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Reader, I assume that you, an engaged citizen of the world, are up to date on the most consequential news of the week.“What are your thoughts on the shirtless baseball men?” you have no doubt been asked, at the various salons, round tables and ideas festivals you frequent. “What meaning do you make of them, and the way in which they whip their previously-worn shirts around their heads?”

I trust this, but just in case you have somehow been distracted by other matters, (for instance: keeping yourself and your loved ones alive), here is what you need to know about the most important shirtless baseball men of our time.

Who are the shirtless baseball men?

In one sense, the shirtless baseball men are members of the Stephen F. Austin University club baseball team (presumably, this means that they are not as good at playing baseball then that school’s official team, but more experienced at recreational drinking). They came to St. Louis for a tournament, decided to attend a Cardinals game, and subsequently took off their shirts.

In a slightly broader sense, the shirtless baseball men are everywhere, because fans across Major League Baseball have discovered that the math checks out (empty bleachers + dudes - shirts = hell yeah, buddy).

But in a cosmic sense, we are all shirtless baseball men, for we all long for connection and belonging.

When were the baseball men shirtless?

Last Friday, and then nonstop ever since. The next time you are walking on the beach and only see one set of footprints, it is because members of the Stephen F. Austin club baseball team are carrying you, on a blanket made of their shirts.

What were the shirtless baseball men doing?

They were engaging in a storied tradition, credited first to Indiana University football fans a few seasons back. It’s called going “tarps off.” The idea is that you and some buddies make your way to the upper deck of a sports stadium, remove your shirts, and generally whoop it up. This will serve as a siren call to previously unaffiliated bros to join you in shirtlessness, thus creating a formidable bro assemblage (a murder of bros, if you will).

What was once tiny will become impossible to ignore. You will get on television. The athletes on the field will notice you, and it may encourage them to play better. The team may give you tickets to future games, and allow one of your more impressively mustachioed group members to throw out the first pitch. Everybody involved will have one hell of a time.

How were the shirtless baseball men?

They were, and are, doing great.

Why, the shirtless baseball men?

If possible, I’d like to answer this question, not with another question, but with the sound of dozens of world historically pasty gentlemen chanting the“Seven Nation Army” riff in union.

Where are the shirtless baseball men?

Look behind you, broadcast crew. They were there the whole time.

If only I could live every day like it was tarps off day. This story contains every single one of my primary interests: masculinity (is the cure for male loneliness taking your shirt off and whipping it around your head like a helicopter? Petey Pablo has been trying to tell us this for decades); whiteness (in this case, less the social construction of whiteness and more the visceral experience of publicly weaponized mass paleness); and, of course, community (how we find love in hopeless places, such as the upper deck of Busch Stadium).

In case it isn’t clear, my love is unironic and full. I am a straight man, and that means that inside me are two wolves, and even though I frequently pen earnest paeans to books about feminism and resistance to empire, if the Edison bulbed coffee shop where I’m currently writing this were to put on ACDC’s “Thunderstruck,” both of those wolves would immediately start whipping their shirts around. “Let’s gooooooo, baby!” one wolf would yell to the other. “I low key love you, man!,” the other would yell back, and then the barista would politely ask the three of us to take our business elsewhere.

So in honor of those wolves, I say: Bless these fellas, and their distaste for covering their upper bodies. But also, I don’t know actually know anything about them. Once they leave the upper deck, they may very well be pursuing lives that make me very sad, both for themselves and the people around them. Maybe they’re jerks. Or maybe not. I will not be doing any further research.1 Fellas, if in addition to good-natured baseball shenanigans, you love bell hooks and organizing mutual aid collectives, hit me up. I’d send you a shirt, but I know what you’d probably do with it, so let’s go with a hat instead.

But the whole tarps off thing, at least in isolation? It’s basically the ideal scenario for collective male sports fan behavior. Are the fellas picking fights? Nope. It’s hard to rumble when your hands are busy doing the helicopter shirt thing. Are they getting in other people’s personal space? Absolutely not. They’re literally going off into a separate bro section, far away from the general population. It’s like a tot lot for guys.

Come to think of it: every municipality should have a designated bro-zone in their downtown entertainment districts. You know, a place where bros can do all of the things that make us happy (taking off our shirts, scream-shouting “Mr. Brightside,” remarking “hey, remember Mickey Tettleton?” and pretending that constitutes a conversation, following each other on Letterboxd, etc.). A room of one’s bro-own. The fellas get our space, and perhaps even a chance to overcome our internalized homophobia as we embrace one another without the hindrance of fabric. And the rest of the world? You all won’t have to deal with us.

But also, as somebody who literally teaches and writes about how to build community, I say this sincerely. Shirtless fellas, thank you for giving me a new visual case study. This is way better than the now-cliche “first follower” lecture with the hippie dancer. It’s a cute video, but it’s always struck me as too self-aggrandizing. Public invitations matter, not because they automatically constitute “a movement,” nor because the person making the invite is “a visionary leader.” We just really want to find each other, is all, so it’s nice to make doing so easier.

I’ve been a broken record on this lately, but the deeper I get into my current project (a relay of 50 community gatherings across the country), the clearer it gets. What distinguishes the most effective community builders isn’t an otherworldly set of leadership qualities, but their willingness to make an invitation, in public, in spite of the risk of rejection. They make it clear where people can find them, don’t take it personally if others don’t initially show up, and respond with gratitude and joy when they do.

I believe this with all my heart, but I haven’t, up to this point, had a succinct visual aid. So forgive me for a quick Zapruder-film level analysis of the bros. It’s worth it, I swear.

Here’s a view of the tarps off section from that first Friday game. It’s already the seventh inning, which is to say— this effort was NOT an immediate success.2 Where are the bros? It’s hard to tell. At this point, I probably would have packed it in. Seventh inning and it’s still just the initial group? We tried, boys. Better luck next time.

But look what’s happened by the eighth inning! Momentum! Credit to this video, not only for doing the Lord’s work of breaking down the film, but also for unironically commenting “as you can see, there’s now a solid chunk of bros up there.”

By the bottom of the ninth, the parliament of bros is clearly visible from a distance (also, unrelated, but please admire that advertisement for FEET. You take FEET for granted, don’t you? Thank you, Busch Stadium, for the reminder).

Ok, it’s getting serious. This is the point where I might be asked to leave this coffee shop for screenshot-based affronts to public decency. “Sir, that’s too many pictures of bros.” Yes, it is, but check out what happens when the game goes into extra innings. It’s foggy, but if you look right above the empty red seats you can see an orderly stream of suddenly mobilized men rushing in to join the section (here’s the video).

And just as it was predicted, so to has it come to pass. The section is growing, um, exbronentially. 3

Finally, here’s how things looked when the Cardinals eventually won the game on an 11th inning walk-off single. If that isn’t a murder of bros, I don’t know what is. And, for one night at least, do you know what the bros killed?The myth that we are separate from one another.

All right, that’s going a little too far. We are literally just talking about a bunch of fellas (who, it should be noted, showed up on $5 beer/$7 margarita night) being loud and silly together. You may very well be saying, “Garrett, you sweet naive fool, I know how the world works and you shouldn’t praise a bunch of rowdy dudes merely for not doing any visible hate crimes” And you know what? Good point.

I mean, even on the face of it, there’s aspects of this that I don’t fully endorse (for instance: the affiliation with the St. Louis Cardinals, a franchise I dislike for the very principled reason that I live in a different rust belt city with a rival baseball team). And I bet, now that this trend has expanded to other stadiums, we’re just a couple days away from it jumping from cute to gross (“Let’s check in with the Tarps Off Crew… brought to you by Open AI, Zyn Tobacco, Raytheon, and somehow J.D. Vance personally”).

I don’t need you to love tarps off, nor do you have to hand it to the bros. But what I do want you to recognize is that even the rowdiest and least tanned baseball fellas are searching for something bigger than themselves. The section grew, not just because guys love being dudes, but because isolation sucks and togetherness rules and, for one night at least, the barrier to connection was pretty damn low. “Bro, look up there. See those dudes with their shirts off? Let’s goooooooo.”

When given the opportunity, the bros found their people. And if they can do it, you can too. Make the invitation that works for you. I mean, you can even keep your shirts on if you’d like. But please make it. Do it for yourself, based on what you’re seeking, and know that you’ll eventually find the people who need that space too.

