'The Friend of Mankind Is No Friend of Mine': What's the Misanthrope's Place in Community? | 🔗 https://brennan.day/the-friend-of-mankind-is-no-friend-of-mine-whats-the-misanthropes-place-in-community/

#IndieWeb #Philosophy #Community #WebCulture #PersonalEssay

This account, this corner of the fediverse, has become one of the places I let those questions be noisy in public. What does healing mean when the conditions that harmed you are not gone, only rearranged into more respectable shapes? What actually happens inside a counselling relationship when disability or neurodivergence is present but unnamed, or misnamed, or politely ignored? How do we begin to notice the ways power and unspoken norms travel through even the most well-intentioned helping professions? How do we hold culture as something we are constantly creating and being created by, something we may need to grieve and interrogate and occasionally celebrate, often all at once, sometimes in the space of a single conversation?

I keep circling back to the interior labour of this work. The slow, repetitive practice of building emotional regulation when your nervous system's default setting is red alert. The awkwardness of learning self-compassion when sharp self-criticism has been your most reliable survival tool. The moments that feel like failure because you find yourself reacting in an old way, when in reality this is precisely how recovery moves, looping back on itself, revisiting old ground with slightly different eyes. The way trauma and joy can sit shoulder to shoulder in the same hour, the same therapy session, the same breath, and how unnerving and holy that can feel.

Rauch and Ansari suggest that silence can be deliberate and strategic, a form of self-regulation rather than withdrawal, a boundary rather than an absence. I think about this in relation to the freeze response, to the moments in my own history when going quiet was not giving up but holding on. The body stills because there are no safe words yet. Sometimes the silence is the story. And learning to hear it as such, to receive it without rushing to fill or fix it, is one of the things I am still practising, in music and in therapy and in the ordinary, unglamorous dailiness of trying to stay present in a life that sometimes arrives all at once.

I am not arriving anywhere with a finished theory of how any of this is supposed to work. I am coming, again and again, with fragments and questions and a stubborn intention to tell the truth as I understand it in the moment I am writing. That truth is often partial, often shifting. My understanding of myself, of trauma, of disability, of care, keeps moving, and I want it to. I would rather be inconsistent and alive to new information than seamless and rigidly wrong.

If you are still reading, you are already participating in something I care about. A space that treats complexity as ordinary rather than excessive. Where being too much is not an accusation but raw material. Where intense feeling and rigorous thought are both welcome at the same table. Where healing is not a linear journey toward a fixed destination but something more like learning to live inside unresolved chords without pretending they have resolved. Where music is both metaphor and method, both a way of speaking about change and a way of practising it in the body.

True silence does not exist. What we call silence is simply what we have not yet learned to hear. The fullness of life in quieter tones. The heartbeat of thought. The whispered rhythm of resilience. The steady murmur of healing is underway. And when we learn to tune into the music between the notes and into the truth held in breath, we do more than survive. We begin to sing again. This time, in a voice that is entirely our own.

I am not here to introduce myself so much as to keep turning up alongside you. To keep writing from the middle of things, not only from the rare polished moments that look good in hindsight. To keep noticing the small, ordinary, unglamorous ways humans find their way back to themselves, even inside systems that were never set up with them in mind. If any of these threads brush against something in your own story, then you are part of the imagined audience I write towards. And maybe, in a slow, imperfect, occasionally dissonant way, part of the choir that is still learning how to hear itself.

#AuDHD #Neurodivergent #Blind #Deafblind #Disabled #DisabilityJustice #MadStudies #Psychology #Counselling #Therapy #Trauma #TraumaRecovery #Neurodiversity #MentalHealth #ChronicStress #Healing #WindowOfTolerance #LivedExperience #CareWork #Culture #Power #Normality #Access #Inclusion #Ableism #Music #ClassicalMusic #ChoralMusic #Choir #Singing #Writing #PersonalEssay #Silence #LongPost #Fediversea (2/2)

The Work Isn't Finished, It's Abandoned: Thoughts on WIP Pages | 🔗 https://brennan.day/the-work-isnt-finished-its-abandoned-thoughts-on-wip-pages/

#DigitalGardens #IndieWeb #WebCulture #PersonalEssay

12,000 Generations: On Deep Time, Grief, and the Body | 🔗 https://brennan.day/12-000-generations-on-deep-time-grief-and-the-body/

#PersonalEssay #Philosophy #Anthropology #MentalHealth #Gratitude

Introducing the Toonie Club! | 🔗 https://brennan.day/introducing-the-toonie-club/

#IndieWeb #CreativeEconomy #Community #PersonalEssay #Sustainability

At the "Carlos" Santana premiere, Isabella laughed at the screen. I saw children playing. And in my head: "Corazón Espinado." I'm scared. ✨🎸
https://medium.com/the-pub/isabella-laughs-at-the-screen-40ff0f6f947c
#LoveAndFear #Santana #PersonalEssay

