“Wow! New Yorkers really like out-of-towners!”
Cartoon by Mads Horwath
2026-04-07 00:06:02
2026-04-06 21:06:02
April 12, 1915–December 17, 1975
Hound Dog once confessed:
I can’t play shit, but I sure make it sound good.
Others just said he played the hell out’ that guitar.
Yes, it’s true the hell was played out
of his guitar on the daily—along with five hundred miles
of barbed wire wind whistle, a murder
of crow caws, twenty pounds of brass-knuckle
jangles, and forty acres of midnight cricket song.
When he dragged the holler of his humbucker
through wire and magnified coil, folks swore
they’d heard the muffled motor rumbles of seven
funeral cars, the spinning chambers
of eleven .44s and a mother’s murmured-up prayers
echoed off plaster-cast praying hands.
In short, he slid metal on string till the devil
got tickled and laughed up the Blues.
Born a polydactyl, his twelve fingers
flayed the six-string till one night
he freed himself of his right hand’s
sixth nub. Sawed it off drunk
on something loaded
with more proof than sense.
Each boogie he played held a secret
line dance for the sacrificial digit,
its spirit hovering up in the stratosphere
somewhere with his howl.
In a distant forest,
the monument to his reckless
fretwork rustles in the treetops
and hums with beehives
like the watts in a worn, weary amp
burning, crackling for release.
2026-04-06 19:06:01
The desks of the New York Public Library’s main branch, on Fifth Avenue, are five and a half feet apart. That is enough space for a jeté or maybe a restrained arabesque. The other day, a squad of dancers stretched and limbered up in the halls as, outside, the lions stayed still. The dancers were there to prepare for Lunch Dances, a series of free performances organized by the library, in which they twirl through the building’s collection of around fifteen million items, to dramatize the joys and serendipities of research.
Robbie Saenz de Viteri, the project’s co-creator, came into the visitor center, wheeling a library cart laden with a blinking soundboard. Next to him was Monica Bill Barnes, the co-creator, choreographer, and lead dancer. Saenz de Viteri looked like a podcaster: tousled hair, black-rimmed glasses, a plaid button-down, and a microphone. Barnes stood with dancerly poise in a crisp white shirt, a black tie, and cushy black sneakers.
Each performance lasts an hour. Audience members, who sign up online, wear headphones, through which they hear music and a live narration by Saenz de Viteri. During the run-through, he said softly into the mike, “There’s no way to rehearse this in the studio.” It was after hours, but the dances are designed to be performed when the library is packed.
In the dance, Barnes plays a library page on her lunch hour who has to deliver five research requests to patrons. It’s a quasi-Shakespearean structure, comprising love and heartbreak. At the great doors of the lobby, she meets five more pages, who shimmy and snap like a gang of Jets. Inside the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room, with its elaborate murals, Barnes meets two researchers. Anna, in a cardigan and a messy bun, has ordered a box of editions of The Ladder, a magazine launched in the fifties, published by the first lesbian-rights organization in the United States. Hannah, opposite, in a checkered shirt and Vans, has ordered Us Weekly. (“Yes, we have Us Weekly. So does your optometrist. But your optometrist does not have twenty-five years of Us Weekly,” Saenz de Viteri said.) Around them, the dancers spin and slide. The researchers’ eyes meet.
Watching the rehearsal were two librarians in headphones: Meredith Mann, a curator of manuscripts, who had on a tartan skirt, and Kate Cordes, a director of reference and outreach, who was dressed all in black. Both had helped Saenz de Viteri and Barnes find ideas for the plot.
Saenz de Viteri had taken Frank O’Hara’s 1964 book, “Lunch Poems,” as loose inspiration, but making a dance about a library was a challenge. “We just really panicked,” Saenz de Viteri said, of the commission.
“Everyone has that, the first time they visit,” Mann told him. (Her initial job at the library, as a volunteer, was a project that involved transcribing historical menus.) She had shown Saenz de Viteri The Ladder, when he and Barnes were rummaging in the collection.
A lot of the dances turned out to be slightly melancholy. Cordes teared up at a scene about an older visitor, sitting alone in the gold-ceilinged map room. “I’ve had people cry at the desk,” she said. “Especially in Genealogies.”
“Doing research is a really personal thing, but you’re also surrounded by people,” Mann said. “You’re reading someone’s diary, their love letters.” In the Periodical room, Anna discovers an edition of The Ladder, from November, 1964, that published the first cover photo of an openly gay woman in the U.S. The cover girl is Ger van Braam, an Indonesian woman who subscribed to The Ladder and sent her picture to the editor in search of kinship. “In this city of millions, surely there are hundreds of my own sort,” she wrote.
After the rehearsal, Saenz de Viteri ran through some notes. “Do you feel like you get the story of that object?” he asked the librarians, of Anna’s historic copy of The Ladder. “There’s a part of me that is, like, You’re not allowed to pick it up!” he said.
“It’s like how police officers don’t watch ‘Law and Order,’ ” Cordes said. ♦
2026-04-06 19:06:01
For someone who has been at the piano for seventy years, Emanuel Ax shouldn’t be so worried about performing. “I get terribly nervous when I play,” he said softly, standing on the stage at WQXR’s Greene Space, near SoHo. “But at least I usually know what’s about to happen. Here, I’m not so sure.”
Ax, who is seventy-six, was about to record a special launch-party show to celebrate his new podcast, “Classical Music Happy Hour,” in front of an audience of more than a hundred people. Five chairs were set up onstage for panelists, and a sixth would be added for a surprise guest—Yo-Yo Ma, the world-renowned cellist and Ax’s friend of fifty-plus years. “I like virtually everybody,” Ax said. “But I love that man.”
Ax shuffled to a regal Steinway grand to run through a four-handed piece—“Dvořák’s Slavonic Dance Op. 46 No. 1,” he said. “Not that anybody cares.” The other two hands belonged to one of the panelists, the actor David Hyde Pierce. The pair had met at a benefit in Los Angeles, where Pierce had bravely told Ax that he, too, tickled the ivories.
“I’m sort of in heaven, so it doesn’t matter how the sound check goes,” Pierce said.
Ax seemed to be in hell. “I hope we get through it,” he said. “We’re going to screw up a lot.” He was right. Their page-turner, the WQXR host Jeff Spurgeon, was no help; despite Pierce’s violent nodding, he missed a few crucial flips. (“All of my page-turning gigs have been last-minute,” Spurgeon said.)
“I assume the engineers will take care of stuff,” Pierce said. “They’ll have their work cut out for them.”
In the greenroom, picking at crusted-over hummus and sliced salami, Ax tried to distract himself by getting to know another panelist, the linguist and music teacher John McWhorter. “Do you do—?” he started to ask.
“I’m a pretty good cabaret pianist,” McWhorter said. “And I also played cello for many years as a kid.” He giggled, worried that he’d let slip the Yo-Yo secret. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
When showtime arrived, Ma sneaked in a side door just as cameras started to roll. Onstage, Ax’s jitters melted into charm. “Who would be your ideal guest?” the m.c., WQXR’s Elliott Forrest, asked.
Ax replied, “Obviously, Beethoven would be great, but he’d be asking ‘What?’ all the time.”
Then came time for the Dvořák. Ax and Pierce launched into triumphant C major, tufts of white hair jostling as they crashed through their mistakes. Spurgeon stood behind them, following intently; he whipped a page, jaw clenched. (His wife, sitting close to the stage, squealed, “Yes! Yes!”)
As the action was winding down, the sixth chair was placed. “It’s incredibly nice of him to make the effort and come and see all of us,” Ax said. “It’s my friend Yo-Yo Ma!” Ma trotted out holding a cello, to One Direction-level applause. He nestled himself in the piano’s curve, and the two old friends eased into an arrangement of “Over the Rainbow.” Ma’s bow danced over the strings; Ax’s fingers glistened across the keys. The room was still, and Pierce began to cry.
“We’ve developed a sixth sense,” Ma said, after the show. “We’re not looking at one another, but we know exactly when to do something.”
“You have a very expressive back,” Ax said.
Ma, ever the muse, was the one who inspired Ax’s pivot to podcasting. “It came from Yo-Yo’s idea of doing a music ‘Car Talk,’ ” Ax explained. Ma shook his head in protest, but Ax bulldozed on: “And they wanted both of us to do it, but you had too many things going. I had more time.” He added, with a smile, “I follow your life!”
“We’re like an old married couple,” Ma said. “Every time I go to Manny’s house, he’s got all these wonderful wine bottles. It’s a friendship with benefits.”
“The alcohol I drink most is probably white wine,” Ax said.
“And you drink champagne,” Ma corrected.
