I love Twitter.

Or, I loved Twitter.

It’s hard to say how I’m going to feel about Twitter in the coming days. I may be done with Twitter.

This is a place where I stake my claim on the public square. No billionaires. No sedition. No trolls.

We’ll see what happens next.

Real talk, folks. I’m seeing some well-intentioned reactions to the Texas abortion ban. Boycotts of Texas businesses, spamming the reporting system, hoping Nancy Pelosi can codify Roe v. Wade.

None of that will do jack shit.

The law is the law. The Texas legislature is out of session so they’re not changing any laws. Even if they were working, no lawmaker in Texas will submit a repeal. The leadership wouldn’t bring it for a vote if they did. This is happening and the only thing that will stop is eventual judicial review. Your FB group or Twitter hashtag aren’t going to help anyone get an abortion in TX

If you want to do something productive on the issue of reproductive justice, here’s what I would recommend:

1. Donate to abortion funds in states that border Texas. That’s where people will go for care. The abortion funds offer financial and logistical assistance.

2. Donate to organizations that provide abortion medications by mail. Plan C and AidAccess are two orgs that you can support.

3. Donate to legal defense funds for clinics and doctors in Texas who may find themselves battling lawsuits. The new law allows anyone to sue a provider who may have performed an abortion after 6 weeks. There is real potential for frivolous lawsuits designed to drain clinic resources. Those clinics provide other health services and they will need help to stay open.

4. Donate to entities that file suit to have the law overturned. As I understand it, the process for getting the law in front of a judge is going to be complicated and expensive. Groups like the ACLU will probably be involved. They’ll need funds.

5. WATCH YOUR OWN STATE LEGISLATURE LIKE A HAWK. I can’t emphasize this enough. Other states will try to pass copycat laws. If you don’t want this to spread like a fungus across the nation, you have to block it your home state before it happens.

6. Talk about contraception. Just flood the zone with contraception information. Make contraception the most popular topic on twitter. Post TikToks about contraception. Be a contraception evangelist. If we reduce the number of crisis pregnancies, we reduce the need for abortion.

7. Trust BIPOC women when they tell you what works in their communities. Donate to whatever they say your should donate to.

Sorry if my list is not as clever as writing a bot to take down a right to life website. However, these are the things that will help people get care. That’s more important than getting revenge.

I can see how it must hurt inside for Simone Biles.

I remember when tennis players and fans complained about the noise of the beads on the Williams sisters’ braids. There was nothing else to complain about – they were outstanding players who stuck to the rules of play and rules of decorum. But they were Other and the braids were the symbols of Other that the tennis establishment wielded against them.

The press and the fans waited and waited for those girls to explode into scandal. They never did. They just excelled. What did it cost them to keep their bad days and bad moods hidden from the view of scavengers hungry for strange fruit?

I remember Debi Thomas. Pre-med at Stanford and one of the best figure skaters in the world. She went head to head with East German phenom Katerina Witt, American versus Communist, West against Eastern Europe. She was the first Black American woman to win a figure skating medal in the Olympics. She was featured in sports media of the time, an athlete who had to be the best at everything to earn a place on magazine covers.

She became a surgeon after she retired from skating but something in her shriveled over time. After decades of excellence, she retreated into a world of her own making, riddled with conspiracy theories. She lives in a trailer in Virginia now, broke and unemployed.

I remember Laura Ingraham telling LeBron James – LEBRON JAMES – to “Shut up and dribble.”

I remember young men who wrestled at Ohio State coming forward to say their team doctor molested them. Their assistant coach knew. His name is Jim Jordan and he is a Member of the US House of Representatives.

We know what it costs women to share stories of sexual assault. Can you imagine what it costs men? Strong men, athletes, men who believe they should have been able to avoid such trauma. Can you imagine what they feel when they see an abettor of their pain rising in Republican power circles?

