Books, fiction
Solace Ames’ The Companion Contract (LA Doms #3)
Spectacular, deeply embodied romance. I hope Ames publishes again because this was so damn good.
Micaiah Johnson’s Those Beyond the Wall (Space Between Worlds #2)
Narratively smart and N.K. Jemisin-like in its craftiness. I hope people smarter than me discuss it.
Courtney Milan’s The Earl Who Isn’t (Wedgeford Trials #3)
At last, a romance where the solution is the dissolution of the peerage.
Rebecca Roanhorse’s Mirrored Heavens (Between Earth & Sky #3)
Gimme all the slice-of-life romance between Xiala and Serapio!! Also a Roanhorse romance when??
Valerie Valdes’ Where Peace is Lost
Forever sad this isn’t getting a sequel. One of the most interesting world-building, or rather pacifist-warrior building I’ve seen in awhile.
Jasmine Walls and Teo DuVall’s Brooms
A balm, an antidote of what we can do together when the government seeks to destroy us.
Books, nonfiction
Cecilia Gentili’s Faltas
Myriam Gurba’s Creep
I think both Faltas and Creep can be read in craft conversation.
Tina Horn’s Why Are People Into That?
Tina Horn I will read whatever you write. Come for the kink, stay for the examination of our culture.
Leila Mottley’s Woke Up No Light (poetry)
Vanessa Angélica Villareal’s Magical/Realism
Again, people smarter than me: please build off of Villareal’s work/theory because it’s fantastic.
TV/Film
Blindspotting S2
The Town!!
Dimension 20
Honor the cock.
Game Changer
Sam Reich, the mind you have.
Gong to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
One of the great poets.
Gundam Witch from Mercury
I will love anything that wears its Utena references so clearly.
Pokémon Concierge
Heartwarming, short series.
Music
Beyoncé’s II HANDS II HEAVEN
Cure for Paranoia’s TiiNY DESK
Hiatus Kaiyote’s Love Heart Cheat Code album
Hozier ft. Allison Russell’s Wildflower and Barley
Oceans Before Me’s Hidden Names
Silkroad Ensemble’s Tamping Song (ft. Haruka Fujii)
Vienna Teng’s We’ve Got You (∞ – Two Truths)
Third Reprise’s Some Enchanted Evening (ft. Alita Moses)
Podcasts, fiction
Worlds Beyond Number
Makes waking up Tuesday morning a joy. Plus, the Horner Corner feature in the subscriber Fireside Chat is *chef’s kiss*.
Podcasts, nonfiction
Myisha Battle’s How’s Your Sex Life?
Sounds weird, but I listen to this when I clean the bathroom. Making a chore I hate infinitely more fun.
Sam Sanders, Saeed Jones, and Zach Stafford’s Vibe Check
Makes waking up Wednesday morning fun.
Live
Wild Up’s Julius Eastman’s Femenine
Wondrous and magical. I love me a sleigh bell.
Ballet Hispánico
Unfairly sexy.
Newsletters
Roxane Gay’s The Audacity
Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study
Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha’s postcards from the end of the world
Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine
Alternately, on Patreon.
I do articles a little differently for the year end review. Instead of purely faves, I also organize around topics so I can see thematically what I was interested in. So.
Articles, book bans
Leah Blaine’s Chaos Under the Corset: When Romance Covers Hide Revolution
“And this is why books are banned. Not because they teach children how to rebel, teenagers know full well how to rebel, but because they show that the choices laid out by their family and community aren’t choices at all, but rather acceptable options already chosen for them. The idea that children would dare to choose something not offered to them is downright offensive to many parents and must be avoided at all costs hence micromanaging even the fiction they may come across.”
Lyz Lenz’s I understand why people ban books
“It’s no accident that the book bans are also happening as younger generations talk about sexuality and gender in a way that was taboo even just 20 years ago. The book bans are a reaction to the floodgates of knowledge.
Controlling access to information is about preserving power. Who gets to know that queer identities have been around as long as the history of humanity? Who gets to know about the women who preached and about the queens who put on pants and loved other women? Who gets to know about how to find birth control? Who gets to know about condoms? Who gets to know which boys to avoid dating? Who gets to know which bosses not to be alone with in the office after hours? And who is left out from this knowledge? And who then finds themselves at 35 finally learning that what happened to them at 20 was assault? Who gets to know? And who gets to put a name on their pain? And who doesn’t? Who finds themselves at almost 40 years old reading books written over a hundred years ago and saying, “Why didn’t I know this sooner?”
