Meaghan Wilson Anastasios's Blog

Coal was handed out. Heroes were named. And a horse made the list. Merry Christmas.

Ah, Christmas Eve. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. So, I’ve been writing my naughty and nice list and checking it twice.

There are plenty of both, because 2025 has been… a thing.

I started looking back on the year and didn’t know where to stop.

If you’ve been following me for a bit, you’ll know that I fall into the “Santa as sweary avenging angel” side of the equation. So, proceed with caution.

Here’s what I came up with. It’s part end-of-year political commentary, part scream into the void, and part doff-the-cap to those who kept the light on when things teetered on the brink of the abyss.

But I definitely left out some corkers. Add yours down below in the comments. Because I’d hate to miss out on dumping a curly one in the stockings of some deserving gobshites, or giving due credit to the saviours amongst us.

Without further ado…

Naughty listThe Neck-gina

More majora than minora, they were the pendulous wattles that mesmerised the world. Hints of a rash suggested a yeast infection requiring a topical cream, while debate raged about who in the administration was most likely to be enjoying the favours of those sweet, sweet skinfolds.

Oval Office redecorator

If less is more, the interior design of the Oval Office was once a masterclass in restraint. It conveyed dignity, strength, and power. Overnight, it became “what in Liberace’s gilded taint the fuck is going on here?”

It now looks like an enthusiastic pre-schooler has been set loose with a hot-glue gun, a box of resin decals, and some gold spray paint. And don’t get me started on the “Presidential Walk of Infamy.” There’s not enough sage in the world for the burning we’re going to need when this administration’s done.

Quiet piggy

If I included all fuckups perpetrated by the burlap sack rolled in Cheeto dust then stuffed with abattoir waste and foreskin scrapings, I’d be writing for months. But “quiet, piggy” deserves a mention. It was the moment the mask slipped, and we saw the ash-filled, dank, and desolate space that in most human beings is occupied by a soul.

Donald Trump’s medical team

For much of the year, he’s looked close to death.

You’ve made the list because you kept him going.

Cankles

You’re not working fast enough.

Epstein list redactors

It takes a particular type of person to review documentary evidence of industrial-scale child abuse. They’re usually the ones on the side of the angels, working to bring monsters to justice.

Then there are those who have been burning the midnight oil to wade through the sinkhole of shit that is the Epstein files to protect the identities of the perpetrators. How loudly can you say “aiding and abetting”?

They’re the same ones who are so stupid they used Adobe to redact the files, which as anyone over the age of six will tell you, means if you copy and paste the text into a Word document, you can read it. So now all the filthy muck they were trying to hide is out in the open.

Mar-a-Lago caterers

With an initiation fee of US$1 million, many say that the main attraction of a Mar-a-Lago membership is to gain access to The Great Fatsby. One thing’s for sure; they’re not going for the food.

The Trump Ballroom

Nobody needs that much ball room. Especially him. Just ask Stormy.

And don’t get me started on the East Wing.

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The Circle-jerk Air-wank

I was torn with this one. Could have made either list. On the one hand, I die of second-hand embarrassment every time YMCA hits the loudspeakers, and he starts… whatever it is that he’s doing. But on the other, seeing stadiums of MAGA dingleberries cheering and doing the air-wank while singing a gay anthem about picking up dudes in a sports club never fails to amuse.

Mar-a-Lago face

Proving that money and taste are often mutually exclusive, MAGA women with money slapped down a ton of it to turn their faces into something that looks like a balloon animal crafted by a slow learner in first-year clown school.

Elon

Difficult to know where to start with this one. Between turning the White House into a car lot, using DOGE to defund USAID resulting in 800,000 deaths worldwide, the Nazi salute, and how many rockets did he blow up? I’ll give him this: he doesn’t do “fuckwit” by halves.

Threads

OK, this is personal. But that’s what these lists are all about. Threads makes the list for taking my money to be a verified account, but banning me not once, but three times for being a bot. Upside of this, an army of friends came to my aid and had me reinstated! Even turned me into a trending topic.

ICE

For tearing families apart, terrorising communities, and not being man enough to do so unmasked.

Tariffs

As much as the rest of the world enjoyed their fat slices of schadenfreude pie with cream as MAGA went postal when they realised they were the ones paying the tariffs, the unhinged and shambolic way the program was rolled out caused global economic chaos.

JD Vance

For being duplicitous, self-serving, on a leash held by Peter Thiel, and most of all, out-and-proud in his racism while married to a woman, and father of children, who have Indian heritage. Upside being, he gave us plenty to laugh at. And his eternal vacation gave us something to protest, at home and abroad.

AI

Specifically, generative AI. In a general sense, for filling the world with slop while burning through the world’s drinking water and convincing every man and his dog that he can be the filmmaker or author he was meant to be but had neither the skills nor the talent to do so.

!Spoiler alert! He can’t.

And at a personal level, for stealing four of my books and being trained on them, all with the endgame of putting me out of a job.

FIFA

And its president, Gianni Infantino, for making us all sign up for membership of AntiFIFA after they invented a participation award for the world’s most petulant and over-indulged man-baby. I decided to join the party as well, and granted myself the inaugural FIFA prize for literature.

KKKarolyin’ Leavitt

For being the public face of the least transparent, most corrupt American administration in history, all the while making a show of her Christian faith while doing things that would inspire her god to come down and do a whole lot of smiting.

Billionaires

For sending Katy Perry into space. For bringing her back. For the wedding in Venice. For luxury bunkers being built to survive the pending apocalypse they are creating. For ushering in a new era of global servitude. For not paying taxes. For having more money than any one person could ever need, and for not doing anything truly worthwhile with it. For being capitalism’s endgame.

Nice listTime Magazine

For creating the one, brutally honest, magazine cover you can be pretty fucking sure won’t be ending up framed on Trump’s fap-wall of infamy.

Whoever did this Also, this

The only justifiable use of generative AI.

Diaper Diplomacy

Oh, this too.

The geniuses behind this account, which managed to come up with the only way many of us could bear listening to the stream of diarrhea spewing forth from his mouth anus.

Queen Maxima

Speaking of “mouth anus,” the Queen of the Netherlands did what we’re all thinking every time we’re forced to watch those pursed lips do their thing.

The British Cavalry horse

We were all this horse.

The Rapture that never happened

It came and went in September, and was the source of much-needed hilarity it as people sold their possessions and arranged post-Apocalyptic pet minding, only to be left here on earth with the rest of us sinners.

Mackenzie Scott

While the male billionaires have earned their place in infamy, the same can’t be said for Mackenzie Scott. She shows how it should be done by giving away US$26 billion since her divorce from Jeff Bezos, who traded down when he dumped this fine woman and took up with a bedazzled ziplock bag of silicone.

Otis, the United Nations escalator

The little escalator that could. It was his moment to shine. With his sidekick, the United Nations teleprompter, it only took malfunctioning equipment to stop a would-be dictator in his tracks. Whether it was accidental, or deliberate, we’ll never know. I choose to believe the latter.

Comedians

As so many powerful Americans dithered and played a demeaning game of “who can be the biggest suck-up,” comedians took up arms and manned the frontline. Despite threats and sackings, Kimmel, Colbert, Stewart, and the geniuses at Southpark found something for us to laugh about, even as the White House’s clown-car of cosplaying staffers did their very best to kill satire.

Portland

The people of Portland showed the only way to stand up to ICE. Between the inflatable suits, the rollerblades, and the dance parties, if ICE went in hard, the optics would have been terrible.

Honourable mention? The Portland frog.

Squeaky McTankface

Trump tried to pressgang the US army’s 250th celebrations into a birthday party for himself on a scale that would impress his authoritarian besties. It failed.

Squeaky McTankface was the mascot of the moment.

Canadian PM Carney

Canada’s Mark “Winky” Carney became the leader the world needs now; clever, warm, funny, charming, determined. I tried to negotiate a shared custody situation on behalf of Australia where we got to have him every second weekend, and promised to return him almost good as new. No luck.

Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots

Hold on, don’t shout. It’s on the “nice” list for a reason. Some of the funniest moments on the Australian interwebs this year came from our valiant attempts to rename our homegrown Temu Trump’s pathetic, and delightfully short-lived, political party. It was how we ended up with Crumpetholes of Straightwank, Bumtrumpets of Flatulents, Flugelhorn of Fuckwits, Crumpet of Apricots, and Highland Bagpipe of Hoofwanking Bumblecunts. Sigh. Good times.

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The eyeroll

Putting aside her questionable politics, Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni earns a place in the nice list thanks to the epic eyeroll that said what the rest of us were thinking.

Anthony Joshua & Chase DeMoor

For taking one for the team and wiping the floor with two douchecanoes the rest of us would also love to clobber, given half the chance.

Ahmed al Ahmed

The unarmed Aussie hero who disarmed the gunman taking potshots at Jewish families gathered at Bondi Beach to celebrate Hanukkah. He didn’t see race or religion. He saw fellow Australians being killed by two cowards with guns.

In case you’re wondering, the two skinsuits filled with meat who murdered fifteen Australians did not make the “naughty” list because they are subhuman and should be erased from history.

Zohran Mamdami

For giving right-minded Americans something to hope for. And for showing that “socialism” isn’t something to be feared. It’s what you call looking after each other. Ref: “Billionaires” in the naughty list.

No Kings protesters

Despite threats, the millions of Americans who stood up for those who could not.

Christopher Anderson

His portraits of the cosplaying White House administration for Vanity Fair stripped them bare. It’s a masterclass in portraiture. He captured them as they really are. Chaotic. Common. Messy. Inept. Bile oozing out of every gaping pore. Utterly out of their depth.

Women in the White House press pool

While their male colleagues simpered and kowtowed, the women in the White House press corps stood their ground, fought back, and showed the rest of them how to do it. Catherine Lucey. Mary Bruce. Kaitlan Collins. Katie Rogers.

Kennedy Family

For their grace under fire, as the bloviating tub of month-old hamburger mince and prawn heads dropped his diaper and shat all over their family legacy.

Needless to say, this honorific excludes the one family member on Team Trump: RFK Jnr; the desiccated nutsack I like to think of as microwaved Mel Gibson.

Australia

If we existed and were something other than a continent populated by things that want to kill you, drink you, or swear at you.

Because we stepped up at the ballot box and told our would-be clusterfuck of Tangerine Palpatines to fuck off, then keep fucking off until they ran out of places to fuck off too, only to look for yet another spot just beyond the horizon that warranted a fucking off to and keep going even then. Because we really don’t like Trump. We really, really, really don’t like him.

To add to that, when unimaginable evil came to Bondi, we rose to the occasion. Because that’s who we are. We look after each other.

Rescue kitten Aurora

Because, kitten. Also, kitten. And then more kitten. Always, kitten.

Bouncy son

For bouncing on a global level. For getting an ARIA nomination. For giving us something to cheer for.

Dad-joke-loving daughter

For the dad jokes. And, fuck knows, we need as many laughs as we can get.

Sunday Riley

Yes, she’s a fictional character, and one I invented. But it’s my list. I can do what I like. And a horse made the grade. So, a nod is due to the imaginary woman who let me channel my inner mania and put my feelings about the times I’m living through down on paper in my latest novel, SUNDAY RILEY IS ALL OUT OF F*CKS TO GIVE.

Friends on Threads and Substack…

Topping—or ending—the list, all my friends online who made this year bearable. You’ve helped me keep my sanity. Your wry humour, pithy responses, exemplary grammar and punctuation have renewed my faith in humanity. This year would have been far bleaker without you.

Thank you.

Be safe. Be happy. Be you.

Who did I leave off the list? Who made your naughty and nice list?

The post A Naughty and Nice List for 2025: A Year That Broke Politics, Decency, and My Will to Live first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

A free e-copy of my latest novel, “Sunday Riley is All Out of F*cks to Give”

Exciting news!

I’ve been given a link to a free preview copy of my e-book, SUNDAY RILEY IS ALL OUT OF F*CKS TO GIVE and told to share it with friends who might want to read it in advance of the release on 20 Jan. Big mistake. Because they didn’t specify HOW MANY FRIENDS!

Fuck playing favourites. The vote of confidence you’ve given me by subscribing and reading my ponderings here has helped me keep my sanity this year, and I want to say thanks. Think of it as a Christmas gift.

