Hello there,
One of the things I've found most difficult to grapple with over the past year is the lack of empathy in the face of the pandemic and all of the ugly and unfortunate things it laid bare. That said, I think empathy is like a muscle and is something we must constantly work to build. And getting even just a glimpse of how other people live and what they go through can help that process.
Watch
Take a virtual walk in someone else's shoes.
Queer Eye (Netflix): I'd be surprised if you haven't seen this yet, but in case you haven't, it's a feel-good reality show in which five gay guys help make over a person's life, including their home, clothes, and habits, among other things. Almost every episode made me cry, and I especially loved the Japan season.
Ramy (Hulu): There are very few shows about being Muslim in America, and this is one of them, and it's excellent. It's funny, it's sad, and sometimes deeply uncomfortable. All of the actors are amazing.
Fearless (Netflix): This docuseries follows a group of Brazilian men who are professional bullriders, a dangerous sport with a devastating physical toll. Why do they do it, you ask? Watch and find out.
Kim’s Convenience (Netflix): This wholesome sitcom-style show follows a Korean family and their local community in Toronto. It's really sweet and soothing to watch.
My Octopus Teacher (Netflix): While this documentary about a man who became obsessed with an octopus got, uh, increasingly weird toward the end, this is a good movie to watch to feel empathy toward creatures we might normally not.
Gentefied (Netflix): What's it like to watch your neighborhood get taken over and become unaffordable? This is the best scripted series I've seen about gentrification and the California housing crisis, focusing on Latino families in LA.
Read
There are some books that you read that you think about for months or years after you read them, and these are some of them.
Pachinko is a multigenerational tale of a Korean family and their eventual migration to Japan. It's beautiful but utterly devastating. I appreciated it even more after I learned the book took three decades to make a reality.
Homegoing also follows multiple generations of a family, but in this case, in Ghana and the United States. It's an epic, wonderfully written, and deeply upsetting.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a novel written by a poet in the form of letters, so it's lyrical and doesn't have the feel of a regular novel. It follows the life of a Vietnamese-American family in Connecticut, echoing the author's own experiences.
See the full list of watch and read recs.
Follow
On a totally different note…
I love The Dogist account, which is basically Humans of New York but for dogs. I really liked following it in quarantine because of the normalcy of it all. No matter how bad things get, people still need to walk their dogs.
Do
Feel gratitude for one of the heroes of the pandemic: Katalin Karikó is one of the scientists to whom we owe the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and possibly vaccines for other diseases in the not-so-distant future. Read about her journey of being largely scorned and underpaid for decades to being responsible for saving countless lives all over the world:
Until next week,
Rachel