winter wonders

1.27.2026

Hi all,

Happy new year. I’m writing to you from the heart of the freezing cold storm that has settled over much of the country. I am looking out at the storm from Kingston, New York, where about two feet of snow has fallen since yesterday morning. The town is quiet, muffled. Last night, I went for a walk and saw all sorts of people skiing, snowshoeing, sledding, or snowmobiling by. Most of the sidewalks weren’t shoveled and people were jumping about, landing in the snow banks, spreading out and laying there a while.   

Snow has a quieting effect on my senses, and a snowstorm like this has a similar effect on my perception of time. It slows down. Streets, marked with signs and lines to indicate rules, become walkways — and playgrounds of sorts. In the evening, a neighbor came over to play cards and eat soup while my partner and I finished our chores. It felt like a moment of leisure I did little to create; the time was gifted to me.

I’ve been thinking, this weekend, about the pace of a physical, real place. The gulf between the immediate experience of the physical place where I live — on a corner of a town in upstate New York — and the mental experience of the region, country, and world I inhabit feels at once dissonant, violent, chaotic, and deadening. My mental world feels fast and loud, full of headlines, images, videos, arguments between my own selves, arguments between hypothetical or approximations of real people who have taken up residence in my brain. Even when my mind is calm, the pace of its movement is quick.

My physical world presents a different pace. Over the weekend, the volume of reports about burgeoning or exploding crises — beaming in from places other than the block on which I live — turned up higher and higher. In New York, the news reports got loud too, warning about a historic storm on the approach. I was in emotional distress about things happening in places other than here, but my attention had to continually turn back to the reality in my house, on my street. I set up space heaters on the first floor of my home so the pipes wouldn’t freeze; I brought bedding downstairs so that I could sleep there and monitor the heaters overnight; I parked my car at a friend’s house so I wouldn’t have to move it at 7 a.m. to adhere to the town's snow emergency policy. In the morning, our neighbor cleared our sidewalk with a push-plow as he almost always does, without us asking. 

In the afternoon, with much of the town shut down, I spent two hours cutting photographs, magazines, and books for a collage I’m creating for some friends. At the same time, I spoke on the phone to a different friend, whose spouse is not a U.S. citizen and lives in one of the 75 countries for which Trump just suspended visa processing. They want to be together somewhere in the world, but how? They do not know. After the call, I continued cutting images for a long time.

Twenty four hours later, the snowfall had slowed, but the amount on the ground seemed giant. My partner started digging her car, which was by now almost completely buried, out of our small driveway. At the same time, messages flooded a local Whatsapp chat between friends and neighbors in Albany, a city where I lived until recently. (See below.)

I cooked dinner. While I did, I pictured this informal brigade of people with shovels, bundled in coats, running across an Albany neighborhood, digging cars out of gigantic banks and acting as snow shoveling first responders. It was a warming image, and it brought me some comfort.   

2.3.2026

Since the storm, I’ve continued to think about the the place where I live, and how it invites and requires me to move through time in particular ways, at a particular pace. The snow has now melted some, exposing and collecting dirt. The ice has expanded, stretching across sidewalks and driveways. Temperatures continue to hover near the negatives — scaling up to 25-30 degrees during the day, only to crash back down to 1 degree overnight. I try to remember what I have to do here: rotate the space heaters so our pipes don't refreeze; keep the cats fed; fold the laundry. Tending, I guess. There’s something helpful about the physicality of tending as a response to the incredible (as in, unbelievable) world beyond my block.

All of this has me returning to a question which has taken up a great deal of space in me over the past five or six years: What does it mean to make a commitment to a place? Last year, I moved an hour south from Albany, a city where I lived for five years, to Kingston, a medium-sized town in the Hudson Valley. I’m still settling, but I’ve loved living here so far, and I plan to stay for a long while. At this point, all of my family lives in the western United States. My decision to move to Kingston, rather than to decamp West, represents a conscious decision to stay in Upstate New York, a region where I've spent about 25 of the 35 years I've been alive. I feel my relationship with this physical place deepening.

