Baking Cookies During the State Executions:
The abject humiliation of being a millennial in America

To keep myself from throwing up after watching the latest cell phone video of the latest execution of an American citizen by a masked ICE agent in Minneapolis, I ask my five year old to help me “bake” chocolate chip cookies.

I say “bake” because we live in a rent-stabilized apartment in Queens, which means we have one 12” x 12” countertop in a kitchen that is dwarfed by the café car on an Amtrak train. So, we just break apart the pre-scored squares of this block of Nestle pre-made cookie dough and plop them onto a blackened cookie sheet.

I set the oven to 350° and the timer for 9 minutes.

That’s about four times as long as the interaction between ICE and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, before they shot him point blank from behind.

Renee Good, a mother of three, was also 37 years old when an ICE agent executed her two weeks ago.

I’m 38.

I cannot begin to put into words the abject humiliation of being a millennial in this country.

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From the moment we could be trusted to stay home alone, history has refused to leave us alone. We’ve survived:

• Columbine and the dawning realization that mass violence would become a defining feature of American life

• the contested 2000 election and the unraveling of trust in democratic norms

• 9/11 and the launch of endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

• the creation of the modern surveillance state

• Hurricane Katrina and the televised abandonment of Black Americans

• the Great Recession

• preschoolers murdered at Sandy Hook and the confirmation that even children would not move the political needle

• the first Trump presidency and the normalization of authoritarian rhetoric

• the rise of social media and the mental health collapse that followed

• the Covid pandemic and mass death alongside institutional failure

• J6 and the subsequent pardoning of all J6ers

• the rollback of Roe v. Wade

• the accelerating climate crisis

• a US-funded genocide live-streamed in 4K

• the second Trump presidency

• and now, the rise of ICE as a masked, militarized arm of the state, flush with billions in funding and granted extraordinary power to police, detain, and kill with minimal oversight
  
  

And that’s before we mention the money. Or lack thereof.

Millennials are the first downwardly mobile generation in American history.

We did everything we were told to do. Go to college. Take out predatory loans. Take on unpaid internships. Hustle. Grind. And even after checking all the boxes, we are living through an affordability crisis while we watch the largest upward transfer of wealth in history (Notice a trend? So many “historic firsts,” and none of them are cute).

The natural consequence of these precedented “unprecedented times” on our pretty young lives?

We delay getting married. We put off having children, or we decide to have fewer children. I am a successful, accomplished woman with an advanced degree and my husband and I lucky to make it in the black raising one child with no hired help.

Millenials have powered through an unhinged marathon of sideshow horrors, but because we fail at home ownership or spawning 2.5 children, we are shamed for disrupting traditional values, for being selfish, for not “figuring it out.”

We’re branded “woke radical leftists” for mentioning policies that Christ himself would have sponsored.

We are humiliated at every turn.

But in spite of that humiliation, or perhaps because of it, we fear no monsters.

We are the generation that insists on calling things what they are. War crimes. Authoritarianism. Genocide. Fascism.

We are the ones who refuse to pretend that endless growth on a burning planet is a serious plan. We are the ones who organize mutual aid when institutions fail, who show up in the streets when the law lags morality, who understand that neutrality always benefits the powerful.

We are the first generation to grow less conservative with age. Maybe because we learned early that there’s no hate like Christian “love,” that obedience is never rewarded, and that rights can be revoked quicker than they are granted.

We are not inherently virtuous beings. We were raised and nurtured by our dramatic foils, the Boomers, after all. I think the reason we, in contrast, stand for everything is because the ground beneath us has withstood nothing. Precarity sharpens ethics. Excess erodes them.

But, I digress.

My phone screen says my timer went off two minutes ago, but the buzzer didn’t sound.

I burned the cookies.

Scorched.

No matter.

Today is just another day of humiliation, and tomorrow there will be more.

And us millennials will keep showing up, speaking out, and holding on anyway.

Like we always have.

Survival is our best and only form of revenge.

And it’s the thing that annoys the murderous bastards the most.

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🔥 Afterburn

Here is a long list of reputable places to donate, organize, and support the brave people on the ground in Minneapolis who are doing the hardest work right now.

Stay safe. Stay mad. Stay hopeful.

The Magical Joy of Not Giving a Sh!t: A Guide to Happier Holidays

A holiday essay about how letting go of expectations and even (gasp) “tradition” might be the most festive thing you can do.

Every year around this time, the guilt industrial complex revs up like a leaf blower outside my window. The holiday season is coming. Have I sourced a heritage turkey? Have I sufficiently appeased the Capitalism gods with my gift purchases? Have I secured the tree that suggests I am thriving emotionally, financially, and spiritually?

This year, as in years past, I am opting out.

I am not buying the guilt. I am a former Catholic. I have already stockpiled a lifetime supply.

Part of my perspective comes from how I grew up. My parents poured so much effort and sacrifice into giving my brother and me magical holidays. They pulled off the kind of Christmas mornings that feel cinematic. My mom stayed up too late wrapping gifts, my dad baked his ass off (a true feminist icon), they always bought us what we wanted, and created traditions that still glow in my memory. Those early holidays are some of the warmest moments of my childhood.

But then the spell would break. We would get in the car and head off to a lengthy meal with relatives that we had all but disowned except for holidays and funerals. The vibe? Succession with eggnog.

Maybe that whiplash is what made my twenties feel so liberating. I spent those years as a cheerful nomad, happy to chase work or adventure wherever it took me. It was rare that I made it home for the holidays. One year, I had pizza in Rome on Thanksgiving. I’ve celebrated Christmas in student housing in London and in a casino in Wendover, Nevada – entirely alone but never lonely. My holidays were improvised and imperfect. They were also joyful in ways I did not appreciate until much later.

So now that I am older, more anchored, and blessed with a child who loves twinkle lights with the intensity of a cat, you would think I would be invested in reclaiming those big, traditional holidays. But no. The opposite has happened. The older I get, the more allergic I become to the American performance of festivity.

