Not to elect one Dutchman as the representative of an entire nation, but when my new friend Harald (host of the excellent Verwondering Podcast) told me that “Going Dutch” implies that the Dutch are cheap or ungenerous, I was like huh! I had never thought of the phrase that way. Truly, when someone proposes to split a bill, I take it as a sign of equity, candor, and practicality. And that strikes me as very Dutch indeed.

The nonprofit Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls was founded in 2004 to offer free music education for BIPOC girls and gender-expansive youth. The program’s namesake is rock n roll ancestor Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton. The program might be Thornton’s most precious legacy since she isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and has never been on the cover of Rolling Stone. There is no Hollywood biopic of her life.

— It is 2am on Monday morning and Jerretta Sandoz, a vice president with the Los Angeles Police Protective League (LAPPL) and an LAPD sergeant (at least through January 2023, according to her LinkedIn account), is on Fox News Channel for a live interview during which she excoriates recently elected LA City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez even though the story she is promoting was debunked several days earlier.Soto-Martinez, a socialist, won the District 13 Council seat on a platform that included defunding and even abolishing the LAPD.

You can stretch right up and touch the sky The time it took to write one of the best selling singles in history could be measured by the minute hand of a wristwatch. Ray Dorset was, in fact, taking a break from his day job at a lab for Timex when he wrote “In The Summertime” in about 10 minutes, banging away on a second hand Stratocaster. His band didn’t even have its name at the time.

Someone once said to me, “Who gets to tell these stories?” during a discussion about personal narratives. It’s a question I ask myself often when I sit down to write and a story has found its way out of me, a story that makes me uncomfortable, one where I worry about its impact and who may feel wronged in me writing it. So who gets to tell these stories and how does language change the way we move through a story teeming to find its way out of us?