Digital Manticore

Two Weeks in the Life: May 24, 2026

Posted on May 24, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell / 0 Comment

Hello, friends and enemies. I’m officially 40 years old now, which regular readers already know since I posted Every Book I Read in my Thirties: Reading from 2016–2026. I celebrated by spending last week not working; week one of vacation was our trip to Seattle and week two was chilling and doing whatever I want. I highly recommend taking time off to do nothing and I think I may do it again this time next year. Although for now I am in PTO debt. Alas.

THIS is who you’re asking to work 40 hours per week

I got my voter guides posted this week, so please check them out for information about the election. The California election is on June 2! This primary sucks but we still have to get out and vote. Here’s the English guide and here is the Spanish.

Another thing I did last week was go to San Francisco for some appointments. I’m taking part in a study about fatty liver (or formally known as nonalcoholic steatohepatitis) in women. The researchers are looking at the relationship between that PCOS (just this month renamed to PMOS: polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome). I don’t have PCOS/PMOS, so I’m in the control group. They had me do a fibroscan, blood work, body composition test, and an MRI. When they do MRIs of the liver, they give you periodic instructions about holding your breath. Afterwards, the instructions say “you may resume breathing.” Thanks! That cracked me up and I just know the MRI technicians were like “what the hell is she laughing about.” This is a longitudinal study, so I’ll be going back to do it all again once a year for the next three years. It’s not a clinical trial, they just want to see what might be going on! I hope we learn something interesting.

picture taken from the exam room at UCSF, looking out to a foggy view of the city — the award for the best view from a doctor’s office goes to UCSF

Something I did not do this week was go to or watch Eurovision. This time last year I was planning to go to Vienna to see Eurovision live, but alas, we canceled the plans because it didn’t feel morally right to go under the circumstances. Eurovision is getting an awful lot of attention for Israel’s involvement—even The New York Times published an article about Israel’s involvement, other countries boycotting the competition, and Israel’s not-exactly-above-board promotions to get people to vote for them. Fortunately, Bulgaria won this year, although it is suspicious that Israel was, once again, very close to winning. I haven’t listened to their song this year but the last few weren’t particularly good or interesting and I have no reason to believe anything different this year (seems like the news on my internet would have had something to say if Israel showed up to Eurovision with a true banger). I think the European Broadcasting Union will have to deal with this situation before it explodes soon. If Israel had won, they wouldn’t have been able to contain the outrage. Apparently they’re talking about moving Israel to the new Eurovision Asia franchise, which doesn’t really solve the problem so much as delay dealing with it. In any case, I wish everyone would stop being morally bankrupt so I could get back to enjoying my high-camp European music competition. Thanks in advance!

Finally, permit me to indulge in my annual circus nostalgia. I think most readers know by now that my hometown has a community circus that I participated in when I was younger. May is when they do their shows so I am always thinking about it at this time of year. This year I suppose I have done a little more than just think about circus since I have been trying to unicycle and juggle again, although only in fits and starts. Perhaps one day I’ll be circusing it up again in some form or another.

Me, six years old, on hands and knees while three other girls lean on me for balance in an arabesque — 1992 circus

Me, as an adult, juggling in formation with three other people — 1992 circus

Books and Other Words

cover for Tangled Up in Blue on Kobo ereader. Cover features some very 80s art of a sexy lady and two guys in jumpsuits with big space guns — Tangled Up in Blue

The fourth and final book of Joan D. Vinge’s Snow Queen Cycle, Tangled up in Blue, was, I felt, not particularly interesting. It’s a prequel that takes place about 15 or 20 years before the events of The Snow Queen, focusing on BZ Gundhalinu and another member of the Hegemonic police force. They get involved in some kind of transfer of a powerful artifact and then the local cartel and the cops start working against them. Anyway it’s not really my kind of tale and I find an end-of-series prequel as a concept to be a little boring. We’re supposed to be excited like “there’s our guy!” but like … I have already seen that guy a bunch. I know him. I am not excited.

book: Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto — Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto by Legacy Russell comes from a sub-field of gender studies called cyberfeminism that focuses on the intersection of feminism and computers (in contrast to much of the discourse around technology, which centers on men). Russell starts by offering some explanations of the term “glitch” itself, which embodies refusal and embraces malfunction, “travers[es] along edges” and gives us space to claim “our right to complexity.” (She also includes the fun etymological fact that “glitch” comes to us from the yiddish verb to slide or slip.) Glitch Feminism explores the relationship of our off- and online selves, and how the way we play with identity online comes with is when we are “AFK” (away from keyboard), a term Russell uses instead of the more common “IRL” (in real life) because at this point, the internet “is reality”. Being a woman online means, much like in the AFK world, inhabiting a space not meant for us. Despite claims to the contrary that the internet is a radical place (although that was perhaps a dream of a younger internet), “all technology reflects the society that produces it, including its power structures and prejudices.” But being a glitch, a failure, provides the opportunity “to build new worlds” and “expand in every direction.” What a great perspective.

cover for Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes on kobo ereader — Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary offers a compelling thesis on world history. Here in the United States, and in the “west” generally, we learn very little about the Islamic world (unless, like me, you make it your business to learn and you get a whole bachelor’s degree in Near Eastern languages and civilizations). Ansary explains this through the idea of two “worlds” developing in parallel: the “middle sea” (the Mediterranean and surrounding area) and the “middle world” (“Central Asia, the Iranian highlands, Mesopotamia, and Egypt”), and both groups “had good reason to think of themselves at the center of human history.” Modern sites of conflict between the “west” and the Muslim world lie along the same fault lines established centuries ago, as far back as the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires before Islam surfaced. Ansary writes in the epilogue that 9/11 was one of the first times in modern history that these two stories of civilization (middle world versus Mediterranean) came into open conflict, which is spurred, in part, by a total lack of understanding about what motivates the other group. Heavy geopolitical events aside, I liked this book a lot. There was some information I already knew, but I also learned plenty. One tidbit that’s staying with me is that the word for “horde” actually comes from the turkic word for “military camp.” Yes, the Mongol hordes are outside the gates … they are literally there making camp. I particularly appreciated the history of the most recent centuries. One of the issues in the Muslim community now is the question of, if Muslims won battles in the past because God made the community strong, then what is wrong now that Muslims are losing battles (either literally or losing the battle of colonialism against the Europeans)? It’s a question that, per Ansary, Muslims are still grappling with in a variety of ways, and this, along with the cultural clash at the borders of the Middle World, is why the Middle East appears so tumultuous to us. I highly recommend this book for anyone looking to understand more about this part of the world and the way people there think!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

At last, a pill that can prevent COVID after exposure to infected people via Nature. This is incredible news! This drug sounds like it’s a Plan B for covid: people can take it once they have been exposed to the virus and it significantly lowers the risk of developing the disease. The drug, called ensitrelvir, brought the risk of developing covid down from nine percent to three percent.
Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains via 404 Media. If the people with the strongest case for using chatbot software think the chatbots suck, then what is the point? Why do any of this?
The Influencer Industrial Complex is Warping Local Politics via User Mag. Social media influencers are inviting political campaigns to pay them to make content supporting their candidate. Unfortunately, there are no laws or regulations that require influencers to disclose these relationships so you have no way to know if the people you see online are talking about politics for the money.
We Might Have To Get A Little Less Fandom-y via Curmudgeon dot com. This one might not make a lot of sense to people who aren’t frequenting certain internet neighborhoods, but I liked this piece. From the article: “We end up in quite an awkward position here. We have all these expectations about a work that we want to have met, but the way in which those expectations formed mean that we can be blinded by them into not fully appreciating the technical craft behind the work, or, worse, actively protest those aspects of the work which subvert our expectations in interesting ways and push the medium forwards. In this way, fandom can act as something of an enforcement mechanism for the artistic status quo.”
ArXiv to Ban Researchers for a Year if They Submit AI Slop via 404 Media. Great news: “ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work.” The whole academic edifice will crumble if people aren’t faithfully checking their work and their citations. Why be an academic if you don’t want to do this shit correctly? At this point, Wikipedia is maintaining higher standards than many academic publications.

Languages

I wanted to share some Wikipedia articles I translated recently. In Spanish, we’ve got the Manx version of Halloween, Hop-tu-Naa. I do enjoy helping to preserve, in some small way, knowledge of minority cultures. I also translated the article about the Icelandic book Makt myrkranna, or The Powers of Darkness (I translated the English article about the Icelandic book into Spanish. I know how to party!). It’s about the Icelandic “translation” of Dracula, which is not a translation at all. It sounds more like a fan fiction of Dracula, but it might have been based on early drafts that Bram Stoker provided to the “translator.” Wacky as hell! Finally, I’m still working on translating articles about Icelandic women into English. Behold the tale of Anna of Stóruborg: She owned her own farm and shacked up with a shepherd who worked for her. Her brother was pissed off about it and she had to hide her man in a nearby cave whenever the brother dropped in. Then a few centuries later, some guy wrote a novel about it. Good for them!

Moving It

I am saddened to report that I’ve officially stopped taking ballet class. I feel like this is a decision that I’ve been putting off all year. I stopped taking my other dance classes after my December recital, but thought I might be okay to keep taking ballet if I was careful. Unfortunately, it’s been hard to have fun with it when I’m constantly trying not to aggravate my knee and be very careful with how I move. Still, lasting a little over five years in a hobby is a good run. I can’t be too upset.

I’m really glad I was able to take dance class for as long as I did. I learned a lot about my body—not just how to move it but how to inhabit it, and we even learned about some disorders along the way (how did I not know about hypermobility!) My last physical hobby, roller derby, taught me a lot about doing hard things and made me strong. Dance helped me figure out how to move more confidently and how to use my whole body to express myself. I’m glad that I was able to have a venue to perform on stage (albeit mostly for an audience consisting of parents of children in the recital, but don’t they, too, deserve a little razzle dazzle in their lives?), which I hadn’t had much chance to do since I was young. I’m really hoping I can find something else that can do this for me, but I don’t have any ideas yet!

Kitchen Witchery

Since I am no longer taking ballet class and my Saturday morning is relatively free, yesterday we took a little jaunt to the Elk Grove farmers market to get some vegetables. I’m excited to pick up what’s in season and then figure out what to do with it. Today’s surprise was the bunch of garlic I bought. It didn’t occur to me that it was fresh and not dried garlic because at the store all the garlic is dried. I had to look it up and I found out that you need to use it in about seven to ten days, so I guess we’re going garlicky this week. I’m thinking about roasting or doing a confit for most of it then I can use it in my own time. I also found this blog that mentions you can use the membranes of fresh garlic to make a little spread. Lots of things to try!

straight from the farmers market: broccoli, potatoes, zucchini, onion, fresh garlic, broccolini, and a jar of honey — farmers market haul

This week I tried a granola bar recipe. It wasn’t too hard and the granola bars are good! They don’t taste exactly like what you buy at the store (that’s probably good) and the recipe has dates in it (also probably good), so there is more date flavor than I’m used to in a granola bar (normal amount of dates: zero). The recipe has a few flavor variations. There’s a cashew version that I think I’m going to make with white chocolate chips. I will report back.

In terms of actual meals, we had some red lentil soup. I pulled this out of the freezer this week, so it’s not really new, but I did toss some leftover spiced nuts and a bit of olive oil on top and I think that was a great innovation. By the way, I highly recommend freezing leftovers in deli containers and using a dry erase marker to note what’s inside. The marker washes right off. This system works well for us because we are just two people and may not want to eat the same soup three or four nights in one week. So, I freeze it and it’s a pleasant meal for the future.

Finally I made frijoles con veneno from Mi Cocina. This was really good. It’s tostadas topped with refried beans (I used king city pink beans) and pork braised in a chili sauce. This had a long cook time but was fairly easy to make.

a batch of granola bars spread out on a sheet pan — homemade granola bars

a bowl of red lentil soup topped with spiced, chopped nuts and a drizzle of olive oil — homemade granola bars

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat lounging on top of the couch with his tail hanging down completely straight — long tail champion

Fritz the cat on the sill of an open window. He is looking up and out. His tail is dangling down. — long tail champion

voter guide

Guía para votantes: 2 de junio 2026, elección primaria de California

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell / 1 Comment

Hola amigos y enemigos. Ya es la temporada de elecciones de nuevo. El día de la elección es el 2 de junio, pero si estás registrado para votar vas a recibir una boleta por correo. La pregunta en la mente de todos es ¿quién va a ser el siguiente gobernador de California? pero no es la única cosa en la boleta. Todas las posiciones más altas del estado están abiertas y tenemos que escoger miembros de la Junta Directiva Estatal de Impuestos Sobre Ventas de California, junto con algunos congresistas.

Looking for the English version? It’s right here.

Recordatorios y recursos para los votantes californianos

¡Todos los californianos que se han inscrito van a recibir una boleta por correo en esta elección! No es necesario ir a un centro de votación.
Inscríbete para votar para el lunes 18 de mayo. Aún puedes inscribirte después del 18 de mayo pero necesitas seguir el proceso para el registro del votante en el mismo día.
Comprueba el estado de tu inscripción y consigue más información en https://voterstatus.sos.ca.gov/ES
Ve a donde puedas votar o entregar tu boleta: https://www.sos.ca.gov/es/elections/polling-place
¡Recuerda firmar el sobre de la boleta!
Guía oficial de información para el votante en español: https://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2026/primary/es/pdf/complete-vig.pdf

Descargo de responsabilidad: No soy experta en la política ni el gobierno. Soy solo una persona quien tiene habilidades para leer y buscar información. Si confías en mí, puedes votar como yo. También puedes usar esta guía como un punto de partida para decidir cómo quieres votar.

Consulta rápida

Este cuadro resume mis votos para la elección. Sigue leyendo para ver mis explicaciones.

Oficina	Mi voto
Gobernador	Betty Yee
Vicegobernador	Alice Stek
Secretario de Estado	Gary Blenner
Contralor	Meghann Adams
Tesorero	Glenn Turner
Procurador general	Rob Bonta
Comisionado de seguros	Jane Kim
Junta directiva estatal de impuestos sobre ventas del distrito 1	Nelson Esparza
Superintendente de instrucción pública	Frank Lara
Representante (Distrito 7 del Congreso)	Mai Vang
Juez de la Oficina Número 15 de la Corte Superior	Heath Langle
Juez de la Oficina Número 21 de la Corte Superior	James Morris
Distrito 8 del Senado	Angelique Ashby
Distrito 10 de la Asamblea	Stephanie Nguyen
Miembro, Junta de Supervisores, Distrito 5	Pat Hume
Tasador	Christina Wynn

Algunos pensamientos generales

Antes de discutir mis opiniones sobre los candidatos en detalle, les quiero recordar a todos que California tiene una elección primaria “abierta” (a veces llamada una primaria “de la selva”) gracias a Dos Candidatos Principales – Ley de Primaria Abierta. Significa que no estás limitado a votar por candidatos del partido al que perteneces. Los dos candidatos con la mayor cantidad de votos (a pesar de su afiliación partidaria) se van a enfrentar en la elección general en noviembre. Podría haber, por ejemplo, dos candidatos republicanos en contención para la posición de gobernador, en cambio de un candidato de cada partido, si dos candidatos republicanos fueran los que hubieran recibido la cantidad mayor de votos en la elección primaria. ¡Que pesadilla sería! Tal vez recuerdes que en la elección de 2024 cuando votamos por Adam Schiff como nuestro senador, él se aprovechó de la estructura de la elección primaria para cerrar el rebote a sus oponentes demócratas porque sabía que vencería a un republicano en la elección general. Normalmente, yo diría que la elección primaria es una oportunidad de votar de corazón, pero necesitamos asegurarnos de que tengamos al menos un candidato demócrata en la boleta, para eso no seamos demasiado extravagante.

También tengo que compartir que los candidatos tienen que pagar $25.00 por palabra para sus declaraciones en la guía oficial de información para votantes, “no superando $6,250.00 (250 palabras)”. Yo pensaba que los candidatos que apenas escribieron algo eran perezosos o descortéses a los votantes, pero ahora me doy cuenta que intentan evitar el gasto de miles de dolares. Sin embargo, la mayoría de candidatos serios, en particular para un cargo como gobernador, tiene apoyo institucional de un partido político, entonces $6,000 para una declaración no es muy grave para ellos. Es probable que los candidatos independientes o de tercer partido tengan declaraciones más cortas porque tienen menos fondos de campaña. Asegúrate de repasar sus sitios web antes de decidir por quien vas a votar.

Para hacer mis selecciones, estoy usando las declaraciones de candidatos, sus sitios web, y noticias en línea. Además, Under the Desk News creó una guía excelente (en inglés) sobre los candidatos destacados para gobernador—los que han recibido al menos uno por ciento en las encuestas.

Cargos estatales

Gobernador

Mi voto: Xavier Becerra

Esta elección es bastante horrible. Tenemos alrededor de 50 personas en la boleta y la mayoría no tiene por qué presentarse como candidato, y mucho menos como candidato para una de las economías más grande del mundo. No debería ser posible presentarse como candidato para gobernador si nunca ha tenido un trabajo público, pero supongo que es un debate para otro día.

Al final he decidido votar por Xavier Becerra, en particular porque tiene un porcentaje más o menos alto en las encuestas, y es un factor importante dado el sistema de dos candidatos principales. Becerra apoya seguro de salud de pagador único, que es genial. Tiene sentido que sería una prioridad alta porque él sirvió como el secretario del Departamento de Salud y Servicios Humanos en la administración de Biden. También su plataforma dice que apoya el uso de energía renovable. He oído algún chisme en línea que Becerra recibió una donación grande de Chevron, entonces me pregunté si él se comportaba hipócritamente. Parece que sí recibió una donación de $39,000, pero creo que solo es una noticia porque uno de sus oponentes destacados, Tom Steyer, está haciendo tweets en este tema para convertirlo en algo más grave de lo que es (a propósito, ¿por qué sigue alguien usando el sitio anteriormente conocido como Twitter?) ¿Preferiría yo que él no tome dinero de Chevron? Por supuesto, pero trabajo con lo que tengo ahora y la mayoría de estos candidatos son payasos (peyorativo).

Hablando de Thomas Steyer, el otro candidato presunto demócrata con un porcentaje alto en las encuestas, ¿puedo decir: qué chingados? Steyer es un multimillonario que nunca ha servido en cargo público. Steyer se hizo rico de ser un inversor temprano en la compañía de prisión privada ahora conocida como CoreCivic que construye centros de detención de ICE. Steyer ha vendido todas sus acciones de esta empresa, pero aún es multimillonario. Lo trágico aquí es que en realidad tiene la plataforma más progresiva de los candidatos más destacados. Aunque su plataforma es excelente, me pregunto si podemos confiar en que un multimillonario proponga políticas progresivas. No hay ninguna forma de saber con certeza si Steyer tiene la intención de seguir lo que ha prometido o si piensa que todo lo que diece lo hará ser electo. Las promesas de campaña no son vinculantes. Hasta donde sabemos, él ganaría la elección y después revelar que solo se presentó como candidato para que nos prevenga cobrar impuestos a los multimillonarios. No tenemos ninguna idea que él haría en el cargo porque no tiene ningún historial de servicio público. Dice que es progresista ahora, pero si alguien realmente quisiera expiar sus adquisiciones ilícitas, yo esperaría ver que done dinero. ¿Por qué aún es un multimillonario? ¡Podría escribir un cheque para pagar la deuda médica de muchas personas! ¡Financiar 10,000 campañas de Go Fund Me! ¡Dar bastante dinero a una biblioteca local para que opere confortablemente por 100 años! ¡Sea creativo! ¡No voy a votar por un chingado multimillonario!