I remember Junior Seau ending his life at 43. A much-loved player on San Diego’s championship football team, a linebacker with the Patriots when they went undefeated in 2007, he was dripping with NFL honors. After he died, researchers found distinct evidence of CTE trauma to his brain from years of high-impact football play.

I remember last week when Donald Trump led a crowd to boo the US Women’s Olympic soccer squad. He said they were so “woke” that they deserved to lose. Their crime is demanding equal pay to the men’s squad, an inferior squad with an empty trophy case shrinking in light of the gleaming World Cups the women bring home.

I remember Collin Kaepernick, down on one knee on the NFL sidelines, proposing racial justice. He’s an ex-football player now and justice is still delayed.

I remember Naomi Osaka telling the tennis press that their questions affect her mood and damage her playing. She declared she would rather not compete than answer then. I remember her critics saying “How dare she?” instead of asking fans how dare they demand her entrails on the page.

I remember Simone Biles telling the world that she keeps flying across the gymnastics arena because she knows she’s impossible to ignore. If she doesn’t leave the room, she hopes the powers that be will be forced to reform a sport that has damaged girls for generations.

We ask so much of athletes. We demand they be everything or nothing, depending on our whims. We demand that they show us their best on the field but reject them in the other spaces they occupy. We turn blind eyes to the way sports hurt them and wonder why they are too hurt for sports.

So, I understand why the pain was too much for Simone Biles today. And we should understand the ways we helped to cause it.

God Spare the Girls by Kelsey McKinney

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Many thanks to NetGallery for a free ebook in exchange for my honest review!

“God Spare the Girls” by Kelsey McKinney is a coming of age story set against the backdrop evangelical Christian culture. Caroline Nolan is newly graduated from high school and ready to leave her small town and the church where her father is the beloved preacher. She plans to spend her final months at home preparing for her devout older sister’s wedding. But during the summer before college, her family is turned upside down by news of her father’s affair with a congregant.

Caroline and her older sister Abby retreat to their late grandmother’s ranch house to deal with the own feelings about faith, marriage, and their places in the world. Caroline’s resolve to leave and start her own path never wavers. She can’t understand why her mother and sister seem rooted to their hometown and the church.

Watching the scandal unfold gives Caroline new insight into the power women wield in her church, power they can only keep by propping up her father to be the face of faith.



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In “Respect for Acting,” Uta Hagen tells readers that good acting means making all your character decision in service of the objective. If you get stuck on the obstacles, you can’t move the story forward.

That is also true in politics.

The objective is holding a Democratic majority by winning midterm elections. The obstacle is state-level voting laws that make voting less convenient.

You can play to the obstacles and spend your time being mad at Republican controlled legislatures or Joe Manchin or past Supreme Court decisions. Or you can play to the objective and do something to expand Democratic turnout in 2022.

Pick a state. Find an organization on the ground. Join the effort to get bodies to the polls despite the laws. It’s really that simple.

I don’t remember when is started making a point of using ungendered language in my writing. It’s been a few years.

At first, it came up in pieces where I referenced pregnancy. I got pretty good at constructing sentences that didn’t use the word woman or feminine pronouns. I write things like “anyone who is pregnant” or “expectant parents.” Friendly, folksy, neutral phrases. My goal is to make the writing sound so natural that a cis person wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t all about them.

In my current gig writing healthcare content, this particular challenge of language comes up more often.

This week, I was writing a piece on vasectomy techniques so I was avoiding the word man and masculine pronouns. The pronoun part was easy, since the publication’s style guidelines call for second person pronouns, anyway. I was also trying out be cognizant of the need for plain language, since the intended audience is mainstream health info seekers, not medical professionals or activists.

I thought I struck a pretty good balance overall; no gendered words, lots of very clear anatomical references. But the editor assigned to the piece came back with a note to make sure we were clear that vasectomy was for men. I was disappointed but this piece was work for hire. I have to follow client instructions. Still, I took a moment to explain that I had been trying to make the piece accessible to people who don’t identify as men.