Does that make me a grinch? Absolutely not. I am festive. I want my life scented like cinnamon and Doulgas fir. I want carolers on every block. I want a level of coziness that borders on Scandinavian propaganda. But I refuse to contort myself to meet expectations that do not serve me or my family. And the wild part is that not caring has made me enjoy the season more.

Let us start with Thanksgiving. A “holiday” that, let us be honest, is built on a story we now know is wildly sanitized and deeply harmful. There is nothing sacred about a colonial fever dream. And for years, Thanksgiving meant performing emotional gymnastics around people I would not willingly spend three minutes behind in a Walgreens line. It meant tiptoeing around old wounds. It begged you to be sure nobody saw your eyes rolling around faster than the beaters whipping the potatoes.

Which brings me to the cooking. The thought of making a full Thanksgiving dinner in my rent-stabilized apartment in Queens, with a kitchen the size of a Kohl’s dressing room, is a joke that I refuse to entertain. I can barely fit a cutting board on the counter, let alone baste an entire turkey. Nothing about this setup says hospitality. It says, please microwave your expectations.

So instead, I opt for a reservation. A real table. Real napkins. A meal that arrives hot without me having to time six burners on a four-top stove. There is no cleanup. No fridge stuffed with leftovers that trigger every impulse to binge. No emotional hangover. Just a nice scene that I show up to, tip generously, and leave.

Here is the plot twist. Loosening my grip on holiday expectations is exactly what made me bold enough to take my family to France for Christmas last year. Many were shocked at the idea. Away from home? Away from family? Friends, it turned out to be the most magical Christmas I have experienced in thirty eight years of being alive.

We walked through light drenched streets. We ate pastries that tasted like miracles. I bought Thora’s three (3!) gifts from a Gilbert Joseph bookstore we passed. We celebrated without the frantic pressure to create memories. We simply lived them. I realized how much of the holiday misery we endure is rooted in tradition for tradition’s sake. The assumption that if you do not replicate the past, you are somehow failing the present.

But here is what I keep learning. Tradition should be chosen, not inherited by force. I do not spend a single second worrying that my daughter will grow up with holiday trauma because I do not recreate the rituals of my childhood. I know exactly what I am giving her. I am teaching her that joy does not require martyrdom. I am showing her that a holiday is not a test of womanhood or motherhood. It is not a performance of competence. It is not an audition for family approval.

If anything, my refusal to care about the expectations is what makes room for the joy. When we strip away the pressure, the season becomes what it was supposed to be in the first place. A little light in the dark. A reason to gather. A moment to breathe. A chance to feel a flash of wonder before the year ends and life begins again.

Some people love the spectacle of it all. I support them with my whole chest. Hang the garland. Deep fry the turkey. Knock yourself out! I’m glad my parents always did for me.

But if the spectacle feels like an obligation instead of a celebration, then it is not a holiday. It is unpaid labor wrapped in tinsel.

The real magic comes when you stop giving a shit about what the holidays should look like. That is when you finally see what they can be. A dinner out with no dishes. A quiet morning. Waking up in Paris. A season freed from performance. A season lived on purpose.

If I had my way, we’d never spend a Christmas at home. We’d pick a new destination each year, pack a bag, and enjoy the holidays together in a new place each time. No other presents. No expectations. No commitments. No “musts” of any kind at all.

That is the joy I want. This is the magic I am gifting my child: the holiday tradition of no pressure.

So if you’re feeling “meh” about it all, I hope you have yourself a merry little season of no-thanks.

Ho ho no.

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🔥 Afterburn

What’s one holiday obligation you dread? What source of joy will you replace it with this year?

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Choose Your Cunning Linguist: Rosalía vs. JD Vance
A treatise on tongues and power

What do a Catalan pop star and our Vice President have in common? Absolutely nothing, except that both made the news this week for talking about language in starkly different ways. This is a love letter to the polyglots and polyglot-curious out there, and a warning about the politics of linguaphobia.

Friends, it was a banner week for linguaphiles with a super-niche interest in how people engage with multilingualism (points at me).

In one corner: Rosalía, radiant in an interview about her new album, describing how she’s sung in thirteen languages and why learning others’ tongues “opens your mind.”

I think if I made this album it’s because of the love and curiosity, wanting to learn other languages, wanting to understand better the other, to understanding the other better. Maybe you can understand yourself better, and you can love, learn how to love better.

In the other: JD Vance, our Vice President and self-styled champion of the forgotten American, gave an interview in which he slickly declares that it’s “reasonable” and “acceptable” for Americans to not to want to live near people who don’t speak the same language as them.

“[Neighbors (of immigrants who move in) will say] ‘Well, wait a second. What is going on here? I don’t know these people. They don’t speak the same language that I do’… It is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with.’

Two worldviews, gone viral in 4K, just hours apart.

So, choose your fighter: are you a Rosalía or a JD Vance?

In this corner, Rosalía treats language like clay begging to be played with. She molds it, melts it, remixes it. Catalan quickly slips into Andalusian melisma; she fuses flamenco’s wail with Dominican dembow; and with her newest album Lux, she writes and performs in Sicilian, Latin, Portuguese, and ten other languages. She moves between continents and worlds. The only bars are on the sheet music.

Contrast that with Vance’s vision: a world where the sound of a neighbor’s voice in Urdu or Spanish is not an invitation, but an intrusion. “If you don’t speak my language,” his logic between the lines says, “you threaten my sense of safety.” It’s less about comprehension than control. It’s not a stretch to say his comments promote segregation. In 2025.

Rosalía’s multilingualism expands the self; Vance’s monolingualism protects it. One is porous; the other is armored.

Now, there’s a particular irony in hearing this take from a man who built a career (and a bank account) on translation. Hillbilly Elegy was sold as a bridge between Appalachia and the Ivy League, and Vance as the interpreter of a misunderstood America for the coastal elite. But his was translation as condescension, turning real struggle into a story that debases and blames the people it claims to explain.

