“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them — work, family, health, friends, and spirit… and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls — family, health, friends, and spirit — are made of glass.” I had a baby! My daughter was born on her due date at the end of August, and my partner and I instantaneously felt all of our priorities shift — not unlike the way every part of my body had adjusted to make room for the tiny-but-chubby human inside me. I love advice and love lists and this is a nice list of pieces of life advice Ryan Holiday has collected over the years to remind me to keep my eye on the glass ball. (Forge)
“Under the sheer volume of competing facts and studies, news stories and social media posts that bludgeon us daily, we succumb to truth-lite. The overwhelm sees us seek expedient options”: Sarah Wilson has some ideas on why the wellness realm has fallen into “conspiratualism.” (The Guardian)
“All these men, some of whom I knew intimately and others I’d never met, were debating who owned an image of me”: Emily Ratajkowski can’t buy back her own image but can claim to have the final word in this devastating story (that subsequently went viral) of her abuse and exploitation in her modelling career (The Cut).
On the other hand, Ratajkowski may have missed an opportunity to broaden her argument to include people other than herself, writes Haley Nahman. Without further analysis of the complexity of the modelling industry and Ratajkowski’s own complicity in its value system (the male gaze, female objectification, and self-commodification), the essay falls into a common trap in late-capitalist reflective writing: “which is to assume that by simply calling out a problem, or exploiting it in her favor, she takes away its power.” (Maybe Baby)
For more on this idea of “the reflexivity trap,” Katy Waldman dared take on Sally Rooney and other contemporary novelists whose protagonists believe self-awareness absolves them of any need to effect genuine, systemic change: “that professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that fault—that lip service equals resistance.” In a moment that desperately demands more than performative lip service, the danger of the reflexivity trap is that is casts self-awareness as a finish line, not a starting point. (New Yorker)
“It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women... Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity”: Judith Butler does not come to play. (New Statesman)
“She chose her words precisely, like silver arrows sailing to hit their targets. Instead of referring to something as “racist,” she called it “thoughtlessness”; she referred to underrepresented groups as “misfits.” She is aware of the ways words like racism and microaggression have lost their power, so she searched for new ones that might make people listen”: I watched and loved Michaela Coel’s incredible TV show I May Destroy You. It will be compared maybe to Girls and Fleabag because of the way we always fetishise and compare female creators, and it’s not unlike those shows but it’s also something completely original and beautiful and unique. E. Alex Jung has written the definitive profile — read after watching (Vulture)
First picnic since lockdown began
