Does it count as “fool’s spring” when you’re a whole month into spring and the weather is actually summer?

1. “I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America,” by Caity Weaver for The Atlantic. If you’re a Weaver head like me or don’t know about Caity Weaver’s writing, it’s your lucky day. This piece is nearly perfect, my only complaint is that I…

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Welcome back to Dear Danny. Today we’re answering six questions on: a boyfriend’s catholicism reveal, a neighbor who wails in the night, parents that want to hang out three times a week (lol), a boyfriend who’s passionate about music and his (female) band mate, a boyfriend who never cries, and wedding toast tips. Lots of boyfriend material as always…

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When Jury Duty premiered in 2023, I was spellbound by the premise. An unwitting solar contractor named Ronald Gladden would attend a full round of jury duty, only the entire case was scripted and everyone involved was an actor—a two-week-long prank which would be spectacularly revealed at the end of the “trial” alongside a $100,000-dollar check for his troubles. I started the series with genuine glee and managed not to feel sick until the very end, when the level of deception, false intimacy, and undisclosed surveillance stopped feeling funny and felt, finally, unethical. Later, I was surprised to find that, aside from my canonically cynical boyfriend and one writer at Page Six, almost no one seemed to share this pessimistic view.

As you might expect, the Jury Duty producers worked hard to prevent viewers from suffering any deception-related queasiness, aggressively marketing the show as feel-good television. Gladden, nicknamed by production as the “hero,” was clearly cast for being a certain type: remarkably cheerful, endlessly understanding, perhaps not the shrewdest observer. The kind of guy who definitely wouldn’t get mad about all of this. If he ever strayed from seeming downright lovely and loveable, it must have been cut from the final edit. The characters surrounding him (including James Marsden, who plays an absurd version of himself) were silly, always willing to be the butt of the joke. The stakes were such that Gladden always got to be the good guy. The reveal was an explosion of joy and love and financial security—no mean-spirited “gotcha” energy whatsoever, unless you watched Gladden’s face very closely.

The packaging worked. The show was a viral sensation. It was anointed the breakout comedy of the year and was nominated for four Emmys. Gladden got a (lightweight) Hollywood reception: He moved to LA and signed a two-year deal with Amazon, starred in a couple commercials, posed for photos with Kendall Jenner, and supposedly maintains a friendship with James Marsden (lol). Creators Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky were greenlit for a second season before season one even aired. That second season, clunkily titled Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, was just released, and it takes the peaks and valleys of the first season and intensifies them to a breathtaking degree.

I approached Company Retreat with a lot more trepidation than its predecessor, but couldn’t really imagine sitting it out entirely. I had to see if they could pull it off again. This is of course the appeal of the show. The novel format harnesses the original draw of reality TV: the feeling of being a fly on the wall, the sense that you’re witnessing something the people (or person) on screen cannot understand from their particular vantage. The dramatic irony of The Truman Show rendered in the “real” world. Such a value proposition has been all but abandoned by most modern day reality TV, with the stars now increasingly aware of the audience and participating in the charade. It doesn’t feel like spying in precisely the way it once did. I guess you could say we wanted our power back.

I’d be remiss not to mention that both Jury Duty and Company Retreat are amazing feats of creative production pulled off by highly skilled people. An unthinkable amount of writing and contingency planning is involved, with comedic improvisation pushed to its limits (and sometimes past them). If the producers cannot maintain the prank, the entire show fails and tens of millions of dollars will be wasted. It’s impossible to watch the show and not be impressed when that doesn’t happen. The logistical achievement is half the fun.

The other half is the cast. The new hero, Anthony Norman, perfectly chosen, shares Gladden’s penchant for heart-wrenching enthusiasm, well-placed blind spots, and radical acceptance of strange and flawed people. (Can’t help but appreciate the accidentally evocative nature of the heroes’ names: glad-guy Gladden and normal-guy Norman.) The principal difference in season two is that the long-con takes place at a fake company retreat, with the cast having a scripted history spanning 20 years—Norman is hired on as a temp to help out. Where season one had a group of “strangers” coming together, season two invites the hero into a well-established relational dynamic, with all the warmth and intimacy that entails. This renders the stakes much higher and the reveal more complicated. Still, the cast members surrounding him are funny and sweet and hard not to love. Their ability to stay in character is a testament to their comedic talent—apparently they didn’t learn each other’s real names until the end, lest they slip up.

My initial grievance with Company Retreat, which I enjoyed to a point, is the unrelenting presence of its comedic influence, The Office, where creators Eisenberg and Stupnitsky (very obviously) both worked for years as writers and producers. The now-20-year-old style of humor feels pretty played out, not to mention the quirkier bits and characters favored by the mockumentary format never felt particularly “real.” Applied to a supposedly realistic scenario, this spirit of hyperbole strains the terms of the feel-good prank, making Norman seem increasingly dense as he doesn’t catch on.

In the first piece of proper, non-sensationalized media criticism I could find on the show (article, social post, or otherwise), The New Yorker’s Inkoo Kang skewered this aspect of the show’s pollyanna perspective: “Too often, the season asks the audience to see [Anthony’s tolerance for nonsense] as evidence of [his] unstinting optimism, rather than the quality they must have cast him for: an apparent inability to recognize red flags.”

The setting of season two heightens the nature of the show’s deceit. The retreat is for a fake hot sauce company called Rockin’ Grandma’s, and turns dramatic when the retiring CEO pivots from bequeathing the position to his deadbeat-but-earnest son to selling to a private equity company. Through this existential crisis, the charming cast of characters take on Norman as “one of their own.” They draw him continually into intimate conversations and moments of personal strife and transformation; they bond; they tell him he’s part of the family. From our fly’s perch on the wall, his growing affection for his fake coworkers verges on devastating; you can’t help but wonder if he’s hoping for a full-time job. Eventually he’s set up to save the company from financial and spiritual ruin, in a climactic moment that could only make someone at the center of it swell with pride—that is, unless it all turned out to be an elaborate ruse.

The reveal takes place shortly after, and it’s no accident that he’s told about the $150,000-dollar check within the first 60 seconds. (Note his payout is 1.5x larger than Gladden’s, and you can guess why.) The news of the windfall is presented like an award, but it feels more like a covert gag order. Who could be mad in the face of such spoils? Still, Norman is unable to fully process what he’s hearing. He’s smiling a lot, but you get the sense he’s doing this for the sake of the crowd swarming around him, who are understandably unable to contain their excitement at what they’ve pulled off. They must feel drunk with relief and pride of their own.

In rare moments that feel like glimmers of the truth, Norman looks sick, unconvinced, reeling and overwhelmed. As a viewer, I felt the reveal ought to have been slower, gentler, more like a confession than a celebration. But that wouldn’t have played very well, ethically speaking. Anyway, the crew doesn’t appear very interested in the intricacies of Norman’s emotional state during this denouement, they’re much more focused on showing him the location of each hidden camera. The cast, meanwhile, appear more conflicted, showering him in professions of love that seem genuine but also feel a little like apologies.

Luckily, Norman isn’t the type to get mad. In the press following the season finale, he has consistently referred to the show as a positive experience (although initially “there was sadness”). He’s in close touch with the entire cast, he says, joking that it took him a while to learn their real names. They talk all the time! Maybe he’ll have a brief future in show business like Gladden, with whom he’s also connected. He’s open to anything. He’s very grateful.

