[Go to site: main page, start]

The Library

Books that have informed my thinking, organized into five themes I'm exploring in my current work. Some I've read closely; others I've encountered through interviews, talks, or other readers; a few are on my list — books I know belong here but haven't yet had time to engage with. Each card links to either a newsletter where I mentioned the book, or something I listened to or read about it.

Mothering as public practice

20 books
  • Foundations
  • Garbes reframes mothering as collective rather than personal labor. It shifted parenthood from the realm of the personal to the realm of the communal for me, and while she also addresses the many limitations in our current culture of parenting, she challenges us to think about how to look at the work of caring for children as something of utmost importance, be it for our own children or others'.
  • In a chapter about ambition, Catherine Ricketts writes about children, work, and the mother-artist identity. She points to beautiful examples of mother-artists who have been able to blend the two, especially by centering their work in or on the home. Encountered through Mothers in Art and Design SF, the community that recurs across this archive.
  • bell hooks explains, in the simultaneously nuanced and direct way only she can, how Black women carved out spaces of love, dignity, and resistance within their homes, even under the most dehumanizing conditions. This opened up everything for me. Of course we can't compare the circumstances of slavery to the environments in which most of us get to mother today, but we can consider that any environment in which one mothers is a site for political choices. The way we approach the most mundane acts — making a bed, cleaning a kitchen, holding a child — can be politically and emotionally charged.
  • Biology
  • Bohannon tells the story of human evolution through the female body — the actual biological scaffolding for the argument that mothering is species-wide. I read this while pregnant, and couldn't stop thinking about the fact that all human babies are technically born premature because our upright bodies don't allow for a gestation period longer than 9 months. It opened the door to a completely new view of the postpartum period and how we evolved to navigate it.
  • Beekman, an evolutionary biologist, argues that human language evolved not for hunting or tool-making but because human infants are born so underdeveloped that they require years of cooperative care — and that care required communication. The argument seems difficult to prove, but listening to this interview at the precipice of my child becoming verbal still gave me a new appreciation for all his creative attempts at language in the pre-verbal years.
  • I picked this up because I have a very active, very vocal new toddler and wanted something grounding. As a child of immigrants, most of what I do intuitively as a mom isn't as American as I thought. A child-centered life is actually unnatural in human history. It opened up a lot of questions for me about the types of social structures that enable the equanimity required to go through daily life in partnership with, rather than in service to, your child.
  • Preston, a science journalist, makes the biological case for alloparenting by touring the wider animal kingdom — fish, frogs, beetles, naked mole rats, hyenas, primates. What stayed with me from her conversation with Saxbe, whose work is referred to in the book as well, is that the tools for alloparental care are sitting unused in every human brain, ready to come online when an infant is in proximity. Anyone who loves and pays attention to a child can activate them.
  • Saxbe, a psychologist who runs a lab studying parental brain changes, makes the case that fatherhood restructures the brain in ways parallel to motherhood — that great fathers are made, not born, because the neural equipment for caregiving comes online in response to proximity and attention, not gender. Belongs here as the biological evidence that caregiving capacity isn't fixed by sex; it's activated by the work itself. The book is soon to come out, but see her conversation with Preston, the author of the previous book.
  • Parenting
  • Delahooke explains how to nurture a child's mind-body connection rather than managing their behaviors. Regulation in a child's physical body supports healthy relationships and loving interactions, in turn building the infrastructure that eventually enables the child to use reasoning and thinking to flexibly manage life's challenges.
  • A collection of papers describing a way of seeing and caring for infants based on respect. I love that it's directed at both infant care professionals and parents. (It has never made sense to me that we expect education of the professionals we hire to care for our children, but we don't expect the same of ourselves.) There is so much literature on what to do with a baby. But few resources on how to be.
  • Practical in the best sense — full of specific language for specific moments. A translation guide: here is what the child is experiencing, here is what they need to hear, here is how to say it without losing yourself in the process. I use it constantly. It sits on my nightstand not as inspiration but as a tool.
