Not a lot of books, but there are a lot of interesting articles to read.
Reread
Ilona Andrews’ Sapphire Flames and Emerald Blaze (Hidden Legacy #4 & 5)
Music
Juliana’s A Tiempo
Juliana’s Narices Frías (A COLORS SHOW)
Allison Russell’s Sparrow (ft. Allison de Groot)
Utada Hikaru’s Gold -Mata Au Hi Made-
Music video: Jamila Woods’ Tiny Garden (ft. Duendita)
Podcasts
Dimension 20’s Mice and Murder
Dimension 20’s The Unsleeping City S2
Dimension 20
Just in general, I’ve been binging their back catalogue.
Worlds Beyond Number’s The Wizard, The Witch, and The Wild One S1
Patreon here.
Articles
Comic: A Andrews’ The Cost of Living With a Disability in America
“While life with a disability isn’t necessarily as removed from the normative experience as I think many able-bodied people tend to think it is, the barriers that plague our access to any semblance of economic stability are nearly impossible to overcome.”
James Ball’s ‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline
“Thanks to wellness, QAnon is the conspiracy that can draw in the mum who shops at Holland & Barrett and her Andrew Tate-watching teenage son. The QAnon conspiracy is one of the most dangerous in the world, directly linked to attempted insurrections in the US and Germany, and mass shootings in multiple countries – and wellness is helping to fuel it. Something about the strange mixture of mistrust of the mainstream, the intimate nature of the relationship between a therapist, spiritual adviser, or even personal trainer, and their client, combined with the conspiratorial world in which we now live, is giving rise to a new kind of radicalisation. How did we end up here?”
Charles Blow’s Coming Out Late
Good stuff to think about.
Alex Brown’s “It’s going to be magnificent.”: He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan
“Don’t come to this duology looking for rep where queer characters do good things or learn positive lessons from their mistakes to become better people. There are no queer stereotypes or tropes here. The relationships are fraught and messy and complicated in the best and worst ways. Characters fuck up, accidentally and intentionally, and good morals are not anyone’s main concerns. And I’m all the more grateful for it. Give me queerness as sharp as a knife and hard as steel. Give me queerness that does not apologize, that sneers at attempts to mollify or temper. Give me queerness that flings open the doors to all possibilities.”
Nedra Glover’s Navigating and Surviving Bad Days
“When we are having a bad day it is important for us to consider a few factors that may be contributing to how we’re feeling:
- How did you sleep?
- Is your body nourished and hydrated?
- What is happening in your environment and/or your life that you’re reacting or responding to?
- How do you get through this moment without bringing other people down with you?”
Jenny Hamilton’s How to Uphold the Status Quo: The Problem With Small Town Witch Romances
“SFF and romance both promise escape, but they falter when they forget that we cannot escape to without also escaping from.”
Yoon Ha Lee’s Starting on the Wrong Side
“I do know that “fun to read about” or “I enjoy this fictional character” are distinct from “I genuinely think this character is a good person because I enjoy them.” But boy howdy, I do see a lot of people twisting themselves into pretzels with “I like this character but liking a character means they have to be GOOD and TRUE because I am a GOOD and TRUE person who only likes GOOD and TRUE characters ergo this specific problematic fave is actually GOOD and TRUE.””
Anne Helen Petersen interviewing Sara Petersen, Pretty White Moms in Their Pretty White Houses
“[Sara]: …unthinkingly pursuing motherhood as a shortcut to self-actualization. The “choice” to have children (or not) is not equitably offered to all people, and I think it’s still a choice wrapped up in the way we value (or don’t value) people with uteruses.
A lot of this has to do with the way kids are culturally conditioned to equate their self-worth with how well they perform gender, but I think momfluencer culture — with its emphasis on how things look rather than how things feel — can make motherhood seem like an avenue towards becoming. But becoming what? And for whom?”
“[Anne Helen]: I find myself spending a lot of time grappling with the tension between “it’s misogynistic to shit on an industry dominated by women, just because they’re making money through the commodification of labor that’s unusually unpaid” and “the ideologies most of these influencers reproduce are regressive at worst and GirlBoss feminism at best.” It’s hard! Where did you land on this spectrum before you reported out the book, and where did you end? Where are you now?
[Sara]: I think your inclusion of the word “commodification” is huge here. Because momfluencers aren’t making money from the labor of motherhood, they’re making money from the performance of a certain type of maternal identity. And that identity (usually) is rooted in (usually harmful) constructions of gender, race, and class.”
Jennifer Vanasco’s Vibrating haptic suits give deaf people a new way to feel live music
Love stuff that expands my understanding of what’s possible!
Esther O. Lee 