Both seasons offer the same trade-off to their respective heroes: Forgive us the staggering levels of deceit, exposure, and surveillance to which you couldn’t possibly consent, and we will pay you a lot of money, connect you with Hollywood, and show the world how amazing you are with our flattering edit. Audiences, meanwhile, are offered a similar exchange: Look past the duplicity and the manipulation and we’ll entertain and delight you for four hours straight. We might even make you cry! (I will confess to shedding a couple tears both seasons.)

Lightweight as this TV show may be, or well-meaning as its creators are, this bargain feels familiar. As modern civilians, we’re offered increasingly shiny spoils in exchange for our willingness to look past the surveillance-industrial complex. However variable the stakes, the playbook is the same. The show’s success, its easy brandability as “life-affirming,” only underlines our vulnerability to this style of trickery. Offer us enough and we won’t worry about things like privacy or consent. Nothing is so precious that it can’t be traded up.

After wrapping production on season one of Jury Duty, Gladden was destabilized. “[I]t took that entire weekend to realize what had happened,” he told the New York Post. He was intermittently paranoid, wondering if cameras were still following him. Per Page Six, he told iHeartRadio that it took a long time for him to process. “Months and months down the road, things would just randomly hit me. I’d be doing laundry or washing the dishes or something, and I’d be just like, ‘Oh, wow, was that fake?’” Thankfully, James Marsden was only a phone call away, and his invite to Kendall Jenner’s 818 tequila party was already in the mail.

Last week’s 15 things including a comedy show I highly recommend you catch while it’s on tour, a movie that made me cry harder than expected, and four articles worth reading. The rec of the week was best ways to prep tofu. Thank you for your wisdom!!! Last Wednesday’s podcast was on maternal ambivalence and my random love of potty training (lol).

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Take care,
Haley

Cover image via Getty | Eric Charbonneau / Contributor

1. “Beyond Equality,” by Jonny Thakkar for The Point, a fascinating essay on why the left needs a vision for the good life that goes beyond “equality.” Was a little thrown when the conclusion was so focused on AI, but I found this super interesting and worth pondering.

2. The NYTimes Dutch Baby recipe. Avi a…

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Coming at you with a free-wheeling Voice Note on some feelings I’ve been having on parenting lately (very positive ones!!) and also reflecting on potty training (I’m loving it not even kidding). Few essays I mention in this:

“Problems are the worst when they’re almost over”
“Both are better”
“Parenthood’s PR Problem”

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Thanks for listening!
Haley

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For the unaware, the two-week wait (or TWW, in baby-making parlance) is the span of time between ovulation and your period, during which you might be pregnant but it’s too early to test. I shared a bit about my experience with the TWW a few years ago (here and here, and in podcasts here, here, and here), and the gist is that it made me lose my mind. Specifically it made me feel desperate for a baby—a desire that I was, first of all, ashamed to associate myself with, which was a misogynistic bias I had to unlearn, but also a desire that truly didn’t resonate with me when I was feeling more “like myself.” This was endlessly confusing. Was I desperate for a child but just didn’t know it? If I wasn’t, why was I acting like I was?

My recent email purgatory, low stakes as it was, threw me right back into that tension. This time it occurred to me that what I was registering as an obsession with the information in the email was actually just a desire for the wait to end. These desires present almost identically, but are of course quite different. One is a more direct form of desire: I’m eager because I want the information! One is more mediated: I’m eager for the information because I desire an escape from unpleasant feelings of uncertainty. One springs from attraction, the other from avoidance. When the email finally came, I was excited, but more importantly, I was relieved.

The more I thought about this bifurcation of desire the more I noticed it everywhere. Was I actually hungry or did I desire a salty distraction from my work? Did I really want to go to that thing or did I simply want to feel included? Did I really need that coat or was I just bored and looking for a shopping rush? None of these desires are “wrong,” but the latter examples are all performing a little trick: I believe I want the thing itself, when in fact I’m catering to a pathological need I hadn’t fully owned up to yet. I think I’m walking in the front door, but it’s actually a trapdoor that leads me somewhere else.

An example of front-door desire: A romantic crush to whom you’re genuinely attracted; their personality lights you up, you feel real chemistry. Example of trapdoor desire: A romantic crush who makes you feel desperately in love because they’re mysterious and withholding. Again, nothing wrong with someone mysterious, but it’s also worth noticing, as the crush-er, when the draw is spurred on by game-playing—an appeal, perhaps, to your insecurity—versus pure, unmediated attraction. An important aspect of the front-door/trapdoor dichotomy is that both initially present as front-door and are only understood to be distinct in hindsight.

Front-door: Wanting the job because the work appeals to you. Trapdoor: Wanting the job because it will impress your parents. Front-door: Wanting to be friends with someone because you like their personality and get along well. Trapdoor: Wanting to be friends with someone because their approval would make you feel better about yourself. Front-door: Changing your diet to feel better in your body. Trapdoor: Changing your diet to be accepted by your judgemental boyfriend. Whereas a front-door desire represents a relatively transparent relationship between you and your desired outcome, a trapdoor desire is working to distract you from or obscure an unpleasant emotion like fear, anxiety, or insecurity.

Maybe it’s oversimplifying to suggest that our desires are ever perfectly pure and “unmediated.” Still, I think mediation suits the framework because of the outsize impact of media on our modern-day longings; a constant noisy barrier between us and our objects of desire. Advertising is nothing if not the corporate machinery required to construct trapdoor desire. The war machine, the beauty industry, social media, technology in general—each rely on their ability to mediate and manufacture desires and fears that otherwise might not naturally motivate us. If time and reflection can help us parse our true desires from our covert ones, the goal of capitalism is to speed things up enough that none of us pause to ask.

All these idiosyncrasies of desire might explain why it can be difficult, in a quiet or honest moment, to answer the question of what we really want. This is unfortunate, because the answer to that question informs how we prioritize or respond to our desires, and how we narrate and regulate ourselves in courting them. When I was trying for a baby, I did eventually figure out that I wasn’t so much desperate for a baby as uncomfortable with the waiting, but even that answer was incomplete. After a couple years passed and I watched a friend go through the process, I realized that anxiety during the two-week wait wasn’t a matter of finding one’s zen, but a rational response to an unusual and high-stakes process. The more effective response, then, might be radical acceptance and dispelling of shame around feeling “crazy.” That is, not to sidestep the trapdoor through self-discipline and claim victory over it, but to allow oneself to fall gracefully through it.

So maybe the trapdoor isn’t always the wrong door; it merely transforms, in the light of our awareness, from a trap into an escape. I wouldn’t want to live in a world completely devoid of escape routes, or opportunities to lose your head for the wrong person or do something fun for the wrong reasons. How dull. In contrast, to misread our trapdoors as front doors is to let ourselves be guided by our shadow selves. To live our lives in a state of perpetual running away rather than running toward, jumping from one cosmically unsatisfying desire to the next.

