What I highlighted the week of February 22, 2021
Articles
VGR is doing some good writing on storytelling at Ribbon Farm recently.
This new show at the New Museum about Black art and grief sounds powerful. I'm looking forward to checking it out soon.
Roxane Gay and Monica Lewinsky talking about how to write about trauma.
This Meghan Daum essay from many years ago was incredible. It describes an experience of New York city in her 20s that sounds very familiar to me, if not personally, as an experience I know a lot of my peers have had here.
I loved this essay in Point Mag, from an English professor in India, about the ways in which European and American writers are read versus post-colonial writers:
Postcolonial texts seem to have two jobs in these syllabi: they either negatively illustrate some form of moral or social misconduct, or they positively represent a “marginalized” culture or geography. Ideally, they do both at once, often in the manner of a Live Aid concert.
The New Yorker profile of Glennon Doyle, about whom I knew little, but whose presence can be felt throughout culture, features an intersting quote from Elizabeth Gilbert about people who write and share a lot about their lives:
Doyle’s good friend Elizabeth Gilbert—who also rose to fame with a memoir about self-actualization, and who addresses her followers as “dear ones” online—explained the connection. “I don’t want to pathologize, but we might have some teensy boundary issues, and some history of not being able to tell where I end and the other person begins,” she said. Gilbert defended the relationships as real, though: “People will say, ‘I feel like I know you,’ and what I tend to say to them is, ‘Well, you do—that’s not an insane thing for you to think. I’ve quite literally told you everything.’ ” She added, “If you’ve come this far with me in my—I hate the word—journey, and you’ve stuck with me, then I kind of know you, too.”
I'm not sure about lists like these that are supposed to help you through moments of depression or high anxiety, but in so far as they're useful, this was a good one.
And another good one about why learning from YouTube is so well suited for how we learn
“We are built to observe,” as Proteau tells me. There is, in the brain, a host of regions that come together under a name that seems to describe YouTube itself, called the action-observation network. “If you’re looking at someone performing a task,” Proteau says, “you’re in fact activating a bunch of neurons that will be required when you perform the task. That’s why it’s so effective to do observation.”
I loved this Rivka Gelchen essay about the neighborhood in Midtown where I worked for more than five years. It is an odd, alien planet of a place and Gelchen captures it perfectly.
This personal essay by historian Ada Ferrer about the Cuban revolution that separated her family and the life-long toll it took on her half brother was gutting.
Movies
I watched and liked, but did not fall in love with Nomadland, sort of like Richard Brody, I guess. But I did like this conversation with Chloé Zhao and Frances MacDormand. And this profile of Chloé Zhao.
I thought The Stranger was one of the best depictions of an under-explored and under-theorized aspect of Indian culture: scam, doubt, and lack of trust.
TV Shows
- We continued our rewatch of Mad Men and Don Draper is much less sympathetic as a character on second viewing.
Podcasts
- I listened to more episodes of "Working it out with Mike Birbiglia"
- And the Rewatchables episode on "Coming To America" was everythign I'd hoped it would be
