🔖 Kelly J. Baker’s essay, “You Were Ambitious,” struck me to the core.

Cross-posted to: Twitter

🔖📺 Alex Brannan’s article, “It Could Be About Anything”: Middleditch & Schwartz and the Viability of Televised Improv Comedy is an interesting read. Longform improv is definitely hard to explain to non-improv normies but also, in my experience, it’s um, not great fun for most people who aren’t “yes…and” nerds, as Thomas Middleditch calls them, to watch. Like… Does anybody NOT initiated into longform WANT to watch a Harold? Maybe they do, but I’m not sure. By the time I was about to stop performing improv, I was over the Harold as an audience member. And I got to see some really amazing teams. Still not a format I would recommend to just anybody. It’s a performance art piece as much as a comedy piece. I don’t know. Anyway, I’d been thinking about watching the show and now I definitely will.

It’s worth noting that I myself never was on a team that did longform without a gimmick. I think our gimmicks were a huge part of the fun for me. We may never know if I would be able to sustain interest in performing the Harold for longer than a six-week class.

🔖 Adrienne So’s Wired piece, ”‘Crisis Schooling’ and the New Rhythms of Pandemic Parenting," makes me feel okay about how extremely unstructured and screen-heavy my kid’s last 120+ days have been.

🔖 📚 I found myself wanting to read so many of the books on Book Riot’s Best Books of 2020 So Far list that I decided it makes more sense to bookmark the whole list than to add each title individually.

🔖 Where do I donate? Why is the uprising violent? Should I go protest? And other commonly asked questions by white and/or privileged people, answered by other white and/or privileged people*

🔖 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice is immensely valuable, because it gives you concrete actions to take in the face of our overwhelming and appalling reality.

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🔖 Read ‘A joyful thing’: the man who wrote his wife a poem every day for 25 years. I have a bad habit of idealizing other people’s marriages. This article isn’t helping.

🔖 Stuff I read yesterday:

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🔖🎵🎭📚 Read 8 Musicals that You Might Not Know Were Based on Books by Emily Neuberger.

I’ve been grieving the fact that public performances likely won’t be a thing for the next couple of years. I grieve it both as an audience member and as a performer. Neuberger’s book is going on my to-read list, as her main character’s early experiences with musicals are nearly identical to mine. The musicals and books she writes about are now on my radar if they weren’t, or things I’m going to make a point to revisit if I was already familiar with them.

I bet Neuberger’s book would pair well with The Secret Life of the American Musical, which acts as a Poetics for musicals, describing their shared structural features.

🔖📝 Read How to Write 1000 Poems in a 1000 Days by Nick Asbury. More why to than how to, this is a moving read and a great argument for making art in response to crisis.

🔖 From Austin Kleon: Not Everything Will Be Okay But Some Things Will I share Kleon’s frustration with platitudes like “We’ve gotten through worse, we’ll get through this.” Many of us won’t. But more of us will.

🔖 Keeping kids busy at home

Storing links here so they’re easy for me to find when I need them during the next two weeks. Maybe they’ll help you, too?

More to come.

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This is pretty much two weeks' worth of online reading.

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I’ve also been binge-reading Erin Morgenstern’s blog from the very beginning. I’ve just finished 2008.

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🔖 Read Ask an Astrologer: How can I create more success and flow for in my career according to the stars?

🔖 Read How to build wealth slowly Paul Jarvis

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