That’s complicated in many ways, I suppose, but if you train your heart on the end goal— the bet that others also crave whatever form of connection you personally need for yourself— you’ll do all right, truly. To return again to the words of Petey Pablo, the man who first taught my generation to take our shirts off, twist them around our heads, and spin them like a helicopter.

“This one’s for you? Uh-uh This one’s for who? Us, us, us.”

End notes:

-This is a bonus essay, on the front end of a long weekend, but trust that I shared plenty of fun links and news in the essay I wrote on Tuesday. Also know that this continues to be a fully reader-supported project (at a time when sustaining those isn’t easy) so if you got a kick of this or any of my pieces, I’d love if you could chip in to keep this operation running.

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And yes, I know that technically Petey Pablo was only singing for North Carolinians, but as I’ve learned from some very enthusiastic club baseball team members, if the message resonates, it resonates, man.

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The best thing about being joyfully overwhelmed by a book is that you get to keep experiencing the gift of it over and over. The worst is that, in most cases, you are the only person you know walking around with that New Epistemology Glow. Your friends didn’t read that book, or they did, but it didn’t click in quite the same way. Sometimes, you live your truth in quiet, keeping your bound fount of wisdom to yourself. Or sometimes you make this new book your personality, you wave your arms around and shout things like, “Ok I’m probably not describing it well; let me try that again…”

What I’m saying is that I want to tell you about a book. And then I want to tell you another book, also remarkable, which I would have loved no matter what, but that I appreciate even more given the first book.

Oh, and I should probably be honest that the book in question, 58 Facets: On law, violence and revolution, by Marika Sosnowski, was published in Australia, and as of this writing may or may not be easy to buy a physical copy in North America (though you should very much try to do so, and if you hit a snag, grab an electronic version).

So why am I doing my arm-waving-maniac act about a book that you may or may not be able to purchase, one that (by design) is a bit of an unclassifiable oddity: part memoir, part sociology, part work of legal scholarship, part expose? Because of passages like this (the 41^st of the titular 58 facets).

“We constantly move toward [liberation], we work every day for it through large and small acts of revolution, through small cracks in precedent, through forms of care, of tenderness, of violence, of ingenuity, of resourcefulness, through joy and survival. And sometimes nothing happens for years. And then years—decades even—happen in a few days.”

58 Facets is about a number of things that human beings do to and with each other, from the hope-giving to the horrific. It is globe trotting and time traveling, jumping between Europe and the Middle East and Australia. There are, contained in its pages, Holocausts and Nakbas, dictators and functionaries, violence administered by bombs and statutes, trauma experienced both directly and, generations down the line, as a phantom limb.

Throughout, Sosnowski returns to the framework of checkpoints and camps, imaginary but strictly codified geographies where human worthiness is determined by law. These inventions are everywhere, Sosnowski asserts, not all of them immediately death bringing, but all married by the intertwining of violence and law. They are stories we have always told ourselves: “It is necessary to keep you on this side of a line, or constrained in this space, not because we are cruel because that is the natural order of things.”

To read 58 Facets is to be confronted with the ways in which the prefix “in” feels impossibly wed to the suffix “humanity.” We are so awful to each other that we find ways to reify our cruelty. Who can argue with checkpoints and camps, if we are told the alternative is chaos and disorder?

And yet, that is not the entirety of our being. That 41^st facet creeps up on you, just as revolutionary sparks often emerge when least expected. We are always resisting, us humans, because even if revolution is not a magical switch that, once flicked, will deliver liberation tomorrow, there is something in us that is drawn towards… call it freedom or love or a right ordering of human relationships. We keep trying, even if we don’t know where the trying will get us.

The language of facets comes from diamonds, gems meant to be held into the light in any number of ways. A facet never reveals a single truth. It depends on the angle at which you view it. When Sosnowski introduces readers to the city of Daraya, Syria, where an unorthodox local sheikh named Abdul Akram al-Saqqa inspired followers living under the backdrop of state terror to build a home for a variety of dreams—community care, gender equality, democracy— it’s natural to wonder will this story be tragic or triumphant, will my heart be uplifted or destroyed?

58 Facets has too much love and respect for the people of Daraya, and for you as a reader, to fall into the trap of a binary answer. Instead, you are left with a very different variety of question. What does it mean, to live a life and posses a heart, if that heart will inevitably be split into a million pieces but will also keep beating?

Or, I should say, that’s the question with which I was left, perhaps intentionally, or perhaps because that’s the angle at which I held this book to the light.

I finished 58 Facets a couple months ago, but it’s been with me every day sense, including when I finished an ostensibly quite different book, ’s familial memoir My Mother’s Daughter. My brain couldn’t stop from putting the two in dialogue with each other. There they were again, the camps and checkpoints, the hungry ghosts of shame and longing that pop up generations in the future. But also, that pesky humanity inside us. The draw we have, towards reunion and reparations.

There are camps in Clark-Flory’s book, in particular a long-shuttered home for unwed mothers on the West Side of Chicago. Clark-Flory’s own mom was forced into that home when she became pregnant in college— one of many young women disappeared because their sexuality was a problem to be solved. There are also checkpoints, like the liminal space of the American adoption system through which Clark-Flory’s older sister Kathy traveled after being taken away from their mom.

Clark-Flory, like Sosnowski, is a masterful weaver of the systemic and intimate. Like all family stories, hers is one marred by the worst constructions of human cruelty—patriarchy and racism and American capitalism. There are monsters in Clark-Flory’s narrative, human beings who’ve convinced themselves of the inevitability of camps and checkpoints and the need for some people to be punished to cleanse and anoint a chosen few.

But hers is also a love story, a Velveteen Rabbit tale of mothers and sisters and fathers and aunties and nephews who can’t help but run towards each other, hands outstretched. It is about mourning and raging and then, after turning your insides out a million times over, looking out into the world and discovering that you aren’t alone.

So here I am again, arms waving wildly, desperate to reduce the complicated truths of either book to a trite blurb. We are inheritors and perpetrators of great cruelty; but our love for each other contains the seeds of a million revolutions.

I mean, that’s not an inaccurate summation of my feelings. And friends, if you know me well, you know that I am not above tying my thoughts up in a saccharine bow. But, in the spirit of how much I’ve been pulled into the complex and (ahem) multi-faceted world of both books, I will resist that pull. What if instead I sat with that summative statement, if I treated it less as a declaration and more as a discipline.

What if I turned that sentence over in my head over and again, sometimes as a riddle, sometimes as a taunt, sometimes as a prayer. What if, on some readings, the first clause overwhelmed me so thoroughly that I never got around to seriously considering the second half. What if, at other times, I repeated the latter clause over and over again, until it filled me up. What if some days I was numb, and none of these words meant all that much to me at all.

And what if, one day, I heard the same sentiment, in somebody else’s words. What if I yelled across the room, “YES!’ and they yelled ‘YES!” back and then we found our way towards one another.

End notes

1. I should probably disclose that I am lucky enough to know and admire both authors, though that doesn’t explain either why I felt compelled to write about them. I am fortunate to read many great books by people I know and admire personally. It’s far rarer, though, to read books that I not only love but which I can’t get out of my mind. Neither author goaded me to write about their books in any way, let along with awe and gratitude. I came by that naturally. Also, that’s a pretty nice reason to have a newsletter, so thanks for allowing this to be a space where that awestruck feeling can live out loud.

2. There are links to purchase both books above, but to put a finer point on it: I highly recommend buying and reading both My Mother’s Daughter and 58 Facets, the latter of which is worth any extra clicking you have to do to find an electronic or print copy in your part of the world (the former is a new North American release and should be easy to buy just about anywhere).

3. In case you’re wondering whether it continues to be an immense joy to facilitate a 50 state relay of community gatherings… the answer is VERY MUCH SO. I just got back from a whirlwind trip to San Francisco and Kauai (where I saw some of you! and also where I got quite tired but also where my heart grew quite full).. Those reports coming soon, but in the meantime you should read about the Portland and Seattle events.

   1. A quick reminder that applications for the North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas gatherings will close on May 31st. Did you know we give you a stipend to host a gathering? And that it doesn’t have to be a super complicated production? You should probably click this link to learn more, don’t you think?

   2. We HAVE chosen our NV, AZ, CO, NM, UT and ID hosts. They’re not all up on our website yet (we’re confirming a couple dates), but keep checking back through the week. A heads up that. I will not be at most of these myself, but the point of the relay is not my own travel dreams— it’s building a web of inspiring gatherers.

