And of course my hair was ruined. Pulling up to the venue with sand spilling out of my everywhere, my still wet string bikini still strung on a hook in the van. Hauling shit with my guitar-guy strength (all in the back, none in the core). I tried to strangle my hair into some legible shape and it defied me, so I put it wherever it wanted to go, which was everywhere. What was I going to do? A low bun? When you coil an instrument cable, you have to pay attention to where it wants to go (unless you want to be a hasty teenager playing basements and ruining cables you will have to replace in your twenties — also fine but more expensive!). It’s like that with everything, though. Tap into the energy and rise to the occasion. Sometimes rising means falling to your knees.

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In an effort to connect with people in every way that I can, everywhere I am, I ask the person at the vegan restaurant what they recommend I order, forgetting that doing such a thing essentially compels you to follow their suggestion. This is how I ended up with a fried mushroom burger that I wanted less than anything.

But I was finding it hard to eat, hard to decide. I needed help. This was weeks ago, after I emerged from the airport to catch the New Jersey rail train and I found the air so temperate and the sky so uniform that I at first believed myself to have entered another building with a high ceiling. It was difficult to convince the mind that I was outside, that the ceiling was actually the eternal sky. Normally such a mistake in perception would have hardly occurred to me, but that day the thoughts keep coming and I found it nearly impossible to shake the idea that my believing the sky to be the ceiling applied all the way down. I sat down at the end of the platform and cried helplessly for a half hour, listening to Silver Jews “Pretty Eyes” and trying not to think about the train or the tracks.

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Like I said, it was a while ago. There is more to say but I’m scared of saying it, or I’m scared of scaring people. It’s all fine now, at least in the logistical sense. All I really mean is that I’ve had experiences of surrender so complete that I earnestly attended Easter mass in jean shorts on the East side of Los Angeles last Sunday. I am quick to cry now, and I don’t even say “this usually doesn’t happen to me” anymore because I have a new usual and it happens all the time.

I forget that repression is a non-directional force until I’m looking into my boyfriend’s eyes on Laguna Beach, all of a sudden remembering exactly how it felt to be twenty-one and falling completely in love with him. My sky-ceiling came down and crushed everything, and I realize now that sweeping darkness took with it not only the memories of pain and loneliness but those of love and belonging.

It’s not that I remember everything now, only that my present has ceased existing in isolation — each moment pinging other embodied experience, creating a thread that I can feel running across my whole body. This means that pain now feels like being electrocuted. And that, on Laguna Beach yesterday, loving Max felt like existing outside of time, felt like floating in pure sensation, felt like putting my head under, felt like making promises to a teenager, felt like stickysandysaltwater that I didn’t mind knotting up my hair.

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I have decided that nothing can be taken from me because nothing belongs to me. Everything I have has been given.

If they had it their way, music business executives would rather not deal with the fans at all.

Fans are a complicated, messy, unpredictable group. Sometimes they love a record, sometimes they hate it. Sometimes they love the single and hate the record. Sometimes they love the record and hate the single. They’re teenage girls, oldhead uncles, Gwenyth Paltrow, and the guy checking your groceries out at the Safeway. Their communities are niche and complex, their tastes formed not only by the artists they listen to but by the opinions of other fans. As an executive, you can inflate the charts, you can buy streams. You can buy vinyl (though who even cares about that). You can even pay people to crowd the shows once or twice. But for any art worth your investment, you will eventually need real people to reliably, measureably, and genuinely care about it.

In the dream world of an executive, fandom is something like a parasitic disease — contagious through mere exposure, trafficking quickly between hosts with immediate contact and little to no external intervention. This way, the executive needs only to create a Patient Zero and watch the snowball gather material. The disease would spread seamlessly, easily. It would be viral.

Last week, I came across a Billboard interview with the founders of Chaotic Good Projects, a digital marketing agency that promises to create virality by, among other things, manufacturing hundreds of fake fan accounts for musicians.

Having been a working musician for the better part of the last decade, this was not particularly surprising to me. Commercial music exists for a reason (it is widely liked and extremely profitable), and it is no secret that there is a gigantic machine that is not only behind our biggest stars, but playing a part in breaking the new mainstream. There are kinds of music that are compatible with TikTok trends, and others that rely on a broader context, a less immediate delivery. Distinguished taste is something people pride themselves on — the idea that they have some resistance left still, that they don’t have to listen to the Alex Warrens of the Sombrs of the world simply because the algorithm has offered its teat to suck.

Alex Warren and Sombr are, to no one’s surprise, clients of Chaotic Good Projects. These two are part of the new mainstream broken primarily by algorithmic social media platforms, though Chaotic Good’s client list also includes more established pop giants like Dua Lipa, Shawn Mendes, and Justin Bieber. The careers of these people, while obviously influential in my industry, are not really what I’m interested in. I’m interested in the people who made it without capitulating completely to commercial demands, whose personas don’t eclipse their work. People who are making stuff that’s simultaneously viable enough to be profitable and still uncompromising on a vision. I’m interested in the real rock stars, if we have any left.

The first time I heard Cameron Winter’s “Love Takes Miles,” I probably heard it one hundred times in a row. I had found it a week after its release and became immediately convinced that I was one of the few people in the world who knew about this perfect, beautiful little secret. At the time, the song had just under a million streams, and I was obsessed with showing it to everyone. Everyone soon caught on. The next year, it was the summer of “Love Takes Miles.” I played it in rental cars in Los Angeles and off my phone speakers in the most remote parts of Chimney Rock, North Carolina. The rest of that record was a similar revelation for me. I had discovered some kind of magic.

Though, I can’t remember exactly how I discovered it. I didn’t hear about the song from a friend or a music blog, and can’t recall a particular memory — only that of seeing the title somewhere on my phone and searching it up on Spotify. How I came to know the song is almost irrelevant information at this point, eclipsed completely by the experience of loving the song on my own terms, creating my own memories with it. The song just came to me, from somewhere, populating seamlessly in a stream of consciousness. A stream of consciousness, otherwise known as an algorithm.

“Loves Takes Miles” was worked as a part of a “narrative campaign” by Chaotic Good Projects. A “narrative campaign” is one of four kinds of services the agency offers — the others being “UGC” (which stands for user-generated content), “Fanpage,” and “Brands and Media.” According to the agency’s website, they also worked narrative and UGC campaigns for Geese’s record “Getting Killed.”

When I discovered that the same media apparatus propping up Sombr and Alex Warren (the term propping up here is used intentionally — to me, there is almost nothing compelling about these artists aside from their aggressive social campaign) was also boosting Cameron Winter and Geese, I was shocked. I thought this was the kind of thing that was only deployed in service of mass-market, commercial pop — secretly, also, that this was the only kind of music such marketing would work for.

Alternative music used to mean just that — an alternative to the mainstream — something that couldn’t simply be adopted by everyone else through pure exposure, through virality. There are certainly arguments to be made about the mass appeal of a band like Geese, but no one in good faith could compare them to the commercial pop stars that populate Chaotic Good’s roster.

But the roster runs deep, far past the predictable internet sensations one could expect (and, apologies to the internet sensations, including people I consider to be genuinely great musicians). Geese and Cameron Winter, but also Dijon and Mk.gee. Laufey and Wet Leg. Oklou and Jane Remover.

I have no doubt that these artists could have ascended without the assistance of Chaotic Good because they are great musicians, and many people enjoy their music. I believe that this could have happened in the same way that I believe my friends in bands who play at bars could be the biggest musicians in the world if the industry were willing to facilitate their exposure. Much is said about hundreds of thousands of AI songs being uploaded to streaming services every day. Not enough is said about the many bands that are playing to no one, so many bands that could be huge if given the opportunity to be heard.

But the industry has changed. “Being heard” is not just about putting out music or even promoting it. The gatekeepers hardly matter anymore. SNL performances and favorable Pitchfork reviews don’t move the needle — TikToks about those things do (Chaotic Good ran a UGC campaign specifically to promote Oklou’s Tiny Desk performance). So, in this new landscape, is creating hundreds of fake accounts just par for the course of being a good publicist?

Though their website gives next-to-no details aside from who their clients are, Chaotic Good’s UGC (user-generated content) campaigns seem self-explanatory. Chaotic Good is paid to create accounts that generate content and simulate trends, which will ideally result in organic users generating content to further the trends themselves. Founders Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman know that the internet is highly suggestible, which also happens to be the ethos of their narrative campaigns.

“A lot of what we do on the narrative side will be controlling the discourse,” said the founders, “I think most people see a video or see something about an album that came out and it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”

Well, that sounds quite unfair. What is an agency to do when its clients are at the mercy of an unruly TikTok comment section? They become the comment section.

“I think in the past, let’s say like a label and a management team do a great job. They get their artists on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J or something like that. Then they post it and then they kind of wait for the comments […] what we do at Chaotic and with our management clients is, the second SNL drops at midnight, you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.”

