Hello, or hello again.
You may be reading this because you once signed up for my occasional podcast recommendation newsletter, archived here. This is a new iteration, and I don’t know yet exactly what form it will take.
Right now, it shares a form and spirit to its earlier incarnation: a collection of things to listen to or read that I think make sense together. I’m sharing a thought process, I guess.
I think I’ll try to send this once a month, if it keeps feeling good. I imagine I’ll be writing more, and I’ll probably try things. I’m going to let it become what it is. If it’s not your cup of tea, now or later, no problem—unsubscribing is easy.
Photo above by Gin Majka, with permission.
4 listens on creativity, love, and accompaniment, from a mountain drive
1. I listened to Björk’s Sonic Symbolism on a drive through New Hampshire’s White Mountains. More specifically, I listened to the episode about my favorite album, Medúlla in each episode, Björk reflects on and analyzes one of her albums with her friends (I wonder if she took inspiration from the great Song Exploder).
I like how Björk describes early motherhood on the Medúlla episode—she made the album when her daughter was a baby. Her friend recalled attending to a dinner at her house in those early days of motherhood and “feeling how the hospitality was extraordinary. There was something very meaningful in the air.” Björk speaks about the “playfulness” of motherhood, how much is communicated beyond language: smiles and expressions, jokes and sound. That Medúlla is all a cappella, or nearly, is reflective of her creative choices but also of her limits at that time. And apparently “Mouth’s Cradle” is quite explicitly about breastfeeding, but in all those years of listening, first on my discman and now (tragically) on Spotify, I never caught on. As in every episode, Björk lists words she associates with the album—for her, Medúlla is: primordial, motherhood, black braided hair, breastfeeding, passive, pre-civilisation, goth, folk, archeology, bones, family around campfire.
When I say "I like” how Björk describes this time in her life, I guess I’m saying: I realized I want more glimpses of motherhood like that. I’m collecting positive things people say about motherhood, positive things I trust. Writing from this side of things (not yet a parent, but the possibility still an open question), parenting and especially motherhood is such a confused subject, I think. Aware of the centuries of women’s lives, pregnancy and mothering as the only option, how it can trap and silence, it’s been hard to navigate my own wishes around this choice. A choice that Cheryl Strayed described as choosing between the ship that will carry you and the ship that won’t. I’m so grateful to the likes of Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Jenny Offill, Eula Biss, Elena Ferrante, and more and more, who have all written honestly and nakedly about this struggle and the actual experience: the depression, exhaustion, isolation, resentment and relentlessness. I trust them, but I think I’ve read enough of that aspect for now (not forever, just for now). I crave real examples of people and communities of caregiving, especially mothers—not cuteness, not the divine feminine, as neither work well for me—but connection, community that is life-giving to all involved.
Like how Björk described this time in her life. Like when Jia Tolentino’s partner planned and executed the Halloween costume for their toddler without her involvement, and she described this act as enabling “maternal disinvestment” (I love this concept, but she shared it on her Instagram stories so the digital trace has disappeared); pregnant people and mothers and children on the runway; the way Sarah Sophie Flicker + Jesse Peretz appear to navigate family immersed in a community of beloved friends—and, related, Anne Helen Peterson’s reporting, with and for her readers, on being a person without kids but still in community with parents and children; writer + Radiolab cohost Lulu Miller described her own fear of becoming a parent-zombie, that motherhood would spell end of her creative life, but found, actually, “no, they're drawn to fear, they're drawn to questions, they're drawn to the hard stuff and real humor,” and now her best ideas emerge from that relationship. The sense of friendship I feel in the way Joanna Goddard writes about her boys. Chelsea Steinauer Scudder’s curiosity about her daughter’s “animistic” relationship to the world in a time of ecological collapse.
2. I’ve been a fan of Jessica Dore for a few years now. A licensed social worker, she writes essays weaving psychology, folk stories, and readings of the Tarot. She offers a read-aloud of these essays, and on the same drive when I listened to Sonic Symbolism, I put on her November offering.
Last year, Dore wrote a book called Tarot for Change, and since then,
“people would say that it helped them too, and that they feel less alone. I struggled with that a little bit, because I don’t want people to just feel less alone. I want us to be less alone.”
