I would not make this move if I didn’t feel like it was the right thing for this newsletter and the community. So I know it’s a pain, but it will be worth it.

And now, here is a preview of this week’s Wednesday newsletter.

You can read the full thing FOR FREE on Patreon.

What do you do in a country where facts don’t matter?

What do you do in an America where reality is fake and the lie is the reality? What do you do when an authoritarian government insists that they and they alone know the truth? What do you do when people want to believe their own lies so much they lie to themselves?

There are a lot of things you can do. Fact-checking feels futile, but it is a necessary step. Supporting the voices that do tell the truth doesn’t hurt, either.

But also, sometimes the best way to counteract a false narrative is to put on a frog costume, get out in the streets, and dance.

In the face of the president’s lies, protesters in Portland have donned inflatable costumes and held dance parties. It’s hard to manipulate images of a person dancing in a puffy unicorn outfit into something fearsome and scary…

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I am leaving Substack for Patreon.

Why?

➡️ Well, go over to Patreon to read all about it. My first Patreon newsletter is a reflection on my 20-year career in media and how I got here. It’s also about why I didn’t move from Substack before, as so many of you have asked me to do. And why I’m moving now. It is also why I don’t think just abandoning spaces is the right answer all the time.

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My first premium newsletter for subscribers at the $10/month level will be about Josh Hawley and manhood and will be published on Thursday. So make sure you are signed up!

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Thank you for being here. I’m so grateful for your support, and can’t wait for the next five years.

But seriously, go over to Patreon now.

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.

You can read the full story here.

In the days that followed, I was terrified about how I would pay my mortgage and buy groceries. But Substack reached out and offered to ensure that I would make a decent income if I focused on writing my newsletter full-time. And that is what I did.

Now the newsletter has more than 72,000 subscribers. And together we laugh about dinguses and take on the hot garbage strewn waste of this America. In the years since it launched, I’ve published a NYT bestseller and put out two seasons of a podcast that has over 200k downloads.

So many of you all write to tell me that this newsletter challenges you, or helps you see things a little clearer, and gives you hope. Or sometimes it just gives you a laugh that helps you think that we can make it through all of this. And we can.

It’s important for this newsletter that I write from a red state where there are no media jobs, not really. It’s important that I’m a single mom, a journalist and an activist. Voices like mine are rarely represented in newspapers or opinion columns.

And it’s important that I have 20 years of experience living in and reporting on the Midwest. In the aftermath of my firing, every potential new employer told me I would eventually need to move — away from the place and perspective that makes this newsletter unique.

Thank you for continuing to be here. Thank you for supporting this newsletter and the voice of a fierce, unapologetic feminist in red-state America.

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Tilly Norwood isn’t a real actress. She’s an AI puppet conceived of by AI production house Particle6 and its subsidiary talent studio Xicoia. She can’t think or feel or even talk without human guidance. But Particle6 CEO Eline Van der Velden has a vision that Norwood will be the first of many AI actresses, stating that she wants Tilly “to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman.”

In response to the news about the creation of an actress so fake and so pliable, the Free Press published an essay by Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, thirstily declaring that, “Tilly Norwood doesn’t need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts, and if you wish to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances.”

It’s not likely Norwood’s career will extend much beyond the horny imaginations of AI slop creators and the libidinal minds of sweaty economics professors. But it matters that one of the first AI bots forced upon us as a new vision of the future is a woman. It matters that in the cultural imaginings of men, she’s a pliable virgin.

Society doesn’t want real human women.

Our administration is staffed by the human equivalent of Norwood. Women who have contorted themselves into a Fox News fever dream of perfection. The internet is filled with women who perfectly perform motherhood and marriage, while wearing aprons and feeding chickens. GLP-1s have greatly increased access to thinness, making it easier for women to shrink and sculpt themselves into yassified models of perfection. All my ads on social media are about weight loss or beauty or how to self-optimize. Everything is designed to keep me in constant search of perfection, never once resting, never once being satisfied.

America doesn’t want to see real women.

Real women are being forced out of the workforce and, as a result, are losing access to economic freedom and agency. Women are losing reproductive rights and, as a result, are losing their ability to choose the lives they want to live. SNAP benefits are being cut, which hurts women the most, as they’re the ones most likely to stay and raise their children; they are the ones who earn less, because the gender pay gap is growing. Access to health care is also getting more and more restricted. This, too, impacts women the most, because they’re more likely to stay home to help aging parents, sick kids, disabled kids?

Tilly Norwood’s company heralds her as a problem-solver. But this robot only solves a problem if you see humans as a problem. If you see people with full lives and sexual agency as a problem. And her debut comes at a time when women — especially Black, queer, trans, and immigrant women — are being pushed out of public life, not through culture wars or jeans ads, but through laws and policies designed to make existing that much harder.

And it is harder. Things are harder now than they were five years ago when I started this newsletter and even one year ago, when I published my feminist manifesto about equality and relationships. People are less likely now to subscribe to a feminist newsletter that looks at how we build inequality into our daily lives and how oppression happens, personally and politically.

But this newsletter has given us the space and platform to raise money for trans rights and abortion access in Iowa. Together, we’ve built a community that doesn’t always agree, but we do know that we will all be in the same Mad Max truck together in the end. And what we are fighting for is the value of our lives, our voices, and our homes.

This community is a reminder that every voice matters, especially in the face of a government and a movement that want us to be quieter, nicer, more put together, with a bit more lip filler, and could we just be more demure, focus on our protein goals, and enter our soft girl era. And I will be doing none of those things.

I am looking forward to the next five years. Unless Tilly Norwood develops a real talent for making long-form jokes about Pete Hegseth.

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🏠 So this newsletter is about all of that.

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This week, two men with saws came and cut down my children’s playset and hauled it away.

I had tried to give away the playset for free to anyone who wanted it. I posted pictures online and had family after family come look at it and ask me skeptical questions about its safety, would it fall? Would it give their kids splinters? Was it sturdy? Was it right for a 5-year-old? What about a 10-year-old? What was the weight limit? What was the age of the playset?

I didn’t know the answers to those questions. The playset was here when we moved in, and I couldn’t find its equivalent online. I told them how my kids loved it when we moved in in 2019, how it was their hideout in 2020, how we painted the inside with stars and tree branches, how they made broomsticks out of old branches and duct tape and rode on the swings with their sticks and pretended like they were witches. How it held together when my daughter ran up there crying after her birthday party was canceled in 2020 and then again in 2021. How it held me when I sat in the swing after being fired, and I had days of emptiness and fear. How it had survived the inland hurricane of 2020, and the neighbor’s tree just missed smashing it into pieces, and how it sheltered the fairy world we’d built underneath it, and how that, too, had survived. And look, there were still little fairy people hiding in the dirt, although they were fading and worn.

None of these were assurances enough for parents who wanted facts, statistics, schematics, and weight limits.

I heard one woman whisper to her father, who had come to test the playset with her, “It’s not worth the risk.”

It’s ironic, I think, in a state that overwhelmingly votes to preserve gun rights and takes away food assistance for kids, that everyone who comes here is so worried about the safety of the playset. And I am a little angry because of course, it’s safe; it has been for us! But also, I know she’s right: Things that are safe for a moment aren’t always safe forever.

The playset was here before I bought this house. I don’t know how old it was, and maybe it wouldn’t have been safe for another family. Maybe it would have been a risk rather than a rescue.

So I paid those men to chop it down and haul it away.

I bought my house in 2019. I’d walked through it with my realtor and immediately wanted it because of the back porch, the trees, and the oak floors, and how, when my daughter saw it, she said it looked like a witch’s cottage. But I was a single mom, living off freelance work and books, and even though I had been paying a rent much higher than my mortgage would be, and had two years of tax returns showing I was stable, I couldn’t get a loan unless I had a job offer. I’d been interviewing for jobs for over a year because I needed health insurance. And two places assured me they were going to make me an offer — soon. But those offers hadn’t come through yet. So I didn’t have the loan, and I couldn’t make an offer. The house was soon listed as sold.

Four weeks later, it was back on the market again. The prospective buyers hadn’t really wanted an old house after all. I went back to the bank; this time, I was employed. My local newspaper had given me an offer to work full-time for $49,000, which put me just under the poverty line for a family of three. But it was what the bank needed, so I got the loan. And I got the house.

Six months later, when the world shut down, this house became our refuge.

The first thing I did when I heard about the shutdowns happening across America was to buy a trampoline for my kids. I did not have the money for it. But I bought it anyway. If our world was going to shrink to the size of this house, I wanted us to have some fun.

