If you are new to Heated Rivalry, here are the basics. The plot is fairly simple: Over a number of years, Shane and Ilya hook up in hotel rooms and stage secret rendezvous while slipping and sliding into love. The show indulges in a slew of tropes familiar to romance readers: enemies-to-lovers, secret relationship, slow emotional burn. There's even a touch of a rake/ingenue dynamic, as Ilya (who tells Shane in their first hook-up, "I like trouble") is charming but sharp-edged, and Shane presents as awkward, overachieving and pure of heart. The leads are attractive and have incendiary chemistry, the show is absorbing and beautifully made, and the story is sensitively told. 

A lot of the discourse about Heated Rivalry has focused around the semi-explicit gay sex in the show, which mostly happens in the first two episodes while Shane and Ilya are still trying to keep their relationship surface-level. Is the idea that sexual intimacy can develop before emotional intimacy so strange? The pearl-clutching seems extreme to me, but I wonder if some of it is because of how skillfully the show depicts intimacy in general, and specifically between two men, a type of intimacy we do not see often. 

Without spoilers - because this is a show that benefits from being seen spoiler-free - I think what I can say about KinnPorsche is that it gets some very essential aspects of what it means to be traumatized extremely right: that it is a thing you are taught to hide at all costs; that you will never find a way out of it unless you seek it yourself; that avoidance will not heal you; that you can heal; that it is forever. 

As I am writing this, it is 5 am. I do not sleep much these days. If you do – well. 

About 4 hours ago, I returned from the first concert I have attended in more than two and a half years. The last concert I went to was Against Me! in 2019 in Los Angeles. Though I had no idea what was to come in a few months time, it is hard to ask for a better concert to precede a long hiatus from live music. They are furious, frantic, political, and filled with rage.

I have come to realize that I love music that lives in the rage place. This has always been true to a certain extent, raised as I was on the blues and hip-hop and indoctrinated in high school into the benevolent cult of artists such as Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails. Later I would discover so-called emo bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, though in times of great strife, I always fall back on the classic soul greats like Nina Simone and Etta James - definitely ladies who lived in the rage place, always.

It is 2003. I’m home from college in DC, taking a semester off after having a slight nervous breakdown and leaving my private liberal arts school in Minnesota.

We’re watching The Wire. The show is about Baltimore, a city 45 minutes away from where I live, but one trillion miles removed from my life. At the center of the first season is a kid named Wallace. I remember little about that season but I remember Wallace’s face. Wallace is young, and black, and trapped. He is played by an extraordinary child actor named Michael B Jordan. By the end of the season, Wallace will be dead.

Here is a moment I think I will remember for the rest of my life: as we were driving to NYC to see the most famous boyband in the world, K-pop group BTS, one of my best friends got a text alert that Brett Kavanaugh had been confirmed to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court.

The timing was, if anything, surreal. I have had these tickets for almost two months, but never would have imagined this show would coincide with this particularly hellish development in the news. But truthfully, many things about this trip were unexpected. When, a little over four months ago, I chanced upon a BTS video on YouTube after seeing a short Netflix documentary on K-pop, I had no idea it would lead to making a trip like this to a sold-out show at Citi Field, the 40,000 person capacity Mets stadium. The concert is historic: no Asian band has ever played a stadium show in the US. The BTS show sold out in under ten minutes.

I grew up in a house where people did not cry.

This is a lie. I cried a lot. I mostly cried alone, and I grew up believing that crying was something you did alone, because you should not cry. Crying was not okay. Crying was weakness, it was vulnerability, it was wrong. When I cried my mother would tell me not to cry. She didn’t do this out of meanness, she did this because she was also raised not to cry. We are a society that raises children not to cry, that tells people to be ashamed of their feelings, that pathologizes and overmedicates sadness and grief. It fucks us up.

