My Year in Content
Some books, articles, and podcasts I enjoyed this year that have been rattling around in my brain since I encountered them.
Happy Christmas Eve to those who celebrate Christmas and to everyone else who experiences the secularized dominance of Christmas in our cultural mainstream anyways! It’s a weird one, and I hope that you are able to find what joy you can with yourself and/or the people you are with. It’s hard to relax and take a breath, and takes way more intention than I used to think it did.
This week, my anxious existential crisis brain rumbled to a halt. I’ve been thinking a lot about one-sided relationships on the Internet and men’s overentitlement to their opinions (separate ideas), but I haven’t been able to distill either of those into coherence quite yet. We’ll see. While my mind is on hiatus, I figured I would offer you some of the media I have enjoyed this year and am still thinking about.
This is by no means a comprehensive or even a “best-of” list, and I tried to limit the amount of health-based stuff I put in because I know that isn’t everyone’s fascination the way it’s mine. These are some of the pieces that I felt really gave me a new angle to think about the world and/or myself from, or have just been stamped onto my cerebral cortex since I encountered them for a wider variety of reasons. I also left explicit coronavirus coverage out, but you can find some of my favorites of those at the end of Second Thoughts About the Second Wave, or just ask!
Not everything here came out in 2020, and not everything may resonate with you the way it did me. Sometimes a piece of work just hits you at the right time or mindspace and sometimes it does not. There are topics that hit closer to home than others. I would like to say though, I have been thinking about how I tend towards discussing race/racism with my friends who are also racial minorities, and I tend towards discussing feminism and sexism with my female friends, and how I think I am doing a disservice to my other friends by not also engaging with them on this or assuming they are uninterested in it. So if you’re not Asian, I might be extra interested in your thoughts on Minor Feelings and if you’re a guy I kind of want you to read No Visible Bruises even more. Lastly, while I probably spend an above average amount of time reading/thinking about serious and very social science-biased topics like you’ll see below, I also watch a lot of TV and do other things, I promise.
In case you missed it, last week I wrote about how “finding your passion” is a scam, and before that I thought about the outsized influence alcohol has in our culture. You can subscribe to this un-themed newsletter here to get it in your inbox approximately every Thursday (or Friday, we’ll see). Feel free to share with friends, and let me know if you end up reading/listening to any of these and want to discuss.
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Books (use Bookshop.org instead of Amazon if you buy!)
The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel
This book pulled together a lot of thoughts and opinions I’d had in my head for a while - regarding the inequities of higher education, the unrealistic pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality perpetuated in the American Dream, the fact that jobs like banker make way more than jobs like teacher even though the latter is probably universally considered more valuable to society, the focus we have on technology-based solutions, and how little we factor luck into the equation when we look at our lives. Essentially, Michael J. Sandel presents an argument against our current structures of meritocracy and shows that we need a fundamental philosophical and cultural shift away from it. He uses a lot of interesting examples to show just how deep our belief in meritocracy runs. I think a lot of us are aware of some of these ideas, especially in the wake of Brexit and Trumpism, but this book gave me a better framework to approach this with, and showed how a lot of these ideas are very interconnected.
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
I love this book (and Jia Tolentino) with my whole heart and I feel like a lot of people around me have heard too much about it. The greatest luck is that someone I kind of know stopped me on campus as they were walking past to let me know that this might be a book I’d like. They were so right! This is a book of essays on self-delusion, identity, selfhood, and the Internet, that really unraveled me on so many levels regarding modern feminism, how we consume media, how we perform for ourselves and others, the marriage-industrial complex, and more.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
This book is written as a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his young son about growing up Black in America, and recounts Coates’ own experiences growing up in Baltimore, reflecting after the birth of his son, and visiting with the mother of his college friend. I read this in June during the George Floyd protests, and while not much of what Coates says about racism was novel to me, I can’t say I had really thought deeply about what it means to be a parent to a Black child in America, and the writing is really beautiful. This is my favorite quote, and one that is important to keep in mind when people intellectualize and abstract debates about race:
“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
Every hip Asian-American girl I follow on Instagram posted about this book at some point, so I had to read it. It was worth it. Minor Feelings is a book of essays on the Asian-American experience, and perhaps the most interesting part was how I saw the author’s perspective diverge from mine, as she is older and Korean-American (I’m Chinese-American). She puts forward a really powerful and well-articulated rage that I’ve never felt fully justified in having. As a kid, when I got microaggressed I thought it was funny, or took it as the person being dumb, and looking back I find it astonishing, the kinds of things people have said to me about being Asian. This book also highlighted to me how I had gone so long without ever really seeking out Asian-American literature or media, and unaware of Asian-American history. I think it was also particularly compelling to be reading it in the midst of an uptick of xenophobic and racist attacks on Asian-Americans, a reminder that our “white-adjacent” and model minority status was always conditional.
No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder
This is a book about domestic violence, or intimate partner terrorism, as Snyder terms it, because of the psychological dynamics at work, and highlighting that it’s never an isolated act. The author focuses on one particular story of a woman in Montana who was murdered by her husband, while also zooming out and examining all the ways we could work to not let this happen, and all the ways we continue to let this happen, at individual and systemic levels. Too many people will experience some form of verbal or physical domestic violence in their lives, and too many children will bear witness and potentially repeat these dynamics in their own adulthoods, and it’s our responsibility not just to help victims escape, but to prevent abuse by examining our laws and justice system as well as how we raise our children.
What the Eyes Don’t See by Mona Hanna-Attisha
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha is the pediatrician who helped to whistleblow on the Flint water crisis, and this book did a couple things. It showed how absolutely ridiculous our government, from the CDC and EPA to state and county governments are in handling issues like this. Dr. Hanna-Attisha is also admirably optimistic about the future while also being very honest about the work it took to prove that the lead levels in Flint were unacceptable and actively harming children in Flint. For me, Flint was a passing news story when it happened. For these parents, children, and community members, the effects continue to ripple out.
Articles
“What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About” by Lynn Steger Strong
This is an excerpt of a book by the author, and I think it captures a particular feeling many of us have about our parents, where we understand now their failings and recognize how hard it was to raise us, but it’s also still very emotionally fraught. I’ve had a lot of conversations with friends about how the parent-child relationship is so weighed down, is so deep, that it’s so hard to really separate that out and appreciate your parents as people independent of yourself, and to really have a completely honest conversation with them, maybe because you want to protect them, to avoid worrying them, and also maybe because everything you do is still so personal to them.
“As Mayor of Minneapolis, I Saw How White Liberals Block Change” by Betsy Hodges
This is an important one! I think especially now that Joe Biden has been elected, and we want desperately to “go back to normal,” and our President in 2021 will not be openly racist, we think it’s going to be okay. It’s not, and white liberals are a part of the reason why. This op-ed emphasizes how tiny, flimsy steps that seem like progress can distract from or delay the structural changes we actually need.
“As the mayor of Minneapolis from 2014 to 2018, as a Minneapolis City Council member from 2006 until 2014 and as a white Democrat, I can say this: White liberals, despite believing we are saying and doing the right things, have resisted the systemic changes our cities have needed for decades. We have mostly settled for illusions of change, like testing pilot programs and funding volunteer opportunities.
These efforts make us feel better about racism, but fundamentally change little for the communities of color whose disadvantages often come from the hoarding of advantage by mostly white neighborhoods.
In Minneapolis, the white liberals I represented as a Council member and mayor were very supportive of summer jobs programs that benefited young people of color. I also saw them fight every proposal to fundamentally change how we provide education to those same young people. They applauded restoring funding for the rental assistance hotline. They also signed petitions and brought lawsuits against sweeping reform to zoning laws that would promote housing affordability and integration.”
“The Opposite of Loneliness” by Marina Keegan
Especially for all my Class of 2020 or Class of 2021 readers! I reread this a lot. Though published in 2012, it only entered my life in 2019. Postgrad life always seemed vague and lonely and weird. We graduate, and then… 40+ years of work? Living in different cities (maybe even countries) away from our friends, having to work so much harder to hold onto those relationships, seeing them change in ways we sometimes can but often cannot predict. Graduating in the pandemic exacerbated this, and I have a lot of trouble differentiating what parts of my uncertainty and sadness about this year are tied to postgrad adriftness and what parts are tied to COVID-19 and world uncertainty. I miss having the opposite of loneliness. I don’t know when I’ll find it next, or if I’ll ever have it in the same way I did in college, but I am grateful to know what Marina Keegan means when she describes it.
“The Black American Amputation Epidemic” by Lizzie Presser
No need for a medical degree or medical degree in progress to read this! You cannot claim medicine or health is not political, and I think about this article a lot when I’m thinking about that. This piece is about the Mississippi Delta region, and a specific cardiologist trying to address the complicated medical and political neglect and biases his patients are facing. I think it’s an incredible look at rural health, how medicine continues to be fraught with racism, the social determinants of health, and both how much one doctor can do as well as the limits one doctor faces in making change. We have so much work to do.
“America’s “Daughters” Grow Up To Be Women It Can’t Handle” by Rebecca Traister
This article digs into why we put children at the forefront of political messaging yet we still can’t respect women equally as politicians, because children are full of potential and easily controlled but women are not. Oh man, feminism is complicated, and I’m never going to not live in a patriarchy. I really liked this piece because it was a different angle on sexism in media than the usual, and it gave me a lot to think about regarding how we view young girls versus teenage girls and adult women.
“alligator” by Helena Fitzgerald
This is an un-cheesy essay about love and also luck that I found recently and enjoyed a lot. In particular, these sentences stay with me, not just about love: “Luck is ugly, full of casualties. Luck is somebody else’s house falling down instead of yours. The statistic of your joy is made meaningful against the way that other people have failed.” In this year of tragedy and loss, thinking about the 326,000+ Americans who have died from COVID-19 and their bereaved family members, the frontline workers working so hard and lacking support in so many ways, and the people who have been evicted or are food-insecure due to layoffs, luck feels particularly ugly.
Podcasts
NPR Hidden Brain - “A Founding Contradiction”
It is widely known and often mentioned that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner and also wrote the Declaration of Independence. What I liked about this podcast episode is how it demonstrated that Jefferson himself saw this contradiction in his values and his actions, and he figured that progress would be made eventually, and maybe the next generation would get rid of slavery, but he was busy working on other important stuff. Looking back, it is easy to scorn historical figures for their moral failings without further contemplation, but this episode of Hidden Brain really pointed out to me how I also live with these types of contradictions when I think about things like the end (or at least fundamental restructuring) of capitalism.
This is a five-part series by the New York Times that explores New York City public schools and how so-called “nice white parents” stand in the way of meaningful public school reform and actual integration of our schools. You see how schools have to cater to certain demographics, and how for many “nice white parents,” externalized progressive beliefs don’t align well enough with internal ambitions/desires for their children for them to really stick with school desegregation.
The Ezra Klein Show - “Work as identity, burnout as lifestyle”
I’m a big fan of The Ezra Klein Show and Ezra Klein, and also Anne Helen Petersen, who wrote a couple of the articles I mentioned last week. This is a discussion about burnout, internalized capitalism, and our obsession with work that I think an unfortunate majority of us relate to a lot and is similar to what I was writing about last week. It feels hard to escape, and even Ezra Klein and AHP do not have perfect answers for us, but what I love about them (and many other writers) is the way they put into words the feelings that have been buzzing in the background for a long time.