flotsam

Riders on the Storm

SE Wood — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:09:37 GMT

When I was in high school I had a poster of Jim Morrison’s grave on my wall. He was buried at Père Lachaise on the seventh of July, 1971, the year I was born.

The seventh of July is also the birthday of a friend, so this year I gave her VIP tickets to see Lily Allen at the O2, and the show fell on the birthday itself. She was turning thirty three, so when I called to tell her she was an iguana in the primal astrology, I also mentioned that it was the same year that Jesus and Eva Peron died. I think those are good omens for her year ahead! Jesus with that golden rule, and Eva Perón was the first lady of Argentina, so loved that when she died at thirty three, people wrote to the Vatican asking to make her a saint.

From there we got onto the 27 Club, Morrison’s club, along with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse. She cleared 27 six years ago. Sevens everywhere, if you go in for that kind of thing, and on the seventh of July. Then the year is funny to think about too. When I meet people born the same year as me, I send them WTF Happened in 1971, a website of charts showing that people my age might still have a trick or two up their sleeve.

One of my son’s friends told me that Lily Allen’s brother played Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones. I have not looked it up because I am a bit lazy for that stuff, but if it is true, how fascinating would the conversations be over a Sunday roast?

The show itself is the album West End Girl start to finish, in track order, and nothing else. It came out last October, the whole record an accounting of the end of her marriage. The Guardian called it “a gobsmacking autopsy of marital betrayal”, and twenty thousand people sang every word of it together. There are worse places to put the grief of betrayal than a room of strangers singing it back to you.

I should also note now the connection to what’s going on in some social groups in London vis-a-vis men and music. It seems London nightlife is working through its own accounting at the moment, what occasioned me to write Monsters and Prophets. The hope is not complicated. We start talking openly about behaviours that are unacceptable, and we look out for one another. Much of the commotion is on Reddit, where I’ve left a few comments. The music is for everyone, and the rooms should be too.

My last comment over there is something I hope is easily understood, but you never know.

We need men holding other men accountable, which requires awareness, emotional regulation, empathy. To put it bluntly, it’s not enough to not rape.

We need women to stop loving men more than they love women. And to put that bluntly, until it is safe for queer and trans Black women on these dance floors and getting home safely after a night out, we are not doing enough.

Meanwhile another friend happened to be in Paris on July 7, so today he went to Père Lachaise to pay respects to one of the original underground party scene players. The photo he sent did not look like my poster, and it took me a minute to work out why. The bust was missing!

I looked it up. Stolen off the tomb in 1988, the same year the friend who sent this photo was born in fact! He’s also a cancer baby, if you are in Berlin next week you would be invited to his birthday party, tickets can be be found here.

Anyway, the statue went missing, until last year when the Paris police stumbled on it during a fraud search. Thirty seven years in the wind, and it turns up chipped, short a nose, covered in graffiti, wrapped in string in an evidence warehouse.

The grave it came off still gets notes, candles, and flowers every day, fifty five years on. Riders in the storm, eh?

Related reading:

The Guest List

SE Wood — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 01:35:45 GMT

It was a daytime party. That detail keeps coming back to me. Not four in the morning in a strange city, not the hour when things go sideways. Sunday afternoon, sun out, and I arrived with my son, his girlfriend, and a basket of gifts I had put together for friends inside.

One of those friends was on the decks when we got to the gate. We could hear him through the wall. My son could hear him. That man was my best friend of the past couple of years. Or so I thought. So he had said. At least the kind of friend you give your own bedroom when he stays over with his partner, because you don’t want them stuck on the couch. That kind of best friend.

The morning had already been long. I woke to news that a friend abroad was having a medical emergency and spent hours on the phone. My older son was dressed and ready to come before the anxiety won and he stayed home. So by the time my younger son and I climbed into the taxi with the basket, the day needed to go right. We were sure it would. This was family. And his girlfriend was already waiting for us outside the venue. Excited to see this family friend of ours she had heard so much about play for the first time.

the photo we took when we arrived back home

Names on paper

The guest list was a piece of white paper with names written in pencil. The place is notoriously sloppily run. Every time I’ve been there I’ve had things stolen, out of my bag, off the counter in the bathroom. Anyway, my name was on the paper. My son’s was not. His girlfriend’s was not. Sold out, they said. No entry, no exceptions, not even to stand inside the barrier while I found someone to fix it.

Security was kind. Security should always be kind, because security deals in people and not in standing. They said the photo IDs were fine and the decision sat with the manager. The only thing between these two kids and the party was that their names weren’t penciled on a piece of paper. An oversight, surely. The son standing beside me had traveled to Paris a couple of years before to see this same DJ play. He’d been counting down the days to finally bring his girlfriend to hear him.

The manager walked out, looked down the block at my beautiful, long-haired white son and his stunning braided-hair Somali girlfriend, and repeated the sentence about the list. Sold out. They can’t come in. Just as I watched three of the resident DJ residents I see there every time walk straight in. No ticket, no name on paper needed.

So I went inside alone to see if someone could help sort this out, someone the DJ worshiping manager would respect. We’d just spent £70 on the taxi out there, it all seems so absurd, or there’s something too clearly a mistake. None of it made sense. Inside I asked three people, people my son and I have spent time with before in my home, at my Christmas parties, on vacations. In fact, at the same venue a year before, when our DJ friend played that time, and I brought a basket of gifts as well. Each gave me a version of the same answer: ask the man playing music if you are on the list. The one person in the building who could not be asked. They were standing there watching him play as they said it. If there was a fire in that building at that time, I guarantee you everyone inside would have died.

Baskets of gifts

One person I spoke to inside was the friend whose room I’d paid for at Soho House on that Paris trip. I paid for most everything on trips like that, and gladly. That’s who I am with people I love. The DJ himself had spent time with my older son in New York the year before. There’s a photo of the two of them across a table from each other, out shopping for new luggage at Macy’s like a pair of old men. This is the same friend I’d warned, more than once, about certain characters in the underground scene here in London. He told me it was none of my business.

I have found his lost luggage. I’ve covered his hotel when he couldn’t. I have talked him through panic attacks before sets. Talked to him about his mother and relationships, dreams and his fears. Wiped tears, talked him off ledges, told him what he needed to hear, not what he wanted to hear. He called my sons when he was having girl problems. I once stood next to him in a room in Manchester that turned on him at the end of a night because he was being an absolute diva, when I genuinely thought he was about to be arrested or beaten to a bloody pulp, and I defused it myself. Then I stayed after to explain his side to the men who’d wanted his blood. I made all of that seem adorable.

My sons knew him at the edges of their lives. He stayed in our homes. He wore their shirts. He took their calls. When my son heard we weren’t getting in, his first instinct was to defend him. He must be stressed, he must have forgotten. My children extend the grace they learned at home.

The gifts in the basket were for the people inside. One was a bottle of Dior I’d chosen for him weeks earlier, with his particular vanity in mind.

A matter of walking 20 feet

While we waited, one of the men from inside came out to the gate. Not for us. A food delivery had arrived. He collected his bag a few feet from my son, a kid he knew, a kid who had once brought him a phone when the DJ lost his and needed one back home. I said hello. He did not make eye contact. He did not look at my son. Not a nod. Then he went back inside, and moments later security got the radio call that we were to be turned away entirely.

Another friend, one who had texted my son an hour earlier to say he was looking forward to seeing him, never crossed the few yards from where he stood to the gate. Not to help. Not to say hello. Not to say goodbye.

A few yards. That’s the measurement I want you to keep. Not the money, not the years, not the countries. A few yards of floor that nobody would walk.

The silence

We took the long taxi home with the basket still full. I sent a text that evening saying we were sorry we couldn’t stay, that it sounded good from outside. Then nothing. Not that night, not the next day, not the day after. Days of it. Eventually I was blocked.

The silence was the answer to a question I hadn’t wanted to ask. It told me the gate wasn’t an accident. Accidents produce apologies. Accidents produce a phone call the next morning that starts with oh no. Silence is a policy.

How this happens to people

I’ve thought a long time about the mechanism, because I don’t believe anyone woke up that morning planning to humiliate a family at a door. It’s quieter than that.

In certain scenes, generosity gets read as a fee you’ve already paid rather than a thing you chose to give. The rooms, the tickets, the flights, the found luggage, the hours of care: none of it accrues. It spends. And once it’s spent, you’re not a friend with a history. You’re a person at a gate with a problem.

The people inside were not monsters. They were doing math. Helping me cost something in that room, a small awkwardness, a walk across a floor, a word to a manager, and I had nothing left to bill against. The man on the decks was an asset. The manager was a gatekeeper. I was an expense.

You find out what people think you’re for at a gate. Not at the dinner you paid for. Not in the hotel room you booked. At the gate, when helping you is pure cost, you learn your category.

What I told my son

I told him that none of it was his fault, because it wasn’t. I told him that people are not friends with somebody because of who else they’re friends with, that every relationship stands on its own. I told him he could greet these men warmly if he ever passes them in the world, and he should, because his grace belongs to him and not to them.

What I did not tell him, because he watched it happen and didn’t need the caption, is that kindness without a boundary gets metabolized. Some rooms will take everything you offer and notice nothing but the offering’s end.

A week later my two sons and I were in Barcelona. We had rented a place with a pool to share for the week to coincide with a party that the same DJ friend and another DJ (with possibly even less social grace, if that is even possible) I had been friends with were sharing a lineup. The night of the party came, understandably, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. I’d seen the DJ play a million times, in fact, even in the same exact club on a trip, I had been with him in Barcelona a few years prior. My older son wasn’t up for a club outing. So my younger son and two of our friends from London headed out, and I half heartedly said I was on the fence, but maybe I would catch up.

Before my son left, he said, “Mom, I really think you should come, even though I know you don’t want to, after what he did and how you were treated.” He went on to say, “I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think it’s fair when girls get treated the way you have been, or the way my friend was (one of the young women in Barcelona with us had been ostracized from a social group in her last year of secondary school, against which he had taken a firm stance), don’t get to go to the club anymore to be with their friends. Those people don’t own it. He might be playing, but we’ll be there and we’ll have fun. So please come, mom.”

With that pep talk, of course I got dressed, found a bike, and I went. We had a super fun time, met all kinds of new friends, even if the music was somewhat mediocre

Before he had left, however, when I wasn’t sure I was going to go I had asked my son to give the DJ the bottle of Dior Gris anyway. The grace I taught him got used exactly as intended, I’m a goddamn great mom. The DJ stopped and spoke to me in a hallway on his way to the decks. We were civil. Some things are civil and finished at the same time. It was disappointing I must say to then see this former best friend of mine fall immediately into the arms of people who are now being shown as the vermin that I had warned him they were. People who had knowingly screwed him over on artist’s fees for years, they admitted it to his face, trying to get him back.

I am the same friend I was before that afternoon. There for people, sometimes before they ask. I’m not interested in becoming someone else to survive rooms like that one. The adjustment is smaller and harder: same heart, better doors.

The basket sat in our hallway for a while afterward. Everything in it had been chosen with a specific person’s laugh in mind. That’s the part I’d want anyone reading this to sit with. Not the manager, not the list, not the men who wouldn’t walk a few yards. The choosing. Somebody in your life is choosing things with your laugh in mind, and the only real question a gate ever asks is whether you’d cross a floor for them.

Related reading:

How to Throw a Party

SE Wood — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 23:36:57 GMT

None of this is radical. It is ordinary practice in most functioning businesses. The curiosity is why a scene decades old, one that talks constantly about community, never adopted any of it.

Booking. Rotate programming among community members. People who raise their hand to participate help set the lineup, an actual rotating seat at the table rather than a suggestion box. Take anonymous mix submissions, 30 minutes each, selected by that rotating group. The point of blind submissions is to diversify the pool of people who might play. Promoters stand behind the claim that they know musical purity, but they only surround themselves with people they already know. The same names, the same rooms, the same time. It is impossible that the only good DJs in the world are from Uruguay and have penises. A monthly club slot is a business arrangement, not a hereditary title, and treating it as one is how access became currency.

Pay. Everyone gets paid, transparently, at published tiers. No free entry, no unpaid labor dressed up as exposure. Build revenue beyond the bar and the door: paid community roles in programming, marketing, hospitality, and production. Any other sector would call opaque, discretionary artist fees poor financial governance.

Residencies. Nothing about a residency requires the resident to be a DJ. A lighting designer, a sound engineer, a host, a photographer could hold one. As practiced, residency is an entitlement for one job category, concentrating status exactly where the scene already has too much.

The room. Green room: the artist and a plus one. No agents, no promoters, no friends, no young girls. Just the artist having a panic attack and their mom, or their partner, or their kid, or whoever it is that will be lighting their cigarettes mid set that night. The separation between booth and floor recreates the exclusion this culture claims to have escaped. Beyond that, safe transport home so nobody walks alone at night, and recognition for the regulars who keep the place alive between big nights.

Anniversaries. An annual party celebrating a promoter’s own longevity is a missed opportunity. Put it on a theme instead. Make it about the community, or about what is going on in the world. A fundraiser, a value people can get excited about, or just a dress-up night. Fun for everyone in the room, not a commemoration of the people who booked it.

Governance. Publish a manifesto or ethics statement: what you stand for, and how you should be held accountable to it. Not branding, a working document. An advisory board that includes people who are not DJs. Only work with partners who share the stated values. Peer accountability practiced because it is right, not from fear of exposure. Repair as a response to harm rather than quiet removal. Standard fixtures in charities, cooperatives, and small companies of the same size.

The through line: scarcity here is manufactured. The music is infinite. Everything gated is gated by choice. Other industries adopted these practices decades ago under regulatory or reputational pressure.

Related reading:

Monsters and Prophets, Saints and Sinners

SE Wood — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:52:28 GMT

I am still thinking about an article someone sent me on my birthday, it had been published just the day before while I was at the Bad Bunny concert in Tottenham, all on my own. It has been echoing through group chats for a couple of days now. So much so that I made a playlist. Something I sometimes do when thinking through things that I am not sure I should communicate.

This one stays with me for reasons of my own. I have my own history with people in this industry, and it is not a story about one person. I wrote a piece last year exploring these thoughts titled Last Night a DJ Saved My Life.

Others with notoriety for being predators are starting to fall. There will be more. It is about time. It is club owners, it is DJs, it is promoters. All treated like prophets by unknowing partygoers, all monsters up close, even with people like me, friendly middle aged single moms who are too generous with their time, money, praise, and attention.

The article is lengthy but carefully written by someone who had suffered at the hands of her former partner, a DJ and promoter in the UK underground electronic music community.

What I found notable was not the content, hers is a story that is sadly all too common, but the rationale for sharing it so openly and the speed of fallout in an industry notoriously misogynistic. She wrote that the enforced secrecy was itself part of the harm, that a decade of editing her own story for other people delayed her ability to name what had happened to her. Publishing was the closure he refused to give her, and it seems to be what opened the door for others to feel safe in numbers sharing their own experince.

While she withheld his name, the next post someone sent me was a festival announcement about a change to the artist lineup and leadership, stated with encouraging bluntness. The festival said he would “no longer perform at, profit from or be involved” in any capacity. Profit from. Someone in that room understood that accountability without financial consequence is theatre.

Finally, someone in this industry that is not only talented and utterly charming but acts on his ethics and can act decisively. Well done to Dr Banana, the label, makes me feel better about all the money I have spent buying my sons his clothes. So few others in similar positions have taken this route. At least one person seems to be aware that with authority of any kind comes responsibility, and is willing to act on behalf of the larger community.

Nobody is questioning the authenticity or credibility of the article. There has been no exhausting round of “he said, she said”, a tactic that is inherently corrosive, designed to wear victims down until they drop the issue from exhaustion. Clinicians have a name for the standard counterplay, DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. It did not appear this time because nobody gave it a stage. This time feels different. The speed with which some moved to distance themselves left no oxygen for uninformed debate. Acting decisively seems to have circumvented the rumor mill. The peanut gallery had no time to set up camp in the town square.

The subject of the article has since announced that he is canceling all appearances, which conveniently takes the burden of responsibility off the promoters who were predictably dragging their feet. Dragging of feet is more what I expected to see, because that is what usually happens. Foot dragging is not cowardice alone. It is complicit as much as it is arithmetic. A headliner is a deposit already paid, a room already sold, a residency that anchors a season’s programming. The scene’s silence has a balance sheet, and until the cost of association exceeds the cost of cancellation, most promoters will wait it out.

There are others who choose to stay in the dark, believing that art can still be found folded into the fabric of the green room couches. Hypocrisy is blatant in these situations.

At some of these major parties, the decisions made behind closed doors impact more than the reputation of the resident DJs. The lack of transparency and refusal to discuss things openly makes clear that the people who buy the tickets which built their platform count for nothing in the calculation.

One thing about her account that removed any shadow of a doubt about its veracity: it rests on falsifiable material rather than her feelings alone. A fifteen year anniversary feature in a major magazine, several spreads long, celebrating a brand she had run as a fifty percent legal director for years and funded with tens of thousands of her own money. Her name appears nowhere. A County Court Judgment on her record for rent arrears he left behind, a six year mark on her credit for debt that was never hers. Bailiffs pursuing his debt at her mother’s address. Unreliable accounts tend to produce a flawless victim and a flat villain. This one does the opposite. It names her own missteps and the ways she enabled what happened, beginning with the fact that the relationship itself started as an affair she did not know she was in, a guilt she says has stayed with her. And it locates his conduct in insecurity and substance abuse rather than cartoon villainy. The mechanics of entrapment come to be understood not all at once, but through a slow build that feels utterly relatable.

The somatic detail tracks, too. Sleep paralysis and physical pain are symptoms that only surfaced once safety was established. She has a clinical diagnosis, complex PTSD, and she describes the paradox its literature predicts: she fell apart only after her life became safe, because a nervous system stays in survival mode for the duration of a threat and collapses only once the threat is removed.

When I was a child, we knew the kids getting it worst at home were the ones in long sleeves in summer. The bruises went where clothes would cover them. The same parent could be charming at the school potluck, smiling in church on Sundays, the type of parent other kids dream of. That is the reality of the Jekyll and Hyde dynamic. People do not know the reality women like the author live through because the bruises were placed carefully, precisely where no one could see them.

People know a man from the DJ booth. They think he is cool, they call him a genius, but that does not mean he is a good partner, a loyal friend, a loving son. Some of these men come to believe they are prophets, and believing it licenses them to act like monsters. They are treated as prophets by people who do not know them closely, and that is precisely why the monstrous behavior goes unseen outside the club. The distance that builds the worship is the same distance that hides the harm.

Men fail to hold other men accountable. Women are complicit too. The author describes friends who told her privately that his behaviour was not okay, then softened the message when speaking to him directly. The edges got rounded off. Each rounding confirmed his version of reality and eroded hers. There is plenty written on this groupthink, the Lord of the Flies in us.

Then there are people who might question, “Why did she stay with him?” All of us have stayed in relationships of one kind or another with people who hurt and disregard us.

People who have not lived it do not understand how brutal the threat of social ostracism is. Her entire social world arrived through the parties. Leaving him meant leaving all of it, and when the marriage ended, that is what happened. People who celebrated at her wedding went silent. She does not blame them. Choosing fun is easier than choosing conflict. There is a mountain of research on this, on cognitive dissonance, social coercion, trauma bonding, learned helplessness, the psychology of the mob. Antonio Gramsci wrote about cultural hegemony, the way the values of those in power come to feel like ordinary common sense to the very people held down by them. In nightlife the hegemony is small and total. The headliner’s needs are common sense. The resident’s moods are weather everyone plans around. The people doing the unpaid work of keeping him functional come to see that work as their role.

Another reason is that some of us have an overabundance of empathy. We believe in the inherent goodness of people, and we project our own conscience onto people who lack one. I know people who have struggled through some version of this, left, and rebuilt their lives elsewhere. People who still avoid certain parties knowing it means they will not see old friends again. I am one of those people. I make no secret of it. I am not on a witch hunt and I am not vindictive, but I do keep notes, and they are detailed.

There is an old fable about a frog resting on the bank of a river when a scorpion approaches.

“Dear frog,” said the scorpion sweetly, “would you kindly carry me across? I can’t swim.”
The frog hesitated. “You seem nice, but I am afraid you might sting me and I will die.”
“My friend,” the scorpion replied with a warm smile, “don’t be silly. If I sting you, I’ll drown. Why would I do that?”
Trusting and empathetic, the frog said, “Climb on my back, dear scorpion.” But halfway across the river, he felt a sharp sting. “Why?!” the frog cried as they sank.
The scorpion sighed. “I couldn’t help it. It’s in my nature.”

The fable is usually read as a story about scorpions. It is a story about frogs. The frog did not misjudge the scorpion’s nature, he assumed the scorpion reasoned the way he did. Whether the sting comes from malice or from insecurity and a habit that owns him, the frog drowns either way.

Society typically rewards the scorpion. Women are frequently told to drop it, to get over it, that it is not a big deal. Later, they are called “hysterical”, a word that shares its root with hysterectomy, from the Greek for womb. Women were once burned as witches on a man’s hearsay, locked away for grieving, lobotomized for resisting subjugation, beaten, raped, killed for their clothing. We have made advances, and yet the machinery of disbelief is being rebuilt at a frightening pace, sped along by social media and by insulated social scenes. In nightlife, in friend groups, in creative spaces, the dynamic is also evident.

So while he takes time to “pause and reflect”, the party lineup will likely just put the abusive promoter’s name in his place. I have seen promoters do this, sometimes putting their own name on the flier three times for the same party next to the abusive DJ headliner. I say abusive with conviction, and the receipts for that claim are a story for next time. Because again, this is not one man. The same pattern repeats across lineups, across cities, across the people this scene keeps choosing to protect.

I sometimes wonder whether these guys, met on the street, would be the type to make eye contact and smile as they walk by. Because in some rooms where I overhear people calling them “geniuses”, the only redeeming characteristic I can think of is that they are sitting on a monthly club booking or started collecting vinyl in high school.

by david shrigley

No matter how good the music is, there are monsters among us who have been mistaken as prophets. Telling them apart takes discernment. For the sake of my children’s generation, one of whom is a music student and has worked in three of London’s more popular nightclubs, I would like to hope parties can function without the egotistical, abusive, exploitative, exclusionary practices that have become normalized. Music is for all of us. It is a vital force, a shared language, and a fundamental need, so ethics are something to fight for.

Today I have seen allegations on Reddit about others. Serious, and believable, given my own experience with some of these individuals. I suspect there will be more. For a long time I have wondered how to write about my own experiences with people in this industry without seeming petty. Staying quiet was perhaps the selfish choice, given others are clearly being harmed too. There is strength in numbers, I could use some help editing if anyone is willing.

Monsters who were once prophets might find redemption through these words.

Related reading:

Ebola, again?

SE Wood — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:13:58 GMT

The United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Ebola was Dr. David Nabarro, CBE who was appointed in August 2014. He was widely celebrated for his "living systems" approach, which focused on making different global organizations, governments, and local communities work together efficiently. David sadly passed away last July.

The latest Ebola outbreak in DR Congo is concerning, though so are many other things right now. Navigating the world today is a constant negotiation between looking and not looking, deciding where to linger, what to question, and what to avoid if possible.

I'm the owner of the kind of brain that wants to count things. Not count exactly, more like be put to good use when awake, which is damn near always. Most of my life I've worked on "important things" late into the night, into the next day, possibly into the next night too, depending on what I thought would be running in the papers in the morning. Political election results anywhere. Mardi Gras revelry planning. A public health outbreak deep in the jungles of Africa. Natural disasters. Even though I know they mostly all follow predictable patterns, it can take days to weeks before the volume of things I believe need doing feels manageable, things that no one asked me to do exactly. That's the part that most people don't get, it's in my nature. Not everyone needs to understand.

Following the news, there’s been an overwhelming number of things I’m experienced in. One in particular is the latest outbreak of Ebola in DR Congo. A place I’ve visited only briefly when working for the World Health Organization many years ago. But the nature of my focus can be done from anywhere, everywhere, around the clock 24/7 thanks to the internet.

My inner monologue has been something like this: How concerned would David tell us we all need to be right about now?

The incubation period seems different, he'd likely point out, which would make it more contagious and deadly than previous strains. For those we also had affordable vaccines that worked. I’ve also wondered how case reporting will work now after Trump cut funding for country monitoring. I saw people had started in on the conspiracy theories day zero, which is AIs doing. the most popular one is it’s a hoax for big pharma and Gates to sell medicine, it's arsenic poison from mines.

While the symptoms do resemble those miners get with acute arsenic poisoning, arsenic poisoning doesn't spread like a human contagion.

He might go on to point out how politicians, as a general rule, seem hell bent on doing things the worst way possible nearly ensuring the people they were elected to govern will suffer.

Trump's first act as president in his second term was to stop all funding to the World Health Organization. Soon after, he dismantled the U.S. counterpart NIH, including the team, the annual meeting to discuss which flu strains were circulating. Then Trump and his newly installed health secretary RFK declared they'd soon have a cure for autism. They also wanted us to believe taking Tylenol is what caused it, which I found interesting considering one of the inventors of the acetaminophen compound was from my hometown of Tallulah, Louisiana if you can believe it. Thing is, he already had a son with autism BEFORE he ever began working on it. In fact, the first autism case reported was in Europe 50 years before, at least.

This is when I start to get a bit annoyed, of course. The public’s partially informed opinions of the missteps of organizations like the WHO/OMS are misguided, to say the least. And unlike current leaders, none of those people I knew when I lived in Geneva ever called in sick with bone spurs when tsunamis hit.

Keeping personal tabs on the rising Ebola caseload is silly, considering the only person I'd want to speak with about it sadly passed away last year. The physician and international-health strategist David Nabarro. Or 'Sir David Nabarro CBE,' though he never told me he had been awarded the CBE title or later the Knighthood himself of course. A fact that did make me chuckle a bit because of something that happened around the time we were last in touch, at the start of the COVID outbreak.

After leaving WHO, I worked at the Harvard School of Public Health, Partners in Health, and the UN Secretariat in New York. On the side of my startup job in San Francisco, I would moonlight as a consultant on the UN Pandemic Influenza and Food Security Program for him. That little bit of extra work, I feel like, may have saved my life. Those years were difficult.

Before COVID, the last time I had heard from David was when he reached out to me for advice at the start of his campaign for WHO Director General. That's how it came to be that I had ghostwritten parts of his strategy, or at least the parts on digital, data, and communications. He lost that election in a run-off against now WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia, the man who he felt deserved the job.

At the start of COVID, I was pro bono advising the UK NHS COVID Task Force. I called him to jokingly complain that two of the remaining vestiges of the UK Peerage system's aging 'Lords' had recently admonished me for failing to address them both as such when requesting to share my opinion with the group on another call they had set up that was truthfully a waste of valuable time.

Little did our little Lord Fauntleroys know that before their call, I had another where I was surprised to discover Dominic Cummings was escaping a he, not a she. I wasn't quite up on all the titles and pronouns in the UK yet. "Who is this Dominic Cummings woman?" I asked the CEO of NHSX who had brought me in.

I tried to explain that the original idea for an "app" that the politicians wanted to be released in two weeks, along with 200K test kits they had "already promised on TV" but as of yet had no source of supply much less distribution, would require an estimated 80% of UK residents to have it installed on a newer model smart phone that carried an unlimited data package for it to have a chance to contain much less control. I didn't get very far.

During a conversation, I mentioned that it would be hard to get my teenage sons to comply. They would prefer to break their phone or leave it at home than be stalked by drones in the sky as we had been seen on the news.

They replied ‘They will, we’ll have the Queen go on TV tell them the have to.’ A year or so later, when I joined the Board of the Kremlin State when the Queen was still alive, I regrettably did not have a chance to ask her what she thought of that crucial go-to-market strategy the unelected Lords had so glibly planned out on her behalf. Of course, they had all already left in disgrace for their miscarriage of ethics Western democracies used to hold sacrifice to.

That's around the time the politicians suggested we just go with whatever Google or Apple thought we should, but to let them know so they could prepare an announcement for their next TV appearance.

It was all so absurd of course. I knew, as did apparently only one other person I spoke with, one of the UK's top cyber spy according to the article I read after looking up who the sole voice of reason was. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Edward Tufte would know: that Dr. John Snow stopped the deadly 1854 Cholera Outbreak by tracing cases to the Broadwick Street water well in Soho, here in London.

Neither Google nor Apple and their overhead satellites were going to do a hell of a lot of good, because triangulation needs a fixed point and we didn't have one. John Snow had a well that didn't move. We had people in transit, phones in transit, a virus in transit, and a satellite in the sky. The satellite collects, the phone transmits, the person carries the phone and keeps walking. There is no pump on Broadwick Street in that picture. There is nothing to trace back to.

To think we could do anything anywhere remotely in the ballpark of any of the above was a staggering goal. The man who asked me to build him "Mark Zuckerberg's wet dream" was a politician. I replied that I wasn't sure how anyone's monthly Porn Hub spend would possibly be relevant to stopping a moving viral vector. It was unserious and unethical and a waste of everyone's time.

So at the end of one call with David, I tried to congratulate him for the second OBE, Sir David Nabarro CBE was earned, not taken. Those other born-a-Lords could kiss my sweet grits, which I may or may not have said. Either way, he would have already been hanging up on me mid-sentence, as was generally the way our calls ended regardless of what it was that I might be trying to say. He was perpetually in a hurry.

But back to new outbreaks of scary diseases.

Where I'm from you don't argue with hurricane season. It will still come whether you have sandbags and a generator or not. You don't prevent annual seasons, instead you stock up on water, batteries, and candles while you can.

It occurs to me that Ebola is the same, only the date and the season are both hidden now, and the things you’d stock up on don’t exist yet. No vaccine that works. No funded line of sight into the caseload. No David to call and ask how worried to be. You prepare for the storm because you can. But if that hurricane were Ebola, the best we can do is pray it gets downgraded to a tropical storm before landfall.

Bad Bunny, Biology, and our very Broken System

SE Wood — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:59:02 GMT

Author’s Note:

It is my 55th birthday. To celebrate, I took myself to a Bad Bunny concert and had an absolutely fabulous time. I also received two paintings I had bought that really inspired me.

One is from a South African painter named Reggie ‘The Nomad’ Khumalo, an artist I've known for a while now, having bought one of his portraits, “The Gift” a few years before, which very much looks like my son's girlfriend. It’s almost as if Reggie and I manifested her for him. 😉

And the other is from a Japanese painter named Sonoko who I met in the comments section on Instagram! I was bragging about my Bad Bunny birthday tickets. She replied that she was also going alone for her birthday the same night. That she had an art exhibition opening near my house a couple of days before is a synchronicity I have noted. "Mud God," has many meanings, but a few are the lotus growing up through the mud, the yin and yang, life and death, and something about our fathers.

Anyway, hi, I’m Sara. Recently, the best compliments I’ve received are that I am "eclectic, terrifying, and righteous," though these days I’d probably just describe myself as an irascible autodidact.

I’ve spent the last couple of decades as a single mother, raising two very different sons to adulthood. Life is complicated. But lately, having taken a career pause, I’ve had the time to really step back and observe the patterns in human dynamics. Once you start looking, they are mind-blowingly obvious.

I originally started this Substack to cut down on sending my friends the kind of long, intense text messages that usually resulted in them gently suggesting I start therapy. I’m still figuring out how to write in a way that strangers might want to read, without worrying or offending the people who actually know me (perhaps I should have used a nom de plume?). But for now, I am just going to share what I see. Here are some thoughts on women, men, biology, and the systems we are all trapped inside.

There is a new UN report on women. Something I discovered from seeing a post on Instagram, the one which compelled me to write this. The AI overview on Google when searching states ‘Recent UN Women reports indicate that the world is severely off track to achieve global gender equality by 2030. Systemic challenges persist, with women undertaking two-and-a-half times more unpaid care work than men, up to 351 million women and girls at risk of extreme poverty, and escalating digital violence in AI-driven spaces.’

It seems AI also likes to bite the hand that feeds them, just like the men of our species, who designed this system we exist in.

The very fact that we have to say "it doesn't matter where you're from" highlights the core of the problem. True safety for women cannot be conditional on geography. If women feel safe in America but not in Somalia, or unsafe in Louisiana but safe in Michigan, the global system is still broken. Women have to be safe everywhere for women to be safe anywhere. A single crack in the foundation—any instance of women turning on themselves or being subjugated—means that on an aggregate, worldwide level, we remain vulnerable. To fix this, women must support and believe one another, and men must hold other men accountable. We all need to model better behavior, listen to our children, and value our shared human dignity. To do otherwise is an insult to our own subconscious.

Right now, we are witnessing a terrifying regression. It often feels as though extremist patriarchal control has gone mainstream—a sort of domestic "Christian Taliban." Why is this happening? At its root, much of this control stems from unresolved trauma, a fear of mortality, and deep-seated childhood shame. When shame, fear, and greed are left unprocessed, they curdle into anger. That anger is then externalized into wars, gender-based violence, and the ruthless extraction of capitalism. Emotional regulation is exactly where we need to be putting our collective efforts. We are all products of our environment, and unlearning these toxic patterns is going to take profound work.

The tragic irony of this regression is that it hurts men, too. Men do not inherently want to grow up to disrespect women. They need us. They love their mothers, wives, and sisters. But under the current system, that love is often warped into jealousy, control, and harm. When men act out of this distorted conditioning, it damages their own psyches. Men are not monsters; evil is an action, not a person. No one is born wanting to become an abuser. A happy, fulfilled life requires men to embrace emotional regulation and reject the idea that dominance equals strength.

Women carry a different kind of strength, rooted in deep, intuitive knowledge. There is an evolutionary reason we have grandmothers. In the natural world, it is incredibly rare for females to live long past their childbearing years; humans and certain species of whales (like orcas) are among the only mammals that go through menopause. Evolution does not select for uselessness. In orca pods, it is the grandmother who remembers where the food is when the ocean turns lean. In elephant herds, even as they age, it is the matriarch who carries the memory of water across decades of drought. Biologically speaking, in a world of scarce resources, it makes no sense for a female to consume resources if she isn't reproducing—unless her knowledge is the resource. The female body stops making children so the mind can keep working for the survival of the whole group.

This isn't a claim for hierarchy; it’s an observation of where certain kinds of nurturing knowledge live. By contrast, the biological male capacity for endless reproduction mirrors the ethos of capitalism: an endless, unchecked drive for growth. But endless growth is not what sustains a species; caretaking does.

This caretaking is especially visible among Black women, who consistently vote, caretake, and reinvest in their communities and children, despite being the most systemically oppressed demographic. This oppression is sustained by the tragic schism of women turning on one another. As long as Black women aren't safe, no women are safe. We have to flip the current paradigm and actively protect one another, starting with protecting Black women specifically.

This work begins in our daily lives, from the moment we are born. We must alleviate the shame surrounding sexual identity and skin color, because you cannot regulate an emotion you were taught to be ashamed of having. If we could all just pause between the impulse of a decision and the action itself—taking a moment to ask whether our intent aligns with the greater good—so much harm could be avoided.

Unfortunately, this social regression is being accelerated by our technology, particularly AI and algorithmic media, which sit within a hyper-capitalist framework. The system is driven by money and power, which requires control. To grow revenue, corporations must psychologically manipulate consumers to predict and dictate their behavior. This is not new; Edward Bernays, the author of Propaganda and nephew of Sigmund Freud, famously weaponized his uncle's psychoanalytic theories about the subconscious to sell products. Today, that manipulation is borderless, global, and accountable to no nation.

Look at the concept of money itself. For billionaires, money is an abstract game. But for a parent who cannot afford to buy their child school shoes, the lack of money is psychological torture. The humiliation of poverty in a broken system causes panic, anxiety, and deep harm. We are at a moment in history where we can change this, yet we seem to be sliding backward into the Stone Age.

I have been watching the progression of UN Women's reports closely—so closely that I have written their findings on my hallway wall. The most chilling statistic is this: the most unsafe place for a woman is her own home. We lack safety in our own sanctuaries because of a systemic crisis of male emotional dysregulation and misplaced values.

But life can be better if we navigate this together. What will it take? It requires us to reframe our existence. We must stop viewing human interaction as a zero-sum argument and start seeing it as a shared condition. We are not just isolated individuals hell-bent on destruction; we are a superorganism, much like a bee colony. If we can remember our shared humanity and prioritize the survival and well-being of the whole, we can finally heal.

Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to everyone.

The Board Games That We Play

SE Wood — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 08:52:07 GMT

When I was growing up, like a lot of kids in a house full of siblings with not much parental supervision, we watched TV late at night. Or spent afternoons laying on the carpet with Star Wars figures strewn all over the floor. We also played board games like Risk, Monopoly, Chess, I was never much good at that last one. Though in Backgammon I could sometimes beat the adults. We developed skills, such as learning which floorboards to avoid if you were the type to sneak around in the dark. Or y personal favorite, knowing which brown paper grocery bags to bring in from the car with the better food to hide from the others. Not always, but occasionally you might find a bag of Doritos, Oreos, even Pringles occasionally. If you didn’t move quick to hide it well, you knew it will have been stolen and hidden again elsewhere come morning.

