PicoBlog

I grew up in the city and I lived in the city all my life and now all of a sudden I live 35 minutes from the closest store and that store is a mini-mart that sells worms. I live 12 minutes from the closest paved road and an hour from the closest hospital and the only internet available (except for Elon Musk’s baby boy space juice, which I’m ashamed to say we are considering) runs at pre-Napster speeds.
Last night, Substackers Against Nazis received some encouraging news: Company leadership decided it would actually enforce its terms of service and said it planned to remove a handful of accounts in violation.  Since the news broke, there’s been no shortage of opinions about it, ranging from “this is huge!” to “you did absolutely nothing.” After more years online than I care to admit, this is hardly a surprise. But I wanted to take this moment as one of the organizers of the effort (which remains ongoing) to clearly lay out what’s transpired and what this latest development means for the group and for me.
Laid Off Life is a place of respite for the weary workforce. Whether you’re unemployed, underemployed, or just trying to make it through the workday, let this be your 5-minute mental break from the grind of late-stage capitalism.  Update time! About six months ago, when I was in my rock-bottom unemployment era, in a space of…let’s call it desperation, I was exploring several woo-woo rituals to amp up my job search.
I thought I was completely prepared for the first day of school. I was entering my fourteenth year in education. I was comfortable with the material I was teaching and I was feeling rejuvenated in our move away from a city where I never felt like I belonged. First period had gone well and I was feeling pretty positive about the semester. Then the second-period announcements began, and with them, the pledges.
Monday Monday is a free weekly newsletter. If you love reading and want access to my advice column YES YES and other essays consider becoming a paid subscriber You can also share excerpts of today’s Monday Monday on social media, forward it to someone who might benefit, or text it to a friend. Thank you for reading. They say the unexamined life is not worth living But what if the examining becomes your life
(Horace Walpole by Sir Joshua Reynolds 1756) Hello friends— In the current zeitgeist, mostly meaning publishing and media Twitter, Internet Novel is a misnomer, a false-cognate, because the two novels put forward by that very zeitgeist as being emblematic of the form and genre aren’t really about the internet. Fake Accounts and No One Is Talking About This are primarily concerned with social media, mostly meaning Twitter, and its effects on the mores of white upwardly mobile media writers.
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to author Diana Evans, who is of mixed Nigerian, Welsh and English heritage. Diana is the author of 26a, The Wonder, Ordinary People, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and A House For Alice, a book that moved me to tears before the first chapter even began. Her stories, many of which are set in South London (where I currently live,) often feature mixed-race characters and interracial relationships, themes I was excited to explore with the author herself.
I am writing this to you from the magical window of time where Lil Yachty’s song “Poland” has gone viral, but has not yet quite reached critical mass. Within 24 hours I’m sure we’ll get articles like, WHY YOU CAN’T REALLY BRING THE WOCK TO POLAND or THE TRY GUYS BRING THE WOCK TO POLAND AND YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT followed soon by the quick descent into internet chum: SEE THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK TO BRINGING THE WOCK TO POLAND THAT DOCTORS DIDN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT.
In the autumn of 2012, I moved to Roorkee, a small town in the state of Uttarakhand in India, to pursue my master’s at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. Although rare at the time, on one of my weekend trips to Rishikesh (Yoga Capital of the World), I came across a book about a man-eating leopard authored by Jim Corbett in a small riverside cafe. The order took so much time to arrive that I read almost 30 pages of the book before whatever it was that I ordered was served on the table.