I know, I know. It’s been a minute or two since the last one of these.
I’ve been collecting links for several months now and every Thursday I’d think about pulling together a post and…I just wouldn’t. So I did a lot of thinking about why I wasn’t. Initially, it was because I was too tired. This was true through November and December–going back to work was great but exhausting. Then it became clear that my reluctance was about something else. It’s not that I don’t want to share interesting things with people, it’s just that I was putting so much pressure on myself to do it perfectly.
I am a somewhat anxious person and not doing something perfectly is a major trigger on that front; so I sat down and did a lot of thinking. And what I decided is this: instead of spending hours on Thursday pulling it together I would, instead, spread the work out over the course of the week–take a bit of time every day and do a little bit of work.
Let’s see if it works out.
- “After its release, a criticism waged against my memoir was that my ‘narrator’” (which, spoilers, is me) isn’t likable, that I write things that make my readers uncomfortable and that I make choices with which my readers disagree. As if my most important job in finding language for a story that had none were to please. As if by labeling me unlikable, they don’t have to listen to the story I needed to tell. Raped women are unlikable, apparently. So are strong women. Women who survive. Ambitious women are unlikable, women who are good at their jobs, women who tell the truth. Women who don’t take shit are unlikable, women who burn bridges, women who know what they are worth.“
- “In their view, ‘madness’ associated with ‘the change of life’ was not madness at all — not a serious affliction to be taken seriously — but a women’s malady to be treated with bleeding and leeches, herbs and ointments, drugs, alcohol, and the desiccated and powdered ovaries of farm animals.”
- I’ve become obsessed with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, in part because of The Dropout and mostly because I’m fascinated by con artists–which Holmes certainly is. Even her voice was/is fake. If you’re not a podcast person, let me recommend these two recent articles at Vanity Fair: “She Never Looks Back”: Inside Elizabeth Holmes’s Final Months at Theranos and As Theranos Burned, Elizabeth Holmes was Partying–at Burning Man
- Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the release of the Indigo Girls’s eponymously named album, Indigo Girls. It’s one of my favorite albums and this retrospective of “Closer to Fine” feels like a good way to round out the week.
Sunita says
March 5, 2019 at 11:30 amI have Bad Blood on hold at the library, and the list was so long, but they have lots of copies, so I think I will get it in the next couple of weeks. I read both the articles on Holmes/Theranos and I read Carryeou’s reporting in real time in the WSJ. I still can’t get over how thoroughly she was able to con a bunch of old white men. Oh, wait. The answer is in the question, isn’t it?
I’ll report back on the book. A friend who listened to the audiobook thought it was very good. She was also dumbfounded. To think that George Schultz disowned his grandson rather than admit he was taken in by Holmes.
And welcome back! It’s lovely to see you on a Friday again.
Natalie Luhrs says
March 5, 2019 at 11:50 amI still can’t get over her fake voice.
I have had a lot of blood drawn over the past 9 months, sometimes up to 7-8 tubes at a time (from my hand so it’s extra hurty). I literally cannot conceive of how they were going to be able to run hundreds of tests on one or two drops of blood without reinventing all the tests from the ground up. Which, frankly, is a terrible use of capital. Yes, having blood drawn sucks, especially when your veins aren’t cooperating or if you have a thing about needles, but in the vast spectrum of medical procedures, it’s pretty low on the suck scale. At least for me it is (drains and pancreatic MRIs top my list).
Do let me know how Bad Blood is–I’m currently so far behind on my reading that I’m trying to avoid adding more things to Mount TBR.