rAIny days

News! My essay “Home Range” was named a finalist for the South 85 Journal Editor’s Choice Award. Thanks to Leslie Pietrzyk, Laura Platas Scott, and their colleagues for giving my college road trip/death of a parent/COVID lockdown ramblings such a good home. It’s in great company. The theme of the spring/summer issue is “borders | boundaries | lines." Read it here.

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May or March? The calendar and the deepening green of the garden this week suggest May, but the thermometer says otherwise. A cold steady rain moved in earlier this week, tap-tap-tapping on the roof over my work space. I haven’t quite gotten over the pathetic fallacy of believing that weather mirrors mood. Here’s a rainy-day view from my writing chair:

Who pulled the plug on Mr. Frog and Billy Bear? Why do we still have enormous stuffed animals in the house?

As you can see, things around here—household organization, liberal democracy—have been in a state of semi-collapse lately. M. Gessen captured the general feeling in a May 28 op-ed in the NYT:

The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chain saw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms.

Unlike the Russian autocratic breakthrough (or, for that matter, the Hungarian one, which has apparently provided some of Donald Trump’s playbook), the transformation of American government and society hasn’t been spread out over decades or even years. It’s been everything everywhere all at once.

As Adrienne Matei explained in a May 22 essay in the Guardian, things have now reached a state of hypernormalization:

First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.

The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.

This month I’ve carried on in an effort to get some books read, pages written, and general living done in spite of [waves hands at everything]. The writing chair’s tucked into a corner of what my family persists in calling the playroom, though it’s been years since that was its primary function. It’s an old sleeping porch, enclosed to make an all-season room decades before we moved into this 1922 rowhouse.

Because it used to be open to the air, the playroom feels more connected to the outside in a way the other rooms in the house do not. It’s easier to sense the outside temperature here. The rain sounds a little closer on the thin roof. The boundary between the everyday and the dreamworld feels thinner. It’s a place to find some shelter from the calamities of the world, even if it’s not well insulated from the weather.

I can hear myself think here, and the ghosts are friendly. I am never lonely in this room. Two bookshelves filled with old friends from the kids’ childhoods and mine stand cozily at either end. The dog curls up in her bed next to the chair and sleeps while I work. She’d steal the chair in a heartbeat if I gave her the chance. She feels comfortable in this space too.

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Sparkle, sparkle, little chatbot

SkyNet lite

One intrusive presence will not leave me alone no matter where I park myself, and I don’t mean the dog. If I’m on one of my digital devices, some manifestation of AI tries to sneak through any digital crack it can find.

My generation imprinted as kids and teens on movies like “The Terminator” and “WarGames.” Early in life we were primed to brace for sentient-computer dystopias in which intelligent SkyNets come after humanity. I didn’t expect the rise of the machines to be so damned annoying.

On top of the multitude of social, cultural, environmental, ethical, IP/copyright, and business questions and problems the rapid deployment of AI has created, it rudely insists on grabbing my attention even if I don’t want to use it. Talk about everything everywhere all at once.

[Lest you think I hate all things machine-related, here’s an AI application dreamed up by my friend Mike Witmore that looks kind of cool: BitBard, “a performance platform for AI-generated Shakespearean characters. The troupe—Falstaff, Lady Macbeth, Iago, Miranda, and Sir Andrew—interact with audiences, each other, and Shakespeare’s texts. Digital artifacts from their performances and interactions are archived, annotated, and bound to the blockchain.”]

I’ve come to dread seeing the telltale sparkles emoji on my screen. My hometown newspaper, The Washington Post, flogs AI recaps of readers’ comments and tries to serve up AI-generated summaries of articles. The settings for the Chrome browser now include “AI innovations” with a default “Help me write” option. (Hell no.) I open Gmail and Google wants me to take Gemini AI for a spin. Even my meditation app offers up an “empathetic AI companion,” a feature not designed to create a Zen-like calm in this particular user. I block, disable, opt out, repeat. It gets tiresome. (My nose for chirpy-stilted ChatGPT-generated prose, however, gets stronger every day.)

