It was most different for the first one, because I was worried no one would come. Like, more than a guest would be. I was specifically haunted by an image of myself standing alone in the (spacious) back room of Consignment Lounge, holding 100 nametags.

But that didn’t happen, even for a second! A couple people got there before me.

Now I just do a few recurring tasks that are templated, optional, or delegate-able. (For instance, I’m pretty sure we don’t need the lists of questions to talk to each other, but I LOVE writing them, so I do.) The main thing differentiating me from other book club members is that I have so much DATA.

I think it’s really interesting, and there’s no need to keep a lot of it private. So I am going to share some today!

How many meetings have we had so far?

5 — our 6th is tomorrow! In chronological order, we have read:

• Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)

• If Beale Street Could Talk (James Baldwin)

• The Trial (Franz Kafka)

• Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

• Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson)

How many people come to the book clubs?

I usually make reservations for ~20, because that’s how many people came to the first club, and because you often have to pay for groups bigger than that at bars. So that’s the target.

And then here’s roughly how many people have come to each book club (myself included).

• Frankenstein: 20

• If Beale Street Could Talk: 18

• The Trial: 15

• Never Let Me Go: 23

• Housekeeping: 21

• Average attendance: 19.4 « doing pretty good!

It’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison across clubs, though, because I have offered progressively more tickets over time. I just got more confident that not every ticketholder would come. So for the first club I offered 25 tickets, and for our club tomorrow I offered 35.

How many different people have come to club?

46 people have come to at least 1 book club.

How many regulars are there?

A lot! They are great, thank you regulars! Here is some data:

• People (including me) who have come to all 5 book clubs: 6

• People who have come to 4 or more book clubs: 8

• People who have come to 3 or more book clubs: 13

This is not completely random, to be clear — I do stuff to encourage regulars (regularness?). If you come to a book club, you get early access to tickets to the next book club, for example. And I’m just generally more flexible and accommodating with people as they come to more clubs.

But I’m still touched people come back! They don’t have to. I’m especially touched when they hated the book and they come back anyway.

How flaky are people?

Not prohibitively flaky. Here is the % of people by club who had an Eventbrite ticket, never cancelled, and didn’t show up:

• Frankenstein: 9%

• If Beale Street Could Talk: 18%

• The Trial: 41%

• Never Let Me Go: 28%

• Housekeeping: 24%

• Average flake rate: 23%

This data has two pretty clear things to say:

• We really had beginner’s luck with Frankenstein! I think there was a special halo around the first meeting, and a special Jacob-Elordi-movie halo around Frankenstein.

• People did NOT like The Trial. Even the people who finished it and came to club said frowningly that it seemed “unfinished” (!!!) (I mean how is it supposed to keep going…?) . It’s no problem though, because I love The Trial enough for us all :)

How many people have flaked more than once?

Only 2 people have hard-flaked more than once. It’s more common that people repeatedly get tickets they cancel a few days before club.

One interesting thing: The chronic hard-flakers are women, and the chronic soft-flakers are very disproportionately men. I have no interpretation of this!

How many people on the current email list have never come to book club?

88% — the email list is extremely inefficient lol.

What drives most of the email list sign-ups?

I post about each book club in at least one neighborhood community group, and I have done some flyering. Those things drive most of the sign-ups.

Actual Instagram posting brings in almost nothing besides vibes—just kinda proves the book club is “real.”

How close is the email list to “too big”?

70% of the way there! We currently have ~350 subscribers, and the most emails I can send in a day from a free Gmail account is 500. When we hit 500, I’ll probably switch the email list to invite-only, and reserve it for people who have attended at least one club. I don’t want to go pro and buy an email domain and warm my list and blah blah blah.

I also don’t want us to purely do tickets on Instagram, because I believe hardcore book people hate social media — but I think it’s okay if Instagram is a sort of “foyer” that first-timers have to navigate, and that’s the non-monetary cost of the free book club.

Any other interesting metrics floating about?

Yes! It would be too much work to fully quantify the below, but here are some “lived numerical realities” (a phrase I made up) that I have noticed:

• Never Let Me Go tickets sold out the fastest

• Housekeeping tickets sold out the slowest

• The Trial tickets were the least sticky (went decently fast but people kept cancelling)

• If posts about a given book get high Instagram engagement, that does not mean people like that book OR that they will come to book club. Instagram engagement might even be inversely correlated with real-world joy and activity. It’s weird!

• When I make an Instagram video with a blowout specifically from Drybar, it gets way more views-per-engagement than a normal video. Blowouts I do myself or get at other salons give ZERO boost. Drybar stands alone!

Linxxx

• The perspective switching… the horns… the delivery… a gorgeous song.

• This Ask Polly question made me feel like I did it. I grew up!

• PREORDERED: The new Rachel Cusk book that might be about Natalie Portman, or not

• An observant person goes to the movies

• All Instagram wants to do is sell me this shirt with a puckered, weird seam under just one boob. It’s giving… mastectomy?

• “There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

• Our next book club book is The Vegetarian by Han Kang!

I am very excited for this trip. My vision is that I will cycle around Italy all day every day, getting hungry for pasta, and then every night… I’ll eat pasta. I mean! That’s the life for me. The one catch is that to live this beautiful dream I must also bike 40-60 miles per day. On an ebike, so it’s not THAT serious, but still.

Preparing for the trip has already been illuminating. I sort of suspect the prep will be the best part. There’s something very cool about doing something new (biking far) in familiar places (Chicago, my body). It’s a non-spatial vacation from my routines. Type 2 Vacation.

Here are some things I’ve learned from my biking adventures so far:

• Strava is really useful. I thought it was just for runners, but it’s also for bikers; it tracks how far you go in a very precise way, and saves a map of where you went. Without it, I would have no idea if I biked 7 miles or 500 miles; I have no body-feel for distance. Unfortunately, the price of knowing my distance is knowing my speed, which is tragically slow due to…

• Wind. The riptide of the air! I found biking out to the Point “a breeze,” because there was a literal breeze behind me the whole time — but then home, it blew enormous gusts into my face. My bike speaker, set to the same volume I had heard and enjoyed on the ride out, was inaudible. I was biking at a sometimes walking pace. Wind is serious! Especially for me. I was passed many times on my way home by more wind-resilient (strong) bikers going in the same direction.

• Biking makes me see the city differently. I typically take transit to places far from my house, such as Hyde Park, and I kind of zone out along the way, listening to a podcast. I only start paying full attention once I get to my destination. So I experience most things outside a five-mile radius of my home as these little… islands of consciousness? But I’m more continuously present when I’m biking, and it helps me feel how the city is not a constellation of destinations. It’s all one big slab!

• I get nervous about getting home. I don’t understand how far I can go without overextending myself yet. I think encouragingly to myself, a lot, that I just have to do my best and it’s okay to take breaks. But it makes my brain restless to be out and about, unsure how hard or time-consuming it will be to get home. I keep thinking, “My cat is alone! Is he okay?” (Sometimes when I’m not sure I’m okay I do weird proxy worrying about whether my cat is okay.)

• Locations are stored in my memory in an interesting way. I was biking on the Lakefront Trail, and it helped me remember my last big Southbound bike trip on the Lakefront Trail, which I took a couple years ago with my ex-bf. When I started biking the memory was hazy, but as I biked, it came back into crisp focus. The path felt familiar, and I could tell exactly when I biked past the place my last trip ended. I thought it was cool, how much of the memory was situational / stored in the physical place.

• Biking for a long time hurts my hands. Like, a lot, and they kind of go numb. Apparently I am compressing my hand nerves by holding onto the handlebars. Reddit people rec adjusting the fit of your bike (ok) and increasing your core strength (ughh ok). Apparently biking and planking are not dissimilar.

• I don’t know how to rest in the middle of a ride. Like, how long does it take to feel refreshed and ready for the ride home? According to r/bicycling I shouldn’t rest for more than 5 minutes unless I’m a freaking loser. But I could be a loser. I think the real issue is I don’t know how it feels for me to be “too tired” or “rested enough” yet, and I just have to feel it out.

• More things seem close now. Earlier this year, I biked to my favorite place in the world, the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool, and felt it was kind of a schlep. After I biked to the Point, I stopped at the pond on my way home to lie on a rock, and I thought of it as a nice scenic pit stop “close to home.” Biking far brings everything a little closer, mentally. I thought that was nice!

Reader question

Do you know about biking sort of far?? Any tips? Anything you’ve learned about yourself from doing it?

Linxxx

• Speaking of slabs, which I was above, The Radicle has amazing chocolate slab pie

• [Feeling enthusiastic and looking forward to her pastry plans]

• Another thirst trap that really worked on me……….. I like how his lips aren’t green SORRY!

• A generational chicken talent

• The ultimate NSFW New Yorker article ft. real-life Dr. Frankenstein

• The next book club book is The Picture of Dorian Gray! Sold out for now but things can change fast.

I really was not to my knowledge feeling sad. I thought, “Wow, this song really brings something up for me!”

I think some of it is the song itself, which (shoutout Spoon) makes no sense lyrically, but has some themes of romantic longing and missing someone from your past. I’m single and my mom is dead so I can always get down with themes of this nature.

It’s also a nostalgic song (cassettes mentioned!) that brings up nostalgia for me personally, so that’s a surreal layered thing. It makes me remember the names of buildings on my college campus I never think about — I guess you could say it summons them! Here are some: Reynold’s Club. Cobb. Max Palevsky.

I don’t think any of that is really why the song makes me cry, though. Upon reflection, I think I cried because the song gives me language for something mysterious that just happened recently, during a period of really intense sadness that felt unprecedented in my life.

It’s weird to even say that, because as discussed mere paragraphs ago, my mom is dead! She died in 2011. But when she died, I was 22 and I honestly kind of white-knuckled through it. The thing I remember thinking then was that I had to keep going to work. I was not going to lose my job because my mom was dead. I would write my daily quota of Groupons!

So I did. I wrote soooo many Groupons, literally thousands. And in that time, day-to-day, I didn’t feel as sad as you might think. I felt, iirc, unfocused and numb — I was kind of like, “I have my whole life to feel sad about this” (true). I primarily wanted to act normal, go through the motions, and occasionally tap out of a party early if my ears started ringing.

Feelings about my mom’s death come back periodically, though — I think they always will — and now I feel them more directly as sadness, or I guess grief. (Grief is a subset of sadness, I am learning from feelingswheel.com.) They usually come back when something difficult happens, and I wish I could talk to my mom about it, and then I’m like, “Wow I really miss her!” They also sometimes return when something great happens, or I see a very stylish British living room (IYKYK), and I wish I could tell her because she’d be thrilled.

Sometimes it’s a mix of both, where I’m really in the shit with some guy or whatever and I know that if I told her about it, we would both REALLY laugh. Talking to her would transform the situation into something silly and new. But she’s not here, I’m sad, and that specific flavor of LOL and reframing is lost. I can usually find a little something with my friends or my dad, but it’s not the same.

In Q4 2025 (yes I measure my life in fiscal quarters, because I’m a corporation), I was in this last situation — I was fresh out of some sort of thing with some guy, and I knew there were comic elements to the situation, but I wasn’t laughing. I was sad, and then I was sad and missing my mom, and then it was snowballing and this blanket of inertia fell over my life. I would sit down on the couch and spend 30 minutes trying to get back up and microwave a burrito (from Trader Joe’s, callback).

All kinds of transitions became really hard and slow: between sleeping and waking up, between work tasks, between exercises at the gym. I kept wanting to sit down on my weight bench at the gym and just… stay there, Bartleby style. I didn’t even want to go home.

Needless to say, I wasn’t enjoying things the way I used to, as a questionnaire you too may have taken would put it.

I definitely remembered enjoying things. I recalled myself having a whole energetic personality, where I joked around with the baristas at Dunkin and the bagel shop, and played with my cat, and went for walks, and felt really engaged and excited to learn new things at work. I could focus and I liked to try new things. I had a lot of ideas!

Where did that lady go? I thought. I miss her.

The only thing I found energizing during this time, weirdly, was reading my old writing. I was reading old diaries, Substacks, anything I could find. Why was I doing this? I didn’t know exactly, and it struck me as sort of unseemly, self-obsessed behavior. But I was also like, you know what, it’s a rare thing that feels good right now, and it’s not hurting anyone, so why not.

I read a ton. I remembered long-forgotten work incidents from many jobs ago, acquaintances 90% buried by the sands of time, my MFA colleagues’ thesis collections. I reread recent history, too — I kept a detailed journal while I was seeing the guy I was no longer seeing, thank goodness. He often tested the hypothesis that I had a bad memory, and that if he waited long enough I’d forget hurtful stuff he did. It never worked out for him, and my journal was a key reason why.

I knew the purpose it was serving in real time, too. I said it in an entry from last September (reread many times), that started:

I sort of don’t want to write about this, but I need to document it so I remember. I HAVE TO REMEMBER HOW BAD IT WAS. FUTURE MAE, DON’T MINIMIZE THIS. PROTECT US!

I think maybe I thought this was funny when I was writing it, or that it would become funny? It’s a little melodramatic. But it’s still mostly sad to me. I remember the feeling that someone needed to get mad on my behalf, but that I was too weak to do it myself. I couldn’t hold on to the indignation. I couldn’t hold on to much at all; my hands were always hurting and curling up into little stress claws around this time. Sometimes I would Google around for finger stretches, like it was a purely physical ailment, but as Future Mae, let me tell you: It wasn’t.

It took a while to feel like Future Mae, distinct from and protector of Previous Mae. I did a lot of rereading and went back to therapy and just… felt really bad for a few months. Slowly, verrrrrry slowly, my old energy and old personality came back. I actually got this weird huge surge of energy right at the end of the year — like all my energy for 3 months arrived in one day — but it didn’t stay or stabilize right away. It’s still a little in and out.

When I hear “I Summon You” now, it definitely reminds me of this rereading era (which has passed; I get bored now rereading old journals). I think part of what I was doing back then was summoning my old, energetic self back, ingesting her thoughts into my brain like that would graft her back into me. It worked, to some extent, and I’m so glad!

When I wrote that desperate little note to Future Mae, I was also summoning myself — a new kind of self with a more protective, parental approach to her own well-being. And that worked, too! My mom’s still not here, but a new echo of her is here. You could say I summoned her.

.

.

.

Here she is, with me :)

Reader question

Have any of your parents died? Do you ever summon dead people, or new versions of yourself?

Linxxx

• 23-year-old Mae on her mom’s death, for a little time travel!

• My mom loved the BBC Pride & Prejudice miniseries, and she was right to.

• A powerful critique of the Space Needle

• Famesick is awesome and that freako second-opinion doctor HBO sent her to should be IN JAIL

• My thirst has never been trapped so effectively and idk what it means either

• The next book club book is Housekeeping! Tix out today :)

I used to mainly evaluate books on pleasure reading potential and that muscle is strong. Before I open a book, I can pretty accurately clock how much I’ll enjoy it and how much effort it’ll take to read, based on a bunch of stuff I’ve read and heard about it and then mostly forgotten.

But I’m less confident assessing discussability (made up word alert). I don’t have the reps! We’ve only had three book clubs so far. And I’ve taught and participated in many classes where we discussed books, but book CLUB discussion is different. There’s no teacher, and the goal is more “social club for nerds” than “true academic rigor.”

What books fit this situation? I have a lot of partially-tested hunches and theories, and I thought it would be fun to share them and see if other people have countervailing thoughts!

So OK, here are some loose opinions about which books are fun to discuss at book club:

1. High-effort books

A book is usually effortful to read (for me) because it asks me to do interpretive work. It’s not as digestible as an email; I have to make educated guesses about what the characters are thinking and feeling, what’s motivating them, how the book is striking certain emotional chords with me, and what it all means.

When not everything is super spelled out, that creates space for more diverse perspectives on the book, and a better discussion. I think!

The Trial made me soften on this, though. In the “In the Cathedral” chapter, two characters discuss a story that is pretty short and low-effort to read. But the in-text discussion reveals SO many layers of ambiguity and texture that I did not see on first pass that now I’m like, huh. Maybe that story wasn’t low-effort… I was just putting *in* low effort and reaping what I sowed.

That said, there is a real type of low-effort book — I’m guessing Famesick by Lena Dunham is such a book? — that actually is bad for discussion, because it’s telling you a story and interpreting it in the same text. It’s actively trying to quell discussion and “set the record straight,” or tell you an injustice is bad, or similar. I’m excited to read Famesick and listen to 3-5 podcasts about it, but it’s not for book club.

2. Short books

400 pages max, and under 300 is ideal. How much is a normal person going to read in a month? How much am *I* going to read in a month? A SUMMER month? BFFR.

3. Old books

If I’ve heard of them, they’ve “stood the test of time” and probably have something interesting to say.

+ any book that came out before the first iPhone (2007) counts to me as old. Since then we have all gotten worth at thinking longform thoughts. (This isn’t even my idea; I forget where I got it. Maybe How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell? But it tracks.)

4. Books with a solid plot-to-interiority ratio

My two favorite books are basically character studies of shy, awkward everywomen: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld and The Idiot by Elif Batuman. They’re all about the narrators’ inner worlds, and the plots are caaaarefully constructed, but low-intensity. I love that! And yet, I don’t want to discuss these books at a book club.

I know these narrators so well, and relate to them so much. They are my cherished imaginary friends. Why would I discuss them behind their back in a book club?

I’m joking a little, but I genuinely worry that with a book takes place heavily in the narrator’s head, the discussion will become too much about the narrator — how much we each like and resemble them (or don’t). And then are we starting to discuss ourselves and whether we like each other? Ahhh!

That said, a plot that bangs can support a lot more interiority. Crime & Punishment, for example, would be great to discuss, even though it’s so zoomed in on Raskolnikov’s real-time thoughts you like literally know if he sees a bug. The key (imo) is that a BIG event happens. It’s not just a novel about him; it’s about murder!

5. Books that don’t promise a happy ending

I don’t want to use book club to discuss romance novels, or Harry Potter. Books invested in triumphant arcs and good vs. evil feel dull and overdetermined. (Not to sell Harry Potter short, because Harry definitely wonders if he’s evil at times, and Ron gets a little evil when he gets too hungry in book 7.)

I want us to be discussing a story that is complicated on purpose. Like something the author and I agree is complicated. A problem with a right answer only gets a club so far. There’s a reason there are no addition clubs.

6. Books with stakes higher than interpersonal relationships

There are a lot of great books about marriages and friendships! But for book club, I feel we need some kind of systemic or existential question in the works. There has to be something more at stake than love and relationships, pretty explicitly. Discussing relationship-focused books can veer into… gossip? And I LOVE gossip, but I want book club to operate in a different register.

I worry this is sexist! It excludes all of Jane Austen. But then I look within myself and I really don’t really want to discuss her at book club!

7. Self-serious books

Here is the first sentence of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy: “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.”

The first time I read it, browsing in a used bookstore, I literally laughed out loud. I recall thinking “Dear lord. Men can use commas too!” and firmly putting the book down.

But in the intervening years, I have grown to respect this sentence, for two reasons. First, the man referenced (seemingly) (I’ve still only read one sentence) cares about the sleeping child, and there is something nurturing and impurely cowboy about that.

Second, it’s way more fun to discuss prose like this, that takes itself and its cold nights seriously, than some ironic tale about a dumbass. (Or even some earnest tale about funny characters—because then it’s like, why are these characters so relaxed and horsing around? Stakes probably low; see item #6.)

Authors operating in any kind of snarky/ironic mode are positioning themselves as smarter than the characters. They’re making a subtextual argument that They Get It — which even if true, restricts them to the realm of stuff that they get.

In self-serious fiction, the author is really going for it. Their claim is less that They Get It, more that They’re Trying to Understand Because It Matters. That’s more ambitious and opens up a wider array of possibilities. I’m more excited to discuss it! Even if it makes me laugh.

Question for readers!

What do YOU think makes a good book club book? I am so curious!

I would also love to hear if you think I’m making inaccurate and/or unacknowledged assumptions about “good discussions”! I surely am and I would love to know about them. I’m Trying to Understand Because It Matters!!!

Linxxx

• The dumbest intelligence-flavored blog post I’ve ever read.

• Conversely! The most insightful stupidity-flavored blog post I’ve ever read.

• Enjoying the song “iPad” [beautiful lobotomized smile]

• Felt extremely called out by this.

• Pusha T on Jay Z // Stevie Nicks on Taylor Swift!

• 🗣️ I CAN KEEP MY GUN IN MY TRUCK

• And our next book club book isssssss Never Let Me Go :)

I’m not going to even pretend to write about book club discussion topics anymore, because it’s restrictive in a way that serves nobody. But I AM going to keep writing Substacks about book club books until it becomes impractical or unpleasant (not yet!). There’s a depth or type of thinking I can only do in writing.

So without further ado: the thoughts! Overall I really enjoyed If Beale Street Could Talk. It felt refreshing to read after Frankenstein, which was 99% summary and speeches. Beale was the inverse — 99% scene and conversations! Almost exclusively scene!

Which leads me to my first take:

1. Sometimes there was too much scene!

There’s one part in particular, right after Tish non-verbally tells her mom she’s pregnant, when there’s dialogue AND narration about how they’re going from the kitchen to a bedroom for some privacy and maybe Tish can lie down. Tish lies down and then gets up and takes off her coat and lies BACK down. I was kind of like, wait, let us not forget our useful friend summary, and our other useful friend, “I took a nap.”

Still, I’d much rather a bit too much scene than too much summary, in the end. Scene gets me emotionally invested in a story, and James Baldwin is a master of a long, realistic scene with exciting stage directions. (Spit! Slap!)

I’m almost like, sir, do you want to write a PLAY? But then he’s dead.

2. Was Tish… God?

Listen: She’s an omniscient narrator, describing many scenes she wasn’t present for: Sharon’s trip to Puerto Rico, some of Fonny’s time in prison, her and Fonny’s dads chatting at the bar, etc.

And she’s creating life… by being pregnant…

I don’t think this is the main thrust of the novel, but there’s a little troll here, where Baldwin has created a first-person omniscient narrator (unusual!) who dislikes church and feels specifically UNLOVED there. You know?

3. Fonny was too obviously innocent.

Fonny isn’t presented as a perfect angel (he threw Tish’s tomatoes at a wall!), but he IS presented as 100% definitely innocent of the rape he’s in prison for. He was somewhere far away when the crime happened, with two witnesses, AND he’s a good guy. At book club, I really wanted to find the one weirdo who thought Fonny did it, and I couldn’t!

I felt like James Baldwin didn’t trust the reader to trust Fonny. Part of that is the heaviness of a rape charge in a novel, because it’s like… why did the author CHOOSE to give that to you? In fiction, things don’t happen randomly.

But Fonny’s alibi is so airtight to Tish and the reader, though not to the state, that it made the story feel a little didactic to me. Systemic racism can still work hard and create obvious injustice in a slightly ambiguous situation. (I mean that police lineup where Fonny was the only black guy!)

As is, we don’t see Tish doubt Fonny’s innocence for one second. She never even speaks to a reasonable person who doubts his innocence. She deals with the cognitive dissonance of his innocence and imprisonment, which is interesting, but to me it’s even more so outside a sealed aquarium of certainty.

4. Artifice deserved more credit.

The villains of If Beale Street Could Talk, at least as much as Officer Bell, are the women of Fonny’s family, who Tish refers to as “hags.” Their main crime is enjoying the performance of “goodness” at church, even though it’s out of alignment with their private lives, where they do some secret sex stuff and rarely visit Fonny in prison. Oh, and feud with Tish’s unborn baby.

Those fake hags don’t sound fun to me either, trust. But you know what I’ve also found through living, unmentioned in this book: Artifice helps get things done.

For instance, what if Sharon had employed a bit more artifice when she went to Puerto Rico to try to persuade Fonny’s accuser to drop the charges? She played that pretty direct and confrontational, and it didn’t work. People don’t like to be politely asked to drop their rape charges in the middle of a home invasion, it turns out.

Unfortunately, I do think Fonny’s reviled mom could have handled that situation more effectively —and I thought it was a weakness of the novel that it was so outside the realm of possibility for her to go!

As written, the fans of artifice and the fans of fighting injustice were two mutually exclusive, warring factions throughout. Every woman who cares about artifice and amassing social capital also sees their perceived virtue as something to passively hoard.

I don’t know, man! There’s an alternate version of this book where at least SOME women in Fonny’s family cash in their church cred and organize the church community to fundraise and get him out on bail. And maybe they still don’t visit him at The Tombs, and that sucks! But I really think it takes all kinds to make dinner. That’s not a real idiom but it should be.

5. Tish didn’t overdo it!

She might be the purest “observer” narrator I’ve encountered who isn’t literally, physically restrained. We do see her make one big decision: to stand in front of Fonny at the tomato store to protect him from Officer Bell. It’s arguably the inciting incident of the novel.

But after that…?

She wants Fonny out of prison more than anyone, but she kind of doesn’t take the lead on that. Or on a side quest. Her boldest moves are thoughts and speech acts:

• Thinking about doing sex work

• Inviting Mrs. Hunt to come kill her [Tish’s] unborn baby (invite declined)

• Thinking about [checks notes] opening up and destroying Officer Bell’s face so they can both be free

This is not to say she does NOTHING or that she has to do more for me to like her. I love her. She’s an incredible observer. She has a solid work ethic and gets herself to the perfume store even when she feels like crap.

For a character in a novel, she just expresses herself unusually heavily through thoughts and reflection. Her actions are mostly repetitive care work — going to work, visiting Fonny, and… implicitly getting reports from more active characters? Maybe she will become a journalist one day.

6. “The system” runs on desire with nowhere good to go.

I thought a lot about why James Baldwin talks about sex and sexual urges in such granular detail in this book. Tish loses her virginity to Fonny for seven whole pages! We get a full page of a Fonny solo expedition in prison! Why?

Here’s my working hypothesis: I think there’s a submerged story here about how institutions — the church and the police force, specifically — are built on displaced sex drives.

In the world of the novel, sex is ideally an expression of love, like it is for Tish and Fonny; then it becomes sacred, in a way church wishes it was. But most of the characters can’t or won’t access that, and instead express their sex drives in unloving power play — usually by participating in the normalized BDSM baked into hierarchical institutions.

For example! Officer Bell (symbol of the police) is turned on by dominating civilians for work. Meanwhile Fonny’s mom (symbol of the church) seems to be getting an interesting sexual something out of submitting to her husband in the present, because she will ultimately dominate him in the afterlife.

Basically, I thought the novel made a case that people running around with sexual urges they don’t understand or want to understand are the ones most likely to participate in morally dubious institutions / “the system.”

I found it pretty persuasive! I’m not sure sex is THE thing that makes the world go around, but it’s huge. Top two. There’s just also money.

Linxxx

• I don’t watch Summer House but I do think this song I love is prophetic West/Amanda fanfic.

• A chatbot goes to couple’s therapy with her human lover?!?!?!?

• Welcome to heaven: the California peanut butter cup. I made that up but I did eat my first one in LA.

• A gorgeous impression of Walgreens! Like I was really there.

• If Beale Street Could Talk makes me want to give to a BAIL FUND!!! What if we all do it right now O.O

• I’d link to an Illinois bail fund but we abolished cash bail in 2023. Wooo!

• Next book club book is THE TRIAL!

The club’s first book was Frankenstein, and today I’ll be covering:

• The Frankenstein main characters I liked most and least

• Frankenstein: feminist?

• Frankenstein x modern life

• Friendship chaos in Frankenstein

• Dr. Frankenstein’s sickliness

• Sexual tension between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster

• The movie vs. the book

If you, too, read Frankenstein and are overflowing with opinions and feelings, I would LOVE it if people wrote their own Frankenstein Substacks and sent them to me. Or hosted their own book clubs! (Here’s the list of book club discussion questions.) My dream is for this to all be very Open Source and Conversational.

Alrighty, here we go.

The Frankenstein main characters I liked most and least:

I’m going to focus on just the three narrators, for concision — here’s my power ranking:

1. Robert Walton: Sort of wins by default, because he’s never killed anyone, and he shows an ability to learn and grow. When we meet him, he’s on an obsessive quest to find the magnet at the North Pole — so basically, he’s looking for individualistic glory on the Frontiers of Knowledge — but by the end, he turns his ship around goes the eff home. His men want him to. He wants to see his sister. Growth! He probably mainly wins this ranking because we get to know him the least.

2. The monster: He IS a serial killer and I hold that against him, but he isn’t trying to hide it, and he can talk openly about his motivations and impact. It turns out I value self-awareness over not killing people?! I’m in danger. I also feel sympathy for the monster because a lot of his difficulties are not his fault — he didn’t ask to be born (and won’t let you hear the end of it!), or to be abandoned at birth. As Eminem would say, “Where were the parents?” A lot of this fella’s wrongdoing comes from a huge, curdled desire to connect and love.

3. Dr. Frankenstein: THISSSSS WORMY LITTLE GUY. If he has zero haters, I’m dead. He’s such an irresponsible and neglectful scientist, husband, and friend. A man constantly wallowing in self-pity about problems he caused himself! He is the king of self-sabotage and self-unawareness. Even on his deathbed, he can’t clock his greatest misstep: abandoning his creation when it first came to life. The monster never needed to become a monster, dude! No one has more deservedly died a virgin than Dr. Frankenstein.

Frankenstein: feminist?

I’ve heard that it is but I’m not so sure. Can a book be feminist if the female characters rarely appear, and when they do they’re like, “Eh, no big deal if I get wrongfully guillotined! 🤷‍♀️😇” ? I want more for them all—especially Robert’s sister, who spends the entire book being addressed and never speaking.

But I do think the core, unnatural “horror” of the novel is that a man, on his own, created a life. Dr. Frankenstein cracks immediately under the weight of that responsibility, like literally doesn’t lift a caretaking finger and falls ill for months. He only realizes YEARS later he might owe the monster some kind of guardianship, and even then he “realizes” murkily at best. Meanwhile IRL, women routinely create life and carry caretaking responsibilities, and often do a good job. (Though not all/only women, sometimes a bad job, etc.) The book brought that contrast into focus for me, which is arguably feminist.

Then AGAIN, Frankenstein doesn’t critique men in general so much as Dr. Frankenstein specifically. Other male characters would surely handle his situation better: his dad, Clerval, even the monster. (The monster would be a super-devoted dad!) So like I said, I’m on the fence.

One thing I definitely think is feminist is that Mary Shelley thought of this story and shared that with the world. It’s VERY strange! I support women being strange in public.

Frankenstein x modern life:

Reading Frankenstein in the present day, I felt like the monster was our first incel. I was struck by the parallels between his worldview and Elliot Rodger’s on a recent reread Amia Srivinivasan’s “Does anyone have the right to sex?” (loved her whole essay collection btw, banger).

The biggest parallel is that the monster and Elliot both blame their social rejection on their looks — but as Amia astutely points out, that’s probably not it:

Rodger was a creep, and it was at least partly his insistence on his own aesthetic, moral and racial superiority, and whatever it was in him that made him capable of stabbing his housemates and his friend a total of 134 times, not his failure to meet the demands of heteromasculinity, that kept women away.

I mean, YEAH. Yeah. For the monster too, his capacity to murder probably comes through in his vibes.

Frankenstein added to my concept of incels, too, because it made me consider that they might be lonely more generally for friends and human connection. The monster surely is. As much as I was disturbed that he asked for a “female companion” because she would be… literally a sex slave from birth… Frankenstein is also a very unhorny book. I think the monster’s request came mainly from wanting a family.

Could incels want that… too? Maybe the fixation on sex in incel culture (which I don’t know that well) (guys I’m coming out as not an incel) is spackling over some secret similar dreams of happy family life, or vibrant friend groups…

It could be more vulnerable to talk about those kinds of dream in public, because you can’t achieve lasting loving relationships with violence. So when you can’t get them, there’s no tinge of choice or agency. You’re not abstaining from crime… you’re just purely flopping.

A possibility! If you’re an incel who has read Frankenstein please write in with your thoughts here, genuinely.

Friendship chaos in Frankenstein:

Every narrator in Frankenstein has an intense relationship with friendship. These men yearn for friends and they also don’t totally get what friends are, which might be why isolation stalks them all throughout the book — almost like some kind of monster???

Like, here’s an early passage that kind of captures everyone’s issue. This is about Robert Walton’s dad and his friend Beaufort, who moved to a new city due to financial troubles:

My father loved Beaufort with the truest friendship… Beaufort had taken effectual measures to conceal himself, and it was ten months before my father discovered his abode.

Hm. Is that friendship or stalking?

And then here we have the monster seeing William, a brother/cousin/idk of Dr. Frankenstein’s in the woods:

Suddenly, as I gazed on him, an idea seized me, that this little creature was unprejudiced, and had lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror of deformity. If, therefore, I could seize him, and educate him as my companion and friend, I should not be so desolate in this peopled earth. [bold mine]

He proceeds to seize him by the NECK and strangle him to death. There’s a reason normal people don’t find their friends through a SURPRISE SEIZE!