Aquí están algunos candidatos por los que no voto y porqué:

Betty Yee: Fue mi selección inicial para gobernadora. Su nombre ya está en la boleta, pero se ha abandonado la campaña oficialmente.
Katie Porter: Me gusta Porter y siempre disfruté los clips de ella usando su pizarra blanca en el Congreso para mostrar a las personas porqué están equivocadas. Hay algún parloteo en línea diciendo que ella es, esencialmente, una perra. Tal vez sí, tal vez no, pero las alegaciones no son peores de lo que algún hombre en la política hace. Mi preocupación a esta inflexión es que demasiadas personas creen que es una vieja insoportable, y no sería posible obtener bastantes votos, aunque es una de mis primeras selecciones para gobernador(a).
Matt Mahan: Alcalde actual de San Jose y ¿parece que odia un poco a las personas sin hogar? Es un antiguo ejecutivo de una compañía de tecnología y parece que esta empapado del mundo de Silicon Valley lo que significa que no es el tipo de persona que quiero como el gobernador.
Chad Bianco: Es un republicano y cree falsamente que la elección de 2020 fue “robada” que recientemente “tomó por la fuerza más de 650,000 boletas de la elección de noviembre pasado para determinar, como él dice, si fueron contadas de modo fraudulento”. Además de alguna manera gana casi $600,000 cada año como el alguacil de Riverside County. No me parece correcto. No debemos votar por un hombre que dice que no se puede confiar en las elecciones. Si fuera la verdad, ¿por qué se presenta como candidato?
Steve Hilton: Es la primera opción según Trump y, según yo, la última.
Butch Ware: Me interesó en cierto modo la campaña de Ware pero no va a estar en la boleta porque “no entregó las declaraciones de ingresos correctas a tiempo para calificar”. Si no puede terminar el papeleo a tiempo para ser un candidato oficial, tal vez no esté listo para ser el gobernador de una de las economías más grandes del mundo.
Eric Swalwell: Aunque su nombre está en la boleta, Swalwell ha abandonado su candidatura después de que se asomaron alegaciones fiables del abuso sexual. ¡No votes por este hombre! No cometer abuso sexual es una vara muy baja. Ninguna persona que ha cometido abuso sexual debe estar en el poder. Si no puede respetar la autonomía de otras personas al nivel mínimo de evitar cometer abuso sexual, no tiene derecho a gobernar. La periodista Lyz Lens tiene algún comentario muy bueno sobre este asunto, escribiendo:

Sé que lo que leíste no es realmente la historia completa. Es lo que los periodistas y el departamento legal pudieron asegurarse suficientemente para evitar retos legales. Sé que es muy probable que los periodistas sepan mucho más, tal vez cosas aún peores, que no pueden contarte porque no pueden probarlas o verificarlas, o porque la gente que podría no va a hablar oficialmente, porque tiene miedo o está cansada, o una demanda legal la silenció. Puedo contarte que si una historia avanza a este punto, no está en duda.

Si no crees en las mujeres cuando hacerlo no es conveniente políticamente, entonces realmente no crees en las mujeres. Solo quieres usar el dolor de las mujeres como una herramienta política para convertir en una arma contra tus enemigos.

Vicegobernador

Mi voto: Alice Stek

La doctora Alice Stek es una candidata bajo la bandera del partido de Peace and Freedom (Paz y libertad), ¡el que es mi partido! Ella es una parte de la Lista de Unidad Izquierda en esta elección. ¡Su plataforma tiene todo con lo que sueño! Hay universidad sin costo y asistencia médica para todos, terminar la deuda médica y escolar, involucrar en programas de seguridad comunitaria, dejar de financiar a Israel, licencia parental garantizada, aún prohibir la privatización de la costa. ¡Estas son las políticas que necesitamos! Me gusta ver plataformas osadas presentando ideas que realmente mejorarían nuestras vidas, en cambio de encerrarnos en un ciclo infinito de la mediocridad neoliberal.

Si no estás listo para permitir que los izquierdistas dirijan, mis segunda y tercera opciones, respectivamente, son Michael Tubbs y Janelle Kellman. Tubbs fue el alcalde de Stockton, dónde lanzó una prueba de un programa de renta básica universal, que ayudó a los ciudadanos tremendamente. Kellman parece una candidata muy fuerte con respecto al clima, lo que necesitamos sin duda ahora.

Secretario de Estado

Mi voto: Gary Blenner

Voto por Gary Blenner del Green Party (Partido Verde) para Secretario de Estado porque él apoya, entre otras cosas, el voto por orden de preferencia. Con este tipo de voto, no sentiríamos que tengamos que votar basados en cuales candidatos parecen “elegibles” porque todos votarían por sus candidatos preferidos. Por ejemplo, si usáramos este sistema ahora, diría que mi primera selección para gobernador es Katie Porter, mi segunda es Xavier Becerra, etcétera, y ¡todos de estos votos contarían! Serían mucho más fácil para elegir a personas que nos gustan porque no tendríamos que preocuparnos por “desperdiciar” votos por candidatos que recibieran solo una porción pequeña de los votos.

Además Blenner apoya el uso de financiación pública para campañas, el cual sería un cambio inmenso en cómo funcionan las elecciones. En vez de estar bombardeados por las personas con la mayor cantidad de dinero, cada candidato recibiría una cantidad igual de fondos para operar su campaña. Sería genial, ¿no?

Contralor

Mi voto: Meghann Adams

Una de las tareas del contralor es dirigir los fondos de capitalización de CalPERS y CalSTRS (los fondos de empleados estatales y maestros californianos, respectivamente). Meghann Adams, mi selección para contralor, dejaría de invertir los fondos en compañías que están involucradas en el genocidio en Gaza, algo muy importante para mí. Ella nota que “CalPERS tiene casi $400 millones en Lockheed Martin, cuyos misiles, aviones de combate, y bombas guiadas por instrumentos de precisión se usan para destruir edificios de apartamentos, escuelas, y hospitales en Gaza. CalSTRS tiene muchos fondos en Elbit Systems y Caterpillar, cuyos productos están siendo usados para bombardear a los civiles y derribar barrios en Gaza.” Nuestra habilidad de jubilarnos no debe depender de que invirtamos en guerra. He escrito anteriormente sobre mis esfuerzos de prevenir que mis cotizaciones sean invertidas en compañías que lidian con guerra. No es fácil pero puedo informar que hay beneficios. Mi 401(k) no ha perdido dinero durante la locura económica reciente. Garantizo que es posible ahorrar bastante dinero para jubilarse sin invertir en genocidio.

Tesorero

Mi voto: Glenn Turner

Glenn Turner es la candidata del Partido Verde y, como su compañera de la Lista de Unidad Izquierda, Meghann Adams, apoya no usar los fondos de CalPERS y CalSTRS para financiar la guerra y los combustibles fósiles. También demanda que se cobre impuestos a los multimillonarios y condone la deuda académica. Son cosas que quiero ver y por ese voto por ella.

Yo no voto por Eleni Kounalakis, nuestra vicegobernadora actual y la candidata demócrata, porque creo que se fija más en su cartera de inmuebles que apoyar californianos comunes. El año pasao, cuando Kounalakis se planeaba presentar como candidata para gobernadora en cambio de tesorera, CalMatters informó que ella “gana millones de dolares anualmente de sus inversiones de propiedades extensivas en la región de Sacramento y afuera”, lo cual sería un conflicto de intereses notable. Personas en línea se preguntan si una parte de la razón que los empleados estatales tuvieron que regresar a la oficina para trabajar durante la pandemia fue que la cartera de inmuebles de Kounalakis incluye edificios de oficinas estatales y otros lugares que se beneficiaran económicamente de empleados estar en el centro. Todos están de acuerdo que los empleados eran tan productivos en casa (si no aún más) que en la oficina, pero el gobernador Newsom insistió que los empleados estatales regresaran a la oficina durante una pandemia activa. ¿Puede ser que Kounalakis influyera en la decisión? En cualquier caso, no tenemos ninguna razón de creer que sus decisiones como tesorera no la beneficiarían económicamente, y no es como funcionaría el servicio público.

Procurador general

Mi voto: Rob Bonta

La guía oficial para votantes que actualmente está en el sitio web del Secretario de Estado (y la versión que recibí por correo) no incluye al candidato demócrata que está de turno, Rob Bonta. Sin embargo, confirmé que es un candidato oficial en la elección primaria. Voto por él porque parece que ha hecho un muy buen trabajo como el procurador general, haciendo cosas como demandar a los crisis pregnancy centers (centros de embarazo de emergencia, las cuales son organizaciones religiosas que engañan a personas para que crean que son proveedores legítimos de salud médica). ¡Quiero que él siga haciendo cosas así!

Comisionado de seguros

Mi voto: Jane Kim

Voto por Jane Kim porque tiene un plan coherente y específico para lo que quiere hacer como comisionanda de seguros y las cosas que quiere hacer realmente ayudarían a la gente común. Quiere establecer una versión de seguro de desastre de pagador único para ayudar a tratar los efectos del cambio climático. Ella propone una opción pública para el seguro de automóvil y terminar la discriminación de precios. Ahora que se menciona, ¿por qué se permiten las compañías practicar la discriminación de precios?

Con respeto a los otros candidatos, Steven Bradford no parece una elección mala, pero me gusta la plataforma de Kim más. Patrick Wolff parece demasiado corporativo y creo que es extraño que menciona en su declaración de candidato que es un gran maestro de ajedrez. No necesariamente es un rasgo de un buen comisionado de seguros, pero estoy segura que tiene el efecto de parecer inteligente. Tampoco voto por el candidato de la Lista de Unidad Izquierda, Eduardo “Lalo” Vargas porque no ha publicado una plataforma específica para el trabajo. ¡Tengo que saber que va a hacer cuando llegue a la posición!

Junta directiva estatal de impuestos sobre ventas del Distrito 1

Mi voto: Nelson Esparza

El Distrito 1 incluye casi todos los condados no costeros, incluso mi hogar el Condado de Sacramento. Solo hay dos candidatos demócratas para este escaño y Esparza es el único con una declaración de candidato coherente. Me gusta que dice que quiere asegurar que “los ricos paguen su porción justa”. ¡Lo quiero también! ¡Que cobre impuestos a los ricos!

Superintendente de instrucción pública

Mi voto: Frank Lara

Frank Lara es otro miembro de la Lista de Unidad Izquierda y tiene una plataforma que me encanta. Él es el único candidato para superintendente de instrucción pública que habla de sacar a ICE y la policía de las escuelas. ¿Cómo pueden los niños aprender cuando están preocupados de ser secuestrados por ICE? No es posible enfocarse en la escuela cuando se está estresado sobre algo tan grave. Lara apoya aumentar la financiación de escuelas, notando que California usa “menos de 3 por ciento del producto bruto estatal para financiar nuestras escuelas”, y se opone a que las escuelas privadas reciban fondos públicos. Me gusta también que quiere mejores servicios de educación especial, cuidado infantil universal y gratis, y extender educación para adultos. ¡California podría tenerlo todo!

Cargos del Condado de Sacramento

Representante de Distrito 7 del Congreso

Mi voto: Mai Vang

Escucha. Nuestra representante actual, Doris Matsui, tiene 81 años. Es DEMASIADO VIEJA para ser congresista. Además está casada con un multimillonario, y basada en una apariencia pública rara, ella está bastante desactualizada.

Voto por Vang porque realmente tiene una visión progresista y ha estado afuera en contacto con la gente. Según el periódico SF Gate, “Vang quiere abolir el Servicio de Control de Inmigración y Aduanas, apoya tan la propuesta de un impuesto federal sobre el patrimonio del representante Ro Khanna como la iniciativa electoral estatal de un impuesto sobre el patrimonio, y apoya la propuesta de seguro de salud de pagador único llamada Medicare for all.” Su plataforma en general es progresiva y llena de cosas que realmente necesitamos como cuidado infantil universal y dejar de financiar la guerra genocida de Israel contra Gaza. Tenerla como nuestra congresista sería genial después de décadas de Matsui aprobando más fondos para el ejército y variados horrores modernos.

Juez de la Oficina Número 15 de la Corte Superior

Mi voto: Heath Langle

Votar por jueces siempre es extraño porque los cargos deben ser no partidarios aunque tenemos que votar por ellos y tenemos poca información disponible. Si no eres un observador ávido de las cortes, es difícil saber si alguien sería el tipo de juez que quieres. Además, los dos de los cargos de juez de la Corte Superior tienen solo un candidato a juez en la boleta, entonces en una forma nuestros votos no importan muchos. Por supuesto, puedes retener tu voto de un candidato que no te gusta o votas escribiendo el nombre de un candidato que no figura en las boletas, pero no creo que tenga mucho efecto.

No hay mucha información sobre Heath Langle en línea. Actualmente es un juez en la Corte Superior de Sacramento y fue el exalumno del año de Lincoln Law School en 2025. ¿Que padre? No encontré nada ofensivo, entonces supongo que recibirá mi voto.

Juez de la Oficina Número 21 de la Corte Superior

Mi voto: James Morris

James Morris tampoco tiene oposición en la boleta y actualmente es un comisionado de la Corte Superior de Sacramento. Sí tiene un sitio web que parece fijarse en quien lo ha respaldado, incluso una lista larga de jueces y la Asociación de Ayudantes del Sheriff del Condado de Sacramento. Desearía que supiera más sobre este hombre pero supongo que voy a votar por él porque es Morris o nadie para este cargo.

Senador estatal de distrito 8

Mi voto: Angelique Ashby

Angelique Ashby es nuestra senadora estatal actual del distrito 8. No me encanta pero parece que ha estado involucrado en algunas leyes buenas y que hace un trabajo decente por lo general. Su página de Wikipedia ni siquiera tiene una sección de “controversias”, entonces debería hacer algo correcto.

Me gustaría votar por la candidata del Partido de Paz y Libertad, Linda Roberts, sin embargo no parece tener un sitio web ni ninguna información en línea sobre lo que representa. Hay un artículo en el sitio web del Partido de Paz y Libertad declarando que se ha presentado como candidata, pero es todo. ¡Tengo que tener más información si voy a votar por alguien!

Miembro de la Asamblea del estado de distrito 10

Mi voto: Stephanie Nguyen

Stephanie Nguyen es nuestra miembro de la asamblea actual y algo que me gusta sobre ella es que siempre hace eventos y actividades dónde puede unirse con la gente en el distrito. Estoy suscrita a su boletín informativo, entonces veo que hace cosas como una reunión mensual para hacer artesanías dónde las personas pueden hablar con ella, u organizar una hora para pasear y platicar con sus votantes. Creo que es una forma muy considerada para conectar con la gente que representa.

Su único oponente, Vanya Singh, quiere “que California vuelva a ser grande” (“make California great again”), entonces no voy a votar por esa mierda.

Miembro, Junta de Supervisores, distrito 5

Mi voto: Pat Hume

Pat Hume es nuestro miembro actual de la Junta de Supervisores y no tiene oposición. Encones … claro.

Tasador

Mi voto: Christina Wynn

Christina Wynn no tiene oposición para el tasador del Condado de Sacramento. Ella es la tasadora de turno y ha servido en este cargo desde 2017. No encontré ningunas noticias malas sobre ella, entonces supongo que voy a votar por ella.

¡Comparte esta guía!

¡Has llegado al final! Te aliento a compartir esta guía si la encontraste útil. Por favor deja un comentario si crees que olvidé algo importante. ¡Gracias por votar!

voter guide

Voter Guide: June 2, 2026 California Primary Election

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell / 0 Comment

Hello, friends and enemies! It’s election season again. Election day is June 2, but you will get a ballot in the mail before then (assuming you’re registered to vote!). The question on everyone’s mind in this election is who will be the next governor of California, but that’s not the only thing on the ballot. We have all the top California offices open, State Board of Equalization members to pick, and various congresspeople up for election.

¿Buscas la versión en español? Está aquí.

Reminders and Resources for California Voters

Everyone registered to vote in California will get a ballot in the mail this election! You do not have to go to a polling place if you don’t want to.
Register to vote on or before Monday, May 18. You can still register after May 18, but you will need to use the same-day voter registration form.
Official Voter Information Guide is online here: https://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2026/primary/pdf/complete-vig.pdf
Check your voter status online: https://voterstatus.sos.ca.gov/
See where you can vote or drop off your paper ballot: https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/polling-place
Remember to sign your ballot envelope!

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on politics or government. I’m just a person who’s good at reading and looking things up. If you trust my judgment, you can vote how I vote. You can also use my guide as a starting point for your own research.

Quick Reference

This table summarizes how I’m planning to vote in this election. I explain my choices below!

Office	My Vote
Governor	Xavier Becerra
Lieutenant Governor	Alice Stek
Secretary of State	Gary Blenner
Controller	Meghann Adams
Treasurer	Glenn Turner
Attorney General	Rob Bonta
Insurance Commissioner	Jane Kim
Superintendent of Public Instruction	Nelson Esparza
Board of Equalization District 1	Frank Lara
Representative (Congressional District 7)	Mai Vang
Justice of the Superior Court Office No. 15	Heath Langle
Justice of the Superior Court Office No. 21	James Morris
Senate District 8	Angelique Ashby
Assembly District 10	Stephanie Nguyen
Member, Board of Supervisors, District 5	Pat Hume
Assessor	Christina Wynn

Some General Thoughts

Before I get into my opinion of the candidates, I want to remind everyone that California has an “open” primary (sometimes referred to as a “jungle primary”) thanks to the Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act. This means that you are not restricted to voting for candidates for the political party you belong to. The two candidates with the most votes—regardless of party affiliation—will face off in the general election in November. That means we could have, for example, two Republican candidates running for governor in November, rather than one candidate from each party, if two Republican candidates were the ones who got the most votes in the primary. What a nightmare that would be! You may remember that, in 2024 when we voted Adam Schiff in as our senator, he took advantage of the primary structure to box his fellow democrats out of the race because he knew he could beat a Republican candidate in the general election. Normally, I’d say that the primary is the time to vote with your heart, but we need to make sure we get at least one Democratic candidate for governor on the ballot so let’s not get too wild.

I also must share that candidates have to pay $25.00 per word for their statements in the voter guide, “not to exceed $6,250.00 (250 words).” I used to think that candidates who barely wrote anything were being lazy or disrespectful of the voters, but now I realize they’re trying to avoid spending thousands of dollars. However, most major candidates, especially for a position like the governor, have institutional backing from a political party, so $6,000 on a statement is no big deal for them. Independent or third-party candidates are likely to have shorter statements because they have fewer campaign funds. Be sure to look at their websites before making a decision.

For making my choices, I refer to candidate statements, their websites, and news online. Additionally, Under the Desk News put together a great guide on the top candidates—the ones polling over one percent—in the governor’s race.

Statewide Positions

Governor

My vote: Xavier Becerra

This election really sucks. We’ve got 50-something people on the ballot and most of them have no business running for office, let alone governor of one of the world’s largest economies. I don’t think you should be able to run for governor if you’ve never held public office before, but I suppose that’s an argument for another day.

I’ve ultimately decided to vote for Xavier Becerra, not the least because he’s currently polling fairly high, and that’s an important consideration given the top-two primary system. Becerra is for single-payer healthcare, which is great. It also makes sense that this would be a top priority since he served as the secretary of Health and Human Services under Biden. His platform also says he supports affordable renewable energy. I did hear some chatter online about Becerra receiving a big donation from Chevron, so I wondered if there was some hypocrisy happening. It looks like he did get a $39,200 donation from them, but this mostly seems to be news because one of his leading opponents, Tom Steyer, is tweeting about it to make it a thing (by the way, why is anyone still using the site formerly known as Twitter?). Would I prefer him not to take money from Chevron? Of course, but I’m working with what I have right now and most of these candidates are clowns (derogatory).

Speaking of Thomas Steyer, the other alleged Democrat with high polling numbers, can I just say: what the fuck? Steyer is a billionaire who has never held political office. He got rich from being an early investor in the private prison company now known as CoreCivic, which builds ICE detention centers. He has sold off all the stock in this company, but he is still a billionaire. He actually has the most progressive platform of the top candidates, but I question whether we can trust a billionaire to deliver on progressive policies. We have no way to know if Steyer really means his campaign promises or if he’s just saying whatever he thinks will get him elected. Campaign promises are not binding. For all we know, he could win the election and then go mask-off and say he only ran to prevent us from taxing billionaires. We have no idea what he would do in office because he has no record of public service. He claims to be a progressive now, but if someone really wanted to atone for their ill-gotten gains, I would expect to see them giving money away. Why are you still a billionaire? Write a big check to pay off people’s medical debt! Go fund 100,000 Go Fund Me campaigns. Give a local library enough money to operate comfortably for the next 100 years. Get creative! I’m not voting for a fucking billionaire!

