Aryana Rose told a story at The Moth’s Houston StorySLAM in 2015, but I just came across it when a friend shared The Moth’s Instagram Reel of her performance last week. My world stopped. By the end of it I found myself just lying in my bed, crying. I watched it two more times, and cried two more times. This is one of the most beautiful love stories I have ever heard.

When I first moved to New York City, I worked in midtown Manhattan, at Saks Fifth Avenue. Rockefeller Center is across the street from the store, and sometimes after work I would wander around the complex, window shopping in the underground shops in the maze of corridors that led to the subway. Sometimes I would also peek into the windows of the stores that lined the plaza. Like thousands of other people every day, I used to pass statues like the famous one of Atlas, who holds up the world on 5th Avenue, directly across from Saks.

I love emojis. I especially love when they are used in opaque or unexpected ways. The melting face emoji joined the canon early in 2022. Recently, I’ve started noticing it as I scroll through the faces, trying to find one that conveys my tone correctly (usually I use one of these two because I feel like they cover a lot of bases: 🥳 😩). The melting face has felt like the right thing to send in an exceptionally wide array of contexts, and each time I’ve used it, I have thought to myself that I could not articulate what I mean by it and the person I am sending it to might understand it to mean something entirely different, anyway.

John Sinclair was a legend at the University of Michigan, where I went to college. The guy who went to jail for 10 years for 2 joints: that was the shorthand we used to use. But I’ll be damned if that isn’t the most reductive possible way to describe Sinclair, who was not only a poet but also an activist whose shrewd understanding of how marijuana laws were tied to larger systems of oppression was ahead of its time.

If you love 70s music (and people must. It is still being played 50 years later), you owe it to yourself to watch The Midnight Special on YouTube.  The Midnight Special was a late-night live music television show that ran from 1973 to 1981. At the time, television stations signed off at 1:00am (after Johnny Carson) and started up again in the morning with the news. The Midnight Special bought air time at 1:00am on Friday nights (technically, Saturday mornings) and convinced Chevrolet to sponsor the show.