For the Washington Post, a short essay on decluttering and how it might actually be bad for our souls, not to mention the planet:

Decluttering’s appeal can feel very modern, a timely response to late capitalism’s mass production of objects not destined for a long life. But decluttering, as a concept and a ritual, is much older. In a 2021 essay in the International Journal of Practical Theology, Christiane Lang Hearlson, a religion professor at Villanova University, argued that decluttering is in line with spiritual practices dating back millennia, like repentance, detachment from worldly things and purgation. “The idea with purging is to send out of yourself or your life the things that are preventing you from living in a whole way, in a good way,” Hearlson told me. Noting modern-day language around “purging” or “detoxing” from clutter, she went on, “It’s the same idea: … there’s something toxic in my life and I need to send it away.”

Image by José L. Soto for the Washington Post

For the New York Times, a story about how female Senate staffers are processing the hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh:

Despite what the country thinks of Congress, Senate staff members are also real people. (I know, I’m married to someone who used to be one; none of his direct co-workers are quoted in this story.) They walk marble halls conferring with senators, their bosses. They try to make sure that if someone does have to ask a woman under oath about the defining trauma of her life, it is at least done with some sensitivity. That hearing everyone spent the week fighting over? They’ll have to fill the water glasses and print out the name cards.

And female Senate aides must also process a nation’s sexual trauma after a year spent making sense of their own.

Photo credit: Architect of the Capitol

For the New York Times, I wrote about a failed novel project and the question of whether (and when) nuclear war can ever be comic.

Is Trump the worst boss in Washington? My story for the New York Times Sunday Review:

Even as summer approaches and the window shrinks for getting new confirmations through the Senate before its long August recess, the administration has announced just a trickle of new hires. Part of this is incompetence — a number of high-profile candidates have stumbled in the vetting process — and the undeniable fact that Mr. Trump doesn’t seem to be trying very hard to fill those positions. But people are also clearly put off by the fact that Mr. Trump, who ran on hostility to D.C.’s “swamp,” now seems like the worst boss in Washington.

Review for Slate Book Review of Esther Schor's Bridge of Words:

As Princeton literature professor Esther Schor shows in her combined history of the language and memoir of her seven-year encounter with it, Bridge of Words, the success of Esperanto might be measured less in what it did for humanity at large and more in what it did, and continues to do, for its speakers, including Schor herself. Esperanto may not have changed the world. But in both its ideals and its practice, it holds out the possibility of transforming the lives of the people who use it.

My visit to a nudist dinner party in suburban Virginia, and what it all says about D.C. under Trump, for Elle.com. Illustration by Mia Feitel for Elle.com

For the Atlantic, a look at the mystery of why we love cats so deeply, despite the increasingly undeniable fact that they are an invasive species on the level of Dutch elm disease or kudzu.

Review of Phyllis Korki’s The Big Thing for the New York Times Book Review:

The daily effort required to complete a major creative project is monumental — and frequently invisible. It’s rare for novelists, artists, composers or computer programmers to pull back the curtain on the granular accumulation of alarm clocks set an hour back, day-job ­duties plugged through, sunny afternoons spent indoors, moments with family and friends unattended. Part of this is because it would be very boring. And yet we are fascinated by famous artists’ and writers’ daily routines: Benjamin Franklin and his naked “air baths,” Patricia Highsmith’s bacon and eggs for every meal, P.G. Wodehouse’s calisthenics.

Can a cat have an existential crisis? My cat Lucas’s anxiety … and my own. Story for Nautilus Magazine. (Awesome illo by Jackie Ferrentino for Nautilus.)

Elle: My Son Hates Me

About the year when my toddler son decided he was through with me:

One day last fall, my three-year-old son Danny got pink eye, and I stayed home to rub antibiotic ointment on his eyeballs every four hours. It's not easy to get a toddler to sit still while you stretch his eyelids apart and poke your finger into the crevice below. But, fortunately for bribing purposes (although unfortunately for all other purposes), the pink eye hit during the reign of ChuChu. Danny was obsessed with the seizure-inducing YouTube videos, in which obese animated babies dance jerkily and sing nursery rhymes. Over the course of a very long day, the tinny music resounded throughout the living room while Danny, feverish and dejected, sat slumped on the couch, staring at the screen of my laptop through red, mucous-y eyes.

Column for Washington Post on that time when "that time when" took over the internet:

There’s something ersatz about our weird online nostalgia for very recent events. In that sense, “that time when” is extremely useful, hugging the recent past and a speaker’s audience close in a way not many other phrases do. And yet it heightens the disturbing slipstream effect of Internet time, where we never feel quite in the moment, instead always observing it through various mediating devices, recording it, time-stamping it, commenting on it, as it fades away as surely as one of Taylor Swift’s boyfriends. “That time when” will, despite our best efforts, eventually be forgotten.

Story for Foreign Policy about a new comic book series in Japan offering a sympathetic look at the lives of trans teenagers:

Manga, which command more than $5 billion in annual sales in Japan and are gaining traction abroad, have long presented gender-bending characters: heroic tomboys, villainous cross-dressers, and princesses disguised as princes. But Wandering Sonbroke new ground. Originally published in the 25,000-circulation Comic Beam magazine from 2002 to 2013, adapted into a TV series in 2011, and read by more than 1 million people in book form, the comic offers a sympathetic look at modern-day young people who grapple with gender identity in a deeply conservative society. Other manga have followed suit, introducing more authentic transgender characters.

Mary Pilon’s The Monopolists reviewed for Slate Book Review:

You can tell a lot about a family by its house Monopoly rules. The rules I grew up with, inherited from my father and his three boisterous, competitive brothers, were cutthroat. There was no namby-pamby $500 bill on Free Parking. It was completely permitted to let your game piece float a space or two ahead of where the dice dictated, so long as your opponents didn’t notice before next roll, putting everyone in a constant state of mutual suspicion that made deal-making very fraught. Games could last for days. Whenever I made a move directly against my father—buying up all his favorite orange properties, or lining an entire side of the board with hotels when he was about to pass through—he would murmur, approvingly, “You devil, you.”

Monopoly’s savagery can extend beyond the board. This past November, a New Hampshire woman was charged with domestic violence for slapping her boyfriend during a game. The British royal family, Prince Andrew said in 2008, isn’t permitted to play it at home because “it gets too vicious.” All of these people, and my own family, and anyone else who has threatened to eviscerate a loved one over their income-tax accounting, should be required to read Mary Pilon’s enthralling new history of the long, pitched battle over the origins of the game, The Monopolists. Starving out your enemy until he breaks may make for a fun family games night, but in real life, it’s significantly less enjoyable for everyone involved—the ostensible winners as well as the losers.

Review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline for The New Republic:

The relationship between Rachel Cusk and the English press is like a lousy marriage from one of her own barbed, unsentimental novels. When Cusk first blew onto the scene in the early ’90s with the publication of Saving Agnes, she was a photogenic and brilliant Oxford grad who always sounded a bit depressive in interviews. British journalists—in love with the glamour of privilege, but always suspicious of someone who might not be enjoying it appropriately—responded with backhanded flattery. “The life of Rachel Cusk is not a tale for those of envious disposition,” wrote TheTimes of London in 1995. When Vogue profiled her around the publication of Saving Agnes, the story began, “Don’t you just hate people like Rachel Cusk?”