Hi friends.
When I moved to Transylvania in the dead of winter, I braced myself for brutal cold. But I found blue skies and crisp air. In a season meant for dormancy, I felt alive. Then my most loathed Sunday of the year arrived: the clocks went forward. Time to pay back that hour we’d borrowed in autumn. For days after, I felt fuzzy-headed and depleted.
When I mentioned feeling out of sorts to a new friend over coffee, she had a diagnosis for me: "You have astenia de primăvară". The direct translation from Romanian is “spring asthenia”. Spring fatigue. A kind of reverse SAD. We laughed about how fittingly Eastern European it is to feel depressed during warmer months instead of winter.
This thing I was experiencing – a physical overreaction to spring – had a name that matched how dramatic it felt to me. And it was a Romanian term, taught to me by a new friend, from a homeland I was reconnecting with. This small moment felt like a milestone in our budding friendship. I felt the kind of click you only get when someone sees you in a way you didn’t know you needed to be seen.
You're reading Relevant to Your Interests: links, recs + minutiae that connect the dots for you, sent via email from your friend in Transylvania. The last time I sent one of these, I lost 700 subscribers. Then I posted a silly joke about it on Notes, which went viral. Make of that what you will.
Now for the links!
I was once paid six figures to write an article—now what? My friend texted me this piece about Vanity Fair's heyday with a warning: "It will make you gnash your teeth." She was right. Bryan Burrough was paid just shy of $500,000/year for what was “never even a full-time job. Vanity Fair stories took maybe six months of my year; the rest I spent on a book. I worked at home, rarely attending anything like a meeting." If I dared to utter that this is my literal fantasy work life, I’d be chatised for being an entitled, workshy millennial. (For clarity, I’m not mad at Burrough but rather the industry writ large; if anything, I deeply appreciate his pay transparency.)
Claude is a brown-noser. A spot-on cartoon from Emily Bernstein about AI assistants being yes-men, telling us everything we do is great. Behind the humour is a hard question: Do we really need another entity in our lives that only validates and never challenges?
'I just want to hang out with other nerds': how TV's water-cooler moments found a new home online. I can personally confirm the trend Amelia Tait writes about: Reddit has become the go-to online spot for talking about TV in depth. I love that there are people out there who think as deeply about shows as I do, where I can find answers to my random questions about plot holes or character motivations from series that aired years ago. There's something comforting about knowing my oddly specific TV thoughts aren't actually unique.
Former Substack creators say they're earning more on new platforms. I feel like I'm going crazy with the creator economy reporting. One moment, I’m reading about YouTubers leaving for Substack because they can make more money over there. Next, I read that the Substackers who left for other newsletter platforms are making more money there. With so few people being transparent about money in the creator economy and my inherent scepticism of these platforms, I don't even know what to do with this information anymore.
Women, work and why we're getting it all wrong. Isabel Berwick's piece in the FT tackles something that plagues me: how work has a complicated place in our lives that we struggle to articulate. Despite years of career advice telling women how to lean in and break ceilings, we've barely scratched the surface of work's actual meaning beyond paychecks. I've been writing about work for years, and I still don't feel like I can properly articulate either its meaning in our lives or capture how it truly makes us feel.
Choco Yogi Tea. Delighted to be living somewhere the Yogi tea brand is easy to find. The Choco blend is my current morning go-to because it’s caffeine-free but full-bodied enough to start the day right.
🎵 A playlist of music to work to. Don't let the "ADHD playlist" label deter you if you don't have ADHD (or take it as a diagnostic tool, up to you). Just instrumental tracks that create a meditative background hum.
 | ADHD Hyperfocus Stimulance By Robin van den Bosch Playlist |
My bi-annual reminder for writers to sign up for ALCS. I just got my March payout for secondary royalties from my book and articles. ALCS collects fees when your work is photocopied, used in schools, or accessed through libraries. Minimal effort to register = payments twice a year for work you've already done.
I truly can't believe I'd never heard of (let alone seen) the TV show Parenthood until now. As a die-hard Gilmore Girls fan, missing that Lauren Graham essentially plays Lorelai Gilmore again – just with a tearaway teen instead of an angel child – feels like a devasting oversight on my part.
Of course, r/parenthood had an explanation for this: Netflix only recently added Parenthood to their international roster, which in turn reinvigorated the subreddit. And that’s where I learned the show's creator, Jason Katims, was also behind Friday Night Lights … and other important bits of info.
After binging all six seasons, I've been doing what I always do with shows I love –searching for ways to stay in that world a little longer. If you've just finished it too, here are my post-Parenthood recs:
The soundtrack is exceptional: Joni Mitchell, Iron & Wine, Dire Straits, Angus & Julia Stone etc. The music becomes another character in the show, highlighting emotional moments without overplaying them.
One and a half New Yorker essays that capture what made the show special [spoilers!]:
“Parenthood" and TV's emotion revolution. “Parenthood, set in Berkeley, in a whiter, more affluent, more suburban world, looked more like dozens of other American TV shows. But both shows were groundbreaking in their emotional realism and power ... It was brave in its foregrounding of emotional honesty and its resistance of melodramatic story lines."
Warming trend. Emily Nussbaum on how the show balances family warmth with genuine emotional complexity.
Wash your dishes in the morning. I'm probably going to lose another 700 subscribers for admitting this, but I go to sleep with a sink full of dirty dishes. There's this almost puritanical movement trying to convince us all we must retire for the night with a spotless kitchen. I call bullshit.
Not only am I simply too tired to clear up in the evening, for me, washing dishes first thing gives what I can only describe as a pure sense of accomplishment. The effort in perfectly matches the effort out. Dishes are definitively clean or not – unlike my actual work, where I might spend hours writing with seemingly nothing to show for it. In a world where work's meaning remains elusive and the rules shift constantly, there's something grounding about a task with clear parameters and immediate results.
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