We can’t believe the school year is coming to an end! Just wanted to send a few quick reminders about important end-of-year events to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

• June 8th 5pm: Picnic!

  • To cover the cost of pizza, please Venmo $3 per person in your household to anyone in your contacts named “Emily.”

  • If your child’s last name begins with A-E, they are responsible for bringing PLATES. Last names F-L please bring NAPKINS. Last names M-R you are in charge of CUPS! Last names S-Z please bring SPOON. If your child’s last name is HYPHENATED, please bring SELTZER.

• June 9th: Pajama Day!

  • If your child is in the BLUE room the pajama theme is “Space!”

  • RED room the theme is “Barnyard Fun!”

  • GREEN room: “Under the Sea!”

  • YELLOW room: “Superheroes and Princesses!”

  • PURPLE room: “Tasteful Gingham!”

• June 10th: Moving On Ceremony (2s half day, 3s full day, 4s half day)

  • Dropoff is at 8:45. Ceremony will be in the gym at 9:30 and conclude at 10. Refreshments will be served in each classroom at 9:45 somehow. Pickup is at 11:30. You thought you were going to work? Hahaaaa!!!!!

• June 10th: End-of-Year Concerts! (2s full day, 3s half day, 4s half day)

  • Dropoff is at 8:30. Please be BACK in your child’s classroom at 9:10. The concert will end at 11:30. Pickup is at noon. If you are not there the entire time your child will remember this forever and grow up to do a one-man show called “Mother’s Choice” that is poorly-received at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

• June 11th: Crazy Hair Day!

• June 12th: Crazy Mom Day!

• June 16th: Dance Performance!

  • Please dress your child in the color OPPOSITE your classroom’s color on the color wheel. (GREEN room wears RED, etc.)

• Uh oh….June 16th AGAIN: Groundhog’s Day Type Situation Where You Re-Live June 16th One More Time to Get it Right.

• June 17th: Grandparents’ Day!

• June 18th: Deceased Grandparents’ Remembrance Day!

• June 19th: Xanax Refill Day!

• June 20th: Meteor, hopefully!

• June 21st: Beach Day!

  • The bus for the beach will leave from The Port Authority at 7am. Pickup is directly from the beach at 11am.

• June 22nd: Graduation Parade!

  • Please dress your child in HISTORIC GARB FROM HIS OR HER MATERNAL GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMOTHER’S COUNTRY OF ORIGIN.

• June 23rd - September 9th: Several different camps patched together in a frantic pastiche of childcare, a chaotic trip to the grandparents where everyone barfs at least once, one trip to the ER for what turns out to be poison oak, and the oldest one forgets how to read.

Please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions!

We did not send this to any dads,

Ladybug Montessori

I’m going to present the whole thing and before you judge me too harshly, know that this is who I have always been, and despite years of therapy it is who I am now, and I will never change.

Please enjoy the very first installment of “The Grudge Report, 1994.”

Read more

• YES: “Yes!”

• NO: “This is not good timing for me.”

  ---

• YES: “Son, I would not miss it for the world.”

• NO: “I have a thing called Iran and other things.”

  ---

• YES: “Since your mother is no longer with us, of course I will be there.”

• NO: “If I do attend, I get killed. If I don’t attend, I get killed by the fake news.”

• YES: “What an honor. Would you like me to officiate?”

• NO: “Hopefully they’re going to have a great marriage.”

• YES: “As your only living parent, nothing could stop me. I’ll be there straightening your tie and wishing you well.”

• NO: “While I very much wanted to be with my son…circumstances pertaining to Government, and my love for the United States of America, do not allow me to do so.”

• YES: “Your wedding? Of course I’ll be there. And I’m sorry for allegedly slapping you in the face and knocking you to the ground in front of multiple eye witnesses in your dorm room at Penn all those years ago. My loathing for you is inherited. My father’s alcoholic rage is the defining trauma of my life, and my inability to meet his standards or please him created a pathological complex around amassing power. I’ve built myself monuments and surrounded myself only with people who abet my conquests or serve as trophies, and in stamping you with my name, you serve as a living reminder of my obsolescence. I am incapable of feeling affection toward you because your existence is a threat. I hated my father and I hate you as he hated me. This is not a family, this is a nuclear pain generator whose blast radius is the free world. So, no. I can’t attend your wedding because seeing you with your young, beautiful new wife is a painful reminder of my own loveless marriage, in which I, a decrepit old man vainly clawing to the appearance of virility, am so loathed by his own wife that she lives in another state. I can’t attend your wedding because I cannot bear witness to my own inferiority, a bystander to the triumph of the enemy I created. There is nothing I would rather do than anything else. Forgive me. May you one day, when you are on your third or fourth marriage and surrounded by sons who look at you with the same contempt, forgive me.”

