Odessa's Oddities & Curiosities | Week of 4/7/2025

Dear friends,

Oh boy, am I in the thick of the semester. And let me tell you, I love this little turn of phrase—used liberally by all my senior friends swamped by their theses. I imagine we are all in this dense forest, swatting at stray branches, trampling thickets. We can only hope & pray we’ll make it to the clearing (read: graduation) unscathed.

So this newsletter again serves as good-old-fashioned procrastination (Dad! avert your eyes! I promise I’m also working on my thesis.)

I’m (roller)coasting through a continuous state of illness, popping Dayquil left and right. My sore throat only varies in its severity. But I’m pushing through it (as any good college student must). Ah, I was so arrogant at the beginning of this semester, proclaiming my immunity from all illnesses in the Fall.

I’ve been hemming and hawing over recommending Cleopatra & Frankenstein to you. On one hand, I’m finding it compulsively readable. The writing is sharp, often funny. The characters are interesting. But also the book is sometimes annoyingly self-important, sometimes stressful. I can’t decide if it’s trying too hard to be something it’s not. Ah, I’m not sure. Read at your own risk.

But all my fantasy readers must pick up The Chronicles of Castellane ASAP. The second book is even better than the first, and I’m just obsessed with it. Cassandra Clare shines once again! If you’re reading it, please tell me so we can gab about it.

Deborah Triesman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, visited my class on Wed. She was wonderful and answered my cascade of questions. My main question which I didn’t have the chutzpah to ask in person is why people read short stories. I mean, I love a novel. You don’t have explain the necessity of fiction, but I’ve long struggled to understand the form of short story. My class (and professor) was a bit aghast at my question. Would love your thoughts.

Also, a lovely essay on sacred (digital) texts in a new magazine, titled Amulet. And this essay/book review on listening to music while running.

I had my Mellon Forum a few weeks ago, and what a delight to get to share my research with my friends. Even better, we now share the parlance of the biopsychosocial model of stress. My friends have been telling me about how they had a “threat” vs “challenge” stress response. I’ve included a photo (I know! a photo!) of me at my Mellon Forum below).

I’ve begun to attempt to see beyond college, and I’m feeling greedy about my college friends. I’m doing some brainstorming about the best ways to stay in touch with these people I hold so dear. Monthly Zooms? I’m not sure. I would love suggestions.

It’s that time of year when my camera roll is shamelessly filled with the daffodils that pop up all over campus. (Also, photos of weird R-peaks in ECG curves lol)

Final (?) update on my glasses journey. Goddamn, my quality of life is so much better. I’m realizing all the ways I was coping for my tired eyes pre-glasses. I mean, who knew there weren’t these huge auras around street lights at night? Glasses are also great for distracting from my persistent ‘third-eye’ pimples. I do feel like I look wildly different in my glasses. I feel like everyone should be pointing and whispering, as if I started walking around campus naked. Although I still instinctively take them off when talking to someone, because they feel like sunglasses—I feel like they can’t see my eyes. I also have this bizarre instinct to charge them at night. I plug in my phone, and then I have a thought that I need to charge them. What fantastic pre-electric technology.

(Not) final update on my running journey. I tripped. Like slow-motion, tripped on a crack, skinned both my knees. (shout out the best parenting book that I did read at age 12: Blessing of a Skinned Knee). My half-marathon is in 8 short days. I ran 10 mi on Tues, so I’m feeling less stressed about that. The major stressor is rather eating enough. Half-marathon while keeping kosher for Passover?!?!?! All my deep-seated food anxiety rears at the thought. My (debatable) relationship with G-d goes through its most arduous hurdle yet. Upon consultation with friends, I think I will be keeping kosher for Passover for the first three days, then give me bread, give me pasta, hello carb-loading for half-marathon.

Oh! I’m listening to the most fabulous history podcast that’s perfect synced to my attention span: A Short History of…. I am admittedly a person who favors breadth over depth…the dreaded generalist. I can’t tell if this is a curse of my attention span or an easily excitable curiosity. And this is the perfect combination: 1 hour episodes that dive deep and comprehensively on a little nugget of history. The podcast has excellent production-value, and often drifts into these audio scenes where they transport you into history. And the topic of each episode is remarkably random. While processing data for my thesis, I’ve listened to episodes about The Tudors, The Normans, The Battle of Stalingrad, Constantinople (now obsessed with Empress Theodora), and Angkor. I do love history because it’s all ripe material for my own writing, and I’m trying to repair gaps in my own knowledge (including a particular gap in military history).

On my dad’s jaunt in the podcast circuit, he had a fantastic conversation on one of my favorite podcasts: People I (Mostly) Admire. Listen here.

And an episode from The Atlantic Podcast on Mind-Reading: a beautiful and perplexing exploration.

My Joyce & Proust class is currently knee-deep in The Search. And I just want to emphasize again everyone is Jewish!! If I was surprised that Joyce’s Leopold Bloom is Jewish, I’m even more surprised to learn that Swann (titular character of Swann’s Way) (and the narrator?) are Jewish. Many of the lengthy dinner parties in the novel are animated by discussion of the Dreyfus Affair. I’ve been assisting the urgent pace of the readings by listening on audiobook at 2.6x speed (and of course, the audible has a slightly slightly different translation).

My yellow scarf that I’ve been knitting since January is indeed very long. I’ve taken to winding it around my neck while knitting. It will be a fabulous accessory next winter.

My nonfiction reads. I’ve actually started reading Chris Hayes’ book: The Siren’s Call (which I referenced a few newsletters ago), and it’s blowing me away. The writing is crisp and populated with a variety of delicious sources. I actually cannot recommend enough. (I often find that these types of arguments are better served via essay or podcast, but I’m enjoying this book so much). He notes an interesting distinction between information and attention. Information is infinite. Attention is limited. Attention is the real resource of the 21st Century. I stopped reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson one chapter in. I found the writing kind of terrible (?) Instead, I recommend their discussion on this podcast from Good on Paper (evidence that certain books are better off as podcasts).

I must shout out a fabulous weekend in the Catskills (a Jewish pilgrimage of sorts) that included lots of laughter, communing with farm animals, and karaoke. You must visit Dale’s for karaoke if you happen to pass through Mountain Dale. (Oh, how I love LG)

I had the immense joy of getting to hear from Ocean Vuong at The Yale Review Festival. Ocean talked about how we are contaminated by our culture of capitalism, leading us to use a metaphor of production when it comes to writing, fetishizing the product: the writing “workshop”. The real idea of writing is the thinking, the questing, the “quarreled interesting somatic thought.” He talked about how we’re taught to read as plunderers/hunters: snatch the meaning, the thesis, come out. Instead of writer’s block, we must think about it as charging or investing in the soil. Let’s borrow metaphors from the meadow instead of the factory or institution.

And I cannot end this newsletter without acknowledging that it does feel like the end of America as we know it. The deportations. The tariffs. The decline of nearly everything we hold dear as a country. In that despair, I cannot recommend enough Kaveh Akbar’s essay: “What Will You Do?”

I’m ending on an excerpt from that essay. Hopefully, you will read the rest.

With love & curiosity,

Odessa