These Are a Few of My Favorite Links: 03/15/22
Every other week, I send an email that solely features great links for you to peruse throughout the week and weekend. Enjoy!
“The ‘stunning’ shift in how the media covers MLB labor strife”
Baseball is back!
The article linked above is a really interesting piece on the media coverage of the lockout. As American culture becomes generally more aware of labor strife and employment issues, the reporting of those same issues in sports has changed too—and not necessarily for the better.
If you need some context on the baseball lockout and what I’m even talking about, this is a great longread on how the relationship between owners and players became so heated.
“I'm common as muck and spent £150 in a Michelin star restaurant to see if it was worth it”
This is such a fun, lighthearted piece and mirrors exactly how I feel about dining at fancy places. It sometimes feels ridiculous, but my wife and I love it because it’s such a luxurious experience for us in the midst of the un-luxurious day-to-day of raising three small kiddos.
Author Brandon Sanderson Raises Almost $30 Million on Kickstarter
The biggest book news of the last couple weeks* is fantasy author Brandon Sanderson breaking Kickstarter’s record for the most funded project of all time. Take a look at the page for a few minutes and watch the number keep ticking up. It’s pretty remarkable.
For way more money than I’m willing to spend, readers will get “A Year of Sanderson” in ‘23, which includes monthly swag boxes and four brand new books. Not bad for an author who gets pegged as “genre fiction” and isn’t ever found on year-end “Best Of” lists. Real readers who spend real money certainly disagree.
*Second place would be Cormac McCarthy’s announcement of TWO new books coming this fall!
“The video essay boom”
I work closely with our YouTube/video team at WordPress.com, so this piece was particularly interesting to me, both personally and for work purposes. Longform, in-depth content is not dead. Hour-long videos are taking off on YouTube. TikTok recently upped their time limit for uploaded videos to 3 minutes—the previous max was 60 seconds and it was just 15 seconds when TikTok first launched.
People want nuance and deep understanding. Even on the internet. There is hope!
The World’s on Fire. Can We Still Talk About Books?
I recently finished Rebecca Makkai’s spectacular The Great Believers and have been digging up her other writings and interviews online. This piece from 2018 remains annoyingly, incredibly relevant, even three years later. Allow me to spoil it just a little by sharing the final lines:
Write while you can. Paint while you can. Spread your art through the world. Not everyone is so lucky. Publish books and read books and teach books while you can. Take the art you love and blast it from your trumpet. Shout into the wind the names of the things you love.
Art is a radical act. Joy is a radical act.
This is how we keep fighting. This is how we survive.
So. Good.
This Isn’t the California I Married
The temperature hits 60 in Colorado and I tend to start thinking about what the wildfire season might bring for our state. This piece about the annual, terrifying fire situation in California was written in early January, just a few days after Colorado’s most destructive fire ever—which was just a few miles from our house. It’s a harrowing read, to say the least. Last fall, wife and I considered moving into the mountains and becoming a little more rural. While not the only reason by a longshot, part of our reasoning was that we’d live in near-constant fear of wildfire.
Thanks so much for reading and subscribing! I sure appreciate it.
-Jeremy
I was close to signing up for a year of Sanderson but now I’m just hoping if I mention it enough to enough people, someone will gift it to me.
By the way, have I told you I love Sanderson and plan to read all his stuff next year?