Rosalía’s translation, by contrast, refuses to make difference displeasurable. Where Vance reduces essence to stereotype, she expands it into symphony. He simplifies culture for comfort; she multiplies it for connection. Her songs don’t render other voices palatable to the mainstream; they demand the mainstream learn to listen differently. In her hands, translation isn’t about making the unfamiliar digestable, but about letting the unfamiliar take up space and change you.

She doesn’t demand a safe space of hegemony around her. She invites the whole damn orchestra and choir into her living room. Literally.

How many from Vance’s intended audience sought to further understand the real Appalachia after reading Hillbilly Elegy? And how many listeners of Rosalía’s new single Berghain felt compelled afterward to give classical music a first (or another) try? The answers to each tell you all you need to know.

Before you roll your eyes and call this post overreaching, the poets and the scientists agree: language doesn’t just describe the world, it actually builds it. Which is why we need to pay attention.

It’s a well-established linguistic theory that the languages we speak shape how we think.

In Turkish, every verb demands an evidential; you must specify how you know what you know. In Korean, you adjust verbs depending on hierarchy. In Spanish, we (annoyingly) have two verbs for “to be”: ser expresses essence and estar expresses condition, a constant philosophical reminder that identity hinges on both who we are and where we find ourselves in the moment. In English, we emphasize subjects over actions: I broke the vase. In Japanese, the subject often disappears: the vase broke.

Each language encodes a different moral calculus. Some demand humility or accountability, while others require full-throated confession of uncertainty or doubt (I’m looking at you, Spanish subjunctive, you tricky bastard!).

So when Vance dismisses the value of other languages, he’s not just protecting a preference for English. He’s flattening the world’s many ways of knowing into a single epistemology – one that centers “me,” “mine,” and “my people.” It’s a philosophy of linguistic isolationism masquerading as common sense, and, in this case, a matter of national security.

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And if you’re a fan of irony, you won’t have missed a truth Vance refuses to grasp: English itself is an impure mutt. His mother tongue is a rascally, bastard child that loves to dress up in hand-me-downs from others.

The word language comes from Latin; piano from Italian; algebra from Arabic. Every sentence you speak in English is an admission that the language has never lived in isolation. To defend it as pure is to misunderstand what it even is.

Rosalía’s art praises this patchwork identity. JD Vance’s rhetoric fears it. One builds bridges; the other builds fences.

And beneath the cultural contrast is something even more telling: a clash between curiosity and fear.

Curiosity to hear, to mispronounce, to try again.

Fear that to understand another people is to risk harming your own.

If you’ve ever tried to speak another language, you know the vulnerability it demands. You sound like a child. You lose the armor of eloquence. You must gesture, point, laugh at yourself. And yes, you must ask for help. It’s humbling. Which is why nationalism so often clings to monolingualism. As I’ve written before, fascism has always feared language. Power cannot survive humility, and multilingualism demands it.

To insist on one language is to insist on one truth. To speak several is to live in translation; to accept that meaning is subjective and that there is always more than one way to see the world.

Rosalía understands this instinctively. You don’t possess a language, you participate in one. Every tongue you learn rearranges who you are, not because you lose something, but because you gain another way of being, another rhythm of thought, another home inside yourself.

So when Rosalía sings in Ukrainian or French or Latin, she isn’t toggling between identities; she’s braiding them. Each language becomes a thread in a larger weave of belonging that refuses to stop at borders. She is concerned with permeability, not purity.

JD Vance, meanwhile, imagines a neighborhood where everyone sounds the same. A place without mispronunciations or discomfort or negotiation. Harmony, here, paradoxically means everyone is singing the same damn note.

In the end, maybe this is the simplest test of our politics:

Do you want to live in a world that sounds like a chorus, or like a monotone drone?

Rosalía’s world is messy, challenging, alive.
Vance’s is intelligible, safe, and mind-numbingly boring.

I don’t know about you, but give me the noise.
Give me the errors.
Give me the symphony.
Or, get me the fuck out of here.

🔥 Afterburn

If you haven’t yet read my piece Fascism has always feared language, click below to continue the conversation:

And if you haven’t yet heard Rosalía’s Berghain, please, allow me to introduce you:

No, Taylor Swift is not your bestie.
Yes, this is about capitalism.

A billionaire pop star sells the same vinyl in seventeen pastel shades, and women everywhere can’t wait to give her more of their hard-earned money. Let’s talk about capitalism, the cultural and creative industries, and wtf is going on here.

I have a master’s degree in Cultural and Creative Industries from King’s College London (earned with distinction, thank you very much), which is to say, I have a very special kind of trauma that has permanently left me unable to consume pop culture without analyzing how art becomes capital, how audiences become labor, and how pleasure disguises power.

So when I watch Swift’s endless quest to extract the maximum amount of money from her fans (deluxe editions, seventeen versions of the same album just in different colors, hair brushes?!) I see a case study ripe for the unpacking.

And before the Swifties start typing: I’m not critiquing her artistic talent or your taste in music (that’s a whole other post). Nor do I begrudge her the success or the strategy she has masterminded. I simply refuse to glorify it. It’s precisely because of my time spent in the tortured critical theory department that I’ve long taken issue with how expertly she’s turned fandom into a system of capital flow. We don’t have to cancel her for it, but we should at least be honest about what’s happening.

So, wtf is really going on here?

In the Spotify era, artists earn fractions of a cent per play. Some would argue that’s a huge improvement from the revenue my generation generated for artists through Napster and LimeWire and the family’s Dell desktop (RIP). The real money for music artists and labels is in touring, licensing, and merchandise. Commodities.

In that sense, Swift isn’t doing anything unusual; she’s simply playing the only game left. What’s new is how perfectly she’s fused capitalism with communion. Her fandom is simultaneously the audience and a labor force of unpaid marketers, data miners, and evangelists. They aren’t just the audience captivated by the machine, they’re funding the machine and working for it.

