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Democrats destroyed Republicans in the midterms last night. They won so far 54 seats in the senate seemingly flipping most or all of the contested states, including Texas, Kansas and South Carolina. And they won huge in the House. This is a gargantuan, massive Fuck You to D. Trump. He won fair and square in 2016 and 2024, largely due to Democrats’ failures and the shift of white working-class voters away from the Democratic Party. (And more Black and brown voters choosing Trump in 2024.)

But this is the beauty of democracy! People came out en masse to make their voices clear. Divided government is a very good thing, generally speaking. Having a Democratic congress and a Republican white house is a good thing (or vice versa). For the past 18 months all three branches of government have essentially been dominated by not even the Republican Party but Donald Trump himself as an individual. (With some exceptions on certain issues, especially in the Supreme Court which has occasionally ruled against him.) That is anti-democratic to the core.

I do, however, also worry about what Democrats will actually do once in power. What I hope they do is balanced, measured, mature and democratic: Most Americans just want some sort of rational independent-style broad form of “centrism” to occur. *(Independents make up the highest number of Americans now, at 45%. The broad middle shows higher numbers than the extremes on Left or Right.) If Democrats can shift us back towards the middle, even just a little bit, and can block most of Trump’s madness, then we’ll be going in the right direction.

Do I worry about the small DSA “coalition”? Yes. Does Abdul El-Sayed worry me? Honestly: Maybe. I don’t know. He mostly seems to me like a more or less run-of-the-mill Progressive Democrat who also happens to be Muslim. I have seen no evidence that he actually wants to implement “Sharia Law” nor that he has any genuine, current connection to The Muslim Brotherhood minus vague smear campaigns. (If evidence does arise I will change my tune on him.)

So he’s Muslim: Who cares? I don’t care about any candidates’ race, religion, ethnicity, gender, etc: Can they govern? Do they love America and respect the Democratic process? That’s all that really matters. *(I am definitely AGAINST Sayed’s views on Israel. But that’s ok. We can disagree in this country; we have free speech for a good reason. I am against any and all far-left Progressive or DSA candidates, but that’s my own biased opinion. If Sayed tries to implement antisemitic ideas I assume this will be pushed back against, as it obviously should be.)

So what now?

I want to see Democrats push back hard against Trump, but in a rational and measured manner. We don’t want an “equal and opposite” reaction against Trump. Extremism IS the problem. We’ve seen plenty of extremism from Trump and the spineless Republican congress; there is no need for Democrats now to kowtow to their far-left DSA/Progressive wing therefore losing crucial momentum. Think about what Americans want, the voters, the Democratic constituency: Ending the unnecessary war with Iran; lower gas prices; a shift away from radicalism on either side of the political spectrum; lower cost of living; affordable housing; a focus on crime; more or at least stable funding of police; targeting the extreme wealth gap; etc.

This is our moment, the moment for all of us who have been scratching our heads at the rise and sustaining of Trump for the past decade-plus now. Even when he was out of power during Biden’s reign he was never really out of power politically and culturally. Trump thankfully rules in a nation where dictatorship is next to impossible. And he is not a “fascist,” a true “authoritarian” or a “dictator.” But he has surely brought us as close as we’ve ever seen in the direction of those movements in this country, and that is frightening to the very bones.

Our system still works. The people have spoken. Even the states that haven’t gone blue in forever have switched.

I never blamed the Trump voters: They were, like all voters, looking out for their own interests, they were understandably dissatisfied with corporate elite Democrats who have lost touch with the working-class and with the people and have moved too far to the left where only a tiny minority of mostly young white people exist; farmers who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 switched for Trump in 2016. Twelve percent of Bernie Sanders primary voters in 2016 switched to Trump in the general. Record numbers of Black, Latino and Asian voters rose up for Trump in 2024. It’s not about race, at least not entirely by a long shot.

Even now, the Democratic win probably wasn’t because Democrats did such a good job, though they obviously worked hard. Mostly it was a clear, definitive rebuke and rejection of Donald Trump and the current spineless Republican congress. It was more of a Protest Vote against Trump than a mandate vote for Democrats. We won’t know for sure if this is a correct analysis until we get more data and exit polling, but that’s my initial theory.

Democrats have a real opportunity here. I am glad they dominated.

Let’s pray they don’t fuck it up like they’ve fucked up everything else the past decade.

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I have argued endlessly over the years that “true” writers are born, not made. That writing is, in essence, an innate and not learned skill, like the behavior of humans which stems from genetics versus environment.

I still think this is true.

That’s not to say, of course, that writing is some radically exclusive club or that I, Michael Mohr, somehow have a magic wand and get to lay down the law of who is or isn’t “a writer.” And that’s not to say that writing in the broad sense hasn’t been cracked open in an obviously more democratic way a la computers, the internet, social media, email, Word programs, the digital landscape, etc.

In many ways these are good things. The writing world has been opened up from a small minority to more or less anyone. The MFA has created an environment wherein young people want to learn the craft in a formal setting spending a lot of money and often going into debt to do so, debt which most of them will be paying back for decades with interest.

My argument isn’t that only “certain people” should be able to write. Like I said, I think it’s a good thing, mostly, that writing is much more accessible and available to the masses. Yet I also do think—and this has somehow now been labeled as “pretentious” and controversial, not to mention exclusive—that the notion of creative writing being a serious art, a craft, an innate talent which someone hones for many years and unfurls over time, has been largely lost.

But it’s an odd thing to rage against, isn’t it, the idea of writing being a serious and innate art? And not just an art but a feeling, a spiritual inner urge and drive, a genetic disposition, a compulsion, an obsession, a need to express experience through language on the page, and also a lifestyle, a way of seeing, a way of knowing, understanding and grasping yourself, experience and the world.

Here’s George Orwell in the opening paragraph of his epic essay Why I Write:

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.”

Again, that isn’t to say that someone who perhaps lacks that innate drive can’t write at all or necessarily lacks literary talent or can’t greatly improve their craft. However, with the truly profound and meaningful writers—Homer, Virgil, Dante, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bellow, Hemingway, Baldwin, DFW, McCarthy, etc—I just don’t buy the idea that these authors “learned” without any innate talent, “how to write.” Something deeper, mysterious, and probably genetic on some level moved these people and was foundational to their skill.

~

What is the “purpose” or “point” of writing? Or rather, more pointedly: What is the point of writing novels, aka of creating fiction?

This is of course a complex and challenging question and there isn’t really one “correct” answer. Even though Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, both written nearly 3,000 years ago, were “epic poems,” by today’s standards they may be viewed in some ways (this is perhaps a bit revisionist) as the world’s first “novels.” They are poems, yes, but they are essentially narrative in form, telling stories with plots, tension, characters, beginnings, middles and ends, etc.

So what is the point?

Well on the most basic level I suppose I’d say that fiction’s purpose has been to reflect humans back to themselves in complex and imaginative ways which are unavailable to nonfiction, aka histories, biographies, even memoirs. But as some say, the irony seems to be that, when a writer is allowed to fudge “the truth” (meaning something approximating “objective truth,” according to our five senses) he or she can actually end up producing something which is in a sense more honest than the “objective truth”—I put quotation marks around this phrase because, as Schopenhauer suggests, every person perceives “reality” differently—and more “true” to our essential humanness. In other words: By dancing around the physical “truth” and creating something made up we can actually perceive deeper emotional, psychological, and spiritual truths about Man.

“This is why the same external events or circumstances affect no two people alike; even with perfectly similar surroundings every one lives in a world of his own.”

~Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (1851)

So I guess what I’m saying is: One purpose of fiction is to tell ourselves deeper truths which can’t be located in other ways. Ideally a master author can do this in a “universal” way, pointing to ancient handed-down traditions, whether oral or written, and ancient symbols and themes such as love, the inevitability of death, striving for success, war, grief, happiness, glory, the rise and fall of civilizations, facing fear, power, manhood, womanhood, rites of passage, etc.

Another purpose for fiction is, of course, more commercial: To entertain.

There are some exceptions. David Foster Wallace’s famous 1996 magnum opus, Infinite Jest, at just over 1,000 pages (over 480,000 words), is a good example. The novel is brilliant, no question. And there are sections of incredible depth, nuance, symbolism, universality and, yes, entertainment. But let’s face it: The novel is, for the most part, a fucking slog. Ditto Tolstoy’s War and Peace. These novels can be entertaining, for sure, but in general they prize literary brilliance, style, depth, themes, metaphors and ideas over fast, easy plots and pure enjoyment. (There are plenty more beyond these two examples, obviously.)

But for the most part the idea is to both “feel into truth” and also entertain. Reading fiction is an escape, among other things. Up until very recently, books were the primary mode of entertainment, in fact. Before the advent of the radio in the 1920s, the cinema around the same time, computers in the 1950s, television in the same, the internet in the 1980s, and the rise of social media and iPhones in the early-mid 2000s, there were books.

Again, in a sense extending all the way back to ancient Greece and even before, likely to the ancient Babylonians, ancient Egyptians in some form, etc. Gilgamesh was written over 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. Before things written down on clay tablets or papyrus there were oral stories handed down. There was physical art on structures and inside caves which told visual stories.

So the idea seems to be for fiction to show us who we actually are, as limited, complex souls, and to entertain us while doing so. What else?

Good, quality novels—literature—ideally also challenge you intellectually and make you think. They disrupt your casual, easy assumptions. They force you to see yourself in new lights. They bring up potent questions about morality, fairness, ethics, politics, fame, and many other ideas.

