Way Too Many of My Favorite 2018 Reads
The best things I managed to read while living with two children under two.
Hello from Substack! TinyLetter was supposed to go away in 2018, and I was supposed to use that as a reason to write more, but neither of those things happened. So here’s my attempt at making myself feel like I got something done last year that wasn’t growing/delivering/raising a baby/toddler.
There are too many links here for you to read them all. They’re sorted by what folder they ended up in my Instapaper account, so the idea is that you can browse and find one or two things that might grab your eye. (That’s how all the year-end reading lists are supposed to work, right?) Also, to make this as less of a bummer as possible, I omitted my fattest folders—Crime; Death; Disasters; and Feminism & Intersectionality. Happy 2019!
Art
I found that when you are in a wheelchair in public, there’s rarely a middle ground. There’s never normalized space in that moment, or more generally, in society. I wanted to capture those moments in these photographs.
—Revelations in a Wheelchair, Nolan Ryan Trowe
Eau de Nil (“water of the Nile”) is a tricky color to pin down precisely. It is a light-greenish hue, more saturated than celadon, less gray than sage. It has tan undertones and a cool bluish cast. It is, confusingly, an entirely different color from Nile green.
—Eau de Nil, the Light-Green Color of Egypt-Obsessed Europe, Katy Kelleher
Celebrity/Interviews
And he's doing a little dance, and I think he's holding a pie, and he's staring directly at me, those eyes piercing through the already-cracked screen of my iPhone, daring me to suggest that anything about his whole vibe is the opposite of sexy as fuck.
—This Chris Hemsworth GIF Is Ruining My Life, Tyler Coates
“You can—for a while—look past the problems, but for yourself, you can’t really look past anything. You can repress, and you can try and be blind, but you will always be hobbled. I think one will always be hobbled by what they’re trying to hide in themselves—that burden will always make a weird emotional posture for you.”
—The Unbearable Horniness Of Being Jenny Slate, Kristin Iversen
High school couplings are intense and beautiful because they’re rarely made to last. They’re intense and irrational and can either give you a false sense of superiority (I would never be so foolish as to move in with someone after a month and a half) or of wish fulfillment (WHEN WILL MY GHOUL-LIKE PRINCE COME?). In either case, they’re always meant to be temporary, because this level of intensity is not remotely sustainable. No one actually has this much energy, not even these two hot teens.
—Ariana Grande And Pete Davidson Have No Chill And I Love It, Scaachi Koul
Woods is compelled by a higher power (etiquette) to either pay me a polite compliment or ask me a question every ten minutes. What have I been doing today? My questions are great questions! What is my favorite kind of piece to write? His curiosity isn't affected. At one point Woods catches sight of my handwriting, which is the sharply slanted cursive of a Victorian madman, and he stops mid-sentence and says, "Oh my GOD, is that your handwriting? Can I just look at your handwriting?" He grabs my notebook. "I won't read the questions, I promise. That's incredible. You're like a Jane Austen character." In short order he's nodding encouragingly while I tell him about the cognitive pros of learning cursive as a child. I'm about to dive into some deep recollections of elementary school before I remember where we are (a pleasant, leafy hotel garden) and what we're doing (an interview).
—Zach Woods in the Woods, Lauren Larson
To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.
—Bourdain Confidential, Maria Bustillos
Listen, I made it work, honey.
—In Conversation: Kathleen Turner, David Marchese
Food
Honestly, who knows how many hours I’ve spent watching broth on the stove. Watching it simmer. Watching it boil. Sprinkling chiles before I stirred the minced garlic, but only after I’d already spooned in some watered-down doenjang. Or, on other days, I’d whisk whole cans of coconut milk in the pot, entirely unperturbed, setting the base for a blistering heat. I’d sip a teaspoon and dash the rest towards the fridge. Or I’d ladle a thimble, and then a palmful, until curiosity evolved into gluttony, spilling down my chin, and the serving I was taste-testing entirely overwhelmed me, and the front of my hoodie was drenched.
—The Year In Broth, Bryan Washington
What they aimed to achieve was droolingly described in the Saturday Evening Post in 1947, after the contest was two-thirds through: “one bird chunky enough for the whole family—a chicken with breast meat so thick you can carve it into steaks, with drumsticks that contain a minimum of bone buried in layers of juicy dark meat, all costing less instead of more.” Anyone who wanted to compete—and they ranged from small farmers to large, established companies—was granted one year to devise and breed a bird that possessed the sturdy, meaty qualities the contest was hoping for.
—The Surprising Origin of Chicken as a Dietary Staple, Maryn McKenna
Honestly, nothing makes me crave a bowl of cold cereal for dinner like someone telling me the most important thing I can do for my kids’ health, IQ, the economy and even the earth they’ll inherit is to cook dinner every night.
—Never Cook at Home, Deb Perelman
Funny
One poster said she asked her husband if he entered the tub this way, and he then went on to “ask the 10 guys he works with.” (An open workplace.) “None of them have ever thought to do this,” she said. “There’s no way water can get to [your husband’s balls] first unless it planks across the bath tub and lets his junk in the water,” said one poster, with a confident exactness.