If you like the way I write here, you’ll like SUNDAY RILEY IS ALL OUT OF F*CKS TO GIVE. It’s a funny, sweary beach read – blurb & other things below.

Importantly, I’m sure the point will come when I’ll be told I’ve given enough away for free, and to cease and desist. The link will expire on 18 January, either way. So grab your copy while you can!

If you have any problems with the download, the Bookfunnel people can help. Don’t ask me – I’ll be less than useful. Words I can do. That tech shit? Forget it.

Of course, don’t feel obliged to read it. It may not be to your taste! Feel free to pass it on to someone you know who you think might enjoy it, instead. But the link will only work once. If you want to pass the book onto someone else, you’ll need to share this post with your friend so they can sign up themselves.

Most of all, thank you. This wouldn’t exist without you.

Without further ado, click here for the link to download your copy from Bookfunnel.

Really hope you enjoy it! It will, if nothing else, make you laugh!

The post A Christmas gift from me to you! first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

In the aftermath of the Bondi attack, Australians respond in a way that reveals something profound about our national identity.Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia.It was the vision that gripped the world

A passer-by tackles one of the Bondi shooters, wrestles him to the ground, and grabs his gun.

In a moment of extraordinary bravery, that man put his life on the line to save strangers. He took multiple bullets from the second gunman for his troubles.

Then we learnt the hero’s name.

Ahmed al Ahmed. The Aussie hero of the day came here as a Syrian migrant ten years ago. He is a Muslim man who risked his life to save Jewish strangers.

It couldn’t have been a more Aussie moment.

Why?

When shit goes down, we help each other

It’s that simple.

He might have been born half a world away, but Ahmed al Ahmed gets it.

He saw two men shooting at a group of Jewish Australians celebrating the beginning of Hanukkah in a park by Australia’s most iconic beach.

It wasn’t self-defence. They weren’t shooting at him. He was across the road having coffee with his cousin. But it was enough that they were shooting fellow Australians.

As his parents put it after the event, “When he did what he did, he wasn’t thinking about the background of the people he’s saving, the people dying in the street.”

“He doesn’t discriminate between one nationality and another. Especially here in Australia where there’s no difference between one citizen and another.”

Australia is a place of refuge

Ahmed didn’t know it at the time, but he had at least one thing in common with an elderly man who died on the green lawn fringing Bondi’s iconic golden beach.

Alex Kleytman was a Holocaust survivor; Ahmed came to Australia ten years ago, when he fled Syria to escape ISIS’ reign of terror. Both men arrived here wanting to put a violent past behind them.

It’s true of so many Australians. Perhaps that’s why we’re so quick to help each other.

We empathise with each other because so many of us came here to build a better life in a safer place.

Photo by Gary Sankary on UnsplashWe come together as one

Now, twenty-four hours after the attack, here are just some of the things that are happening:

· Queues at blood donation centres around the country are out the door.

· The state premier is calling for more—not less—gun control.

· Ahmed al Ahmed, is in hospital recovering after sustaining multiple gunshot wounds. A GoFundMe page for him has raised A$1.7 million and is still climbing.

· Our Prime Minister laid a floral wreath at the site of the attack.

· The road outside the Bondi pavilion is a carpet of bouquets from people arriving to pay tribute to the dead, and the many Australians who helped them in their hour of need.

· The leader of the opposition Liberal party in New South Wales, which is our equivalent of America’s Republicans and, confusingly, not very “liberal,” was interviewed by our local version of Fox News. The journalist tried to turn it into an attack piece on the government’s anti-Semitism policy. A horrified Kellie Sloane shut her down.

· At a National Cabinet meeting between our Prime Minister and all the state premiers, a resolution was passed to tighten our gun laws.

· Australia’s Islamic community has refused to handle the shooters’ bodies or perform religious burial rites for them because the Qu’ran forbids the murder of non-combatants. The message? Heinous acts like these will send the perpetrators straight to hell.

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie.

This is the way things work here.

As the tragedy unfolded, lifeguards, passing nurses and doctors, off-duty police officers, and ordinary Australians ran to offer aid and comfort to a group of fellow Aussies who were attacked while they were celebrating together by the ocean.

In that moment, they were Australians above all else.

We don’t look for difference. We don’t hide. We don’t find someone to blame. We take care of each other.

There are always a few who try to make hay while the rest of us are checking in on each other. But they get told in no uncertain terms.

It’s part of who we are.

And it got me thinking about what it is that makes us this way.

The tall poppy syndrome

For one thing, exceptionalism has no place here.

We’ve got a thing here called the “tall poppy syndrome.” It means we cut down anyone who rises above the pack.

That’s not always a good thing. It means individual achievement isn’t always celebrated as much as it should be.

But at its heart, it means we think of each other as equals. We don’t put people up on pedestals.

Because we’re not all desperately scrambling over each other to get to the finishing line first, we look sideways at those who do. Donald Trump wouldn’t have made it out of preschool with his self-adulation and bloated pride intact.

In Australia, it doesn’t matter where you come from. It doesn’t matter which school you went to. It doesn’t matter what car you drive. As long as you’re not “up yourself,” and “think your shit doesn’t stink,” we’ll help you.

Because, as far as most of us are concerned, we all bleed red. And we don’t have much time for those who think otherwise.

Welcome! But leave your shit at the door. Photo by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash

If you want to know our immigration policy, that’s pretty much it.

We celebrate being a multicultural nation. We’re proud of it.

One in three of us were born overseas.

But when you arrive, we’ll be making you our own. Like it or not, you’ll be getting a new name if the original’s a bit of a mouthful. Mohammed will become ‘Mo’, Deepika will be known as ‘Dee,’ and Dimitri will be ‘Jimbo.’

We’ll definitely adopt your food. The go-to street-food favourites here are Turkish gözleme, Chinese dumplings of every type, and HSP—Halal Snack Pack for the uninitiated; it’s a plate of grilled meat with fries, melted cheese, and chilli sauce. And let’s not forget every Aussie kid’s favourite fast food: a tuna nori roll. Yes, really.

Not a weekend goes by without a festival celebrating one of the hundreds of cultures whose people have chosen to make Australia their home. It’s why Sydney’s Jewish community had gathered to celebrate the Festival of Light by the sea. It’s what we do.

But there’s one thing most Australians don’t want to hear about. If you have stories about rusted-on, intergenerational shit from your home country, you can check it at the cloakroom before you come in.

Start banging on about the battle in 1549 when the neighbours crossed the border and stole a chunk of land from your homeland, and the response you’ll most likely get here is, “time to build a bridge and get over it, champ,” or “have a cup of concrete, mate, and harden the fuck up.”

That hasn’t always sat well with me.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating this attitude. I’m a historian. I’m all about learning from the lessons of the past. So, this Australian characteristic has grated on me over the years.

But here’s the thing. After having children and wanting to raise them in a place that’s safe and accepting of difference, I’ve realised the value of drawing a line in the sand. There’s a lot to be said for defusing a ticking time bomb by setting aside difference and finding common ground. It’s about moving on.

You hear it all the time here when things get heated.

“Steady on, mate.”

“Take it easy, champ.”

“Yeah, nah, she’ll be right.”

And, most of all, “C’mon. Give it a rest. Shout you a beer?”

We really, really, really hate authority

Did I mention we hate authority?

Our soldiers in both world wars were regarded as amongst the most dogged and fierce troops sent to the front. They were also the most disobedient. They ignored orders and pushed back against decisions they didn’t agree with.

It’s a funny thing, because as much as America likes to call itself the land of the free, I reckon we’ve cornered that market.

We swear, and we drink. Admittedly, probably a little too much of both.

Most of us don’t care what you do in your bedroom, as long as it doesn’t involve children or animals.

You’re free to worship whatever floats your boat. But don’t start your happy-clapping at our front door, because almost 40 per cent of us have no religious faith at all, with only 4 per cent of us heading to church every week. As for the so-called “Muslim invasion,” only 3 per cent of us are Islamic.

All in all, we’re not inclined to toe the line.

Thank fuck we got the convicts rather than the puritans

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I’ll always be glad that Australia got a bunch of political and social exiles and petty crooks rather than the god-botherers. Although, of course, First Australians would have preferred neither.

But the original lawbreakers who made it out here were, for the most part, small-time criminals. Serious crime got you an appointment with the hangman. Nick a loaf of bread, turn a trick on the docks, or forge a banknote, and you’d find yourself on a crowded convict transport headed for the Antipodes. We also got our fair share of political prisoners, including a raft of Irish rebels.

After their sentences were served, former convicts were offered land grants to stay here and build the colony. Many of them did so. But they were left with a solid mistrust of the British officials in charge.

It’s a characteristic that’s woven through Australia’s fabric even today.

For the common good

It seems contradictory that we don’t like being told what to do, but we’re still happy to sign up to compulsory government initiatives.

The catch? We’ll do it when they’re things that make our community better.

Gun controls. Universal healthcare. Paid parental leave. A universal disability support scheme. Paid carers’ leave. Paid annual holidays. Paid sick leave. Employer-funded superannuation.

It’s the same reason we sucked up lockdown during COVID. Sure, there was a noisy minority who made a fuss about vaccinations and social distancing. But when it came down to it, we were more concerned about making sure our neighbours didn’t die, than we were about preserving individual freedoms.

Again, it all comes down to looking out for each other.

The democracy sausage Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

The other thing that makes us who we are is our electoral system.

For a start, electoral boundaries are decided by an apolitical, non-partisan electoral commission that also supervises our elections.

And let’s not forget compulsory voting. It keeps the lunatic fringe right where they belong: on the fringes. Because when you’re forced to stand in that booth and make a choice, most of us don’t grab a pencil and choose an utter numpty to lead us.

The other thing that works for us is that election day here is a Saturday. Polling places are often local schools, which run BBQs and bake stalls to raise funds. It’s why we talk about having our “democracy sausage.” While we wait to vote, we have ourselves a snag (transl: sausage) in a slice of bread with sauce (transl: ketchup).

But we don’t vote for our legal and law enforcement officials. They rise through the ranks based on merit. They’re appointed by peers, rather than public acclaim. And we’re quite OK with that. I’d much rather a sober-minded and serious adherent to the legal justice system was hearing my case, than someone who ended up in office as a political or popular appointment.

The sum total of all this is that our society is missing many of the adversarial platforms that tear America to pieces. We trust the system because it’s not spawned by an “us vs. them” mentality.

The past should not define our future.

This extraordinary land is blessed in so many ways. People come here for a fresh start. But a clean slate only works if it’s wiped clear of all the layers of accumulated chalk that make it difficult to read.

That doesn’t mean you ignore the past. My home state, Victoria, recently passed into law a treaty with Indigenous communities to acknowledge the horrific losses Aboriginal people endured when Britain colonised this continent.

The treaty allows us to apologise for past crimes and make amends. That’s a wonderful, and very important, thing.

Anti-migration? Don’t make me laugh.

The only people who do have an unbroken and ancient connection with Australia are those Indigenous people who have called it home for at least 60,000 years.

They are the guardians of the longest continuing cultural tradition in the world. To put that in context, the early human migration out of Africa began 100,000 years ago.

Compared to Aboriginal Australians, the rest of us are newbies. My family on both sides have been here since the early 1800s. For someone of European heritage, that’s almost as old a connection as you can get. But compared to 60,000 years? Don’t make me fucking laugh.

It’s why I get hot under the collar when the anti-migration lobby start carrying on. Compared to Indigenous Australians, we’re all recent arrivals.

And we’re all very lucky to call this place home.

I am, you are, we are Australian.

Australia has an unofficial anthem that captures all this. It’s a stirring and beautiful song.

No, it’s not The Angel’s classic, “Am I ever going to see your face again?” and its rousing, crowd-pleasing response, “No way, get fucked, fuck off!”

It’s “I Am Australian,” written in 1987 by The Seekers.

Anytime I hear it, it brings tears to my eyes because it captures all that is wonderful about this great southern land.

Today, it resonates even more than ever.

This is the chorus:

“We are one
But we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We’ll share a dream
And sing with one voice
I am, you are, we are Australian.”

© Bruce Woodley, Dobe Newton 1987

This is who we are.

