#73 Q: Is the storefront crumbling?
A: Maybe?
Hi! This is the regular Sunday newsletter you’ll start receiving each week if you’re a paid subscriber, and occasionally if you are a free subscriber. Today’s newsletter was meant to include a list of 10 books for these times but it got way too long—I ended up writing a lot more than I meant to about the assassination of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO (which is the last point below and very long).
Instead of giving you too much to get through, I’m breaking it into two emails and sending the booklist Tuesday morning so you have two separate resources. Details about my upcoming 30 day audio guide to assist in changing your relationship with alcohol will be in that as well.
Big hug, see you Tuesday. H
17+1 THINGS RIGHT NOW
This longform article about the actual lived experience of homelessness written by Patrick Fealey, a homeless journalist and author, is one of the best things I’ve read this year. We are surrounded by people our society makes invisible and this is something we can actually change. I mentioned last week that we are so fucked up about what we think impact is and that impact is talking to someone no one talks to—he mentions that in six months of very public and visible suffering, not one person offered him help. It is so easy to offer someone in our direct line of sight kindness, a little bit of what we have, humanity. I hope we get better at this.
This podcast with
, “My Unofficial Investigation of Male Podcasters”. There’s a lot in here not just on male podcasters but on what’s happening culturally right now and Elise really nails a lot I’ve been trying to articulate myself (especially the part about her responsibility to engage with racists and homophobes and conservative fundamentalist white men and how over she is of knee-capping people). She talks about whether we’re in some great awakening or revolution, spiral dynamics, a beautiful array of interesting topics that checked all my boxes. The biggest takeaway for me was her breakdown of how abundant-minded male podcasters are (they launch each others careers and platform each other and they don’t act like there is only so much attention or success to go around1 ) and how the opposite is true for women—we’re scarcity minded and gate-keeping in this way, and not because we are terrible but because patriarchy, which I agree with based on my own very relative experience, and which makes me so hungry to be different. I rarely text podcasts to my friends; this one I did.Interdependence is a Survival Skill, But Shouldn’t Feel Like Building a Bunker
Why I'm pulling back from social media and focusing on building my own coven. “We’re not supposed to enjoy social media. We’re not supposed to experience our phones as little carriers of wonder, moments of bliss delivered to us throughout the day.”
I learned about the ADHD tax maybe a year ago, which refers to the extra time, money, or energy spent due to challenges with organization, time management, or impulsivity commonly experienced by people with ADHD (unpaid taxes, parking tickets, lost items, late fees, unused impulse buys, there’s so many). Anyway, I deal with all of it (it’s expen$ive to be me) but I am especially gifted at the losing of things, like the phone I left on top of my car last Thursday as I drove home from therapy, that is now probably sitting in a snow bank. The point isn’t about the tax per se but about how losing so many expensive things so often can force you to break out of certain habits, like buying brand new phones, or brand new anyting, which is my very long way of telling you about Backmarket, where yesterday I bought a used iPhone (13 mini) and a used tablet (again, mini) for half of what a new phone would have cost me—the entire purchase including insurance plans was $600.
Related: I have been getting less and less interested in buying things new things, and things at all.
wrote about their Great Spending Ban, and while I’m not quite there, I’m close.Related: What makes the internet addictive? This article by
on what makes the internet addictive is great. Since (mostly) quitting Instagram I don’t use my phone as much and I’ve broken out of any kind of issue with social, but I still spend wayyyy to much time on my devices (and I especially have been doing way too much shopping, or just browsing endlessly things I will never buy) since the pandemic. To create a little barrier for myself, I bought a smaller iPhone that I plan to use only for maps, phone, text, photos, email, and an iPad I plan to use for research. That is, I’m going to use my phone for comms, and a tablet for research (no comms)—and block all shopping sites on both. This article about self-control talks about how self-control is often the result of not tempting ourselves in the first place—not being able to resist it once we’re already in its tractor beam pull—and it works. For me, the less temptation, the less I have to fight myself to not do things.“We have dropped the pretense, and fat-shaming and anti-fatness is not as hidden anymore.” (TW on ED); it’s very wild to me how much “pretense” is being actively dropped everywhere.
This beautiful and complicated piece by
“Teens Are Getting Botox. I’m Going Full Crone in 2025.” same same same same same
"This unapologetically authentic new beverage line was designed by women for women, because wellness isn't about striving for perfection 24/7”—a podcast host launched a functional beverage and this was the tagline for it and I just need you all to read it with me
💊🍺📱: Australia bans social media for everyone under 16; the case for Dry December; what is Zebra Striping; Maia Szalavitz on the drop in overdose deaths; Still waiting for second-hand drinking to become a thing; U.S. alcohol-related deaths nearly double in 20 years; what studies get wrong about alcohol being harmful; what the Trump administration might mean for addiction treatment; finally; what is intermittent sobriety; your finger length and alcoholism
🌲🌲🌲 [pot gets its own section this time because there is a wild amount of things happening with pot]: This investigative report from the NYT (co-authored by Megan Twohey) is so good and reveals the more complicated story emerging from pot legalization and the rising associated harm (and our belief that pot is safer and even healthy); This podcast on our weird time in drug policy, and this one on NYCs saturated and unregulated cannabis market, and this one on whether cannabis is safe for folks w/severe mental health issues (it’s REALLY good); States that are legalizing pot are NOT putting that money back into the harms it will inevitably cause (like treatment, harm reduction, or healthcare); Pot and psychedelics fared not great well this past election; Jay Z’s pot company blew through 600 million fucking dollars in capital and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or or calculate what it could have bought instead; Big Alcohol’s weed drinks push; Cannabis and sleep; weed drive throughs 😩; total fuckery
If you want to assemble the infrastructure of an authoritarian government, this is how you do it
This website that lets you watch random anonymous home videos from around the world.
I can’t believe this is a headline
ONE LAST THING
A Man Was Murdered in Cold Blood and You’re Laughing?
The assassination of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare executive, got me big time. Like many people I know, I’ve been following it closely because it feels like all kinds of complicated and brain-breaking things, and because it feels like a new kind of normal. The public reaction feels oddly unanimous (Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker: “The whiff of populist anarchy in the air is salty, unprecedented, and notably across the aisle”), and everyone I’ve asked about it (a dozen people) have all reflected back to me at least some sort of belief that this was bound to happen—that it makes sense someone would eventually murder a healthcare CEO, whose income and bonus structure is positively correlated with death and suffering.