This past Monday, I had the honor of attending my sister’s Ph.D thesis defense. She’s been on this path since she was in college, but this hour-long talk was the culmination of six years of serious work. We’re talking late nights and weekends in the lab, lots of experimental failures, and plenty of going back to the drawing board. While I’ve followed her throughout this journey, most of our conversations centered around particular events during a given experiment. Monday was the first time that I heard the narrative behind her research and understood how it all fits together.

Image: LoveIs Wise

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.

Photo: Awol Erizku

Photograph by Talia Herman for The New Yorker

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.”

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!

I love reading about famous peoples’ processes. I look for meaning in their rituals and routines in hopes of finding wisdom that will make me more productive. Joyce Carol Oates an excellent productivity role model: she’s written over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction.

In 2016, 7% of the top 250 films of that year were made by women. If we learned anything from 2017, it’s that we can do better. Girls On Tops isn’t waiting for the world to realize the power of women in film; they’re celebrating right now. Their simple yet bold tees shout out prominent women in the industry who deserve more credit.