https://carvellwallace.medium.com/?source=post_page-----6f8a4de24c91-----------------------------------

Carvell Wallace

https://level.medium.com/christmas-lol-6f8a4de24c91?source=post_page-----6f8a4de24c91-----------------------------------

Dec 22, 2021·6 min read

We approach the time of year when we have all been tricked into linking together the buying of things with the genuine expression of love and there seems to be no way out of it. I (barely) survived a giant family fight with one of my teenagers this week — set in motion by me announcing that due to various logistical factors like global pandemic and a vast unnameable existential fatigue, her mother and I have decided not to do a huge many-gifts-per-child…

https://clivethompson.medium.com/?source=post_page-----d64291cea550-----------------------------------

Clive Thompson

https://marker.medium.com/who-was-first-with-a-big-idea-its-often-hard-to-know-d64291cea550?source=post_page-----d64291cea550-----------------------------------

Dec 22, 2021·6 min read

Guglielmo Marconi invented radio in the 1890s — but so did Nikola Tesla and several others. (Photo by Nicolas Buffler)

I recently wrote about the history of “pinch and zoom” — and how Apple didn’t really invent it. Apple executives love to claim they did; Steve Jobs even stood on stage and boasted “boy, have we patented it!”

https://sarahstankorb.medium.com/?source=post_page-----532e515e16b4-----------------------------------

Sarah Stankorb

https://gen.medium.com/in-drama-queens-podcast-one-tree-hill-stars-rehash-the-making-of-the-show-the-good-bad-and-532e515e16b4?source=post_page-----532e515e16b4-----------------------------------

Dec 16, 2021·6 min read

Photo courtesy of Drama Queens

I’m of an age that for me, first-run WB shows — *One Tree Hill, Gilmore Girls — *felt like guilty pleasures, not only for…

https://pwross.medium.com/?source=post_page-----db40275a5418-----------------------------------

Pete Ross

https://index.medium.com/entry-level-jobs-are-everything-wrong-with-the-21st-century-db40275a5418?source=post_page-----db40275a5418-----------------------------------

Dec 13, 2021·4 min read

Photo: Adrian Sulyok/Unsplash

As a 41-year-old, I’ve seen the working world make a sizeable transition from when I was a kid to the point we’re at now. When I started working, it was all about “getting your foot in the door” with an entry-level job and working your way up. The pay wasn’t great (it wasn’t…

Photo by Barry Zhou on Unsplash

I lost two students last month.

Not students who are currently enrolled in my class, although I have experienced that particular sort of devastation. No, these students were in my class several years ago. My kids. Any teacher will tell you that this is how it works.

When a student comes into my classroom, I tell them they have a lifetime warranty on their experience as my student. Struggling in college? Call. Need a reference? Email. Want to meet up for an in-person pep-talk? Text.

Many do.

I’ve attended college graduations and weddings and baby showers and birthday parties to celebrate them. I’ve held their brand new babies. I’ve let toddlers waddle across the colored tiles in my classroom as their parents fill me in on their adult lives. I’ve met them for brunches, lunches, dinners, and coffees. I’ve scheduled their appointments with therapists and talked them through post-college crises.

I tell them to call. Many do.

The ones who don’t are the ones who linger in my mind. They’re the ones I wonder about on some random cloudy afternoon as I drive down Interstate 5, my mind wandering to the crystal-clear centers of otherwise foggy memories: the stickers they carefully arranged on their water bottle or the playfully doodled notes they left on their assignments or the tears they shed as they sat in my classroom and cried over a break-up.

In sixteen years of teaching, I have yet to be able to convey the depth of the care I feel for my students. Every day they sit in front of me, vulnerable in their roles as learners, trusting me to guide them in a manner that will make them feel valued and capable. It’s the greatest responsibility of my life.

I just wish they knew.

I wish they knew that I root for them as I grade their essays.

I wish they knew that I see their pain on a bad day, the pain they try to hide behind a hoodie, and I cross my fingers, hoping that the next time I see them, the hood will be down and the smile will be back.

I wish they knew that I see them vying for acceptance every day, earnestness sparking quietly in their eyes, even as they work so heartbreakingly hard to make it seem like they don’t care what anyone else thinks.