4. You know what makes me very grateful? The fact that I am able to do this for a living, both writing and hosting community gatherings and hopefully making the work of processing this world and building a better one a bit more bearable for you. This sounds trite, but it’s very true: the only reason I’m able to do so is that, at the end of every email I make a pitch to you all to become a paid subscriber and… a few of you do (usually enough to make up for folks who supported previously but whose finances no longer allow them to do so). Please consider! Thank you!

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Hey pals

As you probably know, I’m on the road right now for the Interdependence Relay (very sweet event in San Francisco last night, made even more lovely by the fact that I got to meet some of you in person, either there or at my Oakland office hours).

Now, I’ve got all sorts of fancy answers for what the interdependence relay is all about, but at its …

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It does not feel like it, but January of 2025 wasn’t very long ago. I have beaten this drum before, but it is still insane to remember the discursive fatalism of that cursed month. So much was declared to us, about us. Wokeness? Dead. Past eras of anti-Trump resistance? Cringe. The vibes? Shifted. This second era of Trump? Your fault, on account of your deeply embarrassing concern for others’ well-being.

January, 2026 definitely wasn’t that long ago. And by that point, it wasn’t pundits sowing fear. Minnesota wasn’t just being rhetorically terrorized. Government forces murdered human beings in the streets. Goon squads terrorized schools. Cars were left abandoned on the sides of the road, their occupants disappeared to God knows where.

Across the country, a million panicked Signal groups sprung into action. Rumor networks worked overtime. What town would be next? Yours, most likely. Surely, this was just life now. Ours would no longer be a world where powerful people made life worse for the most vulnerable quietly, and with a mask of plausible deniability. Now, the subtext would be text and the terror would escalate without limit.

And since then?

You could argue that nothing has changed. Donald Trump is still President. We are literally at war. ICE may be more circumspect, but it hasn’t disappeared. The U.S. continues to afford only a small slice of the population safety and dignity. And this administration, aided by its apparatchiks in the Republican Party and on the Supreme Court, are currently speed running through an Orbán-meets-Jim-Crow style mass gerrymander.

And yet here I am talking about how we’re winning. I promise I’m not being brusque, though it is important to define our terms. By we, I mean those of us who wish for a country and planet where everybody is safe and loved.1 And by winning, I’m not inferring that we have fully defeated this or any empire of cruelty. Ours remains a world that worships money and hierarchy far more than care and dignity. That was true before Trump, and remains particularly true under his watch.

Readers, I understand if nothing about this moment feels victorious. This gerrymandering apostasy, to take just one example, is disempowering by nature. Powerful people in suits and robes are picking and choosing whose votes matter and whose votes don’t. Red State Republicans? Deserving of enfranchisement. Black voters? This is America, so you know how that story goes.

If you feel like the fix is in, that no matter how unpopular Trump becomes, we’ll wake up in November to find that dirty tricks and duct tape were enough to manufacture another MAGA victory, you’re not being hysterical. That’s the game. Disenfranchisement isn’t just a structural reality, it’s a spiritual state.

But we are winning. Through collective action and agitation, we continue to reveal that this Emperor is as naked as they come. Even the most callous dictators require a popular base for their dirty tricks. Every strongman’s hope is that, over time, their opposition will become more demoralized and less willing to take to the streets. It matters then that Trump is historically unpopular. It matters that Republicans keep losing elections. It matters not only that anti-Trump protests continue to grow larger, but that the thousands of actions on May Day showcased an increased tactical sophistication.

We are better at countering fascism than we were even a year ago. Yes, they have the guns, but the guns only work if every time you fire them, they’re met primarily by cheers, apathy and cowardice. How incredible that, up to this point, we’ve robbed this administration of that depraved, humanity-destroying luxury.

Nothing proves this better than Minneapolis in January. For all the attention given to the miracle of Minnesotan solidarity, we somehow haven’t adequately celebrated what was accomplished on those snowy streets this winter. Once again, I say this carefully, as somebody who talked to Minneapolis activists on a daily basis during the height of that crisis. On the ground, nothing about Operation Metro Surge felt like a victory. The trauma was and remains immense. Every family that couldn’t be protected was internalized as a collective defeat, and rightfully so. That’s what being a neighbor is all about. Bearing the full pain, together. I know that Minnesotans don’t want shallow praise from gobsmacked outsiders, especially when their community’s wounds are still so fresh.

But it is also true that there’s a reason why ICE has not attempted a redux of Operation Metro Surge in your community. There’s a reason why, after being given the full run of the White House, Steven Miller is finally being sidelined. There is a reason why men with longarms and masks are not parading down the street of every major American city. The administration thought they’d win in Minnesota, not just in terms of arrest numbers, but in the court of public opinion. The regime bet that the opposition would be tepid and easily demonized. Minnesota should have been the model. But they weren’t ready for the grocery deliveries. They weren’t ready for the families taking shelter in each other’s homes. They weren’t ready for the crowds to grow larger and more in love with each other. So they retreated.

And again, I’m sure many of you have cynical rejoinders. “Just wait— they’re just holding out until after the midterms, that’s when there’ll be another surge.” And yes, that could very well be true. But if they were winning, there’d be no need to wait.

You’ll notice that I’m being careful about my tenses here. I’m not guaranteeing that we will win permanently, though I very much believe that we can. I am merely stating that what those of us who oppose Trump have been building— both on the community level and through mass protest– has accomplished far more than we often acknowledge.

We are winning, and I’d very much like us to keep winning.

To give up the game here, I didn’t write this essay because I believe in celebration for celebration’s sake, particularly preemptively. I too am absolutely terrified, but not primarily at what Trump might do. I’m terrified that we’ll give up. I fear that those of us not under daily threat will fall into complacence. We won’t host that organizing meeting we dreamed up a few months ago. We won’t go to the next protest. We will disengage from our workplace’s unionization drive. We’ll let life take over.

I fear that we’ll check the headlines, see that another GOP-run state has passed a racist, crooked map, and we’ll give into the narcotizing spell of nihilism. I fear that we’ll put too much of our faith in electoral politics, and that when we do engage on political campaigns we’ll do so out of fear rather than hope. I fear that we’ll believe, implicitly if not explicitly, that we no longer have to meet our neighbors because ICE isn’t metro surging through our particular town.

I need you to know we’re winning, not for smugness sake, but so that we don’t quit. So that we believe in each other. So that we cultivate short, medium, and long term communities of resistance. So that we win elections, but also so that we remember that electoral politics alone isn’t where democracy is built and practiced. So that we keep an eye on this regime, but recognize that the rot at the heart of empire goes far beyond one politician.

We are not a perfect opposition, but whatever we’ve been doing has mattered, and will keep mattering, more than we can even imagine.

But not if we buy the lie that they have us on the ropes.

End notes:

1. The 50 state relay of community gathering continues to be the most hope-giving thing imaginable and I’d love for you to join us. TWO EVENTS THIS WEEK, LET’S GO! I’LL BE AT BOTH OF THEM!

   1. This Thursday, May 14th in San Francisco— An everybody’s welcome at the table party at Fog City Community Fitness (1649 Valencia). 6:30-9:30.. We’re potlucking (of course) and then, for anybody interested, there’ll be an actual relay race (you know, in honor of the broader relay). RSVP here, please.

   2. Saturday, May 16th in Kalāheo (Kauai)— Yellow House invites you to a celebration of neighbors (complete with fire dancing). 4:00-9:00 at the corner of Papalino and Alelo.

2. If you go to our website over the next few days, you’ll see a few exciting updates, one that’s already live, one that will be soon.

   1. LIVE NOW: The full report from our Portland event! I wasn’t at this one, but working with the organizers on the recap made me cry in the best way (and also wish so badly that I was there). I think all of you will enjoy this recap, but particularly those of you involved in faith communities who are trying to be more welcoming.

   2. COMING SOON: Our official hosts/dates for AZ, NM, UT, CO and ID. There are some cool ones, you all.

3. NOW IS THE TIME TO APPLY FOR OUR NEXT ROUND OF STATES: Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas. YOU’RE UP. Deadline is May 31st, As I’ve mentioned in previous weeks, Applying is not hard! And we’ll give you a lot of support and celebrate your event in so many ways and also give you a hosting stipend. Whoa.

4. Last week, I offered hang out hours for my Bay Area trip (on Thursday during the day at Kinfolx Coffee in Oakland). As of this writing, all the slots are filled, but sometimes there are cancellations so it never hurts to check. And of course, a good place to hang out is the event that evening.

