This is Purple Titanic. Welcome aboard.

In August, 2018, after a transatlantic red-eye to a bus to a train to a walking tour, I collapsed onto a twin bed on the second floor of the Commodore Hotel in Cobh, Ireland—the Titanic’s last port of call.

I pulled out my laptop, intending to jot down a few notes before I melted into the sheets.

When I was a kid, I loved to write. I wrote murder mystery plays and organized my fourth- and fifth-grade classmates to perform them. In eighth grade, I founded, and very snobbily edited, the Temple Sinai youth group monthly newspaper. I dedicated three summers of middle and high school to a nerdy academic camp where I spent peak July sunshine inside a college classroom, writing. But then things changed (friends and a social life) and I didn’t write much. For a long time.

That night at the Commodore Hotel, though, a wall in my mind fell away.

An hour after bedtime, I was still clacking away at the keyboard: describing the glint of the sea through the glass monument at the Titanic Memorial Garden, picking apart my walking tour guide’s analysis of the class dynamics on the ship, inventing backstories for the people I overheard at supper in the hotel dining room, reflecting on my conspicuous (to me) American accent and Jewish nose and gayly swishing hips, and, and, and …

It was like I had bricked up the room where my creative self lived. But the plane ride or the waves of Cobh harbor or the ghosts of the Titanic had shaken a few bricks loose. And when I started writing, the rest crumbled.

Since then, and especially when I’m in a new place, I’ve found that writing helps me organize worlds by organizing words. At the keyboard, I make sense of what’s happening, both in my little private world and in the larger worlds around me.

Now, my partner Danny and I are living in Germany for five months. He’s got an academic fellowship to work on a book project. 

And I’m working remotely here in Hamburg. I’m staying connected to what’s happening in the U.S. I’m observing changes simmering here in Germany.

It’s a time like no other for organizing worlds, and words, and people, a time for sense-making—a time when ‘truth’ feels nebulous, up for grabs, upside down.

So I’ve been feeling the urge to write: for myself, and, maybe, for you.

Not the hot-take, feed-you-the-Truth kind of writing that fills my inbox and whatever social media app I open. No, the kind of writing that spins a story, that probes, that allows for—invites, even—challenge and contradiction. I want to write like that.

I’ve been feeling the pull of writing since we left the U.S., since the weeks we spent in Spain just before coming here, gathering rays of light to bring back to the damp gray clouds of the Northern German winter. I’ve been feeling it in the mornings before work, in the evenings after dinner, at night when the digital clock next to my square German pillow glows 12:45 a.m. and I can’t banish the thoughts of my friends who’ve already lost their jobs, the executive order impacting kids I care about, the demons of a world hardening around me.

I want to write about the surprising roadside monument in a tiny town in the mountains of Gran Canaria that moved me nearly to tears, and about the glass of wine with strangers in a pub in Granada that gave me hope for the U.S.

I want to write about the Catalan propaganda posters hanging in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid that helped resist the Franco dictatorship, and what they say about today’s meme culture.

I want to reflect on being Jewish American in Germany. Watching authoritarianism take hold in my homeland of the U.S. Learning how Germany recovered from its authoritarian era. Living, a temporary immigrant, in an apartment in a tony neighborhood of Hamburg, where four small brass “stumbling stones” in the sidewalk outside memorialize Julius, Amalie, Max, and Bertha, four former residents of this very building; four victims of Nazism. And all this on the eve of elections next week that could empower the far right more than any time since World War II. Deep breath.

I want to share some of my most fascinating Titanic facts with anyone who will listen. (In some ways, I have not changed since the third grade.) And I want to rummage through the parallels between the gilded age of Edwardian England—with its huge, dangerous, polluting machines that made men rich—and the times we live in today. (In some ways, maybe I have changed a bit.)

I want to scratch at how being the partner of someone starting a fellowship in a new city is like first-year college orientation all over again, and what we miss as we cling to the hamster wheel of Trump’s executive orders, and what I learn from reading far-right newsletters, and what’s true and what’s not about what I tell myself to self-soothe when it’s 2 a.m. and it’s all too much.

I want to find and share and discuss ways to harness the despair and horror paralyzing so many good people right now and alchemize it into action—and I want to draw on my decade and a half of organizing to probe what’s strategic and what’s a distraction.

I want to have fun with it, and make stupid jokes, and bring a mix of “oh, interesting!” and “wow, inspiring!” and “LOL!” to whoever winds up reading this.

I want to draw in my smart friends, family members, and colleagues to engage with this writing and shape my thinking.

In that little room at the Commodore Hotel, as I tapped away alone, the wall in my mind fell away. But now there’s a second wall, a wall even scarier to break through: the one between my writing and the outside world.

These times call for expanding the circle, for picking up the tools we have and using them to work for change. This is one of my tools. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even inspire you to peek behind some wall of yours and pick up a tool you’d lost track of or didn’t know you had. That’d be so cool.

So … wanna join me? If yes, subscribe here. (Then check your email and click to confirm.) And then, would you leave a comment sharing what interests you most, of all the things I might write about here at Purple Titanic? That’ll help me shape what comes next.

Love,

Ari

P.S. Why “Purple Titanic”? Keep reading and find out. Guesses welcome.