Leaning into my own taste

The responsibility of a curator (and some of my favorite things recently)

I posted on TikTok earlier this week about this podcast episode from The Ezra Klein Show, How to Discover Your Taste, because it very much reminded me of what I do on TikTok (or try to do):

CURATE

And it inspired me to commit more fully to this. The guest, author Kyle Chayka, says a few things towards the end of the episode about being a curator that resonated a lot. Being a curator is a role that history (and religion) did not take lightly; it was a role with responsibility. It was, and should still be, a civic leader, who is entrusted to:

1. Develop a coherent body of objects

2. Make people understand things in a deeper, more complicated way

3. Do vast amounts of research

4. Provide insight and context into how things work

This lit something up in my brain. This is the satisfaction I get from posting things I learn on TikTok.

• From collecting articles from all different news sources.

• From starting open ended conversations with no answers.

• From soliciting dialogue and conversation in the comments sections.

• And why I get so riled up when people comment “it’s not that deep!” Because to me, IT IS ALWAYS THAT DEEP.

I am discovering through my posting online that I really enjoy this act of collecting, researching, contextualizing. I want to continue to work on it, and I want to use this Substack to keep experimenting with how to do that.

So here is my question to you: if you follow me here (and/or on TikTok) I assume you find some value in my curation. I would love to hear from you about what you’d like to see here on Substack. I have received quite a few comments recently, asking something along these lines:

Feels like a great way to get this Substack back in motion. SO— while I wait for further inspiration to hit (or to hear from you all), I want to share some of the things I’ve listened to or read recently that have stuck with me. This is me attempting to do my civic curation responsibility (mainly because it’s just fun for me, but now I have justification to call it a civic duty lol).

My recent curation (most of this I posted on TikTok, but still.. here it is all in one place):

I. The Year Culture Reached Peak Nostalgia (Dazed): I saw Mean Girls the Musical the Movie (lol) recently and left feeling..strange. Like who was this for? Did we need this? Was this because we wanted this, or is this Big Cinema telling us we want it? What happens if we enjoy the nostalgic things even as we know we are being manipulated? Is that..ok? A quote I really loved from the article:

At its root, nostalgia is the suffering felt when one desires to return to their place of origin or to a familiar moment of their life. It’s the pang in our chest when we watch an old movie or smell a scent that hasn’t been around us in years. It is also what’s been used to pacify and, in turn, monetise consumers’ genuine feelings of discomfort and anger at the state of the world. What does it mean to grow up in a world that has not only robbed you of stability but routinely uses media to stunt your transition from adolescence to adulthood and asks you to depoliticise yourself in order to engage with it? 

II. How Do We Discover New Things? (Edge, Ideo): This one was different than what I normally read. I’m not super into ghosts, visions, tarot etc. Not because I don’t believe in them necessarily, but because I am way too in my head to, well.. be in my body. This year, I am going to work on slowing down, being in silence, listening to and feeling what I feel. To seeing my gut and intuition as the clearest North Star, worthy of making decisions by and through. I found this article really inspiring for that reason: what can we create and discover if we try to stop micro-managing our own thoughts and just let them pour out of us?

III. The Subversive Act of Photographing Palestinian Life (NYTimes): How do we bear witness to genocide and disaster while also not shrinking Palestinians to ‘just a suffering people’? How can we also show Palestinian life, joy, minutiae, while also not downplaying the catastrophe at hand? It’s such a complex tension that I think is really well captured in this article. Also, the pictures are just so beautiful and quiet. When I posted about this article on TikTok someone commented this, which I’ve been thinking about for the last few hours

IV. Take Our Leave, Bobbie’s Parental Leave policy: I saw this on LinkedIn and was floored by how thorough and frankly, revolutionary this policy is. I hadn’t heard of Bobbie before; they’re a baby formula company with progressive and human-centered leadership (at least from the outside, it appears to be so). This parental leave policy, which they offer free to download for anyone who wants to read is really amazing. Here are some of my favorite parts

V. How to Spot a Trauma-Informed Workplace (Queer Sex Therapy IG): I have so.many.thoughts. Namely, that I have never worked at, or seen, a workplace that can do all (or even half) of these things. It gave me so much to think about. I ended up recording a TikTok about some of the interview questions you might ask to try to get a sense of whether a workplace meets (any of) these expectations. Now of course they can lie, but I think even just catching them off guard in an interview and watching them sputter out a lie is satisfying enough, right?

---

There are of course dozens more things I’ve read, listened to, and thought about recently but I wanted to start there to get the juices flowing (and also because this will probably look really long if you’re reading on mobile, so I should stop).

Like I said, I want to get back on here, and want to lean more into the role of responsible curator, researcher, connector of dots and ideas. Please reply back to this email or leave a comment if you have thoughts about what you’d like to see with this Substack and/or on my TikTok. Also- send this to a friend if any of these pieces of content are interesting to pass on!

Thanks so much!
Miriam