media consumption: articles, video essays, podcasts to make you smarter (vol. 21)
and sharing my june tbr
hello.
the first week of june always feels like a false start. the calendar says summer, but the sky still flickers between moods. one day you’re barefoot, sun drunk on strawberries and humidity. the next, you’re back in your sweater, wondering if you imagined the heat at all. it’s a season of thresholds, and i love a threshold when everything is about to become something else, but hasn’t quite yet. nothing is fixed. the world smells like cut grass and warm cement, like it’s rehearsing for something.
i’ve been thinking a lot about attention and how easy it is to lose it. more importantly, how fragile and sacred it feels when you finally get it back. this week, i found mine in little things: a chess game that demanded silence, a grapefruit candle that turned my room gold, a line of iris murdoch that made me underline three times. noticing is a form of devotion. what tastes good, what smells strange, what makes you pause long enough to write something down.
so here’s what i’ve been noticing. what i’ve been reading, eating, feeling, playing, obsessing over. a map of one week’s worth of thought and texture and trying to pay attention.
weekly report
reading
sharing my june tbr…
bonjour tristesse & a certain smile by françoise sagan
two slim novels soaked in sun and self-destruction. sagan writes like someone who’s felt everything too early — older lovers, rich girls in emotional free fall, the soft violence of parisian boredom. bonjour tristesse follows a teenage girl on a summer holiday with her father as jealousy and desire unravel everything in slow motion. a certain smile feels like its older, more cynical shadow — another affair, another quiet undoing. both are deceptively cool on the surface, but they sting in the places that don’t heal easily. read them in a slip dress with the windows open.
the portrait of a lady by henry james
james at his most psychologically sharp. isabel archer is a young american woman with ideals and inheritance who steps into the quiet machinery of european society and watches it dismantle her. it’s about freedom, marriage, illusion, and the slow realization that you’ve made a life-altering mistake. the prose is dense, yes, but hypnotic. it’s not about what happens. it’s about what it feels like to be trapped in your own mind with nowhere to go.
the years by annie ernaux
a collective memoir that moves through one woman’s life alongside decades of french history not as a clean narrative, but as fragments, commercials, photographs, headlines, fleeting desires. it reads like a memory you’re not sure is yours. intimate, political, and emotionally disorienting in the best way. it’s about time, language, and the porousness of self. like reading history through a mirror.
existentialists and mystics by iris murdoch
a collection of essays and lectures from a philosopher who writes like a novelist and a novelist who thinks like a mystic. murdoch wrestles with morality, god, love, art, and the limitations of existentialism with clarity and depth. she believes in goodness without sentimentality, which somehow feels radical now. the writing is lucid, humane, and often startling. one of the rare books that makes you feel smarter without feeling alienated. read slowly, underline constantly.
tractatus logico-philosophicus by ludwig wittgenstein
cold, crystalline, obsessively ordered. a book of numbered propositions attempting to pin down the limits of language, meaning, and the world itself. famously ends with: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” reading it is like sharpening your brain against something hard. you won’t agree with all of it, but it will rewire the way you think. equal parts frustrating and profound. best read with pencil in hand and tea going cold beside you.
autobiography of red by anne carson
a myth retold as a queer coming-of-age poem. geryon is a red-winged boy. herakles is the one who leaves. carson writes in fragments. part lyric, part theory, part dream. but the result is sharp, aching, and unmistakably human. it’s about longing, art, queerness, survival, and what it means to be soft in a world that doesn’t care. a perfect book for anyone who’s ever been devastated by love and still wanted to turn it into something beautiful.
the summer book by tove jansson
a quiet, careful novel about a grandmother and granddaughter living on a small island in finland. they walk, they talk, they grieve. nothing happens, but everything matters. jansson writes with the kind of restraint that makes the silence between lines feel full. it’s a book about noticing. about aging, childhood, and the kind of love that doesn’t need to say much to be felt completely. read when you’re tired of noise and want to remember how to be still.
eating
– strawberries sliced into cold cream
not whipped, just poured. dreamy, creamy, nostalgic.
– a cucumber salad with vinegar, dill, and flaky salt
crunchy and bracing. best eaten while barefoot in the kitchen.
– a bowl of cherries straight from the fridge
slightly too cold. eaten slowly. you leave the pits in a chipped teacup.
– a boiled potato with olive oil, herbs, and salt
simple, grounding, vaguely eastern european. something to eat when you’re spiraling but want to feel capable.
– zucchini sautéed until soft and golden, eaten with ricotta
scooped up with crusty bread. quietly luxurious.
– a plain croissant torn into little pieces and dipped in coffee
when you’re not hungry, you just want something warm and flaky and familiar.
– cold lentils with lemon and garlic
make them in the morning and forget about them until you’re tired and need something quiet.
– an open-faced sandwich with whatever’s left in the fridge
cold cuts, jam, arugula, butter, nothing at all. it doesn’t have to make sense to be good.