When you think about the destabilizing power of the true answers to those questions, it’s not so hard to understand why you would ban something. The wonder is when people actually tell the truth.
People say they ban books to protect children. But every day we send bombs to other countries to annihilate children in genocidal wars. We pass laws that aim to protect the lives of children but kill their mothers and then we refuse to feed those children school lunch once they exist. Not, it’s not love or protection. These bans are rope tied around children, designed to hold them in place, and keep them tied up and tamed, like that horse the man compared me to all those years ago.”
Anne Helen Petersen’s When Your Profession is On Fire
Emphasis mine. Also thinking about the privatization goal in relation to Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s interview (also in this roundup post under podcasts).
“Some of what these unions are fighting for is pay. And some of what they’re fighting for is the ability for workers to do their job well. That’s what unions have always done! Advocated for working conditions that don’t kill, maim, or injure people (physically and psychologically) for workers to be compensated for that work with a fair and living wage. And that’s what unions are doing now. It’s just the work itself that often looks different.
Even if you don’t have a union, your organization should be asking itself: What does a sustainable workload actually look like? How many hours does it require, and what portion of a person’s whole self should it demand?The ideology of passion work tells us that the answer to that question should be as much as possible, because more work means more benefit (for the kids you’re teaching, for the climate crisis you’re addressing, for the public health problem you’re fixing, whatever). But as much as possible often makes the work itself impossible in the long term.”
“The refusal to grapple with these structural issues has led us to the charter school movement, to bourgeois parents taking their kids out of public school even when they philosophically support it, and to ongoing attempts to defund public education. But that understanding how how we’ve arrived at this current moment of educational crisis is too passive for me. The fire is spreading because the fire was set intentionally. In red states, in court cases, in state legislatures, in anti-union messaging, in messaging against local school levees, but also in general pushback against “entitlements” and all manner of policies, passed by both Democrats and Republicans, that exacerbate the wealth gap and exacerbate poverty.
The goal — sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, sometimes accidental or unintentional — has always been to privatize education. To control the curriculum, of course, but also to wrest control away from the unions and the educators themselves.”
Podcast: Fascism and Book Bans, Maggie Tokuda-Hall on Our Opinions Are Correct
Transcript not yet available on site, but Apple Podcasts generated a decent one, from which the quote is pulled.
“MAGGIE TOKUDA-HALL: I believe this [book banning] is a fascist movement.
“And so fascists on the far right have figured out that there are so many Americans with easily inflamed bigotries, that this is a really expeditious way to defund institutions of public learning, whether that’s public schools or libraries. And so they don’t give a fuck that it is actually also a permission structure for violence against these marginalized bodies and identities that they represent. They have this larger goal.
“And the foot soldiers in it, I don’t think are aware of that at all. They just have easily inflamed bigotries that they find certain things scary and they are willing to throw down on that. And they are able to do this with very little effort on their part.”
Podcast: Maggie Tokuda-Hall on Kelly Jensen’s Hey YA
Quotes taken from Apple’s autogenerated transcript.
“I think there’s always been a push in [?] and Children’s Literature that we have never really answered in a meaningful way on an industry level about whether or not good children’s literature encourages obedience.”
“And I think adults have always been threatened by children’s autonomy. And that is one of the reasons that book bans have been so effective is because there are so many parents, and I think even well-meaning adults who are in this space, who still struggle with accepting the need for children to be autonomous.”
“As an obedient kid who’s an adult now, I can tell you, it was really hard for me to find as an adult what happiness actually means to me because it was so difficult to distinguish good feedback from obedience from my own pleasure.”
Articles, writing craft
Lizz Dawson’s Vulnerability is the Hardest Place to Go, a conversation with Melissa Febos
“…students, where they are bringing the imagined criticisms of a bad faith reader to the desk with them when they’re doing the first draft. Basically, they’re already thinking, “What is that person on Twitter going to say about this when I publish it?” It is a preoccupation with others’ perceptions…. do not write for the bad faith reader. You have to write for the reader of best faith, the reader who most needs your work, and you need to do your absolute best work for that reader. Exile the thoughts of the person who is looking to invalidate the art that you’re making; you can’t make art that way. Or it will be a brittle, sad version of what you would’ve done if you had imagined the loving reader who is grateful and interested in what it is that you actually are trying to communicate.”
