Books

Eliana Lee’s A Pack for Winter

Sierra Simone’s A Lesson in Thorns and Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel #1 & 2)

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Music

Bad Bunny’s BAILE INoLVIDABLE

Durand Bernarr’s GENEROUS, No Business, Reaching, Specialty

Juan Luis Guerra ft. Janina Rosado’s DJ Bachata

Hadestown: Live from London

JoJo’s Ready to Love & Start Over

Moses Sumney + Lyra Pramuk + Sam Smith’s You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)

Sheila E. ft. Jean Rodriguez’s The Way That You Do

aja monet Live at Club Jazzafip

Teedra Moses ft. Durand Bernarr COMPLEX SIMPLICITY

Windborne’s Welcome in Another Year

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Things to watch:

TV: Dimension 20’s Dungeons and Drag Queen S2

TV: DesiQuest Winter Special, episode 1

DYING @ “you want to EBENEZEER MCSROOGE him????!”

Live: Improvised Shakespeare Co.

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Articles

Gerry Canavan’s Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia

More from Octavia E. Butler’s archives on the unwritten Parable of the Trickster. I somehow missed this when it first came out.

Miranda July’s You Bust Loose From Heaven And Now Your Life Starts*

some guidance for when you want to blow up your life, or make big life choices

Kate Manne’s When Do Women Get Cared For (by Men)? Introducing Hetero-Insistence

“But have we required men (I nearly wrote “asked”) to give as good as they get when it comes to caring for their female partners?

I cannot help but wonder if the huge proliferation of the self-care industry for women owes something to the feeling of being fundamentally unheld and uncared for by the men with whom, again, statistically, many of us co-habitate.”

Anne Helen Petersen’s This is How We Fall Out of Love with the World

“I remember the first time I realized that this was the end game. Legislators in my home state of Idaho were cutting the education budget to the bone. Soon thereafter, they started devouring the marrow — while simultaneously creating funding structures for homeschoolers and private (Christian) academies. The far right’s goal is the end of public education, full stop. It’s not that they hate teachers — teachers are welcome to teach at their private religious schools! They just won’t have pensions. Or unions. Or job protections. Or anything else that made the difficult but essential work of becoming a public teacher stable.”

“So why has teaching and so many other federal jobs remained tenable when journalism and the vast majority of the arts have not? Public funding and unions. Get rid of the public funding, defang the unions, and these jobs become the new journalism and career non-profit work: available only to a select few who can shoulder the costs, which means they’re usually privileged, usually partnered, and equipped with private personal safety nets.

When that sort of change occurs across an industry, you don’t just change who can do the work, but the character of the work itself. And when a civilization is limited to work that produces profit, we don’t just lose the artistry and texture of everyday life. We distance ourselves from the values of care and generosity — and the simple but profound belief that what happens to one of us affects all of us.”