This month, I’d like to introduce you to Tiffany Dockery, the owner of one of Brooklyn’s newest Black-owned bookstores: Gladys Books and Wine. Located in Bedford-Stuyvesant off of Malcolm X Boulevard, Gladys sells a variety of titles and has a specific focus on uplifting the Black lesbian community.

In addition to owning and operating a bookstore, Tiffany also works full-time in tech. Despite the level of privilege that comes with working a six-figure job, there are still systemic barriers that make brick-and-mortar entrepreneurship nearly impossible for those who don’t have easy access to capital or generational wealth. Tiffany has gotten creative with her funding to open Gladys, including dipping into her retirement savings (known as a Rollover as Business Startup), using a home as collateral, and even turning to her community in a pinch.

Opening Gladys has required a lot of blood, sweat, and tears - and approximately a quarter of a million dollars, the cost of which shows in how beautifully designed the space is. With its emerald green and gold accents, Gladys has a cozy, neighborhood vibe that feels pulled out of another era. A bell tinkles each time the door opens and someone is almost always at the coffee bar to give a big hello. Visitors can curl up on a couch upstairs, which is the main bookstore and coffee shop, or have a more intimate, moody experience downstairs at the wine bar.

Last weekend, I stopped by Gladys to catch up with Tiffany. To watch Tiffany in action was to see a woman who was not just a business owner but someone who genuinely cared about the community she was serving. She chatted with regulars, including one woman who thanked Tiffany for her food recommendations during a recent trip to Chicago, Tiffany’s hometown. In less than half an hour, two people purchased Assata Shukur’s autobiography, which I came to learn was the store’s best seller. At one point, a person hugged a book to their chest, sighing, “I can’t wait to read this.”

In my conversation with Tiffany, we talked about how her community has played in getting the store off the ground, the role of Black bookstores in fighting fascism, and some of her favorite recent reads.

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The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

What did it take to go from the idea of creating something to actually opening Gladys?

Originally, I wanted to open a spa, which was informed by my own experiences with burnout. We’re overworked as Black women, but the wellness space is so white. I had this dream of a space that centered Black women, that centered their rest, that felt like an uplift for us in a world that is often trying to kill us. I decided to do the spa after I got laid off in the fall of 2024, but I started getting really worried about the economic outlook and thinking that it’s going to be tough because it’s the first thing that people remove from their budget.

The bookstore idea came about because I felt like I was aging out of the queer social scene in New York. I’m only 37, but I feel like I’m 85 when I go out, and I love to host. Gladys came about really from a desire to do something that centered black women, my desire to do something that was specifically around Black lesbians, and my love of books.

What does it mean to have a space that centers black women, but particularly Black lesbians?

Lesbian erasure is real. I identify as queer as well, but I’m sensitive to lesbian erasure because in a patriarchal society, to be a woman who loves women is radical. Sometimes people feel like you can’t be both Black and queer. That if you are queer, you’re de-raced, and if you’re Black, you are desexualized. When we have these Black icons who are also queer [Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni], the erasure of their lesbian or queer identity is kind of incentivized because of latent homophobia that’s not specific to Black people, but in our society as a whole.

In addition to the erasure of the store’s audience, what were some of the other barriers that you faced while opening a small business as a Black woman?

I think we’re in a dangerous moment where the reality of Black life is so talked about, but so disregarded that people take it for granted. When you talk about the structural barriers to access to capital, people go, “yeah, I read a New York Times article about that.” I struggle with this personally because I think intellectualization is actually an emotional bypassing.

What does it mean for a people to have once been enslaved and then have a century of being locked out of most formal capital structures?

For me, those structural barriers are, first of all, access to capital. My family of origin, we were poor but I want to be super clear, relatively speaking, I’m incredibly privileged. I have assets, I have two Ivy League degrees - and even then, it was hard.

I knew that to get the small business loan that made this place possible, they required me to have a job, and it couldn’t be any job; I needed to make a certain level of six figures. At first, I was like, why? Now I get it, because it’s been hard even with the income from my job. Luckily, I do the type of work where that is possible, but I think about folks who have a great vision, don’t have access to capital, and that kind of capital requirement for a loan precludes them.

There’s this other part of entrepreneurship we like to tout, like, “I had nothing.” When you dig deeper into that, people have something. It’s too neat a narrative to really make sense. Sometimes it’s access to friends and family or working, like in my case. I don’t come from generational wealth, and I think a lot of my early career was characterized by a drive to never experience the kind of poverty that I grew up in. People have a real romanticized, literature-infused view of poverty, but when you’ve experienced it, you’re like, I don’t care what I have to do, but I’m not going back there, you know? I have a belief that over time, Gladys is going to get to a better spot, but I am kind of closer to poverty than I was before.

I think the other one that we don’t talk enough about is that I don’t have a partner. Given the level of singleness amongst black women, I don’t think people appreciate that that’s not just an emotional need. There are real financial implications to being unpartnered, in general, but especially right now when the cost of living is much higher. I’ve been very blessed with amazing friends, but I think the emotional toll of it. I don’t think we talk enough about how, as Black women, we’re often the people giving support, but often we lack that level of support for ourselves.

@notesfromkayla📚 welcome gladys, brooklyn’s newest Black owned bookstore!! #nyc #brooklyn #booktok #bookish

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What role has your community played in helping you open Gladys?

My community has played a role in three different ways. The first two are emotional and spiritual. This is so hard. The way my community has listened, encouraged, and in the dark moments, reminded me that I’m capable - I can’t overstate that enough.

People also just showed up and volunteered, like opening books - I think I probably had more than a thousand books in the store when we opened. One friend project-managed the grand opening because there were so many different pieces to it, and she’s a great organizer.

The most powerful part is that my best friend loaned me $40,000. We were really short because the loan was taking a long time, and there were capital expenses that were coming due. I was really stressed. He was like, “I believe in you. I believe in this dream.” And he is neither Black nor a woman. I think that meant a lot to me because he also doesn’t come from means. He works in public health - he’s not a tech executive - and that’s a substantial amount of money for him. It was a real investment in this little dream that I had.

During the middle of our conversation, a young man came in to ask if he could use the space for an event that was rescheduled due to the blizzard in New York. Black bookstores have a long history of serving as spaces that both educate and empower the community. What are other ways Gladys carries on that tradition?

Char Adams talks about in her book, Black-Owned, that before publishing cared about Black books, and that it was Black bookstores that gave them a chance. Gladys is now getting our consignment program up. Not everybody can get published by a Big Five publishing house. If you self-publish, which is easier now than it’s ever been, you should be able to go to your local bookstore. We can’t afford to carry the cost of that inventory, but the way consignment works is that we pay you once you have a sale. For us, that’s a win-win where we get to expose people to work that could be the next Octavia Butler or Terry McMillan.

It was also very important to me that it be in Bed-Stuy. As a person who is a homeowner in the community, I’ve seen the neighborhood change, even in my short time of living here. I had no idea the kind of community I was kind of buying into, but two things became clear: how special this place is and how under threat it is to change, especially, I think, hastened by the pandemic. As folks got priced out of Park Slope and Williamsburg and Bushwick, Bed-Stuy became this kind of place, like, “oh, we can own there.”

I fundamentally believe that you learn about the history, the present, and the future of a place from the businesses. Having a space that is unapologetically Black and unapologetically queer is important to me. To be able to offer a space to gather for people who have dreams who need a space and a platform for those dreams to come alive - that means something to me.

I wanted the space to be beautiful because I think we deserve access to beauty. We do a lot of literary-based events, obviously as a bookstore, but especially because I think the work deserves that level of regard. That’s the part I take the most seriously. I view writers as celebrities - taking words and making a world or taking complex ideas and making them accessible to people, that’s important, but I think especially in a world that gaslights Black people, that we have no culture. We’ve always had culture.

Events are also important to me. I worked at Instagram. I promise you what you’re doing behind that keyboard is not the same as me looking into your eyes, sitting with and listening to your work, your ideas, and having to do it in real time, not face you as a set of letters on a screen, but Kayla as a person. That’s why Black people were not allowed to congregate because there’s power in us coming together.

The store’s named after your grandmother. I know there are several other Black-owned Brooklyn bookstores - Liz’s Book Bar and BEM - that are also named after their grandmothers. Why do you think that is?

I view grandparents as living ancestors - they have and always have had a special place for us as Black people and especially for African-Americans. I don’t think we understand what it means to be a people where our families were totally disrupted, either by the reality of slavery or life outcomes. I think our matriarchs in particular have always been culture bearers, and I think grandmothers hold a special place amongst Black people because they have been culture bearers. When you see people who want to do this to honor their grandmother, it’s about the larger project of a bookstore, which is cultural veneration via ancestral veneration.

The other part is really around this idea that people feel lost right now. We’re seeing a resurgence in nostalgia. Some of that is escapism, that the present feels hard and so we’re escaping back into better times. I think some of that is actually us trying to harken for ancestral wisdom at a time when we need it most. I deeply believe in the concept of Sankofa, that you have to look back to move forward. When we look back, the ancestral wisdom of our grandparents is a light. Before we had these fancy labels called mutual aid, it was like, let me go talk to my neighbor and see if I can borrow this until I get my check, and then they borrow from me. The ways that we’re looking to survive now are literally things that our ancestors had to do.

What’s next for Gladys?

I think we live in a world of mimetic politicization, where people’s politics are informed sometimes by memes, but not engaging with, like, what’s the reality of this? Let’s actually get to it in terms of dollars and cents, because I want to operate in a way that reflects my values, and I think the most important thing I can do right now is to keep this business open in a way that is fair and sustainable.

I want to get the business to a place where we are on a profitable, sustainable trajectory. There are a lot of beloved black businesses that will be open one day and closed the next. I used to be like, how did that happen? And now I get it. People were flushing paper towels down the toilet, and we had to spend $3,000 on a plumber to snake it. That’s why you don’t see paper towels in our bathroom anymore. We have hand towels that I wash at my house because it’s not worth it. I don’t know if we could survive another $3,000 hit.

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Rapid fire. What was the last book you read?

Model Home by River Solomon. It is the darkest book I’ve read in quite some time. The premise is that there’s a haunted home in the Dallas suburbs that a Black family occupies. The children all leave to escape the haunted home, but then their parents die, and they have to come back and contend with what it means to grow up there. I think it’s this larger allegory for the things that we do as Black people for proximity to privilege, for saving face, the violence of being the only Black person in a white space - that alone is a haunting.

Favorite Black literary icons?

A contemporary author I’m enjoying is Courtney Faye Taylor, and a book of poems called Concentrate. It’s about Latasha Harlins, who was a Black girl who was killed at the hands of Korean shop owners and whose death was a precursor to the LA riots. There are so many forgotten young Black girls, and her story is an allegory for all the types of things that Black girls contend with. She was being abused by a safe adult in her life who was at a community program she was in, and nobody cared except her aunt. She had dreams, and she was a poet. Concentrate is a mixed media book that brings in a lot of elements of the archive.

On the literary front: Toni Morrison was just so unequivocal that we have a culture as black people, that culture is rich, it deserves, and can be engaged with in a way that is true literary fiction that does not live under the gaze of white people.

Finally, poetry-wise: Gwendolyn Brooks, because she was a genius. The fact that she spent her life teaching black students at a historically Black university in Chicago - I think people take Black women’s genius for granted. After winning the Pulitzer, she could have done so much. To have that highest literary award and then to say, I want to use my genius to uplift Black people, I think she’s engaging in that project, which is really near and dear to my heart, too.

You can support Gladys by visiting their store at 306 Malcolm X Boulevard or buying from their Bookshop. Follow along on Instagram + TikTok.

If you liked this interview, be sure to check out last month’s with Jenn Burchette and consider subscribing to see who I speak with in March for the next “Going for It.”

The series offers a window into the policymakers, activists, creatives, and entrepreneurs from around the country who aren’t waiting for anyone’s permission to go after something they’re passionate about - and neither should you!

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It was a Saturday evening in late November, and a few dozen people had spread out in the sanctuary of a church to discuss how to prevent the sale of 375 Stuyvesant Avenue, a Renaissance Revival mansion in Stuyvesant Heights.

Built in 1915, the mansion was eventually purchased by Dr. Josephine English, New York’s first Black OB/GYN. Dr. English stewarded several buildings throughout Brooklyn, including the former Paul Robeson Theater in Fort Greene. Over the years, 375 Stuyvesant Avenue has served numerous functions, ranging from a senior home and filming location for shows like “Boardwalk Empire,” to its current use as an informal community center, incubating small businesses and serving as a backdrop for celebrations.

However, its future is now in question after a court order clears a path for a prospective buyer to purchase the property. Some of Dr. English’s descendants see an opportunity to cash out, reflecting another dimension of how gentrification can play out, one in which profit - not predatory actions - contributes to the loss of community and cultural spaces.

For the group gathered at the church in November, the sale of 375 Stuyvesant Avenue wasn’t a simple real estate transaction; it was another example of Black history and culture slowly fading away in Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy). At a time when the neighborhood is witnessing an acceleration of gentrification and cultural displacement, the mansion has served as a low-cost gathering space, a physical reminder of the neighborhood’s Black history, and a preview of some of the efforts to imagine a new future.

Contemporary policy discussions about the loss of Black spaces are often situated within a larger narrative about late-stage capitalism, rising housing costs, and the reversal of suburban white flight. Linking the story of gentrification to macroeconomic trends perpetuates a narrative that displacement is inevitable, ignoring the efforts of remaining or incoming community members who are adopting new collective ownership models, like community land trusts, as a way for residents to determine what happens next in their community.

While Harlem has an entire artistic movement named after it, Bedford-Stuyvesant has also played an important role in Black culture and urban policy over the last century.

Brooklyn’s Black population can trace its roots as far back as the colonial era; Dutch Director General Petrus Stuyvesant, whose name still adorns several streets, landmarks, and neighborhoods through New York City, was a prolific slave trader. Shortly after the state outlawed slavery in 1827, a Black middle and upper class emerged, and by the late nineteenth century, some even lived among their white peers. Members of the Black elite class were often doctors, lawyers, and other professionals who served the community.

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Black churches and the pastors who led them also exerted political power. Silom Presbyterian Church was established by a former slave in 1849 and would lead some of the first school desegregation campaigns in Brooklyn during the late nineteenth century. Originally located in downtown Brooklyn, the church would follow its congregation in the 1940s to the new center of Brooklyn’s Black community: Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Originally two distinct neighborhoods, Bedford and Stuyvesant Heights were home to some of Brooklyn’s white upper-middle class during the early twentieth century. Many of the architects who were active in Park Slope at the turn of the century were also building lavish homes in this corner of Brooklyn. However, the neighborhoods would eventually become home to the largest Black population in New York City by the 1950s. The construction of the A train in the 1930s made the area more attractive for Black middle-class families who wanted to leave the slums of Harlem in search of better living conditions.

Following World War II, migration from the American South, as well as a new wave of Caribbean immigrants, accelerated the neighborhood’s growth. As the Black population grew, the two names merged, and the boundaries of what was considered Bedford-Stuyvesant continued to expand during the mid-century, eventually including what is now Crown Heights.

Bed-Stuy became a melting pot of new arrivals and older community members, young Black radicals, and institutional players.

The foundations of grassroots organizing during the Civil Rights movement had their origins in this period of transition. Malcolm X hosted a “Moslem Dinner and Surprise Program” in 1959 at Siloam Church and lived in the neighborhood for a period of time; Dr. English delivered Malcolm’s children, furthering the contemporary activist group’s claim of the mansion’s cultural and historical significance. In the early 1960s, Brooklyn’s chapter of the Congress of Racial Equity staged a local demonstration against discriminatory trash collection practices, gathering litter left by the Sanitation Department on Gates Avenue and dumping it at Brooklyn Borough Hall. Shirley Chislom, who would become the first Black female congresswoman in 1968, got her political start in organizations focused on neighborhood revitalization and youth programming.

During the mid-twentieth century, one of the biggest sources of national anxiety was youth delinquency. America’s young men were in a crisis - best captured culturally through films like “Rebel without a Cause” or, later, “West Side Story” - and concerned community members, like Chislom, were volunteering in groups to help them. Programs from this period initially focused on wayward teens but soon began to consider the “root causes” of poverty, like having a parent out of work. Dozens of organizations were created in Bed-Stuy to address community challenges, including improving access to jobs and upgrading the aging housing stock.

At the time, Bed-Stuy had some of the largest Black homeownership rates in the country. One of the first community groups, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Neighborhood Council, was created in 1939 and represented block associations. Oftentimes, the goal of these smaller community initiatives was to protect and preserve access to homeownership. One early initiative that invested in both the economic future of young men and property upkeep was a program where homeowners would pay local neighborhood boys to rehabilitate historic brownstones at a heavily subsidized rate.

Given that most community organizing was focused on homeownership, wealthier, more educated Black residents tended to dominate the public conversation, though their programs weren’t always as self-serving as low-cost home repair. In line with earlier iterations of ‘lifting while climbing’ - in which upwardly mobile Black Americans viewed it as their duty to support the educational, economic, and political advancement of the entire race - the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council (CBCC) was formed as a “cultural development project that [would] expose the deprived child to middle-class values.”

At its peak, CBCC represented a coalition of nearly 100 organizations and was arguably the center for Black political influence. Chisholm and other rising political stars, like Elsie Richardson, who became the public face of CBCC during local meetings and visits with elected officials, were active members. Several of the most beloved community programs from the midcentury were affiliated with the CBCC, including Youth in Action (YIA)’s Young Mothers Program, which provided in-house nursing and other supportive services for teen mothers to finish their high school education. However, CBCC also lacked representation from the working class. Every one of YIA’s twenty board seats was held by a college graduate.

As the nation entered the turbulence of the 1960s - increased protests against racial discrimination, political violence, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, women stepping into more publicly visible roles - these issues would reveal a growing power struggles over who would define Bed-Stuy’s next chapter.

By the mid-sixties, white elected leaders began to pay closer attention to New York, hoping to avoid another Watts. As a first-term U.S. Senator eyeing a presidential bid, Robert F. Kennedy had all the more reason to make sure Bed-Stuy didn’t become a national embarrassment. He began meeting with community organizers, planners, and residents in early 1966 to hear their concerns. Political commentators at the time referred to this - and other similar policies - as “riot insurance.”

On December 10, 1966, Kennedy announced the creation of the country’s first community development corporation that would “combine the best of community action with the best of the private enterprise system.” In addition to federal funds, Kennedy solicited some of the biggest names in business and philanthropy, including the Ford Foundation, IBM, and CBS.

By the late 1970s, federal and local funds that had once supported programs like YIA had all but vanished. Bed-Stuy Restoration Development, located on 1358 Fulton Street, became the only game in town. Restoration’s dominance was largely thanks to its white, wealthy donors, who were more willing to funnel resources toward an organization they had direct oversight over, versus smaller groups that were often run by women and had ideas that existed outside of the mainstream.

Reaffirming Black class dynamics in a post-Civil Rights context meant physical separation. Once legislation like the Fair Housing Act made it easier for the Black middle class to move to the suburbs, cities across the country with large Black communities saw a rapid population decline. Black elites also began to reframe the more radical language and policy goals of the sixties, instead focusing more explicitly on maintaining their own upward economic mobility. This meant Restoration’s programs were primarily targeted to stop the outflow of the Black middle class, not create programs that would support and uplift the growing low-income population. As such, Bed-Stuy Restoration’s signature programs were homebuying assistance and repairs.

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Census data and anecdotal comments from long-time neighbors support Restoration’s initial success. Some census tracts in the neighborhood saw huge spikes in household income between the 1980 and 1990 censuses while remaining almost entirely Black. However, the desire to achieve upward social mobility often meant this group distanced themselves from the ‘wrong’ type of Black American. There was now a stronger political distinction between newly hired, corporate middle management and poorer or more radical factions of the Black community that wanted to overturn capitalism to address structural economic inequality.

The result is a type of neighborhood development that focused on individual problems - a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality - rather than the expansive approach of community-oriented solutions. For the next several decades, organizations like Bed-Stuy Restoration focused on helping people attain a mortgage but didn’t consider the long-term vision for the neighborhood.

Grassroots organizers, like Jitu Weusi, warned about what would happen by prioritizing home repair over other initiatives - questioning who Bed-Stuy Restoration was preserving the brownstones for: the Black community or an eventual return of the white upper-middle class? These were valid concerns at the time, given the new wave of white homebuyers returning to Cobble Hill and Park Slope in the 1970s and 1980s. Fifty years later, those fears are now actualized in Bed-Stuy.

Since the 2010s, Bed-Stuy’s Black population has declined at such a rate that the neighborhood is now barely majority Black. Some of this loss is attributable to predatory actions, like deed theft, or rising property taxes. However, several Realtors active in the area also talked about how family members see gentrification as their golden ticket. The reality is that homeownership is still the primary way Americans achieve and pass down generational wealth. Many of the homebuying programs that made it possible for the Black middle class to purchase in the midcentury have now provided an opportunity to cash out at the expense of leaving Black cultural history to the whims and mercy of the highest bidder.

