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Sometimes, when the news feels overwhelming and everything seems awful, I find it helpful to do one small thing. I try to pick something small that I can accomplish in an hour or less and feel good about. This time, there was a broken glass jar in the middle of the street that needed cleaning up — mind you it would’ve been my car with a flat tire, if not. Once that was done, I kept going until I filled up a plastic bag. Three different neighbors shouted a thank you at me while I was picking up garbage on our street1. So that’s not nothing. Maybe there’s a ripple effect to be had. Or perhaps it simply makes them feel better that their sidewalks are clean for the day.
Either way, I’ll take it. I can’t control most things, but I can control this.
Here are 5 things I was looking at and loving this week:
Erin Sutherland is an official Senate photographer. She can’t post her own work (unless it has already been published online by a senator’s office or committee). So, she found a fun workaround to share some moments from 2025 with us.
How The New Yorker at 100 got to Netflix. If you like the mag, you’ll love the film.
Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut Had Something to Say. We Have It on Tape. The NYTimes is telling you that the 92nd Street Y just digitized its authors’ talks dating back to 1949. The website is overwhelming and a bit of a catchall, but I found the research portal to be useful for searching by keyword or author’s name.
I read this piece on How The Times Assessed That Photo From Trump of Maduro in Handcuffs. And was left scratching my head. My take is that they saw the photo in Trump’s tweet. Knowing full well he’s posted false statements and AI-generated images in the past. And “…even if we had no surefire way to confirm that the image was authentic,” they posted it in the context of Trump’s Truth Social post — because they deemed that context newsworthy enough.
And because a palette cleanser is often necessary, I give you this. Just trust me.
Lastly, here’s some shameless self-promotion by way of my other newsletter.
As soon as I had finished cleaning up, my wife sent me this City Cast Philly episode about Why Windy Recycling Days Are the Worst here. If your city has a City Cast podcast, I highly recommend listening to it for some terrific hyperlocal news.