I wish they knew how often they make me laugh — even when I have to hide it.

I wish they knew just how much they’re capable of accomplishing — especially when they have resigned themselves to the fate of being “bad” in school.

I wish they knew how much I love the notes they leave for me — on assignments, on the whiteboard, and on post-its. The crooked smiley faces and the silly jokes are fuel for another day.

I wish they knew that I carry their successes and failures with me long after the final bell of the day.

I wish they knew that I cross my fingers and toes for them on graduation day. That I hope post-high school life is everything they hope it will be and more. That if I could pave the road they’re about to travel to glass-like smoothness, I would. But I can’t and I know it’s for the best.

I wish my students knew how much I think about them after they leave me. I wish they knew how proud I am when they become mothers, fathers, teachers, nurses, lawyers, mechanics, firefighters, baristas, artists, welders, problem-solvers, soul-searchers, world-travelers, or whatever it is that fills them with a sense of their own tremendous worth.

I try to tell them these things— explicitly first — and then through my actions. I talk to them every single day. I try to cultivate silly little inside jokes with them. I tell them I’m glad they’ve come to class — even when they’re 30 minutes late. I invite them to stay after school if they need help — or just a quiet place to work. I encourage them to join the clubs I advise, and I tell them I miss them on the days that they’re gone.

I lost two students last month. Gone forever. Two truncated sentences in what should have been two full-length stories of vivacity and accomplishment.

I can’t help but wonder if they knew the richness they added to *my *life.

I hope they did.

https://irmamcclaurin.medium.com/?source=post_page-----6275c7ddb3d0-----------------------------------

Irma McClaurin

https://zora.medium.com/ode-to-bell-hooks-6275c7ddb3d0?source=post_page-----6275c7ddb3d0-----------------------------------

Dec 16, 2021·2 min read

Images from bell hooks INSTITUTE, Berea College, bellhooksinstitute.com

sista bell hooks,

to you,

we owe

an enormous debt

that can never really

be repaid

in full.

You fed our minds,

gave us concepts

like Black Feminism

Photo by Mike Meyers on Unsplash

I’m no self-help guru but call your friends

https://johndevore.medium.com/?source=post_page-----4f244cbfa03a-----------------------------------

John DeVore

https://medium.com/humungus/my-favorite-podcast-is-talking-to-you-on-the-phone-for-hours-4f244cbfa03a?source=post_page-----4f244cbfa03a-----------------------------------

Dec 16, 2021·5 min read

The internet is a horn of cornucopia overflowing with mostly harmless self-help advice from aspiring gurus. Drink water. Yup, sure, can’t hurt. Go for walks. I get my 10,000 steps in every day. Try to get eight hours of sleep every night. It’s hard because I do love scrolling in bed at…

“Granite erratic, Dudmaston” by Richard Webb is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse&atype=rich

It was the rock that caught my eye. Dappled with lichen and lighted by the afternoon sun, it appeared to be the perfect place for contemplation. A spot where you could sit and write your novel, ponder your place in the universe, and perhaps reach some kind of equilibrium with the planet.

https://evepeyser.medium.com/?source=post_page-----763e1678591b-----------------------------------

Eve Peyser

https://evepeyser.medium.com/how-people-who-kept-their-new-years-resolutions-did-it-763e1678591b?source=post_page-----763e1678591b-----------------------------------

Dec 17, 2021·7 min read

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Time is kinda fake, but the new year nevertheless feels like a clean slate, a moment where you have the opportunity to shed old sins and reinvent yourself anew. For many, this translates to buying a gym membership and vowing to lose 15 pounds. So by March, when you…

Increasingly independent lifestyles aren’t good for all of us, and especially not for families.

https://medium.com/@RhianninB?source=post_page-----dcfd0a1da74d-----------------------------------

Rhiannin Bunney

https://medium.com/in-losing-the-village-we-abandoned-societys-parents-dcfd0a1da74d?source=post_page-----dcfd0a1da74d-----------------------------------

Dec 17·10 min read

Photo by Benjamin Manley on Unsplash

It takes a village to raise a child.

