My favorite fair food is the spicy pickle dog from the Pickle Dawg truck. It’s a dill pickle covered in spicy cream cheese, wrapped in pastrami, covered in batter, and deep-fried.

The first bite is crisp, warm, and crunchy with a little bit of peppery heat. I look forward to it every year.

When we talk about the foods of American fairs, we talk about excess and quantity. It’s novelty, nostalgia, and class, all deep-fried and put on a stick for our collective consumption.

So many of the foods are designed to make us laugh, to invert expectations, like deep-fried butter, fried beer, and fried jelly beans. They also seem to mock us by deep-frying cultural stereotypes. In 2022, a vendor at the Iowa state fair was selling the Iowa Twinkie, which was a jalapeno filled with pulled pork, corn, and cream cheese, wrapped in bacon, smoked with sweet and sticky BBQ, then finished with ranch

And while these foods can seem indulgent and exciting, they may also elicit disgust and disdain. I think that is on purpose. Fair foods bait you to try them with novelty, mocking you if you hate them. The foods almost invite you to moralize about nutritional value, fats and carbs and caloric consumption and in response, these foods laugh at you with their fried profligacy. They are not real foods in the sense that you would eat them every day. They are surreal foods — excessive, bizarre, and delightful, existing only in one world: the world of the fair.

Fair foods find their origins in the celebration of abundance that drove attendance to fairs around the turn of the 20th century. In her article “Eat Me at the Fair,” historian Francine Kirsch describes how food installations at fairs were in part an advertisement for a state to attract people to move there. Look at us, Iowa could declare with an attention-getting palace of corn. We are a land of growth. A land where you can harvest enough corn to build a kingdom.

Historically, it has been through food exhibitions that new foods have captured the American imagination. Fairs are sites of cultural exchange and cultural flattening, a place where, through humor, we negotiate who and what we are through what we eat.

Kirsch writes, “If the food exhibits at later fairs were particularly lavish, their genesis can be seen in drawings made at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial.” Here in the Agricultural Building, Mary Todd Lincoln’s favorite confectioner Henry Maillard displayed a 15-foot-tall sugar spire covered with edible historical figures. At one booth, a mammoth grape vine from California grew toward the ceiling. The New Hampshire booth displayed stuffed hogs that when they were alive had weighed 1,307 and 1,253 pounds. And this was the same fair that launched the butter sculpture trend when Caroline Shawk Brooks delicately carved Iolanthe.

Taken together, these food exhibits “reflected America’s exuberance at its coming of age best,” Kirsch writes. “And that desire to have and be the biggest would truly take hold in more ways than food in the century to come.”

But were they only about size, scale, and excess, I don’t think state fair foods would have nearly the grip they do on our culture. They are also about humor and desire.

Mikhail Bakhtin, in his writings on the carnival, described it as a space outside the everyday, one that is both temporary and freeing for lower classes often oppressed by the usual social order. Here, laughter is a key element, and is built on the subversions of expectations. Whereas in the outside world, we are expected and cautioned to eat more salads, in the world of the fair, that salad is on a stick. Cows are made of their own butter. It’s silly. It’s fun. It’s dark. It’s complicated. Who cares? It’s the fair. And how often is food allowed to be fun? How often are we just allowed to eat and enjoy it and eat some more?

In the oppressive superego of keto, Weight Watchers, protein goals, carb-free, and Noom, state-fair food is our culinary id — a grotesquely joyous display of all that is forbidden and still desired. Waffles and Snickers, battered and fried and put on a stick. Bacon dipped in chocolate. It’s fried and sugary and, unless it’s corn or coleslaw, there is rarely a vegetable to be found.

While fair foods reinforce American identity, they also reveal that our identity is changing.

Because beyond the smorgasbord of deep-fried consumption, fair foods are also the space in which our cultural identity is mediated, processed, put on a stick, and sold back to us.

In Trump’s America 2.0, where DEI is under attack and masked ICE agents are rounding up immigrants, food is both a negotiation of identity and exploitative capitalism.

And, like the food, these conversations can feel a little gross. Last year, at the fair, I went to find a hyped-up Korean BBQ vendor, only to find it was run by a very white couple. I made assumptions. They profited. And I wondered at the people who would take a culture’s food, sell it, and then vote for a president who vowed to deport the same immigrants who brought that food to America in the first place.