Today, we’re not British or Indian, Chinese or Syrian, Italian or Greek.

We’re not Christian, Jewish, or Muslim; Buddhist, Taoist, or Hindu.

Today, we’re Australian above all else.

We will get through this and be stronger than ever.

I’m sure of that.

The post Bondi and the Best of Australia first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

Yeah. Me too. It’s why I wrote ‘Sunday Riley is all out of f*cks to give.’Marrakech’s medina broke me. Koutoubia minaret, Marrakech, Morocco. Photo by M. Wilson Anastasios

That was where my latest novel, Sunday Riley is all out of f*cks to give, began.

It was meant to be the trip of a lifetime.

A three-month working holiday for me and the husband. A ‘grown-up gap year,’ was how we put it. With our second child graduated from high school, last year we decided to escape Melbourne’s bitterly cold winter in favour of summer in our beloved Mediterranean.

One month in the tiny, hilltop Andalusian village of Gaucín; another on the Sicilian island of Ortigia; and the third on the tiny Greek island of Symi, with side-trips to Morocco, Puglia, and Turkey.

Sounds pretty fucking brilliant, right? Yeah. It was never going to be that easy, though.

All good so far. Sunrise, Marrakech Medina, Morocco. Photo by M. Wilson Anastasios

I chose Morocco as the place to kick off our adventure because I’ve always wanted to visit. The husband loved it when he spent time there many years ago. So, it seemed as good a spot as any.

We’re both seasoned travellers. We met when we were working as archaeologists in Turkey and have travelled extensively in the Middle East. So, we understand the unfamiliar.

Or so I thought.

We’ve always been “choose your own adventure” style travellers. Tours and itineraries? Yeah, nah. No thanks.

So, of course we decided it would make for a much more authentic experience if we booked into a boutique hotel in a lovely converted riad in the Marrakech medina—the thousand-year-old walled heart of the city. Sure, it’d be more of a challenge than staying in one of the luxury hotels outside the city walls.

With GPS, we’d be fine, right? Marrakech Medina, Morocco. Photo by M. Wilson Anastasios.

Wrong. Turned out our provider from home didn’t offer internet service in Morocco. Even more helpfully, when we tried to buy an e-Sim via the hotel’s WiFi, our account was blocked due to “suspicious activity.”

That was our first mistake.

Our second? Thinking we’d be able to find our way around with an old-school paper map. Yes, they do still make them. I was surprised, too. Only, trap for young players: don’t try to ask anyone under forty to use one to give you directions. You may as well ask them to calculate your room tab with an abacus.

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Enter, the Marrakech medina. Marrakech Medina, Morocco. Photo by M. Wilson Anastasios

Actually, don’t. Not without a guide.

To draw a picture for you, imagine taking a colander of cooked spaghetti and dropping it on the ground. That’s the map we were confronted with.

North African medinas were designed to bamboozle invaders. The corridors and laneways are narrow and hemmed in by walls so high it’s impossible to orient yourself with the sun, much less the horizon or visible landmarks.

We were lost within minutes.

A few minutes after that, we fell for the oldest scam in the Marrakech handbook.

Tip for travellers? Marrakech Medina, Morocco. Photo by M. Wilson Anastasios

When an apparently helpful local in Marrakech offers to help you find your way to where you are heading, what they’re actually doing is leading you deeper into the medina so they can make you hand over cash to guide you out of the maze. And don’t ever accept an invitation to the Berber market. It doesn’t exist. Trust me.

Cue me and the husband standing in a rundown corner of the medina with three men demanding cash.

Yeah.

The effect it had on me was not what the seasoned conmen had anticipated.

Something snapped. Marrakech, Morocco. Photo by M. Wilson Anastasios

I started shouting. I called them every name under the sun as the husband and I started walking back the way we had come. They shouted back. I shouted some more. People stopped and stared. And I did not give a single fuck.

There was a reason the Greeks made their Furies women. That day, I was one of their number. And I didn’t know myself.

The husband held my hand, and I knew if things got nasty, he’d fight back because he is that guy. So, I didn’t feel in danger. I never do when I’m with him.

The men followed us for a bit, but eventually tired of the chase and wandered off to find another mark.

We just kept walking. Fes Medina, Morocco. Photo by M. Wilson Anastasios.

I wasn’t looking where we were going. I wasn’t enjoying the extraordinary things that passed us by. I just wanted it all to be over.

I knew we’d end up horribly lost. And we did. But we kept going until we saw an official sign—instead of one of the many unofficial ones put up to confuse tourists—pointing to a museum of photography I had seen on the map.

We found our way to the museum and saw quite a lovely exhibition we never would have seen otherwise. Small wins, right?

But while the husband was in the bathroom and I was sitting at an outdoor table in the roof restaurant with an orange soda—because even though what I desperately needed at that moment was a glass of something, anything, alcoholic, Morocco is a dry country.

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I started weeping. Orangina, Marrakech Medina. Photo by M. Wilson Anastasios.

The existential horror as I crossed off that fucking awful first day and realised there were eighty-nine to go before I’d see my children’s faces again was next level.

That’s right. A three-month dream holiday, and I was counting down the days till it ended.

If you’d asked me before we left whether my identity was all knotted up in my role as a mother, I would have laughed myself silly. But there I was, crying into my Orangina and feeling like there was an over-extended bungee cord connecting my heart to my two children, half a world away.

‘They’ll be fine,’ friends had said to me. ‘They’re great kids. They can look after themselves.’ But that was the problem. They would be fine. Because they didn’t need me anymore. Life was thanking me for my service and sending me out to pasture.

It was a lot more than just that, though.

The hormonal rollercoaster of being a woman of a certain age, which coincides with the erosion of the foundation of who you think you are as a person, is something I was completely unprepared for.

Why is that? How many leaflets and utterly cringeworthy videos about what to expect from puberty did we all have to suffer through? Where’s the ‘how-to’ guide for the other massive hormonal shift half the world’s population goes through?

For me, it wasn’t just about the physical symptoms, although they are definitely a big thing. What the fuck is with the itchy ears? And the waking up at 3am? I swear that’s where the idea of witches came from. It was just a bunch of perimenopausal women grabbing a broom and doing a bit of housework in the dead of night.

The biggest issue for me has been the erosion of my sense of self.

For much of my time on this planet, I’ve been a risk taker. The way I figured it, I didn’t want to have any regrets if I ever found myself contemplating my life as I lay on the road dying after being hit by a bus. The irony being that the time came when I was, in fact, involved in quite a serious head-on assault by a tram. But that’s a story for another day.

My motto has always been “give a fuck!” What did I have to lose? I’d happily wander down a road for a bit to see where it took me. If I didn’t like where it was headed, I knew I could always backtrack and take another turn.

However, the coming of age has brought with it the realisation that those pleasant byways and highways are fast becoming a thing of the past. As time begins to run out, exploration feels like a luxury. But that’s always defined my life; discovery, exploration and never being entirely sure what might be hidden around the next corner.

It’s a central part of who I am.

Perhaps my new truth is that it’s the old me.

And that’s what began to bother me. As I grappled with the impenetrable laneways of Marrakech’s medina, I was utterly lost, literally and figuratively.

That’s where Sunday Riley came from. I wanted to capture something I know to be true for so many women. When I made a callout on social media asking women to share their experiences, the post went viral. More than three thousand women wrote responses that made me laugh, cry and rage on their behalf.

Sunday Riley is me, and she is all of them. Pedi Beach, Symi, Greece. Photo by M. Wilson Anastasios.

After the less than stellar start to our dream holiday, I did get to my Greek island. It was as idyllic as I had hoped. And it was where I began writing, and Sunday found her voice.

Sunday’s not me. Not exactly. Her experiences aren’t mine. Not exactly. But she does speak for me, and for all the women like me.

Sunday’s own Greek island adventure is funny, outrageous, angry, and heartbreaking because life for women like me at this stage of life is all those things. It’s an uplifting and tender coming-of-age story for the middle-agers about the search for a new chapter in life full of love, meaning, and purpose after all those things have been stripped away.

It’s also a story for the people who love them despite, or perhaps because, of it.

This is my promise to myself that everything is going to be OK, and that the journey is one worth taking.

In the meantime, things are getting better.

More than anything, I’m looking forward to the moment so many women who have been through this stage of life say is coming.

The moment when like Sunday Riley, I, too, have no f*cks left to give.

The post Pining for the Greek islands with a serve of mid-life crisis? first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

The art of storytelling and why it’s not going to die anytime soon

Once upon a time, there was a moment in human history when one of our ancient ancestors looked down at her or his hand and thought, “What the fuck am I? Where did I come from? What am I doing here? And, wow, check out this opposable thumb!”

There’s a good reason we respond to stories. Human beings have been storytellers for as long as we have been capable of abstract thought.

Stories have always been more than just entertainment.

At its most heightened, storytelling is a way of grappling with the vast and abstract nature of existence.

Stories are how we capture, condense, and communicate the essence of what it means to be human.

At its most basic, storytelling is about survival. Tales of gods and heroes make sense of natural forces outside our control. Myths and legends are mnemonic devices that allowed us to survive and thrive as a species.

Without this meaning, context, and history, a story is just a pre-packaged, processed word salad tossed in a bowl without dressing.

It kind of looks like the same thing, but completely lacks flavour or distinguishing features.

It’s all in the story

The stories that grab us are the ones that seduce us and burrow down into our souls. They do that because they’re born of human experience.

Art isn’t a product. It’s not something glued together from bits pulled out of a box. There’s no flat-pack art of any value. It’s the result of a process guided by human emotions and informed by the myriad things that make us who we are.

An artist sets out to make a work of art—whether that’s a song, a painting, a poem, or a play—by bringing a lifetime’s experience to the table. It’s not writing a prompt and having a machine spit out a plagiarised puree of words that resembles what it thinks a human might feel.

For example, I asked ChatGPT to write a sentence that would make me cry.

This is what I got:

When she packed away his favourite mug, she realised the only thing in the house that still remembered him was the dust on its rim.

Yeah.

Sort of a few things there. But it’s a random handful of Lego. It’s not a fully realised Millennium Falcon (yes, Star Wars nerd. Sue me.)

So, I had a go at the same idea myself:

She never got around to fixing the chip in his favourite mug, which broke when it fell from his hand that last breakfast together; but she kept it next to hers in the cupboard just the same and sometimes brewed him tea anyway—’strong and sweet, like you’ he used to say—and let it get cold on the sink.

If that moves you even a little bit, it’s because my own experience of loss is speaking to you through those words. I’m channelling the grief I feel when I think of people dear to my heart who are no longer with me and imagine a future when I lose those who remain.

If you understand, it’s because you have felt it too.

We’re speaking to each other through the medium of those words.

There are few things more human than that.

The most potent art is never formulaic

The “Persian flaw” was a deliberate error woven into a Persian rug by the weaver. It was there to acknowledge that the only creator capable of perfection was Allah.

Don’t know about that. They clearly haven’t tasted my Christmas pudding.

But the most potent art is never formulaic. It doesn’t follow a set of SEO prompts. It’s not created to maximise clicks, follows, or views. Just like my Christmas pudding kind of follows a recipe but changes slightly every year. I couldn’t ever repeat it.

That’s what the best art is like. You can’t necessarily pick what it is, exactly, that speaks to you. But you know it when you see it.

Or, should I say: you know it when you feel it.

Often, it’s the random and accidental moments that feed into its creation that make a work of art sing.

The story is as important as the art Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889.

Whatever its form—whether it’s art on a page, or a canvas, or a playlist—the art that moves us has a backstory.

Vincent Van Gogh didn’t just make pretty pictures. That’s not why we’re obsessed with him. We’re touched by his art because we connect with his story.

Starry Night isn’t just a painting of a night sky. It’s the view out the window of the asylum Van Gogh retreated to after his mental breakdown and the infamous ear episode. We value the story almost as much as the art object itself.

Want proof? Take the painting once owned by the National Gallery of Victoria and described as a self-portrait by Van Gogh. Its value then? Fifteen million dollars or so.

Enter the Van Gogh Museum. When questions were raised about the painting’s authorship, the world authority on the artist examined it and declared it a dud. In an instant, its value dropped to a few thousand at best.

