Reading and Watching Lately

While on all those flights to and from Maui (with a quick layover in Dallas each way) for my recent vacation, I read several books in a row, all of which I greatly enjoyed. It had been a while since I had such an excellent success rate with picking things to read. Plus, in the weeks since my trip, my streak of good luck with book selection has continued, and I'm really quite pleased! I desperately hope that this trend continues, as it's a bit dispiriting when one ends up with several dud books in a row. Here are my favorites from my recent weeks of reading:

Please note that this post contains affiliate links that could result in a commission, typically a few cents, for me if you click. Thank you for your support!

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah: I'm super, super late to the party when it comes to this book, and, like everyone else, I thought it was wonderful. Every good thing you've heard about it is true, and though I don't think my description could do it justice, I'll try to describe it anyway. Trevor Noah has an incredible way of describing moments of both terrible near-tragedy and extraordinary hilarity (he'd be the first to say that he was a very naughty child, and also a rather cheeky young adult). He also approaches some extremely heavy subject  matter (including apartheid, poverty, racism, and domestic violence) with a remarkably sage perspective. Whether or not you enjoy Trevor Noah's comedy, or his work on The Daily Show, his is an extraordinary story and perspective, and one that's worthy of all the acclaim this book has received. If the book had been double, or triple the length it is, or even longer, I'd have been thrilled to continue reading. 

The Unwinding of the Miracle by Julie Yip-Williams: I first learned about this book, and about the author's blog, which the book was partially adapted from, from Kathy. It is really good, really powerful and sad, Julie Yip-Williams writes with such unflinching honesty. I cried when I got to her letter to her young daughters towards the end of the book. She has an incredible life story, one that was cut off much too soon.

The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon: This is maybe the least universally loved of the books I picked up recently. There isn't much of a resolution to the story, and maybe not all that much of a plot either, and it may be written in a style that is frustratingly cryptic. But I found it beautifully written, and I enjoyed the experience of sinking into it and just letting the words wash over me. I'd describe R.O. Kwon's writing style as mysterious, surreal, and fragmented. It's rather obvious from the text that the narrators are highly unreliable, and certain important information is being withheld. I can see why a lot of readers find this book frustrating (and even with the generally positive critical reviews, I also find some of them mystifying, as they describe the book very differently from my perception of it as a reader). Kwon is an excellent writer, and I'm eager to see what she'll do next.

And now I'm working through and enjoying Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere (though I enjoy it a bit less than her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, as I find the characters in this one a lot more difficult to connect with) and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, both of which are quite good. I'm not sure what I'll move onto next after that, but I hope my good luck streak with picking books holds up!

Oh, and I also wanted to chatter briefly about TV shows. I've been watching the new What We Do in the Shadows on FX, and it's fabulous, definitely highly recommended for anyone who enjoyed the movie a few years back (which I also highly recommend). The deadpan sense of humor is really great, and I think they do a really fantastic job of ramping up the hilarious absurdity of the jokes as the season goes on. The show really hits its stride a few episodes in, after a somewhat slow start in the series premiere. Episode 7 is particularly good, and it picks up on some of the jokes made in the movie.

What books and shows have you been enjoying recently? There was, alas, also one recent TV series that I haven't been enjoying much, but oh well. I must say, though, Emilia Clarke was really wonderful this season, and from reading about the health challenges she was dealing with while filming much of the show and also seeing and reading some of her interviews to promote the most recent Game of Thrones season, I've really become a huge fan of her. (I really liked her in the Star Wars: Solo movie too, though sadly, it seems as if the studio may have decided not to continue with that series.) 

Highly Recommended: Educated by Tara Westover

Tara Westover's Educated (affiliate link) is an extraordinary book. Immediately upon finishing it late one night last week, I was absolutely desperate to talk about it and the larger conversation surrounding it, including certain public responses from some of her family members. I was determined to convince as many of my friends as possible to read it so that they could discuss and dissect it with me and share in the emotionally harrowing experience of reading it.

Looking at the timeline, Westover must have started writing shortly (certainly within a year or so at most) after the last of some difficult and traumatizing events, only the latest in a long string of highly dysfunctional things that happened in her family. She has a talent for vivid, visceral writing, taking us back to what she felt as a child and then a young adult who'd spent her entire life believing certain things, only to discover, much later on and through great effort, that many of them were not true. She witnesses so many dangerous situations and injuries, both her own and suffered by several people in her family. There were so many times when I was scared that someone was going to die because of her parents' negligence and recurring refusal to involve medical professionals, though that never turned out to be the case. Quite frankly, that may be a near miracle, as her father had a habit of encouraging his children to do construction work or operate heavy machinery without training or observing safety requirements.

