Books
M.A. Carrick’s Labyrinth’s Heart (Rose & Rook #3)
Excellent trilogy ender. I laughed, I cried, and it’s one of the few books this year I stayed up late finishing.
Prachi Gupta’s They Called Us Exceptional
Courtney Milan’s The Marquis Who Mustn’t (Wedgeford Trials #2)
Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s The Siren, The Song, and The Spy (The Mermaid, The Witch, and The Sea #2)
Nghi Vo’s Siren Queen
Reread: Alyssa Cole’s Can’t Escape Love (Reluctant Royals #2.6)
Reread: Nalini Singh’s Mine to Possess (Psy-Changeling #4)
Music
Babyface’s Change the World (MTV Unplugged)
Beyoncé’s MY HOUSE
Fanasia & Taraji P. Henson’s What About Love?
Whitney Houston ft. The Georgia Mass Choir’s Joy to the World
Hozier’s All Things End and De Selby (Part 2)
Julie and the Phantoms’ Flying Solo
Karol G’s S91 & Bichotag
aja monet’s give my regards to Brooklyn, the perfect storm, for sonia, yemaya, give thanks, for the kids who live, window seat
aja monet’s castaway & weathering (NPR Tiny Desk Concert)
Victoria Monét’s On My Mama (Live at The Tonight Show)
Prince Royce’s Corazón Sin Cara
Allison Russell ft. Resistance Revival Choir’s Take Me To Church (Hozier cover)
Pharoah Sanders’ Ore-Se-Rere (Nigerian JuJu HiLife) and Elevation
Misc.
Dance performance: Ballet Hispánico’s Doña Perón
You’ll need a PBS membership to watch now, but well worth it.
Live: Allison Russell
Podcast: Dimension 20’s Burrow’s End
Podcast: Dimension 20’s A Starstruck Odyssey
Ally Beardsley playing a kindly corporate shark isn’t what I thought I needed, but totally was.
Newsletter: Alaya Dawn Johnson
Articles
Report: Mia Birdsong and Saneta deVuono-powell’s Freedom’s Revival
So this is a 172 pg PDF, but it’s much shorter than it seems. There were a ton of quotes I wanted to highlight, but wasn’t able to due to tech issues. Well worth a read, both for its approachability, it’s unique use of footnotes to highlight the comments from their readers, and for the interesting sources. Also reminds me of one of the women profiled in ___’s The Persuaders, who argued the left must reclaim the language of freedom instead of ceding it to the right.
See: page 70’s graphic on individualistic v collective freedom.
“Bridgit: Powerful question. I wonder if this section needs to go deeper into what happens in the body when we dance? In some of our working groups through which we’ve developed our thinking about how storytelling/art inspire people on their journey to pluralist identity, we convened a group of artists who all insisted that if we wanted to cultivate the abundance mindset, we had to fund communal dance as the embodiment of “freedom’s rehearsal.”” (76)
“Friendship as freedom, in this story, names a dangerous closeness that capitalism works to eradicate through violence, division, management, and incitements to see ourselves as isolated individuals or nuclear family units.” (134, quoting Friendship is a Root of Freedom)
Podcast: Stephanie Foo’s Book Has a Happy Ending
“I think, yeah, people are often like, how did you have the courage to heal? How did you have the courage to go to therapy and survive and whatever? And I’m like, it’s not about courage. It’s about survival. It was that or death. It was like, it was either that or nothing at all. There was no future – so, yeah.”
Transcript here.
Alice Liang’s What Does a Happily Ever After Look Like?
An article with cool infographics about the changes in romance novel covers over the years.
Ed Yong’s Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me to Be a Better Journalist
“Covering long Covid solidified my view that science is not the objective, neutral force it is often misconstrued as. It is instead a human endeavor, relentlessly buffeted by our culture, values and politics. As energy-depleting illnesses that disproportionately affect women, long Covid and M.E./C.F.S. are easily belittled by a sexist society that trivializes women’s pain, and a capitalist one that values people according to their productivity. Societal dismissal leads to scientific neglect, and a lack of research becomes fodder for further skepticism. I understood these dynamics only after interviewing social scientists, disability scholars and patients themselves, whose voices are often absent or minimized in the media. Like the pandemic writ large, long Covid is not just a health problem. It is a social one, and must also be understood as such.”
“In this status quo, people are expected to ignore the threat of infection, pay through the nose if they get sick and face stigma and ridicule if they become disabled. Journalism can and should repudiate that bargain. We are not neutral actors, reporting on the world at a remove; we also create that world through our choices, and we must do so with purpose, care and compassion.”
“As the pandemic wore on, many grim outcomes I warned about came to pass, and most societal changes I hoped for did not. I watched two successive administrations make avoidable mistakes, and then make them anew with each successive surge or variant. I witnessed almost every publication that I once held in esteem become complicit in normalizing a level of death once billed as incalculable. It was galling, crushing work that wrecked my faith in journalism and its institutions. But the solace that many long-haulers drew from my pieces gave me solace in turn. It convinced me that there is still a point to this horrible work, a purpose in bearing witness to suffering and a reason to continue shouting into the abyss. Sometimes, even if just slightly, the abyss brightens.”
Esther O. Lee 