What am I reading? So glad you asked
Whelp, there are things that keep me up at night, and then things that keep me entertained, so I'll include a mix of both. Let me break them down for you.
Writers read—a lot—and as soon as I accepted that it’s okay to read a variety of things that have nothing to do with my own writing, I realized that I have a wide range of interests (who knew?)
I have observed that my reading habits can be divided into two categories:
Things that keep me up and night, and
Things that keep my mind entertained so that I don’t stay up all night.
(Do you do this, too? Let me know. We can bask in our eclectic reading habits together?)
One of the main things that keeps me awake at night is climate fear, so the New Yorker’s recent feature, “What a Heat Wave Does to Your Body” has the same impact on my psyche as watching a car crash. I don’t want to see it but I also can’t look away.
Here’s a sample:
Deadly heat, once rare, is spreading. This summer—which is likely to be the hottest in recorded history—Beijing warmed to a hundred and six degrees and Sardinia baked at a hundred and eighteen. For forty-four consecutive days, El Paso recorded temperatures of a hundred or more. We’re all becoming guinea pigs in a vast experiment: How will people of different ages and levels of fitness respond to unprecedented, ongoing heat? What will happen to our bodies when we have no choice but to stay outside, or when the air-conditioning goes out?
The article goes on to discuss experiments to determine the impact of heat on the human body and how the everyday materials around us will turn into dangerous weapons (concrete, door knobs). Devastating stuff, and our future writ large.
Next on the fear scale is my concern over diminishing rights for women. This next essay combines that fear with another one, the loneliness epidemic. While men are major victims of this epidemic, in some cases, that loneliness is being weaponized and guess who gets hurt? (Ding, ding, ding. You got it: women). Read it at Men Yell at Me, which is a terrific Substack.
In this essay, Lyz hones in on Richard Cooper and his book, The Unplugged Alpha. Here’s a snippet:
Cooper is almost worth writing off as another loud voice of angry men in a culture of isolated angry men. But America is in the vise grip of lonely men. Their politics and their violence are choking us to death.
Every day I wake up to see another story of a lonely and angry man who got a gun and shot up a school, a church, a grocery store.
To read the headlines, the male loneliness epidemic is at a crisis point. New York Times columnists encourage women to just have sex with men, as if perhaps the seething rage and isolation weren’t contributing to a lack of sex. Or maybe, people suggest, men should play pickleball. Even an article in the Washington Post seems to indicate that women are surging ahead and men are struggling. (Not exactly true, but okay.)
It’s hard to be a mother and a woman and more than three years into a pandemic and see this concerned hand-wringing and not be reminded that women fared worse in 2020; that women are also isolated and lonely and are still doing poorly, and in response are now facing a country that is further restricting their rights to bodily autonomy while men play the victim.
This isn’t to say men aren’t suffering; it’s just that their suffering apparently merits a level of concern that women’s suffering never has.
Now for the FUN part. I’m a sucker for a good con artist story and Kyle Deschanel, the Rothschild Who Wasn’t in Vanity Fair was just what I needed. The man claiming to be a Rothschild while actively (and fraudulently) fundraising for multiple companies (including one in Toronto) may actually be Aryeh Malkiel Dodelson, 36, who until recently, was a practicing rabbi in Lakewood, New Jersey, where he lived in a home with his wife and child.
This is a text from his double life:
“I’m hot and rich and nice and smart—and have a KILLER dick,” he once texted a friend.
I hope Netflix is paying attention. I loved the Inventing Anna series.
Last but not least, straight-up humour from
. If you need a laugh, read her post on Prince Andrew. I love the faux outrage as well as the term “Me-too victims,” which I plan to borrow and use when I need to be appropriately sarcastic.PS - I will continue to serialize parts of my blended memoir-in progress here about my grandmother, growing up as the descendent of Holocaust survivors, and what that means in today’s climate. I hope you will continue to join me on this journey.
Great roundup! Thanks for the reminder to check out "Men Yell at Me". Sometimes I worry that otherwise great writers on feminism and gender stuff can get caught up in a zero-sum-game mentality. But here Lyz is pointing out there's an epidemic of loneliness about men AND there's similar issues for women that simply aren't getting the same attention.
delightful how you breakdown impetus for reading thru the digestive system of staying awake ha....i did catch that piece on prince andrew somehow (my own reading habits are as capricious as hummingbirds quarereling mid-air) and it brought a few satisfied giggles.....regarding the new yorker (which ive missed) the piece you mentioned and the car crash part recalled another story from a few years back a friend sent me in mail as i used to live in Vermont where it took place: a near tragic accident on a snowy highway (I-91by St. Johnsbury) in which the writer dissects the moments prior and during the event and makes an intellectual/spiritual examination of hmmmm supernatural? but via excursions into the young Vienna life of Einstein (or maybe Freud?) and all these connections as he explores the existential realm of near-death anyways it was fascinating beautiful and has lingered with me and i saved a copy...your continued writing on own history always joyfully anticipated here thnx