Chris Klimek’s This Play Within a Play Confronts the Power Dynamic Between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson
“The major lesson she took away from [James] Baldwin—one that she now tries to pass on to her own students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts—was not about technique, but bearing.
“The main thing he taught me is how to conduct myself in the presence of the spirit,” she says, “how to listen with rapt attention, how to conduct myself like, ‘I am a lightning rod. I am ready. Send it. We will achieve transmission!’””
Yoon Ha Lee’s Dance the Exotic Dance for Me!
“The happy ending is a cage. A white-ass writer can write retellings of classical mythology and it is unremarkable. How many people hassle Madeline Miller about Greek heritage? When I write a retelling of the “Judgment of Paris,” I get pushback because it’s not a Korean story; how dare I step outside “my” lane? At the same time, people assume personal background levels of authenticity from that Korean-religion-factoid I put in a story after reading it six months ago on Wikipedia. Certain readers want me to provide exciting cultural voyeurism, and educate them in a fun, exotic bingo-square experience for their Goodreads challenge, and make them feel good about how performatively progressive they are; how dare I step outside the cage and refuse to perform the way they require me to?”
“At the same time, I’m troubled by “authenticity” when it’s weaponized selectively as a cage, used to gatekeep “acceptable” stories and topics for some authors and not others. There’s a reason Jedao is space Asian, but he’s a space Asian with a Texas drawl, as opposed to whatever the hell people think men of Asian heritage “must” look like or sound like according to some K-drama. I’m troubled when certain experiences or stories aren’t considered “real,” or more relevantly from a career standpoint, marketable, because they don’t fit into the confused preconceptions of some fucking cultural voyeur or some demographic calculation.”
Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha’s campfire on the superfund site
“When it comes to thinking about the ethics of writing your survivorhood, it’s never been as simple as that oft-cited line “if they wanted you to write about them better they should’ve treated you better,” to me. There are some people who I can write about that way with impunity. There are also people where I sit with a lot more complexity about what part of what stories I can tell.
But: you can write about the people who are survivors who abused you, with as much grace, compassion and “I understand their intergenerational trauma” as you can muster. You can leave out the worst parts. And they can still not see any of that and come to jesus.
Because, here’s the thing: people who were abusive to you, they didn’t abuse you because you were good or bad, and you can’t make them not be abusive by being really good or writing really good. They abused you because they made that choice. They might be still making it.
Writing your survivor story is, at best, something that tells a mean, good story. It’s not healing in a therapist office and it doesn’t have to be “healing.” Maybe it offers healing for you or others, because the story makes a new portal into a next, as well into the past.
Those that hurt you, they had choices and made them. Their choices to be of account, to heal, to change, are still theirs.
Your writing is not the magic spell that can make your child or younger self finally have people apologize. If you’re lucky, it’s a magic spell that changes you by the process of writing it.”
Jen Silverman’s Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable
See also Yoon Ha Lee’s Starting on the Wrong Side.
“Here on my screen was the distillation of a peculiar American illness: namely, that we have a profound and dangerous inclination to confuse art with moral instruction, and vice versa.”
Juliana Ukiomogbe’s Akwaeke Emezi Won’t Tell You How to Feel
““I think there’s a media literacy issue that we’re experiencing everywhere where people think that because you write about something, it means you’re condoning it,” they say. “I’m like, ‘No, I write about it because it happens.’ With The Death of Vivek Oji, several people couldn’t believe there was incest in it. People think that this thing of marrying cousins is a redneck, white thing. And it’s very common in cultures outside of the West. That’s why I wrote it like that. With Little Rot, it’s much of the same. I’m just like, ‘What is the issue? There aren’t teenage sex workers in Nigeria?’ That’s not true. It’s something that happens and I write about it. That’s my job.”
Years ago, Emezi encountered a similar situation when they were taking a Toni Morrison seminar. “We were reading Song of Solomon and in the book, there’s a pedophile in the community. Everyone knows he’s there and no one does anything about it. One of the other students in the seminar got really agitated about it and said, ‘What does Morrison want us to think about this? Why would she write that?’ And the Professor just smiled and said, ‘Morrison is just showing you a thing. It is your job to decide how you feel about it. It is not the author’s job to tell you how to feel about it.’ People expect their media, their literature, their TV, and their movies to tell them how to feel about things. And I’m like, ‘No, I’m so sorry. I just show you the thing. You have to decide how you feel about it.””
