āImagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them ā work, family, health, friends, and spirit⦠and youāre keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls ā family, health, friends, and spirit ā are made of glass.ā I had a baby! My daughter was born on her due date at the end of August, and my partner and I instantaneously felt all of our priorities shift ā not unlike the way every part of my body had adjusted to make room for the tiny-but-chubby human inside me. I love advice and love lists and this is a nice list of pieces of life advice Ryan Holiday has collected over the years to remind me to keep my eye on the glass ball. (Forge)
āUnder the sheer volume of competing facts and studies, news stories and social media posts that bludgeon us daily, we succumb to truth-lite. The overwhelm sees us seek expedient optionsā: Sarah Wilson has some ideas on why the wellness realm has fallen into āconspiratualism.ā (The Guardian)
āAll these men, some of whom I knew intimately and others Iād never met, were debating who owned an image of meā: Emily Ratajkowski canāt buy back her own image but can claim to have the final word in this devastating story (that subsequently went viral) of her abuse and exploitation in her modelling career (The Cut).
On the other hand, Ratajkowski may have missed an opportunity to broaden her argument to include people other than herself, writes Haley Nahman. Without further analysis of the complexity of the modelling industry and Ratajkowskiās own complicity in its value system (the male gaze, female objectification, and self-commodification), the essay falls into a common trap in late-capitalist reflective writing: āwhich is to assume that by simply calling out a problem, or exploiting it in her favor, she takes away its power.ā (Maybe Baby)
For more on this idea of āthe reflexivity trap,ā Katy Waldman dared take on Sally Rooney and other contemporary novelists whose protagonists believe self-awareness absolves them of any need to effect genuine, systemic change: āthat professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that faultāthat lip service equals resistance.ā In a moment that desperately demands more than performative lip service, the danger of the reflexivity trap is that is casts self-awareness as a finish line, not a starting point. (New Yorker)
āIt would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women... Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignityā: Judith Butler does not come to play. (New Statesman)
āShe chose her words precisely, like silver arrows sailing to hit their targets. Instead of referring to something as āracist,ā she called it āthoughtlessnessā; she referred to underrepresented groups as āmisfits.ā She is aware of the ways words like racism and microaggression have lost their power, so she searched for new ones that might make people listenā: I watched and loved Michaela Coelās incredible TV show I May Destroy You. It will be compared maybe to Girls and Fleabag because of the way we always fetishise and compare female creators, and itās not unlike those shows but itās also something completely original and beautiful and unique. E. Alex Jung has written the definitive profile ā read after watching (Vulture)
First picnic since lockdown began