I’ve been reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez, which everyone should read immediately if they’ve ever cared or plan to care about data. Spoiler alert: women have not been part of the data for centuries. And we pay for that with our time, our money, and our lives, all because society is built around a default human named Some Guy.

Then last week, one of my top five medical journals, The Lancet walked in carrying my final corkboard pin.

PCOS — polycystic ovary syndrome — has officially been renamed PMOS: polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome. If this sounds administrative, let me tell you, it is NOT. 

Because the “cysts” were not actually cysts. They were arrested follicles. But since the name pointed everyone toward the ovaries, the entire medical system followed the map: referrals, research, treatment, insurance codes, all of it.

Generations of women were essentially told: wow, your ovaries sure are being dramatic. Maybe try losing weight. 

When in reality it is a complex endocrine and metabolic disorder affecting the entire body.

And medicine has an absolutely unbelievable track record of not giving any thought to women. 

Hysteria comes from the Greek hystera, meaning uterus. 

The ancient Greeks believed the uterus could physically migrate through the body in search of moisture. Up toward the liver, maybe take a left at the lungs. Hippocrates recommended directing strong smells at the vagina to lure it back into position. Perfume down low, something terrible near the nose, so it would flee downward.

The uterus, notably, does not have legs. It was not roaming the body like a glitchy Roomba (Woomba?) that keeps bumping into the coffee table. 

Oh but that was so long ago, I hear you thinking. 

In 1977, the FDA formally recommended excluding women of childbearing age from clinical trials. 

Formally. Recommended.

Not “we forgot.” Not “recruitment challenges.” An actual institutional decision that the best way to understand women’s bodies was to not.

This policy lasted until 1993, which is a long time to approach half the population like a software compatibility issue. It’s giving “we’ve tried nothing and are all out of ideas.” Like the Democrats. But I digress.

So that was the map. Doctors trained on it. Institutions formed around it. The most astonishing part is not that they were wrong. It’s how confidently wrong they were. 

But we must give credit where it is due. Science does something beautiful: it admits the map was wrong.

It did not happen because someone at The Lancet woke up one morning and thought, hmmm, maybe we should check. Lol if only.

It happened because researchers, clinicians, and patients, many of them women who had spent years being told their condition was mysterious and probably just hormonal, pushed for an international evidence review. More than 6,000 studies later (not an exaggeration, can you believe?!), the conclusion was that the name was wrong, the diagnostic criteria were wrong, and the harm had been real and measurable and terrible. 

Progress. Eventually. Yay. 

We can admit that is worthy of admiration in a world where few institutions can own up to being wrong 

However, we are also allowed to be furious that “women are not a niche expansion pack for men” had to be discovered in installments.

This is not a niche problem. It is the problem. And my girl Caroline is one of the countless humans writing this wrong.

Waiting for the baja to blast,
xo,
Saana

Welcome to May I Have a Word, a series I hope to continue, assuming I remember I started it and inspiration, like a strong labor force, strikes at the right time.

Let’s get into it:

Mountebank (n.) — a charlatan who peddles worthless goods from a raised platform.

• History: From the Italian montambanco, literally “one who mounts a bench.” In sixteenth-century Italian piazzas, quack doctors would climb onto benches to draw a crowd, then sell them coloured water and call it medicine. The bench was the whole trick. Without elevation, no audience; without an audience, no sale.

Use case: The Met Gala is a piazza for mountebanks in borrowed couture, ascending the steps to hawk relevance to the press it controls.

Ultracrepidarian (n.) — one who holds forth confidently on subjects they know nothing about.

• History: Coined by the essayist William Hazlitt in 1819, drawn from the Latin ultra crepidam, “beyond the sandal.” The phrase comes from a story about the painter Apelles, who told a cobbler critiquing his painting to stick to judging sandals. The cobbler did not stick to sandals. Neither, it turns out, does anyone.

Use case: The Met Gala carpet is thick with ultracrepidarians, each one ready to explain that year’s theme to a camera whose operator gave up somewhere around the third sponsor mention.

Mumpsimus (n.) — a person who stubbornly clings to the same mistake after being corrected, purely on principle.

• History: From a sixteenth-century anecdote about an illiterate priest who, for decades, mumbled “mumpsimus” during Mass instead of the correct Latin sumpsimus. When finally corrected, he reportedly replied that he would not change his old mumpsimus for anyone’s new sumpsimus. The word has outlived the priest, the Mass, and most of his parishioners.

Use case: The Met Gala has become a mumpsimus in tulle, repeating itself louder each May, mistaking the volume for evolution and the budget for meaning.

Snollygoster (n.) — a shrewd, unprincipled operator, especially one in a position of soft power.

• History: Nineteenth-century American slang, possibly from the dialect word snallygaster, a mythical Maryland monster said to snatch livestock and children. The word migrated from cryptozoology to politics with almost no edits required. A Georgia newspaper editor in 1895 defined a snollygoster as a man driven by “the desire for office, regardless of party, platform or principles.”

Use case: Behind every Met Gala theme sits a snollygoster who has correctly identified that “cultural institution” is the most tax-efficient phrase in the English language.

Fustian (adj.) — pompous, overblown speech; or, fittingly, cheap cloth pretending to be fine. Not to be confused with Faustian, which is making a deal with the devil. Also applicable, admittedly, but everyone already knows that one. I digress.

• History: From the Old French fustaigne, originally a sturdy cotton-linen blend made in Fustat, a suburb of Cairo. By Shakespeare’s time the cloth had a reputation for being passed off as something grander than it was, and the word leapt from textile to rhetoric. Anything dressed up to sound expensive could now be called fustian. The fabric and the bombast share a genealogy and a flaw. Like you and that one cousin.

Use case: Met Gala coverage is pure fustian, draping a corporate fundraiser in the borrowed vocabulary of cultural revolution and hoping nobody checks the receipts.

Bonus: Lickspittle (n.) — a sycophant, but vulgar about it. A sycophant minus the flowery language and twice the desperation.

• History: A blunt seventeenth-century English compound, exactly as graphic as it sounds. A lickspittle was someone willing to lick the spit of a superior to curry favour. The word survived because nothing else quite captures the specific blend of obsequiousness and indignity. Sycophant is what you call them in the article. Lickspittle is what you call them over brunch.

Use case: The Met Gala guest list is padded, as ever, with lickspittles who have confused proximity to wealth with participation in beauty.

The Met Gala was, once upon a time, a benefit for a costume institute. It is now something stranger and harder to forgive.

Consider the arithmetic: The Metropolitan Museum of Art sits on an endowment of more than three billion dollars. In 2018, after a century of letting anyone in the door for whatever they could spare, it ended that policy and began charging non-New Yorkers $25, as if they’re already not at a disadvantage. A child from New Jersey now pays to see a Vermeer, as if the kid doesn’t already have enough to overcome. Like ever learning about Vermeer.

Meanwhile, a billionaire who could fund the whole evening and still be richer in the morning than he was the night before pays $75,000 for a seat, files it as a tax write-off, calls it philanthropy, and expects applause.

This is not a fundraiser. This is a museum with the GDP of a small nation throwing itself a party, charging the public for the privilege of visiting on ordinary Tuesdays, and then asking us to admire the generosity of people who arrived by chauffeur. It is the modern dress rehearsal for let them eat cake, except cake would at least feed somebody.

Yours from the cheap seats, aka the only fun raiser in town,

xo,

S

Full disclozh: I do own a Stanley cup, but only because work handed them out as branded swag, which I think legally exempts me from mockery. I drink NYC tap water out of it, which is clean and delicious and has been since I was a kid. (Looking at you, most of the country.) My favorite movement in this space is the free stuff movement, the great American tradition of putting a chair on the sidewalk and letting the universe decide. I use the curb for anything I need to give away, and there is no better feeling than looking at the spot a whole two minutes later and finding it empty. It went somewhere it was wanted. We all deserve that. Even that one night stand that never should have been in your house.

So it’s from this position of unimpeachable moral high ground that I’d like to walk you through 3,000 years of people being exactly as ridiculous as we are now. Status symbols are how societies whisper what they actually value, and they all share one trick: they’re expensive in ways the poor can’t fake. When the fakes catch up, the symbols mutate. Like a virus. Also like a virus, if you don’t get it together, it will kill you.

Snail juice
The Phoenicians figured out around 1500 BCE that you could extract a deep purple dye from murex sea snails, and that it took thousands of snails to produce a single gram. The dye was called Tyrian purple. The workshops smelled so foul they were exiled to the edges of cities. The resulting color was reserved for emperors. Justinian I eventually wrote it into law: imperial purple, for his use only. Wear it without permission, you’d lose your stuff or your head, depending on the century and the emperor’s mood.

So picture this. The single most expensive substance on earth is…smelling like a dumpster behind a seafood restaurant, draped on the most powerful man in the world. He thinks he looks majestic. He smells like low tide. Nobody can say anything.

Quetzal feathers
Across the Atlantic, the Aztecs and Maya prized quetzal feathers above gold. For the uninitiated, a single quetzal produces only a few usable tail feathers per molt, and killing the bird was forbidden (which is actually really lovely, tbh) , so feather-collectors trapped, plucked, and released them. Imagine being the bird. You have one job. You grow one beautiful thing. These guys keep showing up, putting you in a temporary psych hold, and none of your friends believe you…for now. I don’t know why that took a sinister turn. I’m gonna leave it in. I digress. So Aztec nobles wore cloaks that took years to assemble. Montezuma’s headdress (if it’s really his) is in a museum in Vienna, and Mexico has been politely asking for it back for over a hundred years.

Japanese cracks
The Japanese tea ceremony pulled the cleverest move in the history of status: it elevated wabi-sabi, the deliberately humble and imperfect, into the ultimate flex. A cracked, asymmetric bowl from the right master cost more than a flawless imported one. The poor had cracked bowls because they were poor. The rich had cracked bowls because they were enlightened. This is quiet luxury, invented in the 1500s and still working five centuries later. And now it’s relegated to a phrase floating above a serene waterfall on Jennifer’s insta story as she tries to get over a situationship. Brutal.

Some teeth stuff
While the tea masters were perfecting the cracked bowl, Heian Japan was perfecting the blackened tooth. The practice was called ohaguro, and it lasted until the Meiji government banned it in 1870, and sometimes I like to think about that legislative session. Black teeth, for some reason, signaled refinement, marriage, and status. The dye was made from iron filings soaked in vinegar and tea. It tasted exactly like it sounds. People did this on purpose, every few days, for a thousand years.

English teeth stuff
Everyone knows the whole thing about English teeth, and they come to it in the most English way possible: by accident, with gusto, and still refusing to admit it was a problem.

Sugar arrived as a luxury import, so expensive it was treated like a spice. The wealthy ate it constantly. Elizabeth I brushed her teeth with a sugar paste, because nobody had told her, but to be fair, nobody could tell her anything. By her sixties, her teeth were black, several were missing, and she wore false ones. Heian Japan would have been OBSESSED. The Germans were not, because a German visitor named Paul Hentzner wrote in 1599 that her teeth were “black; a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar.” He said this to a queen. It’s a good reminder that Germans came to a place of humility only in the last 60-ish years, and we may never know why.

And here’s the parallel to the rich/poor wabi-sabi: the lower classes, seeing the queen’s blackened mouth, started rotting their own teeth on purpose. The ones who couldn’t afford sugar blackened their teeth with soot. The symbol was literally rotting in your skull, and people imitated it anyway.

English pineapple
There’s more with the English. There’s always fucking more with the English. Having ruined their teeth with one tropical import, the English moved on to ruining their bank accounts with another.

A single pineapple in 1700s England cost the equivalent of about $8,000 today. People rented them for dinner parties, displayed them until they rotted, and never ate them. There was a whole rental industry. You’d walk into a soirée carrying a pineapple, walk out, return it the next morning, and somebody else would carry the same pineapple to a different soirée that night. The pineapple lived a richer social life than most people in London.

The Earl of Dunmore committed so hard to the pineapple flex that in 1761 he built a 45-foot stone summerhouse shaped like a giant pineapple. It still stands. You can rent it on Airbnb. We have not, as a species, gotten any smarter.

