A Cozy Winter Storm of Recs & Links
A preposterously good looking new soup recipe + so many book recs + a drink for a salt pig + all the reading for your Sunday morning
First a PSA: If you feel like you don’t always get this newsletter in your inbox (and you’d like it in your inbox)….or you feel like there are OTHER newsletters you’ve definitely subscribed to that aren’t getting to your inbox, chances are high that your Substack delivery settings are doinked.
This is probably not your fault — Substack is always trying to get us to hang out more in the app, sort of like how dorky adults were always trying to get teens to hang out at the TEEN CENTER or whatever — but you should go into your Substack app settings and check your “notifications” settings and make sure they’re set to email and email alone. This post explains how.
Where I live, on an island off the coast of Washington state, the winter sky is rarely clear. It’s grey, and a different sort of grey, and then a darker sort of grey, before clearing for about an hour right at sunset and making you believe that you’ll wake up to sunshine the next morning (false!). I don’t say this to talk shit; grey almost always means rain, and rain is what makes our brilliant summers possible. But I will say that this past week, when every day brought a new and even bluer sky, was welcome.
Granted, it was freezing. Not Montana cold, but bone-chill cold. Which was more than welcome, since we haven’t had a real freeze yet this winter, and you need a freeze to keep the invasives at least somewhat at bay. Every morning, the marine layer would freeze on the stairs up from my house, on the pebbles on the side of the road, on every blade of grass, and if you left the house as the sun was just beginning to rise — right around 8 am — the world felt blinding in its beauty. Absurd!
And it did this for five days! Unreal! I know some of you in sunny mountain places are used to this, but we are not. It felt like an outrageous gift — and the only counter to the absolute fuckshow that is this administration’s first two weeks, which has transported me back to the feeling of anxious vigilance and fear that defined the first Trump administration, only worse, much worse. I will take my small solaces where I can find them, like the fat snow flakes falling from the sky as I type this, even though they’re melting as soon as they hit the ground.
Below you’ll find a real wintery mix: there are pieces that elucidate what’s happening right now in ways that feel essential, and there are recipes that make me feel like there’s something to look forward to. There’s celebrity gossip that’s distracted me, romances that have beguiled me, the running app that’s pushing me, the book that made me laugh out loud at least a dozen times, and the Substack post that feels like a primary text for Gen-Z’s understanding of the world. Plus a weird salty drink recommendation, because I don’t know your life or your sodium needs.
As always, the only affiliate links here are for Bookshop (all affiliate proceeds go to a different books-related organization every year) and I’ve used gift links whenever possible. And if you haven’t moved to paid, this Late-in-Life Loves Thread from earlier this week is worth the price of admission. Plus you’ll get all the good stuff below.