And how many days that year did I sit at the kitchen table trying to work while my kids played outside? Watching them jump on the trampoline and climb in the playset. My daughter took old curtains from the basement and hung them in the playhouse. She took blankets up there and made nests for herself and her brother, and they sat there in a world where they felt safe, while I watched from a world that felt out of control.

My son began having nightmares in March of 2020 and stopped sleeping in his bed. He told me he dreamed of evil red balloons that flew in the sky and hovered over him and his sister. He said he didn’t know what the balloons would do, but he was scared. And I asked him, where was he safe in the dream? And he said in his playhouse. So I told him to dream about the playhouse.

For centuries, women could not own property. And even once they could, it was hard. Hard to get a line of credit at a bank without a man’s signature. Impossible to get a loan without some approval, some backing, some signoff from a man. When I told a friend who owns his own business how hard it had been to get the loan, he was confused. He’d gotten his home loan when he was in debt up to his eyeballs with his first restaurant. Maybe I’d done something wrong?

When I left my marriage, my husband accused me of ruining the home. But hadn’t I been the one who’d painted it; cleaned it; organized and arranged it? That home still stood and still does. Another wife now arranges pillows and vacuums rugs. Most of the walls are still the same color I painted them 20 years ago.

Homemaking is the domain of women, a service we are supposed to render in service of men. Something I am reminded of every time I try to fix something in my home. “Is it just you?” They’ll ask. “Is there a husband who needs to sign off on these decisions?”

Just us, is the answer. Just the three of us. This is our home; this is where we feel safe.

The homes women share with men are not safe. Thirty percent of marriages involve intimate partner violence. This doesn’t count the instances of emotional and financial and verbal abuse.

But making your home on your own isn’t easy. Women still face discrimination when buying homes. Despite the fact that single female homeownership eclipses men, we pay more for our mortgages and often sell our homes for less.

I wasn’t ruining a home, as my husband had said. I was making a new one. And what I had done wrong was imagine that instead of trapping me, this house could be my freedom. That instead of hiding me away, it could be my harbor.

And it has been. In a state people leave, in an America destroyed by violence, I have created something beautiful.

But every act of creation is an act of demolition.

So the playset is gone, making room for what I hope will be a fire pit where my children and their friends will sit on summer nights surrounded by all the flowers I hope to grow. And I know demolition means loss, but it also means creating space for possibility. I am so happy my kids have lived long enough to outgrow a playset. What a gift to watch children age in a country that criminalizes their identities and watches them die in school shootings. If I can imagine a future here in this backyard, I can build it.

The day had been prophesied by a New York farmer turned Baptist minister, William Miller. Miller fought for the Americans during the War of 1812 and was present at the Battle of Plattsburgh, where the Americans, who were severely outnumbered, defeated the British. After witnessing the horrific devastation and loss of that battle, Miller concluded that the Americans had won only due to the mighty hand of God.

After the war, Miller returned home and faced even more loss — the deaths of his father and sister. In despair, he spent years researching, trying to calculate the coming of the Lord, who would save him and his followers from the misery of war and disease. At first, Miller determined Christ would come on March 21, 1844 — but then, no, he apologized; he’d gotten it wrong. It would be in April — nope, sorry, more apologies. He finally settled on October.

But Jesus never came. The Millerites were devastated. As one faithful follower, Hiram Edson, explained, “Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before. We wept, and wept, till the day dawn.”

The day is known as the Great Disappointment. No one was saved from the misery of their lives.

Miller, the father of the Seventh-day Adventists, was not the first nor the last minister to declare, in a time of social and political upheaval, that now is the time when Jesus will rescue the faithful.

I grew up in fear of the rapture. In the red-brick Baptist churches of Texas, where fans stirred the thick, hot air, our voices rang over the chords of the piano as we sang, “People get ready, Jesus is coming.”

It was the 1990s, and the siege on Waco had happened only an hour away. It was a sign, our pastor preached, of a world in which the government would take up arms against its citizens. A time in which no one who believed was safe. The governments of the world were hostile to Christians; we were hunted and persecuted across the world. We were surely in the end times.

In this period of millennial panic, between 1995 and 2007, Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins published their breakout series, the Left Behind books, which gave a vivid narrative to the supposed end of the world. In that series, persecuted white male Christians were the heroes — aided, of course, by converted women who also happened to be hot.

The books were published by Tyndale House Publishers, a niche Christian publishing company, but they captured the American imagination beginning in the Clinton administration and lasting through two wars in Iraq, Y2K panic, and the attacks of September 11, 2001.

That end, also, never came.

This year, after the murder of Charlie Kirk, my kids’ private school sent an email to all the parents, urging us in this “dificult time” to seek Christ, our only hope and refuge, noting, “At the same time, we should not be surprised by hardship. Paul reminds Timothy that ‘there will be terrible times in the last days’ (2 Timothy 3:1).”

Kirk’s death, the school administrators believe, was a portent of the end times.

Over the weekend, I saw TikTok videos and Instagram reels of people obsessing over the end, desperate for Jesus to come save them. And of other people desperate for Jesus to come collect his mess. The rapture was supposed to happen on September 23, 2025.

This obscure prophecy of South African Pastor Joshua Mhlakela gained a foothold in an America blind with panic. A nation in which the victors declare themselves the victims and the victims are afraid to say much of anything. It’s a world in which facts do not matter. Conspiracies have permeated our everyday lives. And we all feel hopeless. A type of end-times theology has even seeped into the liberal worldview, where people are prepping for a climate apocalypse.

As easy and as fun as it is to mock the idea of the rapture, especially for people who aren’t Evangelicals, apocalypse theology affects us all. An apocalypse theology is not only used among the faithful to justify abandoning the wicked to their own fates; it’s also used to justify abandoning red states, or relinquishing our power to authoritarian forces rather than fighting them.

The proliferation of the belief in another rapture speaks to the pervasiveness of the politics of pain. It’s a narrative that centers on the grievances of the powerful, while the voices of the vulnerable are muted. “Deliver us,” the faithful cry, while the government whips up a sense of grievance and fear to strip rights away from trans people, immigrants and women. The justification is found in the logic that these are wicked times. The tribulations of Biblical proportion are upon us.

This past Sunday, at the church I used to attend, the pastor preached that Christians ought to seek our hope in Christ and his second coming. The world is a wicked place, he said. We should not trust governments or people, only Christ.

Watching that video this week, I saw a roomful of people who’d primarily voted for Trump washing their hands of the results. They were declaring themselves the victims, although they’d voted for the victimizers. They used the death of Charlie Kirk to claim persecution of men — Christian men who “innocently” chose to speak out. Erased from the narrative were other forms of violence — the racism, the transphobia, the militarization of ICE against Americans.

Because an end-times theology, as tempting as it is to embrace, is a kind of deus ex machina. It’s a belief that a disastrous end or a swift rapture into the heavens helps us escape our responsibility to our neighbors and our world. Apocalypse logic argues. What can we do?

While researching God Land, I spoke to a farmer who believed in climate change and climate apocalypse, but saw it as part of God’s plan for the end times. He didn’t feel a responsibility to the earth. It would all end anyway.

The world is ending. So the faithful stand on hills, raise their hands, and await the Lord, while ignoring their neighbors.

This end will not come. We will still have to wake up tomorrow, facing the consequences of the world we created.

Further reading:

A Public Witness

Chris Tomlin’s Worshipwashing of Charlie Kirk

The memorial service for Charlie Kirk on Sunday (Sept. 21) functioned as a stand-in for Sunday worship. The service officially started at 11 a.m. local time, but several Christian worship artists sang hymns and contemporary worship songs for two hours before that as people entered the football stadium that’s home to the Arizona Cardinals. More worship s…

Read more

7 months ago · 395 likes · 13 comments · Brian Kaylor

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 assault just going to school, to work, just living our lives.”

Nancy Sliwa then appears beside her husband. “Curtis and I have always fought for women,” she says. “And we will keep defending them, because no one has to choose between supporting their family and protecting their life.”

Nancy Sliwa is blond and white, and her invocation of the specter of violence that haunts the good white women of America is a tried and true political tactic.

There is an insidious logic to the ad. Life for women certainly feels more dangerous than it did before. As I write this, the right-wing media cycle has been dominated by the murder last month of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, in Charlotte, North Carolina. (This is during a week that has otherwise featured the publication of several quite grim economic reports; the release of more Epstein documents; an Israeli strike in Qatar, a U.S. ally — oh, and Politico ran a story about the Treasury secretary threatening to punch out the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. But I digress.)

The ad sort of has a point. Reports of rape are on the rise in NYC, but not by 40 percent. The real number is closer to 20 percent, and this is primarily because last year, New York passed a law expanding its definition of rape. A CBS report notes that, even accounting for that change, there is a small percentage increase in reported rapes, but this could be because more people are reporting them.