While the neighborhood has lost a substantial share of its Black population, remaining residents and newcomers alike are working not only to preserve its cultural legacy but also to create something that is distinctly of the twenty-first century.

Once it became clear that the family controlling 375 Stuyvesant Avenue was moving forward with selling, different organizations currently housed at the mansion started mobilizing. In late November, local organizers hosted a community action day. Much like the community groups that began 60 years ago, the leaders that night were overwhelmingly Black women representing a spectrum of ages, backgrounds, and connection to the building. Some had lived in Bed-Stuy their entire lives, witnessing everything from Chisholm’s political rise to the ‘do or die’ days and the neighborhood’s more recent changes. Others were newly arrived, drawn to the promise of stoops and block parties. Following an afternoon featuring storytelling, connection, and a tour of the mansion, the group held an initial organizing session nearby at St. Phillip’s Church to brainstorm how to keep the building in community control.

One of the proposed solutions is to acquire the property and incorporate it into the BLAC Land Trust. A community land trust takes land off the speculative market and allows an organization to collectively steward it by leasing the land; when someone purchases a home in a land trust, they agree to sell in the future at an affordable, set rate. Similar models exist for community assets. One of the first land trusts in the country stewards property in and around Cooper Union in Lower Manhattan.

GrowHouse, a local design and development group, established the land trust a few years ago to protect Black cultural assets. BLAC Land Trust is currently raising capital and acquiring funds to purchase the mansion as the first project in their portfolio. During the meeting in November, Shanna Sabio, GrowHouse’s co-founder and co-director, emphasized the benefits of collective ownership and a way to honor Dr. English’s legacy by preserving a beloved community resource.

While the fate of the property is still in limbo, the recent advocacy and organizing efforts show that a new generation of Bed-Stuy residents is willing to fight for their community. People are realizing, once again, that there is also value in community over profits. The question now becomes, who will get to have a say in the neighborhood’s future this time around?

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A version of this story will appear in the print version of Public Bonds Magazine later this spring.

For a brief window of time, American culture was defined not just by political leaders but by a group of multi-racial creative intellectuals, activists, and everyday people. They used their voices to turn a mirror toward both the minutiae and injustices of their time, documenting their experiences through writing, music, and other art forms. NOTES Magainze seeks to honor this tradition while updating it for the twenty-first century, drawing inspiration from James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” essay collection.

Local Focus, National Reach.

During my time working across the country, I’ve had the privilege to meet people who are developing solutions to the biggest challenges of our time. Labor organizers fighting for fair wages. Nonprofit groups figuring out how to deliver services with razor-thin operating margins. Local art collectives and neighborhood groups piloting new ways to build community.

Yet these wins either aren’t widely celebrated or, if they are reported at a national level, often leave me wanting more - more depth, more storytelling, more ways in which people can actually do something instead of screaming into the void about how expensive/fascist/bleak the world is today.

NOTES is grounded in the belief that cities are the theater in which our country’s founding principles are contested, transformative policies are piloted, and cultural trends emerge. We are guided in the pursuit of delivering clear, concise, and captivating content that helps people make sense of what’s propelling the country forward. By uplifting voices and ideas at the local level, we hope to remind people that they have the power to decide the country’s future through their daily interactions and choices - not just every four years during a national election.

Our stories bring you one level deeper into the conversations that define modern politics, news, and culture, pulling back the curtain to reveal the policymakers, artists, activists, and everyday people who are shaping American life.

NOTES core content pillars are:

• NEWS. Surfacing emerging policy trends and providing greater context to topics dominating the national news cycle.

• COMMENTARY. Reflections, criticism, and critiques on art, culture, and society.

• ARTS. A space to profile new and diverse perspectives through a curated mix of visual media, fiction, poetry, and prose.

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What we are looking for.

Notes by…Diverse and distinct voices, not simply defined by race, gender, or sexuality, but also class, country of origin, and other lived experiences that are traditionally left out of the mainstream news cycle.

Notes from…Off the slightly beaten path. The best NOTES bring us straight to the frontlines of emerging social, political, and artistic movements. We’ll have stories from New York and LA, but we also want to hear from Columbus, Omaha, Dallas, and other parts of the country - bring us into your world! What’s happening in your community that you think more people need to know about?

Notes on…The niche thing you won’t stop thinking or talking about. We’re not interested in hot takes reacting to an existing headline. We want your unique perspective on how you’re looking at the world. Tell us about the councilmember pushing the status quo, the artist-activist designing know-your-rights guides, the small business in your neighborhood that serves as a vital community hub.

NOTES inaugural print issue launches in July 2026.

While the founding principles and values of the Constitution still aren’t fully realized, there is something both inspiring and disheartening that the fight for liberty and justice for all continues 250 years later. As we approach this anniversary, we want our print issue to answer: whose stories are being recorded, whose are being erased, and how are we each contributing to the historical record?

We are seeking pitches and submissions from around the country for the following types of content:

PITCH US…

LONG-FORM & NARRATIVE CONTENT. Layered storytelling that captures the moment.

These are research-heavy and interview-driven pieces that explore a particular person, place, and/or topic. Illustrative examples of the types of stories we’re looking for include:

• A drag artist challenging American exceptionalism through a puppet show

• A group of housing advocates and neighbors forming a community land trust to prevent gentrification

INTERVIEWS & DISPATCHES. Transcripts and shorter observations.

Condensed, edited transcripts or micro-profiles on a certain person, place, and/or topic. Illustrative examples of the types of stories we’re looking for include:

• Reflections from a key official of a mayoral administration

• An organizer supporting anti-ICE efforts

• An oral history from the eccentric local who is a fixture of your community

SUBMIT YOUR PITCH.

Submit a 150-word pitch and writing sample to kayla@notes-mag.com by April 1. Selected pitches will be notified on a rolling basis by April 15. The deadline for completed drafts is June 21, with one round of edits. Final revisions are due on August 1.

SUBMISSIONS

ESSAYS & COMMENTARY. Reflections, criticism, and critiques.

Longer-form observations about recent news, society, and culture.

POETRY & SHORT FICTION. Original literature.

Accepting all genres, as long as they address some aspect of American identity, culture, and/or history, either literally or figuratively. Due to space considerations, please limit submissions to fewer than 3,500 words.

VISUAL ART. Photo essays, cartoons, and other visual forms of storytelling.

Please submit via a Google Drive link or another online cloud storage. Note: We are adamantly against generative AI!

SUBMIT YOUR COMPLETED WORKS

Submit a completed draft version of your work to kayla@notes-mag.com by May 1. Selected submissions will be notified by May 15. There will be one round of edits, with final revisions due on August 1.

FAQ

Money, money, money.

At this time, we are a scrappy, self-funded publication without mommy or daddy’s pocketbook. As a contributor, you will receive a free copy of the issue at no cost and will also receive a cut of the proceeds from our launch party and fundraiser in September. We hope to use “America at 250” as a proof-of-concept to raise funds for future issues and be able to financially compensate contributors, editors, and others on the team moving forward. We appreciate you taking this leap of faith with us!

What’s the timeline?

• February 1 - May 1: Pitches for longer-form content and submissions for completed work (e.g., short story) open.

• April 1: Pitches for longer-form content are due.

• April 15: Selected pitches are finalized.

• May 1: Submissions of completed work are due.

• June 21: First draft of long-form stories due.

• August 1: Final drafts of all content are due.

• September: Launch party and fundraiser.

Have another question or want to get in touch?

Emaill us at kayla@notes-mag.com

Welcome to Going for It, an interview series that uplifts and celebrates the big, bold moves people are taking to actualize their dreams. Each month, I’m sharing the stories of people who are trying, failing, and growing as they work to turn their idea into a reality.

Going for It offers a window into the policymakers, activists, creatives, and entrepreneurs from around the country who aren’t waiting for anyone’s permission to go after something they’re passionate about - and neither should you! I hope that this series will both empower and educate others by demystifying what it takes to go from concept to execution.

For our inaugural Going for It, I’d like to introduce you to Jennifer Burchette.

Jenn is a fashion and beauty publicist based in New York City who has worked for brands including Sephora, MAC, Neutrogena, Doc Martens, and more. When she’s not building brands, she’s telling stories and hosting events through the Special Collections Section. Jenn hopes to inspire individuals to start seeing themselves and their experiences as living archives. The Special Collections Section is grounded in the belief that every person has a special wealth of knowledge that is worth exploring and sharing. During our conversation, we talked about gentrification in Bed-Stuy, how she got in touch with Olivia Dean’s team for an event, and how important it is to ask for help when trying to deliver a big, ambitious idea.

GOING FOR IT WITH JENN BURCHETTE & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS SECTION

What inspired the Special Collections Section?

I’ve always been someone who has been curious. I love finding and discovering really unique things about people. When I started thinking about the Special Collections Section, it was me [realizing] what’s more important is not really storytelling for brands - it’s storytelling through people [and] their stories. Sometimes when you’re looking around, I feel like we’re not understanding that there’s so much within you and within the space that you may be occupying.

How did you go from this idea into what it is now?

[I realized in 2025 that] this is a timely thing that needs to be done now. There’s erasure in all different [forms], whether that’s in schools, whether that’s in museums, whether that’s living in a neighborhood where you don’t see lots of you anymore.

I’ve lived in my neighborhood [Bedford-Stuyvesant] for almost 10 years now, and there are stories or different things that are in the neighborhood that [new] people coming in don’t really have the wherewithal to care about. We all say we love to live in these beautiful homes, and we would love to live in this beautiful neighborhood, but do we actually know the neighborhood that we’re in? Do we actually know the people who have been in the neighborhood?

That makes sense in terms of why that was the final push for you. We met at an event in November to save 375 Stuyvesant Avenue, the former home of Dr. Josephine English. She was the first black OB/GYN in New York State. Her descendants are selling that building. There are now questions about what it means for a space that for decades has served as a kind of informal, low-cost community center to potentially not be accessible to residents within the community.

Your first event was a Friendsgiving in November, where guests had to bring a personal object of significance and share why. Since then, you’ve done a couple of other events. Tell us a little bit more about the Olivia Dean listening party.

[Olivia Dean] is someone whom I consider an important living archive. There’s a song called “Carmen” that talks a little bit about her grandmother coming over on the Windrush from the Caribbean Islands to London. Britain was trying to reconstruct after the war, and they brought a lot of Caribbeans over to London to come and do the work. Her grandmother was a part of that journey. How beautiful it is that, to carry on that legacy through your talent and what you do?

@oliviadeano_speaking to @British Library about my wonderful granny and my song for her called Carmen 🌹

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We started off the night [by] talking, being more rooted and grounded in her work, and understanding that whether you’re a singer, a dancer, or in a sport, there is a way to give back to the past and also appreciate the present through what you do.

How did the event come together?

I used my community. I have a following on TikTok. I posted it at 6 PM, and within less than 24 hours, I had gotten so much interest. I created a submission process where people could tell me a little bit about why they love Olivia [and] why something like Special Collections Sections would be of importance to their current life journey.

I really have to curate the room with people who actually want to come share [and] be open to being vulnerable. I got over 80 submissions and had to cut it because [my apartment] can only fit maybe 15, 20 people. I really did go through and read every single one of those submissions. They were so incredibly beautiful - stories of going through a really rough breakup [or how her song “Lady Lady”] has really helped [them] get through different chapters in life.

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I [felt] like she should be reading these, and I actually ended up getting in contact with and sharing with Olivia Dean’s team. Being able to share with her team definitely comes from having a PR background that I often overlook because I struggle sometimes with asking for help. I asked someone I knew who works on a social media team, like, “Hey, by chance, do you have Olivia Dean’s manager’s contact?” [Olivia’s team] really showed an interest in what the Special Collections Section stands for.

That is what I appreciate [about] having that PR background and using it for good [to] share how beautiful or how impactful their work is to other people. Being the connector who connects for purpose and meaning is important to me.

Very cool that you were able to use your professional contacts for something outside of your 9-to-5. My mom always says, a closed mouth doesn’t get fed.

We also did an event together recently that was focused on bringing together black creatives, policymakers, artists, and educators. We had a conversation around what folks feel called to protect and preserve around America’s 250th anniversary this year. I’m wondering if you could describe the evening and what one thing that’s still sticking with you from it?

I think there’s a common theme of people needing help. I’m someone who struggles with asking for help. If there’s someone out there who’s like, “how do I just start, or I want to do this thing, but none of what I’m doing is in the same field,” think about all of the things that you’re already good at, and think about your community or the network that you already have. You’re probably a lot closer to what it is that you want to do than you think you are.

What’s next for the Special Collections Section?

I think what’s cool about using the phrase ‘living archive,’ [is that it] does not have to just stay on one floor of a brownstone. You are a living archive that is going out into the world, and you’re going out to different spaces and places. I would love to go to different institutions, like a museum.

I got invited to come back to my university and speak about this particular work to the students, and get the next generation to see themselves as living archives. I think it’s crucial to work on getting them to explore their own history and ancestry [and] having more wherewithal to know yourself and what’s important to pass down and teach to other people.

Quick, rapid-fire questions to close this out. What is your most treasured possession?

To know me is to know that I’m into fashion and I love accessories. I love storytelling through my look, and I especially love wearing my family’s history on me.

I would say my most treasured possession is the butterfly ring that I wear. It was my mother’s. It was the first thing she ever bought with her first hard-earned money at her first job when she was like, 16. I think it’s so uncanny that the ring’s stone is similar to my birthstone. I’m like, “How did you know that this would someday be my birthstone?” But according to her, she’s always manifested me. So there is power in that!

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what would it be and why?

Dido Belle.

Favorite lipstick?

A good brown lip liner and a nice, clear gloss wins the day for me.

What’s one brand you’re currently obsessed with right now?

I’ve been really drawn to brands like Sanctuaire because the storytelling is embedded in the product itself. The brand was born in Martha’s Vineyard, and even their scents carry cultural history, like their Polar Plunge candle, inspired by the Polar Bears, a group founded in the 1940s to create a safe space for Black swimmers gathering at Inkwell Beach. It’s a tradition that still lives on today. I actually had the chance to join one of their plunges last summer.

It’s not just clever branding; it’s honoring lineage, place, and memory. That kind of depth really resonates with me. And now that scent has become a signature in my home. It’s a lovely reminder of that experience and what it represents.

And having been to your home, I can attest that it always smells lovely. Thank you, Jenn!

Stay in touch with Jenn and Special Collections Section on TikTok and Instagram: @specialcollectionssection & @hostingroyaltea

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monthly roundup: january in review —

reading

This year, I’m going through my personal library to decide what I should still keep or donate. After watching I Love LA last month, one of my favorite episodes was written by Jean Kyoung Frazier. I decided to revisit her debut, Pizza Girl, which was crazier than I remembered in the best way possible - definitely keeping. Other books that have made the second cut include: School for Good Mothers, Cult Classic, and Colored Television. Re-reading Danzy Senna’s most recent book made me curious to try her debut, Caucasia, which was the perfect long read for a cold winter weekend. To round out the month, I picked up a copy of a play, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, am continuing to explore Angela Davis’ speeches (Women, Culture, and Politics), and have found so much inspiration through Claudia Tate’s collection of interviews with Black Women Writers at Work.

watching

Trying to make the most of my HBOMax subscription before it ends next month by catching up on some movies I’ve missed over the last few years. Loved the soft, introspective coming-of-age story in Janet Planet; am always a fan of the strange, suburban oddities that have come to define the collaboration between Andrew DeYoung and Tim Robinson (Friendship). In that same vein, I haven’t rewatched the complete series of Nathan for You since it originally aired while I was in college, and after finishing that, I also had (re)crash my Scion TC (Rehearsal). Also appreciated the documentary on Black representation in the media through Seen and Heard and Broey Deschanel’s latest video essay critiquing (among other things) TikTok feminism.

listening

So glad I made the switch to Qobuz. It literally took less than 15 minutes to transfer over 14 years of my Spotify history, so definitely consider making the switch if you’d like to support a music app that is totally okay with running ICE recruitment ads… While Qobuz’s personalized algorithm isn’t as robust, I am finding it’s actually pushing me to discover more new artists, including Kashus Culpepper’s country debut, Act I. In addition to Qobuz magazine, which you can view on the mobile app, they also have curated - and sometimes even annotated! - playlists made by their editors. Very impressed by how robust their Quiet Storm mix is and have enjoyed rocking out to Canyon Sounds of the 1970s.

viewing

Earlier this month, I wrote about Jordan Casteel’s exhibit at Casey Kaplan. This was actually part of a larger solo gallery crawl, where I also checked out Kandy Lopez’s dynamic textile portraits and Dawn Williams Boyd’s race-swap quilt series. I also returned to the Studio Museum, which is sure to become a favorite.

supporting

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re aware of the federal government’s occupation in Minnesota. If you’d like to do more than passively consume online, Stand with Minnesota is a directory of organizations you can support. Please consider donating to some of the mutual aid funds, crowdfunding campaigns, and/or organizations that are listed in the directory.

This is true across mediums, whether that is the circular joy of Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” or the laser-focused satire of Obama-era Brooklyn millennials through “Search Party.”

Visual media in particular has this ability to document a specific time and place, forever crystallizing a singular moment - real or imagined - that generations can return to decades or even centuries later, and why I believe we will see even more of a premium on physical media in the coming years. There are entire sub-communities online dedicated to lost media, content created decades or even a few years ago that is now no longer accessible on streaming platforms or websites. Even for content that is still currently accessible, there is a sense of impermanence, as distribution rights to media mean certain shows frequently shift from platform to platform.

Physical media and archival records are also the main way our society tracks history, ignoring the storytelling and oral history practices found throughout non-Western cultures. Yet pointing to a lack of a physical record is another form of erasure, one that minimizes the humanity of oppressed groups, as if creativity was not present on the ships of the Middle Passage or while toiling in the heat on sugar and cotton plantations.

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Over the holidays, I went to the newly reopened Studio Museum in Harlem. Originally conceived as a “place where Black art lives,” the museum first opened in 1968. Throughout its nearly sixty years, the Studio Museum in Harlem has played an important role in incubating, promoting, and preserving the works of the African diaspora. An archival exhibit on the sixth floor begins to capture its influence and impact, but the long-running artist-in-residence program is perhaps the best way to understand the museum’s impact on modern art.

The list of alumni on the fourth floor exhibit reads like a who’s-who of Black artists over the last five decades, ranging from David Hammons, whose flag adorns the entrance of the museum, to Renee Green, who has a year-plus-long exhibit still on view at Dia Beacon. But perhaps the most notable recent graduate over the last decade is painter Jordan Casteel.

Long before walking the red carpet of the Met Gala, Casteel first broke out into the mainstream art world in 2014 through her ‘Visible Man’ series.

This was the summer of Eric Garner and Michael Brown; in the fall, 12-year-old Tamir Rice would become another victim of racial violence. At a time when images of Black men in the media were often moments before their death, Casteel’s ‘loving, intimate, caring’ portraits of Black men presented a welcome counternarrative.

Her latest body of work, which closed last weekend at the Casey Kaplan Gallery, continues this exploration of Black domesticity. This show brought together some of Casteel’s previous experiences - a nod to the Studio Museum; portraits that emphasize softer moments of Black life; landscapes and floral motifs - while also serving as a deeply personal meditation on her desire to become a mother.

The exhibition’s name, “covered holes in our walls with sunflowers,” takes its name from an Alice Walker essay. Published in 1972, at a time when Black art was receiving more mainstream recognition, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Walker writes about how generations of Black women yearned to turn their soul’s purpose into art but never could, instead planting seeds they would never see bloom. It is only relatively recently that Black Americans, but especially Black women, have begun to enter the recognized American canon. By choosing a line from this essay, Casteel chooses to situate herself on this continuum of progress and recognition.

The most obvious nods to Walker’s commentary are several tightly cropped plein air representations of flowers and a vibrant, monumental portrait - Casteel’s largest to date - of two mothers and their child at rest in the grass.

The women represent a modern type of family by creating two points of protection as they embrace their child, forming a triangular unit. Spread across two canvases, two groups of flowers in the background mimic this trio while the rest of the garden - all of those other planted seeds and long-held dreams - wait to burst forth. They are both dressed in various combinations of black, brown, and yellow, evoking both those great pollinators - as is the case of the woman wearing a casual button-down adorned with bees, confidently gazing at us - but the braided woman’s dress also calls to mind the color palette of sunflowers.

Another painting, “Mothering While Black,” could also serve as a subtitle for the exhibit. A flower curves over the book as it rests face up on a desk, its color arc acting almost like an umbrella, providing a protective cover. This piece sat diagonal from a portrait of Casteel’s own mother, a woman she portrays with an almost girlish sensibility through her pose, not unlike a kindergartner sitting on a carpet - or in this case, a colorful comforter - patiently awaiting instruction. There is such love in this gaze and a certain level of vulnerability, a temporary inversion of power dynamics, where the parent now becomes the sitter, awaiting instruction and guidance from the artist. Casteel typically paints from photographs, and I’d like to imagine they were chatting and laughing in her mother’s room, that she captured this moment right as she looks up in pride at her daughter.

