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Wait for it (Persona, 1966)

Hiya. Here are some lovely and/or meaningful things for you from this week:

  1. Every year for the past 50 years, the Swedish town of Gävle has put up a giant straw goat to celebrate Christmas. Twenty-nine of those 50 years, someone has set fire to the goat, Burning Man-style. It's a weirdly delightful suspense game every year: Who will win, the goat-protectors or the goat-burners?? For the latest updates, you can follow the goat on Twitter.
     
  2. Friends with Secrets: Three friends publish four months' worth of their chat logs for an exercise in vulnerability and an exploration of how we seek to improve our mental health. Newsletter Fave Akilah Hughes is one of the friends. ("What kind of work do you do? Are you in a relationship?" "I'm a writer and comedian so I'm obviously single.")
     
  3. I learned this week that British youths use "dench" as a slang term meaning "excellent" BECAUSE OF JUDI DENCH.
     
  4. The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community, Fran Lebowitz, 1987.
     
  5. "She cooked for him. He married her anyway. This was right around the time that arugula was discovered, which was followed by endive, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by frisée, which was followed by the three M’s—mesclun, mache, and microgreens—and that, in a nutshell, is the history of the past forty years from the point of view of lettuce." Nora Ephron's cookbook crushes.
     
  6. NBA Players Standing Next to Normal People.
     
  7. Favorite New York moments.
     
  8. Jason Kottke's round-up of good holiday gift guides. An additional idea from me: Get people classes in something they've expressed interest in (bread-baking, cocktail-making, pottery, rock-climbing) or an experience you think they'd enjoy but might not spend money on themselves to actually do (fancy opera tickets, a massage, dinner at a nice restaurant with a few hours of babysitting time).
     
  9. "I feared waking up in my 20s and finding that I’d produced 1,000 corny videos for a website that was once my baby and was now under the control of a guy named, I don’t know, Bryce." Tavi Gevinson is folding Rookie, her wonderful website for young women, and explains why in her final editor's letter.
     
  10. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
    is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
    something happens better than all the riches
    or power in the world. It could be anything,
    but very likely you notice it in the instant
    when love begins


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Laura

P.S. Jobs: Global Deputy Editor and Culture Staff Writer, The Atlantic; Director of Communications and Marketing, Teach for America; Head of Production, Audio, Vox Media; Deputy Digital Editor, Food & Wine; many culture journalism jobs at the LA Times; Copy Editor, Mother Jones; Editorial Fellows, Popular Science; Distributed Organizing Manager, Sierra Club; Associate Communications Director, Daily Kos; Training and Onboarding Manager, Central Park Conservancy. Bye.

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