So:

1. Teach us about our truest, deepest selves.

2. Entertain us

3. Make us think.

Anything else?

Well, I’d add a fourth thing: They help us empathize with other people. When you read someone’s novel, you’re basically—figuratively—sliding into their skin, or rather into the skins of their characters. Beyond direct lived experience, it’s hard to imagine a better way of learning what it’s like to be someone else. This helps us flex our empathy muscle and to see that in one way all humans share an incredible amount—the universal speaks to us all, young and old, west and east, male and female, gay and straight, etc—but it also zooms the microscope in and helps us understand what life is like in more specificity, individuality and detail than we would normally be privy to. There is something special, magical, organic and brilliant about that. We can inhabit the figurative skin of another human being just by reading lines across many pages. Wow.

~

In modern times I have to say that it certainly feels—broadly speaking—as if the showing us our deeper, truer selves; making us think and challenging our assumptions; and helping us to empathize have all largely been reduced (not completely but by a big amount) and what is mostly left, say 75%, is a mix of political culture war virtue-signaling, the narcissism of small differences (“my experience versus yours”), group-think, TikTok narrative writing, and, of course, the old classic, entertainment.

That’s not to say there aren’t contemporary novels which explore all the things I mentioned above: Showing us our truer selves; entertaining; making us think; and empathy. Even authors like Sally Rooney, I would argue, attempt to do this, even if they mostly (in my opinion) fail. I recently read the 2026 Marlon James novel, The Disappearers. Though I had plenty of criticisms (and some big praise) of the novel, I absolutely felt that he was trying to nail all these concepts; actually, contrary to most modern literature, if anything James was weakest on entertainment and was focused more on depth, empathy, and thinking, even if, again, I felt he often (but not always) largely failed in this attempt. Miranda July’s All Fours worked in all the concepts, I think.

Anyway. Sadly, Americans every year read fewer and fewer books. And it does seem that the quality of the novels being read appears to be dropping in general. This isn’t surprising given that racial and gender identity has more and more seemed to take over the academy and major publishing which of course leads to some very poor novels which are published less because of merit or quality and more because of the author’s skin pigmentation, gender identity, political ideas, or minority standing.

For a while now—perhaps a decade or more—fiction readers have been asked again and again to plug their noses and praise bad books in the name of DEI, whether it’s the antisemitic socialist Sally Rooney or gay Black authors like Brandon Taylor and Ta-nehisi Coates or else propaganda fiction by some radicals in the LGBTQ community, etc.

Obviously, your race is irrelevant when it comes to literature. James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Zadie Smith, Thomas Chatterton Williams and Richard Wright, among others are some of my all-time favorite modern American authors, and all of these writers are Black or half-Black. is Native American and brilliant. Toni Morrison, Zora Neal Hurston, Alice Walker, etc. And I don’t think any real reader gives a shit what the gender or sexual orientation is of the author (Baldwin was both Black and gay).

What matters is whether the writing is good, whether the fiction works, and whether we as readers feel blown away.

Marlon James’s The Disappearers had a lot of shock value: Absolutely brutal physical violence; insane hardcore sex and rape. I will defend James’s writing here one hundred percent on free speech and literary grounds. And yet, much of his book, as an example, felt to me too slow-paced, too contrived, and too interested in the sex and violence for simple shock value, which felt banal to me.

Sometimes a novel needs a whole lot of sex, rape, violence, you name it. Baldwin’s incredible, ruthless essay called Going to Meet the Man (1965) about white Southern racists brutally hanging, burning alive and castrating before killing an innocent Black man accused of raping a white woman, is a genius use of violence. That story feels like an angry accusation, as if Baldwin is looking at you dead in the eyes and saying, Pick a side. It’s a moral play, done stunningly well.

There does seem to be an underground sort of “outsider art” revival, though, of serious, quality fiction, from all races and genders, and it seems to largely be coming out of places like Substack. We’re in an era where big structures are slowly toppling, in our case major publishing. The heathens—those writers like me who have some work published but never got an agent or a traditional book deal—have been rattling the gates for decades and the past half decade or so (COVID was a big motivator and was what brought Substack into the public arena) and have finally broken those gates down for the most part.

Now anyone can do it and promote it and it’s a true free speech and meritocratic environment. No one gets rejected for being a WSM or a Black Conservative writer or a non-feminist female writer, etc. Everyone gets a chance. No one is turned away. Even Nazis (they are rare). It’s the true democracy, the true meritocracy. If you write it and put it out there and it works: You’re in. If it doesn’t it doesn’t; and this is how it should be.

The ultimate irony is that now we’re seeing more and more major publishers, traditional literary magazines, and, especially lately, tons of NYC literary agents joining Substack in a seeming fit of desperation trying to snag new clients and take a look at The New Literary Wild West. And why wouldn’t they? This is where most of the talent is turning.

As we all now well know, most traditionally published debut novels sell less than 5,000 copies, and on top of that you don’t control your editing, your cover image, your PR, etc. Plus it takes a whole year from publisher acceptance to publication date. Why wait? Why not just put your work out there with very little money, doing it your way and on your schedule, with complete control over cover design, language, editing, etc. If you want you can spend a little money on a freelance book editor like me. Or not; your call. *(But cover design can be done using KDP and/or AI. And you can get free beta readers and even very low-cost editing.)

Just like with traditional publishing, Substack has a lot of bad writing on the platform. But there are also some hidden and not-so-hidden gems. Either way, you’ll find hundreds of thousands of writers and would-be writers, wannabes and even geniuses on the platform; all you have to do is look, listen and read. Like the northern Vikings sacking the Angle and Saxon tribes in England in the 8^th and 9^th centuries, the writers—both “true” and fakers—have finally busted down the doors.

I see this mostly as a good (if messy) thing. At a minimum, generally speaking, it brings us closer to the ages-old, broadly agreed upon purpose of fiction.

*Read more cultural satire:

1. What happens when a white working-class writer lies to a literary agent convincing her he’s actually a Black trans man?

2. What happens when a young man meets an asshole in 1950s Cuba named Ernest Hemingway?

~

He didn’t want to go to the party and he already had a queasy suspicion that something would go wrong.

But, his girlfriend wanted to go and, this being the case, more or less as always, he finally relented. Evan and Jeannette lived in East Harlem, ironically just a couple blocks north of James Baldwin Place, where the famous author had once upon a time, in the 1940s, lived. Ironic because everyone—their small literary circle of friends in Manhattan and Brooklyn—called Evan The White James Baldwin, after the Black author James Baldwin, of course. This designation had always made Evan think of Baldwin’s good equally famous white author friend, Norman Mailer, who in the 1950s had published his famous essay, The White Negro.

This sometimes put Evan in weird situations, especially with Progressives in New York City, because, having read every book, fiction or non, ever published by Baldwin, Evan had an inherent depth and contrarian nature, and an intrinsic love of nuance and complexity, which often led Evan to contradict many young Progressives’ false notions of who Baldwin had been and what, in fact, he’d actually believed.

This was just the type of party that worried him. Two in the afternoon in Crown Heights, with Jeannette’s undergrad Progressive friends from NYU who were all doing MFAs hoping to be successful writers. They were all in their very early twenties, a decade younger than Evan and Jeannette. Jeannette was their teacher, in fact; she taught a Race and Class in American Literature course at NYU. (She was half-white, half-Black.) And so, already feeling put out, Evan didn’t want to go.

As they walked the seven minutes from the subway stop to the apartment, Evan thought about what his life had been like a decade ago, when he was these kids’ ages. Like Baldwin, he had not even gone to college. Though Evan hadn’t grown up poor like Baldwin—he’d been born and raised in the white working-class in Indiana—he had certainly not come from wealth and class privilege. Kids today slobbered over college and especially the damn MFA—the most pointless scam in America, Evan felt—but they didn’t realize that everyone from Dostoevsky to George Orwell to James Baldwin to Jack Kerouac to Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald either hadn’t gone to college, had dropped out of college, or had studied something having nothing to do with either writing or literature.

Evan hadn’t been able to afford college and there’d been no way a white boy like him would have been able to get a scholarship. In this era you had to be Black, brown or trans in order for that reality to occur. This was, of course, an exaggeration, but not by much.

He’d left Fort Wayne, Indiana, at the tender age of 19—the same age Baldwin left Harlem for Greenwich Village in 1943—and had moved, with $500 in savings, no job, no car and no connections, to Manhattan, taking a Greyhound bus. He’d struggled but he’d made it: He’d rented a cheap tiny room in an apartment in Harlem and had started washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant on West 57^th Street near Columbus Circle. Then he quit a month later and started bussing tables at a Greek place. Three months after that he got a job finally serving tables at a French spot in the Village. (Baldwin had also worked serving tables at a famous Village restaurant called Calypso in the 1940s.)

Evan had saved up for two years before finally quitting and managing a different French restaurant in Tribeca where he still worked now. He made good money, he had weekends off, he answered to no one but his regional boss and the corporate higher ups. It was easy at this point. All he did was work, read Baldwin’s books, and explore the city. It was here, in this very French restaurant, that, three years prior, he’d met a customer, a beautiful woman—blond, half-Black half-white, tall, thin, classy and with notable fashion style—who had just started teaching a Lit and Race class at NYU.

“Well,” Jeannette said, eyeing him, both of them stopped and standing in front of a crimson door at an old brownstone apartment. “We’re here.”

