If you’re able, please join me in donating to Casa San Jose, a Pittsburgh organization working on immigrant rights and serving the city’s Latino community.

In The Human Condition, Arendt writes of the rebirth, or ‘natality’, as she calls it; the emergence of the will to remake oneself as an adult. This, to her, was the essence of politics; to change the world from the way it was inherited… We must learn to identify with the Other in order to find empathy for those who are not like us. As the world grows smaller and more crowded, the notion of stable, impermeable frontiers retreats into myth.

—Jamal Majhoub, A Line in the River

Dear friend—

I am reflecting on the year so far, which is mostly a reflection of the post-inauguration weeks. I spent January 20, inauguration day, with friends in my heart city, Pittsburgh. I was fortunate to have the space and means to drown out the newest addition to our nightmare timeline with loved ones.

A cadre of college friends and former roommates left Pittsburgh this spring, and I visited for a sort of last hurrah. Since we graduated in 2020, many of us have scattered, slowly trickling from the city that held us in its hilly hands for four or more years.

On the 20th, it was snowing—big, thick flakes that quickly blanketed the streets. A few friends and I spent the entire day watching House. In the evening, I gathered with other friends I’d gone to grad school with. We played Pittsburgh trivia for, like, two hours. I have retained zero (0) facts in my head from that night, but lots of fond memories.

Dear friend—

At the Grammy Awards earlier this month, Beyoncé took home “Album of the Year” for Cowboy Carter, which is in large part an homage to American country music’s roots in Black music and musicians.

The album commands recognition of a historical fact: country music—while being a cultural cornerstone for many white Americans—has got Blackness embedded in its DNA.

Much of mainstream country music has obscured these roots. The Billboard charts fought to deny Lil Nas X his flowers for “Old Town Road.” Early on in the genre, record labels hid the Black performers behind their biggest hits. The country establishment has embraced racism as a “marketing tool.” Cowboy Carter received its fair share of naysaying doubting Beyoncé’s country cred, even though she’s literally from Houston, Texas.1

First, some places that really need resources right now, if you’re able to support: I have been giving regularly to the Sameer Project, a mutual aid project getting tents, medical aid, food, cash, and more to families in Gaza. Also bumping this list of organizations/initiatives that could use support in Los Angeles following the wildfires, including lists of GoFundMes for families who have lost their homes. If you know of other projects you love and support, please feel free to share.

Dear friend—

One of my guilty pleasures is watching actors on their press tours. Interviews with big legacy media. Silly Buzzfeed challenges. Red carpet quickies and friendship quizzes and lie detector tests. Puppies and cookie jars and hot wings and chicken shops. It’s how I know so much about actors and movies without really watching many movies, lol.

Dear friend—

Hello. It’s Wrapped Season :-)

For the uninitiated, Spotify Wrapped is the collection of listening stats that Spotify shows its users at the end of every year, featuring superlatives such as one’s “most-listened-to artist” of the year. While I love Wrapped Szn, I am also increasingly seeing how the Wrappification of Everything is an indicator of some dark Tech Stuff—a list that grew with this year’s installment.

If the internet rumors have any truth to them, the 2024 Spotify Wrapped sucked mega because the company fired a bunch of staff and tried using AI to make up the difference.

Dear friend—

Hello! It’s been a while. I write to you now from Idaho. I’ll be here for a year, probably. Alex and Hazel and I stretched the drive from Pennsylvania over five days. It was not as bad as I was expecting, tbh.

This was the longest drive I’d ever done or taken part in, and I had a surprisingly good time (I am an anxiously mediocre driver, and yet I struggle to stay conscious in a moving vehicle, even behind the wheel, lol). I kind of wasn’t expecting how invested I would be in seeing the landscape change from state to state. Red, scraggly mountains in Utah, with strata like layer cakes; flat farmland in Nebraska that extended infinitely into the distance and then some; dusty greige fields dotted with black cattle in Wyoming (and even a few bison); and in Iowa, wind farms.

In Pennsylvania, I don’t see many wind turbines. The state gets a measly (roughly) 1.5% of its energy from wind (less than 4% from renewables overall). Sure, I pass a few every time I travel along the Turnpike. But seeing a handful scattered in a field is nothing like an honest-to-God wind farm.