In Sherry Ning’s beloved essay, “You’re overspending because you lack values,” she posits that developing stronger values, in the context of shopping, can prevent us from caving to trapdoor desires (although she doesn’t use that term, as I just made it up). “Stronger values make you spend more mindfully because they shift the axis of desire,” she writes. “When you know what you worship—what you actually stand for and who you want to become—everything gets tested against that vision.” Here she refers to values as a filter or a sieve, but in applying this idea outward, to other venues of desire, I think values function more so like a light. Here’s what’s actually going on, they might tell us, so tread carefully.

Treading carefully could mean behaving differently, or it could mean responding differently to our own behavior. Often I find that my bluntest self-analysis in moments of trapdoor vertigo—that I’m shallow, desperate, impatient, pathetic—fails to appreciate who I actually am and what I value. Only later can I see that I was falling for another kind of trap, whereby I might behave “better” through the discipline of my character. The simplicity of the punitive solution holds appeals. But when I afford myself more time to reflect, I usually find that my values would have served as a better guide than discipline; not to choose or behave perfectly but to operate in awareness and with compassion.

Desire might be one of the most heavily explored philosophical fixations: Buddhism’s “attachment,” the Freudian unconscious, Lacan’s “desire as lack,” the internet’s obsession with dopamine. There seem to be infinite ways to think about it, which is mildly unnerving when you consider how often we allow it to serve as a compass. But forever approaching it with skepticism feels risky in a different way, like throttling some vibrant aspect of our humanity. I don’t really want to live without desire (another desire), I’d just like to fall knowingly.

You can find last week’s 15 things here, including a book I absolutely fell in love with and can’t stop thinking about.
The rec of the week was best book/film adaptations (great recs!).
Last Wednesday’s Dear Babies was about love and mental illness—thank you so much for your insights.

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Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley

Strange time we’re living in, but I guess we just keep posting!! :D

1. “How to Measure the Good Life,” by Becca Rothfeld, a great piece of criticism for The New Yorker about “happiness expert” Arthur C. Brooks and the people like him. Hard not to feel like a certain sphere of upper-middle-class liberal media is consumed by people like him. This tone is …

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“Dear Baby,

My girlfriend (29) and I (f, 27) have been toget…

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Welcome back to Dear Baby. Today I’m answering two questions (rather than three) because I found them so inspiring I went a bit long. I was also taken with the way the two questions felt spiritually connected: The first from someone who’s stuck in the doldrums of everyday life; the second from someone who, following a traumatic experience, is struggling to empathize with the everyday doldrums of their friends. These two questions might seem opposed in a sense, but I think they’re ultimately scratching at the surface of the same truth.

ICYMI: Last week’s podcast in which I discussed picking a baby name (and other parenting conundrums) and last Friday’s 15 things.

On being a mess

“Hi Haley,

I’m in a phase of my life where I feel very sloppy, disorganized, and uninspired. I want to get out of this rut, but I don’t know where to start.

I am two years out of a really stressful job that did a number on my mental health. During that time, my partner and I moved in together and adopted two rescue dogs, one of which we lost to a tragic accident. Needless to say, it was a tough time! But we are (somewhat) settled in a good apartment in a neighborhood we love—albeit after a stint in a neighborhood I hated—and I’ve been at a less stressful job for the past year, and am generally feeling much more mentally balanced. But now that the dust has settled, I feel like a mess! I look sloppy all the time, the place is messy with no real aesthetic, my hair has gone gray and out of control, and I spend all of my free time scrolling or playing games on my phone. I want to pull myself together and find inspiration creatively and aesthetically but don’t know how or where to get started.

Simultaneously, I feel like I shouldn’t be casting this judgement on myself at all. For example, I know you’ve talked about releasing the shame of scrolling on my phone, and I agree! But it still feels unproductive. I feel similarly conflicted about my desire for aesthetic appeal. Shouldn’t I be happy and confident with who I am? Shouldn’t I embrace the grays and the messy apartment, knowing that most of what I see on social media is a facade anyways? I know the only thing that truly matters is living a life full of love, joy, and care...but I’d like to look good in pictures too.

Any advice for how to manage these conflicting thoughts, and where to get started?

Thank you!”

Facing your feelings this directly is brave. But I’m interested in the way your attempts to improve things for yourself are being stymied by well-meaning social scripts to “dispel shame,” which I suspect are only stagnating you further. I deeply relate to this cursed little trade-off. I was struck by your mention of my suggestion to “release the shame of scrolling.” If I recall correctly, what I was hoping to communicate was that it’s more useful to understand avoidant scrolling as evidence of an unmet need. This is different from giving yourself permission to continue scrolling without guilt, and closer to an invitation to understand the scrolling as a habit that needs care and attention—and also forgiveness, yes. I think your life might require a similar tending right now.

Let’s talk briefly about the progressive social scripts that suggest we accept and forgive ourselves when self-judgment comes up. I think these scripts are most useful when wielded to break up paralyzing shame. When we try to shame ourselves into “behaving well,” we usually end up in a kind of toxic ouroboros. Shame can have an outsize impact on our behavior, which can make it seem “effective” in a way, but it usually only controls our actions through fear, which we’re wired to avoid, and the cycle repeats. Shame, then, is a shoddy motivational tool. It can also provide cover for systemic problems that make our lives worse, shifting blame to individuals who just don’t want to work hard anymore (or whatever). For all these reasons, the notion of radical self-forgiveness means well and can be spiritually useful. But when we use it to thwart our earnest attempts to improve our lives—attempts which often start with taking stock of what’s not working for us—it can be a motivation-ender in its own right.

You feel sloppy and like your house is a mess and like you’re stuck in a pattern of avoidance. I’ve absolutely felt like this and I assume many people reading have felt this way too. You’ve just gotten yourself out of a period of great mental instability, even tragedy, and while you’re finally feeling more balanced—a testament to your resilience and resolve—you feel far from “thriving.” Something I’d like for you to hear is that you’re allowed to want to thrive. This is not a voice you need to quiet, this is a loving and caring voice! If you’ve fallen into a bit of a depression, which I won’t assume but your note suggests, this desire can help you start to crawl out of it.

I also want to add that “thriving” can include looking and feeling good. Vanity isn’t always or necessarily a form of submission to oppressive beauty standards. I resent the way that caring for ourselves has become so distorted, perverted, and commodified by the beauty and wellness industries that we’ve lost sight of them as baseline worthwhile endeavors. Tending to our bodies is important for our health (physical, mental). I have to remind myself of this too, by the way. Obviously we owe it to ourselves and each other to be vigilant about when these standards become exploitative and oppressive, but we also have to remember that care—the giving and the receiving—makes us human.

Consider the care we give to our homes. I’ve written before about chores as a form of everyday revelry, and I meant that both in the sense that chores are the repetitive work of our lives and also the means through which we connect with our agency and self-worth. If we’re lucky enough to be able to do it, caring for our homes can remind us that we’re able-bodied, that we deserve clean spaces, that we respect the place we call home. In return for our chores, our homes provide us comfort, safety, and pleasure. As overwrought as this may seem given the tedium of chores (obviously they can suck), I do believe they tap us into this vital equilibrium: The way our care returns to us as a kind of love.

