Virginia Eubanks

Adopt A Station - Rescue Public Media Help preserve independent journalism and community programming across America by adopting a public media station. Congress has voted to rescind public media's funding.

4/4: Please, if you're able, help keep the public in public media right now.

adoptastation.org

It is especially crucial to support rural public media, as it often provides communities with their only local news and provide life-saving weather and emergency alerts.
ruralpublic.org

3/4: In many ways, it's the model I've been trying to live up to ever since. I see lots of quotes if Timothy Snyder's first rule of defeating tyranny ("Don't obey in advance."), fewer of the second ("Defend institutions.") Public media in the United States is an institution worth defending.

2/4: Watching college students and local community members rise to the occasion, sleeping on studio couches, caravaning down to LA to cover the aftermath firsthand, and getting information out to a community hungry for factual, accurate, humane stories made an indelible impression on me.

1/4: I got my start in public media. I still remember when the Rodney King verdict came down my first year at KZSC. We had a remarkably good public affairs department.

In Sickness and in Health An urgent and deeply affecting account of America's failure to provide meaningful support to its chronically ill and disabled citizens and our resulting...

I feel both joyful & terrified: My book is actually on the @eccobooks.bsky.social @harpercollins.bsky.social website now! IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH: Love Stories from the Frontlines of America’s Caregiving Crisis will be out Feb 2026 ✨ eeeeek! www.harpercollins.com/products/in-...

On a white background, black text reports no results for a DuckDuckGo search of "tyrannical lifestyle maintenance."

I think I just coined the phrase "tyrannical lifestyle maintenance," and I'm very proud.

One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All Abstract. Despite its enormous wealth, the United States leads the industrialized world in poverty. One Nation, Underprivileged unravels this disturbing pa

I learned it from Mark Rank's great lifecycle research on poverty.... 20 years old now, but absolutely still worth reading. academic.oup.com/book/2883

Also, Medicaid isn't just poor-people health insurance. It's the main payer for long-term care. Middle-class people can't afford nursing homes either at ~125k/yr. The typical outcome is that they "pay down" (go broke paying for care) to become eligible for Medicaid.

Made up a little song for myself today:

"You are feeling insecure...
Because that's a natural part...
Of the process!"

#AmWriting #EditingKillsEgo #GuideToOpenWaterLifesaving

Thank you for your amazing work!!

Kat McGowan NPR stories by Kat McGowan

Also, read everything @mcgowankat.bsky.social
has written for NPR on caregiving!

www.npr.org/people/g-s1-...

"In the early 20th century, disabled and older people who needed help were relegated to almshouses, which were public institutions of last resort."

No matter what I write about, I always end up back at poorhouses.

Why is caregiving so hard in America? The answers emerge in a new film A new documentary on PBS shows what it's like to care for adult family members and recounts the history of caregiving policy in the U.S., revealing why those caring for family are often on their own.

Why is caregiving so hard in America? Excited to see this new film...

"Caregivers are on their own--and...spend an average of $7,242 out of pocket ea yr. According to a recent DoL report, they also miss out on an av of $43,500 in income due to the demands of adult care." www.npr.org/2025/06/20/n...

There are going to be Andrew Solomon-level endnotes on this book. Which is crazy, because it's a freaking #memoir.

Honoring Mental Health Awareness Month - Orion Magazine A curated list of 12 stories

All of the essays curated by @orionmagazine.bsky.social for mental health awareness month are worth a read! orionmagazine.org/article/hono...

Try Sky Follower Bridge to bring your X/Twitter followers over. www.wikihow.com/Import-Twitt...

"... much in the way my mama would her cigarette butts on the long drive down, the kind of love unafraid of losing, which is the kind of love that now I am not."

"Even then I loved orange groves like I loved the word grove—G-R-O-V-E—loved the way it was spelled, the last bit of the word love snuggled right inside that single-syllable’s opening growl, the kind of love okay with its own first letter pitched out the window..."

One Hundred Reasons Not to Die - Orion Magazine Finding resilience amidst these many storms

Holy crap this essay is amazing.

@nickolebrown.bsky.social ! THANK YOU!

orionmagazine.org/article/one-...

On a background of snow-covered steep mountains, artfully designed test in warm shades of orange and yellow reads: "Care is both the hardest and the best thing we do as human beings. We should find better ways to share and support it, both because it is difficult and because it is beautiful."

A quote that's resonating with me today from the manuscript of A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving:

"Care is both the hardest and the best thing we do as human beings. We should find better ways to share and support it, because it is difficult and because it is beautiful."

Was hitting the point of diminishing returns enforcing desk discipline for these edits, so grabbed a camp site, took a paddle, swam in the river, slept under the stars. Then a hike and breakfast this morning and I'm back to the desk. Gas $30, campsite $18, food $20. 24 hours and $70 for the win.

A white plastic basket filled with the withered petals of blush and shocking pick roses and peonies sits above a metal sink, also filled with the withered petals of blush and shocking pick roses and peonies.

I love the two weeks of voluptuous abundance when the roses and peonies first bloom. I can't keep up with the deadheading, and I'm always having to clean up the petals from the five or six arrangements I've got going in the house. And then, like smoke, they are gone 'til next year.

Personal writing is SO. MUCH. SCARIER. 🤣🤣😳

Hi Jenny! Long time. Super excited (read: terrified and elated, in equal measure) about this one. Among the hardest and best things I've ever done. XO

A Publishers Marketplace Deal Report that reads: Non-fiction: memoir November 9, 2022 Journalist and author of AUTOMATING INEQUALITY Virginia Eubanks's A GUIDE TO OPEN WATER LIFESAVING: A CAREGIVER'S JOURNEY INTO PTSD, a memoir expanding on the author's NYT Magazine Essay "His Trauma and Mine," combing personal narrative and investigative journalism to explore the extended effects of violence, the failures of healthcare and social support, the economic toll of long-term disability, and the love and labor required in related caregiving, pitched for readers of Barbara Ehrenreich, Eula Biss, and Anne Boyer, to Jenna Johnson at Farrar, Strauss by Sam Stoloff at Frances Goldin Literary Agency (world English). Rights: sg@goldinlit.com

Closing in...

"No officials serious about governing should willingly create such problems for their own state."

Thanks, Stephen! I've been slow on the uptake (see post re: healing, hiding). 🤣

KEV! And TREV! Y'all are my heroes.

Opinion | We Saw Medicaid Work Requirements Up Close. You Don’t Want This Chaos.

Read this OpEd from two of the finest people I know, @kevindeliban.bsky.social and Trevor Hawkins, who remind us that Arkansas was living today's national politics ten years ago, with deadly impacts. Also that the people of Arkansas fought back, and won.

A cardboard box of seedling packets sits in a dirty planter.

Seedling trays -- one filled with several week-old baby plants, the other full of labeled soil -- sit in a patch of sun inside a greenhouse.

A large stack of drafts sits on a paint-spattered hardwood floor.

Two dozen or so small stacks of paper are arrayed on a hardwood floor.

Edit a chapter, plant some seeds. Repeat. Trying to remember that after all this quiet, patient work of cultivation comes harvest.