When the U.S. election result was finally called, I was in an online quilting class, learning how to sew freeform curves instead of just straight lines. (The metaphors, they write themselves!) In 2020, I've spent so many hours on Zoom when I'd rather be in person, so much energy trying to find a balance between checking into and out of politics, so much time sewing as a way to manage malaise and anxiety. This moment was my year, distilled.

My first instinct wasn't to close the laptop and beeline for a bottle of champagne. I sent some texts to friends, I exhaled deeply a few times, then I picked up the rotary cutter and went back to the workshop. Maybe I had so thoroughly prepared myself for bad news that I was unable to absorb a more positive result. I'm usually not a superstitious person, but in recent months I'd started telling myself that CYG was politically cursed. Every time we interviewed a candidate, that person ended up losing their race—Donna Edwards, Cynthia Nixon, Stacey Abrams. And we'd interviewed Kamala Harris before. 

The curse is broken. Though, of course, the curse was never really real—and not just because superstitions are illusions. It's true that Stacey Abrams wasn't elected governor of Georgia in 2018, but it's also true that she didn't lose. She redirected her efforts and, along with a dedicated group of activists, ended up shaping the outcome of the 2020 election in her state. (A state that could end up defining the next four years of American politics.)  

The quilting workshop was mostly white women who were there to learn an improvisational technique pioneered by Black women—from the quilters of Gee's Bend to Rosie Lee Tompkins, who made art from dish towels, clothing scraps, old flags, bits of embroidery, batik, tapestry. This style of quilting is not about planning and repeating a consistent pattern. It's about responding. Reorienting. Reusing and reconfiguring the pieces until they make sense as a whole. It's no coincidence that most of the innovative artists of this form are Black women—as are most of the leading activists pushing for a more perfect union. 

There are no definitive wins or losses, no fresh starts or new mornings. We're always working with lingering ideas and leftover scraps, deciding what can be salvaged and what must be tossed. I'm just now starting to consider the post-election pieces. What might be possible if we each follow Stacey Abrams' lead and use the power we have, in the circumstances that exist now, to create something we couldn't have even envisioned a few years ago?

Goodbye, Ivanka! Goodbye, Jared! See ya, Stephen Miller! You're expelled, Betsy DeVos! Good riddance, anonymous Republican source! But deeply embedded problems are here to stay in this country. What happened to the "pink wave" of women voters? If white people are "losing" this country, who's winning? How wailing women disrupt the social order. What Kamala Harris taught her niece about ambition. "Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women." Inheritance, not work, is the modern path to home ownership. Can the labor movement survive "independent contractors"? The new Black Art Library and the importance of decolonial archives. Should Spotify be responsible for what Joe Rogan does? The true cost of keeping a restaurant open in a pandemic. On life without the sense of smell. An ode to end-of-summer fashion in Southern California. Cigarettes are back. "I think it is normal to imagine new existences when the world is crumbling."

I know, I know, I made you a meme and not a pie chart. But after four years of Trump and so many months of this global pandemic, I feel like the botched restoration on the right. More... abstract. Related to the person I was before, but rearranged in a confusing way.

Deep thanks to the paying supporters of this newsletter! You make it possible for me to write and curate every week, even when I'm in my most abstract form.

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A moodboard of clips that have inspired Hilton Als. The origins of the electoral "blue swoosh" through the Southeast. Kimberlé Crenshaw (who coined the term "intersectionality") on Keep It.

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Bertha Robertson, Birds in Flight Variation, ca. 1950 Addie Pelt, Everybody Quilt, ca. 1988


Rosie Lee Tompkins: Untitled, 2005