I enjoyed going through my Evernote, in which every link I save I associate with several tags, so that I can go back and find saved links on general concepts when they strike me. If you liked this sort of “links on a specific theme” thing, let me know and I can feature other themes in the future.
This post is excerpted from my near-weekly newsletter, the Hu’s Letter. You can subscribe if you’re into that sort of thing.
If you and I spend any one-on-one time together, we inevitably get around to some of my favorite topics — love, fidelity, identity and memory. I cover human connection (and how technology is changing it) as a beat, so over the past year I’ve been writing more on these themes, with posts questioning whether online dating is really helping us make better matches, etc.
I’ve also evangelized the best show on TV right now (since Mad Men isn’t back yet), The Americans on FX. It’s ostensibly a show about Russian spies living as sleeper agents in the U.S. But really it’s about love, fidelity and identity. And it stars one of my mad crushes, Matthew Rhys. (I love Matt’s! And Welshmen!)
Buried in that exposition was RECOMMENDATION #1: The Americans on FX. Watch it. Seriously. Season 3 debuts on Wednesday.
Okay, here are the rest of my recommendations on this theme:
#2 Why We Cheat (Slate Magazine)
The author of the book ‘Mating in Captivity’ sits down for a Q&A, in which she dispels some of our black-and-white thinking about stepping out on our partners. The nut graf: “Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.”
Showtime’s Golden Globe-winning (but not necessarily deserving) program, The Affair, explores the notion of perception and memory in our intimate relationships. It tells half its story from the man’s point of view, then flips midway through each episode to the woman’s perspective. Even though they remember the same sequence of events (for the most part), the tone and details are completely different. This NYT piece gets at “the canyon of ignorance that cuts across every human relationship” and got me thinking about how we can treat one other better by seeking to know our partners more.
An argument for the villages of yesteryear — extended families. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When a couple has an argument nowadays, they may think it’s about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!”
This piece made me want everyone to get laid more. As I mentioned in a previous post, an economist dives into the big data we have on sex-related searches, whether it’s penis size or the number of times “sexless marriage” is searched instead of “loveless marriage.” The results show Americans are have WAY TOO LITTLE SEX and that they’re really hung up about body insecurities.
This morning my new pal Om Malik tweeted out his list of what he’s reading, a list he’s been sharing for quite awhile. I find it really enjoyable, much like I love receiving friend Sean Bonner’s newsletter. The missives are basically his delightful stream-of-consciousness with reading that guides that consciousness. I used to do some link roundups on this here blog, but have largely abandoned it. I think I’ll try and start it up again. A few of the pieces I read today:
The team at my favorite magazine ever got the help of San Francisco Magazine writers to write a series of dispatches from SF, a city whose tech-boom-2.0-fueled identity crisis seems to foreshadow the kind of struggle America is about to have in a few years. I love the little vignette about ‘founder hounders’ — ladies who seek out tech company founders just before their company’s IPO. Absurd.
The Guardian’s Emily Bell calls out this era of white-men-led news startups, i.e. Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, Glen Greenwald. “The new micro-institutions of journalism already bear the hallmarks of the restrictive heritage they abandoned with such glee,” she writes. Nate Silver recently responded, admitting that 85 percent of his applicants are men and “that worries us.” He follows up by saying, “We’re hiring the best candidate for the position,” which worries me. Because “best” is subjective, and if you extend this defense too far, you could fall into believing a meritocracy myth that is so pervasive in the mega-gender-unbalanced world of tech. I’ve written about that before.
When a couple has an argument nowadays, they may think it’s about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!” A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It’s a terribly vulnerable survival unit.
This makes a tremendous amount of sense, especially in the face of studies recently that show our expectations of our spouses are higher than ever, which makes marital satisfaction lower. Conclusion: Our spouses can’t be — and shouldn’t be — our everything. I maintain that the key to success in my own marriage is the tremendous amount of freedom my introverted husband gives me to party hard with — and seek connection with — people-who-aren’t-him. h/t Sean Bonner
