I Don't Hate It | Mushroom Walks, Can't Even
Hey there. I turned on ABC in anticipation of the Emmys (the “Pandemmys”) and had to mute Celebrity Family Feud (don’t even get me started on Steve Harvey). It looks like a line up of has-been white guys, beginning with Seth Green (this might be unfair; it was a knee-jerk observation). I said this out loud and my boyfriend said, “That must make you feel good: the women and people of color are busy doing things.”
Manels—panels made up of only men—are a thing. Many academics and professionals of all sorts have committed to not appearing on all-male speaking panels. We should all do our part. Most of us can do more.
This morning while reading T: The New York Times Style Magazine I happened upon this delightful essay on mushrooms. If you follow me on IG, you know about my #mushroomwalks this summer. Here are just a few of the fungi I came upon in my neighborhood.
Anne Helen Petersen’s new book comes out on Tuesday. Pre-order now! Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation is an extension of her BuzzFeed article on the topic of burnout from 2019. I’m a Gen X’er and it resonated with me so hard. I read a galley of Can’t Even and I recognized myself, so many of my friends who are parents, my own parents, my colleagues, and the underpinnings of twenty-first-century society itself.
Poet Nikki Giovanni has a new collection coming out in October, Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose. I don’t know a better way to say You must get this book other than to say exactly that. It is 2020 in verse.
I listened to Claudia Rankine on the Longform podcast, where she talked about her new book, Just Us: An American Conversation. It includes, and expands upon, this essay, originally published in the New York Times Magazine, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.” It is essential reading.
The Fall issue of VQR is themed Citizenship in the 21st Century. I love the cover. Our art director, Jenn Boggs, is brilliant. The issue is two, maybe three years in the making. I hope you’ll read it. (At this point, if you subscribe to this newsletter, I hope you’re also a VQR subscriber. If not, you can get 20 percent off a subscription with the code FALL20.)
Once we closed the issue, I took a Covid test and, with a negative result, visited my parents in Texas. It was so good to see them. I’ve missed them since I left, a little over a week ago. It had been more than nine months since I’d seen them, which I realize is not a lot of time for many people, but longtime readers of this newsletter might recall that my father will be 98 in November and I generally see him more often. And I like to hang out with him and my mother more than once a year!
Self-isolation is hard for us all. Everyone has their own expectations and limits. When I came home from Texas, my fiddle leaf fig had grown at least nine inches (in five days!) and sprouted four new leaves. If you had asked me a year ago whether or not I would have cared about that, I would have rolled my eyes. Global pandemics are weird! Keep wearing a mask. Wash your hands. Do it for people like my father, who, when he came with my mother to pick me up from the airport said, “This is the second time I’ve left the house since March!”