Attenberg encourages participants to designate a set time of day, to gather their materials in advance, to treat the experiment with devotion. Committing to the writing generates, for me, even a little bit of mysticism: where might this discipline take me?

(In my case, the answer is often: water.)

I’m in a group chat dedicated to the challenge, and over the past almost-dozen days, my phone has lit up with writing progress updates and reactions from dawn till dusk. Some of us are morning pagers (me!); some of us are ‘write drunk; edit sober’-ers (also me, depending on the day). Folks check into the group chat to celebrate crushing their daily word count goals (one friend is further into a novel than she’s ever been! Yes, chapter 14!) or eking out just a few hard-won syllables.

The challenge is fun and high-spirited. I think it inspires one to write with abandon, and therefore, to unearth surprises or explore new directions. Pushing past our self-imposed limits, our mental barricades, is one of the best ways to encounter unexpected dimensions in our work.

This, I think, is what is talking about when she describes great writing as “happening to yourself . . . mining the depths of your own potential.” How does your writing place you on the path to encounter your Self rather than cater to whatever you think will earn you some shallow validation from others?

approaches the matter from a slightly different angle, but I think this is also what she’s talking about in her essay “Mind Fuck,” published first in the Sewanee Review and later as part of the essential craft book Body Work: the Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Febos describes the process of self-encountering this way:

“Over the years, I’ve come to look forward to the point in my own writing at which continuing seems both incomprehensible and loathsome… That resistance is a kind of imaginary prophylactic, a barrier between me and a new idea. It is the end of the ideas that I already had when I came to the page—the exhaustion of narrative threads that were previously sewn into me by sources of varying nefariousness or innocuity. It is on the other side of that threshold that the truly creative awaits me, where I might make something that did not already exist. I just have to punch through that false wall.”

I love this quote, at least partially because it helped me shape my MFA graduate presentation, which later became the essay, “The Problem with the Evangelical Story Structure.”

Sometimes, in order to access the deeper, truer, riskier, more intimate version of what you’re trying to say, you have to write yourself there. The only way to unearth what you’re trying to say is to write, read, revise, repeat.

And sometimes — especially in the midst of this summer challenge framed by word counts and daily productivity goals — ‘writing’ means something a little more expansive.

This past Saturday morning, I posted this note:

I did, finally, find the book I was looking for — Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino. (Tell me your favorite essay from that collection!)

Leave a comment

But by the time I found it, I’d settled into my cleaning + organizing groove. I turned from the craft lab to my bedroom, and organized all my clothes for the first time since Michael and I moved into this house in February. I cleared off the bathroom counter, made a dedicated space for my jewelry organizer, and hung up all my necklaces and earrings.

Over the course of several hours, I finally eliminated piles and piles of stuff that had been buzzing in my brain like a kind of environmental static.

My workflows and workspace can both get pretty chaotic, so I need occasional intervals to bring the clutter — physical and mental — back under control. I won’t claim that it literally is writing, but it does support the writing.

I’m a process girlie: I love to know the how. So please chime in! Are you doing 1000 words of summer? Do you have any specific strategies? What are your writing-adjacent activities that support the writing?

Some seasons and circumstances are more conducive to putting words on the page. This past weekend, after organizing my entire wardrobe, I got to spend time with a friend and her two young kiddos, a four-year-old and a one-year-old. She told me that she’s not really writing right now, and that’s fine, too. But what if she is, and it just looks different? Scribbles in margins, poems drafted in crayon on the backs of coloring pages, 3 a.m. iPhone notes typed only by the light of the screen?

On Sunday afternoon, we went to the creek. We blew up my inflatable duck tube, the one Michael gave me for my 26th birthday (one of the best gifts ever), and we floated in the current, marveled at the nearby mallards’ iridescent plumage, listened to the baby chortle.

Sunday night, after the baby had gone to bed, we sat on the back porch couch, relaxing in the evening cool. Michael played guitar. The four-year-old danced on the deck in her bare feet and the rest of us laughed and laughed.

Sure, it’s not writing, and it doesn’t need to be. But it’s not separate from the writing, either.

Experience and expression are inextricable from one another. This might be what C.S. Lewis was getting at when he wrote, “If only this toothache would go away, I could write another chapter on the problem of pain. But once it stops, what do I know about pain?”

This essay = 1061 words. I’ll text the group chat and let them know I’ve hit today’s word count goal.

If you need me, find me by the creek.

~ McKenzie

For those who don’t know, The Chosen is the currently the buzziest tv series to dramatize the life of Christ. Created, co-written, directed and produced by Dallas Jenkins — son of Jerry B. Jenkins, co-author, along with Tim LaHaye, of the Left Behind series — The Chosen is recognized as the highest-grossing crowdfunded media project in history.1

We started watching The Chosen because it was covered in the New Yorker last week. Okay, not just because it was covered in the New Yorker. Rather, I first learned about The Chosen through a Revealer article in April, and I followed a link to find that the show’s also been covered (repeatedly!) in Texas Monthly.

Christian attempts at film and tv do not typically receive lengthy, nuanced feature essays in prestige media. Coverage in The Revealer (a highbrow publication out of NYU that covers religion and culture), Texas Monthly (fantastic longform journalism for the masses stuffed with Texas love and lore)2, and The New Yorker (the iconic magazine needs no introduction [but have I told you I once visited the beautiful home of a translator and her bathroom was literally wallpapered with New Yorker covers? So classy]) is enough to pique my interest.

Furthermore, the coverage seemed to center on two distinctives about The Chosen: 1. its unusual crowdfunding model (sometimes getting into the legal dispute between The Chosen’s original production company, Angel Studios); and 2. its popularity amongst nonbelievers.

The first point is interesting mostly because of how it builds on and differs from longstanding Christian media tactics. identifies the way that consumerism and Christian culture became a uniting force for evangelicals, tracing the history of outlets like Family Christian Bookstores and Lifeway; has written about the Kendrick brothers of Sherwood Pictures (the production company behind Christian blockbusters Flywheel, Facing the Giants, and Fireproof) and their heavy reliance on donations and volunteer labor.3

But for me, the second point is the more intriguing one. It’s not like biopics about Jesus are new; in fact, every generation seems to try their hand at making one.

I mean, who remembers The Jesus Film? Created in 1979 by Campus Crusade for Christ (an evangelical organization that later rebranded to Cru), the film has been translated into more than 2,000 languages and has been shown by missionaries as a conversion tool all around the world. The movie even includes a sinner’s prayer at the end of the film, when viewers are invited to follow Jesus.4

The Jesus Film was already heavily dated by the time I was in youth group, but we still watched clips of it during sermons. Later, when we left church and were hanging out at each others’ houses, we watched the Jesus Dubs - youtube clips of the Jesus Film but with silly voices dubbed over. (It turns out the point was to satirize common misconceptions about what Jesus is like.)

PLEASE TELL ME SOMEONE ELSE REMEMBERS THE JESUS DUBS.

Leave a comment

The Jesus Film represents the extreme end of the spectrum of Christian media being used for proselytizing. The film is explicitly geared toward audiences who don’t yet believe, meant to serve as a sort of narrative threshold to bring them into the fold.

Since then, I feel like the pendulum has swung toward the other end of the spectrum: media designed to serve the needs, preferences, and biases of those firmly and safely ensconced within evangelicalism.

Kidd writes, “It continues to be possible to live a hermetically sealed Christian life, consuming only the evangelical propaganda that fits with one’s worldview.”

In my mind, this swing reached its apotheosis with “God’s Not Dead,” which the New Yorker describes as “a triumphalist account of campus evangelicals outdebating atheists.” What an incredibly lame-sounding plot summary. However, it is accurate. Joelle Kidd describes the God’s Not Dead franchise as “culture-war fantasies wherein an upstanding Christian proves the existence of God to a hard-headed atheist.”

I think I saw the first God’s Not Dead movie — I have a vague memory of watching it in the dorm lounge one night at Christian college — but the plot was so predictable I can’t remember if I actually watched it or if I just feel like I did. Ash Greyson, who worked on the marketing for God’s Not Dead (which, I should acknowledge, blew box market expectations out of the water), is quoted in the New Yorker article as saying, “We surround the core audience and we fire inward, and we don’t care if anyone else knows it exists.”

This feels like a distinctly different approach from The Chosen. Jenkins appears to have created a biblical dramatization that appeals to believers and non-believers alike. Statistics suggest that up to 40% of viewers do not identify as Christian. Some media outlets credit this to his interest in narrative structure; others chalk it up to his very human depiction of Jesus and the disciples.

As Sean O’Neal writes for Texas Monthly, “The show is more of a character-based drama than anything. It presents Jesus and his disciples as real, vaguely neurotic people, busting free of the stained-glass images that have long enshrined them. They bicker and fall in love. They struggle with insecurities and jealousies. A lot of them are just plain rude to one another. In many ways, The Chosen feels like a pious Entourage, following a bunch of hothead doofuses as they jockey for power around their famous friend.”

The Chosen has become renowned for its use of psychological concepts and frameworks for the first-century characters: Mary Magdalene’s demon possession is rendered as PTSD from sexual assault; Matthew the tax collector is on the spectrum. Furthermore, the show intentionally zooms out a little from the biblical narrative (which is really spare, if you’re trying to dramatize something, make rounded characters and compelling choices) and showcases the sociopolitical context: financial extraction by the Romans, in-group tensions and rivalries within the oppressed Jewish community.

Share

I find myself strangely bolstered by the fact that The Chosen concentrates on the story of Jesus’s life, however imagined by Jenkins and the production team. The life of Jesus remains radical, especially in an era when “Christian” has been reduced to a kind of politicized identity and “Christianity” is often interpreted as little more salvation-as-status. After all, if the only thing that Jesus did that mattered was die on the cross, why did he have to bother living on earth at all? Re-centering the life of Jesus diminished the power of transactional models of salvation that elevate intellectualized concepts like substitutionary atonement over the intrinsically interpersonal practices of forgiveness, redistribution, and mutual care.

The earthly life of the man they say is the Son of God retains its capacity to compel. Jesus is one of those characters who is simultaneously so pivotal and so opaque that he is remade in the media every generation.

In his breathtaking book, My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, Christian Wiman writes, “To every age Christ dies anew and is resurrected within the imagination of man . . . One truth, then, is that Christ is always being remade in the image of man, which means that his reality is always being deformed to fit human needs, or what humans perceive to be their needs. A deeper truth, though, one that Scripture suggests when it speaks of the eternal Word being made specific flesh, is that there is no permutation of humanity in which Christ is not present.”

I’m not yet sure how I feel about The Chosen. But I want to know your thoughts! Have you seen the show? Heard of it? Read any of the media coverage?

What are your instinctive reactions? What depictions of Jesus’s life generate strong reactions for you? And if you’ve never seen a Jesus biopic, what about this conversation stands out?

Leave a comment

When I sat down for morning pages yesterday (Monday) on my back porch, the date reminded me that it’s been five years since I’ve been back in Colorado. Five years since the cross-country relocation, from Texas to Colorado, that initiates the reckoning with self, belief, and belonging that serves as the arc of my memoir.

The memoir explores what it means to come back home. I moved away from Boulder, Colorado, full-time in 2011 to attend Christian college on the East Coast, with the intention of becoming a youth pastor. Ten years later, I moved back to Boulder with my atheist husband, and I got a job at the liquor store. Told in present tense in 2021, the memoir examines the collision between past and present and the tension between the memory of the girl I left behind and the woman I came back as.

It’s a deconstruction memoir, yes, but it’s also about home, family, and place. Can anyone really come home again—and how do you have grace with yourself when you do? How do you encounter the other as a real person with agency to deviate from your expectations for them? How can you be close to someone with whom you fundamentally disagree?

Figuring out how I want to handle time has been one of the most challenging aspects of revising my manuscript. For one thing, a story—at least in the Western framework—is essentially an assertion of causality. This happened, then this happened; ergo, this resulted.

At this point in the essay, a writer who is not me might invoke E.M Forster and his book, Aspects of the Novel, in which he asserts that a plot requires events connected by causality: “the king died and then the queen died of grief.”

I guess I have just invoked E.M. Forster (as the poets have taught me, to introduce something by way of negation is still to introduce it), but the citation more germane to my personal cultural education is the comedian Brian Regan, one of the few standup comedians we regularly listened to in the van on the way to and from church trips2.

In the video linked above, Brian Regan talks about how he hates it when authors use the phrase, “One thing led to another." "

“Isn’t that your job as the writer to tell me how this led to that?!” Regan says. I think of this bit all the time.

Leave a comment

If you’re attempting to demonstrate causality, you generally want to position the cause prior to the effect. So theoretically, if I want to show how I went from being a devout Christian teenager to a troubled twenty-something with a fraught relationship to faith, I should dramatize the earlier stages first: show growing up in church, what it felt like to be “swaddled in a blanket of significance,” the wraparound security that came from total assurance of salvation.

But the story I’m telling in my memoir isn’t rooted in the years-ago past. And other writers have already written books that tell the longform story of growing up in the church: ’s When We Were on Fire, ’s Wayward: a Memoir of Spiritual Warfare & Sexual Purity, and while I haven’t yet read the next two, I’m guessing they fit this category too (while also extending beyond it in different ways): ’s Growing Up Saved, and ’s On Fire For God.

The story of my memoir is not about the growing up, and not about the intervening years of gradual disaffiliation, but is about how to reckon with the dissonance. This story lives in the immediacy of recognizing my misalignment with the past and attempting to address those ruptures in real time.

During my MFA, I started writing the church camp essay that would eventually become “Dear Jesus, Am I broken enough yet?”, which was published in the Christian Century. While I was working on an earlier version of that essay, one of my advisors, Scott Korb, noticed that the tension of the piece didn’t lie in what happened in the past. The tension, and the possibility for revelation, lay in what I made of it now. “The reckoning,” he said, “is the story.”

Five years back in Colorado and I’m still reckoning, though that reckoning looks different now than it did for the first few years. I chafed for quite some time against ending my memoir where I did, because everything’s not resolved. But that’s also the nature of religious trauma. I don’t want to write a ‘happily ever after’; I don’t want to re-apply a kind of salvation arc.

In fact, I worked really hard in my memoir to avoid suggestions of a panacea, a deus ex-machina, a kind of coverall cure to the human condition. The incredible memoirist and critic, , has said that the arc of a memoir follows the protagonist from fucked-up to slightly less fucked-up. I wrote a couple months ago about my frustration with salvation stories, easy epiphanies, narratives that end with ‘and then I figured it all out.’ That’s not relatable to me, or believable. And it truncates the possibility of further storytelling. After all, what happens after you figure it all out?3

I’m still here in Colorado. Still treading the same streets I knew as a teenager, still bumping into my old ghosts every so often. I’m still revising and still reckoning. I hope you’ll stick around for the ride.

Share

Several readers are new here thanks to last week’s deep dive on the discourse around Yesteryear. If that’s you, thanks for reading, and I’m glad you’re here!

I’ve been on vacation this week in advance of some big summer shifts (stay tuned for updates!), so this week’s post is mostly a roundup of recent publications and a few comments about what I’m reading and writing now.

I’m writing to you from my friend’s living room couch in Miami Shores, Florida. Earlier this afternoon, my husband tried ocean fishing with defrosted squid as bait; now, he’s swapped the cephalopod for a stuffed mouse on the end of his fishing line, and he’s using the pole to play with one of my friend’s cats.

So now, as Michael baited Habeas, I will bait all of you with links and brief descriptions to some of my recent work! Think of each bullet point as a stuffed purple mousie tethered to the end of an invisible fishing line, reeling you in to read more good work about the intersections of Christianity and culture.

• A few weeks ago was book release day for both , with her new book, I Belong to Me (which I have not yet read but can’t wait to get my hands on!), AND , with her gorgeous graphic memoir about purity culture, childhood religious indoctrination, and finding freedom by relinquishing dogmatism, Everything in Color. I reviewed her book for Hippocampus magazine, a digital nonfiction publication, and I wrote about it in short form for this very newsletter, Critic at Play.

• I have an article in this month’s issue of The Revealer, an magazine that examines the role of religion in culture. I wrote about how Dr. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, shows up in the Epstein Files.

  
  I grew up in Colorado — mainly in the self-appointed liberal hub of ‘the People’s Republic of Boulder,’ but my family also spent a few years in Monument, a forested suburb of Colorado Springs. We made plenty of family pilgrimages to the Focus on the Family headquarters, where they had a a three-story slide, a retrofitted airplane a la Last Chance Detectives, and a functioning ice cream parlor called Whit’s End, in honor of Adventures in Odyssey.

Leave a comment

Speaking of Focus on the Family: I recently learned from perusing the back issues of ’s Strongwilled Project (conducted in conjunction with their partner, ) about Out of Focus: My Story of Sexuality, Shame, and Toxic Evangelicalism by Amber Cantorna-Wylde — a memoir about Focus on the Family’s legacy of promoting homophobia and one person’s journey to reclaim themself and their sexuality. I haven’t read the memoir yet, but it’s definitely on my list.

• Also out in the past month — my latest piece for Mayday magazine! I have been serving as Mayday’s inaugural critic-in-residence and during the course of my residency I have published four different essays about the intersections of Christian culture and popular media. “Christian Nationalism and the Dubious Possibility of Change” is the latest, but you can also check out the previous three:

  • “Please Don’t Make Fun of God,” about The Righteous Gemstones and religious humor

  • “The Silo of Spirituality,” about the chasm between religious publishing and mainstream literature

  • “The Gravel Path of Belief, Non-Belief, and the Ambiguous In-Between,” about reapproaching (books that reapproach) the Bible after deconstruction.

• For those of you looking for sincere stories about growing up religious, look no further than the latest story from , “The Mark of the Beast,” by .

  sneaker wave magazine

  the mark of the beast

  NOBODY BELIEVED ME when I told them demons sat next to us in the classroom or watched us pump back and forth on swings with chains that were probably illegally long. And when I described these invisible demons in intricate detail, people either made fun of me or scrunched up their faces and side-eyed me—the same way I do now when my QAnon sister tells m…

  Read more

  a month ago · 16 likes · 5 comments · sneaker wave

  I serve as executive editor for sneaker wave magazine, which is an online nonfiction literary magazine that publishes one well-written true story a month. And we are currently open for submissions! From now through June 15, send us your best true stories between 2,000 and 4,000 words.
  

  Submit to sneaker wave now!

  ’s 1000 Words of Summer starts in eleven days and I’m excited to generate some new work. I pulled out two of my old journals and I’ve been working on an essay about the Challenge Conference, a biennial national youth gathering for teens in the Evangelical Free Church in America (EFCA).
  

  What are the trips or experiences you always seem to keep writing about? And what sources do you use?

  

  What have you been reading, writing, and reflecting on this week? Hop in the comments and let me know.

  xoxo, McKenzie

Allow me to clarify: I’m interested in the female experience of religion WITHIN the context of mainstream culture—the religious subculture that operates at the fringe, the margin, of popular culture at large.

I’m not particularly interested in extreme fundamentalism, sectarianism, separatist communities. Rather, I’m interested in the uncomfortable overlap: the spaces where girls and women were taught to be ‘in the world but not of the world.’

I’m interested in this experience because it’s my own. My upbringing was not fundamentalist, but it was conservative evangelical. My parents supported Focus on the Family and Chuck Swindoll’s Insight for Living, but somehow avoided the Debi Pearl and Bill Gothard schools of parenting (IYKYK). I am constantly trying to quantify the strange quotient of ‘normalcy’ I experienced: I attended public school, but mine was a ‘values-driven’ public charter school run by a board of Christian moms. I watched the Office but never the Simpsons. I participated in high school theater, but after rehearsal, most of my theater friends carpooled to midweek youth group. My parents let me host parties in the basement, but my friends and I spent those parties playing card games and going to the local playground to play groundies, not getting drunk or spinning bottles.

I am interested in the normalization of conservative Christianity—partially because the powerful Christian factions pretending at separatism are the same ones that have slowly been accruing greater and greater power in Washington. The more their tactics and values are normalized, the less resistance they face. The same Christian groups who claim to want nothing to do with the world are actually the ones working so hard to remake the world—specifically, the United States of America—in their own authoritarian, patriarchal, white supremacist image. (If this captures your curiosity, check out ’s recent deep dive on the New Apostolic Reformation, or my recent essay for MAYDAY about Christian Nationalism.)

Maybe that’s why I’m not overly interested in the tradwife conversation. Plus, I don’t know that much about it—it’s not my lane. There’s a dangerous flattening that comes from conflating all religious participation with fundamentalism and all church involvement with cults. Identifying everything with its most extreme expression is another kind of binary thinking that ignores nuance and squelches critical engagement.

So I’ve heard about Yesteryear. I haven’t read it. But I have been reading the reviews of it, and I have been surprised and gratified to find a melody threaded through the discourse that harmonizes with something I’ve felt for a long time.

In ’s review of Yesteryear, she identifies what disappointed her about the novel: Caro Claire Burke(CCB)’s lack of serious inquiry into the context in which she sends her protagonist.

Stein writes, “Caro Claire Burke didn’t think it was necessary to bring any research into the novel about what it was like for women homesteaders in the American West in 1855. She wasn’t curious enough to learn what “chores; chores; chores” actually entailed; . . . Burke doesn’t seem to find women’s domestic labor very interesting.”

Whether it’s domestic labor or religious devotion, readers and reviewers consistently take issue with the lack of granularity in CCB’s portrayal of her protagonist, Natalie. Burke has presented an idea of a character that she never fully inhabits. Furthermore, the fact that she thought she could present such a blurry-edged character in such a major book reveals what I’ve suspected for a long time: religious experience is not taken seriously as a subject in mainstream contemporary literature.

When women of religious persuasion or commitment are depicted in popular media or literature (and even for such women to appear is fairly rare), they are often not shown with empathy but with a kind of exoticised fascination.

Yesteryear seems to deliver more identitarian bewilderment than narrative development: who does one have to be in order to be like this, rather than, how did you get here?

The implicit response to the question ‘who does one have to be’ is the answer, someone completely unlike myself. The author apparently cannot compassionately envision herself in the shoes of her protagonist.

But if the question is, how did you get here, then the implied determinative factor is not identity but circumstance — could something happen that would put me in that same position, too? “There but for the grace of God go I.”

frames it like this: “No matter how much of an “other” I may seem to you, your job as a novelist is not to work inductively – i.e. “What a sad little life this lesbian millennial led! What sort of sad little consciousness might emerge from such a life?” – but deductively: “These are the circumstances of this character’s life, so what’s the consciousness to match them?”

What kind of religious values, commitments, and fears would a character have to have to end up in Natalie’s position? If someone is going to write a book with a religious protagonist, I want them to take that protagonist’s religiosity seriously.

Yesteryear is painfully out of touch with the experiences of religion that it claims to represent.

In the Argument’s review of Yesteryear, and write, “Perhaps because of her “secular childhood,” Burke does not imagine that faith could play much of an important role in understanding the perspective of women living in religious communities. The word “God” is invoked more times as a curse (“God no,” Natalie laughs when asked about getting plastic surgery) or descriptor (“God-awful quilt”) than as the central figure of any Christian’s life.“

When I read this, I thought, yes! This is one of the problems with so much published writing about religion: religion is depicted as so foreign, so strange and niche, that authors seem to forget (and apparently no one reminds them?) that the religious and the formerly religious may in fact be among their readers.

I felt this way last summer while reading Melissa Febos’s latest book, The Dry Season: Finding Pleasure in a Year without Sex. Febos writes about her experiment with voluntary celibacy as if the idea is completely novel, an approach to sex that hasn’t been invoked since the time of Hildegard of Bingen and the other female mystics Febos so idolizes—when, in fact, the United States has facilitated a pretty major movement encouraging sexual abstinence, partially funded by government dollars and carried out by public schools, colloquially known as purity culture.

When Famished author posted an Instagram story about editing her book review of The Dry Season, she and I shared a brief text exchange about how disorienting it was to read Febos’s book and to reckon with Febos’s apparent ignorance as to the prevalence of purity culture. Does she not know about the existence of girls like us? Anna and I both seemed to ask.

The Dry Season is a memoir, so one could argue that Febos has no responsibility to comment on movements that do not intersect with her experience. Maybe my frustration was solely self-aggrandizing; I wanted to see more of myself in Febos’s book. But as a memoirist who loves to see a story grounded within a broader cultural context, I’m curious how a nod or two toward purity culture could’ve expanded the scope of the book, could’ve located Febos’s experience of sex, sexuality, and intimacy hunger in a larger cultural conversation.

Secular literature and the secular literary discourse at large don’t consider earnest religious experience worthy of serious consideration. That’s the major misstep that Caro Claire Burke seems to have made.

I am thrilled that Yesteryear has propelled the female experience within repressive religious contexts into the zeitgeist, as seems to occur once every few years. These books, like Yesteryear, tend to be sensationalist, reductive, and lacking emotional nuance. I would include on this list Tara Westover’s Educated and Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox—not that they’re bad books, just that they’re treated like singular stories of escaping fundamentalist ______ (insert religion here), often without much reflection.

CCB kind of damned herself to a lot of religious (and formerly religious) readers when she said, in an interview with the Rumpus, “I realized very quickly that whether it’s Mormonism or evangelicalism or Jehovah’s Witness, it’s really all the same in terms of how women are treated and what the expectations are for them.”

This is an inherently reductive framing, weakening readers’ capacity to engage in education conversations about the many faces of fundamentalism.

Sure, I have also written about how fundamentalist religious patriarchy can create similar situations of abuse across different religious contexts. There are, as CCB acknowledges, similarities. But asserting that whole categories of religions WITH WHICH ONE HAS NO PERSONAL EXPERIENCE are ‘really all the same’ feels so patently disrespectful. Irresponsible.

The discourse around Yesteryear reveals that believerhood has become illegible to the public at large. At some point, polarization pushed faith past ‘the other side of the (sanctuary) aisle’ and into a realm so foreign it elicits ridicule, not recognition.

Share Critic at Play

In a wide-ranging conversation about Yesteryear in the “2 Girls 1 Book” feature, and interpret Natalie as a protagonist “filled with violent zeal (she is religious, that part isn’t fake)”.

‘That part isn’t fake’? I repeated back to myself skeptically. Why? Because Natalie uses the phrase ‘waterboarded with modernity’? I mean, sure, great phrase, but that tells me nothing about the epistemology to which she adheres.

To be anti-modernity is not necessarily a hallmark of religion, and the fact that that phrase is what convinces Sykes and Akpovbovbo (whose arguments I otherwise find quite engaging!) that Natalie’s religiosity is ‘real’ seems to illustrate the way a caricature of anti-intellectualism and anti-feminism has come to serve as a stand-in for religiosity on the big screen, even when that screen is pulped paper rather than silver projection (and, given the major announcement that Anne Hathaway had bought the screen rights to Yesteryear before the novel was even finished, potentially a relevant conflation).

, a writer who can certainly chronicle the particular interiors of evangelical religious life, writes about her time at Moody Bible College as a place characterized by serious intellectualism, just pointed in a different direction than most of her contemporaries.

If you’re going to give me a protagonist who claims to be defined by their religion, at least let us see them wrestle with that. Give them—and us—the decency of allowing that to be real.

In the review on Vox, also presents Natalie as wrestling with modernity.

But in my understanding, the religio-political steam engine powering the ‘trad’ train, as it were, is fueled more by an affection for retrograde gender roles and religious hierarchies rather than the ignorance of modern technological conveniences. After all, as Burke makes so visible, trad wives have built thoroughly contemporary product lines and media empires with the means of thoroughly contemporary technology.

Are people looking for a tradwife novel or are people looking for a time travel novel? One of the quickest ways that readers go wrong when assessing a book is that they evaluate the book as it is against the book they wanted it to be, rather than the book it was trying to be.

I don’t believe for a second that tradwives are actually yearning for an earlier time. The moniker is a misnomer. At no point has the goal been to travel back in time, but to conjure a false, mythological past, where women are revered at the same time as they are disenfranchised.

I think, in spite of myself, about my mother: a conservative Christian woman who flourished as a stay-at-home mom, who has never felt effective in an office, who shamelessly idealizes the homesteaders and pioneers who settled this land (and participated in displacing and genociding the indigenous people who lived here before them). She is a twenty-first-century woman who doesn’t really get feminism. It’s not that she hates feminists, or views them as working toward something evil. It’s just that . . . she doesn’t really see what all the fuss is about. So what if all the pastors of her church are men and she spent years working as the assistant children’s programming director reporting to a six-and-a-half-foot tall man with a bad temper named John? She wouldn’t have wanted to be a pastor anyway. She’d rather make crafts with the kindergarteners.

My mom is the antithesis of Natalie, CCB’s seething, embittered protagonist.

In the Vox article, Grady continues, “Throughout the novel, characters create an imaginary woman out of scraps of social media content, just so that they can get mad at her. Natalie does it with Reena, and Natalie’s followers do it to her. In Burke’s telling, we do this because we are all unhappy with our own lives and want to lash out. Which is a little strange, because what is the novel Yesteryear if not the process of creating an imaginary woman out of scraps of social media content, just so that we can get mad at her?”

Grady names the hypocrisy of the novel about social media hypocrisy: that to deny Natalie her own beliefs is to rob the premise of its power.

Subscribe now

That being said, I’ve also noticed aspects of commentary that seize upon Natalie’s identification as a ‘Good Christian Woman’ who does not attend church or practice any form of visible devotion as possibly emblematic of the most dangerous forms of Christianity today—forms of religiosity that have coalesced into an identity devoid of accountability and commitment, a cultural alignment without any ideological guardrails. These are the ‘Creaster’ Christians who only attend church on Christmas and Easter, cultural Christians who claim Christ but still curse at the car one lane over in traffic, or use the c-word like Natalie does. For a comparative benchmark: I’m personally quite fond of expletives, and my Christian parents recently asked me to tone down the swearing while I’m in their presence. Christians like Natalie might identify as ‘evangelical’ in a Pew survey and also unquestioningly support Trump. This is the ambiguously affiliated evangelical of the Trump era. In Jesus and John Wayne, historian writes about the messy lack of definitional criteria, explaining,

“What it means to be an evangelical has always depended on the world beyond the faith. In recent years, evangelical leaders themselves have come to recognize (and firmly lament) that a ‘pop culture’ definition has usurped ‘a proper historical and theological’ one, such that today many people count themselves ‘evangelical’ because they watch Fox News, consider themselves religious, and vote Republican.”

The lack of particularity in books like Yesteryear is actively contributing to the erosion of shared cultural language for discussing Christianity and fundamentalism.

Leave a comment

I want to root for Caro Claire Burke (where did the framework of competition come from?). Her article for the Guardian about tradwives, “Serve, Smile, Procreate,” is smart and biting. CCB references how there is a singular continuum that stretches from viral tradwife content to the ICE raids and murder of Renee Good, and I agree with her. But there are so many interim steps that also bear addressing.

In ’s rave review for the Cut, she describes feeling full access to Natalie’s interiority. Maybe this is in contrast, Hogan admits, to the caginess of real tradwives, the ones on which Yesteryear is allegedly modeled, the ones from which their colossal audiences only ever receive immaculately produced content and never off-the-cuff cursing or furious inner monologues. With that comparison at the forefront of Hogan’s review, her appreciation for what she interprets as the fictional Natalie’s transparency is a little more understandable.

But there’s one paragraph in Hogan’s review that gave me pause.

“The real-life tradwives would never let us see what compromises they’ve made . . . There’s never an acknowledgement that they’re cosplaying Betty Draper because they have no other choice, because other doors had shut behind them.”

Hogan juxtaposes the fictional Natalie’s ‘transparency’ with her ‘censoriousness’ around what she has lost, or sacrificed—in the words of , “what she has had to amputate in order to become herself.”

Ever so subtly, Hogan implies that one would only choose the tradwife life (‘choice feminism’ is a major aspect of the discourse surrounding Yesteryear) if they had no other options—and a choice made under duress is hardly a choice.

Again, I want to return to circumstance, to the empathy of imagination that asks, ‘how did you get here.’

This is where I hope to remind readers that all choices are made within specific contexts. None of us truly have access to infinite opportunities at once. All of us have experienced the closure and opening of different doors in our lives.

For example: if I had found a godly man at Christian college who’d actually liked me at the same time as I liked him, I’m not sure I would be writing this essay right now.

When Hogan writes of the tradwives, “there’s never an acknowledgement that . . . other doors had shut behind them”—for how many of us is that true?

Reading the reviews of Yesteryear made me wonder about our collective capacity to imagine people fueled by motivations other than our own. Has the breakdown of the social fabric and the intensification of our echo chambers deposited us in a place where we cannot fathom an ‘other’ who is not made in the image of ourselves? Where we are more likely to interpret someone different from us as fraudulent rather than simply unfamiliar?

In God, Human, Animal, Machine, former evangelical turned tech writer Meghan O’Gieblyn uses the alleged prevalence of internet bots to examine the challenge of conceptualizing the other. This is a big block quote, but it’s been sizzling in my brain for weeks.

“The problem is not merely that public opinion is being shaped by robots. It’s that it has become impossible to decipher between ideas that represent a legitimate political will and those that are being mindlessly propagated by machines. This uncertainty creates an epistemological gap that renders the assignment of culpability nearly impossible and makes it all too easy to forget that these ideas are being espoused and proliferated by members of our democratic system—a problem that is far more deep-rooted and entrenched and for which there are no quick and easy solutions.”

How do we reckon with the reality of people whose behavior and allegiances we cannot predict? What do you do when the other has become incomprehensible, unimaginable, to you?

Well, if you decide to write a book about that unimaginable other, you better start doing some serious research.

, in her so-hot-it-burned-my-hands review of Yesteryear, makes a fantastic point about CCB’s self-described research methods, which involved talking to Mormon and evangelical women and lurking on forums for people who left.

Holly writes, “Burke’s primary corpus for understanding fundamentalist Christian womanhood was deconversion narratives — testimonies from women who left. This is, to be fair, a rich and important body of material. I have read a great deal of it and written some of it. But it has one structural feature that matters enormously for what Burke was trying to do: the narrator has, by definition, left. The frame is retrospective. The interpretive lens is “here is what was wrong with the thing I was inside of.” It is an excellent corpus for understanding the experience of leaving. It is a terrible primary source for ventriloquizing a character who is, per the conceit of the novel, still in it and sincere about it.”

This reiterates, yet again, the dearth of legitimate representation of religious women—and it brings me back to original point that instigated this (now very long) essay:

When I started formulating these thoughts in a Substack note, I said that the mainstream literary treatment of women’s religious experiences is so often over-marketed and under-considered, while the people writing with intimate knowledge of religious dynamics and communities are often seen as too far outside the mainstream to comment.

As a literary critic who specializes in covering books about religious identification, experience, and communities, and the intersections of religion and culture, I’ve repeatedly had trouble placing reviews because literary magazines don’t consider the books I’m reviewing to be relevant, or they won’t touch work from ‘religious’ presses.

How are we supposed to engage in rigorous conversations about culture if so many people insist on ignoring and minimizing the role of religion?

I have written elsewhere about the apparent chasm between secular and religious literature and how I have trouble finding my own footing somewhere in between these two cultural worlds. I long for greater overlap, more conversation between the two. I want more mainstream readers to find the work that showcases the endless variations within religious experience, its irreducible complexity.

There is good — nuanced, textured, thoughtful, rigorous — work out there about the nuances of religious and post-religious experience!

For example, ’s memoir, A Well-Trained Wife, gives readers an intimate glimpse into the far-from-romanticised life of being a submissive fundamentalist Christian wife. Levings also traces her journey from ‘normal’ teen girl to being a mother who wore shapeless denim jumpers and re-used toilet paper to eventually fleeing her abusive marriage and repressive fundamentalist community. A Well-Trained Wife captures Levings’s motivations, her missteps, and her very human arc from a position many of us can relate to—that of being a teenage girl at church—to a position—tradwife and survivor of domestic violence—that is hopefully far less familiar. Levings (whose sequel, I Belong to Me, came out last week!) writes with lived experience from within the phenomenon.

As I wrote about two weeks ago, ’s breathtaking graphic memoir, Everything in Color, just came out. I also cherish the work of , , , , , , and so many others. (If I didn’t name you and you write in this space, it’s not an intentional exclusion! I’ve just been working on this essay for . . . so many hours . . . and it’s late.)

Have you read Yesteryear or the reviews of it? What lands for you, and what feels alienating? Do you see yourself in portrayals of religious or religious-adjacent characters, or do they feel fraudulent?

Leave a comment

Who are the writers you turn to for portrayals of religious experience and religious wrestling? These can be narratives of religious disaffiliation, deconstruction stories, escape memoirs, all of it. There is room for a multitude of stories here.

An observation: pandemic stories have started resurfacing. They have started appearing in books (most notable example: Ben Lerner’s Transcription) and in manuscripts I’ve been editing.1 What is it about now, I wonder, that finally has people ready to start revisiting that time?

While it was still happening,2 people seemed to want to hold onto their work until they could see it with greater clarity, greater perspective. I remember one Nonfiction Zoom Hang in spring, 2021, when a friend said that she was waiting to understand how it all came about before she wrote about it. “Whoa,” I remember saying. “It’s like you’re a protagonist waiting for the arrival of the reflective narrator.”

Today, behind my rain-streaked windowpane, I don’t know if I’m protagonist or narrator. Is the action happening to me, or am I capable of commenting on it?

Share

How does one write from within a cresting wave?

How does one write from within a phenomenon, a surging cerulean capsule, that has not yet made landfall?

Today I took a bath and brought my laptop and wrote about local sauna clubs and biohacking and what being a human is even for.

Today I stopped by the liquor store and then went to a local coffee shop + bar and wrote about state-specific nuances within the spirits industry. I wanna delve into corporate exploitation, commodification of the body and what we consume, the subtle implication that ease is good for businesses (“we have to streamline the industry,” strikes me as such a standard justification for the removal of consumer protections) and bad for humans (that old protestant association of suffering and moral benefit). But these kinds of essays are slow to write, slow to research, slow to ruminate over. I think often of the essay, titled “Girl 6” in Tressie McMillian Cottom’s book, Thick, wherein she, asks who is granted the position of setting the cultural agenda?

I’ve been struggling with substack — is this inevitable? What’s that term for starting out with something, thinking you’re preternaturally gifted, and then only as your skill develops do you realize how unsuccessful your early attempts were? Ah, the Dunning-Kruger effect — because I promised to release one piece a week and holy shit that is a lot of work. But I want this to be a forum for musing, curiosity, half-baked ideas that I launch into the world like a bottle to float on the sea for a while and then maybe, in the fantasy where there is someone waiting on an opposite shore, the bottle returns with a human reaction from somewhere outside of myself.

