Please Don’t Go is a monthly essay about life with other people: why it’s terrible, why it’s essential, and why we shouldn’t give up on it.

Living in community can be awful. Think of the social internet, promising to connect you with the world while destroying your mental health, or the megachurch, offering communion with the Divine while exploiting your physical and emotional vulnerabilities. Think of democracy, wonderful in theory, challenging and inconvenient for us in almost every way.

Is it hard to live in a world with other people because of toxic electoral politics? The demands of life under capitalism? Is it because of the difficulty of reconciliation despite our obvious, perennial need to repair our relationships? The foolishness of forgiveness in a world where we can expect to betray one another repeatedly?

I’m working these questions out in writing, and in conversation with you. In the meantime, this newsletter is titled Please Don’t Go as a summary of my general attitude: while there are many frustrating, incomprehensibly terrible things about life in community, I’m not ready to abandon the possibility that we can find ways to stay together.

I’m a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area who covers belief and belonging in American culture.

My essays and reporting have been published in Teen Vogue, Relevant, and Christianity Today. I was a columnist for Christianity Today’s culture vertical, Ecstatic, where I covered topics ranging from political artwork to viral television to megachurch scandals. I’ve interviewed Justin Giboney on recovering the Black church’s legacy in American politics and Elizabeth Bruenig on bearing faithful witness to the experiences of people on death row. I’ve written about the uneven effects of K-pop on Asian American creatives and explained why J. Cole correctly diagnosed celebrity Christianity before most of us knew there was a problem.

For the purposes of a newsletter on community, however, here is another useful bio: I am a person who is, or has been, a member of

Local churches

Prayer groups

Protest groups

Youth groups

Diversity and inclusion committees

Bible studies

Local advocacy groups

National advocacy groups

Mommy and me play groups

Group chats

Group housing

Group therapy

and one of the strongest qualifications I have for writing this newsletter is that I think about all of them with curiosity and interest, all of the time.