Ten years ago this November, my 28-year-old son was found dead in his apartment.

That’s a shocking way to start and I apologize. I’ve written a great deal about this. But for my purpose here, it’s really just backstory, to explain what I’m going to tell you next.

My husband, John, and I - and our younger son - were destroyed. I mean this literally. Grief like that is a body blow. We were shattered mentally and physically. We drank too much and walked out in front of cars. Didn’t sleep for nights then slept for days on end. Nothing made sense. Time disengaged.

It took a while to plan a funeral because Andrew’s death was under investigation and we had to wait for the system to finish its thing. Finally, we got a ceremony together that was actually….lovely. As healing as something like that can be. It took place on a glorious Friday with brilliant sun and trees leafed out in red and orange and people came from all over, including some of my husband’s family.

Another bit of backstory: John is my children’s stepfather. He loves them like his own, but he came into their lives when they were teenagers. So when I say his family came to the service, these were people who - in most cases - I’d met only a handful of times. I appreciated their traveling all the way from Oregon and Florida to Minnesota. It was comforting to have so many people there and caring for us.

But the day after the service, which happened to be a wickedly cold rainy dark day, all the grief and terror descended again and I felt like I honestly might be crazy. Fully psychotic, I was losing a sense of anything. The world felt upside-down. Sinister. So I’m right in the middle of this when there’s a knock on the door.

It’s my husband’s oldest sister. I’ll call her Sally. She was about 60 at the time, wealthy, married to a big insurance guy. She came into my house with her enormous suitcase and sat down in my living room.

She’d come all this way, she said, and she hated to waste the trip. So she’d decided to stay for a week or so and look around Minneapolis. Maybe hit some museums! She asked me where the guest room was and if I’d ask my son to get her suitcase because it was heavy and what was I making for dinner? She had some food allergies for me to take into account.

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I took the first round of Covid vaccines.

Start there, and I lose some percentage of readers who have decided - based on a very personal medical decision - that people like me are no longer ‘pure.’

I took the shots under duress; I was living in the Twin Cities and my husband worked for a government contractor that was subject to OSHA. Also, my family refused to see me until it was done.

I believe the vaccines did me more harm than good. I bled for 20+ days after the first (J&J) and was sick as a dog for three days after the second (Pfizer).

Worse, I had a terrible bout of Covid after the second shot that knocked me down 30 pounds and decimated my sense of smell. So, the vaccines that were forced on me caused me heinous side effects, then I got the virus anyway and am still suffering long-term effects.

Was it a ‘mistake’ to have taken the shots? If I were magic, sure. If I could go back in time and see how everything turned out and make a decision based on that, yes. But in the earth we live on with [supposedly] linear time, no. The choices I made were sound.

Because back in 2021, whatever you did was a gamble. That applied to everyone in the world. Including Dolly Parton.

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For 20 years, I’ve used the word ‘quixotic’ to describe my first husband.

In an essay for “Tablet Magazine” in 2021, I wrote:

My then-husband and I were too young and poor to have a child—much less two. Our 1-year-old had respiratory problems and asthma, which consumed time and money. We were on the edge, barely able to pay our bills and buy macaroni and cheese. It was just dawning on me that I’d married a dreamy, quixotic guy who drank when he was troubled and couldn’t hold down a job.

But it wasn’t until last month, when I actually read “Don Quixote” (volume one) while segmenting and publishing it on Storyalīz, that I truly understood. My ex wasn’t just quixotic; he wasn’t like Quixote. He was Quixote, down to all but the Renaissance detail.

Way back in 1605, a Spanish writer and poet foretold the man I would marry in 1987—and then again in 2002. He made him unreasonable and irrational, stubborn, heedless, emotional, and completely disconnected from reality, but also gallant, admirable, brave, and oddly clever. I know this paradox. I feel it in my soul.

I met Z at a bar called The Deadwood. I was 20. He was a worldly, swarthily-bearded 25, carrying through the murk an elaborate mountain bike, in one hand over his head.

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A reader’s note: I’m thrilled to bring you this piece co-authored with my friend Jeffrey Tucker, great reader, writer, thinker, and founder of the Brownstone Institute. — Ann

There’s an old joke drawn from the discipline of economics. Two economists are walking together. One points out to the other that there is a $20 bill on the sidewalk. The other responds that this cannot be true. If there were a $20 bill there, someone would have already picked it up. So they walk on and leave it there.

The joke illustrates a theory called Rational Expectations or RatEx. The idea is that agents form expectations using all available information optimally, and do not make systematic (persistent, forecastable) errors. All that is known is already in existence. There is no uncertainty, no mistakes.

This model is of a family with the Fermi Paradox, which postulates that there’s no life on other planets, because if there were they’d have contacted us. It’s a framework that eliminates options by declaring them wrong because they haven’t already happened. And that's the world we all live in right now with AI using its sweep of infobits to date and declaring its result: Static truth.

It’s seductive, this idea that there’s a borg ready to give us all the answers—no mistakes; no uncertainty—at the stroke of a few keys. People have climbed on board heedlessly, following influencers like Claire Vo of “How I AI,” who recommends that her followers use LLMs not just to track competitors, manage projects, and send rote emails but to ‘summarize school and family messages’ and ‘handle personal scheduling.’

So, exactly which part of your life are you living? You’re running Mom’s latest note through OpenClaw nd generating an AI response (that you tweak with a few emojis). You’re having Claude schedule your son’s bar mitzvah and decide on the theme. You’re reading summaries of movies intead of seeing them, posting enhanced photos of you ‘cooking’ in your ‘spotless’ kitchen instead of shopping or cleaning —or even showering.

