Lydia Likes It

What's new in your neighborhood?

Call me old-fashioned, but I love neighborhood newsletters, the kind that come in my email inbox and keep me up-to-date on what's going on where I live. Events, arts, celebrations, sports, volunteer opportunities, new restaurants and shops opening, old favorites bidding my community farewell: it's all there. I'm very lucky to have two neighborhood newsletters land in my inbox every week: Sampan, the official communication from Chinatown in Boston, where I live now; and Fig City News, that's teaching me a lot about the community Ted and I will be moving to late in 2025 in Newton, a Boston suburb. Both newsletters are free of charge.

Zooming around the kitchen table

At the start of the pandemic, when in-person classes and meetings and work were cancelled, everything moved to something called Zoom. As I had retired a few years earlier, I didn't know what Zoom was, or how to use it, or why I should care, but it didn't take long for me to figure out that this was how we were all going to stay connected until the universe calmed down, and then everything would go back to the way it had been. Or, that's what I thought at the time. Zoom, an interactive online platform, allows for two-way participation between two people, or 50 people. You can attend a lecture, organize a neighborhood action group, meet with your entire family at the same time, or even take a class. One of my friends does Zoom art groups, where everyone is working on a fiber or art project together. My adult English students love Zoom, because they can work from home, take care of their children, and save time and money on commuting to school for classes. And I've come to love it, too. Do you Zoom?

Magazines with benefits

Remember when magazines were printed on paper, and delivered by the post office every week or every month? If you were like me, you read some of them right away (New York Magazine, Seventeen, Mad), and others, like The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly and cooking magazines, piled up for a month or more until I had time to settle in with them. These days we still get The New Yorker in print every week, because my husband Ted makes art out of the covers, but I read the magazine with my digital subscription. Same with The Atlantic. And both of those digital subscriptions come with benefits -- special interest newsletters, at no additional charge, so I'm sure to see content that most interests me.

Every Thursday, Arthur C. Brooks sets his sights, and his mighty pen, on making us happy. Not in a haha entertaining way, but in a way that helps us think our way to the life we want. He tackles the big questions of meaning and happiness in his column, How to Build a Life, in The Atlantic. Recent columns discussed how to have your most fulfilling vacation ever, the happy art of grandparenting, the narrow-but-easy path to happiness, and the happiest way to change jobs. You'll need to sign up for a digital subscription ($79.99) to The Atlantic to get this newsletter delivered to your mailbox every week, but that digital subscription will get you more than just How to Build a Life, which you can order in newsletter format. Of course you'll be able to access every article in the magazine. You can also subscribe to their other wonderful newsletters, like The Weekly Planet (climate) and The Books Briefing (new and interesting books), plus daily or weekly news updates.

A digital subscription to The New Yorker drops a newsletter called The Food Scene in my inbox every week, along with The Borowitz Report and a weekly news and politics review, plus access to all the content of the magazine, and daily crosswords during the week. Digital-only subscription: $59.99 for the first year. Worth every penny.

Heather Cox Richardson, historian

"What's past is prologue," Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, and how right he was. By reading and learning about our history, we begin to understand why today is happening. Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of American history at Boston College, writes her daily Letters from an American to set the events of the day in context and connect the dots between past and present. It's my first read every morning, before I tackle the newspapers. Subscriptions are free, and if you want more, she also has a weekly podcast, Now and Then, on Tuesdays.

Reasons to be Cheerful

If, like me, you're a bit down in the dumps about the state of our world these days, here's an antidote to despair. Pay a visit to Reasons to be Cheerful, a site founded by Scottish-Canadian artist and musician David Byrne, lead singer of the band Talking Heads. Under the banner of Byrne’s non-profit organization, Arbutus, Reasons to be Cheerful aims to inspire us all to be curious about how the world can be better, and to ask ourselves how we can be part of that change. By lifting up small stories of hope rooted in evidence -- Did you know the Austrian government subsidizes small businesses to repair broken stuff like electronics, bicycles, furniture and clothes? How environmentally cool is that? -- Reasons to be Cheerful addresses the big topics (civic engagement, climate, economy, education, health, justice, science) by focusing on the small actions that are making a difference at home and around the world. Every post makes me think. Every post makes me smile.