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Letter of Rec
Artists being earnest + my favorite songs of April
Laura Brooke Robson
April 30, 2024
I ingest an inordinate amount of content so you don’t have to! Here are the best things I spent time on this month:
Why did every artist release new music this month? Not complaining. Here are the songs I had on repeat this month:
This Ezra Klein interview with Ethan Mollick on the state of AI. Interesting discussion on how to use AI in schools! I’m currently finishing my master’s, and as I am specifically studying English and media education, you would assume I would have seen literally any systems in place to get educators comfortable with AI and how to teach with it. You would be wrong! If you work in edtech pls email me!
Haley Nahman’s newsletter on moving from San Francisco to New York and “starting over” at 27. I found this lovely for obvious reasons—because I am also 27 and staring down what will be the third major restart of my 20s (graduating, moving to Australia, moving back to the US). Sometimes I wonder if the chaos of all this is ballast against later feeling like I didn’t experience enough when I was young, but increasingly I appreciate the chaos itself. I’ve learned so many unexpected little things!
Severance on Apple TV. I think the most compelling speculative fiction (sci-fi, fantasy) leverages its genre by turning a real-world feeling into a literal, observable form. In this case, the sense that our work selves are disjointed from our non-work selves is made literal via science fiction technology that divides one’s consciousness. The finale is one of the tensest hours of television I’ve ever seen. So weird! Loved it.
The inside of an MRI machine, for which I have no link. The friendly technician told me people usually emerge from the machine deeply distressed or incredibly relaxed. For thirty minutes, I lay perfectly still without my phone and listened to noises I can only liken to the songs of a jet turbine. I am convinced if I had to get an MRI every day, I would never run out of book ideas. Alas: What if I checked my phone instead. Consider injuring yourself to have an MRI experience of your very own.
Bird photos for Earth Day! Enough reading!
Chi Shiyong / VCG / Getty
If Books Could Kill: The Better Angels of Our Nature (part 1 and part 2). This is a podcast that debunks/analyzes/criticizes popular nonfiction—in this case, the work of Steven Pinker. This episode relates to my pet interest, which is that we often overemphasize how badly people treated each other in the past to underemphasize the need to treat each other well in the present. The theory posited in Pinker’s book is that there was more rape and murder in the Middle Ages, society has come a long way, and now people get worked up over comparatively little. The obvious flaws: 1) Society has not reached its evolutionary pinnacle, and it would actually be great if we kept improving; 2) If you personally believe that the only thing keeping you from committing a violent crime is a modern social more, raise your expectations for yourself.
Maggie Rogers in The New Yorker. This profile is transcendent.
The manuscript focusses on the idea of creativity as a form of religion, and stardom as a kind of default modern pulpit…
“It was really jarring—people asking me for advice on suicide, or to perform marriages. I started to realize that there was this functional misalignment with the work that I had trained to do and the work that I was being asked to perform. I was put in this unconventional ministerial position without having undergone any of the training. Anyway, that’s how I made it to divinity school. What I ended up doing was developing a system for myself to hold these things. And then I went out and tested it…”
I told Rogers that I’d noticed a theme in her lyrics: the possibility of loving someone without possessiveness or panic. “Oh,” she said. “That’s cool. That’s how I feel about love.” She paused. “I think, in choosing someone, I want to be chosen back. You know? So much of this record is about mutual culpability.” She continued, “The art that means the most to me has some friction. To me, living a beautiful life is so much about devotion, and devotion to art is about telling the truth. That’s not always an easy story to tell, especially when it points back to ‘I’m fucked up, too.’ ”
This episode of the Modern Love podcast where Laufey reads a 2021 Coco Mellors essay. I love all of this: I love the Coco Mellors piece for reminding us that we are all neurotic little weirdos; I love hearing Laufey talk about why the piece moved her; I love the conversation about the power of genuine feeling in art. Emotions are so cute and we get to have them every day! This is the podcast equivalent of drinking tea.
We have had the tools to create this meme for 150 years.
Currently reading: Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, which is a pedantic little joy. This footnote about The New Yorker is my favorite thing: “A certain magazine famously—notoriously, you might say, and I do—would have you set a diaeresis—the double-dot thing you might tend to refer to as an umlaut—in words with repeat vowels, thus: ‘preëxisting,’ ‘reëlect.’ That certain magazine also refers to adolescents as ‘teen-agers.’ If you’re going to have a house style, try not to have a house style visible from space.”
Non-urgent thought of the week: What behavior falls under the umbrella of “people pleasing”? I’ve been thinking about this since last week because there’s a scene in Uncanny Valley where the author’s boss criticizes her for being a people pleaser and then quickly also criticizes her for making a sexual harassment complaint at work.
If you liked this, consider sharing it with your favorite person. If you hated it, consider sharing it with your least favorite person.
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