• “I’ll try.”

I owe her an apology for what I wrote on Instagram last night. I’m going to reprint it all here, and include a dozen more things nobody should ever say about this stylish and cool person.

And I’m not just saying this because I am a working television writer who is actively pitching projects to streaming platforms including Amazon, I’m saying this because the woman is a timeless, regal human-looking person who seems like she’d be very kind to a spa attendant who accidentally dropped something while she was TRYING to relax.

So here goes. Lauren Sanchez Bezos, who legally has to share a bed with a man who looks like a cartoon turtle without its shell, wore this to the most important night in fashion:

I saw this look, styled by Law Roach in exchange for his voice which she wears in an amulet around her neck, and my initial reactions were — I freely admit — unfair. In case there are Amazon execs reading this, here are some observations I wrote that I disavow:

• This is the most “Mother of the Groom” I’ve ever seen a woman look not at her son’s Long Island country club wedding. This is the face she makes after ending her toast with, “And remember, he loved ME first, Sarah!”

• Her tailor is part of the resistance.

• It’s giving “The most requested Badgley Mischka mid-range gown on Rent the Runway” with dangly earrings from the case at the hair salon.

• It’s giving Oscars seat filler.

Read more

I had met him for the first time years ago at comedian friend’s house in LA, where he was fundraising for his Congressional campaign and ingratiating himself into an alt-comedy circle, which seemed to be a focus of his ascent in politics. He’s one of the few members of Congress who has appeared on Kimmel, Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Chelsea Handler’s shows, and this month he had a cameo on this season’s “Jury Duty: Company Retreat.”

That day in a backyard in Silverlake, he exchanged cell phone information with a few of us, including my friend, a beautiful genius who would eventually use that contact information to text him “Resign” last week.

I thought nothing of it. He was friendly. All politicians network to survive. They all have a forced charm that hopefully translates to pushing a policy agenda through an unwilling legislative process.

Months later, I got an email from Swalwell’s friend:

I remember feeling a bit odd about the invitation, and for reasons that remain mysterious to me, I never replied.

In Manhattan last month, I entered the apartment while he was holding court in front of a half dozen people seated on two couches, hanging on his every word.

He stood when I entered, immediately familiar, and I reached out for a handshake. “Cmon, Bess,” he guffawed, pulling me in, “We can hug.”

I was charmed. It seemed to be folksy gesture of camaraderie, if a bit forced. After all, I hadn’t seen him in seven years.

Over the course of the ninety or so minutes he spent with us, I saw a very different man than I had met in LA so early in his political career. Back in Silverlake, he was a corn-fed slightly dorky character from The Music Man, eager to please and ebullient. But here he was, the frontrunner for the California governorship, with a clichéd mid-40s “glow up” beard, commanding the attention of some of the most judgmental bastards in New York City (myself included). I gave him a joke to use at Trump, and after the event, one of the two — and this has stuck out in my memory of the evening — extremely attractive young women working for him took my cell phone number for the Congressman. Again.

I texted a smart friend after:

“What’s your read on Eric Swalwell?”

“Not impressed,” was the response, then went straight to voice notes.

I agreed, and neither of us could really articulate why.

Another writer friend, who was invited to the apartment hangout but didn’t come, said she didn’t come because she had a similar gut feeling.

Thanks to the heroism of women who came forward about Swalwell’s multiple sexual assaults, we now know how horrifically that gut check bore out to be.

I’m not writing this because I think Eric Swalwell was in any way hitting on me. I don’t think he had any intentions with me beyond getting some free jokes and connections with famous friends and maybe a selfie on Instagram (which, again, for reasons I cannot account for, I did not post). I think he is the type of man who only interacts with anyone remotely female-shaped by flirting with them. This was a man who operated in a system that rewarded flirtation as a modus operandi.

All politicians rely on a degree of charm and charisma to separate donors from their money, and to convince voters that they’re worthy of their trust. But there’s a difference between politicians who use charm to push a political agenda and the ones who use it to assault their own staffers. The charisma divide between the Swalwells in office versus politicians like Mamdani and Obama and AOC, is that the latter group had magnetic personalities that owned a room since the time they learned to talk.

Swalwell, as my unimpressed friend texted after I met him, just never had it. Even with the forced charisma, there was something dead-eyed and rote about him. Despite the media exposure and anointments by all the right mega-donors and PACs, he had the vaguely pathetic rizz of a looksmaxxer, not a Kennedy. Eric Swalwell is a monster, and he is also the consummate pathetic loser. And according to multiple accounts, the way he could truly have his command of women was to drug their drinks.

Eric Swalwell is the latest flare up of an insidious American problem with sex abuse. This is a country founded by men who fucked around with impunity and were put on money and carved into stone.

The Declaration of Independence was drafted by a ginger violinist who was impregnating a woman he owned. The sitting president, of course, bragged about his habit of grabbing women’s genitals before he was elected the first time, then was convicted of sexual assault before he was elected for a second time. When reports came out about Trump’s close ties and “wonderful secrets” with known child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, his approval rating initially slumped, and as of this writing, remains between 81 and 88% among all Republicans. As of March, among Republicans who identify as “MAGA,” Trump’s approval rating is even higher. If there’s any partisan lesson to be gleaned from Swalwell’s resignation, it’s that Democrats won’t blink twice before annihilating one of their own when he’s accused of rape, while MAGA proudly wears the rapist’s hat.

But rape remains a nonpartisan offense. This stomach-churning list of American politicians in federal office across the political spectrum who faced sexual misconduct, harassment and assault accusations is longer than the list of poet laureates.

So what we are reckoning with is clear: This is a country with a rape problem, CNN recently reported on an online “Rape Academy” that had 62 million visitors in February alone, most of them by American users.

62 million visits. Mostly Americans. All looking for ways to drug and rape women.

I do not think 62 million men are preparing to actually commit rape in some kind of Purge-like marauding spree, but I do think all 62 million were entertaining a fantasy of dehumanizing and violating women.

The only hope I have in any of this are the women who are fighting back. The accusors are incredibly brave, and so are the women like Arielle Fodor and Cheyenne Hunt who initially fielded the women’s multiple reports and took them seriously.

So long as women continue to hold bad men accountable for their crimes against us, there’s justice. Our voices have legitimate political power when the whisper network turns into a collective scream.

As Eric Swalwell, in hopefully the last throes of narcissism, posts direct-to-camera denials of the charges that eventually came out on video, I look into his eyes that never twinkled like Obama’s, and his muppet features that never coalesced like Kennedy’s, and his forced innocence that doesn’t ring as true as Talarico’s, and I pity him. Here he is, asking for a hug, and getting told by every woman alive to go fuck himself.

That’s right: From here on out, the dress is off and so are the gloves, because it’s Pope Leo, Bounty Hunter.

So what’s the plan now that I’ve taken Donald Trump’s critique to heart and am solely dedicated to fighting crime and cheering war? First order of business is all the cardinals will be trained in mixed martial arts and pumped full of so much of RFK’s creatine/peptide injections you can see their neck veins from space.

Also all the communion wafers are Big Macs now.

You might have some questions as this could strike you as antithetical to Christian doctrine and my own past statements including last week’s Easter address in which I advocated for global leaders to choose peace.

First of all: Shut up. And second of all: The Bible was written by pussies (Hail Mary x 3).

From here on out, my time in Papal office will be spent doing awesome stuff, like shooting a gun out of the Vatican turret at anyone who seems like an immigrant. Also I think there should be more gold on the walls of my chambers. Also instead of zucchetto all the lesser cardinals have to wear MAGA hats.

Also I’m getting a Slovenian wife. Of Czech. Whoever can get her papers in order fastest.

But let’s not get sidetracked by all the awesome shit (Hail Mary x 5) I’m going to do. The most important thing is that I am tough on crime. Not crimes like sexual assault in the state of New York or mounting an insurrection or election interference, but crimes like being the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because it was Jesus who said: “Come [at] me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you [a concussion].”

I want to end by thanking Donald Trump directly for inspiring me with your sound critique. And, sir, I’d like to let you know that I have spoken with the Lord, and he thinks the AI image you posted of yourself as Jesus was “awesome.” And, Mr. President, though God is sad He will never meet you, He asks that you give His regards to Satan when you meet him in two years, one month, and six days.

Peace War be with you,

Pope Leo the Redpilled

But I married a practical person, and so I recently suppressed everything about myself and met with a lawyer and did what responsible people do.

The following list is from the notes from the meeting during which I, a comedy writer born to deflect, was faced with a series of tragic hypotheticals:

• Never pull the plug. Keep me hooked up to machines like a Saudi prince. They’ll find a cure.

• Ok. If I die first and he remarries someone the trustee deems skinnier than me, he gets nothing.

Read more

Here’s what he declared yesterday:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

When my grandpa’s friend Bert started talking like this, his kids had to move him to a facility that helped him with personal hygiene and getting dressed if his shirt had buttons.

These are the dissociative, raging outbursts of a mind incapable of organizing thoughts beyond primary processing.

That this is the unchecked man entrusted with the nuclear codes and given carte blanche to take us to war without congressional approval is enraging on two levels. That it is happening, and that Congress continues to let it happen.