This is RatEx 2.0. Everyone’s taking shortcuts and feeding fake bits into the system while at the same time assuming that the information they get from AI is factual. What happens in the machine becomes what happened. There is nothing else.

It goes to follow, you will consult AI for wisdom instead of actually reading a book.

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When we first created Storyalīz, a classic literature and conversation app, the first thing I announced on X was that we’d be featuring all 14 Oz books by L. Frank Baum. An account that went simply by Maria warned me that we must not.

She - I’m assuming it was a she - told me that as a newspaperman Baum had advocated for the extermination of all Indians. He was a genocider, she said, and should not appear anywhere on our app.

I was horrified. The original Oz series—which runs from the original “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” of 1900 to “Glinda of Oz,” published posthumously in 1920, a year after Baum’s death—was the touchstone of my grade school years. I acquired the books in order, as if they were just being released. Each one felt like a gift, an island where my woes and worries made sense. For almost half a century that’s continued to be true. The monsters, thrills, and heroes of Oz explain nearly everything in my life.

But when I looked it up, I found, devastatingly, that Maria was correct. Baum did write an editorial in The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, following the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, that argued the safety of white settlers required the "total extermination" of remaining Native American tribes, and referring to Native people as "untamed and untamable creatures."

I looked up several literary and 19th century history scholars and the consensus was that this stance should be made widely public—the full picture of the man must appear in the public record—but that his contributions to American fairytale remained solid and significant. They also point out that Baum qualified his words, saying ‘once begun’ total extermination was the only way forward, because relations between Indians and white settlers were at a point where one side or the other would be slaughtered.

Still. The statements were unforgivable.

As with men ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Woody Allen, one has to live with the paradox. True change makers are often ruthless and disruptive, so you have to balance the bad with the good. Bottom line, I believe people who care about the sins of our country can love Oz without endorsing the 1890 opinions of L. Frank Baum.

I went back to Maria, thanked her for bringing this to my attention, and told her what I’d found. At that point she accused me of being a genocide apologist and became my persistent troll.

Yet, I kept engaging with her. I felt like it was my duty to do so if I stuck to my decision and published the Oz books on our platform. I let her know when I decided not to include an early science fiction story from Baum because it was overtly racist. When The Free Press asked me to write about Baum for their Great Americans series, I took great pains to include the information about his ‘total extermination’ comments. Many readers did not like this; they accused me of being lazy and leftist, doing an ‘obligatory examination’ of his ‘supposedly negative traits.’

Simultaneously, Maria came after me from the other side. She went into a flurry of posting about the piece, and my professed love for South Dakota, calling me a racist and an appropriator and a genocider and a bunch of other terrible things.

I finally blocked her. I’d put in six months. It was overdue.

Reading is not a safe space, my co-founder (and husband) kept telling me. The point of literature is to challenge, question, upend, and disrupt. That’s our policy.

But the next time someone pushed back against us, it was utterly reasonable. The objecter was kind, polite, and articulate. And he was one of our best/favorite users.

At issue: the acronym MILF.

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The last plane I boarded electively was a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2023.

Prior to Covid we’d been frequent travelers, visiting Europe yearly, trying random places, taking wild chances (e.g. riding a rented motorcycle through Rome). But there are risks we’re willing to take and those we are not. The public health and speech crackdowns in the Schengen region alarmed us. While we weren’t happy in Minnesota, we were determined not to get detained overseas.

During 2021 and early ‘22, we were put off by prices and crowds. Paradoxically, all the ardent pro-regulation folks we knew hopped on planes the moment they were able (usually complaining about ‘non-maskers’). We’d had enough of this group and certainly weren’t going to go thousands of miles to be among them. Mostly during that time, we hung out in the American South and West.

Finally, the itch to see a new place overwhelmed us. And Oaxaca was amazing: sunny, easy, beautiful, full of extraordinary food. The Blue House alone was worth the price of the trip. Then we got on the plane to fly back and it was a disgusting 12-hour ordeal. Loud, tedious, smelly, tense, and forever long.

We asked ourselves, was our week in Oaxaca worth THIS? The answer was no.

Since that time, we’ve flown a lot—to conferences, sales meetings for our new business, and repeatedly for family emergencies. But we’ve never gotten on another plane for leisure travel. Every time we discuss it, we decide the ratio of enjoyment versus unpleasantness isn’t high enough.

This week, I escorted my mother from MSP to Philadelphia, where she was moving to a memory care facility. And I got a look at one reason air travel keeps getting worse. The combination of smaller, more jam-packed spaces with a surge of elderly, disabled, and obese people. These passengers are flying at no additional cost in most cases, and a whole layer of process is moving them through airports and around the country.

Unless you have a first class ticket, you are behind it all.

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He sent an email informing my sister and me and I honestly thought when I first read it that he meant my mother had breast cancer but he was so upset he wrote “I” instead of “she.”

Not the case. There was a lump! he said. The biopsy was positive. It might be “that Jewish kind of breast cancer,” he told us. Both my sister and I expressed concern and sympathy and asked what we could do then asked, as delicately as possible, “Are you going to be tested for BRCA?”

We both knew that mutations of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which suppress tumors in the breast, ovaries and pancreas, were more common in people with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, like us—partly because it’s a group that has historically intermarried. In our case, we had an Irish-Catholic mother who had never had cancer herself (good!), but it happened that she’d had an aunt and some female cousins with the BRCA mutation, all of whom had died young.