But perhaps the most intimate of the paintings on view was Casteel’s self-portrait, which is where the themes of the exhibit merge into a coherent thesis.

The self-portrait is an intimate window into Casteel’s fertility journey and how capturing the world around her serves as a quiet balm during an otherwise draining period. In the painting, Casteel is surrounded by plants in various states of maturity. Some are little seedlings on trays, while others are potted; in the background, an entire forest seems to emerge.

In the essay, Walker talks about how a quilt made by “an anonymous Black woman in Alabama, a hundred years ago” is now part of our country’s formal record (for now), memorialized at the Smithsonian Institute. Quilting spans across race and culture, serving a dual purpose as practical objects that warmed bodies and an opportunity for its makers to imbue special meanings. Casteel’s sweater and the rug each featured quilted designs.

What’s less noticeable until further inspection is their nod to the small painting in the lower right corner, which shows slaves working a cotton field. In the foreground, Casteel features a lone washerwoman next to quilts on the line, drawing a connection from the past into the present. It is in this way that Casteel both inserts herself as an artist - she will not be anonymous - while also acknowledging the work of this woman lost to time.

However, it was only after I had left the exhibit and was starting to research this essay that the self-portrait became even more meaningful. Days before the show’s opening, Casteel revealed through an Instagram post that the painting was originally conceived as a mother-child portrait. Casteel and her husband have tried to conceive for over five years. The caption includes quantifiable points that finally led to them hearing the heartbeat for the first time, the day she completed the self-portrait. With this additional layer, the show clicked into place for me.

Last year, I saw an exhibit, Really Free, at the California African American Museum. The artist, Nellie Mae Rowe, was born around the same time as Walker’s mother, at the turn of the twentieth century. And much like Walker’s mother, Rowe had her own dreams of becoming an artist. However, that wasn’t the type of life made available to a Black woman in rural Georgia. Instead, Rowe painted casually for decades, outliving two husbands and the family she worked for as a domestic. It wasn’t until the last fifteen or so years of her life, in her mid-sixties, that Rowe was finally able to achieve her soul’s purpose. And who knows how many other Nellie Mae Rowes were out there, generations of artists lost to time.

Many of us today are the living embodiment of our ancestors’ wildest dreams. This isn’t to say modern life isn’t without its faults - we now live in a post-Roe world - but artists like Walker and Casteel know that amidst the pain, against all the emotional wounds, each of us still has the opportunity to fill that sorrow with joy whenever we can, wherever we can.

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By now, you’ve probably seen or heard about the situation evolving in Minneapolis this week.

On the morning of February 7th, Jonathan Ross, an ICE agent, shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good. In a country seemingly defined by gun violence, what has made this death all the more troubling is how the Trump administration has spun the narrative in the hours and days afterward.

Good’s body is barely cold, yet some Republicans are already using this as an opportunity to go after their favorite boogeyman, the “radical left.” Just hours after the shooting, President Donald Trump described a “vicious situation,” despite multiple videos from the scene showing otherwise. During a press conference on Thursday, Vice President J.D. Vance went further, calling the media coverage pushing back on this framing an “absolute disgrace” and that Good’s death was a “tragedy of her own making.”

This isn’t the first time the administration has defended the violent actions of immigration agents. Over the last year, four other people have lost their lives. Good isn’t even the first person agents have shot at while in a car. Back in October, during “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, 30-year-old Marimar Martinez was also shot multiple times by Border Patrol agents. Martinez survived but was charged with using her car to “assault and impede federal law enforcement” by the Justice Department.

While the case in Chicago was ultimately dropped, Minneapolis represents the latest escalation by the Trump administration to silence dissent, transforming peaceful protests into supposed acts of domestic terrorism.

As of a September executive order, antifa - defined here as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law” - is now an official terrorist group. Never mind the fact that antifa is more of an ideology than a coordinated movement with known leaders, unlike the Proud Boys. Never mind the fact that there are actual coordinated movements seeking to overthrow the government, including the very groups that stormed the Capitol five years ago to stop the certification of the election, only to receive blanket pardons on Trump’s first day back in office.

We are barely a week into 2026, and I can already sense the exhaustion from some - at this point in the post, I imagine many have already stopped reading. Yet this disengagement and lack of interest are exactly why this administration continues its anti-democratic actions. We have collectively lost our sense of agency, buying into the nihilistic narrative that the actions of one person will have little to no impact.

I had originally set out to write about something completely different this week - a survey of contemporary Black art in New York City - but instead feel as though it’s important to build from last week’s post: where do we go from here? Rather than remain in the conceptual, I’d like to offer a few actionable steps I am taking and have implemented in my life over the last year.

Attend a ‘Know Your Rights’ training.

As we continue to see federal immigration agents descend on cities, making sure you understand your legal rights might just save you or a neighbor. The 4th Amendment of the Constitution protects against search, seizure, and arrest without probable cause. It does not permit the police or ICE to enter homes without judicial warrants or consent. Sometimes ICE will use an “administrative warrant,” which is signed by an agent or supervisor, not a judge. This is not legal. Do not let them in.

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These trainings cover other tips, like reporting sightings to a local ICE watch group, and are typically organized by local nonprofits, immigrant rights organizations, or other community groups. You can find these events in your city by searching on Instagram, TikTok, or bulletin boards in spaces like libraries, cafes, and bars.

While NYC-specific, if you’re not able to find one in your community, former Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine’s office shared a virtual training last summer that provides some good information.

Hope for the best - but plan for the worst.

No, this doesn’t mean you need to go full “prepper,” but that also doesn’t mean you should FAFO either. Your blase attitude is cute until you’re scrambling during the next LA wildfire or Hurricane Sandy. Making sure you have some basic supplies that reflect the potential disasters in your community is simply the responsible thing to do. At a bare minimum, make sure you have a first aid kit in your home and know where your important documents are. I would also recommend identifying a specific meet-up location, either with your partner, family members, and/or a group of trusted friends.

If you’re curious about where to get started, resources I recommend include the Red Cross Preparedness Checklist and your local Office of Emergency Management (NYC has a great overview).

Conscious consumption.

As a consumer in a capitalist economy, one of the few areas where you have some power is where you spend your money. This is why the boycott, like “don’t buy where you can’t work” or contemporary efforts like the BDS Movement, can become successful tools for raising awareness. As we see with the ongoing Target boycott, these micro decisions can have an outsized impact. In 2026, I will be more discerning with where and how I am purchasing goods. For me, that has meant finally leaving Spotify and transferring over to Qobuz.

Part of conscious consumption is also around my media habits. Rather than doomscrolling throughout the day, I subscribe to several newsletters that go to a specific email just for my news. I check this inbox 2-3 times a day, typically no more than 15 minutes at a time. These are the ones I regularly read:

• States Newsroom (my favorite) - Collection of nonprofit newsrooms reporting out all 50 state capitals plus DC; great for a high-level snapshot of what’s happening across the country

• Politico - Good for understanding top national and international stories from a “centrist” perspective

• Mother Jones - An added layer of national coverage that aligns more closely with my personal politics

• Semafor - Another aggregator of top national and international stories; also read their D.C.-specific newsletter

• Daily Deduction - Tax/finance policy analysis out of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution; very in the weeds but good for having a sense of how lawmakers are thinking or voting on legislation

• Gothamist and NY Focus - New York-specific news

Other sites I semi-regularly view for news and media include: 404 Media, The Guardian, NY Magazine. I also have current subscriptions to print editions of the New Yorker, Harper’s, Mother Jones, and will not be renewing my subscription to the Atlantic.

Prioritize time for joy - both alone and with others.

In this time of darkness, it can feel so easy to sit in the murkiness and become bogged down with the news. It’s important to stay aware, but also make sure you’re carving out space to laugh and find small pockets of light. Don’t lose sight of the things that keep you feeling grounded and connected.

I’m regularly talking with loved ones on the phone throughout the week, making plans to socialize with friends a few times a week, and also enjoying moments of inner solitude or reflection, like this week’s gallery walk that I’m excited to share next week.

currently –

reading

• The School for Good Mothers (Jessamine Chan) - In a dystopian world, negligent parents must complete a year-long reform program or else risk losing their children. I’m currently going through my personal library, revisiting books to decide whether I want to donate or hold onto them. This one’s a keeper.

• Jordan Casteel monograph - Coming to a deeper appreciation for this contemporary artist through this recent Phaidon monograph, which features reproductions of her work throughout her career, alongside an interview with the artist and essays.

• Forgotten Lands, Issue 7: Poetics of Architecture - Slowly making my way through this gorgeously edited collection of art essays and commentary that focuses on Caribbean art and dialogue.

watching

• I Love LA - Lowkey expected to hate this but binged over the holiday and it surprised me. One of my favorite episodes was episode 3, “Girls Girl,” which was written by novelist Jean Kyoung Frazier; I loved her debut novel, “Pizza Girl.” This felt like the right balance of social commentary and pure laughs.

eating

• Heyday Canning Co - This is an upcoming brand that is attempting to reinvent canned beans and soup; seriously obsessed. Their canned beans come pre-sauced, which makes for an elevated lazy girl dinner. At this point, I’ve tried almost their entire product line. Standouts include the cannellini beans in a pasta alla vodka sauce (great with some crusty bread and cheese) and a black bean, sweet potato soup.

See you next week, where I’ll talk about the contemporary Black art scene in New York, as well as some initial thoughts heading into the upcoming exhibition season from some major museums and galleries.

xx,
kayla

Each Friday before you head into the weekend, expect more:

• Long-form storytelling through profiles, including a look at two new Black-owned bookstores in Bed-Stuy and one group’s efforts to prevent cultural displacement through a community land trust

• Interviews with artists, policymakers, and other folks curating today’s culture and shaping life in cities across the country

• Observational essays and commentary ranging from the contemporary art scene, like thoughts on the upcoming Whitney biennial, and reflections on modern politics, not unlike today’s post!

Through NOTES, I aim to create a space, both online and in-person, that empowers, inspires, and entertains other intellectually curious and creative people. More to come, but drop me a line and let me know what you think! What’s a topic that you think I should explore?

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The highs and lows of 2025 are officially behind us.

Or at least that’s the quiet comfort we sit with during the first few days of a new year, as if somehow the last twelve months no longer have any bearing on who we are or hope to become over the next twelve months.

Last year was disorienting. There was DOGE and the massive restructuring of the federal government, the implications of which we have yet to understand fully. In November, we had the longest government shutdown in history. Masked men have unlawfully detained undocumented neighbors and citizens.

Amidst the chaos, there were also some bright spots. Democrats from Georgia to Seattle won big in local and statewide races. I am currently working on the transition for Detroit’s first female mayor, Mary Sheffield, where I’m supporting policy committees and organizing for community events in a few weeks. Indiana Republican lawmakers pushed back against a gerrymandered map.

2026 still has that sense that maybe we’re finally headed in a different direction, but despite this cautious optimism, anxiety still lurks just below the surface. With all this hope and fear, what comes next? To chart a course that looks toward the future, I’ve turned to the wisdom of those who came before me, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a speech he delivered nearly sixty years ago that poses this same question:

Where do we go from here?

For King, the answer to what comes next is simple. As a nation, we must be born again and start over. We must imagine a better version of this country than the current iteration we’re presented with, though it is not enough to simply dream. We must also do the work that’s required to achieve that outcome. Delivered during the 10th annual convening of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King’s speech is both a testament to the wins this country achieved in the sixties and a reminder that they were meant to serve as a foundation for continued organizing, not as the final chapter.

When we think of the past as something that is finished business rather than a narrative point that’s part of a larger struggle for freedom, we risk falling into what Angela Davis describes as “historical closures.” Instead, history is something that we must constantly contest, revisit, and engage with. Situating ourselves within a continuum that looks at the past to inform the present and plan for the future is critical for moving forward. King understood the importance of contextualizing the current moment by connecting the present to the past. He references the three-fifths clause, where enslaved people were not viewed as fully human, and draws a similar comparison to how Black bodies are still disproportionately devalued, highlighting racial disparities in Vietnam War fatalities.

It is only by knowing where we’ve come that we can then turn our attention to a type of self-care that acknowledges our individual and collective trauma. King argues that prioritizing one’s dignity and personhood is essential in renewing our strength to continue the “confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to preserving the status quo.”

Today, we talk about this fraught moment as if the entire history of this country wasn’t defined by violence. Some even choose to distance themselves from the action to “protect our peace” rather than engage. However, when King and other movement leaders talk about taking a step back, it’s not to fill one’s time with the 1960s equivalent of rotting ( what would be what, dropping acid? free love?) but to actively prepare for the fight ahead.

The path forward is clear. As this nation begins celebrating its 250th anniversary, we must come together, not only to socialize and celebrate but also to defend the chance to fully actualize this country’s founding principles. To be clear, it will be hard. The challenges we face are many - climate change, rising income inequality, the adoption of artificial intelligence - but these problems only appear insurmountable because we prioritize the individual over the collective.

When we come together, the impossible suddenly becomes reality.

And we only need to look at the last year as an example of what can happen when we do. A sustained boycott of Target since February 2025 has translated into shareholders losing over $20B. Neighbors and strangers have become the face of the resistance against ICE and others who are too afraid to reveal their identity as they kidnap people on the streets and in courthouses.

The sustained efforts of over 100,000 volunteers propelled an unknown candidate to victory who was barely even polling this time last year. A group of organizers, volunteers, and others who were ready to challenge the status quo helped this person shock established party gatekeepers and the mainstream media, who dismissed his campaign. That man, Zohran Mamdani, was officially sworn in as the mayor of New York City yesterday.

During Mamdani’s inauguration ceremony, each of the speakers - from Senator Bernie Sanders to the guest poet, Corneilius Eady - emphasized the importance of collective action and community. In what was perhaps the most emotional moment of the afternoon, public advocate Jumaane Williams broke down in tears, offering words of encouragement to his younger self before asking those in the crowd to take an oath to join hands and not let go, “because if we’re all connected, we can’t lose anyone.”

As we make our way through the coming weeks and months, I hope that each of us can reach out, grab more hands, hold on tight, and get ready to face whatever obstacles come our way - not alone, but together.

currently —

reading

• An Apprenticeship, or the Book of Pleasures (Clarice Lispector) - A woman undergoes a personal transformation. Truly sublime; I wanted to underline nearly every page.

• Small Rain (Garth Greenwell) - Stream of consciousness of a poet stuck in the ICU during COVID. Unlike any other reading experience I’ve had in a while.

• Early Sobrieties (Michael Deagler) - Short, connected vignettes of a man couch surfing his way through Philadelphia’s gentrifying neighborhoods during his first year of sobriety.

watching

• Marty Supreme (dir. Josh Safdie) - a charming anti-hero with aspirations of becoming a world champion table tennis player. Chalamet really carries the film, but I don’t think it’s enough to push him to an Oscar (though that’s not to say they aren’t trying).

• Die My Love (dir. Lynne Ramsay) - The slow unraveling of a couple after the birth of their son. Strong premise, but uneven execution.

viewing

• Contacts (Ken Ohara - on view at the Whitney through 2/8) - In 1974, New York-based, Tokyo-born photographer Ken Ohara started a visual chain letter using a pre-loaded camera. Participants were asked to take a photo of themselves and their loved ones. The result - intimate, candid, and staged shots from all walks of life across the country.

Have a great weekend! And let me know what you think! What’s a political or cultural topic that you think I should explore that you’d want to read?

xx,
kayla

The end of the year signals a period of reflection, a chance to look back and understand how the last eleven months fit into the larger narrative of our lives.

What were the moments and media that have informed how we will remember this year? Who were the people - both in our community and in the larger culture - that meant something to us? It’s an exercise that can result in a deeper appreciation of time and how we navigate it - although, as with most things these days, this type of personal introspection is now outsourced to generic, algorithmically generated templates.

Everything is now “Unwrapped.” Several other brands have created their own annual look back, ripping a page from Spotify’s incredibly popular music recap. You can even relive the one LinkedIn post you made while trying to look busy at work earlier this year. But as much as these retrospectives attempt to capture something, at the end of the day, there’s no whimsy, just code.

Instead of showing a couple of screenshots of what I listened to this year, I thought I’d instead spend this final stretch of the year briefly sharing how some of the media and culture I consumed informed my 2025 experience and what I’m taking into 2026. While I enjoyed some of this year’s new releases, I also couldn’t help but feel underwhelmed and hungry, searching for something deeper, richer, fuller during a time that otherwise seems so empty.

Contemporary media is defined by this sense of hopelessness, a collective agreement to accept our growing detachment from ourselves and the world around us. Even projects that I love, like “Severance,” heavily rely on this type of dystopian surrealism. Recent shows from Tim Robinson and Nathan Fielder also capture something that so closely resembles our own world - but for a glaringly obvious problem that no one but the protagonist seems to see.

The mockumentary style format of “The Rehearsal,” where some individuals are actors while others appear genuine but could also be actors, leaves you questioning other forms of media, such as reality television. Fielder initially examined the limits of one sub-genre, the business makeover show, through “Nathan For You.” He continues to pull on that thread in the show’s latest season about pilot safety that aired earlier this year.

How much of what you’re seeing is real? Does it even matter if it makes for great entertainment?

Robinson’s more explicitly fictional depiction of modern disorientation, “The Chair Company,” is another window into 2025. Here is a world in which people can’t get straight answers to seemingly simple problems. Instead, they have to swim through what feels like never-ending waves of nothing. The way Robinson’s character appears to lose whole hours while scrolling through poorly written website copy, hoping to find an answer, is both heightened for the comedic effect, but could just as easily have been someone’s living experience. There’s even a term for it: “sludge – torturous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss.”

In a cultural landscape that increasingly feels defined by sludge - content that feels overly burdensome with little payoff - this year I went deeper into the back catalogues of both contemporary and older artists. Many of those observations were shared through essays, whether it was my newfound admiration for Lorraine Hansberry or marking the last MetroCard.

These were some of the other rhythms, words, and movements that helped define my 2025.

MUSIC

Innervisions: Stevie Wonder (1973)

Smooth jams with an explicit political message that still resonates over fifty years later.

The very first album I ever downloaded back in 2005 was a Stevie Wonder compilation. Stevie is simply one of those artists who has floated in and out of my life. Every track flows so seamlessly, from the commentary found in “Living for the City” to the sweet romance of “Golden Lady” and into an absolute banger that is “Higher Ground” - but don’t miss out on the rest of the tracks that bookend the album’s core. “Visions” is a mournful plea - questioning whether a place “where hate’s a dream and love forever stands” could really exist - that feels especially timely.

recommended tracks: Golden Lady; Higher Ground; Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing

Adventures in Paradise: Minnie Riperton (1975)

Sweet honey delivered straight to your ears.
recommended tracks: Love And Its Glory; Inside My Love; Don’t Let Anyone Bring You Down

Reading, Writing and Arithmetic: The Sundays (1990)

Dreamy, breathy British tunes perfect for pretending like you’re the main character in a 1990s rom-com.

While I admittedly first found out about the Sundays through a TikTok sound using “Here’s Where The Story Ends,” I quickly fell in love with their entire discography. Their debut has earned a special place in my musical rotation. Earlier this year, the album was the perfect background music while driving through the suburbs of Atlanta with my little brother, David, and my mom after my grandfather passed away. Unbeknownst to me, David also ended up falling in love with the Sundays, a nice reminder that even though we’re now both adults, my influence as the oldest sibling still lives on.

recommended tracks: A Certain Someone; I Won; My Finest Hour

Congratulations: MGMT (2010)

Groovy psych-rock beats to dance to, bliss out on, and ponder - or maybe all three
recommended tracks: Siberian Breaks; Flash Delirium; Congratulations

Titanic Rising: Weyes Blood (2019)

A cinematic submersion highlighting the triumphant highs and devastating lows of contemporary life.
recommended tracks: Something to Believe; A Lot’s Gonna Change; Wild Time

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BOOKS

Rattlebone: Maxine Clair

Brief snapshots of an observant black girl, her parents, and friends in 1950s Kansas City.

Looking for Lorraine: Lorraine Hansberry

A collection of journal entries, play excerpts, correspondence, and sketches published posthumously after the writer’s death.

Immediacy, or the Style of Too-Late Capitalism: Anna Kornbluh

A look at how modern technology prioritizes speed and volume over depth and quality.

The Stories of John Cheever

Stories from white, midcentury America that are both so specific yet easily recognizable in 2025. Favorites include “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor,” the “Sorrows of Gin,” and “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear.”

Interpreter of Maladies: Jhumpa Lahiri

Short stories exploring American culture at the turn of the twenty-first century, told through the lens of Indian immigrants. Favorites include “Mrs. Sen’s” and “Temporary Matter.”

