Reading List: Anxiety Consumerism, Judicial Apocalypse, Hope in Awful Experiences

Dearests, I’ve neglected this fine newsletter this week, as a few of you have sweetly pointed out. It’s been a weird month of travel and change and frankly, I’ve been lacking the confidence to pull these together, lest they are not as good as I want, or as I imagine you expect them to be? But I promise there are some gems to get you into your weekend, one I am excited is right upon us.

But first, I wanted to tell you about an amazing event I attended last night. An ancillary event for this week’s Global Climate Action Summit, The Future of Food event hosted by WeWork and sf.citi was amazing, and not just because I won a hefty vegan food box from the lovely folks at JUST (see Mum, sometimes social media pays.) Featuring a wide variety of plant-based food entrepreneurs, the event pointed a hopeful eye towards the farmed meat-free future, and had a metric tonne of delicious vegan food to boot. Basically, if someone told me I could only live on Impossible Burgers and JUST cookie dough for the rest of my life, I honestly wouldn’t mind.

Anyways, ON TO THE (mostly) LONGREADS!

Eva Hagberg Fisher, The Professor I Reported For Harassment Got Suspended. Does That Mean I Won? (BuzzFeed) - Trust me when I tell you that this painfully beautiful piece is woefully underserved by its headline. It's deliberate and charming and heartbreaking and so so so sad, an awful experience shared in a poignant, affecting and—dare I say— hopeful way.

Ainsley Harris, Memo to the Silicon Valley boys’ club: Arlan Hamilton has no time for your BS (Fast Company) - This cover story portrait of the queer woman of color who landed in Silicon Valley with the sole purpose of investing in underrepresented founders and the companies they build is fantastic and inspiring. Arriving with no money and sleeping on the floor of SFO while taking meetings during the day, Hamilton is now raising “a $36 million fund dedicated exclusively to black women founders.”

David French, End Qualified Immunity (National Review) - French’s piece on how hard it is to hold law enforcement officers accountable for their malfeasance includes the great line: “When the Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, the Second Amendment Foundation, the Reason Foundation, the National Police Accountability Project, and Public Justice (among others) join hands, we’re approaching the “dogs and cats, living together” phase of the judicial apocalypse.”

Barbara Res, Trump and his flunkies: Why aren't staffers standing up to him? (New York Daily News) - This reaction to the anonymous New York Times op-ed by the former vice president in charge of construction at the Trump Organization asks White House staffers, “But what have they done to try to control him? Steal a memo off his desk so he will forget to sign it? How about not preparing the memo in the first place? And who refuses to lie for him when he makes his outrageous claims?”

Steven Johnson, How to Make a Big Decision (New York Times) - Servicey read for your indecisive readers out there on how “hard choices require us to make those kinds of imaginative leaps: to discover new paths and outcomes that had not been visible to us when we first started wrestling with the decision.”

Rob Pegoraro, Remember Stasi spying to understand the GDPR (The Parallax) - As someone who’s pretty much obsessed with post-war German intrigue, this history lesson-turned-cautionary tale about government spying via dysopic past is 💯.

Rebecca Jennings, Fidget spinners, weighted blankets, and the rise of anxiety consumerism (Vox) - Sometimes you encounter an article that you swear is directly targeted at you. This is one of those articles.

I love you all. And to the two Missive readers and best friends of mine getting married this weekend—by me, I may add!—I hope you are taking a deep breath, caring for each other, and forwarding this newsletter on to at least five of your coworkers.



Be kind to each other, my loves.

Amy