Fine, here’s an election hot take, sort of (Monthly update #14)

Plus: Halloween, quitting Twitter, weight loss, trivia, atheism, Job

It was Halloween night and I was out trick-or-treating with my daughter and a couple of her friends from autism therapy. The late-October-in-Wisconsin weather was cold, but with several layers and a Bigfoot onesie on, I was doing okay. The kiddos were making their way through a posh lakefront neighborhood, tromping through leaf piles and dodging plastic skeletons and Harris/Walz signs. The parents hung back, talked about the boring sorts of things that middle-aged, middle-class parents tend to talk about.

“I’m so nervous about this election,” my daughter’s friend’s mom was saying. “I’ve already voted, so whatever, but I can’t sleep.”

I didn’t say anything, because the older I get, the more I realize how few helpful things I have to say, and how bad I am at saying them anyway. How do you explain to someone that slightly over half the country has perceived, not wrongly, that those of us in the wealthy blue counties hold them in utter contempt, and will continue to do so no matter what they do¹, and so they might as well vote for the guy who at least talks to them like they’re human? That things are far too broken for one election cycle to make any real difference, as we all should have learned from the last eight years? That we can’t save the world until we all learn to tend our gardens?

Ah, well. The night was about nothing if not scaring ourselves with silly plastic things.

Soon our kids’ pumpkin buckets were overflowing with Snickers and Starburst, so we wrapped things up and went back to these parents’ house, where they passed around mugs of hot apple cider. I stood in their kitchen with the rest of the adults, the top half of my Bigfoot onesie tied around my waist and a warm mug in my hands, and somehow the conversation turned to my writing. I told them the truth: that I’d published a psychological thriller (thus torpedoing my prospects as a Christian writer) and a humor book on the Bible (thus torpedoing my prospects as a horror writer); that both had won some obscure awards but neither had sold more than a couple thousand copies; that I couldn’t find a publisher for my new novel, I was struggling to complete another novel, and I hadn’t heard from my agent in months.

I left out my sincerest thought: that in a world where everyone is increasingly isolated, insulated, and looking to be congratulated for their own righteousness, I’m not sure I have a lot left to say to anyone.

The friend’s father, an avid reader, said, “I’m going to add your novel to my Kindle queue.” And that’s how we normie authors get new readers: one book sale at a time.

When Election Day rolled around a few days later, it was overcast and raining for the third day in a row here in Madison. Between that, the time change, and the consummation of two years of campaign hell, the whole town was a soggy pile of moaning zombies. I clocked out of my church receptionist gig at ten a.m. like always, stopped at my polling station, tossed another vacuous vote to Harris’s vacuous campaign, went home, and started work on the final (final! for real this time) draft of my work-in-progress.

I’m gonna finish it by the end of the year. Because all I know how to do is tend my garden. 🕹🌙🧸

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Poll of the moment

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Two years ago: So you’re quitting Twitter, for real this time

Back in 2022, Twitter—soon to be known as “X,” and nearly as soon to be known as “the website that literally no one will ever call ‘X’”—was purchased by some unhinged rightwing shitposter, and half the people on it immediately put on a big show about how they were going to quit.

None of them actually did quit, obviously, but since I had already quit Twitter months earlier, I put together this handy reference guide for anyone who was actually serious about getting off the site:

In the last week or two, an awful lot of people have made a big show of Quitting Twitter, which in practice means that they posted a bunch of tweets to Twitter about leaving Twitter, and then continued to hang around Twitter in order to count how many likes and retweets their tweets about leaving Twitter got, and then spent several days tweeting back at all the people who questioned their sincerity about leaving Twitter. Of course they were quitting Twitter! The Bad Electric Car Man had bought Twitter, so it was Extremely Important that they make it known, via Twitter, that they were quitting Twitter.

But I’m going to assume that some of y’all are acting in good faith, and are totally-for-real-this-time stepping out of Plato’s Bird Cave, blinking blindly into the sun. So, as someone who’s been off Twitter for literal months at this point, it’s my solemn duty to reacclimate you to the realities of living in meatspace. With that in mind, here is your official guide to not-Twittering: …(Read more here!) 🕹🌙🧸

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⬅️ In case you missed it: I thought Joker 2 was actually pretty okay

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Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately

One of my favorite parts of writing this newsletter is the monthly book giveaways for new readers (see below for more details!)—not just because it gets more of my books out into the world, but because it gives me an excuse to make a more direct connection with my very cool, very attractive subscribers.

One of last month’s winners was new member

Ryan Smith

, who, when I reached out to him to let him know he’d won, told me he’d been drawn to the blog by the piece I wrote a few months ago about my recent weight loss and thought I might like to read a similar essay he’d published back in January. He’d posted it over at his Substack,

Trivia Factorial

, which is typically just a twice-weekly trivia quiz, but this piece was pretty different—some long-form thoughts on why he decided to lose weight, how he did it, and the mental hurdles he had to overcome to make it happen:

A common aphorism that you might see in the gym-going crowds is something like “No matter how slow you go, you’re still lapping people on the couch.” That sentiment does nothing for me; in fact, it’s demotivating to me. The need to be better than someone else, and to be motivated by that thought, is deeply odious to me. There’s nothing inherently virtuous or admirable about running, compared to any other hobby that doesn’t hurt other people.

I looked up dieting and fitness strategies, still feeling like an outsider. You know that dream some people have? They’re in school about to be given a final exam, and they’re confused because they don’t recall being in this class—or even being in school? That was my waking life. I was sitting for an exam in a class I had no idea I was taking, and I was going to fail.

It’s my favorite thing I’ve read in the last few weeks, and not just because it weaves together two things I care about—trivia and fitness—but because it manages to weave them together in a really inventive, surprising, and illuminating way. You can read the rest of it here.

Thanks for sharing, Ryan—super glad to have you aboard! 🕹🌙🧸

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Reminder: By popular demand, I’ve debuted a new monthly feature, Ask a church receptionist, where I (a real, honest-to-God church receptionist who literally wrote the book on the Bible) answer all the questions you were afraid to ask about the Bible, Christianity, and everything else. Send any and all questions to luke.t.harrington@gmail.com, or just click the button below:

Be sure to tell me whether you want me to use your real name, a pseudonym, or whatever else.

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Favorite comment of the month

I was excited to read this, because the book of Job is probably my favorite book of the Bible. It's also the one that started my re-conversion back to Christianity after many years as an atheist.

Like many atheists, one of my big problems with faith, especially a Christian faith, was the problem of evil. And I know it seems weird that it was Job that both cast that into sharp relief, and then also started to resolve it. I was also studying evolution at the time, and was engaged in a lot of very public arguments against creationism. (I'm still very convinced of the truth of biological evolution.) As I came to understand evolution better, and spent more time in nature, the last few chapters of Job made everything fall into place, in a way I can't really explain in words. It was just that the natural world is so beautiful, even with its bloodshed. I don't have to be able to explain everything. But I get to be a part of it.

Later, when I had more experience of suffering and our reaction to suffering, it became increasingly clear to me that this book is also, dominantly, about how we react to others' misfortune. Do we help Job bandage his boils, or do we come up with a well-reasoned explanation about why he deserves the boils? I don't have to be able to explain anything to be able to help, to love. —Doctrix Periwinkle 🕹🌙🧸

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1. If you think I’m wrong about this, consider the following thought experiment: Imagine that NASCAR made the decision to open their rallies with land acknowledgements instead of Christian invocations. Imagine they were 100%, unambiguously sincere about it and fans were 100%, unambiguously onboard. Would the overwhelming sentiment on BlueSky and MSNBC be (a) “praise goddess, the south is finally cured of racism” or (b) “lol u rednecks, land acknowledgements are actually super cringe and racist now”?