—Do Men Enter Bathtubs on Hands and Knees So Their Balls Hit the Water Last?, Kelly Conaboy
Health
Delano couldn’t get Clue to understand that she had a shorter, often irregular cycle because it literally wouldn’t let her input a cycle that short, and it wouldn’t let her remove the algorithmically generated “fertile window” from her calendar despite the fact that there was no physical possibility of her getting pregnant with her partner, who was also a woman.
—Period-tracking apps are not for women, Kaitlyn Tiffany
The emotional costs are incalculable. I have never written a story where so many of my sources cried during interviews, where they double- and triple-checked that I would not reveal their names, where they shook with anger describing their interactions with doctors and strangers and their own families.
—Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong, Michael Hobbes
Internet & Tech
The algorithm is my mother and my undermining friend and my id and my boss and my guide and my enemy who read my diary. The algorithm looks me in the eyes and sees what makes me me, the deep weirdnesses in my soul and my clicks, my lingering late-night scrolls, and the searches too urgent for a private tab.
—The Algorithm Knows Me. So Why Does It Keep Shaming Me?, Noreen Malone
Movies
It’s just so strange to me – there’s the movie you write, the one you shoot and the one you cut: three totally different movies.
—'Bring It On': The Complete Oral History, Kase Wickman
When my daughter proposed watching “The Breakfast Club” together, I had hesitated, not knowing how she would react: if she would understand the film or if she would even like it. I worried that she would find aspects of it troubling, but I hadn’t anticipated that it would ultimately be most troubling to me.
—What About “The Breakfast Club”?, Molly Ringwald
Personal Essays
Women know a lot about good eggs. We are told early and often how to look for them and the dangers of choosing a bad one. After years of ignoring this advice I had, at long last, picked a good egg. There are so few out there, and fewer as you pass various sell-by dates. When you find a suitable egg the sensible thing to do is make it yours and enjoy it. I found one, and now I was contemplating breaking it.
—How to Poach an Egg, Brandy Jensen
I follow her into the yard and then back into the apartment while she talks through the apartment’s qualities, a short list: the rent is cheap. There is a garden. That’s about it. As she does so, the winter mud, the dead grass, the snow, these all seem like lies. I already feel like it is my home, and that the first thing I must do is plant a garden.
—The Rosary, Alexander Chee
At 16, Jane Austen didn’t really stick out as someone who was particularly for me. I was freshly out of the closet, estranged from my family, and giving toothy blowjobs to Cold Stone Creamery employees in the back of Pontiac Sunfires. Nothing about the struggles of Jane Bennet and Elinor Dashwood particularly resonated with me at that moment in my life. But about a decade later, I’d pluck a copy of Pride and Prejudice off my shelf (purchased to display in my Brooklyn apartment to convince Grindr hook-ups that I could fuck and think), stick it in a tote, and head off for the first time to Fire Island.
—Pride and Prejudice on Fire Island, Joel Kim Booster
Thousands of words on the wrong problem. I have perfected a two-handed backhand to clobber the lob that is coming at me that is: the wrong problem. I have aced the wrong problem.
—Bastard, Elizabeth Wurtzel
Parenthood
My husband could see I had a novel inside me, and it was a commotion, and the only way to settle it was to write it, and the only way to write it was to be alone. I had not been alone in a decade. I had not been alone because I am a mother, and a mother is never alone. When she is washing, sleeping, raging, she is not alone. For a mother, this is the state of things. Children hang from your clothing. They pummel you with questions. Like a gunfight, like the most consuming love, like an apocalypse: they take up all of the available space.
—Mothers as Makers of Death, Claudia Dey
Politics
The only answer that the people in power can ever come up with for social problems is more jails, more police. I try to stay away from the dollar signs because they can be distracting from the fact that this system is a moral horror, but it’s so absurd that we’ll shell out for this expensive criminal justice system, but not for anything else. By and large, my clients were not provided with some basic level of education, shelter or health care.
—“This System Is a Moral Horror,” An interview with Franklin Bynum
Television
The email from Raphael Bob-Waksberg to Lisa Hanawalt on March 22, 2010, was to the point: “Hey, do you have a picture of one of your horse guys, by himself? I came up with this idea for a show I’d like to pitch. Tell me what you think: BoJack the Depressed Talking Horse.”
—How BoJack Horseman Got Made, Chris McDonnell
In an interview with Grub Street, Antoni does talk about actually cooking — but he admits that he mostly enjoys cooking at home (where there are no witnesses?) and also that he is mostly untrained.
—Investigation: Does the Incredibly Hot Food Guy from Queer Eye Even Know How to Cook?, Patrick Lenton
Travel
When a group reaches the mural, they snap solo shots before asking the next person in line to take a group picture. On Saturday morning, a woman in a maroon shirt that reads “BRIDE’S LAST RIDE” poses with one leg tucked behind her, her head cocked to the side. Then she scuttles away to join the rest of the group. “Tara, are you so happy?” one of them asks.
They huddle together to scrutinize the photos. Someone, not Tara, finds them lacking. “Can I just squeeze back in and do it one more time?” she asks. But two Ubers have already pulled up to bring the group to their next destination. A pole dancing class, a bicycle bar, a pedicure, a wine tasting tour — and, by the end of the night, a trip to the honky-tonks on Broadway, where bachelorettes have become conspicuous, ubiquitous, and unavoidable.
—How Nashville Became One Big Bachelorette Party, Anne Helen Petersen
Writing
That we live in a time where people pay to be locked in a room together and have to find a way out. That this is fun to us now.