  • Interiority
  • Something almost no one talks about is what your body experiences as a caregiver to young children, through birth and breastfeeding but also through being a 24/7 physical comfort provider while still maintaining your autonomy. Montei's analysis connects this to consent at large, and to what cultural norms are embedded in touch.
  • The body is the specificity that makes a human experience universal. I've used this book to make a case for writing the body back into experience: a task in two senses, since mothering re-anchored me in my body and the memoir I'm working on is a memoir of waiting. Van der Kolk's book on how trauma lives in the body and how we can process it through embodied practices anchors that case.
  • I first encountered the idea of matrescence years before getting pregnant through the work of reproductive psychologist Aurelie Athan, who is known for reviving the term to describe a mother's development (akin to adolescence for kids). It was an incredible turning point for me because it provided so much nuance to what I knew and had observed to be a deeply personal shift. Shortly after becoming a mom, I read journalist Lucy Jones' book of the same title and participated in a discussion with a group of new moms in my neighborhood about it. The strangeness and joy of making new friends in early motherhood feels inextricably tied to matrescence for me: you are going through a whole life shift and you need a cohort.
  • Not a parenting book — a novel in fragments, rotating through voices across centuries, circling the question of what it means to bring life into the world. The structure itself is an argument: reproduction is never just biological, it is always also a transmission of language, memory, loss, and form. I was averse to writing about motherhood before I read this. After, I understood that my aversion was itself the subject.
  • On the choice to become a parent
  • Donath clearly differentiates between 'regret' and 'ambivalence' — interviewing anonymous Israeli women, ages 26-73, who regretted having children. The cultural context was specific enough that I couldn't fully relate to the women themselves, but the honesty of their emotional experiences was very eye-opening, and the regret-vs-ambivalence distinction has stayed with me. The first book I ever read on this subject.
  • In a different space we occupy — our marital relationships — we also experience tremendous change through the transition to parenthood. Here, psychologist Molly Millwood explores not only how women navigate the transformations of motherhood, but how it impacts their partnerships.
  • A blend of frustrating personal experience and thorough research by NYT parenting writer Jessica Grose on the history of unrealistic parenting expectations in the United States. Helpful in understanding the history and structural gaps that make parenting so hard in the U.S., but also how much we've internalized about what parenthood is supposed to look like. A primer for anyone whose fear of parenthood comes from unrealistic standards, and encouragement to parent according to your own values.
  • A thorough reality check about the impact of social media on our interpretations of motherhood, particularly from 'momfluencers' who are the modern-day incarnation of the very same narratives about idealized mothers, wives and heteronormative nuclear families that were peddled by glossy magazines in the last few decades.
  • From the publisher: "In the midst of a historic 'birth dearth,' why do some 5 percent of American women choose to defy the demographic norm by bearing five or more children? Hannah's Children is a compelling portrait of these overlooked but fascinating mothers... The social scientist Catherine Pakaluk, herself the mother of eight, traveled across the United States and interviewed fifty-five college-educated women who were raising five or more children. Through open-ended questions, she sought to understand who these women are, why and when they chose to have a large family, and what this choice means for them, their families, and the nation."
  • From the publisher: "What is 'woman' if not 'mother'? Anything she wants to be. Forgoing motherhood has traditionally marked a woman as 'other.'... Instead of continuing to paint women without kids as sad, self-obsessed, or somehow dysfunctional, what if we saw them as boldly forging a first-in-a-civilization vision for a fully autonomous womankind? Or as journalist and thought leader Ruby Warrington asks: What if being a woman without kids were in fact its own kind of legacy? Touching on themes like intergenerational healing, feminism, environmentalism, and more, this personal look and anthropological dig into a stubbornly taboo topic is a timely and brave reframing of what it means not to be a mom."