To help break down how, why, and why we should care that fandom has become an engine for wealth transfer from working women to a billionaire pop star, let’s consult three old, dead German men, the real showgirls of their day, who I spent entirely too many midnights with in grad school:

Marx, the 19th-century economist who has ruined Thanksgiving dinners for generations, warned that under capitalism, even our emotions get put to work. He called it commodity fetishism: the process by which we mistake economic relationships for emotional ones, investing things with the power and meaning that really belong to people.

Taylor doesn’t just sell music; she sells belonging. Each album cycle becomes a ritual of devotion where fans literally buy their way into community. Marx would see this as alienation. Put simply, labor is disguised as love.

If Marx were here, he might point out that the true innovation isn’t the art, it’s the emotional supply chain. Fans are the raw material, their feelings extracted and recirculated as capital. Capitalism, as he’d remind us, always finds a way to monetize its critiques.

Adorno, the philosopher who believed pop music was the opiate of the masses, argued that the “culture industry” feeds us sameness while pretending it’s originality. He’d look at Swift’s eras, clues, and rebrands and call them the illusion of choice.

To Adorno, the Swiftie hunt for Easter eggs is merely obedience disguised as play. Every decoding, every purchase, every repost keeps the machine running. He’d recognize her fans’ devotion for what it is: a perfectly efficient loop of desire, consumption, and distraction.

Adorno would have no patience for the argument that it’s fun (I can confirm Adorno doesn’t do fun). That’s the point of ideology: to make domination feel delightful. The Eras Tour isn’t freedom, it’s choreography. Every scream, every bracelet, every standing ovation is both real emotion and real profit, perfectly synchronized.

Benjamin, the melancholic poet of the group, would be both impressed and horrified.

He believed that art lost its aura (its one-of-a-kind presence) once it could be endlessly reproduced. Taylor, he’d admit, is doing something uncanny: she’s rebuilt the aura through mass production. Her fans create sacredness and meaning out of the very duplication.

He might marvel at the miracle of that reversal: how millions of identical vinyls can still feel personal, even transcendent. But he’d also note that the aura has been reanimated as spectacle—a ghost of authenticity kept alive by algorithms.

Mein Gott. The worship is real, but the altar is made of merch.

And this is where I start to worry.

Once capitalism learns to mimic authenticity, critique becomes impossible.

And the system Taylor has crafted and now rules can absorb anything, especially criticism, without breaking.

As she said herself last week in response to tepid critical reviews: “The rule of show business is if it’s the first week of my album release and you are saying either my name or my album title, you’re helping.”

Maybe I’m just nostalgic for Anti-Capitalist Rock. I remember when musicians still fought the system instead of championed it. Tom Petty versus MCA to lower album prices. Pearl Jam versus Ticketmaster to lower ticket costs. Nirvana versus anything wearing a tie. Even U2’s disastrous 2014 deal with Apple — when the company forced their album onto every iPhone — became a massive PR crisis when the public pushed back en masse.

In my day, we used to call artists “sellouts” for cashing in on us, and it was the biggest kiss of death your fans could brandish you with. Now, Swifties are begging to swipe their credit cards for “variants” (they’ve even made buying dupe material sound sexy) to boost Taylor’s sales numbers.

The exploitation is smoother, self-aware, aestheticized, and demanded by the masses.

Now, I’ll allow the Devil’s advocate the floor (but she’s wrong).

Yes, Taylor is a woman in a man’s world. And for generations, male artists have been rewarded for the same ruthless ambition now being used to critique her. But equality shouldn’t mean achieving parity in exploitation. We don’t need women to pillage in all the ways men have to prove we belong.

And yes, her fans are mostly women – many with their first real disposable income (the kind their grandmothers could only dream of), finally able to spend freely on what brings them joy. That autonomy is worth celebrating. But is this what we fought for? To express freedom through iterative consumption? To measure devotion in ticket tiers and limited editions?

There’s a difference between true empowerment and just being able to buy your own way into the machine. Knowing that difference is part of the work to be done.

So, my dear Swifties, please know this:

I’ve written before in defense of guilty pleasures, and how they keep us alive in a burning world. And, I’ll fight for your right to keep yours.

But we should at least recognize when our guilty pleasure is pouring the gasoline.

You can dance along, and still interrogate the soundtrack.

You can hum the song, and still see the spell.

You can love pop, and still ask who profits from our devotion.

🔥 Afterburn

What’s your favorite artist vs. capitalism story?

Here’s mine. It’s worth the 1:42 listen.

Microdosing Carl Sagan:
The Radical Power of Insignificance in a Me-Me-Me World

The universe is telling us what many main characters refuse to hear: we are breathtakingly insignificant.

Being small might be the most radical, life-saving belief we can pass on to our children.

Every once in a while, I microdose Carl Sagan. A paragraph from Cosmos, a clip of his voice describing the pale blue dot, a reminder of the speck we all live on. Instantly, I feel smaller.

And that’s the point.

For anyone who didn’t grow up with him on PBS, Carl Sagan was an astronomer, writer, and communicator who made the universe feel both vast and intimate. He helped decode the origins of planets and the chemistry of life, but his real gift was moral imagination. He treated science as a way to live with humility and responsibility. From Cosmos to Contact, his work translated the cold math of space into a warm ethic of care.

Believing you are insignificant is an act of rebellion in 2025. It pushes back against the me-first violence of this moment. While leaders across the planet shout “America First” or sell chosenness as justification for the darkest of horrors, Sagan offers a different medicine: remember how small you are, and act accordingly.

We live in a culture that worships significance. Hustle metrics, follower counts, securing the bag. Everyone is pushed to matter more than the neighbor, to win the algorithm, to plant flags in places that aren’t theirs. The refusal to accept smallness grows into conquest and, to be frank, pitiful burnout.

Some people would just rather be special than happy, even though they’ll ultimately end up exactly where we all do — under the planet’s topsoil.

Sagan reminds us that we are not the protagonists of the universe. We are temporary. We are stardust with an expiration date. That reality is not nihilism. It is awe.

