Can you hear me?
I don’t know how to remove it. [The pandemic.]
I'm prepared to go forward with it. [This newsletter.] 
I’m here live. I’m not a cat.

Are you ok? [I hope you are.]
You're upside down. [We all are, tbh.]
Is this a metaphor? [Probably.]
I don't know how to fix it.
At least [you're] not a cat. 

I just kind of gave up and stayed as a potato.

Inheritance, a project about American history, Black life, and the resilience of memory. Everyone is going to recall this pandemic differently. A Pakistani-American doctor acted quickly to avoid wasting vaccine doses and was fired for it because, essentially, "there were too many Indian names in that group." Hanif Abdurraqib on hope, history, and the so-called Black Lives Matter Era. What happened when Denver replaced cops with health-care workers. What the TikTok algorithm does to creators who aren't white. Anti-Asian racism is rampant, violent, and deadly. "Sometimes I wonder if the Asian-American experience is what it’s like when you’re thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you." Not all children of immigrants grew up embarrassed about their food. The truth about the urban legend of a woman who froze to death in Minnesota while trying to find a buried suitcase of money featured in the film Fargo. The toll of reporting on QAnon. The half-legal cannabis trap. That sad Dolly Parton Super Bowl ad. Confessions of a Venmo voyeur. Stories of people live happily without social media. The secret geography of the office and the vicarious thrill of Google street view. The lives of trans and gender nonconforming call-center workers, and the plight of flight attendants. The man who saved corn. Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird's happily ever after. Pablo Escobar's hippos, venus flytrap poachers, and Instagram's anonymous gossip queen. Bring back the nervous breakdown. 😂😂😂

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Breathing Free, a visual album by the Heartbeat Opera company. Ten years of Rebecca Black's "Friday." A new ambient album from Chuck Johnson. (I've spent many hours writing to his 2017 pedal steel album Balsams.) A narrative short about New York, books and the lonely hearts.

Lunar New Year is "a reminder that I can begin again, at a time when I feel behind on everything." Celebrate with these recipes for Tet, with many bitter melon dishes because "when we taste bitterness, then we know what sweetness is."

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Telling Amazon to let workers unionize. The company is posting record profits and cracking down on workers at the center of organizing efforts in Alabama. (Here's a short video about that.) Especially if you're an Amazon customer, let the company know that this is not acceptable.