Worth It #15

the very best of what I'm reading + watching + listening to

Aug 01, 2024

Welcome to Worth It, a monthly(ish) round-up of the very best of what I’m reading, watching, listening to, and occasionally even cooking. Only the things absolutely worth your valuable minutes.

Heyo Bobby!*

*I don’t know who Bobby is! But my 8-year-old daughter stole my phone and sent a text to my sister this week, and that’s what it said. We’re going with it.

Summer is almost over, but don’t panic—the book recs are year-round at BTT!

And for this edition of Worth It, I’m telling you about them in video format. That way I feel less like I’m writing book reports! I’m savvy y’all!

Here’s the complete book list, but check out the videos to see my favorites. It’s like #BookTok but less cool and viral! Hashtag Ireadtoomuch!

I read this Slate article “It’s Weird Times to be a Happy Mother” back around Mother’s Day and have thought about it so many times since. The internet discourse around motherhood is bizarre (and, unsurprisingly, pretty binary) these days. I appreciate how Strauss grapples with all of it.

As it happened, my relationship with my kids has been as philosophically, spiritually, or intellectually vital as anything else I’ve done, leading to the kind of realizations we’ve long wanted to seek elsewhere, away from the home, away from the family. Through them, I’ve cultivated a healthy relationship with uncertainty, with attention, with feeling closer to the source of life, whatever it is, with all its wonder and fragility—all moments of revelation that came by way of a mix of stress, rupture, wholeness, and ease. If I had let motherhood stay small, confined to the sidelines, then those stressful moments would have felt like forces holding me back on my way to an interesting and meaningful life. But by letting motherhood become big, those challenges—and yes, my kids annoy me sometimes, and yes, I appreciate working and other time I spend away from them—became part of a larger narrative arc.

Y’all know I’m a Haidt fan (at least 86% of the time… some bones to pick with that Coddling book), and I’ve also read Lenore Skenazy for a while (who started Free Range Kids). Here’s a guest post Skenazy wrote for Haidt’s Substack

After Babel

I have only few hills I’ll die on, but letting kids have analog childhoods is one of them. We’re all used to hearing about anxious tech-addicted kids, but this essay considers the other side of that equation: their anxious parents. Omg YES. We are growth stunted!

Without the opportunity for real separation, we parents are like the kids who don’t get the “dozens of times a day, hundreds of times a month” to go off-base and explore on their own. We’re missing out on our half of that attachment cycle—the half no one thinks about: us letting go, us being afraid, us having them come back, feeling comforted by their return, and then allowing them to go off again. We and our children are both unused to letting go. This may explain why so many parents are still tracking their kids at college.

After Babel

How Phones Are Making Parents the Anxious Generation

The moment a baby is born, a parent is too. There is suddenly a new (screaming) person in the world. But just as suddenly, there’s a new you, too. (Also possibly screaming.) You have a new relationship in your life, and a whole new definition of who you are and what your job is…

4 months ago · 408 likes · 104 comments · Lenore Skenazy

And someone sent me this post by

Yascha Mounk

after my post about liberalism the other day:

The basic formula for liberal toleration is extremely simple. Like everyone else, you think that your way of life is right and that others have it wrong. But at the same time, you recognize that others think that their way of life is right and yours is wrong. Based on this realization, you agree to refrain from trying to impose your way of life on others, and in return they agree to refrain from imposing their way of life on you. Use of coercive power by the state is therefore restricted to cases in which everyone can agree that some form of behavior is unacceptable.

Persuasion

Illiberal Liberalism

4 months ago · 165 likes · 16 comments · Joseph Heath

Presumed Innocent!! This show fell into the sliver of shared space on my and my husband’s TV enjoyment Venn diagram. It’s the first time I’ve entered a show (the finale) onto my calendar since the Game of Thrones era. I thought about the finale the whole day, and when my kids refused to go upstairs at night (because summertime), I finally shouted, “I LOVE YOU BUT YOU MUST GO AWAY SO I CAN WATCH MY MURDER SHOW!!!!!!”

I love, love, love the show Hacks. Hack comedian-slash-HSN-mogul in her 70s meets flailing comic writer in her 20s. Both are so funny you could watch this show twice.

Please Hollywood, make more funny television. We are all so sad out here.

I’m watching House of the Dragon (I give it a 7 out of 10?) and just started America’s Sweethearts (idk, kind of cringe??).

Also I maaaaaay have watched season 2 of Perfect Match. Like, all of it.

I started playing it one night in an attempt to zone out, but then I couldn’t zone out for even a SECOND because I was so worried about the cast. First, the women are in these thong bikinis that look about as comfortable as wearing a jump rope, and I just wanted to stop production and get them a SHAWL so they could sit like a normal person without self-consciously adjusting something every nine seconds. I also felt the constant urge to walk on set and be somebody’s mama. Like put my arm around them and ask who hurt them. They 100% should write a mandatory therapy clause into these Netflix Reality Universe contracts! I’m not saying I recommend this show—it is bad for my heart and the environment!!!