1. The best thing I read all week: A Food Critic Reviews the Swedish Chef’s New Restaurant
2. A man who recreates airline meals at home
3. Me today, going into the office for a mandatory barbecue:
4. Just putting this after the mandatory barbecue for no reason whatsoever, why do you ask?
1. As I see more and more grey hairs, I’m more and more interested in other women’s take on it (and I still wish for a cool gray streak, but no, it’s coming in evenly). From the New Yorker about giving up coloring during the pandemic: Silver Linings.
2. Also related to women of a certain age: If you’ve had a vaccine, maybe you want to read this.
3. Still reading everything I can about the future of remote work. This Ed Zitron article was a link from a Charlie Warzel newsletter (I think; I get a lot of newsletters).
The drumbeat around hybrid work is not remotely about spontaneity or collaboration, deep down. Sure, there’s a vague element of “it’d be nice to see everyone,” but I think at the core there’s just an expectation that people have done this for years, and thus it’s the way things work…And, if I may be a little dark, I think that there is an executive function that asks “what am I getting for this money?” and doesn’t want to admit that part of that thing they’re getting is a person’s physical presence as well as the time, so that they may feel that they own them.
1. Would you like to see every Bob Ross painting ever done, with links to the show where he paints it? I thought so.
2. Here is Mona Eltahawy talking about grief literacy, in a post-pandemic sense and also just in general.
People in a grief literate society would understand and accept differences in grieving styles, in terms of gender, race, and culture, and they would feel comfortable to talk about their own loss experiences and to ask about loss experiences of others, instead of avoiding the subject or showing discomfort.
3. Yep:
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“aaall right”
1. Has this felt like the longest week ever? I can barely make words go on the page, I haven’t sewn anything, the weather is beautiful but I just sit inside… hopefully a long weekend will help. Also, this is good to remember:
A year of quiet everyday trauma might have been bearable but it was and is still trauma — that’s what I keep telling people who ask me why they still feel like exhausted, demoralized shit
— Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen) May 26, 2021
2. A year of quiet collective trauma notwithstanding, it’s been nice to realize that I’m vaccinated and can do things like go to dinner again. I’m meeting a friend for lunch today and meeting her nine-month-old baby (Little Loaf) for the first time!
3. And as we all emerge from our shells into the world this summer, let’s remember CicadaBro:
Therapist: The cicada that shouts “AWW YEAAAH” isn’t real, he can’t hurt you
The cicada that shouts “AWW YEAAAH”: pic.twitter.com/3MOyJo78Xm
— David (@Beabosaur) April 14, 2019
AWW YEAAAH!
1. A Helena Fitzgerald essay for you to while away some time on a Friday: Here Is The CDC’s New List of Activities in Which Fully Vaccinated People Can Engage Without Masks
Looking at old photos of yourself and not understanding how you could have felt so ugly when you were so obviously beautiful and then not applying this lesson to the present at all.
Adding clothes or home goods or candles or jewelry or fancy cookware or any number of other items that you will without question never in a million years actually buy to an online cart, and then abandoning those carts and leaving the tabs open and finding them still open much later, hanging around like these little ghosts of all the wholly different people whom for a minute you imagined you could buy your way into being.
2. Gym Instagram making it personal:
3. Mental health/artist Instagram with a reminder:
1. Thinking about the “after times” on the heels of the CDC’s announcement that if you’re vaccinated, life is back to normal: This Molly Osberg piece in Jezebel is a gut punch. “There Is No After”
Previously unimaginable atrocities and shattering disruptions in how people live have been distilled into articles about how to work from home without ruining your back or more effectively disinfect your kitchen. Recently, those have given way to stories on how to secure a vaccine appointment and an entire genre of work addressing post-lockdown anxiety, as if the pandemic’s impact was a shift in American’s preferences and tastes for social interaction—a lifestyle instead of a roiling and preventable mass casualty event that killed half a million in this country and will in all likelihood define the rest of our lives.
2. I linked to Lyz Lenz’s piece about having why women aren’t having babies last Friday, but this Tiktok does the same thing in under 90 seconds (wait for it):
@vanguardigan♬ original sound – cj
3. Speaking of Tiktoks, sound ON:
@cadetarchickIt’s like drinking straight tv static ##fyp ##xyzbca ##follow ##viral
1. It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday. Thinking of all women, especially a couple groups on here.
(from artist Mari Andrew)
2. Oh, and speaking of moms? This is an excellent piece by Lyz Lenz: The Pandemic Is Breaking Women and Now We Have to Have Babies? Go to Hell
Let me spell it out for you clearly. The gender pay gap is real. And it’s worse for women of color. Women who take time off from work for children find themselves at even more of a loss of income. America also has the worst maternal mortality rate among developed nations because of deep institutional bias and a lack of standardized protocols. And this was before the pandemic.
3. I’m on a streak here so have this, too. Happy weekend!
(source)
1. I just spent an afternoon last week dusting and fertilizing and leaf shining all the houseplants, so now I’m in a houseplant mood. This site has charming illustrations and lots of info about taking care of your plant friends. (Via Laura Olin’s newsletter)
2. Virginia Sole-Smith writes about surviving the pandemic in a body that may or may not have gained weight and just being grateful:
“Some days just getting out of bed and taking a shower is resilient. Logging onto a Zoom meeting is resilient. And in a world that’s constantly telling us we aren’t good enough, nice enough or thin enough, just giving yourself permission to be your imperfect self takes a ton of resilience. In other words, you deserve a giant prize just for existing right now.
Everyone still standing right now has survived a life-changing amount of collective trauma. We are all different than we were 13 months ago; we will never again be our pre-pandemic selves. And so it makes sense that our bodies are different too.”
3. This makes me laugh every time:
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1. I’ve ordered and returned two different pairs of non-skinny jeans lately and I give up. If we ever return to the office, I’m doing this:
I’m going to deal with not knowing what kinds of jeans to wear by doing what I did the last time I felt this way: wear nothing but dresses for a decade.
— laura olin (@lauraolin) April 12, 2021
2 Related:
3. Wait for it.
1. I’ve discovered Virginia Sole-Smith’s columns about fatphobia and diet culture and kids and have been learning a lot. I’ve never struggled with my weight and I started lifting to get stronger, not smaller, but…no one is immune to fatphobia or the pressure to look a certain way, no matter who (or how old) you are. She linked to this article about posting online about “losing the pandemic weight” and it’s just really eye opening and helpful.
2. So true, from the caption of this Kat Vellos post: “How are you?” can be a hard question to answer when a multitude of positive, exciting, hopeful AND scary, sad, disappointing things are *all* happening AT THE SAME TIME.
3. About to head into the weekend like this:
— Koala 🖤 Commissions Open! (@koalaXCF) March 3, 2021