Category: Other Writing

Proposal E doesn’t do what you probably think it does. (I am voting NO on PROP E)

This one is basically just for Ann Arborites:

Proposal E is on your ballot for the upcoming election (get those ballots in by Tuesday Nov 3!).

I’m gonna vote NO on Prop E.

Here is the entirety of the ballot language:

Creation and Governance of a Municipal Electric Utility
Shall Chapter 15 of the Charter be amended to require the City to establish a municipal electric utility and governance structure therefore?

That sounds good–so good, that I thought we’d already voted for this. This left me confused as to why I had to vote for this again, so I looked at the complete ordinance language that would be enacted if Prop E passes. I walked away more confused and started to get worried.

Anyway, here is the skinny:

  1. Prop E has nothing to do with the SEU that something like 80% of us supported and is already doing really good work that brings together renewable energy and justice. Bravo!
  2. Prop E is a totally separate parallel effort to buy the crappy power infrastructure we have (poles and lines and transformers and all the other things that blow down every time we have a big wind) from DTE
  3. That requires a massive immediate investment (on the order of $500,000,000 to $1 billion)
  4. That equipment has been neglected for decades (which is why folks are mad enough here to want to start their own power company), so we’d also inherit the maintenance burden on busted down old equipment
  5. That price tag does not include any way to generate power; we’d still need to buy that on the open market. We’d just be buying poles and wires.
  6. The only avenue to pay for this is basically rate increases, so power would get more expensive immediately (in a city already deep into a housing affordability crisis that is forcing out families and shrinking our schools), at a time when people are acutely aware of rising energy costs (data centers, A.I., wars in Europe and the Middle East, etc.)
  7. There is no recent example of a community successfully buying out a local utility company and converting it to a municipal utility. Boulder (a much wealthier community than Ann Arbor—which is by no means economically deprived) tried and failed. The successful municipal utilities here in Michigan were formed in the late 1800–1900s and were the original power companies in those areas; there are only two examples of a community buying out a traditional power company in Michigan, one is Bay City (which was already running its own municipal utility and bought out redundant grid structure) and the other Traverse City—who did so in 1912. Point being: conditions are somewhat different now, and pointing to success in Lansing (Lansing Board of Water & Light, founded 1885) and Holland (Holland Board of Public Works, 1893) are not good priors for us buying ill-maintained second-hand equipment from DTE in 2027 in a city that has no power generation capacity and nowhere to build it.

This roundtable discussion composed almost entirely of environmentalists, activists, and developers with a track record for sustainability and eliminating reliance on fossil fuels helped me understand what I was missing when I looked at this inscrutable wall of text:

Give this a watch and don’t forget to get your ballot in early or show up in-person on Nov 3.

“Everyone I know feels lost. The trick is / to feel lost together.…”

… from “This Again” by Bob Hicok (published November 5, 2023), which begins:

The recommendation from some website quoted on the news
is to rape, cut the throats of, and throw female Jews
off a cliff. But how far are the cliffs of Ithaca
from Cornell, where the raping and throat slashing
is supposed to occur? And if you don’t have a car,
are you supposed to borrow one or can you Uber a body
to a cliff and ask the driver to wait while you chuck it off?
And what if you’re afraid of heights? It’s time we address
the shocking lack of detail in antisemitism. It’s one thing
to hate Jews but another to ask me to hate Jews
without telling me how to hate Jews or why I should hate anyone
when loving everyone is an option.…

I also especially like this poem of Hicok’s, for the final two lines:

…since Jews really are relentless
when it comes to being human.

(And, of course, I love this one, as a fellow Son of Michigan.)

Reflections from the Aucilla River

Last week was my wife’s and daughter’s Spring Breaks, so we drove with the dogs down to the Florida Panhandle, where we stayed in an especially crooked fishing shack hanging over the Aucilla River. From there, it was an easy paddle down to the Gulf of Mexico, complete with old-man’s-beard, leaping mullet, and easily spooked alligators.

“They like me! They really, really like me!”

My short cosmic-horror-IKEA-home-inspction-reality-show-Jews-CrypotJews-JewsOfColor-siblings story, “The Nölmyna,” made it into Reactor’s 2025 “Best of…” antho (grab your free copy, no strings attached). I always like these, because I’m more of a Kindle/paper reader than a phone/tablet/laptop reader, but I especially like this year’s edition because I’m in it, with my name on the cover and everything.

Enjoy!

Our Most Important Thanksgiving Traditions 🦃💀

I repost this (or a variant of it) every year. This is a year, and so I repost. QED. After all, without our traditions, we are as shakey as a fiddler on the roof.

1. “What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”

I wrote this essay a few years back, as a little bonus for the folks kind enough to have subscribed to my newsletter.  A good friend, Chris Salzman, was gracious enough to make something pretty of it. I relish the opportunity to reshare it each year, and I’m doing so once again.  Every word here is both true and factual—which is a harder trick than you’d think.

You’ll be 15 minutes into that Lesser Family Feast in Michigan when your mother-in-law will turn to you and ask:

“What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”

You should be prepared for this sort of thing in Michigan. But even though I’m warning you in advance, you still won’t be prepared.…

(read more: IN MICHIGAN: A PRIMER, A TRAVELOGUE)

2. “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!”

THANKSGIVING TURKEY GIVEAWAY! (WKRP in Cincinnati) from Tony DeSanto on Vimeo.

I repost this every year mostly because I love this gag, and because watching this on TV—and rehashing it with my mom and sisters each year—is one of my fondest holiday memories. But I also come back to it again and again because it is a damned near perfect piece of writing. (If you wanna read more of my thoughts on this specific gag and what it can teach writers, you can do so here.)

