If You Need Some Longreads / And You'd Like To Read Them / Come On Honey / Let Us Know!
My loves, happiest of Fridays. A wee personal plug: If you’re in the Bay Area, I’d really love - nay, NEED - you to join us at Odd Salon on Tuesday, October 16th for my first curated evening, MYSTERY! I may be biased, but it is an amazing line-up and I am so thankful for every speaker who is gracing the stage. From what I’ve heard, they are actually selling fast (eeeeeek!) so please make sure to get your tickets now to guarantee your spot. And omg, look at these amazing humans speaking! LOOK AT THEM!
Colin Alexander - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Dons the Deerstalker: Solving a Real-Life Murder, Sans Sherlock
Michelle Larson - Paradise lost... and found? How an ancient city went "boom" and became legend
Schuyler Erle - CROATOAN, or The Strange Disappearance of the Roanoke Colony
Muriel Gordon - Rabies, maybe? The mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe
Julia Markish - Orcas: Humans (or Persons?) of the Sea
Tre Balchowsky - Into the Fog: the Disappearance of L-8’s Blimp Crew
And this amazing art by Imogen Speer!!
Anyhoo, TO THE LONG READS!
Gaby Hinsliff, How self-love got out of control (The Guardian) - Do any of us have any idea of what narcissism actually is? And why is that term being used to describe “overindulging in all kinds of navel-gazing” a la our current social media age? And if everyone’s a narcissist, is anyone a narcissist? I like Hinsliff’s dive into the history of the term and how it is used.
Christopher R. Browning, The Suffocation of Democracy (The New York Review of Books) - As many of you know, I was a History major in college, focusing on European history, specifically WWII and the Holocaust, so I’ve read a great deal of Browning’s work. His most famous book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland looks at a look at a group of middle-aged men who had been drafted into the war efforts, but due to being ineligible at the front, were instead used to terrorize Jews and commit mass murder. In Ordinary Men, Browning purports that normal people killed out not out of fear or rage, but because of a difference to authority and pressure from their peers. So when Christopher Browning takes to the New York Review of Books to describe “several troubling similarities and one important but equally troubling difference” between Germany in the 1930s and the United States now, we best be listening.
Taylor Lorenz, Teens Are Being Bullied ‘Constantly’ on Instagram (The Atlantic) - Look, junior high and high school were rough. And they were super rough even before we had ever-connected computers in our pockets that can instantly capture our best and worst moments and slingshot them out into our social circles for permanent posterity. I can’t imagine what it must be like for today’s teens.
Alexandra Petri, It is very difficult to get the train to stop (Washington Post) - "I am so tired of the moment when you discover how little your weight counts against the train’s. / I want us to be the train and not the thing thrown under it." Petri is hands-down one of the best satire writers of my generation. So when she goes real and raw and personal, it’s devastating.
That’s it, that’s all. Buy those Odd Salon tickets. And be kind to each other.
xoxo Amy