Category: Shorts

• A Forgotten Black Founding Father.
• Rain. A short story about mothers and daughters and being who you are.
• The Secret Essential Geography of the Office. “I once worked for a few weeks at a big, busy company, and one day I asked, jokingly, ‘Where do I go to cry?’ An hour later, I was taken aside and told in seriousness about a specific stairwell. Another person there led me on a five-minute walk through the skyscraper to a tiny, hidden conference room, and then made me promise to keep the location a secret, a vow I have kept.”
• Who was I before the pandemic? And who am I now?
• A Priceless Archive of Ordinary Life. This hurts my heart. I want to know where to donate and how to set up a library that will be a proper resource for these materials.
• When I want to feel strong, I turn to Eartha Kitt.

• An Oral History of The Emperor’s New Groove. This movie is low-key one of my favorite animated movies. It’s so funny! And the process to make it was apparently barely a process at all. It was more “we need to get a movie out in a year: go!”
• In keeping with the inadvertent “stuff for kids” theme, can I interest you in this article about metafiction and The Monster at the End of this Book?
• Humanity is flushing away one of life’s essential elements. Phosphorus, to be exact. Reclamation from wastewater facilities and farmers is an obvious solution to the problem, but it needs to be built out.
• I offer you two articles about the fashion business. First, fast fashion is eating the world, which is more about how all fashion is becoming fast fashion, NOT about its terrible environmental impact. It contains this great nugget: there is a correlation between social media usage and how much clothing you buy. Second, Where does discarded clothing go?, which does address some of the environmental impact. I’m not sure I agree with “for-profit clothing recycling is bad”, but whatever, I’m here for more clothing recycling (once we start buying fewer clothes).
• This is just a nice little history of how collegiate women’s hockey became a thing. I really love this newsletter, and learn something from each new edition.
• Living in New York’s Unloved Neighborhood. I love this article for so many reasons: it’s about living in a city, a thing I miss; it’s about finding what’s good in a not-so-great place; it’s about finding community in a place you wouldn’t normally think to look for it. Recommended.

• What do Lars Ulrich and A.O. Scott have in common? A lot, it turns out. About art and criticism and process – it’s interesting.
• He wants to save Classics from Whiteness. Can the field survive?
• The Mothers Who Already Left.
• Portraying Paris without the Clichés

• The double-edged sword of women’s empowerment – I am a fan of women’s hockey – watch the NWHL playoffs on Thursday and Friday on NBCSN! – but it doesn’t need to grow by appealing to sexists.
• If you are at all interested in the literary world, How Mary-Kay Wilmers Became Britain’s Most Influential Editor is a great read, if only for the reminder about the piece in the LRB that starts out: “I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.”
• During lockdown, I’ve found solace in online recipe comments. Really, this article is lovely.
• How to Make Sense of Scents. Pair this one with What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell? and you will be smarter about how to talk about what things smell like.

• A lesson in the price of colonization: How Britain stole $45 trillion from India.
• The Future of the Queen. An interesting look at the British Royal Family, steeped in the current moment.
• A History of Juneteenth.
• The Silent Parade of 1917 – a thing I learned about for the first time just a couple of weeks ago.
• How a mysterious ghost ship brought cosmic disco to Cape Verde. This reminds me of nothing so much as how the NYC blackout in 1977 led to the rise of hip hop music. Give people the resources they need to make art, and they’ll make art!
• The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America. Y’all. Oregon didn’t ratify the 14th Amendment until 1973.
• Assa Traoré and the fight for Black lives in France.
• Environmental Justice Means Racial Justice.

• America’s Racial Contract is showing.
• Algorithms are not the answer.
• I will always recommend a Queens of Infamy long read. This one is Lucrezia Borgia.
• No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear. I need to read more Toni Morrison.
• The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House by Audre Lorde.

How to get back up and keep running. Not so much a how-to as an inspiration to make art as a way to keep your sanity when the world continues to be its current hot mess.

One of my favorite tidbits from the championship parade of the USWNT today is that they were drinking Veuve Clicquot champagne, a company whose success was because of a woman in the 1800s.

The Importance of Photographing Women in Sports. Some stats from the article: “The overt lack of media representation fuels the divide. While four out of 10 athletes are female, just 4 percent of sports-related media coverage is devoted to them. They get only 5 percent of Sports Illustrated covers and a paltry 2 percent of airtime on ESPN’s SportsCenter.”

The Lingering of Loss. This is heartbreaking.

The False Narratives of The Fall of Rome Mapped onto America. The rise of Rome is so much more interesting than its fall to me. Especially when its fall is so often twisted to ill purposes. From the article: “Interest in the decline of the Roman empire became a subject of popular fascination, particularly for White colonial men who lived in fear of losing their own grip on power and took his narrative as a cautionary tale.”

Drop Dead Gorgeous was panned by critics when it came out? …Really? I find this hard to believe. I would recommend it to anyone.

You should all read The Sisters, about the Mitford sisters. If you don’t want to read a whole book on this crazy family, Messy Nessy has a good primer on the six of them.

My mother was killed in a car accident. So I care very, very much about this: Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, But the Law Insists on It.

25 French Brands You Can Buy in the US. We just got back from a Paris trip, and I’m holding onto that Paris feeling any way I can.