Hibernation Notice

plus: two good video essays and a reader survey for you

Greetings my beautiful escargatoire,

I’m taking a little brain break in the dead of winter, a ritual I started in the years since I moved north and Katherine May’s book talked me into appreciating the frozen times. I get recalcitrant and nocturnal when the temperature drops, start wandering around my house in the wee hours, sleeping through almost all the available daylight, and totally forgetting the last time I took a shower.

But if you’re looking for some content while I am in wild bear mode, my work was recently included in a couple very interesting and thoughtful YouTube videos which I can highly recommend!

ADHD: A Nightmare Under Capitalism

I recently talked to the very talented Elliot Sang about Russell Barkley’s timeblindness, and there’s some great research in this video on the colonization of time. (Me and my little face appear near the end!) I also really enjoyed Elliot’s video from earlier this year on the myth that your brain stops developing at 25.

Dopamine Doesn’t Work Like That

This video by Sydney Zarlengo was posted in the slug discord, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see my work included! It’s a great TLDR on the problems with how dopamine is understood in pop culture and the federally-funded drug addiction research these ideas came from. Sydney also has a bunch of videos on disability, eugenics, and psychology that would probably interest many readers of this newsletter as well.

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Pls Tell Me Why You Read This???

On another note: I am deeply in love with this little project and I want Sluggish to keep growing. It’s so cool/exciting/scary that over 8,000 people in the world want to read what I’m thinking about every week. Blogging is weirdly intimate and distant at the same time — my innermost thoughts and feels are in your hand, your head, your home, and meanwhile, I have no idea who you are or why you read this! I cannot fathom how far my little writings travel across the earth!

I have a lot of ideas and a very limited supply of energy, so I want to make sure I’m not straying too far from the reason you gave me your email in the first place, and I would love if you could fill out a quick little anonymous reader survey to give me some more insight. (It’s mostly checkboxes! No annoying short answers, I promise!)

Feel free to reply to this email or leave a comment if you’d like to elaborate. I hope you are able to slow down and curl up a bit in these last days of the year, too. Remember, you’re a soft, slimy little creature, not a machine.

<3 Jess