Sullivan, a man notorious for having once chased a burglar out of his house with a gun while wearing nothing but his underwear and a cowboy hat, still despises Francis.
“Inside the Stunning Rise and Fall of Girls Gone Wild”, Sacchi Koul for (RIP) Buzzfeed News
This entire story is full of stories that must have been heartbreaking to edit into mere asides. Top-notch.
Sexy kissing does not fossilize nor preserve in burials, and even if it did, some historian might find a way to dismiss it as merely a brotherly kiss, a kiss between brothers, brothers who kiss.
“When Was the First Sexy Kiss?”, Sabrina Imbler for Defector
Some other bangers from this article:
Rasmussen, the wildlife ecologist, actually specializes in hedgehogs, and recently published a paper documenting the life and death of Thorvald, the oldest scientifically documented European hedgehog—research that might seem unrelated to the matter at hand, which is kissing.
As more Mesopotamian tablets are discovered and studied, perhaps more sexy kisses will be revealed.
let all my poems be / bowls or thrones or hairpieces or marriages.
“which art? what fact?”, Nate Marshall
Via Stacy-Marie Ishmael reposting this 2019 newsletter.
Life is so much more biochemical work than chemical equilibrium, but still, staph seeks that work.
The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green
I first did this book back when it came out as an audiobook, but I bought the paperback edition while I was in DC last week helping out my mom. This decision was partly because of my unhealthy coping mechanism of taking comfort in stacks of books when I do not want to attend to reality, but also because this essay collection has become a touchstone for me when thinking about what I want my own work to do in the world and what I’m sort of afraid to do in my own work. Green deftly walks this line of personal and big-picture observations in a collection that could have been cloying or self-righteous but instead is funny and sad and above all else full of faith in the wonder of the world despite all of the many reasons to despair at it. He pulls this off partly through the simplest and hardest thing in the world, which is being very specific while being vulnerable.
Probably around the time I quit drinking (so, nearly a decade ago) I made an effort to put less of myself into my writing—not in the sense that it lacked voice but more in the sense that I didn’t want to Get Personal. (I still wildly overshare online, but in limited-character asides rather than, for example, the incredibly cringe zines I made in college.) Part of this was because I decided that most of my problems were not actually interesting or special after going to enough AA meetings to hear other people describe all of my problems when describing their problems. But I also kind of wanted to avoid my feelings and avoid being vulnerable, and dismissing them as not interesting was an effective way to do that.
To be clear, I don’t really want to write memoir. It’s more that I feel some pressure in the niche of science and technology-ish stuff I research to write like I Have Answers rather than admit I’m writing my way through something because I don’t fucking know what is to be done. Generally, pulling that off in a work of nonfiction requires being vulnerable. Maybe John Green gets to do that in an essay collection because he already sold a lot of books, I don’t know. But it’s been helpful to read it more to think about the formal dynamics of vulnerability or personal narrative in big-picture-y writing rather than as a story read to me.
Here’s some other favorites from the first half of the book: