Over the past two weeks, I’ve been building new venues for my writing — my education policy/education politics/disability writing is getting funneled into two new newsletters — The Educated Parent and The Great Leap. Honestly, I love building new websites, so it’s been a lot of fun. 

I’m still deciding what I will do with the Apt. 11D sister sites. I could easily make Apt. 11D a strictly personal-lifestyle site with cooking tips and pictures of my house. I do admire many lifestyle social media empires with beautiful people doing beautiful things. It’s women’s work, being being recorded and memorialized – invisible no longer. Even though, I’m not as cute as I was 20 years ago, when I started blogging, and can’t do influencer-glam shots, I could use my kids as props for my photoshoots. 

But I’m not sure the world really needs another recipe for creme brûlée. And I’m not quite sure how those influencer/creators can write about yoga or sour dough starter, when there are 1,500 people buried in the basement of the ruins of a theater in Mariupol, Ukraine. How can they not use their platforms with millions of follow to scream at the top of their lungs about mass graves and dead children? 

One or two political leaders are trying to make politics into a beautiful trendy influencer thing, including Barack Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I do appreciate their efforts to take public affairs away from the stodgie old people and popularize topics like transportation and housing. It’s also great that they show that politics can be a way of life. For me, I truly cannot separate politics from my personal life. I have strong opinions on everything from disability rights to public housing to international affairs. Politics IS my lifestyle. That’s why I would feel a little ill just writing about food and home decorating all the time, and am very interested in people who use social media to talk about politics.

From the Apt. 11D Newsletter. Read the rest here.