Category: The World

I don’t think I ever thought too much about the symbols of our country until recently. Well, until January 6th, 2020. Ironically, the attack on the Capitol building drew attention to the intention behind our public monuments. The intention being far more noble than the people responsible for building them. Obviously, as we know, the…

Yeah, I’m knitting. I’m also reading – every day, after work, for an hour. And writing. A thousand words every day, after work. And working in exercise next week. I’m adapting to a new job – a commute, even – that’s fallen by the wayside, but I’m aiming to be in an exercise routine by…

I will not link to anything related to Charlie Kirk’s death. I’m aware there’s a video circulating. I would advise anyone who’s watched it to immediately play Tetris. And I don’t think I need to comment on any of this. Everyone else is. I’ll just say that he advocated for gun rights against the “acceptable…

Trump says he’s sending in troops – all kinds of troops, all the troops, so many troops, so many kinds of troops – to all the “Democrat cities.” Leaving aside the fact that Eric Adams is a goddamn weirdo, and this is a perfect example of him on a normal day: Leaving that aside… In…

I left the office at 2:30 this afternoon, at the behest of my manager, because both New Jersey and New York had declared states of emergency due to incoming violent storms that would drop seven inches of rain in just a few hours on the New York/New Jersey corridor. It wasn’t soon enough. What is…

Or probably were never taught. My parents became Democrats in the 1950s, as the party swung from being a racist, southern, KKK-adjacent organization to a party that stood for civil rights, feminism, human rights. (One could argue they are all the same thing, and one would not be wrong.) My family name is Nixon. My…

Haven’t we been through this five years ago? I’ve been reading about Stephen Miller – I honestly cannot understand a person who grows up hating so many people. I cannot understand a glee taken in separating families and children; I cannot understand the rationale for what’s happening now. His family can’t understand it either. He’s…

I’ve disappeared down the well. I started a new job last Monday, May 5, at Prudential. I’m working on creating taxonomies to describe business processes. It’s fun work – I never thought I’d have fun working in insurance and financial services, but here we are, it’s a brand new day, and I’ve learned something about…

I’ve been thinking about Virginia Giuffre. From what I understand, she was training in Thailand for massage therapy, at Epstein’s expense, when she met her husband. She was only 19. So she kind of jumped out of the Epstein frying pan into the fire of a new relationship that got serious quickly. She didn’t start…

Years ago, my kids graduated from hamsters to a rabbit. Lucy Bun – named after Lucille Ball because she was a ginger rabbit – was so sweet. For a while, she was a free-range rabbit, until she chewed a few charger cords (Macbook chargers are EXPENSIVE) and the lower spines of the Oxford English Dictionary.…

The balance between keeping my sanity and being a responsibly-informed citizen is so incredibly difficult. The “flood the zone” approach – which has gone on much longer than this administration’s first week – leaves me exhausted, which is the point of it. The obtuse misunderstanding of the way language works depending on context – the…

Well, they haven’t got around to changing Denali back to McKinley, but the caving to fascism has, in a lot of ways, shot past mere capitulation into actual erasure. In NYC, there is a monument to Stonewall in Greenwich Village, which was where gay rights really began to kick off, in large part led by…

A lot happened the week of December 4. Luigi Mangione shot the CEO of United Healthcare. A day or so later, possibly even the same day (because nobody cares to understand the exact timeline), two teenagers in NYC were stabbed with what appears to be a screwdriver (and one was killed) for not being able…

I’m obsessed. With several things – the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO in broad daylight in Midtown Manhattan; the assassin’s escape, particularly how he’s proven the NYPD to be rather inept despite over $5B in funding and cameras all over the city; the response of social media across the political spectrum (which is extremely rare,…

I really wish I had found this 1989 letter from my father earlier. It’s a problematic letter because it is truly from the past, where terminology is not at all carefully thought through. But I think it retains a level of truthfulness that increasingly we’re not going to be finding much of. Dear Laura Jo… [Responding…

Your loneliness is not my problem The Discourse(TM) has been full of male loneliness. Young male loneliness, to be precise. If we’re defining “young” as the advertising demographic of ages 18-34, which is an advertiser’s Precious Precious, the concern seems to be that without corrective action, these lonely young men will be susceptible to Tate-ism…

I’ve been thinking a lot about this Giselle Pelicot case in France – the woman who discovered, after thinking she had Alzheimer’s and other unexplained ailments, that her husband had been drugging her every night and inviting 70-some men to come and rape her over 11 years. The men who refused to participate…also refused to…