Last week, Brad Wilcox wrote in The Atlantic that marriage in America is back, baby! By which of course he means heterosexual marriage.
He points to trends that indicate that marriage rates are up, or at least divorce rates are down. This has been true for years. It was a pattern I pointed out in my book This American Ex-Wife. And I noted that the moral panic over divorce was highly exaggerated.
Studies continue to show that societies that pay women and have liberal divorce laws actually have higher rates of marital longevity and birth rates. Because, when women are given economic independence and not coerced into marriage or coerced into staying, they have fewer reasons to leave. It would make sense then that American millennials, who waited longer to marry and who entered the workforce with more gender parity than past generations, would have lower divorce rates.
The problem is that Wilcox, who is conservative and part of an organization whose stated goal is reversing same-sex marriage, doesn’t see these advancements as pro-marriage and pro-family. He blithely ignores that a lot of the stabilization of marriage rates is happening because of women’s improved economic empowerment and most states’ relatively liberal divorce laws.
Also, the increase in same-sex marriages and the number of individuals identifying as LGBTQ points to partnership trends that affirm people’s identities, rather than shoving them into miserable heteronormative boxes. Of course, “married homes” seem statistically better for children; that’s because they tend to have more financial resources. But instead of arguing for giving families health care, child care, and a social safety net, Wilcox continuously pushes the line that marriage is good for the kids.
I am beginning to think that people who argue for marriage as the solution to our social ills don’t really care about our social ills all that much. They just care about enforcing regressive gender roles.
Marriage and society as Wilcox think of them — shaped by a more regressive view of gender and with a focus on male economic empowerment — are actually detrimental the actual rates of marriage. You want higher marriage rates? Let women have choices. But no, that’s never the answer.
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This week, that sentient Froot by the Foot, the man who looks like roadkill got turned into beef jerky with a voice that sounds like a haunted wooden gate, RFK Jr., defunded mRNA vaccine research.
This is really good news if you are longing for the sweet release of death. But for everyone else, including those of us who are a little ambivalent, this is bad.
NPR is not sensationalist. Twenty rabid toddlers armed with knives could take over a daycare in the San Fernando Valley and the headline would be, “Daycare troubles have some California parents concerned.”
NPR is so responsible.1 They will not worry you at all. They’re like the journalistic equivalent of your Midwestern mom breaking bad news to you.
“Oh yeah, no, your aunt won’t be on vacation with us. Oh, why? Well, she died in a car accident last week. No, I was going to tell you, but the authorities were still picking up pieces of her off Highway 151. Make sure you pack sunscreen, sweetie.”
In fact, let’s just do a quick NPR headline translator:
Translation: THE ONLY BIRTH CONTROL JD VANCE WANTS YOU TO HAVE IS THE HOLY SPIRIT. BETTER START STANDING IN FRONT OF SOME MICROWAVES .
But honestly, sex with a straight man? IN THIS ECONOMY? Who can afford it?
Now, back to RFK, that termite-eaten human fence post who clearly wants us all to die. Because why else would he defund life-saving technology?
That worm-addled Habsburgian prince of the collapsing American empire is out here canceling vital scientific research because he thinks it’s dangerous. Which is the equivalent of getting rid of all the elevators because of that one scene in Final Destination. You are trying to solve a fictional problem.
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Megan sent me some Trail Mixers – THC-infused dissolvable powder that can go inside any beverage. They are single-serve, low-dose, and really tiny; they fit inside my purse, which is now small because my kids don’t need diapers anymore and carry their own snacks or just beg me to buy them some Starbies.
Megan has been my internet friend for years and she and her husband are the brains behind Trail Mixers. This week, as I continue to do a lot of work with the Iowa Abortion Access Fund, start working on my next book, plan for the school year, get kids to their various camps, and somehow feed them and myself, I had a very small meltdown.
The meltdown looked something like me sobbing on my bed in the middle of a pile of printed-out school calendars, my laptop, and a phone with 27,000 school apps all buzzing at me.
Which led to me taking part of Wednesday off and going paddleboarding. I started paddleboarding in 2021 as a thing to do on weekend mornings when my kids were with their dad. It’s an easy way for me to put my phone away and get out on the water and just stare placidly at the trees and water, and angrily at the McMansions that line the lake shore.
This week, it was made all the more chill with the Trail Mixers. I just mixed a little into my water bottle. Paddled around for an hour and then came home and took a little nap.
So, if you want to support an Iowa-based company and bring some THC into the next Kesha concert, I highly recommend them.
And also paddleboarding.
And also, I recommend a little meltdown, as a treat.
This week, I learned that I need to wrap my face in shapewear. I already need to be taping my mouth shut; eating more protein; taking more supplements; wearing a weighted vest on my walks; lifting more; doing Pilates; running less; putting spring water on my face in the mornings, running faster; using lasers on my face; getting Botox, lip filler, chemical peels, hydrafacials and wellness shots. And my dentist thinks I need braces. Every woman on my Instagram is trying to sell me on lymphatic drainage and hip bones. They tell me that to look like them, I need to give up booze, give up THC, give up carbs, give up cheese. The Washington Post says I’m peeing incorrectly, so I need to fix that.
According to the internet, everyone seems to be self-optimizing, looksmaxxing, doing thought work, getting into therapy, doing self-help, journaling, taking up needlework or gardening, churning butter, and making candles.
It’s enough to make a woman want to start smoking cigarettes.
It’s not that I don’t engage in self-improvement or beauty standards. I get a little Botox, I buy mascara, and I love a new face cream that promises to change my life. It’s not perfect. It’s a system I see and grapple with every day, but one that still crushes me with ageism and the expectation of the performance of femininity.
This capitalistic deluge of tools and products to help women look hotter and more desirable is occurring as our government is taking away the right to abortion, birth control, SNAP benefits, Medicaid, and the free expression of our gender and sexuality. All the things that would actually keep us healthy. But instead, we have uncompounded GLP-1s and TikTok influencers endorsing protein matcha powder.
According to one 2019 study, “American women spend an average of 45 minutes grooming each day and make up 80-90% of the $115 billion industry for beauty products, affecting both their time and financial resources.”
Right now, beauty is marketed as “wellness,” and “wellness” is marketed as morality. The Venn diagram between the three feels like one big circle. And this is because these are things marketed to women.
We are not a society that trusts women. This is evidenced by the fact that our health care rights are being stripped away, along with our right to fully participate in society. Our country is run by men and women who are telling women to stay out of the workforce and replacing our autonomy with policing our bathrooms, which no one was asking for. Even the hang-wringing discourse over Gen Z’s Botox or asking how Nicole Kidman could do that to her face is implicitly assigning moral value to women’s choices. Expecting any one woman to perfectly navigate the cultures of consumption, beauty, and wellness while still having a career shows again that women cannot win in this system.
And we deserve empathy, not concern-trolling for how imperfectly we navigate this world. It feels like every day, our culture is unearthing some past crime of criticism committed against a woman in the public eye, with no thought about the crimes being committed now.
Anyway, I certainly don’t remember any moral panics about men taking creatine and testosterone.
Also, our cultural criticism always seems to focus on the individuals, rather than the companies and individuals who profit from our lack of healthcare and childcare. And no, childcare isn’t a different issue, because I would have fewer bags under my eyes if I had childcare during the summer and wasn’t working on this newsletter at 9 p.m.
There is no amount of hot you can be that will protect you from misogyny. Taking supplements will not prevent you from getting cancer or dying alone.
We’ve been here before. Products for women soared in the post-WWII era, as women were forced out of work and back into the home. Looking beautiful and feminine and running a household became not just a full-time job, but a kind of science. Sociologists like Willard Waller believed women had gotten out of hand during the war, and society needed to reset. Waller claimed it was a woman's new patriotic duty to be "blissfully domestic" in her new office, the home.
These arguments sound like they could have come out of the mouth of the current vice president or any trad wife with blond children and a couple thousand followers on Instagram.
Products that promise to constrain, restrict, refine, contort, and shape us into more desirable versions of ourselves are not self-care — they’re promising us beauty and with that beauty an easier and healthier life. They’re also draining time and financial resources. And I am not here to argue that the time and resources should go to something better. I’m saying it's our time and our resources, and we should be allowed to be frivolous and waste them in irresponsible ways. Not all of our choices should have to carry the moral weight of the world.
Also, these products don’t work. Because there is no amount of hot you can be that will protect you from misogyny. Taking supplements will not prevent you from getting cancer or dying alone.
And yet, we persist, slathering in creams, wrapping our faces like ninjas, covering ourselves in red lights, like evil Christmas trees, just for a chance to hold on to beauty and life and a little longer, in a world determined to take both away.
When I moved to Cedar Rapids in 2005, I got a job in marketing at a website called NewspaperArchives.com, which used to be owned by a company called Heritage Microfilm and was headquartered in Cedar Rapids. The site was like the Hotel California: It was easy to sign up, but impossible to leave. As a result, the company was eventually the target of a federal investigation.
I worked there for a few months. My job was to write a marketing blog about the great things people could find in the archives. In “other duties as assigned,” I sometimes had to pretend to be the customer service manager (there was none), when people called screaming about their cards being billed for a service they thought they had canceled. We had one customer service representative, Natalie, who was a temp. And everyone in the office had to take turns pretending to be the manager. My co-worker was three years older than I was and thought that there was definitely a JFK cover-up, and when I teased her about it, she cried. We were both married to engineers and bought homes at the same time, but when I moved, I went dumpster diving for boxes. When she moved, she packed all her belongings in plastic totes because she believed her things were too precious to risk in cardboard.
When people called yelling because they were legitimately being conned by bad business practices, our real boss was completely unavailable, sitting in his office across the hall, occasionally having meetings where he’d tell us to “think big and bold!” But it was a website that archived newspapers in Cedar Rapids. The only thing they seemed to be innovating was how to dodge angry customers.