The painting had not changed in any material sense. What had changed, however, was its story.

That’s where the value lies. Its story.

Making Vincent Van Gogh Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger, 1889.

You know who knew that better than anyone? Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the widow of Vincent’s art-dealer brother, Theo, who inherited Van Gogh’s entire body of work.

Vincent famously didn’t sell a single painting during his lifetime. His posthumous fame came when Johanna saw the value of the stories captured in Vincent’s letters to his brother. She tapped into the stories behind the paintings and marketed his work to collectors across Europe.

Without Johanna, we would never have met Vincent.

Thank fuck, right?

Storytelling as a survival guide

For tens of thousands of years, storytelling was, quite literally, a matter of life and death.

As human beings moved further from their place of origin in the animal kingdom, their brains became something else.

All other species know how to navigate vast swathes of sea or land without maps and signs, much less GPS. Most of us humans? Not so much.

Like, I’m sorry, but how the fuck do salmon spend seven years out at sea, and still find their way back to the river they were born in to spawn? My kids wouldn’t even be able to point you in the direction of the hospital they were born in.

We lost those skills while our brains were becoming organs that allowed us to worry about things like how to get a mortgage to buy a house so we no longer have to migrate when the weather turns foul. But for our ancient ancestors, and for indigenous communities who still rely on ancient wisdom, mnemonic devices embedded in stories are a matter of survival.

Memory palace

If you’ve ever tried to memorise the times tables or the conjugation of the verb ‘to be’ in Latin, you’ll know how difficult rote learning can be.

It’s why storytelling was such an important thing for our ancient ancestors. When we were still wandering the landscape, following the migration of the wild herds that we needed for our prehistoric barbecues, we didn’t have beasts of burden to lug our shit around with us. We had to carry it ourselves.

Think of yourself packing for a month in Europe. If you’re carting your bag yourself, you get damned efficient at downsizing. For bookish folk like me, the Kindle and bag-space saved on books was a godsend.

It was the same for our prehistoric ancestors. Stories weren’t read from a page, because who could be buggered dragging clay tablets from campsite to campsite? Stories were recited out loud and handed down from generation to generation.

The world’s oldest story The Pleiades or Seven Sisters constellation

We know this, because so many stories have passed down virtually unchanged for thousands of years.

And astronomers have identified one that may well be the oldest on earth. That’s right, astronomers. Not historians, palaeontologists or archaeologists.

Bear with me. This is a ripper.

A cluster of stars called the Pleiades are also known as the Seven Sisters. Funny thing, though—if you track them down on a clear night, you’ll only see six, not seven stars.

This is where it gets interesting. Stories of seven heavenly sisters appear in otherwise unrelated European, African, Asian, American Indian, and Aboriginal Australian traditions. All the stories begin with a tale of seven women being pursued into the stars by men.

For the Ancient Greeks, the Pleiades were the seven daughters of Atlas—the guy who held the sky on his shoulders for eternity. Zeus transformed Atlas’ daughters into stars to protect them from being raped by Orion (yeah, rape is a depressingly consistent theme in human storytelling). But the seventh daughter, who had fallen in love with a human, took off with her boyfriend instead. That’s why, according to Greek mythology, we only see six stars.

Half a world away, Indigenous Australian traditions tell a very similar story. Seven sisters were stars, pursued by hunters. Only, one of them disappeared when she hid or was abducted.

Same story, different ending

A collection of stars in the sky can be anything, right? A saucepan. A bull. A man with a bow and arrow. The mnemonic devices used by human beings to read the stars have always been creative, or we’d forget them.

So why would so many diverse cultures choose the exact same story to describe the constellation?

Here’s the kicker. Stars move over time. The reason it only looks like there are six stars in the Pleiades is that one has moved close enough to another that it now looks like a single star.

But astronomers did some calculations and discovered that 100,000 years ago, the stars were in different positions, and all seven would have been visible to the naked eye.

Out of Africa Prehistoric human migration routes.

Know what else happened 100,000 years ago?

The great human migration out of Africa began. Our ancestors travelled across the globe, eventually populating all continents other than Antarctica. Indigenous Australians arrived downunder at least 60,000 years ago and established the longest continuing culture on the planet.

The theory is that all these people who once lived together in Africa carried with them the foundation story of the seven sisters. But once they settled in new homes and thousands of years passed, the seventh sister ‘disappeared’ from the sky. That required a coda to the story.

So, each of the indigenous cultures that speak of the Seven Sisters has a different explanation for what happened to the missing sister.

Sure, it’s just a theory. But it’s a fucking good one if you ask me.

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Once upon a time

The power of storytelling transports us to imagined worlds and transcends the preoccupations—and dangers—of daily life.

It inspires us and lifts us up. Storytelling offers us companionship and wisdom and offers us a sanctuary where we might find comfort and peace.

It’s this deeply ingrained and very human instinct that compels mothers and fathers to read aloud to their children at bedtime, as our ancient ancestors once huddled, wide-eyed, around the safety of a campfire and listened while a wise woman or man recalled tales of gods, ancestors, and great deeds.

Storytelling is the tangible record of humanity.

It lives on in every one of us.

The post How long have we been telling stories? Try 100,000 years first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

Press freedom, journalists holding power to account, and why it matters now more than ever.

When the world’s biggest oinker called seasoned White House correspondent, Catherine Lucey, “piggy,” the world was horrified.

Of the many stains on the soiled toilet-paper roll of horrors Donald Trump has delivered, I don’t know why this one upsets me so much. But it does. And I know I’m not alone.

It’s the abnormally stubby little finger stabbing the air. It’s the physical aggression from a bloated bucket of lard, and the tone of voice familiar to anyone who’s ever been in an abusive relationship. It’s the born-to-rule air… the unwavering sense of entitlement. The certainty that he can do whatever the fuck he wants without ever being called to account.

It’s the fact that he does it while demeaning a woman representing an institution that exists to protect every one of us.

Journalists are there to hold power to account.

You and I can’t line up in the White House press room and ask the hard questions.

In Australia, it’s not unusual to run into our prime minister at a local pub. But even if he was inclined to debate the government’s environmental policies with us, would we even have the right questions to ask?

That’s a journalist’s job. And the best of them knock it out of the park.

When Trump lobs insults at the women and men tasked with trying to keep him honest (yeah, good luck with that), he’s undermining human rights around the world.

Because if the self-acclaimed leader of the free world refuses to answer reasonable questions from the press, why would anyone else?

Photo by Nils Huenerfuerst on Unsplash

I’m not talking about hate-spewing pundits and talking heads here.

They aren’t even a boil on a real journalist’s bum.

I’m talking about old-school journalists. The men and women who will go to jail to protect a source. The heroes who put their lives on the line reporting from war zones. The dog-at-a-bone newshounds who spend months chasing down a lead.

They’re not there to make friends. They’re there to do their job.

There’s a reason that men like Donald Trump don’t like them. It’s because the best of them won’t be bought, won’t be bullied, and won’t give up.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Real journalism vs. opinion

What I’m doing here and elsewhere is not journalism. It’s opinion.

Sure, it’s opinion backed up by experience, knowledge, and research. But it’s unapologetically coloured by my political leanings.

And that — to repeat — is not journalism.

This is the equivalent of having a spirited conversation with someone you know who shares the same opinions as you. You can both bring new things to the table. But your way of thinking isn’t going to be challenged by an inconvenient fact that doesn’t play into your worldview.

Sometimes that’s a good thing. But in chaotic times like the ones we’re living through, it’s not healthy to live in an echo chamber.

On both sides of the political fence, that’s what we’re doing when we let an algorithm decide what we see and hear.

Old-school journalism is the cure.

Only it’s getting increasingly difficult to find it. In a world governed by clickbait headlines and doom-scrolling, society has lost its patience when it comes to reporting.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein spent two years investigating the Watergate scandal before breaking the story for The Washington Post and bringing the Nixon presidency down.

Oh, those were the days, weren’t they? When the act of bugging the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters caused such a scandal that President Nixon fell on his sword. It wouldn’t even rate a footnote today.

It’s also hard to imagine the publication now owned by Jeff Bezos dedicating that amount of time to an investigation into the illegal activities of an incumbent president, especially when the WaPo proprietor is one of the donors to Trump’s fancy new ballroom.

Photo by dole777 on Unsplash

It all comes down to the bottom line

The billionaires who own the social media platforms we use to get our news of the day only care about one thing: the bottom line. Those off-grid luxury bunkers and Yeezy clown shoes aren’t going to pay for themselves, after all.

They want you doom-scrolling on their platform, exclusively. If you see too many things that challenge your belief system, you’re likely to stop. So, they funnel you into silos with a bunch of people who think the same way you do. Which is fine in a social setting. But not great when you want informed points of view that might challenge your perspective.

It’s why social media is eroding critical thinking. We’re not having to defend our opinions. Every like, follow and share convinces us that we’re right. We block people who challenge us and never have to explain why our strong-held beliefs are right, much less try to convince someone else to change their mind.

Photo by Jørgen Håland on Unsplash

There’s a reason Donald Trump goes weak at the knees around dictators.

What he seems to forget is that he’s a public servant. He’s there because an alarmingly high number of Americans chose him as their president.

That also means he must answer to the people who are there for the almost impossible task of keeping him on the straight and narrow: the White House press corps.

And Donald Trump can’t stand that. He looks at Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Mohammed Bin Salman, and Kim Jong Un and wants what they have.

He wants a cowed and blinkered population spoon-fed propaganda by a compliant media that toes the party line and questions nothing.

Until he has that, Donald Trump will continue to undermine and attack the women and men brave enough to face off against him in the Oval Office.

They’re the ones who call him on his lies and pull back the curtain to reveal what’s really going on in the least transparent administration in American history.

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”

It’s literally right out of the Nazi playbook. It’s called the “illusion of truth.”

Lying is second nature to President Trump. The price of groceries has fallen. Other countries are paying the tariffs. America is respected again… it’s the HOTTEST country in the world right now. They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs.

The problem for the Liar-in-Chief is that real journalists know the difference between his lies and the truth. And those with a spine call him on it.

He responds by lobbing insults at — mainly female — journalists who push back. “A terrible person,” “not smart enough,” “you ought to go back and learn how to be a reporter,” “second-rate,” “obnoxious,” and a “terrible reporter.”

He snaps “keep your voice down,” “be nice; don’t be threatening,” “no more questions from you,” and “that’s enough of you.”

Their questions are “horrible,” “insubordinate,” “just terrible.”

News outlets are “fake news,” “a crappy company,” “disasters,” “unwatchable.”

And he threatened to go dibber-dobber and tell Prime Minister Anthony Albanese when an Australian investigative journalist dared ask whether there’s a problem with the Trump family raking in cash by the billions from sweetheart deals while he’s president.

But the point of it all is that while he’s insulting them, he’s not answering their questions.

Photo by Larry Alger on Unsplash

The First, and most important, Amendment

Press freedom was important enough to America’s Founding Fathers that they signed it into law in the First Amendment of the Constitution. So, not buried down the end. Right up the top.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The problem with a free press for those who would rather stifle human rights is that the best journalists shine a light on their bullshit.

That doesn’t always end too well for the journalists themselves.

Ending up at the pointy end of a bone saw was not on Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi’s, agenda when he arrived at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

According to US intelligence, the gruesome state-ordered execution was carried out on the orders of the man snuggling up to President Trump in the Oval Office on 18 November when Mary Bruce of ABC News dared ask the Saudi crown prince a question about a fellow journalist’s horrific death.

Trump called it a “horrible, insubordinate… terrible question.”

The mask slipped, though, when Trump said “It’s not the question that I mind; it’s your attitude… I think you are a terrible reporter… You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.”

Bruce was right to ask the question. Journalists like Khashoggi end up on the shit-list when they expose things that powerful men and women would rather keep quiet.

Trump knows it. His voice shook. You can see the barely contained rage beneath the surface.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Trump was furious because Bruce was doing her job.

As Caroline Hendrie, Executive Director of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) put it: “Journalists are not props at a photo op — they are watchdogs for the public. When reporters ask hard questions about the murder of a fellow journalist, that is not an embarrassment. What’s embarrassing is a leader trying to silence those questions.”

