Listen, I will never recover from the first link in this links round-up, and that is just because I think it’s quite rude that someone walked into my family home and took numerous secret recordings of how we talk and how other people feel about how we talk. YES it took several years before my brother-in-law was able to figure out how to participate in our conversations because he was too polite to interrupt us and therefore he never got to say anything at all. YES I show engagement by peppering people with questions. Please let me have my privacy in this confusing time.
“Participatory listenership (i.e., interrupting)” has killed me stone dead. Have some sociolinguistic analysis about why some people think New Yorkers are rude. (link)
ASTROLOGY BOOK CLUB. I really enjoy astrology book club. (link)
NPR has worked hard to bring together this list of the 100 best books for young readers. Yay! (link)
“Living in the now is a constant negotiation of how to put the things that I value—humane and safe working conditions, diversity in storytelling, anti-racism and justice—into active practice in an imperfect world.” On the revival of West Side Story. (link)
Lauren Markham appreciates the magic of the postal service even more in these quarantimes than she did before. (link) (This is true of me, Jenny, also — I am sending out one lovely note per day to friends!)
Slate dot com has done the important journalism of charting all the murmurs murmured by anyone in the Twilight saga. (link)
“Black people will defend your right to Blackness… That’s how these deceptions are born.” Evette Dionne on Jessica Krug. (link)
The country can change. It’s done it before. (link)
“Instead of solving social problems, the U.S. uses techno-fixes to bypass them, plastering the wounds instead of removing the source of injury—and that’s if people even accept the solution on offer.” On the American failure to address the pandemic. (link)
Eula Biss is so consistently good and smart. (link)
Here’s what’s going on with Storygraph, the burgeoning successor to Goodreads. (link)
This article on the Nancy Meyers kitchen is a few months old but it is very, very good. (link)
That’s all, folks! Have an absolutely stupendous weekend! I will be shut up in a dark room whispering “participatory listenership (i.e., interrupting)” over and over again until I have come to terms with it. Which will never happen. So that is just what I will be doing with my life from this point onward. Be blessed.