The New Morning Reads

The Newsletters of Note corner

I’ve been terribly remiss in not telling you about some pretty great reads I look forward to receiving each week. Although two of the recommendations below have large followings, the rest are new and deserve to be read far and wide. They represent a wide range of subjects and styles. A couple dissect and bring clarity to complex issues. The others are delicious and often funny—traits so needed these days!

Yay Babies! - Resilience and Adversity. Written by a cohort of advocates and academics who are working to eradicate the dire circumstances experienced by homeless children and families. Each issue highlights and wrangles with the various public policies that specifically impact them and the policies potential negative or positive impact they will have. Yay Babies! manages to make a dispiriting subject easy to understand and intriguing to read. (And yes, the head writer is my brother but we weren’t raised to promote nepotism—he really is an expert and well-regarded advocate.)

What They Did Instead is a beautiful work-in-progress novel by Stephaine Urdang. The novel is constructed as a series of stories exploring the lives of two daughters and their mother as they age. The women are, in turn, infuriating, loving, bitchy, unapologetic, brokenhearted, unafraid, vulnerable, and brave. Each week, Stephanie releases a paragraph from each story which, in its way is infuriating, loving, bitchy, unapologetic, brokenhearted, unafraid, and vulnerable because you always are left wanting for more. That’s how finely it is written!

Abortion Every Day. I say this all the time—I can’t begin to understand how Jessica Valenti has the fortitude to gather and report each day on all the horrors and confusion this most consequential issue engenders in our lives today. And she does it with her sanity and humor intact. She may be the reason why I tend to scream each morning, but she is also the reason that there is hope the good fight will be a successful fight if people like her can keep us all focused on the battle.

On the Kitchen Porch. The high standard for any food related publication is whether or not you would like to eat and/or cook with the writer. I would give my best cutlery and apron to do both with Nancy Harmon Jenkins. You’ll have to read her About to be bowled over by her expertise and just one issue of On the Kitchen Porch to feel the same way I do. Of generous heart and extensive curiosity, Nancy is always the first issue I open when she pops up in my email box. You’ll be happy to do that, too.

The Recovering Line Cook. Wil Reidie is what his newsletter’s title suggest, a former restaurant cook with the burns and addled brain to prove it. What I have learned from him: how to cook a steak; mushroom tarts; and black sesame ice cream that sounds horrible but rescued a searing summer day. Recovering is a relatively new publication so go over and make Wil’s day. You could be (a) not interested or b) done with the food world but his newsletter will transcend your reluctance to add one more food-based publication to your shelves. His pieces always revolve around life’s concerns and blessings that are steeped in a very good marinade of dead-pan humor that probably rescued him while he burned himself in some pretty great restaurants.