To my delight, the editor replied that she hadn’t thought of that but she agreed with my instinct. Together, we brainstormed a couple of edits that made it clear that a vasectomy is for anyone with testicles.

I tell this story because it makes me happy to think that I put something into the world that will help people in a small way. And I’m happy that I encountered a fellow freelancer who was glad to join me in my quest to make my words inclusive. It was a good day at work and I wanted to share.

Emily Oster has a new article out in The Atlantic where she says it’s safe to let children resume a more normal social life this summer. She acknowledges that there is not yet a covid vaccine for kids but she writes, “Although scientists don’t quite understand why, kids seem to be naturally protected. As a result, you can think of your son or daughter as an already vaccinated grandparent.”

She goes on to make some risk-benefit analyses about severity of disease in children but I stopped listening to her because I was too angry at her for trying to apply economic principles to the path of a novel virus.

Now, I’m going to preface this by saying I’m not a virologist. But neither is Emily Oster, so you can choose which not-expert you want to listen to after you read what I have to say.

Let’s start with a journey back to the time I caught human papiloma virus (HPV). Remember that? Hahahahahahah! No, you don’t and neither do I because HPV is a sneaky little fucker of a virus that sets up housekeeping in human bodies without notice. You probably have HPV right now and you don’t even know it.

Chances are excellent that eventually your immune system will evict HPV and you’ll never know it was there. Or, maybe your HPV will be like mine and cause pre-cancerous abnormalities on your cervix.

If that happens, you’ll need a procedure called a LEEP where a doctor removes a layer of your cervix. It may require general anesthesia, you may bleed vaginally afterward, and you’re considered high-risk for cervical cancer until you get a clean HPV test. If you ever get a clean HPV test. A LEEP doesn’t cure HPV. It just cleans your own cells that have started to mutate into something that wants to kill you.

Oh! It might also affect your ability to carry a pregnancy because having one less layer of cervix means you might not be able to keep a baby in your uterus for 40 weeks. I was on cervical rest for most of my second pregnancy thanks to my close encounter with HPV.

Now, you’re probably thinking that I have lost the plot because we were discussing covid-19 and covid-19 doesn’t cause cervical cancer.

Or does it?

We don’t know what covid-19 does over the long term because covid has been a pathogen that affects humans for approximately 16 months. There is no data on the long-term effects because there is no long term. But there is plenty of data to show that other viruses can behave in destructive ways for years after initial exposure.

Think about chicken pox. That’s a virus and, like covid-19, it’s not super harmful to kids when they first get it. But then it hangs out in the body for years and sometimes reappears as shingles. Shingles is painful, debilitating, and highly contagious. That’s one of the reasons why we started vaccinating kids for chicken pox; to prevent a more serious illness in later life.

Zika is a virus that doesn’t cause dramatic symptoms in the person who has it. However, if a pregnant person gets Zika, it can cause major fetal anomalies, including problems with brain development that lead to microcephaly. The baby is likely to have lifelong disabilities.

Polio is a virus that can cause paralysis and death in children. People who have survived polio are at risk of post-polio syndrome, a neurological disorder that emerges 30 or more years after the person has recovered from polio. It causes chronic fatigue and progressively worsening muscle weakness.

Covid-19 is a virus just like all the ones I just mentioned. We know that some people who contract covid-19 continue to have symptoms for months after exposure. No one is sure why that’s happening or what to do about it. Some covid-19 patients end up with irreparable organ damage. Others have circulatory problems that don’t resolve. Covid-19 is unpredictable. Disease longevity and severity vary widely and no one can predict who will get sicker or if they will get better. Nor do we know if covid-19 will stay in the body and re-emerge later in life.

Which brings us back to Emily Oster’s hypothesis that it’s fine to let kids risk covid-19 exposure because they probably won’t get too sick in the short term. She’s right about that but what about the long term? Will there be post-covid syndromes that wreak havoc on people years later?

And do you want to put your kids at risk of that happening to them?

