Both this newsletter and my YouTube channel have been kind of silent for the past month. My excuses have all morphed together into like one big Saturday morning cartoon mega excuse: traveling, moving, finishing up one work thing, starting up a new work thing, family visits—the works. But now that things have settled back down, I’m easing myself back into writing and making videos using the tried and true method of just forcing myself to sit down and do it. For YouTube, this hasn’t been so bad. I’ve read books! I can talk about books! But I’ve been putting off trying to write this newsletter for the oldest reason in the book: I don’t know what I want to write about.

It’s weird to me because writing this newsletter seems like it should be easier than YouTube. I just have to write it. I don’t have to clean up my desk to make it presentable. I don’t have to make a sacrifice to the lighting gods. I don’t have to turn off the fan to film in humid 90 degree weather with sweat pouring down my face. And the editing! I could just press submit right now on this newsletter and it would be out without having to worry about captioning or exporting or uploading or whatever. But even weirder is that for some reason, I’m much more self-conscious about this newsletter than I am about YouTube, a place where I upload videos of myself talking through existential crises about books.

I describe YouTube to people as very self-indulgent—this thing where I’ve convinced myself that people not only want to hear what I have to say, they want to watch me say it. But even though my face isn’t on this newsletter, it feels weirdly even more self-indulgent. Like this thing where I’ve convinced myself that people not only want to hear what I have to say, they want it directly in their inbox. And like some of you are people I know in real life who have indulged me in many a tirade about something stupid, but I’ve never sent you an e-mail out of the blue with multiple paragraphs of My Thoughts—but that’s what you’re getting now.

Anyway, I’m working on getting past that, so if this newsletter starts to take a turn towards the inane, that means I’ve probably succeeded.

Recent Science Reads

• The Last of It’s Kind, by Ed Yong (The Atlantic): Any Ed Yong read is a good read to share, but this story of a biologist in Hawaii whose task is preserving the last of the islands’ snail species is particularly great (but also terrible because yeah, it’s bleak).
• The Chilling Mystery of High-Altitude Suicides, by Shayla Love (VICE): (Content Warning in the article for discussions of suicide) In 2011, a few Utah scientists put forth a theory that oxygen deprivation at high altitudes are connected to the high suicide rates seen in those areas. Some people have found comfort and even treatments based on that hypothesis, but other scientists worry that it is over-simplifying depression and suicide. I appreciate article that are able to portray science for the process it is, and I think this one manages to weave that in with a delicate subject matter and its very real consequences.
• Can You Unwrinkle A Raisin?, by Maggie Koerth-Baker (FiveThirtyEight): I was going to throw in another bleak article about something terrible in here, but then thought better of it. So instead, here is a delightful post from FiveThirtyEight’s “Science Questions From a Toddler” column that starts with a lesson on Prohibition and ends with a discussion about cell senescence.

Things I’ve Made/Places I’ve Been

• The Cast of Vanderpump Rules as Books: I stand by this video as one of the dumbest things I’ve ever made, but also one of the videos I’m most proud of. In my quest to honor the cast of Vanderpump Rules for the geniuses they are, I decided to introduce them into something you could loosely describe as a literary canon.
• Coming of Age Stories (Snark Squad Pod): Nicole and Marines let me join in on their discussion about coming of age stories across a whole bunch of media, and of course we ended up talking about periods in historical fiction.

My Week in Read/Watch/Listen

I’m taking liberties with the idea of a “week” for this. Because I can.

TV

• Veronica Mars (season 1): I am a (questionably) self-respecting millennial woman who was obsessed with this show the first time around, so of course I have been obsessed with it now that it’s back on Hulu and about to get a new season. I have Thoughts about how weirdly this show has aged, and maybe I’ll get back to that.
• The Bold Type (season 1): Some of my friends have been telling me to watch this show about three women in New York making their way up at a Cosmo-type magazine because apparently this is what they imagine my job is like. It isn’t, but man would it be fun if it were.

Podcasts

• “Taylor vs Scooter: The Pop Music Civil War of 2019” (The New York Times Popcast: The closest I come to a guilty pleasure is the developing acknowledgment that I might be a Taylor Swift stan. Or, at the very least, that she is both the most problematic and the most fave of all my problematic faves. This episode about the conflict between Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun over her masters, which is inevitably also about her conflict with a whole bunch of other people, was a helpful breakdown of both the music industry and her own messaging that helped me better understand what I found both sympathetic and frustrating about her statement.
• “Tales From The Parking Lot,” (Planet Money): Do you hate parking? Do you love yelling out loud in your car? Then this is the podcast for you. There are ridiculous parking regulations and people trying to fight back against those regulations and Uber drivers using parking lots to up their own income. It’s great and terrible, just like parking.

Books

• I just finished Cat Sebastian’s Turner series (well, there’s a novella coming out in August, but I finished the main trio), and I think I’m in love. I read the third book (The Ruin of a Rake) in this series a while ago and liked it okay. But I think this is one of the rare romance series where even though the event of each book are independent enough that you can read them out of order, the characters are connected enough that it’s much better if you don’t.