PicoBlog

I spent five years writing a book on the history of trans children. When I sat down to pen its preface, the very end of that process, I wrote an ambiguous line that accidentally conjured the idea of my trans childhood. I sat back and read it a few times. It sunk in. Fuck. In that fleeting moment I saw my own transness staring back at me for the first time in what was, in retrospect, the most obvious platform possible: a book, that I wrote, with Transgender in the title.

Eggs begin as hidden things—one of the most private things in the world, MFK Fisher wrote—but after they shed a shell we want them to bare all. Now that so many American eaters have become accustomed to putting an egg on basically anything in order to create a meal, we consider a yolk smiling up at us as a sign of good things to come. We worship it like the sun.

This week’s letter is free! Last week was the anniversary of when I went on Felix’s podcast and my world turned upside down. To celebrate, I dropped the video where we spill the tea on everything - from our age gap, to when his best friend spied on me at a party, and so much more. Watch it below. If you like the content in today’s letter, you can pay $6 a month to get it in your inbox every week.

This essay adapts an op-ed I published in the Washington Post in 2020. I’ve added new research and photographs that open a door onto a world of activism sparked by the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia. On Aug. 3, 1935, 25,000 Black and White New Yorkers marched down Harlem’s Lenox Avenue to protest Fascist Italy’s plans to invade Ethiopia, a League of Nations member and one of the few African nations that had never been colonized.

Ælfgif-who? provides short biographies of early medieval English women. Click on the podcast player if you’d like to hear this newsletter read aloud in my appealing Yorkshire accent. Osburh, who lived in the first half of the ninth century, was the mother of one of the early medieval period’s most famous rulers: King Alfred of Wessex. Often known as ‘Alfred the Great’, her son is well known for fighting against Viking invaders. Osburh was married to Alfred’s father King Æthelwulf, and it’s assumed that she was also mother to his siblings, making her the mother of four successive West-Saxon kings.

A few days ago, a friend of mine reached out to me via email. She wanted me to weigh in on a parenting situation that was causing disagreement among her friends. She wrote (and gave me permission to share): One of my friend’s daughters had prom last weekend. While she was finishing up getting dressed and waiting for her prom date to arrive for photos, she got a phone call from the boy, who attends another school.

I wrote a feature for Romper about non-monogamy through the lens of single/married/queer/straight motherhood that was published on Valentines Day. (I also wrote a how-to piece in the same spread for those interested in opening their marriages.) I was assigned this piece by my editor before all of the non-monogamy articles dropped and I became increasingly frustrated by the erasure of female desire in almost all of them. (I loved this piece by one of my faves, Kimberly Harrington (subscribe to her substack immediately) about Molly Roden’s memoir, MORE, which, full disclosure I haven’t read yet, although I have written about ENM and non-traditional relationship structures before.

Catherine Sinow - a past contributor to this newsletter - reached out to me a few weeks ago with a mystery. In 2006, Jessica Simpson released her hit single “A Public Affair” with a curious marketing campaign. Over 500 different versions of the song were recorded with people’s names substituted in where she originally sang ‘baby.’ So, if you were named Adam, for example, you could buy the Adam-version of “A Public Affair”.

As you may know, Sabbath-observant Jews are forbidden from working on the holy day, and this prohibition extends beyond manual labor to using things like electricity. Unsurprisingly, this can create problems, and not just when you are running for vice president of the United States. What happens if the lights go off—or if the air conditioning needs to be turned on during a heat wave? The traditional solution to these problems has been the so-called shabbos goy—a generous gentile who performs these tasks when observant Jews cannot.