Why did we know so much about this? Because Angelina Jolie! Christina Applegate! Plus every mainstream news source and prime time medical show on TV.

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I no longer buy theater tickets. They simply aren’t worth it to me.

Are there good plays out there? Sure. But I don’t have the money, the time, or the patience to find them. Most theater today is excruciating: politically-driven, prefaced by droning land acknowledgements, botched by constant seat talkers, and harnessed by sensitivity rules. It bores me, and I’ve said so. Which has provoked a certain high-status artsy clan of people to call me a rube.

So be it. I could not give less of a hoot about what people think. But I do care about consistency. And the fact is when people say parallel things to me about literature—they’re not interested; reading doesn’t ‘keep their attention’; they’re too busy—I’m aghast. So I asked myself, “Am I as snobbish about reading as the online culture police are about theater?”

The answer is a small bit of yes. But mostly no.

Ten years ago when my husband and I had good jobs and free time and a desire to “support the arts,” we made it a practice to see two or three shows a month. Sometimes they were great; often, they weren’t. But we felt like we were investing in something worthwhile—working actors and brick and mortar theaters. This added culture to our community, we reasoned, so the $60-80 per person (plus service fees) for quavering vocals and flubbed lines didn’t bother us much.

But around 2019, we began to grow weary of local theater. This after a series of highly-reviewed productions that broke into abjectly and artlessly political rants, all progressive in nature. More and more in 2019, we felt held hostage in the theater. Berated. Lectured. Talked down to. For $60-80 per person (plus service fees).

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One of the last things I heard my mother say to my father before he died was, “Irwin, you promised not to leave me.”

I was frankly angry, though I struggled not to show it. My father was ragged and choking on his own phlegm, 90 years old, so deep into Parkinson’s he was more tremor than man. It horrified me that she’d order him to stay by her side and suffer.

It also broke my heart.

She has, since the moment they met, been terrified of being without him. When I was four or five years old, I woke up one night while my father was on a business trip and wandered downstairs. There, in the foyer and the family room were a kitchen’s worth of metal pots and utensils, topped with book ends and fireplace pokers, stacked in pyramids and blocking both outside doors. I got a glass of water and went back upstairs, guilty, somehow knowing I musn’t mention what I’d seen.

Years later, I asked my mother about that night, if I’d dreamed it, and she reddened. I’d discovered her alarm system, she admitted. She was nervous when my father was gone overnight, so she barricaded the house with everything she had on hand.

They lived like this for 60 years, until May 22 of this year, when he died in their bed. My mother called me, unnaturally calm, to deliver the news. She spent two weeks discussing arrangements with my sister and me. She declined our offer to move closer to all of us, out east. It seemed as if now that the worst thing in her life had happened, my mom was no longer afraid. She got through my dad’s memorial service, greeting nearly 100 people by name.

Three days later, she lost her mind.

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On one hand, this is not how I want public discourse to be conducted. On the other hand, f*ck it. Free speech is IT. The most important thing—maybe the only one—that stands between us and tyranny. And last time it was directly under threat, starting in March 2020, I was slow to object because I felt unqualified and was afraid to offend.

What followed was two to three years of government clamping down in the most unAmerican way possible: censoring citizens, labeling opposing viewpoints “disinformation,” colluding with media to hide information from the public, and appointing administration watchdogs to monitor and limit speech.

It was the stuff of Cold War movies and dystopian novels. Would it have made a difference if I’d taken a stand and become ungovernable right away in March 2020? No. But would it have made a difference if we all did? Undoubtedly yes.

So as the only part of ‘all’ that I control, that’s my practice now.

One of my problems in 2020 was that I operated on the reasonableness theory.

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Some 60 years ago, my parents did a brave thing.

They met at work—a Jewish man from New England and a Catholic girl from Minnesota—and they fell in love. Then they decided, despite both of their families’ fury, to marry. Their bond lasted until two weeks ago, when my father died at 90.

Unfortunately, because they never settled the religious question, it died with him. And I am watching this twist my mother into a dark flatness. She does not talk to him, or about him. Despite a lifetime of weekly Catholic observance, she has no spiritual connection with the man she loved more than anyone on earth.

There weren’t a ton of good choices in 1965. My father conceded to be married in the church and went so far as to sign the promise that he would agree to raise any resulting children Catholic. But he told my mother in the moment that he was lying and, in fact, he absolutely would NOT inflict fantasies about ‘virgin birth’ or resurrection on his kids.

My mother insisted to herself that he would change his mind as time went on. She never had any desire to convert to Judaism; in fact, she found Jewish women overly forthright and loud and had no intention of surrounding herself with them.

In the end, each of my parents practiced their religion quietly, privately, passing along nothing to my sister and me. They started their marriage at a stalemate, and they ended it that way, too.

On Saturday, my father will be interred in a Catholic cemetery with no service or rites. There was talk of a rabbi for a day or two, but ultimately my mother decided no. My father had considered himself proudly culturally Jewish but he hadn’t attended a synagogue in decades. It would be false, she said. And she wasn’t wrong.

I suggested other ways to bring in a spiritual element: Hebrew readings, Beethoven’s 9th symphony (which my dad loved), or perhaps a program with speakers who talked about my father’s character and legacy, but those were discarded too.

There was no format for such a thing. It was too hard. Who would officiate? Who would attend? It didn’t make sense to either my mother or my sister. What they wanted was a “Celebration of Life.”

