Miro’s Grandma Claudia gave him a wooden toy box with various cutouts designed to fit different blocks. The triangle block goes in the triangle hole, the square block in the square hole, and so on. Children of his age are little scientists, testing their theories out on whatever objects fall into their orbit, first in a purely physical sense, then graduating to the symbolic. Miro tests various block-hole configurations to see how they fit, trying the triangle block in the pentagon hole enough times until something connects in his prelinguistic brain that one block has three sides, while the other has five. So begins the process of differentiation. This is as true of wooden blocks as it is of his conception of Me and Not-Me.

Grandma Claudia tells a story about when Calen was little — while they were selecting their favorite colors of something or other — he announced suddenly: “I know you like blue, Mom, but I like yellow.” When I think about moments like this ahead for Miro and me, it makes me want to hurl us back into the earliest days of infancy when he could fit in the crook of my neck. The infant’s process of differentiation is never quite finished. So claimed the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, an unusually tender man and clinician, who made it his life’s work to understand the interdependence of mothers and their infants. Practicing in the 1940s and 50s, he specifically studied mothers and their biological infants — but his findings may be useful for all kinds of primary caregivers insofar as they involve “the highly particular transactions that constitute love between two imperfect people.”2

For Winnicott, the pain of childbirth was a physical manifestation of fetal anxiety in becoming newly separate from the mother — the first rupture in the experience of complete unity with another. After birth, the infant does not initially realize she is separate from her caregiver, instead experiencing the world as an omnipotent force. When the baby desires milk, in early infancy the milk arrives without fail. The baby thinks this milk is of her own making, that she willed it into existence by the mere fact of feeling hunger. Then, inevitably as time goes on, when there’s a delay in responding to her cries, or the arrival of her milk takes longer than she would like, the infant realizes that she is reliant on a separate entity, her caregiver, to produce the milk she so desires.3 Through these “graduated failures” of perfect care, the infant becomes aware of her own dependence — a terrifying and thrilling realization. Terrifying because she must recognize her caregiver’s otherness, her humanity. Thrilling because this self-conscious dependence might be called a building block of love.

But there is much negotiation in this work, these little separations. What amount of distance is tolerable, and when? A video titled “The Distance I Can Be From My Son” appeared on my Instagram feed recently, made by the artist Lenka Clayton.4 Clayton films her infant son as he toddles away and sees how long she can wait before running after him. I liked the piece because it gives shape to an ambient feeling, one that is near constant at this stage of parenthood. (Another one of Clayton’s works is titled “63 Objects Taken From My Son’s Mouth.”) Clayton reflects:

“There was a particular new scale of measurement within myself. It’s an emotional scale, and I was interested in trying to quantify that […] There was a moment where my parent mind took over from my artist mind, and I would just run and grab him, and then I measured what that distance was.”

Miro is still developing his theories, measuring the feelings that arise in him proportionate to our varying degrees of separation. At night, for example, when I put him to bed, Miro gives his nightly shout. After a procession of songs and books and the other things that make up our nightly routine, he will stand in his crib facing the door, wailing to the point of exhaustion until one of us goes in to comfort him. When we do go in, it often doesn’t take much to get him to rest — a little rocking, a little singing, and just a bit more time spent together in the dark room to show him that we’re still there, even when we’re not. After this, he will typically go down easy, relaxing into the mattress and letting us leave the room without protest. From the omniscient eye of the baby monitor in his room, I can see he stays that way, eventually rolling over to sleep. Miro’s nightly shout has become part of our shorthand, one of the many stops on our bedtime routine. It feels to me each time like he is asking a question, one he needs answered before he can truly rest.

I am dealing with the separation anxiety in my own ways. Embarrassingly, on more than one occasion somebody has observed that my son and I are wearing matching outfits. I look down, bewildered to discover that in fact the baby is wearing some version of the clothes I’m wearing: maybe it’s sailor stripes or corduroy pants or a particular shade of blue. No one seems to believe me when I say it was by accident. Evidently whatever part of my brain is processing my own self-expression is processing his, too. Even a year on, I still conceptualize us a single unit. (Once when Miro was in the shower with me, I reflexively leaned over to shave his legs before shaving my own — realizing, in the process, the absurdity of what I was doing.)

Winnicott had a name for this psychological state: primary maternal preoccupation, which he describes as a kind of necessary madness endured by mothers in the latest stages of pregnancy and the early postpartum period. This madness is a feat of psychosocial engineering, a temporary and highly sensitive attunement to the needs, rhythms, and patterns of the growing child. “This is Your Mind On Motherhood” is a phrase that randomly broadcasts in my mind during moments like the shower one, hijacking my consciousness like an infomercial earworm. “This organized state (that would be an illness were it not for the fact of the pregnancy) could be compared with a withdrawn state, or a dissociated state, or a fugue,” Winnicott writes. Notwithstanding the tropes of the Hormonal Woman that Winnicott’s writing skirts casually, I actually found this description to be pretty accurate.

The past year feels like emerging from a dreamlike state not unlike the bewildering haze of falling in love. Indeed, the hormonal blueprint is the same: the emotional vertigo, the compulsion to be close, the heaven of togetherness and hell of separation. One of the hardest parts of this emergence is relearning how to be a self again while remaining entwined with another. I’m not sure I have the answer yet, but maybe the simplest version of it can be found in a child’s game: the one where the heart-shaped block, to play its role fully, needs a heart-shaped hole.

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APPENDIX

I was seven months pregnant and had tagged along on one of Calen’s trips to Florida for one last getaway before the baby was born. While Calen was at work, I spent the days floating weightless in the hotel pool, downing cups of lemonade and ice. One day, I took the rental car out to Siesta Key and waded into its cerulean waters so the baby would know the sea before he was born. I imagined him curled up in my stomach like a tiny seahorse while I drifted in the ocean’s expanse, feeling part of something primordial and eternal. On Calen’s day off, we took a trip to St. Petersburg to visit the Dalí museum, cruising down the Pass-a-Grille isthmus to feeder roads studded with low-slung buildings in various shades of pink. We hadn’t picked a name for the baby yet, but already we were flirting with surrealist notions (influenced, probably, by Florida’s immense strangeness).

Miro was born in late July. When summer cooled to fall, we bought the 1981 Chances Are compilation album as a keepsake. When I put the record on, I listened to the lyrics in earnest for the first time. The title track is a heartbreaker, an anthem of loneliness and grief and not at all the syrupy love song I heard on that first expectant road trip. For many months after my delivery, I couldn’t listen to the song without dissolving into a puddle of tears. The song inspired an intensity of feeling that surprised me, mapping onto some subterranean truth I wasn’t yet ready to reckon with.

My birth experience was not straightforward, but also not remarkable in any great sense. I had a long labor that stalled out after 36 hours, when the doctors said the baby was beginning to show signs of stress despite hours of steady contractions. Only after my Cesarean did they understand why: A band of tissue had formed around my uterine wall, segmenting it into two parts. One part worked with the baby, trying to push him out towards the world, while the other part worked to hold him in, turning his home for the last nine months into a confusing and newly terrifying environment. This discovery felt like a betrayal —the coherent whole dividing itself into two warring factions. So much well-intended birth education comforts the expectant mother, telling her that her body is built for birth — as if the body were a single entity, wholly responsive to our own will and determination, as if the natural world were always harmonious, as if it were ever that simple. I found greater comfort in Maggie Nelson’s notion of birth as the ultimate act of surrender. One doesn’t do labor, she writes. Despite your best preparations, labor does you. She sees the act as inextricably linked to death:

“If all goes well, the baby will make it out alive, and so will you. Nonetheless, you will have touched death along the way. You will have realized that death will do you too, without fail and without mercy. It will do you even if you don’t believe it will do you, and it will do you in its own way.”

During the final hours of stalled labor before my operation, I fell in and out of sleep with the blissful aid of an epidural. Each time I woke up, I saw Calen with his cheek resting on my stomach, talking to the baby, telling him we needed him here, that we loved him, that it was safe for him to make his passage into the world. I felt it was this little prayer, this act of faith, that allowed us to find another way. By the time my doctor cautiously broached the possibility of a c-section, I felt an overwhelming sense of clarity about what we had to do.

After the operation, the doctors couldn’t tell me much about why the band of uterine tissue had formed, or when, or how. My doula, Cait, made me promise not to look up my condition during the weeks I was newly postpartum as she gathered more information, so I initially held out. When my curiosity got the best of me, I found a litany of possible outcomes online: severe hemorrhage, uterine rupture, and a not improbable chance of maternal and fetal death. The potentialities of that day became unreasonably real to me. I felt as if I had experienced them all in my body and in my mind: I had seen the death of myself, the death of my baby. I knew I needed to mourn this truth properly before I could move on and live in the reality where everything was okay. “Chances Are”, with its transmutation of love into grief, helped me to do that; gave me a tangible ritual, something real to pin all these unspeakable sorrows to. Isn’t that, after all, what a breakup song is for? For exorcising the parallel universe from your system so that you can return to the present reality — the one in which you live?

