GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

The Copper Merchant

2026-05-02T00:00:00Z

Next week, I'm planning to publish the next edition of WORK IS FOUR LETTERS — I had a delightful conversation with historian, podcaster, and author Patrick Wyman about the work he does, how he got started doing it, and why it matters. He started a new podcast this year, has a book coming out next week, and I'm very grateful to him for sharing his time with me, given everything he's got going on.

But because I am both terminally online and unable to stop myself, I had to ask him about the infamous copper merchant, Ea-nāṣir, and whether he thought the man was, indeed, a crook, or might be unfairly maligned throughout history.

Here's what Patrick had to say.

I think that our dear friend, the copper merchant, was both a crook and unfairly maligned.

I'm gonna have my cake and I'm gonna eat it, too. There is no question in my mind that he was a cheat. But based on what we know about trade, I think they were all cheaters.

Imagine you're a trader coming up from the Indus Valley civilization, traveling along some real estate that is today disputed, heading up toward Mesopotamia. Yes, you need people to continue buying from you, I guess — but, like, do they actually know what your products are? Can they evaluate them? Can they evaluate your costs? There's no currency! Not that these people couldn't do sophisticated trade, but maybe the people who were complaining about Ea-Nāṣir shouldn't have been throwing stones from their own glass houses, because what did their customer complaints looked like?

Yes, he was a crook, but, glass houses, stones, pots, kettles. I’m guessing there were a lot of unclean hands amongst the merchants of Mesopotamia.

I love Ea-nāṣir so much. I am convinced that if we looked hard enough, we would find a lot of these complaint letters. People would be mad about this shit all the time. How could you not be? You're talking about people traveling hundreds of miles with no common standard of value, no common understanding of what quality accounts for, relying on these really informal institutions and networks, of course people are gonna cheat you, you’ve got to keep your head on a swivel.

What are you writing a customer complaint letter for, you should expect to be cheated! Not to live in an entirely Trumpian world, but, like, my god, man, if you trust this shifty copper guy? That’s on you.

Check back next week for my full interview with Patrick, it was a delight.

Of Clay and Colors

2026-03-26T00:00:00Z

I'M AN ARTIST.

I spend my days making art.

My focus has been ceramics for the past three or four years now. I don't really want to call myself strictly a ceramicist, because I just see myself as an artist, and I don't want to put myself in such a small box. I love working with a variety of mediums, but I really love ceramics. I view ceramics as my soulmate, as a medium. But that's what I do.

I took a ceramics class in college, which was over a decade ago, I think, 2012. I just took one class, and I loved it. I almost went into the intermediate ceramics course, but the problem was, you had to go talk to the teacher to sign up, you couldn't just sign up online, and at the time, I was really shy. The teacher, he wasn't mean or scary, but his vibe was kind of intimidating to me, because he was very confident, and I just was very, you know, meek. I was like, "I don't really want to have to talk to him to get into this class". I'd rather just not sign up and miss out, rather than be uncomfortable and talk to him.

THE CLAY WILL TELL ME WHAT IT WANTS TO BE AS I'M SCULPTING

Anyway, fast forward to 2022, and everything's opening up after COVID. Around that time, I was getting back into my handmade, DIY roots, because, up until that point, I had been making more merchandise-type stuff, like enamel pins and t-shirts of my own design, and I just really wanted to get back into making things by hand. I found this local art co-op makerspace, and they had ceramic classes, and I was like, "You know what? I think I'm gonna sign up and do this".

So I did. I almost quit by the third day.

It was a six-week course, once per week, and on the third week, I almost quit because I thought I really sucked at it. I was miserable. This was a nighttime class, and I'm a morning person. Every class was three hours long. I didn't get home until 9:30pm, and I was just like, "I hate my life right now". Everybody else in the class looked like they could understand how to pull, and how to make sure everything's level, and how to throw properly, because this was a wheel throwing class. And I just couldn't get it, you know? But I had this thought that was, like, "You know, you're not always going to be perfect at everything that you do when you start out", and so I felt like it was important that I just stick with it and finish the class, so that way I could say, "Hey, at least I tried!"

By the end, I enjoyed it, and I was glad that I stuck with it. I was like, "Well, now that I know how to work with the clay a little bit more, I can start hand-building stuff". So that's when I started making little animal figurines and things, but I was tempted to stop working with the wheel, because it was just so difficult and I thought, "Well, I'm really good at hand sculpting, why not just stick to what I'm really good at?"

But I want to try new things and push myself. I don't want to just stick with what I'm good at, because then I feel like you kind of get sedentary, or, like, just kind of… you stop growing, you know? I was like, "I'm gonna stick with this, I'm gonna keep practicing and try as best as I can, you know, to make cups and things."

It took me a while, and a lot of clay, but, last year, I finally mastered centering the clay and being able to properly throw cylinders, so now I can make even more stuff, and not just little animals. I just fell in love with it, and I thought, "This feels like it's meant for me", and I'm so glad that so many people adore them, because ever since I started getting into ceramics, my career has been blossoming and blooming. I'm glad that my passion for the medium is being matched and reciprocated by the reception that it's getting via, like, galleries and sales and people just liking it online.

You would think I've been doing this for a long time, and people are shocked when they learn it's barely been 5 years. But, all of the prior work that I had done over the years as an artist made it so that when I jumped into ceramics, I could take all those skills and translate them into making a three dimensional object, which is kind of cool and interesting to me. When I was working with 2D mediums, I really struggled with drawing things to make them look 3D on paper. So I thought, "Well, if I suck at drawing it and making this look dimensional as a drawing, I'm probably not going to be very good at sculpting".

But it's actually been really easy. I find drawing more difficult, because with drawing, you kind of have to think of the composition of a piece. With sculpting, I just grab a block of clay and start manipulating it, you know, and I don't have to worry about how it looks with the rest of the space that it's within. I can just start manipulating and touching it, and, sometimes, the clay will tell me what it wants to be as I'm sculpting.

the creative, artistic spirit gets beaten out of you. You're either told you suck, or you're not gonna make money doing this, and people drop it, or they grow up feeling like they're terrible at it, when it's really just a skill you develop over time.

I went to a state school, Weber State University, up in Utah, and they had an art department, and originally I was actually studying to be a vet, but I immediately got out of that, because I didn't feel smart enough to be a vet. Which I realize now was a lie, because I can do anything I put my mind to, but I mainly tried to be a vet because there's job security there, everybody needs a vet.

But something in my soul was just saying: No, this isn't the right path for you. You need to dump being a vet and just pursue art, regardless of whether you end up making it or not, because there's just something within me that says I really love art, I love creativity and creating, and I just love being an artist.

So, I got into the art program. I specifically went into Visual Communications, which they later renamed to Graphic Design. I went with it for job security, thinking maybe I could be an illustrator. But I was also able to take all the other art classes along the way: printmaking, 3D design, 2D design, painting, etc.

I've always wanted to be an artist, even as a kid. I was always drawing, painting, making stuff. I remember, as a little kid — my mom doesn't remember this, but I do — she had this nail polish collection, and there was one color I was obsessed with. This neon magenta pink. As a kid, you know, you don't touch mom's makeup, but one day, I just got possessed. I had to touch this nail polish. I got it, and I didn't paint my nails; I started painting on the hallway wall. My mom caught me before I went too far.

It's just always been within me to create.

As I've gotten older and worked as an artist, I feel like art and creativity is a part of not just my nature as a person, but human nature in general. It's something within everybody — similar to how fish naturally swim or birds naturally fly. But as we get older, the creative, artistic spirit gets beaten out of you. You're either told you suck, or you're not gonna make money doing this, and people drop it, or they grow up feeling like they're terrible at it, when it's really just a skill you develop over time.

The COVID shutdowns were kind of proof of it. So many people leaned toward doing something creative when they had the time. People want to create. We've been doing it since we evolved and became human beings. I really wish we could have a world and culture more centered around that.

when I think about it, people are similar to animals; we've got arms, legs, a head, similar shapes. And yet, for some reason, when I try to draw one, it just doesn't look right. But animals? I can draw any of them.

I love animals. I've always loved animals and nature. I find them easier to draw than people. I have started a couple of experimental sculptures where I'm starting to incorporate people. They're very simple, but it's interesting getting into that, because when I think about it, people are similar to animals; we've got arms, legs, a head, similar shapes. And yet, for some reason, when I try to draw one, it just doesn't look right. But animals? I can draw any of them. I've just always loved them and connected with them, and that's why they're such a big staple in my work.

My printmaking background definitely comes through in how I carve and create all these lines to fill in the space of a piece. I get told all the time they look Neolithic — just kind of old. I've always been fascinated with that kind of art. I remember loving that style in art history class, but I never pulled it into my 2D work, interestingly enough. But suddenly, working with clay and creating 3D objects, I'm able to, without even consciously thinking about it, create similar forms and shapes to what people made way back when.

I see parts of my life, as they're changing, somehow seep into my work — before I got into ceramics, because of my printmaking background, I always stuck to very limited color palettes. I hated using more than three colors in a piece. Even with my enamel pin work, I tried to stick to the color of the metal plus two other colors. I love black, white, and gold, or black, white, and red. There's just something about them. I always feel like if you can design something in black and white then it can stand on its own, that's a successful design. That's probably my graphic design background talking. If you're creating a logo, it needs to stand strongly on its own without any color at all.

But as I got into ceramics, there's just a whole rainbow of colors available. I love the black and white look with a pop of orange from the poppies. I just started playing with other colors, and it's just fun. That started showing up in my personal life too: I’ve added more colorful pieces into my wardrobe, and I repainted my kitchen cabinets this beautiful bright turquoise, blue-green color, subconsciously adding more color into my life. Then, suddenly, I'm doing the same in my artwork, and actually liking it. I love gig posters, and with screen printing, you limit yourself color palette-wise to create more visually interesting designs. That's what I'm drawn to.

I still find myself limiting myself to only two colors plus the color of the clay itself, because I'm kind of scared of doing more since I struggle with color theory. I recently had a piece, a panther, and I wanted to make the spots slightly different than the black, because in real life you can kind of see them, but kind of not. So, I tried this shade of blue underglaze. But I also had a big yellow crescent moon on its back, and when it was done, the blue was clashing with the yellow. I thought about adding gold details — that could have tied it all together — but something about that blue just felt icky. It wasn't resonating with the whole thing. I ended up doing some test tiles to see what would happen if I repainted the flowers, repainted the moon, or just repainted over all the spots.

What I ended up doing was repainting all the spots with a different black underglaze to cover the blue, and all of a sudden, everything tied together.

I have one piece sitting in the garage right now that I sculpted, and it looks fine, but there's something about it where I'm like, “You're not what I envisioned in my head”.

Starting this year, I thought, “Why don't I treat gallery shows as a place to be more intentional about my designs and what I'm making?”, versus, like, making for my store, which can be more experimental and whatever I feel like. A lot of it just boils down to: “Why am I making this? Is it for the store? Is it for a specific themed gallery show? What am I trying to say, or show, with this piece? What is its purpose for being brought into the world?”

I have a show coming up with Giant Robot at the end of August, and for that, I really want to pull from that more personal well of inspiration. The inspiration has just been finding me like never before, it's been crazy. I'll write something down in my sketchbook or quickly scribble it out, then try to sculpt it. It's been fun, pulling from that well and making 3D objects inspired by these concepts, which I would have struggled with trying to do as 2D illustration. But somehow, with 3D, I'm able to just intuitively bring it to life.

Sometimes, if I just want to make something, I'll grab the clay and start. I usually start with wolves, that's my fallback. If I don't know what to do, I'll just start sculpting one. Other times, it's more like, well, what haven't I tried making? Lately I've been sculpting whales, because I've never really sculpted a whale before, and I've been trying different birds.

The clay can dry too fast. Summertime is difficult because it gets so hot here in Fresno. And if you don't keep the clay wet, it's gonna dry out on you, which is bad for me because the majority of the work I do with the clay is in the greenware stage — basically unfired clay. I do all the coloring and carving before it ever gets fired. I found that it’s hard to remove your mistakes when you're painting bisque ware, and I didn't like working with it at that stage anyway.

I have one piece sitting in the garage right now that I sculpted, and it looks fine, but there's something about it where I'm like, “You're not what I envisioned in my head”. And I just don't have the heart to put it in a bucket of water to make it all soft and squishy again. Most of the time, I try to work with what I've made and manipulate it to get to what I pictured, versus scrapping the whole thing and starting over. But there have been times where I'm just, like, it would be easier to start with the lump and mush and sculpt from there than to try to fix whatever I've already made.

BUT, LATELY, I'VE BEEN THINKING — WHAT IF I COULD?

I used to make pins, prints, stickers, things like that. I would sell my stock most of the time, although enamel pins, I still have quite a few. I'm thinking about sending them to the metal recycling plant. I have a giant box of them.

People would still buy stuff, and it was at a certain price point, which was nice because I like my work being accessible. But with ceramics, people love them so much, it's crazy. I try to offer a variety of price points because I want to keep my work accessible to everybody, but some of the stuff, there's just no way I can price it too low, because I've got to pay the bills, and it took so long to make, and the materials can be expensive. But I love the response. It's way, way more than when I was solely doing 2D stuff.

My focus right now is my upcoming solo show, because that feels like a really big deal. I've never had that kind of show, at, like — I would consider Giant Robot a legit, big deal gallery. They've been around for a long time, so it feels very prestigious. That's where my focus is.

I'm typically a planner. I would usually be like, this is where I want to be in five years, this is what I want to accomplish. But I haven't been able to do that, because it almost feels like I don't need to. Things are chaotic right now, which is good and bad — bad in some ways, but it also means anything can happen—including good things. I just want to keep doing what I'm doing. My brother has said to me before, “Shirley, your work could be in a museum one day”, and I'd be like, “Yeah, when I'm dead”.

But lately, I've been thinking — what if I could get into some of these places like the MoMA or LACMA? I think that'd be a pretty interesting thing. It's something I'm putting out there.

I don't know how I'm gonna get there, but I'm open to it.

Go check out Shirley's work at LIONINTHETREES, and, if you're in Los Angeles, please go check out her show at Giant Robot from August 16th, 2026 through August 31st, 2026.

The Columnist

2026-02-26T00:00:00Z

I knew I wanted to be doing public work

I am a columnist for the New York Times Opinion Section.

I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2009. I studied political theory at UVA. I did odd jobs around Charlottesville for a year, mainly working at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, which is just UVA's Public Affairs Center, but I wasn't doing anything substantive, right? I was an assistant that they had around to do random stuff.

So, I spent a year around Charlottesville trying to pay rent, and during that time, I was trying to find some other thing to do.

I thought I might apply to law school.

I ended up applying for a writing fellowship at The American Prospect — I had been doing some freelancing, so this wasn't totally out of the blue. I got this writing fellowship, and that was my first job in journalism, that was in 2010. My path from there to the Times, from my perspective at the very least, has been about devoting my time to working, all the time. Trying to cultivate a journalistic voice, but, also, like, developing knowledge about the world that could be deployed for political analysis.

I don't think I knew exactly what I wanted to do, coming out of college. I've always been interested in politics, I've always been interested in law. I did lots of public speaking in school, and in college. I did a lot of civic engagement. I was a Boy Scout, that kind of thing. I knew I wanted to be doing public work of some sort, but, what that looked like, I had no particular vision.

I remember talking to one of my college professors who I was close to, and just sort of, you know, brainstorming ideas with her about what I might do with my life. Things came up, like, obviously, lawyer, you know, maybe labor organizer, like, that kind of stuff. But, journalism, I got into journalism more because it was an opportunity that was available, and less out of any aspiration.

What I don't think I'm doing, what I'm not trying to do, is sort of, oh, "This is a running compendium of things Jamelle has thought about during a week".

How does one approach the work, and how does one get started? These are two separate conceptual questions.

How does one approach the work?

It's a big picture question about "What is it that I think that I'm doing?", because that shapes how I go about writing a column. I can say what I don't think I'm doing. What I don't think I'm doing, what I'm not trying to do, is sort of, oh, "This is a running compendium of things Jamelle has thought about during a week". That's boring. The things I think, and the things I dwell on are, like, "Should I buy a camera lens?"

I don't have some ready repository of takes to deploy, on a weekly basis. I think that that kind of approach to a newspaper column, especially at a place like the Times, is wasting the space and wasting the resources.

We're given a lot of resources, we can do a lot, and I think it's incumbent upon those of us who have this kind of platform to try to use it wisely, and make good use of the resources that we have been given. When I conceptualize the job, it is less about what it is that I think, and more about, "Okay, what can I provide to readers? Given what I know, my own expertise, my own interests and the resources available to me, what would be the most useful way to use this space?"

To my mind, the most useful way to use this kind of space is to do as much as possible, because I'm not a scoop-breaking reporter, that's not really in my skill repertoire. We can provide, like, deep context for events happening in the country. Specifically, context coming from American political history, and American history, broadly. We can bring up questions of politics and policy, historical context, and also maybe think a little more deeply about what is happening: This is what the American political system is, this is how it works, this is why it works this way and not that way, here are the benefits and detriments of that, and here's how you might be able to change it.

When it comes to writing any given column, the first question I ask myself is, "Do I actually have anything useful to say to anyone?" Has an event happened? Has something happened for which I can actually bring something to bear to help people understand? If I can, that helps set me on a path to figure something out. If I can't, then I have to go back to the drawing board, and I might not even write that week, because I'm resistant to writing for the sake of writing, I think that's where you get into trouble.

When I started in 2019 at the Times, I did two columns a week, plus a newsletter, and I did that until last year, when I switched to one column a week. The one column a week became more like a long essay, so, roughly the same amount of writing, just, like, compressed into a single piece.

I don't know if an editor is going to say this, but, I'm saying it, at a certain point, people have to trust you to have good judgment about what you should and shouldn't write, and, so, there is an expectation that you're going to write something once a week. If, at any point, you say, "You know what, I don't have a column this week", or "I just want to do a short newsletter that's just chiming in on something that happened", because nothing warrants a longer treatment, I think people are like, "Alright, well, okay".

I'll say that, for my first year or two at the Times, I needed to build up the confidence to have that good judgment and that was why I wrote two columns a week. I don't think I took a week off, except for vacation time, and I was like, "I need to make sure that this plane is staying in the air, you know, I'm gonna make sure I'm delivering."

My kids are younger, and every year, they go on winter break or spring break or something like that, and I'm like, "I'll write some stuff, I'll schedule it", but if we're on vacation, like, I'm not working. They're kids for a very limited time. I don't want to miss out on any of that.

I just don't have this kind of, like, massive ego about my work to think that, like, "Oh, it would be a tragedy if I didn't write this week".

Other people can probably write off the cuff, but I can't with any coherence.

The things I write, I try to divide into two large buckets. One contains straight news analysis. Something has happened, and I'm trying to lend some context or insight to what has happened. That kind of thing can be written very quickly.

The second bucket are pieces that are somewhat longer, more essayistic, and are explorations of themes and ideas, typically drawing heavily on historical context. These are things that take a lot more time. I've worked on some pieces that took upwards of 3 to 4 weeks. I know I have an angle, and I know what I want to do, and it becomes a question of, "Okay, what books do I need to read? What articles do I need to read?" Then you do the reading. You prep your thoughts on the thing, and then you write. In the process of writing, I almost always encounter a point where it's like, "You know what? I don't know what I'm talking about, I actually need to know more". So the 90% completed column has to be set aside to do more reading to get to the place where I'm like, "Okay, now I understand this more".

I have a couple of friends who read my columns closely, who sometimes will observe that only about a quarter, or, sometimes maybe half of the research I do for a given piece actually makes it into the piece, because so much of it was background that I needed to know, so that I could understand what I needed to say, but isn't actually going to be in the final piece itself.

Reporting columns are columns where I talk to sources. I've written columns where you talk to a couple people, I've written columns where it's, like, a dozen people. You start reaching out, you schedule time with these people, and sometimes you're working over 2 or 3 or 4 weeks to have the time to do all of this. Then you have to sit down and write the thing. After you write it, it goes through a rigorous edit process at the Times.

I will often extensively outline before I write, because writing and thinking are deeply intertwined, and you need to map out your thoughts before you can write in a way that is actually coherent, in my experience. Other people can probably write off the cuff, but I can't with any coherence. Part of me wishes I could, but I can't, and so I outline extensively, and then I write from the outline.

Somewhere around halfway through a piece, I will have a much better sense of what I'm trying to say. I go back to the outline, I rework the outline, and, then, I finish the piece. Then there's the self-editing process. You write a column, you read it, you let it breathe for a day or two, you read it again.

Sometimes I'll read a draft out loud, because that's a good way to get a sense of how it sounds. Then it goes to an editor. Usually, I am reasonably confident in the column by the time that I turn it in. But I have definitely submitted things that were trash, and, like, my editor was like, "This is not going to work", and so you go back. Because he was right, it's not going to work.

The first layer of editing is very tight line editing, which is pretty unusual in my experience. Then you go through a copyedit and a fact check. If I say, you know, "FDR won in a landslide in 1936", I don't need to actually cite that in the piece, that's just something I know. But the fact checker is going to be like, "Yep, that's true", or "No, you're wrong". Once we're done with all of that, it's only then that it's published.

Then it starts all over again.

There's a style guide for the New York Times. It's a very long style guide. I don't think I've ever had reason to look at it, in part, because the copy desk is on top of all of that. If I style something incorrectly, it gets fixed. There are a few style choices that writers themselves will make, though.

I need to have it in my brain, so that I know when I say this thing in the piece, it's correct

I'm sitting in my office right now, in my house. I've got a reasonably nice desk, a pretty comfortable chair, a pretty nice monitor. I have a nice keyboard and mouse that I like. I've become a bit of a keyboard nerd in recent years. I really like mechanical keyboards, so I have a couple, a few different mechanical keyboards that I like using. I have some little knickknacks, but not too much, because I don't want a ton of clutter around me when I'm working.

I want to be able to, you know, focus. I often will have music on when I'm working. I find that sometimes I need music, and sometimes I don't. It kind of depends on where I am in the writing process. I have a lamp for if I'm working at night, and I have a window so I can look outside. I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and, like, I have trees right outside my window, so that's nice.

If I am working on a piece that is in that mode where it is, the hard part of writing, where you're just, like, sitting there, and you have to write, the time of day that I think I do best is the morning, so, if I can sit down in the morning and work, that's the best. But, you know, other kinds of writing tasks don't require that same kind of focus, and so those can be done any time of day.

I don't really take many notes. I read a lot, and if I think, like, "Oh, that's a good point!", then I'll, like, snap a picture on my phone of the page. When I'm writing, I'll go through the pictures. Often, I won't use most of them, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's not relevant to the final piece. I also take little voice memos for myself. So, if I'm on a walk, and I'm thinking about something, I'll be like, "Okay, I'll do a voice memo", and kind of talk to myself about it.

On historical questions and research, I'll go read a book, and I want to absorb what it is that the book is saying. Much of what I learn from the book won't end up in the piece. It's just, like, I need to have it in my brain, so that I know when I say this thing in the piece, it's correct. If I'm calling someone, I will take notes during the call, then type up the notes, so I have them in a place I can work with them.

I think the big thing that I'd like people to take away is an understanding that not everything we're experiencing now has happened before — I reject that

Writing for the Times is my main thing. It's what I draw a salary from, it pays for my and my kids' health insurance. But I've been experimenting with video, for the past 2 years, really. I'm really kind of ramping it up, as of late. I do stuff on TikTok and YouTube. At the Times, I've been doing a lot of video, almost weekly videos now, and then weekly podcasts.

I have a podcast with my buddy, this writer, John Ganz, where we talk about political thrillers from the 1990s. I also just do lots of general podcasting. But I don't have, like, a Politics podcast, necessarily, that people can go listen to. I tend to just show up on lots of other people's podcasts as a guest, and then I show up on non-politics podcasts quite frequently, like comedy podcasts, as a guest.

My day job is Times columnist, and it intersects with — but is not entirely coterminous with — my job as, like, internet personality. Which is… I find quite strange. Like, me, the internet personality, is very odd, because, in my own head, I'm just a guy who wears tweed all the time, I don't know what I'm doing.

I give talks at universities and colleges, sometimes even high schools. I exclusively talk to educational institutions. They're civic-oriented talks. I think of the video as being part of that — as a kind of commentary on the news, but I'm also trying to provide, like, an informal civic education. Many people do not get a particularly good civic education, and it often leaves them feeling disempowered, and so part of what I hope to do with the video stuff is remind people that they have agency.

I’m trying to sort of teach something about the country, about the political system, and so on. That's kind of how I see that. That's my objective with video, and it's very much similar to my objective when I give a talk to a bunch of college students.

I think the big thing that I'd like people to take away is an understanding that not everything we're experiencing now has happened before — I reject that. The past is truly a different country. Although you can find historical analogies, they're just that: analogies. They aren't one-for-one equivalents. But what you can say is that past generations of Americans have had to sort out their own struggles, and have faced similar questions that we face today, similar questions about the nature of our country, the nature of who belongs here, etc., etc.

You can learn a lot from how they approached those questions. You can learn a lot from the choices and successes and mistakes of previous generations of Americans.

Part of what I want people to take away from my work are, like, practical lessons for how to do democracy, how to live in a democratic society, how to engage in democratic life, with an eye towards learning from people in the past, but applying the past to our present.

People will often describe me as being very optimistic — I don't perceive myself as being some sort of, you know, Pollyanna-ish optimist. I perceive myself as being someone who takes the agency of individual people very seriously, and think that It's important to remind ourselves, continuously, that our choices actually do matter a great deal.

Dan Does Everything

2026-01-27T00:00:00Z

I do what I lovE, AND that's not necessarily what I do for money.

I do a bunch of things, and I have done a bunch of things for a long time.

I am a writer and a journalist, though, none of those things pay the bills, you know? The main bill-paying thing is that I help run a fellowship program at a university. But I never think of that as what I do, despite having done things in and around nonprofits and fellowships for a very long time. I do podcasting, but, again, I never totally think of myself as, like, "I'm a podcaster". I've done a podcast for 10 years now, and I produce another podcast that's won a bunch of awards and shit. I design and sell merch, and, well, it's… there's just a lot, man. There's just a lot.

It's difficult, I think, because there's what you do, and then there's what you do for money, and in this country, those are the same question, usually. But when I think about what I do, I do what I love, and that's not necessarily what I do for money.

I just put together a little zine of the writing I did that I really liked in 2025. I decided to do a pre-sale of it — one thing I'm bad at is judging how many of a thing should I make. When you have to pay for the thing that you make, it's like "If I pay too much and they don't sell, then I'm fucked". Originally I was going to make a small run, just 150 copies of this thing. Then I was like, "Well, maybe I should make 200, 150 is maybe a little low". Then I put a pre-sale on, and by the time I had to place the order, I was like, "I think I gotta do 400". I took the presale off, and now I have 50 left. This weekend, I had to sign and number these little zines, and then pack them. Tomorrow I'll ship around 360 zines or so.

Another thing that I do right now is that I basically run a whistle factory in the corner of my basement, where I'm running a 3D printer 15 hours a day, printing whistles to send to communities to defend from ICE. There was a moment this weekend where I was sitting at the same little desk that the printer is chugging away on next to me, and I'm signing and numbering zines. I'm building this giant pile of these little books as I go, and I was like, "Man, this fucking rules". I was so happy right then. I was like, "Well, this is kind of what I do, right?"

This is what I've done for a long time, and it felt really great.

I came up in — I would say the Chicago punk scene, but that's not really true, because this was the punk scene of the late 80s, early 90s, so pre-internet. Chicago's a big enough place that the scenes were factionalized. It wasn't just like, "Oh, everyone goes to one place for a show". I came up in the northern suburban Chicago punk scene, which was distinctly different than the western Chicago suburban punk scene, let alone the north side of the city, or the south side of the city. There was one band in the scene that had a real following, and an actual record out, and it was this band called Billingsgate.

Everyone in that band was in high school. Everyone booking the shows were in high school, and everyone putting out records and zines were in high school. I think I was about 14 at the time, and it was just this revelation — like, wow, these are people my age doing shit that I didn't think you could do if you were my age.

The most incredible part of it all was that the way you participated in that scene was by contributing to that scene. Sure, you could go and just go to shows, and fucking dance, and that kind of thing, but, most of the time, you actually wanted to do more than that. You wanted to be an active member of that scene, and that meant actually doing things within that scene. So, like, I helped book some shows, and then I started making little zines and giving them out or selling them at shows, and that felt right. I was in a band — we had a couple of 7-inches, but I'm glad I'm not a band guy.

How did I start? It was that. I was just sort of finding myself in that world, and that world was a radically participatory world. I think that's true everywhere, but I think it's also uniquely true to Chicago. Chicago is a very working place, and the way you are measured here is less about who you know and less about how you present in the world, and much more about what you're doing, and that was really true in that scene.

Couldn't we just make a magazine? How hard could that be?

Flash forward a few years — I was still in a band, and the internet was not totally a thing, but there was an America Online message board about punk, and it was crazy, because there were, like, real people in there talking about punk. It wasn't just posers — Larry Livermore, who ran Lookout Records, was in that message board. This was a moment in time, this would have been early '94, so, at that point, Green Day had signed, Nirvana was huge, and there were a lot of questions about what the underground was, in relation to mainstream commercial music. That was a large part of the discussion happening in this message board, which was really the "sellout" argument. Which is such a cute and antiquated notion now, but that was a real thing. A real, real thing.

There was this magazine called Maximum Rocknroll that was a big, big, big punk zine. All newsprint, black and white. You would know people who read it, because their fingers were smudged with black by the time they finished reading it. Maximum Rocknroll was a key element to that entire underground, because if you put out a record, you would send it to them. It would get reviewed. You would get little orders sent to your P.O. box. There was a whole classified section. The ads were a vital feature to it, because they were really cheap, and anyone doing a record label at their kitchen table, or in their bedroom, could probably afford an ad to let you know that the new 7-inch was out. One of the things that came out of this kind of mainstream punk thing was this backlash, and it wasn't just a backlash against major labels, or that sort of thing. It became a backlash around sound, or around pushing boundaries in directions that didn't adhere to what punk had been.

Maximum Rocknroll got inundated with records. I now understand the shit that they were in — so many record labels started in that time, and not all of them started because "I love it and I want to contribute to the scene", there were a fair number of people who were like, "Hey, we can maybe make some money here". They were inundated with records. They could not possibly keep up with the number of records that they were being sent for review. They instituted a review policy for the first time. But you couldn't possibly have labeled that review policy in a worse way, which was "We're only going to review punk records", which most people sending them thought they were sending!

I remember, very distinctly, there was a DC band called Rain Like the Sound of Trains, who were very chill, and did not sound like what DC punk sounded like before that, and they had their record refused by Maximum Rocknroll. That was also true with a lot of Midwest emo stuff being refused. That was a problem, because if you were a small label, that was your one lifeline to anywhere else. If you were a small band, you needed to get in there. So, I was on this message board. I had a computer, and at one point, I realized everyone on this thing is sitting here with a computer, and we're all spread out everywhere. Couldn't we just make a magazine? How hard could that be?

I was 19.

My roommates had gone away, I think, and I don't remember the circumstances that led me to not being able to get into my apartment, but I couldn't get into my apartment, which means I couldn't get onto this message board, and I couldn't see what was happening. I finally got back in, and there was an entire volunteer staff that had stepped up. I had to be like, "Hey, I kind of want to help with this. Can I also be an editor?" Two and a half months later, the first issue of Punk Planet came out. That's how I got started — like, I mean, really, 19 years old, having no idea what the fuck we were doing. I was calling other people that made zines. There was a punk collective in Chicago called Underdog, who published black and white on newsprint. So I called them up and was like, "How do you print a magazine? How do you do that?", and they were like, "Oh, there's a printer in Astoria, Illinois". So that's where we got printed, because that was the one place I called that was like, "here's where we do this".

I often describe Punk Planet as a public learning process. Like, we were all figuring it out. None of us had any background in any of the things that needed to be done. And we were also — this was 1994 — we were doing this remote. There was no one else in Chicago doing it. Everyone was everywhere. We literally mailed floppy disks back and forth with files on them. It wasn't until a few years later that it was like, "Oh, we could send these via email". I remember — this guy Josh Hooten, who did design work with us, and later became an editor — he was in Boston, and I was in Chicago, and at that point, we were the main design people. We would have to stay up all night to make sure that the files actually uploaded from him to me. If they didn't, if they failed, I would have to call him up, and I would literally — he would have an answering machine, and I would just go, "wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up" until he finally would hear it and would come groggily to the phone.

"Mentor" is a funny word, coming up in this scene where everyone was your age and doing shit, and some people were a little further along the learning curve than you.

From the jump, Larry Livermore was very supportive of the idea of starting a magazine. I think probably because him and Tim Yohannan from Maximum Rocknroll had a falling out, and he was like, "here's a way to kind of get back at him". But Larry was super supportive. And super supportive of me, specifically. He lent — I think it was $800 — at the beginning, because we did not sell enough ads to cover printing. In 1994, if you published, I think it was 54 pages for the first issue, and we printed 4,000 copies, and it cost $800. He lent us that, and then we repaid it with advertising for Lookout. He left his column at Maximum Rocknroll and wrote a column in Punk Planet. I think without that, it would not have flown, because everyone else was just like, "who?"

Larry was super important. Pretty early in doing the magazine, I was still in college. I went to art school, my major was in video art. A year in, I joined the student newspaper. Both the editorial advisor and the design advisor for the paper were really, really helpful. The design advisor, especially, a guy named Michael Miner, was teaching me — like, he explained shit like dot gain to me, where it was like, "Yeah, you need to actually print this lighter than you think, because it's going to get darker on the paper", and I'm like, "Oh, that's why it always looks like shit".

I think those people early on, but, Larry, especially, were really, really crucial. Mentor is a funny word, coming up in this scene where everyone was your age and doing shit, and some people were a little further along the learning curve than you. You would say to them, like, "How do you do that?", and then they'd go, "Oh, this is how you do it". Mentorship was often just peer-to-peer. It was like, "Oh, here's how I figured out that problem", and then it's like, "Oh, cool, that's awesome!", and then they'll be like, "But how are you doing that?", and it'll be like, "Oh, well, this is how we're doing that".