In any case, you should look hard at any crime statistics coming from a man who faked crimes in the 1990s to make himself look like a hero.

But the Sliwas’ ad feels effective because it can, in fact, be quite scary to be a woman in America. The raw pain of gendered grievance oozes out of every social platform — TikTok videos where people describe awful dates and Facebook groups where women ask, “Are We Dating the Same Man?” Even the few conservative influencers I follow post memes about men being bad. It is bad.

But the violence that women have to fear is rarely coming from unhoused people or immigrants. The bulk of it is coming from the people in charge. Women have fewer rights, and they’re being forced from their jobs. Rising prices, the reduction of the Child Care Tax Credit, stagnant wages and never-ending cuts to the social safety net make it harder to support a family now than it was even five years ago. Women and mothers are being violently yanked off the street, not by immigrants, but because they are immigrants. (Or because they look like maybe they might be immigrants. The Supreme Court said that was fine.)

This week, the president made comments suggesting he doesn’t think domestic violence is a crime. The newly rebranded Department of War is run by a man who may or may not believe women should be allowed to vote.

The actions of the GOP are branded as protecting women. (As was the Clinton-era crime bill.) Even the logic of depriving married women of the vote is pitched as a sort of benevolent protectorship.

But that protectorship is coming at the loss of our rights; the scapegoating of trans people; violence toward immigrants and the unhoused. In this world, only white women get to feel protected — and only then if it’s not their husbands they need protecting from.

And despite the PR campaigns of trad wife influencers, this bargain is never what it says it is. Give me public transportation and a weird boss over an overbearing husband any day. At least with the boss, I have money, and with that money, some freedom.

Yes, there is violence being done to women. But despite a handful of cherry-picked and well-publicized stories, the threat to cis women is not from trans people or immigrants. It’s the state-sanctioned violence that strips us of our right to a safe and legal abortion. It’s the destruction of the social safety net. It’s the violence of the National Guard patrolling our streets and ICE deporting people without due process.

Patriarchy and power rely on stoking the flames of our fears of the other. Fear is intended to make us compliant. But what we should fear the most is the men who use our bodies as a cover for their violence.

🔗Further reading

✍️Moira Donegan wrote about Trump’s comments about domestic violence.

📖 My friend Sarah Weinman has an incredible book about the history of marital rape in America that will be published in November. You can hear us chat about the book on my This American Ex-Wife podcast.

✍️Also, as points out with this story about the Epstein files, the real violence against women is being done by the men who are claiming to protect them.

📈 300,000 Black women losing their jobs is also a kind of violence.

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Where were you when you heard the news that one of the most talented and wealthy single women in America was getting married? Me? I was trying to read a book, just 24 hours after getting dumped by a guy who was uncomfortable with my career.

The deluge of posts, hot takes, videos, and memes already beginning to flood the internet have little to do with Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce themselves. Grown women posted that they were crying. The Wendy’s account on Threads posted, “I can’t believe we got Travis Swift before we got gta6.” The New York Times did a push alert; so did ESPN. The president wished the couple “a lot of luck” during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.

From the wedding of Isabella and Ferdinand to the union of Mr. and Mrs. Swift, every highly publicized union is idealized because it makes a fairy tale feel like it’s within reach. Sometimes that fantasy is wealth, beauty, glamour, or a distraction from poverty. In this case, what resonates for many women — who will undoubtedly be scolded for fawning over this royal American wedding — is that this fairy tale features an ambitious and successful woman actually finding a supportive partner.

I don’t know either of these people. And I am not convinced this isn’t some sort of very successful business deal. But who cares? Taylor Swift writes great songs about shitty men and profits from it; good for her!

Also, most of our parents married for worse reasons than record sales.

I am also not trying to project into the interiority of the lives of these celebrities. But the image they are projecting to us is that a successful woman has found a supportive partner, one who eagerly fawns over her new album cover while interviewing her for his own podcast.

This reality is far from reality for most American women.

Since January, 212,000 women have left the workforce, while 44,000 men have joined it. Women’s participation in the workforce peaked as flexible work-from-home policies allowed them more readily to juggle career and family. But under the Trump administration, those policies are being rescinded. Meanwhile, laws that gut reproductive rights and narrow access to childcare, healthcare, and SNAP benefits will do more to push ambitious, educated women out of the workforce and limit their economic power and personal freedom. And a spiritual leader who opposes women having the right to vote has the ear of the president’s Cabinet.

Women who do succeed are often punished for it. Studies show that women who out-earn their husbands are 33 percent more likely to be victims of domestic violence and 22 percent more likely to be victims of emotional abuse.

Women who out-earn their husbands still do more childcare and domestic labor. And overwhelmingly, studies show that male partners, no matter how much they earn or how little they earn, how much they work, or no matter how flexible or inflexible their jobs are, are still not doing much domestic labor or childcare.

These are all passive forms of punishment for women who seek career success and financial security. Women who speak out are often met with outright misogyny or cutting remarks.

And all of this is happening as social media posts and think pieces declare the end of ambition, from #girlboss to #girlmoss. Author Stefanie O’Connell, who has a new book about ambition coming out in 2026, observed in her newsletter:

As a millennial woman reckoning with my own disillusionment with the 2010s girlboss era, its obsession with hustle culture, and the broken promise that getting what you want is as easy as asking for it, I too became obsessed with this reevaluation of ambition. During the five years I spent researching and writing my own book about it (out in 2026), I watched as these anti-ambition trends took hold… and evolved — from the #softlife to #feminineenergy to the #tradwife (short for “traditional” wife) — each promising to unlock a new layer of leisure, satisfaction and meaning as it limited women’s ambitions to a smaller and smaller window.

I, too, have struggled with ambition. I have a lot of it and it isn’t going away. But I am also exhausted. I’m so sick of succeeding in spite of everything around me. I’m tired of having a job and still doing the majority of the emotional and domestic labor for my kids while my ex, who is remarried, complains about how I maintain the shared calendar.

Every time I succeed, there’s a downside. The hate mail gets worse. The man I am dating backs away. A tabloid publishes a scathing story about me. I’m so, so tired.

The fantasy that Swift and Kelce are selling isn’t romance; it’s not even equality. It’s a fantasy world where a woman can be successful and her partner won’t be mad about it.

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)

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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.

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.

“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)

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.

I’ve been watching as my queer friends who have built beautiful lives and communities wrestle with whether they should stay or go. So many of the articles about these bills focus on the pain and trauma of queer life in a red state. What is missing from these stories is the joy of queer life and the beauty of community. All too often, if a story isn’t about death or disaster, it doesn’t get much attention. But queer life and queer joy are an essential and vital part of our communities.

I asked my friend Molly Monk to write about the intentional way she’s building her life in red-state America. Molly is a queer writer and a problem in Cedar Rapids. She has no current projects to plug, but thinks that donating to the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund is a great idea.

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Like any good Midwestern dyke, I spend a lot of time thinking about my lawnmower. I’m quite fond of this lawnmower — largely because I didn’t pay for it. This lawnmower is living out its Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants fantasy in the Cedar Rapids queer community. Before it was mine, it belonged to my old roommate’s boyfriend. He gave it to me when I bought my house, partially because he’s a sweet and generous person and partially to clear out his garage. Before it was his, it belonged to our friend, Ben. Now it lives in the back of my garage — just a few houses away from Ben.

I was nervous about buying a house and living alone as a queer woman in a red state, but when I saw that there was a house three doors down from Ben and his partner, my anxiety turned into excitement. With Ben on my block, I knew I’d always have someone who would help me out.

Then, a year after I bought my home, my friend Jessalyn bought the house next door.

I first moved to Iowa in 2012. At the time, I was just beginning to break away from my conservative Catholic upbringing and was gently testing out saying I was queer out loud.

Ten years ago, Iowa represented hope. Hope for what the Midwest could be at its best: a place where being my authentic self was not only accepted but affordable. At the time, Minnesota, where my family lived, had a constitutional amendment on the ballot to ban gay marriage. But Iowa had become the third state to legalize it. On my first weekend in the state, I took a bus with my friends to see President Barack Obama speak (more importantly, The National was his opener) in a town a half-hour away. There was hope, there was change.

The next week, I started classes at Simpson College, where I met Jessalyn in a political science seminar. Four years later, I followed her to Cedar Rapids.

Where we live next to each other has become a kind of queer enclave. It’s us, a few other openly queer households, and a coven’s worth of feral cats. We’ve taken to calling our block the Gayborhood. The proximity feels like security — a safety net we wove together by accident and by design. I’ll pop over in my slippers to fix Jessalyn’s plumbing issues (perks of being a gay stereotype), and she’ll ask the group chat if anyone wants in on the takeout she’s ordering. Ben will help me with my yard, and we’ll all take care of each other’s houses and pets when we’re out of town. We take turns hosting costume parties for Taylor Swift album releases and we check in with each other during severe weather.

