“Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps” by Kehinde Wiley

Hello! I have mostly regained my equilibrium and aplomb, huzzah! Things have been mostly quiet on the home front and things are at least manageable at work now that I’ve gotten religious about deciding on what three tasks I am going to work on each day. I’ve also started telling people no, which has been an interesting experiment.

I’ve also been doing a bit of reading, mostly Kate Elliott’s Jaran novels, which I’d never read before. They’re so great (and super-long). I’m also gearing up to get my backlog of short fiction reviews posted and made a list of a bunch of stories I’d like to read this month, including the third issue of Fiyah. There are also an awful lot of books that look really great coming this month: Fran Wilde’s Horizon, Ann Leckie’s Provenance, Kristen Cashore’s Jane, Unlimited, Kat Howard’s An Unkindness of Magicians, and J.Y. Yang’s two novellas, The Red Threads of Fortune and The Black Tides of Heaven. And all of them but Jane, Unlimited come out on the same day and I’m basically going to need a time turner. Oh and there’s also Hillary Clinton’s What Happened, Katy Tur’s Unbelievable, and Brené Brown’s Braving the Wilderness on the non-fiction front. Can I make a dent in my entirely ridiculous TBR pile and get these nine books read as well? Maybe!

• Brené Brown on Blame I found this to be a useful thing to watch.
• A couple of articles from i-D that I found interesting:
  • Follow Your Instincts, Not Your Instagram
  • Celine Dion Knows It, Your Mom Knows It: Style is Having a Middle Age Renaissance
• This collection of quotes from prospective jurors in Martin Shkreli’s trial brought me so much joy.
• Someday I will have more money than sense and be able to purchase a Nakaya fountain pen. (I sort of love the way this piece is basically someone discovering that there are people who like to use fountain pens.)
• Exceedingly excellent story by Andrea Phillips: “Three Laws”
• Crunch Culture Is Never Just About Individual Choice
• The Age of the Algorithm
• Dear Hollywood: Being Unattractive Is Not Brave
• Can Real Life Compete With an Instagram Playground?
• And a couple of articles from Eater:
  • Dessert Has Always Been Political
  • The White Lies of Artisanal Food Culture
• I really enjoyed this round table discussion at Strange Horizons: Emotional Labour in SFF – The Work Of Caring (and hey, their annual fund drive is happening, too!)
• Jess Nevins recently ran a survey about sexual harassment in SFF. The results were not entirely unexpected but they were still disheartening. 
• Zoë Quinn Is Rebooting Her Life After Gamergate
• Yoon Ha Lee has interesting things to about #ownvoices: Why I don’t use #ownvoices, and why readers should stop demanding writers’ personal credentials
• What I Said When My White Friend Asked for My Black Opinion on White Privilege This is really great and it should be required reading for well-meaning but clueless white people.
• Teaching White Students Showed Me The Difference Between Power and Privilege
• Jelani Cobb on The Battle of Charlottesville
• Ta-Nehesi Coates weighs in the White Supremacist in Chief: The First White President
• “Where You Come From is Gone” This series of photos by Gusdugger really needs to be viewed in its entirety. The pictures are haunting, evocative, and heartbreaking. They attempt to make visible the historical–and physical–erasure of the original inhabitants of the American South.
• Helping people affected by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Mudslides in Sierra Leone. Flooding in South Asia. (But hey, climate change is just fake news, amirite or amirite?)

And on a lighter note–this video was a nice 2 minute break from the ongoing mayhem that is my dayjob. Watch with the sound turned on.

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