The Medici giraffe, briefly
The English were not the only people humiliated by their own exotic acquisitions. In November 1487, the Sultan of Egypt sent Lorenzo de’ Medici a giraffe, the first living one in Europe in over a thousand years. Florence lost its mind. Crowds gathered. Painters scrambled. Lorenzo, in a flex move, planned to re-gift it to the Regent of France. Two months later, in January 1488, the giraffe died. The cause: it stuck its head into the rafters of its stall trying to extract a snack, got stuck, panicked, and broke its own neck. The first giraffe in Renaissance Europe died because nobody had giraffe-proofed the building.

Europe would not see another giraffe for nearly 340 years, and I don’t know they deserve it even now. All because Lorenzo wanted to flex on the French, who on a genetic level, cannot be impressed.

Akbar’s nine thousand cheetahs
Lorenzo had one giraffe and ruined it. Akbar had a different approach. Saving my homies for last: the Mughal emperor kept around 1,000 hunting cheetahs at any one time and collected 9,000 over the course of his fifty-year reign, according to his son Jahangir, who would know because they were probably his best friends. Each one trapped, tamed, and trained to course alongside the emperor. He had a favorite, named Madan Kali, who sat next to his throne. The world’s first cheetah valedictorian.

Today’s quiet luxury, where the entire point is that nobody can tell you’re rich, only works if the rich people can.

Cold plunges are the blackened teeth of our time. Our great-great-grandchildren will read about ice baths the way we read about ohaguro. The pattern doesn’t change. We invent new ways to be expensively inconvenient, the fakes catch up, and we invent new ones.

The pineapple is eternal. Only its disguise changes.

Frugally,
xo,
S

So I did. I tried to convey that a single human’s experience is proof of the human experience. We’re all walking around inside a soup of hurt and hope, and the world we’ve built seems violently committed to showing us only the first part. You have to fight for access to the second. And the easiest way in is through other people’s stories. Stories will leave you far less lonely than anything most people can say to make us feel better.

It was during that same conversation where “what happened on this date” came up, as it is wont to do. It’s kind of my party trick.

Anyway, today’s date is one that a lot of people are familiar with, or could guess pretty quickly.

April 14th. The sinking of the Titanic. The ship hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic, roughly 1,500 people died.

What is very true is that every regulation that exists now about lifeboats, about maritime safety, about the weight capacity of rescue vessels, every single one of them is written in blood. You don’t get safety standards without bodies first. You don’t get a checklist until someone has already drowned proving you need one.

There are so many ways to examine the events. The engineering hubris (the ship was “unsinkable,” which is what you say right before the ocean corrects you). The cost-cutting that meant not enough lifeboats. The telegraph operators in nearby ships who were asleep (not their fault, we require a night shift now, one of the regulations to come out of this).

What strikes me most, though, through it all, is the grace.

The people aboard knew, certainly in the last hour, they knew there weren’t enough lifeboats. They knew the mathematics of their own survival had already been calculated and found wanting. And yet the band played. The men stood back. There are accounts of passengers singing as the water rose, not in defiance, just in the particular way humans organize themselves when they’re about to die and there’s nothing left to do but be decent about it.

Not hysteria. Not even virtue, necessarily. Just behavior under known scarcity that still organizes itself around dignity.

This is a Mr. Rogers’ stan account, so I want to tell you the story about the helpers and a vivid dream I had last summer.

I was standing beside Arthur Henry Rostron, captain of the RMS Carpathia, somewhere in the dark of the North Atlantic. Around us, the ship was moving at a speed that felt like it might split the hull open. We were defying something. Physics, maybe. Common sense. Exhaustion. The captain was quiet and absolute, and that’s when I understood: he already knew he was racing to save people, and he was going to do it anyway.

The Titanic sank around 2:20 in the morning. By 3:30, the Carpathia was heading toward the disaster at a speed that terrified its own crew. Arthur had turned the ship directly into an ice field. Most captains wouldn’t, and frankly, some didn’t.

Here’s the thing: the Carpathia understood the assignment.

Arthur ordered his crew to fire rockets into the air every fifteen minutes as they approached to send a signal across the dark water: we are coming. Hold on. There is hope.

Stop. Sit with this. Imagine being one the people in those lifeboats, almost certain of a painful, devastating end and you see the rockets. And you think, someone knows we’re here, someone is coming. And you would it find it easier to hold onto hope for a little while longer.

And what hope does to our minds and bodies is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Arthur knew, as sailors have always known, that the will to survive is fragile. He understood that a glimmer of hope was all they needed, and that meant shooting literal light into the sky, and he said let’s fucking go (that was the scene in my dream. 10/10 dream, would rescue shipwrecked people again).

The Carpathia was lined with ice when it arrived at the lifeboats, but nevertheless, she persisted.

And when Arthur reached the site, he reportedly asked: where is the Titanic? Think “what do you mean?!” a la Jennifer Lawrence on Hot Ones.

He could not immediately comprehend that it was gone, that the ship had already slipped entirely beneath the surface. He would not have known then that it had broken in two, a fact that would not be confirmed for another 73 years.

In the immediate moments, he and his people picked up the 705 survivors. The Carpathia was able to absorb so many additional people because (so excited to tell you this) the crew and passengers worked out possibly my favorite combination of things: something astoundingly moving and utterly practical: they threw stuff overboard.

Luggage. Weight. Everything that was not a person.

They discarded their cargo into the Atlantic so that people could live.

The survivors who came aboard told stories for decades. About blankets that appeared. About hot drinks. About being treated like they mattered immediately, without question, without paperwork. About Arthur. About his crew. About passengers sitting quietly with the traumatized, saying nothing that needed saying, giving them their rooms.

The Carpathia kept sailing for another decade and Arthur lived another 40 years. People who knew him said he never made much of it. He just knew he’d done what he had to do, what might be possible.

That’s the thing about stories. They show us the shape of what humans can do. Not what we should do in the abstract sense, but what we actually can, which is something different entirely. The difference between an ideology and a proof.

On April 14, 1912, people and a ship and circumstances failed on a massive scale. I think of the last post, how tragedy needs to be honored, the agonizing failures are actually part of the success for us all.

And also on April 14, 1912, people responded to that failure without hesitation. Grace was shown. Hope was sent like a signal.

And here is the inevitable conclusion: when you actually read the facts, when you truly sit with the stories of individual people, even in the face of everything that should have broken them, hopelessness, even now, even with all the headlines and heartache pressing in, becomes much harder to justify.

A cynic is simply not well-read.

xo,
S

Here’s the thing about old stories: they get shuffled through a thousand hands. Different translators, different eras, different people trying to make sense of what the ancients were really saying. Some versions swap the Orion storyline for Endymion. Some trade stars for eternal sleep. The details shift like light through water, each telling bending the narrative slightly toward whoever’s holding it.

But underneath, no matter which translator, which century, which language, the fundamental truth remains unchanged. A goddess loved someone. The universe took him away. And she refused to accept that taking as permanent.

The refusal is the story.

She took what made him luminous—the brightness, the speed, the relentless hunger to hunt—and she scattered these across the darkness. Not to erase him. To rebuild him. She stitched him into the night sky, a constellation positioned where time surrenders its dominion. The same Orion, only infinite now. Her Orion, only forever now.

(We’re all teary, right?)

For thousands of years, humans have kept telling this story in different languages, different dialects, different centuries. Why? Because something in us recognizes what Artemis did. Something in us revolts against the simple equation of loss. Love plus time equals erasure? Absolutely not. We reject it entirely.

We must inscribe what we love into something larger than ourselves. We have to place them where time cannot reach. We do whatever we can to make them visible, permanent, eternal.

For most of human history, that was metaphor. Poetry as prayer. A reach toward the infinite that we could only dream about.

But on April 6, 2026, we stopped being poetic about immortality and started using navigation coordinates.

And for someone who is both right- and left-brained, this is bliss.

-----

Between the moon’s Ohm crater and its Glushko crater, if you’re into that kind of thing, is a spot that catches light in a way that draws the eye. The Artemis II crew identified this spot during their historic lunar flyby, and they made a request to the International Astronomical Union.

Can we name it Carroll?

Here’s the thing about Carroll: she had clarity. The kind of clarity that shows up when everything else falls away.

Perhaps because of her chosen career as NICU nurse, she knew how to handle the hardest things with an otherworldly grace. So when her cancer metastasized and her husband Reid wanted to move the family back north, closer to her family, closer to comfort, closer to all the small mercies you gather when time is running out, Carroll said no. Not with anger or desperation, but with the kind of steadiness that stops an argument before it starts.

“This is where you work,” she told him. “This is the job you love. This is where our kids are growing up, and we are going to stay right here.”

She was calling him back to what mattered. Even as she was dying, she was insisting he not diminish himself. That takes a particular kind of love. The kind that doesn’t cling. The kind that says: go do the thing you’re meant to do. I’ll be here, and then I won’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re meant to do this.

While she was dying, Reid stepped back from active flight rotation. Three years after Carroll died, Reid learned he’d been selected to command Artemis II.

NASA was asking him to climb into a machine that had never flown with humans before, that had untested systems, that carried risk in ways that even seasoned astronauts don’t casually discuss. They were asking him to ride that machine farther from Earth than any living person had ever gone. They were asking him to circle the moon. They were asking him to go somewhere dangerous, asking him to understand that place might never give him back.

He said yes.

It’s easy to pass over that moment. Easy to assume that of course he said yes. He’s an astronaut, right? This is what astronauts do. But consider the weight of it: a man who had just learned how to live without his wife, a father of two, a person who had spent the last three years figuring out/showing his daughters what it looks like to live…chose to reach for the infinite.

When Artemis II swung around the far side of the moon, when the crew surpassed Apollo 13’s distance record of 248,655 miles, Reid did what Artemis had done thousands of years before. He reached for immortality. He looked at the lunar surface and said: I’m going to name this bright spot after her. I’m going to make sure her name stays visible. I’m going to inscribe her into the skies.

Anne Carroll Taylor Wiseman, the woman who insisted others shine as she faded, is now the light on the moon. Visible from Earth. A constellation of her own.

Reid didn’t save her from death. He did something more defiant than that. He took her absence and turned it into presence. He refused to accept she was gone and declared “No, she gets to be here too.”

And he did this from a metal box called Artemis.

(We’re all crying now, right?)

-----

Some editors will claim to be your friends and insist you stop here. It is important that you ignore him them.

Because just like the universe, there’s more. Here’s the part that breaks you open: the Artemis II was built from the ghosts of two shuttle disasters. I like calling it “heritage hardware.”

The SLS rocket’s solid rocket boosters contain pieces that flew on 47 shuttle missions (left booster) and 64 shuttle missions (right booster). The oldest segment, near the top of the right booster, first flew in 1982 on Columbia’s fifth mission. Columbia’s final flight was STS-107 in 2003. That nosecone and skirt that protected astronauts through the atmosphere, that carried Kalpana Chawla and Rick Husband and Laurel Clark and Michael Anderson and David Brown and William McCool and Ilan Ramon into space? Those pieces are now part of Artemis II’s solid rocket boosters.

Both boosters also contain segments from Challenger missions. Challenger broke apart in 1986, killing Dick Scobee and Michael Smith and Judith Resnik and Ellison Onizuka and Ronald McNair and Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe.

The Orion capsule’s main engine flew six times as one of Atlantis’s orbital maneuvering engines, starting in 2000. Three of Artemis II’s four RS-25 engines were flown on shuttles. Engine 2047 flew 15 shuttle missions. It was aboard Columbia’s last successful flight in 2002. It was aboard STS-135, the final shuttle mission in 2011.

NASA could have built shiny hardware that hadn’t carried the weight of disaster. Instead, Congress and NASA made a choice: take the machines that failed. Take the machines that killed 14 people. Take them apart. Take the pieces that proved themselves. And use them to reach the moon.

Think about that decision. Think about what it means to look at catastrophe and say: we’re not going to forget this, no way are we going to build something that erases what happened. We’re going to take the pieces that survived the worst days of our program and we’re going to carry them forward. We’re going to take them to the cosmos after all.

Resurrection, engineered by humans who understood that grief becomes wisdom if you’re brave enough to let it transform you. That loss becomes purpose if you’re willing to carry it.

Reid rode to the moon in a machine built from the ashes of two catastrophes, powered by the ghosts of dead astronauts who never made it home, to carry his wife’s name while pieces of seven other people’s lives burned through the sky to help get him there.

That’s the Artemis blueprint. That’s what happens when humans refuse to accept that love simply ends. We take the pieces of what we lost—whether it’s a person or a program or a dream—and we rebuild them into something that reaches toward forever.