Jarred out of his reverie—he often spent time in his imagination—leaning in for a kiss, he said, “Let the games begin.”

She stared up at him. “Promise me you’ll be good.”

“I’m always good.” He smiled widely.

“Shut up.”

“Scout’s Honor,” he said.

“Don’t drink too much,” she said.

This irritated him. But he forced the smile back like jacking up a car’s wheel in order to replace it with a spare tire. “Of course.”

She knocked and they waited. He heard the soft blue melancholy of jazz playing behind the door, possibly Thelonious Monk.

A moment later the red door swung open and a short, skinny white kid stood there, beaming dumbly at them. The kid wore a white tucked-in collared shirt, trendy pre-torn jeans, black high-top Vans. Pseudo post-hipster.

“Hey guys,” he beamed. Evan tried to grin. “Hi, Mrs. Winterson,” he said, laughing and hugging his teacher, Evan’s girlfriend. The kid might have been twenty, maybe twenty-one. It was a graduate program.

They shuffled in, Dominic (the kid) shaking Evan’s hand. Dominic seemed friendly enough. The jazz was a little louder now, and there were people here and there.

“C’mon,” Dominic said, “Party’s in the back yard.”

They followed him through the house, zigzagging around people, before winding through a big open kitchen, going through yet another door, and at last being deposited in the massive, protected backyard, where perhaps 100 people stood around loudly chattering and talking all at once, with the jazz now somewhat loud in the background. There was a grill where smoke was rising and food was being cooked. He smelled this and realized he was hungry. There was the low-cut green grass everywhere. People of all races and genders happily, half-drunkenly chattering. Chairs everywhere. A fire pit, which gave off a strong whiff of wildfire and thick smoke.

“Have fun,” Dominic pronounced, before trotting off lazily.

Jeannette looked at Evan and smiled, taking his hand in hers. Just this simple act made him begin to get hard, and he glanced around nervously hoping no one had somehow noticed. He leaned down and kissed her, sliding his tongue in for a moment.

“I love you,” she said plaintively, gazing up at him.

As always, he felt a rush of love for her, a feeling unsurpassed by any woman he’d been with before her, bar none. It was in these moments that he sensed the beauty of love, of commitment, and envisioned their long future together. He’d already bought a ring. Three years was long enough. He planned to ask her next month, on her birthday, at a fancy dinner they had on the calendar on the rooftop at a dazzling, pricey restaurant on the 45^th floor near Wall Street. He’d known from the moment they met. His feelings had only deepened with time.

“I love you, too,” he said.

“Be good,” she reprimanded, grinning.

He rolled his eyes. “I was born good.”

She scoffed and then wandered away, as if a person stepping slowly deeper and deeper into a lake which they’ll soon dive into fully and begin swimming away.

He stood there, already feeling lonely and uncomfortable. He hated parties like these. Mandatory social occasions. He wasn’t good at small talk. He didn’t particularly love people, which was ironic given that he’d worked in the service industry for so long. But that was work. He could fake it at work. But at a party? In real life? On his own? With people he didn’t know?

He scanned the surroundings slowly, seeing all kinds of people, watching them smile and talk, their mouths opening and closing incessantly, eyes widening and half closing, almost everyone carrying some kind of alcoholic beverage whether it be a red cub from the keg across the lawn which he now spied, or else a glass bottle of what looked like Blue Moon Pilsner. Some smoked cigarettes, which he smelled from here like a heavy, nasty aftertaste. Nasty only because he wasn’t smoking himself. He was, after all a big drinker and smoker…just like Baldwin.

He decided to aim for the massive silver keg, the afternoon late summer sun glinting its harsh yellow rays off the thing like yellow knives, which made him think of Camus’s The Stranger. Evan started his journey, awkwardly smiling and saying “excuse me” while artlessly zigzagging through and around the myriad people, the people who all seemed to belong and fit in somehow whereas he, clearly, was an outsider.

He’d always felt that way, like an outsider. Even as a child growing up in Fort Wayne he’d felt like a freak. Always he’d been “different.” Sensitive, moody, brooding, a book reader, friends far and few between. He liked hanging out with girls even more than boys until around 5^th grade when he’d met Luke Changon who became his best friend. Luke was trouble. Black, from Philly originally, and poor. He was on public assistance.

He and Luke somehow strangely connected and they became inseparable. They “canned” cars on the highway, prank-called neighbors, broke into houses in the middle of the night and stole random shit, and generally caused havoc. Luke had come from a stereotypical “Black American Family.” Dad split when he was young. Single mom, only 16 when he was born. Five siblings. Welfare. Social Security income. Dysfunction and alcoholism from Mom and in the family at large. Luke sometimes stayed with his paternal grandparents outside of Philly.

They went to the same public high school—Fort Wayne High—but broke with each other junior year, when Luke started getting into more serious trouble and Evan began working part-time jobs on weekends and in summer and reading books constantly, always more or less in seclusion, feeling lonely and alienated from everyone else in his life…except for girls. He always chased girls. There was often a girlfriend, some hot, chipper chick who thought they could “save” him. Eventually, just after high school, Luke started shooting heroin, selling crack and stealing cars. He was caught and sent to prison for several years. At first Evan wrote letters to his old pal but over the months the letters stopped. They hadn’t talked in 15 years at this point.

He grabbed a red cup and filled it with beer, chugging it all down in one fast glug. He poured another one and did the same, before finally pouring a third, wiping his lips and chin, and scanning around him. Around the firepit were a dozen haphazardly placed hard plastic chairs. Several were empty. Some very attractive young women were sitting in some, chatting away about Lord knew what, and two young white men were sitting on the other side. Between the two men and the women he arrowed himself.

As he approached them from behind he heard one of the young men saying, “I mean it’s definitely a Genocide, no fucking question there. Fucking Zionist pricks.”

Evan coughed on purpose. “This seat taken? Mind if I sit?”

“Go ahead,” one of the men said, a small head, thick brown beard, prescription glasses, a collared green shirt, black corduroy pants, polished black boots, and what appeared to be a green glass bottle of some kind of liquor planted in his lap.

“Thank you,” Evan said, sitting.

“I’m Herman,” the kid said. He glanced at his friend, who looked shorter, fatter, with a pug nose and blue eyes. “This is Jamie.”

“Nice to meet you both.” He took a swig of his beer. “I’m Evan.”

“Wait,” Herman said, slightly adjusting his glasses, “Evan Dawson? As in Prof Winterson’s husband?”

He jacked up yet another fake smile. “Boyfriend…but yes.”

Herman glanced at his buddy and they seemed to momentarily exchange a secret look. Then Herman stared at Evan and said, “They call you The White James Baldwin.”

This struck Evan hard, like an unexpected punch to the gut. How would this kid know such information?

“No, you must be mistaken,” Evan said, grinning against his lie.

The two kids laughed at each other and then Herman faced him again and said, “No. I’m sure. It’s you. Evan Dawson. Prof Winterson’s husb—boyfriend. The White James Baldwin. You, like, debated some Black professor on Baldwin a year ago, at NYU.”

Irritated yet also impressed, Evan took another swig of beer and then said, “Alright. Ok. Fine. Good investigative work. You caught me. It’s true. I am he.”

Herman’s smile spread across his face like a never-ending desert stretching for interminable miles. “Fuckin-A. You’re like a minor NYU celebrity, man.”

This made Evan chuckle. “What you got in that bottle in your lap?”

“This?” Herman said, smiling. He lifted the bottle. It was three-quarters full. “Bourbon.”

Evan, glugging down the rest of his cup, said, “Mind if I have some?”

Herman laughed along with his friend. “Not at all.”

Evan offered his cup but Herman waved it away. Instead he drank straight from the bottle and then, wiping his lips, he handed the thing over. Evan snatched it and took a deep, satisfying drink.

“Ahhhh,” Evan sighed, after removing the bottle from his mouth. “Now that is what the doctor ordered.”

They went back and forth like this, between the three of them for a while. The jazz music at some point switched to The Doors, the first self-titled album and Jimbo was blaring out with Break on through to the other side!

Everything was fine, the fire was warming them even though they didn’t need the warmth since it was only three in the afternoon, he’d even eaten a burger at this point, and the bottle was more than halfway finished, and he felt tipsy which was his sweet spot—the spot he loved just before he slid over the edge of the other side into the darkness, sometimes—until a Black older man, perhaps 40, walked over and plunked down directly across the firepit from the three men.

The man was thin, maybe 5’9, with medium Black skin and natty thick tangled hair. He wore creased dark brown Dockers, black boots, and a black high turtleneck. In fact, eyeing him curiously now, Evan realized he actually sort of looked a little like…James Baldwin.

“Hello, Prof Neely,” Herman said, clutching the bottle. “Want some bourbon?”

“No thank you, Herman. It’s a little too early for me.”

“Suit yourself,” Herman said.

There was a strained silence which was finally filled when Herman said, “Prof Neely, this is Evan Dawson, also known as The White James Baldwin.”

Evan blanched, feeling his face cringing. His heart rate sped up. Herman continued, “Evan, this is Jonathan J. Neely, aka Prof Neely, NYU professor of a famous course everyone loves called Race and Literature.”

Evan faced Neely across the firepit, perhaps a distance of ten or twelve feet, and their eyes locked. There seemed to be something in the vein of a staring contest for a minute before Neely smiled superficially and said, “I know your girlfriend, of course. Jeannette. We teach in the same department.”