I mourned it all. I mourned the sleeplessness of early blue morning after the contractions began. I mourned that lonely tunnel of pain, how everybody’s reaction to me while I was inside of it felt deranged and inappropriate. I mourned the vulnerability of being a body carrying a body for the last nine months, and the daily indignities pregnancy brought forth. I talked to friends who are also new mothers, and realized how common it was to feel this not-okayness. Every birth, even the most ordinary one, touches death in some way. I don’t buy the “nature’s amnesia” explanation of why women choose to endure multiple childbirths. I think women remember the pain they felt, insofar as any person can truly remember pain. “After all,” Nelson writes, “What does it mean for pain to be ‘memorable?’ You’re either in pain, or you’re not.”

It’s the extreme duality of the experience — new life cradled in the threat of extinction — I think, that makes the experience of childbirth so totalizing and even addicting. I miss the day already, somehow. “Chances Are” will forever bring me back to that place: the cold lights of the operating room, the warmth of my husband’s hand, and the silence before the air cracked open with the first cry of my son, my little Miro, marking the day we surrendered together to the terrifying fact of our aliveness.

***

A parting note:

Hello again! It’s been a minute since I’ve published here. I’m excited to be sharing my writing regularly again — in the same spirit of why I started Night Toast in the first place: as a home for ideas about art, culture, and ordinary life examined up close. Thanks for supporting my work.

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Appendix

• “Chances Are” by Bob Marley

• “The Argonauts” by Maggie Nelson

• “OPENING” by Tess Gallagher

• Window Water Baby Moving, 1959. Directed by Stan Brakhage.

• Jamieson Webster on Florida from an interview with The White Review:

Q: Where did you grow up?

A:  Miami, Florida. Very hot. Edge of the great phallus of the United States. It feels like it’s sinking into the sea, or turning into South America. It was a great place, then. I sometimes think of Miami as the unconscious of America, like Koolhaas calling Coney Island – in its absurdity, diversity, and delirium – the unconscious of New York City.

Thanks for reading Night Toast — close readings of the ordinary. Subscribe here for free.

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I guess my first order of business here is to say thank you for reading Night Toast and for sticking with me through this year. This project has connected me to people who make me feel hopeful and expansive even under the most confining conditions. It has opened up opportunities for collaboration despite the atomizing designs of the Internet and this year writ large. And in that sense, it's fulfilled every wish I had when I started it: that Night Toast could be a place to slow down, to make space for ideas that are sometimes hard to describe, and, in some small way, make sense of the ordinary chaos that shapes modern life. I hope it has given you something to keep. 

The first piece I ever wrote here was about returning to old places or ideas, having changed in some way. Tonight's newsletter in some ways is about the same thing. It explores the relationship between past and present specifically during an era which feels marked by a sense of accelerating catastrophe. With every climate disaster and economic recession we live through, the paradigm of normalcy tilts a little further away from what it was before. How does affect our relationship to the recent past? And what does it do to our memories?

—🌙

I came across an article around time of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 called “A Time Capsule In Two Front Pages,” which compares two copies of the New York Times published before and after the attack. The paper printed on the morning of  September 11th before the towers fell features a large colorful image of a bustling crowd outside a Fashion Week event. In the photo, people are carrying shopping bags and looking idly at their phones. It shows a certain mundanity that mirrors the tone of  the adjacent headlines: “In A Nation of Early Risers, Morning TV Is A Hot Market” and, “School Dress Codes vs. A Sea of Bare Flesh” (y i k e s). The headlines on the front page the following day, having caught up with the horror of 9/11, reflect what feels to me like a more recognizable modern norm: the apocalyptic images, the all-caps typeface that's at once too neutral and too alarming. “Side by side, front pages on Sept. 11, 2001, left, and, on Sept. 12, 2001, show a world changed” a caption of the two images reads.

A around that same time, an Instagram account I follow called @90sanxiety shared an image of a German woman named Isabel Daser who reportedly was unaware of the attacks when she a coworker to take her photograph in downtown Manhattan. The photo shows Daser pregnant, gazing at the camera serenely while smoke billows from the World Trade Center in the background. The image has appeared in Vanity Fair and in several other syndicated round-ups showing “haunting” 9/11 images on the likes of Bored Panda and Reddit. The captions almost always point out Daser's ignorance at the time. Troublingly, a Globe and Mail article refers to the woman by a different name, Isabel Bessler, and reports that she was aware of the burning towers when the photograph was taken, contradicting another Globe and Mail interview where she suggests that she didn't. In any case, the Internet has largely adopted the little-did-she-know framing of the image. Whether or not this is true, I have no idea, but I do get the sense that this framing is exactly why the photo is so captivating and reproducible online. It's the same mechanism that powers so much viral content, like homecoming videos of veterans surprising their families or college acceptance videos on YouTube. (Culture writer Amanda Hess calls this the YouTubeization of dramatic irony.) As viewers, we know what the outcome will be; we watch because of the emotional tension between the subject's ignorance and our own knowledge of what's to come.

The pandemic, in the way that disasters do, produced a before-time and an after-time. Like the two NYT front pages that delineate “a world changed,” the pandemic has left behind accidental time capsules in its wake, too. Last spring, I remember walking by advertisements in the subway for movie premieres and Broadway shows that never happened. The posters become faded and tattered since they were wheat-pasted nearly a year before, and I felt almost embarrassed that they were still up. I've also recently been reading my old journal entries from the beginning of the pandemic, consuming them not unlike the way the Internet consumes eerie or uncanny images taken right before the 9/11 attacks.

“It’s the spectacle, I think, that makes a disaster a disaster,” Elisa Gabbert writes in her essay, Magnificent Desolation. “A disaster must not only blindside us, but be witnessed and witnessed in public.” The prevalence phone photography and first-person accounts on social media amplify this witnessing, which Gabbert claims this may even create a kind of cultural demand for disaster. Her theory might explain why during the first weeks of lockdown, pandemic documentaries and movies like Contagion took up the prime real estate on Netflix's homepage because they were so popular. Even when we ourselves are affected by disaster, we’re addicted to its dramatic irony — and our own role in it. “Horror and awe are not incompatible; They are intertwined” Gabbert writes.

Maybe this is why relics from immediately before a cataclysmic event are so intriguing. The Internet has latched on to Isabel Daser's photo, I think, because it feels like something real enough to hold. There is an unreality to mass disaster as it happens, like it's an impenetrable experience you can only witness from outside yourself. Sometimes representations of disaster can feel more real than the disaster itself. When I watch a scene of a large crowd in a movie, I still tense up. You probably do it too, noticing the lack of hand-washing or masks or the faded antiquity of any scene involving an office. It's like my physiology knows the narrative arc; I carry the knowledge of this pandemic quite literally in my body. I know how the story ends, and still, I'm just sitting here. Daser’s photo is this same kind of representation — the critical moment suspended in amber before the world changed in incomprehensible ways.

Memory in the digital age is a funny thing. On one hand, we use technology as a crutch to outsource what we would usually store in our heads, and then in turn, our phones bombard us with irrelevant past memories to a truly annoying degree.

On this day, 10 years ago, you took a basic photo of your cappuccino and decided it was a good idea to share with the world!

Please Facebook, I respond, let me live in peace. This is humiliating! I say, as I get served another ad for a new brand of oat mylk.

“Past NYC memories still lurking in my camera roll, how rude!!” I wrote in a caption on Instagram in April 2020 along with a series of photos and videos of ordinary pre-pandemic moments. It had only been a few weeks of lockdown when I posted it, but things were already very bad. Even then, my instinct was to reach for the before-time, to revisit the moment before it all changed and hold it in my hands. When I look back at this caption, I think to myself a phrase that's become a hallmark of post-lockdown small talk. It’s a phrase I’m sure I thought to myself when I posted the Instagram the first place — like a Russian doll effect that never ends: if only we knew.

I am both nosy and, thanks to my mother's devotion to perusing the aisles of Home Goods with the hawk-eyed precision of an Olympic athlete, also well-trained in the sport of bargain hunting. As such, when the U-Hauls appear on tree-lined streets each September 1st, and pairs of  old shoes and dodgy kitchenware begin to sprout from people's front doorsteps, I know my time has arrived. Stooping season is here, and let me tell you, there are treasures to be found among these heaps of other people's mismanaged trash.

Maybe you've followed the Instagram account @stoopingnyc, or ones like it, which have formalized the fun of freebie-hunting by posting the rough locations of user-submitted photos of notable scoops. The Brooklyn couple who run the account have said that the number of direct message submissions has grown to hundreds per day due to the churn of movement brought on by the pandemic.

Over the course of this summer, among the gifts I've received from the providence of the sidewalk economy are: an annotated copy of Dracula, a set of glazed indigo bowls, and an enormous lamp with a truly gigantic lampshade that I can't believe is mine to keep. I'm not one for astrology or birth charts, but I do believe in the hand of subtle mysticism that places an object or book into your path at the moment you need it. I have found copies of Clarissa Pinkola Estés and Sally Rooney books swollen from use, which, if I'm being honest are more likely markers of Brooklyn's geography of taste, but in my most main-character moments, secretly believe are acts of divine intervention.