-----

Victor Glover, the pilot of Artemis II and the first Black man to travel beyond low Earth orbit, had a mic float moment when he told a reporter, “Maybe the distance we are from you, makes you think what we are doing is special…but we’re the same distance from you and I’m trying to tell you, just trust me, you are special.”

He was talking about perspective. About what happens when you get far enough away to see the whole thing at once. Like when New Yorkers realize how great their city is, but only after they move away. I digress.

It’s been a dark few weeks for some of us. Maybe for all of us, in different ways. The kind of dark where you scroll through the news and feel the weight of it, where you wonder if we’re building anything or just rearranging the rubble, where you lose sight of why any of this matters anyway.

But this isn’t about feelings. This is physics, and the mathematicians were ruthless in their verification. What Artemis had done in myth, what the ancients envisioned in poetry, they proved empirically.

And all that is why on a clear night, if you know where to look and the timing is right and you’re brave enough to wonder, you can always see the bright spot.

xo,

S

The moment Women’s History Month rolls around, the same chorus assembles right on schedule. Women haven’t built anything. Women haven’t contributed anything. Women haven’t done anything. They say it with such serene confidence, as though they have personally reviewed the historical record and arrived at this conclusion reluctantly, as a scholar must.

I watched Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere this week, and I’m glad to report I had heard of virtually none of the people featured. One of them espoused the aforementioned take. He was so certain, wrapped up in the comfortable, incurious bliss of never having asked the question seriously, never having looked, never having wanted to know.

I don’t care about him; I care about who regularly watches him and his ilk. The teenagers trying to make sense of a world that feels like it was designed to confuse them. The insecure, the impressionable, the lonely. Misinformation sticks the way it does partly because admitting you were wrong requires a kind of ego death most of us aren’t trained for. Nobody wants to raise their hand and say I believed something stupid and hateful. So people double down. The walls go up.

So my directory feels more important than it did a week ago.

Here is a drop in the ocean: Women who built, discovered, led, created, fought, proved, and changed things, often without credit, usually without support, always in the face of someone insisting it couldn’t be done or, worse, that it wasn’t worth doing, and once they did it, others rapidly took credit.

I got 99 women and your history book got none.

tee hee

Okay, serious face: If you know someone stuck in a loop of manufactured grievance who needs a reality check, gentle or otherwise, send this their way. And if you have a name of a woman I can add here, DMs are open.

Because just like women, this thing is gonna live and breathe.

Cheers to that,
xo,
S

Around the world, people are pausing to acknowledge that women exist and that their health, safety, and opportunity deserve to be respected. This happens every March 8th. Every March 9th, we return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Women everywhere will mark the occasion by sighing the sigh of a people who have been sighing this particular sigh for several thousand years, straightening their spines, and resigning themselves once again to the age-old agenda of being recognized as full human beings. The bar is on the floor.

We keep clearing it anyway. Honestly, quite impressive of us.

Which brings me to the metrics, because I cannot help myself: by every measurable standard, women are excelling. Longer-lived. Better-educated. More emotionally intelligent. Demonstrably better at running companies when given the chance. Capable of friendships so sustaining they should probably be studied by scientists, and they have been, and the scientists were women, and that’s actually in this directory. But I digress.

The thing is, when someone says “name a brilliant woman who changed history,” most people produce a very short list. Marie Curie. Cleopatra. Maybe Amelia Earhart if they watched the biopic. (I see you, Japan, huge Earhart fans over there. Curious, curious...I digress) Maybe a couple of others, so let’s estimate…five or six names for half of humanity across all of recorded time.

We can do better. We’re going to do better, starting now.

Because here’s what nobody hands you: a directory. A ready-to-go, dog-eared, pull-it-out-at-dinner collection of women who did genuinely groundbreaking things against all the odds. And the evens. Against a deck so thoroughly rigged it should have been illegal, which, fun fact, it sometimes actually was. The barriers these women cleared to do their work were so absurd, so layered, so comprehensively engineered to stop them, that producing anything at all would have been remarkable. What they actually produced was world-changing. That gap between what they were handed and what they built anyway is the whole story.

So here it is: the Excuse Me, She Did That: A Directory.

A collection I aim to return to whenever the world feels miserable and I need proof that women are, despite all available evidence, capable of extraordinary things. Because to feel hopeless is to do the work of the very men who tried to erase them, and those men were, with all due disrespect, losers.

Fair warning: this directory will also make you furious. Good. Furiousity is useful for you. Hopelessness is only useful to aforementioned losers.

We begin with Science and Medicine, the truly smart stuff. (I say this with love, fellow writers and policy nerds and project managers. We do important work. But let’s be honest: we do our work so that the scientists have time to do theirs. We are the support staff of civilization and I personally wear that with pride bordering on arrogance so basically we can all use a little humility, no?).

What they did. Who took credit. What happened next. No softening, no “it was a different time,” no charitable interpretations of behavior that does not deserve charity. The receipts are attached and they are damning.

These are the women who built the foundations of everything you learned in school, taught to you, if you were taught at all, under someone else’s name. Men tried to bury them. We have shovels and an internet connection. Let’s begin.

xo,
Saana

PS - I will almost definitely return to the excel sheet with increasingly unhinged notes.

Not loudly (he was a scholar, not an emotionally unregulated charlatan) but in the specific, productive way that turns frustration into infrastructure. He had a PhD from Harvard. He had watched an entire civilization of Black achievement get ruthlessly evicted quietly from the historical record. And he decided, with the energy of a man who had absolutely had enough, to do something about it.

In 1926, he designated the second week of February as Negro History Week, timed to honor the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

It was practical, strategic, and just a little bit audacious.

He wasn’t asking permission.

He was establishing a fact.

Fifty years later, it became Black History Month.

Carter Woodson didn’t live to see it, but I like to think he would have found it satisfying and shown it in the way that people who build things for the future show their approval: with a crisp nod and an immediate return to work, because Carter Woodson did not come this far to stand around feeling good about things.

This month, Tiny Pantsuits USA (TPUSA when the subject is American history) got to introduce you to a few people who deserved far more than one essay: George Washington, the man who literally founded a city and got forgotten anyway. Alice Ball, who saved lives and almost lost her name entirely.

But I wish I could tell you about Mae C. Jemison, the first Black woman in space, who became an astronaut partly because Uhura on Star Trek made her believe the stars were an option.

I wish I could tell you about Robert Smalls, who literally stole a Confederate ship in 1862, piloted it past five checkpoints, freed his family, and handed it to the Union Navy before going on to become a Congressman. That man contains multitudes.

And I wish someone would make a heist film about Mabel Staupers, because while the U.S. military was busy turning away Black nurses and letting soldiers literally die during a global war, Mabel was busy calculating how to make that position so publicly embarrassing that the Army Nurse Corps eventually had no choice but to integrate, which is a very polished way of saying she won by refusing to let anyone forget how absurd they were being.

Good news is…you can find them all by yourself!

There will never be enough Februaries. That is both humbling and, if you sit with it long enough, genuinely majestic.

The story doesn’t stop on March 1st. Carter Woodson knew that. He built the whole thing on that premise, made a bet that you and I would keep it going.

The very least you can do is walk around the world a little less sure of yourself because you cannot be sure of all that has happened because some people in power got to decide all that which shaped you.

And the most you can do is keep going, limit your short-form vertical videos for silliness and cute animals, and consider these:

Visit:

The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., or their digital collection at nmaahc.si.edu if you can’t get there in person. It is the most incredible museum I’ve ever been to. And I’ve been to 419 museums.

Watch:

• “13th” (Netflix),

• “I Am Not Your Negro” (James Baldwin, directed by Raoul Peck), (Amazon, YouTube, Roku)

• “Rustin” (Netflix),

• “Miss Juneteenth” (Amazon, Apple TV)

Read:

• “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson,

• “The Half Has Never Been Told” by Edward Baptist,

• “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson,

• “Stamped from the Beginning” by Ibram X. Kendi

Listen:

• “Seize the Day” podcast,

• “Sold in America” (APM Reports),

• “1619” (NYT Audio)

Granville T. Woods and I request a moment of your time, if you please.

Granville was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1856, to free Black parents in a country actively debating whether that should be a thing. He left school at ten to help support his family, which is the point in lesser stories where ambition quietly dies. The little boy had other plans.

It would be a disservice to this publication’s entire personality not to pause here and acknowledge a nerdy child who stayed inside during recess to read about train systems.

He spent his teenage years working in machine shops, rolling mills, and eventually as a railroad engineer, learning by doing in the way people do when the doors to formal education are locked and you have to come in through the window. At night he read everything he could find on electrical engineering and mechanical systems. 

He was, in the truest sense of the phrase, self-made. Not as a metaphor for pluck, but as a literal description of a man who assembled his own education from scratch while working full time, which honestly makes my college experience feel a little embarrassing in retrospect.

By 1884, at twenty-eight, he had his first patent. Then another. Then another. He eventually held over fifty, covering everything from steam boiler furnaces to telephone transmitters to an improved telegraph system he sold to American Bell. He opened his own laboratory in Cincinnati, which he called the Woods Electric Co., because when you’ve spent your whole life being told the institutions aren’t for you, you build your own and you put your name on it. Missed opportunity to call it “Wood ya look at that, Inc.,” but I digress. 

Then came the masterpiece.

His Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph was patented in 1887, and I need you to understand what was at stake.

Before this invention, the American railroad system, the great roaring spine of industrial progress, the thing politicians gave speeches about and investors got rich off, was running on a prayer and a pocket watch. Trains operated on fixed schedules and manual signals. Dispatchers communicated through static telegraph lines bolted to the ground. Moving trains couldn’t talk to anyone. Not the station they left. Not the station ahead. Not the other train hurtling toward them on the same track.

Collisions were not rare. They were not shocking. They were, in the accounting language of the era, anticipated losses. People died on schedules almost as reliable as the trains themselves, and the industry shrugged and kept selling tickets. It’s giving Kirkian vibes of “sucks people have to die but what else can we do, it’s just the cost of freedom,” or something. 

Now Granville looked at this system, this loud, expensive, celebrated system, and saw it for what it was: a catastrophe wearing a conductor’s hat. And he said (probably) how dare you think we are all so stupid that we cannot possibly think of a way where people can have guns trains and innocent lives not lost. 

So he built it a brain. Using his own brain. 

His telegraph allowed moving trains to communicate with stations and with each other, simultaneously, in real time, without signal interference. For the first time in the history of American rail, a train in motion could tell the world exactly where it was. He handed the most powerful industry in the country a fully operational nervous system, and the implicit message was clear: you’re welcome, and also, please stop killing people.

Thomas Edison said he invented it first.

Granville Woods said the fuck you did. Okay he probably didn’t say those exact words but the sentiment tracks. He went to court and won.

Edison came back with a second claim. And he lost again. 

At this point Tommy Edison, a man not historically known for graciousness in defeat, offered our boy a position at his company. 

And G-man said no. 

He was not interested in working for the man he had just beaten twice in federal court, which is a level of composure I find genuinely aspirational. I can barely decline a social invitation without hinting my disdain at the offer. I digress. 

Granville continued to demonstrate excellent life choices and eventually moved his operations to New York, filing patents through the 1890s and into the early 1900s, continuing to shape the electrical railway systems that would define urban transit for generations. The third rail running beneath your feet on the subway platform right now, the one powering the train that gets you home, carries the fingerprints of his work.

He died in 1910 in New York, with very little money. The electrical and railway industries he helped build did not pause to mark his passing.

Even though he built a company and a body of work that shaped how cities move and how trains stay on schedule, and he did it without a single institution opening a door for him that he didn’t first have to build himself. We valorize a lot of mediocre people for much less. 

He built a world that couldn’t function without him and saved a lot of lives doing so.

So thank you, Mr. Woods. For the patents, for the courtrooms, for the “no thank you, Mr. Edison.” And for the trains that still run, quietly and on time, carrying people who never learned your name to places you made possible.

xo,

S

PS - he was 7 feet tall. I didn’t know how to fit that into the piece and I feel like it’s an important fact.

PPS - he is sometimes referred to as the “Black Edison” which is so incredibly dumb because Edison was trying and failing to be the “White Woods.”

Nine. Out. Of. Ten.

