A research library and writing project on what happens when the professions, systems, and structures we relied on to navigate life begin to dissolve — and what we build in their place.
Over the past six years I've been writing about care, time, media, and invisible labor in my newsletter, Time Spent. These questions became more vivid through motherhood, community life, and stepping away from career-centered work. Below is a research project in progress — each chapter contains the essays, books and interviews that are helping me investigate each question. When a chapter is complete, it will be available in print through Time Spent Press.
Becoming a mother changed the way I understand care — not as a domestic duty but as a form of knowledge. This chapter is about what happens to your identity, your body, your partnerships, and your sense of time when you take on the work of raising another person. It's about the transformation that most people are underprepared for and the books, frameworks, and community practices that actually help. It's also about the people who can't or don't become parents, and what that reveals about what we've made motherhood mean in the first place. I came to this question first through a long fertility journey, then through early motherhood itself, then through the realization that how we parent reflects everything we believe about belonging, care, and the good life.
What fills the space when work stops defining you? This chapter follows what happens when you step out of career-centered life — by choice, by necessity, or by the slow realization that it was never the right container. It's about the invisible labor that was always there underneath: the care of children, elders, neighbors, and communities that happened while everyone was looking elsewhere. What does it cost to do that work seriously? What does it give back? And why has it taken so long to count?
What do we leave behind, and for whom? This chapter is about inheritance in the broadest sense — not just what we pass to our children but what we owe the people who come after us, what we received from those who came before, and how we hold that across generations without being crushed by it. It's about the texture of people we carry inside us long after they're gone — parents, grandparents, teachers, writers — and what it means to tend those relationships across time and distance. It's also about the systems we're inheriting and what we're obligated to do with them.
Journalism gave me a framework for understanding the world, and then that framework slowly stopped working. This chapter is about what comes after the news — not the industry but the function. How do communities make shared sense of things without institutions telling them what to pay attention to, and what gets lost when that infrastructure collapses? I spent fifteen years as a journalist and news literacy educator. What I kept seeing: the practices that actually worked were coming from artists, organizers, librarians, and neighbors. Not newsrooms. This chapter is about that gap and what fills it.
I'm not anti-tech. I think the binary between technologists and humanists is nonsensical. But I'm deeply interested in what AI is doing to the invisible systems underneath daily life — the care, the attention, the judgment that can't be automated and increasingly isn't being paid for. The question I keep returning to: what does AI optimize away, and what does that cost? Not in productivity terms but in human terms. The people who know this best aren't AI researchers. They're caregivers, teachers, community organizers, artists — people who do the work that has no metric. This chapter is an ongoing inquiry. The Companion Machines series is its notebook.