Here are some people I’m not voting for and why:

Betty Yee: She was my original choice for governor. Her name is still on the ballot, but she has officially dropped out of the race.
Katie Porter: I like Porter and I always enjoyed the videos of her using the whiteboard to give people hell as a Congressperson. There’s some talk online about her being, essentially, a bitch. Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t, but the allegations are no worse than what any other man in politics does. My concern at this point is that too many people think she’s being a mean old lady and there’s no way for her to get enough votes, even though she is one of my top choices for governor.
Matt Mahan: Current San Jose mayor and it kind of seems like he hates homeless people? He’s a former tech executive and it seems like he is very steeped in the world of Silicon Valley, which is really not the kind of guy I want governing my state.
Chad Bianco: Republican election-denier who recently “seized more than 650,000 ballots from last November’s election to determine, he says, whether they were fraudulently counted.” He’s also somehow making almost $600,000 a year as Riverside County sheriff. That doesn’t seem right to me. We should not be voting for a man who says you can’t trust election results. If that’s true, why even run for office?
Steve Hilton: He’s Trump’s first choice for governor, and my last.
Butch Ware: I was somewhat interested in Ware’s campaign, but he hasn’t made it onto the ballot because “he did not file the correct tax returns in time to qualify.” If you can’t get the paperwork done on time to be an official candidate, maybe you are not ready to be governor of one of the world’s largest economies. He is now running a write-in campaign but we already have 50 people on the ballot and don’t need to split the vote any further because this man couldn’t figure out how to file his paperwork correctly.
Eric Swalwell: Although his name is still on the ballot, Swalwell has dropped out of the race after credible sexual assault allegations surfaced. Do not vote for this man! Not sexually assaulting people is a very low bar. There shouldn’t be anyone in power who has committed sexual assault. If you can’t respect other people’s autonomy enough to keep yourself from assaulting them, you have no business governing. Journalist Lyz Lens had some very good commentary on this, noting:

I know that what you read in the story isn’t actually the whole story. That’s just what the reporters and the legal department could nail down enough not to fear legal challenges. I know that it’s very likely that the journalists know a lot more, perhaps even worse things, that they cannot tell you, because they cannot prove it or verify it, or because the people who can will not go on record, because they are scared or tired, or a legal threat silenced them. I can tell you that if a story makes it this far, it is not in doubt.

If you find yourself not believing women when it’s not politically expedient to do so, then you don’t actually believe women. You only want to use women’s pain as a political tool to weaponize against your enemies.

Lieutenant Governor

My vote: Alice Stek

Dr. Alice Stek is running under the banner of the Peace and Freedom Party (the party I’m registered with!) and is part of the Left Unity Slate for this election. Her platform has everything I dream about: free college for all, and end to medical and student loan debt, healthcare for all, investing in community safety programs, divesting from Israel, guaranteed parental leave, even banning privatization of the coastline! These are the kind of policies we need! I like seeing bold platforms featuring ideas that would actually improve our lives, rather than lock us into an endless cycle of neoliberal mediocrity.

If you’re not ready to let leftists take the wheel, my second and third choices here are Michael Tubbs and Janelle Kellman, respectively. Tubbs was the mayor of Stockton, where he tried out a basic income program, which helped citizens tremendously. Kellman sounds like a very strong candidate on climate, which we certainly need now.

Secretary of State

My vote: Gary Blenner

I’m voting for Gary Blenner of the Green Party for Secretary of State because he supports, among other things, ranked-choice voting. With ranked-choice voting, we wouldn’t feel like we have to vote based on whether candidates are “electable” because everyone would vote for their top choices. For example, if we were using system now, I might say that my first choice for governor is Katie Porter, second choice is Xavier Becerra, etc. and all of that would count! This would make it much easier for us to elect people we want because we wouldn’t have to worry about “throwing away” votes on candidates who might only get a small fraction of the vote.

Blenner also supports public financing of campaigns, which would be such an immense change in how elections work. Instead of being bombarded by the people with the most cash, every candidate would receive an equal amount of funds to run their campaign. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Controller

My vote: Meghann Adams

One of the jobs of the state controller is to direct the CalPERS and CalSTRS retirement fund (the state employees’ and state teachers’ retirement funds, respectively). Meghann Adams, my pick for controller, would divest these gigantic pension funds from companies that are being used to fund the genocide in Gaza—and that’s something very important to me. She notes that “CalPERS holds nearly $400 Million in Lockheed Martin, whose missiles, fighter jets, and precision-guided bombs are being used to level apartment buildings, schools and hospitals in Gaza. CalSTRS has significant holdings in Elbit Systems and Caterpillar, whose products are being used to bomb civilians and bulldoze neighborhoods in Gaza.” Our retirement shouldn’t hinge on whether we financially invest in war. I’ve written previously about trying to keep my own retirement contributions from being invested in companies that deal in war. It’s not easy but I can report that it does pay off. My 401(k) has not lost any money during the recent economic madness. I guarantee that it’s possible to save enough money to retire without investing in genocide.

Treasurer

My vote: Glenn Turner

Glenn Turner is the Green Party candidate and, like her fellow Left Unity Slate candidate, Meghann Adams, she supports divesting CalPERS and CalSTRS from war and fossil fuels. She is also calling for taxing billionaires and forgiving student debt. Those are all things I want to happen, so I’m voting for her.

I’m not voting for Eleni Kounalakis, our current lieutenant governor and the Democratic candidate, because I think she’s more focused on her real estate portfolio than supporting regular Californians. Last year, when Kounalakis was planning to run for governor instead of treasurer, CalMatters reported that she “earns millions of dollars annually from extensive property investments around the Sacramento region and beyond,” which would be a notable conflict of interest. People speculating online have also wondered if part of the reason state employees had to go back to working in the office was because Kounalakis’ holdings include state office buildings and other places that would benefit financially from employees being downtown. Everyone agrees that employees were just as productive at home (if not more so) as at the office, yet Governor Newsom pushed for state employees to return to the office during an ongoing pandemic. Might Kounalakis’ influence have been involved here? Regardless, we have no reason to believe that her choices as treasurer would not benefit her financially, and that’s not how our public servants should be operating.

Attorney General

My vote: Rob Bonta

The official voter guide on the Secretary of State website (and the version I got in the mail) does not list the Democratic candidate, incumbent Rob Bonta; however, I did confirm online that he is a certified candidate in the primary election. I’m voting for him because it seems like he’s been doing a really good job as attorney general doing things like suing crisis pregnancy centers (which are religious organizations that trick people into thinking they are legitimate healthcare providers). I want him to keep doing that stuff!

Insurance Commissioner

My vote: Jane Kim

I’m voting for Jane Kim because she has a coherent, specific plan for what she wants to do as insurance commissioner and the things she wants to do would actually help regular people. She wants to establish a single-payer version of universal disaster insurance to help address the effects of climate change. She’s proposing public-option car insurance and ending pricing discrimination. Now that she mentions it, why do insurance companies get to use price discrimination?

As to the other candidates, Steven Bradford doesn’t seem like a bad choice, but I like Kim’s platform better. Patrick Wolff seems way too corporate and I also think it’s weird to bring up in his candidate statement that he’s a chess grandmaster—that isn’t necessarily going to make you a good insurance commissioner, but I’m sure it makes him sound smart. I’m also not voting for the Left Unity Slate candidate, Eduardo “Lalo” Vargas, because he has not published a platform specific to the job. I have to know what you’re going to do when you get there!

Board of Equalization District 1

My vote: Nelson Esparza

District 1 includes almost all of the non-coastal counties, including my home of Sacramento County. There are two Democratic candidates for this seat, and Esparza is the only one with a coherent candidate statement. I like that he says he wants to make sure that “the wealthy are paying their fair share.” I want that too! Tax the rich!

Superintendent of Public Instruction

My vote: Frank Lara

Frank Lara is another member of the Left Unity Slate with a platform that I love. He is the only candidate for superintendent of public instruction talking about keeping ICE and police out of schools. How are kids supposed to learn when they’re worried about being kidnapped by ICE? You can’t focus on school when you’re stressed about something that serious. Lara supports increasing funding for schools, noting that California uses “less than 3 percent of the state’s GSP [gross state product] to fund our schools,” and he is against private schools receiving public money. I also like that he is pushing for better special education services, free universal childcare, and expanding adult education. California could have it all!

Sacramento County Elections

Congressional District 7

My vote: Mai Vang

Listen. Our current congressperson, Doris Matsui, is 81 years old. That is TOO OLD to be in Congress! She’s also married to a billionaire and, based on a rare town hall appearance last year, is fairly out of touch.

I’m voting for Vang because she actually has some progressive vision and has been out meeting with the people. Per SF Gate, “Vang wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, supports both the federal wealth tax proposal from U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna and the state wealth tax ballot initiative, and supports the single-payer health care reform proposal called Medicare for all.” Her platform overall is progressive and full of things we really need like universal child care and ending funding for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. It would be great to have her as our congressperson after decades of Matsui signing off on military funding and various modern horrors.

Justice of the Superior Court Office No. 15

My vote: Heath Langle

Voting on judges is always weird because they’re supposed to be non-partisan, yet, we’re voting on them and have very little information available to us. Unless you’re an avid court-watcher, it’s hard to know whether someone will be the kind of judge you want. Additionally, both of the Superior Court Office positions have just one judge on the ballot, so in a way, our votes matter very little. You can, of course, withhold your vote from a candidate you don’t like or write someone in, but I don’t think it will have much of an effect.

There’s not a lot of information about Heath Langle online. He’s currently a judge in the Sacramento Superior Court and he was Lincoln Law School’s alumnus of the year in 2025. Cool? I didn’t find anything offensive about him, so I guess he has my vote.

Judge of the Superior Court Office No. 21

My Vote: James Morris

James Morris is also running unopposed and is currently a Sacramento Superior Court Commissioner. He does have a website that mainly seems focused on who has endorsed him, including a long list of judges and the Sacramento County Deputy Sheriff’s Association. I really wish I knew more about this man but I guess I’m voting for him because it’s Morris or nobody for this position.

Senate District 8

My vote: Angelique Ashby

Angelique Ashby is our current state senator for district 8. I don’t love her but it looks like she has been involved in some good legislation and it seems like she’s doing a decent job overall. Her Wikipedia page doesn’t even have a “controversies” section, so I guess she’s doing well.

I would like to vote for the Peace and Freedom Party candidate, Linda Roberts, however, she doesn’t seem to have a website or any information online about what she stands for. There’s an article on the Peace and Freedom Party website stating that she’s running for office but that’s it. I have to have more information if I’m going to vote for someone!

Assembly District 10

My vote: Stephanie Nguyen

Stephanie Nguyen is our current assembly member and something I like about her is she’s always doing events and activities where she can meet people in the district. I’m subscribed to her newsletter so I see that she’s doing things like a monthly craft meetup where people can come talk to her or organizing a time to go walking where she can chat with constituents. I think that’s a really thoughtful way to connect with the people she represents.

Her only opponent, Vanya Singh, wants to “make California great again,” so I’m not voting for that shit.

Member, Board of Supervisors, District 5

My vote: Pat Hume

Pat Hume is the current District 5 county supervisor and is running unopposed. So … sure.

Assessor

My vote: Christina Wynn

Christina Wynn is running unopposed for Sacramento County Assessor. She is the incumbent and has been our assessor since 2017. I didn’t find any bad news about her, so I guess she’s getting my vote.

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books

Every Book I Read in my Thirties: Reading from 2016–2026

Posted on May 11, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell / 0 Comment

I’ve been keeping track of what I read since 2008, when I was in my last year of college. I had always liked to read but I had been wondering where my time went, so I started keeping a list, and this evolved into my books of the year posts. In 2018, I put together a books of the decade post, reflecting on what I had read in the last ten years. I had been assuming I would do another books of the decade post in 2028, but then I realized I had a more interesting, somewhat less arbitrary option: all the books of my thirties.

Today is my fortieth birthday! It’s a little strange to think about how time just keeps on keeping on like that, but I do feel good about who I am and who I continue to become. I am looking forward to discovering the person I will be in another ten years and my forthcoming “Every Book I Read in my Forties” post (ETA: May 2036). A very important part of who I am is what I have read and thought about, a process you all have a front-row seat to here with the blog (consider subscribing!). I love being able to make connections between things I’ve read and see how an idea develops over multiple books.

In analyzing ten years’ of reading habits, I found the premium version of Storygraph to be very helpful (follow me on Storygraph, if you use it!). Although I keep a spreadsheet of what I read, it’s a lot nicer to have a service to figure some of these things out for me. Still, Storygraph doesn’t do it all, so thank you to my past self for keeping track of this stuff.

Stats

On to the numbers!

Books finished: In ten years, I read 638 books but 618 distinct titles since there are some repeats. I have just under 800 books saved in my “to-read pile” on Storygraph. If I add no other books to the list (lol) and pick up the pace, maybe I’ll catch up in the next decade (lol again). Although it feels like I find at least a few books that look interesting every week to add to the list, so I think it will forever be an unfinished project.
Pages read: 218,535, for an average of 21,853 per year. According to Storygraph, 64 percent of the books I read were 300 or more pages long.
Longest books:
- Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes (1,216 pages)
- Harry Potter y la Orden del Fénix (928 pages)
- The Empire of Gold by S. A. Chakraborty (800 pages)
Shortest books:
- The Ice Owl by Carolyn Ives Gilman (44 pages)
- Caperucita se come al Lobo by Pilar Quintana (69 pages)
- The Lights of Ystrac’s Wood by Alexandra Rowland (85 pages)
Year of Least Books: 2016, with 43 books (15,690 pages). I’m counting the entire year of 2016 here, not just the part after I turned 30. Part of the reason I read relatively few books is that I was trying to improve my Spanish and spent a lot of time slogging through the Harry Potter books en español. However, 2025 might be the real year of least books, since I only read 47 (16,490 pages). If we pro-rated the amount of reading I did in 2016 after my thirtieth birthday, I think it would be more than what I read in 2025. I was also slogging through a long book in Spanish that year.
Year of Most Books: 2020 (lol), with 88 books (32,996 pages). In a not-that-close second place is 2023 with 82 books and a total of 27,566 pages.
Library use: I didn’t start keeping track of this until 2017, but that’s okay, we still have a lot of information. I read 273 books that I borrowed from the library or friends, which represents about 45 percent of my reading. Thank you, Sacramento Public Library!
First book: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, finished May 14, 2016.
Last book: The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook by Matt Dinniman, finished May 9, 2026.
Fiction and non-fiction: I read 413 fiction books and 206 non-fiction books. Reading about 20 non-fiction books per year is very respectable in my opinion.
Most-read authors: My most read author is Martha Wells (14 books). She’s the author of the Murderbot series, which has eight books (the eighth book just published last week) and I recently re-read the series, so that makes sense! After that, we have a few more genre fiction authors because I do love a science fiction/fantasy series: Kate Elliott (10 books), Mary Robinette Kowal (9 books), and then Deborah Harkness, Max Gladstone, and Alexandra Rowland (8 books each).
Gender gap: I’m pleased to report that the vast majority of books I’ve read in the last decade were written by women, with 484 books by women authors and 120 by men (some books were anthologies or written by mixed-gender duos, so this doesn’t represent every book). That means 78 percent of the books I read were by women. I’m still reading an average of 12 books per year by men though, so before anyone jumps in to call me a misandrist, consider that I am reading more books by men authors in a year than most people read at all.
Other languages: I read 28 books in Spanish, which is some real rookie numbers, not even three per year. I started with Harry Potter in 2016 and the most recent was Don Quijote in 2025. Even though I didn’t read a ton of books in Spanish, I’m clearly doing something right if I evolved from fighting for my life reading Harry Potter to making it through Don Quijote (that was also a fight for my life, but my opponents have gotten stronger).

image of a frog on top of a stack of books with the text "reading for pleasure? Nope. I read for PAIN." — art by Frogwitch

Thoughts for the Upcoming Decade

Here’s what I’m thinking about for my upcoming decade of reading:

Read more (my forever goal). Lately I have been having a hard time not tripping into the infinite scroll abyss on instagram in the evenings. I want to try setting aside a particular time of day to read.
Take physical notes. I had been getting into a bit of a habit with writing thoughts in a notebook while reading. Honestly, the main thing stopping me is finding a comfortable position to read and take notes. Maybe I need to designate “study time” reading sessions for reading non-fiction. It helps me retain what I read and it makes it easier to write about the books on my blog.
Read outside. I want to be taking in the free air more often, weather permitting.
Read more in Spanish.
Start reading in Icelandic. I think I’m ready.
Read with others. I love reading a book and discussing it with friends.
Read through books I have already bought! I’m feeling this keenly after a few recent bookstore shopping sprees.
Get back into riding my bike to the library because there’s really nothing like filling my bike basket with books.
Keep following my interests. I often see people online making lists or designating categories of what to read and that has literally never worked for me. I just have to go with what I feel in the moment. Related: when I don’t “feel” like anything in particular, just pick up a book and start.

That turned into more of a mini-manifesto, but I stand by what I said.

comic panel from "Persepolis." A woman is smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. The caption reads "Once again, I arrived at my usual conclusion: One must educate oneself." — from Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis”

The Big List

Here’s the list of all the books I read in my thirties, presented in alphabetical order! I’ve removed duplicates (titles I read more than once), so if anyone is counting, you won’t find 638 unique books here.

