Disclaimer: I wrote this piece last year on commission for an upstart magazine that shuttered before it could go to print. I shopped it around a bit to no bites. Then I shelved it because I had a major operation. Then COVID came along just as I was completing my recovery from surgery. I think this topic is even more timely now as we experience record unemployment, which is why I am posting it here. Yet be aware it was initially written in/for a pre-pandemic society.

Nearly a century ago, the renowned British-born economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological…

I was born with a really severe case of clubfoot — the kind of case that required several surgeries as an infant and wearing a cast for the first few years of my life to correct.

I still walk with a slight limp at times and even occasionally require a cane, and the condition has led to other complications with my body as I have aged. As a child, my mother always reminded me that had I been born a few years or decades earlier, or even born at the time I was but in a less industrialized nation, I…

“Feminist cunts should die.”

This was the subject of an email I received a year and a half ago. Wary but curious, I opened the message and confirmed that the feminist cunt in question was me.

I didn’t delete the message. Instead, I printed it out and brought it to my local police station, where they added it to a growing file that had started some months earlier, after I published an article in Politico correlating toxic masculinity and mass shootings. …

You’re not even making sense. I already stated my other post was in error (almost immediately actually) in the way I worded it and clarified that most mass shootings were forms of murder-suicides arising out of domestic violence incidents rather than most suicides involving white males were forms of murder-suicides — yet nonetheless, murder-suicides are still a problem and the vast majority of their perpetrators are white males and most of the victims are females. And in some states that’s more prominent. And in some states, it’s even a more prominent problem (Vermont, Florida).

A year and a half ago, in the wake of the tragic Las Vegas shootings, I was struck by a single idea: If mental illness is such a prominent culprit in the phenomenon of mass shootings — as so many politicians and media pundits claim it to be — where are all the female mass shooters? After all, we have mental illness too, in arguably much greater numbers than men (at least according to the best available data). And yet, almost all mass shootings to date have been committed by cis men (most of them white).

In October 2017, I…

The doctor I’d emailed earlier that day agreed to a 20-minute phone call with me. He was known for performing a rare procedure I hoped might potentially restore some of the nerve function to my right leg, which had been compromised ever since I suffered severe herniation and cyst formation in several discs in my lumbar spine nearly three years prior. He quickly shot down that hope when I shared my other diagnoses, though, because I had too many other things going on in my body that would make me a risky prospect.

Nonetheless, he stayed on the phone with…

It often begins like this: I run into an issue with an authority figure who is a gatekeeper to a service or safety net I need to survive, or someone of some esteem in my town or an organization I do some sort of business with.

It may be that my healthcare benefits are temporarily shut down due to supposedly not getting in required paperwork on time (even though I sent it weeks in advance and have the certified mail receipt to prove it arrived before it was supposed to). …

Starting this summer when the Trump administration put its “zero tolerance” pilot program regarding immigration to work along the Mexican border— effectively separating parents and legal guardians from minor children by the thousands in the course of only a couple of months in a policy move that can only be called cruel and inhumane— I watched the debates explode on social media.

It was not my friends saying troubling things, but their friends or relatives — who in smug tones decried that the people trickling into our country are taking away precious resources that “real” Americans so desperately need. There’s…