Reading Roundup 2022

Reading Roundup 2022!

One of my (rare) New Year's resolutions is to track what I've read better. I always like the look back. Here's a sampling of stuff I read this year (not including books, which I was pretty delinquent about, but trying to be kind to myself) that wasn't included in previous reading roundups. I tried to avoid sharing things that were super topical, but I think next year I'll include them because it acts as an anchoring in time. Special thanks to Metafilter and Mastodon and friends for linking many of these.

This year I moved across the country and am expecting a second kid in the spring, not to mention we're living in a pandemic no one wants to acknowledge anymore, so it's been A Lot. Here's hoping I can crawl out of the hole a little bit next year.

• A top researcher says it's time to rethink our entire approach to preschool - Rich people let their little ones do play-based learning, but children in poverty are forced into an overly strict public school style education system too early.
• A Year After Blackout, Texans Navigate Climate Trauma in a Failing Fossil State - The trauma from Snowpocalypse 2021 was the last straw for me and I moved out of Texas, despite loving the particular place where I lived and having a strong social network. Change is hard-won there, and the activists there have my utmost respect and admiration.
• Why We Can't Solve Big Problems by Jason Pontin
• The Capital of Garbo
• It's Time to Stop Living the American Scam by Tim Kreider
• If I Don't Remember What I Read, Did I Really Read It At All? by Molly Templeton
• Arguing with Someone Who Doesn't Want to Listen
• Why do we remember more by reading in print vs. on a screen?
• Why books don't work - a clickbaity title, but good analysis. I suppose it really depends on what your end goal of reading is. Sometimes reading is about the experience, enjoying the moments of reading a book, and not necessarily having perfect recall of whatever was in it. Sometimes you're left with a feeling. If something strikes you particularly, you can always reread. I'm trying to be more chill about the ephemerality of memory.
• Informing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture by Derek Thompson - This has really stuck with me, amid the algorithmification of all aspects of human culture. We're so obsessed with the idea of never consuming something we might not like that we miss out on a complex experience of life. See culling vs. surrender.
• Where we'll end up living as the planet burns
• A Few Rules for Predicting the Future by Octavia E. Butler
• Who Goes Nazi? by Dorothy Thompson - A reread, I think about this a lot.
• One insomniac’s descent into the world of sleep research to understand what screens before bed are doing to our brains - Just a delight from beginning to end.
• Curing the Ills of Social Media by Teri Kanefield
• A Parent's Typical Day, As Envisioned By My Child's Preschool - Every line of this is too real.
• What Makes a Cult a Cult?
• Every "chronically online" conversation is the same - sociologically fascinating
• My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I'm a writer - I mean, honestly, he broke up with her because he's an immature douchenozzle, but a juicy read.
• It's Not Cool to Overreact: How Normalcy Bias Will Define Our Future