Links
📚🔖 Here is the actual study with the evidence of the correlation between fiction reading and cognition.
🔖📚 Read If You Read a Lot of Fiction, Scientists Have Very Good News About Your Brain.
It’s always good to look at the actual studies behind news articles like this, but the evidence that reading fiction is associated with improved cognition suggests the importance of libraries, I think.
🔖 Read a pair of pieces about art and mothering:
The ‘Impossible Life’ of Equal Devotion to Art and Mothering by Jessica Grose (NYT Gift Link)
“Is This The Best Use of My Time?" Sara Fredman in conversation with Catherine Ricketts, author of The Mother Artist.
🔖📚 Read How Pregnancy Forever Transforms the Body and the Mind by Lucy Jones (Literary Hub).
🔖📚 Read What Eve L. Ewing’s Career Trajectory Tells Us About Black Women’s Place in Mainstream Superhero Comics by Ravynn K. Stringfield.
Dr. Stringfield does an awesome job illuminating how Eve L. Ewing’s comics career highlights structural inequality in the comics industry
🔖📚 Read A Daughter Becomes a Mother: On Inhabiting Both Roles in Fiction and in Life by Heidi Reimer (Literary Hub).
🔖 Read The films that gave us unrealistic expectations about what makes a ‘home’.
…I too had one of those houses I had always dreamed of. But it wasn’t by design… It was by living my life and creating a home that served the needs of that life.
🔖📚 Read Tackling Ballet’s History of Anti-Blackness as a White Woman.
The infinitely kinder cousin of ignorance is curiosity.
A great short piece that’s about cultural humility as much as anything.
🔖📚 Read My Son’s Love Life Is None of My Business, Except It Is by Yukiko Tominaga (Electric Literature).
This is a lovely piece about love and dealing with our children growing up.
🔖 Read The Messy Places Are Where the Learning Happens: On Being a Beginner by Michelle Boyd (Digits and Threads)
A great reminder to deliberately be a beginner sometimes.
🔖📚📝 Read Mothering and Writing Are Both Undervalued Labor, so How Do Women Do Both? .
An excellent excerpt from the book The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity.
🔖📝 Read An Oasis in the Desert: Why Libraries Are the Best Places to Write.
I love to write in a library carrel. More than once I’ve considered getting one for our home office. I wonder if my favorite local library branch has them. I haven’t noticed. Next time I’m there, I’ll check.
🔖🧶 Read This Is Your Brain on Fibre by Michelle Woodvine (Digits & Threads).
A great article that explores a lot of the reasons fiber crafting is good for our mental health.
🔖 Read You are having a midlife crisis. It’s fine.
This is an interesting pairing with The Cut’s The Case for Marrying an Older Man.
The former points out that a woman partying at midlife is not, in fact, a revolution. Which pairs fascinatingly with the latter’s framing of being a young artist supported by a partner as a brilliant life hack. I’m curious what the author of the latter’s midlife crisis will look like.
🔖 Read Why I Celebrate The Spring Equinox As The Real “New Year”.
I really love this. I want to live more in line with the seasons. Spring is a great time to make the changes so many people want to make in the new year: eat more produce, move around more.
🔖 Read The “Disney adult” industrial complex by Amelia Tait (The New Statesman via The Rec Center)
The grown-up Disney superfan has become a much-mocked phenomenon online. But creating these consumers was always part of the corporation’s plan.
I’m a second-generation Disney adult deliberately mixing other culture into my kid’s life. I appreciate this critique written by a fellow Disney adult.
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I love this. I often feel that blogging is the most natural medium for my writing, which makes sense as I’ve been doing it for over 20 years. Maybe this incompleteness is part of why.
🔖 Read The Memex Method
Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is [BS]…
Cory Doctorow on the value of a blog as a commonplace book.
🔖 Read What Is Mental Load? (And Why Is It Important?) by Randi Donahue (The Good Trade).
It feels a propos that I read this sitting in the dentist’s office a couple yards away from where my kid is getting sealant on his 6-year molars.
I’m lucky to have a partner who carries a lot of this load, but list-making and note-taking also help me immensely.
🔖 I’m genuinely thrilled for the Gen Zers and others who have the energy for a weekly everything shower, but this chronically ill Xennial is pretty sure it would use up all of her spoons.
🔖📺 Watched Pokemon Concierge and read Pokémon Concierge’s Psyduck Is for the Millennial Pokémon Fans.
I’m a Xennial: Pokemon was more for the kids I babysat than for me, though I did get into the card game my freshman year of college.
Psyduck has long been my Pokemon soul mate, with her constant headaches and love of water. And this article articulates why Psyduck appeals to me even more in Pokemon Concierge.
🔖 Read The Web Renaissance Takes Off by Anil Dash.
Sign me up.
(I’m trying to make a web-related pun here about Lucrezia Borgia, but it’s just not happening.)
🔖 Read Ambient Co-Presence by Maggie Appleton.
This sounds really nice. My favorite locale for physical ambient co-presence is a university library, which I use a Winter Whale sound video to replicate at home. I use a few co& working sessions via a Mighty Networks or Zoom to do this, too. I wonder what the role of services like Focusmate or Flow.club is here.
🔖 Austin Kleon’s list of 100 things that made his year is excellent, as always.
🔖 Read by Matthias Ott.
How about, from now on, we make every year the year of the personal website – and make the internet human, creative, personal, and weird again?
I’m down.