Friends,

First off, before we get to this week’s topic, I need to let you all know that there is just one hour remaining in ourl MARCH MADNESS POTLUCK THROWDOWN competition. Brownies and enchiladas are in a tightly fought battle, so if you haven’t voted yet please do so here. If you’re in line, stay in line.

Secondly, as you probably saw, this week’s publ…

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Last week, my family took the train to visit my parents in Montana. It was a lovely trip. Amtrak has long been crippled by austerity, and never truly allowed to reach its potential, but it’s not without its charms. An American story, if ever there was one. The train I rode is called the Empire Builder. Another American story. Better not to dwell too long on that name and instead marvel at how a single vehicle connects my home in Milwaukee with the skateboard toting rez kids in Wolf Point and the cowboy/cowgirl sweethearts, in matching boots, kissing on the platform in Williston. Also along for the ride: A pair of twenty-something guys from Haiti, traveling for work. A multi-generational family on vacation, actively planning an upcoming quinceañera in the observation car. A retired couple who met decades ago, as young people working the tourist kitchens in Yellowstone. When I talk about being tethered to other people, this is what I prefer to imagine.

The day after we returned home I sat down to work on our taxes, my annual exercise in magical thinking. It’s a load bearing story, the one I tell myself every April. I’ve grown up in a post Chicago School world, so I know the damage wrought by the taxation is theft crowd. I flinch every time I hear the phrase “my tax dollars,” that righteous proclamation of entitlement and isolation. Like everything about my life, my family’s income doesn’t appear out of thin air. I walk on sidewalks, ride the city bus and send my kids to public schools. I receive mail at my home, drink relatively clean water, and can trust that the money I put in the bank won’t disappear tomorrow. I am blessedly reliant on this imperfect, maddening, and deeply essential project that we call government.

The story I tell myself, when I pay my taxes, isn’t wholly untrue. But it relies, even in better years, on heavy redactions. I file my return and picture it funding libraries and food for hungry families. I think about social security and subsidized housing. I imagine the train, a future version of it, connecting even more communities than it does today. I do not picture bombs falling on schools and bridges in Tehran. I give as little thought as possible to genocide. I lie by omission. I sand down culpability and buff up benevolence. I do so to rob the welfare state-destroying cretins of one more psychic victory. They’ve taken everything, and if the cost of keeping them from stealing my heart is a bit of fantastical storytelling, so be it.

The story works, most years. This year is rougher. It’s widening gyre season. We’re hearing about it more and more, aren’t we folks? Falcons and falconers, they can’t understand each other. Rough beasts. So much slouching. Not a good situation.

This is not the first year that I have filed my taxes while U.S. bombs fall on other people’s homes. It is not the first year that government agents have murdered civilians in our own streets. That empire, the one memorialized on the train I just rode, didn’t build itself.

But it is the first year that I have sent money to the federal government at the exact moment that the President of the United States ranted and raved about using those funds to destroy an entire civilization. This will always will be Trump’s most enduring legacy– taking the plausible deniability that propped up past U.S. regimes and ripping it up for the cameras.

I am fully aware that there are oppositional paths that I haven’t taken. I have deep respect for the war tax resistance movement, and considered joining it myself, but it’s never felt quite right. Partly, I always want to be directly connected to the limited government programs I adore. But also, I don’t actually believe that I can divorce myself from the most heinous chapters in the American story. That’s true, to a certain extent, for all of us, but especially for those, like me, who have long been cocooned at the top of this country’s multiple caste systems.

Whenever I protest war (and I have protested so many) I see signs about how this one too isn’t “in our name.” And I believe it, to a point. I get there’s no false equivalency. I am not as culpable in this latest American travesty as, say, Pete Hegseth. But as long as I am a citizen of the U.S.A., and as long as my country attacks other countries, a piece of every one of these wars, including this one, belongs to me.

I am tethered, not just by romance and hope, but in a global web of heartache and loss. If I get to claim the connective power of the train, I have to also accept the connective horror of the bomb. I have to accept that the parent who clutches their child in Tehran is both terrified of what my country might do, and already reeling from my country has already done. And no doubt that parent, who likely has complicated feelings about their own regime, understands that I am not my government. But I also don’t want them to let me off the hook. My country is run by a mad king, but it is too easy to simply say not my America. The same country that produced him produced me.

We don’t get to pick and choose when we are and aren’t connected to one another. I couldn’t do anything to prevent this war. I know that logically. But it is my war. And I need to act– in a million Sisyphean ways– in the spirit of heartbreak and repair demanded by that truth. I need to make my silly little calls to Congresspeople who will assure me, unconvincingly, that there is nothing they can do. I need to march around in circle with the same collection of bleeding hearts that I’ve been marching alongside my entire life. I need to continue launching tiny projects that seek to remind us that we depend on one another. I need to do more, because the warmongers will always do more. I need to feel in my bones that it is not enough, and keep at it anyway.

I paid my taxes yesterday. Right before I finished, I was given a new option, one never available to me before. If I wanted, I could sign my children up for Trump Accounts. I shuddered, visibly. One connection to that man, at least for now, that I could still reject. I tidied up my tax paperwork and checked the news. Trump still hadn’t backed down. I started writing this essay, feverishly refreshing headlines. By the time I finished, it was official, for now. A two week ceasefire. Who knows what that will mean, or what relief it will bring to those already killed. But a better headline, for now, than the hellfire that had been promised.

It was only in that moment that I realized why I had been physically uncomfortable in my body all day. I had been clenching my heart.

I don’t know what comes next, but I am caught up in it. We all are. The man who threatened war crimes is still in power, in my country. Yesterday, I gifted him more money.

We are bombed and we are bombers. Oh God, in whatever combination of devastation and relief comes next, let us never forget each other. Inshallah, let us never believe the lie of separation. Let us act as if all wars are our wars, and let that ache propel us to stop them in their tracks.

End notes:

1. A two week ceasefire is not the same as the end of a war. Calling Congresspeople may feel like a fool’s errand, but it keeps us connected. Keep doing it.

2. I’m giving some money to Doctors Without Borders, currently active in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza (and so many other places). Maybe you could too?

3. Speaking of tiny projects that remind us we are connected to one another, I am excited to announce the Interdependence Relay’s FIRST DATES. These are all public, and you are welcome and encouraged to come. More details coming soon, and further updates can be found at our website, but YOU ALL! IT’S REAL!

   1. WASHINGTON STATE: April 22nd with the Columbia City Neighbors Club in Seattle. 6:00 PM at Southside Commons (3518 S. Edmunds). They’re both celebrating their neighborhood and are excited to connect with both existing and nascent neighborhood gatherers in other parts of the region. It’s a potluck AND I WILL BE THERE! [Stay tuned for another opportunity to hang out, Seattleites, while I’m in town]. Info here.

   2. OREGON: May 3rd at Reedwood Friends (2901 S. Steele Street, Portland). More info coming soon.

   3. CALIFORNIA: May 14th at Fog City Community Fitness (1649 Valencia, SF). Details coming soon BUT I WILL BE AT THIS ONE!

   4. HAWAII: May 16th. A food truck party (with fire dance lessons) at Yellow House Kalaheo (corner of Papalina and Alelo, Kalaheo, Kauai). 4:00 PM. I’LL BE AT THIS ONE TOO!

4. A reminder: We’re currently reviewing applications for our hosts in COLORADO, IDAHO, UTAH, NEVADA, ARIZONA, AND NEW MEXICO. Due date May 1st. Definitely reach out with questions. Also remember that we’re looking for a wide variety of groups, of all sorts of sizes, from living room gatherings to more established spaces. Maybe you’re a middle school teacher who wants to bring the relay to your class? Or you’ve got a cool block club and you’d like to host us on your front porch? Never hurts to toss your name in the ring!

5. Like all of us, I’m trying. And I hope this space (and all the organizing and connecting I do around it) helps you to keep trying too. If you value this work, I’d love for you to consider supporting it. We’re a tiny shop, just me and Carly, my professional partner in crime, and we can only keep this space running thanks to readers like you. Would you be down to chip in? We’d appreciate it so much.

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6. I’ve been lucky, recently, to be a guest on a number of podcasts, all of them quite fun. I joined my Milwaukee friend for her Gather, Connect, Create pod (we talked about the relay) had a bunch of fun with and Quinn Emmett on their Not Right Now show (the topic: parenting as an activist) and then had a lovely talk about bagel flags and potlucks with and Jessica Becker on the Human Powered podcast. [Italian chef voice: That’sa lotta podcasts!].

Hey pals

I’m not in a place to be a fully engaged community discussion host right now (due to the double whammy of trying to be present with my family on spring break and also battling this illness that just won’t fully quit) BUT I do want to give you a chance to vote for a single potluck dish to rule them all.

Now, was this a deeply unscientific process…

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Right now, somewhere in America, the most unnervingly ambitious men on the planet are jockeying to be the next President of the United States. There they are, in South Carolina, or New Hampshire, or on their own podcast, or pretending to enjoy fried fish in the vicinity of Iowans. Every week, like clockwork, new profiles of these men emerge in high profile publications. These essays will rarely be revelatory, because the only thing you can really say about these men is that they really want to be President, but there are always a few nuggets.

Here’s the sum total of new information I learned about Rahm Emmaunel this week, from one of those profiles.

• He eats his salad in a manner that definitely violates the Geneva Convention. There is so much aggressive shaking. The man goes to war with salad, and seems pleased with himself that he emerges victoriously. I know that this is just a punchy lede, included by Adam Wren from Politico as a metaphor for how presumptive Presidential candidate Emmanuel will “attack” the race, but I don’t know, man. I’m not that impressed. I’m a certified weakling. My hands are uncalloused in a way that would invite derision from actual infants. But if it were me in the octagon against a literal head of lettuce? I think even I would win that one.

And here’s the new information I learned about Gavin Newsom, a man who by all appearances has been running for President since conception.

• He likes to make jokes on social media about how his political opponents are gay.

I would prefer not to know either of these facts, thank you very much. And I would especially prefer that they not be harbingers of what is surely to come– two whole years of these guys doing their bighorn sheep in heat act all over the Democratic political ecosystem.

The Rahm Emmanuel salad expose was part of a piece about how the disgraced former mayor/Chief of Staff/congressman/ambassador is crisscrossing the initial 2028 primary states like a grumpy tank engine. You want to know who is a loser? Every other Democrat who isn’t Rahm Emmanuel, according to Rahm Emmanuel. They’re a bunch of pronoun-obsessed wimpy babies. They’re too scared, apparently, to do the one thing that literally every ambitious politician in my lifetime does all the time. Tell ‘em, Rahm.

“I’m not into Democrats sitting on the 30th floor of a Manhattan highrise in their Lululemon outfit with their Yeti cup, talking about, ‘We should go to places that we don’t go’ and then never go,” Emanuel told me before embarking on this trip. “So I don’t talk about it, and I’m just gonna go.”

Rahm, as a resident of the actual Rust Belt, I say this with tears in my eyes. Thank you. Finally, a multi-millionaire willing to take a picture with a non-plussed welder. We thought the others would come here, but they are too frightened of hard work and real Americans. If only you would come to our diners as well.

The primary piece of non-salad information I gleaned from that profile is that Rahm’s sole hope, after somebody meets him, is that they think he’s “neither weak nor woke.” Huh. When I meet somebody, my goal is to get to know them better, but I must be doing it wrong. I learned more from this piece, which documents watching the Democrats’ self-proclaimed working class whisperer drone on at extreme length about his buddies Bill and Barack while complaining that he’s late for an Eric Church concert. A classic rhetorical move, Rahm. “I’ve got better places to be than stuck here with you cretins, but I’m gonna make that your problem, at length.” Crowds love that.

The Newsom news wasn’t a full profile, but it fits neatly into the broader political identity he’s crafted for himself. He’s the attack dog, the only guy willing to muck it up in MAGA’s down and dirty sandbox. If you’re offended by his jokes, that’s your fault, loser.1 And besides, they were written by gay staffers. So get off Gavin Newsom’s back, ok? Do you, the leftist nag, reject the God given rights of gay politicos to write homophobic social media posts in the voice of their straight boss? Well maybe YOU’RE the reason we lost the white working class, you “when they go low/we go high” killjoy.

There’s a lot to hate here. There’s the manosphere b-list brand of comedy. There’s the peacockish performance of masculine ultra-confidence. There’s the condescending Democratic consulting class obsession with appealing to “working class America,” not through taxing the rich and sticking it to corporations, but instead just by, I don’t know, bragging about going to country concerts and, um, also saying slurs?

But most of all, there’s this zombiefied assumption, one obviously still lurching through left-of-center, MAGA-averse circles, that what we need to defeat Trumpism is an opponent ready to go get a little Trumpish himself. Wicked, for good, if you will. Lots to unpack there, and I’ve done some of it before, but there’s no need to get all philosophical. At its core, it’s not just a morally vacuous strategy, it’s bad politics. I just don’t buy that you can expunge the most outwardly malevolent political movement of our lifetime with malevolence-light.

Let’s play this out. Say, for instance, that Newsom wins the Democratic Primary because he didn’t kow-tow to humorless scolds like me. Or maybe Rahm comes from behind, thanks to his generational ability to assure a random machinist in Macomb County that trans people are, like, soooo annoying. These lifelong penthouse dwellers are now, in spite of themselves, the toast of the mythic American “working class” (apparently 0% of whom are women, gay, trans, or immigrants, because, as we all know, every single member of those groups are literal tenure-track Yale Law Professors).

Then what? The winner of that first race to the bottom now has to out-hatred JD Vance. Get out of here. J.D. was built for this. Throwing people under the bus is all he knows. He did it to his own family. And that was before he became fully evil! You know what they always say: Don’t bring an aggressively shaken salad to the “act disconcertingly like Hitler” fight.

I just don’t get it. And that’s even putting aside the fact that assuming the worst of a particular voting bloc is an awfully weird way you show to respect them (“You’re welcome, bigots! I came to your crappy town! I guess you want to hear some gay jokes, right?”).

Back to that “when they go low, we go high” rhetorical construction. I was never a massive fan, but I’m even less of a fan of the million of critiques and mockeries that have emerged in its wake. The whole debate presupposes two options– either we stay quiet and take it as our adversaries pummel us with vitriol, or we mimic their tone and style, either as a form of catharsis or praxis.

It’s a myth, that dichotomy. And it only benefits braggadocious, masculinity-performing dudes who both love the sound of their own voice and need the reassurance that they, alone, are the biggest, toughest guy.

There’s actually so many things you can do when your opponents go low…

… you can build

… you can organize

… you can throw a better party than they could ever hope to throw

… you can spend even more time loving and supporting people most in the crosshairs of that “going low” nonsense.

… you can form a line in the streets with thousands of your closest friends and stare down your adversaries with your collective righteousness and rage.

…you can engage in thousands of radical political experiments to topple the foundations of these brutal systems that grind us all down.

When they go low, we do a million goddamned things, because oh my god have you seen the world right now? How could it be possible that there be only two reductive courses of action?