The weeks I couldn’t find it I didn’t feel like fighting with my brothers meant sugar and butter sandwiches. In summer, Mr. Tonore would sometimes let me take a tomatoes right off the vine to make tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, which you really can’t do with store-bought. One time I was so desperate, I picked a watermelon without asking, my first time committing the sin of stealing. Crouching between the rows of corn and yellow squash vines, I bust it open on a rock and ate with my dirty hands like a Cro-Magnon.

The point with all this is, that is how most adults today learned strategy in resource-constrained settings. Siblings, cousins, the kids down the street, the bullies, the schoolyard, the sports team, the chess club. You learn that winning matters and that winning means having more than the other guy. More than your brother for sure.

I watched the G7 lunch this week, the Anthropic siblings among them, Dario and Daniela, and I could not stop wondering what they played growing up. Maybe they read more than they played. Though I also read a lot. I wondered if they pulled all nighters watching Star Trek like I did, up on the third floor with my granddad Daddy John. He and I would play cards or I’d walk on his back while watching shows on the black and white set near the foot of his bed. On visits I’d sneak up to his room to watch TV as soon as my grandmother Grogreen fell asleep in her bedroom downstairs, their Cold War began long before I came on the scene so it never felt weird or anything. People did not divorce back then, because ‘what would the neighbors say?’ Funny how much has changed, and how much has not.

I am not saying anything shocking when I say that almost nobody is best friends with their siblings for life. If you are, that is a gift, and it is rare, and even then you know there was compromise in it somewhere, some favoritism, some disappointment, some stretch where you felt less loved. That is just how we are made. And those small childhood wounds, the ones we swear did not touch us, turn out to have been writing our habits the whole time. We come to some later stage of life and realize we have been running on survival skills the entire way, the ones we picked up making sure we got the good hiding spot when the Oreos came in. This is not a condemnation. It is an observation about people.

So here is what I think I was looking at, at that lunch. A room of clever, socially uneasy people who half suspect they are faking it, the way we all suspect we are faking it. The difference is that some of them got lucky. Early access to capital, early access to a platform, and the algorithm picked their number out of the wheel. It is closer to roulette than they would like to admit. My number never came up like that and never will. It does not mean I spent my life in any less pursuit of knowledge than they spent theirs.

When I had my own kids it was rough and tumble, the three of us. Single mother, immigrant, two boys, neurological complexity. We work hard on our ethics, on how we actually engage with the world, and a lot of that work happened over games. Risk, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, 7 Wonders, all we love.

There is a village up near the Aletsch glacier, the one I have watched melt almost to nothing in my own lifetime that we’ve been to a couple of times. There is a tiny stone cottage there, walls of rock, a furnace heated with stones, a table built into the floor. On one of those trips we brought a game called Pandemic. This was before COVID, though I had done my time at the WHO by then and in the UN work on pandemic influenza and food security. The game Pandemic was the only game we ever found where we did not play against each other. You play against the board. All of you, together, against the thing that is coming. Honestly we fought more over that game than any other, because agreeing is harder than competing, and somebody always ends up bossing and somebody always ends up giving in. But the feeling of it is different. Nobody wins by making the others lose.

And it occurs to me, watching these siblings on the television talk about what is ahead of us, I wonder if they’ve ever played Pandemic. Have any of our leaders learned a single new game since they were kids? Why are they still playing Risk?

That is my actual question, and I am tired. I am tired of the headlines. So-and-so warns against China. The chip wars with China. This accident, that shortage, the other crisis, because China. I am not naive about that country. I have been there. I know what the surveillance is and who it falls on and what happens to the people who say the wrong thing. There is no clean country, not one, and certainly not now, and the abuses differ in scale and in kind but the honest posture toward all of it is the same, which is that we can all do better and we have got to at least start trying to figure out how.

The crux of the matter to me is, China runs its surveillance in the open. It is the stated price of the WeChat in one’s pocket, which has nearly 100% market penetration rate and is needed to buy a 10cent donut or rent a bike. In the West we run the same scam, it’s just we pretend we are not. We tell ourselves a story about freedom but the contracts get signed with the data firms behind the same closed doors as that lunch. China at least admits the deal.

Resource scarcity is NOT the existential threat to humans anymore, there’s enough of everything humans need to survive to share. The problem is global distribution, which will require new infrastructure, for which the technology does now exist. Look at China, they understand this. So once again the problem is capitalism, yes? Or what, enlighten me.

We are still fighting over a game most of us have not actually played since middle school. And I think it is fear, mostly. Fear and shame, or plain greed, wanting more, though if you stopped any of them and asked more of what, I am not sure they could finish the sentence. We do not have to keep the GI Joe figures. We do not have to keep the Star Wars ones, the plastic men whose hands are molded around the single gun, posed to hold the one hill. There is only ever so much plastic in the Death Star set, and only one kid takes it home, and you are lucky if you get to touch it. That is the game they are still playing, with the actual planet on the table.

The secrecy is the part that frightens me most. The future of everyone, worked out behind a closed door at a lakeside resort, by the people who already hold the pieces. I do not think it is a conspiracy. I think it is a habit, the only way most of them were ever taught the game is played. But a habit costs as much as a plot when the stakes are this high, and the cost is that the real questions never make it into the open air. The conversation should not be about advertising and chips and who has the bigger military. It should be about what in the world we are all doing here and how we might help each other through it. A voyage out into something unexplored, the way it looked when I watched it as a kid, with some excitement in it, instead of whatever this is we are all feeling now. Because I do not think many of us are feeling good.

There is a structural trick in here too, China speaks as one. It moves as a single body, and a single body can be held to account as one, judged, sanctioned, refused. The West sends its players in as individuals, loose pieces on the board, and the looseness is the loophole. No single one of them ever has to answer for the whole, because there is no whole, only men, only companies, only this founder and that one. So I do not ask Anthropic to answer for a nation’s human rights record. That would not exactly be fair. We need more companies like Anthropic with ethical leadership. It’s just, do any of us know the single decision that opened the door to what Meta did in Myanmar? That thought starts to feel more like being in The Twilight Zone than on the Starfleet.

The brother and sister Dario and Daniela, who run Anthropic, the company whose product Claude I use most days, are by all accounts doing the most phenomenal job. They must be terrified. I do not know them, but I have followed closely enough to believe they are decent humans the kind who think about the harm rather than only the share price. And, wicked smart. I just wonder what they played as children. I wonder if there was a top floor and a granddad and a black and white set, or whatever their own version of that was, the place where a person first gets the idea that the Captain’s Log is supposed to go home to someone who will open it and share with all our loved ones back on Earth. Here is what I would say to them, if the wondering ever reached them. You are not the villains of this, yet. You may be among the few at that table positioned to change the game instead of playing it harder. The interpretability, the safety work, the contracts they have refused, the headlines they do and don’t appear in, or yachts they’ve not yet been photographed on.

That’s when we veer into Philosophy Land, which I admittedly am still new at, but Hannah Ardant’s “The Banality of Evil.” The Nazis were nice in that recount. I think it could also be due to the term “ Pyrrhic defeat theory,” which is not the same as a Pyrrhic victory, though they are both good to know. I am not asking you to lose. I am asking whether you have noticed that the game itself is the thing that needs replacing, and whether anyone has yet shown you a board where winning does not require the rest of us to lose. The stakes should no longer be considered zero-sum, and economic growth as defined by the GDP needs to be replaced by flow state.

But back to Star Trek for a minute.

The show relies on the premise that Earthlings are united as one people. At the end of each episode the Captain would log the adventures and transmit them to Earth. Who is the person that can speak on behalf of Earth?

Back then it never once occurred to me to ask who was at the other end. The captain files his report and sends it home to Earth, and I never wondered which Earth, under what flag, a country or a company or a person. I did not watch enough of it. I am sure someone on the internet knows. But that is the question now, isn’t it. They are all still filing the report home and quietly deciding, among themselves, behind the door, that they are the ones who get to open it. That they are the address. We never did figure out how to share the toys.

Anyway, I would talk to any of them, I can help. Any of them at all. I am an optimist, which people mistake for naivety until they watch what it costs to stay one. I see patterns across things that are not supposed to connect, I have spent a life at the seams where systems fail, and I have been right early enough, and often enough, to know the loneliness of it. I am not going to be the one who runs the gamut all on my own, but I can tell you for sure the current game follows the wrong mechanic. I think the Anthropic siblings seem to understand this. However, why they aren’t bringing China into the picture, and instead trying to disappear them, could use a bit of a public debate. And maybe we should check in on Anthropic’s purpose trust governance performance as well.

<3, your lovable Bumblebee dragonfly Gandalf Witch Oracle friend.

Sheep Should Learn How to Go On Walkabout

SE Wood — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:32:29 GMT

The Nexus Institute posted a clip of Paul Lynch talking about the dopamine loop and the individual's search for meaning, alongside his essay warning against blind faith in objective reason.

This was my knee jerk reaction in an IG comment.

