Solar return

10 things worth sharing + 20% off sale

Hey y’all,

The solstice is here and I’m offering 20% off paid subscriptions! A paid subscription gets you a special newsletter from me every Tuesday, membership in a community of thousands of creative people, and access to comments and the full archives. The kind support of paid subscribers also keeps this Friday letter free for everybody:

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. I celebrated my 42nd trip around the sun by working on my book, but I took a tiny break to make a new monthly mixtape to play by the pool. You can listen to it on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
   
   

2. There’s a line in Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About This that I think about a lot: “You'll be nostalgic for this, too, if you make it.” More than two decades ago, during the second war in the Middle East of my lifetime, I could read Molly Ivins in The Texas Observer (she was also syndicated in newspapers), Kurt Vonnegut in In These Times, and Hunter S. Thompson on ESPN.com of all places. They’d seen war and nutball American times before and they could provide young me with some meaningful prose to help process the wicked absurdity of it all. They’re all dead now, and I don’t know who, exactly, has replaced them, or whether there’s even a place in the world anymore for the kind of columns they wrote.
   
   

3. One person I think is carrying the torch is Tim Kreider, who drew political cartoons throughout the second Bush administration and switched to writing brilliant essays. In 2019, he wrote about how we’d be sold an Iran war “for the benefit of readers for whom what’s going to happen over the next months might seem bizarre, horrific, or inexplicable if you aren’t old enough to have lived through it before, or read enough to know that it’s a syndrome with an etiology as predictable as that of any other disease.” Of course, Tim’s best book (so far) is titled We Learn Nothing. (To quote Antonio Gramsci: “History teaches, but it has no pupils.”)
   
   

4. “Anyone who tells you that you can skip the ‘War’ parts and only read the ‘Peace’ parts is an idiot. The bits that interest you personally and the bits that you find of only abstract curiosity are going to change when you read the book at 20, and again at 50.” 10 things to know about Tolstoy’s War and Peace. (I’m almost a third of the way through and still loving it. I’m even listening to this playlist.)
   
   

5. “Either method works, eventually, as long as you show up every day and put your time in.” 5 things that help me hit my deadlines.
   
   

6. Things to do while waiting.
   
   

7. In-person event for arts educators: I’m keynoting The National Arts Integration and STEAM Conference in Baltimore, Maryland on July 8. They’re also offering online access. (I’m about to come out of heads down mode on my book, so I’ll be available soon for more speaking throughout the rest of the year. Hire me for your event!)
   
   

8. “The most important advice I have is to have fun. To try to create something that is fun to work on…” 8 writers share their advice.
   
   

9. TV: We’re watching the early seasons of Death in Paradise on Britbox. It’s a chill, British mystery series set on a made-up island in the Caribbean. My favorite part of the show is all the great Jamaican music they play, like The Skatalites’ “You’re Wondering Now,” Tenor Saw’s “Ring The Alarm,” Phyllis Dillon’s “Don’t Stay Away,” Toots & The Maytals’ “54-46 Was My Number,” and Desmond Dekker’s “You Can Get It If You Really Want.” (Here’s a 12-hour Spotify playlist of songs featured on the show.)
   
   

10. Your assignment this week, once again: Do not start (or end) your day with the news.

Thanks for reading. This hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To keep Friday free for everyone and get an extra exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin