Draft Four: 24 winter side dishes
Many many many links, and happy holidays.
This is the 50th letter this year. Writing Draft Four has been a great joy, and I have all of you to thank. My Christmas gift are these 24 recommendations, some new, some repurposed from previous letters. Hope you find something relevant – either as a holiday diversion or as inspiration for 2024.
1. My playlist. I picked 23 songs for 2023, a year Spotify says I went heavy on The National. Warning: it’s an odd blend. Also: Two extra songs worth setting apart. In January I discovered Ren, and Hi Ren, his autobiographical guitar-fueled journey on light fighting darkness. This week, I discovered Cojo, a Romanian Gen Z rapper whose freestyle on dropping masks and embracing vulnerability just broke me. (PS: Taylor Swift also broke me).
2. Ezra Klein. The man, the podcast, the writings. Ezra’s thoughtfulness and curiosity have been fuel for a while. This year he’s helped me navigate my feelings on the tragedy of Gaza better than anyone else, and his podcast conversations have set the standard for what engagement with a guest and a topic can sound like.
3. The vulnerability of men. Richard Reeve’s book Of Boys and Men digs into data (mostly US data) to show boys and men struggling in school, at work, and in the family. They fall behind in education and fail to graduate. They also earn less than they used to, and, in some cases, they are being replaced. They die faster, and they commit suicide more often. They’ve lost the clichéd “provider” role in families as the women have closed the gap. For some, this leads to withdrawal from society. For others, this means war.
4. And some thoughts on bad men. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Claire Dederer, is a bold book and an attempt to look at the works of monstrous men (because they are almost always men – think Pablo Picasso, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Kanye West etc.) and asking whether she can still love the art, while also hating the artist.
5. Escape to Copenhagen. If men are struggling, that follows centuries of patriarchal power. Tove Ditlevsen, whose memoirs of the early-1900s were collected as The Copenhagen Trilogy, shows the price one pays for breaking out of that system. „In the morning there was hope”, Ditlevsen writes. These were the mornings of childhood, just before life kicked in and kicked everyone in the face.
6. The imposter syndrome. In this piece, Leslie Jamison questions the cultural ubiquity of the “imposter syndrome” – which many of us talk about to the point that it has become humble bragging about our doubts. But what if that wasn’t its initial point, and what if it often obscures real systemic problems of access and discrimination?
7. Lost and found. This is a beautiful book by New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz. It’s easy to describe as a memoir about the time in her life when she loses her father and meets her partner. But it’s so much more. “One of the many ways that loss instructs us is by correcting our sense of scale, showing us the world as it really is: so enormous, complex, and mysterious that there is nothing too large to be lost – and, conversely, no place too small for something to get lost there.”
8. Grief. Losing brings grief, and this year I discovered someone who can write about it with candor and wit. It’s “hardcore sentimentalist” Max Porter, a British writer who penned the astounding Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, the story of a father and two boys mourning the death of their wife and mother alongside a foul-mouthed crow who moves in with them: “Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.” In 2023 Porter published Shy, which was (rightfully) called “a lyrical study of troubled youth”.
9. Embrace failure. “Failing is essential to what we are as human beings”, Costică Brădățan argues in his amazing book In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility. You can also listen to Costică in audio form – here he is, in English, on The Gray Area, and in Romanian, speaking with Anca Simina.
10. Let’s play. Whether you play or don’t play video games, this book will charm you. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, is a tale of making games, creativity, and yes, love. (“And what is love, in the end? Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?”)
11. OK, love. I discovered philosopher Agnes Callard this year. She asks complicated questions about who we are to each other in relationships. As this New Yorker story shows, Callard ended a long-running marriage because she fell in love with a former graduate student, a relationship in which, she says, she glimpsed the capacity for “radical transformation”. Here’s one more fantastic essay she wrote about break-ups.
12. Love in journalism. I’ve written plenty about journalism, so I’ll just share something short and sweet from the amazing Jennifer Brandel. It’s a plea for the place of love in journalism, and what it could do if taken on by (at least some) newsrooms: “They’d recognize that beneath the anger and pain at every protest covered was love – love for people who were taken, or not given a fair shake, or for a world they know is possible. They’d see that horrible acts committed by public figures were, in fact, driven by an absence of love (…). They’d see that humans’ power to persist and to make progress despite incredible odds against them throughout our history was thanks to accessing that infinitely renewable resource of love.”
A VISUAL BREAK FROM EMA
13. The best of European journalism. Read the nominees and winners of this year’s European Press Prize. It’s an amazing list, and it’s one of the most wonderful things I get to do. One story that deeply moved me was about what we in the Balkans actually do when we send food and stuff to relatives.
14. Support good journalists. My long-time partner in crime Sorana Stănescu writes a newsletter in which she takes apart the medical system. A few extra paying subscribers would allow her to make this a full time job. Same with Andreea Giuclea, who looks at sports through a lens of empathy and inclusion. I’m a proud paying supporter because I want to read her work from the Paris Olympics next year. I doubt my Romanian readers aren’t already subscribers or patrons of Jo Ilie, who helps thousands plan meals, save money and actually be more mindful of their habits. What you might not know is that she has also started a cooking podcast alongside a witty and steak-obsessed co-worker: Învinge tava.
15. No operating instructions. The editor in me is proud to have worked on the stories in Ioana Burtea first collection of essays, a witty, poignant, and heartbreaking tale of growing up as a millennial Romanian. Makes for an amazing gift.
16. Student safety is essential. This year I also got to work with my friend Carla Lunguți on a series of stories about student safety. Carla wrote in late spring about the perils of verbal abuse. In January 2024 we hope to publish a few more stories – this time on sexual harassment in a university setting and what can be done about it. (I wrote this preview for it).
17. Deep reading. Have you found it harder to concentrate on reading books or long articles? That’s because we’re paying a price for our addiction to our digital devices. We should embrace change, but also acknowledge loss. And the loss of deep reading hurts.
18. Is the internet broken? If you’ve joined Romanian Threads (which has been available for a week or so) you might have asked yourself this question. It’s a mix of the most brutal and fisticuffs Twitter/X, with some old school 4chan seasoning, plus tons of pent-up rage at the lie that influencer culture turned out to be. Us internet boomers panic at all the shitposting, vitriol and violence (some of it performative, but nonetheless). So it’s worth pondering why nobody knows what’s happening online anymore, and how we’re now living in the Zoomers’ (and Alphas’) internet. (Yes, we aren’t having fun anymore, but they seem to enjoy it). And we can’t fight it. Want more internet predictions? Here’s a bunch for 2024. (Threads going massive, GPT-5 coming for our lunch, and election apocalypse everywhere).
19. How old are you, actually? Even if we’d aged out of the fun places online, maybe we’re not yet walking boomer jokes. I laughed throughout Jennifer Senior’s article that asks this simple question: what age are you in your head? Jennifer is 53. But in her head, she is 36. Her mother is 76. In her head she is 45. I am 42. In my head, I’m no older than 32.
20. Escape from reality. Into science fiction? This short beautiful book will soothe you: Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel. If you’re new to stepping outside reality, Ted Chiang is a great bridge into sci-fi; his collection Exhalation remains divine. And if you really want to take it to another planet, try Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan series: A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace.
21. Come back for nuance, and complexity. This year I met journalist and changemaker Mónica Guzmán, whose book I Never Thought of it That Way talks about bridging divides through conversation. (“If two people are talking, they are in a relationship that has the potential to grow deeper. Always.”) “We get together into groups”, writes Mónica. “We’ll call this sorting. We push off against groups that seem opposed to us. We’ll call this othering. We sink deeper into our groups and our stories, where it’s harder to hear anything else. We’ll call this siloing.” Where do you think that leads? A safer place, maybe. But also a lonelier one. If you want to keep reading against our tendency of polarization I also suggest Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict, and Elif Shafak’s slim and beautiful How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division.
22. Say yes. I can’t quite put my fingers on how this essay as a letter from writer Dave Eggers came back to me. It’s about selling out as an artist or, more accurately, about saying yes. Never mind the noise or the voice of the inner critic. Just say yes, Eggers writes. “What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand.”
23. Time is finite. Oliver Burkeman wrote one my all-time fave books on the allure of time management. Optimizing is awesome, but we’re all going to die, and we’ll die never having mastered time. If you need a guide to better think about our finite days, read Four Thousand Weeks. For a more political and aesthetic take on time, venture forth with Jenny Odell (author of the amazing How to Do Nothing) and her latest: Saving Time.
24. Your Future Self. This slim and exciting book – Your Future Self by Hal Hershfield – goes through a lot of the research about how we keep failing at planning for the future. A new year is around the corner – what have you planned for Future You? One suggestion: In a world of specialists, forego a static job description and become an interstionary.
Bonus tip. I write one journal page every morning in a Moleskine daily planner. To make sure the habit stuck, I paired it with an existing routine. I wake up, take two vitamins, make coffee, and then write for the 10 minutes it takes to fill a page. A few times a year – let’s say I have an early flight – I write later in the day. It’s fine. But it’s a habit; that’s what matters. And it captures an evolving story. (If you’re looking for digital tools, try this list).
Cristi! Waking up early on Sundays feels different knowing I get to read your substacks (with eyes half-closed, still, but I don't make the rules). Hope to see more of draft four next year, too!