Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends

Read Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make and Keep Friends by Marisa G. Franco ( )

How do we make and keep friends in an era of distraction, burnout, and chaos, especially in a society that often prizes romantic love at the expense of other relationships? In Platonic, Dr. Marisa G. Franco unpacks the latest, often counterintuitive findings about the bonds between us—for example, why your friends aren’t texting you back (it’s not because they hate you!), and the myth of “friendships happening organically” (making friends, like cultivating any relationship, requires effort!). As Dr. Franco explains, to make and keep friends you must understand your attachment style—secure, anxious, or avoidant: it is the key to unlocking what’s working (and what’s failing) in your friendships.

I’ve been changing my entire world every decade at most for my entire life, and it gets lonely out there. Moving to a not-actually-new city and having to start from not-really-scratch has been very hard for the past six months, and my whole approach of friendship doesn’t help – I struggle a lot with keeping…

The other black girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris

Read The other black girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris ( )

Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Nella is left in the dust.
Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.
It’s hard to believe Hazel is behind these hostile messages. But as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than just her career.

Such an excellent book with such a disappointing ending. Mild spoilers for the endingI was really invested in the conspiracy arc and having it end nowhere AND sprinkled with magical realism when the plot could have been just as solid without it? I truly hope fanfic writers will write the conspiracy arc I need to…

blogrolls or sharing?

Liked Are We Rolling? (Bix Dot Blog)

Just the mere thought of trying to assemble a list of my recommended blogs gives me mild anxiety not worth the confronting. This is why—and I’ve mentioned this before, of course—my solution simply is to present you with an updating list of the actual blog posts by other people that I’ve actually read. This list appears at the bottom of my front page, above a separate list of places to find more blogs.

It was a really big effort to bring all my RSS subscriptions together into my blogroll, and now I’m reading this post and realizing that sharing posts I liked, with context, is more useful anyway… oops. Guess I’m doing both 🙂

Being broke, poor, or maybe just upper middle class in an upper class world

Liked “Saltburn,” “The Bling Ring,” and the Pathetic Desperation of the Upper Middle Class by Drew Burnett GregoryDrew Burnett Gregory (Autostraddle)

I could respond to every sign of immense privilege with reasons why I still had less than the people around me. I mean, do wealthy people grow up hearing their parents worry about money? I thought, of course not. The real answer is, of course. Everyone worries about money! My parents would argue they had to take loans out to pay for my college and rich people can pay out of pocket. But the truth is there are just levels to being rich.

I really liked the way this post used personal experience and a couple of movies to remind us that there are different levels of rich and of privilege. I had the exact same struggles as the author when in business school: many of my peers were going to all the fancy open-champagne skiing events, while…

How to do a good bad job « trying » with your loved one’s transition

Liked How To Do A Good Bad Job « Trying » With Your Loved One’s Transition by Daniel Lavery (The Chatner)

Trail off immediately [after using the right pronoun] if you can, to demonstrate that the effort has drained your slender resources. “The store…” What were you saying? Who can remember? Your voice has been stolen. This is so hard!!!

After the excellent Avoiding transition by family committee, here’s the other side of the coin: How to do a good bad job « trying » with your loved one’s transition. Hilarious, and horribly true, as usual.

deprecating content

Liked Advent of Technical Writing: Deprecating Content by James James (jamesg.blog)

This is the tenth post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.
Tayl…

This is something I never quite know how to approach at work. Thanks for writing it, James − it’s going to be shared with my colleagues!

Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris

Read Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris ( )

The first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, from railroad capitalists to microchip assemblers, showing how Northern California created the world as we know it

Palo Alto is nice. The weather is temperate, the people are educated, rich, healthy, enterprising. Remnants of a hippie counterculture have synthesized with high technology and big finance to produce the spiritually and materially ambitious heart of Silicon Valley, whose products are changing how we do everything from driving around to eating food. It is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system.

I forced myself to not take any notes or highlights when reading this book, and ended up with three (3) highlights on a 700+ page book, which I consider a win. Palo Alto was a really good book at some points, and felt like a chore at others. I think the images and narratives are…