I had a very different experience of growing up in the United States. I wasn’t…

https://clivethompson.medium.com/?source=post_page-----d64291cea550-----------------------------------

Clive Thompson

https://marker.medium.com/who-was-first-with-a-big-idea-its-often-hard-to-know-d64291cea550?source=post_page-----d64291cea550-----------------------------------

Dec 22·6 min read

Guglielmo Marconi invented radio in the 1890s — but so did Nikola Tesla and several others. (Photo by Nicolas Buffler)

I recently wrote about the history of “pinch and zoom” — and how Apple didn’t really invent it. Apple executives love to claim they did; Steve Jobs even stood on stage and boasted “boy, have we patented it!”

https://ericweiner.medium.com/?source=post_page-----32fd0a4fd1ca-----------------------------------

Eric Weiner

https://forge.medium.com/the-art-of-seeing-32fd0a4fd1ca?source=post_page-----32fd0a4fd1ca-----------------------------------

Dec 20·5 min read

Photo by Harry Quan on Unsplash

I thought my vision was pretty good. Not quite 20–20, but close. Then I read Thoreau.

Yes, *that *Thoreau. Forget what you may have read by or about the “hermit Concord.” He is misunderstood. His experiment on Walden Pond was about seeing. All the rest — the solitude, the simplicity — were means to this end.

One email notification led Carla Barnes to question her whole identity and try to find it again. Barnes expected the email — even looked forward to it — but it delivered an unexpected shock. The email held the results of her at-home DNA test. It revealed her ethnicity, a list of her DNA relatives, and a secret her mother kept from her for her entire life. When she opened her results, she didn’t second guess the accuracy of her ethnicity, but the list of relatives the test identified made her question its validity. As she scrolled through the list of people with whom she shared DNA, she noticed some obvious oversights. The test failed to identify any of her family members from her father’s side as DNA relatives.

Barnes’s experience provided her membership in a growing community — those who experience a non-parental event (NPE). An NPE occurs when a person discovers they are not genetically related to the parent or parents who raised them. The acronym first stood for non-paternity event and some use it to mean not parent expected. Others also often use the term MPE, or misattributed parental event, to refer to these situations. People created these different terms and acronyms to be more inclusive of all situations and to make these discoveries more personal and less scientific.

NPEs can result from a multitude of situations, including adoption, sperm or egg donation, kidnapping, rape, adultery, a mistake during IVF or artificial insemination, and a range of other scenarios. While NPEs themselves are not new, it is becoming increasingly easier to discover them. “This stuff has always existed, but we’re just now on the brink of discovering how frequent this is,” Barnes says. The prevalence of and increased accessibility to at-home DNA testing has led many people to discover their own NPE, and those discoveries and the emotional challenges they create have led to the growth of organizations that seek to support those who experience them. NPE Friends Fellowship, a non-profit that aims to support and raise awareness for NPEs, says that 5% to 10% of people who take an at-home DNA test discover an NPE. NPE Friends Fellowship began in June of 2017 as a Facebook group of people who experienced NPEs supporting each other. The group grew to 20 members after a week and more than 1,000 after a year. The group currently boasts more than 11,000 members and grows every week.

And the growth of the at-home DNA test business helps fuel these experiences and these communities. In a 2020 blog post by Ancestry, then president and CEO Margo Georgiadis said that 30 million people “started a DNA journey” worldwide. 23andMe alone has sold more than 12 million of their DNA test kits since they began in 2006. While these millions of tests likely resulted in a large number of NPE discoveries, most users who decide to spit in a little vial do not seek to discover or verify their biological parents. Another Ancestry blog post outlines some of the main reasons users do decide to take a DNA test including seeking out the specifics of their ethnicity, connecting with distant relatives, and making discoveries about their family trees. DNA test takers also often get their test kit as a gift from a loved one as the biggest DNA test companies run sales around the holiday season. In Barnes’ situation, she hoped that taking a DNA test would help fill in the gaps of the family tree that she started researching and building more than a decade earlier. Rather than being able to see it grow more branches, she instead had to watch half of the roots of her family tree die and disappear.

