Hi friends,
Today - as it’s a four-day holiday weekend and (more importantly, of course) my birthday weekend, I don’t have much for you by way of Thoughts and Discourse. But I do have quite a solid collection of further reading/links/recommendations to share with my beloved captive audience, so read on:
The Remarkable Brain of a Carpet Cleaner Who Speaks 24 Languages: An incredible story - fascinating and sweet and heartbreaking - in the Washington Post. If you click only one of my links today, let it be this one!
I always love Leslie Jamison’s writing, and so to get a glimpse in her head through this interview was a delight. A standout quote from her:
‘You see me in that journalistic mode, and the arc of the collection digs deeper into the question, “What are the personal experiences that are informing these acts of journalistic inquiry?” Because I've always been interested in that bleed between different layers of experience, where no matter what you're doing—working, romancing, making small talk at a cocktail party—you're always bringing all this baggage to it. So what would it be like if you could wear psychic goggles that allowed you to experience all the weird stuff that was coming up for somebody internally, as they were saying these seemingly banal things to the cocktail party?’
Britney Falls in Love: Anne Helen Peterson, on the money as always with considered and compassionate takes on pop culture, for Bustle.
SWANA: What Do You Call the Cradle of Civilisation?: In order to break the shackles of a colonial identity, it’s time to ditch the yassification of a culture and create our own reality. Great op-ed by Celine Semaan on reconsidering the ‘MENA’ abbreviation in favour of the more decolonial term SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa). I’m keen to educate myself about this further - and always interested in the power of language in transmuting, gatekeeping, and empowering how communities and cultures access/embody their identities. (Side note that I’m also shook at the way that niche Internet in-joke lingo like yassification continues to permeate all membranes of society, even the subheaders of GQ Magazine.)
The Music Industry’s Sickness, by Eleanor Halls: a sobering (pun not intended, I swear) piece in the wake of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins’ recent death.
With Father-and-Son Writers, Who Gets to Tell the Family Story?A relationship reconsidered by reading between the lines. A complicated, human, and beautifully-written essay by Tad Friend in the New Yorker.
This very salient Twitter thread by Alec Karakatsanis, director and founder of Civil Rights Corps, on the New York Times’ coverage of the Brooklyn subway shooting. I feel like I’m always shouting from my soapbox about meta-narratives in media, but sorry-not-sorry because here we are again! There is always SO MUCH to unpack, not just in the literal words but also in the tone of a story and its framing. I say ‘framing’ to mean both contextually and quite literally on the page - as we see in Karakatsanis’ point about further-reading links - and in what is omitted from the story. I will die on the hill of media literacy! Anyway, here’s a key bit:
‘The lead article on the shooting today did not mention that U.S. is an outlier in the availability of guns, or poverty, or inequality, or lack of mental health care, or that NY just added more cops to subways… Nowhere in articles about the shooting is the possibility raised that all of the investments in new cops didn’t (and can’t) stop events like this. Nowhere is the scientific consensus mentioned: violence is mostly not a function of police at all. Why is this missing? Who benefits?’
Among Europe’s Ex-Royals: What do the descendants of dethroned monarchs have to offer the continent in the 21st century? by Helen Lewis for the Atlantic (with fantastic photographs by Jelka von Langen). Very worth reading partly because it’s surprisingly engrossing, and partly because Helen Lewis is just a bloody great journalist. Worth pairing with Lewis’ newsletter from this week, which offers some hilariously weird contextual/BTS details from her reportage.
Why making good work is no longer enough: The creative industry prides itself on innovation, but it’s still stuck in the same old systemic loops. What it needs is to centre care as a creative principle. A spot-on piece by Gem Fletcher for It’s Nice That.
Have a beautiful long weekend and I’ll catch you next time,
Maddy