10 Things: Berries, Mangoes, Peanuts
Sophie's things to read, do, look at, explore, and further dive into this week. (They are mostly not food, actually.)
Welcome back to the weekly roundup of ten recommendations for your weekend and beyond. This post is for paid subscribers, so if you want the inside scoop on music, television, and non-recipes, please pay me $5 a month! If you’re already doing that: thank you. I love you. I appreciate you. You have great hair.
Enjoy this mid-summer joy-time!
1. New York Times: mango man and pygmy possums
There were two articles in the New York Times this week that made everything feel less like a heap of hot garbage. This one about a man in India who knows everything about mangoes and is in love with them and it is very wholesome and beautiful (and if you read it, you will learn about mangoes); and this one about a pygmy possum family (which, who even knew something so adorable existed?) cohabitating with a spiny-tailed gecko, and they like each other. “They were climbing all over each other and neither seemed to mind.”
2. service berries
This week, Luke and I made a (not really photographable) scrap tart with black raspberries and gooseberries from our neighbor’s yard, and service berries from all over the neighborhood.
I mentioned it in the “Invitation” email from this week, and reader Isabella asked one of my favorite questions for a person to ask, which is, what is a service berry? Alexis Nikole Nelson (Black Forager) explains this better than I can, so here’s that video:
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
We planted a service berry tree for T just before she was born, since they’re a native plant that birds love and are also jaw-droppingly delicious. If you live in planting zones 4 to 9, you can find a service berry tree TODAY! The season is short and sweet, so leave the house right now and have a service berry.
There have been quite a few rewatch podcasts that have come out over the past few years, but none have ever interested me — not even the “Gilmore Guys,” which I didn’t even really give a chance, since I don’t care about men who watch television. But this one is co-hosted by Danielle Fishel, Will Friedle, and (wait for it) RIDER STRONG. I binge-listened to the first three episodes, and felt incredibly settled by them; it’s a nice companion piece to “The Nineties: A Book,” which I just finished (9/10 recommend)1. The behind-the-scenes stuff is an interesting insight into how different Hollywood was in 1993.
Most importantly, though, this podcast has helped me move on from my lifelong obsession with Rider Strong (see book excerpt below). After listening to him talk for five hours, I’ve realized that, while eighth-grade me was in love with Rider Strong for excellent reasons, adult me has actually dated him like twelve times already, and does not need to date him again. This is a big relief, because he has always rudely spurned my advances. On the other hand, Will Friedle is much more charming than I imagined he would be, and I now realize that maybe I should be setting my sights on him instead.
4. Alexandra Petri In the Washington post
Humorist Alexandra Petri has been on maternity leave for four months, and she writes humorously about that in a column for the Washington Post. If you like tongue-in-cheek new parenting observations (a likelihood based on your reading of this newsletter), this article will be right up your alley.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to You Are Doing A Good Enough Job to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.