Mental Hellth

[The title of this piece is a reference to the Smashing Pumpkins, in case you didn’t get it]. What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine?is the title of philosopher and bioethicist Hanna Pickard’s recently-published book, and also a question I can’t stop thinking about (I would probably do a lot of cocaine).

Good news! The rural upstate New York school district that spent almost $60,000 to bring “Sally,” an AI-powered human-esque robot, to its classrooms, has paused its plans. The school board had partnered with an AI startup called Realbotix to introduce the bot in order to theoretically teach kids about technology. But the plans hit a snag when the New York State teacher’s union pointed out that Realbotix’s sister company was a hyperrealistic sex doll manufacturer.

Ancient millenial wisdom. This is part five (the final part, I think) of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here, and part two here, and part three here, and part four here.

This is part four of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here, and part two here, and part three here. Go forth and prosper or whatever!!!! I remember peeing in a gender-neutral bathroom of the science building at my hippy-dippy college and seeing a poster on one of the stall’s walls that said something like you can be whatever gender you want to be, you can have whatever pronouns—he/him, she/her, xe/xir—you want.

Criticizing complex works like The Body Keeps the Score shouldn’t be so … black and white. Rebecca Armendariz is a clinical social worker and psychotherapy provider in Baltimore, MD.

This is part three of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here, and part two here. Go forth and prosper or whatever!!!! A few years ago, a friend who likes to have fun and be gay went on a trip to Maine with some highly-educated 30-something straight people. They played Scrabble. They cooked locally-sourced food. They talked about possible future pregnancies. They had one or two glasses of natural wine in the evenings and then went to bed around 10pm.

While Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, an anthropologist and a professor at the University of Michigan, was doing fieldwork in Mexico City, studying the effects of chemical exposure, she happened upon a viewpoint that shook her world. In the working-class neighborhoods she was studying, addiction to drugs and alcohol wasn’t viewed as an inherently bad thing.

“Blast Furnaces,” 1969-93, by Bernd and Hilla Becher. This is part two of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here. There’ll be more parts to come. My first visit to Dia Beacon was 15 years ago. I went alone on a random weekday. The museum is located in a semi-rural town in upstate New York on the Hudson River.

ANXIETYLAND by Gemma Correll. Copyright @ 2026 by Gemma Correll. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Gemma Correll is an illustrator and cartoonist whose work often focuses on anxiety. In 2018, Correll had an anxiety attack that would not end—it lasted for weeks and weeks. Eventually, she ended up in the emergency room, and then an outpatient mental health program in an attempt to deal with her constant panic.

This is part one of a series on fostering one’s own agency. This one is free. The next ones won’t be. One of my favorite scenes in The Sopranos is in season three, when Carmela goes to a therapist for the first time. She’s attempting to figure out how to live with her husband’s misdeeds constantly on her mind; how to process the guilt and shame of her complicity, how to endure Tony’s constant violence, both towards other people and herself.