In part because of how little time appears to have elapsed since many of the events in the book, Westover's story sometimes feels like one that is very much "still in progress", one in which many of the people involved (Westover herself included) may still be in the process of trying to understand and deal with things. (This long-form essay is a fairly good take on this issue, I thought.) Reading Educated was a frustrating experience sometimes, both Westover and certain people in her family make decisions that seem so likely to turn out badly.

It's the first time I've ever been so desperate to talk about a book right away. It's also the first time that, though the text itself was not too dense for me to read as an ebook, I still wanted to eventually buy a hard copy, so that I could go back to it and potentially get more out of it that way. 

To me, this book contains multitudes. On the one hand, it is what it first appears to be marketed as, a story about growing up with a father who identified as a "Mormon survivalist". (Some skeptics on Goodreads and Amazon say, essentially, that her family wasn't fundamentalist Mormon enough or off-the-grid survivalist enough for them to believe her story, or to think it "special". I think that's generally a wrongheaded view.) Yet, as Tara herself takes pains to note, both in the book itself and in any interview where the topic comes up, any critiques in the book are not about the church. Neither the church, nor even her father's anti-government (she didn't have a birth certificate until she was nine), anti-medical establishment, and survivalist tendencies (and there was a lot of all of those things going on in ways that could and did cause harm to his children) fully account for all that happens. President Obama's brief but glowing recommendation of Educated captures something important and remarkable about all this, Westover writes with an almost impossible empathy and love for a complicated (to say the least) father and family, and their complicated world.

The primary theme, and how Westover characterizes the book in interviews, is that it is about how an education, broadly defined (and including aspects of an informal education that she credits her parents with), made her who she is and helped her ultimately break free of what was abusive and dysfunctional in her upbringing. It also allowed her to accomplish some truly extraordinary things: She had no formal schooling (nor any kind of regular homeschooling with any kind of  consistent schedule) until, at around age 17, she was able to score a 28 on the ACT and matriculate at Brigham Young University. (As she recalls, she initially didn't know how to go to school, what reading assignments in a syllabus meant, how to take exams, what the Holocaust was, and what the Civil Rights Movement was.) It was a long and hard-fought process, to eventually win a Gates Scholarship to Cambridge and earn a history PhD. 

Inevitably, Educated does, like any memoir about something both controversial and quite recent (and involving people who are very much alive, who use computers and the internet, and have their own fresh memories of the events depicted), implicate questions about memory and the sometimes different perceptions of past trauma by other people who were there to witness it, or who participated in it.* To that extent, I find it to be an extremely timely book.

Please follow the link below if you're interested in reading the rest of my many, many thoughts on this book.

Link List: Sweater Blazer Edition

via

I was quite excited to see photos of the Duchess of Sussex wearing a very familiar J.Crew collarless sweater blazer (affiliate link) recently. I'm not sure I attain quite the same level of lovely, effortless casual chic when I wear mine, but I can certainly vouch for how this sweater blazer makes a nice and versatile topper. The one downside to the item is that, given my terrible luck with wool-containing items from J.Crew in the past, I don't think I dare machine or hand-wash it, so I'm stuck with dry-cleaning when it eventually needs laundering someday.

Things at the office have continued to get more hectic. Not long ago, I had an emergency assignment to research the standard for mandamus, which, let me tell you, is a major sign something's gone terribly off the rails somewhere, and likely for reasons entirely beyond any one party's control. I do find these odd and urgent legal research questions sort of fun and exciting, though.

1. // I wanted to put in yet another recommendation for Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy (affiliate link), and also for True Justice, the recent HBO documentary about Stevenson's life and career thus far. I've written here to recommend his book quite a few times now, and I simply cannot understate how much I admire him and what he has accomplished, as well as the outlook and perspective he brings to questions of racial justice and criminal justice. Fun fact, though I probably overuse the term "extraordinary" in my writing, to describe various things, it seems clear that I use the term most often when I'm recommending Just Mercy and describing the person behind it.

The inspiration for recommending his book again was the recent release of the trailer for a movie adaptation, from which it looks like the film will be depicting the earliest part of Stevenson's career. I'm excited that there will be a movie. Just Mercy is such an important book, and any opportunity for it to be shared with more people is therefore a wonderful thing. But I may admire the real Bryan Stevenson so much that no movie could ever possibly be fully accurate in embodying everything I admire about him. 

2. // A while back, I wrote a little bit about the process for making a claim in the Equifax settlement, the result of a widespread data breach a while back. I was also pretty cagey about exactly what type of claim I intended to file, and about the other implications of various provisions in the court documents, because I didn't want to inadvertently sound like I was giving legal advice. (As always, nothing in this blog should be construed as legal advice. This post does not create an attorney-client relationship, etc. etc.) 

In any case, tons of news sources out there were not so shy about recommending a type of claim to make. Events played out from there, and the FTC soon needed to amend its information page to, essentially, explain that class action settlements are not as straightforward as the general public may have originally been led to believe. Based on my review of the court-approved documents pertaining to the settlement, I have not personally been surprised by any of these developments. 