I am in the business of feelings. When I’m working as a therapist, that is a big part of what I do - try to understand how and why and what people feel, all in service of helping them to feel better.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard all the therapist jokes in one form or another. After all, therapists manage to be both incredibly in demand and also widely mocked. Never more so than in pop culture, where therapists stand in as convenient narrative devices on TV shows and in movies: But how do you feel about that? How does that make you feel? Pop culture representations of therapists are overwhelmingly terrible, inaccurate and insulting, both to therapists and to the people who seek them out, but they are also ubiquitous enough to highlight the strange fascination we have with those who do this for a living.

This summer has brought two wildly different - and yet strangely similar - pop culture products of our fear of and fascination with feelings. Sense8, available via Netflix streaming, is a lush, confusing and breath-taking show about eight people from all over the globe who have the ability to feel each other’s feelings and share thoughts. It is maybe the most ambitious TV show ever made. Inside Out, perhaps Pixar’s most perfect movie, takes the viewer inside the mind of an 11-year-old, where her core emotions are visually represented by adorable avatars: sadness, joy, anger, fear and disgust. Both of these intra-psychic fantasies invite the viewer to do the work of a therapist: to try to understand the way people relate to each other while also trying to understand what it’s like to live inside someone else’s head.

There is a lot of stuff out there in the children’s and YA book publishing world about diversity right now. Everyone has an opinion. Most people think we need more diverse books, which is a sentiment I completely agree with. Literature should reflect the mixed up reality of our world, and the current generation of young people is both the most diverse and the most integrated generation ever. By all means, tell the stories of all kinds of kids from all kinds of backgrounds. Tell different stories, tell exciting stories, new stories, real stories. Let’s do this. I’m stoked.

The things is, though, I’m not so sure that this emphasis on diversity in theory is translating to diversity in practice. When I go to Barnes & Noble or browse on Amazon or frequent my local independent bookstore, often all I think is: S.O.S. Same old shit. In Barnes & Noble, for example, they devote significant shelf space to "If you like this, you’ll like this” displays, not unlike how Amazon recommends books to you based on a complex algorithm that finds similar books to ones you’ve read. If you like John Green, you’ll like this book about kids with cancer. You like this book about dystopian teens in a maze? How about this book about dystopian teens on a planet where everyone can hear each other’s thoughts? Even the covers are designed to trick you into thinking you’re reading something you’ve already read. Such marketing by its definition discourages readers from reading diversely, from going outside their comfort zones. How do we expect different stories to flourish in a marketplace that is trying so hard to keep everyone in their own lane?

This morning in a seminar I attended on Suicidal Assessment, the facilitator told us that people who express strong feelings of anger and hostility are more likely to kill themselves. “Like in those school shootings,” he said. “We look at those as acts of violence against others, but most of the time that’s just a way to commit suicide. These are people who just want to take a lot of other people with them.”

It’s true: it’s a refrain that we hear, time and time again. Columbine. Virginia Tech. The Sikh Temple in Wisconsin. Jiverly Wong in Binghamton, NY. George Hennard in Killeen, TX. James Edward Pough in Jacksonville, FL. Pat Sherrill in Edmond, OK. Now Newtown, Connecticut. Then the shooter turned the gun on himself.

Have you all heard of Fifty Shades of Gray? I bet you have. It’s been quite the topic of water cooler conversation lately, according to magazines like Entertainment Weekly, who last week featured a salacious cover of a naked, faceless woman with the headline Fifty Shades of Gray EXPOSED! Always subtle, that Entertainment Weekly. About as subtle as this book sounds like it is.

If you don’t know what Fifty Shades of Gray is, I’ll enlighten you. It’s a novel that began as a piece of Twilight fan fiction and became a best-selling phenomenon. It’s a romance, I guess, about a mysterious man and a woman who falls for him. As far as I can tell, without having read any of it, it’s mostly about sex. They have a lot of kinky sex, tie-me-up and hit me sort of sex? And people like to read it, especially – according to the media – women.

My grandparents were classic model minorities, back when Jews were the immigrant group to emulate – they pushed education as the most important thing a person could acquire, they networked and stuck together, they tried to pass. They’re successful and unashamed of it because they worked damn hard for it.

I wasn’t raised religious, but I was raised 100% culturally Jewish. I miss it.