– a bowl of chilled soup (vichyssoise, cucumber, tomato, whatever)
best eaten out of a wide bowl with a spoon that feels too big. ideally while reading something dense.
– green grapes, eaten while standing in the doorway between rooms
they snap when you bite them. it feels like punctuation.
playing
- poker….
– scent layering experiments: mixing violet with vetiver, fig over incense, iris against musk. no goal, just curiosity. some combinations hum, others fall flat, but the process feels like a quiet kind of authorship. something private. something alive.
– chess: my favorite kind of focus. the kind that clears your head and sharpens it all at once. there’s elegance in the strategy, peace in the logic. it doesn’t ask for emotion, only attention.
– snoopy jazz: gentle piano, a little melancholy, like the end of a childhood summer. it’s music that feels like coming back to yourself. best played low while the kettle boils and the sky turns pink.
– eric rohmer films: light-drenched and word-heavy, like eavesdropping on people who overthink in beautiful places. long conversations that go nowhere but mean everything. every look lingers a second too long. every silence says more than it should. i’ve been playing this on a loop.
– season one of friends: grainy lighting, baggy jeans, awkward flirting, and the kind of nothing-plots that feel like everything when you’re tired. it’s not just nostalgia, it’s a mood: a little low-res, a little overcaffeinated, and somehow exactly what you needed.
obsessing
candles. let me be specific…
– trudon abd el kader candle — green mint, hot spices, and wind off the coast of algiers. it smells like a breeze through a tent at dusk. sweet tea in hand, smoke curling from somewhere nearby. sharp at first, then warm and enveloping. like being held in a memory that isn’t yours.
– byredo tree house candle — dry woods, bamboo, and the ghost of incense. smells like an old sanctuary built into the trees, where no one’s lived in years but it still feels sacred. a little dusty, a little clean, like cedar floors and the warmth left behind by sunlight.
– byredo cotton poplin candle — clean laundry, sun through gauze curtains, the kind of quiet that smells like safety. not sterile, just soft. like a freshly made bed in a room no one else knows about.
– foin coupé candle by diptyque: wild herbs, honeyed pollen, and something that smells like light on old wood. like laying in dry grass with a book you’ve already read.
…..
– keeping a journal just for perfume: not reviews, not for anyone else. just scent as memory, as theory, as ritual. writing down what it makes you feel before it disappears. (this is my favorite pen)
– old ballet documentaries on grainy youtube channels: the kind where the lighting’s bad and the audio’s worse, but something about the footage feels sacred. rehearsal sweats, blistered feet, girls tying ribbons like ritual.
– making playlists with one specific mood in mind: songs with unfinished thoughts, soft static, echoey guitars, the kind that lets you escape somewhere far away in your mind.
recommending
– watching recipe videos without cooking anything
just to feel the rhythm of someone else’s hands. the sizzle of olive oil. the way time slows when you watch someone slice fruit with intention.
– rose lemonade poured into a coupe glass
because presentation matters. because summer is sweeter when it’s a little theatrical. especially when no one else is watching.
– writing a line on the first page of an empty notebook
not to start a new project. just to prove you’re still here. that the well isn’t dry. that you can still begin.
– a tiny haul from the fancy grocery store
one tin of fish, one impossibly good chocolate bar, one absurdly creamy cheese. ritual, not errand.
– dried flower bundles from florabrook
they don’t wilt. they just stay. like a memory with color. hang them by your bed or in your kitchen window. they make the space feel like it listens.
– your own signature summer snack
mine is cold rice with shiso and sesame. yours might be crackers with labneh and dill. ritual is flavor’s best friend.
– scenting your pillow with something herbal
not to sleep better. just to dream better.
treating
– a vintage tote for farmer’s market mornings
the kind with faded lettering and soft canvas straps. something that looks like it’s held a hundred peaches.
– investing in really good jam
fig, rose, or sour cherry. keep it in the fridge like a secret. eat it on toast or by the spoon. both are equally valid.
– a solo dinner at my favorite restaurant
no phone. just me, a good book, and something seasonal.
– (also) a midweek dinner with a friend who understands silence
not a party, not a catch-up. just someone you don’t have to explain anything to. maybe you split a bottle of wine and maybe you order too much.
– repurchasing a fragrance i’ve already used up
a rare kind of loyalty. there’s something beautiful about knowing exactly what you want and letting it become part of your skin again. can you believe i’m already almost out of my 2nd bottle of molecule 01?
– a metrograph subscription
for nights when scrolling feels impossible and you want to be reminded that cinema is still magic.
– buying the good salt
the flaky kind. the kind that feels like finishing a poem. you don’t need it. but also, you do.
this next section is for paid subscribers where i share a sizable list of interesting articles, video essays, and podcast recommendations that i’ve curated throughout the week(s). today’s media consumption roundup includes the power of women eating alone, a tarot card deep dive, the power of everyday rituals, the death of capital letters, how to improve your philosophical thinking, how to fix your attention span, the objection to adam & eve’s story, overcoming nihilism, and so much more…
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