When I graduated, I got a job at the Chicago Reader, which is an alt weekly in Chicago. I got a job in the production department. That's a job that I got because of Punk Planet, because that's where I learned to do design work. The Art Director there was a woman named Sheila Sachs, who was hugely important to me. She was also involved in the Chicago indie rock world, like, she did a bunch of design work for Thrill Jockey, and that kind of thing. We knew a bunch of people in common, and she was a few years older than me. She let me come in and use the high-end printing machines there when I didn't work.

This was also the perfect job, because it was a full-time job in 3 days. You worked Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Your Monday and your Wednesday were ridiculous days, just forever. I worked out a deal with my boss that I could sleep under my desk if I was idle for a little bit. You were supposed to — if you were idle — go up and file photographs into their filing cabinet, and I was like, "Dude, this is a punishment for being fast. It's incentivizing me to be worse at my job. How about you let me sleep and just kick me when you're ready for the next thing?", and he was like, "Okay, fine".

But I feel like most of the time, it was really just people you met along the way who knew one thing that you didn't, and then you'd learn it from them.

The barrier for entry for making a thing now is so negligible in a lot of ways compared to when I got started.

I feel like I used to do stuff that was much bigger, in terms of audience, in terms of who it was connecting with. Now, mostly, I do stuff for a fairly small audience, an incredible group of people, and who are amazingly supportive and enthusiastic about the work that I do. But the scale is just very different, and I think that — like, when I want to be charitable to myself, which is not very often — I think that's true everywhere. Like, I think the scale is just different. Look at TV ratings in the 1980s, it's fucking bananas. The worst show on ABC was being watched by 12 million people, and now, Game of Thrones is being watched by 3 million.

As things bifurcate, audiences become smaller. But, all that said, it means that I can just kind of have an idea and be like, "Well, I think there's probably some folks that'll support it".

Making things now is a miracle. Making things in 2026 is mind-blowingly easy. I make shirts for my podcast, for myself. I hold no inventory of shirts. I pay no upfront money. For shirts! They get ordered, I don't ever have to touch that order. They get filled and shipped. They cost what it would cost if I were to place a huge order to get silkscreened, and try to guess the right distribution of shirt sizes and all of that.

What kind of miraculous world is that?

The zines that I did — there are 54 pages. They're perfect-bound. They look like a little book. And I made 400 of them. They took two weeks which is amazing. They cost $2.50 with shipping, each. Like, what the fuck? If I wanted to, I could have just had the files there, and they would print one out if somebody ordered one. That's insane! The barrier for entry for making a thing now is so negligible in a lot of ways compared to when I got started. That really does feel miraculous. It enables small ideas for small audiences in a way that just wasn't possible before. I mean, like, the original Punk Planet, we printed 4,000, because I think that was probably the smallest number we could print. Now I could make a magazine and print one. That's fucking wild.

another goal I set for myself was to just say yes to opportunities that present themselves.

Last year, I really committed to writing and publishing my own stuff. I had a good run of doing some freelance stuff, but freelance is bananas now, and it suddenly just dried up. I don't know why, but it just went away. I don't think it was something I said, I think it was budget stuff. But I was doing the hustle, and then I was like, "I fucking hate this hustle". I hate the hustle. Some people are amazing at it, and god bless them, but to me, it was just easier to be like, "You know what, I'm just going to publish this stuff myself. Yeah, I'm not going to get the $150 or whatever that this freelance would have paid, but I can probably make that up in merch, maybe?"

I started up a blog again when Elon Musk bought Twitter, and I left Twitter. And I was like, "I need somewhere that I feel like I actually control, because we've gone way too long ceding all of it to someone else". I needed to have my own spot. I set up a blog and a website, and I stressed myself out trying to publish to it. Not publishing enough, spending a lot of time stressing out about it, I was like, "You know what, I just gotta bite the bullet", and I set myself a goal, and I was like, "I'll do 36 of these".

I'd been reading the papers of this radical publisher in Muncie, Indiana, named George Dale. They became especially useful to my brain after Election Day and Trump's re-election, because this guy fought the Klan in the 20s. He didn't just fight the Klan — like, I don't know that I have ever experienced someone so willing to destroy themselves in a fight, just over and over and over again. As I've been doing research, it's just like, the metaphor to me is just like the boxer that will not fucking stop, even though everyone is like, "Please stop. Like, you are a bloody-ass pulp", and it's this guy, George Dale — he just literally never stops, just in a fascinating and unrelenting way.

So I wrote — another goal I set for myself was to just say yes to opportunities that present themselves. With something like readings, I'm often like, "I'm not going to do that". But I agreed to a very early January reading in Chicago at this long-time reading series called 20x2 which is 2 minutes, 20 people. I was like, "Well, 2 minutes is not bad, I'm not going to beat myself up that bad over 2 minutes". Cut to an entire week of me being like, "Fuck you, goddamn it!"

But I did a little 2-minute thing about George Dale, and reading stuff in front of live humans is amazing, especially live humans who had been drinking for most of the night. This was a week, I think, before Inauguration Day, maybe two. Afterwards, an internet pal named Mikki Kendall came up to me and said, "So when's the book coming out?", and I was like, "What are you talking about?" Then Peter Sagal from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! , who had also been a reader there, was like, "I want to know more about this guy", and I was like, "Okay, well, I was thinking about doing a podcast", and he was like, "Why would you do a podcast? There's no audio from 100 years ago", and I was like, "Oh, that's a good point". He said, "No, it should be a book", and both of them saying that in one night made me think, "Well, fuck, maybe this is a book".

So, then, I rewrote it as a blog post, because I was in the grind of trying to blog 36 times last year, I was like, "Fuck, it's February, I'm already behind, I gotta write a thing". I wrote a thing about George. Up to that point, I'd published blog posts and I was like, "This is a good blog post, it got read by 1,500 people". Two days into that George Dale post, 100,000 people had read it, and I'm like, "Oh, okay, something's happening". I reached out to a friend and was like, "Hey, you published non-fiction books — do you have an agent?", and she was like, "Yeah, I do, I love my agent". She connected me to the agent, who then was like, "Oh, I had just read that thing this morning, someone had sent it to me, and I thought, I hope this guy's doing a book".

It's funny, because a lot of things that I do, when they don't look like the normal things I do, I'm the last person to know that I'm doing it. I did this satirical Twitter account about Rahm Emanuel's run for mayor back in 2010. I wrote it for 6 months anonymously. Four months in, a bunch of people were like, "This is the best book I've ever read", and I'm like, "This isn't a book!", and it was, like, finally, somebody said, "God, I hope they make this into a book", then I was like, "Oh, is this a book?", and it kind of felt like the same thing. Practically every single person was like, "This is a book", and I was like, "Well, I guess I don't know what a book is".

So, yeah, so now I'm doing a book.

It's funny, because it's extremely historical research-heavy, which is not shit that I've done before. It's a lot of words, which is not something I've done before. It's super intimidating, but in a lot of ways, it feels like a familiar space, because it's yet another situation where it's a combination of making it up as I go along, and turning to other people to be like, "How the fuck did you do that?" In that way, it feels really nice and comfortable.

I am, at my core, a problem solver, and the beauty of Punk Planet was every day was a problem.

The thing that I'm most proud of is Punk Planet. Like, it was huge and a remarkable thing to have done. It lasted for 13 years. I was a kid when it started. There was never a plan, so every year felt like a miracle. Like, "How are we still doing this?" It had real cultural impact that still percolates today. It started a remarkable number of people on paths and careers that I don't think they necessarily would have started on without Punk Planet. And so that is — like, that's everything. Make a thing that has impact, and there are many, many people who can point to and say "That's where I got my start writing", or "That's how I started designing", or, you know, "I read that thing, and I made a thing like it". It's amazing. It will always be amazing.

It also, frankly, is incredibly painful to talk about. Because it is — you know, the end was hard. I mean, I'm fucking 51 years old, I think I was 33 when it ended, and it's still hard. I actually — one of the first things I did on this blog was to do a series of 13 entries about the magazine, and it was because I have done a very bad job of shepherding the legacy of that magazine, in part because of the pain associated with the end of it. But the thing I'm most proud of is absolutely that.

That said, I remember years and years ago — well, it was in Punk Planet — we did an interview with Ian MacKaye post-Fugazi, when he was in a band called The Evens. I forget what the question was exactly, but it was along the lines of, like, "You're doing weird shit now. Like, what is that about?" and his answer was basically, like, "I'm not a fucking statue". I always feel weird, like, that answer — like, what's the thing you're most proud of is it this thing that I did when I was 19 years old? What the fuck? I've done so many things that are amazing, and that I'm proud of in many different ways.

I would say most recently, I'm proud of the work that I do with Akilah Hughes on Rebel Spirit podcast, where it was me and her and Elizabeth, 3 people, being like, "Let's create a narrative story of race in America, but funny and approachable". I'm immensely proud of that work. We are embarking on Season 2, which is going to be even more ambitious in that capacity. I'm just immensely proud of it. That work — like, I'll put that up any day of the week to Punk Planet. It's important and really good work. So, I mean, it's just hard. It's, like, everything I do, to some degree, I'm proud of. Sitting this weekend, numbering these little zines, and it's like, "Wow! I wrote all of this", and then people were like, "I liked it". They can just go read it. It's free on the internet, but they were like, "I like it, I would like to have it in my house". I am super proud of that. So, it's — yeah. There's a lot that I'm proud of.

I am, at my core, a problem solver, and the beauty of Punk Planet was every day was a problem. Like, one of my favorite days of Punk Planet was when we moved into our last office space, and they didn't provide garbage, and I had to learn how to get a dumpster. I fucking loved that shit. Or we ended up partnering with Akashic Books to produce books through Punk Planet. One of them was the first collection of this poster artist, Jay Ryan, who prints under the name The Bird Machine, and Johnny at Akashic was like, "Well, we can do it, but I don't know how to print color stuff. I think you gotta do it overseas. I don't understand any of that". So I was like, "I'm on it". The most fun moment of that whole process was trying to figure out how overseas shipping works. It was great. I ended up on the Port Authority's website, and I downloaded a coloring book that was for kids about how ports work, and I was like, "Now I understand!"

I think the most fun I have had recently was a project with a longtime collaborator, the author Joe Meno, who came to me and said, "Hey, I have this idea to write a novel, but it's not a book — it exists on the internet". And it's called Question Mark Ohio, and it's about this town that's disappearing. I was like, "That sounds awesome. Let's do that". For a year and a half or so, it was a daily thing. The beauty is, he totally pitched me in the way that I pitched Maureen Johnson for my podcast, Says Who, where I was like, "It's 8 episodes, both of us are busy, don't worry about it".

We're coming up on our 10th year, and we're at 400-plus episodes. At the time, Joe was like, "It's cool, we're both busy, I think we can kind of do an entry every now and then, we can advance the story", and then very, very quickly it became a daily thing. I ended up making, over the course of a year, I think, 45 different websites, and just this sprawling mess of a thing that was an absolute joy to make. Joe would write a little bit, and I'd be like, "Well, I think it would make more sense like this" and it was like, how do we create these websites that feel real and lived in, but also advance this narrative?

It was so much fun, and nobody gave a shit. In retrospect, I'm like, "Oh, we created a story that, like, if you weren't in on day one, by day 200, you were not getting in". But god, it was fun to be in. Like, just so much fun. The best thing is, Joe is — I mean, he's by no means a Luddite, but he's not, like, online, like me, so it was all over email. You would just reply to one email, until you would hit the limit of replies, and then you would reply to the next one, I think it was a hundred, before it would start a new thread. It was a true joy. Like, just a true joy. Every single part of that project was fun as hell.

I think Question Mark Ohio is such a beautiful story. It was very much a story about the kind of post-COVID, where nobody wants to face up to the fact that things have changed. It was a meditation on change and grief told in sort of a sci-fi absurd, amazing way. Like, I mean, it really is, again, a project that to me stands up against anything. Man, I liked that. I liked that project a lot.

If I go long enough without making something, that speed bus is going to explode

As part of my day job at the fellowship program, we onboard new fellows every year. Part of that is everyone has to give sort of a little 5-minute talk about themselves. I tend to really make myself feel terrible in the lead-up to doing that. This year, I did that for a while, and then I finally was like, "Fuck it", and I came up with a metaphor that I actually think really sticks in my head well, which is the movie Speed. Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock. Keanu Reeves is a cop, Sandra Bullock is a passenger on a bus, and the bus is rigged to explode if it goes below a certain speed, and the metaphor is: there's a speed bus in my brain. If I go long enough without making something, that speed bus is going to explode.

That's the driving force. Years and years and years ago, I think it was 2012, I was doing the most legit work I've ever done. I was the Executive Director of a non-profit that worked at the intersection of journalism and technology called OpenNews. It was a lot of work, and it was an incredible experience, and I was not making a lot of things. I started to feel worse and worse and worse. I finally turned to the woman who was the deputy, and I was like, "I gotta take a couple days off. Like, I don't feel good, I feel shitty".

Then I just made some stuff.

This was during the Obama re-election campaign, and David Axelrod had said, "If polling in these 3 swing states or whatever drops below a certain amount, I'll shave off my mustache". He had a glorious mustache, so I ended up making a website called, like, "Does Axelrod Have His Mustache Still?", or something like that. It just hit — I think at the time, the Huffington Post had an open API for polling stuff, and so it hit that. There was a little drawing that I had done of David Axelrod with a mustache, but it had — if polling dropped below a certain amount, the mustache would disappear, and I felt great afterwards. I was like, "Oh, right! Like, I need to be doing this shit".

I left that job in very capable hands, and I'm very happy about that, because I started that project, it's still going today. But I just — I was fairly miserable in it by the end. Afterwards, I was talking with a friend, and I was like, "I don't know what happened, like, you know, it's doing good work, it's got this massive budget", and he was like, "Yeah. But you're a builder, you're not a maintainer", and I was like, "What?", and he was like, "You enjoy getting the plane off the ground, but you're not flying that plane". I was like, "Oh, shit! You're right!" That was such a helpful thing to recognize, like, maintenance mode is not my strong suit.

Making stuff, to me, is the driving force. I desperately want the world to be better than it is, and so most of what I make is about that. It's about trying to push us forward toward a future that is better than the shit we're living in. That's true all the way back to Punk Planet, that's true from the just the punk shit that I was doing as a teenager. Like, the world's gotta be better than this, like, it really does, we gotta fucking live here. We could be doing such a better job at that, and so that's the other driver for me, how can I help make this better? That's the motivating factor behind most of what I make. It's like something like Question Mark Ohio — that was just about, like, how can we talk about the grief that we're all fucking walking around with? Like, millions of people died during COVID, and we just don't talk about that. So what's the story about that, about disappearance and loss, and how you come to terms with that?

It's not always just like, "Forward!" But that is definitely the driver.

10 Songs: Summer in Middle Age

2025-08-15T00:00:00Z

The title here is mostly a troll for Ed Niedermeyer after a back and forth on Bluesky the other day about getting older and listening to more "world music", which is mostly just a pretentious name for "music that isn't in English and isn't four on the floor pop". Not everything here fits into that category, but most of it does. I go on periodic binges for this kind of thing every once in awhile, and this was a good opportunity to put a few of them together.

Most — though not all — of this comes from Mississippi Records, who are a fantastic resource for this kind of thing. Make a cocktail (Hemry's got you covered), sit on the patio or the porch or open up the windows, and enjoy the beginning of the end of the long, hot summer.

Click this link if you'd like to listen to this in a playlist.

We Have Been These People

2025-04-03T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

I review and authorize permits that may result in environmental impacts, specifically to aquatic resources — wetlands, rivers, mudflats, etc. We review permits from applicants that include Ma and Pa businesses, small business, large corporations, and municipalities. My job is to identify potential adverse and beneficial effects to aquatic resources, and, through laws like NEPA and the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, NHRA, Magnuson-Stevens, and many others, I ensure that applicants avoid and minimize adverse effects. Where adverse effects cannot be avoided or minimized, they are mitigated.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

After high school, and after attempting and failing college for the first time, I joined the Army during The Surge of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I joined as a M1A2 Main Battle Tank crewman (19k). I spent two 12-months tours in Iraq, before I got out on honorable discharge.

With my G.I. Bill, I started going to school in the evenings, while I worked construction during the day. It was working outside in Florida where I fell in love with nature, and all of the natural beauty the state had to offer, so I switched to an environmental degree program, and I got a job in undergrad doing ecological work for a small stipend, until I graduated. Once I graduated, I applied for the job I have now using the (now defunct) Pathways Program for recent grads. I've been doing this job for the last 8 years, and have enjoyed serving my community, while also helping others be better stewards of our natural resources.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

Personally, I believe in our organization's mission. Even given my love for the environment, I think it's important that we authorize and help inform development. That could mean more housing, or better municipal infrastructure. Doing this job allows myself and my colleagues to help private citizens and developers build in ways that don't cripple our natural resources, or jeopardize the existence of endangered species. I've been a part of several instances of relocation of endangered species that would have been impacted by development, we have authorized emergency permits to help fix eroding shorelines, I've been a part of beach renourishment reviews, and I've worked closely with FEMA to write environmental assessments to authorize housing developments for those impacted by storms.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

I don't want to speak for the American people. However, what I will say is, without us, there would be significantly less federal oversight when large developers plan and execute their work. The risk that you will have less consideration given to neighboring properties, to water quality, to impact on natural resources and to native species will be high. In some cases, where state and local governments step in, things might not be as bad. However, I am not optimistic about the ability for state and local governments to be completely unbiased when it comes to large developers and their lobbyists. Unfortunately, corruption exists at every level of government. It's my opinion that access to local and state officials, where local protections to natural resources can be exempted or waived, is easier and, therefore, more common. With federal oversight there is a robust bureaucratic machine that levels the playing field, where the rules are the same for developers in all 50 states.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

Unfortunately, it means many people I work with are in a more dangerous position. I have people that now suffer a commute of more than two hours. Or, others who are new mothers, or have spouses that rely on the health insurance this job provides. It makes it harder for them to do their work to advance our mission. That, in turn, makes development suffer, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of government inefficiency. It puts our organization at risk, as well as our mission, and that risks the protection of natural resources and species.

I sympathize with the blue collar worker who isn't able to go to work because their boss doesn't have a permit. I sympathize with officials and developers who legitimately want to improve housing supply, or improve municipal infrastructure and have to go through the permitting process. I agree that our process could be more modernized, more efficient, and better serve the American public.

However, the wholesale slashing of government agencies, the trauma inflicted on the federal workforce, and the crippling of partner agencies we rely on to execute the mission is not the solution to this problem, and it will not bring change that improves the lives of Americans.

Instead, I fear, it will result in less protection for our natural resources, and lead to growing economic and environmental disparity. A salient point that's lost amongst the disregard for federal workers and the work they do is that they are, themselves, Americans, many of whom worked on the private side of the industry before finding an opportunity in the federal government, on the other side of whatever industry they came from.

We know how these policies affect those people, because we talk to those people everyday, and in many cases, we have been those people.

Spite Can Keep You Going

2025-04-02T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

I do administrative support at a national lab. I'm attached to a group of scientists, and help them navigate the paperwork. Right now, that falls into three areas: purchase card purchases, tracking accountable property, and general paperwork. Helping with paperwork when applying for an official passport, approval for attending conferences, stuff like that.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

Basically, I needed a job, and a friend knew about an opening at the lab, so I applied. At the time, I was waiting tables after being laid off from being a paralegal. Way back in the Bush administration, I applied several times for the Foreign Service, but never got past the personal interview. The things that can make you a good FSO (Foreign Service Officer) also slow down the background check. If I remember correctly, I think it's easier to get into Harvard.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

We do important basic research, and, in particular, research that protects the country. In the past, we helped develop stuff like radar, and GPS, and stealth materials (I don't want to be too specific about what my specific group currently does, but most people would say it's darn useful). I help scientists by making sure they have what they need to do research. It's not sexy, but someone has to buy the screws and the oscilloscopes, and you can't do research without equipment and materials.

When it comes to the federal government, there's a lot of paperwork that has to be filled out for spending money. This makes DOGE exasperating. Wired reported that DOGE ordered purchase cards at GSA and USAID have their limits set to $1, with hopes of rolling that out across the government. That shuts down any purchases under $10,000.

As an example, normally, anything that costs under $10,000 is purchased with a purchase card. Like, everything. Journal fees, software, computers, hardware, metal stock, electronic parts — these are all orders that I now have on hold. We often build our own experimental equipment, and that gets paused if we can't get the parts. If you don't have the equipment, you can't run the experiment. This purchase card is not a credit card - it gets paid in full every month. It also has lots and lots of paperwork. Each order needs three approval signatures before I can order anything, and the purchase file ends up with a half-dozen documents when I'm done with it. What Musk says we need to implement in order to prevent fraud is already implemented.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

We do basic research that's too risky for the private sector to handle, and when it pays off, it pays off big. Historically, the lab built the proof of concept satellite for GPS. We currently do some neat stuff in robotics and metamaterials, which I am vague about, because I don't understand it very well, more than anything else. The lab is also big, so, I don't even know what, say, the chemists do, beyond "chemistry".

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

It mostly pisses me off. I unfortunately now get the line from Red Dawn: "the hate keeps me warm". Last week, we had an all-hands meeting to discuss the firing of provisional hires. The head of research started to get emotional, which was like watching Mr. Spock cry.

Fortunately, the exemptions our administration pushed worked, and when the announcement came down, none of our probationaries were fired. I know people who qualify for retirement and have said they're staying through January 2029 just to spite the bastards. So, in general, there's a lot of anxiety, and a lot of anger for being yanked around. I was here at the end of the last Trump administration and the feelings are way, way more hostile to the guys in charge than I've heard before. Guys at the top of the executive branch, the lab leadership, clearly have our backs.

The freeze put some projects on hold as we wait for parts. There have been some workarounds, but I don't want to say what they are. We use purchase cards to make payments easy — Amazon doesn't take checks. Travel has also been frozen. That's caused us to cancel some conference appearances, and some lecture visits. Luckily, field experiments haven't been affected, yet.

Often, the reason why government seems so slow is because we have internal business rules that are written by Congress, and have the force of law. There's paperwork that I think is silly, but I have to do it, because it's a federal crime if I don't!

Going Down Swinging

2025-04-01T00:00:00Z

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I ended up in the Army because I learned in high school that ROTC would pay for college. I'd done JROTC in high school — honestly, because I was accidentally enrolled in it for my elective, and a relative said they didn't think I was cut out for it. I had to prove 'em wrong. I ended up liking it, though I'm sure it was mostly a matter of it being a ready-made community, and that one of the instructors was fantastic — one of those cases where a person was in the perfect kind of job for them. The last person in my family to serve was a grandparent who volunteered in WWII. My parents were actually a bit weirded out when I decided to go after a ROTC scholarship. I'm from a blue state, and from a pretty liberal family - this isn't something people from my milieu really do.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

When I opted to be a cadet, it isn't as if I didn't take the military seriously as, oh, an institution or a career field - but I signed up for the folks already in the military, and for the community. I originally wanted to do SAR (Search and Rescue). I signed up the year of the Surge - they couldn't even get all their scholarship slots filled that year. People always find that bizarre, they expect one would've had to be the most HOOAH! Army person to decide it was the right career choice that year.

I hated being a cadet. I'm glad I did it, and I won't claim I got nothing out of it, or that it was a waste of time, but a lot of it was brass ring-type bullshit. It was a relief to get to the actual Army and realize, "Oh, okay, Cadetland is a different place compared to the real thing". I like my job, and I've generally liked my job in my career.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

I've tried to get assignments that I think matter, and I've been pretty lucky on that front. I mean "matter" in the sense that — not that the specific role itself is vitally important, but that it's contributing toward a mission that is. So, for an example: I think European stability is vitally important, since we have hundreds of years of what it looks like when Europe is a shitshow. So, I've gravitated toward billets in Europe. Does this mean I am doing something for the American people? Probably for most Americans, only in the sense that America is almost certainly better off not having a war raging across another continent. I don't have illusions about it being like, "Oh, if I didn't do this, Americans would die!". But in my current job, I do very strongly believe it is important that this region doesn't collapse into war.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

I admit, I'm tempted to be flip and say, "If shitlibs like me don't do these jobs, then some fascist shitheads will, and then we're all gonna learn what it'd be like to have an American Kadyrov". But I want to be more serious, when I think about whether to stay in or not — and I have thought about that some — I think, "Good lord, I'm not perfect, and I remain suspicious that maybe I'm just trying to justify myself, but how could I bag out now?" It wouldn't be the honorable thing to do, I'd be ceding the ground to terrible people, I've got to try to grit my teeth and keep on.

It's better if this region doesn't go to shit because it'd probably, as it has done before, drag bigger players in and make the world shittier for everyone. My subordinates' work helps keep Americans stationed here safer. There might not be a ton of them, but they are Americans and have families and people who would be crushed if they were harmed. My subordinates' work also helps keep other non-DoD Americans here safe. Maybe that's abstract for most people, but it matters.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

At the moment, if I don't win my current fight to prevent my civilians from having their jobs cut, I straight up won't be able to do my mission. They're too critical to it — they provide the continuity which the military personnel don't. Military duty assignments across DoD are usually 3 years or less. Civilians get much more time in-place, and, if they're good, the command they're in will put in extensions for them until the sun explodes. In my previous role, there were civilians who'd been there for 12+ years. My civilians are like that. Chucking them out suddenly, I can't possibly replicate their body of knowledge, experience, in the space of a few months, and that doesn't even touch on the toll on them already — we've had since the inauguration a constant rollercoaster of, "You might be getting cut! Ok, no, maybe not, we'll think about it… ok but only if you demonstrate your worth. Oh, just kidding, you were gonna do that and you'd prepped what we demanded, but we already decided to stuff you."

They keep apologizing to me! Which pisses me off, they shouldn't feel like that, I'm just doing what I should as their boss, fighting it. We're not able to provide as much support as we did or should. My time has been eaten up mostly with trying to fight this. Of course, they're having trouble focusing while also having to take time to, for example, figure out what aspects of their work they should emphasize most during these "Does this really matter?" sessions from on high. My higher-ups aren't helping the situation — it's a shitty one, but I don't believe they couldn't handle this with more human decency. It makes me so angry. It's such an awful way to treat people, especially people who have been so dedicated over the years, and so willing to pour everything they can into it, because they truly want to ensure Americans here can operate safely.

I am going to stick in the military and I promise to fight tooth and nail to fulfill my duty, which is really to say, I won't follow illegal orders, and I will fight to do what is right, even if people above me are insisting I shouldn't. I'm still pissed that voters have put me in this position. I don't want to have to be honorable, I want to boringly do my job!

Woke Ops at HHS

2025-03-31T00:00:00Z

What did you do? You don't have to tell me your job title, but what was your job?

I worked at Health and Human Services / Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (HHS/CMS) in Operations. I'm not a policy wonk, I don't have an Master of Public Health (MPH) or a public works background, I have worked in tech most of my career, so, I don't write it or legislate, but I observe, track and understand policy and its effect, and I work on teams to help 'operationalize policy'.

Basically, I worked on the other side of bringing policy to life, in whatever way that means. For example: a new rule is released in Medicaid that says enrollees have a new requirement to fulfill for eligibility; I worked on the teams that build the tools, web portals, give the trainings, and educate the beneficiary (the American public) and roll out the systems that are required to capture that information and execute that policy and bring it to life. A small example, but there are many programs, systems, and tools that the American public uses to access resources to help them in their search for healthcare, and I help plan, track, and roll them out to that market.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I worked as a federal contractor for a long time, from about 2010-2019. A lot of my work was with HHS. I moved to the private sector between 2015-2020 and fully left federal contracting by 2020. I liked the rigor of federal service compared to private sector — it does make things move a bit more slowly, but the discipline, planning, and checks and balances mean that fewer mistakes are made as rollouts are a bit more balanced. Contrast with my private sector tech experience, which was anything but.

I didn't have dreams of joining federal service, specifically, but I do have a sort of civic-oriented heart. I volunteer a lot, I co-lead an affinity group for kids to help teach about social justice and, as the years went by in the private sector, I felt more and more disoriented around the goals of revenue, rather than building a good product that is useful to the end user (or end beneficiary), so I started looking for federal jobs again starting around 2023, but becoming a full-time federal employee can take months or years — especially if you don't already have an in-track or come from a lot of public sector experience.

I applied to a ton of jobs here and there, but nothing too serious until I left my last job, and went all-in on applying for basically anything that looked like it fit my skills. I applied to agencies I have never heard of, and I grew up in the DC area and am very attuned to the federal space. With the help of a couple of folks I know in fedspace, and a couple who work at CMS, I learned about a hiring sprint at the end of 2024 and applied to a ton of roles, and was finally able to land in an Operations group that was looking for high technically-skilled folks to execute some website and other product rollouts. Which I felt was both a great way to not lose the skills I had sharpened over my career, and better apply them in a space where I felt the work mattered more.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

We all deserve to have access to the resources, information, and tools to help plan for our futures. Health is wealth, and we live in a country with abundant resources, there is no person who shouldn't have access to — and the ability to — partake. Many people on the outside may not understand the utility of the work I do, or the importance of it, but it makes sure, in as many ways as possible, that we get that information and those tools into folks' hands, so they can make informed choices about their health. In this job, my hard work means someone can get access to what they need to survive.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

The American public should know is that this culling/gutting of the 'probationary' workforce is also a farce. These are highly skilled, capable, seasoned folks who often have decades of experience and a ton of expertise rolling out large scale programs. I think that many folks imagine probationary employees were kids just out of college, and, yes, there were many of those, but they also had a lot of experience, and there were plenty of veterans. Even myself, I'm in my 40s and have a long job history.

This stuff isn't for the faint of heart, executing these goals at this level is insanely hard. But the mission and directive are clear; to diligently execute the programs that benefit the public, be good stewards of public funds, and exercise our duties, in good faith and service to the Constiution and the American people. This is the hardest work I've ever done, and I've worked in really complex environments. It takes a ton of experience and a willingness to learn to understand how government work is meant to be executed, government is not a for-profit organization, it's a service organization, and the American people are the end beneficiaries. Services are always loss-leaders in tech and that is part of what Elon Musk's dumb brain doesn't and will never understand — profit is not the way government works.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it’s all going to impact the work and the mission?

To me, it's theatrics meant to disorient and distract folks. Also, a bit of sheer stupidity - this is par for the course in how these tech CEO admins operate, they all have the same playbook. Ultimately, it's meant to create a diversion to whatever the goal of those creating the chaos is… specifically when it comes to the work I was doing, and from changes that I was already seeing to existing program integrity rules, Trump, Elon or whoever want to privatize the unsubsidized health market and hand it back to their buddies and then 'Target new audiences', which means they will also try to find a way to privatize the entire bucket at some point. That is horrific, people will die. A privatized, unsubsidized market will end up becoming predatory, just like what happened with the mortgage industry, but at a time like this, when the economy is so fragile, and everything is on the chopping block for deregulation, this will cost many lives.

Do you know what you're going to do next? If reinstated, would you go back?

I'm taking it day by day, doing my thing, staying sane. I'm looking into picking up some bit of consulting within my network. All I know now is that our center is still undertaking ongoing suits, board appeals and all that, and we are on perpetual admin leave for now. If I were offered reinstatement, I wouldn't be so sure a RIF or some other insane action wouldn't seal the deal in the future. I've had an extensive career, and I've worked in the same sectors that Elon and Trump come from. To say this is a mindfuck is an understatement — it's abuse, and emotionally and psychologically taxing. Ultimately, as each day passes, I'm not sure my conscience will allow me to function in this kind of environment, and I know I wouldn't thrive working in this administration. I took a big gamble, leaving the private sector to go to Fed. While I don't regret that decision — I believe civic work is meaningful and vital — this admin won't get our society anywhere good.

Computer Science in the Stars

2025-03-27T00:00:00Z

What do you do? You don't have to tell me your job title, but what's your job?

I write flight software for NASA. Flight software is basically any software that runs onboard a spacecraft, so it includes things like direct interfaces with motors and sensors, coordinating communications with ground stations, managing spacecraft operations, keeping an eye out for fault conditions, and a lot more. Flight software is used on everything from satellites the size of a Rubix cube to the tennis court-sized James Webb Space Telescope, so it tends to be fairly custom for each mission depending on their unique needs. It's fairly different from typical Earth-based software because of the very different space environment it's run in. Once you leave the protection of Earth's magnetic field, there's tons and tons of radiation that screws with electronics, so the radiation-hardened hardware we run flight software on is pretty specialized and much more limited than your typical laptop hardware, while also having much higher stakes!

It's not like you can send tech support to a satellite if you accidentally brick it. So, a lot of my time is spent trying to come up with software solutions that are light, flexible, and as error-resistant as possible.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I always liked space as a kid, but in the same way that lots of kids find space fascinating, there's such a wide universe out there that we only know a very tiny fraction about! I didn't really intend to go into the space field though, I studied computer science in college with no clear idea of where to go beyond that, but when I was looking for summer internships, someone forwarded me a link to apply for a NASA internship and I was just lucky enough to get hired and lucky enough that my manager at the time was an absolutely lovely person to work with.

The internship program I did was designed as a feeder program into the civil service; you do it in parallel with your degree and once you graduate, conversion was more or less guaranteed provided you met certain requirements. Sadly, due to the hiring freeze and preexisting issues with hiring caps, it's now much, much harder for current interns to get full time jobs at the agency after graduating. This is a shame, since it's hard enough to recruit talented software engineers who are willing to effectively halve their pay compared to what they could get in private industry.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

To me, NASA is the epitome of what the US, with all its power and wealth, can achieve in service to humanity and to our collective knowledge. The origin of life on this planet is one of the great questions to investigate, and in learning more about our universe, we can get closer to approximating a complete answer.

But in more practical terms, there's so much that NASA does that's deeply relevant to our lives now. There's a ton of satellites that collect data on various aspects of weather (both Earth weather and space weather!), climate, land use, ocean health, and a ton of other metrics that help us understand both the human impact on the planet as well as the planet's impacts on humans.

Although there's certainly a large and active private space industry, these are the sorts of missions that industry doesn't tend to do without federal funding incentivizing them, there's just not a lot of money to be made here. Monitoring solar weather to see when coronal mass ejections from the sun might impact Earth is super important to keep our electrical grid from getting damaged, but no company is willing to front the millions of dollars that doing that would require.