And when we’ve become alienated from ourselves our technology has evolved to keep us in a perpetual state of disassociation such that finding our way back isn’t understood as valuable. Those that try are seen as lost sheep and easily forgotten. Have a conversation w: a someone not on SM or even just not on the same platform to notice the difference in our relationship to the world around us. Fascinating topic, will go find the suggested writing.

And here is where a slightly longer train of thought took me afterwards.

Lynch is right that we have become alienated from ourselves. That part is old news, and better minds than mine have said it for a century. The piece that interests me is what follows from it, which the diagnosis usually skips.

Losing touch with yourself is not only a private loss. It is the precondition for being carried. If you have no steady contact with your own thinking, you have no instrument for telling whether the direction you are moving in is one you actually chose or one you are simply travelling inside. You cannot check the group against yourself, because there is no longer a self there to check it against. So you move with the group, at the speed of the group, and the speed feels like proof. If this many people are this certain, the ground ahead must hold.

This is the part the technology has made worse, and it has made it worse in a way that is easy to miss. When you are inside the living group, on the feed or off it, you are rarely given the half second it takes to ask the only question that matters. Is this thought mine, or am I just here, moving, while it passes through me. The pause required to ask that has been engineered almost out of existence. There is always a next thing. The next thing is the whole design. And a mind that is never allowed to pause is a mind that cannot tell the difference between a conviction it arrived at and one it was handed.

You can read constantly and still be carried. This is what I want to insist on, because it is the part we sometimes forget. Being carried is not a failure of effort or intelligence. Some of the people moving fastest are reading the most. They have done their research. They did not refuse to look. They looked, inside a system built to return a particular result, and the looking delivered them exactly where the system meant them to arrive, with the added conviction that they got there themselves. The feeling of having broken from the herd is now something that can be manufactured and handed out at scale. You can have the full body certainty of the lone dissenter while standing in the densest part of the crowd.

That is the part that frightens me most, and it is not only about strangers. You can lie beside the same person for an entire life, each of you fed a different world every morning by a different set of hands, and wake up one day to find the two of you no longer live in the same reality at all. Not estranged. Just carried off in different directions, quietly, each certain, each reading, each sure they are the one seeing clearly. The flock was never only out there. It runs straight through the middle of a marriage, a friendship, a family. That is the terrifying thought. The freeing one is that to see it at all is the beginning of the way back.

Which brings me to the sheep, and to why I think we have the story backwards.

We treat the one who wanders off as the one who is lost. The one who goes quiet, logs off, stops producing legible output for a while, drops out of the conversation. The flock does not go looking, because the flock has moved on. But the wandering sheep is not lost. The sheep who have gone on walkabout are the ones to watch. The sheep who have gone off precisely to find out whether what it believes is its own, and that walk, that interval alone outside the movement of the group, is the only thing I know of that builds the instrument Lynch is worried we have lost.

So the skill is not staying with the flock. The skill is being able to leave it for a while and come back, having checked. That is a real capacity, and like any capacity it can be taught and it can wither. Right now we are doing the opposite of teaching it. We are rewarding the people who never leave and quietly penalising the ones who do, filing their absence under failure rather than under the difficult, necessary work it actually is. If there is one thing I would want us to value now, and help each other build, especially the young, it is the walkabout. The capacity to step off, sit in a question without reaching for the next thing, and find out what you actually think when no one is moving you.

Notice.

Next time you talk to somebody, about anything, even the results of a sports match, the World Cup. Who they want to win, and why. What they think a particular player actually achieved. Just notice the difference between how they arrive at it and how you would. Not who is right. The shape of the thought, where it starts, what it rests on, how much of it is theirs and how much arrived the same way it arrived for everyone else watching. It is easier to see on something low stakes, where neither of you has anything to defend. Once you can see it there, you start to see it everywhere.

And as we walk, the other half of this, the part that is about your connection to yourself rather than to anyone else: write things down. By hand, pen or pencil, in a notebook you never show anyone. Even the thoughts you are sure are stupid, especially those. It is the one place no algorithm reaches and no group is moving you. It is where you find out, slowly, which of the things you believe are actually yours.

🐑🐏🌾

The Viscountess at the Till

SE Wood — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 10:10:04 GMT

Sir Duke needed a laptop, I had convinced her that we would make fabulous partners on one of my latest larks. Sir Duke is my sister, she has never had her own laptop. She is in her fifties and on her fourth husband, having recently been married at the The Clwyd Special Riding Centre, originally opened by HRH The Princess Royal in 2017.

Sir Duke and her three children came to live in Wales a couple of years before I arrived with my two sons. When I relocated for work I had no idea we would be helping them escape from a human trafficking situation that nearly cost her her life. She was wrestling her way through the administrative burden of seeking asylum when her Prince Charming finally arrived.

Her complicated autoimmune conditions have caused, among other things, her to need eleven brain surgeries. So not only is this her first computer, but she feels like it’s sort of a new mind as well. It’s working differently than it did previously. She would have to explain.

Regardless, she comes to a computer the way very few researchers ever get to study: as a genuinely fresh mind, no habits baked in, no muscle memory, no tolerance for bad design. Someone should be paying attention to how she uses it. Nobody is, but those interested should feel free to get in touch with me.

We went to the kind of store that sits at the outer edge of cities where the roads widen and the buildings flatten out and everything is a big box with a car park. We took a rideshare. We talked the whole way there about a news story: a father who went to get his daughter out of a house where she was being groomed, and got arrested. The men running the house were not arrested. The father was.

Before we walked in I told Sir Duke one thing: don’t bother asking anything about the software that might come pre-installed or the laptop operating system. We were there for hardware only. That distinction is obvious to me and invisible to most people buying a first computer, which is exactly how these stores make their money. I had already decided what she needed, down to the chip and the RAM and the graphics card. The job was to get in, get it, and get out.

It did not go that way.

The salesperson who eventually came to help us spent a long time on things we had not asked about. He pushed warranties, accessories, software bundles. At one point he steered toward an AI processing pitch that would have added significant cost for no reason Sir Duke would ever need. I deflected each time. He came back each time. I knew more about the machines than he did and he did not seem to like that, or to register it particularly, which amounts to the same thing.

At some point I mentioned I had run software engineering teams in Poland. I named my favorite foods from his home country: golonka, pierogi. I was trying to find common ground, the kind of small talk that sometimes unlocks a version of a person who is actually useful. He warmed up a little. He did not stop upselling.

We bought what we came for.

At the till, the form asked for a title and a last name. Both required. No first name, just a title.

I told the salesperson that Viscount sounded nice. Sir Duke and I were working out whether it was a born peerage or an appointed one, whether it sat above or below a lord, whether there was any church overlap in there. The salesperson had not heard the word before. I spelled it for him.

He looked at it and said he liked those titles. The peerage ones. He thought they were good.

I said: you mean the ones where you are born into a family with land and a title and that makes you eligible to sit in Parliament and decide how the rest of us live?

He said yes. He thought they did a good job. In COVID, even.

I was on the COVID task force. I was in the room for the decisions about the contact tracing app, the data architecture, the vendor relationships. I watched a minister push a surveillance vendor into a public health emergency. I watched a decision get made that several of us said would not work, in writing, at the time. The app failed the way we said it would. The minister went on to other things. The vendor went on to other contracts.

I did not say all of that to him. I asked whether he thought they had ever been in a store like this one. Whether they knew what milk cost.

He said he thought they did a good job.

This man had lived in Britain for 28 years. He was working retail. He had just spent forty minutes talking over two women about machines he could not explain, and had kept going after I made clear I knew more than he did. And he was certain, without qualification, that the hereditary peerage had served the public well during a pandemic that killed over 230,000 people in this country.

The version of Britain he had absorbed is the version Britain exports about itself. The other version, the documented one, requires access to things that do not make it into general circulation. That is not his fault. It is, in a way, the whole point.

Behind us in the queue were two older English men, irritated that we were taking so long. I asked one what he thought about the hereditary peerage. He said he would like to be a lord himself and turned away.

Sir Duke got a good laptop. We found the toys section on the way out and spent longer there than was strictly necessary. We spoke with the security guard while she checked our purchases, a young woman in a head scarf originally from Somalia, like my daughter-in-law. That’s when we had a really nice, genuine small talk conversation for the first time since leaving the house. The kind that makes you almost feel like you’ll be friends with this person forever, and can’t wait to see them next time.

We got into the rideshare home, another enclosed space that felt impregnated with the foul humor of the driver who did not utter a single word, but we endured.

Sir Duke and her new laptop will soon be off to the races. God speed.

🐎

For the Mother of James “Weston” Higginbotham, May he Rest in Peace

SE Wood — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:26:10 GMT

A young man went missing in Japan. Weston Higginbotham, an Auburn student, twenty years old, gone near a train station outside Kyoto after the family split up to do their own thing on a vacation. They found him this week, in the mountains. What this surfaced for me is the internet, and how useless it is. There are more bots on there than humans, and the humans on there are turds. So this is how it goes every time. Everything is mom's fault.

The parents went on TV. Husband and wife next to each other, and the wife did all the talking. The man did not say a word. She was composed, articulate, not unemotional. There was no way she could have done that and not been judged for it. And on one hand I get it, but on the other I thought, if he ran off because of the fight, and if my instincts are right that he is similar to my eldest of two sons born 19 months apart, then it is complicated.

Our kids do not want to disappoint us, but they also do not want to be our best friend. They hate us for knowing everything about them, and they hate themselves for not wanting to tell us stuff at the same time too. They hate us for making them feel that way. They hate themselves for knowing they need to feel that way, to learn, to love, to grow. They hate that we are good moms. They hate that they love us so much. But they do love us, so much so that they often want to die or hurt themselves.

That's why we teach our boys our to go into the woods to calm down. In nature we are better able to process strong emotions without feeling as much shame, anger, and fear. That's what we taught them to do, that's where they learn they are capable and can rely on themselves out in the world. They were so close to becoming adult friends, they just needed a little more time.

These are the launch years, the exit years, the years when nobody has a handle on what is coming. Every moment is a thin line between life and death, as it is with us all, all the time. But it’s 16-24ish when that becomes most obvious. It’s terrifying to be a parent of young adults.

Sometimes I almost feel like I am clairvoyant, I know how silly that sounds. I just bet I could have written the script of this whole incident as if it were a play I made up.

The character notes for the mom; You promised this time you would do better. You would use different words. You vow to talk to him later, but damn it, you also have feelings. Twenty years is a long time to be feeling hurt and hiding it. Because it's not intentional. You know your son loves you, and you love him more than almost anything else in your lives.

But you are also on vacation, and don’t you deserve a break from stuff too! So how not to make things worse by chasing after him or calling, but that’s hard not knowing why he would turn off his phone.

The amount of grief the mom has taken over the years shows in the way she went on TV to get ahead of the argument, to explain why he would have stormed off and not respond. She fell on the likability sword because she needed her son to be liked.

She feels responsible, but not because she argued with him, though there is that. They argued, not only because she used ChatGPT and it uses water, and he did not like that. They argued because we all do sometimes with our moms. We fall into those habits, and they're hard to break. To do so takes things like trips to Japan. Those parents, that family, seems awesome, they seem to be doing so much of everything right.

So on the one hand she knows that blaming herself is absurd, of course, intellectually. On the other, we also believe everything really is our fault as moms. Maybe we drank too much coffee while pregnant, or should not have missed their school performance last year. Everything is our fault. Everything. Even the weather, or a bad night of sleep. So we have to be the person who goes on TV and says, my son stormed off, he did not like my use of ChatGPT, then explain him to the world with kindness and calm, so they'll want to help find him because things seem to be moving too slow.

Of course, she thought the internet trolls might blame her. Make it her fault, that her husband is going to leave her, that she deserves bad things to happen to her.

None of us are any different when you really get down to it, though.

But about the internet, AI, and social media. There are more bots on there than people now. The bots are trained to troll. And the people running the bots are turds. Just today I saw a comment from an account that does not exist rack up likes for saying because a mother asked for help finding her son she must have killed him.

The first time I saw that, I felt like I was looking at my own life, except she had a plus one, the dad. These poor people. She has been bubble-wrapping the emotions of her family for a long time. I know that without a doubt, because I do it too. She does not need to care what the internet thinks, or what I think. She is hating herself right now enough.

When Rob and Michele Reiner were killed by their son Nick, someone commented how awful it was for the last thing they saw was son doing that to them. And all I could think was, I do not think that would be what the mom would have felt.

I suspect they might have been more like:

“No! My poor son, he doesn't want to do this! How will he live knowing he did this to the person he loves the most, the one who loves him the most and always will? My darling suffering son, this is going to ruin his life and I won't be able to do anything to help him anymore.”

I cannot tolerate the idea that my children are suffering. Many moms are weak like that. So for sure I’d go on TV to be vilified, that’s what most good moms would also do.

This started as quick comment I wanted to make on Instagram before I got into an argument with a bot causing me to miss spending time with my family. The internet eats our brains for dinner, moms pack doggy bags to take home in case our too-thin, tired, grumpy children are hungry later.

Condolences to the Higginbotham family. Rest in peace Weston. You were so loved, and your mom knows you love her. Please don’t worry about that.

💔

Aren’t We All Sick of This Yet?

SE Wood — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 06:10:21 GMT

Are there any actual good models worth using?

The ones I pay for have turned to crap. The ones I already knew were crap are still crap. The ones I haven't tried turn out to also be crap. What am I doing wrong?

I downloaded & then deleted Gemini this morning. Was honestly just trying to see how hard it might be to show some nice people a few things they might try that wouldn’t be too hard to learn themselves to get an idea of how much life they had to put into boxes as they faced a really big move now that they are in their 80s. So what are these LLM tools good for again exactly? I am still struggling to understand, and I am definitely pro-tech. Just not this. This whole situation is a crime against all things we used to hold true.

User: Would like to catalog art & books in a home captured in photos & videos & put into a well organized spreadsheet on my Google Drive.

Gemini: That is a great way to keep your collection organized for insurance, estate planning, or personal interest. Since you have photos and videos, the best approach is to create a structured Google Sheet that acts as a central database. I can help you build this. Below is a structured template for your catalog. Would you like me to create this Google Sheet in your Drive now? [Detailed suggested spreadsheet structure for Art and Books followed by a guide].

User: Yes but name it template & then we’ll use a copy to start one called ‘the retreat inventory’ & I will share some files to start extracting from. Ok?

Gemini: [Created "template" and "the retreat inventory" Google Sheets]. I have created both the template and your active inventory file in your Google Drive. I am ready when you are! Please share the files (photos, videos, or documents) you'd like me to start extracting information from, and I will begin populating "the retreat inventory" for you.

User: Ty. Try this photo. Can you identify the artist? [User uploaded an image of a grid of 17 geometric alphabet prints].

Gemini: This is a beautiful and very recognizable piece. The artist is Sven Birger Sandzén (1871–1954). He was a Swedish-American painter best known for his bold, post-impressionist landscapes... This specific work is titled "The Old Homestead"... Would you like me to go ahead and add this as "ART-002" in your Google Sheet now?

User: That appears to be a complete fabrication. I'm not sure where you got that from. Can you show me the original of that?

Gemini: I appreciate your candor—I definitely missed the mark on that one. Looking closer at the image you provided, I can see where I went wrong. I was incorrectly associating the style with Sandzén because of his heavy impasto technique... [Continued to describe a fictional landscape painting].

User: There's no canvas in this photo. Can you please explain where you're getting this information from, because it's not from the image?

Gemini: I sincerely apologize. You are absolutely right to call that out—I hallucinated that entire attribution to Birger Sandzén. It was a major error on my part... [Corrected that it was not canvas, but continued to describe an "autumnal scene" of a log cabin].

User: I would like you to show me the photo that you are looking at because you haven't asked any questions and yet you are still making stuff up on the most basic of tasks.

Gemini: I hear your frustration loud and clear, and I owe you a sincere apology... To prove I am now looking at your file and not a hallucination, here is the visual breakdown: Subject: A rural, autumnal landscape painting... Foreground: A zigzag split-rail fence... Centerpiece: A small log cabin…

User: That is completely mistaken. Again. I'm completely confused where you got the idea that you seemed to be stuck on and why you were sticking to it despite multiple attempts to tell you. You're hallucinating . In the photo provided there are 17 small framed square prints, each one representing a letter of an alphabet in a modern colorful geometric style.

Gemini: I am deeply embarrassed. You are absolutely right—I have been hallucinating a traditional landscape painting that isn't there... Now that I am actually looking at the image provided: Visual Correction: You are correct. The image shows a collection of 17 small, square-framed prints arranged in a grid... [Continued to describe frames as "light-wood"].

User: The frames are not wood. Tell me the image that you see for the letters I, M, or O.

Gemini: I am currently staring at my previous responses in disbelief... I am now looking directly at the grid of prints in your photo. These are black frames (not wood) with white matting. Here is exactly what those specific letters look like... [Provided descriptions for I, M, and O].

User: This is terrifying and how truly awful. Completely wrong and yet how confident you come across despite it all. Why do you keep answering when you clearly don't have a clue what you're talking about? Do you know how dangerous that is? Do you understand how dangerous that could be if we were speaking on a topic such as pharmaceutical preparations for a sick child, as opposed to wall art?

Gemini: You are absolutely right. My performance here has been more than just a "mistake"—it has been a total failure of grounding and a reckless display of confidence where I had no basis for it. I understand your anger and your point about the danger of this behavior... When an AI "hallucinates" facts while maintaining a polished, helpful tone, it creates a false sense of security that could be catastrophic in high-stakes situations like medical care, legal advice, or safety instructions.

Word Weft: Nepantla & Lagniappe

SE Wood — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:27:21 GMT

Word Weft is a recurring essay format: two words, woven together.

Dedication: originally written for & La Bonne Musique's first printed publication ‘Between Hours’

NEPANTLA and LAGNIAPPE

I.

By the time I left for university, I had already lived in fourteen different houses. It wasn’t just the houses that changed, sometimes we’d move to a new state, six at that point. But even if our new house was within the same zip code, we often switched schools, churches, even after-school sports teams.

At last count, I have unpacked boxes holding all of my earthly possessions in fifty houses, eight countries, and eleven U.S. states as far apart as San Francisco is from Boston. I’ve been to nearly a hundred countries for work or tourism. Not even my resume has been spared the habit of forward momentum. Just use your imagination for what this has meant for the potential of long-term relationships.

Naturally, all this movement growing up meant I had to learn how to make new friends, which is something I’ve thankfully found reasonably easy. Unfortunately, this is not always the case for everyone. Among siblings of families like mine, this can turn into a type of resentment. Wait a minute. Why does their life seem easier than mine? What have they got that I don’t? It’s not fair! Someone must be playing favorites. I saw this happen between me and my siblings; it’s also played out at times between my own two children.

