Good Wednesday morning, friends!
Welcome to September, which will hopefully be the best month of our lives. Today, I have for you a somewhat longer-than-usual collection of links, but most are short and fun, so I encourage you to open all the tabs! Then, a compilation of musings on my August longer reads and listens. Didn’t read quite as much as usual this month due to extenuating circumstances, but I have been listening to tons of music! Maybe I’ll share some recommendations/favorites soon— what do you think?
What have y’all been reading, listening to, watching, doing, musing about these days? Weird world we live in, don’t you think?
Cheers,
Maya
For musings and smiles
Things that made me think
- Fun fact to start things off… a new most northern island in the world was discovered above Greenland recently. And Oodaaq’s formation had nothing to do with climate change!
- This article made me even more inspired to try out Wingspan, the epic bird-themed board game, and mentioned a couple other cool options…
- Hopeful progress on the idea of “hacking the coral microbiome” for climate resilience, a personal passion of mine.
- Very uncertain how I feel about GMO plants including human proteins, particularly ones with potential health complications, but interested in learning & reading more… first reactions from any of y’all?
- A quick but sorta fun quiz to quantify your ability at the Divergent Association Task. What’d you score? More importantly, what words did you use?!
- An eclectic dive into the world’s whistled languages, including some surprising snippets of whistled speech that you can sorta understand as words!
Feast your eyes
- Creativity lives in a box has always been a favorite inspirational mantra, and it’s exemplified perfectly in this collaboration between designers John Galliano and Tomo Koizumi transforming each other’s work.
- Beautiful— a massive, colorful, crocheted canopy by a teacher and her students to provide shade for a shopping district in Malaga…
- The official 2020 Paralympics posters are stunning, dynamic, and very intentionally designed. An interesting read about artist Goo Choki Par’s process, and of course some great art throughout.
- Can’t say it any better than this, and recommend taking a glance!: “Stunning New Astronomy Museum in Shanghai is the World’s Largest”
- More epic photos & images:
- A true eagle’s eyes view of a flight over the mountains
- An AI-generated video compilation stitching together a continuous parkour run across cities and mountains
- Very cool compilation of 300 AI-generated images of plant botanicals by Johnathan Whitaker, inspired by “classic botanical watercolors”
Finally…
- Add this song to your Spotify playlists, and its revenue will go to planting a tree every few hundred plays. Yeah, probably another gimmick, but it requires exactly zero effort, so why not?
- CLICK FOR SMILES! 🐾
Longer reads & listens
Connections
- Such a stark contrast in the depictions of healthcare in Hunter Biden’s Beautiful Things and the Brian Alexander’s account of a small-town Ohio hospital… interesting to consider the political aspects affecting how hospitals are run, the cultural opinions of the population towards using the healthcare systems, and the ultimate shared humanity that occurs within them. Also, right from the beginning of Alexander’s The Hospital, I was struck by themes from The Four Lost Cities, with the descriptions of fragmentation and decline of urban centers of the Midwest
- All My Puny Sorrows, We Run the Tides, and The Seed Keeper all showcased strong women protagonists from walks of life across time, space, and culture; reading all three in succession provided a stark juxtaposition to the normal collection of books I find on my lists, and is a great reminder that there are so many stories to be told from “the other side” that is often silenced.
Books
- Funny Weather — Olivia Laing
- A collection of essays from critic Olivia Laing.. Some common themes she looks to address: how art is concerned with resistance and repair, not necessarily beauty; how art isn’t a magic tool for humanity (empathy still requires work!); looking beyond the artwork of paranoia to reformative, restorative works—those that are generative, innovative, creative.
- Also finding it fascinating to hear about the collaborations and interactions of the artists Laing profiles, how they influenced and inspired one another, introducing new themes and media and subject matters. I appreciate the additional significance of the narrative behind works of art, even when experiencing them by description rather than visually!
- The Hospital — Brian Alexander
- Alexander documents the broken US healthcare system through the microcosm of a rural town in northern Ohio. Disconcerting and eye-opening to read about a world so physically close to my own with such a different sense of reality.
- Malibu Rising — Taylor Jenkins Reid
- I very much needed a break from my last few and current reads, so snagged this fresh hardcover from the library’s Lucky Day shelf… Somewhat sadder than expected, but fast and easy.
- Small bit of wisdom: “Too much self-sufficiency was sort of mean to the people who loved you… You robbed them of how good it feels to give, of their sense of value.” Reminds me of some advice I got a couple years back.
- Beautiful Things — Hunter Biden
- Hunter Biden’s memoir: the title, a heart-wrenching reminder of the life view he and his late brother embraced, to dedicate themselves to “appreciating and cultivating the world’s boundless beauty,” to always remember “to look, to see, to love.”
- Biden conveys the depth and emotion of his journey with grace, but there remains a veil of formality and distance that I wished, at times, would drop. However, given the family’s current and past circumstances.. it makes sense to err on the cautious side of oversharing.
- All My Puny Sorrows — Miriam Toews
- I’m immediately captivated by the two Mennonite sisters at the heart of this novel, with their complexities and how their relationship is almost a third character in and of itself. It has been awhile since immersing in a new cultural world through a fiction novel, and this was a welcome return to the experience.
- Also enjoying the brilliant descriptions of emotion in music embedded into the novel.
- Musical Chairs — Amy Poeppel
- Calming, very well-recorded and entertaining audiobook much needed for my life right now. Was a fun and distracting listen with a full cast of readers, and a light, heartfelt story!
- What’s Mine and Yours — Naima Coster
- Honestly did not/have not been paying much attention to this one, as was madly puzzling through the first half, but it seems an okay time- and place-spanning family saga. Maybe will get into it more in the second half?
- I lied. Going to start something else. Just couldn’t get back into it!
- Between Two Kingdoms — Suleika Jaouad
- Brutal honesty on the grid and realistic despair of prolonged medical treatment, interspersed with sterling observations of hope and inspiration on living— both in general, and creatively. Very much appreciating.
- Heart-breaking, at times.
- Part II was kind of superfluous, but short enough that it didn’t have too much of a negative impact. Worthwhile read!
- We Run the Tides — Vendela Vida
- A quiet story, like the author’s others, and something that fits my mood at the moment a little more than my last attempt. Vida focuses on a smaller cast of characters, including the strong voice of pre-tech Silicon Valley setting in this coming-of-age story with just enough unique points twists (Swedish Christmases, Russian kidnappings…) to stay catchy without being too overwhelming.
- Well, it got a little weird as the fake kidnappings escalated, but ¯*(ツ)*/¯ was far enough into the reading to finish it off. Probably wouldn’t recommend for more than a background listen.
- The Seed Keeper — Diane Wilson
- I’d had this one built up in my head to be really spectacular, and it’s been somewhat of a let-down from that, but the novel carries a well-crafted, authentic, and unique intergenerational story covering the history of the Dakota people, the great land theft of Americans, and the environmental crisis.
- Miscellaneous topics covered that caught my attention: how to save seeds from tomatoes and corn; rise of GMO corn & the conflict it caused in communities (the dark side of GMOs being so much more on how they are used to manipulate the economics of agriculture than their potential health danger… covered in previous books I read, too); the systemic, near genocidal forces to destroy indigenous cultures by the US government through education, etc. (something I want to learn more about, despite and because of how awful it is).
Podcasts-ish
- The True American — Anand Giridharadas
- Listened to the serialized release of the first few chapter of this 2014 journalistic book about a Bangladesh Air Force officer who dreams of emigrating to the US… which gets complicated, after 9/11. The book explores the incredibly charged, intertwined, and critical dynamics of immigration, racism, Islamaphobia, sexism, and more, but I was not left hooked quite enough to want to finish it, at least not where I personally am.
- Edith — QCODE, Crooked Media
- A potentially semi-fictional(?), very entertaining audio casting of behind-the-scenes of the Wilson White House.
- Maggie Smith on Small Joys with Hanif Abdurraqib
- Love Maggie Smith’s poetry, and this was a refreshing slice of life from a while back in the pandemic, a couple relatable moments on jigsaw puzzles, and insights into the process of writing and publishing poetry.