What is the purpose of an informal blog (if I can venture to claim that anything is informal, in the era of commodification and the self-as-brand-identity) in a forum deemed (aspirationally) equivalent to legacy publications, but absent their structural support?

I’m reticent to post something so ragged, because I want to develop a platform where I write with polish and footnotes and authority—but for this week, I guess my ‘authority’ lies in shared experience, that so many of us are scrounging together essays at the end of long days, that we are trying to stitch together experience and subjectivity and research and inspiration to create something novel, some new insight, even as the rain dribbles down the windowpane and the cat scratches at her litterbox and you don’t know the vagaries tomorrow will hold.

Maybe my heightened awareness of change is because it’s spring, the weather fluctuating on the hour, the inescapable awareness that nothing is ever truly static. A relief and an indictment all at once. The flowers wilted before I can even catalogue all their names and shades.

I worry that this sounds like a somewhat frenzied essay, lightly despairing, but it’s not. We can’t all be producing all the time. Some nights are just right for sitting by the window while it rains.

Deep breath, drink some water, remember that you are a person before and after the demands layered on you.

And if you haven’t yet, now is a great time to grab your free seat for my virtual panel on Friday! You can read a bit about the background of this panel in a recent Critic at Play, and if you can’t make it live, I’ll send out a link to the recording next week. Thanks, as always, for being here.

First off, HAPPY PUB DAY to Stephanie Stalvey, former church kid, graphic memoirist, and author of Everything in Color: a Love Story, available now from 23rd St. Press.

I literally requested an ARC (advance review copy) of Everything in Color *checks spreadsheet* a full eleven months ago. As soon as Stephanie Stalvey announced her publisher, I reached out and asked to review the book. Thankfully, the person that responded to my email was very gracious about my overzealous request and told me that I should check back again in the new year. I followed up on January 2nd . . . and got an automatic out-of-office response that said they’d be back on January 5th.

Overeager much?

On one hand, I knew that my request timeline was completely unhinged. On the other hand, I have followed Stalvey’s work for a while, and I could not wait to get my hands on her gorgeous, full-color, five-hundred-plus page graphic memoir. And I knew that reviews of books about earnest religious experience can be really difficult to place.1

As a book reviewer and former church kid, I have made it my personal beat to read all the memoirs (and essay collections, and the occasional novel)2 about renegotiating one’s relationship to religion. Stalvey’s work is set apart not only by her stunning illustrations, but also by the clarity with which she renders the individual experience in a larger sociopolitical context.

The book arrived in my mailbox two days before I met up with my childhood best friend in Europe for a girls’ trip. (Hannah is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship about a thousand miles away from me, so she picks out TravelZoo deals as a way for us to spend time together.)

When Hannah arrived at the hotel in Reykjavik, I pulled Everything In Color out of my bag. “Look what I brought us!” I announced. She grinned.

“I was wondering what book we were going to talk about this trip,” she said. When we were in Barcelona, we both read Shannon Harris’s memoir, The Woman They Wanted3, and we discussed ’s Knock at the Sky4 over beignets in New Orleans.

I won’t say much more about Everything in Color here, in hopes that you pop over to Hippocampus and check out my review—and then click over to Bookshop.org (where you can find a handy-dandy page with all the books I’ve reviewed) and buy yourself a copy!

Also out today is the latest essay of my critical residency at Mayday magazine! I’ve used my residency to write about certain friction points between evangelicalism and culture, including Christian children’s media, the Righteous Gemstones, and, in this latest essay, Christian nationalism. I wrote the essay in early November, and, as is typical in the Trumpocene5, anything vaguely political written more than a week ago can feel disorientingly out of date. I was drafting this essay back when Trump was first building the White House Ballroom, long before he would use an assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to talk up his architectural endeavors. But the books and the topics that I consider in the essay feel even more urgent than when I first started reading them—so join me in considering ’s book, Star-Spangled Jesus, alongside ’s The Undertow.

Which of these books/essays are you immediately drawn to? I’m interested in how different aspects of evangelicalism concentrate on the inner life (as explored by Stephanie Stalvey) and the outward-facing, communal life (as addressed by Ajoy and Sharlet). Everything in Color dramatizes some of the dynamics that were so intimately familiar to me, the way that evangelicalism teaches its adherents—and specifically, its adolescent, female adherents—to crucify their inner nature, to override their inner voice. Then, Star-Spangled Jesus demonstrates how evangelicalism also incentivizes its adherents to push back against cultural norms, to defy cultural expectations and distinguish themselves by way of difference.

These demands function together as interlocking systems of alienation, cutting you off from your inner voice and outer connection with others. You’re isolated from multiple directions, with nowhere to turn for empathy or self-understanding. So you’re forced to turn to Jesus—or the commercialized version of him presented to you by Christian media—for comfort and strength. Note how this is also a tactic of abusive partners: to incrementally reduce your support network and undermine your self-trust.

This is exactly why books like Stalvey’s are so vital: they take the isolated experiences that were sold to us as individualized failures (if God feels far away, who moved?) and reveal them as engineered systems of control.

Leave a comment

What in these essays resonates with you? Did you grow up with a soft fondness for the aesthetics and privilege of Christian nationalism? What sources do you turn toward to make sense of it all now?

And as always, thanks for reading.

Apparently CNN broke the story back in March, so I don’t know why it was all over my social media this week.

“62 million hits in a month,” the posts exclaimed.

I’d opened instagram as a momentary distraction from whatever draft I was working on, and my body froze while I pieced together the news: an online ‘rape academy’ littered with video footage of assault tagged with instructions and search terms that men can use to learn ‘best practices’ for how to drug their wives and sexually assault them while they sleep.

If this absolutely horrifying methodology for intrafamilial abuse rings any bell of familiarity, that’s likely the fault of Dominique Pelicot, the French man who, after being caught in a supermarket taking photos up a stranger’s skirt, was discovered to have arranged for over 70 men to come to his home and rape his sedated wife, over the course of about a decade. The site that Dominique Pelicot used to facilitate his abuse has been shut down, but according to the CNN article, untold others exist.

Many of the men engaging in these forms of abuse also record them, and the video footage, typically labeled as “sleep” content, is traded online like a commodity.1

What are we supposed to do with this information?

I felt numb reading the social media posts, and I feel numb typing this now.

As I scrolled, I wondered about the way the individualization of the algorithm robs us of our ability to respond collectively. It seemed like everyone I knew online was posting about the CNN story, but in my embodied life, no one mentioned it. Were the algorithms just feeding my anxiety? Were others aware and staying silent, or had the news not been fed to them?

How can anyone confront this? How can anyone integrate this information with the daily grind of ordinary responsibilities and the wonder of being alive? How do we learn about ‘rape academies’ amidst the quotidian rhythm of bills and laundry, grocery shopping and networking events?

How can we live other than in a state of constant dissociation?

I want to have a response to the atrocities that goes somewhere, that offers consolation and insight, that leads to restoration, somehow (restoration of what, a more cynical part of me mutters). But I don’t have that. What I have is fear.

Fear of the men who are becoming emboldened with each new revelation that there are no consequences for abusing women, children, or folks who are otherwise marginalized. Fear of the men who feel comfortable admitting that they would act on their worst instincts ‘if the circumstances allowed.’

Subscribe now

I have always known that men, given the opportunity, would take advantage of those with lesser social status. This assumption was embedded into the purity culture in which I was raised. When I was 14, I attended a Pure by Choice rally at the now-demolished Broomfield Events Center. Concert lights illuminated the stage and the speaker — a charismatic white man, likely in his late thirties or early forties, sporting a tight black t-shirt, expensive jeans, and a Britney Spears-style headset mic — held up before the gathered audience (hundreds of us? Thousands of us?) a leather-bound book, with a gilded title and a red ribbon bookmark. “This is one of the most-read books in the world,” he claimed. But it wasn’t the Bible. It was The Game, a 2005 account of investigative journalist Neil Strauss’ experiences undercover in the pickup artist community.

This was why we needed to commit to sexual purity, the speaker explained. As a devout evangelical teenager, the speaker’s rationale made sense to me. The purity movement — the evangelical-turned-conservative-mainstream injunction toward sexual abstinence outside of marriage and the implicit conflation of a woman’s sexual status with her personal worth — was meant to provide an alternative to the “sex-obsessed” secular world and hookup culture.

However, when I recall this scene now, I’m mostly struck by the pathetic insufficiency of the speaker’s exhortations for keeping women and girls (and queer and nonbinary folks) safe. Purity culture did nothing to alter women’s position in society as little more than sex objects. The Pure by Choice rally speaker’s remarks uncannily prefigured the first definition I ever heard of rape culture: “It’s telling women not to get raped, rather than telling men not to rape people.”

While I write these words, there is a rapist in the White House. A rapist holds the most powerful position in the United States of America, one of the most powerful positions in the world. We, the American people, voted him in, multiple times. White women like myself2 elected a rapist to the highest office in the United States, partially motivated by a desire to preserve the privilege they reap from his endorsement of white supremacy, even at the cost of his endorsement of patriarchy.

What was Nixon’s tell that exposed the Watergate scandal — a sweaty forehead? That’s all it took to remove him from the halls of power. Not public bragging, drawings of a nude woman gifted to the country’s most infamous sexual predator, ample photographic evidence of a long-standing relationship with aforementioned predator, evidence-backed testimonies of a woman who survived being sexually assaulted when she was a child?

Trump has been impeached twice.

All this evidence exists against him.

And yet he’s still in the White House, starting wars no one approves of, threatening genocide in a social media post.

When will the horrors be enough for anyone to fucking do something?

And I don’t mean collective action or creative protest signs or incredible papier-mache puppets to show off at a No Kings rally. I don’t want to denigrate those efforts and I believe they’re important.3 But I mean, when will the institutions that exist to curb presidential overreach of power actually fulfill their duty to do so?

Where are the checks and balances? Where is Congress? Where is accountability? Where is prosecution for those who violate the rights of others?

Leave a comment

I recently read French philosopher Manon Garcia’s incredible book, Living with Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial (translated by Maya B. Kronic, Polity Books, 2025). Garcia, who teaches on the concepts of consent and submission, writes with clarity, insight, and vulnerability about acts of violence and trespasses that exceed my capacity for comprehension.

Neige Sinno’s book Sad Tiger (translated by Natasha Lehrer, Seven Stories Press, 2025) is both a gripping account of childhood sexual abuse and a critical inquiry into the ways CSA is addressed (or elided) in literature and film. In it, Sinno asks who is the ideal commentator to reveal such horrors to an outside audience. “If the person talking was affected but they were not the primary victim, their account offers a way of discussing incest as a social phenomenon while avoiding the unbearable pathos of direct suffering,” Sinno explains. Garcia fulfills this role impeccably: she incorporates her formal knowledge as well as her subjective, embodied experience as a woman. She educates the reader about consent within French law, the ways the claims of the defendants perpetuate certain myths that undergird rape culture, and she also includes her human reactions to the trial.

“I constantly feel like screaming,” Garcia writes.

At the end of the book, after 143 pages of commentary and analysis of the trial, Garcia enjoins men to fondness. She rails against “the absolute objectification, which serves to negate the very existence of the other, [which] is reflected in the language used by the defendants.”

Unsurprisingly, because they are perpetrators of the same kinds of crimes, the men featured in the CNN expose use similarly depersonalized language to refer to the women they drug and assault. Always, the woman’s personhood is framed as contingent upon and belonging to the man pimping her out. One man references “my Mrs,” as if he has not forfeited every bond of affection, trust, and legal alliance by selling access to her body on the internet.

This assertion of male possession overriding a woman’s autonomy calls to mind the disgustingly elated reactions to Donald Trump’s re-election in 2019, which far-right fuckboy Nick Fuentes celebrated with the reprehensible slogan, “your body, my choice.”4

Of course, I cannot write about one group’s intention to claim possession of another group’s autonomy without referencing the larger context of chattel slavery in this country, when white folks — men and women alike — believed that they owned the bodies and lives of the Black people they enslaved. I cannot, as a white woman, rail against the abuses of patriarchy, without acknowledging the ways Black women and other women of color are disproportionately targeted and discarded.

Thursday morning, I scrolled dozens of posts on social media about the CNN story. Then I closed instagram and stared out at my backyard, at the budding trees in the park beyond, and the blue wall of sky beyond that.

Thursday afternoon, I put on a high-necked plum-colored velvet jumpsuit, paired it with the faux leather jacket I’d originally obtained for last Halloween’s Bad Janet costume, and drove down to Denver for the final show of Flamy Grant’s Drama Queens tour.

The concert was held in an Episcopal church a few blocks from Cheesman Park. Apparently several years back a ceiling beam fell into the sanctuary, and the congregation decided to re-imagine their meeting space rather than restore it to what it had been before.

“Can you imagine that?” the queer priest joked to me after the show. “A church that’s actually willing to change?!”

Flamy Grant is a drag queen who sings about growing up Christian, suffering under the church’s heteronormative expectations, and finding acceptance and flourishing outside the church.

Flamy’s set was preceded by that of the opener, queer activist and singer-songwriter Heather Mae. The performers each wore bright and dazzling jumpsuits — Heather Mae’s was hot pink, Flamy’s was floral with a wide orange belt — and they sang about being hurt and discarded by the powers that be, but not letting that hurt restrain them. They sang about joy and beauty and love and hope.

I’ve written about Flamy Grant before. The first time I saw them in concert was last June, an idyllic evening at a mountain venue where we sat around afterwards sipping beers and swapping church camp stories. I wrote about it for Christian Century, holding my restorative evening with Flamy alongside the breaking sexual assault allegations being brought against Christian music superstar Michael Tait.

I don’t want to repeatedly juxtapose Flamy Grant concerts with the worst news coming out of the patriarchy. And I’m not trying to pair Flamy, or Flamy’s music, with these accounts of abuse.

Also, though I can’t believe this needs to be said, let me say it loud and clear: drag queens are not a categorical threat to children. Hetero-presenting men in positions of power are a threat to children.5 Hetero-presenting men in positions of power — even relative power — are a threat to their wives, women they don’t know, queer and nonbinary people. Drag queens are not the problem. Queer and trans people are not the problem. Ideologies of domination are the problem.

But I don’t want to write about the CNN story without writing about the Flamy Grant concert. Flamy’s music reminds me that there is life beyond frameworks of domination. Liberation is possible.

I’m not trying to minimize anything and I’m not saying that being able to find joy and purpose after suffering somehow justifies or nullifies the suffering. And I am so sick and tired of a society where it is deemed acceptable to break things in the name of progress. The story of domination is not the only story. There are also stories of reclamation.

The Flamy Grant concert reminded me: we can cultivate new communities, choose our own families, reconfigure our churches after the ceiling falls in.

We don’t have to settle for the frameworks we’ve been given. We can grow toward more.

“I grew up watching old movies with my mother. Together, we’d sit side by side, our bodies parallel, sunk within the plush and fold of oversized living-room armchairs—one champagne cream, one cabernet red—each with a wineglass filled to the brim (mine with apple juice and sparkling water, her with something pink or white poured from an economy-size bottle) balanced on the table between us.”1

Westerfield describes watching through the catalogue of Turner Classic Movies with her mother, drinking the beverages that made them feel decadent, imbibing along with the liquid sugar messages about what it meant to be a woman: ideas of sophistication, class, and elegance. Their favorite, Westerfield writes, was The Philadelphia Story, a 1940 film with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, directed by George Cukor.

In the margin of my review copy, I wrote, cf. Lonesome Ballroom. Written by Madeline McDonnell, Lonesome Ballroom also presents scenes of a matriarch and a young girl, cosplaying at culture and romance, Betty the younger dressed up in fur coats and white gloves and drenched in complicity with her grandmother’s designs to watch old movies all afternoon. In their case, the favorite is Gaslight (1944), starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, directed by George Cukor.

But even as I noted the correlation in the margin, I thought of another one. Is there a mother-daughter drinking-and-tv-watching scene in Howling Women? There is. ’s protagonist, Sabine, has left her husband and her boyfriend and ended up back in New Mexico, hiding out at her mother’s house, drinking stolen gin and refusing to explain what’s brought her there. “No amount of frozen pizza could soak up the level of drunk I was on my way to. We sat in the living room drinking and watching reruns of Law & Order and then whatever came on after it,” Hinte writes. When Sabine wakes up, “the usual morning-after montage began, disjointed images flashing into my conscious brain until I had enough information about the day before to know the headlines of my life but not enough to understand what it all meant and how it all fit together.”2

Mothers, daughters, granddaughters, story of booze and men, bad relationships and sexual assault, and the flawed and faltering ways we try to make meaning of all of it.

As soon as I had three, a fourth book pulled up a chair to the same table: Tamara Jong’s Worldly Girls. Also about mothers and daughters, alcohol and intergenerational trauma and attempts to wrangle the ache of living into something coherent. In Jong’s case, the molds for meaning come not from old Hollywood movies but that other well of metanarrative: religion, and specifically, the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Planning the panel didn’t so much feel like something I was initiating as it felt like something I was recognizing: these books are already in conversation with each other; I just wanted to make it explicit. To identify their latent harmonies and bring them into the fore.

YOU’RE INVITED to join Lauren W. Westerfield, Madeline McDonnell, Shelby Hinte, and Tamara Jong for a live conversation about their books!

I’ve written about each of these books over the past year, and by the time I was drafting my review of Westerfield’s Woman House (which only came out last month!), I knew I wanted to plan an event with the authors. Four female writers, four small presses (University of Massachusetts Press, Rescue Press, Book*hug Press, and Leftover Books), two novels and two books of nonfiction. Do you want to support small presses, debut authors, unconventional narrative forms, daring writing, and working critics?! Come to this panel.

The panel title riffs on a refrain from Lonesome Ballroom: This is not a song of husbands or fathers.

These authors all draw from a range of cultural material—squeeze their books too hard, and lines of music drip out, opera and country and honky-tonk and sacred. So a song. A song for our complicated lineages.

Charis Books & More — the oldest feminist bookstore in the South, located in Athens, Georgia — is our virtual event host! The panel will take place LIVE over crowdcast (a video event software) on Friday, May 8th, at 4:30 PT / 7:30 ET. Attendance is free but registration is required. You can register (and if you’re interested, buy all of the books!) through Charis’s website.

Register here!

You can also check out my reviews of all of these books here:

Review of Woman House, at the Rumpus:

“She invites the reader to join her in developing a feminist consciousness: first the naive satisfaction in sexual attention before she can identify her own objectification, then the frustration at the inexorability of her status as sex object after she perceives it. “How to neutralize this open secret,” Westerfield ruminates. “How to de-fetishize my body, reclaim some sense of dimension beyond the token identity I’d taken on as the virgin to be claimed (or avoided). How to climb down from that pedestal—that cage—of others’ desire and simply move in the world, freely and without constraint.” These descriptions of discomfort mirror my own frustrations with female embodiment, which I often ascribe to growing up in purity culture, the religious veneration of virginity as the locus of a woman’s worth.”