Are people more likely to try new foods at a fair? Will it make them more open to other cultures and foods? It’s hard to know. But despite the moralizing, it won’t go away. Egg rolls with bacon and ranch are here to stay. Fiesta wontons. Korean corn dogs.

I can’t tell you if this is good or if it’s bad, only that this is America.

In this world already turned on its head, it’s easy to introduce new foods and change the narrative about who and what America is. The safe space of the familiar fair, combined with the gleeful embrace of novelty foods, creates an environment rich for experimentation.

Every year, new foods are introduced to the fair. This year, at the Iowa State fair, amid all the usual fried concoctions, there are also bacon chicken ranch egg rolls, potato half & half Korean corn dog, and a Saigon lobster dog. The Minnesota State Fair offers a variety of foods that fuse cultures and traditions, like a steamed bun with lutefisk and hoisin sauce, hot honey cheese sticks, and a dill pickle cheese curd taco.¹ Other state fairs, too, are embracing and selling more diverse ranges of food, offering a safe environment for people to try new things and experience new flavors.

Fair food is America inverted, a mirror image reflected back to itself in its greasy plenty, mass-produced and served up hot.

This essay is an edited and updated version of a newsletter that I wrote in 2023.

Deep-fried food takes:

"Toward a Theory of American Festival Cuisine” (Eater)

“Fried, Fatty, and Fanciful: State Fair Foods” (Modern Farmer)

“Eating While Politicking Is Harder Than It’s Ever Been. Here’s Why.” (Politico)

This week, one of the world’s greatest television shows ended.

And Just Like That was over-the-top, bizarre, goofy, and wonderful. And people would not stop criticizing it.

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Kim Davis, that Duggar family reject with hair so dry it has its own red flag warning, is back.

If you don’t remember Davis, lucky you and I’m sorry. Davis was the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk elected in 2014. In 2015, after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. She was sued and ordered to issue the licenses. She continued to refuse and spent five days in jail for contempt of court; a judge and jury later ordered her to pay a total of $360,000 in fees and damages.

Davis lost her 2018 reelection bid and has clearly spent the past decade or so doing what Jesus would do — stewing in the juices of her own hate-filled heart. Now she’s bursting back into the American political consciousness like a poorly dressed Kool-Aid man.

Davis recently petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell (and also, separately, to overturn an appeals court ruling earlier this year that she really does have to pay that money). While it’s unlikely that the Supreme Court will rehear the case, the fact that this homophobic bridge troll who cosplays as a Christian freedom fighter is rearing her brittle head of hair again is truly a recession indicator. Don’t we deserve a new set of villains — not just the run-through ghouls of the past?

Not to mention gay people and their allies deserve a better enemy than a woman still sporting a Bumpit and a missionary’s reject-pile jean jumpers.

Kim Davis claims she was fighting for her religious freedom, but if that was the case, she should have just resigned from the job. If your job is to dig holes, and then you convert to an anti-hole religion, you don’t get to insist on being paid for not digging holes and then compare yourself to Jesus Christ himself.

Sorry, Kim, you aren’t a freedom fighter. You are using your religion as a tool of oppression rather than a tool of liberation.

As Larry Wilmore pointed out nine years ago, “Going to jail for what you believe in does not necessarily put you on par with Martin Luther King. Jeffrey Dahmer was in jail because he believes in eating people. That doesn’t make him a freedom fighter!”

I am not the first to point out all this sanctity of marriage business is a bit ironic coming from a woman who has been married four times to three different men. I’m not against divorce! I am very pro-divorce. But if you have such a literal interpretation of the Bible, Kim, your divorces count as multiple sins. I mean, per Evangelical math, three divorces? That’s like a butt sex and a little manslaughter.

Also, as Andrew L. Seidel writes in his book American Crusade, Davis also got her job in the first place from a healthy dose of nepotism.

So to recap, the woman who got a nepo baby government job and has had more spouses than Father Abraham is still out here acting like some paragon of holiness. And in the entire decade, she hasn’t bought one bottle of conditioner. I’m honestly not sure which is more offensive.

Anyway, my religion says that I can discriminate against raggedy bitches named Kim Davis, and if you say I cannot, then you are oppressing me and I will take it all the way to the court of Christ himself.

