What If I Had a Focus? My Writing Year in Review
“Create a brand.” “Claim a niche.” “Stay focused.” All good advice for newsletter writers, I’m sure. With discipline, I could have focused on the topics that gain me the most readers or topics I’ve spent years researching or those I’m most interested in or that seem most urgent. Without it, you get Nobody Wants This.
Still, my 2023 writing fell into several broad categories: censorship, education, women, car culture, and books/TV/film.
Censorship
My most-read post this year was an argument that the wave of censorship of teachers, librarians, and booksellers should be taken more seriously. (TY to Talking Points Memo for getting more eyeballs on this one.)
I also wrote about this censorship reaching the student stage, a place that helped shape the adult I became, in “Student Theater is a Triple Threat.” I’d been thinking for a while about how To Kill A Mockingbird is being used in the book banning debate; the controversy over The Blind Side had me writing about it in “The Grip of the White Savior Story.”
Education
A report showing that fears of a teacher shortage were warranted sparked this post:
My return to the classroom this semester clarified ways teaching could be a more sustainable profession (“It’s Fall and I Have a Mild Case of Teacher Brain”). In a piece cross-posted on Education Post I wrote about how political actors and pundits invent narratives about education. Then I wrote about why it is so easy for them to do (“Truth-Telling About Schools is Hard. Lying is Easy.”) Diane Ravitch cross-posted my explanation of how vouchers are forcing taxpayers to prop up religious institutions.
Women
I outlined GOP efforts to push women into traditional marriage through restrictions on bodily autonomy and contraception, support for child marriage, and hoped-for repeals of no-fault divorce and gay marriage:
The passing of mini-skirt inventor Mary Quant had me thinking about dress codes at work and school (“The Wear on Women”), and the 2024 campaign was the occasion for writing as a childfree woman on a tendency in political media coverage to use “moms” interchangeably with “women.” In “The End of the Seventies” I wrote about growing up female and hopeful in the 1970s.
Car Culture
The furor over proposals to ban gas stoves reminded me of the right’s conflation of waste with freedom, something with an outsized impact when it comes to vehicles. And I connected our over-dependence on cars to America’s loneliness epidemic:
Books, TV, Film
Two pieces centered on true crime, one about the danger of normalizing the abnormal based on the Murdaugh trial and the other about my ethical dilemma watching shows like Dateline. The series Fleishman is in Trouble prompted musings on the obsession with youth and the satire The Menu, on the horrors of work. I eulogized author Martin Amis and refused to eulogize great writing in the age of AI in “David Foster Wallace vs. The Machine.”
Thank you to my subscribers, especially those who thought they’d be getting a newsletter focused on one topic and open my emails to find I’m onto another one. It’s possible I know one of my New Year’s resolutions already.
Happy Holidays.