This forceful idea of friendship also pops up towards the end of the book: Dr. Frankenstein tells Robert he can’t be his friend — Victor’s already “done” friends (weird but okay) — and Robert persists in calling the doctor his friend. It’s nuts! I wrote “rape culture!” in the margins.

On reread this all really echoes the incel stuff above. You can’t take a sustainable, reciprocal, genuinely caring relationship by force! To have a fun, caring friend you also need to also BE a fun, caring friend who knows the difference between socializing, nursing a rando back to health in the Arctic, and murder. (Some call these The Big Three.)

Clerval is a really good friend, though! Very nurturing to Dr. Frankenstein. Not all men, etc.

His name sounds horrible on the tongue, though… like an STD. CLERVAL, ew.

Dr. Frankenstein’s sickliness:

Listen, I trust almost everyone when they say they are sick. Dr. Frankenstein??! The man’s not sick. I know he “died” of his “sickness,” textually, but I’m pretty sure he has the same guilt-masquerading-as-fever issue Raskolnikov had all through Crime & Punishment. In my professional, medical opinion (I work in marketing but shhhh), Dr. Frankenstein would have lived a long healthy life if he had been open with or apologized to anyone he loved, ever.

Sexual tension between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster:

Is it there? They sure are always thinking about each other, and one is always chasing while the other one flees. In my experience (especially when the pursuer switches midway?) this is a sign of dysfunctional sexual desire.

BUT. I actually think Dr. Frankenstein is so intensely avoidantly attached to this life that he is basically asexual. And then I think the monster just wants Dr. Frankenstein to give him a hug.

The new Guillermo del Toro movie vs. the book:

I thought the Guillermo del Toro Frankenstein adaptation was odd. He clearly read the book — the monster ate berries, and no one but Mary Shelley thinks monsters eat berries — but his version of the story is full of people dying in gun battles and CGI wolf attacks. There’s so much conflict and fire onscreen!

This didn’t sit totally right with me. I thought the main message of Frankenstein was that violence can look like negative space, too — you can kill obliviously, by neglecting people out in the cold, and never even fully notice you did it.You just happen to be kinda sick all the time. You just randomly have an 8-foot monster following you around… so unlucky!

Q for readers:

If you read Frankenstein, what did you think? Did anyone think Dr. Frankenstein was a solid guy? (Guillermo del Toro sure didn’t lol.)

If you didn’t read Frankenstein, was this tolerably or INtolerably boring? I guess if it’s intolerably boring you prob won’t get down here.

Linxxx

• I DON’T WANNA BE A HOOOMEWRECKER!

• Mary Shelley’s life story makes Ozzy Osbourne look twee.

• This New York Turkish coffee psychic puts on an amazing, very color-coordinated show. Highly rec! Even though he claims I’m about to fall in love with a “stubby” man, ugh. STUBBY?!

• My new bike bell is so fun! Like banging a gavel.

• The new Ohio Love Is Blind season is extremely, weirdly good. Vic & Christine forever <3

I used to put this type of energy into writing, and I still do! Look at me writing right now, wow. But I wanted this project to be a next-generation Mae thing—SOCIAL, creative, energizing, and “so me-coded that it repulses people I wouldn’t vibe with, just by existing.” (<<< I said this to my therapist and she said “That’s a great goal!”, beaming with confidence I could repulse many people. A confidence I share!)

Anyway… I decided to start a book club. I’m going to bullet out the deets:

• Name: Cool New Book Club, kinda like Now That’s What I Call Music! — you have to give it a compliment to speak on it >:)

• What it is: An in-person book club based in Logan Square (in Chicago)

• First book: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

• First meeting: Wednesday, February 18 (venue / time TBD — join the venue convo here)

• How to join if you’re in Chicago: Follow on Instagram and/or sign up for emails

Though it hasn’t met yet, the book club is already very me-coded, in the sense that I make REELS of my OWN FACE and post them on the book club Instagram. This involves many firsts and almost-firsts for me: filming myself, buying a tripod because my fingers hurt from filming myself, continuously confronting my own freaky affect and facial proportions. It’s a journey! I guess someone has to be able to fit a sofa in their wide wide mouth, and that’s why I’m here.

Why am I doing this? Why in Logan Square? What kind of books do I like to read? I have a hypothesis that answering these questions will help people care about the book club enough to read the book—so here we go.

Why I’m starting a book club as opposed to another type of meetup thing:

I LOVE BOOK CLUBS. I love to laugh in a book club. I love to respectfully disagree in a book club. I love to make a book club read Taipei by Tao Lin, and find out I’m the only person who likes that book (at least in my book club).

Book clubs motivate me: I read War & Peace because I thought my friend was reading it too and the slog would culminate in a book club sesh. She actually never started it, lol.

Book clubs attract people I think are cool: I met a cherished friend through book club and she let me be a bridesmaid in her wedding!

It also feels telling that I wasn’t able to describe my ideal conversation in this old Substack without mentioning book club (“Let’s book club our subjectivity!”).

Who inspired me to start a book club:

Biggest influences here by FAR are Claire and Ashley, co-hosts of Good Noticings (formerly Celebrity Memoir Book Club). I listen to their podcast and Patreon podcast religiously, and they’ve inspired me in a few ways:

• They hosted an Audition book club event with Katie Kitamura in New York, and I wanted to go so badly that I considered moving to New York so I could go to more events like that in the future. This helped me identify the powerful book club yearning inside of me.

• They’re very open about what it was like to start their podcast / community / events empire, and how the most important thing is to start, and if no one cares about your thing at first, that’s normal. This has helped me start and stick with this book club for more than two (2) weeks.

• They share a lot of thoughts on books and articles, and a lot of funny short-form videos about like… learning new things from Bug (Ashley’s dog) and looking like Kelsey Anderson, but worse (I really loled at this video) (they of course both look lovely). The videos make me care about their book recs more! So now I’m making short-form videos to support this book club, even though I’m historically a very off-camera person.

Other people who have inspired me:

• My friends Mel and Jeff (who live together and are lovers) — They are great and creative hosts. I can never fully get on their level because Jeff is an amazing chef, but I can try in my own low-food way!

• Robby Hoffman — She is an opinionated, borderline hostile comedian who hates new towels and men having birthday parties. I saw her live this summer and the feeling of being in a room of people who love Robby… while she told straight men in the audience that they were gay, VIGOROUSLY… was wonderful??? (She’s gay… useful context.) I have some hard-wired beliefs that people who “create community” have to be bland, opinion-free smiley face emojis brought to life, and the way she brings people together disrupted that for me and helped me move on this project. I’m not as aggro as Robby, but I’m not sweet!

• My managers past and present — Leadership people often say that things will happening before it’s a 100% sure thing. I used to worry that they were confused; now I suspect that’s what leading is. You carry the uncertainty without barfing it all over everyone (“Please sir, do you think my book club will happen???”) and you try your dangedest to make it happen. Very relevant here!

Why it’s based in Logan Square:

Because selfishly… I want more friends who live near me? I have more faith a quorum of people like to read in Logan Square than in, like, Wrigleyville (sorry). I’ve also lived in Logan Square so long that I’m more effective at tasks here than elsewhere. I was biking around flyering the other day thinking, the stretch of Milwaukee from California to Kimball is my effing Sherlockian mind palace. I am remembering sweet tiny apartments my friends lived in circa 2011!

What I like to read:

My two favorite books of all time are coming-of-age novels. BILDUNGSROMANS (roma?) if you will. I have reread them many times and interpreted them different ways, but they always ring so true on a character level, and on a craft level they are both built like freaking dovetail joints even when it seems like they’re meandering:

• Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

• The Idiot, by Elif Batuman

Some other types of books I love include…

Formally funky novels (often about theater!):

• Audition, Katie Kitamura, obviously

• Trust Exercise, Susan Choi

• The Biography of X, Catherine Lacey

Old Russian novels involving a lot of shame:

• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

• Crime & Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Novels with intense non-sexual intimacy:

• Sula, Toni Morrison

• Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters

Novels with intense SEXUAL intimacy:

• All Fours, Miranda July

• Another Country, James Baldwin

Midnight’s Children (couldn’t get this to fit in a category with other books but it’s about the partition of India with some magical realism and iirc a lot of pickles):

• Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

I also love a juicy article and used to listen to the Longform podcast religiously, RIP.

How I like to read:

Creatively! I try to read with some baseline distrust of most narrators, an eye on what’s not getting said, and another eye (when I read I guess I have three eyes and the third eye’s actually reading the text?) on thematically related stuff I’ve read elsewhere. I’m not always successful, as you can see in #9 here, but I try! You can see my attempts at creatively reading Audition and Anna Karenina on this very Substack.

Amazing creative readers include Mary Ruefle (see “My Emily Dickinson” in Madness, Rack & Honey — damn) and Game of Roses (the text they creatively read is The Bachelor).

What I’ve learned about myself and the world from starting this book club:

• A lot of people want to read Frankenstein and never have. Jacob Elordi is clearly a part of this. A lovely-looking lad.

• Being myself takes practice. When I started making videos of myself, I thought the first take would always be the “best” or “realest,” but it’s actually the most convoluted and camera shy. I revise my personal writing a lot to make it legible and aligned with what I actually think, and I don’t know why I thought video would be different. It’s the same!

• Next time I flier, I need to bring tape. That way you can hang fliers in front windows. Bulletin boards with pins are almost universally in the back of the establishment by the bathrooms.

• People who tell me I have a “dry” or “deadpan” sense of humor are RIGHT. As a guy at a bar put it one time, “You’re very dry… not funny. JUST dry.” Yes, sir. My affect is so flat I’m missing my own attempts at humor. I am the rare woman who actually might benefit… from smiling… more?! It hurts to say and yet.

• I can draw a penguin that’s really recognizably a penguin. Even to a viewer I have not prepped in advance! Empowering.

• I talk really slow and use “and” as my filler word. This creates multi-minute run-on sentences in my vids. I need to speed up and let sentences end. But how do other people talk fast? Is it drugs?

• Strangers are nice. People have really come out of the woodwork to support this little book club! Thanks <3

Question for you all

If you’ve ever been in a book club (or other community discussion) that you really liked — why did you like it? Were there any rituals or replicable practices that made it great?

Reply and let me know! Looking for ideas for how to run the actual book club meeting :)

Linxxx

• The ICE situation in Minneapolis right now is dire as hell. Some non-profit and mutual aid links; I gave here.

• Cried laughing at this TikTok + comments. Did Marvin Gaye found Wikipedia?

• I was recently stopped at an intersection and my bike speaker algorithmically started playing this in the dead of winter. To play it for the public wearing insulated gloves… just special.

• This kinda gives Frankenstein idk. Remixing and reimagining the body…?

• If you want to join my book club, follow on Instagram and/or sign up for emails!

***

1. Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

This novel didn’t come out this year, but I read it this year and loved it. It’s a lot about journaling and isolation (which sounds like it has no plot, but I promise the plot COOKS). As a huge 2025 journaler, I thought it was very insightful about the different things journaling is: it’s your memory and a historical record and a form of self-expression, and then also this time-traveling social act that lets you be friends with your past self. A lot goes on there!

Also: Sometimes I feel some vague societal pressure to “stay busy, “ but there is nothing cooler to me than how Mr. Piranesi turns his solitary free time into a deep relationship with nature and his house. I feel like he sees the world around him more clearly and lovingly than any busy person.

2. Subway tuna subs

Listen, Subway serves REAL TUNA according to their Tuna Facts page, which starts with the giant relaxing headline “Subway Tuna Lawsuit Dismissed.” Whatever the nice smooth substance is that they serve, it tastes amazing. I like to get my tuna sub to go and add my own Dijon mustard at home :) #French

3. The Yoko Ono exhibit at the MCA (Chicago-only)

Sometimes it’s hard to think of something novel to do in a day, but not for Yoko Ono. She’s like “Why don’t you nail a strand of your hair to a board!” My dad and I went and saw this Yoko exhibit over Thanksgiving, and I was so inspired by her interactive, instructions-as-artwork project. Did she pave the way for TikTok dances with her… embodied memes? Is that something? Rando Chicagoans (plural!) definitely nailed their hairs to a board before my eyes, and my dad and I played a game of chess on an all-white Yoko chess set, where you couldn’t tell one player’s pieces from the other’s. It was VERY world-peace-coded. You were clearly supposed to say, “Well why even bother to play this war game when we’re all the same?” My dad and I played normally, and when I said, “How can you tell our pieces apart?” my dad said, “I just remember.” But then, out of respect for Yoko, he orchestrated a stalemate at the end of the game. World stalemate ✌️

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4. This spatula

Or sorry, I guess it’s technically a Restaurant Turner. It feels insanely good to scrape it on a cast iron, and it gets “more underneath” my eggs than a normal spatula. I don’t know what I’m saying or who I’m quoting here, but I mean this with my whole heart.

5. Rereading my old workshop letter to the MFA’s most inscrutable poet

I reread a bunch of my old workshop letters from grad school this year for no real reason, and my favorite was my thesis seminar letter to our most inscrutable poet. I am not a strong poetry reader in the best of times, and his poems specifically involved a lot of references and vocabulary I didn’t understand. I was lost. It shows. Some highlights:

• “I had trouble telling why running water A was functioning differently (or if it even was different) from running water B,” I write.

  • What am I looking for here? It’s okay if there are 1-2 creeks and we don’t nail it down….

• “This collection is named after a Spanish musical tradition,” I notice, “but we don’t get poems set clearly in Spain, or much reference to man-made music, until towards the end.”

  • My literal prose-writing ass: “Why isn’t there a main character in your poetry collection whose name is also the title? Have you read Piranesi?”

• “Your poems are full of nature imagery, and these natural loops full eternal… [b]ut… IRL human activity is disrupting all of these cycles (except the sun) (the sun is doing OK),” I write.

  • Lol at me clinging to the one remotely relevant fact I know. Global warming does NOT hurt the sun. I heard it actually comes from the sun??? Have you guys heard this?

The letter is so unhelpful yet un-self-deprecating it becomes sort of HEROIC. It’s like: “Hello. I do not know, and it does not silence me. Here are my thoughts. Farewell.” Aragorn energy. But I think there’s something pro-social about openly communicating confusion, and receiving missives from the confused. More of this in 2026!

6. “Which One,” Drake and Central Cee

I listened to this joyous song about tradeoffs a lot this summer, and I have to say, I love when Drake patronizes women and pretends he’s from an island nation. I know he’s from Toronto and I just can’t care! I also love when Central Cee says “I’ve got a chopstick for your wonton.” Makes me feel like I don’t know how sex works. Or eating. Just one chopstick?

7. Sorry, Baby (HBO Max)

This movie is the funniest movie about sexual violence we may ever get. Great central friendship; great single woman x cat relationship. It’s impossible to spoil this film but I found it validating — as someone mystified by how bad ghosting feels (what is that???) — to learn that it can even strangely suck to get ghosted by your rapist. My favorite line read is “She said ‘Yum.’”

8. This one smoothie in Brooklyn

I did some detective work and I thinkkkk the smoothie is “Healing Turmeric Smoothie” at “Lively Brooklyn” in Park Slope. After I drank it, I wrote down the ingredients IN MY JOURNAL (normally reserved for feelings): hemp milk, banana, mango, turmeric, chia, cinnamon, ginger, and black pepper. This smoothie was $14 and worth at least $100. If you have these ingredients in your home please lord blend them together.

9. The Harper’s gooning article and Daniel Ortberg’s Substack about it

These two pieces of media, which I read in the order they are listed here, revealed to me that I am not the critical reader I hoped. I just felt… whatever the writer I was currently reading felt, about everything. So in the course of roughly an hour I went from “I’m so scared that strangers masturbate too hard” to “Haha remember when I was actively part of a moral panic 12 minutes ago?”

Ultimately, I think gooning is just not a good topic for journalism, or at least for Daniel Kolitz (Harper’s guy) (wow both authors are named Daniel!). Kolitz was too squeamish to verify most of his article’s claims — he just heard and repeated them. Like, when he goes to the goonparty, does he even know for sure it occurs once he leaves? No. So the story is ultimately about what people want to anonymously say about their masturbation habits, not the habits themselves. But I still enjoyed and recommend these two pieces in quick succession! An absolute rollercoaster.

10. Beth’s Dead

My coworker recommended this podcast to me and I absolutely devoured it, and paid $9 to get it faster than you normal peasants (even though I really only had to pay $4). It’s the story of two podcasters, a married couple, who shut down their very successful comedy podcast after a spooky situation with some listeners; in this show they reconstruct the events of the past and do some additional investigation in the present.