The Gayborhood is just one part of my very queer life in Cedar Rapids. During the summer, almost all the food I eat comes from lesbian-run farms in eastern Iowa. My friends and I go to queer trivia at our local gay bar most weeks, and everyone brings a dish for the community potluck. A group of queer women and I take turns hosting watch parties for Formula 1 races each Sunday. My favorite bartenders and baristas are queer. My doctor is queer. The bookstore where I go for books and gossip is run by a gay man. So many of the local bands and musicians I love are queer. My running group is queer. I can’t go a day without seeing my community in this city.

When things are bad, we support each other. When a friend ended his long-term relationship and was worried about where to live next, he moved in with me. Any time I’ve been in the hospital, my friends and neighbors have visited me, stocked my fridge with casseroles and Gatorade, and taken care of my house. We organize protests and show up to marches. We volunteer. We provide mutual aid to each other.

When things are good, we celebrate.

In the summer, I like to get a bit drunk and play croquet. My yard is full of molehills and I refuse to learn the rules, so it’s more a round of trash talk than an actual game. Last year, a neighbor and I did this to celebrate our birthdays. We set up camp on my driveway and had our friends stop by throughout the day to join in the fun for however long they liked. I went to bed with sore cheeks from smiling so hard.

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.

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.

—

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This essay was originally published in March of 2023.

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2025 is a hot summer in America. To paraphrase the Simpsons meme: one of the hottest summers of our lives so far.

The heat and the political turmoil feel different now than in 2020, which was a summer of primal screams, of our political discontent, of shouting for systemic change, of being locked inside and taking to the streets. That summer was hot asphalt and stifling masks. Demanding, pleading for institutions not to kill us and our neighbors.

This summer, we’ve lost so much and we continue to lose. But our screams feel different now. Tired feet back in the hot streets, smelling of tar and the closeness of bodies. Recycled protest signs. Hoarse voices pleading again for life over death. People are exhausted because, as the clichéd sign reads, we can’t believe we’re still protesting the same shit.

Maybe that’s because whatever allegedly ironclad dedication to systemic change was promised and pushed through promptly crumpled like tin foil. Hope and change run over by a desperate keening for the past. Any past.

The conventional wisdom is that as people get older, they will become more comfortable and more conservative. But millennial voters, voters born in the 1980s and ‘90s, are so far bucking that trend, aligning, by a few percentage points, with Democrats over Republicans. It’s not much, but it’s enough that trend forecasters are taking notice. Millennials, now aging, have seen the collapse of a financial system (multiple times), wars, historic elections, girl power to #MeToo to trad wife, the crime bill to racial reckoning to ICE deportations, same-sex marriage to trans healthcare bans.

In her book of essays I Want to Burn This Place Down, Maris Kreizman writes in a chapter titled “Neoliberalism and me” about going to see Bill Clinton speak in 1992 and believing so fully in the dream of neoliberalism. Believing that if she worked hard and and played by the rules, she too could be part of the American dream.

The opening is funny in the same way that reading a character in a novel write about how excited they are to take a trip on the Titanic is funny. The reader knows what’s coming. One big sad trombone doing the “whomp whomp” of history. Kreizman takes us from the hope of Clinton to the scandal to the 2000 financial collapse to the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. And then again to Clinton. Kreizman writes about how, when she decried Kavanaugh’s alleged behavior to Christine Blasey Ford, the online hordes pushed back and said, “Well, if you condemn Kavanaugh, you must also condemn Bill Clinton.”

Good. Done. “Sounds good to me,” Kreizman replies. If, upon consideration, those institutions we believed in failed us — if they were part of our oppression when we thought they were our liberation — then, fine, burn them to the ground.

Kreizman’s book is part of a cohort of books from Gen X and older millennial women rethinking ambition, the American Dream, and the promises we were raised with.

A generation of women raised on girl power who saw Hillary Clinton concuss herself on the glass ceiling, and Kamala Harris too, and all of us thinking, “Okay, now what?”

In this space are Jennifer Romolini’s Ambition Monster, The Myth of Making It by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, and Glynnis MacNicol’s I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself. Each a story of a woman pushing against the narrative of girl bosses and ambition and confronting the emptiness of the neoliberal dream.

Other books in this genre come at it slantwise. Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl is a cultural examination of the world in which millennial and Gen X women grew up, charting both the rise of the girl boss and the emptiness and the frustration of clawing to the top. Because if you get there, you haven’t changed the world much; just played by rules never made for you in the first place. So what then?

It’s a conversation my friends and I are all having. When is enough enough? How do we be happy? Where does our ambition go when the world has made it impossible to have it all? Do we keep trying? Do we try something new? A whole generation of Paris Gellers crashing out, we tried to do everything right and still didn’t get where we thought we’d go. Not through lack of hard work or talent, but because these institutions were not designed for our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

For Kreizman, the dream wasn’t complicated. Just a middle-class career in publishing, health insurance, and making books she could believe in. Then came the endless rounds of layoffs, the shitty pay, the revelation that the game is stacked in favor of those who already have money. But Kreizman doesn’t write about quitting in the same way as other cultural conversations around women and ambition.

She’s not saying, “The deck is stacked, so go be a trad wife.” None of the writers in this genre are. But there is a cultural push for that narrative. It’s present on social media and TikTok, in the insistence of princess treatment, the soft girl life, and, of course, the trad wife. Instead, Kreizman talks about agitating for change, unionizing, and demanding better wages.

Each of the essays in the book contends with an aspect of social, political and/or cultural change that Kreizman had to face and rethink, from insulin (Kreizman is diabetic) to the police (her twin brothers are cops), to kids (Kreizman and her husband, Josh Gondelman, are child-free).

I spoke with Kreizman before writing this essay, and I asked her how her ambition has changed as she aged. She told me she no longer has big ambitions for herself, but her ambition hasn’t gotten smaller; it’s gotten more encompassing. Now, she said, “I am ambitious for my community. My ambition is that I don’t want to see people die from a lack of insulin.”

It’s a reframing of ambition that is subtle and big-hearted, moving from the American dream of individual prosperity toward community survival.

Kreizman told me she was worried the book would be seen as “too angry.” The book seethes with a gentle anger, but it’s an anger built out of love, the tired kind of anger that wants everyone to be happy, to live, to experience a socialist revolution.

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I asked Kreizman, a New Yorker, what she hopes her book brings to this hot political summer. And she said, “The best thing about having this book come out right this second, right now, is I look at my city, and last week, so many of us decided that the old ways weren't working. The Chuck Schumers of the world and the Democratic Party, as it stands right now, are just putting stuff out on social media and doing nothing. And that is not what most people want.”

“I see Zohran Mamdani capture so much of the imagination of people in my city,” Kreizman continued, “because he calls for change, but does it joyfully. And it's the best message to come out of that election. And what I want for this book.”

Now that’s ambition: to keep pushing for systemic change, despite all we’ve seen and witnessed, and to do with a smile — or, at least, with an endless capacity for joy.

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This is the Prime Minister of Israel — the man ultimately responsible for the devastation in Gaza, which has resulted in more deaths of women and children than any other conflict over the past two decades. He’s trying to free the women, even if he has to kill them first.

Elon Musk, a pronatalist who believes that the biggest threat to civilization is population decline, oversaw cuts to (among many other things) USAID, which has already resulted in deaths, including those of children. He’s trying to get people in the US to have more children, even as he is responsible for the deaths of many abroad.

I don’t think it’s just cynical messaging. These are men who truly see the lives of only some women and some children as worthy. Those lives are both the human cost of their violent missions and the justification for them.

It’s been three years since the Dobbs decision eliminated the nationwide right to abortion.

In the wake of Dobbs, more people in America are pro-abortion than before, with a notable exception: men.

Since 2022, fewer men identify as pro-choice — a seven-point dip from 48% to 41%. According to a recent Gallup poll, “There is now a record-high 17-point gap between women (57%) and men (40%) in their belief that abortion is morally acceptable and a record-high 15-point gap in women’s (56%) and men’s (41%) support for abortion being legal in all or most circumstances.”

This shift represents a difference not just on policy, but on who sees women as individual human beings, with choice, independence and the right to make their own health care decisions. It seems, in fact, that not all lives matter.

People on the left often debate how to finesse messaging to bring men aboard. They worry about how Democrats are “losing men.” So we have to worry about the tone of our voice as we beg for our lives. Recently, a man emailed me to say he supported women’s rights, but he didn’t like my tone and maybe I should consider that women would be better off if we were nicer.