And here’s what he wrote this morning:

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

To the congressional staffers who read this newsletter, impeachment and building a plan for invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment should be the only thing on your agenda today.

This isn’t just a man unfit to hold presidential office, he isn’t competent enough to work in a high school yearbook office.

The most horrifying thing about these presidential outbursts isn’t that he said them, it’s that the guardrails are off to the extent he is allowed to say them.

The overarching problem is that Donald Trump exists in a culture of infinite permissiveness. His leadership approach, from the time he was a TV businessman to the time he is a TV president, is simply firing anyone who impedes his power.

It all makes for a compelling reality show on a fake boardroom set and outright despotism in the (Home Depot-gilded) Oval Office.

This isn’t projection of some grouchy liberal Substack writer, it’s what Donald Trump openly admitted on camera in a rant the White House briefly, accidentally uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday before making the video private.

In it, Trump laments:

“I can’t get a ballroom approved. It’s pretty amazing, right? If I was a king, we’d be doing a lot more. I’m doing a lot, but I could be doing a lot more if I was a king.”

On the 250th anniversary of the revolutionary war, America is contending with another Mad King.

This is hardly a new train of thought for Trump. Last February, Trump posted AI imagery of himself in a crown accompanied by the text “LONG LIVE THE KING.” There was also the AI video of Trump flying a “King Trump” airplane dumping brown liquid on “No Kings” protesters. The man is quite literally a treasonous shit-poster.

So where does that put our lawmakers, and what can be done? The MAGA majority has made it clear they’ll bend the knee, but there have to be enough moderates who got into government because they actually care about what their constituents think. And sure, many politicians are narcissists who get off on proximity to power no matter the moral cost, but we just need a handful of representatives to do their basic jobs should a vote come before them.

And as of this month, Trump’s approval rating is at an historic low, at only 39%. Most of the people who currently employ members of Congress do not support this president. And that counts for something that could move the needle.

Here’s what the fourth section of the 25th Amendment states:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

Most practically, this would come down to JD Vance and Trump’s cabinet, but it’s unlikely Trump’s cabinet — hand-picked sycophants chosen for their fealty and kept in check by the recent career executions of Noem and Bondi — will step in.

But, Congress can technically establish a body to invoke Section 4, so long as JD Vance, a man as (conveniently!) ideologically spineless as he is power-hungry, is at the helm.

I understand the conundrum this hope raises: “But wouldn’t a JD Vance presidency be so much worse?” In the short term, possibly. Vance makes no secret of his openly fascist ideas about immigration and women’s rights. But every member of Congress with whom I have spoken agrees: Without Trump on the throne, MAGA crumbles. Vance simply doesn’t have the Machiavellian ringmaster respect Trump holds over his henchmen. He’d flounder. The man doesn’t even have the charisma to cash out and pivot to FOX News. You need a chin for that.

The only saving grace of King Trump’s lunacy, is without him there’s no lasting successor to the crown.

I also recognize that writing about this fantastical path to Trump’s removal is a bit like writing a piece about why I should be allowed to spend one magical night with Paul Mescal, but to quote The Art of the Deal: “If you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.”

So what do we, the people do?

A week ago, I spoke with Katie Bethell, the executive director of MoveOn.org. She said that walking through the halls of Congress recently, the phones were eerily silent. Nobody is calling.

Today, let’s light up the switchboard.

It’s time to call each of our representatives and demand they do their very basic job: Uphold the constitution and hold Donald Trump to account. You pay their salaries. Demand they do their jobs. Invoke their war powers. Stop this incapacitated madman who is treating to annihilate a civilization if he goes unchecked.

Here’s the number for the Congressional switchboard.

(202) 224-3121

Here it is again, but larger.

(202) 224-3121

You know what to do. It’s time to take the keys before he drives us off a constitutional cliff. Let’s go. Think big.

But it’s exhausting being chill and I don’t especially like to hang, so to paraphrase Louis himself, I’m just going to come out and say a resounding:

“UuUnnnnnnnnnggggghhhhhhhhhhhh. Uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. AAahhhuuhhhhn!!!! Oh God oh God. Fuuuuuck.”

I should say, Louis CK was one of my favorite living comedians. His show “Louis” was, to me, close to perfect. It remains a template for how to make a good, funny, true show the way “Annie Hall” remains a template for how to make a good, funny, true movie.

And like Woody Allen, in reconciling the art and the artist I find it best to consider them both archival acts. And as a human woman who thinks it is bad to use your position of power to sexually terrorize someone for your pleasure, I think the non-redemption arc of Louis CK is deflatingly sad, but not at all surprising.

