First off, Jackie A is an incredible Substacker whose Substack is called Jackie’s Academy. She does not mince words when speaking truth regarding white supremacy, racism, and more. She also writes about Black excellence, which is amazing beyond words. I find her to be insightful and an absolute joy to follow and subscribe to, and I greatly admire her as a person as well.

So, when I learned about what was going on with this disgusting white man, I was enraged. Then she wrote a piece on April 23rd titled “I Named My Cyberstalker. The World Chose Him.”

Jackie's Academy

I Named My Cyberstalker. The World Still Chose Him.

I am living through something that should be simple: a cyberstalker, a mountain of evidence, and a clear pattern of behavior. Yet somehow, I am the one questioned. I am the one asked to “prove it.” Meanwhile, the white man stalking me only has to say, “Nope, not me,” and suddenly the burden shifts. His denial is treated as the truth. My evidence becomes…

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14 days ago · 51 likes · 17 comments · Jackie A.

This piece angered me even more, as she has the receipts, and yet, as she states, she is the one being questioned. Like, WTF, people? However, as she writes in her piece, this type of pattern is nothing new for Black women. It goes far back, dating to plantations work camps. As Jackie A. aptly states:

Enslaved Black women were called liars when we reported violence. We were called ‘hysterical’ when we named the abuse. Our pain was dismissed as an exaggeration. Our fear was treated as manipulation. White men were positioned as rational, credible, and trustworthy. Even when the evidence was in our bodies, our testimonies, our scars.

And here it is, the year of our fucking Lord, 2026, and a Black woman is enduring cyberstalking, harassment, and lies being spewed about her by this white man trash can cosplaying as a human being, which, again, she has the proof, and yet (white) people are telling her, “Prove it.” So, please, go read her story, and see for yourself what she has been contending with. But be warned: It isn’t pleasant. That said, she needs our support, love, and care. Most importantly, she needs to be believed, which I can’t believe I have to say, as what she presents provides you with the evidence to make it so.

When I wrote to Jackie A. in response to her story about what’s happening to her in the comments section, I said:

Oh, Jackie, this story enrages me to no end. I’m so sorry it’s happening to you. Reading those texts made me sick to my stomach. I believe you. I will write about this story in my bi-weekly reads round-up when I write it up next to raise awareness for you.

As I wrote up my bi-weekly reads round-up this evening, however, I decided that Jackie A.’s story needed its own space. I needed to give it specific attention, so instead of cramming it in with my round-up reads, I am writing it out here and now. Jackie A. endures endless amounts of racism on social media—I’ve seen it myself on Substack, as well as when she’s screenshotted images from her Instagram. It’s relentless, daily, and despicable, and I’ve witnessed this treatment towards my other Black friends online. And now Jackie A. has to endure a cyberstalker on top of the everyday hatred she receives from white rando assholes who hate on her here and there and everywhere online.

In sum, believe Black women. Listen to their pain when they share it with you. They carry generations of trauma with them, and these things continue to happen to them today, which, as I’ve said endless times in this post, enrages me to no end. (And, yes, I know most of us, at least in this space, know the reasons why and the complex, bullshit history behind it, but there are times when we put all that aside, i.e., the analytical explanations to “help” describe the reasons for how it’s still happening, and simply listen to their stories and hold space for them to share. After all, they too know all the reasons why and the bullshit history behind it. So, do ’em a favor, especially if you’re white, and zip it and just be a quiet support to ’em.)

Finally, acknowledging it is only the beginning. I’m not sure where it goes from here, but I needed to write about her experience, and let her know that it has been on my mind, that I’m thinking about her, and just say, Jackie, I’ll always have your back. ♡

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I’m a few days late in getting this bi-weekly best reads round-up out, but it’s better late than never, right? So, as everyone says, without further ado, here’s my list for this time ’round.

1. , whose Substack is titled Rich Queer Aunties, wrote a beautifully rich piece called “White People Need Ancestral Excavation,” in which she aptly and movingly describes how white folks, and that includes me, need to go back to our cultural roots and rediscover ourselves and community.

Rich Queer Aunties

White People Need Ancestral Excavation

White people have a community problem. The problem is not that you don’t know how to behave around Black people. The problem is that you have no culture to come home to…

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7 days ago · 416 likes · 39 comments · Christabel Mintah-Galloway

She opens by writing:

White people have a community problem. The problem is not that you don’t know how to behave around Black people. The problem is that you have no culture to come home to.

You hear a Black person talk about their culture, food, music, and way of being in community, and something in you aches. You have been to the trainings. You know the language. You do the work of showing up. And you still cannot locate yourself. You don’t know what your people do. You don’t know what belonging looks like in your own lineage. So you sit adjacent to other people’s culture and call it solidarity.

She urges us to go as far back as possible, i.e., before capitalism, before Christianity, before the brutality we imposed upon millions of others, to discover the folk traditions that we once shared communally. When she apparently posted this suggestion on Instagram, she immediately received pushback from white folks (quelle surprise). One told her it was “too hard” and that they would rather commune with nature in a spiritual way. First, no one said it would be easy, and second, they are saying this to a Black woman who is doing her own work after centuries of devastation and trauma meted out on her and her people by white people. In addition, as Mintah-Galloway explains, this concept of simply communing with nature spiritually is solitary and does not allow for building relationships and forging bonds with other white folks around positive cultural praxis that ground us in our own past.

It’s a rich, provocative, insightful piece, so, as I always say, read it in its entirety, and make sure to smash that subscribe button to hers.

2. , who writes over at The Dialectics of Destruction, delves into how good vibes are actually ideology in his piece “Good Vibes as Ideology: Emotional Management in the Dictatorship of Capital.” Indeed, these so-called good vibes function as a form of “soft control,” Murphy explains, “suppressing contradiction while commodifying the inner life of the working class.”

The Dialectics of Destruction

Good Vibes as Ideology: Emotional Management in the Dictatorship of Capital

“Good vibes only” sounds harmless—until you realize it’s doing political work…

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13 days ago · 30 likes · 12 comments · William Murphy

He also notes the persistence in the U.S. of “good vibes only.” It’s important to note that Murphy isn’t analyzing this phenomenon at the individual level, but rather as a “system of reproduction.” (This is why I mourn the lack of sociological awareness by most folks here in the U.S., as they fail to grasp the nuances of Marxian arguments and analysis that Murphy is setting forth in this essay and on his Substack.)

How does this insistence or “enforced positivity” operate, according to Murphy’s adept analysis? It nullifies contradiction. Furthermore, given the innate and exploitative inner workings of capitalism, it is in perpetual crisis. Murphy lists those crises—ecological, economic, and social. However, as he adds, “it cannot allow these contradictions to fully register in consciousness.” So, what must it do in response? It creates a buffer; otherwise, if it didn’t, a collective class consciousness would arise in response to this polycrisis. In addition, instead of considering the structural inefficiencies that are causing problems in one’s own life and in the lives of others, one is told to adjust one's attitude or perspective.

Murphy also analyzes the commodification of emotional life. This is one example of how capital leaves “no domain untouched.” He points to the purported wellness industry, a direct result of this commodification, as the capitalist class profits from the suffering they have created and extracts capital from it, while rendering the actual problem it’s creating insolvable.

Murphy covers five other sections in his essay: “Social Enforcement and the Policing of Negativity,” “Empire in Decline and the Intensification of Positivity,” “Positivity as Survival: The Human Dimension,” “Toward a Materialist Reorientation of Emotional Life,” and “Conclusion: Breaking the Spell.” The final two offer us ways out of this capitalist hellscape.

Most importantly, in terms of actual ways out, we must come to understand that what we perceive to be as private issues are actually collective matters. That realization, in and of itself, has power. Most importantly, Murphy tells us, “[e]motional life becomes politicized—not in the sense of manipulation, but in the sense of connection to material reality.” That means, our anger is justified when it is in response to, as he writes, “injustice.”

In short, we must abandon this manufactured notion of “good vibes only” if we are to come together in revolutionary struggle for real material change.

3. Next up is a piece titled “When Vegans Appropriate Atrocity” that was written over at the Journal of Free Black Thought (JFBT) by (his own Substack is called the Edokwin Journal, so make sure to smash that subscribe button and support his work, too). The essay opens with a description of a 2015 tweet depicting an image of a Black man hanging from a tree next to a pig. The caption read, “Then we had racism, now we have speciesism.” (Peter Singer coined the term “speciesism” in the 1970s—I am not a fan of Singer.) As Que notably points out, although the tweet was deleted, “the damage—and the mindset—persists.”

Journal of Free Black Thought

When Vegans Appropriate Atrocity

WHEN VEGANS APPROPRIATE ATROCITY…

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13 days ago · 34 likes · 11 comments · Free Black Thought

He continues:

Years later, mainstream vegan organizations continue to treat the horrors of slavery, lynching, and the Holocaust as rhetorical raw material for animal rights advocacy, apparently unconcerned that these comparisons might alienate the very communities whose suffering they’re instrumentalizing.

As Que argues well, the problem isn’t that they care about animals. It’s how they have appropriated centuries of racialized violence Black people have experienced (and continue to endure) to convey their message regarding animal rights. More importantly, as Que points out, “[m]ainstream veganism has a diversity problem.”

There certainly should be and needs to be a better way to describe the horrors of what’s happening to animals that doesn’t require the diminishment of Black people’s history and that of the Holocaust, too, as Que states. Again, like the other pieces I mentioned above, Que’s essay is superb and well worth reading on its own, rather than just my synopsis.

4. Finally, I am pleased to share a recent short story by called “Blades of Grass.” DeBritz writes mostly fiction, brilliant fiction, mind you, over at his Substack here.

The story starts out with two people, a man and a woman, who meet in a park. (It feels like Central Park, but I suppose it could be any park in New York.) In any event, the woman recognizes the man, tells him so almost immediately, and they wind up getting drinks together. Let’s just say things take an interesting turn after that… But I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s thought-provoking, starts off at a slow pace, and then slams you over the head (in a good way) at the end. Like all of DeBritz’s stories, while they are tightly written and condensed, they take you on interesting twists and turns, making you wind up in psychological and intellectual spaces where you least expect to find yourself. This one leaves you quite breathless.

On that final note, I wanted to also announce that I will have a publication coming out soon in DeBritz’s Poor Ezra’s Almanac. I’m delighted that he and the other creators of that magazine have accepted my work, so stay tuned for that publication soon.

Stay tuned for my forthcoming bi-weekly reads round-up. In the meantime, love one another, and fuck fascists!

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Further Reading

It’s that time again to announce another outstanding Substacker for this past April—I apologize for the late output on this one. I’ve been working on a short-term project, so time got away from me. In any event, this time around, it’s . Glass Empires was created and founded by Wendy Lawrence. As she explains in her “About” section, her Substack is “a reader-funded publication focused on historically grounded analysis of power and institutional behavior.”

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

Glass Empires examines rogue authority through history, global politics, psychology, and art. Each serves as evidence to map structures and reveal forces shaping rule. Analysis exposes fracture points, providing insight few publications reach.

Lawrence is incisive, highly analytical, and also very engaged on Notes—I thoroughly enjoy our interactions there. While she and I have our disagreements (we don’t disagree a lot, but we do disagree on Trump’s frontotemporal dementia, something I won’t get into here), I value her insights and appreciate her breadth of knowledge. (She’s also a huge supporter of my work, which I appreciate greatly.)

I could list countless pieces I admire by her, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll list just two that I really liked below.

First, I was most struck by her piece on how women’s rights are being “dismantled in real time.” It’s a terrifying examination of how Trump’s executive orders are erasing women’s legal rights, healthcare rights, voting rights, and more, while “steering women back toward enforced legal dependence.” I’d add, they’re namely driven to do these things to all women with an eye towards white women in order to create a white ethnonationalist state that births white babies for their nefarious plans. (The rest of the babies from Black and Brown women and trans-birthing and non-binary people, according to these monsters, can go to hell, as erasure is the point.) As she notes, these events aren’t just coincidental, but rather by design. Lawrence comes with the receipts, too.

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

Women’s Legal Rights Are Being Dismantled in Real Time

Trump’s executive orders are accelerating the deliberate erasure of a century of women’s legal rights, stripping healthcare, voting access, education, and workplace protection while steering women ba…

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3 months ago · 995 likes · 6 comments · W. A. Lawrence

In another piece titled “The GOP Is a Mob Family. And the Godfather is Dying,” Lawrence writes the words that so many refuse to acknowledge: “The Republican Party is the crime syndicate running the United States government.” While some may whisper this truth to others, Lawrence says it out loud in no uncertain terms. And she’s right to do so because it’s the fucking truth. They are a crime syndicate, and the sooner the public accepts this fact, the sooner we can get out of this mess, and the better off we’ll be.

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

The GOP Is a Mob Family. And the Godfather Is Dying.

Failed leadership leaves everyone else fighting for scraps. Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1819…

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a month ago · 298 likes · 28 comments · W. A. Lawrence

As we know, the child rapist, malignant narcissist, and dementia-addled President, Donald J. Trump, is the mob boss, or “godfather,” as Lawrence aptly points out. She compares the GOP and the Gambino family to one another, asserting that organizationally they are no different. But here’s a striking and very dangerous difference, “[t]he jurisdictional difference is everything [my emphasis]. The GOP does not operate alongside the American state. The GOP has captured the state entirely.”

And then there are their Russian ties, as well as their entanglement with Putin and the Russian state.

Again, she is a treasure trove of knowledge and hard-hitting analysis, so hit that subscribe button and buy her a cup o’ joe while you’re at it.

Next month, May, I’ve nominated for the outstanding Substacker of the month, so stay tuned for that write-up.

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Further Reading

In a stunning and provocative piece, “When The Moment Came, We Weren’t Ready,” tells those of us on the left, especially those of us who are white, what we need to hear: “the Left makes black people do the work just for us to lose the particular grief of people who are very good at autopsies and have never once arrived before the body hit the floor.”

Tara Knight

When The Moment Came, We Weren’t Ready.

the Left makes black people do the work just for us to lose…

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11 days ago · 14 likes · 6 comments · Tara Knight

So, what does it all mean? How did we get here? And where do we go from here? These are the pressing questions Knight raises and incisively, in part, answers for us in her brilliant essay.

She goes on to write:

Ferguson was slaughtered and became a hashtag. Me Too became a ledger of named men, most of whom are fine, several of whom have podcasts now. (Ugh sorry Jenna) 2020 became murals and a Juneteenth federal holiday, which is the legislative equivalent of a fruit basket, and the largest rightward electoral realignment in a generation.