This is the same logic that is extended to policing people over their race and nationality. If you must protest, be respectful. Ask for your rights, but be polite, and work hard.

Sorry, no: The very definition of inalienable rights is that they belong to me regardless of how little I work or how much I scowl and call people dinguses.

I joined the board of the Iowa Abortion Access Fund after the Dobbs decision because I wanted to channel my rage and despair into making my state a better place. The IAAF raises money to give to clinics and patients to help cover the cost of abortion. I may not be able to fix American democracy, but I can make sure that at least 700 people a month have the money to pay for their abortions. I can help them access choice. And that is the foundation of democracy if anything is.

I was at a recent event for the IAAF when a man told me that it was hard for him and other men to support a cause that didn’t affect them. I balked. Was he not human? Did he not have people in his life who he cared about? “Sir, don’t you have sex with women?” I asked. “Aren’t you a human being?”

He pushed back, asserting that in the time of Trump, when there are wars and people storming the Capitol, we had to be focused. As if my participation in public life was of no consequence to the project of democracy.

Feminist author Ellen Willis wrote about encountering logic like this at the counter-inauguration protest on January 19, 1969. In response, Willis noted that solidarity “...will not be accomplished through persuasion, conciliation, or love, but through independence and solidarity: radical men will stop oppressing us and make our fight their own when they can’t get us to join them on any other terms.”

Our individual rights are the foundations of democracy. Writing in Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler observed, “Stripping people of rights in the name of morality or the nation or a patriarchal wet dream belongs to the broader logic amplified by authoritarian nationalism.”

Don’t tell me you are fighting for one part of democracy while ignoring the others.

Recently, , whose newsletter is a necessary and often excruciating accounting of the impact Dobbs has on our country, wrote that she thought about pausing the newsletter in the middle of the war and societal upheaval. She notes, “But then I thought about everything we’ve built over the last three years—the daily ritual of refusing despair, concession, or silence. The hopeful habit of working for change, even when that future feels impossible. That’s not something I’m willing to forgo—especially on days like the ones we’ve had recently.”

War and invasions don’t protect women. And our rights are not a distraction from the bigger issues. Democracy, like hope, is a practice that relies on the foundational belief that all people deserve rights. That all women matter, not just the ones that fit our definition of who and what we want them to be.

Some articles about abortion rights in America

• The right not to be pregnant

• The evidence that Dobbs is harming reproductive health

• What pregnancy does to the bodies of young girls

• All these hysterical women

• The post-Dobbs reality for Black maternal health

• Iowa’s abortion ban is causing a funding crisis in the Midwest

• Amber Thurman’s death in Georgia

• Abortion bans cost the US more than $1 billion

• A story of a third-trimester abortion

The game marked a moment when nostalgia for a fictional past was made manifest. But despite the heavily manufactured atmosphere of charming Americana, the game had its moments of uncomfortable reality.

When the players walked out of the corn stalks, they commented on how uncomfortable and itchy they were. The corn itself was constructed like a Potemkin village, propped up with zip ties and fiberglass rods after being leveled by a recent storm. (Baseball players who tried to eat some of the ears of corn immediately spit the kernels back out, learning the hard way that the majority of the corn in the US is grown for livestock feed and ethanol production.) Guy Fieri even created a hot dog encased in apple pie crust. The metaphor wasn’t even subtle; this was a manufactured version of what we believe America should be. What we so desperately want it to be. And what it never ever has been.

The Field of Dreams was originally built for the 1989 Kevin Costner movie that gave it its name. The movie, based on the book “Shoeless Joe,” is about a man named Ray Kinsella who is on the verge of losing his family farm. After being visited by the ghost of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, the former Chicago White Sox player who was part of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Kinsella builds a baseball field in the middle of his farm. It’s a romantic gesture and a story about family, the past, and the future, all combined with hope in the face of insurmountable odds.

The movie came out right after the farm crisis of the 1980s devastated the Midwest. Many families were left barely hanging onto their land and their lives, hoping for something to save them. The movie was a hit. And the field, which was built specifically for the movie, became a shrine to baseball, nostalgia, masculinity, loss and hope.

The movie, which ties into Kinsella’s dysfunctional relationship with his long-dead father, is about something that never existed. Kinsella could never go back and make his father a better person or fix their relationship. But he could play baseball, one of the few good things they shared. For Kinsella, building the field is an act of redemption, for his childhood. He can’t redeem the past, but he can change the future. He’s not forgetting, he’s rebuilding.

(Just as an aside, it’s pretty ironic that in the movie, Kinsella’s wife, Annie, gives a speech against banning books in schools. Meanwhile, Iowa’s government is currently finding new and creative ways to ban books in schools, while Iowa’s governor gives millions in grants to honor a movie that spoke out against that very thing.)

The game in 2021 was ridiculous. It was like if Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore had reunited to reenact the pottery scene from Ghost for $1,400 a ticket. But the game happened in an America still reeling from the shutdowns and losses from the Covid pandemic. Trump had lost the election. But the January 6 insurrection had shaken the foundations of democracy. People were looking for something good about America, something innate to hold on to, and the best they could come up with was a fiction.

But this fiction has been embraced more closely than any truth about America. When news of the $80 million development broke, fans were quick to criticize the commodification of the site.

Chris Williams, publisher of the Iowa State fan site Cyclone Fanatic, lamented, “Am I the only person who fears all of this growth around the original site is going to ruin the site’s quiet, nostalgic appeal? Hope I am wrong…” He wasn’t the only one.

Dave Dreezsen, managing editor of the Sioux City Journal, tweeted, “Glad I got to visit and experience the site when it was still quiet with a nostalgic feel. All the commercial development has ruined that.”

This wasn’t the first time those concerns were voiced. In 2012, after Go the Distance LLC bought the field, columnists and residents worried about losing that “nostalgic” feel to the site.

The comments spoke to something lost. Of something ruined. But what? The movie is fantasy. Everything about the site and the story is contrived. The field didn’t exist before it was built for the movie. Even the America depicted in the book doesn’t and has never existed.

Expressing nostalgia over the Field of Dreams is a bit like expressing nostalgia for the good old days when children could walk through magical wardrobes and commune with talking lions. The sense of loss over the field is a longing for a fiction — something that never existed. Something manufactured to tell a story about the Midwest that simply isn’t true.

But it’s significant that in America’s heartland, more money is being poured into creating a fiction than preserving actual history.

Field of Dreams fans aren’t the only ones lamenting a past that never existed. Prairie dresses are back in fashion; manufactured barn wood signs are sold in home stores across America. Amish romance fiction has spiked in popularity and is known for depicting a life that is not at all Amish, but an idealized version of a past that never existed. Similarly, hit television shows like “Sweet Magnolias” and “Yellowstone” depict people fighting to defend a romanticized past.

Trad wives on social media model a life that is purely a fiction, contrived as a return to “gender norms” — when women took care of the home, and husbands were the providers. Even that has never been true. Black women have historically been employed outside the home. And those happy white housewives of the 1950s? They were addicted to painkillers.

Country music still dominates our cultural zeitgeist, spinning narratives about the good old places, the good old days. But good old days for whom? Certainly not anyone not white, cisgendered and male.

In a recent op-ed, Tressie McMillan Cottom writes about Obama Derangement Syndrome — obsessing over the idea that the former president should come back and save us. She writes that the America of Barack Obama that some people long to return to doesn’t exist anymore. And even when it did exist, it wasn’t as beautiful and brilliant as we want to remember.

Even the return to the waifish body ideal is emblematic of an America that doesn’t want to deal with the realities and agency of grown women, but the imagined and fetishized innocence of the virgin teen.

We have all lost so much these past few years. And we will continue to lose. Cuts to healthcare, SNAP benefits and foreign aid programs; rollbacks of reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights; deportations violently separating families; government policies supporting wars that target children and families — all of this is devastating our country and our humanity. Even if you are insulated from the consequences of the government’s violence, the economic realities still manifest themselves in the rising cost of living and the stagnant wages, and structural and systemic loneliness.

It is easy in this moment to wish for a simpler time. But what we are grieving isn’t a lost America. It’s a lost ignorance.

Construction to the Field of Dreams has prevented any games from being planned there since 2022. Although for what it’s worth, the mayor of Dyersville anticipates an MLB game in 2026. That might be a bit of wishcasting. There is no evidence that the previous games were good investments for Major League Baseball. Often the cost of creating such an elaborated fiction is more than it’s worth.

This essay is a significantly revised version of an essay I wrote in 2021.

Further Reading:

This was a pretty solid story about the 2021 Field of Dreams game from Defector.

In March, I wrote about nostalgia and Chuck Grassley and what actually happened to America.