People were not at all pleased, to say the least. Nor should they be, as class action settlements are rarely that satisfying for individual class members. (A cynical view of the class action device may be that settlements are generally still quite satisfying for plaintiffs' class counsel, regardless of how the actual class members feel.) Note, however, that it seems to me as if a lot of the angry reactions mischaracterize many key facts, particularly about who technically is to blame. Plaintiffs' counsel - the people who, in theory, represent all us affected class members - did need to consent to how the settlement was structured, or else there wouldn't have been a settlement at all.

3. // So, uh, nothing literally like anything in this viral story from The Cut has ever actually happened to me. But upon a quick look at the article to help me decide whether to save the link to read later (given my situation at the office, I don't really have time to fully read and digest long-form articles at the moment), I found myself relating... a lot, actually... to some of the themes and feelings described therein. And that's a strange feeling. Especially because a lot of public reactions are fairly dismissive of the story, and not really receptive to Natalie's perspective.

That's complicated for me because, even if my own experiences are ultimately very different, I too had a time in my late teens and early 20s when I just... made poor, sometimes inexplicable (to my adult perspective) decisions about friendships because I was terribly insecure and didn't know myself, or how to draw boundaries. And I don't think it's that rare to have had this experience. I take responsibility for having made those poor choices, and I don't expect anyone to feel sorry for me. (And I'm not accusing the people I felt overawed by of doing anything wrong either. We were all very young, and sometimes immature. Sometimes they were unkind, and sometimes so was I. But ultimately we mostly meant well, including to each other. All of us have grown up a lot since, we're all very different people now.) But I also think it's something that's worthy of empathy. A lot of people have a toxic-to-them friendship or romantic relationship at some point in their lives. Or at least I think so? 

Anyway, college and the year immediately after it was a highly strange time for me. I'm still fascinated by how strange and disorienting that period of my life felt, and I continue to be befuddled by how I thought about social situations back then, how I reacted, and how I handled things. 

4. // A few blog entries elsewhere that I've been enjoying: I'm still thinking through some of the ideas raised in Adina's recent entry about personal branding. I have different ideas about "personal branding" in my profession on the one hand - the legal world is extremely small and one's reputation will precede you* - and for social media purposes on the other hand. Decluttering is clearly one of my favorite things to think about, and Luxe's post about the topic was a great read. It's always interesting to hear about different people's perspectives on the process and what it means to them. JENKR recently discussed a topic that's always near and dear to my heart, about how one's wardrobe might be different, if one's profession were different. 

Did you end up making a claim in the Equifax class action settlement? Have all the news stories about it also been giving you whiplash? I'm not necessarily shocked by the contents of any of the news coverage about the settlement, but I had thought it would take a lot longer for these problems to become fully apparent. Is anyone else following that story from The Cut, and the public reactions to it?

*Seriously, it could take as little as one bad day or bad event to ensure that tons of industry people will be gossiping about you for years to come (albeit not constantly, just whenever your name comes up, but that includes things like when you're a candidate for a new job opportunity).

Friday Link List

via The Oatmeal

Pardon the slightly coarse language above, but in an unusual turn of events recently, I was given occasion to attempt to explain cryptocurrency and blockchain to someone quite senior to me. I can't say for sure that I was successful. This joke is very relevant to law in general, actually, because of the extraordinary number of open questions that remain in even well-developed areas of the law. 

1. // As it's been a while since I last recommended it, I wanted to sing the praises of The Fashion Law again. It's such a fabulous and prolific blog, with broad coverage of legal and business issues related to fashion. I gather from this recent interview with Julie Zerbo, the creator and primary author, that she runs a very small operation, in which case, wow, the level of dedication and hard work that she's devoting to it, possibly entirely by herself on the writing front, is amazing. I particularly enjoy Zerbo's coverage of FTC guidelines and truth in advertising issues, i.e. here. 

2. // One reason I'm so protective of my anonymity (when I first started this blog, I didn't even disclose the type of graduate school I attended) is that a part of me worries whether my blogging could ever become a professional obstacle. I've seen someone lose a clerkship interview over their conspicuous and weakly written online article that popped up in their first page of google results. There manages, in a fit of strange coincidence, to be more than one current biglaw lawyer by day, former fashion blogger by night, that I don't think I can ever view positively, in the highly unlikely circumstance that our professional paths ever cross, specifically because of poorly written entries or other serious markers of poor judgment (think cyberbullying a vulnerable person) apparent from their blogs. In all instances, the offending content has long since been scrubbed from the web, but my memory is forever.

