Substack Reads: Dark days, diary of a refugee, and poetry for the New Year
Substack Reads: Dark days, diary of a refugee, and poetry for the New Year
Welcome back to Substack Reads! With 2023 well underway and a slew of new and exciting Substack publications to share, we can’t wait to get stuck in.
What have you been reading on Substack over the holidays? Tell us in the comments section below, and link to your favorite writers and their publications.
HISTORY
Bringing the myrrh
Dougald Hine was always cast as the third wise man in the school nativity, spreading the air of gathering gloom. In the darkest days of the Northern Hemisphere, he considers how seasonal traditions travel through culture and time
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Cultural memory runs deep. Six centuries after 1066, at the time of the English Civil War, the appeal to resist the Norman Yoke remained potent. Reading about the 10th-century origins of the Peace and Truce of God, I can’t help thinking of the Christmas truce that broke out up and down the trenches of the Western Front in 1914. Perhaps cultural memory is not quite the right frame here; perhaps it’s something more like ‘the field,’ in the sense in which Carol Sanford speaks of fields as ‘organized patterns of energy that influence and respond to the quality of activity occurring within a system’?
This line of thought is running off the edge of the map, I know, but it’s the pattern that’s been running within me, these past few days. What kind of a truce is to be wished for, this Yuletide, aside from the obvious wish for an end to war in Ukraine and all the less publicised front lines where fire has been exchanged in 2022? What kinds of unlikely peace might be worth working for in 2023?
A kind of refugee
Larissa Babij started her Substack in March 2022 after fleeing her home in Kyiv on February 24 and becoming a refugee in Lviv. Through her newsletter, she offers glimpses into life in a country under attack
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Drinking coffee in Kyiv, my friend the physical therapist says we all have PTSD. I’ve never been a fan of diagnoses. This is both a gift and a fault.
It’s warm at home and the lights are on. No words can describe how tired I am.
On Monday I met a soldier who had shrapnel lodged in many parts of his body for a couple months while he was a prisoner of war. They were surgically removed only after he returned to Ukraine in the fall.
Sitting in a cafe, I marvel at this tall young man, still underweight, with bright intelligent eyes. He came in on his own two legs; it’s the third day he’s walking unassisted. After the explosion that filled his body with shards of metal and glass, he could only move his head.
BUSINESS
For the love of books
In 2018, “boring” bookstore Barnes & Noble had hit rock bottom. No one expected the total turnaround that happened, all down to one new book-loving CEO
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Amazon seems invincible. So the idea that Barnes & Noble can succeed where its much larger competitor failed is hard to believe. But the turnaround at B&N is real. In many instances they have already reopened in locations where they previously shut down.
Barnes & Noble is no tech startup, and is about as un-cool as retailers get. It’s like The Gap, but for books. The company was founded in 1886, and it flourished during the 20th century. But the digital age caught the company by surprise.
SCIENCE
The rise and fall of peer review
Psychologist Adam Mastroianni dissects the greatest failure in scientific history, shared with images taken in the 1980s by his dad
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For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.
Most of those folks didn’t even realize they were in an experiment. Many of them, including me, weren’t born when the experiment started. If we had noticed what was going on, maybe we would have demanded a basic level of scientific rigor. Maybe nobody objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t pass muster. They called it “peer review.”
TV
All we want is more time
For Emma Gray, Hulu’s latest series, Fleishman Is in Trouble, doesn’t sugar-coat the female experience of aging, and its finale episodes are a real depiction of two women on the brink
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The series’s last two episodes move away from focusing on Toby, a recently-divorced doctor whose ex-wife has gone missing, and reveal what the show is really about: two women. It’s the early midlife crises of Toby’s ex-wife, Rachel (Claire Danes, making such expert use of her famous cry face that I thought her performance in the penultimate episode might break me in half), and his college friend Libby (whose voiceover provides the central through-line and true heart of the series), that [creator Taffy] Brodesser-Akner is most interested in interrogating. Toby still matters in this story—and Eisenberg does a wonderful job of portraying him in all of his angry, gentle, loving, selfish complexity—but the most powerful and revelatory moments belong to Rachel and Libby.