5. As you know, I always make a regular request to consider supporting The White Pages with a paid subscription (it remains one of the best deal in media, I’d argue, both because there are so many free perks, I keep the price as cheap as it ever was, and you’re supporting not just this writing but all my work training and supporting community builders across the country). It would be very cool if you’d do so. AND…

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6. … last week, I also made a broader pitch to support, well, any newsletter authors you love (because it’s a pretty brutal time in our broader field right now). I also promised to choose two new newsletter writers to support myself (because I believe in this work, I already have dozens of subscriptions, which I include in my family’s budget for mutual aid/causes I believe in). First, I chose the single writer whom I’ve been most grateful for these past couple years (Rebecca Solnit, not a surprising choice, but unsurprising choices still deserve support). I then asked paid subscribers for ideas on my second new sub. Thanks to a great rec, I’m now supporting ‘s thoughtful writing about both baseball and the broader world around it. I’m so glad I asked, because my kids and I are in a deep baseball-following moment and I do want to enjoy smart writing about that sport, but I wouldn’t have made that connection on my own.

7. It’s been a while since I’ve written about movies but holy cow if any of you want to talk about The Drama, I’m all in (I hope this doesn’t spoil anything but I was NOT expecting it to hit on so many of this newsletter’s major themes!).

Hey pals,

Hope you’re well. We just celebrated a thirteenth birthday in our house (fun!) and I’m also getting ready for one more relay-related week of travel (San Francisco and Hawaii, then I’m home for a nice long spell).

Here’s the idea of today’s discussion: We don’t all live next to each other (though it’d be pretty cool if we did), so it’s harder t…

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Red Lobster wants your attention. You can tell, because their current ads deploy not one but two separate announcers. There’s the expository guy. He’s a little pushy but at least he sticks to the facts. And then there’s the loud guy. He’s got a deep voice. He sounds like he’s broadcasting live from the submerged city of Atlantis. He says it with feeling, and also reverb.

“Because you’ve been asking… a lot… and we made it happen.”

So claims the not-from-Atlantis announcer. But what’s he talking about? We have been asking for many things. To be able to afford homes, for example, or not to have war crimes committed in our names, or to have our planet still exist twenty years from now.

Oh, this is about shrimp. Endless shrimp. It’s back, or so I’m told, in multiple forms. Every time the less pushy guy shares one of the currently available shrimp offerings, his partner pipes up with a complementary point straight from the bottom of the sea.

“Walt’s favorite shrimp.”

“ ENDLESS!”

“Garlic shrimp scampi”

“ENDLESS”

“Shrimp linguini alfredo”

“ENDLESS?”

“And all new marry me shrimp”

“ALL ENDLESS!”

The duo isn’t wrong. Endless shrimp is back. While the previous iteration didn’t technically bankrupt the chain (the real culprit was private equity and real estate chicanery) it was, by all accounts, an absolute mess. American consumers, who rightfully identified that they were getting ripped off in every facet of their lives, leapt at the opportunity to get one over at least one big business.

Back when Endless Shrimp was a permanent feature, shrimp hoarders would occupy tables for hours at a time, not leaving until they beat the house. The real victim of this behavior was, of course, the chain’s underpaid servers (if you walk into a restaurant with “me against these suckers” mindset, you’re less likely to view your waiter as a fellow victim of capitalism and you’re definitely not going to tip well). For the C-Suite, though, the larger concern wasn’t the dignity of their employees. It was a jumbo-sized hole in their bottom line.

It’s like The Boss once sang. Endless shrimp dies baby, that’s a fact. But maybe the endless shrimp that dies, some days comes back. Put your make-up on, do your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight at the only Red Lobster still open in your city.

I’m not all that interested in the relative success or failure of chain restaurant promotions, but I do care about the various ways corporations try to win our affection (meaningful cultural signifiers, or so I’d argue). And contra the two announcer voices, the most interesting thing about Red Lobster’s promotion isn’t the shellfish, either of the Walt’s Favorite or Marry Me varieties. It’s what’s whispered rather than shouted.

You see, the biggest difference between the current iteration of Endless Shrimp and its unprofitable predecessor is that now Red Lobster wants you to know that you (the shrimp-loving consumer) and they (the company) are in this together.

If you want the full story, I highly recommend this piece by Luke Winkie in Slate, but here’s the truncated version. There are varieties of shrimp on the Red Lobster menu that aren’t officially part of the promotion. They’re on the menu, but excluded from the benevolent blanket of endlessness. But if a customer were to ask for unlimited quantities of a non-official item (for example, Crispy Dragon Shrimp, a food item that I’m assured contains no actual dragon), the server is to welcome them into a cool secret. Their official, handbook-mandated line? “These items aren’t on the menu for this promotion, but I would be happy to make an exception for you.”

It’s like they say, “the exception is the rule.” Except literally, and by mandate. Servers are required by corporate policy to act like you and they are cheating the system, in hopes that when you remember the night you rode the dragon (shrimp), you remember it not as a conspiracy-of-one, but a sneaky secret between you and your best friend (Red Lobster restaurants, a subsidiary of the Thai Union Seafood Company).

This is not a new psychological trick. It’s a classic low stakes confidence game. The most effective way to a mark is to convince them that they are, in fact, in on the con themselves. It’s the same move that car salesmen use when they leave the room to “talk to their manager” before returning with a report that “he didn’t want me to give you this deal, but…”

It’s still striking, though, to see the strategy laid out in grandiose internal strategy documents. A beleaguered but iconic American brand name hedges its survival on two bets. First, that you are tired, angry and aware that you’re on the wrong side of a rigged game (correct). And second, that, by offering you a facsimile of camaraderie and a very real pile of seafood, that they can win your loyalty (huh).

“[This is] about more than just shrimp,” the document proclaims. An absolute work of art, that sentence.

“[It’s] about creating an experience that says, ‘We listen to you.”

“When guests see Endless Shrimp back on the menu, they feel heard and valued.”

I have never addressed a sit-down chain’s internal strategy document, but I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say, tears in my eyes: Red Lobster, thank you. THIS is what democracy looks like.

As Eli Zeger argued in his 2020 essay about companies that talk like snarky teens on social media, this particular iteration of the “brand as friend” canard is the product of the marriage of late stage capitalism (and its reliance on the selling of “ideas” rather than goods and services) and the post-Citizen United codification of corporate personhood. Red Lobster isn’t a restaruant anymore. It’s your rule-breaking, shrimp loving, newly empathetic pal. It sees you. In fact, it is the only one who see you. It gets that you’re broke, but more so that you’re alone. It’s no longer offering you cheap shrimp (the price tag for the promotion has risen markedly since its last iteration). It’s promising you something more important– belonging, connection, a port in the storm of alienation and precarity we’re all weathering.

Red Lobster’s friendship?

“Endless”

Or that’s the idea at least. Apparently, the promotion hasn’t been as lucrative as the company had hoped, at least so far. It’s not 2016 anymore. We’re seeking something more these days. Bread and roses? Perhaps, but definitely not just shrimp.

But Red Lobster isn’t alone, in surveying a landscape of mass alienation (economic, relational, spiritual) and seeing a business opportunity. Advertising agencies are publishing unironic blogs chillingly titled “the loneliness crisis: how brands can step up?” Silicon Valley’s greatest minds heard that you wanted community and responded with sycophantic AI chatbots. Apparently, our tech overlords’ understanding of human relationships is a robot who agrees with you all the time, including when you muse about harming yourself. Even the outright scammers get it. Gone are the days of far flung princes offering you a financial windfall. As you may have experienced personally, the hot new con is… pretending to be an acquaintance and inviting you to a party.

This is a step beyond the classic commodification funnel, as documented in nineties leftist classics like No Logo and The Conquest of Cool. The brands are no longer promising a great deal, or even hipness. What’s on offer now is the dream of a welcoming community, one deep enough to solve for the isolation that the companies themselves helped create.

That’s very depressing, of course, both the reminder that our economy has always been built on the exploitation of vulnerability, and the reality that there’s just so much more vulnerability to be exploited at this particular moment.

But there’s another truth, not a counterpoint, but a complement. How fortunate, for those of us who actually want to connect with other human beings, rather than just make a quick buck off of them. We already have what every corporation in the world wishes they had– the fact that, when we offer a space by our side, to either a stranger or a friend, we actually mean it. We’re not trying to trick you into springing for a Main Deck Margarita Flight to go along with your shrimp. We’re not trying to mine your data or add you to a marketing funnel or load you up with debt and junk. We just think this world would be more navigable together rather than apart.

