November 13, 2020

hope for all four seasons total landscaping

Hi there,

What a week for hope! And, of course, for Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Imagine trying to remember all the details of 2020 in the future, and not believing your own memory that the pandemic and also this utter nonsense happened in the same year. In one year, kids! I can already imagine my niece’s disdainful teenage face, as she gently floats away from me on her hoverboard, to somewhere safely out of earshot.

While we didn’t just wake up in a perfect world this morning, or last Saturday, we can ease off on feeling as though the world is treading [some dangerously populist] water, and actually have some hope that things will improve.

Nikita Gill’s very well-timed Insta post from earlier this week struck a chord with me:

Let’s never get so cynical, or so numb to ongoing events, that we can’t find some truth in idea that “hope is a product of action.” There’s still so much to do.

Links of the Week

• Rise & Shine’s Ask the Audio Producers! panel

• The Philly Inquirer’s deep dive into Four Seasons Total Landscaping

• The Mirror Chicken’s Twitter feed

• Carrie Symonds v Dominic Cummings

  Suchandrika @SuchandrikaC

  The only downside of the Dominic Cummings resignation is that we'll have no reason to hear his best nickname in @JoshBerryComedy sketches bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…

  Josh Berry @JoshBerryComedy

  Conservative Party advisor phoning Blojo about Dominic Cummings’ fury over Lee Cain’s resignation https://t.co/bVMZMPF2vG

  November 13th 2020

• Our obsession with unconscious bias created a diversity disaster

• Abby Phillip Is Next-Gen CNN

• The Making and Unmaking of the Council Estate

• How the news took over reality (from 2019 but felt v. relevant this week)

• Facebook, QAnon and the world's slackening grip on reality

• All my life, I have been biking with brakes on

• The brilliant, resilient Sylvia Plath behind the myth

• The Subversive Awkwardness of Four Weddings and a Funeral (an oldie, but I found myself regressing into 90s romcom this week)

• Ask Molly: Heart

• Lazy Susan: Keep It Light (audio)

• The Week Unwrapped: Viral faith, Armenia and legendary prejudice (audio)

• This timely and necessary new book by Lucy Kueng, of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (I was one of her interviewees):

My stuff

• I slacked off on NaNoWriMo this week as I had too many other things to write - back on it this weekend!

• I wrote for the episode of The Now Show out on Radio 4 tonight at 6:30pm, what a lot of news we had to talk about in the writer’s room

If you enjoy my work & fancy buying me a virtual coffee, I’d be delighted (and will hopefully experience a virtual caffeine rush):

https://ko-fi.com/suchandrika