My oldest kid sent me an email with the subject line: “DO NOT LET Z SEE THIS EMAIL UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES OR I WILL KILL YOU AND HIM.”
She was telling me she’s trans.
When she was really young she wore girl clothes. I went with it for a while. We have pictures of her in a tutu. At Target she insisted we shop in the girls’ section. But around age five we said that’s enough. And she said okay. Read more
Levittown, NY, a post-WWII suburban single-family sprawl
Gen Z is conservative. Not culturally, but in how they respond to collapse. They grew up inside system collapse—financial crisis, institutional failure, pandemic, climate instability—and they’re responding the way post-crisis generations always do: by seeking constraint. Read more
Ghislaine Maxwell and her father, Robert Maxwell
We clamor for the release of Epstein’s emails, but we already know what they’ll show: powerful men sexually abuse girls. What we’re avoiding is this: the U.S. government trafficked children as an intelligence operation, and we—the electorate—have spent two decades protecting everyone who made that possible. Read more
Each week I post about personality type. If you don’t want to miss a post, subscribe!
INFJs are not negative; it’s fundamentally positive to think everyone can do better
INTJ: What happens when you optimize the wrong thing
ENFP hazard: learning forever, producing nothin
INFPs don’t need motivation, they need inevitability
ENTPs think rule-breaking is why they succeed
ENFJ trap: turning parenting into coaching
INTPs don’t need to master emotional conversation — just show up
ENTJ danger zone: I should just take this over
Farewell to the Wet Nurse by Etienne Aubry (1776)
For hundreds of years, middle-class women have maintained their social position by making childcare into dirty work that only desperate women do. The wet nurse was the original outsourcing: a poor woman feeding another woman’s child while the middle-class mother kept for herself the clean, socially acceptable parts of motherhood. Read more
I’m learning to serve a volleyball with my left arm, because my right can’t handle another ten years of impact. I keep having to use my right arm anyway, to remind myself how to serve with my left – to remember the little details. So my right arm coaches my left. Read more
You should send money. I know most people don’t like sending money to random, unvetted recipients. But here’s why you should do that now.
All over Minneapolis there are neighboorhood groups on the ground helping people who have gone into hiding because of ICE. Hiding is isolating and scary. They cannot go to their jobs, they can’t take their kids to school, they can’t access their community support system. Read more
Book illustration by Yaacov Epter 1922
.jpg){kind=link}
The subreddits for personality type torture me because people who misstype themselves are always the loudest – probably because misstyping ourselves is not a faulty attempt at a test but rather a faulty attempt at wish fulfillment. Read more
Before everyone’s home for winter break, I rearrange things to feel like there’s enough room. Picture: my two kids plus one kid’s boyfriend, and me, and most nights Nino, in an apartment that’s 1,000 square feet. Of course, there isn’t enough room. But after years of very small apartments, some things are normal for us: beds doubling as sofas, dinners on top of unfinished puzzles, cafés as a source of solitude. Read more
TechCrunch published a list of 30 women disrupting tech in 2011, and I was on the list. Since then I’ve tracked how the women manage kids. Almost all the women were childless at the time, but enough years have passed that we can see what happened next.
The women fall into four categories: Read more