🔖 Read On looking down.

A lovely meditation from @dwalbert on the things we notice when we walked. Our family stayed in Le Vésinet, a garden city outside of Paris, for a couple of weeks in May and their greenways existed in a state of studied neglect. Wildflowers sprouted all along the sidewalks. It was beautiful—and something we were only able to notice because we had to walk a kilometer to get to the train station.

🔖 Read The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries.

Karawynn Long compares the trajectory of Overdrive/Libby to platforms like Amazon and Facebook and finds a lot to worry about. An important read for those of us in libraryland.

🔖 Skimmed Publicize Your Principles.

This idea might be helpful for articulating Micro.blog’s principles. ATTN: @manton @jean

🔖📚 Read IN A WAVE OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY RETELLINGS, WHERE ARE THE GREEK WRITERS? by Lyndsie Manusos (Book Riot).

Lots of exciting recommendations in here.

🔖🍿 Read Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a Fascinating, Spectacular Philosophical Experiment by Olivia Rutigliano (Literary Hub).

Well, I was already interested in seeing Barbie, but now that I know it’s about existential crises, I really want to see Barbie.

🔖📚 Read Let the Kids Get Weird: The Adult Problem With Children’s Books by Janet Manley (Literary Hub).

🔖📓 Read Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time by Ellen Samuels (Disability Studied Quarterly).

🔖🎭📚 Read It’s Getting Hard to Stage a School Play Without Political Drama by Michael Paulson (NYT, gift link) via Book Riot’s Literary Activism newsletter.

When I was in Europe reading censorship news from the US, I kept thinking, “I just want to fight censorship and make theatre.” Turns out these two things are related.

🔖 Read What Is A Third Place? (And Here’s Why You Should Have One) by Emily Torres (The Good Trade).

I’ve been thinking about third places, their role in fiction, what they look like online, & how they overlap with affinity spaces for a few days so it felt like serendipity when this hit my inbox.

🔖 Read Katy Simpson Smith on Writing a Southern Woman Louder Than Herself.

Writing, as a career, is inherently boat-rocking.

🔖📚💖 A couple of links about pleasure reading for your reading pleasure:

🔖 Read A LETTER FROM THE NEW CORPORATE OWNERS OF HOOPER’S STORE (McSweeney’s).

This is hilarious and ends with a perfect button.

🔖 Some interesting links around “wholesome” as a word for things that restore us, rather than a conservative metric by which to judge people:

🔖📓 Read How Pew Research Center will report on generations moving forward.

I love some of these alternate ways of creating age groupings. I could especially imagine grouping people according to their age at the time of key historical events or technological innovations producing valuable insights.

🔖📓 Can ChatGPT Replace UX Researchers? An Empirical Analysis of Comment Classifications

This is an interesting study with implications for qualitative research beyond UX. Looks like the answer is, “It’s too soon to tell.”

🔖📚 Read This Is Dedicated To Anyone Who Ever Left - Kelly McMaster interviewed by Lyz Lenz.

🔖📚 Read “I think, like marriage, home is a fantasy” - Kelly McMaster interviewed by Amanda Montei

Here are all of my intellectual intentions and here is this adorable, smiling, chubby baby, swallowing it whole.

When writing real life, there is always going to be a connection between what is happening at the breakfast table and how you are showing up on the page.

🔖 Read Monkey House: Strange Reflections at the Singerie by Kate Zambreno (VQR).

🔖 Read The Winter Zoo by Kate Zambreno (The Yale Review).

For a few years when M. was a toddler, our family went to Knoxville - the place of my mother’s birth - for The Collective library conference. W. would present and M. and I would wander about town, exploring the best haunts and generally enjoying the adorable downtown and the home of the 1982 World’s Fair.

One of the places I took M. was Zoo Knoxville. We were there in mid-March so it was pretty much a winter zoo like Kate Zambreno talks about here, and our experiences there were very similar.

🔖 Read How to Scale Back, Even When It Seems Impossible.

Do you need to lose something else to find yourself? Katie Pryal writes about how she had to let so many things go to create space for herself to thrive.

🔖📝 Reading Revision can be fun. No, really. by Charlie Jane Anders.

…revision can actually be kind of exhilarating at times. Because instead of thinking of the revision process as fixing my garbage draft, I’ve started to think of it as unwrapping a series of presents that I wrapped for myself before.

🔖 Read The Healing Power of JavaScript.

❤️

🔖🌐 Read Webring History.

animated email gifs, web counters, scrolling and/or blinking text, midi background music that could not be turned off and the “under construction” images.

I’d forgotten about midi background music! This quote is basically a list of things that made the web feel fun for me. I’m going to work on recapturing that vibe, even if the tech looks different.

🔖 How Does Motherhood Impact Your Creativity? It’s Complicated vogue.com

Read: www.vogue.com

My inhibitions were methodically ripped to shreds by the pure chaotic energy of the small children and carers around me. I stopped caring about whether what I was doing made me feel silly, and that is a huge boon to anyone wanting to express themselves creatively.

🔖🎵 Read Patiently Holding the Sound: Gretchen Parlato on motherhood as a musical inspiration.

What a great interview.