Sunday Edition: Something Bad Is Happening in Oz

And it will get worse if we don’t talk about it.

The Sunday Edition is Tuesday’s little sister—off-the-cuff updates I’d bring up over a coffee catch-up with a friend.

I went back and forth on whether I wanted to say anything about Charlie Kirk, but the reason I decided to is, in large part, because it would be so much easier not to. As I type, our current administration is working hard to shift the Overton window on acceptable criticism of fascism. This week, top government officials including Pete Hegseth and Christopher Landau took to social media to use fear and intimidation to disempower opposition, increasingly normalizing authoritarianism.

I don’t condone violence, nor am I celebrating a murder or saying that his death was anything short of unconscionable, but I am also outraged by how many highly visible people I see eulogizing Charlie Kirk hagiographically, using words like “kind” to describe a person who used his own privilege to attack those most vulnerable and advocated for structural violence (harm that doesn’t look like direct harm, but creates conditions of inequality and suffering). As Hannah Arendt pointed out with her observations on the “banality of evil” a half a century ago, this kind of coverage weaponizes our empathy to further normalize this violence and publicly pardons those who have made it their life’s work to dehumanize others. I will, no doubt, lose subscribers for this (and may, much more frighteningly, be putting myself in physical danger of coordinated doxxing campaigns intended to intimidate people speaking up), but it is dangerous when we can’t hold those in power accountable (yes, even posthumously).

When we are intimidated out of our empathy for the most marginalized, it distorts the very soul of our society. Expressions of basic empathy and full humanity are not “radical” or “violent.” They are the minimum conditions of decency, and exactly what we need more of right now.

(Kristin Chenoweth, what did you think ‘Wicked’ was about?)

And with that, I’m returning back to our regularly scheduled programming. This is a relay and after carrying the baton, it’s important to take care of ourselves so we can pick it back up. Read on for highlights and photos from my week, including:

• How I’ve been finding my way back to running (and the insane race I signed up for in 2026)

• The metaphor my yoga teacher shared, that I’ve been thinking about all week

• A longtime favorite risotto recipe

• My journaling practice, and what I use instead of traditional prompts