I feel like this is the purpose of NASA and the government — to invest money in the public good rather than in simply generating profits. I'm just one person within the massive teams it takes to make space missions a success, but being able to contribute even a few lines of code to this work is an incredible feeling.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

As politicized as it might be, climate change is very, very real, and NASA satellites are necessary for collecting data on how this planet is changing and how it will impact all of us. We work closely with NOAA to get weather data available to the public (for free!), so that we know when and where a hurricane will hit, or a blizzard, or a wildfire, or any of a number of extreme weather events that, without proper preparation and advance notice, could kill countless numbers of people.

NASA also monitors asteroids and recently demonstrated the capability to push an asteroid off its course, which could potentially prevent an impact like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The solar system is a very hostile environment and we are, in many senses, ants clinging to a tiny rock hurtling through the universe. The Earth protects us in so many ways, but it's a fragile balance that we've disrupted, and there's a lot we need to know about both our planet and about the universe at large, if we want to continue to thrive on this blue and green marble.

Even if some of the astrophysics missions we do have less of an obvious benefit for the public, I think they provide a multitude of indirect benefits in cultivating American engineering and scientific talent, inspiring young people with the vastness of outer space, and in simply learning more about the universe and our place in it.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

At the most basic level, all the chaos and uncertainty is just completely destroying morale, which doesn't lead to a particularly efficient workforce. People work at NASA mostly out of a deep appreciation and love for the work, most of us could get paid so much more in private industry. But low morale tends to kill the passion, and it's going to scare off the next generation of engineers and scientists from considering NASA as a place to work.

I'm worried about NASA's long-term success if it can't manage to retain or attract employees, and given the conflicts of interest with DOGE and SpaceX, that does almost seem to be the point. There's clearly an interest in furthering the exploration missions, like Artemis, thanks to their high political profile, but I'm worried that with shrinking budgets, that will come at a cost to all the other missions, especially ones focused on climate and Earth science. NASA has had funding problems for years at this point; I've worked on countless projects that have gotten major budget cuts or full on canceled, and I don't know how we're going to survive as a leader in space science if this trend only gets worse. People seem to have some hope that due to Musk's personal interest in space we might be able to escape the worst of this administration's cuts, but I'm somewhat skeptical.

I think we're in serious danger of worsening the long trend of privatizing the American space program and simply selling off NASA for parts. The US could lose all the best parts of our space research in favor of giving billionaires joy rides to space, and the decades of NASA's dominance and prestige could be completely lost. I'm definitely more cynical than a lot of my coworkers, but I just don't see how we come out of this without major institutional damage.

NASA's had problems that way precede this administration (the 2024 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has a lot to say about the future of the agency), it turns out there's only so much you can do with a budget that's less than a single percent of the total national budget. Yet, despite serious problems, we've had some major successes too, with the James Webb Space Telescope, the return of samples from the asteroid Bennu, the first Artemis test flight, and more. Lone geniuses didn't get us these successes, the hard work of many, many teams of people did, and if we give these people the funding and support needed to do their jobs, there's so much more we could do.

Answering the Call

2025-03-26T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

I’m a federal emergency manager.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I joined the active army at age 17. Eventually transitioned into Army Reserves and civil service for the Reserves. While in the Reserves I sought higher education in emergency management, retired from the reserve military and left DoD civil service for the DHS role I currently hold. I have served this nation in some capacity since 1990.

During disasters we use FQS, Federal Qualification System. Under FQS we have Incident management (IM) roles and Incident Support (IS)roles. In my day job I help support states in our region prepare for disaster (think: training and exercises). When I’m on disasters, my roles for IM and IS are both in logistics - I am a qualified logistic supply chain manager and I am working towards becoming a qualified transportation lead. So many of the full time employees in the agency I work for have multiple hats.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

This job means I get to help people. Period. It's satisfying to know that the teams I work with are doing their best to lift up and support communities impacted by disasters. When I was a little girl, my mother’s house burned to the ground — no one was hurt but everything was lost. The outpouring of help from neighbors and family has stayed with me my entire life, and I have always wanted to be able to help the next person in the same way my family was helped.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

I do not believe that the majority of people in our nation have a solid understanding of what the agency I work for does. When I took the oath of office for this job I genuinely didn’t know the scope of work from this agency. I am in awe of how many people here have hands on experience and working knowledge of the varying departments - the flexibility of my colleagues to adapt under duress is commendable! All that to say Americans look for help when they have gone through something catastrophic, and the agency I work for are the first to answer that call when are needed.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

Our work/mission is changing rapidly (daily). Just recently, an Executive Order - Achieving Efficiency Through State and Local Preparedness - was signed, and our workforce has to adjust focus to ensure we are complying with it. I think some change is good, to be clear, but I think the sheer volume that is changing seems to be driven by malice. I am not a “parasite”, none of my team deserves the anger directed towards them. In the past few weeks we’ve seen colleagues fired, then reinstated. We have seen all things related to diversity eliminated. We’ve been ostracized by the media and the president of the United States and we’ve persevered.

Down and Out at the FDIC

2025-03-25T00:00:00Z

What did you do? You don't have to tell me your job title, but what was your job?

I was working on resolution planning, which are plans that major financial firms have to give to regulators for dealing with stress events. A resolution plan presents a strategy for the firm to wind itself down during financial stress. I was one of several people brought on in the past year to help FDIC improve their processes on that, particularly if the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) would be in the situation of having to take the big firm over. My team focused on the 8 biggest firms, called Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIB). If the FDIC had to step in, we would have to determine a different strategy to what the firm itself proposed.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

A former boss of mine in the private sector worked for FDIC, and thought I would like it. I've worked on writing these plans for financial firms for over 10 years before I started there. Prior to working in resolution planning, I worked for a major investment bank, supporting traders of credit default swaps. I had a front row seat for the 2008 financial crisis. After that experience, I liked that I was part of a solution to problems with financial stability by working in resolution planning, and being at FDIC would be the pinnacle of that work.

You don't have to come from private sector, but last year FDIC made a point of bringing in people with that experience after the 2023 bank failures.

What did this work mean to you? Why was it important to you, personally?

My work was focused on bank capital. Think of it as a certain amount of equity a bank needs to stay open. Normally a bank is insolvent if liabilities rise above assets, but regulators are supposed step in long before that happens. I was working to improve that process of figuring out if and when the FDIC would step in, from a capital perspective, and what we would do after. I also worked on improving coordination with overseas regulators. It's all highly impactful stuff, far beyond anything I would experience working for a big bank, even as a senior executive.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

In the aftermath of the 2023 failures, investigations were done by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the regulators themselves about what went wrong. A failure point was how understaffed the regulators were to deal with major bank failures, among other issues. My coworkers are very talented and dedicated people. They will figure out a way to get all this work done without us, it's just going to be harder without the subject matter experts that were just let go. All the distractions that keep getting foisted upon them from DOGE are not helping!

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

I have serious concerns about what cryptocurrency can do to financial stability, there's zero regulatory framework. We've been here before with financial firms jumping into credit derivatives, and that ended poorly. I fear a repeat as banks start jumping into crypto, especially if they are trading with their own money to juice profits. The only real "guardrail" was the FDIC keeping the banks out of it, and that's likely to change, more bag holders. Just because a big financial firm is getting involved doesn't mean that it understands the risks it is taking. To keep banks out of crypto, all FDIC really did was ask detailed questions about how banks would manage the risks and most banks decided it wasn't worth the hassle. At least, that was my read from the "smoking gun" that Coinbase have been whining about.

We don't get severance. I would love to work for them, or another banking regulator, but it's not clear if any will be hiring anytime soon. I also have restrictions on which banks I can work for, for up to a year, which greatly limits my career options.

I was repeatedly told, in the lead up to this, that I had nothing to worry about. My performance was great - good reviews and performance bonuses, in part because of how important my role was. None of that mattered. I had five weeks left on probation. I don't hold anything against my managers or division leadership, I know they all tried to save us. The conventional wisdom was that the workforce would be cut through retirement buyouts. One third of FDIC staff are retirement-eligible, or will be by 2027. FDIC also had a higher proportion of deferred resignations than other organizations, around 8%.

At least the job market for my field is good at the moment. Recruiters are, so far, accommodating despite my termination letter saying that I was deemed unfit for public service or whatever, I'm hoping to land something soon, before the bottom falls out of the job market.

Wired Into the Army of the Future

2025-03-24T00:00:00Z

What do you do? You don't have to tell me your job title, but what's your job?

I work for a center under Army Futures Command. We work on developing what the Army of the Future needs to look like, based on our best assessment of likely threats, the theaters we’d face them in, the capabilities we’d have to have to counter those capabilities we expect an adversary to have, etc., and then figuring out what research, development, and engineering need to be done to bring that concept into reality in the necessary time frame. My work is a small part of that whole thing, but is in kind of a nexus point trying to marry up the concept and the science to make sure they’re pointing in the same direction.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I had always imagined myself as a teacher, but I taught for a year after college and it wasn’t for me. Then I pictured myself as a professor, and I entered a PhD program for a year, and it wasn’t for me. Some friends from college had gotten jobs working for the Army, and I was kind of adrift after leaving grad school, so I applied and, all these years later, here I am. It wasn’t a calling, it was an opportunity that presented itself, and I only really came to appreciate the service aspect of it gradually.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

I am not a militaristic person, so I’ve kind of had to grapple with this question for myself over time. It seems cliche, if you know the army, but I have really come to think of it in terms of Soldiers. Helping to supply those people who have signed up to serve to have what they need to do to perform their mission with the greatest likelihood of coming home safely.

A lot of times the work is just the work — I go in and do it, and I’m not filled with a huge sense of duty and purpose. My previous job was much more nitty gritty, and it was easier to lose myself in details, and lose sight of the connection to the mission. My position now has a lot more direct connection to mission, to the hard trades that have to be made to put equipment in people’s hands who are putting themselves in harm’s way, and it feels much more important and immediate to get it right.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

A lot of why it matters to me personally is, I think, why it should matter to Americans more generally; but also, I think there are some rising powers in the world that are much more malevolent than the US has been in the world, looking to project military strength, and countering them is a good and necessary thing.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

The broad answer to this question flows from the last one. We seem to be abdicating our military role to counter some of those powers, and are, in fact, allying with them, or at least signaling that we’ll leave them alone. That’s awful, and it leaves me wondering what we’re doing this for anymore. In the much more narrow sense, all of this chaos has led to a massive drop in morale and productivity. Removing telework has meant much less work is getting done, because people are having to take leave to manage family situations, or they’re not logging on in the evening to think about a question they’d had during the day, etc.

The people I work with are smart and committed, and just the return to office alone has sapped probably 25% of their productivity. Another 25% has gone into endless meetings figuring out the impact of Executive Orders, drafting and revising bullet points to protect our jobs every week, etc. I have never seen anything even remotely like this in two decades as a federal worker. It is absolutely unprecedented for our leadership to be providing us mental health services to deal with the stress of a new incoming administration.

10 Songs: Spring Begins

2025-03-20T00:00:00Z

Lots of bad news lately, and there'll be lots more to come, but Spring started, official-style, this week, and that's something, at least. Good time to get outside, put on your headphones and lie down in the park. Bring a bottle.

Mostly new stuff on this one, a couple of standouts include Dust Bunnies by Lebanon's POSTCARDS, and Self-Help by THE GHOULIES, though all of this list is pretty great, in my opinion.

For as long as it lasts, here’s a BNDCMPR playlist if you’d like this in playlist format.

Disaster Response is Democracy

2025-03-20T00:00:00Z

What do you do? You don't have to tell me your job title, but what's your job?

I'm a social scientist at FEMA. I'm one of many people the agency employs to study how we do what we do — how do we measure our success, how do we ensure we're getting the outcomes Congress intended for the dollars we spend on everything to help people before, during, and after disasters. If DOGE were serious about efficiency and effectiveness, offices like mine are what we'd be talking about expanding rather than cutting.

However, like everyone else at FEMA, I also have a disaster role. When disasters reach a certain level of severity, my steady state work is paused and I deploy to assist survivors, most recently, during Hurricane Helene.

As a social scientist, we analyze the data the federal government collects during normal administration of programs to better understand how well programs are achieving their intended outcomes, and where needed, go out and collect additional data to supplement that. While some agencies, like USAID, HHS, and DOL have really robust, mature functions for this, DHS and FEMA are still pretty nascent and we're learning a lot as we go.

Most recently, in my disaster role, I worked to connect with survivors who weren't able to return to their homes and find them temporary, transitional housing. It can be really emotionally tough work, because you're working with people who often didn't have much to begin with and have lost what little they did have, in a sudden and awful way.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I always knew I wanted to do work that mattered, and work that would help people. I come from a family of scientists and engineers (educational courtesy of the GI Bill), so I got pushed into STEM, but it wasn't quite the right fit. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do when I finished undergrad, and the economy was still in shambles from the 2008 financial crisis, so I joined AmeriCorps. I got to work in educational access and it was a formative experience. I saw that no matter how great the nonprofit I worked for was, there would never not be a need for nonprofits like them unless bigger things changed. Government seemed like the place where those bigger things could happen.

I went to grad school, on a public service scholarship, to do data driven decision-making and program evaluation, in the hopes of learning what works, for whom, and under what circumstances. With that knowledge, we can update how the government delivers those services so we can do more good for more people. Since then, I've worked in several different agencies trying to move forward policy that makes it easier to do this kind of rigorous study of government programs. I feel such an incredible responsibility to pay it forward for the opportunities I've had to go to school and build a good life, public service feels like the only thing that would rise to that duty.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

This is the work that undergirds democracy as we know it. Jefferson and other visionaries of American democracy were students of the enlightenment. They believed that government could also work like a science. We take a falsifiable hypothesis and test it, and from that we can learn how to do better. I think that is the promise of the idealistic words in our founding documents. What good is having a government at all, if you aren't striving to do better? To be better? That's what drives me everyday.

FEMA has always been my dream job because I think disaster response is such an expression of democracy and community. Disasters don't discriminate in terms of who they can affect and it takes everyone coming together to recover. There's something so incredibly beautiful in the way people come together after the worst days of their lives, I can't imagine anything more human than saying, yes, and I want to help too.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

I'll speak to FEMA broadly first, then Evaluation across the government.

It's hard to think of an area of life that FEMA doesn't touch. I am terrified of a nation where individuals and communities are left on their own to recover without the coordination, expertise, and infrastructure that FEMA provides. I personally don't think most states have the administrative capacity to absorb what FEMA does. Someone I deployed with told me about one state that decided to funnel all Individual Assistance through their state level emergency management agency for a disaster. It takes FEMA about 3 days to process payments to survivors bank accounts once they're approved; this disaster was taking upwards of months for survivors to get their money.

We'd also be worse off without the extensive preparedness and resilience efforts the agency implements to limit the devastation of disasters when they do occur. Ready.gov is an incredible resource for families and communities to be ready for most disasters Americans are likely to face. FEMA provides nearly a billion dollars every year to security measures for public transportation. The agency also helps fill in gaps in local budgets, so they can keep Emergency Managers on staff. We would be worse off without all of these things.

Losing evaluation & social science research offices like mine has already started across the federal government and we're losing institutional knowledge and access to research your tax dollars have already paid for. USAID was the gold standard for evaluation work and supported other agencies to stand up evaluation capacity. The Institute of Educational Sciences team ran the What Works Clearinghouse which aggregated the best research from around the world on evidence-based interventions to improve student outcomes. Those are just two examples, but who is going to do that when they're gone?

Cutting these offices means getting rid of the best, most rigorous way we have to actually learn about making government programs more effective. Most program staff don't have time to do literature reviews, much less digest what current developments in research are and how they apply to their programs. They don't have the capacity to run the kind of studies on their programs that would give them the insights they wish they had into implementation and results. It's cheating the American people out of getting the best services possible for their tax dollars and we should all be really mad that we're losing decades of research in mere weeks.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

The nature of my work illustrates that I do agree government has issues in delivering services and I think we should fix them! But everything I've seen so far, I don't trust to be operating in good faith. It doesn't seem like throwing the baby out with the bathwater; this feels like setting the whole house on fire. I don't think I can understate the damage this is doing to both the Nation's ability to adequately prepare for & respond to disasters or our knowledge of how best to do so. FEMA doesn't even have a nominee for administrator, just a lower level political appointee who doesn't meet statutory requirements to even serve in the role (the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 specifies experience requirements he doesn't meet).

Most of my work has been paused or cancelled. An agency-wide embargo on external engagement means no new data collection and no new participatory research with the people who are trying to keep us safe at state and local levels. Canceling study contracts means wasting money Congress specifically set aside for learning and we'll never get to findings that could help people. I'm not allowed to go to conferences to share my work or learn from other researchers this year. I haven't been RIF'd yet, but I've heard through the grapevine that my office probably isn't safe in the plans being submitted today. All of this loss in capacity and the chilling effect on federal research will take literal years to restore.

Personally, I'm furious. I've spent most of my career trying to build up evaluation capacity in the government and now all of that work is just gone. Trying to get good researchers into government in the future will be an extremely difficult sell. We are losing our ability to build a responsive, smart, and nimble government that can meet the challenges of today, much less those of tomorrow.

Abroad and in the Field

2025-03-19T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

In general terms, I'm Eligible Family Member (EFM)-employed at my post, under a Family Member Appointment (FMA) mechanism that allows for spouses to apply for jobs at the mission where their Foreign Service Officer (FSO) spouse is assigned. I've served in several FMA positions over more than a decade.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I met my spouse on their first assignment, and it was a very difficult decision I had to make to give up my career and follow them around the world. I have been fortunate that my education and experience qualified me for meaningful jobs wherever we served. It's not always the case that trailing spouses get decent job opportunities. I've always felt honored to be able to contribute to the mission.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

It's important because diplomacy is important, engaging with the rest of the world is important. The rest of the world look up to us, and, as diplomats, we feel an obligation to represent the US well. There are little things that go a long way, like small grants and alumni exchanges that don't show immediate impact, but 10-20 years down the road you can see the effect. You can provide a library or water to a school in a poor country for, like, $10,000. The impact is that all of the kids who went to that school remember that the Americans provided that for them. It's a win-win all around. I guess that's the answer to the first part of your question — it's being able to use our privilege as Americans to promote goodwill in the world, which benefits both USA and the world.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

I think the reality is that there is evil in the world, and it's not that the US should be the policeman of the world, but retreating from the international order cedes that space to bad actors. We may want to pretend that we can do as we wish as a country, but you can already see how some of Trump's actions are disproving his belief that the world will fall in line with whatever the US wants. The foreign service is full of experienced diplomats whose job it is to provide that expertise and guidance back to the administration. We are in the field, in countries, reporting back on opportunities and risks, etc.

The point is that we can't retreat from the world. Even our Department of Defense (DoD) colleagues recognize they can't work without us. There's value in the DoD, State and USAID team working together, and the DoD budget is much much bigger than the latter two. A military-only presence is not enough or appropriate.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

It's a reflection of the success of the United States Government's apparatus that people won't understand how they benefit from it until DOGE rips it apart. He's not saving money, he's cutting services that people didn't have to think about, how those things happen, and who does that work. If anything, I'm so angry and disappointed that Americans don't appreciate what they have. People who flee other countries for various reasons, economic or political, understand that, but I don't think Americans have really had to grapple with what living in a failed state or without state services looks like. It's utterly disappointing that we don't have an opposition party, and that government workers are left to fend for themselves.

We're apolitical and we take that very seriously, and we are constrained from doing more. We have to maintain neutrality for our missions, and provide some leadership for our local staff. With the hiring freeze, I don't know if FMA jobs will be reinstated. For some Foreign Service families, that will be devastating. It's difficult to figure out what's next. FSOs are waiting to see what cuts will be made to State and how. We have no idea what's coming. Not for ourselves, and not for the local staff that are looking to us for leadership.

Fighting for the Worker

2025-03-18T00:00:00Z

What do you do? You don't have to tell me your job title, but what's your job?

I'm a civil rights attorney. I help enforce employment discrimination laws. So when people are fired or harassed because of their race, religion, sex, or national origin, I try to help them. Of course, sex includes sexual orientation and gender identity.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I applied straight out of law school. I actually found my application recently and it said, "I have no interest in the private sector, and I have no intention of pursuing a lucrative but unfulfilling job. Instead, I am seeking a position that both furthers a cause I believe in and requires my level of discipline and determination. At my agency, I can use the passion that drives me to serve the public by ensuring effective enforcement of the law."

That was in 2007. I actually worked in immigration enforcement for a few years in the Obama administration. It was a great time to be there. Then I found my way to employment discrimination and have been doing that for many years.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

My work is everything to me. I'm proud of the specific work we do, helping people, but I'm proud to do it on behalf of my country. I admire my coworkers and many of the people around me who have been at my agency for decades producing fantastic work. My current job is my personal and professional dream. That sounds so cheesy! But it's true.

I've written hundreds of briefs and argued dozens of cases in federal court. I've won cases that improved the law for workers. As a manager now, I've helped newer and less experienced attorneys learn to do the same, and made important strides in the law.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

Congress effectively gave us this job: fighting for people who are treated poorly at work. They envisioned that we we do that job so that people wouldn't have to bring a lawsuit every time they're treated unfairly. We make work fairer and safer, and we do it without charging a cent. In fact, we help employers, too, by giving them guidance on how to comply with the law. Our cases are all civil lawsuits. They involve discrimination in hiring, firing, and everything in between (failure to promote, mistreatment at work). We bring harassment cases based on sex, race, age, disability, etc. Often, they are some of the most egregious sexual harassment cases you can imagine.

Another big part of our caseload is disability discrimination, including failure to make reasonable accommodations. We also bring pregnancy discrimination cases and cases about failure to accommodate pregnant workers, as well as failure to accommodate people based on religion.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

I really want people to know that the people I work with at the federal government are the hardest working, most talented, most dedicated group of people I've ever known. Many of them walked away from a lot of personal gain to serve the public, and it's heartbreaking to see them treated as if they are expendable at best, parasites at worst. We are working for the people and all we want to do is keep doing that.

Doing Less with Less

2025-03-17T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

I work in Department of Defense finance and accounting software systems.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I tried to go directly into government when I left college. I moved right away to DC with a friend and worked in temporary jobs until I got into the NP. I’ve always been really interested in government work and foreign relations, as well as foreign assistance, and you've got to be in or near the civil service to do that kind of work.

I first got a job with a nonprofit supporting an international development project, then moved to a think tank. I did all of this while trying to get closer to a government job, where I could be more involved in policy or near my areas of interest, and I was able to find my current spot through luck, and got in. It's not the usual journey, nor is it even where I wanted to be when I started out, but I’ve learned a lot, and I’m proud of the work I’ve done.

It's corny, I know, but there’s always better paying jobs with easier restrictions in the private sector, so you have to have less mercenary reasons to go be a civil servant.

Why is this work important to you?

It’s pretty boring — but crucial — in meeting the goals, and facilitating the operations of the force. That's very generic, but I can't get into too many of the details. I get a standard sense of accomplishment out of it that anyone would of getting stuff across the line, but, overall, it feels good to be part of helping out with the mission.

Why is this work important to the people of the United States?

It’s important because it allows the DoD to function and to save taxpayer money by upgrading existing capabilities. The force can get what it needs faster, and more easily, with fewer hoops to jump through. This is really important if you want better performance, fewer hours devoted to chasing down items, and more elaborate processes. So, all of this saves money, saves time, saves headaches.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

I mean you’re killing off a generation of seasoned talent. That’s not something you can replace. During the Biden administration, we mostly brought up State back to pre-Tillerson levels, but there was still a lot of knowledge lost, and those who stayed became more ensconced in influence, and the overall bureaucracy becomes less balanced.

Over the long term, we're going to spend more money on payouts and legal work, less work is going to get done, and we're going to deliver a less reliable result, for more money, with far less transparency and oversight. It’s going to be a worse result for Americans who want to know what we’re doing, and why. Additionally, all the fire drills, the degraded morale, the confusion over Executive Orders and other memos are all going to make employees less effective at actually doing their jobs.

Everyone in the space is used to doing more with less, but now we’re doing less with less, because of forced attrition and reviews that we have Inspector General reports on, along with internal and program audits. If there were massive waste, we’d see it, and we'd know it. Hell, you can read all the kinds of reports, on, say the FFG, and what was done incorrectly, but we know that because we have robust investigative and accountability offices. This is going to strip that and make the normal jobs harder.

Records, Kept

2025-03-13T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

I am a supervisor at a federal agency that manages federal records. If you name an agency, we likely have records from them. Most federal records are required by law to be held onto for a certain period of time, or, sometimes, permanently. Most agencies don’t have the capacity to hold them so we do it for them.

How did you enter the service?

It basically started because I needed a job and I thought it would lead me to what I really wanted to do, which was to become an archivist. The pay I started at was awful, and I was on my feet for seven hours a day. I would tell myself that I just needed to get my year in so I could find another job within the same agency, but doing something much different. Seven years later, and I’m still working at the same location but have worked my way up to my current position.

What should be important to Americans about the work you do?

We help people get the benefits they are entitled to. Whether it’s a veteran accessing their benefits for the first time, or someone who has used the Indian Health Service and needs their medical records. Records are essential to government functioning. Not only do they help people get what they are entitled to, but also helps keep the government in check. If records aren’t properly maintained, the government can just pass off complaints saying there’s nothing to back it up from their end. Paper trails keeps the government and the politicians honest.

The facility I work out is roughly the size of 16 football fields, broken up into rooms the size of a small warehouse. Each room has a central aisle with rows of 15 foot shelves on either side. Records are stored in boxes, and we have a system that lets us track specific boxes to their exact location on a shelf. Sometimes, we then have to use the originating agency’s filing system to find a specific record within the box.

There’s one exception to this, which are IRS tax records, where we don’t know the exact location of the record, but can easily find it by using a numbering system established by the IRS. On a daily basis, we receive requests for records. Those records need to be pulled and then are either shipped, faxed, or digitally scanned. Records that are returned to us need to be refiled. Records that are scheduled to be destroyed need to be pulled off the shelf and shipped out. New records coming in need to be assigned a space and shelved. It’s a lot of physically demanding work. Some records don’t get touched for decades, until they need to be destroyed. But the government is required by law to keep them for a certain amount of time.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

Financially speaking, I don’t make nearly as much as my friends in the private sector. One of the reasons I have stayed with the government is the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. I also just do not see myself thriving in a corporate environment. In terms of mission, I truly believe that the current administration is trying to disrupt government functions to the point of collapse. I also think my agency is in the scope of the president, and the head of my agency and the senior level executives have already lost their jobs because of that.

Call your representatives daily. The fate of the government as we know it rests on their shoulders. The administration has already done a lot of damage that will take years to reverse. Don’t let democracy go quietly. If you know someone that works for the government check in on them and offer them your support.

Man in the Field

2025-03-12T00:00:00Z

What did you do?

My title was actually Range Technician. Field ecologist is a little more descriptive. But, essentially, I worked in rangeland ecosystems. I went out and collected field data on ecological processes, plant, wildlife, etc. I looked at grazing and the benefits or degradation that occurred. I've worked with ranchers and other stakeholders in various capacities. We supported the PhDs in these larger projects meant to benefit agricultural producers, land management agencies, and others. We published our findings in the hope that they can be shared with the public to improve how we get our food.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I’m not a highly patriotic individual. However, I’m devoted to the plants and wildlife, who don’t have a voice in how we manage our lands. We’ve made so many mistakes in the past, and I wanted to play a part in making it right. I also just wanted some security and a living wage. Both of those are gone now.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

This work is highly complex and requires a great deal of critical thinking, everyone had their own speciality or talent they brought. It was really cool to collaborate with all these great minds, we innovated, we could operate at a loss when private industry can't afford to. The science and technology we contributed to agriculture producers is so important, new techniques in grazing management can have so many cascading effects on the natural world. We developed strategies and technologies for producers, so that they can keep their farm, and ranch, and the overall ecological health was not degraded. Through our work, we were attempting to improve our food systems.

Rangeland is not just a biological ecosystem, its also socioeconomic. So many people throughout the world live and work on rangelands. Our products can help improve those situations. It's all so closely connected to people, not just the environment. We develop methods for measuring the ecological health on our public lands. We created virtual fencing, so we don't have to rely on physical fencing. We study long term ecological processes that inform agencies like BLM, USFS, and NPS.

I'm proud of the team we built. Myself and the other techs were all on probation. We were getting into such a great rhythm and planning everything, and running on all cylinders. None of this work happens immediately, we are talking about much larger spatial and temporal scales. None of this happens overnight. But I'm proud of the team we created. My supervisors and other researchers would remark that we had such a great team rolling together and the work we were doing was phenomenal. It was finally all falling into place.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

It's a complex question to answer, because for a lot of it, we don't know yet! We don't know what these novel ecosystems will look like. Climate change is affecting everything we do. It's all important to the American people, whether they know or not. Many people don't know how important grazing is to other wildlife. Grassland birds have seen a population net loss of 750 million, and a lot of that is due to land conversion (farming), land development (housing), and overgrazing. If a rancher can't make a living, they're going to sell their land. That could be developed or broken out into cropland, and that's a bad thing. Our products assist the working producer to be more efficient but also be less impactful on their land. Once that land gets past a certain threshold, it's going to stay like that through our lifetime. Birds benefit from large intact rangeland, not little patches here and there. They need millions of acres of healthy grasslands. The more we fragment and sell off grazing lands, the more that impacts wildlife.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact the work and the mission?

The researchers here have been really amazing. A lot of us have been lucky to find a part-time gig, but it's at lower pay, with no benefits, and only temporary. I kinda saw the signs. I started applying to jobs upon the first "fork in the road" email. I wasn't gonna take that bullshit offer, but I held out hope that we wouldn't get fired, too. I've lost jobs before, and felt I should get a head start. I've got another seasonal job lined up doing ecological monitoring for a non profit. But that only lasts until January. I'm not sure if my 45-year old body can handle it. I am more concerned about the long-term career aspects. The administration has been working on gutting so many environmental laws that there may be no use for anyone in natural resources. Maybe, I could have a career in consulting for mines and other extractive industries? Shit is dark.

The one thing I am struggling with: how do I go forward and work with Trump supporters, who probably make up the majority of ranchers? They're hurting themselves because of some grifter who makes up lies about who to "hate". I don't know if I want to be "civil" with the fuckers who made me unemployed.

But ultimately, I need to get over that. Birds don't fucking vote.

The Boy Scout

2025-03-11T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

I am a Foreign Service Officer (FSO), a.k.a., a US diplomat. FSOs are the diplomats and staff of US embassies abroad. I work for the State Department as a political officer, meaning I work directly with foreign governments and civil society to pursue US interests, as defined by Congress and the President. This can include delivering messages to the foreign government (what we call a démarche), transmitting messages back to the United States, etc. It also includes writing reports back to Washington about what's going on.

There are other kinds of FSOs, though, including those who take care of visas, those who help Americans abroad, those who follow and analyze economic issues, and those who work directly with the public, through educational programs and public diplomacy.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

From the time I was young, I wanted to do work that helped others, helped my community, or helped my country. I thought about being a prosecuting attorney, until I worked at a law firm, as a kind of internship. When I met an ambassador while in college, and he explained how he had supported human rights, economic development, and better international relations, I knew that was what I wanted. In my time here, I've done a lot of work to promote human rights, democracy, and better relations. I've also sought to get information to help policy makers make good decisions. Those goals — helping to create a freer, more democratic, and less violent world — have always driven me. There have been times when the work I had to do didn't align with that, but at least the overall mission did. I grew up a Boy Scout, and service to my country and my world means everything to me.

To join the Foreign Service, you take a standardized test. Some are job-related (geography, politics, email, management theory), some are writing-related, and, at one point, a "biographical questionnaire," which asks about your foreign experience, your job skills, etc. If you pass the exam, you go on to a section with some personal narratives. Next are oral exams, then security and medical clearances. Then you are on a list, and you have 18 months to hope you get called up. I applied several times to the Foreign Service, and it took several years for me to get in. In the meantime, I did a lot of jobs, mostly low level. I did a lot of temporary jobs and adjunct teaching.

There are those who get in easier, but overall, that's the process. I want to add, this career has many blessings, but some extreme drawbacks. I have been called to live in some very difficult places. Many of my tours have been places with poor medical care, poor schools (some have no schools), a lack of necessities, high crime, political violence, etc. I've lived under threat of bombing, serving my country as a civilian. It's not tea parties and soirees.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

My goal in life is to make it better for others. I want to work for a more just and a safer world, which in turn, makes things better for the United States. Improving human rights, encouraging democratic reforms, and building friendships with other countries — this is truly fulfilling work, in a way that selling widgets just isn't, to me. I've tried to think of other options, and have considered what else I could do, but this is what I'm trained for, what I can best do. Also, it's what I'm good at. I have a knack for languages, I'm good at moving, and I'm good with people. I can't imagine another career.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

Well, there is the quote from former Defense Secretary James Mattis: "If you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately". We are working to keep governments on board with us, supporting our priorities, and trying to keep conflict down. We also maintain access to markets for American businesses. We're also out there supporting Americans in trouble. There are so many problems that are better solved by encouraging relationships and affection, rather than blunt force, and we are a large part of that soft approach. We're the velvet glove to Defense Department's iron fist. We are necessary to maintain the network of trade, travel, etc., for Americans, but if you want America to succeed in influencing the world, we need a robust foreign service.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

On the overall mission — they are destroying American power. Our ability to influence the world has long rested on our webs of allies and friends. The current administration is blowing that up. USAID was essential for convincing people around the world that we cared about more than just geopolitics, and that we were a trustworthy friend. That's a much harder sell in this environment. It's a bonanza for anti-US messaging.

Personally? The betrayal of the ideals I was taught makes me literally sick to my stomach. I've had to call out one day due to gut pain. And watching my friends and neighbors at USAID get slandered and jerked around has been horrifying. And then there's the uncertainty for my own life — will they come after us?

There are good faith criticisms to be made about how government offices are run, about how long it takes government to both hire and fire people, the arcane rules on procurement that drive up costs and often lower quality. However, the functions of government are too important for a "move fast, break things" mentality. Most of the slowness is due to rules and regulations put in place to protect people, especially the American people. We follow the laws Congress put in place. We serve the American people via the elected officials. The idea we're out here just doing what we want — laws and elections be dawned — is ludicrous.

Sabrina | Washington, DC

2025-03-10T00:00:00Z

What did you do?

