(Originally posted: 2/3/17)

The week after the election, I heard Zadie Smith speak about her new book Swing Time at Sixth and I, a synagogue and cultural gathering space in Washington, D.C.

(Originally posted: 1/26/17)

A special photo essay from Erin Pearlman!

(Originally posted: 1/20/17)

For most of my high school years, I suffered psychological and verbal abuse from someone who thought he knew what was best for me. He didn’t. His words and actions smashed me, split my self-worth like a walnut, muddled the brightness of my world slow and steady like pollution.

(Originally posted: 1/13/17)

The first edition of Staunchly picks!

(Originally posted: 1/11/17)

My parents used to have a friend who, when he came over, would ask me absurd hypotheticals about babies and fire. I was 10 or 11 or maybe a little older. We had just gotten my first dog, Miles, with his silken long spaniel hair, color of an almond embryo, always trapping dirt. Miles was my first true love after Nick Carter, even though he pissed & shit everywhere and I knew he’d run away if he could just fit through the spaces in our gate. He could. We had to add chicken wire.

(Originally posted: 1/6/17)

Before we put 2016 in a time capsule (I don’t know—can you put smallpox in a time capsule?), I want to take a moment to celebrate one of the indisputably best things about last year. And that is: the absolute bounty of truly phenomenal writing done by women.

(Originally posted: 1/2/17)

Resolve.

It’s very fashionable to say you don’t believe in resolutions. The year that begins in January is, after all, an arbitrary restart, a construct, a way of stuffing last year’s sins under a dust skirt and proclaiming spiritual freshness, renewal, clean floors, without actually exorcising the monsters.

(Originally posted: 12/27/16)

Three tubes of red lipstick
Two tattoos
350 lattes (estimate)
One book started

(Originally posted: 12/20/2016)

Last Tuesday, on the 5:40 pm flight out of Reagan, I left Washington, DC after four years. At the gate, I spent some time reflecting on the legacy I was leaving behind.

(Originally posted: 12/6/16)

I first encountered the mind of Sarah Gorman on the internet in 2015, where her obsessive cataloguing of food in Kanye West lyrics, every soul-crushing hat on the Gilmore Girls revival, and the particular merits of each Kimoji showed me I was dealing with a person of exquisite taste and vision.