Articles, post presidential election
Alexander Chee’s The Novel That Tells You How To Survive America
“I have often said cynicism gets you nothing you want. It doesn’t protect you, it doesn’t win you allies, it doesn’t create communities, and it is a gift to your enemies.”
Alexander Chee’s This Country Is Still That Country
Wisdom from Chee’s activism with ACT UP.
- “The radical and the liberal. when each thinks they do not need the other, the work usually falls apart and the conservative usually wins. The conservative only needs the liberal as a kind of patsy, branding them a radical as soon as they are not needed.
- There is a violence directed against you when the state does not see you as fully human that begins with the knowledge that this status has been conferred. Do not underestimate then the power of that which returns to you your sense of your humanity and that of others.”
- “Make time to dance. To sing. To do it with others. Feel yourself in your body, feel your voice. The catharsis of dancing after an action reminded me of why I did it.”
The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals, Caitlyn Collins on the Ezra Klein Show
Link is to the transcript.
“CAITLYN COLLINS: …And to be honest with you, Ezra, as a sociologist, as a feminist, I don’t really care about our total fertility rate as a policy target. If you asked me, I would tell you, we should open up our borders and let immigration solve our, quote, unquote, “fertility problem.”
I don’t think that we should try to be using policy as a lever to encourage more births. What I do care deeply about is creating a society in which adults can make choices for themselves that bring them, again, as we’ve been talking about today, joy, meaning, fulfillment, happiness, a sense of wholeness.”
Kai Cheng Thom’s How to survive the apocalypse (again)
“If we take queer ancestors as our possibility models, then the capacity to survive the terror and pain of this moment lies not in any individual’s mental fortitude, not in the wellness studio or on the meditation cushion, nor in the bubble bath (though there is nothing wrong with those things), perhaps not even in the therapist’s office. Our greatest power to resist oppression and death comes from our connections with one another, our ability to create community structures through which we can give and receive care, make art, share pleasure and raise our collective voices.”
Margaret Killjoy’s The Sky is Falling; We’ve Got This
“If I were to spit out some suggestions, based on my experience (about 20 years in anarchist organizing and a full-time job learning about and teaching about social movements of the past), here’s what I’ve got:”
- “An awful lot of people are newly disillusioned with status quo politics. The right wing has an easy time bringing those people onboard, and we need to work harder to bring people onboard as well.”
- “Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.
- We need to offer an offramp for people on the right wing. We need to offer people the chance to deradicalize away from fascism. This isn’t to say we need to be nice to our enemies, just that we need to make it clear that they have the option of no longer being our enemies.”
Lydia Polgreen and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Democrats Had a Theory of the Election. They Were Wrong.
Technically a podcast, but I read the linked transcript.
“McMillan Cottom: …If you want to feel empowered to do something, know that history actually is only written after the things are settled, and it is our job to settle them.”
Sarah Thankam Mathews’s every day is all there is
“Something that’s been forgotten by a lot of people is that politics is won and lost over two things: how you impact people’s material circumstances, and how you make people feel.”
“The future of American politics will belong to whoever can make a coalitional majority of people feel like they belong, like their lives will improve, and like the world makes sense.4 The future will belong to whoever can tell a simple and thus powerful story that allows a majority of people to see themselves within it.”
Articles, Palestine
Naomi Klein’s How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war
“In an interview, she told me that memorializing traumatic histories can be done in ways that encourage collective healing and a sense of solidarity across divides. But there are also times when, for political actors within these groups, healing isn’t the goal – keeping trauma alive, despite the passing of time and changing conditions, is infinitely more useful.”
Anne Helen Petersen’s The College Student Keeps the Score
“Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have talked about what is going to happen to all this deferred grief, all this swallowed loss and unprocessed trauma. The result is all around us: in the disengagement from politics, in the loss of faith in public institutions, and in the waves of people fleeing professions on fire. It’s in the wages of our ruthless economy: the growing encampments of people with nowhere else to go, the bodies breaking because they can’t find or afford the care they need.”