Review of Lonesome Ballroom, in the fall 2025 issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books:

“The voice of Lonesome Ballroom is exuberant in its despair and manic in its anticipation of apocalypse, a millennial postmodern malaise that insists everything is fucked and there’s no way out of the matrix of ever-self-replicating inanity. The classes Betty takes are an absurdist pantomime of higher education: “Introduction to Connoisseurship,” “Literatures of Empire,” “Theories of the Studio.” The names—Betty, Bird, Block, Flowers, Goodman, Guy, Joe, Jenny Oeuf, Sarah Small, Sunshine—are ripe with symbolism and the kind of sonic genericism one expects from a fable. Criticism is both ruthlessly satirized and sincerely invoked.”

Review of Howling Women in Full Stop:

“The book wants to know, with a desperate and furious urgency, who will do anything to defend women. One of the novel’s central questions is how to respond to crime that will not be punished or pursued by the American legal system. Howling Woman is distinguished by her willingness to fight back, her willingness to raise her voice and howl in the face of a system that is silent about violence done to women and girls.”

Review of Worldly Girls in Full Stop:

“Jong’s tenderness and vulnerability come into full view when she explores her relationships with other women. These are, presumably, the titular ‘worldly girls’: Jong herself, who walks away from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and her mother, who first brought Jong into the Witnesses and was then disfellowshipped during Jong’s most fervent years of devotion. When Jong begins to drift away from her faith, spurred by therapy that “had [her] thinking about possibilities other than religion and God,” her best friend Robin treats Jong with the same kind of emotional withholding that Jong displayed to her mother so many years before.”

Y’all, I can’t hardly tell you how excited I am for this panel. Imagine fireworks of brilliance. Reserve your spot today!

I got sick this past week. My seasonal allergy-induced smoker’s cough got worse and worse throughout last week until it was some full-blown respiratory thing, strong enough to take me out for three days straight. From Thursday through Sunday, I slept. In the brief periods of waking, I lay in bed and watching the light play on my bedroom wall.

What a blessed reprieve from the striving.

You’re allowed to be sick, Michael told me, a reminder meant to keep the anxiety at bay, as he knew I was mentally tallying lost hours of work on freelance assignments.

I have a hard time slowing down, taking breaks. I often don’t feel like I can afford to. These days, I’m a full-time freelancer, constantly chasing assignments, trying to dredge up enough money to justify spending my days writing. I’m also currently looking for more traditional work, because freelancing hasn’t been sustainable for me or my family. In the interim, I try not to fall into the questions: Is this just a vanity role? Is this glorified unemployment? There’s so much I want to write—but I’m not alone in feeling that way. It’s not that I want to be able to write more, faster: the process of writing is part of the point. What I want is for my work to be economically feasible.

Share

The reason I started this series—when the hype around AI seemed to change in color, in quality—was because the AI tools available had suddenly crossed a productivity threshold that seemed to realize some of the promises which had been hanging for so long in the air.

In the New Yorker AI-expose that was fresh when I started writing this series, Gideon Lewis-Kraus reported, “In January, a Google engineer tweeted that a project that took her team an entire year had been accomplished by Claude in an hour.”1

That quote harmonized with what Michael had been telling me. “I don’t have to choose between ideas anymore,” he said. “I can iterate on all of them simultaneously.” Given the proper application of the tools, projects that would previously take quarters are taking weeks or even days. Multiple coding agents can work on different projects and can even interface among themselves to eliminate duplicative work. “It’s getting to the point where code generation is a commodity,” Michael said.

Use cases are already shifting; companies are reallocating funding based on how they envision the future. Last week, Oracle laid off approximately 30,000 employees worldwide.2

Professor Casey Fiesler explains in this reel on instagram: “Don’t let the humans off the hook, and don’t give AI that much agency. These are decisions.”

‘Inevitability’ has become one of the buzzwords around AI, because it completely absolves any actors of responsibility (‘actors’ in this sense meaning not performers but humans with agency, people choosing to act).

In one of my other essay projects right now, I’m writing about the ideologies of abuse that fuel a culture wherein we have the Epstein Files, the Gisele Pelicot case, and a constant stream of breaking news about men in positions of power and authority revealed to be sexual predators. A recurring theme I keep hitting on in that piece is the way abusers wrangle out of responsibility for their actions, finding ways to blame the victim and absolve themselves.3 Finding ways to evade responsibility is a tactic that paves the way for abuse. I’m extra-attuned to the ways that people in power can wield narrative to justify getting others to enact their will, even when it is to those other people’s detriment.

Inevitability is a narrative. As with any narrative that becomes dominant, I want to carve out the time to ask: who benefits from this framing? What concerns or downsides does it obscure? What alternative narratives are silenced by this version?

What’s inevitable is that in some ways, the machines we make will mirror us. The hallucinations, conspiratorial tendencies, and racist and sexist associations displayed by AI agents are all outcomes of the human-produced data sets these models are trained on. There is a desirable convenience in writing off their flaws and failures as features of code, rather than features of their creators.

On the topic of bot interference on social networking sites, Meghan O’Gieblyn writes,

“Hate speech is often spoken of as though it were a coding error—a “content-moderation nightmare,” an “industry-wide problem,” as various platform executives have described it, one that must be addressed through “different technical changes,” most of which are designed to appease advertisers. Such conversations merely strengthen the conviction that the collective underbelly of extremists, foreign agents, trolls, and robots is an emergent feature of the system itself, a phantasm arising mysteriously from the code, like Grendel awakening out of the swamp.”4

The problems that we’re facing because of AI — the very content-moderation nightmare I wrote about last week, the rampant overuse of finite resources with no regard for their limits, the use of technology to dehumanize and exploit — these problems are not novel. They are, it could be postulated, only inherent to AI insofar as they are inherent to human civilization as we know it.

So the question becomes not ‘what are we going to do about AI,’ but ‘what are we going to do about us?’

Share

That is not a question for the techbros, but for the philosophers, the poets, the priests. The writers, artists, and birdwatchers.

Well, kidding. Because I don’t believe that anyone should be categorically disenfranchised from wrestling with these society-wide questions. In fact, I think these are inherently society-wide questions, and the fact that we’re not treating them as such is kind of a tragedy.

I quoted Ezra Klein’s recent podcast episode with Naomi Klein in last week’s installment, and I’m going to revisit it here. Klein says:

“I think the great question that A.I. is going to pose across functionally every level of society is: What is the human for?

We have trained people to act in ways that are useful to the economy. Then we trained AI models on the output of those people. And now we’re like: Hey, we got these AI models that can act like people acting in economically useful ways.

To me, there are very profound and dueling questions here. One is: What are humans for? . . . And what happens if we have under capitalism—the structure of our society—spent a long time valuing something that we’re not about to take a lot of value away from?”

Klein’s question is one I’ve heard before, so I track down the Wendell Berry essay, originally published in a 1990 collection of the same name.

In the essay “What Are People For?”, Berry is responding to the widespread top-down lament that “there are too many people on the farm.” His immediate rebuttal, of course, is: what if there’s too many people in the cities? His argument teases out the underlying logic of the claim: too many people for what? To make the economy run at maximum efficiency? Do people exist to serve the economy? To raise profits, to increase GDP, to grease the wheels and cogs of society until it runs as ever more efficient machine, slicked and oiled and capable of operating on its own accord?

“The great question that hovers over this issue,” Berry writes, “one that we have dealt with mainly by indifference, is the question of what people are for. Is their greatest dignity in unemployment? Is the obsolescence of human beings now our social goal? . . . In a country that puts an absolute premium on labor-saving measures, short workdays, and retirement, why should there be any surprise at permanence of unemployment and welfare dependency? Those are only different names for our national ambitions.”5

All this talk about productivity—and for what? It can write our essays, surface source material, conduct “deep research,” even (allegedly) make music and art.

But here’s the deep dirty secret I’ve been guarding throughout this whole series: I don’t really care what AI can or can’t do.

Remember what I said about my own work?

I want to be enfranchised—economically enfranchised, specifically—to write long, deeply researched essays, to think my own thoughts, and to make novel connections from the materials I’m assembling. I want a world where this work is recognized as valuable and meaningful.

If the great breakthrough in AI is advancements in productivity, how does that translate to improvements in quality of life? How does it become the proverbial rising tide that lifts all boats? How do these alleged benefits turn into actual benefits for anyone other than a boss who can consolidate his workforce and keep the profits for himself?

And once again I ask myself: where do we go from here?

Leave a comment

On my computer, I toggle back and forth between unfinished essays. This one about AI. The one I mentioned above, about the Epstein Files. A short article about biohacking and an investigative piece about industry corruption, multinational corporations weaponizing their power against smaller companies. Sometimes, all the research gets to be too much, and I slip out of my chair, leave everything on my desk, and walk to the bird sanctuary on the far side of the lake at the edge of my neighborhood.

The bird sanctuary is in a marsh, dense with reeds and dried cattails and huge cottonwood trees growing at the edge of the water. Various conservation groups have planted the area with native flora, and different educational signs show me what to look for to identify different bird species according to the season. The dirt path winds past labeled local plants and stops at a small wooden observation platform.

I let the chatter in my mind grow quiet until it is replaced with the whirring sounds of the marsh. I step, as Wendell Berry wrote, “into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief. I come into the presence of still water.”6

“The Peace of Wild Things” is likely Berry’s most famous poem, but my mind has been drifting to others lately—to “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” and “The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes From the Union.” And to this one, “Questionnaire,” published in his 2009 collection Leavings and then again in his 2012 New Collected Poems.

I think, again, of Ursula K. LeGuin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” I want to claim that I would be among those who walked away, but look, the evidence is stacked against me. I live in a place with far less prosperity than Omelas, and with far more suffering. We all do.

But I also choose to believe that we have agency, here, still. So I’m going to keep showing up to this society with my questions and frustrations, my curiosities and qualms, my insistence that we do not have to settle for the world possible version of this world, and of ourselves.

I believe in embodiment. I believe in community. I believe in local economies and handmade goods and planting pollinator gardens and spreading wildflower seeds. I believe in difficult conversations and refusing to cut people off if they don’t meet your standards for morality. I believe in reflection and self-incrimination and grace.

I believe in other forms of intelligence: the intelligence of the starlings, the swallows, the trees, the mycelium under the soil. I believe in the intelligence of instinct and ecosystem. I believe in the intelligence of poetry, emotion, and caretaking. I believe in a hundred different forms of intelligence beyond what the techbros know how to quantify or fundraise for.

“Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.”

— Wendell Berry

Huge thanks to these authors and their books, which have guided me in my exploration over the past several weeks:

One final thing: this substack is currently free to all to read and share (so please read! and share!). The main perk that I offer to paid subscribers is that you receive original artwork in the mail from me about once every three months. This month, paid subscribers will be receiving a print of Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things”. Prints come with handwritten notes and are mailed in handmade envelopes! Thank you, as always, for being here.

A short sidebar and then we’ll get into it: I recently read a post from , who makes incredible resources for writers who don’t want to go into bankruptcy pursuing this strange art of making marks on a (sometimes virtual) page. In this piece, she argues that what makes for a good newsletter is a clear focus or obsession, a topic that gives the newsletter/column a raison d’etre beyond personal networking: the I-like-this-writer-and-read-everything-they-write justification. Because as much as we all want that to be the case for us, the newsletter space is getting pretty saturated, and if you approach your writing like a business, you need a clear sales pitch.

Critic at Play — the substack you’re reading now! — finds its cohesion not in subject matter but in methodology. I’m a cultural critic, and I train that lens on all kinds of cultural topics that capture my attention. This substack is rooted in literary criticism and a love for small presses, but I also approach big ideas in the zeitgeist from a post-evangelical perspective.

Every week, I post one essay of researched cultural criticism. These essays are also personal, in that they consider self-as-vantage-point rather than self-as-subject (shoutout to ’s recent essay about personal narrative and the Lindy West discourse for that language).

Technology is not my area of expertise, but the recent shifts in the landscape of AI development felt too significant not to address. Thank you for exploring along with me.

I came to my understanding of AI backward.

If you heard the sales pitch and were compelled by the vision—prosperity for all humans, and all the ease that entails—then you’re more willing to accept the costs and interpret them as part of a process you’ve already signed onto. But if you somehow missed the pitch—either you blocked it out because you weren’t interested and assumed it wouldn’t affect you, or you don’t belong to the decision-making class so the techbros1 didn’t bother to solicit a gesture of consent from you before they went about disrupting everything—and then you’re suddenly saddled with the costs, the pitch for AI is a lot harder to sell in retrospect.

This is how it happened to me. I was not paying attention to LLMs or chatbots until fall 2023, when my social media feeds flooded with authors who wanted to talk about AI. More specifically, these authors took to social media to talk about the fact that their work—often represented in years of their life—had been stolen in order to train this job-stealing aberration none of them had even consented to. This was the scandal surrounding Books3.

2018 was when OpenAI released the first model of what would eventually become ChatGPT. The first iteration was GPT-1, a name that stood for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. The Transformer was a particular neural network invented by Google well-suited to picking up long-range patterns: like a much, much stronger version of the old predictive text tool in the iMessage app on your iPhone.

The men behind the steering wheel continued to press the gas. Bigger models, more compute, faster timelines. They scaled up to GPT-2, the first model that, according to Hao, made it “possible to automate writing at scale.”2 Still not enough, never enough. Always forward, faster, more. Besides, OpenAI had a demo to perform for Mr. Gates, one Mr. Bill Gates. They needed to scale up to another model, GPT-3, and they needed to place it in the hands of the people.

“Years before ChatGPT,” writes Hao, “these two decisions—the one to explode GPT-3’s size and the one to quickly release it—would change the course of AI development. It would set off a rapid acceleration of AI advancement, sparking fierce competition between companies and countries. It would fuel an unprecedented expansion of surveillance capitalism and labor exploitation. It would, by virtue of the sheer resources required, consolidate the development of the technology to a degree never seen before.”

What a clusterfuck, you might be thinking. You’d be right—and we haven’t even gotten to the implications of those decisions.

In order to make a bigger, better model, the researchers training it needed more data. Previously, researchers had been selective in the material they used to train their models. Think about it: most of us don’t let our children start consuming offensive media while they’re still tykes, right? “Garbage in, garbage out,” as my mom used to say. But the data they’d used before wasn’t enough, and the demand for more data—the demand for scale—was presented as an absolute good.

This is when the researchers start incorporating shoddy data into the training models. They used Books2, “a mysterious dataset . . . [that] contained published books ripped from Library Genesis, an online shadow repository.” They also started using a dataset known as Common Crawl, which contained data from all over the web— “a source Radford [one of the GPT developers] had purposely avoided because it was such poor quality.” For GPT-3, the researchers applied some sort of filter to the data sourced from Common Crawl, but as they continued to scale, the filter was abandoned.

OpenAI was setting the standards and the speed for industry-wide AI development. All of this was treated as a race to the biggest, brightest models, and if OpenAI was finding ‘innovative’ ways to use more data, so would all its peers.

In September 2023, Alex Reisner, writing for The Atlantic, broke the news about Books3, another dataset of upwards of 190,000 published books that had been scraped and used (without authorial or publishers consent) by Meta, Bloomberg, and others to train their AI models.

These revelations launched a wave of lawsuits against the tech giants, brought by individual writers as well as the Authors Guild, in complaint against use of the authors’ intellectual property that was neither compensated for nor consensual. “It may be beyond the scope of copyright law to address the harms being done to authors by generative AI,” writes Reisner. One of the biggest gaps I have observed in the non-conversation around AI is the patent unwillingness of AI developers to engage with the criticisms and qualms of creators whose work is fueling so much of the tech research that seeks to supplant us.

Thus far, the tech community has not figured out how to broach the conversation with the artists it’s exploited.

It wasn’t until reading Empire of AI that my memories of the fallout of the Books3 scandal slid into place as a cipher for something else. The mandate that led to the use of Books2 and Books3 was a company dictum, which self-replicated across the entire industry, to prioritize training the models on more data, acquired from any source, at any cost.

“The decision to lower quality barriers—and then effectively drop them altogether—would have sweeping downstream effects on the human labor behind AI systems,” writes Hao.

These later iterations of GPT were suddenly being trained on enormous datasets culled from the scummiest corners of the unregulated internet.

** To be clear: research suggests that the AI models we have would still be prone to overconfidence and hallucinations even if not trained on these seedier datasets. These features are not so much outcomes of training data as they are consequences of the theory of mind by which these models have been developed.

However, there are other aspects of the AI debacle that trace directly to this terrible choice to settle for sub-par data.

Enter the laborers who conduct content moderation: the Ghost Workers.

These are people, often in developing countries, who work as contractors for downstream companies within the global AI Industrial Complex. Their job is data preparation, an umbrella term that has also come to include content moderation.

The need for cheap global labor to help manage data has spawned and sustained a subsidiary industry of companies that connect Silicon Valley firms with data workers overseas. These companies are global brokers of invisibilized labor.

“Soon after GPT-3 normalized the use of giant, poorer quality datasets,” reports Hao, “the demands for the work shifted from the handling of largely benign content to frequently disturbing content. . . Such moderation was necessary to prevent generative AI systems from reproducing the most vile parts of their all-encompassing datasets—descriptions and depictions of violence, sexual abuse, or self-harm—to hundreds of millions of users.”

Since OpenAI and its peer companies abdicated their responsibility to appropriate curate the training data, they’ve been externalizing the labor onto vulnerable international contractors—often in unstable, high-conflict areas—to control the outputs of the generative behemoths the techbros are dead set on designing.

The content workers—contractors who log their labor hourly, often not receiving pay—sit in front of a screen for untold hours a day, confirming or denying whether or not a piece of digital content—which has already been flagged—is suitable for consumption. “In India, this labour is increasingly performed by women, who are part of a workforce often described as ‘ghost workers,’” the Guardian reports.3

These are vulnerable workers being exploited so that we in the developed West can—can what? Make cutesy illustrations without having to worry about actual artists? Can get grammar tips in our cover letters for one of three jobs we work to stay afloat in the gig economy?

This is where I’m almost desperate for some of those promises of AI to come true so that at least all the suffering was actually in service of something worthwhile.

But if I start to feel that way after a few weeks of research, think of how that sunk cost fallacy starts to work on the minds of the researchers, investors, and pundits who have made it their life’ s work to promote these models.

Milagros Miceli, a sociologist with the Data Workers’ Inquiry, says that “Content moderation belongs in the category of dangerous work, comparable to any lethal industry.”

The Guardian’s reporting on the ghost workforce illuminates that our development of AI continues the practice of externalizing costs: we can tell ourselves something is less costly because we simply hide the evidence of what it requires. Externalization is Not In My BackYard (NIMBY) taken to its fullest extrapolation: I want the ease and enjoyment of playing with ChapGPT, but I don’t want to be confronted with the horrors it requires, so just export all that labor to India (or Kenya, or Venezuela, or . . . ). The companies hiring for these jobs deliberately target under-resourced areas, so they can tell themselves they’re doing something good, even altruistic, by providing global tech jobs to people who otherwise might not have them. “Women form more than half of this workforce,” the Guardian reports. “A sizable number of workers in these hubs come from Dalid and Adivasi (tribal) communities. For many of them, digital work of any kind represents an upward shift.”

“That’s the calculus of late-stage capitalism,” writes Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan, who was featured in a 60 Minutes spot titled “Training AI takes a heavy toll on Kenyans working for $2 an hour”: “Exploitation masquerades as opportunity.”4

Here’s an excerpt from Gebrekidan’s devastating essay:

“For Ethiopian content moderators, in particular for those from Tigray, where a genocide was being committed against our own people while we moderate the war content, the job was a nightmare we couldn’t wake up from.

