#35. 34 Things You Need to Read

In honor of my 34th birthday.

Asked Paul to take a picture of me for this issue and here we are in a parking lot? Lol

Hey! First, let me just say how wildly, effusively grateful I am for the reaction to last week’s issue, “I (Didn’t) Quit My Job.” I am still mildly in shock at all your kind words and the overall response to a piece I was nervous to share and spent weeks writing, which I ultimately published before I was really “ready” but then realized it was a piece that would never actually be “ready” and I eventually just had to say fuck it, here we go. The writing and editing process for that issue was genuinely an emotional rollercoaster trying to find the goldilocks zone of over/under sharing and I’m just so humbled/thrilled/ecstatic that it seemed to resonate. Thank you, seriously. So much.

In other news, today is my 34th birthday. This lap around the sun was filled with so much(!!)–getting engaged, starting this newsletter, tons of wedding planning, helping a friend with a top-to-bottom home renovation, starting a book club, seeing a career therapist, actually making friends in my new city, the Eras Tour, quitting (but also not quitting) my job and starting with a new company for the first time since I was 29–and so many more beautiful, ordinary, and mundane things. I laughed, I cried, I still have a half-renovated bathroom with a marble sink I bought from Etsy sitting on the floor where it’s been for almost a year because we haven’t figured out how to install it yet (I told Paul that’s what I want for my birthday, lol).

Because I poured all of my emotional energy into a difficult essay last week and am craving a bit of offline time for my birthday, I have something a little different for you this week. I gathered 34 essays, articles, and podcast episodes that I think are absolute bangers and assembled them into a list, organized into five different categories: inspirational, interesting, beautiful, lighter, and heavier. You might find time to read one or two today, but my hope is that you’ll revisit this issue a few times whenever you’re needing something really good to read (or listen to) this summer.

This issue is also a direct reaction to Threads, which I did (somewhat reluctantly) sign up for and am still forming an opinion about, and it’s a celebration of long-form content, which has always been my favorite. Some of the articles below will take you ten minutes to read (or listen to), some an hour, and some are best digested over a few days or even weeks. I’ll continue to romanticize the almost-forgotten art of having a long attention span for as long as I live, with a deep appreciation for content that you can’t fire off with just a few taps on a little black screen. (If you’re feeling similarly, you also have to read “The Thread Vibes Are Off” from Monday’s issue of

Culture Study

; it’s a yes for me.)

Some of these articles (or podcasts) are new, some of them are old, and all of them are things I have consumed and thought, “wow, that was fucking great.” Some of them are essays that I have mentioned in previous newsletters or talked about with friends a million times, and some are more recent finds that I’ve been wanting to share. I tried to make sure that most of the options on this list are free to read, but some of these are truly excellent pieces of journalism that are (deservedly) behind a paywall. Some of you may already have subscriptions to these paywalled outlets too, so I still included them. I used gift links wherever possible, and there’s currently a deal for The New Yorker where you can get 12 weeks of digital access for $6, which I do recommend because The New Yorker slaps. Here’s a handy guide so you know what you’re in for before you click:

• No stars = Free access

• * = Gift link

• ** = Paywall with limited free articles per month

• *** = Paywall

Before we get to the list, I have one birthday favor to ask. You may have heard already that Substack just launched a referral program that writers can turn on to “reward” readers for referring their friends to publications they love. As someone who does this kind of thing (marketing) for a living, I think it’s an interesting feature, but I also know that referral programs are inherently flawed because they aren’t necessarily the easiest things to use and often do not mimic real user behavior, like telling a friend next time you see them about an essay you read or just hitting the “forward” button on an email. In order for a referral program to actually be successful–i.e., you tell you friends about this newsletter and go out of your way to do so using a trackable link in exchange for some kind of incentive–it better be fucking worth your time. So, I present to you a poll. What would be worth it for you to actually use the “share” button to tell your friends about this newsletter? (Note that you would only get credit if your friend actually subscribes, instead of just reading one issue and going on with their day, so it would take some thinking about who you know that might actually enjoy this newsletter on an ongoing basis). Here are the options I’ve come up with so far (think of these like proposed “tiers”):

• A free month of a paid subscription

• A personalized list of 5-10 recommendations I’ll send you via email (for any topic of your choice)

• Books! You send me a list of books you’ve loved, and I’ll send you free copy of a book I think you’ll like

• A 45-minute Zoom call where you can ask me anything you want (career advice, how to make your online dating profile actually work, what paint color to choose for your walls, how to know when it’s time to go, etc.)

If you have a better idea, you can reply to this email! And if you wouldn’t use a referral program (I don’t blame you) and don’t have any ideas for what would change your mind, you can just skip the poll. TYSM!

And with that… here we go!

Inspirational–

1. “Some Thoughts On The Real World by One Who Glimpsed it and Fled” by Bill Watterson, a commencement speech for the class of 1990 at Kenyon College

“You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.”

2. “Hi From Your Childless Friend” by Caroline Donofrio for Cup of Jo

“When it comes to friends having babies, I have stood here over and over again. Metaphorically, she is about to move to a distant land and become fluent in a language I do not speak. No matter how much I try — no matter how many well-meaning visits I make or books or documentaries or babysitting experience I have on my side — I will never fully comprehend the landscape: an unmappable terrain where a piece of your heart exists outside of your body.”

3. “Hinge: Justin Mcleod” episode of the How I Built This with Guy Raz podcast

“In 2010, Justin McLeod was in business school, still trying to get over a bad breakup that had happened years before. Determined to solve his own problem and convinced that the best way to meet people was through friends of friends, he built an app to replicate that experience. Gradually, Hinge grew into a streamlined swiping platform that yielded mixed results: good dates, bad hookups, mismatched swipes, and missed opportunities. Disappointed with this outcome and inspired by a sudden twist in his own love life, Justin redesigned Hinge as an app for finding meaningful relationships, with the tag line "designed to be deleted.""

4. “Why I Ended a Happy Relationship” by Haley Nahman for Man Repeller

“I loathed that roller coaster. All in one day and not the next, with nothing to blame but my own twisted paradigm shift. It felt like such a waste of energy to experience, each time, a tiny hypothetical heartbreak.”

5. “Ask Polly: How Do I Make My Boyfriend Listen?” by Heather Havrilesky for The Awl

“And then there are smart women with lots to say who are also very sensitive and weird and analytical and incredibly talkative, who ALSO listen very closely. These women are often labeled “a little too intense.” We think way too much, and slice and dice everything under the sun like a Ginsu knife that’s been sharpened one too many times and is now capable of cutting a watermelon in half like it’s made of crepe paper.”

6. “I Want a Wife” by Judy Brady Syfers for New York magazine **

“I want a wife who is sensitive to my sexual needs, a wife who makes love passionately and eagerly when I feel like it, a wife who makes sure that I am satisfied. And, of course, I want a wife who will not demand sexual attention when I am not in the mood for it. I want a wife who assumes the complete responsibility for birth control, because I do not want more children. I want a wife who will remain sexually faithful to me so that I do not have to clutter up my intellectual life with jealousies. And I want a wife who understands that my sexual needs may entail more than strict adherence to monogamy. I must, after all, be able to relate to people as fully as possible.”

7. “Elizabeth Banks: How Do I Know if He’s My Soulmate?” episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast on Spotify

“Elizabeth Banks joins Call Her Daddy to share some wine, wisdom and laughs. She reminisces on meeting her husband on the very first night of college and how she knew he was the one - even though they were only eighteen. Elizabeth and Alex discuss and normalize not always knowing exactly what you want in life -- and give advice to those feeling confused after graduating college. Elizabeth opens up about her path to motherhood and the decision to use a surrogate. She talks about the feelings of shame and grief she experienced after discovering she could not get pregnant. The duo break down other topics, including women having autonomy over their bodies, power imbalances in the workplace and the privilege of using your voice for change.”

8. Margaret Atwood’s commencement speech for the class of 1983 at the University of Toronto

“You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.”

9. “How to Pick Your Life Partner” by Tim Urban for Wait But Why

“In our world, the major rule is to get married before you’re too old—and “too old” varies from 25–35, depending on where you live. The rule should be “whatever you do, don’t marry the wrong person,” but society frowns much more upon a 37-year-old single person than it does an unhappily married 37-year-old with two children. It makes no sense—the former is one step away from a happy marriage, while the latter must either settle for permanent unhappiness or endure a messy divorce just to catch up to where the single person is.”

10. “Why Having Kids Won’t Fulfill You” by Maria Guido for TIME

“I did what society and my family expected, never questioning the choice. But sometimes I wonder how much of the blueprint of my life was drawn by me, and how much was sketched by experiences I had when I was way too young to be the architect of my own destiny.”

Interesting–

11. The End of the World with Josh Clark podcast (especially episodes 1 and 2, “Fermi Paradox” and “Great Filter”)

“We humans could have a bright future ahead of us that lasts billions of years. But we have to survive the next 200 years first.”

12. “Your Skin Doesn’t Need Skincare” by Jessica DeFino for Slate

“Let me assure you, no plastic bottles were squeezed in the making of this skin care routine. I haven’t used an essence or eye cream in years. I don’t need to. You don’t need to. The human body produces all the aforementioned chemicals on its own. It uses them to self-moisturize, self-exfoliate, self-protect, self-heal, and even self-cleanse.”

13. “Nothing Drains You Like Mixed Emotions” by Arthur C. Clarke for The Atlantic **

“Mixed emotions drain your emotional batteries, like a phone connecting to multiple networks simultaneously. They are one of the most complex psychological phenomena we are capable of, and bring us a great deal of distress. You might think that purely negative emotions are the most unpleasant ones; in truth, a cocktail of negative and positive can be worse.”

14. “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen Petersen for Buzzfeed News

“Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives.”

15. "The Mystery Behind The Crime Wave at 312 Riverside Drive" by Michael Wilson for The New York Times *

“Again and again, police officers had raced to the tree-lined block of the Upper West Side, between West 103rd and 104th Streets. Firefighters and paramedics met them there. But the responses all ended the same way: The emergency vehicles turned and left, their sirens off. The police, over time, stopped responding to the calls at all. Because there is no 312 Riverside Drive.”

16. “Are You Nice or Kind?” by Haley Nahman for Maybe Baby

“Maybe that’s why I feel so intent on crystalizing the distinction between nice politics and kind: my own sense of shame. If I were to describe my personal political arc, it would entail me learning this lesson over and over, often stumbling. The biggest gift leftist thought has given me is teaching me to see beyond myself and helping me divorce my sense of morality from saying the right thing, being seen as a good person, or being on the right side.”

17. “Eat The Rich, Steal Their Skin?” by Jessica DeFino for The Unpublishable

“Every outlet from Vogue to Forbes to TIME Magazine has covered the trend, which is also known as “quiet luxury.” (Although if the buzz is so loud and the look so noticeable, how “quiet” can it be?) The generous interpretation is that its popularity signals sustainability: buying less, buying better, buying timeless pieces in materials that last. The less generous but more accurate interpretation — supported by the media’s many “quiet luxury for less” listicles, featuring fast fashion “dupes” from Zara and ASOS — is that it signals unsustainable class performance.”

18. “The Plague Year” by Lawrence Wright for The New Yorker ***

“The first thing you notice about Graham is that there’s a lot of him: he’s six feet five, with a gray goatee and a laconic manner. Graham’s boss at niaid, Anthony Fauci, told me, “He understands vaccinology better than anybody I know.” Graham had to make several crucial decisions while designing the vaccine, including where to start encoding the spike-protein sequence on the messenger RNA. Making bad choices could render the vaccine less effective—or worthless. He solicited advice from colleagues. Everyone said that the final decisions were up to him—nobody had more experience in designing vaccines. He made his choices. Then, after Moderna had already begun the manufacturing process, the company sent back some preliminary data that made him fear he’d botched the job. Graham panicked. If his vaccine worked, millions of lives might be spared. If it failed or was delayed, it would be Graham’s fault.”

Beautiful–

19. "Dreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations" by Leslie Jamison for Astra Mag

“I’ve spent my whole life daydreaming. It embarrasses me to think of tallying the hours. It feels like ingratitude. It feels like infidelity. It’s often been about infidelity. I’ve daydreamed while walking, while running, while drinking, while smoking—sitting in the Boston cold, seventeen years old, daydreams sprouting like so many weeds from the cracked sidewalk of a broken heart.”

20. “Goodbye to All That” by Joan Didion

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.”

21. “Joy” by Zadie Smith

“He kept asking me the same thing over and over: You feeling it? I was. My ridiculous heels were killing me, I was terrified I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that “Can I Kick It?” should happen to be playing at this precise moment in the history of the world, and was now morphing into “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I took the man’s hand. The top of my head flew away. We danced and danced. We gave ourselves up to joy.”

22. “Babes in The Woods” by Courtney Hoddell in Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids

“All the available cultural artifacts seemed to be telling holdouts like me that if you were a woman, your business was having a baby, and if you didn't, there was something wrong—with your body, meaning you couldn't conceive, or with your mind, meaning you couldn't conceive of it.”

23. “Love Song to Costco” by Yuxi Lin for Longreads

“Pushing a cart along the massive aisles in the Orlando Costco, my father loads up boxes of oranges and blueberries that he tries to force-feed me over the next few days. I do my best to act grateful because I know the people he’s trying to feed are no longer alive.”

24. “Uncanny Valley” by Anna Wiener for N+1

“Still, there are days when all I want is to disembark, eject myself into space, admit defeat. I pander and apologize and self-deprecate until my manager criticizes me for being a pleaser, at which point it seems most strategic to stop talking.”

Lighter–

25. Every Single Album: Taylor Swift podcast by Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard for The Ringer

“Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard are on a journey to break down every single Taylor Swift album ahead of the re-release of 'Fearless' on April 9. So they're starting at the beginning.”

26. “Are You Sure You’re Not Guilty of the ‘Millennial Pause?’ By Kate Lindsay for The Atlantic **

“Once my eyes were opened to the Millennial pause, I started noticing my age in every part of my internet experience. I get confused whenever Instagram changes its layout. I use GIFs to make jokes in Slack. I have posted song lyrics on my Instagram Story. The range of mannerisms is so broad, the signs such a staple of my online behavior for the past 15 years, that it’s not even worth trying to fight them.”

27. “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This” by Mandy Len Catron for The New York Times *

“More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.”

28. “The Enduring Legacy of Buffy The Vampire Slayer” by Angelica Jade Bastién for Vulture **

“Ask any Buffy fan about the titular character’s romantic life, and you’ll get a host of arguments about the two most important relationships she had on the series. The show tapped into the fertile territory of love, desire, and the growing pains that come with trying to connect, but the best decision it ever made was ending with Buffy being single. Unlike most of the shows Buffy is compared to, this series was daring enough to say that its lead heroine’s romantic journey wasn’t her most important. Adulthood for Buffy was marked not by romantic entanglements, but her relationship with her own identity and destiny.”

29. “The Unexpected Gratitude of Eating Roast Chicken After Taking LSD” by Jia Tolentino in My First Popsicle: An Anthology of Food and Feelings via Bon Appétit **

“Raw meat seemed like a lot at the moment, noted one of my friends, who was dancing to Fleetwood Mac like a car dealership inflatable tube man. But I felt unusually thankful for the chicken, which had once been alive, and for the arbitrary cosmic reality that I was the person cooking the chicken and not the chicken itself.”

Heavier–

30. “How Microagressions Destroyed My Dream of Living in Suburbia” by Thao Thai for cupcakes and cashmere

“I think back to my first weekend in that town, when my husband and I painted the mustard-yellow walls of our new house a pale grey. When we were done with the first coat, we could still see the undertones of the decades-old paint underneath. So we covered it up again and again, until the layers of new paint sat thick and opaque against the foundation of the house. Somehow, our histories begin to look like that, a covering and whitewashing until we can’t remember the original colors at all.”

31. “Thresholds of Violence” by Malcolm Gladwell for The New Yorker ***

“The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.”

32. “How Are You Doing?” by Amy Lin for At The Bottom of Everything

“To start, falling out of time does not mean the end of life. I am still, as of the moment of writing this, living. I am just doing so within a temporal reality that is entirely altered, entirely counter, entirely unlike the time I inhabited previously. I see time, now, as a wending, silken ribbon above me, and I am looking up at its flow, its continuing undulations.” 

33. “We Need to Talk About How We Talk to Each Other” by Leslie Stephens for cupcakes and cashmere

“I've developed a thick skin over the past six years of publishing my writing online, and can honestly say it takes a lot for a negative comment to get to me under normal circumstances. There isn't one comment I can point to and say, "That's the one. That's the one that makes me feel this way." Few are mean enough to warrant deleting per our comment policy, and some of the comments that feel the most cruel start with "I don't mean to be critical" or "I've been reading for a long time, and..." And for every negative comment, there are tens of positive comments. (But ask me which of those I can quote back word for word.) “

34. “We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse” by Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker ***

“Anyone who can get pregnant must now face the reality that half of the country is in the hands of legislators who believe that your personhood and autonomy are conditional—who believe that, if you are impregnated by another person, under any circumstance, you have a legal and moral duty to undergo pregnancy, delivery, and, in all likelihood, two decades or more of caregiving, no matter the permanent and potentially devastating consequences for your body, your heart, your mind, your family, your ability to put food on the table, your plans, your aspirations, your life.”

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Really trying to enjoy every minute of summer

I haven’t had the time to do a proper “of the week” in a bit, but rest assured I’m watching the new season of The Bachelorette, I’ve listened to Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) straight through five times (“I Can See You” slaps), and I finished The School For Good Mothers for book club a week ago; I just haven’t had a moment to write it all down. Summer has been exhilarating and exhausting so far! I genuinely hope you are having a great summer so far–it truly is the best season in Minnesota.

That’s it for me, and I’ll see paid subscribers next week! <3

K bye,

Kelly