Essays, tools, and newsletters exploring the skills we might need as the systems that organized modern life begin to dissolve. Subscribe here.
Over the past six years I’ve been writing about care, time, media, and invisible labor. These questions became more vivid for me through motherhood, community life, and stepping away from a career-centered structure of work. For a long time I couldn’t find the words to describe what I was seeing. Eventually I realized I was experiencing systems change — something that can feel deeply disorienting but also rich with questions worth examining through a journalistic and design lens.
What might we need to learn if the industries and roles we’ve long used to define value continue to shift or dissolve? For example:
- how to tend the commons (which requires valuing interdependence)
- how to design our own time (which requires understanding our rhythms)
- how to create meaning beyond external validation (which requires tremendous self-efficacy)
- how to navigate information (which requires knowing what questions to ask)
- how to change our values (which is harder than changing our schedules)
- how to care well for ourselves and others (a skill many of us have outsourced for so long that we’ve forgotten how to practice it)
- how to live with machines (which requires understanding what makes us human)
If these skills became essential infrastructure for society, how might we design institutions and practices around them? What values might guide them?
In other words, what comes after the systems that organized modern life—news, work, birth, and the individual self? This is where my thinking has started to take shape:
What comes after news? >> Tending shared reality as civic care
What comes after work? >> Care as the organizing principle of daily life
What comes after birth? >> Mothering as public practice
What comes after me? >> Intergenerational stewardship
News and work have been personal entry points for me but I’m also interested in other systems—like how mothering might become better understood and supported as public work, and how intergenerational decision-making and interconnectedness might be taught in an individualistic society.
Many of these ideas originate as first-draft thoughts in my newsletter, Time Spent. A selected archive can be found below. If you want to chat or collaborate, reach out.
NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE (2019-present)
On information as civic work
a letter to my 2-year-old about power
an attempt at media cartography
thinking about media, thinking about positions
notes on developing a civic heart
soft skills for a hard world
ok, let’s talk about AI feelings
journalism as art: an exercise
journalism and mental health
collaborative journalism and intricate ecosystems
becoming critical thinkers
the fear of irrelevance
navigating the new news ecosystem
understanding precedes action
the in-between place
commentary vs. citizenship
tricky moral questions about information
reverse engineering the workflow of a scientist
divorcing the terms ‘journalism’ and ‘news’
news diet for the new year
the twin peaks and valleys of consumption and care
who gets to be a knowledge worker, and isn’t it all of us?
what makes you feel like you belong?
so, what’s journalism for again?
rare events are common at scale
why it’s important to study audiences
who gets to be a journalist?
real-time vs. analyzed trends
dystopia is exhausting
setting boundaries around media consumption
taking a bird’s-eye view
slowing down the news
centering the news consumer instead of the news
who would you call in an emergency?
why do people exchange misinformation?
opinions and falling under spells
bodies + information
how do you organize your news apps?
introducing a needs-based approach to news
news consumption tip for the week
ain’t no rest in worry
leaving hadestown
a journalist’s apology
the future of columns
three tips for reading the news during inauguration week
dialogic reasoning
week beginnings, clusters, and constellations
how are you feeling about the news?
it’s too early to conform
a juxtaposition to observe in 2021
the work of awakening
On care as the organizing principle of daily life
no one told me this was work
who pays for the future?
where do you see power in your home?
designing a system that withstands variability
home as a care studio
monoliths vs. ambiguity
public spaces inside the home
the economics of work-life conflict
answering the question what do you do?
on the choice to become parents
questions about caring as we age
how to design a life
on longterm care work
where would you live
an inside job
on taking pains to care
70 years of dialogue
on why we take breaks (and also don’t)
on giving up things we might need later
seeing my home as a small company
how the women would live