My job title was “Budget Analyst.” I worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the Office of Habitat Conservation. I made the money happen for a near-billion-dollar coastal wetland restoration program called CWPRPA, or the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act, that shores up South Louisiana.

CWPPRA is a complex beast of a program - the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority work together with each of 5 federal agencies to plan and execute coastal wetland restoration.

In my role, I prepared legal interagency agreements and routed them for approval. I made the funds available in our financial system so that they could be spent, either at NOAA or by grant to fund CPRA. The program is older than I am and has a multitude of records to match, so I also spent a lot of time untangling and reorganizing complex data that stretch back to 1990.

I wanted to leave the program better than I found it.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I've always been in public service - I started out working in state government in Louisiana, and when I moved to DC, I found a contract job with the Office of Response and Restoration at NOAA. I worked as a contractor for several years, and, eventually, one of my OHC colleagues recruited me into my most recent position. I never wanted to work in the private sector, because something just made my skin crawl at the idea of my labor enriching someone else. I think it is a really noble mission to serve the American people and it’s in keeping with a long tradition of public service in my family. Civil service is all I’ve ever known, and it makes the prospect of being ejected into the private sector that much scarier.

My dad’s dad was in the Navy, and then became a schoolteacher, along with my grandma. My dad was in the Air Force. My mom’s dad was a state senator, and my mom is a lifelong community volunteer. Many aunts and uncles served in the military, work for the federal government, or did both. One of my sisters is a teacher and the other works for a city transit agency. There was simply no way I was going to do anything other than give back!

We owe it to the vulnerable people whose lives are held together by levees, duct tape, and hope to do our best to restore the coastline to what it used to be.

It was everything! I could have done budget work anywhere, but chose to do budget work at an agency with a mission I could take pride in. I grew up on the Gulf Coast in Florida, and went to college on the Gulf Coast in Louisiana, and I've lived through hurricanes, and have loved many people in my life who were impacted by Katrina, Rita, and all the storms yankees haven't heard of. Without a strong coastline, there is no Louisiana, no New Orleans, no Mississippi River with a shipping industry the way we know it today.

What did this work mean to you? Why was it important to you, personally?

We owe it to the vulnerable people whose lives are held together by levees, duct tape, and hope to do our best to restore the coastline to what it used to be. A strong coastline protects them from hurricanes. It provides habitat for migratory birds. It allows the unnamed bayous that people know like the back of their hands to continue flourishing without the risk of saltwater intrusion.

A lot of people only see grandeur or majesty when they gaze upon a scenic vista off the side of the mountain, but I believe it takes a lot more patience and love and discernment to look out over a gray-green muddy swamp in the winter and see the beauty in it. It’s a one of a kind ecosystem that’s home to a one of a kind culture, and I was proud to every day try to help rehabilitate it little by little.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

From a purely financial perspective, this program gives a crazy return on investment! Louisiana contributes $2.4 billion to the US seafood industry and 1 in every 70 jobs in Louisiana is in the seafood industry. You can't have healthy fisheries without a healthy coastline. And when we protect Louisiana’s coastline, that dampens the impact of hurricanes coming ashore, so they don’t visit as much destruction on people’s homes — or on the massive amount of petrochemical industry in South Louisiana.

With a strong coastline, when a storm comes, those people and industries won’t need as much money from FEMA to build back what was lost, and we don’t run the risk of a massive oil or chemical spill from a damaged industry plant contaminating the area. From an environmental perspective, you’re protecting a rare and unique habitat of coastal wetlands that’s home to all sorts of birds, fish, bugs, grasses, and so on that aren't found anywhere else. Wetlands are a massive carbon sink, so they’re critical to preserve if we care about slowing down climate change.

Finally, there’s the human perspective - small towns dot the entirety of the coast and those people deserve to live safe and protected lives, without worrying about whether the one road out of their town that runs along the levee will get washed away every time it rains. In this country we often say we're “by the people, for the people,” and if you ask me, that means EVERYONE who lives in this country, not just the ones who live in places that aren’t slowly sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.

So, what do you do now?

Nothing yet. I was locked out of my NOAA email account on Thursday night but didn't receive my termination letter until the following Monday. They couldn't even terminate me right - my termination letter says that my occupation was "Research Biologist." I'm applying for other financial jobs and thanking my lucky stars that I have a career that exists in both the public and private sectors.

Zeke | Public Defender

2025-03-07T00:00:00Z

I handle primarily lower-level felonies, and I represent people charged with crimes on their criminal cases who can't afford lawyers.

I am an Assistant Public Defender at the Wake County Public Defender's office in Raleigh, North Carolina. What that means is, if you’ve been charged with a crime, if you can't afford a lawyer, the Constitution says the state has to provide you with one. One of the ways that that can happen is that some jurisdictions have public defender offices, which are law firms that essentially just do criminal defense, and then work on cases for people who have a court-appointed attorney. We're state employees, and that's all we do all day, every day.

I'm one of the line assistant public defenders in my office. I'm one of, I think it's a little over 30 attorneys at this point. I handle primarily lower-level felonies, and I represent people charged with crimes on their criminal cases who can't afford lawyers. That's what I do all day, every day.

We're the second largest office in the state, behind Charlotte. I used to work in the public defender's office in a more rural jurisdiction, and there we only had 10. So, here, we're on the bigger end. As these things go, we don't exactly call ourselves a law firm, but, like, we are a law firm, just a weird one, and, by the standards of this kind of thing, we're on the big side.

Most of the day, on a day-to-day basis, I come in, and I have at least one thing in court. But a lot of the time, that's something pretty brief, or not very complicated. Most of what I spend my time doing is talking to clients, talking to prosecutors. Reading discovery, you know, that kind of thing. You know, you work within this system that very heavily encourages plea negotiation and plea bargaining. Most of what I'm doing most of the time is plea bargaining, trying to get a better plea from the prosecutor, talking to the client to learn about the client's understanding of the facts and what happened, reading discovery to see what the state is coming at us with, and then trying to get the prosecutor to agree to this kind of a plea offer, or that kind of a plea offer, like, that's most of it. But even though most cases plea, and even though the pressure to get people to take pleas is very strong, that's not every case. Mixed in there with plea bargaining, there’s working on pleas that have been negotiated, and you have some time that you spend in court either like doing litigation or a motion or doing trials.

Probably the most common in-court litigating I do has to do with bond motions. Certainly with the cases I get, most of my clients, most of the time, have to pay a bondsman to get out of jail when they get charged. If you can't do that, then you sit in jail until your case is resolved, or until your bond gets reduced or whatever, and because the nature of most of the charges that I have, it's pretty common to have a situation where if my client were to go to trial and lose, the sentence that they would be facing would be shorter than the expected delay that they would have waiting for trial. If you said, “No, no, no, I can't post my bond, but I want a trial”, and then you sat in jail long enough to get in front of a jury and lost, you'd be at time served. You would have already done a lot more time than whatever you would have gotten if you'd have taken a plea in the first place. So, as a practical matter, if it's going to be a 2 1/2 year wait for a jury trial date and they're offering you 8 months, then if you can't post bond, you're going to take the 8 months, right? Virtually every time. So we do a lot of fighting about that, if you have somebody that either does not want to get out of jail by taking a plea, or can't get out of jail by taking a plea, but wants to get out of jail and fight it, you have an argument in front of the judge about what your client's bond should be. You try to get it reduced so your client can get out. We do that a lot. From time to time you have more complicated things, either full-on jury trials, or suppression hearings, where you're trying to get a judge to do something more complicated for you that might set yourself up to win the case, or force them to dismiss the case, or, you know, knock things loose in terms of like getting a more favorable plea deal or whatever it might be. Beyond that, you have jury trials. But those are pretty rare.

I just wanted to do public service, defending poor people charged with crimes all day, every day

I'm in that generation of people, where I graduated from undergrad in 2009 and was living with my parents and waiting tables for minimum wage. I was kind of stuck there for a little while, before I decided that I wanted to go to law school. When I went to law school, I didn't really know when I started what kind of a lawyer I wanted to be. I was just like, “Well, I'd rather go to law school than keep waiting tables at a country club, and I think I'd probably be okay at it”. By the time I graduated, I knew that I wanted to be like a litigator. I wanted to be in a courtroom, fighting. I was pretty sure — but not entirely sure — that I wanted to do criminal defense. If you want to be in a courtroom doing trial-level stuff, there's only a few different things you can be as a lawyer, where that's going to be most of what you're doing all day. Most lawyer jobs are in an office, dealing with contracts or this boring stuff that I stopped thinking about after I passed the bar. With criminal law, there's a lot of, like, trial-level litigation in criminal law, but I was mostly, like, “I'm going to be a defense attorney or I’m going to be a prosecutor”. I hadn't completely shut the door on being a prosecutor, but I had mostly shut the door on being a prosecutor because, even then, I had opinions about the criminal justice system and mass incarceration. I was more interested in the defense side than the prosecution side. I got out of law school and didn't really have my act together, in terms of how to get a job or where to get a job in the state, and so I kind of struggled for a couple of years and did document review and this or that.

During that time I made up my mind to do criminal defense, indigent defense. I didn't want to start my own firm, or whatever. I just wanted to do public service, defending poor people charged with crimes all day, every day, and I put in an application for a job in this rural jurisdiction where I had never lived and that I would have to relocate to. In part because it's really hard to get lawyers to come and stay someplace like that, they took me in and I learned on the job. When I started, there was this really, really fantastic attorney that I was shadowing for the first few weeks that I was on the job before I started getting my own cases, and they have since moved on and are now in the district of DC’s public defender office, which I think is really fantastic for them, because, at the time, they were a trans person in a very rural conservative jurisdiction in eastern North Carolina. They were doing amazing work, but that's a tough way to live, right?

Any criminal charge is a big deal. Any kind of incarceration is a big deal.

Through my boss at an old gig, I got connected with this professional development nonprofit that supports public defenders in the South called Gideon's Promise. They do this 2-week, very intense, defense attorney boot camp. You walk through trying to simulate every step in a homicide case from start to finish. It's kind of hard to describe in detail, and I think that they probably wouldn't want me to describe everything they do in detail, because they want to be able to surprise people that are coming in with some of the stuff that they do. But this program works on building trial skills and connects you with a mentor, and it has all this stuff around motivation, and addressing burnout, and all that kind of thing, which are, you know, problems that come up a lot. So I did that, and I cut my teeth doing misdemeanors on my own in these, like, single courtrooms and small towns in eastern North Carolina, and you go out there and you do cases and you learn from your mistakes, and you get better over time. I mean, it's still a big deal. Any criminal charge is a big deal. Any kind of incarceration is a big deal. But, for example, I still clearly remember this case where we called for a trial. I had prepped the client beforehand and gone through what the client was going to have to testify to, and I thought the client was going to get on the stand and want to say one thing, and the client got up on the stand and basically just confessed. I had to stand up and come up with some kind of a closing argument.

It's very human, there's some stuff that's more mechanical, like, how this rule works and what are the implications if you do this, but a lot of it is just like, you know, “What will this judge think of this?” “What will this prosecutor agree to?” “This client that I'm talking to? What's important to them and how does their brain work and what do they want out of this? How are they going to respond to this?” or whatever. When you have a bad result, it's almost always this weird mix of wondering whether it's fair for you to blame yourself or not. But you get used to it over time. You learn the skills over time. I've been fortunate that I've worked in offices where people are willing to give you the time of day.

When I have a good day at work, I get to know that I protected somebody from the system being cruel and racist and unfair and poised to screw up their life, in whatever way it's poised to screw up their life.

This is the kind of job where the reasons for doing it, and the things that are hard about it are very obvious. To be interested in doing this work, despite the things that are hard about it, you have to be some kind of like a weirdo, or a maniac, or a fanatic, and I'm a fanatic, so, I come in here and I see how the system works and what the cops are doing every day, what the judges are doing every day, and what the prosecutors are doing. I see them come in every day, and do things that I think are stupid, or unfair, or racist, or cruel. When I have a good day at work, I get to know that I protected somebody from the system being cruel and racist and unfair and poised to screw up their life, in whatever way it's poised to screw up their life. That can mean a lot of different things, because there's a lot of different ways to have a good outcome in a case. But, when you're having a good day, you get to call and tell somebody who you're sympathetic to, like, “Hey, man, the prosecutor’s dismissing your case, this is over. You're not convicted of anything. You're not going to jail. You get to move on with your life.” When you get to have that happen, it’s fantastic.

One last thing; Google “jury nullification”.

LJ | Washington

2025-03-06T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

I’m fairly high up at HUD, still work there, and I’m absolutely terrified about what the planned staffing cuts mean for the literally millions of vulnerable people on rental assistance. I help manage some of HUD’s programs. This involves making sure funding is available, fixing problems when something doesn’t work right, and making/updating clear policy so program participants across the country know how it works and have a similar experience.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I intended to be a social worker but stumbled into the housing field after college and worked for nonprofits at first. I started noticing things that weren’t working well - why were there always huge waiting lists for affordable housing? Why was it so hard to build more? I learned that the answer to these questions was public policy, and it sounds silly but it was a job I never knew existed. I wanted to make things better, so I went back to school for a Master’s in Public Policy, and joined federal service wanting to combine my practical experience in the field and what I’d learned in grad school to make the best use of the scarce resources we have.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

I love that my work enables me to be creative, use data analysis to inform good policy, and that it makes a difference for people in need of affordable housing. It’s fulfilling for me, every day brings a new challenge.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

People really rely on these programs so it’s important that they’re predictable and fair, and that’s what my work is meant to ensure. HUD in total provides rental assistance to around 5 million households nationwide, many of whom are seniors or others on fixed income who literally could not afford an apartment on their own. It means that I get to live in a country where people who can’t afford a market-rate apartment still have options to find a home they can be proud of. Resources might be scarce and waiting lists are long, but for the people who have stable housing they can afford, it makes a huge difference in every other aspect of their life and I’m so glad to be a small part of that.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

I think above all I want people to know how hard my team works and how fragile things actually are. We’re working with software from the 90’s and it’s a lot of manual work, and there’s a lot of (necessary) oversight. If the proposed cuts at HUD happened, it wouldn’t be long before payments stopped coming and thousands of people were evicted. Almost all of us could go make more money in the private sector, but we stay because it’s important to keep people housed.

A | Pacific Northwest

2025-03-05T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

So briefly, if the IRS sends you a notice that you owe money, you can contest that in the Tax Court. I work for the office of attorneys that represents the government in that court.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I was in private sector before, in an auto injury firm. I felt a little stuck in my old job, so I applied for this job to do something different. I also was drawn to the idea of public service. Both my husband and I considered the military, but we're medically ineligible. My family is full of teachers, which is something I had considered before covid.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

I appreciate that our job is to give people a chance to tell the government they're wrong. The IRS messes up sometimes, and I appreciate that the ethos of the office is that our job is to be right, not to defend whatever the government is doing. We've absolutely gotten cases and said "Yep, the taxpayer is right and we need to tell the IRS to back off". My job is largely clerical, so for me the proud moments are things like organizing a very messy file room or dealing with backlogs. Important things to be sure! But not exciting. The kind of unsung stuff needed to keep an organization running.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

The IRS is definitely a big faceless entity, and while they're extremely important, they can also be confusing and impersonal. So, having a whole couple departments specifically for people to say "Hey, the IRS is wrong", and be heard and worked with is really important. You don't have to go through some giant court proceeding with judges who are more used to criminal trials to contest your tax bill — there's a whole system that knows how to hear you out, and make sure the government is only taking as much of your money as it's allowed to.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

I'm out of probation, and our office wasn't affected by the cuts this week. We don't know why. In general, people are expecting a proper RIF at some point, just because we can't go unaffected by the IRS cuts for too long, but we're not really sure what the future will look like. I don't know about across the country, but we lost about 10% of folks to the deferred retirement. Most of them were retirement-eligible, so thats a lot of good experience leaving all at once. We hired the majority of our staff in the last couple years. Those folks retiring represent a substantial amount of the experience and organizational knowledge of the office. Ultimately it means we'll be providing worse advice to the client, doing less well in court and losing cases we shouldn't, and having a hard time keeping our knowledge base.

I think a lot of government is a mystery to people, until they interact with it — I know I hadn't heard of some of the agencies being targeted before. Hopefully, this whole episode shows people just how many things the government does. I'm hearing from management that they have no idea how we're going to be able to backfill a lot of those roles. I'm optimistic, but even in an agency with no firings and no funding cuts, we're not going to be able to fix things for a long time. That's maybe the biggest takeaway for me right now. All that's happened for us is an uptick in retirements, and it's still going to take a while to recover. The places getting really gutted are going to have a long road ahead, no matter what.

These cuts are super anti-efficiency, and they cost us all money by making it easier to be a tax cheat, if you've got the resources. I think everyone knows the whole efficiency thing is horseshit, but the stuff with the IRS and sister offices really makes it clear what a lie that is. The perverse thing is that the complex stuff is the business and high earner taxes, so those will take longer to recover. Joe Schmo not filing his taxes is easy.

HW | West Coast

2025-03-04T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

I work in nuclear command and control at STRATCOM, NC2. We track missions, operations, and status of the US arsenal.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I came from a military family. It goes back generations, so getting my GI Bill after serving was an expected path. It was just seen as a likely path, not really remarkable at the time. I remember when we told my grandfather, he just kind of grunted, and supposedly told my grandmother in private that he was proud. Civil service was a fluke. After college, I was contacted about a job by a former shipmate and applied on a whim. I had planned to go work in Silicon Valley. It came up at a time when I was looking around, but I also felt alone and looked forward to working with my former shipmates. I also missed having a mission and being a part of an organization I dearly love to this day. Military environments can be demanding but feel very special.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

Working in a normal office for several years was depressing. Here, I'm part of something big and important. I feel tremendous pride in doing a job that most people don't know exists but, on a very real level, is a key to our national security. It's frustrating, and hard at times, and I'm the type of person who thrives in and environment of constantly being on your toes. Maybe it's the long-tail of PTSD, who knows? I've worked on mission planning and operations teams that have executed missions all over the world.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

The core, largely unspoken truth about our national security is that our state adversaries know that we have tremendous military power and the experience and knowledge to bring it to bear. I sit in a room with a group of people with utterly irreplaceable skills and training to carry out our mission. Without that group of people, and the knowledge they have, American safety is compromised. It takes many years of training to get there, and it's something we all treat with deadly seriousness. The weapons are not a deterent without the people behind them.

What does all of this mean for you? Do you know what's next?

I worry. Partly for my job, but largely for the next generation taking the reins. We need that pipeline of motivated, sharp young people. People who used to look at government work as a viable path. Our pay and benefits have shrunk. Politicians vilify us as lazy and overpaid. We've lost so many just starting out. Government work as a stable place to build a career was about all we had to attract those people. Look at the crisis many states are having hiring good teachers. The work is important, but that can't be all there is. It's worth noting that the older Millenials who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and transitioned to government are a finite resource. They're now middle-aged and having to make hard choices about careers going forward. They were a little DoD baby boom in Federal work. The vast majority of the 789K DoD civilians are vets. We all speak DoD and come from a certain place professionally that's very hard for non-military folks to learn.

Jordan | Texas

2025-03-03T00:00:00Z

What did you do?

I worked in USAID's South and Central Asia office, supporting 4 countries over 3 years. Day-to-day, I was the go-between for our leaders at each US embassy and policy leaders in Washington. This meant everything from prepping leadership for meetings with heads of state to helping design new anti-corruption programs to serving as a surge expert on outbreak responses. I worked on four big things:

Sri Lanka's 2022 economic and food security crisis. USAID supported their entry into an IMF deal, surged fertilizer assistance to stave off a famine, and ultimately helped monitor free and fair elections.
Opening a new USAID office in Maldives: most people in Maldives don't benefit from the tourism sector, and the country has a large extremism/unemployment problem, plus the obvious climate change existential threat. We built really cool private sector partnerships to help all of the above.
New global health security programming in the Kyrgyz Republic: I flew out to serve as health office director there last summer during a staffing gap. This was during a major measles outbreak, and before anyone there was talking about avian influenza. We were about to launch new lines of effort against drug-resistant tuberculosis, border disease surveillance, and laboratory strengthening.
Most recently, I switched to Bangladesh to help support them as they built a new government from the ground up following their authoritarian leader fleeing the country last August. Immediate priorities were to keep their banking sector from collapsing, support anti-corruption reforms and domestic tax revenue collection, and help build the infrastructure for their first free and fair elections in decades this year.

How did you enter federal service?

I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist by training, working mostly in humanitarian contexts. Nearly every job I've had over my entire career, from parasitic disease eradication in Chad, to tracking the needs of people displaced by Boko Haram in Northeast Nigeria, has been funded in part by USAID or the CDC. I got pulled into USAID to work on COVID, when the Delta variant was killing hundreds of thousands of people in India. It took a year for my security clearance to come through, so I accidentally wound up working on broader issues. As a kid I was always really torn between careers in science and public policy, so was lucky to find a way to do both. I never left my home state growing up, so working in both globally was pretty beyond my imagination.

What was important to you about your work?

I was really proud of working to minimize hypocrisy in American foreign policy. That's an impossible goal, but I really felt the work I was doing was the legwork. Walking the walk on helping governments be responsive to the needs of their people was really important to me. That's a role only USAID could fill - no NGO operates on that scale. Also, the government-to-government level of operation was really important. I've been in meetings with heads of state where USAID was able to persuade them (along with our funding) to treat refugees in their countries humanely, or to hold local elections as scheduled. Not even Bill Gates can do that.

What should be important to Americans about the work you were doing?

It is really, really hard to explain to people outside the sector how much we do with so little funding. US foreign assistance, especially through HIV treatment, provides over half the national health budgets of some countries in Africa. I think the speed and scale at which people start dying globally is going to be really shocking. I'm especially worried about drug-resistant tuberculosis skyrocketing. And at some point it will come home. This certaintly isn't the most important impact, but I think Americans are going to be shocked at how travel is impacted by the shuttering of USAID alone. Anyone who dreams of going on safari, or backpacking in Asia, is going to wind up facing wild civic unrest and instability and, probably literally, people dying in the streets. For basically every global crisis that pops up over the next four years I'll be able to point to something that USAID funded specifically working to prevent it. That much I'm certain about.

What's next for you now?

Hah, well, two months ago my game plan was to spend these four years speedrunning a PhD. But with the simultaneous destruction of research funding & universities pausing admissions, that's already a non-starter. I'm employable with transferable skills, went to fancy schools, blah blah blah but the work I want to do will almost entirely cease to exist. There is basically no private sector infrastructure for this stuff. For now I've managed to cobble together some contract work and paid writing. A retail side gig I used to have for fun will hopefully take me back with enough hours to cover health insurance. And after that? No idea.

USAID has local staff in every country we work in. These people include every type of expert you can think of, incredibly well-connected, just the absolute best and brightest around the world. Some of them have spent 20, 30 years working for America. Losing them - betraying them - was my biggest nightmare before the election, and now it's happening.

Kathryn | Emergency Vet

2025-02-28T00:00:00Z

I am an emergency veterinarian and I work at a 24-hour speciality and emergency practice.

I've been in veterinary medicine since 2010. Veterinary school is a 4-year program. Unlike human medicine, there's no additional requirement for, like, postgraduate training. I went to school in New Zealand — veterinary school is difficult to get into. There are more of them now, but when I was applying way back in the early 00’s, they published stats on admission every year, and there were 27 schools in the US.

The average number of years from first application to admission was 3. I applied to 9 different schools and didn’t get in, then I broadened my net, and was looking for schools that were accredited. It was, like, one of the top 5 decisions that I've made in my life. I did an internship coming back, at the hospital where I am currently, I did my hell year there, and I would totally do it again. Then, I was in general practice for about 3 years. Then, I got bored, I missed the practice and the people that I was working with, and so I came back and I've been in the ER field now for 10-ish years.

I mean, it sucks, but it's like, this is the cost of doing it. This is what you agree to when you take on a pet.

I have never really wanted to do anything else. Have you ever read any of the James Herriot books? All Creatures Great and Small? I wanted to be him. I wanted to do that job. Some people make it through school and start doing the job, and then they find out they actually hate it, which sucks. You're in, like, a pile of debt, and you have a job that you don't like, and it wasn't what you expected, or whatever. Some people will be like, you know, “I went into veterinary medicine because I hate people”, or “I'm doing this because I don't like people, I like animals”, well, guess what? Animals don't drive themselves to the clinic and they don't carry credit cards, so you're always going to be dealing with people, like in any other field. I really like the connection with people, the stories they tell and, especially in emergency medicine, you have a lot of crazy stuff that goes on, people coming in and in all kinds of states, and it's just so fascinating to me. I'm so glad that I love it because not everybody can say that about their job. It's a lot of work.

There are people that I know that discourage young people from going into veterinary medicine because they're like, “You're going to have a whole lot of debt and you're going to be paying it off for a really long time”, because we don't get compensated to the level that human medical professionals do, but we have just as much as just as much debt as they do. I tell people, “Yeah, I would totally do it again, I don't care”.

People will use that against you sometimes, because the cost of care is increasing. Your routine checkups to your veterinarian are probably getting more expensive. The exam fees, costs for vaccinations, costs for surgeries and stuff like that, and I think people are very shielded from the cost of health care because of their own insurance. We're a service industry, you know, it's fee-for-service. So many people are like, “What do you mean, how can it cost that much? Don't you love animals?” And I'm like, yeah, I do, but I also like my house and I like to pay my bills. Also, you're here talking to me at three in the morning. I mean, it sucks, but it's like, this is the cost of doing it. This is what you agree to when you take on a pet.

Ear infections, vomiting and diarrhea.

It's funny, because the thing I wanted about general practice, the thing I was excited about, was not only helping animals, but forming relationships with people, following animals from puppy and kitten visits and through their lives and the whole arc of life and illness and stuff like that. There was some of that, but also I just got bored because it's just all the same thing all the time. Ear infections, vomiting and diarrhea. You know, routine procedures like spays and neuters and, like, a lot of it just kind of gets a little mindless. It’s not that you don't see interesting things, but it was just hard to stay engaged and feel challenged. I like pushing myself and I didn't really get that. I also discovered that I don't really like managing cases long-term. As an emergency veterinarian, you get all kinds of crazy things, you never know what is going to walk in the door, and that is, to me, very exciting. It is very butt-puckering, and very scary. But you never know what you're going to encounter. I'm guaranteed to learn something every day. It’s a very emotional environment, but I like the challenge of working with people that are in a difficult spot. I like bringing them down, getting people to cooperate, getting people on board with plans.

General practice was just not for me. It was just too boring.

This practice that I'm working for right now was independently-owned for a long time, and then we signed with a corporation, probably 5 years ago. For us, that experience has been great because the company that we're a part of didn't make any mandates. There are some places where they're like, “This is the prescribed way you practice medicine. These are the products that you're going to use. This is what you're going to do”. They have algorithms to follow. This practice is not like that. We got a larger HR department. We had access to more funds for updating equipment. More support, and access to information, and a nationwide network of veterinarians and recruiters and all kinds of stuff.

I was reading that veterinary medicine has become one of the top investment industries because it's guaranteed money, because people are only caring more about their pets, and so they are willing to spend money. So, it's very low risk for somebody to invest in something like that, you're guaranteed to get money back. Part of that is the way they run their businesses. I can understand why that would be super frustrating. I definitely know people who, you know, their practices are bought out by a corporation, and everything goes to shit because they start making demands on things you have to sell, and things you have to do.

Most people think euthanasias are the hardest thing.

As I get older, it’s definitely harder. Doing overnights is hard now, recovering from a stretch of overnights is a lot harder than it was even 5 years ago. I don't know that I'll be able to work as hard as I am, or the way that I work that I do for the rest of my career. But I definitely plan on staying at the hospital where I am in some capacity.

Most people think euthanasias are the hardest thing. I cannot tell you the number of times in the middle of euthanasia, people will be, “I wanted to be a veterinarian, but I could never do this”. I’m like, “This is easy”. I look at it as a gift in my practice of medicine, because we can make a choice to have a dignified end, and your pet can be pain free and surrounded by the people that it loves. We don't really have that in human medicine. I know my patient is not suffering anymore. I have to advocate for my patient. I have definitely tried to talk people into euthanizing their animals because I think it is the correct thing to do, and they won't. I have also had people come in and they were like, “I want to euthanize my dog”, for whatever reason, and I've said, “I'm not going to do that. What you're asking me to do is inappropriate because you haven't tried to do anything, and your pet's condition is not lethal, there are more options.”

People have become so separated from death, as a culture. We don't understand what dying is, or we just don't understand the process. So that, for me, is not a big deal. I think that talking about money and managing the owners is the hardest part, because at this point, I feel like I’ve been doing it long enough that the medicine is not the most challenging thing. There are certainly cases where I don't know what to do, but, I mean, I have textbooks, I have specialists, I have resources that I can go to for help.

I worry, sometimes, about our profession, because I feel like we're producing a lot of veterinarians that just don't think, that practice fear-based medicine and just react. We've had an internship program for a long time. Internships are being actively discouraged by educators in veterinary schools, like, if you're not going to do a specialty, then it doesn't matter. I really disagree with that. My internship year was super duper hard, but I learned so much and I think it made me a better clinician, and I think that that is important. It taught me how to think, because you learn so much in school, but when you come out and you're synthesizing the information, putting it into practice is really hard. That's the hardest part. It's like, you do your physical exam the same way every time so that you know, “I looked at everything”. It's the same thing with problem-solving. We need to train people to think through things instead of just being like, “Well, I don't know, I was just going to do bloodwork and X-rays, just to see…”. I think that we probably need to have a different training standard for veterinarians coming out of school. But, that's a hard thing, too, because the cost of care is going to continue to rise. There's pet insurance, but it’s like regular insurance. A lot of them, they just totally try and wriggle out of things. And it sucks. So I don't know, I guess I don't know where our profession is going.

We do it because we love it and it's a passion. But, it's really hard.

I think that the thing I would love people to know is that we appreciate you saying “Thank you”. Like, I mean, what we do as a profession can be very difficult, because we are intimately involved in our clients’ lives, we are making decisions and recommendations for a member of their family. A lot of people see their dogs and their cats as their children. It's so easy to be shitty, instead of focusing on the things that we can do and take the help that we are offering, like, it's just nice to have people say thank you, instead of just yelling at us about how much it costs, and how we only want the money, and how we're telling you we have to kill your dog. I think that just having some compassion for our profession and the things that we do, the shit that we put up with, would be lovely. There are a lot of people that do that, like, with euthanasia or end of life talks and, and it's so wonderful to hear people say, “Thank you.” “Thank you for making this easy.” “Thank you for being compassionate.” And I'm like, I hope that everybody else would do the same thing. But, it's nice to hear it. What we do is difficult. We do it because we love it and it's a passion. But, it's really hard.

MW | Pacific Ocean

2025-02-27T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

I am in a mission critical position that is directly involved in emergency and routine warship repair.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

In the aftermath of the 2008 crises, I worked at a private elementary school. Colleagues and I were let go when school leadership decided to hire their friends' kids. All of that "at-will" stuff horrified me, so I only sought government work from then on. I ended up in state government for a while, where I wasn't paid all that well, but I directly helped the unemployed and saw firsthand how work can provide dignity and meaning. One day I saw a posting for my current job. The pay was more than what I would have ever gotten at the state, and I knew I had the skills required to learn the job, so I applied. Turned out the position was in high demand, so I got a call back quickly.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

I work near where a WWII aircraft carrier was repaired in 72 hours and returned to fight in the Pacific, and the departments I work with still achieve similar turnaround times. The workplace culture across all departments is deeply rooted in how hardworking the employees at this place have been since WWII, to an extent where, even today, the worst possible insult is to tell someone they are a shitty worker. My team is constantly working to prevent the taxpayer from being ripped off by private industry while also keeping our warships ready. We are also doing our best to fight the negative effects of having fewer industry vendors which we know are resulting in overpriced repairs.

Looking back on my career, I have found great purpose in fighting against unfairness, greed, and corruption in its many forms. I thought my primary focus in my current job would be to fight these things in terms of our interactions with the private sector, but my team will be impacted by illegal terminations of probationary workers, so I feel urgency in fighting for the dignity and meaning of their careers and livelihoods today. I am most honored to be involved in teaching these new employees and ensuring their success as the newest generation of federal workers. They are asking the right questions to excel in our service, and they deserve to be here because they are proving their worth on a daily basis.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

Without us, warships requiring both emergency and routine repairs will not be repaired timely nor at a cost that is fair to the taxpayer. Without us, there will be no more wartime success stories. Loss of any members of my team will place America at risk of harm both in defense of ourselves and our allies.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

For now, the chaos primarily makes me very angry on behalf of my newest employees, because I see how hard they work for the ordinary taxpayer, and for our national defense. Our day-to-day work hasn't yet changed. We have all the necessary processes in place to keep doing our work and maintaining compliance with regulations. More broadly, however, I read the chaos and dysfunction as attempting, most ineffectively, to convince my team that we are shitty workers. Little do they know that we have joined a long line of employees who consider these to be fighting words. At each turn of this nightmare, I will do everything in my ability to protect my team, protect the ordinary taxpayer, and outlast this joke of an administration.

W | Southeast US

2025-02-26T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

I’ve been working for the past 15-20 years on the inspection of safety and compliance of our nuclear industry. There are many regulations that exist to ensure that nuclear material is safely controlled and handled, and my job has been to ensure that the requirements which we’ve imposed to ensure the safety of people, the environment, and security have been followed. I also identify and follow up on cases where those requirements may not have been followed, and keep up on status information for those cases.

How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?

I got into this directly out of college. It was the time of the nuclear renaissance, before Fukushima occurred. They showed up at my college, and I kind of slid into it by accident. I got super lucky. My dad served in the Navy, so serving my country in some way appealed to me, but based on his description of his Navy service, I didn’t think I would be a good fit for defense. Also, I was applying to a bunch of different places, and they were the first ones to get back with a serious offer. I was kind of learning how to interview as I went to the various job interviews.

Also, I hate lines and no one was at their desk at the job fair.

What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?

I love that there’s a wide range of possible things to follow up on, and I like that I don’t have to be in front of a screen all of the time, even if you can’t escape it entirely. At some point, you have to read the 50-year history of why the requirements are what they are and write up your findings. I’ve always been impressed with the people I work with, and I like the sense that, in a small way, I am performing a needed function that makes people safer. I take pride in that last bit.

