DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: April 26, 2026
Do You Have A ‘Floordrobe’? This guy says it’s a sign of ADHD:
Do you ever delay putting away clean laundry or unworn outfits from a vacation and instead keep those clothes in a pile on the floor or draped over a chair for many days on end? What about items you’ve only worn once and don’t want to wash but also don’t want to return to your closet because you think you’ll wear them again in the near future?
If that sounds familiar, you might have what some call a “floordrobe.” And this manifestation of laundry clutter is quite common among people with ADHD.
“A ‘floordrobe’ is a place, typically on the floor, where we leave either clean or ‘not quite dirty’ clothes,” he said. “It can be in a laundry basket that just sits there for days and days or weeks, or it can be in a pile of clothes that you’ve worn for a little while, but they didn’t quite get dirty. And so you think you’re going to wear them again, and so you leave them sitting on the floor or hanging over a chair or whatever.”
He also offered a few ideas to help people with ADHD tackle this type of clutter. But why exactly are laundry issues like floordrobes so common in people with the disorder? We asked ADHD experts to explain the phenomenon and share their advice for keeping clothes from piling up into an overwhelming mess.
“ADHD impacts the brain’s executive functions, which control motivation, planning, working memory, organization and self-control,” said Billy Roberts, a therapist at Focused Mind ADHD Counseling in Columbus, Ohio. “When faced with a task that is boring, the ADHD brain gets overwhelmed and starts craving more interesting tasks. Tedious chores like laundry tend to be particularly frustrating because they can pile up, leading many with ADHD to feel incredibly overwhelmed and to further avoid the task.”
Blahblahblah. Is this mic on? I have a floordrobe and I’m the SANEST PERSON I KNOW! You always need a sweatshirt around to throw on if you’re going to the grocery store. Riddle me this, doctor–Is it better to put the not-quite-dirty item back in a drawer with clean items than to leave it in a heap with other not-quite-dirty items? Is it better to wash the not-quite-dirty items before they need washing? Seems like a waste of precious resources to me.
In fact, that’s the problem with the world today–people washing clothes before they need to be washed. Solve that, and the rest of our maladies soon disappear. A floordrobe is the sign of a superior mind. Not that I’m bragging or anything.
Lithium Extraction: Challenges And–Hope?:
Electric vehicle sales are skyrocketing. In 2025, more than one in five new cars sold globally were electric.
But while electrifying transportation is essential to addressing the climate crisis, the mining required to build out these green technologies brings its own environmental and social costs. The batteries that power electric cars are typically made of metals like nickel, copper and lithium. The intensive extraction of these critical minerals from the earth has left numerous ecosystems and communities with polluted land, water and air.
To understand these impacts, author and political scientist Thea Riofrancos traveled to the Atacama Desert in Chile, home to one of the largest lithium reserves in the world. She is an author and associate professor of political science at Providence College. Her latest book is “Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.”
The entire conversation is worth a deep dive. This comment places it in context for me:
The first thing I want to say is that my book is not an argument against electric mobility. It is not me saying that a gas-guzzling car is better than an electric car, which is not true. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that 14 million barrels of oil a day are extracted just for U.S. transportation alone. We live in an extractive economy already. It’s just that the extraction is for fuel that is burned and creates the climate crisis, versus the extraction being more about mining and the physical building out of a new energy system. It’s urgent, I should say, to leave the oil and gas and coal in the ground.
That said, the environmental harm that comes from lithium mining for electric vehicles is exacerbated by the fact that our imagination of the energy transition is very car-dependent. The imaginary is, every household is going to swap in their traditional car for an electric car, and that’s how we’re solving the climate crisis. That’s a huge amount of mining.
If, in contrast, we think about other forms of mobility—what if we think about electric buses? What if we think about creating and designing cities in which distances are shorter, people can walk places? And the more that we can embrace a varied toolkit, the more progress we’ll make on climate action, and honestly, the more equitable we will be. Because we’re in a cost-of-living crisis right now, the idea that a working class or even middle class person is about to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a new vehicle when their current vehicle works OK, that’s a big proposition. That’s a big investment for struggling American households. We’re just very hemmed in by the assumption that everything has to be about driving in the U.S., and that’s not serving us financially, in terms of the climate crisis, or in terms of the environmental impacts of these supply chains.
Noir has become pretty much my go-to as (I think) it bests expresses my pessimistic world view. Pretty sure we’ve ordered this one for the Arden Library:
“COKE! SEX! LIES!”
Those neon-lit provocations appear on the back of a sitcom star’s hoodie in “A Violent Masterpiece,” Jordan Harper’s latest Hollywood-flavored crime novel. It’s a tiny critique of hedonism as fashion, but it also sums up Harper’s primal-scream approach to storytelling.
“I’m just not convinced that this is the moment for subtle art,” Harper, 49, said over coffee in Eagle Rock, the Los Angeles neighborhood where he lives (and where he once encountered a corpse, an incident that influenced his writing). “The world we exist in — the world we’ve made — is all death drive, all the time. It’s hard to make the villains in your book as villainous or stupid or disgusting as the villains in real life. So writing at an extremely high volume was quite intentional.”
First impressions of Harper do not prepare you for this. He comes across like a Criterion Collection archivist — calmly self possessed, a little nerdy, nobody’s idea of a rabble-rouser. Asked whether his amiable demeanor matched his interior state, he grinned and scratched his left elbow, revealing a tattoo of a scorpion with oversized claws.
“There’s a lot of anger inside me,” he said. “I just think it’s getting closer to the surface now.”
His previous novel, also suffused with well-earned anger? ‘Everybody Knows’.
Some 38 (!) years since its release, no song better reflects for me our perilous times than this Leonard Cohen classic:
For your next non-news, filler article, I’d like to read how you grade recent governors. You’ve poked at Carney but what specifically about his tenure/personality/style did you object to.
Lack of vision. Everything driven by ONLY fiscal considerations. Vetoes of good bills despite overwhelming legislative support (legalized pot, end-of-life choices), lack of putting forward any progressive proposals, ‘budget-smoothing’, lack of a single positive defining initiative, a total lack of curiosity, his agenda driven pretty much by only Chamber considerations, the privatizing of the expenditure of state dollars for business proposals, his disdainful disregard for progressive initiatives and legislators, a lack of empathy, his embrace of the Concord Coalition.
He’s added more since he’s become mayor.
But those pretty much illustrate why I can’t stand Carney. He’s not really a Democrat.