Title	Author
“You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People	Aubrey Gordon
[Un]framing the “Bad Woman”: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, and Other Rebels with a Cause	Alicia Gaspar de Alba
A Burning	Megha Majumdar
A Choir of Lies	Alexandra Rowland
A Closed and Common Orbit	Becky Chambers
A Conjuring of Light	V. E. Schwab
A Conspiracy of Truths	Alexandra Rowland
A Court of Frost and Starlight	Sarah J. Maas
A Court of Mist and Fury	Sarah J. Maas
A Court of Silver Flames	Sarah J. Maas
A Court of Thorns and Roses	Sarah J. Maas
A Court of Wings and Ruin	Sarah J. Maas
A Desolation Called Peace	Arkady Martine
A Discovery of Witches	Deborah Harkness
A Field Guide to Getting Lost	Rebecca Solnit
A Jewel Bright Sea	Claire O’Dell
A Marvelous Light	Freyja Marske
A Memory Called Empire	Arkady Martine
A Mirror Mended	Alix E. Harrow
A Passage of Stars	Kate Elliott
A Power Unbound	Freya Marske
A Prayer for the Crown Shy	Becky Chambers
A Psalm for the Wild Built	Becky Chambers
A Restless Truth	Freya Marske
A Secret History of Witches	Louisa Morgan
A Spindle Splintered	Alix E. Harrow
A Study in Honor	Claire O’Dell
A Taste of Gold and Iron	Alexandra Rowland
A Witch in Time	Constance Sayers
A Wrinkle in Time	Madeleine L’Engle
Acceptance	Jeff VanderMeer
Afterland	Lauren Beukes
Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability	Emily Apter
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism	Safiya Umoja Noble
All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now	Ruby Tandoh
All of Us Murderers	KJ Charles
All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship	Jennifer Natalya Fink
All Systems Red	Martha Wells
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator	Barry Levine and Monique el-Faizy
Amberlough	Lara Elena Donnelly
American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power	Andrea Bernstein
American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment	Shane Bauer
Ammonite	Nicola Griffith
Amnesty	Lara Elena Donnelly
An Earthly Crown	Kate Elliott
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace	Tamar Adler
An Excess Male	Maggie Shen King
Ancestral Night	Elizabeth Bear
Annihilation	Jeff VanderMeer
Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives	Gary Younge
Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects us and Undermines Democracy	Siva Vaidhyanathan
Arcana, ciudad escalera	Tamara Romero
Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past	Sarah Parcak
Arkfall	Carolyn Ives Gilman
Armistice	Lara Elena Donnelly
Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy	Ben Davis
Artificial Condition	Martha Wells
Ascension	Jacqueline Koyanagi
Assassin of Reality	Sergey Dyachenko, Marina Dyachenko
Authority	Jeff VanderMeer
Autonomous	Annalee Newitz
Azura Ghost	Essa Hansen
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution	R. F. Kuang
Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream	Megan Greenwell
Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship	Anjan Sundaram
Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange	Ann Searcy
Battle of the Linguist Mages	Scotto Moore
Beans: A History	Ken albala
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language	Gretchen McCulloch
Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women	Lyz Lenz
Beowulf: A New Translation	Maria Dahvana Headley
Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China	Leta Hong Fincher
Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution	Shiri Eisner
Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime	Jennifer Taub
Binti	Nnedi Okorafor
Bitch Planet, Volume 1: Extraordinary Machine	Kelly Sue DeConnick
Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party	Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin
Black Sun	Rebecca Roanhorse
Black Water Sister	Zen Cho
Bodies on the Line: At the Front Lines of the Fight to Protect Abortion in America	Lauren Rankin
Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression	Jana Evans Braziel, Kathleen LeBesco
Borne	Jeff Vandermeer
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants	Robin Wall Kimmerer
Brilliant Imperfection	Eli Clare
Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America	Kathleen Belew
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory	David Graeber
Bunny	Mona Awad
Burial Rights: A Novel	Hannah Kent
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle	Emily Nagoski, Amelia Nagoski
Cahokia Jazz	Francis Spufford
Camp Damascus	Chuck Tingle
Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation	Anne Helen Petersen
Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition	Debt Collective, Astra Taylor
Cantoras	Carolina de Robertis
Caperucita se come al Lobo	Pilar Quintana
Caramba!	Nina Marie Martinez
Caramelo	Sandra Cisneros
Carl’s Doomsday Scenario	Matt Dinniman
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents	Isabel Wilkerson
Certain Dark Things	Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Chain Gang All-Stars	Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Cheese Sex Death: A Bible for the Cheese Obsessed	Erika Kubick
Chiapas, la rebelión indígena de México	Carlos Montemayor
Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings	Neil Price
Children of Ruin	Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Time	Adrian Tchaikovsky
Cinder House	Freya Marske
Circe	Madeline Miller
Claiming the B in LGBT: Illuminating the Bisexual Narrative	Kate Harrad
Cold Fire	Kate Elliott
Cold Magic	Kate Elliott
Cold Steel	Kate Elliott
Como agua para chocolate	Laura Esquivel
Composting for a New Generation: Latest Techniques for the Bin and Beyond	Michelle Balz, Anna Stockton
Composting: Bob’s Basics	Bob Flowerdew
Confessions of the Fox	Jordy Rosenberg
Crossroads of Canopy	Thoraiya Dyer
Crosstalk	Connie Willis
Crow After Roe: How “Separate But Equal” Has Become the New Standard In Women’s Health And How We Can Change That	Robin Marty and Jessica Mason Pieklo
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir	Michelle Zauner
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism	Amanda Montell
Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America	Jane Borden
Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy	Talie Lavin
Dark Orbit	Carolyn Ives Gilman
Daughter of Eden	Chris Beckett
Daughter of the Moon Goddess	Sue Lynn Tan
Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession	Alice Bolin
Death Valley	Melissa Broder
Deathless	Catherynne Valente
Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea	Rita Chang-Eppig
Deep Space Nine: Hollow Men	Una McCormack
Deep Survival	Laurence Gonzales
Devil’s Gun	Cat Rambo
Disco Witches of Fire Island	Blair Fell
Docile	K. M. Szpara
Doing Harm: the Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick	Maya Dusenbery
Don Quijote de la Mancha	Miguel de Cervantes
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World	Naomi Klein
Double Bind: Women on Ambition	Robin Romm
Dracula	Bram Stoker
Dungeon Crawler Carl	Matt Dinniman
Earthsong	Suzette Haden Elgin
Egypt’s Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth	John Darnell, Collen Darnell
El beso de la mujer araña	Manuel Puig
El Espejo Enterrado	Carlos Fuentes
El Mañana: Memorias de un éxodo cubano	Mirta Ojito
El reino del dragón de oro	Isabel Allende
Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics	Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Empire Ascendant	Kameron Hurley
Empress of Forever	Max Gladstone
Escaping Exodus	Nicky Drayden
European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman	Theodora Goss
Even though I Knew the End	C. L. Polk
Everfair	Nisi Shawl
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection	John Green
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation	Alexei Yurchak
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City	Matthew Desmond
Exit Strategy	Martha Wells
Eyes of the Void	Adrian Tchaikovsky
Fathomfolk	Eliza Chan
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia	Sabrina Strings
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It	Janina Ramírez
Feminismos: Miradas desde la diversidad	ed. Pikara
Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World	Leslie Kern
Fevered Star	Rebecca Roanhorse
Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win	Clara Zetkin
Finna	Nino Cipri
First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens	Becky Ferreira
Foundation	Isaac Asimov
Four Roads Cross	Max Gladstone
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle	Angela Davis
Fugitive Telemetry	Martha Wells
Full Fathom Five	Max Gladstone
Furious Heaven	Kate Elliott
Ghost Talkers	Mary Robinette Kowal
Gideon the Ninth	Tamsyn Muir
Gingerbread	Helen Oyeyemi
Glamour in Glass	Mary Robinette Kowal
Gods of Jade and Shadow	Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Goldilocks	Laura Lam
Gonzlez and Daughter Trucking Co.: A Road Novel with Literary License	María Amparo Escandón
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch	Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Half A Soul	Olivia Atwater
Halfway Human	Carolyn Ives Gilman
Handbook for a Post-Roe America	Robin Marty
Harrow the Ninth	Tamsyn Muir
Harry Potter y el Cáliz de Fuego	J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter y el misterio del príncipe	J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban	J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter y la Orden del Fénix	J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter y las reliquias de la muerte	J. K. Rowling
Heart of the Sun Warrior	Sue Lynn Tan
Hench	Nina Zine Walschots
Her Body and Other Parties	Carmen Maria Machado
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America	Sarah Kendzior
High Times in the Low Parliament	Kelly Robins
Hild	Nicola Griffith
His Conquering Sword	Kate Elliott
History of Wolves: A Novel	Emily Fridlund
Hollow Kingdom	Kira Jane Buxton
Homegoing	Yaa Gyasi
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot	Mikki Kendall
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities	Rebecca Solnit
Hotel Silence	Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia	Craig Unger
How Emotions Are Made	Lisa Feldman Barrett
How Infrastructure Works	Deb Chachra
How Long ’til Black Future Month	N. K. Jemisin
How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse	K. Eason
How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge	K. Eason
How to Be an Antiracist	Ibram X. Kendi
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy	Jenny Odell
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States	Daniel Immerwahr
How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict	Nina Jankowicz
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic	Emily Croy Barker
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective	Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Hunger	Roxane Gay
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life	Ed Yong
I Hate Men	Pauline Harmange
If Tomorrow Comes	Nancy Kress
In Other Words	Jhumpa Lahiri
In the Dream House: A Memoir	Carmen Maria Machado
Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have	Tatiana Schlossberg
Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings From the Me Too Movement	Shelly Oria (editor)
Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America	Pekka Hämäläinen
Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong — and the New Research that’s Rewriting the Story	Angela Saini
Ink Blood Sister Scribe	Emma Törzs
Inland	Téa Obreht
Interference	Sue Burke
Intuitive Eating for Diabetes: The No Shame, No Blame, Non-Diet Approach to Managing Your Blood Sugar	Janice Dada
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men	Caroline Criado Perez
Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine	Michele Lent Hirsch
Iraq + 100: The First Anthology of Science Fiction to Have Emerged from Iraq	Hassan Blasim
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956	Anne Applebaum
January Fifteenth	Rachel Swirsky
Jaran	Kate Elliott
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation	Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind	Molly McGhee
Karen Memory	Elizabeth Bear
Katabasis	R. F. Kuang
Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern	Jing Tsu
Knitlandia: A Knitter Sees the World	Clara Parkes
La distancia entre nosotros	Reyna Grande
La fruta del borrachero: Una novela	Ingrid Rojas Contreras
La Maravillosa Historia de Español	Francisco Moreno Fernández
La nostalgia de la Mujer Anfibio	Cristina Sánchez-Andrade
Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism	Leandro Vergara-Camus
Last First Snow	Max Gladstone
Late in the Day: A Novel	Tessa Hadley
Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community	Barbara Rogoff, Carolyn Goodman Turkanis, Leslee Bartlett
Leave the World Behind	Rumaan Alam
Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality	Lily Geismer
Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China	Leta Hong Fincher
Lesbian Love Story: A Memoir in Archives	Amelia Possanza
Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care	Kelly Hayes, Mariame Kaba
Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism	Joanne Limburg
Leviathan Wakes	James S. A. Corey
Lies Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics	Arti Rabin-Havt
Light Perpetual	Francis Spufford
Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America	Bridget Read
Little Gods	Meng Jin
Living in Your Light	Abdellah Taïa
Longshadow	Olivia Atwater
Lords of Uncreation	Adrian Tchaikovsky
Los desesperados	Joselo Rangel
Los hombres me explican cosas	Rebecca Solnit
Lost Children Archive: A Novel	Valeria Luiselli
Machine	Elizabeth Bear
Magic for Liars	Sarah Gailey
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media	Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky
Master of Djinn	P. Djèlí Clark
Mediocre: The dangerous legacy of white male America	Ijeoma Oluo
Men Explain Things to Me	Rebecca Solnit
Mexican Gothic	Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains	Kerri Arsenault
Mind of My Mind	Octavia Butler
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning	Cathy Park Hong
Miracle Country: A Memoir	Kendra Atleework
Miranda in Milan	Katharine Duckett
Miss Iceland	Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
Monsignor Quixote	Graham Green
Moonbound	Robin Sloan
Mostly Dead Things	Kristen Arnett
Mother of Eden	Chris Beckett
Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men	Katrine Marçal
Mr. Slipfoot	Samantha Hunt
My Brilliant Friend	Elena Ferrante
My Sister, the Serial Killer	Oyinkan Braithwaite
My Year Abroad	Chang-Rae Lee
Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America	Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Network Effect	Martha Wells
NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity	Steve Silberman
New Suns: Original Speculative fiction by People of Color	Nisi Shawl (editor)
Nickel Boys	Colson Whitehead
Nine Pints: A Journey through Time, Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood	Rose George
Ninefox Gambit	Yoon Ha Lee
Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in your Car, and Food on Your Plate	Rose George
No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need	Naomi Klein
No Meat Required: The Cultural History & Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating	Alicia Kennedy
No One Is Talking About This	Patricia Lockwood
Nona the Ninth	Tamsyn Muir
Nophek Gloss	Essa Hansen
Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age	Donna Zuckerberg
Not Funny Ha-Ha: A Handbook for Something Hard	Leah Hayes
Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture	Roxane Gay
Now Is Not the Time to Panic	Kevin Wilson
Ocean’s Echo	Everina Maxwell
Of Noble Family	Mary Robinette Kowal
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This	Omar El Akkad
Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business	Roxane Gay
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit	Jeanette Winterson
Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home	Charlie Warzel, Anne Helen Petersen
Outlawed	Anna North
Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion	Elizabeth Cline
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void	Mary Roach
Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity	James O’Donnell
Palestine: A Socialist Introduction	Sumaya Awad, Brian Bean
Passing Strange	Ellen Klages
Payback’s a Witch	Lana Harper
People Collide	Isle McElroy
Permanent Distortion: How the Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever	Nomi Prins
Pink-pilled: Women and the far right	Lois Shearing
Piranesi	Susanna Clarke
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia	David Graeber
Plain Bad Heroines	Emily M. Danforth
Practical Magic	Alice Hoffman
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder	Caroline Fraser
Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights	Katha Pollitt
Project Hail Mary	Andy Weir
Provenance	Ann Leckie
Psychology of Time Travel	Kate Mascarenhas
Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day	Peter Ackroyd
Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love	Lida Maxwell
Rage Becomes Her	Soraya Chemaly
Range of Ghosts	Elizabeth Bear
Read and Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism	Nadya Tolokonnikova
Rebel Blade	Davinia Evans
Record of a Spaceborn Few	Becky Chambers
Red Clocks	Leni Zumas
Red Plenty	Francis Spufford
Red, White, and Royal Blue	Casey McQuiston
Remote Control	Nnedi Okorafor
Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and their Surprising Rise to Power	Anna Merlan
Republic of Thieves	Scott Lynch
Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto	Tricia Hersey
Revolution’s Shore	Kate Elliott
Rogue Protocol	Martha Wells
Roller Girl	Victoria Jamieson
Running Close to the Wind	Alexandra Rowland
Sappho Is burning	Page DuBois
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture	Jenny Odell
Semiosis	Sue Burke
Servant Mage	Kate Elliott
Seven Surrenders	Ada Palmer
Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery	Annie Liontas
Shades of Milk and Honey	Mary Robinette Kowal
Shadow Baron	Davinia Evans
Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right	Anne Nelson
Shadow of Night	Deborah Harkness
Shards of Earth	Adrian Tchaikovsky
Shattered Pillars	Elizabeth Bear
She Who Became the Sun	Shelley Parker-Chan
She Would Be King	Weyétu Moore
Shipley Proposal Guide	Larry Newman
Shoestring Theory	Mariana Costa
Silent Spring	Rachel Carson
Sing, Unburied, Sing	Jesamyn Ward
Sistema nervioso	Lina Meruane
Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism	Seyward Darby
Sistersong	Lucy Holland
Skyward Inn	Aliya Whiteley
Smoke and Mirrors	Mary Dublin, Anne Kendsley
Sombras de Reikiavik	Anthony Adeane
Some by Virtue Fall	Alexandra Rowland
Some Desperate Glory	Emily Tesh
Soulstar	C. L. Polk
Space Oddity	Catherynne Valente
Space Opera	Catherynne Valente
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One	Kristen Arnett
Storm of Locusts	Rebecca Roanhorse
Stormsong	C. L. Polk
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right	Arlie Russell Hochschild
Strong Female Character	Fern Brady
Swann’s Way	Marcel Proust (translated by Lydia Davis)
Swordcrossed	Freya Marske
System Collapse	Martha Wells
Tadek and the Princess	Alexandra Rowland
Technical Communication Today, 6th Edition	Richard Johnson-Sheehan
Tema Libre	Alejandro Zambra
Ten Thousand Stitches	Olivia Atwater
Terran Tomorrow	Nancy Kress
Text Me When You Get Home	Kayleen Schaeffer
The Actual Star	Monica Byrne
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi	Shannon Chakraborty
The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War	Craig Whitlock
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power	Shosana Zuboff
The Age of Witches	Louisa Morgan
The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate	George Lakoff
The Archive Undying	Emma Mieko Camden
The Bear and the Nightingale	Katherine Arden
The Bees	Laline Paul
The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies	Mariana Mazzucato, Rosie Collington
The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity	Amy Webb
The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag	Sasha Velour
The Black Bird Oracle	Deborah Harkness
The Black God’s Drums	P. Djèlí Clark
The Book of Goose	Yiyun Li
The Book of Life	Deborah Harkness
The Book of Love	Kelly Link
The Bright and Breaking Sea	Chloe Neill
The Broken Heavens	Kameron Hurley
The Bruising of Qilwa	Naseem Jamnia
The Burning Page	Genevieve Cogman
The Calculating Stars	Mary Robinette Kowal
The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls	Anissa Gray
The Cartographers	Peng Shepherd
The Centre	Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption	Kathryn Joyce
The Chosen and the Beautiful	Nghi Vo
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls	Aliette de Bodard
The City in Glass	Nghi Vo
The City of Brass	S. A. Chakraborty
The City We Became	N. K. Jemisin
The Coin	Yasmin Zaher
The Collected Schizophrenias	Esmé Weijun Wang
The Color of Air	Gail Tsukiyama
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America	Richard Rothstein
The Cooking Gene	Michael Twitty
The Crescent Moon Tearoom	Stacy Sivinski
The Crime Without a Name: Combatting Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America	Barrett Holmes Pitner
The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life	Johan Eklöf
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau	Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Deep Sky	Yume Kitasei
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth	Andreas Malm
The Devourers	Indra Das
The Disaster Tourist	Yun Ko-Eun
The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories	Jared Shurin, Mahvesh Murad
The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth about Food and Flavor	Mark Schatzker
The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe	Kij Johnson
The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook	Matt Dinniman
The Empire of Gold	S. A. Chakraborty
The Empress of Salt and Fortune	Nghi Vo
The End of Drum Time	Hanna Pylväinen
The End of Men and the Rise of Women	Hanna Rosin
The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto	Jonathan Taplin
The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language	Mark Forsyth
The Everlasting	Alix E. Harrow
The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy	Caroline Dooner
The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill	Rowenna Miller
The Fallen	Ada Hoffman
The Fated Sky	Mary Robinette Kowal
The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race	Jesmyn Ward (ed.)
The First Bright Thing	J. R. Dawson
The First Sister	Linden Lewis
The Flamethowers	Rachel Kushner
The Future	Naomi Alderman
The Future Is Blue	Catherynne Valente
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within	Becky Chambers
The Geek Feminist Revolution	Kameron Huley
The Ghost Bride	Yangsze Choo
The Girl in the Tower	Katherine Arden
The Glass Hotel	Emily St. John Mandel
The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History	Kassia St. Clair
The Goldfinch	Donna Tartt
The Heart between Kingdoms	Mary Dublin, Anne Kendsley
The Heart Goes Last	Margaret Atwood
The Hexologists	Josiah Bancroft
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017	Rashid Khalidi
The Ice Owl	Carolyn Ives Gilman
The Immortal King Rao	Vauhini Vara
The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation	Cory Doctorow
The Invisible Library	Genevieve Cogman
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue	V. E. Schwab
The Jasad Heir	Sara Hashem
The Jasmine Throne	Tasha Suri
The Jewel and Her Lapidary	Fran Wilde
The Judas Rose	Suzette Haden Elgin
The Kingdom of Copper	S. A. Chakraborty
The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics	Olivia Waite
The Language Hoax: The World Looks the Same in Any Language	John H. McWhorter
The Law of Becoming	Kate Elliott
The Left Hand of Darkness	Ursula K. Le Guin
The Librarian	Mikhail Elizarov
The Light Brigade	Kameron Hurley
The Lights of Ystrac’s Wood	Alexandra Rowland
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet	Becky Chambers
The Lost plot	Genevieve Cogman
The Lover	Marguerite Duras
The Luminous Dead	Caitlin Starling
The Magician’s Daughter	H. G. Parry
The Mars Room: A Novel	Rachel Kushner
The Masked City	Genevieve Cogman
The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism	Jen Gunter
The Mere Wife	Maria Dahvana Headley
The Midnight Bargain	C. L. Polk
The Ministry of Time	Kaliane Bradley
The Mirror Empire	Kameron Hurley
The Mortal World	Genevieve Cogman
The Mothers	Brit Bennett
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See	A. Kendra Greene
The New Age of Sexism: How Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny	Laura Bates
The Night Tiger	Yangsze Choo
The Night Watchman	Louise Erdrich
The Notorious Sorcerer	Davina Evans
The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future	Julie Hobsbawn
The Obelisk Gate	N. K. Jemisin
The Once and Future Witches	Alix E. Harrow
The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center	Rhaina Choen
The Outside	Ada Hoffman
The Palestine Laboratory	Antony Loewenstein
The Past Is Red	Catherynne Valente
The Phoenix Empress	K. Aresenault Rivera
The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election	Malcolm Nance
The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy	Anna Clark
The Poppy War	R. F. Kuang
The Power	Naomi Alderman
The Price of Ransom	Kate Elliott
The Radium Girls	Kate Moore
The Raven Tower	Ann Leckie
The Refrigerator Monologues	Catherynne Valente
The Restoration Program	Mary Dublin, Anne Kendsley
The Ruin of Angeles	Max Gladstone
The Saint of Bright Doors	Vajra Chandrasekera
The Season: A Social History of the Debutante	Kristen Richardson
The Secret Chapter	Genevieve Cogman
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket	Benjamin Lorr
The Secret Lives of Glaciers	M Johnson
The Sellout	Paul Beatty
The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls	Mona Eltahawy
The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl	Theodora Goss
The Sisters of the Winter Wood	Rena Rossner
The Snow Queen	Joan D. Vinge
The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps	Kai Ashante Wilson
The Space Between Worlds	Micaiah Johnson
The Spare Man	Mary Robinette Kowal
The Starless Sea	Erin Morgenstern
The Stars Are Legion	Kameron Huley
The Stone Sky	N. K, Jemisin
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter	Theodora Goss
The Summer Queen	Joan D. Vinge
The Teleportation Accident	Ned Beauman
The Ten Thousand Doors of January	Alix E. Harrow
The Testaments	Margaret Atwood
The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic	Emily Croy Barker
The Third Hotel	Laure Van den Berb
The Tiger’s Daughter	K Arsenault Rivera
The Travelers	Regina Porter
The Unbroken	C. L. Clark
The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep	H. G. Parry
The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays	Elisa Gabbert
The Unwomanly Face of War	Svetlana Alexievich
The Vanishing Half	Brit Bennett
The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam	Marshall G. S. Hodgson
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches	Sangu Mandanna
The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America	Sarah Kendzior
The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide	Steven W. Thrasher
The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper	A. J. Fitzwater
The Warrior Moon	K. Aresenault Rivera
The Water Cure	Sopihe Mackintosh
The Will to Battle	Ada Palmer
The Wolf in the Whale	Jordanna Max Brodsky
The World Gives Way	Marissa Levien
There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America	Brian Goldstone
There There	Tommy Orange
They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent	Sarah Kendzior
They Were Her Property: White Woman as Slave Owners in the American South	Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Thick: And Other Essays	Tressie McMillan Cottom
Things We Lost in the Fire	Mariana Enriquez
This Is How You Lose the Time War	Amal el-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
Threads of Life: A History of the World through the Eye of a Needle	Clare Hunter
Three Parts Dead	Max Gladstone
Tierra de Brumas	Cristina López Barrio
Time’s Convert	Deborah Harkness
To Be Taught, If Fortunate	Becky Chambers
Todas las hadas del reino	Laura Gallego
Tomorrow’s Kin	Nancy Kress
Too Like the Lightning	Ada Palmer
Trail of Lightning	Rebecca Roanhorse
Trainwreck: The women we love to hate, mock, and fear … and why	Sady Doyle
Transcendent Kingdom	Yaa Gyasi
Translating Myself and Others	Jhumpa Lahiri
Translation State	Ann Leckie
Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest	Zeynep Tufekci
Two Serpents Rise	Max Gladstone
Umami	Laia Jufresa
Un vaso de agua bajo mi cama: Inmigración, feminismo y bisexualidad	Daisy Hernández
Unconquerable Sun	Kate Elliott
Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity	Devon Price
Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia	Kate Manne
US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty	Lance Selfa
Vagabundos	Hao Jingfang
Valour and Vanity	Mary Robinette Kowal
Vampires of El Norte	Isabel Cañas
Vita Nostra	Sergey Dyachenko, Marina Dyachenko
Vox	Christina Dalcher
We Ride Upon Sticks	Quan Barry
We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Cover Girl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement	Andi Zeisler
What Happened	Hillary Clinton
What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Fat	Aubrey Gordon
When Tiger Came Down the Mountain	Nghi Vo
When Women Were Dragons	Kelly Barnhill
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide	Carol Anderson
Why Bad Governments Happen to Good People	Danny Katch
Wild Seed	Octavia Butler
Winter’s Orbit	Evarina Maxwell
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times	Katherine May
Witch King	Martha Wells
Witchmark	C. L. Polk
With Teeth: A Novel	Kristen Arnett
Without a Summer	Mary Robinette Kowal
Woman at 1,000 Degrees	Hallgrímur Helgason
Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age	Kathleen Sheppard
Women Talking	Miriam Toews
Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone	Sarah Jaffe
World’s End	Joan D. Vinge
Yellowface	R. F. Kuang
Yield under Great Persuasion	Alexandra Rowland
You Have the Right to Remain Fat: A Manifesto	Virgie Tovar
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place	Janelle Shane
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty	Akwaeke Emezi
You Sexy Thing	Cat Rambo

weekly update

Three Weeks in the Life: May 10, 2026

Posted on May 10, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. Last week, Kirk and I took a little vacation to the Pacific Northwest. My beloved friend Kira was celebrating her 40th birthday and having a big party. She asked me to host a roast of her. I had a lot of fun putting my jokes together but I did somewhat feel that I was being trolled since everyone else got up and said nice, sincere things. Kira said I did the job she wanted me to do though. I’m the entertainment! Not everyone has the chops.

Because I wanted to be extra (and the dress code was “extra festive and over the top”), I had a custom jester outfit made. I had honestly been thinking that I would like some clown couture but didn’t have a good excuse (though do we really need an excuse?) until Kira’s invite, so I was happy for the opportunity to get weird with it. I worked with Lindsay Cade, who did a wonderful job and helped me refine the idea into something that looked cool and would be wearable. I’m obsessed with all of it and I do think I need an entire custom wardrobe now.

me and Kira dressed fancifully for her party. I'm in a shiny, irridescent jester outfit and she's got a pink tulle duster on and a tiara made out of My Little Ponies — extra-festive birthday outfits

I had Kirk take some photos of me, and one of them caught me hitting the “emotions are offline” face. I think it’s hilarious on its own but it’s even funnier when you realize it’s a case of life imitating art. I’m really making the same face as Stańczyk in the Jan Matejko painting. Universal jester experience: getting off stage and shutting down.

me, fully decked out in my jester outfit, momentarily forgetting to mask and going neutral/sad face, looking dejectedly at the ground, my hands on my hips — tale as old as time: sad jester

the painting Stańczyk by Jan Matejko, featuring a jester clad in red, seated, apparently dissociating or maybe simply not masking. the expression bears an uncanny resemblance to my own picture — tale as old as time: sad jester

After the festivities, Kirk and I did some tourist activities since he had not been to Seattle. Week took a lap around Pike Place Market where a woman who didn’t speak much English asked me where the original Starbucks was (thrilling to complete the corporate pilgrimage, I guess). We went to the top of the Space Needle! We also visited the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum, which is full of surreal glasswork. It was very cool!

Seattle skyline on a clear day seen from my friend's apartment. The space needle and Lake Union are straight ahead and there are sky scrapers to the left. — view of Seattle

Kirk and I at the top of the space needle, with a view of Seattle in the background — view of Seattle

After Seattle, we headed to Orcas Island, which is a lovely place. There wasn’t a lot to do; we were there on a Tuesday, which, it turns out, is the day when most shops are closed after being open for tourists all weekend. That is okay because I spent my free time reading on the balcony of our hotel room (view pictured below) and becoming best friends with the hotel cat, Mr. Lily. My friend Shannon lives on Orcas, and we got to visit a little with her and her family, which was also lovely! There’s nothing like visiting friends to remind you that the whole meaning of life is to hang out with your friends and eat food and talk about stuff (and pet cats).

Mr. Lily, the Orcas Hotel cat, sitting on my lap and chilling with his eyes closed while I pet him. — Mr. Lily, the Orcas Hotel cat

stunning view of the Salish sea and Shaw Island, along with the ferry docked, from the Orcas hotel. It's a clear day and the sea is bright blue. — Mr. Lily, the Orcas Hotel cat

On Saturday after we got home, Lemon and I hosted another of our themed food parties. It’s my birthday on Monday, so I wanted to do a summer reading pizza party, inspired by the nostalgic joy of reading books to get a free personal pizza. We invited everyone to bring a pizza topping and we all made our own little pizzas. A surprise hit topping: BEANS. Yes, I will always find a way to include beans at the potluck. I was surprised that so many people were willing to toss some cassoulet beans on their pizza. I was also surprised that no one dared to try cashews. It’s a good pizza topping and I will die on this hill!

We also asked everyone to bring a wrapped book and then had people pick which book they wanted based on a few details, excluding the title and author. I hope everyone goes home and reads a good book and eats more pizza. This, too, is the meaning of life.

a paper plate with a large-ish personal pizza topped with a smattering of pepperoni, cashews, olives, beans and some pesto and goat cheese — pizza party!

brown-paper wrapped books scattered on the dining table. Each has a "blind date with a book" tag that provides some details — pizza party!

Books and Other Words

The Power of Queer Love

Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell focuses on the relationship between Carson, best known for authoring the 1962 environmental work Silent Spring (which I read in 2019 but apparently didn’t bother to write about on here!), and Dorothy Freeman. It feels like a disservice to say Carson and Freeman were “friends” (it sounds a little “they were roommates”), but they really weren’t roommates; Freeman was married to a man and we don’t exactly know the extent of the relationship between her and Carson. However, in the excerpts from their letters that Maxwell shares, the two are constantly calling each other “darling,” writing at length about how much they love, support, and miss each other, and talking about the “wonder” of their friendship. Much of what we know about Carson and Freeman’s relationship comes from an archive of their prolific correspondence, however, Freeman ended up burning a large portion of the letters she wrote after Carson’s death because she was afraid of what someone might think about the two of them.

Maxwell makes the case that Silent Spring was inspired by Carson’s love of nature and sharing that love with Freeman. Much of the commentary on Carson’s work centers on the fear of climate change as a motivator for environmental action, but Maxwell argues “that a vibrant multispecies world is necessary to sustain and hold onto because it allows us to become truer selves.” That is, through queer love—as opposed to heteronormative love, which “encourages us to turn to intimate life rather than politics for solace for our unhappiness”—we can open ourselves to appreciating the world because it brings us joy, rather than calling for sustaining the planet for the sake of our children or out of fear that we will lose access to modern conveniences. Maxwell writes that queer love “is a poetic activity of creating a new worldly horizon of possibility, in conjunction with other people … and living creatures.” By becoming close with Freeman, Carson is able to open herself to the possibility of queer love, developing a will to write politically about the environment.

Finally, one of the thoughtful choices Maxwell makes in this book is in the term “nonhuman nature.” Carson and Freeman’s relationship revolves around their experiences in nature—listening to the song of the veeries, watching the stars from the beach—that inspire feelings of wonder in themselves and for each other. Humans are a part of the natural world but we normally think of ourselves as a thing apart. By specifically naming “nonhuman nature,” we are forced to consider the fact that nature includes humanity too.

Searching for Lost Time

book cover for Swann's Way shown on kobo ereader — Swann’s Way

When Lito invites me to a group read, I always say yes—that’s how I ended up reading Don Quijote last year. This year, he said he wanted to start reading Marcel Proust’s seven-volume series, In Search of Lost Time. I’ve gone into this knowing virtually nothing about Proust or his work except from what Steve Carell’s character had to say about him in the movie Little Miss Sunshine. I’m not sure I would have decided to read this on my own but it’s been enjoyable reading with friends (as doing most things is!) and discussing it and joking in the group chat (most of the posts are like “this is gay/autistic [affectionate]). The book is dense, so we’re reading it a little at a time, and we just finished the first volume, Swann’s Way. Proust has a reputation for being wordy and that’s certainly well-founded. He also digs up so many specific-ass words (I have sympathy for the translator); rarely have I looked so many words up while reading in my native language. It took a certain amount of patience to read this book because, when you think about it, you realize that Proust’s narrator says something like “one night I couldn’t fall asleep,” and next thing you know you’re 80 pages deep into what is ultimately a charming story about the narrator’s childhood and his obsession with getting a little kiss from mama before going to bed. It’s good, but when I stop to think about it, it’s like, what are we doing here? All this because you couldn’t fall asleep? Still, the prose does carry you away and I found it a generally compelling read (but maybe it’s just that there are very few natural stopping points?). We did get rather sick of the middle section of the book, which focused on Swann’s liaisons with a courtesan. His insufferable behavior led me to send messages to the chat like “Swann is really displaying unprecedented levels of incel thinking” and “Swann needs to touch grass and get a fucking life.” Anyway, I can’t wait to see where all that goes.

internet post reading "Would it be considered 'gay' to go for a walk in the evening?" — Swann’s Way: summarized

The Summer Queen

The Summer Queen is the third book in Joan D. Vinge’s Snow Queen Cycle. When I wrote about the previous book, World’s End, I kind of didn’t get the point of focusing on the character of BZ Gundhalinu, but apparently I did not see the greater vision. In The Summer Queen, we see the fruits of Gundhalinu’s work in World’s End, with the development of a plasma drive for faster-than-light space travel. He returns to Tiamat and reunites with Moon nearly 20 years after she has become queen and they link up with a third character, Reed Kullervo, to save the universe or whatever. I don’t actually have a lot to say about this book beyond that! I thought it was good overall but so far, the original Snow Queen has been the strongest book of the series.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

Another book I would not have picked up on my own, but from a wildly different genre is Dungeon Crawler Carl, a series by Matt Dinniman. Kirk has been enjoying the audio books and suggested we listen to them on our drive, and they are actually very amusing. The books are written as though the main character is playing a video game, complete with using skills, collecting magical items, and, yes, dungeon crawling. I think listening to the audiobook is a much more fun experience than reading it because the voice actor does such a good job bringing the characters to life and imbuing the in-game descriptions with a perspective (the game AI is sassy). We listened to two and a half books in the car (book two: Carl’s Doomsday Scenario) and then I downloaded the ebook from the library so I could finish book three (The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook) because I had become invested. I think the books are effective for their genre of “POV: guy playing a real-life video game” but I don’t think the prose is especially compelling, though I suppose it doesn’t have to be.

The story itself is a post-apocalyptic scenario in which an alien corporation flattens everything on Earth without warning to take its resources, and the survivors enter into a real-life game where they attempt to make their way through multiple levels of dungeon crawling, which is televised to the wider universe for fun and profit. The titular Carl is the focus of the story. He enters the dungeon with his ex-girlfriend’s prize-winning cat, Princess Donut, who soon gains sentience and can talk and cast spells and shit. We all love Princess Donut. Carl is supposed to be something of an everyman: he’s in the coast guard, he recently split with his girlfriend who cheated on him, and he’s just trying to live his life and maybe work through his unresolved childhood trauma. Unfortunately, now he’s in a fucking dungeon TV program trying to keep himself and Donut alive by assembling contraptions and blowing all kinds of shit up.

While I get the impression that Dinniman wrote the books after perhaps developing a Dungeons and Dragons game in excessive detail, which is not especially interesting to me, I think what’s compelling here is that Carl is actually much more than an everyman. If the men on the internet are anything to go by (I know this is not a representative cross-section; don’t “not all men” me), many men don’t seem to give a shit about much beyond themselves. Yet, Carl, whose private mantra becomes “you will not break me,” consistently goes out of his way to help other crawlers and even non-player characters (NPCs). In fact, I would argue that the point (or maybe just a point) of Dungeon Crawler Carl is developing class solidarity. All the Earth’s remaining humans (and some animals, like Princess Donut), are being unwillingly compelled to participate in a death match spectacle. Carl also identifies that the NPCs are people too (albeit alien people and creatures) who are here against their will and being brutalized and having their memories replaced to make them dance for the viewers. Instead of taking the producers’ bait and going with an “every man for himself” philosophy, he repeatedly finds ways to forge bonds and build solidarity with other players and puts himself in mortal danger to help other people survive. Although this book may not feature the most florid prose or innovative concepts (Star Trek and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy come to mind as direct inspiration), it feels good to see a man (a man in particular!) actually give a shit about the people and cats around him. There are about eight books in the series so far, so you can expect to hear more about this subject.

Meanwhile, on the internet

What to know about the growing potential for a ‘super El Niño’ later this year via AccuWeather. We’re all familiar with the weather phenomenon of el niño, but a “super” el niño means that ocean temperatures “[reach] 2 degrees C or greater above average.” They’re saying this could “smash global heat records in the year ahead.” Great, lots to look forward to.
Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit via 404 Media. I opt out of every cookie, and for what?
At Long Last, InfoWars Is Ours via the Onion. A judge has ruled in favor of The Onion buying the Infowars site. This is objectively the funniest thing that could happen to Infowars now that Alex Jones has been forced to sell it. (Here’s a real news post about it if you want more than the Onion‘s silly version of the announcement.)
Meanwhile, Zohran Is Just Getting Things Done via Current Affairs. I bet it feels really good to be a New Yorker right now. From the article: “Socialism is not just about bringing the means of production into state ownership, but about adhering to a set of egalitarian principles that emphasize solidarity, erode class distinctions, and build the public sector and public assets, making our country work for everyone and not for the profits of large corporations. Fixing potholes may not be “socialist,” but Mamdani’s aggressive effort to escalate small infrastructure fixes is part of a much broader plan to restore faith in the public sector’s ability to get things done.”
You Can’t Steal a Recipe. So Why Does It Feel Like Theft? via AllRecipes. You can’t legally copyright a recipe, but that doesn’t stop certain people from being assholes. This is an interesting discussion of how some people may come up with new food ideas and then bigger publications or companies may pick up the idea and start selling them. Also I couldn’t help myself from doing the meme:

image in the style of the early 2000s "you wouldn't download a car" PSAs that reads "you can't steal a recipe" — created with https://youwouldntsteala.website/editor.html

Rampant Consumerism

I do love picking up treasures when traveling. Kirk and I had been kicking around the idea of getting new dishes to have a bigger set and to have something a little more festive. We went to Orcas Island Pottery to see if anything sparked joy and, indeed, joy was sparked. We are now the proud owners of some quite cool new plates and bowls and we have an exciting souvenir.

On our trip home from Seattle, we spent a night in Portland that included an outing to Powell’s Books. My dad sent me an early birthday gift of a Powell’s giftcard, so I spent a good hour or two going ham in there and picking up a bunch of books. Kirk dutifully followed me around and carried my basket. What a guy. Between this and my recent trip to Beers Books to sell some of my old books and then immediately spend my store credit, I am extremely well-stocked on reading material. Time to lock in and earn that summer reading pizza, haha!

Plates and bowls, each of two sizes, on my kitchen counter. They are ceramic and white with a light blue to dark blue gradient, and brown speckles throughout — New dishes from Orcas Island Pottery

A pile of 11 books, including a diverse mix of fiction and non-fiction — New dishes from Orcas Island Pottery

Corporeal Form

After partying a little too heartily to celebrate Kira’s 40th, my knee was feeling fucked up. I ended up using my cane a lot while we were out sightseeing, and I was very glad I brought it, but it felt weird to be using it in public for the first time. I know the point of a mobility aid is to keep oneself mobile and to keep from getting worse, so I was very glad I had it. I would not have been able to manage any sightseeing without it. It did feel weird though, as if everyone knows I’m new to the game and must be judging me. I know that’s not true and, in fact, people were extra nice to me, but it was bizarre to temporarily become visibly disabled (and I’m sure there are more to come, alas).

tweet from @hotsoggi that reads "why is wearing a hat as someone who doesn't usually wear hats so difficult and humiliating. it feels like everyone can tell i don't know what i'm doing"

Kitchen Witchery

You know I love beans and soup, so I tried a new-to-me bean soup: borlotti bean and barley (recipe from Rancho Gordo). I think I used bayo beans for this despite it having borlotti (aka cranberry bean) in the title. We had that with big and bubbly foccacia and I was forced to ask myself why I’m not making foccacia more often. I revisited one of my favorite recipes: chicken and dumplings, which is always tasty. I do cheat this recipe a little bit though by cooking chicken in the slow cooker and shredding it instead of doing all this searing and whatever. I don’t have that kind of energy. I did a variation on a cookie bar from Snacking Bakes. I’ve made this recipe before but instead of chocolate chips, nuts, and coconut as the recipe calls for, I loaded it with a ton of mini peanut butter cups simply because I could. Finally, I tried this alfredo-ish broccoli and chickpeas, which was very tasty and fairly simple too.

a square pan of foccacia bread with pleasing bubbles browned on top — big and bubbly foccacia

a bowl of bean and barley soup topped with a drizzle of olive oil and a bit of parsley — big and bubbly foccacia

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Fritz was extremely displeased that we left him for a week.

Fritz the cat serenely lying on the bed — Fritz, content that we’re home

Fritz the cat lying on top of the couch, flattened out with his legs tucked under him — Fritz, content that we’re home

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: April 19, 2026

Posted on April 19, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. Last week, I made my debut appearance at the Elk Grove city council. They were voting to expand the city’s use of Flock, a company that operates automated license plate readers. Elk Grove already has a lot of Flock cameras, but the city wants to add more, even though Flock has been found to share data with federal agencies, like the Department of Homeland Security (that is, ICE). In the previous city council meeting, the council was discussing an audit of Flock, but in this meeting, they voted on moving forward with expanding Flock without waiting for the audit.

