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Share Donald Trump's Save America fundraising committee is selling "NEVER SURRENDER!" Trump mugshot t-shirts ($34.00), beverage holders ($15.00 for two) and coffee mugs ($25.00).  Then there is the Trump campaign’s sale of a signed poster ($28), a beer cozy ($15), and bumper stickers ($12)—all bearing his mugshot. You name it, and Trump is selling it with his mugshot taken by the Fulton County Sheriff.  While we don’t know exactly how much he has raised from these sales, Politico reports Trump raised nearly $7 million in the days after he was booked in the Fulton County prison.

Welcome to Is My Kid the Asshole?, a newsletter from science journalist and author Melinda Wenner Moyer, which you can read more about here. If you like it, please subscribe and/or share this post with someone else who would too. For today’s newsletter I’m doing something different: I’m going to expand on a parenting piece I just wrote for The New York Times, and provide the backstory on how it came to be to give you a window into my life and creative process.

Narrated: Why It’s Important to Avoid Loaded Language· October 30, 2023 Issue No. 9 You can write a book and divorce it completely from time and place. It’s much harder to do that with a newsletter. One that leans on topical events and pop culture to drive home reminders about the importance of rational thinking. When world events unfold, as in these past two weeks, and the headline mill goes into full swing, I remind myself that we owe it to our children not to pass onto them our own biases and preconceptions.

I bought my first house in Florida in early 2007. I got a Robo-signed loan from Chase Bank. By late 2008, I was caught up in the housing crash there and the Great Recession. My house was suddenly worth less than HALF what it was originally worth. I lost all equity practically overnight, yet was still paying on the original, highly inflated value. I was then laid off from my high paying job, got another, (far lower paying) job, and struggled to pay my bills for two long years after that.

A few weeks ago, a friend emailed me asking for help. Her 5-year-old had recently — and repeatedly — started announcing how smart he was. “I'm definitely worried he's running around saying stuff like that to the other kindergarteners and making them not like him,” she wrote. I have been wanting to write about arrogance in kids for a while. Because of my own kids, of course, who sometimes (often? constantly?) claim they are experts at everything.

Have you ever spent hours mesmerized by the Le Creuset website, caught in a daydream utopia where you design your own kitchen down to the color of the range hood and the enamel on the dutch oven? No? Just me? Regardless. Today’s newsletter is part cultural commentary, part shopping guide. It’s about the clout — and quality — of Le Creuset. It’s about why everyone should own a dutch oven and know how to use it.

[Warning: This essay contains spoilers from Warrior Nun seasons 1 and 2.] There are many reasons why Lilith is my favorite character in Warrior Nun. The bitter rival has been a character in stories since the dawn of time. To every Cain there is an Abel. To every Rick Grimes there is a Shane Walsh. But there is not always a rival who is an enemy like those previous two examples.

(Amblin Entertainment / Universal Pictures) Everyone who has a list of favorite film directors, probably has a least favorite film of said directors. For most Tim Burton fans, it’s usually his remake of Planet of the Apes (2001). A lot of Quentin Tarantino fans don’t seem to care for his segment of Grindhouse (2007), ‘Death Proof.’ As a longtime Martin Scorsese fan, for me, it’s his 1991 version of Cape Fear.

Apologies for no post last week. It turned out to be the ‘Sahm rule Roadshow.’ Today, I share some of the highlights. I will be back to regular programming soon; the economy, too! But again, a recession is not inevitable. Indicators of economic downturns like the Sahm rule are empirical regularities from the past, not laws of nature. The pandemic was extremely disruptive, and the rebalancing of the economy has been messy and slow.