Runner-up: Owen Shroyer

The Vikings have two male cheerleaders. And that’s great.

blaize_shiek

A post shared by @blaize_shiek

But what’s really amazing is how mad it’s making some Vikings fans.

Listen, male cheerleaders have been around for a long time. My little brother was one and the guy is in the Army. He is not what anyone would call “woke.” And he hates when I write about him, so I will stop because he’s better with weapons than anyone else in the family. Except, for me, weirdly, which is a long story that goes back to growing up in Texas and winning a lifetime membership to the NRA at the age of 10 because I won a shooting competition. ANYWAY.

George W. Bush was also a cheerleader! And last season, according to Outsports, seven NFL teams had a total of 18 different male cheerleaders — some gay, some bi, some straight. Additionally, the Panthers had a trans cheerleader.

None of these things has stopped Owen Shroyer, a radio guy who I refuse to learn any more about, from being so mad that he’s spitting. And honestly, I love it. Are you made that your game with the men in tight tights where they pass balls back and forth and between each other's legs might be a little gay? Are you worried that a male cheerleader is going to ruin your view of the scrum of heaving, sweaty bodies of men?

You — a man who cheers for men in sports — are mad that other men are cheering for men in sports, but they have better hair and pom-poms? Are you just furious they have such nice skin? What’s going on?

Actually, I don’t really care. Don’t tell me. Just hire the gayest, cuntiest boys, and put them on the squad. And then let me bask in the impotent outrage of these men. Inject it straight into my veins.

And now for something good

Taylor Swift announced a new album. And she did it on the Kelce brothers’ podcast, which I think is a sign that the patriarchy comes for us all. A new album means that the Swifties now have a new little project and I love that for them. I think Swifties could find and release the Epstein files if they thought Taylor left an Easter egg in there.

Gen Z is making my eye bags trendy.

A special gift just for readers of this newsletter

Last week, I wrote about my newfound love of Trail Mixers, a powdered form of low-dose CBD and THC that my dear friend Megan and her husband created through their company Yonderbound. It combines three of my favorite things — supporting friends, Iowa businesses, and a little THC. And apparently you all loved the idea of them so much that last Friday, Trail Mixers had their biggest sale day ever.

As a “thank you” to the MYAM readers, Trail Mixers is giving us a little deal. Use the code DINGUS10, and it's good for 10% off their entire order. Right now, it'll combine with the free shipping code GETRADICAL for a limited time, so double whammy. Megan says she doesn’t know when the free shipping will end, so order now.

Get Trail Mixers

Something I am enjoying

Summer is always rough as a single mom with no summer childcare. This summer has been even more overwhelming as I have been managing the Iowa Abortion Access fund, hiring a new executive director, starting work on a new book project, and doing some very exciting behind-the-scenes stuff with this newsletter that I think you will all be very pleased to hear about.

This week, my kids asked to make some tea and sit on the couch and talk. This was a tradition that started in 2020 as a way for us to wind down together. We don’t do it every night, but whenever we need some deep heart-to-hearts, the signal is, “I’m going to make some tea, do you want some?”

So, they made tea and we sat on the couch. My daughter asked her brother if he was worried about starting sixth grade and she listened to him and gave him advice on the teachers he will have. And they laughed and talked some serious shit about their school, commiserating together, and there was only a light amount of physical violence.

And despite everything, I just felt so lucky – like I was the richest woman in the world to have these two people and my two dogs, my work, our community, and our little house.

I could use a nap, though.

If you forward this email and look forward to it every week, consider becoming a paying subscriber. I cannot write this newsletter without support from readers. And independent voices don’t survive without your help.

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For over a year, the Planned Parenthood clinic in my city has been closed. At first, it was closed for renovations, the doors and windows covered with wood panels. Now, it’s closed permanently. A casualty of Iowa’s extreme abortion ban, cuts to Medicaid, Title IX funding, the attacks on Planned Parenthood, and, of course, Planned Parenthood’s own dysfunction.

Iowans are getting abortions, but they are going out of state or self-managing them at home. And anecdotally, I hear a growing number of young women are choosing to sterilize, using Reddit to find sympathetic doctors and clinics.

Iowa has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation.

And yet, once a week, as I drive by the clinic on my way to kid pick-ups or the grocery store, I see a group of older white men and women standing in front of the clinic, praying and holding signs demanding an end to abortion. Their stoic Midwestern faces are grim as if they alone are waging a holy war — and the whole world is against them.