Apparently the pod has a lot of Reddit haters because it’s not 100% journalistic in its inquiries—but even though I was just hating on unverified information sentences ago, I don’t mind the lack of verification here. I do not think this is investigative journalism; it’s more of a two-author memoir about fear, and how we can get stuck in scary static beliefs about people we don’t know (for good reason!), but we also really want to trust each other! And it’s more of an animal thing than a documentation thing, in the end. When you think you’re looking for Answers you’re maybe really looking for a kind face or a certain tone of voice. This is true to my experience! Reminded me of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, in a way, with all the super zoomed-in, emotional play-by-play around Emailing. Also, I recently watched the 1994 and 2019 Little Women movies back to back and thought damn. Beth is dead in every universe!

11. Getting parented by my friends

When I visited my friend Kelsey this year, her daughter (age 2) really wanted to decide what shoes I wore one day. She kept bringing her chosen shoes over to me and placing them by my socked feet suggestively. Kelsey said something like, “We can invite Mae to wear those shoes, but it’s her decision what shoes she wears!” I now think about this a lot now in a variety of situations. We can invite, but we can’t insist! Forever relevant. I’m growing up.

12. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Netflix)

My dad and I both loved this documentary, and it’s hard to hit the middle of the Mae-Ed Venn diagram — he can’t get through even S1 of Fleabag because Fleabag (the character) is upsettingly unlikable to him (??????). This documentary is about a Norwegian guy, Mats Steen, with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He spends many years in a wheelchair, and dies at 25. The movie has two parts: his life story as observed by his family, and his life story reconstructed from World of Warcraft chats and records. It’s sort of like Piranesi, in that it’s about the life and records of a seemingly isolated person, and it makes isolation seem FULL of possibilities!

13. “Chun Swae,” Nicki Minaj ft. Swae Lee (in song and in ASL)

This is a great song to listen to when you need to feel confident and nothing else in about 3 minutes. (The Nicki promise! Also fulfilled by “Yikes.”) I saw a TikTok of a woman signing along to this song that put me in an (incredibly) MORE powerful headspace than the raw audio, and I was hooked and watched a bunch of her other videos. Then I wondered: am I just getting bamboozled by a rapidly-gesticulating woman? Idk what’s ASL. So I sent it to an ASL-fluent friend who confirmed it “looks legit,” although musical ASL is a little different from musicless ASL, and allows for more creative liberties—so not textbook, but not fake. Phew!

14. Hey Bagel (Seattle only)

This bagel place in Seattle (in a MALL?!) serves the best bagels I’ve ever had. I say this as someone who has been to New York (and famously drank a smoothie there), and eats every bagel I encounter in Chicago. I am literally considering buying a car so I can drive out and eat a Ka’ak bagel at Al Manakeesh in Bridgeview (?? where even is this).

But so far, Hey Bagel triumphs over all. Their bagels are so hot and fresh. Crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside. It’s frankly annoying, because they not only sell a perfect product but act like they are the first bagel purveyor on earth. If you ask for cream cheese on your bagel, they’re like, “Sorry, you must be confused… cream cheese on a bagel? Our bagels are too hot and fresh and the cream cheese will fall right off. You must rip up your bagel and dip the bits in cream cheese.”

Hmm. How come everyone else can shmear their dang bagels, guys?

But then the rip and dip method is actually super good and as of recently, cosigned by Martha Stewart. Hey Bagel: infallible!

15. Titanique

This musical asks the important question: “What if Celine Dion was in the movie Titanic, and played herself, and kinda poked her nose into everything?” The answer is hilarious and the Celine Dion character in the show is the absolute queen of self-esteem and strutting and turning a French-Canadian accent up to 11.

Here are my Titanique texts with my friend who saw it first:

After the show I listened to “A New Day Has Come” on repeat until my ears hurt. Highly rec if it’s showing in your city!

16. Who’s the Clown?, Audrey Hobert

I loved this whole album. I often interact with music as a text — which is why I like rap and Taylor Swift and also why I’m a loser (it’s not a text!!) — and Audrey makes my perverse preference fun. She’s such a weird, granular storyteller that I even respect the skips (for me), like “Wet Hair” or “Bowling alley.”

I also think her public persona is cool because she is not trying to look the hottest she can look (or she would use volumizer) (and make her hair and face colors more different). I believe she is intentionally skipping hotmaxxing to instead look the most like the person who wrote her songs—a person who craves male validation that eludes her and thinks she has “a fucked-up face” and wants to get felt up when she’s drunk at the club (“Are you even allowed to say that?!” I gasped like Mr. Gooner Journalist when I first heard it). This works in a powerful way and gives her music extra heft. It also gives her access to a special Napoleon Dynamite vibe while dancing (and she knows!).

17. O Noir (Montreal only)

This is a pitch-black restaurant in Montreal, meant to give sighted people empathy for blind people, and also employ blind people—the waiters are all blind. The purity of the darkness in the dining room is… unforgettable. You can’t see your own hand in front of your face, or your food. Without any visual cues, I felt like I was floating, and I kept saying “I feel like I’m dead,” creating a wonderful mood for my dining companion. I had ice cream for dessert, and immediately spread it all over the tablecloth. I couldn’t see the edges of the bowl and I guess I have no internal sense of how big a bowl could and couldn’t be. Going here was humbling and wonderful. When I left the world and my eyes felt brand spanking new. The food is good but beside the point.

Reader q

What places and things brought you joy this year? Did you have strong reactions of agreement or disagreement to this list?

Would love to hear your thoughts and recs! Reply to this email or leave a comment at the button. Happy hols <3

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It brought me so much joy and reflection!

Before I get into why, let us pause to listen to the song (it’s 3 minutes) and consider: Who are the father and progeny here?

[LISTENING BREAK]

One internet read is that this is a song about her masters, and the father in the early verses is Scott Borchetta or Scooter or whoever, some old business guy, addressing/”mentoring” baby Taylor. But by the end of the song the speaker (and the owner of Taylor’s masters) has changed. She’s daddy now!

This feels a little convoluted, but okay.

Another hypothesis: The song is about her relationship with Olivia Rodrigo, who Taylor ripped off as much as Olivia ever ripped her off? But I guess Taylor could still be mad.

I choose to walk a different path here. I read “Father Figure” as one more diss track about Taylor’s most recent ex, Matty Healy (lead singer of The 1975) (subject of The Tortured Poets Department, “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” etc.).

Viewed in this light it is very delightful and interesting.

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Why it’s delightful:

• Casting a man who casually broke your heart as your lackluster mentee in a song — something funny and true in that.

• The song is obviously referencing “Father Figure” by George Michael, which had its most recent cultural moment in Babygirl, a movie about a hetero workplace affair with a power imbalance that favors the woman. But that doesn’t mean CEO Nicole Kidman comes out on top or controls the trajectory of the relationship. Feels like a good, complicating reference in an otherwise triumphant, big-dog song.

• Key change for “whose portrait’s on the mantle?” !!!!!!

• This song feels In Conversation with something Matty said in 2016: “I am NOT being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend… you know, FUCK. THAT. That’s also a man thing, a de-masculinating, emasculating thing.” (The comment lives on in secondary sources, but the original has been meticulously scrubbed from the internet… Tree Paine, is that you?) “Father Figure” strikes me as playing with this comment: “You’re right son, I was always daddy.” Love to see an alternative to the “Woman shrilly contesting a sexist comment” role.

• Saying “you remind me of a younger me” to a man exactly your age, in your industry… one of the sickest burns ever.

• Fun to see Taylor Swift, one of THEE most cisgender women we have, strap it on a little. It’s nothing groundbreaking, and nothing Nicki Minaj hasn’t done more and better and 10+ years ago, but genderbending is edgy in the context of Taylor Swift’s brand. She literally sold a “Life of a Showgirl cardigan box set” this album cycle. A showgirl… cardigan… an object playing so safe it doesn’t even make sense.

Why it’s interesting:

To me, “Father Figure” loudly echoes… Kanye West’s “Famous.” Uh oh!

To review, “Famous” is the song Taylor hated so much that it restarted her feud with Kanye and started her feud with Kim Kardashian. The GQ scoop and the phone recording leaks that sent Taylor spiraling into her Reputation era — that was all about “Famous,” and whether she approved these two Kanye lines about her / the 2009 VMAs mic grab:

I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex
Why? I made that bitch famous

Now, in “Father Figure,” she’s not exactly telling us “I made that bitch famous,” though she was repping The 1975 in 2014 and there’s a case to be made. The claim is a little more mournful: “I tried to make that bitch famous.”

She did. She made a surprise cameo at a The 1975 show in 2023, and the band was slated to open for her EU leg of The Eras Tour, iirc, up until she and Matty broke up. (Tree! You made a source hard to find on that.)

But ultimately, Taylor’s efforts backfired. Matty left their relationship widely disliked, after he made an appearance on a podcast where he made comments / laughed along with jokes that people read as racist, sexist, homophobic, and disrespectful to Ice Spice. The vibes were so bad Matty started watching what he says?!! The ultimate depression symptom, for him.

But seriously, people were mad. Not Ice Spice… but Swifties. A lot of Swifties who had discovered his existence ~2 days prior. To them, his comments and snickerings on the podcast were his first and only utterances. Stripped of context in Taylor World, he experienced the extreme end of natural PR consequences for what he said.

So yes, Taylor did help Matty’s career by dating him while wayyyy more famous than him, and connecting him with a new audience. She did make some (audibly rushed!) efforts to “cover up [his] scandals.” But I’d say she also put him in a uniquely vulnerable professional position by surrounding him with a fandom that wasn’t his.

Like “Famous,” it all makes a person wonder what constitutes a professional favor.

Ultimately, I think Taylor and Matty lived a reality HR has been telling us about for decades: It’s hard to be close, or even helpful, across huge power differentials. The lines between support and control and abuse blur, as Taylor herself chronicles in songs like “All Too Well” and “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve”; she captures the blurring most insightfully when she’s on the losing end of a power imbalance.

In “Father Figure,” she takes on the winner role and blurs history in her favor even more than Kanye does in “Famous” — casting herself as the betrayed, benevolent hero. In “Famous,” Kanye’s just a benevolent hero… but no one is betrayed. Life is fun and hopeful. They might still have sex!

(I find the “Famous” lyrics pretty gross, but in a similar way to “Actually Romantic.” Why are we sexualizing these vulnerable, sexless moments — the VMAs mic grab and “Sympathy is a knife,” respectively??? It’s weird.)

Now I don’t want to be too hard on Taylor for the (possible) punching-down moment in “Father Figure.” She says Matty ghosted her, and after they had known each other a long time. That hurts BAD and warps your judgment. I also think “Father Figure” is sort of tongue in cheek, a bit “Blank Space”; “Matty thinks I’m some freaking mafia don careerist because I worked hard on my tour, lol.”

But here’s my closing thought: I think Taylor very primally wants people to understand her feelings. It’s why she writes confessional songs, and why they’re good. And sometimes, to feel understood, people end up inflicting their feelings on other people without even meaning to. It’s like… an effort to connect?

I was recently reading an article largely unrelated to Taylor Swift, “The Pain of Perfectionism,” and this passage stood out to me:

The analyst Elizabeth Spillius wrote about a time when she felt that sessions with one patient were going badly; then she realized that her perfectionist patient was subtly “trying to make me want to be perfect and then to feel discouraged and despairing, just as she expected herself to be perfect and was constantly disappointing herself.”

The patient’s trying to induce her feelings in her therapist, instead of just verbally describing them. I see a bit of this in “Father Figure,” too. It’s a diss track that’s also a bid for connection: Taylor strikes a Kanye pose and feels a little of how he felt making “Famous.” Taylor makes Matty the unwilling subject of a powerful person’s mentorship anthem, so he can know how she felt hearing “Famous.”

We’re all getting to know each other forever, I guess! Even after it seems like we’re done.

Question for readers

What did you think of The Life of a Showgirl and “Father Figure”?

Linxxx

• I started liking another TLOAS song, oops.

• Do you want to read EVEN MORE of my thoughts about Taylor Swift? Well here you go and seek treatment.

• The GOAT Taylor Swift fan zine. Thanks Tavi!

• “Matty Healy… took over the DJ booth to play ‘Call Me Maybe’ while smoking a cigarette.”

• I love freshly-sober Matty on equine therapy (4:46).

• Honestly, bars.

• Random product rec: this hair mask is AMAZING.

I’ll write a research memo about new/scary Trump policies for ya — reply to this newsletter to request!

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It all started with the latest season of Couples Therapy, and specifically Rod and Alison. It seems like they’re doing well now, and still together! But at time of filming, Alison COULD not stop talking.

It sounds misogynistic and perhaps is, but if you watch the two of them in action you’ll see what I mean. She will interrupt anyone! She NEEEEDS to be HEARDDD. She is disappointed and she doesn’t know why and the time to discuss that is FOREVER NOW!

“If you want Rod to talk to you more, you need to make the conversations inviting,” Orna Guralnik, the docuseries’ titular couples therapist, tells Alison in this clip.

My more practical thought there is: “If you want Rod to talk to you more, when would he do that exactly?”

It’s not just Alison creating the forever-speaker-and-forever-listener dynamic—Rod loves to be a silent sounding board, for his own matrix of personal reasons—but of the two of them, Alison is the one I relate to more. I am, after all, Mae Rice of the Mae Rice Culture of Talking. So ever since watching the show, a thought bubble has been hovering over my head: What if I shut up more?

Here are some types of talking I’m trying to cut back on:

• Talking when someone else is talking: Not that I do a ton of this.

• Talking RIGHT after someone else was talking: Maybe they’re not done! I interview people for work, and if I let a silence sit for a few seconds, a source will often continue their thought in an interesting way.

• Talking about a forthcoming action: Why say “I’m about to do this!” when I could say “I did this!” (or at least “I started to do this!” if it’s like, buying a house, running a marathon, etc.). It’s more interesting to discuss real things. It’s also a great way to avoid feeling or looking like I have weak follow-through—I’m saying fewer future-tense things about myself!

• Defending a decision: Continuing to discuss a choice after it’s made suggests it’s still up for discussion. Silence says it’s not. This is primarily about telling guys from Hinge we’re not going on a third date. We aren’t!

• Talking about distrust: “I think you might not be telling the truth” is sort of a useless thing to say, no matter how you (I) phrase it—it just makes the other person feel upset, and encourages them to say defensive new things that also don’t feel trustworthy either. It’s like saying, “Let’s have a tense and unproductive conversation!” So I’m trying to address distrust more by… holding the uncertainty quietly in my brain? Not betting a lot of money or time on sus claims? Idk. But trust is a prerequisite for good talking.

• Talking with baseless urgency: I almost never need to say something RIGHT AWAY, but I often think I do, because I have a baseline high sense of urgency about all tasks. (I recently realized most people start work projects X days before they’re due, hence the institution of “due dates,” whereas I have been starting projects the moment I’m free. This means I have been doing tons of work no one needs in the end, all while feeling VERY virtuous, lol.) When I respond to texts or Slacks or even big verbal questions right away, I am less likely to be fully grasping the situation or telegraphing… calm. Trying to slow that down.

• Talking to convince myself something is real: When something unusual happens to me — good or bad! But mostly bad — I often recount it to someone else immediately, to convince myself that it happened. And like yeah, if I get hit by a car, you bet your ass I am recounting that to everyone I know, probably multiple times per person, to bring out all the different themes and motifs. But not every experience is worth recounting; it can veer into the same territory The Rehearsal, just with the repetition on the backend of the event. I can trust my own eyeballs more and move a little quicker through life.

• Indecisive talking: Talking about how I’m not sure what to do about X just postpones the decision. Sometimes I get feedback when I do this, but a lot of times it’s kind of bad feedback from someone with incomplete information who I have roped into my inner life for no reason. I can just decide!

• Giving other people directions: I don’t give other people a lot of ORDERS, but I’ve realized that by asking questions, I still exert a type of control over conversations. A question is sort of an order in disguise: “Fill in this blank next.” I am never going to stop asking questions (I can’t emphasize enough that I interview people for work), but I am also trying to imagine new ways to create “open play situations,” like Myst, for people I’m talking to.

My goal in being more quiet isn’t to be a “quiet woman,” which will never happen for me, realistically. I’m more trying to be in a solid, ongoing conversation with the world. I want to say and do stuff, and see how the world responds, and learn from that… sort of a basic feedback loop, idk if I needed to elaborate on that lol. (Another non-ideal type of talking: overexplaining!) But for the conversation with the world to happen, I have to be quiet and listen sometimes. Otherwise I’m just living in a Truman Show world made out of my thoughts!

Reader qs

When are you being quiet? AND if you watched the new Couples Therapy season, how did it affect you?

Linxxx

• This song deserves another billion streams!

