When things aren’t going your way, it helps to have a reminder of your strengths. Based on a book by Andy Selsberg, “You Are Good at Things” celebrates the tiny victories: knowing just how high to toss a baby before it gets dangerous, deciding which doughnut you want with briskness and confidence, or trying on cheap sunglasses like you’re in a movie montage. Dan Castro’s animations made me smile on this chilly morning.
Photograph by Talia Herman for The New Yorker
Illustration: Liz Climo
Image credit: Eleni Kalorkoti
I’ve kept a journal on and off since I was 14 years old. In addition to journaling, which documents my most personal thoughts, I also keep work notebooks. The structure of my notebooks is a little fuzzier: they serve as a catch-all for ideas, resources, people, and places. It’s amazing to revisit them to get a snapshot of where I was and what I was thinking about at that moment in time. And yet it’s not a particularly accessible or well-organized system. If I want to share these thoughts more widely, I’ll need to take a page from David Sedaris’s book and take his advice: “Jot things down during the day, then tomorrow morning you flesh them out.”
House finchnigel. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
As a runner in NYC, I’m spoiled: the community here is unique and beautiful. Not only do I have tremendous teammates on North Brooklyn Runners, but I’ve met fantastic people in other clubs around the city. Patricia Tirona is one such human. She’s run nine marathons, loves the Spurs and hot wings, and cheers her face off when she’s not actively racing.
One of my favorite books of all time is Love in the Time of Cholera. It was my uncle’s favorite, and my dad gave me an inscribed copy as a gift. Over the years, I’ve left a lot of books behind, and I rarely reread a book, but that novel is a rare gem. So happy to see UT archivists putting in the work to make his writing public. 27,000 pages is no joke!
