Hello, hello. I’ve been made aware, recently, that multiple people thought I had moved moved to Iowa City, or at least, was staying there through the year. Beloveds, no. I am back in Brooklyn. I live here still. I enjoyed my stint in the Midwest being Mx Visiting Assistant Professor greatly and I left full of longing and anticipation for a New York summer, my favorite season bar none. Summer in Brooklyn is generally lush, oceanic, a certain kind of everyday sweetness emulsified with doomy malaise, inseparable from each other…simply the condition of how we live now.
I’ve had to lightly neglect Miss Substack for a minute, but we are getting back on the horse. I had a frantic April and a vexing, nonstop, sometimes genuinely painful May, which I handled with grace™ but exacted its costs on me and mine. June, though, has felt like a reset. A lot of work, a reasonable amount of play, my brain functioning well again. I’ve been unspooling an essay that is dense/fun/thinky; its current draft quotes Lenin, Sylvia Wynter, and my south asian sister Charli XCX. That one needs an edit or more still.
Today’s thot pudding is an amuse-bouche of sorts, a trifle of little findings to get back in play.
zine
I got a sweet message from a stranger about a mini-zine I designed and wrote for my friend Katie Garth’s project Quarantine Public Library a hundred years ago (in 2020).
I have no idea how it ended up in Northampton/anywhere at all, but the zine was called The Share, The Work: On Social Media and Liberation, and it was a strange and nice experience, to reread this short thing that I’d essentially forgotten about. I’m realizing anew how much of writing is like this, living out in the world, separate from you, occasionally washing back up to you like ocean flotsam. Anyway, you can read/print the zine and a bunch of other actually incredible art zines here.
heat (next week)
“In the end, the most enduring legacy of air-conditioning may be the divide it has created between the cool and the damned.”
― Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First
Okay so next week a ~heat dome~ will entrap New York, and the combination of that and humidity will make for some days that feel like they’re over a hundred degrees. Whenever I hear something like this I think about something Hanna once said during an organizing meeting, which was, “As we know, survival is not an individual act.” Extreme heat is dangerous; perhaps one of the more insidiously dangerous forms of extreme weather. From a former desert baby, and someone troubled by and interested in heat waves as part of the climate disaster, here’s a quick and dirty doc I made of 9 things to know for xxxtreme heat, NYC edition. Stay safe out there.
read
Bro Summer Waits For Us All, a blog post by Kelsey McKinney in Defector
Acts of Language, a vital essay in the New York Review of Books by Isabella Hammad.
Chirlane McCray’s iconique 1979 testimony in Essence, I Am A Lesbian.
If you’re up for something a little dense: here’s The Techno-Patrimonial Welfare State, from Rohan Venkat in Phenomenal World, one of the more interesting things I’ve read about India’s economy under the BJP. Less dense, but no less interesting: AI and elections in India.
All Fours, a novel by Miranda July (actually incredible and not overhyped)
Short War, a very good novel by Lily Meyer
A beginner’s guide to keeping an art journal from blogger The Paper Kind
see (some snippets of film from iowa city)
Until next. Bisous bisous,
STM
N.B. during my period of getting out of the struggliest parts of Struggle May, I found the concept of Wise Action useful. Maybe it’ll hit for you too.
The "tips on extreme heat" doc is a fantastic resource and (unfortunately) relevant again so quickly. You've inspired me to help create something similar for Boston through some climate/public health work I'm leaning into. So appreciative of your work!
Oh, I had thought you moved to Iowa too. Glad you get to be back in your beloved Brooklyn, Sarah!