• Ongoing highlight of my life: Biking around playing tunes out of THIS GREAT SPEAKER that’s also water resistant.

• Loved Andrea Long Chu’s pan of Maggie Nelson. And I stan Maggie Nelson!

• I’ve loved these beans for years and we’re still going strong (Taylor rec!)

• I’ll write a research memo about new/scary Trump policies for ya — email me or DM me!

This is not a super noteworthy perspective—Audition was a bestseller that made Barack Obama’s summer reading list and got short-listed for the Booker Prize—but the *way* I loved it was powerful.

I looked like this while I read it: 🫨

One thing I am forever working on in life is Dealing with Uncertainty, and nothing is more uncertain than what the heck occurs in this novel. It genuinely rocked my world. I’ve read mystery novels where the mystery is unsolved, and I’ve read Alice and Wonderland, famously all a dream, but the shape of the uncertainty in Audition felt sculptural and confident and new to me (a limited woman ofc). I was confused, but I didn’t think the author was confused.

(This was particularly striking because when I read Katie’s last book, Intimacies, I had the opposite sensation: I wasn’t confused, but I suspected the author was. I did not think this with Martyr!, either; I thought me and Kaveh were roughly equally confused there.)

I got the sense that Katie could have said many more words about the events in Audition than she did (it’s <300 pages!). But instead, she communicates a lot of the novel through vibes and… adjacency? Maybe not the right word. But she puts two arguably unrelated things together and asserts that they are a whole, and that makes the togetherness very loud.

Below I’m going to spoil Audition in some ways (in many ways: unspoilable), and tell you my theory of what happens in it, which I developed after reading it twice in a rowlike a freak.

If you want to not read this until you read Audition (it’ll honestly take you like 15 minutes), here are the links I usually put at the end—now get outta here!

Linxxx

• BRAIN BLAST 💥

• I’m late to the new Clipse but this is my fave song

• Robby Hoffman is learning about combs… evolving situation

• Unmoved by Taylor Swift’s engagement but this cracked me up

• The best TJ’s product is back in stock!

• 🗣 IF NOW WAS THEN I’D GET OUT OF MY HEAD

• I thought the Caleb Hearon special was bad :)

• I’ll write a research memo about new/scary Trump policies for ya — DM me!

OK back to Audition:

The uncertainty of Audition

Audition has two parts, with (I think) the same main character: a married actress in her late 40s, starring in a Broadway play. It’s split into two parts:

• Part 1 takes place during rehearsals. A handsome, much-younger stranger named Xavier tracks the narrator down and tells her that he believes she’s his mother. He looks a lot like her, but she has never given birth; she had a miscarriage that was characterized confusingly in the press. She tells him it’s not possible. Then Xavier starts working for the director of the play the narrator is starring in, and becomes her colleague. The narrator has trouble with the play; there’s a scene in the middle where her character radically changes, and she doesn’t know why, and it’s hard to perform. She worries the play will flop.

• Part 2 takes place during the play’s extended run. Our narrator figured out the “hinge” scene and now it’s her favorite scene to perform. But the play has a different name in this half of the novel (thanks Debi for pointing this out!), and you can tell something has changed big-time because Xavier is the narrator’s son now??? Wow. He’s a 20-something at a transitional time in his career, and he moves back in with that narrator and her husband. It’s a little awkward and strange. Then his girlfriend Hana comes to live with them, too, and it’s even MORE awkward and strange.

The core uncertainty is… how are the parts related? In some ways they’re continuous with each other (in time!). In some ways they contradict each other (in mom!). In some ways they echo each other (there’s a specific gesture that recurs across both), and in some ways they are remixes of each other (the person who does the gesture changes).

It gave me an enormous feeling! Possibly the closest I’ll ever get to doing ayahuasca (I don’t want to do drugs that make me barf sorry). But it was also confusing.

My interpretation on first read

Initially, I thought: Is this a Sliding Doors-type story about having vs. not having a miscarriage? But that’s a pretty cruel premise for a novel, since it hinges on a non-decision, and it doesn’t really track, since Xavier is equally alive in both parts.

But maybe there’s some other decision point I’m not clocking, and the two parts of the novel are still the two possible outcomes of that choice?

It wasn’t a great interpretation, in that it barely existed. It also left me unsettled, because when you read it as two possible futures, it makes the decision to have a child seem CREEPY. Like look at this passage about Xavier moving in:

As the days passed, I realized how little continuity there was between the child or even the young man I remembered and the person now living with us. He was like a familiar stranger… always a little uncanny.

Call me crazy but I thought people knew their kids pretty well???

This passage also gives me the heebie jeebies:

[Xavier] would take out the knife [whose spot in his parents’ kitchen he had forgotten], and then he would cut the bread as if the blade were new to him, and it was as if he had forgotten that he had ever lived here… so that it was not Xavier but the apartment that seemed subtly wrong.

Why doesn’t he remember the knife? Why is the center of this domestic scene a BLADE?

I asked my friend Debi, who has three adult children, to read Audition and give me her take. I wanted to know what an IRL mom thought of the book.

Debi iconically read it immediately, didn’t really like it, and said she wasn’t sure what happened either, but it was obvious (!) that the narrator wasn’t Xavier’s real mom in Part 2.

That was when I decided to read Audition a second time, because I never questioned the familial relationship in Part 2. I believe what I’m told! But Audition, according to itself (and more importantly, Barack Obama’s Instagram), has an unreliable narrator.

My interpretation on second read

The second time around, I had a totally different take on Audition. To be fair, I was trying to have a different take, and I was reading the beginning with knowledge of the structure and the end, which is a fundamentally different experience.

BUT—on the second read Audition seemed less about family, and more about The Hinge.

It’s a huge part of the book. There’s a hinge scene of transformation in the middle of the narrator’s play in both parts of the book, and there is of course a similar transition in the middle of Audition itself, between parts 1 and 2.

I think that’s because the novel is about major-yet-undefined transitions, and the hinge the narrator is dealing with, in both parts, is the transition from youth to middle age.

The narrator and her husband have both gone through major shifts in their personalities since they met as Youths. The narrator used to have “some underlying curiosity, an old instinct to draw close to other people” when she was younger, but once she met her husband, Tomas, she “learned to curtail that urge, to see it for what it really was—a passing curiosity, a spirit of bedevilment, and a form of voyeurism.”

Tomas has transformed in a similar way, turning inward with age:

When [Tomas] was younger there had been something grasping in his manner, which was not unusual in someone so ambitious, someone who wished to make his mark upon the world and who cared what people thought of him. But as he attained further success in his work, he became less interested in what other people thought, his ego no longer requiring external reinforcement, and then less interested in other people more generally.

These are mentioned in short passages, but they’re substantial news. Even though they are technically the same people with the same social security numbers, finding a partner and success and “maturity” (maybe) reversed the main couple’s personalities. They found what they wanted, and went from seekers to self-contained individuals in a self-contained household.

I think Xavier and Hana represent the return of their old selves. They’re foreign (with different dispositions, from a different time) and family (deeply related to the main couple!).

The text supports this more than I expected! There are moments when the young people blur into the older people in the novel — like here’s Xavier and Tomas:

They did not generally look alike… yet as they gazed at me now, their expressions were the same, the effect like a doubling, a repetition, in which their individual selves, such as I had always known them, dissolved.

And here’s the narrator on Hana laughing off a creepy man:

I might have done the same myself, once upon a time… I felt a stab of surprise, how could it be, that a woman of her age and generation, how could it be that she would still feel the need to do such things?

Well, maybe on some level she’s NOT of her generation!

The past selves theory makes extra sense to me because in Part 1, the narrator feels a “starburst of [sexual??] longing” for Xavier, despite being happily married; in Part 2, Tomas has a moment of transgressive desire for Hana. Not that we don’t all get horny for randos from time to time, but it makes *even more* sense to be powerfully drawn to your partner’s past self than a random youth.

Thinking of Xavier and Hana as the main couple’s past selves also helps explain a lot of uncanny/surreal elements of the novel, too—why Xavier might not know the apartment layout (he never lived there!), and why Hana would have a “strange and ghostly touch” and “bizarrely insubstantial” presence, frequently mentioned:

Her [Hana’s] grip [was] so light as to be an act of aggression, it left me with the sensation that I was holding onto nothing.

Makes sense! They don’t 100% exist.

Not that I think they’re pure figments. It’s a multi-faceted novel you can read a lot of ways—maybe it’s getting at the way adult kids can feel like your past self?—but this reading felt like an interesting and illuminating option. And if you read the young people as past selves, the two parts of the novel together show how difficult it is to relate to your (and your partner’s) past self in a functional way.

You can deny the connection entirely (Part 1—Xavier relegated to coworker, and Hana mentioned in passing as a friend of a friend’s daughter!), but there’s still some uneasy loss and longing around that. Or you can try to literally share your home with your younger self (Part 2), but that won’t be a stable arrangement, either.

It all supports one of the narrator’s main theses — that the self, or at least her self, never coheres for long. As she says in her account of playing the hinge scene, at the beginning of Part 2:

“[H]ere, the gap between my private and performed selves collapsed, and for the briefest of moments there was only a single, unified self.”

Question for readers

If you read Audition, WTF did you think happened? Are you going to watch Audition, the movie (another Taylor find, praise Taylor!)? WHAT will that be like?

Also not to be so dumb but anyone know why it’s called Audition?

My dad is gearing up to move, and I recently went home to go through my childhood bedroom and ship everything I wanted to keep to my place in Chicago. The BFG was one of the books I shipped myself — a Roald Dahl fantasy book from 1982 for (checks Amazon) 7- to 10-year-olds.

It starts when an 8-year-old girl, Sophie, spots the BFG (short for Big Friendly Giant) blowing something (dreams) into people’s homes at night with a trumpet. He sees her back, and abducts her from her orphanage to make sure she doesn’t narc on him. He takes her to his homeland, Giant Country, where he is the only vegetarian giant—all the other giants are bigger and eat humans alive. Sophie and the BFG have to work together to protect the human race!

I just reread this book, and I had a BLAST.

Best part: Magic = getting better at noticing things

The BFG kind of cracked open for me towards the end, with this side note about a gardener at Buckingham Palace. When the BFG takes his first daylight foray into the human world (to tell the Queen giants are eating British children), this nameless guy spots him:

A gardener… caught sight of the BFG’s legs over to his left. His gaze travelled slowly upwards along the entire height of the enormous body. He gripped the handles of the wheelbarrow. He swayed. He tottered. Then he kneeled over on the grass in a dead faint. Nobody noticed him.

There’s probably a word for what that “Nobody noticed him” sentence is — irony? Lie? By existing, the sentence undermines itself. Clearly the writer noticed. But this sentence still casts the reader as a special person, in on a secret. “Nobody noticed him… except you and me [the authorial voice].”

That’s the message of the book overall, too: “Nobody noticed the giants, except Sophie and you and me.” Or, more abstractly: There is a special world of magic and slapstick and fun available to observant people, and it’s right out in the open, and most people never see it.

In the BFG, there are basically 3 levels of “human bean” (what the BFG calls human beings):

• People who only notice what they’ve been told to notice (most people): These people will never spot a dream-blowing giant in the shadows, because no one ever told them to look for that. These are the NPCs of the BFG, who ignore him as he strides around at night being 24 feet tall.

• People who can notice things they don’t expect to see (Sophie at the beginning of the book): She looks out the window of her orphanage and sees the BFG — something no human has ever done before, he says. It’s luck, but it also shows Sophie has a certain aptitude for breaking explicit and implicit rules: She gets out of bed when she’s not supposed to, and believes her eyes when she sees something that makes no sense (a giant with a trumpet).

• People who can notice things they don’t expect to see AND know they can’t notice everything (Sophie by the end of the book): The BFG has huge ears, even given his size—they’re big enough for Sophie to ride in!—and he can hear “all the secret whisperings of the world,” like the sound of the stars or trees or dreams flying around. Sophie is initially skeptical of all the things he claims he can hear, because she can’t hear them — but by the end of the book, he has earned her trust, and she understands that there are real things going on in the world that she can’t observe directly.

The first category of person isn’t presented as bad — but if you can make it to the last category, so much more is possible in your life! You can see the BFG and collaborate with him to solve a problem that neither of you could solve alone: giants eating people alive every day. Wow.

(It does help to work with the Queen and the British military on the giant problem, too.)

I love that The BFG about directly and flexibly observing the world—and working with people with better / different observational capabilities! It really is so cool to be observant (I wrote about this previously).

Especially in our current era where a lot of people are looking at representations of the world online, or moderately accurate statements about the world from ChatGPT, The BFG feels especially relevant. What if you just looked out your dang window at a time your normally don’t do that?

Other great parts:

• The way the giants talk is amazing. How did Roald Dahl think of this? Highlights include “chiddlers” (children — my dad says this to this day like it is a real word), “splatch-winkling” (running?), “babblement” (conversation), “swimmeling” (swimming), etc. That doesn’t even factor in the giant grammar, which is mostly “I is” instead of “I am” but there’s some extra texture to it sometimes, too.

• The BFG knows he speaks in a technically improper way, and he’s just like you know what, I’m doing my best and getting my point across. Great attitude!

• When the BFG farts, it propels him into the air! And he LOVES it. Made me think I could benefit from a more excited attitude about farting myself.

Messiest part: Humans deserve to be apex predators of earth for no reason?!

Well, there’s sort of a reason — because it’s a kid’s book, and you can’t tell kids they deserve to get eaten alive.

BUT. Humans get special status in the BFG, in two ways:

1. It’s a more urgent issue when humans get killed than when another species gets killed

2. Humans have more implicit license to kill humans than other species do

So first off, killing is most urgently wrong when a human dies. Giants killing humans is THE intolerable problem of the book, solved by all giants getting life in underground prison with only “repulsant” snozzcumbers to eat. (Human rights issue?! Macros of this diet very wack.)

Humans eating pigs is mentioned in passing, as sort of analogous to giants eating humans:

Sophie: I think it’s rotten that those foul giants should go off every night to eat humans. Humans have never done them any harm.

The BFG: That is what the little piggy-wiggy is saying every day. He is saying, ‘I has never done any harm to the human bean so why should he be eating me?’

Sophie: Oh dear.

But pig rights don’t have the same moral heft in the book. All the main characters eat bacon enthusiastically in the book, in Buckingham Palace! Even though the Queen says, “I do not approve of murder,” her household is serving DEATH FOOD. (Also she has GOT to Google the history and present of England.)

Killing humans is presented as special, extra-bad killing.

But even so, humans get special leeway to kill humans. It’s acknowledged in The BFG that we kill each other, and that it’s bad — but no one springs into action about it.

The BFG and Sophie just briefly discuss it:

The BFG: I is not understanding human beans at all. You is a human bean and you is saying it is grizzling and horrigust for giants to be eating human beans. Right or left?

Sophie: Right.

The BFG: But human beans is squishing each other all the time. They is shootling guns and going up in aerioplanes to drop their bombs on each other’s heads every week.

This brief interrogation of human supremacy / innocence quickly drops off. For the rest of the book, humans are the good guys, human systems work (the Queen and the British army help save the day!), and giants deserve everything short of death for eating innocent, unsuspecting humans.

Part of the reason for this: Giants are ugly, so they must be bad. They have POTBELLIES! And yellow teeth and “purple frankfurter lips” and they drool a lot!

Not the best moral reasoning I’ve ever seen. Huge uggos still deserve… maybe… something. Due process? Protein? They don’t even live in the Queen’s jurisdiction — and she went and arrested them in their homeland!

I guess the goal of this narrative distortion is to make kids feel that the world wants to protect them, and that they deserve it.

But then again! This is the story of an 8-year-old orphan, Sophie, getting abducted in the middle of the night, and no one cares about that—including her. By the end of The BFG she’s like, “My abductor is my surrogate dad AND my best friend!”

It’s weird. In The BFG, killing humans gets special, extra-bad status — and it’s also kind of the only bad thing. By abducting and NOT killing Sophie (and sometimes crying about how sad it is he abducted her, TO her) (sus), The BFG establishes himself as good in the world of the novel.

Other messy parts:

• The BFG “has” to abduct Sophie when she sees him, because otherwise she’ll tell people she saw him and start a huge giant hunt—so he says at the beginning. But then when she wants to tell the Queen about giants later, to protect children, the BFG tells her no one will believe her and hunt giants with her. Worldview inconsistency!

• The BFG blows dreams into people’s bedrooms — and the dreams are gendered?! Some dreams are for boys and others are for girls and it’s important not to mix them up. Why??? Dumb.

Overall verdict: This was fun!

Roald Dahl was a true freak and I thank him for his service. I wish The BFG was real.

