What is Tina?

Tina is a new way to talk about news and politics.

Social media is noisy and it’s often toxic. You can post or share or like whatever you want, but unless you’ve got hundreds of thousands of followers, it’s hard to break through. If you follow the news, you’ve probably heard them talk about polls. But you’ve probably also never participated in one. We’re trying to change that, and we hope you’ll be a part of it with us.

How does it work?

Each morning, I’ll send out an email with a few questions of the day.

A lot of them will be about the news and politics, but we’ll also cover sports, pop culture, tech, business and the best recipes you’ve discovered in quarantine. Hopefully, you’ll share your answers (privately and anonymously, of course) and then I’ll compile the results. I’ll share them with you in the next day’s email.

It’s also more fun with more people from more backgrounds with more points of view, so please, tell your tell your family and friends!

Okay, but who is Tina?

Tina is named after Tina Sass, my mom. She passed away unexpectedly about three years ago, after a long battle with mental health and substance issues. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about her, and I wanted to honor her memory by naming this project after her.

But she’s a deeper part of this story. I grew up loving the news and politics. In our family, the TV was always on during dinner, and it was always set to the news. Politics was a natural part of that, and I fell in love. Hard.

I loved the pageantry and poetry of campaigns, the story-telling of the world as it could be, the assumed reality that We the People could change history if only we worked hard enough. (In high school, I even signed yearbooks “President 2028”. Yikes. Talk about lacking some self-awareness.)

My mom, though, wasn’t as into it. Though she had plenty of views on plenty of issues, she never voted or did anything political. She was so unconvinced that her voice mattered. It’s not that she didn’t care. She did. But she didn’t think anyone else cared what she thought.

I wanted to start this project to help give a voice to people like her: single moms, in far flung places across the country, seemingly a million miles from Washington, who don’t feel heard.

I hope you’ll join us!

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.