But the circular economics of stooping are really a result of something more physical: a fact of spatial interdependence. The stretches of suburban Atlanta where I grew up offered an abundance of yard and garage sales, but no object-rehoming model so freed from transaction besides donation centers, which are different things altogether. But in this floating metropolis of concrete and iron, proximity is a way of life. Within the steady flow of passersby exists a person out there who will find value instantly in what you no longer need. At its rosiest, stooping season is born from a necessary ethos of the enmeshed; one that says, take what you need and leave what you don't.

I love the two sides of this equation with equal measure. The satisfaction of a really good stoop find is only matched by the thrill of seeing someone from the perch of your windowsill whisk away your rejected desk lamp with an air of self-conscious gratification. There's a thread of serendipity that connects both the leaving and the taking, and I think my attraction to this dynamic, and spaces where it happens (thrift stores or libraries are others) stems from a deep desire for an element of chance in the day-to-day of things. I rely on it to believe in possibility outside the realm of my own purview.

There's a segment of Jenny Odell's book How To Do Nothing, where she writes about the limits of those personalized ‘Daily Mix’ Spotify playlists as it relates to algorithms customized to your music taste. She explores the idea that “good music” is actually music that sneaks up on you by chance, changing you in ways unseen, often falling outside the parameters of genre or BPMs you can predict. She writes,

“If we're able to leave room for the encounters that will change us in ways we can't yet see, we can also acknowledge that we are a confluence of forces that exceed our own understanding. This explains why, when I hear a song I unexpectedly like, I sometimes feel like something I don't know is talking through me.”

I love the serendipity of stoop finds for a similar reason. So much of modern life is governed by systems designed to remove chance or aberration from our daily experience as seamlessly as possible. I discover new music on a playlist made for me by Spotify, purchase furniture surfaced to me by an ad on Facebook marketplace, and choose which restaurant to visit based on the highest user ratings produced by my search engine of choice. And while of course there’s a form of pleasure involved in express reordering the same food delivery order each time, more and more I find myself disturbed by a sense that this automatic ease narrows my decisions in ways that feel less human.

“Bounded rationality” is an idea within the behavioral sciences that describes how decision-making becomes limited when constrained by earlier choices. The concept was originally introduced by the economist Herbert Simon as a challenge to the ruling notion of homo economicus within neoclassical economics: the underlying assumption that any economic agent will act rationally to maximize their own happiness. But since humans are not omniscient, no person can possibly have all information about a given situation to be consistently logical and happiness-optimizing. We know this to be true; humans act irrationally all the time. Sometimes our irrational behavior, which can be shaped by bias or misinformation, harms us. (Just look at the rates of American vaccine hesitancy and its resulting personal and collective harms.) But sometimes, ‘irrationality’ can benefit us in ways that previously were inconceivable; miscalculations reveal new dimensions and choices we never even knew we had. It’s why sometimes we make decisions we have trouble describing cogently. Why accrue student debt for a college degree that has little value in the marketplace? Why have a child in a world that by all accounts, appears to be ending? As Joshua Rothman writes on the subject for the New Yorker, “If we couldn’t aspire to changes that we struggle to describe, we’d be trapped within the ideas that we already have.”

When I talk about the mysticism of finding a book on the street, I mean that I feel a brief reprieve from the rational narrowness that an algorithm-centric life can produce. When considered through the lens of bounded rationality, chance encounters can be small freedoms. I relish the idea of stooping season because its conditions are blissfully irrational. With each thing that’s re-homed, it's use is renewed, and a wordless relationship forms between two people that's neither wholly altruistic nor fully selfish. This too feels radical. Unlike the countless (online) spaces where our opportunities for action feel bounded and binary, a divergent mode of relating to each other feels as paradigm-shifting as any form of magic.

🌙 To accompany this week’s essay, I asked my friend Knar if she had any photos to share on the theme of “Lost & Found.” In true Knar-form, she replied with a lyrically personal take on the idea: a collection of photos reflective of what she had gained and lost throughout the stretch of the pandemic.

Thanks to Knar for sharing these. You can check out more of her work here.

Til next time -

Nicola

The name felt right for a project that, whether I realized it at the time or not, was a bid to restore some sense of belonging during a period of in-betweenness. In the past 12 months, there’s been a mind-bending amount of upheaval: packing up belongings, moving cities, reconfiguring domestic identities, professional identities, social identities — honestly, no identity was left unturned during this…unprecedented year. Night Toast is an ode the power of place — both physical and psychic— and how an orbit of people, objects, and sensations can make you feel right where you should be in the larger order of things. In other words, at home.

During a year where uncertainty became a near universal language, the importance of home has taken on a renewed significance. Our homes, after all, can be vessels of fantasy, or emblems of the self. They are the structures we imbue with our ideas about security, or happiness, or a life well-lived. For a privileged class, the prospect of remote work has opened up new realms of possibility in this sense. It has also scrambled for some the personal calculus of what gives a place purpose. Affordability, access to nature, proximity to loved ones — these factors always mattered, but were sublimated (perhaps for far too long) by a cultural decree that your profession should be the animating force of your life, often at a great cost. The slowness and stakes of this year have invited reassessment of so many facets of modern life: What conditions do I accept as normal? What parts of myself have I neglected? What does a meaningful life look like after the stark realization of this year that nothing is certain?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, a story about a community of roving travelers, resonated so deeply with audiences this year. “Home: is it just a word? Or is it something that you carry within you?” says a friend of Frances McDormand’s character, quoting a Morrissey lyric to describe her commitment to rootlessness. I’ve seen pandemic couples set off to starry new cities together, growing families move to greener pastures where washer-dryers abound, and friends who have embarked on a new chapter alone, indulging in the freedom of simply being able to do that. We are witnessing a mass redefinition of what it means to make somewhere home — and with that comes so much unexplored terrain.

In the spirit of this, I’m delighted to share a photo series shot by my friend, Charlotte Rea, from a temporary home she found this year in Arizona. A few weeks ago, we were sitting in the park together talking about the places we had been since we last saw each other. Her photos always brings a sense of poetry to the foreground of experience — and though I’ve never been to Arizona, the place she captures in her photography I feel like I’ve been to many times before.

In her own words:

“These photos are from in and around Saguaro National Park, taken in the early days of the 2020 pandemic after what was supposed to be a 3-week trip to Arizona snowballed into close to 3 months of hiding away from a crumbling world in a quiet desert.”

“There’s a lot of tension guiding most of these photos. On the one hand, I had free rein to wander around one of the most beautiful places on earth— a dream for pretty much any photographer, and an unspeakable privilege during a dangerous global crisis. On the other, I felt crushed by isolation and its nauseating emptiness, longing for purpose while watching my motivation and sense of self dry up by the hour.”

“I do not feel much connection to these photos— they’re more of a creative dry heave than anything else—but inwardly they do still represent a kind of fumbling cry against circumstance, a weary grasp for belonging in the form of lonely walks, alien hues, and unheard whispers.”

— 🌙 Some Bookmarks

*More of Charlotte’s photography here.

*This tweet that came across my timeline at the very beginning of the pandemic, which, arrives in my mind whenever I feel myself getting too reality-clingy

*The Anxiety of Influencers; Educating the TikTok Generation - Barrett Swanson for Harpers. I immediately ordered the author’s book of essays after reading this because it was so perceptive and devastating and so, so funny.

* The Elemental Strangeness of Foxes - Zito Madu for Plough Quarterly on the fated feeling of seeing late night foxes in London

* Voicenote ~ NYC ILU CU L8R - from Hawa Arsala’s Substack, Reality Streaming, on leaving New York to move back to her hometown on the West Coast

I've been mostly a pile of mush these last few weeks. Relatedly, I've discovered (maybe a little too late at this stage in the pandemic) that if I walk outside first thing in the morning, a world of possibility opens up in a way that feels chemically unachievable within the confines of my 750 square-foot apartment. In a bout of stir-crazy desperation last week, I began walking to a coffee shop two blocks further than usual for the sole purpose of introducing some element of difference into the day. It's a small thing, but seeing the morning light slant in a new direction brought a minor revelation that this route had always existed, that the light looks this way most mornings if you can find it, and that even after stewing in a haze of stasis for weeks, change is possible.

I am now half-vaccinated, which is both a fortunate and weird existence to navigate. For me, it has meant finally feeling comfortable with seeing a friend or two in one of those outdoor dining structures — the ones that look like garden sheds with clear shower curtains put up as dividers. In the fall when these dining bubbles first popped up, there was general apprehension about their safety (Is this outdoors? Is this indoors? Did we just build a miniature version of the very environment we're being told to avoid??). Now, as waves of vaccines roll out by the millions daily, these structures have become the most visible sites of this uneasy phase of reintegrating back into society.

I sat inside a bubble at a restaurant in Nolita last week, and it felt surreal to be surrounded by other groups of diners sitting so thrillingly close, even if the normal thrum of chatter and clinking silverware was absent thanks to the transparent seal keeping us safe from each other's particles. It was a strange dynamic: each table, a little silent movie, free to observe, pulling you in like the yellow windows of apartments you can see from the street on a moonstruck night —something about these illuminated containers of living are hard to look away from.