Question for readers

Have you reread any books from your childhood—and if yes how did they hit you as an adult? I feel like parents must be going through this all the time.

Mailbag with one piece of mail: Gracie Abrams

I got one response to my newsletter defending Gracie Abrams from… not much, tbh. I loved this response, and it must exist on the internet!

From Rebecca:

Any argument that hinges upon "as a ___ to daughters" is already kind of messed up to me:

1. It suggests young girls have no discernment, agency, or capacity for complex feelings.

2. It perpetuates the notion that youth (and girls specifically) only matter in relation to adults (and maybe dads specifically, even though a mom wrote this, since the whole "daughters" thing is very male Republican-coded).

3. God forbid a girl does get messed up by Gracie Abrams (unlikely). It is not her parents' fault for under-censoring her media consumption. Watching American Pie 1, 2, and 3 at age seven messed me up in ways I barely understand now, but I don't blame my mother, or my father, or even Paul Weitz!

As a nanny to DAUGHTERS, I asked Ava, age 11, what she thought of Sabrina Carpenter, Gracie Abrams, and what it's like to listen to pop music as a girl.

Me: What do you know about Sabrina Carpenter?

Ava: She's a good musician. I don't listen to her all that often, but I know "Taste" and "Please, Please, Please" and "Espresso." Those are her most popular songs. Any songs that are popular at the moment, she'll probably sing at least one of them. I won't go, "Hey Siri, play Sabrina Carpenter."

Siri: Plays Sabrina Carpenter.

M and A: Jam out to Sabrina Carpenter.

M: Do you like listening to Sabrina Carpenter?

A: She has a nice voice. I like her voice. I feel like with boy singers, they have similar voices, but with girl voices some are more unique, like Sabrina Carpenter. When I hear it, I know it's Sabrina Carpenter.

M: Do you know who Gracie Abrams is?

A: Of course. There's this song my friend likes, and I learned it and kind of liked it: "That's So True." I feel kind of the same about Gracie Abrams, but I don't know as many Gracie Abrams songs.

M: Do you think it can be empowering to sing about love, or do you think people have to do it because it's part of the songwriting industry?

A: I wouldn't use the word "empowering" or "powerful," but love and all that stuff is something all adults do.

M: What do you think "That's So True" is about?

A: There's a line that's like, "Kicking back on your couch / Making eyes from across the room." It's kind of hard to tell with her songs, but I have a feeling that she had a boyfriend and he cheated on her. That's another topic in love that happens a lot on songs.

M: Are there any songs you can think of that you like or love that are not about love at all?

A: I like the song "Saturn" by SZA, and I think it's about not being happy with the place you live in. And also I think that SZA probably has depression and a lot of anxiety. She's kind of talking about, not about how she hates the earth, but some part of me goes to littering and how people treat the earth. She says, "I'll be better on Saturn," as in Saturn's another planet. It's not livable, but it's somewhere besides earth. I know when you have depression, you feel like there's no hope left, and I think that's a lot part of it, that there's no hope left, because she's not happy with the place she lives in.

Linxxx

• This article by Karl (Ove Knausgaard) asks the question: what if Sophie was a middle-aged Norwegian man and The BFG was the internet?!

• This song makes living on top of a hill seem so freaking cool.

• Ok I’ll go to New Buffalo, TikTok. You win.

• I was crying laughing at this podcast about Scheana Shay. I wish it was 3 hours long but it is ONLY 2.

• I’ll write a research memo about new/scary Trump policies for ya — DM me!

The title was: “As a mother to teen daughters, I'm not that concerned about Sabrina Carpenter's influence (...but I am about Gracie Abrams)”

Let us discuss!

To start, some stream of consciousness thoughts on Gracie

I like Gracie Abrams less than Taylor Swift, more than Ariana Grande. I’ve listened to The Secret of Us a lot, though not proudly. That bob really suits her. She can pick a single and “Risk” and “Close to You” are probably her best songs. She is sort of a Taylor protege and did some opening for the Eras tour. Someone on a podcast (Who? Weekly?) said she makes Taylor Swift look like Aretha Franklin, and that’s so true. J.J. Abrams, creator of Lost and Alias and stuff, is her dad. I just Googled and she’s 25 — older than I thought!

Now let us return to the concerned Substack about Gracie

I’m going to go through and pull out key lines for comment in chronological order, starting with the title.

“As a mother to teen daughters…”

I don’t love this opening clause, because it feels a little exclusive (should I not respond as only the daughter of a mother?) and I think the author is being reductive to herself. She’s also been a teenage daughter in the past, because of time. But her Substack operates mostly in this near-future tense, focused on her hopes and fears about her daughters listening to music, instead of her personal experience of music as a young and then older person—which would be more grounded and interesting.

“...I'm not that concerned about Sabrina Carpenter's influence (...but I am about Gracie Abrams)”

Intriguing! Sabrina just dropped a very oral-sexy, walk-me-like-a-dog album cover for her upcoming album, Man’s Best Friend. It was seemingly designed to concern concerned moms. But no! We are in a sex positive, dog positive, anti-Gracie Substack.

Abrams and Carpenter aren’t all that different. The ratio of their songs about attracting boys to their songs about literally anything else is… disheartening.

Now this hits me as unfair to both of them. This is mostly listeners’ fault: No one wants songs about taxes, and if they do they already have “Taxman.” Also, both Gracie and Sabrina sing much more about DESIRING specific boys than attracting large volumes of random boys. Important distinction! Subject vs. object.

Two of [Gracie’s] biggest hits are “I love you I’m sorry” and “I miss you I’m sorry.”

Please God, may neither of those sentences ever escape my girls’ lips.

Women can apologize to men! Dear lord. One good way Gracie is building on Taylor Swift’s legacy is she doesn’t cast herself as a perennial innocent victim of sexy, evil men. Taylor took a longgg time to complicate that narrative and make “The Archer,” “Anti-Hero,” etc.

This is great for daughters, no? Let’s reflect a bit on the role we played in our relationship problems, instead of (or in addition to — case by case!) vilifying our exes.

And it’s not that Gracie is apologizing for existing. She’s sorry for…

• Making everything about herself

• Being a dick (deets unspecified) (but she calls herself a dick twice in “I Love You, I’m Sorry”—she did something!)

• Hitting a guy she dumped with an “I miss you” when he explicitly doesn’t want to be in touch

This is very normal, good accountability. Gracie, like all of us, can be a little Future texting meme.

[W]hile both singers [Gracie and Sabrina] have seemingly dedicated themselves to winning over the male gaze (as is their right of passage as hot 20-something pop stars), Carpenter does so with a wink and a smirk, always having the upper hand. She’s in on it.

Do we really think Sabrina Carpenter has the upper hand over the male gaze because she’s winking and smirking? No one has the upper hand over the male gaze. Not even men. They’re having a loneliness epidemic because they can’t look at other people in a loving, connecting way! They can only look at porn and gun.

Abrams on the other hand prostrates herself in the fetal position at the feet of men. Far from having the upper hand, she turns herself into putty in their hand—willing herself to be shaped into whatever form they want her to take.

As a mother, the prostrated putty scares me much more than the brazen sexuality.

I think the way Gracie gets vulnerable in the public sphere is the opposite of being “prostrated putty.” She shows that people get over stuff! She wrote some sad songs (or at least slow songs… the two things may be getting conflated) about breakups, from a moderately dark place. Now she’s touring, singing about her former sadness, smiling and vertical (non-prostrated!!!).

And generally, singing about your feelings is powerful. It shows you know and care about how you feel, and you think other people should too! Gender non-conforming for women.

Which teen girls are safer- those who follow after Carpenter’s example or Abrams’s?

I mean one, let’s dream bigger for teen girls than just safety!

But two, this feels like a false binary. Gracie and Sabrina both play flattened characters in their music — Sabrina’s is confident, perky and upbeat (she can dance), and Gracie’s is moodier and more vulnerable (she can’t dance as well, I suspect). Most people inhabit both of these personas in their lives; Gracie and Sabrina probably relate to each other’s music, at least a little.

The writer surely knows this from her own life. But she won’t discuss that, only her daughters, who she discusses like they are beyond her grasp, a Different Generation. Their self-respect and future relationships might hinge on Gracie’s word choice.

As the daughter of a mother, this is really at odds with my personal experience. My mom died more than a decade ago, and there’s still no one I’m more connected to. Her self-respect and my self-respect, her relationship with men (skeptical at best!) and mine—it’s all tied up together. It’s hard for me to stop acting like my mom, even when I want to.

Meanwhile, I can’t even remember who I was listening to in high school… Death Cab for Cutie? Kelly Clarkson? OutKast? They made no major impact on my life choices. If they influenced anyone, it was my DAD, who loves “Since U Been Gone” and talks about it a lot to this day. (“That song really captures a feeling!”)

So it’s hard to understand the impulse to worry about Gracie as a parent. Parents have insane clout. It’s called reproduction for a reason.

Even in Gracie’s music, she’s like, “I want to drive to your [presumably some boy’s?] house but J.J. Abrams gave me a curfew and you live at the ends of the earth (Glendale).“

The City of Glendale I can see having concerns about Gracie Abrams.

Q for readers

How much have musicians influenced you in your life? Do you see something I’m missing in the anti-Gracie argument, perhaps as the parent of daughters, or just as a person?

Email and do tell!

Mailbag: Vibe check!

Got two lovely messages about vibes after the last newsletter. No one knows if you can trust vibes, but they definitely exist and they might be smells!

From Alex

Your recent post about vibes reminds me of a kind of woo-woo book I think about a lot called The Transmission of Affect by feminist theorist Teresa Brennan (who got hit by a car and died! and then an Australian judge three years later tried to get out of a speeding ticket by saying she was driving his car! but she had been dead for three years!), which in short tries to dismantle the Western myth of the discrete individual and instead suggests that affects are shared (hence "transmitted") between people, and we have a whole vocabulary to talk about this ("atmosphere," "vibes," "energy" etc) but we don't know how it works quite yet. She suggests that there is SOME MECHANISM out there and IT MIGHT BE something like pheromones that are literally being transmitted from person to person! So vibes COULD BE people physiologically affecting each other through smell.

From Amanda

This reminded me of this thing I recently read: "The vibe shift has been criticized as a soft-headed preference for mystical interpretation in place of empirical inquiry. But a vibe is just a technique of compression. A near-infinite variety of inputs is reduced to a single bit of output: YES or NO, FOR or AGAINST."

Personally I believe vibes have power though they're not always reliable. That was vague, sorry. A vibey take on vibes.

Thanks for writing in!

Linxxx

• I made a playlist of every song linked in this newsletter in order for no reason

• This miso asparagus recipe absolutely slays. I don’t even like asparagus.

• Some medical-grade Scottishness. Thanks Mel for bringing this into my life!

• A nice Materialists takedown

• You know what song I’m a little maternally concerned about… this ode to running red lights!

• I need Matty’s curly hair routine

• I’ll write a research memo about new/scary Trump policies for ya — DM me!

When I was a little kid, I had a strong editorial hand in my bedtime stories. My dad was always trying to tell me stories about the Pafufniks, a fictional family capering about, or a lot of times going to sleep—in hindsight I see what he was trying to do there. But I would always stop him when the bedtime story plot started cooking and ask: “But what did they SAY?”

Things have not changed much since. I love a novel where people speak in paragraphs (Detransition, Baby, baby!). I love a PLAY with MONOLOGUES. So it’s a miracle I finished and loved Anna Karenina, because if dialogue has one enemy, it’s Leo Tolstoy.

Like, look at this iconic (to me) Anna sentence, from a club in Moscow where all the male characters briefly hang out together eating, gambling, and going into debt:

Gagin [a rando guy], dropping his voice, told the last good story from Petersburg, and the story, though improper and stupid, was so ludicrous that Levin [a main character] broke into roars of laughter so loud that those near looked round.

Gagin’s story is never shared! This is not unusual. The specifics of what gets said in Anna Karenina just generally… don’t matter. It’s rare to see dialogue in quotation marks, and even rarer that what’s inside of quotation marks impacts the plot.

It seems like this would pose a craft problem for Tolstoy. How are the characters supposed to interact and affect each other, if speech is off the table?

Don’t worry! What Anna Karenina lacks in speech, it makes up for in VIBES—the engine of the novel. Glances, FLUSHES (omg the granular details we get about flushes!), flashing eyes, facial expressions. Body language and non-verbal cues drive everything.

For instance, if you grew up in a Mae Rice Culture of Talking (MRCT) you might think people “tell the truth” with “words.” But here’s a line from Anna Karenina for ya:

What always struck [Levin] in [Kitty]… was the expression of her eyes, soft, serene and truthful.

Yes: She doesn’t tell the truth — it simply comes out of her eyes!

And you might think (again if you are from MRCT) that this would lead to miscommunication. People aren’t mindreaders! You need to use your words and express how you feel and what you want, right?

False. In Anna Karenina, the omniscient narration makes it clear: There is HEAVY consensus around vibes. Early on, there is a scene at a ball where Kitty — who thinks she’s being courted by Vronsky and that they’re about to get engaged — sees Vronsky interacting with titular Anna. She realizes he and Anna are falling in love (which they are) from pure, undiluted vibes.

Behold:

[Kitty] kept watch with a growing pang in her heart. “No, it’s not the admiration of the crowd that has intoxicated [Anna], but the adoration of one. And that one? Can it be [Vronsky]?” Every time he spoke to Anna the joyous light flashed into her eyes, and the smile of happiness curved her red lips. She seemed to make an effort to control herself, to try not to show these signs of delight, but they came out of her face of themselves. “But what of [Vronsky]?” Kitty looked at him and was filled with terror. What was pictured so clearly to Kitty in the mirror of Anna’s face she saw in him… on his face was a look such as Kitty had never seen before… They were speaking of common acquaintances, keeping up the most trivial conversation, but to Kitty it seemed that every word they said was determining their fate and hers.

The words Vronsky and Anna are saying in this scene literally, textually don’t matter. They are “trivial conservation,” a pretext for hanging out together and delighting in transgressive flirty vibes. (Anna is married to another guy!)

The final nail in the coffin of Vronsky and Kitty is an action — so this is not PURE vibes. Later at this same ball, Vronsky asks Anna instead of Kitty to dance the mazurka (a clouty dance, I guess). But Kitty sees it coming from the vibes—and there is no dialogue around their breakup, or the dissolution of their courtship or whatever. No need! All is perfectly, wordlessly clear.

I think there are a few reasons speech is so deemphasized in Anna Karenina. First, I think everyone communicated less directly in old-timey Russia than in the modern U.S. Important information, at least around love and marriage, came in more through rituals (the mazurka) and subtle violations of ritual norms (dancing the mazurka with someone New and Forbidden) than it did through words.

Second, Tolstoy has an ideological agenda, which he reveals at the very end of the book: he’s an evangelical Christian, baby! The novel ends with Levin (widely understood as a stand-in for IRL Tolstoy) realizing that he has been over-intellectualizing his life, and it’s made him depressed and stupid. To be happy, he needs to think less and have more faith in a Christian god.

Talking is a mode of over-intellectualizing, in this paradigm, as are reading and writing. They’re all ways of focusing on your thoughts as opposed to received wisdom on right and wrong as laid out in the BIBLE.

(Question for Tolstoy: is reading the Bible overintellectualizing because it’s reading, or awesome because it’s Bible?)

(Question 2 for Tolstoy: Why are you tempting us into the Sin of Reading with this long ass book?)

Now it’s true you can have too much of anything, including… reasoned thought, I guess. But the book ends in an anti-intellectual in a way I found genuinely off-putting. Like look at this:

Lying on his back, [Levin] gazed up now into the high, cloudless sky. “Do I not know that that is infinite space, and that it is not a round arch? But, however I screw up my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot see it not round and not bounded, and in spite of my knowing about infinite space, I am incontestably right when I see a solid blue dome, and more right than when I strain my eyes to see beyond it.”

Here, Levin is seeing the wisdom in trusting his body’s perception of the sky vs. his learned, academic knowledge of the sky. But this pro-vibes stance is too extreme for me. I think it’s “right” and worth knowing that the sky is not a solid blue dome. Especially for pilots!

To Tolstoy’s credit, there are also a few places in Anna Karenina where vibes arguably lead people astray. My personal read of (no spoilers) the famous ending train situation is that it’s a cautionary note about vibes. Your ability to read vibes drops when you’re isolated — too few vibes coming, and you get rusty! — or depressed — all vibes start to seem bad and eternal. Good AND bad interpersonal vibes are situational and fluctuating in Anna.

Except the vibe that Vronsky likes Anna categorically more than Kitty—that one was eternal.