Won't you be my neighbour? | 🔗 https://brennan.day/wont-you-be-my-neighbour/

#IndieWeb #Community #PersonalEssay #WebCulture #DigitalSociology

Four Years Later: Connor, Silence, and the Things Addiction Leaves Behind

https://jaimedavid.blog/2026/02/21/12/47/41/analysis/jaimedavid327/9957/four-years-later-connor-silence-and-the-things-addiction-leaves-behind/

What Can I Offer? The Shell. | 🔗 https://brennan.day/what-can-i-offer-the-shell/

#PersonalEssay #Spirituality #Writing #IndigenousWriting #Philosophy

Apathetic, Intentionally. Why I don't block AI scrapers on my website. | 🔗 https://brennan.day/apathetic-intentionally-why-i-dont-block-ai-scrapers-on-my-website/

#PersonalEssay #AI #IndieWeb #Technology

The Many Wonders of Being a Late Bloomer | 🔗 https://brennan.day/the-many-wonders-of-being-a-late-bloomer/

#PersonalEssay #IndieWeb #Writing #Community #PersonalDevelopment

The 1% Rule: An Open Letter to Everyone Who Doesn't Post Anything Online | 🔗 https://brennan.day/the-1-rule-an-open-letter-to-everyone-who-doesnt-post-anything-online/

#PersonalEssay #SocialCommentary #DigitalCulture #IndieWeb #Community

Unseasonal | 🔗 https://brennan.day/unseasonal/

#PersonalEssay #Philosophy #ClimateChange #Mindfulness #Hope

Day four of the retreat, something broke.

I realized I was suffering not from meditation, but from measuring against an imagined ideal. I wanted proof I was special.

When did you realize you were chasing an idea instead of transforming?

#meditation #spiritualjourney
#meditationretreat #selfdiscovery #lettinggo
#himalayas #spiritualpractice #personalessay

Our Shared Oblivion | 🔗 https://brennan.day/our-shared-oblivion/

#PersonalEssay #Philosophy #MentalHealth #Hope #Activism

Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight – The New Yorker

The Daily

Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight

By David Remnick, February 8, 2026

You’re reading The New Yorker’s daily newsletter, a guide to our top stories, featuring exclusive insights from our writers and editors. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.

It’s truly impossible to keep up, isn’t it?

Last week—after the Wall Street Journal broke more news about the Trump family’s dodgy crypto-business dealings and before the President shared a racist video of the Obamas depicted as dancing apes—the Amazon entrepreneur Jeff Bezos decided that one of his smaller properties, the Washington Post, has proved such a drag on his two-hundred-and-thirty-billion-dollar fortune that prudence required that he obliterate much of its newsroom.

Early in his proprietorship, Bezos endorsed a new motto for the paper: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It turns out that one of democracy’s most celebrated media institutions can be strangled in broad daylight.

On Wednesday, Bezos and the paper’s leadership fired a third of the staff. They shuttered or vastly reduced an array of sections. Lizzie Johnson, one of the Post’s leading foreign correspondents, received her digital pink slip while working in the war zone of Ukraine. Bezos did not offer his staff the decency of a public explanation, much less a gesture of generosity or regret. The publisher and C.E.O. Will Lewis did not appear on the “webinar” at which the cuts were explained to the staff. He did, however, manage to head off to the Super Bowl festivities. By Saturday evening, Lewis had resigned. His work was done. He will be succeeded by the paper’s chief financial officer, Jeff D’Onofrio, who has held posts at Tumblr, Google, and Yahoo.

As someone who worked happily at the Post for a decade a long time ago, and as an ardent reader of the paper, I am sick about all this. I feel like someone forced to watch an arsonist torch the house he grew up in. I cannot imagine how it must feel for the current staff and the hundreds forced to leave. If that is sentimentality or worse, well, then guilty as charged. The loss is terrible, the behavior is beyond heedless. The reporters and editors who remain at the Post will undoubtedly go on doing honorable work, but they must now do so for a proprietor who shows them no respect. And that is no way to live. (Ruth Marcus, a writer and editor at the paper for more than forty years, brings home superbly the anger and the sadness of the situation.)

Over the years, in these pages, I’ve written about both the former owner Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, the paper’s Watergate-era editor; for all their complexities, these were figures who built a great newspaper out of a mediocre one, who developed an institution that worked not only in the interest of financial gain but of democratic vitality. That standard of quality endured, but, by 2013, Don Graham, a decent man and a devoted publisher who inherited the leadership of the company from his mother, came to realize that the revolutions in technology and the declines in advertising were so severe that he no longer had the capacity to invest effectively in the paper. After a long search, he sold the Post to Bezos, a vastly wealthier owner who promised to be an effective custodian.

For a while that worked; under Marty Baron, the paper was fiercely competitive, and thrived during Trump’s first term in office. Bezos was a decidedly detached owner, but he gave the newsroom what it needed and invested in both journalism and the technological support it requires.

But during the Biden years, readership declined and, by 2024, as Trump headed toward a second election victory, Bezos clearly reassessed his interests and his sense of risk. His timidity prevailed. He quashed the paper’s impending endorsement of Kamala Harris. He sat in Oligarch Row at the Inauguration. He instructed the Opinion section to set a new, more conservative course. These were his prerogatives, many argued, but they were hardly wise. With every move, more subscribers fled—surely one of the worst own goals in the history of the news business.

Undoubtedly, Bezos believes that all the criticism that has come his way is naïve, self-righteous, and terribly unfair. How could his critics possibly understand the business the way he does? In some sense, every aggressive story on the Administration that the paper publishes allows Bezos to tell himself that he has not retreated at all.

For the sake of financial and moral context, perhaps this is as good a time as any to remind ourselves of the maritime interests of the Post’s proprietor. Some commentators have mentioned that Bezos, in order to better support the Post, might have held on to the tens of millions of dollars he spent to bankroll “Melania,” a documentary portrait of the First Lady worthy of a long run at the Pyongyang Cinematheque. Cooler financial heads will contend that this is a cheap point. The Post’s losses are more significant. And they are right. Better then to turn to one of the Amazon founder’s more expensive recreations, his 125.8-metre, three-masted sailing yacht, Koru. (No need to get into the details of Abeona, the seventy-five-million-dollar “shadow boat” that trails Koru and provides a helipad and adequate space for extra staff.)

Koru cost an estimated five hundred million dollars. This is double what Bezos paid for the Washington Post. Annual maintenance runs tens of millions of dollars. It is, to be sure, a very special boat. According to Architectural Digest, “Bezos’s superyacht has a classical style, with a navy-blue steel hull and a two-level white aluminum superstructure. The ship’s teak decks include spots for outdoor lounging as well as three Jacuzzis and a swimming pool. Robb Report notes that the hull features traditional portholes, while the upper deck windows are smaller than typical, which might help to foil paparazzi trying to capture guests inside.” If that information about the boat is not galling enough, there is more: the Journal published a story on Friday by Richard Rubin headlined “Trump’s New Tax Law Saved Amazon Billions.” But the Ukraine correspondent had to go.

In the world of tech, so many of the leading tycoons and V.C. geniuses have a way of convincing themselves that because they have made a fortune, because they know one big thing, they know everything. Everyone else is a Luddite or a dewy-eyed fool. Maybe Bezos will find a way to stay in good odor with a vindictive President and, at the same time, transform the Post so that it can “do more with less,” and all those other whiteboard phrases popular from Wall Street to Palo Alto. No one doubts that change, even painful change, is necessary. But the scale of the cuts last week, coupled with the lack of any sense of a strategy other than retreat, is beyond demoralizing. Bezos has made it plain that his commitment to the Post, to say nothing of his performative talk about democracy, has diminished to the vanishing point.

The Post is hardly the first major American publication to face a financial crisis. It wasn’t so long ago that the Times was caught in an existential fix. Who would buy it, people asked knowingly, the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim or Michael Bloomberg? And yet the Sulzberger family, with a tiny fraction of the Bezos fortune but infinitely greater determination and integrity, found a way to thrive.

Bezos, by contrast, is immersed in his primary business, a space race, an active vacation life, and much else. After a promising beginning at the paper, he just does not seem to have the focus or the courage to do what is necessary to guide the Post through an unstable and threatening era. With Trump in office, he refuses to see that, although the Post is valued less in financial terms than his yacht, he is responsible for a priceless commodity. Will he rock the boat? Will he ultimately do the right thing? So far, the evidence offers only misery.

 Editor’s Note: Thank you, David Remnick, good article and journalism. The dying of a national newspaper, which all my life I was proud of say, “Independent,” but no more. –DrWeb

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight | The New Yorker

WriterBox, French Magazines, and Money-Making | 🔗 https://brennan.day/writerbox-french-magazines-and-money-making/

#PersonalEssay #Writing #Development #DigitalCulture #AI

Back in 2016, I wrote about not being able to orgasm from oral sex.

10 years on, I've updated this post through new-but-older eyes. An in-depth piece in which I share my personal perspective on internal and external sexual pressure & expectations.

https://carasutra.com/2016/05/why-cunnilingus-doesnt-work-for-me/

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#SexPositive #BodyAutonomy #Consent #Pleasure #SexEducation #SexualHealth #WomensVoices #Midlife #PersonalEssay #TraumaAware #Healing #SelfTrust #LifeUnscripted

"I wished I were edgy but knew I had no edges at all, like an amoeba, a protozoan. I was a blur." —Jill Lepore for The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/09/living-in-tracy-chapmans-house?src=longreads #memoir #personalessay #history #longreads

#poetry #blog #personalessay #perspective #personalgrowth #evolve

'love is the key, see? (Choosing Evolution in the Edge of Chaos)'

http://baccusbeepoetea.blogspot.com/2026/02/love-is-key-see-choosing-evolution-in.html