Friday Post: Link Roundup
Favorite Essays From Favorite Substacks
ICYMI, this week’s posts:
Rocks and minerals day on Monday ft. fun facts about glass cannons
Rebuttal of Lyman Stone’s recent claim that intimate partner homicide is about gender equal
What disagreeable people, including some feminists, miss, and what agreeable people may need
Nobody’s writing about womanhood quite like Helen Roy, and she’s one of my favorite Substack authors and a privilege to know. I read this piece on the complexity of what motherhood is and find myself wishing I could send it back in time to the impetuous teenager and 20-something I once was who couldn’t stand that people kept telling her that motherhood was a field of ever-blooming peonies where nothing ever smells or dies.
This is probably my favorite short story ever published on Substack. Naomi Kanakia, the writer behind Woman of Letters, is an exceptional literary talented and a gracious individual; I highly, highly recommend both this (complex, messy, funny, and surprising) story and her work overall.
Jordan Call is a longtime friend of the blog (check out his guest post for the blog here) and this piece from this week featuring heavy and creative use of computer doodles is one of the best things on this entire website.
David R. MacIver is a delightful follow I’ve known for years on twitter, and this particular post, an accessible introduction to a form of information gathering that will benefit you whether or not you code.
I love someone who’s good with storytelling, be it fiction or non, and Henrik Sorensen has a knack for both. This essay about his experiences during the Christmas season while serving a mission in Europe is beautiful and painful, well-balanced.
Susannah Black Roberts is an absolutely tremendous writer whose work appears in Plough and Mere Orthodoxy, the latter of which hosted the following incredible piece. I believe it’s over 10,000 words weaving together sources from antiquity and early Christianity to provide a yes, partially religious but partially anthropological engagement with just how much about our world changed when the cultural keys passed from the pagan Greeks to the Christians. The Birth of Comedy is one of my favorite essays from the past year.
“…something else dies, every year, with the waning of the sun, and that something manages, every year, to come back. And that something is the world.
Spring comes every year, as Persephone returns. And – there’s something strange about that hope, in the poems of those bards, those mantics; the hearts of those men. It was always almost victorious - it seems to be saying, maybe this year. And the story that’s connected most closely with those mysteries is one of that hope working at the level not just of the world, but of one human life: the life of a girl, dancing on her wedding day, who dies, and whose husband will not let that be the last word.
Maybe this year, it will be different. But it never quite was. And after all, he fails, that poet. He turns around to look back, and his bride tumbles back down to death.”
The following is a classic post, familiar to many fans of Ozy Brennan’s exceptional Thing of Things. The reminder that the life you want does not lie on the other end of suffocating all of your desires and inconveniences is wonderful to return to, every time.
This dynomight post is one of my all-time favorites; a counter-intuitive stroll through the math of supply and demand to demonstrate that even by fixing prices higher, it is extremely difficult to change the functional output of a market, because you can never adjust just one variable.
Linch of the Linchpin writes on all kinds of surprising and accessible technical subjects and I cannot recommend this piece on what stealth aircraft are and how we figured out how to make them enough.
I love Substack not just for the opportunity to write and publish my own work - where what I feel like writing is the only limitation - but for the exposure to so many interesting and insightful writers. Take some time to review their back catalogs too, if you have it.
Until next week!
Wow thanks for the shoutout on the stealth article! :)
You're very generous in your compliments! :) <3
Thank you for the shout-out! You're too kind but I'm glad you liked the piece