We’d had the big white box of old 8mm and Super 8mm family movies for 40 years, handing it off from sister to sister after Mom died of breast cancer in 1975, each one of us promising to digitize or otherwise take care of these precious family heirlooms. No one had.

Then one summer in Santa Cruz, at the little beach house Mom had bought with an unexpected windfall the year she died, we set up an old projector my husband had found on eBay, along with a portable screen. …

I ask you: why does the world’s richest man need to bust a union organizing effort? Why does he have to quash a business tax that would help the homeless in Seattle? Why does he treat his employees so poorly that they pee in bottles to avoid taking bathroom breaks? Does Jeff Bezos need another private jet? Or is his dick so small that he won’t rest easy until the whole world is as miserable as he is — living entirely inside our apartments, hovering perpetually over our computers, ordering yet another piece of useless crap from Amazon.com?

There are so many reasons that I hate Jeff Bezos

1. My husband…

Two young women from California travel to New Orleans in search of redemption after the death of their mother. Carolee thinks she will show her little sister the world, but what they find in the barrooms of the French Quarter at Mardi Gras is more than she knows how to handle, or could have imagined back home. This is the twentieth chapter of the novel Thirsty Work.

When the morning of Mardi Gras arrived the whole flat was eager and excited about the day’s festivities. For the first time that vacation, everyone got out of bed early and was out…

I had an intellectual friend in high school who “really loved” women, by which he meant he put them on a pedestal and periodically became obsessed with one. Later in life we got in touch via email to discuss a novel I had written and soon enough, I was the deified girl. He used software to “paint” pictures of me; wrote me long, entertaining emails; came to town and took me out to dinner and a ballgame. I thought we were having a friendship. …

Two young women from California travel to New Orleans in search of redemption after the death of their mother. Carolee thinks she will show her little sister the world, but what they find in the barrooms of the French Quarter at Mardi Gras is more than she knows how to handle, or could have imagined back home. This is the nineteenth chapter of the novel Thirsty Work.

The next morning we got ready for our first Mardi Gras parade. Howard was slow getting up and out of our sleeping bag and I wondered if he was still angry with me…

I woke up this morning to read that the Evanston City Council approved the nation’s first reparations plan March 22 on an 8–1 vote. The sole dissenter was a Black woman who didn’t like that the money had strings attached. And I get that. It’s disrespectful. But I believe in what my brother-in-law calls “success by approximation.” It’s far better to approve a flawed plan now and then work to make it better than to wait forever for a perfect one to arise.

I’m not Black and I don’t live in Evanston, but you better believe this plan benefits me…

Two young women from California travel to New Orleans in search of redemption after the death of their mother. Carolee thinks she will show her little sister the world, but what they find in the barrooms of the French Quarter at Mardi Gras is more than she knows how to handle, or could have imagined back home. This is the eighteenth chapter of the novel Thirsty Work.

When I awoke sometime later I found the flat was full of sleeping people, including several squeezed together on the bed, Howard among them. He was snoring loudly and had his shirt off…