An NPE discovery can take some people on an emotional journey of rediscovering their identity, but for others, the information is as insignificant as what they ate for breakfast. One NPE, who wishes to remain anonymous due to the fact that much of her extended family is unaware of the situation, took a 23andMe DNA test and discovered a half sibling she never knew about. After repeated attempts to convince her parents to explain the half-sibling she found, her mom called her crying and finally admitted that she was conceived through a sperm donor due to infertility issues with her parents. This new information, though, failed to alter her self-perception. “For me, it almost turned into, rather than being this emotional event, it was kind of just a detective, mystery-solving thing,” she says. She does not feel as though she lost any connection to the man who raised her even with the knowledge that they are not genetically related. “Honestly, I don’t care. This doesn’t, from my perspective, change anything. My dad is still my dad,” she says. “Sure, he didn’t donate genetic material to me, but I think that fatherhood is so much more than that.”

“My dad is still my dad. Sure, he didn’t donate genetic material to me, but I think that fatherhood is so much more than that.”

— Anonymous NPE

For many people who discover their own NPE, they question their own identity, not just the identity of their biological parents. “It’s probably like grief of a parent who loses a kid. It’s probably on that level,” Barnes says. “No one has died, but a part of your reality and your truth of yourself has died when you hear something different.” Those who discover the truth of their ancestry through an at-home DNA test often feel an extra level of hurt than if a loved one had told them. “It adds a betrayal factor on top of the issue in itself,” Barnes says.

An NPE discovery can lead to a person questioning not only who their parents are, but who they are too. | Original photo by Caleb Oquendo

Barnes recalls that the stress and crisis of the situation would wake her up in the middle of the night. Instead of putting her head back down on the pillow, Barnes would instead pick up her phone and start searching the internet for answers to her questions. Googling phrases such as “my dad is not my dad,” “mom had an affair,” and “I don’t know my dad” did not result in any support for Barnes, but she kept trying. Two years after her initial DNA test, she learned the term NPE from a New York Times article. It was then, as the brightness of her phone’s screen shone on her face, that she felt less alone in her experience, and she used the term to find some support and understanding. “I found some communities on Facebook. I found other people who had stories like me, but I had to search for it,” she says. “It took a long time.”

“No one has died, but a part of your reality and your truth of yourself has died when you hear something different.”

— Carla Barnes

Jodi Klugman-Rabb also discovered her NPE situation through an at-home DNA test. But the shock and realization of what the results meant took longer than Barnes’ immediate shock. In fact, the chaos of life, including having young children and a career, kept her from truly understanding the reality presented in her genetic report. Two years after taking the DNA test, while on vacation in Mexico and reading a book poolside, Klugman-Rabb relaxed enough to process her results. The test revealed that she was 50% Scottish and not 50% German like she was expecting. She used this information to deduce that she was not genetically related to the man she believed was her father. This revelation made her rethink who she was. “It destabilizes your sense of identity and creates an identity crisis,” Klugman-Rabb says.

With improved and accessible DNA technology, more and more people are discovering their own NPE and being left to deal with an identity crisis. In the past few years, various support efforts emerged to help NPEs deal with the turmoil that a discovery causes. One of these efforts is the non-profit organization NPE Friends Fellowship. The organization began in 2017 as a Facebook group that was created by NPEs and for NPEs. As it became more in demand, the group expanded to a non-profit organization in 2018. In addition to the original Facebook group, the organization also holds a yearly conference for those in the NPE community to meet each other, works with researchers to get more data about NPEs, and provides grants to help people financially afford to travel to see their newfound biological family. The organization hopes that their efforts will help raise awareness for NPEs and provide them and their affected loved ones with support. “It’s a multi-sided coin. The NPE is at the nucleus of what we do, they’re at the heart, they’re at the core, but we know there’s a ripple effect. So, our long term goals are to make sure that we provide resources and support to that entire ripple,” Rebekah Drumsta, Director of Public Relations at NPE Friends Fellowship, says.

“It destabilizes your sense of identity and creates an identity crisis.” — Jodi Klugman-Rabb

In addition to organizations, individuals are also dedicated to working to help and support NPEs through dealing with their discoveries. After discovering their own NPEs, both Barnes and Klugman-Rabb decided to combine their experiences with their careers to help others in situations similar to their own. Barnes, a licensed professional counselor, specializes in working with NPEs. Prior to her own discovery, Barnes worked as a school counselor, but she decided to open up her own practice in Schertz, TX so that she could provide others in her area with the help and support missing for her when she first took her DNA test.