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It’s truly amazing to me how ignorant and foolish the Left has become. Their fatal flaw, I think, is misunderstanding WHY Trump came to power. Obviously, despite what some progressives claim, there was no one reason why this occurred. Progressives will often lazily just call it “white supremacy” or “racism.” But this, while surely playing some role among some Trump voters, only accounts for a minority of votes.

What mostly drove Trump’s win in 2016 was a mix of factors, including economic anger by the white rural working-class who were struggling more than ever with lack of jobs, stagnant wages (in many sectors slowly descending since the 1970s) and unfair competition with cheap labor in Asia and South America coupled with cheap illegal labor here at home. What happened in the 1990s under Clinton? NAFTA. This hurt the working-class in many areas, alongside automation, shipping jobs overseas, more trade with China, etc.

Also, though, two crucial points to keep in mind. Despite Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by three million ballots, she ran a weak campaign, famously not even visiting key swing states such as Wisconsin. In American politics it’s the electoral college and swing states that rule supreme.

In addition, large swaths of the country who had voted for Obama—in case you forgot the first Black president in American history—not once but twice in 2008 and 2012...then switched for Trump; enough to make a major difference. (Kind of damages the racism claim.) But also: Fewer Latinos and Black voters chose Clinton as a whole; they either voted for Trump, no one, or a third party. Clinton won 3.65 million votes fewer than Obama in 2008. A higher share of voters liked neither candidate. And yes, immigration and racial resentment did have some impact.

So most people were reacting to economic factors, a badly run Democratic campaign, and social/cultural change.

This last one is key.

Wokeism—or hard progressivism—has been around for a long time in one form or another, probably since the 19^th century in some proto-form but an earlier, less identity-based pseudo-form really exploded first in the 1920s and then even more so in the 1960s. (In the 1920s it was more class-focused whereas in the 1960s it was more about identity.) The ideas were interesting back then, and some were inevitable, necessary and righteous, such as second-wave feminism and of course post-1950s Civil Rights, helping to end the disastrous Vietnam War, producing more of a social welfare state (this one is complicated and mixed), etc.

But some of the ideas, like resurfacing Marxism and identity politics, were terrible ideas.

These ideas mostly went underground circa the 1980s under Reagan. Boomers grew up and became adults; many voted for Reagan. But the ideas didn’t totally go away, especially in the academy, book publishing, and other higher-education and/or intellectual leftist circles. Around 2012, 2013, Wokeism again poked its ugly, race-essentialist head out. Now we had a resurgence of “critical theory” and “intersectionality,” both of which had been around for decades but had been culturally sleeping in the shadows.

The shit hit the fan, of course, when Trump stepped down that elevator in June, 2015. Trump was and is so crazy and vapid and extreme—and so mired in his own brand of White Identity Politics—that he actually pushed Wokeism into the mainstream by allowing extremist hacks like AOC and others to gain real political power in the midterms of 2018. Things have been unraveling ever since, for the past decade now.

The problem is obvious: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Ronald Reagan was a reaction to Jimmy Carter and the FDR New Deal coalition. Bill Clinton was a reaction against George H.W. Bush. George W. Bush, the son, was a reaction to Clinton’s moderate neo-liberalism. Obama was a reaction to GW Bush’s “war on terrorism” and extremism re torture, nation-building, Iraq, Afghanistan, exporting “democracy,” and the far-right brand of conservatism; etc.

Obviously, there were other, more nuanced and complex factors involved in each new presidency; I am simply highlighting one glaring generality.

And, of course, Donald Trump—the silly narcissist former talk-show host—was and is a reaction not so much against Obama himself, who was wildly moderate in spite of his 2008 campaign, but against what the Obama coalition represented which was left-of-center multiculturalism, more open immigration (which turned out in reality to not be true, i.e. Obama as “the deporter-in-chief”), more focus on LGBTQ, more elitism, aka: More of what conservatives didn’t want.

I agree, Trump was a HORRIBLE answer to that question for the Right. But Trump was an answer to the question: What kind of country do we want to be?

Political correctness and Wokeism may not have burst out and exploded until the 1960s and again in 2013…but it never fully died, as I said. The New Age version did have a new shelf-life beginning in the culture of the 1990s. This is one reason why the midterms of 1994 brought in the most virulent right-wing nuts around, and why Christianity went on the defensive (there were other causes as well).

All this to say: None of this should be surprising.

What America needs and what most Americans want is moderation. Statistically, more voters are in the center than on the extremes of either side. The problem is that both Right and Left have been captured the past decade more and more by their minority extremes. On the Right the mainstream has largely—but definitely not entirely!—rejected this element: Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, hardcore antisemites, etc. But on the Left this is not the case. Jason Arday. Nikole Hannah-Jones. Ibram X. Kendi. Robin DeAngelo. Hasan Piker. I could go on and on here. Not only have these people not been publicly rejected by mainstream Democrats (some have but very few), they have often been given massive platforms and widely praised, such as The New York Times giving Piker a big stage. (This is a man who harshly criticizes Israel and supports Hamas, a literal terror death cult.)

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There were the mountains, the valley and the forest below, over a thousand feet down. A wide, blue river snaked calmly through the middle of the valley. Sharp outcroppings of exposed, bald granite rock protruded in many places. Here and there homes with black roofs perched along the lower sections of mountains. Gleaming railroad tracks sat a little above the deepest cut of the valley where trains sometimes chugged along, creating sudden wild noise and occasionally crossing the river via bridges.

Thick patches of snow appeared dotted along the mountains and hillsides.

Today—in early March—it was a blue, sunny day out with slowly grazing white puffy clouds like massive floating cows in the sky chewing on cud. It was still cold out, the season sluggishly morphing in daily shades from the brutal cold of winter to the still cold but warmer reality of early spring. Central Colorado with its elevation and its jagged snow-capped mountain peaks and the scenery herein described. A thin, narrow backcountry road ribboned down below in the valley, which took you east across the land in the direction of Kansas.

Standing on the top of a ragged hilltop, far above the valley like some ancient Grecian god, Zeus perhaps, a man appeared. The man was in his late thirties, copper-skinned, American but of Spanish heritage going back many generations to well before the Spanish Civil War. His name was Jonas. His wife had died seven years prior of breast cancer. Here he was, alone, no kids, no wife, in the year of our Lord 1992. He stood atop the hill gazing around at the mountains and the forest and the valley below and he felt exhausted.

He’d gone on a backpacking trip, solo, knowing very little about the area. He lived just outside of Boise, Idaho and had never been in this part of the country before, even if he had once been to Denver. A long time ago he’d been a bank teller at Wells Fargo and, before that, he’d even briefly been to college at Idaho State studying civil engineering until his father went into terrible gambling debt and he dropped out sophomore year to help the family out on the farm where they raised sheep, cows, chickens and goats.

During the years back home on the farm he met and married his wife, Maddie, and they agreed on not having kids. Both were only children. Both had career aspirations which they wanted to focus on instead of kids: She wanted to teach acting at a local theatre, maybe even one day in New York, and he wanted to build bridges one day, finishing his education. But in the end his father became sick with a rare skin cancer and he had to not only work but caretake for his father for over two years until the old man died. When his father passed all the old man’s debts were passed onto his son. Jonas and Maddie’s careers had to take a backseat.

And then Maddie, eight years ago now, was diagnosed with advanced stage four breast cancer. He took care of her and she was frequently hospitalized. She died and he fell into a depression. He had paid off his father’s debts and he received a reasonably large inheritance through Maddie which had been left for her from her own deceased Mother years prior. A few years of depression mixed with working as a common bank teller and slowly saving money and then he’d bought a small house in Boise and rented that out and now he was doing relatively well financially.

He’d come to Colorado, by car, to hike and reflect and sleep for a few nights out in the woods. Here he was, standing atop the steep forested hill, his heavy pack strapped onto his back, his wide-brimmed beige hat on, a thin string attaching it under his chin, his clothes stinky after three days out in the woods, the sharp, warm stench of his own sweat warm, fetid and fermenting (a smell he actually sort of strangely liked), and he was dead lost.

Somehow, he’d ended up off the main trail. It had happened at a section where it morphed from trail to shale rock to boulders and then forest and seemingly no trail. He’d turned around trying to backtrack but this had only made him more lost. Not an experienced hiker or backpacker he stupidly had no compass, no map, no idea what he was doing or where he was going. He had no clue where his car was at this point, parked at the original trailhead. All that morning and into early afternoon he’d been hiking hard, freezing in the early March crisp air, his breath pluming translucent plumes, until he’d found himself here, at the edge of this steep mountain, gazing down below at the vast and sinister beauty before him.

He was quickly running out of food: he had left only some trail-mix, a half block of yellow cheese, some salami and a handful of granola bars. For water he had one large bottle left and some iodine tablets which he could use with creek or river water to drink safely. The cold, especially at night, was brutal; it crept deeply into his bones despite the tent and two pairs of pants and thick wool socks and thick jacket with hood and beanie.

Here he was, 38 years old, and he had acted like a dumbass 20-year-old, inexperienced, clueless, not even telling anyone where he’d gone. He’d decided to backpack because his maternal grandfather, according to family legend, had been a frequent and skilled climber and, around the turn of the 20^th century, the old man had spent many long nights solo in the mountains, even catching his own animals for food, hunting, creating his own natural structures for sleeping, and had survived out in the wild alone for weeks on end without ever complaining or seeing other humans. (So the legend went, anyway.)

