top five
Before the memory of 2017 fades entirely from our minds, I wanted to slide in with an ever-so-slightly belated list of faves to share. I'll keep it short and sweet, since I know you've all already seen a million of these round-ups, but I for one will never turn down recommendations from a person whose tastes I trust—do you trust me, readers?
Read MoreI have been having trouble motivating myself to write because Everything Is Awful and why blog in the face of all that, right?, but I figure the least I can do is throw a tiny thimbleful of positivity onto the dumpster fire of our current world and hope it helps someone, somewhere feel just one second of happiness. So, here are some things that don't suck.
Read MoreTime for Part 2 of my end-of-year, best-of-2016, share-all-the-things lists! This part is more specific-experience focused but hopefully still includes things that you can seek out and take part in or try out yourself (some more easily than others, to be fair).
Read MoreAs I wrote last year, despite popular opinion, I am actually a big fan of end-of-the-year lists, roundups, and rankings. I like to hear people talk about things they love, I like getting recommendations from smart people, and I like forcing things I enjoy onto the people around me, so this is basically my favorite time of year.
Here's the first half of my Best of 2016 compilation, specifically focused on all forms of media.
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The Boston University Bridge over the Charles River going from Cambridge to Boston. I took this on Tuesday morning, just after voting, on my walk to work.
This seems like the week to revive this feature, even if "Happy" might be an overstatement. Here are some things that have made me feel even a tiny bit better about the world this week.
Read MoreI've been wanting to do this kind of post for quite a while, but I never seemed to get around to it. I've seen other bloggers use this sort of trope and of course it's a central section every week on my favorite podcast, Pop Culture Happy Hour. It just seems like a nice way to talk about some things that have been making my life better lately and that you might be able to enjoy, too.
Read MorePodcasts are definitely one of my favorite forms of media. The podcast is an incredibly diverse, democratic, and creative format. The average podcast that I listen to is between 25 and 45 minutes long, with some outliers at the very short end being just a few minutes in some installments, and some of the more rambling ones stretching to over an hour each. I listen to several a day, mostly thanks to the fact that I walk to and from work, about 40 minutes each way. The bulk of the shows I subscribe to could be loosely called "educational" but a better word might be "exegetical" (as long as we're taking a pretty wide view of what is a "text"—and as a former academic, I certainly do). These podcasts are usually run by highly intelligent and vocally charismatic obsessives who have a passion for sharing the things they are obsessed with. Some are produced as more traditional radio essays, some as panel discussions, some as sort of dramatic monologues. (Podcasts are also the reason that this blog is built as a Squarespace site, since they are one of the most frequent sponsors on nearly EVERY SINGLE PODCAST I listen to, so when I started to think about making a blog, that was pretty much the only way I could conceive of doing it.)
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