Hello lovies,
I’m writing from North Carolina, recently returned from my annual pilgrimage to the homeland: Canada!
This month, I packed up my husband and son and headed home to Winnipeg, a place flat as a pancake where I become sixteen years old almost immediately. And I was reminded, the way you always are in your childhood kitchen, that “home” is just a group of people who have once picked you up on the side of the highway when you and your parents got into an argument about something you can’t remember now.
I managed to take a little side trip to Alberta where I saw the absolutely divine Sarah Bessey. Also I went catfishing, and let me just say that the channel catfish is not God’s best idea. They feel like rubber, are too heavy to pick up after you reel them in, and their faces are covered with whiskers covered in worms. WORMS, PEOPLE. And since this is a community of lovely people, let me just admit that it grieves me that there is so much anti-Canadian sentiment on American social media and let us pray for those affected by the wildfires. Above all, we will decide to be humans and not ride the rollercoaster of the latest outrage cycle.
But as I mentioned last week, my friends and I conducted our biannual review of The List and then added our new tradition of Bless and Block and Commendations. (By the way, reading your commendations had me weepy. You really are the best kind of people who have endured so much and deserve All The Awards.)
So it’s been a month of two kinds of home: the flat, familiar kind, and the kind that requires a passport to your own history with a friend who remembers who you were before you became whoever you are now. I also noticed that both trips required me to leave my house and stand near actual people. Have you seen the research on this? I’ve seen the research. One is joy in the ordinary and regular, and the other is joy in the extraordinary, but both only happened because of other human bodies. We need both, or at least I did this month. Now I am home again, thoroughly loved and staring at my inbox as though it belongs to someone else. (Forgive me.)
Here’s what I’ve been watching, reading, and loving lately.
Well, just about my entire team is obsessed with this YouTube series from the good crew at Mythical Kitchen. Each interview asks, if this were genuinely your last meal, what would you choose? The stories that unfold around food and togetherness are really a wonder. Chef José Andrés, a man who has won several Michelin stars and fed literal disaster zones through his work with World Central Kitchen, answers with a specificity and joy that makes my own potato-chip-sampling approach to eating look pretty gastronomically void.
Our girl Jen Garner plays a celebrity chef whose husband dies suddenly, and instead of falling apart in private, she summons every close friend from every era of her life to Nantucket for a weekend of wine and reckoning. It’s a gorgeous picture of what grief could look like—everyone you love in one house.
Netflix has rebooted Little House on the Prairie, which means Laura Ingalls is once again being almost suspiciously resilient on a prairie, a landscape I have deep personal respect for having just spent a week on some prairies myself. I am filled with awe for anyone who homesteaded this land without air conditioning. And you know, I’m all in for moments of nostalgia.
Sacasas has a theory that “the arc of AI bends toward demoralization,” and not just because the robots might take our jobs, but because we keep outsourcing the activities through which we once recognized ourselves. He borrows a rallying cry from a Spanish philosopher: “I will not resign from life; I must be dismissed.” (Say that one out loud. It’s a very good sentence to keep in your pocket.) Keep writing badly, keep drawing badly, keep making whatever can only be made by wasting your own irreplaceable time on it. I love thinking about this in light of the conversations we’ve been having here about staying porous.
This one is about the millions of people managing their parents’ pills, doctors, and dignity with no job title, no paycheck, and no one asking how they’re doing. I don’t have anything more profound to say about it except: if this is you, I see you, and you are doing one of the hardest, least-applauded jobs there is. Ai-Jen Poo is doing such important work on this gaping problem of lack of support for caregivers and caregiving. My conversation with her is a must-listen.
My friend Shauna got cranky at the internet, and I loved every word of it. She’s tired of “beauty” meaning serums and “wellness” meaning macros, and she wants both words back—beauty as the pink across your kid’s nose after a day of swimming, wellness as carrying something hard for a friend. Her wellness list includes cherries on ice, pancakes for dinner, and “prayers that sound like yelling.” I feel very known.
These two pieces belong beside each other. “The quiet grief of adult friendship” names the heartache of watching friendships thin out with distance and time, and Elan’s “Befriending neighbors and beneighboring friends” (Escape the Algorithm, Substack) makes the case for closing the gap and turning the people nearby into the people you know. In recent years, I moved to a new house mere steps from my local best friend’s home, and I can tell you my life is absolutely better because of it.
My friend Catherine strikes up a conversation with a TSA agent out of sheer boredom and he tells her, deadpan, about the time someone tried to bring a live boa constrictor through security in a bag he thought was a salami (you know I live for stories like these!). But she’s writing about something real underneath the joke: Nicholas Epley’s idea of “the choice,” the small daily decision to either talk to the stranger in front of you or stay sealed off. This made me want to ask one more question to a stranger than I normally would this week.
A toxicologic pathologist named Robert Maronpot has spent since 1999 photographing sand under a stereomicroscope, grain by grain, stacked from dozens of shots at different focal depths, often using sand mailed to him by strangers from beaches around the world.. Longtime readers might remember I have a whole thing about tiny objects being just as awe-inducing as giant ones. This might be my favorite version of that yet.
I’m not crying, you’re crying (Fine. We are all crying.). I have thought about the friendship between Mr. Q and Shep roughly four times a day since I saw this. This is what humanity looks like.
An interactive simulator where every dot on the screen is a person, shaded by opinion, connected by lines to the people they follow. Pull the tolerance slider and watch a mixed crowd drift into sealed-off camps in real time. The data-loving historian in me short-circuited with joy over the visual, and also, it made me a little more compassionate about how easily any of us end up there.
We’re officially in book club mode! After falling hard for Wren and Lewis’s love story last month, this month, we’re headed somewhere a bit more…rugged. So Far Gone follows an off-the-grid grandfather who’s forced to reckon with the people he left behind—and the complicated past he can’t quite outrun. It asks what we owe each other after years of silence, and whether it’s ever too late to find your way back. We’ll tell you more next week about why we picked it, but for now, grab a copy from your favorite independent bookstore, put a hold on it through Libby, or listen wherever you get your audiobooks.
This month I spent time with people who remember versions of me I sometimes forget. Tell me about a place or person that turns you back into yourself almost immediately. You know the one.
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