Links o' the Week, #23
Efficiency, hospitals, jam, a new print quarterly, and more!
Hi everyone!
Just for fun, I thought I’d share a links post this week. If you’re a longtime reader of the Hollow, you’ll remember that I used to do this regularly quite a while back — looks like I did it, uh, 22 times, in fact.
I always enjoy curated lists of links — shoutout to my favorite link list gurus,
& (who is on sabbatical and whom I MISS) — so here are 5 things that have recently struck my fancy and that you might enjoy seeing, too.First, my friend has a great essay on efficiency and its downsides at Public Discourse today.
Ivana comes at the topic from a number of different angles, having lived a life of effective professional efficiency as well as one of fruitful inefficiency at home in recent years. Ivana has a way of making strong arguments without sacrificing nuance — read it here:
“When We Outsource Every Hard Thing, What Do We Lose?
My hilarious friend made me laugh my head off with her recent piece about children and tape.
Talk about inefficiency…but worthwhile inefficiency. As usual, Nadya takes something small, even quotidian and connects it to a deeper truth. These little things — they are the stuff of the good life. (And for the record, I buy tape 6 packs at a time!) Read it here:
“It Takes a Lot of Tape to Raise Kids”
I curled up into myself when I read this striking piece by this week on humanizing hospital birth.
Like Serena, I have had experiences in which I have had a successful hospital birth, retaining my agency, but still suffered considerably along the way at the hands of incompetent or dismissive medical staff. (I’ve also been greatly helped in hospital births by highly competent, compassionate medical staff.) Serena’s essay has echoed in my head for days, as I wonder to myself, What could be done differently so that we could have better hospital births? Read it here:
“A Hospital Birth Doesn’t Have to be Dehumanizing”
Do you like jam? What about making it?
CHILDREN! DO NOT TOUCH THE JAM WHILE IT RESTS AFTER CANNING! It’s hot, spluttery work, and fortunately, it’s not something we have to do these days. But it brings me delight to “put up” jams for my family and friends. A spoonful of wineberry or peach or apricot jam in the middle of winter is such a burst of sunshine! (My favorite recipe is simple: 10-11 cups berries or stone fruit, 6 cups sugar, zest and juice of one lemon.)
So I really loved this post:
“Five Reasons to Love the Humble Jar of Jam”
Something big happened this month in my world: the release of the first print issue of Hearth & Field Quarterly!
I and the other editors are thrilled to share with you this human-paced, beautiful (color! 200 heavyweight pages!), thoughtful journal. I really think it’s something special and something you will treasure in your home over many years, if you take the plunge to try it out.
Don’t want to take my word for it? I understand. Go check out
‘s generous review of the Summer issue here, or see how people have been talking about it over on Twix (gosh, every time I say that, it makes me hungry) — for example, Well-Read Mom leader Carla Galdo, former Books & Culture editor John Wilson, and children’s literature specialist LuElla D’Amico.We have a stellar array of contributors in this issue, if I do say so myself — from Carla to Tsh to Leila to Ben Reinhard to Anthony Esolen to Kirk Wareham to reprints by Robert Frost, Willa Cather, and G.K. Chesterton, and still more! — and our pieces range from essays to tutorials, and from poetry to recipes.
Read about why you should subscribe and what you’ll get here!
That’s it for this week! I’ll be spending the weekend eating ice cream, going on dates with my younger two children, baking a cake for a very dear friend’s birthday (trying this recipe!), and doing some homeschooling planning. I have no idea how there will be time and energy for everything this coming academic year, no I do not, but I figure it will work out somehow. It always does.
What are your weekend plans? And what did you think of these links? Let us know in the comments!
Have a wonderful weekend,
I’ll be continuing my homeschool planning this weekend! I actually really enjoy the planning stage because everything on paper works out so well. Reality is much…messier 😂
I loved the print edition of Hearth & Field so much! It's been a treat having it on my bedside table to read before bed. I especially loved your article on Talking to Strangers. Thanks for all your hard work on it!