📝 Brilliant gem from Jaya Saxena in today’s #1000WordsOfSummer letter:

my writing got better the moment I allowed myself to be the kind of writer I am, even if I don’t work the same way as the writers I want to be.

📚 Me, reading Ayesha At Last: This is a Pride & Prejudice retelling, I know this, so when is Khalid going to go all Mr. Darcy?

Author Uzma Jalaluddin, on page 40: Here you go.

I am on Day 4 of a migraine. I’m about to try a new medication for it. Here’s hoping it makes a difference.

Picard: I feel as if I’m in the Scottish Highlands.
Colonist: The cornerstone of every building was taken from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen…
Me, A Jerk: Those aren’t in the highlands.
🖖🏻

Hey friends, what are some good values statements from organizations? (I’m deliberately not defining criteria for good, but please feel free to explain why you think the ones you mention are good.)

🔖 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.

My desk chair broke a little bit and I’m having trouble determining whether I can fix it…

📚💬 “To me intellectual life is fundamentally different from academic careerism.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the artist at work

📚💬

It is precisely because common structures of evaluation and advancement in various academic jobs require homogenous thought and action… that academia is often less a site for open-minded creative study and more a space of repression that dissenting voices are so easily censored and silenced… it is dangerous for us to allow academic institutions to remain the primary site where our ideas are developed and engaged." bell hooks, remembered rapture: the artist at work

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

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