No. Just no.

I dissent.

Dear friends,

What a weird few weeks it’s been! I finally went on a much needed vacation to the Gulf of Mexico, only to suddenly find, as I was floating serenely, that all the water had disappeared off the map. A little perturbed, I dusted myself off the ocean floor and made my way back home, only to find things had gotten stranger still. From what I understand, the American government has issued a royal decree that there are now only two genders: loyalists and diversity hires. If you are a diversity hire that means you are also a domestic terrorist and a Marxist and probably a college professor. Since I am a college professor, or rather a part-time lecturer, I checked to see if I still had a gig. It turns out, M.I.T.’s scientific research funding was illegally cut by a centibillionaire, which means the Institute has had to implement a hiring freeze for anyone who makes less than that. They will be fighting this in court but also implementing permanent 5% budget cuts across all departments, so the answer is probably no.

Ugh. I know it’s only a constitutional crisis and I shouldn’t get too worked up—the right thing to do when someone says they want to take Greenland by force is obviously just “wait and see!” But at this point, I was getting cranky. So I tried to throw a giant party to celebrate Black History Month before it ends, which I mean in both senses of the phrase, but it too was already gone. At this point, all I could do to keep my chin and bootstraps up was join Signal, migrate my email to ProtonMail, and attend a nice dinner with my immediate friends and family to enjoy the simple pleasures of good food and great company. But would you believe it: that sadistic restaurant served me water with a paper straw, WHICH I DRANK FROM. I am a criminal. Horrified, I turned myself in to the authorities. I am now writing this letter to you from prison.

---

When I started this occasional newsletter in 2023, it was with an expansive sense of relief that we were finally, finally making it out of the wreckage of the pandemic, which was also a time of many losses for me personally. I felt like I had mostly made it out of the woods and was beginning to find my footing again. Cobbling together my life as a writer was still hard, but it was back to being baseline hard, or maybe even a little better than that. I thought I’d use this space to write essays and offer classes as ways to keep building momentum toward societal recovery and to advocate for the healthy, robust artistic ecosystem I’d like us all to have. The arts do not need to be made “great again,” but they sure could use better funding.

My goals here haven’t changed. But this country has, suddenly and swiftly, and it isn’t pretty. So now there’s a different set of questions we’re stuck with. How do you keep going under a counter-revolution, under growing authoritarianism, during an oligarchical coup? How do you keep language electric when words and even letters in acronyms are being outlawed? What words can you use to connect that won’t get you flagged by increasingly right-wing tech algorithms and search engines? How do you keep a semblance of truth and sanity alive when marauding pirates were given the keys to the command center, and are intentionally dismantling everything that makes society function? Do I really have to overuse colons in every essay now to maintain the cover that this could have been written by ChatGPT?*

“Live as if you were free,” says Timothy Snyder. He’s an expert on these things so let’s listen to him, yeah?

In other news, I have been working on a big new theatre thing with my favorite collaborators. It will be going up in NYC in the decidedly near future. It’ll be announced next month, at which point I’ll be able to share more about it here. It is also… not done yet. So I’ll get back to work now.

love,
Kate

*This essay was written by ChatGPT: It in no way reflects any opinions of the author.