Recommended Reading
Sunday, May 10, 2026
Note: today’s newsletter is free, so that all the world’s mothers can enjoy it. If you would like to purchase a gift subscription so that your mother gets reading recommendations all year, click below:
This Week’s Selections
All My Dad’s Sons (link)
Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching! (link)
Before Leviathan Wakes (link)
The Savanah Bananas Bring Back a Negro League Team (link)
The Lamps Are Going Out (link)
I Want to Live Like Costco People (link)
A Mother’s Day Extravaganza
Amy Tan: Mother Tongue (link)
Katie Roiphe: My newborn is like a narcotic (link)
Megan McArdle: Why I’ve spent the days after my mother’s death polishing copper pots (link)
Vanity Fair: Demi’s Big Moment (link)
Mary H.K. Choi: My Mom (link)
Cris Beam: Mother, Stranger (link)
Olga Khazan: Want to Change Your Personality? Have a Baby (link)
E.J. Levy: Mastering the Art of French Cooking (link)
Alice Walker: In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (link)
Cheryl Strayed: The Love of My Life (link)
Zadie Smith: Joy (link)
Matt Yglesias: This mother’s day, let moms have Waymo (link)
Mary Gordon: My Mother’s Body (link)
Miriam Wasser: Breastfeeding grief (link)
Caitlin Flanagan:
Ruyi Wen: A Parent’s Typical Day As Envisioned by My Child’s Preschool (link)
Poems about mothers from Carrie Fountain, Alice B. Fogel, Nikki Giovanni, and Kate Buckley
Bruce Springsteen’s song for his mother (link)
Other Items of Note
Yesteryear: A Chilling Satire of the Empty Self (link)
A cartoonist on cartooning (link)
The origins of Indians (link)
A 1,578-foot tsunami struck a popular Alaskan cruise destination. Now we know why. (link)
Bruce Bawer: Cult to cult to cult (link)
Ross Douthat: The Atheist and the Machine God (link)
Also Ross: Trump’s Ukraine Policy Is Succeeding As His Iran Policy Fails (link)
Toward a theory of post-partisan storytelling (link)
Hollis Robbins: Red, white and psychedelic (link)
The trouble with narrative history (link)
Andrew Sullivan: Why the New York Times is post-liberal (link)
Kevin Williamson: “Debt held by the public now exceeds 100 percent of GDP.” (link)
Christopher Coome: How occultists remade the world (link)
William Voegeli: The Democratic center cannot hold (link)
Articles that Works Progress would like to commission (link)
On the imperfection of elegies (link)
“Lavinia and Michelle are twins who grew together in the same womb, were born from the same mother, and delivered within minutes of each other – but have different fathers.” (link)
Mike Solana on assassination culture (link)
Meghan Daum: “Am I saying that the producer-crafted ‘villain’ from The Hills who later blew his fortune on Birkin bags and moldavite crystals is the best person to be the mayor of the second largest city in America? Uh, no. Am I saying that given the options currently before us, I believe Spencer Pratt is L.A.’s best hope for reversing course on a path towards a crisis that, in my view, grows more heartbreaking by the day? Yes, to my astonishment, I am saying this.” (link)
Adeline Dimond: The case for Spencer Pratt (link)
Is the California Coastal Commission Finally Losing Some of Its Regulatory Powers? (link)
Noah Millman: what is consciousness for? (link)
People gave Trump a lot of money without anticipating that he may spend it selfishly or ineffectively (link)