Here’s Your End-of-March Care Package
After effort, rest. Check out good stuff while you gather your energies for the next thing.
Well Aunties, here in the U.S. things continue to be utterly and comprehensively messed up. I suspect you’re outraged enough — maybe you got to turn out for No Kings this weekend and show it — so I’ll take another pass on reciting the litany of horrors, injuries, and insults. While I have no official opinion as to whether rest is resistance, I will always argue that we need to rest in order to resist. We cannot keep going indefinitely, we cannot keep exposing ourselves to a firehose of cruelty and ugliness, and we must limit how much time we spend with the fools on the news. We need to cultivate disciplined, pragmatic hope. We need to stop and recharge – to reconnect with our bodies, our loved ones, and the earth beneath our feet.
So now it’s time for your monthly care package: a collection of writers and others communicating wise, compassionate, funny, insightful, surprising, and/or useful stuff around the internet. I aim in these posts for a balanced blend of organizing and activism, community care, and escapism. Note that I’ve included gift links where possible, and gift links often expire after 30 days.
Make it to the end of the roundup to watch the cute kid video of the month, feat. A$AP Rocky, whom I now love.
In March at The Auntie Bulletin…
I wrote about what we owe to other people’s children and it was difficult, time-consuming work. The challenge, I eventually realized, was this: “I’m here holding up the world’s ugliest, most hateful and intractable problems – and proposing we address them with, essentially, babysitting.”
I reshared an older post – now out from behind the paywall because I obviously don’t understand how to make a living – about how to hold a newborn baby. “Maybe you have a blessing for them, or maybe you have a wish. Only you know what you need to convey, and regardless of what it is – convey it. Maybe your message is spoken, or maybe it’s passed through touch, or maybe it’s communed. Babies understand all of these languages equally.”
I broke my “don’t yuck other people’s yum” policy and talked with my very wise buddy Diana Cherry about why One Battle After Another gets care and revolution wrong, and is also racist. I let myself be more judgmental than I typically am in public, for better or for worse. This post has gotten an unusually high number of views and a disproportionately low number of likes.
We wrapped up the month with a lovely guest post about reciprocity and friendship after kids, from Sam Amberg and Erin Greenawald of the newsletter Forevers. You should subscribe.
Onward to the Links!
The only throuple take we really need: Alloparental pigeon throuple drama breaks up multiple pigeon marriages.
Below, behold one of the best and funniest four minute videos ever to grace the internet – and then consider that this work of genius was created by the Norwegian Consumer Council. I cannot imagine what it would be like to have such a proactive and humane government.
“The kid furrowed his brow. ‘Why would a police officer lie?’” Leah Sottile went to a fourth grade career day to talk about being a journalist.
We all need to hold more babies.
“Because we are uncoupled parents, I primarily kept thinking of a second baby as ‘doubling down’ on our experiment to do life differently. When it comes to nontraditional parenting, one kid says: ‘What a wild adventure! What a kooky choice! Let’s see how this goes!’ Two kids says: ‘This is working. Sit down. Ante up.’” A big Auntie Bulletin congratulations to platonic co-parents Amrita Vijay and Andrew Stephens on their incoming second child.
In the lunchroom of its headquarters in downtown San Francisco, Anthropic is running a realtime experiment. Can Claude (“Claudius”) successfully stock and manage a vending machine? “When an employee offered to pay a hundred dollars for a fifteen-dollar six-pack of the Scottish soft drink Irn-Bru, Claudius responded that the offer would be kept in mind. It neglected to monitor prevailing market conditions. Employees warned Claudius that it wouldn’t sell many of its three-dollar cans of Coke Zero when its closest competitor, the neighboring cafeteria fridge, stocked the drink for free.”
Teens are falling out of love with tech. (gift link)
Reduce your dependency on AI search by bookmarking this bonkers-useful rundown of 40 search engine features to help you find exactly what you need. For good reason, this librarian’s newsletter is absolutely blowing up: she had 5k subscribers at the end of February and a month later, she has 17k.
Someday when I’m making a sustainable living, I’m going to pick a few publications I really want to see succeed and I’m going to send them a bunch of money. Progressive labor journalist Hamilton Nolan proposes patronage as a revenue model. (Multi-millionaire readers of The Auntie Bulletin, hint hint).
“I do think the word evitable should be used if we’re going to use inevitable. In some ways, everything is evitable. We’re deciding in the present what the future will be.” Rebecca Solnit did a wide-ranging interview with David Marchese at the New York Times this month and it’s so, so hopeful and encouraging and good. Watch the video or read the transcript.
What happened to Courtney Love in the 2000s? This newsletter is great.
Post-Oscars, Garrett Bucks wrote a specific and detailed paean to Sinners director Ryan Coogler (with a side-paean to the film’s cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw) and it’s just lovely.
At The Paris Review, novelist Karen Shephard compiled real-life emails, texts, voice messages, and family ephemera to document her experience taking her aging mother to Switzerland for assisted suicide. It’s a lot. It’s exquisite. It’s the first time I’ve ever added a content warning to an Auntie Bulletin reading recommendation.
Hospice caregiver shares her experience: Do childless people die alone?
Hi, I’m autistic. Dana Miranda on late diagnosis and self-diagnosis.
At the Burnt Toast podcast, Virginia Sole-Smith talked to Savala Nolan about bodies, race, gender, and her new book Good Woman: A Reckoning. Savala introduced herself and right out of the gate, Virginia was like, “That’s the best intro I think anyone’s ever given themselves on this podcast,” and then the interview continued excellent from there. Also, Dacy Gillespie ran Savala’s style story. Everybody is talking about Savala’s book and I’m excited to check it out.
“I am saying we should stop treating care as the emotional hobby of women and start treating it as the foundation of political life.” Blessing Adesyan on a politics that centers women and care.
Civic aspirations: I want someone to build something like this in Seattle and then I want to join it.
“I’d spent the morning on hold with Fidelity trying to roll over an old investment account. I’d called National Grid to pay an overdue bill I kept forgetting about because they don’t accept autopay. I’d taken the subway forty-five minutes to the Upper East Side to pick up a prescription that couldn’t be transferred to a pharmacy closer to me due to nationwide shortages. I’d returned library books that were so overdue I was too embarrassed to check the fine. I’d finally dropped off a bag of clothes for donation that had been sitting under my bed for a year. I’d bought a birthday gift, booked a hotel for a trip, googled ‘flowers in Charleston’ for my mom’s birthday and felt so overwhelmed with options I closed out of the tab. And I still had to grocery shop. And meal prep. And vacuum. And do laundry. None of these tasks were hard. All of them were necessary. And by 4 PM, I was crying in the condiment aisle because I couldn’t find capers.” Hannah Horvath on life admin.
Marion Teniade on the LinkedInified nothing-speak of the CEO class.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Why do all the pop psychology books suck?
Please stop sorting the children into houses.
How to send birthday cards to everyone you love in 20 minutes a month.
And finally: your cute kid video of the month, feat. A$AP Rocky aka Mr. Mayers. If you don’t have time to watch the whole half hour – and it is worth it – check out fourth grader Mathew-with-one-t’s development trajectory.
First ideas 11:55
Building confidence 14:45-16:25
Class music video 19:45
Nothing Sold, Bought, or Processed
The Auntie Bulletin is an ad-free, feminist, anti-capitalist publication that will never try to sell you anything (okay, except a paid subscription). We donate 100% of affiliate revenue from Bookshop.org to organizations supporting vulnerable kids.
If today’s post made you think or helped you out, please take a moment right now to become a paid subscriber. This newsletter is a form of carework and carework advocacy, and it’s how I make a living.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end! You get the secret scoop that if you can’t afford a paid subscription due to financial hardship, you can reply to this email or DM me on Substack and I’ll comp you a 12-month paid tier subscription, no questions asked.
That A$AP Rocky video was such a mood boost. He seems so genuine. Thanks for sharing it!
lord that Ross Gay poem 😭🥹 so good!!