On Monday, Donald Trump announced he was calling in the National Guard to patrol the streets of Washington, DC. The claim from the White House was that the country’s capital city is mired in crime and “total lawlessness.” In reality, despite some high-profile incidents, crime in DC is on the decline. Trump’s act of martial law and abuse of power, reporting suggests, was sparked by the attempted carjacking of a former DOGE staffer, Edward Coristine, best known for going by the nickname “Big Balls” online. Coristine is also the nepo baby son of the snack brand Lesser Evil. Everyone has to suffer; the rights of the poor to exist are curtailed, all because a rich man felt victimized once.

In the middle of the press conference about the made-up problem Trump claims to be solving, he went on a rant about people being transgender. At first he was talking about tax cuts; then he nonsensically went on, “That's why they want men playing in women's sports, that's why they want transgender for everybody. Everybody, transgender. And they just got walloped in an election, in a landslide and they haven't changed one thing. I saw the other day, a certain gentleman who is a very well-known politician, Democrat, was fighting like hell that men should be allowed to play in women's sports. They just don't get it.”

Of course, none of this makes any sense. It was just another moment of free association from an addled brain. But it’s also another moment when a person in power claimed to be the victim of a made-up problem. There are maybe 10 trans athletes in women’s sports in the NCAA. And trans people are more likely to face discrimination and violence than any white man walking to his car in Washington, DC.

It’s an invented narrative to keep the winners claiming grievance, while others lose their rights.

In the pages of the Washington Post, Shadi Hamid wrote once again that men are lonely. He blamed politics and #MeToo. He claimed there is “data” to back this up, but the reality is that men are not lonelier than women. There is no male loneliness crisis. And while we’re at it, the educational crisis among boys is severely overblown.

And while highly male opinion columnists like Hamid, David Brooks and Ross Douthat — and even prominent Democrats like Gavin Newsom — claim men are in crisis, the maternal mortality rate is soaring; Black women are being forced out of the workforce; and women and LGBTQ people are losing their rights to healthcare. Young girls are experiencing a huge mental health crisis.

But so much more ink is spilled over how sad men think they are. It’s a make-believe problem that ignores life-and-death crises for women in favor of the perceived victimhood of men.

These are the fantasy problems of a fictional world. One where the billionaire's fears of being taxed are more terrifying than people going hungry. Where affordable housing is more terrifying than a sexual predator in office. Where 10 trans people competing in women’s sports is scarier than thousands of women dying in childbirth. And one where not getting a date or never marrying is far, far worse somehow than dying septic in a hospital parking lot.

An entire cultural and political movement has been predicated on a mythical narrative of victimhood, loneliness, and disenfranchisement. And we are buying into it even as it kills us.

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• Spencer Ackerman wrote about the cultural hysteria around Mamdani’s candidacy.

• And, in case you missed it, this weekend, I wrote about yet another piece of pro-marriage drivel from Brad Wilcox.

• And in this newsletter, a few years ago, I wrote about why we seem to be trapped in the same discourse cycles.

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.

You know it’s bad when the people who are actually experts in the field are screaming, crying and throwing up. Which is my translation of this NPR headline, “Public health experts dismayed by RFK Jr.'s defunding of mRNA vaccine research.”

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:

Headline: Federal records contradict what FEMA leader told Congress about Texas flood response

Translation: FEMA is more dysfunctional than your uncle’s third marriage and everyone in charge is gaslighting you and we have the receipts!

Headline: Trump's broad tariffs go into effect, just as economic pain is surfacing

Translation: The economy is sinking faster than your son Aiden's chances of making the major leagues. Hope you like being poor, you dumb sluts.

Headline: Trump cuts threaten access to birth control for millions of women

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.

I’ll never forgive that brain worm for not finishing the job.

And now for something good

The Las Vegas strip is being unionized.

You can’t have health care but you can have golden sriracha Doritos.

I love that Texas lawmakers literally fled the state rather than be part of the GOP’s extremely corrupt redistricting scheme.

*puts finger to ear* Sir, I’m hearing that Fox News actually told the truth.

Elizabeth Warren continues to be right.

And funny.

What I am enjoying

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.”