Being there reminded me of a scene in Wim Wenders’ 1984 film Paris, Texas, where the main character, Travis, revisits his ex-lover, Jane, in a peepshow club where she works. In the scene, Jane sits behind a sheet of sound-proof glass in a replica of a 1950s kitchen —a reminder of the life they once dreamed of sharing together— while Travis talks to her through a phone line with his back turned. The scene is a portrait of two people yearning: for each other, for the past, for something more unplaceable.

Socializing in these dining bubbles — simulacrums of an old reality we desperately miss — is just one of the countless reminders that the world as we knew it is gone. I think fondly of all the strange and wonderful distractions from the early Tiger-King-Sourdough-Zoom-dance-party phase of quarantine— but none have distracted from the immutability and sorrow of this year. For Jezebel, Molly Osberg writes about the dislodged tone of a culture trying to offer people ways self-help our way out of the pandemic:

“In the place of a shared sense of reality or collective expression of mourning, I see a torrent of advice on how a person who managed to survive can feel more self-actualized once they return to the shuffle between the office and after-work drinks. To me, this looks like denial, the first tentative step towards what I’m told are seven distinct stages of grief.”

Outside, the flowers are blooming and the days are getting longer, and each day I oscillate between clear-headed optimism and an ocean of grief. “We go up to heaven and down to hell a dozen times a day,” wrote May Sarton in her 1972 journal collection, “Journal of a Solitude.” I came across her book last spring, just as the lockdowns were beginning and that line has stuck with me. The incalculable tolls of this year are still making themselves known to us, delayed processing we couldn't quite get to through the Zoom rooms replaced by clear plastic dividers — even as the world begins to look a bit brighter.

A few hours after I got my vaccine, I was knocked back by the intensity of its side effects. (I did not, as Calen put it, “handle it like a champ.”) I fell into a shallow sleep of feverish dreams, in which some kind of monster had sawed off my arm. The pain woke me up and I couldn't get back to sleep. I thought about all the people in their homes who were feeling the side effects of this modern medicine coursing through their bodies and felt a slight comfort in knowing that this experience was shared by so many at this particular moment.

The reverberating effects of this virus have shown two truths: that our pain is both shared and rarely the same. It's that tension that powers a terrible sense of isolation and also collective meaning. We do what we can to cope. I call my grandma in her nursing home to make it feel like we're together. I take a new morning walk. Some days, these small things bring a remarkable sense of freedom. Others, they feel totally fruitless. And some days, all there is to do is wait for some language to arrange the chaos of this year. And wait and wait for ideas to push up like spring flowers once again. And wait and wait and wait for the words to build bridges across incomprehension.

— 🌙 Some Bookmarks

*The Incalculable - Popula

*A Virtual Memorial for Those We’ve Lost - NYT

*The Singularity - new poetry series from Atmos Mag on the relationship between the environment and the human experience that's all kinds of lovely

*The Rise of Therapy Speak - New Yorker

& a parting visual bookend on the subject of bubbles

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If it hadn't been for the Texas state flag face mask, he might have slipped through security unnoticed. He could have laid low in the first-class lounge until boarding, waited for a quiet time, and slunk into his seat in peace. There was something incredibly theatrical about the videos of Senator Cruz swanning through the Houston airport, gradually becoming aware of the cameras inconveniently placed between him and a five-day tropical vacation at the Ritz Carlton, Cancún.

At this point, millions of Cruz's constituents in Texas had lost power, stuck in their homes without heat for days as the temperatures dropped below freezing. There were valiant efforts to save face: Cruz insisted he was only being a “good dad” to his young daughters who were cold and bored after school was canceled. Cruz used a favorite tactic of bad-behaving men — invoking fatherhood as a proxy for morality — to shield himself from any threat of personal accountability. In a press statement, Cruz initially claimed he had planned to fly back to Texas the following morning after dropping his kids off in Cancún with friends. Then, Heidi Cruz's impressively shady friends leaked text messages revealing that the Cruz clan had been the ones to suggest the sun-soaked trip, inviting others to join them for the full five-day getaway.

The whole ordeal could be called a comedy of errors if it weren't for its deeply depressing implications. Cruz in particular brought to mind a stock character called Pulcinella from the traditional Italian theater practice, Commedia dell’arte, known for its satirical depictions of a topsy-turvy social order that’s recognizable beyond 17th century Italy. Pulcinella's character is one of social fluidity and double meanings: he is both powerful and powerless, cunning and stupid, used by both the Zanni (servants) and Vecchi (ruling class) because of his desire for self-preservation at all costs. Pulcinella's entertainment value is in his paradoxical nature: He goes to great lengths to avoid responsibility, and in doing so, always ends up entrapped by it. The Commedia maestro Antonio Fava, who dedicated much of his career to studying the character of Pulcinella, described him as the ultimate “comic symbol of the urgency of survival.”

In the past 12 months, visions of apocalypse have been ambient. There were the ruby-red skies of California's wildfires before the phantom snowfalls in Texas. Before this, floods of biblical proportions swelled over the Gulf Coast and a torrent of snowstorms with names like Snowmageddon and Snowpocalypse buried the East Coast. These visions are not new, but the rate at which we're experiencing them is speeding up perceptibly. In David Wallace-Wells’ book, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” he describes this era of cascading crises we are now entering and the “anthology of comforting delusions” that signal a vision ahead that is much, much worse. Among these delusions, Wallace-Wells cites the false belief that climate crises are natural sagas, unfolding remotely in the Arctic or rainforests; that economic growth and the technology it produces will save humans from climate-related devastation; and that wealth can somehow immunize people from catastrophe. All of this is an illusion.

In this crisis-prone future, the urgency of survival impresses itself on all of us. This pandemic is very much a symptom of this new world — and not as singular or separate from issues of climate as one might hope. The blistering pace of deforestation, for example, has infectious disease specialists warning of future pandemics beyond this one. (This John Oliver segment on the rise of infectious diseases since the 1980s is enough to make you shudder.) In Texas last week, we saw the compounding social effects (homelessness, carbon monoxide poisoning, widespread food shortages) of an irregular blizzard amid a global pandemic mired within a political system in which the man in charge believes his own escape could save him. This belief too is an illusion.

In this sense, Ted Cruz is the perfect Pulcinella, patron saint of delusion, embodying the urgency of survival within an archetype of free-market politics, individual exceptionalism, and truth denial. Reports have warned that global warming will create an entire new class of climate migrants, and just this year, we have seen the ways the pandemic has fragmented so many people's connection to their homes. I’m so struck by this story because Cruz and his family experienced just a temporary sliver of the diminishing living conditions that so many migrants have lived through without an easy escape. For a brief moment, Cruz shared in that plight, seeking refuge from an all-encompassing upheaval that felt beyond the limits of his power.

But of course, Cruz's power as both a symbolic figurehead and a legislator of systemic influence is exactly the kind of power that matters. Last week's scene — with its live-action airport drama, incriminating lies, and rehearsed mea culpa - crystallized our own topsy-turvy political order and the utter absurdity of current affairs. Within it was a jewel of irony that was nothing short of Shakespearean.

🌙 Some Bookmarks

*This Longform interview with David Wallace-Wells, whose writing on climate change has been some of the most urgent and visceral I’ve read

*Britney Spears Was Never In Control - I’ll be thinking about this essay for a very long time. About teenage girls and myths of sexual agency.

*My Year of Grief and Cancellation - more thoughts on “call-out culture”

*Sound of Metal is the perfect quarantine film - about a heavy metal drummer who suddenly loses his hearing; in many ways a film about the journey of adjusting to quietude

*This “outdoors from indoors” downloadable coloring book made by my friend Lea on her road trip from California to British Columbia

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This week, I talked to Lenéa Sims, a community builder and educator who founded two online membership groups called Inner Play and Outer Work. Lenéa and I first met while on staff at our college’s student magazine, the Tufts Observer in 2011. The Observer was one of those spaces Lenéa might call a “third place” — somewhere that’s separate from both home and the workplace —not quite leisure and not quite labor— that opens up possibilities for creative interaction, process-oriented connection, and community building.

When I think of my own experiences with meaningful community, my mind goes to late nights with the Observer staff at the media lab, where we spent hours together each week making a magazine. It was an unusual and alchemic setting, bringing together students from different years and majors outside of their immediate social circles to sit alongside each other, reading drafts and learning the intricacies of Adobe InDesign, switching out our favorite playlists as we worked — there for no other reason beyond loving this shared thing.

It felt apt for this first Q+A to talk to Lenéa, who has carried so much of that spirit and those values into her work today. We discussed the possibilities for building and maintaining that same kind of magic in third places online.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What are Inner Play and Outer Work?

I call Inner Play and Outer Work dual education networks, which sounds really clinical, but basically, they're both membership sites. Inner Play is where I coach primarily young creative people in moving through spiritual blockages, helping them find purpose and direction through energetic self-care. I started that a year ago and then this past June, after George Floyd was killed, I started Outer Work, which originally was called the Inner Play Anti-Racism Practice Group.