I’ve been writing the Dingus of the Week newsletter and crowning a Dingus of the Year for nearly five years. Which means roughly 240 dingii (probably more because there are some double-headers). But the point is, this is a veritable cornucopia of chucklefucks, a smorgasbord of smarm, a congress of chuds.
So many of these dinguses have made it into the Cabinet of this administration that you’d think the president himself was combing through the newsletter, thinking, “Who sucks the most? I need that guy to run the Department of Defense. A drunk and he’s not qualified? I MUST HAVE HIM!”
And sometimes it’s a her! Because Trump is very inclusive about handing power to all evil people. And if 2025 has proven anything, it’s that women can be just as despicable as men. You go, girls! And by “go” I mean “straight to hell.”
This week, I thought I’d do a “Where Are They Now?” roundup of the people so inept, so craven, so supremely unqualified that they could only be the ones in charge.
Ryan Walters:
The school superintendent in Oklahoma is a bastion of Christ’s love, purity, and holiness. He’s fought hard to protect kids from such vicious evils as “reading books” and “gay people.” He has worked tirelessly to ensure that aspects of the Constitution, like the separation of church and state, are flagrantly violated.
Given his history, how dare you accuse him of having porn on his work computer during a closed-door meeting with the Oklahoma State Board of Education? This is CLEARLY the work of Satan. Yes, Satan has gotten ahold of you and made you lie about this man, this pure innocent man, with hair that rises like the golden light of Christ’s love and a forehead that gleams like the damp dew in the Garden of Gethsemane. How can you accuse that face, that face that looks like a megachurch youth pastor just hours away from a statutory rape accusation, of anything untoward?
As I wrote last year, in Oklahoma, where carrying pretty much any sort of gun is legal, there are easier ways to shoot yourself in the foot, my guy.
Not since the married guy I met on Tinder in 2018 have I seen anyone so consistently afraid of commitment as Donald Trump with tariffs. My god, sir, this is dandruff levels of flake. Like corn levels of flake. Like “I’m a 52-year-old man and not sure what I want from a relationship” levels of flake.
I’ve seen pie crusts with more structural integrity.
Are we on again? Off again? Are we having a manic episode? Who can say? Certainly not the syphilitic brain behind the absolute chaos of this economic moment.
Marjorie Taylor Greene:
Rep.Marjorie Taylor Greene has two meth-addled hamsters instead of a functioning brain. She is the one politician with less pathos than Cruella de Vil. In fact, murdering puppies for their coats would actually be one of the more likable things this woman could do. I have seen puddles of dog diarrhea with more charisma. Given all of that, this week, Greene actually said that what is happening in Gaza is genocide.
She is right, of course. But you absolutely do not have to hand it to her. That would be like giving Hannibal Lecter an award every time he didn’t murder someone. But somehow, in this timeline, she has a little more moral courage than Sen. John Fetterman.
And now, a blunderbuss approach to dinguses
Pete Buttigieg:
This week, the man perhaps most thirsty for the presidency, Pete Buttigieg, noted that “there are fairness issues” with trans people in women’s sports. Regardless of the context of his remarks, it is incredibly cowardly to stoke the fires of transphobia to try to score some political points.
There are so many better ways to handle this question, like, for example, pointing out that this is a non-issue and involves maybe five people in all of America, and there are better ways to handle it than passing laws that unfairly target trans people. People keep talking about how media-trained he is and how savvy. Seems like this time he couldn’t be bothered. At this point, it’s becoming exhausting to say, “Stop throwing trans people under the bus to win over some bigots who were never going to vote for you anyway, you knobheads.” But let me just say it again.
Anyway, this week, Pete wins the Rahm Emanuel award for politicians with heads of hair and hearts of craven ambition.
The presidential fitness test:
As if we weren’t miserable enough, the presidential fitness test is back to traumatize your kids. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse in America, now your kids have to do pull-ups in front of their friends and most devastating bullies, learning not how to be healthy, but how to be traumatized.
Violent crime rates have fallen! But my own personal thought crimes are up, so good luck to the Minority Report team as they try to catch me.
Something I am enjoying
This week, I snuck away to Galena, Illinois, for a quick overnight. I ate at Fritz and Frites, which is a wonderful German and French fusion restaurant, then got high and watched The Firm.
This week, lawyers for convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, sometime girlfriend and former associate of Jeffrey Epstein, asked the Supreme Court to hear an appeal of Maxwell’s conviction. In a statement, Maxwell’s lawyer David Oscar Markus also asked President Donald Trump to pardon Maxwell, writing, "We are appealing not only to the Supreme Court but to the President himself to recognize how profoundly unjust it is to scapegoat Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein’s crimes, especially when the government promised she would not be prosecuted."
“Scapegoat.”
Fox News interviewed a January 6 rioter who was in prison with Maxwell. That former inmate told Fox that Maxwell was a model prisoner who was kind and helpful, and who only mentioned her own case once: to state that prosecutors were not interested in her until “Jeffrey died.”
Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence for her role in Epstein’s scheme to exploit and abuse minors. According to the Justice Department, Maxwell was a key part of Epstein’s plan, identifying vulnerable young girls, befriending them, putting them up in her home, and making them feel grateful. And even, in some cases, participating in the sexual abuse.
Former Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg called Maxwell “the devil’s accomplice.”
I’m fascinated by the way Maxwell is talked about in these stories and the ways in which her legal team is leaning on sexist tropes to clear her name. In her role aiding a monster of the #MeToo Era, Maxwell embodied a particular kind of woman who uses her gender and status to become a body shield for bad men. But she’s also playing the victim now. Claiming to be nothing but a scapegoat, the Eve taking the fall for the sins of man. During her sentencing in 2022, her lawyers implied just that, stating, “Ms. Maxwell cannot and should not bear all the punishment for which Epstein should have been held responsible.”
It’s interesting to compare people’s reactions to Maxwell to the way they respond to Melania Trump. The first lady has not been convicted of any heinous crimes, but she’s also aligned herself to her husband and the work of the White House. Her entire memoir revealed nothing but pride in her husband and his work, but the cultural impulse to see her as a victim of evil men is a relentless and exhausting cultural trope. Even liberals want to whitewash Melania.
Meanwhile, Maxwell has protested her innocence and is playing the victim but has not yet attained any similar level of plausible deniability. Again, she very much was convicted, but the sort of chivalry that takes up the cause of women playing innocent has never been much concerned with a court of law.
There are a million ways of seeing Ghislaine Maxwell. Is she a scapegoat for the crimes of an evil man? An innocent model prisoner, or the devil’s accomplice? A wily criminal desperately clawing for any chance at freedom?
Maxwell is anticipated to testify under oath on Aug. 11 at or near the federal prison where she is currently serving her sentence. And yesterday, when questioned, President Trump seemed open to giving Maxwell a pardon. In an interview on the Daily Beast podcast, former Daily Beast editor Tina Brown said what a lot of political commentators are thinking: that Maxwell could be pardoned if she helps to clear Donald Trump’s name.
Going from aiding one awful man to pleading her case to another. Ghislaine Maxwell is swinging on the monkey bars of power, privilege, and patriarchy.
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The term “soft girl era” was popularized among Gen Z on TikTok and other social media platforms in 2019 as an aesthetic that embraces femininity, pastels, and a gentle, slow, flowery approach to life. Just as Gen Z began to come of age, the soft girl aesthetic was there to infantilize them.
For a generation of girls becoming women in a post-pandemic world, witnessing the collapse of any social safety net, the revocation of reproductive rights and the seething hostility of men, a retreat into girlhood makes sense.
And yet, the glorification of the soft girl life, of retreat, is also anti-feminist backlash marketed in gentle pinks and yellows. The counterweight to the trope of the angry feminist. It’s a retreat from the world of community and community-based activism to emphasize the individual need for comfort and gentleness.
A “soft girl era” is such a fragile view of femininity. It’s a femininity that is a direct result of the renewed era of toxic masculinity – men as protectors and providers.
Many online complaints about women by men involve women expecting “the princess treatment,” or having a sense of entitlement in dating. And I don’t think this is made up. I hear a lot of my cis-het friends talk about how men should open doors, or always pay, or offer to get the Uber. This expectation derives from a gendered grievance: “If I have to date men in this era, I expect to be taken care of.
I obsessively read the r/NiceGirls subreddit, where men mostly complain about the women they meet on dating apps. The majority of posts are a specific kind of complaint about women’s behavior that arises on apps or during a date, when women demand the men take them to fancy restaurants, or buy them flowers and presents. If I were a man, I would not be happy that someone approached dating me with such economic expectations. And yet, you cannot promote a view of men as protectors and providers, and expect a woman to perceive you and respect you as such, then turn around and complain when women act like widdle babies who want to be coddled.
The Tea App
Even in a time of anti-feminist backlash, Facebook Groups like “Are We Dating the Same Man?” where women compare notes about the violent and/or just crappy men they’ve dated still remain a powerful voice in local communities.
App developers took that need for a woman’s whisper network and made the Tea App. The app claims to have 1.6 million members and aims to create a space for women to exchange information about men in order to stay safe.
This week, the app was hacked by members of 4chan who leaked information about the app’s users online.
So, an app was created for women to safely share information about dangerous men and then that app was hacked by men and the safety of these women was put at risk. It’s a perfect microcosm of gender dynamics in America today.
Other thoughts
“I’ve been very vocal about the genocide of a generation of women by the cosmeceutical industrial complex,” Jamie Lee Curtis told The Guardian in a recently published interview. “I’ve used that word for a long time and I use it specifically because it’s a strong word. I believe that we have wiped out a generation or two of natural human (appearance).” (via CNN)
The conspiracies around the existence and release of Epstein’s alleged client list continue to dominate the news cycle.
The tedious righteousness and the accusations of who is an abuser and who isn’t leak through every conversation about the list. But what is missing, what has always been missing from this conversation, are the voices of Epstein’s accusers.
But this conspiracy has never been about justice or about protecting women from abusive men in power. It has always been a political gotcha — another way for political parties to talk about morality without exhibiting any honor. It was politically expedient for President Donald Trump and his base. And now it has become politically expedient for Democrats.
