December 16, 2023

Something I thought about:

• I read a post on BlueSky about “a special slow read project of Kate Briggs & Roland Barthes next year,” and I really loved this idea of slow reading. I typically read ~150 new books/year (not counting rereads), and this isn’t because I’m racing to hit some specific number or anything — I just like to read. A lot. But I’ve been thinking about slowing down on purpose. What would it be like to only read, say… one book per month? I can spend forever on a single poem — and that’s what happened when I tried the Sealey challenge earlier this year. I couldn’t read a collection of poetry / day because I wanted to spend time with each poem. I don’t think I’ll limit my reading to only a book per month or anything so arbitrary. There’s too much fun, light reading that I’ll continue to zip through because I want to fill my head with stories. But I may select a few books to dig into really slowly. It sounds like such a treat.

Something I did:

• Went to the “Family Trees” exhibition at the Concord Museum
• Went to French class.
• Caught up on a PM backlog for a couple of projects.
• Finally turned in copy edits for a paper.
• Zeroed my inbox.
• Started to plan 2024.
• Finished Christmas shopping. (Finally! I started a month ago…)

Something I read:

• Ed Yong’s op ed on covering Long Covid, which is a call to action to journalists. Mostly it’s a call to tell stories with empathy.

Covering long Covid solidified my view that science is not the objective, neutral force it is often misconstrued as. It is instead a human endeavor, relentlessly buffeted by our culture, values and politics. As energy-depleting illnesses that disproportionately affect women, long Covid and M.E./C.F.S. are easily belittled by a sexist society that trivializes women’s pain, and a capitalist one that values people according to their productivity. Societal dismissal leads to scientific neglect, and a lack of research becomes fodder for further skepticism.

• The Boy Who Loved Maps by Kari Allen