Just being normal
Look Mom, I'm a content creator now!
Welcome to ‘Being Normal,’ a new weekly newsletter by me for you
After two years of pandemic hermitude, I held a 10-month contract position in a senior editorial role for a legacy east coast American media outlet. The abrupt transition from near-total isolation to elite-institutional immersion made me notice relational dynamics I probably wouldn’t have paid attention to otherwise. I saw how establishment power structures are created and maintained: the unspoken codes of conduct, the tacit understandings. The deliberation and calibration involved in deciding and enforcing what’s normal. I walked out of there with my eyes peeled open like some real-life Cronenbergian masque. Those impressions stuck.
Other events followed. Gaza; the 2024 election; inauguration and mass capitulation. Etcetera, etcetera.
It’s all added up to an irrepressible need to connect some damn dots.
More on that last point.
I’m a journalist who writes about social, cultural, political, and professional norms. I don’t expect anyone to look at the sum of my work and necessarily see how it all fits together — it comes across like the scattershot portfolio of any general-interest freelancer who’s just trying to make rent, which isn’t exactly wrong. But I see how, for instance, the sudden comeback of American milk relates to the rise of gentle parenting, which relates to Ozempic’s hush-hush descent onto college campuses, which relates to the institutional marginalization of the autonomist-feminist scholar Silvia Federici, which relates to the shadowy spectre of the “woke left” as a scapegoat for power brokers’ willful ignorance of what the masses actually want and need.
There’s a shared material logic behind so much of what we say, do, buy, and believe. It’s all a part of the same big stew of what passes for normal today.
What does this newsletter offer that others aren’t already offering in a nicer, shorter, cuter package?
I’m not normal. No, but really: I’m a full-time freelance journalist making a mostly adequate living by doing journalism and journalism-adjacent content work. If that stops working out, I’ll find some other hustle. So, while I won’t say no to your donations, I’m never ever putting this newsletter behind a paywall.
Not only am I a freelance journalist, but I’m a freelance journalist who isn’t tethered to a specific beat. This lets me piece together a picture of ~The Way Things Work Today~ from a whole bunch of different vantage points, which can sometimes feel like having a backstage pass to society itself.
Spend enough time doing this kind of work and you’ll develop a vocational fixation. Mine is what it means to be normal. In these deeply abnormal times, I think the construction of social and cultural norms is fascinating. The process isn’t organic nor the results inevitable.
I know that there are readers out there who will find this fascinating too. This newsletter is for you.
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Keep an eye out for Being Normal every Tuesday. Next week we’ll be talking about the rise and fall of the nuclear family :D