“…if these students are “less resilient,” it’s not because they’re not resilient — it’s because they were forced to expend so much of that resiliency over the last five years. But even that framing smells of bullshit. Here is a micro-generation that, if we’re to listen to the commentariat, is detached and anti-social thanks to smartphones and disillusioned by coming of age in the middle of multiple economic, social, political, and viral disruptions. By that logic, these students should be removed from the world to the point of nihilism. But what we’re seeing in these protests is the near opposite. It’s not nihilism. It’s activism.
These protests aren’t taking place on forums or social media; they’re happening in physical space. It’s not a disengagement from a world that has largely left them to fend for themselves; it’s a brave, angry, and frequently messy engagement. I look at the protests and see students funneling their grief in a way that disrupts the narrative of their own disengagement. And I see them they using the tools they were given to fend for themselves during the pandemic — the surgical mask — to fight surveillance. I see adults, not children, furious about the inhumane Israeli assault on Palestine, and advocating for their institutions’ disinvestment in that war.”
Meredith Shiner’s The Appalling Attack on Ta-Nehisi Coates Is a Massive Media Failing
“The Discourse tells us there is a “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” and that it is “complicated.” But somewhere in this word soup we have simmered long enough to deflect attention from how power works, who benefits from it and who loses everything…”
“What might happen in January 2025 with these overt threats to Jews in 2024? Why are we downplaying this, and who is served by it? Why are we pretending that Tlaib’s generalized complaint about the right to dissent is the same thing as Trump’s constant incitements to political violence? The effort expended on bothsides-ing us into meaninglessness inoculates those in power from criticism and simultaneously emboldens a reckless wannabe dictator.”
Rafia Zakaria’s Why Brené Brown’s Gospel of Vulnerability Fails the World’s Most Vulnerable
“In Brené Brown’s worldview, compassion is generated by a shared belief that everyone is “doing the best they can.” The rude cashier, the unaccommodating flight attendant, are all “doing the best that they can.” It is cute this idea and even workable, but it is a prescription best suited to those who are by and large untouched by systemic injustice. It tells us to think that the white cop nailing brown bodies to the pavement is just doing his best—in doing so it furthers the fraud that all our vulnerability is equally valued.”
Articles, misc.
Sesali Bowen’s What You Look Like Stanning Chris Brown
“Using CB as an example, I explained that my intentional decision to not support him isn’t about punishing or holding him accountable. It’s about holding myself accountable”
“Whenever possible, my choices reflect my values and I stand on the business I claim. It’s about integrity for me.”
Kate Mann’s Broken Bones: America’s Violent Indifference toward Women
“Misogyny isn’t about hating or discriminating against women because they are women and thus attract suspicion and consternation. Misogyny is about exposing women to harm because our gender makes us beneath full consideration. Misogyny is primarily something we face, not something people feel in their hearts.”
Anne Helen Petersen’s White Celebrity and Rituals of Civility
Really interesting article that starts at Taylor Swift and Brittany Mahomes’ relationship and then pivots to how white women writers cover celebrity.
“white people with societal power cannot be allies to those with less of it if they’re also allies with those who believe in the eradication, degradation, and/or dehumanization of that first group of people.”
“you’re avoiding the sort of conflict that could occur if you used the trust and intimacy at the heart of your connection as the beginning of a much more difficult conversation”
Anne Helen Petersen’s “The Kids Are Too Soft”
“The best indication of the health of an industry like journalism isn’t who excels there, because the answer is obvious: work robots who come from some sort of family money. To understand just how broken media is, look at who leaves the field — or who dares not pursue it. Because this much I know is true: it’s not because they’re soft.
So how do we break this cycle? If, upon encountering or even considering the attitude, ambition, or “work ethic” of a younger generation, your impulse begins to drift towards they don’t work like we do, my hope is we consider the following:
- How have we, as a society — and how have I, as a leader — helped foster the conditions that encourage someone to work a certain way, with certain habits, or attitudes, or ambitions?
- How much of my reaction is to the fact that someone is not working exactly the way I did at that point in my life — even though my circumstances were almost certainly wildly different?
- How has our society — or our industry — tacitly agreed on an understanding of excellence that has little room for different ways of navigating the world, of making space to care for others, or collectivism just generally?
- What if working differently is also an attempt to keep people in the industry for longer — and make the industry as a whole more sustainable?
- What can *I* learn from the way they’re approaching work?
Hard work isn’t always the work that takes the most time, or the work that gets paid the most. The hardest work is the work that challenges, makes us uncomfortable, or requires change. If we actually value hard work — we have to do some of our own.”
Esther O. Lee 