An essay that Greenwell wrote and posted to Deadspin the day she quit immediately went viral. The essay, “Adults in the Room,” is a searing indictment not just of the owners of Deadspin, but of the jackal-like American system of capitalism. She noted, “A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart.”

Greenwell’s thesis was that the men taking over her company, who were promising to do business better, were actually doing it worse. Their decisions made no sense. They were cutting back on the kinds of writing that were getting clicks and readership. They were attacking the very people and work that gave their company value. And they were doing it while claiming to be the best in the business.

• Read “The Adults in the Room” by Megan Greenwell

Six years later, this observation could be made about every industry and political system in America, where people trust rich people because they are rich. Not because the rich are any good at business, but because in America, wealth is seen as an indication of worthiness. And wealth for its own sake becomes the goal — crushing creativity, ingenuity, our towns, our families, our democracy, and our lives.

It’s a real “stop hitting yourself” cycle. Companies set up for failure eventually fail; private equity profits.

After her Deadspin experience, Greenwell decided to investigate the broader impacts of private equity. Her book Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream follows four Americans in four different industries. Greenwell shows how private equity is disemboweling our country — acquiring stores, companies, hospitals, housing units, hotels, strip-mining them for profit, then closing them down. The method devastates communities and families. It’s also a really dumb way to make money.

So often in America, the brutality of wealth is hidden by corporate lingo; its impacts are called “the cost of doing business.” But this book shows exactly who and what is at stake. When a Toys R Us closes, it’s not just another big-box store; it’s jobs, it’s the sponsor of the Little League team, it’s a mother putting her partner back through school and supporting her family. By focusing on the human impact, Greenwell shows the real costs.

And there is hope. The book also shows how people who get creative can keep their businesses open, benefit their communities, and create jobs. Greenwell offers us a more humane way to think about wealth.

We spoke about her book, the media, and how we solve the problem of wealth in an increasingly stratified country.

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Lyz Lenz: Why did you decide to write a book about private equity?

Megan Greenwell: The promise of private equity is that it can take failing businesses and turn them around. The industry talks about itself like the people in it are superheroes, swooping in to save distressed assets. And it is true that they target a lot of industries where there are pretty serious challenges.

One of the industries I write about in the book is local newspapers. Their problems were not created by the private equity industry. There were so many catastrophic business decisions long before private equity entered the picture, so the promise makes sense on a lot of levels. The flip side of that promise is that they're also promising money for pensioners. A lot of the money that's invested in private equity funds comes from public pension programs.

So the promise is on one hand, we're saving these companies, and on the other hand, we’re the caretakers of public pension money so all these retired nurses and firefighters and teachers are going to be able to retire and support themselves based off this money that they've earned from our funds.

Turning bad companies into good companies, great, wonderful. Who doesn't want that? Helping public employees retire. Great, wonderful. Who doesn't want that?

The devil, as with so many things, is in the details — but that is why I think a lot of people are attracted to what private equity says it's doing.

LL: What were some of the things that have stuck with you the most that you discovered while you were researching?

MG: I knew private equity was really powerful politically and in society at large. I didn't realize until I crunched the numbers that 88% of representatives and senators on Capitol Hill take money from private equity — that's across parties. And so the extent to which these folks are really on the dole is pretty striking. People often ask me, why isn't there more of an appetite to do something about this system? And that's the answer. Nobody on Capitol Hill has an incentive to do something about this system.

LL: It feels complicated because yes, maybe private equity can keep a newspaper open, but at what cost?

MG: A thing that people don't really understand is when newspapers started struggling, many of them were still making 20% profit margins.

Now, those were significantly lower than they had been in the past. So people were absolutely correct that there was a downward trend, but the idea that in 2008, 2010, newspapers were on their deathbed is just not supported by the facts.

What private equity firms did is they sort of capitalized on that panic. And they said, great, we will save them. But what saving them meant was stripping them for parts, making a lot of money for the private equity firms and leaving the newspapers without much, if any, local coverage.

Not only do they not save the day, but they're not even taking on any risk because of the way the system is structured.

You end up with this division of incentives where the private equity firm is supposed to be working on behalf of the company they've acquired, but the incentives are split in such a way that they can make theirs regardless of whether the company lives or dies.

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LL: Could you talk a little bit about that human toll?

MG: It is really so devastating to workers, to communities, to tenants, to patients, all of that. I think Toys R Us is the story that carries the least moral outrage in the book because fundamentally it is retail. But like you say, Toys R Us was an institution in many, many, many communities. It was a place that multiple generations would go to buy toys. The Toys R Us would sponsor the little league team in town.

Obviously the private equity firm that is based hundreds or thousands of miles away has no interest in sponsoring the Little League team. In many cases, they’ve never even been to that community. This is literally just one of a thousand widgets they're overseeing.

The woman I wrote about in the Toys R Us section was supporting a family of five because her husband was in school. I think we have this stereotype of people who work jobs like retail, that they are replaceable cogs in a machine and that they're just taking whatever job they can get. Here, the opposite was true. This woman had picked out Toys R Us as the single best option to support her family. She was an incredibly dedicated, high-performing worker. She made many of her best friends working there. She got a Toys R Us tattoo with a bunch of her colleagues.

Because the company went under, not only was she laid off, she was told she wasn't going to get the severance that was promised in her contract. All of a sudden you have a family of five who is at serious risk of homelessness because she is the sole provider for this family.

LL: I also was struck by the way private equity works in housing.

MG: I knew from the beginning that private equity was in housing, but a couple of years ago, most of the talk about private equity in housing was about mobile homes.

I write about this apartment complex in Northern Virginia. It's five buildings. It's over 2000 units, and it's a lot of African immigrants and refugees living there, and it's just a massive, massive space.

They have their own bus depot for public buses because it's just so many people. And that complex got bought by a private equity firm, and all of a sudden, this is affecting the entire community because it's just so many people. And so a stunning percentage of all the eviction proceedings going on in the city of Alexandria, outside DC, where this apartment complex is, were from this one complex. Now all of a sudden, you have massive political problems because all sorts of government resources are getting swallowed up just by this one company's desire to evict a lot of people. And you have thousands of many of the most vulnerable people in your community who are now facing potentially living on the street.

The extent to which private equity has its tentacles in housing, every sector of housing cannot be overstated, nor can the effect on some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

LL: And the reality of it all is they don't profit off our success. They profit off our individual misery.

MG: How could a private equity company possibly make money if they're not serving customers? And the answer is essentially over the last several decades, we've turned into an economy where you make money not by making things or providing services, but by making money. It’s called financialization: Basically you make money through tax maneuvers and bonuses and savvy investments, and you do that not only if you're a bank; you also do that if you are a landlord, a hospital company, whatever it is. And that's what made me so obsessed with this system: they have their ways of making money regardless of what the companies that they own are up to, how they're performing. And I would argue that that's not a symptom of a healthy economic system.

LL: There is a real question of, what do we owe people, and how should we talk about what we owe people?

MG: Private equity firms are correct that it is very difficult to make money off a rural hospital. That's absolutely true. And also, okay, so does that mean rural communities just don't get hospitals?

One of the most surprising parts of reporting this entire book was when I was talking to this guy who works as the managing partner at this consulting firm that is the preeminent consulting firm for rural hospitals. When they're in trouble, they call him. He doesn't tell them to strip all their services. He tells them, in most cases, to provide more services. So maybe a hospital can't make money off the maternity ward. But they can offer specialized procedures. Then they’re underwriting the maternity ward.

There is an interesting story from Oskaloosa, Iowa, not too far from you. This hospital, Mahaska Health, that's run by a former Dallas Cowboys linebacker, Kevin DeRonde — when all of the hospitals in their area started laying people off because they were panicked about the effects of covid, DeRonde did exactly the opposite. He scooped up all the people who were getting laid off elsewhere so they wouldn't leave the community. And what ended up happening is he went from running a struggling hospital to now a solidly profitable hospital.

That is something that a private equity firm would never do. It is so contrary to the fundamental business model. But in this case, and in many other cases, it resulted in actually making more money. So yeah, I think that's one point I've really been trying to hit: You don't have to be Karl Marx to think this system is broken, right? You can want hospitals to make money and also realize that this is not the way to do it.

LL: There's a conventional wisdom that if something doesn't make money, then you just stop doing it. But when you do that, you quash creativity.

MG: And I think what has happened with private equity companies is the company then does not have the wiggle room to be creative in terms of finding new solutions. So if we take the media example, where does the New York Times make its money to underwrite investigative reporting? Games and cooking. This is just a fact of the industry.

LL: After investing so much time and seeing this bleak capitalist landscape, what's the hope that you're holding on to?

MG: A lot of the work has to be in reinventing these industries, because private equity did not create the problems in any of these industries. They profited from those problems, but they didn't create them themselves.