I was more for a Celebration of Death. But I was outvoted two to one.

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We were AT the county animal shelter, waiting at the desk to pick up a 50-pound Boxer mix named Pedro, when my mother called to tell me that my father had died.

It was not unexpected. My dad was 90 years old and had been ravaged by Parkinson’s. A fall in winter had left him with a fractured neck. He’d lived longer than anyone predicted, which was the point. For months we’d been putting things off—such as international travel, or getting a dog—thinking we’d be needed to dash back to Minnesota and help my mother.

Finally, we decided we had to live our life. We met Pedro and arranged to adopt him. And there we were, leading a smelly, rambunctious dog out on a leash, as I spoke to my mom about my father’s last hours.

We took Pedro home. My husband, John, bathed and distracted him while I contacted people and talked to family. We set out bowls of food and water, gave Pedro some chew toys, and showed him his bed. He leapt from chair to couch, gnawed on shoes, and lifted his leg on everything upright - including a set of cloth-sided suitcases.

For the next three days, we spent most of our waking minutes trading off dog duty. Pedro had been in the shelter for a year and when they billed him as “housetrained,” it meant - apparently - that he did not relieve himself in his kennel; he did, however, do his business anywhere else he liked. He’d never been aggressive, they said. And it’s true that no matter how rough he played with us, sometimes leaping a full five feet in the air, he didn’t bite. We took this as a good sign.

My father’s funeral was planned, two weeks out. We had time to get Pedro in order we told ourselves. We bought treats he loved and gave him lavish praise for everything from peeing outside to lying down. We taught him to walk with a gentle leader. Our first weekend as a family came and we decided to trial an overnight. Pedro was a terrific car traveler, silent as he watched out the window. We found he loves a hotel and loves a dog park even more. We thought we were in the clear.

So we stopped for lunch at an outdoor cafe. It was sunny and the sidewalk was a little crowded. People kept walking by him…over him. Two or three approached him without warning. Still, things were fine. We relaxed. Then out of nowhere, he lunged at a woman who was facing the other way.

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My male partner was invited to several events, including a group on AI coding, investor relations happy hours, and a luncheon with the mayor. He is the CEO and the more technical/financial of the two of us; I’m the humanities side of the business. So all that made sense.

Then I received an invite to a women’s event. I showed up at the appointed time with my business cards and laptop, only to find a large group of 40-ish ladies carrying designer handbags.

“Alrighty,” said one of them, rising and adjusting her smart mustard-yellow leather jacket. “Let’s stand in a circle, and everyone hold hands. Then I want you to say your name and your business and tell us your favorite Thanksgiving side dish.”

I honestly hoped someone would drive a truck through the building, or that a light fixture would fall and kill one of us. Fine if it was me—anything to get me out of this nonsense. But before I could think about faking sudden illness the women on either side of me sprang up and knocked me playfully with the backs of their hands.

Slowly, I put down my laptop, rose, and submitted to the handholding. When it was my turn I said my favorite side dish was roasted Brussels sprouts. But throughout the 25-minute circle share I was burning with fury. My anger only intensified when we were split into groups and told to discuss what tasks we were procrastinating (I don’t do that) and how to deal with our guilt. I grew snappish, then silent. I was accused by one woman—a ‘solopreneur’ with a massage business—of not being a team player.

I should have made a rule that day: No more women’s events. Ever. Sadly, I did not.

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It’s true that 96% of my life right now is about classic literature.

I’m not complaining! If you’re going to focus on one thing, this is a great one. It’s fun and comforting and chock-full of wisdom. But I do get caught up in loops.

Yesterday, for instance, we published “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” - with annotations from a superb high school English teacher - on Storyalīz. I was reading through the comments and decided I need to know more about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—his legacy, specifically. How many movies, series, book and TV characters did the single character of Sherlock Holmes beget?

Hercule Poirot, Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew. House, Monk, Robert Goren, Fox Mulder. BATMAN! (That’s just a handful of the scores I found online.)

When I sat down to watch TV, I wasn’t done. I surfed through the current Sherlock offerings. The Benedict Cumberbatch one—cringey since older women started forming watch parties and calling themselves as ‘Cumberbitches.’ Miss Sherlock, set in Tokyo. Young Sherlock, which was convoluted and forgettable. Something from the BBC that had grown kind of grainy. Sherlock & Daughter, a recent, tepid generations-collide Murders in the Building sort of show.

Then I found a seven-season CBS series called Elementary, and started watching. It was…for this overworked aging lady who was sinking into her couch at 10 p.m. after a very long day and a tall drink…perfection.

Easy on entry. It started with a montage-of-three (tried and true film technique): a grisly chase and bludgeoning, a young woman running in the freshness of morning, an odd guy in a cluttered apartment with bondage equipment and multiple TVs. Within minutes, the plot brought these three elements together: edgy, addictive Sherlock; his paid companion, a young female Watson; and the murdered society lady.

But that’s not all!

Aidan Quinn—the heartthrob cop from Practical Magic and star of The Book of Daniel, one of my favorite shows of all time—plays the lead detective. The great Lucy Liu makes a terrific Watson, with a tragic past. John Noble, from Fringe (again, one of my top 20) and recently of Severance, promises to make an appearance later in the series as Sherlock’s dad.

The story, in that pilot at least, is well-paced, with just the right mix of humor, suspense, character building, short-term payoffs and long-range plot arc. Now, juxtapose this with any of the Sherlocks above, most of which I have begun and tried, tried, tried to remain interested in, and failed.