Instagram has been an important tool in your work, but you’ve also been vocal about your hangups with the platform. Can you talk a little bit about that?

The performativity on Instagram is something that I had noticed but never really been able to put into words until last summer when it became a social justice platform all of a sudden. Of course, the disclaimer is that there was a lot of good that came from that. But at the same time, it became really clear to me that Instagram was becoming this very toxic bubble of outrage and not doing anything.

A perfect example of this is when I posted something on the Outer Work Instagram about what it means to actually practice anti-racism. I had a poll that was like, "Do you feel like you've been practicing?" and one hundred percent of people said 'Yes.' And then right after I posted, "What does your practice look like?” And literally, no one replied to me. It just became really clear that people were conflating the performance of posting about issues — posting about problems, spreading information— with action. And that was really frustrating to me.

What do you feel is missing from existing social media platforms and online communities?

Recently I watched “The Social Dilemma” and then I watched “The Social Network” again, not necessarily on purpose — I just happened to watch them both within a month of each other. And I started thinking about how when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, it was supposed to be only at your college. And that's the beauty of what it used to be like: it was like an extension of my social life at school. With Instagram now being our primary social tool, especially during the pandemic, it's kind of like we don't have anything that ties us together besides Instagram. It's not like we have a common school connection or even a common career connection. It's just like we're all existing in our own lives. And then we're using Instagram as the focal point. What’s missing in social platforms today is a forum to reflect on behavior. Because there are no moderators, no leaders in the space. And I think that's also important.

Yeah, I feel like so much of social media today is designed to reward the image of an end product. Even the way the little squares function on Instagram’s grid, there's a sense of framing something that’s fully-formed. Like, here I am living my best life with very little acknowledgment of process, which can feel inhuman.

And like, what does a person need to grow? You know, I think it keeps us stuck where we are, more so than it helps us to advance. I was just talking to someone about this yesterday because I was explaining the concept of a third place, which is a sociological term that's basically a space that's not work and not home. So places like barbershops and coffee shops are the classic examples. Someone I know was saying that her third place was being in theater companies, which were places to learn about yourself while you did something that was fun for you and a place where people would show up and applaud you for what you've done so far, even if it wasn't perfect. And that really blew my mind. I was like, that's exactly what's missing, I think, from a lot of our lives.

I think of Inner Play and Outer Work almost like physical third places. Mighty Networks is the platform I run them on, which allows you to build your own niche social networks on specific topics or shared interests and you can charge access for them or not. I feel really excited about the platform because there’s a common thread. It's really blown my mind how powerful both of the spaces have become in terms of how open people are willing to be, how much more care and thought they put into the things they say even when there's inevitably conflict that arises, and just having those tough conversations with so much grace.

You place an emphasis on collective consciousness and community action on your sites. Can you talk a little bit about why that’s an important value in your work?

For Outer Work it's particularly important because when we talk about anti-racism work or any form of oppression, I mean, the real clear-cut kind of way for all of us to take direct action in our lives is through community care. And so it's important to me that this space reflect that value by uplifting the community always. An individualist viewpoint on life is a white supremacist viewpoint and a capitalist viewpoint. So if we're going to kind of rally against those things, we need to embrace approaching things from a community point of view.

How do you put that into practice, especially at scale? Is scale even something that’s even desirable to you?

That's funny that you say that because I am in the process of opening of Inner Play right now for membership sign-ups again. And I'm thinking about putting a cap on. It feels very scary in a way because of this ingrained capitalism. But I also really want to preserve the space. I don't want to have three hundred people in there like talking about their feelings. For one, that's too taxing on me and I think it does also take away from exactly what we're building.

I really see the future of social networking as these niche social networks because I think they afford us so much more accountability. You get the ability to mold the group into something that you want it to be. You have to set an intention for the space if you want people to join it and I think that those barriers are necessary to build better communities online.

🌙 Lenéa’s Bookmarks

Reading: 

*How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong

*Pleasure Activism by adrienne marie brown

*all about  love by bell hooks

*The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope

*Get Together: How to Build a Community With Your People by Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh & Kai Elmer Sotto

Listening to:

*I'm really into the Chani app and have been listening to the mini astrology podcast and meditations there every week. 

Parting shoutout to Jenna Rink, the patron saint of student journalism and making stuff you love (courtesy of Lenéa’s personal IG)

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On several occasions during orientation week in my first semester of college, I found myself in one of those large packs of traveling freshmen (gaggles, if you will) you can see roaming around just about any college campus. We walked toward the dining hall or a campus event in this collective structure, which was formed by the continuous glomming-on of every new person introduced to the group who might contribute to some temporary sense of security. Because of its largeness, this arrangement also ensured nobody within the group would actually get to know one another (or at least that was my experience) and so, in order to avoid the embarrassment of being seen eating alone, we ate alone, together.

Boston is surprisingly hot in September,  which gave orientation week the rogue air of midnight at summer camp.  Word would travel through the residence hall that there was some party happening at an off-campus house and soon there'd be a mass tug toward that, stringing us along like ducklings to another cavernous space full of beer and new people. In these big groups, there was a particular style of communication that happened. Contributions to conversations were more like announcements that volleyed back and forth between the most vocal members of the group without much effect.  Shared experiences coagulated within the room - towns in Connecticut, high school sports rivalries,  and the bewildering concept of pre-orientation programs. On the phone to my mom on a long walk back from the mailroom across campus, I described to her that it felt like everyone was telling a joke at the same time but no one was there to hear the punchline.

The state of social media this past year has felt a bit like a freshman year party, sparkling in promise while inspiring a private sense of nihilism. Despite everything I know about social media’s corrosive effects on my mental health and privacy, I’ve always told myself that its redeeming value is its ability to connect me to my friends - a proposition made more important by the pandemic - and to broader cultural realms and conversations that I find interesting. I've tried all the tricks to make my experience a healthier one: deleting and hiding apps in folders I never use, time limit settings, whittling down who appears in my feed to friends I know personally or accounts dedicated to ideas; inspiration. But none of these tactics can blunt the fact that these platforms are progressively numbing me to the very connection I’m seeking.

If you’ll allow me to indulge the party metaphor, the problem isn’t that there’s a lack of interesting people in the room, it’s that the environment is completely deafening. These days, I find I don't have the attention to read long, personal Instagram captions, even when they are written beautifully. I glide past photos of celestial sunbeams, quotes from my favorite thinkers set in striking colors and fonts, and life milestones from people I'd ordinarily love to hear from — they all melt into the same continuous scroll downward.

Then there's the question of posting on social media, which somehow has become even more dreadful than this passive glaze of consumption. Nothing described my feelings better than Stella Bugbee's writing in her essay, "Our Shared Unsharing" which explains how 2020 distorted the laws of social media participation throughout the pandemic but especially after the Black Lives Matter protests this summer.

“This year, it seemed like no matter who you are, whatever you posted, you had a high chance of getting it wrong in some way, because many of the values we’ve come to expect (and enjoy) on Instagram feel incorrect for this moment: Narcissism, flexing, even the forgivable human cry for validation seem crass in the face of so much social discord...The alternative, using Instagram to constantly blast out political messages (especially if you’d never posted that kind of material before), can also feel disingenuous, however well intentioned.”

Social media’s cacophony was wearing on us pre-2020, but the pandemic’s isolation threw it into sharp relief. Just as our interdependency was becoming visible in the rising Covid cases charting across our screens, our lives were becoming atomized in just about every other way.  As each remote month passed, to exist in the world increasingly meant to exist online. But while the systems governing the old way of life cracked and splintered —  electoral processes, corporate protocol, social welfare infrastructure — social media channels largely functioned in their same old ways, and they certainly weren't optimized to support the weight of the issues 2020 delivered. Now, to exist on them is to find yourself in a frustrating atmosphere of not-enoughness. The memes and informational slideshows are not enough. Seeing friends through rainbow outlined orbs is not enough. Expressing solidarity through hearts and emojis feels almost disturbing in its not-enoughness.

There's been a lot of good writing recently about what online communities are not. Food writer Alicia Kennedy wrote about the debilitating effects of context collapse on social media — how the vastness of online audiences has created an impossible imperative to both speak personally and universally. The former deputy editor of Man Repeller Haley Nahman wrote about her decision to disable the comments section of her independent newsletter, "Maybe Baby" because of the swarming conversations that left her feeling more like an Amazon product than a writer.

It got me thinking about how privacy in this new landscape feels like its own luxury. It's telling that the Close Friends feature is gradually taking precedence over general Instagram stories, which have all but replaced regular posting. My friends and I started communicating on an app called Marco Polo, a walled-garden app designed to exchange video notes in private groups, almost like vlogs. But after a few giddy weeks of sending videos almost daily and speaking to each other in the long, rambling ways we used to in middle school, we admitted recently that that too started to become something less than connective.

The problem, I suppose, is that social connection isn't a value that can be optimized. Its utility doesn't grow as you increase its inputs like any interchangeable widget. If my experience is at all representative, then the whole equation is actually inverted. The more time spent on these apps and the more connections acquired, the more fraught the experience becomes.

