Hold Two Opposing Ideas

But don't go insane.

Someone recently asked me how I “have time to read so much.”

And I said: I’m a writer, so reading is my job.

It doesn’t pay much (lol it costs money). But reading and thinking are the engine for good writing. And folks who read a lot start to feel like their brains are bubbling over with word stew.

Hence, the newsletter. It will be about American culture, books, motherhood, southernness, marriage, faith+ethics, and the institutions built around those things. It will be about residing inside liminal spaces, straddling two worlds, holding two ideas at the same time and not going insane. As Fitzgerald famously wrote,

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Let’s do that, here. Even when things are hopeless, let’s try to make them otherwise.