On the last Wednesday of every month, I’ve been sharing a dozen of the best things I found. Media. Music. Podcasts. Films. Gear.
Though the intent is to keep them punchy-short, it’s just so fun curating these roundups, a simple counteraction against the algorithms to amplify the beautiful work of others. Here’s a link to previous lists so far.
12 Things I Found in April…
RACISM. This article on Ibram X. Kendi, the “progression of racism,” and his new book on Malcolm X, Malcolm Lives! (Out May 13) caught my attention. Sure it’s for young readers, but this 41-year-old is very excited.
SHABAZZ. I was obsessed with Digable Planets growing up, and my dear friend Brendan Leonard introduced me recently to Shabazz Palaces, an experimental hip-hop project by Digable’s lead, Ishmael Butler. Such good sound. Start with “Swerve…the reaping of all that is worthwhile.”
OUTSIDE. This recent New Yorker article, the one that at least eight people texted me as soon as it came out, dives into the complications at Outside (my former employer) but also addresses a larger cultural shift in the Mountain West, which is important. Sharp piece. Sad piece.
FABLE. This conversation in front of a live audience in Brooklyn between On Being’s Krista Tippett and Justin Vernon from Bon Iver, about their new album, SABLE/fABLE, is plain delicious.
HERZOG. Through interviewing folks for an upcoming piece I’m writing about Antarctica, several people have mentioned Werner Herzog’s “Encounters at the End of the World” as a favorite Herzog. I might agree. (It’s also free on YouTube.)
SOUP. I’m never not looking for recipes that a) I can batch-prepare and b) are knockouts, and this curried carrot coconut soup recipe was probably my number one go-to dinner this winter/spring.
GRIEF. “Grief is a threat to the current power system.” Francis Weller’s interview on The Great Simplification Podcast is a good one. (If you’ve somehow missed The Wild Edge of Sorrow, please stop everything and find a copy.) It inspired this one sentence about grief-joy experienced recently in a trip to Portland for Magic Canoe.
ROHR. I’ve grown to really love and trust Tami Simon over at Insights at the Edge, and last week she had on Father Richard Rohr to talk about his new book, The Tears of Things, likely his last book. Order, disorder, reorder.
GOD. “Americans Still Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion” (NYT). These sorts of articles are popping up with more frequency — making sense of an uptick in spiritual interests as they ping off late stage capitalism — and they’ve been catnip for me these days.
DOROTHY. I just wrote this deep-divey piece on rewilding and the Catholic anarchist mystic, Thomas Merton, for Emergence, but didn’t somehow include the radical life of Dorothy Day. This episode really captures her essence. Such a hero for the working class. Expect more from me on her life soon.
EMPIRE. The DIG podcast by Jacobin Magazine is dishing up some essential historical nutrition, and this one on settler empire with Aziz Rana was so full of necessary context for the moment we’re in.
ORBITAL. For Book #117 on the Mandorla 200 (Micro-distillations of 200 necessary books on ecology, justice, and place-belonging for our times, 200 words or less), this short fiction meditation on our fragile, enduring, blue marble of a planet from the perspective of six astronaut/cosmonauts left me breathless on so many occasions. The winner of the 2024 Booker prize, nearly every sentence of Orbital is poetry. A top read of year, no question. My dispatch…
Despite the madness, there’s grace here. Suspended in space for a moment we recontextualize the barbed wire, the bleaching events, the family tragedy and cold pizza, the bunions. We awaken to how this home rock, in fact, bounds us in song, that every thought about Earth and its cosmic address literally comes from Earth, that this blue-green-brown dot held in a crush of mysterious space-ink is both whole and on fire. So are we, marble worlds orbiting one another as we tend our losses and our rage, our self-comparison and differentiation because the marketplace says so, while tired of this human exceptionalism grift on a shared a planet that never stops orbiting and being orbited anew, ascending to the light and descending into shadow. How do we keep our bodies attuned to collective awe, harmonizing as simultaneously part and whole? Instead, we choose to agonize against it and remain adrift, lonely, exiled from a home so obviously breathing us in tide, blushing us in lilac, tickling us with aurora borealis. In this we miss the whole, we miss our fecund capaciousness, we miss that their breathing is our breathing, their song our song.
The Book: Orbital (2023)
The Author: Samantha Harvey
The Publisher: Grove Atlantic
The Tip: The Tattered Cover
"Encounters at the End of the World"—yes! A bunch of those folks were the crew when I was at McMurdo. Herzog really captured the quirky culture of that place moment.