That’s because the streaming Sherlocks are created for a different purpose. Rather than presenting a story that can be consumed, enjoyed, and wrapped up in 48 minutes, they’re designed for “bingeing,” for leaving the viewer unsatisfied and jonesing, tapping the Next button to get more.

You know that rule that streaming services now follow, where they restate the plot of an episode or movie approximately every 20 minutes, for the benefit of viewers who are also scrolling on their phones? (By the way, THANK YOU to Matt Damon and Joe Rogan for making this public, because I thought I was losing my mind.) This wasn’t going on yet in 2012, when Elementary began. I’m not saying it’s overly complex; in fact, it’s ridiculously watchable TV. But it’s storytelling that treats you like an adult. In a couple of ways, actually…

One of the things I’m loving about this is though it’s transposed to New York in the 21st century, the character of Sherlock is really close to the guy with the Meerschaum and the raging coke habit from London in the 19th. He’s an aloof addict with an Asperger-ish affect. Watson is a former surgeon who quit practicing after a crisis. No one is questioning their gender identity or making statements in support of fat acceptance or giving random soliloquies about climate change or in a polyamorous relationship—so far.

I suspect there are people who’ve seen this show, ready to jump in and say, “Just wait! It gets woke in season 3.” And maybe it does. But what I saw last night was a call back to the tightly-written, well-acted nourishing dark-chocolate mind candy that we all gave up in favor of cause-of-the-moment shows packaged for rapid, half-conscious consumption and full of [this is the part that absolutely guts me] REPETITIVE, TARGETED ADS!

We traded the 96% RT-rated Elementary and it’s like (The Good Place, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Wife, Parks and Recreation) for services that distribute theatrical Pez. And we did it because it seemed ‘high-minded.’ But now, we get Matt Damon’s dreaded robotic plot summaries inserted between insurance ads, all of which is likely written by AI.

There have been wonderful streaming shows. The Crown was terrific, for the first couple of seasons. Same with Dead to Me. I was a huge admirer of the Netflix German original called Dark. But most of the shows are poor and quality across the streamers has been on a steady downward trend. Whereas, I’ve come to realize the networks - even with their FCC laws; maybe partly because of their FCC laws? - continues to eke out some great stuff.

The one thing I will never miss about old-school TV was having to tune in at a particular time or miss part of the show. That decade where we DVR’d things was stupid. Having thousands of shows available on demand is the best thing about home entertainment today.

But give me a beautifully shot, highly-rated witty dramedy with actors who are having fun, a script that doesn’t preach, and a variety of whimsical general-interest ads. Every time, if possible. That’s all I ask.

Anyone have such a show to recommend?

He ignored an overwrought memoir written by a heartbroken mother who happened to have the connections to get her hastily-published book covered by several very major media outlets over the past two weeks.

Quietly, instead, Mr. Franklin sent out a newsletter recommending two of the best grief memoirs ever written: Max Porter’s “Grief Is The Thing With Feathers” and “Things In Nature Merely Grow” by the extraordinary Yiyun Li.

I’ll come back to Li’s book, as well as Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which Franklin also mentioned—that monster feat of grief writing, so deft it became a stage play and an entire psycho-social movement.

But first I want to tell you that when my older son died in 2016, it was simply assumed among my writing colleagues that I would produce a memoir. People didn’t ask me IF I was writing a book about him but whether I’d started yet.

The Providence-based novelist Ann Hood, who lost her daughter in 2002 to a strep infection and wrote copiously (and well) about that tragedy, actually launched an imprint specifically devoted to grief memoirs in 2018. “You must talk to her,” I was told by everyone I knew in the industry. I did, dutifully, send her an email and she set up a call, though she clearly had no idea who I was.

“So, what kind of book are you writing about your son?” she asked.

Everything in me revolted. Write? It had been a little less then two years since Andrew died and I could barely read! “Um, I’m really…not,” I said.

I could hardly be offended when she cut our talk short.

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Here’s another truth: Donald Trump has said horrible things about these journalists, writers, and academics, and threatened them in purely unconstitutional ways. He is often boorish, mean, and uncareful. (FTR, I’m with him on jailing the ones who used leaked information about the Iran rescue ops. That’s treason.)

I believe these are facts in evidence. But I can debate them if you like. Feel free to leave your comments and objections below.

What occurred at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 27 was a third specific, material attempt to assassinate Donald Trump, by a person who had listened to those journalists [writers, academics, pundits] who loathe him and wish him dead. It just so happened, in a narrative twist worthy of “The Good Wife,” that those very journalists were also in the room, and in the putative line of fire.

OK, so that’s what we know. Seems clear. Did these people want Trump dead or at least ‘removed’? Yes. That’s what they’ve been saying. Did they want to die themselves or even be splattered with blood at their expensive dinner? Not really. They were stuck in this place of cognitive dissonance, hiding under tables, guzzling wine, turning cameras on themselves and narrating the events.

There was the one dude who ate his salad, some warrior who refused to get on the floor because of his suit. (Maybe these were the same guy, I don’t know. Funny memes just don’t do it for me.) But mostly people were afraid and conflicted and once the drama was over they just wanted to get home to their brownstones and cashmere pajamas and the kale chips and kombucha they’d shoplifted from Whole Foods.

So why did Caitlin Flanagan, a writer I have loved for years, turn this into some sort of hero story about journalists and their ethics? It wasn’t that.