I need you to understand what we’re talking about here. The Supreme Court. The marble building. The robes. The justices who eat lunch together and have opinions about pretty much everything. Constance Baker Motley walked into that room ten times and walked out victorious nine of them, and we have somehow collectively decided that this story is not the first thing we tell every child in America on their first day of school and their last day of law school.

She was born in New Haven in 1921, the ninth of twelve children, to parents from Nevis in the Caribbean. Twelve children. From a small island. In 1920s Connecticut. I am telling you this because I want you to understand that Constance Baker Motley did not arrive into ease. She arrived into a specific, clarifying kind of difficult, and she apparently looked around and thought: okay fine, I’ll become one of the greatest constitutional lawyers in American history, then.

She got her law degree from Columbia in 1946 and went to clerk for Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She stayed, because the work was there and someone had to do it and she was, as it turns out, phenomenally good at it. She argued the case that got James Meredith into the University of Mississippi (please go down that rabbit hole). She helped dismantle segregation in Birmingham, in the schools, on the buses, at the lunch counters, document by document, argument by argument, in the patient and devastating way that actually changes things permanently.

While most people were, I don’t know, figuring out what to have for lunch.

Here is the part of the story that I want you to feel in your sternum. Go ahead, poke right under your collarbone to get warmed up. Ready?

When it came time to name a new director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the job she had essentially been doing all along, the organization she had helped build from the inside out, the position she was so obviously qualified for that nominating anyone else required a specific and deliberate choice, would you believe it?! they gave it to a man.

Nine Supreme Court wins. First Black woman elected to the New York State Senate. The architect of some of the most consequential civil rights litigation in American history.

This is the thing about being a woman in the world that doesn’t get said plainly enough: you are often fighting two battles simultaneously, and sometimes the second one comes from the same side as the first. Racism and sexism are not separate enemies who politely take turns. They gang up on you. And sometimes the men who march beside you on one front will, without apparent irony, hold the door closed on another. 

Constance Baker Motley knew this. All women know, all girls sense it before they are old enough to name it. Which, incidentally, is why probably no one on the U.S. women’s Olympic hockey team was shocked when the men got an Oval Office call centered on insulting the women. Old joke, new punchline. 

What Constance did next is the part that makes me so impressed. She didn’t shrink. She didn’t submit a strongly worded memo and go home.

She ran for New York State Senate in 1964 and won.

She ran for Manhattan Borough President in 1965 and won.

Lyndon Johnson put her on the federal bench in 1966, making her the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge.

She’s on a stamp!

She just kept opening doors that people kept pretending weren’t there.

And then there’s this detail, which I think about more than is probably reasonable. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, as a young girl, read about Constance Baker Motley in a magazine and discovered they shared a birthday. And something clicked. She thought maybe she could be a lawyer too. That’s the whole transmission right there. One woman’s name in print. A girl doing birthday math. A future Supreme Court justice assembling herself from the available evidence that women like her had already been there.

We’re still taking notes, still losing our minds a little, still grateful you decided to stay to let us know we can, too. 

xo, 

S 

But here’s the problem with famous: it’s easy to think the words did the work. That writing “all men are created equal” actually made it so. That the permission slip and the reality are the same thing.

They’re not.

This is about the other George Washington. The one who took the permission slip seriously and actually lived it. Which is hilarious, in a deeply American way, because the guy on the money would probably be shocked to learn that someone actually believed him.

George Washington was born in Virginia in 1817. His father was an enslaved man. His mother was a white woman who understood, immediately and painfully, that the law would never be on her side.

So she made a choice that still doesn’t fit neatly into any narrative we have. She gave her son to a white couple named Anna and James Cochran, who adopted and raised him to be as free as the times would allow.

I think about the birth mom sometimes. About what she must have believed was possible in this country. And if we’ve lived up to her expectations.

George grew up in that in-between space, caught between the world that claimed to offer him something and the legal machinery that kept slamming doors. He tried to stay put, to plant himself somewhere and call it home. But freedom in the early 1800s came with invisible boundaries, and every state he entered seemed to have found a new way to say “no one wants you here.”

Missouri rejected him. Illinois did too. Every state had a different excuse, but they all meant the same thing: we have a really good filing system for keeping you out.

You can only be told you don’t belong so many times before you start believing the only place left is somewhere no one’s thought to forbid your existence yet.

Then came 1850 and the Compromise aka a law designed to protect slavery, to give it more room to breathe. The Cochrans looked at that law and understood what it meant: even the freedom George had was temporary, conditional, subject to revision. So in 1850, George did what restless Americans do: he moved west. Oregon Trail’d it up. Except Oregon had its own polite way of saying no.

Turns out, Black people couldn’t own land there. That was NOT on the Manifest Destiny brochure.

It’s like being invited to the greatest party in American history and then being told your invite only gets you access to the porch, and also you have to wait outside, and also the porch is on fire, and also you’re framed as the arsonist and now you’re a thug or savage or a witch or an illegal alien or whatever. You get it.

But the Cochrans were not just gonna take this. They bought 640 acres where the Skookumchuck and Chehalis rivers met and filed it under their names. A legal loophole made of love and paperwork and the kind of quiet coordination you do for family. I wonder if his birth mother ever knew her decision was validated, or if his father ever heard anything about what his son did. pause for deep sigh

When Washington Territory separated and the restrictions quietly vanished, they transferred everything to George before a law could be passed to prevent it. He got his land because his parents made themselves visible in the paperwork so he could become visible in his own life.

They read the law the way a clever person reads a contract: looking for the thing nobody thought to forbid.

Now, most people with 640 acres and a river view would have become farmers. Lived decently, minded their own business, turned it into an animal sanctuary.

Not George.

In 1872, the Northern Pacific railroad was coming. George was savvy; he knew that was gonna happen. George was sensible; he’d spent so much of his life searching for a home that when he saw a chance to make one for other people, he took it. While everyone else was thinking “nice farm,” George was basically thinking “actual town with mail delivery.”

He divided the acres into plots, sold them for ten dollars each, and watched a community materialize around his vision. Centerville, later renamed Centralia (because the name was taken, which is very on-brand for American naming). He became the only Black person to found a town in the Pacific Northwest. He donated land for the first church. He gave the park its ground. He became the foundation that everyone else built on, in a town that was predominantly white, in a region that had said, quite explicitly, you can’t be here.

People said he spoke in such an honest and straightforward way that buyers would become suspicious. Imagine that. A man so committed to fair business practices, to steady growth, to treating people right, that honesty itself became the thing that made people nervous. That tells you something about what the world usually expected.

He didn’t just survive in a place built to exclude him. He built it.

For about forty years, that worked fine. Centralia grew. People came, built businesses, married each other, had children. The kind of quiet prosperity that makes you forget how precarious everything actually is. Churches had potlucks. Businesses had opening days. Life happened in the ordinary way it always does, which is to say, people showed up and did the work and nobody really noticed how extraordinary that was.

Then came 1893, and the economy decided to see what would happen if it was led by people who maybe didn’t give as much a thought to fair business practices as GW.

Banks folded, farms disappeared. People lost everything in that particular way that only economic collapse can accomplish, with a kind of impersonal brutality.

Centralia was going to disappear too. People were starving, the town was dissolving like salt in water. Societal stressors are a chance for people to find out if their community is actually a community or just a collection of people who happen to live near each other.

And so George Washington, a man who would literally be classified as property, invented the first food bank by driving to Portland like some kind of 1890s Costco run. He brought back tons of provisions to help his neighbors survive.

When neighbors couldn’t pay, George didn’t collect. He didn’t even pretend to collect. He just didn’t. Which apparently was revolutionary.

He bought the empty properties, blocked speculators from picking the town’s bones clean, and basically became the immune system for a community that was trying not to die.

He wasn’t a politician. He wasn’t trying to be famous. He wasn’t writing letters to newspapers about his own heroism or waiting for someone to write a biography. He just showed up with food and made sure the place held together.

When George died in 1905, Centralia stopped. The whole town shut down for a day of mourning. There’s a bronze statue of him and his wife Mary Jane downtown now. A park carries his name. As of August 15th, it’s officially Founder’s Day, because this George Washington too was a founder.

Here’s the thing: the George Washington on the money doesn’t mean anything without the other one.

He wrote “all men are created equal.” Inspiring. Heavily asterisked. Useless without someone actually believing it enough to build a town on it.

You’re reading this because a mother gave her child away. Because the Cochrans found a loophole.

Because George saw a railroad coming and saw a town. Because he drove to Portland in the rain with groceries. Because when everything collapsed, he didn’t leave.

One George wrote it down. One George made it happen. Both necessary. One is famous. Both should be.

If that mother hesitated. If those parents didn’t think fast. If George decided farming was easier. You’re not reading this. If the other George had given up, there’d be no permission slip for anyone to read.

But they both existed. Both refused to quit. That’s not luck. That’s inheritance.

That’s what it means to be American. It’s not the declarations, it’s the quiet refusal to disappear. And also the declarations about how we’re not going to disappear.

You have to pity the people who only know how to close doors. It tells me they’ve never read a contract the way the Cochrans did. Could never see a railroad coming the way George did. Don’t understand that a nation’s real strength isn’t about preserving the original packaging like a desi mom who won’t let her daughter play with her new Barbie doll. It’s in the aunt who advocates for her niece to play with the doll while ensuring she recognizes how important it is to take care of it, too.

I’m not saying break into the museum and bust out the Declaration of Independence. I’m saying look up the words online and honor the people who have met that promise and helped others do to, too. And on that list are the Georges Washington.

xo,
Saana

PS - we’re on tiktok!

First, she had the absolutely impeccable foresight to be born into Philadelphia’s wealthiest Black family in 1810. Her father James Forten was a sailmaker (yes, we’re having a maritime week at Tiny Pantsuits) who employed both Black and white workers because he believed in the completely unhinged concept that job performance mattered more than melanin levels. Wild business model for 1810s America, still pretty revolutionary in 2026, but that’s a different newsletter. I can do a whole post about James Forten, but also you can look him up here, you coward.

The Forten household was essentially an intellectual salon where abolitionists would gather to discuss dismantling human bondage over formal tea. Little Harriet grew up watching these gatherings where brilliant minds would assemble, spend three hours discussing the absolute horrors of slavery, then sit around looking like they’d been personally defeated by the weight of human suffering and possibly also bad lumbar support from those Victorian chairs.

Harriet looked around and thought: the vibes are catastrophically off here. To her brilliant young mind, it was glaringly obvious that revolution requires substantially better funding than whatever loose change everyone could fish out of their coat pockets while looking vaguely constipated about the state of the world. Plus, these meetings had all the emotional energy of a funeral parlor and approximately the same fundraising potential as a lemonade stand in a monsoon.

When Harriet married Robert Purvis in 1831, she found herself with a husband who essentially said, “Whatever delightfully unhinged scheme you’re plotting, darling, I am absolutely here for it and will probably help you execute it with enthusiasm and considerable financial backing.” This is genuinely the foundation of any successful partnership and also most effective revolutions. Their marriage was so egalitarian and collaborative that historians literally call it “a unique phenomenon” for the time, which is scholar-speak for “we have no idea how to process a functional marriage where the woman had agency and the man thought that was deeply attractive.” Some things never change.

So Harriet invented Anti-Slavery Fairs that were basically gorgeous seasonal markets featuring exquisite handmade goods where every purchase directly funded human liberation. I cannot overstate the absolute genius of this move. These weren’t your sad, somber, guilt-inducing fundraisers where everyone stands around feeling terrible about themselves and the refreshments. No. These were events so spectacular, so aesthetically magnificent, that wealthy Philadelphia socialites were literally fighting over invitations to support abolition.

“Susan, darling, you simply must secure us invitations to Harriet’s Anti-Slavery Fair. I heard they have the most divine hand-knitted mittens, and apparently purchasing them makes plantation owners cry actual tears of impotent rage. Also, the canapés are extraordinary.”

Between 1840 and 1861, Harriet’s fairs raised genuinely staggering amounts of revolutionary funding. We’re talking enough money to make slaveholders nervous and fellow abolitionists follow suit.

Here’s what makes me want to reach back through time and high-five this woman: Harriet understood that we don’t need to sacrifice our standards to fight injustice. We can have meetings that are properly organized, events that look genuinely stunning so people don’t question our commitment to excellence, AND we can systematically dismantle oppressive systems. Revolutionary work deserves revolutionary excellence. This is not the time to cut corners, unless you’re literally cutting fabric corners to tie a perfect silk bow atop a beautifully wrapped gift that funds someone’s escape to freedom, in which case please do cut those corners with precision and make sure both ribbon ends are exactly the same length.