Still, overall, Anna Karenina had a strong pro-vibes stance—and it also rang really, holistically true to me as a piece of literature. The characters, their relationships, their evolution… it was so persuasive that it’s made me reexamine my relationship with vibes!

I think I want to take vibes more seriously, and speech less seriously, especially in situations where words and vibes are all I have to go on. So for instance, if someone is telling me about how happy they are while giving a vibe of despair—alone with myself in my brain, I’ll trust the vibes more.

I don’t see this being a visible process (inadvisable to say “no” when someone tells you they’re happy!), but I think it could be good to assume my mind and body know things I can’t put into words—while also NOT assuming the sky is a blue bowl. We’ll see how this goes! Thanks Anna Karenina!

Q for readers

How do you feel about vibes? Do you trust them at all and if yes, when do you trust them the most?

Also, is this all coming off kind of woo-woo/crystals/anti-vax? I swear I’m crystal neutral and pro vax. Ugh but if my words conflict with my vibes… you should probably trust the vibes!

Mini mailbag — blood relative edition

Two bonus reasons not to kill people from my relatives! Here are the first 11.

From my dad (paraphrased from phone):

I think you forgot the main reason not to kill people, according to Crime & Punishment: empathy. You feel a little bit of their pain, even when you really dislike them, and that’s enough to keep you from killing them.

From Paul, my second cousin in Australia:

Don’t murder in case there is an afterlife. If both victim and perpetrator go to hell, the victim has got a head start on how things work there, and will be so out for revenge!

Linxxx

• Ariana Grande is very Anna Karenina and so are these 2 songs: 1, 2.

• It’s not just me and Tolstoy against speech!

• Randomly found 6 “Closer” remixes all together in a little family.

• The rogue arm makes this soooo much funnier. It’s nothing without the arm.

• I’ll write a research memo about new/scary Trump policies for ya — DM me!

“You can see their eyes!” I said to anyone who would listen, including my landlord. “How can you kill something after making eye contact with it?”

I can basically only kill bugs. But this is not a sign I’m a “good person” necessarily.

In an interview I read recently, Ocean Vuong (poet and novelist) recalled a time when he was 15 and really wanted to kill a guy for stealing his bike. Ocean asked his friend, Big Joe, if he could borrow his gun, and Big Joe said no.

“What was so touching to me is that I was not responsible for that,” Ocean says. “Someone else’s better sense saved me.”

I think Ocean gives himself too little credit there. I bet without Big Joe’s intervention, he still would have chickened out before fully murdering. He hasn’t killed anyone since and cries when he talks about this incident.

Still, I was also very struck by what a great thing Big Joe did, protecting 15-year-old Ocean from probably the most unwise and intense impulse of his life.

For most of my life, I haven’t been equipped to do that! I don’t have a gun to not-give anyone, and I didn’t have much to say to someone considering murder besides “What?” and “People have eyes!!!”

But after reading Crime & Punishment, I feel like I have a lot to say to someone considering murder.

Why Crime & Punishment was educational in ~100 words

If you haven’t read, Crime and Punishment is about Raskolnikov, a somewhat (???) normal guy who axe-murders a pawnbroker and her sister. This is early in the novel! Then he just kinda stews in the emotional and logistical fallout of that for hundreds of pages, with cameos from friends, family, and very chill and giggly law enforcement professionals.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the axe murder suckssssss for Raskolnikov. He gets a few waves of euphoric “I got away with it!” feeling, but he is overall freaked out and literally sickened by what he did.

Murder: It’s bad for the perpetrators, too! And you really see that up close in this book.

11 reasons not to murder people, according to Dostoevsky x me

1. You might just need some fresh air. And isn’t that more fun and easy than murdering? It’s crazy how repeatedly different figures in Crime & Punishment, including the omniscient narrator, attribute Raskolnikov’s decisions and mental state to his cramped little rented room (which he never pays rent for so… stolen room?). Visitors keep stopping by and confusing his room with a cupboard or a hole. Just a little Friends-style running gag throughout the book. But seriously, a major message of Crime & Punishment is to go for a walk! Get a bigger house! Environment and ventilation is key to obeying the law.

2. Murder is bad, and you’re not a special exception. Raskolnikov has this creepy ubermensch theory that he is like Napoleon, one of the men who has some vague cosmic license to kill people because he’s a creator of history. (Remember he’s only SOMEWHAT normal.) This theory sucks! Napoleon had a “license” to kill, to the extent he did, because a huge nation/army of people felt like he was killing on their behalf. He also risked his own death by killing people in what was widely understood as WAR. Raskolnikov is not living like this. His murder is a solo surprise attack on his pawnbroker, who he axes from behind during what she understands as a work visit. Raskolnikov trying to feel like Napoleon by killing a lady reminds me of something I did when I was a kid: I’d try to eat my last piece of French toast FIRST, because the last piece always made me full, so could I get immediately, magically full by eating it first? No. Context matters.

3. Circumstances change! Raskolnikov feels he “has” to kill the pawnbroker so he can rob her and give his sister money, while protecting the pawnbroker’s sister from (alleged) physical abuse. But shortly after the murder, other financial resources for his sister emerge, and he never gives her any money. Plus he kills the pawnbroker’s sister when she catches him mid-murder. Raskolnikov is a fake friend to sisters!

4. Murder is DISGUSTING. I honestly feel like Dostoevsky murdered someone IRL because he gives so much detail.

5. Murder logistics are really stressful. Getting to and from the murder is a nightmare. Raskolnikov is very uncertain about whether there’s blood on his clothes that he hasn’t spotted; whether he actually fully killed the pawnbroker; whether he is successfully concealing his axe in his jacket; whether he has been spotted going down the stairs post-murder; and MUCH more.

6. Goals change! After the murder, Raskolnikov almost forgets to rob the pawnbroker, and never figures out whether what he stole was valuable. He wanted money going in, but going out, he has a new goal absorbing all his attention: getting away with murder! Even if (BIG IF!) murder solves a problem, it creates a huge new legal problem that swallows his life.

7. It’s hard to act normal after you kill someone. Not that Raskolnikov is the king of acting or normalcy, but he has trouble controlling his affect in the aftermath—lots of giggling and rage and heart palpitations. He also has a remorseful fever for like 90% of the book. He has a really strong, physical reaction to murdering.

8. Murder is a huge secret that isolates you. Raskolnikov sees his mom after the murder, and has this realization that he can never be truly honest with anyone again (unless he confesses and goes to Siberian prison camp). It’s really sad! I cried at this part because I would hate it even more than him. I love to be EXCESSIVELY HONEST with people who are barely asking me anything.

9. Confessing to murder is no fun, either. Raskolnikov really wants to talk about his murder experience, so he confesses to Sonia, his friend’s daughter. He feels clear to tell her because she’s a sex worker, therefore just as bad as him (in his eyes) (not in mine, Sonia is way cooler). This puts her in a terrible position, where she has to narc on Raskolnikov, who she has an ultra-Christian crush on, or become complicit in this murder. She navigates it AMAZINGLY, but that doesn’t mean it was kind or appropriate of him to share. The pawnbroker’s sister was Sonia’s Bible study friend! Not cool.

10. Murder makes it hard to be present. Raskolnikov is often flashing back to the murder and literally returning to the scene of the crime, or planning one million defensive steps ahead because a guy in the street looked at him sideways. (No one understands “I Think He Knows” like Raskolnikov!) This means he can’t feel feelings about his life as it happens — he’s so guilty and anxious his whole emotional fusebox is blown. It takes him like 7 years to notice he’s in love! Talk about a slow burn.

11. You’re never sure you got away with it. Raskolnikov is trying so hard not to go to jail, but as long as he’s alive, he could go. There’s no statute of limitations on murder. The uncertainty hangs over him forever. Most people (myself included) can barely tolerate that scale of uncertainty for 10 minutes, let alone for life!

These are just some of the discouraging thoughts I would share with someone considering murder, though maybe in a less peppy tone and a less BuzzFeedified format.

Obviously I think a lot of people would instead RUN from someone considering murder, which is healthy. But the amazing thing about Crime & Punishment is that it made me more strongly against murder than I already was, but it also made me root for Raskolnikov and see his good traits and want to talk to him, ideally before the murder, but after would work too.

As my dad said about Raskolnikov, sort of hilariously: “He’s trying to be a good person!”

But I agree. The “trying” in “trying to be a good person” and the “somewhat” in “somewhat normal person” — two of the hardest working words in history.

Bonus: Meet an unforgettable dream baby (pejorative)

There is a wild passage at the end of Crime & Punishment where a side character (I won’t say which one!) sees a child, realizes he’s dreaming, wakes up, and kills himself. The flow of causality is NOT CLEARER in the book than it is here.

But let us look at how Dostoevsky describes this man’s encounter with the child:

He raised the blanket carefully. The child was sleeping soundly, she had got warm under the blanket, and her pale cheeks were flushed. But strange to say that flush seemed brighter and coarser than the rosy cheeks of childhood. “It’s a flush of fever,” thought [anon guy, no spoilers]. It was like the flush from drinking, as though she had been given a full glass to drink. Her crimson lips were hot and glowing. He suddenly fancied that her long black eyelashes were quivering, as though the lids were opening and a sly crafty eye peeped out with an unchildlike wink, as though the little girl were not asleep but pretending. Yes, it was so. Her lips parted in a smile… now it was a grin, a broad grin; there was something shameless, provocative in that quite childish face; it was depravity, it was the face of a harlot, the shameless face of a French harlot… “Accursed child!” [he] cried, raising his hand to strike her, but at that moment he woke up.

UM?! As Taylor Swift would say, “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby.” But this is more goth because the guy truly (in his dream) feels the baby is drunk and coming on to him and that he needs to HIT her.

I sort of love it — I think he’s realizing the problem is his worldview, not the sluttiness of the baby — but I can’t believe most people read this book in high school. I was barely old enough to read it just now.

Q for readers

Any reasons not to kill people that I left out?

Linxxx

• Dostoevsky has his own Subreddit :)

• Summer is for beats that sound like hold music!

• I love Robby Hoffman so much. It’s not even what she says, it’s HOW!

• A doc about people in Chicago who do Big Joe-style violence interruption

• Perfect “end of discussion” song

• I’ll make a research memo about new/scary Trump policies for ya — just ask!

Without further ado, let’s empty this mailbag on this… desk!

From Amanda:

My version of "watching my cat" (the meaning of life) is hanging out with my baby. There is a timeless quality to our hangs if/when my phone is not around, which to me seems precious, almost like a luxury. Also I don't want my son to get the message that my phone is more important than him, or for him to roll into danger because I am distracted. I will be honest, I was never someone who thought to herself, "My truth is that I want to be a Mother one day," but now that I am one, I think it's the coolest thing, probably the best part of my life, and I don't want to miss it.

I'm more conflicted as far as being present while I'm eating. One of my favorite pastimes is stuffing my face in front of my laptop. Either while I scroll something mindless or crank through some kind of project/task that I've convinced myself is urgent. I know it would be better for my digestion and diet to slow down and chew. Part of me wants that for myself, especially after I've crammed in six chocolate bars in one sitting. But another part of me treasures my mindless eating freakout time. I can date this practice back at least to the early 2000s when I used to read Perez Hilton, a terrible website. For some people. there's reality TV and wine. For me, there's only the internet and snax.

Check out Amanda’s Substack! I really liked this week’s edition about following your passion (or not).

From Jordan (2x mailbag champion!):

Places where I have valued being present recently:

- On the dance floor - I love to dance and be in my body, it's one of the places where I feel most free and I think this is a very "being present" thing. The more I just focus on the music and moving how I want to, and the less I focus on worrying about looking a certain way, the better I feel. Sometimes I wear sunglasses on the dance floor so I don't have to worry about stressful accidental eye contact, which I think allows me to be even more present.

- Like you - in conversation, listening, asking questions. I wonder whether there is a correlation between how much of a Fact person you are and how much you think you are "being present"???

- Much longer and vulnerable one: As of 4 weeks ago I have been dealing with moderately severe tinnitus from accidental noise exposure. It's a loud, constant ringing in my ears that is audible in even moderately noisy spaces like an office with quiet conversation and HVAC noise. There are 2 sounds - one is like the high pitched whine of a TV that's left on with nothing playing on it, and the other one is lower and sounds like the D 2 octaves above middle C. I can no longer hear quiet! I have really been struggling with my mental health as a result of this.

One of the unfortunate things about tinnitus is that there isn't really a "cure", the main thing that the medical establishment agrees on is CBT and mindfulness therapies. So I've been forced to confront this kind of more deliberate mindfulness against my will. The goal of the therapies is to teach the brain to "habituate" to the tinnitus - aka "tune it out" the way that you learn to tune out planes or highway noise audible from your home. And this is done in part by convincing the brain that the noise isn't "negative in valence" in the language of the Sasha Chapin people - as in just considering it to be a noise that's neither positive or negative. The noise isn't going to hurt you even though it's (highly) unpleasant.

After the tinnitus started, each time I remembered that I was hearing the sound it would release a jolt of panic and upset into my body. And I could see that this was conditioning my body to be more anxious and "listen for" the sound more, which would cause more anxiety and upset when I inevitably noticed the sound again, and on and on.

So I have been working on trying to just be present with the sounds - rather than feeling hurt by them, or upset that this is happening to me or worrying about whether I am going to have to hear this forever or whatever the goal is to just exist, try to feel other parts of my body, acknowledge the sound is there without attaching emotional content to it, and redirect my attention. And so far I would say it is actually helping reduce the anxiety and problems although it is still pretty unpleasant and tough.

Overall the tinnitus experience has made me start to understand more of the deeper value of mindfulness. But I don't think I would have understood it without experiencing a real mental health problem. I wonder how many people who are really into mindfulness started because of a serious or unpleasant mental health problem and turned toward mindfulness as a healing strategy.

From Taylor:

Been thinking a lot about this topic. I forgot my AirPods on my two-week trip and while I had my noise-cancelling headphones for planes and trains, I didn't have anything to entertain me while walking around, which comprised most of my day. I found that I didn't miss my AirPods too much and was able to be much more present and appreciate hearing conversations in Chinese even when I didn't understand. I also brought my camera on the trip and that also helped me stay in the moment.

Your Taylor [Swift] top 20 is very different from mine! I'm not the most active fan, so I have barely listened to anything since Lover and many of my favorites are from when I was in middle/high school. I really like some of the Taylor's Version remakes though, like Dear John, which benefit from her more mature singing voice and my own perspective as an adult who has been in an age gap relationship!!

Bonus from my dad (paraphrased from a phone call):

I click all the links in your newsletter but I don’t like them. They’re always about things I don’t understand. You’ll link out to a big article about how Sweetpea and Lipto [people he made up] are fighting, and I don’t know who they are, and I don’t want to find out. I’m too old to find out. But it might be interesting if I knew.

Linxxx

• The best Taylor Swift TikTok we’ve got!

• I found an old playlist from college and it took me back.

• Trump-era survival strategies, from me to you :)

• That’s it! Let’s give my dad a break!

I said to the receptionist, “Wow, there’s an Easter egg hunt going on right now!” and she said, “Yeah, there are actually a bunch of plastic eggs hidden in this room.” So I looked around, “found” a plastic egg (it was lying on the floor pretty nakedly), and opened it to find a 15% off coupon for a local restaurant I didn’t want to go to!

It was a very “love, actually, is all around” type of moment. (But instead of love, it’s eggs.) I’ve been having moments like this more often lately and it’s fun! I think it’s related to “being present.”

I have not always been, or aspired to be, present. In grad school, I did a lot of yoga, and the teachers were always telling me to be present and “focus on my breath.” It was so boring, I stopped going to yoga.

I have historically thought of being present as a corny, faintly lobotomized state — like the “equanimity” the Calm app was pushing last time I checked, where you “protect your peace” (TikTok phrase alert!) so hard you’re actually totally checked out of your life. It’s marketed as an absence of distraction, agitation, screens, etc. But what are we making space for when we clear out those (sometimes nice!) things?

I had no answer for a long time, so I was just vocally, off-the-charts future oriented, knee-deep in my phone.

But lately, I think I’ve figured some things I like that I need to be present to do. They are:

• Noticing things around me — like the Easter flier at the massage place! I want to get ⅓ as good at this as my BFF from college, an astonishingly observant person. Once ~15 years ago, it was winter and we were leaving a movie and walking by a planter, and she said “Look at the ice pooping out of that planter!” (this was how we talked to each other at that time — I think it was kind of a You, Me and Everyone We Know reference so quite HIGHBROW!). There was a drainage hole at the bottom of the planter with water streaming out, and it had frozen mid-flow in a very beautiful, Narnia-ish manner. This is the type of thing I want to see! With or without friend assistance!