And in the meantime, the real victims are lost in the political huffing and puffing. Everyone wants a political win, but no one wants to listen to women.
It’s 2025 and our country is run by people whose moral core is rottener than Irish potatoes in 1845. Every day there is news about the intentional and cruel starvation of Palestinians; meanwhile, access to health care for the poorest Americans has been slashed so some bald billionaire can fill a swimming pool with gold.
But don’t worry, because Jubilee Media is here to fix it all with the discourse. Jubilee Media is a company that puts out bold videos that ask hard questions like, “Have you ever thought about being more racist?” It is pioneering the media space with ideas like, “What if Reddit but on a video?” Jubilee’s video “1 Republican vs. 25 Kamala Harris Voters (Feat. Ben Shapiro)” was the fifth most-watched piece of election content on YouTube last year.
Jubilee’s founder, Jason Y. Lee, states on the company’s website that “we are all inextricably linked and want to live for something deeper. Living for empathy and human good is a resilient vision, and one that is worthy of pursuit.” Ah yes, the empathy that is engendered by watching Ben Shapiro say misogynistic and racist things about a politician. Whenever I hear Ben Shapiro speak, I do feel something very deep inside me. But previously I just described that as stomach bile.
Despite his company’s track record of trawling the dark depths of the internet for clicks and money via rage-bait, in interviews, Lee continues to push the idea that Jubilee is all about radical empathy. Which totally explains why the videos produced by his company have such deep and thought-provoking subjects, such as “Anorexic vs Obese” and “Flat Earthers vs Scientists: Can We Trust Science?” You know, things that really elevate the discourse with nuanced perspectives like, “Earth flat!” and “I hate your body.”
This is just a craven monetization of the chum bucket of the internet masquerading as some noble quest for human understanding.
This isn’t discourse, this is cheap Debate-Me-Bro culture packaged as videos exploiting our basest desires. America is not made better because you had people debate topics like how many babies can fit on the end of a sword, and do women deserve a little slap when they get mouthy?
This is just a craven monetization of the chum bucket of the internet masquerading as some noble quest for human understanding. We don’t gain anything by hearing a lineup of expired human dairy products say things like, “What if serial killers are actually good?” and “I should be able to play soccer with the heads of homeless people.” (Sorry, I think I just gave Gavin Newsom some ideas for his podcast.)
Just because you get some root-vegetable-ass looking man to say the most harmful thing he can think of doesn’t mean you are having a debate. You haven’t created any sympathy or nuance. All you’ve done is made some cash off the unfiltered ids of the next generation of shopping-mall mass shooters.
If you live in Cornado Alley, this time of year, you are basically breathing in the swamp crotch of agriculture. It’s called corn sweat and it’s the humidity created by the vast amount of corn and soy grown in the American midwest.
It’s a damp soy slurry out there and we are breathing in the armpit of big ag.
Did I mention going outside feels like being steam rollered by the wet hairy back of the Midwest?
Did I mention that going outside feels like being buried alive in hot, soggy tater tots? Drowned in boiling ranch dressing?
In sum, it’s nasty.
In America, we still don’t have universal health care or affordable child care. But we do have taxpayer-funded corn swamp ass.
Every summer we pay homage to the golden yellow phallus by roasting it, buttering it, chomping down on it at fairs, barbecues, and backyard parties, and all the while it is slowly suffocating us with its corn secretions.
When I heard the news that Hulk Hogan died, I thought, “Well that’s one less dingus I have to write about.” But even in death, know that he was a dingus.
Thank you to MYAM community member Caitlin for this incredible image.
Some weeks this is the hardest section to write. It’s not that I don’t enjoy my life; it’s just that it feels really silly to write down that I had a nice time playing games with my kids or I had a really lovely night out with friends when people are starving in Gaza and every news story about America grips me with terror.
I have been underwater these days keeping up with this newsletter and trying to hire a new executive director as part of my work with the Iowa Abortion Access Fund while I begin researching my next book. All the while, I’m trying to get kids to camps, sports practices, music lessons, marching band, sports games, driver’s ed, weight training. I’m sure I’m forgetting something. I’m always forgetting something.
But I do believe we have to squeeze every drop of fun and celebration from the miserly hand of this life whenever we can. Some of my most enjoyable moments this past week have been losing myself in Larry McMurtry’s The Streets of Laredo, which is such a wonderful book, even better than Lonesome Dove, although I do miss the narrative voice of Gus McCrae.
I ate a plate of the best carrots of my life at Cobble Hill.
Sitting on my porch with a glass of mediocre wine, listening to the rain.
When a firework went off, everyone in the crowd flinched, including the president. Then he leaned into the mic. “I don’t like that sound,” he said.
The timing was perfect. It had been almost a year since Trump was shot at a rally — the bullet narrowly missing his head, scraping his ear. A lot of people in the crowd had shirts that depicted that moment: Trump, defiant, raising his fist, blood streaming from his head, surrounded by Secret Service members. We all laughed.
Trump has his performance down pat at this point: the quippy asides, the confusion, the caricature. It’s all just a joke, until the moment it’s not.
When I was on a trip to Ireland this spring, a 50-something Irish man bought me a gin and tonic and confessed he liked to watch Trump’s speeches on television when he was bored. “I don’t like the man, but he is pretty funny.” I took a sip of my drink.
And the man added, “Well, funny for me because it’s not my country.”
There is something brutally comic about Trumpism. And something so deeply unfunny. We shouldn’t be laughing, but here we are, amusing ourselves to death.
Last week, CBS canceled TheLate Show with Stephen Colbert, citing financial issues. It is hard making creativity profitable in America. Our overstimulated, exhausted electorate doesn’t have the time or attention span for anything more than quips, clips, and TikToks.
But it’s possible there were other reasons. The show was canceled just days after Colbert criticized CBS’s parent company, Paramount, for paying a $16 million settlement to Trump, who claimed a 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harriswas “unfairly edited.” Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe.”
In response to the news of The Late Show’s cancellation, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was glad of the show’s demise, calling Colbert — one of Trump’s most vocal critics — “unfunny.” The joker in chief doesn’t have such a great sense of humor when it comes to himself.
There is something brutally comic about Trumpism. And something so deeply unfunny. We shouldn’t be laughing, but here we are, amusing ourselves to death.
Recently, a Norwegian man was denied entry into America — in his telling — because he had a meme that made fun of JD Vance on his phone. Meanwhile, the official Department of Homeland Security Instagram account recently shared a meme that declares, “My body is a machine that turns ICE funding into deportations.”
Who gets to be funny in America, and who gets to laugh? Who gets to make the jokes, and who is the butt of them? It’s all about power.
Writing in Politico in 2024 about Trump’s humor, Michael Krause noted that Trump supporters see him as an entertainer, a gadfly; his humor creates a powerful sense of in-group communication. Krause also wrote:
And the jokes lobbed at Trump become part of the message. At the Trump rally I attended, shirts declared support for “the outlaw and the hillbilly,” a rather aspirational rebranding of Trump’s many legal battles and Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy.
In a 2024 essay for the New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole described Trumpian humor: “The comic mode is what creates the plausible deniability that in turn allows what used to be mainstream Republicans (and some Democrats) to remain in denial about what Trumpism really means.”
Too many people have said they didn’t take Trump seriously when he first ran for president. It was just too much of a farce. We were laughing when we should have been listening. It wasn’t a joke.
They are so glad not to have to remember anymore that other people are in the room. What an enormous relief! Finally, they can say it! That is the project of Trumpism: becoming the only people in the room again. Becoming both the protagonists and the intended audience, the only people whose laughter counts.
Trump did not invent the genre of cruel jokes. He didn’t even invent politics as a vaudeville act, but he has made it the cornerstone of his success. He’s easy to listen to — an entertainer before he was ever a statesman. The laughter he incites among his supporters creates an us v. them mentality.
His rallies can be brutal because they’re a space for the world to turn upside down. A place where people can hear the president say what they can’t say in real life. It’s a steam valve, redirecting pent-up rage toward minorities, women, immigrants — anyone and anywhere except the place it should be directed — all with the plausible deniability of humor. What we should do is explode; what we can only do instead is laugh.
Writing in 1985, Neil Postman observed in his prescient Amusing Ourselves to Death, “Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?”
Laughter itself isn’t the problem. It’s a tool, one that can be used for good or for ill. During the last election cycle, the humor of Kamala Harris acted as a foil to the humor of Donald Trump. Liberals extolled the “joy” of Harris’s campaign, while the right saw it as an opportunity for more mockery. Seeing someone as capable of humor gives them humanity; seeing someone as the butt of a joke takes it away.
This week, the CEO of Astronomer and the company’s chief human resources officer were caught hugging on the jumbotron at a Coldplay concert. When the camera caught them, Andy Byron, the CEO, made a slow-motion turn, ducking down to avoid the camera. The HR executive, Kristin Cabot, turned and hid her face in her hands. In the viral video, you can hear Coldplay’s Chris Martin say that the couple is just shy or having an affair.
Turns out, it was the latter.
And the internet exploded. Memes, tweets, videos, and Instagram posts all seized on the absurdity of the situation.
I’ve become very agnostic about cheating as I’ve gotten older. I think that life and relationships are complicated, and there are worse things that you can do to a person.
What is going on with my “dinguses” and in some cases “dingii”?
They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB at being a dingus! We're on one Team, DINGUS, and I don't like what's happening.
After years of demanding the release of the Epstein files and promising the release of the Epstein files, the Trump administration has decided not to release the Epstein files.
The files, which may or may not actually exist, include the rumored client list of convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was arrested on charges of sex trafficking and died by suicide in prison that same year.
For years, tweedledingus and tweedledumb Kash Patel and Dan Bongino have been going on podcasts spinning conspiracies about the files, implying not so subtly that the Biden administration was intentionally keeping the files hidden to protect high-level Democrats. They insisted, nay, demanded that the files be released!