Dear friend—

A few weeks ago, I found myself on the subreddit r/SimpleLiving. I opened a thread from someone asking folks to share about their “simple” jobs—what lower-paying job had they turned to to escape the palpitation-inducing pace of corporate life? What benefits did they see?

One of the top responses was someone who had become a janitor at a nearby school. They talked about popping in their earbuds and listening to podcasts and audiobooks. They had summers off, experienced little stress on the job, and they brought no work home with them. The pay was of course not fantastic, but he and his partner lived simply and enjoyed the other freedoms such a job provides.

That’s the whole shtick of r/SimpleLiving. It’s for people who want to give (or have given) up the hustle and bustle, the grind, the material accumulation, and pare down their lives. They do it for environmental, mental health, financial reasons—or maybe they’ve just decided that Playing the Game isn’t worth it anymore.

Dear friend—

I wrote this essay almost a year ago but never hit publish (see: dated Silicon Valley bank reference. I actually, totally forgot SVB had been a thing until I opened this draft this past week).

Recently, I’ve been watching a lot of vlogs about people quitting their jobs and video essays about quiet quitting and Gen Z’s disillusionment with the promises of college → secure employment → A Good Life™. I’ve been thinking more about what it means to do “good work” and the absolute ridiculousness/infuriation/injustice of how I get paid a good salary to typetypetype from my bedroom nine to five, while others work 60+ hour work weeks and barely get by. So I revisited this essay and thought it worth a publish. I hope you do too, lol :)

Dear friend—

Our second snowstorm of the season has finally melted. The other day, the temperature rose so fast and the snow was still piled so high, a dense, grey fog blanketed my neighborhood as it all vanished. “All that is solid melts into air,” or something like that.

My life is quiet, still. A nasty cold kept me even more at home than usual. I take Hazel out. I write my stories. I read, a lot. Here are a few things that have been on my mind.

This biting article on the Antonoff of it all.

Dear friend—

I have many thoughts about the “Wrappification”1 of media consumption (mostly wholly unoriginal). Brandon Taylor has written before about how, in the absence of religion, we’ve turned to media as identity markers, as conception of self. Consuming X (and doing it visibly) means you’re virtuous, smart, thoughtful, worldly, ahead of the curve, any number of adjectives.

Taylor:

In short, the Spotify Wrapped takes the seemingly random, personal course you take through the universe and reflects it back to you, articulating something about who you are and what you feel and what you value.

Dear friend—

While writing this, I came upon a recent essay by Palestinian writer Hala Alyan with similar threads and ideas. I recommend the whole essay, but I’ll preface today’s letter with her closing words:

In the urgency of moments like this, indeed, art is not a replacement for policy. Poems will not save us. Poems will not save Gaza. I say that as a poet. They will not stop what needs stopping, or single-handedly bring about action, policy change, Palestinian self-determination, rights, and dignity.

It is also true that poetry—and art and music and film—are offshoots of bearing witness: they fortify us, sustain us, especially in times of erasure. They help us rehearse empathy, and build the necessary muscle memory to call upon it regularly. They can also remind us what we’re doing and why, becoming useful as compasses, rest stops, places to sharpen our ideas and counter dissonance, to clarify our thinking, and our hearts, and to rest in community. They are where we unlearn stories, where we cut our tongues on new ones.

Dialectically: a story isn’t enough, and one cannot triumph in any social justice struggle without examining the stories that have been turned into gospel. This is true for any project of imperialism, occupation, or persecution: narratives get us into them. Narratives will get us out.

My voice is very far down the ladder of priority, so if this is not what you need right now, I enthusiastically invite you to skip this letter. This is true of all of these letters, but especially today’s: It’s a personal exploration made public, in the chance that it connects with someone. If you do read it, thank you in advance for your generosity in time and good faith.

Dear friend—

Fall has fallen!! The past few days in my neck of the woods have been marked by high winds, grey skies, and intermittent rains. My favorite time of the year has come, and with it: thick sweaters, hot lattes, and snuggling under the blankets at night.

I’ve been thinking a lot about growth vs. maintenance lately (though that seems like a recurring theme in my brain), and I think that so much of how we think of growth and progress is wrapped up in novelty. Our lizard brains want newness and excitement and so we look for more, better, greater. It’s one of the things that drives people toward consumerism and hedonic treadmills.