“I thought that was a wine,” Ax replied.
“Well, you said white wine,” Ma said. Checkmate.
“We try not to drink too much,” Ax said. “We’re very easy to put away.” They looked at each other with boyish glints. Conversation turned, inevitably, to music. “By definition, we cannot reach the aspirational goal,” Ax said, loftily. “There’s no perfect performance.”
Ma nodded. “And ‘Over the Rainbow,’ for example, is about yearning,” he said. “If the bluebird can, why can’t we?”
Perfect performance or not, Ax thought the live show had gone well. “I was silly in all the right places,” he said. He was even O.K. with the messy Dvořák. “We had to play something,” he said. “Since I don’t talk so good.” ♦
2026-04-06 19:06:01
Come springtime in the Hamptons, the sight of large flocks of Canada geese, flying in V’s overhead or foraging in fields, brings mixed feelings. On the one hand: summer is around the corner! On the other: droves of (human) jerks will be arriving soon. But, recently, a different seasonal scourge disrupted the status quo. Highly pathogenic avian influenza—or H5N1, a.k.a. bird flu—has plagued the East End’s Canada-goose population, littering some of the most expensive Zip Codes in the country with hundreds of bird carcasses.
The die-off became a talking point after the Instagram account @kookhampton (“kook” is slang for a clueless surfer) posted a photo of a three-foot-deep trench dug on Georgica Beach—a mass grave, packed with geese. Commenters noted that this was “how horror films start,” and that it posed a hazard to excavation-minded dogs and kids with shovels and pails.
For the nitty-gritty of who (Trustees? Mayors? The Department of Environmental Conservation?) is responsible for dealing with scores of deceased birds, there’s one guy to read: Christopher Gangemi, who writes the “On the Wing” column of the East Hampton Star. The other day, he joined Kathleen Mulcahy, the executive director of the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center, to answer a call from the East Hampton homeowners Kyle Glaeser and Andy Yuder, about a sick goose.
Gangemi’s own migration pattern: he left the city and a job in day trading after 9/11; another flock followed him during COVID. “I think, with this war, if there’s the tiniest hint of danger, everybody’s going to come out,” he hypothesized, then spotted the ailing goose, whose neck was coiled, its eyes cloudy.
“I don’t know why I’m gendering him, but we saw him yesterday,” Glaeser explained. “And then we were at dinner last night and a friend told us about all the birds that they found at the beach . . .”
Mulcahy, wearing gloves and a mask, cornered the goose, wrapping it in towels and handily depositing it in a plastic bin. “I chased a turkey for twenty minutes this morning,” she said. The turkey perked up and flew off. This bird, however, was going back to the center to be euthanized.
“Is it peaceful—like we did with our dog?” Yuder asked. “What is it, gas, over the beak?” Mulcahy reassured the callers that the goose would inhale a vapor, and “just go to sleep,” protecting other birds and scavengers from the virus.
Gangemi’s articles chart the progression of the disaster, from “Geese Rule State Bird Count Here” (February 19th, when 10,806 geese were spotted on the East End; business as usual) up to March 26th’s “Goose Die-Off Slowing.” The D.E.C. is hopeful that the flu will peter out, as warmer weather leads geese to break off into breeding pairs.
But one goose still had to make its final journey to the rescue center, in Hampton Bays, which, last year, had 2,666 “patient admissions,” spanning nearly two hundred species, and released more than eight hundred and fifty animals back into the wild. That bird was met by a staffer named Grace DeNatale, outside an isolation tent. Geese had suffered this year, she noted, because the winter was so brutal. “This was supposed to be their oasis, and everything was frozen for weeks,” she said. “They were all probably smooshed together in whatever thawed areas they could find, with barely any resources. People would also be getting sick in that situation.” (2025 was the year of raccoon distemper—it’s always something.)
Gangemi had spoken to an ornithologist at Cornell who said that the goose population would likely bounce back. But they face other threats.
“Cars, pesticides, lead,” Mulcahy said. “Have we ever gotten a swan that didn’t have lead poisoning?”
She introduced the center’s education animals, which, for various reasons, can’t be released. There was Henry Hunter, “a very angry screech owl,” and America, a red-tailed hawk, who, as a baby, had fallen out of his nest. After being reared by rehabilitators, he was sent to a flight-training program in New Jersey, but failed (bad vision).
DNA testing some years ago revealed that the center had been wrong about the sexes of many of its residents. Vlad, a turkey vulture who’d been hit by a train, was, in fact, female. The center had tried to release Vlad but kept getting calls from restaurants complaining that she was eating people’s French fries.
“You know where turkey vultures really like to hang out?” Gangemi said. “The Roanoke Avenue Elementary School—there’s this chimney and they just all sit around it. Whatever is coming out of that chimney, they like the smell.”
The goose was dead. Everyone headed back outside, where a steady chirping could be heard. “How’s that for the best sound in the world?” Mulcahy asked.
“Peepers!” Gangemi said. The spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer) is a small, loud frog; male peepers have a bell-like mating call that heralds the arrival of spring. ♦
2026-04-06 19:06:01
Cleveland, Tennessee, is deep in evangelical country. It’s the home of the Church of God, a major Pentecostal denomination, and not too far from the town where prosecutors went after a schoolteacher on charges of teaching evolution during the Scopes “monkey trial” a hundred years ago. Still, even there, in the reddest part of red America, the girlboss has infiltrated.
Emma Waters was a senior at Lee University, a Christian school in Cleveland, when the girlboss struck. Waters was close to achieving her dreams. She had piled up academic honors, and she was planning a move to Washington, D.C. But there was an obstacle: her boyfriend, Jack, had started talking about marriage. “The idea of beginning life as a wife and mother felt like a major letdown after years of working hard in college to prepare for a career in politics,” she writes in a new book, “Lead Like Jael” (Regnery). “Somehow, I had gotten this idea that prioritizing marriage and children earlier in life is what you do if you lack ambition.” There it was, creeping in: the girlboss world view, in which the best kind of life is one you define for yourself. She broke up with Jack.
Not to spoil the story, but: she regretted it. She turned to the Bible. She realized that her thinking on marriage and motherhood had been “self-centered,” focussed only on what she wanted and would have to sacrifice. He took her back, and they got married. Today, he’s in seminary, and, at twenty-eight, she’s got two daughters and another baby on the way—along with a job as a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, which she does in the early mornings and at night while her kids are asleep.
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The premise of “Lead Like Jael” is that young women have been offered a shallow vision of the good life, one in which academic achievement and professional success are the only markers of worth. What’s perhaps more unusual for someone coming out of Waters’s conservative milieu is that she also warns women against adopting a competing life script: that of the trad wives, a highly online ecosystem of women who revel in domesticity, wearing prairie dresses while baking sourdough with babies on their hips. “It is a mistake to treat the tradwife as the antidote to the girl boss,” Waters writes. “The temptation to curate a life rather than live it is strong.”
Her proposal is something of a middle path: women should recognize that there are seasons of life with different demands, and see their roles as wives and mothers not as a retreat from work but as a chance to build a foundation. She tells young women to stop scrolling, to date seriously, to treat sex as sacred, and to resist elevating career over everything else. She argues that mothers should stay home with children under three, suggesting that these kids need to be around their moms full time to form secure attachments. She envisions husbands and wives as “battle-mates,” and encourages women to commit to hosting regular meals to build community.
Her model for all this, incredibly, is the Biblical heroine Jael, famous for luring the Canaanite commander Sisera to her tent, plying him with milk curds, and driving a tent peg through his temple. Jael was able to take such decisive action, Waters argues, precisely because she owned the sphere of her home. Jael wasn’t a “social justice warrior” who was trying to “break a tent-canvas ceiling”; instead, she was able to use her “distinctly feminine means” to take her place in history.
Waters’s book is aimed at Christian women who are looking for guidance on how to navigate their seasons faithfully. But she’s writing into a moment of wider exhaustion and uncertainty about the models of a good life on offer. Theology aside, the concept in her book that might be most foreign to someone outside of her world is that of authority: the notion that getting married and having kids is a matter not just of personal preference but of finding the conviction to live a life that is ordained by God. “Motherhood is a path of surrender and trust rather than a project of control,” Waters writes. Fighting the obligations of motherhood leads to misery. Waters describes the unpleasant hustle of the working mom, who “juggled deadlines and daycare pickups,” who “ate a rushed lunch at her desk while drafting presentations no one would remember,” who Zoomed while folding laundry, who lay in bed at night scrolling “through pictures of the kids she barely saw that week.” It’s no wonder that the kind of life Waters is proposing—strong marriage, more time with children, tight-knit community—would take on a subversive allure.
Bible-based advice for women is an old and popular genre, and many books follow a format similar to Waters’s: Old Testament heroines—Esther, Sarah, Deborah—offering lessons in wisdom and discernment to modern women, particularly in their roles as wives and mothers. The genre has produced huge celebrities in evangelical circles—Beth Moore, Priscilla Shirer—along with a few who have broken containment, like Jen Hatmaker.
Twenty years ago, Hatmaker was much like Waters: a young pastor’s wife raising three little kids while writing her first books on Biblical wisdom for Christian women. She practiced the same schedule sorcery as Waters, writing from 8:15 A.M. to 12:15 P.M., three days a week, plus occasionally during nap time. In “Make Over,” from 2007, she seeks to help overwhelmed women find their balance: “If the Lord created a woman to be a servant of God, a wife, a mother, a professional, and a friend—not forgetting that she is still a daughter—then there is a way to be that woman.” In “Ms. Understood,” published a year later, she distances herself from feminism—“this is no battle cry for independence, because men are our beloved allies”—and carefully circumscribes her mission. “On behalf of my generation, I believe we’re pursuing center,” she writes. “We recognize the oppression of being subservient male accessories as well as the danger of turning into contentious, genderless semi-females.” Same polemic, just with Bush-era archetypes.
Not long after these books appeared, however, Hatmaker’s career took an unexpected turn. She had begun straining against the boundaries of the Southern Baptist subculture she came up in, in which women teachers were relegated to small groups and sidebars. She and her husband left their church to co-found “one centered around the marginalized.” She started tossing around words like “patriarchy” and “white supremacy.” In 2016, she gave an interview in which she said she would gladly officiate a gay marriage. The backlash was swift: books pulled off shelves, speaking engagements cancelled. For four years, she slowly built back her brand—still the advice-giving Christian sister, just a little libbed out. But, in 2020, the final, irredeemable break came: she filed for divorce.
In a memoir from this fall, “Awake” (Avid Reader), Hatmaker writes of how she discovered that her husband, whom she had met and married while they were both students at the same Southern Baptist college, had been drinking, lying, and cheating. “Out of a dead sleep, I hear five whispered words not meant for me: ‘I just can’t quit you.’ My husband of twenty-six years is voice-texting his girlfriend next to me in our bed.” Hatmaker, who is now fifty-one, had spent years coaching women on marriage: “Sweet Friend, if your marriage has suffered a catastrophic blow, I beg you, seek Christian counseling,” she wrote in her early thirties. “I know it would cost your pride, your controlled image, to seek help, but is that worse than a destroyed marriage? A family in crisis? A lifetime of loneliness?” And yet, when the catastrophic blow finally came for her, she knew to call it. Within thirty-six hours of her middle-of-the-night discovery, she was talking to a lawyer.
Whatever evolution Hatmaker went through in the heady years around Donald Trump’s first Presidency, it was nothing compared with the wreckage at home. She sees her failed marriage not just as a specific relationship gone bad but as a casualty of rigid Christian purity culture that taught her to keep herself small and to idolize early marriage as the ultimate achievement. “The community that raised me placed little premium on healthy young evolution,” she writes in “Awake.” Her husband entered ministry soon after graduation, a choice she seems to look back on with both regret and tenderness. “What if that boy splinters inside hierarchical leadership, and that girl is actually powerful?” she writes. “The patriarchy failed him too.” She is scathing about “biblical rules” that “felt terrible”; for example, that women should “spiritually and socially submit to men” and that queer people should be shamed. “Some combination of patriarchy plus religion, gender roles plus groupthink, power plus the threat of exclusion became the soil in which my marriage ultimately died,” she writes. She stopped going to church, convinced that “the fruit of these trees was rotten. Not one bad apple, not one questionable limb; rotten to the roots.” Her career has been huge—five Times best-sellers, an HGTV show, more than half a million Instagram followers—but she concluded it wasn’t possible to continue within the constraints of traditional Christian womanhood.
Many evangelicals of Hatmaker’s generation have travelled the same path of pointed questioning—not just about specific verses or churches but about their whole cultural milieu. The phenomenon is so common that defectors have repurposed the term “deconstruction” for it, as in “I’m deconstructing the deeply patriarchal views that evangelicalism taught me.” Of the five prominent Christian female writers whom Hatmaker counts as among her closest online friends, two got divorced around the same time that she did, each from a pastor she had married young. The scripts Hatmaker seems most interested in these days don’t come from the Bible. They come from within. In “Awake,” she lightly auditions new paradigms for sisterly guidance: learn to self-mother; listen to your body; trust your intuition as the greatest source of truth. Your authority is yourself. Her early books are no longer on her website.