This equilibrium occurred to me a lot as I considered your question. When we’re holed up at home, failing to care for ourselves or our spaces or our friends or communities, I think we feel awful because we’ve thrown the divine balance off. No care given, no care received. It’s less transactional than I’m making it sound—I’m not meaning to imply that caring for yourself will enable you to receive love (poisonous idea!). I mean that when you care for your life, it reflects back a certain splendor. Or when you care for your body, it cares for you in return. This is different from primping, pampering, and chiseling your body into submission, which can be its own form of neglect. I just mean simple things—good hygiene, moisturized skin, clothes that fit and make you feel like yourself. Caring in this way can afford you a sense of self-respect and self-possession. Tit for tat.

The other day I saw a post from Twitter fashion god Derek Guy about how his friend described dressing well: “Style is simply about being yourself on purpose.” I think this is true, and it tracks, then, that feeling lost in ourselves can show up in how we self-style. Maybe you’re not being superficial when you say you want to look good; maybe you just want to be who you are on purpose sometimes, rather than by sloppy accident. Of course we are no less worthy of love when we feel and look sloppy, that’s not the point. Sometimes we just need to feel the weight of our own agency.

Speaking to the less tangible aspects of the care equilibrium, depression can turn you inward. It’s possible, with all the personal crises you’ve been dealing with, you haven’t had the opportunity to extend yourself outward very much. Showing up for other people and receiving their energy in return is an important part of feeling alive. It sounds like you’re in a period of feeling extremely drained and it might seem counterintuitive to spend what little energy you have on other people, but you might be surprised by the way it rights certain vague internal wrongs.

Any of these care endeavors can take a dark turn: giving of yourself to a codependent extent; cleaning your home compulsively, self-consciously, or out of fear of a little texture (mess is a beautiful part of life); tending to your appearance neurotically or obsessively. I think you’re right to be aware of these extremes—to question, for instance, if you might not be better off embracing your gray hair than hiding it, or if “looking good in pictures” is necessarily better than true embodiment. But I also don’t think these are reasons to continue on as you’re currently living. You’re feeling avoidant and lifeless—that matters! Not all “aesthetic” concerns are superficial, a facade. Beauty can be generous and generative.

As a counterpoint to your stated desire to feel differently and less incidental, you say at the end of the question, “I know the only thing that truly matters is living a life full of love, joy, and care.” I’d argue that’s more like an explanation for your distress than a counterpoint. You deserve more love, joy, and care, as does the little corner of the world you inhabit. If you can reframe this longing you’re feeling as a longing for care, maybe you can forgive yourself for lacking it for a while. You’ve been through a lot.

If I can offer a cliche suggestion, start small: Make your bed every morning, delete the apps for a while, start a new book, meet a friend you miss for coffee (and walk there), replace the pants that don’t suit you any more with a pair that does. And if those feel impossible, take stock of what aspects of your life are most aggressively sapping your energy right now—what fundamental needs are not being met—and see about addressing them little by little. This will probably involve asking for help or support; remember, that’s an important part of the equilibrium.

This is less about any individual thing changing your life and more about forgiving yourself enough to feel the force of your own will again. One of the great thefts we’ve experienced in this technological era is no longer feeling the power of our own agency. Bottomless scrolling is designed to cater to the insatiable and avoidant little demons that lurk within all of us, and it robs us of making decisions and feeling the creative power of that decision-making. Tough breaks in life only intensify our exposure to this faustian bargain. We may be able to skate by imbibing in little doses, but we all know the feeling of over-extension, of losing the intangible spark that once made us feel excited to be here. I think you owe it to yourself to try to find it, and in that very pursuit, let it find you.

On resisting curmudgeonry

“Last year, I had one of the most difficult years of my life. Every single facet of my life was ruined, largely in a cascading effect, and the inciting event was outside of my control. Most of my last year was spent picking up the pieces of my life and rebuilding every aspect.

Today, I’m finding it hard to be supportive of my friends’ and family’s ‘problems.’ I’ve always been the person people come to with their problems to listen and give advice. But last year, no one really helped me emotionally or materially with any of my issues and I felt incredibly alone despite being surrounded by family and spending time often with friends. No one ever really asked about my issues or helped me with processing anything and often if I tried to bring it up, people got uncomfortable and changed the subject.

Now, when people come to me with their issues it’s very hard for me to care. Work problems, relationship arguments, misunderstandings between friends all seem so trivial to me that I don’t even know how to respond to people. The other day, my sister mentioned how she didn’t feel supported by me as much recently and I realized that other people can tell that I don’t care. How do I learn to care about these issues again when they all seem completely silly to me in comparison to what I went through? All I can think about when I hear them talk is how they would’ve been institutionalized if they had to live my life last year if something like being unhappy at work is enough to get them worked up for months (look for a new job...come on now, it’s not rocket science).

But I don’t want to become a curmudgeon and think that my issues matter more than other people’s, nor believe that because no one supported me, I shouldn’t support anyone else. So how do I rewire my brain to care again?”

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I keep falling asleep at my desk like I’m 19 in a Business Law 101 lecture so if you catch a typo here I’m sorry! I was up late for no reason.

1. “My Season of Ativan,” by Amanda Peet for The New Yorker, a poignant (and also somehow funny) essay about losing her parents amid receiving her own cancer diagnosis. Had no idea she could write like t…

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Coming to you solo with a little roundup of questions I’ve received in recent months that I’d earmarked as “[possible solo pod?]”—so I’m finally following through on that! I decided to stick to a motherhood theme this time, but if you’re not sick of the Q&A format I’ll plan to revisit other themes in the future. I think of this style of pod as a li…

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Avi’s mushrooms hit on It’s a Small World and he appeared temporarily rattled before launching into a theory about the ride as post-war propaganda for America as global peacemaker1—ironic, he noted, as Walt Disney was a documented Nazi-sympathizer. My brother came up shortly after on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, care of the smiling, three-foot-tall fiberglass statue that greeted us, and I came up an hour later in Frontierland, where I suddenly noticed the “wooden stakes” surrounding our enclosure were actually made of metal that had been carefully painted to resemble woodgrain.

The following three hours were some of the most frightening and fascinating I’ve ever spent on psychedelic drugs. As it turns out, the upside of tripping at Disneyland is identical to the downside: Disneyland is the weirdest place on Earth.

The first subject of our collective fixation were the trees—how some of them were real while others were fake. This threw the authenticity of everything else into question. Were the flowers real? The birds? When we discovered a wooden fixture painted to look like metal, further questions abounded: Why swap wood for metal and metal for wood? Why was every material painted to look like another? Our heads were on swivels. Nothing was as it seemed.

None of us had been to Disney in years, or went much as kids. We repeated details we’d read on the drive in about how the park was meticulously maintained: hitching posts repainted nightly to appear like new, chewing gum scraped off of pavement by custodians every day after closing, chipped handrails constantly being sanded and repainted. “The primary goal of the after-hours crew is to pursue Disney’s vision of an immaculate land free of the litter and grime of the outside world,” one blog read. On mushrooms, this work took on a sinister edge. Disney Magic was, by Disney’s own admission, produced only by sanding away all the friction of real life.

We’d also read that these days every visitor to Disney parks was extensively surveilled and tracked “through a mix of MagicBands, biometric scans, and app-based location services” to “enhance your visit.” Soon we got to witness the phenomenon up close: Around the Indiana Jones ride, while walking through an artificial fog, my brother took a surreptitious hit of a vape. A few minutes later, while winding through the rails to get in line, a stiff, grinning parks employee held her hand out and looked directly at my brother. He handed her the vape and we walked on. Not a single word was exchanged.