But he, Jonas Garcia, was not his grandfather, and by a longshot. He was, instead, an idiot, a know-nothing, a man as clueless about backpacking and hiking as William Jefferson Clinton who was most certainly primed to be the next president of the United States.

By his best guess he seemed to be a good five or six miles—perhaps a little less—from what appeared to be the nearest house across the valley and up a mountain across the land. It appeared to be a classic, authentic log cabin. Just now, a little after 11am, there was white-gray smoke billowing from the tall chimney which he could barely make out. He was already hungry. He’d barely slept last night. He’d been up hiking since dawn, around 6am.

“Well, fuck it,” Jonas said out loud, to no one, and he started along the trail in the general direction of the distant house on the hill across the forest and rock outcroppings and the valley.

As he hiked he sang old songs he’d learned as a kid in the 1960s. Born in 1954, less than a decade after the end of World War II and the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, he’d learned war songs from his father who, 43 years older than his son, had been a tough man with big arms, thick rugged shoulders, and a penchant for corporal punishment. He and his dad had never seen eye to eye but there’d also always been a strained, grudging mutual respect. He’d been closer with his mom, a woman 15 years his father’s junior who’d originally been his secretary at the real estate office. Taking care of his father during his sickness had mended the two men’s hearts and patched their disagreements and his father died on good terms with his son.

After about a mile, Jonas stopped and pulled his pack off. He was sweating fiercely—the sun was arrowing down against his face like it were slapping him—and he needed water. He set his heavy pack down and pulled out the bottle of water, opening the plastic cap and glugging like a desperate man seeking water in a vast, eternal desert.

Coughing and wiping his chin with his hand he then dug around his pack and pulled out the cheese, salami and trail-mix, eating like a poor man offered a free hamburger. He felt feral and savage, reckless and ignorant. A minor panic was quietly growing within him, inside his solar plexus like a slow-moving cancer he couldn’t treat and inevitably had to accept. There was something uniquely startling and terrifying about being alone and lost in the woods which seemed nearly indescribable.

Dirt streaked his jeans from a previous minor fall the day prior. Dirt was caked under each of his fingernails. He knew he reeked like shit. That fetid stench of the Great Outdoors, of dirt and nature and the brush.

Fifteen minutes later, after drinking, eating and briefly resting, he hucked on his pack again, now just slightly lighter, locking the belt buckle across his stomach and abdomen to keep the weight up on his back, and he kept going.

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He was smoking a Marlboro 100, sitting on an old purple plastic crate of rotting vegetables, clad in his beat-up leather jacket and wearing a blue beanie, loose torn jeans and with his deeply scuffed alligator boots, when she approached.

The crate was up against a beige, stained wall; he leaned his back against that wall, smoking and watching the woman as she slowly came closer and closer. His view was of the road and a convenience store 100 feet in front of where he sat, closed and silent with all its lights out.

It was 6:03 in the morning, cold and morose and quiet in the early Seattle air.

“Hi,” the woman said, sashaying.

She was short, blond, wearing a thick green rumpled dress, red high heels, red lipstick smeared against a pale, ghostlike face. Her eyes were almond with a sharp edge. He decided she was pretty, young, and probably either drunk and/or in some kind of trouble.

Jutting his chin the man said, “Hey.” He inhaled on his Marlboro, took the tobacco deeply into his lungs, and then sighed, blowing it back out his nose.

“Bum a smoke?” the woman said, now standing only five or six feet away from him.

Sitting still on the purple crate—his ass was slowly going half-numb—he coughed, cleared his throat with a little rattle, sniffled, and pulled out his pack, extracting one single Marlboro and handing it over. She took it, coming closer, and he pulled out his silver Zippo, flicking the clanking metal lid and rolling it to start fire. She bent, got it lit, and smiled, standing back again.

She couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20, he decided. He was 37.

For a moment they looked at each other in awkward silence, smoking. Then they averted their eyes and looked away. The road to the left of the closed convenience store was dead silent and looked cold and romantic to him.

“What are you some kind of sailor or something?” she said.

He puffed on his cigarette, eyeing her seriously in a studied, wise manner, and then said, adjusting his thick blue beanie, “Commercial fisherman. Alaska. Seasonal. I just got off a boat a few hours ago. I didn’t feel like getting a motel yet. Too hopped up on adrenaline. Wouldn’t sleep anyway.”

She gazed at him with genuine, sincere curiosity. “That sounds highly exciting. Adventurous. Thrilling.”

He laughed uncomfortably. “Sure. It’s very romantic. Jack London kind of thing. And it is. But it’s also an exhausting amount of work. We work like dead dogs.”

“I didn’t know dead dogs worked, given that they were dead.”

He smiled curiously at her and said, “What’s your name?”

She inhaled on her cancer-stick, looked away and said, “Darlene.”

“Reminds me of Jolene, that song by Dolly Parton.”

She chuckled. “Well I’m no Dolly Parton.”

They both laughed and then silence fell between them. They once more avoided each other’s eyes.

Finally he said, “My name’s Frank Ludd.”

“Darlene Edgarton.”

“Nice to meet you. How old are you, Darlene?”

She giggled. “Why? Trying to make sure I’m legal?”

Frank offered a half-assed fake grin. “Just curious.”

“How old do you think I am?”

Frank hated this psychological game. He hated games, period. Women had always been both his Achilles Heel and also his worst nightmare, not because of the women themselves but more because of his own failure to do things right. He was bad with women. He was bad with people, in general. He and a few guys working hard on the boat for four months was all he could stand. He was closing in on forty and he’d never been married; hell, he’d only been in two serious relationships and those had both ended badly. Mainly his tragic flaw was his lack of emotional depth. He had never understood emotions. Didn’t know what they were, how to handle them or what to do about them. Mostly he just drank, smoked and ignored them. When he needed to get laid he paid for a woman. Simple. Easy. Stable.

“I dunno,” Frank sighed. “Nineteen?”

She faced him then, her almond eyes penetrating his own, and it seemed like for the first time she was really, truly seeing him. It was almost as if this were the first woman who’d ever actually seen him. It drove a shiver down his spine and a ragged pulse in his solar plexus. Suddenly he felt alive and scared all at once. He didn’t know why. But he wasn’t angry, he didn’t think. Only hopeful somehow.

“Twenty-three,” Darlene said.

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I Tried Being a White Man for Three Years. It Didn’t Go As Planned.

Imagine it’s 2009, and you’re a freshman at a well-regarded liberal arts college who’s been admitted under a DEI policy intended to expand the presence of your identity group on campus. You’re scrolling Tumblr in your dorm room. You’re a little stoned, or you’re taking a three-hour “homework break,” or you’re contending with another bout of teenaged insomnia. You see someone’s reblogged an essay with the above headline. You see the accompanying photo. You think wait – what?! You click. I certainly would have.

If you were young person who dreamed of becoming a professional writer and was addicted to reading the internet between 2008 and 2016, then you saw confessional personal essays proliferating on sites like Thought Catalog, Jezebel, xoJane, the Awl, Buzzfeed, and the Hairpin. The headlines were grippingly lurid, Plath meets pulp: “I’m Not Going to Pretend That I’m Poor to Be Accepted By You” or “There Are No Black People in My Yoga Classes and I’m Suddenly Uncomfortable with It” or, most harrowingly, “On Falling In and Out of Love with My Dad.”

Click and you’d be treated to 1,500-word chunks of selfhood which writers – almost always women – used to advance the terms of “a politics” or “an identity,” as in this particularly uncomfortable example, or (much more optimistically) the notion of the writer herself as a known literary quantity.

There would be no grappling with ideas on the page here, no loose sallies of the mind. Instead, these essays were streamlined to reproduce a well-worn series of emotional beats. Shock, insurmountable obstacle, revelation. Oppression, raised consciousness, resistance. They were exceedingly shareable. They sparked outrage, and clapbacks. Accordingly, they often went viral. Their omnipresence and gray ethics caused Slate editor Laura Bennett to bemoan the “first-person industrial complex” in 2015. Two years later Jia Tolentino, herself a veteran of the form, pronounced the “personal essay boom over.”

“The Internet made the personal essay worse, as it does for most things,” Tolentino wrote, “but I am moved by the negotiation of vulnerability.” She admits to a nostalgia for encountering unusual new voices, watching novice essayists figure out “if they had something to say.” It was certainly a time when the unproven writer could at least take a stab at announcing herself, could even get so lucky as to be heard, agreed with and afforded a kind of thought leadership, however briefly.¹

Is the confessional personal essay a form for beginners that arrived with new media verticals and then vanished, as Tolentino claims, in the age of Trump? I doubt it, as Tolentino herself still writes them, however loath she may be to admit it. It’s a form of internet writing that fits hand-in-glove with her collapse-forecasting criticism, as well as the prevailing cultural discourse of the 2010s: identity as ethos, trauma as etiology, modernity and the white men who made it as victimizers of an inexorably damaged lumpen-marginalized.

Take this essay, published in the New Yorker after Donald Trump’s second inauguration. In it, she confesses that her grip on reality is slipping, that she struggles to differentiate between the AI-generated horrors her phone is showing her and the real ones, that though pink pussy hats are pathetic and quaint², our times are nevertheless relentlessly, miasmically unprecedented. Shock, insurmountable obstacle, revelation.

What is it about the confessional personal essay, anyway? Why do we still want to write and read them? For many – myself included – the impulse to explore and adumbrate one’s past feels quasi-automatic. “I tend to be a hypocrite. I decry confessional writing, but I write essays on Substack,” Audrey Lee admits in her viral essay against the personal essay. Girl, same. She correctly takes issue with the confessional personal essay’s obsessive inward gaze, its paralyzing fixation on womanhood-as-victimhood – a consequence, she maintains, of second-wave feminism’s philosophical advancement of the same. Lee concludes by opining that we ought to get out of our heads and into the wider world: more Didion, less Calloway.

Yes, and…as with every cliché, there’s something true about the confessional personal essay form. It’s a way of explaining where you are by way of where you’ve been, of accounting for who you are by way of what’s happened to you.

And while we are all far greater than the simple sum of our bodies and our pasts, we risk losing something important when we discount these things entirely. Erase them, and what grows up in their place looks like Bryan Johnson’s desperate quest for endless futurity and AI sex dolls and the Access Hollywood tapes; like whole neighborhoods being razed for new condo developments; like the grinding of the laboring body between the gears of “progress” and the attrition of the mind in pursuit of profit – or else just less pain.

Without the testimony of individual experience, we fear being drafted into a collective destiny we didn’t choose by oligarchic power brokers uninterested in preserving our freedom of choice. In such a situation, self-determination would be an impossibility, the individual narrative a luxury enjoyed by a powerful few. The rest of us become handmaidens to the onslaught of the future, charged with performing our menial tasks and forgetting our pasts.

Sure, it may sound like the stuff of Bluesky discourse or an HBO series, but it also describes cultish behavioral authoritarianism and the violent encounters happening behind closed doors that feminism’s second and third waves have long protested against. Sexual assault does have a way of bearing one back ceaselessly into the past, whether one wants to be borne back or not.

And yet…it’s equally possible to build a regime of the past as of the future, to erect monuments to one’s hurt and force others to bow before them or risk social reprisal. If ultra-wealthy tech men like Bryan Johnson appeal to a disembodied, AI-assisted future to adjudicate the pain of the present, then activists who advocate verbal acknowledgment of the stolen land I’m sitting on as I write this are appealing to the past for the same.

And as surely as Bryan Johnson will depart this mortal coil along with the rest of us, there is no speech act capable of reversing the colonization of the Americas. There is no diverse hiring policy that can retroactively correct the course of human history, no book deal that will banish an assault from memory, no staff writing job that, once occupied by a queer woman of color, will somehow result in Harvey Weinstein never having been born.

We personal essay confessionalists were right to think that the past ought to be grappled with through individual testimony, that the body has a whole lot to do with how we’re received in space. But we were wrong to think that justice can be extracted from symbols and speech-acts, power grabs and pile-ons.

If our vertiginous present is refreshing as quickly as Jia Tolentino’s feed, how can we expect it to deliver us from the injustices of the past, let alone the crimes of two minutes ago? Could it be the obsession with “fixing” injustice that finally broke our brains? Could it be all that good praxis, that increasingly rigid identitarian thinking, that transformed our equity-focused project into something not only leery of real inclusion and understanding, but turned resolutely against them?

I should know. I tried being a white man for three years, and it didn’t go as planned.

*

I certainly ticked every diagnostic box. Yes, I didn’t like how I felt in my body. No, I didn’t enjoy the performance of femaleness – in fact, its expectation felt like a violation. Yes, I was queer and eating-disordered and profoundly depressed and a little neuroatypical: all common comorbidities, as I’d learned both online and IRL.

Except, hold on, “comorbidity” is too medical, too pejorative a term to use here. Let’s say these were axes of my identity, symptoms of my uniqueness, to be advertised in my online bios and identified as sites of #resistance. I had already been systemically victimized because of these axes, which made me strong (if perpetually beleaguered) and therefore more likely to survive the rising tide of neofascism swelling around me.

The rights of all human beings to bodily autonomy and self-determination have always been core features of my belief system, and always will be. Had I become pregnant without wanting to, I would have gotten an abortion. Upon understanding that I’d become a woman without wanting to, I pulled the plug on my gender.

Yes, and…what did I want? My desires felt less political, less historic, less poetic than what I didn’t want. I wanted to stop spending all my brainpower figuring out how to get thinner. I wanted to unself-consciously flirt with other women instead of responding to the flirtations of men. I wanted to remove the firewall that seemed to prevent men in the academic and literary worlds from taking me seriously. I wanted to be less goddamn sad.

I became, via speech act and gender-affirming healthcare, a white millennial man in the summer of 2021. While DEI may have bottlenecked career opportunities for my kind, it had done nothing to decrease the social cache of white maleness. I was invited to book festivals and offered speaking engagements. I was taken more seriously by writers and scholars alike. The novel published under the name Rafael Frumkin sold better than the one published under the name Rebekah Frumkin.

I had pink hair, a bridge piercing, and a high-pitched voice: I was far from unclockable. But I still felt relieved. And other people seemed to share my relief. I just made more sense this way. Now we could all dispense with the stress of having to understand me as a woman. We could scuttle the past, refer to my “boyhood,” focus on the bright future ahead, my ongoing delivery from dysphoria.

And yet…there was no amount of cheerful goodwill, pronoun-correction, or burying my past that could change the fact of how I’d arrived at manhood, nor the type of manhood I’d arrived at. I was not the same as a Bernie bro named Kyle. I was not a heterosexual dude who enjoyed playing Fallout 4 in his basement, nor was I someone who’d grown up putting gum in the hair of girls I liked. I never played football to learn teamwork and discipline. I would never be at risk of building a goon cave, nor of chasing the perilous high of the “goonstate.” I would never recall memories of my father telling me to “man up and stop crying,” nor of getting beaten in fights with other boys. I didn’t feel seduced by the rhetoric of podcasters in the manosphere, nor did I spend years loyally imitating the prose of Ernest Hemingway or the poetry of Charles Bukowski.³ I didn’t think to myself, as the main character jokingly does in Torrey Peters’s novella “The Masker,” that I was forfeiting my chance to become President of the United States by transitioning – I didn’t imagine transition suddenly gave me a shot at it, either. It would have been delusional to think otherwise.⁴

I was a trans man. As in transfer, translate, transcontinental. Across, beyond, through. The very prefix announces a bodily “before,” a turbulent past that had delivered me to my present. In other words, I was a walking personal essay.

It was not a lack of access to gender-affirming healthcare nor the adversity of living as a trans person nor a sudden heel-turn away from self-determination – mine or anyone else’s – that ultimately burst my bubble. It was trying to maintain the impossible balancing act of both having and not having a past. My gender identity began to feel like yet another performance to be rigidly kept up. I stopped taking testosterone. Shock, insurmountable obstacle, revelation.

And what did I do, when I stopped living as a man? When I stopped living as a woman whose future was determined by the identity markers of her past? I started writing a book about it.

*

This is part one of a two-part essay. If you enjoyed, check out part two here!

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*Enjoy this 40-minute monologue where I discuss the long publishing journey of my first novel, The Crew. Agents, editing, school for writing, sobriety and more. This was the second episode of a podcast I briefly did about a year ago. I think it's valuable for anyone going through this process.

Lit agent essay

Lit agent essay #2

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I’m a published writer and developmental editor; I’ve been doing both for around 16 years. Along the way I successfully edited many books (both fiction and memoir), among them Christian Picciolini’s “White American Youth,” Deborah Holt Larkin’s “A Lovely Girl: The Tragedy of Olga Duncan and the Trial of One of California’s Most Notorious Killers,” and Gini Grossenbacher’s “Madam in Silk,” among many others.

Over the years I got my degree in writing from San Francisco State; I interned for a literary agent for nine months in 2013; I began getting my fiction published; I wrote 15 books; I started a Substack writing newsletter; and I edited hundreds of books. I also joined probably half a dozen freelance editing/writing sites, such as Upwork, the EFA (Editorial Freelancer’s Association, a great resource for new writers seeking editing), BAEF (Bay Area Editors’ Forum), Fiver, and more. During all this time I learned a LOT about what works and what doesn’t work for editing, both from my perspective and from the perspective of the author.

From this experience I include below a common list of Do’s and Don’ts:

DO:

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1. Before choosing an editor: Do some research. First: What type of editing do you actually need? Most new writers need structural/substantive aka developmental editing, NOT line or copy editing or proofreading, etc.

2. Do your homework regarding each editor you look at. What are their qualifications? How long have they been in the industry? Do they have proven, tested, published titles to tout? Do they have testimonials? Feel free to even email a few of the writers with testimonials to see what their experience was.

3. Be prepared to spend some money. Nowadays, sadly, the vast majority of new writers more or less want something for just about nothing. I can’t tell you how many writers have asked me to do free work, or have offered me rates so abysmally low that I couldn’t possibly respect myself if I took the gig. Quality costs bread, pure and simple. I charge 5 cents per word. So if your book were 80,000 words that’d be $4,000. I know. It’s a lot. Again: You pay for quality. It’s a tough one because the chances of a writer legitimately making money off their book are very slim. But most writers write out of love, not potential profit.

4. Accept as many of the suggested changes as you possibly can. In the end, yes, the book is ultimately YOURs, of your creation entirely. I would never, ever say that a writer should 100% accept every single suggestion from an editor. That would be foolhardy for anything in life…except perhaps a doctor. (Although not necessarily even then.)

That said: Do your very best to be receptive and grateful for the time, effort and energy your editor put in. If they’re a quality editor they labored hard on your book. Be thankful for that. Go over the manuscript slowly and scrupulously. Pause before emailing about a project. Take some deep breaths. Take notes. Think deeply.