Every embroidered pillowcase purchased became a small but meaningful show of force against the plantation system. Every hand-knitted scarf sold was essentially a beautifully crafted middle finger to slave catchers. Harriet had figured out how to weaponize America’s obsession with shopping for the forces of human dignity, which is honestly genius. It’s like if Anthropologie suddenly became a recruitment center for economic justice, except actually effective instead of just aesthetically pleasing and vaguely progressive in a way that requires zero actual commitment outside a #BLM sticker in the window.

But Harriet wasn’t just throwing devastatingly beautiful parties and revolutionizing abolitionist fundraising. She was busy simultaneously running one of the most effective Underground Railroad stations in Philadelphia with Robert, helping approximately 9,000 enslaved people escape to freedom, and you know those were some cozy rooms beneath the trap doors installed in the floors to hide refugees from authorities. By day, elegant dinner parties where Philadelphia’s elite ate fancy cheese and discussed abolition; by night, life-saving covert operations involving secret compartments and terrified people trusting their lives to this brilliant woman’s organizational genius. The woman had range that would make anyone calling themselves a “multidisciplinary thought leader” on LinkedIn immediately delete their entire profile and go sit quietly in a corner to reconsider their life choices.

There’s more, can you believe it?

Harriet was also deeply involved in the Free Produce movement, only purchasing goods that weren’t made by enslaved labor. Even when fellow abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison questioned its effectiveness (there’s always that one dude at the dinner party, isn’t there?), Harriet stuck to her principles because she understood that hypocrisy would undermine their entire cause. You cannot credibly argue for human dignity while your morning coffee was harvested by enslaved hands. She got it.

She co-founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society with her mother and sisters, creating the first biracial women’s abolitionist group. She helped organize the Fifth National Women’s Rights Convention. She fought against streetcar segregation in Philadelphia and won, getting a state law passed in 1867 for equal access to public transportation. She was close friends with Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott, working alongside them for both women’s suffrage and abolition because, again, Harriet understood that justice isn’t a single-issue endeavor and lived her principle so beautifully.

Some heroes storm barricades with weapons and righteous fury; others build something so beautiful that the old world looks ridiculous by comparison, and take on the exhausting work of being consistently brave, thoughtful, well-read, and a perfect hostess through it all. Harriet chose elegance as her battlefield and made joining the resistance…well, irresistible.

I think about her whenever I watch a prestige drama where a powerful woman has concluded competence requires the emotional availability of a tax audit and showing up looking like you got dressed in a wind tunnel during a late night earthquake is evidence of deeper priorities, and not just callously inflicting your lack of self-respect and organizational failures on everyone else who has to pretend your contempt for working alongside them is some kind of a powerful feminist statement. We could all be better about time management and we should grade ourselves nightly for how we chose to allocate our finite talents and attention that day.

Harriet Forten Purvis refused that false choice entirely and Netflix producers should, too. She showed, not telled that we can have beauty AND justice, excellence AND revolution, stunning parties AND impeccable manners AND the systematic destruction of slavery.

She was right then. She’s still right now.

xo,
Saana

If You Want to Fall Down the Harriet Forten Purvis Rabbit Hole (And You Should)

Look, I’m not going to pretend there’s a prestige HBO miniseries about Harriet waiting for you on Max, because apparently Hollywood thinks we’d rather watch another show about a tortured antihero who treats his family terribly. But here’s what actually exists:

Books That Will Make You Want to Be Her:

• Fortunes of a Free Black Family: The Forstens and Purvises of Philadelphia by Julie Winch is the deep dive. Julie spent years researching the Forten-Purvis family, and it shows. Fair warning: you will become insufferable at dinner parties because you’ll want to tell everyone about Harriet’s organizational genius.

• The Abolitionist Imagination edited by Andrew Delbanco has excellent context on the Philadelphia abolitionist scene where Harriet was essentially running the most effective anti-slavery operation in America while also being the best-dressed person in the room.

• We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century edited by Dorothy Sterling includes primary sources from Harriet and her contemporaries. Reading their actual words is like getting letters from the most fascinating women you never got to meet.

Articles for When You Have 20 Minutes:

• The Library Company of Philadelphia has digitized materials related to the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, including some of those gorgeous fair catalogs. Looking at 19th-century revolutionary merchandising is genuinely a spiritual experience.

• The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has the Purvis family papers and abolitionist society records. Their digital collections are searchable if you want to see the actual documents Harriet helped create.

Places You Can Actually Visit:

• The Byberry estate is gone (tragic), but you can visit Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia where the Forten family worshipped and organized. It’s the oldest AME church in the nation and still standing at 419 S 6th Street.

• The Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s archives are at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania if you want to see the actual records of Harriet’s work.

Academic Articles (Free Access):

• The Digital Public Library of America has primary sources related to the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and the anti-slavery fairs.

The Honest Truth:

Harriet doesn’t have a biography dedicated solely to her yet, which is a crime against historical justice. She tends to appear in books about her father James Forten, her husband Robert Purvis, or the broader abolitionist movement; she’s always the supporting character in someone else’s story, which is particularly galling for a woman who was clearly the main character of 19th-century Philadelphia. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to write an entire book about her myself, except I have a newsletter I can’t seem to squeeze into daylight hours, and I also lack several crucial qualifications like “being a professional historian,” “ever having written a book before,” and “knowing how to obtain a book deal.”

But the Julie Winch book about James Forten is genuinely excellent and will give you everything you need to become as obsessed with Harriet as I am, if you aren’t already.

Today (Feb 2) I read the Kennedy Center is closing for two years…but I made myself a promise so here we go, I’ve got a midnight deadline.

David Walker. I would love to tell you about him.

Born around 1796 in North Carolina to a free mother and enslaved father, David grew up understanding America’s most twisted math problem. His early life unfolded within the brutal realities of a slave society, where you could be technically free (he was because his mother was) and practically imprisoned, where liberty was both birthright and complete fiction. It’s like being told you’ve won the lottery but the prize is a lifetime supply of anxiety.

Fast forward, it’s 1829, David’s up in Boston, where we have a harbor, as you may recall. We once dumped a ton of tea? Anyway, David runs a clothing shop. Seems like a normal business, you’re a sailor, you need a decent coat, you walk into the shop (or shoppe?), try on a jacket, check the fit, haggle over price.

What you perhaps don’t realize is that David has just turned you into an unwitting revolutionary courier because he did something spectacularly dangerous. He wrote An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, exposing the hypocrisies of American claims of freedom and Christianity, and demanding abolition happen NOW (not our now, his now, to be clear).

David was super proud of his pamphlet calling for immediate abolition and possible armed resistance and thought, “You know what this needs? A stealth delivery system involving maritime workers and careful needlework.”

He enlisted sympathetic sailors, both Black and White, to carry The Appeal to Southern ports, and also was sewing copies into the lining of jackets to be unwittingly carried south. Every coat became a Trojan horse. This man turned the phrase “fashion statement” into something approaching literal warfare.

Can you imagine the patience this required? David sitting there with needle and thread, carefully concealing revolutionary pamphlets between layers of fabric, knowing that if anyone discovered his side hustle, he was basically dead. This is artisanal rebellion at its finest. Handcrafted, small batch revolution with attention to detail that made plantation owners absolutely apoplectic.

The delivery network was pure genius. Maritime workers are already traveling, they already need clothes, and they already have reason to be in multiple cities.

I keep imagining those moments of discovery. Some sailor in Charleston unpacking his bag, finding David’s pamphlet hidden in his coat lining, and suddenly experiencing extraordinary cognitive whiplash must have been extraordinary: “I thought I was buying underwear, but apparently I signed up to the Underground Railroad?”

The reaction from Southern authorities was exactly as hysterical as you’d expect. They banned the pamphlet, banned Black sailors from disembarking in Boston, and put a $10,000 to anyone who could bring David before them alive or $1,000 for his head.

David died in August 1830 from “tuberculosis” officially.  Many people suspected poison. One year between publication and death? Okay.

What moves me most about David’s story is how perfectly he understood the mechanics of change. This was strategic, patient, absurdly risky work that required him to trust completely in the basic decency and courage of people he’d never meet.

We live in an age of viral content, where ideas spread at digital speed to millions. But there’s something profoundly moving about David’s analog approach, that the most subversive act might be trusting ordinary people to carry extraordinary ideas, one careful stitch at a time.

You could say he

(•_•). ( •_•)>⌐□-□. (⌐□_□)

altered history.

Fun emoji is in lieu of a sketch because #tired but look up David Walker, please. And tell two other people about him.

xo,

Saana

PS - This was an important rush job, save your edits, BTR.

As I write this, half of our country is experiencing what meteorologists cheerfully call “a significant ice event,” which feels like the universe’s way of reminding us that the powers that be don’t care for our plans. But before you despair while staring out your window or doom-scrolling through apocalyptic reports on your phone, let me share some comfort from history: humans have been spectacularly pissed off by ice for centuries, and we’ve gotten remarkably creative about destroying it.

There’s something almost poetic about our eternal war with frozen water. It’s a battle that transcends class, geography, and political affiliation. Look, ice doesn’t discriminate. Whether you’re a Gilded Age industrialist or a modern-day gig worker, ice will bring you down to your knees and humble you with enthusiasm.

• Maritime Solutions: Icebreaker ships - These floating battering rams were essentially the monster trucks of the maritime world, designed to ram through ice with the subtlety of a rhinoceros in a china shop. Your snow shovel is the spiritual descendant of these maritime marvels, and you should keep it within reach these days.

• Ice saws and chisels - Sailors would methodically cut channels through frozen harbors, armed with patience and the kind of determination that comes from really wanting to get yourself and your crew safely home. Think of it as the original community-based problem solving, except with more frostbite.

• The Explosive Era: Dynamite on ice dams - This is fun. By the late 1800s, Americans had discovered dynamite could solve most problems, including inconvenient ice, with entire communities gathering to watch like it was the Super Bowl with more property damage potential. There’s something beautifully unhinged about this approach that feels quintessentially American. We’ve always preferred direct action when bureaucracy moves too slowly to cart ice away.

• Heated projectiles - Possibly my favorite. Militia forces would heat iron balls in fires and launch them at ice barriers, combining medieval siege tactics with genuine scientific innovation. I wish I were around to see it. In the past. When people did it. Back when local communities had more agency to solve their own problems. Sometimes you gotta respect tribalism.

  

• Chemical Warfare: Salt and road chemicals - Perhaps the most elegant solution came from understanding chemistry: salt melts ice. So go ahead, get your salty bitch game going. Every time you sprinkle salt on your sidewalk, you’re participating in chemical warfare against winter itself, armed with knowledge passed down through generations of people who refused to be trapped.

• Community Efforts: Ice gangs with sledgehammers - Entire towns would organize crews with crowbars and the kind of determined energy that comes from being collectively aggravated by systems that make life harder than it needs to be. I’m getting Viking vibes here.

• Steam-powered equipment - The industrial revolution brought heated shovels and steam-powered ice destroyers, proving that sometimes the best response to oppressive conditions is superior engineering and collective innovation. It was humanity’s way of saying, “Why did we invent all this technology if it’s not specifically to make life better for people, instead of worse?”

These historical ice warriors understood something: breaking barriers isn’t just about individual survival, it’s about clearing the path for everyone. Those sailors cutting channels weren’t just freeing their own ships; they were opening routes for entire communities. Those town ice gangs weren’t just clearing their own streets; they were ensuring that neighbors could reach each other, that families could stay connected, that essential movement could continue.

We come from people who looked at each other and said “Yo, help me clear this,” and the other guy said “Bet.” And as future ancestors ourselves, we have a duty to say “ABSOLUTELY NOT” to anything that restricts movement and human dignity, and figure out creative solutions with the same ingenuity our predecessors showed. So we can eventually move about freely in the warmth again, as is our birthright.

Do what you gotta do, folks. Get a grip, don’t slip up, hold onto your center of gravity, wear shoes with good traction, call the gang and see who in your community needs help shoveling.

With full solidarity and a fireplace-presenting electric space heater,
xo,
Saana

PS - It’s not just a southern accent thing; the phrase is actually “hard as hail” and not “hard as hell.” Maybe hell is frozen over because it’s full of so much ice? You decide.

