Archive (Page 3) • practice • Buttondown

I wrote this a few years ago for Lucky Peach. The magazine is gone and the archives are offline, so I'm putting it here because there's nothing else I want...

a grand unified theory

I wrote for Buzzfeed about one my most persistent obsessions: people who are convinced that celebrities are involved in intricate, nefarious conspiracies to...

The thing I like about boxing is that you have to be tenacious: throw the same punches in different combinations at the same bag over and over. Three minutes...

(I wrote this like, four days before the Trump administration engineered a border crisis, and then the Supreme Court kneecapped unions and abortion rights...

A few weeks ago we were in Missouri and talking about maybe going to see The Mounds. "I read an essay about the Mounds once," I said. "By John Jeremiah...

"I'm on intimate terms with this prairie."

In college I co-produced on one (1) play*, and on opening night the director addressed us by saying: "I've never before worked on a show with so many...

"Why didn’t you just write about your experience? the reader asked me. Why isn’t it a memoir? I looked at him and felt confused for a moment. I didn’t...

the road to two hands

photo by friend of the Tinyletter Sarah Enni This is me for the last week and a half, just typing and living very, very awkwardly. This morning I showered...

I'm having surgery tomorrow (minor, getting the cyst in my pinky fixed up) so I'm honestly too frazzled to write anything useful. But I do have some things I...

lover's spit left on repeat

The weather in Los Angeles can't make up its mind: I'm writing this in front of an open window in a tee shirt, but it's supposed to rain tomorrow, and then...

February 28, 2018

At some point last week I opened a Tinyletter draft, typed the word "etymology" into the subject line, pasted a link I didn't want to forget to send you into...

February 21, 2018

"Especially in the internet era, where publications field underfunded freelance “staffs” and personal-project bloggers are in impossible abundance, writers...

February 7, 2018

The hardest thing, it turns out, is not to find a lesson. To tell myself: a broken bone isn't a sign, but a fact. A cyst bloomed in my pinky and it grew...

January 29, 2018

Three weeks ago I was in a wrestling class and someone hit the wrong finger at the wrong angle, and the bottom bone in my right pinky snapped. "Did you know...

a long time ago

January 17, 2018

When I was eighteen I picked up a Polaroid-- 80's, plastic, crappy-- that had been sitting around my room, and started taking pictures with it. I took what I...

January 5, 2018

So like, I wrote a lot last year. I was trying to figure out how to make a living, how to live a life, and I did it the way I always do things: intensely and...

December 28, 2017

It turns out I snuck in a couple more pieces under the wire: one on FAKE JEWS for The Awl, and one on Los Angeles burning to close out Personal Geography....

waxing & waning

December 13, 2017

On the first night of Hanukkah, the moon is close to full, and we light one candle. The next night, the moon turns its face from us, and goes a little bit...

December 4, 2017

bodies This weekend I was at a bar with my boxing coaches and we were talking about something, I don't remember what, there had been a lot of wine, and W....

November 29, 2017

A thing (small, largely inconsequential) that I do not forget: working in the New York office of my dad's company the summer I was 21. I was a secretary, but...

November 17, 2017

In 2017 I published 56 stories on the internet, an average of one a week. I sent 30 Tinyletters, or one every other week. I wrote 50 sample pages for a book...

November 6, 2017

One of the first times I flew on an airplane without an adult it was to visit Zoey in Texas. I was eight or nine years old. Zo and her family had moved from...

October 24, 2017

A small, good thing was last week when I was sitting near the top of the bowl of The Greek, surrounded by the hills and the night and some very good pals,...

October 2, 2017

I don't know what to say. I wrote another essay for Medium about LA, this one focused on Dodger Stadium and the specific consequences of that "no history"...

September 26, 2017

or, a brief history of how these things happen: 1. When I was writing GRACE AND THE FEVER, I was thinking a lot about social media and self-presentation: how...

September 14, 2017

I've been working on two big pieces about the Kardashians for the last few months-- one, which came out last week, is about their relationship to plastic...

don't forget where you belong

September 6, 2017

"The oldest hotel in Los Angeles turned 90 this year, which means there are people living in the city who have been here longer than it has. I guess this is...

notes from nowhere

August 31, 2017

I haven't written a Tinyletter in weeks. I bet you can guess most of why: Charlottesville, vacation, post-vacation catch-up, Houston, heat wave. More or less...

August 15, 2017

Have I told you the story of how I used to know Kesha a little bit? We did a summer program at Columbia together when we were 17. She was already a...

the good flesh continuing

I ate wild blackberries twice while I was in San Francisco. The first time, P and I were walking on the cliffs above Land's End and he stepped off the path...

those who can't

So I've started teaching people how to write. Or, I've started teaching a writing class? I've certainly been obsessing about the difference between the two...

that's how I live my life

In boxing, we do bag drills for three minutes at a stretch: one combination of punches aimed at a heavy bag, repeated over and over and goddamn over again,...

On Hanson: "Listen, just do me a favor and forget about 1997 for a minute. Not the whole year, maybe, I’m sure something important happened to you in 1997—...

So it's summer again, apparently. It's weird. We've already blown through everything I remember about last summer, the fun good easy stuff, and gotten to the...

queerer and queerer

Last weekend I ended up at LA's 10th annual Dyke Day, a celebration of queer love and family that mostly involved, for my part, lying on a blanket drinking...

Good news / bad news for you, reading this Tinyletter: all of that chattering about my book actually worked. I mean, I got an email six days after it had...

In the chaos of release week I forgot to say: thanks for sending me money, guys! It was really weird and great to have dollars just like, appear in my inbox,...

industry standard

Last week I went to a party being thrown by one of the publications I write for, where I had the always-surreal experience of meeting in person an editor...

Surprise! I've been freelancing for a year this week, which means this Tinyletter is just slightly older than that-- I sent the first edition to 57 people on...

how will I know

So last weekend I went to the LA Times Festival of Books, which is always sweltering and exhausting and nonetheless very fun. One of the panels I attended...

this field is required

Usually there's some kind of essay that goes here. This week I don't have one. But I do have links: to the essay I wrote about the narrative failures of...

where is my mind

The last time I was in Arizona it was for my grandmother's funeral. It was three years ago, early June, and the heat was already enormous: a thunderclap of a...

In 2015 I went to Seattle to mourn. In 2016, I went to wait. This year I got to go to celebrate. Which also means that two years ago I was just about to sell...

"there are no bad words

for the coast today." - Last week I flew to St. Louis and spent a day bumming around the city with M: eating and drinking and doing our nails, watching...

straight & neat

February 26, 2017

In the winter of 2011 I went to see Joan Didion speak at the New York Public Library. Loving Didion is a cliché for girls like me—bangs, glasses, lit degree;...

February 5, 2017

One of the things I did at my first real job was book travel arrangements for other people. It got to be routine pretty quickly: calling airlines and hotels,...

February 2, 2017

Since the election I've been taking self-defense classes with some friends-- all YA authors, actually, a bunch of women who spend our days writing books for...

January 25, 2017

"And it got late and someone turned on some vintage disco, and all the people young enough never to’ve heard these songs the first time round got up and...

January 15, 2017

Not being able to talk is somehow both extremely weird and extremely boring. I had a lot of time to think about this when I couldn't talk for six days last...

January 6, 2017

I wrote this essay-- three times? Four? The first paragraph was always in place, pretty much, and then I kept putting together the thousand words that came...