Put the book away for a few days or a week or two, then come back to it and try your best to see it as objectively as you can. Remember: Your close friends and family do NOT represent the general reader. The general reader is hostile going in; they expect powerful writing and to be constantly entertained. An editor’s job is to prepare your book for serious scrutiny from strangers who have no emotional investment in you or your writing. You have to prove yourself.

5. Accept the hard fact that writing and producing a quality book takes TIME. So many new writers are incredibly impatient nowadays. Relax: This is not a contest to see who finishes first. It can often take three, six, nine months, even a year or longer (not often this long but sometimes) to get an early draft into tip-top shape. It requires emailing back and forth between editor and client; zoom calls; revisions; breaks; etc.

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DON’T

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1. Don’t TELL the experienced editor (especially as a new writer) how “things will go.” This is disturbingly common. “You’re going to edit at this rate at this speed and look at these things.” That’s like having very little to no clue how a car’s engine works and bringing the car into the mechanic and trying to tell them how to fix it. You obviously don’t know how to fix it, which is why it’s in the shop to begin with. Trust, people. Trust.

2. Don’t lowball the editor financially. Always pay what they ask. If you can’t afford the editor, find someone more affordable, or save up for the one you want. Also: Always, always, always pay on time. Don’t be one of “those” clients.

3. Don’t disrespect your editor’s time. A developmental edit is ONE go-through; any further edits or rounds cost another full price. (You heard me right.) We editors do this for a living. Remember that. Also: Yes, you can email back and forth and do a few zoom calls after an edit (admittedly, there is a lot to discuss and digest), but after that’s done, don’t consistently email or call your editor. They have a life, too, and of course “time is money.” Don’t be surprised if some editors charge for phone calls. Really, anytime we’re focusing on YOU we should be getting paid. Lawyers get paid the same way. How would you react if I started expecting you to do free phone calls about your work? Unhappy, is my guess.

4. Don’t expect an editor to make changes in your manuscript. An editor makes SUGGESTIONS, unless you have a prior understanding which changes this. Editors suggest changes; the author goes through the MS and makes (or doesn’t make) these changes. Then you discuss. The end.

5. Don’t be too sensitive about suggestions by an editor. Look, as a writer myself, I understand being sensitive. I do. It can hurt and feel very harsh and uncomfortable to have your words, your characters, your plot, your dialogue critiqued and marked-up. Most writers write to some degree in lonely isolation. You create this universe on the page and it’s very much your “baby.” Then some asshole goes through and marks all of it up and says you should do this, shouldn’t do that, etc. I get it. I’ve been there. It hurts. It’s painful. Emotional. You sometimes get angry, resentful, reactive.

But do yourself and your editor a favor: Take some deep, slow breaths; pause; put it away for a while if need be; and try to come to it as objectively as you can. Again: The editor is attempting to prepare the writer for the harsh, scrutinizing landscape of Random Readers. Believe me: Many readers will NOT have mercy. The editor is here to genuinely help. Trust that.

*Interested in having me edit your book? I look a literary fiction, YA, suspense novels, thrillers, and some other genres, plus memoir and biography. No science fiction, fantasy, etc. Unsure: Email me: michaelmohreditor(at)gmail(dot)com

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If you live under a rock you might not have heard of Jason Arday, DEI-Boy Extraordinaire. The fiasco started a couple months ago when Arday—a young Black British academic in his early 40s who had become the youngest Black professor in Cambridge University’s history at the age of 37—was accused of plagiarism by a “race scientist” named Nathan Cofnas.

It soon became clear that not only had Arday almost certainly plagiarized much of his doctoral thesis, but he actually also made up substantial elements of his life story. This reminds one of the plagiarizing and antisemitic Claudine Gay, former president of Harvard who resigned after accusations were made by Christopher Rufo and other right-wingers. For Progressives the idea seems to be that if the accusations come from the “wrong” people or political side, even if the claims are true, it is invalid and an unfair witch-hunt.

Arday claimed to be autistic and non-verbal until age 11, and to not be able to read or write until age 18. (As of this writing this claim has not been disproved but given his track record of fabulism and the unlikelihood of the claim it’s obvious to contemplate the veracity. Some former classmates have contradictory accounts of his childhood.) He claimed—insanely—to have run 600 miles in six days. He claimed a pig’s head was left at his parents’ doorstep as some kind of racist threat. Many of his claims have already been seriously questioned, criticized, and found to be false. And there so far have been over 100 alleged instances of plagiarism. (Cambridge is currently doing a second independent investigation so we’ll see what they say officially concerning plagiarism claims.)

As the fire heated under Arday’s figurative feet, many within Cambridge and many Progressives denounced the media attention and rising rage as a Conservative-created racist witch-hunt. Given that a “race realist” had first made the claims the left felt more emboldened to cry foul play. Soon Arday quit his professorship. We soon discovered also that some of his former students had questioned Arday’s teaching abilities and style, saying he was more racially and DEI-focused, missed a lot of classes, and could be both extremely harsh with some students and very soft with others.

The media campaign against Arday, or rather the public outcry at this brazen insanity, rose to a fever pitch and, sadly, on August 14^th, Arday was found dead, likely by suicide. (Investigation ongoing.)

I, of course, like any rational, sane person, decry any aspects of the outcry that were genuinely racist, and some of it was. I saw, even on Substack, some people gleefully denouncing him as an “N-Word.” And it’s nothing but a tragedy that he likely took his own life. He is first and foremost a fucking human being, and that should never be forgotten. May his soul rest in peace. It didn’t have to end this way. He must have been in a world of emotional pain. It seems very possible that he had some mental health issues. The likelihood of being a pathological liar seems high as well.

Still, this is a lightning rod moment for a reason. This perfectly encapsulates our culture war moment. When school or mass shootings happen the Right often says “now is not the time to talk about guns,” and argue it’s the time to grieve. I disagree, as do most Democrats and Progressives. It’s the same here with Arday. Now is the time to discuss the harm of DEI, the racism of “low expectations,” the dishonesty of higher education, and the protection of fraud.

For the past decade (and longer, but especially the past decade) Progressives have been complaining about racism, claiming that it’s worst now than 1950, which is patently absurd purely on its face, legally, culturally, in all ways. Black Americans have full and equal rights today and have had them for a long time now. We fought a ruthless and bloody Civil War ending slavery in 1865. Yes, Southern Reconstruction was brutal, painful, immoral and complicated, as were the necessary and correct Civil Rights battles of the 1950s and 60s which resulted in the LBJ Civil Rights Laws of 1964 and 1965, etc. No nation is perfect. Certainly America is no exception.

But Black Americans are clearly more free today than ever before. There is a thriving Black middleclass. Obama was president twice. Many more politicians in power are Black. More Black folks graduate college today, climb the corporate ladder, run cities and states, etc. There are hugely successful Black podcasters, such as (for better or worse) Candace Owens, Keven Jackson, Kmele Foster, and many more. Black thinkers and authors like Glen Loury, John McWhorter and Thomas Chatterton Williams are major voices. I could go on and on.

Why Progressives keep picking the worst examples of Black American excellence is beyond me: Jussie Smollett, Claudine Gay, George Floyd, Kamala Harris, Jason Arday. There are so many qualified Black Americans: Why not pick one of them instead of these people? It’s as if Progressives want failure in order to stoke more culture war rage and polarization.

This event with Arday is exactly what I meant in my previous essay on progressive racism.

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To start off this essay I want to be clear about something. No “side” has a monopoly on racism. The Republican Party historically in America was the “Party of Lincoln” which fought the Civil War and freed the slaves. But this of course changed dramatically in the 1960s during Civil Rights when the “Dixiecrats” (white racist Southern Democrats) defected the party a la Barry Goldwater and produced the inchoate new modern version of the racist Republican Party. This was a clean, clear line of demarcation and it was all about race and civil rights.

However, original “progressives” in the 1880s and 1890s who were pushing back against Big Steel, the Railroad monopolies, Standard Oil, etc, also happily propagated eugenics. (See early Planned Parenthood, for example.)

Black Americans began switching for the first time voting for Democrats versus Republicans in the early 1930s under FDR. Not because Roosevelt was good on race—he wasn’t, see Japanese Internment, etc—but because he did something which contemporary progressives should probably learn from: Leaving race out of it, he attacked class issues instead, which necessarily, because there were more of them, disproportionately (to use a highly overused and trendy word today; one might even call it at this point a “racially oversexed” word [my phrase; pretty good, huh?]) helped Black Americans.

It was the Great Depression. Unemployment skyrocketed to 25%. Almost everyone was affected but no population more than Black Americans who were still at that time very much dealing with serious legal and cultural racism and were struggling with the economic legacy of slavery.

But now, here, today—in 2026—we live in once again very strange, weird, backwards, odd times. Things have switched yet again.

Let me add another comment here to be clear. My critique of progressives on race or of the left more broadly does not in any way let Trump or Republicans off the hook. Trump himself, as anyone who has followed his life knows, has a long and nasty history of racism, from questionable anti-Black rental practices in New York in the 1970s (he and his father) to the Central park Five and thousands of comments about Black people and race in general throughout his life.

And Republicans, since the 1960s, and generally over the past half-century, have time and again, over and over said, done and passed bills which clearly appear racist (and often purposefully so). True, ironically Trump—of all people—in the runup to the November 2024 election gained shocking numbers of (mostly male) Black and Hispanic voters, but I see this mostly as a result not of these demographics loving Trump so much as hating the new woke elite Democratic Party which has become increasingly young, white, rich, female, and anti-working-class. “It’s the economy, stupid,” as James Carville classically remarked in 1992. The Left have replaced economics and the working-class (which they held for decades) with identity politics.

