that's what I want
I've been thinking a lot about money lately. It's the holidays; it's sale season; it's end-of-the-year accounting season. I'll do my annual update on what I...
hineini
Two years ago I wrote something joyful and fun about what women were wearing to the polls to vote for Hillary Clinton. (I decided on a Yale sweater, a red...
what hurts
That was last week. This week I got a tattoo. It didn't take all that long-- nothing like the hours I spent in a tiny Brooklyn shop with Nozlee (whose Tumblr...
politicking
It's complicated how to figure out what I want to talk about online, so the rule I try to keep to is: either be funny, or be giving someone an action item. I...
solidarity
I woke up this morning and checked the news; I saw all the shit we're all seeing. I spent most of last week off of Twitter but it's Monday and like any...
endlessness
Part of the problem is that I don't want to be responsible for knowing how it ends. The essay's graceful conclusion, a novel's satisfaction, even just a...
lacuna
Hi, sorry, it was August, and I wasn't writing. Or I was writing novels and not much else. Or I don't know what's been going on, but it hasn't resolved...
gold
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...
again.
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...
focus
(I wrote this like, four days before the Trump administration engineered a border crisis, and then the Supreme Court kneecapped unions and abortion rights...
four
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...
love and fire
"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...
'sup
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...
etymology
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...
for free?
"Especially in the internet era, where publications field underfunded freelance “staffs” and personal-project bloggers are in impossible abundance, writers...
waiting rooms
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...