The phrase “you should post a hundred times” is said again and again over the course of the Billboard interview. As an artist, I am used to getting that instruction myself from management and label executives — post, post, post, try to hit the algorithm, fail miserably, post, post, post again, try covering other songs, try posting memes, try posting your feet, try posting your songs again, well, no, try posting the feet again. Coren and Spelman know that sucks, and their solution is for the burden to be shifted away from artists and onto agencies like theirs. When they say, “you should post a hundred times,” it is an instruction for their own employees and contractors and, for once, not the artists themselves.

To be honest, it sounds appealing to me. I’ve written extensively about the burden of the attention economy on artists and how it denigrates artistic efforts as a whole, especially as it applies to the relationship fans have to the work. I have no doubt that musicians would literally pay to not have to do this, which is exactly how Chaotic Good makes their money. The founders don’t shy away from the dystopian implications of the new algorithmic economy, either; “it does get overwhelming because I don’t think the pendulum is swinging back anytime soon. I think what we’re seeing is things get more and more extreme.”

The offer is not to create a new paradigm but to be the biggest fish in the pond. If 100 people think your song sucks, Chaotic Good will create 200 people who think your song is awesome. There’s no going back to pre-Napster times. Now that songs are files and files are Godless, record sales mean nothing, and the “analog revolution” won’t change that. Records used to mean fans, which meant money; now that there are no records, it’s just the fans and the money, and fans are a renewable resource. Chaotic Good knows that you can create a fan through imitation.

When Coren and Spelman get specific about their marketing campaigns, they say that their team is constantly monitoring TikTok for trends. Quotes do particularly well, with the marketed song integrated seamlessly into the background. “Yeah, just kind of any quotes, just phrases that could be relevant to something that’s happening at the moment […] It’s things you share with your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your brother, your sister.” The interviewer offers, “I’ve seen many times on my TikTok feed, maybe a picture of a coffee cup with a quote that’s like, “I can’t believe I found you in this world.””

These are fans created through pure association — this quote reminded me of this person, and it just so happens that a song was attached to this experience. I may, then, listen to the song on my own in order to remind me of the experience I had of watching a TikTok. Chaotic Good seems to aim for such results.

In order to boost the profile of indie folk musician Kevin Atwater (whose song “startripping” I found on TikTok years ago and played every day for months), Chaotic Good started pumping out edits to the show Yellowjackets, to much success: “The song has 40,000 creates on TikTok, and it’s really improved a lot […] But what it’s done is now every time he posts with the audio, he’s supposed to do well because he has this trending audio, and it’s tied to his brand. And now fans show up dressed as the characters, and it’s kind of been this huge moment for him.”

Is this success? Yellowjackets is a good show, which is lucky. But algorithmic associations are not always so tasteful. What if the nearest analog to “yearning” becomes the inevitable Ryan Murphy yaoi adaptation of the Columbine shooters? Those edits need soundtracks too — could it be your song?

I’d let it be mine. My utopia knows nothing of “short form content” or “trend simulation” or “narrative campaigns,” but my utopia is a bedtime story I stopped telling myself the first time I got a $30 Spotify payout. This industry is a dirty one, and the cost of success has almost always been paid in dollars and cents — usually by a big label, a management company, or someone’s dad. If a label wanted to contract Chaotic Good on my behalf, I would accept such a deal handily and gratefully. The promise that industry has always made to artists is a tempting, paternal one: you create the magic, and I’ll take care of the rest.

This isn’t to say that swimming against the current is futile, only that I see the kinds of developments made by Chaotic Good as an appropriate weapon in the algorithmic war of attrition. And indeed, Chaotic Good views this as a war; throughout the Billboard interview, the founders use terms like “hand-to-hand combat” to describe the process and referred to the early stages of production as “building an army.”

I suspect that the more ubiquitous this service and its volumetric output become, the more bands will resist it, pulling back from streaming and socials altogether in favor of embracing hyper-local, scene-based methods of growth. This wave has already started, with the rightful backlash to and divestment from streamers. I wonder about the longevity of the “trend simulation” strategy — if fans will eventually catch on to it, and thus eventually rebuke it. After all, nobody likes falling for marketing. It surprised me greatly to hear the founders of Chaotic Good talk so freely about who and how they manufacture hype for, as it seems to me that it would be in the interest of artists to withhold such information from the public. But perhaps there’s nothing to be ashamed about. Or, there’s no need to be more ashamed of the tactics created to get through the world than of the world itself

I wonder also about fandom, that complex web of mostly young women creating worlds for themselves and their friends online, using art as a compass for self-discovery, connection, and meaning. I wonder if the marketing accounts, who exist primarily to post, ever engage meaningfully with other, genuine fan accounts. It seems to their advantage to connect themselves to the network of real fans. Do they? Somewhere, is there a 27-year-old in a New York office reading Cameron Winter fanfic on AO3 in order to ingratiate himself into the larger, realer army of young fans who do their job for free?

Some of these processes can be automated, and I expect they will be soon; posting indiscriminately is the number one service of bots worldwide, and has been even before the technology became sophisticated. But other things, I have to believe, can’t be done by machines or even by real people who are invested in art primarily because that investment is made with real money. Some things can only be created by the fans themselves, without whom Chaotic Good and artists everywhere would never again cash a check.

I’m on tour right now, trying my best to be present. I am promoting the shows, I am making short-form content, I am balancing the budget, I am trying desperately to find vegan options in North Dakota. Being on the road is kind of like being in a boat that’s full of holes, but you happen to have a bucket that’s exactly large enough to bail you out — as long as you keep hauling water. Debt can’t hit a target that’s always moving to the next city, trying to sell one more t-shirt. But when I have space to settle, I do. I look into the faces of the people in my crowd and become overwhelmed with love and gratitude, completely flooded with the kind of emotion I can only access in shared space, in shared work.

My record came out last October. It did not perform well, technically speaking. It’s not hitting large streaming numbers, none of my shows sold out, and I’m all but waiting to see if this is the year it’ll start putting me in serious debt. But I don’t know what hundreds of millions of streams would mean to me, what it would feel like. How do I touch that? How do I grasp it?

When I’m on the road, the thought strikes me hundreds of times a day: this is real. I see a wild buffalo rub its face against the mountainside. This is real. A teenager in the front row cries to a song I wrote when I was her age. This is real. The cliffside in rural Washington takes the breath from my lungs. This is real. I listen to “Love Takes Miles” with the windows down and think about my best friend, who I moved across the country to be near. This is real. My hands are on the fretboard. This is real. I run through the Badlands for the first time in my life, past the van, into the expanse. This is real. A sound escapes me and reaches you. This is real. This is real. This is real.

Oh, yeah… COME SEE ME ON TOUR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thanks

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Every prayer candle at the spiritual store in the Village was fully stocked except INTUITION, which had only one left.

As it happens, INTUITION is the prayer I was seeking. At another time in my life, I would have taken this as a sign. Just one, just for me. Now, I look at the candle and share a smile with myself. Praying for intuition is like praying for atmosphere; it’s always there, even when we can’t sense it. But the candle is like the wind, permission to feel.

At another time in my life, I might have been happier, believing that a guardian angel had sent me a candle. Now, I think about how many have stood here, wanting to believe like me. Is it better to feel this sort of emptiness, knowing it is shared? I’m not sure. I turned the candle around and noticed that it was $23. At another time in my life, I would have walked it up to the register, been taken aback by the price, and purchased it anyway. That kind of belief is costly.

Though, far be it from me to turn my nose up at a prop for enlightenment. I used to think that cigarettes relaxed me, and now I believe that I am more relaxed without them. The cigarette is still the prop, this time reified through abnegation. My response unsettled me. Surely, it was simpler when I embraced synchronicity and saw myself as uniquely blessed. Perhaps the reason I’ve been having trouble with my intuition is precisely that I’m psychoanalyzing the fucking prayer candles instead of simply lighting them and taking a deep breath! I don’t think I was smarter at 23. But maybe that’s the point.

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I have decided to believe in needles. I’m scared of needles, but I’m more scared of being in pain forever. Sandra told me about a Chinese medicine doctor off Canal Street who takes my insurance. What’s been happening to me is that the forefinger and thumb of my right hand, in addition to a decent part of my right arm, have been numb for months.

I know it is a pinched nerve. I know this because my body pinches them all the time, especially in times of stress. It always happens on my right side, which, according to Chinese medicine, is the side of masculine energy. For my birthday, I saw an astrologer who told me that, in every life before this one, I was a man. This makes sense to me for reasons I can’t quite explain, potentially because, upon closer inspection, the “reasons” are probably bio-essentialist nonsense I absorbed from The Bible and Instagram Reels. But still, it feels nice to believe that I’m in pain because I’m being a woman wrong, or that womanhood is a wrong condition that causes pain.

The Chinese medicine doctor didn’t tell me that I have a wounded Feminine. He told me to stop going on my laptop in bed at night, and then he put 10 needles in my body, plus a few electrodes on the back of my neck. He thinks that I pinched a nerve by looking at my phone and laptop, even though I have several books at home which say that I pinched a nerve due to my body’s refusal to process repressed emotions.

I grow bored of looking at the wall, I pick up my phone. I realize that my neck has fallen in precisely the way the doctor had mimicked for me earlier, when he said that many young people have this problem due to phones and laptops. I put my phone down.