I get that leftists and liberals alike are scared and want fighters. Hell, I want a fighter. I’d give anything for public figures who work harder for screwed over communities than their own careers. But come on. We can see through these two fakers, right? These guys aren’t the fighters we’re looking for. These are Temu populists. They rehearse their pseudo-folksy straight talk into gilded mirrors. They’re backed by the yacht and jet class. They don’t care about the white guy welder in Michigan any more than they care for Black and Latina nursing assistants in Stockton and the Southside.

I know it’s a long way to 2028, and we’ve got so many crises to navigate before we get there, but since these guys are already on the campaign trail, how about the rest of us preemptively plant our flags? No thank you, man. No thank you at all.

End notes:

1. I’m going to keep the end notes short, because I’m both on spring break with my kids AND sick, but I will say this: Do you value independent writing that tries to build a better world? Do you want writing not by AI but from an earnest-to-a-fualt dad whose kids are having a blast with grandma and grandpa right now but who still wishes he wasn’t sick? Well, then I’d love for you to consider a paid subscription. The perks are great, and my gratitude is deep.

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2. Oh my God I’m so excited about this upcoming book and you should 100% preorder it (I have! I bought a few copies, because what better gift for friends, right?).

3. Big Interdependence Relay news (first four dates: Washington, Oregon, California, Hawaii) coming next week. But in the meantime, we’re looking for for our next bundle of states (ID, UT, NV, CO, AZ, NM), so get on that, pals!

All right, we’ve done this once before, and if I’m remembering correctly it was super fun. Basically, you get to pose a question or topic for discussion to anybody— perhaps the group as a whole, perhaps to a specific person, or a subset of people (you know, like,, “if anybody in here lives in Chicago, I’m planning a visit and would love vegan restaurant…

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When we talk about parasocial relationships, we scold. You, the consumer of art, are wrong for the intimacy you feel towards somebody you’ve never met. Or you are wrong for the way that you engage parasocially– too judgmentally, too sycophantically, too weird and creepy.

I mean, there’s something to critique here. We can be awful, both to loved ones and to strangers. A lady just shot up Rihanna’s house after ranting on Facebook about how the superstar was talking behind her back. Yikes.

Yes, and… we’re talking about a ubiquitous aspect of human life, supercharged by the trillion hub and spoke relationships of the influencer economy. Parasociality is not something that other people do. It is just how we live these days. Studies show that it can offer a stepping stone to less social isolation. But we rarely consider it with grace.

Let’s jettison the plural pronouns. I frequently judge other people’s parasociality. I yap about neighbor this and local community that. I caution against accepting simulacra of relationships. Try the real thing, I am always saying.

But what constitutes “the real thing?” While I am not a Super Famous Writer, I am fortunate to be connected, due to my work, to a growing web of people whom I love. People who support my family financially, and myself emotionally. People who tell me, gently, when I let them down. People who, in many cases, are now full fledged friends. Are those relationships parasocial? Or were they? Perhaps, but we only ever use that term pejoratively, so how can it represent the miracle of a stranger, thousands of miles away, welcoming my writing into their life?

And how should I act towards the voices in my headphones, or the writers whose books I’ve re-read a hundred times, or the director whose evening at the Oscars was fodder for my hamfisted paternal lessons? Is my distanced affection for them wrong? Some of it, I bet. But surely, it’s not just a miasma of flattened humanity and false intimacy. Encountering somebody else’s heart and responding with our own story…I mean, that’s not unlike a potluck.

Last week, my corner of the Internet was in an old fashioned tizzy. L’Affaire Lindy West. Perhaps you missed it. We live, after all, in atomized information environments (I can’t imagine an aide breathlessly reporting to the Pope, “your holiness, we’ve received reports that Aham emailed Scaachi Koul an expletive-filled rant in response to her Slate profile– it’s a real mess”). If this is new to you, you are neither a better nor a worse person than those deeply immersed in it. That’s just how algorithms work.

The point isn’t the story itself. It never is. But also, I wouldn’t be thinking about parasociality right now if I hadn’t read too many presumptions of discontent in the House of West, so here I am, discoursing like a hurricane.

Unlike myself, Lindy West is a Super Famous Writer. She helped create the 2010s feminist Internet– funny, intimate, interested in the personal-as-political, simultaneously unapologetic and self-deprecating. Because she is a woman (and because she’s a fat woman who writes about her body), she has long been on the receiving end of degrading threats from men. That’s on top of well-meaning but patronizing advice from strangers projecting their lives onto hers, and the generalized exhaustion that comes from being publicly perceived. No wonder she and I (much less prominent, and also a guy) have a different relationship to writing in public. Of course I soliloquize about the gift of strangers’ attention. Must be nice, West would say, if she knew me.

Lindy West just released a memoir. It’s about many things (it’s very much about the weight of being somebody whose partially told story of self matters so much to strangers), but its most salacious concern is her relationship– previously with one person, now with two.

There is, my God, so much here: polyamory, and what does or doesn’t make it ethical; interracial relationships; cross-gender marriages where the woman is more famous/successful; fatphobia; dudes in relationships who lie, cheat and act like jerks; whether that dynamic is changed by the fact that the dude-presenting (and behaving) partner in question has, since the book’s publication, come out as nonbinary; white guilt, as both a productive and manipulatable force; all of our collective feelings about 2010s Internet leftism; the metropolitan Pacific Northwest and, you know, its whole deal; whether memoirists are reliable narrators and if that’s any of our business; and most of all, if it is more feminist to trust or doubt the famous woman when she assures us that her partner, who she admits was an “asshole,” makes her happy now, she swears.

I am sure that I am missing some layers, but I plan to weigh in on none of them. So many others have, including West and her partners (“Um, Mr. Pope, sorry to bother you again, but Roya’s email to Scacchi Koul was also pretty mean”). It is all quite messy and overly familiar and centered on topics with which I have zero expertise (if you would like to hear a mini podcast episode about how little I know about polyamory, you are in luck).

The original title of this piece was something to the effect of, “there is more to politics than having perfect opinions about other people’s lives.” I stand by that , but you can imagine the variety of essay that would have followed. I was gonna pox all over all y’alls houses. Towards people defending or excoriating West: why not do something beautiful in your own neighborhood instead? Towards West, and writers of her milieu: understand that we helped create this ecosystem. We built careers on telling people that their identification with us, and our worldviews, was itself a form of doing something useful.

Particularly for writers such as West, whose fame hinges both on their moral valence and relatability, why is it surprising to learn that you play a disproportionally load-bearing role in other people’s political and relational lives? Just a few years ago, West’s fans were invited to celebrate her marriage as a political act of body liberation. It is a hard sell, to then admonish those same fans for continuing to read that marriage-made-public through a personal and political lens.

I considered all that and then got sad, an ill-suited emotion for excoriation. I can neither blame West for making her living as a confessional memoirist, nor her readers for responding in kind. Much more than West’s love triangle, that’s the potential codependent relationship— rife with feelings of betrayal and heartbreak on both sides— that fascinates me the most.

They tried, West and her fans. And perhaps the famous writer shouldn’t have been the vessel for so much diasporic trying, but in a nation of lonely islands, that was the one made accessible.

I mean, we’re all just trying. I imagine that everybody writing think pieces about America’s most over-analyzed marriage knows that the part of our self that cares for strangers would be put to better use volunteering for a mutual aid effort, or protesting the war in Iran. Nobody needs another lecture from me to that effect.

I trust that we would all prefer to connect in real ways, with the people in our immediate vicinity, but so often that feels impossible, for reasons both imagined and real as hell. And yet, we want to reach out our tendrils of care to other human beings, so of course when a writer whom many people have followed for two decades bares their soul, it produces soul-baring in response.

This, for me, was the early 2010s left-liberal Internet: an overstuffed mess of overly strident first person essays and performative dogmatism for which I have a great deal of affection. The problem was never that we gravitated to strangers’ stories, nor even that we preened and performed for one another. We were making sense, out loud, of a sub-optimal world. Of course the statement superseded the action. That’s often how it goes when you’re practicing.

Whenever there is a critique of parasocial behavior, the author usually makes a token reference to the original article that coined the term, by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl. I’ve seen it cited hundreds of times, but never read it. It’s written in the 1950s, about the then-medium of television. It’s far more generous than I imagined.

“Sometimes the ‘actor’- whether he is playing himself or performing in a fictional role– is seen engaged with others; but often he faces the spectator, uses the mode of direct address, talks as if he were conversing personally and privately.”

Well no wonder our television-watching forbears responded to moves like that parasocially. Those are connective poses, be they earnest or manufactured. How can we help but want to reach out, in response, through our screens?

West earned her audience because she’s immensely talented at inviting other people into her life, but that doesn’t mean that her life should dissolve in a flood of strangers’ vicarious opinions. I imagine this is a hell of a moment for her, and I’m legitimately sorry for all the mean-spirited, bad faith ancillary takes she’s had to weather.

But I also understand why West’s fans are processing so many emotions out loud. It’s not just wanton gossip. She skillfully connected her life with that of thousands of others, and when tethers like that fray, broken hearts on on both sides will grieve, rage, or just a need to state their worldview out loud again, to grasp onto a center worth holding.

This should never be our end point, a cyclical argument about a stranger’s marriage. Telling the famous lady to get divorced will not bring a grand victory for feminism. Neither will critiquing others for doing so, shouting “how dare you deny the famous woman her agency.” But I get it. We’re all trying to care, and to have our care add up to something. And this is the imperfect space we’ve been disproportionally given to do so– logging on, experiencing somebody’s story vicariously, expressing an opinion.

There is, indeed, more to a political life than this. But it’s not our fault that we find ourselves here. We are figuring out new answers, thank goodness. We’re bumbling, but we’re bumbling towards each other. I may bemoan our continued distance, but I trust we’re getting closer. How can we not, when being apart is so unsettling?

End notes:

1. In searching for pictures for this piece, I went, as I always do, to the Library of Congress’ archive. They have a lot of wedding themed pictures in there, but you are welcome that I did not choose this creepy one of three cats getting married (?). You’re welcome, parasocially.

2. This time next week: We’ll be announcing our first hosts for the Declaration of Interdependence Relay. Oh my God I’ms o excited. In the meantime, if you live in Idaho, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado or Alaska… now would be a very cool time to apply! It does not take long to do so, I promise, and we will help you with your event (we’ll even give you a stipend). How’s that, for potential connection.

3. I hinted at this before, but I will never take it for granted that a number of you, most of you strangers, value me and this work enough to support it financially. My whole family is very grateful for you. I would love for more of you to become paid subscribers, and I’ll be grateful for you as well. Also, the perks are really good, I promise.

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4. Sharing with friends helps too. In fact, in a post-implosion of social media/atomization and oversaturation of the newsletter world, it’s the only thing that does. Thank you!

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5. Don’t forget to vote in our March Madness Potluck Throwdown. The “things that are called salads but contain little to no vegetables” region could literally go in four different directions (I am so proud of you all that egg salad doesn’t have a chance).

Pals,

So… it’s March, and I don’t know what any of your relationships are to basketball brackets (I love filling them out, and I do not care about my success after I do so), but that’s fine, because this isn’t quite like one of those brackets anyway. In a traditional bracket, two contestants go head to head. In THE FIRST EVER WHITE PAGES POTLUCK BRACKET,…

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“You all, check this out,” I called, iPad in hand. “Is it something fun?” my daughter replied, a question that I should have anticipated.

“I mean, I think so,” I stammered, “just trust me, I need to show you this guy. He’s a dad I really respect.”

Bless them, my children, for humoring my minimally compelling paternal sales pitches. We had a snow day yesterday, a spring blizzard, so they were a temporarily captive audience.

The dad in question, of course, was Academy Award winning director Ryan Coogler. I don’t know him, but I suspect he’d appreciate the honorific.

Actually, let’s pause there. I truly don’t know Ryan Coogler, a human being who seems damned cool, but who knows? Maybe he’s not so hot, in real life. Maybe, like me, he annoys his spouse by leaving the cupboards open when he’s cooking. Maybe he’s just really good at a very specific public presentation of self.

But also, I hear the way Coogler talks about the people he adores, and the way they talk about him, and my goodness. You could do worse. I am raising two kids, after all, a nine year old girl and a boy just a couple months away from officially being a teenager. My daughter reports that, in her third grade classroom, the boys play “Youtube” on the playground, each taking on the persona of some flashy, tough talking influencer bro. My son is aware of the influencers too, but more frighteningly, he’s aware of the actual news. He’s had to hear Pete Hegseth utter the phrase “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” while grinning like a schoolyard bully.

You do what you can, as a parent, in a world where boys and girls alike are asked to accept boorish men as either role models or necessary evils. And yesterday, what I had to offer was clips of a man who seems worthy of their attention.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about Ryan Coogler, in public speeches and profiles. He always positions himself in context, not just of other people, but their stories: His parents’ stories, his uncle and grandparents’ stories, his wife and kids’ stories, the stories of his colleagues and friends and their children, the stories of American Blackness, the stories of the East Bay. Whenever he talks, he sounds like he’s picturing himself cradled in a web of humanity.

This is love, I believe. Ryan Coogler loves, and not merely rhetorically: women, his parents and extended family, his wife and kids, other people’s families, his hometown, Blackness (both his own and a global community of Blackness). He does so in a world that vilifies Black men (and buries narratives of Black male gentleness), and which has low expectations for male behavior in general. He loves in public, and appears fully aware of the semiotic power in doing so, in his own voice, even when it shakes.

Yesterday, I made my kids (and my soon-to-be teenage son in particular) watch clips of Ryan Coogler signing “I love you” in ASL to his friends on stage. I made them watch clips of him hugging another man tenderly and then bounding back to his wife. I made them watch clips of him inviting his crew to stand up so he could praise them. I made them watch other people– Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Ludwig Göransson, Michael B Jordan– talk about how much he respects them, and what his trust has meant in their and their families’ lives.

I made them watch Arkapaw’s speech most of all. I wanted them to see it on its own terms, as a celebration of Arkapaw and her love and respect for her place in the history of women of color in film, but I also wanted them to notice Coogler’s role in her historic moment, as she became the first woman in Oscar’s history to be honored as a cinematographer.

You likely saw it, or heard about it after the fact. There’s Arkapaw: taking the stage, vibrating, beaming. The first words out of her mouth, “Aidan, where are you at?” After a beat, the camera turns to reveal Coogler, sprinting down the aisle, carrying an ebullient Aidan in one arm. A mother and child reunion, with the mom’s boss in a supporting role.

It is gorgeous, on many levels. That Arkepaw’s instinct was to share this moment with Adian. That the ten year old was so clearly proud of his mom. And in the middle of it all, that both mother and son mattered so much to the famous man in the tuxedo, blood relation to neither, family to both.

Again, I don’t know Ryan Coogler personally, but here are some things I do know that seem germane.

When Coogler remembers what sparked his love for cinema, it’s sitting on his dad’s lap, watching Boyz n the Hood and other movies about Black fatherhood.

When Coogler talks about deciding to become a father, he evokes Oscar Grant, a Black man murdered by Oakland police and the subject of his first film, Fruitvale Station. Grant cried out to his murderers, “I have a daughter.” When Coogler and his wife, Zinzi made the leap into parenthood, he couldn’t stop thinking about Grant’s love for his then-four-year-old Tatitana.

