Happy Friday Sunday,
Cue the music, brew that pot. I spent a few days at a lake in Minnesota floating and listening to loons a c fireworks, so this newsletter’s coming a few days later than scheduled (someday I’ll code a “publish in future” option on my website).
Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:
- Typewriters acted as a “meeting technology that enabled White women to marry above their socioeconomic backgrounds and achieve upward mobility.”
- Twice a year LitHub publishes a long list of upcoming books, and great for 1) finding interesting new books (obvi), 2) guessing which ones will be mega-popular prize winners, and 3) finding niche titles I’d never encounter otherwise.
- All of us contain a variety of selves, and “a piece of writing succeeds when the writer invokes the best self to tell the particular story at hand.”
- Very excited for Peter Heller’s “The Dog Stars” to hit the big screen this August. His literary wilderness thrillers are a go-to beach (lake?) read for me, and this is one of his best (I just hope the movie doesn’t lose the emotional tenderness of the protagonist!)
- Goth Babe on why luxurious RVs can never capture the same experience as simplicity and companionship of camping with friends.
- I think that semi-myth about writers writing in a frenzied bout of inspiration so intense the rest of your life recedes to a small echo is that state we all aspire to be hijacjed to - no matter how real or fleeting it might be. The dream: to be inspired with such certainty no doubt or judgement gets in the way of output!
- “There are such obvious benefits to not scrolling your life away, and yet we do it all the time.” I think phones suck our energy, curiosity, and agency away from our interests and self-expression, but I still find advice like “find moderation and intention” to not be ass effective as I’d like.
- This video from 10 years ago still crops up in my mind as on of my favorite examples of good (unexpected) storytelling.
- There’s purpose and peril in daydreaming of “could be’s” in your future and “could have been’s” in your past — and this book sounds like an excellent teacher for not becoming too weighed down in the latter.
- Still videos of nature doing its thing set to chill music like this invariable 1) calms me down, and 2) simultaneously gives me an existential crisis about how we’re spending our existence in this place.
See you on down the dusty trail,
Isak