• This is perhaps one of the most incredible stories I have ever read. It’s a love story, a prison reform and civil rights advocacy story, involving a middle-aged lawyer (one of the first women to graduate from Columbia Law) moving to Texas and meeting a brilliant inmate who, despite an eighth grade education, wrote a class-action suit on a piece of toilet paper that was heard by the Supreme Court: “The Love Story That Upended the Texas Prison System” by Ethan Watters
• Extremely gorgeous, unconventional, fragmented, and fascinating fiction about an affair (the Rumpus does everything right and this is no exception): “Beginnings” by Shelly Oria
• This has been integral in reshaping my thoughts on 2020: originally, I was of the playing-it-safe mindset. With this election being, obviously, critically important, running a far-left candidate seems too risky — Beto, or some other generic moderate white man Democrat, seemed the slam dunk choice. But based on the midterm turnout, the key is mobilizing non-voters. That’s how we’ll get a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and a representative governance that creates policies to benefit its diverse constituency. “You Can’t Get Conservative White Women to Change Their Minds” by Katha Pollitt

 

WOMEN

• “Does marriage have a single past? No, says Bernard. It has as many pasts as it has futures: “For the past has been as varied as the present, with a meandering course and scores of tributaries, large and small, and many potential futures.” Later, she writes one of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read: “The future does not hit everyone at the same time.” “The Marriage Plots” by Haley Mlotek
• A lovely and thought-provoking exploration of female friendship: we can always use a reminder of the value of platonic relationships (said especially as someone historically unlucky in romantic love living in a society that heavily prioritizes romantic forms of love). “Why do we stop giving meaningful gifts to our friends?” by Sara Petersen
• The one, the only; the legendary, the wonderful; the trailblazing, the inspiring: “Julia Louis-Dreyfus Acts Out: The actress on challenging comedy’s sexism, fighting cancer, and becoming the star of her own show.” by Ariel Levy
• “Apples represent the beautiful forbidden—the things that will make and unmake us. Our salvation and our curse. Blessing and a curse—it’s the dichotomy handed down from Eve, who bit that first fruit. Apples nourish, but they condemn, and so, too, does my femininity. Every strength a weakness and every weakness a strength.” “Endless Preparation: Apples and Women’s Work” by Lyz Lenz

 

CULTURE ON ANY TYPE OF SCREEN

• “The American film industry is dominated by children’s films—superhero movies, post–Star Wars franchise films, and animated family films. As the audience becomes similarly infantilized, the critics have followed suit. No one wants to be too mean to these babyish productions that audiences cart their families to again and again, or that they leave on permanent repeat in the back seats of their cars … We are all becoming like the underground miners on Mars in a Philip K. Dick novel, watching Perky Pat and pretending we are living full lives back on Earth.”
  “Remember Me on This Computer” by A. S. Hamrah
• Sharing this one as an invitation to chew on the ideas: “Sister Stop Breathing takes up the question of how one might create art, or anything at all, while surrounded by artifacts that will outlast everyone who is currently alive, and then some. Art, shit, and death are the results of linked processes. In Rome especially, new art must not only contend with a massive cultural backlog, but also be absorbed into a space literally crowded with everything since the Etruscans.”
• Overall, there is something about graphic nudity in this country. We are all graphically nude a couple times of day, so I don’t quite get it. “PG? NC-17? She Made Such Calls For Years” by Brooke Barnes
• “I love to look at [horses]. Their stunning manes, their shiny coats. I especially like it when they’re big—have you ever seen a big horse? They’re wonderful. Sometimes they’re both big and fast. I especially love those horses. Other times they’re small and slow. I especially love those horses as well.” “The Year of the Horse” by Tyler Parker
• “Overload: Will any shows from the Golden Age of TV endure?” by Sonny Bunch
• “I grew up Catholic, and I went to church every week until I was about 18 and I started to realize the theater is my church. Anything that was guilt-inducing never really landed with me, but what I liked was “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” I liked sitting there with this group of people, regardless of what we say the dogma of this religion is or regardless of what the rituals are — the fact is, we’ve all come here for a good reason, because we want things to be better for ourselves.” Turns out I am John C. Reilly, who Wants to Play Vulnerable Men, by Molly Lambert.
• My Brilliant Friend. My Brilliant Friend. My Brilliant Friend. It’s all I want to talk about. “The Sweet Linearity of “My Brilliant Friend”” by Emily Nussbaum

 

PROSE BASED; PROSE INCLINED

• “Black Male Writers of Our Time” by Ayana Mathis
• I would recommend sitting down and spending a few hours with this website: Pudding marries complex cultural analysis with visual data and the result is undeniably awesome. Perhaps start with “The Structure of Stand-Up Comedy”.
• Character is most interesting in the literary sense—character as a kind of fictional construction. Personality, or these discourses and systems of personality, allow us to imagine ourselves as characters. They articulate narratives about our fate and allow us to imagine ourselves as part of larger, social orders that we navigate in different ways through different plot trajectories based on what we learn about our personalities. To me, personality and character are deeply intertwined along that kind of imaginative dimension of character creation. When we think of personality or character as innate, what do we miss? “Who’s Got Personality? The Myers-Briggs Bias: An Interview with Merve Emre” by Deborah Chasman

 