Things came to a head around Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, when our running commentary about Disneyland as a fascist utopia gave way to an actual theatrical performance of fascism: The gun-wielding Stormtroopers stomped ominously through the area, occasionally led by Kylo Ren, who swept in to grill a girl in Minnie Mouse ears about the location of the Resistance. She giggled. We loitered near the painted concrete wall, reshaped to look like a five-story-tall rock face, and watched as children whooped and cheered at the display of militaristic musical theater. The Galactic Empire was heavily inspired by Nazi Germany, Avi reminded us, pointing at the giant red banner flag with a round, geometric insignia. Here Disney’s willingness to wield totalitarianism in the name of cheery entertainment was made literal.

Our mushroom trips melted away, appropriately, with a jumble of frozen Dibs in a red tub, which we passed around like a joint while sitting at a white metal table in California Adventure. Behind us loomed a massive “forced-perspective” mural of a Hollywood street. When it didn’t send us into a tailspin, we laughed with relief. We rode rollercoasters and finally screamed. We bought beers and a hot salty pretzel shaped like Mickey Mouse and FaceTimed our sister to make her jealous. We got soaked on the Grizzly River Run and squelched joyfully in our sneakers.

A few days before, I’d gotten my period, my first since Avi and I had started trying for a baby—this was 2022. As the sun set and the park was bathed in colorful luminescents, I watched kids’ eyes light up in delight and thought to myself, Having a kid will be fun. Suddenly my fear felt far away, buried next to our cynical political analysis. It felt better to see it all differently.

Disney’s duality

I’ve thought a fair bit about that trip to Disneyland in the years since. In particular, I’ve meditated on the way it was split into two acts: the first a haunted spectacle of American propaganda and the second a joyride through American kitsch. Both seem to capture something true about the modern Disney experience—or the modern American experience. Often caught between that which entertains and that which exploits and manipulates, I suspect many of us are “Disney adults” of another kind, if you swap out the context. But Disney, as an institution, remains our most scintillant display of American duplicity.

Now, as a mother of a two-year-old who occasionally watches Disney movies, I regularly confront this tension. Zootopia, our airplane movie of choice, is one of my favorite examples. Although we never bring headphones and thus only view it on mute, you don’t need to hear the movie to understand it as both extremely charming and heavily propagandized.

Zootopia is set in a modern capitalist city populated by animals and stars a plucky young rabbit who dreams of becoming a cop. Although she discovers the system is corrupt, she eventually redeems it by exemplifying a good cop capable of saving the day. There’s plenty to laugh at—the sloths working the DMV, the assembly line of rodents eating popsicles, the visual gag of a tiny bunny in a parking enforcement scooter. The overall absurdity of the animal kingdom behaving like Americans. Zootopia displays the trappings of Western modernity with glee: markets, advertising, finding purpose through work, managing one’s emotions “productively.” This is not just nefarious, it’s also what makes the movie fun.

This tension is present in almost every modern Disney movie. Pixar, Disney’s beloved and respected subsidiary, is one of the most effective pushers of American ideology through quirky storytelling. The heartwarming tale of toys existing within a consumer-product ecosystem; the energy-extracting monster corporation that’s redeemed through a better extraction method; purgatory and the afterlife reimagined as corporate bureaucracy; emotions cast as coworkers learning to cooperate efficiently. The underlying structure of Pixar movies is almost always the working levers of modern capitalistic America rendered silly and optimistic. The neoliberal curriculum is subtle but foundational.2

I’m using the term “propaganda” loosely here. It’s probably more accurate to think of modern Disney animators as both victims and mass reproducers of what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism: our collective inability to imagine life outside of capitalism. It suffuses everything, even our fantasies. No doubt, and it should be noted, that Disney has employed and employs incredible artists. Avi and I rewatch Disney classics sometimes just to revel in the artwork, and the modern films are creative achievements in their own right. Still, we have a running joke that the premise of almost every Pixar movie is: “What if x were capitalists?”

Old Disney classics were obsessed with different political structures, especially monarchy, but were similarly embroiled in American ideology. Matt Roth’s 1996 social analysis of The Lion King, Pinocchio, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin for Jump Cut Magazine, entitled “A short history of Disney-fascism,” is an iconic contribution to the Disney-critical canon. He analyzes the queer-coding of villains like Usrula, Scar, and Jafar; the much-discussed paternalism; the covert racial allegories and winking references to the welfare state. Disney “presents a vision of adult society,” he writes. “The full contours of this vision are difficult to see. We have to look past the sheer brilliance of Disney animation—with its dramatic thunderstorms and kaleidoscopic musical numbers.” The same could be said of the parks.

The Parks

Disneyland visitors enter the park through “Main Street, U.S.A,” a shopping corridor modeled after the small towns of the early 1900s, like those of Walt Disney’s youth. Its surreal perfection—facades and hitching posts repainted nightly according to precise humidity levels—combined with its provincial charms create an idealized simulation of American history. The rest of the park aims for a similar flattening. As Dave Schneider wrote in TruthOut. “Disney World is an immense patchwork of medieval castles, colonial history, future technologies, dinosaurs, movies, animals and exotic destinations. Each of these elements is presented out of its context, and thus loses a large part of its original meaning. This is decontextualization.”

There’s something comforting about this glossy oversimplification—not just to children, but to adults. As one adult visitor notes on a popular Disney blog: “[Main Street] was a Victorian, turn-of-the-century setting better than anything that could have ever really existed. It was like being on the greatest movie set in the world except it was real! I was hooked!” This is the power of Disneyland, where the simulation is so totalizing it’s perceived as reality. As Jean Baudrillard famously wrote of the park in Simulation and Simulacra: “All [America’s] values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pacified.” The visitors are pacified, too.

In several personal accounts of self-described “Disney Adults,” I found that they all mentioned this enrapturing quality of Disney parks. “I am not, and never have been, a person for whom joy really comes in consistent supply. But at Disney, it’s nothing less than an IV in my arm,” wrote EJ Dickson for Rolling Stone. For NBCNews, Jodi Eichler-Levine compared Adult-Disney fandom to religion: “For some people—both those who have another ‘traditional’ religion and those who don’t—the promise of magic at Disney and the feelings they get there are powerful. I’ve seen people cry at the fireworks. Many times.” Yes, Disney is “capitalism on steroids” with a shoddy corporate track record, she notes, “But it is also a storytelling company, which is why people invest so much in its worlds.”

The “magic” of Disneyland, it must be noted, is a heavily-regulated and draconianly-orchestrated corporate experience. Park employees, known fittingly as “cast members,” are beholden to strict dress and grooming codes, otherwise known as “the Disney Look”: no piercings other than ears, no long nails, no big tattoos, no sunglasses, no part of their uniforms (“costumes”) concealed, wrinkled, ill-fitting, or out of place. They must stand up straight (no leaning), never say no, appear happy and helpful at all times. Even the dirty business of mortality can’t touch this sanitized paradise: Disney prefers that no one is declared dead at their theme parks. It’s been reported that the park goes to great lengths to avoid the presence of emergency vehicles on the premises and prefers for declarations to be made after parties have quietly exited the property.

While Jodi Eichler-Levine presented Disney’s hyper-immersive storytelling as a benevolent counterpoint to its less-benevolent “capitalism on steroids,” I would argue these are intimately connected. Disney is as alluring as its ability to tell us stories about ourselves that effortlessly refashion human friction and dissonance into harmony or amusement. As Vicky Osterwieil writes in “The Daddiest Place on Earth,” for The New Inquiry, “Disney World [makes] sense as the symbolic center of America only as long as America’s ideological projection of itself as ‘the good totality’ successfully [hides] its massive economic inequality, its inexorable transformation into a police state, and its function as a global military empire.”

As it becomes increasingly difficult to hide these American realities, the cynics in my life and on my feeds have less and less patience for adults who revere Disney’s authoritarian approach to unity. “Disney Adults,” they say, are suffering arrested development, willfully ignorant, incurious, politically illiterate. They want to inoculate themselves with childish fantasies, refusing to grow up instead of living in the real world.

There’s likely some truth to these accusations, but I also wonder if this antipathy is at least partly fueled by self-recognition: Our widespread willingness to blind ourselves with entertainment, whatever form it may take. To me, the most frustrating aspect of Disney isn’t its glaring childishness or overt attempts to overstimulate us, but its far more subtle way of purveying American dogma. Perhaps we sense our openness to this duplicity in other areas of our lives and resent it.

The problem, as ever, is the fun to be had. As Dave Schneider wrote in the intro of his takedown of the “fascist political economy” of Disney, “Before I go any further, I just want to say we had a delightful day of riding rides, seeing shows, and buying grossly overpriced food and drinks. When criticizing Disney in general, most people react by questioning all but your very humanity with the indignant question, ‘But did you have fun?’ Let the record show, I had a lot of fun.”

The fun

There’s a more interesting question than whether Disney parks or Disney movies are a good time, or “magical,” as they’re masterfully engineered to be. It’s whether the sinister aspects of Disney, evident as they may be even to fans, can ever meaningfully compete with that. When I was on mushrooms, the seams were particularly visible: the hollow simulacra, the cheery choreography of control. It was eerie and impossible to ignore. But when I came down and stopped being such a “cynic,” joy easily took over.

“[I]n a world that feels increasingly inhospitable to the human psyche, people gravitate specifically toward the kind of saccharine, empty pleasures,” wrote P.E. Moskowitz on their newsletter, Mental Hellth, in which they announced “We Are All Disney Adults.” But what do we do with compromised pleasures that don’t feel empty? In the online defenses I read by adult Disney fans, several referenced the genuine sense of community it gave them. I see this justification all over the place—fans of Disney, fans of beauty and cosmetics, fans of complicated pop stars.

Last week while reading the viral gambling feature by McKay Coppins in The Atlantic, one of his interviewees, a “blackjack obsessive” named Tom Nichols, made a similar defense: “Tom loves Las Vegas—the kitsch, the unsavory history—and seems almost protective of it. Too many people think of casinos as depressing, predatory places, he said, filled with dead-eyed senior citizens sucking on oxygen tanks as they pump their Social Security checks into slot machines. But what he loves about casinos is not so much the gambling per se as the sense of community it generates.”

We could of course ask whether these institutions provide the conditions for quality communities—whether they invite healthy conflict, interdependence, and meaningful friction, whether they challenge us to grow and change and transcend earthly pleasures. We could ask who and what’s exploited in the name of the magic, and who’s profiting. But in a time when, as Moskowitz put it, the world feels “increasingly inhospitable to the human psyche,” we shouldn’t be surprised when these questions feel like too much of a buzzkill to broach.

We find ourselves in a historical moment when pleasure and community shouldn’t be the end of the conversation, and yet they often are. Disney, of course, understands this. It doesn’t need to win an argument against a leftist about its societal value. The ideology that animates its films—the belief that broken systems can be redeemed through good actors, that harmony is always achievable within the existing structure, that dissatisfaction is an attitude problem—has already won the public over. In this sense, calling the “magic” of Disney an escape from reality undersells it. What Disney’s magic actually does is augment reality until the constraints of modern capitalist life feel cozy, hopeful, and familiar. The question, now, is whether we’re capable of stepping outside the entertainment kingdom to imagine anything else.

Here’s last week’s 15 things including five articles worth your time and my favorite household product maybe ever. Rec of the week was a 150+ comment free-for-all. Last week’s Dear Danny episode featuring a friend who keeps crying about the news, a dramatic roommate conundrum, a stinky coworker, a boyfriend who’s (maybe) drinking too much, a vibrator proposition, and parents who became snobbish after a windfall. As always thank you for the Qs!

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Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley

For those of you who never saw my cross-post with Ali Slagle in which she designed 3 recipes for me (apparently it only sent to those who have email notifications turned on for Maybe Baby, which apparently 25,000 of you do not?!), you can read it here. You can also find it here with all my other posts in the future, you just have to scroll to March …

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Welcome back to Dear Danny. Today we’re answering 6 questions: about a friend who keeps crying about the news, a dramatic roommate conundrum, a stinky coworker, a boyfriend who’s (maybe) drinking too much, a vibrator proposition, and parents who became snobbish after a windfall. Thank you for your questions! I know I always say this but we had so mu…

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Today I’ll be answering a question and teeing up a discussion on friendship in your thirties. When I was writing in my twenties, I found myself fielding questions and covering the topic of friendship all the time—it’s very much in the air at that age. But I’ve actually found that managing friendships in my thirties has been just as rich, surprising, and challenging, only with slightly different points of focus, and potentially fewer scripts. The below question I received spoke to me for a few reasons, so I wanted to use it today as topical inspiration:

“I’m in my mid 30s and I’ve never had a best friend—never been someone’s automatic first call, their person. I’ve done a lot of work on myself and I have real friendships now, but I still never feel chosen. I watch my friends prioritize each other and I’m always on the outside looking in. Is this something that can change, or is there a point where you have to accept this is just who you are?

I’ve always had big friend groups that shifted with different seasons of my life, but I’ve never had a person. I had a codependent relationship with an ex where we both desperately wanted that best-friend dynamic, and he became everything to me, which ended badly. Since then I’ve done real work on myself: therapy, dropping the ‘cool girl’ act, finding people who actually match my energy. I have genuinely close friendships now. But I still never feel chosen. I watch my friends make plans without me, and it stings in a way I can’t shake.

Is this something that can change, or do some people just never become someone’s person?”

I’m so sorry you’re feeling this way. While my own hangups take a different shape, I relate to many of the sentiments you shared here! If my years thinking about this topic have taught me anything, it’s that everyone has a friend hangup of some kind.

As someone who’s historically been very best-friend-oriented and only now feels slightly more group-oriented, it’s been fascinating for me to experience the upsides and downsides of both. I can’t tell you how often I felt inadequate for not having a consistent “crew” as a younger person—I assumed people who had one were somehow more lovable or higher functioning than I was. I had a similar insecurity about the fact that I hadn’t done a good job of staying close with old friends, and had a way of “resetting” according to my geographical environment, which is another habit I’ve since broken and see differently now. The overarching lesson has been that different friendship formats are suitable for different personalities at different times and in different circumstances. There isn’t one ideal setup, and more importantly, it’s impossible to reap the benefits from every setup at the same time. There are always trade-offs.

