Can it be? A Green New Deal is happening right here, right now in NYC? Our lawmakers are considering budgeting for congestion pricing for Manhattan, and we can send an email telling them that we wholeheartedly support it, too. (I hope you do!) Congestion pricing is important if you care about improved air quality, reduced carbon emissions, quality public transportation, economic justice, and equity. (This article is a great primer.)
For the Discerning & Literary Child
On gardening, with kids.
Malala's Magic Pencil is a beautiful and important picture book. It is Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai’s story but is also our children's story: we hold all of our power and potential within and no one can take that away.
80's children: Broad City and GLOW producers are bringing The Babysitter's Club to Netflix.
Asides, Ideas, Miscellany
"What if the next New American Home was a condo? And what if there was a new American dream, not of auto-dependent suburbia, but walkable urbanism?" by Allison Arieff
Who is the pedestrian? What is public space? An illustrated charter of pedestrian rights imagines a world built around people, not cars.
The creator of Reality Bites on the irony of selling a Hollywood movie to the slacker generation. See also: Gen X's existential panic after Luke Perry's death.
This review of Hudson Yards, the largest mixed-use private real estate venture in American history brought forth by corporate welfare, is both scathing and spot-on. "A relic of dated 2000s thinking, nearly devoid of urban design, the "antiseptic, inward-turning, glass-tower formula" ... "is, at heart, a super-sized suburban-style office park, with a shopping mall and a quasi-gated condo community targeted at the 0.1 percent."
Jessa Crispin, a writer I admire, recently interviewed the writer Johanna Hedva on her podcast The Public Intellectual. This conversation led me to Hedva's essay Sick Woman, a manifesto on the politics of care. "The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself," Hedva writes. "To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care."
New Works on Paper
Getting meta with this mailing list: My essay on connecting with readers via good-old 2000s electronic mail is included in the 2019 Writer’s Market. For an annotated bibliography of my all-time fav books on the art, craft, and business if writing, check out my running list right here. And then please tell me who I’m missing! I’m a junkie for this genre.
"The remarkable collective achievement of the Bloomsbury writers and artists was that they placed in posterity's hands the documents necessary to engage posterity's feeble attention — the letters, memoirs, and journals that reveal inner life... Were their lives really so fascinating, or is it simply because they wrote so well and so incessantly about themselves and one another that we find them so?"
~ Janet Malcolm on the self-constructed archive (or, why we still care about Virginia Woolf)
Thoughts? Ideas? Recommendations? I love connecting with fellow readers, writers, parents, and humans. Please drop me a line!
New here? Peruse the archive of letters right here or join below for monthly-ish news and notes.
r.p.
