Wednesday Recs | Feb. 28
Weekly recommendations on what to read, watch, listen to, and think about
Leap Day is just ONE day away, and I hope all of you have made extensive plans to take advantage of your bonus 24 hours.
I personally will be using the extra weekday to not be productive, considering this is an extra “work” day that I get by without just fine in 75% of my calendar years.
Also, it feels like ice cream should be involved somehow.
I must have been feeling topical and opinionated recently, as in two consecutive essays I made the case for optimism as a social responsibility and put an entire industry of creatives on blast.
Don’t worry — this Friday I return to my regularly scheduled, inoffensive and uplifting vibe with a post about the rooms we don’t think we deserve to be in, and why.
As a dad of two young boys who also teaches young adults and volunteers as a mentor for teenage boys, I’m dead set on helping remake the male environment for all of them. Dr. Jo-Ann of
nails some of the challenges of this mission in her excellent recent post on male bashing.I must be feeling comfy on my save-the-kids soapbox, because I’m also loving
and his substackLet’s all be a little more bored with help from the very un-boring
and his killer essay “In Defense of Boredom”This track by Spoon is outside my usual genre wheelhouse, but damn it’s just so good — and puts me in a scrappy underdog mindset that I love.
If you can get past the oddly out-of-tune acoustic guitar of the intro (Is it on purpose? An oversight? WHY?) you’ll be rewarded by this sixten track “Slip” and its moody-yet-uplifting chorus
No one does sad quite like Tom Odell, and this track off his new album is him at his weepy, melodramatic best. Come for the conversational lyrics, stay for the devastatingly beautiful instrumental drop in the 2nd chorus.
Two brothers playing two electric guitars, inspired by 1950s Latin American music, produced by the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. So simple, and so, so good.
Natalie Hodges is a former musician who went into academia, so it’s no big shock that I relate to her. What is shocking is the gut-punching profoundness of her National Book Award-nominated memoir Uncommon Measure
Apparently the 13th-century poet we know as Rumi has been translated and re-translanted and interpreted so many times that it’s impossible to know whether any of his most famous poems or quotes represent anything close to his original intent. But they’re still incredibly beautiful.
The other day, I heard someone use the words “reservoir of joy,” and I thought it was just the loveliest little phrase.
I just really respond to the concept of joy being something we can bank, something that we can build up when things are good if we’re conscious and careful and deliberate about it. And when we’ve put in the work, when we’ve added to our reservoir of joy, then we can draw on it when things are tough — when the rain doesn’t seem to be falling for days or weeks at a time.
What do you do to fill your reservoir of joy?
What have you been reading, watching, listening to, or doing? Let us all know in the comments!
Thank you so much for the recommendation, Taylor! I'd like to recommend Next Gen Men, a small but mighty Canadian nonprofit that really gets the tone right about how to engage with boys right now. They have a newsletter, podcasts, and lots of resources on their site: https://www.nextgenmen.ca/
Thank you, Taylor! I appreciate the shout out so much. And love the idea of thinking about 2/29 as an extra leisure/fun day rather than a work day!