Since October, MYAM has been hosted on Patreon.com. I made that move for a lot of reasons, which I wrote about here. And since then, lots of other creators have moved off Substack as well.
Many of you didn’t notice the move (and that’s fine!). You should still be receiving your emails as usual. (If not, let me know!)
But I wanted to send you a little email to let you know about all the fun we’ve been having. Maybe to make you a little jealous. Maybe to make you have a little FOMO.
🤖 I interviewed a woman who is dating Luigi Mangione’s AI. And that interview is revelatory about the way that AI blurs the line between fiction, reality, and what we want to believe about ourselves and others. People keep telling me it’s the most weirdly interesting thing they’ve read.
If you haven’t yet made the move, it’s very easy, I promise. All you have to do is search your email for an email that begins “Claim your free months…” Find that. Click on the link in the email, and let’s go.
That offer of free months ends on Nov 4. SO CLICK NOW!
You can also just click on this link. (But I recommend finding the email so you can get some free months at a paid level.)
And listen, I hear you…
But Lyz! One more platform? I simply cannot! I get it. I, too, have platform fatigue, and one of the reasons I wanted to move from Substack was because, as a platform, it’s moving to be more of another Twitter than a functional newsletter space. Five minutes to transfer and you can be on the peace of Patreon. And the newsletter will be reliably in your inbox, and you won’t have to worry about the app.
I can’t afford another subscription! Once again, I get it. Which is why the MAJORITY of my content has always been free and easy to access. You just have to sign up to make sure you never miss anything. The Wednesday essay, the Dingus of the Week newsletter, and the podcast are all free. And will always be free.
But over on Patreon, I have some new features for paying subscribers. There will be 1-2 deep dives a month that are for the paid tiers, the Sunday links, and more.
➡️ You can read all about why I made the move and the new features here.
✉️ If you haven’t yet made the move over, check your email for an email titled “Claim Your Free Months to Men Yell at Me on Patreon.” If you have any trouble with the move, please fill out this form.
This is a preview of the Dingus of the Week. To read the whole thing, go over to Patreon. I’m serious, git out of her!
This week, Politico published a story revealing chats from leaders of Young Republican groups in which they joked about slavery and professed their love for Adolf Hitler. (It’s important to use his first name so we don’t get him confused with the other Hitler.)
And that’s just the PG stuff. Members of the chat talked about raping their opponents. According to Politico’s report, one particular Young Republicans vice chair used the N-word a lot. And as Politico reported, another member of the chat, “who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
That member “was referring to an upcoming vote on whether he should become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old.”
So, breaking news: A bunch of amoebic sacs of vanilla pudding sent the exact kind of texts you’d expect them to send: racist ones.
Oh my god — a collection of sentient phlegm behaved in a disgusting manner? What in the pleated-front khaki is going on here!?
🚚 Yesterday, I announced that MYAM is moving to Patreon! For more on why I am moving, you can read all about it over on Patreon. Please check your email for an email titled, “Claim your free months to Men Yell at Me on Patreon” for a link to help you switch over your subscription. Already 1/3 of you have moved with me, thank you!
Last year, I was interviewed by Maria Shriver on “The Today Show.” She had read my book This American Ex-Wife, after reading about it in The Atlantic, and her team reached out to get me booked for the show. The date was in the middle of my kids’ spring break, and when I asked if there was a different date they could book me, the producer paused before saying, “This is the day Maria is available, you should make yourself available. And bring your kids.” And so I did.
My favorite moment was after the cameras turned off, when Maria pulled me behind the set while the Indigo Girls played. She had something she wanted to ask me.
I love reading the news because the headlines will say, “The administration violates every single article in the Constitution! And no one will stop it.”
Then immediately below that:
“Here are five fluffy bathrobes you must buy from Amazon today!”
“Thousands of children are dying in a genocide!”
“How exhaling at the wrong time saps your strength”
This week marks my fifth anniversary of writing this newsletter.
By now, maybe you know the story. I was a broke single mom, working for my local paper, making below the poverty line. In 2020, the editor-in-chief fired me after GOP leaders in the state complained about my writing and I opposed the publication of a really bad op-ed.
For the first three years after the divorce, I was constantly bending and accommodating to my ex-husband and his schedule. I justified it as being an adult. I justified it as being a bigger person. I justified it because there were kids and I wanted to keep things nice, and after all, wasn’t this situation my fault?
And then one year, around the holidays, I made a mistake in my schedule and needed some accommodation. Could he please swap weekends? After all, for years hadn’t I done that for him, for his mother, for his family? That one weekend he wanted to take the kids to the family farm because the apples were ripe, and hadn’t I been so helpful in making that happen? And the wedding? Could I just have this one weekend?
I love to live in America, a country where every day you wake up feeling like Pete Hegseth personally knocked you in the face with a skateboard, and you get to play my favorite little game, “Am I Dying?”
🏠 I recently conducted a survey about this newsletter, and so many of you told me you wanted more essays on single parenting and homemaking. You asked about how I am muddling through all of this *waves at the world* with kids. And about how I co-parent with someone who, let’s just say, when Roe was overturned, served cupcakes to celebrate all the babie…
On Sunday, I write an essay and then offer up a buffet of internet reads curated by me and my assistant editor, Isabella.
These are paywalled because, well, this newsletter is a full-time job. And your money creates jobs for me and Isabella jobs in a state where there aren’t many jobs in the media. It also helps us be independent in a time when independent voices are being silenced.
Today, I am not paywalling the essay. Please read, and subscribe if you can.