In the video, you can tell Aidan is comfortable in Coogler’s arms, a sign that he already knows and was cared for by his mom’s boss.

Relatedly, both Coogler and Arkapaw have talked about how filmmaking takes you away from your family for too long. For Sinners, Coogler encouraged his cast and crew to bring their families down to Mississippi, to re-create a summer camp together.

Coogler’s 98-year-old grandma still lives just around the corner from where the Black Panthers held their first action. Her grandson visits regularly, delivering home baked sourdough bread.

Coogler signs I love you to his friends because Zinzi— not just his wife but also his professional partner and producer— is an ASL interpreter.

On the red carpet, Coogler talked about his sadness on Oscar night, because it would be the last planned opportunity for the Sinners cast and crew to all be together.

Coogler isn’t actually a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which sponsors the Oscars, but is a proud member of the Directors and Writers Guilds. In his own words, “If I’m going to be a part of organizations, they’re going to be labor unions, where we’re figuring out how to take care of each other’s families.”

A man, in context. A man, aware that he is held up by a web. A man who actually loves women. A man who actually loves children, and not just his own. It need not be that complicated.

Because I am corny and too frequently tell rather than show, I blurted out a few too many of those facts to my kids yesterday. Probably just more paternal white noise, if I’m being honest.

I do worry about shoveling all this praise on another dude. Maybe I should just elevate women’s and trans people’s stories instead. Maybe I cheapened the power of Arkepaw’s moment by yelping, “LOOK AT WHO THAT IS, HOLDING HER SON!” I don’t want my kids to over-praise men for doing the bare minimum.

But I do want my son to be the kind of guy who adores other people, of all genders, who earns trust through care and interest, not through self-conscious declarations of allyship. I want my daughter to also love like that, and to know that she can and should expect care, tenderness and respect from men. And I want them to recognize the racial story here, to know that our country reserves a different narrative for them as white recipients and givers of love than it does for their Black friends.

I also hope they won’t let their own dad, the one who often tells rather than shows, off the hook.

We watched the clip of Coogler’s own acceptance speech last. Of course I teared up at the end, where he tell his own children how much he loves them (more eloquently and succinctly than I’ve ever mustered, I’d add) but I hope that’s not the lesson my kids take. Yes, I hope they know their dad loves them. But I hope they can name all sorts of kids their dad loves, and all sorts of places where children live and are worthy of love. I hope they tell stories of their lives, and others lives, in context. I hope they too feel cocooned in webs that stretch far outside the four walls of a house that, even when snowed-in, is never an island.

End notes:

1. As it turns out, it was a good Oscars for collective care and friendship. Of note; Teyana Taylor, one of the best celebrants of other people I’ve ever seen; Joachim Trier, who paraphrased Baldwin: “all adults are responsible for all children” (you will not be surprised to learn that Trier and Coogler are pals); and of course Javier Bardem’s “no to war and free Palestine.”

2. More on the Oscars (ahead of time) by me.

3. You all, I am SO CLOSE to announcing our first hosts for the Declaration of Interdependence Relay, but first: Alaskans, Hawaiians, Oregonians, Washingtonians (state), and Californians… your deadline to apply is tomorrow night! It does not take long to do so, I promise, and we will help you with your event (we’ll even give you a stipend).

4. One more thing I respect about Coogler: He believes that artists should strive to be useful to society, but that we also deserve to make a living doing so. I very much want to be able to keep supporting my family while doing this work, but I need your help to do so. Thanks for becoming a paid subscriber. The perks are really good, I promise.

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5. Sharing with friends helps too. In fact, in a post-implosion of social media/atomization and oversaturation of the newsletter world, it’s the only thing that does. Thank you!

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6. What the hell. Let’s look at more pictures of Ryan Coogler, a dad I really respect, hugging and celebrating his friends:

WELCOME… friends, cinephiles and people who exclusively watch Youtube videos of silent Midwestern dads power washing their decks. The stars are out1 and the red2 carpet is packed3 for the most glamorous and least potluck-focused essay of the year… the annual White Pages Guide To The Oscars.

Here’s the deal. Every year, I watch the ten movies that were nominated for Best Picture. Because I am a professional, I do so in the manner the filmmakers intended (in twenty minute increments, usually while falling asleep). Afterwards, I write about them, here, for you all.

No, I don’t believe that the best picture race is the most pressing current event right now. But there’s something here, for any of us concerned with the long tail of stories we tell ourselves. Even with the death of the monoculture, movies are still fascinating cultural texts. They are big messy beasts— narratively, financially, logistically. Intentionally or not, they can’t help but say reflect and refract all the topics that animate our lives (gender, race, power, human fallibility, fascism, war, faith, community and its discontents, and, of course, sad dads).

Also, movies are things we enjoy, made (for now) by human beings, and if we are not pausing to appreciate every possible variety of creative miracle right now, then how will we keep dreaming of a better world than this one?

In case you’re wondering, my favorite film of 2025 wasn’t nominated for any Oscars, because the world still isn’t ready for what my girl Ann Lee has to say (namely: “yeah, you’ve tried traumatic 1700s sex, but have you tried founding a utopian anti-racist/feminist/furniture-centric religion where you get to yelp and spin around?? have you???).

Oh, and I know it’s only March, but I can already declare that the best film of this year will be this video of the Veronicas performing the Australian National Anthem with a live string section.

“I wanna, wanna, wanna get, get, get what I want, don't stop.” Still true, Veronicas, and I’m glad you’re saying it.

If you enjoy cinema-adjacent silliness and want more of it, I highly recommend the conversation about 2025 movies that and I had on the greatest podcast in America4, .

And with that, we’re ready. We come to this place for magic. I try to steer clear of big time spoilers, but if you enjoy a tabula rasa movie-going experience and haven’t seen these films, maybe skip this one.

BUGONIA

What is this movie about, at least according to a guy who doesn’t know anything about film criticism? It’s about aliens, man, and the kind of dudes that might (reasonably or unreasonably) decide that they exist. It’s also about girl boss CEO culture and the last decade or so of the Internet and also about how life in exurban Atlanta can really go to your head if you aren’t careful. It’s directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, whose work generally gives me “Marilyn Manson Now Going Door To Door Trying to Shock People” vibes but maybe I’d get it if I I had gone to art school instead of Protesting Wars School (true fact: I studied Peace And Global Studies in undergrad, so I guess the fact that we’re in another war is proof that I should have studied harder).

Oh, this film was also about bees, for reasons that weren’t clear to me.

When the moon hits your eyes like a big pizza pie… THAT’S BUGONIA!

So, what’s the movies take, on whether aliens are real or not? I’m not gonna tell you, but remember back when, for a significant number of white Americans, the biggest thing to worry about, vis a vis our government, was whether they were lying to us about aliens. Man, what a trip.

What is its message for this political moment? I honestly don’t know! And I’m not sure the movie knows. This may be too spoiler-y, but for about two-thirds of its run time there was a pretty darn coherent idea being considered, but that was thrown out the window in the interest of hijinks. For real, your guess is as good as mine: Avoid conspiracy rabbit holes? Don’t be a high powered middle aged CEO who listens to Chappell Roan in the car and doesn’t give her employees enough paid leave? Save the Earth? Or do the opposite of that? Sadly, nobody will ever know.

Was this movie conceived by incredibly stoned juniors at Sarah Lawrence at three AM in the morning? Ok, bro, you know what would be totally sick? If [redacted].

How’s Emma Stone doing these days? I think she’s doing well, thanks for asking. She does not care whether I understand her movies or not.

What’s a bugonia? Oh, not much. What’s begonia with you?

F1

What is this movie about, at least according to a guy who doesn’t know anything about film criticism? FAST CARS, BABY! And men who don’t want to play by your rules, because… ugh, why won't you let me drive my fast car the way I want, mom? It’ll be FINE. JEEZ! What am I gonna do… crash?

Is there a crash? I mean… come on.

I thought you said there’d be no spoilers? My friends, that’s no spoiler. That’s a social contract. You think the motion picture F1 starring Brad Pitt as the bad boy of speedy automobile racing WOULDN’T have a car crash?

What is the name of Brad Pitt’s bad boy racing character who doesn’t play by the rules? Ok, I’m not going to look this up. I’m remembering Sonny. Maybe something like Sonny Blaze or Sonny Podcast. Maybe Sonny Creatine?

Were you right? I just went and looked it up. Sonny Hayes. I think I did pretty good. Creatine must have been his maiden name.

What is its message for this political moment? Man, don’t worry about it. Climate change? Wealth inequity? The United Arab Emirates, as a country that actually exists? Las Vegas, as the kind of city that should be shut down so that fast cars can drive around to the delight of rich people? Brad Pitt, as a guy we should be lionizing? Sorry, can’t hear you. I think my Batmobile is about to go through a tunnel. Oh shoot, you’re breaking up…

FRANKENSTEIN

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My guys,

It is both ironic and predictable that it’s International Women’s Day, and here I am talking both to and about us. But holy hell, we need to discuss this study. Apparently, nearly a third of you, across dozens of countries, believe that “a wife should always obey her husband.”1 What’s more, over half of you feel that society has gone “too far” in promoting women’s equality. Of all the generations surveyed, your views were the most reactionary. Compared to your elders, you are more likely to believe that men should be “physically tough,” that caregiving is emasculating, and that women shouldn’t be too independent or self-sufficient (though you do want them to have careers). It turns out that women can have it all, as long as you Gen Z fellas get to define exactly what “it all” entails.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You don’t know me, and if I’m being honest, I’m not the kind of guy who usually commands your attention. I’m about as soft as they come: a cringey millennial dad who has never thrown a punch, doesn’t know how to track a macro, and patently refuses to “maxx” much of anything. Are we really talking like that, by the way? Like, with two xx’s? I shouldn’t get distracted, because that’s the least of our problems here, but man, whatever.

I say all this just to acknowledge that I am– in the eyes of any alpha bro who has ever streamed or podcasted his way to fame and fortune– a grade A beta cuck loser. Call me whatever you want, by the way. I’ve heard it. I mean, you’ve probably been called all that yourself, likely from the same guys now trying to sell you lines, both about about how you’re supposed to treat women (like a lazy king, too busy protecting and providing to bother with paternity leave), and how they’re supposed to treat you in return (like obsequious handmaids, but who are also, like, super hot for you).

You may think those guys are cooler than me (and what a choice of guys: Are you a Rogan man? An Andrew Tate worshipping sex pest? A Galloway disciple? Or, more likely, do you take your advice from some 18 year old on Twitch with a name like AlphaPenis67 who somehow has a billion followers?). I’m sure those dudes talk more confidently than I do. I bet they could cook me in Call of Duty or bow hunting whatever it is real men are into these days. Bench pressing? I wouldn’t even know where to start.

But here’s what I have going for me, compared to every single one of those guys. I don’t actually hate you. And relatedly, I don’t want you to live sad, lonely lives. Those dudes? Oh man. They can’t stand you. Their only hope is that you wind up as small and petty as theirs, so as to somehow justify the craven path they’ve walked in exchange for likes and views. Is masculinity a pyramid scheme? All I’ll say is that I’ve never met a guy who has ever gotten to the top.

Make no mistake about it, to whatever extent there is truly a male loneliness crisis, its red hot epicenter is in those guys’ hearts and souls. They may be rich, but that doesn’t mean that they love and are loved. They may have J.D. Vance on speed dial, but doesn’t mean any of their buddies would show up at their house with a lasagna if they went in for surgery. They may brag about their romantic and sexual conquests, but that doesn’t mean that the women in their life actually feel safe around them.

Again, today is International Women’s Day. That holiday wasn’t invented as a grand feminist plot to leave you friendless and sexless. It was founded by socialists and labor activists who were into the idea of workers of all genders not dying preventable deaths. From its earliest days, it’s been a celebration of a whole slew of overlapping struggles to improve our lives. Justice for women. Justice for queer people. Justice for colonized people. Justice for workers getting screwed by bosses.

If you spent some time with feminist activists, by the way, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Contrary to decades of jokes about miserable, scold-y ladies who blame men for everything, here’s the secret about contemporary feminism: It wants a less rigged world for all of us. Yes, that means critiquing patriarchy and the ways it screws all of us over, but not in a vacuum. Last I checked, “intersectionality” remains a verboten concept in Trump’s America, but at its core it means being holistically honest about the world around us.

Do you believe that powerful elites have built a system that keeps us all down? Cool. Feminists are right by your side on that one. The primary thing we’d add (yes, I’m a feminist by the way, and no I don’t hate myself) is that the system is so thoroughly rigged that it has messed up our hearts and minds. It’s told us a lifetime of lies, many of them about how us guys should be allowed to be absolute jagoffs. Interpersonally. Systemically. Politically. We’ve been given a permission to make so many messes.

I don’t think you’re a jagoff, by the way. Not any more than the rest of us, at least. You’re a human being, like me, and you’ve probably made your share of mistakes, but there’s also a whole lot of things that make you beautiful. But if, as the manosphere influencers like to say, “iron sharpens iron,” then I have to be honest with you. Are you really walking around, in 2026, responding to a survey about gender roles with absolute neanderthal nonsense about how women were put not his earth to obey you?

Please, my guys, play this out for me. Explain how you will somehow be delivered from an epidemic of alienation if this is the full extent of your life’s purpose:

(1). get a job

(2). find a wife

(3) impregnate her.

(4). bark out orders at will

(5). expect her to tend over your household, your children, and her womb with gratitude and deference.

Actually, I bet I know the answer. “Because some guy online told me that both women and men were happier before feminism, and there’s this other sick looking dude on Tiktok whose wife wears gingham dresses and bakes sourdough bread and they seem like they’ve got it all figured out.”

I’ve probably seen that video too. I have my suspicions as to whether those couples are happy, but I do know that they have paid staff just out of frame. I also know that every true huckster knows that you don’t get rich hawking products. Nah, man, you gotta sell the fantasy.

Now, I bet you consider yourself a critical thinker who doesn’t like being taken for a sucker, so you should probably know that the whole “feminism makes women unhappy”claim is actually a lie that gets rolled out every time there’s even the smallest attempts to try to correct for gaping gender inequity. There’s never been any real evidence,2 but it makes for easy backlash fodder (which is to say, it makes us, as guys into useful idiots for a system that feeds on our misapplied resentment). Have you ever read Susan Faludi? Add her to your list after you check out some bell hooks, Barbara Ehrenreich and the Combahee River Collective. Talk about a group that respected us, as men, enough to never lie to our faces.

It’s a hoax, of course, that all our wounds would be healed if there were two genders, men and women, and the women were quiet and agreeable and we, the men, got to have big boy jobs and carte blanche to ignore the world outside of our acquiescent familial fiefdoms. If it weren’t a hoax, we wouldn’t get so huffy every time anybody tried to puncture it.

That big, dumb, infantilizing lie is sold to you as some biological truism, but its real appeal is the permission structure it gives us guys to act like a bunch of petulant babies. Engage with new perspectives about the world? That seems hard. Listen to feelings and perspectives different from our own? No thank you. Show up for others, even if there is no immediate economic, reputational or sexual benefit in doing so? Sorry. we’d prefer to put down another $100 on a March Madness parlay.

You’d be forgiven, at this point, for crying foul on me. Didn’t I just say that I wasn’t going to blame you for everything? Didn’t I claim to be on your side? But that’s the core problem, actually, the fact that any of this feels like an attack rather than an invitation. If I were your football coach, and I informed you that you were literally sprinting the wrong way down the field, you wouldn’t accuse me of being unfair to running backs or causing a tight end loneliness crisis. You’d accept the feedback.

Again, I don’t know which podcaster or streamer you’ve surrendered your better judgement, but I can assure you that they don’t have an endgame here. They tell you that you’re lonely, that the world has turned its back on you and that feminism is the reason you can’t get dates. But when in human history has the cure for loneliness been found in caring less for fewer people? That’s not a ticket to connection and community. That’s paying for your own life with junk bonds. Some day, maybe sooner, maybe later, the bill is going to come due.

I have written about this in the past, and I am happy to talk to any of you about it whenever you’d like. The reason why I care so much about you all is that I’ve fallen into this same trap. Sure, I’ve never told a woman to shut up and get back in the kitchen, but I definitely wasted too much of my young adulthood pretending that I was on some great man hero’s journey.

Here’s what I learned from my years of sucking up the oxygen in rooms and offering far too little to others. Nothing makes you lonelier than pretending that everybody else in your life exists to help you tick off a bunch of personalized achievement boxes. When I spent too little time showing up for a wider swath of people, my world was smaller and sadder. What made it bigger and richer wasn’t some abstract quest to invent a new model of “positive masculinity.” It was just old fashioned giving a crap about other people Being caring. Being curious. Being neighborly.

You know how you come off, to over half of the world’s population, when you spout trash about how there are only men and women in the world, and how the former gets to be the boss and the latter has to take it? They don’t hear some bold provider and protector. They hear a scared little boy, a necessary evil whom they’ll have to navigate around, another guy they’ll complain about with their friends. I mean, to be truly honest, they hear one more bush league simulacra of the entitled ghouls in the Epstein files.

There are two reasons why I hope you stop listening to those grifters who hate you. The first is that I love and care for a whole lot of people whose lives are going to be worse if you revert to the least reflective, most ungenerous version of yourself. The second is that I also love and want so much more for you. Nobody deserves to be lonely. Nobody deserves to be alienated. Nobody deserves to be tossed to the curb, and nobody deserves to be the kind of person who tosses others to the curb.

Those other guys— the ones who peddle supplements and drive their cyber trucks to gated compounds– will never love you enough to admit that it’s an act. I’m just a nobody. I’m not trying to build an empire on your back. And so you may think I’m a loser, but at least I’m an honest loser who really wants the best possible life for you.

There’s a better world out there, fellas. One where other people actually love having us around, and more importantly where we truly love being around other people. But we’ll never get there if we keep plugging our ears and blaming the messengers. We’ve tried everything else: gambling, numbing the pain, blowing up (in a million different ways), literal fascism. Maybe it’s time to try gentleness. Maybe it’s time to volunteer to clean up after a community meeting. Maybe it’s time to ask fewer questions about what it means to be a man, and more about what it means to be a human being.

Love you, sincerely,

Garrett

End notes:

1. On the subject of facilitating connection, I’m currrently organizing a relay of parties, potlucks and other loving gatherings across the whole United States. Maybe you’d like to join us? Or just learn more? That’s all here. Pretty exciting stuff.

2. On the subject of admitting when you need help. Yes, it’s boring that the number one way you can lend me a hand is by becoming a paid subscriber, but everything I do here is independent, ad free and aimed to help us build a better world, and those kind of efforts are hard to keep running. Towards that end, I am running a subscription sale as we speak (until the end of this week, for my birthday, which is tomorrow) and seriously- it’s a really good deal and there are so many cool thank you gifts. I wouldn’t ask if each subscription didn’t help so much. Thank you.

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3. Last week, I wrote about wars, and how it’s always a good idea to oppose them. On Friday (and continuing on through the weekend), the paid subscriber crew had a really beautiful discussion about things that have actually gotten better in our lifetime. Later this week… absolute nonsense (this week’s edition of my annual review of every Oscars movie, guaranteed not to be helpful, but always a good time).

Hey friends,

On one hand, I thoroughly enjoyed using my regular Friday email last week as an excuse to kick off the Interdependence Relay (an aside there: oh my God you all were doing it! we’re really hosting fifty gatherings in fifty states, though I still haven’t found Alaska and Hawaii hosts and those are the first two states and jeez if you all have …

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God, I hate this war, the one we started with Iran, which has only just begun.

I don’t mourn this war merely because the current U.S. President is Donald J. Trump, a liar, crook and sexual predator who should not be in charge of a nuclear arsenal.

I don’t mourn this war merely because of the big dumb hat that Trump wore when he informed us about this war, nor the big dumb grin that Pete Hegseth wears on his face literally all the time.

I don’t mourn this war merely because of Benjamin Netanyahu, an authoritarian war criminal in both the past and present tense.

I don’t mourn this war because I am a naive fan of the current Iranian regime. If one of the core plagues of our world is vainglorious men having their run of world governments, I find no safe harbor on either side of this conflict.

I don’t mourn this war because of a lack of Congressional authorization. I believe in checks and balances, sure, but also: a human being is no less dead because the aggressor country dotted their Is and crossed their Ts.

I don’t oppose this war because of theoretical implications for “my” country. After a war starts, self-serious experts always drone on about abstractions that might be destabilized. “The region.” “The global pecking order.” “The stock exchange.” What an odd game, to play-act as if a war only becomes abhorrent after it passes an imaginary tipping point. When your house is leveled by a foreign drone, or your loved one is sent home in a casket, shouldn’t that be destabilization enough? Why wait to cry out in collective rage?

“The war in Iran” is now being waged, in one way or another, in nearly fourteen countries.

I don’t oppose this war because I believe that I, an American, pretend to know what’s best for the Iranian people. There’s a reason why I don’t get invited to write New York Times op-eds, particularly of the saber rattling variety. How do they do it, those pundits? You’d think they’d have imploded from the pressure of all that bloated self-certainty by now.

There is so much I don’t know. I am, admittedly, still learning the poetry of liberation, but I can’t imagine that anybody’s freedom can be delivered by this combination of words.

A few days ago, parents in Minab kissed their children on their foreheads, dropped them off at school, and then found, just a few hours later, a crater where their little girls once sat. Here are some more words, from the warmongers. Tell me, again, if they speak to our intertwined humanity.

Oh thank God, energy secretary Chris Wright. That’s why I couldn’t get to sleep last night. I was worried about a crazy spike in oil prices.

I oppose this war for the same reason I have opposed wars waged by Presidents for whom I voted. I oppose it for the same reason that I have opposed wars that were, at their outset, wildly popular. I oppose it for the same reason that I have opposed wars that were short enough, at least in American memories and imaginations, to be easily forgotten.

I oppose this war because every war sorts us gorgeously complicated human beings— in all our brilliance, fragility and woundedness— into one of two tragic buckets. Which side of the gunsight are you on? Are you a death machine or cannon fodder? Will you die today, under a pile of rubble, or years from now, with a guilty heart?

I oppose wars for their false answers. There is a bad man, or a group of bad men, and the only way we can be safe is if our good men dispatch with them swiftly. Never mind whether that makes us bad men too. Never mind if the removal of the bad men sets off a decades-long chain reaction of bullies piled up on top of bullies.

Mohammad Mossadedgh might have something to say, by the way, about what happens when Iran is “liberated” by U.S. guns, but the drums of war have a pesky way of triggering mass amnesia.

The first casualty of war is the truth, they say, but I’m not sure that’s true. The first casualty of war is all the questions we don’t ask. War whispers in our ear, “don’t bother your silly little head with questions— those are for weak people, and thank God we are strong.”

If our goal, as a country and a world, was true liberation for all, I imagine there’d be a million curiosities that would occupy our attention before we’d arrive at “what times should the bombs drop?” We’d ask…

…who is feeding their neighbors, and how can we help?

…who is most under threat, who is standing by their side, and how do we join them?

…how would we act, if we truly believed that none of us were expendable?

…what is our most capacious dream for the lives we could live together, and what would our first step be if we actually believed that dream could come true?

It is a tired observation, I know, the old yarn about war and opportunity costs. It’s a literal bumper sticker, for God’s sake: “what if our schools had all the money they need/and the Air Force had to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber?” But man, I have in fact contributed to multiple emergency bake sales in the past month, and one of those bombers just reduced an Iranian girls’ school to a pile of ashes, so it seems like we might need to keep asking.

War doesn’t care about how we got here, what might be lost in the rubble, or what happens next. War believes in the false dignity of a button to be pushed or a trigger to be pulled, but somehow plugs its ears to the most human universal sounds known to the human ear: a baby crying, a parent wailing, a scream in agony.

I know that there are plenty of you who broadly share both my politics (and my admonition at this current conflict), but who might, for any number of good reasons, balk at my opposition to all wars. I’m well aware why us pacifists don’t get invited to parties, and I’m not offended. I understand the questions that my stance begs:“but what about armed liberation movements/…and World War II?/isn’t it immensely privileged of me (due to my straightness, my maleness, my whiteness, my gentileness, my Americanness, etc. etc. etc.) to sit on my pacifist high horse while others bear the brunt of the despots’ wrath?

I have thoughts (and a wellspring of inspiration from a long history of nonviolent liberation movements across the world), though I’m sure if I offered them in detail, you’d have counter-points. And honestly, if your heart truly beats with love for all of humanity, then I don’t have the energy to argue with you. Please know that I am willing to stand in front of you if a gun were pointed at your face. That may feel like solidarity to you, or perhaps you also need me to say that I’d also be willing to point a gun back at the bullies. I am so sorry that I cannot, and will not, because I still cannot conceive of holding a tool of death and saying “I love you.”

I recognize that may be a disappointing answer, and for that I’m truly sorry.

But I do stand by this assertion: You will never regret opposing a war, not because it is impossible to conjure up a justification for a war, because of what the opposition to war offers to our collective imagination. Rejecting war is not the same as rejecting the need for the world to change, nor the need for strongmen to fall. What that opposition offers, instead, is an almost limitless set of roads that we can walk together. Who do we need to be, to make wars obsolete? How could we protect each other, without tanks, bombs and guns? What does solidarity look like, if it was rooted in something far more profound than a common set of enemies?

If war kills questions, the rejection of wars lets loose a flood of them. And for me at least, where there are questions, there is a path, and where there is a path, there is hope for us still.

I hate this war, and I hate all wars, not out of naiveté, but out of this stubborn, deeply inconvenient affection I have for all of us. I just can’t imagine that we were created merely to destroy. I can’t believe that we were given hearts merely to turn them off. I can’t believe that we were given the ability to cry and wail if we were supposed to turn our back on one another’s tears.

God damn this war. God damn all wars.

End notes:

1. The world I dream goes far beyond Congress passing a War Powers resolution, but I do very much believe Congress should do that (and do everything in its power to stop those attacks), so please add your name to this petition and make those calls, friends.

2. Thank goodness that there have been and will be protests, and that there’s gonna be a pretty damned big No Kings one coming up by the end of the month. Every time there is a new war, I take to the streets, and I will be honest— many days feels tiny and Sisyphean but it also always feels like a prayer. All of us should be worth so much to each other. Standing outside, holding a dumb cardboard sign, wondering “is this enough?” is truly one of the smallest ways we can live that reminder.

3. At all times, and especially this one, we should keep loving harder than the fascists can hate. Both our neighbors half a world away and those close to home. You may have missed it, but I just launched a project to help us do both at the same time. A whole bunch of gatherings built on love and care and the joy that comes from getting into a room and building with another. Read more here, and then definitely check out our website. A relay, you all! Of parties! Of interdependence!

   1. P.S. I’m still especially looking for rad gatherers to be our hosts for our first two events in Hawaii and Alaska. More info about what that entails (in any state, but right now I’m focused on those two) here. Stipends for hosts! And lots of support!

4. Do you find this space (either this newsletter, or my broader work with the Barnraisers Project) to be valuable? Would you like it to keep going? I know it’s such a boring thing to say, but it’s true. “That’s only possible thanks to the support of readers like you.” Next Monday is my birthday (what a cool thing, sincerely, to get to be alive with you all). One tradition I keep around this place: doing a subscription sale the week before (and a few days after) my birthday. What does that mean? All the benefits of a subscription (yes, including the merch) but even cheaper (tbh the base price is still one of the lowest around these days). Thanks for considering!

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5. I have written so many essays about war and peace, and every single time, I listen to Joan Baez sing Finlandia while I write. This past weekend, I missed my Quaker Meeting singing Finlandia in unison because I was downstairs teaching the middle schoolers, but even hearing about it afterwards let out the waterworks. Man do I ever dream of a day when I will no longer sing Finlandia (This is My Song) with tears in my eyes, but until that day…

   “…but other lands have sunlight too, and clover…”

6. Speaking of songs that I’ve returned to in moments that I wish were far different, one of the first essays I ever wrote here was about Iran. I wrote that essay while listening to Jomeh by Farhad Mehrad. This one, too, got me today.

You know what’s usually a bummer? When somebody announces that they’re “launching” a new initiative. I suppose there are still some good launches out there (new books, for example), but more often than not a “launch” means that a company has figured out a new way to sell us something we definitely don’t need. Probably AI. Or an app. Or an AI app. In either case, you’ll end up with another password to remember and a town in the Central Time Zone will see all of its municipal power supply drained for a new data center.

So no, this isn’t that kind of launch. I’m not selling anything. I’m actually giving money away (not a lot, but keep reading). And I’m not running for office either, which means that this also isn’t the kind of launch that will result in you getting five million text messages that say “[INSERT NAME], IT’S NANCY PELOSI. WE HAVE A PROBLEM.”

Actually, come to think of it, this isn’t any sort of launch. It’s more like an invitation. Or, better put, it’s me helping you make an invitation.

Over the course of the next year, myself and my Barnraisers co-worker Carly are going to host fifty gatherings in fifty states.1 That’s a lot of gatherings.

Now, Carly and I won’t be at the majority of them, but we’re not the point. It’s a relay, except instead of a baton, we’ll be passing around a big wooden box with fifty compartments. The box is being made as we speak, by carpenters who know way more about how to make a shippable box full of a nation’s worth of compartments than I ever will. That’s right, I now know smart box people. What a life.

The gatherings can spend their time in whatever way feels right for each group (a party, a potluck, an organizing meeting, a neighborhood clean-up, a space for mourning, a dodgeball tournament). At each stop, participants will talk about what commitments they want to make—both to each other and to a whole nation of caring neighbors. They’ll write down a few of those commitments and then choose some artifact or gift from their home before sending the box on to its next destination. Often, the box will travel by mail, but we hope that occasionally it’ll be hand delivered from one gathering to the next. In either case, the web gets woven.

We’re going to start in Alaska and Hawaii (next month, we hope!) and finish, roughly a year later, likely in Maine. When the box is filled, we’ll have a party. We haven’t planned that party yet, because right now it’s just Carly and me and a website and a google doc, but a year from now we’ll have pulled together a diasporic community of gatherers, and there are at least a few aspects of this project that we want to discover together, somewhere down the road.

