Culture Study

We lost my sweet dog Peggy, who many of you have come to know in various ways — including through her paralysis and eventual amputation — in the early hours of May 6th. You can read more about what happened here and here, but I am also recovering from my first case of COVID and am in that stage of grief where I feel like someone is punching in my stomach and standing me up again and punching me in the stomach every waking hour. I’m in a deep eddy of sadness, and am so grateful for your understanding that I need to take some time from the newsletter as I put the pieces of myself back together again.

Fair warning: this is a piece about dog grief. But it’s not just a piece about a dog grief, because any piece about dogs or grief is never just about either of those things. I wrote last week that we lost Peggy after complications from surgery, just weeks before her eighth birthday. She was a tripod who loved street trash (especially the stale bread the Italian grandmas threw out for the birds in Carroll Gardens) and tearing toys to shreds in under five minutes and ignoring her brother. She was the type of dog that had a distinct and vital personality, the sort that emanated off of photos like the one up there.

What if there's no such thing as the perfect coffee maker?

Elise Hu on K-Beauty and aesthetic self-optimization

Angela Tucker on what adoptee centrism actually looks like

We haven’t done this for many months (and it’s the thread I get the most requests for) so let’s DO THIS and return to the most participatory of Friday Thread Topics, the sort that can abscond with an hour (if not more) of your Friday, the sort that manages to answer the most niche and difficult questions…..

The most astonishing show on television, a step up from babysitting sandals, plus Meet Bevvy Lou

The Limits and Possibilities of the Scientific Imagination

I don’t know what, exactly, I thought a book by an abortion doula would be like. I do know that I didn’t expect it to feel like an embrace. A call to action, absolutely, but also filled with tenderness. If that surprises you, as it surprised me, you probably don’t know enough about abortions or the people who have them.