My niece Freya found this in the street the day after the election. She wrote, “The anger I have feels so righteous that it’s difficult to replace it with optimism and courage. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be brave. Today I’m in mourning.”

Me too.

Eight years ago, I wrote an elated post celebrating the election of Barack Obama. I really thought the U.S. had turned a corner. I wasn’t naive. I knew there were problems the U.S. Deep intractable ones that aren’t solvable overnight. Some of those problems became worse, as the Republican party radicalized and Obama’s management of the economic wreckage left behind by Bush did not work fast enough (thanks partially to an utterly intransigent Republican party that blocked almost everything Obama did, holding the budget hostage and forcing a credit downgrade). Even still I had a lot of hope. And Obama ended up being a fantastic President. Last week I voted for Hillary Clinton.

Eight years later, I now realize how complacent I’ve become. I knew injustice happens, even though it doesn’t really happen to me. I knew that women and people of color, and especially women of color, get a raw deal in this country. And as a white man, I profit off it without lifting a finger.

A few weeks ago I tweeted, “Hermione is so bossy and shrill! That’s why I’m voting for Baron Harkonnen” as a joke. But apparently that’s how white America actually feels. And make no mistake, this is white people’s fault. Don’t recite to me statistics about how a nonzero percentage of people of color voted for the wrong guy. That’s a rounding error in comparison. White men and women, who make up 70% of this country, overwhelmingly voted for a monster.

So now it’s time to figure out what to do next.

Lucy and Ingrid are 7 and 5 years old and they’re enthralled with Harry Potter (of course). We’ve been reading our way aloud through the series, book by book, and I’m now reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix to them. Every year we have a Halloween party where all the neighborhood kids come, and this year Lucy wanted to be Hermione, so we thought we’d throw the party with a Harry Potter theme! (Ingrid preferred to dress up as Saorise, the selkie from the movie Song of the Sea, but she was still on board. She’s the one in the video who is sprawled out on the couch, too pooped to participate.)

You can check out Lucy’s guided tour in the video above. Unfortunately, once the party got underway, I was too distracted and sociable to take many pictures! (I was also helping to run the “haunted house” that we’d made in the basement, which started out as a cart ride through Gringotts, until an alarm got tripped, and the kids have to crawl through a tunnel to escape the vengeful goblins, which unfortunately led to an Azkaban swarming with dementors! Many children screamed that day.)

Who were Heather and I dressed as? Well, Professor Trelawney and Professor Snape, naturally. Oh, come on, somebody must have shipped these two! It’s not out of the question!

Have you seen these wizards? VERY DANGEROUS.

The thing that took the most work were the candles floating in midair. We made about twenty of them. More labor intensive than I expected, although they were nothing more than cardboard tubes with glue-gun dribbles down the sides to simulate melted wax, all painted white, with an electric mini-candle stuck in the top, hung from the ceiling with fishing line. Hat tip to Pins and Things for the idea!

Some wanted posters for Sirius Black and Bellatrix Lestrange. Speaking of Sirius Black, there’s his head in the fireplace, just like in books 3 and 4!

Here’s some Hogwarts students just hanging out in the stairwell. Not everyone was in-universe. Some upstart telekinetic girl from Stranger Things made an appearance as well.

Unfortunately I don’t have pictures of all the other great costumes that night: the father-and-son Han Solos, the impeccable Mrs. Weasley, the Sirius Black, the Alexander Hamilton, Link and Zelda, and more! In any case, another champion Halloween. Already looking forward to next year!

I grew up in a suburb of Detroit. In high school, I used to go to the Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts all the time. The DFT is where I first saw David Lynch on the big screen. It’s where I learned about Jane Campion, Werner Herzog, Akira Kurosawa, so many great filmmakers. There was no Internet to speak of in the late 80s and early 90s. Video stores were a mixed bag, to put it mildly. So if you were fascinated by great and strange movies, and you lived around Detroit, then there were only a few theater options: the Main Art in Royal Oak, the Maple in Bloomfield Hills, and the Detroit Film Theatre. The DFT was my favorite. Just look at it:

With that buildup, you can just imagine my enthusiasm when I got the opportunity to bring the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival to the Detroit Film Theatre! Back on August 26 and 27, we showcased a “Best Of The 90-Second Newbery” screening at the very same place where I used to thrill to Wild At Heart and Touch of Evil!

My co-host was the hilarious, brilliant, and very game Maria Dismondy, author of picture books such as Spaghetti in a Hot Dog Bun and The Juice Box Bully. Check out the video of her and me at the top of this post, doing the opening song-and-dance of What Would John Newbery Do? She’s a natural!

We got good crowds on both Saturday and Sunday. I hope that this leads to future screenings at the Detroit Film Theatre . . . and more 90-Second Newbery entries from the Detroit area!

The fact that this happened at all is due to the enthusiastic advocacy of my old friend Ronica Bhattacharya, who under the name Ronica Dhar wrote a great, highly-praised book called Bijou Roy that St. Martin’s published a few years ago. And the folks who worked at the DFT who actually made the show happen—Emily Bowyer, and Gavin, Jody, Mary, and Lindsay—were so friendly and helpful and a pleasure to work with. Thank you, everyone!

After the show Ronica and I went with another friend to La Rondinella, an amazing restaurant in Detroit’s Eastern Market that’s run by my friend-since-childhood-who-grew-up-across-the-street-from-me David Mancini. The last time I wrote about Dave, back in 2009 (check out the pictures of what we looked like as children, compared to what we’re like now!), it was the one-year anniversary of his pizzeria Supino. Supino is still going strong (and is still some of the best pizza I’ve ever had, along with San Francisco’s Ragazza and Gialina), and La Rondinella blew me away. If you live anywhere near Detroit, you have to go to La Rondinella. The best. Just the best. And the prices are mysteriously, seemingly impossibly low!

It was a great time in Detroit. I always love coming back, seeing family and old friends from high school.

That said, wild horses couldn’t drag me to this year’s 25th high school reunion. I mean, nostalgia has limits.