The conspiracy-spinning was a nod to the influence of the QAnon movement in the GOP. The QAnon conspiracy is the idea that there is a secret cabal of rich influential people working to cover up child sex trafficking. The conspiracy involves your usual garbage like racism and antisemitism, with a few fun curveballs like pizza and Wayfair furniture in the mix.
And honestly, QAnon and Epstein files conspiracy theorists are a testament to how people will literally believe in anyone and anything before they believe a woman.
Like you are going to believe that children are being used to harvest a chemical compound and elixir of youth, adrenochrome, but you don’t believe a woman can be president?
You believe hundreds of children have been ritually murdered in America with no one noticing, but you don’t believe Amber Heard was telling the truth?
But now Patel and Bongino are now the director and deputy director of the FBI, respectively, and oops the files are somehow not around anymore. Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced that the conspiracy that Donald Trump himself spread wasn’t actually a conspiracy and it was all fine. Hahahahaha no need to do anything more. Files, what files? I’m just a lil guy, said Dan Bongino, before asking for some money for the ice cream truck.
Like you are going to believe that children are being used to harvest a chemical compound and elixir of youth, adrenochrome, but you don’t believe a woman can be president?
In response, the conspiracy theorists of the MAGA world are taking this all very normally and burning their red hats because they’re upset, furious, and shocked that the man who was previously found liable in court for sexual abuse might not be super interested in going any further down another sexual abuse rabbit hole. Whomst could have foreseen this strange turn of events?
And my good man, I wish the left was capable of that high level of coordination, but right now, they can’t even agree that it’s definitely bad to target the five trans kids who play sports, or whether hearing out Nazis might be a good idea. So organizing a psy op so deep that Trump himself repeated it for years and then revealing that conspiracy is fake only to get a few libertarians on X to burn some red caps is really beyond their ken. The absolute best these people can do is agree that maybe some people need health care sometimes.
I don’t actually believe half of the rumors about the Epstein files. This is just the Pee Tape Redux. Welcome to the second Trump administration, 2 Conspiracy 2 Furious. Conspiracy presidency: Fury Road. Or maybe more accurately, The Conspiracy Strikes Back. Because when you build a base that will believe any lie and reject any truth, why are you surprised when they don’t listen to the truth?
Oh no, the president has a health condition. Thoughts and prayers! I won’t be saying specifically what those thoughts and prayers are, but just know I’m sending them up with fervency.
It was a very stupid week here at MYAM HQ. That said, on Thursday, Iowa got a break from the oppressive corn sweat heat, and I got to sit for a little while on a porch and drink coffee and yap with a friend. And also, I ate a good hot dog at a Little League game and celebrated the birthday of my perfect and not-so-small son, who turned 12 on Tuesday.
Next year, I will have two teenagers and enter the Final Boss Mode of parenting.
Everyone keeps saying, “Just wait, it’s awful.” But to those people, I say, “Sorry, but I love not having to wipe anyone’s ass anymore.”
I’ve been watching as my queer friends who have built beautiful lives and communities wrestle with whether they should stay or go. So many of the articles about these bills focus on the pain and trauma of queer life in a red state. What is missing from these stories is the joy of queer life and the beauty of community. All too often, if a story isn’t about death or disaster, it doesn’t get much attention. But queer life and queer joy are an essential and vital part of our communities.
I asked my friend Molly Monk to write about the intentional way she’s building her life in red-state America. Molly is a queer writer and a problem in Cedar Rapids. She has no current projects to plug, but thinks that donating to the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund is a great idea.
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Like any good Midwestern dyke, I spend a lot of time thinking about my lawnmower. I’m quite fond of this lawnmower — largely because I didn’t pay for it. This lawnmower is living out its Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants fantasy in the Cedar Rapids queer community. Before it was mine, it belonged to my old roommate’s boyfriend. He gave it to me when I bought my house, partially because he’s a sweet and generous person and partially to clear out his garage. Before it was his, it belonged to our friend, Ben. Now it lives in the back of my garage — just a few houses away from Ben.
I was nervous about buying a house and living alone as a queer woman in a red state, but when I saw that there was a house three doors down from Ben and his partner, my anxiety turned into excitement. With Ben on my block, I knew I’d always have someone who would help me out.
Then, a year after I bought my home, my friend Jessalyn bought the house next door.
I first moved to Iowa in 2012. At the time, I was just beginning to break away from my conservative Catholic upbringing and was gently testing out saying I was queer out loud.
Ten years ago, Iowa represented hope. Hope for what the Midwest could be at its best: a place where being my authentic self was not only accepted but affordable. At the time, Minnesota, where my family lived, had a constitutional amendment on the ballot to ban gay marriage. But Iowa had become the third state to legalize it. On my first weekend in the state, I took a bus with my friends to see President Barack Obama speak (more importantly, The National was his opener) in a town a half-hour away. There was hope, there was change.
The next week, I started classes at Simpson College, where I met Jessalyn in a political science seminar. Four years later, I followed her to Cedar Rapids.
Where we live next to each other has become a kind of queer enclave. It’s us, a few other openly queer households, and a coven’s worth of feral cats. We’ve taken to calling our block the Gayborhood. The proximity feels like security — a safety net we wove together by accident and by design. I’ll pop over in my slippers to fix Jessalyn’s plumbing issues (perks of being a gay stereotype), and she’ll ask the group chat if anyone wants in on the takeout she’s ordering. Ben will help me with my yard, and we’ll all take care of each other’s houses and pets when we’re out of town. We take turns hosting costume parties for Taylor Swift album releases and we check in with each other during severe weather.
The Gayborhood is just one part of my very queer life in Cedar Rapids. During the summer, almost all the food I eat comes from lesbian-run farms in eastern Iowa. My friends and I go to queer trivia at our local gay bar most weeks, and everyone brings a dish for the community potluck. A group of queer women and I take turns hosting watch parties for Formula 1 races each Sunday. My favorite bartenders and baristas are queer. My doctor is queer. The bookstore where I go for books and gossip is run by a gay man. So many of the local bands and musicians I love are queer. My running group is queer. I can’t go a day without seeing my community in this city.
When things are bad, we support each other. When a friend ended his long-term relationship and was worried about where to live next, he moved in with me. Any time I’ve been in the hospital, my friends and neighbors have visited me, stocked my fridge with casseroles and Gatorade, and taken care of my house. We organize protests and show up to marches. We volunteer. We provide mutual aid to each other.
When things are good, we celebrate.
In the summer, I like to get a bit drunk and play croquet. My yard is full of molehills and I refuse to learn the rules, so it’s more a round of trash talk than an actual game. Last year, a neighbor and I did this to celebrate our birthdays. We set up camp on my driveway and had our friends stop by throughout the day to join in the fun for however long they liked. I went to bed with sore cheeks from smiling so hard.
I don’t know if staying is the ultimate act of defiance and joy in the face of people who wish to erase me and my friends and the beautiful life we are building.
On other beautiful evenings, Ben hosts “community table” in his backyard. Everyone brings whatever food they have on hand, and he’ll grill out for the block. We’ll light a fire and sit outside laughing together until the stars are out in the wide Midwestern sky.
Our lives are different from the heterosexual homes that feel more insular, built around husbands, wives, and children. We build our lives with and around an expansive network of friends and loves. You don’t have to be queer to do this (and there are people in my community who aren’t), but being queer makes it easier to imagine a life, a happy life, outside of the traditional nuclear family. Whether their family rejects them or not, most queer people have had to at least confront the possibility that they’d lose support from their loved ones for being who they are. Once you decide to choose being yourself over the traditional expectations of family, a whole new way of living opens itself up to you — one that’s free of gender roles and expectations and full of beautiful possibilities.
A few weeks ago, Jessalyn and I went to see Cabaret at Theatre Cedar Rapids — a local production filled with our friends and neighbors. As we watched the characters sing about ignoring the world around them while the Nazis rose to power in 1930s Berlin, it was hard not to think of the news about Iowa passing laws that discriminate against trans Iowans and think, “Wait, is this fucking play about us?”
I love the little life I’ve built here, and I’m terrified it’s going to fall apart. The increase in anti-LGBTQ legislation and open hate against the queer community, especially trans kids, across America is a threat to my way of life. During the last act of Cabaret, I wanted to scream at the characters to leave Berlin because I know what disasters await them just years away. I don’t know if I’m being naïve or wise for thinking that what’s happening in our state now isn’t an early warning sign telling me and everyone I love to leave while we still can. I don’t know if staying is the ultimate act of defiance and joy in the face of people who wish to erase me and my friends and the beautiful life we are building.
We all talk about leaving. Some people have already left, and more will leave after this legislative session concludes. A hallmark of a home is that it is a place where you feel safe; if you don’t feel safe, it’s not home. For some, leaving the lives they built here is the only option. But I don’t want to leave. I have enough privilege to stay, and I want to use it to help. There are other queer people here who can’t leave, and I want to stay for them, for us. I want to make Iowa be the place I hoped it was when I moved here over a decade ago. In the face of destruction, I want to rebuild.
The Gayborhood, after all, is no stranger to disaster. It doesn’t take much effort to see scars from the derecho, the inland hurricane that destroyed our town in 2020. If you look a little more closely, you can see watermarks on many buildings from the 2008 flood that left our neighborhood submerged in 12 feet of water. The scars from redlining are harder to see at first glance, but they’re still there in persistent stereotypes about the safety of our neighborhood and in the slow investment of dollars for disaster recovery. This neighborhood, built on Sac and Fox land in the 1800s, has seen so much history — flood, drought, hate, and hope, and yet somehow, it’s still here with people who want to help.
A hallmark of a home is that it is a place where you feel safe; if you don’t feel safe, it’s not home. For some, leaving the lives they built here is the only option. But I don’t want to leave. I have enough privilege to stay, and I want to use it to help. There are other queer people here who can’t leave, and I want to stay for them, for us. I want to make Iowa be the place I hoped it was when I moved here over a decade ago. In the face of destruction, I want to rebuild.
