The next episode of Quitted drops Thursday morning (6 A.M. ET to be exact); in our second episode, I interview Emily on a lot of things, but the best part was our discussion around, as she called it, “the spiritual implications of becoming a personal brand.” The show airs on all podcast apps. It hit the top 150 in Society & Culture podcasts, and I’m pretty sure 50% to 90% of that spike belongs to you all and your ridiculous and kind support. Thank you.
Links are below and as per usual, my favorite things from this week are listed at the bottom.
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Link Party, Week of February 13th 2022
It’s weird but I wonder if anyone else feels tired of being mad about this (truly awful, fucking maddening thing)? I wonder if something broke in me, or if I used all my mad points, or if I’m just dead inside.
See if you can follow this: A new study at UCSD shows that folks who are low responders to alcohol (meaning, higher risk to developing dependence) are also not great at recognizing social cues which may lead to higher rates of intoxication because, essentially, you’re not able to read the room. I mean: I am sure studying this helps with something? Maybe?
“At this point in your career, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Why start a sober champagne line?” Katy Perry makes fake drinks.
Crack pipes and safe injection sites: Why we can’t have nice things, but also maybe we can?
“Is love addiction even real?”
Speaking of love: Laura Pitcher is one of my favorite journalists and this piece on whether you can manifest a partner hit all the right spots (also the comments section is exploding head emoji).
Why are we still using Facebook?
I feel like sometimes all I do is share AJ’s work but that’s only because it’s good. This piece on refraining from being a helping kind of person, and letting friendships die, was brilliant.
I love critical discourse and opposing points of view (especially if they run counter to what I think): this article on how Dry January benefits the alcohol industry and this one on why promoting sober dry months is unhelpful (for some) were really good food for thought.
Mary J. Blige’s sobriety
Annie Grace still thrills me all these years later: 'I Drank Two Bottles of Wine a Night. Then I Launched The Alcohol Experiment'
This piece by Haley Nahman on living to her lowest potential: “People want to know, ‘What’s my highest potential?’ when they can’t function at their lowest.”
On Harriet Tubman’s little known disability: “We owe her the respect to add the adjective ‘disabled’ to Tubman’s list of descriptions when we discuss her identities.”
I think we probably already knew this
A study concludes: “Alcohol industry actors are highly strategic, rhetorically sophisticated and well organized in influencing national policymaking.”
VINDICATION: Why using “like” or other filler words (“like, you know, I told her it was bad…”) is intelligent, not ditzy. (Ty for the rec Courtney Carver.)
Five Things I Loved
This extremely (EXTREMELY) long essay on friendship in The Atlantic, “It’s your friends who break your heart” which explores why we need our friends so much, and why it’s so hard to keep them. It was almost too full of information that exploded my brain a bit; like how the friends we don’t like too much or who get under our skin are actually more toxic and threatening to our health than our actual enemies (if we have enemies?); or why the pandemic made so many friendships easier to disappear. I skimmed some of the later parts because it really is an article that never ends, but it’s good and worth your consideration. This part especially: People may say that friendship betrayals aren’t as bad as romantic betrayals if they’re presented with hypothetical scenarios on a questionnaire. But that’s not how they experience friendship betrayals in real life.
A hot take on climate anxiety and whether it translates to anything positive: People need to hear the good news about climate change. “But when I see story after story after story on climate anxiety, I am mostly not reading stories of people who decide they want to increase their level of commitment to addressing climate change and then take action to do so. Everyone might feel better and the planet would be much better off if the anxious weren’t paralyzed by depression.”
Bill Wilson (that Bill Wilson) on LSD: “I AM CERTAIN THAT THE LSD EXPERIENCE HAS HELPED ME VERY MUCH.” A long-form read that I loved, if only because I love Bill W. so so much (and besides the point, I love reading about psychedelics and addiction recovery, and this is one of the original stories of it.) Anyway, back to Bill: Researching him for my book was a highlight and a love story, if only because you don’t have to look far to understand what a visionary, progressive, radical human he was; what it took to create what he created, and what it must have felt like to lose influence over a thing you gave birth to. You can see elements of that in this piece. A lot of people assume, incorrectly, I’m anti-Bill or anti-AA; I’m not. It’s fundamentalism that gets me. We have made only a fair-sized dent on this vast world health problem. Millions are still sick and other millions soon will be. These facts of alcoholism should give us good reason to think, and to be humble. Surely, we can be grateful for every agency or method that tries to solve the problem of alcoholism — whether of medicine, religion, education, or research. We can be open-minded toward all such efforts, and we can be sympathetic when the ill-advised ones fail.
My Favorite Podcast of All Time is Hidden Brain, and this episode on what we think other people think of us, and what people actually think of us—called the “liking gap”—was phenomenal.
I’m reareading Marlee Grace’s book, Getting To Center: Pathways to Finding Yourself Within the Great Unknown, to prepare for an upcoming interview. There’s this one passage I missed the first time around: “There is a part of not knowing that can also call us into deeper knowing. If I don’t know something about myself, about how I walk through the world—it may be time to know it deeper, to seek teachers, books, resources that bring me into a greater knowing of myself.” I also read this article, about The Second Book Problem, by Nicole Chung. What do these two things have in common? I’ve been “writing my second book” for a year, which means I’ve been thinking about writing my second book, and not writing it, and feeling terrible about that. The reason I haven’t started writing: many reasons, but one outstanding factor is that I feel like I have forgotten things I swore I knew; oftentimes, I don’t feel like a person who has anything to give; the best version of me and my intelligence and craft are lingering somewhere in a pre-pandemic winter of 2020, or even the summer of 2019 when the final draft of QLAW was turned in. I don’t buy this lie, though. What I believe, fully, is that when we don’t know something, it isn’t because we forgot. It’s because we are going deeper.
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These are some great articles. I especially enjoyed the one on "like"... I've often thought about the different ways but didn't have the appropriate grammatical names for them. It often serves an important purpose in how I mean to convey a thought.
I am recorded by a court reporter for my job a couple times a month. I noticed how much more often I use "you know" when I'm trying to make sure that the folks I'm speaking to are coming along with me on my thoughts. And I feel validated in the use of "you know" as described in the article.
Looking forward to tomorrow's podcast... I'm interested in hearing you interview Emily and vice versa.
Thank you for another amazing round up of articles. These quick bits are usually very enlightening and proving to be more and more timely for me. I just read an article that made me feel worried/bad about using filler words. So definitely appreciated the "VINDICATED" link/shout out. :)