🔖Paging Through Broadway While the Stages Are Dark: 2020 was supposed to be the year I got back into theater. 🎭

🔖 In “The Black Casting Choices in BRIDGERTON Were…A Choice”, Jessica Pryde explains the ways this was very much NOT colorblind casting. I especially appreciate her acknowledgement of the trauma related to maternal health outcomes. 📺

🔖 This is really cool. I hope that in addition to making it possible for scholarship recipients to show up, they make it so scholarship recipients actually want to stay: ‘SNL’ And ‘Second City’ Announce Scholarships For Diverse, Emerging Comic Talent

🔖🍿 The Wonder Woman Movies Have a Women Problem A great analysis with ideas for how Wonder Woman movies could better reflect all the best stuff about other Wonder Woman media.

🔖 Tips for Starting a Bookstagram: Getting started in the bookish corner of Instagram can be overwhelming. This blog post offers some helpful advice.

🔖 Yes to Masks. No to Parties. 2021 Will Be a Lot Like 2020: disheartening, but not surprising.

🔖 Run, Die, Repeat: How Roguelike Games Helped Us Get Through 2020 - Roguelikes reflect not only the cycle of the pandemic year, but also the cycle of chronic illness.

🔖 Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us I will never not appreciate Ed Yong.

🔖 The Vaccine Rollout’s Known Knowns and More In Zeynep Tufecki’s Insight newsletter, Whitney R. Robinson explains the intersection of exposure, infection, and fatality risk and how it interacts with vaccine prioritization.

🔖 The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable I don’t have a word for how this article hit me, but it hit me hard.

🔖Humans Used to Sleep in Two Shifts, And Maybe We Should Start It Again

via @Miraz

Humans Used to Sleep in Two Shifts, And Maybe We Should Start It Again sciencealert.com

Archiving...

🔖 How Literary Female Friendships Shaped the Fiction Market

This piece by Sarah Lonsdale describes the kind of literary friendship I fantasize about having. Who wants to be my literary bff?

How Literary Female Friendships Shaped the Fiction Market ‹ Literary Hub lithub.com

Read: lithub.com

Highlights & Notes

Naomi Royde-Smith was an astute literary editor of the Saturday Westminster and brought Macaulay, an awkward “innocent from the Cam” as she described herself, into her circle of friends, who seemed to Macaulay “to be more sparklingly alive than any in my home world.”

Please. Bring me into your literary circle.

Macaulay would often stay in her friend’s Knightsbridge home where they held soirées for authors and journalists to bolster each other’s standing and forge mutually supportive networks.

We can host soirées. I’ll set up the video chat.

Tell me about your favorite literary friendships and relationships! I’m especially fond of the Shelleys, who wrote collaborative diaries. ♥️

🔖 Laurie Penny’s WIRED piece about falling in love over Zoom is one of the most hopeful things I’ve read in a long time. It makes me really happy.

🔖 This NPR piece about keeping warm and embracing wintry outdoor adventures is exactly the kind of thing a Florida baby like me needs. I want to enjoy the outdoors in winter; I’ve just never learned how!

I really enjoyed reading this piece about Star Wars stormtrooper strategy & tactics, which is super unlike me. 📺🍿

🔖In ‘The Mandalorian,’ Stormtroopers Have Finally Discovered Tactics wired.com

🔖Lee Skallerup Bessette sums up so much:

Just because its hard, doesn’t mean it’s good and when everything is hard and you have issues with executive functioning, how can you even ever tell the difference?

🔖📚 From Petra Mayer at NPR: Welcome To Story Hour: 100 Favorite Books For Young Readers

Well, that’s a help in choosing which books to share with my kid next. A nice mix of classics and newer stuff.

🔖📚 From Megan Mabee at Book Riot: How The Hunger Games Prequel Helped Me Realize I’ve Changed

I can relate to Mabee’s realization that being a mother has changed how she responds to books.

🔖 Here’s a study that combines my loves for qualitative coding, comedy, and tween media: More than Just a Laughing Matter: A Coding Framework of Humor in Media Entertainment for Tweens and Teens

🔖2015 Kimberly would be SO EXCITED about this article: ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ Using Improvisation to Hone Library Employees’ Customer Service Skills 📓

🔖From Pat Thomson, the ‘later on’ PhD

…what the professional usually wants from their PhD are systematic ways into core scholarly practices in research, and academic writing, rhetoric and argumentation, as well as immersion in the scholarship in their field.

This is me. I began my PhD at age 34. By this time I had two Masters degrees, five years' experience as a classroom teacher, one as a school librarian, and three as a managing editor/digital asset manager/public communications specialist.

My department at work was clearly going to be eliminated and I didn’t have a plan for what to do next. I knew that I wanted to get a PhD eventually, that I wanted to have a kid in the next few years, and that while being a PhD parent is hard, it would allow me to have more flexibility in my schedule than any other job I was likely to get. I decided to go ahead and move my PhD plans up by a few years.

I don’t know what I will do next. I am extraordinarily unlikely to apply for any of the few tenure-track jobs that will open up in the next few years. I have a lot of experience from both my professional work and my personal pursuits, so I’m not worried about developing particular skills.

I came to the PhD because I wanted to understand research methods better, because I wanted to learn how to capture great work happening in libraries and education, and because I wanted a job where research and writing were expected. I’ve gotten those things out of it.

As I said, I don’t know what comes next. For now, I’m writing my dissertation, researching academic makerspaces, making the most of all the kid snuggles I can get and blessing my mother-in-law for being with M. so I can do any work ever, doing informational interviews, and otherwise trying to do what’s fun. 📓

🔖 Katie Yee’s Very Good Writing Advice from New Girl’s Nick Miller is the most delightful thing I’ve read this week, and makes me want to re-watch New Girl. 📝📺

🔖 From The Oatmeal: Marvelous & Melancholy Things I’ve Learned about Creativity

This is so good. If he makes it into a book, I’ll probably buy it and carry it around just like I do with Austin Kleon’s books.

🔖 5 Productivity Practices That Helped Me Finish My Dissertation

Thought I would feel attacked by this post, then I read it and it said “If I was experiencing pain, brain fog or fatigue due to my chronic health issues, I gave myself permission to take breaks, rest and take the rest of the day off.” I do this too!

🔖 The Allure of the Nap Dress, the Look of Gussied-Up Oblivion

I don’t have a clothing budget these days, but if I did, you can bet I’d be scouring eBay, ThredUp, and Poshmark (among others) for nap dresses. I have many aesthetics and would love “Victorian Ghost” to be one of them, though I think I like the idea of embracing my Madwoman in the Attic status even more.