I came away from orientation week with a lesson I still believe in intently: that making your presence known does not mean making yourself known. And because we are human, even more than wanting to be seen, we want to be understood.

🌙  Some Bookmarks

*A Lockdown Guide to Sunday Dinner - the loveliest essay on the grounding ritual of Sunday dinner and part of a broader series on time during quarantine

*How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted - a long but worth it NYT Magazine feature that explores lockdown isolation, sensory deprivation tanks, and the rise of numbness as a cultural theme

*The Dream podcast - on the subject of social connection (or lack thereof), season 1 of The Dream dives into the shady world of multi-level-marketing companies and how they prey on people’s intense need for community

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On my phone's notes app, I have a list hastily titled "bad language." Like the rest of my notes, this one is filled with nonsensical phrases typed on the go without much context. But unlike the other slippery ideas jotted down in cryptic notes on this app, I know exactly what the words on this list mean when I revisit them— and why I wanted to document them in the first place.

"Outercourse" is one of these words. I added it to the list when Brock Turner's lawyer used it to describe his client's sexual assault of an unconscious woman named Chanel Miller during an appeal hearing in 2018. What a strange and perfectly neutral word choice, I thought, to describe a man convicted of attempted rape.

"Government guest houses" is another phrase on the list. I added it in 2019 after reading an article in which an Indian state official used the term to refer to the refugee housing meant for stateless Muslim minorities under the Hindu nationalist government. It reminded me of the elastic words plucked by the Trump administration to distract from the reality that ICE agents were separating infants from their immigrant parents and detaining them in cages around this same time.

I started the bad language list after reading a booklet written by George Orwell called, "Politics and the English Language," where Orwell draws a connection between the misuse of language and political tyranny. Bad writing, Orwell thought, was a symptom of unclear thinking. He opposed any linguistic devices that were pre-formed, like clichés or overused metaphors or clinical jargon. These were containers for prepackaged thoughts that didn't require the writer to be an active participant in the process of meaning-making. For Orwell, this problem wasn't just an issue of intellectual laziness. An epidemic of bad language could power authoritarian governments, sanction state violence, and numb a population to the acute suffering of the oppressed. He writes:

“Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

The images of violent Trump supporters storming the Capitol today provoked shock and dismay across the political spectrum. But the language used by leaders in each faction rendered the shock unequal in its degrees of political usefulness. Ivanka Trump tweeted a now-deleted message calling the people waving Confederate flags on government property “patriots.” In his rebuke of today's insurrection on the Senate floor, Lindsey Graham called Trump “a consequential president,” with a “uniquely bad idea to delay this election” which, honestly, is as stupid as it is spineless.

There was intellectual laziness: Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren predictably compared the MAGA militia to Black Lives Matter protesters this summer. But defacing Chase Banks and Targets is not the same as breaking into a government building and seizing the democratic processes within it. And fighting for the right to stay alive within a system of police brutality is not the same as enforcing the will of a lying, unrestrained dictator to undermine the will of the electorate.

This moral decay is what perpetuates Trump's system of falsehoods and what jolts the levers of oppression to click into gear. The police mostly escorted Trump's mob out of the Capitol in jagged contrast to the ornamental shows of force against BLM protesters, despite the felonies laid bare in those white marble halls. Terms like "patriot" and "protester" veiled the condoning of domestic terrorism within the highest rungs of power. And the perpetrators of this violence, who were mostly white men, will likely continue to be described in bad language: the"misunderstood," "economically anxious" "silent majority."

For me, the problem isn't in extending attempts at empathy to people who have done terrible things. I don’t know that anyone is beyond understanding. But there's a force of history that's invoked each time a phrase or a word is applied in the same way to the same group of people again and again and again. Each time the qualifier "rural working class" is used to excuse racist behavior, an excuse for violence materializes, but it’s one that’s only available to white people. Despite the fact that nonwhite and immigrant people make up a vast proportion of the rural working class, these descriptors almost never serve them in the same way.

At around 3:30am Eastern Time, when lawmakers finally completed the electoral count to certify Biden’s win, Senate Chaplain Barry Black delivered a closing prayer to a beleaguered Congress: “These tragedies have reminded us that words matter, and that the power of life and death is in the tongue. We have been warned that eternal vigilance continues to be freedom's price.”

Maybe this is the last gasp of Trumps's official hold on power. But the tyranny he's unleashed on the basic mechanics meaning, his thuggery against a coherent realm of understanding, and his looting of any appeals to American value will be much, much harder to impeach. We should use our words well.

🌙  —

Meanwhile, please enjoy this perfect use of incisive political language, even by Orwellian standards — the only bookmark of my week:

When it was still warm, I spent a night at the Sunset Motel in Greenport, Long Island. Calen and I decided to book a last-minute trip the night before, and after trawling through sold-out listings online, we came across the motel's website. It was a busy landing page with swirly fonts and bouncing animated titles that was so starkly opposite Airbnb and Hotel Tonight's sleek minimalism, a few rooms had been spared from the weekend reservation rush.

Knowing little about the motel, other than its last-minute rates were decent and its guest reviews were almost unbelievably good, we pulled up to a collection of chalky yellow clapboard buildings that didn't so much greet us as direct us toward the main event, the ocean. Beyond the parking lot, we walked out to the bluff that stretched into an expanse of space and color so foreign to the sensory experience of living in a city, I felt immediately anointed with a kind of modest clarity.

There was so much to love about the Sunset Motel. The rooms were sparsely outfitted with beachy reed furniture that had known the space for decades, and someone had written in sharpie all the TV stations and their corresponding channels on a piece of paper taped down next to the TV. If it's possible to feel cared for by a place before you have any real reason to, I felt it there. Maybe it's because it tugged at a personal history, reminded me of the place my dad is from in Canada, Newfoundland (the bluff, the sea, the clapboard), but I think it’s also because it represented a moment in time when that kind of simplicity felt way more accessible.

We joked that the next time we came back to the motel, it will have transformed into a sceney beach bar with long lines and ironic drinks and new furniture bought to approximate the old styles, and that maybe, if we were enterprising enough, we should be the ones to do it. The authenticity of a place like the Sunset Motel is a powerful force beyond my not-unusual attraction to it. Ever since apps like Instagram and Snapchat granted us unprecedented access to each others' lives and tastes, the need to distinguish ourselves from one another became increasingly valuable. An aesthetic of authenticity - customizable, small-batch, highly visible originality - exploded everywhere from the restaurant industry to tourism to commerce. It came in the form of microbreweries and speakeasy bars, faraway yurts and cabins you could only access with great effort. It was san-serif honesty, back-to nature iconography, and quippy copywriting that just wants to be real with you, you know?

Americana hipsterism - that mason jar strain of the authentic aesthetic - was one of the most enduring, and today has become a cultural export as ubiquitous as Hollywood movies. It's why if you go to this barbershop in Kabul, you'll find it looks strikingly similar to one thousands of miles away in Copenhagen or Minnesota or Seoul. It's why you can find a hotel in just about any city with the same exposed brick, Edison lightbulbs, and reclaimed wood on which to place your latte art. “We could call this strange geography created by technology 'AirSpace,'" wrote Kyle Chayka in The Verge. “It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset.”

If the mass exportation of authenticity seems like an oxymoron, it's of course because it is. I had a moment of cognitive dissonance recently while browsing the gin section at a liquor store, in which all of the labels boasting each regional distillery's particularities used the same language, font type, and design elements that could have been peeled off a Catskills milk carton. The Canadian philosopher and critic Marshall McLuhan wrote about how new media technologies in the 1960s (television and early computers) fundamentally altered people's experience of space and time. Instead of the chronological progression audiences had come to know in print media, people now consumed information with a sense of “all-at-onceness.” This flattening of time and space created what McLuhan called a “global village,” in which relative sameness (and critically, Westernized sameness) shaped a new age consciousness.

My generation has gotten a bad rap for seeking authenticity almost ruthlessly - and then churning it into content to share on social media apps. My own consumer behavior has lined up neatly with the millennial archetype countless times before: I traveled to Iceland solo and took pictures of myself on a black sand beach with an abandoned airplane behind me, I've chosen the yogurt brand with the cursive-looking doodle on the container because it looked vaguely more homemade than the others, and I've floated into Air Space's vacuum in various localities around the world despite my best efforts to avoid it. The impulse has become so sophisticated, I don't even need to post about it on social media anymore. My taste in so many ways is self-curating. So much so, that when I feel pleasure holding a vintage teacup I found in the kitchenette at the Sunset Motel - translucent white with a flowery mid-century print around the brim - I can't help but wonder if the feeling is an honest one.

Of course, I derive pleasure from the content churning too, at least most of the time, even if it's in pursuit of feeding my curated social avatar. But authenticity, as I see it, can't really be sought; it must be found in as unguarded a state as you were when you found it. “Objects are not without spirit,” bell hooks once wrote, “as living things they touch us in unimagined ways.” A teacup inside a motel kitchenette can tell you a lot in the right circumstances. About the woman at the front desk, for example, who is terse but kind, and who gave you two extra towels and a plastic bucket when you told her about the leak in your bathroom. She knocked on your door, twice, later that evening to make sure everything was ok. The teacup and the weighted-bottom water glasses and the small plastic toaster with its cord wound about it like a tail were placed there, maybe by her too. Their presence spatializes a kind of care and comfort that’s hard to export - and it feels as fresh as seawater.

