Strivers with no chill, unite!

let's hear it for the scrappy and ambitious

ROCK PAPER RADIO is a dispatch for misfits & unlikely optimists by your favorite hapa haole, beet-pickling, public radio nerd. It’s a weekly email newsletter that shares three curiosities every Thursday - something to hold on to (that’s the ‘rock’), something to read (that’s the ‘paper‘), and something to listen to (you guessed it, that’s the ‘radio’). Themes include but are not limited to: rebel violinists, immortal jellyfish, revolution. Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word.

“There’s an unmistakably negative connotation to the word ‘careerist.’ It is a dismissive insult often deployed against people who have the temerity to transcend their economic class. Every time I’ve heard it used, it has been by someone who has enough privilege that needing to work and worrying about advancement are alien experiences.” —Elizabeth Spiers in defense of striving and L to the OG rapper Jeremy Strong. Image credit: Jason Wong

SOMETHING TO LISTEN TO

Some excellent personal news: Keri and I recently became aunts again! Between our five siblings, we now have six nephews and one niece. The latest addition to the fam—a little 7-pound mochi ball named Declan, and my sister, the mochi’s mom, are back home and doing great.

There are few things I love more than babies, but uncanny coincidences and magical grandmothers might be right up there, and this 17-minute story from This American Life and producer Brian Reed has all three: The Motherhood of the Traveling Pants.

I’m not a big fan of swaddling newborns in gender expectations, but I have to say, as I listened to this family’s astonishing story of how a miniature pair of brown polyester pants predicted the sex of their children for generations, I found myself rooting for either a boy or a girl as Nona’s powers became undeniably clear with every gender reveal. The next time one of our siblings gets pregnant I’m going to send them this link and a little rainbow onesie in the mail.

SOMETHING TO READ

Like many Tweeters, I too found Succession actor Jeremy Strong to be more than a bit insufferable in Michael Schulman’s New Yorker profile in December.

There was Strong’s very Kendall Roy quote on playing Kendall Roy: “To me, the stakes are life and death.” That casual mention of Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness. That Costume National hoodie that Schulman tells us Strong “wore to shreds” back when he was waiting tables in Soho and sleeping on a floor mattress.

And yet. A creeping sense of protectiveness rose in me as the jokes about the jokes Strong wasn’t getting flooded my increasingly snarky Twitter feed. I couldn’t quite place it, and it was bugging me. (That hoodie! Why couldn’t I stop feeling weird about that hoodie detail?!)

But then finally the very sharp Elizabeth Spiers entered the chat with her Opinion piece for the New York Times and I was like, YES, THAT’S IT EXACTLY. Reading this felt like an exhale and throwing a working class fist in the air at once: A Defense of Jeremy Strong (and All the Strivers With No Chill).

Spiers—like Strong, like all of the friends and colleagues I have ever known who have also clawed their way out of financial and class anxiety—is a proud careerist, and in this beast of an essay she owns it not just for herself or for Jeremy Strong, but for all of us. It’s a defense, yes. But it’s also a rally call. Let’s go.

SOMETHING TO HOLD ON TO

For the lead-in to this week’s SHOT, I’m just going to share with you NPR’s headline, because it is amazing: Israeli scientists have trained goldfish to drive, in a scene out of a Dr. Seuss book. Go, Fish. Go!

I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S STILL JANUARY

That’s a wrap on issue 67, friends. Thanks for reading, listening, holding on.

I don’t know about you, but this month has been one hundred years long for me and I am just so glad the days are getting longer and it’s almost Muscat grape and pants-without-other-pants-underneath season soon.

Shout out to all of you who have been forwarding our misfit dispatch to your curious friends and spreading the good ROCK PAPER RADIO word on social. Thank you, thank you, thank you! All of you amplifiers are such a moving reminder that there’s so much good that comes from putting ourselves and our meandering wonderings into the world.

If you have meandering wonderings too, feel free to hit reply if this week’s newsletter landed in your inbox (high five to you, subscribers) and let me know what’s inside your brain. I'd love to share what our readers are discovering and thinking about in an upcoming RPR. Reach out, misfits and unlikely optimists.

See you next Thursday.

K.

You can find ROCK PAPER RADIO on Instagram and Twitter @RockPaperRadio. You can find Kristin on Instagram @leongstagram and on Twitter @kristinleong. 

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