Ideally, all sorts of groups will raise their hands. It’d be pretty amazing if some of the gatherings were in middle school social studies classrooms, others in churches, mosques and synagogues, a handful in union halls, and more than a few in crammed living rooms or front porches. If you’re intrigued but you doubt that you could be a host, I say this with love, but I bet you’re wrong. You can do it! Established groups. New groups. Groups that never knew that they were groups (because they just called themselves friends or neighbors). Let’s go.

We don’t need or expect every gathering to single-handedly change the world. We just want to show each other and the country that there truly is something special brewing—a national turn towards each other and away from hate, alienation, and all the systems that have worn us down. We’re calling it the Declarations of Interdependence Relay (but you can just call it the Relay if you hate syllables).

Yes, that name is a direct nod to a different Declaration that has its 250^th birthday this year. You could say that we’re throwing fifty birthday parties, but not for jingoism or ahistorical nationalism. Definitely not for this regime. We’re celebrating the fact that the best part of this complicated place has always been the agitators, dreamers and most of all the community caregivers.

To put it mildly, there are a one hell of a lot of American stories that don’t fill me with pride. But the ones that do— the Underground Railroad; the Unemployed Workers Movement during the Great Depression; the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program; Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective— have all shared two common bonds. They dreamed of a better country and world for all of us, but they took care of people locally. They fed each other. They tended space together. They listened. They loved.

That’s all we’re trying to do. Feeding, tending and loving… and also connecting.

We are in a tenuous, frightening, possibility-filled moment. Oh man, are we ever. There’s much to bemoan, but also: For the first time I can remember, those of us who long for justice are finding inspiration, not in saviors or charismatic leaders, but in anonymous neighbors putting love and justice into action. That’s why Minnesotans lit our hearts on fire this past month. We are hungry for connection and agency, and are discovering, in real-time, the transcendent alchemy of focusing on both at once.

I love our energy, this nascent movement of community-curious dreamers. But I’m also pretty darned nervous. I’m worried that we have more experience being reactive than proactive— we can mobilize when ICE is in town, but not on an average Tuesday. I worry that we’ll fall into familiar traps, like putting all our energy behind short-term fire drills and none of it in building sustainable projects close to home. I worry about attention and algorithms. I worry that while some of us have well-developed muscles for care, hosting, and bringing people together, others (myself included) have been so addicted to the lie of rugged individualism that the turn towards collective care feels like walking on wobbly deer legs.

We started this project for this specific moment. Sure, the 250th anniversary, but it’s more than just that. We are here together, in 2026. Anxious about what might come— for our country, for our world— but wanting to trust and build with our neighbors. Many days, the small and local won’t feel like enough, even though it’s the most important place we can direct our energy.

I hope that this relay will make your local gathering feel less alone. I hope that we legitimately learn something by hearing 50 different verses of the same chorus. We don’t need to wait for the disaster. We can be neighbors now. We are being neighbors now.

I bet you have a million questions.

Yes, we are going to be doing all sorts of things to support hosts— both through coaching, connection and modest stipends ($250, not all the money in the world, I know, but enough to help with snacks-).

Yes, we have spent a ton of time stressing over the logistics of how to schedule gatherings and move a box from place to place.

Yes, we have a decent plan but we’ll probably muck it up.

No, your gathering doesn’t HAVE to be a potluck… but potlucks do, in fact, rule.

I could keep going, but I’ve answered a bunch of those questions on our website, and even more in our participant handbook.

If all that sounds intriguing to you, here are the next steps:

1. You take some time to at least skim that handbook.

2. If you’re into this but don’t have time to apply yet, fill out the interest form (separate from the Barnraisers interest form).

3. But if you are in fact, ready to apply, you do so here (a longer process than the interest form, but not too onerous, we promise)

4. You can also send me an email with thoughts and questions or whatever. My email is my first name (Garrett) at barnraisersproject.org

5. I’ve said this already, but it bears repeating: Just about anything can be a gathering, not just large, community groups. Are you a classroom teacher? A lay leader at a church? Somebody who has not gathered before but is looking for an excuse to invite a handful of people to your house? We want you as well.

Seriously, you all. It would be so cool to do this with you. Also, I do need your help in a few different ways:

1. Our most urgent need, in the short term, is to find great hosts in our first two states (Alaska and Hawaii). As mentioned above, ideally we’d love to launch in April, but that hinges on help in those places. A bonus (perhaps?) for those gatherings: To help kick things off well, I’m likely going to attend both of these events in person, before delivering the box to the continental U.S. (Washington State— this may mean that I’ll be able to do an in-person event with you all as well). That’s all to say: Alaska! Hawaii! Or people who know cool gatherers in either state— please get in touch. I’d love to talk.

2. We do have a grant for this project, but this is also a massive undertaking, and so if you are in a position to help out financially, either a donation to Barnraisers or upgrading to a paid subscription here will help a ton. We think this project is going to tell a really powerful story, both in fifty individual places and across the country. That’s totally optional, though. Like I said up top: nothing for sale here.

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3. I don’t often say “hey, share this piece far and wide” but I really would love to get the word out on this project. Could you help spread the word? I appreciate it.

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Most of all, thank you. You all have helped me believe that there is a whole world full of people who are realizing that there will be no survival, and definitely no liberation, without a radical turning towards each other. This was a pretty wild idea, and it scared the dickens out of get to this point, where I’m telling the world about it. But what do we believe? That it’s better to walk into fear together than alone.

Appreciate you all. Now let’s throw fifty great parties.

jointherelay.org

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-Meritocracy, and the lie that the rich and powerful must have done something impressive to earn the right to rule over us.

-Capitalism, and the calculus that a million human lives are disposable so that a select few can gaze down at us from atop mountains of money.

-Misogyny, somehow both “not that serious” and also a witchy incantation so powerful that men lose their minds any time it’s brought to our attention.

-Racism, which the majority of us not directly employed by the current U.S. regime claim that we hate, but which we also pretend can be washed away with a workplace training, or a single summer of protest, or constipated statements about “listening and learning,” or even just pointing in the direction of another (presumably more racist) white person within eyesight.

-Mass death: as a fact of life.

-Locker room talk: as a victimless lark.

-Same day delivery: as a human right.

-Centrism: as the only acceptable form of politics for serious grown-ups.

-Nihilism: as the most useful possible emotion for those of us further to the left.

-Dignity: as a finite resource, only available to a sliver of the population.

-Our phones: as tiny miracles, or whatever other claim Steve Jobs used to make on a stage, in a black turtleneck, with a PowerPoint.

-Every other claim that Steve Jobs ever made on a stage, in a black turtleneck, with a PowerPoint.

-Just about every claim that any CEO, particularly any “great man” CEO, has ever made (stage and PowerPoint optional).

-The concept of the “great man,” and that I should aspire to be one.

-The concept of “good men” and how all it takes to be one is to claim the mantle for yourself.

-Every single time that I’ve been told “how to be a man” that doesn’t start with, “first of all, practice being immensely kind, because virtually every message about gender you’ve internalized tells you the exact opposite, and that seems like the root of why we’re so damned dangerous.”

-Every single time white America has claimed “well, we tried to fight racism, and we just didn’t know what to do, or we went too far, or we got tired of trying” as if the demands of the moment (reparations and repair) are ephemeral ghost stories rather than concrete questions of policy and power.

-Every single time a worker has been told that they have more in common with the bosses than other human beings just trying to get by.

-The convenient story that Trump is an anomaly, the first time America has flirted with fascism.

-The equally convenient story that the work of this moment is merely to vote out one bad President (again).

-The myth that what makes a city progressive is a set of lifestyle amenities (ramen shops, graffiti alleys, music festivals) instead of a commitment to feed, house and welcome everybody.

-The myth that what makes an employer progressive is whether they have a float at Pride and not whether they pay their taxes.

-The myth that what makes a life worth living is your own house, protected from undesirables by sprawl and cameras and brute force.

-Borders: lines on maps that claim to separate worthy people from unworthy people.

-School district boundaries: lines on maps that claim to separate worthy children from unworthy children.

-Prisons: concrete boxes that claim to separate those of us who still considered human from those who have been stripped of that right.

-Men with guns, in their houses: the source of a family’s safety, somehow?

-Men with guns, wearing uniforms: the source of our collective safety, somehow?

-Gamification: of anything and everything.

-The environment: there for the taking, forever and without obstruction.

-Boys: they “will be boys,” wont’t they? In perpetuity, up to and beyond the moment that their names pop up in the Epstein files.

-War: the source of freedom and human flourishing rather than a depraved assault on it.

Patriarchy and white supremacy: rotten systems that somehow don't leave their rot on everybody, “beneficiaries” and victims alike.

-Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos: smart men who should get whatever they want.

-An app made by a sad, lonely Harvard student for the purpose of judging women’s bodies for laughs: too big to fail.

-Mark Zuckerberg’s gold chain: a cool thing that works.

-Podcasts where dudes talk about crypto and bow hunting and how “me too” went too far: a vital pillar of the economy.

-Gambling: a thing we should do more frequently, for more reasons, ideally on our phones.

-God: Cheering from the heavens every time a megachurch pastor slips on a new pair of designer sneakers before telling a gay parishioner, “of course the church loves you, but….”

-Trans people, existing: the reason, we’re told, that nobody likes the Democratic Party (a political group, it should be noted, that has never stood up for trans people in any meaningful way).

-The robots: who should now be summoned to do everything we used to do for each other.

-Your neighbors: whom you probably do not know, and who are therefore not to be trusted.

-Data centers: more deserving of land and water than your own grandchildren.

-Your brain: no longer to be trusted with the joy of creation, or art-making, or writing pages and pages of terrible poetry until you finally stumble on something gorgeous and true.

-Feeding each other: no longer a necessity, because we can instead tap a button and await a notification, twenty minutes later, that a bag of food has been dropped off at our doorstep by either an anonymous human being or a robot on wheels (same difference).

-Writing love letters and obituaries: one more thing the robots can do for us.

-Politics, as an act of yelling louder.

-Politics, as an act of waiting for a savior.

-Politics, as a consumer purchasing decision.

-Politics, as something that you do every election cycle, but never again.

-Politics, as a punditry slot machine that, when we pull the lever, delivers us a token of validation or rage.

-Politics, as something that’s supposed to make us feel less rather than more alive.

-Revolution, as a cool brand that looks sick on t-shirts, rather than a messy, human thing that comes alive in a million boring meetings.

-Liberation, as something you can somehow conjure magically through strident proclamation while you balk at inviting your neighbors over for dinner.

-Neighborliness, as something that we start doing the moment that the TV cameras are on and the fascists are at our doorstep.

-Beloved community, as something that we talk about, but can’t really imagine building.

-You, as somebody who isn’t worthy of loving, being loved, and building a life centered on love.

It’s no wonder, then…

…that everybody is talking about community these days. It’s no wonder we’re turning towards each other. We have tried everything else. Or I have, at least. I’ve bought into far too many of these myths. And I’ve been let down by every single one.

That’s not to say that we won’t let each other down. We will. But we will try to be better, at least. There’s a difference in coming together to mend then scrolling alone, waiting to be torn further apart.

Why not try community, if nothing else seems to work?

Why not try community, if this is what it feels like to be so alone?

Why not try community, if in the midst of this cacophony of lies, we might sit together and finally tell one another the truth?

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End notes:

-I am announcing something fun this week: I told past Barnraisers participants yesterday, will tell folks who are signed up for the Barnraisers interest list tomorrow, and then all of us, here, on Friday. It’s exciting, you all! And while I get to help make it happen, it’s not really my news, but a cool opportunity for your community.

-I share this next link with a massive caveat: If theological language (and Christian theology specifically) isn’t for you, this video probably won’t be be your cup of tea. If, however, you don’t mind some occasional references to God from somebody (me) wearing an ostentatious robe… who knows, maybe you’ll enjoy this? I had the chance to spend the weekend doing all sorts of events at Trinity Episcopal in Portland, Oregon. One of those events was a sermon, and you know what? It’s actually a pretty decent 10 minute summary of what I feel and believe most in this moment.

-Why should you become a paid subscriber to this newsletter? It allows me to support my family (which is nice), I think it does help the world and should continue existing (I’m trying) and if I’m being honest might be the best deal in newslettering [you get an occasional but not overwhelming number of bonus essays, access to the absolute best community discussions on the Internet, discounts on a silly and fun podcast, FREE merch (hats, shirts, posters, totes, oh my). And for only $50?] Well, when you put it that way….

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-Don’t forget Minneapolis, friends, and especially don’t forget rent relief in Minneapolis. The need persists.

Hi pals,

I’m writing this from lovely Portland, Oregon, where I’m here for a weekend of events at Trinity Episcopal (perhaps I’ll see you?).

Here’s a confession about me and events (and also me and classes): I love them. Authentically. They give me a ton of energy, and it’s always a gift to meet and connect with people (to say nothing of how gratifying i…

Read more

The Olympics, like most legacy institutions, are both beautiful at their core and complicated messes in execution. To love the Olympics, as I do, is to make an uneasy peace with a mountain of greed, corruption, arena-shaped white elephant projects and a metric ton of unsavory dudes shaking hands with each other. That’s even before you add in the whole nationalism element, especially tricky for those of us who live in, ahem, certain countries these days. Take the opening ceremonies. A glorious celebration of Italian oddness, but with occasional cutaways to J.D. Vance.

Again, none of that is unique to this particular imperfect enterprise. Basically everything I adore and/or rely on to make a living in 2026 is an exercise in uneasy moral compromise. The Olympic are a sordid, grift-soaked mess. And also, what a concept. It is amazing that they exist, but even more amazing that we give them the attention that we do.

Think about it. We watch the Olympics, apparently in record numbers, in spite of having virtually no clue what’s going on. Maybe that’s not the case for the summer games, when at least some of the events are rooted in acts that normal people might conceivably do from time to time. But what are the Winter Olympics, truly? Just an absolute pageant of chilly weirdos throwing their bodies up, over and especially down various sheets of ice and snow.

That is a hack “what’s the deal with airplane food?” level observation, I know. But it doesn’t make it any less true. I am a white American who has lived almost exclusively in our country’s frozen environs. If any lay person should be able to make sense of the Olympic events, it’s me. I’ve actually curled! I have tried both varieties of cross country skiing (poorly, but still)! My family regularly goes ice skating at the same place the U.S. Olympic speed skating team trains! And you need to believe me when I tell you this: every single event I watch, I’m faking it. What is a triple axel, like really? Why isn’t it a penalty when the speedy downhillers hit those flags? How many times does Russia have to invade your Northern European country before your populace gets that skilled at skiing with guns strapped to their backs? What makes one pair of dudes lying on top of each other better than other piled-upon dudes at traversing the icy death ramp on a sled? Beats me.

I don’t actually get any of it. You probably don’t either. And I realize that it may sound insulting to call these niche pursuits hobbies, because these are literal world class athletes. But I will use that term, not as an insult, but as a point of connection. Every four years, we stop what we’re doing and willfully hand our emotions over to other people’s hobbies. We cheer and groan and go through the whole cycle of “thrill of victory/agony of defeat” melodrama for lycra-clad strangers. Not because their specific obsessive pursuit is relatable in any way whatsoever, but because we trust that they are doing something they earnestly love.

