Letter of Rec

I ingest an inordinate amount of content so you don’t have to! Here are the best things I spent time on this month:

1. The Tradwife Rises on You’re Wrong About. Thank you to You’re Wrong About for keeping my mom and me company on long drives since 2018. This was so funny. “Please embrace pasteurization.”

2. Surely you can be serious by Adam Mastroianni on Experimental History. This talks about “seriousness”—not in the “we shouldn’t have a sense of humor” way but in the “you should care about some things” way. I’ve been thinking about this lately as it pertains to why some kids start writing stories: they’re bored and they want to impose structure to make their lives feel more meaningful and coherent. I found myself talking about this a lot this month:

3. How CoComelon Captures Our Children’s Attention by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker. I’ll read anything Jia Tolentino writes (Trick Mirror, her book of essays, is so fab), so I read this more because I like her than because I had any strong pre-existing feelings about CoComelon (I don’t currently spend a lot of time around one-year-olds). Worth a read to understand the scope of its influence and production methods of ultra-data-driven entertainment.

4. Sexy Mushrooms with Avery Trufelman on Normal Gossip. I had never listened to Normal Gossip before, but I had listened to (and loved) Avery Trufelman’s seven-part series on preppy fashion on Articles of Interest, which is presumably why Spotify recommended this to me. Apparently, the premise of this show is just to talk about a funny, gossipy story that happened to someone—in this case, someone who goes on a Hinge date with a weird mushroom hunter with a cult of personality. I’m so delighted.

5. 57 Sandwiches That Define New York City in The New York Times. I have no particular allegiance to the sandwich as a food group (I prefer my foods to be eatable with the teeniest tiniest little spoon), but this is nonetheless an absurdly fun article design.

6. Maggie Rogers on tour! I also got to see Bleachers and Lizzy McAlpine this month—huge!—but the Maggie Rogers concert was particularly magical because A) she’s great; and B) the governor of Maryland showed up to declare it Maggie Rogers Day. Literally could not have been happier for her.

7. Rise of the Nanomachines by Dhruv Khullar in The New Yorker. I do not purport to know anything of note about nanotechnology, but I sure do think it’d neat if Ms. Frizzle could bop around lancing diseased cells.

8. A Poem That’s Like a Perfect First Date by A. O. Scott in The New York Times. I recommended a different Close Read last month and was under the (false!) impression that NYT was no longer updating these. Delighted to realize a new one came out recently! This is a deep dive into Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You,” which I love.

9. What Happened to People Magazine? by Anne Helen Petersen on Culture Study. How every other media outlet became an SEO farm. Worth a read if you (like me) had never heard of Dotdash Meredith.

10. Non-arbitrary mental association memes for linguistics teens:

Currently reading: The Future by Naomi Alderman. Funny and weird and interesting, though I’m only 60% through so I make no promises about the ending.

Non-urgent thought of the week: I wonder if having an adjective + noun grammatical structure changes the way our brains process/retain the adjective. Are you more likely to remember the age of the brother if someone says “my older brother” than if someone says “mi hermano mayor”? Linguistics teens pls weigh in.

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