THIS YEAR HAS BEEN MEDIUM COOL
And the five most read posts from our first year
It's been one year since Emily and I have been oversharing like we’ve had three coffees and haven’t been outside in a week, and damn, that kind of time goes by fast.
We started with a vague plan that Medium Cool would be like the zines we made at the start of our careers: personal, honest, hilarious cries for attention with the hope of getting on a promo list or two. But this time from the perspective of middle-aged life in Brooklyn.
Thank you to all our readers, new friends, and old friends we’ve reconnected with. We especially want to thank contributors like columnist Hannah Meyer, and our guest essayists who have trusted us with their rawest feelings about their work.
Here are the five most read stories from the last year…
1. Politics often fail us, but our personal revolutions will always save us. Here Emily revisits her late mother’s defiant act.
MY MOTHER’S ILLEGAL ABORTION
My mother didn’t talk about her illegal abortion until I was nearly the same age as she was when she’d had it. I had just dropped out of college and she was worried enough to tell me her story while we did dishes in her kitchen.
2. Did you know we can be controversial still? Here’s the quiz that caused the drama.
ARE YOU GEN X OR MILLENNIAL?
That’s right, Medium Cool has done the work that sociologists and journalists never got around to doing: defining the beginning, ending, and in-between of Generation X and Millennials. And we’re doing it with one simple question…
3. You REALLY liked our revisit of the first NC-17 film.
DON’T DATE OTHER WRITERS
Is sex back in film? In international cinema it never left. America, on the other hand, has never been too comfortable with the subject, no more today than in 1990 when it was forced to create a new rating for a studio film, Henry & June.
4. Columnist Hannah Meyer went there.
BEST EXES FOREVER
I am a 27-year-old queer woman and I know a lot of queer people are able to be friends with their exes and are neutral about them dating other people. I’m finding it extremely difficult to do this with my exes — do you think that some people just aren’t able to be friends with their exes? Even if they are queer? Or do I need to work on my attachments and self esteem?
5. Our working class families have given up asking, “What do you do for a living?” mostly because stories like these are hard to convey over a table at IHOP.
WOULD YOU WORK WITH NATALIA GRACE'S ADOPTIVE MOTHER?
In 2017 Kristine Barnett was only known as the author of The Spark, a questionable bestseller about raising her special needs son. Emily Schultz was a then out-of-work writer and mother to a recently diagnosed autistic child. A cold call from a producer aimed to put them together on a feature development. There was no way to know what was to come in the saga of Barnett and her adoptive daughter Natalia Grace, now covered by both an HBO documentary and a dramatized Hulu series premiering this month. But enough felt wrong about Barnett’s book—and the producer’s intentions—that Schultz could not get out of that meeting fast enough.