Things are stolen, betrayed, wrapped in burial gauze, and entombed. Remember Sandra Bland? You probably do, or at least I hope you do. Knight recalls her well, as does most of the (white) left. But so what? Everything analytical was already provided for us to understand what would happen to her, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and the slew of other Black women and men mercilessly slaughtered by police. We just chose to ignore all the writings that came before their state-sanctioned murders that could have made their deaths preventable. Knight calls this preventability “the gap” and asserts that it is neither new nor accidental. And here we are, and the next murder of a Black or Brown person is upon us. And it is, just like the previous murders I listed, entirely preventable.

At the heart of these things, Knight accurately contends, is economics. But instead, centrist Democrats, “who discovered class the moment race entered the room,” treat identity politics as a distraction. The real constituency was the working class.” Yet it was “captured by its own graduate students” who “started talking about language instead of power, and this is why we can’t have nice things.” (The right, of course, also talked about identity politics, but Knight argues that they talk about it with more honesty.)

Then we turn to 2008, and symbolism took hold when Barack Obama won. Knight insists, however, that his 2008 election was real, but that he, as most of us know, governed from the center-right. Drones were used to kill Brown people in places like Afghanistan. The wealth divide between Black and white people grew, and the housing crisis hurt Black Americans in profound ways. But, as Knight writes, “at least there’s someone who looks like us in the room.”

In short, she writes, “You get the symbol. You don’t get the policy.”

Then Ferguson happened. “Hands up, don’t shoot.” As Knight says, “it was just another Tuesday, until it was filmed.” The cops couldn’t control the narrative, so white people finally saw what had been happening for decades, hell, since the plantations work colonies had existed: terror being meted out against innocent Black bodies. Darren Wilson's shooting of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, was not new. Knight continues:

The footage went everywhere before any official narrative could get there first, which meant that for possibly the first time in American history, a significant portion of the white public was unable to simply take the police account as given, because the footage was right there, and the footage said something different.

Black Lives Matter already existed, having been founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the cold-blooded murder of Trayvon Martin. But, as Knight explains, “The American left encountered this formation and did what the American left does: absorbed the vocabulary and managed the politics.”

(This makes me recall the leftist white men I knew in college. They were older than I was. They insisted that the material and economic conditions of the world were what mattered the most—that’s what needed to be changed. They diminished race, sex, and LGBTQ+ issues. These were all secondary matters, they told me over and over again, when I would raise questions about them. I no longer speak to these men, who were older than I and thought wiser than I. I’m glad I don’t engage with them, but I hope they’ve changed their tune, but somehow I doubt they have.)

Knight then addresses Harvey Weinstein and the Me Too Movement. She does not find this of interest. After all, she explains, Catharine MacKinnon, a legal scholar whom I discovered when I was just 16, wrote about men of this nature, “had named it as a feature and provided the legal framework for addressing it as sex discrimination in 1979, in a book the legal establishment spent the following decade declining to take seriously until they couldn’t anymore.” Furthermore, Knight notes that the “Combahee River Collective had named in 1977 the specific way that Black women’s experience of sexual violence was organized by the intersection of racial and economic and sexual power in ways that made white liberal feminism’s framework constitutively unable to account for it.” In a word, the analytical literature had existed for decades. Similarly, as Knight points out, Tarana Burke created Me Too in 2006.

It’s both amnesia and willful ignorance to overlook what's already there and available.

Most importantly, however, the wrong question was being asked about Weinstein. No one was asking a structural one. As Knight brilliantly writes:

The question “what did Harvey Weinstein do?” is answerable and generates enormous public attention. The question “what conditions made Harvey Weinstein inevitable and what would have to change to make him impossible?”

The latter question, which, again, is structural, is far more challenging, requires much thought, and presses a society to actually change itself.

Her next section is breathtaking. In “Summer With Nowhere To Go,” she cites how 26 million people showed up to protest across the U.S. in 2020. The rage, sadness, and resolve were palpable. But what to do with all of it? There were no institutions to organize that number of people who were ready to put themselves out there, demanding change. The Democratic Party could get away with doing nothing and changing nothing, as the mechanisms necessary to make it do so did not exist.

Defund the police was the right response, and Knight is right in saying that. It was, Knight adds:

correctly identified that policing as an institution could not be reformed into something that didn’t systematically kill Black people and correctly pointed toward abolition and reinvestment as the structural alternative. It was adopted at the moment of maximum political opening and abandoned with remarkable speed by the Democratic Party, by major media outlets, by every institutional apparatus that had briefly and loudly endorsed it. The abandonment was possible because there was nothing to prevent it. No organization with sufficient institutional strength to extract a political price from the politicians who abandoned it.

And so the detractors and critics won by skewing the message, taking the abolitionists' message away, watering it down, weakening it, making it something it wasn’t.

There was no way this movement could lead to economic disruption, as Knight notes, not in the way previous movements have succeeded in doing so. Knight points out that the infrastructure was already in place when Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Montgomery to launch the bus boycott, which lasted 381 days in 1963. She also refers to Selma in 1965 and SNCC’s voter registration drive.

The current left, however, possesses the language of the past left, but it lacks its previous infrastructure. Instead, it has been relegated to academia, its last turf, where it argues about language, as previously mentioned. It has ceded the rest of the turf to the right, aside from perhaps when Occupy came onto the scene.

So, where do we go from here? How do we rebuild the necessary infrastructure to fight back? How do we begin to fuse a language of the left with action that makes it possible to put words into praxis?

This synopsis of Knight’s long essay only provides a brief view into it. Please read it in its entirety.

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Before I get into how we can cancel student loan debt for millions and millions of suffering borrowers, I need to provide some background. First, let’s talk about medical debt being canceled and a church in North Carolina, and then I’ll briefly talk about my history in the student loan movement.

There is a church in North Carolina that buys medical debt and then cancels it for the person who had it. I interviewed the pastor, Pastor John Jackman, about how it’s done a few months ago, and will be sharing the story here soon. That conversation got me thinking about the work I did on behalf of student loan debtors over a decade ago, making me wonder: Why couldn’t the same be done for student loan borrowers? Surely, there must be a way that we could do something similar? More on that in a moment.

Many of you may not know, but for the better part of a decade, I was an activist and advocate who fought on behalf of millions and millions of people in the U.S. who struggled to pay off their “student loan debt.” I put that in quotation marks because the majority of these folks have actually paid off the original principal, and there’s evidence for that, but are being penalized for a host of reasons and having a hard time keeping up with interest on the original balance—lack of a job, underemployment, and so forth makes it difficult to keep up with monthly loan payments, especially when you have mouths to feed, rent, and a host of other expenses with which to contend. On another note, the bogus argument that people make, “Well, you took out the loans, so it’s your responsibility to pay them back!” also doesn’t hold water. The next time you hear that said, either offline or online, you can say it, too, as the majority of people have already paid the damned principal off and are trapped in a usurious system! Indeed, the system was created to keep borrowers in debt in perpetuity, and that is precisely why it needs to be smashed to smithereens. Even worse, those who suffer the most are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, women of color, and poor, and attended for-profit schools that have high attrition rates, so these individuals were loaded down with debt, dropped out of school (oftentimes due to a host of pressing obligations in their life), have nothing to show for their schooling, and work meager jobs, if any at all. There are also the Parent PLUS loans, which have loaded those low-income folks down, too.

I spent years going to Capitol Hill, speaking with congressional leaders who, at the time, acknowledged there was a crisis behind closed doors but were unwilling to do anything about the issue (I also founded a non-profit called All Education Matters, which was named after my blog, but, as you can imagine, the donations only went so far, so lobbying Congress was not a possibility, as I certainly lacked deep pockets to persuade them to write legislation on behalf of what I called the indentured educated class, although there was one bill introduced that included language from me at one point, but it never made it beyond committee). I launched a blog (linked above), too, wrote articles for major outlets like The Huffington Post, USA Today, The Guardian, The New England Journal of Higher Education, and elsewhere, plus appeared on television and radio, like CNN, Headline News, NPR, and eventually wrote a book about the topic ten years ago (the book is titled Solving the Student Loan Debt Crisis: Dreams, Diplomas & A Lifetime of Debt). It was all in the name of public service. At the same time, the now-deceased writer, activist, and author Barbara Ehrenreich became my mentor and awarded me a grant from her Economic Hardship and Reporting Project, which enabled me to delve into the harmful psychological effects of student loan debt. That’s how I landed my television and radio interviews: the piece, “The Student Debt Suicides,” went viral when it was cross-posted on The Huffington Post and stayed on their front page for close to 5 days in the summer of 2012, right around the time my marriage was collapsing. Those were, uh, good times for me personally, but I digress.

One of the policy solutions I insisted on then and still insist on now is canceling all student loan debt. Back then, I received more than just pushback; I was called “crazy” and all sorts of other misogynistic names that you can imagine. But then, as we know, President Joe Biden began canceling student loan debt before he left the White House.

Well, as I said, after speaking to Pastor Jackman at length about their medical debt jubilee in North Carolina, something I look forward to sharing with all of you here soon, I pondered it for quite some time, and eventually called up my mentor and long-time friend, Dr. Jon Oberg, to discuss it with him. At one point, Jon worked for the Department of Education and discovered what was called the 9.5% loophole, meaning student lenders were taking advantage of subsidies they shouldn't have been eligible for. He was reprimanded and even punished for bringing this discovery, as it was illegal and criminal, to the attention of his superiors. He eventually retired, but he refused to remain silent and sued several loan companies, including Sallie Mae (now Navient), Nelnet, and PHEAA, and won after years of litigation.

Anyway, Jon is a real hero of mine, and I am grateful to have him in my life. He’s a leading expert on student loans, so I wanted to get him to put his thinking cap on about how we could adopt a model similar to what Jackman has done in North Carolina for people with medical debt.

And Jon has done just that. He’s written several detailed, technical pieces on the issue here and here.

Here’s how it would work.

Billions and billions of dollars worth of “debt,” which, as I said, is really accrued interest, penalties, and so forth, which people are paying on principal balances that have already been paid off, could be bought by states’ bonds from the federal government and then be canceled. The ensuing economic activity would be enormous. This would affect millions and millions of Americans. Not only would it help with economic activity, but it would also improve the quality of life for millions and millions of people. Just think about how that would affect the happiness index here!

We need to get Democratic governors in states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York, and so forth to come together, buy up this debt, and take control of these state agencies. They need to stop playing games and get serious about changing the lives of millions and millions of people.

This issue could be nonpartisan, too. But we, collectively, need to make it one. After all, student loan debt affects Americans of all political persuasions.

So, I’m going to continue writing about it here, and I encourage you to share your stories with me here about what it’s like to have student loan debt right now, and tell me also how life would be different if you were free of it.

One of the things we need to do is get this idea circulating, i.e., how states could buy up the debt using states’ bonds and then cancel the debt.

I can’t begin to explain to you how much this idea excites me. Jon has worked out all the details. I came up with the notion, and he’s ironed out the plans. Now, we need this idea to gain traction. That’s going to take collective action and strategy building. Who’s with me?

Remember, you heard about this idea here first. Let’s make sure it gains steam.

It’s that time again when I have the pleasure of sharing others’ insightful writings on Substack with you. So, as it’s said, without further ado, I will dive into the bi-weekly best reads round-up this time ’round. Here it goes:

1. First up is ’s powerfully written piece titled “If you kill your wife, you don’t get to be a husband anymore” over at her Substack called The Golden Hour. It is a scathing indictment of how the media characterizes men who murder their spouses, as they still describe them as husbands. In this piece, Attiah also discusses two recent murders of high-profile women by their husbands, that of Nancy Metayer, who was the vice mayor of Coral Springs, Florida, and then Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax of Annandale, Virginia, the latter of which rocked this region, as I live in the D.C. area.

The Golden Hour by Karen Attiah

If you kill your wife, you don't get to be a husband anymore

It’s 7:50 pm EST. Welcome to the last bits of Friday evening’s Golden Hour…

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19 days ago · 601 likes · 51 comments · Karen Attiah

In honor of Wanzer, I will refer to her by her maiden name. Wanzer has left behind two teenage children and a dentistry practice with patients who adored her. Thanks to the selfish, violent, brutal act of a murderer, her children are now orphans, as Attiah also notes.

What’s worse, again, as I noted above, is how the media portrays the tale, like so many others that are related. Attiah explains:

The discourse and media framing of Dr. Cerina’s murder have been as predictable as they are disappointing. “Justin Fairfax Was Once A Rising Star before Scandal Sank His Career”, reads a headline from the Associated Press. “Justin Fairfax’s rapid rise in Virginia Politics Flamed Out After Scandal”, reads a headline from the Washington Post. What really happened wasn’t a “scandal” — Fairfax was accused of sexual assault by two women (he was never charged). But the stories are framed about his career, his rise, his fall.

Read Attiah’s piece in its entirety; she also captures the complexity of both women being Black, so she delves into that aspect of it, too. In addition, she discusses the despicable pictures the media use when showing these murderers with their families after they have taken their lives, many of which are with them together on vacation, smiling in family pictures, standing in front of Christmas trees, and so forth—they are sickeningly sweet and wholly inappropriate given the nature of the stories, ones that are clearly barbaric and grim. After all, we are talking about the loss of life at the hands of murderous men. As Attiah says, these men do not deserve to be treated as husbands, as they are cold-blooded killers.

While those reporting on these horrific crimes may not be smashing patriarchy, they might at least honor the victims by, as Attiah insists, stripping these men of their status. It’s at least a start.

2. ’s “Dworkin’s a Terf and You’re a Sexist” is up next.

Tara Knight

Dworkin’s a TERF and You’re a Sexist

Why I, a Black transsexual woman, stan Andrea Dworkin…

Read more

a month ago · 66 likes · 8 comments · Tara Knight

Knight writes that she, a Black trans woman, is a Dworkin stan. In this long, incisive, deeply analytical piece, Knight delves into a long history of why those who have misappropriated Dworkin—namely, TERFs—have mischaracterized her work, particularly how she wrote on pornography, among other things.

Knight writes:

When I read Dworkin on pornography, I am not uncomfortable. I am recognized. When she writes that pornography is ‘the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance,’ she is describing something I have lived in my body, the way male entitlement to women’s sexuality operates as a baseline cultural assumption, the way that assumption becomes violence when it meets refusal, the way the violence is then justified by the ideology that produced the entitlement.

She goes on to explain that Dworkin’s discussion about pornography is ultimately about power, and more specifically, the power that men have over women. This fact becomes even trickier and insidious when it comes to trans women.

Again, the piece must be read in its entirety to be appreciated.

