Cruel Compendium #62 🕷️

Fill out my reader survey pretty please

Oct 31, 2023

As you may know, this year I worked with a financial coach (shout out to the powerful Stella Gold) and did a lot of thinking about what I want my future as a freelance writer to look like. Now, I’m ready to move forward with some of those plans. My shiny new website will soon launch, and I can’t wait to share it with all of you. I’m planning the next season of the CSBC podcast, to launch in the spring. And I’m working on giving this newsletter a well-deserved facelift.

I’ve been writing CSBC for four years! And I still love writing to all of you every week, sharing my life, and exploring the world around me. I’m ready to recommit to this newsletter, as well as (eventually) introduce paid subscriptions so the hours I spend crafting essays and carefully curating my favorite bits of the internet can be more sustainable for me.

So today I’m asking you to please take five minutes to fill out this reader survey. Your answers will be anonymous. Your input means so much to me and will help me choose the best future for CSBC.

Fill out the reader survey

I also want to offer huge thanks to those of you who paid for this newsletter back in 2021 (the last time I asked you to), and to those of you who have already pledged to pay for CSBC once I launch paid subscriptions. I’m so grateful to you, and so glad you’re still here.

Happy Halloween from my friend’s homemade alien

On to the links!

What I’m Reading

The cards are vague and mysterious by Susannah Conway

This is how I use Tarot in my life as well! I usually do a Tarot pull on the new moon and the full moon, asking myself important questions and digging into the answers I find there. The thing is, the answers were already within me. Tarot is not for telling fortunes—it tells you what you already know.

My quest to downsize without throwing anything away by David Pogue

Fodder for my Facebook marketplace obsession.

Shooter weather by Rusty Foster

Feels appropriate to link to Kottke’s reads on the United States of Guns, what an AR-15 bullet does to the human body, and my piece about guns in America that I wrote after I was home during a shooting on my Brooklyn corner.

We cannot cross until we carry each other by Arielle Angel, Editor-in-Chief of Jewish Currents

Plus, read Jewish Currents’ explainer of reader questions about Israel and Palestine.

The view from my window in Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha

More historical reading about Israel and Palestine: I read The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan, a nonfiction story about two families—the Palestinian family forced out of their home by Israeli soldiers in 1948, and the Jewish family who lived there in the decades afterward—their connection to one another, and their struggle to understand each other. I learned a lot. There’s also a young reader’s version of this book. Next I’m reading My Promised Land by Ari Shavit.

Where to donate: I donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Donate there, or to any of these charities aiding the suffering in Palestine and Israel.

Take action to demand a ceasefire in Gaza:
—Download the 5 Calls app to easily dial your representatives. They give you a script and you can leave a voicemail—be sure to leave your zip code. This is not as scary as you might think and it does matter.
—Anti-Racism Daily is hosting an action hour today, Oct. 31 at 1pm ET. Register to join.

I’m listening to:

Celebrity Memoir Book Club on Britney Spears’ memoir The Woman in Me. I learned so much and finally understand just how terrifying her abusive conservatorship really was.