A diary is a special kind of empathy portal. This was the week I found Yevgenia Belorusets’s Kyiv war journal, something I was able to connect with more quickly, and more devastatingly, than the dozens of thinkpieces and breaking-news headlines about Ukraine that previously crossed my screen. 

As I write, it occurs to me that during the day I saw many smiling people. For example, a woman who was sitting in the park on a bench next to two big shopping bags. She spoke to me in an absurdly happy voice, saying that she was waiting for her nephew to help her carry the bags home. "I'm so happy to have you standing next to me now, talking to me. When there are two of us, I'm less afraid of the artillery."

When I was a girl, I got a copy of Zlata’s Diary, a 1992 account of the Bosnian War by Sarajevo pre-teen Zlata Filipović. I'd read Anne Frank before that, of course, and the details of her hidden annex and first-flush crushes and terrible, unjust end were still fresh in my mind. But there was something different about reading the intimate details of a new war, one happening in real time and affecting a girl just two years older than me. "She likes Madonna and 'Murphy Brown.' She's Everygirl in a war zone," The New York Times wrote. I think you can trace a direct line from me reading Zlata's diary as a pre-teen to me writing Amnesty International letters as a teenager. A direct line from empathetic connection to action.

And yet. I can't talk about Zlata and Yevgenia without also talking about who is and isn't framed as "Everygirl," about which violence is deemed worthy of attention and lament, about the countless diaries written in Somalia, Myanmar, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Palestine, Xinjiang that have not been published to a wide international audience. The flip side of recognizing a diaristic connection is realizing what is lost when I don't have access to real-time accounts by people at the soft center of a violent conflict. Or, more damningly, when I do have access to those first-person stories, and I don't bother to absorb them. All those times I've passed by the empathy portal, gaze fixed firmly ahead.

"Our upbringing tells us to 'eat bitter'—to not be a burden — but it's time to unlearn this and demand that our grief be heard," writes Chelsea Peng. And Bianca Mabute-Louie concludes, "Community is what makes life worth living."

The "return to normal" is bullshit, writes Dan Sinker. Anya Kamenetz reports on the impact of school closures, two years later. And Zara Hanawalt skewers Kim Kardashian's willfully ignorant advice to "Get your f—ing ass up and work." The truth: You do not have the same 24 hours in a day as Beyoncé or Kim K if you don't also have their level of wealth. I mean, we live in a time of black-market diapers.

There are some truly terrifying laws in development that threaten anyone with a uterus: Making it a crime to order abortion pills or seek an abortion out of state, allowing vigilantes to report people who do, forcing people with ectopic pregnancies to suffer the fatal consequences. Even if these laws don't pass, Claire Lampen writes, they "signal a shitstorm ahead in which a lack of federal jurisdiction creates a complex web of conflict and broad questions of privacy."

I was really moved by this story about the Bat Mitzvah and its history by Deena Prichep.

A dispatch from Bombay Beach on the Salton Sea. "Emphasizing the visuals of ruination," writes Johanna Hoffman, "offers an emotional buffer from the economic, political, and social issues that lead to ruin’s rise." Related: Sarah Hume on what strip-mining did to central Ohio.

Kari Paul on "goblin mode," aka the comforts of depravity.

And I enjoyed Xochitl Gonzalez's Puerto Rican diaspora epic Olga Dies Dreaming, which is a little bit of everything: a romance and a political thriller and a family drama.

 

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I know it's annoying to click through and enter your payment details, but maybe this is the week? It's just $15/year to become a member.

Paying members, thanks for supporting my work! You also support my writing fellowship program, which is entering its second year. Stayed tuned for an announcement about my new fellows next week—I'm super excited to introduce you.

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Janice Chung's photo series Who Are You?, an intimate study of her Korean American identity. Cameron Esposito on situational pronouns. Ezra Klein talks to Masha Gessen.

One minute you're trying to read a recipe for breakfast casserole, and the next minute a pop-up ad is telling you that you can achieve deep, restful sleep by... ~becoming a skeleton~.

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Turning off all notifications except for the Moon app. Eliminate that tense feeling you get when a box pops up on your screen, and replace it with an exhalation of "ahhh, a waning gibbous!"

Pairs well with Nina MacLaughlin's monthly column, The Moon in Full.

March 26 & April 2, virtual - Jade Chang and I are hosting an ideas workshop! For people of all creative disciplines, the question isn't "where do you get your ideas," it's "how do you develop your ideas?" And we have lots of answers! Still a few spots left.

April 9, Los Angeles - I'll be in conversation with Chloé Cooper Jones about her phenomenal new book, Easy Beauty.