A sampler of screenshots from my daily digital rounds:

I promise you that this newsletter, like everything I write, is 100% the work of my overtaxed, imperfect, un-AI-assisted human brain.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,

Jen

Earth Day and a new essay

Happy Earth Day! As you’ve probably noticed, the planet needs some TLC now more than ever. (Check out this BBC story about images from space that capture how 50 years of climate change has affected our beloved planet.)

I’m not a Catholic, but I appreciated climate activist Bill McKibben’s tribute to the late Pope Francis as a champion of the earth and its inhabitants:

I think Francis’s project for the earth—a recovery of fellow feeling, with a special attention to the poor—is the only thing that can save us over time.

Worth a read this Earth Day. I hope you’ll be kind to yourselves, each other, and the planet today and every day.

I’d forgotten that I planted some Joe Pye Weed (a pollinator fave) in the garden last year, so it was a nice surprise to see it springing up.

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New writing: I’m so pleased to have an essay, “Home Range,” out in the world this month. It’s about a college road trip I took to California with my son in the pandemic summer of 2021, soon after my mother died, with lockdown and the J6 insurrection casting long shadows. Birds (hummingbirds and swallows) make an appearance too.

I haven’t written such a personal piece before, and I’m grateful to the editors of South 85 Journal for giving it such a good home. If you’ve lost a parent and/or launched a kid into the world, you’ll probably recognize some of the feelings I describe. Here’s a taste:

For a long time, I thought of home as a place that does not change. But the comings and goings of that summer reminded me that home reshapes itself into something new, over and over. Even if you never leave, it will change around you, as the people who made it familiar make their exits. My mother has left for good. My children now come and go, each return a little more fleeting than the last. I’m still here, for now.

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This morning I went over to the Supreme Court for a rally in support of inclusive education, organized by a coalition that includes Authors Against Book Bans. (I’m a member; if you’re an author, please consider signing up.) Why today? The court was hearing arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case that could have significant implications for what books—whose stories—are deemed acceptable for school kids.

SCOTUSblog explains:

“In Mahmoud v. Taylor a coalition of parents from Montgomery County, Md., contend that requiring their children to participate in instruction that includes LGBTQ+ themes violates their religious beliefs and thus their First Amendment right to freely exercise their religion.”

This afternoon I’m going over to my neighborhood indie bookstore to pick up a copy of Jacob’s Room to Choose, one of the books cited by the plaintiffs. It’s published by Magination Press, the publishing arm of the American Psychological Association, which filed an amicus brief in the case:

A substantial body of research indicates that inclusive instructional materials that acknowledge LGBTQ+ people and stories as part of the general curriculum reduce student victimization in schools and ameliorate associated mental health issues for student populations. As the largest professional association of psychologists in the United States, the APA is deeply concerned about the mental health effects on students of limiting instruction using books that feature LGBTQ+ characters.

Hats off to the APA, the AABB, and everyone else standing up for inclusivity and diverse stories. Let the kids read.

Cheers,

Jen

Stress reading

Shared spaces and good books

Greetings from the nation’s capital, where things are—well, TBH, they’re not good. If you want to know how many of us here are feeling, this guy captures the local mood pretty darn well.

Tragedy-mask floor tiles, Great Hall of the Folger Shakespeare Library

I’m typing this at Quill & Crumb, the new cafe in the Great Hall of the renovated Folger Shakespeare Library. It’s a mere two blocks from the Capitol, where the fate of DC’s budget (and so much else) hangs by a thread. There’s a hell of a lot to be angry, upset, and worried about, close to home and far away. I could fill this newsletter about how hard the last six weeks have been for my Capitol Hill neighborhood, not to mention the rest of the world, and for so many people and institutions I care about.

But that doesn’t feel like the best use of my time or yours. When every news blast or social media post conveys yet another horror/outrage, you don’t need me adding to the psychic load. Not today, anyway.

So instead I’ll tell you how all around me in this beautiful space people are reading, catching up with friends, working on laptops, scribbling in notebooks. A handful in suits look like they might be here to hash out some political business, but this is not a space where DOGE boys or Muskovites would hang out. It’s too bookish, too convivial, too humane, too…shared.

