Let me tell you what to do

February edition

Below please find a list of suggestions for occupying yourself this week/month!

To eat

Molly Baz’s Grandma Pie pizza (from More is More)

We’ve made this approximately six times in the past month. With roasted pistachios, Castelvetrano olives, mortadella, mozz, ricotta, and basil it’s briny & bright & complex. I like to use banana peppers instead of the peperoncino.

image via u/fluxxy on r/pizza

Broccoli Pasta Salad (it’s good, stay with me)

This pasta salad recipe is very lightly adapted from Susie’s excellent 1993 version (which was heavily adapted from her ex-husband’s original)

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To read

Given last week’s reporting that searches for ‘abortion’ on CDC website prompt a suggestion to look up ‘adoption’, now is a great time to read Gretchen Sisson’s excellent book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood.

A powerful decade-long study of adoption in the age of Roe, Relinquished reveals the grief of the American mothers for whom the choice to parent was never real. Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable.

The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem.

We are in a political moment in which adoption is, increasingly, being revealed as an institution devoted to separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family-building. Rooted in a long-term, qualitative sociological study, Relinquished is an analysis of hundreds of in-depth interviews with American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption collected over a decade. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard as a response to this moment.

The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row

Sisters from a convent outside Waco have repeatedly visited the prisoners—and even made them affiliates of their order. The story of a powerful spiritual alliance.

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To listen to

If Ben Kweller was also important to your emotional development in 8th-9th grade, he has a new album out in May that explores his grief from the loss of his teenage son. A couple of songs are out now, and I’m excited to listen to the rest of it.

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To consider

Did you know that you can order abortion pills before you need them? Check out Plan C’s guide to getting pills in advance (just in case).

Also:

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To bake