What I'm Reading/What I'm Writing
On how I'm trying to stay informed and sane in this moment
My book The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow has been out in the world for about a month now. The first two weeks following its release were a whirlwind of events and interviews (peep me on C-SPAN!), and I had a blessedly limited capacity to engage with the firehose of democratic assaults coming out of the White House. How far away that time now feels!
Like everyone else, I’ve been grappling with how to stay informed and focused without losing my mind or giving into nihilism. I can’t say that I’ve found a perfect balance yet, but I do know what does not work for me: doomscrolling on social media and getting pulled down 17 different rabbit holes trying to figure out what’s actually going on after seeing a snippet of an outrageous story that’s gone through a game of telephone.
It’s true that sometimes Instagram and BlueSky (I’m off Twitter) are good places to get informed about things that I might not encounter elsewhere. Yesterday, for instance, I learned about a bill in the Missouri state house that seeks to create a registry of pregnant women “at risk” for seeking abortions and match-make them to “proper and fit” adoptive parents via birth mom and adoption reform advocate Kelsey Ranyard’s Insta stories. Kelsey did the work to clearly explain what’s in the bill, why it’s terrifying, and who to contact to register concerns. I wrote to the Missouri house committee on children and families in my capacity as a journalist and child welfare researcher to ask them to reject the bill, which I fear could be used as a model in other states and which echoes some of the darkest parts of our country’s history of policing women’s reproductive choices and forcibly separating them from their children. This felt like a way I could be actually useful, I was glad to hear back from one representative who said the bill is unlikely to move forward.
So I’m going to keep paying attention to people like Kelsey and other people I follow on socials who are experts and advocates and who are putting good, focused information out about what’s going on in the current national nightmare and, importantly, how we can fight back. But I’m trying to tune out some of the outrage machine of reposts, not because I’m not outraged, but because it’s exhausting and is all too frequently a source of misinformation.
Instead, I’m trying to get the vast majority of my news from the actual news, at specific times of day (not always great about this when a breaking story comes along but!). Here’s what’s working for me:
Since the election, I’ve been starting every morning by listening to Up First on NPR. It’s about ten minutes long, focusing on three major headlines in world news (with a focus on the US). I like Up First because it’s a good source of straight reporting and they often highlight stories that I’m not seeing much on elsewhere.
While I have breakfast, I have always read The New York Times online. I usually start with a scroll through all the major headlines and then read their Morning Briefing newsletter, which varies a lot in quality and can be a covert op-ed from David Leonhardt, so I read it critically.
I also like to cross-check stories on The Washington Post to see how they’re covering the same stuff. While I’m as pissed as everyone else that Bezos is trying to ruin that paper, I still think they have the best reporting on issues coming out of Washington, and they’re doing excellent work covering how DOGE is wreaking havoc on the federal government and the consequences for federal workers, who are our neighbors.
In the morning I also read the newsletter from The Philadelphia Inquirer and look at major stories on their homepage. Subscribe to your local newspaper!
Sometimes I listen to The Daily from the NYT or Consider This from NPR while I work in the morning. They both focus on a single news story and offer more analysis.
In the evening, I go back to the homepages of the Times, the Post, and the Inky, and typically read a few major stories. I’ll also read stories from some of the magazines I subscribe to, like The New Republic, The Nation, and The New Yorker, and others I follow, like Mother Jones.
This sounds like a whole lotta news consumption all typed out, but as a journalist I have always really cared about being up-to-date and well-informed. I also personally feel that it’s a civic duty. It’s hard not to feel helpless these days as Trump and Musk are attempting to unilaterally dismantle the federal government and reneg on public goods as the Republican-led Congress sits on their hands and nods. I’m trying to put my news consumption into action by calling my representatives—including Republican Senator Dave McCormick—several times a week. I use 5Calls and riff on their scripts based on the issues that feel most urgent to me after I read the news.
While reading the news does not keep me sane, reading books does. Recently, for The Washington Post, I reviewed a novel that kept me totally rapt during election week: Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum’s Elita. Gift link here. I wouldn’t call this 1950s PNW-set take on the Nordic noir escapist, but it is an enthralling slow-burn that offers a deft meditation on society’s constraints on women and girls. And for The Atlantic, I reviewed a book that made me think critically about reading and losing oneself in books—Sarah Chihaya’s memoir Bibliophobia.
Some other books I’ve read recently and loved include Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead (finally! perhaps I’ll write about it here a bit soon) and Sophie Lewis’s brand new book Enemy Feminisms: TERFS, Policewomen and Girlbosses Against Liberation. I was lucky to interview Sophie at Giovanni’s Room here in Philly on Tuesday, where we talked about how there really were KKK feminists and blackshirt feminists and why it’s important to reckon with them. Here’s a gratuitous picture of our cat Dougie Jones enjoying reading the book with me:
Another way I’m trying to stay sane? Not reading reviews of my book on Goodreads, StoryGraph, and Amazon. BUT if you’ve read The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow and are inclined to gas me up on those sites, please, by all means, do so! Whatever it takes to get the book in front of people who might vibe with it.