3. over at The Pugilist has written a great piece titled “Please Stop Telling Independent Journalists They Should Send Their Stories To Legacy Media Outlets.” Valdes-Rodriguez gently schools her audience on what many of us already know: the free press no longer exists, having been dismantled long ago in this country, along with so many other institutions. That’s precisely why one must seek out independent journalists like (who, incidentally, was the first person to be nominated for my monthly nomination of an outstanding Substacker in December of 2025), Valdes-Rodriguez, , , , and others for ground-breaking news on what’s happening here and elsewhere around the globe.

The Pugilist with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

Please Stop Telling Independent Journalists They Should Send Their Stories to Legacy Media Outlets

There is no free press in America. There used to be. I’m old enough to have worked in it. But it was dismantled deliberately, over the past thirty years, by the same people and the same ideology that dismantled unions, deregulated Wall Street, and turned healthcare into a profit center…

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a month ago · 1156 likes · 141 comments · Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

Valdes-Rodriguez doesn’t mince words in this piece either. In it, she writes:

Every day I see smart readers on Substack posting outrage that legacy media failed to cover some story. I want to gently take those people by the shoulders and ask: what exactly were you expecting?

When you look at a legacy media brand today, you are looking at a serial killer wearing the flayed skin of their victim. The name is the same. The logo is the same. The building is the same. But the thing wearing that skin is not, say, the Washington Post of Woodward and Bernstein. It’s Jeff Bezos, hopping across a damp cave floor, muttering ‘Yes, my precious.’

Again, it’s critical to read her piece entirely, subscribe to her, as well as the others I’ve mentioned, and get the full breadth of her points.

4. Finally, there is ’s breathtaking piece titled “Before Reason, There Was Madness.”

In this piece, Boutayeb examines the phenomenological work of French-Tunisian philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem (MBK) in his Système du Pléonectique. In this work, MBK asks why only humans go mad. In it, he asserts that before Reason, there was madness. And further, madness continues to dominate over Reason.

Boutayeb quotes MBK saying: “‘The human specimen manifests itself to us, massively and in all senses of the word, under the form of madness. So-called reasonable behaviors only come in second place.’”

A superb piece that allows us to ponder our current predicament in this world, perhaps helping us find answers to why things are so off-kilter in the world of politics as it is today. It also invites us to consider who we consider “mad” and who we consider sane, and raises real questions about what that terminology means.

Alright, that’s a wrap for this bi-weekly reading round-up. I hope you will smash those subscribe buttons to each of these folks. They’re all fantastic thinkers. Tune in next time for more great reads.

Stay safe out there, and be kind to your loved ones, friends, and people in your community. Peace.

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Further Reading

Emilee, who was around 18 at the time of this tale, was dating a slightly older man named Jody. At the time, Jody had a 2-year-old son. One spring day, before Easter, they headed to Weston, a town of about 3,500 people, 40 minutes north of Sutton, to buy his son an Easter basket and candies for it. But before buying these things in Weston, he suggested they go visit a “buddy” of his. Being a good sport, Emilee was along for the ride and also thought to herself, “The older, cute guy wants to show me off to his friends, you know?”

“So, we get off the highway and take multiple turns on these dirt roads,” she said, and continued, “We’re in the middle of nowhere. And we pull up to this house…”

“What does it look like?” I asked, sipping on my Bourbon. The Elk River, which is 172 miles long and is part of the Mississippi watershed, stretched out behind us, babbled quietly, as the pitter-patter of rain began to fall.

“It is a plywood house. There is no siding on it. Literally, it was, like, whatever scraps were brought to this guy, he built this house out of it.”

I recalled how she had referred to him as a specific type of man, so I asked her again, “And you called him a Mountain Man, right?”

“Yes,” she replied, “He was very much a Mountain Man. So, we pull up, and there is a claw-foot bathtub outside.”

We both started laughing, given the stereotypical nature of this image. It doesn’t get more West Virginia than a clawfoot bathtub in the middle of the forest, plopped on top of a mountain, now does it?

“There is a panel on one side and a panel on the other side. Out steps a naked Mountain Man from the full bathtub, and he says, “‘Hey!’ Waving real big at [Jody] across the driveway, and says again, ‘Hey! I haven’t seen you for a while!’” (She sees all of his “bits,” of course, when he stands up out of the sudsy, dirty-looking water.)

Emilee told me that while Mountain Man was drying off, she and Jody entered the plywood house made from various types of scraps. Being that Mountain Man was apparently one with nature, they didn’t have any trouble entering the house, as the door was wide open, letting in all sorts of critters, insects, and anything else that blew through the entry. Upon going inside, the first thing Emilee saw was a “massive, nasty ass” aquarium, which had the largest “yellow Boa constrictor” she had ever seen in her life.

She continued, “It was so big, that the tail was so big, the shed was probably about 2 foot on the floor up the wall and then 2 to 3 foot across the ceiling. It was tacked up there for decoration.” What she means is that the snake had shed its skin, and Mountain Man had pinned up the snake’s skin on the floor and also across the ceiling. That’s quite an interesting choice of, er, “natural artwork” to display for visiting guests, like Emilee and Jody. Apparently, that’s what Mountain Men might appreciate in those parts of West Virginia, although Emilee found it quite off-putting. Alas, she is not a Mountain Man. (It also seems, based upon conversing with Emilee, that folks in the state are fond of pet snakes, as she has also owned a few of them as well, and currently owns a snake named “Dude,” after “The Dude” from The Big Lebowski. She let me know that her snake “does abide,” too.)

I asked for further clarification about the skin, and Emilee confirmed that it was stapled to the ceiling and floor, adding, “It was probably about 16 foot long.”

“Wow,” I said, sipping some more of my Bourbon. “Oh, my God.”

“Yes, a massive albino Boa constrictor.”

But that wasn’t the only pet snake that the Mountain Man had. Emilee then said, “I sat down on the couch, and I looked in front of me, and there was this coffee table. It was a black box with a clear piece of glass on top of it, and in this glass—it was like a little terrarium, a little habitat set up, and I realized that there was a fucking copperhead inside this table, and that’s just something that he had caught.”

So, Mountain Man was a pet curator, too!

For those unaware, the Eastern copperhead is a venomous snake. While fatalities are uncommon, if bitten by them, the wound causes extreme discomfort, swelling, and even tissue damage. Once bitten, immediate emergency medical care is necessary. So, it’s not really a great idea to have these snakes as pets. But Mountain Man most likely didn’t care about those things. Clearly! Discomfort be damned! Swelling be damned! And fuck the potential for tissue damage! Mountain Man could withstand those issues. (If this guy is still alive, my hunch is he’s a MAGA man, too.)

Mountain Man finally arrived inside his plywood house, and he was fully dressed at this point. Jody introduced Emilee to him, and Emilee, naturally, because she is a normal human person and has manners, said to him, “Hey! What’s your name? I didn’t get your name earlier.”

And the Mountain Man curtly replied to her: “Oh, I’m just Another. Another Brother. And then we got two ostrich eggs from him.” Emilee began laughing hard, as did I. Did this man spring from a Faulknerian novel? Or perhaps Emilee was being sucked into an O’Connor short story without knowing it?

“But Another Brother was a white man, right?” I asked, stirring the last bit of my Bourbon with a straw, intrigued by Another, the strange Mountain Man, wondering where he was now.

“Yeah, yeah,” Emilee said, adjusting her glasses.

The rain began to fall more heavily, hitting the Elk River’s currents behind us, creating a natural harmony of sounds that matched the soft lull of the crickets. The resident cat, an orange tabby, stirred outside the open doors of the bar and mewed ever so quietly, unbothered by our boisterous laughter.

“Another Brother was this really, dirty ass, shaggy white man,” she added.

I guffawed, as did Emilee. The tabby suddenly left to find his sleeping spot for the rest of the evening.

I then asked Emilee to describe Another’s physique.

“I’d say he was about 6 foot, real thin, athletic. He had natural muscles, you know, a fit physique.”

“Ah, yeah. I know the type.”

“So, we hang out for a while with Another. We smoke a bit.”

“With Another,” I said, smirking. I then again begin to wonder, “Another what? Another man? Another stranger? Another friend? And he also referred to himself as Another brother.” Was there something psychological about that? There are so many possibilities to add to the determiner “another”—it’s nearly endless. It’s one additional, extra, or different person or thing. I wanted to find this Another and ask him why he called himself that. Because he clearly left off “brother” at times, as did Emilee when referring to him.

“But he was super paranoid when I asked him his name, and I thought I was just being normal in introducing myself, and he was highly offended that I asked him his name.” And, yes, Emilee was right, as I said already. She was being a totally normal human being in asking him his name, and somehow this caused him great angst.

“Right. Right,” I responded in total agreement. (And who the hell calls themselves Another? Well, apparently, some wild, odd, shaggy-ass Mountain Man in West Virginia.)

As for Emilee asking him his name, as we are all aware, it’s commonplace to ask one another to announce who we are when we first meet each other, which typically means providing a first name in the very least, if not one’s last name, too. It would sure have been interesting to go through life refusing to give people my name upon first meeting them…

Apparently, though, Another must have loosened up some after they smoked a bowl together, as he asked Emilee and Jody if they wanted to go see his alligator, to which Emilee said, “This is not typically what people in West Virginia say, but I was, like, ‘yeah!’ So, he takes me outside, and there is this square, wooden box. He opens it up, and there is a heat light in there, and a fucking alligator. It was probably about 4 foot long, and he grabs it by its mouth and tail…”

“What?” I shrieked, nearly spitting out my drink.

“Yeah, he grabbed it by its mouth and tail, and he’s showing it to me from different angles.”

“He grabbed it by its head?” I asked incredulously.

“Yeah, and I, like, got to touch it because I’d never touched an alligator.” (Like most of us.)

“Right, because who has touched an alligator?”

“So, then he lobs it back in the box and shuts the door really quick. And then he said, ‘Come to this side, I got some donkeys I want to show ya. I say, ‘Oh, cute. Little donkeys, and he has, like, this little barbed-wired fence, and he has these little donkeys in this massive field, and it’s dark at this time, and then all I hear…”

Emilee began to beat her hands vigorously on the wooden bar top, making a loud, rhythmic sound that drowned out the soft sound of rain hitting the river's currents outside. She made this sound for several seconds, catching me off guard.

She abruptly stopped and asked, “What the hell is that? I wondered.”

My eyes widened, and I asked her, “What was it?”

“I can see the donkeys, and the donkeys are not running towards me. And I look over, and there is a herd of fucking emus charging at me in fucking central West Virginia again. So, there were ostriches, emus, a boa constrictor…”

Fittingly, a group of emus is a mob, and that is something out of a nightmare if I ever found myself in that situation. Emus are dangerous birds. While they aren’t as deadly as cassowaries, I still wouldn’t want a mob of them running in my direction.

“Wait, so, ostriches, emus…”

“Yes, ostriches, emus, peacocks…”

“Peacocks,” I repeat after her.

“Alligator,” she adds. “Boa constrictor, copperhead. Donkeys.”

“Oh, my God,” I said, sighing.

“That’s what I encountered that day,” she adds, laughing.

“And your boyfriend took some ostrich eggs?”

“Yes, he took two ostrich eggs, because they are supposed to be really great to eat.”

“Wow.”

“But I did not eat them,” Emilee replied, laughing. “Yep. That was Another Brother.”

“Another Brother.” I let out a long sigh and laughed again.

“Shaggy, ass white boy.”

We both laughed.

We talked more into the night, about serious things, too, things that touched on the state of affairs in the country, and how those things have affected the small town of Sutton, and in ways that aren’t so great. I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Emilee’s daughter, a beautiful, energetic, smart young person who dreams of attending NYU to study acting. (I sincerely hope she gets accepted there and is able to live out that young life of being in New York City as a young adult. I’m sure that would be thrilling for Emilee, too, being able to visit her daughter in the Big Apple.)

I was humbled that Emilee opened up to me, shared some of her life stories, and agreed to let me write about her here. I was the only one at the bar, so I had her all to myself. It was an unforgettable tale about Another. We both suspect he might be dead, as he sounded like a wild man, a Mountain Man of West Virginia, surrounded by exotic animals, tucked away in the forests of an untamed, rugged part of the country.

Every time I drive through West Virginia, which is quite often, I am taken aback by its raw beauty and its people. This time around was really special for me, thanks to Emilee telling me her stories. When I get back there, I look forward to going back to Sutton, returning to Emilee’s bar, and hearing more tales that she has to share.

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Estimated prep time: 1 hour

Serves: 6 - 8 people

Ingredients for Marinara sauce (10):

• 2 (14.5 oz.) cans stewed tomatoes (I always buy mine imported from Italy)

• 1 (6 oz.) can tomato paste (Just like my tomatoes, I always purchase the paste from Italy)

• 1 medium-sized red onion, diced

• 4 tablespoons of Italian flat-leafed parsley, chopped

• 5 cloves of garlic, minced

• 5 tsp dried oregano

• 1/2 cup of white wine

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• Fresh ground black pepper to taste

• Heavy pinch of salt

Ingredients for creamy tomato-based pasta (14):

• 2 tablespoons olive olive

• 2 cups of water

• 1 medium-sized red onion, diced

• 2 red bell peppers

• 5 gloves of garlic

• 1 lb of hot Italian sausage

• 1 lb of sweet Italian sausage

• 3 tsp fennel seeds

• 2 lbs rigatoni

• 1/4 cup dry white wine

• 1/2 quart heavy whipping cream

• 1/4 cup fresh basil

• 2 cups Parmigiano Reggiano

• Homemade Marinara sauce

• 3-6 tsp Calabrian chili peppers (optional)

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Tools That You’ll Need (3):

• Large skillet

• 2 wooden spoons

• Scissors

• Dutch Oven or Large Pot

• Knife (As I said in my previous piece, and I’ll say over and over again, I invested in two Japanese knives made by Imarku, one of which is the 7” cleaver knife that is currently on sale for $47—it’s the one linked to Imarku’s name. It’s usually $129. I use it for everything. Kyoku is another great option.)

• Wooden cutting board

Directions for Marinara Sauce

1. Place stewed tomatoes, tomato paste, parsley, garlic, oregano, salt, and pepper in a food processor or blender; blend until smooth

2. Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the red onion and cook until slightly softened and translucent, about 2 to 3 minutes. (Do not brown.)

3. Stir in blended tomato sauce and 1/2 cup of white wine.

4. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the sauce has thickened, about 30 minutes.

5. Set aside.

Directions for Creamy Tomato Sausage Pasta

1. Heat the olive oil in either a Dutch oven or a large pot over medium heat, and saute the red peppers and onions until they soften, about 7-8 minutes.