This feeling excites me, though it’s not something I often talk about with other people. I’m generalizing here, but when I talk about it, people tend to find me weird. Over the many years I lived in what most people seem to think is one of the most condemnable places in the East or maybe anywhere (Albany), I got used to a particular refrain: Did you move there for a job? A partner? A family? When I said no, the conversation usually stalled. Sometimes, people actually laughed at me — or maybe they were laughing at Albany. Lol! I’m not sure.

For a long time, I found it hard to explain my choices to those people, or just in general, other than to say: I think I love a place, or a region, the way other people love other things. On the one hand, it did not feel crazy to choose to live somewhere simply because I loved the physical place and did not want to live anywhere else. On the other hand, it did feel crazy because few people seemed to get me when I tried to explain it. 

Is it so weird to treat a place like you would a partner or a friend? To decide: I love this place deeply, and I want to continue to see how our relationship evolves — to invest time and energy into that experience. No idea! I have little clue how any of us should be organizing our lives, especially not now. But I continue to ask questions about this place where I’ve lived so many years, as if I've been slowly steeping in the region — each of us seasoning and shaping the other — and about what I might now be able to share as a result.

Work Things

I published and worked on a wide variety of projects over the past year, but to be honest, I spent a lot of that time feeling very burned out. This feeling of burnout (a weak word for what can be a wide range of physical/psychological experiences but there’s not a better one I can think of..) reached its apex in December. I was fortunate to be able to take a few weeks off over the new year. Now, I am easing back in, as slowly as I can. I’m thinking a good deal about what needs to change. If you have experienced something similar and would be interested in chatting, please reach out.

Here are some things I wrote or did last year when I wasn’t lying face down on the floor, which I did often and genuinely recommend. Not being clever, I really did a lot of lying face down on the floor. Try it right now, I'm not kidding!

In the beginning of the year, I concluded a ~two year project with New York Focus traveling around the state to research community information needs. After we published our findings, New York Focus Engagement Editor Alex Arriaga and I did a fair number of interviews with radio stations and podcasts. We also met with students at Columbia’s journalism school. It was gratifying to see so much interest in the state of public information and journalism not only in New York City but across the state. Here are some of my favorite interviews from that period:

• Frustrated with Albany? New York Focus finds you're not alone. (NCPR)
• Alex Arriaga and kate harloe on local journalism in New York (The Study Hall Podcast)
• New York Focus: The Impact of Declining Local News Sources (Central Current Radio)

Collecting those links reminded me that I also spoke on a panel organized by the civic media advocacy organization Free Press, titled "Local News in Times of Crisis: How Civic Media Is Rising to the Moment." This was, I think, one of the most fun speaking engagement I've ever participated in. It helped that everyone on the panel was completely brilliant and a friend, so we talked about serious Journalism things but also laughed a lot. Nearly 300 people attended which was surprising and...arresting. I remain pretty amazed at the number of people showing up for causes like this, with so much else in need of our attention.

Moving on: Last year, I continued to steward a working group at News Futures focused on media reform and narrative change, alongside journalist Carla Murphy. We will publish more about that soon. 

I also continued to organize with my feisty union of freelance media workers, the Freelance Solidarity Project at the National Writers Union. In the summer, I worked with a few other members to organize “Journalism Futures: Funding Under Fascism,” a panel discussion between nonprofit journalism leaders about nonprofit status and philanthropy as a solution to the structural breakdown of the journalism industry. Panelists included Mazin Sidahmed, co-executive director of Documented; Alicia Bell, director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund at Borealis Philanthropy; and Lara Witt, editor-in-chief of Prism and an organizer of Media Against Apartheid and Displacement. Roshan Abraham, freelance journalist and FSP member, moderated. I’m probably biased but this was, in my opinion, the best panel discussion I attended all year. It is tiring to see philanthropy and nonprofit status relentlessly touted as The SolutionTM to structural problems; meanwhile, genuine reckoning with the nonprofit industrial complex et. al remains...out of reach. (Speaking of: if you're able, please donate to ProPublica's strike fund.) This was a rare, public, and honest conversation about that — and all the dynamics that nonprofit journalism leaders have to contend with when trying to fund their work amidst genocide, fascism, and collapse.

