You can watch the interview online.

My favorite moment was after the cameras turned off, when Maria pulled me behind the set while the Indigo Girls played. She had something she wanted to ask me.

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And then one year, around the holidays, I made a mistake in my schedule and needed some accommodation. Could he please swap weekends? After all, for years hadn’t I done that for him, for his mother, for his family? That one weekend he wanted to take the kids to the family farm because the apples were ripe, and hadn’t I been so helpful in making that happen? And the wedding? Could I just have this one weekend?

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These are paywalled because, well, this newsletter is a full-time job. And your money creates jobs for me and Isabella jobs in a state where there aren’t many jobs in the media. It also helps us be independent in a time when independent voices are being silenced.

Today, I am not paywalling the essay. Please read, and subscribe if you can.

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I saw it like so many other people, on a video on my phone. I was on Instagram and a friend had reposted a video of Jorge Gonzalez, an employee of the Bread Garden in Iowa City, being thrown to the ground and arrested by two men, identified in the video as ICE agents.

The Bread Garden is a Whole Foods-like market located on the pedestrian mall. The Bread Garden is a central hub for the small college town. At any moment of any day, the patio is occupied by students doing homework or professors eating sandwiches and flipping through pages of books. Across the mall is a playground, newly redone with rubber padding and colorful climbing equipment.

Gonzalez is an immigrant whose son is an American citizen. He came to Iowa earlier this year to join his partner, to start a family, and to begin a new life. He reported regularly to ICE and was being monitored with an ankle bracelet. If they wanted to detain him, they knew where he lived. They knew how to find him and bring him in without violence or intimidation.

Instead, plainclothes officers, who did not identify themselves, went into the crowded market right at the beginning of the lunch rush, attacked Gonzalez, threw him to the ground, and arrested him.

My son saw the video and said, “Isn’t that illegal?” Yes, I said, but no one can enforce the laws when it’s the police breaking them. That night, during their nightly phone call, I overheard my kids’ dad tell my son that Gonzalez must be a bad guy, must have done something bad.

I didn’t shout, “Whatever helps you sleep at night, asshole.” But I wanted to. Maybe I will next time. There seem to be no rules to the cruelty; maybe there should be no more rules to my civility.

Iowa City is sometimes, jokingly or not so jokingly, referred to as the People’s Republic of Johnson County. It’s one of the only safe Democratic strongholds in a state that still wants to believe it’s purple, but is in fact, deeply, deeply red. I have friends who talk about how they want to move somewhere better, somewhere bluer, somewhere safer.

Gonzalez isn’t the first person arrested without cause in the middle of the day, by men not in uniform. He won’t be the last. And this is happening in places that didn’t vote for Trump, that protested him, that held and hold demonstrations and rallies.

Johnson County, where Iowa City is located, is where Jon Green, the county supervisor, defied the governor’s orders and refused to fly the flag at half-staff for Charlie Kirk. In defense of Green’s stance, another supervisor, Mandi Remington, stated, “Johnson county is home to a diverse community, including many who were the direct targets of Kirk’s rhetoric. To honor him with our flags would be to dismiss the harm he caused to our neighbors and constituents.”

“Supervisor Green’s stance affirms that our county will not elevate voices that work to strip others of dignity, freedom, and belonging. I believe this decision is a principled one, rooted in respect for the people of Johnson county and the constitutional values we are sworn to protect.”

Nowhere is safe.

That’s the point of these public arrests. They’re a show of force. A statement that is supposed to make us afraid.

These aren’t just arrests; they are disappearings by an authoritarian and secret police that answers to no one except the whims of an increasingly vindictive president who is going after his political opponents, weaponizing our government against us.

On Friday, I went to a protest against ICE and I heard Gonzalez’s partner speak about the violence of losing him, of what it means to have someone you love to just be taken away in the middle of the day with no answers, no recourse. The unknowing of it. The confusion. The understanding that this is the government, and there is no one to appeal to. No higher authority. There is only us. Us to stand up to this.

After the rally I spoke with the lawmakers in attendance, some of whom want to plan trainings so people can interfere with ICE next time. So they can, if not stop them, stand up to them. And I spoke with other politicians who talked about the harassment they’re receiving for even speaking out against it. Not just online, either; they’re the targets of vitriol from their neighbors, who might come up to a politician’s mother at church and tell her to get her kid to shut up. Somehow worse are the people who encourage moderation, the ones who are supposed to be the leaders, who say, “It’s not that bad. Just be civil. Just be polite.”