2. Stir in the garlic, fennel, and the Calabrian chili peppers, plus a good pinch of salt and black pepper.

3. Crumble the 2 pounds of sausage into the skillet and cook with the other ingredients until it’s completely browned. Pour the wine into the skillet, then deglaze the bottom and sides.

4. Pour in the marinara sauce, plus 1 cup of water. Add the pasta and stir it into the mixture until well-combined.

5. Bring the liquid to a boil, reduce the heat to medium-low, and cover. Allow the liquid to simmer, stirring from time to time at first and then more frequently to prevent the pasta from sticking to the bottom, for about 15 to 17 minutes. Every few minutes, stir in a little of the remaining cup of water. Do not let the water boil.

6. When the pasta is al dente, stir in half a quart of cream, 2 cups of Parmesan, and most of the basil (leave some aside for garnish). Make sure to heat the cream up for at least a few minutes. Season again with salt and pepper to taste. Allow the dish to cool and then sprinkle the remaining basil over the top. Serve.

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Further Reading

Much to my delight, when we visited the Anchorage Museum while visiting Alaska, there was an exhibition dedicated to dogs. The show was predominantly dedicated to the role dogs play, and played, in the lives of the Alaskan indigenous peoples, but there were also pieces of art that solely celebrated humans and their relationships to these special creatures.

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Furthermore, two new scientific papers in Nature now indicate that our relationship to dogs goes back further than previously believed. The papers show that dogs, genetically different than wolves, were close to humans more than 14,000 years ago. That means that even before human beings were farming, dogs were “a common part of life across many ancient cultures.” In addition, dogs are the only domesticated animals in the pre-contact Arctic.

The show began with a moving, haunting short clip of Kimutsik (Dog Team) by Glen Gear, which he created in 2022. This clip is part of a series that confronts the Canadian government’s violent removal of the Inuit from their land into permanent settlements. This led to a horrific loss of their dogs, which included seasonal movement across land. The exhibition note stated, “By the 1970s, the Canadian Inuit Dog was nearly extinct.” Gear describes these dogs as “spirit dogs,” and he is chasing after them, not sure of where they’ve been or where they are going. (The clip is worth watching. It’s only 29 seconds long.) Here are a few stills from it below.

Next up was Sara Tabbert’s “Black Dog Winter,” created in 2001. This piece of art, created with India ink on birch plywood, was inspired by a huge German Shepherd named Rupert, with whom Tabbert spent a winter. She was gifted a retired sled dog shortly after spending the winter with Rupert, and said, “Adventures and misadventures ensued. I can’t now imagine life without a dog.”

Around the corner from Tabbert’s piece was a phenomenal photo of “Icy.” (I took a picture of the placard for “Icy,” but it didn’t have the artist’s name. I also did research online, but to no avail. If I’m able to find the creator’s name, I will update this entry here.)

This image stole your heart, as it’s intended to do. The little pup also did the same to the artist, as they wrote, “Before I could decide which puppy to pick, she came up to me and her eyes reminded me of the crystalline ice in winter.” Indeed, those eyes are filled with endless pools of deep affection.

This exhibition wouldn’t have been complete without the story of Balto. When Nome, Alaska, had a deadly diphtheria outbreak in 1925, communities across the entire state came together to deliver medicine from Seward to help them fight the bacterial disease. Seward was over 1,000 miles away from Nome. Initially, the medicine was shipped by train, but eventually the last 500 miles were covered by mushers1 and their dogs. Musher Gunner Kaasen and his dog, Balto, completed the last part of the journey. Balto was the lead dog. With his bravery, they made it to Nome, despite encountering a raging blizzard.

We should also recognize Togo. He was also highlighted in the show. He’s not as well-known as Balto, but he is just as badass. Togo led Leonhard Seppala’s team to deliver the serum in 1925, too. Togo encountered moving ice along the Norton Sound and temperatures that dipped below -85° degrees fahrenheit!

As we know, since our dogs are beloved to us, they have become especially beloved to our children, which has led us to replicate them as figurines, toys, and stuffed animals. The show included toys to celebrate these dog-like imitations. Here are a few that I captured:

Then there were the images and paintings of the indigenous peoples with their dogs.

Then there were the gold prospectors in the 1920s, too (gold mining and prospecting began in the 1870s and became more large-scale in the 1920s), like this man with his dog.

The exhibition also included gear that the dogs wore on their treks. The gear included sleds, harnesses, backpacks, booties, and whips. The whips are not used to strike the dogs. Instead, the whip's snapping in the air spurs the dogs on. The dogs that race the Iditarod go through 1,500 to 3,500 booties for the 1,000- mile race. To honor the dogs, blankets are draped over them before or after their arrival in a village or town. The blankets are either embroidered or elaborately beaded, which is yet another indication of how much the Alaskan peoples tend to their dogs.

The exhibition also caught quiet moments of the indigenous people with their dogs. This one captured a young woman, a boy, and a dog together. The woman in this picture, perhaps the boy’s mother, is wiping hair away from her face, likely from a strong breeze from the Bering Sea behind her. She keeps the dog close to her, holding its collar. The boy, who appears to have rosy cheeks from the icy air, smiles for the camera while holding a small boy on his back.

I was also struck by this image, as the dog in the boat, alone, evoked a sense of loneliness.

The rest of the series I captured is simply dog- and human-centric and was not focused on the indigenous peoples of Alaska.

I loved the rich colors of this memorable painting. The beautiful ebony skin of the two dog owners, juxtaposed with their white dogs’ fur, is remarkable. The woman's green hair also stands in stark contrast to her interesting tasseled, rust-colored hoodie and jean jacket, as does the yellow cap that the man wears against his dark grey pants and black sweatshirt.

This different kind of love, as we know, speaks to the young couple’s dedication to their three pups, gathered tightly in their arms. Proud dog owners. Speaking of these three dogs, Cameroonian artist Elangwe says, “We look so different but so alike; you’re my soul’s true counterpart.” The owners’ faces beam with deep love for their furry friends in their arms.

This next one hit me as an intimate, private moment that we, as dog owners, often share with our dogs. The piece is by Brooklyn-based artist Arcmanoro Niles and titled “Tell Me You’ll Never Leave.” The softness of the moment, the hand cupped under the dog’s chin, his eyes turned upward, slightly closed, subtly conveying to his owner to stay—to please stay. Yes, it’s enough to break your heart, as you know how much you’re loved and adored, and yet you still must go to attend to human demands.

The next painting that struck me was by Ghanaian Ametefe Kukubor. Here, you have a symbiosis of colors, with mandarin oranges and deep browns. The two subjects stare at you suspiciously with the same intensity. We have rudely interrupted a moment that they were having together, and we are not invited to this conversation.

Kukubor says growing up in the ’80s in Ghana, people didn’t have much of a relationship with dogs, but that has since changed. Ghanaians, he says, now have a special relationship to dogs. That is clear in this painting between the young woman and her dog.

In the next painting, this breed, the Xoloitzcuintle, is one of my favorites. Referred to as Xolos, they are a hairless breed from Mexico that dates back 5,000 years.

This watercolor by artist Nery Gabriel Lemus depicts Caulli. Lemus chose the colors to memorialize Cualli.

If you are a dog owner, you know that a nap is not a proper one unless you’re joined by your dog(s). Nelson White’s “Afternoon Nap” (2021), oil on canvas, captures this leisurely, joyful activity perfectly with his English bulldog.

Nelson is part of the Mi’Kmaq peoples and a member of the Flat Bay First Nation Band in Flat Bay, Newfoundland. Nelson describes this as a moment of “serenity” with his dog Higgins. The painter only napped for 15 minutes, but Higgins would stay for 2 hours or more.

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Argentine artistic duo Leo Chiachio and Daniel Gianonne created the ingenious Coleccionistas de trapos (Rag Collectors). This beautiful hand-embroidered piece depicts the couple with their dogs, enjoying a relaxing moment in bed, celebrating everyday life as a “multispecies” LGBTQ+ family.

No exhibition would be complete without a photograph by Gordon Parks. Here, we have a lovely moment captured of a beautiful, young Black woman with her dog, both of whom are leaning out a window in Harlem.

In another very private moment, artist Shona McAndrew depicts a brown-haired woman with her dog, after she’s drawn a hot bath for herself. Her head is bent down, resting on her arm, as she languidly runs her finger through sudsy water, her loyal companion next to her side, both of their reflections looking back at them.

Finally, we have Oxford-based artist Annan Affotey, who painted his friend Paul, holding his little dog Norma. Affotey states that Paul is a loving, tender person, especially towards his family. Those sentiments come through in how he’s holding Norma so gently in this painting, who appears to be an aging, black Chihuahua with white scruff on her muzzle.

A deeply moving show, one for dog lovers around the globe, I left feeling replenished, uplifted, and missing my own dogs!

With that said, my dogs wish you a good day, and are glad I’m back from Alaska, although I’m currently just with two of them in Kansas. (Don’t worry, the other one—the Basset—is being well taken care of.)

Here’s a picture of them back in Maine on a walk in misty, cold weather.

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Further Reading

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my Smorgasboard live video a few days before I hit the road for Kansas! Unfortunately, it didn’t download properly, so I can’t post that short discussion here. Otherwise, I would have included it. In the future, however, I’ll be doing short 15-25-minute videos, discussing the queue of writings I’m working on, current events, and whether I have travel plans ahead. The topics will vary from that, too. I’m going to be flexible.

This first video covered the following topics:

• The dementia-addled child rapist’s upcoming “speech” the other night.

• The upcoming interview that I’ll be sharing here with Pastor John Jackman at the Moravian Trinity Church in Winston-Salem, NC. They have an amazing project, the Debt Jubilee project, which relieves people in the community of medical debt.

• My forthcoming essay, “Unquenchable Thirst: Drinking from a River of Words,” which plays off of Heraclitus’s metaphor of how you never step in the same river twice. I invert that concept, suggesting that when you’re a reader and cross the same path with a writer and are in sync with them, you feel that unquenchable (intellectual) thirst, which makes you come back for more of their writing. I’ll be discussing the following writers in that piece:

  • ’s “The Black Place”

  • Oliver Sacks’s “The Abyss”

  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italian Journey (Italienische Reise)

  • Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft)

• My piece on the Anchorage Museum’s “Dog Show” Exhibit, which I mentioned in the second piece I wrote about visiting that museum while visiting Alaska.

• My upcoming trip tomorrow from Baltimore to Kansas (I stopped in Lexington, Kentucky, yesterday evening, and then headed the rest of the way to Kansas yesterday.)

• Cooking for my parents for Easter—I’ll be making saffron risotto with scallops and shrimp. Plus, I’ll also be baking a red velvet cake for my dad as well as bread pudding with crème anglaise sauce drizzled over it, and I’ll be sharing these recipes on “Gather”.)

I hope those who joined the discussion enjoyed it!

Be kind to one another. Hug your loved ones tightly. Hang in there.

Finally, Substack is currently the only way in which I earn cash, but I’ve turned off my paid subscriptions, as I don’t want to support a platform that allows Nazis to run amok here and defies their own TOS when it comes to misogyny and attacks against women. So, I’ve switched over to BuyMeACoffee. If you want to become a monthly supporter or toss me a few bucks to help me buy a cup of coffee, smash that button below this note. Thanks so much for your support!

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I used to highlight the best Substacks every two weeks, but ’s model of calling out great essays, who writes over at Philosophy Publics, has inspired me to share the best reads I’ve come across in the last two weeks, too. (I’ve been humbled to have Mona Mona include some of my works in those lists a few times, so a shoutout to her in thanks as well!)

These essays, short stories, or poems aren’t dated in any particular order. I have just come across them over the last two weeks, found them moving and thought-provoking, and thus wanted to let you in on some great work here. I’ll write about 3-5 of them every two weeks.

Let’s dive in.

1. “Soul Food Is Not the Villain—Colonialism Is” by The Herbal Geek.

   The Herbal Geek

   soul food is not the villain—colonialism is.

   One propaganda I never fell for was that our food is unhealthy for us. Soul food has carried a lot of baggage that never belonged to it. It’s been flattened through a colonial gaze of a cuisine treated as a guilty pleasure rather than valued for its nutrition. But that framing says more about who was doing the labeling than about the food itself. Tradit…

   Read more

   3 months ago · 241 likes · 11 comments · The Herbal Geek

This beautifully written, in-depth piece explains the biochemical history of Soul food, explaining how it has been “flattened through a colonial gaze” and “treated as a guilty pleasure rather than valued for its nutrition.”

The Herbal Geek is a clinical herbalist, and delves deeply into the history of enslavement and why Black people originally created Soul food as a cuisine for their very survival in a world that wanted to kill them. The white, colonizing, moralizing gaze, that of surveillance, did not understand that how they fried their foods, used salts, cured, and smoked things was, as the Herbal Geek states, “our solution to scarcity.” They add that those who call their food unhealthy are exposing a “layer of systemic racism.”

The Herbal Geek goes on to explain how the ingredients of Soul food—collard greens, mustards, and turnips—are filled with folate, vitamin K, and anti-inflammatory polyphenols. They go on to add, “In other words, they help our bodies repair cells, keep our blood healthy, and calm inflammation that so many of us carry from stress, environment, and generational strain.” These aren’t the only foods that nourish the body, as the Herbal Geek provides additional information on sweet potatoes, black-eyed peas, okra, and more.

After describing the ingredients, the Herbal Geek discusses the art and science behind cooking Soul Food and wraps up the essay by emphasizing the necessity of decolonizing it.

Again, a must-read essay, and someone who is more than well worth following and subscribing to here on Substack.

2. “On Radical Hope” by .

The Khatoun Journal

On Radical Hope

The first victim of tyranny is hope…

Read more

a month ago · 75 likes · 5 comments · Khatoun

Thanks to , I came across this absolute gem of an essay by the Iranian writer Khatoun. In the opening lines, Khatoun writes, “The first victim of tyranny is hope.”

Mentioning the Sassanian period, Khatoun writes that rites of passage were similar to those of today. The religion was Zoroastrianism—some believed it to be Truth, while another form was called heresy. During this period, as Khatoun notes, “philosophers debated the oldest and most fundamental of human questions: the origin of evil in the world. Is evil just the absence of good, like darkness is the absence of light that dissipates into oblivion once a candle is lit, or is it an active force, with a will?”

