I launched the first proper issue of Domestic Left on May 1, 2019. It was on another, simpler (and one might say tinier) platform, which shut down recently, prompting me to shift to Substack at the end of last year. I’ve since noticed that other Substack writers use the email-to-new-subscribers feature to send out a kind of greatest-hits list of their favorite pieces.
Since I’ve been meaning to compile them for that purpose, have been busy with work travel, and have picked up a bunch of new subscribers in the past few months (hi!), who I thought might enjoy some of my older writing, here are my favorite pieces from each year of this endeavor. (There is also some bonus content further down, to entice long-time readers and anyone who is interested in the name of this newsletter, driving in Pittsburgh, and/or running.)
Domestic Left #5: Do the Dead Know What Time It Is?
A piece about cycles of birth and death, how I learned to love good writing, St. Crispin’s Day, and trying to teach myself how to draw.
Domestic Left #9: Ruled By Fear
The second year of Domestic Left began during the pandemic lock-down, and I only managed two posts between May 2020 and April 2021. This one doesn’t mention COVID-19, but it’s in there. A meditation on a negative emotion.
Domestic Left #12
I didn’t give this piece a title. It’s about a peculiar way in which I received news about the 2003 Gulf War, written about a month into the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Domestic Left #19: “I think this is a song of hope”
The longest piece I’ve written for this newsletter — about 4,500 words, I think. About Led Zeppelin, the electric guitar, violence, and melancholy.
Domestic Left #30: In the end, we all admitted
A transcription of a dream, and an attempt to come to grips with guilt.
Bonus content if you read this far: Why is this publication called Domestic Left?
I adopted @domesticleft as my nom de internet about 20 years ago, initially because I needed a subdomain for Blogger. It subsequently became my username on Twitter and Instagram, once they were invented.
I picked it because at the time my main occupation was taking care of my two then-small children. I was mostly blogging about, well, domestic subjects, but from a left-wing perspective. (The subtitle of that Blogger blog, for many years, was something like “Irregular diary and recipe book of a left-wing housewife in drag.”)
However, I also thought it would be funny to take a phrase commonly employed by right-wing alarmists to describe the American left (and subtly imply that we are agents of some foreign power), and use it as a container for posts about things like taking children to the dentist. To embrace both the quotidian and the geopolitical sense of the word “domestic.”
Also it just kinda sounds cool.
Bonus content if you have ever lived in Pittsburgh, or tried to drive in it
I don’t think it’s as good as the Led Zeppelin piece, but the piece that has probably gotten the most positive feedback is “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” from January of 2023.
Bonus content about running
I ran the Pittsburgh Half Marathon this morning, and posted a race report on Instagram.