When I remember that my lifespan is a geological blink and my accomplishments microscopic on a cosmic scale, the only honest response is wonder — wonder at being here at all, at sharing this tiny world with billions of other brief lives who are just as real and just as fragile as I am.

Decades ago, as Voyager 1 was leaving our neighborhood of the solar system, Sagan urged NASA to turn the camera around. The image showed Earth as a pinprick suspended in darkness. He explained that on that tiny mote rests every person, every joy and sorrow, every language and idea, every community that has ever existed. In that frame, all our borders and battles dissolve. The picture makes a simple case: there is no elsewhere to flee to and no one else to conquer without destroying ourselves

On the small blue dot, the only sane ethic is care.

Feed the hungry. Welcome the stranger. Care for the widow and the orphan. None of this requires a divine green light for vengeance or annexation. Religious fanaticism depends on a lie of being special; that one nation, one sect, or one ideology matters more than everyone else. A cosmic perspective shreds that lie. If we are all specks, then we are all equally insignificant.

Insignificance is democracy in its purest form. It says you do not sit above me, and I do not sit above you. We are co-tenants of the same tiny home.

But somewhere along the way, we confused greatness with goodness. We built an economy and a moral code around being exceptional. We are told to stand out, to outperform, to always be closing. Hustle harder. Be special. Win or disappear.

It’s no wonder we treat smallness like failure. The idea that you might just be — ordinary, content, enough — feels almost subversive. But Sagan’s lens makes clear how absurd that is. The universe does not care about your résumé or your passive income. It doesn’t rank us by wealth or accolades. In the cosmic view, all our striving collapses into the same quiet truth: we are tiny, temporary, and breathtakingly equal.

The “America First” worldview is just a nationalized version of that personal delusion. Me first at scale. It’s what happens when the obsession with being special metastasizes from individuals to entire countries. We start to believe that significance is something we can hoard.

When you finally accept how small you are, something liberating happens. The race stops mattering. The noise quiets. What’s left is awe, connection, and the humbling recognition that our shared survival depends less on being special and more on being humane.

Refusing smallness has consequences. A heating planet. Democracies buckling under the weight of ego. A genocide that slaughters thousands of children with impunity. Systems built to fail the people they claim to protect. The universe will keep going with or without us. Our power is borrowed. Our task is stewardship.

Our kids do not need policies that promise dominance. They do not need any theology that trains them to see themselves as superior or above reproach. They need a practice of awe. A daily reminder that being small is not the same as being helpless. Small means connected. Small means accountable.

When I think about what will matter to my daughter, I do not picture a country shouting louder about greatness. I picture her under a night sky, realizing she is made of the same stuff as the stars. That her worth is not measured by standing above someone else, but by belonging to everything. That the point is not to conquer the world, but to care for this fragile dot we’ve been loaned.

A microdose of Carl Sagan would do more for the next generation than any manifesto built on exceptionalism ever will. Awe teaches what propaganda cannot: we share a destiny, and it’s small enough to fit in the palm of a spacecraft camera.

The next time your ego convinces you that you are at the center of everything, pause. Picture that tiny Earth suspended in the dark. And take a seat.

You are not the main character.

Insignificance is not despair. It is the gateway to wonder, humility, and care. It frees us from the violent urge to dominate. It hands us a clearer job description: protect each other, protect this little world, and leave it a little less cruel than we found it.

The medicine we need is not more power. It is more perspective. And the therapeutic dose is smaller than you think

🔥 Afterburn

It may come as no surprise then that we read from Cosmos at our wedding.

I’m leaving you with those words from the master himself, and I hope you’ll seek out more of his writing or speeches. A dose now and then will do you good.

“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us - there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. … The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. … In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. Those explorations required skepticism and imagination both. Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.”

Carl Sagan

Monsieur 100,000 Volts and Me:
In Defense of Guilty Pleasures in a Burning World

I may be the world’s #1 Gilbert Bécaud listener (Spotify seems to think so). I can’t fully explain why a mid-century French balladeer has become my refuge, but maybe that’s the point. This piece is about guilty pleasures, the ones that won’t make sense to anyone else, and don’t need to.

According to my Spotify Wrapped, I am in the top 0.005% of listeners of Gilbert Bécaud. Which means I may very well be the #1 human being on this planet listening to him. Honestly, I’d be shocked if I’m not.

It’s not exactly a competition anyone else is trying to win.

Most people I know on this side of the Atlantic have never even heard of Bécaud. And yet here I am, logging hours that must look unhinged to the Spotify algorithm. It would be easy to blame this obsession on autism (that’s actually probably it, but I have another couple hundred words to write).

Whatever the reason, I keep going back to him.

I don’t even remember how I found him. It must have been an accident, a gift from the algorithm. And, I'm not even remotely fluent in French, despite an embarrassing number of years of trying. Still, I’m hooked. When the world outside feels unlivable, burning, buzzing, collapsing, as it does now, I retreat into his music.

Maybe it’s the layered warmth of the arrangements: the swelling strings, the virtuosic piano, the narrative drama that’s completely missing from today’s pop. Maybe it’s his unabashed love of love, even when love knocks you sideways. Or maybe it’s that by listening in French, I’m far enough away from my own troubles to breathe again. Suddenly I’m 19 and 25, 27 and 30… every version of myself who once wandered Paris, lit up with the electric belief that anything could happen.

And maybe that’s part of it, too: Bécaud lived through hell and earned a happy ending. As a teenager, he left school early and joined the French Resistance. He came out of that darkness and went on to build a life in song, first writing for others, like Edith Piaf, and then for himself. Over his career he wrote nearly 500 songs and recorded them in over five languages. He became known as “Monsieur 100,000 Volts” for the sheer electricity of his performances, and he radiated a relentless sense of joie de vivre, even when the vivre was clearly hard-won.

That’s what I hear in him, at least, and what I chase in my own small ways. One day, I’ll write the definitive Gilbert Bécaud musical, uproot my family, and move us all to Paris. (A girl can manifest.) Until then, I get my fix where I can. We spent last Christmas in Paris, and while there I slipped away on a little scavenger hunt, crisscrossing the 6th to buy up whatever Bécaud vinyls I could find across adorable little shops and down streets I’d never have wandered otherwise.