It’s sad because it makes anyone who raises an issue with it an annoying killjoy bitch. And it’s unsurprising because there is no such thing as cancel culture so long as the canceled person was a man embraced by the American Right. And if the Right’s resounding silence on the release of the Epstein files demonstrates anything, it’s the majority consensus of the United States is you can do whatever you want to terrified girls and get away with it. You can even invade Iran if it makes you feel better. Or get a Netflix special.

Read more

Call me ASAP so we can touch base about the bullshit nightmare that was “Seder” last night. It was definitely NOT what was described when I signed on, and going forward I would like to HARD PASS on any project that involves New Jersey/reading/singing/shirt with buttons/horseradish.

I thought having you on location with me would help in terms of running interference, but from beginning to end it was basically a worst-case scenario.

We can’t change the past, but at this point I’d just like assurance that anything remotely like this will NOT happen again.

Thanks.

Goof

(Sent at 3:32AM)

Happy Thursday, Goof!

So sorry to hear the project was not what you hoped. So frustrating and totally hear you!

If it’s any consolation, I have been getting calls ALL morning from your sea (no pun intended!) of adoring fans gushing over how incredible you were in Four Questions.

I’m sadly back-to-back today so don’t have a ton of time to jump on the phone, but if you give me a sense of any points you’d like me to relay I can definitely pass along up the chain.

Just want to stress how happy you made so many people by not only being there, but by giving it your all despite the less-than-ideal circumstances.

Chag Semeach!

Mommy

First of all, the Afikomen part was — excuse my language — fucking bullshit.

Cousin Ella is a full year-and-a-half older than me, so the fact that a SECOND grader is even allowed to participate is an actual union violation. And I don’t want to start a rumor, but since it was at her house, I have STRONG reason to believe she had prior knowledge of where it was hidden.

Second of all, everything else. Let’s start with the “food.”

Read more

Here’s the picture, taken in October, 2021:

One baby and many years later, I got a call when I was on the way back home from DC after delivering testimony about the first amendment to the House Judiciary Committee. It was Jane. Fonda. Here’s the screenshot I took because I wasn’t sure if I was having a visual hallucination:

Jane (Fonda) invited me to give a shortened reading of the testimony for a rally she was organizing for The Committee for the First Amendment. The rally would do what testimony couldn’t: Unite artists across genres to stand together and speak out against the Trump regime’s attack on free speech. The rally would be in front of the shuttered Kennedy Center. She remains among the most unstoppable forces for good on earth.

I agreed to do it before she told me the date, which was today.

This afternoon, in the rain outside the Kennedy Center, after Joan Baez sang, here is what I said. The end is the real RALLY part:

I would like to begin the way I start most speeches: Thanks for that, Joan Baez. I would like to thank the Committee on the First Amendment for inviting me to be here with these legends today in the place where my mother and grandmother marched against similar tyranny. Here is a bit of what I said to the House Judiciary Committee last month.

I am a comedy writer, I wrote for Jimmy Kimmel Live for eight years, and I am an author who recently got back from a national tour for my picture book series, Buffalo Fluffalo. So the fact that I have become a traveling spokesperson for the First Amendment means something has gone very wrong in America.

I gotta say. I didn’t see this coming. I thought we were entering a new golden age of free speech. On January 20^th, 2025 President Trump, on his very first day in office for the second time, announced a Presidential Action called “RESTORING FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND ENDING FEDERAL CENSORSHIP.”

Which was a big relief…Because I had some concerns about how he felt about speech he didn’t much like.

My first brush with this President happened in 2017. At the time, I was doing a recurring bit on Twitter, before it was owned by the world’s richest and most online man, Elon Musk.

It was all fun and games until, one night, the president blocked me after I wrote a joke that hurt his feelings. It turned out that the man in the Oval Office couldn’t take a joke and wanted to make sure he didn’t have to hear one, either. The Knight Foundation sued him to get him to unblock me and several others. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ended up having to rule on this, and the Supreme Court took the issue up, too. He quite literally made a federal case of a joke.

The problem here is not that jokes bother this President, it’s that he is in the habit of looking for ways to silence the joke tellers.

That became clear this year when the administration went after late night television. When I wrote for Jimmy Kimmel Live from 2012 through 2020, it was never supposed to be a job where I’d have to know anything more about the founding documents than an off-color joke about John Hancock.

For late night comedy writers, the president is our best and worst audience. He is our best audience because unlike most Americans he watches late night television. He is our worst audience because his inexplicably bruised skin is very, very thin. He complained about our jokes frequently, often in real time, on his own social media site he invented so that nobody could make fun of him on it.

This went far beyond social media tirades when this year, after Stephen Colbert told jokes about the settlement CBS paid to President Trump, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was coincidentally bulldozed like it was the East Wing of the White House. Then months later, the administration had Jimmy Kimmel Live briefly yanked off the air for jokes that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr called “distasteful,” which really grabs me by the –I’m not going to say that word in front of Jim Acosta.