Dear friend—

Happy fall! I hope September is bringing you milder weather. The summer in my neck of the woods was surprisingly gentle—lots of 70-degree days—which made reading the apocalyptic forecasts and headlines from around the country and globe a little surreal. I hope everyone is staying cool, dry, safe.

This summer, my reading habits have turned back to fantasy, which I’d turned further away from as my taste shifted in new directions (notably, thought-provoking and occasionally existential-dread-inducing nonfiction, as the installments in this newsletter would suggest).

I am increasingly realizing that my interests and passions and energy levels move back and forth like a pendulum. Stay too long in one domain, and I will inevitably tire myself and lurch headlong toward another.

Dear friend—

It's been a hot second. I hope this missive finds you keeping cool and safe.

I'm been thinking a lot about this newsletter in relation to a bunch of other things on my mind, which I'll try to lay out here.

One. I’ve been thinking about content and hustle culture that the internet encourages. Everything we do, every talent we have, can become content; a way to accrue either social capital (i.e., clout), or income.

Dear friend—

I live alongside a set of train tracks in Pittsburgh. I also live with Hazel, my dog, a skittish terrier mix who can handle the trains’ roar and screech but would definitely prefer not to. Hazel would also (putting it mildly) prefer not to come across other dogs while on her walks. And so (thanks to the flexibility that my job affords me), I walk her at odd hours.

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Dear friend—

When I began graduate school, I was excited to start learning about economics. It was becoming increasingly clear to me that the entire world runs on the field. I understood that wuestions like “How much does this cost?” “How much are people willing to pay?” “What is the return on investment?” are fundamental to crafting policy or any change in our current political systems.

My logic: if I could learn about economics as practiced by economic advisers and policymakers, then I could learn how to leverage it in ways that would create a ~better world~. I thought about it as learning the system to change the system. I still believe this, to a certain degree. I think there are some problems so urgent that working within the system we’ve got is an essential first step.

Hello friends. I come to you in the wake of Pisces season (halfway through Aries season lol).

I’m thinking about this because I’m thinking about Braiding Sweetgrass, which I just finished and loved. The connection between the two is a very personal one for me. First, to explain the Pisces part:

As a Pisces, one of my biggest frustrations with myself is my wishy-washiness. I chameleonize based on context. I flip back and forth. Take, for instance, the thing I am most concerned about right now and probably will be until the end of my days: climate change.

As I’ve written before, I feel I am constantly vacillating between “I need to completely overhaul my life and live zero waste and scrub myself clean of it all” and “We live in a society, I am a small fish in a little ocean, and I can only do my best and have fun while I’m here.”

Dear friend—

Spring really do be sprung. This feels like the first hint of “spring” I’ve had in Pittsburgh since my freshman year in college.

In all the years since, April would come around, the end of the semester on the horizon, and we would still be weathering freezing rain and chilly, gray skies. At the slightest hint of warmth, students scrambled for the lawns near the Cathedral of Learning. We would sprawl on the grass, many (me) atop the single bath towel in their possession, for a single day or two of unseasonably 60, 70-degree days.

Then the weather would be sure we stayed humble, plunging us back into the dreary climes where we apparently belonged—only to dump summer on us like a boiling pot of water by late May.

Dear friend—

A few years ago, I took a class on literary magazine publishing, and one of the assignments was to write “charming notes” to authors we admired.

I don’t quite remember the specifics of the assignment—how many notes? why exactly? (I think it had something to do with how reading and publishing in literary magazines is about community)—but a few weeks ago I was organizing my email folders and came across the charming notes that I wrote that semester.

Dear friend—

When it comes to sentences, Nghi Vo only writes bangers.

Last year I read Vo’s (she/her) The Chosen and The Beautiful, a magical realism queer retelling of The Great Gatsby from the point of view of Jordan Baker. I immediately declared it one of the best YA books I’d read in a long time, if not one of the best books full stop.

Not since Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone was I so completely bowled over by the prose of a book. It’s lush. It’s clever. It’s rhythmic. Every sentence is a song, buoyed by the imaginative magic that Vo infuses into her world.

CW: Explicit descriptions of factory farming and industrial animal husbandry.

Dear friend—

Is it any surprise to any of y’all that I’m a Disney kid?