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: James Weldon Johnson

One man’s journey through early twentieth-century New York as he confronts the joys and limitations society places on him as a Black man.

ART

Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930 (Guggenheim)

Selected pieces from a group of artists that would influence modern European art.

All Day All Night (Whitney Museum): Christine Sun Kim

A survey of Kim’s work, playing with form, body, and audio/visual techniques in ASL and written English.

The Equator Has Moved (Dia Beacon): Renée Green

A collection of the Cleveland-born artist Renee Green’s work over the last four decades. This show is still on view at Dia Beacon through August 2026.

Really Free (California African American Museum): Nellie Mae Rowe

A woman realizes her dream of becoming an artist in her mid-sixties.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

The Sopranos

Worth the wait - can definitely see how the show’s approach to character development and writing would go on to influence Matthew Weiner’s “Mad Men,” which is perhaps my favorite piece of modern television, just ahead of “Succession.” My favorite episode was Test Dream (S4E11) because of how it builds on the show’s visual language and story. The arc with Pie-Oh-My is perhaps the wildest detour in the show that I absolutely loved. It’s such a twist, something that was both building up to its climax for seasons but would also have unforeseen repercussions throughout the rest of the show.

Practice (Playwrights Horizon): Nazareth Hassan

An experimental theater troupe gets ready for an overseas tour - it was so unlike anything I’ve ever seen live before that I saw it twice during its run. The play comments on cults, modern reality television, and how trauma from marginalized creators is harvested for white, wealthy audiences. Very meta; you either love it or hate it.

rip maxwell

A beloved local brick-and-mortar said goodbye this October. This place truly felt like the Room of Requirement - they always had exactly what I needed each time I stopped by. Here are some of my favorite brands I discovered there that I plan to keep supporting:

• Song in D Minor perfume - it’s like a spicy, floral summer garden

• 54 Celsius tarot candles designed by Sophy Hollington

• Bath salts from 6 pm candle co

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Next week, I’ll share some thoughts as we make our final preparations for the new year.

What were some of the things that defined and shaped your year?

• news:

  • indiana republicans oppose trump-approved congressional map

  • supreme court hears oral arguments to expand presidential powers

  • dozens of government websites impacted by malicious seo scam

• culture:

  • new promo for the zendaya/pattison spring 2026 film, ‘the drama’

  • victorian origins of self-optimization

  • fonda parodies kidman amc spot after proposed warner bros sale

• art

  • interview with ari melenciano: “conviction is trusting the way that you exist in the world”

  • discovering the house that herman built

  • wifredo lam’s long-overdue moma retrospective

• reading

  • freedom is a constant struggle (angela y. davis)

  • writers and lovers (lily king)

December always comes so suddenly.

Thanksgiving feels like yesterday, yet early October seems like a lifetime ago. It’s hard to believe there are only a few weeks left in the year.

2025 was a particularly complicated year, defined by videos and images of masked men and armed guards in major cities. Mass layoffs and corporate consolidations. Technology that threatens to either change the course of history or set off the next global financial crisis - or sometimes both, depending on the day and the person you’re talking to. And yet this is also the first holiday season that I don’t feel utterly gutted.

This year, I took a significant step back from the internet. I prioritized more living and experiencing over documenting and scrolling. Our current culture prioritizes pumping out content to feed the algorithm and “stay relevant,” which leaves little time to explore one’s own interests or discover new things. Spending more time ‘touching grass’ was an invitation to scrap off all of the passively consumed, pre-chewed content that has come to define modern life and instead attempt to answer: what does it mean to live at a time that feels like the end of the world?

While overly hyperbolic and histrionic, answering this question at the start of the year was a personally clarifying exercise. Of course, computers crash, people die, relationships fall apart, but imagining this was the end pushed me outside of my comfort zone in ways I didn’t think were possible. This was my busiest year socially because I knew the alternative was staying inside, doomscrolling, and I just couldn’t allow myself to wallow. I had to do something. I had to engage.

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Community is a buzzword right now, and it makes sense.

We are still only a few years removed from the 2020-21 lockdowns. Many acknowledge how it fundamentally reshaped the world; perhaps we might even have an example of how our socializing habits are different pre- and post-vaccinations. However, I don’t think we’ve collectively sat and thought about just how destabilizing those months were. There is a deep sense of loss that we ignore rather than confront because to do so would mean to acknowledge the confusion and the pain and the sadness and how we wish it were still 2019.

Instead, we look up at the mirror to find a slightly older, potentially unrecognizable version of ourselves. Instead, we turn to our phones, to our quick little dopamine hits of online shopping and sports betting and endless content - always a new show to watch, a documentary with “never before seen footage,” as if each new day passing right before our glazed-over eyes also doesn’t have the potential for the same sense of novelty and curiosity.

We have convinced ourselves that listening to a podcast “where it feels like you’re really in the room listening” is the same as sharing a physical space with someone. We have convinced ourselves this is acceptable, sometimes even pretzeling our way into absurd bad-faith attacks, reductions, or excuses, using individual justifications for our isolation instead of taking collective ownership towards a solution.

We confuse the concept of community with an instant follow rather than active engagement. We deprioritize catching up with someone in person, instead mindlessly surveilling them online, knowing it doesn’t fully convey a person’s depth or reality, but accepting enough of the highlight reel not to ask questions. We view modern technology as the default instead of a bridge, a temporary replacement, a potential facilitator to in-person connection.

We want to have an easy, fast solution because we live in an easy, fast world. But there is no amount of money one could spend on creating real, authentic connections. You can’t purchase a sense of belonging, as much as people try. Community is something that’s built, interaction by interaction.

This year was hard. To think that next year, a midterm cycle that is already contested, will be any easier is not only naive but dangerous. Assuming the digital channels - many of which are owned and controlled by Trump’s allies - will continue to remain viable sources to share information and organize is also misguided. Now is the time to make the effort to rebuild old connections and form new ones.

This will not be easy, and it is not entirely our fault. There is the decline of free or low-cost third spaces, longer work hours, a greater sense of disillusionment and fear and anger that is packaged through content and sold right back to us. But that doesn’t mean it is not worth fighting for. It doesn’t mean we give up and join the Metaverse simply because there’s no point. It’s not over until it’s over. And I think there is still something worth fighting for.

Taking the time to connect with others helped deepen my sense of self and belonging, which then flowed into my creative work and back into my interactions with others.

Earlier this spring, I hosted a panel about how artists and intellectuals are approaching their work during the second Trump administration. One friend designed the poster. Another offered to bartend. A local wine store, brewery, and aperitivo brand all donated beverages. The cafe I hosted the event at was free because I had worked as a server at one of the owner’s other restaurants. The thought of so many people chipping in to help me actualize a dream felt foreign, a fluke. Instead, it was just the beginning.

Part of why I thought the May event would fail was that I had gotten used to the narrative I’ve had about myself for years. People leave me. People hurt me. People do not show up for me. I was practically sobbing during a therapy session the week of the event, thoroughly convinced eight people would show up. That night, we were nearly at capacity with a little over 30 people, including several whom I had never met before. It made me realize that maybe the story of who I was needed some revisions.

After that event in May, I started sketching the idea for a novel on scraps of paper, a continuation of a story I had started last year as a screenplay. Those scraps turned into printer pages and a notebook, then thousands of words. I am nowhere near a manuscript, but chasing experiences off my screen opened up so many opportunities for new experiences, a chance to go deeper on certain things without worrying about how to commodify or package them.

Once I stopped the online performance, it was as if this great weight was lifted, and I could finally create without wondering how I could please an audience or the critical part of myself that always shut down my ideas. I made and screened a documentary. I wrote an essay for a local publication, which will appear in print early next year. I read random philosophy, media theory, and history books. I spent precious time with people I love.

This year, I made new friends and deepened existing relationships at free community events, while volunteering and canvassing or simply striking up conversations. I went to dinner parties and campaign events and art talks. Some conversations pushed me. There were spirited debates that changed my mind about long-held beliefs. I showed up for friends to help with their creative projects and at film screenings and birthday parties and impromptu walks. And they also showed up and supported me.

These little discoveries about myself and the world around me were essential in building my understanding of who I am and how I hope to show up during a time of rising fascism and state violence. It allowed me to realize that what is happening in 2025 is “same shit, different day” when put within the larger context of this country. This is something I knew for years in an abstract way based on historical context, but now it’s clear I simply wasn’t paying enough attention to its contemporary manifestations.

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This is not the first time it has felt as though the world is falling apart, nor is it the last.

Amidst this particularly destabilizing climate, my family, friends, neighbors - and even kind strangers - have served as my anchor points. I don’t know what tomorrow holds. No one does. What I do know is that I am ending the year somewhat lighter than how I started, my faith in humanity and our ability to come together somehow reaffirmed.

My greatest wish for 2026 is that people realize they still have some type of agency, that it is still possible to try something new, be vulnerable, and allow others in. To let people surprise you. It might seem scary, but I would argue that a world without connection is a world I’m not interested in living in.

“Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.” - Audre Lorde

• watching: the chair company – a delightfully eerie abstraction of modern life and the seductive search for order in an increasingly chaotic world.

• listening: a lot’s gonna change, weyes blood – obsessed with “something to believe” + “wild time”

• questioning: water sommeliers – h20 is the new must-have beverage (i hate this stage of capitalism).

• reading: minor black figures – literary fic exploring racial identity, sexuality, faith, and navigating the modern art world.

• don’t forget: polls in new york city are open until 9 pm tonight! find your election day poll site here.

“My older sister said the vibes were like this with Obama,” a co-worker commented a few weeks ago. During a moment of American political life that otherwise seems defined by perpetual despair, the energy in some parts of New York City (and online) has reached near euphoric levels over the Zohran Mamdani campaign. The question today becomes whether it’s enough to translate into electing the city’s first Muslim mayor who is under 35.

The “New York is Not For Sale” rally at Forest Hills Stadium last weekend was not unlike a rock concert, except instead of swaying to hipster nostalgia core, a crowd of thousands cheered for Starbucks workers fighting to unionize. There were spontaneous “AOC” chants during the Congresswoman’s opening remarks, which included a breezy mention of presenting the Eugene V. Debs award to the evening’s next speaker, Bernie Sanders, earlier that weekend. In hindsight, it seems almost a given – it’s New York City, a caricature of coastal liberalism – but the narrative around Mamdani’s surprise primary victory betrays a misunderstanding of contemporary politics.

There is already a growing cohort of young people leading major U.S. cities. Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu is expanding the city’s childcare system. Baltimore’s Mayor Brandon Scott just signed sweeping zoning reform to create more housing. Both offer their own brand of progressive ideology, were under 40 during their first campaign, and are now in their second terms (Wu is running unopposed tonight). However, in our media-saturated landscape, you’ll likely never hear about these policy wins. The fact that New York is America’s largest city means that there are more eyes (and scrutiny) that have pushed some of Mamdani’s ideas, like universal childcare, into the mainstream.

That the historical Socialist presidential candidate needed no introduction at a rally for New York’s frontrunner in the mayoral race felt indicative of the growing schism between progressives and Establishment Democrats. Years of grassroots organizing by groups like the Working Families Party and Democratic Socialists of America had led to this moment: a progressive coalition (potentially) upending the existing power structure of the Democratic Party.

What does it say about the party if a traditionally moderate incumbent governor eventually embraces the young upstart? Since both the House and Senate Democratic minority leaders are from New York, how are Republicans framing this local race to their base on national television within the context of the government shutdown? Why does President Trump care so much? All of these questions swirling in the air have created this charged energy in New York over the last few months.

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A little over a year ago, a New York State Assemblymember launched a campaign to become mayor of New York City and wasn’t even initially polling. That same candidate is now expected to win tonight.

As a lapsed New York City DSA member, I was familiar with Mamdani and remember hearing about his hunger strike, how he was arrested near Chuck Schumer’s apartment shortly after the October 7^th attacks. However, the early days of the second Trump administration meant there was so much news happening on the national scale that the local race barely registered on my radar.

To live throughout the last ten months of 2025 is sometimes to feel as though you’ve lived ten years. Artificial intelligence is changing our perception of reality. Masked men are arresting people on the streets and in courtrooms. The East Wing of the White House was demolished to make room for a ballroom paid for by big tech (Meta, Apple), crypto (Ripple), and defense contractors (Lockheed Martin).

Earlier this year, I wrote about how disappointed I was with the lukewarm attempts to meet this moment of rising authoritarianism. It wasn’t until around Memorial Day that I felt I could finally come up for air. Seeing how this relatively unknown person had catapulted to near-mainstream recognition – and then how, against all odds, beat Andrew Cuomo in the June primary – made me think maybe all wasn’t lost amidst this otherwise dumpster fire of a year.

As we neared the final weeks of Mamdani’s campaign, I knew I couldn’t remain passive. I had to canvass, which is essentially door-to-door sales. Canvassers download a list - known as a “turf” - with around 70-100 addresses. Each address has a person’s name and age. Canvassers rate each interaction; one means “fuck yeah, I’m excited about this candidate/issue,” and five is a hardcore no. In most cases, people aren’t home. Those who open the door typically score a three – undecided. The canvasser’s goal is to generate enough interest for a canvasser to re-engage during another round of outreach.

I also knew that if I wanted to make an impact, I needed to go outside of my neighborhood. Dubbed the “commie corridor,” there are now parts of central Brooklyn and Queens that have successfully run left-of-center candidates like my councilmember, Chi Osse, who represents Bed-Stuy, and a slate of state assemblymembers, including Mamdani.

@channel5tiktok#NYC Council member Chi Ossé goes off on #AndrewCuomo #channel5

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Situated on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, I met different types of voters out canvassing in East New York during the final weeks of the campaign. While Mamdani handily won Brooklyn during the primary, Cuomo held a sizable double-digit lead in most of East New York, which made outreach in October all the more urgent.

Recent headlines portrayed the initial surge in early voting among older New Yorkers as a boost for Andrew Cuomo. However, the overwhelming majority of voters over 65 that I spoke with in East New York were either leaning toward Mamdani or had already voted for him.

One Indo-Caribbean man stopped working on his car to dish out life advice (“sleep and rest are very important”). He talked about how he had lived in the neighborhood since the 1980s, owned a few small businesses before retiring, and felt income inequality had gotten out of control. His entire family already had plans to vote together on Election Day.

At another address, an older Black man in his late seventies opened the door and went to get his wife, who usually handled the voting decisions. A few minutes later, he came back to say she was busy cooking – the smell was heavenly – and was joined by a man in his early twenties, his grandson, who became excited. “Oh yeah, I’m voting for him already. This is the guy you gotta vote for, grandpa! I already talked to grandma.”

Along the way, I also encountered a range of disengaged and skeptical voters. At my very first house in mid-October, an older woman sat on her covered stoop next door, peering out at us. My canvass partner and I made polite hellos before asking if she had a plan to vote in a few weeks or had any questions about Mamdani.

“I don’t decide who I vote for until that morning.” Was there anything on her mind that she was hoping the next mayor of New York would address? “It’ll be whatever is on my mind when I wake up that day. I don’t really like to know a whole lot of information before I go in.”

We left her a flyer about the campaign’s major policy priorities and continued down the block. Several of the people I spoke with over the last few weeks were waiting until Election Day to officially decide. Others had never even heard of Mamdani.

At a large apartment complex, an older Black woman, Sandra, opened the door a crack and was already adamant – she wasn’t voting for Cuomo or Adams. She was about to close the door when I clarified that I was with another candidate. Sandra popped the door back and began to apologize. Her younger sister was the one in the family who helped share information about upcoming elections and had passed away earlier in the year. In the midst of her grief and focus on the national news, Sandra had tuned out local politics. Who was this other candidate?

We ended up talking for almost twenty minutes. I met her cats, her husband, and her teenage grandson, who lounged on a recliner chair the entire time, scrolling on an iPad. When Sandra asked if he had heard of Mamdani, he responded, “Yeah, he’s everywhere,” and she asked him to show her more of his content later.

During the last election cycle, she wasn’t excited about Adams and had reluctantly voted for him. The very idea of voting for Cuomo was repugnant. She was impressed that Leticia James and her union, as well as her husband’s union, had endorsed him.

“I really didn’t know there was another option,” she said.

The fact that his policies resonated with Sandra, but she hadn’t heard of the leading candidate until three weekends before the general election, was both encouraging and a primary motivator for why I kept going to East New York.

Part of what makes Mamdani such a captivating candidate is that he offers an aspirational vision for the future at a time when everything else seems like it’s falling apart.

Talking to people about how there was a candidate out there that is also thinking about the things that keep them up at night, that they are not forgotten in the narrative of what makes New York City so special – seeing people find shreds of optimism to cling to was inspiring. These little moments of human connection and recognition during otherwise uncertain times have provided a type of levity I didn’t know I needed.

It’s the joy of waving to a little boy who is excited to go vote with his father on Tuesday. The quiet excitement on someone’s face when they open the door as they tell you they’ve already voted for him. Tapping on your phone to help people find their polling site. Eating flaky beef patties after completing a turf as the elevated train rumbles over. Hustling to catch a bus because the next one won’t come for another half hour. Taking the time to listen to someone.

Canvassing has created a little temporary community. Over 100,000 people volunteered for the campaign. Arriving at a random location with a group of strangers – young and old; natives or recent transplants; working class or creative professionals – and coming together in pursuit of a shared outcome is an experience that increasingly feels rare in a world where everything feels curated and categorized.

Each day leading up to the election, it didn’t matter that we were film bros and cosplayers; museum lovers, tennis players, and choir members; tenant organizers and disillusioned software engineers; teachers and flight attendants and journalists and actors. It didn’t matter whether we had grown up in this neighborhood our entire lives or had recently moved from another state and wanted to get involved in local politics. It didn’t matter if we were Muslim or Jewish or atheist and in a polycule.

What mattered is that we were all New Yorkers and that there was suddenly reason to hope again.

polls in new york city are open until 9 pm tonight! find your election day poll site here.

One day, we looked up and the world changed without us even realizing it. Maybe we didn’t look up until after the 2016 election or during lockdown in 2020. Maybe we didn’t recognize something was off until yesterday. Suddenly, it became apparent that all of the explicit power and implicit ideas of what it meant to be an American felt like they didn’t exist anymore. It was almost as if we were silly for even imagining the status quo of stability and the faint veneer of democracy had ever existed to begin with. Of course, certain segments of our countrymen had lived with this dissonance for years, decades, centuries but since the limited economic opportunity and unease hadn’t yet made its way to Main Street USA, most of the country could shrug, could say, “that’s a them problem,” e pluribus unum flying straight over their heads.

To pay attention to the news in 2025 is to remain unsure whether one is watching what is happening or if instead we’ve stumbled across some poorly written B-movie. We’ve got trade wars and trad wives; recession indicators and Alligator Alcatraz. It is a year in which an official White House X account can post an ASMR video of deportations, and we’ve already forgotten because there’s so much shit flooding our feeds.

Given today’s political climate, I was curious about how this generation of artists is meeting the moment, often to disappointing results.

There was one night back in April – air so humid I could feel its heavy wetness in my lungs – where I stood outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music, chatting to two women in their late twenties who were hoping to catch a glimpse of Suleika Jaouad as she left an event. We made pleasant small talk before they asked about the group of people I had come from further down the street.

“Seems like quite a little scene,” one of the women remarked. “So well dressed.”

The event I had attended earlier was a “collectivist” film festival. The dress code: black tie. But of course, this being Brooklyn, black tie was a term loosely applied and here meant the intersecting aesthetic sensibilities of vaguely bisexual women and a particular brand of straight men who exaggerate their love of bush.

In many ways, the festival embodied the cultural ouroboros we seem to find ourselves stuck in as coastal elites turn their gaze so far inward that their art remains increasingly self-referential and inaccessible. The more I spend time in the Brooklyn “scene” — however peripheral that may be — the more this disconnect between ‘tastemakers’ and their inability to grapple with the challenges of today becomes obvious. The conversation in these spaces feels stale, circling the same few topics but lacking the intellectual rigor, conviction, or interest that would result in anything other than the shallowest of takes.

The films that evening included a pithy mockumentary featuring the type of man who would write multi-verse poems for the female roommate he has an unrequited crush on. There were white women either coming of age or exploring their relationship to social media. A comedy depicting a certain type of Brooklyn man who has recently discovered chess and uses his newfound intellect to manipulate women.

It’s not as if these films weren’t well made, acted, or wonderfully shot. Of course they were. Some were even funny. And yet I also couldn’t help but think, this is how contemporary artists are approaching our modern era? It’s not that every piece needs to have meaning. However, at an event that began with a vague mention about donating a percentage of proceeds to a family in Gaza (a call to political action that was never mentioned again), it was almost comical how performative everything was.

I was beginning to feel concerned about the state of art, about the state of humanity, about whether we had truly run out of things to say or if it was simply a matter of elevating the wrong people to the right positions. But during one particularly hallucinatory moment of miming patriotism on America’s 249^th birthday, I started to regain hope.

