Links To Click This Week: July 14, 2023
My work & work I've been reading
I’ve been wrapping my head around what this newsletter might look like since I finally took the plunge. Sometimes you have to jump and find your wings on the way down. For now, here’s what I envision: Fridays or Saturdays, you’ll get a link roundup that includes my writing for the week across the internet and then links I’ve been reading. Then on Sundays, you’ll get a full blown fresh newsletter from me on something I haven’t published previously somewhere else. During the week, I am using the Notes feature to drop links and re-stack interesting reads as well, so you may see those popup again in these roundups.
I aim for consistency, but I also give myself plenty of permission to be a person. Some days or weeks might not happen.
This week’s Sunday essay is a long one, but I hope it is one that you are able to sit with for a while. I’m grateful for the set of eyes I got on it, especially as it is a story about history, about a bad guy turned good, and about why the disintegration of blogging has been such a loss for, well, a lot of things. I offer that the following Sunday will be much lighter, with a much more “classic book blog” type feel to it.
Thanks for joining me here. I appreciate it. I plan to keep this place free, but those of you who pay—know how much it means and know that my kiddo will love the new books you’re helping keep her in, too.
One last note before the links this week: I continue to struggle with this particular platform’s founder and his stance on transphobia and lack of action on misinformation. I know I have rubbed at least one queer pal wrong about moving here, and that’s someone who told me as much, so it might be more than one person. This place feels better than Twitter for now, and yet, those problems nag at me because of the work I do. Until there is a better free alternative–I’m not paying for Ghost, for example–I’ll be here, and I’ll also be sharing relevant longform pieces over on my original 15-years-strong blog, STACKED, on Mondays (RIP to RSS, and thank you for the topic this week). As always, part of pushing back against bigotry and racism is to keep speaking up and out about it and acknowledging the problems in a tool like Substack.
My Work This Week
The Impact of Book Bans on Authors (go read this over on )
Three anti-book ban bills are being advanced in Massachusetts.
In Pennsylvania, an anti-book ban bill will be presented in the next legislative session.
Pride month cancelations and changes in US libraries. This piece, while a downer because of how much hate it contains, is important. I reached out to a beloved Drag Story Hour performer and author to share what she saw and experienced this June, and her words are the most important part of this story.
This week’s book censorship news from across the country, including a dangerous new bill being proposed in North Carolina, removal of book decisions from professionals in Florida, and the revoking of access to LGBTQ+ books for teens in Montgomery County, Texas.
What I Read This Week
I did not know Milwaukee had such a storied typewriter history!
You know you’ve reached Peak Content when the story is about how sandwiches are just too damn big. I grew up in Sad Sandwich Culture. Give me big sandwiches, dammit. (How much do you want to bet that the same writers ignoring the idea of leftovers advocate for meal prepping, which is just planning a week of leftovers).
Retailers are sweating over the return of student loan repayment and I, for one, cannot be happier for them to sweat. They had the chance to speak up and they didn’t–how many of the same ones worried now got PPPs?
We really need more stories like this one that focus on the librarians whose careers are being upended and mental health destroyed by book bans. I have said it from the beginning and will continue to say it: we care more about the physical objects than we do on the humans enduring all of this, whether they are the librarians and educators and/or the queer and BIPOC folks being hurt.
I am so excited for Britney’s memoir. I am also so happy she got good therapy while working on it.
This week for school–I’m currently half-way through a masters program for clinical mental health counseling–I ended up down a rabbit hole on adult ADHD. It’s a topic with a lot of thorns to it, so I’m not getting into that, but did you know that women between 23 and 49 have been diagnosed for the first time at double the rate they’ve ever been diagnosed in just the last two years? That number is staggering. The data comes from Epic, one of the most commonly used records systems in the medical industry, so it’s not pulled out of nowhere.
Finally: just released their (our?) best books of the year so far. Grab the whole roundup over here. My pick is below—a deliciously weird queer horror mermaid story.
