my experience watching the Eras tour movie in theaters, and again at home when it came to Disney+, I had no plans to see the tour live. The tickets were prohibitively expensive, and what if I had a panic attack? But then, almost completely by chance, I got last-minute tickets to see the tour with two dear friends in Lyon, France. I decided to just go for it, because I was already in France and I wasn’t going to let anxiety get in the way of my joy. And you know what? I didn’t have a panic attack. It was crowded, but I didn’t feel squished, or trapped. I just felt connected to tens of thousands of other people who loved Taylor Swift.

It turns out, it just feels good to love something.

It turns out it feels even better to love something alongside lots of other people.

And it turns out screaming fuck the patriarchy directly into the air above the giant open stadium, alongside tens of thousands of people and Ms. Swift herself is completely different, like on a molecular level, than singing it alone in my car. I wasn’t thinking about what I looked like or sounded like because in that moment I didn’t exist as an individual being in space and time. I didn’t need to look cool or feel cool or have anything to do with the concept of coolness, which suddenly felt very silly to me, very abstract, in the face of all this joy.

When I binge Eras Tour videos on TikTok I’m not just looking to recapture the experience of seeing Taylor Swift in concert, although that’s part of it. I’m searching for that unifying effect, that sense of connection, which only comes when you abandon your need to be seen a certain way. I think I’m talking about vulnerability here. I suspect it’s what people who believe in God feel when they participate in a religious service; I’ve often wondered if belief in a higher power is actually more closely tied to the feeling of experiencing music together, by which I mean, of course, that music is the closest way for an atheist like me to experience the feeling of the divine.

Or, as Keltner puts it in the Marginalian article:

“Music breaks down the boundaries between self and other and can unite us in feelings of awe… We sense that we are part of something larger, a community, a pattern of energy, an idea of the times — or what we might call the sacred.”

This Week’s Delights

1. Lo Fi, the debut novel from Liz Riggs, which made made me want to smoke a cigarette outside a Wilco concert and text someone I shouldn’t. As I shared on Instagram last week, it’s the perfect book to read if you’re nostalgic for a time you’d never actually want to re-live.

2. The fact that this playlist exists

3. The fact that this full size decorative horse figure exists, in Long Island, for someone with twenty-eight thousand dollars burning a hole in their pocket. (Price firm, but at least there’s free delivery?) Facebook Marketplace is such a gift.

   

0: I do not feel particularly discouraged about the future.

1: I feel discouraged about the future.

2: I feel I have nothing to look forward to. 

3: I feel the future is hopeless and that things can never get better.

I understood that I was supposed to answer according to how I felt about my own individual future. But how could I separate my future from the future of the country, and humanity, and the planet? Everything intersected. My concern about my future as a writer and a professional intersected with my concerns about the economy which intersected with my concerns about artificial intelligence which intersected with my concerns about climate change which intersected with my concerns about the beauty industry which intersected with my concerns about my own appearance which intersected with how I experience gender which intersected with the upcoming U.S. election which intersected with my concerns about human suffering here and elsewhere on the planet.

Lately I keep envisioning all these concerns tangled up below me, like a snake pit in an Indiana Jones movie. I have this urge to climb up and out, away from all these concerns, but into what? Into where? 

I wondered about the kind of person who would choose 0 in Brock’s Depression Inventory. Who doesn’t feel discouraged about the future right now? I started to feel a little bit angry at this hypothetical person, a little jealous. I pretended to myself that I felt concerned for them. Perhaps this person needed professional help even more than I did! Surely anyone choosing 0 lives in willful ignorance! 

After a few days of simmering with resentment, I challenged myself to flip the question. I asked myself: what would it take for me to get to 0? Is it possible to be aware of what feels wrong and scary, and still feel hopeful about the future? 

I thought about a book I adored during the early days of the pandemic: Ross Gay’s Book of Delights. It’s a slim volume, one that you can breeze through in a day or intentionally savor, as I did. The book arose from an exercise Ross assigned to himself, to observe and record something delightful every day for a year. He wrote these little essays in 2016 and 2017, and worried that he would really have to “scrounge” for delights. But he found that the practice of looking for delights led to finding them everywhere. In an interview for NPR, Ari Shapiro asked Gay whether spending time focusing on delights affected the rest of his day. Here’s how he responded: 

Absolutely. I mean, the thing that I also discovered in the course of writing this is that so much of what, to me, sort of inspired or uncovered or unveiled delight was so often personal interactions. So I became acutely aware that delight is sort of a manifestation of interdependence.

Delight is a manifestation of interdependence.

The interdependence of all the bad things contributes to my feeling of hopelessness – but maybe the interdependence is also, somehow, the way out of it. The recognition that I’m not in the snake pit alone; that even in the snake pit, there can be moments of delight.

I am too much of a cynic to keep a gratitude journal, although I understand intellectually that gratitude is something you can practice. Perhaps it’s just semantics, but keeping track of my delights, especially in connection with other people – that feels more manageable to me. Recognizing the delight and sharing it with others helps make it feel more real somehow. And maybe, after enough time, I’ll work my way closer to choosing 0 on the Brock’s Depression Inventory.

Just kidding. I’m not a psychopath. Maybe a 1 feels more reasonable. But I wonder what would happen if you thought about a delight today, and shared it with a friend. Or right here in the comments.

This Week’s Delights

I’m still figuring out what Internet Bivalve will look like, but I’m going to try ending each edition with a few delights.

• Beyonce’s Partition came on while I was driving my pickup truck and I could feel the bass vibrate throughout my whole body

• I saw the neighborhood fox in my front yard one night, just as I pulled into the driveway, and I rolled down the window and she didn’t run away and we had a nice chat. I told her she should be more afraid of me, but she didn’t seem to agree.

• Bob’s Red Mill 10-Grain Hot Cereal. I first learned about it from Ethaney Lee, and it’s now an almost daily delight for me. I have been enjoying it with dried chopped dates, sea salt, brown sugar and a little swirl of cream, which is fantastic, but my friend Patricia turned me on to trying it with sea salt, olive oil, and honey, and which is also fantastic, especially with a little sprinkle of orange zest on top.

• The Coin, a debut novel from Yasmin Zaher, which has one of the most compelling narrators I’ve read in years and also a fantastic cover design.

• For the first time in ten years of keeping chickens, one of my hens, Louise, has successfully hatched a brood of baby chicks. She’s a little on the older side, at 4 or 5, and a first time mama, and she is just absolutely nailing it. She’s got eight babies now, none of whom are biologically hers, but she doesn’t care about that. I can’t look at them all without crying a little, because she seems so happy, so natural. At nighttime they all huddle under her wings, and when I check on them with a flashlight they peek their heads out and look at me. A true delight.

Love,

Natalie

Internet Bivalve will be the place where I attempt to make my lifelong anxiety useful to you, dear reader. Like an oyster agitating sand into pearls, I’ll write, weekly-ish, about something that worries me, and I’ll always end with a practical insight: a comforting thought, a useful product, or an easily accomplished action item.

If you don’t have anxiety, I hope it’ll be informative, helpful, and occasionally funny. If you do have anxiety, I hope it’ll make you feel less alone. I hope to build an active, caring community where we share what we’re worried about, and what’s helping us to manage it.

In addition to attempting to form pearls from my neuroses, I will also attempt to filter for you the things I think are worth reading, watching, listening to, eating, buying, and otherwise enjoying.

That’s the short version! If this sounds like something fun and useful to you, please subscribe and come along for the ride. Keep reading if you want to know more of the backstory, and a little more about me.

I didn’t know I had anxiety until one morning in 2018. I came into the office feeling a little groggy, because I hadn’t slept well the night before. I explained to my coworker that I couldn’t sleep because my husband was away on a work trip, and I was stressed about having a different morning routine; I had to get the kids to school on my own, and take a different train than usual. She gave me a look that conveyed both empathy and confusion.

“You know,” I said, doubling down. “When you have a different routine than usual, how it keeps you up the night before?”

“No,” she said, gently. “I don’t know.”

I felt like Cher Horowitz, standing in front of the Electric Fountain, shopping bags in each hand, realizing that she loves Josh.

Except for me, it was: “Oh my god. I have anxiety!”

Until that moment I thought anxiety was something that happened to other people. Surely everyone else felt the way I felt.

After that moment I understood two things. The first was that many of my friends also had anxiety. The second was that, perhaps, this was something I could get a handle on, and make my life a little easier.

Fast forward half a decade, and I haven’t exactly gotten a handle on it. I still don’t sleep well, and I still worry about things I can’t control. Anxiety can still hijack my conversations and make me unpleasant to be around, at times. But over the years, after a lot of therapy, I’ve realized it can also be a super power.

In 2021, I published my first essay in The Rumpus. Among other things, it was about how during COVID my anxiety finally found a purpose. It’s true that, like many people, my mental health suffered during lockdown. But I also never ran out of toilet paper, and had plenty to eat – because I started stocking up on nonperishable food and working from home in February, when my obsessive consumption of COVID news helped me to realize this wasn’t going away anytime soon. I was terrified, but I also felt prepared, which helped mitigate some of the terror.

This came up a few days ago, during lunch with two writer friends. Over watermelon aguas frescas and ceviche, we shared updates on our books, and after some time the conversation ventured into the various things I’m worried about. The crumbling state of democracy, the dying planet, the inevitable death march of artificial intelligence. I started to feel like Debbie Downer, until one of my friends told the other how refreshing she found my anxiety. She talked about how prepared I had been for lockdown, how I was the only person who told her from the beginning that we’d be in it for the long haul. She said it with admiration in her voice, and I realized something: perhaps my anxiety can be useful for other people too.

And thus, Internet Bivalve was born.

I’m a writer and editor living in the Connecticut suburbs (the part where I can still commute to New York City). I worked in tech for a long time, and will probably look for another job in tech before long, in spite of or because of my sense of dread about where the industry is headed. I raise chickens and goats for fun, and live with two mutts, two barn cats, an axolotl, two feral boys and a very patient husband.

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