ThatAmericanClare

One recent example: My novel Turtles All the Way Down was banned from being taught in English classes because one school board member claimed it "romanticizes mental illness."

(It does no such thing, of course. TAtWD makes mental illness seem really unpleasant and not at all either lowercase-r or capital-r romantic. To acknowledge something's existence is not to romanticize that thing. But part of co-opting this language is misusing it for the end of removing books thematically centered on mental illness, or physical illness, or sex, or anything else that might be deemed insufficiently inocuous for Educational Literature.)

But the question of when writing about something veers into romanticizing it IS actually a very important question for contemporary literary criticism, and one that's been explored a lot (sometimes with generosity and care, sometimes not) in book discourse online. So the Christian Nationalist Right is using the language of analysis that we are using in ways that are at best misguided and at worst disingenuous.

It's really discouraging--I mean, on a personal level obviously but also just as an American who believes teachers should be allowed to teach--to see such widespread book bans in American high schools and libraries. But it's not surprising, really. Books retain a lot of power--to deepen our empathy with those who are suffering, to connect us to ourselves and to others, and to see the full humanity of those who might be dehumanized or marginalized by the social order.

It helped me too. My eldest hasborderline ocd and it grew my empathy for his struggles.

Mothers Day is a weird holiday founded by a woman who eventually tried to get Mothers Day canceled because she found its commercialization gross.

WELL SORRY ANNA JARVIS BUT I MADE A GIFT BOX THAT IS A GENDER-NEUTRAL CARE PACKAGE FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE CHOCOLATE AND CANDLES AND TEA. YOU CAN GIVE IT TO YOUR MOM OR TO YOUR BUDDY OR TO YOUR AGENDER NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR WHO IS KINDA CUTE BUT YOU DON'T WANT TO MAKE A DEAL OUT OF IT.

In response to all of my asks: No. I mean, my new novel Hollywood, Ending is about the experience of sudden fame and the ways that real human beings must navigate being seen as More Or Different From Regular Persons, but I started writing it in 2018 before HudCon existed.

If anything, it is about what I saw my friends go through, and to a lesser extent what I went through even though I was grown up and married and everything when my work got near the center of U.S. pop culture.

In the novel, I try to write about the cost of publicizing one's private life, but just to state the obvious, the heated rivalry fandom is not the first time this has happened--in fact, on some level, it happens to everyone who participates in the social internet.

Like, it used to be that the business of commodifying one's private experiences was primarily an issue for movie stars, but now everyone who uses the social internet understands the costs and benefits of trading your frailties for public attention.

This is hard for me to remember on a minute-by-minute basis, but when I visit insta/threads/twitter/tiktok/googlenews/etc, I am seeing a feed of information that does not reflect a complicated and multivalent reality but instead was created by an algorithm designed to maximize the amount of time that I spend on social media sites.

These algorithms do not give a shit what is true or useful or humane; they want me in bed spending as much time on those feeds as they can possibly get me to spend.

For example, if your information feed fails to remind you that global literacy rates have never been higher, that fewer children are stunted due to malnutrition, and that the rate of child mortality is the lowest it has been in human history ... there is something inadequate about your information feed.

But of course the fact that the world used to suck more doesn't negate the fact that the world still sucks (and in important ways sucks more than it did ten or thirty years ago). Injustice permeates every facet of human-built systems and social orders. This should dishearten us. It should anger us. But the proper response to this anger, imo, is not idle despair but engagement.

Progress happens (and it does happen) when hundreds of millions or billions of people work together to make it happen. We reduced the likelihood of a child dying by 65% over the last 30 years not because it was inevitable or ordinary but because hundreds of millions of people refused to accept so much needless suffering and built more inclusive systems to expand access to healthcare, clean water, and adequate nutrition.

You have to remember: People are being paid a lot of money to use the most powerful tools in the history of the world to capture your attention, and then they are giving you access to those tools for free.

(This should give you some idea just how valuable your attention is.)

So the first thing I'd say is that you should not be too hard on yourself that you spend a lot of time scrolling. Scrolling is incredibly and (literally) unprecedentedly good at distracting us from boredom or ennui or whatever else we would otherwise be feeling.

Walking and writing, meanwhile, are much less good at distraction. They are better than staring at the ceiling, maybe, but not better than Instagram or Tiktok.

The problem, which you point out above, is that Instagram and Tiktok both solve for anxiety/boredom/isolation in the short run and worsen anxiety/boredom/isolation in the long run. And so you have to make incredibly difficult, counterintuitive decisions to resist the most powerful attention-holding tools ever created.

After ten years of dreaming, eight years of government support, six years of fundraising (we needed $50,000,000!), and five years of construction, the Paul Farmer Maternal Center of Excellence at Koidu Government Hospital finally saw its first patients on February 14th.

13 babies were born at the MCOE that day. Several were admitted to the NICU, the first in Sierra Leone's history. The MCOE is already radically transforming the kind of maternal and infant care available in eastern Sierra Leone.

Five thousand babies will be born at the MCOE this year. 5,000 more will be born there next year, and the year after that, and the year after that--hopefully for decades. The healthcare workforce of the entire nation will grow stronger because the MCOE is a teaching hospital training the next generation of Sierra Leonean nurses, midwives, and doctors.

One of these guys would go on to become a prize-winning novelist, a MacArthur genius grant winner, and the host of several important podcasts. The other is me.