If you look at the very roots of our nuclear history, in a lot of ways we fucked around and found out with a lot of the choices we, as a country, made in the nuclear industry. I got to be part of the aftermath of that, trying to ensure the lessons learned made us safer. I looked at different aspects of upgrading safety systems, and I’m proud of the work I’ve done. Anytime I found an issue that had an actual safety impact, which was then resolved, it’s been something I am proud of.

Do you think all of this will change the public’s perception of your work?

With the public, I think the trust in general is still there (or at least hasn’t changed anyone’s previous position on nuclear). I tend to look at whether an event builds or loses trust. Fukushima, even though it happened in Japan, killed a lot of trust — no talk of a nuclear renaissance after that. The NNSA firing and rehiring makes the government look incompetent, and incompetence tends to get painted with a broad brush on the government as a whole. That obviously lowers trust. How much, I don’t know. Most of my stuff is local impact, and I haven’t seen the needle move yet in my area. No one’s coming to me asking me if we’re still safe yet. So, that’s good. But a lot of the public isn’t plugged into my field. It can be hard to gauge — until it’s not. Local people tend to be vocal when they have concerns, and it’s a different environment in the Southeast than in the North or the West.

All the probationary people they’ve fired so far (that I know) have been veterans of one defense service or another, and I can no longer recommend to people that they should work in government. I think we’re eating our seed. It also leads me to distrust who may be hired in the future, because, at some level, a Nazi approved that person. Not that anyone is hiring right now, anyway. These were people fired without regard to their background, merit, or input from local management. Does that sound like a place you’d like to work?

How does all of this impact you, personally?

All I have are contingencies at this point. If they can fire me to make number go up, then I will be fired. I’m going to stick it out as long as I can, because I have to believe this won’t last forever. I’ve had a lot of luck in my life no matter what happens. If the worst happens I’ll have to rely on the friends I’ve made along the way, like anyone does

Sometimes, people forget that, at its root, the government is people.

There’s a lot of other stuff, too, and that’s super important, but at some point, you’ve got to have people to do the needed work, and they have to hold to their oaths. Well, most of us have made oaths, anyway. With this new group they’ve got running around, who knows?

This bullshit they’re pulling is petty and condescending. But that’s on brand.

Jamie | Southeast US

2025-02-25T00:00:00Z

What do you do?

I'm a Department of Labor attorney. In my part of in the Department of Labor, we are basically civil prosecutors, or trial attorneys for any violations of regulations that the Department of Labor oversees. We have client agencies that do investigations and pass any cases that get contested to us. We then go and litigate the cases. Some of our client agencies include OSHA, MSHA, WHD, OWCP, BLS, and ERISA. Litigation includes things like civil discovery, depositions, subpoenaing witnesses, going to trial, and settling cases if possible.

Most of our work is before administrative Article II courts, though sometimes the work falls into Article III federal district court.

How did you find your way into civil service?

I knew I wanted to be do something public interest-related for a long time. I am from the South, and I always wanted to give back to the region, I wanted to try to make it better and get people what they are owed and deserve in a place that is mostly left behind, and exploited by capital or political leaders.

I went to law school thinking I might get directly into politics, but I got disillusioned pretty quickly. Since I knew I was going to have to be a lawyer, and most lawyers end up working for big corporate firms that do grunt work for big capital, I decided I wanted to either work for a public interest firm, or for the government, in the South if I could. Ultimately, that lead me to DOL.

What is important about this work to you, personally?

I am proud to do it because I think, in some way, I am helping to make working in America safer and more just. Winning a case, or settling on good terms for us, means that workers get money their bosses stole from them, it means companies that exploit child labor have to pay for it, and it means contractors who put employees in dangerous positions, or hurt them, or even kill them will have to pay. We can also help people recover lost retirement funds, or make sure they get worker’s compensation they are owed.

Criminal law often will simply not hold people to account for the abuses we deal with, which may be a failing of the system, but we get to at least push back on it, and rectify real dangers and injustices in American labor. So, I am very proud of that, it makes me feel good to know that I have one of the few jobs in law that helps the law work for people without resources. I can say that I have helped recover hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen overtime and wages, which is what I would be proudest of.

What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?

It matters because without us, and this is especially true for our clients, there is nothing standing between a worker and their boss. When they withhold your paycheck, or injure you, or deny you what you have worked for, we are the people that can get it back. We make sure America is a safe and secure place to work, as much as we’re allowed to by federal law.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

It has been absolutely awful. One thing that I think is missing in a lot of media coverage is how, especially for those of us not in Washington, none of DOGE’s actions or requirements are communicated to us or our supervisors. We often find out about things when an email arrives in our inboxes, or when we read about it on the news. Thus, the chain of command is unclear as to the legal effect or authority for things. The chaos is a massive security risk for case details or information, since we are often asked by anonymous unsigned emails to reply or provide information without prewarning.

My office has also spent weeks wondering if we will come in and suddenly be fired without warning due to the lack of communication. Multiple employees, good and productive employees, have been functionally terminated due to the return to office policy. I have never, ever, been more furious in my life at these people, who are ruining good things they do not understand without even pretending to learn about the necessary work we all do. I have had to delay buying a house, and possibly starting a family, because I simply do not know if my job will exist in 3 months.

The biggest effect will be increased workload for us all, as we were already a bit understaffed. Obviously, that will lead to decreased attention on each individual thing and will more corner-cutting. I expect that the way that gets dealt with is that we just end up taking fewer cases, prioritizing the worst abuses, meaning a lot of stuff will fall through the cracks or be settled at the client level on more favorable terms for the violators.

People should understand that this is not about efficiency or saving the government money. My department makes the government money through penalties, and returns money to people that earned it. This is a chaotic, vague process that is being done randomly and without guidance or forethought. The result of that is knocking over trees they do not even know exist, hurting good people who forewent much higher paying jobs because they wanted to help people and serve their country. I can tell you that just about everyone I work with is proud to work for the American public and earnestly believes that service means something. We’re not leeches, we want to work for the everyone.

The worst part is that when they get us, there will be more people being exploited by their bosses whose calls go unanswered and never see the paycheck that was stolen from them.

Nate Brought | Maryland

2025-02-24T00:00:00Z

First off, what would you like me to call you, and where are you located? We can use a pseudonym or initials, and region is fine, I don't need specific location.

Nate Brought, Maryland. I would prefer you use my full name. I want these bastards to know it was me.

What do you do?

I am the Director of the Executive Secretariat at the National Institutes of Health until COB Friday, February 28.

My office handles documents to be approved by the Director and Deputy Director, incoming and outgoing correspondence, coordinating drafting and clearance on all types of documents including Congressional reports, Congressional letters, committee assignments and charters, HR packages requiring front office approval, and about a hundred other different product lines. We also handle records management compliance for the director and deputy director, as well as managing their email inboxes, and sending all-staff messages.

How did you enter federal service?

It's probably easier to show you this.

Note: If you don't have a LinkedIn account, you can view Nate's letter here.

What was important to you about the work you were doing?

I viewed myself as having 2 primary roles:

Protecting the legacy and reputation of NIH, the NIH Director, and the NIH Deputy Director by ensuring that their records were managed in accordance with all regulations, and ensuring that everything they approved was consistent, legal, and done to the highest caliber.
Taking care of my employees in the office policies I set, my interactions with them, by representing their interests well to those above me, and through coaching, training, and mentoring.

Obviously, I believed in the mission of NIH and it was important to me, and serving those two roles was my primary way of serving the Agency mission.

What is important to Americans about the work you were doing?

Most immediately, if you wrote a letter to NIH, we were the ones who received it, made sure it got to the right place, made sure you got a thorough, complete, accurate, and legal response that has been coordinated with everyone necessary across the agency, and that it made its way back to you. In the bigger scheme of things, we are the grease on the gears of NIH. If things aren't moving efficiently through my team, NIH's ability to interact with anyone outside NIH would be severely limited, and many things simply wouldn't be able to get done. There are a lot of things that can't go out without the Director or the Deputy Director's signature, and those folks are too busy to keep track of a hundred different people sending them those things. But they knew me and they knew my emails were important. Also, a lot of times things get submitted for approval that are less-than-ready for publication, or are inconsistent with other documents. We are editing experts and we ensure that everything that goes out is in a consistent "NIH Voice." Even the director's ability to communicate inside of NIH would be severely degraded. We handle sending out his all staff messages. We handle a lot of his email. We make sure that he gets back to people if he forgets.

We also handle FOIA requests for DIR and DDIR records though, and we did a lot of work on the Republicans' wild goose chases. We knew they were bullshit, and we knew they were fruitless, and we knew they were going to try to use the results to hurt us, but my staff faithfully located, categorized, and provided every single responsive record every single time, even when MY records were requested.

Fortunately, I was not at NIH until August of 2023, so my predecessor dealt with a lot of communications during covid, and comforted my staff through the death and rape threats they received by phone and email on a daily basis throughout that period. The worst part is the right never stopped sending those threats, and now we're getting them from people on the other side, because they're upset about funding freezes and indirect costs issues.

On a personal note, my favorite workdays were hearing prep days. I've had to watch a LOT of congressional testimony over the years for work, and getting to participate in the mock hearings was always extremely fun. Apparently I'm pretty good at it, because after the last one I did a couple people asked about my acting experience. The key is to just be as one-sided and disingenuous as possible and you'll nail your impression of most anyone on the Hill.

What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it's all going to impact your work and your mission?

I think if Republicans in Congress don't act soon, this is an existential threat to the America that has existed since 1776 and we are damn near Trump realizing his dream of Putinizing America. I honestly, 100% believe if he's not removed from office soon, 2024 will be our last free and fair election.

But let's just assume for a second that things don't get that bad. The relationship between the people who do the work of the government and the government has been irreparably harmed, which will absolutely degrade the mission and is already leading to severe brain drain. They're, all of a sudden, putting out a bunch of job ads for critical skills, many of which they just fired people out of, and I guarantee you nobody is going for those spots unless they have no other choice. The government has turned its recruitment efforts away from "the best and the brightest" and towards the lowest bidder.

And degrading the NIH mission? That doesn't just harm the American people. That harms the entire world. The medical advances that NIH makes benefit people on every continent and in just about every country. Like, I imagine North Korea and a couple of other places aren't really up to the latest and greatest on the results of our research, but every other country benefits from the medical advances that we make. Millions of people will die unnecessarily in the coming decades because of the damage that we're doing to scientific research, and the way we are degrading our reputation by letting somebody like RFK Jr lead the department.

For me, the most serious concern, and the biggest reason I resigned, is the ways in that they're already refusing to comply with the courts. It's anathema to US ideals and the separation of powers, and it potentially leads us somewhere even worse. At NIH, it's most obvious through the FRN issue right now, but you can also just look at the statements they've made over the last few weeks.

These are not minor issues, or normal political squabbling. These are things that, if they happen or they're not stopped, will absolutely bring about the downfall of American democracy as we've always known it. People need to wake up to the fact that the fate of the country is literally at risk. People need to get out of the headspace that they can just tune out the news and none of this will matter or impact them. To borrow a phrase from Donald Trump, "you've got to fight like hell or you're not going to have a country anymore." The only two hopes of stopping this right now are Republicans in Congress doing what they should be doing and getting him out of there, and then all of us moving forward into a world where it's not Party-Line-Or-Nothing. Or, senior military leaders and a coup, which isn't really a road we want to go down either, and potentially leads somewhere much worse.

I suppose you could argue that some sort of "amicable divorce" with a mutual defense treaty between the red States and blue States might be possible, but they'd never allow that to happen. They're in the standard fascist playbook of expansionism right now, so there's no way they're going to give up control over any territory.

Anyhow. I could literally talk about this for 5 hours so I'll stop there.

Nancy | Inpatient Counselor

2024-10-31T00:00:00Z

Name: Nancy

Location: Springford

I guess you could say I was troubled as a teenager myself, though, really, trouble just found me.

I’m an inpatient counselor at a hospital which primarily treats youth patients. Most of my patients struggle with the things you might expect young people to struggle with, depression and anxiety. Being a young person has always been hard, but it feels like it’s gotten much harder now with so much school pressure, anxiety about social media, and how difficult it can be to just hang out with your friends, and I feel grateful that I’m able to help my patients learn healthy strategies for coping with all of these pressures.

I guess you could say I was troubled as a teenager myself, though, really, trouble just found me. My dad was actually a police officer in the town where I grew up, but I hung around with a pretty wild crew from my school, which isn’t really that uncommon for kids who grow up with parents who work in law enforcement. I didn’t have a great home life, which also isn’t uncommon for those kids, unfortunately. I hung out with a few kids who did some partying, and while I was never a partier like them, we’d stay up late together a lot. Something we had in common was that we all had terrible nightmares, so we’d take over the counter amphetamines to stay up really late and try to keep from falling asleep. Nothing too extreme, this was a small town, and we were just kids, so we’re talking about No-Doz or Stay Awake, if you can remember those. That was really it for me, though, I was never much of a risk taker. This probably doesn’t seem related to my professional work, but I had some really traumatic experiences as a result of my dreams, and understanding what nightmares are, and helping my patients to control them has really been a singular focus in my counseling career.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a sleep disorder, but they can manifest in all kinds of different ways. For me, I’d have pattern nightmares that always followed a similar trajectory, which isn’t uncommon at all, especially with younger adults. It’s so funny, as an adult, you can kind of forget what being a teenager can feel like, but kids feel things in such an intense way, like, if you have repetitive nightmares about someone chasing you, or someone trying to hurt you, well, those things can feel intensely real to you, even though the adults around you tell you that they’re just dreams. I think — or, at least I hope — that one of the ways I can connect with my patients is by trying to put myself in the same frame of mind that they are, and try to show them that I treat their feelings and their fears as legitimate. If a patient tells me that her dreams feel real, that someone’s trying to hurt them in their dreams, I treat those fears as just as legitimate as I would if someone were trying to hurt them in real life.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a sleep disorder, but they can manifest in all kinds of different ways.

As you can probably imagine, the day-to-day job in a treatment facility can change a lot, depending on how many patients we have and what’s going on with them. Group sessions are probably one of the most consistent day-to-day experiences. I find that being able to get our patients together and open up to us and one another about what they’re experiencing really helps them to understand that they’re not alone, and that they’re in it together. We have a special group for the kids with sleep disorders, where we all talk about what kinds of dreams we’re having, and it really helps all of them to hear from each other that they have shared experiences. The details are always different, of course, but there are enough similarities that they can easily relate to one another. This is one of the areas where I feel like I’m most successful and do the most good, because I can relate to them in a way they often feel other adults can’t. I still have terrible nightmares of my own, but I’ve learned how to control them and try to help these kids understand that they can learn to do that, too.

I mean, like any job, I have complaints. I think facility administration is always a little too conservative about being willing to try unconventional treatment approaches, and, like every administration, it’s very male dominated. Just in general, I think men too frequently brush off concerns that our patients have, and, as you can probably guess, this is much worse for our female patients. Many of the young women in our facility have been told, so many times, that they’re making it up, or that what they’re experiencing isn’t real, all of this is probably the part of my job that frustrates me the most, because it takes much more time to build trust with my patients if they feel like they haven’t been heard in the past. That’s what it was like for me when I was younger, too, so many of the male authority figures in my life would just tell me that I was crazy, or that I was making things up, but I had real problems, and I would have really appreciated their support rather than their dismissals. Fortunately, for me, I learned how to solve my problems for myself.

I mentioned earlier that I grew up with a kind of wild bunch. All of them had real problems, but no one would listen to them, and all of them had very tragic endings. I’m the final survivor of that cohort, and one thing I’ve really dedicated myself to is trying to help as many kids as I can learn how to avoid those same fates. My peers and my coworkers don’t always agree with my methods, but they’ve been able to show really encouraging results. It’s funny that we’re talking about work now, because I’m starting a new role next week at a new facility. I’ve spoken with a psychologist there and he thinks I can really help a group of his patients who sound like they’ve had very similar experiences to ones I’ve had in the past, and I think I know how to help them.

Vic | Lecturer and Researcher

2024-10-30T00:00:00Z

Name: Vic

Location: St. Gallen, Switzerland

I’m also a researcher, more a generalist than a specialist, though I have a lifelong interest in the study of life.

I’m a lecturer and researcher at the university in St. Gallen. It’s a small, but influential school in St. Gallen, Switzerland, I’m not sure how many people in America are familiar with it. I teach mathematics to graduate-level students. Most of my students will go on to work in tech, though, of course, not all of them, some will go on to research or themselves, teach. We’re fortunate here, many of our students go on to become very successful business people, which means we get to see and influence these students at a critical point in their lives. As you can imagine, that relationship often becomes reciprocal once those students have established themselves in their careers, which feels a little declassé to mention, but is essential to our work. Even successful schools in Switzerland have limited budgets for research, believe it or not. I’m also a researcher, more a generalist than a specialist, though I have a lifelong interest in the study of life. I’ve always been fascinated by life. How living things actually live, how they’re born, how they age, how they die, what happens once they’ve died. To be truthful, that’s my passion, though, the math is incredibly useful in the pursuit of those studies.

Think about it: what’s more interesting than life? The science is fascinating, and the research is never-ending, we’ll never reach the end of researching life. But setting aside the science, what is life? How and why does it start? How does it continue? Why does it have to end? Does it have to end? These are the questions I’ve spent my career asking myself and trying to answer. Even as a boy, I was fascinated by life. Have you ever seen a sail swallowtail eclosion? I grew up in Genoa, where swallowtails are common, and as a child, I used to capture little green caterpillars and raise them in my little glass enclosures. I was fascinated by how they could transform through multiple stages of life, from caterpillar, to pupa, to imago. I still am, I have a small tank in my lab that I will occasionally fill with caterpillars to raise and release in the spring.

Day-to-day, the job is pretty routine, I imagine it’s very similar to other lecturers. I usually lecture twice a week, and hold office hours on Fridays. I don’t know if you know very much about graduate students, but they typically have many questions, and they’re difficult questions to answer. At this level of their education, my students should be able to answer the easy questions themselves, which means I often have to research their questions on my own, or may have to do some work myself in order to help them, which takes up much of my time. I enjoy it, I love the opportunity to teach and to help my students, but it does, sometimes, take up more of my research time than I would like. I could probably transition to researching full-time, but I believe that my interactions with my students help to keep me fresh. It also helps me identify potential lab assistants, my current assistant is a young German who wasn’t the best student, but he is a very dedicated worker who works very hard to complete the tasks. He’s truly impressive in that regard, he has a disability which makes carrying heavy items difficult for him, but he never complains, he simply throws it over his shoulder and does what is asked of him.

What could be more important than researching life itself?

My research is, without question, the most important part of my work. What could be more important than researching life itself? As I mentioned before, we have many students here who go on to great success in business. You may have even read about one of my students, who is currently exploring the possibilities of life extension. At great cost, he and his team have explored many different methods of life preservation. Recently, he completed a full plasma transfusion, which I believe may show truly promising results over the long term. As a disclosure, I have advised he and his team from time to time, but I’m not a member of his staff. He’s contributed financially to my research, but my focus and his are different. He’s focused on extending his own life, which I find a noble goal, but, for myself, I feel it’s probably a little late for that. I am, however, entranced by the idea of extending the lives of others, maybe even beyond death.

I don’t think we can defeat death.

My research hasn’t been peer-reviewed, and I think you should be skeptical of my claims without having seen my work, but I’ve been able to observe some truly remarkable results in some of my experiments. I’m fortunate in that my subjects, as they were, are already deceased. This work would be much harder, and, to be frank, much more heavily regulated if I had to work with live subjects. But I’m exploring the possibilities inherent in stimulating cortical function in dead tissue using electrical nodes. The possibilities here are really remarkable, and the results, while early, are very promising. Just think — what if death wasn’t the end, what if we could reverse it, or overcome it? We’re a long way from that now, my results are preliminary, and there’s still so much work to do. But just imagine the possibilities! What if death wasn’t the end? Maybe more importantly, what if new life could spring from it? We observe this in nature, but what if we could enhance that, what if we could bring new, sentient life from death, maybe even in the same vessel? Many of my colleagues are studying ways to defeat death, but they’re on a different path than I am. I don’t think we can defeat death. But — and, again, my results are very preliminary — but what if death were just another phase in our lives? What if we could go on living afterward? Isn’t that exciting to think about?

Editor's Note: RIP, Teri Garr, you were one of the best to do it.

Liz | Skincare Influencer

2024-10-29T00:00:00Z

Name: Liz

Location: Northern Great Plain, Hungary

I always like to say that you have to love the skin that you’re in

I suppose you could call me an influencer, though I hate that term. I think it’s unfortunate that people are labeled by what they do, it seems like such a shallow way to define ourselves. I feel like being your authentic self about something that you’re really passionate about shouldn’t be something people make fun of you for, you know? But I keep at it, because my followers really benefit from my experiences and what I know about looking and staying young. I always like to say that you have to love the skin that you’re in, and so I just wake up every day and try to do the best that I can for everyone who follows me on YouTube and TikTok and help them learn how to keep that skin glowing.

A lot of people who get into skincare have these long, drawn-out rituals, and I have some of those, too, though some of mine are my little private secrets just between my team and I. The key thing to remember is that, even when it seems like it’s a lot of work — and maybe, especially when it seems like a lot of work — there’s just not a price you can put on youth. Expensive doesn’t really matter, right, like, it’s your life we’re talking about. Who doesn’t want to feel young forever? I really think that my focus on how to preserve your youth is what speaks to all of my followers out on social media.

I grew up in Hungary. I come from a family of means, and I’m not really very shy about that. Everyone talks about nepo babies or whatever, but I feel like I’m doing something really good for the world by sharing what I’ve had the time, and of course, the luxury, to learn. Believe it or not, I grew up in a castle! How cool is that? Last year I took my followers through a tour of where I grew up on my YouTube series. One of the main things I learned from growing up in a castle is how much your lived environment around you can have an impact on your skin. In the winters, our halls would get so dry and smoky from the fireplaces, all winter long, your skin would just feel like dry paper. Then, in the spring, it would rain, all the time, everywhere! Good luck trying to straighten your hair in that weather! I learned how to carefully balance my own secret blend of masks, baths and facials to help myself look my best in any season, but it took a lot of experimenting. I started with small creams and tinctures made from the local ingredients around our land and gradually started finding what works and doing bigger experiments that I’d play around with in the bath and record in my notes.

I don’t have any official training, though I’ve attended so many Zoom lectures with dermatologists that I feel like I am owed an honorary degree. But I just feel like this is the kind of thing that can come naturally to you, particularly if you take the time to really learn what works. Being ready to take that next step whenever it’s presented to you is soooo important. I’m not really on Facebook very much anymore, my team helps manage our Groups, but I still like to drop in there from time-to-time to hear about all the ways we’re helping people preserve their youth out there, every day.

My rituals, as I like to call them, have actually gotten less complicated over the years. I used to be more into more complicated ingredients, like, figuring out the right balance of glycolic and salicylic acid for brightening. I still use a lovely blend that includes baltic amber powder, which is made from the powder of fossilized resin that comes from ancient trees along the Baltic sea. Baltic amber powder is great for exfoliation, but it also helps to settle your mind and center you, and I’ve heard that it’s also great for your immune system. I’m not a doctor, though, I just know, for certain, that it’s a fantastic part of my daily little rituals that helps keep my skin feel fresh and soft. Some of my followers know all about this, I did a series of Stories on how baltic amber powder is made and how we import ours from Lithuania.

I enjoy having these little secrets that never leave my little castle up on the hill.

I think it’s so important for anyone who has so many followers like I do, to keep a little part of themselves for them, and keep it away from social media. I don’t think it’s good for someone like me to have everything in their life be public. I don’t have any secrets from my team, of course — they’re part of this, and my wins are their wins, too — but there are a few small things I keep to myself. I enjoy having these little secrets that never leave my little castle up on the hill. I think that’s part of the secret of staying young, too, keeping a few things for yourself.
But, you know what? I’ll share one of those little secrets just with you. I know a lot of other skincare experts have started moving to plant-based products, and it may not be very “woke” of me or whatever, but I have to tell you, I think there are still a few benefits you can get out of animal-based products that you just can’t get with the vegan or chemical blends. Of course, I absolutely don’t condone cruelty, but I think there’s a little bit of truth to the idea that death sometimes has to pay for life. I shouldn’t even be saying this to you, my Threads mentions are going to be terrible when this comes out! My team and I pay the utmost attention to ethically sourcing our ingredients, everything we use is local to this area, but like I tell them, sometimes a little sweat and blood have to go into our most important wins.

Rennie | Personal Assistant

2024-10-27T00:00:00Z

Name: Rennie

Location: Bran, Romania

It’s interesting, when I think about it, it’s like a lot of the jobs I’ve had since I started working really prepared me for this one.

I work as a personal assistant. It’s a hard job to describe, because it’s a little bit of everything. I work out of my employer’s home, which isn’t unusual in this kind of profession. I have a furnished room on-site, it’s one of the better perks of the job, honestly, his home is pretty remarkable. But it does mean that I’m sometimes responsible for tasks that some personal assistants might find beneath them, janitorial work, or taking care of his pets. I don’t mind, though, I enjoy the work, though pest control is something I could probably live without, if I had my druthers.

I’ve always been a person who enjoyed performing a service. I didn’t go to college, but I’ve worked as a clerk a bunch of times, I’ve worked as an office assistant, I’ve worked as a janitor, I even briefly once worked in a cemetery. It’s interesting, when I think about it, it’s like a lot of the jobs I’ve had since I started working really prepared me for this one. My employer’s a really busy guy, so I’m pretty self-directed most of the time. I feel like we’ve got a working relationship where he doesn’t even have to say what he needs and I can kind of, I don’t know, intuit it, I guess? It’s almost like I can hear him in my head, but, not in, like, an overbearing way.

I work a lot of odd hours. The thing about live-in or on-site jobs is that you’re always kind of on-call, I guess? I get plenty of downtime, it’s not like my employer is awake at all hours or anything, but my actual tasks can be a little erratic. We tend to be on opposite schedules a lot, he has meetings that can go pretty late at night, so I do a lot of errands and cleaning and appointments during the day. There are plenty of times I’ll need to be out late to help him with something, but that’s just sort of the nature of the beast. It’s a lot easier to do this kind of work when you’ve got living quarters on-site, it’d be a lot harder if I had to drive up from town at all hours.

I spend a lot of time setting up meetings, to be honest. My employer’s been in this community a long time, which is good and bad for him. If you live anywhere long enough, I feel like you’ll eventually ruffle someone’s feathers, and I think that happens a lot more with, like, people of means. As a result, I go into town pretty often to talk to people around the community that my employer would like to meet with, for whatever reason. Sometimes it’s business related, sometimes it’s not, it’s not really my job to ask about that, usually. But it’s a job I take really seriously - sometimes, my employer’s livelihood can depend on a meeting at the right time, and so I’ve learned to be pretty persuasive.

Like, spiders eat bugs, right? Birds eat spiders, you know? The wolves will eat anything.

Maybe the weirdest thing about working an on-site, live-in job like this is the kitchen, you’re almost never on the same meal schedule, so you end up having to just sort of make do with what you find around. But I manage to fend for myself.

So, yeah, the pest control thing. The thing you have to understand is that this is an old, old place. I’m not even sure how old my employer’s home is, to be honest. He’s been here a long time, but it was here for a long time before him, too. The downside to that is that we’ve got all kinds of bugs and critters around, all the time. Bugs, spiders, birds up in the rafters. We’re in a rural area, so sometimes we even get wolves on the property. Like I said, my employer has a lot of meetings here, so keeping on top of the bugs is a pretty serious responsibility. It’s weird, though, like, I feel like there’s a whole ecosystem at work that you can make work for you if you spend enough time working on it. Like, spiders eat bugs, right? Birds eat spiders, you know? The wolves will eat anything. What I’ve been working on for the last few years is trying to figure out how to get the spiders to eat the bugs and the birds to eat the spiders. I’m not sure I’ll try with the wolves, to be honest, I stay inside when I hear them around, and just try to make sure we don’t have anything laying around to attract them. I’ve never gotten a great look, but they look pretty big.

I think the hardest thing is… just getting recognition for my work. My employer’s a very important person, so it’s not like I want a trophy or anything. But he’s a pretty demanding boss, and I feel like I work really hard to support him, and personal assistants just don’t really get a lot of recognition. I think there’s something about being so familiar that my employer just looks past your efforts because he has become accustomed to them. It’s okay, though, it’s not like it drives me crazy or anything, it’s just something I think about sometimes. I mean, I’ve helped him dress for meetings — this isn’t a weird thing, this is pretty normal for a personal assistant job — and sometimes, when he’s looking in the mirror, it’s like he doesn’t even see himself, so how could he see me, you know?

I’m getting valuable life experience here that will eventually just set me up for, well, basically forever.

Realistically, I took this job because there’s just so much I want to learn from the master, and I think he really has a lot to offer me. He has so much more life experience than I do, my life’s been pretty small. He doesn’t have a lot of time for me now, but I can tell that one day, he’ll be able to share so much more with me, and, you know, all this petty stuff like the pest control or setting up meetings or cleaning up after the meetings, like, none of that matters, right? I feel like I’m getting valuable life experience here that will eventually just set me up for, well, basically forever.

10 Songs: Halloween, pt. 1

2024-10-25T00:00:00Z

This time of year, everyone's filled with anxiety about the spooky gourds carved into scary faces and filled with light. Here are 10 songs intended to lean all the way into that and have you cavorting with the devil. Let Abigail Williams see you do it.

For as long as it lasts, here it is in playlist form.

Jim Dandeneau | Executive Director

2024-10-23T00:00:00Z

Name: Jim Dandenau

Location: Vermont

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I am the Executive Director of the Vermont Democratic Party. I have been working in and around campaign politics for 22 years. I got my start working in the Queens Democratic machine. I worked in a state Senate office for about 6 years. The way political staffing in the state Senate worked, you didn’t get overtime, you got flex time, and because of the schedule during the legislative session, I would finish my hours for the year in August, and I would then get farmed out to campaigns in the fall, and I got a taste for it.

I worked on state Senate races, New York City Council races. The last big race I was involved in was against the Queens machine. I helped a friend, a 25-year old woman who had been a political staffer. She decided to run against the machine, I helped get her onto the ballot. She kicks so much ass, she's an Assemblywoman in Queens, and she's outstanding.

Since then, I have been working to build infrastructure in the party heading into this election.

My wife and I got married in ‘14, and we decided it was time to start settling down and having a family. My wife had gone to college in Vermont, and taught at a preschool. So we moved. We did an airlock year in Burlington so that I could get used to not living in an enormous city. We bought our house in July of 2016.

I connected with a gubernatorial campaign in the Democratic primary. I ran her field operation and helped with the campaign through the election. We didn’t even register what was going on in the rest of the country because I was so deep in that campaign, but when we emerged from the boiler room, licking our wounds from the loss, and came up for oxygen, we realized what had happened in the rest of the world, and I felt an urge to do something. We were still childless at the time. I took a pay cut to become the House Caucus Director for the state party. I was a one-man DCCC, right? Recruiting, training, supporting 125 candidates around the state. We went +12 in the House. We went from 83 to 95. We got a super majority coalition with our lefty third party, the Progressives. Then, my first kid was born in December, between elections. So it was, you know, it was genuinely time to go spend time with my family.

Heading into the ‘22 elections, I got a call from the state party chair, asking if I'd be interested, so I came back. We sent our first woman to Congress in November of ‘22. We went +13 in the House that year, and got to 104 out of 150 in the House and held strong at 23 in the Senate. We still had the same governor we’ve had for 8 years, but our lieutenant governor turned over. We sent a new person to Congress. We elevated our existing congressman to the US Senate. New secretary of state, new attorney general, new treasurer. Unprecedented level of turnover. Since then, I have been working to build infrastructure in the party heading into this election.

We don't have churches the way the right does. We don't have chambers of commerce, really. We have some businesses for social responsibility, but we don't have social infrastructure baked into our coalition the way that the right does.

You do whatever needs to be done. The job of the state party is winning elections. But as the Executive Director, you're the only 24/7 entity tasked with political maintenance. It's relationship building. It's infrastructure development. Our strength is not in our fundraising capacity, our strength is not in our technology, our strength is not even exclusively in our hustle, and we definitely work ourselves very, very hard. Our strength is in our relationships.

We had a covid baby. First kid was born in ‘17. Second kid was born in ‘21. We didn't really leave the house. They got vaccinated and their vaccines were fully baked on Primary Day 2022. I didn’t go to a lot of big events before that. When I started coming back into large gatherings, one of the things I noticed was that they were like family reunions. People who’d known each other and been friends for 20 years, who were seeing each other again for the first time in 4 years. Even going to DNC meetings or going to the convention in Chicago, there's an element of that, because it was still the first opportunity for folks to reconnect post-pandemic. We haven't had stuff like this in a while. That relationship building is the most important thing about being a state party.

We don't have churches the way the right does. We don't have chambers of commerce, really. We have some businesses for social responsibility, but we don't have social infrastructure baked into our coalition the way that the right does, and, you know, every 2 years, we have to reorganize. We have to elect new town committees. Town committees elect new county committees, and then county committees elect a new state committee.

The ground level stuff that feeds up to that is such a great foundation for building change and broader coalitions. I realized when we were doing it last year that it’s such an undervalued tool. We win elections by building the long-term, durable infrastructure that enables a campaign to step up and beat the Republicans.

People were like, “Why were you answering my email at 2:30 in the morning?” And I'm like, “Why aren't you out knocking on doors right now?”

My first job in politics, I was waiting tables in an Italian restaurant across the street from campus. The owner of the restaurant’s dad was a judge in Queens, he was politically connected. One night, a state rep called and asked them to keep the place open late so that he could have a meeting with unindicted co-conspirator number 3. I was his waiter, and my roommate was sitting at the bar waiting for me to finish. He's like, “Ask him for an internship!”. So I asked the state rep for an internship. He takes my resume, he gives it to his political consultants, and they placed me on a campaign. You don't need to go to college to get into campaigns. You will eventually want to get some higher training, especially if you want to move up into management. But to get started, you really just need to want it, and you need to try it, because it's extremely Not For Everybody.

