Celebrating: Discovery
It's a link roundup, friends! Find captivating writing, news, and ideas that are worth your while.
Welcome to this edition of Discovery—the Celebration link roundup—where we celebrate great writing, explore new ideas, keep abreast of newsy items, continuously reframe our understanding of the world, and also (ahem) laugh at memes.
First, a mea culpa
Whoops! I haven’t sent out a newsletter in well over a month largely because my day job, and life in general, got very, very busy (even busier than usual) and I—like most people—am a terrible multi-tasker. In my defense, lots of scientists say the ability to multi-task is a myth altogether and that what many people call “multi-tasking” is actually doing more than one thing badly rather than doing one thing competently. So—something had to give, and sadly, this substack was that thing. Or at least, this is how I’m self-soothing in the wake of my abdicating my newslettering duties. Sorry. But I’m back now with a voluptuous bounty of fascinating links to share.
Here are the links galore
First, if you only read one article from this roundup, consider it being this one from The New York Times Magazine: I Spent My Life Consenting to Touch I Didn’t Want in which author Melissa Febos shares a visceral and vivid reflection on “all the casual, unwanted touch women endure—and why it’s so hard to refuse it.” Even though the specifics of her experiences and my own are very different, they’re alike enough in the broad strokes that I felt—physically—every word in this essay, each hair on my arm standing at attention, a metallic taste in the back of my throat, as I saw shades of myself and all of womankind “who have spent their entire lives being socialized not to upset or disappoint people,” in this piece. As we emerge from a pandemic that forced us to limit our physical contact with other people, and we are beginning to negotiate reentry into a social world, now is a great time to reevaluate our relationship with touch and our cultural mores around consent, no?
Another exploration of the way women are socialized and the limiting stories we are told about ourselves—and the way race compounds the consequences—is smartly explored in this Harvard Business Review piece by Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey: Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome. The authors completely reframe the conventional understanding of the concept of “imposter syndrome,” which, they explain, takes somewhat universal feelings of “discomfort, second-guessing, and mild anxiety in the workplace,” and pathologizes it, “especially for women.” This creates the belief that it is women and their “syndrome” that need fixing, when it is really workplaces that need to be improved. “Leaders must create a culture for women and people of color that addresses systemic bias and racism,” in order to “reduce the experiences that culminate in so-called imposter syndrome,” or at least help employees “channel healthy self-doubt into positive motivation.”
For more on the behaviors, expectations, and violence foisted upon women, read Jessica Valenti’s substack post, Following the Rules Won’t Save Us, where she puts the truth bluntly: “Convincing women that we can protect ourselves by following some arbitrary set of rules doesn’t stop us from getting assaulted or killed.” Then read Rebecca Solnit’s piece in The Guardian, Women Are Harmed Every Day by Invisible Men, where she laments the state of our culture—a culture “in which men and the society at large blame women for men’s behavior and the things men do to women.”
It’s also important to understand the link between misogyny and white supremacy, an intersection that is so prevalent that, according to this NYT piece, How Racism and Sexism Intertwine to Torment Asian-American Women, misogyny is considered a “gateway drug” to other types of violent extremism by groups who track hate crimes. When it comes to hatred of women and racism, it’s not an either/or proposition; it’s often both, which is why it was infuriating to watch punditry and comment sections alight last month with arguments that the March 16 shootings in Atlanta, which killed eight people—6 of them Asian women—couldn’t be racist, because they were already sexist. As if there’s a quota for ‘isms’ as motivating factors—as if a terrorist act can’t be the result of two things simultaneously! This kind of binary thinking drives me insane but you shouldn’t listen to me ranting about it; instead read this Marie Claire article, Solidarity & Solutions: Asian American Women on Where to Go From Here in which six Asian American women who are leaders in their field share ideas for protecting, empowering, and uplifting the AAPI community—and for acknowledging and addressing the evils of both racism and misogyny.
On the sad subject of white supremacy—the congenital birth defect of America—the police continue to murder Black people with presumed impunity and to do so against the backdrop of the Derek Chauvin trial. So let’s hold hands in depression and grief (and perhaps read this Instagram post from Black Liturgies on “Preparing for the Chauvin Trial Verdict) before jumping into some required reading on this most somber of always-current events:
Read Jamil Smith’s piece in Rolling Stone, “George Floyd’s Body Is on Trial for Its Own Murder,” in which he writes:
“We’re talking about a black man killed by police on camera in America, so we cannot rely upon video footage. The history of police abuses going unpunished despite photographic evidence is too abundant to recount. . . cops across the country will keep abusing and killing even if the jury convicts Chauvin. No verdict can take the place of systemic change, but an acquittal would make things even worse. It threatens to further standardize and legitimize the use of racist tropes to excuse cops when they murder us. It would remind us all that no, the tape does not speak for itself.”
And read Ibram X. Kendi’s piece in The Atlantic, “Compliance Will Not Save Me,” in which he writes:
“But the question is not how many good or bad cops exist today. The questions we should be asking are: What are police officers empowered to do to me by policies and practices? Why are they given military training, weaponry, and near-total impunity? Have racist narratives trained them to fear my dark body?
These questions are not about any individual cop. These questions are not individual. These questions are institutional. The question is whether the institution of American policing is good.”
Then read Charles M. Blow’s piece “Rage Is the Only Language I Have Left,” in which he writes:
“ . . . it becomes hard to write about this in a newspaper because it is no longer new. The news of these killings is not that they are interruptions of the norm, but a manifestation of the norm.
There is no new angle. There is no new hot take. There is very little new to be revealed. These killings are not continuing to happen due to a lack of exposure, but in spite of it. Our systems of law enforcement, criminal justice and communal consciousness have adjusted themselves to a banal barbarism. . . A society that treats this much Black death at the hands of the state as collateral damage in a just war on crime has no decorum to project. That society is savage.”
And some related tweets:
Navigating away from the most heartbreaking parts of our dystopia, please know that Mark Zuckerberg is still awful and now he’s coming for your children. If you forgot all the ways Zuck is a true comic book villain and how Facebook is literally ruining our lives, this 2018 deep dive in Mother Jones is a great refresher: It’s the End of News as We Know It (and Facebook Is Feeling Fine).
On writing
Moving on to the topic of writing, I’ve always felt most alive, absorbed, and engaged as a reader when the prose is full of poetry—indulgent use of language and descriptive flourish, mainline those paragraphs directly into my bloodstream please!—so I loved this short Catapult post by novelist R.O. Kwon, “A Case Against Killing Your Darlings,” in which she writes:
“I want any novel I write to be full of darlings. If possible, all darlings. I don’t want any published novel of mine to include a single line that bores me, that hasn’t been shaped, pressed, and attentively loved into the most truthful, living version of itself.”
Hear, hear, R.O. Kwon.
If you’re curious to hear some of my own meandering thoughts on writing, I participated in this American Writer’s Museum ‘Author Talk’ on the business book that I co-authored, The Blueprint, and I share some of my tips, tools, and musings on the craft.
Also, for some fun, this tweet reads writers for filth. Enjoy the accuracy:
Finally, as #shotgirlsummer approaches and we are collectively getting vaxxed allllll the way up so we can be #vaxxedandrelaxed in the summer sun, please enjoy some vaccine humor below. (And please share your vaccine related hashtags with me; I am sorry to report that I am very corny and I can’t get enough of them.)
And one for my fellow real housewives fans. (If you know, you know.)
That’s all the discovering for this edition! Please feel free and encouraged to share this email.
With appreciation,
Amy
Love your thinking. Love your writing. Love your humor. Love your heart!