That’s truly the only connection point here. Yes, some of the athletes are representing our country, but that only gets you so far. If we’re told that a Kazakhstani ski jumper has been dreaming of this day ever since she was a little girl, we get it. We don’t need to be versed in the micro-politics of the Almaty winter sports community. We definitely don’t have to understand the not-at-all-relatable instinct that causes her to gaze down from the peak of a frighteningly tall mountain and think, “you know what I, a human being with a theoretically healthy survival instinct, would like to do? Ski down that mountain for a while, then hit a really big ramp and hurtle myself into the literal sky at the velocity of a late model Volvo.” We understand that this moment is meaningful to her, and so, for at least a few minutes, it matters to us as well.

I love this so much for us. I love that it proves, once again, that though we are stuck in systems that frequently bring out our worse, we are still hard wired to root for each other. We’re such saps, us human beings. Such mushy, fist pumping, “shhhh, be quiet, the Norwegian curling team has the hammer and I need to see if they can pull it off,’ goofballs. We are suckers for underdogs. We are suckers for tear-filled celebrations. We are suckers for that moment when the silver and bronze medalist jump up and down and hug whomever got gold, and we realize that of course they’re friends, these talented snow weirdos.

We are drawn to celebrate one another, because we too crave being celebrated. When we hear that an ice dancer fell in love with the sport when he was four, we are reminded that there are things that we have loved for as long as we can remember. I may not be an Olympic-caliber anything, but there are so many interests and proclivities that are core to who I am. I don’t need the entire world to pause every four years and watch me write an essay about lessons from the 19th Century Danish cooperative movement, but it’s still nice to be seen and appreciated occasionally.

“You can love completely without complete understanding,” that’s a Norman Mclean quote, another Montana ex-pat who lived most of his life in the upper Midwest. An apt observation for this essay, but one that probably means more to me than it does to you. That’s ok. What matters is that you gave me the time and space to share it with you.

Back to the Olympics. They’re pretty great, but that doesn’t make them less of a complicated mess. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could acknowledge and celebrate each other without the jingoism and the corruption? Wouldn’t it be great if we could share and receive attentional gifts without leaving a new municipality reeling from debt and displacement every four years? And shouldn’t our smaller celebrations be at least a bit more reparational than the big spectacles, conscious of who is and isn’t typically given the benefit of being seen?

We can, is the thing. The opportunity is right in front of our face, literally all the time. Virtually every question I’ve ever gotten about community or gathering has the same answer. “What kind of gathering should I offer?” “What if nobody shows up?” “What if we’re one year in, and then people stop showing up?” “People have been showing up, but can I ask them to pull more of the weight?”

Make a space that celebrates.

The first time we come to a new space, it’s to satisfy an immediate feeling. We’re afraid, or alone, or curious. We keep showing up, however, when we feel seen, when the space feels curious about us. Eventually, we might get more involved, but only if we trust that the space will appreciate our collective effort, that we can imagine our gifts and interests and energy not falling into a void.

We’re currently in a moment when more and more people are talking about caring for each other as neighbors. Mutual aid has replaced fundraiser as the nom de giving in progressive circles. But truth be told, most of us are still building those muscles, and in the majority of cases, “mutual aid” is merely one more cool title to put on your Gofundme. There is no true mutual aid without mutual knowledge of each other. A group of people that’s only bonded in their enmity for fascism isn’t really a community; it’s just a grumpier mailing list.

So given that dynamic, here’s a free idea for your next potluck, or for the first time you get your block together for a neighborhood bash, or a way to reinvigorate an activist group that doesn’t know what to do now that they already made whistle kits. Host a “what everybody’s best at,” party. Like the Olympics, except you don’t have to rent a mountain or build a luge track. There are already popular versions of this floating around (a brewery in my neighborhood does a “three minute thesis” night; it’s an Australian invention so if it’s made its way to Milwaukee, odds are you’ve encountered it as well), but you there’s no need to follow existing models. Just make a space where people get to show off, or at the very least riff on one of their quirky micro-passion.

In some cases, the thing you celebrate and discover may be incredibly useful. They may spark ideas for how you all can mutually aid each other that aren’t just giving money. You’ll no doubt discover which of your neighbors makes the best cookies, or who is a real spreadsheet whiz. In other cases, it’ll just be lovely to know somebody deeper. Your buddy’s encyclopedic knowledge of every Gilmore Girls episode may not be strictly necessary for surviving fascism, but I bet she’ll appreciate that you can ask her about it, with genuine curiosity, after the next meeting.

Ideally, the better you and your group gets at celebration, the better you also get at interrogating who, in all of our communities, has previously been least likely to be seen and heard and believed. Scales can be tipped, but they’re tipped best by groups well honed in seeing everybody.

Perhaps that’s a helpful idea. Perhaps not. The broader point is that we are not just angst-filled political automatons. If our efforts to build a better world are built merely on fear, outrage and shared self-righteousness, they’ll lose us, because they won’t make space for what truly makes us human.

We don’t love the Olympics because we are all desperately in love with our home countries. We definitely don’t love them because we spend every waking moment thinking about triple toe loops and proper bonspiel strategy. We love them for the same reason that we sit in the front row of our college roommate’s book talk when they finally self-publish their novel. We love them for the same reason that we remember to make the chocolate cupcakes for the neighborhood potluck, because a few months ago the nine-year-old next door told us that chocolate was her favorite. We love them for the same reason that, in our saddest and quietest moments, we remember rooms where nobody seemed to understand us or care.

We want to celebrate, and we want to be celebrated. We want to see each other, and be seen. And if we’re never quite sure where to start, in bringing each other together, goodness knows we can do far worse.

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End notes:

1. In last Friday’s essay, I put in a plug to keep giving to Minneapolis rent relief (and to tell me after you do so). Together we’ve already raised $13,000 (on top of all that we raised for the fund in January). Thank you! The need persists, though (ICE, notably, is very much still doing their awful business in that town, and even if they don’t leave the disruption will have long-reaching effects) so if you haven’t given yet, please do so.

2. Portland! I’m still coming your way this weekend and would love if you could join me for either of these events at Trinity Episcopal downtown. Yes, they’re open to all! You don’t even need to bring a potluck dish. And if you don’t mind attending a church service and can’t make the other events, I’m going to be preaching at 10:00 on Sunday. RSVP here for the potluck and here for the workshop.

3. One of my favorite writers in the world, Butte, Montana’s own is launching a new interview series at her newsletter , and she just published her first interview… with me! What an honor, but more than that, I definitely recommend subscribing, you all. It’s going to be a great series and Kathleen is one of the greats.

4. Not directly related to today’s essay, I literally just finished reading Jesse Jackson’s obituary in the New York Times and I have a sense it’ll be sitting with me for a while. I wasn’t expecting such a complex reflection on the promise and pitfalls of ego and charisma in social movements, but it felt like one of the more honest (and therefore most human) memorials I’ve ever read.

5. Actually, scratch that part about that not relating to this essay. Here’s Jackson, on Sesame Street, leading kids in the “I am somebody” chant.

6. If you’ve been here for a while, you have heard me share that one of the trickiest time periods for a writer who makes their living off of subscriptions (hey, that’s me!) is the one year anniversary of the time they got a whole lot of new subscribers. Why? Because there are a lot of folks who, for all sorts of reasons, who can only afford to support an initiative like this for more than one year (though there are so many who renew, and goodness knows that means a lot). I’ve been hinting for a few weeks now that we’ve now arrived at the biggest of those anniversaries (many of you discovered me last February/March, thank you again), which means that in spite of the generosity of so many, my little graph of how much I’m able to count on making in a year has started looking a bit more ski hill-ish than is ideal.

Is this a big deal? Oh goodness, no. I am doing very fine, you all. In a world full of great need, I am currently able to live my literal dream, very much thanks to you all. But, when I say “now is particularly a useful time for new subscribers to jump on and take a relay shift in keeping The White Pages running,” that’s what I mean. It’s nice to have a guarantee that, when all is said and done, my income will be steady year-in, year-out. And yes, I’ll give you free merch as a thank you, like potlucks hats and that shirt with the jaunty heart on it who hates fascism (yesterday, two readers in North Carolina met each other because they both wore their shirts to an anti-ICE training— hey, you two!). And yes, I’ll always have notes like this at the bottom of essays, even though I know they’re probably annoying, but I promise NOT to have ads or weird stuff like that. Trade-offs!

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Oh, and if you don’t have money to spare, that’s ok. Sharing helps too! Or just being here, honestly. Or tossing me an email, and understanding that I love it even if it takes me months to reply sometime. Or coming and saying hi in Portland. In every case, I appreciate you.

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This has been a particularly loose end notes, so here’s one more Olympic picture. This is from the giant slalom. Going into the final skier, Federica Brignone of Italy, Sweden’s Sara Hector and Norway’s Thea Louise Stjernesund were tied for gold. Then, Brignone, who incidentally has a super rad tiger painted on her helmet, swooped down the mountain and barely bested them. It was quite the performance, and though I didn’t understand one lick about what made it great, Stjernesund and Hector did, which is why they immediately ran over to Brignone and did a really adorable “we’re not worthy” bow.

We can’t help but celebrate each other, you all. We just can’t help it.

Let’s be very clear. Nobody actually knows what it means for ICE to announce an end to Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities. With this particular administration, there are plenty of reason for caution, confusion, and fears of another shoe still to drop. Perhaps the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul might finally grow a bit calmer. Perhaps families can once again send their kids to school, show up for medical appointments, or shop for their own groceries. We hope, but we don’t know. We are not dealing with trustworthy actors here. But, blessedly, we are dealing with cowards, and the thing you need to know about cowards is that whatever they claim behind lecterns, they always retreat in shame.

We don’t know if ICE will repeat its occupation in another city, or if their tactics will change. We don’t know what will be required of us— everywhere— moving forward.

But here are two truths worth holding at once.

The first…

One way or another, ICE will eventually leave Minnesota. They will do so in defeat. Their mission, which has and will be left unaccomplished, had nothing to do with arrests. It had everything to do with performance. The goal was to charge into Minnesota on the backs of a manufactured conservative outrage cycle about Somali fraud. The hope was that while previous occupations (Chicago in particular) didn’t go their way, this one might be different. The administration would win back the voters they’d lost over the past year, thanks to a few staged photo ops and some good old fashioned manufactured consent.

Their hope was that their propaganda from the frozen streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul would win the day, that various tough guys would stare at the camera and assure us, the red blooded American viewing public, that they had removed monsters from our streets. The protestors would be easily dismissed: as blue hairs, as banshees, as terrorists, as wine moms.

But they failed, and not for lack of trying. They failed because they expected their long guns and fascist puffery to leave Minnesotans cowering in fear. They failed because the residents of the Twin Cities are as imperfect as the rest of us, but in their best moments they have always taken pride in being neighbors. This is shovel one another’s walk country. This is bring a hot dish when your buddy comes home from surgery country. Again, it was not and is not a perfect beloved community, but it is the kind of place that, when the gun thugs streamed in by the thousands, folks from all walks of life were triggered instinctually. “You wonder if we love our neighbors here? YOU’RE GODDAMNED RIGHT WE DO! WE’RE GONNA LOVE OUR NEIGHBORS SO HARD.”

The Minnesotans kept caring, and the regime didn’t know how to respond. They tried literal murder, but that didn’t quell the crowds. They tried lying about the murdered, lying about the deported, disappearing more and more people into Whipple. They tried disguising themselves, changing their tactics, pumping more toxins into the air— both literal and figurative. None of it worked. The spreadsheets kept connecting neighbors to neighbors. The groceries kept being delivered. The whistles kept blowing.

Across the country, outside of the MAGA base, very few people believed the regime’s lies. Support for ICE, already dropping, tumbled even further. Something primal was triggered in the rest of us, as well. “We know what it looks like to be a neighbor,” millions of us marveled, “we may fail at it ourselves, but we know it when we see it… and we know not to hate it… those neighbors love each other….And we do too.”

We were supposed to turn on each other, and love our supposed protectors. That was the regime’s plan. And very few— even in this country, where white Americans in particular have often been more than happy to take that bait— actually did so. And that’s literally an honest to God miracle. One that didn’t happen by accident, but because neighbors in the Twin Cities zipped up their parkas, wiped away the tears and lit their hearts on fire.

ICE lost. The Minnesotans won. That’s the first truth.

Here’s the second…

The aftermath of war and collective trauma never feels like a victory. If you are lucky, as I am, to be in personal contact with activists and neighbors in the Twin Cities, you know that this moment doesn’t feel triumphant. They are exhausted. Their heads have been on swivels. They’ve mourned thousands of neighbors disappeared, thousands of kids traumatized, millions of lives disrupted. They’ve had to bury their dead, literally. And yes, they held their city together, but at a tremendous cost.

Money is not all that matters, but it is one way of quantifying disruption or stability in our lives. And by all accounts, the people of the Twin Cities are stretched thin in every way, including financially. Small business are devastated. Tens of thousands of people haven’t been able to work. Mutual aid has knit communities together, but so many neighbors have given so much to each other that they too are now broke.

At some point, “normalcy” will be declared in the Twin Cities, but the trauma will remain. Neighbors will still be disappeared, as is happening in the rest of the communities. They’ll just be disappeared quietly. Fear will not dissipate merely because the gun thugs aren’t roaming the streets. Minneapolis in particular will be a city transformed, both by beauty and by tragedy.

I have no doubt that the good neighbors of the Twin Cities will keep loving each other through what comes next. But I do have some fears. I’m terrified that they will feel abandoned by the rest of us, once the news cameras turn away. I worry that there will be some of us (particularly those most cocooned by various privileges) for whom life will go back to normal. I fear that we will forget what it felt to have our own innate neighborliness sparked by and for each other.

The other night, I was texting some of the most brilliant activists I know, a pair that has been so kind in letting me into their lives these past two months. If you’ve been following my writing about Minneapolis, you’ll know them as the anonymous group that organized a fundraiser to pay their neighbors’ rent. So many of you contributed, and I and they are profoundly grateful for your help. There are literally hundreds of neighbors still in their houses because of your generosity.

As we processed all the trauma that hasn’t and won’t go away anytime soon, though, my friends shared that just in the past couple days, there have been over two hundred new requests for assistance from the fund.

ICE may go away. I hope they do. But the needs of the community that stopped it its tracks will continue.

What, though, of our attention? Will it, too, dissipate?

You know where this is leading. And yes, it would mean the world to me and hundreds of people in a city I love if you could contribute to this fund right now. After you do so, you can tell me how much you gave and where you live using this form, so that we can keep track.

The word on the street is that tomorrow there’s a holiday about love. What I’ve learned the last couple months, from one city in particular, is that love in action is profound and wondrous, but also fragile. It is brave and hardy and resilient and it works overtime. But it doesn’t protect you from the scars. It doesn’t stop the sting of tear gas. It doesn’t hold back the heartbreak. It is the most beautiful gift we can give each other, but there is always a need for more.

Love to the Twin Cities. Love to neighbors everywhere. Love to you all, for keeping your hearts on fire.