I can’t tell you what to do but I’m not going to back down on covid-19 mitigation for my family. I expect there will be vaccine for kids by the end of this year. I can wait until then to resume normal life. That seems better than waiting decades to see what covid-19 might do to people I love.

This is a letter I sent to my Board of Education and Superintendent of Schools on 2/23/21. None of them have replied. None of my concerns have been addressed in public statements since then.

Dear Dr. Smith and Board of Education Members,

I am a parent of two MCPS students and I have been following the reopening plans quite closely. The more I learn about they way the central office has put together this plan, the more confused and upset I am. It appears that this entire scheme is a top-down dictate, devised without input from teachers, administrators, parents, or students.

Everything you have presented up to this point leads me to believe that you are returning kids to buildings just for the sake of having kids inside buildings. I understand the ostensible reasons for opening buildings but you haven’t spoken to any of those reasons. For example:

Mental Health: Many parents and school counselors have been worried about the mental health effects of the pandemic. However, I have yet to hear concrete plans for how the schools will manage this concern. If there is an effort in progress to identify and help students with significant mental health needs, I hope you will clarify that. If there isn’t a plan for this issue, then there needs to be one. Otherwise, MCPS risks failing on one of the top priorities for the return to school.

Social Isolation: There is no doubt that bringing students into the same space will provide an immediate remedy to the fundamental problem of social isolation. However, sitting masked, at a desk, 6 feet away from classmates, with constant 12:1 student to adult supervision is hardly an ideal environment for socializing. K-5 students will have recess periods to interact in a purely social way but that isn’t true for middle and high school students. What does MCPS plan to do to proactively address the social needs of kids? If you don’t have a clear guidance to schools for that, you need to develop it.

Childcare: Four days per week of full time in-person school for K-3 students does address childcare needs for those days. Is MCPS offering any support for before- and after-care or care for asynchronous instruction days? What about care for kids in grades 4 and 5 who will be on an A/B week schedule and still need care 50% of the time? What about childcare in the event that a student needs to quarantine and do virtual learning for some period of time? Will the school work with employers to aid adults in managing unexpected schedule changes? How is MCPS planning to assist families in piecing together the childcare they so desperately need? Or is the plan to cover only a portion of a child’s time and leave families to figure out the rest on their own?

Learning Loss: “Our kids are falling behind” is probably the most cited reason to bring them back to school. We all accept that virtual learning has drawbacks in terms of curriculum delivery and that typical in-person teaching corrects that problem. However, we are not returning to typical in-person teaching. Instead, we are phasing in a series of disruptions to instruction. Each new group of students returning to buildings changes the logistics of the building. Staff will have to adapt to the new circumstances with each phase. Any need for quarantine will create more disruptions to in-person instruction. All these disruptions have the potential to negatively affect curriculum delivery. How will you mitigate that enough to prevent further learning loss?

Of even more concern is the fact that the instructional modes are going to change for every student in the county. In order to accommodate classes that simulatenously take place in-person, down the hall in an overflow classroom, and virtually, teachers will have to adapt their instructional methods dramatically. There will be a significant period of adjustment for teachers and students to get comfortable with the new teaching styles. With no time to practice or troubleshoot, there are bound to be missteps. Lesson plans won’t work out. Technology won’t cooperate. Implementing a universal change to instruction doesn’t seem to address the issue to learning loss at all. Quite the opposite, actually.

On a personal note, these changes leave me feeling betrayed on behalf of my children. They have been among the students who were thriving with virtual learning. They want to continue with school as they have been doing it all year and I am in a position to agree to that. However, I expected they would continue to get the same – or better – quality of instruction that they have had all along.

While I believe their teachers and principals are committed to doing right by the 60% of MCPS students who are remaining remote, I have no such faith in the Board or the leadership in the central office.

I honestly don’t know why we are doing this at this point in the school year, expect as a means to facilitate state testing. You haven’t made plans to address the underlying reasons for returning to buildings. You don’t plan to help them manage socialization and mental health struggles. The childcare aspect is insufficient. And instruction may actually be worse in the spring thanks to the massive shift you are expecting of everyone involved.