I found the DeFlock Elk Grove group on Instagram and saw that they were calling for people to show up to the meeting and ask that the city council wait to vote on this until after an audit by the California Department of Justice, which is a very reasonable request. Seven people came to speak out against expanding the surveillance system, which is a lot for a weeknight city council meeting! Unfortunately, the city council looked uninterested and like they already had their mind made up on this issue, despite appeals from a variety of angles. After the public comments, the council invited the chief of police (the same man who is currently being sued for being inappropriate at work) to make a rebuttal. He said that Elk Grove does not share information with federal agencies, and maybe other cities do but we aren’t them, so our data are safe. This is, at best, an incredibly naive response. I don’t think that the company that built a nationwide surveillance machine really gives a shit about whatever security protocols you think you have. Just say you don’t know how computers work.

The city council voted on expanding Flock, which sucks but is unsurprising. I wrote out my comments before the meeting, and I’m publishing them here too. I didn’t share the citations when speaking in the meeting for obvious reasons, but you know your girl always has a citation, and I’ve included them here. I made sure to look them in the eye on that last paragraph. The mayor and city council may be in denial but I refuse to mince words about what these cameras are ultimately being used for. There’s also a video of the meeting online. You can see me beginning around the 52 minute mark.

I am against the city expanding the Flock contract and I am asking you to pull this item from Consent and wait to continue it until after the California DOJ has completed an independent audit of the data to verify no federal agency access has occurred.

Please suspend the Flock Safety ALPR contact pending that investigation and research alternative ALPR vendors with proven local control and a record of complying with California law.

Although California Senate Bill 34 prohibits state law enforcement agencies from sharing license plate reader data with out-of-state public agencies or federal entities, and Flock itself claims it does not share data with ICE, many California cities have shared information with federal agents. Whether or not Elk Grove intends to share data is irrelevant; our data become part of a national database that has proven to be highly insecure. Flock maintains a national lookup tool for law enforcement agencies to reference and they typically don’t even need a warrant to search. Additionally, many federal agencies have access to Flock, and there is evidence of ICE and the Secret Service accessing the camera network.

Flock has been used to wrongfully accuse people of theft, Flock has left livestreams of its AI-powered cameras exposed to the open internet, and other police departments have failed to redact searches when responding to FOIA requests, inadvertently releasing data about surveillance targets. Flock has claimed that case studies show installing Flock cameras decreases crime, but independent analysis found that crime stayed flat or increased.

It is reckless to increase surveillance during this era of expanding authoritarianism. Surveillance does not make us safer, although it may provide the illusion of safety. Expanding Flock in our current political climate sends the message that only white people have the right to be in public. Our family, friends, and neighbors are afraid of being disappeared by ICE. There is no reason to invest in a tool that makes it easier for DHS to surveil us. Elk Grove can and should do better.

screenshot from the video feed of me speaking before the city council — Giving the city council hell

The next day I was surprised to learn that the local news covered this story (I was also surprised to learn that Elk Grove has a local news outlet). They quoted me in the article’s lede and again in the body of the article. A few friends have told me, in response to all this, that I should run for office. To which I say: no I shouldn’t. People in a political office can’t get on the internet and say whatever they want. I would lose my jester’s privilege!

Books and Other Words

book cover for Against World Literature shown on kobo ereader — Against World Literature

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability by Emily Apter made me think and I mean that literally. I saw the title and I guess focused more on the “untranslatability” and less on the “politics of.” I did appreciate this book but it was a somewhat outside of my typical academic milieu, so I was really fighting for my life through some chapters. Apter also assumes readers are familiar with French and German and my three years of college French are not all that firmly fixed in my mind, to say nothing of how little German I know, so that was hard. Although I did note that the author did not assume familiarity with Spanish or Arabic, both of which I have and did come up at various points. All that said, this book was interesting, especially in chapters that were a little more in my wheelhouse. I was particularly intrigued by the chapter Kilito’s Injunction: “Thou Shalt Not Translate Me”, which refers to a lecture by Abdelfattah Kilito who discusses the strangeness of hearing foreigners speak his mother tongue, Arabic, using phrases like wallahila, which do technically refer to god but Arabic learners just pick up as a way to season their speech (consider people online lately saying inshallah). Apter discusses how, despite the “apparent neutrality of translation,” there are always power differentials at play that “complicat[e] the politics of ethical translation and bilingualism.” I took some good bits of information from the book but I, unfortunately, would have a hard time tell you what it’s about on the whole.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

The Incel Global Order via Hegemon. This is an insightful article explaining the connection between rising right-wing populism worldwide and male grievance. The author writes that, for men in the manopshere and in MAGA, “the natural hierarchy has been overthrown by a corrupt establishment and only the reassertion of dominance, personal or national, can set things right. The manosphere says feminism stole your birthright; MAGA says globalism stole your country. Whether it’s Andrew Tate or Donald Trump, the emotional logic is the same: you’ve been humiliated and I will make you powerful again.”
FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database via 404 Media. If you’re using signal, make sure you turn off the message previews, just in case.
Clowns Are Everywhere. Is It a Sign of the Apocalypse? via Cultured. This is an interview with Michelle Tea, author of the forthcoming anthology Clowns, which I am now very much looking forward to reading. I really recommend reading this article because it’s so good. I’ve been seeing clownery in the zeitgeist a lot lately and wondering what’s drawing so many of us toward this brand of buffoonery. Do we all yearn for jester’s privilege in a time of fascism? One reason might be that “satire might not be a useful comedic mode in apocalyptic circumstances. Sartre famously distinguished between rebels, who want the system to remain the same so they can continue rebelling against it, and revolutionaries, who are willing to risk their own obsolescence in the service of genuine change. Where a satirist might rebel, clowns—the ultimate failure artists—manage to enjoy getting flamed by the society that their revolution galvanizes.” Such a brilliant description of what’s happening now. Satire isn’t doing shit for us anymore, but clowning (jestermaxxing, if you will) is highlighting the absurdity of daily life in a way that traditional forms of commentary cannot.

Moving It

Here are the last two weeks of stickers! I have been keeping busy and I am happy to report that my knee is doing a little better. I think it took a little time for those gel injections to work, but I’m very happy to have less pain now and I hope it lasts. Both this week and last week I made it to ballet class so that is exciting, though I’ve realized that, to keep myself from aggravating my knee, I can’t really do anything in relevé (on my toes/ball of the foot) without potentially tweaking my knee so I have to take it a little easy. Still, I do think the ballet is good for me overall in terms of stability and doing something I like even if I can’t do everything. I do long to jump though. Alas.

four stickers in my planner, a parrot, an anthropomorphized flower on roller skates, a heart, anda mischevious bunny — first week of april stickers

stickers in my planner featuring a t-rex skeleton, a cat, a dragon drinking a juice box, a loaf of bread, and a ballerina — first week of april stickers

Kitchen Witchery

My run of energy for making food has continued and I made some good stuff this week. First, I did a bean and potato chowder. The latest Rancho Gordo bean club installment recommended making this with scarlet runner beans, but I had some tiger’s eye I wanted to use, so that’s what I did and we had no complaints. The bean club mailer also had a recipe for a new bean, zipper cream peas, with rice and broccolini. I liked these beans a lot! They kind of smell like peanuts. Of course, they’re not crunchy but they do have a bit of a nutty taste. For some extra vegetables, I made the Smitten Kitchen zucchini parmesan crisps. They were good and I want to make them again but I think I’ll cut them longwise with the mandoline because breading 100 tiny zucchini coins is not how I want to spend my time in this one wild and precious life. For a snack, I made oat muffins with the addition of butterscotch chips because the idea came to me and sounded good. I’ve been enjoying them. Finally, I made the pink cookie bars from the Snacking Bakes cookbook. This is basically a shortbread cookie with a little cardamom and almond extract. The topping is cream cheese frosting with almond extract and food coloring—I doubled the frosting but only needed about one-and-a-half times the recipe. That’s okay because I had extra frosting to snack on.

a bowl of soup! Beans, chunks of potato and carrot, topped with herbs — bean and potato chowder

a bowl of beans and broccolini over rice — bean and potato chowder

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz sitting up very straight and, perhaps, judging us — regal

Fritz the cat lying in bed, his head tucked into his chest — regal

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: April 5, 2026

Posted on April 5, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I hope everyone is out there finding ways to be whimsical and get offline now and again. Though you should get online long enough to read my blog (obviously). Where else are you going to get this specific combination of book commentary plus notes on what I’ve figured out about using Linux this week? Nowhere. This is a unique niche.

Books and Other Words

Project Hail Mary

Kirk wanted to see the new movie Project Hail Mary, based on the book of the same name by Andy Weir, so we made plans to see that with friends last weekend. My friend said I should read the book before we saw the movie and loaned me her copy two days beforehand, so I locked in and started reading, finishing it about an hour before we left for the theater. I still got it! I enjoyed the book, but I definitely think the movie made me appreciate the book more. I’m not saying the movie is “better” than the book, but it gave more dimension to the story.

Project Hail Mary is written from the first-person perspective of the protagonist, Ryland Grace, erstwhile middle school science teacher who ends up on a space ship to Tau Ceti in humanity’s only hope for figuring out how they can stop a certain space-traveling organism, called “astrophage,” from eating the sun and dooming humanity. Grace’s internal monologue is very snappy and has a tone of “science: it’s cool *sunglasses emoji*.” This is fine and I did like the book but his point of view can get a little stale in my opinion. The best part of the book is when he encounters an alien and they start trying to figure out each other’s languages. If this book were just for me, that would have been like 80 percent of the story but it’s not (anyway that’s what Native Tongue is for). The alien, who Grace nicknames “Rocky” because he’s basically made of rocks, speaks in a language made of whistling noises, which the movie brought to life in a way that my imagination had not. I’m not always good at picturing the things that I read, so it was cool to read the book and immediately see a very beautiful and faithful deception of it on screen.

Still on that Snow Queen Cycle

book cover for World's End shown on kobo ereader — World’s End

World’s End is the second book in Joan D. Vinge’s Snow Queen Cycle. This story features one a character that was not especially prominent in The Snow Queen, BZ Gundhalinu, and follows his misadventures after leaving the planet Tiamat. BZ’s shithead brothers squandered all of their family wealth then went to a planet called World’s End to hunt for treasure in an area with a reputation for making people insane. BZ, dutiful brother that he is, goes in to find them. At first, I wasn’t really sure what this book had to do with the previous installment other than having a character in the same universe going about his business. However, as the plot progressed, I realized that the purpose of this book in the series is to show how sibyls, a type of oracle that actually connects to a giant galactic computer to answer questions, work in more detail (Moon, the main character in the last book, is a sibyl). I mean, the point of the book is also to entertain us and make us think but, although I really loved The Snow Queen, I thought World’s End was just okay. Still, I’m interested to see what happens in the next book, which returns focus to Moon on Tiamat.

The law of conservation of (book) mass

On Saturday I made a fun trip to Beers Books downtown to sell a significant pile of books after clearing out my shelves, which I mentioned in my last post. I was delighted to get $90 of store credit, which I promptly converted into a stack of books to take home. I need more time in the day to read! Everything is interesting! As much as I like reading ebooks because they are convenient and easy to hold, I really love browsing the bookstore in person and finding stuff I never would have known about otherwise.

a pile of books including a few books on chess, some novels, one about norse mythology, and "introduction to african civilizations" — new book pile

Meanwhile, on the internet

The world energy shock is coming via The New Statesman. The world is about to drastically change. From the article, “Since local storage facilities for oil and gas have filled up behind the Strait of Hormuz, several production sites have had to stop production – they are ‘shut in’. Supply is not just slowed but simply not there. And you cannot switch oilfields or refineries back on overnight – it can take weeks or months to do so. Moreover, production and transport infrastructure has been damaged. And as fertiliser is produced with gas, and sulphur and helium are by-products of oil and gas production, these chemicals are no longer produced either.”
5m tonnes of CO2 emitted in just 14 days of US war on Iran, analysis finds via The Guardian. I saw this article shortly after posting last time about my environmental concerns regarding the war on Iran. We’re ruining the environment at top speed and for what?
The People Falsely Accused of Using AI via New York Magazine. People who speak English as a second language and autistic people are being accused of using chatbots to craft their communication, which sucks. One bit of the article made me, maybe not laugh, but sigh laughingly: “The particular snarl we’re in is new. But some people have been accused of sounding robotic for most of their lives.” Who among us has not been accused of roboticism or being a “walking dictionary”?
Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content via 404 Media. Love to see it! From the article: “The new policy, which was accepted in an overwhelming 40 to 2 vote among editors, allows editors to use LLMs to suggest basic copyedits to their own writing, which can be incorporated into the article or rewritten after human review if the LLM doesn’t generate entirely new content on its own.”
Thirst Traps Over Think Tanks: Dems Want Hotter Candidates on the Ballot via The Bulwark. Democrats are so fucking stupid. Zohran Mandani didn’t become the mayor of New York because he’s hot, it’s because he actually stands for something and cares about people! Saying we need to elect hot people feels like the Democrats finding more stupid ways to promote Gavin Newsom for 2028 who will probably win because he looks like a TV president. God, I hope I’m wrong though.

Media

I found a series of albums called the Top 100 best techno (volumes 1 to 18, lol) and I haven’t listened to all 18 yet (because 1,800 songs is a lot), but I have very much enjoyed what I’ve listened to so far. It made me think about what kinds of music people get nostalgic for. Lots of people feel sentimental about the music of their teen years. I had recently been reflecting on that and realizing that the music from when I was 17, did not fucking speak to me. At the time, I instead developed what I would now acknowledge as an autistic special interest in new wave, which was not au courant when I was in high school in the very early 2000s. Later, in college, thanks in no small part to high-speed internet access and peer-to-peer file sharing (also lol), I started listening to a lot of electronic music, and this is the stuff I associate with youth. I was feeling very good bopping along to these albums recently and I’m really glad I found them! A lot of electronic music is not well-preserved because it didn’t always get published on a CD, so this has been a nice little treat for me.

Rampant Consumerism

Now that the sun is out later in the evening, I decided to get a hat to wear to the pool for water aerobics class. I don’t really wear hats so I had to figure out a good one to get and, of course, settled on the classic Wikipedia Editor hat. It feels very nerdy to wear but I also think it absolutely rules. It is the blue of an unclicked hyperlink! It’s ripe with possibility!

Me in my new "Wikipedia editor" hat. It is the blue of an unclicked hyperlink — People need to know who they’re dealing with

Computer World

This week I finally learned what an AppImage is. I’ve tried to download various programs for Linux and one way to do that is by using an AppImage. I thought this would be an executable installer like on Windows, but it’s actually far simpler than that. Despite this simplicity, I’ve been struggling with figuring out how to make them work. Thankfully, someone on the Linux Mint forums has explained this before and said all you have to do is update the properties of the file so that it’s executable, then you double click the AppImage and the program opens. Now I know something! Thank you, Linux users for always answering questions online. They are doing the (non-denominational) lord’s work.

On another topic, I’ve been concerned about the state of the internet, so this week I downloaded Wikipedia. Yes, that’s a thing you can do. Wikipedia has archives available of just the articles (leaving out the user pages, talk pages, revision history, etc.) and you can view them on your computer through an offline browser. The most common is Kiwix, and that’s what I’m using. This is theoretically a very easy process (and I know it is for some people because one friend told me it took hardly any effort), but I had a little bit of trouble that ended up having an easy fix. Once you download Kiwix, you can download Wikipedia (or other archives) through the program itself, but for some reason it was telling me I didn’t have enough space when I absolutely do have enough space. I was able to download a torrent of the Wikipedia archive from the Kiwix library—I downloaded English, Spanish, and Icelandic—and then imported that into the Kiwix program and that worked just fine!

I am relieved that I’ll have access to information even if we end up subject to horrible age-verification laws that make it impossible to use the internet or if there are widespread power outages that make all the servers go down. I’m not even joking at this point, I think these are things that could really happen, so I’m making a point of downloading whatever important stuff I need from the internet.

Top portion of the homepage of Icelandic wikipedia in the Kiwix browser — Icelandic Wikipedia homepage in Kiwix

Moving It

I know the sticker updates are important to all, so here are the last two weeks’ worth of stickers. As for the exercise itself, I started going to the aqua jogging class and it’s a lot of fun. Running laps (and doing other exercises) in the lazy river is ultimately pretty enjoyable as exercise goes. I am also proud to report that I did a set of five bench presses at 135 pounds this week. When I started in December, I wasn’t really sure about this plan to focus on upper body strength because that’s not usually what I’ve done, but I have to say it is paying off. Shocking that regular training will do that (sarcasm!)

stickers in my planner including a hedgehog carrying gifts, a stylized cat face wearing a crown, a snowflake, a goose drinking from a case, and a ridiculous simplistically drawn unicorn — Stickers for the third week of March

stickers in my planner including a swiss roll cake, a mischievous bunny with a mallet, a cute bird, a goose with an asparagus neck, a milkshake, and a ballerina — Stickers for the third week of March

Kitchen Witchery

I had a lot of energy in the kitchen recently, which is nice because I like being able to make stuff! A few weeks ago I had the most disappointing so-called pasta primavera at a restaurant and felt that I had to make a better one out of spite. I used this NY Times recipe but substituted tortellini for the regular noodles because there are no rules in this life (No Rules!). I also made a black bean skillet bake (recipe from The Bean Book), to which I added some sweet potato. We ate that with chips kind of like deconstructed nachos.

I’ve been trying to make more snacks so I have reasonable thinks to munch on. I did a batch of golden chocolate chip muffins (the “golden” here refers to them being whole wheat) and replaced some of the chocolate chips with cherry jammy bits, and those turned out really good. I tried a granola bar recipe; it’s really a nut bar but I just think “nut bar” does not convey the idea of a snack in the way I would like. In any case, I used a mixture of peanuts, macadamia, hazelnut, and pistachio because I had little bits of the last three to use up. They came out tasty but I think I needed to bake it a little longer to get true bar-shaped cohesion. Most of it fell apart, so I mixed all the the rest with the chocolate and cooled that, then snapped it into chunks, which worked just fine. For treats, I made oatmeal cream pie bars because I was browsing my blog looking for receipts on some topic, saw it, and was like “wow I gotta make that again,” so I did! Finally, I made this strawberry vanilla bean soda. I saw the recipe on instagram and thought that it sounded good and that Kirk would really like it as a person who drinks soda often and who loves strawberry. He said it was very good, so yay.

a plate of tortellini primavera and some pan-fried chicken tenders — tortellini primavera

a skillet of black beans, corn, and sweet potato covered in melted cheese — tortellini primavera

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat in the windowsill, scrunched up as if to start a fight because there's a bird outside on the fence — neighborhood watch

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: March 22, 2026

Posted on March 22, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I know you’ll be surprised to hear this, but I am deeply against the very concept of a heat wave in March. On Friday, the temperature here in Elk Grove hit 90 degrees (32 Celsius), beating the record of 81 degrees (27 C). It’s upsetting for me, personally, as someone whose body is unwilling to participate in the task of temperature regulation. I’m now worried about how hot it’s going to be this summer (outlook: hot), and, you know, for the rest of our lives. Which brings me to my next point …

Current Events

World War III, I guess

The United States and Israel are at war with Iran and there are many reasons to be mad about this, not the least of which is that our country bombed a school during school hours. While this is shocking, I suppose it’s not surprising given that Israel has destroyed all the schools in Gaza. This war is needless and terrible for so many reasons, including environmental ones. Israel bombed Iran’s oil infrastructure which “will have major long-term environmental repercussions.” The local effects are bad, with the people of Tehran experiencing health impacts and the environment now being full of a bunch of “soot, smoke, oil particles, sulphur compounds, and likely heavy metals and inorganic materials.”

a simple wooden sign in front of a house painted with the text "How many beautiful, gentle people have I helped to KILL just by paying my TAXES?" — A question now permanently on my mind

Of course, burning a whole bunch of oil really quickly is also the thing we’re supposed to be avoiding if we don’t want to heat the planet up to the point that we make living here a challenge. A while back, I wrote about how armed conflict is making us very unlikely to keep below the Paris Climate Accords warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius. I can only assume it’s worse now. A 2024 study showed that “The emissions from the first 120 days of the Israel-Gaza conflict exceeded the annual emissions of 26 individual countries.” And that’s just four months of one piece of what, I think, we can fairly safely refer to as World War III (although Wikipedia is holding the line by keeping the World War III page as one about a “hypothetical future global conflict.”). Even though some scientists have been working to quantify the carbon output of war, Scientific American wrote in 2024 that we don’t really know for sure how much the world’s militaries are contributing to global warming because a lot of military activity is necessarily secretive. Regardless, “A 2022 report by the Conflict and Environment Observatory suggested that militaries could account for around 5.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — but that could be an underestimate.” Seems like it should be obvious that keeping the world habitable is more important than doing wars—especially wars that our own government hasn’t even bothered to articulate a justification for.

two-paneled image of a masked man on top of a tank riding through a bombed-out area. The first says "Hey friend, remember when I told you things were going to get worse?" The second zooms in on the soldier's face and says "They're getting worse now" — I’ll keep using this image until things stop getting worse

What the hell can we do about it

I wish I had some better ideas about what we can do to stop the war, but I really only have things to say about how to mitigate whatever the effects might be for us here. Unless you are personally in a position of some power (or around people who are), it’s hard to imagine what we can do to put a stop to this. The existential dread was upon me this week between the heat and the war and the pervasive feeling of doom that’s in the air. As usual, I try to find outlets for my anxiety, and for me that often turns into some form of disaster preparedness (as regular readers probably know by now). I don’t think Iran will physically attack the United States and I think countries like China are standing back and waiting for us to destroy ourselves (American century of humiliation, lol). That said, Iran is talking about targeting American tech firms and banking interests (if Iran manages to hack and wipe out Americans’ student loan debt, I would laugh and laugh for the rest of my life. Nothing would get Americans on their side more, I assure you). While I think the risk of physical injury is low, taking out major tech services could have a huge impact on daily life. Remember when there was that global tech outage in 2024 because of a “faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows”? So, here’s the stuff I’m thinking about for broad emergency preparedness, keeping in mind that this is a group project!

