Relevant to your interests #3
Relevant To Your Interests is a regular round-up of reading, watching, listening and other online and offline materials to make you feel better about your career – or at least distract you from it. All handpicked by me and only available to paying subscribers (aka, you!!)
LINKS LINKS LINKS» Rachel Aviv is one of my favourite writers at the New Yorker for her masterful telling of complex stories about real people. If there are any villains in her pieces, they’re systems, forces and institutions rather than individuals. Her latest piece, about what happened to a former-foster-care-kid-turned-scholarship-student at the University of Pennsylvania, was simply brilliant
» “If you were better at this than I am, you would know, as I do, that the rules of grammar are mostly suggestions. Guardrails to help us corral and curate the mess in our heads into something cohesive. And, to quote Jason Reynolds, what happens within that space is a form of alchemy.” I loved columnist Damon Young’s elegant, biting reply to the man who emailed in to correct his grammar
» Wordle and the Spelling Bee are part of my everyday life. I loved reading about the 26-year-old puzzle nerd who compiles the word games every day at the New York Times, but was heartbroken to read about the daily torment he receives from puzzle fanatics
» In a similar vein, I loved this piece by Stephanie Golden who used to edit the Park Slope Food Coop newsletter and what it taught her about conspiracy theories. I really chuckled at anecdotes about how formatting issues would be interpreted as a cabalistic plot. “Members whose italics vanished in this way saw not a lazy person skimping on their work slot but a calculated attempt to undermine whatever argument they were making — an argument that they considered crucial to the well-being not just of the Coop but of society as a whole.” On a serious note, however, it tells a frightening tale of how easy is it to become paranoid
» New York Times Magazine writer Sam Anderson’s essay about his recent weight loss starts out by recounting his “success” with a diet app and beautifully unfolds into an existential meditation about what it means to live in a human body
OFFLINE READING» It took me the best part of three months to finish Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise. It’s 800-pages long and I’m a slow reader; I also needed a break two-thirds of the way in as I wasn’t emotionally ready for the part set in a pandemic. The book is a trilogy of sorts, written as three -books-in-one, all set in New York in 1893, 1993, and 2093 respectively. The only way to describe To Paradise is as a masterpiece. As I was reading it, I was just constantly thinking about how it’s going to enter the literary canon and be read for decades, even centuries, to come. It’s harrowing, complex and beautiful and you simply must read it
» I’ve just finished Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation, edited by Marker Kramer and Wendy Call. I give it 5 stars for how it breaks down all the technical skills that go into crafting narrative non-fiction, but it does fall short at explaining how to make the career aspect of ambitious magazine writing work
NEWS YOU CAN USE» Narratively is currently open to submissions for its Spring Memoir competition, with a cash prize of $3,000 for the winner
» How to build healthy habits when you’re truly exhausted (spoiler alert: start by sorting out your sleep)
» The argument for scheduling all of your emails
» Rachel Feintzeig on how you can be more than your job title
» How to limit pregnancy, dating, or weight loss ads on Google
WATCH AND LISTEN» This American Life recently re-aired its Death and Taxes episode from a few years back and it floored me. The “taxes” half of the show is fun, but the first part, about a hospice, will have you in tears
» The pilot season of Totally Fine with Tiffany Philippou, a podcast about moments in life when we pretended to be ok when we really weren’t (which I executive produce!) is ending next week. It’s hard to pick my favourite episode, but I loved the most recent one with the children’s author Laura Dockrill about post-partum psychosis. (There’s also an episode with me talking about job loss)
» I can’t believe I’ve not listened to this sooner, but I finally got round to the Jeff Maysh episode of the Longform podcast. Maysh writes what he calls his “bangers”, epic stories with wild twists. What I loved about this episode is how candid he was in talking about the fact he has a day job as a copywriter!
» I took out an Apple TV subscription just to watch Severance and have zero regrets. Somewhere between a drama and horror, the show is about an office in which the employees’ memories are surgically divided between work and home. One of the many things I loved about the show was its 90s corporate aesthetic; the only futurist element was the severing procedure, while everything else (office key cards, bulky monitors and non-electric cars) were almost analogue. My sole complaint was the ending. Without giving anything away, all I’ll say is that while it had the atmosphere of a different era, the way it ended was an annoying reminder that it’s still a show very much made for a present-day streaming channel
A STACK OF STACKS» “Writers too often convince themselves that no one wants to read their stories. In fact, I hear this lament so often that I can no longer count the number of times I have responded by asking whether they themselves would be interested in a story about a guy whose father dies and whose mother then marries his uncle, who may have had something to do with his father’s death, and oh yeah, he has a girlfriend with issues whose father talks too much. Nah, they said. Hamlet, I reply.”
Writerland is one of my absolute favourite newsletters, an endless source of inspiration for the burnout writer:
LOVE the grammar rebuttle.