There are a lot of places one might expect to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Standing in a darkened theater at a drag puppet show in Williamsburg while Fourth of July fireworks sporadically explode outside doesn’t immediately come to mind. Yet here we all were, most of the audience realizing we still knew the words – ‘and to the Republic’ – while on stage, the Stars and Stripes stroked their flagpole before reaching a patriotic climax.

Welcome to Vape Kid’s Cool Zone.

Presented as a lost recording of a children’s program, the Cool Zone features Courtney, a genetically modified albino pig developed by the U.S. government to become the perfect cop. It’s hard not to instantly fall in love with Courtney’s dopey eyes and faint lisp as he learns valuable life lessons from his handler, Vape Kid, the program’s saccharine host, and an assortment of other characters. But what starts as a seemingly by-the-numbers show, complete with cue cards, quickly turns into a blood bath that sees more than one character dead by the time the ‘network’ cuts the transmission.

The Cool Zone’s creator/performer, Ashley Pignataro, has managed to tap into some of the underlying anxieties of our time around policing, the myth of American exceptionalism, and how our consumer culture promotes these concepts. And she does it all with puppets.

Pignataro, who grew up in New Jersey, always had creative ambitions – early memories include constructing elaborate vignettes in the front yard for Halloween, like a scarecrow conducting an autopsy, with her twin brother – but pursuing that talent never felt like a viable career path. Instead, she decided to focus on medicine, even attending a specialized health and science high school, before majoring in biomedical engineering.

During college, Pignataro started making content on Snapchat, submitting quick videos to a student-run, campuswide account. Following graduation, she fell into hustle culture, working long hours in tech, which left little room for creative pursuits. It wasn’t until a bad mushroom trip upstate – “it was like my skin was being peeled off and I was being scraped away across this infinite corridor” – that Pignataro realized something needed to change.

This tension between embracing one’s ‘special talent’ and how it conflicts with the demands of our capitalist society shows up in the Cool Zone through Courtney’s initial struggle to accept his future.

As a small child, Courtney is still impressionable enough to do anything that will make Vape Kid happy, but cracks begin to emerge. The “Letter of the Day” is a song that is both an introduction to the episode’s theme - everyone has a special purpose - while also teaching the audience to support the state, surveillance, and special forces. While watching the sultry letter “S,” Courtney begins to sing, only to receive a swift punishment from Vape Kid. Pig boys don’t sing. They learn how to become a good cop.

This spin on easily recognizable games from the last half-century of children’s programming is part of the show’s sinister charm. Audience participation takes several forms - a la Dora the Explorer - like chanting, “open the door, Courtney,” each time a character knocks. Another segment, “Eye Spy,” is framed around teaching kids how to profile by spotting “who doesn’t belong,” and includes custom animations for the audience to spot the difference between entirely objective things, like a cowboy and a clown.

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The process of building out the show involved a creative team that included other trans performers, including the show’s director, Octavia Leona Kohner. Part of her role was helping Pignataro take the vignettes she had workshopped over the years. Kohner also worked to establish the relationship between the performers and the puppets, of which there are five in the show: Courtney, Officer Opportunity, a green rooster, the letter ‘S,’ and another mutant performer, Sonny.

“The best puppet pieces are going to accept the reality of the puppet being an individual rather than an accessory of the performer,” Kohner said. “There was quite a lot of direction in terms of physicality and movement and the ideology of a puppet’s movement.”

Courtney, originally conceived as a giant teddy bear that would sing screamo, was soon repurposed into his current version. Defining features include multiple rows of teeth, droopy eyelids, and stick legs with stripes. Pignataro learned how to handle and move the puppet through self-taping.

“I kind of had to figure it out on my own what interactions with me from him sell him as a real thing, which is why very early on [in the performance], I tickle his tummy to establish physicality,” Pignataro said. “He’s here. He’s real. He’s a biological thing that can react to stuff I do to him.”

Officer Opportunity’s first appearance is during a ‘career exploration’ segment, teaching Courtney (and the audience) about the wonderful world of policing through a song. Operating the puppet, an orange mutant pig with tusks and exaggerated movements, required the coordination of two puppeteers.

“[His] movements are these big stomps with large waves because it’s like, the state is not graceful,” Kohner added. “It is not beautiful. It is this object of destruction.”

Even during its earliest iterations, Pignataro’s work as Vape Kid, Jr. featured some degree of satire and critique of the U.S. government.

After her mushroom trip, Pignataro started carving out time to explore stand-up comedy and began performing at spots like Purgatory. Since most of the events emphasized drag, she got curious and decided to try it herself, a decision made somewhat easier since she had already started going by the name Vape Kid, Jr. at open mics.

The move from comedy to drag to puppetry wasn’t that big a leap. Muna Mushin, one of the show’s puppeteers, reflected on how each of these sub-communities within New York’s queer nightlife scene tends to overlap “because all of their acts revolve around the reveal.” Expanding into drag opened up new opportunities for Pignataro, including performing with Courtney in the Mx. Nobody Pageant, Brooklyn’s longest-running drag competition.

While initially eliminated during a qualifying round, Pingataro was brought back in the finale as one of three wild cards with the explicit ask that her performance needed to include Courtney. The only problem? Pignataro had just one number at the time and now needed to create something original in less than six weeks. She spent nearly a month writing a space opera around Katy Perry’s “Firework,” but pivoted again after attending a punk show just two weeks before taking the stage.

“They played [this] song that night, which is about eliminating every last cop and looping in that police aren’t just literally the guys in blue,” Pignataro said. “Police are the military, are the politicians. Police are the stockbrokers. It’s the entire system.”

The song, “Every Last One” by L.O.T.I.O.N Multinational Corporation, would become her number for Mx. Nobody. In the competition, Officer Opportunity, as a disembodied voice, reveals Courtney’s origins and what it means to live up to this ‘special purpose.’ Rather than accept his fate, Courtney rebels. The piece was enough for Pignataro to place first runner-up and became the closing number for the Cool Zone production I saw in July.

While getting more involved in the scene, Pignataro met Lorelei Maiorano, who performs under the name Selena Surreal. Maiorano is the co-founder and producer of the Black Cherry Sideshow, the first and only BIPOC, all Trans troupe, and provided feedback during earlier iterations of the Cool Zone.

“[Pignataro] is an incredible political satirist whose objective and space that she is coming from is explicitly addressing anti-fascism within the police state in America,” Maiorano said. “You have to go absurdist, especially for a room full of white people.”

Since Mx. Nobody, Pignataro has continued to explore themes of indoctrination and American exceptionalism. “History Time,” a number involving a School House Rock-esque tune and the Pledge, was one way to involve the audience and show how we are each complicit in perpetuating a system that reinforces capitalism, sexism, and racism.

Deciding to set the show in an asynchronistic period that vaguely resembled the 1980s, drawing from the U.S.’s involvement in El Salvador, Cuba, and Nicaragua, was another intentional decision.

“I thought [the decade] was really reflective of the revisionist history of what the American Dream is [by] overwriting the sovereignty of all these other countries in order to tell them here's how you're going to organize yourselves,” Pignataro said. “We were so afraid of anybody setting up a society that worked some different way or a better way.”

Memory and what we choose to remember (or forget) can serve as a way to uphold a specific ideology or status quo. Part of why “Make America Great Again” is so powerful is that those four words capture a fictional past that exists at both the personal and societal level without having to confront the decades of policies (or the people behind them) that contributed to this sense that something is lost.

“[There’s] this collective imagination about what America was, and it’s never accurate to a specific time period of how it actually was to live in the country,” Pignataro reflected. “It’s just this idea of things were so nice when I didn’t have to worry about all these faggots around on the street, but it was never like that. It was never any of those things.”

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Throughout the Cool Zone, the audience follows the various ways in which Courtney is manipulated and indoctrinated by the state. Part of this is achieved through dialogue, but the production also utilizes police academy training videos, as well as curated commercial breaks taken from the 1980s or 1990s that were used to market military and police toys to young boys.

“This is the brainwashing that happens to the people who enter the police state,” Maiorano said. “Even if they are initially good people, through subjection within that system, they eventually become part of the state, and they become part of those gears.”

Our current political woes didn’t happen in a vacuum but instead emerged over time, often at the expense of harming Black, brown, and other marginalized communities. However, that doesn’t mean we are forced to live in the world we inherited. Courtney learns that even if he is influenced by his surroundings or biology, he doesn’t have to remain complicit. And if mutant pig boys can exercise free will, then so can we.

Pignataro’s art is one of the ways she makes sense of our current reality.

“If [I try] to deal with ICE, it’s just absolutely overwhelming,” Pignataro said. “[Vape Kid] is a way that I can process my relationship to what’s happening, and I can even acknowledge the tragedies in a way that’s accessible to me.”

It’s this refusal to accept the status quo that I find most inspiring about not only Pignataro but the other creatives I’ve met over the last few months. The world we seek isn’t handed to us but instead comes through direct action. Maiorano was tired of being the only trans artist of color in sideshow spaces, so she decided to recruit and train her troupe, which now performs every second Saturday at Purgatory and recently celebrated its first anniversary.

“You’re going to see us as brown people and you’ll see us as black people and you’re gonna see us as trans people, “ Maiorano said. “You’re going to recognize us because the world at large is on fucking fire, and I cannot put out that huge fire. I don’t have that much water. But I can make sure that it doesn’t get this fucking close, and I can do that within my community amongst artists.”

It is one thing to acknowledge how overwhelming this moment feels, but it takes a particular type of person to wade through the despair and come out on the other side with a truly engaging and unique piece of art.

Yet I also still wish those in greater positions of power were able to use their voice and platform to reach a larger audience. Reflecting on the role of artists in protest movements, Kohner believes that the democratization of art has also meant the commodification of creativity, which is why we aren’t seeing the same scale of contemporary artists using their platform to advocate for change.

“I think there’s a sort of shamelessness about selling out that previous movements have not had in their counterculture,” Kohner said. “The idea of the counterculture at all has been lost, and now it’s all about co-opting the dominant culture and co-opting the tools of the oppressors that the capitalist class is already utilizing.”

During an era increasingly defined by elitism and generative AI, Mushin feels concerned about artists who are cynical about their approach and view themselves as a failure because their work doesn’t meet preconceived metrics of ‘success.’

“You are not an artist because you make money off of your art,” Mushin said. “You’re an artist because you’re here and you’re alive.”

We are currently witnessing a reshaping of our government and the global order, yet many of us are still acting under a business-as-usual mindset. Unfortunately, these are not normal times. It is easy to want to bury our heads in the sand and make the conscious choice not to engage because we are too tired or overwhelmed or unsure or just trying to focus on making ends meet.

Those are all valid responses, ones I imagine people throughout time have also felt. And yet we have the rights and freedoms we currently have (and are in the process of being stripped away) because people with those same concerns, worries, and weariness also saw something bigger than themselves at stake that was worth committing to

“We can collectively reconstruct what reality is because I think everybody else is at home going insane thinking this can’t be real, almost like society at large is telling you that everything’s normal, nothing weird is happening,” Pignataro said. “[But] we can collectively come together and regain our sanity and see we’re not crazy, see this shit’s happening, and like we have to do something about it.”

You can follow Ashley @vapekidjr and Selena Surreal @selena.surreal + @blackcherrysideshow to stay in touch about upcoming performances.

We rarely know when something is truly over.

The day you spent outside, sun touching skin as you sit on a blanket, laughing with friends, doesn’t even register as you toss the pair of shorts you were wearing into a bag destined for either a second-hand store or the landfill. A meal with your family at a restaurant, a place that felt as familiar as your own kitchen, each of you groaning about how you couldn’t possibly eat another bite. And now you won’t, because the restaurant abruptly closed the next week. Walking under a tree for years, for decades, barely even registering it until one day, a stump. A shadeless stretch of sidewalk.

So many unacknowledged little endings.

Of course, knowing when something is over is its own type of quiet loss. Minutes tick by before the final school bell, a recognition of moving forward, of moving on - even if you’re not quite ready - quickly overshadowed by the uncertainty and anticipation of what comes next. Closing the door of an empty apartment, fingers gliding down a bannister you will never touch again. Final words of love delivered bedside, the pain of saying goodbye when we’re not ready.

Maybe it’s better not to know, to let the loss float by unannounced, silently leaving us.

Earlier this year, I got an email - my final MetroCard.

Nearly a decade after my first trip to New York, riding the subway or bus has never lost its appeal. Even during the times when the train is delayed, there is the annoyance in the moment, but it doesn’t take too long for my mind to wander back to the past, to days spent trapped inside the suburbs, wishing I had the freedom to roam around. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was almost twenty. Without a car or access to public transportation, I spent much of my time alone at home, dreaming about a future when I wouldn’t need to rely on friends or my mom to take me where I wanted to go.

Eight years ago, I moved to New York to start my first job after college. The first few hours of new hire orientation were a blur, but one thing stuck out: I could request a fully loaded MetroCard as a benefit, automatically taken out of my paycheck, pre-tax, and delivered straight to me. Freedom had finally arrived in the form of a small, flimsy, goldenrod rectangle straight from the nineties.

Learning how to swipe that summer was an introduction to New York’s secret rhythm. Swipe too fast and all you’ll end up getting is a pair of bruised thighs, maybe even another rushed commuter slamming up behind you. Swipe too slow and you reveal yourself for what you are - an easy mark. You have to be firm. Confident, but not showy. Aside from two years in Canada, each month I would open my mailbox and find a thin envelope loaded with a MetroCard, a ritual that was both utterly benign, completely administrative, yet oddly reassuring - a regular reminder that against all odds, this little girl from Texas had made her way to New York City.

I swiped to first dates and picnics and doctor’s appointments; ran down streets and up stairs in the hopes of making train doors and buses before they pulled away. A swipe took me to Washington Square Park, where I got engaged; another swipe to Kings County Courthouse, where I finalized my divorce. It was in this way that life slowly inched forward: reaching into my wallet, swiping my MetroCard, moving about the city, unaware of how attached I had become to a magnetic strip until -

Practically speaking, I knew this transition made sense. Conceptually, the move to tap-and-pay is the next logical step in transportation technology; parts of Europe and Asia have had this for years, decades even. Switching to OMNY was a long time coming. The decision to end the MetroCard started an entire year before I even moved to New York. This was something that was always going to end. I just didn’t think I would care so much.

Phasing out the MetroCard didn’t matter until it dawned on me that it was one of the last things in my life that I regularly engaged with that wasn’t my phone. Now, instead of reaching for my wallet and slipping out my MetroCard, I can just tap. It’s simpler, but it also feels as though something small was lost. The struggle and eventual joy of figuring out how to swipe, of learning the city’s subtleties, is instead replaced by a transaction style that doesn’t feel all that different from paying for a cup of coffee or a pair of shoes.

There is a sort of quiet intentionality that went behind the design of not only the card but the vending machines as well. As the MTA was rolling out vending machines, the off-the-shelf Cubic model quickly became an issue. The original design was clunky and hard to navigate for the system’s variety of users, which range from tourists, harried commuters, and everyone in between. Just two years after its launch, the MTA hired a design firm in 1996 to reimagine how New Yorkers would buy their transit fare.

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Created “for a future that never quite happened” by alumni of the human-centered design firm IDEO, the colorful vending machines drew inspiration from a design theory out of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in suburban Detroit. It was there that students, including Masamichi Udagawa, were taught “product semantics.” This represented a departure from more modernist approaches of “form follows function,” instead emphasizing “form follows meaning.” Udagawa and another IDEO alum, Sigi Moeslinger, would go on to lead the redesign of the MetroCard machines by emphasizing “expressive, often metaphorical shapes” and “fanciful sensuality.”

The final version of the MetroCard machines was both functional yet oddly pleasing to look at. Art hidden in plain sight. It has gone on to become a beloved industrial design piece, finding its way to MOMA and other art retrospectives over the years. The same could not be said for its replacement, another off-the-rack Cubic model defined by dull blue-gray tones, another entry into the monochrome future that has come to define modern design and fashion.

Of course, it’s not just how we pay for getting on a train. Life generally feels frictionless, everything reduced to a slim piece of plastic and metal.

Modern life somehow feels bleaker than ever.

Last year, Apple released an ad showing a variety of purpose-built things - a trumpet, arcade machine, paint supplies, journals - crushed into the “thinnest” iPad Pro. As if the experience of learning how to play an instrument is something we can replace with learning how to program a sound that mimics it on GarageBand. Naturally, this created a backlash, especially coming just months after the Hollywood strikes, where writers and actors pushed back against the use of AI in the entertainment industry. Rival tech companies briefly capitalized on the bad PR, Apple issued a generic statement, and the news cycle quickly moved on.

So much of contemporary experiences feel soulless, devoid of any personality or signs that a human was even involved. Emma Goldberg recently wrote about this in the New York Times, calling it the “slopification” of life. Our clothes, which are also increasingly plastic, are slop, cheaply made, and then upsold across different brands. We watch slop by way of airbrushed reality contestants or “prestige” television that masquerades as commentary without actually saying anything. We buy our salads and mushy bowls that are virtually interchangeable, so we can maximize some semblance of health while multitasking in front of a phone, computer, or TV screen (or maybe all three). Netflix now creates content specifically for “second screen” viewing.

At this point, it might not even be human but some fever dream generated from an AI prompt. Dead internet theory slowly moves from an online meme to a potential reality as people outsource everything from their dating app responses to college essays, all packaged in the name of efficiency but ultimately the latest Silicon Valley gold rush, where moving fast and breaking things now means fundamentally altering what once seemed infallible: the truth.

Being online lately feels exhausting, and not simply because of the signature headline mania and whiplash that has come to define Trump’s second administration. Each day I log on, I dread the point - a point that feels like it’s rapidly approaching - when I will see or hear something so convincingly real, only to find out later it was fake.

The last six months have felt like a fugue state.

Each time I take a look at my phone or turn to the news, I wonder what fresh hell awaits me. As of this week, that list includes the U.S. bombing Iran and the Supreme Court ruling on birthright citizenship.

During this time, I’ve found comfort in re-reading older books in my collection. I revisited Ya Gyassi’s debut, Homegoing, finding new appreciation for vague ancestral ties, and Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story, a novel that packs more weight about grief and the possibilities that await us on the other side than its slim spine would lead you to believe. And then there was returning to 1984.

If you need a quick reminder of the plot, 1984 is set in a world where three superpowers are engaged in continual warfare, and a surveillance state is deployed to keep the management class docile. 2+2 = 5. War is peace. Ignorance is strength. The parallels between our reality and this fictional story published almost 80 years ago serve as a reminder that everything and nothing has changed. When people like Marco Rubio, someone who once proudly championed agencies like USAID, even as recently as six years ago, now all but gleefully relishes its dismantling, 2+2 = 5 indeed.

Of course, reality is sometimes stranger than fiction. There was Signalgate - a scandal in which the editor of the Atlantic was somehow added to a Signal group chat that included both Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as they were planning active military actions. In our “let them eat cake” moment, Katy Perry is somehow relevant enough to go to space for less than 15 minutes. And Republican lawmakers think a $5,000 “baby bonus” is enough to incentivize women to have kids.

Fiction can also serve as a mirror to our reality. One of the buzziest shows of the year so far, Severance, was focused on the dehumanization of corporate workers, yet was made by one of the largest corporations of our time, Apple, which has some questionable labor and human rights practices. An official White House account posted an ASMR video of deportations.

Within Trump’s first hundred days, the scale of change has felt overwhelming. There’s the reduction to the federal workforce, an obsession with tariffs. During this same period, the administration has gone after the Smithsonian collection, including the American Art Museum, the Women’s Museum, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture because certain content “degrade[s] shared American values, divide[s] Americans by race or promote[s] ideologies inconsistent with federal law.” The Naval Academy is banning books like Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings while keeping Mein Kampf on library shelves.

Part of why I’ve been so absent on Substack - across all social media - is that I’ve realized being present is the only thing that has kept me from descending into a bottomless pit of angst about the state of the world.

For the longest time, “being present” was something I conceptually understood but whose meaning had remained elusive.

It wasn’t until March, as I started counting down the days when my MetroCard expired, that I started to think more about how to make the most of the current moment. At the time, I was going through a period of loss. Mourning the death of a grandparent I never knew. A judge finalizing my divorce. The sudden departure of my closest allies at work, co-workers who grew to become friends outside of the office.

Each of these losses forced me to confront how nothing is ever truly stable or a given, to appreciate the people in your life for as long as they’re around, to finally stop saying I was going to do things and just do them.

Over the last three months, I’ve put that mindset to the test. I performed at a live storytelling event. Traveled across the country - Oakland, Dallas, Columbus, LA - to facilitate meetings and workshops with leaders who are trying to make a difference in their community. There were dimly lit dinners and potluck parties on unauthorized roofs. Walking down the block and running into a friend, waving hello to the coffee shop owner who lives in the neighborhood. Joining a food justice group and sitting in a darkened restaurant after hours while learning about how other states are working to protect undocumented workers.

