This Newsletter Has...Everything

From the National Archives to Snakes on a Plane to Facebook fights to Sing Sing and Babygirl.

On Monday, I gave myself permission to just… not. I’m not disengaging forever, or even longer than the day, but I decided I didn’t need to force myself to watch that toxic, hateful, treasonous buffoon and his cronies celebrate the ruin they’re about to inflict (the immediate January 6 pardons, and the Proud Boys marching in D.C. proclaiming the streets theirs, make me sick enough to my stomach and that’s only the beginning). I’m saving my energy; spending it on Inauguration Day wasn’t it.

But I did decide maybe there’s something I could do, so instead I’ve spent time this week volunteering for the National Archives as a Citizen Archivist. This can be done at my desk or on my laptop in front of the TV, just with my eyeballs, helping transcribe the contents of records that have been digitally scanned — mostly, to help decipher handwriting, but also because the text interpretation software is prone to errors. This is not always thrilling work, depending on which projects have a need right…