But these permanent and temporary cancellations aren’t just about controlling jokes, they’re about controlling criticism of this administration and its corporate bedfellows. It is the state using its power to shape what is profitable to say. And we’ve learned nothing if not this: the bottom line comes first – even before the first amendment.

And here’s how that trickles down. The censorship of free speech we have witnessed from the highest office in the federal government has emboldened Americans in sacred positions of power from the state to the local, to the school board level, which is where I found myself just weeks after Kimmel’s suspension.

This fall on a national book tour I read my book Buffalo Fluffalo and Puffalo to thousands and thousands of elementary school kids in small towns and suburbs in Kansas, Missouri, Texas and Montana.

In Montana the tour hit a snag. A group of parents, who had previously caused a stir at a school board meeting where they successfully campaigned to ban certain books from the library, decided to ban me. They emailed the school superintendent en masse with jokes I had written in my life as a political comedy writer, and told him that if I came to read my book about prairie animals and their feelings to their kids, they would show up and make a scene in front of the children until I left.

The visit was canceled.

It isn’t some great national tragedy that a story time was canceled. But it’s a harrowing indication of how a joke can be wielded against its writer by exactly the same movement that railed against cancel culture to defend jokes that punched down.

On that day in Montana, I was sad for the kids, but I was mostly sad for the librarian. School librarians are at the front lines of these school board fights over book bans with increasing regularity. They are tired. They are pisssed. They just want to be able to give a kid a book they’re excited to read, even if that book is about a kid with two moms, which as of this speech is a legal amount of moms to have.

Because here’s the thing about those kids across America that I have met.

From deeply under-funded title one schools where most students were on free lunch, to immigrant communities where many of the kids are the first people in their families to learn to read and speak English, to fancy schools in oil money subdivisions where I was offered a choice of flat or sparkling water, I will tell you this: The kids were the same. The kids were the same.

When I read my books in auditoriums and gyms and libraries and classrooms, some fidgeted, some daydreamed, but they all laughed at the same parts, and when I asked if they had any questions at the end – to a school – they all asked me the same one: Why was Buffalo Fluffalo mad? Why was he mad?

I’ll tell you. The book is about a Buffalo who is at first tough and blustery and rude and pushes his friends away, and when it is revealed that underneath all his fluff, he is just this tiny, frightened guy who wants to be loved, his friends love and support him anyway. And he gives them gratitude and kindness right back. Call it left wing commie propaganda.

I believe that the impulse to censor speech comes from exactly this fear in the book. The fear of being seen as weak, or vulnerable. The desire to project an air of bravado and to silence and push off anyone who might pull the curtain back on the image of imperious strongman.

A true leader is only as strong as the joke he can take at his own expense. There’s nothing funny about the fact that we are living through a time when jokes about the government are a liability.

Today at this rally, surrounded by artists I admire – and two women whose songs were on my birthling playlists, Ms. Rogers, Ms. Baez – I have hope. The icons who spoke before me are proof that if they push artists off stage, artists will build a new stage they are proud to stand on.

And I am certain our message will outlive this administration’s attempt to silence it. Joan Baez has been out here in Washington standing up to tyrants since Donald Trump was getting a doctor’s note for his bone spurs. Jane Fonda has been arrested more times for standing up for what’s right than any of the men in the Epstein emails. And we don’t just listen to them because they are legends, but because they are leaders, holding the torch that will march us out of this dark time in solidarity. And when we march tomorrow to we will send a message to the administration: The Un-American activity in this country is in Oval Office. And Mar a Lago. And the patriots are the ones exercising their first amendment rights to hold any would-be Kings to account.

May we keep speaking, keep reading, and keep marching, in the spirit of the leaders who keep lighting the way, and in the name of the children whose future may shine brighter than this passing storm over Washington.

Thank you.

The guards, the metal detector, the armored door, are all signifiers of safety, and the reminder of the threat.

I send my children to Jewish preschool for the same reason I attended Jewish preschool in the same city. Because I am Jewish. Because in my 30s I remember the prayers and stories I learned when I was three. Because we are a rounding error in the global population and our children are the hope that anyone will sing the prayers and remember the stories and carry them through a world that they make kind and is kinder to them.

The hope feels like wide-eyes idiocy this morning.

When the children in West Bloomfield, Michigan were rushed out of their Jewish preschool yesterday, some holding hands, some looking warily over their tiny shoulders, I saw my child. It bears saying: When I saw the starving children in Gaza lining up for food, I also saw my child. My hands shook with rage and fear for their mothers as I wrote so many words advocating for ceasefire in the name of all children. When I saw the little boy in Iran who would be decimated by American missiles last week, I saw my son. That is how motherhood works. That is how Jewish motherhood works. It is primal beyond empathy. The children are ours. The children are the light, and it is our job to make that light eternal.

The children in West Bloomfield go to exactly the same type of school as my son. My son in his green puffer jacket and orange velcro sneakers he puts on all by himself. My son who walks into that building and fist-bumps the security guard and giggles when his bento box sets off the metal detector. He does not know the metal detector is looking for weapons to kill him for being Jewish. He does not know the guard is ready to exchange gunfire outside a place of worship because someone might kill him for protecting Jewish children. He does not know any of this, because I know this and my job is to guard him from the fear I carry. When I watched him bop through the doors this morning, I saw the grainy news footage of the children in Michigan fleeing the school in their tiny sneakers, holding hands, moving quickly so they would not be killed.

And I thought about the comments under the video of the footage. The comments were cheering the killer, excusing the killer, explaining the killer, mocking the number of police cars, mocking the children, calling it a “false flag,” and what-abouting the children. The comments hundreds of likes. The comment “Flase flag” under the Metro Detroit News Instagram account has, of this writing, 19,000 likes. Nineteen thousand. The comments were normal.

The loudest voices speaking out against antisemitism have so often been poisoned by Islamophobia. It is a shame these uneducated, right-wing, Netanyahu-apologist propagandists have grabbed the megaphone and drowned out progressive voices with it. They have done my child a disservice. In trying to protect Jews, they have turned from empathy when we need it most. They have turned from facts, numbers, information, photographs, human rights organizations, and UN reports when we need to reckon with the atrocity done in the name of protecting the Jewish state. They are not the only voices calling for our safety. I am calling for our safety.

My Israeli family members are in bunkers now because of Netanyahu’s decisions. The antisemitism that is ramming into synagogues in Michigan, and the online chorus of antisemitism justifying ramming into synagogues in Michigan is what happens when terminally online anti-zionism drops its mask.

Anti-zionism is antisemitism when someone is shooting at children in Michigan because of Israel. Anti-zionism is antisemitism when there are hundreds of comments under footage of children in Michigan explaining how the children deserve it. Anti-zionism is antisemitism when Angelina McCahey went on GB News and contextualized the attack incorrectly saying the synagogue was “An Israeli Temple.”

I speak, sleeplessly and unguardedly, for every Jewish person in every group chat I know when I say we felt this coming, the attack and the silence. What you are doing now when toddlers are in an active shooter lockdown because of a hate crime is what your Jewish friends are noticing. We are tired. We are scared and horrified for the children and parents and siblings and grandparents and teachers and friends of the children in West Bloomfield. When the car rammed into the preschool it rammed into every Jewish psyche. It was an act of terror against a people. And we are scared our children will be next. Of course we are. And when and if it happens to my child, I am wondering how many of the people I know will shrug it off as deserved.

It is 2:10 pm. I have thirty minutes before I have to go pick up my child from his Jewish preschool. I will walk past the security guards and walk through the metal detector and I will walk up the stairs and stand at his classroom door with the other parents who are all walking around with the same pit in our already terrible stomachs. And when the door opens and my son sees my face I will smile so big and kiss him on his pudding cheeks and tell him I am so happy to see him. I will smell his hair and squeeze his tiny, pudgy body and hold his hand down the stairs as he natters about his best friend and tells me about gym and anything else wonderful that happened while he was safely inside that building. I will say thank you to the men who would take a bullet for him. They are my heroes. They are my family’s heroes and my ancestor’s heroes. They are the line between my sanity and my bottomless fear.

Today I will walk my four-year-old child down the block away from the school slowly and calmly, and that slowness, that calmness will be a tiny victory march. May I remember that slowness and calmness is an absolute blessing. May every day be so fortunate.

Shabbat Shalom.

Read more

“Sorry,” he smirked at me, practically glowing, “Life is so fuckin’ crazy lately.” He sighed, sinking into the velvet lounge sofa, “But I just feel so damn blessed.”

Though he’s only been in the spotlight for a matter of days after flaring up on a certain presidential collar, Neck Rash already has the air (and rabid fan base) of a bona fide star. When I was assigned this profile I was met by an almost frantic line of questions from everyone I knew — “What’s he like up close? Who is he with? What’s going on behind the scenes? Send me pictures!” — but in person, he was open, raw, and anything but tame.

A waitress came by to take our order, clearly giddy to see him.

“And for the man of the hour?” She asked. He laughed, “Just isopropyl rubbing alcohol and some gauze,” he asked with a wink. “And keep it coming.”

She disappeared behind the lobby bar and was immediately swarmed by hotel workers hoping to know what he was like. But after just a few days under this kind of feverish scrutiny, Neck Rash seemed unbothered and genuinely thrilled by the reality of his own spectacle.

