Media You Might Like Too: 2024 Edition

Laura here. Happy New Year.

For our first email of 2025, we’re excited to bring you an email that we had planned to get out in 2024. December brought a St. Nicholas tornado to the Netherlands (I’m looking at you Sinterklaas and Santa Clause) that had my kids exploding with so much festive energy my easily overstimulated brain was losing it. As many of you can relate, it was a lovely and cozy time, and I was counting down the days to Winter Break. 

So here we are a week into 2025. A year that the internet told me is the same distance to 1980 as 1980 is to 1935. 🤯 (The internet provides no shortage of micro-moments to remind me that I’m getting older.)  

But growing older is a privilege - one that I’m always grateful to have. And this newsletter has provided Sarah and me with a meaningful outlet to share our thinking and dreaming with you. Without it, I wouldn’t have written about staying put or coming into my new identities. Sarah wouldn’t have shared her business plans for the small businesses our world needs. Thanks for being here.

So, with this first dose of Laura & Sarah musings for the year, I’ll leave with you some of our favorite reading and listening from 2024. 

Please tell us - What do you think? What are your top recommendations from 2024?

*(My brother just shared that he gave one of my favorite 2024 books two stars, so don't hold back. We can handle it. 😉 ) 

Laura 

📚 Reading

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I couldn’t put this one down. It is a story of friendship, work, and love.

The Making of a Manager. I first discovered this one many years ago, and I still think it is one of the most readable management books, with clear insights and advice for first-time managers. 

Remarkably Bright Creatures. An unlikely friendship between a woman and an octopus. 

Matrescence. Matrescence, a word coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s, is the process of becoming a mother. Blending science, poetry, and memoir, this book explores what happens to the body after pregnancy and childbirth. Truly fascinating and a worthwhile read for anyone who is or has a mother. 

🎧 Listening

I have been obsessed with podcasts since the first season of Serial. But this year I felt a shift; with what seems like everyone talking into a microphone these days, people just talking about a theme rarely keep my interest anymore. 

While I do have some that I’ll go to more than others (here and here and here) - what keeps me most engaged are the American classics: The Moth, This American Life, and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. 

One exception is the podcast that gets me to sleep most nights: Sleeping with Celebrities. If you’re like me and need to listen to something to fall asleep, this is the perfect podcast. Soft low voices, mixed with just interesting enough content to get your mind off the day and to sleep quickly. I couple this with my “night time headphones”. 

P.S. - I would love some non-American recommendations if you have them.

Sarah

📚 Reading

With a precocious teen in my house, I’ve become a somewhat unwilling participant in a mini tech-futurist book club. I will make 2 recommendations and one meh.

• The Ministry for the Future - Ok I actually read this a couple of years ago but few books have stuck with me or continue to be part of our daily conversations around climate change, so I have to recommend it as a hopeful introduction to the genre.

• Termination Shock - an absolute delightful ride along with an eclectic group of fictional characters- including the imaginary future Queen of the Netherlands, yet well researched and based in historical facts and reality. 

• Cory Dokrow’s The Lost Cause is described as “hope punk” - I feel like that is enough for me to not like it. It was a little too earnest for my taste. I only bring it up to recommend keeping tabs on Cory Dokrow in the media for his tech insights. He coined the term “enshitification” - the degradation of online environments caused by greed and I can’t stop using it. 

Doppleganger by Naomi Klien. If you have a friend or loved one whose views and beliefs have changed in ways that are alarming to you, this book may be cathartic.

The Covenant of Water - Abraham Verghese became my favorite author a little over a decade ago and this pre-queal to Cutting for Stone doesn’t disappoint.

An Indigenous History of The United States - Some things were left out of my history class…this was a fantastic read and deepened my understanding, even love, of my birthland.

🎧 Listening

Maintenance Phase and If Books Could Kill share the host Michael Hobbs. Both shows are hilarious while also making me think more critically. 

Holding the Fire: Indigenous Voices on the Great Unravelling from the non-profit organization resilience.org which is a great resource for hopeful action in the face of climate adaptation.

There is a theme emerging from 2024 and that is of trying to face, feel, and understand the catastrophe that life is, while also practicing hope and joy. I have so much hope for the year ahead with full knowledge that it will contain all the hard stuff too, but I can handle it.