Alas, under our current administration, significantly worse blogging activity and other internet-based indiscretions are no longer sufficient to disqualify a person from becoming a judicial nominee. There are no less than three separate examples. Thankfully, the one who both failed to disclose a conspicuous potential conflict of interest and who simultaneously managed to be a ghost hunter, a horror novelist, and a KKK-defender has been withdrawn.

3. // Here are a few memorable 2017 posts from the many cool people in my blogroll: Style DTour's beautiful wedding dress; Jane's post about being done, for now, with online dating (in my usual way, I left a rambly comment); Cassie's year-end recap, including of her moves towards zero waste; Ariana's post about why she first went zero waste, and by the way, her writing this year has been incredible and harrowing, and is all highly recommended; and LL's thoughtful post about the Woman's March in Boston, which is particularly interesting to read now, as so incredibly much has happened since, both arguable victories and setbacks alike. I could never successfully compile a comprehensive list of every post worth checking out from my blogroll, as the list would be miles long, but rest assured, you can't go wrong with clicking on any of those blogs!

4. // If you're based in the US and have Netflix, or otherwise have access to the show, I highly recommend Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the CW musical dramedy. I haven't had this much fun watching something in a long time. It isn't for everyone - it's very much about mental illness (and is a compassionate treatment of those issues) - among other fairly dark and serious things, and the opportunities for secondhand embarrassment from what's onscreen are about as extreme as I've ever seen, but it is so smartly written, and completely hilarious. I'm normally someone who'd be completely turned off of a show by the secondhand embarrassment effect, but it's so good that I powered through anyway.

Please note that this portion of the post contains affiliate links that could result in a commission, typically a few cents, for me if you click. Thank you for your support!

5. // As you may recall, I have a possibly questionable fondness for H&M Premium Quality cashmere, in part because their super-slouchy cashmere sweater (worn here), a birthday gift from a few years ago, is my favorite sweater. They've brought back their cashmere blanket scarf in more versatile colors than earlier this year, black, pale gray, and a somewhat toned-down bubblegum pink. The dimensions are a little smaller than the Grana one I bought, but it seems large enough to wear the same way, as both a slightly chunky scarf or a medium-sized shawl/wrap.

6. // I may put in an order for a pair of Sam Edelman Loraine loafers, as I've been in the market (I waited for months for the M. Gemi Felize to come back in solid-color leather, but they've only had it in suede), but might ultimately be put off because my size, 7.5, is no longer available anywhere in black leather. If I order, I'll be trying out the 8. The almost-identical Sam Edelman Lior loafers are available my size, but the horsebit hardware looks different. (And yes, I might be influenced by wanting something that looks like the Gucci loafers.)

How do you feel about Bitcoin? Have you ever seen Crazy Ex-Girlfriend? I wasn't able to get into it the first time I watched because the format takes some getting used to, but this time I got completely swept up. 

On Justice Ginsburg

A photograph of Justice Ginsburg with other members of the Harvard Law Review. She was the first female member of the Law Review, and one of only nine women in her Harvard Law School class of over 500 students (archive.is link, if needed). Due to family reasons, she ultimately moved to New York City and completed her 3L year as a graduate of Columbia Law School instead.

I was devastated to learn of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing last Friday. Justice Ginsburg was a trailblazer in the profession, entering it in a time when women were, by and large, unwelcome. 

Three years ago, in July 2017, I wrote a blog entry discussing some of Justice Ginsburg's personal writing, focusing mainly on her opinion piece about her "Advice for Living," which she wrote for the New York Times in October 2016 (archive.is link, if needed). In that entry, I made sure to emphasize just how extraordinary she was, just how extreme the obstacles were against her and against all women who sought to become attorneys in her day:

I had to search hard for a readily accessible online citation for how things were: "Upon graduation from Columbia Law School with top honors in 1959, [Justice Ginsburg] received no job offer from any law firm in New York City, presumably because white shoe law firms were aghast that a woman, a mother and a Jew would dare think she was qualified for the job." She has also written that, back then, law firms simply "would engage no women" as a matter of absolute policy. [See Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, The Changing Complexion of Harvard Law School, 27 Harv. Women's L.J. 303, 307 (2004).] 

So I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that all women attorneys practicing today - regardless of political views or preferred judicial philosophy - should reasonably consider Justice Ginsburg to be a role model, someone who helped make it possible for us to participate fully in the profession today.  We are all, in a way, part of her legacy to the profession. While the legal profession remains an extremely challenging one for women and minorities to navigate, it has come a very long way since the early days of Justice Ginsburg's career. 

By now, you've probably also seen that, long before she was appointed to the Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg was a brilliant attorney. In that time, she argued several key cases before the Supreme Court that developed our gender discrimination jurisprudence under the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution, practically from the ground up. 

