November 2019

Books, poetry

• The Opposite of Loneliness, by Marina Keegan (!!!!!!! excellent.) some favourites essays/stories:
  • Even artichokes have doubts
  • Reading aloud
  • Hail, full of grace
  • Against the grain
  • I kill for money
• Becoming, by Michelle Obama
• Autoboyography, by Christina Lauren
• Sandhya Menon’s fiction: never knew how much fun it is to read Indian characters in traditional YA till now
• The Flatshare, by Beth O’Leary (for (a) wonderful main and supporting characters, (b) the portrayal of emotional abuse)
• Read for school and greatly enjoyed
  • [How Can One Write about Bosnia] by A. K. Ramanujan | Poetry Magazine
  • The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot | Poetry Foundation
  • Hedda Gabler, once again
• Trying out DNFing books I don’t feel like reading. Among others:
  • Sick, by Porochista Kharpour (not the writing style I want right now)
  • Men Explain Things to Me, by Rebecca Solnit (didn’t really learn much from the essays) (titular essay: Men Explain Things to Me – Guernica)
  • On the Move, by Oliver Sacks (really liked it, will read the rest later.)
• CR: Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou
• TBR: When Breath Becomes Air, The House on Mango Street, The Raven Cycle

Essays, blog posts, articles, news:

• David Foster Wallace on Leadership, Illustrated and Read by Debbie Millman – Brain Pickings
• How to Make ‘Self-Care’ Actually Feel Like Self-Care – The New York Times
• The woman who tracks ‘dark’ Instagram accounts – BBC News
• I Know What You Think of Me – The New York Times
• The Invention of Empathy: Rilke, Rodin, and the Art of “Inseeing” – Brain Pickings
• Abhijit Banerjee: Focus on weakest pupil
• Diaspora Blues* – Surbhi – Medium
• Behrouz Boochani, voice of Manus Island refugees, is free in New Zealand | Australia news | The Guardian
• Want to be a Great Writer? Then Don’t Focus on Writing. (Do This Instead)
• The media loves the Gates Foundation. These experts are more skeptical. – Vox
• Gratitude can make your brain more charitable, generous, and altruistic – Vox
• Ohio bill orders doctors to ‘reimplant ectopic pregnancy’ or face ‘abortion murder’ charges | US news | The Guardian
• Books As Medicine: A Conversation With Sandra Cisneros – Electric Literature
• Rapidly press X to refuse to come to terms with your own mortality – Alexey Guzey

Video, podcasts

• My new favourite thing in the whole entire world: Capacity for Wonder and Sunsets | The Anthropocene Reviewed | WNYC Studios
• Why Does Tipping Still Exist? (Ep. 396) – Freakonomics Podcast
• McDonald’s Broke My Heart – Revisionist History Podcast
• A visual guide to Bayesian thinking – YouTube
• BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content – YouTube (extremely beautifully filmed)
• You’re Not Relatable Anymore – YouTube
• The RSA
  • Being with Jane Goodall – YouTube
  • Brené Brown on Empathy – YouTube
  • Brené Brown on Blame – YouTube
• MY BOOKSHELF TOUR! – YouTube (i don’t know why. i just enjoy these a lot.)
• Hillary Rodham Clinton ’69: Wellesley College 2017 Commencement Speaker – YouTube

College application-related things (things that made me feel better while waiting for decisions)

• MIT Admissions blog, even though I’m not applying
  • Life is like a Game | MIT Admissions
  • Waiting for Decision Day | MIT Admissions
  • An Open Letter to MIT Applicants | MIT Admissions
  • Folding | MIT Admissions (<3)
  • here comes a thought | MIT Admissions (<3)
• Dealing with Rejection – YouTube
• College Isn’t The End Goal: Lessons From The Sophomore Slump – YouTube

Entertainment 

• Anne with An E season 3 (really liking where the Native history arc was going, sad that show is cancelled)
• Atypical season 3 (character development!)
• Patriot Act, everything recent
• The Great Gatsby (the movie)
• More video essays on Three Billboards and other films

