~This week’s list of things worth reading, watching, listening to, contemplating, and sharing.
1. Poetry: Somehow Inside This Day and Even in a Time of Intolerance and The Turning from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Ways to Survive the Coup and Let It Change and Considering the Hearts of Mammals from Julie Barton, Eavan Boland’s poem “The Famine Road” shared by Pádraig Ó Tuama on Poetry Unbound, Behind-the-Scenes Look: “A Suit or a Suitcase”: Annotation & Author’s Note from Maggie Smith, and Bent to the Earth By Blas Manuel De Luna shared by Patti Digh.
2. She’s Trying to Stay Ahead of Alzheimer’s, in a Race to the Death on The New York Times. (gift link) “In the Netherlands, doctors and dementia patients must negotiate a fine line: Assisted death for those without capacity is legal, but doctors won’t do it.”
3. Conversations @ the Salt Line Ep. 26: Robert Jones Jr. (video). “In this episode of Conversations @ the Salt Line host Wesley Dixon chats with author Robert Jones Jr. about his debut novel ‘The Prophets,’ which served as the first-year common reading for the students in the Vassar Class of 2028. With ‘The Prophets’ as the backdrop, Wesley and Robert discussed themes of humanizing complex individuals, navigating marginalized identities, and experiencing deep love.”
4. Recipes I want to try: Monster Cookies and Baked Cottage Cheese Eggs.
5. Nourishing Collective Resonance on The Wonder + The Haunting. “For many of us, the chronic ‘off’ feeling we experience in our modern culture is a collective experience that no formula, strategy, or intellectual reasoning can resolve. The ‘off’ feeling that haunts us is a sense-ual knowing that our lives are wonder-deficient. The ‘off’ feeling is our bodies sending us a message of discord rather than harmony—the further we get from our animal nature, the further we drift from a life of resonance.
6. Fatigue: The Modern Mind’s Silent Battle on The Gurdeep Magazine. “In our contemporary world, a new form of fatigue has emerged, specifically related to our interaction with digital technology—particularly phones, social media, internet browsing, and what’s commonly known as ‘doom scrolling.’ From my personal observations, I’ve noticed a distinct pattern: even when beginning with a clear, energized mind and an active body, engaging in prolonged scrolling sessions can rapidly lead to feelings of exhaustion. Even brief periods of 10 to 15 minutes can induce a noticeable sense of tiredness, suggesting that excessive screen time has become one of the primary contributors to modern-day fatigue.”
7. Earthlings and Broken Hearts on The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad. “This layering of loves and losses and more loves has been a great teacher for me. It has taught me to accept the rhythm of our lives, which is all loves and all losses, all of the time. It has taught me to be proud of the intensity of my heartbreaks, because what is grief but a measure of love? The more deeply you love, the more deeply you grieve. I have come to believe our capacity for love is infinite, and like love, I believe our capacity for grief is infinite, if we accept it for what it is — as part of the rhythm of life.”
8. 100 Days of Creative Resistance, “a free email of encouragement, opposition, and commiseration — a reminder of why we write and create — from 100 iconoclastic contemporary voices on each of the first 100 days of the 47th president’s regime. The program begins January 20th, 2025, Inauguration Day. As the emails post, they are archived here.”
9. Re: The Super Bowl and Whiteness from Hugh Hollowell. “You have a choice: You can see this as an opportunity to learn new things, to see art outside your gaze, to develop in understanding of the world around you, or you can complain, whine, and whither into hatred.”
10. Please Promote Your Work In The Face Of Uninvited Nightmare from Chuck Wendig on Terrible Minds. “So, instead of some big thing about how writing is resistance and art is an act of optimism, blah blah blah, let’s just scrape away all that stuff and go right for the heart of the matter: We need the art. Shit is bad, and we need books, and music, and paintings. That’s it, it’s as simple as that. The times are hard, and art helps us through hard times.”
11. Hazy shade of winter snow day, “A missive from the fourth week of the regime” from Rita Ott Ramstad on Rootsie.
12. Five ways to be calm – and why it matters. “Is being calm about passivity and numbness, or is it a superpower that makes us strong? Lindsay Baker explores the ideas behind serenity, and ways that we can achieve it.”
13. This Artist Immortalizes Your Pets With Custom Embroidered Animal Portraits.
14. The One Who Got Away on The New York Times. (gift link) “Lasting relationships require a particular kind of alchemy. There’s chemistry and commitment, sure, but also timing and luck. So this Valentine’s Day, The New York Times asked readers to share stories about ‘the one who got away.’ More than 1,000 people wrote in about the electric chance encounters and deep love that slipped through their fingers. Here are 20 of our favorites, which have been edited for length and clarity.”
15. ‘Cancel culture? We should stop it. End of story’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on backlash, writer’s block – and her new baby twins. “It’s been 11 years since she published a novel. In that time, the author has lost both parents, seen Trump become president twice – and finally returned to fiction after a bruising reaction to her comments on gender.”
16. The White Lotus: the TV phenomenon is back – and it’s still next-level viewing. “Exquisitely awful guests and drama it’s impossible to look away from: it can only be the third, Thailand-based season of Mike White’s luxury resort drama. Bring on the memes!”
17. Words of love, “Some favorite poems and quotes” from Austin Kleon.
18. To Savor Your Next Vacation, Ditch Your Phone and Grab a Colored Pencil on The New York Times. (gift article) “Some travelers are picking up a creative pastime, sketching, in order to slow down and fully appreciate their destinations.”
19. Are You Never Doing Enough? on Peace of Mind by Meg Josephson.
20. Out of the night that covers me…Writing into the chaos on Writing at Red Lights.
21. Good stuff from Be More With Less: 10 Heavy Things You Don’t Have to Carry Anymore by Courtney Carver and 12 Daily Habits That Will Help You Simplify Your Life by Tammy Strobel.
22. Tuesday Tools: Join the resistance, “Another look at activism in the Musk era” from Patti Digh.
23. How I Fight Back by Josie George on bimblings. “Long ago, I discovered that the antidote to despair and fear isn’t hope — no, not that unsteady thing, heartbreaking in its fragility — it’s gratitude. It’s saying thank you thank you thank you over and over again, to everything and everything, until the world becomes bathed in light again.”
24. The Crucial Differences Between Community and Friendship, Explained on Double Shift. “I want you to find your people. But first, you have to know what you are looking for.”
25. Thirty lonely but beautiful actions you can take right now which probably won’t magically catalyze a mass movement against Trump but that are still wildly important on The White Pages. “Why? Because others will see you do them, and it will make it easier for them to take their own (slightly less lonely but equally beautiful) action by your side.”
26. Teenagers turning to AI companions are redefining love as easy, unconditional and always there. “The question to ask, then, is not simply how to protect children from AI’s seductive influence, but how much you are willing to invest, emotionally and culturally, in the messy, challenging and profoundly human art of love.”
27. We Only Have Ourselves: The How-Tos and DOs and DON’Ts of Mutual Aid. “Kim Kelly Offers Advice and Reading Suggestions for How We Might Survive the Depredations to Come.”
28. A Few Eggs of Advice in These Trying Times on Librarian Shipwreck.
29. Democracy is Crumbling. Is Anybody Doing Anything? “Yes. And You Can Too.”
30. And finally, a few images I saved this week.
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 