You have a conversation with a voter, and you talk to them for 15 minutes and flip them to supporting Kamala Harris or supporting your candidate for state Senate, and that mashes the dopamine button in your brain so hard. Everything we do on the campaign side is about volume, right? I have statistics from the ‘18 cycle where we tracked conversations our organizers had, and folks that we talked to at the door were 18% more likely than our baseline expectations to show up and vote. Folks that we talked to on the phones were 9% more likely. Texting was 7%. You think, “Okay, if they're 18% more likely, and I had 100 conversations at the door, then I moved 18 votes. Other organizers moved another 18 votes with me.” The margin of victory was 170 votes. You think, “Me and my 3 friends got a quarter of the margin of victory, and that person that we got elected went on to become the deciding vote in a veto override for a minimum wage increase.” If you know what you're looking for, you can trace the door that you knocked to a major policy change.

We had a pretty substantial minimum wage increase in 2019 that passed with a veto override of the governor, and we would not have had the votes to override had we not had those successes in that previous cycle, and we wouldn't have had those successes in that previous cycle if I hadn't spent 2 years chasing people down in every corner of the state and recruiting 125 candidates and answering emails at 2:30 in the morning when I was up feeding my kid who who had just been born. People were like, “Why were you answering my email at 2:30 in the morning?” And I'm like, “Why aren't you out knocking on doors right now?”

You’ve got to find a way to force yourself to balance. Otherwise, you're going to get absolutely fried.

Something that I've been working on and that I know has been a movement, is that like any nonprofit, this gets treated like a cause and not a job. You work extra hard, you work long hours, you don't get paid enough, you get taken advantage of. This happens in every part of politics, whether it's government-side staff or campaign-side staff or PACs or state party staff, and, if you're unable to disconnect at some level, it's going to fry your brain. Christ, the number of colleagues who are divorced is unsettling for me, as someone who's not divorced and doesn't want to be divorced, ever. You’ve got to find a way to force yourself to balance. Otherwise, you're going to get absolutely fried.

There's been a union movement in state parties over the last 8 years that has sought to address this. It's not necessarily about squeezing more money — unless you're a purple state, every year, your state party is going to struggle for cash. Staff knows that, funders know it. The staff's not going to try and squeeze unreasonable amounts of money out of a state party. But you have to make sure that vacation time is taken, and make sure that there's some penalty baked in if you don't take the time. Our contract has a use-it-or-lose-it provision. If you don't use your vacation time, it goes away after a year. You get a payout if you leave, and you still have accrued vacation time, but, like, take your time. One of the nice things about having 2 kids is that I don't really have a choice. I have gotten into a routine of being home in time to clean up the kitchen and cook dinner for everybody.

We just haven't paid enough attention to the atomic-level units, and party infrastructure. If you strengthen those, then party identity as a whole will follow. Party strength as a whole will follow.

I don't know how many people have actually internalized this, but the vast majority of local Democratic operations are staffed and run by blue-haired little old ladies who have been doing this for 40 years and are funding it with bake sales, and are keeping the flame alive in a time when parties are as weak as they've ever been. If you are under the age of 50 and you show up and act normal for, like, 3 months, they will do whatever you want because they're so excited to have a young person there. Parties are weak right now because of some factors that are outside of our control, but a lot of factors are within our control and the big one is that we just haven't paid enough attention to the atomic-level units, and party infrastructure. If you strengthen those, then party identity as a whole will follow. Party strength as a whole will follow.

One of my goals was to show our town and county chairs they have more power than they thought. Our districts are small, it’s not uncommon for 1,000 votes to be enough to win. I would tell candidates to plan to knock on 1,000 doors, make 5,000 phone calls and raise $10,000, and if you do that, you're going to win. It's a little bit more expensive now, the state Senate is a different ball game, but that's mostly true. If you're a town chair or you're a member of a town party in a district where the candidate only has to knock on 1,000 doors, make 5,000 phone calls, and raise $10,000, and you can raise $2,500 at a house party, which is not a lot of money, you've raised a quarter of their budget, and in the process, you will have spent time with that person, built a relationship with that person, and you will have developed your own political skills to a point where you can do it for anybody, right?

If you know how to target, and you know how to set up a phone ban, and host a party that can raise $2,500, and you don't like your representation — if your state rep decides to do something that doesn't represent you — you can get them to come to your meeting and talk about why they made the decision they did. If you don't like the answer you get, you have the skills and the fundraising capacity to go get them. If you're the person who can help organize and canvass and knock out 200 of those 1,000 doors, you can make a lot of change.

We have to give people more time to be better citizens if we want them to be better citizens.

One of the things that worries me is that people need more time to be involved. People need more time just to be an informed citizen, never mind being an active participant in politics. You need time to find out more about the people you're voting for, and the issues facing your town. You need more time to understand your town's budget and why your property taxes are what they are, and we just don't have it. We have side hustles, and they’re proliferating. We have to give people more time to be better citizens if we want them to be better citizens.

There’s a lot of talk about the crisis of self-radicalizing young men, and I think the isolation and the lack of community people feel in the world is a strong driving factor in some communities getting radicalized, and we need to find a way to take the pressure down on people to be constantly productive, and let them be part of their communities and see their families.

If you're there and you're building these relationships, you will see a difference, and it won't take very long for it to happen.

Get involved in the most local politics you can get involved in. You’ve got to find the smallest political entity that you can, and start building up from there. For anybody who's reading this: you have no idea the capacity for change that you are able to produce until you actually get in there and start digging into it. The best people in politics are the ones who stay late to fold up chairs. They grab the cheese platter from the grocery store and they stick around to make sure that the chairs get broken down at the end of the event. We need a ton of those people, too. You don't have to be the person knocking on the doors or the person making the phone calls, or the person raising a shitload of money, but if you're there and you're building these relationships, you will see a difference, and it won't take very long for it to happen.

Joe | Software Developer

2024-10-15T00:00:00Z

Name: Joe

Location: Pacific Northwest

I'm a software developer, hoping to be promoted this year to software engineer. I was formerly every flavor of QA that you could be. That's how I got started there. I've been at my current company about 8 years, longer than, I think, 92% or 93% of the company.

Before that, I was a Domino's delivery driver for three months. I think that was the platonic ideal of a minimum wage job. Minimum wage jobs suck. But if you're going to do one, that's the one. Before that, I was unemployed, and before that, I worked for a seismic processing and exploration company. They work in oil, technically, they don't have to, but ain't no one else asking what's under the seabed.

I went to school for physics. Physics, math and astronomy, actually. I went to UT. I came in with a ton of AP credits because I like bopping around. If it's easy, I'll always add it. I'm really good at finding low-hanging fruit, so I'd take AP tests. What's the worst that'll happen? It's, like, $15 to take the test. I thought I wanted to do physics, then I had a panic attack during Christmas before the last semester, and said, “I'm not ready to be an adult. I don't know how to get a job”. So, like many people in college, I added another year. I was lucky because with a physics major, you're doing so much math, and the overlap with astronomy is so high that I could add 2 degrees, and I only had to take, like, 5 classes. I graduated in 2013. The economy was kind of un-shambled, but it was still sort of in shambles. At the same time, oil was doing gangbusters. There are two major modes in oil: “The price of oil is so high, let's hire everyone and throw money at them like there's no tomorrow!” Then, there's “Oh God, it crashed. Who could have seen this coming? Lay everyone off.”

You have to be curious how things work.

If you're in QA, you either love QA or you realize that the job gets laid off every 5 years. I prefer the job stability now. I live in Seattle, and, you know, tech is big here. I know how computers work pretty well, and I was reading job descriptions. There's no geophysical work up here, and I didn't want to do it anyway. There's IT work, there's customer service and client-facing stuff, which I'm no good at. There's generic engineering, which I'm no good at, and then there was QA, which will hire you without any specialized knowledge except for knowing how to learn. It's a personality type more than anything. You have to be curious how things work. Back when I worked in QA, I did a lot of interviews, and we were supposed to be testing for skill, but the thing was, I don't care about your skills. The question was, are you asking questions? Are you putting things together or are you taking feedback and learning?

I got into software engineering because QA is the first group that gets laid off whenever a company is in trouble, especially in software. I did kind of a self-taught coding bootcamp, more to get through the interview process than anything else. I got through the interview, there weren't any open positions. Then, one person offhandedly mentioned an open position, and knowing how the bureaucracy worked, I reached out to the hiring manager and went, “Hey, your idea is bad, but I want to do it and we'll do what you ultimately want, but you shouldn’t do what you’re thinking”. He wanted to move an automation engineer, which was my title, over to his team , and then he would work to transition them to a software engineer after a while. He had an open software engineer position at that moment, though, and I told him not to change it, to keep the software engineer position rather than the automation engineer position. It was the right call, because 6 months later, my company did its first-ever layoff, they laid off every manual QA engineer, and about 2/3 of the automation engineers.

The new work is easier to describe, but it's more cog-in-a-machine-style stuff. It's low level developer work, so it feels very boring to describe.

So, a developer and an engineer? There's not really any difference. We just needed a word for people who are junior that they're taking a chance on. Basically, it let them fire me after 2 years, if it was a mistake to hire me. It's the same job, same role, same meetings, same tickets, but I will do bigger, more complex tickets and contribute to the team. You know, you get higher and higher up the chain because eventually the job is about never doing any real work and just going to meetings and telling people who do real work what to do.

We had layoffs — again, separate from the QA heavy layoffs — so I'm on a new team, which helps, because no one expects me to do anything. For context, my team stretches from Brazil to Seattle. It’s, like, all the time zones possible. I think most people follow roughly the same system. There's a morning meeting. This one is way too early, except it's at 9AM, which is really not that early. I usually drop my kid off at daycare, go to that meeting, then putter around for a minute trying to remember what I'm supposed to be doing, then grab my actual ticket that I'm working on. Tickets are a variety of things. It's weird for software developers, because you can get anything from a ticket, like, “Make an entire new project to ingest data and spit it out”, to a ticket that says we should rename our alert so it makes sense.

ChatGPT can pump out this code, but that's not your job. Your job is knowing what code you need to write.

How do I expect my day-to-day job to evolve? You're always going to need people like me. Like, there was this idea when ChatGPT came out, that, because it could spit out code, people would go, “Oh my God, that's my code! What am I going to do?”, but the answer is that this was always possible, right? That's Stack Overflow. ChatGPT can pump out this code, but that's not your job. Your job is knowing what code you need to write. What you have to know is, “What should I code? How should I code?” ChatGPT can tell you how you can use java strings, and how you can format it, and ChatGPT does a halfway-decent job, but it can't tell you: “Should you even use a string here?” It can't make value judgments. That's what the developer does. It is legitimately acceptable to close a ticket by saying, “We're not going to do this”. That's still a ticket done. It doesn't matter if it's a ticket that would take 16 months of work, if you can safely say, “This is a bad idea, here's how I got all the stakeholders to agree, I had all the conversations” then you saved 16 months of work. It doesn't matter if ChatGPT could do 90% of that work and do it in 6 weeks.

As the code gets more automated, it becomes more and more clear that our job is to go to meetings and talk to people. I know that sounds horrific to a lot of people, but, like, there's a reason meetings are super common, because they get everyone in agreement, and let everyone have voices. It's the democratic process in action. Even when it's top-down, if you are allowed to speak, you have a voice. So, for me personally, hopefully, getting more into management means going to the meetings and saying “We shouldn't do this”, and saving everyone 6 months of work.

A lot of industries are solved, kind of, a lot of people that went to work at Meta are probably incredibly depressed, because Meta has been done for a decade now. They’re just rearranging deck chairs. You're fixing stuff as it breaks, but that's Ops. You're tweaking deck chairs, but that's Product, if you do it right. So then, what are we doing here? You have this, you know, $100B company making titanic sums of cash, and it's slowly dawning on everyone involved that they don't need to have employees. They need some, but they don't need a lot. A lot of companies are facing this issue. Cloud storage is (kind of) a solved product. A lot of companies could stop hiring people to do new product development, aside from, you know, marginal stuff, because the core product offering is fine and they make money for the parent companies, or make money for the shareholders, and they could give all of their employees raises. As employees leave, they don't have to backfill them. As long as you're not having outages, that's fine. Each employee rakes in piles of cash. A lot of companies that aren't, like, Microsoft, Google or Apple are facing that problem, right?

Google and Apple and Microsoft all have enough fingers in enough pies that they might be investing elsewhere, but I think the big problem now for companies is whether they accept what they do. ChatGPT is not a risk factor at all for my life, but my financial well-being is staring down an existential gun, because they don't need to hire another Me to do product work.

The bad news is, almost none of the work we're doing ultimately matters. There was the example of Google forever ago, they tested 20 different colors, and they found the best out of 20 colors because with a 95% confidence interval, this was the best color. Each color has a 1-in-20 chance, or, a 5% chance of being random. Which means if you tested 20 of them, what you saw was random noise. A lot of experiments are doing that. You think, “I found the best color that all people care about!”, and all you found was noise.

But the good news is, no color matters. So like, okay, you made the wrong choice. But it's not the wrong choice because no choice is the wrong choice. It doesn’t matter. The fact that this is so much of what a lot of us developers are doing is terrifying.

During the pandemic, I managed to just about automate myself out of a job.

I think my big problem with describing tech is that you're working on widgets, none of the widgets are the same size, and it's hard to generalize, and it's best not to explain how much money you make doing these dumb tasks. My wife worked for the Health Care Authority, which handles state health care. She has a master's degree. She worked there for 3 or 4 years, she was top-rung. I think the next promotion was managing things. She got a $10 million grant for the state. She was working with thousands of hospitals, controlling a lot of people's lives and making people's lives better or worse with a tremendous amount of power. During the pandemic, I managed to just about automate myself out of a job. My job was uninteresting, because there was no work to do for a year. They gave me a promotion that I did not work hard for. During the promotion, my boss was like, “Hey, by the way, here’s your wife's salary in stock. That'll pay out over the next 3 years, because obviously you've done such a good job. Also, we're worried because now that you've been promoted, your bonuses aren't going to be as big, and we're worried about that for you, so here's your wife's salary again in stock as an apology for that”. And I was like, “I have not done an honest day's work in a month”.

Ivy | Urban Planner

2024-10-08T00:00:00Z

Name: Ivy

Location: New Hampshire

I watched a lot of towns in southern New Hampshire zone themselves out of existence.

I am technically known as an urban planner. I specialize in helping smaller places do two things: I help them figure out why they're not getting the built environment that they want. Spoiler: it's your zoning. I do a lot of work around housing choice and availability. Zoning is not the answer to everything, but it is part of the answer to everything.

This is my fifth career. I went back to the college from which I graduated, today, to take a class, and it was kind of stunning. It was a library when I was there, and I realized as I walked up the steps: I first walked these stairs about 50 years ago. In the interim, I have done a bunch of different things. I was a children's librarian for 3 or 4 years. From there, I went to work for a small town weekly in southern New Hampshire. Eventually I was a section editor, the editor for the town section. That's not the first place I started thinking about the built environment, but it's one of the first places that I started thinking “Why do we build such shit when we have great examples in front of us?”

I watched a lot of towns in southern New Hampshire zone themselves out of existence. They panicked about people with children moving to town, because everything, all the education in New Hampshire, is funded on the back of the local property tax. No income tax. No broad-based tax. Just property tax. They’re this cute little town and they want to stay that way. So, they enacted 3- and 5- and 7-acre zoning, which meant that you had to have a big parcel of land. What that did was make their existing village illegal and irreproducible. You had to have 3 acres per house. A typical village lot is in the neighborhood of 5000ft², 7500ft². That’s 1/8 of an acre. If you're requiring a 3-acre minimum, you are requiring 24 times as much land for a single family house as you have in your village.

I didn't have the language to talk about it back then, but you end up with suburban sprawl. Big box stores with giant parking lots. Villages that were beautiful and walkable and had a little village store — their property values there always stayed high, even in the crash of 2008, even in the crash in 1988. I'm so old, I remember when those areas held their value, because there weren't very many of them. If you look at Philadelphia, Park Slope, you've got these places that work well as habitats for humans, but you can't build new ones because you've adopted this idiotic zoning. There are places that have beautiful, walkable, human-scaled character with corner stores, but you can't build any more of them.

I'm trying to teach people how to allow that development form to return.

I was a reporter, then I went to seminary, then I raised 4 children, and then I got a master's in education and taught. My husband and I were living in a rental house and trying to find a house to buy, and we couldn't find anything. I said to my husband, “Well, we could build a house”. He said, “Yeah, we did that once”. I said, “Yes, and look, we're still married! We did it! It was fine, and we could do it again”. The next day, I was talking to a friend who's an environmental engineer, and I said, “Have you run across a building lot in Peterborough?”, where we were living, and he said,”You wouldn't want to live on High Street, would you?” I was like, sarcastically, “Oh no, Richard, I would never want to live on High Street”. I didn't realize there was a lot on High Street, and technically there wasn't. But there were 23 acres of land, which is a big chunk of land, and it had access off of High Street, which was and is a very nice neighborhood.

On New Year's Day I walked the land with a friend on the conservation commission, and he said to me, “Ivy, I think you need to build a neighborhood here”. He said “Halloween should be your model”. I now know that there is a thing called the Halloween model, which tells you that your neighborhood is successful if you have a rip-roaring Halloween trick-or-treat parade, because what that means is the houses are close enough together so that the kids can walk from house to house and the parents can trail along behind. That neighborhood that has the best trick or treating in your town. That's your model for what you should be building. I went home that night and said to my husband “Our friend says we ought to build a neighborhood on that parcel”. He was like, “I do not have time to take on another project. I have a business”. The next day at dinner time, we sat down and he looked at me and said, “I've been thinking about that neighborhood, if there were someone with a not too demanding day job…”, and I was working as a nursery school assistant at the time. So it became my project.

What I do is a combination of translation and evangelism. I explain why your place looks the way it does and what you can do to make it look different. That's the translation. I'm trying to convince you that this is a good idea. That's the evangelism.

I went to Florida for a 4-day workshop on building the new traditional neighborhood, and I discovered that I was a New Urbanist. I had no idea until I showed up there, but I had been this my whole life. All the things they cared about were all the things that I cared about. People were so generous, and so kind, and so helpful, and they said, “You can do this. You can build a neighborhood”. So I hired a New Urbanist firm.

We drew up beautiful plans to build this new neighborhood on High Street, where you have all the things that we wanted and short frontages and walkable streets on Halloween. Then, I ran smack up against the zoning code, which required 75 feet of frontage. You can't build a neighborhood like that. We messed around for a couple of years. We tried using a code that allows you to manipulate your lot sizes, but it requires you to throw away half the land. In the end, the crash of 2008 happened and the bottom fell out of the market.

We never built anything. I sat on the land for 18 years. In the meantime, I got myself onto the planning board. I started going to conferences and taking classes and doing the reading and talking to people, and then I took the exam, and I became a certified planner. What I do is a combination of translation and evangelism. I explain why your place looks the way it does and what you can do to make it look different. That's the translation. I'm trying to convince you that this is a good idea. That's the evangelism.

My first job once I got certified was for the Congress For the New Urbanism as a project manager, on a project that they were running all across the country with the American Association of Retired People, who, by the way, are big proponents of good development. They have done a lot towards making walkability something that we can talk about without freaking out. It’s going to be a huge problem as the United States ages — we've got a lot of people in their 60s and 70s who are still living in suburbia. If you cannot drive and you live in suburbia, it’s a bad scene.

I want you to care about those people who aren't here.

Here's the thing: we need statewide reform, because there's really nothing in it for 1 town to do the right thing if the other towns around it are not, why should 1 town say, “Okay, we're going to legalize up to 4 units on any lot”, if the town next door is like,”No, we're sitting with our 2-acre zoning”. It doesn't make sense.

What I talk with these towns about is that nearly every town has a village center. What I try to convince them is, okay, you can require giant lots out in the rural district. That's fine. We can talk about the road costs, but that's not a terrible thing. But you have to allow a more historically appropriate pattern somewhere. You need to lean into your village, you need to replicate your village. There are ways of dealing with water and sewage and septic that will allow you to have closer lots.

I come from a long line of storytellers. If you take a group of people who showed up at a meeting, they're cranky when they get there because they're pretty sure that somebody is trying to put something over on them. I send out postcards that say, “Come to housing camp, we’re going to talk about housing issues facing your town!”, and then I go check the local Facebook page to see what's going on. Sometimes, they're convinced it's a communist plot, and that all these housing units that we're talking about are there to house illegal aliens. And also, that I hate their pickup trucks. That actually is true. I do hate their pickup trucks.

But what I'm trying to do is tell a story and help them tell their stories to each other about their lives and their housing situation. I want them to talk to the people at their table, and I want them to tell their stories, and I want them to tell the stories of people who aren't in the room. I want you to care about those people who aren't here.

I served 4 terms in the New Hampshire House. Do you know anything about the New Hampshire House? It is the third-largest English-speaking legislative body in the world. After the House of Commons and the US House of Representatives, the New Hampshire House has 400 members. For every 3200 people, you have a rep. My town has 6400 people. We have 2. You can't get anything done, every term, the turnover is just punishing. Something like 1/3 of the House turns over every 2 years. You constantly get new people who don't know anything about how anything works. Also, they pay you $200 and they take out federal taxes. I told somebody the other day, it's not even enough to buy a pair of fancy shoes.

Of the jobs I've ever had, or all the careers I've ever had, or even the jobs I ever wanted, they all had that storytelling piece. I taught everything, but I loved teaching history because that's storytelling. I went to seminary, that's nothing but storytelling. They are what makes us who we are, the stories that we tell about ourselves.

I see this a lot right now, because the housing market is so tight everywhere — everybody is looking for a villain, right? The latest is Blackrock. Blackrock is coming to your neighborhood to buy all the houses, they’ll inflate the prices and not maintain them. But that model only works if your place is already undervalued. Memphis. Southeast Atlanta. Jacksonville, Florida, all of those places, those neighborhoods that have been underinvested in, and that are primarily occupied by black and brown folks, those places are ripe for that model. But in most places, that's not your villain. The villain is you.

Our zoning codes make our places worse. I'd like to see an understanding that if we hope to have adequate housing choice, adequate housing availability, adequate housing attainability, we have to allow more housing to be built, across the board. We just haven't built enough and we haven't built the right things. We've privileged 2 things: big, single family houses on lots out by the edge of town, and 40-unit garden apartment complexes out by the highway. Those are the only things we built in most places for the last 50 years. We need to go back to building actual places.

Bill | Quality Improvement

2024-10-01T00:00:00Z

Name: Bill

Location: Pacific Northwest

Content Warning: This piece does not contain descriptions of triggering events, but does discuss working in crisis support.

Social work is, almost inherently, a radical profession.

I work in quality improvement for a national mental health nonprofit, overseeing a service that's nationally available. I play one cog in this giant machine of oversight.

I have been in the social service realm for about a decade, and I've been doing crisis intervention and suicide prevention work for about 8 years. First as a volunteer, then a call taker, then I was on the program management and administration side of things, and, now, I’m in the compliance and quality assurance side of the work.

I was interested in getting into social work as a field because I wanted to be in a, like, helping profession. I was interested in doing my work in high-risk, grimy environments and suicide prevention is pretty chief among those. You want to help people, and you want to help people in really acute, crisis-type situations. Where's the opening for that? Overwhelmingly, it was crisis intervention and suicide prevention. I’m currently finishing up my M.S.W., but in a different life, I worked as a union organizer. I have an M.A. in labor studies. I was never going to make a good accountant or business manager or something like that — I needed to be on the ill-defined, sticky elements of the human experience.

At first, I was really interested in academia. Howard Zinn's book, A People's History of the United States had just come out, and it was, like, this new wave, where the classroom — both high school and college — was going to an ideological battleground, and I was like, “That's where I want to do the work”. Then, I spent enough time in college to go, “Alright, I think I've pretty much had enough of that. I don't want to be on either side of the desk at this point.” But social work is, almost inherently, a radical profession. It starts from the assumption that there are unmet human needs, and there are existing resources to meet those needs. The system that we operate under doesn't permit those two things to be married in any functional way. So, while it's not necessarily as overtly political as, like, “I am your communist professor!”, doing the work of a social worker is almost necessarily anti-capitalist or, at least, non-capitalist.

Interesting is a diplomatic word to describe my current situation. I'm working in a social welfare context, but remotely, and cross-country, and not in direct client services. This is the first time I've been so removed from client-facing work, and I'm really in the bureaucracy more than on the front lines. Most of my work could be described in shades of tedium. I am improving services, but not directly helping, so this is a new chapter for me. For the first time in my trajectory as a social worker, a lot of my frustrations are actually more common in everyday life. Like, navigating a humongous bureaucracy that doesn't work efficiently. This is the first time that I’ve really understood that bureaucracy is meant to standardize results, it’s not meant to find pathways for efficiency. Most of my day is spent merging this direct client experience that was so fulfilling and so immediate and impactful with being on the “corporate” end of things. I'm in a corporate excellence division, right? Being in meetings about meetings for other people to meet, to discuss meetings. It reaches a certain level of abstraction, right? Like, “How does my work impact the thing that I intended to be doing?” You know, like, if you wanted to be a mechanic, and now you work in sales for a credit company that sells car loans. I’ve found myself drifting further away to the corporate end of things.

When the pandemic started, and we all moved to work from home, I was working at a local nonprofit, and nonprofits are pretty classically known for their, like, flexitarian approaches to the labor arrangement. We were quickly voluntold to do all sorts of things that we wouldn't otherwise be doing. I found myself back in a call-taking role. I was working to recruit volunteers and other things that weren’t within my immediate purview, and that's largely remained the case in my current role. I take sort of a jack-of-all-trades approach, plugging myself into, like, service gaps or system inefficiencies. I never quite know what's going to be expected of me, week in and week out. But that also has something to do with the the nature of the service that my agency provides, suicide prevention.

There's a reason that there's only so much lifespan for crisis counselors.

The onus of responsibility to connect the day-to-day work, which can often be so tedious, to someone reaching for a service that we provide, is an intellectual labor. There aren’t enough spreadsheets in America that you can put data into that will make you feel like you made a difference in anyone's life. My current role is really data-driven, it provides meaning and a point and fulfillment to what we've done, as opposed to directly speaking with someone that I was able to assist in whatever capacity. On such a macro scale, what were formerly direct clients that I was serving are now case numbers, client IDs. Maintaining that intellectual thread between the things that are unsexy and unfun to do, and connecting them to the outcome for someone reaching out for help, that has to be continually in my mind, otherwise I could easily lose sight and think this is no different from any other sort of button-pushing job.

I've been happy to see that a lot of the people that move the purse strings are deeply, quantitatively motivated. It’s always a good practice to throw in a cheeky success story when you’re talking about a pilot program or the efficacy of an initiative, but data is the only thing that really gets the goods. A nice story can only get you so much in grant funding, right? So, having this bird's eye view of the totality of all the work that gets done presents its own opportunity to define fulfillment. It's not intuitive, it's much easier to give yourself a pat on the back after a tough phone call than it is to say, “Wow, that was one hecking data report I ran, I cannot wait to see how this is going to change lives!”.

I miss being in direct touch with clients, because that’s what fills up the emotional and spiritual gas tank, doing complicated and taxing work. At the same time, there's a reason that there's only so much lifespan for crisis counselors. The burnout rate is exceptionally high. Most centers in our network are still heavily relying on volunteers, not staffers. For the highly motivated, ideologically-centered person, the direct work feels like you're really getting the goods. But I have enough self-awareness to know just how taxing that role was, day in and day out, and I was being paid for it, I wasn't even a volunteer. I don't know that I would want to go back in the trenches with direct client contact. The clients that I would be working with were in situations that would be seen as materially or socially advantageous, you know, like, someone's fully employed, or their family offered to pay their bills, they have no crippling physical or chronic health conditions. But they still find themselves in a moment of total crisis.

There are people that would reach out and who would say really abhorrent stuff, but we’re a 24/7, 365 service, and even if you're a piece of shit, you still deserve help. That’s eliminated a lot of binary thinking I had about, “What’s a good person? What's a bad person?” Even people who have racist or misogynistic or xenophobic beliefs and articulate them in their moment of crisis, it would be so easy to write them off and say they don’t need support, or think they're the author of their own poverty and situation, but moving myself from a less judgy and a more empathetic space came with all the years on the frontlines. We only have a very brief opportunity to know someone that we're working with, given the acute, crisis nature of the service. To improve the quality of your work — it's the only way to make it possible — is to see every single person that reaches out as worthy of support, even if they're bringing along a whole host of unpleasant things.

A few misfortunes beyond my control, and now I'm in a crisis situation. Be aware of that. Empathy is not always easy, but it's crucially important.

I think social service workers, in general, then more specifically, social workers, then even more specifically, social workers in crisis intervention and suicide prevention, are probably in the least advantageous position in terms of their material support. Social service work is underpaid, professional social work is underpaid, and crisis intervention is the highest stress and lowest paid of those respective professions. The case for me for a while, and certainly the case for a lot of people now is in making it make sense, right? Not in the sense of like, “Why am I doing this?” But in making the dollars and cents make sense. How can I do this long term if the institutional support is not there for this to be more than a hand-to-mouth occupation? Which it so often isn't, for crisis counselors who find themselves working in some of the most heinous or stressful situations. It's not just the emotional burden that comes with suicide prevention, but the material burden as well, that you could just as easily take the same experience and go be an HR associate, and never be burdened with any of the emotional labor that you do in this position. You would certainly be paid more handsomely. It’s a dual squeeze, both the nature of the work and how the work is valued.

I saw a billboard recently that said something to the effect of, like, “Beware who you hate, it might be someone you love”. It's incredibly easy to consider someone a throwaway person or a perpetual problem or someone with intractable issues that can't get themselves unstuck. But in the same way that all of us are only so many paychecks away from homelessness, we are all on the precipice of being a person in crisis, or being someone who just can't seem to get it together, but I think our humanity is just that common — when you see the people that reach out, and for the reasons that they reach out, you know, crisis, and suicidal crisis most specifically, is an all-gender, all-income, all-ethnicity issue. Those people aren't just around us, they're often ourselves. That could just as easily be me. A few misfortunes beyond my control, and now I'm in a crisis situation. Be aware of that. Empathy is not always easy, but it's crucially important. And if we think we deserve it, then others do as well.

10 Songs: The Long Dark, Pt. 1

2024-09-28T00:00:00Z

Fall is, without question, my favorite season, and fall in the Pacific Northwest is exceptionally lovely. Even so, I always feel a little maudlin when the days start getting so much shorter, so fast. But the fading light through the leaves is a lovely sight, and the crisp weather always makes me feel a little sharper and a little more aware of my surroundings. It's a season for reflection, I suppose, taking stock before the holidays begin and you round out the year and prepare for the next one.

By this time next month, it'll be dark before supper.

For as long as it lasts, here's a BNDCMPR playlist if you'd like this in playlist format.

Misty View | Library IT

2024-09-18T00:00:00Z

I work at the public library. I don't have a library degree, so I don't call myself a librarian. It's kind of controversial in the industry. People with an MLS, a Master's in Library Science, you know, sometimes they push back against, like, de-professionalizing the industry. I fell into library work accidentally. I've worked at a lot of really small nonprofits. I'm functionally an IT guy — I've always been an IT guy with an art degree, and when I finally got to libraries, I realized I could touch everything and do everything.

I’ve worked at this library for 9 years. It's the only library I've ever worked at, so I've been in libraries for 9 years. Every other job I had before that was maybe 18 months. I worked in a tech services department in college for 2 years. So, yeah, 18 months, 18 months, 18 months, 18 months, 9 years.

I was a super lazy student. I was one of those people that never turned in my homework, I would do a lazy job on my papers, I aced the standardized tests and I would get a B-. I left high school with a 3.2 GPA. I learned exactly what I wanted to learn, and ignored everything else, and art was always the thing I was naturally good at. I liked to write as a kid, I wrote stories, and I love to draw. I love to play with clay, like, I loved to make little clay figurines and stuff. Everyone was like, “You're an artist!” my whole life, and I was in a real cruise control mode going out of high school, so I decided to do what I was already good at and not open myself to any new experiences. But they opened for me, anyway, because I wanted to go into graphic design in the art program, and they only accepted 36 students. It was very popular, and I didn't get in. I didn't have a great portfolio, because I was a lazy high schooler.

So then I was like, okay, I'll do industrial design, I couldn’t get into that, for the same reasons. I was so fixated on, like, “You have to do something that you can do for work”. I've always worked. I got my work permit when I was 14, and I've worked nonstop since then. I took a 3 month break once, but otherwise it's been job after job after job after job, part-time when I was in high school and college, and then full-time any time I wasn't in school. So, I've always had jobs, I have had a million weird jobs. I've worked at a self storage place, I worked at a sub shop, I ran the second video camera on a public access television show. All these little weird jobs just didn't light a fire in me to have any career that I wasn't already good at.

I went to a School of Fine and Applied Arts, and I couldn’t get into Applied Arts, and I was like, “Oh no, who goes to school for painting?” I had a scholarship, too, so I didn't feel a lot of pressure, necessarily. I was like, “I guess I could major in fine arts, but I can't get a job doing that. But I'm good at getting jobs! Maybe I'll enjoy it?”, and I really, really did. Doing group critique was incredibly important, one of the most important things I did in my life, as far as setting me up for a career, making me a resilient worker and person, because I had to get over that this guy was criticizing this thing that I made. How dare he? It’s not that he doesn't like it, it's not that he doesn't like me, I have to take the feedback, and I have to put it back into the work. If your professor tells you to do something, you should strongly consider doing it, and that was really good for me, because I am very individualistic, very sensitive and very anxious. I was like, “I am getting this feedback, and going to take it, I have to internalize it and then I have to put it into the next version of this work”, and having to do that 3 times a week was huge for making me a more well-rounded person.

They always give the art students the worst building on campus, because pouring the paint down the sink would ruin the plumbing. They would always give you something that was 1 year away from demolition, so I would stalk back to my studio and be like, “You're telling me to do this!? You’re telling me, an undergrad art student, how to make my art?!?” But it becomes like a muscle. This is really silly, but I remember they were critiquing something of mine that had bilateral symmetry, and they were like “In many cultures, bilateral symmetry has a certain… you know, it looks like it has a gynecological quality to it”. I remember being in such a huff of like, “It's not fair! That's not what I meant! I'm not trying to do that! Do I have to take the bilateral symmetry out of this work so people don't think that about it?”, and then I stewed over it, and I finally did it, and then, lo and behold, I took it to the next critique, and people understood what I was trying to say because it was no longer so strongly bilaterally symmetrical. That became a muscle.