After the protest, I walked to get lunch with a friend, and her phone pinged. There had been another arrest, Ian Roberts, the superintendent of the Des Moines Public Schools, who was born in Guyana and grew up in Brooklyn. He was also an Olympic athlete.

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After the paywall is a little essay on what I think the point of telling the truth is and why I refuse to modulate my voice. There is also a cornucopia of links from me and Isabella, who helps me with the newsletter.

This week, as I was casually scrolling the internet in the morning while reading my morning dose of newsletters, I saw a post on Substack notes chiding newsletter writers for their tone when talking about masculinity in America.

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“She’s okay,” he wrote.

But she’s not. Not really. None of us are.

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This is a huge milestone for us for all the normal reasons. Somehow, the baby that had to be vacuumed from me is making jokes about the Epstein list and giving me the finger. She’s almost as tall as me.

She’s exchanged pull-up diapers for pull-ups on the bar. She’s just two months away from getting her school permit. And already her days are filled with practices and activities that have nothing to do with me. So much of her life these days is not for me to write about. It’s her life and her journey, and I am so lucky I get to tag along.

In so many ways, I became a writer because of my kids. I had been writing for years before they were born. I’d been working for different websites for years and went to graduate school all in the years before she was born. But I found my voice when I had my kids. I am not saying this is necessary for all writers. I am saying, for me, having my daughter fundamentally changed something in me. I think it made me hungrier and sharpened my sense of purpose.

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

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He points to trends that indicate that marriage rates are up, or at least divorce rates are down. This has been true for years. It was a pattern I pointed out in my book This American Ex-Wife. And I noted that the moral panic over divorce was highly exaggerated.

Studies continue to show that societies that pay women and have liberal divorce laws actually have higher rates of marital longevity and birth rates. Because, when women are given economic independence and not coerced into marriage or coerced into staying, they have fewer reasons to leave. It would make sense then that American millennials, who waited longer to marry and who entered the workforce with more gender parity than past generations, would have lower divorce rates.

The problem is that Wilcox, who is conservative and part of an organization whose stated goal is reversing same-sex marriage, doesn’t see these advancements as pro-marriage and pro-family. He blithely ignores that a lot of the stabilization of marriage rates is happening because of women’s improved economic empowerment and most states’ relatively liberal divorce laws.

Also, the increase in same-sex marriages and the number of individuals identifying as LGBTQ points to partnership trends that affirm people’s identities, rather than shoving them into miserable heteronormative boxes. Of course, “married homes” seem statistically better for children; that’s because they tend to have more financial resources. But instead of arguing for giving families health care, child care, and a social safety net, Wilcox continuously pushes the line that marriage is good for the kids.

I am beginning to think that people who argue for marriage as the solution to our social ills don’t really care about our social ills all that much. They just care about enforcing regressive gender roles.

Marriage and society as Wilcox think of them — shaped by a more regressive view of gender and with a focus on male economic empowerment — are actually detrimental the actual rates of marriage. You want higher marriage rates? Let women have choices. But no, that’s never the answer.

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I worked there for a few months. My job was to write a marketing blog about the great things people could find in the archives. In “other duties as assigned,” I sometimes had to pretend to be the customer service manager (there was none), when people called screaming about their cards being billed for a service they thought they had canceled. We had one customer service representative, Natalie, who was a temp. And everyone in the office had to take turns pretending to be the manager. My co-worker was three years older than I was and thought that there was definitely a JFK cover-up, and when I teased her about it, she cried. We were both married to engineers and bought homes at the same time, but when I moved, I went dumpster diving for boxes. When she moved, she packed all her belongings in plastic totes because she believed her things were too precious to risk in cardboard.

When people called yelling because they were legitimately being conned by bad business practices, our real boss was completely unavailable, sitting in his office across the hall, occasionally having meetings where he’d tell us to “think big and bold!” But it was a website that archived newspapers in Cedar Rapids. The only thing they seemed to be innovating was how to dodge angry customers.

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The tedious righteousness and the accusations of who is an abuser and who isn’t leak through every conversation about the list. But what is missing, what has always been missing from this conversation, are the voices of Epstein’s accusers.

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

But this conspiracy has never been about justice or about protecting women from abusive men in power. It has always been a political gotcha — another way for political parties to talk about morality without exhibiting any honor. It was politically expedient for President Donald Trump and his base. And now it has become politically expedient for Democrats.

