One Brain Cell: Double Issue #2

We partied too hard over the holidays.

* By party, we mean lie-on-our-couch-watching-The-Good-Doctor-and-other-trashy-TV. 

Welcome to 2022, our fellow readers! The crossing of the year is always a reflective time for us, and we are back, rested for the year ahead. 

10 things that inspired us these months 

1. Goodbye to All That. A Joan Didion essay about her relationship with New York City. I read this the first time before my first trip there in 2013. Or was it the second? Not sure, but the essay has lingered throughout the years. “All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.” What might it feel like when I am back again? – glo

2. Kauai45 & Sweet Cocoa - Just the Two of Us [Bill Withers Cover]. Turning thirty in six months and I think… I want the rest of my life to feel the way this sounds? Like a dreamy Sunday afternoon, reading a book in the sun, stroking a dog. Like warm milo after a cold swim. That’s how this cover sounds to me. Like time is inconsequential. – sh

3. Perception Cafe. One: Those ceilings! Two: The Einspanner, a lovely discovery. Three: An unpretentious but confident air. Four: Upon my recommendation, another friend visited and loved it, too. Another travel-related feeling I hadn’t had in a while: Joy multiplied. – sh  

4. Company: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert. I went down the rabbit hole of another recently departed cultural icon, Stephen Sondheim, and came across this intimate rendition of the musical’s hits. This current Broadway run features a gender switch — the main character is played by a woman rather than a man, and her best friends are male. Does the musical’s main question “why marriage” take on a different tone because of this? One thing is for sure, I can’t think of a more apt stage for the musical than NPR’s Tiny Desk. – glo (note from sh: THIS is the best Company cover and it is because Adam Driver has insane sexy sexy energy.) 

5. A Young Woman Falls in Love with Everything. If the universe loves order (Fibonacci sequences, symmetry), why does it also embrace randomness? This charming 3-min clip reminds me of the wonders of the world we live in and how it contains multiplicities and contradictions that make it all the more beautiful. – glo

6. Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible. Then-editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, writes about his attempts to master and perform Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, Op. 23, amidst the chaos of Wikileaks, hostage situations, and building a piano room. It’s an underrated sleeper gem; a surprising number of people texted just to sing its praises in response to a quote I posted. I played the piano for years as a child, and then the trombone in a symphonic band, and I absolutely understand what Alan means when he says it changed his life. – sh

7. The Longform Podcast #472: Michael Schulman. That viral profile of Jeremy Strong? Yeah, it’s by this guy. I love longform writing, I love celebrity profiles that go off the rails (see: the infamous Tom Hiddleston profile by Taffy Brodesser-Akner), I love a peek behind the curtains of how it all comes together. This is a perfect podcast episode. – sh 

8. On My Radar: Moses Sumney’s cultural highlights. Just wanted to bring to your attention that hipster icon Moses Sumney watches Selling Sunset. And announced it in The Guardian. High low brow, y’all. – sh 

9. Crypto Design Challenges. Here, our obligatory crypto link for the month! Wherever we stand on crypto’s long-term impact/prospects, I think we can agree that its UX at the moment is at best confusing and mostly intimidating. This essay helps articulate a few key challenges that I feel are quite worthwhile exploring. – glo

10. 14 Peaks. I can’t fathom climbing one 8000-meter mountain, let alone 14 in 7 months. That’s one every 2 weeks on average! But this dude, Nepalese ex-gurkha Nirmal Purja, did just that. Besides being a story about the extremes of human endeavor, it is also a story about the under-acknowledged Nepalese climbers who also form the backbone of many a climbing expedition. As Nims put it, if it was a bunch of white people who accomplished this feat, we’d be having so much more media coverage instead. – glo

Happy year of the water tiger folks! — sh & glo