🌙  Some Bookmarks

*LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe (on the psychopathy that is the LinkedIn feed…I loved this piece so much)

*The Strange Lives of Objects in the Coronavirus Era

* “Appearances” podcast by Sharon Mashihi (honestly one of the most masterful pieces of audio storytelling I’ve ever heard. It’s a nine-part series about family, gender, and immigrant identities that explores the blur between truth and fiction)

* And a moon meme for the road

When I worked at Refinery29, one of our top-performing video series was a home tour show called Sweet Digs. The series mirrors the format of MTV’s Cribs, except instead of multimillion-dollar Hollywood mansions, it's 400-square-foot apartments in New York, and instead of celebrity homeowners, it's women in their 20s (usually working in media or fashion) paying more in rent than most people would deem reasonable. 

During the particular era of digital media when Sweet Digs launched, the most valuable videos were the ones that you could produce at the speed and scale needed to game the Facebook algorithm. Which is to say, the ones that generated views and engagement at a pace blistering enough to quickly pay off its own production costs in ad revenue - and hopefully then some. Sweet Digs is all of these things: cheap, quick, and relatively easy to produce given R29’s employee network of young, camera-ready women. The comments section of each video is a blueprint of the show’s success — each one a museum of the kind primary-color emotions that make a video go viral: delight to jealousy, irritation to outright ire. 

People watch Sweet Digs for the voyeurism, but also, apparently, to affirm—and often explicitly express—something about themselves. Many of the comments are of the generic judgmental variety (“Bathroom beside the kitchen...that's interesting”), others are sexist gripes about how a particular woman presented herself (“Vocal fry annoys me to no end. Speak or do not speak. There is no try.”) Occasionally there are genuine reflections on gentrification or the deranged economics of living in a city like New York (“People like you calling that ‘a steal’ is the reason I can’t afford rent”). But mostly, the comments show people's intense desire to be seen and envied for their lives, for their cheaper rents, or greater number of bedrooms, or big back yards, or peaceful vistas.

The comments reveal the kind of deep cultural and economic divide that has been invoked over and over again since the 2016 election between so-called coastal elites and everyone else. “So did you go to Applebee’s or Chili’s on a Friday night?” one urban-dweller responds to a woman who shares that she pays $425 in rent for a four-bedroom two-bathroom house.“But she also lives in Manhattan…obviously far superior to the Midwest,” another commenter says. “Arguably superior 😒” the Midwesterner retorts, “Careful, your snob is showing.” Two people can pay the same in monthly rent, but one derides the other for not valuing her cosmopolitan ideals, while the other balks at the choice to prioritize those ideals at the expense of her material conditions. The country-dweller posts a photo of her gorgeous wooden home just to show so.

What possesses someone to share a photo of their house in the comments section of a Facebook video home tour? The built-in rewards system of social media is one part of it; the more you share, the more validation you get. But a part of it is also specific to a generation’s relationship with money, and in particular, a generation of women’s relationship with money. For the New Yorker, Carrie Battan wrote about the comments section of another confessional-style R29 series in an article titled, "Money Diaries, Where Millennial Women Go to Judge One Another’s Spending Habits.” She sees the chorus of moralizing commenters as an example of millennial women’s anxiety created by the brackish waters of cultural 'liberation' and economic oppression:

"Millennial women have experienced a minor cultural revolution and a major economic panic within their young life spans. We’re now, in theory, encouraged to dress how we please, sleep with whomever we want, choose to have children or not, wear makeup or go barefaced, demand raises and take maternity leave, and speak out about sexual harassment and assault. At the same time, we are products of the Great Recession, instilled with deep-seated financial panic and also acutely attuned to notions of privilege.  Money—the “last taboo facing modern working women,” as Refinery29 puts it, and a locus of profound pressure and anxiety—may be the last arena in which we’re allowed to judge one another openly."

These anxieties also exist in the comments section of Sweet Digs, but instead of women commenting on the weekly expenditure logs of Money Diaries, their scrutiny focuses on the image of the dream home. 

In just a couple of minutes spent browsing titles on Netflix, you can find more than a half dozen shows centered on the pursuit of finding and creating your dream home: Dream Home Makeover, The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes, Amazing Interiors, The Home Edit with Reese Witherspoon, Million Dollar Beach House, Tiny House Nation, Grand Designs.

Importantly, the fantasy of the homes in these shows is that they often look like no one has lived in them, except for, maybe, an artisanal bundle of cooking utensils or the medium-format photography books opened gracefully on a coffee table. In the bathroom, there are a few sparse sprigs of eucalyptus but not a product in sight. Even in the shows where the house is just one part of the larger life-improvement plan, like in Queer Eye, the house makeover ‘reveal’ must be shown before the friends and family arrive. After the makeover is celebrated and life begins again, the mid-century modern glass table will be smudged and the West Elm cushions flattened like sad pancakes. 

In her essay, “Inside Out, Or Interior Space” Rebecca Solnit writes about the godmother of all lifestyle influencers, Martha Stewart, who popularized and made beautiful the idea that the labor of maintaining a home is to akin leisure. “Stewart’s greatest contribution was to make the setting of the stage into the drama itself...In Stewart’s world, the bride is always getting dressed, the hostess is always setting the table for guests who have not yet arrived.” 

The dream home precedes any signs of life, it cleanses us of the messiness of bodies and relationships and the mundanities involved in the business of actually living. A slate wiped clean, the dream home’s visual power sets the stage for the better, cleaner, more satisfying life we hope to live. Solnit writes, “Thus the hankering for houses is often a desire for life, and the fervency with which we pursue them is the hope that everything will be all right, that we will be loved, that we will not be alone, that we will stop quarreling or needing to run away, that our lives will be measured, gracious, ordered, coherent, safe. Houses are vessels of desire, but so much of that desire is not for the physical artifact itself.”

The American obsession with homeownership always underpinned the worship of dream homes, but the pandemic has crystallized the image of home through more sustained pressures. Our homes are now sites of romantic and familial achievements, culinary panache, physical fitness, and professional success. As we sit in front of our laptop’s camera all day, we concern ourselves with how we present our interior space as a matter of self-expression, more than with how we might place the desk in order to get a better look at the view outside our window. 

Living in quarantine under the spell of Instagram has made me aware of all the ways I can be at home better. See: 'eco-friendly’ metal straws for iced coffee that will both protect my teeth from staining and save the oceans. Also: 5-lb weights to be stored alongside my yoga mat for at-home workouts that will save me money and time in pursuit of a better body. The perpetual project of self-optimization that Jia Tolentino writes about in her book “Trick Mirror" is now possible without stepping outside the front door. I have invested in plush slippers, a portable keyboard, a laptop stand, more aesthetically-pleasing coasters to prevent ring stains, sweatpants that don’t look like sweatpants but are comfortable like sweatpants so that when I sit in front of my laptop for hours at a time, half-reclining, like a gremlin covered in blankets, these pants might somehow flatter me? Solnit could have predicted. “It often seems that the house is an extension of the female body and the car, the male body, for thus go the finicky and exacting arenas of self-improvement, the space that represents the eroticized self.” The task of constant self-improvement was always a lonely one, but now is made all the more lonely by the fact that you don’t even need to go to an overpriced group barre class to do it.

The real-estate and design site Curbed has a Money Diaries-like column called, My Week in Zillow Saves, a clever meta-content-construction in which you, the reader, oggle at people oggling at homes they don’t own or live in, but dream about. It’s a nesting doll of voyeurism and desire, which stands to reason it will do very well on social media. My former colleague at Refinery29, Angela Lashbrook wrote about millennials’ obsession with Zillow, describing the escapist role real-estate apps provide a cohort of young people less likely to own homes compared with previous generations at their age:

“In the face of economic instability and personal financial insecurity, what are the things that most young people still have control over? What we click on. What we look at. What we daydream about. And so Zillow or Instagram step in, where fantasies about more stable lives are more possible than actually achieving them.”

Of course, the great affordability crisis is not just a story about millennials. Pre-pandemic, even when the economy was in good standing by all formal metrics (low unemployment, healthy stock market, rising wages) low-and-middle-income Americans could barely afford the conventional staples of a stable life due to spiraling student debt, mounting hospital bills, and surging housing costs. A study from George Washington University found that in 2018, more than a third of American households could not afford to cover the cost of a midsize budget shock like a hospital bill or car repair within a month.

That type of economic fragility will pale in comparison to the freefall already in motion from this recession. There are families today whose only buffer from imminent homelessness hinges on the government’s politicized decision to renew unemployment benefits, which will expire on Christmas Day, or not. Among the 12 million jobless Americans, some may be forced to leave their homes, sell their belongings, or take out loans designed to newly crush them as we ring in a new year.