Dear friend—

I recently read an essay/newsletter by writer Cat Valente rage-mourning Twitter in the context of a long history of idiots and corporate baddies ruining community-built internet spaces, and she mentioned a site called Diaryland.

I had never heard of Diaryland. Valente mentioned that Diaryland still remains as it was in the 90s, crystallized in amber—except people still post regularly. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the hyperlink she included in her essay.

My friend, when I got onto the site, I was kind of floored.

Dear friend—

In a recent post, I lamented my inability to write good stories or good characters. Earlier this month, I finished a book that made me want to dissect the whole thing, so I could figure out exactly how both are done.

(Warning: This review has a few early/mid-plot spoilers. I’ll try to keep them as vague as possible, but if you want to read this book and want to go in with every twist fresh, turn back now).

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Dear friend—

On January 1, I finished what I am sure will be one of my favorite books of 2023—if not my absolute favorite. It’s called Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, a collection of essays by Xiaowei Wang (they/them).1

I think it goes without saying that China is a central figure in the global economy, especially when it comes to technology manufacturing and development. That’s the starting point of this book.

Dear friend—

After a month of not being in Pittsburgh, it’s good to be back. There’s nothing like a week straight of skies the color of dirty dishwater to humble you a bit.

(Mostly) kidding. If not for the lack of vitamin D that I can sometimes feel in my bones, I don’t mind the grey. It just inspires me to get out of the house and get cozy in the library or a coffee shop. And the wave this winter seems to be these tiny little flurries of snow that fall like confetti from the clouds. Last Friday, for the first time in a few weeks, those little bits of confetti actually stuck to the ground.

Some of my favorite views right now arrive right around the corner from my house, with the lampposts and the sidewalks and the orange glow that turns snowflakes into something like the still-glowing ashes that fly from a campfire.

Dear friend—

Hello. I’m back. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season :)

I rang in 2023 with a walk with Hazel and my mother. Bade Alex goodbye and cleaned my room. Wrote a bit and read a bit. If this is any indication of how the rest of my year will go—peacefully, full of things to learn and make and small moments of love—I cannot ask for anything better.

Dear friend—

I am thinking about surveillance capitalism again after an interview I listened to from one of my favorite podcasts, Tech Won't Save Us, with data journalist Shoshana Wodinsky.

About a year ago, I read Shoshana Zuboff's book coining the term (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism), and besides being one of the most humongous nonfiction books I've ever read in my life, it opened up some things for me.

Dear friend—

Bring forth the fruit! All that stains the edges
of a smile, all that colors laughter &

tosses it to air — what gift, what nourish.
First! a harvest. From grandmother’s garden,

orchard down the road, the farmer you see
once weekly, on Sundays, the new neighbor,

so quick to kindly. Second! homage the
soil. Dig in to wrists, feel it all shift, breathe

about your fingers, the million tiny
souls, squirming to raise it all to sunlight.

Third! kiss the sunlight, let it kiss you. Feel
it on every honest part of you &

know, all you touch also names it “mother.”
Now, bring forth the fruit! the many-named much-

loved, the sweet burst on tongue & soak between
teeth, so evolved as to be shared. What else

do you know, so intended by time &
creation to be plucked from bush & tree,

seeds saved, gathered, grown, again & again —  
this most generous reincarnation!

title line from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights.

.

Dear friend—

I am a luddite in many ways, but I am a luddite highly sympathetic to those who are not. I am just as enthralled with the immediacy, flexibility, and possibilities of digital life as I am with the joys of analog ways of doing things—if not more.

But at the same time, I'm becoming increasingly aware of how my reticence to using certain kinds of technology leaves me behind in many ways.

I remember realizing something one day, as I helped my very smart, white-collar mother navigate a website. She has worked with computers and the internet since there were computers and an internet to work with. She serves as tech support for the majority of my family.

Dear friend—

I've read some Thought Provoking things recently. Here are three:

1. On bonkers-looking fish and yet another ecosystem we might pillage.

2. On a national model for sustainable living that actually exists.

3. On the American South, by a historian and daughter of the region.

Dear friend—

I would say I’m a fan, in depth if not in width, of films from Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli, the creators behind Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro and a few dozen other classics of animation. Much has been written about these movies. I am just adding my own two little cents.