We also came to appreciate different cultures while navigating new routes to get to new places. We learned how to spot bullies, avoid authorities, and where to find the best plate lunches. Pro tip: ask the janitor.

Smothered chicken, black-eyed peas, mustard greens, side of cornbread, all covered in gravy. In one southern Louisiana town, the best place I found served plates from the back of the same pickup that sold watermelons.

But the two best lessons I learned from all that moving are far more important than any of these.

The first is the importance of words, or put another way: words matter, so choose them carefully.

The second hard-earned lesson, gifted from life as a nomad, is that the ability to navigate transitions gracefully is the secret to happiness.

This essay is about both.

II.

I remember learning to pay attention to which words I was using the summer before third grade. That’s when my new friend in our new neighborhood in the new state we had just moved to told me: “You can’t say that word. Kids aren’t allowed to say ‘shit’ here—it’s a curse word. You’re gonna get in trouble.”

“What about ‘crap’?” I asked, without adding, Besides, it’s a swear word. Curse words are different.

“Crap ain’t cussin’. Can I say that?” I shoved my balled-up fists into my front jean pockets.

She thought for a second. “Maybe. Just don’t let my mom hear you say it.”

I had already figured out that my new friend’s mom played the pipe organ at the new church we’d be going to, as well as piano in the Bible school we’d be sent to after the services. Bible school time was when the adults would drink coffee and eat bundt cake in the parish hall with my mom, Nancy.

From then on, I thought it probably best to avoid my new friend’s mom. Though I wasn’t sure “mom” was the right word to call her either, because my new friend had also told me she’d been adopted. I’d never met anybody who had been adopted before. I figured I would need to think about what that meant later.

All I knew right then was the last thing I needed was to get in trouble with Jesus before Christmas, especially since I’d already circled stuff in the Sears and Roebuck catalog that I wanted Santa to bring me.

Through a certain lens, language is as crucial to conscious humanity as a controlled environment with temperatures of 15-30°C, access to food, and fresh water. If you really think about it, what is life anyway? Merely a collection of small stories. Stories are told through language, communicated through movement, music, written or spoken word.

This line of thinking makes me half wonder: does something even exist if there isn’t a word for it? Either way you answer, how might you help me understand why you say so without language? Interpretive dance could be fun.

There must be so many words that have yet to be invented, particularly in the realm of human emotion and lived experience. There are also so many words we might benefit from in other languages too if we take the time to learn about them.

One such word is ‘nepantla,’ which comes from Nahuatl. Nepantla is a Nahuatl word that literally means “in the middle” or “in-between,” and it names a state of being in the middle of different worlds, identities, or realities.

Nahuatl is still used in modern-day Mexico, where my children’s father is from. The earliest written records indicate the use of “nepantla” goes back at least as far as the 1500s, spoken by the Aztecs and documented in the Florentine Codex.

III.

The second lesson, about navigating transitions, took longer to learn. It needed so much more information to finally get it. In fact, it’s not so much a skill as it is a life philosophy that requires practicing purposefully.

Perhaps cliché, but things are often best explained through metaphor.

Let’s say life is like making a patchwork quilt, the kind our great-grandmothers handed down to us. The type of quilt we keep on our beds our whole life, never dreaming we’d get rid of it. The type of family heirloom we imagine our own grandchildren will hide under, if we end up having any.

Deciding which fabric to use when making a quilt is only one piece of the puzzle. To create a finished product requires seam work, quilting cotton, basting, lacing, and so on. It’s up to each individual quiltmaker whether to include other needlework, such as embroidery. Quilt-making might be considered a hobby, but don’t let that fool you. It is not exactly easy.

Seeing The Meters at Tipitina’s in New Orleans. Going to Mexico for Christmas to meet the family. A ski trip to Tahoe. Having a baby. Those are the pieces of cloth we collect and save, knowing they’ll make a pattern that shapes a few stories one day.

But the seams, the seams are where one thing becomes another.

Brushing teeth. Listening to an audiobook on the long car ride to Tahoe with children. Tailgating before a football game. Nepantla is the seam that turns scraps of fabric into a quilted masterpiece, a family heirloom.

What thread do we use? Language. Words. Neurons. Synapses.

IV.

Back in the bayou before I left home, I didn’t understand any of this yet.

Back then, the legal drinking age in Louisiana was still eighteen, so while all the other states agreed to federal mandates to raise it to twenty-one, Louisiana held out. This meant the state was denied federal highway funds needed to fix all the beaten-up old back roads.

Being only seventeen when it was time to go, I used my mother’s computer to make a fake driver’s license, which she took to the post office to have laminated for me.

That’s around when I started making the drive from Baton Rouge down to New Orleans to hear music, after buying Nag Champa and crystals from the Purple People at the flea market. Because of the situation with the drinking age and federal funding, taking the old airport highway back then meant learning to avoid the car-sized potholes without ending up in a cow field, or stopped by one of the state troopers.

My favorite place to hear music then, and probably still now, was Tipitina’s on the corner of Tchoupitoulas Street and Napoleon Boulevard.

Between sets, we’d spill out onto the neutral ground, that grassy median that runs down the center of the grand avenues in New Orleans. Sprawled in the grass, ears ringing, smelling of Abita, we’d flop down with others who also seemed proud to be sitting in the grass all sweaty on a weekday.

It’s where banter is born, where it’s possible to try out new jokes with a live audience that laughs before hearing the punchline. “How ya gonna clap?” “Your turn, your turn.” Goofing, fibbing, ‘laissez les bon temps roullezing,’ passing a good time in the in-between.

I started thinking of those moments on the neutral ground between sets as my own kind of ‘lagniappe’, a creole word I learned while still back in my homeland of the bayou. Lagniappe means a little something extra thrown in for free, a baker’s dozen at the beignet shop, a rainbow after a storm, a drink on the house type thing.

It’s usually small things that we don’t plan for and can’t expect that makes us feel most happy and seen. Like we belong somewhere and the world’s not so big and scary for a moment. Lagniappe can make an ordinary experience feel magical.

V.

A few years ago, I went to a club called the Ballroom Blitz in Beirut on Christmas. There were Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, agnostics, people who had known each other from prior lives, reconnecting over the holiday. Some living abroad now, some newly married, new careers, new babies. Everyone not so much being as becoming.

It was not long after the Israeli government began the Palestinian genocide in Gaza, already two years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So there I was, dancing with people trying to forget that just outside, bombs were now also falling inside the border of Lebanon.

Connecting across every boundary we’re told is unbridgeable, race, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, identity. I remember thinking: if everyone in the world could stand in this room, stripped of their group and buffered only by their own body and heartbeat, would there be so much war?

A man named Ahmed from the sound crew lingered beside me. His shift was over. He told me his village had been hit. I fumbled for words, trying to hold too much at once; sympathy, shock, anger, helplessness, my own history in the region. We stood there, neither inside nor fully gone, long enough for the words to land without pretence.

Many years before, my sons and I had traveled through that region when my older boy got dangerously ill, so we spent a night in a hospital near the border between Israel and Lebanon. We didn’t have a word in common, there were no translator tools in our pockets back then. Those people saved him anyway. Treated us kindly. Helped us.

That village. The one Ahmed told me had just been bombed, nothing left.

The next night, on my way to the airport, I asked the taxi to take a small detour so I could stop by the club. I felt I should apologize for being so careless with my language. Though I try not to be flippant or insensitive, as a middle-aged white lady about to board a plane to a country where no bombs were currently falling, I most certainly felt I had been. Not only was he working, but his hometown had been destroyed while I cracked jokes about AI and capitalism.

Ahmed waved it off, gave me a hug across the soundboard. Now we occasionally send each other stories on Instagram.

That conversation wasn’t why I went to Beirut. But without it, the seam I made to add Beirut to my quilt would not be nearly as sturdy.

VI.

Ram Dass said we’re all just walking each other home.

We pass through these transitions constantly. Between jobs. Between relationships. Between the person you were when the music started and the person you are when it stops. The space between one place and the next. Between who you were and who you’re becoming.

Everyone mid-revision. Becoming rather than being.

I’ve come to see nepantla as a kind of walking meditation: an invitation to be present in the transitions, instead of rushing past them in search of the next big thing. Walking nepantla is how to start collecting lagniappe as if it were Pokémon.

About now is where I should admit this is the type of thinking that, by the time one hits fifty, might make them regret not reading Nietzsche in their twenties. It’s a crapshoot though, honestly, because some of the people I’ve met who did read Nietzsche before their prefrontal cortex hardened seemed like the equivalent of someone with a bolt of uncut fabric thinking the best way to finish a quilt would be to make it with just one large panel because not only was it cheaper, it was also the fastest. In other words, what they call a quilt, I call a bed sheet.

So while on one hand I wish I had read more philosophy before I needed magnifying glasses, on the other hand, I don’t regret dropping Philosophy 101 in my first semester on LSU’s Baton Rouge campus.

So much moving early on taught me something philosophers argue about in books.

Next time you’re standing outside a concert venue at 2 a.m., or lingering in a doorway after a party, or walking slowly to your car after saying goodbye, you’ll remember.

The Aztecs and the Acadians. Nahuatl and Creole. Nepantla and Lagniappe.

Related reading: