Dear readers,
Some days, you wake up early. You go for a run. You drink a cup of fair trade coffee, eat an incredibly reasonable breakfastâyogurt with berries and mixed nutsâand stride into the world. Your hair behaves. It lays flat and curls nicely at the ends. Your jeans zip. On those days, things seem simple. Your purpose is clear and your work important. You are on that most enviable of conveyor belts: The right track.
Those days, dear reader, are not the sort of days we write about here at Ali & Kate Industries, Inc.
No. We write about the days when you polish off a package of bacon. Alone. Wearing sweatpants from the menâs department of Walmart. Where did that bacon come from? Who knows. But suddenly you need to eat it right from the pan, using your fingers, burning your tongue and staining your shirt with grease.
We write about the scramble. The days when everything feels messy, confusing, unnavigable. The days when it is too hard to set one foot in front of the other.
We write about the existential questions: What does it mean to live a worthwhile life? What is right, and what is wrong? When will it get easier to tell the difference?
You wonât find any straight answers here. It would be more lucrative (and probably better for our writing careers!) if we used our study of mess to offer advice on cleaning up. We could churn out little two-word headlines of self-help, commands to be better: âLean in!â âKick back!â âWork harder!â âJust relax!â
We could be declarative: If you are burning your tongue on bacon, stop. Itâs so simple. Stop it!
But that would be stupid. We would be completely ignoring the complexity of human experience, all the things that make our lives rich and interesting. It would be the literary equivalent of swirling cake frosting onto a giant pile of cow manure. Weâd miss all the treasures within the muck.
So, we donât. Instead, we ask questions. We wrestle with things, and read, and research, and call our moms, and call each other, and whine for a while, and then read some more. Then comes the hard part: we write. Not to offer answers but to make discoveries. To think in action. To think in collective.
This month, the staff at Ali & Kate Industries Inc. (pictured below, plied with iced coffee and breakfast tacos, seated at a coffee shop in Austin, Texas *detesting the scooters*) have been hard at work churning out writing. For who? For you, dear reader. So that we may swim in the manure â all that muck and confusion â together.
We tackle light fare this week: Pregnancy, capitalism, freedom, and obligation. Enjoy!
From Kate:
The Point Magazine: âLiberty and Limitationâ
Today, Kate did the impossible. She published a thoroughly reported, empathetic, and emotionally engaging essay about the consequences â and beauties â of having a baby.
Does deciding to have children lessen your freedom? Yes. Will ambitious women be required to make sacrifices for the work of caretaking? Yes. Is the alternative, pursuing freedom at all costs, without any limits, inherently better? That needs unpacking, she writes.
Rather than seeing caregiving as a threat to womenâs achievement, it should become more of an expectation for everyone, men and women alike. Caregiving should be accommodated. It should be celebrated. If our understanding of personal achievement is so threatened by basic needs and tenderness, maybe itâs time to reevaluate whether what âsuccessâ requires is worth itâwhether demanding such things of people is even human, much less free.
From Ali:
Well + Good: âI ran a mile for 31 daysâ
Ali took up running. Why? Not for the merits of aerobic exercise, but for developing a sense of self-reliance. Read the full essay here.
Fortune: âThe Museum of Ice Cream is Backâ
Would you pay $40 to wander through a building engineered to illicit selfies on Instagram? Ali went to the Museum of Ice Cream opening in Austin, Texas. It gave her a headache. Read the full essay here.
Architectural Digest: âHereâs why Iâll never go back to apartment livingâ
What makes a house a home? Itâs a mindset of permanence, regardless of structural ephemerality: âIn the end, all of our homes are temporaryâone way or another. But what if we made the decision to commit anyway?â Read the full essay here.
XOXO,
Ali & Kate Industries Inc.
So glad to have found you guys, and to see more images of beautiful Austin. Much appreciated, from Ararat, Australia.
Discovered you both through Aliâs piece on Not Boring about Kim and Kanye- huge fan and I love especially this note about how it would be easy and likely profitable to simplify the mess of being human, but that is just hugely unjust to the experience. Thanks for all you do!