I had websites as a kid, like, I'm part of the Angelfire, GeoCities generation of people who learned HTML so they could put falling snowflakes on their page with their Webring buddies. We had a computer in 1996, we got a Gateway 2000. I took a keen interest in the internet, and I think my parents were kind of like, “We don't know if that's normal or not, so, you know, don't look at anything illegal”. Neither of them were super techie, but my mom was a librarian, and so she was the one who said that the kids should have a computer. She's a college librarian and she had a stipend from her college for a family computer, so she's the one that brought the computer home. I have a vivid memory of her pulling up the Gopher site of a Swedish library and saying “We're inside a computer in Sweden right now!” and I remember being like, well, “This is what you gotta do. You’ve got to be on the computer”. Whatever creative or artistic endeavor I was interested in, there seemed to always be a computer component, and I would figure it out because I wanted falling snowflakes. By the time I was 18 and leaving for college, I was sort of like, “whatever I’m going to do, it’s going to be on the computer, I kind of like it”.

My only nepo baby job was that my mom got me hired at the community college computer lab. That was really formative — like, being the most junior person in the IT department. You're there after hours, pushing a cart around, Norton ghosting in a computer lab. I absorb things fast in a trivia way, so I just built and built and built on what I learned, but I can't count. I have what I think is dyscalculia, like, I cannot count, I cannot do math. I'm at remedial level with math, and that was a big reason no one ever encouraged me to go into tech as a major or as a career. Computer science was totally off the table. I kept having hands’-on IT experiences, and each one built on another one.

I would go in and out of the industry. I worked in a t-shirt shop for a while. For a while I was like, “I need to work in a factory. I'm sick of educating myself”. It was a really good perspective, working in a factory and realizing how tired your feet get. I remember being like, “Okay, maybe not 100% factory work, because my feet hurt more than they’ve ever hurt in my life”. I'm glad I had that experience early. I had a work-study web design job at a really small web design company. I just kept collecting little bits of technical knowledge with almost no formal training at all. I’m totally taught on the job. I remember some vendor sitting down and explaining Microsoft Group Policy to me. He didn't have to do that — he was dropping off a piece of equipment.

I was always, like, the office manager for a bunch of 20-person nonprofits. When you’re at a 20-person nonprofit, you can gently just tell them what you're going to do, because they're paying vendors, they're leaving stuff on the table, they say “We don't do that. It's too much messing around”. Whatever it is — they don't publish their newsletter, their routers all have different names. They don’t have custom email newsletter templates. It’s all a bunch of stuff they give to a vendor. Their vendors are kind of slow and don’t like them very much, because they’re a small client. You can just start going in there and bushwhacking through systems and say, like, “Let's simplify this one”, “Let's upgrade this one”, “Let's print this in full color”. You have to earn trust, but I earn trust pretty fast. In my electronics job, I would say “All I'm doing is reading the manual faster than the customer”. People would call, and they'd be like, “Excuse me, I need to know what the minimum operating temperature of this thing is?”. I would Google it, look through the PDF faster than they did, and I'd be like, “Oh, of course, it's -20 Celsius”, and they'd be like, “Thank you so much!”. I don't know it, I just know where to find it for you. That's how it's been for a lot of things. That's how I taught myself. I don’t know how to use InDesign, I just know that I want this to look cool.

Any time I could, I’ve tried to make it about 50% art and 50% technology, and I need both, because each is a release valve for the other. As an IT person, nobody questions you, right? You're constantly power tripping. You're constantly getting to be like, “It just works like that”, and people go, “Oh, that sounds so true”. I go back and forth on sexism in the industry, but as a young woman, I loved being like, “We need this to be in a high availability configuration”, and people are like, “Yes, of course you can have $1,200”. That's very important for me, it was a memorable incident where I realized people were just going to listen to me. It's important for my ego. But it's hard, I'm often pushing the limits of my ability and my creativity, too. I'll get stuck on stuff and be like, “I shouldn't have done this, they're going to find out I'm a fraud. I’m a failure and they’re going to figure out I’m a fraud!”.

Art, of course, everyone has an opinion. Nobody listens to artists. Everyone goes, “I don't like lavender. I don't think it's good. I can't explain why. I just don't like it.” People don't have any idea why they don't like things, they just know they don’t. Have you ever seen the movie The September Issue? It's really cool. It's about preparing an issue of Vogue, the September issue, which is their big issue. They show the whole process of making these beautiful photographic editorial spreads, they send people to Versailles and they take all these pictures. There’s a famous photographer and famous models and the famous façade and there's lighting, and then they show the photos coming back to the office, and they've got people painstakingly color correcting, and they show a guy laying it out how it's going to look in the magazine. They put these spreads on big tables in front of Anna Wintour, she's the brand, right? She doesn't have time to give feedback. She goes around and just pushes the one she didn't want off the table. That's how it feels sometimes. When I feel a little too put upon as an artist, I'm going to go and image some computers. They won't tell me something doesn't look great.

I got super lucky. I arrived at this little town kind of on a whim. It's a rural area, and there's a chain of rural towns. We were renting and working in a college town, and wanted to move to one of those rural, scenic mountain towns, it didn’t matter which one. I didn't have a job, but I felt like, you know, I moved to Colorado with no job and moved to Minnesota with no job, and I felt pretty confident that I could find something, so I quit my education electronics company job. When I started looking, I was like, “What kind of jobs are in this little town?” and I checked library jobs because my mom is a librarian. I noticed they had 1 position open for the exact kind of job I'd been doing since I graduated from college, it was a tiny IT department job plus office management. There was no art quality to it at all… except at the interview, they said, “We're thinking about putting in a makerspace”, and I had worked at an educational electronics company, and before that, a kids science and engineering museum, so it was like, “Not only am I an IT guy, but this makerspace thing, I can help you with that. I'm also an artist and an illustrator”. Sometimes, you have to wait on telling them that, because it sounds like you're going to be really head-in-the-clouds. Every single job I’ve had, I’ve had to prove the art and design thing quietly.

We do a different theme almost every month. We're starting to reuse themes, but we've gotten into a habit. They always want to make the library look welcoming. They always want people to see what's new. Me and the marketeer, the communications person, have gotten the library on a schedule of changing all the collateral every month. We used to do it quarterly because we had a quarterly printed newsletter, so it started as a newsletter cover. And then I would be like, “The newsletter is coming out, oops, I just slipped and I made a really beautiful cover for it and it's all original illustration”. It started as a newsletter cover, and then we turned it into this monthly thing. August is ‘School of Life’ month, and the posters we put up around the library look like composition notebooks with doodles all over them. That gives me up to 12 opportunities every year to do custom graphics, and we reuse a lot of them, but that's where a lot of my illustration work goes. I make t-shirts, I just made tote bags for the volunteers that have a really sumptuous illustration on them. They would be content with less, but our marketing person, she says that the original illustrations make her job easy. She really sees the value of it. So we keep doing it. Once in a while, I try to pull out the stops and do something that's more handicraft-ish. I'm cutting some old paperbacks into a fall pumpkin. Here's your pumpkin vine, an old phone cord. My pumpkin leaves are magazine pages.

We’ve had a makerspace at my library since 2018. It's a downtown library, it's really cool. There's only 1 branch, which is unusual. We’re a library district, so we're tax funded just for our library. Gives us a ton of autonomy. Many libraries are huge systems with multiple branches, and the branches report to a main library, they're in all different parts of the city, they have different needs and challenges, all of their buildings are different. We get to make decisions based on our staff capacity and what our community wants. The makerspace is a big square meeting room with cabinetry, and we've slowly gotten equipment in there, though I'm not in charge of it anymore. I helped kick it off, and they did eventually decide they needed a full time staff member who does the class programming. We've got 3D printers, we've got a laser cutter that’s constantly booked, we have an industrial sewing machine, we have tons of hand tools, we have a lot of scrapbooking-type crafting tools. There's an automatic embroidery machine that's really popular. There’s a laser cutter that can do engraving, that one’s cool, I use it all the time. I used it in my work today, I was engraving leather notebooks for departing trustees.

My hope is that makerspaces and libraries that by the time I’m retired, a makerspace will become a kind of library branch, because the other makerspaces are, what, $60 a month, usually? From a library philosophy standpoint, I think there are a lot of parts of this that libraries are really good at. How do you make everyone share without breaking too many of the things, and make sure that we’re all part of the community? How do we make sure it's free for people who can't afford it, or make it free for everybody? Libraries think about this all the time, along with how to manage public spaces, including public spaces that are tempting to misuse in whatever way. I would love to see these things more formally join forces, like, a makerspace is also a library, and a library can also be a makerspace.

Colorado Springs has an amazing, mall-sized library and makerspace. They're a big system and they prioritize it. I think a lot of places could go that way. I'd love it if spaces like that became more accessible via libraries and libraries became more, you know, like, more dangerous. I'm just so tantalized by the implications.

My library would like me to go into management after 9 years of being the little IT dude, the all-purpose jack of all trades. They were like, “What if you were a manager?” I don't want to, I really like to be very hands’ on. I like doing project lead type stuff. But I have laid the seeds of, like, “But if you ever spin this makerspace off into a branch…”, and probably the only thing that would seriously tempt me to leave is if I could run a library makerspace branch. We have a tool lending library, and I'm in charge of the committee. So that's one of my weird little roles. That's the part that I really get capital-L Librarian about and have a lot of philosophical perspectives on. I just got back from a conference where I spoke about it. I love the library of things. I love the tool library concept. I really enjoy that. It's probably 4 hours of my week, but I love getting really philosophical about, like, “How do you lend someone a sewing machine? How do you lend them a stand mixer? How can we all, as a community, share a stand mixer?” It's a really fun, small, energizing part of the job. I'm really proud of the library of things, and all of the things we can lend, and of the makerspace. But I'm also jealous of all the other makerspaces.

I'm not suited for some other jobs, for a bunch of different reasons. I have to be honest, this job doesn't pay that well. There's that great tweet that was like, “The ideal job would be 4 hours of programming in the morning and 4 hours of loading boxes on a truck in the afternoon”, and I was like, “Oh, that's my job!”. It's wonderful, and it's very important to me, and I really need it. But it pays more like loading a truck. My mom often is like, “You've got a perfect job that you built, and you made it in your image”. I still complain, I’ll come home and complain all the time. But I've been lucky to make it in my image. I'm lucky that it's the right size, and that I can contribute the way I want to. I'm tremendously, tremendously lucky, you know?

10 Songs: Never Forget, Pt. 1

2024-09-13T00:00:00Z

It's been a pretty long week, with some ups and downs — I got a layoff notice at the beginning of the week, which has had me at pretty high anxiety all week, but I also played a show with some friends mid-week and had a great Work Is Four Letters interview.

I don't remember a whole lot about September 11th, other than, like everyone else, being glued to the television until I had to go to my job at a lunch counter, where I was then, again, like everyone else, glued to the television all night. I had just turned 21 a couple weeks before that, which usually meant that we'd go to a bar I'd been going to for years, and I think after work, we went to a bar and watched even more television. My entire memory of the day is essentially of watching the television. Such a strange way to experience an event like that, and odd to remember it that way.

For as long as it lasts, here's a BNDCMPR playlist if you'd like this in playlist format.

Bill | CTO

2024-09-08T00:00:00Z

Name: Bill

Location: Midwest

My school had a lot of problems.

When I was in 8th or 9th grade, they went into receivership — a treasurer had stolen a large percentage of the school's budget. So, the state took over running the school. A bunch of programs had to get cut. Most of the best teachers were the most experienced ones. They got cut or they got asked for early retirement. Things very quickly went downhill in my little suburban school, and, alongside of that, I was not having a good time. I was not enjoying myself. I was not liking my own life. I was not enjoying anything. I was not doing very well in school. I remember walking around my science class trying to get kicked out by throwing a bouncy ball off the wall while the teacher was going over her slides. There was this sort of nonsense where I thought it wasn't a good use of my time and it wasn't a good use of their time, and so I was arguing with my guidance counselor and the principal, trying to get early release or early dismissal.

In 11th grade, I took physics. It was just what was on the schedule. I had a teacher, she was a former nun. Whether she left by choice or not by choice, I don't know, because she was gay. She was an accomplished guitar player. She had over 200 credit hours in the sciences and in education. She was absolutely incredible. She had a master's degree, she probably could have had 2 more if she would have just, you know, taken 1 class in the field. She was amazing. I describe her as, like, a Hallmark Movie of the Week. She had the right mixture of challenging you and asking you to look at things in a different way. I was blown away, I had never had a love of learning like this. I would go see her when I was supposed to be in other classes. I was asking her questions that were far outside the realm of what we were covering, because I was curious and she was willing to go there.

By the end of it, I asked her, “Hey, our school doesn't offer Physics II. Is there anything that we can do about this?” She went to her partner, the principal, and I was able to take independent study with her. This involves things that aren't typically covered in high school classes like cosmology and quantum mechanics. I learned about the light slit experiment.

You familiar with this at all?

This is the Level 1 way to demonstrate that light acts both as a wave and as a particle, it is both continuous, and discrete. You can't have both at the same time. Yet, light seems to do that. We can prove it pretty easily. The idea is that you cut some slits in a piece of paper, and you shine a light, and you see an interference pattern where the waves are bouncing against each other. Sometimes they bounce against each other and reinforce, and sometimes they cancel out. So you see this series of light and dark patterns, and you do some tricks to prove that there's nothing up this sleeve and nothing up that sleeve, and, yes, light is a wave. You can see it right there.

However, if you send one photon at a time through, which means there’s nothing to interfere if there's only one, right? You still get an interference pattern of light and dark. So somehow the light is interfering with itself like a wave, even when you’re doing it one piece at a time.

It’s basically this idea where you have these two things that are very obviously true, and at the same time, judging by how we interact with the world, cannot be true at the same time.

This physics teacher, I could not be more thankful to her. I went back after I had gotten my double major on the Dean's list, and graduated summa cum laude and went and, you know, said, “Thank you”. I don't know what she's up to or or where she is at this point, but, I mean, she absolutely changed my life. If I would have taken biology instead of taking physics, I wouldn't have had her as a teacher. Everything would have been different for me.

I went to college initially for physics, and I was enjoying my math classes a heck of a lot more than a lot of my other stuff. You don't really get into physics your freshman year, that started your sophomore year. I was having a lot of fun with math and I went to my advisor and said, “I'm thinking about picking up a math major to double major, I'm really having fun.” He looked at my schedule and my classes, and I hadn't done any post-secondary, I hadn't done anything special when graduating high school. I didn't have a great high school experience. My guidance counselor in my senior year of high school told me to drop out. My advisor, he's like, “You can't do it in four years if you can't take summer classes.”

I went to school entirely on loans. Summer classes were a lot more money. I would have had to stay on campus for the summers instead of going back home, I couldn't afford it. I said that wasn’t possible, and he was like, “Well, you just can't do it”. I went to my math teacher and he said, “Yes you can, you just need to get special dispensation to take extra hours during the semester”. At that time, they had a limit of 18. I took 21 and 20 my freshman year, after having a conversation with the Dean, he gave me a thumbs up, and I did pretty well. I continued taking a lot of classes to finish the double major, but it was mostly because my advisor told me there was no way that I could do it without taking summer classes. I was like, “If you're going to challenge me, then I'm going to go see what I can do about this”. It worked out extremely well because at the end of it, I went to grad school for math instead of physics.

My initial plan had always been… the reason I went to college was for physics, but in the end, I enjoyed the math more. It was more suitable for my temperament.

There's a well-known quantum mechanics textbook for undergraduates. It's by an author, David Griffiths. He's pretty well known. He's got an electricity and magnetism book that's widely used, and he's a pretty popular guy. In his quantum mechanics textbook, he writes something that's not true. It's a mathematical statement. He has an asterisk by it, and at the bottom of the page it says, “If you're thinking of pathological counterexamples like: counterexample to the thing he just said was true, then maybe math is for you”. The situation that he was describing doesn't come up in the real world, so the fact that it's not mathematically true didn't bother him. But it did bother me. It's a good example of why I preferred math. I went to grad school for math and ended up staying at the same university. I got a master's along the way, because in math grad school, you might as well, you just have to fill out a paper, everything else you do is the same, and so I got a PhD in mathematics.

There are different angles that I appreciate about math. One is pattern recognition and abstraction. You do something for the first couple of cases, and say, “I wonder if it always works like that?”, you do it for a couple more cases and you're like, “Now I’ve got to see if I can prove this”. Extrapolating and saying, “What are the weird situations that can happen? What do we have to investigate? What are the corner cases?” It's the same sort of nonsense people have fun discussing, you know, “Is a hotdog a sandwich?” type questions. This is the same sort of thing except with numbers, right? You say “Here's a pattern, it seems to hold. Let me see how I can twist it. Let me see how I can turn it and make it so that it's not true.”

When you're doing math in primary school, middle school, elementary school, it's arithmetic, right? Numbers and fractions. Maybe you're trying to pull out some stuff from word problems. When you get to high school, you start putting letters in there. Now you've got to solve for X, you’ve got algebra, maybe trigonometry. You deal with shapes. If you're a particular kind of student, you see calculus and, now, you start seeing some weird stuff, weird techniques, you see things that don't obviously connect to the arithmetic you started with. It seems like a different discipline. I didn't find math interesting until I got to college. They have a different perspective because college math teachers are not coming at it from, “Hey, I want to teach you how to solve a problem”. They're coming at it from, “Hey, I want to teach you this idea”. It’s explained in words. Ideas are explained in patterns and logic. It’s not about following the same steps over and over again to get the result.

There’s an element of creativity that comes in, and an element of lawyer-like logic and precision that comes in. You have this perspective of people who have to prove things, it rarely involves numbers, and, at least in the kinds of math that I was interested in, it's descriptions and explanations. There are certainly equations involved, but you're really arguing from logic rather than playing with numbers. and so it's a very different feeling. That’s what I fell in love with, this idea that, “Hey, I think this thing is true and I want to try to prove that, and then I want to try to convince other people that it's true”. What appealed to me was trying to prove things, much more than trying to solve problems.

I thought I was going to work for the government. That didn't work out. This was in 2014. In 2008, the world collapsed and nobody could find a job for people in higher education. This became a problem a couple of years later. You've got people graduating in 2008, you've got hiring freezes going into place. ‘09 or ‘10 and then you've got postdocs looking for jobs, you've got people graduating who aren't where they want to be. By 2014, there's this giant backlog in academia of people who want either a different job or a new job, or in some cases, like me, a first job. A position opened up in a school close to me where my advisor knew somebody that worked there. It was in my specialty, which is neither the most niche nor the brightest area of mathematics, but it was my area, and I thought I had a pretty good shot at it. They had a position open. They had 230 applicants. Another university had 2 positions open, over 700 applicants. You had all these people applying, and all of these people are math PhDs. I was not having a lot of success.

I finally had an opportunity to teach and to be either a professor at an HBCU, or to teach at a private, all-girls high school, so my wife and I went to work at the HBCU. They had a hiring freeze, separate from, you know, the 2008 thing, and, I don't know if you're aware of this, but HBCUs are occasionally underfunded. Everybody was down to their shoe strings as much as they could be.

We were doing everything on a challenging budget and my student loan bills came due. Comparing them to my salary, the numbers were not pretty. A third of my post-tax salary was being sent out to public and private loans. I expected to have a big bill, and I did.

I did not have a gift as a teacher. I was not extraordinary at it, and it wasn't my favorite thing to do. But at the same time, I felt good about being a teacher, I was competent, you know, the students came out doing what they're supposed to do.

There was a group working on a NASA grant out of… I don't remember if it was Houston, or a different NASA in Texas, but they were working with an interdisciplinary group, doing biology work. They were trying to determine how different kinds of microbes survived — or didn't — in space. They said, “Why don't you teach yourself some coding? I don't know how much math we're going to have to do, but we're definitely gonna need scripting”. So, I started learning Python, and I was having a really good time with it. I enjoyed coding a heck of a lot more than I enjoyed teaching my fourth remedial algebra class of the day. So I started interviewing at some tech places.

Eventually I caught on with a consulting firm. They place new grads in a bootcamp, and then they place them at a location, typically in finance, for a couple of years. I had a head start on the coding. They placed me at the Options Clearing Corporation, in Chicago. Setting up their internal issue tracking software, migrating their HR system, helping the accounting team get their new printer set up. It was a really good first job in the industry, and my wife had a ready-made community. We knew people in Chicago already. I served it out, it went well, I learned a ton. In the end, they were eliminating my position, so I was looking elsewhere when I applied to and got the job that I have now. I had 2 offers at that time, and I went with this one because of sustainability, social conscience, and with all other things being equal, I'm going with the one that makes me feel better to work at.

I am the Chief Technology Officer for a small company. We are startup-like, but we've been around for about 10 or 12 years. The company has changed directions a couple of times, but I will focus on what I do today.

We take in institutional food purchasing data — think, like, a hospital or a university — food and beverages and disposables, things like that. They or their distributors collect that data, and they send it to us. We standardize it, clean it, and we tag it for sustainable attribution.

What we’re looking for is: what did they purchase that’s USDA Certified Organic? What was bought within 250 miles? What was within the state that the institution is located in? We return the data to them in the form of reports.

There's an organization called the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability and Higher Education, and a lot of schools belong to this organization. They have a program called STARS. STARS ranks schools on how they're doing in terms of sustainability. Not just with food, but with energy use and similar things, and the schools get ranked on that. This feeds into US News and World Report rankings. Some institutions have public ESG or DEI commitments they've made, and they have to report to their boards. Occasionally, state governments will give kickbacks just to institutions for purchasing things locally — there's a program called Kentucky Proud that's a good example of this. If a university buys something that was involved in some way with a Kentucky business, locally grown or produced, or even if it's just the distributors being located in Kentucky, they still get credit for that in some fashion.

The company started off sourcing local produce for Chicago Public Schools. They were a kitchen table business, the founder of the company was connecting local Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois farmers with Chicago Public Schools. They were taking the food, getting the trucks to bring it to food prep locations and they were doing things like “Bring a farmer to the classroom!” events.

At some point they got involved with a big food service management company that services CPS, and the food service management company said, “Can you tell us about your local sourcing?” Not necessarily where they were getting the stuff, but, in terms of money, and in terms of percentages, and CPS were interested in getting all the stuff we report on. The company said, “This platform you built for reporting to collect this information and to disseminate it, it’s pretty good, could you do this if we gave you other data?” and so, from that point, I've been involved. I've been with the company for about six years. There were a couple of us hired at the same time that set up initial processing and databases and reporting and all that. I was hired as, I think, a senior manager. At some point, I got a promotion to director, and then somebody left, and in order to make sure that I didn't also leave, I got a promotion to VP, and then last year, I got a promotion to CTO.

My boss is the founder of the company. She's the CEO, the one doing the initial kitchen table work, boxing up the potatoes and putting them on a truck. She's still with the company, but she’s started to think about retirement. So, we're looking at maybe getting acquired or maybe getting funding, with the possibility that I may take over her role in the next few years or something along those lines. We're pretty sure that things won't continue this way indefinitely in a tiny company, it can't because we're too dependent on the individuals involved.

We are 80% remote at this point. We were partially remote prior to Covid, and then after Covid, we started doing 1 day in the office after things loosened up a little. Most of our folks are not local to Chicago, so every day, you’re talking with somebody in Spain, somebody in Argentina, somebody in California. One of the things that's been difficult for vacations and for holidays is that our biggest customer has a deadline where we need to have a particular data set ready on the first of the month. The world doesn't fall down if it's not. But a lot of people get a lot of headaches. It’s pretty important, which means somebody has to be in charge of it. Initially, it was me and a couple other people all working together to hash out the process and make sure that we could meet that deadline. Some of the folks got bored and wanted to move on. Eventually it got to the point where it was faster for me to do it myself than to try to train somebody, and then have to worry about it and look over their shoulder, so I just took it on myself. The biggest client and the biggest, most important deadline for them, I’ve shouldered that.

My job is partially management, partially making sure workflows are appropriate, partially making sure nobody is too stumped, making sure people are asking questions when they're supposed to, making sure everyone’s workload is appropriate. The other part is actual hands-on tech work, shepherding files through our process and making sure the output makes sense compared to the input. I would say that I now take a lot more ownership, in the sense that this is now my process, and I'm both responsible for making sure that it works when it's supposed to, and deciding how it's supposed to go. Initially it was sort of, like, “Well, you tell me what this is supposed to look like, and I will do my best to sort of implement what you think”.

You know, if you bang your head against the wall enough times, you will, in fact, make a hole in it, and that’s sort of what I think the primary responsibility of the job is, we have a nice head-shaped hole in the wall where I fit comfortably.

Dr. Nova | Medical Science Liaison

2024-08-14T00:00:00Z

Name: Dr. Nova

Location: East coast

I'm a pharmacist by training. I have a Doctor of Pharmacy degree from an HBCU. My plan was to go work in the basement of a hospital somewhere until I'm 65 and retire. I graduated from college shortly after the economic crash in 2008 and like others in my generation, I went rushing for an advanced degree.

When I graduated from pharmacy school, that series of years from the early 2010s to the mid 2010s had the largest number of pharmacists who graduated. Every year across the country, the number of pharmacists just increased. It created a workforce that was easier to exploit because you're more replaceable. So, Walgreens and CVS know that they can burn you out, kick you out of the door, and they'll have another person come in. They know that people are going to be desperate for jobs. It got to the point where nobody wants to be at the large retail chains. We were all competing for the smaller pool of hospital clinical jobs, and a lot of the hospitals wanted more specialization or residency training, whereas, like, 20 years ago, you got your degree in pharmacy and you could go work anywhere. Long story short, I did not get a residency position, and I absolutely refused to go work at CVS and Walgreens, and I graduated, and I was just really at a loss.

I was about to graduate and I had no job offers, nothing. My mom was talking to one of my professors at my graduation — I don't know how this conversation started — but he comes to me and he says, “Have you ever considered working in the pharmaceutical industry?” And I was like, “Not really”, because, on the one hand, it always seemed like something you do much further down when you're more established in your career, if you do it at all. And then there's also the stigma of Big Pharma. So it was just like, “Okay, I never really thought about that, but what the heck, I don't have a job at all”.

Two weeks later, I'm on a plane to the Midwest, I interview for this job, then two days after that, I get offered the job, and I was like, “Well, I guess I'm moving from the east coast to the midwest.” So that's how I got into the pharmaceutical industry.

I work in an area of pharma called Medical Affairs. It's, like, all the scientific communications, all of the stuff that a pharma company puts out that's not marketing, not advertisement, and essentially educational in nature. Medical Affairs sits in this place where we're dealing with marketed products. Products that have been approved by the FDA. If we're involved with pre-market products, it's mostly towards the end of their development phases. Because we're noncommercial representation, we talk with physicians and other health care providers. My role specifically is that I'm a Medical Science Liaison. In a nutshell, I am the scientific expert representing my company for a particular region of the country.

That first year was just learning the ropes. The biggest part of that was moving across the country. Like, I barely remember what work I did. I was just like, “I'm in a new place!”, so that was a challenge, and after I finished my first year fellowship, I didn't really know if I wanted to stay in Medical Affairs or go focus on the Research and Development side of things. My second job at [Company A] was in pharmaceutical development project management. I was responsible for a number of assets, most of them early-phase diabetes projects. I was responsible for coordinating all of these different functions that play into getting a drug developed — engineering, chemistry, all the different scientists. And then you have manufacturing people, all these different groups that you have to herd, to get to a final goal of a drug that might come out 15 years from now.

Some of it got very complex. One project I was dealing with was about to go into phase one, where you just look at the basics of a medication in human beings. We were supposed to be ready to start the first human dose, and I remember the chemical engineering guy saying, “We can't do this because the drug is not stable anymore”. The chemical engineers were like, “We cannot give it to people, it’s got to be redone”. And like, that's it. The hard part about that was that it's, you know, very long-term. The work that I was doing might have some effect on something in 10 years or more. So, if everything goes perfectly, according to all of these estimates, this drug might be submitted to the FDA in 2025. This was in 2015 or 2016.

That's why it was hard for me, because I have... I like to organize things and I like to see projects happen. I mean, it's very important work, but for me, it just didn't have enough immediacy, and at the very same time, I had to get the hell out of the Midwest.

I started looking outside and successfully snagged my first Medical Science Liaison role at another company. Things were only normal for about one year, because I started in 2019 and then Covid happened in March 2020 and then, like everyone else, I had to stay home. Of course, being in the pharmaceutical industry, everybody's efforts turn to, like, “What do we do about this?” Which was very cool, in a way. I remember we had a town hall meeting early in the pandemic, like, two weeks after things shut down. Our Chief Medical Officer was like, “Everybody, right now, open up the archives to look at every molecule we have to see if anything at all could be used against coronavirus.” At that time, we were just starting to try to figure out how the virus was even working, and what it was doing to people's bodies. It was really heartening to hear, like, “We're opening our library, we're going to search every molecule that we have ever had in development, everything that we've ever even tried to make something out of and see if anything works”.

That’s how we had such a slew of random drugs at the very beginning of Covid, like, the remdesivir and baricitinib, a drug that they were using for people who were really sick with Covid, that all came from companies scrambling to figure out anything out.

I switched jobs towards the end. In 2021, I came over to [Company C], doing the same job that I was doing at [Company B], but outside again. I am in Dermatology. So that's how I got to where I am and what I do.

If there's a question about our medication, it comes to me. If there is a clinical trial ongoing with one of our medications currently or one that's in the pipeline, I have to be aware of it. I am responsible for medical education. So, say, there's a residency program, and they want a crash course through certain immunology topics, or something that's specific to the drug that I represent. I’ll present that info to them as an educational program.

What I like most is that I don't sell anything. If I walk into somebody's office and they're like, “This is the best drug ever!”, I'm like, “Cool.” If I walk in and they say, “This is the worst drug ever!” I'm like, “Cool.” We are a conduit back to the company for important insights. If you know, we have a bunch of people saying, “You know, this drug really sucks and you guys dropped the ball”, that's valuable information, and we develop initiatives to address that. That’s the gist of it.

I'll put it like this, a chill day is a day like today where I basically work from home. I spent some time answering questions from people in my territory, medical questions that they had. They’re never urgent because nobody's dying in dermatology. There are some things that are better to explain to people face-to-face than trying to send an email, or, just, like a research paper or something. A very busy day is when I’m out in the field. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day. I'm going out to an office in the morning where I have to address some safety questions about our drug. A patient had a bit of a hypersensitivity, like, kind of like an allergic-type reaction after they started their first dose. I'm going down to talk to the doctors about how that came about and what to do if the patient has it again and if they feel more comfortable discontinuing the patient. Then I'm going to hit another office where I'm hoping to meet up with some physician assistants and go through one of our data sets with them. Then maybe I'll hit a third. That's just locally, like, driving around, hitting three offices.

Next week, I'm going to West Virginia for 3 days, and I'm essentially going to be doing the same thing that I do locally. When I travel, I tend to pack those days up with more things, like, I will have, like, a breakfast meeting, a lunch meeting, and then I'm going to go out to dinner with somebody. Another day I'll hit 3 or 4 offices.

This can differ across therapeutic areas, even within my own. Within our company, Immunology is divided into Dermatology, Rheumatology, Gastroenterology. Neither Rheumatology nor Gastroenterology has even half the number of conferences that Dermatology does. I don't know what dermatologists do, because they're always at conferences [laughs]! Some of them are regional. Some of them are smaller. Some of them are big, national ones. I do 1 to 2 conferences a quarter. Because it's a conference, it usually runs over a weekend, so when I do a conference, I'll do Thursday, Friday, Saturday, sometimes Sunday, depending on the schedule. We often have booths, displays, things like that. It's a lot of standing around and talking to people and socializing and smiling and all of that, and it can be very tiring, very busy.

I guess the best snapshot of what my days will look like depends heavily on where I'm located, what I'm supposed to be doing, but I like it, because I hate working in offices. That's the main reason I became a pharmacist, I never wanted to work in an office. I always wanted to work in medicine, but I knew I didn't want to work in an office. I had full intention of working as a pharmacist. I studied my ass off, I got great grades, I'm a licensed pharmacist. Like, I passed all the licensing exams and everything, I just don't use it.

Sometimes, I wish I had done it. Where that hit me was when the pandemic started, because I just wanted to be more useful. Even though I don't actively use my medical expertise, it’s still there, and early in the pandemic, I had a lot of friends from pharmacy school who were working in hospitals who were just as overwhelmed as everybody else. I did a course online, for ICU Pharmacy because I was like, if they open up jobs for something like that, I'm going to do it, because everyone's burned out. It was awful. I did get hired by a local medical center for reserve pharmacy, and I did, like, a little bit of backup. I mostly worked on vaccination, so, I was glad I had that ability at a point where people were really, really in need.

The thing that keeps me away from turning my focus back into pharmacy is that everyone gets so burned out. I graduated, what, 8 years ago? I know people that quit, completely. Maybe if the field improves in some way, or if there's really a great need again, I definitely would do it in a time of need. But you know, this is fine. If I had to go work in a regular retail pharmacy right after school, you know, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to survive. If I could go all the way back to college and choose again, I probably would have stuck to going to medical school. When I was trying to get out of the Midwest, I was very close to applying for medical school. I was like, “You already have so much debt, what's a little more like, it doesn't matter to you, you’re not paying it off!”

Nobody ever pressured me to be a doctor. I just genuinely fell in love with science as a kid. Always wanted to be some kind of scientist, and then, you know, gravitated towards medicine, it didn't turn me off in the way that it turns others off. Like, other people get queasy when folks are ill. But I was very, very interested in it. And I wanted to know, like, why someone was sick and how they could get better? What could we do? and I became a very big chemistry nerd. I love chemistry. That pushed towards the drug part of things. I ended up deciding to do pharmacy school instead of medical school for some stupid 22-year old reason that made sense to me at 22.

If you have questions about how the sausage is made in pharma, like, how drugs come to life, I can answer them because, goodness, the internet is very confused about it. A lot of that is the industry's fault because so much of the stuff that would answer people's questions is proprietary information. I’ve actually seen the line items for drugs in development; it’s hard to grasp a real sense of the costs otherwise. They sit in front of Congress and they're like, “Well, we need $1 billion to develop this drug.” I mean, they're not lying about it, it's true, but they don't provide that evidence because it's proprietary, trade secret information.