Although Trump would happily hand the lot of them over to Prince MBS —known forever now as Mr Bone Saw — if he had the chance, it’s why all self-respecting journalists must keep pushing. Because Trump will break.

Pioneering journalist, Nellie Bly

Female furies

At the heart of the issue is Trump’s woeful attitude towards women.

As the SPJ puts it: “These incidents are not isolated; they are part of an unmistakable pattern of hostility — often directed at women — that undermines the essential role of a free and independent press.”

Do you reckon he would have called a male journalist “piggy”? Me neither. It’s his favourite slur for women he wants to insult. It’s also rather ironic given his own porcine physique.

But it does warm the cockles to see female journalists fighting back.

There’s a long history of female journalists going in hard. My favourite? Nellie Bly. That’s her in the picture.

In 1887 at the age of 23, she feigned insanity to go undercover at a notorious women’s asylum. The story she wrote for Joseph Pulitzer’s (yes, THAT Pulitzer) New York Worldled to reform at the asylum, and fame for Ms Bly.

She went on to report from the front in WWI and was arrested when mistaken for a British spy.

Look her up. You’ll thank me.

Maybe that’s it. The thought that a rotting husk like Donald Trump thinks he has the God-given right to attack brilliant women like Mary Bruce and Catherine Lucey makes my blood boil.

They’re the offspring of pioneers like Nellie Bly. And as a measure, he’s not worth one of their toenail clippings.

Photo by Tabrez Syed on Unsplash

The White House Shit List

Bullies like Donald Trump only thrive when nobody pushes back.

That’s the other thing that shocked me.

I’ve seen The West Wing. The White House press corps is tight. So why didn’t anybody on board Air Force One go into bat for Lucey?

If, like me, you’ve been wondering why there has been so little resistance from the Press Corps when Trump starts in with his bullying tactics, it may be because he’s got a sword of Damocles hanging over their head in the person of Brendan Carr. Carr is a fierce Trump loyalist who decides who does, and does not, get broadcast licences. Carr is also one of the authors of Project 2025. So, yeah.

It’s why Trump has a habit of threatening to pull ABC’s licence anytime journalists like Mary Bruce ask him questions he doesn’t like.

Remember what happened to Jimmy Kimmel? And Stephen Colbert?

“Neither fear nor favour” has taken a back seat. The cost of doing business with the Trump White House, it seems, is to play nice and cross the president’s palms with gold.

The billionaire owners of the biggest media empires know that. If they want to keep their jobs, the people working for them know it as well.

Quiet, piggy

When journalists ask questions that leaders would rather not answer, they’re doing their job.

When a journalist is attacked without repercussions or pushback, the foundations of democracy begin to erode.

While mainstream media might be on a leash, there’s no controlling hyper-viral social media content.

In the meantime, I hope more brave journalists like Mary Bruce and Catherine Lucey find their voices and start to support each other.

Because the rest of the world certainly has their collective back.

The “quiet, piggy” clip made a mark because online accounts started talking. I had over half a million views on just two posts I made on Threads alone. And there were many, many more. Social media became the conversation.

“Quiet, piggy,” is already the biggest meme of the year.

And I don’t think I’m alone when I say I hope it’s the last thing Trump hears as he’s drummed out of office.

The post This little piggy went wee, wee, wee all the way to the White House. first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

Bollocks, I say. In defense of human voices.

There’s been a bit of a thing online lately where people are questioning the point of creative work, now that AI is replacing so many skilled craftspeople in the creative industries.

Fuck that.

If you’ll happily surrender your creative outlet because a machine can have a fair stab at whatever it is that you do, then you don’t have a creative bone in your body.

Creative expression is an addiction. You may as well tell a junkie to go cold turkey.

Creativity is not a job. It’s a calling. A primal urge. There’s no turning it off.

Will I stop writing novels now that ChatGPT can spit one out in thirty seconds? Not on your life.

Does it mean that my work will be lost in the tsunami of AI-written material that’s flooding the airwaves and drowning out real, human voices?

Quite possibly.

But will it stop me writing?

Never.

Photo by Aaron Burden on UnsplashCreativity is a uniquely human trait.

Taking the spark of an idea and turning it into something totally new, simply for the joy of creating something, is the one thing that distinguishes us from all other creatures.

That’s not to say that animals don’t create remarkably beautiful things. Whales sing to one another from one side of the vast Pacific Ocean to the other. Male bowerbirds scour the undergrowth for iridescent blue trinkets to adorn their elaborate grass bowers. Even the humble toadfish creates mandala-like designs with their fins on the seafloor. But they do those things with a greater purpose; in most instances, to attract, or keep, a mate.

Because, of course they do. The things creatures will do for a date, right?

But human beings make things just for the sake of making them. It’s not about convenience or function. We do it just because.

Just because you can buy a pre-fab iced cake at Coles, if you love baking, do you go for that rather than making one yourself? Hell, no.

Sure, you can order a Richmond scarf online from Tigerland (shut up, haters). Does that mean you don’t have a go at whipping one up for the season opener if you’re a halfway decent knitter? Forget it.

Creativity will never die, because it comes as naturally to humans as breathing.

But can the creative industries survive the AI-generated assault it’s currently enduring? Well, that’s another question altogether.

Photo by Kevin Luke on UnsplashWhy are the creative industries in their sights?

I would genuinely like to know why the first industry the tech bros locked in their sights was the creative one. Why not direct their efforts towards curing cancer? Or solving the climate crisis? Perhaps because to them, true creativity is a puzzle to be solved.

We creatives were all a little too smug when AI first appeared on the scene, weren’t we? “Oh, they’ll never be able to replace us!” we all cried. “It’s just a tool! We can have fun with it, right?”

Wrong.

Instead, they came in the night and robbed us blind.

I was surprised by how violated it made me feel when I learned that four of my books had been downloaded onto LibGen, a pirated book database that was used to train AI programs.

It wasn’t just that my own work was being used to create a system whose primary aim is to make jobbing writers like me redundant. Though that is certainly a thing. It was because as any creative writer will tell you, our work means a great deal more to us than just words on a page.

Photo by Robert Anasch on UnsplashOur souls are sandwiched between the covers of our books.

When I write something for pay — a piece of copy for a developer, a script for a documentary series, a pitch document for a feature film — it’s an exercise that primarily comes from my head. There’s a series of switches I’m conscious of flicking on and off to tap into a particular voice, tone, and lexicon to suit a specific job.

Those jobs are the ones that have kept the lights on while I work at the deeply personal, financially ruinous, work of being a novelist.

Unless you’re J.K. Rowling, you’re not raking it in as a novelist. It’s a labour of love. We take on all the risk. We work for years without pay and with no expectation that whatever it is that we’re writing will even end up being published. Speaking for myself, I have two full manuscripts on my laptop that most likely will never see light of day.

Yes, we all want to find an audience and are incredibly grateful when we do, no matter its size. But the returns are so microscopic, there’s no expectation that sales and royalties will ever pay the bills.

And there’s the rub. The jobs that have been subsidising my creative work are drying up because the work of many thousands of writers like me has been plugged into a system that is designed to stop us earning a crust. In the past twelve months, what was a flood of work that had been keeping me liquid for more than ten years has dried to barely a trickle.

It’s heartening to know that the Australian government, at least, is doing something to stop this happening in the future. The unfortunate part of that? For many of us, the horse has already bolted, been snatched up by the neighbouring farmer, and is hitched to his wagon.

Worst of all, there’s no action for creatives in other art-forms who are also being ripped off by the AI beast.

This may be the winning argument for programs like Ireland’s recently enacted Basic Income for the Arts. As creative artists’ bread-and-butter jobs disappear, it provides a solid base to build from.

Photo by Kalden Swart on UnsplashPractice makes perfect

I’ve heard plenty of people put forward the argument that it’s no different from the very many times in human history that technology has sent industries packing.

No doubt Thomas the Tank Engine’s stoker was pretty pissed when the diesel train first appeared on the horizon. If he was of a certain age, he would have taken a package and, well, quite possibly taken up a creative pastime in his retirement that had nothing to do with his profession. If he was younger, he would have re-skilled and moved into a new industry.

But the thing with creative work is that the more you do it, the better you get at it. The wedding singer might prefer to poke her eardrums out with knitting needles than sing “Horses” at yet another suburban wedding. But every time she does, she’s improving her voice, and her stage performance. And that feeds into the gigs she does in front of three people at a bar in Northcote. One day, it may be the foundation of what will be a long, and brilliant, career as a singer.

It’s the same for me. Writing-on-demand has been my apprenticeship. Every pitch I write for a drama series. Every description of an apartment complex I write for a website. Every script I write for a documentary. Every article I’ve written. They’re made to order. They must fit a brief. My creative skills are on a leash. But every job has made me the writer I am today. They have made me faster, more efficient, and more confident.

What of the emerging creatives whose only engagement with the nuts and bolts of the industry will be crafting careful prompts for AI to spit out something they once would have made themselves? What will that mean for them as they try to find their own voice?

Photo by Toa Heftiba on UnsplashCreativity will never die.

We’re born with the urge to create. Anyone who’s seen a baby spreading its mushed carrot over its dinner tray can tell you that.

It comes down to the gesture. Our ability to make a mark.

That urge, I’m sure, comes from our sense of mortality. It’s our way of leaving something behind; something that bears witness to our passing through this world.

When I was a small human, and an agnostic one at that, I decided that the Old Testament tale of the Garden of Eden was a story about the evolution of human consciousness. Yes, I was a peculiar child.

To me, it was about the loss of innocence when our early hominid ancestors decided that hanging about in the jungle eating roots and leaves was boring as fuck, what with all that vast savannah out there. Then came the opposable thumb, and we were — quite literally — off and running.

That was the getting of wisdom. But it came at a cost. Because we quickly became aware of our impotence in the face of natural forces, and our mortality. Magic, ritual, and religion are how we try to deal with the former. Creativity — the making of marks and leaving behind testaments — is how we try to cope with the latter.

Photo by Mariano Rivas on UnsplashCreativity is much more than that, though.

As a race, if you strip away our intellect, human beings are pathetic. Useless teeth and nails to defend ourselves in a fight. Our hopeless babies can’t walk for a year. We can’t even outpace a wombat — they run four times faster than most of us. Add to that, no body hair to keep us warm. So, yeah.

The main reason we’ve thrived? The fact that we band together and look after each other. We’ve been able to develop complex and large brains because our mums carry us around for a ridiculous amount of time. They also give us high-energy breastmilk that go towards brain growth rather than limbs that would otherwise have us running around minutes after we’re born, which is normal for most mammals.

The other thing our hominid ancestors got from being carted around by their mothers for so long? Communication skills. Up-close facial expressions and sounds. The first humans developed complex communication because they were physically and emotionally bound to their mothers.

Communication and connection are key to human existence. It’s why social media has thrived. It taps into an evolutionary trait that’s been essential to our survival as a species.

Photo by Arthur Parado on UnsplashThat’s why creativity is such a big thing for us.

We make because we must.

We want to fight mortality and prove we were here.

But we also need to touch other people and hold them close. Whether that’s through words on a page, images on a screen, or a jumper knitted for a grandchild.

We want to make things that touch other people, because that connection is what holds us together.

It’s the thing that makes us, well… us.

We must fight to keep that instinct healthy and strong.

Without it, we are only skin-bags stuffed with blood, bone and meat.

And that is not who we are.

At least, it’s definitely not who I am.

The post Is the age of human creativity finished? first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

Zohran Mamdani puts the social in socialism and rides a blue wave to victory.

He’s got the MAGA faithful sweating in their too-tight pleather hammer pants.

Trump called New York’s newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani a “little communist,” and a “communist lunatic.”

For Ted Cruz he’s a “literal, Karl Marx-quoting, America-hating jihadist.”

Mamdani’s biggest crime? He wants to make New York — America’s most eye-wateringly expensive town — more affordable.

Awful, right?

The catch? He wants to do it by sharing the wealth. Because Mamdani is a democratic socialist.

For the people holding the reins of power, that’s an existential threat.

We’re talking reds-under-the-bed. The red peril.

But Mamdani’s opponents dropped the bundle by leaning into Cold War fearmongering.

For anyone under the age of forty, “reds under the bed” is a Pornhub category.

It’s been a long time since it’s carried any real political heft.

