New Year, New Links

How the time flies.

The last couple o’ weeks have been about driving thither and yon on roads of variable slippyness, which means I have all kinds of time to listen to podcasts and audiobooks. Which is some of my favorite time, indeed.

Podcast-wise, I’m enjoying the heck out of The Boghouse, which is the true story of a married couple who buy a magic theater in downtown Philadelphia and things start getting historic.¹ The pod premiered in 2019, mind, and I am sure there have been recent developments but I’m still working my way to the present. It’s going to take a minute.

Audiobooks-wise, forever and always T. Kingfisher.² I’d read Paladin’s Faith³ when it came out but hadn’t yet listened to the book. And so here we are. For me, it’s the best comfort listen out there.

In other news: I talked with Gloria⁴ about the importance of local office, especially in Times Like These. Please give it a read.

And now, some links:

• Blair Braverman sails to the bottom of the world.

• We just keep discovering new things about the human body—like a whole new class of organism.

• Image below taken from this NPR story:

  

  I can pretty much tell you that the answer to the question will be “no.”⁵ And yet we’ll do the same thing again and wonder why it still didn’t work.

• Case in point: The View from 1938.⁶

• The people being demonized are, you know, real people with real lives.

  

• A story to warm the heart of any knitter and/or choral music lover and/or Swede. (photo credit above Anna Ericsson (with a hat tip to Phoebe for sending it.))

• We really don’t think about Francis Perkins enough. We owe her a lot and this is just one small step toward honoring her legacy of social action.⁷

• My 2025 mantra. (Be sure to read to the end for all you need to know about finding the truth.)

• One of my favorite 5Ks is back, baby. And no you don’t have to run it in Suffragette garb (like in the image below) but it does make it more fun…

  

• This. This. This. From Danielle Kurtzleben:

  The government is not a business. It prints money. It subsidizes mortgages. It lends money to college students. It insures the health of tens of millions of old and poor people. It’s true that, like a business, the government has inflows and outflows of money, and it can’t go into debt forever.

  But the government doesn’t have the same goals as a business. The government is trying (one hopes) to make constituents’ lives better. Businesses, meanwhile, try to profit.

1. How I found The Boghouse is a tale as old as time: social media is full of friendly folk (and, of course, lunatics, but mostly friendly folks) who hear that your older kid is moving to the city they live in and love—and that you are kind of a history (and theatre and puppetry) nerd and very much might enjoy learning about this place and this couple whose place is not at all far from where your younger kid now lives.

2. a.k.a. Ursula Vernon

3. I have a whole disquisition on the Temple of the White Rat and Bishop Beartongue kicking around in my noodle but now is not the time.

4. Gloria is the publication, mind. The writer I talked with is Leslie Price.

5. A million years ago in J-school, we were repeatedly warned against writing headlines that had yes or no answers because most readers will simply answer the headline and then not read the story.

6. The key quote: “And despite the fact that we’ve seen it before, we’ve seen literally all of it before, half the country falls for it.”

7. Perkins is my newest obsession. In my brain, there’s a book to be written about her, Belle Moscowitz, and Emily Post. Yes, the etiquette Emily Post, who did a lot of writing before that part of her career. Not sure how to connect them yet, tho.