One nuance that isn't always fully headlined in non-lawyer discussions about gender discrimination law is that - based on their facts - the landmark cases that Justice Ginsburg argued also made clear that women's rights are everybody's rights. Just as the law must not restrict the rights of women based on antiquated stereotypes about a woman's "proper" role in the home or in society, the law is also not to burden men based on those same stereotypes: husbands of those serving in the United States military should be entitled to the same dependent spouses' benefits as the wives of those in the military, Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677 (1973); widowers should be entitled to the same Social Security survivors' benefits as widows, Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U.S. 636 (1975); and boys should be entitled to purchase alcoholic "near-beer" beverages at the same age as girls, Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976).

After hearing about Justice Ginsburg's passing last Friday evening, I am currently staying off Twitter and limiting the time I spend on news sites in order to protect my mental health. Up until now, I've never before in my life felt the need to separate myself from social media or from the news like this, but last Friday pushed me over that edge. I simply cannot tolerate hearing about what the President or Mitch McConnell are saying right now, for at least a few more days. 

I have also made donations to the Biden/Harris campaign and to the "Get Mitch or Die Trying" fund. (Sadly, I understand that the polling data shows Amy McGrath probably has no real chance of unseating Mitch McConnell, so the latter fund donates to other Democratic senate campaigns that have a better chance.) With regards to the Supreme Court as an institution, and regardless of how Justice Ginsburg's seat is filled, I don't really see any way around needing some radical change to the structure of the Court, such as by court-packing. This was true even before last Friday, and it remains true now. 

(Very Belated) 2019 Year-End Shopping Reflections

Now here's a post that's a year overdue! I'll admit, it feels silly to look back now on lessons learned from 2019 - particularly about something as light as my wardrobe and shopping - when we know, in hindsight, that it's soon to be followed by the postscript of the dramatic changes wrought by 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But in the end, this type of shopping reflection is the original focus of my blog. Also, I really do think I came into my own in 2019 with regards to knowing and understanding my fashion tastes and preferences. Even if, starting in March 2020, I then had to learn yet another set of tastes and preferences to accommodate my new - even if temporary - work-from-home lifestyle.

Before getting into the shopping-focused analysis, some words about the larger, mostly financial context: April 2019 was when I first hit "net worth zero" - my student loan balance was finally equal to my cash savings and investments - nearly four years after graduating law school. (If I hadn't delayed my repayment progress by nearly two years due to the pay cut I took while clerking, I would probably have finished paying off my loans by April 2019. But that's not the career path I've chosen.) Then, in late December 2019, my student loan balance dropped below six figures for the first time, which really made it feel like the end was in sight. Since then, I've continued to ratchet up my monthly student loan payments, I now pay $5,100/month. Assuming no significant disruptions to my income, I'm now on track to finish paying off my loans in August 2021.

My total spending on my closet in 2019 - as documented monthly here - was $4,409.33, a personal all-time high. Totals for previous years were $2,729 (2015), $1,945.99 (2016), $2,883.13 (2017), and $4,016.51 (2018), as listed in my 2018 year-end shopping reflections post. I could even argue that most of my rather jaw-dropping January 2020 shopping should more properly be attributed to December 2019, as these were almost all post-Christmas sale purchases I ordered before the end of the year, though they arrived after. This would drive my 2019 total up even further. 

For all that I've been facing the prospect of, and then slowly chipping away at, a massive - initially over $190,000 total - student loan balance the entire time I've kept this blog, I've never been too worried about how much I spend on my wardrobe. Sure, the year-end totals look - and, in fact, often are - extravagant, given that my net worth was negative until April 2019. But whenever I've had a private-sector income - for four years out of the past five - I've always devoted well over half my take-home pay to "net worth positive" activities, a.k.a. loan repayment or savings and investments. Furthermore, with the exception of 2015, each year's total spend on clothes, shoes, and accessories is generally less than just a single a month's worth of student loan payments I'm making at the time, or would soon be making. 

And, as you'll see once I get into the nitty-gritty analysis of my 2019 purchases, I knew my fashion tastes and preferences well. There were no significant mistake purchases or shopping regrets that, in hindsight, I should have seen coming. 

Life Lately

I passed by Anthony Bourdain's old restaurant in the week after he passed, and it was amazing to see how much of an impact he left on so many people. He was just such an extraordinary, wonderful person.

For US-based readers, I hope that you'll be able to have a relaxing Fourth of July holiday! I'm extending mine into a very long weekend to hang out with my sister, W (and her dog), in the Washington D.C. area, which should be lovely. 

Please note that this post contains affiliate links that could result in a commission, typically a few cents, for me if you click. Thank you for your support!

Book Chatter

I've been trying to read a bit more after having not read much for fun in quite a few months, and have mostly been sticking to Karin Slaughter crime thrillers after finishing the latest Tess Gerritsen. I also read Roxane Gay's Hunger, which was powerfully written.