That’s the other thing Bécaud teaches: joy is not frivolous. Unbridled joy, the kind that makes no sense, that bursts in without permission, is survival.

We’re taught to be measured, to temper our delight, to justify it with productivity or self-improvement. But joy that’s unreasonable, extravagant, even embarrassing? That’s the joy that restores you, and the joy worth protecting.

And guilty pleasures are how we practice that. They aren’t rational. They don’t require a business case. They’re ours precisely because they resist justification. In a world where everything has to be optimized, monetized, explained to death, guilty pleasures are a rare sanctuary.

Mine happens to be a French balladeer with a penchant for strings and cigarette smoke. Yours might be reality TV, or vintage romance novels, or an actor who begs a “hear me out…” defense when you mention their name in conversation.

Whatever it is, hold on to it.

Our guilty pleasures are lifelines in dark seas. They remind us there’s still sweetness, still distance, still a place to go when the headlines scorch. They remind us of what could be ahead, even when today feels unbearable.

There’s a certain satisfying feeling of rebellion in saying, “I don’t need a reason to love Gilbert Bécaud.”

And you don’t need a reason to love your thing either.

The joy is that it’s yours. Unreasonable. Unsharable. Perfect.

Or as Monsieur 100,000 Volts himself might remind us: l’important, c’est la rose.

🔥 Afterburn

Bécaud wont’ be everyone’s thing. But if you’re looking to feel a little je ne sais quoi while the horrors persist, may I suggest the following?

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Fascism has always feared language:
In Trump’s America, Spanish is on trial. History (and common sense) says pay attention.

This week’s post is about a Supreme Court decision that, unbelievably, makes speaking Spanish enough to raise “reasonable suspicion” of wrongdoing. Sounds absurd, but history shows it’s deadly serious: Franco, Mussolini, and the Nazis all went after language as a means to control, and America has not resisted that impulse, either. I take you through that history, what’s happening today, and share why multilingualism, far from being a threat, is our greatest defense. Queens, my home, proves it every single day.

I live in Astoria, Queens, the most linguistically rich community in the United States, and the world. More than a hundred languages are spoken here every day. It’s an incredible place: safe, charitable, and full of restaurants, corner stores, churches and playgrounds where you hear Greek, Italian, Arabic, Spanish, Tagalog, Urdu, and English sometimes all at once.

Astoria feels like the “melting pot” Americans used to brag about.

Only…have you noticed? We don’t use that phrase anymore.

The current regime has a strict no-melting policy. They don’t want the patchwork quilt of races and cultures and languages that make America unique, and once upon time, special. Through its unhinged supersizing of ICE’s budget (“larger than most of the world’s militaries”) and increasingly judicial-proof powers, coupled with outrageously dangerous rhetoric about immigrants at every turn, the Trump administration has made it crystal clear it wants an America made from 100 percent white stock (which is ironic considering several officials, including Vice President Vance and Stephen Miller, are married to brown women.).

That’s exactly why last week’s news felt like a five-alarm fire. The Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a weapon it has always wanted: the power to punish language. Speaking Spanish, in particular, can now be used as “reasonable suspicion” of criminality.

In plain English, that means millions of Americans can be legally stopped, questioned, or harassed for nothing more than speaking to their children or ordering food in their own tongue.

This is exactly the kind of thing I once wrote case study papers about as an International Relations and Spanish double major. Only now it’s not the midterms, this is our reality.

So here’s the crib sheet on why fascism always seeks to control language, and how screwed we are if we pretend it isn’t happening right now:

Francisco Franco banned Catalan, Basque, and Galician in Spain, hoping that without their languages, people would forget who they were. For nearly four decades, entire generations of Spaniards grew up forbidden to read, write, or even pray in their mother tongue, a silencing so profound the cultural and political repercussions reverberate today in painful and sometimes violent ways.

Mussolini did the same in Italy, outlawing German in South Tyrol and Slavic languages in annexed regions, forcing schools, newspapers, and even family names into Italian.

And Nazi Germany, never to be outdone, went further still—erasing Yiddish and Hebrew presses, banning Polish and Czech in occupied lands, even purging “foreign” words from German in a fanatical drive for racial and linguistic purity.

The lesson was always the same: one people, one culture, one tongue. Or else.

The United States has not been innocent from this impulse.

During World War II, Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps in part because speaking Japanese at home marked them as “suspicious.”

Native American children were beaten in boarding schools for using their tribal languages under the motto “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

Spanish, too, has long been treated as “un-American,” even though it was one of the first non-indigenous languages spoken here. My own grandmother - born to two Spanish immigrants – was beaten by her school teacher in California for not speaking English.

“English-only” is just a nicer way of saying “we don’t really want you here at all.”

Throughout most of the world, especially Europe, multilingualism is a totally normal way of life. A Belgian child may grow up speaking Dutch at home, French at school, and English online. In Switzerland, citizens move easily between German, Italian, French, and Romansh. Even in small countries like Luxembourg, three or four languages are expected. Being multilingual is…simply part of life. It’s a hallmark of citizenship, not a threat to it.

Contrast that with the United States.

Despite being a nation built by immigrants, only about 20 percent of Americans speak another language at home, the vast majority of them immigrants and their children. White Americans are overwhelmingly monolingual, with only 6% able to speak a language other than English.

I feel sad for them.

I wish everyone the indescribable joy of reading Neruda in Spanish, listening to Gilbert Becaud in French, and watching Sophia Loren in Italian.

The world is an oyster only stubbornly ajar if you can’t venture into waters colored by a language other than your own.

Beyond the cultural doors that are opened, monolingual Americans are also missing out on the empathy, creativity, global perspective, and long-term brain benefits (hear that, MAHA?!) that comes from moving between languages.

And instead of celebrating bilingualism, or even just talking about it as a neutral thing, the current regime has demonized it, casting English as the only “real” marker of belonging.

