one weird trick to read more books

Sorry for the shamelessly clickbaity subject line, but I’ve discovered the secret to reading more books: reading ebooks on my phone. For years I’ve felt guilty about how much time I spend on my phone — those weekly apple screen time reports are a guilt-inducing weekly reminder — but it turns out there is a way to be on your phone all the time and feel slightly morally better about it, and that is to read books on your phone.

I recently started using Libby to get ebooks from my library (here is a great New Yorker piece about Libby from my former coworker Daniel Gross!), so I’m constantly putting ebooks on hold through Libby and forgetting about them and then being pleasantly surprised when I get an email that it’s my turn to check out this ebook many weeks or months later. And you know all those small pockets of time when you have nothing else to do so you scroll on your phone for 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes? Those small pockets add up, and you can actually read a lot of books in that time that you’re already spending glued to your phone screen. (To be clear, this is not spon con for Libby and I am not affiliated with them or paid by them in any way, I just genuinely like the app!)

So on to book recs: I have two books I’ve recently read on my phone via Libby and want to recommend. They are both a little in the parenting or parenting-adjacent realm, so apologies to the non-parents who read this newsletter, but here they are anyways: first, Keith Gessen’s new sorta-memoir Raising Raffi, which will be delightful to anyone with young kids. It was particularly refreshing to hear a dad recount his journey through the many mundane challenges and decisions that occupy so much of parents’ days. We know that much of the domestic labor and project management of childcare is typically managed by mothers — moms are the ones read the books, do the research, do the paperwork, make the decisions. Gessen isn’t a perfect dad by any means — he struggles a lot in the book with how he yells at his kids — but it’s refreshing to see a dad, for a change, read the books and do the research and confront the endless number of decisions that parents have to make every day. I loved hearing his and his wife’s thought process as they waded through each new challenge at each new stage of parenting.

And secondly, I loved Lara Bazelon’s Ambitious Like a Mother, which is part reported nonfiction and part memoir about women who continue to have big, ambitious careers after having kids. I’ve recently found the general attitude towards new moms is that people assume, even expect, that we’ll slow down our careers, put our ambitions on hold, and work less, because we want to prioritize our kids. But I haven’t found that to be the case for me, and this can be a lonely experience. I often wonder: where are my other moms who want to prioritize work sometimes?? It’s extremely taboo to even say that out loud, so I appreciate Bazelon not only voicing it but writing a whole book about it, and candidly discussing her own decisions — she often travelled every week and spent extended time away from her young kids for career opportunities she couldn’t pass up. Bazelon interviews several other mothers who often prioritized work first — not all the time, but some of the time — and ultimately challenges the conventional narrative that moms want to take a step back in their career because they have kids.

Good things to read

Your career is just one-eighth of your life, The Atlantic.

Maternal instinct is a myth that men created, New York Times. There is no such thing as a biological “maternal instinct”!!

Meghan of Montecito, The Cut.

Failure to launch, Vox. A terrific investigation into the tech founder social club/group house Launch House by my colleague Rebecca Jennings.

Why self-care hasn’t cured your burnout, Bustle.

The recipe convention that dooms home cooks, The New Yorker.

This messy moment, The Cut. Maximalism is in!

The new quantified self, Maybe Baby.

In Hasidic enclaves, failing private schools flush with public money, New York Times. An important investigation from the NYT.

Too many Americans live in places built for cars — not for human connection, Vox.

Why don’t millennials have hobbies?, The Walrus. Do restaurants count as a hobby? That’s my hobby.

Why do moms love fall so much? The Cut.

Good things to cook

Things I’ve cooked recently: Tomato and mozzarella baked gnocchi. Coconut curry salmon. Sheet pan chicken with chickpeas, cumin, and turmeric. Steak tacos with corn salsa. And once again, this crispy shrimp with slaw and gochujang mayo because I never get tired of it.