How to have a truly delicious summer

A Sunday round-up of links about radical liberation of all kinds

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This is the Sunday roundup of things we’ve loved, a feature for paid subscribers.

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Our feature story this week was my conversation with the author Anna Malaika Tubbs, who digs into the long history of our particularly American version of patriarchy in her new book, Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us.

What has patriarchy erased?

“Intuition and courage and interconnectedness and ancient wisdom,” she told me.

“You have to be able to say: Something else exists,” she said. “ I don't believe this thing that's being offered to me, and I'm going to build something different, because it's the only option I have.

So this week’s links celebrate other ways of living, dreams for better tomorrows, and some delicious ways to survive the moment we are in now.

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First up is Lane’s interview with Rosie Card, a feminist activist in Utah who is hard at work fighting one of the very worst we’ve got, the Utah Senator Mike Lee, most recently in the news for posting comments on social media mocking the horrifying killings of a Minnesota State Senator and her husband.

I was incredibly inspired both by what Card is fighting for, and because she’s fighting within a system that is so totally stacked against her: the pressures of Utah and Morman patriarchy, a social system that discourages women’s political participation and a red state politics that makes views like hers almost unspeakable. Still, she says, she is not without hope:

I hope to help women like me (white, relatively financially secure, on the Mormon spectrum, and privileged) realize the potential power they hold to do some serious good.

Sometimes I want to scream when I think about the size of the collective audience Utah influencers hold and the power they could wield. If they wanted to, they could effect massive change.

Along the lines of using your platform for good, here’s a story I can really get behind: Chin Hair, Laundry, Your Opinion: Women in Menopause Don’t Care (h/t

Kate Manne

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Melani Sanders, a 45-year-old mother whose viral social media accounts are focused on building the “We Do Not Care” club. Menopause has an incredible power to clarify what really matters. You know what doesn’t matter? Arm fat. You know what matters? Getting enough rest, speaking your mind, taking care of your rage.

Ms. Sanders said that she spent decades caring for others, and caring about what others thought of her — fixating on whether her sons ate all their vegetables, for example, or applying makeup before leaving the house. Now, she said, “it feels liberating just to free my mind from caring so much about things that don’t truly matter.”

And the point isn’t to not care about anything. As the philosopher Kate Manne explains in her piece about the We Do Not Care Club, there is power in choosing not to care about things that disconnect us from our values, from our core beliefs.

I think about aesthetics as a particularly clear case in point here: there can be something genuinely good about having beauty in our lives. But, in many areas, we may reasonably choose not to give a proverbial fuck about aesthetics. I don’t care what my car looks like; I don’t care that my daily look is relentlessly utilitarian; I don’t care that my fingernails are short and unpolished and unlovely. Sanders didn’t care, in her first video, that she was wearing an old sports bra that she deemed ill-fitting. It is fine to care about these things; it is also fine not to. Most of us go through seasons of caring and not caring while doing life triage.

And in this season? “Nothing is mandatory from this point but survival,” as Sanders put it.