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On May 2, I brought together three people who sit at the intersection of art, culture, and politics to discuss the current state of their fields, reflect on the last hundred days, and the role artists should play during this fraught moment. It was the biggest event I’ve ever produced, one that came together in under two months. Everything about that evening was perfect - from the local vendors who donated wine, beer, and aperitifs, to the incredibly patient audio technician who spent over an hour on the phone with me as I learned to set up a mixer for the first time.

There were also quieter, solitary moments, often marked by watching the sunset. One day in early April, I stood by my kitchen window to mark gloam, that final part of the day that stretches out like warm molasses, golden and seemingly infinite. In actuality, three minutes went by, but it felt like an eternity. Maybe because it was. For a brief moment, nothing mattered except watching the light slowly inch over. That was true peace.

As I stood by the window, I wondered how many others had stood where I was, admiring this brief slant of golden light. Was the light just as bright and bittersweet in 1905 as it was in 1925 or ‘65, or 2005? And I thought about what was just around the corner, about what was already in progress, about what hadn’t even begun.

Life is a story of beginnings and endings. Sometimes you will know when something is over. There is a finality to someone’s last day of work as they return their laptop and key cards, receive last-minute hugs and tearful goodbyes. There is a gray area, like the MetroCard, something that’s gone only if you cared enough to notice. But most things we don’t mark. The last time you played outside with your siblings, chasing fireflies in the muggy evening air. Passing a mural on your way to work that’s painted over by the time you come home.

These are the small tragedies and petty dramas that are woven into the fabric of our lives. I find these moments particularly fascinating because of how fleeting they are. I am incredibly fortunate to have had a chance to mark when something is ending or just starting. During this particularly turbulent period, perhaps what can ground us is recognizing and appreciating something for what it is, not what it was or will be.

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• reading: memoirs found in a bathtub, a soviet-era genre bending story about a diary found centuries later in a former american military base; a raisin in the sun, lorraine hansberry’s debut play

• mentioned: had the opportunity to speak with and be featured in olive pomesty’s piece in the new european about the rise of intellectual content on social media.

• viewing: my co-worker natasha during opening night for soonest mended, a play she stars in exploring what happens when a couple opens their marriage.

• producing: my first event! bringing together some really incredibly talented and thoughtful people on may 2 to reflect on trump’s first 100 days.

• performing: you can hear me read a version of this essay during a storytelling event this tuesday at 6:30 pm at starr bar.

Ever ahead of the curve, long before RFK vowed to “Make America Healthy Again,” my mom was buying organic.

The only cookies in our house most of the time were Newman’s Own, and apparently packing this faux Oreo also made me an Oreo - black on the outside, white on the inside. As if avoiding highly processed foods was something only white people did.

There is a certain type of pain, a silent suffocation of the soul, that occurs while growing up Black in a predominately white suburb. On the one hand, I knew that I was supposed to feel lucky. Everyone from well-meaning teachers to jaded family members often repeated this to me over and over and over. I am here and I am lucky. But I was also told - in so many different ways - that I was different.

Every time I picked up a book or opened my mouth, I went against people’s preconceived notions and stereotypes of what it meant to be Black in America. But because this was America in the early 2000s, people’s backhanded observations were more covert than saying, “Wow, that nigger can read.” Instead, it came in a subtler, more conciliatory tone, though its impact was doubly cruel, a put-down disguised as a compliment.

There were earlier examples of this - I was one of only four non-white students in my entire elementary school in Ohio before my family moved to Texas - but one of the earliest memories happened when I was eight or nine in a doctor’s office. Having two younger siblings often meant that all three of us were dragged around to each other’s various appointments, practices, or recitals. Since I wasn’t sick that day, I sat in the extra chair in the examination room, reading a book, while my mother talked with either the nurse or doctor. At a certain point, they looked over at me.

“You’re sitting over there so quietly. What are you reading?” The nurse/doctor asked. She was a white woman with a pinched nose and blank eyes.

“Jane Eyre,” I replied, barely looking up.

“Wow, that’s so advanced! And you understand what you’re reading?”

My mom jumped in. “Kayla is reading at an eighth-grade level now. She just flies through books.”

“Still, though…I don’t even think I could read Jane Eyre!” She turned to me again. “And yet here you are, reading it. We truly live in such interesting times.”

I returned to reading, but an uneasy feeling rose in my stomach. Something about her tone suddenly made me feel self-conscious, as if I was doing something I shouldn’t. It wasn’t anything she said explicitly, but the message I took away from that interaction - and others like it - was that there was something about me simply living my life that made white people uncomfortable.

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Nearly twenty years later, I saw this dynamic of low-grade racism in the latest season of Apple TV’s hit sci-fi thriller, Severance.

The show follows a group of office workers at Lumon, a biotech company that has pioneered a procedure called “severance.” People who are “severed” effectively have two personalities: an “innie,” who trudges through the monotony of pushing paper and forced team building while at work, and an “outie” who gets to enjoy life outside of the office. Innies and outies don’t have memories of the other's lives.

Most of the drama plays out between Adam Scott’s character, Mark Scout, a former professor mourning the death of his wife. He works with a trio of other innies who have varying motives and backstories for why they underwent severance. However, my favorites are the show’s side characters: Mark’s bloviating self-help guru brother-in-law; a teenage middle manager who seems like a misplaced extra from Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” as she marches down the hallways in her knee-high socks; and, of course, Mr. Milchick. Seth Milchick, portrayed by Tramell Tillman, is the floor manager who oversees Mark’s “mysterious and important” work and - in addition to Patricia Arquett’s Ms. Cobel - one of the main antagonists for the innie workers.

** very light severance spoilers ahead but major plot points aren’t revealed **

Already a favorite after the joyfully absurd defiant jazz music dance experience, his character received slightly more screen time this season to briefly explore what it means to work in a predominantly white environment. Midway through this season, Milchick is written up for using “big words” and is reprimanded by his white supervisor, the imposing Mr. Drummond. He must simplify his language. Milchick spends time looking at himself in the mirror, practicing shorter sentences, yet Tillman’s portrayal in this scene communicates a deeper inner battle. Milchick’s character development throughout the season touches on this struggle.

Do you change your personality to make others more comfortable and maintain the status quo or remain true to yourself?

There’s a scene early in the second season where a conversation subtly teases this question. Milchick runs into the delightfully eerie Natalie, who has the ominous distinction of “communicating” with the Board. After a promotion, Milchick receives a blackface portrait of the company’s founder, on behalf of the board, from Natalie. This bizarre gift is so he can ‘see himself’ in the work and Lumon’s mission. Milchick wordlessly stares at this portrait before ultimately placing it out of sight on a top shelf in a storage room. When he finally sees Natalie again, he tries to gauge her reactions or thoughts on what she felt when given the same portrait. Natalie instead changes the subject.

@thegardeningtheologianLet’s talk about Natalie from Severance #fyp #severancetvshow #severanceappletv #appletv #diversityandinclusion #diversityequityandinclusion #blackatwork #jobtok #worktok #corporatetiktok #corporatelife

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Over the last century, different identity groups have developed informal ways to protect one another in the workplace. For women, that might mean subtly letting the new girl know to avoid a particularly handsy executive or that a manager likes to take credit for a woman’s idea. There are similar unspoken norms and rules as a Black person navigating corporate culture. You share if a manager is quietly racist. You trauma bond over drinks about how a white coworker mistook you for the only other Black woman in your division.

By not engaging in the conversation, Natalie communicates that she sees herself first as an extension of the corporation, not as a fellow Black employee trying to make sense of how crazy it is to receive a blackface portrait. She chooses to align herself with the white status quo. Yet as much as Milchick attempts to fight back by choosing to communicate in a way that feels authentic to him, by the season finale we are also reminded that there are still limits. In many ways, both of the show’s Black characters would likely earn the label of “Oreo” as well.

Growing up, being called an Oreo versus something more explicitly racist honestly felt more damaging.

Coming of age during the 2000s meant nothing could capture the angst, the confusion, the complete and utter self-loathing of being a teenager in the suburbs more than midwestern emo and pop punk bands. If it had four skinny white dudes in it, I was likely crying in my room about how unfair life was while listening to their music and writing near novel-length fanfiction about them.

That wasn’t to say I didn’t listen to music written and performed by Black artists - during Limewire’s heyday, I was illegally downloading deep cuts, like Fingertips, to fuel my Stevie Wonder obsession - but nothing quite reflected my middle school journal entries like “I got troubled thoughts and the self-esteem to match.” Unfortunately, people weren’t able to reconcile my love for both 1970s soul and 2000s indie rock. Any interest in white culture or in doing “white people” things, like reading a 19th-century novel in elementary school, was viewed as some hidden desire to want to be white.

At least with the n-word, it’s clear where you stand with the person. But being called an Oreo does two things: if it’s a white person saying it, the term is meant to be taken as a compliment; uttered by another Black person and it’s an insult. Yet regardless of who says it, both instances erase your identity. It’s saying, that by being Black yet liking or acting a certain way, those attributes couldn’t possibly be associated with a Black person, so you must be white - at least on the inside.

To grow up in the suburbs is to straddle these two worlds, looking out and seeing your white peers move with a level of ease you could only imagine while also looking back and seeing that your people are still oppressed. It is having the privilege of only reading about the criminal-legal system yet continually living in fear that all it takes is my younger brother having just one wrong interaction with the police to change that.

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Over a century ago, W. E.B. Du Bois wrote about how some try - and fail - to please white, mainstream audiences while simultaneously alienating the Black community. In the Souls of Black Folks, Du Bois refers to this as double-consciousness, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” It’s this concept that Black Americans are continually trying to figure out our place in a society we didn’t ask to be a part of - and continually doesn’t want us to fully participate in - while also trying to make the most out of this great American ‘experiment’ in democracy.

Some remain adamant in their refusal to assimilate into the mainstream, but as Black Americans have broken barriers in sports, entertainment, politics, and corporate America, there’s still this tension: how much of our identity do we get to retain by achieving these monumental wins? What is gained versus lost in our attempts to be recognized not as three-fifths of a person, but fully human? And that’s not to even touch on the classism within the Black community once you’ve “made” it. As someone from a working-class background - who was only in the suburbs because of some questionable financial decisions my father made that temporarily elevated our economic status - and is now in spaces with Black Americans who vacation in Martha’s Vineyard or have generational membership in Jack and Jill, it can often feel like existing on an island within an island.

Severance isn’t the only story that asks some of these questions - nor is this a major question within the show. What I find so fascinating is that in a mainstream show involving baby goats, deeply meditative philosophical questions, and a love triangle a surface-level exploration of the Black experience in corporate culture was even considered, let alone given screen time. And it also raises new questions. Who gets to tell our stories? In what way are they told? What does our current sociopolitical moment mean for this next generation of Black Americans - those who came of age in a world with a Black president, greater cultural visibility, and improved economic mobility - yet still live under the constant threat of white supremacy?

For most of my life, trying to figure out my place in the world as a Black American who grew up in the suburbs meant I was constantly changing who I was to make others feel more comfortable rather than focus on simply being Kayla. I felt like no matter who I was, I would always be treated with either skepticism - is she really Black - or as a toy to be paraded out when it was politically convenient - look, I have a Black friend - only to be shoved back in the closet until the next social movement deemed me necessary.

After spending the last two decades trying to defend my Black identity, yet feeling like I was constantly failing some test, last year I finally decided I would stop driving myself sick with anxiety in my attempts to prove how people’s perceptions about me are wrong - that there isn’t one thing that makes me any more or less Black, that I am simply because I am.

In the end, I decided my soul might have been wounded trying to navigate these two worlds, but I am still here. I am still here and I am still lucky, and I owe it to myself to find out who I really am: someone who is silly, curious, slightly neurotic; someone who can dissect both Vampire Weekend lyrics and James Baldwin in the same conversation; someone who can fry chicken by sight and prefers vanilla ice cream with a drizzle of olive oil and flaky sea salt; someone who is proud to “bring the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave.”

I am me. I am Kayla.

That’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.

And now I get to be just that.

Just me.

you can hear me read a version of this essay during a storytelling event this tuesday at 6:30 pm at starr bar.

• reading: in the near future, a woman tries to prove her innocence for a crime where the only evidence is based on a dream (dream hotel) + following the impacts of colonization’s legacy through one family over 150 years (wandering stars)

• (re)watching: the good place

• listening: reading, writing and arithmetic (the sundays)

• drinking: st. agrestis’ phony negroni and sanzo’s pomelo sparking water are my two non-alcoholic go-tos when out with friends or a way to destress after a long day

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” - James Baldwin

Moving around a lot meant that, except for my two younger siblings, I often spent more time alone than I would have liked.

One constant was the North Texas library system and the piles of books I would check out every other week. Reading was a way to pass the time over the summer when we were new to the neighborhood and the Texas heat meant there were limited opportunities for meeting potential new friends at the park or roaming around. Thankfully there were always summer reading programs and challenges at the library. Maybe a love of reading is simply part of who I was meant to be, but I’m sure rewarding and celebrating books also played a huge role.

As I’ve gotten older, I've grown to have a particular sort of respect and admiration for the writers I’ve encountered throughout my life who have had a profound impact on how I think about the world and make sense of my brief time here. There are the blockbuster names - Morrison, Austen - but also others, like Amy Tan, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Brit Bennett. If you’ve followed the last few newsletters, Lorraine Hansberry is the newest addition to this list as I make my way through her published works.

While I don’t have a Goodreads (I don’t like social cataloging apps, so you won’t see me on letterboxd either!) and my bookstagram days are long gone, I still like to read and like to periodically share recommendations - I just refuse to make it a sole part of my online “identity.” Now that we’re in March, I want to highlight books I’ve read over the last four years written by women.

This is not a comprehensive list of everything I’ve read since 2020, though I have organized it thematically, ranging from some of my favorite coming-of-age stories to motherhood and memoirs. Everything is a “three” or above, meaning I enjoyed it, but I’ve also starred a few titles that I absolutely loved.

coming of age

stories navigating the complex emotions and experiences that define the transition from childhood to becoming an adult.

brown girls // daphne palasi andreades
a kaleidoscope of perspectives from a group of young girls as they grow up in new york city.

** rattlebone // maxine clair
brief snapshots of an observant black girl, her parents, and friends in 1950s kansas city.

dominicana // angie cruz
an immigrant teen searches for identity and meaning following her marriage to an older man.

pizza girl // jean kyoung frazier
an unnamed korean-american becomes obsessed with one of her pizza delivery customers.

nightcrawling // leila mottley
set in oakland, 17-year-old kiara makes her way through the criminal justice system following a traumatic event.

how much of these hills is gold // c pham zhang
two children make their way through california at the height of the gold rush to bury their father.

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collegiate

finding yourself among the library stacks, parties, and painfully pretentious conversations that are unavoidable during college.

bunny // mona awad
an exploration of class, femininity, and the niche social dynamics of MFA programs - you’ll either love it or hate it, bunny!

** disorientation // elaine hsieh chou
a delightfully sharp commentary on academics, race, and gender following a taiwanese american woman’s dissertation.

vladimir // julia may jonas
a professor of women’s literature has to confront her husband’s decades-long relationships with his students.

come and get it // kiley reid
a visiting professor and a resident assistant form an unlikely relationship that tests the limits of girlish gossip and race.

ask me again // clare sestanovich
part coming of age, part interior wrestling with modern life and maintaining friendships.

corporate

just a material girl, in a material world.

the new me // halle butler
a biting satire about a depressed woman trying to “find herself” while working a series of equally depressing temp jobs in chicago.

the other black girl // zakiya dalila harris
a young publishing assistant finds a potential ally when another black woman joins the same publishing company.

the best of everything // rona jaffe
the unfiltered sex and romantic lives of women in 1950s new york city.

** there’s no such thing as an easy job // kikuko tsumura
a woman works a series of increasingly odd and fantastical jobs as she searches for the perfect, easiest job.

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the modern woman

a second coming of age as women contend with changing social norms around changing political climates, sex and relationships, gender roles, and friendships.

against the loveless world // susan abulhawa
a palestinian woman remembers her life and political activism while in solitary confinement.

the forest brims over // maya ayase
tired of her husband’s constant philandering, a woman protests and ultimately finds herself by becoming a tree.

death valley // melissa border
grief, sex, and self-discovery (plus a magical cactus) collide in the desert.

if i had your face // frances cha
four characters adapt or reject south korean beauty standards and cultural attitudes around women.

cult classic // sloane crosley
a woman keeps running into her ex-boyfriends and discovers a tech company (that maybe, definitely is a cult).

ripe // sarah rose etter
a commentary on depression, the tech industry, and the hoops we jump through to convince ourselves something isn’t wrong.

** girl, woman, other // bernardine evaristo
an exploration of various black character’s lives in britain.

luster // raven lelani
a young artist gets involved with a man in an open marriage, befriending his wife and adopted daughter in the process.

colored television // danzy senna
set at the intersection of race, relationships, and contemporary media, a woman tries to option a television show to improve her family’s financial situation.

detransition, baby // torrey peters
an unexpected pregnancy forces three cis and trans characters to reflect on their relationships, gender identity, and potentially redefining parenthood.

motherhood

one of the biggest transitions a woman can go through -

the push // ashley audrain
a psychological drama about the generational trauma we carry with us - and whether we can really break it.

the school for good mothers // jessamine chan
cancel culture and our modern surveillance state through technological advancements come together as one mother tries to reunite with her daughter.

of women and salt // gabriela garcia
the lives of mothers and daughters across the decades, told through 12 interconnected stories.

short and sweet

for when you want to read but aren’t ready to commit to a full novel and still want something meaningful.

** earth angel // madeline cash
for those who are both chronically online and incredibly jaded about what all of that “connectivity” has actually led to.

daddy // emma cline
brief windows into the lives and psyche of people with varying degrees of privilege during moments that challenge their status quo.

sarahland // sam cohen
a collection of stories exploring relationships, life after death, and more - all experienced by characters named sarah.

whatever happened to interracial love // kathleen collins
themes of sexual liberation, challenging domesticity, and reflections on the civil rights movement.

** neighbors and other stories // diane oliver
commentary on the lives of black americans in the mid-century touching on integrating an elementary school, working as a domestic, and a tragic relationship.

personal reflections

memoirs that made me feel less alone in this world.

** speak, okinawa // elizabeth miki brina
a woman tries to understand her parents and their complicated marriage while also coming to terms with her identity.

** they said this would be fun // eternity martis
reflections on attending a PWI as a black canadian.

i’m glad my mom died // jeannette mccurdy
a former child star comes to terms with the emotional and psychological trauma she experienced from her mother.

once i was you // maria hinojosa
an exploration of how the award-winning journalist and host of npr’s latino usa navigated her immigrant background in chicago.

surviving the white gaze // rebecca carroll
a biracial woman recalls her experience growing up in a white adopted family.

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currently —

• reading: on girlhood, an anthology of short stories from black female authors; to be young, gifted, and black, lorraine hansberry in her own words; the love affairs of nathaniel p, a book a man recommended while on a date (which makes it all the more hilarious bc it was our last date)

• watching: still fangirling over that latest episode of severance + abbott elementary

• viewing: harmony and dissonance at the guggenheim

• eating: rigor hill’s harissa carrots (trust me - the grapes make the dish)

A few weeks ago I did something I never thought was possible: I resigned my lease.

This seemingly innocuous administrative procedure, in which my landlord slipped a thin envelope of papers for me to sign under my door, was a huge milestone for me. Ever since I left for college in 2013, I have moved every single year - sometimes multiple times - ranging from suburban Chicago to Berlin for a semester abroad, a brief stint in Panama City, and enough time in Vancouver to become a Canadian Permanent Resident. Nothing has felt quite as good as coming home after a long day than opening my door and seeing everything just as I left it. Yet one year in I am now having to confront that this newfound freedom, this dream, this hope, is also seen as a threat.

My ability to financially provide for myself, to live alone in an expensive city, challenges traditional gender norms and assumptions that even the most self-professed “liberal” man might find intimidating. It also represents a type of progress conservatives are actively challenging. Although we still haven’t achieved pay parity, financial opportunities for women have significantly improved over the last fifty years. Some of my mother’s earliest memories are of her aunts coming to her house every Friday to deposit money in a safe my great-grandmother kept in a closet. My great-aunts squirreled away money as an insurance policy, a safety net should anything turn south with the men in their lives. This was a reality thousands of women had to confront because up until 1974’s Equal Credit Opportunity Act, women weren’t able to open their bank accounts or lines of credit without a man’s permission.

Women on average still earn less than men, but in major metropolitan areas, the disparities are shrinking. As of 2019, women under 30 working full-time earned 102% more than men in the New York and Washington metro areas. To be clear, there are still stark disparities and challenges women face but to look at how far women - especially women of color - have come compared to fifty years ago is to understand that we are at a unique period of human history, one that this current administration is going to great lengths to end. Make no mistake, efforts to end “woke” DEI are not limited to race-based affirmative actions or transgender participation in youth sports. It is also a direct attack on women, and we are already starting to see its impacts one month into the new administration.