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Dear friend—

Here are some things I am grateful for:

Some proper fall weather.

Fall has descended onto the city of Pittsburgh—and perhaps a great part of the mid-Atlantic—with a passion. The fall equinox dipped below the clouds and brought the 80-degree weather down to 60 overnight, and ever since then (knock on wood) it’s stayed there.

Dear friend—

The other day I did a thing that I have been trying not to do where I go to the library and take out several books that I know I will likely not read in the prescribed amount of time that the library has entrusted me with them. Luckily, my local library system has done something very cash money of them and gotten rid of fines. 

There’s tons of research on why this is a good thing, mostly having to do with making the library a more equitable and welcoming place for low-income folks. That research shows fines make little difference in encouraging people to return their books on time.

There are people who turn in their books on time no matter what. There are people who mean to turn their books in on time but life circumstances delay them a day or four, and fines are overkill (especially for low-income folks for whom a few dollars can mean a lot). And then there are people who may never return their books on time, and a fine won’t do much to dissuade them. 

The first version of this letter went out riddled with mistakes. My fault for scheduling it and then forgetting to do a final edit. Please accept this take two and my apologies <3.

Dear friend—

This morning, as with every morning, I have made coffee. It is decent coffee, but nothing to write home about. I made it in my little coffee machine that came with my apartment. But the making of this coffee began in the grocery store.

As I stood in the aisle among the throng of fellow shoppers, the bag of coffee I needed stood beside all the other brands and varieties. The package had fancy minimalist type that read “P R E M I U M   R O A S T” and in smaller type “(samsung compatible).” This coffee cost $2 more than every other coffee on the shelf. But what can I do? Buy another coffee maker?

Dear friend—

I have accidentally taken a break from this newsletter, and have not done nearly as much thoughtful reading and watching as usual these past few weeks. Hence, this kind of flaccid letter coming to your inbox this morning.

This summer, I started watching The Bear on Hulu, starring Jeremy Allen White, whom you might be familiar if you’ve ever seen Showtime’s Shameless. The Bear is similar to Shameless in some ways—the gritty Chicago backdrop, the messiness and the struggles of its characters, the seemingly boundless shouting and profanity, the complicated yet intense bonds of family, blood and found—but with several marked differences.

Dear friend—

We are nearing the dog days of summer, and despite some on-and-off blessedly balmy days in Pittsburgh, that means more ghastly-hot days to come. I don't have a car. Sometimes I am too impatient or anxious to be bothered with public transit. So walking becomes my main mode of transit.

These days, I will extend a trip by 10 minutes zig-zagging across the street to remain under the generous shade of trees. They make the walk so much more bearable.

Dear friend—

My first taste of reality TV came from VH1’s I Love New York, a bachelorette-style dating show. My cousin put it on while I was at her house and I pretended to be less interested than I actually was. I did the math and I must have been 10 or 11 years old at the time.

Almost immediately, I knew this was something my mother—soft-spoken, practical, polite, erudite—would disapprove of. My cousin and I never watched it in her presence (sorry Mom, sorry Steph!). But the part of me that loved gossip, loved romance, loved to see folks who didn’t look and sound like me, was super into it.

I remember watching Jersey Shore a few years later (with the same cousin) and being amazed that people like Pauli D and Snooki existed. Maybe partly with some feeling of superiority (I’m not that shallow or reckless or love-obsessed, etc. etc.), but also with an anthropologist’s fascination for a social world completely unfamiliar, with its own interior quirks and slang and symbols and values.

Dear friend—

Sometimes I read stuff and I have Thoughts that are not yet solid enough to incorporate into a proper essay—but I don’t want them to melt into air.

I also want to share them! So I am going to try and do a little series each week on what I'm reading (or watching, or listening to, etc.). Maybe I will throw in some little slice of life thoughts. Some photos of Hazel (my dog).

Dear friend—

I started working when I was 16, at a Walgreens that sat (and still sits) a five-minutes drive from my house. I had two work shirts—one, a light blue cotton t-shirt, and the second, a disgusting collared polyester number, also light blue. I learned regulars’ cigarette orders (Marlboro menthols. Virginia Slims. America Spirit, the dark blue please). How to do small talk. How to face the shelves so they all look full. How to unload a tote and make it last across the length of a mind-numbing shift. How to listen for a customer approaching the counter while in the freezer, 12 aisles away. How to count change fast (I’ve since lost this skill).