Also in the summer, when the federal government eliminated funding for public media across the country, I reported a story for New York Focus investigating how much New York’s public media organizations would lose: ~$57 million, it turned out. In a short time, I talked to almost all of the state's ~30 public funding recipients to confirm not only the financial loss, but also what these cuts would mean beyond budget spreadsheets — for communities across the state. It quickly became clear that, as was the case across the U.S., New York’s rural stations would be hit much harder. One example, which we cited in the piece, made the disparity clear: WNYC, New York City’s public radio station, lost approximately $3 million a year — or just 4 percent of its annual budget — while Mountain Lake PBS, a public TV station that serves a large, rural region of state, lost about $950,000 a year, or ~35 percent of its annual budget. More on that in the chart below.

It is always fun to have an excuse to chat with North Country Public Radio (NCPR), a station that covers the vast, northernmost region of New York State where I grew up. The station’s manager Mitch Teich talked to me at great length and shared all sorts of tidbits. (Thanks, Mitch!) One favorite made it into the end of the story: 

The weekend after Congress approved the federal cuts, Teich appeared on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” to share the perspective of rural stations. He heard from listeners across the country. Some expressed appreciation for public radio; others challenged him over whether NPR deserves federal support at all.

“I wrote back to all of them and made the point that I wasn’t defending the funding, I’m simply explaining what the impact on a local station is, whose service is about providing more than NPR news,” Teich said.

Many people were shocked to receive a personal message from him and softened in their replies, conceding that “their argument wasn’t with the local stations,” he said.

“As cliche as it is, this tells me that for the situation to get better for stations like ours, we’re going to have to work with people one by one,” he continued. “We can’t afford to take a one size fits all approach.” Which is what, Teich concluded, makes public media, and rural stations in particular, special.

Teich’s determination to see the station survive was shared by the many other public media journalists I spoke with. To learn more about my findings, you can read the paywall-free article here.

A few months later, I was surprised to see this story featured by John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. Ha! That was neat. You can watch his full 30-minute segment on public media here. The story was also shouted out in The Guardian, and I was interviewed about it onto WAMC Northeast Public Radio's show, The Legislative Gazette, which you can listen to here.

Finally, the update I feel most grateful and proud to share is: I joined CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism as an Adjunct Professor. Teaching is something I’ve long been eager to make a larger part of my life, and I’ve been especially happy to land at CUNY. During the fall semester, I taught courses on journalism law, ethics, and safety, as well as freelancing and a range of other topics. 

Teaching those courses for the first time, right now, gave me a lot to think about, as did the students, who were truly exceptional. I hope to write more about that soon. For now, I’ll share that, in September, when I was in the challenging first month of the fall semester, my mom had a dream that I still reference when trying to describe what teaching is teaching me. Here’s what she texted me:

I had a dream last night in which my father wrote my sister a letter that said in part “In all the world there is no better sight than that of a teacher.”

In all the world there is no better sight than that of a teacher. In all the world there is no better sight than that of a teacher! 

For better or worse, I've been an eager student all my life. In spite of this, I’ve been deeply surprised by the extent to which using my mind in a teaching capacity has changed my mind; the perspective from which I look out at the world; my sight. Thanks to my mom for creating or grabbing that line out of the ether.

Oh and — sometime amidst all of this, I also finished a book proposal which I’ve been slowly writing over the past ~two years. It’s been sitting on my Google Drive since. (Recall the burnout.) There are clear next steps I need to take, though, which I will now return to with a little more verve in the wake of time off. More on this to come.

Fragments (Or: Things I've Enjoyed Recently)

I’ve noticed that the ways in which I consume news and information are changing. I’m reading less obsessively. I’m trying not to read from a place of panic, but from a place of focus. Rather than attempting to read everything, I’m declaring bankruptcy. I’m trying instead to attentively read 1-2 in depth pieces of journalism about an event, happening, new policy, etc.