For two years, I believed scrubbing blood stains from Facebook live feeds was ‘tech adjacent’ work, and I felt like I was in control and saving my community from harmful content so they could scroll in peace. Then came the migraines, the nightmares, the core sadness and anxiety, and then the day I realized I’d memorized the sound people make when they’re set on fire.

Every suicide video we tagged, every beheading we categorized, every racist slur we annotated, that’s what taught Zuckerberg’s algorithms so ‘moderate’ themselves. Our trauma and psychological scars became their machine’s intelligence.”

Leave a comment

I asked my partner if there’s a way to justify the development of AI, in light of these costs. Michael’s answer was that, like everything, it’s a question of risk and reward.

Regarding the data required to train LLMs:
The kind of data that’s useful for training LLMs is actually different from the kind of data that’s proven useful for hyper-individualistic targeted marketing, which was the main focus of Big Data before this current AI explosion. The hyper-individualist model reached its fullest expression in the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2016, when data was being used to create highly specialized and granular portraits of people in order to cater their preferences and biases. Meghan O’Gieblyn, in God, Human, Animal, Machine (Doubleday, 2021), suggests that the data profiles on each of us have become so robust that one should consider if that might take the place of uploading their mind onto the cloud for a possible futuristic technology-assisted resurrection. But the kind of data that facilitates machine learning is less about individual behavior and more about collective representation.

There’s a difference between data that identifies individual behaviors and data that codifies human language. The base function of an LLM requires it to communicate with humans, therefore it must understand human means of communication, and it must develop an understanding of reality that reflects a human understanding of reality. That’s why it requires an unfathomable amount of data, including all of our flubs and foibles. It’s because of the ‘lower-quality’ data, Michael explained to me, that chatbots are able to understand their human interlocutors when we make a typo. If the idea is to model a machine on the human brain, it must be supplied with annals of abstracted experience, or at least the records thereof.

Machine learning models are really good at pattern recognition. This is (as far as I can tell) their primary use case: all of their prophesied capabilities rely on recognizing and extrapolating patterns that humans have either not yet identified or have not been capable of continuing. (This is, to some extent, what is getting at in his recent essay on the AI bubble.)

One now-classic example of AI’s ability to recognize and extrapolate patterns occurred in real time, in the 2016 DeepMind Challenge Match, in which DeepMind’s deep neural net (DNN) AlphaGo went up against Go 9-dan grandmaster Lee Sodol and won.

Philosopher Cameron J. Buckner, in From Deep Learning to Rational Machines, writes, “One particular move made by AlphaGo against Lee—move 32 of Game 2—was so unorthodox and unexpected that even the DeepMind employee tasked with recording the move assumed it must have been a bug. On the contrary, commentators now describe this move as exceptionally brilliant.”5

AI could discover the cure to cancer. It could regulate all energy markets, could help resurrect endangered languages, could . . . I don’t even know the prophecies well enough to paraphrase them here. (The tv in the bar where I’m typing this is currently playing a commercial of an old man who runs a pizza shop, and AI is helping him “bring back the $1 slice.” I guess it can do that. The message of the commercial, ostensibly, is that AI can help you maximize your business efforts, but given that my concerns around AI are that it will serve the interests of those who own the means of production, this commercial only reiterates my fears, albeit transposed onto the nonthreatening avatar of an elderly man.)

It could, but is it doing those things right now? And is it worth the costs it will take to get there?

I bring this second question up to Michael, and he reminds me that progress has always come at a cost.

This past weekend, we attended a screening of a silent film—Buster Keaton’s The General—accompanied by live music, played by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. Rodney Sauer, a local live music legend (at least in certain circles), gave a brief introduction wherein he explained that silent film scores were at one point likely the most-played music in the United States. “Chorale music and hymns were played every Sunday at church, and dance music was played every Friday,” he said, “but movies were shown every night of the week.”

In our conversation about AI, Michael points out how many musicians were put out of work by the invention of technology that allowed recorded music and even dialogue to be played with those moving pictures.

Think of all the weavers put out of work by the Industrial Revolution, he says. I’m knitting a baby cardigan while we speak. Maybe someone who still actively practices traditional handicrafts isn’t your best target for a ditch-the-Luddites-in-the-dust argument.

Still, I can’t help but feel like there’s a difference between workers being put out of work by technological advancements and the horrors confronted by the Ghost Workers.

And I haven’t even gotten into the environmental ramifications of AI.

Late last week, my friend Hannah sent me a news release that the world is entering global water bankruptcy.

An entire chapter in Karen Hao’s Empire of AI focuses on the construction of new data centers and their impact on local communities and environmental resources. The required amount of water—specifically, potable water—and energy are common talking points in the arguments against AI.

Historically (prior to the past twenty-four months), training a model was far more resource intensive than using that model. Therefore, an argument could be (and frequently was) made that the most resource-intensive phase of the AI era was model training, and we would see welcome reductions in resource usage once all the models were ready to go. That’s obviously an oversimplification, and as you might have guessed, that trajectory has not come to pass. In the past twenty-four months, as AI tools have become increasingly integrated into everyday life, the ‘inference costs’ (use of resources required to run the tool itself) have dramatically outpaced training costs.

A group of researchers from Princeton has recently released a paper titled “An Alternative Trajectory for Generative AI,” addressing many of the qualms I’ve raised in this and my previous essays.

The group notes, “As models transition from research prototypes to high-traffic products, the dominant energetic burden has shifted from one-time training to recurring, unbounded inference—a phenomenon exacerbated by the emergence of “reasoning models” that inflate compute costs by orders of magnitude per query.”

The embrace of scale as the one-way highway to AGI, they argue, is running up against tangible physical limitations. The authors’ biggest problem with the current paradigm fueling AI developing is that it does not lead to developments in critical reasoning. “Good reasoning and trustworthy behavior depend on high-quality, well-curated training data and on targeted curricula that teach models how to use abstractions.”

The authors argue that AGI is unlikely to arise from LLMs as we currently have them, saying, “humans can learn from only a few examples and readily generalize their learning to novel situations. In this regard, LLMs are still far behind human-like intelligence. One argument is that the human brain is better at forming and maintaining compact abstract representations, whereas LLMs primarily encode knowledge as a vast collection of context-weighted “special cases” that support pattern reuse rather than abstraction as the default mode.”

Beyond this, the authors also indicate that there, whereas previously the most resource-intensive phase of AI development was restricted to a one-time training period, inference costs have now outpaced training costs.

Subscribe now

In terms of understanding and mapping the resource consumption of AI, this is terrible news. It also exemplifies something called the Jevons Paradox: the idea that, while technological leaps allow certain processes to get more efficient, the demand is still growing, and therefore, total resource usage also increases.

The more efficient the consumption, goes the Jevons Paradox, the lower the cost. And the lower the cost, the greater the demand. Increased efficiency, at least by one lens, increases the speed of collapse.

When Hannah sent me the article on global water bankruptcy (which the UN distinguishes from “water stressed” or “water crisis” by virtue of its irreversibility), she also mentioned that AI is actively making her job harder. Hannah is a neuropsychologist who currently works in a university hospital setting.

These tools in the hands of an expert have the potential to streamline work and aggregate resources in a way that could be revolutionary.

These tools in the hands of a rando who is using them to replace legitimate expertise have the potential to fuck shit up in a lot of really stupid and unnecessary ways.

I believe this is one of the most complex topics unfolding in our present moment, and I want to be attentive to it. That’s what so much of my work revolves around: not a single galvanizing topic, but curated attention, curiosity, creativity. I would love to hear from all of you about your current experiences with and feelings regarding AI. Have you had any opinion-shaping experiences? Is there a singular meme that summarizes how you feel, or a particular op-ed that has shaped your usage? Please share in the comments.

Leave a comment

This is the third installment in my multi-week deep dive on AI. The next (and possibly final?!) installment will be released next Tuesday. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!

Subscribe now

It wasn’t until I started reading about the origins of these AI companies that I learned their existence was (at least partially) posited on a kind of fairy tale about collective prosperity and flourishing. And if such a world—where AI is available and useful and everyone benefits—could actually be realized—? Well, that’s the High Hopes section of the essay.

But much of what I experience of AI on a daily basis, to whatever extent I do interact with it, fits more under the heading of Hallucinations. This is what we’re actually getting from AI: unfounded claims, false information, unqualified validation that can lead to the phenomenon known as ‘AI psychosis’, deepfakes, and more.1

Meanwhile, tech giants keep forcing their tools on us through automatic integrations that no one asked for, scrounging for usage as a way to justify their mounting costs. AI bots appear in the sidebar of my screen, offering to summarize the personal essay I’m editing—as if me spending time with the piece wasn’t the actual point of what I’m doing.

This forced inclusion of AI tools is what design researcher Faizan calls “supply-side desperation”—though even the more official term, “induced demand,” also gives me the ick. He interprets the aggressive incorporation of AI tools to be a modern reprise of how electrical companies, in the early 1900s, dealt with the problem of load factor by marketing a bunch of electronics that could be plugged in and justify powering the grid 24/7.

In the comments, Faizan also notes that “Samuel Insull, the guy who pioneered this ‘load factor’ strategy for electricity, eventually saw his empire collapse because it was built on too much debt and over-expansion. The parallels with today’s AI infrastructure spending, which is outpacing revenue by billions, are historically destructive. We might be watching a slow-motion crash.”

So why do we keep going when the results are such a clear mismatch for the proposed use case?

In her book Empire of AI, Karen Hao walks her reader through how so much of the tech industry consolidated its resources— intellectual (in terms of employees/researchers/brainpower), fiscal (profits and investment capital), and technical (compute power, Nvidia GPUs [Graphics Processing Units]) —in service of a narrow and ambiguous vision set by specific men.

The vision was AGI: a dream so fantastical that any expense could be justified in its pursuit. Dario Amodei, founder of Anthropic and then-researcher at OpenAI, told Karen Hao in a 2019 interview: “We’re in the awkward position of, we don’t know what it looks like. We don’t know when it’s going to happen.”2 As Hao explains, OpenAI has justified much of its work on the basis of a nebulous assumption, cooked up by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, and others.

These aren’t just random men, either: they are some of the world’s richest and most neurotic men, fueled by a poorly mixed cocktail of ambition and fear. Greg Brockman—co-founder and president of OpenAI—is one of the largest donors to Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc.

Also: call me a feminist conspiracy theorist if you want, but the gender disparity in AI is a HUGE RED FLAG for me.

Sometimes I ask myself: is the entire world being used as a dick crutch for these men in history’s most high-stakes penis-measuring contest?

Share

Let’s witness one of these men fantasizing about being a final contender in the competition for “Conqueror of the Universe.” This is the vision shared by Roy Lee, CEO of Cluely (marketed as an undetectable meeting assistant), as captured in the social media series wherein , AKA Brian Patrick, is posting a video a day of an unhinged thing an AI executive has said.

‘Inevitability’ is one of the go-to excuses for people in this realm. It’s the reasoning that University of Colorado has provided for signing a recent multimillion dollar contract with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu to all students, staff, and faculty.3 The most frustrating thing about the inevitability argument is that its an ideology bandied about like fact, when ultimately it acts like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we buy into inevitability as a rationale, the more inevitable total embrace of AI becomes.

Claims of inevitability make the perfect bolster to hide behind because such claims are inherently unfalsifiable. The inevitability argument also displaces responsibility. You can’t blame Sam Altman or Elon Musk or Dario Amodei if A(G)I was always inevitable anyway!

AI does hold great potential: people who understand it better than I do have assured me of this over and over, and I am not in a position to disagree. This potential has yet to be realized in a way that doesn’t exert colossal—likely inestimable—costs on communities far enough removed from the places where the gospel of AI is being proclaimed that we can lie to ourselves about their suffering. We can tell ourselves their subjugation is necessary and inevitable: a principle of nature as self-evident and inviolable as the divine right of kings.

But even that metaphor brings to mind the Ursula K. LeGuin quote:

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

In addition to being known for that quote, Ursula K. Le Guin is known for her speculative science fiction novels and short stories, including the very short (you can read it in fifteen minutes! But it will stay with you much longer) “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas.”

One of the points I hope to demonstrate in writing all of this is that the original vision for AI isn’t necessarily evil. (Or, maybe it is, and I’m just not qualified to identify that. But I’m also pretty practiced at calling other people and their intentions evil. And just because the motivating vision isn’t evil doesn’t mean the instantiation isn’t evil.)

I want to capture the wonder in my partner’s voice when he tells me things like this is the first time something of scientific construction has come anywhere close to approaching what has historically been regarded as an essential and exclusively human domain. “Knowledge synthesis, planning, music, painting, conversation,” he writes. “The last time other beings with these capabilities existed, it was our now-extinct extended hominid family tree.”

My sweet partner is a StarTrek true believer: he wants to see technology applied to erase inequality perpetuated by greed and oppression. He believes in the possibility of space communism with Data-like androids that might learn to paint or laugh or love a cat.

What would it be like to shed our anthropocentric ego and stop regarding our own species as the telos of all evolution?

I want to access a fraction of the amazement my partner feels for the technology that is being developed.

And I do not want high hopes for what it could mean to bribe me into blindness about what it does mean in the current moment.

Leave a comment

Let’s talk about SCALE.

The companies fueling this research are in fact companies who have repeatedly made the decision to release their products according to a profit-incentivized timeline that has not allowed for adequate research and development.

OpenAI was originally founded as a nonprofit to resist the corrupting influence of the market, but then restructured as a corporation, caving to market pressures to commodify its research into paid products. Then, in its neurotic and self-aggrandizing need to be First, OpenAI accelerated the race to scale AI to the fullest extent possible at every juncture.

Naomi Klein, in her recent interview on The Ezra Klein Show, pointed out that the ramifications of these companies’ rampant profit motive elicits “the question of whether this belongs in the private sector. I don’t think it does,” she continues. “This is much too fundamental. These are technologies that exist because they fed off the accumulation of all human knowledge and output. I believe we own them already.”

Now, accelerationism and scaling mandates have become foregone conclusions within the industry, a kind of cultural standard that it’s too expensive not to participate in. In the recent Vanity Fair profile on Anthropic, journalist Joe Hagan recounts a conversation with Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, who also argues on behalf of unfettered growth.

Hagan writes: “We discuss ‘scaling laws’ and ‘compute-optimal training’ and ‘emergence of capabilities at scale,’ and I nod along. The bigger you make these models, the smarter they get, he explains—and we’re nowhere near the limits of how big we can make them, which means we’re nowhere near the limits of how smart they can get, which means we have no idea what’s coming.”

However, I take slight issue with the presentation of this. Yes, research has demonstrated that making the models larger—training them on more data, with more compute power—allows them to make more connections, faster.4

But Hagan’s jokingly basic summary is reductive in ways that may go beyond his intentions. Hao notes, OpenAI’s “belief in scaling was once viewed as extreme. Now scaling is seen across the tech industry as doctrine.”

Is this—scaling—the only way that researchers have had success in developing ‘smarter’ models?5 And when Kaplan asserts that ‘we’re nowhere near the limits’, what limits is he referencing? What limits might he recognize?

What if it’s not AI that is inherently so dangerous and costly—what if it’s the way we’re going about developing it?

Hao argues clearly: this aggressive scaling was not inevitable. Many of the most horrific social costs are because of this acceleration and would not necessarily be present in every method of developing AI.

TL;DR: it doesn’t have to be like this.

How would you like to imagine the development of AI? What have you read that’s shaped your perspective the most? What aspect of AI feels the most dangerous or destructive to you?

Leave a comment

And stay tuned for next week, when I take these grand theories and pin them to more specific examples.

I wanted to write about AI as a way of educating myself on everything that I’ve ignored while this topic has moved into the zeitgeist, but I undertook this self-generated assignment without realizing its magnitude. Saying ‘I wanna write about AI’ is perhaps not too dissimilar from saying ‘I wanna write about religion.’ Plus, writers should know that a general topic in and of itself is not a compelling pitch. You have to provide constraints, an angle, and a thesis. I didn’t have any of those.

I had a topic, a knapsack full of biases and preconceived ideas, and a library card.

I’m not here to give hot takes. I like to amass a wide range of source materials, read them carefully with pen in hand, isolating pull quotes and synthesizing across different sources. I want to let my brain roam like a free-range bovine, following its stomach to the tastiest grass (okay, there’s a terrible metaphor). But I still wanted to commit to my project. So this week is the first of a multi-week series about Artificial Intelligence.

AI is a touchy subject in our household, because Michael uses it daily for his work, whereas I’m one of those rage-bait liberals who doesn’t even want to talk about it.

Up until about a month ago, my personal strategy had been to ignore AI categorically. I’d blocked it out so fervently that I’d been living in a cartilaginous shell of my own ignorance, barely capable of engaging in civil conversation about the chatbots on the verge of regurgitating the world.

But then one day Michael texted me to say that the new model release for Claude had changed everything. When I got his text, I paused. I have enjoyed holing up in my corner of self-righteousness, assuring myself that my refusal to engage with the conversation around AI is because of my superior moral principles. But what if my self-imposed ignorance was actually more in service of comfort rather than my true values?

This is an old impulse from my days of evangelical fundamentalism: the idea that to learn about something that feels threatening is akin to sacrificing my moral high ground. This kind of thinking demonizes curiosity and intensifies polarization.

How can I truly have a defensible position about a topic that I have actively refused to understand? After a moment of reflection, I texted Michael back.

“Can we actually have a conversation about this? I want to know more.”

In the month since then, I’ve been scrambling to catch up on developments in AI and machine learning that other people have been following for months, years, or, in some cases, decades. And the speed at which the AI conversation is developing has only increased. I started doing my research the week the New Yorker published Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s essay about Claude. That was before the Anthropic-Pentagon dispute that led to the Department of War declaring Claude a supply chain risk while at the exact same time still using Claude as part of the war in Iran.

I’m writing this essay to hold myself accountable to my own values: curiosity and the ability to have respectful conversations across ideological divides (not something I’m great at, but something I’m trying!). What are the hot-button issues that are hard for you to discuss?

Leave a comment

DEFINITIONS: Let’s start by defining our terms.

*Please note: I’m aware that most of these terms are painfully basic. However, this gives us a shared vocabulary moving forward, which is essential to any contentious discussion.

AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. Whether or not the programs currently available do in fact constitute ‘artificial intelligence’ is a question for the philosophers.

As part of my research, I read Karen Hao’s recent Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin, 2025). Her book reads like a biography of OpenAI, demonstrating how the company acts as a mirror of its capricious, duplicitous founder (Sam Altman), and how OpenAI has been, more than any other actor in Silicon Valley, instrumental in pushing the envelope on AI development, in terms of capital, commodification, and compute. Her book introduced me to the term ‘AGI,’ which stands for Artificial General Intelligence: something more rarefied than the ‘AI’ we’re using now, a sort of hypothetical shape-shifter whose alleged existence has been leveraged to justify all manner of excesses.

Hao writes: “To justify the elongating timeline and the ever-expanding costs of pursuing the ambition for AI, the promises we’re told about it have grown more grandiose than ever before: AI was once a scientific fascination, a technology with some potential commercial utility. Now, AI is the harbinger of the fourth industrial revolution. The keystone of the modern superpower. AGI, if ever reached, will solve climate change, enable affordable health care, provide equitable education. OpenAI is the poster child for this line of thought. It cannot say how the technology will deliver on these promises—only that the staggering price society needs to pay for what it is developing will someday be worth it.

