Relevant To Your Interests #2

A round-up of internet and offline content to make you feel better about your career (or distract you from it)

Relevant To Your Interests is a regular round-up of reading, watching, listening and other internet materials to make you feel better about your career – or at least distract you from it, all handpicked by me. These posts are usually only for paying subscribers. If you enjoy receiving this newsletter, consider taking out a subscription! It’s a practical and meaningful way to support my work. Right now, there’s a special offer on annual subscriptions: the first 100 people to sign up will get a free copy of the audio version of my book, You’re The Business, essential reading for anyone who works for themselves

THE READING LIST

• Edith Wharton was a bestseller who hated best sellers. This was a juicy read about her reading habits and what the gaps in her library shelves tell us about her taste in books: namely that she was a literary snob and she was ok about it! There’s also a strange comfort in reading that the tension between writing and making from that writing is a centuries-old struggle

• Brandon Stanton: “My subjects have more agency over the outcome than just about anybody else who’s a nonfiction storyteller.” I loved this profile of Brandon Stanton, the street photographer who started the Humans of New York project. He talks about the growing pains of his viral success and how the pandemic has taken his platform of empathy in a new direction: philanthropy

• The murkiness of being a writer-slash-influencer: A good run-down of what happened at The Cut when writer Andrew Nguyen was fired for a conflict of interest after appearing in a Target ad. I think about the ethical issue of journalists accepting brand deals a lot as a freelancer. It’s even trickier to police when you work solo because there is no church and state between the editorial and commercial departments: it’s just you trying to navigate that dicey territory alone. (It’s also worth re-visiting one of my favourite pieces written on this, Allegra Hobbs’ essay, The Writer as Influencer, from 2019)

• Losing my ambition: Ethical quandaries aside, The Cut is running a brilliant series atm about the shifting nature of ambition. Amil Niazi writes searingly about how ambition is “a funny thing when it’s blunted by the structural inequality … faced as a woman of color in a newsroom. It takes on a jagged shape, one that seems designed to maim anyone hoping to grasp it.” (Also see: Vicky Spratt calling the death of ambition back in 2020)

• The new neurasthenia: I’m not sure I fully agree with everything in this essay/book review about how burnout became a contemporary buzzword, but I was fascinated to learn about “neurasthenia” – a “state of nervous exhaustion that was an ailment of the well-off, highly educated nineteenth-century American brain worker”

• Don’t let the gatekeepers stop you but don’t become one, either: The bestselling author and TV writer, D. Watkins, makes the case that helping other creatives should be considered part of one’s body of work when you work in the arts

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NEWS YOU CAN USE

• My tweets haven’t been getting much engagement lately and who knows, maybe they just suck, but I found this post about how Twitter hates external links very helpful

• Speaking of Twitter, one of the best things I did recently that has totally changed my experience on the platform was switch to a reverse-chronological feed

• Jessica Reed, head of narrative at the Guardian US, published her latest pitching guide earlier this year. Anyone interested in long-form, ambitious journalism should follow Jess and read the brilliant pieces she publishes. (There’s also a Q&A with her in the archives of this here newsletter!)

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WATCH AND LISTEN

• Jane The Virgin: Long-time readers know that I love a) TV characters who are writers and b) love to re-watch shows. I’m re-watching Jane The Virgin at the moment. Does anyone else think her character is one of the most accurate portrayals of what it’s actually like to be a writer? Down to the episode in Season 3 in which she quits her day job when she gets her first book deal, only to realise that the way her $50,000 advance will get paid out in instalments won’t allow for it and she begs for her job back

• I Am All In with Scot Patterson: Speaking of re-watching shows about writers, I recently discovered that Scott Patterson, who plays Luke Danes in Gilmore Girls, has a recap podcast (ICYMI: I wrote about how I’m scared of turning into Rory Gilmore last year)

• Totally Fine with Tiffany Philippou: I’m so excited to be executive producing a new podcast! It’s called Totally Fine with Tiffany Philippou and it’s about the impact on our lives and identities when we pretend to be totally fine about something big that we’re actually really not fine about. I was the first guest on the show and I talked about the complicated relationship I have with losing my job nearly five years ago. Listen below on Spotify or find it on Apple Podcasts here

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📌 ICYMI

The medical language we use to talk about our work problems: Earlier this week, I wrote an essay about the clinical vocabulary we use to talk about our jobs, and how that encodes the pain we feel in the workplace and about our careers:

The medical vernacular of work problems