Mamdani gets that. He said that his opponents “speak only in the past because that is all they know.”

But to the powerbrokers who worship at the temple of Mammon that is 21st century capitalism, what Mamdani is proposing is the thin end of what they see as a very evil wedge.

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By Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – X.com, Public Domain

A trillion reasons to hate capitalism

Want to know what really is evil?

Have a guess how much cash each New Yorker would get if Elon divided his trillion-dollar pay packet up between them.

$125,000 each. Every man, woman, and child.

To put it another way, imagine you were paid a million bucks a day.

Want to know how long it would take for that to add up to a trillion dollars?

2,700 years.

That’s not a typo.

To put it in context, 2,700 years ago, Homer decided it might be cool to tell a story about the Trojan War.

Is it any surprise that people like Elon Musk are keen to keep things as they are?

Unfortunately for the rest of us, it doesn’t add up.

Photo by Timo Volz on Unsplash

Cost-of-living crisis? No shit.

Why are so many of us struggling?

It’s pretty straightforward.

The system is broken.

The billionaires’ club is bigger and richer than ever.

Fifteen per cent of the world’s wealth is controlled by just three thousand (mostly) men. That’s fewer than a quarter of the number of spectators you see on Wimbledon’s Centre Court.

Those three thousand individuals control $16.1 trillion between them. You have to combine the GDP of Japan, India, and the UK to equal their combined wealth. The only countries with a higher stand-alone GDP are the US and China.

There is no world in which that level of inequity is fair.

What’s not to love?

Zohran Mamdani isn’t an ideologue. He’s just coming up with real solutions to real problems.

Free buses. Free childcare. A freeze on rent increases. A $60 million municipal grocery store program.

Mamdani won because he chose hip-pocket issues over polarising identity politics.

Culture wars have no victors, only victims.

For the left, it’s a winning equation.

Photo by Janine Robinson on Unsplash

This is what happens when you have nothing to lose.

Democracy means you don’t need a revolution to make change. Because change begins at the ballot box.

And the people driving that change have plenty of gas left in the tank.

In the New York mayoral race, 72% of voters aged under forty-four supported Mamdani.

As for the Trump-backed, former Democrat mayor, Andrew Cuomo, despite millions in donations from billionaires including Mike Bloomberg, The Estée Lauder family, and a Walmart heiress, he racked up just 23% in the same demographic.

If the powers-that-be weigh the game so heavily in their own favour, young people have nothing to lose.

They’re locked out of the system. They can burn it to the ground without flinching.

It wouldn’t be the first time.

Mao Zedong was a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party at 28. Fidel Castro began the Cuban revolution when he was 27. When Vladimir Lenin laid out the principles of the Russian Revolution in his 1901 pamphlet, What Is To Be Done, he was 31. Seventy-five per cent of the signed-up members of Russia’s Bolshevik Party in 1907 were younger than 30.

Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.

“Greed is good”… you think?

Cuomo did attract 55% of the over-65 vote, though.

Kudos, mate.

Only problem with that?

They don’t have many elections left in them. Fewer still if the American health and aged care systems keep going the way they are.

But greedy old fuckers like Donald Trump who fuel the machine haven’t got the memo. They’re still living in the 1980s.

They still think Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko was a good guy.

Remember him?

“Greed, for want of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms. Greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will save that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

A tsunami of voters looking for change

Well, the next generation has some news for them.

Greed is not good.

Greed is not right.

And greed does not work.

Not when greed means people can’t afford to feed themselves, much less afford a place to call home.

And you know what? The voters who pine for the glory days where hair was big, shoulder-pads were bigger, and greed was the buzzword… they’re on their last legs.

Every year, another wave of young people reaches voting age.

Pretty soon, it’s going to be a tsunami of voters looking for change.

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Photo by Ilse Orsel on Unsplash

Sewer socialism

Zohran Mamdani is speaking their language.

There’s a not very polite term used for Mamdani’s approach. “Sewer socialism.”

That doesn’t mean it’s shit.

It means it’s from the same school of thought that centered on Milwaukee in the first half of the 20th century.

The card-carrying members of the Socialist Party of America didn’t want to burn the capitalist pigs.

They wanted to clean up cities and improve ordinary Americans’ way of life. They started with the sanitation system, hence “sewer socialism.”

Milwaukee was America’s socialist heartland for half a century. Socialist candidates dominated the city from 1910 to 1950.

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

What Red Peril?

Anti-Communist hysteria is so last year.

The only people coming to burn your books, silence the press, dismantle democracy, quash dissent, and rob you of your individual freedoms nowadays aren’t communists.

The only red-under-the-bed coming to do that is a red-blooded American.

Communism as it existed in the 20th century is dead.

Russia today is an autocracy ruled by oligarchs and a dictator-in-charge. China is a global economic powerhouse also ruled by a strongman.

If the MAGA faithful want to push back against the undeniable appeal of socialist ideas, they’re going to have to come up with a better line.

Thanks for reading Human Matters by Meaghan! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Roy Cohn

The communist witch-hunt

But MAGA is sticking with their (literal) guns and leaning into yesterday’s-tired patriotism playbook.

If the way Trump weaponizes patriotism seems familiar, it’s because it is.

It was the same tactic used by the House Un-American Activities Committee during their Cold War Anti-Communist witch-hunts in the mid-20th century.

The committee’s most loyal and dedicated pit-bull terrier?

Attorney Roy Cohn.

An old friend — yes, friend — described him like this: “You knew when you were in Cohn’s presence you were in the presence of pure evil.”

This is the same Roy Cohn who was Communist attack-dog, Joe McCarthy’s, wunderkind, and went on to mentor Donald Trump.

Coincidence? Definitely not.

The other thing Roy Cohn taught Trump were his rules for success:

1. Never settle, never surrender.

2. Counterattack, counter-sue immediately.

3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.

Yeah. They were lessons young Trump took to heart.

Roger Stone by Gage Skidmore – https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=172612712

Dirty tricks

Roy Cohn is also how Trump met the flamboyant Roger Stone, one of Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters.

Stone, who has a tattoo of Nixon on his back, describes himself as a political hitman, and was Trump’s political Svengali.

In the 1980s, Stone was business partner with Paul Manafort, Trump’s first campaign manager.

Their first client? Donald Trump.

Another of Stone and Manafort’s early clients? Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

In true Trump style, legend has it that when he gave Cohn a gift of diamond cufflinks to thank him for years of service, the diamonds turned out to be fake.

Some things never change.

A new Gilded Age?

Trump likes to claim he’s setting America on the path to a second Gilded Age.

The term was coined by Mark Twain in his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.

It was the age of America’s Robber Barons.

The term came from medieval Germany. Raubritter, or “robber knights” were lords who charged illegal tolls on roads crossing their lands.

The American feudal thieves demolished competitors, bought politicians, and rigged markets. Sound familiar?

Sure, there was progress. New railroads crisscrossed the continent. Factories pumped out new technology — typewriters, archaic calculators, cash registers. And the steel and coal mining industries went gangbusters.

Their methods were on the nose, even then.

The pockets of the obscenely wealthy few were lined through the exploitation of the workers who manned their production lines and hacked minerals out of the earth for them.

Without any regulations, it was a time of rock-bottom wages.

As for workers’ rights? Yeah, right.

You know the names, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Duke, and Frick.

But want to know the key difference with today’s robber barons?

The reason their names are familiar, is that they gave back. Libraries. Universities. Scholarships. Museums.

Sure, they may have been doing it as an incredibly effective form of corporate whitewashing. But, still, they did it.

What do we get from our Costco bargain-bin robber barons?

Vanity rocket rides, eight-figure wedding ceremonies, and douche-canoes for cruising the Mediterranean worth as much as Trump’s overinflated ballroom.

Billionaires hate redistribution of wealth.

The reason socialism is such a threat to people like Trump and his billionaire cronies is that there’s no profit to be made.

No shareholders.

No CEOs.

No dividends.

You don’t get to be the billionaires we have today without capitalism and consumerism.

Little Rocketman Jeff Bezos wouldn’t be sending his then-new squeeze, now wife, Lauren Sanchez, and “astronaut” Katy Perry into space without a system that turned him into the world’s most effective middleman.

We’re living in a world where that’s exactly what many of the wealthiest companies and their owners do. Most of them don’t create anything other than elegant strings of code or efficient supply chains. They shuffle things from makers to consumers.

Amazon is a glorified parcel delivery company.

Airbnb is a holiday rental business on speed.

Uber is a dating app between people with cars and others who need a lift.

Without people buying shit, none of these people would have two red cents to rub together.

Photo by Raymond Petrik on Unsplash

Remember when fridges lasted thirty years?

Sure, they cost more to buy, relatively speaking. But they were made to last.

A drive along any suburban street on the weekend is a living testament to the culture of waste we’re buying into nowadays.

Flat-pack furniture, TV screens the size of small sedans, enough sofas to break little JD Vance’s heart, all left out on the sidewalk to rot in the rain.

There’s no market to resell them, because they’re junk.

And they’re junk because the billionaires, their companies, and their shareholders don’t want you to keep them.

They want you to buy them again.

And again.

And again.

Hands up if you can sew on a button?

That’s the other thing we’ve been encouraged to give up to feed the beast.

Self-reliance.

We work all day to earn money to buy things we used to make or do ourselves.

When a button falls off a shirt, and the guy who repairs shoes and does the odd bit of tailoring wants ten bucks to sew it back on, what do we do?

Seems a bit pricey. Plus, we don’t have a sewing kit and wouldn’t know how the fuck to sew a button back on even if we did.

So, we buy a new shirt.

Photo by Mollie Sivaram on UnsplashSubscription slavery

It’s all part of the plan to turn us all into good little consumers.

And the best little consumers are those who are chained to the treadmill.

One of the most insidious means of coaxing us onto the track is the subscription model.

Some of the most important things we once bought outright and owned, we now rent in digital form.

I mean, sure. Convenient! Space saving! Yay!

But if you lost your home, at least you had your CD or record collection, your photo albums, and your DVDs to take with you.

Now, if you want to listen to your music, watch a movie, or look at photos of your kids, you need to pay to play.

Can’t afford your iCloud anymore? Well, fuck me. Say farewell to the lot.

It’s the 21st century version of indentured servitude. Which has nothing to do with false teeth.

The tomato problem

The other thing the consumer model achieves brilliantly, is conning us into paying for things we used to get for free.

I use the tomato example. Which probably only works in places like my home, Australia. Because no way would any self-respecting Italian put up with this shit.

Used to be the tomatoes at the supermarket were plump, juicy, and red. They smelt and tasted like… well, tomatoes.

Until the day they didn’t. Overnight, they became firm, pink things that looked like sun-bleached cricket balls.

A short time later, the tomatoes we knew and loved turned up on the shelves again. Only they had green stalks attached (and, so, smelt even more tomatoey) and had a fancy new name. Truss tomatoes.

They also cost twice as much as the disappointing tomatoes.

So, within a very short time, we were paying twice as much to get the exact same thing.

It’s what’s happening with free-to-air vs. streaming services.

We used to watch TV for free. We paid in kind by using our time to watch ads, which fed money back to the broadcasters.

Then streamers came along, and we paid for their services and got to watch our shows without ads.

Now? Unless we want to pay even more, we’re stuck with paying for something we used to get for free. Watching a program with ads.

See how it’s done? And we all fall for it.

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Photo by Vicky Ng on UnsplashLet them eat brioche

While kids wonder how they’ll survive this mess, Trump clutters up the Oval Office with gold trinkets and spends his days building vanity projects, while entertaining fawning billionaire buddies at an ill-conceived Mar-a-Lago ball that coincided with SNAP benefits running out for millions of Americans.

When he talks about needing an ID to fill up the car, or to buy groceries — great word, that one (?!).— he flags himself as a man who has never done a single ordinary thing in his life.

Man of the people? Yeah, right.

It’s Trump’s Marie Antoinette moment.

Not long before her head was forcibly detached from her body, when told that the peasants were starving because they were out of bread, she supposedly responded, “then let them eat brioche.”

Photo by Eye Speak on Unsplash

A shitload of smiting.

“Jesus!” is right.

I’m a committed agnostic.

