Link Roundup: Quarantine Edition
Quarantine is weird. It’s really the easiest thing most of us could be asked to do, but I say that as someone who already worked from home before the pandemic and who has no dependents, so I think I’m relatively very lucky. To me, it feels like there isn’t more time under quarantine, because my schedule and routine haven’t really changed. But then, I think of all the trips I would have made to the farm shop, the eye doctor, the dentist, friends’ houses, etc. and I realize that I suppose I do have more “free” time now, than before. Mostly it’s taken up with being in contact with friends, and reading. These are both things that already occupied my free time, and they seem to have just stretched and expanded to fill the new openings. Sadly there isn’t anywhere to roller skate here (the roads and sidewalks are all too cracked and gravelly) but I have been leaving the house to jog almost daily (pictured below). I haven’t tired of my books, but this weekend, I plan to dive into the links I gathered below. I write these posts really as a way to stay organized, personally, and to hold myself accountable for reading things I intend to; but I also enjoy sharing them in case anyone else finds them useful or interesting. Shout out to Ann Friedman’s wonderful weekly newsletter, where I found some of these.
I remember that after Trump became President, so much writing seemed suddenly outdated. Books, articles, even fiction, felt old, even when it wasn’t. I remember reading someone’s ideas and thinking, ‘Right, but what about now?’ Many of us needed to adjust our mental schema to accommodate the new reality we found ourselves in, and that can be tricky, not only because most of us are set in our habitual ways of thinking/being, but also because we exist in a multi-leveled, subjective reality that is always unfolding. “History” is not something in the past: It is the past, present, and future, and our vantage points are constantly shifting. We don’t like to think that way, because we find ourselves unmoored. We are in constant motion, but it’s easier to imagine we are not. I find myself feeling a similar sense of disorientation now, as during 2016/17. Articles written just before the global pandemic sometimes read as quaint or tragically obsolete. Regular life simply isn’t happening. Nothing is certain under these circumstances. But in a way, it’s a revelation: Nothing ever was, really.
This is a picture I accidentally took while jogging alone on nearly-empty streets.
Here are links to the articles I’ll be diving into:
The College-Admissions Scandal and the Banality of Scamming [The New Yorker]
The Fourth State of Matter: A week in the author’s life when it became impossible to control the course of events [The New Yorker]
The New American Homeless [The New Republic]
The Education of Natalie Jean: For Years, Mormon Mommy Blogger Natalie Lovin Curated A Picture-Perfect Life. Then She Left The Church—And Her Husband [ELLE]
What It’s Like When Writers Are Best Friends [The Atlantic]
The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right [POLITICO Magazine]
A New Chapter in a Double-Murder Case [The New Yorker]
Janelle Monáe’s Secret Power Was Always Saying ‘No’ [The Cut]
Horny pens for all [The Outline]
How to read more while you're social distancing [Penguin]
Inside Kim Kardashian’s Prison-Reform Machine [The New York Times]
‘I Refuse to Be Repentant’: The Woman Challenging Uganda’s Ruler [The New York Times]