In fact, like Barnes and Klugman-Rabb, many of those who build communities or create resources to help people who experience NPEs do so to address the lack of awareness, information, and support they experienced after a DNA test revealed a secret in their family tree. Klugman-Rabb, a licensed marriage and family therapist, works with NPEs to help them deal with their discovery and its effects. She also works with parents of NPEs prior to a discovery to help them figure out the best way to tell their child the truth. “The anger is going to be there one way or the other. The hurt and confusion is going to be there regardless, but there’s a way to mitigate it so that it’s understandable,” Klugman-Rabb says. “You just have to give an MPE time to work through the feelings to get to that point where they understand it, and that happens with counseling and the ability to talk about it openly with people in their lives.”

In an effort to educate more non-NPE mental health professionals on the appropriate ways of supporting clients working through an NPE discovery, Klugman-Rabb created a curriculum called Parental Identity Discovery. Through webinars, she uses the curriculum to train mental health professionals all over the country on the topic of NPEs so that there are more resources available for NPEs that are equipped to properly help them. She feels that many education and training programs fail to adequately teach mental health professionals how to properly support someone going through an NPE discovery. By combining her experiences and her expertise, she believes her program will prepare professionals to effectively assist those who discover NPEs in the future. “For most people, they just don’t put it together that it’s an identity issue,” Klugman-Rabb says. “So then I decided, well, I have so much of the clinical background already in place, this makes sense that I put together a curriculum to help other people go through this as well.” She also hosts a podcast called “Sex, Lies & The Truth” with Christina Bryan Fitzgibbons, a genetic and family investigator. In the podcast, they interview real people going through a variety of DNA revelations. Klugman-Rabb hopes that between her curriculum and her podcast that she is able to make going through an NPE discovery a little bit easier for others. She says, “It helps to have a safe place to talk about what you’re going through when you’re scared.”

Essential prep for the beginning and end of the new year

https://medium.com/@amberthealchemist?source=post_page-----e55199ddf7b4-----------------------------------

Amber the Alchemist

https://zora.medium.com/how-to-ground-your-mind-body-spirit-and-emotions-e55199ddf7b4?source=post_page-----e55199ddf7b4-----------------------------------

Dec 17·8 min read

Some folks use notebooks to review the old year and plan for the new year. Do you? Image: Getty

You don’t need a crystal ball to tell you that the past two years have been a whirlwind, to say the least. No matter how hard some people have tried to separate themselves from the Collective, the pandemic — along with political…

https://pwross.medium.com/?source=post_page-----db40275a5418-----------------------------------

Pete Ross

https://index.medium.com/entry-level-jobs-are-everything-wrong-with-the-21st-century-db40275a5418?source=post_page-----db40275a5418-----------------------------------

Dec 13·4 min read

Photo: Adrian Sulyok/Unsplash

As a 41-year-old, I’ve seen the working world make a sizeable transition from when I was a kid to the point we’re at now. When I started working, it was all about “getting your foot in the door” with an entry-level job and working your way up. The pay wasn’t great (it wasn’t…

https://evepeyser.medium.com/?source=post_page-----763e1678591b-----------------------------------

Eve Peyser

https://evepeyser.medium.com/how-people-who-kept-their-new-years-resolutions-did-it-763e1678591b?source=post_page-----763e1678591b-----------------------------------

Dec 17·7 min read

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Time is kinda fake, but the new year nevertheless feels like a clean slate, a moment where you have the opportunity to shed old sins and reinvent yourself anew. For many, this translates to buying a gym membership and vowing to lose 15 pounds. So by March, when you…

I would like to dismiss 2021 as a terrible, no-good, very bad year, a year to be sept away and forgotten as quickly as possible. After all, it was a year that began with the insurrection and was quickly followed by my ALS diagnosis. Dire on both the public and private fronts. Such a year can’t possibly have been anything other than bad. And yet — it was also the year that I not only had a new book published, I also sold two new books (on the same day!) to come out in 2022. More importantly, it was a year in which I connected in a deeply heartfelt way with so many friends, old and new, near and far. So, as is so often the case with not only years, but life experiences in general, 2021 was a mixed bag.

Still, I feel a need for a cleansing ritual as 2021 comes to a close, an acknowledgment that some things must be cleared away to make way for what comes next. I have a friend and a sister both of whom are avid sweepers. They take their brooms to the floor with such determination and ferocity it is almost scary — you would not want to be a crumb in their paths. I would trust both of them to sweep out the toxins of 2021 and prepare a clean slate for us going forward. I’ll let you know if they rent out their services.

When my husband and I moved, sixteen years ago, to the house where we currently live, neighbors eyed us warily then came over to check us out. They were amazingly direct about hoping we were good people, because the residents who preceded us were definitely not. Those people had harassed the African American kid across the street. They had amassed piles of glass-laden junk that they expected Goodwill to cart away. They irked the postwoman, the utility person, the telephone guy. Everyone had a story of malfeasance. They were all relieved this extended family had moved out.

Several people suggested a saging ceremony was in order, and I, as a lover of ritual, thought *why not. *So we obtained some sage and burned it in a short ceremony in which we said some words about hoping to made the atmosphere of the property more positive and loving. It seems to have worked, as all traces of the former residents’ bad juju seem to have disappeared, and our years here have been happy, including very enjoyable and mutually helpful relationships with our neighbors.

Sweeping and saging are both great rituals to take us over the threshold into 2022. It is, of course, a completely arbitrary crossing, but because we, as human beings, are meaning makers, it doesn’t feel that way, much as we (I) often try to tell ourselves that the celebration of a new year is manufactured. Why do we do this crazy celebrating with drunkenness and resolutions we know we won’t make good on? Because, I think, a new year gives hope a new platform. The things we hope and wish for seem to have a greater likelihood of coming to pass in the shiny new year than they did in the nasty old one.

When I met my now-husband, he had been reading the Tao Te Ching, and he wanted to warn me about the dangers of hope (the hope of being published was then in our sightlines). The Tao Te Ching warns us against the danger and fallacy of hope. “Hope is as hollow as fear,” says the Stephen Mitchell translation. Or, as my husband put it, “Hope is the flip side of despair.” The Tao eschews hope because of its relationship to selfhood which is reputed to be the cause of human suffering. To hope sets us up for disappointment.

After many years of thinking about this, and weighing the pros and cons of hope, I would humbly take issue with this Taoist point of view. I think most human beings need hope to carry on through life’s plentiful challenges. We need to feel that our lives, and the world in general, might improve. Without hope the motivation for doing much, beyond going to work, would quickly dissipate. Why exercise if you don’t hope to improve your health. Why do volunteer work if you don’t hope that someone will benefit. Hope has been a powerful force in the accomplishments of so many great liberation movements. Women and blacks would not have achieved the right to vote were it not for some people with very strong hope. People dared to hope, as Barack Obama knew. We need to hope without getting attached to specific outcomes, but we can’t give up on the entire idea of hope, which is endlessly renewable.

January is named for the Roman god Janus, guardian of doorways and transitions, who is depicted with two faces, one looking forward and one looking back. It’s almost impossible not to do both at this time of year, reflecting back to sweep out the horrors of 2021, and looking ahead with hope for better things in 2022.

As I try to expunge the bad juju of the insurrection and my diagnosis, I am keenly involved in looking ahead with hope and optimism: I’m hoping to be alive and mobile when my books come out in August and September, I’m hoping to get to Denver to see my grandniece after she is born in February, I am hoping to hold onto my manual dexterity for the continued writing of fiction and this blog, I am hoping Congress passes the voting rights bills, I am hoping to continue communicating with as many friends as possible. And finally, I am hoping I can make peace with whatever of these hopes don’t materialize.

I wish you all a smooth transition as you sweep and sage and make the most of hope.

Here’s my annual list of favorite books, music, and movies. Art always sustains and nourishes the soul. But for me, music and storytelling felt especially urgent during this pandemic year — a way to connect even when we were cooped up.

Since these are works I have actually listened to, watched, or read, I’m sure I’ve missed some worthy stuff. So if you have your own recommendations to share, I’ll add them to the stack of books and movies I hope to catch up on over the holidays!

Favorite Books of 2021:

• Matrix — Lauren Groff

• How the Word Is Passed — Clint Smith

• The Final Revival of Opal & Nev — Dawnie Walton

• The Lincoln Highway — Amor Towles

• Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City — Andrea Elliott

• Harlem Shuffle — Colson Whitehead

• Cloud Cuckoo Land — Anthony Doerr

• These Precious Days — Ann Patchett

• Crying in H Mart — Michelle Zauner

• Aftershocks — Nadia Owusu

• Crossroads — Jonathan Franzen

• The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois — Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

• Beautiful Country — Qian Julie Wang

And here’s a reminder of books I recommended earlier this year:

• At Night All Blood Is Black — David Diop

• Land of Big Numbers — Te-Ping Chen

• Empire of Pain — Patrick Radden Keefe

• Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir

• When We Cease to Understand the World — Benjamín Labatut

• Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future — Elizabeth Kolbert

• Things We Lost to the Water — Eric Nguyen

• Leave The World Behind — Rumaan Alam

• Klara and the Sun — Kazuo Ishiguro

• The Sweetness of Water — Nathan Harris

• Intimacies — Katie Kitamura

Favorite Movies of 2021:

• Drive My Car

• Summer of Soul

• West Side Story

• The Power of the Dog

• Pig

• Passing

• The Card Counter

• Judas and the Black Messiah

• The Worst Person in the World

• Old Henry

• The Last Duel

• The Tragedy of Macbeth

• C’mon C’mon

• Quo Vadis, Aida?

Favorite Music of 2021:​​

• The Only Heartbreaker — Mitski

• I Don’t Live Here Anymore — The War On Drugs ft. Lucius

• Tala Tannam — Mdou Moctar

• Magnolia Blues — Adia Victoria

• Witchoo — Durand Jones & The Indications & Aaron Frazer

• Formwela 10 — Esperanza Spalding

• Gold Chains — Genesis Owusu

• Broken Horses — Brandi Carlile

• Woman — Little Simz ft. Cleo Sol

• Pepas — Farruko

• Go Down Deh — Spice ft. Sean Paul & Shaggy

• Freedom — Jon Batiste

• It’s Way with Me — Wye Oak

• Nobody- Nas ft. Ms. Lauryn Hill

• Nightflyer — Allison Russell

• Montero (Call Me By Your Name) — Lil Nas X

• Patria y Vida — Yotuel, Gente de Zona, Descemer Bueno, Maykel Osorbo, el Funky

• Notice — Tammy Lakkis

• Armash — Teddy Afro

• Write a List of Things To Look Forward To -Courtney Barnett

• Volví — Aventura & Bad Bunny

• Headshots (4r Da Locals) — Isaiah Rashad

• Boomerang — Yebba

• In My Blood — MO3 & Morray

• Ya — YEИDRY

• Rumors — Lizzo ft. Cardi B

• Walking at a Downtown Pace — Parquet Courts

And here’s a reminder of the songs I had on my summer playlist:

https://kellyeden.medium.com/?source=post_page-----2898974e945a-----------------------------------

Kelly Eden

https://kellyeden.medium.com/when-the-world-feels-dark-and-beautiful-in-the-same-moment-2898974e945a?source=post_page-----2898974e945a-----------------------------------

5 days ago·3 min read

Image by Comfreak from Pixabay

I’m sure you’ve experienced those strange moments when you feel like your heart is pulled in opposite directions. There are so many experiences with this double-sided quality, where we feel two emotions at once.

https://evepeyser.medium.com/?source=post_page-----88ec444b6835-----------------------------------

Eve Peyser

https://evepeyser.medium.com/the-best-books-i-read-in-2021-are-all-about-weirdos-88ec444b6835?source=post_page-----88ec444b6835-----------------------------------

Dec 10·6 min read

I might be a professional writer or whatever, but for many years, I have felt deep shame over the fact that I don’t read enough books. It’s not that I hate books or anything. They’re fantastic! It’s just that in this terrible modern world, being able to focus on a book isn’t…