💜[11/08] the creativity for good...saturday six? 😅

1. Full Transcript of Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani’s Victory Speech (transcribed by Epicenter NYC)

Fun fact about me: In general, listening to politicians speak is one of my least favorite things on the planet. My go-to is to read transcripts, or, if I can’t, to just watch videos on mute — I can’t stand listening to people talk over one another (outside of friend and family gatherings, obviously, I’m still Jewish and that’s The Culture) and I find the smarminess that tends to come off politicians in visible waves to be deeply off-putting.

Y’all, I listened to this entire speech, and I genuinely almost cried.

Putting aside the delightfully passive aggressive quoting of Mario Cuomo (a genuinely hilarious fuck you if I’ve ever seen one), what stood out to me about this speech was that it was, at its core, about the we of political work. Yes, he talked about his campaign, yes, he talked about his own work. But the focus was on collaboration, on connection, on collective work to create a future built on unity over division. It made room for people who weren’t ready to see that future, without condescension or spite. It put solidarity front and center, naming the truth that so many of us know — that none of us will ever succeed in building a better future by sacrificing another group’s safety or liberation.

Whether we’re writing a novel or building a new era of political action, none of us create alone. We do this together. And that’s what makes it worth it.

2. Meet the High Schoolers Who Overturned a State Reading Bowl Book Ban (Kelly Jensen at Book Riot)

Some background here: The Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl is an annual reading event held in Georgia, with a focus on encouraging young people to read. Generally, the books on the reading list for the event are selected from the nominees for the Georgia Peach Book Award, which are selected by a committee of school and public librarians. Teens then read and rate the nominated books, with the books earning the highest numbers of readers and ratings ultimately selected as the Peach Book and Honor Books.

This year, shortly before the Reading Bowl was scheduled to begin, the steering committee removed eight of the 20 nominees from the high school reading list, due to “receiving numerous reconsideration requests about some of the books nominated for the 2025-2026 Georgia Peach Book Award for Teen Readers.”

Within hours of news of the reduced list going public, the steering committee reversed course, issuing an open letter and restoring the eight missing books to the high school list. It wasn’t because of a coordinated effort by adults or a pressure campaign by politicians — the change happened because a group of high school students said, absolutely the fuck not:

Jensen interviewed three of the teens behind the restoration for the article. While they came from different backgrounds and different experiences with the Reading Bowl up to this year, they all had one thing in common: The understanding that book bans aren’t just about availability or “parental concerns,” but rather an authoritarian tactic designed to restrict freedoms, increase censorship, and reduce the availability of the kinds of stories that foster empathy, connection, and understanding across lines of difference — all of which are fundamentally in opposition to the work of authoritarian regimes.

The kids, as they say, are alright. And goddamn, if you, a grown-up, are being out-actioned right now when it comes to local book bans? Find out what’s going on at your library, on your local school boards, at your town halls. Use your voice. It makes a difference.

3. Creating Without Inhibition: In Praise of Making Bad Art (Anna Hogeland for Literary Hub)

Many newsletters ago, I wrote about the idea that all art is worth making — that even when art is, quote unquote, “bad,” it still teaches us something in the process.

I think about this a lot these days. As an extremely sensitive perfectionist parenting another extremely sensitive perfectionist, I spend a not-insignificant amount of time trying to impress upon my five-year-old something I absolutely fail at internalizing myself: That no one does things perfectly the first time, that messing up and doing something “badly” (or “not as nicely as we do it in our heads,” because that’s slightly less likely to trigger weeping at the idea of possibly doing something “badly”) is still important, because it helps us to do things differently, more easily, and maybe even more skillfully in the future.

But recently, when my kiddo and I were having version eight billion of this conversation, she sat up and said, “Mom, it’s easy for you to say. You’re a grown-up. You don’t have to learn how to do things you’re bad at.”

To which I really had no response. Because, frankly, she’s right.

Because just like her, I don’t like feeling bad at things. I tend, more often than not, to do things I’m comfortable when it comes to creative work. I dip my toes into new genres or forms, but I don’t, as a rule, dive into a totally different skillset (see also: why I don’t write poetry).