You see, this Supreme Court ruling comes just weeks after Trump signed an executive order to make English the nation’s “official language,” something the U.S. has never had (and technically, still does not).

For the originalists in the room (listen up, Alito and Thomas), the founding fathers themselves did not feel it was necessary, and did not think ostracizing the foreign-born friends who helped America win it’s independence was smart.

Defenders of the administration’s relentless obsession with English-only will argue it’s about encouraging immigrants to learn English. But if that were true, we’d invest in free ESL programs for adults, bilingual schools for children, and incorporate language support into our bureaucracy, not remove those pathways entirely.

Defenders would (and do) also argue that diverse, immigrant-heavy communities are unsafe.

Queens proves the opposite.

Despite being one of the most multilingual and immigrant-rich places in the country, Queens’ violent crime rate is lower than in plenty of mostly white, conservative cities. Take Mobile, Alabama: its violent crime rate is nearly double that of New York City, and its property crime rate is higher too. And yet, there’s never been a propaganda blitz to paint a Southern drawl as dangerous and criminal.

Now, don’t misunderstand me: I’m not railing against conservatives.

It wasn’t that long ago that Republicans understood the value of immigration, and some even reached for Spanish to connect with immigrant communities.

In Ronald Reagan’s farewell address he said, “Anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” The belief that immigrants are necessary and valued was a core piece of his conservative vision.

George W. Bush went further. He ran campaign ads in Spanish and gave an interview in Spanish (his brother Jeb also loved to speak to the media en español). W. even delivered a presidential radio address entirely in Spanish on Cinco de Mayo, the first ever president to do so. He didn’t see Hispanics as a threat. His conservatism was about faith, family, and opportunity, and he believed that immigrants and bilingual Americans shared those values. He wanted them to be part of the Republican coalition.

Contrast his vision with today’s Republican Party, where the Trump administration isn’t trying to build a coalition at all.

Dictators have no need for coalitions, after all.

They demand purity.

And nothing disrupts purity more than a society fluent in many tongues.

Multilingualism is a threat to authoritarianism because multilingualism builds creativity and empathy.

To move between languages is to know there is more than one way to see the world.

And that is exactly what fascism fears.

A society that has the imagination to reject absolutes is a society that has the skills to resist.

So, what do we do?

Be more like Queens. We don’t fear language. We don’t give a shit what language you speak here, just pick up your dog poop and stop double parking.

That’s the America I believe in.

We don’t have to buy into the propaganda that multilingualism is suspicious or dangerous, even if a 6-3 Supreme Court decision says otherwise.

If Queens can hold over 100 languages and still be safe, generous, and thriving, then the rest of America can too.

As Justice Sotomayor says, “rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

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🔥 Afterburn

If you missed my last post, please be sure to give it a read here. I think you’ll find many of the same themes simmering over there:

Our Ghosts in Their Machine:
The Spanish diaspora in the United States is racing against time and bureaucracy to reclaim what history erased.

Spain’s Ley de Memoria Democrática was designed to provide a pathway to citizenship for descendents of those who fled the country, but for hundreds of descendants navigating its opaque, grueling bureaucracy through the consulate in San Francisco, California, it has become more than a legal process; it’s a collective act of remembrance, mutual aid, and the rebuilding of transgenerational kinship across continents and generations.

In October 2022, Spain passed the Ley de Memoria Democrática — a law that, among other things, opened a pathway to citizenship for descendents of those who fled the country. I didn’t hear about it right away. In fact, I found out just after the government had extended the application window to October 2025. A stroke of luck. I almost missed my chance.

But like so many others applying, I soon found that instead of opening a door, the law led to a void.

The San Francisco Consulate, where my and my family’s application would be processed, offered no clear roadmap, no timeline, and no expediency. Just years of waiting, refreshing inboxes, and wondering if your application even made it to the other side.

The San Francisco Consulate is, regrettably, known for long delays. Spanish press has reported that Spaniards living in California were waiting more than two years just to register the birth of their child. The problem is layered: San Francisco services the largest geographic area of any Spanish consulate in the U.S., covering nearly a dozen western states, and California alone is home to a vibrant diaspora of Spanish descendants, many tracing their roots back generations. At the same time, the Consulate is severely understaffed — a result of salaries that haven’t kept pace with the region’s soaring cost of living. It has sadly, through no fault of the staff who work there, become a bureaucratic black hole for paperwork and dreams.

And yet, in that silence, or rather, because of it, something extraordinary happened. In my search for answers, I stumbled across a small Facebook group called “LMD San Francisco.” It was created by Ronald Perez, a Spanish descendent by way of Cuba and Las Vegas, to crowdsource tips and updates from people applying for citizenship through the beleaguered Consulate. That group, our little flotilla in a sea of bureaucracy, has since grown to over 500 people representing over 1,500 applications for citizenship through the San Francisco Consulate.

I’ve been a moderator for the past nine months. I’m not a lawyer, but I dove headfirst into every clue, regulation, and personal story posted on Youtube, Reddit and Facebook to learn how to submit applications, not just for myself, but for my brother, my father, and my aunt. I’m now using that knowledge to help usher members of our group through the process before the law expires in October. We’ve answered hundreds of questions, tracked down documents, and shared in countless small victories. We are each other’s case workers, translators, cheerleaders. We are, unexpectedly, a community.

And like all good communities built in diaspora, we’ve discovered we are more connected than we realized. In a random post about the waiting times for processing, I found the nephew of my beloved great-uncle, a branch of the family tree I thought had been lost to time was suddenly recovered through, as we like to joke, spiritual conspiracy. When one member asked for help finding her grandmother’s birth certificate from Grazalema, another member not only had a copy of it, they also introduced her to a cousin she didn’t know she had in Sevilla. We log on to trade screenshots, prayers, contacts, and tips on how to get a tiny registro civil thousands of miles away to return your phone calls. We use our American doggedness to traverse Spanish bureaucracy. We lean on each other. We push each other. And we all believe that this fellowship would make our ancestors proud.

