Monday Miscellany: There are no guarantees, but there are possibilities

Notes from May 5 - 11

May 12, 2025

Today’s newsletter marks one full year of Monday Miscellany! What?? It feels like I just started writing last month and also like I’ve been doing this forever. Let’s pour one out for the very first missive, in which I talked about McSweeney’s, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a novel full of tree facts, my raging crush on Katie Crutchfield, leaving a little dirt under your pillow for the dirt man, and star-gazing with friends in search of the northern lights:

Monday Miscellany: Katie Crutchfield stank-faced me to death

Emily Poe-Crawford

May 13, 2024

Read full story

I am marking the occasion by *takes deep breath* turning on paid subscriptions *dies* which I’ll say more about at the end. But for now, books! movies! etc!1

Read this week

Before I even started One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, I knew it would mess me up. And I was right. This is a nonfiction work about, to put it simply, the spinelessness of the West—the way the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nations have time and again refused to do anything about wars, genocides, and other horrible injustices until it’s entirely too late. You’ve probably seen the October 2023 tweet that the title comes from:

This book is a reminder, an indictment, a bringing into the light of things I’ve known about for a while but have felt too scared and guilty to face head-on. But boy, it’s (way past) time to really confront our complicity and do something about it. I wrote down approximately one billion quotes, but the one I’ve been mulling over pretty much constantly since I finished reading is this one, about opting out of a structure that enables global destruction and atrocity:

The idea that walking away is childish and unproductive is predicated on the inability to imagine anything but a walking away from, never a walking away toward—never that there might exist another destination. The walking away is not nihilism, it’s not cynicism, it’s not doing nothing—it’s a form of engagement more honest, more soul-affirming, than anything the system was ever prepared to offer. (174)

Read this. Get your friends to read it. Chew on it. Talk about it. Let’s hold hands and walk toward something better than this dumpster fire.

And while we’re on the subject of using distress to energize and activate, might I further recommend No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit?? This essay collection, coming out tomorrow,2 is focused more on social movements, feminism, and the environment, but its tone puts it very much in conversation with Omar El Akkad’s work. Solnit’s over-arching idea is that change does not happen quickly, that small actions and steady pressure add up over time; so to see progress, we must broaden our scope. There is no room for despair.

Once you create a new idea of what is possible and acceptable, the seeds are planted; once it becomes what the majority believes, you’ve created the conditions in which winning happens. It may be the least tangible—but most important—part of a campaign. Ideas are powerful and dangerous, as their enemies know, and everyone else often forgets. (33)

What I appreciate most about these essays is their focus on hope. They do not shy away from the serious or the dark, but in the face of what might seem insurmountable, they insist on a tenacious optimism founded in research and fact. If like me, you’re worried about our climate and beating yourself up about changing your own behavior to help solve the crisis, you will find comfort here and a clear-headed encouragement to stop feeling guilty and keep moving forward. “There are no guarantees,” Solnit writes, “but there are possibilities.”

Last week I also read Sky Daddy by Kate Folk, a novel about… a thirty-year-old woman who is obsessed with and sexually attracted to airplanes. Yes, that is indeed what I said.

Linda, our protagonist, works as a content moderator for a social media company, spending her days reading through hundreds of flagged comments and deleting the ones that go against the terms of service. But her main focus is earning enough money for a monthly airline flight—she’s convinced that her destiny is to be united with a plane in marriage, aka die in a plane crash. If you’re thinking “wow, this is a completely insane premise,” you’re right, it is. And somehow it works? Linda is a stone-cold weirdo in the best of ways, and along her journey she gets into vision boards, accidentally makes a few real friends, and tries to change her life for the better. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I will say that I gasped!

If you purchase a book through the bookshop.org affiliate links in this post, I may earn a small percentage commission. This is an easy way to support my work at no additional cost, and I appreciate it very much—thank you! ♥︎

Watched this week

One of the few benefits of being best friends with a long-haul trucker who hates scary movies3 is that while she’s away on the road during the week, you and the other horror-loving besties can watch things she would never agree to in a million years. Like The First Omen (2024)! I haven’t seen The Omen (1976), but I don’t think that’s necessary in order to enjoy (perhaps the wrong word?) this one. It has everything:

A sinister choral soundtrack
Freaky drawings by (evil??) children
Ralph Ineson’s low-ass rumbly voice
Baby nun’s first hangover
Demon hands coming out of holy cooches
And more!

For a palate cleanser, look no further than Masterminds (2015), the criminally under-sung Zach Galifianakis and Kristen Wiig comedy masterpiece based on the true story of David Ghantt and one of the biggest cash heists in American history.4 If the plot itself doesn’t hook you, perhaps you’ll be interested in the scene where David’s underwear is stuffed with bundles of bills and he struts through the airport in a disguise of dirty sweatpants and tank top, long blonde wig, orange cat-eye contact lenses, and cowboy boots.

Or maybe the engagement photo shoot featuring Kate McKinnon and “Only Time” by Enya is more your speed.

If none of this is sufficiently convincing, I fear I simply cannot reach you, and I wish you a blessed day.