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About 15 years ago, Comcast did a brilliant thing. They introduced Xfinity—a new everything residential service that “bundled” Internet, cable TV, and home phone. One bill! Discounts! My dad, then in his later 70s, signed on.

Comcast didn’t tell him that the new VoIP (voice over internet protocal) might not identify his location for 911 calls, which is the reason my dad insisted on a landline. Or that there were similar VoIP services that were free. Because they made the deal seamless—meaning, my parents could use the phone they had—it felt white glove.

Fast forward to last week, when I spent approximately 9 hours of my life trying to disentangle my now-super elderly parents who are in assisted living from their Comcast contract. Can’t be done.

I actually visited a brick and mortar Xfinity store to pay my parents’ overdue bill and was directed to this machine:

It’s true, paying was express. But everything else took a LONG time.

My sister had already tried to contact Comcast by phone to discuss our list of problems. My parents’ cable was hooked up but not coming in to their new senior apartment. They couldn’t figure out the new Internet. And why was there a past due bill for almost $600? She gave up after the sixth or seventh phone tree.

So I got in line for customer service, naively thinking I could get everything solved.

You should know that the dude I talked to was REALLY nice (Ridgedale store in Minnesota, in case anyone wants to give him a raise). Young, dark beard, wore an ankh. He told me understood and he very much wanted to help but he couldn’t tell me anything, because I’m not on the account.

Not what services my parents have, or how to troubleshoot their connection issues, or how much was due on their bill. He did say it was far more than I thought and had just paid into the machine.

They have to add you to the account, he said. Then I can talk to you.

My dad won’t, I said. He thinks he can handle this himself. But he can’t.

Then you need power of attorney. Just the fact that this 30ish guy knew that meant he’d been in this spot before.

We’re working on it, I told him.

Listen, I know it sucks and I sympathize, he said quietly, but I’d lose my job.

I went back to my parents’ apartment, where two maintenance guys were reconfiguring their TV to bring in cable through the building. You’re paying double for cable now, I told my dad. Comcast, plus a bill from this place. Also Internet that you never use. Will you get on the phone with me and cancel Xfinity?

Once the new cable was installed, he agreed. We called. We waited through the phone trees, got to a human, and I translated because my father’s voice is affected by advanced Parkinson’s Disease. But when the representative finally understood, she pointed out that we can’t cancel. Because of the phone.

The problem, she said, was the bundle. My parents need Internet for the phone, even if they don’t use it for anything else. And without the cable, the prices for both would go up—possibly, because he’d been grandfathered into some deal years ago, more than what it cost for the three now.

So we left it as is. My parents now pay more than $350 a month (two cable providers, phone and Internet) in order to have a landline and watch reruns of “Blue Bloods.” Because they can no longer access their bill pay (because they can’t remember passwords), they actually pay way more because their accounts go past due and they’re charged interest and fees, but my dad won’t let anyone else take over the bills.

This is breakage. Comcast locked in my parents more than a decade ago and to be fair they were BIG users of the cable and Internet services up until last year. Now, they’re non-users, but on the hook probably for life.

I want to be clear: Technically, Comcast is doing nothing wrong. This is a perfectly legal practice I just don’t happen to like. They know it takes months and thousands of dollars to get a court-ordered conservatorship and power of attorney. And they’re quite happy to be paid during that time.

In the old days, before subscriptions were the way we bought everything, it was mostly gyms and gift cards that operated on this model. Fitness companies prosper only when customers buy packages or pay monthly fees for terrific training services they don’t use. It’s a super reliable strategy: People famously think they’ll exercise and pay to exercise but don’t do it. So gyms make their money on the 67% of memberships that are rarely used.

Gift cards have a 15-20% breakage rate. It’s a bonanza. The buyer pays full freight for a company’s service or product; the recipient sticks the card in a drawer or loses it or doesn’t like that particular restaurant. Magic income for which there is no output. It’s why you see a carousel of gift cards at almost every point of sale.

But today, a large percentage of transactions have a breakage component. Go to a grocery store, see a sale price, grab the item and throw it in your cart—without noticing you have to be a loyalty customer AND have a digital coupon, or it defaults to full price. Here’s another: this very platform. Substack has no provision to stop charging paid subscribers when a contributor dies. So careless users keep sending their dollars for Substack to take a cut long after the ‘product’ is definitely gone.

When we started concepting Storyalīz—our Duolingo-style serialized reading platform—last year, we were anti-subscription. Our plan was to charge only for the parts of stories that people actually consumed: 5 or 7 cents for each episode. Pay only for what you read. But after talking to the experts—by which I mean both app developers and readers of great literature—we were convinced to abandon the idea.

Micropayments have been tried again and again and they don’t work. There’s too much friction. Also, too much cost. Each individual payment comes with a credit card processing fee and the only way around this is to have people ‘bank’ a sum of money with you that they can draw down from. You know what people’s major complaint about this is? So many companies use those accounts as breakage. They create revenue by inheriting the dregs of forgotten accounts and millions of balances too small to pursue.

Readers told us they want a subscription model. It’s what they’re used to, and it’s the only way to make the reading experience seamless. So we’ve been puzzling over how to do this without doing evil. Because our consumers? They include families, and older single people, and first-generation college applicants, and a bunch of other people who cannot afford for us to pad our operating budget with their breakage. So we won’t.

It took us a while to figure out, but our solution is to let users opt in to an auto-cancel feature. When they sign up, they’ll be asked if they want their account deactivated—and all payments stopped—if they don’t use the app for three months. That way, we won’t be taking money from people who’ve suffered a health crisis or a divorce and lost track of their spending. We also won’t be shutting down perfectly happy users who happen to be touring Europe for six weeks….

We wish others would adopt this model. There are services that come close. Hulu and Netflix will allow users to pause their subscriptions, or go on a reduced plan when they’re not using it, and that’s great. But they also resume full charges at the end of some set period with a midnight withdrawal. Mass media do this, too.

So here’s our promise: A different kind of subscription. We don’t want your breakage. We don’t want to make money from tricking people into buying a service they can’t or won’t use. We just want you to love reading and do it every day.

I don’t know about you, but around late 2020 something changed for the worse in my brain.

It felt like my synapses kept shorting out. I had trouble following a recipe and struggled to organize my day. When speaking, I would lose my next thought. But the thing that bothered me most: I could no longer lose myself in a book. I didn’t love reading any more, and that felt like a tragedy.

Reading had been my solace since I was a weird, badly dressed kid in the late 1970s. No matter what was happening day to day, a library existed with an infinite (by my measure) number of stories I could live in.

But months into the worldwide shutdown, when I had more alone time than I had since age nine, my superpower wasn’t working. I’d start a book, but the details wouldn’t come together and form a universe in my mind. My thoughts kept stirring like dry leaves. I couldn’t forget my circumstances, which is essential to immersive reading. I was stuck in the present and I didn’t like it at all.

There were a few exceptions. “The Overstory” held me, in large part because I read it in winter of ‘21, sitting at a window, gazing out at the trees in my backyard. Later that year, Jonathan Franzen’s “Crossroads” consumed me; it felt like talking to an old friend about the spiritual struggles of a family he knew.

But these were outliers. I bought and borrowed literally hundreds of other books with no success. Literary novels were stiff with righteousness and I gave up on one after another. Genre fiction left me feeling undernourished and I wandered away. My husband, John—a Tolkien superfan of longstanding—kept reading new fantasy series but discarded more books than he finished for the first time in his life.

This left us, as a couple, lusterless. Reading was our travel, especially in the Covid era. We were both stuck. But we assumed it was us.

—

The pandemic wasn’t even close to the worst thing that had happened to us. Three and a half years earlier, our older son had been found dead in his apartment and our whole world went dark. There was a period when our minds were so broken, neither of us could think at all. We drank a ton and worked jigsaw puzzles and watched British comedies and cried.

Outside our tiny sphere, though, things kept humming. About a year after Andrew’s death, I was able to get through a whole book—Ann Patchett’s “Commonwealth.” I will never forget my gratitude for that escape. John had regained his ability as well. So when Covid dashed our reading brains we assumed there’d be a similar quick recovery. There was not.

Looking back, I think it’s because suddenly nothing made sense. About half of the things we’d accepted as organizational bedrock—children should go to school, Americans can congregate at will, spouses should be together when one of them dies—were overturned, overnight.

It’s true that nothing made sense about Andrew’s death at 28, either. But everyone we knew agreed on this point. There was consensus. Kindness. Warmth. In 2020 all of that splintered and the people we had known and trusted for decades went in opposite, and very hostile, directions.

Both John and I were on perpetual high alert, because it felt like literally *anything* could happen. People might eat bats and wipe out all of humanity. Countries could decide they had to kill everyone’s pets. It was possible for societies to be shut down and reopened as something different, so you had stayed in one spot but were in a whole new place.

We paced through ‘21, ‘22, ‘23 - each of us reading sporadically. I kept starting new books—the ones that got glowing reviews and were up for awards—and putting them aside when the author (inevitably) started shouting some political talking point.

This time, we weren’t alone in our reading desert. Long after the emergency lifted, friends and colleagues would confide, “I used to read all the time. But I just can’t any more.” They talked about feeling distracted and overwhelmed, about the avalanche of content from news, streaming, and social media. Almost everyone I spoke to used the word ‘doomscrolling’ to describe what had replaced reading in their life.

Even people who claimed they were still enjoying books would pause when I asked for a recommendation. “Well, I guess I haven’t had time lately,” they’d say slowly. And inevitably, they’d look guilty, as if I’d caught them in a lie.

I didn’t think anyone was lying intentionally. (It wasn’t until last year that the real liars - Internet book influencers - started doing that.) The people in my neighborhood and work life were lulled. They’d always been avid readers. They had houses full of books!They were the sort of intelligent people who read. Problem was, lately, they’d completely lost the urge.

Statistics show that literacy is plummeting in every American demographic. Eighth grade reading scores are at a 30-year low. One-third of students don’t have basic reading comprehension skills. But the one that explains it all: 44% of U.S. adults did not read a single book last year. This is a slow-motion catastrophe—the dawn of a post-literate age—and far from being struck with disbelief, I—a writer and former English professor—completely understand.

—

In 2023, an old friend called to ask if we’d join his book club. It was an odd one. Mostly couples. And they read only dead authors. No small talk or snacks; just books. We decided to try.

We attended for two years and while I didn’t always love it, something about the format helped. I plowed through “The Brothers Karamazov,” skimming the last third to prep for the meeting. I fell down on “Jude, the Obscure” and “Lonesome Dove,” which I found tedious and heavy on horses. There were delightful one-off surprises: “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

Then came “War and Peace.”

By this time, John had left the book club. He was a tech security consultant, putting in slavish hours. But over dinner, I’d tell him about the book. “It’s easy reading, line by line,” I said. “But there’s so much of it. So many characters! I’m out of practice.”

That weekend, my husband coded a quick and dirty reading app that he loaded on my tablet. “It’s a storyalizer,” he said. “Now you can read “War and Peace” in installments, the way it originally came out.”

The method was magic. We started loading up classics from Project Gutenberg, both of us reading like addicts again, sneaking sections in between tasks and phone calls. We told a few friends and they asked for the app. We told our son and he commented, “That sounds like it might be helpful for kids.”

Since that time, I’ve read and loved more books than I can count. Some that I had read before: “Jane Eyre,” “Little Women,” the entire Wizard of Oz series by L. Frank Baum (14 books). But also novels that I meant to read and hadn’t gotten around to, such as “Pride and Prejudice,” “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “The Time Machine” and — I’m embarrassed even now to admit this—”Frankenstein.”

I’m not saying there are no great books being published today. In fact, I’m sure there are. But it’s impossible to know which ones. The thing about the classics is that they’ve survived and sustained over hundreds of years for good reason. They transmit something universal, deeply human and transferable to every era.

Political books can be brilliant! “War and Peace” opens with a scene of people purity-checking each other at a party and discussing the terrible people that support Napoleon Buonaparte— whom the hostess refers to as the Antichrist. I read it in 2024 during the Biden-Trump election and chuckled, comforted that nothing about our predicament was new.

“A Tale of Two Cities” takes a decided position on the French Revolution. Steinbeck makes a case for farmers ruined by the Dust Bowl in “Grapes of Wrath.” Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” argues against colonialism.”1984?” Enough said. But these views have been judged moral by history. And they’re illuminated in a way that’s universal. When people cite the classics, no matter what their politics, they believe the hero is aligned with them.

—

For me - and for John - the dive back into classic literature of every kind has been healing. Like yoga, or a good quality meal. It is repairing the darting, lizardy brain patterns we acquired during Covid and replacing them with something soothing. Like music, or prayer.

And something about the storyalizer John whipped up in our home office helped; it felt undaunting, like less of a failure waiting to happen, to commit to roughly 800 words at a go.

I began carving out time in the afternoon, post-lunch, with the cup of coffee I know I shouldn’t have but allow myself if I’m reading. Each day I open up my tablet and start—”Don Quixote,” “Lolita,” “The Age of Innocence”— marking the places where the story captures something I didn’t know I was thinking, or relates to modern life.

It may not work for everyone, but reading has become again the thing I look forward to and treat like a guilty pleasure. I know I should be doing laundry, or sending that email, or researching the Middle East, I will think to myself, but this is so good. Just one more section.

And a beautiful calm descends.

Ann Bauer is the co-founder of Storyalīz.

Listen, I know you’re against this idea of group sex in public spaces with admission fees and drugs and spectators. But there’s precedent in Minneapolis. A proud past. The city has a history of bathhouse culture that goes back to my teen years and I feel this weird sort of nostalgia at their return. Though you could not pay me to enter one.

Gather round and I’ll tell you a story. When I was 15 years old, I left my parent’s three- story Colonial in Minnetonka, a mostly wealthy western ‘burb, and moved in with a drunken divorcee in a garden-level apartment on the far east side of St. Paul.

Why? Because my father was like a Jewish version of Charles Foster Kane and I wasn’t having it. My mother and sister knew how to placate and act dumb and he liked that. But I was a stupid, arrogant, stubborn sort of girl who could not manage. So I got hit once or twice and thrown out the door in multiple rages and ended up hitching a ride to a bar called the Will Hop In one night where I had a hamburger and met some dude.

Anyway, after that, my father and I mutually decided that living in the same house wasn’t for us. So I was ‘placed’ with this newly divorced woman and in return for taking me her rent was paid.

But that didn’t work out either. This woman had been richer than my parents until her husband’s empire of scam fell down. He went to prison, she to this basement unit. To cope with this, she drank. And screamed. To be fair, I was a very frustrating teenager and she had a lot to yell about. But our arrangement only lasted two months.

Eventually I lied about my age and got a waitress job and I lied again and rented an apartment (one of the best things about the pre-Internet age was you could do this) and moved out and disappeared. I was only three miles away, but so far as the divorcee and my parents knew, I had vanished into the city.

Again, I’m going to tell you, I was 15. Dumb as the day is long. I walked through dark alleys at 2 a.m. and left my door open and I probably definitely would have been raped or murdered or both. Except the gays found me and took me in.

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There are people who dream of starting businesses and being their own boss. Innovating. Growing something from the seed of an idea to a product out in the world. They were born to be entrepreneurs.

I definitely was not.

So when I agreed to be the anchor and chief funder of a tech start-up called Storyalīz—along with my husband, John—I was truly naive. I didn’t understand that as an entrepreneur you have to change direction repeatedly and work 19 hours a day 7 days a week and keep track of both the biggest picture and the smallest detail simultaneously at every minute, including in your sleep.

Speaking of sleep, I didn’t understand that our business concept would creep into my dreams and dominate every car ride and dinner conversation. Or that I would think about it almost (but not quite) the way I once did a newborn, obsessing over each choice and viewing the whole world through the lens of helping it survive.

My husband is in his glory. He’s been inventing stuff since he made a computer out of spare parts in his teens. He loves the kind of work day where you eat microwave ramen and sleep under your desk. It brings him back. Not me. I’m truly an accidental entrepreneur—having a great time! very few complaints—but damn, I am not organically suited for this.

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