The Present Age Weekly Recap: April 8, 2022
License plats, bad advice, and other chaos
Welcome to the weekly recap. In this post, I’ll be linking to my work from the week, sharing some stories from others I thought were interesting, and providing a few casual thoughts on [gestures at everything]. If you’d like to receive this weekly email ONLY, please go to your account page and under “Email notifications” uncheck every box except “TPA Weekly Recap.” If you don’t want to receive the weekly recap, leave all boxes except “TPA Weekly Recap” checked.
From me this week: Bad advice and license plates
On Monday, an episode of the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast I appeared on about license plates went up. It was a lot of fun talking to Alex Schmidt and Blake Wexler about a topic that is, as the show’s name suggests, secretly incredibly fascinating.


On Tuesday, I wrote about how decisions by Democrats to follow some terrible post-2016 advice helped provide Republicans with an all-clear to relentlessly attack trans people.
Posts from others that I want to draw attention to:
Maybe it’s just because I’m a Cubs fan, maybe it’s because I love baseball, or maybe because it’s just a really good piece of writing, I really enjoyed Tyler Kepner’s article about Mike Montgomery, the man who pitched the final out for the Cubs in the 2016 World Series but now finds himself struggling to stay in baseball at all.


Writing for Rolling Stone, Nico Lang wrote about what the passage of an Alabama bill banning transition-related health care for trans teens means for the trans people who rely on it. It’s heartbreaking, and I honestly just don’t know what to do. One of these articles could be written about a number of states, all willing to effectively banish an entire group of people just for being trans.


Joan Walsh wrote a piece for The Nation about the legacy of Eric Boehlert. I never. had the chance to meet him and I don’t think we ever actually interacted on Twitter, even, but he’s someone whose work I read and largely admired for years.
Christopher Ingraham has a story at The Why Axis about the Republican member of Congress who gave a scholarship to a student, “coach” her through college, and then married her. For as much as Republicans have been trying to brand LGBTQ people as “groomers,” this is what actual “grooming” looks like.
Also, happy launch week to Willets Pen, a Substack about the New York Mets! (My wonderful wife Kayla designed WP’s logo.)