I’ve sought out spaces like this all my life, but they’ve taken on new meaning for me amidst the current chaos. I often go work at a neighborhood branch of the DC Public Library—not as upscale as the Folger, and with fewer comfy places to read and no fancy coffee drinks to order, but accessible and welcoming. Good things both. Where do you go to think, read, reflect, and be alone together?

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Is stress reading a thing? I’m already three books ahead on my Goodreads 2025 reading challenge, and I don’t see any reason to slow down. (I post mini-reviews on my Instagram account for now, until I figure out a better, less Meta-heavy platform I like.)

Last night I trekked across town to the flagship Politics & Prose on Connecticut Avenue NW to hear my friend Gary Krist talk about his new book, Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco. (PW called it “a masterful work of true crime….as edifying as it is exciting”—starred review.) Check it out. I’ll be reading it after my spouse is done with our copy. I loved seeing a lot of DC literary friends at the reading, too. As another pal said to me recently, “We’re all in this together.”

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Signs of life, Capitol Hill, March 13, 2025

New writing: I got to escape 2025 Washington via some literary time travel when my editor at the New York Times Book Review asked me to review Linda Joan Smith’s The Peach Thief, a historical middle-grade novel set in 1850 in Lancashire, England. The book follows Scilla Brown, an unwanted workhouse girl who stumbles into a paradise of sorts when she steals into an earl’s garden in search of a peach.

Caught and mistaken for a boy, Scilla’s put to work scrubbing plant pots and in the process discovers her own version of paradise:

Every garden is a secret garden, revealing wonders, if you know how to look. Smith, an author of garden books and the former editor of Country Home magazine, writes with a hands-in-the-dirt affinity for the rhythms and needs of growing things. “The Peach Thief” bursts with sensory details: the sun-warmed velvet of a ripe peach, rhubarb plants with “stalks red as rubies must be,” “the hum of life” in the “tiny scrap of green” of a cauliflower seedling.

Is Scilla, lying about her identity and her background, the serpent in this eden? You’ll have to read the book to find out. :)

Keep reading—and keep on keeping on, because we are all in this together.

Cheers,

Jen

Ice, fire, and Feiffer

Hello friends,

It’s been a weird and scary few days here in DC. It feels dangerous to leave the house. An Arctic blast rolled in yesterday like a freight train and knocked the temps into the low teens. Taking the dogs around the block means suiting up like a polar explorer.

Taking the dogs out. [Frank Hurley, Huskies pulling sledge, First Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-14. Silver gelatin print, from the collections of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, via Flickr Commons]

The weather’s far from the scariest thing to hit town this week. Apologies to my high school English teachers for indulging in pathetic fallacy, but the cold feels like retribution for what’s been unfolding in DC. I could go on, but I doubt you need me to catch you up on the news.

To distract myself from one disaster by keeping tabs on another, I’ve been using the Watch Duty app to see if my oldest kid, who relocated to the LA area in September, is still safely out of the fire zone. (So far she is.) It’s an impressive app, and doing real public service. Since the fires broke out, Watch Duty’s become a critical resource for a lot of people. Many media outlets have written it up now, including the Verge:

If you live in Los Angeles, you are probably already intimately familiar with Watch Duty, the free app that shows active fires, mandatory evacuation zones, air quality indexes, wind direction, and a wealth of other information that everyone, from firefighters to regular people, have come to rely on during [these] historic and devastating wildfires.

Watch Duty is unique in the tech world in that it doesn’t care about user engagement, time spent, or ad sales. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit behind it only cares about the accuracy of the information it provides and the speed with which the service can deliver that information. The app itself has taken off, rocketing to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Over 1 million people have downloaded it over the last few days alone.

Tech isn’t going to save us, but applied like this, it helps.

[A good read related to the LA fires: Carolyn Kellogg on the seven books she saved when it came time to evacuate.]

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New writing from me: Don’t forget about the humanities, either. We still need those, so it made me happy to write this piece for EdSurge: “As Humanities Fight for Support, New Journal Aims to Celebrate Their Role in Public Life”

A new peer-reviewed, open-access journal, Public Humanities, aims to strengthen the connections between university-based humanities work and the wider world, creating a space for academics and practitioners to share what they do and how they do it. And its creation is a sign of how professors and others in higher education want to make the case that, in spite of perennial laments about the crisis in the humanities, they’re very much alive, especially if you look beyond dismal stats about funding cuts, threatened departments and declining majors.