I had met someone exactly twice, and yet, when I found myself with a ticket to something that might be historic, might be nothing, and definitely required a road trip with no guaranteed parking, no real plan, and a non-zero chance of spectacular failure, I turned to this virtual stranger and said, “Can we do this?”

His response wasn’t “What time?” or “Should I bring snacks?” or any of the normal human questions. It was just “I’m in!” and that too, delivered with the confidence of someone who either makes excellent life choices or spectacularly terrible ones, and honestly, those people are always the most fun.

We drove. We got there. We were part of it. It was, indeed, historic. We will both be dining out on that story for a good decade. And I realized that some of the best decisions I’ve made this year involved finding my people, trusting my instinct, and taking that once-in-a-generation shot.

I’m thinking about that moment, and so many others, because my social media feeds are becoming populated with everyone’s end-of-year lists. Number of countries visited. Career milestones. Books read. Goals crushed. The whole apparatus of Evidence That I Lived Well This Year.

And the list I would want to make isn’t really something I can track or adequately capture.

How do you quantify:

• the moments when someone gets your completely unhinged reference and you both just stand there grinning like idiots who found their people

• the number of bits you and your friends committed to that are now forever inside jokes

• the rambling voice messages exchanged about everything and nothing

• the dances with kitty, her purring that deep, rumbling purr, both of you spinning in afternoon light like you’re the only beings in the world who matter

• full-commitment face-plants where i didn’t just stumble but fought a battle with gravity i was never going to win

• the times i said “i’m just a girl” to escape adult responsibilities

• the instances i announced “i’m deceased” while being demonstrably alive and usually holding chai

Once again, in the best way, history reminds me I am not the slightest bit special.

Humans have always had this problem, maybe not in the grand, philosophical sense (though we’re pretty terrible at that too) but in the immediate, tactical sense of this moment, right now, what should I be paying attention to?

These days, we have entire industries dedicated to telling us what’s important, algorithms fine-tuned to surface the significant, and yet somehow we keep getting it wrong.

Consider the Byzantine monastery ledgers, which are frankly works of bureaucratic art. Pages upon pages documenting grain stores, candle consumption, the precise schedule of prayer rotations. But tucked into the margins of a 9th-century account book, there’s a barely legible note about a monk named Theodore who carved wooden toys for the village children during his free hours. We know this only because the abbot added a grumpy marginal comment: “Brother Theodore’s hands might be better employed in copying scripture.”

Brother Theodore, I hope you made so many toys. I hope those children loved them. I hope you knew, somehow, that a thousand years later, someone would notice. I like to imagine the cranky abbot rolling his eyes at how Theodore chooses to spend his personal time (management, amirite?) while secretly hoping nobody noticed he’d saved one of those wooden horses for himself.

Zip over and back to a Chinese provincial record from the Song Dynasty from 1073 and there’s an accounting of a local magistrate’s year-end expenditures. Most of it is standard: repairs, salaries, tax collection costs. But there’s one line item that clearly annoyed whoever was reviewing it: “Wine and musical instruments for Mid-Autumn Festival celebration, including elderly residents who typically do not attend public festivals.”

Someone spent government money making sure the old folks who usually stayed home got to join the party. And someone else was mad enough about it to write it down, probably thinking it would reflect poorly on the magistrate.

Plot twist: it makes him sound like a goddamn delight even though he was clearly the worst.

You know who did this get right? The griots of West Africa. They memorized the official records (the kings, the battles, the treaties, etc) but they also memorized the small stories. The personality quirks. The jokes. The year when the mangoes were particularly sweet and everyone talked about it for seasons afterward, the way we all still talk about that one perfect week in September when the weather is perfect.

There’s a Mandinka saying: “A griot’s memory is seven times as long as the ancestors.” Because the griot doesn’t just remember the dates. They remember the grain of truth that makes the past recognizable, human, real.

The official record says: “Treaty signed, Year X.”

The griot says: “And do you know, at the feast afterward, the chief’s youngest wife made everyone laugh so hard with her raunchy humor that even the elders forgot to be dignified.”

Guess which one actually tells you what it was like to be alive. It’s so good that I'm choosing to focus on her comedic timing rather than the whole "one of several wives" thing, because honestly, that's a separate historical can of worms that deserves its own essay about ancient marriage customs and the deeply conflicting feelings they elicit.

I digress.

So anyway, here’s what I’m thinking as the year ends:

I’m not making a list of accomplishments. I’m not tracking metrics. I’m not curating evidence of a life well-lived for social media consumption. Because a) who cares besides the people who would already know, and b) more of a.

I’m sitting with the unmeasurable stuff. Because all of us, throughout history, are facing the same impossible task: how do you capture the stuff that actually shapes you? How do you measure love? How do you quantify the moment someone says “I’m in”? How do you track the number of times rain made you feel held? How do you count the moments you found your people over a copper bowl at a house party?

You can’t measure it. You can’t track it. You can’t turn it into content. You just get to live it, notice it, and hope that somewhere, a thousand years from now, someone finds the equivalent of your margin notes and thinks: “This person knew what mattered.”

And on that note, thank you for making me feel like what I’m doing here matters.

Thank you for wandering through this peculiar little corner of the internet where I dump historical anecdotes and ponder the cultural significance of everything from snowflakes to imperial escapades. Those handful of comments you left? They brought me ridiculous amounts of joy, and they’re the reason I’ll keep launching these thoughts into the digital void.

This project is my attempt at a message in a bottle, except instead of contributing to oceanic plastic pollution, I’m just cluttering up inboxes with Byzantine monastery gossip and deeply felt opinions about rain across various civilizations.

I hope your 2024 was gloriously full of the unmeasurable stuff: the conversations that rearranged something inside you, the moments that made you feel less alone in this beautiful, dark, magical, heartbreak of a world, the tiny rebellions against taking everything so damn seriously.

Here’s to a new year of finding your people, authorizing festival funds for the elderly, carving toys when you should be working, and collecting all the stories that will never make the official record but somehow end up being the most important things that happen to us.

Happy new year,*
xo,
Saana

*there are approximately seven different new years approaching and you’ll definitely get posts about at least three of them, so let’s not overdo this one.

For the last few months, I’ve been in what I can only describe as a watermelon era. And not in the #FreePalestine way, although yes, that too, and always. I mean I have been obsessed. There’s always watermelon in my fridge. I’ve become that person in the produce aisle evaluating pre-sliced containers like I’m choosing a diamond. I’ve become a watermelon sommelier. “Ah yes, this one has good color saturation and optimal juice-to-seed ratio.”

I didn’t think much of it. People have phases. Some people get really into sourdough and/or opioids. I got into watermelon. Fine.

Until I started planning for Shab-e Yalda, aka the longest night of the year, and suddenly my entire watermelon situation made ancestral sense.

You know how Persians deal with the extended darkness of the winter solstice? They wage psychological warfare against it with aggressively red summer fruits. Pomegranates. Persimmons. And yes, you guessed it: watermelon. In December. When it makes absolutely no meteorological sense but makes *perfect* symbolic sense.

So now I’m sitting here wondering: what if my months-long watermelon obsession isn’t about hydration or taste at all? What if I’ve been genetically programmed for this? What if so many of my ancestors participated in this ritual that my DNA just…knows…that when it gets dark earlier and seasonal affective disorder can kick in, some ancient part of my brain goes “FETCH THE WATERMELON” and I dutifully march to the produce aisle and emerge with 5 pounds of pre-sliced summer in a plastic container?

What if I’ve been self-medicating with fruit this whole time and didn’t even realize it?

Here’s what Shab-e Yalda actually is: Tonight is the Persian winter solstice, and the centerpiece of this ancient celebration is slicing open the reddest summer fruits in the dead of winter, looking darkness straight in the face, and saying “Not today, darkness. We brought RED (snacks).”

This tradition is an old one. Older than Islam, older than the Persian Empire’s greatest hits, older than anyone’s ability to remember exactly how this started. Some ancient Zoroastrian looked at the longest night of the year and made the most relatable human decision: “Well, if we’re going to be stuck in the dark anyway, we might as well throw a party.”

The theological reasoning is actually sound. This was the night the god of light triumphed over darkness. Not through battle or drama or a celestial fistfight, but through the deeply satisfying fact of planetary physics. The sun would return because that’s literally how orbits work. But in the meantime: fruit, family, poetry, and the collective decision to eat like it’s July when it is very much not July.

Here’s my favorite part. After you’ve consumed your defiant winter watermelon, you open Hafez’s Divan, his collected poetry, to a completely random page and read whatever verse you land on as your fortune for the coming year.

No pressure or anything.

It’s like a Magic 8-Ball, except the ball is a 14th-century Sufi mystic who spent most of his career writing about wine and absolutely *roasting* religious hypocrites. The homie wrote things like “Last night I saw the angels knocking at the tavern door / They kneaded the clay of Adam and molded it into a wine cup.” He basically said “your religious leaders pray in the mosque but I found truth getting drunk with regular people,” which in medieval Shiraz was the equivalent of posting “organized religion is a scam, actually” on main.

The verses are never straightforward though. You’re asking practical questions about your actual life and Hafez responds with something about nightingales and rose gardens and the beloved’s hair.

So you sit there squinting at the page like you’re decoding the Da Vinci Code, trying to figure out if “the nightingale sang to the rose at dawn” means “yes, take that job” or “Maybe less screen time.”

It’s a Rorschach test disguised as poetry. You’re projecting your entire anxiety disorder onto a medieval mystic who refuses to be literal about *anything*. He’s not going to tell you what to do. He’s going to tell you about gardens and maybe throw in a wine metaphor and you have to figure it out yourself.

And somehow? This works. You find your answer in the metaphor. Or you decide the metaphor IS the answer. Or you just feel comforted that a man from 700 years ago was also confused about life and wrote beautiful things about it anyway.

This is how Persians do hope. Obliquely.

The tradition survived the Arab conquest, the Mongol invasions, multiple empires, several revolutions, and thousands of years of general human chaos. It survived because people refused to let it die. They kept gathering in the dark. They kept reading cryptic poetry to each other and nodding solemnly like it all made perfect sense. They kept insisting that eating summer fruits in winter meant something profound, even if they couldn’t quite articulate what.

So maybe my watermelon obsession isn’t random at all. Maybe it’s cellular memory. Maybe some part of me remembers what my Zoroastrian great-great-times-fifty grandmother knew: that you fight darkness with color. With sweetness. With defiance in fruit form. It’s hope you can hold in your hands and bite into.

Tonight, Iranians from Tehran to Los Tehrengeles and everywhere in between will do exactly what their ancestors did thousands of years ago: stay up too late, eat seasonally inappropriate produce, crack open Hafez to a random page and get zero help, and trust that the light comes back.

Because it always does. The planet turns whether we’re paying attention or not. The sun keeps its appointments.

So here I am, writing this before I pull out my books and my fruits, preparing to participate in a ritual older than my ability to comprehend time, finally understanding my watermelon phase for what it really was: preparation.

Even in the longest night, even when everything feels dark and uncertain, even if the sun forgot about us or was running late picking us up from night school and is now stuck in the cosmic carpool lane, we can find our colors against the darkness. We can bring our own light. Persians have had a millennia-long love affair with fire, with red, with warmth against the void.

The point is: you can slice open something red and sweet and summer-bright and remember that this isn’t forever. The light returns. It always has. It always will.

Shab-e Yalda mubarak to anyone staying up tonight. Not gonna lie, I’m not gonna make it past 12.

And to everyone else: maybe eat a watermelon this week. Or throw in extra tomatoes in your salad. Do it because people back then knew some things we are still trying to figure out. Do it because in red we trust.

The light’s coming, okay? Grab a snack.

xo,

Saana

A note before we begin:

This isn’t my usual post. Rob Reiner died two days ago, and I’ve been sitting with that in a way I didn’t anticipate. Sometimes you don’t realize someone was a pillar until you’re wobbly in their absence. And if the whole point of what I do here is to show how human we all are across time and space—how an ancient Mesopotamian’s complaint about bad copper feels immediately recognizable, how history is just us, over and over, trying to figure out how to be decent to each other—then grieving a filmmaker who taught millions of strangers how to articulate loneliness and love and the ache of growing up feels like exactly the kind of thing that belongs here. The people who give us language for what we’re feeling, who turn private grief into shared experience, who make it possible to point at a screen and say yes, that, exactly that—they’re part of how we survive being human. If this isn’t what you came here for, I understand. But tonight, I needed to write something, and so I’m going to hit publish.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

There are countless people across history we never talk about. Farmers who fed empires, midwives who delivered generations, scribes who kept records no one reads anymore. The vast majority of human existence is anonymous: people who lived and died and left no mark we can trace.

Then there are the ones we do talk about. Presidents. Generals. Inventors whose names end up in textbooks, whose decisions changed borders or technologies or the course of nations.

And then, somewhere between the forgotten and the enshrined, there are the memory-makers.

Not the ones who create history, but the ones who shape how we feel about being alive. The ones who give us language for things we didn’t know how to say. Who turn private emotions into shared experience. Who make it possible to point at something on a screen and say: yes, that, exactly that.

Mr. Reiner was a memory-maker. A movie-maker. Which sounds smaller until you realize: he’s the reason an entire generation knows exactly what it feels like to lose the friends you had when you were twelve. He’s why “as you wish” means “I love you.” He’s why we turn the volume to eleven and expect people to understand what we mean.

For people who were going to movies in the ‘80s, Mr. Reiner isn’t just a director they admired. He’s woven into the fabric of their memories: first dates, late-night dorm room debates, the VHS tapes they wore out. He’s part of their history in a way no textbook can capture.

And for those of us who came along later, who know him as Jess’s wonderfully neurotic father on New Girl or as the warm, exasperated dad in The Wolf of Wall Street, trying his best to understand his son’s increasingly unhinged life choices, Mr. Reiner was the person who radiated something rare: the sense that he’d give great hugs and slightly irreverent advice. That he’d listen to your problems and then tell you something both funny and true that would somehow make it all feel manageable.

I never met him. If some of the stories people believe are true, if there’s something beyond this stupid life, maybe I’ll meet him someday. And that’s exactly how I’d address him: Mr. Reiner. With the respect you give someone who taught you how to understand your own heart.

-----

Here’s something that will wreck you if you let it: Mr. Reiner met his wife, Michele, on the set of When Harry Met Sally.

The film he was making about whether men and women could be friends, about two people who spent years circling each other before finally admitting what everyone else already knew, that’s where he fell in love.

And here’s the thing: originally, Harry and Sally weren’t supposed to end up together. The script had them going their separate ways, a bittersweet acknowledgment that sometimes timing is everything and everything isn’t enough.

But Mr. Reiner met Michele. And suddenly that ending felt wrong. Because if he could find this, this person, this love, this proof that the cynic can be converted, then Harry and Sally deserved the same chance.

So he changed it. Gave them the New Year’s Eve speech, the desperate run through the party, the admission that all those neurotic details aren’t obstacles to love but evidence of it.

“I love that you get cold when it’s 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich.”

That’s not just good writing. That’s autobiography. That’s a man who discovered that the particularities of another person can become the whole reason you want to wake up in the morning.

They were married for thirty-three years. Long enough to prove that fairy tales can happen, that the volume really does go to eleven, that sometimes when you storm the castle you actually win.

-----

Before he made us believe in second-chance romance, Mr. Reiner made us laugh about a fictional British rock band whose amps went to eleven. This Is Spinal Tap was entirely improvised: no script, just actors being ridiculous with absolute commitment.

“It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever,” says David St. Hubbins, and that was Mr. Reiner’s whole approach. He never condescended to his characters. He believed in them even when they were describing a Stonehenge monument that arrived at 18 inches instead of 18 feet.

Studios told him it was too scary to improvise an entire film. His response? “To me, it was the opposite. I wasn’t scared.”

That’s the thing about Mr. Reiner. He wasn’t scared to let people be fully themselves.

-----

Jerry O’Connell was eleven and hyperactive when he filmed Stand By Me, the kind of kid always told to sit down and be quiet. During one scene, he was ad-libbing, and Mr. Reiner yelled “Cut!” O’Connell thought he was in trouble. Again.

But Mr. Reiner said: “Jerry, keep going man. That’s what I’m talking about right there. More.”

Not less. Not smaller. More.

That was his gift. He saw what was already there and amplified it. Wil Wheaton said Mr. Reiner treated him with more kindness than his own father ever did. The four boys in Stand By Me weren’t just acting, they became the friendship they were portraying, because Mr. Reiner made space for it.

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”

That line has been passed down like an heirloom. Wheaton used it in his tribute this week. It’s the truest thing anyone’s ever said about growing up: that ache of knowing some things can’t be recovered, only remembered.

And here’s the other line, the one that comes right before it, the one that might matter even more:

“Although I hadn’t seen him in more than ten years, I know I’ll miss him forever.”

--—

In one of his last interviews, Mr. Reiner talked about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a commentator he’d opposed politically for years. He could have weaponized it like some of the worst people with access to an audience like to do. Instead, he talked about forgiveness.

He was moved, he said, by Kirk’s widow’s grace. “I’m Jewish, but I believe in the teachings of Jesus and I believe in forgiveness,” he said. “And what she said to me was beautiful. You know she forgave his assassin and I think that that is admirable.”

This from a man who fought fiercely for what he believed. But he understood that strength includes the capacity for mercy. That you can be principled and tender.

In A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson snarls “You can’t handle the truth!” But the real truth of that film is quieter. It’s about choosing conscience over convenience, about handling the truth especially when it’s hard.

Mr. Reiner knew that moral courage isn’t loud. It’s steady.

-----

“Have fun storming the castle!” That’s what Miracle Max yells in The Princess Bride, and it’s become shorthand for attempting something absurd because the cause is worth it.

Mr. Reiner understood fairy tales: the old, bloody, honest ones where true love requires sacrifice and cleverness and coming back from mostly dead. The Princess Bride works because he never forgot these stories are instruction manuals. They teach us how to be brave when terrified, how to love when impractical.

“Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”

“As you wish,” says Westley, and we all know he means I love you.

-----

Mr. Reiner said it himself: “The first years truly last forever.”

He wasn’t just talking about childhood. He meant the stories we encounter early, the examples we’re shown, the moments that teach us who we are.

For a lot of us, Mr. Reiner was there in those first years. Not literally. We never met him. But his work was there. In the VHS tapes, the quoted lines, the blueprint for being someone who feels deeply and still shows up ready to laugh.

“It happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant.”

That’s the line from Stand By Me that doesn’t get quoted as much, but maybe should. It teaches us how to hold loss without letting it flatten us. That people matter even when they leave. Especially when they leave.

-----

Mandy Patinkin told a story that I keep turning over in my mind.

When they were filming The Princess Bride, there’s a scene where Inigo Montoya finally confronts the six-fingered man who killed his father. It’s the moment the entire movie has been building toward. Revenge. Justice. The thing Inigo has dedicated his life to achieving.

And Mr. Reiner kept telling Patinkin: “Do less.”

Over and over. “Do less.”

Patinkin didn’t understand at first. This was the big moment. Shouldn’t it be big? Shouldn’t the anger fill the screen?

But now, after Mr. Reiner’s death, Patinkin realized what he’d been trying to say. He wanted less anger so the broken heart could be felt. He wanted us to see past the fury to the grief underneath. To understand that vengeance doesn’t heal, it just gives the wound somewhere to go.

“Now I’m hearing his voice tell us all to do more,” Patinkin said. “To keep fighting, to keep living for every soul taken from this earth, that no longer has the life and breath to raise their voices for a better world. We must raise our voices for them.”

Less anger. More heartbreak. More action. More love.

That was Mr. Reiner’s final instruction, delivered through a scene filmed almost forty years ago, reaching forward through time to tell us what to do now. How to move through grief. How to honor the people we’ve lost.

We feel the broken heart. And then we do the work.

We keep making things: art, conversation, meaning. We keep believing that the people we love leave marks on us that time can’t erase. That memory is a form of immortality if we’re willing to carry it forward.

Mr. Reiner’s blueprint says: Feel the broken heart. Do the hard thing. Love your people fiercely, even when they’re far away. Even when you haven’t seen them in ten years.

Even when you’ll miss them forever.

Some friendships last a summer. Some lessons last a lifetime. And some people, the memory-makers who taught us how to see ourselves clearly, they last forever, too.

There’s a line in A Few Good Men that doesn’t get quoted as much as “You can’t handle the truth!” but maybe it should. When Daniel Kaffee is talking to Colonel Jessup, trying to understand what honor really means in a world that demands compromise, the truth slips through:

You don’t need a patch on your arm to have honor.

You don’t need permission to grieve someone you never met. You don’t need a degree in film criticism to know when something has changed you.

The memory-makers give us permission to feel. To recognize ourselves in strangers. To carry words and images and moments that weren’t ours to begin with but somehow become part of how we understand the world. To give us something to measure ourselves against.

So tonight, I’m giving myself permission to miss someone I never knew. To feel wobbly in the absence of a pillar I didn’t realize was holding something up. To turn the volume to eleven and say my gratitude is struggling to make a dent in an unanticipated, consuming, worthy grief.

Saana​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A few weeks ago, I was at a party, the kind where there are little bowls of snacks scattered around and people hover near the food table pretending they’re not eating their third handful of sea salt kettle chips.

There was a copper bowl on the table. Just sitting there, minding its own business, prettily holding some extremely fancy mixed nuts.

I picked it up and said, out loud, to no one in particular: “What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt?”

A woman I’d never met, standing maybe three feet away, mid-reach for a cracker…stopped. Her hand froze. She turned to me with this look of absolute delight and said: “Fuck Ea-nasir.”

Reader, it was magical.

Every once in a while, out in the wild, you find your people in the most unexpected places. You discover that another human has also spent time thinking about ancient Mesopotamian business correspondence and has opinions about it.

Though this isn’t actually an obscure reference anymore. It’s taken on its own life in Tumblr communities where people care deeply about 4,000-year-old drama. I must confess: I have never Tumbled. I don’t fully understand how Tumblr works or why everyone there seems to have seventeen different usernames but I am aware that Ea-nasir has become their internet villain, the original scammer, the patron saint of bad customer service.

So let me tell you about him.

Around 1750 BCE, in the ancient city of Ur (located in what’s now Iraq) a merchant named Nanni had ordered copper ingots from a trader named Ea-nasir. As you do. He’d paid good money. He’d sent messengers, “gentlemen like ourselves,” he notes with the particular emphasis of someone conducting serious business with serious people.

The copper arrived.

It was total garbage.

Nanni did not just accept this. He did not write it off as a learning experience or tell himself “well, you win some, you lose some” and move on with his life.

No.

Nanni took a clay tablet and carved his absolute rage into it for all eternity. He created what is essentially a 4,000-year-old Yelp review, except angrier and significantly more permanent.

“What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory.”

THROUGH ENEMY TERRITORY.

Nanni is so angry he’s listing every aggravating circumstance. Not only did you send my messengers back empty-handed—not only did you do it multiple times, you son of a—you made them travel through enemy territory to receive this disrespect. The commitment to documenting every detail. The sheer prosecution-level specificity. This man was building a case.

He continues:

“Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt!”

Translation: I have dealt with MANY merchants. I am a PROFESSIONAL. And NONE of them—literally ZERO other merchants—have treated me this poorly. This is SPECIFICALLY a YOU problem, Ea-nasir. Fucking idiot.

And then, the devastating finale:

“How have you treated me for that copper? You put ingots which were not good before my messenger saying ‘If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!’”

The casual “if you don’t like it, leave” attitude! The dismissiveness! The ingots which were NOT GOOD!

This is not just a complaint. This is a dissertation on being wronged. This is someone who has reached the absolute limit of their patience and decided that if they’re going down, they’re documenting exactly how they were mistreated, in excruciating detail, forever.

Now here’s where it gets truly, wonderfully absurd.

Fast forward thousands of years to when archaeologists excavated Ea-nasir’s house in Ur, they found Nanni’s complaint tablet. And another one. And another one.

They found multiple super pissed off rage-chiseled tablets.

An entire collection of angry customers.

Which means either Ea-nasir was an extremely diligent record-keeper preserving business correspondence for tax purposes, or he was running the ancient world’s first documented scam operation and kept the evidence like a trophy.

(I’m not saying which one I believe, but someone who responds to quality complaints with “if you don’t like it, leave” is probably not a meticulous archivist doing it for bureaucratic compliance reasons.)

The fact that he kept them means we have them. And the fact that we have them means that 4,000 years later, the internet knows exactly what kind of businessman Ea-nasir was.

