Where is your mind?

And other questions

There are many pressing inquiries regarding the future of American democracy, including the extent to which it existed in the first place, and, of course, that inescapable and inevitable follow-up question: What the hell is going on?

At any given moment, every major news outlet is running different stories, if not the same story from very different angles, and when every given update is a freedom-corroding nightmare, it’s confusing to be able to pick and choose which crisis really gets your goat. Perhaps that is the most American thing about the chaos, what with our supermarkets boasting no less than forty-eight ways to buy salt. There are no real guiding voices here, no assumption that anyone could have ever had any idea it would ever get this bad, no way to even begin to process that we are living under a wannabe king striving to erase basic human rights. As a formerly-Twitter-famous journalist, I once spent anywhere from twelve to fifteen hours a day alternately informing myself and screaming for people to be informed, but now we have to contend with the more pressing moral obligation of trying not to explode.

As I begin to write this newsletter, it is Friday morning, 8:45 AM in New York, and, if you were to peruse the political landscape with a cup of coffee, you would find an endless array of places on which to focus your sense of impending dread, unless you were so lucky as to burn your tongue. To start with, at this particular instant, The New York Times top political story is “Trump Power Grab Defies G.O.P. Orthodoxy on Local Control,” The Atlantic is leading the site with “Trump’s Assault on USAID Makes Project 2025 Look Like Child’s Play,” there is slight crossover with NBC, whose splash reads, “How Elon Musk boosted false USAID conspiracy theories to shut down global aid,” the main story on A.P. News is “Japan’s Ishiba makes a whirlwind Washington trip to try to forge a personal connection with Trump” and The Washington Post website is running live updates of Trump’s meeting with the Prime Minister. The Times front page has no mention of Japan, besides the fact that Japan Airlines recently had a fender bender with Delta. It was a quaint time when that might have been the big news of the day, but no one has the capacity to worry over middling emergencies like plane crashes at such a time as this. What is it that we need to know to carry on with our day, our jobs, our lives? What does it mean that the dehumanization of the trans community is no longer an emergency headline? Will we find more space to get upset about Trump’s stated plans to remove Palestinians from Gaza? And can anything even ever really mean anything at all when it will all look different by 9:30?

What does it really mean to be informed? You can’t see this, but I am typing with my head spinning around like that scene from The Exorcist, eyes rolling back, frothing at the mouth, and all while desperately sipping a third cold brew, if only to calm myself down. My inner Democracy Barbie is standing at the ready, smile spreading across her face with the right answer to every question. She straightens her spine, like a flight attendant telling you how to deal with unlikely emergencies while the plane is crashing, “Read the local news, get informed about what is happening in your community, decide how to take action in ways that can immediately effect change!” I would cringe at how hopeful I once was, but I have no energy to spare as I cling to the most nihilistic interpretation of my former optimism, which is to say, “Don’t focus on the shit you can’t change.” And yet, I find it almost impossible to live by this truth in New York City, the place where I was born, lived for a decade, and am now staying again for a weeks at a time, where it sometimes feels like I am inside the physical manifestation of my doom scrolling, where the buildings try that same thing they do with the wind, looming towers trapping fascist heat in metal and concrete, especially yesterday, when it was freezing cold without no sky to be found.

Yesterday in New York, there was an impenetrable whiteness overhead, as if there was nothing besides buildings in which it is eternally increasingly impossible to afford four walls and a closet. Perhaps it was one giant cloud enveloping the entire island of skyscrapers, leaving no sky to be scraped. It’s been awhile since I lived here, and I forgot that it takes about an hour to get anywhere from everywhere. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but you need about an hour between locking the door and getting wherever it is you need to be. As I zoomed into my fourth hour of hurtling in a filthy tube through the underground tunnels, I shifted in my seat, waiting to get back outside again, and then, at the top of three sets of stairs, there was no outside to be found. Only that awful flat white, like the ceiling was too low down. Living out in the Arizona desert has taught me how to really see the sky, but there was no looking to the horizon for hope yesterday in New York, because I have read far too much terrible news this week, because the buildings would have been blocking it anyway, and, even in the bits and pieces of the cosmos visible above all of that, not a mere crack of blue, and cold enough to forget it had ever been there to begin with.

Today, once again, the sun is shining, it’s a bit less freezing in the light. With the blue sky above the brick line, I remember that the dirty tubes and tunnels take me to see so many of the people I love, to see theater, to see art. Later this evening, maybe I’ll even be able to catch the pastel ombré rainbow of the sunset even through the cracks in the grid. It’s Friday, February 7th at 3:13 PM, do you know where your sanity is?