This Week and Next

Thanksgiving Chores, Leftovers & Hungry Elise Stefanik Comes for Second Helpings.

For over twenty years I’ve been writing my blog at joshuapowell.com. I know those readers. Now my work is now promoted and distributed through NewsBreak. I have thousand of readers from Medium, Substack, and LinkedIn – collectively hundreds of thousands of readers. I get a lot of exposure and a lot of feedback, but today I have to confess the reaction to “The Reference” has knocked me sideways. As any writer knows, your work can land anywhere, and honestly, the reach of this particular essay floored me.

When I sat down to write it, I googled the statistics around people being treated like trash to be taken out. The numbers stunned me. Saddened me. And – here’s the thing – relieved me. For the first time, rendered in my love language (statistical data), I felt ordinary. My pain, my isolation, my fear, my self-loathing – all of it normal. The essay poured out fully formed, sentences and phrases arriving like visions. This is not how I write. I’m not as witty as I sometimes appear. I …