And so that means that people are going to have to do the work of building a healthier industry in whatever. To use the media example, there's all sorts of interesting work that's being done on this front. So there are worker-owned cooperatives. There are interesting explorations of what public funding of media that doesn't violate the First Amendment could look like. There are this wave of nonprofit, local startups, many of them funded by the American Journalism Project, that are at this point routinely winning Pulitzers, breaking big stories and becoming financially sustainable.

You need a lot of people to do a lot of hard, slow work for that to pay off. But my argument is the hard, slow work is the only thing you can choose between becoming part of a fight or just rolling over and playing dead. And I know what I would choose, and I hope many other people choose that path too.

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See Lyz in NYC tonight!

👋 Hi friends! Tickets are still available for the Red State Rager to support abortion access in Iowa! I hope to see you there.

📅 When: Wednesday, June 11 · 7-9 pm EDT.

🍸 Where: 4 Berry Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211

🎟️ How do I buy tickets? Through this Eventbrite link!

During the collapse of Twitter as it devolved into the shit-posting morass of X, I found myself navigating to the dating subreddits — ones for men, ones for women, ones that decry the behavior of men, and especially the ones that bitch about the behaviors of women.

Here anonymous strangers gripe about apps. About loneliness. About heartbreak and companionship. These stories mesmerize me because they feel like kicking over the rotting log of America. Revealing everyone’s loneliness, isolation, and struggle, all presented in forums for advice, ridicule, and desperate efforts to help and to form human connections. These aren’t the glossy, Instagrammable lives of an influencer; this is gross reality, horribly written, emotionally stunted, and above all, raw as hell.

In every post’s comments, there is always the advice to quit. To just stop. To drop out of the pursuit of romance altogether, deliberately or out of sheer exhaustion. For women, it often results from rage — the relentless objectification and emotional toll. For men, it seems to be more of a resignation. Women are too difficult. Dating is too difficult. Communication is difficult. Easier to lift weights. Easier to spend time on Reddit.

It’s hard to quantify. But dating, relationships, marriage, they all do seem harder now. The ubiquity of AI has made every word and interaction feel stilted and hard to parse. Are we building genuine connection or conversing with a bot? Has an overreliance on smartphones made us incapable of meeting good people in real life, or are we bad at picking dates? Have gender dynamics been mined for outrage bait, making it harder for us to see people as humans, or are we just deeply reprehensible to the opposite sex? Is marriage hard or is the collapse of safety nets hard? How do you wrench happiness out of the cold, miserly hands of capitalism? How do you be less lonely in a world with billion-dollar industries designed to profit from loneliness?

This is where Melissa Febos comes in. Her new book The Dry Season explores her year of intentional celibacy. It’s a bit of a funny premise. One year? Amateur stuff — make it five, make it relatable. But Febos realizes the humor in the conceit. Her goal is not to be relatable, but to mine the depths of our cultural biases and personal understanding. And this time, she’s doing it with love, connection, and relationships.

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Febos came to her year of celibacy after a disappointing one-night stand that left her wondering, in true Reddit form, “Am I the asshole?” A serial monogamist, Febos describes herself as a hungry ghost, with an insatiable appetite for connection and romance. But these appetites made her, like a ghost, a bit of a pest. Using lessons she’d learned in recovery, Febos decided she needed a detox. What if she stopped seeking romance and instead made space for other things in her life?

Unlike other modern celibacy movements like incels or the 4B movement in Korea, where women refuse to engage in relationships out of a punitive desire to hurt men, Febos comes to her year of celibacy with an “enough already” attitude.

She’s also seeking to find a way to live as a woman and a writer with deep ambitions in a culture where those ambitions are often sublimated and sidelined in favor of marriage, relationships, and children.

Every single, childfree ambitious woman has had to put up with the condescending reassurances of their friends letting them know that while publishing a book is great, children are the greatest joy. Or that they wouldn’t trade success for their spouse. In 2025, it feels like many people have given up trying to have it all and are just trying to survive.

Febos is a queer woman, but she operates out of a heterosexual dynamic of relationships. Part of the question driving her year of celibacy is profoundly political: Can a woman be happy? Can a woman be alone?

Because our deepest intimacies are deeply political. We cannot separate our bodies from the world they exist in.

In this context, Febos is trying to find a new model of love, ambition, and living. One where joy and passion escape from the cultural pressure cooker like a steam. Throughout the book, Febos examines models of women who were intentionally celibate; Margery Kempe, Hildegard von Bingen, and the feminist separatists of the 1960s. The celibacy of nuns and mystics was often a way for women to opt out of the repressive and often deadly dynamics of marriage and childbirth. Febos, too, is looking for an escape. Heterosexual dynamics have trapped us; what more can there be when we opt out and find a new model?

What Febos finds at the end of it all is, of course, herself. And all of herself, not just the good and enjoyable parts, but the ones that have hurt people she loved. She writes of her years in a particularly difficult relationship she calls the “Maelstrom,” noting that that for good and for bad, “The manner in which I had loved people was a symptom of how I moved through the world and understood my place in it.”

In a profile for the New York Times, Febos’ mother, Nancy Sowell, a therapist, observes that her daughter learned, “you don’t have to be so defensive in the world. You can afford to have your heart be open because there’s somebody home inside who always loves you.”

While she is writing about a phase of her life nine years before the book’s publication, it could not have come at a more timely cultural moment. Increasingly, people are opting out. In 2024, the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life found that “only 56 percent of Gen Z adults—and 54 percent of Gen Z men—said they were involved in a romantic relationship at any point during their teenage years. This represents a remarkable change from previous generations, where teenage dating was much more common. More than three-quarters of Baby Boomers (78 percent) and Generation Xers (76 percent) report having had a boyfriend or girlfriend as teenagers.”

This generational opting-out has led to a lot of hand-wringing about the future of families and babies, and about male loneliness. A kind of cultural hysteria over what will happen if the marriage market changes. Beneath all that panic lies the fear of what could happen if women are happy on their own terms.

The Dry Season is an exploration of the terrifying power of a self-actualized woman, one who can be alone. One who is not always in the throes of fixing herself through serums, self-help, a new relationship, or a TikTok-inspired fitness challenge, but who is happy with herself and her life, with the work she’s chosen and the life she’s living. A woman who has the ability to say no to the shitty systems and compulsory heterosexual dynamics that are thrust upon us through politics and culture. She is not taking the scraps thrown at her and calling it good enough because she is too afraid to ask for more.

It’s radical. It’s profound. It can scare all of us. Because who are we if we aren’t defining and validating ourselves by external relationships? Are we happy?

Searching the Reddit forums every night before I sleep is a reminder that even now, even as our systems collapse and the world we thought we knew reveals itself to be something else completely, it doesn’t stop us from being humans, desperately seeking new narratives for our happiness.

• You can buy The Dry Season wherever books are sold. I highly recommend ordering from your local independent bookstore or BookShop.org.

• I also wrote more deeply about the AI-driven enshittification of dating apps and the vulturistic capitalism that thrives on our loneliness.

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The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives returned for its second season on May 15. In the first week, the show had over 5 million views, and per Disney the show has held a top spot on the Hulu Top 15 Today list since Season 2 premiered.

The show’s formula is a familiar one: beautiful women gossiping, fighting, and navigating messy romantic relationships.

The show came to be after one of the women, Taylor Frankie Paul, blew up TikTok with her revelation that the loosely defined group of Mormon mom influencers who call themselves “MomTok,” previously known for their hair extensions and dance moves, had been engaging in “soft swinging.” Which is basically everything but intercourse.

The crack in the perfect veneer of the cultivated life of online Mormon wives made the women stars. And the first season showed the women struggling in their relationships with one another as well as with fame, faith, and their husbands.

The first season felt like comfort food with a twist. It combined the familiar script of low-stakes domestic drama set against the novelty of a life steeped in the world of the Church of Latter Day Saints — with bartenders mixing fizzy soda drinks, a scandal over a Chippendales visit, and the women fighting over who does and does not get invited to the baby blessing ceremonies.

In the second season, it’s harder to ignore the narrative tension of the women of the show coming up against the strictures of their religion. If the first season was easy to write off as the antics of silly Mormon wives, the second season feels much darker — because the reality for American women is much darker.

As the current administration rolls out plan after plan to get women to marry, have children, and stay out of the workforce, and as news stories reveal the depths and devastation of abortion bans and cuts to SNAP benefits, it’s become much more obvious that the strictures of patriarchal religion are closing in around all of our necks — whether we believe in them or not.

It’s harder to say, “Oh, that’s just the Mormons,” and write off the drama as niche religious extremism when so many of the show’s themes hit close to home.