“What’s left unsaid is that in a vacuum of agreed-upon meaning, “artificial intelligence” or “artificial general intelligence” can be whatever OpenAI wants.”

But for now, let’s side-step the maybe-benevolent boogeyman that is AGI, and let’s get back to defining our terms.

AI is a discipline and area of study within data science. Machine learning models are a form of AI. The algorithms for Spotify that surface new music you might want to listen to are AI; the forecasts on your weather app are created through a combination of physical models in conjunction with AI tools.

Large Language Models (LLMs) traffic in text input and output. Anything that’s generating photos, audio, or a different medium, is a different model or set of models. ChatGPT is actually a symphony of many different models operating together to accomplish a wide range of tasks.

Every chatbot uses LLMs to present in a chat-dialogue format, but their cohesive functionality is enabled by a consortium of different AIs. Different chatbots are developed and owned by different companies, and based on their training, they specialize in different things.

ChatGPT, the most famous/ubiquitous of the AI chatbots, owned by OpenAI, is the most generalized.

Claude, developed and owned by Anthropic, is trained to be an effective software assistant—and is the source of several of the latest controversies in the AI conversation.

Generative AI is meant to refer to AI that is capable of producing, or generating, something new, whether that be text, image, or another form of media. The way we currently see this used in conversation is to clarify when an image or video is AI-generated and therefore not necessarily reflective of reality. One of the many controversies about AI is whether or not it’s possible for an AI model to generate anything truly original, since everything that it produces is, in some way, contingent on the data on which the model’s been trained.

AI slop is what AI agents ‘generate’ that doesn’t serve any purpose. It’s mass-produced digital drivel of no value.
I love the point that Anna Sproul-Latimer makes in the note below about the way language can be manipulated to serve social hierarchies rather than to identify specific cultural phenomena.

AI Hallucinations are the false information that an AI spins up, maybe a fluke of predictive text or inconsistent information in the training data. The most problematic part of a hallucination is that the AI doesn’t ‘know’ when it’s lying, and thanks to humans’ automation bias, we are unlikely to question the bot’s authority.

This conversation is so much larger than shitty search engines. Confidently supplied wrong answers from a machine regarded with more authority than it merits are dangerous: hello, yes, duh. If we have so much evidence of the flaws and failures of these models, why are people still pushing forward? That’s what we’ll be exploring in a future essay.

Everything in life is a question of costs and benefits. These are the terms. Now, how do we assess the costs and benefits? How many baby giraffes are we willing to feed the machines in hopes of it finally answering a question correctly? And, more accurately, how do we quantify the benefits when the costs are exerted on marginalized communities of the global majority?

Is there a world where the alleged benefits of AI can be distributed throughout society, rather than consolidated at the top?

Throaty voiceover: find out next time on Critic at Play. And thanks for reading.

Leave a comment

I’m McKenzie, the writer, artist, and critic behind Critic-at-Play. I’m also the founder and host of the Thunderdome Conference: a small-scale residential conference for writers eager to learn from one another.

Is that you? Do you want to stay up late around a campfire dissecting the nuances of your favorite short story collections? Do you want to get into the nitty-gritty of essay structure, point of view in personal narrative, or the architecture of fiction at different lengths?

Do you want to spend three nights at a private conference campus in Boulder, Colorado, eat good food, take in craft talks on a breezy back porch, and maybe squeeze in a local comedy show?

Well then YOU should apply to the Thunderdome Conference!

Visit the Website + Learn More

When I started my low-residency MFA in January 2021, attending zoom lectures and group workshops from the desk in front of the living room window in my apartment in Houston, I didn’t expect to make friends. I had been writing daily for the past decade and a half, and I had never had writer friends. What might “writer friends” offer me?

Other facts from that time: I had almost never published anything.1 I had blogged for about a decade without developing any traction, and I had never submitted to any literary magazines because I didn’t know what literary magazines were.

I’m not suggesting a direct equivalence between having writer friends and finding one’s footing in the literary-publishing-scene/hellscape.2 But I am suggesting some kind of relationship.

I don’t want to mean that in a gatekeeping, pay-to-develop-connections-to-an-elite-ring-of-people-in-power kind of way. What I mean is that I have learned an inestimable amount from developing mutually supportive peer-to-peer relationships with other people who have made writing part of their way of life. It’s not like these friends have automatically extended opportunities to me simply because we share an alma mater and paid the same fees. Rather, we have learned together how to craft artist statements, we have given each other feedback on work samples and pitches, we have swapped notes on great opportunities and which outlets to avoid. They are the ones who have taught me about small presses and the intersection of storytelling and medical narratives, the ones who have taught me about radical publishing tactics and who embody literary citizenship and know how to champion one another’s work.

Subscribe now

It is a material reality that connections can lead to more opportunities. This is the basis of networking. It becomes problematic when that networking and those opportunities are locked behind some kind of unscalable paywall, exclusively accessible to those with a class- or prestige-crane to winch them up and over.

For these reasons and others, I launched the Thunderdome Conference: a small-scale residential conference for writers eager to learn from one another. The Thunderdome happens late summer at a private conference campus in Boulder, Colorado, where up to ten writers stay on-site for four days of craft talks, a public reading, local excursions, and generative writing time. The Thunderdome is rooted in a belief that everyone has something to offer, so all writers attend in the position of faculty-participant. In practical terms: everyone who attends presents their own lecture, and attends everyone else’s. (On the topic of opportunities and connections, this also means that everyone who attends can list “faculty for the Thunderdome Conference” on their cv.)

Because the Thunderdome is committed to a vision of accessibility, I strive to keep costs as low as possible. This year’s going rate is $650, housing included. Rooms at the private conference campus are shared and meals are a mix of catered and home-cooked. I also have select scholarships available.

Last year was the first year of the Thunderdome Conference and it was a dream. Faculty-participants flew into Colorado from all over the country: from Portland, Oregon, to Baltimore, Maryland. One of our sponsoring companies provided us with bespoke chocolate bars wrapped in a poem. Faculty-participants delivered craft talks on topics ranging from the divided self in memoir to the architecture of horror.

Thunderdome faculty-participants have attended the Tin House Writers Workshop, the Macondo Writers Workshop, the Carolyn Moore Writing Residency, the Dirtbag Fellowship, and more. They have published work in the Sewanee Review, Barrelhouse, Roxane Gay’s the Audacity, Newsweek, the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Electric Literature, the Rumpus, and elsewhere.

And now, I’m looking for YOU! Are you interested in a (relatively) low-cost, high-tier writing conference experience? Are you obsessed with a niche element of craft or have a particular strain of knowledge to share? Do you want to deepen your curiosity in conversation with other artists and writers?

APPLY NOW!

Since the conference is small-scale AND residential, I will be vetting candidates for relevance of lecture topic as well as for group dynamics. I am hoping to curate a diverse cohort that represents different genres, perspectives, and experiences. Depending on how many applications I receive, I may or may not conduct follow-up interviews by phone or video.

Expectations, approximate itinerary, and additional details can be found on the website. Feel free to reach out to me with ANY questions, qualms, or squeals of excitement. And I hope to see your applications soon!

See, if I shared anything that I was actually embarrassed by—like my crush on the curly blond-haired boy I carpooled with sometimes, or how desperately I wanted to be invited to parties or after-school get-togethers by the girls who seemed to treat me like secondhand furniture, or that I didn’t figure out how to use a tampon until like five years into having my period—that would be way too vulnerable, too revelatory. I wanted to perform collective triumph over embarrassment without actually having to endure the embarrassment part, because I secretly believed that those things—my yearning, my insecurity, my direct-from-purity-culture discomfort with embodiment—were unredeemable, and that they made me unredeemable.

The shame was both a signifier of how desperately I needed Jesus and a lurking hint that something might be wrong: that I hadn’t accepted him enough, as if such a thing were possible. So I prayed for Jesus to save me (again) and to take my shame away, and I never admitted it to anybody.

But in the interest of seeking connection and flouting shame and building a community bolstered by self-revelation, I’m here to tell you about my latest most embarrassing moment.

Here we go: This past Sunday morning, I woke up to find that my primary email—which I’ve been using for over a decade now—had been hacked, and the malicious actor/bot sent a bogus Paperless Post invite to *checks notes* everyone I have ever emailed.

If you were a recipient of an email that looked like this—

—I am so sorry; I hope you didn’t click the links, and if you did, please go reset your email passwords and add two-factor authentication right now.

The reason we’re here is because I fell for the same phishing attempt: someone whose internet persona I respect appeared to send me a similar invite, and I clicked on it. I was so flattered to be contacted by this person—and I figured that the event might be going on during AWP1 next week—that my ambition overruled my critical thinking. Apparently this phishing attempt has been going around like mono in a high school theatre troupe.

The incident happened on a weekend when Michael, my partner, was out of town. (Extra unfortunate because he is the tech guru in our household.) I’d planned a series of activities to take advantage of my personal time: brunch with a friend, a solo ticket to a contemporary ballet accompanied by the Colorado Jazz Repertory Orchestra (more on that, and the incredible dance company Wonderbound, another time). I arrived at brunch early and was scribbling a condensed version of morning pages in my latest composition notebook when my phone lit up: a no-longer-in-service auto-response from one of my best friend’s former work emails. What on earth? I wondered. I opened my phone and saw it: already half a dozen auto-replies to a Paperless Post invite I had never sent, but that damn sure looked like it came from me.

The worst part is that I 100% would send a contextless party invite to everyone I’ve ever met! That kind of chaotic but community-oriented shit is MY JAM! So extra fuck you to the scammers for hijacking my literal dream!

Plus, now I find myself in the awkward position of the boy-who-cried-party.

Subscribe now

The spam e-vite went out to old coworkers and classmates, editors at top-tier magazines, a former therapist (who thanked me for the invite and said the nature of our previous relationship prevented them from attending), the entire google group of my old neighborhood. People I had never spoken to in person and people I desperately want to impress.

I spent Sunday trying to mitigate the damage, by sending emails to as many people as I could think of, telling them, “that wasn’t me, but this is. Don’t click the links!” I sent these alert emails from a hot-spotted laptop on a public bench outside my brunch spot (this whole saga definitely reiterated my neurotic tendency to never leave home without a computer). I sent another slough of emails after brunch from the front seat of my car in the parking lot of the Butterfly Pavilion.

When Alan Turing published his paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in 1950, he asserted that “the progression of machine intelligence” could be evaluated by “whether a machine can talk to a human without giving away that it is a machine.”2 This question is the basis of what’s now known as the Turing Test.

We now live in this weird, technologically mediated world where we—humans, individuals—are increasingly incentivized to communicate in ways that are indistinguishable from computer programs: calendar invites, generic language in emails, requests for feedback or input or interviews that sound canned and scripted. Hustle culture runs on a push for efficiency, the mandate that one must reduce friction and inconvenience in order to do more and therefore earn more.

How do we manage to differentiate ourselves from the machines? Captcha—those annoying and banal little puzzles that pop up at random intervals around the web—is the main way that we evidence our humanity (by clicking all the images that show a bicycle, for example), but even that data is being used to train machine learning models so they can better impersonate humans. Feels a little ouroboric to me.

Computer programs don’t throw parties; people do.

A scenario like this requires both prevention and repair. Prevention: turn on two-factor authentication, download an authenticator app, advocate for better privacy legislation. Repair: publicly carve out time and space to build a community where human flubs are met with grace and compassion.

Shame is neutralized by bringing it out in the open, which is what I’m hoping to do here. This is something I didn’t understand back in my summer camp days: I thought that shame, if confessed, would grow like the Blob. If everyone knew about my failures, they would use that information to mock and spurn me. Instead, transparency gives other people the chance to say, “Oh yeah, I’ve done the same thing.” The embarrassment comes from believing I’m the only one foolish enough to fall for something like this, which isn’t true.

Phishing scams like this are particularly dangerous because they weaponize trust. What bolstered me throughout the day was when people who replied with questions and genuine reactions: many of them expressing a desire to come to whatever I was allegedly planning, others checking on the validity of the e-vite by posing personal questions. I heard back from people I hadn’t corresponded with in years. Other emails came from people I’d never met (but apparently emailed). Someone said they were sorry to hear about the hack and wanted to know more about the conference mentioned in my email signature. I was shocked by people’s eagerness to be invited to something. Connection leads to unexpected outcomes, and I want to leverage my network for curiosity rather than suspicion.

Leave a comment

“Is it stupid to write about this?” I asked my friend Stephen on Sunday night, while we sat at the bar around the corner from my house sipping light beers and rehashing The Incident.

First, he cackled. Then he said, “Dude, isn’t like half your oeuvre about embarrassment and catharsis and the collective processing of individual experiences?”

I grew up with shame as the automatic response to having done anything I perceived as Wrong. When I realized on Sunday that I’d been hacked, my whole body flushed. Jitters shot to my fingertips. Everyone you’ve ever emailed will know how incompetent you are, shame whispered.

I grew up evangelical, rooted in the belief that “the wages of sin is death.” Anything you do wrong, I believed, disqualifies you from the right to connection. Wrongdoing—inevitable and hereditary—is proof that each one of us deserves to be cast out into outer darkness.

Furthermore, based on the watered-down theology that I absorbed as a child, “all sin is sin.” Digital negligence that results in your email getting hacked is, according to this view, not substantially different from committing murder or sexual assault. This false equivalence is exacerbated by a framework that sees sin primarily as an offense against God rather than other people: ‘sin’ isn’t so much about causing harm as it is about violating an abstract, existential rubric for behavior.

This flawed theology has numerous disastrous trickle-down effects: it absolves bad actors from addressing the harm they’ve caused, it inculcates victim-blaming, and it de-prioritizes the investigation of serious offenses while elevating scrupulosity, self-policing, and shame.

Transparency allows me to shift what happened over the weekend back into proportion. Yeah, my email got hacked. Yeah, I should’ve responded with more skepticism and media literacy to the original spammy e-vite I received. And: making a mistake doesn’t condemn me to eternal damnation.

These beliefs of sin and damnation are so deeply ingrained that they rise to the surface with the slightest provocation. But those aren’t my held beliefs anymore.

In the past, when something like this would happen, it could take me out for days at a time. Shame would press me back into bed, remind me of my un-fitness for everything I wanted to do, and I would stay there, immobilized and aching. I have been working to un-learn these beliefs, to deprogram my innate association between messing up and placing myself in exile. And I can observe the changes in myself: the freedom that comes from giving myself the grace to make mistakes and then keep on living.

What’s been your latest most embarrassing moment? What kind of instances are shame triggers for you? What practices help you regulate?

Leave a comment

These topics will hopefully be in rotation for the next few weeks or so. I’m working on a deep-dive into generative AI and LLMs (see the footnote reference to Karen Hao’s Empire of AI!) as well as an essay that will examine dynamics of power, absolution, and abuse within a flawed theology of sin.

Also—in the vein of throwing parties—I’m working on planning an online panel with some of my favorite recent debut authors! Details should be coming soon, and they’ll be all over the invite, so you can trust it’s coming from me and a few collaborators and not an anonymous bot trying to steal your passwords.

If you’re going to AWP, I would love to see you there! Shoot me an email or a DM if you’d like to meet up or hi-five in the book fair.

That’s all for this week, folks. Since I’m working to combat the anonymity of the internet, here’s a picture of my face so you can envision the person behind the essays.

Xoxo, McKenzie

Share

Last week, I wrote about Boulder’s first romance-only bookstore, the influence of booksellers, and the distinctive offerings of curated spaces. I mean, don’t we all want a public space where we feel like our interests and quirks are acknowledged and centered?

As soon as I asked that question, I repeated it to myself: do we want that space—and who do I mean by ‘we’?

My instinct tells me that a specifically curated space holds more appeal for people who have experienced marginalization, whether for identity, interests, or preferences. People who think of themselves as normative1 generally expect their interests/preferences to be automatically centered in mainstream spaces.

[insert hand-drawn comic of Stick Figure Ed Sheeran playing guitar at an open mic. SFES says, ‘this one goes out to all the normies!’ and someone in the audience – maybe someone with pink hair? A sOciAl NoNcOnFoRmIsT - says, ‘dude, everything you do is for the normies!’2]

Then, on Friday, my instagram feed served up a string of sponsored posts broadcasting the recent opening of the Denver Book Society: “a bookstore. A cafe. A community hub” launched by Kwame Spearman, the former CEO of Tattered Cover. Gripped with curiosity, I decided to go in person and check out this latest contribution to my local literary scene. But first, I did some research.

Spearman and his business partner Rich Garvin envision Denver Book Society “as a modern ‘third place’ designed for conversation, connection and culture.”3

I’m not against third spaces (a space that is neither home nor work), I’m very into them; I just worry that the popularity of the term has led to a dilution of the concept. The idea of ‘third spaces’ comes up so frequently in my local journalism and cultural criticism that I’ve finally placed on hold sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place—the text in which he coined the term. Soon, I will pick it up from my local library, a true third place. Then, I will be fully empowered to police everyone else’s language. ;P

The flippant deployment of ‘third space’ in marketing copy has started to feel almost sinister to me: that by claiming the concept, these entities (often businesses) are attempting to secure community loyalty without having to work for it. It’s sort of like proclaiming yourself an ally: like, that’s not up to you.

At the same time, elsewhere on the internet, the Denver Book Society has already started fielding vitriol, largely thanks to Kwame Spearman’s professional history in the city. In addition to being credited with running Tattered Cover straight into the ground like an oil drill, Spearman is a former Denver mayoral candidate who dropped out of the 2023 race after encountering considerable blowback to his pro-law-and-order campaign.4

But since Denver Book Society is a bookstore, and Critic at Play is a literary newsletter, join me for a tour through the history of what was once Denver’s most illustrious independent bookstore.

Share Critic at Play

What was the Tattered Cover?

A Denver institution, the Tattered Cover was, at one point, one of the largest and most beloved independent bookstores in the US. The original Tattered Cover opened in 1971 and occupied less than a thousand square feet. The bookstore quickly outgrew this space, expanding and moving all around Denver, opening additional outposts in LoDo (lower downtown), Highlands Ranch, Littleton, and elsewhere. In 2006, the flagship store moved from the Cherry Creek neighborhood (where Tattered Cover had launched) into a former theater on East Colfax, which remains its central location today.

One Joyce Meskis was at the helm of Tattered Cover during its most influential decades, from 1974 to 2015. Meskis served as president of the American Booksellers Association during the early ‘90s. She contributed to the founding of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, and later sat on its board. Oren Teicher, former CEO of the American Booksellers Association, is quoted in one of Meskis’ many national obituaries (she passed in 2022 at the age of 80) as saying, “She helped invent the modern indie bookstore, and led the way in establishing the best customer service while treating every employee with dignity and respect.”5

Meskis herself, described as an unwavering advocate of free speech, seems to reach out from beyond the grave to weigh in on my recent essays. “Meskis believed,” PW reports, “it is up to customers to decide what content they want to read, and that it is bookstores’ role to provide access without passing judgment.”

Meskis was also a technological innovator, introducing some of the first computerized inventory systems for bookstores. (However, NPR notes, “When the first computers were introduced on the sales floor . . . she insisted on painting them brown, to blend in with the bookshelves.”6 What a delightfully revelatory detail.)

