Well Read #1
Five things to read and savor
Welcome to Well Read, a monthly column featuring a few favorite links and reads from across the Interwebs!
Word to know: Ikigai
A primer on a Japanese word I’ve been seeing more and more in written media—ikigai. Think of it as the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs more of.
Preview it:
Numerous Japanese words have entered the global lexicon; one recent newcomer is ikigai. A broad concept, it refers to that which brings value and joy to life: from people, such as one’s children or friends, to activities including work and hobbies.
READ IT
(And here’s a thoughtful entry on why ikigai > passion.)
Oferflownis, Flewsa, Flux
A fascinating article from Literary Hub on the etymology of the word “period” for menstruation.
(Consider this my official campaign kickoff for every last one of us to begin referring to our periods as lunations instead. Never has a forgotten word been more deserving of resurrection—period, end of story.)
Preview it:
Etymologically at least, periods are moon-th-lies as well as month-lies. These moon months were sometimes called lunations, a more elegant word than period. Lunation was indeed briefly used as a polite term for menstruation in an 1822 medical textbook, but it didn’t catch on.
READ IT
Things to make you laugh
We could all use some smiles courtesy of satirical writing, so herewith, a few McSweeney’s articles—both from their archives and recently published—that made me lol.
It’s the Job of My Dreams, But I’d Have to Write a Cover Letter, So Never Mind
It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers (a classic!)
I’m a Four-Year-Old Boy, And This Is My Masterclass on How to Pee Standing Up.
Will also make you laugh
Goop, Gwyneth, and a cruise ship — what’s not to love, especially if you are a culture obsessive? Plz plz bookmark this super long, super worth-the read-piece that I would’ve shared with you all a lot sooner had I been quicker to set up my Substack over the summer.
Preview it:
Last summer, I got an email from my editor asking, sneakily, among the how are you’s, “Have you ever thought about writing on wellness??” She was looking for someone to go on “the Goop cruise.” Like most female writers, I had thought about writing on wellness, mainly in terms of the free stuff I could get to do so. And for name recognition and potential hate-read appeal, a Goop assignment is the ne plus ultra of wellness writing. I don’t know anyone who uses the Goop skin care products, much less reads the graphomaniacal website or attends the “In Goop Health” summits, but I had a hunch that the products, the actual Goop, were nice.
The email sat smiling, evil, in my inbox, certain of its power. It didn’t care how uninteresting I thought the phenomenon was. It didn’t care that I’d already done my time at a feminist website, escaped, and moved on. Our genre was calling, and it knew I’d pick up, because I’m addicted to my phone. Bizarre anecdotes would be collected, holistic therapies undertaken, details of my personal life “shared.” Ideally I would cry. As a woman, I cry frequently, so as a feminist I have a duty to destigmatize it by doing so in public—that’s the prevailing philosophy.
I was in the right emotional state for a nine-day (yes) wellness cruise from Barcelona to Rome. This is precisely why I really, really did not want to go.
READ IT
For the Swifties and Swiftie adjacent
I would classify myself as the latter, which is why I really delighted in this feature from the New York Times Magazine, “My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom.” It has it all—the backstory, the context, the cracking open of Easter eggs. Come for the cultural zeitgeist, stay for Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s incredibly fun writing.
Preview it:
One can enter Swiftiedom at any level: avocation or vocation, background music or full-time job. Being a Swiftie at the highest level means access to an all-consuming, all-absorbing empire of evidence, where all the questions have answers, all the mysteries are solved, where you get to feel excited and smart and involved with something bigger than yourself without ever looking up from your phone.
Let’s go straight to that level. That’s the level where we read the codes she leaves in her liner notes with random capital letters to equal the name of the guy that the song is about or a secret message. The level where she seems to indicate to her fans which album is being recorded next via a series of hidden images in an Instagram post. The level where, as I began writing this, legions of fans were crunching and computing and tabulating data to determine if (and why and how) the number 112 is significant when it comes to predicting the releases of her rerecordings.
READ IT
(And a must-read bonus: why you’re obsessing over TS/TK, which is really about obsessing over beginnings and utopias.)
You’re up!
What’s something you read in the last week or two that you loved? Book, article, essay, poem—share it below so we all have a place to escape if things gets weird at Thanksgiving dinner.
That’s it for this first installment of Well Read!
In case you missed it, last week I published an essay about the on-demand economy and selfishness.
On that note, I hope you’re enjoying newsletters from Well So Yeah! Have a suggestion for an essay topic, or anything else you’d like to read about? Tell me in the comments below.
And of course: HAPPY THANKSGIVING! We’re introducing our daughter to the joys of a non-traditional Thanksgiving meal by serving a mega charcuterie board/picnic situation on our living room coffee table. I don’t know what we’re all more excited about: the volume of cheese and bread incoming, or the tree we’ll purchase and immediately decorate on Friday. Wishing you all a great long weekend ahead. 💜
