Collections

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash I read Margo's Got Money Trouble and the comparison I immediately thought about was The L-Shaped Room. In both novels, the protagonist gets accidentally pregnant and decides to keep the baby despite most men in her life discouraging her. Margo lives in 2020s USA while Jane lives in 1950s UK, but the ways these two women are marginalised are strikingly similar. On the surface, both women are shamed for getting pregnant outside of marriage. Jane

Photo by TopSphere Media on Unsplash I'm reading Margo's Got Money Trouble, and she has some fantastic metaphors. They make me envious, obviously, but also they got me thinking about why I love a good metaphor. A good metaphor distills what I love about books. It lets me see the world, for a moment, from someone else's perspective. Not just to see what they do, but to see how they see the world, how they feel. The last good metaphor I marked was "The walls were painted teal a

Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash I watched Reality last week. It’s a film about Reality Winner, an NSA contractor who leaked a classified document to a news website. The film makes a distinct choice: it uses only recordings. Mainly, it’s the recording of the FBI interviewing Reality in her home, but there are some news broadcast recordings, and a recording of a phone call she made to her sister from jail. Reality's story opens up a host of questions that would be worth explori

My new Sakura Notebook. It makes me happy. I started a new notebook today. It’s a gorgeous Moleskine I got in Milan, the Sakura edition. As you would expect from Moleskine, the paper quality is outstanding, and the attention to detail is quite something (there are two ribbon markers, each a different shade of pink to match the design). There’s even a little bookmark with sales copy about “The Art of Capturing Fleeting Beauty”. It says: “…Pen and paper are the best way to capt

Photo by Joey Jacob on Unsplash I’ve been playing with Tarot cards recently, and I noticed that asking the right question is surprisingly difficult. We come to the cards wanting answers, but we haven’t quite formulated the question yet. So at the beginning of the session, before we even touch the deck, there’s already some work happening. It connects, for me, to my academic research. In academic research, half the work is figuring out how to ask a question that, if answered,

Photo by Igordoon Primus on Unsplash I watched Broken Glass at The Young Vic last week. The way the auditorium is set up makes you a part of the play, not merely an observer. Case in point: in the climax when Phillip collapses and the rest are standing around laughing, I had a strong urge to run over and help him up. It makes us feel compassionate towards someone who isn’t easy to feel compassionate towards. Then we get to go home feeling like heroes. We totally would have h

Photo by peter bucks on Unsplash I’ve come across the phrase “late bloomer” a few times recently, and I noticed I resisted it. I was an early bloomer, or what is more often called a precocious child. I had my first existential crisis when I was five. I can still remember crying in bed, my mum trying to figure out what I could possibly have to cry about. I was thinking that evening about how my grandfather died and how my parents will die someday, and I’ll be left alone, and

Photo by Djim Loic on Unsplash After writing the piece Curiosity, Taxed , I felt that maybe it was too clean. Sometimes the voice that tells me to keep writing rather than follow this curiosity spark down a rabbit hole is actually right. Sometimes what I need to do is to keep writing. But I still firmly believe that sometimes I need to fall down the rabbit hole. So how do I tell which is which? Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer for that. When I follow the curiosity t

Photo by Eijat Darus on Unsplash I’m taking a course called Creative Systems , and one of the things Kening Zhu talks about is resources and our relationship to them. She names the most obvious ones—time, energy, attention, inspiration—but she says a lot of things can be resources. When I heard that, the thought that hit me was: I’m rich in curiosity. It’s not just a trait, it’s the driver of much of my work. Here’s what usually happens. I hear something or read something. I

Photo by Andreas Haimerl on Unsplash Everyone says listen to your body. It's the (not so) new fad in the wellness industry. Your body knows best. The assumption is that our bodies hold all the wisdom, and we have to shut up and take it. Which, don't get me wrong, I understand how we ended up here. For much too long, women's bodies in particular have been silenced and disbelieved. Especially if there's pain, or, heaven forbid, hormones involved. But in the same way that my bo

Photo by Takemaru Hirai on Unsplash To all intents and purposes, I'm a collector. I collect quotes in various places, fragments of beautiful sentences, random thoughts and ideas. I collect books I want to read and TV shows and movies I want to watch. I have a whole section on my website called Collections (you're in it right now). A while ago, I was reading Empireland (a rough read but such an important book), and I noted that the British Empire is, among other things, disti

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash For much of my life, my automatic cognitive stance was black-and-white thinking. If something annoyed me, it was bad, and everything around it was awful. If someone said something that hurt my feelings, I'd break off contact and never speak to them again. Today, I was reflecting that I think that's no longer the case. In fact, I think my automatic stance became seeing both sides. I was thinking about the British Library and how, on th

Photo by Emilipothèse on Unsplash I was listening to Ezra Klein interviewing Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, and he said something that is both insane and makes perfect sense at the same time. He said: "...when you start to train these systems to carry out actions in the world, they really do begin to see themselves as distinct in the world... But along with seeing oneself as distinct from the world seems to come the rise of what you might think of as a conception of

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash Today I'm thinking about the word taboo. In Hebrew, the same word has two meanings: the first is a legal property term, derived from the Turkish word tapu , meaning proof of ownership of a property (a land or part of it). A registration in the taboo, in Hebrew, means the land is legally yours. The second meaning of the word comes from Polynesian and means sacred or forbidden . I was sure these two meanings came from the same word, but t

Photo by Aedrian Salazar on Unsplash Today I'm thinking about the futility of making art. David Speed (excellent podcast , highly recommend) says that all the artists he talked to say that you just need to keep making things. Which is decent advice, I guess. But he doesn't interview the thousands of people who kept making things their whole lives and stayed obscure; no one ever heard of them, and only very few people even engaged with their work. It's not that I intend to st

Photo by Sepp Rutz on Unsplash When I started the collections, I was super excited and couldn't see this rather predictable slump coming. On many days, I feel like I don't have anything interesting to contribute. Today, for example, I feel like a dilettante--there are no consequences for my success, so really I'm just dabbling in writing, surely. Then I say, well, if I don't have anything interesting to contribute, then I'm just making noise, and the internet already has qui

Picture taken this weekend I've never seen myself as a "dance mum". With the equivalent "hockey mom" (in Canada) or "football mum" (when we just arrived in London), the term connotes, for me, a kind of relentless pushing of the child who may or may not be interested in the relevant sport. I was always a proponent of laid-back parenting, and when my daughter said she wanted to take ballet, I assumed this was an opportunity for her to stay an hour after school, giving me a bit

Photo by Ian Barsby on Unsplash I finally got around (read: scheduled time) to reading Zadie Smith's excellent essay titled The Art of the Impersonal Essay . While I don't necessarily connect to her fiction, I think she's a very clear thinker, and I admire that. I've taken notes. I don't think I was taught how to write an essay at school, and in university, I mostly learned how to write academic papers, which aren't exactly the same. I loved the permission she gave writers t

Sakamoto Kaori at the team event When we lived in Ottawa, we discovered the Olympic Winter Games. When it's -26 degrees outside and pitch dark at 4 pm, anything would do. Plus, there's hockey . Despite the excitement, Olympic hockey isn't as good as NHL hockey, and when I watch the winter olympics I opt mostly for the more creative stuff: figure skating (although I can't connect to ice dancing, however hard I tried), big air (jumping with a snowboard), slopestyle (jumping wi

Photo by Aleksandar Cvetanovic on Unsplash I was thinking about resting today, since it is Sunday. I've been trying to take Sundays off, with mediocre success (as evident by the fact that I'm currently writing). Now that the young people are no longer young children, the household rhythm has changed on weekends. We're no longer constantly on call, and so Sunday can be a day of rest. A sort of Sabbath, if you will. But then I thought about the word rest, and the two meanings

Ben Kingsley and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Trevor Slattery and Simon Williams I watched the whole first series of Wonder Man this week. Mostly, I was looking for a shorter commitment than the hour-long episodes of The Morning Show, which I started watching, but feel like I need to take time off to properly watch. Anyway. It's a very decent series. The performances are great. The episode about DeMarr "Doorman" Davis was both elegant and one of the weirdest things I've watche

Photo by Ricardo Viana on Unsplash I've been working on and off with The Dictionary of Obscured Sorrows. I started going through the entires and jotting down my own reactions for the words, sometimes little stories came out of that. The more I worked through it, the more I became acutely aware that the desire to catalog and define everything may be fundamentally opposed to what life is. But I completely get this desire (which Brené Brown talks about so eloquently). Just tod

I've been thinking a lot about the Traitors lately. Like many people, I became quite addicted to the show. My gateway was Celebrity Traitors. My dealer was, of course, my 14-year-old daughter. We love watching things together (it was Ginny and Georgia until we finished the last season). She said watch the first episode with me and then decide. We watched the entire season as close as we could to the live sessions (everyone will be talking about this at school tomorrow, Mum)

Image by Kilaarts on Etsy I'm trying very hard to let myself follow my curiosity. It has to do with being between books, letting the idea of the new book come to me when it's good and ready - something I adopted from Julia Cameron . Yesterday, through a newsletter, I came across this dude on YouTube . Two hours later, I had to really run to make my appointment in the city. One of the problems with letting your curiosity lead you in this day and age is that you can be swallo

Photo by Micah & Sammie Chaffin on Unsplash Today I've been thinking about taking risks. Society sends us mixed messages about risks. On one hand, we have the stories about mavericks who do things their way and have been celebrated, from Picasso through Mel Gibson's Riggs to Mark Zuckerberg; these stories are about men who behave in sometimes abhorrent ways, but they are forgiven because they're really good at what they do. We are supposed to idolise these people and want to

Photo by Sean Stratton on Unsplash I was thinking about private and public spaces today. I wrote not long ago that we need to be careful about processing our raw emotions in public, where we can trigger others and contribute to the escalation of general public mayhem. And this new collections adventure felt like blurring the boundaries between the private and the public. Am I adding any value, or just creating more noise? What I realised is that it's not a binary. There's

Image by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash Today I'm thinking, not for the first time, that secular modern science gave up too easily on spirituality. We consigned it to the religious institutions far to early. It is a blaspheme for a serious scientist to suggest things like researching spirituality, and as a consequence, all research of spirituality is done in disciplines and institutions that are not known for their rigorous scientific enquiry. Why does this matter? Because human

Image b y Tim Cooper on Unsplash I've been thinking about marketing lately. I want people to read my book. I want people to read my newsletter, and mostly, I want them to reply to the newsletter and tell me what they think. I'm a lousy marketer--I think--because I much prefer listening over talking. The social media state of people shouting to get attention exhausts me. But I also live in the real world, and I understand that there are people out there who would love my book