• Spontaneous chatting — This is usually just unrepeatable small talk, where I say something slightly personal or situationally specific, instead of the standard “How are you?” or “Have a good one!” So like recently my favorite Orangetheory instructor was covered in cupping circles and I said, “Does cupping hurt?” and they said, “Not as much as getting a new IUD, which I also just did!” and then we had a quick, very interesting chat. The underlying theme was Pain (why do we not get anesthesia for IUD insertion? They get it in Australia!), but it was still fun and interesting and beyond surface level. A conversation we could only have had that day.

• Asking follow-up questions — I love to ask and be asked! I think of follow-up questions as acts of love and part of active listening, which is TOO often understood as saying “uh-huh” over and over. I more understand it as thinking along with whoever’s talking and helping them tell and elaborate on their story so you fully understand it, and it requires being focused and present with them.

• Joking around — There is a way of joking around where no one is necessarily Telling A Joke That Could Go In A Standup Special, but everyone is reacting to each other in a fun and playful way. I don’t know why I’m explaining this like I discovered it. This is the foundation of podcasting and friendship. It’s probably more about being friends and being present than being funny, honestly, it gets a lot funnier than most people can get alone! Here is a perfect example that cracks me up every time (and I’ve watched it like 60 times). Of course Chelsea Peretti is also funnier than god on her own.

• Watching my cat—This is the meaning of life. Especially when he really gets a bee in his bonnet and needs to climb on the air ducts or otherwise run an urgent errand. Gotta be present to watch him knock out his to-do list so I can tell him “Good job!” and mean it.

• Acting how I feel emotionally/physically—If I feel an urge to cry, eat, sleep, laugh, whatever, I want to act like it (outside of work—no crying at work!). I think acting on body impulses in real-ish time helps me (and everyone) feel relaxed and come across as legible and trustworthy. No one has more constipated, THREATENING energy than someone who is hungry and doesn’t know it. But to avoid that fate, you have to be present enough to notice how you feel.

So lately I’m trying to do these things, and so far it’s fun and better than yoga. (Although I am losing mobility and approaching this physique in small but notable ways every day… might have to return to yoga soon.) Maybe everyone has their own special matrix of things they want to be present to do, and yoga/meditation folks are only pushing one facet of presence that works for a certain kind of chill person.

Also to be clear, I’m not trying to be present all the time. Sometimes I do need to lock into my laptop and do my job and ignore my body and surroundings until I have 30% starved to death. I’m just trying to be present more, or regularly, and I’m motivated in a new, clearer way!

Question for readers

Do you care about “being present”? How do you know when it’s happening? Reply and tell me, I would love to know! I will ask you a follow-up question if I am being present at time of receipt.

+ if I can republish your thoughts in a mailbag, please put “Mailbag approved” in your email!

Mini-mailbag: Fact people

Ok the mailbag about this “Fact people” newsletter is small because figuring out which messages I have permission to share fills me with inexplicable dread. THAT SAID, here’s an excerpt of a very thoughtful message from someone who specifically said I could republish, praise be!

I also do not do well in a Fact conversation. I think similar to you, I want to talk about relational topics and feelings, or experiential things etc. I think this is something that blossomed in me more after I moved into the manager world at work - I learned how to "coach" which it turns out is basically professional training for how to ask questions in conversation, which turns out at least for me as being a huge unlock in improving conversation! I seriously think that more people should be required to take a class like this in school - how to ask questions and how to have a good conversation. I really think it's a teachable skill that can badly hamper a person if they don't acquire it.

Lately I have been trying to swim more in a Fact society, especially when it comes to politics. For me, I've noticed that political discussions that I'm part of usually involve people making long form points. I am not as good at this and have trouble making a longer coherent thread without switching it back around and asking a question or inviting participation - but in this type of chat people will go on so I lose my "conversational turn" and possibly the point that I was trying to make. So lately with my political chat friends I have been practicing being more of a Fact guy. One thing I've noticed is that it makes me feel a feeling of mastery over material if I am doing it, and a feeling of satisfaction if I'm able to provide a longer-form coherent "point" that is stuck in my head in a way that I think my conversational partner understands and vibes with.

— Jordan

Thanks Jordan and everyone else who responded who I was too weak to ask about perms! I see and appreciate you!

Linxxx

• NO ONE does it like Chelsea.

• A way to be present in the bathroom :)

• Intensely into the new Bon Iver album. Music to sleep and get married to!

• This Sasha Chapin newsletter suggests that being present = charisma? TBD, I am not getting this feedback personally lol. Yet!

• My top 20 Taylor Swift songs, RANKED (subject to change) (made this randomly on a plane) (send me yours!)

• Chicagoans, volunteer fair this weekend!

• Trump-era survival strategies, from me to you <3

It's dangerous to make your first smoothie. If you haven't started making smoothies yet, don’t start.

If someone offers you $100K, a great counteroffer is $5 million.

Don't stay in the villa with the "suicide tree" in the yard.

Don't date a visibly balding man with shoulder-length hair, even if he pulls it off like crazyyyyy.

Devil’s threesome with your brother sounds REALLY awkward but it's better than you think! The key is to be on drugs during and get really into reading (in separate locations) afterwards.

If you wave a gun in a stranger's face and run away, don't run away to HIS resort.

Dads... no thanks. Try to avoid hanging out with your dad or even knowing who he is if possible.

If you think it's morally wrong to kill people, take a deep breath. Relax. Start by fatally shooting a guy (just one guy!) in the back. You can do it :)

If you kinda hate your friends, tell them you LOVE them you just feel sad when you’re with them. For no reason!

Water is really nice. Droplets of water… bodies of water… great stuff.

If you're negotiating a blood money deal with a murderer, take your son with you! This is a big part of parenting.

Linxxx

• This guy is a freaking genius of White Lotus commentary.

• A good Ask Polly. You don’t have to relate to the question to feel the answer.

• Are these shoes cute? Please respond and help me. I get so many Insta ads for them it’s eroding my sense of style and self.

• Trump-era research memos, from me to you <3

When I first heard there was a new TV show called Severance, I assumed it was based on Ling Ma’s novel Severance, which I loved. It’s not, but the two weirdly have a lot in common!

• They’re both realistic with one weird medical twist — in Severance (novel), the twist is a fictional global pandemic. The disease (Shen Fever) gets people stuck in unbreakable behavioral loops (and then kills them). In Severance (TV), the twist is this fictional brain surgery that severs workers’ consciousness, so there’s a version of themselves they’ve never met—their “innie”—who’s only conscious at the office. Speaking of which…

• They both are set heavily at an office — In Severance (novel), the narrator is one of the last “Shen Fever” survivors in New York, and one of the last people to stop working. I think she lives in her office for a while because the elevator goes down? In Severance (TV show), the innies literally only exist in the office, specifically on the Severed Floor of Lumon. So we’re there a lot. John Turturro hates the lights.

• They have the same title — Duh. In Severance (novel), the title alludes to the end of a job — and the protagonist does eventually leave her job (though no literal severance package, according to Google Generative AI :-/ I read it a long time ago, sorry). In Severance (TV), the title is the name of the special brain surgery.

But there’s one main difference between the two Severances — it’s clear to me what Severance (novel) is about: work, routine, repetition vs. novelty, health vs. habit, etc. The themes of the shared facts above are the themes of the book. It’s very conceptually cohesive, although there are other threads and digressions and stuff.

Severance (TV show), on the other hand, is not about any of the things listed above. Even though it takes place largely in an office, it doesn’t strike a chord with anything I’ve experienced in an IRL office. For instance:

• In Severance (TV show), the innies don’t understand the purpose or process of what they do for work. (You feel the numbers’ vibes?!) In IRL offices, you are supposed to know what you’re doing. If you’re doing something with numbers, it’s supposed to be math.

• The protagonist innies on Macrodata Refinement (MDR) are discouraged from physically finding their colleagues on their floor. They’re definitely not supposed to learn what they do or building relationships with them! In IRL offices, this is the #1 thing you’re supposed to do. Integration! Synergy! Collaboration! We’re all one team. (Also office space is too expensive and human psychology too precarious to isolate 4 people in a giant windowless room like MDR does.)

• Severed jobs in Severance come with… free brain surgery?! No IRL resonance. I feel like the lean of jobs right now is more “What if everyone was a 1099 employee?”, not “We want to make a huge up-front, medical investment in junior employees.”

• The hard 9-5 at Lumon, where innies get in the elevator and physically can’t think about work until they come back the next day, is not something any workplace I know about wants. No employer has ever told me like, “All your system passwords are suspended between 5pm and 9am. We’re that concerned about our privacy / your work/life balance. GO LIVE!”

• The time-intensive consequences the innies get for misbehaving (this is more of a thing in Season 1—all the stuff in The Break Room) are just not the vibe at IRL jobs. Direct critical feedback is pretty rare, and no one wants to punish you. If there’s a behavioral problem, you get let go… not tortured! This is a good thing about IRL work. Thanks, work!

• Senior people are surveilling junior people at nutso levels in Severance. Ms. Cobel is just sitting at her desk, watching live footage of MDR people’s physical bodies?! She’s spying on Mark’s outie at home? In IRL offices, this is not how senior people are spending their time. They are all hanging out together in endless meetings, fighting and being best friends (I think) (I really have no idea). If my boss cared THAT much what I was doing, I’d wonder if I should be their boss instead.

So. Historically, I thought this was a weakness of Severance (TV show). It seems like it’s a thoughtful show about office work, but it also seems like no one in the writer’s room has worked in an office before.

But after I watched the season two finale of Severance (no major spoilers, I think), I started to see this differently. Because the themes of the show are abstract and not bound up in the setting — I’d say main themes are identity, memory, love, dissociation / compartmentalization — it’s more open to interpretation. Which is cool!

Now that I’ve watched two season of TV about severance, a “work surgery” with no clear real-world analog, I feel like it brings up echoes of all kinds of stuff for me, like:

• Alcohol! Severance is kind of like other stuff we do to numb out and dissociate — in the finale, Mark’s outie makes a comment about getting severed because he was drinking too much, and it basically gave him a healthier way to forget his wife’s day for large chunks of the day. Interesting! Drinking a LOT does get you closest to the memory-reset innies get when they leave the severed floor.

• Children?! I saw this TikTok that really spoke to me where the creator (@tejuabiola) argues Severance (TV show) is actually about children, and the ways parents disrespect their children’s autonomy. I LOVE this. The innies do have this kind of childlike innocence (Helly’s literally 2 seasons old!), and the outie/innie relationship is much more of a parent-child dynamic than peer-to-peer. Plus Lumon feels more like a weird, severe boarding school — with the bottomless discipline budget and the opaque authority figures — than a workplace. Even the severance surgery tracks kind of aligns with medicating rambunctious children so they behave in school…

• Polyamory? This show has helped me understand the (a?) poly ideal, where you have multiple partners who connect with different facets of your personality. Then again this show has convinced me we all contain multitudes, so maybe it’s poly to be in a monogamous relationship, too!

Overall, watching Severance (TV show) has made me more open to a surreal premise or a twist or whatever that’s pure invention. Not reality turned up to 11, nothing directly allegorical — just something fictional someone asserts is real. It starts meaning things over time! And maybe the severed workplace takes on more meanings because it started out meaning nothing to me.

Question for readers

Do you think Severance is about work? Did you like the finale? Did you know Adam Scott is *51*? Lmk! Especially about that last one…

Linxxx

• Highly rec Ling Ma’s short story collection, too, Bliss Montage!

• This Severance (TV show) TikTok made me laugh so hard. Skip to 0:50-ish if you want. “It might be the relationship you’ve seen on screen!”

• This song has MOVEMENTS like a SYMPHONY and I love it.

• Trump-era research memos, from me to you <3

I’m talking well-intentioned, unarmed people who smell OK. We aren’t arguing. It’s possible they think we are having a good time. But for me—and I make up as much as 50% of the interaction!—the hang feels itchy and bad. Worse than boring. Worse than being alone!

I think normal people are just like, “Aww too bad we don’t click!” and they keep it moving. (Actually, the most normal people probably think, “We click! It’s too bad I’m always busy when they want to hang out!”)

But in my heart of hearts, I’m like… “We don’t click. WHY DON’T WE CLICK?!?!?!!”

I have developed a working theory about the type of person I aggressively don’t click with. Most often, I meet this type on a Hinge date. Sometimes, they are a friend of a friend. Always, I wish they would change!

My anti-type: People who need to be factually right at the function

Most people would rather be right than wrong. That’s so normal. But people who NEED to be right — people who identify as a source of accurate factual information, and nothing less (or more?) — seem to me like they are living in Flatland. They are out at a bar, talking about measurable quantities and addresses! Literally, why?

I have no idea. I do know these people tend to congregate around certain experiences:

• Trivia (though no shade to trivia—I like it, too!)

• Games of skill and accuracy (where you win by being The Best a.k.a. right)

• Hobbies of skill, like knitting or coding or archery

• Making a ton of money (this is the “right” answer to capitalism)

• Reading and repeating news

• Traveling, and tracking the number of countries they’ve been to (bigger number = closer to accurate, all-encompassing knowledge of Earth?)

They also tend to flee certain experiences:

• The arts (creating and, to a lesser extent, consuming)

• Astrology/tarot

• Laughing unreservedly (jokes are often UNTRUE exaggerations, which is unsafe!)

• Anything where you produce information, like journalism (because then you learn that what’s “right” is often a bit socially constructed and uncertain)

My anti-type is just a small subset of all the people congregating around and fleeing from these experiences—but for me, they are an unpleasant, inexplicable little subset!

I would actually love to learn more from this type of person. What motivates them? What do they fear? What’s fun about telling me what year a movie was made?

These are tough questions, though. Answering would involve The Fact Brigade (as I sometimes call them) engaging with their own subjectivity, a.k.a. their least favorite thing. I can’t tell if that’s because there are no opinions and preferences inside of them—is it just Wikipeda in there?—or if they just refuse to share them, due to the social risks of being “wrong” and falling into the legendary “hole of wrongness” that lies beneath the city.

Whatever it is, they always bring the conversation back to facts—reciting facts, verifying facts with Google, agreeing with each others’ facts. It is, for me, hell.

My type: Let’s book club our subjectivity!

My favorite social thing is talking about subjective experiences—feelings, interpretations, theories, open-ended or unanswerable questions. If I’m getting coffee with someone and I say something they could reasonably respond to with “That’s correct,” I’m like… wait, why did I say that.

Here is half of my ideal conversation:

How did you feel after you watched that movie? How did you interpret this ambiguous scene? I interpreted it like so, because it reminded me of x, y, and z things in the movie and outside of the movie. Wow but I see why you read it another way! Because of these other factors! Maybe we’re both onto something, and it’s really showing how [third possibility opens up because we are talking to each other].

Then we both enter the cave of wonder and deepened understanding! Attempting to go to this special cave is my favorite hobby.

My attempts to go to the cave are DEFINITELY hell for some people. Let’s be clear. It’s not even just The Fact Brigade that hates it. Cool people I really like can get annoyed with my cave expeditions and start frowning or (worse) yawning while making direct eye contact (the most powerful nonverbal “no thank you”).

I don’t know their exact reasons, but I’m guessing it can hit as overthinking, “intense” (??), or just… too much yapping. When there’s no right answer, there’s no clear end point to the conversation. Concerning when you have work the next morning!

My preferred conversational style can also be hell for people who like it, but don’t want to do it with me. Maybe we don’t care about overlapping topics, or they don’t think I have the sophistication to take them to the cave. Awkward! There are many ways for life to go wrong.

But it’s fun to try to go to the cave. And for me, it’s boring to recite the phone book. And that’s my opinion on that!

My question for you, cherished reader

Do you like to say facts to people socially?? Email me and tell me why. Forward this to your fact friend and make them (MAKE them!) email me.

How does it feel in your body when you say your facts? What sort of response to a fact makes you feel good? What does your ideal fun conversation look like? I would love to do a mailbag of responses to this newsletter. Or just broaden my worldview.

Linxxx

• I fear I am coming off anti-fact, but my neighbor actually told me a great fact this week, and here it is: Did you know Pizza Hut used to be the largest kale purchaser in the U.S.?

• Behold a kale bedecked salad bar at Pizza Hut. Wow!

• Every time I look at my newsletter archive, I am struck by how much Lindy West has influenced me. Is this newsletter my failed attempt at this 2009 Lindy article? Yes.

• These freaky little candies are so good.

• I was CRYING laughing at this podcast episode. A rigorous roast of a silly man and self-serving cognitive distortions! Hell yes.

• Trump-era survival strategies, from me to you (as always)