And in the meantime, the real victims are lost in the political huffing and puffing. Everyone wants a political win, but no one wants to listen to women.

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Turns out, it was the latter.

And the internet exploded. Memes, tweets, videos, and Instagram posts all seized on the absurdity of the situation.

I’ve become very agnostic about cheating as I’ve gotten older. I think that life and relationships are complicated, and there are worse things that you can do to a person.

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Selfishly, this makes me happy because attending the rally was the first official research trip I took as I began writing my next book, The Middle Kingdom. The book is a reclamation of the Midwest and its culture of mutual aid and stubborn care, told through floods, farm bankruptcies, Kum & Go parking lots, hot dish, and butter cows. Essentially, an antidote to Hillbilly Elegy.

I was particularly struck by one comment by Meghan, who observed that America often “manufactures [an] anxiety of scarcity in a time of abundance.”

While the midweek and dingus emails are free, the Sunday emails are for subscribers only. If’ you’ve been meaning to subscribe today is the day! The hot socialist summer sale ends tomorrow!

Get 20% off for 1 year

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Normally, I have some thoughts or a little essay before the links, but right now I have no thoughts.

I will, however, remind you that I am running a hot socialist summer sale! And if you’ve been meaning to subscribe for these elite links harvested from the internet and brought to you by me and my assistant editor, Isabella, then today is your day.

Get 20% off for 1 year

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I wrote about Not My Type and the gendered violence of 2025’s America for MSNBC.

A woman is not a person, not in this America. Not now, when centuries of ground gained have been ripped out from under us. Our rights — the offering voters sacrificed because of “economic insecurity.” Our dignity — taken because a generation of lonely men couldn’t have access to our bodies.

For Carroll to publish her narrative in this America is a violently hopeful act. In the book, she asserts her control over a story that has threatened to subsume her, and us all. It’s not an easy peace or a perfect triumph, as this profile of Carroll in The Cut reveals, but it’s a dogged persistence of truth, life, and narrative. When I wonder how to keep going, this is the kind of model I look for and look to.

I read the book this week, and it oscillates between asides about fashion and trial transcripts. There are glorious pictures, and there is tragedy. It’s infuriating to read Trump’s lawyers trying to slut-shame Carroll, but it’s also fun to see her responses. The book, like Carroll, is a bit erratic, frustrating, fun, and wholly her own.

The violence of the state against immigrants and women reveals that the American anxiety that led us to this moment was never really about the economy — we are talking about racialized and gendered capital. Understanding the fight means understanding by what and whom Trump and his administration feel most threatened: immigrants, especially people of color; LGBTQ people rejecting rigid conservative notions of gender; and women refusing the roles of wife and mother.

This was, and is, about social order. An authoritarian realignment that seeks to take the people and bodies deemed aberrant and force them out or force them back into the places they belong.

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Yes, I do. Back in 2019 (the night before I questioned Joe Biden at an LGBTQ presidential forum), I had dinner with the journalist Olivia Nuzzi. She was a delightful dinner companion, patiently listening to me discuss concerns about my career and accepting the lack of late-night vegan options in Cedar Rapids. At one point, she made a joke about having a WikiFeet.

I consider myself criminally online, but I didn’t know what WikiFeet was.

She pulled out her phone and showed me a photo-sharing website dedicated to feet pictures of celebrities and celebrity lites. It’s a foot fetish website, but publicly sourced. Every foot gets a ranking; Olivia has 4.38 stars.

“I bet you are on here too,” she said. And there I was, with a 2.75 rating.

I was furious. A 2.75? Why wasn’t I ranked higher? Why did someone go through all the trouble to take my pictures from my Instagram, put them on the World Wide Web, then give me a mediocre ranking?

If you are assigned “female” at birth, you have one of two options for what you can be: hot or smart.

At birth, I was assigned “smart.” My first pair of glasses came six years later. But the label didn’t protect me.

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You can read the full essay here.

I also had the joy of interviewing Melissa at Prairie Lights in Iowa City. I spoke with Melissa about her work, her perspective on religious saints, and living in a female body. I also asked her about why she remains committed to living in Iowa, a red state that is openly hostile to LGBTQ rights.

Melissa Febos on existing in the world as a female body…

I've been a feminist my whole life. I've been queer my whole life, and there was part of me that thought that I was inured to heterosexual conditioning to some extent, because I had done so much fucking consciousness-raising in therapy and politically through my work. So I think if you had suggested to me that my relationships were still sort of functioning in a sort of compulsory heterosexual model, I would've been offended.