Years ago, a friend told me she envied how many new friends I’d made in my late twenties. To me, her connections felt so old and steeped in tradition, like she had an entire network she’d grown up with, a family. It made me feel flighty in comparison. I told her I’d always admired her deep connections, and she explained that while she did value her old friendships, she also felt a bit stagnated by them, stuck in her childhood self. She admired how I’d reinvented, and thought my social world reflected that back at me. It was a transformative moment for both of us, to recognize that both of our circumstances came with challenges but also had benefitted us in ways we didn’t always appreciate.

In your question, you mention a lot of friendship achievements: You’ve fostered big friend groups throughout your life (I’m impressed by this!), you’ve let them shift with the seasons, you’ve explored the topic in therapy, you’ve committed to being authentic and finding authentic connections, and now have genuinely close friendships that feel “real.” I’m not just hyping you up, these are signs that you are socially high functioning. Many people are trying to develop the skills you’ve both exhibited naturally and also learned to put in practice. Your longing is no less valid for it, but I do think you should feel proud.

A few ideas passed through my head while considering your predicament. The first was triggered by your mention of codependence. Although I felt envious of big friend groups as a younger person, I was obsessed with having a best friend. This was not always healthy. I was after the exact relationship you described: being someone’s automatic first call, their everything, and vice versa. Only later did this occur to me as pathological, an expression of my fear of being left out or behind. I only felt safe if I could claim a best friend and also hold the title, anything less felt risky. Today I find myself much more resistant to this idea: It’s not always healthy or realistic to winnow your energies that way, or expect it of someone else. In the same way it can be harmful to a romantic relationship to expect them to be everything, the same can be true of friendships. When I find myself overly eager to designate someone a best friend, I now recognize that impulse as fear-based.

One of the ways this lesson has more materially manifested for me is learning to let go when I feel left out. Obviously there are limits to this—exclusion can be cruel in some circumstances—but as I get older, I’ve really tried to set down the calculator. I’m not saying I never get a stomach ache upon hearing of friends doing something that I might have expected the invite for (or an extension of this: the dreaded group chat without you!), but I’ve gotten the pains down to a cool five minutes. The pep talk is always the same: Unless I doubt the genuine affection and care of these friends, it’s no big deal. Sometimes plans come together when you’re not around, sometimes they cohere around an experience or quality you don’t share, sometimes people have history together and want to revel in that, or any number of harmless reasons they might hang out without you. This is not an indictment of you. The golden rule applies: Sometimes you want to hang out with certain friends without everyone you mutually love being there, and it’s not meant as a slight.

Before I move on to more actionable ideas, I also want to talk a bit about social roles in friendship. Something I’m regularly making (and remaking) peace with is that I’m more likely to be the planner/inviter than the invitee. It sounds like you may fall in the same camp. This role comes with so many (I’ll say it!) admirable strengths, but carries risks of feeling unwanted and small. When I was younger, and sometimes even now, nothing seemed a surer sign that you were loved and liked than being invited to lots of things. But I’ll never forget when a friend of mine who embodied that quality said that they felt the opposite—my role as the planner, they said, radiated confidence and self-respect. They felt nervous initiating social plans, and this made them feel small. Every social role has their cross to bear.

So far this answer has focused on letting go, but I do want to give space to the possibility that this desire of yours is not pathological or capable of being resolved intellectually. Maybe it feels grounded and instructive regarding how you ought to prioritize right now. If you’ve historically been wired to be part of a friend group versus fostering deeper one-on-one relationships, there might be a few things you could do differently to encourage more depth. Apologies in advance if these are obvious, but my best tips off the top:

1) Spend time together that’s unstructured. Not just coffees or dinners planned three weeks in advance, but ambling around for an afternoon, running errands, keeping each other company while you clean out your closet, etc. Drop-bys are a big part of this IMO—going to something near their apartment? Ask to stop by beforehand to say hi!

2) Tell them your secrets. Being overly private is anyone’s right, but I do think it inhibits the development of super deep connective tissue. Hear and keep their secrets too.

3) Ask for and offer favors. This one can be really tough, but you’ll know you’ve broken through when they lean on you in a pinch. I never forgot my friend’s advice to always help your friends move: Not only is it a kindness, but it’s very bonding to do something difficult and sweaty together (then revel in it afterwards).

4) Communicate informally and spontaneously. FaceTime when you’re bored, or after they’ve had a big night to ask how it went. Text them things that remind you of them. (Obviously don’t continue if these don’t feel natural and aren’t being enthusiastically received.)

5) Be willing to be a mess in front of them (literally, emotionally), and receive them in kind. My friend Gyan1 has a great bit of advice about not cleaning up too much before your friend comes over. I don’t always follow this, but I try to keep the spirit in mind: If you want to be known, let yourself be seen.

6) Make the plans happen that you want to happen. You can wish that someone else had the idea or took the initiative, but there’s no use wasting energy wishing someone else did something you’re just as capable of. So plan the trip or the weekend or the class. Build the friendships you want to have.

With the right person, a lot of this will click. With someone more suited to a different role in your life, it might not. I say that because sometimes the right person just hasn’t come along yet. I’ve been really surprised by how many friends I’ve made in my thirties, when I expected those to primarily take root in my twenties. But those friendships also look different than I might have expected. Whereas some have immediately struck me as a “best friend,” I find myself way less fixated on this designation, and a lot more appreciative of more idiosyncratic styles of friends. “Best” isn’t everything, nor necessarily sustainable. The longer I’m around and the more life shifts I’ve been privy to—in myself and in others—the more open I’ve become to the logic of reasons and seasons. I used to see friendship as this sort of linear project, and now I understand it much more cyclically. There are winters, springs, summers, falls. They all serve their purpose.

I hope that, whatever you might take away from this, you give yourself credit for what you’ve built. As inundated as we all are with cultural models for what a fulfilling social life looks like, I think it’s imperative that we pause and take stock of what we do have—not in comparison to other people or some ideal we’ve seen in movies—but in the vacuum of our personal lives. Maybe you really do want a best friend, or maybe you’ve just been led to believe you were faulty for not having one. Regardless, remember there are no friendship boxes to check. Even if there were, they wouldn’t stay checked for long. Friendship is an evolving organism—impossible to pin down, and all the better for it.

I’d love to hear about your experience with friendship in your thirties. I didn’t fit this into the above, but I think having a kid has brought up a lot regarding friendship for me: the distance I feel from old friends without kids, the distance I feel from new mom friends with whom I don’t share history, but also the joys of going through this transformative experience with both groups. There’s a lot there! I’m really interested in the way our big life choices impact friend dynamics at this age. In your twenties so many friendships feel solid and impermeable, or else flighty and unreliable, only to be totally inverted by life changes. It’s fascinating. If you have thoughts for the questioner or general thoughts on friendship as you age, please share. I’ve opened up the comments to everyone:

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Last Friday’s 15 things, including five pieces on Iran. ROTW was how to get fiber—STUNNED BY THIS RESPONSE BTW. So many fiber warriors in my comments?! I learned so much. Podcast on Wednesday was a Voice Note on a quote I read last week that got stuck in my head and made me think differently about an internal struggle.

I’ll see you on Wednesday for Dear Danny!
Haley

Lots for you this week if you’re in a reading mood.

1. “Men Who Kill Themselves,” by Django Ellenhorn for The Metropolitan Review. Heavy content warning on this one, as you’ll find at the top of the essay (written in second-person but clearly autobiographical). It’s been years since I had a reading experience like this. Incredibly gripping and moving (a…

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Coming to your ears today with a Voice Note on a line from this piece by Haley Mlotek that I can’t stop thinking about (no spoilers on which). A little meditation on self-policing and self-punishment, and when it’s appropriate to tweak and personalize so-called universal scripts.

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Thanks for listening,
Haley

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Today’s newsletter is based on the premise that something I’ve long desired might also be something you’ve long desired, which is an organized spreadsheet of all the literary fiction Maybe Baby readers have passionately recommended to me over the last four years. I’ve always wanted to document and categorize these books, pulling out the ones I’d most like to read, so I finally did! And today I’m sharing the results.

Last Friday, when I wrote that I finished Lily King’s Heart the Lover in less than 24 hours, I asked readers to share books they’d finished similarly quickly, or at least interrupted their lives to finish. More than 250 people commented. Four years ago, I asked for books that were both literary and page-turners, which garnered over 200 comments. And a while after that, I asked for the last book you couldn’t put down, and received about the same. These comment sections demanded to be combined and collated. My book-related comment sections always pop off (I’ve also done best children’s books, best audiobooks, best sci-fi books, best non-fiction books, which together accumulated over 1,000 recs), and I plan to organize those one day, too. But today I’m focusing on my favorite genre: literary fiction, or genre fiction that reasonably connects with that category.

TIP: If you ever want to find a particular Rec of the Week comment section, you can head to the 15 Things section of my archive and scroll through the posts—the Rec of the Week is listed as the subtitle, so you can scan them all without clicking in until you find the one you’re looking for. (To go even faster, I often have luck Googling “Haley Nahman 15 things [insert rec topic].”)

Before we get into my personal edit, here is a spreadsheet of all 269 books that were recommended to me, including some notable reader commentary. There has been some light curation here. I didn’t include books that felt more appropriate for another data dump (e.g. non-fiction, sci-fi), and may have skipped some that were included in a long list that lacked explanation, as I find those less convincing. I also omitted a few that I’d read and didn’t find worthy (sorry). On that note, I cannot personally endorse all the books on this list! I’ve only read 18% of them. But I do believe (brag) my subscribers have good taste.

By the way, I don’t think “quickly” is necessarily the best way to read a book. Many books I’ve read slowly are very important to me. But my initial love for reading is so intertwined with the sensation of staying up late, with my mom flipping the lights on in the living room to find me with a book an inch from my nose, that I often find myself longing for that reading experience as an adult. Sometimes I just want to recapture the magic.

269 literary page-turners

Moving on to my breakouts: Below are the 30 books which, after reading through nearly a thousand comments, I would now urgently like to read. I’ve given them some flair and also broken them into tiers. Tier 1 is basically: I need to buy these books and read them ASAP, with Tier 2 and 3 denoting slightly softer versions of that sentiment. Some of these were only shared by a couple people, but their commentary sold me. If I had to pick three, I’d say I’m most eager to read God of the Woods, Small Things Like These, and (based on title alone) Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

👍Number of times it was recommended (actual comments, not “likes”)
📣Extra convincing endorsements
👀Book I was already curious about

Tier 1 (alphabetized)

The Wedding People by Alison Espach👍👍👍👍👍👍👍📣
Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes👍👍👍📣
On the Calculation of Volume (a series, but this is Part 1) by Solvej Balle👍👍👍👍📣👀
A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst👍👍👍👍👍📣
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier👍👍📣
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore👍👍👍👍👍👍📣
Euphoria by Lily King👍👍👍👍👍👍📣👀
Luster by Raven Leilani👍👍👍👍📣
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan👍👍👍👍👍👍👍📣
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata👍👍👍👍📣
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk👍👍👍👍📣

Tier 2

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue👍👍👍👍📣
Open Throat by Henry Hoke👍👍📣
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas 👍👍👍👍👍
An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector👍👀
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami👍👍👀
Popisho by Leone Ross👍📣
Flesh by David Szalay👍📣
How to Be Both by Ali Smith👍👍👀
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout👍👍👍📣
Blindness by José Saramago👍📣

Tier 3

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt👍👍📣
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan👍👍👍👍👀
Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash👍👍📣
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli👍📣
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw👍📣
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead👍👍📣
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt👍📣
There There by Tommy Orange👍👍👀
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden👍👍👍👍📣

And finally, here are 49 books people recommended that I had already read, including Lonesome Dove, which I’m currently reading and can’t yet endorse. Other than that one, I sincerely enjoyed these books—they all fell in the category of “looking forward to reading tonight,” but I’ve highlighted a few for being memorably addictive, an all-time fave of mine, or special to me for some other reason (particularly thought-provoking or lovely prose, etc).

⭐️memorably addictive
❤️ all-time fave
🌸falls short of all-time fave but special to me nonetheless

(alphabetized)
The Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Push by Ashley Audrain⭐️
Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker🌸
Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Milkfed by Melissa Broder
Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
The Idiot by Elif Batuman🌸
Piranesi by Susannah Clarke⭐️
The Guest by Emma Cline
Heartburn by Nora Ephron
Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides
The Neapolitan Novels (series) by Elena Ferrante🌸
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen🌸
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill🌸
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi🌸
Lungfish by Meghan Gillis
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman⭐️❤️
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro⭐️
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro⭐️❤️
All Fours by Miranda July🌸
Heart the Lover by Lily King⭐️
Writers & Lovers by Lily King⭐️
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura🌸
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee⭐️
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood🌸
The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
Severance by Ling Ma
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai⭐️
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason⭐️
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (current)
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid⭐️
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney🌸
Normal People by Sally Rooney⭐️❤️
The Door by Magda Szabo⭐️❤️🌸❤️🌸❤️🌸 (I loved this book)
The Secret History by Donna Tartt🌸
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt❤️
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin⭐️

For the handful of you that have complained over the years that I don’t use Goodreads—shout out to my sister specifically—this will have to do. I hope you find this as useful as I did! If you’d like to make a strong (incontrovertible…) case for a book that belongs in my Tier 1, I won’t stop you.

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^literally

In case you missed it, here’s last Friday’s 15 things and last Wednesday’s reader’s digest on Iran. The rec of the week was bars of soap and how to hold them—some of your recs blew my mind.

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Hope you have a nice Sunday!
Haley

Currently eating string cheese like a candy bar. Hits different than stringing.

1. “Mogadishu, Baghdad, Troy; or, Heroes Without War,” by Mark Greif for N+1. This was written in 2004, and it was hard to get through at times, but it gave me so many new ideas to consider about modern warfare (which of course have only gotten worse since this was written).…

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If your social feeds are anything like mine, they’ve been dominated by news and opinions on Iran this week. Today I’m deviating from my typical output to share a few perspectives I’ve found helpful in parsing reality from propaganda. Hawkish people love to claim that U.S. intervention in the Middle East is “incredibly complicated,” but I’ve come to …

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