The federal government doesn’t oversee curriculums at the state or local level (yet) but it does provide education to children on military bases in the US and abroad through the Department of Defense. Over the last month, not only were Pride clubs and Black History Month celebrations abruptly canceled or toned down, but a Women in STEM group was also put on hold. While nothing about this administration should surprise us at this point - especially after Friday’s recent pro-Russia shouting match between Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian President Zolenskyy - it’s worth tracing why this attack on education goes beyond race and sexuality to target women more broadly.

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The last time men and women attended college at the same rate was in 1995, the year after I was born.

In the thirty years since women now make up over sixty percent of college students at both two- and four-year colleges. These numbers are staggering, particularly when we consider that the majority of college campuses weren’t even co-ed until the 1970s. There are several reasons for why this has happened, ranging from the way girls and boys are socialized at a young age and how that impacts applying for college - some universities, like Bayor, have resorted to initiatives like “males and moms,” a communication campaign to help rising male seniors make sure their applications are turned in on time - to federal actions like Title IX.

Perhaps the biggest reason, though, is that our economy has moved from manual labor, like manufacturing, to the creative and service economy. These “jobs of the future” are more likely to require additional education versus simply graduating from high school and showing up at a factory to receive on-the-job training the next day. Our country has also seen an expansion of rights for both women and non-white Americans, who have eagerly seized opportunities once unavailable to them. In a 2021 survey asking people without a bachelor’s why they didn’t, men were almost 10 points more likely to say “they didn’t want to” than women, whose largest reason was that they couldn’t afford it.

Earnings for non-college-educated men have fallen by twenty percent over the last few decades, while they have risen for non-college-educated women. College-educated men—especially white men—still have clear prospects, but the working class is increasingly feeling “shut out” of job opportunities that now seem to favor an educated class of liberals, people of color, and women. White men, in particular, see others succeeding in this economy but aren’t willing or able to understand why. 

Women’s improved economic mobility through educational opportunities has changed the motivations for marriage.

Declining outcomes for men create a perceived shortage of “marriageable” partners. A woman would rather stay single and shoulder the economic burden of this economy alone than stay with a man who is not contributing emotionally or financially to their relationship. There are still financial incentives for marriage, especially when thinking about combining resources in this current economy. However, the group most likely to marry in our current society is the college-educated, not the working class, further accelerating our country’s socioeconomic divide. For many, marriage is no longer a necessity in the same way it has historically functioned. Women are now asking - what value do men bring? - and are deciding to opt-out, either willingly or begrudgingly, as a way to “protect their peace.”

@sheiscelesteeEvery woman should experience living alone. #livingalone #livingalonediaries #livingalonevlog #loft

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A certain type of single man might look at women and feel like the social agreement that has existed throughout history - women provide our bodies, our labor, our emotional support in exchange for a man’s financial support and protection - is no longer working.

Enter the incel.

Online communities like 4chan have given lonely men a platform to complain about recent societal changes. Social media has also made misogyny more visible - both to like-minded men, further reinforcing their opinions, but also to women, who are now able to see how men talk about them. Technological advances have also allowed women to share their experiences online, providing a space for some women to talk openly about their struggles with dating and leaving some to consider celibacy. This creates a cycle where women become more disgusted and pull back from dating, which reinforces these men’s misogynistic and warped views on why no one will date them.

Conservatives understand the power of culture. If you don’t like the narrative, change it. Play to men’s insecurities by creating a boogeyman, how liberals, immigrants, the tap water - whatever - is the reason why you’re not getting laid or making enough money. Play into the powerful emotion of fear. Create and promote figures who affirm your feelings. Translate those online forums to offline communities where they can become further radicalized by right-wing content. And make being submissive look good so that women are put “back in their place,” which is having babies.

Elon Musk, one of the most powerful men in the world right now, is a pronatalist. He is joined by others in the Silicon Valley crowd who have raised fears about the predicted demographic collapse within this century because people are having fewer children, meaning the world will have fewer workers (and consumers). Increased access to education, contraception and legal protections in the workplace have all contributed to lower birth rates around much of the world. This projected demographic decline has led to a strange marriage over the last few years between the tech world and Christian evangelicals, who have similar goals but a slightly different ideology. Their conservative ideas are spread through cultural propaganda on social media platforms. Some of it is obvious, like trad wives, but others are slightly more subtle, such as the recent focus on finding your “feminine” energy while dating.

With Trump back in office, pronatalists and evangelicals now have the political capital they need to begin advancing their agenda. These people are proposing policies straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale and are now in positions to try and enact them. Except this isn’t a book, this is our reality. Sean Duffy, the new Director of the Department of Transportation, wants funding tied to high-birth states. Techno-Puritans Simone and Malcolm Collins - pronatalists with connections to Vance and Peter Thiel - “joke” about wanting to create a birth task force. Each of these groups talks about wanting to raise the birth rate, but without providing the necessary economic support that would keep women in the workplace, like daycare subsidies or affordable housing.

Take these people at their word.

Even if some ideas are outlandish and likely won’t happen, the sentiment is clear: making America great again means reducing women back to subservient, docile roles. We have seen this play out before roughly a century ago. Trad wives of today aren’t that far away from the “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (children, kitchen, church) propaganda of Nazi Germany.

Delusional optimism, this belief that it is “not that serious yet” does nothing but reduce our window of time to take action. Roe v. Wade was supposedly the law of the land - until it wasn’t. Now is the time to start talking about these issues with others, especially if you have brothers, male friends, or partners. It is also important to speak up and stand with women who might not have the privilege or platform to reach a larger audience. And to also stand with other marginalized groups. There are other identities at risk, some of which are already facing harassment, discrimination, and the reversal of rights. Just because you are safe today doesn’t mean you will be tomorrow.

Finally, prioritize community. This is a word that gets tossed around flippantly now but at its core, I believe it is about finding like-minded people that are physically proximate to you. Yes, there is something special about online communities, but as we briefly saw in January, there is no guarantee those spaces will exist indefinitely.

Building community can take a variety of forms, whether that is intentionally meeting with a group of existing friends each week or month as a way to maintain connection, to joining a book club, regularly attending programming at a library, or simply making an effort to get to know your neighbors more. In the year since I moved in, I’ve had the opportunity to not only get to know all of the other people in the building I live in but also a few of my neighbors on the block. It can start as simply as waving or perhaps saying hello during a nice day outside.

There is a quiet power in briefly acknowledging someone’s humanity. It is something we will need now more than ever.

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• reading: rattlebone, a coming-of-age novel set in 1950s kansas, and clean, a chilean domestic thriller

• watching: yellowjackets + living single

• eating: saraghina’s granola - typically sells out the day of but if you happen to snag a bag, it’s become one of my favorite breakfast toppings

• listening: kelela’s in the blue light after @lovie.world’s recent recommendation

Over the last week or so, I have quietly fallen in love.

Lorraine Hansberry is an artist that has, until recently, remained at the periphery of my awareness, a fact to recall during moments of random trivia - the first Black woman to have a play, A Raisin in the Sun, produced on Broadway. I have a faint memory of reading it when I was in high school, but when press for Imani Perry’s newest release started making the rounds, something told me I first had to start with her brief sketch into Lorriane from 2018. The book couldn’t have come to me at a better time.

Lorraine grew up in an upper-middle-class home in Chicago’s South Side. Her father was a landlord, renting out kitchenette apartments that would eventually become the setting of Lorriane’s most famous work. Much of Raisin contains autobiographical references. As a child, Lorraine’s family moved into a white-only neighborhood that became the site of racial violence - a brick thrown by an angry white mob just barely missed her head - and would eventually become one of the early Supreme Court cases that would challenge housing discrimination in the 1940s. Someone of Lorraine’s background could have done the easy thing: gone off to Howard University, where her uncle taught, or another historically Black institution, met a nice man before having a few kids, perhaps spending her time organizing on the side through the NAACP.

Instead, Lorraine integrated the female dorms of the University of Wisconsin at Madison before spending time at an artist collective in Mexico and completing a time-honored tradition of young twenty-somethings. She moved to New York, though not to Harlem. Instead, Lorraine first made a home amongst 1950s beatniks, communists, and a nascent queer community in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood she would continue to have a presence in throughout the rest of her life. It was there that she met her Jewish husband, began to study under Black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois, and tried her hand at several creative pursuits - one of which would ultimately become Raisin.

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Reading about her wonderfully radiant and radical life during our current political moment has left me wondering: where are our Lorraines?

For a brief window of time, American culture was defined not just by elected political leaders but by an equally impressive group of creative intellectuals, activists, and everyday people who were able to turn a mirror toward both the minutiae of their lives and injustices they faced, documenting their experiences through writing, music, and other art forms.

One of the most striking things about Lorraine - and there is a lot - was her unwavering commitment to radical political involvement. She dabbled in leftist causes throughout her brief life, traveling to South America to speak at a communist conference, publishing political commentary drawing connections between African colonial struggles and the Jim Crow South - enough to earn the scrutiny and surveillance of the FBI. After the runaway success of Raisin, Lorraine was unwilling to let the fame and attention that came with it water down her politics. Even as she was sitting in closed-door meetings with Robert Kennedy, appearing on panels, or hosting fundraisers for the student-led civil rights movement in the South, she always stuck to her beliefs.

Part of why I grow increasingly disillusioned with social media but also the personal essays that tend to dominate this app (and that I have been guilty of writing) is we are now so quick to mine our internal lives without taking a step back to observe, assess, and critique our surroundings.

Content is now made either explicitly or indirectly to serve our desires for instant gratification rather than exploring our relationship and connection to a broader community - virtual or otherwise. Better to remain as middle of the road and moderate as possible for the clicks and views and likes. Better to share fashion hauls than to question the labor that goes into it. Better to write about a bad date in the most surface-level way possible than dig one or two levels deeper about what that means about shifting gender roles in our country or globally. Better to pose as a thought daughter by reading the words of past intellectuals than critique or question issues of today. Better to consume than to nourish, abstain rather than challenge, forever a girl because to grow up would mean to take ownership of the world we live in and the role we play in shaping it.

Right now, while Democrats file legal challenges and provide commentary on cable news, I believe those of us both within and outside the mainstream are missing an opportunity to come together. We are missing an opportunity to create something larger than ourselves by continuing to place all of our hopes on a group of elected officials when history has repeatedly shown us that social movements and change require action at the grassroots level as well.

Democrats are not coming to save us because they have historically favored maintaining the status quo.

Ever since the 2024 election and subsequent inauguration, op-eds and hot takes on social media have seemed to focus on where the Democratic Party is, and why there aren’t more leaders - outside of seemingly AOC and Bernie Sanders - taking a forceful position. Yet this current moderate stance and lukewarm action by the Party is a feature, not a bug. Modern Democrats like to position themselves as the champion of Civil Rights, of progressive values, but this narrative obscures how much of the reforms and legislation we now associate with this party was based on decades of grassroots organizing.

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The modern Democratic Party remains vague about its pre-New Deal origins, but directly following the Civil War, the Party had two factions: a vaguely progressive but still quietly racist bloc in the North and the openly racist Southern Democrats who challenged efforts led by “Radical” Republicans during Reconstruction, which they viewed as “Negro dominated.” It was Southern Democrats, not Republicans, who enacted violence and Jim Crow laws; Northern Democrats made the very conscious decision to accept these views for decades to maintain political power at a national level.

In the 1930s, President Roosevelt tried unsuccessfully to reshape the party by supporting candidates in the South who were more closely aligned with his New Deal vision. For the next thirty years, Northern Democrats continued their moderate stance on civil rights and unionization to appease Southern segregationists. Occasionally there were confrontations, like the 1948 “Dixiecrats” splinter group after the party began adopting a more public position around extending civil rights to Black Americans. But part of what is missed in the narrative about the Civil Rights Movement is that there was an inevitable nature to it, either glossing over the amount of violence that occurred before legislation like the Voting Rights Act was signed or ignoring its Cold War context in which segregation was a massive PR problem for America. One can’t exactly promote “democratic” values when a significant portion of the population is politically disenfranchised, living in fear of their homes or places of worship becoming the site of violent bombings, and facing attacks during nonviolent protests.

The same year President Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democratic National Convention was still segregated.

It took the coordinated action of different groups, particularly, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), to challenge white supremacy within the Democratic Party’s southern states and at the convention. The MFDP was an off-shoot of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition formed in 1962 that combined the efforts of various organizations - Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Congress of Racial Equality, and the NAACP - who were leading voter education and registration drives in the South. In 1964, a group within COFO ran a parallel delegation process to select delegates for the 1964 Democratic Convention.

During “Freedom Summer,” Black activists made their way to Atlantic City, demanding the party reflect the values it had just passed through legislation. President Johnson, fearing a Southern Democratic walkout - which would destabilize the convention during an already tenuous political environment - tried to get ahead of the breaking story by issuing a press conference to avoid live coverage of Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech, “I Question America.”

LBJ’s move ultimately backfired though. The news ended up reporting Hamer’s speech for days - along with the President’s attempt to suppress it - pushing the Civil Rights movement further than the more moderate, “slower” response mainstream Democrats had initially hoped for. The actions of this group from Mississippi would go on to inspire the “single greatest moment of party reform in American political history,” shaping the influential 1968 and 1972 conventions and fundamentally changing how delegates are selected through the primary process we know today.

While the student movement and grassroots organizing captured the public’s attention, influencers of the time made an effort to promote and support these efforts - either through reporting, financial contributions, or their art. Near the end of her life, Lorraine gathered a group at her upstate house to raise over $5,000. Funds from that event would help pay for a station wagon that was used by activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner - victims of the brutal triple murder known as Mississippi Burning. Their deaths helped draw national support for the eventual passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Change does not happen overnight.

The passage of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s was part of a nearly-century-long struggle that played out not only through court battles and reinforced by racial violence, but in mutual aid groups, conversations in living rooms, and individuals willing to stand up for their beliefs - sometimes at great cost. People were also in conversation with one another. The work of the MFDP is just one of several examples in which groups outside of the traditional political process were able to effectively leverage the media and technology of their time to keep the public’s attention on issues important to them. Even if those groups didn’t always agree on the means, they were able to work together towards achieving a shared goal: a vibrant and free democracy.

We are currently witnessing a fundamental reshaping of our government and the global order, yet many of us are still operating under a business-as-usual mindset.

Unfortunately, these are not normal times. And I think the sooner we come to terms with this new reality, the better equipped we will become to meet the moment rather than hide behind fear and wish we had done something sooner. It is easy to want to bury our heads in the sand, to keep our focus on what is directly in front of us rather than pop up, see a world that we increasingly do not recognize, and make the conscious choice not to engage because we are too tied or overwhelmed or unsure or just trying to focus on making ends meet.

Those are all valid responses, one I imagine people throughout time have also felt. And yet we have the rights and freedoms we currently have (and are in the process of being stripped away) because people with those same concerns, worries, and weariness also saw something bigger than themselves at stake that was worth committing to. Political activism and involvement don’t always have to mean getting out on the streets and protesting. Lorraine and her creative peers, whether that was other Black intellectuals like James Baldwin or Joan Didion’s earlier work writing profile pieces about leaders of the American Communist Party and capturing other social changes of the era, were all using their talents to capture their present reality to help others around them make sense of it.

Right now we have an opportunity to share, contribute, and shape the conversation about the future we want to live in. I would hate to look back, wishing there was something I could have done, only to come up empty-handed.

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Freedom never descends upon people. It is always bought with a price.
- Harry Moore

The last four weeks have felt like a cruel attempt to compensate for the warped sense of time we experienced during the initial days of the pandemic.

Five years ago, we watched the world unravel in a matter of days before life came to a standstill. The clanging of pots from balconies in the evening took on an eerie quality, a small sign of life during a season marked by so much loss. Living through the first month of Trump’s second term has taken on a different - though just as unsettling - quality.

Since his inauguration, it’s felt like we have lived through four years, not four weeks. There is the avalanche of executive orders ‘flooding the zone’ while raising fundamental Constitutional questions around birthright citizenship and the role of the executive branch. Mass firings that represent, in some cases, 10 percent or more of certain federal departments serving critical functions, like the IRS and CDC. A bill to implement a national abortion ban was introduced to the House. Mayor Eric Adams seems poised to sell out on New York City’s sanctuary status, going so far as to meet with Trump’s border czar on Thursday to protect himself from legal troubles.

To turn on the news is to listen to statements that seem taken from either a poorly written dystopian novel or an episode of reality television. Depending on the day, it’s hard to tell. The richest man in the world has eagerly assumed the role of edgelord supervillain, waving Nazi salutes, gutting Congressionally-approved departments delivering humanitarian aid, accessing sensitive information - all with little oversight. Elon Musk is now a “special government employee,” running a department named after a meme that we now all have to suffer through geriatric politicians saying with a straight face. The last month has all the makings of a compelling drama - except for the fact that this is reality.

The current administration is delivering on its promises outlined in Project 2025, leaving many wondering: Where are the Democrats?

If the first Trump presidency was defined by its pussy hats, online clapbacks, and a dizzying amount of Handmaid’s Tale references, the #resistance this time around feels like a parent going to the principal’s office with a strongly worded letter after finding out a classmate is bullying their child. Nice in theory, but still not addressing the root of the issue. Trump convinced his followers that the 2020 election was stolen and they stormed the Capitol. Democrats are watching the very fabric of our republic fall apart and are filing lawsuits - which Vice President Vance has already signaled the administration won’t follow. After all, the Supreme Court ruled last summer that presidents are effectively above the law.

None of this happened by accident, nor was it some secret plot only discussed in shadowy basements or backrooms. In addition to an entire 800+-page policy document, there was also a series of yellow lights Democrats either knowingly or unwittingly blew right past that deserve greater attention and scrutiny. It’s clear that we weren’t paying attention, but in trying to find some meaning in how we got to this moment, I keep circling back to three themes I have observed over the last decade.

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From a national level, Democrats and leftists have allowed conservatives to recapture the public’s attention without offering a compelling counternarrative. Those in positions of power either willfully or naively believed that the mere passage of laws and legal rulings was enough to move our society to its idealized, post-racial conclusion. However, if Reconstruction were to offer any warning, the battle isn’t simply about winning rights but working to maintain them.

Rather than focus on preserving those rights and enshrining new ones, Democrats have instead shifted to become as moderate as possible to maintain the mythical “white working class voter,” simultaneously alienating those further on the left while refusing to recognize the pervasive role white supremacy continues to have. During the 2008 primary in West Virginia, twenty percent went as far as to say the quiet part out loud - race played a role in who they voted for. Of that bloc, seventy percent of Democratic voters said they wouldn’t support Barack Obama over John McCain. To pretend that we could move on from discussing racism and its continued presence in our country was a delusional miscalculation.

At the same time, the oldest millennials are approaching their mid-forties and we have yet to see a successful social movement maintain momentum.

Instead, it has come in fits and starts - Occupy Wall Street, Ferguson, Defund the Police - while missing the critical aspect of community and coalition building that defined previous waves of activism in other generations. We are the most connected generation in modern history, yet have failed to organize effectively in a way that continues the conversation while inspiring others to take action. Commentaries around how our opportunities were stripped from us are both valid yet also miss how other generations were able to still mobilize during times of racial violence and economic turmoil. Instead of turning inward and realizing no one is coming to save us but ourselves, the helicopter generation is stuck in a state of arrested development, expecting others to pick up the slack without realizing we are the adults in the room now.

This isn’t to say there is not incredible, important work continuing to happen across the country. If anything, I increasingly believe the next phase of political involvement must shift from the national to the local level.

My job as a consultant working with left-leaning organizations has taken me from Grand Rapids and West Lafayette to Boston’s North Shore and the Bay Area. There are coalitions, nonprofits, and local government leaders who are piloting municipal grocery stores to provide fresh food to low-income communities, creating low or no-interest loan funds to help families repair their homes, and developing programs in Black neighborhoods to support artists. So much work is happening, yet even in the age of social media and interconnectedness, it’s become even harder to uplift and share these stories.

Despite being the first in my family to graduate college, I now find myself in incredibly privileged spaces both socially and professionally. Working to support progressive causes around the country has led me to back rooms with future NYC Mayoral candidates and riding the trams beneath the Capitol building. My background has given me a unique perspective to observe the evolution of the white moderate, the impacts of millennials’ weaponized incompetence, and how the integration of a few carefully selected non-white representatives continues to uphold the status quo.

Over the next few weeks, I want to explore and interrogate each of these observations, beginning next week with how the resurgence of white moderates can help explain how our politicians and contemporary media landscape were not equipped to respond to this recent wave of white nationalism.

currently…

• reading: looking for lorraine (imani perry) + live through this (kristen mcguinnes)

• watching: severance

• eating: smor

• listening: hazel scott

• hot goss: jacquline woodson is working on a new adult fiction novel

c u next week —

xx, kayla

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I had spent the night before at an election watch party a friend’s partner hosted at a bar in the Lower East Side. Last November was my first time in the country on election night in almost a decade. I was living in Vancouver during the last election; studying abroad in Berlin back in 2016. While I had low expectations about how the evening would go, I knew I wanted to either celebrate or mourn with a group rather than sit at home alone. The event was part comedy show, part schmooze fest - the host had worked on the Harris campaign - but the evening began to take on a somber tone fairly early on. By midnight, I was in a car with my friend and partner, back over the bridge into Brooklyn.

Despite only having two drinks, when I woke up the next morning, I knew I didn’t want to feel like this again. While I couldn’t control the outcome of elections, I did have a choice in what I put in my body. Alcohol was never something I particularly enjoyed, but I often found myself drinking it anyway, making up excuses along the way. If I was going to a party where I didn’t know anyone, I drank.

If I was going to a work event and didn’t want to suffer through awkward small talk, I drank. While out on a date, I would drink to calm my nerves. Drinking became the default, but when I finally asked myself why, when I finally realized I didn’t like to drink but felt like I had to as a way to blend in socially or self-medicate my social anxiety, I decided that wasn’t a good enough answer anymore.

Alcohol consumption is now a leading preventable cause of cancer, trailing just behind tobacco use and obesity. Younger people are drinking at considerably lower rates than previous generations. In the early 2000s, 72 percent of adults under 35 reported consuming alcohol. As of 2022, that number has shrunk to 62 percent. Following the Surgeon General’s advisory last month, I anticipate we will see alcohol consumption continue to decline.

While there isn’t a definitive reason for why younger people are drinking less, the increased focus on wellness and personal fulfillment offers the easiest answer.

As of 2023, the global consumer wellness market was valued at a trillion dollars, with over $480 billion concentrated in the United States. Wellness—broadly defined as everything from mindfulness and nutrition to fitness and appearance—is increasingly becoming a priority among Americans. This is particularly true among Gen Z and millennial consumers, who now outspend older consumers in this category. Some trend analysts even go so far as to call this cohort “Gen Well.”

The wellness industry’s influence is perhaps most apparent in videos and content focused on outer beauty. Younger generations are trying to preempt signs of aging - procedures like “preventative Botox” for women in their 20s have increased by over 28 percent since 2010. As a diuretic, that glass of red wine doesn’t necessarily help your long-term skincare goals. Yet younger generations' souring attitudes toward alcohol aren’t just focused on beauty. In a 2024 trend report, McKinsey identified several areas of growth within the wellness space, including increased focus on weight management, gut health, and sleep - all of which are antithetical to alcohol consumption.

People are more inclined to limit or abstain from harmful substances when they know the long-term impacts. In the 1960s, 42 percent of Americans smoked. Following decades of public health campaigns, that number is down to 11 percent. However, while 89 percent of Americans are now able to recognize tobacco use as a risk factor for cancer, only 45 percent can make the same connection to alcohol.

As with tobacco ads of the midcentury, part of alcohol’s appeal is its clever marketing. Stock photos tend to feature groups of young, beautiful, vaguely multiethnic people clinking a can or glass, carefree and living in the moment. Commercials take those good vibes to the next level. In beer and liquor ads, life is always a party, whether it’s a boisterous nightclub or family room as people gather around for a sports game. The focus is always on the positive social benefits - I have yet to see an ad accurately depict the pounding headaches and aching sense of regret I have felt the morning after. If you’re a young person and want to have fun, drinking feels like a given, because what else does socializing look like?

There are signs that this is beginning to change, both in the data and in broader mainstream acceptance. Last month, roughly a third of Americans participated in Dry January. The trend—which started just over ten years ago as a fundraiser in the U.K. where people abstain from or substantially limit their alcohol intake for 31 days—has opened the door for people to reconsider the role they want alcohol to play in their lives.

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There are also simply more options besides seltzer and lime. Non-alcoholic beverages are a growing market, valued at over $13 billion in the United States.

One of my biggest worries about going sober wasn’t around navigating the holidays or social events but how to handle dating.

Socializing for young adults in large cities, but especially in New York, still revolves around drinking. An after-hours chat with coworkers over a beer or bottle of wine. Catching up with friends might involve checking out a new restaurant with an extensive cocktail menu. A low-stakes first date might take place at a bar.

Leading up to my decision to become sober, I found myself drinking to make an otherwise boring situation more enjoyable. Sobriety has helped me prioritize the relationships in my life where I don’t need an edible and several drinks to tolerate someone’s presence. It has gotten easier over the last three months where I now no longer feel uncomfortable trading a cocktail for either a mocktail or soda with bitters while out bar hopping with friends who are supportive of my decisions.

I wasn’t sure how to handle my sobriety while dating but after the first few weeks, I realized that if someone is making me uncomfortable or we’re not on the same wavelength, no amount of alcohol is going to change how I feel - it just delays the inevitable. Staying sober means staying authentic to myself and if that makes people uncomfortable, they’re probably not the right person for me anyway.

Later this week I’m going out to Mockingbird, a zero-proof cocktail bar in Park Slope. And while I can’t predict how the date will go, there’s a quiet comfort in knowing I’ll wake up the next morning clear-eyed, well-rested, and sober.

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Describing the last few weeks as “challenging” doesn’t begin to define the depths of despair I have felt personally and for my country.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, gave a Nazi salute - twice - on Inauguration Day.

This is the same man who actively supports far-right candidates abroad, including actual Neo-Nazis in Germany. To suggest otherwise feels deeply Orwellian yet utterly consistent with our post-truth era. Anything can mean everything - or nothing. In fact, “you are the media now.” Last week, the new Press Secretary officially ushered in the era of ‘new media,’ giving a prominent seat to this new generation of podcasters, influencers, and alternative news sites.

To observe the last few weeks - but really the last several years - is to see a car barreling towards us yet stay firmly in place, either seemingly oblivious, half-heartedly gawking, or screaming at a volume that remains imperceptible to most. Our country went from the promise and sense of achievement with a Black president to the next eight years defined by the resurgence of white supremacy, a global pandemic, and a major political party still unable to align around a convincing counterargument. In this sense, perhaps Obama’s presidency was a mirage, an experience that convinced us we were on our way towards finally addressing our country’s past sins when really it distracted us from missing a growing white Christofascist movement that now has a home in this current administration.

Earlier last week, I went to Washington for a work trip to lead a workshop about a topic the current administration is now using to blame everything from the price of eggs to the tragic accident that happened on the Potomac River just a few miles from my hotel. People within my circles in the urban policy and political sphere are worried about how their organizations will survive a potential spending cut, whether their jobs are secure, and whether they can continue to deliver services.

There is a lot to worry about right now - my anxieties over the general state of the world prevented me from meaningfully writing over the last few weeks - but I refuse to remain paralyzed by fear. As we enter into February, I’m trying to focus more on the immediate actions I can take - virtually through this Substack, as well as exploring ways to get involved with different organizations and groups in Brooklyn. I also want to prioritize self-care, not through clay masks and candles but in how I am nurturing my mind, body, and spirit.

One of the ways I have always found joy and comfort is through reading. Now that we are officially in Black History Month, I’m sharing a few of my favorite books in my library that go beyond the standard canon that gets recycled around this time of the year. As much as I love them, there are more Black American authors besides Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. By all means, please continue to read and celebrate them, but here are a few other authors to keep in mind.

Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man by James Weldon Johnson

First published in 1912, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography is likely the first example of a first-person narrative written by a Black American. The novel is a fictional account of a young man who hops across the color line at the turn of the twentieth century, traveling from Connecticut to Atlanta, Florida, New York, and even abroad. Engaging with this novel made me want to learn more about Johnson - who wrote the lyrics for the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing - and about life for Black Americans pre-Harlem Renaissance.

Quicksand by Nella Larson

While Larson is best known today for an adaptation of her other novel, Passing, I prefer her debut novel, a semiautobiographical account of a well-educated, mixed-race woman struggling with her identity. Larson captures a particular type of anxiety while existing in predominantly white spaces as a person of color, what is lost in the process, and what that does to our sense of self—all things that rang true to my experience nearly a century later.

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Neighbors by Diane Oliver

Oliver’s short story collection, posthumously published in 2024, really gives ‘gone too soon’ a new meaning. Born in 1943, Oliver was a rising literary star of her time, attending the Iowa Writers Workshop before meeting her untimely death at 22 after a motorcycle accident. Unlike her Northern contemporaries, Oliver’s work provides a brief glimpse into the realities of life in the Jim Crow South, highlighting the psychological terror of a house bombing after a child tries to integrate into a school or the interior thoughts of a teen girl during a sit-in at a department store lunch counter.

Francisco by Allison Mills Newman

Long out of print, Francisco was re-published a few years ago and follows the life of a young Black actress in California during the early 1970s. The book takes its name from the narrator’s boyfriend, a Black director trying to launch his career. There’s so much to love about this short novel, from the way Newman describes the counterculture - so many parties, so many drugs - to her observations about what it takes to make it as a Black artist that still rings true today.

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love by Kathleen Collins

Another Black artist from the 1970s and early 1980s who is finally receiving praise (albeit posthumously), Kathleen Collins was an activist, writer, and filmmaker. Her career was cut short with an untimely cancer diagnosis, but the body of work she was able to produce includes Losing Ground, a 1982 independent feature that was one of the first films directed by a Black woman. Interracial Love is a collection of short stories exploring the interiority of Black women’s love lives, drawing from some of Collins’ personal experiences, and was finally assembled nearly thirty years after her death in 2016.

The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor

I’m glad I stumbled across Naylor’s debut novel resting on a stoop last spring. It’s a chorus novel, with each chapter devoted to one of the eponymous women before the storylines converge. Brewster Place is a housing complex in an unnamed, Northeast city that has seen better days by the time the novel starts in the early 1980s. Each of the stories offers a glimpse into the different lives of Black women, ranging from a wealthy young woman ‘slumming it’ to a lesbian relationship marked by love and tragedy. The book was widely popular during the time, culminating with Oprah producing and starring in a 1989 miniseries adaptation alongside an ensemble cast featuring Cicely Tyson.

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

Between the Underground Railroad and the Nickel Boys, Whitehead is undoubtedly skilled at capturing both the pain and small moments of joy found within the horrific historical moments that define Black life. However, my favorite Whitehead novels are some of earlier works, like Apex Hides the Hurt, or his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in Sag Harbor, a historically Black vacation enclave in the Hamptons. This novel strikes the balance between a light-hearted beach read about boys becoming men, as well as some of the darker themes of race and class every Black kid navigating a predominantly white space must learn.

Lot by Bryan Washington

Anything that can capture the subtle nuances of modern life in the South, but particularly Texas, is an automatic favorite. Washington’s debut is a novel about a queer Afro-Latino man coming to terms with his sexuality and family dynamics, nestled in between short stories and vignettes set in Houston.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

Set throughout the Deep South, Church Ladies is a collection of short stories that captures the intimate moments of Black women as they try to navigate complicated mother-daughter relationships, search for romance, and the outsized role the church plays - whether one is a believer or not. The ending of “How to Make Love to a Physicist” never fails to make me cry.

Luster by Raven Lelani

One of my favorite novels of the decade, Luster explores what happens when a young Black woman begins living with her married white boyfriend. She develops a complicated relationship with his wife and their adopted Black daughter. This novel is subtle, gliding in and out of the action that feels both immersive and has me craving Lelani’s next work.

I’m in Georgia for a family member’s funeral, but normal posting and essays will resume this Sunday - see ya then!

On Friday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether the proposed TikTok ban violates American’s First Amendment rights.

In a rare example of bipartisan support, Congress agreed last year that Tik Tok - a subdivision of ByteDance, a Chinese-based company - posed a national security threat. ByteDance must divest TikTok to a U.S. company or it is no longer allowed to operate in the country. After a series of appeals, the ban is set to take effect next Sunday, pending a last-minute Supreme Court decision.

The closer we get to January 19, the more mixed the reactions on my feed become. Black content creators have me kicking up my feet in laughter as they pantomime various iterations of “falling out,” frantically waving paper fans and showcasing parodied versions of ‘praise dances,’ seemingly accepting the end of an era while having some fun.

@_iamjamilaKEEP HOPE ALIVE!!!! #tiktokban

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But there are also people - those who both make a living and enjoy watching content - who are angry and veer more towards the conspiratorial. The general sentiment among this crowd is that the TikTok ban is an orchestrated lobbying effort from Meta to claw its way back to relevance. Instagram became popular so Facebook bought it. Vine rose in popularity so Instagram introduced videos. Snapchat came along and then there were Instagram Stories.

In each instance, Instagram (Meta) was able to maintain its dominance by buying or copying competitors - that is until TikTok. Instagram Reels are viewed as inherently inferior, because they lack some of the basic UX functionality found on TikTok (such as the ability to pause a video) and because the personalized content it pushes is not as tailored. The For You Page really does seem like it is for you.

As a TikTok creator, I have a lot to lose should the ban go forward. I’ve spent the last seven years of my life creating and generating content on YouTube, various blogs, and as a bookstagram influencer. TikTok is far and away my favorite platform because it has allowed me to connect with a specific audience, which has led to friendships and networking opportunities in the media space I otherwise likely wouldn’t have found. However, as a consultant, as someone who analyzes power in relation to a specific topic or within an industry, I also can’t stop myself from asking a series of questions.

Who wins (and loses) by owning and controlling a platform used by 170 million Americans? Is there any merit in the national security claims?

Given people’s fears and lack of enthusiasm about a potential forced return to Instagram, I’ve begun seeing more and more videos about how people “would rather have China own their data than Mark Zuckerberg.” This is absurd for several reasons.

As much as there is the very real question of what companies do with our data, it feels like an intentional false equivalency. China, and other foreign countries, do have political motivations for sowing discourse or general mistrust, both in perceptions of our government and in our opinions of each other. And what better way to understand the cultural dynamics, simmering racial tensions, and regional nuances of our country to further these efforts than creating a widely beloved social media app that can collect that data?

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In the Information Age, governments no longer need to go through lengthy and costly efforts to invest in traditional espionage efforts. Social media provides the perfect opportunity to learn more about your desired target and how to influence them in ways that aren’t obvious. China doesn’t need to directly create propaganda; with the right algorithm, it can rely on Americans to do the work for them.

Modern warfare is no longer fought on the frontlines, with drones and heavy artillery. It is also online.

Researchers predicted this new form of war as far back as the 1970s, but it didn’t coalesce around a term until 1993 after John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt’s “Cyberwar is Coming!” They predicted that future conflicts will resemble “a chess game where you see the entire board, but your opponent sees only its own pieces” and go on to define two types of potential conflict: netwar and cyberwar.

Cyberwar speaks more to the operations and tactics a military would deploy. Think of ‘smart weapons,’ like AI drones, or intentionally damaging enemy communication. This has evolved over the last thirty years to what we see today in Ukraine and Gaza. What’s more interesting, and speaks to this present moment when thinking about TikTok, is this idea of a netwar.

A netwar is about “trying to disrupt, damage, or modify what a target population ‘knows’ or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it.”

Netwars are all about controlling the narrative around information, how it is distributed, and whether the public believes what it reads, hears, or watches. In this sense, we are already engaged in a series of netwars with the 2016 election marking a new, public phase that has only continued to escalate over the last eight years.

Arquilla and Ronfeldt question whether traditional nation-states will even have a role in future iterations of netwar. One need not work on behalf of a government to engage in netwar. In Transformation of War, Martin van Creveld argues that: “In the future war, war will not be waged by armies but by groups whom today we call terrorists, guerrillas, bandits and robbers, but who will undoubtedly hit on more formal titles to describe themselves.” It’s why I have such great skepticism about Elon Musk and his motivations around buying Twitter, turning it into his soapbox that uplifts white supremacist content and influences politics both at home and abroad.

Social media has democratized information in that anyone can share a story by uploading text, an image, or video to the internet. This was the great promise, how anyone with a voice who felt like they had something to say now didn’t need to rely on the validation of ‘mainstream media’ to communicate with the masses, but could instead bring their own stories to life. However, deputizing anyone with an iPhone and WiFi as a trusted news source instead of prioritizing those with the resources required to verify a story presents this fundamental question: who gets to decide what’s true?

Welcome to the post-truth era.

The term “post-truth” was first used in a 1992 essay by Steve Tesich - a Serbian-American playwright- to reflect on how quickly the public seems to move on during seemingly big, important events. We would rather forget, or simply not know, rather than sit with what’s right in front of us. He coined ‘post-truth’ to capture our inability to actively grapple with events like Watergate (or more recently, electing a felon to the highest office) and what it reveals about our ability to stomach the uncomfortable reality found in the truth.

Twenty-five years later, post-truth - used to “relate or denote circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion that appeals to emotion and personal belief” - became the Word of the Year. It feels fitting given 2016 was a period marked by different levels of interference in both Brexit and the U.S. elections. There was Cambridge Analytica and its use of Facebook profiles to develop software to predict, redirect, and influence American’s perceptions of Trump. Russian bots and agents engaged in coordinated attacks of misinformation, as well as leaking classified documents. Depending on your political beliefs, this was either shocking and viewed as credible information or all part of a larger plot to ‘drain the swamp.’

A year later, in 2017, Pew Research surveyed over 1,110 academics, researchers, journalists, and others to understand whether this level of misinformation was a blip or a harbinger of what was to come. Fifty-one percent of respondents believed our media landscape and understanding of the issue would not improve, and now we are living with some of their predictions.

Bad actors will increasingly use “new digital tools to take advantage of humans’ inbred preference for comfort and convenience” by creating online echo chambers.

This is known as ‘homophily,’ or a tendency to listen to and associate with people like yourself while excluding the voices of others you don’t agree with. It’s how feeds tailored to either a liberal or conservative audience can feel like they’re from two different realities. We are more likely to seek out things that reinforce our existing worldview, which is heightened by the attention economy, as companies tweak algorithms to get us to stay online just a little longer each time. It’s part of why TikTok is so incredibly skilled at keeping us engaged. Its algorithm was at the heart of the oral arguments on Friday, with Justices questioning whether this was an issue of free speech and more about corporate divestment.

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Theoretically, TikTok could continue operating if it were sold to a U.S. company or made its algorithm open source. It begs the question - nearly six years later - why no other company, including Meta, has been unable to replicate the precision and fluidity of their algorithm. What’s the secret sauce and when does it become a matter of natural security?

Pessimists in the study also pointed to this belief that our brains are not capable of handling this much technological change at once. Think of the rise in phone scams, no longer relegated to spam bots but instead leveraging voice technology to sound like loved ones, begging you for money for a family member’s bond money. As AI continues to improve, it will become harder to tell what is human- versus machine-generated content.

Meta is already leveraging AI to create fake influencers. While it was shut down days later, it raises doubts about what we know or perceive to know about the world around us. Are we talking to a real person, a foreign agent, or a bot? The fact that we increasingly can’t answer this question has led some to speculate that the internet will become a bot-filled, AI generated slop wasteland known as the ‘dead internet theory.’ It’s just bots, all the way down.

All of this leads to the decay and erosion of public trust, providing the perfect canvas for any bad faith actor, whether that is a government or corporation, to continue exploiting our fears for their gain.

Earlier this week, Meta announced its recent decision to roll back its fact-checking team from independent, third-party journalists in favor of community notes, where the “community [can] decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context.” Other decisions include rethinking what constitutes hate speech and, as of Friday, cutting the company’s DEI initiatives. Given that Meta created a Black, queer AI influencer who has self-reported that she was created by a team of almost entirely white men (with not a single Black person consulted at all), this is a troublesome direction for several reasons.

Meta’s decision was clearly politically motivated, though I’m not surprised. While I’m not a fan of the mealy-mouthed man Trump viewed him as a political adversary, even going to say, “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 Presidential Election.” As Zuckerberg works to protect himself and his self-interests, there are open questions about the future of online spaces and how that will potentially translate to the real world. What if ‘the community’ decides the Holocaust or slavery weren’t real?

As it becomes harder to discern what is real versus fake, what is AI versus reality, we will begin to see a digital divide between people who place a premium on trusted, verified information and those who either can’t, due to the cost, or won’t, because it does not fit their political narrative.

@notesfromkaylaprint media is (kind of?) back 🗞️📖🤓 #nyc #news #commentary #socialmedia #media #fyp

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I think it’s naive to think an app is just an app. Someone is always winning; it often comes at the expense of our data. As technology continues to evolve, it will also likely become a tool for covert warfare and manipulation by both foreign actors and corporations.

While I’m generally a skeptic in the federal government, outside evidence and theory appear to support claims that TikTok does pose a national security threat. For now, I will continue to use TikTok given these risks to further in-person connection and events, but should it go dark, I’m not exactly racing to find a new site outside of Substack. Instead, you can find me waiting to see what new front in the netwar opens next.