Status Updates From Slouching Towards Bethlehem

joan didion’s MIND! one of the first short stories she ever wrote as a child was about a woman dying of cold in a snowstorm who awoke to find herself dying of heat in the desert, and now she’s writing about the didactic tales of the deaths of the donner party (sierras) and the jayhawks (death valley) and what society wants us (perhaps incorrectly) to take away from these tales concerning morality