Enter the new reality.

While contemporary “Republicans” (there is no actual conventional Republican Party anymore, certainly no more Conservatism; Trump is a nothing-president comprised of leftist leanings, republican leanings, libertarian leanings and a bunch of ahistorical, apolitical, anti-intellectual nonsense all mixed together) are still often far from good on race, what has truly emerged in our time, and over the past 10-12 years, is a new and dangerous phenomenon: Progressive racism.

Progressive racism is much more subtle and challenging to overtly “identify” as racism. But it absolutely is.

The problem is that as a society we are used to the conventional and historical notion of racism: Angry white men in the 1950s and 1960s trying to prevent little innocent Black children in the deep South from integrating a white school, say, or some white man screaming the N-word for no apparent reason other than he simply cannot fathom the notion that a human being with Black skin is, in fact, a human fucking being. This kind of racism I’ve honestly never truly understood. I know it stems out of slavery and the South’s deep-rooted self-hatred, shame and guilt and the white Southern man’s need to project that self-hate onto The Other. (The North in this era was not as bad as the South…but still often very bad.)

But over the decades this kind of overt, cartoonish, white-ape-like over-the-top racism has slowly descended and finally, for the most part, thankfully leaked away. (There are rare cases still, yes.) America post-civil rights, after MLK, the Kennedys, Malcom X, Black Power, James Baldwin, etc, created in essence the new contract which MLK had wanted.

America became less racist, first legally and then culturally. Despite the leftist claims that innocent, unarmed Black men are being gunned down every two seconds by rabid racist white cops—a totally false narrative debunked by data—and that 2026 is actually more racist than the 1950s, reality, facts and data tell a much happier story. (A story you would think progressives would celebrate instead of pretending it’s far worse than it is, which makes me genuinely wonder if they want a race war.) *(Extra source re unarmed Black deaths via police.)

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Steve smiled, lying sprawled out naked on his plush gray leather couch except for tighty-whities, phone in hand, gazing at the photos of Patricia on Tinder.

She was just about perfect: 21, pale skin, blue piercing eyes, long black hair cut in severe bangs above her bulbous, bug-like (but sexy) eyes. She reminded him vaguely—and humorously—of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. (He’d once, a long time ago, been an aspiring writer, in his dreaded early twenties, over a decade back now, before he realized he didn’t want to be poor and decided to get into software engineering.)

Yet there was something somehow off about Patricia, assuming “Patricia” was even her real name. You never knew on the dating apps. Women did all sorts of things: Used crazy photo filters making themselves look hot or thin when they weren’t; lying about their ages; you name it: He’d seen it all. Seven years he’d lived in Boston and he’d dated them all. Many had been fun, casual sex. Some he’d dated superficially for a while. Two he’d actually really liked, Joanne and Becca. Joanne had suddenly, mysteriously broken things off one day, disappearing without a word. Becca had become oddly distant until months later she admitted she’d met someone else. Always there was something.

Steve had lived in his apartment near Boston Common for several years now. His own little one-bedroom apartment, atrociously expensive but all his own. He walked around naked. He brought women home. He sometimes even tried his hand at penning bad short stories when he wasn’t crammed at work. He made almost a quarter-million a year doing software updates for a big company everyone had heard of; their office was in Manhattan but they had branches in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.

He was 39 years old. Never married. Never engaged. Never had a girlfriend longer than six months, truth be told. Born and raised in Tampa, where all his family still resided, whom he saw less than often.

Steve looked again at Patricia’s profile. He liked younger women. Of course he did. What red-blooded American male didn’t. Oh, sure, in polite society one wasn’t supposed to “admit” that, but c’mon: It was biology, evolution, reality. Humans were animals, and men were driven by deeper urges evolved over millions of years. You could slap morality on that and judge it, but why?

Patricia’s profile read as follows: I’m a 21-year-old woman living in Boston interested in meeting nice older men. I have a degree in English Literature from Brown. I like strolling through parks, hiking, eating good food, dancing and deep conversation.

That was it. Short. To the point.

She provided six photos, the most allowed. Three were of her face fairly close up, the severe black bangs, the blue eyes, the pale skin, the hot gothy look. One showed her in a bikini at some mystery beach, and she looked fantastic: Skinny, big-breasted, everything physically doing the right things in the right places. And then two of her wearing normal clothes and from a distance, one at the peak of some mountain wearing hiking clothes and boots, and the other of her standing in front of a giant redwood tree looking forlorn. Her profile said she’d been born and raised in Northern California but didn’t specify where.

Steve had seen her picture amongst the many—the myriad internet faces trying to sell their souls just like he and the men were, attacking dating as if it were some sort of gameshow of mad entertainment where you picked the “perfect” mate only they were never perfect—and it had arrested him.

Hey, he had texted. You seem fun.

An hour later she’d responded and it felt slightly tentative to him somehow, though you could never tell with text. They were on the app at this point, no number exchange yet. That was always the first and hardest part of the fishing. First you had to get the fish to bite the bait, and then to get the hook inside the lip, and then you had to slowly, fastidiously reel them in. All the while the fish might get free of the hook, fighting, twisting and jabbing their head back and forth, trying desperately and cruelly to break free and escape, even as they also wanted to be caught.

The deadly game and sexuality, attraction, desire, gender roles. The push and pull. The fake pretense. Being the “best version” of yourself, which really meant lying. It was all exhausting. He knew women hated it as much if not more than men. But they all had no choice, like lambs going inevitably to slaughter at an abattoir. This was now the culture, for good and, mostly, bad.

Hi. Thanks. How so?

Her message had pushed a siren song of thrilling electricity down his spine; he’d almost leapt clear off the couch.

He considered how to respond.

This was always a key moment. Women were profoundly sensitive to anything they deemed “creepy” which basically meant anything having to do with sex. He thought about being poetic, but that felt too silly. Kind and soft? No, she seemed more like a no-bullshit type of woman. But she was 21, that was young; women at that age were naïve, vulnerable, pliable. That was, if he were honest with himself, part of the reason he pursued them.

Women his age, besides being less attractive, were too much work, with their past divorces and their kids and their shitty, boring careers. Women Patricia’s age were more excited by life; they were free; the world was still vast and open ahead of them. Perhaps, he realized for the first time, they were a sort of psychological barrier against aging, against depression, against reality, against, ultimately, death.

I don’t know, he said now, typing out the message. Maybe it’s the hair, the severe bangs.

A minute later, she responded. What makes them ‘severe’?

Steve thought about this and then typed back, The black, sharp, hard angles.

Kind of like my personality…

Really??! He said back.

JK, lol 😊

His body relaxed and he felt relief. For a moment he worried she’d be a dud, one of those catch-and-release gothy angry types who hated men.

You’re really cute, he said.

Thank you. You’re quite handsome yourself.

He suddenly felt the strong urge to send her a dick pick, a photo of his hard cock this instant. He looked down and saw his dick was powerfully tenting his tighty-whities. He smiled. No. Bad move. This was always a risky maneuver and he always asked them first for permission.

Thank you. I am much older than you.

I like older men.

This turned him on so hard he considered jerking off right then and there. But he refrained. It was Friday which meant he had two days off after work today. Thank God, the weekend.

Well that’s good. He felt like adding the word “sweetie” or “sweetheart,” a sort of pseudo misogynistic trope he sometimes couldn’t resist adding but here, again, he resisted. Cause I’m almost two decades your senior.

I know. I like that.

He was going crazy now.

Can we meet? This weekend? He said.

There was silence. Nothing happened. No bubbles on the message bouncing. His nerves were killing him. He stood up, leaving his phone on the low coffee table in front of the couch, and he crossed the living room into the open kitchen and poured himself another cup of steaming hot black coffee, the lovely, delicious stink of the Sumatra beans glorious inside his nostrils.

He still felt faintly hungover from the bar last night; he’d been with Greg Casey and John Task, his two best friends in Boston; nothing special, just a few bars, some live music, mild drunkenness, one sloppy dance with some older woman randomly, and then the long, clanking subway ride home. He was getting too old for these excursions. Then again he was getting too old (already was too old) to be flirting with 21-year-old girls on the internet.

Finally the jumping bubbles appeared, and he waited with bated breath, now standing above the couch and coffee table glancing down anxiously at his iPhone 13 mini, now closing his eyes for a moment and slurping his coffee which was too hot and burned his tongue.

I’d love to, she had responded. I’m busy today but how about tomorrow for lunch? There’s a place I like near Ramsay Park in Lower Roxbury. A pizza place. Meet there say 2pm? The place is called Carmine’s.

He grinned widely like a drunken Cheshire Cat. He felt like rubbing his hands together. He almost couldn’t believe it. Though he was just a hair under 6 feet tall and had a fairly thin, wiry runner’s physique, it nevertheless these days, at his age, always surprised him when a beautiful woman of her age said yes.

I’ll be there, he wrote back. Looking forward to it.

Me too 😊

Should we exchange numbers? He said.

Sure, and she added her digits, with a Boston area code.

He saved her number into his phone as Patricia Tinder and they ceased messaging. He logged off the app. Usually he never logged off, but this felt like a celebration.

~

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*All photos from Nicholas Bogg’s Baldwin: A Love Story

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