But of course, that's exactly what I got to where I was like, something is amiss. And as has happened many, many times before in my life, the sort of curtain pulled back and I was like, “You again, patriarchy.”

Lessons from a year of celibacy…

One of the greatest takeaways of that year was the experience of feeling like I reentered my body and sort of moving from a body for others to a first-person body, to actually feeling embodiment.

I think one of the consequences of being oriented to the gaze of other people is self-objectification.

I was always looking at myself through other people's eyes. And when I removed that, suddenly I felt so much more present in the world and for the kind of sensual pleasures that had nothing to do with my interactions with other bodies. They had to do with my interaction with a perfectly ripe piece of fruit on the right day, or sleeping in on clean sheets or eating pickles in the middle of the night, or the erotic experience of becoming attuned to my own body and what it wanted and delivering on that in a way that no other person ever could.

On everything being political…

Everything we do, from sex, to how we do our shopping, to how we treat other people in various contexts, is an extension of who we are. And I think in many ways, that's the point of the book, is that it's all connected. And we have this way of talking about our lives, where we silo — we love categories.

And there are really grave consequences for that. And we talk about “my sex life”, “my dating life,” “my work life,” “my home life” as if they're separate lives. It's all the same thing. And the way we do all of those things are in conversation with each other.

And so, when I stopped putting all so much of my energy in this one area of life, that energy got distributed in every single other area of my life. And I thought, oh, I can bring the same passion and presence and sense of the erotic to my friendships and my family relationships and my activism and my creative life.

On religion and spirituality…

I've never been a religious person, but it is a place that I often end up in my writing because I think I define “spiritual” in a pretty broad way. Everything that has to do with my spirit, which is to say everything. I see my spiritual life as holistic.

It is the foundation of my creative practice and my relationship and even my teaching, certainly my relationship to my body, it comes back to the spiritual, my connection with the universe, the same way that we fantasize about this kind of really intense individualism, especially in this country. It's not real. It's a fantasy. We are profoundly connected to other animals and nature and the earth and the cosmos. And that is a spiritual outlook, spiritual concern.

And I sort of got back to that in this book through kind of the back door, which is I thought, “I need new role models in my love life.” I started with women who were voluntarily celibate throughout history, and then they turned out to be these incredible role models for everything because celibacy for them, ultimately for me, was just this doorway to a self-actualized life, a doorway to a spiritually active life, which meant active in terms of community and activism and mutual aid and spirituality and creativity and community with other people.

I was reading about these little girls or adolescent girls in medieval times. They would compete for sainthood and be, they would be whipping themselves with nettles and starving themselves — it was like little girls trying to get into the Olympics, because that was the most powerful woman they could see.

On living in Iowa..

It has been so incredibly rewarding for me to show up for the classes I teach here for my queer and trans students, for all of the little Iowans, like most of our undergrads, especially our locals, they come from Iowa, they come from these farm towns. They haven't been exposed to much. Sometimes they've been exposed to things that have hurt them, and they show up in my classrooms. And I feel so incredibly lucky to be the person that they are open to, that they come to feeling teachable and I would do anything for them.

And that feels so, especially being who I am, doing the work that I do, married to the person that I'm married to, happy art-making couple in this state. All of this feels so much more meaningful than it did in New York. There are some things I really miss about New York, but I also love living in Iowa and I love my students.

I want to be here. When those students come to Iowa City for college and they're looking for community and they're looking for role models and they're looking to have conversations that they didn't feel safe having in their hometowns, that's so important to me to be there and be part of that. And there's a hundred examples I could give where it just feels like the impact here is more meaningful than it is in a lot of other places. And also Iowa City is the sweetest place. The people are genuinely fucking nice here, and I like that. It feels good. And there are people working incredibly hard for the rights of other people here, and I feel really proud to be a part of it.

We did a big audit recently a few years ago where we were like, are we staying here? And we thought about the pros and cons and made our lists and thought about the good things we've experienced and the relationships we've built here and the community we have here. And there really wasn't much of a conversation about it. We were like, oh, this is where we belong right now.

And now, some links for your Sunday…

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This week, JAMA Internal Medicine published a study that surveyed 200,000 mothers and found that in 2016, 1 in 20 mothers reported her mental health was poor or fair. By 2023, that share had shot up to one in 12. By contrast, in 2023, 1 in 22 fathers surveyed reported fair or poor mental health.