This gendered issue is getting more expensive and impacting younger people. The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reported in 2022 that nearly 75% of facial plastic surgeons had seen an increase in the number of patients under 30 requesting cosmetic surgery or injectables. The American Med Spa Association made a similar observation in 2024, adding that Gen Z and millennials are the generations most interested in injectables. And comparatively, “...adults 55+ are the least interested in non-surgical cosmetic treatments.”

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.

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.

Other links

• Tressie McMillan Cottom on the modern temperance movement.

• answers the question about “giving up” vs. accepting your face.

• writes that the Disney story about love and marriage that the internet is selling is a hell that women fought for generations to escape.

• And reminds us that beauty standards won’t save us.

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.

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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!”

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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.

Tariffs:

Tariffs were named as a dingus in April, but wow, have they continued to dominate the headlines (derogatory).

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.

Sydney Sweeney:

Every generation has a blond actress that no one can be normal about. That said, I’d rather walk across a wasteland strewn with LEGO pieces or step in dog shit at 2 AM on my way to the bathroom than write about Sydney Sweeney’s ad or explain it. To quote Sam Sanders, “Everything I have learned about Sydney Sweeney, I learned against my will.”

And now for something good

• I just love it when I get to see dingus on dingus violence. In this case, it’s Trump vs. Hawley. And also, it’s Joe Rogan vs. Trump. It’s like that old Irish proverb: Live by the conspiratorial brain worms, die by the conspiratorial brain worms.

• RSS is back, you beautiful nerds!

• WHAT CAN’T WOMEN HOLD?

• Some Celsius cans were accidentally mislabeled as High Noon. And as someone who has had Celsius, I have to say, I probably wouldn’t notice if it made me a little drunk. Also, a little free booze? In this economy? THANK YOU.

• And the AP won its lawsuit against the White House.

• 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.

And while there, I got to tell the incredible story about the time I went to Galena with a former politician (who shall remain nameless) and we heard a ghost say BACON.

Also, Open Mike Eagle has a new album out. And in this house we love Open Mike Eagle!

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.

If you open this newsletter all the time, if you forward it to your friends and family, and if it challenges you to think in different ways, consider becoming a subscriber. I can’t make this newsletter without your support.

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“Soft girl era”

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 podcast has some thoughts on the recent Republican conference for women.

• Why do people accuse powerful women of secretly being men? (via The 19th)

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.

The stories are there. They exist. The victims are speaking out.

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.

Read more

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 week, Jubilee made headlines with a viral video featuring British journalist Mehdi Hasan debating a guy who identified himself as Connor, who stated he hates being called a Nazi, because he’d rather be called a fascist and professed a fondness for Francisco Franco. Connor has since been fired from his job, but he’s been raising money on a Christian fundraising platform where people are leaving comments like “It's ok to be white” and “We need a white nation! It’s our only future! Vive le Fascisme!” You know, things that Jesus Christ would say.

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.

Dingus runner-up: Corn sweat

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.

The dingus runner-up is a rerun of last year’s “Corn Sweat” dingus newsletter.

And now for something good

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.

Hey, everyone is being really mean to the commander in chief and hurting his widdle feelings over a list of alleged sexual abusers.

And now the president is suing the Wall Street Journal for putting it in the newspaper that he’s in the Epstein files. You just love to see the worst people fight it out.

God bless the Scots.

This week, Planned Parenthood won a partial victory fighting funding cuts in the courts.

And the French prime minister is suing Candace Owens.

Something I am enjoying

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.

I laughed harder at the Trump rally than I wanted to.

It was 90 degrees with no shade, on pavement. People were red-faced, red-hatted, and scrabbling over chairs. But still, it was kind of funny.

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 The Late 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 Harris was “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.

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:

His critics along with experts in rhetoric and nationalist and populist movements and leaders say it helps him turn his opponents into not just enemies but jokes. They say it helps him recast his own liabilities as laughing matters and desensitizes his supporters to his most outrageous comments and proposals — the undermining of institutions, the abandonment of allies, mass deportations and all but outright invitations for Russian invasions and so on. They say the mirth masks the menace.

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.

Writing this week in the Atlantic, a very funny woman, Alexandra Petri, observed of Trumpian humor:

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.

Further reading:

• The 19th interviewed LGBTQ comedians about being funny in this American moment.

• Fintan O’Toole’s essay for the NYRB is worth reading in full.

• And Michael Krause’s essay on how Trump uses humor was very thorough.

