It's a Bed Rotting, Drinking, Self-Care Kinda Day
Five For Friday, September 26, 2026
Because I’ve been working multiple stressful jobs for the past year, I suddenly hit a wall last week. Luckily, I already planned to take a week break from my day job. Since Steve and I didn’t have the energy to organize a trip to Paris, we ended up staying at home. Which was precisely what I needed. I should have used that time to finish off some writing and to paint Jonah’s old bedroom. Instead, I mostly loafed around.
Bed rotting, so popular with the Gen Zers, is sometimes necessary. I’m not going to judge them, because I needed that time to sit in bed and play Sudoku for hours on end. After five days of that, I’m nearly back to normal.
Speaking of five, it’s FIVE FOR FRIDAY — the end-of-the-week newsletter dedicated to the random and the weird.
Kirk and Kimmel
With my lingering burnout, I have been unable to finish a coherent newsletter about Charlie Kirk. I took a couple of runs at the topic, but I never published them. I do think that any commentary on Kirk's assassination will benefit from a few months of serious thought, so I don’t feel too bad about missing the boat.
Heart of Darkness:
I’ve been bummed out about Charlie Kirk’s assassination all week. I was clearly not a fan of this conservative stuntman, but he wasn’t a bad guy. In fact, I admired his interest in debating ideas with anybody who came up to the mike. He certainly didn’t deserve a bullet to the neck.
I guess what’s making me feel more sad is my basic neurosis. I’m worried that this assassination is going to push the country to a place beyond politics. I’m concerned about nihilism.
Based on what I’ve read so far, Tyler didn’t have a straightforward political slant. He was brought up a Republican, but he had a transgender furry partner. Rather, Tyler was an entirely modern entity — extremely online, four-year college dropout, and probably living in the same toxic goo of despair as so many other young men.
Hot Takes:
Almost everyone has a hot take on Charlie Kirk’s assassin, Tyler Robinson, and on the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel. I’m going to do my hot takes in ten seconds:
Tyler Robinson was like too many young men today — sad, confused, extremely online, and a recent dropout from a four-year college. Don’t look for politics. It’s not there. He’s a pathetic young man.
Free speech is a good thing, and cancellations sucks regardless of who is doing it.
Here’s one extra: Stop it, people!
The Rise in Autism Rates
As ya’ll know, autism is my day job. I see autistic kids and families from nine to five. They are all different and all wonderful.
At the same time, the needs are staggering, especially when the families are poor and have few resources. Whew.
The rise in autism rate is mostly due to greater awareness, better access to autism therapy through insurance, and a changed definition of autism. It has nothing to do with Tylenol. These changes are happening worldwide.
However, that’s not the whole story. A new study from Norway points to certain environmental triggers, including poverty. These environmental triggers may activate autism genes that may have remained dormant in another situation.
I wrote a piece earlier in response to Trump’s crazy-assed press conference about Tylenol and autism.
Health Fads That I’m Following
Okay, I’m a sucker for health news. So, I was definitely interested in the no-processed foods for a month diet.
A nurse practitioner in my office said that she lost 30 pounds on the Mojito diet. So, I bought the book and have been reading it this week. I just shared the highlights with my hairdresser:
“And I’m trying out this new diet, called the Mojito diet. It allows you to have two drinks…”
“Wow! Two drinks a day. Yeah, I could totally do that.”
“two drinks per week.”
“WHAT? HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?”
The Evil Self-Care Industry
On top of bed-rotting, Zoomers have a host of other terrible habits. They don’t drink. Research shows that “two-thirds of adults 18 to 34 have a negative view of alcohol, compared with half of adults 35 to 54, and even less for adults 55 and older.”
Rather than drinking, young people are staying at home and getting high. After the horrible COVID years, they don’t know how to socialize in a bar.
And if they aren’t going to bars, they aren’t meeting people, hooking up, and forming relationships. Another bad thing.
Not that anybody is putting relationships at the top of their priority list. Young women, in particular, have negative views about relationships and family. Young men rank “getting married” as seventh on their list of measures of success. For young women, marriage is ranked 11 out of 13 on their measures for success. They rank emotional stability fourth, according to a poll by NBC News.
Kids Can’t Read. And It’s Getting Worse
Buried in the morass of bad news was data on student reading levels, according to the latest data from the Nation’s Report Card, NAEP. Shall we cut to the chase? They suck.
Matt Yglesias writes, “In other words, about a third of high school seniors basically can’t read prose text at all. They can (I hope) read signs and labels in stores and iMessage each other, but they cannot read a passage of text and understand what it’s saying.”
In an excellent article for the Argument, Kelsey Piper writes, “But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVID and has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth-grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil.”
Mississippi improved its reading methods. California didn’t.
I am sorry to see the violence erupting right now. I’m certainly not in favor of assassination and wish firearms were better regulated in the USA. I do not think Kirk was a good man and as I know a lot of people who work in schools where they deal with both the risk of gang violence and mass shootings it was frustrating to see him conflate the two. There’s a difference in how schools handle each and Kirk’s falsehoods just make it harder for them to advocate for their schools. I can’t condone his indifference to how he was impacting real children.
Marianne
But seriously I wish your thoughts about Kirk were shared more widely. Ezra Klein got it right and if so called leftists don’t agree about rejecting political violence and not treating him as a human being with a family and real talent then I just have to disagree with them 🙂