Things I Saw This Week - Friday, December 3
TISTW is a collection of reads, visuals, and music, curated by Elle Perry, a Memphis-based journalist, featuring art and culture, food, cities, and more. (Issue No. 129)
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Animals
Behold: bird rankings.
Art
Have you noticed hard-to-hear dialogue in movies? You’re not alone.
On a semi-related note, from Vulture: The Browser Apps That Teach You Languages While You Watch TV.
In the dance world, the famed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has been virtual since March 2020. Now, two dances the company created for streaming will be performed before live audiences for the first time.
Two stories of note from the visual art world:
Harper’s Bazaar: A New Vanguard Is Reshaping the Art World
The New York Times: With Armory Show, the World Is Catching Up to Carrie Mae Weems
And, finally, KQED has the story of Mystic, a Digital Underground member with a single produced by Kanye West and featuring Donell Jones, who walked away from a record deal, instead opting to go to UC Berkeley and earning a master’s degree from the University of Oxford.
Food
Variety details how those fast food and music collaborations happen. (I still have yet to go to Popeyes for the Hottie Sauce, but I will be resolving this ASAPtually.)
Another case where my summing up the story can’t beat the headline, so here goes.
Cities
Is (Northwest) Arkansas the new Austin?
The metro area, anchored by the state’s flagship public university and the largest corporation in the U.S. by revenues, is growing as fast as recent urban juggernauts such as Boise, Idaho, Raleigh, North Carolina and Orlando, Florida.
Northwestern Arkansas also benefits from the continued growth of Texas in the same way that Austin benefited from the growth of the economy in California. There's intense competition from universities in neighboring states to raise their profile and fill seats by recruiting students from Texas, and more than 25% of the student body of the University of Arkansas hails from Texas. Fayetteville is an 8-hour drive from Austin and a 5.5-hour drive from Dallas, so to the extent the Texas metros get too crowded or expensive for locals, northwest Arkansas already has a diaspora of Lone Star expats that should make it a sensible place to consider while remaining less than a day's drive away from "home."
Work
After a viral social media post made by a mother about her postpartum night doula, Julia Craven talked to a postpartum doula about what the job is like, parenting expectations, and more.
Sometimes I hear from postpartum, overnight clients that they’ve gotten feedback from people saying, “If you have a baby, why didn’t you want to take care of it?” And the underlying assumption is that if you’re not up every two hours for the first several weeks, you’re not taking care of your baby, which is a completely unreasonable expectation. Everyone needs sleep, everyone needs rest—particularly breastfeeding parents.
Podcasts I Listened to This Week
The New Guard of the Food World | Food with Mark Bittman
Mark talks to new publisher and vegan extraordinaire Bryant Terry about the reinvention of food media, nurturing his daughter in the kitchen, and why he chose to include meat in his new book. Plus, a conversation with seventeen-year-old Rahanna Bisseret Martinez about the problems with food television, tweaking her family's recipes, and how to foster a love of cooking in young people.
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