But I am also a student of human belief systems. And I can say with absolute certainty that the Jesus so many Americans claim to believe in would be doing a shitload of smiting and turning over of tables in the temple if he were here today.

Money? He had a bit to say about it.

“You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realise that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked” (Revelation 3:17)

Also this:

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21)

And most of all:

You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24)

Maybe it’s just me.

But what Zohran Mamdani and his crowd are hoping to do sounds a fuckload more Christian than anything else going on in America at the moment.

The post “Greed is good?” Fuck that. first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

As Trump plays human wrecking ball at the White House, why does it hurt so much? And does it really matter?

The answer to that is a big, fucking “yes.”

Donald Trump just sent the bulldozers in to rip out America’s heart.

Because as First Lady Betty Ford said back in her time: “if the West Wing is the mind of the nation, then the East Wing is the heart.”

Reuters via Brian Rittmeyer on X

As the East Wing of the People’s House is smashed into bite-sized, (possibly) asbestos-ridden chunks while Trump’s supersize-me American flags flap away in the background, it feels like the beginning — or end — of something significant.

Turns out, only 28 per cent of the American population support the move.

Stephen Colbert puts into words what most of America and the rest of the world feel. The carcass of what was until last week the First Ladies’ wing and grand public entrance to the White House looks like “a rotisserie chicken your dog got into.”

It’s more than just wanton destruction and vandalism.

It’s an attack on the American psyche.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

Donald Trump is a dog pissing on a fire hydrant.

The purpose isn’t to relieve his bladder. It’s about covering the scent of the dogs who have been there before.

When the Trump Ballroom rises from the rubble, it will erase centuries of history. Number 47 is claiming the hallowed turf in the most visible of ways.

His message? This is not the People’s House. This is my house.

It’s why he paved over Jackie Kennedy’s rose garden to recreate a Boca Raton shopping mall food court.

Camelot has been supplanted by Sir Lunch-a-lot.

The Rose Garden Club, as it’s now known, comes with tacky patio furniture, striped umbrellas right out of a Slim Aarons photoshoot, and a playlist curated by the President himself.

Yes, YMCA is on repeat. Seriously.

But this is more than just the actions of a man missing the friendly surroundings of Mar-a-Lago.

It’s an aggressive move to erase the legacy of one of America’s most revered First Ladies and that of her husband.

Democrats, both.

Photo by Julien Maculan on Unsplash

Porta-loos and tents

It’s not that the White House couldn’t do with some improvements.

There are plenty of good arguments in favour of the White House having a bigger space to entertain visiting dignitaries. My local pub has a bigger function room.

It’s said that the Trump administration is not alone in its wish for a banqueting space that can fit more than 200 people.

Although they might not admit it in public, members of the Biden and Obama White Houses apparently agree it’s a little bonkers to ask visiting VIPs to use porta-loos when tents are required on the South Lawn for state dinners, which is the status quo.

Even if that’s the case, when someone tears down a building that occupies such a prominent place in the public’s consciousness without consultation or warning, it’s an assault.

Photo by Ksenia Obukhova on Unsplash

The ghosts of First Ladies past

What is America’s 47th president so eager to erase?

Since the 1970s, the East Wing has housed the First Ladies’ offices in the White House.

By levelling it, Trump has gone scorched earth on the place that Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Jill Biden made their own during their time at the White House. I doubt that’s an accident.

Number 47 had already made his presence felt in the corridors of the East Wing. The gargoyle-like portrait with an American flag painted on his features — the same image he uses as an avatar for his Truth Social posts — shouldered its way between portraits of Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush in the East Wing’s Booksellers’ Hall.

As for Melania, it’s unlikely that the current First Lady is sorry to see the East Wing go because she was hardly ever there.

In May, the New York Times calculated that Melania Trump had spent fewer than fourteen days at the White House since her husband’s second term began.

And in the case of Trump and his relationship with the White House, it does feel like there’s an agenda at play.

Photo by Tiago Rosado on Unsplash

More than the sum of their parts

The legacy of the First Ladies who have passed through those corridors is important.

Because here’s the thing. Public buildings add up to much more than the sum of their parts.

Every schoolkid or veteran who has walked through those doors left their mark.

The walls are painted with the souls of the people who passed by them.

Public buildings embody the history and belief systems of the people who live in their shadows.

Buildings like this evoke deep feelings — reverence, awe, wonder — that become ingrained in a place. They become deeply symbolic because human beings seek out places to invest with meaning. They’re the things that anchor us in place and time.

It’s in our DNA.

Imagine the pull of St. Paul’s Cathedral for a child living in the slums of 18th-century London. Or the power of the pyramids for a shepherd in Ptolemaic Egypt. And the awe that fishermen on the banks of the Yamuna River experienced in the shadows of the Taj Mahal, the monument Shah Jahan built in memory of his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

What would Paris be without the Eiffel Tower? Or Athens without the Parthenon? Or China without its Great Wall?

It’s the reason there’s an unholy rush to construct iconic wonders in places that were, until very recently, architectural wastelands — Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi.

They are constructing a past for the future out of concrete, steel and stone.

It’s always been the same. When the Vandal army was marching on Rome in 455AD, Pope Leo I convinced King Gaiseric to leave the city’s churches and palaces standing. He knew that the Roman people could recover from the loss of gold and silver. But if the city lost its potent symbols of faith and identity — the basilicas of St Peter, St Paul, and St John — then Rome as an idea would be lost.

Unfortunately, the 21st-century vandals know this. And they are not going to leave America’s fabric untouched.

Photo by Pavlo Osipov on Unsplash“A Gut Punch”

For the men and women who worked there, the leveling of the East Wing is a “gut punch.”

As the bulldozers moved in, former East Wing staffers for First Lady Pat Nixon begged the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) to intervene and pause the demolition.

That was never going to work because the White House fired all the Biden appointees on the NCPC earlier this year. The new Commission head? A man named Will Scharf.

Scharf’s qualifications? He’s an attorney and White House staff secretary. Never know… maybe he’s an architecture fanboy in his spare time.

As for the members of the Commission of Fine Arts who oversee design elements of government projects, they were fired a week before the demolition at the White House began.

Coincidence? Seems unlikely.

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

“Death by a thousand papercuts.”

The undignified speed is for a good reason. As the Washington Post put it, “this project would not have gotten done, certainly not during his term, if the president had gone through the traditional review process. The blueprints would have faced death by a thousand papercuts.”

And so it went ahead.

Four days later, all that remained was rubble.

“I don’t know where I can go to find the information. I can’t find any accessible drawings. I can’t find a permit,” said Democrat Rep. Bennie G. Thompson. “And then I see a bulldozer tearing down the east side of the White House.”

As the dust settles, millions of people around the world are asking the same question.

How the fuck did this happen?

A human wrecking ball

Donald Trump’s signature move is to stomp rough-shod over norms and human decency.

He is a wrecking ball in human form who leaves out the “forgiveness” part of the “ask for forgiveness, rather than permission” equation.

He has form, as any New Yorker can tell you. His destruction of a historically significant frieze from the façade of the Bonwit Teller building, despite promising it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, earned him the lasting scorn of his fellow New Yorkers.

And the unfortunate fact is that thanks to the odd status the president has in the American political system, Trump does appear to have the right to do what he likes with the White House.

As he described it to a group of wealthy donors at a recent dinner arranged to pass around the begging bowl to fund the project: “I said, ‘How long would the process take?’ Because I’m so used to zoning. They said, ‘Sir, you can start tonight…. You have zero zoning conditions, you’re the president.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding’.”

Presidential power has largely been constrained by respect for the office, and adherence to a system of norms and standards.

Trump and the people around him have shown that they have none of those things.

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Presidential makeovers

It’s not the first time the White House has had a presidential makeover.

But it is the first time it’s been done like this.

Taft built the first Oval Office in 1909. Teddy Roosevelt knocked down greenhouses to build the West Wing. FDR relocated the Oval Office to its present location for more privacy and installed an indoor swimming pool for his polio therapy (yes, kids, that’s why we have vaccinations. Polio is bad.) Nixon turned the swimming pool into a press briefing room. And Jimmy Carter installed a solar water system, bless him.

The biggest alteration was during Truman’s time behind the Resolute Desk. When a floor fell in beneath his daughter’s piano, an engineer told the president that the building’s interior was remaining in place “from force of habit.”

Truman gutted and rebuilt the interior but left the exterior of the White House largely untouched, other than the addition of the balcony that now bears his name.

Because they understood the symbolic and historic importance of the building, those presidents sought the advice of heritage experts. But they chose to do it. They were under no obligation to do so.

Given its prominence as a public building, it’s staggering to learn that the White House is exempt from the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires an impact assessment for the alteration of historic buildings.

The usual way of thinking is that the president of the United States of America doesn’t own the White House. The president is a temporary resident in a building owned by the people of America who voted to put him (and, one day, her) there.

But as far as Donald Trump is concerned, he’s completely justified in doing this. It’s just the latest in what the White House is now saying is a “history of improvements and additions from commanders-in-chief to keep the executive residence as a beacon of American excellence.”

Was Donald Trump allowed to demolish the East Wing? By the letter of the law, quite possibly yes. Although I imagine that will be challenged in years to come.

But remember what your mum always said?

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

Photo by Steve DiMatteo on UnsplashHow big is your ballroom?

Part of the issue is what’s replacing the East Wing: a presumably Trump-branded ballroom that, at the size of two American football fields, will be nearly double the size of the White House and accommodate 999 people. Why 999 rather than 1000? No fucking idea. Probably something numerological.

He calls it “a great legacy project.”

Trump’s many critics were, and are, aghast at his plans. Or, as the White House put it: “Unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies are clutching their pearls over President Donald J. Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House.”

The Washington Post editorial board came out batting for the President’s grandiose plans for his temple to the new Gilded Age.

According to the Post, Trump is a “lifelong builder boldly pursuing a grand vision, a change agent unafraid to decisively take on the status quo and a developer slashing through red tape that would stymie any normal politician…. The White House cannot simply be a museum to the past. Like America, it must evolve with the times to maintain its greatness. Strong leaders reject calcification.”

The ballroom is projected to cost US$300 million. Funds have poured in from private donors including Apple, Comcast, and Lockheed Martin.

Another donor is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post. Yes, the same Washington Post that penned that editorial.

Yeah.

But no matter where the money comes from, erecting a US$300 million vanity project while in the middle of a government shutdown isn’t a good look.

Photo by Logan Voss on UnsplashShow me the money

When the money’s flowing and the economy’s in the black, architecture is often at its best.

But in America today, that’s all smoke and mirrors. Despite Trump’s, well, trumpeting, the American economy is tanking. So, he’s making much of the fact he’s funding the ballroom himself.

It’s one of the very many things about this process that’s causing Americans concern.

Quid pro quo means ‘this for that.’ It’s Latin for ‘no free lunch.’

Donations on this scale don’t come without strings attached.

Photo by Steven Su on Unsplash

Liberace’s garage sale

Anyone who’s watched with horror as Trump transforms the Oval Office can confirm that even if his ballroom costs his donors a bomb, it will still end up looking cheap.

Before Trump Mk 2, the Oval Office was an exercise in restraint.

Now it looks like it’s been outfitted from Liberace’s garage sale with some help from a five-year-old crafter set loose with cans of gold spray paint, Costco bargain-bin decals, and a hot-glue gun.

The reason it looks so appalling is that the White House is scaled to project modesty and elegance. It doesn’t sit comfortably with the tizzy gold flourishes that have become a signature of dictator chic.

From beyond the grave, even Saddam and Gaddafi want to have a quiet word with whoever’s calling the shots, because it’s too much even for them.

But that’s all – hopefully – reversible.

What Trump’s done to the East Wing is not.

Like it or not, what he plans to put there will be remain for a long time.

And if the Oval Office is anything to go by, that’s a concern.

Photo by Jessica Kantak Bailey on Unsplash

The Sun King

Trump loves a big ballroom.

When he built the 20,000-square-foot Donald J. Trump Grand (yes, Grand) Ballroom at Mar-a-Lago for his wedding to Melania, it cost him $40 million. It was modelled, of course, on Versailles.

The comparison is apt in a whole lot of ways other than a Fort Worth’s worth of gold leaf, and more crystal than a Swarovski factory outlet.

Louis XIV built Versailles as a reflection of his absolute power over the French people.

The so-called Sun King was known for the extravagance and excess of his reign. He believed in the same Divine Right of Kings that lost the British King his head in 1649. It basically meant he believed he was chosen by God and could do whatever the fuck he wanted.

When Louis established an absolute monarchy, unpicked the independence of the French nobility, and grabbed all the power for himself, he laid the foundations of the French Revolution.

Sound familiar?

No wonder Trump’s a fanboy.

New money

“Louis Quatorze” style, as it’s called, is a favourite of those looking to make a splash.

Gold means success; the more of it, the better.

So, the renderings and plans drawn up by McCrery Architects that Trump has been flapping about the place haven’t done much to allay anyone’s concerns about what he’s building.

It looks like a function room from Trump’s heyday in the 1980s. I don’t mean that in a good way. “Greed is good.” Remember that?

It’s as “new money” as you can get.

Trump would have found a kindred spirit in the ambitious 19th-century socialite, Alva Vanderbilt.

At her “summer house” on Rhode Island, she spent the equivalent today of US$380 million on renovations, including a gold ballroom inspired by — you guessed it — Versailles, complete with 22-karat gold leaf ornamentation and portraits of Louis XIV.

But gross expressions of wealth like this fly in the face of America’s founding principles. Even the most successful colonial Americans rejected the trappings of royalty.

When America fought for its independence and booted out the British monarchy, the idea wasn’t to set up one of its own.

Photo by Saad Ahmad on Unsplash

No Kings in built form

The White House cornerstone was laid in October 1792. George Washington picked the spot himself.

He had a very clear idea of the type of house the American president should live in. It should reflect the foundational concepts of the American nation.

A government by the people, for the people.

It would be modest and restrained.

Irish-born architect James Hoban went with Palladian neoclassicism. It was chosen because it revived the spirit of the Roman Republic.

The idea was to evoke the refined simplicity of ancient Greek and Roman architecture. Neoclassicism was inspired by the 18th-century excavations at Pompeii, and the renewed interest in classical civilisations inspired by European aristocrats visiting ancient cities.

It was a reaction against the flourishes and excess of the Baroque and Rococo styles; the preferred architecture of kings and potentates (yes, like Louis XIV at Versailles).

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“A real dump.”

So, it’s no wonder that when he arrived at the White House for his first term, Trump declared it a “real dump.”

For that, read: not enough gold.

Trump didn’t understand that the point of the White House isn’t to dazzle the world into submission. It’s to project power through quiet restraint and confidence.

With the former comes fear.

With the latter, awe and respect.

No surprises which door Trump has chosen to go through.

George Washington, Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

Burn it all down

George Washington wanted to embody the hopes and ambitions of the new American republic in the building first known as the Executive Mansion.

That word is important. ‘Executive.’ From the Latin, exsequi, meaning ‘to carry out.’ In English, it came to mean ‘a person with administrative and supervisory authority.’

Not a king.

Not an emperor.

An administrator.

That’s why the built form of the White House is so important. Because significant architecture is all about symbolism. It’s about the messages it sends.

Tearing it down sends another message altogether.

Photo by Aidan Bartos on Unsplash

A pissing competition

The demolition of the East Wing is not the first attack on the fabric of the White House.

In 1814, when Britain and America were squabbling over Canada, British troops entered Washington and burnt down the People’s House in retaliation for an American attack on Ontario.

The British understood how potent it is to destroy a monument that occupies an important place in a population’s psyche.

Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a pissing competition. And it’s been going on for as long as human beings have had places to call their own.

It’s why English and French forces burnt down China’s Old Summer Palace in 1860. The famed Library of Alexandria suffered the same fate at the hands of Christian reactionaries seeking to destroy “pagan” knowledge in the 3rd century AD. It’s also why the Romans destroyed the second temple of Jerusalem: to punish Jewish rebels.

Al Qaeda knew the same thing when it targeted the Twin Towers. The World Trade Centre wasn’t just one of the tallest buildings in the world. It was America’s monument to capitalism.

When it crumbled to dust, they were hitting America where it hurt.

Photo by The Now Time on Unsplash

Trump’s way or the highway

The point isn’t whether or not the White House needs a ballroom.

The point is the way it’s been handled.

Without consultation. And without warning.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise.

As in every other aspect of his life, it’s Trump’s way or the highway.

The timing is also suspicious. It swung attention away from dirty laundry the administration would rather not have people talking about: the history-making No Kings march; the attacks on alleged drug boats condemned by the UN human rights chief as illegal; the US$20 billion “lifeline” to Argentina ; the construction of more ICE detention centres; the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that’s looking more and more like the ceasefire you have when you’re not having a ceasefire; and, of course, the biggest elephant in the room: the government shutdown. Oh, and the Epstein files.

It didn’t have to be like this.

As Jill Biden’s former press secretary, Michael LaRosa put it: “every president and first lady in history has left their footprint on the White House in one way or another and all of them are entitled to do that. That’s what is so great about our history and our democratic system. All first families can play a role in evolving and growing the physical infrastructure of the president and first lady’s home … It’s not a symbol of a movement rather than a symbol of a democratic system and institution that still works 249 years later.”

Yet, here we are.

The post The White House gets its East Wing clipped first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

I’m fairly sure it’s not this.“Convincing” doesn’t mean “real”

OK, I’m going to say it. Plugging some prompts into ChatGPT and calling yourself a writer is like putting a frozen TV dinner into the microwave, pushing some buttons, and calling yourself a chef.

Photo by Stepan Kulyk on Unsplash

Generative AI is a compiler of information, albeit a creative and brilliant one.

It is the most accomplished plagiarist of all time. It can do a decent job of synthesising all the things ever written about standing on a beach and watching the sun set. But it will never know what the sand feels like between its toes. Or feel goosebumps on its arms as the night chill settles in the air and the breeze tickles at the waves. Much less know the sensation of supernatural awe we feel in the face of natural beauty.

AI is senseless, in the true meaning of the word.

It does not see. It does not hear. It does not smell. It does not taste. And no matter how convincingly it communicates with you, it does not feel. It is, remember, “Artificial Intelligence.” Not “Artificial Emotions” or “Artificial Sensations.” When AI describes something, it’s cobbling together things written by human beings.

The Turing test wasn’t a measure of real intelligence. It was about crossing a point where technology could convince a human being that it was human. But being “convincing” doesn’t make something “real”. Just ask any half-decent fairground magician.

As far as I can see, generative AI is kitted up in a very convincing cow-suit and is doing a pretty damned good job of mooing. But if you’re using that cow to get your milk, you’re going to be tugging at those teats for a very long time. And if anything comes out, it sure as fuck won’t taste too good on your breakfast cereal.

Originality? Yeah, right.

A very clever friend of mine, Stefano Boscutti said to me that AI can only exist in the past. Relying on it too much is like trying to drive down a freeway while only looking in the rear-view mirror. I like that metaphor.

Photo by Cara Beth Buie on Unsplash

Yes, yes, I know. We’re all building on things that we’ve heard, or read, or seen, before. But we hear, or read, or see those things through the lens of our own, lived, very real, human experience.

The ways we interpret those experiences are, by definition, original. Because we can relate to those things; we are moved; we feel empathy; we feel anger, or horror. We’re speaking the same language. We’re not just reading some lines of code at pace and cleverly splicing them together.

Is it all ‘original,’ as in sprung from nothing? Of course not.

I don’t think anything anyone makes ever is. But what is original is the perspective I bring to it. Because only I can ever see and feel things as I do. Just as you can only ever see and feel the things you do. We could be standing side by side and see exactly the same thing. But when we described it later, we would both use different words. Our experiences, and the we remember them, are unique.

Peanut-butter platform heels

And don’t get me going on the hallucinations. When I was a university lecturer, I started every semester with a lesson about how to research properly. Rule number one was that as useful as Wikipedia might be as a jumping-off point, it’s so riddled with inaccuracies that you rely on it as a resource at your own peril.

AI is next-level wrongtown.

Case in point. A thing I did over on Threads went a little viral after I posted the results of a nonsensical search I did on Google for “peanut butter platform heels” to test what its AI would make of it. The story made it onto news sites around the world.

Now, any human being with a more than a couple of neurones to rub together would recognise it as something that made about as much sense as most of the lyrics on the Sgt Pepper’s album. But Google’s obliging AI couldn’t bear to leave me without an answer. So, it cobbled together an impressively plausible explanation about a scientific experiment in which peanut butter was used to demonstrate the creation of diamonds under high pressure, with that pressure likened to “stiletto heels.”

New technology has always been liberating

The arrival of a new technology has always been liberating for creative types. Photography didn’t mean the end of visual artists. It liberated them from the expectation that they should replicate life in two-dimensional form.

No photography? No Picasso.

Photo by Johnell Pannell on Unsplash

And how about the arrival of the “word processor”? I’ve done some of my best work on my lap beside sports grounds during my kids’ training sessions, and in cafes or the back seat of the family car as I wait for them to finish at a birthday party. Don’t see me doing that with the old Underwood on the knees.

Artists have always leapt on new technology to make their art. I’ll never forget when British artist David Hockney jumped on board the iPad craze and started tapping and swiping out his own electronic artworks.

Collaboration has also always been a thing in the creative industries.

Composers write music that’s played by an orchestra with many musicians. Choreographers work with other dancers. Writers get editors to help refine their work. And once they lift themselves out of poverty and can afford it, visual artists have always used apprentices and expert technicians to bring their work to life.

Sculptor Henry Moore had virtually nothing to do with the production of many of his large sculptures. He’d create models for his apprentices to build to scale. Rodin employed an expert foundry to cast his bronzes. And Bernini would create sketches for his clients, then employ other sculptors to do the majority of the work carving the stone. His student, Giuliano Finelli, created the most revered parts of Apollo and Daphne, because he was an expert in carving hair and foliage. Bernini then took on the task of finishing the faces and hands.

As for Damien Hirst, he has said the best ‘dot’ painting by him, is one painted by his assistant, Rachel Howard.

Automated assistant

So perhaps there’s a role for generative AI as an assistant. I don’t know. Maybe if you’re stuck on a plot point, it can help you unravel the narrative. Or if a character’s spinning its wheels, maybe it can help you find a way to get them moving again.

But an architect wouldn’t call herself a carpenter because she drew the plans that the carpenter used to make the cabinetry in a house.

Tapping a few prompts onto the screen, printing what’s spat out onto some pages and whacking them between a cover does not make you a writer. It makes you something. Perhaps we need to come up with a new word for it.

Writing is about the journey, not the destination

Speaking for myself, I don’t use AI for anything when I’m writing because even when there’s a logjam in my mind, working through that mess is part of the process. And what pops out the other end, for better or worse, is part of the convoluted, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately deeply satisfying job of being a writer in the true sense of the word.

Because the thing is, the act of writing is the art, not the product.

Sometimes I’ll miss the train, swear a bit and maybe throw a few things. But after I wait for a while by the side of the road for the bus that will carry me along a different route to the same destination, I know I’m going places I never would have anticipated.

Photo by Sandro Antonietti on Unsplash

Those places burst from my own imagination. I’ve no fucking idea where three-quarters of them come from.

They’re odd amalgamations of Christ knows what: something my grandfather once said to me; the smell of the carpet in the pub my aunt and uncle owned; the feeling of grief as a fish wriggled between my fingers while I tugged a hook from its mouth; a taste; a sound; a sensation. Maybe it’s a thought planted deep in my subconscious sparked by something I read or saw on a screen.

Stay true to your voice

But what we’re talking about here is something completely different.

And soon enough, there will be so much AI-generated shit floating around out there that it will be thick enough to walk on.

That’s what I’m waiting for. Because that’s when human beings will be given their voice back. And the messy, sweary, chaotic, confusing, exquisite, sublime and transcendent animal roar of real life will echo above the stagnant, milquetoast, SEO-optimised, soulless, senseless nonsense that we’re currently drowning in.

So, all of you writers out there, please stay true to your voice.

Hold the line.

Be strong.

And keep it real.

You are the truthtellers; the ones who are capturing this moment for those who are yet to be.

And I do believe we’ll win in the end.

The post AI, AI, AI! What makes a writer? first appeared on Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.