It would be tidy to situate Waters and Hatmaker as two points on an inevitable arc: when you’re young, you reach for clear answers, but once you’re older and you’ve been through some shit, you’ll realize it was all lies. However much the young Hatmaker had in common with Waters, though, their lives seem likely to trace two very different arcs—ones instructive about both American Christianity and the wider debate over what a good life looks like for women.
For one thing, Hatmaker came of age during what was arguably the peak of evangelicalism in the United States. Some of the most iconic evangelical cultural artifacts, like the apocalyptic “Left Behind” series, came out of the nineties. Evangelicals got George W. Bush elected in 2000. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest single Protestant denomination, reached its highest membership levels around the beginning of the twenty-first century. For Hatmaker, the act of deconstructing religious life and its wholesome images of marriage and motherhood was not primarily about doubting the Bible. It was about fighting back against a powerful cultural force.
By contrast, Waters is starting her career at a time when Christianity is no longer as dominant in America. After years of marked decline, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian has levelled off. It would seem that the faith went through something of a sloughing-off period; people who once might have identified as nominal Christians are no longer bothering. Her call to put home life first and to let career follow can feel genuinely countercultural, because she is writing from within a counterculture.
Waters’s work is also distinctly political in a way that the young Hatmaker’s wasn’t. In addition to Biblical heroines like Jael, she points to contemporary models of family wisdom, most often right-wing influencers: Tiffany Justice, who co-founded the activist group Moms for Liberty, or Charlie Kirk. Waters’s experience of getting married and having kids, especially so young, is itself polarized. Counties with higher total fertility rates were more likely to go for Trump in 2024. Conservative women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five are much more likely to be married than their liberal counterparts, and thirty percentage points more likely to have children, according to the Institute for Family Studies; in the eighties, that gap was only five percentage points. Waters is part of an emerging cohort of Gen Z writers trying to reclaim female empowerment for young women who are both religious and conservative. Just as evangelical deconstruction became its own subculture, which Hatmaker helped define, these new, young, family-oriented religious conservatives seem to be forging a potent subculture of their own.
One notable matriarch mentioned in Waters’s book is Phyllis Schlafly. The conservative activist had six children before gaining prominence in the early nineteen-seventies as the chief opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. Waters expresses admiration for Schlafly’s life. “She didn’t win by acting like a man. She didn’t abandon her home, her femininity, or her faith. She led through them,” Waters writes. “She understood how to use the tools God had given her.” Schlafly also had a distinctive ability to drive feminists crazy. During one debate, the feminist activist Betty Friedan called Schlafly a witch, adding, “I’d like to burn you at the stake.” The reason that Schlafly was so crazy-making is fairly straightforward: while Schlafly was railing against the dangers of feminism, feminists were busy passing laws letting women open credit cards, protecting girls’ and women’s sports, and preventing employers from firing women for getting pregnant. These achievements are so far in the rearview mirror of the feminist culture wars that they may be easy to forget, but Waters and her cohort no doubt benefit from them.
At the same time, feminists have never quite known what to do with women like Schlafly or Waters, or, for that matter, with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, other than calling them hypocrites for having big careers while singing the virtues of staying home. That kind of dismissal misses something important about the project that Waters is pursuing. She’s writing about women who find freedom in the constraints of motherhood and marriage, and insisting that there’s room for them to nurture both professional ambitions and a traditional home life, if not necessarily at the same time. Hatmaker felt small in her conservative world, but Waters doesn’t feel small in hers; instead, she feels relief from the relentless pressure to lean in. She doesn’t experience motherhood and marriage as a millstone she must bear on the way to career success, or as a source of ambivalence about her identity. She appears to be at peace in the conviction that she was made for both.
Jael is a sly choice of hero for Waters, because she’s so easy to cast as a girlboss. After all, it takes real determination to drive a tent peg through a man’s skull. But nobody owns Jael, and women don’t have to fit a feminist frame to be powerful. Waters is lucky enough to be a young woman in a world where she can freely choose her remix of a traditional life. The tent peg is in her hands now. ♦