I'm eagerly waiting for a few books that I have on hold from the library, in particular John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, about the wild and wacky Theranos story. I'm still completely floored by it, I still remember back when Elizabeth Holmes was on the cover of all kinds of magazines and being widely touted as the richest self-made woman in the US. Now that the story's come out, I often hear that tons of people realized that Holmes's and Theranos's claims couldn't possibly be anything more than highly exaggerated puffery, at best, but wow, that house of cards didn't all come crashing down for a very long time. 

Bad Hair Day: The Update 

It's been around eight months now since I got a Japanese straight perm that totally fried my hair. It's been behaving strangely ever since. Around January a single, particularly damaged patch near the roots was frizzing up like dried straw or steel wool most days, and only the really pricey and kind of odd-smelling Alterna Replenishing Moisture shampoo and conditioner was able to smooth away the frizz for a day or two after washing, and results were extremely inconsistent. 

Then the frizz died down, and was replaced by an even bigger patch of my hair regularly getting these really gnarled, intractable small knots, to the point where there seemed to be no other solution except for dragging a comb through, even if my hair would break off at the knot, and I'd shed what felt like an oddly large amount of hair every day. The Alterna shampoo and conditioner didn't help as much with that phase, which is probably for the best, as it's so expensive and the bottles are poorly designed and don't dispense product well. 

Both the frizzy phase and the intractable tangle phase are over now, and I think I've realized that my hair was changing texture and behavior because so much of it was getting broken and shed right around the point where the permed hair starts, what was at the roots when I got the perm. By now, enough of the hair has broken off that there doesn't seem to be enough of the most damaged hair left to frizz up or get tangled, which is good, I guess.

The bad news is that the shape of my hair generally doesn't look right because it's gotten dramatically thinned out in that one particular section, starting about four or five inches of new growth down. Typically, the hair that grows in for months and months after a straight perm stays quite straight on its own, because its weighed down by permed hair, but because a good amount of it was getting broken off around where the perm starts, a lot of it is showing my natural waves and curl in odd ways. Plus, because my hair is still generally dry and damaged, it all looks quite limp and sad. There's probably going to be quite a few months where it looks a bit awkward while all this grows out. Because I don't feel like putting any energy or effort into styling my hair, there's not much to be done except get regular haircuts (once every three months now instead of my usual six) to cut off damaged ends and have a professional try to tidy the shape up a bit. I've put in an order for at-home Olaplex treatment, which is supposed to repair damaged hair, and the salon version of which was recommended by my stylist. We'll see if it seems to do anything!

Reading Life Lately

I've had a touch of writer's block lately when it comes to my ideas for more serious posts. Things may also slow down more here in the coming weeks because soon, for the first time since spring 2016, K and I will be taking off for a long vacation! In large part because of the scheduling needs and pay cut associated with the clerkship, I've only taken shorter, smaller trips for fun in the last two years. We'll be traveling to Japan, and we've basically done zero planning up to now because it took so long for us to confirm dates that we'd both be able to take off from work. We're looking forward to getting our travel plans in order in the next few weeks! 

Today's post is about a few books I recommend. Lately, I've been trying to read more for fun, something I go through on-again, off-again phases with. My taste in books can be oddly fickle, so there are times when I pick too many dud books in a row, and then I lose momentum and fall out of the habit for a while.

Please note that this post contains affiliate links that could result in a commission, typically a few cents, for me if you click. Thank you for your support!

Bad Blood, John Carreyrou's book about the rise and fall of Theranos, is excellent. It had been years since I read a popular nonfiction book I enjoyed quite so much. (I've stalled on and dropped quite a few other bestselling ones in the meantime.) I found this to be a quick read because Carreyrou is such an good storyteller, and the facts themselves are just so wild. David Boies, super-prominent litigator and a big player in Ronan Farrow's account of Harvey Weinstein's Army of Spies, is also a part of the Theranos story, in another arguable example of what may be questionable judgment when it comes to trying to get people to keep quiet about one of his clients. 

I'm also enjoying Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger. It's rather slow-moving, but her writing style is engaging and immersive. One unfortunate thing that keeps me from enjoying this book as much as I think I otherwise would is that I was only inspired to pick it up after seeing the trailer for the upcoming movie adaptation starring Domhnall Gleeson and Ruth Wilson, and it turns out that the trailer gave away the entire plot (which is fairly simple, admittedly). Although I'm still enjoying the experience of reading this, it's a fairly long book and a very slow burn. Part of my brain is definitely wondering if it's still worth keeping at it if I already know exactly where it's going. So be forewarned, avoid the movie trailer if one has any interest in the book. 

This is a book I read years ago that I don't think I've ever mentioned here, but Andrew Solomon's wonderful Far From the Tree has been made into a documentary, which I hope to see at some point. It's a difficult book to describe, with sometimes heavy subject matter and it takes some work to fully get into (it's a giant volume), but it's well worth it. To try and put it simply, the book is about how parents grapple with having children who are different from themselves, but it's really about much more than that. It touches on themes of love, identity, and the incredible resilience of the human spirit, among many other things. Andrew Solomon writes with such extraordinary empathy and compassion. I can't recommend Far From the Tree enough. 

