Kate Cohen is the author of We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (And Maybe You Should Too) and a former contributing columnist for the Washington Post. She now writes an independent column: Scratch. Read more here >
Scratch is a column about what we make that makes us human.
Scratch celebrates obstinate human agency in a culture awash in cheap consumer goods and A.I. It looks at everything people make that consumer culture and corporate interests encourage us not to, from our own food, furniture, and clothes to our own writing, art, and ideas. But it’s not just about things we produce, it’s also about meaning we insist on making for ourselves, despite pressure to leave that to the belief systems we inherited, the gender norms we are given, the social expectations that surround us. Scratch will explore things like . . . the lockdown sourdough fad, the relationship between crafts and activism, the pleasures and pitfalls of movie tropes, the paradox of trying to reinvent a traditional rite of passage, and why we’re thinking about A.I all wrong. And much, much more.