Strongly Connected is an occasional newsletter by Jen Lowe. Please forward and text to friends and screenshot and share with wild abandon. Thank you for reading.
Hello from the land of 7th birthday parties and unexpected midday champagne deliveries. (Turned out it was a gift from P’s work for a work anniversary; happy we weren’t accidentally stealing the champagne from a neighbor but also I need you to know: we would have.)
Season
The Pollening:
LINKS
A father and son team solved a geometry problem with infinite folds. A sweet and interesting story that made me want to try to love math again.
“They changed the criteria of what constitutes a solution in a very clever way.”
Emergence Magazine’s Saguaro, Free of the Earth podcast is a deep dive into the Tohono O’odham relationship with saguaros-as-people, along with the rights-of-nature movement and them absolute atrocity of building the border wall across O’odham land. Plus fun facts! Saguaros in Saguaro National Park are microchipped!! The scientific name of the saguaro, Carnegiea gigantea, was named for Andrew Carnegie to try to get his money and it worked! You can also read it as a photoessay. I don’t usually enjoy reading outsiders writing about the desert, but this is very, very good.
The Harsh Realm of Gentle Parenting. I have a LOT OF TAKES on gentle parenting and was happy to see this conversation started. (One of my takes is that gentle parenting’s language of “sensitive kids” and avoidance of discussing neurodiversity keeps kids and parents from asking for and getting the real material help that they need.)
The housework that Einzig says to put off is a synecdoche for everything that the gentle parent--and, perhaps, the gently parented child's invisible siblings--must push aside in order to complete a transformation into a self-renouncing, perpetually present humanoid who has nothing but time and who is programmed for nothing but calm.
WATCHING
Starstruck on HBO. The first season is a perfect little romcom nugget.
NEWS
Patricio González Vivo and I will be speaking together at Eyeo Festival, in June, and it’s hard to overstate how exciting this is. PLEASE COME JOIN US it will be so fun.
Until next time,
Jen
Email: jen@jenlowe.net or reply to this email
Thanks for subscribing to Strongly Connected, if you enjoyed this post, please share it: