home

You Are What You Read 5

FYI: This is an old post from an old blog I kept in uni

Fill your brain with good today. As I empty my time of social media (difficult), I try to fill it again with challenging, enjoyable Good (this has mostly meant Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but we’re getting there). Here are some (non-Buffy) things that have stood out.

  1. Donate to Deadly Science’s bushfire appeal
    • We’re helping fire-affected schools with resourcing, which is a mighty task. Also, donate to the RFS.
  2. The Anthropocene Reviewed: Auld Lang Syne
    • John Green reviews an aspect of this strange human experience of ours: Auld Lang Syne, my preferred holiday song. Reflecting on his friendship with author Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who passed away in 2017, Green remarks, “…we are here. Meaning that we are together, and not alone…that we are, that we exist…that we are here, that a series of astonishing unlikelihoods has made us possible, and here possible. We might never know why we are here, but we can still proclaim in hope that we are here. I don’t think such hope is foolish or idealistic or misguided. I believe that hope is, for lack of a better word, true. We live in hope that life will get better and, more importantly, that it will go on. That love will survive, even though we will not. As Emily Dickinson put it, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul / and sings the tune without the words / and never stops at all.’” It is the kind of controlled meandering we have come to expect from Green. It is lovely and heartbreaking and hopeful.
  3. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
    • I love a family epic. This is, by all measures, a gorgeous novel. It is not One Hundred Years of Solitude, though I understand why one might compare the two. It is about women. You should read it.
  4. How the Death of iTunes Explains the 2010s by Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic
    • I think the title speaks for itself.
  5. Pressure Doesn’t Have to Turn Into Stress by Nicholas Petrie in the Harvard Business Review
    • A useful reminder for the beginning of a new year. Wake up. Control your attention. Put things into perspective. Let go.