I think often of mine, Gregorio Machado Perez and Maria Carrasco Canton, who left La Calahorra, Granada, with their two young daughters in 1911 aboard the SS Willesden, bound for Honolulu. Between 1907 and 1913, about 8,000 Spaniards, mainly from Málaga and Granada, were recruited to work on sugarcane plantations in the Hawaiian Islands by American labor agents promising opportunity. What they found instead were brutal conditions, backbreaking hours, and racism so raw it could blister. While on Maui, a daughter died and a daughter was born, and between the ten hour workdays, they had to wonder if the risk they took for a better life would ever pay off. Eventually, they made their way to Northern California, becoming one of the first Spanish families from Hawaii to settle in Solano County. Their journey was hard. The odds were long. But they endured. They owned a humble homestead, raised six daughters, welcomed grandchildren, and died grateful for the life they had fought to build.

So much of their origin story was lost, or simply unmentioned, by the time I was born. What I knew came in fragments: a surname, a place, a boat. I admit the biggest regret I carry from my youth is that I didn’t know to ask more questions while my grandmother was still alive. I was too young, too unaware of what her history would someday mean to me. But through this application process, I’ve become an amateur genealogist, historian, and archivist of my own lineage. I tracked down Gregorio and Maria’s birth and marriage certificates from La Calahorra, documents our family was convinced had been burned during the Civil War. I’ve chased their footprints across continents, and through the filing cabinets of the National Archives and USCIS. I found their Alien Registration Files and Declaration of Intention to Naturalize, the latter of which was forwarded to the FBI at the time for further investigation to ensure my great-grandfather did not have communist or falangist sympathies. I learned that he successfully gained American citizenship forty years after they arrived in America. In my hunt, I’ve learned things I never would have otherwise.

One of those moments hit me like a thunderclap. According to the Willesden’s ship manifest, my great-grandmother Maria could not read or write. Not in her mother tongue of Spanish, and not proficiently in English. I stared at her immigration paperwork and the inky thumb print stamped on the page in lieu of the written signature she could not give, and I cried. Because here I am, her great-granddaughter, writing this essay with fluency in two languages, using the gift of my words and my education to tell her story. What is that if not the reward of her sacrifice? What is this feeling if not duende?

This process has given me the opportunity to dig, and beneath the paperwork and records, I found something more enduring: the dignity of knowing where you come from. The dignity of reclaiming something that was taken, interrupted, or forgotten.

I’ve been shaped by this history long before I had the words to name it. At the age of 12, I defiantly started learning Spanish after hearing that my grandmother was tormented by her schoolteacher for not speaking English proficiently, and that the reason she did not teach her children her mother tongue was because society had taught her it was not valuable. Compelled to combat the erasure, I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish, studied abroad in Alcalá de Henares, and later interned in Barcelona. While there, I made a pilgrimage to Gibraltar to witness the last stretch of Iberian coast my great-grandparents saw as their steamliner pulled away, never to return. After I married, I took my husband to Granada to introduce him to my Machado cousins – my most precious family heirlooms, the branch of the family tree that remained rooted and growing in Andalucía. I walked with him around the towering walls of the Castle of La Calahorra, a Renaissance jewel that once loomed over my great-grandparents’ daily lives, rising above the modest homes nestled at its feet.

The culture has always been in me, even if the paperwork has said otherwise. Now, I’m raising my daughter Thora Sofía to know this part of her identity not as myth, but as living memory. Spanish is spoken in our home. Her bookshelf holds Buenas noches, luna alongside The Very Hungry Caterpillar. She eats twelve grapes on New Year’s Eve. And one day, as soon as the Consulate can process my paperwork, she, too, will obtain Spanish nationality.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t fear the threat of history repeating, in reverse, when I look at her. I see the direction the United States is heading, and I want her to have choices. What my great-grandparents endured to live here was supposed to make things better for the next generations. The very door they walked through has long since been locked, and now, I see more doors closing – not just to immigrants, but to opportunity, to safety, to dignity. The very idea that you can work hard and build a better life here feels more fragile than ever.

The love that made my great-grandparents leave all they had ever known is the same love that fuels me to fight for my daughter’s right to return someday, if she wants or needs to.

That’s the quiet, urgent truth under this whole endeavor. For many of us, the citizenship application isn’t just a form. It’s a form of love. It’s a way of saying gracias to those who came before us. Thank you for risking it all for us – your grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and their children who you would never meet. Thank you for surviving what you did, and for preserving just enough of the thread for us to find it again. And it’s a way of saying we remember. We remember the one-way tickets. We remember the ships. We remember the forced relinquishing of your identity. And we’re reclaiming it.

When our ancestors were building new lives in America, they gathered in church halls and cultural clubs to find belonging and to navigate unfamiliar ground together. We, their descendants, now gather in a Facebook group to do the same. We are a family stitched together by memory and mutual aid. We are, quite literally, the living proof that a law meant to restore the past has instead created a new future.

And so, even though my email inbox remains empty, with no measurable timeline for this process that feels never-ending, I feel Spanish already. I always have. I feel it in the stories I tell and the ones I help uncover. I feel it in our community during late-night commiserations, while sharing stories, while scrutinizing screenshots of birth certificates and immigration documents, while cheering when someone finally gets a reply from whoever is managing the inbox over there on Sutter Street in San Francisco.

Every day I cast a hope into the universe for the resolution of my application…for all of our applications.

But whether that paper comes next month or in two years, I already know who I am. I know who we are.

We are living memories.

And we are exactly what our ancestors hoped we’d become.

🔥 Afterburn

Are you applying for Spanish citizenship through the Ley de Memoria Democrática? Have a million questions? I’m happy to help.

Or are you someone tracing your family’s history, trying to reconnect with a culture that shaped you from afar? Share your story in the comments, or pass this along to someone else walking a similar path.

And if you're part of the diaspora community, or just know what it means to belong to many places at once, I hope you’ll subscribe and stay connected. There's more to come.