When Trump was elected the first time, in 2016, my brother had passed away just a few weeks earlier. This win simply confirmed the nihilism I felt in the early, underwater days of grief. I’d long understood that anyone saying, “This isn’t us” about the USA electing a racist clown, a rapist, was not paying any sort of real attention—to either history or the present. But during this time, nothing could truly penetrate the hell in which I found myself: the bubble that grief puts around the body of the mourner to protect them was too thick. I did my work; I cashed my checks, which were still so often then arriving in the mail on paper. It wouldn’t be until the bubble was burst by the passing of time that I would start having panic attacks.

When Trump was elected the second time, I found out because I woke up with a start at two in the morning and checked my phone. I’m not one to be overly swayed by the triumphs or failures of electoral politics (though don’t let me try to say this in front of my husband, who claims that my phone is always blaring the voice of Mayor Mamdani from another room…) because the arc of history is long and supposedly bends toward justice—and because I believe in prefigurative politics—but I got back into bed with a knot in my stomach, knowing that something fucking awful was about to come.

Many somethings fucking awful have come, and the awfulness continues to ratchet up. Puerto Rico is being used once again for U.S. military purposes; Cuba is in the dark, and I ache for them; there is not even the sheen of checks and balances occurring in what was ostensibly a democracy ultimately run by plutocrats.

And with all this global chaos afoot, our dog Benny—Benicio, formally—has gotten a scary health diagnosis while I’m preparing to put out my next book. I’ve written about this before, how we have to hold so much shit all at once in our lives, but it does feel like a cosmic joke for me to have to go through this situation with Benny ten years after losing Brian. I do not have a penchant for drama or self-pity (though you can, I guess, make that call for yourself after reading my memoir…) and I try to grab every bull by its horns to just fix things, but damn! Right now sucks.

We spent February awaiting the possibility of this diagnosis, even though Benny was and is in great health after knocking out an infection with antibiotics. I am grabbing this particular bull by its horns, and I am trying to keep up the pace of all my work at the same time, and usually I wouldn’t write anything about this here until it’s done and processed, but I couldn’t sit down to work until I said all this. Words were not coming, and that’s not a problem I usually have.

Now they’re here, to lead us into culture recommendations.