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I am scared of needles, which is why I think acupuncture may work for me. Though my father bucked his Southern Baptist upbringing (in favor of edgy Atheism which eventually smoothed out into casual Buddhism), my body remembers believing that a meaningful reward must lie on the other side of all this pain. Which of course means that pain must occur in order for good things to happen, and in this way, we must appreciate pain.

I don’t like regarding pain this way. I think the point of pain is the pain and its sensation (as opposed to penance for expected pleasure, the emotion for which feels something more like anticipation or being horny). The refusal to look pain in the face is how repression happens, how fear gets trapped in the body, how my arms and legs go numb. Almost everything you could possibly think to do in your human day involves not directly facing pain — mindless routine, distracting circumstances like working and loving people, soothing yourself with beverages or drugs or beverages with drugs in them — up to and including actively wishing for an end to pain. Even so, one is supposed to face the pain. This is the noble answer.

The true one, however, is that I don’t believe in pain as a bump on the road to superior emotions like joy and peace because I don’t consider joy and peace to be the superior emotions.

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A few weeks ago, I tweaked my back on a deadlift and got so desperate to end my pain that, even though I feared it would unleash latent and lifelong schizophrenia immediately, I broke my 5-year hiatus from weed.

The problem is that weed used to be bad, which was good because I was a teenager. I bought pure shake and shambles from whoever would sell it to me and faced a blunt that left me sober enough to drive to the strip mall. Then weed got better, which was bad because it was actually just a trial phase for the real super-weed that would develop in a few years. During this time, weed started to make me feel like my friends could see into the depths of my soul, which they found to be impossibly, almost hilariously barren, and also that I was peeing myself in public. I stopped smoking.

Now weed is really good, and I’m an adult who lives in a state with dispensaries. The weed is so good now that they even figured out how to make it not scary. I am taking tiny bites of a vegan, balanced 10:2 THC:CBD gummy. I wish I could clap my hand on the back of my stoned nineteen-year-old self, who would probably react as though it was a grenade going off in Vietnam, and say: Welcome to the future.

Immediately, weed started to ease my pain — both physical and emotional. There’s a little person that runs around in my mind trying to manage ever-perpetual disasters, and weed tucks her into bed.

In December, I experienced some kind of emotional crisis, during which this little person was certain that my landlord would refuse to renew our lease again. The signs were there: he’s old, he’s suggested that we relocate rather than ask for trash bins one more time, he’s moved his daughter into the remaining apartment, making us the only people in the building who are not directly related to him. I began to dream about paperwork that evicted us. I dragged Max all across Brooklyn to showings of uglier, smaller apartments1 before asking our landlord about the lease termination he suggested, at which point he replied that he had no idea what I was talking about.

I was so dumbfounded that the landlord didn’t actually want us to leave that he mistook my incredulity for wariness and offered to stabilize our rent. Accidental win for insane girls, I guess.

The lease on this place is the only one I’ve ever renewed. It’s the only one I’ve even stayed all the way through the first time. I love it deeply and fear losing it constantly. Apparently, it is possible to be avoidantly attached to your apartment.

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I started taking the edibles. I was drawing long baths and spending hours decoding my Tarot deck. I slept better. I drew a picture for the first time in years, just because.

And then, when I was sober, that little person got out of her bed and asked when and how exactly we should plan to get rid of weed forever, since it was clear we were loving it so much.

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“Musician, huh?” the Chinese medicine doctor said, turning over my hand. “Guitar?” I nodded. “This numbness must make it hard to play.”

He’s right. The numbness makes it hard to play. A few weeks ago, I was asked to open a Bernie Sanders rally with a few songs, an offer I immediately and happily accepted. The preceding days were full of anguished rehearsal, shaking out my hands and beating them against hard surfaces, willing the nerve endings to cooperate with my brain. I kept dropping the pick. I kept crying.

Sometimes I worry that I might be secretly stupid because my dreams are so ham-fisted. My subconscious, freed from the constraints of the real world and human language, presents to me clear images of things that represent obvious fears and have mostly already happened to me: being home alone with my mother while she’s in psychosis, forgetting the words to a song on stage. The nerve pain lets me know that my body is actually very smart.

It came on soon after I left the job that made me money for the famously gruelling and woefully underpaid pursuit of indie music. Certain bets had to be hedged — one day I might break into the alternative mainstream, one day I might afford to feed myself from music. Other bets I hadn’t even considered, those that I had registered as sheer fact, like I bet that I will still be able to sing. I bet that my hands will still work.

The safe path would have been to keep my job, and my body knows this. It doesn’t like this freedom, my conviction that led me away from certainty and towards beauty and truth. My body has fallen through the floor hundreds of times. My body lies awake and worries about money, even though my favorite thing is sitting in the creek. My body would rather cling to the wall than let go and hit the bottom, where it might wait forever for the bottom to fall out of the Earth.

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Here’s how I know that I don’t find joy and peace to be the superior emotions.

Because they end. Pain is unrelenting, everywhere. When there is nothing to think of, pain contemplates. If I am without company, pain always comes. Joy is a slight silver fish, so quick it could be confused with the reflection of a passing current. Pain is unmistakable.

Perhaps it’s an act of love to believe that the state which is truly unavoidable must be the most meaningful. Perhaps belief itself is a kind of love.

Graham: You’re right, I’ve got a lot of problems... But they belong to me.
Ann: You think they’re yours, but they’re not. Everybody that walks in that door becomes part of your problem. Anybody that comes in contact with you. I didn’t want to be part of your problem, but I am.

I will come back to James Spader.

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The girl who was washing her hands first at the Angelika did it like she was scrubbing in for surgery. There were only two sinks, one of which was inconveniently placed and caused delay, so we all lined up and watched her. After that, it took forever. Every woman ensured she was washing her hands just as much. I don’t think it had to do with feminine competition or anything. Seeing that woman scrub her cuticles with purpose brought me back into presence. Handwashing probably shouldn’t be an automatic process anyway. We’re in New York City, and everything is dirtier than we could ever imagine.

I’ve been watching sex movies this month — sex, lies, and videotape (1989), Secretary (2002), and Pillion (2026) last week at the Angelika. My sense is that we must be due for some kind of cultural reckoning vis a vis kink, though I am known to extrapolate my own personal revelations onto culture at large (I’m a beautiful, clear vessel for God’s everlasting light and eternal message…sorry!). But I think we’re all hungry for an alternative to The Gooniverse or the otherwise pearl-clutched fear of touch. God knows I’m not suggesting we all become normal about sex, as this is my worst nightmare not to mention functionally impossible, but I think playing with the basics could be good for us as a culture. I sat in a quiet room and thought about it. Do I want to be big or little? Strong or weak? Taking care of things or being taken care of?1

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I have a tradition of spending the first week of the year completely offline. After that week this January, and for the first time, I noticed myself interested in finding a balance between analog and the internet (rather than my previously preferred method of believing the internet to be wholly bad, and myself stupid for being unable to detach completely).

Like most things, the internet is a situation in which “the dose makes the poison.” I enjoy watching a dog chase a butterfly on Instagram reels. I do not enjoy forgetting when I started watching Instagram reels, if I decided to do so or if I swiped into it by accident, wondering how long ago the sun went down and why I never turned on any lamps, my mouth hanging open like a baby in front of the cube of blue light.

The scientific jury seems to be out on whether or not “the phones” are addicting in the way that, say, alcohol or heroin is. But, at least for me, the pull is strong enough that simply deciding to moderate my use, employing screen time limits, or setting off the aforementioned avalanche of self-hatred and shame aren’t enough to change my behavior. So, I got The Brick.

I do love the internet, I just wanted to spend most of my time in my waking life. A few years ago, I talked about my wish to create a “computer room of the mind,” making the internet a place to visit rather than a place I live. I began to experiment with a practical way of doing this: office hours.

I decided that I would only visit social media for two hours per week, on a weekday. I hoped it would temper my previous pattern of extreme pendulation (a few days analog, a few days glued to my phone) and help me preserve my experience with the internet I love, without the parts that demonstrably detract from my quality of life.

So far, it’s been working towards that end. But also, the experience been very different than I could have predicted.

Here’s what it’s been like:1

1. i am capable of spending time in silence/boredom

The other day, the Q was running behind. After a while, I noticed that I had simply been standing on the platform for almost ten minutes, waiting for the train. I hadn’t looked at my phone and I wasn’t listening to music. I was just being in the moment, and it hadn’t even occurred to me that it was happening. This is not something I used to do before this year, except every once in a while to prove to myself I could, during which time the experience felt more like extremely difficult active meditation rather than a normal part of my week.

2. i have been feeling so much more

I always knew that my phone was a primary tool I used to dissociate from my life and help me not to feel. It seemed obvious to me that this was unhealthy, cowardly even. It was something I was constantly trying to fix and adapt away from. Now that it’s been a month without my most trusted tool, I can say for certain, IT FUCKING SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My body is extremely smart and wanted to protect me from pain! It was doing a pretty good job! Sure, the other thing hurt me too, but at least it also sometimes showed me a video of a girl doing really awesome makeup! This has been the hardest part, out of everything. The totally base realization that, in every iteration, life is painful.

3. firm boundaries have created more freedom

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If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

— Anne Carson, “Eros the Bittersweet”1

On Corey’s birthday, I w…

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I’m not really interested in art or life advice from men at the moment. This includes the ones that are living, dead, educated, provincial, highly recommended, underrecognized, whatever. I realized at a certain point that I was coming up short looking for mentorship in these men on the page. I don’t think this needs to be any major polemic, though it is not unlike how men have conceived of the thoughts and ideas of women throughout history; it’s just not for me, it doesn’t appeal.

Once, in college, I performed an experiment where I refused to move out of the way for men when walking. I’m pretty sure they did this experiment on Buzzfeed also, which is probably where I got the idea. Anyway, I got pushed into the street a lot. It occurred to me that the men I was reading may not think to register me as a subject on the street, or were otherwise alone in their clock towers and wouldn’t happen to meet me at all. Vivian Gornick does a lot of her thinking while walking; such perspectives agree with me

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The dance club on my birthday was horrible for the first half hour when Kate was running behind and the vibes were off. I stood there, sipping my gin and tonic, trying to calculate the reason. I was coming off the back of a fantastic week, feeling sufficiently energized, loved, sexy, etc. I have no problem dancing alone. Then, I notice the stiffness — backward caps atop skinfades, circle of phones, gum chewing at the bar. I open an empty text thread, to no one: club with too many straight people feels like I Am Locked inside hell

Hours later, when Kate and I were re-entering the dancefloor, feeling magnetic and sparkly, they were swarmed by a gaggle of lesbians who, upon seeing them for the first time, screamed, YOU’RE SO PRETTY! We made it to the other side of the room, and I asked over the pulse of the bass if they wanted to go back to see the lesbians. “No,” they said, “they’ll come to me.” And did.

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I hung out with a child by accident this week. My friend invited me to accompany him to his job where he is a male nanny. Sometimes you will meet someone who says they are a male nanny and it makes you feel weird or concerned but this is not the case with my friend; it makes sense for him, and he is good at it. We spent all afternoon at a café, watching the child draw numbers and ranking our favorites. You should know that the numbers are not ordinary — most are anthropomorphic, and all are highly creative in their execution. A few hours in, as the brackets were narrowing, I realized that I wanted the child to feel happy about the results of our rankings, but also that I wanted to take the rankings seriously, because I took the child seriously. I knew that the child wanted to be both pleased and respected. These are sometimes conflicting aims.

I have a friend who looks only at his wife when he tells a joke, no matter the number of people in the conversation. He seems pleased when the joke lands, but also when it doesn’t; her approval is her love, but so is her annoyance. It’s different with children. The child in the café is asking me what I think of the number, but he is looking at my friend — my friend who bought the notebook and brings the nice pens, who is a transient yet solid element of his reality. What an enormous responsibility, I think, to be so observed by a child who will then convert his observations into understandings of his own value, his relationships to others, the entire world. But then, as I’m walking home, I think of all the ways in which I do the same. All the ways I bounce myself off of people, hoping to find a legible image in the reflection. All the ways I want to be both pleased and respected, flattered and known, exalted and humbled. All the ways I know no better.

If all this is true, I think it’s important to find people who react well to you. This just might be the key to friendship: finding the person who raises an eyebrow, who asks another question. I spent a lot of time around people who ran me over. These days, I just walk down the street, trying to keep my head up.

I don’t think of him very often. It was a surprise to me that I dreamed about him a few nights ago, as I almost never have before. It wouldn’t be right to say that I miss him. Only that I will probably never forget about him and thus every year that passes without speaking becomes more space I have to make up on my own. Because while I won’t forget about him entirely, I have forgotten him. I can’t recall the sound of his laugh or remember where any of his moles are or the name of his favorite movie. And so while I feel quite certain that something, somewhere had the possibility of energetically transpiring between the two of us in dreamspace, the clearer explanation is that he has become a shadow in my psyche, utilized by the subconscious mind to communicate back to consciousness. Once a full person, now a symbol I have trained my brain to decode.

Was there a way to tell my twenty-year-old self who was sitting at that Los Feliz restaurant, “hey, by the way, one day you will know this person primarily as a collection of your own convenient facts, which may or may not align with base reality, and remember them solely in light of how they fit into your own narratives about yourself and your life? Hey, by the way, that kind of feels like losing someone forever. Plus, it makes you think about all the people that you actually, currently know, and whether there is a way to love them without seeing so much of yourself in the process. I think that we need people badly, which prevents us from acknowledging their wholeness. You’ll start having trouble with this later. Did you know that’s going to happen to you?”

But even if there were a way to tell her that I’m pretty sure she would be like bitch WHAT are you talking about.

Kate invited me to the Ana Mendieta exhibit in Tribeca the other day1. I had heard of Mendieta — usually I know something or other about women who died under “mysterious circumstances” — but I was mostly unfamiliar with her work.

The collection is called Back to the Source and features silhouettes Mendieta built into the earth, their shapes mediated by the pliabile, natural world. The museum’s curator calls it a “negative dialectic of exile,” a way of staying through leaving. Mendieta’s impressions are not meant to last forever, as they take form through the manipulation of natural materials that will undoubtedly manipulate themselves further across time, making different shapes, other impressions. I was struck immediately by her focus, how each image seemed to say, simply: I was here.

I was struck also by how each silhouette looks like a woman who had just fallen from a great height. In the 911 call Mendieta’s husband made after her death, he is quoted as saying "My wife is an artist, and I'm an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window." Her husband had scratches up and down his face. He was acquitted after a nonjury trial.

I mean to make no crass insinuation about Mendieta’s work being some sort of omen, though of course it’s comforting to imagine it as such. The idea that one could have drawn a line through the middle of her work to the tactile end of her life, artist as prophet. It’s just to say that this is what the figures reminded me of, their absence conjuring another kind of presence, another space where Ana Mendieta’s body had once been. Both a physical impression and a psychic one.

Even apart from this connection, the photos are eerie. They remind me of my death, but also my belonging. The fact that my death is my belonging, that I wouldn’t feel so tethered to this earth if I didn’t know that I would one day decompose back into it. They remind me that anytime I leave something, I’ve left something behind. That my body is more than a concrete form I can grasp; that my body is also a shape which creates other shapes.

I don’t feel the need to fill in Mendieta’s shapes. There is already someone there. The body is the form which leaves an impression; the body is everywhere it has been.

Memory will always hurt me, but it hurts me most when I believe in it. Is it true that I must let everything pass through my hands like sand in the river? I think so. But it’s not as though I am the person holding the sand which is the other person and the river is something bigger, like God. I have chosen to see the shape, so I take the shape. Somewhere else, I am the sand. Someday soon, I am the river.

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Here’s what I learned in 2025:

1. Choose the hustle over the grind

Recently, I saw an astrologist who told me that Capricorn does their growing up backwards — they are serious children and spend the rest of their lives learning how to find levity. I was a serious child, and I continue to hold onto a certain amount of severity in my twenties. My partner is often reaching over to smooth out the space between my brows where I crunch them together unknowingly, or pulling my nails out of my mouth when I chew out of habit.

In my experience, what helps serious people is serious work. When put to the appropriate task, serious people will find fulfillment and balance in it. The trouble is that serious people often get caught in a grind. This is not always good for us.

There’s two ways to think about hard work, in my opinion.

The grind is dedicated, stable work. It’s doing the same thing over and over again — sometimes in order to gain mastery, and sometimes just because it’s what pays your bills.

The grind is the mindset of the American workforce; it’s the nine-to-five, the tenure-track. It’s also the 3,000-word-a-day writers, the sculptors locked in the basement. There are times when I’ve needed the grind. When I was a rootless teenager in the midst of COVID’s onset, I needed the grind of farmwork. The 6am wakeups, the strict routine. Even when I didn’t want to do it, I did. It built character that I’m proud of, and it gave me something to hold on to when I had nothing. If you have nothing, maybe the grind is for you.

In terms of Tarot, the grind reminds me of the 8 of pentacles. You’re at the workbench, hammering away. The rewards are collecting, but you don’t even look up to see them; that’s how locked in you are.

Hustler energy is different. It’s the forward momentum of The Chariot, with the established past in your rearview. The hustle is the kind of work that requires you to stay flexible and open, to keep moving. Usually, it requires a bit of a fire under your ass in the way of financial or personal pressure. Where the grind is an appointment, the hustle feels more like a quest.

It’s not that the hustle is better than the grind. The grind is essential energy, and some people function best under its rigidity. But people often get stuck in the grind, especially “serious” people, who are assumed to be best suited for it. When this happens, the dedication isn’t rewarding because the action isn’t deliberate. It’s hitting the same nail over and over again which, removed from all romanticism, is just brute force.

It’s my belief that people cannot function well without meaningful, challenging work. It bleeds over into other areas. We get irritable and fussy, neurotic and unbalanced. Not lazy, but unmotivated. It’s part of why this particular era of modern society is so intolerable, with so many of us completely alienated from our work, feeling drained yet unaccomplished, purposeless.

I personally was in major need of some hustling, questing energy. I spent my teenage years and early twenties grinding to build financial security, then I bucked it in favor of chasing that irreplaceable magic of the unknown. Climbed a mountain and I turned around, etc.

It’s alright to turn around. Just make sure that when you come back down the mountain, you’re running.

2. Take advantage of the archetypes

A lot of my year was defined by one essential question: What good is a story about trauma?

I wrote a record about it, read books about it, and thought about it endlessly. In the wake of a traumatic childhood that I pieced together and survived through the vehicle of narrative (and the comfort that narrative provides), I needed to know to what extend I was harming myself by insisting on an exact re-telling, and re-experiencing, of my past.

If you want to know the details of where I landed, listen to the record. But a crucial piece of my exploration has been a study of archetypes — those essential representations prevalent throughout culture, media, and our subconscious. On the theory side, I read some Carl Jung (though I still have plenty of reading to do), and on the practical side, I got into Tarot.

Where a story often left me feeling like I had drawn a line around myself, an archetype felt like looking through a window that was also a mirror. They’re so essential, so familiar — like our greatest stories, but far more flexible. Pulling Tarot for myself, I felt free to spend a day embodying the insular, seeking energy of The Hermit, knowing that there were 71 other cards whose lessons I could tap into at any time.

I am a conclusion-drawer. These are holdovers from a childhood that required hypervigilance and judgement for safety. A necessary lesson for me, into my adulthood, is that my projections are not the truth. I remember that my projections are drawn from the vantage point of a child. It’s not healthy for a child to be the boss, and that’s what I was doing every time I treated those projections as fact. But still, the projections exist. And children are better entertained than saddled with responsibilities.

So, instead of banishing the conclusions, I messed around with them. The archetypes helped me sort out what a certain person, interaction, or situation was doing to my psyche. How am I categorizing these events or this person? What energy are they similar to? What does that remind me of? Can a situation be my Tower one day and my Wheel of Fortune the next? Well…yes!

You don’t have to get into psychoanalysis or Tarot to explore this (though, if you are a beautiful woman in your 20’s or 30’s, it’s probably about time). The good thing about archetypes is that we have immediate, innate access to them. Experiment with external sources of energy or inspiration — animate or inanimate. has been writing about such things for years and her first book, Notes on Shapeshifting, is an excellent resource.

3. Hold loosely

If I had to distill my most important lessons from the year into just two words, it would be these. Hold loosely.

Buddhism teaches non-attachment. As a casual student of the religion for many years, I’ll say this: I am no good at it. Of course, if you speak to many Buddhists, they will tell you that this is the point. That life is a constant balance between holding on and letting go.

It has certainly felt that way to me, that my existence has been a series of contractions, like labor, each squeeze leading to a release that ultimately supports new life. Sometimes, I enjoy these dramatics. That tough pivot, the big break. But, to maintain sanity, most of my life cannot be made up of this kind of thrashing.

I once took a yoga class where the teacher instructed us to think of our breath as a long piece of fabric that was piling up on itself. Each exhale should lead seamlessly into its inhale, like a sine wave. Try it now. You have the conception of the breath, its shape. But mostly, you just watch it go. You let it pass through your hands like water.

This is how I try to relate to my life for the most part. I don’t need to rise above it all, or get down in the mess with each experience. I can touch everything and feel it on my skin. I can try it on and embody it. Then, I can watch it leave me. I often think of these lines from MUNA’s “Loose Garment":”

Used to wear my sadness like a choker
Yeah, it had me by the throat
Tonight I feel I'm draped in it
Like a loose garment, I just let it flow

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WHAT’S BEHIND THE PAYWALL: 20 more lessons

The first part of this post dealt with lessons I had to learn over time, things I chewed on for many months and thus required a certain level of extrapolation and nuance to communicate effectively. However, some lessons are simple and even stupid — like “beauty hacks,” the full embrace of certain cliches, or certain personal idiosyncrasies. Here were mine this year:

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Spotify Wrapped got especially depressing for me this year. In the midst of the company buying AI drones and selling ICE ads and also stealing money from me personally, it just wasn’t that fun to realize that, in addition, it was also stalking everyone and using their information to further the company’s evil. I really like to see data about media consumption and I am also morally opposed to corporations taking charge of such data.

So this year, I decided to make a “wrapped” data summary of my own reading history.

I had a lot of fun coming up with unique categories and tracking my reading habits according to my own metrics. I wrote about every single book I read this year and what I thought about it. Towards the end, I also include a graveyard of unfinished books. Please advise…

P.S. this post is too long for email! Read in your web browser to see it all :)

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QUICK STATS

42 books — 28 fiction, 13 non-fiction, and one that was a mix of both.

I read the most books (7) in September when I was off-the-grid. Go figure.

I read the least number of books (1) in February. That was when I finished Anna Karenina, which is the longest book I read and the only one that made me cry. The shortest book was Chess Story by Stefan Zweig.

I read more fiction at the beginning of the year, and more non-fiction towards the end.

I read 5 books that I would describe as having “changed my life.” Those are at the end.

Okay, let’s get into it.

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CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING

I prioritize reading in my life because, every so often, I read a book that introduces me to a new way of thinking about something. Mostly, I experience this with fiction that connects me to some other people in some other place or time. This year, I tried to learn more through reading nonfiction. I focused on gaps in my knowledge and, if I had an intellectual thread that I wanted to follow, I followed it.

These are the books I learned the most from:

• Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddhartha Kara is a heartbreaking historical and social exploration of the cobalt industry. I didn’t even really know what cobalt was before this book — only that it was in my phone, and it was probably really bad for the environment or something. I learned that the historical precedent of extreme resource extraction from the Congo is long and supremely, almost unbelievably evil. The current state of affairs is difficult to contend with, and it made me think differently about a “climate-positive” future that aims to rely on electric vehicles or other rechargeable batteries. This book also revealed my other gaps in knowledge — I’ve added King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa to my reading list for next year.

• I went vegan this year, in no small part due to a few books I read. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer is, in my view, required reading for anyone eating food in America. The truth about agriculture (ALL agriculture, not just animal) is one of the best-kept corporate secrets in the world, and Safran Foer explores it with depth, humor, and sincerity. I’m not just trying to convert you here — I genuinely think it is in your interest to learn about where your food comes from and at what cost.

• The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams is a bit “final boss” in terms of vegan/feminist theory, but I really enjoyed this as well, and it made me think deeper about the dignity that is stripped from animals. The truth is that all animal agriculture requires reproductive control including rape, genetically modified breeding, forced milking, extreme confinement, and familial separation. I realized this year that my feminism extends to animals, and that I wish to see no earthly being subject to such horrors.

• The other book that opened my frame of consciousness, such that I saw veganism as a part of my spiritual beliefs, was my re-read of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. This book does not need my recommendation; it is appropriately lauded as one of the most impactful books of the century. Wall Kimmerer talks about science in a way that makes sense to me for the first time in my life and explores principles of human relationships to the land that resonate deeply. Also, this book came at a pivotal time, reminding me of my humility before the land as I spent some time in Appalachia.

• The only book I took dedicated, pages-long notes on this year was Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Barbara and Karen Fields — two sociologists who are sisters (LOVE!). The book explores the fiction of race, how and why it was created, and the social function of believing in it. Though dense at times, I do feel that the book is ultimately very readable, if only because it is constantly raising points that I had never thought of, though they made complete sense to me on first introduction.

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GOOD, CLEAN FUN

Some books change my mind, some books change my life, some books are just fun to read... And a lot do all three! Sometimes I forget that books are a form of entertainment. The fact that something is entertaining does not prevent it from also being meaningful, smart, or deeply connecting. There’s nothing wrong — and, in fact, something very right! — with having a great time when reading.

These are books that, primarily, I just really enjoyed spending time with:

• I used to pray for releases like American Spirits by , a highly entertaining book that is sure to make any LDR superfan feel verifiably schizophrenic through the sheer presence of fandom easter-eggs. I absolutely loved every moment of reading this book and cannot wait until it comes out next year

• I crushed The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides in two days on a camping trip. Star-crossed young lovers, Ivy League in the 80’s, a rare portrait of bipolar disorder that is not vehemently dehumanizing nor overly-romanticized… great!

• Herculine by oomf is delightful — funny, touching, scary, sexy… I mean, those are my four favorite adjectives right there.

• When the weather was still cold, I cracked into The Likeness by Tana French. Speaking of crack, there is certainly something of the sort in this book. I’m always impressed by novels that make me even slightly care about a cop/detective character. The prose was great and the twists were TURNING! Loved it.

• Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin was a great summer read. Drama, gossip, wealth, but also family, addiction, loss… I gobbled it up pretty fast and remarked to myself, thank God contemporary novelists are still writing plot!

• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson was the perfect seasonal, spooky read. I listened to it on audiobook while working through my gift knits for Christmas.

• Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth made me laugh out loud several times. Absolutely disgusting and perfect.

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HEAVY HITTERS

Some things are too tough to speak about, such that it’s almost easier to write a book instead. At risk of sounding too much like my Scorpio Moon (or not-like-other-girls), I am often drawn to stories about the darkest parts of human experience.

These are the books that brought me into the darkness:

• Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno is probably the most intense work about child sexual abuse that I’ve ever engaged with. I had to read it quickly to prevent its themes from circling and circling my mind. I think the book is brilliant — especially how Sinno posits that incest is a social problem, something that is part of our culture rather than specific to a few unlucky families. Incredible work, but proceed with caution.

• The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert is an essay collection about disaster — Chernobyl, the Titanic, Biblical floods, earthquakes, possession. I felt deeply connected to it as a person who also constantly worries about the many things that will one day end the world. I particularly enjoyed the essay about female hysteria and witchcraft. She talks too much about Hillary Clinton but it was 2016 so I forgive her I just looked it up to double-check and the book came out in 2020, so this is less forgivable.

• There are a lot of stories out there about being a sick child, but Family Life by Akhil Sharma is about being the sibling to the sick child. The book is a truly bleak portrait of a family under stress from the highly predatory American medical system and in the midst of “losing” their golden child to severe disability. This book reminded me of the Orwell quote about good prose being like a pane of glass.

• On the train to Prague this summer, I read the entirety of Chess Story by Stefan Zweig. In the novella, an Austrian lawyer is arrested by the Gestapo and spends months in solitary confinement, entertained only by an instructional chess book that he manages to steal from a Nazi officer. The book is not all misery, but the descriptions of the imprisonment are jarring and the book features a well-done “descent into madness” plot.

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SUMMONING CIRCLE

If I were lost in the woods, these books would probably bring me back. They’re right up my alley in all the ways that anyone who knows me could predict.

These are the books that were “so me:”

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That was a couple of years ago. Today, I got Botox in TriBeCa. The kind woman asked me to sit down on top of parchment paper and gave me a hand mirror. I recoiled — “Oh no, nothing for my face,” I said. In the interest of journalistic integrity, you should know that I do not have any fine lines or wrinkles. I am twenty-four and Italian and addicted to sunscreen, if I must explain further. But part of me wanted to see what she would suggest. Certainly, I thought, it must be some kind of clinical or ethical violation to offer to freeze a face that is already, mostly, smooth.

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I am not a great candidate for facial Botox. Here’s what I am a great candidate for: microneedling, chemical peels, general liposuction, cankle reduction, hair transplant surgery, veneers, laser hair removal, lymphatic drainage, and more things that I am probably not yet aware of or have not yet been invented. The previous list of procedures has been curated for me, specifically, by a medical professional. They gave me the rundown after my treatment in LA, right when the benzo was kicking in. It was sort of like when you finish a YouTube video and are directed to a menu of other options.

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The things I recommend will of course depend on what struck me most that month, but you can expect a wide range — books, movies, albums, clothes, habits, recipes, mantras, objects… as usual, I’d hate to box myself in here. Recommendation roundups will be available monthly for paid subscribers.

This month, I’m talking about a perfect YouTube lecture with under 3000 views, a kitchen appliance that changed my life, the best book that no one’s read yet, habits that keep me sane in the colder months, and much more.

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Though, of course, it is in my interest to extrapolate about the work. It’s in my interest to not only extrapolate about the work, but to break it down into smaller pieces and turn those pieces into marketing materials. It’s in my interest to help you apply my work to your life, maybe even to make you believe that I’ve understood something crucial that you haven’t yet. It’s in my interest to say that I will teach you. It’s in my interest to be a little less cynical about algorithmic content, enough so that I could stomach making the kinds of videos that would do well. If, of course, “my interest” is to be a financially successful musician.

It’s a big question. What is my interest? For a while I did think it was money and fame. Then I got a bit of that and saw how I compromised in other areas. Eventually I decided that the other areas were worth more. Before I left my last job I thought, will I stand by this decision if I never make money from anything else again? Will I stand by this decision if I have to go back to waiting tables? I decided I would. Though, I haven’t started waiting tables yet.

I enjoy spending months or years on projects that consume my life, make me obsessed with their quality, and are imbued with the full integrity of my creative spirit. I find that work valuable and necessary. I decided that I find it more necessary than money that could buy me a house. In just the few months that I have ceased being a weekly fixture on a public platform, I have experienced unimaginable ease and relief. And now, my job is supposed to be reminding you that I exist, enough so that you might engage with my record (though any short-form content about the record has better metrics than the record itself), and of course I must beg for your attention, your precious time.

The long and short of it is that I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to record a front-facing video of myself mouthing the lyrics to my own song like Ms. Rachel, with key words bolded at the bottom for audience retention. I don’t want to sum it up for you. I’d rather you just hear the song. And if you were never going to listen to the song, there’s nothing in this world that would make me want to trick you into consuming the stupider, smaller, shorter version of it. I hear artists say that they resent this kind of marketing, though they know they have to do it. I am familiar with the pressures. And yet, I don’t think we have to do it this way. There are things more important than measuring by the yardsticks we were handed.

If anything, I think my career may be a bit of a testament to that. I am constantly amazed and humbled by how much of my audience understands my resistance to such flattening structures and embraces my art within a more liberating framework. This is another reason why I buck against the attention economy’s stranglehold on art: I respect you as a person, and I believe in your capacity to digest something greater. I do not want to exploit your parasocial attention. I want more than just your attention. I want to create something worth engaging with, disagreeing with, poring over, responding to, contemplating.

I still care about stability. I still want things. I don’t think that one needs to go broke to be pure. I’m not interested in being pure either, by the way. I will try to sell you CDs and vinyl and concert tickets and paid subscriptions to this newsletter which keeps wet food in my cats’ bowls. But I will not sell you a smaller version of what I really want to say. At risk of sounding like Hillary Clinton, the history of women sees that pattern repeated to detrimental results.

Above all, I am so grateful to have a community of such smart, thoughtful people engaging with my work. It is the kind of thing I wouldn’t sacrifice, trade, or be bribed away from. My life is more meaningful because of it. From the bottom of my heart, I really do thank you.

Good Story the album is out now. You can buy a CD or vinyl here. Tickets for my 2026 North American headlining tour are here.

xo

Eliza

Similarly, I am a bit allergic to watching, reading, or listening to things that are bad. I’m not afraid to feel pretentious when I say this. I love reality television and cheesy movies, so that’s not what I mean if you were thinking of it that way. Those things are good in a way that I am ripe to defend. I mean that I cannot watch Peacock original slop or enjoy half-baked cultural criticism (even if I sometimes write it!). I try my absolute best to resist the endless churn of content in favor of weed whacking my own preferences out of the material I’m presented with.

If you’ve read my last essay, you know that I’m a bit obsessed with quality at the moment. This comes on the heels of a previous month of research about algorithms and streaming services, my main takeaway from which being that we need more mindful consumption, more curators. I don’t want the algorithm telling me what to pay attention to, I need some girl with no job to find me the best books, goddamnit!

I don’t really consider myself a curator. I wasn’t born with good taste. Living in New York makes you realize that children born to the creative class have a leg up in all the ways that matter, even if their parents are still struggling through the art world. My parents raised me on the Adult Alternative Pandora station and bananas with brown spots.

But I do care a lot about things that are good. And even more, I respect the audience that reads me. I’ve never participated in a sponsored post and I doubt I ever will. I don’t want to fill your feed with more slop. For a reason totally baffling to me, people regularly ask me for my book recommendations, about the shoes I’m wearing, about the recipes I make, and in the interest of quality, I thought I would be the change and start a general, monthly recommendation series of things that are actually good.

The things I recommend will of course depend on what struck me most that month, but you can expect a wide range — books, movies, albums, clothes, habits, recipes, mantras, objects… as usual, I’d hate to box myself in here. Recommendation roundups will be available monthly for paid subscribers.

This month, I’m talking about David Lynch’s transcendental meditation, eco-friendly habits, books that make men like reading, the shoes on my Instagram story that prompted 50 replies, an actually good vegan mac n cheese recipe, and so much more.

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Somewhere along the way to the slaughterhouse, the cow ran straight through the trailer, scraped its weight against Route 9, and took off through the Appalachian wilderness, where it eventually came face to face with me.

I’ve been on a sabbatical from my life for the month of September. Or, I’ve been making way for my life to come into view. It’s common practice for entire forests to burn to clear space for new growth. If making this idea analogous to my own personal life strikes you as trite, trust me when I say that I wish I didn’t mean it. I wish I could have come across or come up with anything that strikes me as being more true. But increasingly I am finding that the true things are often simple (another sickeningly compact, sentimental idea!), and such is my desire to be in the woods.

The farm is thirty-one acres of beautiful, mountainous land stewarded by a couple of educators, James and Sofia, and their impeccably mannered children. There is no official work requirement (and thus my desire to be “good” and maybe even “perfect” becomes harder to measure). Kate and I are living in a converted RV near a vast trail network that’s an uphill walk to the nearest sanctioned bathroom. I haven’t pissed indoors since August.

The cell service is spotty enough to be non-functional, though I did press the top of my phone to the window screen to get a text to go through to my boyfriend. It didn’t work, and I soon abandoned the project of trying. Anyway, the attempt went against my stated mission, which was to clear away what was false to make room for what was true. My phone is decidedly False.

It occurred to me the other day, plucking grapes off the vine and eating them directly after, careless in regard to whatever pesticides may or may not remain on the surface, that most Americans have likely never experienced their food straight from the source. Plastic wrapped around the produce, that’s False, I thought.

I’d kick it around in my mind as a thought experiment, keeping myself occupied while weeding or looking into middle distance at trees. True or false. Over the last few years of my life, I’ve become uncomfortably acquainted with the False — the process of deflecting and covering what one knows to be true with alternative explanations, habits, or ways of being (up to and including plainly lying), all of which grate against the psyche painfully and, in the worst cases, subperceptually. I shored up the trail. Hoola hooping true, investment banking False, screaming true, sarcasm False. Infidelity, strangely, true, plausible deniability, False.

In the morning, I let the chickens out of their coop. It’s true that I have amends to make to their species, having spent a summer assisting in the routine killing, butchering, and vacuum-sealing on a family poultry farm as a teenager. There’s a Werner Herzog quote about the eyes of a chicken betraying no soul that I used to laugh at, but beneath the laughter was a knowing that chickens are more alive than most. They can purr like cats, and they have a sense of humor. They can be sneaky. They can make deals with one another, be tricky. They alert each other to incoming danger, even when it proves risky to be the one squawking out a warning. Once you know chickens, you know that plastic wrapped around the meat is False.

And in fact, even before I knew chickens, I knew that there were certain things I had to forget about in order to keep eating them. I used to be a bleeding heart vegan in my high school days (whether or not this lifestyle also conveniently served my eating disorder was neither here nor there for me back then). I watched horrific footage from the inside of factory farms. I knew that animal agriculture was the number one cause of climate change. I believed that all beings had the capacity to suffer and should be spared from suffering whenever possible. It became clear that every axis of animal agriculture caused immense, needless suffering to animals and humans alike. It seemed pretty simple to me what the moral choice was.

But life went on, and I forgot about these things. Or, I tried my very hardest not to remember, because remembering made me feel bad feelings like guilt and shame. When I did remember, I would think about the fact that just about every animal I’ve ever eaten has been bred against its genetics and to our tastes, forced to live in unnatural environments under abusive conditions, and suffered every day of its life until the day that it died, in many cases, slowly and painfully.

I looked at the chickens and wondered how it all added up. Every day, I tell a lie to myself about one of the most basic elements of my life — my food. The lie has been told so many times and has been reinforced in so many ways that to be reminded of the truth feels like a cruel attack. What has such a thing done to my capacity for reason, for feeling?

As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod:

“Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. 'Now at least I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.”1

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The cow doesn’t want to die, which is why it is here, on James’ land. I don’t think the cow knows that the family is vegan. I think it was just running.

For what it’s worth, James usually balks at the idea of land ownership. He’s deliberately opened his space to complete strangers, lets people come here and dry out from all manner of substances and situations for just about as long as they need to. He believes in sharing what is given and, one day, breaking down the barriers of private property altogether. But tonight, when he comes storming back into the kitchen, he says

“They better not shoot that cow on my land.”

The cow, which was being led with sweet feed by its owners when I came across it earlier in the woods, has since taken off, out of sight. It didn’t want to cross the creek, back to the other farm. The owner keeps complaining about the misfortune, and by this, he means his lost revenue. The easiest way, at this point, would be to shoot it.

Guns are mostly False, engaged as last-ditch efforts to maintain control in fundamentally wild situations. The guy who wants to shoot the cow has heretofore strangled each and every aspect of this animal’s life — what it eats, how often it sees the sun, where it can move, how long it lives, how and when it’s going to die. But the bare fact is that the cow is fucking massive and, despite all of this, when it wanted to get away, it could. The gun can overcome the truth, which is that a human alone cannot fully subjugate such a large, fierce animal. No one has seen the cow for a half hour. Maybe she’ll get away.

For a moment, I can see it — the cow finding an undisturbed patch of land to rest for the evening, making it until morning. This night becomes one wild hiccup, which bifurcates her life into before and after captivity. For the first time, she experiences freedom of movement, fresh grass. Outlasting the cops and the cattle ranchers and the other inevitable men with guns, who will just as inevitably go home once the mission becomes too expensive and thus worthless, she manages to make a life for herself in the woods until that life reaches a natural conclusion.

And then I remember her belly, how it swelled grotesquely at the sides like a balloon full of dry ice. I remember her wheeze, breath only narrowly escaping her gaping mouth. I remember that this animal was not meant to run or breathe or fuck or lie down. This animal was meant for us to eat, and for that reason, she has been bred to be just able enough to amble around. If she evades those who are looking for her, she will not live peacefully in the woods. The unnatural weight of her body will buckle her legs. She will starve slowly and painfully. I begin to wish for the sound of a gunshot.

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I’ve heard it said that you can’t get hung up on every small thing that could potentially be immoral because the world is immoral, capitalism is immoral, and one would drive themselves crazy in an attempt to be fully pure. I’ve said this myself many times, but it’s not as though I had reached a breaking point with my valiant attempts, trying to catch myself in every corner, finally becoming exhausted with being just so good. No, usually I’ve said things like this when I’m doing nearly nothing, though I am crushed with guilt and looking for a way to easily release it.

Here’s another dichotomy I’ve been thinking about — easy versus hard. Smoking a cigarette is easy, but a wheezing cough is hard. Eating pork chops is easy, but knowing a poor family lives right next to the hog shit lagoon that is disabling their children is hard. Spending 4 hours on Instagram is easy, but disassociating from your life is hard. We all live difficult lives in some capacity. It makes absolute sense and feels right that we should look towards the easiest way of doing things. But I don’t think the easiest thing is actually easy.

The easiest things can happen with no conscious effort, but the truth of experience remains where I cannot see it. The easiest things often involve a kind of deception or forgetting, a convenient story that the brain believes even when the body doesn’t. The easiest things stacked up over time inside me. The easiest things made me feel empty and claustrophobic. The easiest things made me afraid to seek out the truth, because I was afraid that it would be hard. But it’s hard to feel crushed by an inner knowing that something is wrong. It’s hard to disagree with yourself over and over again.

When I left my job, many people around me seemed dumbfounded that I would walk away from a well-paying position in a creative industry. Staying would have been the easiest thing. But doing something hard made my life so much easier — it alleviated the gap between knowing and doing, stopped the incessant whirr of my mind which, in its discomfort, created other obstacles for me to confront in lieu of the one I was avoiding.

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Quitting smoking seems hard. Quitting smoking at 30 rather than 24 seems harder. It’s been a week, and I’ve taken to breaking out into a sprint whenever the cravings get bad. People here know what’s happening. Sometimes I take off mid-conversation. Quitting smoking is hard. Straining to walk up a modest hill is harder. Making eye contact with a baby while polluting their direct environment is harder. Knowing you’ve been wanting to quit smoking for years and still haven’t is harder.

No animal products, no smoking, and no phone… I’m practically a monk these days. Who knows what will happen when I go back to the city, where everything is available and easy. Maybe I’ll slip back into my old ways, make another excuse, tell another story. Maybe I’ll continue being brave, looking things in the face. The most intolerable experiences of my life have involved obscurity and dishonesty. Right now, I want to rip the mask off of everything. I don’t want to be lied to and, more importantly, I don’t want to lie to myself.

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It’s the morning now, and the cow hasn’t come back. Today, the owner will take off into the woods with other men with guns and shoot it. They will tie ropes to its body and drag it uphill through the woods, past the creek, and to the trailer whose back door is smashed in, but it won’t matter now because the cow will not be alive to kick it. I wonder what the men will feel while they schlep this body. I wonder if they can feel its weight. How heavy.

If I was ever hopelessly destitute, unable to rely on the generosity of friends and family members and on my very last dime, here’s what I’d do:

I’d post a Substack essay entitled something like “how i learned to stop worrying and love being off my phone” or “15 things I do to instead of doomscrolling” or “my month without social media.”1

In the beginning, I’d lament about how we’re all addicted to our phones, how we all desperately want to get off of them, how this unfortunate category includes even me, the person writing from the enlightened future. I’d talk about how our phones rob us of connection, prevent us from engaging fruitfully in the world around us, numb us to sensation and feed us algorithmically curated slop. Then I’d present how I’d fixed everything.

To avoid accusations of being purposefully obtuse or out of touch, I would of course caveat these solutions by reminding the audience of the inescapable tech oligarchy that is slowly encroaching on our every possible real estate, mental or physical. Luckily, I have already set up this premise brilliantly in the first section. I would remind the audience that building a habit takes time, and it’s not always easy, but it’s been so rewarding.

And then I’d put in the paywall, behind which I’d briefly catalogue the last few (days, weeks, months.. probably “months” if I’m really down on my luck) of changed behavior, creating a written montage of times I read a book on a park bench, hung out with my friends, was pleasantly bored. Perhaps I’d include a day-in-the-life journal to document what I’d been up to with all my precious, reclaimed time.

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ii.

“Well, there are two options. One is you direct the attack only to the people who are willing to listen to the complexity, but those aren’t the people who are enslaved by entertainment anyway. Or you find some way to make the attack on entertainment entertaining, in which case you’ve been captured by the very thing you’re fighting against.”

— David Foster Wallace, unedited interview with ZDF (2003)

The “algorithm-friendly, anti-algorithm content”2 that’s been ubiquitous in my feeds across several platforms, including this one, seems at first to belong to the latter option in Wallace’s3 dichotomy: making the attack on entertainment entertaining itself. Here, DFW is in a pre-smartphone era talking about television, and in the context of the interview, he’s talking not just about the “entertainment value” of certain media, but the simultaneous frenetic and anesthetizing effect it tends to have on us, one that is undoubtedly heightened in our current age.

But, as the saying goes, the world you were born into no longer exists, and I don’t think that DFW’s dichotomy holds up anymore. It’s not just Wall-e dolts who can’t rip their faces away from the screens (and it never really was — DFW himself admits to not having a television in his own home because he can’t control his intake). The people who care about complexity are currently caring about it so deeply that they habitually seek out writing about how to get away from algorithmically streamlined lives and back into the real, chaotic world.

When I think about my own impulse to read this kind of work, I realize that I’m not actually seeking information. The trend of writing about “getting off your phone” comes in the wake of years of clear damage. Collectively, we know that the negative effects of an algorithmically-driven, short-form content ecosystem are plentiful, seen in our own lives, rupturing our own relationships with others and the world. When I read about someone who’s put in the work of getting off their phone, the quick tips are immaterial. I have a Brick device that locks my phone. I have digital screen time limits. I have plenty of hobbies and interests and activities to occupy me in my real life. And yet, the pull to “the liquid crystal,” to quote Lorde, remains strong and disheartening. So I keep reading.

iii.

I’m not innocent here. My personal “phone bad, experiencing life good” piece is one of my most-read on the platform. To my own credit, I had some half-decent things to say about the value of information in the attention economy, Susan Sontag, the works… but I still played the algorithm, as one must if trying to maintain relevance on an algorithmic platform. I opened with the Mirror Neuron Fantasy.

The Mirror Neuron Fantasy is an amazing tool for marketing and audience retention. That term is something I just made up, but mirror neurons themselves are real — the neurons that fire when you witness someone perform an action are the same ones that would fire were you to perform the action yourself. Mirror neurons are why I have a clinical obsession with watching operation_niki deep-clean her kitchen, restock her fridge, or do her skincare routine. It’s why I’ve read a few of those listicles about getting off your phone. Just witnessing it feels like I’ve done something myself.

The Mirror Neuron Fantasy hook is just one of many that can open a successful (read: frequently opened, not necessarily quality) piece on this website. Another is what I’ve done with this piece — a hyperbolized, provocative hypothetical that smooths over some genuine points with a sardonic tone. DFW once said, quoting someone else, “Irony is the song of the bird who's learned to love their cage.” Maybe I love the cage.

I begun this piece trying to figure out why these “phone bad, here’s the solution” pieces irritate me. The hypocrisy is certainly one aspect, as many of these pieces are clearly aimed at gaining algorithmic favor while demonizing algorithmic culture itself. But everyone plays the game, and if that were my real hangup, I’d be hung up with myself all the time. Really, and this happens often, I’ve found that beneath the annoyance is a sadness.

iii.

Here’s something DFW says earlier in this interview:

[America] is one enormous engine and temple of self-gratification and self-advancement. And in some ways it works very very well. In other ways, it doesn't work all that well. Because, at least for me, it seems as if there are whole other parts of me that need to worry about things larger than me that don't get nourished in that system.

The angle of these pieces, more often than not, seems to be about individual efforts towards individual gains. Use your phone less to get smarter, to get sexier, to be happier. Desire towards these things is of course natural, reasonable, and likely held by us all. But to work towards these ends alone, from a starting position of personal dissatisfaction, seems to be a comfortable, temporary distraction from the real issues at hand. Perhaps this is because the real issues with tech oligarchy and predatory algorithms, the ones that shatter our communities and rip us from our real lives, are so vast and complex that one would see it more fit to devote a decade to writing a treatise on it than a short essay. And at least the essay is easily shareable.

I often grapple with to what extent I believe the internet to be a force for disseminating genuinely valuable work. To that end, I often grapple with the kind of writing I want and am able to do on the internet. How can I write critically about a reward system that I am still hoping to reap the spoils of?

I’m not a total doomer — in many ways, the internet is a true miracle for knowledge-sharing and, with even a pinch of rigor, one can unlock decades of resources, talks, books, films, etc. But, when placed in competition with seamless algorithms, that rigor can be hard to crave. Speaking from experience.

I’m not naive enough to suggest that we all simply focus on changing the world, but I am optimistic enough to hope that we might consider it. I really enjoyed this video essay about algorithms that thoughtfully combined a social critique with actionable ideas about building a better future (for ourselves and for others).

iv.

I love this beautiful world and I know that there exists a possibility, a reality, in which we all find it easier to be connected to it. I mean this without my irony, with my full earnestness and love to every person reading this. I want to build a better world with you.

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After spending the last decade of my life laser-focused on crafting a personal narrative, I spent the last year deconstructing that impulse. I looked at what telling the story made possible, and what it made impossible.

For the longest time, I thought that the story was the whole point. Getting down to the bottom of things, plotting them, became a lifeboat not only for my psyche but for my career. My life began to depend, in all senses, on my ability to narrativize myself and communicate the presentation of that self effectively. An effective narrative, I came to realize, is a reserve with limited returns.

But I still love to work the magic — I love knowing that a bad time can be a good story, that experience without meaning is only missing a few narrative beats. I love the limits of the story, agency that was once out of reach returning through the act of creation and recreation. And the story saved my life. Here, I think of a quote from ’s The Möbius Book: “There's nothing wrong with inventing a story to explain something real to yourself.”

Since finishing the record, I’ve been reading a lot of material that grapples with the meta-narrative: Delillo, Yuknavitch, Morrison, Lispector, Roth… I’m not reinventing the wheel here. The story about the story has been told over and over again, too.

My impulse is to prepare you aptly for this collection of songs — to tell a good story of it which, of course, is to market it. I resist this, because I’ve worked hard on these songs, and I’m excited for you to hear them in their own container.

For now, the lead single, Like the Boys, is out now. You can listen to it wherever you listen to music, and you can also watch the video that I directed below.

Thank you for reading this, and thank you to the many of you who have followed me for years, through the various stories I’ve woven. I am truly, extremely grateful for your support.

Speaking of! I pressed a limited edition glitter vinyl of Good Story in only 150 copies. I wanted to share it with you first. Here’s the link. The password is LIKETHEBOYS

Thank you, love you, more soon…

xoxo Eliza

Well, it hadn’t been the house he wanted. Or the block for that matter. Owen’s father always told him to aim for the worst house in the nicest neighborhood, that’s the one that’ll appreciate the most in value while saving your wallet in the short term. But in her third month of pregnancy, Tessa started having visions – of the walls caving in, the inside…

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I promise to think before I speak
To be wary of who I give my energy to
Because it is needed for a greater cause
Greater than my own pride
And that cause is to spread the enlightenment
Of love, compassion, and humanity
To those who are not touched by its light I stand to protect and focus myself
In the betterment of my fellow being 

— "13th Century Metal," Brittany Howard

Brittany Howard’s perfect record, Jaime, found me at a time when I called on its protection. I was nineteen and traveling across the country alone during the pandemic, desperately in need of good principles and a backbone. I found the backbone in Colorado — a whole deer skeleton picked clean by nature, I took the spine with me — and Jaime became somewhat of a sermon for me. I listened to “13th Century Metal” every morning, feeling like I was collecting quills for my armory.

Out there, in the middle of nowhere (and in the spaces in-between nowhere such as gas stations and motels or the sidelong glance of a stranger), I had the sense that I was up against something. I never felt the presence of this “something” to be malicious, just a gentle press from the outside in. That year, I learned to press from the inside out.

I think I found my center that summer, and certainly worked to improve its strength over the course of my next few years in California. Although I consider myself to be a very grounded person, there are of course times when centeredness becomes trickier — times when it feels like outside forces are overstaying their welcome, psychically.

As someone obsessed with living in the grey areas of life, I’ve never found it terribly important to draw harsh boundaries, and feel that a life well lived is one that accounts for the flexible and chaotic nature of experience. Still, there are times when I recognize my center as needing a little maintenance.

Whether it’s too much time spent in the virtual hallucination of social media, a specific interpersonal situation that I keep turning over in my mind, unspecified “dark energy” that I picked up from somewhere, an obsession that feels more crazed than creative, or just a general feeling of being “off,” I can sometimes feel a leakiness in my center. In these periods, I find myself being set off easier, defaulting to paranoia rather than good faith, and generally feeling more unstable than usual.

Because I’m needing it right now, I spent the day putting a little guide together for myself — for these times when I need some psychic protection and centered reinforcement, and I thought I’d share it with you in case it can be of any help.

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