Dec Recs: the Nutcracker and fire fire fire
and my contributions to particle physics
Morning album: Aimee Mann’s very solid Christmas album, “One More Drifter in the Snow.”
The newsletters I left off my newsletter list. I knew I’d forget some. Letters of Note absolutely rocks—you know this one got forwarded. Looking at Picture Books and A Pilgrim’s Progress through Children’s Literature are both practically very useful to me and a delight to read. The thoughtful Ludditeism of Blood in the Machine (this post finally convinced me to leave Spotify)? The ambient music selections in Flow State? Everything Sam Kriss is doing? Incredible. Infinite Jaz for important reporting from Palestine; Catherine Shannon, whose New Year’s goal-setting process I’ve been following to the letter, albeit a week early. Not a Substack, but Hell Gate, of course.
Duke Ellington’s The Nutcracker Suite (Spotify link for ease—Qoboz link here). New to me this year, and as a ballet lover, it’s mindblowing—he makes Tchaikovsky’s music sound like it was always supposed to be a Gershwinesque jazz piece. Perfect Christmas afternoon music.
Stickers. Huge in our household right now. We used binder clips to put butcher paper over the coffee table so June can sticker and color it to her heart’s content. I’m also using butcher paper to wrap gifts and then decorating them with the John Derian Sticker Book, which feels very chic and sort of spooky.
Symbolically throwing something into a fire. Last night I went to a winter solstice party where we wrote down anything we wanted to leave in 2025 on a piece of paper and then threw them into a fire pit. I wrote “doing things to have done them rather than doing things for the intrinsic joy of it” and “self-consciousness (the bad kind).” Very satisfying. We also made s’mores.
Lighting a candle during breakfast. More fire! For a few months now, I’ve “lit” an electric candle while June and I eat our breakfast together—it helps distract her from how boring it is to sit down in the high chair for an extended period (also, it’s a vaguely Waldorf thing?). This month, I added a real candle, a bayberry candle—the plan is to finish its burn on New Year’s Eve, which tradition holds will give us good luck for the following year.
Zooniverse. You can assist with research projects and even natural disaster recovery through studying collections of images (such as old handwritten records or satellite photos) and helping to categorize them. You can volunteer to transcribe old medieval manuscripts, identify chimpanzees, digitize climate records, and look for new particles in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. If you have any downtime over the holidays, it’s a surprisingly fun way to pass the time.
Coquito. It’s often referred to as Puerto Rican eggnog, but man, it’s so much better than eggnog. Here’s a recipe.