October 2019

Articles 

• What does it really mean to build health systems? | Devex
• Margaret Mead’s Beautiful Letter of Advice to Her Younger Sister on Starting a Family in an Uncertain World – Brain Pickings
• When Breath Becomes Air: A Young Neurosurgeon Examines the Meaning of Life as He Faces His Death – Brain Pickings
• I Like You: An Almost Unbearably Lovely Vintage Illustrated Ode to Friendship – Brain Pickings
• Your Child Is Not Getting Into Stanford – The Bold Italic
• CHUA: Cold one with the boys
• Kathryn Murdoch Steps Out of the Family Shadow to Fight Climate Change – The New York Times
• Can Bullet Journaling Save You? | The New Yorker
• A US charity tries something new: letting poor kids choose their donors instead – Vox
• ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape – The New York Times
• Preying on Children: The Emerging Psychology of Pedophiles – The New York Times
• On the Politics of Body Hair for Women of Colour
• The 1619 Project – The New York Times (Haven’t finished reading this yet.)

Books etc.

• The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot (reading this for school; very very very much enjoying it. a game of chess is my favorite part so far.)
• CR: On The Move, Oliver Sacks’ autobiography.
• Re-read Mountains Beyond Mountains. 
• Finished Waiting for Godot, found it brilliant. Here’s a great video about it.
• Somehow found and read 2 rom-coms with the backdrop of a US presidential election.

Youtube 

• ZeFrank
  • An Invocation for Beginnings – YouTube
  • Begendings – YouTube
  • Diaries – YouTube
• ItsRadishTime
  • other people’s to do lists – YouTube
  • how i manage depression – YouTube
  • are you too good a capitalist? – YouTube
• Vlogbrothers
  • Giving Away $6,500,000 – YouTube
  • Why Are Poor Countries Poor? – YouTube
  • Deserving – YouTube
• You’re Not Good Enough – YouTube
• Solving the Depression Epidemic in Africa | Sean Mayberry | TEDxCulverCity – YouTube
• Mental health for all, by all: Vikram Patel at TEDxGateway – YouTube
• Why don’t we care? | Vikram Patel | TEDxLSHTM – YouTube

• Inside an Indie Bookstore | Documentary – YouTube
• OursPoetica
  • Jacqueline Woodson reads “Tobacco” – YouTube
  • Tiana Clark reads BBHMM – YouTube
  • Hrishikesh Hirway reads “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop – YouTube
• Opulence | ContraPoints – YouTube
• Crash Course Sociology
• A truly horrific amount of college vlogs

Entertainment?

• Anne with An E, season 3
• Before Sunrise
• sierra burgess is the villain – YouTube

 

 

July – September 2019

articles

• Letting Go, by Atul Gawande
• Why Women Still Can’t Have It All – The Atlantic
• The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan | WIRED
• On Praiseworthiness | Thing of Things
• Gallery: 9 nurses who bring care and compassion to US healthcare |
• India is building mass detention camps in Assam. Muslims are in danger. – Vox
• The First Surviving Photograph of the Moon: John Adams Whipple and How the Birth of Astrophotography Married Immortality and Impermanence | Brain Pickings
• Scientists Discover New Cure for the Deadliest Strain of Tuberculosis – The New York Times
• Jonathan Van Ness of ‘Queer Eye’ Comes Out – The New York Times (h/t tejas)
  

videos

• Uncertain and Afraid – vlogbrothers
• SYSTEMS!!!! – vlogbrothers
• I, Too, Dislike It – vlogbrothers (oh man. i hope they keep making more and more channels. i love them.)
• The Emergencies We’re Ignoring – my TEDx talk
• zefrank1 videos
  • On Mattering :: Friend Hank Green
  • Be Yourself
• Contrapoints – Men, Beauty
• Essays about Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird and 500 Days of Summer
• the ugly truth about beauty standards + my insecurities
• America’s Deadliest Drug: Fentanyl | Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj | Netflix

podcasts

• The Ezra Klein Show – Contrapoints on taking the trolls seriously
• The Weeds – Trump’s war on Medicaid
• Radiolab – Unfit

entertainment

• Queer Eye (is surprisingly wholesome)
• Carol
• Grateful Talking Squirrel
• what bookstores in nyc are like
• Tom Rosenthal – Love Loosens Limbs (Official Video)

misc

• loads of reading on contact theory
• some reading on educational interventions at a primary school level
• Sarah Pinto’s The Draupadi Strategy: Crafting Autonomy Between Marriage and Sex-work
• reading Waiting for Godot in school, I am really really enjoying it

as if I’m on the moon listening to the air hiss
out of my spacesuit, and I can’t find the rip. I’m
the vice president of panic and the president is
missing.

Paige Louis’ ON  THE  TRAIN,  A  MAN  SNATCHES  MY B OOK,  READS

June 2019

(Clearly, I’m still figuring out these categories.)

Talks and podcast episodes

• Malcolm Gladwell at Zeitgeist Americas 2013, on college choice
• David Miliband- The refugee crisis is a test of our character
• Bill Gates- Mosquitoes, malaria, and education
• Tim Urban- Inside the mind of an urban procrastinator
• Nadine Burke Harris- How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime
• The Ezra Klein Show with Bill Gates
• The Ezra Klein Show with Cal Newport
• Hans and Ola Rosling – How not to be ignorant about the world
• Ethan Linderberger – Why we need to fight misinformation about vaccines (I like that it questioned my tendency to vilify anti vaxxers.)
• Shalini Unnikrishnan – We need to turn our response to crisis inside out

Books

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Educated by Tara Westover
• To Repair the World , a collection of Paul Farmer’s speeches
• CR: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and Reimagining Global Health

Articles and blog posts

• SSC
  • Epistemic learned helplessness
  • Buspirone shortage and drug delivery
  • Asymmetric weapons gone bad
• NYT on J Marion Simms
• The New Yorker profile for Esther Duflo
• Another (!) history of Partners in Health on Medium
• The New Yorker profile for Ophelia Dahl
• Brainpickings
  • Seneca on the shortness of life and the art of living wide rather than long
  • The Lost Words: An Illustrated Dictionary of Poetic Spells Reclaiming the Language of Nature

Miscellaneous

• Gapminder Offline
• Dollar Street
• Mr. Iglesius on Netflix
• Aeon’s short film – Time dilates and people flow in and out of each other in a hallucinatory urban commute
• r/wholesomememes
• Global Health Case Studies from a Biosocial Perspective on edX

May 2019

Health and development

• Social Experiments to Fight Poverty, Esther Duflo
• However Long the Night, by Amy Molloy
  • Lessons
• Depression in developing countries
• A lecture by Jim Yong Kim on global health
• Dartmouth First Year Lecture: Mountains Beyond Mountains
• Paul Farmer: Bending the Arc Towards Global Health Equity
• Building the Global Movement for Universal Health Care – Dr. Joia Mukherjee

Articles I liked

• Procrastination and uncertainty
• Why we need a new word for lazy
• The paradox of choice and online shopping
• Counterprotests against anti-abortion activists
• Experts and predicting the future
• Antivaxxers and 23AndMe
• Gender and Harvard’s Math Department

Fun things

• Crash Course Anatomy and Physiology (incredible animations!)
• Ze Frank’s True Facts series on YouTube
• My Year of Saying Yes to Everything, Shonda Rhimes
• Nathan Pyle’s comics
• The Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast by John Green
• The 2015 film The Little Prince
  

April 2019

Content that I valued this month.

Books 

• This is Going to Hurt, by Adam Kay
• Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

Articles

• Finally read Bill and Melinda Gates’ Annual Letter
  • Surprise #4
• Increasingly Competitive College Admissions: Much More Than You Wanted to Know, on Slate Star Codex 
  • More

News stories

• They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals  (2016)
• A  new malaria vaccine (still confused if I think it’s a better idea than trying to increase funding for pre-existing solutions, but it’s possible that there’s no direct opportunity cost since new vaccines are more exciting and may have gotten new donors.)
• Extinction Rebellion

Misc 

• A TED talk on how doctors can help low income patients (tl;dr providing services to those on Medicaid, providing walk in services rather than having appointments, reinvesting a certain amount of profits into the community) while making a profit.
• Looking upstream in healthcare
• Revisited an old favourite by Alain de Botton on success
• Heard a few episodes of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text after a long, long time (it makes me feel so warm and happy!)