“Son Shine” demonstrates how transportive Sault can be: when you hear voices sing about the sun beaming through the rain, you can really feel it happening— it’s like walking into church and being washed over by the sounds of the choir (hence the spelling of “Son”). This song of deliverance lives on “Untitled (Rise),” the latest of FOUR albums the mystery R&B collective has released in the last 16 months, most seemingly recorded in a span of days and each as powerful as the next. Their second-to-latest, “Untitled (Black is),” was just announced as NPR’s best album of the year for the expansive catharsis it has provided through “a robust collection of funk, soul, meditative spoken-word and protest chants meant to score the full spectrum of Blackness.” Please jump in ASAP and stay awhile— this group has so much to say and you should hear it from them directly.
You may not have been online yet during Google’s early-morning outage on Monday, but if you were helping a kid do remote school on that day, you definitely noticed. So many schools have become dependent on Google: they hold class on Google Meet, do work in Google Docs, and access it all on Chromebooks. So when teachers woke up on Monday to all of that gone dark, a bunch of them called off the day altogether. Some called the outage “the new snow day,” which is exactly on point as kids down the Eastern Seaboard plug right on through today’s storm instead of sipping cocoa and building snowmen. Just remember: we’ve done it to ourselves.
If we’re subjecting kids to grown-up things like technical outages, the least we could do is take them seriously (the kids, that is). That’s what’s happening over at the Queens Museum, where an exhibit of kid art is on display. To most adults, kid art doesn’t count as art because it doesn’t have a sophisticated “intent”— but what if intent is as much of a limiting factor as age? That’s what Ulrike Müller wondered as she worked on a mural imagining an end to grownup nonsense like war and bureaucracy; what better way to envision those things, she thought, than to loop in kids whose minds are free of such constraints? If you’re in the city with nothing to do (after your snowball fight, that is), head over to Corona* and see for yourself.
*Yes, that’s the name of the neighborhood, yes, it’s always been named that, and yes, it has been hit hard by the virus. Buy a load of tacos or dumplings while you’re there and spread that $$$.
If there’s a kid in your life who’s far from people who love them, you should know about this very sweet platform that helps you read together, remotely. It’s like a video chat plus screenshare, where you and your kiddo can see each other *and* whichever book you’ve chosen from Readeo’s library. You turn pages with a click, and there’s even a little cursor that approximates the experience of pointing at what’s going on in the pictures.
I am super excited to give this to my one-year-old nephew for Christmakkuh (and have deleted his parents and faraway grandparents from this newsletter’s recipient list to maintain the SURPRISE). If you have a kid in your life who’s under, say, ten, this would be an excellent present for them or their adults, particularly as it doesn’t require shipping. Subscriptions start at $10 a month, and whoever holds the account can connect with as many reading buddies as they like, who join Readeo for free. You can also give it a test drive with a 30-day free trial. Check it out and get reading.
