I’ll be back in 2024 with many more interviews. In the meantime, a link roundup for you:
🖊️ The Heinrich Böll Foundation, “in agreement with the Bremen Senate,” withdrew from awarding the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought to the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, citing Gessen’s recent New Yorker essay “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” which explores the politics of memory in Europe and its implications for current events in Gaza, as the reason for the decision. “The irony of calling for the suspension of a prize named after an anti-Totalitarian political theorist in order to appease the authoritarian government of a rogue state currently committing genocide against an already-subjugated people seems to be lost on the Bremen DIG,” writes Dan Sheehan in LitHub.
📱”Social media is designed to feel random and unpredictable,” writes Amanda Hess in The New York Times. “That’s what makes it so addictive, like a slot machine for feelings. This was the year when its contradictions were heightened to a grotesque level. Monkey baby, soft pants, new life, dead child. I go to Instagram to scroll mindlessly and to share pictures of my children. Now I see the pictures of Gaza’s children there, too.”
👵🏼 Stephanie Wood in The Guardian on the unique caring burden of single childless daughters: “Women, in general, take on a greater burden of care across the board. But a 2020 Australian study found that single women over 45 without children take on more caring responsibilities for family members who are ageing or have a disability than any other group in their age cohort – partnered people, people with children or men.”
💔 “Every few decades, women reconsider the value of heterosexual marriage,” writes Scaachi Koul (also) in The Guardian. An excerpt:
The great Sister Wives schism sits in the canon of very public divorces that shared a theme this year: heterosexual couple ends marriage, seemingly because wife has had enough. Besides Brown v Brown(s), there was Jodie Turner-Smith and Joshua Jackson, Britney Spears and Sam Asghari, Tina Knowles and Richard Lawson – even Kellyanne and George Conway fit the mold. Overwhelmingly, the public narratives are ones in which the woman has grown tired of dragging along a husband who can’t keep up. Anecdotally, I see this too. All the most interesting women I know have divorced in the last few years. For example, my divorce was finalized in February.
🎨 “Certainly it’s a sign of progress that society no longer presumes a woman will or should give up her career when she has a child,” writes Ligaya Mishan in The New York Times Magazine. “Nevertheless, for women artists, motherhood — venerated in theory, belittled in practice — is still seen, by others and often themselves, as an obstacle, if not the end.”
👶🏽 Rachel M. Cohen on how millennials learned to dread motherhood in Vox. An excerpt:
How to explain why, in survey after survey, it is women with the most financial resources, and the highest levels of education, who report the most stress and unhappiness with motherhood? We hear often that the US is the least family-friendly country in the industrialized world, but American women who describe the most dissatisfaction are also those most likely to work in jobs that do offer maternity leave, paid sick days, and remote-work flexibility. They’re most likely to have decent health insurance and the least likely to be raising a child on their own. Understanding what’s driving these feelings might be key to changing it — for me and millions of others.