Pronouncement today from my 10yo daughter: this is my first whoopee cushion. It won’t be my last.

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

"The challenge for the Auschwitz museum now is finding a way to preserve the human feeling of testimony when the question of how it felt can no longer be answered firsthand." For International Holocaust Remembrance Day, an important story from @cfhervey.bsky.social www.thebulwark.com/p/saving-his...

This is a really beautiful reflection on the way Auschwitz is preserving small items—toothbrushes, shoes, artworks—in the hopes they can tell stories when the last Holocaust survivors are gone.

My latest piece, at The Bulwark: open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

My daughter has taken to putting inspirational post-its on the bathroom mirror. I get to see this first thing every morning:

At a coffee shop sitting across from a first date in progress. I can't articulate how I know this but one glance at them and it's abundantly clear.

The Guadalupe

When I am sitting in between my parents and my in-laws and watching them have fun I often think I am the luckiest person in the world.

it's a long way off but inside it there are quite different things going on:

We had out-of-town friends spend the night this weekend and only after they left did I notice my children had left something in the guest room:

Costco on a public holiday—never again.

9yo, looking at posters at the movie theater: "Why would you kiss a spider woman? You can't trust them. They might just be using you for food."

Good morning from the jungle.

The Taylor Swift song Albatross is about River Tam; change my mind

I have a personal theory that men are at their absolute best when they are coaching a sports team of little girls. Just top notch masculinity right there.

My daughter is using my phone to write a story and when I pulled up my browser it had the google results for "2003 ford escort." Only 12 years old and already googling obscure nonsense for her fiction. *sniff*

The microwave has started turning on whenever you open it. I'm no engineer but I'm pretty sure that's the opposite of how it's supposed to work. 12yo calling it "the murderwave" now.

The vibes at this coffee shop are interesting. Croony rat pack tunes and also a giant TV playing an aerial view of Lucerne in winter.

A special Sunday event: a photographic essay celebrating owls, magnificent birds of prey. These nocturnal hunters hail from Europe, Asia, North America, and South America, and are seen here in photos from recent years.

Did something that terrified me today.*

My work software has introduced an AI assistant that likes to let me know when it’s taken initiative to draft things up for me. Pretty sure I’m supposed to be thrilled but my actual response is more like “Nobody asked you to do that you creepy little hobgoblin”

Went to pick my kids up from school and their teacher came out, which everyone knows means Something Happened that day, but turns out she just wanted to say that she'd been asking the kids for examples of handsome famous people for a lesson on comparative adjectives and my 9yo said "Colin Firth"

Just started "The Owl and the Nightingale" last night and so far I am very much Team Owl. She was just minding her business and the nightingale landed on a branch and was like "your home is so filthy your kids basically sit in excrement up to their chins. And you're ugly."

My latest poem, in Eunoia Review: