September 21, 2026

Takes and Gifts

“And it feels so good these days to keep yourself for yourself. What a great trend,” writes my friend Shawna Lemay in her latest Transactions with Beauty post, to which I reply (to myself!), And how! Like Shawna, I’ve been asking what the point is with these sorts of spaces, who is even listening relishing the straightforward humanness of real life encounters. I think I’m still a bit burnt out from my very busy season last spring, and am having trouble finding the motivation to write my monthly Substack essays or resurrect my podcast. For the former, I am pressing on anyway, because I’m grateful to have paid subscribers, but on Substack itself and on the internet in general, I am getting very tired of screaming out into a void. On Instagram, I’m altogether tired of scrolling to find post after post of clickbait by people I don’t even follow, weird and warped content that actually bears no relationship to the world that I live in.

My blog feels different though—it was always fairly certain here that not many people were reading anyway, that relative obscurity was a feature, not a bug. What has always differentiated blog audiences from those of social media is that the former is highly specific, while the latter is terrifyingly general. I know who I’m talking to here. I’m fairly sure that those readers will understand me. And anybody who doesn’t will have the context clues of 20+ years of archives with which to make sense of the matter.

In a piece today, Emily Wilson (recent and well known translator of The Odyssey and The Iliad) complains about the one-noteness of internet discourse (which maybe is part of the reason I’m not very inspired to post on online essay about anything right now). She writes about the “poisonous trend in media coverage, to be constantly reacting to lowest-common-denominator “takes” on the internet, rather than taking up the responsibility to reframe, investigate, listen, and educate.” Sometimes it’s hard to believe that there’s an alternative to this way of being online.

I am so done with “takes,” and am thinking now about about what takes actually take—from their writers, their readers, from the culture at large. And I’m thinking about how the opposite of a take is a give/gift. What Shawna writes:

Artists and writers and makers very often think about the gifts they receive, and understand the give and take of it all. The more you give, the more you get back. It’s a mysterious and wonderful economy all its own.