Ben Dreyfuss
Editorial Director at Mother Jones
Founder at Calm Down
subscribe to my substack CALM DOWN. It's about politics and stuff.
Articles
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1 week ago |
calmdownben.com | Ben Dreyfuss
In the finale of HBO’s second season of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder drops a bombshell with his trademark deadpan delivery: over the past two years, he has secretly trained to become certified to fly a Boeing 737, crowning himself “the least experienced 737-rated pilot in North America.” He has committed to The Bit™ more than anyone has ever committed to bits.
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2 weeks ago |
calmdownben.com | Ben Dreyfuss
A few days ago, I posted a tweet that made the rounds. It pointed out how half the posts online describe an almost unimaginably high level of comfort—job, house, spouse, kids, bulk goods at wholesale prices—and then conclude: “but it sucks.”And listen, I’ve seen the movies from the late ’90s. I know what the disaffection genre looks like. But what’s going on now is different. It’s louder. Angrier. Less coherent. It doesn’t seem to want anything—except to feel something.
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3 weeks ago |
calmdownben.com | Ben Dreyfuss
One of my favorite poets is Robert Lowell, and one of my favorite Robert Lowell lines isn’t from one of his poems at all. It’s from a letter he sent Elizabeth Bishop from a mental institution in 1958:“Talking about the past is like a cat’s trying to explain how it climbed down a ladder.”It’s one of those lines that gets lodged in your brain and stays there long after you’ve forgotten the context.
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3 weeks ago |
calmdownben.com | Ben Dreyfuss
I had always wanted to be a mother. It’s the first thing I said to your dad. We met at a party in LA in February, 1983. I was a producer at CBS. “What do you want to do with your career at CBS?” he asked me. And I said, “Nothing, I want to get married and have children.” And he said, “Me too. Let’s get married.” And we got married like one month later and now we have you three kids. If we hadn’t been this crazy, you guys wouldn’t exist! So be nice to the baby boomer generation.
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1 month ago |
calmdownben.com | Ben Dreyfuss
A rule about families is that when you’re arguing about something, you’re probably arguing about something else. The fight is rarely about the thing—it’s about everything beneath it. In theater, this often manifests as a character arriving from outside the family whose presence sets off a cascade of conflicts rooted in the family’s own dysfunction. But these stories aren’t just about families.
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I have a lot of complicated thoughts about trans issues, and I’ve spent a decade avoiding the issue because I don’t want to get screamed at but I recently lost some subscribers and chart go down=bad. So I think I will do a post on it