I asked how this meteoric rise to fame has been, and he demurred, fiddling with his conspicuous diamond chain, a gift from his “dear friend” Evan Ross Katz, who took it off his own neck after Rash complimented it during an interview.

“Honestly,” he sighed, his voice a touch hoarse from back-to-back media appearances, “It’s been a wild ride. A week ago I was just a cluster of mild epidermal irritation. And now…” he nodded toward the table of tourists across the lobby bar, all filming him, “People can’t get enough of me. It’s crazy, man. But I honestly love it. And I’m just getting started.”

But who is he, really? I asked him to address the online speculation that he was syphilitic, and he cackled. “That’s insane,” he laughed, sloughing off some dry patches onto the lobby carpet. “I actually read somewhere that I was contact dermatitis? Buddy. Come on. I’m so much bigger than that it’s ridiculous. And I’m only getting bigger.”

His publicist, who had been hand-signaling to him since he started talking, whispered something to him, and he straightened up.

“Right,” he said, sly grin widening as he recited his media training, “I’m a reaction to a preventative medication and I should go away in a week or t —”

He was cut off by a gaggle of women who seemed practically rabid as they approached. “WE ARE OBSESSED WITH YOU, RASH! WE LOVE YOU!” one of them yelled.

“Not as much as I love you, baby.”

“Can we take a selfie?” another one in the group asked while taking out her phone, blushing. “Like, of…ALL of you?”

Rash, ever the exhibitionist, began to disrobe when his publicist stepped in. “Actually!” she chirped a bit frantic, “If you want a picture, he’s got to be partially covered.”

Rash rolled his eyes and gave the girls (partially) what they wanted. “This is so lit,” he told me, wincing a bit as he dabbed himself with disinfectant. “The way I look at it to stay humble: I’m just being me, just sometimes with a little makeup.”

I asked him about his costar, Hand Bruise. Was it true that they had anything to do with each other off-camera?

“Handy? I absolutely love that guy. That’s my brother. That’s my boy. That’s my PERSON.”

I pressed, asking if they were in any way linked, which he shrugged off. “Nah, it’s not like that. He does his own thing, and I do mine. I have nothing but love for him, and I’ve learned a ton from how he’s handled himself with such grace under the spotlight. He’s been at this for a couple weeks longer than me.”

He couldn’t help himself, maybe loosened from the rubbing alcohol or talking about the only skin lesion on earth who could relate at all what he was experiencing.

“I wouldn’t be here without him. Literally. And I think he’d say the same about me.”

Before I could clarify if the rumors of topical chemotherapy ointment for a basal cell or potentially more dangerous squamous cell carcinoma were true, given that he looks strikingly similar to a young actinic keratoses, I was cut off by a familiar voice.

“Rashy?” the unmistakable vocal fry of Julia Fox rasped in our direction, “I thought that was you, you nasty bitch.” Neck Rash laughed as the two exchanged kisses, seemingly well acquainted.

“Jules,” Neck Rash demurred, finishing off his rubbing alcohol and discretely chasing it with a powder. “I miss you, baby! Don’t leave me!”

“Neverrrr!” she purred, “We have a table at Le Chêne in like twenty. You’re coming.”

And with that, Neck Rash (and his team) filed out behind the Safdie muse. As he disappeared out the hotel’s iron doors and into the New York night, the remaining guests in the hotel lobby sat in a hushed reverence, the air thick with the sheer potential of what we’d all beheld. There he went, a Rash that captured the world’s attention, either to blow up and take it all, or burn bright and fade away. But for this moment all that was certain is he was in exactly the right place at the right time.

He said, “You’re going to be so good!” and then I started thinking about the most important thing I would have to contend with that day, more important than the speech, Democracy, the Constitution, my family, or even life itself:

Read more

I’ve also included the answers to my questions, at the end.

Some blogs and podcasts have run-away with the anti-Trump angle and the Kimmel-writer storyline, which is definitely more appealing clickbait than the substance of the speech.

But I disclosed something very personal about what happened on book tour in Montana, and it definitely casts a very nonpartisan book in a potentially polarizing light.

One thing that delights me about the response to the Fluffalo series is how politically purple its readership is. The books are about kindness and empathy, which should not be partisan topics.

With this testimony, the jig is up, and everyone in my family is rightfully nervous about what this will do for book sales.

If you feel like supporting the book after I lose truly half my readership, here’s the button to order a copy for yourself anyone you know.

Thank you thank you for watching.

Now here’s Puff:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/743936/buffalo-fluffalo-and-puffalo-by-bess-kalb-illustrated-by-erin-kraan/

PUFFALO FOR AMERICA