My Favorite Writing This Week
the Blue Room gets an assist from the rest of Substack
Good morning, Blue Roomies!
This week has been a lot. My middle kid got a kidney infection, with a fever that stubbornly refused to respond to medication, so we had a late night in the ER and a shift of antibiotics. We’ve turn the corner, but it’s been a draining couple days.
God comes to us disguised as our life, as I wrote last week (h/t Paula D’Arcy). Lately the Great Whatever has sent a bunch of wonderful writing my way, a gift of manna in a week when mental bandwidth has been scarce. These writers are all housed at Substack, which is a mostly delightful place to hang out with good writing.
Here’s just a sampling:
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Last week’s Blue Room on overwhelm got a huge response and a lot of “same heres.” Here’s a deeper dive on the same topic. Key quote: The vast majority of people do not experience this technology as ‘liberating’ them. Rather, they experience it as something that propagates itself around them, and something they must race to keep up with in order to not be ‘left behind’.
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Relatedly, my friend and writer I admire Frances Rosenau talks about the power of devices and apps to slice and dice and gamify life. Key quote: While I love gamifying certain things, there are so many aspects of life we don’t get credit for, like being there for a friend, or showing up at a kids’ performance, or going to church.
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Susan Cain quotes a defiant poem about going against the grain. Don’t be surprised if a line or two show up in my latest book. Key quote: To your rigged fashions, I’m pariah / Nothing a mob does is clean.
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Hope corner: Brian McLaren has a new book, and his chapter on hope (which Diana Butler Bass recently shared) leans heavily on Miguel de la Torre, one of my go-to’s in Hope: A User’s Manual. Key quote: Malevolent forces often use hope to manipulate us, rendering us compliant to their continued oppression. Hope can be a false promise, not just a lie, but a dangerous, delicious lie. And the lie becomes all the more appealing when the only alternative we see is despair.
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Hope corner, part 2: my friend Ed is photoblogging his way through Hope: A User’s Manual. What an honor! I loved Ed’s writing and photography, and he’s recommended the book enough times that I should really send him a commission. Key quote: There’s a lot in this world right now that is trying to draw us away from hope as well as a lot of false hope getting sold. But I hope through this summer we can together begin to move towards a more robust and lasting form of hope.
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Last but not least: I called these lovely articles manna, in a week when I needed some bread. Here’s a Substack with that literal name, written by my friend and another writer I admire, Arianne Lehn. Key quote: I wonder what it looks like to live as a friend to yourself, checking in regularly to ask, “do I really need to do this?” “How am I feeling right now?”
What are you reading this week, and what manna has come your way?
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What I’m Up To
Earlier this week I provided a book-writing update. Free subscribers can read a piece of it; supporting subscribers have access to the whole post, including a Zoom link for our next book talk on Tuesday, May 28 at noon EDT.
I'm already subscribed to all these substacks, which confirms that you have excellent taste! 😁 And I agree, this is a lovely place to read wonderful writers!
The money-and-tech article hit a nerve with me, and here's why: my husband's family (and so now Husband and I) have a cabin in a deeply rural area. We've often had to wrestle with tech because _anything_ that runs off a download or other wireless/internet connection is highly unreliable out there. Even electricity can be problematic.
We have dealt with this in much greater depth in the last few years because we've been building a house out there. EVERYTHING has "smart" capabilities, and we've had to search for the opposite, ensuring that the microwave/washer/window blinds will operate manually, without reliance on an app.
Always, a litmus test for any vendor or delivery person is whether or not they take seriously our warning that "your map app will. not. get you here. Please write down these directions." Sometimes it's just silly: what good does it do for my clothes washer to be able to run remotely through an app? If I'm not home, who is there to load the clothes in? If someone else is home to do laundry, I don't need an app.
I suspect it is literally unimaginable for the people who develop apps and other alleged labor saving tech that there are places their services don't reach, even in the continental US. I guess they don't go to those places! I think there's a lesson there about how our surroundings inform our base assumptions which in turn inform everything we do.