She delves further back, over one and a half thousand years ago, to when only Time existed. Time, in Middle Persian, they explain, is Zurvan. (Time was genderless, “but they had will.”) Khatoun continues:

For an eternity, Time remained alone, and sacrificed in solitude, for they knew that if they reproduced, they’d create both heaven and hell. In that single eternity, a doubt set in about the utility of this sacrifice, and the doubt impregnated Time. They birthed twins: one made of sacrifice, and the other of doubt. One made of hope, and another of despair; Ormuzd and Ahriman. All that is good and fertile in the world came of the first, and all that is evil and destructive of the second. Since the beginning of time, the twins have been in a battle. Equals, borne of the same womb, and the same parent.

For centuries this story has lived on in our psyche. In the Zurvanist doctrine, fate is predetermined, and victory of Light is inevitable, but so is suffering and the destruction of the world. It is perhaps the reason why all our peoples call fate ‘what is written on one’s head’. Still, it is the free human’s duty to align oneself with Light.

So, from this story, we know that hope’s twin sister is despair, as Khatoun tells us later in the essay. Furthermore, hope is not inactive, but rather an “active emotion,” one that is “life-giving” and “sacred.”

As we know all too well, those of us under the rule of tyrants, when they come to power, they try to seize and destroy Hope. Khatoun explains:

Once a people lose their capacity for active, living hope, they fall into the claws of Ahriman. They cease being alive in the metaphysical sense, and unwittingly become agents of Death.

Hope is the antidote to this spiritual death. Hope is the only thing that can temper fear into resolve. That can surpass narrow ideological boundaries, link hands and bring forth a force capable of standing up to tyranny.

However, Hope is not something experienced alone. It must be experienced collectively.

We need to remember Khatoun’s words. All of us do. Make sure to read the essay in its entirety. It’s fantastic. And hit that subscribe button, too.

3. “Once Again, I Wish My Superpower Were Invisibility” by .

Read Me (To Filth)

Once Again, I Wish My Superpower Were Invisibility

The problem with using Sue Storm, a.k.a. Fantastic Four’s Invisible Woman, as my personal icon for Transgender Day of Visibility is that when one searches online for images of Sue Storm, one finds endless images of Invisible Woman being…well…an extremely visible woman…

Read more

a month ago · 16 likes · Badly Licked Bear

Yesterday, Badly Licked Bear wrote about how on Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV), she’d like to have the superpower of invisibility. Brilliantly opening with Sue Storm, the Fantastic Four’s Invisibile Woman, as her personal icon, for the day, Badly Licked Bear, ironically describes the way in which there are endless images of a woman who is supposed to be invisible.

Badly Licked Bear speaks of the impossibility of her being as trans, and how she lives on a “knife-edge of representation and image” as this relates to Invisibile Girl. She then diverges from Invisible Girl by stating:

To be transsexual is to be invisible and hyper-visible at the same time. To be transsexual is to have one’s real needs and real life remain unknown and invisible to ones enemies at the same time one’s image is fixed in the mind of one’s enemies, as fetish object, as pastiche, as drag-as-blackface, as whatever glaring image they need to service their own invisible, internal, secret/not-so-secret world. I slide back in time to Margot Robbie’s Barbie, and the line: “It’s literally impossible to be a woman.” Somewhere in that line, a calm finds me.

But when it comes to being impossible, she concludes we’re all impossible.

She’s older now, and tired of all “this shit,” she writes. But she also knows that if she turned herself invisible, like she wants to, INVISIBILITY=DEATH. And that is the new SILENCE=DEATH. And that’s exactly what her enemies want. She’s not gonna give that to them.

5. “The Trans Genocide Has Arrived,” again, by .

Read Me (To Filth)

The Trans Genocide Has Arrived

Every time circumstances call me to state that which others seem to fear to state, I get the strange impression that I am in a panopticon-of-self, both penetratingly observed and powerfully observing. I ask myself in those moments, “Is this what you should be doing during your own genocide…

Read more

4 months ago · 403 likes · 84 comments · Badly Licked Bear

Seemingly in her own panoptical trap, Badly Licked Bear opens with the chilling question, “Is this what you should be doing during your own genocide?”

All the shit that’s been is here again, and she is too old for all of it, and yet she finds herself in “rooms,” ones she thinks about too as being in places right here in this country being built in concentration camps, while consulting others surviving under MAGA, sometimes as a consultant and workshop leader for various organizations, or speaking on behalf of the Los Angeles LGBTQ+ Arts & Culture Coalition. And, like she says, these are places—the concentration camps—where trans people have been taken before, like sheep and mercilessly killed. She bitterly adds, “This is not, by any means, our first rodeo.”

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Badly Licked Bear and other trans folks do not need to be told by cis gendered folks that they are in danger. They are fully aware. That said, she mentions how genocide experts are now speaking up. (This piece was written in January, and things have worsened for tans folks since its publication.)

So, as Badly Licked Bear tells us, the trans genocide hasn’t just arrived. It’s here. It’s happening. But more than that, we need to denounce it and fight like hell against it.

Make sure to read Badly Licked Bear’s two essays and smash that subscribe button to her, too.

We appreciate all of you who joined us today to discuss fasting, breaking the fast, and other topics related to fasting and food. It was a really lively discussion!

As mentioned during the Substack live, she has many Substack projects here. However, her business is called The Conscientious Emigrant, where she brings her skills as a trained lawyer and policy analyst to help people emigrate from the US in “an intentional approach to their environmental, economic, and cultural impacts abroad.”

The Conscientious Emigrant by Conscientious Emigration™

Emigrating from the US with and intentional approach to environmental, economic, and social impacts abroad.

By Elizabeth Silleck La Rue, Esq.

As I said on Substack Live, I have Cryn’s Substack, which you can click on below to subscribe to, and also “Gather,” where I write about cooking, baking, imbibing, traveling, and Maine, as well as fasting.

The first article on fasting, “Fasting the Right Way,” is on “Gather” and was something we discussed during our conversation today.

We both mentioned that we will be partaking in a 5-day fast together in early May, so stay tuned for Substack Live when we do that (we’ll schedule it when we’re 4.5 days into it, so right around the time we’ll both be ready to break it).

Until then, stay healthy and safe.

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Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, and this should not be taken as medical advice.*

Intro

Let’s dive into it. There is a lot out there about fasting, both good and bad. I’ve curated the incisive, scientifically sound information for you, so you don’t have to look any further. I’m going to guide you through the process of fasting and provide details on what happens to your body when you fast, i.e., the science behind it. This will include the benefits of fasting and the pros and cons of coming off a longer 7-day fast. And when I say fasting, I mean fasting, i.e., no juice, no broth, just water, coffee, and tea.

I know this piece seems to depart from the topic of “Gather,” which generally focuses on abundance, cooking, baking, alcoholic drinks, and so forth, but I also like to hit pause on the consumption of food and alcohol, something I’ve been doing with my fasting buddy

For many who are new to the concept of fasting, it sounds like going into starvation mode. But that isn’t true. Fasting is an ancient concept, dating back thousands of years. Furthermore, consuming three meals a day is a relatively new pattern of eating, a result of the Industrial Revolution. In fact, during the Middle Ages, laborers would eat two solid meals a day, and the Romans believed it was healthiest to eat one meal a day, known as cena, which they typically ate at four in the afternoon.

When it comes to fasting itself, it takes time to build up to a 7-day fast, so I recommend starting with shorter fasts of 14-16 hours over the course of several weeks, then increasing to 18, 20, 21, and 24 hours, and gradually shifting to 48 hours and 72 hours so your body can adjust to these fasted states. Elizabeth and I started fasting together in early January. The longest fast we’ve both done since then is 72 hours. We have also committed to doing a 5-day fast together in early May, so wish us luck! Currently, I’m on a 4-day fast (as of this writing, I’m at around 52 hours.)

Fasting vs. Starvation

Like so many people in our thin-obsessed culture, many of us have struggled, or still perhaps struggle, with disordered eating. Many people have struggled with starvation diets, especially in their early 20s and 30s. However, after a lot of therapeutic work and healing, doing the right type of eating, growing into one’s self, and more, it’s important to understand why this type of behavior is not only bad for the body but also hurtful to the mind. Furthermore, fasting is not the same as starvation. Starvation is a form of denial, punishment, self-abuse of the body and the mind. Fasting, on the other hand, is a form of rejuvenation, a reset, a healing. The whole body is allowed to rest when one fasts.

It’s important to distinguish between starving (restriction of food due to various circumstances, oftentimes psychological, or the withholding of food—not a choice) and fasting (an intentional choice to restrict food for a specific period of time for a purpose).

Pros

It helps us stay motivated to fast when we think about the tangible, medically proven benefits; we’ll delineate those below.

But, given the fact that it’s 2026 and we’re all teetering on the brink of a full-blown sociopolitical global meltdown and the associated economic instability that comes with it, there’s one major benefit that cannot be overstated:

Fasting is free, as in “gratis”. No money is needed. For us, it’s been a rough couple of years in terms of income. Like many of our readers, DOGE cuts earlier this year hit us hard. For Elizabeth, they effectively ended her main business (equitable conservation and environmental justice consulting to nonprofits and government contractors), and she pivoted almost entirely to Conscientious Emigration, supporting clients in leaving the US with intentional approaches to the environmental, economic, and cultural impacts of their emigration abroad. Still, it’s been a tough 5+ years since being laid off in 2020, at the height of COVID.

I know many, many people have stories like this. Money is tight, and grocery bills are steep. Insurance premiums have become inaccessible to many since Republicans allowed the valuable subsidies provided by OBAMACARE (thank you, sincerely, President Barack Obama) to expire.

Given all of this context, perhaps the best part of fasting (for fascist 2026) is that it’s free. No special supplements (besides Himalayan salt, maybe some carbonated mineral water, and apple cider vinegar). No expensive specialty foods. No medication. No cost.

One caveat is that if you’re cutting back on how much you eat, it’s important to make sure you have high-quality proteins and produce. But you can absolutely cut spending on groceries, especially if you cut out the preserved, packaged “snack” foods.

For me, I lost my corporate job in comms, PR, and writing, so it’s been tough on my wallet, too. Now, I’m a freelance writer and also have a Substack where I write about history, philosophy, current events, plus food, drink, recipes, Maine, and travel. The “free” part of fasting is great for me, too.

Now, let’s turn to the science of what’s happening to your body during fasting.

Autophagy

Autophagy is the process whereby your body “eats itself.” When you don’t eat for an extended period of time (beginning around 16 hours and exponentially increasing), your body begins to process your cellular waste. Contrary to old bodybuilding lore, your body does not start by eating muscle; instead, it targets weak, old, diseased, or damaged tissue. This ranges from sagging skin to cancer cells–it’s an entire rabbit hole interested readers should explore. It’s fascinating.

When Elizabeth fasted regularly, she noticed that the skin on her face and neck became tighter, despite her also losing weight. Usually, the opposite happens with weight loss. This is the primary reason she likes to do longer fasts - at age 46, she has a lot of autophagic “clearing” to do.

I, 48, have inflammation that causes my arthritis in my knees and wrist, which I broke when I was 6, to act up. Since I have started doing rolling 48- and 72-hour fasts every other week, I have noticed a significant decline in pain in these areas, which aligns with studies showing that fasting reduces inflammation. In fact, I thought I would never jog again, and a few weeks ago, I began jogging on the treadmill once more.

Ketosis

Ketosis, in simple terms, is when the body uses fat as fuel. Scientifically speaking, it’s a metabolic state where ketones or ketone bodies are produced from fat when glucose (sugar) isn’t available for energy. Ketosis lowers insulin levels and promotes fat burning.

Ketosis generally occurs 16 hours into a fast, but also when someone is on a Keto diet, i.e., when they are following a strict high-fat, high-protein, low-carb meal plan. One of the symptoms of Ketosis is bad breath. One can effectively test the body to determine whether it has entered ketosis using urine strips, breath tests, or a blood ketone meter; the latter is the most effective, as it measures blood levels of beta-hydroxybutyrate (beta-hydroxybutyrate is a ketone your body produces when it’s in ketosis).

Digestive rest

Elizabeth doesn’t know about all of you (!), but her gut has been through some things. At various times, she’s been told she has “leaky gut,” gastritis, GERD, and food sensitivities. She did not have good nutrition by any modern standard as a child or teen, and began eating better only as a young adult. She also drank a lot of alcohol and was overprescribed antibiotics as a teen. All of these things contributed to damaging her gut flora, which is important to fitness and overall wellness.

Fasting gives the digestive system a break and an opportunity to rebalance the gut flora. Elizabeth has noticed the benefits of fasting for her gut flora.

I have also suffered from digestive issues, especially as I got into my 30s and early 40s. In fact, when I was in my early 40s, I developed a debilitating digestive problem and went to the doctor numerous times to seek help. While the problem eventually solved itself, fasting has been key to giving my digestive system a rest and helping it rebalance the gut flora.

Inflammation reduction

As mentioned already, fasting has been proven to reduce inflammation, and Elizabeth can attest to this, too. She got very serious about intermittent fasting for the first time after she experienced a very bad back spasm. Since she couldn’t move—literally—she knew that anything she ate was likely to just get stored in fat cells. She noticed a marked difference in the pain levels during her eating periods versus her fasting periods.

With so many chronic diseases starting as inflammatory responses, this is a really important benefit that folks should know about.

Pitfalls

I came off a fantastic 7-day fast, the longest fast I’ve ever done, many years ago, and made a huge error afterwards.

What I did: First, I was ready to reward myself! Instead of going out and, say, buying myself a book, getting a massage, or enjoying something else, like a nice walk in the park, I went straight to a diner (smart!). I ordered a massive cheeseburger, deviled eggs, French fries, and a Manhattan to top it off (yikes!). I was with my partner and a good friend, and as soon as I took two bites out of my cheeseburger, I felt a massive wave of nausea hit me, like a cannonball had been dumped in my stomach. Since I hadn’t been around much food for the entire week, the entire restaurant’s aromas hit my nostrils like they were liquid missiles–all that grease, those baked desserts, those heavy roasts, every single scent came barreling into my nose simultaneously. I ran to the bathroom, ready to vomit. Luckily, nothing came up. I waited for at least 10 minutes before the nausea subsided, returned to the table, and ate nothing else for the rest of the evening. I know! I know! This meal choice was a terrible mistake. I learned my lesson. Don’t make the same mistake I did (lol).

What you should do (unlike what I did): When you come off a fast that’s 48 hours or longer, you need to be careful about what you eat. First, you should start with bone broth or a small smoothie. After that, steamed vegetables like spinach or broccoli are a good choice. Then you can move on to things like avocado toast, eggs, and simple carbs. Most importantly, you don’t want to make the mistake of eating sugary, high-carb, high-fiber, overly processed foods. (Alcohol should also be avoided for at least 48 hours or longer.)

There is such a thing as fasting too much: Our bodies are adaptable—this is a good thing, but it also means that it’s important to “mix it up” so that your body doesn’t get too used to a particular routine. For example, people who use the “OMAD” (One Meal A Day) method of fasting sometimes report stalled weight loss after long periods of time on the same schedule. (I am an OMADER). “Confusing” the body by mixing up your fasts, doing non-fast days, or switching to longer fasts punctuated by eating days can help. Also see notes above about eating disorders.

Conclusion

While many people fast for weight-loss benefits and to reach the end point (i.e., breaking a fast), there is also the experience itself, which brings clarity of mind, calm, and a sense of centeredness. Once you reach 72 hours on a fast and are in deep ketosis, you no longer feel hunger, as your body is in autophagy and your mind is operating at a different level. I say that, as a writer, I can focus deeply on my essays for hours at a time, in ways I am not able to when I am eating food. In addition, when I read or research, I find myself entirely hooked on the content I’m exploring.

Indeed, nothing compares to the peace of mind it brings, to the presence of mind I have, to being in the now that I feel while I’m fasting. My productivity, which I describe as being deliberate, calm, and intentional, is incredible. I look forward to my fasts now.

If you’ve fasted, what has your experience been like? Was it positive or negative?

Further Reading

https://www.doctorjasonfung.com/

https://www.drmindypelz.com/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12112746/

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1905136

*Note: Fasting is not recommended for children or pregnant women. Medical professionals urge caution around eating disorders, especially in younger people.

I just got back from Anchorage, Alaska, yesterday afternoon, and I have a lot of notes to share about my visit there. One Thursday afternoon, I visited the Anchorage Museum, an astonishingly beautiful and architecturally sophisticated building, made of glass and wood, situated in downtown Anchorage.

The Anchorage Museum sits on the traditional homeland of the Eklutna Dena'ina, and is located at 625 C Street. The museum boasts collections of art, history, ethnography, ecology, and science. It is predominantly committed to studying and exploring the land, peoples, art, and history of Alaska. It also has exhibitions on a regular basis. It was first built in 1968 by architect Kenneth Maynard, with Schultz and Maynard. In 2003, the glass-façade, 26,000-square-foot expansion, designed by David Chipperfield Architects with Kumin Associates of Anchorage as the architect-of-record and Alcan General leading construction, opened to the public. The institution’s name was also changed to Anchorage Museum. For more details on the timeline of its architectural changes from 1968 through 2003 and beyond, go here. (The museum is now 247,000 square feet, all of which is open to the public.)

We went to three exhibitions that the museum offered on Thursday. Those were the following: “Dog Show,” “Tricksters & Sourdoughs: Humor and Identity in Alaska,” and “Cold War to the Cosmos: Distant Early Warning Systems & the Arctic.”

“Dog Show” and “Cold War to the Cosmos” were in-depth, fascinating, and examined how each topic related to the Indigenous peoples of Alaska. I had high hopes for the exhibition on humor, having worked extensively on the topic as a graduate student (not specifically on Alaska, of course), but it wasn’t nearly as thorough or as extensive as the other two I just mentioned.

The other parts of the museum, the permanent collections, were incredible, though. There is so much to take in about the Native Alaskans there. Here is one piece in the entry area: an Indigenous person, apparently being blown by the Arctic winds (he’s actually dancing) by Tony Weyiouanna. When you first step into the gallery, you’re also welcomed by two large geometric-style sculptures of a polar bear and a walrus. (I tried finding the name of the artist of these two sculptures, but I couldn’t seem to locate it. I also looked online, but to no avail.)

And, as I said, the architecture was stunning. The stairwells alone were remarkable, encased in black, a stark contrast to the dramatically high, sweeping, warm cherry-wood-colored walls.

Before heading to the “Dog Show” exhibit, I discovered another stunning piece by artist Susie Qimmiqsaq Bevins-Ericsen (1941 - ), titled “Dancing Spirit,” which was made with laminated birch, walrus ivory, pine, walnut, and cherry. (Qimmiqsaq is her Iñupiat name, and she is now an Anchorage, Alaska-based artist. Bevins-Ericsen was born in Beechey Point, Alaska, a trading post, and had a traditional way of life—hunting, fishing, and gathering—so when she first went to Anchorage, it was a shock for the family and her.)

As for “Dancing Spirit,” on the laminated birch, you see a spirit dancing in the wind, successively becoming freer from left to right, unfurling from a tight ball to an open being, flying away in the sky. In the center, the spirit becomes an explosive light, with flames radiating from it. Below are separate images that I took, depicting the spirit's metamorphosis. The final image is that of the entire piece itself.

Tomorrow, I’ll write about the “Dog Show” exhibition, as I spent a long time examining the pieces of art in that show. Then I’ll share my notes on “Tricksters and Sourdoughs,” along with “From Cold War to the Cosmos,” which turned out to also be a terribly sad exhibition about Project Chariot in Alaska that few Americans are even aware of. These write-ups will also feature the beautiful, deeply complex artifacts that were created by Indigenous peoples in the museum’s collection. The museum, as you can see, was a highlight of my trip.

After those pieces about the museum, I will share details on my dinner at Kincaid Grill, my trip to Alyeska Resort in the Chugach Mountains (we just went for breakfast, but we did see two moose!), spotting No Kings in Girwood (pop. 1,800), attending No Kings in Anchorage (it was a great turnout for the size of the city), thinking about the weird taxidermy at the Anchorage airport on my way out of the state (spoiler: giant, dead majestic animals make me sad), and finally heading home.

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Further Reading

Much to my luck, on January 1st, Dr. David Barkin reached out to me in a comment on my piece, “‘We must spread terror among some by punishing many’: The Witch Hunts in the 16th and 17th Centuries in Europe.” Barkin has a Ph.D. from Yale University and is a Distinguished Professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco Campus in Mexico City, so I was all ears.

In his comment, Barkin wrote:

This is a very important reminder of the significance of the commons in people's resistance to the incursions of the State. [Silvia] Federici's book has long been a staple of progressive analysis and organizing. I would love to correspond directly with you about our collaborations with communities in the Global South presently involved in defending and expanding their commons as ways of building what they call ‘post-capitalist societies’ as alternatives to the powerful forces of global capitalism.

For those not aware of the meaning of the commons, and Marxist feminist Silvia Federici’s work about it (I’ve written about her here and here), it was in feudal Europe, as I wrote about in my piece above—forsests, meadows, lakes, wild pastures—“that provided crucial resources for the peasant economy (wood for fuel, timber for building, fishponds, grazing grounds for animals) and fostered community cohesion and cooperation.”1 The commons played an enormous role in defining the social relations and political economy of the peasantry. At the end of the feudal period, however, the commons were eventually destroyed in Europe, and for the sake of simplicity, privatized. But is that true for other parts of the world? Have they been entirely destroyed? Is it even true for Europe itself?

As Barkin states, there is a resurgence in the Global South, where communities are rebuilding themselves and moving away from capitalist modes of social relations and toward the environment itself. Barkin makes clear, too, in his comment, that these communities in the Global South are defending and expanding their commons in what they call “post-capitalist societies.” The effects are profound, especially when it comes to eco-socialism.

Furthermore, there are examples of this rebuilding and defense of the commons in the Global North, too, which you can also read about in my interview with Kristin Ross in the Further Reading section below. (I wrote a book review of Ross’s The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life and then spoke to her about the Soulèvements de la Terre [Earth Uprisings Collective] in France. (This piece, incidentally, where I interviewed Ross, is how Barkin first ran across my Substack and me.)

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Barkin told me he was writing a paper on the indigenous communities in the Global South and how they were moving into “post-capitalist societies” several months ago. He kindly sent me a rough draft version, which I read with great interest and excitement. It’s finally been published, and I’m sharing it with you now. In this piece, I will dissect his published essay, but before doing that, I also wanted to mention that I’m currently reading Rebecca Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. In the opening chapter, “Swimming Upstream,” Solnit discusses attending a Land Back ceremony on October 17, 2024, about 60 miles north of San Francisco. That same month, Solnit states that a

few hundred miles north along the California Coast, the biggest dam removal in US history had just been completed, the result of decades of campaigning by local tribes and other supporters of a free-flowing river. Four dams had come down on the 263-mile-long Klamath River. The land that emerged from the stagnant water behind the dams is being restored and replanted with thousands of young trees and literal tons of native-plant seeds by tribal governments that live up and down this great salmon river that had been choked and stifled for more than a century. Chinook salmon, stopped for that dammed centure from completing their journeys to their ancient spawning grounds, had surged upstream almost immediately. The day before we gathered on a hilltop, the first salmon in more than cenutry had swum the Klamath’s sinuous route through northernmost California all the way to Oregon. ‘It’s amazing,’ said Ron Reed, a fisherman from the Karuk tribe. ‘That’s what we prayed for,’ he told a newspaper.2

The Land Back initiative is not just happening in California either, as Solnit notes. “From Maine to Washington State, land seized generations before is coming back,”3 she writes. Most remarkable is the story Solnit mentions of the Miwok and Pomo peoples in California in Graton. In 1922, they were granted 15 acres of land or rancheria. Like other tribes in the US, the Miwok and Pomo had suffered violent genocide in the nineteenth century.

In 1958, however, the US Congress passed the California Rancheria Act. This law “declared that forty-one rancherias—including the one in Graton—were no longer the shared possessions of California tribes, merely private property of individuals, and privatization was often a prelude to losing those lands altogether.”4 One woman and her daughter clung to an acre of the land. Now, the tribe has “jurisdiction over a hundred thousand acres.” That is the power of resolve and commitment to community. And now, the group, known as the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, has 1,537 members. (I also returned from Alaska yesterday, and wrote about House Resolution 43: Alaska Native Village Municipal Lands Restoration Act of 2025 (H.R. 43), and House Resolution 42: Amend Alaska Native Claims Act (H.R. 42), which were passed by the United States Senate in my first post about my visit there.) In this 2023 article, “More Indigenous and local communities are getting land back,” the author, Lyric Aquino, discusses how land back is happening globally, stating that “Between 2015 and 2020, Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, along with small, local communities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, gained legal recognition to more than 247 million acres of land—an 85 percent increase.”

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Barkin’s published piece titled “Radical Ecological Economics:5 A Paradigm of the Global South” is just as hopeful. He and his coauthors, Erika Carcaño, Claudia Camacho y Alejandra Sánchez, depart from various scholars to argue that, based upon “thirty years of collaboration with communities in Latin America and our active participation in the international consortium Territories of Life,”6 society in these communities is an integral part of nature and that they are already building post-capitalist societies. Radical Ecological Economics (REE) also focuses on the “centrality of organization,” which prioritizes the group, allowing them to demand autonomy for their territories. In this way, the authors explain:

[The] community subject is forced to take on a revolutionary character in guiding its members toward improving their quality of life, ensuring that no one is left behind or left out, and that everyone participates in collective tasks to ensure its communal continuity. As such, the community subject becomes a constructive force for situating itself and society outside the nation-states in which it exists, forging the foundations of a post-capitalist society.7

Scholars have also tended to draw primarily from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in addition to the scholarly work of critical political economy related to the rise of the capitalist market system and its major effects on social relations, which, as the authors note, “transformed societies into competitive organisms that undermined people’s ability to organize and promote their collective well-being.”8

As already mentioned, Barkin and his colleagues are providing an alternative, demonstrating that communities in the Global South are already building “new worlds,” ones that are embedded in nature and post-capitalistic. The communities are organized around “cosmovisions,” “where reciprocity and mutual aid are present and where their social organizations generate a logic of reproduction different from the capitalist one.”9 Furthermore, these communities are hyperlocal, egalitarian, and deemphasize the individual; such beliefs date back centuries, too. They also lack a contract and are instead driven by the common good, which means that each person can realize their full potential in contributing to society. The market also does not play a major role in these communities. Instead, the authors explain:

given the social and ecological diversity found in the world, goods are distributed through different forms of social and community organizations rather than solely in the marketplace. REE constitutes an analytical approach that allows for a more coherent understanding of the interrelationships between natural and social processes, based on a holistic and integrative perspective. This theoretical framework is configured as a transdisciplinary space where diverse knowledges and situated social practices converge, originating primarily from the Global South, providing key elements for processes of structural transformation. These community experiences cannot offer global solutions to the major problems afflicting humanity, such as climate change. Rather, they are creating societies that are in balance with their environments.10

By creating societies in balance with their environments, they are in sync with nature and not directly contributing to the climate change catastrophe that capitalist societies cause daily. They are also reintegrating themselves in nature, based on collective decisions from “cosmovisions that posit a profoundly different relationship between human beings and nature, oriented toward the care and preservation of life in all its manifestations.”11

Barkin and the authors explain that the cosmovisions are critical and take part in a system of principles, ethics, and social practices in which four of them are noteworthy: (1) there is a notion of equilibrium between society and nature, meaning that the community has enormous environmental responsibilities; (2) a concept of communal ownership that advances the collective utilization and care of natural resources and land. This idea does not entail ownership over nature. Over 40% of the national territory is communal lands held by peasant and indigenous peoples; (3) work organization that is non-capitalist logics of valuation, instead it is concentrated on the collective and a collaborative sense of production; and, finally (4), a participatory democracy that is conveyed through governance and co-responsibility.12

As the description above makes clear, these spaces are alternatives to the global capitalist system that exploits workers, undermines social relations of all kinds, and depletes ecosystems.

In addition, Barkin and his colleagues delve into the ontological, epistemological, and methodological bases for the construction of a radical ecological economics (REE) from below, meaning they examine ontology (the nature or study of being), epistemology (the study of knowing), and methodology (a system of methods) from the bottom-up, in this case from the perspective of Indigenous peoples from the Global South, instead of the bottom-down, i.e., from the perspective of scholars or the intelligenstia from the Global North.

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In this case, REE is inspired by the indigenous people of the Global South and their cosmovisions and cosmopraxis. While they draw on various disciplines, such as political economy, political ecology, ecofeminism, community feminism, decolonization studies, and more, they place the cosmovisions and cosmopraxis front and center. That said, the authors do emphasize Marxist political economy in order to articulate class struggles “within socioecological justice processes,” along with its theories and concepts from ecosocialism,” particularly metabolic rift (if you read the piece I list below in Further Reading on Kohei Saito’s The Case for Degrowth Communism, Saito delves a great deal into this term and its meaning in Marx’s work). They also recognize the importance and complementary nature of Escobar’s political ecology, the ecofeminism of Mies and Shiva, Cruz Hernandez’s community feminism, and Smith’s decolonizing concepts. All of these ideas contributed to their understanding where “most community political dynamics occur at the margins of class struggles but are embedded in other battles such as territorial exploitation and dispossession; gender equity along with corporeal and ecological depletion; racism; and epistemological and ontological domination.”13

It needs to be noted that, for Indigenous, Native, and Afro-descendant communities, and others, the cosmos is a critical part of their Weltanschauung. Hence, the reasons for the authors to dive into ontology, epistemology, and methodology from the bottom up, emphasizing, too, the socio-ecological relationships that they have. These are all highly dense, complicated understandings of themselves and the world and universe in which they are a part.

As is clear, new worlds are being imagined, created, and nourished by these communities in the Global South now. Not a moment has been wasted. These groups are doing it as I write. It’s important to know about these groups and understand that these communities have taken action to defend themselves against capitalism. We deal with an onslaught of negative news day in and day out, and oftentimes are left feeling helpless, but these communities remind us that together, collectively, we have the power to change the course of history. It’s important to recall what these Indigenous groups have been up against—extreme violence, genocide, and dispossession of their lands. And now, so many of them have stepped up and regained what they had lost; they should serve as models for us of what is possible now.

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Further Reading

Deets:

Name: Rustic Goat

Location: 2800 Turnagain Street, Anchorage, Alaska 99517

Contact:

Tel: 907.334.8100 | Email: info@rusticgoatak.com

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After a day of recuperation, I was ready to get out of the room and eat a full meal in Anchorage, so we headed a few blocks west of Midtown to the Rustic Goat. As I mentioned in my first post about my visit to Alaska, the Rustic Goat is run by Executive Chef Frazer Buchanan, whose 17-year culinary career was spent in the lower 48, mostly in Utah, California, and Oregon. 4 years ago, he moved up to Anchorage and has invested all of his time in the Rustic Goat since then. Jamilab “Jam” Sturm Stigall is the front-of-the-house manager, who started as a host for the restaurant and never left. She was our lovely server, too, as we sat at the bar to watch all the action at in the kitchen, plus we arrived 2 hours earlier, since we had made a reservation for 7:45 pm, but both of us were hungy and decided to try our luck and see if there might be room at the bar, and it just so happened that we were able to grab two seats there.

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The restaurant's exterior is a modern, boxy wooden structure. The wood gives it a warm, inviting look and complements the surrounding fir trees and mountains. As you can see in the picture below, there are a multitude of windows that let in a lot of natural light and allow patrons to enjoy the nearby Chugach mountain range.

As mentioned, we sat at the bar and were immediately greeted by a warm and kind Jam. The interior was wood-filled and industrial, which gave it an interesting feel. I first ordered a bright, crisp rosé Cava from Spain. Once I was through with my aperitif, we ordered a bottle of Benton-Lane Pinot Noir from Willamette Valley. I am a huge fan of pinots from Willamette Valley in Oregon, and this one was no different. It had a soft, berry-like taste and lacked tannins, which I prefer. While we had our first sips of wine, we ordered Parmesan-encrusted fries with aioli sauce. (The fries were so delicious that I forgot to take pictures of them!)

After eating our French fries, we had our second course: a split salad of arugula, red and green apples, toasted maple pecans, balsamic vinaigrette, and Stilton blue cheese. I enjoyed watching the woman meticulously make our salads. When they arrived, and I took the first bite, I was amazed by the perfect balance of all the ingredients, and I looked forward to our main courses after this experience, knowing this kitchen had the know-how to use the right amounts of spices, herbs, and other ingredients.

After savoring the salad, Jam served us our main courses. My partner ordered the scallops and pork belly, served with parsnip puree and flat-top Brussels sprouts. The pork belly was braised in cider, and the Weathervane scallops, in a maple reduction sauce, were from Kodiak Island, an archipelago with about 10,000 residents.

Here’s what his dish looked like, and yes, folks, I did take a bite. The pork belly melted in your mouth like butter, and the scallops were sweet, soft, and delectable.

I ordered the American Wagyu stroganoff. It was served in an Oyster mushroom stroganoff sauce, with Dijon braising liquid and topped off with a large heaping of sour cream. The pasta was pappardelle, one of my favorite Italian pastas, made by the AK Pasta Company, a local Anchorage business. The plate, of course, was garnished with chives.

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As much as I liked my partner’s dish, this hearty, generous dish was the pièce de résistance. Every ingredient came together blissfully, and the Wagyu meat was the tenderest red meat I’d ever eaten, plus the mushrooms were a beautiful compliment. The creamy sauce was beyond delightful, and the sour cream just enhanced its creaminess that much more. They have taken stroganoff and made it soar to new heights when it comes to one’s taste buds. This type of dish is one for fantasies: cream, meat, and mushrooms. It has it all.

Once we were finished with our main courses, miraculously, we still had room for dessert. I wanted to order all four of the desserts they had to offer, and, yes, they make them all in-house, except, as Jam told me, the ice creams.

Although Jam said the matcha panna cotta was her favorite (it did sound incredibly enticing), I was yearning for chocolate, so I went with the flourless Mayan chocolate cake, with a small scoop of vanilla ice cream, and Graham’s Ruby Port as my nightcap. It did not disappoint, especially with the hint of cayenne pepper and the warm, rich cherry chocolate sauce.

Once again, like the French fries, I was so taken by the dish that I began eating it before realizing I needed to take a picture of it!

As you can imagine, the experience—the food, the ambience, the services—was fantastic. This place is the type of restaurant where, when you learn that someone is going to Anchorage, you immediately tell them, “You have got to make a reservation immediately at the Rustic Goat.” So, on that note, if you find yourself in Anchorage, hit this place up. You won’t regret it. It will be a highlight of your trip. When I return here, I will be returning there, wearing my Rustic Goat beanie, too.

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Further Reading

I’ve traveled up to Alaska this week, as my partner is on a business trip here, so he bought me a ticket to visit him for a few days. Since the Trump regime has created chaos at the airports, and it isn’t clear which airports are being affected by moronic ICE thugs overseeing the machines and check-ins, I got up at 0430 in the morning for a 0830 flight to Chicago on Wednesday from Baltimore. I arrived at the airport’s long-term parking around 0510 and got transportation to the terminal. Much to my relief, there were no ICE thugs in sight, so I got through TSA security easily.

While in Chicago, I broke my 62-hour fast on a delicious fennel sausage pizza and met a great young Black man, a native Chicagoan, who told me that ICE was all over the airport there. (I didn’t see them, since I was already checked through.) He told me he was in line with an ICE agent and that for every 4 passengers the TSA agent checked in, the ICE agent would check in 1 person. He found this actually “sus” because of how long the ICE agent took to check each person’s passport, which I think was a decent theory to have. Anyway, my new friend eventually headed off to his destination after I finished my meal for the day, and then I made my way to my own gate to depart for Anchorage. The flight was long and uneventful, 7 hours in total. On the flight, though, which was packed, I wondered what was bringing each person to this far flung place. While in Chicago, I did run across a couple from Northern Virginia (one of my many old haunts) who told me that their good friend had moved up to Fairbanks). But that only explained two people and their visit here. The rest of them remained a mystery to me. Obviously, many were visiting for pleasure, but what about all the others? It reminded me of when I would come to and from Maine, as it’s another place that is not an easy location to reach. Alaska is a helluva lot harder to get to than Maine though!

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As the plain approached Anchorage, and with very sore derièrres from sitting in one position for so long, everyone opened their window shades, we got our first glimpses of Alaska. Forgetting about our sore behinds, most of us immediately whipped out our cameras to take photos of the sublime, snow-capped mountain ranges, covered in pink and lavender hues of light below us.

When I first landed in Alaska, I had to have a smoke after the long flight (you know how we smokers are), so I quickly ventured to one of the smoking areas outside of Anchorage’s airport. There, I met three nice indigenous men who smiled widely with nearly tootheless grins. They were smoking pot, and the small covered booth where the three of them sat smelled strongly of it. One of them told me he’d like to bounce me on his knee like a baby, and I told him I was too old for that. We all laughed. Eventually, they told me they were waiting for a bus to return to their small village, explained how they enjoyed ice fishing, and how they dried the fish on the beams along their porches of their homes. I told them this visit was my first time to Alaska, so they welcomed me heartily. Eventually, my partner picked me up, so I bid them farewell and told them to stay warm. They all laughed and said that I was the one who needed to stay warm.

Since I got in late, and had eaten my one meal of the day, there weren’t a lot of options for eating since most restaurants were already closed, but we still wanted to grab a libation and my partner was still hungry, so we headed to an Irish pub called Blarney Stone in downtown Anchorage and had a few drinks before turning in for the evening at our downtown hotel. My partner also got the wings, which looked pretty effing good, and I got an old fashioned. The banter with the other patrons was jovial and the bartender was kind and made good drinks, so it was a satsifying experience.

This morning when I went out for my morning coffee and cigarette, I noticed a beautiful totem pole carved on the side of a building near our hotel. Most of today has been spent recuperating from my long flight, so I got up late (0745), looked for jobs in my room, and am now looking forward to going to an interesting restaurant, the Rustic Goat, that looks out onto the Chugach Mountains. The Rustic Goat is run by Executive Chef Frazer Buchanan. Buchanan’s culinary career for most of his 17 years was spent in the lower 48 in Utah, California, and Oregon. About 4 years ago, however, he moved to Anchorage. The Rustic Goat is a mixture of French and Italian cuisine. Once I’ve visited it, I’ll provide a review of what I thought of the restaurant, the food, and the ambience.

As many of you know, Alaska was purchased by the United States from the Russian Empire in 1867 for $7.2 million, which was roughly 2 cents per acre The treaty was signed on March 30, 1867. At the time there were approximately 30,000 indigenous people living in the area, plus a small number of Russians. For more details about Alaska and its relationship to the U.S., PBS created highlights to read here.

Since the United States was still recovering from the destruction of the Civil War, the new state was neglected after its initial acquisition. Furthermore, when Alaska was purchased, all the land went to “public domain.” This period of time was also fraught with difficulties for all indigenous peoples across the U.S. as assimilation was so-calleld policy for them, meaning that children were required to go to boarding schools and indigenous land was given to individuals. As we know now, these boarding schools were rife with sexual and physical abuse, along with murder.

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Since Congress terminated treaty making with native Americans in 1871, there were no treaties made with the Alaskan peoples. So, while there was next to no interaction bewteen the federal government and indigenous groups early on, things would change in later years. Even worse, when the transaction took place between Russia and the U.S., the indigenous people in Alaska were not consulted about it. So, like other cases in the United States, this becomes a land back matter. On this front, in June of 2025, House Resolution 43: Alaska Native Village Municipal Lands Restoration Act of 2025 (H.R. 43), and House Resolution 42: Amend Alaska Native Claims Act (H.R. 42) by the United States Senate were passed.

As the Native Federation.org’s press release states about these achievements on June 25, 2025:

H.R. 43 aims to restore Alaska Native village municipal lands that were lost or diminished due to previous legislation and policies. This act recognizes the importance of these lands in preserving cultural identity and promotes self-determination for Indigenous communities. By allowing for the restoration and management of these lands, the legislation empowers local governance and protects vital resources, facilitating community development in alignment with traditional values and practices.

H.R. 42 focuses on amending the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), which was originally enacted in 1971. These amendments are designed to address long-standing concerns regarding land ownership, economic opportunities, and the benefits of resource development for Alaska Native people. The updates will streamline processes and improve access to education, health care, and infrastructure by ensuring that Alaska Natives can fully participate in the economic development of their regions.

That’s great news to learn for the indigenous people of Alaska.

More updates to come.

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[ANNOUNCEMENT: I have shut off my paid subscriptions because Substack allows literal Nazis to exist on this platform; I do not want any money from paid subscribers going to the founders. If you do wish to chip in and help me out, you can buy me a coffee here. Also, half the money still goes to my Palestinian family.]

Estimated prep time: 2 hours 20 minutes (20 minutes to make, 2 hours to bake and cool cookies)

Serves: 40 people (2 cookies per person)

Ingredients (5):

• 4 large whites, room temperature

• 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

• 1/8 teaspoon salt

• 1 (200 g) cup granulated sugar

• 1 teaspoon almond extract1

Tool That You’ll Need (3):

• Large piping bag

• Piping tip

• Stand mixer (or hand mixer—using a hand mixer will make it take a little longer)

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 225°F (105°C) and line a large cookie sheet with parchment paper or tin foil. Set aside.

2. Combine egg whites, cream of tartar, and salt in a large, grease-free bowl.

3. Pour the ingredients into the stand mixer bowl. Using the stand mixer, with the whisk attachment, stir on low speed until the mixture becomes foamy.

4. Once foamy, increase speed to high.

5. With the mixer still on high, slowly add the granulated sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time.

6. Beaut until mixture is thick, has a sheen, and has nearly tripled in size. The mixture should have stiff peaks, and the sugar should be totally dissolved. Test the mixture between your fingers. If it is gritty, the sugar is still not dissolved, and the mixture still needs to be run on high to smooth it out.

7. Once it’s smooth and the sugar is dissolved, add the 1 teaspoon of almond extract. If you are also using food coloring, add it now, too.

8. Next, fit a large disposable piping bag with a tip. Transfer the meringue to the piping bag and pipe onto the prepared cookie sheet. There doesn’t need to be much space between the meringue cookies, as they will not spread while baking.

9. Bake at 225°F (104°C) for 1 hour. After an hour, turn off the oven. Leave the oven door shut, and let the cookies cool completely inside it for another 1-2 hours before removing them.

10. The cookies should be crisp and can be stored in an airtight container away from heat and moisture. Enjoy!

An interesting fact about meringue, it was most likely not invented by the French! It’s attributed to a Swiss pastry chef named Gasparini in the 18th century. While there are many theories about the invention of meringue and meringue cookies, that doesn’t stop people from enjoying it in the different ways it is served (on top of cakes, served with pudding, offered as a solo cookie, etc.). So, when or if you find yourself baking these delectable treats, I hope you, your friends, and family will enjoy them thoroughly.

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Further Reading

Introduction

On October 31, 1922, King Immanuel III appointed Benito Mussolini prime minister of Italy. This appointment was a result of the now-infamous “March on Rome,” which occurred from October 22nd through 28th, leading to eventual fascist rule in the country and across Europe. The plan to seize power by descending on the Italian capital with Mussolini’s party, the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF), which was founded in 1921, had been circulating since 1919, and 1922 was the moment to seize the opportunity with Mussolini at the helm. At just 39, he became the youngest prime minister of Italy, helping to pave the way for a totalitarian dictatorship there, forging a relationship later with Hitler, and participating in World War II against the Allies. As we know now, Mussolini would wind up being executed, along with his mistress, Clara Petacci, by Italian partisans on April 28, 1945. (On a side note, given the strange dystopian world in which we find ourselves today, if you wish to argue with Mussolini’s granddaughter on Twitter,1 you can do so. Her name is Alessandra Mussolini, and she goes by the Twitter handle @Ale_Mussolini_ there. She famously called Jim Carey a bastard there in 2019.)