And as an organizing opportunity? From union drives to neighbor-to-neighbor activism to the precious few political campaigns that care more about building community than personal brand building? My goodness. Why do you keep hearing about neighborism these days, and not just from true believers like me? Because more people are admitting every day how hungry they are for connection, and then taking the risk of making an offering.

The terrible news right now is that the hucksters are going to keep selling us a flim flam simulacra of belonging. Yes, the consultants, but also (I fear) the politicians. I strongly suspect the 2028 Democratic primary to feature a million text messages about “neighbors” and “community” penned by a well-heeled K-Street consultants. But the good news is that we aren’t that dumb. We know the brands aren’t our friends. We’ve lived through the great social media con together. We know what the lie looks like, and now we’d much prefer the deeply imperfect, thoroughly messy alternative.

They’ll offer us endless shrimp. And we’ll say no thank you. We’d prefer each other, please. Even if that’s not on the secret menu.

END NOTES (A BUNCH THIS WEEK, BUT THEY’RE FUN):

1. Oh, that Vox article I linked to above about neighborism? It was really fun to be a part of it and to have quotes throughout. I think the reporter, Sara Radin, did a great job.

2. The 50 state relay of community gathering is real and wonderful! A few updates:

   1. Here’s a nice article about tour Seattle launch and also my thoughts on the night.

   2. Our second event was this past Sunday in Portland at Reedwood Friends and it was the first of many events that I won’t be at personally (I was very jealous) but it was by all accounts INCREDIBLE and we’ll have a write-up on our website soon.

   3. Not one but two relay vents this next week, and I’ll be at BOTH OF THEM!

      1. Thursday, May 14th in San Francisco— An everybody’s welcome at the table party at Fog City Community Fitness (1649 Valencia). 6:30-9:300.

      2. Saturday, May 16th in Kalāheo (Kauai)— Yellow House invites you to a celebration of neighbors (complete with fire dancing). 4:00-9:00 at the corner of Papalino and Alelo.

3. Speaking of my upcoming visit to the Bay Area, because it was so successful in Seattle and Minneapolis, I’m once again doing HANG OUT OFFICE HOURS. On Thursday, May 14th, I’’ll be posted up from about. noon-4:00 at Kinfolx Coffee in Uptown Oakland. Want to, well, hang out? Just sign up for a slot here. Old friends and current strangers alike, everybody’s welcome.

4. We are VERY CLOSE to announcing our hosts for our next group of states: NV, AZ, NM, UT, CO and ID (fun ones!).

5. AND ALSO… NOW IS THE TIME TO APPLY FOR OUR NEXT ROUND OF STATES: Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas. YOU’RE UP. Deadline is May 31st, As I’ve mentioned in previous weeks, Applying is not hard! Perhaps you want to toss your name in, if for no other reason than to tell my intrusive thoughts that they are silly [or more likely, because being a part of the relay is very cool and low impact and we literally give you money (a hosting stipend)].

6. Every week, I make a pitch at the end of these essays to help support The White Pages with a paid subscription. And yes I truly hope you do so! I think we’re doing some really great work thanks to your support (I mean, we’re literally hosting 50 gatherings across the country, and while we do have a great to help pay for my colleague Carly’s time on that, my income comes almost solely from your subscriptions). Man, it’d be great to be able to keep doing this for a living.

   But, today’s pitch is a bit different. Right now is a rough time in just about every field (so if you’re squeezed right now, ignore this), but that definitely includes this weird world of newslettering. Just about every newsletter author I know is having to hustle harder to keep making a living doing this work. Lots of reasons for that (the biggest: when everybody’s broke, discretionary expenses are the first to go), but the fact remains. If there’s a newsletter author you value (doesn’t have to be me!) this would be a great time to show them some love— a subscription if you can manage, a share if you can’t, a nice note if you’ve got the time. I’m going to do so as well, and share back next week about who I chose to support myself.

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7. I got out of the habit of songs of the week, but I have it on good authority that you can easily make this one into a parody song about endless shrimp.

8. I know I referenced and linked to this above but it’s still amazing to me that this is a headline that was written in all sincerity.

   

Hey pals,

Happy May Day! I missed our discussion last week (though I loved that even offering a non-discussion space inspired many of you to still hang out with each other). I'll admit that I’m not 100% online today again— my kids are off school— but let’ give it a shot still, eh?

This question emerged fairly out of the blue. At first, I asked myself “I w…

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Once a year, I get together with my two best guy friends for a weekend somewhere in the greater Midwest. I have already made this joke, but it remains true. What if the cure for male loneliness is… building and maintaining actual friendships? Funny nobody’s proposed that solution yet, but that’s why I’m not the Joe Rogan of the left.

This year we met up in Cincinnati, a lovely town filled with nice people, very pretty hills, and also one anodyne, vertical rectangle that says “Kroger” on it, where entire teams of Harvard MBAs are meeting as we speak to plot innovations like “what if we tried no open checkout lanes?”1

To get to Cincinnati from Milwaukee, you drive for an about six hours, picking up your buddies along the way. At some point, you stop for gas in Indiana. In our case, the gas station in question was somewhere between Lafayette and Lebanon. Was it a BP? A Cenex? Maybe, but if you are ever driving on I-65 and need to purchase aggressively gendered interior decor and/or marijuana themed socks, this is your place.

This was not my first novelty man cave sign. If a cursory Google Image search is to be believed, it’s a surprisingly robust interior design genre, though I’ve never actually seen one displayed in its natural habitat, only gas stations and Cracker Barrel gift shops. Come to think of it, have I ever been in a man cave? Do people still have those? Did they ever? I just assumed every McMansion had at least four, but I never investigated.

That’s the magic of this sign, you see. It is both a time capsule to a potentially imagined near-past, and a very real case study for the morass of contemporary gender discourse. I guess that’s how societal regression works. Everything old is new again, and for sale in an establishment where you can also buy Lunchables and Zyn.

According to this sign at least, there are ten rules of the man cave, just as there are Ten Commandments. Much like that other list-of-ten, these are not just empty platitudes that you hang on your wall (or increasingly teach in all of your public schools). You study it. You analyze it. You go deep.

#1. My cave, my rules

Possession is nine tenths of the laws, or so I hear. But already, we’re off to the internally contradictory races. So much of “let me be a man, damnit” discourse infers the existence of a proprietary spark tamped down by a feminized monoculture. Every man is a unique special snowflake, but not that kind of snowflake. If that’s the case, though, why are everybody’s man cave rules the same? Could one of your man cave rules be “this is a space to honestly reflect on your emotions and responsibiliies for community care?” Sorry bud, ran out of room on the sign. Kind of like how, whenever we talk broadly about the demonization of men, the variety of man we’re demonizing always enjoys the same five things: stoicism, gay jokes, shooting stuff, sports betting and those baseball hats where the text is upside down, so you have to tilt your head to read it and then you’re like “oh, I guess it says Miami.”

#2. Only man decor allowed

Now we’re rolling. Remember that a man cave is a physical space that only exists in the context of cis-hetero home ownership. Ontologically, the man cave presupposes that a fella in a cross-gender relationship is oppressed by his lady’s dominion over the rest of the house. Thank God somebody (the United Nations, presumably) bequeathed the put-upon man a tiny swath of de-feminized territory in the name of human rights. Not unlike how, before 2024, women had seized control of every single lever of power (they even had a hashtag that suggested that perhaps there should be consequence for sexual assault! the nerve!). Feminism had gone too far. Reparations were needed. Like, for example, giving guys even greater hegemonic control of all political and cultural institutions.

But back to the home. This is all he’s got, the man. The right to choose the decorations in his man cave. Like this sign, presumably. Or a VERY COOL picture of Kid Rock and RFK Jr. working out in jeans. Or a 1973 beer poster where a buxomly Nordic woman hoists two-to-three Coors Lights and gives the viewer a look that communicates "I wish to move to rural Utah with you, purchase a $10,000 stove and make Instagram content about bread and fertility.”

#3. Replenish all beer stock

Wait, who are these rules for? Is the woman of the house supposed to enter the man cave on a daily basis, consult these commandments, and then run out to get more beer? Well, if so, she’d better not also try to sneak in a “Live Laugh Love” poster or a picture of the man’s children on the wall. MAN DECOR ONLY! You know, like statues of bighorn sheep giving press conferences at the Pentagon. BAHHHH! WAR FIGHTERS!!!!