For much of the show, Libby sees herself in opposition to Rachel. She is loose where Rachel is uptight, the brunette to Rachel’s brassy blonde, the reluctant stay-at-home mom to Rachel’s obsessive workaholic. Libby is, after all, Toby’s friend, and he drifted away from their friendship after meeting Rachel. When they reconnect after his divorce, she hears only Toby’s side of the story of his marriage’s dissolution, and his interpretations of why she apparently abandoned her family without a word.
TECHNOLOGY
Reimagining the NHS
For over-65s, fear of falling at night is based on real risk: there’s a 50% chance of your being dead in six months. Now imagine a device that could stop that from happening
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The NHS seems to be in deep crisis, overwhelmed by emergency cases arriving at A&E in ambulances, which become not-so-temporary hospital beds. In such circumstances it is difficult to think about the longer term, and whether technology could help the health service tackle the challenges it faces. But if we want to cut the traffic to overstretched emergency departments, tech could be part of the answer—and it doesn’t have to be complex or expensive.
That’s what I learned from a GP-turned-inventor, Tom Adler. He’s spent the last five years trying to find a way to cut the number of elderly people suffering falls, many of whom end up in those ambulances heading to A&E. “The eureka moment,” he explains, “came four or five years ago, sitting at my desk seeing yet another woman in her 40s or 50s coming in in a distressed state reporting that her mum had had a fall in the night, broken her hip and was in hospital.”
PERSONAL ESSAY
The trouble with trying
Haley Nahman had come to associate change with hard lines. But a year of uncertainty in trying for a child has left her more frustrated, lonely, and middling than ever
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I didn’t plan to write about this part until it was over—the “trying”: a repellent pursuit, as unreasonably humiliating as standing in line for a treat. It seemed much more civilized to simply announce one day that I was pregnant. To be the kind of woman for whom having a kid was a mere bullet point alongside everything else. To never be thought of as the type to reorganize her life around fulfilling her sacred duty, to pay thousands to make it happen, or cry at her perceived worthlessness when it didn’t. Surely I’d lose credibility if my interest in parenting was anything but supplemental to my intellectual pursuits. I tiptoed fearfully around these sexist caricatures, making them real through my own belief.
Last summer, I intensely considered the difficulties of being a parent and thought almost nothing of the difficulty of trying to become one. I joked for years about being infertile, but only the way I joke about being pushed onto the subway tracks. I didn’t really think it would pan out that way. If anything, I was terrified of getting pregnant too fast. Of being thrust into parenthood before I’d thought of all the reasons it was the right choice and finished my budget and gotten drunk enough times in dark bars (luckily, I’m 15 years in). And so I waited until I was resolute. Not without fear—I’m not delusional—but with my other ducks reasonably lined up: practical, financial, emotional. The joke is that the brain-addling process of trying to get pregnant saw those ducks and kicked them straight into the sun. The punchline is there’s probably no better preparation for parenting, if I ever get to that part.
POETRY
Poems for the New Year
Poetry editor Maya C. Popa rounds up some gems to get 2023 started
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Recently launched
Coming soon
Congratulations to the following writers celebrating publication.
shares news of her 2023 book:celebrates his debut novel, with an opening Substack post:Back in my old magazine days (as publisher of Prevention, Men’s Health and Women’s Health) January was all about “new year new you!” where we told you how to lose weight, get back in shape and stay young forever. Now I say: Fuck that! I love my sexy curvy body with my Buddha belly. My few remaining bad habits are welcome to stay as long as they want. Getting older and the freedom it brings is awesome! And the worry about what other people might expect from me is gone.
However, the feeling of new beginnings that occur this time of year – between the winter solstice, the calendar New Year and the Chinese lunar New Year is a time ripe with possibilities and potential joy. And for me, this year, that includes the release of my new book on February 21st—Love Nature Magic, Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of my Garden.
Substackers in the press
Elle magazine recently shared a list of the top shopping Substacks. Congrats to the following featured publications:
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Substack Reads is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, and audio from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost by Hannah Ray.
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Today I published my first essay on freshstartpress.substack.com What an exciting way to begin 2023! I invite Guest Posts that capture life's momentous turning points. My own transformation began with the unravelling of a long marriage. What happened to you?
I really enjoyed reading about Barnes and Noble and their turn-around 😊