An interview with me, and other cozy week content
I hope everyone is settling in for their ideal hibernation week, whatever that looks like for you. In the past, I’ve been very committed to napping as much as possible during the last week of the year. This year, having already far exceeded my nap goals for 2023, I’m snuggling up with my book edits (and hopefully some movies, too). If you’re looking for content to keep you company during your travels, chill outs, or cooking marathons, here are some things I’ve recently enjoyed.
I was on a podcast!
I’m the guest on the most recent episode of the podcast Water Cooler Talk, hosted by Adam William. Adam chooses two recent news stories to discuss on each episode, which serve as a springboard for wide ranging interviews. We talked about the discovery a previously unknown ancient language within the Hittite empire, colonialism’s responsibility for climate change, the importance of recognizing diversity within and between past societies, and quite a bit about some of the themes of my book, including how recovering from apocalypses requires not nostalgia for returning to an interrupted past, but hope for building a new and better and future. This is the longest interview I’ve done on the guest side of the mic, and it was a great conversation. Click here for links to the episode in several podcast apps, or search for it in your favorite. Here’s a taste of me talking about the recently discovered language and the power of ancient texts in general:
On the one hand, it's really important to have these texts, and it can be so illuminating about how all these different groups were interacting and getting to know each other, or diverging from each other. But on the other hand, written language has been throughout history a tool of the elites. Things are written down by people who get to decide what's going to be remembered. And they're written down for other people who are in that same kind of intellectual and cultural sphere. So I think it's important to realize that when you're reading a text, that point of view can also be inherently limiting.
A TV show with no stakes
The Gilded Age is a lavish take on late 19th-century New York City from Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey. Season two just wrapped up on HBO, and I’m obsessed. The costumes are glorious, the cast is stacked with an absurd number of Tony winners, and the plot…well, let’s just say a lot happens, and none of it ever matters. The most exciting moment in one episode is that soup is NOT spilled on a duke. The most suspenseful season-long narrative arc concerns a servant tinkering with an alarm clock. The Gilded Age will make you feel like you just had a lobotomy, and shouldn’t that be the point of television sometimes? If you watch, don’t miss the Vulture recaps by Alice Burton and their hilarious comment sections.
An analysis of Instagram
I haven’t been on Instagram for over three years, and my impression is that the app itself and our cultural relationship to it have both changed a lot during that time. I don't have the experience to offer a particularly insightful analysis of what Instagram means now, but something is going on with how it's become a vector not just of FOMO or selective presentations of people’s “best lives,” but of the values and pressures of the dominant culture itself. I think this paragraph from a recent newsletter by Rob Horning is onto something:
When people need a sense of what success and social inclusion look like, in their immediate circle and in the concentric rings broadening out toward their aspirational horizons, they look at Instagram. It is where users can consume normativity. They can scroll until they have struck some sort of balance between anxiety and reassurance about where they fit into society, and then they can close the app.
Read the rest here, and reply to tell me how the ~holiday season~ is manifesting on the app. I’m sure it’s nothing but warmth and joy! And if it’s not, remember it’s always ok to take a break. The Gilded Age is waiting.