Hello. Let’s try this again.
I started this newsletter in 2020, as the world shut down, mass death from a still ongoing pandemic rose and fascism had stopped rising on the outliers but was well entrenched in power. Five years later not much has changed. As a journalist I often joke that I’m on the “panic beat” — wars, protests, inequality, poverty, climate change, that’s what I report on. Even when I cover the arts it tends to be about movies or books tied into these anxiety inducing topics.
Then I stopped writing the newsletter. I don’t have much of an excuse for why I stopped posting. I got busy. Overwhelmingly busy. At the moment I work three jobs, with a bunch of side gigs. Journalism is not exactly a stable or highly paying industry, and so I work as a freelance editor, a barback and prep person at a cocktail bar and a freelance journalist. Often I’m looking to get the higher paying gig from outlets with bigger reach than a newsletter can give me. Just the realities of business.
But I’ve grown restless. There are stories I want to cover but can’t. By the time I hear back on a pitch the story’s done, or someone else is on it. So I’m reviving this newsletter. This time I’m on Beehiiv because I have zero use for Substack given its defense of hosting neofascist and racist accounts. This newsletter is, once again, a place for my reporting, essays on the news and conflicts going on and my thoughts on certain films and shows and what they have to say about where we stand. Certain topics probably won’t come up — I already cover the military in my editing job, for instance — and I cannot guarantee a steady publishing schedule although I promise to be more consistent. I don’t have a lot of readers, but people still have subscribed and I appreciate that more than I can express. Thank you for reading.
The world isn’t getting any better and the things that give me anxiety aren’t going away. So if you’ll bear with me, let’s give this another shot.
Let’s do the panic. Again.