At that job, I made my first paycheck, which I took home in a little envelope. Once, I had to tell the scary store manager that I lost my check, and I thought I was going to pass out in fear. He was annoyed, but not unkind, especially after I found it a few days later, so shout out to Dan. Soon after, I got direct deposit.

With a single little form, in which I detailed a medium-sized string of numbers and signed my name, my paycheck was magicked into my bank account every two weeks. Every job I would have after that, I would get direct deposit. It was wonderfully convenient, and I would never risk losing a check worth several hundred dollars or more. One moment: BAL = $256. Blink. BAL = $893.

Dear friend—

I think I am constantly thinking about plastic.

When I was a kid, my mother taught me to recycle dutifully, borderline obsessively. On days out, she holds on to her daily bottle of Diet Coke until we find a recycling bin—more often than not, she has to wait until we return home to toss it in our own recycling bin. I’ve inherited this habit from her.

Dear friend—

I am thinking a lot about my internet presence these days. A few weeks ago, an essay by R. E. Hawley1 brought me back to a meme that I personally laud among the greats: “If we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” It’s a beautiful, precocious, and infinitely memeable phrase that, as the best memes do, alludes to an essential part of the human condition. Vulnerability is the road we walk toward both profound connection and profound ridicule.

Hawley then takes a leap that I hadn’t before, connecting the quote with a genre of meme that despairs about being “perceived.” A bleary 8 am tweet: “It is much too early to be perceived.” Truly, no one should perceive me before I’ve had coffee and put on my eyebrows, for my sake and for theirs.

One night, a few months ago, I was out for drinks with friends and one of our classmates went around the table asking if we felt we got our money’s worth at school. In the moment, I paused, and I've been thinking about this question on and off ever since. First, thanks to scholarships and the college fund my mom has been saving forever, I was lucky enough to be here essentially for free, so on that account, it was certainly worth the money. But did I think that if that weren’t the case, would I still have sprung for graduate school?

When I finished my bachelors’ in December 2019, I didn’t really know what I was going to do with myself. I had cycled through so many ideas in undergrad---high school teacher, professor, some-kind-of-NGO work. I took Arabic and briefly entertained the idea of doing something with that, but then one of my professors told me pretty much the only jobs for non-native speakers are translating for the government, i.e. national security, i.e. becoming part of America’s surveillance-military industrial complex. For about a week, I looked into the foreign service (ha!). And then I thought about publishing---but an internship at a literary agency made me realize that as much as I loved books and writing, the industry was just not for me.

By the time I hit the summer before senior year, I began considering an MFA in fiction. My friends were all taking the GRE for something or another---most of them for MFAs. But that soon went out the window as well. I landed on policy school.

This April, in the frantic flurry of near-graduation job interviews, one interviewer asked me, “Why grad school?” The job I was applying for only required a bachelor's, and it would be copywriting, hardly something I studied in school. I told them how I came out of undergrad not really knowing what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to write. Yet I didn’t think I knew enough the world and the things I cared about. In undergrad, I studied writing and history, and while I appreciated my history courses, there were so many contemporary issues that I was interested in---social justice, climate change, politics---that I didn’t get enough of in school. I was fortunate enough that grad school was an option, so I went for it.

I have a confession to make—I am a book snob. Not as in who I read or what I read, but the actual, physical book as material object. There are few things that bring me more arbitrary joy than a well-made, well-designed book, and no dumber thing that can turn me off a book than the way it is laid out, the dimensions, what paper it is printed on, or even the texture and weight of the cover. I have pet peeves like 200-page books printed on thick paper to make them seem larger than they actually are; line spacing that condescends to the reader and looks frankly ugly; and fonts that have no business being in print. I have Judging-A-Book-By-Its-Cover disease, except instead of just the cover it is the entire book. 

I say this because a few months ago I was reading a book that I was heartily enjoying except—except—it was 900 pages. It was humungous, to the point of unholdable. Not only that, the margins were laughably small compared to the thick wads of text on every page. And the cover was so thin compared to the rest of the book's largesse that I was worried I would rip it just by holding it the wrong way.

