The app for independent voices
Hang in there.
Fellow writers and dear readers, here is a call to persistence and resistance:
The new fat-shaming-American-city-invading agenda of this administration is just the latest outrageous assault upon our country. Project 2025's blueprint is in full execution, purging civil servants, replacing them with loyalists, and concentrating executive power—threatening the information networks that enable informed citizenship. We have all seen and felt this, all the way down to the little examining rooms in which I toil, trying to make sense of symptoms and life.
Authoritarian movements eliminate independent expertise that challenges their narratives. For all you science and medicine writers, and writers in general, this means both educating and preserving: highlight and save suppressed data, document institutional dismantling and the real power consolidating reasons for it, and maintain rigorous standards as official sources become compromised. Do not normalize this. You're now part of a parallel knowledge infrastructure.
For readers: You must develop a new literacy that measures institutional credibility. Agencies you once trusted may be compromised. This doesn’t mean embracing conspiracy theories or rejecting all official information—it means understanding that the reliability of government sources is now variable and politically contingent. Learn to evaluate expertise based on methodology, follow trusted guides, and value transparency rather than institutional affiliation alone. The scientists purged from agencies don’t stop being experts—they just lose their official platforms. Understand you're witnessing not policy disagreement but democratic backsliding.
Speaking truth carries real risks. Writers need operational security; readers should support them concretely. This crisis won't resolve quickly—authoritarian consolidation takes years to reverse. Comments, likes, restacks, forwards, and then real conversations with real people face to face are crucial armor against surrender. Do not obey in advance. Do not shrink into despair. This is no time for sunshine patriotism. And if sometimes the only way you can stomach the daily news is via satire, that’s more than OK.
Writers must build for endurance: You cannot serve as a reliable source of analysis if you’re burned out or traumatized. This means setting sustainable work rhythms even when everything feels urgent. It means maintaining financial stability. It means protecting time for rest, connection, and activities unrelated to political crisis. It means building support networks with others doing similar work.
Strategic self-care isn’t self-indulgence—it’s recognizing that authoritarian systems count on exhausting opposition. Your capacity to sustain this work for years is itself a form of resistance.
Readers face the same challenge: Constant immersion in distressing information creates genuine psychological harm. We must develop sustainable engagement practices: scheduled times for consuming news and analysis balanced with genuine disconnection, seeking writing that provides context rather than just amplifying anxiety, building community with others grappling with these realities rather than processing them in isolation.
The goal is remaining capable of action, not maintaining constant vigilance that leaves you depleted.
I’m personally going to keep writing about things big and small, catastrophic and mundane, heroic and preventative. Treating high blood pressure and scorning bloodshed. Whatever your expertise, passion, or lane with writing or work is, stay there. Don’t take the next exit. Nonviolence, boycotts, stubborn community and connection, and doubling down on joyful moments even when de facto American carnage makes us so sad and furious that we miss being present with our families at the dinner table.
Don’t miss that.
Don’t miss the fragile beauty of each day, discoverable as it is amidst the ugliest of days.
And don’t miss this calling.
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