Aly Walansky's Newsletter

Last weekend, I broke my baby toe. I am fine. Nobody needs to organize a wellness check. I have nine other toes doing their job, and to be honest, I’m already feeling enough on the mend to start eagerly packing for an exciting work trip I have coming up early next week. But to be honest, my toe does hurt, specifically, it hurts when I put pressure on it, which is inconvenient because I live in a fourth-floor walk-up and getting anywhere at all requires a TON of stairs and uncomfortable shoes.

I woke up this morning to the incredibly sad news that Gloria Steinem had died. God, you guys. Just one week after losing Dolly Parton, we’ve lost another woman whose influence is almost impossible to quantify. Gloria Steinem was a journalist, an activist, an organizer, a founder and one of the most recognizable faces of the women’s movement for more than half a century. But she was also something else: Someone who understood the extraordinary power of making people feel heard.

So, apparently, it is September. After the summer I’ve had, I say good riddance. But as to the matter at hand, I know it is September because my calendar says so, and my inbox says so, and all your pitches about holiday travel and holiday gift guides and Thanksgiving dinner very much say September. But, Labor Day hasn’t even happened yet.

First of all: my tiny, bruised, broken, deeply dramatic baby toe would like to thank you. I got hundreds of responses to yesterday’s newsletter—from people asking how I was feeling, wishing me a speedy recovery, sharing their own broken-toe stories, and, perhaps most meaningfully, telling me that they really needed the reminder that we are allowed to do less sometimes. And I cannot tell you how much that meant to me.

My friends, it’s been a week. I’m not just saying it was a busy week, but it was. It was also a heavy and stressful week. The kind of week where even if everything in your own little corner of the world is kinda sorta okay, you may still feel like your brain has been carrying around a million browser tabs at all times. So today, I’m not trying to do anything all that impressive, or ask you to either. Nothing in this post is about optimizing, strategizing, or becoming the best versions of ourselves.

I know that I already sent out an email today, but sending out a second one as a special breaking news announcement you’re going to want to jump on ASAP. Well, I warned you the holidays were coming. We’re at the point where the holiday gift guide pitches are flying, samples are shipping, follow-ups are following up, links are linking, and every single one of us is wondering: Am I doing this right? So, we’re going to talk about it.

There’s not many people or things left in the world whom or that almost everybody seems to agree on. It’s devastating that we are all incredibly divided as a nation and as a world. We don’t agree on politics, the news, what is safe to eat, how to care for ourselves and our families and others, what to watch, what to believe, what to buy, or apparently even what constitutes an acceptable way to load a dishwasher. But Dolly Parton, we all agree on. Everyone loved Dolly.

Today, we’re going back to basics. Like, really basic. Because one of the loveliest things people tell me all the time is: “I read your newsletter every single day with my morning coffee!” In obvious news, as a creative person who is by definition incredibly insecure, this makes me very happy. Except sometimes, five minutes later, that same person will ask me what I’m currently working on, what my general content areas are, or what my current outlets are.

Happy Friday! We made it. And thank God because this week has been A LOT. I’ll be honest, I have a lot going on today both in my head and in the world and a lot of ducks I’m juggling in the air (do people juggle ducks? And if so, why?) - so I’m actually going to segue directly into pending assignments that are wrapping up in the coming days - there’s some good ones in there I want to make sure you do not scroll past. And as always, any question, any thoughts, any feelings, I’m here for you.

Apparently, we need to talk about Uber vouchers. I recently came across some discussion elsewhere on social media about whether brands and PR teams really need to provide transportation for journalists attending media events, or are media who ask about them actually acting like entitled diva princesses. (Said diva princess would be me, I suppose.