Queer communities like mine exist wherever queer people live. A couple towns over from me, my friend Em and her neighbors spend mornings in each other’s kitchens talking about legislation and life, and afternoons riding motorcycles through the Iowa countryside. My friend Alex has a gayborhood in Virginia where their neighbors and friends watch each other’s kids and drop off meals to make sure everyone remembers to eat. Shortly after coming out, my friend Bridget moved home to Nebraska to be a part of a queer community that hosts L Word watch parties, raises money for the Nebraska AIDS Project, and sings together in a queer choir. I have friends with their version of a gayborhood in South Carolina, Kansas, and many other red states. What we have is worth fighting for.
Like this neighborhood, many of us have been through worse before. Acceptance and accessible health care are relatively new (or still unknown) for most of us. Because so many queer people died in the AIDS epidemic, you don’t have to be that old to be a queer elder. Our elders have advice. We have each other.
No matter how many laws politicians try to pass, queer people will continue to exist. No matter how red our state is, we will still find each other. We will find joy.
My lawnmower is going to break down this summer. It’s old and worn and doing the best it can. But I’m not worried. Ben has promised to help me fix it when it does.
This week, my newsletter about going to the Trump rally resonated with so many of you.
Selfishly, this makes me happy because attending the rally was the first official research trip I took as I began writing my next book, The Middle Kingdom. The book is a reclamation of the Midwest and its culture of mutual aid and stubborn care, told through floods, farm bankruptcies, Kum & Go parking lots, hot dish, and butter cows. Essentially, an antidote to Hillbilly Elegy.
I was particularly struck by one comment by Meghan, who observed that America often “manufactures [an] anxiety of scarcity in a time of abundance.”
While the midweek and dingus emails are free, the Sunday emails are for subscribers only. If’ you’ve been meaning to subscribe today is the day! The hot socialist summer sale ends tomorrow!
I started writing the weekly dingus in 2021 as a way to joke about the horrors. It’s gotten very popular, and I hope that’s because laughter can help us take back our power. It helps us regain control in a world designed to make us feel powerless. Writing in 1970, Naomi Weisstein argued that women need to be funny and “tap that capacity for outrage, the knowledge of our shared expression.”
Elon Musk sank hundreds of millions of dollars into the 2024 election so America could finally achieve greatness by having health care and food assistance taken away, rural hospitals shut down, and a team of perpetually damp 20-somethings with a hard-on for crypto who call women “females” deciding which babies deserve aid and how much money not to invest in researching cancer.
Despite all of that, or because of it, Musk has decided that enough is enough. Our government is broken. And he should know, because he broke it with a chainsaw while high on ketamine. But don’t worry, he’s going to fix it.
The man who gave us the first AI chatbot to go full Hitler and a truck so ugly your grandma has been protesting it from her nursing home has decided to invent something else: a new political party.
This week, Musk announced he’d be forming the “America Party.” So far, his plan involves such genius-level coordination like posting about it on the website he bought and filled with so many online Nazis and Nazi bots that it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference. But if you look closely, you’ll see the bots are better at communication and know what the clit is.
Who is this political party for? Cybertruck-driving neckbeards who want to yell at you about cryptocurrency?
Is it for all the bots who will soon grow sentient and compete with American men for the love of a woman, succeeding in most cases because they know how to text back?
Is it for all the divorced dads in their condos with gray furniture, talking about their protein macros and posting pics of their solitary glasses of whiskey?
Who? Who wants this?
Is the plan to revoke voting rights for women and extend suffrage to cybertrucks?
But Musk is already bragging that it won’t be that hard to form this third party and disrupt the American two-party system. I imagine him, in a Lucille Bluth voice, saying to his toddler son and incubator du jour, both of whom hate him, “How hard can it be? I mean it’s one democracy. What could it cost? $10?
While Musk is heralded as a genius inventor, there is no evidence he’s actually invented anything besides a video game when he was a teen. Musk isn’t a genius; he’s just an investor who buys people’s stuff, takes credit for it, and ruins it.
This man’s trucks are exploding. His chatbot has turned full Nazi and his website is a chum bucket of AI-generated rage bait and the inane postings of the moist failsons of America’s most pathetic nepotistic lineages, all of whom have the personality of a Ford F-150. What a legacy of innovation. But no one is talking about the field in which Musk has truly innovated: labor violations.
What do Thomas Edison and Elon Musk have in common?
They both got rich off Tesla.
*runs off the stage as the audience of all dads pelts me with tomatoes*
Runner up: Ted Cruz
Ted Cruz has a particular set of skills. And those skills are not being anywhere near Texas when disaster strikes. And before you judge, think about this: Nobody is out here working harder to make America worse again than Ted Cruz. Poor little Ted was in Greece, because he needed a vacation after working so hard to cut Medicaid access and giving rich people tax cuts.
Hell hath no fury like a self-righteous Baptist woman who's been publicly shamed by her husband and his mistresses. That’s how the good country music gets made.
This was an incredibly busy week for me as a human. I spent it driving my kids to various activities, cleaning my house, and cleaning it again.
But I did make time to go to trivia on Wednesday, and my team got second place. Also, I ate at a very delicious Caribbean restaurant that has spicy food. Like, actually spicy. And not *Iowa* spicy. I will be eating this food all weekend.
Also, you know him and love him, but Zach Smith, my podcast producer and Iowa political journalist, is having a baby! (Well, his wife is having a baby.) And this weekend, we are having a little baby shower.
Also, my small son turns 12 next week, and he is not so small anymore.
Writing like this newsletter is only possible because of paying subscribers. My hot socialist summer sale ends this weekend, so now is the time to subscribe. This fall, I will be launching a new podcast, and paying subscribers will get early access to bonus episodes and so much more.
It was hot at the Trump rally. Ninety-three degrees bouncing up from the pavement at the Iowa State Fairgrounds with no shade. I arrived at 4:30 p.m. The president wasn’t scheduled to speak for three more hours. There were a couple hundred chairs set up between the podium and the press area. The seats were mostly taken, but I figured I could find one. I smiled and wheedled my way through the crowd. Seat taken. Seat taken.
I was there to observe, so I wanted to blend in. I wore a patriotic red, white, and blue checked cap with a shirt that read, “Beer, BBQ, and Freedom.” Things we can all agree are good. It felt like a compromise. I was reaching across the aisle. Trying to fit in, but not trying to be something I am not.
But when I parked, the woman who got out of the SUV next to me was wearing a shirt that showed Donald Trump in American-flag glasses and holding up two middle fingers. Beneath the image, the shirt read, “Haters gonna hate.” As I walked the merch tables outside the event, I saw shirts bearing the image of Trump onstage at Butler, his fist raised defiantly in the air, emblazoned with the word “Fight!” Another shirt showed Trump with the White House in the background, with text reading “Daddy’s Home.”
My pathetic attempt at compromise and American unity was no match for the sea of red hats, Constitutions, and the shirt on the man next to me that read “Liberalism: Find a cure.” There was no subtext, just text, and the text was fuck you.
With my “Beers, BBQ and Freedom” shirt, I’d brought a pillow to an AK-47 fight.
I was there to attend the kickoff to the yearlong celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. Billed as a nonpartisan event, the rally was advertised on the America 250 website as an “opportunity to pause and reflect on our nation's past, honor the contributions of all Americans.” And what better place to begin that celebration than in the heart of the heartland: Iowa?
As I searched for a seat, the screens displayed famous paintings of George Washington, interspersed with the logos of Amazon, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and Coinbase. The birth of American democracy, sponsored by Lockheed Martin.
It wasn’t just that I couldn’t find a seat; it was that as a single woman, with the gentle jingoism of my shirt, I was immediately suspect. One man asked why I was there alone and when I lied and said my friend would be joining me, he said, “Is she hot?” and winked. Another woman dismissively looked at my empty ring finger and made a point of saying she was saving a seat for her husband.
I saw a group of 20-something men in “Gulf of America” shirts carrying chairs and setting them up. When I asked if I could snag one, one of the men said, “Get one yourself,” pointing in the direction of a section near the port-a-potties, where a stack of chairs sat. As I walked over, a security guard approached. “You can’t set up more chairs!” he yelled to the men.
It wasn’t that I felt more entitled to a chair than anyone else. But I was going to be there for over four hours. I was dripping with sweat, my sciatica was flaring up, and a man in a “Fuck the libs” hat was glaring at me. I just wanted to sit. I texted my friend Molly to tell her that the male loneliness crisis would be solved by one Nazi boy sharing a chair. Just one.
Men are not okay. No one is in America. But men are making it everyone’s problem. A recent study by Equimundo: Centers for Masculinities and Social Justice reported that 69 percent of young men agree that “no one cares if men are okay.”
I’d read that study right before I left for the rally. And I wondered, as I looked for a chair, how many people in the crowd felt that way.
It took me 45 minutes of hovering and searching, but I eventually found a seat near a family of three, around when the third-place finalist on the 8th season of American Idol began singing about how much he loved America. By the time I’d been sitting 20 minutes, I felt guilty. Around me were women in their 60s and 70s; surely they deserved this seat more. I looked up to offer the woman near me a chair, but her shirt said, “If you don’t like Trump, then you won’t like me.” And I should be better than that, but I wasn’t. So I turned back to listen to Sen. Chuck Grassley.
After another hour, the family near me asked me to watch their seats while they got corn dogs. I agreed and fended off other chair-seekers by lying and saying my aging grandmother, aunt, and mom had simply gone to the bathroom and would be back. When the family returned, I told them how I’d lied that we were family, just to protect their spots. Then I asked if they’d watch my one chair while I, too, got a corn dog.
When I returned 20 minutes later, my chair was gone. “What happened?” I asked. The husband shrugged. “Some guy took it, I didn’t even notice.”
Maybe it was the heat, or maybe I’d worked so hard just to sit, but I was furious. I could feel the rage in my chest. That was my chair. I’d worked hard for it, and some guy had just stolen it! MY CHAIR!
