Worth the Click

Here are a range of things that I’ve recently found interesting, worth sharing (and clicking).

For the fashion.

I didn’t read the article but I am obsessed with the dresses in this photoshoot. They are art! (The Second Coming of Ariana Grande by Lacey Rose at The Hollywood Reporter)

Hanif Abdurraqib could talk about cement mix drying and it would somehow be powerful and beautiful and the cultural criticism we need.

“There’s a famous Butler quote that surfaces often: “There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers, at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

This quote on its own does the trick of inspiration, I suppose, or at least has the benefit of looking nice laid out on an Instagram grid. But the exchange from which it’s drawn presents a more vivid analysis of how the past and present seem to be on an infinite loop…” (Lessons for the End of the World by Hanif Abdurraqib at The New Yorker)

(I recently wrote a bit about Abdurraqib, and other poets, writing essay collections that are absolutely worth the read if you’re looking for your next read.)

“Evil is lonely.”

Speaking of poets, Saeed Jones was on a bonus episode of Traci Thomas’ podcast The Stacks— which I finally listened to— and it was of course exactly what I needed to hear.

It’s a chat about Toni Morrison’s lecture “Goodness: Altruism and the Literary Imagination” and tying it to our current world. Come for the “hey did you know facts” (the endings of books changed after WWI because the idea of good always prevailing became more complicated after the war) and stay for two curious and thoughtful people talking about what “goodness” means.

A skewering.

This entire article is a class act in publicly dragging someone and there is so much to highlight and quote that it would just be me pasting the entire article. So instead I’ll say that I would never recover if after being a children’s editor someone publicly broke down how I (intentionally or unintentionally) seemed to so thoroughly miss the mark on the entire point of a classic children’s book. (Good-bye, Pamela Paul by Andrea Long Chu at Intelligencer)

Find the new sources you need.

The CDC is intentionally not providing all the information the public may need so it looks like the American Medical Association (AMA) is posting videos on their youtube page about bird flu and current outbreaks the public should stay informed about.