July round up

Monthly -ings

I finally, finally, finally deactivated my Twitter account this month. A couple more weeks and it’ll be deleted for good 🙏 I’m still addicted to my phone, but at least now I’m using it to read (hence the uptick in substacks in this month’s reading recs). Now I’m trying to jumpstart my tired old brain with criticism so if you have recommendations send them my way!

illustration by @nounnewyork on ig

Reading

Books / audiobooks

• Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag.

• Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler.

Articles

• Katy Kelleher on becoming a devotee of destruction. (dirt)

• Marco Roth on how urban planning in the wrong hands kills our cities’ potential (New York Review of Architecture)

• Jael Goldfine on the frontlines of the attention liberation movement (New York Review of Architecture)

• Maria Popova’s almanac of birds. Need this in book format! (Marginalia)

• Maria Popova on Joseph Brodsky on existential boredom (Marginalia)

• Jordan Kinser’s interview with Annie-B Parson. God I wish I could dance. (Believer) (This is cheating and is technically a reread from a few months back but I keep thinking about the body-as-archive of it all.)

• Kristin Ohlson on early childhood and (lack of) memory. (Aeon)

• Jaya Saxena on the food that makes you gay. This reminded me of when a European guy learned Ben was vegetarian and said “don’t you feel weak?” (Eater)

• Kelly Barnhill on writing, traumatic brain injury, memory, and identity (NYT)

Elsewhere on Substack

• Self preservation through privacy in an age of oversharing -

  nikhil
  (
  Splash
  )

• Interiority in essay and memoir writing -

  Alexander Chee
  (
  The Querent
  )

• Revisiting Renata Adler -

  terry nguyen
  (
  Vague Blue
  )

• Food and memory and a tapenade I need to make -

  Clare Michaud
  (
  Beurrage
  )

• Pam Anderson, sexual liberation, and unpacking questions of harm -

  Raechel Anne Jolie
  (
  radical love letters
  )

• Enjoying things to the very end -

  toni bravo
  (
  the delicate decade
  )

• When art feels more real than real life -

  Celine Nguyen
  (
  personal canon
  )

• Moving beyond art monster discourse re:Alice Munro -

  Brandon
  (
  sweater weather
  )

• What was ‘Parts Unknown’ -

  Alicia Kennedy
  (
  From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy
  )

Watching

• Ghostwatch love a gag that provokes irl panic, when will we get another one?

• 13 Assassins 30 mins in we looked at each other and went “this is awesome”

• Challengers fun!

• Love Lies Bleeding fun!

• Singin’ in the Rain a sensory FEAST

• Party Girl this would have changed my life if I saw it at the right age

• When Evil Lurks eek!

• Rewatches: Gladiator, North by Northwest

Arting

• Colossal was firing this month: Phyllis Shafer’s surreal landscapes, Benjamin Sack’s cartographic cityscapes, Skander Khif’s Tunisian photography, Kamwei Fong’s cat drawings, Hitomi Terasawa’s cross-section illustrations of Kowloon Walled City.

• Charles Brooks’ architectural photography of the inside of instruments.

Coveting

• Julia Dufossé’s illustrations for A24’s Dream Theater Zine.

• Lisa Says Gah sardines shirt! (pair w/ my years-long yearning for the cow pants.)

• So many books and cookbooks I added to my tbr this month…too many to list but we are in SAVE MODE over here, so all I can do is covet

Listening

• Dreams & Whispers, Bartosz Kruczyński

Writing

ICYMI, posts from the month:

• Beer brats and mayo-based salads: A cookout survey

• Flowers and friendship bracelets

• 20 years gone.

As ever, I’m open to any recommendations you want to send my way!