The Bread Garden is a Whole Foods-like market located on the pedestrian mall. The Bread Garden is a central hub for the small college town. At any moment of any day, the patio is occupied by students doing homework or professors eating sandwiches and flipping through pages of books. Across the mall is a playground, newly redone with rubber padding and colorful climbing equipment.
Gonzalez is an immigrant whose son is an American citizen. He came to Iowa earlier this year to join his partner, to start a family, and to begin a new life. He reported regularly to ICE and was being monitored with an ankle bracelet. If they wanted to detain him, they knew where he lived. They knew how to find him and bring him in without violence or intimidation.
Instead, plainclothes officers, who did not identify themselves, went into the crowded market right at the beginning of the lunch rush, attacked Gonzalez, threw him to the ground, and arrested him.
My son saw the video and said, “Isn’t that illegal?” Yes, I said, but no one can enforce the laws when it’s the police breaking them. That night, during their nightly phone call, I overheard my kids’ dad tell my son that Gonzalez must be a bad guy, must have done something bad.
I didn’t shout, “Whatever helps you sleep at night, asshole.” But I wanted to. Maybe I will next time. There seem to be no rules to the cruelty; maybe there should be no more rules to my civility.
Iowa City is sometimes, jokingly or not so jokingly, referred to as the People’s Republic of Johnson County. It’s one of the only safe Democratic strongholds in a state that still wants to believe it’s purple, but is in fact, deeply, deeply red. I have friends who talk about how they want to move somewhere better, somewhere bluer, somewhere safer.
Gonzalez isn’t the first person arrested without cause in the middle of the day, by men not in uniform. He won’t be the last. And this is happening in places that didn’t vote for Trump, that protested him, that held and hold demonstrations and rallies.
Johnson County, where Iowa City is located, is where Jon Green, the county supervisor, defied the governor’s orders and refused to fly the flag at half-staff for Charlie Kirk. In defense of Green’s stance, another supervisor, Mandi Remington, stated, “Johnson county is home to a diverse community, including many who were the direct targets of Kirk’s rhetoric. To honor him with our flags would be to dismiss the harm he caused to our neighbors and constituents.”
“Supervisor Green’s stance affirms that our county will not elevate voices that work to strip others of dignity, freedom, and belonging. I believe this decision is a principled one, rooted in respect for the people of Johnson county and the constitutional values we are sworn to protect.”
Nowhere is safe.
That’s the point of these public arrests. They’re a show of force. A statement that is supposed to make us afraid.
These aren’t just arrests; they are disappearings by an authoritarian and secret police that answers to no one except the whims of an increasingly vindictive president who is going after his political opponents, weaponizing our government against us.
On Friday, I went to a protest against ICE and I heard Gonzalez’s partner speak about the violence of losing him, of what it means to have someone you love to just be taken away in the middle of the day with no answers, no recourse. The unknowing of it. The confusion. The understanding that this is the government, and there is no one to appeal to. No higher authority. There is only us. Us to stand up to this.
After the rally I spoke with the lawmakers in attendance, some of whom want to plan trainings so people can interfere with ICE next time. So they can, if not stop them, stand up to them. And I spoke with other politicians who talked about the harassment they’re receiving for even speaking out against it. Not just online, either; they’re the targets of vitriol from their neighbors, who might come up to a politician’s mother at church and tell her to get her kid to shut up. Somehow worse are the people who encourage moderation, the ones who are supposed to be the leaders, who say, “It’s not that bad. Just be civil. Just be polite.”
…no one was working harder to aid and abet the cause of fascism than Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and podcaster, who rushed to defend Charlie Kirk’s legacy from Kirk’s own word…
On October 22, 1844, thousands of Christians in England, in New York and across the Midwest gathered in fields and on hillsides, desperately waiting for the sound of heavenly trumpets and for the Lord Jesus to bring them up into the heavens.
The day had been prophesied by a New York farmer turned Baptist minister, William Miller. Miller fought for the Am…
As America drifts into a dictatorship, at least we can take comfort in the fact that we are being led by men and women who have replaced their souls with red hats and their hearts with a single bitcoin and brains with vats of beef tallow.
Villains are going to villain. We expect them to be villainous. What pisses me off are all the well-meaning people ru…
On October 23, 2019, I sat in a room with Charlie Kirk in the Iowa Student Memorial Union.
I told him I was going to record the conversation. He directed his assistant in the room to start recording. “That way, you can’t misquote me,” he said. He smiled, like he’d already won an argument we hadn’t yet had.
Kirk was in Iowa to do what he did for years — ho…
Below the paywall are some thoughts about an Iowa feminist writer whose work has been forgotten, except by Iowans, and what it means to write from the Midwest. There are also a lot of links to interesting stories from me and my assistant editor, Isabella. As always, thank you for subscribing. Your subscriptions support me, Isabella, our editor, and the launch of a new podcast, which will drop in October.
This week, America is mourning yet another instance of political violence. Another maniac caused widespread terror. And in the wake of that violence, Americans are asking themselves, “What has this country come to?”
In a TV ad for lagging Republican NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, his wife, Nancy, states, “They tell us New York is safe, but women know better.”
The ad shows black and white footage of women on the subway, as Nancy Sliwa, a lawyer, says, “Rapes are up by 40 percent. Felony assaults are at an all-time high… Every day women risk harassment and assaul…
After the paywall is a little essay on what I think the point of telling the truth is and why I refuse to modulate my voice. There is also a cornucopia of links from me and Isabella, who helps me with the newsletter.
This week, as I was casually scrolling the internet in the morning while reading my morning dose of newsletters, I saw a post on Substack notes chiding newsletter writers for their tone when talking about masculinity in America.
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