The outpouring of affection for Meskis’ Tattered Cover made me regretful that I didn’t spend more time there as a teenager—I attended middle school and high school only forty minutes north of the Tattered Cover’s flagship location, but as a teenager busy with theatre and youth group, I didn’t make much time for excursions into the city.

In 2015, Meskis initiated a two-year leadership transition to pass the store to a couple, Len Vlahos and Kristen Gilligan. At the time, the Tattered Cover was nationally renowned, and it operated four Denver locations and three satellite locations at the Denver Airport.

The extended leadership transition was complete by 2017, but Vlahos and Gilligan didn’t have a particularly long tenure after that. As soon as December 2020, they had sold off the store to Bended Page LLC, headed by Kwame Spearman and David Back. The couple cited “the business’s mounting debt” and said “we saw this coming a long way off.”7

Among the challenges facing the store was a loss of public trust after Vlahos and Gilligan had declined to speak out against police violence during the summer of 2020.8 Then the owners withdrew their original statement and conceded that they were in need of (or clearly, overdue for) diversity training, which earned them ire from the other side, “who claimed the store was bending to cancel culture. Either way,” Westword summarized, “the business sustained another hit in a year already full of them.”9

This is one of the places where the story piques my interest.

> To what extent do we require our commercial entities to weigh in on matters of morality? I mean, a bookstore is not a public institution—and maybe this is one of my problems with the thoughtless embrace of “third space” language.10 A bookstore is a business, and I worry about the ways we’ve projected demands for moral purity onto businesses.

Leave a comment

I want to support companies that I view as aligned with my values, yes, but I also think that looking to corporations to reflect my ethics is misguided. A bookseller is not a pastor; can we just let people do their jobs?

In her book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, critic wrestles her way through about a dozen case studies of artists—musicians, writers, film makers—who have done monstrous things. The book originated in her viral Paris Review essay, “What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” and developed into an investigation of capitalism and the seemingly implicit assumption that the ways we consume should be—even could be—a vessel for morality.

“To say someone else is consuming improperly implies that there’s a proper way to consume. And that’s not necessarily true,” Dederer writes. “A series of decisions is made–decisions that are not primarily concerned with ethics–and then the consumer is left to figure out how to respond, how to parse the correct and ethical way to behave.”

Assuming that business leaders—our corporate overlords—are also moral models whose behavior is to be emulated is another way that we’ve come to conflate capitalism with virtue. The fact that one is a business owner does not make them a community leader. A business owner can be a community leader, but they are not both automatically.

That’s what worries me about Denver Book Society: the way its branding positions it as a community space without having to evidence its claims. Spearman’s invocation of community-first language and this kind of hyperbolic branding around collective spaces and warm fuzzy feelings is not new. He’s been doing this since the Tattered Cover acquisition, but clearly with no follow-through.11

I am suspicious of the way language like ‘third space’ has been used to integrate retail more deeply into our lives, to blur the separation between consumption and community-building. This is what I hope to find in reading The Great Good Place: where can I show up as a person and not as my wallet?

When Bended Page LLC acquired the Tattered Cover after the extended public relations scandal of 2020, largest shareholder Kwame Spearman (who is Black), said, “One of the things we will ensure is that Tattered Cover is always on the right side of history.”12

Look: I certainly don’t want my local bookstore owners expressing their intentions to be on the wrong side of history, nor am I particularly yearning for a Literature of MAGA outlet in downtown Lafayette.13 But neither do I feel comfortable with a business owner proclaiming that his corporation will always be on the right side of history.

In my experience, actually agitating for equity and human rights involves a lot of humility and missteps. Maybe this is because I’m a white person: a white woman who moves through the world with an outsized amount of privilege and strives to divest from the oppressive systems that benefit me at the cost of my neighbors. Increasingly, I am interested in surrounding myself with people who are willing to admit when they’re wrong, and who are willing to consider that they might be wrong again.

Also, can I highlight the fact that Spearman made this assertion – we will ensure that Tattered Cover is always on the right side of history – in 2020 and then, in 2023, ran for mayor on a platform that maligned folks experiencing homelessness and advocating for greater cooperation with ICE.14

At the end of 2020, Vlahos and Gilligan sold to Bended Page LLC. Westword framed the transition as a ‘local-bookstore-returning-to-its-roots’ story, mentioning how Spearman and Back “spent their childhoods shopping at the Tattered Cover,” and describes Spearman and Back as “Denver natives.” It’s a positive spin on disappointing news, and by framing the acquisition as a return to local ownership (Vlahos and Gilligan moved to Colorado from Stamford, Connecticut, to take over Tattered Cover), the Westword article glosses over the mismatch between Spearman’s and Back’s corporate backgrounds and the customer-centric emphasis of an independent bookstore.15

The acquisition by Bended Page LLC made Spearman the largest shareholder and CEO, which made Tattered Cover the country’s largest Black-owned bookstore. This is particularly interesting to me in light of the PR scandal that contributed to Vlahos and Gilligan selling the store.

I want to see an equitable business landscape, where Black business owners and other business owners of color and folks of the global majority are equally enfranchised and able to access business loans, capital, client bases, and to build personal, generational, and corporate wealth. However, I don’t think wealth-building is the answer to a better society. Furthermore, a company being owned by someone of a certain identity necessarily precludes that company from conforming to the oppressive mores of our broader society.

Bended Page LLC took over The Tattered Cover at the beginning of 2021. In press releases at the time, seller Len Vlahos emphasized the company’s dire financial position. “Tattered Cover was undercapitalized, he continued, and needed an infusion of capital.”16 Allegedly, that’s what the investor group had to offer (along with Spearman’s Blackness).

In terms of actual business modifications, Bended Page LLC immediately shuffled some assets around. They closed the historic Wynkoop location in the former Morey Mercantile building and opened one across from Coors Field. They opened a store in Westminster, one of the further-out suburbs in the Denver metro area.

Less than three years after acquisition, in October, 2023, the Tattered Cover declared bankruptcy.

Allegedly, the company already felt like a shell of its former self. “You’ve seen the stories of the disgruntled employees,” wrote Mike Littwin, reporting on the bankruptcy announcement for nonprofit newsroom The Colorado Sun. “If you’ve dropped by any of the stores, you’ve seen the not-exactly-barren, but far-from-packed bookshelves.”

Why did the Tattered Cover fail?

“It tried to grow its way out of debt,” Littwin writes.17 After the acquisition, the Tattered Cover opened a whole slough of satellite locations, but none of them were distinguished by any particular emphasis.

Much of my writing is nourished by the underground stream of conviction that context matters. By which I mean, place matters, as well as context that extends beyond place. One of the first things that Bended Page LLC did was to open a Tattered Cover in Westminster. Westminster is a highway-adjacent bedroom community with (somewhat) affordable homes. Anyone who takes ten seconds to think about it is going to realize that curating a third space in Westminster, Colorado, will have different requirements than doing so in, say, a multi-story, stone building that formerly housed a twentieth-century mercantile in downtown Denver.

The three stores that closed before the bankruptcy announcement were that same Westminster location, a Colorado Springs outpost, and the Coors Field store. After mass layoffs and various appearances in bankruptcy court, the Tattered Cover sold to Barnes & Noble in July, 2024.18 The national corporation now operates the remaining outlets of the Tattered Cover, including the bookstore in the Lowenstein Theater on East Colfax and the satellites at DIA.

Incidentally, one of the practices that has shored up Barnes & Noble’s financials since an initial decline at the beginning of the pandemic is current CEO James Daunt’s encouragement for individual branches to act independently and cater their unique customer base: essentially, to account for context.

What a strange and circular parable—independent bookstore attempts to grow, launches way too many satellite stores to sustain, and eventually declares bankruptcy because it forgets what made it successful in the first place: the ability to be truly responsive to its local community. Then, independent bookstore gets purchased by national corporation that has succeeded by impersonating local bookstores.

Enter: Denver Book Society.

Over the weekend, I invited my pal Stephen on a literary field trip. Saturday morning, still buzzing a bit from the latest Milonga del Barrio,19 I drove us down to Denver and located the former restaurant space on the corner of Humboldt Street.

Our visit to the bookstore itself was somewhat brief. The place was crawling with people. The low-traffic genres (Colorado books, poetry) were set up on A-frame shelves on the floor of the main room; the high-traffic genres (for example, “fiction”) were against the back walls and wedged into corners. The children’ s section room had a whimsical mural. I saw three or four other visitors raise their iPhones to photograph the space, which made me self-conscious about doing the same thing.

Denver Book Society has positioned itself as new and trendy and instagrammable, and I chafed against my lack of a visible way to distinguish myself against the acolytes. I’m here for literary criticism, I wanted to shout, or moan; any way of setting myself apart from the masses, to re-establish my distinctive moral purity in a space that I disdain for its baseless posturing around moral purity.

After lingering in the exposed-brick hallway where a couple was assembling a Bridgerton puzzle at one of the only tables, Stephen and I bounced. We walked back to a cafe near where I had parked, ordered a savory crepe (me) and a half-caf iced cortado (him) and read Elena Ferrante.

I don’t think I’ll be returning to Denver Book Society. It struck me as eighty percent hype, minimal substance. (At least one of the booksellers seemed to have taste [I KNOW I’m an egregious elitist; thank you for noticing, and that’s now the name of my band]—they had placed Denis Johnson, Karen Russell, and Carmen Maria Machado on their staff picks shelf. The shelf opposite featured heady selections from Dan Brown, Matthew McConaughey, David Baldacci, Brene Brown, and a book called Why We Love Football.)

From the sound of it, Spearman is a bad business owner. I don’t want him to fail because I disagree with his politics; I want him to fail20 because I don’t like the way he does business. I want my bookseller to be good at selling good books. So far, I’ve found little to evidence Spearman is that.

If he’s good at selling books, that might reduce how much I care about his other policies. Vlahos and Gilligan’s justification for not releasing a public statement against police brutality in 2020 was grounded in Tattered Cover’s historical precedent:21 the bookstore had never offered public statement because that’s not what a bookstore exists to do. Do I think that Tattered Cover needed diversity training and better policies and more oversight around diversity, equity, and inclusion? Absolutely. Do I think that’s the same thing as making a public statement in response to a public event? No!

I want a bookstore that’s actually rooted in community, not just masquerading as such. I do want to patronize businesses where I know the owners and I know “what my dollars are supporting”. And—dollars are dollars. They’re not Morality Tokens. They’re not betting chips we can stash away to barter for a better world. I believe a better world is possible, but we’re not going to capitalism our way there. Are any of us really so naive as to believe in “clean money”?

I want to decry Fuzzy Feeling Capitalism. A bookseller is one node in a much larger chain of production and distribution. What about the other nodes? And what is our role?

Claire continues: “We attempt to enact morality through using our judgment when we buy stuff, but our judgment doesn’t make us better consumers—it actually makes us more trapped in the spectacle, because we believe we have control over it. What if instead we accepted the falsity of the spectacle altogether?”

If we have to live under capitalism, can we at least not fucking pretend that it—the businesses we patronize, the supply chains in which we participate, the ends it serves—should adhere to an impossible standard of moral purity?

I am thrilled that entities exist which allow us to mitigate the harmful effects of consumption on the planet and on the global population. For example, I love that, instead of Amazon, I can buy books online through Bookshop. For my internet fashionistas, there’s Conscious Assembly. There are increasing avenues for harm reduction.

AND—I’m bumping into the wall of belief in a morally pure way of life.

As in, I don’t think I can sustain the pretense of believing that there is a Good Bookstore, a Morally Correct Business Owner, a form of capitalism (or any other economic system?) that absolves us of our extraction-oriented participation.

What if I’m not interested in the pretense of moral perfectionism anymore?

I mean—didn’t I already fucking do that for half my life?

The scrupulosity, the punishing self-surveillance, the performative self-punishment: these are all too familiar, and I don’t want to make space for them in my life anymore.

I didn’t leave evangelicalism just so I could embrace an even more hollow, relentless view of moral striving.

People are opening bookstores. Yes, those people might be despicable corporate shills. They run businesses poorly AND they look down on others.

I do at least one of those things—which doesn’t excuse the other. But/And I don’t want to even pretend to spend my life scrutinizing the imaginary scrolls of others’ behavior in order to indict or release them. I didn’t leave evangelicalism just to designate myself an alternative moral arbiter, without even a distinct creed to fuel my rampage of judgment.22

The doctrine of forgiveness is far too often leveraged to release predators whose crimes need to be addressed and to penalize individuals who have only fallen prey to temptations common to humankind. The lack of distinction between various tiers of wrongdoing — “all sin is sin” — allows too much latitude to abusers and too little grace to the rest of us.

It’s late and I’m jaded and clearly won’t get around to making my clever illustration of Stick Figure Ed Sheeran. Existence is a fractal: the issues that matter on the large scale repeat themselves on the small scale, too.

I want integrity and humility, in myself and in my institutions. I want sincerity and curiosity. And I want to know your thoughts, too.

Leave a comment

Despite the genre’s burgeoning popularity, I’ve never read a real romance novel. The closest I’ve come was in high school, when I stayed up late to plough through2 my thick paperback copy of Francine River’s Redeeming Love, the Gold Rush-era “love story”3 heavily inspired by the Old Testament book of Hosea. Two or three years ago, Hannah and I spent a movie night watching the 2022 film adaptation of Redeeming Love distributed by Universal Pictures, and the film was so slow and self-consciously chaste we could barely get through it.

Obviously, I haven’t spent enough time in the “romance space” to write much about it, beyond the observation that the “romance space” has become increasingly literal. Sugar and Spice Books is only the latest (and for me, the closest) instantiation of the romance-bookstore trend—which is not only fun to watch, but also raises fundamental questions about the ways books are sold and consumed today.

The genre of romance has long been dismissed and maligned, relegated to the sidelines for its associations with feminine desire and its women-forward plot points. Discussion question: is the romance novel the feminine equivalent of ‘airport thrillers’?

Leave a comment

The rise of romance-only bookstores strikes me as evidence of the way an otherwise-dismissed genre has capitalized on its marginalization.

Hannah Morgan, proprietor of Sugar and Spice Books, told me, “I’ve found a lot of bookstores where their romance selection is a little lacking. It’s definitely a market that needs to be filled.” It’s almost like romance readers considered their treatment in traditional bookstores and said, “If you can’t be nice about it, don’t bother making space for us in your stores. We’ll go make our own.” And they have.

A question I’ve been pondering: Are booksellers tastemakers? Or do booksellers exist to serve the client, the customer, to provide the greatest access with the least friction to whatever book the consumer requests?

I have not worked in book retail (tragically!), but I have worked in beverage retail4, and I’m intrigued by the subjective authority with which individual retailers carry themselves. One of the wine guys at my store (they were all guys, because the head wine buyer was a total misogynist) would have a whole tizzy fit every time a customer asked him what he liked.

“What I like?!” he would repeat, incredulously, scoffing at their audacity for even pretending to approach his ascendant palate. “I’ve been tasting wines for fifty years! How dare they [the plebes, obviously] think they’re going to like what I like?!”

Is it the job of booksellers to invite customers to like what they like, or to provide the books the customers request, regardless of the bookseller’s opinion of those texts? This question inherently positions the salesperson as ‘expert’, suggesting the ‘banking model’ of information transfer that revolutionary literacy activist Paulo Freire condemns as classist and inequitable.

Freire writes, “In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry.”5

Is knowledge a protected category dispersed through limited access, often “earned” by means of capital? Or is knowledge—taste—accessible to all, if interpreted differently, applicable in different situations?

What interests me about romance as a genre and romance-only bookstores is that readers are the ones driving the romance economy. The benchmark success of Sarah J. Maas’s series A Court of Thorns and Roses—largely credited with launching the romantasy craze—was not predicted by publishers or marketers, and Mass herself asserts that the series only found its audience by going viral on BookTok (the bookish subsegment of TikTok).6 To me, the popularity of romance novels as a whole, and romantasy in particular, evidences the rise of the people’s voice in consumer literature. Give the people what they want! And what if ‘what the people want’ is something other than what the Big Five and their in-house marketing divisions have decided to make the people want?7

Over the past few months, I’ve read a series of different essays, each of which purports to demystify (to differing extents) the rationale of the major publishing houses that fancy themselves the arbiters of culture.

• First, Tajja Isen’s viral essay in The Walrus: “The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem”

• Neon Literary Agency ’s rebuttal, “The Publishing Industry Has Something More Complicated Than ‘a Gambling Problem’”

• Maria Kuznetsova’s Lit Hub essay, “The Publishing Industry Gambled On Me . . . and Lost”

• ’s “The Search for What Sells Books, or the Failure of Institutions”

There’s a deep-dive-on-publishing paper trail if you want to follow it. (Engage at your own risk; I’m not necessarily endorsing that editorial scavenger hunt.)

In the last essay, though—the one by Sean deLone—deLone talks about the cultural creators and artifacts that have defied, either via their success or their inability to find it with both hands, the commercial dictates of their producers.

“Established publicity machines no longer lead culture, they follow it,” deLone writes. As an example, he pinpoints the film Sinners, which skyrocketed onto my radar when I saw at the 2025 Mississippi Book Fest8 explain how he came to write the liner notes for the Sinners vinyl.

“Sinners,” deLone writes, “gained momentum through word of mouth, until the force of the audience adoration for the film was undeniable . . . It may not have been the industry’s, the publicist’s, or the critic’s favorite film but it was the people’s.”

This shift away from producer-determined successes could be seen as a win for artistry: the authoritarian, top-down approach of the ‘banking model’ has been supplanted by a proletarian resurgence of ‘true taste’ (unfettered by capitalism and market forces) and self-determination.

The rise of romance-only (/genre-specific) bookstores gestures toward the broader segmentation of the consumer market.

DeLone, in his “Search for What Sells Books” essay, emphasizes the (commercial—but also social?) significance of small but highly engaged communities: “hidden, unnamed groups coming together to form their own networks in lieu of institutions being able to accurately identify what people want or care about.” The people are leading the shifts, deLone broadcasts. “Are big publishers, giant film studios, and the oligopoly of music labels set up to reach these groups? Most definitely not,” he acknowledges. Thank goodness those clumsy behemoths are not the only entities that exist. Thank goodness for locally-owned, genre-specific, indie bookstores.

Part of the success of romance lies in its robust acknowledgement that every book is not for everyone. “There are so many subgenres in romance,” Hannah Morgan—for example, hockey romance. Did anyone else know about this before the HBO adaptation of Heated Rivalry?!

I haven’t watched the show—I know, I know; (My excuses:) we’ve been moving and we finally hung up the tv this week but we have yet to find the remotes; also we don’t have an HBO subscription and we used my friend Stephen’s brother’s login to watch The Righteous Gemstones last summer--but I did love reading this essay about Heated Rivalry.

In our interview, Morgan pointed out, “Romance is really the only subgenre that’s branched out on its own.”

While my BRL article was in edits, I took a trip to Europe with my friend Hannah. In the old city of Stockholm, Hannah and I stumbled upon the Science Fiction Bookstore, a marvel of genre-specific interest and enjoyment.

The Science Fiction Bookstore in Stockholm had models of sci-fi characters hanging from the ceiling, whole sections dedicated to role-playing games, action figures and manga collections and more. I found a copy of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by my graduate school advisor, Claire Dederer.