• Also, every week, I try to make jokes about this current moment in my dingus of the week newsletter. A lot of people like it. You should read it.

• Finally, my dear friend has a new comedy special out. If you need something good to laugh at, you should watch it.

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.

Read more

Welcome to the weekly dingus, the newsletter where I make fun of someone or something in the news that has made our lives worse. This week, I am writing about the Epstein Files. But in the past, I’ve written about Kristi Noem, Gavin Newsom, Pam Bondi, and the president’s team of men who gathered to incentivize women to baby, to name a few.

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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.

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?

The backlash among his own supporters is clearly bothering the president, who has posted multiple times on Truth Social demanding that his boys, and in some cases gals, get it together. He’s claiming now that this is all a SCAM created by the “Lunatic Left.”

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?

Anyway, you know you lost them when the lady who believes in literal Jewish weather-controling space lasers doesn’t believe you.

And now for something good

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.

$6.2 million in grant money has been returned to LGBTQ organizations after Trump signed an executive order taking that money back.

Fireflies are so back.

61% of Americans oppose Trump's “big, beautiful bill.” Americans haven’t been this united on an issue since we all decided to collectively hate Nickelback.

New Patty Griffin album is released this week.

Something I am enjoying

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.”

This year, Iowa was the first state in the nation to revoke civil rights protections for trans people.

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.

—

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.

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.

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.

p.e. moskowitz @_pem_pem

“be afraid, and do it anyway” 🧡🧡🧡

3:26 PM ∙ Mar 8, 2023

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4,102Likes817Retweets

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.

—

Support trans people in Iowa

This essay was originally published in March of 2023.

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!

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Read more

Welcome to the weekly dingus, the newsletter where I make fun of someone or something in the news that has made our lives worse. This week, I am writing about Elon Musk’s “America Party.” But in the past, I’ve written about Kristi Noem, Gavin Newsom, Pam Bondi, and the president’s team of men who gathered to incentivize women to baby, to name a few.

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.”

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And now, your weekly dingus.

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.

So far, Musk’s political party has no platform or any ideology, and it’s already illegal in New York, which prohibits political parties from using the word “America” in their name.

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.

That man has the essence of curdled milk.

Breaking dingus news

Texas State Sen. Angela Paxton filed for divorce from her husband, Texas Attorney General and 2023 Dingus of the Year winner Ken Paxton, on “biblical grounds.” Which, per the book of Matthew, includes some zesty “sexual immorality.” And listen, I love a little lite sexual immorality and would never judge. But I’ll make an exception when it comes to this guy, who is so virulent even Karl Rove has washed his hands of him.

Tank his US Senate race, Angela, girl.

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.

And now for something good

Happy birthday to the people’s princess, Moo Deng.

Our government is taking away health care, but Michael Jordan is giving it away for free.

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson is vowing to keep funding Planned Parenthood despite federal cuts.

T-REX WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP RACES!

New fair food just dropped. And RFK Jr. can take those flaming hot Cheetos fries out of my cold, dead hands.

vinn_ayy

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What I am enjoying

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.

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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.

In a 2016 essay on Trump rallies, Stassa Edwards observed in Jezebel that a certain amount of overwrought white male journalism about the events was designed to evoke moral outrage. Edwards wrote,

[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.

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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.

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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.

To win Murkowski over, Republicans changed the bill to give Alaska a carveout for SNAP restrictions and some funding for rural hospitals. If Murkowski had held out any longer, our nation’s new capital would be Anchorage and the American flag would depict a salmon riding a moose.

In an interview with NBC political correspondent Ryan Nobles, Murkowski stared in stunned silence after he told her that Sen. Rand Paul had described her vote as a “bailout for Alaska at the expense of the rest of the country.”

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.

“Oh, my body count? 12 million.” *blushes*

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.

As I wrote back in May:

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.

What if I cut off my feet to save money on shoes?

And now for something good:

Wisconsin, known around here as the Spain of the Midwest, also won my heart this week by striking down a 176-year-old abortion ban.

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.

A group called Unbreaking is meticulously cataloging the damage being done to America. While the need is not a good thing, this is hard and necessary work and I am so happy someone is doing it.

I never thought a man talking for eight hours would be a good thing, but it’s 2025.

Democrats aren’t the only ones who hate all of this.

Gay penguins Flounder and Scampi welcome a baby chick.

Something I am enjoying

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.