So I went to my Libby app to see if I could borrow it in eBook format from my local library. No dice. And then, dear reader, I made the regrettable decision of purchasing the eBook version on Amazon. I am supporting a writer whose work I enjoy, I rationalized to myself, and perhaps that was true, but the proceeds that this writer will receive from this sale are negligible. The lion's share of revenue an author sees from their book sales comes from hardcover copies. And if I was being honest with myself, I made this decision for personal reasons—namely, convenience.

Buying this eBook on Amazon was a single decision in an infinitude of decisions that everyone on this planet makes every day, every year, every lifetime. Yet, the guilt I still feel about it reminds me that it is indicative of a problem that I have and often pretend not to have, because I want to be a Conscious Consumer™ and Steward of the Earth™.

As a self-confessed introvert and homebody, I care a lot about the spaces I find myself and the spaces I make for myself. But it wasn’t until my junior year of college that I realized it’s not only about the look or feel of a space, but how that space enables and prevents certain behaviors and certain ways of thinking.

The summer of 2018, three friends and I moved into what is surely, objectively, and materially, the best place I’ve ever lived. There was a balcony that looked out over the neighborhood with a view of the Cathedral of learning to the south, all new appliances and granite countertops, and as the person with the smallest bedroom on the first floor, I got my own bathroom right next to the kitchen. All my furniture matched in that bedroom, everything a pristine white or grey.

But I was also Going Through It that entire year. I went to campus early and came home to my bedroom, muddling through classwork and books and sad journal entries and dicking around on the internet. I was sick, physically and mentally, and I gave myself no opportunity to reach out to my friends---who were also going through their own struggles that year. Surely we could have helped each other.

My room felt like a sanctuary, where I could curl up on my own and unwind, but looking back, I realize it was super unhealthy. The way the bedrooms were split by floors made it just a little bit harder for me to encounter my friends and housemates during the day. We didn’t have furniture in the living room, just a coffee table and a kitchen table, which did not invite cozy nights getting takeout and watching movies. We lived in Bloomfield, a neighborhood worlds away from the parties in South Oakland, so going out at night would always involve a long bus ride or an Uber (I don’t think I went out that entire year).

“Teferi, all we have is what we remember. All that’s worthy of life is worthy of remembrance.”

—Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King.

In the fourth grade I read Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief for the first time, and when I had finished it—though I didn’t yet have the language for this—my ideas about what fiction was, and what it can do, had transformed. The 2005 novel tells the story of Liesel, a young German girl orphaned in the years leading to World War II. Her foster father teaches her to read, and when the family begins hiding a Jewish man in their basement, books and writing cleave them all together through the horrors of wartime life and Nazi persecution. 

Zusak’s prose is all sound and rhythm, and the characters of The Book Thief are achingly human; as I read, their pain and joy seemed so close to mine. I had found a model for what I wanted to accomplish, lyrically and emotionally, in craft and story, with my own writing. I also caught an interest in World War II that would follow me into college.

In my sophomore year, I declared a major in history, and before that, I took a course on World War II in Europe. Ever since, the War has appeared again and again in my studies, no matter the time and place. I learned how the aftermath of the War set the stage for the Zionist settlement of Palestine, how it shaped Japanese society in the wake of the atomic bombs. At the same time, I was devouring all the stories about WWII I could find—Catch 22, Inglorious Basterds, Unbroken, The Imitation Game. Since reading The Book Thief at age 9, I have been continually struck by the war’s staggering violence, its grand politics—how its stories span all the extremes of the human experience. 

I wrote this post a few months ago. It's long past end-of-summer-season, closer to edge-of-winter season, but I am simply posting it anyway, for the nostalgia, and the books.

When I was younger, I attended an at-home daycare before and after the school day and then all throughout the summers. Some summer days, when there were only a few of us in the house, Miss Jenn would pile us into her minivan and drive us to the public library. The big kids were responsible for getting the babies in their car seats, and Miss Jenn would go through and check them all before we began the pilgrimage out of her quiet neighborhood and toward downtown, where the library sat atop a hill, tucked amongst a clutch of trees.

