“But never delude yourself into believing that you require someone else’s blessing (or even their comprehension) in order to make your own creative work.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Happy Friday, ducklings! I’m dropping the Links a bit early because it is a particularly scrumptious load of internet-y goodness and I refuse to let a(nother) shocking week of political news get in the way of some things worth reading.
If 2018 was anything to go by, something genuinely newsworthy will drop the moment after I schedule this thing to go live… The shutdown is still on, the Trump Show is still trumping, Brexit is still a flaming mess of malice…truthfully I needed a break from most of it.
Here’s your batch of reading, let me know what you are getting up to this weekend in the comments. I’m going to try and get some writing down, the house cleaned, and a just-because-it’s-fun-and-I-can creative project idea going. It’s been a while since I’ve had the bandwidth to sketch up a project like this so I’m enjoying the process.
This thread of museums and cultural heritage institutions sharing their “best ducks” missed the last weekly links post by sheer bad timing but was simply way too good not to post. My weird little nerdy heart could barely take the glee. Whoever runs this account is my new true love. (Here’s an easier to digest rundown if you don’t have time to scroll…but you’d REALLY be doing yourself a disservice.)
Well…I just…drat…
Something interesting happened where the creative world intersects with the business world recently.
This story is horrendous, full stop. But it is horribly telling that the term “rape” is conspicuously absent from this article.
Here’s a great round up of TED talks to start your year with some inspiration.
This longform piece from Buzzfeed hit me hard and has stuck with me. Why burnout and anxiety are the millennial condition, and how we got here. You may start off rolling your eyes or yawning, but I hope plenty of people read this through to the end. It describes almost everyone in my general age range that I can name. “To describe millennial burnout accurately is to acknowledge the multiplicity of our lived reality — that we’re not just high school graduates, or parents, or knowledge workers, but all of the above — while recognizing our status quo. We’re deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs for less pay and less security, struggling to achieve the same standards of living as our parents, operating in psychological and physical precariousness, all while being told that if we just work harder, meritocracy will prevail, and we’ll begin thriving. The carrot dangling in front of us is the dream that the to-do list will end, or at least become far more manageable.” (The follow up piece is worth reading too.)
In related news…
Of course I’m not going to bypass the opportunity to share yet another piece on eschewing fast fashion.
I can’t tell if this is cute or possibly a new for the species. By which I mean humans.
The internet has always been a strange place and we’ve always struggled with how to navigate it. We’re now dealing with the aspect of how much of it is fake.
This is dedication to a goal!
What an important study project this must have been, into those who joined ISIS from the US and why.
Why I decided not to pursue freelance writing full time and as my only source of income: the increasingly grim reality. I suspect this will always be my What Might Have Been personal topic–if I had had a different life or circumstances I might have made different choices–but I found that even as a young woman who was able to land pitches, I didn’t make nearly enough until I branched into other kinds of work as well. I want this to be different, and creative and thoughtful writing to be valued more by society (I sure as hell pay for it), but for so many people it’s not a feasible career. We are missing critical voices and perspectives on every conceivable topic as a society because of it.
Seems legit…/s
Like many, I found the closing quote of this piece extremely telling, “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” In other words, this person voted for a man not on the basis of the bridges he could build or the problems he could solve, but because of the people he said or implied he would harm. President as weapon, not as servant; attack dog rather than home defender. Vox breaks this down more eloquently than I.
Women making change happen.
GUYS. Our girl Hannah Capin’s debut novel made Goodreads Best Young Adult Books of January list!
The White House announced that the President would give an address from the Oval Office regarding the “crisis” of the border (reminder, almost everything that can be termed a crisis–including moral ones–at the border has been a crisis of the President’s own policy and making). All major networks were asked to carry the message, and after some perfunctory handwringing (which is not the same thing as a vigorous debate of how to best coverage a president with record breaking false claims, especially given the precedent of not granting other presidents the same kind of airtime), they agreed. Some thought this was a good idea. Others did not. The speech happened, it moved the national mood not a whit and here we are (presumably) still fighting about it.
Meanwhile – because we live in a reality TV show now – Mr. Manafort’s lawyers either on-purpose-sneakily or stupidly filed some paperwork. Oops. Is this incompetence or a leak, do we think? Because we learned that Mr. Manafort shared some information with people associated with Russian intelligence. And wh
Longtime readers know that my love of collective nouns runs deep, so I was delighted to learn that collective nouns themselves have a collective noun.
And incredibly important and valid point in this piece.
Female scribes!
Who wants this?! Who asked for it?! Bring me their names!
Great, now we’ve got aliens to deal with…
Well, they are late because this is happening.
Small Dog Syndrome 