#4. Junk food is nutritional

So here’s where the sign starts to show its age. Remember when the fellas used to enjoy junk food? That was before we lost some of our best men in the War On Protein. These days, being a real man means having a bespoke eating disorder. In this man cave, we macromaxxx. We carnivore diet. We bulk and cut. We launch our own line of circa 1987 Weight Watchers shakes, but for cowboys. We slather a rotisserie chicken with cottage cheese and mutter to ourselves, 'Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men… ” until we fall asleep, thumb in mouth, on our man couch.

#5. Farting and belching tolerated

Whichever mid-level employee at the metaphor factory came up with this one deserves a raise. Incredible work. I mean, isn’t all anti-feminist backlash rhetoric, at its core, about how annoying it is to be gently reminded that considering the needs of other people might improve your life as well? Not on my manly watch! You’re saying that I should have authentic relationships with those around me rather than being a boorish sex pest? That I shouldn’t “say slurs” because they make me sound like a butthead? That I shouldn’t lose my life savings on a betting app? Why? Because of WOKE?

What’s next, keeping me from hotboxing my sacred man temple with a firehose of rancid man-flatulence?2 Screw you! My compact, hermetically sealed safe space exists for one reason and one reason alone: expelling unpleasant smells and then just sitting in ‘em! Like a man!

#6. Man controls all remotes

All of them? Fine, whatever.

#7. Sports on TV 24/7

And make it man sports, please. Not lady sports, which have never been of interest to us real men. Well, until we receive vague word that a trans high schooler wants to play softball, in which case we remember that women’s sports is the axis upon which our entire identity spins. Who told you we didn’t like women’s sports? It’s all we think about. Women’s athletes. We’re HUGE fans. We’ve got so many favorites. Like Riley Gaines. And, um, Erika Kirk? Also Mary, Jesus’ mother and, we assume, a champion pole vaulter in her time.

#8. Chick flicks are prohibited

At first glance, this one reads like another vintage 90s Home Improvement-level cracks about how women are from Terms of Endearment and men are from Die Hard, but let’s look at the contemporary media landscape. We’re constantly being told that men are oppressed now because of the supposed stranglehold that Big Woman has on all media. Comedy is illegal now. Television shows acknowledge the existence of trauma. You’d turn on the nightly news, and you don’t even see boobs any more.

But nature is healing. In the past few years, we’ve green-lit roughly five million Taylor Sheridan shows about behatted men staring into the middle district. Kill Tony awareness is at an all time high. The Ellisons now own all media, and Bari Weiss3 is in charge of CBS News For Men and Select Other Real Americans. I mean, even Taylor Swift pivoted away from “chick flicks.” She got the memo. I bet she built Travis Kelce a man cave so big that there’s another man cave inside it. One for farts, one for burps. Not like the rest of our wives, who only enjoy nagging and ruining the workplace.

#9. No bitching. No issues.

Want to play a fun game? It’s called “morally constipated Atlantic column or line from the man cave sign.” I mean, isn’t this basically the message of nine million think pieces about how various leftists are personally responsible for Trump 2.0 and the broader death of democracy? Racial justice activists. “Millennial feminists.” Trans people who would like to go to the bathroom without a weirdo yelling that them. You all bitched! And I— David Brooks or Thomas Chatterton Williams or Helen Lewis— am here to warn you about the sudden emergence of… issues. They didn’t exist, those issues, and we were all doing fine, but then you just had to run your mouth, didn’t you? Are you happy now? You personally willed Pete Hegseth into existence, such was the sheer force of your insatiable bitchery.

I know I keep ping ponging between the sign’s hack 90s gender comedy and our current discursive moment, but it’s striking. The old canards that have propped up emotional/physical labor gaps in heterosexual marriages for decades (women are shrill nags; men deserve both to run everything and to lie around doing nothing) ) are now being reheated as brilliant epistles for the second Trump era. “Take my wife… please” is just the molecular level version of “but what about the boys and men?”

But yes, in summary. If there was no bitching, there’d be no issues. Your move, Critical Race Theory.

#10. Whatever Man Says Makes Perfect Sense

See also: Whatever the President and Vice President say (take that, soft on crime, non-theology knowing Pope), whatever a stand-up comic who loves rape jokes says (“oh come on… are you TRIGGERED?) whatever every corporate CEO says (“great news, the world-destroying robots who occasionally tell you to kill yourself are your children’s legal guardians now)) and whatever the New York Times Editorial Board says (“Sure, Zohran is charismatic, but what if he institutes Sharia Law in YOUR man cave.”).

Although, now that I think about it.. I’m a man, and this newsletter is, on some level at least, my man cave. I think I get the appeal. Whatever I say makes perfect sense, you say? Don’t mind if I do.

END NOTES:

1. You all! I’m no longer just talking about helping fifty rad community builders host a relay of fifty gatherings across the country. I really was in Seattle last week (busy travel week, I know), hanging out with many of you at one of the best potlucks I’ve ever attended (shout out to the Columbia City Neighbors Club). Here’s a nice article about the event, and also my thoughts on the night. Oh my god it was the best.

2. Portland, you’re up next. THIS SUNDAY! NOON PACIFIC TIME! AT REEDWOOD FRIENDS (2901 SE Steele). You all, this is going to be such a fun gathering— Reedwood is a faith community, but it’s asking an inspiring questions about how to be the kind of place that is a good neighbor to those for whom faith communities don’t/can’t feel like home. And also, there’s gonna be singing and pizza. You should come

   

3. THIS FRIDAY IS THE DEADLINE FOR OUR NEXT ROUND OF RELAY STATES (Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Idaho), As I’ve mentioned in previous weeks, Applying is not hard! Perhaps you want to toss your name in, if for no other reason than to tell my intrusive thoughts that they are silly (or more likely, because being a part of the relay is very cool and low impact we even provide a hosting stipend).

4. and I made an announcement about our podcast, . We’re taking a break,, but there’s o reason to start singing Green Day’s “Time of your life” or Sarah Mclaughlin’s “I will remember you” at your favorite podcast app, because we’ll be back!

5. This essay’s final line notwithstanding, I do not believe that everything I say makes total sense but I do believe that— in a world where so much ink is spilled keeping the world as it is— that the work we’re doing here matters. I wouldn’t ask you to support if it didn’t truly help (I’m lucky to have this job, but it truly wouldn’t be possible if a few folks every week didn’t raise their hand and say “hey Garrett, thanks for this, I can take a shift helping out.”

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Hi pals,

I’m off today. Once a year, I spend a weekend with two of my best friends (“is the cure for male loneliness… having friends?”) so I won’t be facilitating our regularly scheduled community discussion.

BUT, I did want to take this space, which is, ahem, never short on earnestness, for one bonus dose of mushy sentiment.

You all, the world is very to…

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I’m writing this from a plane to Seattle, fueled by anticipatory nerves and complimentary Biscoff cookies. Somewhere in the cargo hold below me, there’s a large dark walnut box with fifty coffee-cup sized compartments, currently empty. Many of you have heard about this project I’m kicking off (a yearlong relay of community gatherings in every state), but it’s less important that you understand the mechanics than the miracle of it all. I’m in town for a potluck with a group of South Seattleites, most of whom didn’t know each other a couple years ago. They exist now because their founder sat on a bench at their farmer’s market, a few weeks in a row, and asked “would you like to know a neighbor?”

They’re not strangers anymore, these Columbia City community builders. They’re a real group, because they received a few invitations in a row and responded in kind. And now they’re also part of this relay (as is a church-that’s-asking-all-the-right-questions in Portland, an all-bodies-welcome gym in San Francisco, a community food hub on the island of Kauai, and 46 future gatherings, still to be discovered). I too made an invitation, and oh my God people responded. Again, a miracle. I don’t know most of these Seattle neighbors, but we’re now connected. There’s a bag of Garrett’s popcorn in my carry-on bag. Caramel and cheese mix, a perfunctory but well-meaning contribution to a shared feast.

This is how it always goes. The political scientist and Macarthur grantee Hahrie Han frequently talks about how belonging precedes belief. She’s right, but before belonging comes a very normal person who becomes just a bit brave and asks, “I would like you to know about this thing that I am doing, because that seems way better than having to do it alone.”

That’s one of the many things that the Columbia City neighbors do these days, by the way. On their community forum, there’s a thread where they say “I’m going to a movie tonight, would anybody like to come with me?” And people do! A single invitation has birthed hundreds more.

Because of the nature of my work (over-exclamatory community cheerleader), every week I receive multiple messages to the same effect. “I tried it, and it worked,” or “some other people tried it, and look at what they created.” The “it” in question is the same question, repeated earnestly. “Would you join me?” Last week the messages were about how an offer for work-from-homers to share porch coffee went much better than expected, and about how far more people in St. Louis than you might expect journaled in the park this past November. Not a particularly fun time to be outside in a park in St. Louis, mind you. And yet, 80 people showed up. Per organizer Julie Zhang, “it was freezing, it was borderline dangerous, but it was electric.”

But that’s the rub, isn’t it? What if the people don’t show up? Or what if they show up, but everybody’s awkward and stares at their shoes? Or they show up, and it’s wonderful, but months from now they’re still expecting you to manage the invites and do the dishes and lead the conversation and you start resenting those ungrateful community freeloaders in your midst?

I suppose it is my job, as an over-exclamatory community cheerleader, to assure you that these concerns are primarily in your head. And the science does back that argument up. Unless you are literally J.D. Vance, it is highly likely that people think you’re pretty cool and well worth their time. They will come to your thing. They will step up if you ask them.

Dr. Gillian Sandstrom documents a wide range of research to this effect in her recent book, Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up To a Big Life. To cite just one example, Sandstrom and her colleagues tracked hundreds of college students as they initiated conversations with strangers over the course of a week (“will you talk to me right now?” being, of course, the simplest but most daunting invitation of all). When the experiment began, only 40 percent of participants assumed they’d actually be able to initiate an enjoyable conversation. But when the final results were analyzed, out of 1336 attempted conversations, 87% were successful.

Social psychologists have a name for this, the assumption that our entreaties to each other will be rejected, on account of our myriad quirks and failings. It’s called the “liking gap,” but it might as well be called, “having a human brain.” We pump up the volume on self-criticism, over-index lessons from when we’ve been legitimately rejected, and dial down all counter-evidence. I often joke about how I’m still afraid that people won’t show up to my birthday party, forgetting that, in practice, my classmates at Thunder Hill Elementary did join me at the bowling alley when I turned 10. I didn’t ever have to bowl alone, but tell that to my overly risk-averse brain.

I could just leave the pep talk there and call it a day, but I’d be lying by omission. People are starved for community. They are eager for an alternative to generalized despair and AI chatbots. They aren’t actually judging you. Sure, but still: I flake on all sorts of events, and I’m an over-exclamatory community cheerleader. Last week, a very kind person who I know from a previous professional life was hosting a gyro dinner at her house. A gyro dinner! Can you imagine a better excuse to get together? I didn’t go. And I had a good excuse (too many kids’ events, an inability to make all the pieces fit) but the end result was the same—one empty chair, potential evidence, if the host chose to take it that way, that the invitation wasn’t worth it.

I could keep going. I haven’t been to Wednesday game night at Falcon Bowl in weeks, even though I love that crew and wouldn’t mind a round of Wingspan and a couple Hamms tall boys. I signed up for texts from Milwaukee’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America earnestly, but you wouldn’t know it from my commitment to leaving them unread. I’m still working my way through 100 emails from kind people—invitations of one variety or another. They’re in my inbox because I intend to respond to them, but that’s not how it likely feels to my would-be epistolary partners.

We may not out be out here deliberately rejecting each other, but you know the whole deal about objects in motion. Every new invitation is a pebble-sized shot across the bow of the mighty ship inertia, and that behemoth doesn’t turn easily. The “liking gap,” goes both ways. Your earnest invitation likely isn’t being ignored because people find you onerous, but because they’re afraid that you and your fellow gatherers will reject them.

I still believe that you should invite your neighbors over for donuts. You should text that acquaintance with whom you once exchanged half-heard “oh, we should totally hang out,” promises. You should put up flyers around town that you’re going to be doing some random weirdo thing you love at a coffee shop and that other fans of that weirdo thing should join you.

You should make all these invitations, but you should know that they may very well be ignored. People may ghost you. Or they’ll RSVP yes and then have something come up. You may end up sitting at that coffee shop alone. It will likely feel slightly devastating, though in my experience less so than I anticipated. “Maybe next time,” I’ve muttered to at least a few circles of empty seats.

What’s the worst that can happen, if you’re rejected? A single quiet afternoon. Nothing more, nothing less. An entire city will not be texting about you, about how much you suck and how they were very wise to avoid your table for losers.

If you build it, and they don’t come, it is likely because they’re thinking about themselves, about how harried they are or about how, if they were to show up, you wouldn’t like them very much. They probably feel guilty. They’re likely worried that, by ignoring your first invitation, they won’t be invited in the future. Again, there are studies, and those studies look kindly on you and you and your bravery in offering that sad loser table a second time, then a third, until it becomes a filled table filled with people who are actually pretty cool.

I sincerely hope I get invited to the next gyro night. I’m so grateful I haven’t been kicked off the game night text chain. And I really will show up with the socialists again, one of these days. And then, in each of those cases, somebody else’s table will be less empty. There will be the invitation, and then the response. And then who knows what. Belonging? Belief? Perhaps, but at least the inviter will get to tell their friends, “it actually worked! People came! More than last time!”

I can’t guarantee that we’ll never let you down. We’re flighty and self-centered. We’re objects in motion, but often in unhelpful directions. But we’re worth a shot. Because when we do show up, it really is electric.

End notes:

1. Seattle, I’m here! Tonight! And yes, I’m kicking off this year invitation spree with a potluck with the Columbia City Neighbors Club. They’d love to have you, even if you don’t live close by. Truly. 6:00 PM at Southside Commons (3518 S. Edmunds).

2. Have you ever wondered how to get a 50-compartment dark walnut box embedded in a 20x36x12 cardboard box across the country to start a year-long relay project? I now know! [Instagram link/Substack link].

3. The next three dates in the relay are set—Portland, San Francisco, Kauai. You’ll be hearing about them in future weeks, but you can also learn more about them right here, right now.

4. In the spirit of invitations, I’m also offering hang out hours during the day today. I’m posted up at Victrola Coffee on 15^th in Capitol Hill and I made a sign-up sheet for folks who want to say hey. And guess what? It worked! I wrote about this last week, and people filled every spot. Cool people, I bet. But then, one of them had to cancel, which means that if you still want to take me up on that invite, it’s worth a shot. If not, I’ll enjoy the free hour.

5. In case I just seem like I’m just a cool, breezy invite-maker with no care in the world, let me be clear. Every time I put an invitation out, I’m TERRIFIED that this will be the time the bottom falls out and I’ll be left hanging. Currently, that unhelpful inner monologue is being directed towards the next round of relay states (Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Idaho), and whether we’ll get enough cool applications in those states (especially UT, NM and NV, which have been quieter so far). May 1^st is the deadline! Applying is not hard! Perhaps you want to toss your name in, if for no other reason than to tell my intrusive thoughts that they are silly (or more likely, because being a part of the relay is very cool and low impact we even provide a hosting stipend).

6. I know I always include this request, but I always mean it. t’s a gift to do this work, and boy would it be nice if there was a sustainable way to do so without asking you all, “hey, would you consider supporting?” But, also: I’m so grateful that every time I do ask a few of you say “yes, Garrett, I can help” and that generally keeps this ship floating as past supporters have to take a break. As always, thanks for considering.I try to keep prices cheap, and I give really good perks, because I appreciate you all so much.

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Hey pals,

So, sometimes my public essays each week are very much “for me,” not in the sense that I am only writing to myself, but that I personally need to hear a certain message. This week’s a good example. I’ve been finding myself more easily knocked off balance, both by the state of the world and my very fortunate but always a little precarious/making…

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The following is a truncated list of objectively true events that have occurred over the past few weeks:

-The United States and Israel declared war against Iran and Lebanon.

-As of this writing 5000 people, including more than 300 children, have been killed in that conflict.

-In a series of profanity-laden rants, the President of the United States threatened a variety of war crimes, including ending the entire Iranian civilization. He eventually backed off, declaring victory (disputed).

-Peace talks this weekend in Pakistan concluded with no deal in place. The United States was represented at those negotiations by Vice President J.D. Vance, fresh from a stop in Hungary, where he failed to rally support for Viktor Orbán.

-Trump, was not in attendance at those talks, choosing instead to make an appearance at a mixed martial arts fight alongside Joe Rogan and Vanilla Ice.

-After Orbán was defeated in the Hungarian elections, a direct rebuke to the broader conservative project worldwide, Trump spent the majority of the next twenty four hours on his own social media network posting memes of himself as Jesus and escalating his feud with the Pope.