Towards that end, I appreciated this episode of the Jewish Currents podcast “On The Nose,” which featured interviews with three organizers in Minneapolis (Lily Cooper from UNIDOS’s rapid response team, Kandace Montgomery, co-founder of Black Visions, and Jesse Meisenhelter, organizer with Minneapolis Families for Public Schools). More than any reel or rapid-fire scrolling I’ve done, this conversation gave me a visceral sense of what the ICE occupation of Minneapolis has felt like, on the ground. The episode also included a rich conversation about the landscape of organizing/politics in Minnesota in recent years, what these organizers have learned over the last months, and what lessons they have to share with those of us who live elsewhere. ("The preparation starts yesterday. In my neighborhood, what started and has allowed for the thousands of dollars of mutual aid, intricate patrol system, and campaigning, it was potlucks.”) They talk about trainings, moving hundreds of thousands of dollars in mutual aid, and much more. (“These sanctuary schools teams have moved $800,000 of mutual aid in the past month, that’s just through the 25 schools I talked to last Thursday. That does not encompass the other 25 schools I didn’t talk to last Thursday, or any other schools in our district, or the private schools, or the charter schools.”)

The episode is worth your time.

Other things that have stayed with me: 

+This issue of my friend Jihii’s newsletter Time Spent: “My mind and heart have been a mess lately in a way I’ve not really experienced before. I rarely get twisted when it comes to the news.” She continued: 

But something is changing.

Some of it feels like a side effect of parenthood: witnessing human cruelty feels more gut-wrenching when you’re constantly witnessing human innocence. Side-by-side, they wreck you. Seeing power seized and used against people so forcefully and abhorrently feels intolerable now that I have a small human I'm tasked with raising and protecting. And being attuned to the well-being of other people's children has become a daily practice — it's a natural instinct at playgrounds and in the neighborhood and even in community spaces to consider what other children and other parents need…

My approach to tricky knots has never been brute force. I need to sit back, look at it from a few angles, and then decide my approach. While I rarely share raw first thoughts to this degree, here is a letter I wrote in my journal to my son this weekend. I’m sharing it because perhaps you are also dealing with a growing knot…Sometimes thinking about what you would say to a child holds the most honest answers.

Read the rest here.

+ “It Is a Serious Thing Just to be Alive: On this fresh morning in this broken world,” a recent issue of Chris La Tray’s newsletter, An Irritable Métis. “Mary Oliver proved what another of my poet heroes – Matsuo Bashō, probably one of Mary’s too – said: ‘Real poetry is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.’”

+ I saw The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, a few weeks ago. The film is an adaptation of a memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, which I found to be quite formative in my twenties. I didn’t love the movie! But I’m still thinking about it. If you’ve seen it, I’d love to discuss it with you. 

+I also saw All That's Left of You, an intergenerational epic following a Palestinian family from 1948 to the 2020's. I did love this film, though it was complex and imperfect. Highly recommend getting out to see this one.

+I finished The Wilderness, a new novel by Angela Flournoy, billed as a story about young female friends navigating their 20s and 30s together. I found it unsatisfying, and the characters rather empty. I’m still puzzling over why. Would be glad to discuss this one, too.

+At Kingston’s new indie theater Upstate Films, I saw WTO/99, a documentary about the massive protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999. The film was made entirely of archival footage, including local and national media coverage of the time, which made for an unexpected commentary on the relationship between media and social movements, on top of the film’s more obvious meditation on the protests themselves.

The film was not easy to watch; a friend rightly called it “tightly wound.” There was a lot of violence. The WTO protests were the first time that U.S. police used many of the militaristic tactics that we’ve become accustomed to: kettling — wherein police trap protestors, prevent their exit, and either attack or arrest them — was first used here by police in 1999, as was the aggressive use of pepper balls. I left the theater thinking about how the imagery in the film looks a lot like the imagery I’m immersed in on Instagram almost daily. I’ve become adept at speedily redirecting or thumbing past such images, so as not to sit in them as long as I had to during this film. The experience made me appreciate just how much violent imagery we are all swimming in now, no matter what platforms or news outlets we’re engaging with. Obviously, this is not new, but I find myself continuing to wonder about it. Little surprise that the film is having trouble finding distribution (streamers are moving away from political films) but you can find information on upcoming screenings or how to organize one where you live here.

+Loved this essay from my pal Carla Murphy, in her newsletter About the American Mainstream: ”At 250, which nation has mainstream journalism called forth?” 

Good Things (recent moments of joy)

Take really good care out there. ‘Til next time,

kate