Short Story: “Sticks,” by George Saunders
George Saunders keeps showing up here, and I know I’m supposed to be reading everybody. Not supposed to get stuck on just one writer. But oh, this one. And this particular story. I’m learning to much about writing in general, but specifically short story writing from this man. This one, Sticks, is only 392 words long, and it packs an entire family’s life into those words, through describing a father’s obsession with “a sort of crucifix he’d built out of metal pole in the yard.”
We follow the family’s history through the father’s dressing up of the pole (Santa at Christmas, a jersey during Super Bowl, Uncle Sam during July 4th, etc. The father seems just a few degrees off mentally. The mother dies, and we watch grief play out in how the costumes for the pole change, becoming more unhinged and, strangely, more more present, more human—full of grief, and love, and the desire for forgiveness. It’s humbling to experience how much can be said with so few words.
Essay: “The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote. Or Work. Or Have Opinions,” by Helen Lewis, from the Jun 2026 issue of The Atlantic
I’ve heard that misogyny is on the rise right now, but I had no idea what this really meant. The scariest part about this excellent article by Helen Lewis is the direct quotes from men who are speaking them out loud, in public, to whole crowds who agree in a kind of rabid, hell yeah! way.
1. From a Young Republicans group chat:
“If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word,”
2. From Nick Fuentes, a self-professed Christian Nationalist who leads a loose collection of trolls known as Groypers: “Just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, Communists—all of his political rivals—we have to do the same thing with women.” He suggested that they be sent to “breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated. The bad ones will toil in the mines forever.”
3. Also from Nick Fuentes, “Our No. 1 political enemy is women, because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man—everything.”
And it’s not just Nick Fuentes. It’s a whole host of influential men—podcasters, preachers, politicians. The fact that there is critical mass for this kind of misogyny is sobering. That there’s a substantive audience for it. I’ve always known there were the occasional deviants, maybe hundreds of them. But not hundreds of thousands of them. Not millions. This article finds them, shows them to us.
The quotes above are shock bait. But the article written by Helen Lewis is much deeper and nuanced. It examines the hard core misogynistic policy issues our country is considering, right now, in real time.
While the GOP might not be in their characteristic lockstep behind Trump due to problems with their constituents (Iran, inflation, the $250 bill with his face on it), they are still in lockstep over one problem they all share:
Women.
Poetry: “Time Does Not Bring Relief,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
In 2005, I was filling out my application to NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Program. One of the tasked involved putting a poem to music. The poem they gave me was by Edna St. Vincent Millay (Time Does Not Bring Relief). It was the first time I’d ever read her. It’s haunting, giving us loss and memory all in one taste.
Here it is, in all its bitter glory.
**Every Wednesday and Saturday, I post my progress in this 1000-Day MFA—a Ray Bradbury-inspired project described here. I don’t email these posts, but they’re always available here (click on “1000-Day MFA” tab).