Care as the organizing principle of daily life

32 books
  • Work vs. Care
  • From the publisher: "In Get to Work, Linda Hirshman issues a wake-up call to the women of America. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and the latest research, she contends that women's choices to abandon the workplace and stay home with their children — voluntarily or involuntarily — are bad for them, bad for their families, and bad for society. Hirshman argues that women cannot achieve genuine equality until they participate fully in the workforce and the public sphere."
  • On planning a career break after kids — and coming back stronger. The 'power pause' framing gives parents in the gray zone between paid work and care work a vocabulary for what they're doing.
  • The 'fifth trimester' (months 4-6 post birth) is when most women transition back to work. And what a wrought journey that can be.
  • Of everything I read, this book stayed with me the most because it provided language for the challenges of work-life balance that didn't feel emotionally loaded and therefore a bit easier to digest. Filled with stories and research that explain how different women navigate work and family transitions in their own ways (with an eye for cultural differences as well), its focus is how to develop resiliency, from the perspective of researchers on organizational behavior.
  • Folbre, a feminist economist, argues that care work — paid and unpaid — is the foundation of every economy and yet has been structurally undervalued by the metrics economics uses to measure what counts. The book is a historical and political case for why recognizing care as work is the precondition for any serious reform.
  • Callaci, a historian, traces the 1970s Wages for Housework movement — Italian, American, and Caribbean feminists (Selma James, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Wilmette Brown, Margaret Prescod) who argued that the labor of running a home was real, economically productive work that capitalism had hidden by calling it love. The book takes the movement seriously as political theory rather than historical curiosity.
  • Economics
  • Resolving work-life conflicts is as vital for individuals and families as it is essential for realizing the country's productive potential. The federal government largely ignores the connection between individual work-life conflicts and more sustainable economic growth. Business and government treat the most important things in life — health, children, elders — as matters for workers to care for entirely on their own time and dime.
  • A memoir of pioneering feminist economist Devaki Jain, whom I met for the first time at our recent conference in Geneva. "So much of our society seems to me to rest on the assumption of a wife working quietly away in the background, anticipating the needs of others and fulfilling them without resentment."
  • A history of the nursing industry, documenting how nursing went from a ubiquitous practice — home, family and spiritually based — to a profession. DiGregorio does a beautiful job showing the role nursing played in the development of civilization — whether or not you heard about them, nurses were always there.
  • A sweeping global history of work from hunter-gatherers to the present day. Lucassen examines how humanity organizes labor across households, tribes, cities, and states, exploring the constant tension between cooperation and subordination at work.
  • Time
  • Accepting that we have a finite amount of time on earth is important to remember every so often. Especially in a world where our opportunities for consumption, production and work are endless. Burkeman makes a case for doing what matters, rather than trying to fit it all into our limited time on earth.
  • Lightman writes: 'In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along. Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment.' I remember being so struck when I first read this. It seemed to explain so much.
  • 'There are really only two time zones for a person with ADHD: now and not now. A person with ADHD is very present focused.' Besides enlightening my relationship with close loved ones with ADHD, learning to consider that human beings have different relationships with and experiences of time was enormously helpful. It became a wonderful starting point for curiosity and empathy toward others' values.
  • Practice
  • Reflecting on the last year while reading Attenberg's 1000 Words was very grounding. Her four-season frame for creative work explained how my drawn out negotiation with work has felt over the last year. How allowing work to bloom into a practice feels right.
  • My biggest 'goal' this year is to shift from the eternal balancing act of 'I work+rest+play' to the unifying identity of artist in which 'My daily life is art.' In other words, to become a day artist. If we see creativity as a way of being rather than of doing, we can attempt to live each day as if our life itself is a work of art.
  • Choosing to lean into a season, as with winter, is a remarkable way to gain agency. May's 2020 book continues to be a source of solace for so many.
  • In the highest authority on traditional Chinese medicine, the interconnected whole of life and health is directly related to living in rhythm with the seasons. The idea of preventive action stood out to me, as I tend to be a bit delayed in my reactions and adoptions; if a big life change happens, I'll power through efficiently and productively, only to feel the changes weeks or months later.
  • A new year refresher on overcoming resistance in creative work. Pressfield's resistance framing maps directly onto the inner work of legitimizing unpaid creative practice.
  • Last year held a lot of firsts for me in terms of investing in myself: my first writing retreat, my first cohort-based experience of doing The Artist's Way, my first time paying writing mentors to learn specific aspects of craft, and my first writer's group. Part of an antidote to imposter syndrome through investment in unpaid creative work.
  • Deep work — the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks — versus shallow work, which is not cognitively demanding and can be performed while distracted. To read Deep Work through the lens of news consumption, my starting assumption has to be that everyone is a knowledge worker.
  • Mise-en-place — 'putting in place' — refers to the setup procedures used in professional kitchens to ensure that ingredients and tools are put in place before cooking. Charnas extracts key principles from mise-en-place that could be applied to any part of one's life. It all begins with a plan and a map: how will everything happen on the upcoming shift, and accordingly, where should everything be?
  • The best book to end the year with because Le Guin's approach to life helped me punctuate so much of what I was metabolizing — most importantly, that common human work is fuel for writing and art. Responsibility is a privilege. If you delegate that work to others, you've copped out of the very source of your writing, which after all is life.
  • I approach self-care as a complex profession, as in the Checklist Manifesto. I make a list, and I regularly review and iterate on it. Outsourcing the need to remember what works frees up so much space to think about new things, to be present.
  • Sustaining work
  • My body carries the load of my reactions to the world, so whatever I can do to process them out, I'm doing. The Nagoskis make the case that burnout is a body-cycle that has to be physically completed, rather than a mindset to think your way out of.
  • Reading Grit and Burnout side-by-side is interesting. While talented people are enamoring and easy to compare ourselves to, grit is a better indicator of your success — and you can increase it.
  • Lerner explains that most of us are ineffective at using anger to clarify and fulfill our needs. Instead, we're socialized to fear anger, deny it, displace it, or turn it on ourselves. 'Managing anger effectively goes hand in hand with developing a clearer I and becoming a better expert on the self.' What I loved is that this centers the person experiencing anger and encourages them to prioritize themselves rather than trying to change the people around them, which is impossible.
  • An invitation to rethink how we interact with the built world through a series of stories from the lived experiences of disability and the innovations that emerged from them. Disability reveals just how unfinished the world really is, in its mundane forms and in its most aspirational politics.
  • From the earliest days of our friendship, we were each fascinated by the way the other organized her thoughts and ideas, and we wanted to know each other's opinion about every single thing. This feeling has never faded away. Even today as we talk to each other, we swear we can feel ourselves sharpening in real time.
  • Home & inheritance
  • I've never moved to another city in my adult life and I wanted to start my history lesson from the beginning. A quirky, 25-year-old book that offers an unusually intimate take on history; I have already found myself looking at acorns on an SF hike, immersed in thought about what it took to grind acorn into meal daily.
  • On the surface, Emily Dickinson lived an ordinary life — when she died, her death certificate listed her occupation as "at home." Her internal world, however, was extraordinary. She loved passionately, wrote scores of letters, anguished over abandonment, fought with God, found ecstasy in nature, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer.
  • Tanizaki's lament on modern design's failure to consider 'our own habits and tastes' became the organizing line for an entire framework about designing one's own life — newsletter, news consumption, daily structure, home — with that consideration in mind. Much of my interest in the subjects of this newsletter comes from a desire to think big about my own effort to live a life that carefully considers my own habits and tastes.
  • An architectural theory text analyzing how modern homes were designed as visual performances. The 'homes designed as visual performances' framing connects directly to what fills the space when work-as-public-identity recedes — and how the home itself becomes a stage for invisible labor and self-presentation.

Tending shared reality as civic care

20 books
  • Foundations
  • The book that moved me to pursue journalism, which I read (sobbing) en route to Yunnan Province as a junior in college. An employee of the state radio system, Xinran somehow got permission to host a talkback radio show called 'Words on the Night Breeze' about Chinese women's experiences at the end of the 1980s. What is incredible about each story is that it's from a woman who would otherwise have been irrelevant to the national story had there not been a journalist they could call or write to with their most painful secrets and complicated assessments of what it meant to be a woman in China.
  • To be a moral journalist, you must retain your humanity. Journalism is about channeling emotions, not turning them off. Part of your challenge will be to learn and master what you don't know rather than to hide behind your ignorance. It takes time to hear out the innermost truth of individuals.
  • Wallace argues that objectivity has often been used to exclude — that journalists from marginalized positions were forced to perform 'neutrality' in order to be legible, while those in dominant positions could pretend their view was universal. In other words, it takes work to stay neutral. It takes curiosity and imaginative empathy and patience and being willing to take a breath to understand why our neighbors feel the way they do and do the things they do.
  • Industry & infrastructure
  • An extremely accessible history of journalism told through a long list of questions like: When and where was the first newspaper published? When was the first interview? Did people ever trust the press? The authors note: 'News is not necessarily journalism, in which newsworthy information and comment is gathered, filtered, evaluated, edited, and presented in credible and engaging forms. At its best, journalism puts news into context, investigates, verifies, analyzes, explains, and engages.'
  • Ananny's premise is that the public's right to hear is as important as the journalist's right to speak. The book is doing infrastructure-level theory for the project of tending shared reality as a structural argument rather than only an ethical one.
  • Its core dilemma has stayed with me: National journalism cannot tell the stories of place as well or as often as local news media, and yet, American political power is tied to geography.
  • A heavy read on where objectivity came from, how messy it is, and what we can learn from its use in other professions. The book's central question — where journalism's ethical norms came from in the first place — is foundational to what to keep and what to redesign as the news ecosystem fragments.
  • Critical thinking
  • Empathy is less a trait and more a skill that can be practiced. He walks through how we evolved to be capable of empathy, why it's feeling harder than ever, and different ways people have exercised it. People who avoid empathy often hurt themselves in the process — individuals who empathize with others attract friends more easily, experience greater happiness, and suffer less depression.
  • A thoughtful guide on how to learn from people whose views are different than your own, particularly when it comes to political polarization in the US. Guzmán's 'what am I missing?' framing — the question as the doorstop of an open mind in a divided world — is direct vocabulary on the civic posture this constellation is naming.
  • Modeling is the crucial element in normalizing the behavior of critical thinking. We need to do our utmost to increase the spaces in society in which you are the odd person out if you don't think critically.
  • Bogart's 'reading as listening' framing and the broader argument about raising kids who can resist react-to-everything internet engagement is direct material on what tending shared reality looks like at the intergenerational scale. One of three books I name as essential reading for becoming and raising critical thinkers.
  • Civic heart
  • I first came across the phrase 'civic heart' in this 1990 examination of the social security benefits system. The introduction is titled 'The Civic Heart.' The thought resonated immediately because it feels very similar to the Buddhist concept of imaginative empathy — one of three pre-requisites for global citizenship: the wisdom to perceive interconnection, the courage not to deny difference, and the imaginative empathy to understand others.
  • Ikeda summarizes Tsunesaburo Makiguchi's argument that every individual requires three different types of self-awareness: a local awareness, of being rooted in one's own community; a national awareness, as belonging to a nation; and an awareness of being a citizen of the world. Why should we consume global news? Because it allows us to practice global citizenship.
  • Makiguchi advocated broadening and elevating our outlook by alternately looking at the world from the perspective of the local community, and seeing the local community from the perspective of the world. Which is hard. But what if looking at all three levels — local, national, global — is the only way to locate ourselves?
