Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
A few weeks ago I was 40,000ft in the air with Nellie, my wife, and our newborn daughter on our first cross-country flight when the latter decided to test the technological limits of her Pampers Pure Protection Size 2. I was bent over in the aisle, blocking traffic, sweating, wrangling her out of her soiled onesie, when I realized that, in our attempt to pack for several weeks on the opposite coast, we had made the rookie mistake of forgetting to put a change of clothes in our diaper bag. So there we were, having woken up at 3 a.m. for this flight. We had a half-dozen hats and tiny fleece socks and every conceivable gadget (portable white noise machine; baby ear muffs) yet not a scrap of fabric to dress our child in. Strangers were looking at us with concern as we swaddled her in layers of blankets. We laughed, delirious with exhaustion. The laptops we had charged the night before in order to edit on the plane — ha! — were shoved deep beneath the seats. Is this what Sheryl Sandberg had in mind when she told my generation to lean in? Miraculously we made it to a boutique hotel we used to love in Tribeca. This time, the kind staff aren’t ferrying over Champagne — they’re dropping off pack-and-plays and nappy pails. To the antique velvet sofa in the corner of that glorious lobby now covered in breast milk: I am sorry. I’ve officially girlbossed too close to the sun.
I am a boss, which is strange but true. I’m not a unionized New York Times employee, nor am I a one-man band with a lucrative newsletter à la our friend Andrew Sullivan, as my wife would prefer. Though I lack the Patagonia vest and I still have to Google “EBITDA,” I am an entrepreneur, building a small but fast-growing media company, the Free Press. We may be a rebellious bunch — journalists who left the legacy press, sometimes loudly, to start something new — but the day-to-day is pretty bourgeois. I recently reviewed our budget for the year ahead. We have a new reporter joining and I need her to start sooner so she can go to Miami and turn out a story on the Democrats who went for Ron DeSantis. I call my COO and ask how much we can afford to spend on an amazing editor I am keen to poach. Also on my list: why hasn’t the 401K plan started yet? Should we do merch? Should we put the new logo on hats or mugs first? And who do you call to do the merch? Between calls with my colleagues and freelancers, I dip into a dozen Google Docs, getting stories ready so we can all have a few days off for Thanksgiving, which is my favorite holiday.
We’re in Pittsburgh for these weeks, and in the evenings, my family sit around the fire, sip wine and criticize one another. My dad looks over our reader comments and tells me all the ways we need to do things better — the readers want podcast transcripts, and he’s losing sleep over it. He reviews all the stories we’ve missed and should have commissioned, and wonders aloud why a competitor is eating our lunch. My mom says I work too hard and that my sister (who quit the New York Post, our family’s paper of record, to join the company) also works too hard and probably will never find a husband because of it. My wife says she’ll never work more than four hours a day (she quit the New York Times to come aboard) and that she’ll need a serious raise if she’s going to read this piece. Time for a Negroni. Or two.
I read the news obsessively from inside our little midwestern cocoon. There is the ongoing meltdown of FTX and SBF and a zillion other acronyms I find myself obsessed with. There’s the drama at Twitter and perhaps the end of the party in Silicon… but the beginning of a new one in cities like Austin and Miami. There’s Joe Biden’s gaffes and the boorish Florida Man who recently announced he’s running for president. Those are the stories that trend. Foreign policy, not so much. But I find myself drawn to the shaky smartphone videos smuggled out of the streets of Tehran. The reports coming out of cities like Kherson. The stories of those people who are living testaments to the truth that so many of us in the West have forgotten: that freedom is precious. That it is worth the kind of sacrifices they are making.
At its deepest, that is what Thanksgiving is about. It is about gratitude for our freedoms. Gratitude for the pioneers of so many kinds who made our lives possible. And for the great good fortune to live in America. This year, for my family, that gratitude has new depth. Our daughter is my grandmother’s tenth great-grandchild. There’s a Brandi Carlile song that we’ve been listening to a lot lately called “The Mother.” “Welcome to the end of being alone inside your mind/ Tethered to another and you’re worried all the time/You always knew the melody but you never heard it rhyme,” Carlile sings of her firstborn daughter, Evangeline. Of her old friends she sings: “They’ve still got their morning paper and their coffee and their time/ They still enjoy their evenings with the skeptics and their wine/ Oh, but all the wonders I have seen I will see a second time/ From inside of the ages through your eyes.” Merry Christmas. Happy new year.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
