Soft animals
How we doin', babes? We hydrating, trying to sleep, doing the things? I'll admit I'm struggling to come up with appropriately welcoming (but not too perky) intros to these little weeklies. The copywriter in me wants to make it snappy, make it zing, while the observant human in charge of her feels like a quiet squeeze on the arm is the only acceptable greeting. Everything moves in such a strange way now that I never know who's on what wavelength, including myself half the time, and I don't want to make anyone feel even worse by coming at them with too much weird sunshine. So, uh, that was this week's intro, I guess. :::jazz hands:::
I do have good stuff for you, though:
This week's glimmers
- First up, let's just take a moment to remind ourselves that crown shyness exists (see above for evidence). The poetry! The courtesy! The care!
- If you're in Austin, you know who Brigitte Bandit is because of course you do. If you're not in Austin, behold her immediately. She's amazing.
- Speaking of Texas, I’m as sick to death as anybody of celebrities and their side hustles, but I’ll make exactly one exception* and that's for Willie Nelson. In addition to his ~curiously soothing~ teas and coffees, he has a new social tonic coming out, and you know what? I don't much feel like incriminating myself 'round these parts, so that's all I'll say about that.
- Here's a 26-year-old Congressional candidate in Illinois doing it right, leveraging her platform to feed people and spread awareness about her campaign through good old-fashioned word of mouth. This is it, folks. This is the way.
- What do sea slugs and fingerprints, ancient Indian mathematics and the Alaska State Fair have to do with one another? Enjoy finding out in this recent episode of Radiolab (hint: it's all about growth). I particularly enjoyed the segment on the way sanskrit poetry sort of inadvertently made way for what we think of today as Fibonacci numbers. Math and poetry, sleeping together!
- Staying on podcasts for a second, now feels like a good time to revisit Mary Oliver's episode of On Being. She rarely did interviews, but she made an exception for NPR in 2015. A few years later, it re-aired shortly after she died and, as she might have put it, cemented her place in the family of things. Get it while you can.
- Here's half an hour of baby animals, just because.
See you exquisite softies next week.
*okay, three: also Dolly Parton and Rihanna.
"Courage, courage. To never settle, to see with new eyes, to expand."
—Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 1918
20 May 2025
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