Have you read any of these books? If so, what did you think? Have you read anything else that was particularly excellent recently? I've also tried and failed to get into some other popular books in recent memory. Particularly disappointing were Ruth Ware's The Woman in Cabin 10 and Shari Lapena's The Couple Next Door, both of which I thought were boring, tedious, and had annoying, poorly-drawn lead characters. I keep trying to recapture the magic of reading Gillian Flynn's novels, all of which I loved and devoured in about a day and a half total, one right after the other, but I've never found any other bestselling thrillers quite like those. Oh, and if anyone has any must-see, must-do, or must-eat travel recommendations for Japan, particularly Tokyo and Kyoto (we're maybe thinking about a third location, but I really haven't done my research yet), those would also be much appreciated! 

Additional Actions

Art by Monyee Chau @monyeeart on Twitter (also on Instagram)

ETA 6/5/2020: The original version of this art I posted had, as the primary text, "Yellow Peril Supports Black Power," which comes originally from a photograph dated 1969. The artist has since revised the artwork to the version you see above. She, and others she's spoken to, are of the view that the original phrasing improperly centers certain Asian-American perspectives over the Black voices and perspectives that should be amplified at this time. Out of respect to the artist, I have therefore swapped in the revised version of the art. Please see the artist's explanation here.

At this time, mine is not one of the voices that needs to be amplified or heard. Instead, the best thing I can do is to take action as an ally who stands against anti-Black racism and against police violence. Black lives matter. 

As someone with considerable financial privilege, one of the best ways I can take concrete action now is through monetary donations: In addition to donating to the Minnesota Freedom Fund last Friday (they raised $20 million over the weekend, which is extraordinary!), I have also donated to a NYC-based bail fund, via @FreeThemAll2020 on Twitter. I understand both bail funds have expressed that they currently have enough resources because of all the generous support they've recently received. Both groups now encourage donors to donate elsewhere. (There are other general NYC-based bail funds that are still seeking donations, though they are not focused specifically on the recent protests.) I have also donated to Black Visions Collective in Minnesota and to the Lake Street Council in Minneapolis. My donations to these groups currently total $154.30, and I commit to donating at least another $200 this month to related causes. 

Book and Podcast Life Lately

After taking a bit of a break from reading for fun for a few months (I read a few books that were emotionally intense, in a really good way, but I needed some time and space afterwards to reflect on them), I'm easing back into the habit. I've read a few things recently that I greatly enjoyed, and that I wanted to share. First up is Nicole Chung's All You Can Ever Know, a memoir about the author's childhood as a transracial adoptee and the process of reconnecting with her birth family once she was an adult. It's a really wonderful book, she writes with a remarkable sensitivity, and she has a deft and clear-eyed way of describing the highly emotionally complex things she has experienced. She has a somewhat restrained and understated writing style that nonetheless packs a huge emotional punch. It's a very powerful book, and I think you'll be swept away into her story. 

Please note that this post contains affiliate links that could result in a commission, typically a few cents, for me if you click. Thank you for your support!

While the focus is largely on the emotional and other implications of adoption and transracial adoption, and on her family, All You Can Ever Know also has some very sharp, very real things to say about race in America in general, and the experience of living in this country as a person of color. I can't recommend this book enough. 

I've also been reading a lot of much lighter fare. In particular, I recently rediscovered the work of Mira Grant, whose Newsflesh series I read years ago and found quite clever and fun. (Mira Grant is a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, but I've only personally read her work as Mira Grant.) I found her Parasitology series a bit of a dud, unfortunately. It was a cool premise, but the pacing was really off and it would have been much better off as two books instead of three. The first volume of her new series, Into the Drowning Deep, is fantastic however, a fast-paced adventure with a great sense of humor (and a fair bit of horror movie-type violence and gore, I should warn, in case you're sensitive to that). It's so much fun to read and quite original. 

As to podcasts, thank you again to everyone who recommended some in January! It'll take me a long time to get to all of them, but I've already started listening to some, and they're pretty great. In particular, I wanted to second the recommendations for The Dream. It started off as a slow burn for me because I find some pyramid schemes or multi-level marketing schemes ("MLMs") more interesting to learn about than others, and a lot of the ones they mentioned at the start were ones I'd never heard of. But once I gave the series some time, it really grabbed me. They've done a lot of research, and they did a great job weaving together a lot of seemingly very different, fragmented stories that all fall under the same central theme of pyramid schemes and the way they sell that "dream". The episodes about the history of (ultimately mostly failed) attempts to regulate and take legal action against MLMs were particularly interesting to me. 