But honestly, maybe I should. Hogeland notes that giving herself permission to make “bad” art ultimately made it easier for her to ease into a flow state for the work of writing — work that her anxiety had been making harder and more complicated. “I knew my bad art was not going to solve any problem other than my immediate emotional state, but it put me in the clear, calm, creative mindset that could inspire an intelligent response to an actual problem,” she writes. “I could only make good art if I made bad art, too, and so I began making bad art an integral part of my creative practice.”

I don’t know that I’m going to immediately start making bad art. But maybe, the next time I’m sitting with my daughter, I’ll let her assign me something to draw while she works on her projects. Maybe I won’t say “I don’t know how.”

4. These 'can't-idates' are running for office knowing they'll lose. Their mission is to fight gerrymandering (Kameron Baker at Good Good Good)

Speaking of doing things we know won’t be successful: Let’s talk about doing things that really won’t be successful!

In the wake of this week’s elections, there was a lot of energy around Run for Something, an organization that supports progressive candidates running for state and local offices. Which is great! We need that! But what the Can’t Win Victory Fund is doing isn’t focusing on winning, but rather raising awareness for the ways in which our system is deeply, deeply fucked. As their website says, “Cant-idates have instant credibility with voters. Because Cant-idates aren't trying to win, folks assume they aren't lying to gain votes (because they aren't). That means Cant-idates can carry messages about democracy in a way that no one else can.”

Running for something with the full knowledge that it’s a losing game is fundamentally unselfish work in a way that running for office with a genuine attempt to win simply can’t be. Running on progressive values in a +30 Republican district is like auditioning for the lead role in a musical when you can’t hold a tune and have two left feet. But if your goal is less about getting that lead role and more about exposing the fact that the director has been rigging auditions to only give roles to their personal favorite actors, to the point that the audience, the other actors, and even the owner of the theater eventually starts taking notice — it may just be worth getting up on the stage and falling flat.

Listen. Listen to me. I am holding your face so lovingly in my hands when I say this: Go read the comments on this post. And then the comments on the original post. And then the quotes. And then the comments on the quotes.

Not just because there are a number of hidden gems of topics people have tripped and fallen into learning about — though there are, and they’re delightful — but because every single one says something along the lines of “Yes! Do this! You will learn such fun things, for no other reason than because you could!”

Capitalism has a vested interest in making us associate learning with external motivators. Grades. Skills. Paychecks. Learning, capitalism wants us to think, is only worth it if we can leverage it into something tangible, or at least something we can exchange for something tangible. When people take joy in learning for its own sake — just like when they have access to books and stories without the barriers of censorship — we become inherently harder to manipulate, harder to control, and harder to defeat. And yes, it will make you appreciate journalism (good journalism, at least, not the slop masquerading as journalism taking over most of our national media), but it will also just…brighten your day. Open your mind. Teach you something new.

Looking for a place to start? Try Six Degrees of Wikipedia. No, seriously. It just found me 631 paths with 3 degrees of separation between “Bagel” and “Astrology” in less than 10 seconds. I’ve got three hours left of this flight — happy travel day to me.

6. Ms. Rachel Has Poignant Message at Glamour’s Women of the Year Awards: ‘Hateful Responses Aren’t What Matters’ (Sam Reed for Glamour)

Confession: My kids aren’t Ms. Rachel children. We don’t do a lot of YouTube in my house, so they never really had a chance to adore her the way so many other kids do.

I, however, am absolutely a Ms. Rachel adult.

Y’all, I fucking love this woman. No one is perfect, etc etc etc, but when it comes to consistently and determinedly putting her values — that children are people, and that every child, no matter what, is deserving of safety, dignity, and love — where her mouth is. She’s been incredibly outspoken about the violence against children in Gaza and Sudan (despite an attempt by right-wing pro-Israel groups to smear her work as “spreading Hamas propaganda,” which is the kind of shit that so obviously undermines efforts to fight actual antisemitism that it drives me up a wall). When she was honored as one of Glamour’s 2025 Women of the Year, she showed up in a dress featuring embroidery and drawings based on art sent to her by children in Gaza:

There’s a lot of discourse about what we owe the next generation and how (and when) to talk to small children about things that are undeniably frightening. But what Ms. Rachel reminds us is that empathy, when cultivated with love, is the most powerful tool we have in the fight against division, authoritarianism, and violence. When we teach our children to care about others, we plant the seeds for a new generation of resistance.