Sometimes, just being online, it's like watching people is hard… because, I’m like, a left wing person. I watch people say things, and I’m like, “Oh that’s not how it works”. But I can't prove it. The biggest [misconceptions] tend to be when people or news outlets are like, “This drug sells for $70,000, but it's manufactured for $1 a pill” or something like that. And I'm like, no, it's not. The raw materials cost might be really inexpensive, but that price, even if we were to strip out the profit motive — profit motive doesn't matter to me, I don't sell anything. I don't care, I don't care if the shareholders get another yacht. That has nothing to do with me. I'm part of the operating cost, but if you still just priced it for the people who have regular jobs and have to get paid to do the work that they do, it would still be expensive, right? Because people work to manufacture that drug for the 10 to 15 years it takes to develop. And then all of the other 50 drugs that they pulled the plug on, we're paying, you’re paying for all of that at the end of the day. I would be totally fine if someone said like they're not allowed to make profits anymore or whatever, but the fact that we need revenue to power our work, that has to be done and is really important. So that's one thing.

The other thing, the one I hate the most, is importing drugs from Canada. When I was at [Company A], this was like 2017, after that election and a lot of people like Bernie Sanders were talking about importing drugs from Canada. And the thing that I felt like no one realized is that pharmaceutical companies are international corporations. They operate here in the United States, but they make their money all over the world.

If the same drug that is manufactured in Indianapolis, Indiana costs $100 for someone to get just over the border in Toronto, but here it costs, you know, $700, then the problem is not in Canada, it can't be solved in Canada, it has to be solved here. Canada and the United States have completely separate, different health care systems. There's different players involved. There are different people trying to make money at different steps in the chain that other countries don't have. So, you know, maybe if we had some laws here that prevented people from trying to make a buck out of every transaction that has to happen along the supply chain, then maybe it wouldn't cost, you know, $700 to get your prescription every month in Indiana when they make it next door versus somebody getting it for, you know, a fraction of the cost in a completely different country. If you end up importing it back from Canada, like, we're literally paying for our own drug that we already made. That's the problem. A lot of people don't understand just how many different factions are involved in the American health care system and how murky and crazy and messed up it is.

I'm sorry to anybody who loves when someone in Congress holds up a little whiteboard and they're like, well, “You make $300 billion a year!”. Then they ask “Why is this drug this much?” There’s never a straight answer because that dude doesn't know anything. He does not know because nobody knows. You can question the CEO of a drug company or a health insurance company, you’ll keep questioning and the answers will be circular. That’s because it’s impossible to pinpoint one person that's responsible. The whole thing needs to be upended.

I don't blame anyone for being mad about this because, again, all of that info is proprietary and nobody is upfront about anything. Having seen it, you know, in front of my eyes, I get it. It costs $1.5 million to run a fertility study using rabbits. It sounds crazy but it does.

The most exciting thing I'm working on is actually happening right now. We have a new drug in our pipeline that’s launching, and, I'm not intimately involved with the development of it, but I get to see this trial come into fruition. The whole big deal right now in America is all this backlash against DEI, right? My company has made a genuine effort to diversify our clinical trial patient base. Over the last couple years, we did a trial that recruited self-identified patients of color. The drug is already on the market, so we already know that it works, but this was an attempt to make up for the racial gaps in the original study data. We're not just saying, “Well, this study had 80% white patients, so it's going to work for everybody”. We're saying, “Okay, let's try to make this group of patients more representative by doing this”. In trying to diversify our patient population for clinical trials, we actually diversified our investigator base.

Investigator is just another word for principal scientists. They'll be, like, the lead doctor, at a clinical trial site. It's really just a dermatologist who's in charge of a clinical trial site in a particular area. We refer to them all as investigators.

I live in an area that is mostly people of color. We have a lot of minority representation here, but, my area, we had no clinical trial sites at all. We got 3 or 4 sites in my immediate territory that are now participating in the trial for this new drug that's coming out. So we won't have to go 8 years from now and be like, “Oops, let's try to get people of color represented in our drug trial”.

I know there's a lot of people that always say companies have just been doing this diversity stuff for, you know, capitalism’s sake and to get brownie points and everything, and while that might be true in some places, I'm very proud that where I work, that is not the case, that we're doing something that really is going to have impact, we're getting patients in the trials for the for this new drug that haven't had the opportunity to be treated before. They're getting treated for free, essentially. That's probably the most rewarding thing that I have contributed to so far.

For a moment, I was afraid that my company, like other companies, would shrink away from it because the Chris Rufo's of the world were coming for them or whatever. But it hasn't happened. So now I feel like, you know, you can come for us if you want to, but look at what we've done, you know?

10 Songs: Fuck JD Vance, Pt. 1

2024-07-18T00:00:00Z

I spent summer holidays (and sometimes Christmases) in Ohio. My mother's family were in Stow and Cuyahoga Falls, and my father's mother was in Akron. I don't remember a whole lot about it other than enjoying going to the malls and the movies and being less fond of some of my cousins, aunts and uncles, but I've never held them against the state, and I don't hold the odious JD Vance against it, either. Ohio has a long and great tradition of rock bands, here are 10 songs I picked at random while spending an evening wading through Bandcamp rather than reading the news.

Also, I wanted to make a Songs, Ohio joke, but decided against it. Except for this one, obviously.

For as long as it lasts, here's a BNDCMPR player if you'd like this in a playlist format.

Karl | Cartoonist, Illustrator

2024-07-18T00:00:00Z

Name: Karl Christian Krumpholz

Location: Denver, CO

I’m a cartoonist and an illustrator. I've been doing artwork for about 30 years. Back in the day, in the 90s when I started, I was doing very primitive zine-type comics since I really had no idea what I was doing, and you kind of have to just go through and figure it all out. But professionally, I've probably been doing it for almost ten years as an illustrator and cartoonist. This is now my day job, rather than doing it on the side.

What actually got me into the comic book industry, or, I should say, what got me my start doing comics back in the mid-to-late 90s was when I was working at a comic shop in Philadelphia and — you know, I'm all around comics and always talked about doing my own comic. What happened was, there was a woman, I'm trying to remember her name… Patty Breen. She was doing a comic called Kiss and Tell, which started off locally and eventually got picked up by Sirius Publishing, but this was back when I met her and it was still a local comic. She said to me, “If you want to do comics, do one page and I'll publish it in my book”. So that first page I did was a backup feature to her comic. It was gawdawful. This had to have been, ‘97, ‘98, and that was my first comic page. That’s what started it all. I soon started doing my little comic called Angst Boy Comics, self-published zine, going to Kinko's, printing everything out, and it all kind of went from there. It was basically a fictionalized account of my own life. It’s slightly autobiographical, but in a fictional setting.

I went to Temple University in Philadelphia. I was a RTF major, which is Radio, Television, Film. When I was going there, the joke on campus was that it actually stood for “Rather Than Fail”. I was a RTF major with a history minor and kind of just fell into photography while I was going there, started taking photography courses and I found it a lot more fascinating than all the radio, television and film classes I was taking. So I tried to move over to Tyler, which is Temple University's art school. I was told that if I wanted to move to Tyler, I could do that, but I would start off as a freshman again, which I wasn't about to do. So, yeah, I just basically took all the photography courses that I could take with the idea of becoming a photographer. It's funny because, in the last year, I reconnected with a woman that I knew back in the day when I was a student, and she was surprised I was a cartoonist. She was like, “You're a photographer”. I was like, “Oh, I fell into cartooning”.

The idea of, like, how to set up a shot? It's like a crossover as a lot of cartoonists go into storyboarding. I mean, it's the same idea. My photography started off in journalism classes, where the big thing with journalism photography is a full frame shot. Everything is in frame, there's no editing, there's no cropping, put everything in that little box. I slowly moved from journalism photography — because I took all the journalism photography classes — into art photography. I mean, all that certainly helped my cartooning work. Every now and then, I still do storyboarding for commercials. Which is, I mean, that's fun, and it's a different way of looking at things, right?

I always grew up around art because my uncle was a painter and, of course, looking back now, being a little kid and seeing my uncle do these works, these big canvases… they weren't even canvases, he was painting on wooden boards, but big pieces. I remember a large influence on me being a little kid and going to the Annenberg School, which is part of University of Pennsylvania. My uncle had this huge art show, all his pieces on the wall. Looking back now with all the years behind it, like, he was a bit of a failed artist. I mean, this is what he was doing on the side in the 70s and 80s. You know, he was sending out, like we all do, sending out letters, as there was no email. He was sending out letters to publishers about his artwork. Once he passed in 2018, I was the one going through all his archives and found all the rejection letters that he got, and he eventually stopped doing it, which I find heartbreaking. But he did influence me, and this is the art world as it is. It's always going to be a struggle. It always seems that you’re getting through it all by the seat of your pants. My mom calls it a family curse because it was her brother that was the artist, and then I fell into it, and now my niece is — she's, I think, 13, 14 years old — and she wants to become an artist. So my mom laments the art gene of our family. I tell my niece it's not easy. It's always going to be a struggle, a struggle that can be worth it all.

If I was still living in Boston, I don’t think I would be able to get by as an artist, because Boston's so wicked expensive. I get by now for two reasons: Denver is slightly cheaper, and my wife has a great paying job, you know? Which helps when my work is light. Denver is also such a small community, over the last 10 years, I've been able to make a name for myself with my work, so people know who I am. It's funny — going into bars and people who have never met me or Kelly recognize us from the comics. The amount of times Kelly's outside smoking a cigarette and some strange person approaches her and says “I know you, right?”

I've been doing artwork officially since about the end of ‘15, beginning of ‘16. What happened was, I was doing some illustration gigs, but then Noah Van Sciver, who is an indie cartoonist I've known for years, announced that he was leaving Colorado and moving up to Vermont to a cartoonist school up there. At the time, he was doing a weekly comic for the Denver’s Westword newspaper. I don’t know how many indie newspapers are still even around — I know the Boston papers are all gone, and I know the Philly papers are all gone, but the Westword is still holding on because of weed advertising money. Noah was doing a comic for their music page, and when he was leaving, they asked, “Who do you think should take over your comic?” and he suggested me. I still don't know if that was a blessing or a curse. So, I did a weekly comic for the Westword from the end of ‘15 until early 2020, when the lockdowns happened. For the first half of those years, I was doing the history of various music venues in Denver, because the comic appeared on the music page and needed to be music related. After about two and a half years, I was running out of venues to do histories about, so I started doing band stories, little short stories that could be told in three or four panels about weird things that happened to a local band. Of course, that all got shut down when COVID happened because the music venues weren't open, there were no shows going on, so there was no revenue coming in.

The music page shut down, my comic shut down. When things started opening again, the Westword asked me if I wanted to revive my weekly comic, and I said “No”, because it was a lot of work for very little return. But I started doing features for them every couple of months about Denver history, because I was more into the history — especially since Denver's not my city, it’s my wife's city. It's Kelly's city. This is a way for me to learn about this place, and those original Denver music venue comics became the backbone of my Queen City book.

Cover of Queen City by Karl Christian Krumpholz, available at Tinto Press.

When I moved to Denver, I was working for Pearson Education as an editor of textbooks. I did that for a couple of years, but since I was working in Denver and Pearson didn't have an office here, they could only keep me for, I think it was two years. My boss at the time basically said to me, “Do you want to move to Indianapolis?”, and I said, “Fuck No”. So with that gone I started picking up freelance gigs from my old contacts in publishing for a couple of years. Then I did survey work. Again, just kinda falling into it. I traveled around the U.S., mostly barren parts of the country, and set up LiDAR equipment that would scan power lines. It wasn't steady work. The first time I was out on the road for three months and then six months of nothing. Suddenly, they call you up going, “Hey, we need you on the road for another week or two”.

Idaho tried to kill me twice. This was in 2009, I was out in the area around Coeur d'Alene. It was me and another American, the guy who got me the job, Rip, and about three or four other employees who were all English, because this was a British company I was working for. I didn't know Coeur d'Alene was the white supremacist capitol of America, and this was around the time Obama got elected, so I saw a lot of Confederate flags and a lot of anti-Obama stuff while I was up there. We were leaving Coeur d'Alene in late November, around Thanksgiving. The guy's like, “Okay, pack up everything in your car, we'll do the jobs, all the scanning stuff that we need to do in Idaho, and we'll all meet later tonight in Missoula, Montana”.

They sent me up to the top of a mountain in Idaho to set up my LiDAR. I was in a corner of the woods and a lot of trucks were passing me with all these guys with guns and orange vests as they were all out hunting, and when I got the all-clear to head to Missoula, I headed down the mountain. This was before smartphones — we had GPS devices in the rental cars to guide us. It was telling me to go down the mountain and go east, deeper into a forest road between the mountains. I drove maybe three or four miles and it was around 7PM, but I was in the middle of the mountains on a ravine road, so it was pitch black out. As I was driving, every time I turned, the car acted funny, and after about three or four turns, I realized, “Oh, I've got a flat tire”. I got out of my car and… you know, while I have a driver's license, I have never owned a car. I kind of know how to change a tire. I was thinking, “Okay, I can work my way through, pump the car up, take the lug nuts off, put the tire on”. I pulled everything out of the car to change the tire, and while I did have a replacement donut tire in the rental, there were no tools to actually change the tire. After a lot of cursing, I remembered a ways back, I passed a hunter’s lodge, a bar, in the middle of the mountains.

I drove with a flat tire back to the bar and by the time I got there, the rubber was gone and the tire was in tatters. I was in my Red Sox cap and a leather jacket walking into this Idaho hunters’ bar trying to downplay my accent and I was like, “Hey, I got a flat tire and my car doesn’t have any gear to fix it. Could I possibly get gear, the thing to jack up the thing?” I didn't have the winch. The bartender, he looked like beef jerky with this long fucking beard. He was wicked thin and wearing a Seattle Seahawks cap asked, “What the hell are you doing in the mountains without a way to repair your car?” And I just replied, “It's a rental. It's a rental!”. In the end, the guy said, “Hey, I've got a truck out there, you can use the truck jack”. I got the car up. But the rubber was all in tatters since I'd been riding on the rim for a little bit, so it was kinda fused to the car. I got the lug nuts off but couldn't get the rim off. I had to go back into the bar, and they gave me some WD40 and a big maul hammer. I had to spray down the rim and slam it a couple of times with the maul hammer until it popped and skittered off in the snow. I got the donut tire on, got all the lug nuts on, went back in, gave them the maul hammer, bought the guy a drink who lent me the tools and just sat there and the bartender’s like, “Do you need a beer?”, and I was like, “Fuck yeah, I need a beer”.

After about 20 minutes, I'm thinking, okay, I gotta get out of here. And I said to the guy, “Listen, I gotta get to Missoula and my GPS is sending me further down the ravine…” He looked at me and said, “Don't trust those things. It's sending you down hunter trails to get over the mountains. Don't do that. Go out to the highway, go around the mountains, take the long way. It's much safer.” So I finally got down to the highway, taking the long way around.

All during this, I'm out of cell phone range. My phone was dead. Dead, dead, dead. I crossed over the Montana border, and I had to pull off the highway to get gas. This had to be around 10PM. My phone exploded because I was suddenly in cell phone range again with all these messages from the other surveyors going “Where the fuck are you?!”. I finally called them and they were all drunk at the hotel bar because they couldn’t do anything but wait for new info. And they're like, “Oh, thank God you're alive. You better call your girlfriend.”

That was the first time that Idaho tried to kill me, and a month or two later I had to go back so Idaho could try to kill me again. I flew in from a helicopter from Portland to Spokane, where another rental car was waiting for me. It was one of those cars where it’s got the chip in the key. So I drove out to my location, which was in a small town, set up my GPS, blah, blah, blah. When you're doing the GPS you also have to do ground surveying of the area. So I was doing that while I'm waiting for the helicopter to go by. When I finally got the all clear, a couple hours later, I went to pack everything up and I realized I didn't have the car keys. Apparently, when I was pulling out my gloves, I lost the car keys at some point and it's not a thing where I could get AAA help because it's got the chip. It took me an hour or two to retrace my steps and find my car keys in the snow.

During that, in my panic, I slipped on the ice, hit the ground. My leg just went right under me and I really fucked up my knee at the time. And I was just thinking, I was like, “I could have an accounting job, you know, this is bullshit”. That was the second time Idaho tried to kill me, and I've never been back since, thank fuck.

Then I started working for Graphic.ly in the early teens which lasted maybe 3 years. Graphic.ly had tried to be a comic book and social media startup. They were trying to compete with Comixology, and it just didn’t work. I mean, the whole business collapsed, right? I got let go from them in 2013 - 2014, and did more freelance work until I started doing the comic stuff full time.

I'm usually juggling several different projects at the same time. It could be my own projects, like In the City or work for the Westword. Right now I'm juggling 3 different jobs, all comic book work, which is great! This week, I got a script from a magazine that asked for a 2-page comic. I'm not writing it, just drawing it. Yesterday, I spent the day drawing both pages. Today, I spent the day inking, scanning them in and getting them ready for coloring, which I'll do tomorrow. Every morning, I have an idea of what needs to get done for that particular day. It's not like at 9AM, I’m like, “Oh, what am I going to do today?” That's never the case. I usually know all the things I need to get done. I just finished the latest issue of In the City. I'm getting a proof made, reviewing, and sending it out. I'm doing an event on Thursday here in Denver, which is less of a comic event, it's more illustrations — it's for the Colfax BID [Business Improvement District] that I’ve done some work for, so I am getting prints ready for that event, so I have something to sell. It's a lot of juggling various projects and keeping a lot of balls in the air.

[Being an artist] means a lot of things. It’s the idea of creating something new that no one's ever seen before and getting your own particular view of the world out there. I want to create something no one's ever seen before. I want people to enjoy it. This is my view of the world. That's the base gut thing you want to do. But for me, a deeper thing is, because of my background, I love and want to talk about history, but you can't preserve everything.

This is a little way of preserving it. My Queen City book was an example of this, the idea of, “Okay, I want to understand Denver since I didn't grow up here”, you know, since I'm an East Coaster.

I still feel like a tourist in the city that I have lived in for well over a decade. The idea of Queen City was this idea of “Disappearing Denver” — all the cities are going through it. Boston's going through this. Philly is going through this. New York’s going through it. Everything is transient. With the Queen City book, I was thinking, okay, this is what Denver looked like in the early 21st century. I wanted to document all these bars and places that were disappearing and make a record going, “This was here, the Lancer Lounge was here, the 404 was here!” Shelby’s Bar and Grill, which David Wonderich once named as one of the best bars in America, was there. It got knocked down a few years ago and they're now building condos where it once was. And it’s not just Denver. I was doing this for Boston as well, illustrating a bunch of buildings that were disappearing. The Sligo Pub in Somerville, one of my past old haunts, recently closed down. My illustration of it is one of my best selling prints.

Illustration of the Sligo Pub by Karl Christian Krumpholz, available on Etsy.

That's a big thing for me, in all my work, it comes back to history and the city. Aside from Queen City, the project I'm working on now, In The City, is an extension of that and just talking about city life. Weird things, the weird people you meet, the weird conversations that you fall into in bars, this is what city life was like in the early 21st century. It doesn't matter what city it is, because I'm using various cities that I visit, Denver, Boston, Philadelphia,New York, and the things or conversations that have happened while I was there. It’s documenting a time and a place, rather than going, “Okay, I'm going to do a weird comic where wackiness happens!” or, you know, superheroes, which I've never been interested in.

I just finished In the City, Part 3. It's at the printer now. I'm hoping to have it when I do comic shows this autumn. I’ll be in D.C. for the Small Press Expo and in Columbus for Cartoons Crossroads Columbus, both in September. I got a table at Thought Bubble, which is in Yorkshire, in November. And then lastly — hopefully at Massachusetts Indie Comic Expo in Boston, in December. As soon as I get all these commissions done, I'll start on issue 4 of In the City. I'm planning on doing 5 issues in all before I work on the next project, but I want to get this done, and it's been… it's kind of like every comic project you do, at least in my case, every project you do leads into the next one. Everything's influenced by what has come before. When I was doing Queen City, which is straight history, and then The Lighthouse in the City, which is more autobiographical —especially during the COVID years — In the City, was the next logical step for me to take. It's autobiographical, it is journalism, it's observation set into a narrative and it all bounces back to city life.

Karl's work can be found on his website, it can be purchased on his Etsy shop, and you can follow him on Instagram, Bluesky, or any number of other social media sites, he's easy to find.

10 Songs: Songs for Airports, pt. 1

2024-07-08T00:00:00Z

Flying from the west coast to the east for a single day of work, then flying back west the next day is a grind that's been my gig far more often than I would have liked this year, but that's the job for the moment, so that's what I do. Anyway, there's nothing everyone on an airplane loves more than someone who wants to dance, so here's a quickie 10 Songs of Northern Soul and R&B if, unlike me, you actually can dance around in your seat or your chair or at your job or whatever.

For as long as it lasts, here's a BNDCMPR player if you'd like this in a playlist format.

10 Songs: Australia

2024-07-07T00:00:00Z

Australia punches way above their weight when it comes to great guitar rock bands. I've heard a lot of theories for this, none of which I'm remotely qualified to weigh in on, and won't try. Regardless of why, there are a ton of great floppy haired shredders on the other side of the world, here are a handful I've been enjoying.

For as long as it lasts, here's a BNDCMPR player if you'd like this in a playlist format.

10 Songs: Sunday Music, pt. 1

2024-06-26T00:00:00Z

Sundays are a day for the Lord, if you're a religious person. I am decidedly not, so, for me, Sundays are for coffee or mimosas or brunch, but, always, they are for music. Here are 10 Sunday songs for you and the Lord or you and your brunch or you and whatever you do on Sundays.

For as long as it lasts, here's a BNDCMPR player if you'd like this in a playlist format.

10 Songs: Too Goddamned Hot, pt. 1

2024-06-26T00:00:00Z

It's too goddamned hot, everywhere, and as of the writing of this, it's only June. Portland's fortunately been mild this year, but I know folks everywhere are sweating and sweltering and suffering and swearing. Here's some hot weather music, crack open the coldest drink you can find and pretend you're somewhere that doesn't suck at the moment.

For as long as it lasts, here's a BNDCMPR player if you'd like this in a playlist format.

10 Songs: Wednesdays are the Worst, pt. 1

2024-06-26T00:00:00Z

As far back as I remember, I always ~~wanted to be a gangst~~... fucking hated Wednesdays. There's something about the ennui of being in the middle of the week — but not past it — that I hate, it's like sitting in the middle seat, you can't get comfortable and you're just stuck waiting until the heat death of the universe, or the end of the flight, or until you can go to bed, or whatever.

Anyway, here's some existential ennui listening for Wednesday haters.

For as long as it lasts, here's a BNDCMPR player if you'd like this in a playlist format.

Leo | Tattooer

2024-06-26T00:00:00Z

Name: Leo Darlin Guajardo

Location: Portland, OR

I tattoo for a living. I've been doing it about fifteen years or so. I apprenticed in a shop for a couple of years out in Hawaii after working there just to answer the phones, clean stuff, scrub tubes, things like that. After a few months, the guy who ran the shop offered to teach me to tattoo because, in his words, I worked hard, I could draw, and everybody there liked me, which is rare. Apprenticeship was about a year and a half or so. Two years? Yeah. Somewhere in that range. It was… nothing's a set schedule with an apprenticeship or any kind of learning in a trade like that, aside from once you're in the trade, the whole ‘10,000 hours journeyman’ thing.

I had tattooed my own foot after work one day and went in for my next day of apprenticeship. My mentor was like, “I heard you tattooed your foot”, and I thought I was in trouble. And I was like, it's my body. You know? But, he looked at my foot and he was like, “All right, I'm just gonna put you on the schedule tomorrow”, and I was like, oh, all right. Gave me the rest of the day off. I was stoked on that. It was kind of like a surprise because it was, you know… nothing was in the chute for me to be tattooing soon. And then, later that night, I realized the next day was April Fool's. And so I girded myself for walking into work tomorrow and him just handing me a broom and being like, “SIKE!”, you know? But, no, I started tattooing on April Fool's.

I'd actually already tattooed my ankle, but I just wanted something on my foot. You know, living in Hawaii… everywhere, sandals all the time, you're always at the beach, so a lot of people get their feet tattooed. The first weekend I was tattooing professionally, I think I did seven different people's feet. Flowers, turtles, you know? If I were Tarantino, I'd be in heaven.

I was in Hawaii about five years. And then I was in Seattle, for a couple of years. Two or three years, something like that. And then I just kind of fell into Portland through coming down here for guest spots and hanging out. I found this particular neighborhood that my shop’s in [gestures around] and it’s just a pretty special little neighborhood. I've lived a lot of places and when you travel, you start noticing, like, “Oh, this place is special”. Once you move beyond looking for the hip strips in every town, you’re like, “Oh, this is actually a neighborhood. This is great”.

I feel like there's almost not a regular day. There's usually a few types of regular days. There's the, “I have a couple regulars or 1 regular doing, like, bigger pieces” day. There's the “I don't have anything going on, but there's tons of walk-ins” day where you just kind of think on your feet. There's days where nothing happens. Sometimes you end up just doing some painting. I always try to put painting in there somewhere.

It’s a fun, creative gig where you just figure out what people need. A guy came in today and he just picked something off the wall… he had, like, forty minutes before he had to leave to go to a wedding. And he's like, “Yeah, it's just a spur of the moment thing!”. And then he's like, “What about this?” and I'm like, yeah I can knock that out in thirty minutes, get on the fuckin’ table.

I've been drawing consistently since I was about ten, and I've always played music, and written poetry, short stories, things like that. I've done a lot of graphic design over the years as well, just by happenstance, because I can make things for people. I've never been able to be anything except for an artist. I’ve tried to do other normal-ish kinds of jobs, and I was very, very bad at them.

I'm sure it's like this in a lot of other trades, every shop is its own little ship. And whoever's running it is the Captain. And it's like if you're on a ship, if you're not cool with how the Captain runs the boat, you should probably get off the fucking boat. I've worked in shops where, you know, the owner is a hard ass or whatever, but in a way I can fucking deal with. I’ve had other people complain to me about it [shop owners] and I'm like, well, then go work somewhere else, he's not going to change and this is his tattoo shop, you know. I've worked in, like, 1%-er biker shops. I've worked in comic book nerdy shops, and everything has its pros and cons, and, for me, I just wanted to have a spot where I could kind of make things a little bit simpler, where it was just about the tattooing. You know, I came up through the service trade when I was younger… being an artist, you often are waiting tables, bartending, working in kitchens, things like that. I learned a lot of my ethics from that, and one thing I like about tattooing is having a shop on the corner as a part of the neighborhood.

We've been here ten years, so we have a lot of regular people, word of mouth. I'm tattooing a guy tomorrow that I hadn't seen in, like, three years, but I've tattooed him a lot, and he just came back in, like, “I got more ideas!” and, it’s like, all right, cool. I would say almost every day there's somebody who's been there before. It's a very word of mouth business, even with the internet and everything these days. A lot of what has changed has to do with exposure to the mainstream through television. When they [tattoo reality shows] were first out, every tattooer I know was like, “FUCK THOSE SHOWS. IT’S NOT THE INDUSTRY”, yada yada. Now everybody seems to be fine with it. It's pretty analogous to the nineties, when underground music got really big and everybody was like, “Oh, that band's a sell out!”, and then after a few years you're like, who’s a sell out anymore? It's just... are they making something good? That's all that fucking matters, you know?

Instagram has had a huge effect, too, almost equal, if not more than the TV thing, because it's an online portfolio where people can connect with you directly. What I found from Instagram is that it works in a great many ways, like, you can find new clientele that way if you're really looking, or sometimes people follow you and they live in another city. Years later, they visit your city. So you have someone who's followed you for years and wants to get something done. I've tattooed somebody, then like a week later posted a painting, and they’re like “I really want to get that!”. And they just come in like another day later, you know? So it's good for me and how I work.

I've had clientele, who, over the years, who were like, “You should put pictures of yourself on there every now and then, personify yourself a bit!”. And I've realized people like that connection, they get it. To know who they're working with and have a sense of them, there's a lot of your personality that has to be involved. I'm not sure what the angle on that is, but I don't know, I get it from my own enjoyment of art, right? I can appreciate art without being interested in the human being who made it. Like you can post the greatest tattoo you've done or the coolest painting and it gets X amount of likes, but you post a picture just of yourself randomly with something, you know, whether you're going somewhere or whatever, and it gets far more likes. People just like human faces.

I have three full time artists working in my shop, and I’ve owned the shop for ten years, so I've had a few different types, a few different crews over the years, and I love when everybody is having a good day. A good day is me knocking out two or three pieces. I take maybe an hour and a half, two hours each, and everybody else is getting to work all day. One of the great things about those days is that, all the clientele, all the artists, we're all in the same kind of, you know, room together in the shop. The conversation becomes something where everybody's talking, or one person, or, you know, one group's conversation. All of a sudden somebody comments, and then everybody has an opinion or, you know, wild stories get thrown back and forth, or funny things or people will commiserate or moan about something, all together. I think that that kind of community and social aspect is something that tattooing still offers. It’s a people job, even if it's just you and one person that day, nobody else is in the shop, it's still a people job.

You know, Covid, like, we had for awhile. You couldn't have anybody with you. I know a lot of tattooers get annoyed for some reason with friends, people having their friends with them. I think it's great. It helps them calm down and helps the conversation move more naturally. People are usually more chill, for the most part, and then their friend goes “Oh wait, do you have time to do another one?”, or “I like that one, you know, let's do that another day”. You can bring all your friends if you want, as long as they all like tattoos.

If I've had a tattooer complaining about their job or tattooing in general, I’m like, “And then? And then what? You had to draw something, and then someone gave you hundreds of dollars for it?” We’re very lucky to have the job we have. For the most part, I don't sit around and do paperwork. I don't have to email back and forth with a bunch of people. I don't have to be called into meetings. I don't do any of that shit, and it's shit I'm not good at.

There's tattooers out there charging insane amounts for like day rates, just an insane amount of money. Like, when I was coming up, the only tattooers I knew that charged, say, $250 an hour have been doing it for 25 to 30 years, and were very good at a lot of specialties. The reason you were paying more is because they could get it done fast and efficiently. There are a lot of people getting into the trade now that charge prices that I wouldn't charge. I see someone post a piece or something, and I'm like, wow, that's twice what I would charge because I'll do that shit in thirty minutes. Maybe it's going to take them two hours because they're new at it, but I just don't understand where they're coming from. It's just more capitalism. It's like… why make designer products for rich assholes? I like to tattoo for people who want tattoos. You know, like, if you want a $100 tattoo, that's fine.

It does make me feel good that I have a job where I connect with people. Even if I do a tattoo on someone and I never see them again. Like, there's that connection with that conversation, and both of us are going to remember that, because your body remembers that. That's why I like to continue to do it. Whether you're getting, like, something out of grief or fun or whatever, it's with you forever, you know, unless you get a potato peeler or you cover it up. I love it for the fact that I can operate in a way that I think a lot of our society in the Western capitalist culture trains us not to. You know, you go and get your food, you don't make a connection with your server or whatever, like, you get it with the QR codes or you get on the app.

I went to a restaurant in SF with a couple of my friends. We were there tattooing for a convention, and we sat at the table for five minutes before we realized that nobody was going to come. So we had to, like, scan a code, get on there, download an app, put our order in, and then our order would just be delivered by somebody who I assume was a server. I'm like, why? I like the people aspect of it. I guess maybe that's the biggest thing, to put a pin in it, is, like, there's so many things that are getting less personalized, like checking out your groceries at the grocery store, like, I don't mind, I like that, that's the kind of kibitzing I like. I like to see people on a regular basis. I know the people who work at the grocery store down the street from me. You know, we know each other's lives. We ask each other about stuff. I like that we're not friends, we're acquaintances, but it's part of your community. And that's what I like about tattooing, it’s that you are part of a community, whether you want to be or not.

Leo's shop, Hidden Rose Tattoo, is open 7 days a week, hit them up on Instagram or give them a call to get yourself tattooed.

GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

The Copper Merchant

Of Clay and Colors

The Columnist

What I don't think I'm doing, what I'm not trying to do, is sort of, oh, "This is a running compendium of things Jamelle has thought about during a week".

Other people can probably write off the cuff, but I can't with any coherence.

I need to have it in my brain, so that I know when I say this thing in the piece, it's correct

I think the big thing that I'd like people to take away is an understanding that not everything we're experiencing now has happened before — I reject that

Dan Does Everything

10 Songs: Summer in Middle Age

We Have Been These People

Spite Can Keep You Going

Going Down Swinging

Woke Ops at HHS

Computer Science in the Stars

Answering the Call

Down and Out at the FDIC

Wired Into the Army of the Future

10 Songs: Spring Begins

Disaster Response is Democracy

Abroad and in the Field

Fighting for the Worker

Doing Less with Less

Records, Kept

Man in the Field

The Boy Scout

Sabrina | Washington, DC

Zeke | Public Defender

LJ | Washington

A | Pacific Northwest

HW | West Coast

Jordan | Texas

Kathryn | Emergency Vet

MW | Pacific Ocean

W | Southeast US

Jamie | Southeast US

Nate Brought | Maryland

Nancy | Inpatient Counselor

Vic | Lecturer and Researcher

Liz | Skincare Influencer

Rennie | Personal Assistant

10 Songs: Halloween, pt. 1

Jim Dandeneau | Executive Director

Joe | Software Developer

Ivy | Urban Planner

Bill | Quality Improvement

10 Songs: The Long Dark, Pt. 1

Misty View | Library IT

10 Songs: Never Forget, Pt. 1

Bill | CTO

Dr. Nova | Medical Science Liaison

10 Songs: Fuck JD Vance, Pt. 1

Karl | Cartoonist, Illustrator

10 Songs: Songs for Airports, pt. 1

10 Songs: Australia

10 Songs: Sunday Music, pt. 1

10 Songs: Too Goddamned Hot, pt. 1

10 Songs: Wednesdays are the Worst, pt. 1

Leo | Tattooer

I need to have it in my brain, so that I know when I say this* thing in the piece, it's correct*