Another podcast I wanted to recommend, though this is just part of a single episode rather than a full series, is the second half of the February 28, 2019 episode of Stay Tuned with Preet*, which features an in-depth interview with Bryan Stephenson, the author of Just Mercy, one of those two books that had such an emotional impact on me late last year. Mr. Stephenson is extraordinary, and what he has accomplished through his work at the Equal Justice Initiative is so important, even though the nature of such work is that there is always, always more to be done. 

I can also recommend a few other somewhat new and recent podcasts, both in the "true crime" genre. First is The Dropout, which is about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. The podcast doesn't necessarily tread much new substantive ground that wasn't already covered in the excellent and incredibly comprehensive Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, one of my favorite books from last year, but it is interesting to hear the voices of the people in the story, including the whistleblowers and Ms. Holmes herself. Second is a less well-known story, Over My Dead Body, about a murder case in Florida that may be tried later this year. Attorneys or law students who frequently read Above the Law, our main online news source for law school and biglaw industry gossip, may already be familiar with the underlying events, as one of the writers feels a personal connection to the story (he's interviewed in the podcast as well).

Have you read any great books so far this year? Discovered any new podcasts? 

*The whole podcast is very high-quality, but it's just not quite my cup of tea. I spend so much time thinking about legal topics at work that I don't necessarily want to listen to a lengthy podcast episode about it every week!

Little Thoughts from Q4 2018

A few things from the past few months that are probably too small or fleeting to ever possibly warrant their own post, even as part of a "link list": 

1. // I've started playing Pokemon Go again, after taking a nearly two-year hiatus since last time. As you can see, my best Pokemon now are much more interesting than my best Pokemon back then. I've even - gasp! - spent ~$30 of real world, actual money to buy fake, digital money (Poke Coins) to buy fake, digital products in-game (mainly item bag and Pokemon box expansions). 'Twas my very first in-app purchase ever. I was about to make one in Candy Crush a few years ago to get past a level I was stuck on for weeks, but forgot my iTunes password and never got back to it (or the game in general). I don't plan on spending money on Pokemon Go often, definitely far, far less often than once a month, but it could happen again, heh. 

2. // With regards to the health insurance and contraception co-pay situation I was fussing about earlier this year, things have settled down to my being charged $35/month in copays for the brand name. That's a monthly expense level at which I just swallow the cost with a grumble, even though the whole thing makes me extraordinarily grouchy. The generic is not covered at all (judging by GoodRx, the cash price could also be expected to be approximately $35/month, in at least some instances). It really makes me miss how I used to be able to get this exact same pill for ~$15/month over the counter back when I lived in Hong Kong! 

3. // Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was an absolutely delightful movie, I highly recommend it!

4. // I've been taking a bit of a hiatus from reading for fun since I finished Kathy Wang's Family Trust (affiliate link), which I greatly enjoyed, but also needed some time to process. It's darkly humorous and entertaining, but because some underlying aspects of the story are so personal to me, and about things I view as ultimately somewhat tragic, it put me through an emotional wringer a lot more than it would most other readers. 

One thing about the general lack of diversity and representation in media and books is that it's so rare to see a story that's so truly about people like me (this may be the first time ever that I've ever seen such large parts of my lived experience so deeply embedded in any work of fiction) that, even had the book been a much more cheerful one, I might still have needed all this time to process the great shock of finally seeing people so much like myself depicted! I never thought it was possible, much like I didn't fully believe the Crazy Rich Asians movie could be such a box office success here in the US until it actually happened. Here's hoping that there will be more and more room for Asian-American representation in American media and books in the future. 

5. // Another book I read late this year that really put me through a different kind of emotional wringer was Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy (affiliate link). It's a memoir about Stevenson's work of building the Equal Justice Initiative, the profound level of racial injustice in our criminal justice system, and some of the unjust cruelty that results when children are tried as adults and sentenced to extremely long terms of incarceration, sometimes for life. To me, it really drives home the point that the work of building a better world, particularly as an attorney with an eye towards public service, is never-ending and infinite. Even a person as extraordinary and tireless as Mr. Stevenson often finds himself realizing the devastating truth that he can't do everything, and won't always succeed in what he is able to do, but that doesn't stop him in his work.  

6. // The "White Walker" Johnny Walker product tie-in I glimpsed at a shop in JFK airport while on my way home from California is probably one of the stranger product tie-ins I've ever seen. The writing on the Game of Thrones show often displeases me (among many other things, I detest how they manufacture scenarios to show additional instances of violence against women, particularly sexual violence, that weren't originally in the book), but I'll probably still be watching the new season when it comes out. I just can't quit!

I hope that everyone is having a good start to 2019 so far. What were your favorite books or television shows in 2018? Things will be very hectic at the office for the next two or three weeks so things might be quiet around here, though I'm hoping I'll still get a chance to post once or twice in that time.