One thing I’m going to be reviewing is this Community Resilience Guide for a Cyber-Induced Infrastructure Collapse, which is a very detailed answer to the question “what happens if all the computers stop working?” I just found it via a cybersecurity person on Instagram, but it seems comprehensive.
The woman who made that guide also has a primer on a tool called Meshtastic, which is something you can use to contact people even if phones aren’t working. I’m definitely going to look into setting this up and I will report back on the experience.
Energy is about to get very expensive. Think about having things like solar chargers or a backup power source in case of power outages. For example, I have a really big battery that I can use to power my CPAP at night in case the power goes out. Energy being expensive is going to make everything else expensive because the price to transport things will go up. Hard to imagine that groceries could cost even more, but here we are. Maybe shopping at local farmers markets will be one way to get slightly cheaper food.
Might I also direct you to the emergency kit post that I made last year? I have been slowly working on ours but I need to review and finish filling in some gaps for our group. If anyone wants help making an emergency kit, let me know!
I also think I don’t have anything more to add to what I already said immediately after Trump won the 2024 election: keep your pantry stocked, pick a lane to participate in when it comes to supporting your community, read a dang book, and get offline once in a while!

a opossum wearing a helmet and sweater, sitting in a bike basket. text reads "So. bad news. we have to keep going tomorrow. good news is that I'll keep going with you"

Books and Other Words

Fearing the Black Body

Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings is another book in my personal syllabus that I’ve been working through about our society’s attitudes about fat people. Books like What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy, and You Have the Right to Remain Fat have absolutely redefined my relationship to fatness, in how I think about my own fat body and how I think about how fat people are treated and depicted in our culture. Fearing the Black Body adds another layer to this knowledge and really made me be like “this is really all fucking made-up garbage and always has been.”

Strings asserts that our ideas about being thin were affected by “two critical historical developments … the rise of the transatlantic slave trade and the spread of Protestantism.” As Europeans came into contact with African people, they had to find ways to maintain a social hierarchy, with white people on top. She writes, “the phobia about fatness and the preference for thinness have not, principally or historically, been about health. Instead, they have been one way the body has been used to craft and legitimate race, sex, and class hierarchies.” In fact, a few centuries ago, having some meat on your bones was “a sign of good health” and being thin was “a signal of poor health and hygiene.” Now I’m picturing 16th-century people reacting with horror to Ozempic-thin celebrities.

This began to change during the Enlightenment. Certain male philosophers decided that being thin and not eating was a way to signal your intellectual stature, and I guess a cool way to justify an eating disorder. A refusal of the needs of one’s physical being was a way to show that you were deeply invested in intellectual pursuits and that your mind was stronger than your body. At first, this standard was not applied to women because, obviously, women’s job is not to think big thoughts but to look pretty (or do domestic labor I suppose). Fatness was “evidence of vapidity,” and we all know it’s fine for ladies to be vapid. Eventually, European philosophers, mostly without having seen many Black people from Africa, determined that African’s supposedly fat bodies were evidence of their uncivilized ways. “[I]ndulging in food, once deemed by philosophers to be a lowbrow predilection of slow-witted persons, became evidence of actual low breeding. It bespoke an in born, race-specific propensity for laziness and ease.” Some even found ways to “claim that fatness was directly correlated with skin color.”

Over time, it “[became] part of the general zeitgeist that fatness was related to blackness. This, it was treated as evidence of barbarism, of a sort of nonwhite affectation.” Eating less and being thin “became evidence of refinement” and fatness eventually became “lowbrow” and “in women … comically unattractive.” Comically unattractive! This idea certainly continues to echo through our culture. A lot of men treat the idea of being romantically involved with fat women as a joke in and of itself.

Once these attitudes arrived in the United States, they fused with the extreme Christian beliefs that the country is known for and people “began to regard svelte forms as a superior aesthetic ideal for white Christian women.” Eventually, this belief combined with the eugenic ideals that “slim Nordic/Aryan Americans were indeed the only group ‘fit’ to reproduce.” These attitudes functioned as a way to police white women’s behavior, with “the image of fat black women … [being] used to both degrade black women and discipline white women.”

Today we talk about fat as a health issue, but it’s clear that doctors didn’t start saying that being fat was bad until after this association between fatness and blackness was solidified. In fact, based on some of the early medical publications on the subject that Strings cites, it seems that medical professionals in the early 20th century were looking scientific ways to justify existing attitudes about fatness being the purview of poor breeding.

"always has been" meme format with two astronauts and the earth seen from space in the background. The first says "wait, it's all racism" and the astronaut behind him with a gun says "Always has been"

Reading this book was really the last straw for me. I had been thinking a lot about what we learned from the Epstein documents, especially regarding Les Wexner—the man behind brands like Victoria’s Secret, the Limited, and Abercrombie & Fitch—and his high level of involvement with Epstein. I remember being relatively tall and sturdy for my age and wanting the kind of clothes they sold at Limited Too, which was targeted at tween and teen girls, and not being able to fit anything there. We now know that they engaged in a type of vanity sizing in which clothes would actually be smaller than the stated size, as in “a size 12 everywhere else would be a size 16 at Limited Too.” I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that men who were attracted to young girls promoted a culture in which girls and women were encouraged to be thinner and smaller. These men had immense resources at their disposal and used them to promote their preferences, regardless of what makes sense for adult women or what anyone else thinks is healthy or attractive.

The question is: why would I EVER contort my body to cater to racists and pedophiles? If the imperative to be thin was formed out of inventing ways to demonstrate white people’s alleged superiority over black people (especially white women over Black women), if the late 20th- and early 21st-century iteration of this imperative was promoted by wealthy pedophiles with a vested interest in keeping women and girls looking small and nubile, why the actual fuck would I want to conform to this so-called beauty standard? Who wants to see me thin? Who wants to see me weak and tired from starving myself to in pursuit of a completely made-up body ideal rooted in eugenics? Who decided that adult women should look no heavier than they did at the ripe age of 16? Nothing about that makes sense. These attitudes don’t serve us.

This book and the current discourse has completely freed me from the need to spin in my little weight loss hamster wheel. I was already most of the way out from the work I have been doing and learning from my own experience that the solution to binge eating disorder is to know all the way into your bones that you’re allowed to eat what you want when you want (ironically, you stop binge eating when you know you’re allowed to eat food). I will never again be shamed about my fat body. Oh, does someone think I should be thin? Why? Are they a racist or a pedophile (perhaps both!)? Get fucking lost. I have ascended. We are all allowed to just fucking live and, if you happen to be fat, it’s fine. It turns out, that was always allowed.

The Snow Queen

I’ve had a copy of The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge on my shelf for years and now I can finally say that I’ve read it. I bought a used copy online a long time ago when I was trying to read through all the books that have won the Hugo Award for best novel. I shouldn’t have slept on this book for so long because it is very good and there are three more books in the series that I’m looking forward to. The story focuses on Moon Dawntreader, a young woman of the Summer people who live simply off of the sea’s bounty. Moon, however, is a genetic clone (not a spoiler, this happens on the first page) of the Winter Queen who governs people who live in the city and mediates the planet’s relationship with the galactic Hegemony. The Queen’s plan is for Moon to take her place before the next Change, when Summer throws the Winter queen into the sea (not a euphemism) and rules the planet for the next 150 years. There’s a lot of intrigue, some galactic politics, smuggling, and aliens. I recommend it!

Collection Management

I recently pulled a bunch of books off my shelves to sell at the used bookstore, so I had a little more room to work with and decided to move things around. I used to have all the books in languages other than English together, then books about languages together. I decided to reorganize so all the books in and about a language are together, including dictionaries, which were previously all sequestered onto one shelf. I find it very satisfying to look at, so here is a picture for you to enjoy.

The language and non-fiction portion of my bookshelves, alphabetical by language then arranged into several non-fiction categories — reorganized books

Meanwhile, on the internet

Gen Z males twice as likely as baby boomers to believe wives should obey husbands via The Guardian. Yiiiiiiikes. Yikes, yikes, yikes. The dominant cultural beliefs from when I was growing up are starting to feel more and more like an historical aberration rather than the trend. That said, I know a large part of the reason for this is the relentless propaganda this generation is subject to. Kirk says he constantly gets ads for right-wing shit on YouTube. He reports them but, alas, he is just one man!
AI “journalists” prove that media bosses don’t give a shit via Pluralistic. From the article: “‘We used an AI to do this'” is increasingly a way of saying, ‘We didn’t want to do this in the first place and we don’t care if it’s done well.’ That’s why DOGE replaced the call center reps at US Customs and Immigration with a chatbot that tells you to read a PDF and then disconnects the call.”
What do “which is A.I.?” quizzes tell us? via Read Max. This is a very interesting article about what people’s stated preferences for texts by AI versus text written by humans. He writes:

As long as people want to prefer human-authored to L.L.M.-generated writing, we will place a premium on whatever style we associate with human authorship–even as that style changes. You can already see this process beginning from the other direction on social networks like Twitter, where em-dashes and not-x-but-y contrastive corrections–perfectly innocuous and useful writerly tools which not five years ago would likely have been highly correlated with “good prose”–are immediately treated with derision and suspicion. By that same token, certain kinds of “bad writing” should be seen as evidence of human authorship. How long before run-on sentences are preferred to em-dashes?

Your AI Slop Bores Me. This is a funny little website that reminds us that the internet can still be fun! You can ask the “ai” questions or pretend to be the ai and answer the questions people submit. I’ve had some fun with it. Playing as the ai, I learned that many people love pokemon and many others just want someone to tell them what to cook for dinner.
Rapper Afroman wins lawsuit against police over mocking their 2022 raid in viral music videos via AP News. This was truly the best thing online this week. After police raided his home in 2022, Afroman wrote diss tracks about the individual officers and put music videos online. The cops sued Afroman for defamation, but in a win for free speech, Afroman prevailed and was found innocent. Crazy that cops think there should be no consequences for wrongly breaking into a man’s home.

Doing Stuff

Last night, we went to see the Sacramento Ballet. They did a few shorter pieces, including Serenade by Balanchine (you can see a full recording of the New York City Ballet doing it in 1973 on YouTube). It was beautiful and seeing 15 or 20 dancers all doing the same movements at the same time is, indeed, mesmerizing. I also liked how the flowing skirts leave a sort of afterimage of the movement in the air. Now that I’ve seen a few Balanchine pieces, I’m starting to form some opinions about him. He’s really into doing weird arm-linking stuff, isn’t he? He also seems really fixated on having pieces where two or three women dancers are hanging off a male dancer, which I noted last year when we saw Sac Ballet do Apollo and then noticed it here too. It’s kinda weird as a recurring theme. This inspired me to look up whether Balanchine was a creep and, if the “Personal Life” section of his Wikipedia page is to be believed, yeah, at least a little.

The other piece that stood out to me was Love Me Anyway by the choreographer Caili Quan. I was surprised by it because I have actually seen Sac Ballet do this piece before! We’ve now been going to the ballet long enough to see repeats. I’m not upset though because I think this is a really fun piece. Its music starts with the “mah na mah na” song from the Muppets. Maybe more ballets should be set to Muppet music, I don’t know.

Moving It

I know the people want to see my stickers so here are the stickers from the last two weeks. I bought another batch of stickers from Stickii so I could get a little more variety and the results have been delightful. My mom said she also started giving herself stickers for going on a walk so I know I am a trend-setter.

As for the actual working out, I’m still going to water aerobics. Next week, the city starts offering an aqua jogging class so I’ll be giving that a try since it’s in the time slot immediately before the aerobics class. This week, I switched to a lighter band to support me on my bar hangs so I am proud of that. I thought it would take longer to make progress but it has been going fairly well. I also strict pressed over 80 pounds, so that is cool too!

a week of stickers in my planner featuring an angry cat, a bunny with a bomb, a piece of cake, a popsicle, a plant on roller skates, and a pigeon wearing platform boots — first week of March stickers

stickers in my planner including a sparkly bird in flight, a crescent moon, an orange cat with flowers, a fat bird, and a cheese dragon — first week of March stickers

Kitchen Witchery

I went for yet another variation on the peanut butter cookies recipe from 100 Cookies. This time, I used a chocolate-almond butter instead of regular peanut butter and I added chocolate chips instead of candied nuts. It was quite good and I would make it again. I make macaroni and cheese for lunch fairly often, but this week I tried a macaroni and beans (because of course I did). I used shell pasta and normal macaroni cheese but I mixed in some beans (I think it was butter beans but honestly I’ve forgotten by now). It was good! Finally, I made chili colorado with arroz rojo (from Mi Cocina), ayacote morado beans, and this corn cake, which I’m not sure has any real relationship to actual Mexican food beyond the fact that it’s corn but we like it. It all came out delicious.

a pan of chocolate chip peanut butter cookies — peanut butter cookies: the chocolate version

a plate of macaroni and cheese with beans and topped with breadcrumbs, plus a pile of broccoli — peanut butter cookies: the chocolate version

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

A big-ass raccoon walking along the fence as seen from my office window in the middle of the day. Fritz the cat is in the corner of the frame looking out in shock — racoon sighting!

Fritz the cat curled in a circle with the top of his head touching his back legs and his tail curled into his face — racoon sighting!

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: March 8, 2026

Posted on March 8, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I have to resist the urge to begin most posts with something like “wow, shit is NUTS, right?” because shit is nuts and is only getting nuttier and, indeed, the nuttiness never seems to stop. Instead I will say that I think we are all feeling similarly mad right now. It sucks, but it’s not just you (or me, for that matter)!

Current Events

I’ve been completely riled up about the technology known as “artificial intelligence” (in most cases, a glorified auto-complete machine called a large language model [LLM]). Lately, the very mention of AI sends me into a rage, which has been a problem since my corporate overlords have been heavily promoting their AI “tools” (why the hell would I need AI to summarize an email for me when it takes one minute to read? What even are jobs now?) After some reflection, I realized that one of the reasons it makes me so mad is that I have devoted a lot of my time and free will in this life to the pursuit of knowledge. I have a whole-ass masters degree in library and information science. You know, the degree where you take entire classes on how to find information. I have studied searching at a graduate level and now people are telling me to just ask the chronically mendacious plagiarism machine? Open AI has trained its model to “reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty” like some kind of mid-level executive raised from the depths of consultant hell, yet we’re supposed to entrust it with thinking through complex ideas for us? Why would I, an expert in finding information and evaluating its credibility, ask a knowingly bad computer program to do it for me? Why is everyone so invested in this?

Tumblr post from user FreakOutGirl starting: The internet seems like a distant dream. Whatever we are on R N is not the internet. It's ads — It’s just ads

It seems like the whole concept of the internet has been ruined. It’s not exclusively the fault of AI, but that may have been the last straw. The web has been hollowed out by advertisements and social media over the last decade. People my age remember the internet being fun and full of websites. Now there are “five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.” As of October 2025, AI-generated content made up about “half of all new articles on the internet” based on a “random sample of 65,000 English-language articles.” We’re also seeing increasing amounts of AI text on Wikipedia, one of the few reliable places left on the internet thanks to concentrated human effort (yes, that includes my efforts and I am biased). However, Wikipedia has also made deals with major tech companies to “pay for high-volume API access to Wikipedia content, which these companies use to train AI models like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT.” What happens when the AI model keeps eating its own slop? Will the internet be worth anything to us anymore? Will being able to ask the plagiarism machine to write your emails have been worth it?

screenshot of a tweet that reads "I'm old enough to remember when the internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four" from user @tveastman dated December 3, 2018. — from twitter’s criteron collection

There’s a short story by Isaac Asimov I keep thinking about. It’s called “The Feeling of Power” and it opens with: “Jehan Shuman was used to dealing with the men in authority on a long-embattled Earth. He was only a civilian but he originated programming patterns that resulted in self-directing war computers of the highest sort.” As on-the-nose as that sounds for a critique of today’s news (this story was written in 1958), that’s not what I remember it for. The story centers on the lowly technician Ladislas Aub who has learned how to do arithmetic by hand. No one else knows how to do math, relying instead on computers to do it for them. In fact, everyone is incredulous that a person can just do math, which is something only computers can do. I thought this was very silly when I first read it as a teenager. Using a calculator won’t make us forget how to do basic math! Yet, as hyperbolic as that is, it feels like people are literally forgetting how to do things like look up information or write an email without help from the plagiarism machine. Who benefits from us willingly abdicating our ability to think through simple tasks?

tweet by @jazzanchovy dated November 25, 2025 that reads: Today a coworker said he "challenged himself" to "old school google" something instead of using chat GPT. And that he "used to be really good at googling" and it was "hard" for him cause he "only uses chat GPT now." He said this out loud in a meeting — the feeling of powerlessness

Aside from the choices people are making to stop using their brains, I’m mad at how, much like in Asimov’s story, AI is being used to wage war. On March 3, The Guardian reported that “Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, was reportedly used by the US military in the barrage of strikes as the technology ‘shortens the kill chain’ – meaning the process of target identification through to legal approval and strike launch.” This technology resulted in the U.S. and Israel launching “almost 900 strikes on Iranian targets in the first 12 hours alone.” Nine-hundred bombs in twelve hours! We are using a technology that kills people faster because the people deploying the bombs aren’t individually selecting targets. The United States thinks so little of people in the rest of the world that it won’t even spend human effort on deciding who to kill; a machine does that now.

This already high level of disregard for human life has not gone far enough for this administration’s taste. Ars Technica reports that the Department of Defense was renegotiating its contract with Anthropic to “to eliminate restrictions on how AI can be deployed and instead permit ‘all lawful use’ of the technology.” This refers to “one, mass surveillance of American citizens, and two, lethal autonomous weapons with no human oversight.” This is obviously terrible for many reasons, but the response to this news has resulted in a bizarre liberal mania in which Antrhopic’s Claude is now the “woke” AI model to use, becoming the most downloaded free application in the Apple app store. Claude “dethron[ed] OpenAI’s ChatGPT just one day after the Pentagon tapped OpenAI to supply AI to classified military networks.” I can’t believe I even have to say this but: there is no such thing as a “woke” AI. Every AI model is built on so much stolen data that asking for artist consent would “‘basically kill’ the AI industry.” Before this dustup, the Pentagon used the Claude AI in capturing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. There is nothing woke, progressive, leftist, liberal, social justice warrior, or girlboss feminism about kidnapping of the leader of a sovereign nation without provocation.