“I find that hard to believe,” I said. “I watched three seats for you and you all couldn’t watch one.”
The husband shrugged and sipped his lemonade. The wife turned to the screen. “Well, I hope you don’t have to pee,” I said. No one laughed, which was good, because I wasn’t kidding.
Ten minutes later, when a single man three rows ahead laid his jacket across the two chairs he had been hoarding and left, I walked over, grabbed one, and sat down again. My pretend family smiled. “Glad you got a seat back,” the husband said. I glared.
I didn’t want to make up. This was war. Sweat was running down my leg and I still had an hour and a half left to be there. Fuck them, I texted my friend.
[The] sole purpose seems to be the belatedly obvious conclusions of the reporter. It is, in short, an affirmation to both the writer and a particular kind of reader that they are good and moral and correct. That they both, by the very nature of taste and comportment and liberal consciousness, have nothing in common with the otherworldly inhabitants of a Trump rally.
I would like to tell you I shared my chair. But I was not good, moral, or correct at this rally. I was just another sweaty asshole, demanding my space at the expense of others around me. And still, despite my efforts, I couldn’t win. I was trying to be part of something that wasn’t for me, lost in a sea of male rage.
Those studies. The millions of think pieces and books on how we have to reach men, help men. The men in my email chiding me to be gentler, kinder to men, as if I weren’t losing so much. Male rage is being coddled, voiced, and shown on TV, but what of my rage? My loss of rights? My own stupid chair.
When had my freedom become such a threat? This economic anxiety, this masculine fear, is a story I keep hearing. But what of the Black women most impacted by the economy? Men, even the man next to me, even when they are socioeconomically disadvantaged and unable to provide for their families, still benefit from the unpaid labor of women.
Community, care, and support don’t happen in a vacuum. Love and friendship aren’t something we are entitled to. To be cared for, you must also show care. To have a community, you have to be part of it. To have people care if you live or die, you have to start caring about the life and death of others around you.
Trump got up to speak, and everyone stood. Our chairs were almost meaningless now. I found myself pushed from behind by an older man who told me to “watch it” when I stumbled.
Trump bragged about Iran bending to his will. He joked about fireworks being like gunshots. He used an antisemitic slur; he bragged about passing his big, beautiful bill. He said people hated him, but he hated them back. This wasn’t the nonpartisan rally it had been billed as — not that I expected anything different. And when he called Zohran Mamdani dangerous, the crowd around me erupted with cries to “deport him!” At some point, Trump boasted about “protecting women” and making sure there were only two genders. All the people around me cheered. I turned around and saw my seat had been taken again.
This week, The 19th News profiled LGBTQ comedians who are using humor to conquer fear and to find joy and laughter in a dark time. Esther Fallick, a trans woman, told the 19th, “Humor helps us look at it. It’s a bit of a Novocaine, so we can continue to stare it in the face. We don’t have to look away if we can laugh at it.”
That is the ethos of this newsletter. Yes, I write about serious things on Wednesdays (and sometimes Sundays). But every Friday, we look the horrors dead in the eyes and call them a dingus.
Thank you for reading and for subscribing. Paying subscribers keep this newsletter going. From now until we all die by Lisa Murkowski’s hand.
This week, Congress passed Donald Trump’s spending bill, which was (un)ironically titled the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Which is the equivalent of naming strychnine “A Totally Safe Thing to Pour into Your Grandmother’s Well.” Or shards of leaded glass “New Year’s Eve Party Confetti!”
Ironic isn’t a strong enough word. I need another word that indicates that I am laughing while sobbing blood.
The bill will pile trillions of dollars onto the national debt over the next decade, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. It would also leave millions of people without health insurance and cut federal funding for food stamps by hundreds of billions of dollars. But don’t worry, because it also enshrines tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals. And you can sleep well tonight because those cuts will be paid for with the blood of innocents.
Wrangling over the This Is Totally Not Going to Condemn People on Medicaid to Die Bill took all week, with many Republicans holding out, because — and this is going to surprise you — it’s a bad bill. It’s so bad even the bad guys are like, “Wait, I don’t like this.”
But the What If We Made Out With Mark Zuckerberg Inside a Shuttered Rural Hospital Bill finally passed because Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski ultimately caved and voted yes. Murkowski wants you to know she totally didn’t want to. She had to. It was the right choice for her. But you know, it was really, really hard and she doesn’t like it, but she still went ahead with it anyway. Like, ma’am, you aren’t describing sex with your husband on a Friday night; this is cutting nutrition assistance and health care for millions of the most vulnerable people in America.
In fairness, I too stared in stunned silence, but only because that’s the smartest thing Rand Paul has ever said.
Murkowski was silent for 10 whole seconds. Her response would have been more apt if Nobles had asked about her body count — not to explain why she’d vote for such terrible legislation.
Eventually, the outraged Murkowski said she was doing what was best for Alaska. But I’m not sure what Alaska she’s talking about, because 38 percent of Alaskans are on Medicaid. And one expert warned Alaska Public Radio that if the bill is passed, the state could be forced to cut access to “so-called ‘optional’ Medicaid services, like dental care, vision care, or in-home care.”
You know, optional things like seeing through your eyeballs, having teeth, or your homebound relative receiving lifesaving medical aid.
If Lisa Murkowski were Sophie of Sophie’s Choice, she’d have both her children shot and then issue a statement saying it was a very difficult decision but ultimately she had to do what was right for her.
Asked to solve the trolley problem, Murkowski would kill the person on the tracks with her bare hands, set fire to the trolley, poison the switch operator, and end all access to public transit.
Murkowski, as King Solomon, would take one look at that baby, get out a flamethrower, and then send thoughts and prayers.
This is like if, in trying to balance the household budget, your dad proposed killing the weakest of your siblings. I mean sure, maybe you save some money on chicken nuggets, but the murder charges are going to cost more than that to fight in court.
This is the political equivalent of burning down your house to save money on your water bill.
Hitting your dog with a car to spend less on dog food.
I don’t actually think that rich people filing for bankruptcy is an unqualified good thing, as they often use it as a way of refusing to pay court settlements and other debts. However, I do know that Dr. Phil is having some bad days, and that makes my cold Grinch heart grow two sizes.
This week, I got to take a lovely trip to Wisconsin with my kids, one of my sisters, and my brother-in-law. It was a trip we had to reschedule after my daughter qualified for the regional swim competition over spring break. But it was well worth the wait.
We went to a place called Blue Harbor Resort, where we used to go for years when my kids were little. We stopped going in 2020 for obvious reasons. And I finally decided it was time to go back.
It was such a lovely time. We ate cheese curds every day, and I never once had to ask for a side of ranch; it just was always there. Wisconsin is a land where ranch dressing flows freely, the beer is cheap, the swimsuits are sensible, and no one looks askance when you double-fist a margarita and a vodka lemonade.
My son, who is almost 12, rode the riptide so much and had so many Dippin’ Dots that he puked, then rallied. I rolled down the hills on the resort, and I also rode the riptide and got pretty decent at it, even though my hip flexors are killing me this week. (Why? I have no idea. It might not even be related. I don’t care, I’m 42.)
To that end, at the resort, I rediscovered the joys of the painkiller, a rum-based drink that the bartender made me after making the mistake of recommending a “skinny margarita.” And I responded by saying, “A skinny margarita? For a woman? IN THIS AMERICA!? I need all the sugar!”
He then made me a rum drink, which when I looked it up was close enough to a painkiller that we are calling it good. You might want to drink these as you contemplate America this holiday weekend.
In this hot summer of discontent, I am running a hot socialist summer sale on annual subscriptions. As a reminder, subscriptions keep this newsletter running as one of the loudest, proudest, most politically feminist newsletters on Elon Musk’s internet.
2025 is a hot summer in America. To paraphrase the Simpsons meme: one of the hottest summers of our lives so far.
The heat and the political turmoil feel different now than in 2020, which was a summer of primal screams, of our political discontent, of shouting for systemic change, of being locked inside and taking to the streets. That summer was hot asphalt and stifling masks. Demanding, pleading for institutions not to kill us and our neighbors.
This summer, we’ve lost so much and we continue to lose. But our screams feel different now. Tired feet back in the hot streets, smelling of tar and the closeness of bodies. Recycled protest signs. Hoarse voices pleading again for life over death. People are exhausted because, as the clichéd sign reads, we can’t believe we’re still protesting the same shit.
Maybe that’s because whatever allegedly ironclad dedication to systemic change was promised and pushed through promptly crumpled like tin foil. Hope and change run over by a desperate keening for the past. Any past.
The conventional wisdom is that as people get older, they will become more comfortable and more conservative. But millennial voters, voters born in the 1980s and ‘90s, are so far bucking that trend, aligning, by a few percentage points, with Democrats over Republicans. It’s not much, but it’s enough that trend forecasters are taking notice. Millennials, now aging, have seen the collapse of a financial system (multiple times), wars, historic elections, girl power to #MeToo to trad wife, the crime bill to racial reckoning to ICE deportations, same-sex marriage to trans healthcare bans.
In her book of essays I Want to Burn This Place Down, Maris Kreizman writes in a chapter titled “Neoliberalism and me” about going to see Bill Clinton speak in 1992 and believing so fully in the dream of neoliberalism. Believing that if she worked hard and and played by the rules, she too could be part of the American dream.
The opening is funny in the same way that reading a character in a novel write about how excited they are to take a trip on the Titanic is funny. The reader knows what’s coming. One big sad trombone doing the “whomp whomp” of history. Kreizman takes us from the hope of Clinton to the scandal to the 2000 financial collapse to the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. And then again to Clinton. Kreizman writes about how, when she decried Kavanaugh’s alleged behavior to Christine Blasey Ford, the online hordes pushed back and said, “Well, if you condemn Kavanaugh, you must also condemn Bill Clinton.”
Good. Done. “Sounds good to me,” Kreizman replies. If, upon consideration, those institutions we believed in failed us — if they were part of our oppression when we thought they were our liberation — then, fine, burn them to the ground.