She goes on to write about “accompaniment” as an alternative to institutional supports like therapy or social work, which are focused on individual wellness and not systemic loneliness.
“To accompany means to go with. Accompaniment is walking alongside, not wielding power over… A radical departure from more established services like social work, it doesn’t settle for the alleviation of depression or loneliness… it takes aim at the very structures—including ways of relating and supporting another—that proliferate hopelessness and alienation it the first place. Anything that undermines the integrity of body and mind, relations between self and other, and one community and another.”
3. Dore’s offering reminded me of this excellent episode on culturally responsive therapy, a stunning piece reported by Stephanie Foo for Invisibilia. It’s maybe an all-time favorite, on a therapist who realized that the traditional form doesn’t work for everyone. That his practice would need to be embedded in people’s daily lives as he accompanied his patients on their errands. Care, offered while picking up the dry-cleaning, like hanging with a good friend.
(By the way, Foo’s book is a great read too.)
4. The last thing I listened to on that drive was an episode of “The Philosophers” series from The Gray Area with Sean Illing. Each episode considers a theme or event and what a philosopher might have to say about it. It’s not meant to be a complete reading of a philosopher’s work, but bringing them into the present. My favorites are this one on Hannah Arendt and, on that drive, this one, in which I learned a new word for a type of love: eudaimonia, translated from Greek as “being in good spirit.” What a wonderful idea to consider: Are you in good spirits? Are you a good spirit to your partner and family? Is your relationship a good spirit in the world? Are there good spirits near you, around you, helping and being helped?
The shortlist: a few more things, briefly, from this year
Obviously, like everyone else, I loved Normal Gossip. My favorite might be the one on sorority wedding gossip, but this telephone game episode is brilliant. It experiments with just how much a story changes (a great deal) when it’s retold. Producer Alex Sujong Laughlin also consistently offers insight into the process and business of the podcast, which was a creative risk (increasingly special, in every industry).
A recreated 19th century seance, complete with ectoplasm; a mock marketing deck pitching a polar expedition, with budget; a 20th century anthropological film edited to remove any appearance of colonizers. Each is a deeply researched creative response, in lieu of a paper, for a class on the history of science I deeply wish to take.
The mountain lion whose life in Los Angeles was a miracle.
Do bumblebees play? (watch the video)
It’s a joy to read Rachel Cusk and it’s a joy to listen to her talk about writing.
Every generation gets more conservative with age… but not millennials.
A new way to frame abortion: the right to not be pregnant.
3 things I made in 2022
Most recently and happily, I talked to the cold water “dippers” of Maine, ages 30-something to 70-something, who make it a practice to enter the ocean all year round. Many of them do this together, in community. These conversations were thoughtful, funny, vulnerable, generous. They told me about their relationship with the long winter, the cold, sobriety, pregnancy (and pregnancy loss), and themselves. They described what happens in their minds and bodies as they slowly walk into the cold ocean, and then linger there for 5-15 minutes, and how this practice changes their days.
I loved making this piece, which I structured as a journey into and out of the icy Maine ocean. Much like the effects of cold water immersion, it left me feeling glowy and positive. I think the photo by Gin Majka (above, shared with permission) captures the feeling so perfectly: these women are sitting in an ice-hole in Somes Pond on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Circled, laughing in winter hats, holding their hands out of the water in such a way that almost looks like they’re praying— they’re not, I think, but maybe they’re also not not. Greta Rybus also took gorgeous photos of these dippers of Maine, which helped inspire this piece.
Almost a year ago, I made this two-part series on Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese scientist turned farmer-philosopher. Fukuoka wrote The One-Straw Revolution, a book that I (and many dear to me) have long loved. I reported and produced the story in collaboration with writer Hannah Kirshner. It was a real pinch-me moment to travel, through Hannah, to the mountain orchard and rice fields where Fukuoka developed his philosophy and practice of shizen noho, or “do-nothing farming,” and hear the words of his grandson Hiroki Fukuoka, who still farms there today.
This one on climate reporters leaving journalism to work directly on climate solutions (the not-so-sub-text: what is the purpose of climate journalism?) started, or continued, a kind of reorientation for me. That’s ongoing, and maybe there will be more to say on that eventually.
Thanks for being here.
Justine