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I had a feeling you needed this peaceful beauty in your life today. I know I did…

How life starts to feel when your screen time is under 2 hours a day

A PERSONAL SHARE

I have one subscriber who reads a single chapter of my book every week, than emails me every Sunday morning with his feedback.

He's 75, and has no idea how to use the Substack app. He will never see this note.

It makes my entire week when I get his email. He is a wonderful soul, funny and lovely, and he keeps me moving forward.

How do I even repay that?

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You always own your intellectual property, mailing list, and subscriber payments. With full editorial control and no gatekeepers, you can do the work you most believe in.

April Fool's Fish, and Blessed Carlo

The Loneliness No One Talks About

No one warns you about the loneliness that comes with growing.

The silence when old friendships stop fitting, but new ones haven’t formed.

The ache of outgrowing places, conversations, even versions of yourself.

Growth is beautiful, but it can also be isolating.

Keep growing anyway. You’ll find your kindred spirits.

Great discussions

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this and never watching an instagram reel again

Kash Patel’s Podcast Problem

Am I the only one who has a hard time getting his head around a sub-continental Indian supporting White Supremacy? Or is Patel just now realizing that he is, really, actually white and it is our eyes that see him differently? Although, according to his bio in Wiki, "Kash Patel was born in Garden City, New York to Indian Gujarati parents who had immigrated to the United States through Canada from East Africa."

"White" has been a fluid category over its relatively brief history. There's no reason to assume it can't evolve to include people of Indian or Hispanic ethnicity. It's not fundamentally about skin color. It's about power and social hierarchies. nbcnews.com/think/opini…

As someone whose parents were original supporters of the Southern Poverty Law Center (founded in 1971), and having been involved with and supported it for decades, unless you look β€œwhite,” regardless of how much you aren’t going to be considered equal to β€œreal” white folk to true believers in the white supremacist movement. And I am the definition of an β€œAryan” to those folks.

White southerner here, and of course that's true. Skin color counts β€” it just doesn't necessarily exclude you from the category of whiteness. Just as being extremely light-skinned did not and still does not make you reliably "white" if you have any Black ancestry at all. There would be no concept of "passing" if it did. As Nell Irvin Painter points out in that article I shared, there have always been degrees or levels of whiteness. It's complicated, but the best way of understanding it is through a lens of history, ideology, and status, not biology.

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Dec 6
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