When I was a kid and would complain that something wasn't fair, my parents would offer that classic retort: "Life's not fair." They weren't wrong. But—I can't remember if I actually said this as a young sassy brat, or if it's how I respond in my adult mind's eye—my response is, "It should be as fair as you can make it."

I've been thinking about competing theories of fairness while watching the back-and-forth over the Biden administration's baby steps toward addressing the student-loan debt crisis. Is it fair that some people, because of familial wealth, can get a college degree without taking out loans? Is it fair that, for everyone else, improving their financial lot in life requires a predatory loan? Is it fair that, despite the odds, some people managed to pay off those predatory loans years ago and won't see a penny of reimbursement today?

My answers are no, no, and no. Indeed, life's not fair. Especially in this country. But where to even begin with the retort: as fair as you can make it?

What a tight, ugly knot of an American problem! The personal and the political, the systemic and the individual, the required and the optional. It's all snarled up together in student-loan debt. 

Whether you think $10k in loan forgiveness is too much or not enough depends, in part, on your fairness timeline. Those of us who define fairness by looking at long histories and whole systems say that a college degree is, like it or not, a pretty standard requirement for a financially stable life. And while we can't revise the past to level the playing field or afford to forgive every student loan taken out since the dawn of time, we can account for the fundamental unfairness of the cost of higher education as we move into the future. (NB: Not saying that $10k of loan forgiveness effectively does this! It's a small tug at that tight knot.) 

Some people have a fairness timeline that is much narrower and more recent. This timeline accepts the present moment—essentially, a screenshot of a video that's been playing since the dawn of this country—as the context for judging fairness. And if you don't take the historic inequality and decades of policy into account, something like devastating student-loan debt looks much more like a personal failure. You needed loans? You're still paying them off? They're keeping you from buying a house or building a savings cushion? That's a problem for you and the financial advisor you definitely can't afford. 

Knots, timelines, I know I've mixed my metaphors. Sorry about that. I guess I'm trying to say that it's really fucking complicated to start trying to solve huge systemic problems, to account for the past in the present, to agree on what to do next after we agree that life's not fair. But that doesn't mean it's not worth starting somewhere: As fair as we can make it, basically.

Dominique Stewart at Anti-Racism Daily has a great explainer on student-loan debt as a racial-equity issue. 

There's a deeper story behind the shades-of-gray aesthetics of HGTV and house flippers, writes Amanda Mull. All that gray vinyl flooring is about evoking "newness," which has "become one of the most prized characteristics in American consumer life."

"It’s the coldest summer of the rest of your life—enjoy it." Ruby Sutton reports from the climate-rave scene.

What happens when a private-equity firm takes over a nursing home? Nothing good. Read this investigation by Yasmin Rafiei. 

Kari Blakinger on menstruating while incarcerated: "It felt like a bad place to be a woman, and a particularly bad place to be a person with a period. But I was unsure what to do."

Michelle Santiago Cortés, who has quickly become one of my favorite writers, on millennials in middle age: "Millennials, however, aren’t aging out of the internet — they are aging out of youth. Whatever shift is being felt is a loss of access to the social capital of youth. And unlike generations before them, this is happening in the shared space of the internet."

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The things people leave behind in library books. Forgotten art of the AIDS crisis. And do I need to stop lurking and become a TikTok creator who just reads my own articles aloud?

Cheese life is what I'm living, and I do, in fact, want to spread the good word.

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The writing fellows are up to great things, per usual:

Celia Mattison unpacked the girlbossification of Predator and introduced me to filmmaker Anna Biller, whose latest short will be "familiar to anyone who has ever been bothered by a man." Celia also put together A Brief History of White Ethnicities in Rom-Coms. Do you care about film? It's long past time to sign up for her newsletter.

Autumn Fourkiller compiled a reading list on being Indigenous in America. These essays are essential reading (and revisiting)—especially if you can only name one or two Indigenous writers off the top of your head. Autumn writes, generously, "I like to think of it as a primer, perhaps, on writers to seek out at the beginning of your journey." And Autumn's latest dream interpretation newsletter features a subconscious romp submitted by yours truly with images of drought and dogs and gin martinis.