One of the worst parts of the pandemic is its individualizing force. Public policy experts expound on the importance of personal responsibility and we retreat to our homes and busy ourselves with the work of living better. Solnit’s writing on the dismantling of social welfare programs during the Reagan era is prescient: “The people sleeping under cardboard in doorways and the people having a more expansive master suite built shared a common fate not in material goods but in the atomization, of one against the world.”

As this devastation unfolds, we watch shows about dream houses; how to find them, how to decorate them. We condescend each other’s homes and financial decisions in the comments section of a Facebook video just to show that we can. In a cultural moment governed by the nebulous but powerful idea of ‘lifestyle’ and an economic environment that makes its achievement utterly out of reach, to share an image of a house that’s yours, at least for now, maybe feels like something close to power. 

🌙 Some Bookmarks

*Millennials Love Zillow Because They’ll Never Own a Home

*The Great Modern Affordability Crisis Breaking America

*What is Lifestyle? A stunning (independently produced) multimedia project on the roots of "lifestyle" and its contemporary contents

*How Dakota Johnson’s House Built a Queer Cult Following (come for the home tour, stay for the parody TikToks)

*My wonderful friend Mira made a playlist in the spirit of my last newsletter, Hope In The Age of Cynicism and it’s so good)

* A Family Cookbook A delicious new project from my fellow Tufts Observer alum Sahar Roodehchi sharing recipes from friends and family and all their associated delights

*Resources for people interested in volunteering in Georgia’s Senate races (& some more)

It’s a hopeful fact that's come up in conversations about the election recently— one that gets passed around helpfully but vaguely, like maybe it could ward off another catastrophic election result if you say it enough. Assurances like these hang in the air for a moment before the qualifying chaser of cynicism follows. By now we know that Trump’s power has defied conventional tests of success, and a single sunny data point could mean a million things or nothing at all. Skepticism is a good and healthy instinct, but the shared cynicism of this moment seems so much deeper than that. It signals, I think, an awareness of how absurd it is to feel hope right now.

I wrote recently about how 2020 has been a year of reacquaintance. I meant it on a personal level, but when I think about this election, the second wave of coronavirus surging through the nation, and the opportunity to collectively change the course of what happens next, I think it holds true on a broader level, too. Four years on from 2016, we’re confronting another presidential election of existential consequence. Once again, we’re facing a field of political possibility that has been narrowed down to two different versions of the status quo. And while the two candidates promise drastically divergent futures, both represent a lack of the vast imagination it will take to break these cycles of societal disrepair and amnesia. We are weary from a social welfare system designed to exclude the ones who need it most, from needless deaths, and from a bottomed-out economy committed to the persistent and tenacious devaluation of care.

Cynicism is an adaptive response to these conditions, which may be why it travels so easily —through social networks and media systems— and why political jokes on Twitter all sound like they’re written by the same ironic, unaffected voice. Collective cynicism is why Democrats have been whispering among themselves for months that Trump will probably win again, and why, at least in part, nearly half of eligible Americans didn’t vote in the 2016 election. It’s a rational response and a protective one. Hope is absurd given the current conditions, especially when it involves trusting an electoral system that keeps producing the same problems. 

On a night where you have every reason to feel cynical, I wanted to pass along an idea that’s helped me in my most disillusioned moments. On the topic of electoral strategy, writer and activist adrienne maree brown wrote about the need to build a 'political home' outside of electoral politics, while using elections to create the conditions for a political home to exist. She writes: 

“electoral politics isn’t and shouldn’t be our political home. it is a commons of service, meant to be accountable to informed people who direct the values and policies of those we elect to deliver and construct service provisions like home, health, water, education.

political home, on the other hand, is a place where we ideate, practice and build futures we believe in, finding alignment with those we are in accountable relationships with, and growing that alignment through organizing and education."

The two-party system, by design, equates supporting a candidate with participating in an election. But participating in an election can also mean pushing at the walls of its binary structure to make space for something more expansive. It’s exhausting work, but worthwhile. 

Beyond the election, whatever the result, the capacity exists to build a political home of your own. Maybe it’s made of words, or music, or hours on the ground. Whatever the case, it’s a design of your making: a quiet shelter from cynicism and a safe harbor of hope. 

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Fall is the most nostalgic season, and one meant for aimless walking. Here in New York, the days have been warm and dappled, and many of the roads are still closed to cars as part of the city’s outdoor dining initiative. There’s a guy on my street (an absolute legend) who sits on his stoop just about every rainless night, drinking beer and playing air guitar to punk music he blasts from a portable speaker. At my local coffee shop, it’s gotten downright competitive to get a table outside, so people have resorted to sitting in lone cafe chairs facing no direction in particular. You get the sense everyone is just happy to feel the sun and the air on their skin a bit longer. 

This end-of-summer lingering, as always, is steeped in some sense of urgency. The high of rediscovering morsels of normalcy through June, July, and August is wearing off, and autumn’s new cool air churns up memories of ambulance sirens and boarded-up restaurants and, if you're so lucky, the malaise of endless days confined to life indoors. 

I’ve been walking a lot, like many people in this city do, with urgency at my heels and nowhere quite so urgent to be. And without any real plan to, I’ve been walking by the facades of my old apartment buildings. The pull, I think (and this seems obvious to say) feels tethered to the familiarity these places promise. Ants find their way back home through their memory of terrestrial cues in the landscape. I like to think of myself as guided by something similar when I go on these walks. You recognize an Italian church that marks the halfway point to the subway station here, or a familiar tree pushing up through the sidewalk over there. Soon enough, you arrive at the clouded glass doors of a pre-war building you used to call home, peering into the hallway like a phenomenal creep. 

The terrestrial cues of this city are always changing. You can’t revisit an old neighborhood without noticing how much has transformed and gone on living since you were there. There’s always new storefronts or fancier coffee shops or the same idea of a restaurant, just repainted and gussied up. The bodegas are the strongholds, unchanging even in the response they provoke in you: Do I have time to grab a seltzer? It’d be good to have some chocolate at home. (Nevermind, the card minimum.) In a landscape both familiar and strange, reenacting even the most basic rituals can be a comfort.

In a 2001 essay for The New York Times Magazine, just two months after 9/11, Colson Whitehead wrote about New York's eternal rearranging of itself. He describes how each person has their own New York City skyline: a private and ephemeral constellation of places that appears for no one else but its beholder. Each personal skyline is made up of the pinpoints of ordinary life— the dry cleaner, the printing place, the bodega that makes your coat smell like panini— strung together and bound tightly by routine.

But the physical existence of your personal skyline appears as a flash. Your favorite pizza joint, Whitehead writes, becomes a travel agency (this 2001 example only proves his point…a better reference today might be an online retailer’s brick-and-mortar pop-up), which will eventually become a Chillhouse or something just as savvy. Whitehead is interested in the aftermath of disappearance; how the certainty of losing your favorite places constructs a particular relationship between before and after. He writes,"You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”

To live in New York is to know this nostalgic feeling intimately. In times of upheaval— when the changes are doubly accelerated and terrifying— it can feel like you’re dissolving into the mirage, too. When we move homes or say goodbye to old neighborhoods, we also leave behind old selves. Our old haunts contain ghosts, bearing witness to our longing, our loneliness, our triumphs, and our secrets. Our skylines have seen where we’ve ugly cried in public against our best efforts to hold it together and cataloged the micro-moments of recognition between two strangers in a city of anonymity. 

We say the people make a place, but part of New York’s promise is that just being in the orbit of such rapid reinvention will wrap you up in the process, too. Our skylines imprint themselves upon us. This is part of what makes revisiting old apartments such a clarifying experience. "The disappeared pizza parlor is still here because you are here, and when the beauty parlor replaces the travel agency, the gentleman will still have his vacation. And that lady will have her manicure."

Nostalgia, for what it's worth, is a complicated emotion, and one that is misrepresented often as a desire to go back to the way things were. The ‘nost’ in nostalgia is Greek for 'a return home’ and the ‘algia’ describes the pain of witnessing that journey. I think its truer meaning beckons the act of reacquaintance. Nostalgia seduces. It draws us in, promising comfort but producing something else: a foreign feeling in a moment of openness.

As much as “unprecedented” has been the word of the year, I’ll remember 2020 as the year of reacquaintance. I became reacquainted with my parents as a daughter, usually hundreds of miles away, while we lived together as a family under one roof for the longest stretch of time in a decade. Without a job for the first half of the year, I became reacquainted with a more fragile version of myself without formal structures propping up the work I spent my days doing. And I became reacquainted with New York, seeing its streets with new eyes on the long way home instead of more expedient paths, coming newly alive at the sight of my elderly neighbor walking his tiny dog named Parker.

To return to a familiar place with unfamiliar feelings, I think, represents immense possibility. If you want it, that’s what nostalgia can be; an invitation for reinvention. No matter how many times you’ve seen that dumb glittering vista of Manhattan from the movies, the bridge view over the East River always leaves you soft and wordless. What emerges is your personal skyline, built by loss and change of rosier varieties, inviting you, as it always will, to see yourself anew. 

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