Today’s newsletter post has a fun announcement in it. (But still more of the usual too!) shanders-red-eye.beehiiv.com/p/i-love-wri...

Speaking of women being treated like shit, today’s post is on the pressure women/mothers get to do things simply because we enjoy them (like knit or write stories we haven’t already sold for money).

It’s actually brilliant. If you police away everything people use to make themselves feel comfortable/human during pregnancy, you will wind up driving down the birth rate in every community EXCEPT the ones in which ruthlessly dominate women. It’s brilliant and perfectly evil.

Today’s newsletter post has a fun announcement in it. (But still more of the usual too!) shanders-red-eye.beehiiv.com/p/i-love-wri...

I am enjoying Black Rabbit, but I am very preoccupied with wondering why they didn’t cast Jude and Jason in the opposite roles? They surely must have considered it and it would have made so much more sense????

I am absolutely fine with hyping a book that I secretly didn't care for, because I want books like it—books of all types—to continue existing

I have a question about the Rapture and I promise I don’t mean this flippantly. How do the failed past predictions factor into the belief that it’s coming tomorrow? Is it like, “We now know something that previous scholars didn’t know,” or do believers think that the Rapture DID come those times

My husband and I both have to work three days in-office each week now, and every Sunday we sit down with our calendar, bizarrely optimistic that this will be the week we figure out how to make that work 😃

Wait I just heard the rapture is coming??!! Thank god

Congrats to the winner, Will Boast, and finalists of the 2025 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction! Will’s collection was in my first-round judging pile and it knocked my socks off. Viva la short story! ugapress.wordpress.com/2025/09/18/w...

I have one piece of advice for working moms, and it is this: If you ever find yourself with a day off AND CHILDCARE, tell no one. Absolutely no one. (But what about my spouse and my BFF mom? You must mean except for them?) No, I mean them. Them in particular. Literally who else would I mean????

The second wildest thing is the story of your bad day will be so banal, so clogged with confusing logistical details, that you won’t even be able to share it with most of your support system. Better just to say you had a bad day and let them imagine that you got a little bit wet in the rain or w/e.

The wildest thing about being a working mom is that you can have the hardest, most fucked-up day you’ve had in months, and your reward will almost definitely be that the following day is worse. This is because we borrow from our own wellbeing, not the kids’, so all problems get kicked to future us.

This story is so beautiful!! Read it, read it now

A piece by @kristenmulrooney.bsky.social in @thepom.bsky.social that perfectly expresses how I feel about AI in the creative arts:

Controversial opinion: Jennifer Aniston was actually born to play Alex Levy, but suffering through Rachel Green was the price we had to pay to earn her

Also, please make no mistake, I would have preferred to get this done before they were back in their classrooms where the air is a dense mist of germs. But we are at the mercy of what very much feels like a coordinated effort timed precisely to make that impossible.

At a time when C0VID is (yet again) surging, you will never believe how hard it was to source and schedule vaccine boosters for my kids, even in a state that is prioritizing common sense over what some guy without a medical degree said. I deeply resent what an uphill battle it is to keep them safe.

Things are bad enough that common-sense statements by insurance companies are as good as it gets right now

This is my local indie! They supported Company multiple times (events for my hardcover and paperback books, plus an Indie Next rec) and are just all around wonderful. If you’re buying a book, always order through an indie! If you don’t have your own, go through @loyaltybooks.bsky.social:

If you've never seen this, you really oughta watch it. Watch Harry Connick Jr get the white people clapping on the one and three to start clapping on the two and four. What a brilliant musician

Periodic reminder that no one is born already “good at family paperwork.” It’s not a skill. It’s the intersection of (1) attentiveness to deadlines, (2) ability to follow through, and (3) (maybe) legible handwriting. The average employable worker is perfectly adequate at all those things.

How exactly can a body hanging from a tree IN ITSELF not be evidence of foul play?? This place I tell you www.mpbonline.org/blogs/news/l...

