Hi hi,

This is embarrassing: If you’ve replied to this newsletter anytime in the last few months, I didn’t see it because I didn’t realize Buttondown had turned on a feature that keeps replies inside the app (versus just turning up in my regular old email, like they have for years). Sorry! I wasn’t ignoring you intentionally. I am also glad this newsletter hasn’t prompted 100% radio silence for the entire summer, which is what I thought had happened. Whoops. I aim to reply to everyone by the end of this weekend. Here’s some art, ideas, and internet for you:

1. The story of how Brazilians used digital organizing to secure Lula’s re-election (and save the Amazon rainforest) is super inspiring. But I haven’t seen many news articles go into depth about the most novel and potentially applicable-to-the-U.S. aspects of the Brazilians’ tactics: There were a couple of good BlueSky threads about how the digital organizing was centered on ignoring the opposition entirely and recognizing that most major social platforms, including Meta’s, are at best not anti-fascist. Digital organizing in this era means explicitly recruiting people en masse to get past right-favoring algorithms wherever it’s possible.

2. How do we sustain friendships in a world on fire?

3. For fellow screenwriting and/or creative process nerds: I recommend checking out Jacob Tierney’s I’ll Believe In Anything, his annotated scripts for Heated Rivalry.

4. My dear friend Lauren Peterson wrote a beautiful book about the making of modern queer families. It’s partly a memoir and partly the guide she wishes she and her wife had had when they embarked on having kids a few years ago.

5. This month’s “Good Job, Science” dispatch: a new mRNA vaccine can cut the risk of melanoma recurrence in half; there’s finally movement on a promising treatment for glioblastoma, one of the most devastating cancers out there.

6. A good brownie recipe, imo worth the bit of extra faff it requires; Ali Slagle’s 40 essential ingredients.

7. Top-tier NYC Ferry swag.

8. The original Lost Kitchen cookbook is my household’s all-time favorite. While the second of the series was a bit of a let-down, the new, third installment is back to being excellent (but I still find the word “supper” affected).

9. A very short story by Jorge Luis Borges.

10. Glorious: In northern Norway there is a whale-shaped museum about whales. Pro-tip if you’re in the NYC area: do a whale-watching tour out of Sheepshead Bay (we went on this one) during peak humpback sighting season in summer and early fall.

11. The internet is a store but it used to be a library.

12. The link is this document.

13. It’s like this. Your parents are driving
    You home through some newly
    Minted night—after a concert,
    Movie, church festival. You are
    Resting your head against the window
    And your heart is leaping out
    Into some filled-to-the-brim future
    Skin. Still, you are being carried,
    This is necessary to the feeling.
    “I just had to deal with it,”
    Paisley said, when she realized
    Her soft-rock idol was gray.
    Her bewildered father drove her
    To a concert, where she stood
    In the bleachers and screamed,
    MICHAEL, I LOVE YOU!
    “He looked at me in the eye
    And said thank you.” She cried
    And composed herself like a song.
    Is it allowed, is it even allowed?
    To leave the family harmonizers
    And send your lone voice up?
    Riverboat rat, soaring catfish,
    Mississippi queen.
    Look at her grooving, carried
    Along on black water,
    To “What a Fool Believes.”
    
    —From “Sensual Songs for Eight-Year-Olds” by Patricia Lockwood, from her new poetry collection

Bye,

Laura

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