3. “…your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs; we will sell our bracelets by the road sides…”

I share this because the song cracks me up and I sorta love Wednesday’s “Pocahontas” speech, but also because there is a way that the writers put “majority unpleasantness” on display here that I really miss. The depiction of “Running Bear” is cruel, but also empowering. I felt seen, as a chubby insecure Jewish kid watching this scene.

4. ♬♫♪ “Caught his eye on turkey day / As we both ate Pumpkin Pie … ” ♬♫♪

Man, I remember when this song was big when I was little; you couldn’t turn on AM radio without hearing those synths from Halloween onward. Man, the memories! ♬♫♪

5. The Alice’s Restaurant Massacre (in four part harmony)

I’m a child of the 1980s, so most of my nostalgic holiday memories are TV- or radio-related. 🤷‍♀️

I hope your T-day is good and sweet.  Gobblegobble! 🦃💀

Fake Outrage, Real Damage 🤖✨💀

The real lesson of the Great Cracker Barrel Logo Debacle of 2025: Stop and think, dammit.

In August a struggling restaurant chain whose customer base is mostly over 65 made a mild logo change. (That change wasn’t even really a change: the “new logo” closely matched the alternate version of the logo Cracker Barrel had been using on menus and digital ads for six years.)

This “change” triggered a social media firestorm, which ignited a minor culture war brushfire. A week later ~40% of that company’s market value had gone up in smoke, and already weak foot traffic dropped another 8% (per WSJ). That’s $545 million gone, and no doubt more than a few jobs with it.

Within 60 days the chain pulled a complete 180, trashing 18 months of work on everything from visual identity to food-prep procedures.

Then it turns out that the social media firestorm was mostly fabricated. Around half of all the griping was automated bots (via NRN and Restaurant Business). Much of the “real” complaining from humans was in response to the fabricated controversy.

Now the whole story comes out, and I’ve seen a string of mediocre “thought leadership” posts on LinkedIn using this as an object lesson. Those pieces of “thought leadership” invariably have turned out to be entirely AI written. ( 🤖✨ writing is pretty easy to spot, but I still use Pangram to check my work.)

Meanwhile, Cracker Barrel still serves mediocre food slowly to a dwindling audience under the auspices of a logo and decor that haven’t changed since the Carter administration. At every stage in this farce, people are reacting to and amplifying artificial signals rather than honestly listening and talking to each other—and causing real harm in the mix—and never stopping to ask if they actually care, if any of this matters, if what they are doing is tending toward making things better, if they even have a goal or preferred end-state in mind…oy.🤦‍♀️

Archive.org brings you Halloween Treats! 🍬🍭🎃👻🔪💉👶⚰️

"Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child's Book about Satanic Ritual Abuse" cover

I’ve spoken at length about the Satanic Panic in the past, especially Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse—which was a real book that was earnestly written and actually published in order to (traumatically) teach children and parents how to recognize the signs of something that was believed to be an epidemic when I was a kid, but in fact never ever ever happened to anyone (more details, with links to sources, at my original post).

"Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child's Book about Satanic Ritual Abuse" ritual

Sadly, I’d never come across a print copy of the complete book. Happily, that no longer matters because the good folks at Archive.org have digitized it and you can now read the whole thing online for free:

Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse on Archive.org

(As an added bonus, Archive.org also has this law enforcement training video on Satanic Cults from 1994! Again: real resources for taking real actions in the real world to address a made-up thing, often with disastrous consequences for people who did nothing wrong.)

The full text of Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy is worth a look. Seeing the whole book really does underscore that this was a well-intentioned project (and even decently trauma informed, for the period). But those good intentions were tragically misdirected, literally paving a road to hell for some folks who were accused of imagined atrocities.

I suppose there is a lesson there, America. I don’t imagine we’ll learn it.

“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, which means there was a Yizkor service with my congregation, which means I spent much of the day thinking of my father (of blessed memory), who I loved a great deal, despite not necessarily liking him very much.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

by Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn.

                     Outside the open window   

The morning air is all awash with angels.

    Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,   

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.   

Now they are rising together in calm swells   

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear   

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

    Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving   

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden   

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

                                             The soul shrinks

    From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

               “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

    Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   

The soul descends once more in bitter love   

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

    “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   

Of dark habits,

                      keeping their difficult balance.”

Your introduction to the Crypto-Jews of the American Southwest

Some readers are thrown by a reference in my latest story to the protagonist, home inspector and minor-TV celebrity Sadie Espinoza, who describes getting bullied in high school, noting that:

Jewish Espinozas weren’t remotely “wetbacks.” They weren’t even “immigrants”: they’d been in New Mexico—where her dad and his brother grew up—since before it was “New Mexico.” The only thing calling her “wetback” did was make it clear how stupid those girls were, like a house cat strutting around thinking it caught a snake when all it had was a shitty old lizard tail.

Some folks are confused because they had an American public school primary education east of the Mississippi (as I did), and thus don’t know that Santa Fe is the oldest state capitol in the US, having been establish 150 years before the country was founded.

A much greater portion of readers are confused because they think of all Jews as European shtetl folk who came here in the late 19th and early 20th C (as mine did), and thus know nothing about the extremely long history of Jews in the New World (short version: we’ve always been here, and you’ve never liked us).

Anyway, if you’re curious about any of this, the graphic novel El Illuminado is a good introduction to Crypto-Jews and the impact the Inquisition had on world Jewry. Maybe more importantly, it’s really fair in how it illustrates the divisions and discomforts within and among Jews of different traditions/colors/descents, as well as the way that even established, assimilated, respected, modern, “White” Jews often find themselves alienated no matter where they try to stand or sit.