This is proof that customer service nightmares are eternal. That the experience of paying for something, receiving garbage, and having the seller act like you’re the unreasonable one—that experience is older than alphabets.

Tumblr led the charge with “FUCK EA-NASIR, ALL MY HOMIES HATE EA-NASIR” posted next to ancient cuneiform. Imagine the comments, people roleplaying as ancient Mesopotamians:

“BY INANA HE SPEAKS EVERY FALSEHOOD”

“Do you ship to Lagash?”

“may tiamat return me to the soil if ea-nasir has low quality copper”

And my absolute favorite: “Thanks to this trend I have finally started learning Akkadian 😭🔥”

A man sold bad copper in 1750 BCE and accidentally became the gateway to Mesopotamian language studies for Gen Z.

We have reached the portion of the newsletter where I tell you it’s not really about copper.

Every single person who’s ever dealt with a bad seller—a company that sent the wrong product and then acted like you were crazy for complaining—looks at Nanni’s tablet and thinks: Oh my gods, I KNOW exactly how you felt.

The specific outrage of “you sent my messengers back empty-handed several times.” The exhausted rage of “Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone—”

We know this feeling. We have been Nanni. We’ve written the carefully detailed complaint email with timestamps and documentation. We’ve built our case. We’ve ended with some version of “I expected better” that really means “I am so angry I could scream but I’m going to be PROFESSIONAL about it.”

Nanni wanted someone, somewhere, to know that Ea-nasir sold bad copper and treated people with contempt. He wanted the record to show it. He wanted his grievance witnessed.

And 4,000 years later, millions of people know his story. The complaint outlasted the copper. The grievance outlasted the civilization. The tablet outlasted everything.

So when I picked up that copper bowl and quoted Nanni’s complaint, and a stranger responded with “Fuck Ea-nasir,” we were participating in something quietly wonderful.

We were acknowledging that we’re all connected—across millennia, across the enormous distance between ancient Ur and a modern party with fancy nuts—by the simple, human need to be heard. To have our grievances witnessed. To know that someone, somewhere, understands that we were wronged and that it mattered.

And also by the equally human instinct to absolutely roast someone who wronged us, for as long as possible, with as many people as possible.

Millennials, we are used to being wronged. Cyclically. We have emotionally budgeted for it. We will have anxiety if nothing is going terribly wrong in a timely manner. So if you manage to piss us off, you’ve earned it. You’ve wanted it. You love it.

And when you incur the wrath of a millennial, know that we will come with all the fury of a thousand Nannis. Because the need to put a m****f**** in his place is eternal.

xo,
Saana

PS - actual tablet and more info here

He didn’t know I’d moved. He still has my old address saved, and that’s where he sent it to. But there it was in my mailbox anyway, with a cheerful sticker: “FORWARDED.”

I stood there feeling genuine gratitude for a government institution, a feeling I would love to be able to access with more regularity.

Someone at the post office checked the system, saw that I had filed a mail forwarding form with the new address, and basically went full Liam Neeson. “I will look for you. I will find you. And I will deliver your mail.”

Cost? $1.10 for an entire year.

How lucky am I.

What would have happened to that postcard had I not signed up for mail forwarding? Where does mail go when it can’t find its way to its intended?

Let me tell you about the Dead Letter Office, and I need you to understand this was a real place. Not a metaphor, not a Kafka story, but an actual government office where undeliverable mail went to die.

From 1825 to 2006, there was a building in Washington D.C. that functioned as a graveyard for failed connection. Thousands of letters arrived every day with wrong addresses, illegible handwriting, and hopelessly vague directions. Postcards addressed to “Mom, Near the Big Tree, Texas” or “Sarah, the pretty one, Boston” or my personal favorite, “The family in the blue house near the church.”

Sir, there are 47,000 churches in Texas. The Postal Service is good, but they’re not psychic.

Someone had to work there. An entire staff dedicated to opening other people’s mail and trying to figure out where it was supposed to go. The job interview must have been something:

“What are we looking for in a candidate?”

“Strong attention to detail. Excellent investigative skills. Comfortable reading strangers’ private correspondence. Must thrive in emotionally devastating environments.”

“That last one?”

“You’ll be opening love letters that never arrived. Birthday cards from grandmothers to grandchildren who moved without leaving a trace. Marriage proposals. Apology letters. It’s like being a grief archaeologist, but the dental coverage is fantastic.”

I’m serious when I tell you many a budding actor's career has been felled by the fear of losing dental insurance. But I digress.

Herman Melville wrote a story about a man who worked at the Dead Letter Office and it is called “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” I cannot stress enough how important it is for you to read it. I digress…less, but still, I transgress.

The Dead Letter Office employees were postal detectives trying to crack impossible cases. They’d open letters looking for clues, searching for literally anything more helpful than “Dave, you know which one.” Sometimes they succeeded. Mostly they didn’t. Mostly the letters just piled up in warehouses, monuments to all the times someone tried to reach someone else and geography/forgetfulness/pride/drama/ego/miscommunication won.

Mail forwarding prevents this. For $1.10, the USPS looks at the Dead Letter Office and says: “Not today.”

They did the math. It costs them about $1.00 per person to update their systems and forward a year’s worth of mail. They charge $1.10, which is a smaller profit margin than a child’s lemonade stand. They’re not trying to get rich. They’re trying to break even on the cost of making sure we don’t lose each other.

This price has barely changed since the 1950s when it was 50 cents, about $5.50 in today’s money. We’re getting a better deal now (Millennials, rejoice! Something is more affordable now than it was before). Meanwhile, other countries charge significantly more. The UK charges £36.59 for three months (about $47). Australia charges $77 AUD for three months. Canada charges $51 CAD for four months.

The USPS will do it for a year for less than the price of a coffee.

This is because the postal service still operates on a principle most institutions abandoned decades ago: connection isn’t a luxury good. Finding people isn’t a premium feature.

The Dead Letter Office still exists. It’s called the Mail Recovery Center now (boo), located in Atlanta. They’re still there, still opening undeliverable mail, still trying to reunite letters with their humans.

But there’s less mail there now. Not because people stopped moving or got better at updating address books. The Dead Letter Office is shrinking because mail forwarding is working. Because that $1.10 service means fewer letters end up in postal purgatory. Fewer birthday cards die in Atlanta. Fewer “thinking of you” postcards vanish into the void.

The Liam Neeson approach to postal service is working.

My friend drove Highway 1, stopped at every scenic overlook, paid $8 for a latte. He bought a postcard, wrote down my address from memory (the wrong one), and dropped it in a blue mailbox somewhere between Monterey and Morro Bay.

That postcard should have ended up in Atlanta with all the other undeliverable mail. But someone at the post office checked the system, saw I’d moved, and said, “I know where she is now. And she’s gonna want to see this.” They slapped on that FORWARDED sticker like they were personally invested in making sure this postcard about overpriced coffee completed its journey to a friend who would see it and smile, nod along to how the crowds would have been unfortunate, and yet still wish she was there. That is a beautiful drive, a stunning part of the world. I cannot stress enough how important it is that you take that same trip. After reading Melville’s story.

That forwarded sticker is a promise kept. It’s infrastructure that still believes people are worth finding. It’s a government service that tracks us not to sell our data or monetize our movements, but for the most radical reason imaginable: so that someone thinking about us can reach us wherever we’ve gone in our messy, complicated lives.

For 230 years, the post office has maintained its commitment to one idea: deliver the mail. That finding each other is worth the dollar ten. That some things should be cheap not because they’re not valuable, but because they’re too valuable to be expensive.

My friend’s postcard got redirected to me because I paid $1.10 and the United States Postal Service said, “You are worth tracking down. Not in an “escaped convict” kind of way, but in the most genuinely wholesome manner. Your friend is calling.”

Name a better deal.

xo,
Saana

Runners-up included:

• “Did The New York Times Ruin Headlines? And If So, Can Thoughtful Centrism Fix It?” and

• “Did History Ruin The New York Times, or Did The New York Times Ruin History? (Both. The Answer Is Both.)”

But I landed here because honestly, if we’re going to ask if women ruined the workplace, we might as well ask if the paper ruined journalism. Seems only fair.

Recently, the Gray Lady blessed us with yet another entry in her long-running series: Asking Whether Marginalized People Have Ruined the Thing They Fought to Access.

The original headline—”Did Women Ruin the Workplace?“—was so perfectly, crystallinely absurd that even the Times blinked, squinted at it, and quietly changed it to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?”

You know, for clarity.

(Also, what exactly is conservative feminism, then? We ask Karen, who will ask her husband, and get back to us. More tonight at 8.)

The Times has been perfecting this particular editorial move for nearly two centuries. It’s their signature dish. Their greatest hit. The Times doesn’t just report history; it actively demonstrates how institutions can be spectacularly, consistently wrong while maintaining an air of unimpeachable respectability.

And so I present to you, my new recurring series (fyi, who knows if I ever do it again lol):

All the takes fit to retract.

• 1860s: Should Black People Vote?

  The Times spent significant ink wondering whether formerly enslaved people were “ready” for the franchise. Not whether denying them the vote was a moral catastrophe—no, no. The question was whether they were qualified. Whether they understood the responsibility. Whether perhaps we should wait a bit longer, think it through, consider the consequences of moving too fast. You know, for the sake of democracy.

• 1912: The Woman Suffrage Fallacy
  In a piece that aged like milk in the desert sun, the Times patiently explained that women’s suffrage would destroy families, corrupt politics, and fundamentally undermine civilization as we knew it. The argument wasn’t “women are lesser”—the Times was far too refined for that. The argument was that women voting would somehow ruin voting itself. Sound familiar? The logic was impeccable: women had never voted before, so clearly they shouldn’t vote now. Change is dangerous. Things are fine as they are. Have we considered that maybe the problem isn’t that women lack rights, but that demanding rights is itself the problem?

• 1950s-60s: Is Rock and Roll Destroying Our Youth?
  I include this one because it’s delicious in its absurdity. The Times was genuinely concerned that Elvis Presley’s hips and Chuck Berry’s guitar would bring about societal collapse. They treated teenage dancing as a civilizational threat. And here’s the thing—they weren’t entirely wrong that rock and roll would change things. They were just wrong about whether that change was good or bad, and wrong about who got to decide.

• 1970s-2000s: The “Gay Rights: But Have You Considered Both Sides?” Era
  For decades—decades—the Times treated basic LGBTQ+ rights as a debate club topic. Should gay people be allowed to teach? Is gay marriage moving too fast? Are we being too accepting of difference? The paper of record spent thirty years asking whether maybe the real problem wasn’t homophobia, but rather gay people being too visible about their existence. In 1986,they ran an editorial suggesting that AIDS patients’ civil liberties might need to be curtailed “for the public good.” Not “how do we support a community in crisis?” but “should we maybe quarantine them?” That charming editorial (read: EDITORIAL), was preceded by 1977’s “Homosexual Teachers and the Public Interest.”
  
  Note: Those links will work if you have a paid subscription to the NYT, which I do not, because I do not enjoy paying for access to points I would not make in a high school debate.

I’m tired of explaining why “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” is the same question as “Did Black People Ruin Baseball?” I’m tired of watching smart people tie themselves in knots to avoid the simple truth that some things aren’t debatable.

But silence is complicity. Not responding to bad arguments doesn’t make them go away—it lets them calcify into accepted wisdom. It lets the Times keep framing the discourse, keep making marginalized people defend their right to exist in spaces built to exclude them.

The workplace wasn’t “ruined” by women entering it. It was revealed as broken when people it was designed to exclude finally said, “Hey, why is this whole system built on the assumption that someone else is home doing all the care work?” The answer is yes. Absolutely. And by the way, I would love a wife. I wouldn’t make out with her but I would be sooo grateful. But I digress.

But the Times won’t ask that question. That question doesn’t have two sides to thoughtfully consider. That question has a correct answer, and the correct answer is uncomfortable.

The Times is the Ezra Klein of newspapers, isn’t it? Well-funded, deeply intelligent, occasionally brilliant, and absolutely incapable of encountering a topic without asking, “But have we considered that the truth might be somewhere in the middle of two positions, one of which is correct and one of which is morally bankrupt?”

And we are all Ta-Nehisi Coates, wondering why silence wasn’t an option.

In the battle between Lady Liberty and the Gray Lady, if you know your worth, you know your place.

xo,
Saana