5 Quick Things #251 🐝

gender, friendship, food, & bees

Hey there,

It was quite a normal week around here, which was most delightful and most welcome. I taught my classes, I wrote, I cleaned the house, I made dinner, I read, and I walked the dog. On Wednesday our book club attended our local coffee shop’s trivia night, and it was such a goofy, delightful way to pass an evening with friends and neighbors. I’d never gone before, but I could sometimes hear the questions over the mic from our front porch, and from the noise of the crowd I assumed it was an introvert’s nightmare. Turns out, it wasn’t! I very well may go again.

One cool moment from our week… Our oldest kiddo, now a senior, got an acceptance letter from her first-choice university! I’m so stinking proud of her. And I also cannot believe we are in this stage already… (if you’re one of my way-back readers, she was two when I first started writing online). 🤯

The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Événement” by Paul Cezanne, 1866

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5 Quick Things ☕️

1. 📻 New episode of ADWAF: The Genesis of Gender 📻 What does it mean to be a man or a woman? And just as important in today's culture, how do we have civil, truthful, loving conversations about that topic? Seth and I chat with author and professor Abigail Favale to talk about all this and more. She's written a book that's taking off like wildfire about one of the most pressing questions of the day: Who are we as men and women?

2.  Several of you emailed to say last 5QT’s linked essay on friendship really resonated with you (it did with me, too). This timely one does for me as well, especially since just this week I taught Aristotle’s philosophy on friendship in my high school class — “If we better understand what friendship is, then we might better understand how to build new and better friendships.”

3. Much of this recent episode was a sort of “review” of the benefits of eating real food, but it was still a great conversation. Why are we so unhealthy as a society? And what can we do about it?

4. We sometimes forget the ordinary reality of life in historic times, even when we have grainy footage from those days. This video was a cool peek into what it might have been more like, with colorized footage from 1920’s Paris, New York City, London, and more.

5. And finally, someone had to tell the royal bees about the Queen’s death (NYT). 😢

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Currently Reading, Watching, Listening 📻

• Paul Zach’s 2021 album Hymns

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Quotable 💬

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines who you will be when you can't help it.”

— Oscar Wilde #

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With All Her Mind 🙇‍♀️

I'm happy to finally share with you a project I was thrilled to participate in — a new book of essays by some of the smartest, most winsome women I admire! Edited by Rachel Bulman and published by Word on Fire, With All Her Mind is a call to pursue what is too often excluded from our picture of femininity: the intellectual life.

My included essay is about the writing life, and how cultivating a regular practice of writing opens doors to a deeper, richer, contemplative life — even if you're not a writer. It was an honor to write!

Learn more here.

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An Elective Class? 🎨

If you're your current adult self, yet you've magically got time in your schedule to take one elective class (as though you're in high school or college), what would you take? Seems like art class would be the most crowded, and I get it. But you may have been like my neighbor friend, who told me she wanted to take them all and had a hard time answering... As for me, I'll see you down the hall in French class.

Find this week’s poll here.

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Quick Links 🔗

• Create your own Rule of Life

• Subscribe to A Drink With a Friend

• Become a paying subscriber of The Commonplace (and thank you!)

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Question(s) For You to Ponder… 🤔

What’s one specific thing you’re grateful for at this exact moment?

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Have a good weekend,

Tsh

p.s. I’ve got a few new t-shirts in my shop! Including one with the Oscar Wilde quote, above.

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