MUSICALLY INCLINED

• “[Black Panther’s themes] reminded me of why I made ‘To Pimp a Butterfly,’” Lamar says. “It was survivor’s guilt. You want to be homegrown and help folks back home and give them game. You want to be there for them but if you’re there, then you can’t go out and explore.” “Amid the accolades, Kendrick Lamar refuses to compromise his vision, keeping it homegrown” by Jeff Weiss
• Rural voters may have recoiled from the family lines of the Clintons and Bushes, but in celebrating the Robertsons and the Trumps, they’ve merely traded the political dynasty for the dynasties of cash and capital. “If You’ve Got the Money: Country music sells its soul” by Chris Reitz
• “At the end of the day, identity is a construct we build to make ourselves feel at ease and at peace and reasonably stable in the world. But being is not a construct. Being is just being. In being, there’s a whole variety of wild and untamed things that remain in us.” “Beneath the Surface of Bruce Springsteen” by Michael Hainey
• Read, if only for: ““Pour Some Sugar on Me” is upsetting to me. It seems like if [Def Leppard] came over, they would treat your house poorly. If my wife had made a noodle kugel for Hanukkah, [guitarist] Phil Collen would come in and pour sugar all over it and I’d be like, “How dare you disrespect my wife.”” “John Mulaney’s Take on Rock Hall of Fame Inductees Is the Only One You Need” by Jason Newman

 

ENVIRO

• “Are insects ‘philosophical zombies’ with no inner life? Close attention to their behaviours and moods suggests otherwise” aka BEES DREAM! “Bee-brained” by Lars Chittka and Catherine Wilson
• “In decades of photos of fishermen holding up their catch in the Florida Keys, the fish got smaller and smaller, to the point where the prize catches were dwarfed by fish that in years past were piled up and ignored. But the smiles on the fishermen’s faces stayed the same size. The world never feels fallen, because we grow accustomed to the fall.” “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here” by Brooke Jarvis
• “We are a wild species, as Darwin pointed out. Nobody ever tamed or domesticated or scientifically bred us. But for at least three millennia we have been engaged in a cumulative and ambitious race to modify and gain control of our environment, and in the process we have come close to domesticating ourselves.” “The Geography of Hope” by Wallace Stegner
• “The city of Melbourne assigned trees email addresses so citizens could report problems. Instead, people wrote thousands of love letters to their favorite trees.” or, “When You Give a Tree an Email Address” by Adrienne LaFrance
• “Exclusive: “Patagonia is in business to save our home planet.”” by Jeff Beer

 

NATIONAL POLITICS, OR WHAT REMAINS OF IT

• For nearly two years, while Congress has argued and the White House has delayed, Robbins has waited to be sent some colleagues to read his work and rule on the cases. No one has arrived. So he toils in vain, writing memos into the void. “Memos to Nobody: Inside the work of a neglected fed agency” by Juliet Linderman
• “Alexander, it turns out, had not fired the officer who shot Williams. He had fired Stephen Mader, who had chosen not to shoot the young man. Alexander had concluded that the young officer had frozen in a life-and-death moment. Kuzma, the officer who had killed Williams, thought Mader should have shot him first.” “I Don’t Want to Shoot You, Brother” by Joe Sexton
• “The reason that Tucker Carlson devoted a segment to Rudolph is because Tucker Carlson, like a mountain river, serves a key role in a beautiful and essential natural process. And “Problematic Rudolph” is an object lesson in that process.” “Why Is Tucker Carlson Mad About Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? A Guide to the Content Cycle.” by Max Read
• A local beauty pageant can be about more than just looks. It can also reveal how a community wants to be seen, and how it sees itself. On the Miss Lumbee pageant and native pride: “Re-examining America: A Queen Is Born” by Natalie Keyssar

 

MORE REASONS TO DESPISE & OVERTHROW LATE-STAGE CAPITALISM

• “LinkedIn, for instance, turns its users—even the employed ones—into constant job applicants. We are terrified to make even one tiny mistake, yet at the same time we are faced with a ruling class that makes little effort to hide its flagrant misdeeds: graft, corruption, and perhaps most appalling in our age of so-called meritocracy, sheer incompetence. Despite Hillary Clinton running a ham-fisted and bewilderingly tone-deaf campaign, we had the phrase “most qualified presidential candidate” practically shoved down our gullets. And, of course, Donald Trump is president.” “Tell Me It’s Going to be OK” by Miya Tokumitsu
• “Normel Person: The parental is political” by Lauren Weinstein (Just click on this one, it’s a comic, trust me)
• “Share my blog post, buy my book, click on my link, follow me on Instagram, visit my Etsy shop, donate to my Kickstarter, crowdfund my heart surgery. It’s as though we are all working in Walmart on an endless Black Friday of the soul…After a couple of decades of constant advice to “follow our passions” and “live our dreams,” for a certain type of relatively privileged modern freelancer, nothing less than total self-actualization at work now seems enough. But this leaves us with an angsty mismatch between personal expectation and economic reality. So we shackle our self-worth to the success of these projects.” “Everything Is for Sale Now. Even Us.” by Ruth Whippman
• Related: “The pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure.” “In Praise of Mediocrity” by Tim Wu

 

THE WORLD IS SAD SO HERE, PLEASE SMILE

• :’) “Church of England to offer baptism-style services to transgender people to celebrate their new identity for first time” by Helena Horton
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Claims She’s an Average American. So Where Are Her 2.3 Kids and 5-Foot-9-Inch Husband? “Future Headlines About Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” by Jason O. Gilbert
• “Ice Storm” by Robert Hayden
• You will smile through tears at this one: “My Dad’s Friendship With Charles Barkley” by Shirley Wang