-Among other insults, the President of the United States charged the head of the Catholic Church with being “WEAK on crime.” As for the picture, Trump Jesus is shown healing a figure who, depending on who you ask, is either a wounded soldier or Jeffrey Epstein.

-After deleting the Jesus post, Trump claimed the image depicted him not as Christ, but as a Red Cross doctor. The latter group is not known to wear Christ-like robes, nor to administer medical assistance by laying their beatific hands on Eptstein-soldier-patients.

How has it felt, getting blasted with alternating firehoses of legitimate human suffering and bottom feeder detritus? Speaking for myself, it’s messed me up pretty badly, man. I’ve been distracted, anxious and more likely than usual to get caught in headline-refreshing spirals. One day, I await word as to whether thousands of Iranians will be murdered by my government. The next, I yuck it up at famed charisma vacuum J.D. Vance calling Trump from a Hungarian rally and getting redirected to voice mail. This is a dangerous administration who kills people/These are small, sad men who never mastered basic object permanence.

I feel sheepish admitting this, a full decade into Trump’s chokehold on our lives. I should be able to act as if I’ve been here before. I mean, we have been here before. We have weathered this surreal/terrifying two-hander hundreds of times over. My youngest is currently in third grade. Trump has been erratic center of American politics for her entire lifetime.

And also, isn’t this always part and parcel of fascism? Strongmen take a funhouse mirror to reality. That’s how you convince human beings to turn their backs on one another, through a combination of actual cruelty and Dadaesque projections of bravado. The former is perennially terrifying. The latter is perennially ridiculous. I should be used to this by now.

But there’s something about this moment that feels distinct, even from all of Trump’s deeply tiresome past ebbs and flows. It’s the increasingly frenetic pace. The man’s thinner and thinner tether to reality. All that, yes, and also something more.

By so many measures, both Trump and Trumpism are dying in front of our eyes. I will not waste much time prognosticating as to the President’s mental and physical health, except to say that it is clearly not improving. Speculation abounds, and not without reason.

As for the broader MAGA political project, whether you measure it with polling data, its inability to actually make good on the promises that won it a second term, or a clear pattern of post-2024 electoral rebukes, this is not a movement ascendent. Trump has always been a vainglorious galoot, but he’s never been quite this harried and ineffectual. As for Vance? The most unpopular Vice President in American history? Is this your king?

But here’s the rub. These Emperors have no clothes, but they can still bomb Iranian elementary schools. They can still use ICE as their personal Gestapo. They can still kill Americans in the street.

That’s one hell of a pair of truths to hold at once. The king, for all intents and purposes, is dead. But he might take you down with him.

I worry about all this, from a social movement perspective. It’s hard to build when you’re metabolizing one head scratcher after another. Of course I’d rather have a strongman weakening-by-the-day then one blessed with both strategic lucidity and a popular mandate. But it is tricky to organize when your opponent is less a political movement than a critically ill, thoroughly sloshed Godzilla, still rampaging, though without clear direction.

Some days, the monster gets distracted and falls asleep. Then it roars again. A few days later, it does a stupid little meme dance for its social media followers. Before long, it will collapse for good, but that will be little relief to the residents of the apartment complex it destroys on its penultimate day of life.

One of the tricky dynamics, in anti-authoritarian organizing, is that while you never want your opponents to fully have their act together (lest they inflict more harm), it’s easier to oppose a semi-competent threat than a bunch of yahoos stepping on rakes. Activists in the anti-apartheid movement often repeated the mantra that “movements need something to do.” When your opponent has a clear strategic direction, no matter how terrifying, there are no shortage of things to do.

When Trump first came back into office, his team had a plan. It was a ketamine fueled Muskian chaos plan, but a plan nonetheless. Even this January, Trumpism was still capable of quasi-proactive strategy: it sought to both break the spirits of a left-leaning American city while galvanizing its own nativist base. The new goal was to publicly terrorize Minneapolis for the cameras. Activists, famously, responded in kind. A movement swelled, and while the regime inflicted (and still inflicts) so much misery on that community, it has also been forced to retreat.

In the immediate weeks after Minneapolis, activist communities across the country planned as if they would be hit next. Whistles were distributed. Rapid response numbers were memorized. We had something to do, because it seemed like our adversaries too had a playbook. But they didn’t.

Instead, the drunken Godzilla, wounded and distractible, pivoted from domestic terror to half-hearted imperialism. Gas prices rose, approval ratings plummeted. Trump grew bored with his own war. Best to leave that to dorks like J.D. and watch some fellas kick each other in the head. As of this writing, it’s not fully clear what form a new anti-war movement needs to take, on account of the state of the war itself being a mystery box. For all I know, we might bomb the Vatican tomorrow instead of Tehran.

It would be easy to laugh off, except the caskets are still piling up.

That’s why I’m nervous. I’m optimistic, perhaps to a fault, that this is the beginning of the end of Trump’s blustery empire of dirt. But I worry that in the meantime, we will be stuck in the worst of both worlds— the monster continues its stumble-rampage, human beings keep getting killed, but we struggle to build and sustain a formidable counter movement.

You will notice that I’ve not waded into the perennially tiresome discourse about which of Trump’s actions are “distractions” and which ones matter. Not a game worth playing, in my experience.

Personally, it’s been far more helpful to consider the tightrope walk of my own attention. Whatever I’ve done this past week— watching Godzilla’s blitzed-out stumbles and trying to denote a pattern— surely isn’t the answer. But I don’t think there’s much use in shaming myself for feeling dizzy. Everything is real and nothing is real and there is no clear plan and the beast is dying but damnit, it just took out another house. That isn’t theoretically destabilizing. It’s too much. We all, the weary observers and opposers, deserve some grace for not always knowing what to do in the face of it.

It’s not, nor has it ever been the case, that I should ignore everything that comes from this administration, But it also remains true that the answer is always to tend to a project— a project of care, or political education, or power building— that will live far beyond this terrifying moment. Keep calm and carry on? Not exactly. That first part feels as impossible as ever. But we can always carry on. The monster will rage/the monster will bumble. We have to just keep building.

End notes (a lot of fun announcements this week):

1. As you probably know, my current humble building project is a relay of fifty gatherings in fifty states. And in case you missed it, WE’VE ANNOUNCED OUR FIRST DATES… STARTING NEXT WEEK!

   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!. Info here.

      1. Also: Seattleites. I’ll be in town all day, and will be offering another edition of “hang out office hours.” Basically the idea is, I’ll post up in a coffee shop. If you’d like to come hang out, sign up for a slot. Open both to old friends and people I’ve never met before! I’ll be at the Victrola Coffee on 15th in Capitol Hill from 9:00-3:00. Come hang!

   2. OREGON: May 3rd at Reedwood Friends (2901 S. Steele Street, Portland) at noon. You all, this is going to be such a fascinating event. Reedwood is a faith community trying to bridge the gap between a whole bunch of theologies while also being good neighbors to the surrounding community, regardless of belief. They’ll be co-hosting this discussion with a few other faith communities and neighborhood groups, and not only will it be fascinating but there will also be pizza. I’m bummed I won’t be there personally.

   3. CALIFORNIA: May 14th at Fog City Community Fitness (1649 Valencia, SF). 6:30-9:30 PM. What’s Fog City? Basically, think about everything you don’t like about gyms (exclusivity, bro-iness, lots of weird/bad body politics, Pete Hegseth, etc.) and then picture the opposite. All bodies welcome. Inter-generational, queer friendly, diverse, a safe place for kids, REALLY GOOD AT HOSTING POTLUCKS AND PARTIES. And on May 14th, they’re inviting you to hang with them too! Eat food, listen to music, maybe do some fun group workouts if you’re into it. OH, AND ‘LL BE A THIS ONE TOO.

   4. HAWAII: May 16th. A community 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!

2. 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!

3. Today is Ruination Day, my favorite holiday. I used to write an annual piece, but then I successfully said everything new I had to say about the holiday. If you’re wondering why I love it and what it’s all about, this entry will help you get caught up.

4. Finally, an honest request. I hope this helps, both this newsletter and offerings like my Barnraisers trainings and the Relay. Goodness knows we know more things that help right now. I love offering all this, but if you’ve ever wondered “how can he afford to do this? Like as his job,” the answer is paid subscribers. I try to keep prices cheap, and I give really good perks, because I appreciate you all so much. But if you can pitch in, please do. It truly helps.

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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. If keeping them from stealing my heart requires 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: