Mike Frantz is a Democrat running for the Iowa State Senate in Iowa’s third district, one of the reddest districts in one of the reddest states in the U.S. He’s also one of my favorite people on the planet, and he has a lot to say about
What an Instagram reel and a drug bust taught me about my own history, education, and complicity in systems I’m still working to unlearn. So I was scrolling Instagram the other day, which I rarely do because I don’t understand Instagram and the algorithm doesn’t understand me,
The lake in the morning is absolutely silent except for the birds, who yell at each other from the tops of the trees that crowd the shore. There is something about the way the bright green of their leaves looks against the navy blue of the water that feels like
This essay originally appeared on The Politics Chicks' Substack, where I was invited to contribute a guest column on the topic of my choice. So of course I decided to write about diarrhea lettuce. Many thanks to the Chicks for the invitation, and for allowing me to include the
For most of my life, I never really thought all that much about cats except to avoid them whenever I could. I have never been a fan of cats. Some of that is probably just a lack of exposure, since I grew up in a very dog-centric (and cat-
What I learned from the creaky, beautiful disaster that was my childhood home When my parents bought the house that became my childhood home in the early 1970s, it was an absolute disaster of a place and everyone thought they were crazy. The house was a typical Chicago two-flat,
On writing, social media, and living in fragments no longer. I have a friend who is a writer. Like, an actual writer, one who has written books that publishers have published and national newspapers have reviewed and people have purchased with real American dollars. Probably other currencies too. I met