Ultimately, the Science Fiction Bookstore embodied how to use a specific lens or approach to contain the standard products within a more particular—and therefore, at least to me, more compelling—vessel.

I don’t know that I’m about to become a romance reader. But I do want to hang out at Sugar and Spice Books. Fast Company credits the rise of romance bookstores to public interest in third places post-pandemic. I’ve written a handful of articles about different businesses or art spaces that have opened in the past few years, and I think every business owner I’ve interviewed has told me they’re striving to create a third space. (This theme has been so consistent that I keep telling myself I need to check out from the library Ray Oldenburg’s original The Great Good Place so I can actually assess when their visions are aligned with the meaning of the term.) We’re collectively enduring a loneliness epidemic. We don’t know how to gather anymore. Sure, I think some of this is overblown, but I also think that well-curated, welcoming, inclusive spaces hold more sway than ever before.

If you started a bookstore, what would you prioritize? Would your particular taste lie in the books or other elements of the design? Would that emphasis be evident or subtle?

Are you a romance reader? Why or why not? How does the local culture economy present in your area?

Leave a comment

I can’t wait to hear what aspects of the cultural economy get you all hot and bothered.

Xoxo, McKenzie

After renting a sweet yellow bungalow in downtown Boulder for four-and-a-half years (much longer than we initially envisioned), we took the leap and bought a home of our own, ten miles east of where we were before.

Boulder County is an interesting place in terms of human geography: Boulder and its surroundings—“the L-towns,” as they’re known: Louisville, Lafayette, Longmont—are not quite urban or rural, big city or suburb. Boulder is enough of a city in its own right; the University provides a constant flow of students, and starting next year, Boulder will be the new home of the Sundance Film Festival.1 But beyond geography and demographics, I want to consider what it means to be home, and to make home.

Share

I’m writing this to you from the desk in my craft lab (how I refer to my office, because “office” is too stale and corporate, and “craft lab” suggests experimentation and curiosity, tangibility and concerted study [I mean “craft” in multiple registers: the craft of writing, as in “craft books” {of which I have a whole cube on my newly arranged bookshelves} but also “crafts” like handicrafts, the knitting and crocheting projects that have yet to be sorted out of their storage bins and into the wall-sized shelving unit]), where midmorning sunlight spills in from the south-facing window and Keana, my cat, is crouching in the sunspot on the desk.

In my last house, the craft lab was in the basement, and the south-facing window opened onto a garden-level window-well. When Keana prowled through the yard in front of the window, she cast cartoonishly magnified shadows into the craft lab, where her grayscale projection traversed the industrially carpeted floor. Here, my window opens onto sky.

Moving is chaotic, disorderly and disorienting. (I haven’t been able to find my hairbrush in weeks, which is shocking, because I usually brush my hair multiple times a day. If it was any longer right now I can only assume it would froth itself into a rat’s nest so intractable I would have to get it cut.) The frantic energy of moving threatens to eclipse the whole point of it: that my love and I have chosen and invested in a new place to establish the next stage of our shared life. The pandemonium of moving is paradoxically in service to greater stability.

House-hunting brought to the forefront the question, what is a house for? We wanted a house that would keep our values, priorities, and dreams from getting buried in stuff, the shuffle and clutter of everyday life. With every house we toured, I found myself walking from room to room, pantomiming the actions of an ordinary day, asking myself, how would I live in this space?

Our rental in Boulder didn’t have any kind of dining room, so if we wanted to sit at a proper table to eat our food, we could eat on the back porch or hunch over the coffee table in the living room. I want to host dinner parties in the new house; I want to be able to sit and project at a kitchen table, so we looked for a house with a space in which to do that.

We love to entertain, and people always congregate in the kitchen, so we looked for a house where that would be comfortable. Michael wanted a house that we could customize and make our own, so right now the kitchen is little more than studs, exposed insulation, an extension-corded microwave sitting on some garage storage shelves. My parents were never big on DIY or home renovations, so I’m learning on the go, expanding my creative capacity to include kitchen remodeling and interior design. And then, because we love hosting, we invited everyone over for a New Year’s Eve party in our demolished kitchen, and it was magical and memorable and perfect.

We looked at houses through the lens of how we live and how we hope to live.

I’m a big believer in the idea that the spaces we inhabit shape the way we inhabit them: not only on the scale of individual buildings (I once heard someone says that architecture is the only dictatorial art form, because it compels a certain response), but rippling out to the built environment and then to the landscape beyond.

My family moved around a bit when I was growing up: the house in which we lived at the top of the hill in Louisville, Colorado, was a standard multi-level single family home, exterior of brick and wood siding, large weathered back deck, and an even larger yard in which I played horses and my brothers shot arrows into haybales and we had the occasional (but memorable) family-wide whipped cream fight. The neighbor families had girls about my age and I spent endless hours in their homes, playing Barbies on their back decks, and pumping my legs as hard as I could on their swingsets, trying to launch my body over the hedge of lilacs and all the way into the robin’s-egg-blue sky. I knew exactly what the crayola color “robin’s egg blue” referred to, because robins nested in the aspen trees by our front walk and every so often an egg would fall out and break apart on the flagstones. My brothers and the other neighbor kids and I rode our bikes in endless circles in the street in front of our houses, and we ran in packs from our house to the park down the street and back. We were [white] kids growing up in a protected, residential neighborhood in middle America.

The summer I turned nine, we moved “down south”—all of an hour and a half away, but far enough that we exchanged our proximity to Boulder—Colorado’s self-styled progressive hub—for proximity to Colorado Springs, the headquarters of Focus on the Family and an epicenter for conservative evangelicalism.2 The house we lived in during “the Monument years” was a robin’s-egg-blue residential colossus: probably double the square footage of our previous house. The main floor had this “great room” with a soaring cathedral ceiling and breathtaking windows that opened onto our fully forested backyard. We strung a zip line between two pine trees and padded the landing with a mattress we’d sourced from someone’s driveway on trash day (Mom made sure to knock on the door and ask if it was bedbug-free before we loaded it into the back of the minivan).

Life was wilder in Monument: I don’t mean in the sense of crazy things happening, because in that regard I remember little. We felt isolated from politics and a sense of the world as a whole. Instead, I seemed to live suspended in fantasy. I felt wild, untamed, feral. My parents helped me build a tire swing in the back yard and I pretended it was a horse that I rode for hours at a time. Two cul-de-sacs over from ours was an empty lot—empty of buildings, but not of trees—which I studied and mapped and named after landmarks in the Chronicles of Narnia. The winters were defined by excessive snowfall. Once, the whole neighborhood was snowed in, and my mom helped some neighbors cross-country-ski out to the main road—with several bags of luggage in tow—so they could catch a bus to an airport.

Monument granted us more space, but it was space we struggled to fill.

I haven’t much reflected on our move out of Boulder proper, yet. Perhaps it’s too close. And I don’t yet know how our life in Lafayette will differ. Boulder is still just a stone’s throw down the road. I’m still writing culture coverage for local outlets. But I wonder, too, about what this space will instigate in me. Our new house is on a quiet cul-de-sac with a playground at its end. From my window, I can see the breeze plucking and strumming the boughs of the neighbor’s pines.

We are not effortlessly transferable beings, paper dolls that can be cut out and plopped down into any context.

What about for you? How do you notice yourself shaped by your environment, be that your house, your neighborhood, your city or state? What are the choices you’ve made in your living space, and how do they allow you to live? And even simpler: what do you love about the spaces you occupy? What do you dream for them?

Leave a comment

My friend Hannah and I recently visited Iceland and Sweden. I got to Iceland a day before she did. When she arrived at the Reykjavik bus station around 7:30 am, it was still pitch black out, and she texted me that she was walking into downtown. “WHERE IS THE SUN” she asked.

The sun doesn’t come up there until shortly after 10 am these days.

The northern hemisphere is still in winter. The sun came up after 10, set around 5. Our bodies are not meant to be in perpetual overdrive, or even perpetual drive. I am sitting at my desk this morning, remembering how essential it is to modulate, to take time for rest and joy and calm and stillness amidst all the pandemonium. We are not meant to be in constant states of production (and yet, here I am, committed to sending this newsletter every Tuesday, attempting to honor my body’s needs and also make a life out of this writing thing, build an audience, develop consistency and trust).

So this week, instead of a full standalone essay, I’d like to share a couple other recent publications.

• For the past year I’ve been the inaugural critic-in-residence for Mayday magazine. I’ve been writing a series about Christianity in the media, including media created by and for Christians (and media about Christians by non-Christians). In this most recent essay, I write about the HBO show The Righteous Gemstones.

  Read the essay here!

• Last summer while I was in France I picked up Ann Berest’s La Carte Postale, and I wrote an essay about it for the Cincinnati Romance Review!

“While reading, I found it almost impossible not to draw parallels between the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and what’s happening right now in the United States. The global audience, watching constantly through our smartphones, is practically inundated with signs of the rising authoritarianism, and yet public outcry seems out of step with the looming threat.”

Read the review here!

• The piece isn’t available online YET, but this month’s issue of Christian Century features my review of ’s new memoir, Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl. Rollins’s story is a relatable one for anyone who grew up in the hyper-body-fixated contexts of purity culture and/or diet culture of the early 2000s, and it resonates.

Review coming soon!

• Finally, I’d like to share this past week’s story from . As many of you know (but some of you may not!), I serve as the executive editor of sneaker wave magazine, a Substack-hosted paywall-free digital literary magazine where we publish one true story every Sunday. We exist to elevate the work of nonfiction writers and to connect people through the power of storytelling.
  

  Register for our upcoming class!

  
  This past week, we published an essay from Matt Mauch, a poet in Minneapolis who writes about his experience in the burgeoning resistance movement against masked federal agents. I love (and help edit!) every story that we run at sneaker wave, but this one is especially significant. Please read and share widely.

sneaker wave magazine

minneapolis calling

ON MY LAST DAY IN PARIS, I receive a text from a longtime friend and coworker back home in Minneapolis: Secret police are executing us in the streets, in broad daylight. Another friend and her spouse had recorded a video, which was attached, of the scene in the street in front of their house where a woman had just been shot in the head. Our friends were…

Read more

5 months ago · 23 likes · 5 comments · sneaker wave

One more thing: as I’ve mentioned before, paying subscribers to this newsletter receive limited edition art prints from me in the mail! The last one I mailed out is the goth Despairagus print; this week, I’ll be mailing prints of the layered watercolor “Who told you you were in danger” (explored in last week’s essay). If you’d like to receive the latest print, sign up as a paying subscriber at any rate, and I’ll reach out to get your mailing address.

Subscribe now

Thanks for being here.

XOXO, McKenzie

This past Friday, two other Boulder County tangueras and I—shoutout to Alex Karnasopoulos and Anna Paschke Levy—launched our very own monthly milonga (an Argentine tango social dance) in a beautiful historic building where I used to do community theatre when I was, like, eleven. The first night of Milonga del Barrio was a sort of artistic homecoming, and we were blown away by the enthusiasm and support of other dancers in our local tango scene . . .

But I can’t write a whole essay about dancing right now.

After about four months of planning, the milonga was even more of a success than we’d dared to hope for. Anna baked so many incredible snacks, the decor and the music and the crowd were all incredible, and I had so many exquisite tandas. We stayed late to pack all our decorations back into Anna’s and Alex’s cars, and when Michael and I got home around 1 in the morning, we were all so giddy that we stayed up even later texting back and forth about what a fabulous time we’d had.

Saturday morning, I woke up to news about the latest shooting in Minneapolis: the latest instance of masked federal vigilantes murdering US citizens in broad daylight.

Because misinformation and erosion of public trust and consensus are some of the original and enduring tactics of this administration to stoke division and disunity, we must be our own archive (as I’ve written about here). We must repeat the facts, hold one another to standards of spreading accurate information, and think critically about the larger narratives we are creating and propagating.

• On January 7th, federal officers shot and killed Renee Macklin Good, an American citizen who was in her car at the time of her death.
  

• On Saturday, January 24th, around 9 a.m. local time, federal ICE officers attacked Alex Pretti – a white man, an ICU nurse, an American citizen. Video footage of the incident, which I have not watched and will not watch, shows Pretti surrounded by ICE agents, knocked to the ground, beaten, and then shot several times. His ostensible crime is that of carrying a weapon which he was permitted to own, a right that is explicitly codified in the Second Amendment.

A lot of the material I’ve seen on social media shares personal details about Pretti: a dog owner, a gentle man who worked with veterans. His next-door neighbor is quoted as saying, “He was a calm person; he’s a nurse.”

I appreciate this work being done to preserve Pretti’s memory; this kind of humanizing practice is even more important when victims of police violence come from a marginalized group and are more likely to be vilified and misrepresented in posthumous accounts.

That being said, I also don’t think we should need to emphasize people’s reputations or purported good deeds or unblemished character in order to mourn and rage against injustice. I don’t care if Pretti was a ‘calm person’ or not;1 Either way, I don’t support federal agents shooting civilians.

Even when I was researching the details of Renee Macklin Good’s death, my searches mostly surfaced impassioned eulogies. These are important, yes. But to make someone a martyr elevates their story over the context and information about what happened to them. This feeds into the myth of the ‘unique resistor,’ the idea that you have to be a certain kind of person to push back against the encroachment of fascism and use of force. In a perverse way, this elevation of Good and Pretti works in ICE’s favor. Part of the tragedy is that Renee Macklin Good didn’t have to be special for this to happen to her. ICE does not care who you are if they think you are “threatening” or “obstructing” their orders.

Share

Emphasizing these sort of character defenses obscures the principle and fuels an implicit argument that the justification for federally sanctioned murder is dependent on the reputation of the victim. Fuck that shit. I want civilians to be safe from masked secret police, no caveats needed.

• ICE, which stands for Immigrant and Customs Enforcement, is a division of the Department of Homeland Security. It was created by the Homeland Security Act, one of the pieces of legislation written in reaction to 9/11: an incident whose violent backlash we are still feeling now. (Did you know that one of the reasons lex talionis—restrictions on retribution in the form of “an eye for an eye”—was first instigated was actually to put limits on revenge, to mitigate against endless escalation? What the United States has justified in the name of 9/11 has far surpassed the original attack. What limits do we observe? When does the justification run out???)

• The intensification of ICE and xenophobic sentiment have escalated with Trump2 but they did not start with him. The Obama administration broke deportation records and was also notoriously hard on immigrants.3 To pin all of this on the Trump administration willfully ignores the role of the American Democratic party and our collective complicity with the status quo.

As Austin Channing Brown writes in her newsletter, Banned, we cannot mistake this moment as being solely about ICE or immigration.

“This moment is about policing in America. . . . Our history, (white) Americans have been duped time and time again, told there is an enemy that requires cruelty . . . Stop and frisk, no knock raids, brutality in the name of fear, public strip searches, surveillance, mandatory minimums, mass incarceration, and violence of all kinds. And here we are again. Will America once again decide that violence is an acceptable price to pay for feeling safer, even as we have evidence that it is not policing but community that makes neighborhoods safer?”

Inappropriate use of force as justified by fear has been at the center of so many organizing moments: George Floyd. Philando Castile (who was killed by police right down the street from where Pretti was killed). Michael Brown. Trayvon Martin.

The history of policing goes all the way back to runaway slave patrols. Policing in the United States has always been about protecting property for those with privilege and subjugating the marginalized.

Are you willing to believe the story that violence against others makes a safer world for you?

I’ve long been a skeptic of “safety,” which I think is one of the most manipulable concepts. Ideas—and feelings—of safety engage our lizard brains, not our rational prefrontal cortexes. When we feel threatened, we tend to exhibit more impulsive behavior and to reinforce social boundaries of in-groups and out-groups.

There’s a question I’ve been ruminating on this week: WHO TOLD YOU YOU WERE IN DANGER?

To be clear: we are in a moment of real danger—this essay is occasioned by the federally-sanctioned murder of a civilian—but that danger is not equally allocated. Moreover, the murders we are witnessing are largely justified in terms of fear and self-defense. Let’s take a moment to acknowledge the absurd double-standard that civilians are expected to remain calm while interacting with trained police officers who have impunity to shoot and kill whenever they feel threatened.

Who told you you were in danger?

The question takes the same shape as what God asked Adam in the Garden, after he and Eve had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and clothed themselves to conceal their nakedness.

God asked, “Who told you that you were naked?”

Do you hear the betrayal? I imagine God recognizing that the Beloved has been duped, and the sinking disappointment God feels in knowing that once one has believed a lie, one can rarely return to the full embrace of the truth.

Who told you you were in danger?

So many of my actions are conditioned by this deeply ingrained belief that I am unsafe.

For me, this belief is a religious one: that I am fallen and deserve hell; that without divine intervention, I have no hope. Believing this was the requisite precursor to accepting Jesus—but the people peddling salvation didn’t understand the cost of inculcating this sense of existential un-safety in children.

This belief lives in my body, in my nervous system, and it still flares up. Disproportionate reactions are often a cue that, rather than responding to the situation at hand, I’m reacting to a much older threat—something along the lines of, If you mess up, you will be cast out into eternal darkness. For me, the current work of deconstruction is de-tethering my sense of safety from the beliefs I was given so young.

But the question echoes out: beyond the individual scale, the collective. Who told you you were in danger?

White people, who told you to regard everyone else as a threat?

Americans, who told you that immigrants are stealing your jobs and attacking your women? (And have you researched who is actually likely to commit domestic violence? Because multiple studies have found that “~40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10% of families in the general population.”4)

Moreover, why are people with privilege so often encouraged to regard those with less privilege as their aggressor?

Who is benefiting from your fear?

• It’s worth noting how “safety” also appears as a bargaining chip in Trump’s current chaotic geopolitical maneuvering, both in his recent intervention in Venezuela and his current intentions to co-opt Greenland.

Because what’s happening in America is connected to the global stage. How do we justify use of force, both at home and abroad? What is the root of power?

There is so much going on and I want to put my head in the sand and watch silly movies and read escapist novels and not think about or acknowledge any of this. But the moment demands more of us.

The moment demands attention and curiosity.
And ‘the moment’ also promises to be more than a moment (and we’ve been in it for a while now)—so we need to find out how to integrate our values with our lives, so that resistance to federal overreach and institutionally sanctioned white supremacist violence does not remove us from our regular practices, but continues them.

Outer work and inner work are interdependent. I cannot change my relationship to concepts of safety and danger in society if I have not reckoned with the concepts of safety and danger that live in my body.

A few books that have been valuable resources for me over the years:

• Becoming Abolitionists, by Derecka Purnell

• Who We Be, by Jeff Chang

• The End of Policing, by Alex Vitale

• Austin Channing Brown’s “Banned” Newsletter

• Nicole Cardoza’s “Reimagined” Newsletter (formerly Anti-Racism Daily)

I would love to know what resources you are turning to in these times. How are you tending to your own humanity and your community?

Attention to these national crises is not meant to override the beauty and goodness that is embedded within daily life. Celebration, dance, and laughter are just as essential to a new order as equity and basic rights.

Which is why, even if I couldn’t spend this whole essay waxing poetic about dance, I still wanted to mention our new milonga. These are ways that I am tending to my own humanity and to my community. Here’s to beautiful venues and freshly baked matcha cookies and casual movie nights and the relationships in which you feel whole enough to hold the overwhelm and the excitement of life.

I hope you find a reason to belly laugh today.