The library in my hometown looks like a castle, but the inside was sterile--a plain foyer opened up to grey carpet and a circulation desk that was equally drab. But then we'd turn into the children's room, which seemed to burst with color and excitement. I'd check out ten, twenty at a time---Magic Tree House, Geronimo Stilton, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and the still-meme-able Animorphs. The librarian would give us a sheet of colored card stock with what looked like a Candy Land board printed on it, and for each book that we read, we could color in a square. Every ten spaces we colored, we could return to the library for a prize, like a water bottle or a drawstring bag; an even bigger prize waited for us if we could fill the whole board.

In the late 1800s, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche began to lose his sight, preventing him from writing longhand. In 1882, he received a brand-new invention from the inventor himself: the Hansel Writing Ball, a precursor to the typewriters we see today. Nietzsche learned to touch-type and could once again compose prose. But he, and several of his friends and later academics, thought that the writing ball had changed the nature of his prose. Rather than the flowing, graceful lines he wrote longhand, Neitzsche thought his style had become more rigid and terse—mechanical. "Our writing equipment," he wrote in a letter, "takes part in the forming of our thoughts."

In the book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr often returns to this anecdote. The subtitle of his book is "What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains." The book was published at a time when people were just starting to become aware of how the internet affected not only how we worked and communicated, but how we thought. (This was around the same time as Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier was published, a book I've referenced on this blog a few times now).

The first half of Carr's book is dedicated to tracing the history of intellectual technology—the technology that allows us to think more and differently—all the way back to written language, maps, and keeping time. The internet is just the latest in a long lineage of brain-altering technology, he argues.

I have once again moved platforms for this blog. I wanted something simpler and easier to maintain, and cheaper. The previous iteration of this site was made through Wix, which had many wonderful features, but I would have had to pay a premium subscription ad infinitum to be able to maintain the site. WordPress is an older platform, and its free version is much more agreeable.

Migrating my posts Wix to WordPress was easy. It gave me the chance to rethink the visuals and the purpose of the site overall. This iteration is more personal, less professionally driven. The simpler layout brings the text to the forefront; I chose the font to be as unobtrusive as possible.

But there was one minor detail that I couldn't change during the transition, or wasn't willing to take the time to change---I had left links to the Wix site throughout my social media accounts. Now they were like ghostly breadcrumbs that led to nowhere—dead, or “rotten.”

In an article for The Atlantic, Jonathan Zittrain explores the ephemerality of the internet, which is specifically concerning given the internet's function as a repository for knowledge. One of Zittrain's studies found that 50 percent of links in Supreme Court decisions since 1996, the year the Court first used hyperlinks in decisions, lead to web pages that no longer exist.

When I was a kid, the start of the school year signaled the start of a new year, more so than the ball dropping at midnight every January 1. It signaled a new opportunity to make friends, to sit next to the boy I had a crush on, to meet new teachers and read new books. My mom and I (and later, my sister) would go back-to-school shopping for clothes and school supplies, and the season signaled a mental shift, from the endless lazy summer days to structure and activity.

Over the past few years, the start of my new year has shifted slightly earlier---to late July, moving season here in Pittsburgh.

In On Having and Being Had, Eula Bliss meditates on the ideas that define our modern world, even if we don’t want them to---capitalism, money, art, accumulation, consumption, autonomy, and desire. Whether that be desire for the vital things, like security or purpose or happiness, or the luxuries, like upright pianos or a house with a yard.

Bliss also examines her own position in a class-based society, as someone who was well-educated and grew up secure if not wealthy; who bounced from job to job and lived precariously as a broke artist in her early adulthood; and now, as a professor at an elite school, finally making enough to afford a house. She writes to dig deeper into herself---”dismantling” herself---and the way her ideas about money have changed. She asks again and again, to fellow party guests and friends and the authors in the books she reads, what does capitalism mean? She understands the damage it has done and continues to do to our society, yet must confront how she now benefits from it. 

Intertwined with her concerns about capitalism are also her concerns about art. One of the central themes of the book is the paradox of art---Art should be priceless and many artists see their work as "pure" and resist its commodification---yet the only way artists can make art is if they are paid for it. Art is in many ways unbound by the systems of capital, especially because it can’t be consumed in the way that iron, crops, or electricity can. Nor is it useful in any quantifiable way as with kilojoules or calories. Yet, an artist's craft can’t be cultivated without financial security, which provides freedom and time.