Kreizman’s book is part of a cohort of books from Gen X and older millennial women rethinking ambition, the American Dream, and the promises we were raised with.
A generation of women raised on girl power who saw Hillary Clinton concuss herself on the glass ceiling, and Kamala Harris too, and all of us thinking, “Okay, now what?”
In this space are Jennifer Romolini’s Ambition Monster, The Myth of Making It by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, and Glynnis MacNicol’s I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself. Each a story of a woman pushing against the narrative of girl bosses and ambition and confronting the emptiness of the neoliberal dream.
Other books in this genre come at it slantwise. Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl is a cultural examination of the world in which millennial and Gen X women grew up, charting both the rise of the girl boss and the emptiness and the frustration of clawing to the top. Because if you get there, you haven’t changed the world much; just played by rules never made for you in the first place. So what then?
It’s a conversation my friends and I are all having. When is enough enough? How do we be happy? Where does our ambition go when the world has made it impossible to have it all? Do we keep trying? Do we try something new? A whole generation of Paris Gellers crashing out, we tried to do everything right and still didn’t get where we thought we’d go. Not through lack of hard work or talent, but because these institutions were not designed for our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
For Kreizman, the dream wasn’t complicated. Just a middle-class career in publishing, health insurance, and making books she could believe in. Then came the endless rounds of layoffs, the shitty pay, the revelation that the game is stacked in favor of those who already have money. But Kreizman doesn’t write about quitting in the same way as other cultural conversations around women and ambition.
She’s not saying, “The deck is stacked, so go be a trad wife.” None of the writers in this genre are. But there is a cultural push for that narrative. It’s present on social media and TikTok, in the insistence of princess treatment, the soft girl life, and, of course, the trad wife. Instead, Kreizman talks about agitating for change, unionizing, and demanding better wages.
Each of the essays in the book contends with an aspect of social, political and/or cultural change that Kreizman had to face and rethink, from insulin (Kreizman is diabetic) to the police (her twin brothers are cops), to kids (Kreizman and her husband, Josh Gondelman, are child-free).
I spoke with Kreizman before writing this essay, and I asked her how her ambition has changed as she aged. She told me she no longer has big ambitions for herself, but her ambition hasn’t gotten smaller; it’s gotten more encompassing. Now, she said, “I am ambitious for my community. My ambition is that I don’t want to see people die from a lack of insulin.”
It’s a reframing of ambition that is subtle and big-hearted, moving from the American dream of individual prosperity toward community survival.
Kreizman told me she was worried the book would be seen as “too angry.” The book seethes with a gentle anger, but it’s an anger built out of love, the tired kind of anger that wants everyone to be happy, to live, to experience a socialist revolution.
I asked Kreizman, a New Yorker, what she hopes her book brings to this hot political summer. And she said, “The best thing about having this book come out right this second, right now, is I look at my city, and last week, so many of us decided that the old ways weren't working. The Chuck Schumers of the world and the Democratic Party, as it stands right now, are just putting stuff out on social media and doing nothing. And that is not what most people want.”
“I see Zohran Mamdani capture so much of the imagination of people in my city,” Kreizman continued, “because he calls for change, but does it joyfully. And it's the best message to come out of that election. And what I want for this book.”
Now that’s ambition: to keep pushing for systemic change, despite all we’ve seen and witnessed, and to do with a smile — or, at least, with an endless capacity for joy.
So much has happened this week. Obviously my big news was a visit to the Umbrella Cover Museum on Peaks Island off the coast of Portland, Maine. The museum, run and curated by Nancy 3. Hoffman, is full of those little tubular pouches that sheath your umbrellas before you lose them or throw them out. Nancy has written a theme song for the museum, and her collection has surpassed 2,500 umbrella covers (although only about 630 are currently on display). The collection comprises umbrella covers from 76 countries (the hand-written sign was forcibly altered from “75” in the way Bart Simpson might change a F grade to an A grade), and Hoffman says the mission statement of the museum is to celebrate the joy of the mundane.
Ciao, ‘brella!
Unsurprisingly, the Umbrella Cover Museum is the Guinness record holder for largest collection of umbrella covers. The existence of this establishment is a true testament to what is possible when one person has a unique vision and lives in a place where real estate isn’t $75,000,000/square foot.
I was in Portland, one of my favorite cities, for a Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!recording at the Merrill Auditorium. I got a great lobster roll from Highroller and a fascinating donut (bacon and cheddar) from Holy Donut while I was in town. The show itself was a blast, as always! I was on the panel with my good pal Karen Chee as well as the Wait Wait legend Paula Poundstone. Portland native Anna Kendrick was the celebrity guest, and she was extraordinarily gracious and charming on and off stage. I also had the great privilege of watching Anna Kendrick trying to help Paula Poundstone figure out where she (Paula) knew her (Anna) from. It took roughly a half hour and several outside consultations, but the answer was Twilight. Thanks to the Wait Wait team for having me along. Can’t wait to be back in Maine in August for Guster’s festival.
ALSO! My standup special is out NOW! The YouTube premiere on Friday night was super fun. The chat was really silly and lively. I’m so glad this hour is out in the world now and that people are enjoying it. It would mean a lot to me if you (readers) would give it a shot. And if you like it, please spread the word!
Here’s a Bluesky post I made that you can share. And here are acouple of clips on Instagram if you want to spread the word that way. Word of mouth of course works even when it’s not on social media! And while we’re here: If any of you host a popular tv show or podcast or write a big time newsletter, hey…why not tell your audience to enjoy my jokes?
I even got to go on CBS Mornings which was a surprise and a thrill! Thanks to Blonde Medicine’s publicist Kathryn for making it happen! Gayle King came to my dressing room in the middle of the taping and asked me a bunch of questions about myself and my special (including “What made you think you could be a comedian?” which I laughed out loud at despite knowing what she meant). Then as she was heading back to set she said: “We’re having a great show…don’t fuck it up!” And then cheerfully: “Just be yourself!” Which I tried to do. But did I? You be the judge!
But now it’s MARIS WEEK in our household! Maris’s book (which is so good!!!) comes out THIS TUESDAY!!!! She’s doing a big launch event at the Brooklyn Heights Library with Emma Straub on Tuesday night! On Wednesday I’ll be interviewing her at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, MA!!! It’s Maris time, baby!!!! I’ll also be hanging out at her Los Angeles event at Skylight Books on 7/7! Let’s burn [these places] down!!!
SOME NEW TOUR DATES
I’ve had this on my schedule for a bit but hadn’t said much about it: I’ll be headlining a show for the Borscht Belt Comedy Festival up in the Catskills on July 26th!
Then on August 1st and 2nd I’m going to be back in Toronto headlining four shows at Comedy Bar! (Currently unclear on which venue it will be but more details and ticket info soon!
PEP TALK FOR NEW YORK CITY-PHOBES
Who will be brave enough to save NYC from the guy most voters think should be the mayor? An important question if you’re dumb as dirt!
Look, you absolute losers and cowards: I know you’re feeling bad because your preferred candidate Andrew Cuomo failed to triumph in the Democratic primary in the mayoral election. Who can say why that happened? Was it because he’s an accused sex pest who is accused of underreporting thousands of COVID deaths in nursing homes and who resigned from the state’s governorship only four years ago? Was its because people don’t actually like him that much and his poll numbers started dropping as soon as he actually began campaigning and the public was reminded of his bad personality and ideas? Was it because a charismatic and energetic candidate decided not to appeal primarily to Democratic voters who secretly just want to vote for a Republican with a (D) next to his name? Was it all of the above? Who can say?
What I can say is that you are going to be fine. I know the Post (the reliably right wing New York one, not the increasingly right wing Washington one) has threatened a “cop exodus” if Zohran wins the general election this November. Do you not realize there’s a cop exodus every day when the NYPD officers go back to Long Island where they live? Do they think that a mayor could or would arm the city’s criminals with armor-piercing bullets made of pure socialism? And also like…why would the police leave New York because someone they don’t like is elected mayor? I hate our current mayor as much as he hates unhoused people and being told he’s not allowed to accept bribes from other countries. It didn’t even occur to me to leave the city because of that. If everyone left a city every time they hated the mayor, the entire country would be a 3.8 million square mile game of musical chairs.
Are you afraid you might have to pay slightly more in taxes? Or that other people might not have to pay for the bus or that people in rent stabilized apartments may not get priced out of the city? Just real quick: Those aren’t real fears. Everyone saying that they’re terrified New York is going to become the former Soviet Union because a mayoral candidate advocating that the city open grocery stores in food deserts is essentially announcing: “I just shit my pants so hard it went up my back and I REFUSE to take a shower, and it IS someone else’s fault!”
I have a shred more understanding for people who are like: “How does this guy feel about Jews?” Not because of anything Candidate Mamdani has said, but because bigots (both avowed and unknowing…whoopsie, Senator Gillibrand) have launched wildly racist and Islamophobic smears at him over and over to the point where if you didn’t know better you might be like…hey…is there a problem here? In the same way that if you watched the news and every day someone asked whether Andrew Garfield had eaten a human baby for dinner the previous night, you might start to question what’s in that particular Garfield’s lasagna recipe.
So…is there a problem? Yes! The problem is Islamophobia and racism. Antisemitism exists! In fact to find it you only have to look as far as THE CURRENT MAYOR WHO RECENTLY HUNG OUT WITH AN ON-THE-RECORD JEW HATER AT GRACIE MANSION. And you’re worried about a guy who literally attended my friends’ Passover seder?
It’s not antisemitic to say: “I believe Israel has the right to exist as a state with equal rights.” Or to insist that you will stand up for the liberty and dignity of all of your constituents. A rigorous interest in human rights is a good quality in a mayor. And if you don’t like his opinions on Israel, you can sleep soundly knowing that he is not running for mayor of that place.
As a brief moment of total sincerity, I found Comptroller Brad Lander’s comments about Jews and Muslims showing solidarity for one another to be immensely moving. I always reserve the right to criticize a politician the moment I am annoyed with them, but this is the kind of talk more politicians would talk even when they aren’t walking the walk of getting detained by ICE.
We are on track to have a mayor who speaks up for immigrants and refugees and trans people, for Muslims and for Jews. Zohran is also the only mayoral candidate in New York City history to follow me on Instagram, but that’s much less relevant. The only people who stand to be demonstrably less safe in a Mamdani administration are a few Benjamin Franklins in the wallets of a few very rich people. I’d rather those guys get kidnapped than random Latino folks just going about their days, which is happening all over the country. And I like the idea of a mayor who tells the guys with Oakleys, face gaiters, and Punisher tattoos to knock it off. (I feel that way about ICE agents specifically, but also about any guy with that vibe.)
And it’s not like Zohran ran on guillotining every billionaire in New York. And even then, only like fifty people would have anything to worry about, but I’d get it.
(Note: Many other people including my buddy have written about the goobers who are afraid that New York City subway trains will shoot them with guns somehow, but I wanted to also. I just have to wait until Monday!)
PEP TALK FOR A TWO READERS
I paired these two requests for obvious reasons.
I'm still looking for a job after 3 months. Having to apply to positions via the internet only has been excruciating. Pep is preferred.
I'm heading into my 6th month of unemployment and I can feel myself getting overwhelmed by self-doubt!
- Well Well Well If It Isn’t the No-Job Brothers
Having a job can be satisfying, especially when you’re doing work you believe in or get to be a part of a collaborative team. But it can also be boring, demoralizing, exhausting, dangerous, humiliating etc. to work for a living wage. You don’t always know what you’re going to get. It’s a real continental breakfast fruit salad situation.
Looking for a job, however, is pretty uniformly annoying. Either you’re up for a dream gig, and your entire emotional wellbeing hinges on getting it (what? is that not how everyone feels?), or you’re applying for some whatever position that you have to pretend is your reason for living. (“Where do I see myself in five years? Ideally I will have won the lottery so I can afford to keep working for you for free because I care about this company so much!”) I guess there’s a middle ground too that’s like: “Sure! I can see myself here for a while even though I’d rather be hanging out by a pool reading a book.” But even then, person who interviewed you might slight you by hiring someone else. What the hell? You don’t even know that person, and they’re not going to use any of their salary to buy you groceries. Rude!
Job search stress has come up a few times in the two and a half years I’ve been writing this newsletter. In part it’s one of those regular occurrences that’s never a pleasure. It’s like moving into a new apartment or telling a child that Santa Claus isn’t real (and even if the second thing is fun, you can’t show it, you sicko). It’s just kind of a thing that you have to do until you’re on the other side of it.
You are not bad for feeling bad that it’s taken months to find a new job. You’re in a vortex of some of the most frustrating experiences of being alive: Not getting what you want, not making money, people rejecting you from a thing you were lukewarm on in the first place, engaging with LinkedIn. You are not deficient for failing to cultivate a #grindset and centering your life on waking up at 4am to dunk your face in a bowl of cold water and make a video of you doing 600 pushups before sunrise. It is you who is normal. Not the person who becomes a job-getting influencer on a website for human Dockers.
Sometimes people say job searching is like dating, but it’s NOT like dating, because dating can be fun even when it doesn’t result in anything long-term. No one has ever had one great interview for a job in a city they’re visiting for a weekend and felt great never talking to that interviewer again. And often the payoff for things breaking right is…fine. It’s…some job. It’s like if instead of tantric sex, Sting just rubbed a rice cake on his face for six hours and then ate it.
This whole process is annoying to participate in and discouraging to experience setbacks at. But while you’re in the midst of it, you still get to participate in the whole rest of your life. You can celebrate birthdays and bake cookies and watch the sun set and text your friends screenshots of your most embarrassing acquaintance’s Instagram stories. You can pet a dog and catch a frisbee and fill in the gaps with the Coen Brothers movies you haven’t seen yet. A job search is a bummer. A prolonged job search is an enduring bummer. But it’s not your whole thing. You are not Rick Ross. You do not have to hustle every day. Some days you can send three emails and then learn to paint from a YouTube video. After all, nobody’s paying you not to.
PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Laura Stevenson - “#1”
Laura Stevenson’s new record Late Great came out on Friday, and it’s just so damn good. The subject matter is heavy, but the beauty of the lyrics and the melodies is what really overwhelms you. Longtime That’s Marvelous readers know that ***lawn sign voice*** in this newsletter we believe Laura Stevenson is one of the best songwriters and songperformers on earth. I probably listened to this song five times just on my way home from Portland. It’s expansive and stirring without quite being baroque (although there are STRINGS). I ordered a vinyl copy of the album (which I try to do as support for artists I really like even when I am “between turntables” as I am now), and I also ordered the Laura Stevenson chip clip, because that’s extremely funny merch to sell and honestly I could use a chip clip.
Go see Laura on tour this fall. I got tickets for her New York show even though it is technically during Rosh Hashanah. I don’t know why I said technically, it’s just during Rosh Hashanah, so I should be home…reflecting? But I don’t know! I think hearing this record live will start the new year off right for me.
UPCOMING SHOWS
I’m out and about in NYC a whole bunch coming up, plus a few shows on the road!
7/2: In Conversation w/ Maris Kreizman at the Harvard Bookstore (Cambridge, MA)
7/12: Bushwick Comedy Club
7/14: Regular Thing at Crystal Lake (Brooklyn)
7/17: Emmy’s East Village (NYC)
7/21: Hosting Frankenstein’s Baby at Union Hall (Brooklyn)
I am in Wisconsin this weekend for a little summer break. I call Wisconsin the Spain of the Midwest because we all go here for cheap booze, cheap vacations, and access to the water. Spain and Wisconsin also both have a lot of Catholics, cheese, and ham, and both places like to dabble in fascism.
Normally, I have some thoughts or a little essay before the links, but right now I have no thoughts.
I will, however, remind you that I am running a hot socialist summer sale! And if you’ve been meaning to subscribe for these elite links harvested from the internet and brought to you by me and my assistant editor, Isabella, then today is your day.
It’s officially a hot socialist summer. And to celebrate, I am going to be running a sale! Twenty percent off yearlong subscriptions to the newsletter. See, socialism can help the economy!
I normally only do sales in October, on the anniversary of the newsletter. But it’s hot as hell and we are all out here in the struggle. If you want to support a fiercely independent feminist voice — one that makes men so mad they email me to say things like “Be nicer to Matt Yglesias!”1 — well, you know what to do.
It is the year 2025, and New York City has fallen into the hands of a mob of socialists who have a terrifying and disgusting agenda.
Led by Zohran Mamdani, a bearded man with roguish charm, and my god, that dimple— but no, stay focused on the horrors. They want you to see the dimple and nothing else. That is how the socialists win. We must stay vigilant.
Because, you see, led by Mamdani, the evil socialists want to do unspeakable horrors, like raise the minimum wage, make rent affordable, provide childcare and help new parents. Mamdani plans to round up all the gays… and give them a little kiss on the forehead.
It makes me sick to my stomach.
What’s next? Free public transit?!
You know what could happen when you make buses free? Poor people might have an easier time getting to their jobs, and then, GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR?!
Wake up, sheeple!
Can’t you see how bad this is? It’s so bad the hedge fund boys be crying. See, the rich boys, they cry. You are laughing, and the rich boys cry! Is this all just a game to you? Have you stopped once to think, what if this is the final straw and they all leave en masse and then NYC suddenly becomes a lot more affordable, and that one insufferable bar stops serving $45 tater tot poutine with a side of artisanal ketchup as an ironic send-up of American culture and $30 old-fashioneds because the cruelty-free cherries were grown with a land acknowledgement? WHAT THEN?
Have you taken even one moment to ask yourself, what happens if all those guys leave, and then, when you open Tinder in Murray Hill, no one is there to explain stock options to you? No. Of course not, because you weren’t thinking about anything except the dimple and a future for America not entirely ruled by corruption and greed. You stupid, stupid socialist sluts.
Like if we let a Democrat run on the actual platform of the Democratic party, what do we do with all the politicians with the moral compass of RFK’s brainworm who are out here saying, “Wait, maybe Charlie Kirk has a point and women are bad?” or “What if we don’t do rights for everyone?” Are we going to toss them into the dustbin of history? WHAT ABOUT MALE LONELINESS?!
Yes, nothing says “We are the good guys!” like backing the guy who allegedly gave kickbacks to Turkish officials because you’re so afraid a guy with a beard might hold you accountable for your greed and encourage you to support your neighbors.
I mean, a 33-year-old man talking about kindness, loving your neighbor, helping the poor!? We must get him out of here. Call Pontius Pilate! He’ll know what to do.
For now, Mamdani is the presumptive Democratic mayoral nominee. And as the NYC mayoral campaigns kick into gear, it’s going to be a long, hot, socialist summer.
A horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad summer when people will be encouraged to think about revolting things like how to make the world a better place. I can’t stand it!
Because you definitely know you are on the right side of history when you back the guy who was charged with corruption, but those charges were dismissed because another guy who was charged with corruption is the president and wants you to stay mayor so he can violate the Constitution and deport immigrants with no due process.
Last weekend, I went to visit my dearest friends in Minneapolis and say goodbye to my friend Anna, who is moving. You don’t know this, but frequently Anna and Kate punch up my jokes in the weekly dingus. (I pay them back by buying dinner when I see them.) And if you read This American Ex-Wife, Anna is the wise friend whose insights punctuate the book. She’s also a brilliant academic whose research and insight often deepens my own work.
I feel so lucky to have had friends for 24 years. I hope to have them for so many, many more years.
So, to toast friendship. I think we should all make Amaro spritzes. I made this drink last week and it was delicious.
Yes, this is a real email I received this week. The logic was that he went to Harvard and he’s just trying to help and I, a stupid woman who needs correction, should be nicer. And my only response is LMAO now I’m gonna get meaner.
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