  • Lawrence Carter of Morehouse College writes of Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of the World House: 'I intend to open all the windows of my house and, without getting blown off my feet, let the cultural winds of the world blow through. We can widen our perception of the world and enlarge our understanding of who we are, what we are capable of, what we ought to envision, in solidarity with others.'
  • 'There is no escape from your own subjectivity. The world seems complicated and mysterious to you, but if you change, the world will appear more simple. The issue is not about how the world is, but about how you are. It's as if you see the world through dark glasses, so naturally everything seems dark. But can you take them off in the first place? Can you look directly at the world? Do you have the courage?'
  • Holding complexity
  • 'We need stories that foreground interconnection and interdependence. Stories about the digital world that restrict our focus to individual people and individual rights will never inspire the long-term transformations needed to address the network crisis. Here, too, we need different stories.' Phillips and Milner frame our information issues as one of dealing with pollutants in an ecosystem.
  • Schmich was a longtime columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Her power comes from honesty and not prestige. She writes about her family, a lot. She writes about her tribe (Chicago). Which makes you feel like you're reading about your own family, your own tribe. You are making sense of the world you live in together... together. But it's not the same as effortlessly being guided by a wise, even-tempered, local friend. That's what I'm afraid has been lost.
  • Hardy explains that his primary interest in math is creative, and therefore, nothing he has done has been particularly useful or harmful. It's evident this is his way of separating himself from the math that informs war. Reading Hardy's apology left me aware of how easy it is to do the mental gymnastics to disassociate ourselves from some of the darker impacts our professions end up having on society. And I wonder: whose responsibility does it then become to pick up the pieces and rebuild trust, especially with those who see (and reject) our professions as a singular whole?
  • Schwartz, father of the internal family systems model in psychology, makes an incredible case for seeing even our inner worlds as systems or communities. Just like with external ecologies, changes in one aspect can have unforeseen consequences. An excellent case for internal healing + external capacity building for communities of all types.

Humanity in an intelligent world

9 books
  • Living with intelligent tools
  • Hess holds up a pretty clear mirror to our most intimate digital habits. The soothing allure of our phones during vulnerable moments, the intensity with which we can experience a 'what if' just because we can go down a rabbit hole, the way online norms shout louder than in-person wisdom. My biggest insight: the internet feels much louder when you don't have IRL people to talk about these things with. The same info coming from a person in real life is not as loud as it is on social media. Maybe our best chance at navigating digital life is to invest better in real life?
  • Whether you think AI and automation will be great or terrible for humanity, it's important to remember that none of this is predetermined. Executives, not algorithms, decide whether to replace human workers. There is no looming machine takeover. It's just people, deciding what kind of society we want.
  • Harari describes the potential threat of economic irrelevance: 'Liberalism is losing credibility exactly when the twin revolutions in information technology and biotechnology confront us with the biggest challenges our species has ever encountered. The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality. Most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse — irrelevance.'
  • Reading & attention as resistance
  • A 200-page hand-illustrated commonplace book — a slow, embodied response to a text — and the entire issue uses it to argue that reading-as-metabolizing is uniquely human and urgent in the age of AI. Originally inspired by Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing in the early pandemic days, Christie found herself reading closely and copying quotes by hand that she wanted to remember.
  • The originating text behind Christie George's commonplace-book project. Odell's argument for a counter-practice to extractive attention is the foundation for a reading practice that resists AI's friction-skipping.
  • The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player.
  • I've been reading this very slowly for a couple of months. Asparouhova examines how and why certain ideas resist spreading — ones that are important but hard to remember, share, or engage with because of their complexity and context. In her words, anti-memes are "a broad category of self-censoring ideas that includes taboos (things that everyone knows, but can't be said out loud), cognitive biases (things that we can't see about ourselves), or memory lapses (things we know we ought to be doing, but keep forgetting to prioritize)." I read slowly because her examples are complex and I want to give them the time they deserve to unfold. It feels like the right way to engage with this particular study — an offering of words to explain what we do when we are not chasing virality around ideas, but processing them in private channels.
