Spooky season is upon us, somewhat redundantly when every day is terrifying. Pumpkin spice dictatorship, anyone? I’ll take mine to go.
Your boi was interviewed on the queer storytelling site I’m From Driftwood, an archive of short videos by LGBTQ folks talking about pivotal moments in their lives. Watch me talk about becoming Mommy-Man in “Adoption, Transition, and Becoming Whole”. (Shirt by RSVLTS because Facebook clothing ads know me better than I know myself.) These guys were super fun to work with. Get in touch with them if you have a story to tell.
On the Button Poetry channel on YouTube, Ethan Smith’s poem “A Letter to the Girl I Used to Be” shows kindness towards those parts that can be hard to integrate after transition.
A.T. Steel won the 2025 Narrative Prize for “Honey Buns and Cream Soda in the Stairwell,” the sad but defiant story of a young trans woman on the streets of Harlem in 1991. You will need to create a free account at Narrative Magazine to read it.
I have had the pleasure of meeting Solstice Lit Mag poetry editor Robbie Gamble on several occasions. One would not suspect that this modest man with a history of activism for immigrants was the heir to the Procter & Gamble dynasty, as he chronicles in the poem “Gamble Patrilineage” in The Nomad. A short narrative poem with the scope of a 19th-century novel, it reckons with the racist and eugenicist history that many American fortunes share, but in a gentle rather than shrill way.
In the Guardian, this vivid excerpt from Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me describes a childhood of wild outdoor exploration and emotional neglect, as the author’s mother burned herself out trying to provide secure housing for the family during political upheaval. Now I’m eager to read her books. I’ve gotten interested in Indian literature lately, and am struck by how little we were taught about non-European history in my junior high and high school classes. I feel like a 12-year-old again, reading isolated novels without cultural context and missing so much of the significance of the action.
At her Substack twenty-first century demoniac, Helena Aeberli gives us another reason to hate AI: it can take revenge porn to another level by making realistic deepfakes of any woman who dares to speak out online.
Technologies like AI are changing the way we relate to one another. They are exacerbating the worst parts of human nature and society. When social media becomes a first-person shooter game and personalised algorithms deliver your interests on a platter, anything goes. The nonconsensual use of generative AI to doctor women’s images is just the beginning. The end point of individualism is the belief that only you exist. Everyone else is just an NPC.
As AI becomes more humanlike, albeit in a meaningless, surface-level sense, and as people come to regard it as such, the reverse is also true. People come to see each other more like AI, approaching them with an eye to utility. We regard those we encounter online more like characters than people, one-dimensional and stereotypical. They exist to provide a service, whether they like it or not…
In an essay with the catchy title “Stupidology” in n+1, William Davies argues that our social systems are tending more and more towards normalizing the abdication of individual judgment. Authoritarians and tech oligarchs benefit from the destruction of universities and the discrediting of experts, which is why Trumpism aims its guns at anything that “help[s] make the world intelligible”. Artists, too, because imagination alone lets us respond properly to new situations rather than regurgitating data as AI does.
Rabbi, journalist, lawyer, meditation teacher, professor…Jay Michaelson wears many hats, according to the bio on his Substack. In a recent post, he asks the question that’s certainly been weighing on my head since January 20: “Does Anything You’re Doing Matter? (And does it matter if it doesn’t?)” In this time of great disruption and uncertainty, one can find relief in the spiritual principle of non-attachment to results, as propounded by Thomas Merton and the Talmud’s Rabbi Tarfon, who said that “it is not incumbent upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” On the other hand, a too-glib reliance on such reassurance can make us satisfied with merely performative activism, “an un-pragmatic and ineffectual politics of purity, as we see in some corners of the Left today”. Michaelson concludes: “For me personally, the ‘Both/And’ synthesis has to do with using one set of tools to ascertain which interventions can be effective, and a different set of tools to assess the spiritual and emotional worth of those actions.”