But before Mussolini’s neo-fascist granddaughter hopped on Twitter to argue with Carey, or even existed for that matter, or her grandfather aligned himself with Hitler, joined WWII, and eventually found himself—his corpse—strung up, alongside his mistress after the end of the war, Il Duce set out for Washington, D.C., for pragmatic as well as ambitious aims for Italy: to build an impressive, imposing Italian Embassy on 16th St. N.W. in what we all know now as the Columbia Height’s area of the city.

So, well before it was known as Columbia Heights, however, King Victor Emmanuel III sent Mussolini there to buy a property, sign the deed, and hire architects for the embassy. By 1925, the Beaux-Arts-influenced Italian Renaissance-style embassy, built of marble and cast stone, had been completed on a relatively rural part of land just outside D.C. by the New York architecture firm Warren and Wetmore, best known as the architects of Grand Central Station. (As an aside, it’s strange to us now to think of Columbia Heights as being “rural,” but during that time it was.) The cancelleria, or chancery,2 was built in the 1930s and, strangely, was once the side entrance to my apartment. The building was the Italian Embassy until 1977, then became the chancery until 2002, when it was sold to developers.

But it’s necessary to take a few steps back to look at even more rot before the arrival of the fascist stench soaked in from Mussolini and his ilk, as the land had originally been owned by a socialite eugenicist and racist named Mary Foote Henderson (1841-1931), who in 1906 destroyed her husband’s 40-year collection of 1,000 bottles of wine, whisky, and brandy. (She was, not surprisingly, given this, how shall we say, ludicrous move, also part of the temperance movement.) In true racist fashion of the day, The New York Times wrote, describing the event as follows:

Along the gutter down the hill Negroes gathered, and with tomato cans and other utensils scooped up what they could of the liquor and drank it. As they enjoyed themselves they sang old-time plantation melodies, while the Rechabites3 within the courtyard sang stirring temperance hymns….4

Henderson was also responsible for pushing the entire Black community out of Meridian Hill Park, which was just across the street from her castle.5 As John DeFerrari explains:

After many years of persistent lobbying, Mary succeeded in 1910 in getting Congress to authorize the purchase of land for construction of Meridian Hill Park across 16th Street from Boundary Castle where she had previously hoped a new Executive Mansion would be built. She argued that the stunning views from this site as well as the opportunity for elegant terracing and cascades made the spot ideal for a formal park. As Congress and city officials were won over, no one seemed to care that the site was already densely occupied by African-Americans living in mostly single-story frame houses. Since Civil War times, African-Americans had settled in this area, which had been just outside the city limits. The future park site had been subdivided in 1867, and many of its residents owned their own homes. They were all forced to leave. Later Mary Henderson would boast to a reporter that ‘we bought out the owners of the shacks on our hill and pulled them down.’ Once the land was cleared, it took many years to construct the park, one of the most beautiful in the city. No trace remains of the previous inhabitants.6

She seemed nice, didn’t she? One castle wasn’t enough for Henderson, apparently, plus to hell with the long-time residents. A beautiful park was more important. And she needed another castle, too, so she was intent on pushing out all the Black folks in the area who had lived there since Civil War times, and then proudly boasted about it afterwards. Here’s the one she first built—she was inspired by the Romanesque castles she saw in Germany and Normandy. Guess it wasn’t big enough, huh? The grand castle was eventually sold in 1949 and demolished. After that, the land apparently stood empty for another 30 years, when finally Katharine Graham (1917 - 2001), daughter of Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer, who also owned The Washington Post from 1963 to 1991, sold it to a real estate developer, who built Beekam Place in 1976 (those properties were completed in 1977).

I did not learn of any of this history about Mary Foote Henderson before I moved into the former Italian Embassy. I was vaguely aware that Mussolini had signed the deed, and I admit to a frightful naïveté in deciding to move forward with living in an Embassy bearing his signature, but there was an intoxicating allure to the place that to this day I have difficulty explaining, not to mention that the cost of rent for a rather dark basement apartment was prohibitively high for our budget. Nevertheless, I—we—should have known better. Interestingly, when we first moved into our unit, as the embassy had been converted into luxury apartments, the company had images of fascists inside the building on their website. (I may sound like I am absolutely full of bullshit, but as I delve into the hauntings of this place, I have a theory as to why I ignored all these things. More on that in a moment.) As for the fascists at the Embassy itself in pictures, they have since scrubbed them. I have searched the internet for them, but to no avail. That said, I have also reached out to the Italian Embassy about their archives, which contain countless clippings from the previous one. As of this writing, I have reached out twice via email, and they have yet to respond.

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That said, its fascist past, along with Henderson’s blight on the land from her racism and eugenics, is clear. As seen below, once lines were drawn and Mussolini’s aggression became clear, strife and protests erupted outside the embassy.

These protests continued. Here, as can be seen below in the picture, in 1939, protesters appeared again, picketing the embassies of Italy and Spain (Spain’s former embassy was located on 16th St. N.W. and is now the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain and the Spain-USA Foundation; it is now located at 2375 Pennsylvania Ave). Over one hundred protesters showed up, denouncing the invasion of Spain, Ethiopia, and Albania, plus the activists argued that their own peoples were being enslaved by fascist ideology.

Later that day, a small group of the protesters was allowed to deliver a letter to the Italian Embassy, condemning Italy’s fascist actions.

Despite this dark history of fascist Italy’s shadow no longer casting itself directly on the building itself, remnants of it still remain, and perhaps that’s the hauntings that we experienced, ephemeral, spiritual detritus, gauzy, hate-filled ghosts, hungry for attention, wanting us to be reminded of the spectacle of fascism once there on full display. Furthermore, fascist elements are difficult to scrub entirely off, such as the fact that the original deed has Mussolini’s signature on it and the building's old Latin inscription bearing the fasces, the latter of which are bundles of sticks or rods with an axe inserted into them, are also visible. As the Prince of Petworth wrote about on Popville in 2018, that remains on the side of the old fascist Italian Embassy for curious onlookers to see. (After Popville posted this story, the Washington Post also ran a story about it.)

On each side of this inscription were once fasces,7 and the inscription itself reads: “AEDES A.D. MCMXXV AERE PVBL EXSTRVCTAE”/“A temple/building constructed with public funds in 1925.” (That’s my rough translation of it.)

Thus far, only the exteriorities have been explored, and high-level explanations of fascism, a politics of superficial spectacle, have been glossed over, much like the outside of the former fascist Italian Embassy. What were the interiors of this building like, and did we experience hauntings there?

Interiorities: Inside the Haunted Old Fascist Embassy and the Inducement of Trance-Like States

After being moved to rent there, despite the prohibitively high rent, induced by the building into an almost trance-like state, we moved to the old fascist Italian Embassy during an unseasonably cold May in 2019. As soon as we moved into our new basement apartment, with its spa-deep, soaker tubs, gas-top oven, stainless steel appliances, and other amenities, I would wake each morning, after my partner had left earlier than I, to an odd smell in the bedroom: that of burning hair. If anyone has ever used a curling iron and left it in their hair too long, singeing it, the smell is quite distinct. And, so everyone is aware, I do not own a curling iron, and I’ve never once curled my hair (I have curly hair, so it’s not necessary). Eventually, I ignored the odd smell, but it never disappeared in the early mornings when I would wake to get ready for work. Interestingly, that was the only time I’d smell it, and it was right near my side of the bed; nowhere else in the apartment did the smell permeate. (My partner also smelled it.)

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In hindsight, becoming acclimated to strangeness became our modus operandi. The burning smell of hair was only the beginning of what was to come—it was a warm-up as our trance-like stupor intensified as well. Next came the sounds above us from the soggiorno (that’s Italian for living room or parlor), as well as the constant sound of running water in the wall just outside our bedroom. First, the irritating sounds from the soggiorno, which also led to another discovery about the building from Clark,* the security guard. Our cozy library was directly under the soggiorno, a common space for all the residents of the building. It was also right behind the reception area and the building’s entrance.

Every single night at 9:30 p.m. on the dot, we would hear heavy furniture being moved around on the parquet floors in the soggiorno. These sounds of moving furniture lasted until exactly 11:30 p.m. At first, we chalked it up to the staff—one of the receptionists—moving furniture around, perhaps for an upcoming event the next day. However, the sounds persisted every single night. Why were they always moving so much furniture, we wondered. We both finally got curious on Thanksgiving night when a friend spent the evening and night with us (she could hear it, too; it was impossible not to hear). Taking a break from his wine, my partner went upstairs to inquire at the front desk about the sounds. (By this time, we’d gotten friendly with the staff who worked at the building.)

When my partner came back downstairs, he looked somewhat stunned.

“What is it?” I asked, sipping my red wine.

“No one is moving furniture, and the soggiorno closes around 9 p.m. on most nights,” he replied, as we could still hear furniture being moved above our heads. The receptionist was emphatic, too, that she had not been in that room the entire evening, nor had anyone else. The conversation became stranger, he said, as the security guard, Clark, fell quiet as my partner joked to the receptionist about ghosts and spirits in the building.

“Clark has seen a ghost here. Haven’t you, Clark?” the receptionist joshed him, he told us.

My partner told us Clark was not amused, far from it. Instead, he appeared shaken, mumbled something about ghosts, and scurried away. (Clark quit shortly after this conversation took place.)

With no explanation, the sound of furniture moving above us every evening never ceased. After that, and as those sounds persisted, things began to make noises in the walls. This time, it was the sound of gushing water in a pipe, running constantly.

This new sound developed a few months after we moved in. While the furniture became almost a soft lull at night and I got somewhat used to the smell of burning hair in the mornings, the rushing water in a pipe in the wall caused my partner and me great consternation. As soon as we began to hear it, we called maintenance and submitted a request to investigate. Maintenance showed up, two men, and they obviously heard it, too. They did their own investigating, only to come to the puzzling discovery that no pipes ran through that wall. How was it possible that all of us could hear gushing water in what sounded like pipes in the wall, yet we were just all hearing something? It didn’t make sense. We also joked with them about the place being haunted. Like Clark, neither of them found the comments amusing. The sound of gushing water persisted, just as the sound above our heads of moving furniture did. The problem was never solved.

That’s not where the water issues stopped, either. The faucets in our bathroom began to run spontaneously on their own, too.

As you can see in the picture above, the faucet handles must be cranked by hand in order to turn them on. They are not a simple lever that can easily open the tap. The faucets always turned on by themselves at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. in the morning when we were both in dead slumbers. As you can imagine, it was startling to wake to the faucet in our bedroom, which is generally where it happened the most, on full blast. Again, there is no explanation for why these occurrences took place and why they happened on numerous occasions.

The mood was souring for us both. Tensions were rising, and desolation was setting in. We began to notice that apartments that were once filled with tenants were suddenly vacant; people were leaving in droves—were they encountering hauntings, too? And then one day, the impossible happened when I returned home with a few groceries and parked in the garage beneath the building. I walked from my car through three sets of doors and my apartment door without any keys. Every single door, the three that required a FOB key and the apartment door, which obviously also required another key, were entirely unlocked for me, and no one opened any of the doors for me. The two keys were eventually found in my car’s console, having gone missing for a few days before we discovered them on a Sunday. This odd event occurred on a Friday, so I was with my partner the entire weekend, and we searched everywhere for the keys before discovering them in my car. We both shuddered when we realized I had gotten into the building and the apartment with no keys. Again, it defied reason.

Our quibbling seemed to worsen while we lived there, too, especially the final months as these odd occurrences intensified. It came to a head when my partner told me not to move legal documentation and papers related to his car. I promised him I would not touch the papers he placed on the side of our large, long dining room table. I kept my word, but somehow the papers disappeared, as they say, into thin air. Poof! Gone. Gone. Gone. Usually cool and collected, the disappearance of these papers, understandably so, irked my partner to no end.

“I told you not to touch my papers.”

“I didn’t touch them. I swear,” I said earnestly.

But no matter how many times I said that (it became my mantra), he didn’t believe me. Until those papers were rediscovered, I was the culprit.

Meanwhile, one afternoon, our dear friend and cleaner, Marta, came over to clean our place. I entered the apartment and began to have a casual conversation with her. While standing beneath a heavy light fixture above my head in our hallway, I moved a few inches to readjust how I was standing in my high heels. That’s when the light fixture came crashing down less than an inch away from my skull.

We lasted less than a year at the old fascist Italian Embassy, successfully breaking our lease early and moving to a residence that lacked any of these odd occurrences. On their own, they may seem like trifling events, but when combined together, mixed with the land’s sullied past, along with the way in which the space itself seemed to have a grip on us, putting us both in trance-like states, it’s hard not to describe it as anything but that of hauntings.

Interestingly, when we packed everything up, the movers discovered my partner’s legal papers and other related documentation to his car buried in a plastic bag under the kitchen sink. How it got there, to this day, neither of us knows.

The specter of fascism is no longer about mere hauntings locked inside buildings like the old fascist Italian Embassy on 16th St. N.W. Once again, they have been unleashed across the globe, specifically from Washington, D.C., from the Oval Office itself. Perhaps that’s why I was reminded of these strange occurrences inside the old fascist Italian Embassy, as those forces are no longer contained within older spaces such as it, but running roughshod around the world. Trance-like states that people find themselves placed in by populist, fascist leaders are something I’ve also explored here on my Substack. (The earlier piece, of course, that I wrote was not about the supernatural but on the psychoanalytic.) But what if the building did something to my partner and me in a similar fashion that fascistic leaders do to their followers on that psychoanalytic level, but it was supernatural instead? I’ll leave that question for you to answer. I don’t have the answer or answers to how or why things unfolded the way they did. That said, as mentioned earlier, the fascistic ghouls’ spiritual detritus left their dusty sediment on both the old fascist Italian Embassy and all over the globe, and that sediment hasn’t just settled but instead set off a colossal duststorm with which we’re all now contending. So, isn’t it high time we picked up a dust cloth and got rid of it once and for all?

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*Names have been changed to protect identities

7

Here is an image of Mussolini speaking on a balcony. Two fasces are on either side of him. These are what used to be on the sides of the inscription on the former fascist Italian Embassy.