Elise Hu

Yesterday I learned via text that my friend Jeannie died. She was killed by the most swift-moving cancer that I’ve ever heard of — “cancer of unknown primary”. I struggle to even write about her in the past tense because she was one of the most vibrant and alive people I’ll have the pleasure of knowing. She attacked life with a constant smile and a joyful can-do spirit befitting a woman who had…

All podcasts are video now. I began writing this after a relentless 24 hours of miserable news. Another mass shooting on a college campus, a massacre of Australian Jews on the first night of Hanukkah, the stabbing deaths of legendary Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, in their home, by their adult son. The barrage of bad news in a concentrated period is not unlike the rest of…

I’ve been quiet on this here blog because I am doing most of my personal writing and updates over on my Substack these days, where there is more community and while I’m mixed on the platform trying to turn it into yet-another-social-media platform, I do like hanging out there for the most part, and writing to a small and intimate-feeling group of readers, most of whom are people I know. I’ve been…

Throughout 2025 my cat, Abe, has taken it upon himself to “go hunting” and bring me his spoils. True story: One morning I awoke to the sound of chirping IN MY OWN BED and it was a tiny motionless bird that my cat had dragged in. This morning I awoke to the sound of my cat cornering a mouse (or a rodent of some sort) in my shower. He managed to chase it into the clothing hamper. I then proceeded…

GAAAH I can’t help myself, I’m just going to say it: Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. It’s about the ways that technology changes how we see ourselves. It’s something I’ve been exploring for years now, both in my reporting, and in my book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital. What does it mean when we so often see ourselves through the lens of our phones or…

The skies are clear today, making the contrast between the giant plumes of smoke out my window so striking against blue skies. My home is in on LA’s Westside near the coast, but not in a canyon or the hills, which are the two types of places most threatened by the multiple fires that broke out this week. The cause of these fires is under investigation, but we know they are fueled by those…

Reading Vonnegut in Santa Barbara, in February 2024. It feels like 2024 was the year of the divorce memoir, and a lot of them written by people in my age cohort, so I ended up reading a lot of stories of miserable marriages and disappointing partners. I know everyone was wild for All Fours, but I only liked it in bits because I found the main character really tough to relate to(?). Overall, I’m…

Some of the hundreds (thousands?) of balls from Deck the Balls ’24. A humble party I threw together in 2012 back in Washington DC has now turned into a mega-event in my LA backyard. In its original conception, Deck the Balls was an intimate ball-themed potluck/competition in which guests would bring ball-shaped foods to pair with the penis shaped gingerbread cookies my ex-husband Matty and I made…

We all had matching flight suits, which led to some real confusion for the people of Carbondale, Illinois after we landed at a tiny airport and deplaned with giant speakers and a deejay from the Norwegian woods, playing harmonica. It was the year of brat summer, calling things weird, and being very mindful/very demure. The Dodgers won the World Series. TikTok faces an imminent ban. Kamala Harris…

“This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental…

"We thought you'd like to look back on this post from 4 years ago"

Wrong, Facebook. I did NOT want to look back on this post from four years ago. Though, I am glad I captured the destabilizing, dizzying start of the 2020-2021 Zoom school year in this poem. It feels distant in time, but near to my psyche, always. A poem I stitched together from the instructions and error messages and chats when we haltingly began the school year on screens.  

The Big TED 2024

Chatting with Alex and Esther as Reggie Watts gave his TED Talk What I remember about TED 2024: AI. AI. AI. The sun’s unpredictable activity might lead us into a mini-ice age that could last 70 years, but we don’t know because we don’t know enough about the sun. Something about fusion and fission. Quantum computing speaker went on stage with sunglasses on top of his head that he wears at all…

52 Favorite People, Places and Things

Vanity Fair runs its recurring question feature, “The Proust Questionnaire,” and I just recently learned the weekly online magazine Airmail runs a questionnaire of its own, featuring an alphabetical list of prompts for featured guests. I’m putting the question set to myself, and hoping you will do it, too, so I can learn more about you. It’s fun. It’s easy. Why not? AIRLINE: ANA…

LA Parents! Don’t Miss Performing Arts Workshop (PAW) Summer Camps this summer. My spawn have been going to this on and off over the past, gosh, six summers, and now I’m serving as an ambassador for the program because it’s such a worthwhile experience. 

I largely moved my correspondence with you to my Substack newsletter, which meant going many months without posting on HeyElise last year. But I’ll keep this blog going indefinitely because blogging is near and dear to me. It’s a practice I began on LiveJournal in The Year 2000, moved over to Xanga in college (imported many of those Xanga posts here to HeyElise), and by the time I graduated from…

What a pleasure it is to curl up with a book, or take one with me on travels, or speed read a book because I can’t put it down. This year I began listening to audiobooks, after having so much fun narrating my own. I’m still not back up to the 52 books a year pace but managed to do a wee bit more reading this year than last. Focused on fiction in the back half of the year after many non-fiction…