Donate to the rent fund (thank you!)

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End notes:

1. loveletterstominnesota.com continues on, as well. Keep contributing!

2. Here’s that link again to donate to the Minneapolis rent fund. And yes, after you do so, please let me know here what you gave and where you live so we can celebrate the additional funds we’ve raised

3. Other announcements: Portland, I’d love to come hang out with you next weekend (including for a POTLUCK) but please register if you can come— link in the image below:

   

4. You all, the silliest/funniest/best gift I’ve ever received (a song, about all the things I can’t shut up about, set to the tune of Golden from Kpop Demon Hunters) was given to me by on our latest episode of and I think you’ll really enjoy hearing about it

   Finally, please give your money first to Minneapolis, but if you have a bit left over and do care about sustaining this newsletter and my organizing work, I’m always grateful for paid subscriptions and love showing my gratitude by sending you cool merch (look at this picture of my very cool friend Ingrid wearing the “love harder” shirt to event with Bernie). Thank you for considering.

   

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Inside me there are two wolves, and they both watched the Super Bowl halftime show last night. They’re both fine wolves, mind you, and both deserve to be fed. There’s the smarty pants Marxist wolf that read a bunch of Debord and Adorno back in wolf grad school and rolls their eyes at art “brought to you by Apple Music and the National Football League.” When the topic of music comes up, that wolf is like, you should listen to Gil Scott Heron and NoName, man, they’ll really tell you what’s up. That wolf can spit some bars when handed a protest megaphone, but its friends all wish it would chill out from time to time.

The other wolf is more populist. It gets so jazzed when we get to be happy for a change. It hears that other wolf’s critiques, about elite capture and how identity politics is easily commodified, but it can’t resist an ebullient Puerto Rican superstar constructing both village and barrio in the middle of a football field and telling the world to dance and love. If identity politics means more people, especially people under attack by fascists, getting to see their culture celebrated on the biggest of stages, then that’s something, right? The populist wolf watched the show and couldn’t stop smiling. Its idealism has been taken advantage of in the past, but it’s still there, sappy and heartfelt as ever.

We are gifted big mushy hearts and analytical brains for a reason, to both feel and critique. I’m grateful for both wolves, and would hate if either disappeared.

As for last night, boy do I love a message of love and joy on a world stage. Boy do I love a million Boricua Easter Eggs, both in and of themselves and as an act of artistic decolonization. Boy do I love that the party on the field valued both elders and children, as is the case for all the best communities. Boy do I love hearing all that Spanish, and also the artist’s message about how he’d love if you’d learn that language, but it is even more important that you learn how to dance.

I adore all that, and I adore the million times I’ve already seen that Jumbotron image passed around, the one about love rather than hate. And also, I appreciate, in a different way, that it’s impossible to share images of that Jumbotron without the insidious reminder that the stadium, like the halftime show itself and like so much of our daily lives, was brought to us by a line item in a multinational corporation’s marketing budget.

I’m publishing this a day after Bad Bunny told every country in the Americas that he loves us and Apple Music told us to log on for exclusive supplementary content. I’m potentially already too late to add one more missive onto the already teetering discursive pile, so bear with me. There are so many angles from which I’m not that event’s most skilled interlocutor. I am neither a music critic nor a scholar on Puerto Rican history and culture. My beat, to the extent I have one, is cheerleading the power of groups coming together and building something lovely.

It’s not the only perspective, my broken record epistemology of the potluck, but I’d argue that it’s a particularly useful one right now now. It’s a worldview that recognizes that the value in an event such as this— both powerful and constrained, sacred and temporal, subversive and coopted— lies less in its permanent cultural impact than the lessons it offers as a single event. Most of us, I suspect, have some experience balancing both the radical and the populist inside of us. We know that a Super Bowl halftime show won’t change the world by itself, but that it makes us feel pretty darn good.

An event that won't change the world by itself, but that makes us feel pretty darn good.

When you put it that way, that sounds like the kind of gathering we can all host. We don’t need to be a global pop superstar with millions in production expenses at our disposal. We don’t need TV cameras and a global audience. We definitely don’t need corporate sponsorship. We too can host a joyful party. We can, I’d argue, and we must: as soon as possible, over and over again.

I also watched the other halftime show, by the way, the Turning Point USA one with Kid Rock. You all, it was immensely sad. And I don’t mean that in a smug leftist schadenfreude sense. Yes, it was sad in that it was performed on a weird sound stage to a tiny crowd, but I would advise folks who share my politics from taking its scale, alone, as reason for victory. Its aesthetic smallness, I fear, is actually central to the current conservative project. The fact that the left had the massive party with the celebrity cameos helps the MAGA fiction that they are not, in fact, the regime in power, but instead a stalwart group of rebels under siege by a hostile liberal world. We actually gain very little when we call them losers with microscopic crowds and D-list celebrities. In the funhouse mirror of conservative grievance, the mediocrity is the point.

No, when I say that it was sad, I mean that it was the kind of party that, even if I were a far right true believer, I would be desperate to leave early. The vibe was funereal and aggrieved, just one song after another about how (apparently) you’re not even allowed to be from a small town anymore. Multiple artists brought up the topic of fishing, as if that’s a pastime under threat by roving bands of leftist anti-fishing militias. There was some drive-by transphobia, because jeez of course there was. It was notable, when Kid Rock burst on stage to perform one of his early career party rock numbers, how out of place a good time anthem felt in that space. He stopped that song short, by the way, before exiting the stage. A man dressed in Amadeus cosplay dirged the hell out of a cello for a bit, and then Mr. Rock returned, this time to play a song that was not very fun at all. It was about mortality, about how you need to worship either Jesus and/or Charlie Kirk before it’s too late.

It sounded, for all the world, like the sound of something dying. The lighting was dark, alternating between Death Star blacks and reds and the kind of heavy spotlights you’d expect at a high school student play about suicide.

This sadness speaks to the core limit of fascist attempts to craft shared human experiences. Fascism is antithetical to community. It cannot welcome, only warn. Its only offering is the hollow camaraderie of a common enemy. We are together, the fascists preach, not because we actually like each other, but because we both hate and are hated by the people on the other side of the door.

You all, what an opportunity! The fascists are incapable of throwing great parties, which means they’re definitely incapable of organizing childcare collectives, or intergenerational game nights, or workshops where we learn each other’s stories and come out stronger for it. Their movement was never built to welcome people in, only to stew together with the previously converted.

The revolution, of course, will not be televised. But it will be, and always has been, birthed in a thousand folk schools and happy hours; in church and synagogue fellowship halls and punk basements; in summer cookouts with rib smokers and bounce houses and, yes, street parties where the old men play dominos and the vendors hawk coconuts and piraguas.

On Super Bowl Sunday, Bad Bunny threw a party. It was both very fun and, more importantly, very deliberate. It knew what it wanted to make you feel. It knew what (and who) it wanted to celebrate. It knew what it wanted you to do when you walked in the door (dance!) and how you should feel when you left (joyful, full of love, focused more on interconnection than division). Not surprising, I suppose, coming from an artist still in touch with the more collectivist culture that raised him.

And yes, it was sponsored by a corporation, and embedded in a broader pageant that sure as hell isn’t liberatory, and of course it won't bring about the beloved community of our dreams. It was not enough, because any single action, under capitalism and fascism and white supremacy and patriarchy is not enough. Do you think any single event got us into this mess? Then let us not put that load bearing weight on any isolated action we take in response. A million experiments, you all, in a million different places. That’s the name of the game.

The question, in this frightening, emergent, sacred moment, is not whether any one party will save us, but whether we can waste a single moment not hosting as many parties as possible, and making them feel like the kind of spaces to which people want to return.

I have made this call to action in the past. It’s a lovely sounding refrain. I mean, who’s against good vibes? But I also know that, all too often, those of us who dream of a better world prioritize something other than making our spaces just feel good. We get sidelined by ideological puffery, or internal political and ego wrangling, or the siren call of showing off rather than welcoming in. More often than not, we have an event focused solely on accomplishing a task rather than loving the people who showed up. We have a meeting because it’s the second Thursday of the month and that’s when we always have a meeting. We don’t show up to the event, because last time we went there was a a crowd of cool kids who all knew each other and we feared that we’d always be on the outside looking in.

We love to quote Toni Cade Bambara’s line about making the revolution irresistible. But that’s not a bumper sticker. It’s a choice you have to make, over and over again.

But goodness I hope we make that choice. Because you all, whatever your take on whether a Super Bowl Halftime show can change the world, you can’t deny it— you wanted an invite to that party, didn’t you? And I honestly can’t imagine that many stalwart conservatives who’d earnestly enjoy themselves at that Kid Rock show. They’d go, out of obligation and a sense of movement piety, but not forever. Hate and fear, unlike love, isn’t actually a renewable resource.

The fascists don’t know how to party because they don’t know how to care. And if we truly are a movement of love, then that means that nobody can party as hard as we can, nobody can dance with as much abandon, nor extend a hand more joyously.

We can win, you all. But not if we don’t throw those parties. A million of them. Some quiet, some loud. Some with a raucous dance floor, others with a cozy circle of knitters on couches. A fair number of potlucks, I hope, but also plenty of food and diaper delivery spreadsheets. Not every party will be for you, and thank goodness for that, but if enough of us raise a hand, everybody will get an invite to the one they’ve been craving.

It’s never about one night. It’s never about one performance. It’s never about heroes or saviors, be they the pop stars with microphones or the most radical anarchist at the protest. It’s about remembering that, before we hated fascism, we loved each other. And we’re gonna keep loving each other, on the streets, in our cluttered living rooms, and on so many dance floors. We’re going to love each other until we win, and then we’ll throw one more party, the best one of our lives.

End notes:

1. Just a reminder that Minnesota remains under siege. I’m still donating to this rent relief fund and invite you to continue doing so as well. Also, have you checked out loveletterstominnesota.com yet? Have you added yours in? What a beautiful we we’ve woven together.

2. I apologize in advance, during a moment when I know there’s high demand for trainings, that I’m not currently offering any Barnraisers courses. I will soon, I promise. I’m working on a very exciting project that’s about to launch (and that may take me to some of your communities, actually). I’ll announce that soon, and then once we’re on the other side of that launch I’ll be able to catch my breath and figure out the course schedule moving forward. In the meantime, are you on the interest list? I hope so! And stay tuned!

3. As always, a friendly reminder that unlike the Super Bowl halftime show or the Talking Point USA sadness spectacular, this space does not have corporate sponsorship or any big money behind it at all. It exists because you all support it! Thank you! And then, as thanks for supporting it, I give you all sorts of perks, including free merch, like this jaunty heart shirt whose message has not stopped seeming super urgent.

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   Garrett Bucks on Instagram: "I’m Garrett Bucks and I approve th…

4. A repeat SUPER FUN ANNOUNCEMENT: PORTLAND, OREGON. I’m finally coming your way. And I’m offering two public events. Both at Trinity Episcopal (in the heart of downtown). Please come. Please invite friends, or organizing partners, or strangers you only sort of know. What a good excuse to practice putting the invitation out, right? Register for both at trinity-episcopal.org/sacred-learning

5. Last week, I told you that I was doing a Substack Live with the absolutely wonderful . Well, I did that, and it was great! And she then wrote an even better essay inspired by that conversation, and you should read it, I think!

6. Are you listening to , the podcast I host with about gender and friendship and parenting and ANTICS! I hope, because our movie episode is about to come out this week and it’s gonna be so fun.

Hey pals,

We didn’t have a community discussion last week, and I missed both it and you all. Hi!

I’m writing this, as is often the case, from the aggressively yellow coffee shop in my neighborhood where I hang out on Friday mornings. It’s always …

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve fielded the same question dozens of times, always well-meaning, always anxious. “You’re in contact with activists in Minneapolis. What should we do now in case we’re next, if ICE occupies our city the way it’s terrorized that place?” It’s a new variation on an older question, one which rears its head whenever the contradictions of a system built on violence and caste become harder to ignore.

My answer is predictable and, I fear, often disappointing. It doesn’t offer a hero’s path. At first blush it doesn’t match the urgency of the moment. That question (“what do I do?”), leaves so much unsaid (I’m frightened! I feel powerless! I want to take an action that will both calm my heart and send the gun thugs running!). We want to attend a training today and suddenly be leading a neighborhood rapid response group tomorrow. We long for an invite to the secret meeting where every perfect activist step is laid out before us like a treasure map. We crave, whether we admit it or not, “one simple trick,” that will reverse all the ways fascism makes us feel impossibly tiny.

I understand, friends, that not only am I a broken record, but that the song I keep playing sounds like some effervescent bubblegum pop trifle. I understand also that you’re likely hearing the same chorus played from an increasing number of speakers, and that perhaps you’ve grown tired of it by now.

But there’s a reasons why, at the protest I attended last Friday, no less than three speakers talked about community (to a crowd that was actively sharing hand warmers and sandwiches with one another, no less). There’s a reason why Adam Serwer of The Atlantic coined the term“neighborism,” for the variety of resistance that’s emerged in Minnesota, and why Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, recently opined that “in a democracy, the fundamental civic unit is the neighbor.” There’s a reason why , whose day job as the leader of Run For Something is pretty damned political, earnestly believes that hosting dinner for friends every Saturday was the “most political thing [she] did in 2025.” And there’s a reason why my favorite foil, Ezra Klein, is now talking about hosting, if not a potluck, then at least some variety of gathering.

You are hearing the same chorus, not because it’s a hip trend, but because it’s true. My friends, you really do need to host a potluck. You need to bake cookies and write little notes inviting your neighbors to a block-wide Signal chat. You need to untether yourself from the urge to clean your house or whip up a fancy meal. You need to host stoop coffee and hang up flyers for park hangs and register for a potentially disappointing community rec class. You need to ask yourself “what’s the thing I most like to do with other people?” and then take the risk of inviting people, even strangers, to do it with you. These are not pleasant distractions from fascism, nor mere salves for loneliness. We need them. Urgently. They won’t feel like enough (and there’s not a guarantee they will be), but now is the time to build community like our lives depend on it.

Here are a few reasons, seven to be exact, why all this community talk isn’t just a cute distraction from the real work of liberation. The message here isn’t just that we’re stronger together (though we are), it’s that we ignore each other at our peril.

Build community, my friends, because our lives do, in fact, depend on it.

REASON ONE: The skills you and your neighbors need to resist fascism aren’t actually all that hard to learn. What’s going to slow you down is not knowing each other in the first place.

If you ask activists in Minneapolis how they’ve actually spent the past few weeks, you’ll hear about sets of actions that are either incredibly intuitive or that can be taught in relatively short workshops. There’s nothing particularly tricky about learning the SALUTE format for reporting ICE activity. You don’t need a doctorate in social movement theory to organize a food delivery spreadsheet. We all know, intuitively, how to blow a whistle. What is time consuming, however, is vetting strangers who want to join a Signal group, knowing which nonprofits can offer fiscal sponsorship for a mutual aid campaign, which churches or businesses have room for an emergency meeting, and who on your block is more flexible during the day or the night. The people who have been most effective in Minneapolis this past month aren’t the big talkers with the loudest megaphones. They are those who already knew their neighbors, who could be key connectors when, on a dime, an entire city raised their hands looking for something useful to do.