Parody of "you wouldn't download a car" PSA that says "You wouldn't train AI on someone else's intellectual property without asking first". Generated with https://youwouldntsteala.website/editor.html — Yes, I’m using this again. Generated with https://youwouldntsteala.website/editor.html

AI is a surveillance machine. That is how it “knows” how to pick targets for the military. It is, of course, being deployed against us here in the United States too. The Department of Homeland Security is using applications developed by Palantir to “process data.” While DHS and Palantir have been working together for over a decade, “[i]n April, the Homeland Security Department awarded Palantir a nearly $30 million contract to build a system backed by artificial intelligence that would help find and track individuals for deportation.” ICE is also is using Clearview AI’s facial recognition software (which, for the record, received early funding from Peter Thiel, the man behind Palantir), which ICE agents have been using in Minnesota to identify protestors without their consent.

Facial recognition is also about to be weaponized to ruin the internet for us once and for all (as if turning everything into advertisements wasn’t enough). Countries around the world have started implementing age verification laws online, beginning with Australia prohibiting anyone under 16 from accessing social media. The problem is that verifying whether a 15-year-old is attempting to use social media requires that every user submits to age verification. This often means submitting a photo of one’s face or a picture of an ID. This is bad for everyone: “This system not only allows big tech companies to harvest even more deeply personal data on children, but it creates massive cybersecurity risks. Data harvested by identity verification systems does not stay private.” While the United States is considering bills on this subject, America’s favorite governor who stands for nothing at all, Gavin Newsom, recently decided to get a jump on this particular strain of surveillance and signed a bill that will require operating system providers (i.e., Windows, MacOS, Linux) “to collect age information from users at account setup and transmit that data to app developers via a real-time API, with the law taking effect on January 1, 2027.” This would mean that anyone using a computer has to provide their ID, which will go to some database, before they can even use that computer. In the UK, the Wikimedia Foundation sued to challenge the way the government determined which sites had to follow the strictest rules, a category that included Wikipedia. Unfortunately, Wikimedia lost, which means that internet users in the UK have to submit to age verification even to use Wikipedia.

Age verification will kill the internet. This is so dire that over 400 computer scientists have signed an open letter urging governments not to pursue these laws, writing “this influence could be used to censor information and prevent users from accessing services.” I must assume that a big part of this backlash to the free and open internet is because people are getting too aware of the fact that everyone else in the world is people, just like them. That is to say, the propaganda isn’t working like it used to. We have to cut Americans off from the internet before their views of the Israeli government become even less favorable.

There is still hope. Every time you think for yourself or skip the option to use your face to verify something, you are helping avoid the worst version of the future. One reason Anthropic may have turned down the Pentagon on the updated contract is that they simply don’t have the technical capability to do it (neither does OpenAI but they don’t care). Every search, every query, every use of AI trains the machine. The number one thing you can do is simply reject it. As Ann Helen Petersen exhorts us in Culture Study, don’t let the machines do the living. I know existence is highly discouraging right now, but the solution to exhaustion and outrage isn’t to outsource to the computer.

One of the most anti-fascist actions you can do right now is to use your own brain! You are always allowed to just not fucking do it! You do not have to use any form of AI, even if some people are being very loud about it. Many people with a lot of money have a vested interest in all of us just forgetting how to do things we have been doing just fine for years. Do not underestimate the power of “no” in these times. Thinking for yourself is always the biggest threat to authoritarianism. Don’t give that power away for free.

meme image of a skeleton running away overlaid with the text: Just walk out. You can leave!!! If it sucks... Hit da bricks!! real winners quit — just walk out!

Books and Other Words

book cover of Miranda in Milan featuring a charmingly illustrated medieval cityscape — Miranda in Milan

Miranda in Milan by Katharine Duckett is basically a work of fan fiction—and I mean that affectionately—of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The story begins where The Tempest ends, with Miranda and her father Prospero returning to Milan. Miranda doesn’t understand court behavior or why she’s made to wear a veil at all times. The story follows Miranda as she tries to figure out what the hell is going on and she falls for one of her maids. There is magic and intrigue, all the good stuff. I enjoyed it even though I’m not especially familiar with the source material. I would wager it’s even more fun if you really know all the characters.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

The No World Order via Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter. The best piece you will read about why we are waging war on Iran.
AI Added ‘Basically Zero’ to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says via Gizmodo. Lol. LMAO even.
People Are Calling Meta Ray-Bans “Pervert Glasses” via Futurism. As well they should. Anyone who uses these glasses is a huge loser who deserves to be ostracized.
Women’s sizing via The Pudding. The data shows that women’s clothing sizes are made for people who don’t exist. I’ve been thinking a lot about our cultural obsession with staying thin and what external forces encourage the belief that we should all be able to fit into clothes we wore in high school.
How To Weave Friendship Into Everyday Life via Culture Study. Some great observations (and examples) on incorporating casual friend outings into one’s life. Consistent and casual seems to be the key.

Computer World

One aspect of Linux that has been bedeviling me is how to insert en and em dashes. The key combos to enter them in windows—alt + 0150 or alt + 0151, respectively—are part of my muscle memory at this point. I finally got sick of my workarounds and looked up how to properly do this on Linux. You have to designate a “compose” key in keyboard settings (it sounds complicated but it’s very simple); mine is the right control key (and I will note that once the key is set as the compose key, it doesn’t do its old job anymore). Once that’s enabled, you tap the compose key then the hyphen three times for the em dash (two hyphens then period for the en). Et voila: — –

While we’re on the subject, I found out that the Linux Foundation offers free courses in the operating system works. It’s now on my (infinite) to-do list because I really do want to understand Linux! The course looks comprehensive and I am hoping I can find time to start digging into it. Here’s the link: https://trainingportal.linuxfoundation.org/courses/introduction-to-linux-lfs101

Corporeal Form

I mentioned last time that I was getting the gel injections for my knee and you may be wondering if they worked. I think it’s helping! I got my third and final injection last week, and this week, between the shots and my pulled calf muscle finally loosening up, I felt fairly good for the first time in at least a month. I’m really hoping these injections last a while (you’re supposed to feel relief for about six months). The cortisone only got me about three weeks of feeling decent, but it’s definitely not good for you to get a steroid shot every three weeks. Fortunately, the gel injections are much safer.

Moving It

After getting my knee tuned up, I saw my physical therapist to get my exercises updated. Apparently it is a challenge to find things I can do to strengthen my legs while not aggravating my knee. Typically, when people have serious arthritis they don’t have a lot of muscle so their PT can be like, stand up and sit down ten times but that won’t do shit for me. Now I have to stand one-footed on a platform and hold onto something (in my case, the squat rack), and lower into a squat until my toe touches the floor. To facilitate this, I bought one of these little step-up platforms. I quite like it and I’ve been using it for my bar hang practice too. It’s a little more comfortable than stepping from the bench to the band to practice my hangs.

squat rack with a thick elastic band positioned for bar hang support, a 12-inch platform in front of it to step up onto the band — current bar hang setup

Kitchen Witchery

Last weekend, we had one of our themed potlucks. This one was potatoes! It was truly a celebration of all things potato. I made a loaded potato bread with bacon, cheese, and chives in it (from The Harvest Baker) and a fennel, potato, and white bean soup (from The Bean Book). We also had gnocchi, an assortment of gratins, and even cupcakes. In regularly scheduled meals, I tried a recipe for tofu and sweet potato peanut butter curry. I appreciated that it was very easy and reasonably tasty.

a plate of at least five types of potato dish alongside a bowl of soup — potato extravanganza

a squat loaf of bread not unlike a soda bread cut in half to show that it is studded with cheese, bacon, and chives — potato extravanganza

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat lounging inside a sweatshirt with his front leg sticking out — temperature control

Fritz the cat cuddling with me in bed, but looking intently at something outside — temperature control

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: February 22, 2026

Posted on February 22, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve had a bit of a rough time the last couple weeks thanks to the arthritis and it’s been hard to do much. Two weeks ago, my knee started hurting a lot more than it had been and it even hurt to walk. I haven’t been doing anything high impact or especially strenuous, so I’m not sure what brought it on other than the ongoing degeneration of my crappy knee joint. The good news is I was already scheduled to get my first round of gel injections, also known as hyaluronic acid, the same stuff those Olympic ski jumpers have been injecting into their nether regions to try to get a little extra fabric in their suits, operating on the same physical principle as a flying squirrel. I’m getting three injections of what I’m now exclusively calling “dick acid” over the course of three weeks. The stuff takes a little time to work, but I am very much hoping it will do something for me because this pain is making it difficult for me to go about my business. I don’t want to get too optimistic but I think I’m starting to feel a little better. Thank you, dick acid.

Current Events

I think we need to start taking seriously the possibility that elections are not going to count for much in the future. Let’s start with the SAVE Act, which I was yelling about this time last year. This bill, which has already passed the House, would require “individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.” This means you would need to show a birth certificate, passport, or similar to register to vote. Most people do not have these documents handy, or if they do have their birth certificate, it might not match their current name, especially for married women or transgender people. For something practical you can do right now, I suggest getting or renewing your passport (or consider getting a divorce and changing your name back!). You can now apply for passports online and it’s very easy; I just renewed mine last week. They seem to be moving quickly at the passport office right now, so I do recommend that women, in particular, take advantage of that.

Still, even if everyone has a passport and the documents to prove citizenship, this is a pointless and cruel piece of legislation. Voter fraud, which this legislation ostensibly aims to eliminate, is vanishingly rare. It’s not happening at scale. There is no voter fraud conspiracy. Immigrants are not working the system to find some kind of illegal voting loophole. One report found that “most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices.” That’s it. It’s just people at work making mistakes sometimes.

Keeping people from voting seems to be one of the key developing projects of this administration. Last month, amid the chaos ICE has been visiting on Minneapolis, Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded that Minnesota turn over their voter rolls to the federal government. As The Guardian reports, “What do voter rolls have to do with ICE? Nothing. But they have a lot to do with the administration’s ongoing efforts to meddle in elections,” Wendy Weiser, vice-president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, a thinktank, posted on X. “The administration may not threaten ICE deployment to pressure states to cooperate with its improper efforts to interfere in elections.” We also recently saw the FBI raiding the Fulton County election offices in Georgia. Despite being an obvious tantrum about Trump losing to Biden in 2020, this could have real consequences.

The Trump administration is obsessed with elections because of Trump’s vanity, among other things. Trump lost elections when his main opponent was a man and only won against women. Accusations of Russian interference in elections have followed him for ten years. He is so unpopular that Gallup is going to stop tracking presidential approval ratings. Per the article, “Trump’s second-term approval rating fell to 36% in December, which is among the lowest ever recorded by the company. The US president started his second term with an approval rating of 47%.” Trump only wants to play when he knows he can win. He wants to be putting up dictator numbers so he can say he won 90 percent or more of the vote. I’m desperately hoping he dies before his term ends so we don’t have to find out how serious he is about trying to run for a third term in 2028 (yes, I know this is illegal but I don’t think Trump cares. He’s already a convicted felon and yet he is the president).

ICE now has a budget that is almost equal to that of Canada’s military, and it would be the 17th largest military in the world based on funding. Why are we funding a military-sized force for something that is only directed at our own citizens? In Arizona, the state senate is currently reviewing a proposal to have ICE stationed at polling places. Very few people are going to turn up to vote when they could be kidnapped by ICE agents. California has introduced a bill to do exactly the opposite, banning ICE from polling sites, which is great for us but there are 49 other states to worry about. Still, Trump was out in public saying that we should “nationalize the voting.” I don’t think it’s unreasonable that his underlings may carry out this idea using ICE agents as enforcement.

I wish I had something optimistic to add or something we could all go out and do about this, but there are no longer any easy suggestions and I’m just here chronicling the madness because I feel compelled to do so. The way people are fighting back in Minnesota is probably what we will all need to start doing. Perhaps we also need to take a cue from this local hero.

Books and Other Words

cover for Bullshit Jobs shown on Kobo ereader — Bullshit Jobs

I can’t believe it took me so long to read David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory! This is exactly the book I needed in my life. I already have a lot of opinions on the nature and utility of many forms of work, but Bullshit Jobs added a lot of clarity and nuance for me.

Graeber begins with defining a bullshit job as:

“A form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

He goes on to categorize bullshit jobs into five types: flunkies, box tickers, duct tapers, goons, and taskmasters, explaining their origins and how their different roles suggest that most of the “bullshitization” of jobs comes from political motivations, not economic ones. There are plenty of non-bullshit jobs out there, but because our we are “a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself,” we have created a whole class of jobs that don’t really serve any purpose except keeping people employed. This isn’t unlike the USSR’s “millions of dummy proletarian jobs” but we have “dummy white-collar jobs instead.” Graeber cites a survey that found that “37 to 40 percent of workers in rich countries already feel their jobs are pointless.” That’s huge! More than one-third of workers admit to thinking that their job accomplishes nothing. This is a huge drain on all of us; working 40 hours “regardless of what there is to do … def[ies] all common sense.” It’s delivering huge psychic damage to us all.

Graeber also addresses the idea that people who have bullshit jobs should just be glad of their circumstances. They don’t have to do anything but they get paid! Unfortunately, most people find that pretending to work all day is a huge drain on one’s creative energies. After a long day of putting energy into something pointless, most people don’t have energy left for much beyond watching TV and spending money on random shit, which Graeber terms “compensatory capitalism.” Yet, some people are able to find a kind of “guerrilla purpose” to combat the “spiritual warfare” of bullshit jobs and find ways to do useful things during work, although that seems to be a minority.

Ending the scourge of bullshit jobs is not going to be easy, in large part because Graeber writes that this is a political problem rather than an economic one. Creating lots of bullshit jobs is effectively a new form of feudalism in which corporations distribute resources and managers get to feel important by employing many underlings. There is also the issue of how people would be able to afford to live without bullshit jobs propping up so many people. Instead of corporate patronage, one solution would be something like Universal Basic Income, where every single person gets enough money to live regardless of their circumstances. Graber suggests that part of the reason we don’t have universal healthcare in the United States is that these dummy jobs are acting like a form of welfare. He mentions an interview in which President Obama explained that he couldn’t push for something like Medicare for All because too many health insurance employees would be out of a job. Bleak!

Tweet from @PopulismUpdates of a photo of man wearing a bowtie with the caption "Ulysses S. Grant's great-grandson, an author of gay vampire fiction." This is retweeted by @netcapgirl with the comment "i must study war so my sons can study business so their sons can study art so their sons can write gay vampire fiction" — oh, I think people would still find work to do

Another issue is that many people in bullshit jobs seem to envy people in jobs that benefit society—nurses, teachers, sewage plant inspectors—so we end up with a perverse logic like “of course teachers shouldn’t be paid much, they’re already doing a job that is important! The rest of us need to be paid a lot for the psychic torture of doing a bullshit job!” How do we get people to realize that instead of everyone suffering together, we could do something else? Literally anything else? We all want our lives to have meaning, but these fake white-collar jobs are not the way to to it. People love to argue that we’d get “bored” or do nothing at all without work, but we almost always see rich people who don’t have to work making art in one form or another. People want to take care of each other and make art! That’s the whole human experience!

This book also reminded me of some of the things I took away from Can’t Pay Won’t Pay by the Debt Collective, which, of course, did cite Graeber’s work (notably Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I have yet to read). The Debt Collective and Graeber both discuss care work as something that could be considered the basis of the economy rather than making and selling things. Graeber talks about this as a form of “maintenance” work, in contrast to our typical image of a working class person, who works in a factory and maybe makes cars. But, as Graeber points out, you make a cup once and wash it 1,000 times, so why isn’t our economy centered around taking care of people and things? This in turn made me think of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World which describes caring for infrastructure as a form of maintenance that is disincentivized in favor of making new things, even though we have lots of energy available on this earth to maintain things and relatively few resources with which to produce new objects. Pivoting our economy away from having upwards half of the population doing jobs where they feel they contribute nothing to society would have huge benefits for the climate and the culture. The first step is convincing people that life could be different.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Governor Newsom proclaims Ronald Reagan Day via the California Governor’s website. I swear to god, if you chucklefucks elect this man as our next president, I will scream. My current theory is that he’s going to announce he’s running as a Republican to save the soul of the GOP from Trump and fend of the worst excesses of the Democrats.
Meet the Gorgeous Winner of Japan’s Capybara Bath Contest via Tokyo Weekender. The zoos in Japan have a contest to see which capybara can spend the most time in a bath. I can only say that I hope I get reincarnated as a capybara in a Japanese zoo.

Computer World

I am proud to say that I’ve had two friends this week ask me about installing Linux. I’m certainly not an expert but the fact that I’ve done it at all makes me a minor authority, so that is cool. I learned that the Linux Foundation website has free courses available to learn about Linux and I think I’m going to take the Introduction to Linux course. I want to know how the computer works! It would also be nice to be able to help more friends escape the Windows ecosystem especially now that we know Bill Gates himself is allegedly a disgusting sex pest.

The other computer thing I learned is that my favorite ad blocking program, AdGuard, now has an option on Linux. You do have to pay for this one but it prevents ads and trackers from downloading at all, and you can install it on all kinds of devices. I did have to be brave and use the terminal to install it, but their site had instructions and it all worked fine!

Icelandic

I am currently digging into a new Wikipedia category for my Icelandic studies (and I thought I mentioned this before but couldn’t find it, so forgive me if I am repeating myself). I’m working on translating articles about Icelandic women into English and I’ve started with the “Icelandic women by century” categories, which currently has me writing about a bunch of rich ladies and abbesses (sometimes both at once!) from the 15th century. Some of them are badass, like Ólöf Loftsdóttir who got kidnapped by Scottish pirates, had her ransom paid by the Danish king, then went back to Iceland to help keep the English off its shores! Solveig Þorleifsdóttir got excommunicated from the Catholic church. The reasons are not totally clear to me but it seems like she was being loud and stubborn (relatable). The only bummer about working on these subjects is that a lot of what we know about these women is who their husband(s) and children were, and who inherited their money. It’s been a little difficult to purposely ignore articles about the men who intersect with these women because I do really like to complete a set and it feels like I’m leaving holes in the story. However, Wikipedia has way more content about men (according to a 2023 study, only about 20 percent of biographical articles were about women), so I have to remind myself that I am simply prioritizing women at the moment. The men can be someone else’s problem.

Doing Stuff

Last weekend we saw Sacramento Ballet’s performance of Sleeping Beauty. I went into it having seen the Disney movie maybe once and not knowing much else, but it’s fairly thin on plot: the princess is born and everyone dances about it, she turns 16 and we dance some more, she gets cursed to sleep (sad dancing), then the prince wakes her and everyone dances in honor of their nuptials. I was surprised to find that I was familiar with a number of pieces from this ballet because my ballet teacher uses it for her students all the time! So that was a fun little surprise. I really liked how they used the costumes in the performance to show how time had passed; the first act has big 17th-century outfits, but after Aurora’s 100-year nap, the dancers appear in Rococo fashions.

Kitchen Witchery

I’ve been keeping it fairly basic lately. I tried this recipe for chicken arroz rojo, which I am calling “Mexican inspired” and not strictly Mexican food (this is a NYT recipe after all). I added a lot more seasoning and served it with corn cake and some roasted acorn squash. It was good and it was easy. I tried a new soup recipe: curried coconut and red lentil, which we liked. I made some beet couscous with feta (recipe from Ruffage). I liked it but didn’t love it, but the point was to eat an extra vegetable so mission accomplished. Finally, I made a meal of tri-tip, mashed potatoes, asparagus, and rolls (the roll recipe is from The Bread Bible but the rest is just freestyle), which Kirk said was visually impressive (and also delicious), so I am sharing so you can all be stunned by my craftswomanship.

a plate with sweet corn cake, roasted acorn squash, and a rice, bean, and chicken casserole — mexican-inspired meal

a bowl of red lentil soup, alongside beet cous cous topped with feta and a spiced nut mixture, and a naan — mexican-inspired meal

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Kirk bought some catnip bubbles thinking Fritz would be delighted and leaping around after them. Alas, Fritz is afraid of the bubbles.

Fritz the cat in his play tube with only his head visible. There is a solitary bubble on the carpet in front of the tube. Fritz is concerned — fearing the bubble

Fritz the cat, in one of my sweaters, with his face and front paw visible through the collar — fearing the bubble