This month’s links round-up is a mega one - so settle in with a cup of tea. The only way to wrangle the web links was by subject, rather than where on the internet they’re going to - let me know if this works for you all? It’s such a huge one, I’m going to come back later and tell you about the books I read this month!
This is a long, full-of-links, email which might get cut-off by some email providers - I can recommend downloading the Substack App, which puts all your Substack newsletters in one place. I use it myself and really enjoy it.
Alternatively, you can read on my Substack webpage; Substack is the service I use to send out these emails; think of it as a blogging platform hosting my one-woman magazine.
On Books
I’m a long-time fan of BookRiot, an independent, progressive book website. They’re exploring Substack at the moment, and Rebecca Schinsky (who you might know as one of the hosts of the regular BookRiot Podcast) has launched Better Living Through Books: a resource for reading materials that help us live the lives we want.
The first post was the nudge I needed to finally order Tiago Forte’s Building A Second Brain (ad - affiliate link)
On Brain-Wrangling
Rach Idowu wrote a post on her fantastically named Adulting with ADHD Substack newsletter about setting writing goals when you have an ADHD brain. I read it, and promptly shared it with a few work friends, because I think it’s useful for setting and working towards any type of work goals, if you have any sort of brain. That’s because she goes beyond setting SMART goals into coaching yourself to meet them, using her GROW framework.
Similarly, Jami Attenberg’s advice to ask yourself what kind of writer you want to be in 2024 could be expanded to asking yourself what kind of person you want to be.
Activist and writer Emily Ladau also wrote, back at the end of 2021, about replacing SMART goals with FUN goals: Flexible, Uplifting, and Numberless. Somehow this idea didn’t make it onto my screen until this month, but I love it. It definitely helps me understand how I’m thinking about running this year - just getting back to enjoying it, without numeric goals attached.
Also on goal-setting, Harriet Minter wrote in praise of the ‘Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal,’ which I really enjoyed. ‘Shoot for the moon’, as they say, ‘and even if you miss, you’ll land amongst the stars.’ (She didn’t say that in the post - it’s far too cliché!)
Both hosts of Books Unbound, a favourite podcast of mine, are approaching their 30th birthdays, like me. As a result, their episode on 2024 reading goals contained some really interesting discussion on what ‘turning 30’ means to them. I loved that Ariel’s word of the year is ‘industrious’.
For a different sort of neurodiversity, Melanie Deziel explores why so many of us with neurodivergent - especially autistic - brains relate so deeply to Taylor Swift’s lyrics. In particular, to the sheer effort of existing and loneliness that run throughout.
On that note, I appreciated this reminder from Eva Wiseman that it’s okay to (stil)l not be okay about what we’ve lived through over the last four years. For more on disaster survival, I can’t miss an opportunity to recommend my favourite book of 2023, When The Dust Settles by Lucy Easthope.
On Flying Solo
Hannah McGregor of Material Girls, a scholarly podcast about pop-culture, has a fantastic piece titled The Loneliness of the Spinster on their website which was originally written for the Chronicle of Higher Education. After that website closed, she’s reproduced it for us all to read. It’s focussed on the experience of the single woman in academia - and although I’m not in that professional world, I found it deeply relatable. They write:
As a spinster, however, my life is characterized, not by the absence of relationships, but by the absence of the two relationships that the state and its institutions recognize.
🔥🔥🔥
But if being single is so bad, why don’t I just… get a boyfriend? Because, as Elle Hunt explains in the Guardian, the apps are awful and the dates they lead to are… suboptimal. Lucy Handley wrote more about this experience on her excellent Substack newsletter:
And that’s even before you try dating while fat. I’ve been reading Kate Manne’s writing for a while (you bet I pre-ordered her new book, Unshrinking), and I’ve never felt so seen as while I was reading her piece for The Cut, which talks all about what it’s like to grow up never seeing your body as desirable (honourable mention for the male friend who told me, aged 17, that the £15 per hour I made private tutoring was more than I’d be able to make selling myself…).
On Being In The Bodies That We’re In
Harriet Minter, whose piece on goals I mentioned above, wrote an excellent rebuttal to the usual legion of healthy-living-in-January content. As a curvy-and-tall girl, I found it interesting to read about what it’s like being curvy-and-short, which I’ll never experience.
On Dreaming
I fell down a dreamy-home rabbit hole this month, mostly (but not entirely) thanks to the house tours on Cup of Jo. This Brooklyn apartment gives the ‘cottage in the middle of the city’ vibe so strongly - and I felt very satisfied to look at the bedroom with its simple linens and quilt, and then to remember that that’s how I’ve set up my new bedroom in Bristol too.
For more small-space city living, this San Francisco studio apartment looks wonderfully cosy, as do the bedrooms in this New Jersey family house… and then this Minnesota A-Frame had me dreaming of the forests and lakes instead. (I’ll stick to building the Lego one for the time being).
While I was thinking about forests and lakes, I chanced on this Strategist piece about through-hiking from hut to hut in the Austrian Alps. Where do I sign up?
And Now For Something Completely Different
I love libraries - and really enjoyed this Guardian piece about Gen Z romanticising libraries - and using them as backgrounds for their thirst traps. I have to admit, I can’t quite wait for this to be a main work space for me when I start my Master’s in September (fingers crossed!).
You might have heard of Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger podcast company - one of its most well-known products is The Rest Is Politics featuring Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart. A newer podcast from the stable is The Rest Is Entertainment, hosted by Richard Osman and Marina Hyde. In particular, I really enjoyed this mailbag episode which went behind the scenes of TV quiz shows and explained the maths behind the prize jackpots.
Speak soon -
Lily
The library thirst traps killed me. I’ve been working from Edinburgh central when I’m in town for meetings and the random selfies? One day I was in the Haddington library and watched three girls spend 30 minutes trying to take a library selfie that they all agreed they looked cute on. It’s fluorescent strip lighting, no one is ever going to look cute!