Hello I am back and it is 2020! I’m thinking about easing into January this year, like when you pour yourself a bath and it’s a little too hot so you go in a few body parts at a time. Right now I have lowered myself up to the knees but my butt hasn’t touched the hot water of the new year yet. Enjoy what I’ve managed to read thus far!

1. The Communal Mind, Patricia Lockwood. “She lay every morning under an avalanche of details, blissed: pictures of breakfasts in Patagonia, a girl applying foundation with a hardboiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner, white women’s pictures of their bruises – the world pressing closer and closer, the spider web of human connection so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk.” Patricia Lockwood stresses me out but she captures what it feels like (terrible) to spend too much time on the internet. Oof: “Late one night when you were idly typing in searches: Why am I tired all the time? Why can I no longer memorise a seven-minute monologue? Why is my tongue less pink than it was when I was a child? (There were only two questions at three in the morning, and they were Am I dying? and Does anybody really love me?)” This talk made me want to go out and look at a tree for a while.
2. Why Calendars Are So Weird, and What Might Be Done About It, Atlas Obscura. “The economist and the astronomer created the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, a variation on the Gregorian. It’s not wildly different, really. There are still twelve months, with the same names. There are still seven days in a week. But the number of days in each month are changed; each quarter has 30 days in its first two months and 31 in its third month (for a total of 364 days). Say goodbye to January 31 and hello to February 30.” Buh??? This is wild but I’m kind of down for how their calendar accommodates leap years, by adding a “whole new week, which they call Xtra, between December and January, every five or six years.” How was your Xtra week?
3. The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense Of Time, Buzzfeed. “The 2000s were a bad decade, full of terrorism, financial ruin, and war. The 2010s were different, somehow more disorienting, full of molten anxiety, racism, and moral horror shows. Maybe this is a reason for the disorientation: Life had run on a certain rhythm of time and logic, and then at a hundred different entry points, that rhythm and that logic shifted a little, sped up, slowed down, or disappeared, until you could barely remember what time it was.” My one critique of this read is that those gifs follow you down the page and make it hard for the ole eyes.
4. 100 Books That Defined the Decade, LitHub. In the last few weeks of the year there were a lot of “X of the Decade” pieces, and I thought sharing a book-focused one was appropriate here. As the list says, this isn’t someone’s round-up of the best, but of which books defined the decade (good or bad), and for that reason I enjoyed skimming, half-reading through it, because every few minutes I’d be like, “Oh yeah, that book.”
5. “we slidin,” Twitter user @roob_drummer. Here is the tweet in full: “snowing hard this morning. Bus driver slid through a red light. Only thing he said was “we slidin” i cant stop thinking about this”

Bonus features:

• Kind Man Crafts “Stick Library” for All Dogs at His Local Park, My Modern Met. My kind of library!