The show’s stars, as they reveal in the first season, are the breadwinners in their families, and the power that comes with that capital threatens the balance of their relationships. One MomTokker, Jennifer Affleck,* is married to a man who is still completing his medical training. (*Ed. note: It’s confusing but we think there’s no relation.)

Affleck’s husband is financially dependent on her, but he treats her in a way designed to undermine her contributions and independence. She states in the show, “Within the Mormon Church it’s very expected for the women to be submissive to their husbands. But for me, whether this helps me become a stronger member of the church or maybe turn away from the church, I think in order for this marriage to work, we have to be equals.”

Affleck’s predicament can’t be written off as the result of an extremist religion. As more women enter the workforce and have families, mothers rarely get time to clock out. Despite research showing that fathers are doing more chores than previous generations, working mothers have less leisure time than working fathers. Additionally, even when they work more and earn more than their male partners, mothers still do more childcare and housework. Some research suggests that women who are the breadwinners in their homes are more likely to be victims of domestic violence. A working father gets to clock out; a working mother never does.

The women are also constantly slamming into the limits of who and what they can be inside the world they inhabit. Taylor Frankie Paul finds herself at odds with her parents after she learns her partner and the father of her youngest child, Dakota Mortensen, lied to her about his relationships with other women. Paul’s parents take Mortensen’s side, blaming Paul for not trying to make it work with him. It’s a brutal part of the second season that speaks volumes about the world these women live in.

Americans love a TV show that reveals the depths of patriarchy without ever naming the villain. Reality shows that deal with love, betrayal, and reunification are insanely popular because it’s easier to watch and judge an individual’s actions than to question the systems in which they occur. Why is the pursuit of matrimony a competition that pits women against women, men against men, and sells ad spots on Hulu? Why is the performance of traditional motherhood a titillating television show in a culture that refuses to do anything to materially support motherhood? Those questions are less fun than watching Botoxed babes choreograph a TikTok dance.

And it’s easier to judge women’s choices when you can believe women actually have choices. But the second season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives reveals how few choices the women have if they don’t want to surrender their faith or their families. And they face enormous pressure for wanting just a bit of the freedom their money should be able to buy them.

The women of MomTok aren’t different from previous generations of women who have been pressured by their faith, family or limited resources into staying at home with their children. Women stuck in this role have always found creative outlets. In the rural Midwest, housewives stuck at home became stars of AM radio. Frustrated and isolated in the 1960s, Betty Friedan called this pent-up frustration “the problem with no name,” and it led to a revolution. In the early 2000s, when the gender pay gap was closing and it was easier to pretend women were staying at home out of choice, stay-at-home moms became stars of the blogging world.

Same problem, different era. Faced with the isolation in the sacred space of motherhood, women turned to TikTok for a creative outlet and found viral fame. Now, the women of MomTok are even richer. But the money only highlights their lack of options. You can be the breadwinner and still never get a break.

Trapped in the lucrative performance of their lives, these women are not getting a break, nor are they having much fun. They have to juggle the performance of their friendships, the performance of motherhood, being a good wife and still bringing home that paycheck. Reality TV is rarely accused of realism, but these Mormon wives might be a little too much like us.

America was unraveling, and so was my marriage. But it made sense to me. Some things had to be destroyed. Some bridges shouldn’t be built. I wrote at the time, “I don’t believe in bridges anymore. I don’t even believe in fixing all broken things. Instead, what I believe is that we need to stare deep into the darkness of loss and to see the divine.”

When the book was published in 2019, everyone wanted to ask me: How can we win red states back? For me, the question was beside the point.

Dividing America into red and blue, assigning moral and political value to places and people through an electoral lens, misses the reality of what it means to live in America. As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said, “We need to find the first person who put that red-blue map up and beat the hell out of them for putting that on, because it divided the country.”

Around this time, everyone was reading Hillbilly Elegy, a book that purported to explain America through the lens of white rural grievance. It offered a neoliberal bootstrap solution to the problems of America, blaming individuals for their own poverty and arguing that government assistance doesn’t help anyone.

Liberals believed the book offered insight into the rural Trump voter. Conservatives loved that it confirmed all their biases.

The premise of Hillbilly Elegy relies on strategic amnesia. Gone is the culture of Appalachia, its joys, and its beauty. Gone is any acknowledgment of the strip-mining of land and natural resources, which left companies rich and residents poor. The book ignores the legacy of Jim Crow laws, the struggle for civil rights, and the long history of disenfranchising the working poor.

That book sold because it offered something for nothing: a poor kid makes good and says those who don’t have only themselves to blame.

Now, in 2025, the author of Hillbilly Elegy is now the co-architect of our disenfranchisement. And here we all are again. Nothing has been learned.

This month, I sold another book of my own. What that means is that for the past seven months, I have been working on a book proposal. My editor Libby Burton, who also edited This American Ex-Wife, has purchased that book and it will be published through Dey House, which is a division of HarperCollins. Libby is an actual genius, and I am thrilled to be working with her again. But the book itself is not written yet. I’ll spend the next year and some change reporting, researching and writing it. As with my first book, I’ll be doing so as our nation feels like it’s coming undone.

The book is titled The Middle Kingdom and will seek to answer questions like, What does democracy look like? What the hell happened to America? And how do we survive?

My agent, the incredible Anna Sproul Latimer, described it as Somebody Somewhere but for the future of democracy.

The book is a call for collective action, for radical mutual aid, for loving this land in all its contradictions — from its deep problems to its weird Jell-O salads. From gas station pizza to ranch dressing to the secret feminist history of butter cows, the Midwest is a land that finds its way back, again and again, to community. I will argue for loving this heartland while envisioning an America bound not by red and blue, but by community, potlucks, and shared stories.

Recently, a former reader told me they were too busy focusing on the future of democracy to read my “little personal stories.” I am not entitled to anyone’s loyalty. But the note bothered me because it implied that our personal stories, our lives, the messy intersections of community and systems, are somehow different from democracy.

They aren’t.

The man keeping his rural fire department together. The woman leaving her husband. The woman refusing to marry. Butter cows. Gas stations. Running an abortion fund. Or running across Iowa. This is democracy. Care. Love. Community. These are radically political acts.

Why the Midwest?

Listen, I grew up in Texas, so I know this country is big and there are a lot of regions, each with their own personality, problems, and potential. I don’t write about the Midwest to devalue other places.

But I do think there is something special about this region.

For conservatives, the Midwest is the last great agricultural stronghold in a country founded by white agrarian settlers — a site of nostalgia. For descendants of oppressed people — from Ellis Island immigrants to Black families fleeing Jim Crow — the region is an ancestral refuge. And for millions of middle-class Americans, it represents the last glimmer of the American Dream.

During the economic boom years of the 20th century, when working people still had a chance at upward mobility, the Midwest was where that mobility happened. In cities like Detroit and Chicago, high-paying manufacturing jobs and affordable real estate were within reach. Like the dream itself, that promise still flickers in our collective memory.

What do all these examples have in common? Belonging. Americans on the left and right idealize the Midwest because it was, within living memory, a place where they felt they belonged, or could belong. Today, most Americans are boxed out of power and opportunity, but once, in this place, they had it all.

We want the America of hotdish and bridge clubs, bowling leagues and baby showers. We want to run into friends on the street and dip pizza into ranch dressing at the local Pizza Ranch.

That’s the fantasy: simple belonging.

Of course, the reality of the Midwest is far from paradise. It is a land of profound contradictions. It is the place where George Floyd’s murder sparked an international movement for civil rights, and it’s a breeding ground for white supremacist militias. Iowa was the second state in the nation to legalize gay marriage; it was also one of the first to ban LGBTQ books in schools and restrict gender-affirming care for trans kids. In Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer has been a groundbreaking governor, so some of her constituents plotted to kidnap and kill her. Barack Obama won the Midwest, but so did Donald Trump.

The Midwest is Tim Walz, the progressive governor of Minnesota; it’s Kim Reynolds, the hard-right governor of Iowa. It’s Kansas, with a conservative legislature and voters who rejected an abortion ban, and Illinois, where Gov. J.B. Pritzker is rising to prominence as one of the only courageous Democrats left. It is a place of bounty and brutality. And it has somehow simultaneously become a metaphor for what it means to be a “normal” American.

So, for the next couple of years, this is my project. But I will not be abandoning the newsletter. The reality of being an independent journalist in America means I cannot live on book money alone. Very few writers not named Stephen King actually can.

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I need this newsletter. But not just because of the money. I also need you. My last book, This American Ex-Wife, was made better by the conversations we had while I was writing the book. And I know The Middle Kingdom will benefit from them, too. Because it’s not bootstraps we need, but belonging.