REASON TWO: Sure, you’ll eventually need to build relationships outside of your existing social spheres, but you won’t learn those skills if you don’t practice with those closest to you first

There’s a counterpoint that I receive pretty frequently, when I tell people to just host a damn potluck. Its a presumptive critique, resting on the cynical hypothesis that not only will prospective community builders only reach out to others who share their same class, racial and political background, but that they will inevitably stay stuck in those same bubbles forever.

I’m actually sympathetic to this concern, to a point. There are absolutely examples of ostensibly “community minded” efforts (particularly in white, professional class circles) that exist primarily to protect privilege and fortify echo chambers. America is dotted with wealthy neighborhoods that can throw a solid Memorial Day BBQ, but whose residents oppose every new affordable housing and school integration initiative. There are no shortage of ostensibly “welcoming” megachurches, but whose doors are only truly open to those able to walk a very specific path.

The problem with this rebuttal, though, is that it disregards how human beings build and strengthen new behavioral patterns. Having trained thousands of community builders across the country, I find that the neighbors who are most skilled at cross-community relationships are those who first exercised their muscles close to home. That’s the difference between being a colonist or a savior versus somebody who just can’t help expanding strong webs of connection outward. Instead of aimlessly tilting around trying to find somebody else’s community to welcome you in, you act as a representative of a loving network ready to meet similarly bonded groups on equal terms.

There are beautiful examples of this approach in Minneapolis right now. I’m being deliberately vague, to protect activist identities in a high pressure moment, but some of the most trusted organizers across that segregated city are skilled bridge builders who simultaneously do an incredible job of convening welcoming events in wealthier, whiter, more sheltered corners of town, but who also build trusting coalitions with fellow organizers from Black, Brown and working class neighborhoods.

Another example. Here in Milwaukee, a good friend of mine (who also happens to be one of the most skilled community organizers I’ve ever met) recently founded an alternative church, the Kairos Collective, based on an ethos of radical hospitality. The group that coalesced around him, at least initially, shared a lot in common. They were disproportionally white, middle class, and straight Gen X parents. But they intentionally practiced taking care of one another, and then slowly and patiently forged new ties with like-minded communities across the metro area: a majority Black congregation with deep roots in its neighborhood; a younger congregation with a large percentage of queer and trans members; a participatory food bank whose clients are also volunteers. The Kairos crew has been able to forge strong cross-identity relationships, not in spite of their focus on building trust with each other, but because they practiced how to care before reaching out an open hand.

There’s a key difference between the gated “communities” that stay closed forever and the connectors whose webs keep pushing outward. Shared spaces stay insular if their goal is to reinforce traditional power structures. If, by contrast, they exist to challenge power, they can’t help but seek out new ways to blossom. That’s the difference between something dying and something being born.

REASON THREE: Bodies in motion stay in motion, bodies at rest stay at rest

Relatedly, if “politics” is primarily a passive act where you consume content and react to people who rely, for their careers, on making you angrier and more helpless, you aren’t actually building new muscles. If the only action you’re ever asked to take is to call Congress or occasionally pound out a strident social media post, your political imagination will be perennially stuck in the borders of our suffocating present. “Politics” will remain distant and unknowable, practiced by a set of characters whom you correctly suspect don’t give a damn about you or your loved ones.

In contrast, here’s what happens when you commit to meeting more of your neighbors. You are introduced to their networks. You hear about a broader set of actions taking place in your area. You get invited to meetings, protests, and parties. Doors will open, none of them promising the immediate death of fascism, but all of which are useful, connective and that keep you moving.

To be honest, I still have a long way to go in meeting all of my neighbors. I’ve reached out to everybody on my block, but we still don’t all know each other. There are still parents at pick up with whom I haven’t had a real conversation. There are still community events that I haven’t brought myself to attend. I keep grumbling about the vibes in my local DSA chapter, but what do I know? I haven’t been to a meeting in ages. And yet, thanks to a couple good years of showing up more deliberately with those around me, I’m now welcomed into more opportunities to care and be cared for than at any other stage in my life. You all, in the lasts seventy two hours, neighbors have asked me to…

…help find a physical space for people to assemble zine and whistle kits/ pass out a bag of fifty of those kits myself/get plugged into a new mutual aid Signal group for our neighborhood/run a carpool for middle schoolers to and from a forensics tournaments/set up and take down a training for protest marshals/attend three different committee meetings/cheer, alongside my neighbors, for the five hundred person solidarity bike ride in honor of Alex Pretti/watch other people’s kids after school/learn how to play Wingspan at a community game night/show up at an alderperson’s forum on potential ICE activity in the area/(finally) get involved in a Slack group for a really inspiring gubernatorial campaign/lace up my skates at a “the river’s finally frozen enough for ice skating” bonfire party/gather with friends for a neighborhood spaghetti dinner/bowl (not alone!) with an even wider group of friends afterwards.

All tiny actions, mind you. Some of them available to me because I pushed myself to attend an event last week, or last month, or last year. Others that emerged from deeper conversations at school pick up, or brainstorming at a potluck, or because I showed up for friends frequently enough that they now trust me to keep doing so. But all of them, importantly, making it more likely that I keep doing things, with other people, rather than just clicking refresh on a fresh piece of outrage bait.

A quick aside, for the beloved introverts already rolling their eyes at me

I understand that all this sounds exhausting, my friends. And believe it or not, I too dread new social gatherings. Do you know what I earnestly love? A quiet evening in my own house. Having run community building trainings for years, I wish I had a magic word that could melt away social anxiety, or make small talk less annoying, or disappear the exhaustion of a fuller social calendar. I don’t. It does take a lot out of us, especially in those shaking early days of showing up for the first time.

What I will offer, though, is that there’s a reason why discovered, when she sought out the best gatherers across the nation, that a huge percentage of them identify as introverts. My friends, if you’re the kind of person who is better attuned, due to your introversion, to the missteps and omissions that frequently make social events unbearable, then you have a huge potential gift to offer the rest of us. You have a unique insight into how to craft an invitation and a space (even if it’s just for a couple people) that avoids those pitfalls. I don’t pretend that this is a fully satisfying aside, but it’s earnest. Gearing up to show up will sap your energy, at least at first, but I thank you in advance for giving it a try. And also, if you give it a go a couple times and it’s just one disaster after another, please reach out to me. I may not have a solution, but I can guarantee that I’ll have plenty of empathy.

REASON FOUR: It’s so much easier to ask people to do hard things together if you already love and trust each other.

One reason why I’m often confused by the “what should I do?” question is because, honestly, there’s so much to do right now. We are either now or soon will be called on to participate in boycotts, support strikes, pester existing public officials, elect significantly better public officials, protest in the streets, commit civil disobedience, make phone calls, deliver food, raise and distribute funds, and take care of each other while we do so. There are and will continue to be so many meetings. Oh my God, so many meetings.

It strikes me, then, that rather than asking others “what should I do?” we should ask ourselves “who can I invite to join me in any of these actions? Who in my life would attend a protest with me if I asked, or watch my kids so that I can attend a city council meeting, or would let me return the favor for them? Who would deliver me a lasagna for dinner if I was stressed and needed more time for organizing? Who would tell me to take a rest, when I had been running for a while and it was time to pass a baton?”

That’s why you host a game night. That’s why you throw potlucks. Because it’s through shared time together that you end up loving people, and it’s only through loving one another that we truly feel comfortable asking for and receiving help. You deserve a true network of support, and quite frankly, we need you to cultivate that network, because it’s only when you’re surrounded by love that you’ll keep showing up, not just tomorrow but a year from now, when we need you the most.

REASON FIVE: The most effective anti-fascists have always been the best community builders

Here’s a pretty trenchant quote.

“Community is a necessary aspect of human life, indeed of all creation, wherever life and growth is found. No tree, no flower, no blade of grass would be able to grow and to thrive alone on this earth, for they would be knocked over by the wind, pelted by the rain, or dried out by the blazing rays of the sun, if indeed they did not grow up together in common, mutually protecting and nourishing one another.”

I’m a bit jealous that I didn’t come up with that myself, and even more so that I’m a couple hundred years too late. That’s from Severin Jørgensen, one of the pioneering organizers of the Danish cooperative movement in the late nineteenth century. While frequently taken for granted, there’s a reason why the Nordic countries (previously some of the most unequal societies in Europe) were able to transform, in the twentieth century, into some of the most equitable and democratic in human history. It’s because, long before gaining power, they built dense networks of cooperative care infrastructure. What became the Social Democratic parties in Sweden, Norway and Denmark emerged first from a web of folk schools, labor unions and co-ops. The Swedes, Norwegians and Danes built community first, then took over municipal governments, then transformed their countries as a whole.

As they did so, Nordic activists had to weather attacks both from internal enemies (big business and aristocrats) and also literal Nazis. I bring this point up deliberately, because one of the other cynical rejoinders to community-focused activism is that you can’t counter fascism with co-ops and neighborhood associations. To the contrary, if you compare the Danish citizen response to Nazi occupation to that of other countries with less robust care networks, the difference is striking.

Not only was Danish resistance successful in keeping a significantly higher percentage of its country’s Jewish population safe, but neighborhood-based sabotage campaigns actively slowed down Nazi repression in meaningful ways, in spite of betrayal and cowardice on the part of Danish elites. The Danes, far more than many of their occupied counterparts, were a constant bee in the Third Reich’s bonnet. Not, it should be noted, because they hated fascism more than citizens of other countries, but because when the fascists rolled in, they didn’t have to build neighborly connections from scratch.

I know I can’t shut up about the Nordics in particular, but they aren’t the only activists who discovered that empires fall when community bonds are strongest.

Do you know what Indian organizers did before they marched to the sea and kicked out the British? They built and sustained sewing cooperatives. They jumpstarted local economies, while also building civic ties that would later power their mass protest movement. Before satyagraha, there was swadeshi. Before a charismatic leader, there were every day Indians making a choice to get to know their local seamstress.

Similarly, in South Africa, do you know what formed the backbone of the anti-apartheid movement? Labor unions, of course, but not just any labor unions. That country’s liberation movement had largely grown stagnant by the 1970s, when the unions serving Black South African workers shifted their organizing strategy from a top down model that merely asked workers to show up for mass protests to a more democratic one focused on empowering members to address their immediate shop floor grievances together. As Niall Reddy noted in his survey of that era in South African politics, “a movement reliant on charismatic leaders or outsider activists would be constantly vulnerable to decapitation by the authoritarian state. To survive, it had to be rooted in ordinary workers and capable of constantly re-generating new activists.”

REASON SIX: There’s nothing that oppressive regimes fear more than our love for each other

Hannah Arendt famously argued that the root of totalitarianism is loneliness. Apparently that’s a controversial statement amongst political scientists, though that strikes me as a pedantic debate. There is, in fact, plenty of evidence to support Arendt’s assertion, and more importantly, it’s a truism we all understand intuitively. When people are most alone, they’re more likely to be frightened, and therefore most susceptible to demagoguery. We get it. And oppressive states definitely get it. That’s why, historically, colonial powers have worked much harder to dismantle grassroots social movements focused on care rather than vanguard guerrilla cells. The former makes people feel stronger together, while the latter plays into the hands of whomever has the biggest guns.

Here in the U.S., J. Edgar Hoover was famously more frightened of the Black Panther Party’s visionary free breakfast program than their weaponry. In his own words, the Panthers sophisticated community care operations “represent[ed] the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the [Party] and destroy what it stands for.” When in doubt as to which of our tactics are most effective, always listen to the voices of our opponents.

When the question is merely one of force, the fascists always have the upper hand. What they don’t have, however, is a permanent monopoly on a populace’s opinion of each other. When the chorus of trust, love and solidarity grows louder than the regime’s attempts to spook and turn us against one another, we win. We literally drain fascism of its lifeblood.

REASON SEVEN: Opposition and outrage can only take us so far, but there’s no limit to how much we can build together

I know that, for many of us, it’s impossible to see to the other side of this era in American politics. But my friends, it’s crucial, for our collective survival, that we imagine a world in which we aren’t merely fighting Trump but actually shaping the society of our dreams.

Let us not forget. We defeated Trump once before. And speaking just for myself, that was the moment to keep building, the day after we celebrated in the streets. Some of you did so, and your communities are stronger for it. But too many of us didn’t. We breathed a sigh of relief and crossed our fingers that the worst was behind us. It wasn’t.

Rage gets us one step down the road. Heartbreak another. But we’ll burn out if that’s all that sustains us. If we want to keep moving forward, we have to feed each other. With our love. With our laughter. With shoulders to cry on. With stories that were once our own but have long since become shared lore. With casserole dishes filled to the brim. With care for all of our children, all of our elders, all of the loneliest friends in our midst. With memories, now distant, of the days when we didn’t know each other, and how much worse it felt. With relationships, once frayed, now repaired. With mistakes made, and grace both given and received. With a promise, first whispered tentatively, then shouted with full throat. The best is yet to come. There’s a beautiful destination ahead of us. We just can't get there alone.

End notes:

1. Two important repeats from last week’s essays: First, Minnesota needs an eviction moratorium, because a ton of neighbors there are too scared to go to work and therefore don’t have money for rent. Last week, folks sent me and Erin Boyle proof of more than $25,000 in donations. And we’re so appreciative, as are our friends in Minnesota. Let’s keep going. I’m immensely proud of our progress, but so many families are facing immense hardship right now. Keep. Chipping. IN!

2. Secondly, speaking of projects that have been fun to do, have you checked out loveletterstominnesota.com yet? Have you added yours in? It’s been so fun to hear about activists on the ground hanging them up around MPLS and then having their neighbors discover them.

   

3. New paid subscribers who’ve requested merch: I’ve been delayed, but I’m sending merch shipments out this week (including that lovely poster design).

4. Wait, you may be wondering, do I really give free merch (eventually, sometimes I’m slow) to paid subscribers? I do. I also keep a subscription cost down, and offer a whole bunch of other perks. Why? Because I’m grateful to get to do this work, and fully reliant on paid subscriptions to do so, and so how can I keep but thanking you, in so many ways? This is the time of year where new subscriptions go a long way in particular, so thank you!

   Subscribe now

5. I’m super excited to join one of my favorite writers, of Matriarchal Blessing, for a Substack Live, tomorrow at 9:00 AM Pacific Time. Here’s the link!

6. Oh, here’s a FUN announcement. PORTLAND, OREGON. I’m finally coming your way. And I’m offering two public events. Both at Trinity Episcopal (in the heart of downtown). Please come. Please invite friends, or organizing partners, or strangers you only sort of know. What a good excuse to practice putting the invitation out, right? Register for both at trinity-episcopal.org/sacred-learning

7. I apologize in advance, during a moment when I know there’s high demand for trainings, that I’m not currently offering any Barnraisers courses. I will soon, I promise. I’m working on a very exciting project that’s about to launch (and that may take me to some of your communities, actually). I’ll announce that soon, and then once we’re on the other side of that launch I’ll be able to catch my breath and figure out the course schedule moving forward. In the meantime, are you on the interest list? I hope so! And stay tuned!