  • Embodied knowing
  • The way we're able to think about information is dramatically affected by the state we're in when we encounter it. Cognition doesn't take place entirely in the brain, but through a mix of neural, bodily and environmental processes. Those of us who are more in touch with our internal sensations can make better use of the wisdom and experience stored in our body.
  • Reading 'The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action' in the Companion Machines curriculum made me realize that a lot of what I'm exploring isn't about tools, but attention and observing our own minds in companionship. If AI is going to become part of our emotional and cognitive infrastructure, we need more people whose lives are already shaped by care work — not optimization — at the center of that conversation.

Intergenerational stewardship

11 books
  • Inheritance
  • She could indict her mother, as many memoirists do, but instead, she shares the texture of her mother's life. It seems inevitable that the details you offer your child today are remembered later, long after you die, when your child is old. These writers remember their mother's texture — the way you might remember a writer's imprint on you, whiffs of words that haunted you or held you.
  • In the works I've read by writers at the other end of life, their mothers aren't always remembered with the same wounds that may have colored younger years, as if scabs have truly become scars. It seems as though these writers remember their mother's texture, no more, no less. In the last book of poems Le Guin wrote before she passed away in 2018, there's a poem called 'Theodora,' about her mother.
  • There is a line in Crying in H Mart where Michelle's mom tells her that she always keeps a small percentage of herself only for herself, in her marriage. I adored this idea when I encountered it because I, too, have always been someone who refuses to allow anyone in entirely. There was always something to protect.
  • I didn't expect this one to be a motherhood book. But what I couldn't put down was the texture of Lisa Marie's relationship with her own mother — and what Riley Keough understood about it only after becoming a mother herself. Something about the intergenerational transmission of care, its failures and its surprising survivals, stayed with me longer than anything more explicitly about parenting.
  • A theory on American history arguing that modern history moves in cycles the length of a long human life, comprised of 4 eras that always arrive in the same order: a high (confident expansion), an awakening (against the establishment), an unraveling (of crumbling institutions) and a crisis (2020 was due for one on their schedule). It was written decades ago and it's imperfect but I've found it a tangible macro-perspective against which to make sense of where we are and where we ought to go.
  • Caregiving
  • Like many books on life transitions for women other than parenting, this ought to be required reading. By 2030, the United States will need between 5.7 and 6.6 million caregivers to support the sick and aging. The questions of nuance and cultural awareness in care for the elderly are ones we are nowhere near ready for.
  • Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual — if one thinks about it, it's really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn't think things through.
  • The questions of nuance and cultural awareness in care services are especially lacking for the elderly. This resource comparing communicative approaches to dementia care from both western and eastern researchers is fascinating.
  • Mortality
  • How to die well: Religion has long owned the market on this one and our views on life and death, intentionally developed or not, drive a lot of our behavior. The book is rich with perspective on how to approach health and life. In particular, what an effective shift away from a paternalistic relationship with medicine can look like — being a passive recipient of someone else's expertise — because I think we need to shift away from paternalism in the media too.
  • A breathtaking book. I finished it while doing the 100 Day Project — a gentle, wonderful way to explore an in-between, be it in a project, a turning season, or life in general.
  • A beautiful, hopeful, profound look at the four universal sufferings and how to think about death, consciousness and karma from the perspective of Buddhism. 'When open and engaged, we are experiencing the greater self. When closed off, we are putting forth our lesser self. To live for the greater self means to recognize the universal principle behind all things and rise above the suffering caused by awareness of impermanence.' From this perspective, I see my time in this life — about 50-70 years ahead — divided into two major practices: dialogue with self and dialogue with others.
↑ Top