This news isn’t surprising to anyone who identifies as a mother in America right now— our reproductive rights are being abolished; our schools (the only other reliable childcare in America) are being gutted and sold for parts; the cost of living is still rising; wages are stagnant; Congress wants to cut SNAP and Medicaid. It keeps getting harder to exist as a woman and a parent in America. Oh, and the Trump administration’s cuts to DEI programs and the mass layoffs of federal workers have all disproportionately affected women and people of color.

This news came out the same week that the NYT published a report about the Democrats were dedicated to going after the lost, lonely, and disaffected young men of America.

David French and Jake Tapper and a whole Greek chorus of American talking heads weighed in to debate and discuss the Problem with Men™️.

But few people are discussing the desperation of American women. Because it is not just mothers. American teen girls are experiencing their own quiet mental health crisis. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s happening as the progress of the #MeToo era has been halted in favor of what calls “himpathy.” Or that, beauty standards, which for a while seemed to at least try to be more inclusive, have swung right back around to “thin and white” (Instagram Face edition).

During the 2008 recession, I remember reading news story after news story about how the crisis was impacting men who were laid off and hopeless. Years later, while researching my book This American Ex-Wife, I learned that the 2008 crisis effectively ended any progress America was making on the wage gap. And during the years of recovery, men bounced back, but women didn’t.

Even now, despite all the news about men “losing,” they still earn more and are overrepresented in the managerial class.

I’m not pointing this out to play a game of misery Olympics. Or to belittle the struggles anyone is facing. There is no point in telling someone, “I know you’re sad, but statistically you earn more than me!” (Also, 46 percent of men don’t believe in the pay gap.)

But it’s also not helpful to spend too much time wailing about men. The American crisis is not just among men; it’s everyone. As Gavin Newsom tries to be the Joe Rogan of “left” and Democrats spend $20 million to appeal to men, we are all breaking down; we are all falling apart.

And while there is a clear effort to benefit men, women are actively and intentionally being pushed out of the labor force.

Dave Barry is doing fine, so why are you whining?

I recently read Dave Barry’s latest book. It’s not worth reading. It’s a rehash of some of his older columns disguised as a memoir that offers “insight” so out of touch it might as well be in a straitjacket. But he wrote one thing that sent me through the roof.

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My ultimate point was that trans girls do not threaten my daughter. Trans girls are the ones under threat, and all children deserve to compete; to be loved and protected. And I linked to scientific studies that showed that trans girls do not have an unfair advantage in sports.

Then, with zero irony, the Daily Mail (I don’t link to trash, so no links here) wrote a hit piece about my newsletter. The fact that in another wild news week, a national publication took the time to write a hit piece about a niche newsletter that was behind a paywall shows the extent to which transphobia has become the norm in our culture.

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More than once, I’ve been in conversations with well-meaning liberal people who have looked at me in the middle of a political conversation and asked, “Well, what if it was your daughter who got beaten by a trans kid?”

My daughter is an athlete. She’s a swimmer, and it’s been one of the great joys of my life watching her find a sport she loves, and through that sport find her strength, her power, and her motivation. I was not an athlete growing up and I was also homeschooled, so I’ve had to learn the hard way how to Sports Mom. And how to Sports Mom in America, where sports culture for kids is its own pernicious cult, with its rules and norms and intensity that can be off-putting and alarming.

I want my daughter to be happy. I love to see her do her best. But I simply don’t care if she wins. If she wins or loses, my life is the same. Even she doesn’t want to win, exactly. Yes, I think she’d be thrilled if she woke up tomorrow and was the best swimmer in the state. But her goals are more about shaving off a second here, half a second there. Getting stronger. Remember to have fun at practice; remember to stretch. And also, her goals are hers. They are not mine. I don’t have goals for my kids except that they grow up to be kind, empathetic humans with hearts for service.

And I hate that question, “What if it was your daughter?” because the question makes a lot of assumptions. It assumes that my allyship would end the moment my daughter lost a meet to a trans kid. It assumes that my daughter’s rights are threatened by the rights of trans people. The question invokes the specter of my daughter, a blond white girl, as somehow under threat from her trans peers. Invoking nonexistent threats to white girls is a tactic that has been used throughout history to justify horrific racialized violence. And how dare people use my child’s body as a way to justify their transphobia and hate.

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