I would like to support your ideas but so far, you haven’t given me a reason to do so. I hope you alleviate my concerns in the near future.

We have reach the in-fighting stage of the pandemic, and I have to say, I’m not a fan.

People in my town have started lashing out at each other over school and business restrictions. The comments section of any news outlet is pretty gnarly. Lotsa name calling. I keep thinking they should refocus their anger on the real enemy: our inadequate social safety net and the kind of politicians that created the problem.

Instead, I keep seeing rage-filled criticism of covid mitigation policies – particularly about schools. In those screeds, people talk about the pandemic as of it’s been going on for years and it will never end.

I’ll hear statements like “Schools in X have been open since December but schools in Y are lagging behind with a March opening! How can the district deliberately hurt kids that way!”

Thats’s, like, 12 weeks difference. It’s not an eternity. It’s shorter than the 2021 Major League Hockey season.

I know it’s all frustrating. I know it’s hard to watch someone else get the thing you want. I know. But y’all. It hasn’t been that long.

The virus is 15 months old. Some of the science about opening school buildings is under 6 months old. That science is different than science that is 9 months old and also different from science that is 3 months old. There may be new science tomorrow.

This entire experience has been built on shifting sand. There is no security for anyone.

And THAT is the biggest problem.

The most egregious wrong of the covid era is the lack of support the government has given the people. There should have been childcare subsidies. There should have been increased access to mental health services. There should have been bail-outs for business owners and furloughed workers.

That’s what we should be really mad about: we have no safety nets for working families, business owners, or people in mental health crisis. That should be the target our collective rage.

We all have to live in our communities after the pandemic ends. Fighting about dates and phases won’t solve anything. Instead, let’s plan for making it better when this crisis ends.

You can’t log in to the internet right now without some expert shouting about “learning loss” for K-12 students. Allegedly, every kid in America is “falling behind” and we need to get them into school pronto or they will never learn anything on time ever again. The schools are “failing our kids.”

Only no one mentions that “on time” is a social construct that is entirely malleable if only we had the will to make changes. All the arguments about opening schools could be settled if we, as a nation, agreed to revise our arbitrary annual learning goals.

Kids don’t have to learn things on a particular schedule. We made up the standards. It wasn’t handed down on stone tablets from on high, never to be revisited or revised. We could alter the whole educational timeline to accommodate the pandemic. We just….haven’t.

Seriously. The entire concern about kids losing a year of classes could be mitigated by collectively agreeing to teach them the stuff they should have learned this year, next year.

Their brains aren’t going anywhere. The information isn’t going anywhere. It can happen later.

But rather than planning for make-up classes when the pandemic ends, we told kids to suck it up and get to work. We took away all their learning tools and said “Learn the same amount of stuff anyway.” It’s unrealistic and unfair to them.

Now, I acknowledge that learning loss for certain groups is a real and present concern. Initial acquisition of literacy and numeracy are far easier at young ages. Kids who are trying to learn English as a second language need specific supports, as do students with special needs.

I believe those students should have had a special focus this year. They will truly lose the opportunity to learn if their needs aren’t addressed.

But the high school kids who are tying to cram in as many AP courses as possible before graduation could weather a delay. Those kids could have done some independent study projects with their teachers acting as advisors. Or they could have gone back and revisited material form prior years to deeper their understanding. We didn’t have to try and keep cramming a standard curriculum down their throats.

They can learn calculus next year. European history will still be available after the pandemic. Hell, we could offer them all an additional year of high school or a free year of community college to make up for the lost time. But no. We’re making everyone mask up and try to pretend education can proceed as normal.

It sucks and we suck for doing that to our kids.

The real problem in schools this year isn’t students or teachers. It’s the other adults (parents, politicians) who are demanding typical results in decidedly atypical circumstances.

In other words, it’s our fault and we’re the ones failing our kids with our unrealistic expectations.