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RIP Jules Feiffer, whose illustrations for The Phantom Tollbooth were a source of enormous joy for me as a kid. (They still are.)

My childhood copy of The Phantom Tollbooth has a few miles on the frame.

From the WaPo obit for him:

“Discharged in 1953, Mr. Feiffer was unable to get his comic work published. He worked at various jobs, getting himself fired every six months so he could collect unemployment. He called it ‘my own personal National Endowment for the Arts subsidy, awarded by myself at six-month intervals for a period of three years.’”

Be like Jules Feiffer and find your own way.

Stay warm, stay safe, keep clear of frost and fire and insurrectionists.

Thanks for reading,

Jen

Twelfth Night/J6

Notes on an insurrection

[Ed. note: What follows is an excerpt from a not-yet-published essay I wrote that features, among other things, what I saw unfold at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. I would much rather be writing about today as Twelfth Night, marking the end of the festive season, but J6 is an anniversary I will not forget. Neither should you. —JH]

The east front of the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021, 2:26 p.m.

On January 6, 2021, a mile and a half from the rowhouse where my family and I spent so many COVID days, a mob invaded the Capitol. What I’d grown up believing would never happen in modern America—a violent attempt to undo the outcome of a free and fair election—was unfolding almost in my backyard.

Around 2 p.m. that day, on my way home from an errand, I heard the news on the radio. I should have gone straight home. Instead I parked and made my way to the corner between the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, facing the east side of the Capitol. To my mind, it’s one of the most beautiful intersections in the city, though it wasn’t beauty that draw me there that day. I needed to see for myself.

Since 9/11, Washingtonians had learned never to venture too close to certain Federal buildings. We had no senators or congresspeople; now we couldn’t even access parts of our own city, shut out by bollards and barricades and hurricane fencing.

The January 6 rioters didn’t care about barriers. Nothing—not fences, not police, not democratic norms—stood in their way. I watched them roil across the plaza in front of the Capitol, through territory normally occupied by tourists and joggers, and surge up the steps. Even from two long blocks away, I could hear the yells and the roars as they breached the building.

Across the intersection from where I stood, a man wrapped in an American flag yelled at a group of police officers, who seemed unsure how to react. They probably couldn’t believe it either. Behind me, a young blonde woman who looked like a congressional staffer chit-chatted with a middle-aged couple in red MAGA hats. She had her dog out for a midday walk. “Trump supporters are always so nice,” she said.

I heard explosions at the top of the Capitol steps. Fireworks? Tear gas? Some kind of cannon? All of these possibilities seemed absurd, or would have on any other day. But I could see the smoke and hear the yells of the rioters as they forced their way in. I didn’t know then how overwhelmed the Capitol Police and the MPD were, or that it would still be hours before the National Guard got the okay to go in and help shut down the violence.

I went home. There was no place else to go.

Over the next few days, as video and eyewitness accounts of Jan. 6 flooded the media, DC braced for more attacks, more violence. These people would try anything. That much was clear. But Inauguration Day came and went, and terrible things did not happen. This time the National Guard took up posts on every corner close to the Capitol, making friends with neighbors and their kids and dogs. The transfer of power took place peacefully, behind taller fences and more layers of security than even this city was used to.

From my bedroom window I watched the Marine One helicopter ferrying the ex-president and his wife out of town. They flew close to my house, following the course of the Anacostia River, headed east and south, until I lost sight of them.

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Here we are, four years later, and the security fencing has gone up again. It is some comfort that Jan. 6, 2025 will not unfold the way Jan. 6, 2021 did. The Capitol will not be breached, the results of the latest election will be certified without violence, and there will be a peaceful transfer of power. In the next few days, Jimmy Carter will lie in state under the Capitol dome, a reminder that politicians sometimes work on behalf of things greater than themselves. The flags are flying at half-mast for him. I hope they’re not flying at half-mast for democracy too.

Wishing you a free and peaceful 2025,

Jen

The U.S. Supreme court behind riot fencing, Jan. 9, 2021