1. 120 Things To Remove From Your Life from Be More With Less.

2. Writers and the War Against Nature by Gary Snyder on Lion’s Roar. Especially this: “Wild is a valuable word. It is a term for the free and independent process of nature…The wild is self-creating, self-maintaining, self-propagating, self-reliant, and self-actualizing, and it has no ‘self.’ It is perhaps the same as what East Asian philosophers call the Dao. The human mind, imagination, and even natural human language can also thus be called wild. The human body itself, with its circulation, respiration, and digestion, is wild. In these senses, ‘wild’ is a word for the intrinsic, non-theistic, forever-changing natural order.”

3. Good stuff from Austin Kleon: Clichés, puns, and hooks, and Absence of certainty, awareness of ignorance, and Rob Walker on curiosity. In related news, Sharing is Caring, a podcast interview with Austin Kleon.

4. 40+ Larger Fat Instagram Accounts You Should Be Following.

5. Grief Belongs in Social Movements. Can We Embrace It? “A Black activist reflects on intergenerational trauma, community, and coming to terms with death in movement building.”

6. With Capitol Sit-In, Cori Bush Galvanized a Progressive Revolt Over Evictions on The New York Times. “Refusing to move from the Capitol steps, the first-term congresswoman from St. Louis intensified pressure on the Biden administration and showed her tactics could yield results.”

7. Spiritual Bypassing In an Age of Climate Change and Vaccine Disinformation. “Action follows philosophy; philosophy follows attention. Right now, a growing number of people are paying attention to unimportant or irrelevant social trends, fueled and funded by a small cohort of wellness influencers spreading the gospel of disinformation. How long the illusion will hold is a question we’ll continue to face until it’s too close to our faces to ignore.”

8. You’re Still Exhausted. “I think the real problem is that life is still exhausting because the pandemic was and remains exhausting in so many invisible ways — and we still haven’t given ourselves space to even begin to recover. Instead, we’re just softly boiling over, emptying and evaporating whatever stores of energy and patience and grace remain.”

9. “The antidote is always turning deeper towards each other.” “Garrett Bucks on community building and white grievance snake oil salesmen.”

10. Some Of Our Favorite Olympic Photos, So Far. In related news, More Of Our Favorite Olympic Photos, and The Biggest Highlights From the Oddest Olympics on The New York Times.

11. Shoe Obsession for the Ages: Prince’s Killer Collection of Custom Heels, Now on View on The New York Times.

12. Republicans treated Covid like a bioweapon. Then it turned against them. “Trump’s team reportedly believed that coronavirus would hurt Democratic states – and Democratic governors – worse. But the virus does not discriminate.”

13. COVID news: Breakthrough cases aren’t the cause of the US Covid-19 surge, and Delta Is Surging. Here’s What You Need To Know To Stay Safe, and Former vaccine skeptics reveal what convinced them to get the Coronavirus vaccine, and An ICU Nurse Made An Emotional Appeal For People In Louisiana To Get Vaccinated.

14. “Delta” a poem by Rachel Mallalieu. “I am an emergency physician who’s been on the front lines of the Covid battle for 18 months. I also developed an autoimmune illness this year, which makes every Covid encounter feel even more dangerous. As spring gave way to summer, it felt like we had turned a corner. I went weeks without seeing cases in my ER. My teen children were vaccinated, and my younger kids went to camp. Suddenly, my ER has multiple Covid patients every shift again. They’re younger, sicker, and some are dying. It is exhausting to be in this battle; we finally have the weapon with which to fight, and some refuse that weapon. These days, I just try to do right by my patients and take care of myself and my family when I’m off.”

15. Japan Created a Kimono for Every Nation at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

16. #PBSForTheArts Artist Spotlight: Brian Jordan Alvarez.

17. For Your Summer Road Trip from This American Life. “Hitting the road this last month of summer? These stories will make the miles fly by.”

18. How I Made It: Ada Limón, a podcast interview with one of my favorite poets.

19. Pray Away Lays Bare Conversion Therapy’s Cruel History. “The new Netflix documentary dives deep into the notorious ‘ex-gay’ organization Exodus International.” In related news, ‘It doesn’t leave you’: the toxic toll of LGBTQ+ conversion therapy.

20. Taking Self-Care Beyond its Commercialized Version. “Self-care that fails to address the full dimension of individual healing simply isn’t enough.”

21. Trauma and the Nervous System: A Polyvagal Perspective, (video). “This video was developed to give a basic introduction and overview of how trauma and chronic stress affects our nervous system and how those effects impact our health and well-being.”

22. Hiking as Medicine. “In this new life, I’ve come to understand that while my diagnosis limits the intensity of my outdoor activity, it doesn’t prevent me from engaging in it.”

23. Key takeaways from the new IPCC report. Not gonna lie, this read is depressing AF. “A hellish northern summer laced with deadly heat waves, perilous floods, and massive wildfires may be just a preview of coming attractions, according to a blockbuster new assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The assessment lays out how the planet’s air, oceans, and ice are pushing relentlessly into new territory.” In related news, Landmark IPCC Report: Climate Catastrophe Ahead If Humans Don’t Act Quickly and A Major Report Warns Climate Change Is Accelerating And Humans Must Cut Emissions Now.

24. “Dumpster Diving”: 124 Of The Best Things Some People Threw Away That Others Gladly Took Home.

25. 50 Pics Of Dorky Dogs. In related news, 50 Photos Of Animals Just Living Their Best Life.

1. Are You A Highly Sensitive person? 10 ways this Will Change Your Life For The Better. “Find out if you’re a Highly Sensitive Person, why this REALLY matters, and learn how you can honor your wiring if you are.”

2. These Are The Most Common Symptoms Of COVID-19 If You Are Vaccinated. “If you’ve been vaccinated and start sneezing a lot without an explanation, you should get a COVID test, especially if you are living or working around people who are at greater risk from the disease.”

3. Grief Resources: You Don’t Need to Grieve Alone.

4. The Costly Quest for Superhuman Strength. “As fitness culture has reoriented itself around ‘wellness,’ it has become less fashionable to discuss how exercise remains stubbornly linked to rigid and sometimes absurd beauty standards for both men and women.”

5. Silky Flowers Spring from CJ Hendry’s Enormous Hyperrealistic Drawings in Colored Pencil.

6. Simone Biles Shares Video Of Her Struggling To Complete Dangerous Stunt, Further Explains Olympic Competition Withdrawals. When I hear the negative reactions some people are having to her choices, her situation, all I can think of is this video: Worry about yourself!

7. Health update, show cancellations, and a lot of love, a video message from Andrea Gibson. I’m not sure exactly how someone you love so much announcing they have cancer can make me feel more hopeful, but they did it.

8. I Remember: Elementary school edition on Rita’s Notebook, which inspired me to sign up for the writing course she’s taking, Play with Pattern: Crafting the Braided and Collage Essays. 

9. There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory.

10. There is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice.

11. 7 Secret Benefits of an Afternoon Nap.

12. Glued To Your Phone? Here’s How To Rethink Your Relationship With Social Media.

13. I Swapped Out My Bedroom TV Area for a Reading Nook — Here’s What I Learned.

14. The Dharma of Distraction on Lion’s Roar. “It goes a lot deeper than how many times a day you check your phone. According to Buddhist teacher Judy Lief, distraction is the very foundation of ego, the way we protect ourselves against both the pain of life and the open space of awakened mind. You could even say that letting go of all distraction is the path to enlightenment.”

15. Progress is a trade from Seth Godin. “The truth is pretty simple: All we do, all we ever do, is trade one set of problems for another.”

16. 0s&1s interview series with writers, on six different topics.

17. Good stuff from Austin Kleon: Dragonflies and The Twisties, and More life to get, and Skip the boring parts.

18. It’s Never Too Late, on The New York Times, “a new series that tells the stories of people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.”

19. No, you’re not entitled to your opinion. “The problem with ‘I’m entitled to my opinion’ is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for ‘I can say or think whatever I like’ – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.”

20. The Solving Plastic Issue from Yes!. “In this issue we explore the history of plastic, its global impacts, and some of the most inspiring solutions we’ve come across.”

21. How Big Beverage poured empty promises down our throats. “Beverages have become just another way for people to signal allegiance to a certain lifestyle or to tell ourselves that we are working toward something better. But our faith in the beverage industry has mostly survived so long because we are in denial about what gives us pleasure. Instead of collectively admitting that we love drinks — on a social and emotional level that is hard to compare to anything else — we would rather fool ourselves into believing that drinks can fix us.”

22. Mark Lewis Wagner: Drawing on Earth, an interview with an amazing artist, a beloved human.

23. In ‘Goldenrod,’ A Poet Finds Lessons In The Good, The Bad And The Unexpected. “In times of distress, many of us tend to search for a universal truth. Knowing that there’s a way out, a way through can help us make sense of the world when it seems completely out of our control. And for more than a year now, the distress of social distancing, lockdown, and a rapidly mutating virus has overshadowed our public lives. In her new collection Goldenrod, Pushcart-Prize winning poet Maggie Smith responds to this destabilization by turning inward and asking — is the universal truth what we think it is?”

24. How (and Why) to Welcome Insects Into Your Yard.

25. One Simple Way to Stop Climate Gloom.

26. Tom Daley casually knitting a pouch for his gold medal at the Olympics is winning the internet.

27. Artist “Prints” Amazing Landscapes and Portraits Using Only the Characters on a Typewriter.

28. 50 Times People Who Do Not Believe Quilting To Be Fit For Grandmas Only Made These Incredible Things.