> 200: We were trying to live a personal life

Hi hi,

I’m going to be super honest: I can’t remember when I started counting editions of this newsletter. I think it may have been when I first started sending out stuff on TinyLetter (remember TinyLetter?) in the impossibly innocent era of 2013-2014ish. I know I kept counting through the weekly “Everything Changes” era and the Awl newsletter era (real ones know), then weekly lists, then monthly lists. Anyway, happy 200. Maybe, in another 10 years, this newsletter will hit 400 editions as it takes the form of a lightly scented mist in the breeze or an eight-note ringtone once we all go back to Nokias. We can only hope.

Here’s some art, ideas, and internet for you:

1. “Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that's thanks to you.”

2. “What I need you to know is they are coming. What I need you to know is you can stop them.”

3. Good books I’ve read recently: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden and Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe, even though I found the first third so frustrating it made me want to grind my teeth. (They’re making a series out of Margo, with Elle Fanning playing the lead.)

4. “Standing in front of all my stuff, it hit me that all of it used to be money, and all of that used to be time.”

5. How to feed groups, in one chart from Julia Turshen.

6. The USPS gift shop doesn’t have to go as hard as it does, and yet.

7. “The strategic power of being the right measure of annoying”: You can win bold climate laws in your state.

8. 88 artists look up at the sky at the same time and draw what they see.

9. The sun? So hot right now.

10. Fantasy subway map and an incredible database of romance books.

11. Allow me to remind you of Deb Perelman’s perfect (and, coincidentally, lactose-free!) apple cake recipe.

12. In those years, people will say, we lost track
    of the meaning of we, of you
    we found ourselves
    reduced to I
    and the whole thing became
    silly, ironic, terrible:
    we were trying to live a personal life
    and yes, that was the only life
    we could bear witness to

    But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
    into our personal weather
    They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
    along the shore, through the rags of fog
    where we stood, saying I

    —Adrienne Rich, "In Those Years"

TTFN,

Laura

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