Considering there are about 10,000 reasons to assume this is marketing bullshit, can anyone think of even one reason to believe he might be correct

The Washington Post now has no Black Opinion columnists - none - at a time when white nationalism is ascendant in our nation. I am grateful to Karen for the truth and fearlessness her work has always shown. Keep shining that light, my friend.

One thing about her is that she did the thing

Sometimes my excitement about something is completely subsumed by my stunned disbelief that it is so. This is so well-deserved; and, how can he possibly be the first variety.com/2025/tv/awar...

Now the biggest gap in my social life is a catty writing/publishing group text.

When you're a new parent, you might find it really easy to relate to other new parents. But I'm finding again that ~4 is when the general peer group of "new parent" starts to disintegrate. Parents of infants can swap sleep sympathy or diaper recs and it can often be useful.

I love intergenerational friendships and have some very close ones, but one of the best things about holding onto your school friends for decades is that sometimes at the hangout you get to look around and say “Can you believe we’re [age]????” And everyone is like I KNOW

Wes brought me to see the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra playing Beyoncé hits. Of course the night happened to fall on a day when I successfully drank 96 oz of water, and I wore a cute jumpsuit. So here’s a selfie. IYKYK

For anyone like me who was wondering! (We opted for Moderna because cases are up in our area, but I might have risked it if I’d known this timing)

Are swimming lessons going to be the aspect of parenthood that finally breaks me?? It really feels like yes??

I went to bed at 1:30 by accident (mf’ing Unknown Number) and then one of the kids woke me up at 4. I have gone to work on less sleep (the early days of twins), but it did not usually go well

I finished and I was right but found that to be extremely sad and also cheating

I’m about halfway through Unknown Number and I feel like I know what’s going on (I’ll confirm after), but I am astounded they have made something this high-stakes so mind-numbingly annoying and weightless. Please let this be worth it

I don’t know what to say about the death by gun violence of a person whose every public action was rooted in hatred and who opposed gun control with all his might. But I do know that I hate that I’m raising children in a country where public policy agreed with such a person. Gun control now.

Let me be even clearer. In the current political climate, I find it impossible to believe that the ultimate purpose of these mandates is anything other than forcing a cultural shift that reduces women’s financial independence. The people behind it are saying as much. Corporate profit is secondary.

As my friends and loved ones tell me about their offices’ intensifying RTO mandates while the news tells me about women leaving the workforce, all I can say is: POSIWID. But tell me more about how nice it is to eat cafeteria food together.

I so badly hope no one on earth sees this

Women’s clothing websites: “Frances is 5’9” and is wearing a size XS. Zoe is 5’7” and is wearing a size M.” The models: 👯‍♀️ You don’t want to give me even a HINT who’s who??

They told me I can reveal my book cover soon and as much as I understand that no one will care as much as I do, I will be revealing ✨the hell✨ out of it

This review is so funny and snarky (to be fair, Friend started it), and again it begs the question: Do any of these tech bros have even a scintilla of understanding about human nature

@laureneahmed.bsky.social very aptly referred to this as “using all my remembering on others and having none left for me,” and yes that exactly

Today in working mom, I packed all the lunches, wrote out the loving notes, prepped the start-of-year emergency food bags, laid out the outfits, got a healthy breakfast on the table, got one kid to school early, and arrived early at my office, where I promptly discovered I had forgotten my laptop

The funny thing is that I feel like as a musician, Steve Martin would be absolutely delighted by this

Wait, this is also probably obvious, but schedule yours and your co-parent’s for different days (we didn’t this time, oops)

With little kids, you have to totally rethink your threshold for considering yourself incapacitated. There are a bunch of maladies that I once would have considered bad enough to warrant a sick day that now don’t even warrant a 9 am lie-in 😀

If you’re planning a Moderna Covid booster, I recommend preparing for major muscle aches the next day: clear your schedule, queue up some movies, rest. I do not recommend having your kids lose your wedding rings in a massive toy pile and spending all day bending into various crannies to find them.

This is looking better than anticipated!