I want to capture something cool that happened at school/work. A kid ate a pepper from the school garden, not knowing it was a spicy pepper. Now that kid has a new interest in spicy peppers and their SHU ratings and is doing independent research on it. I love when kids find and pursue new interests!

📚🗨️📝 “if your business is words, a notebook can be at once your medium — and your mirror.” Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

People are going to try to tell you spooky season is over at the end of October, but you don’t have to listen to them. If you want, it can be spooky season all year.

Finished reading: We ride upon sticks by Quan Barry 📚

🎮 Played Professor Layton and the Curious Village. As charming as it was the first time I played it.

Finished reading: Dead Beat (Ninth House Series, 3) by Leigh Bardugo 📚 I love this whole trilogy so much. I love how Leigh Bardugo always manages to leave me with a sense of hope, even in a series where there is so much active evil in the world.

📚🗨️ “That was the gift of coming from nothing. You learned to work with what you had.” Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat

"The movies loved cold-eyed assassins and flinty lone wolves. But the world needed people who wept and fought on, saps and suckers and fools who had their hearts broken but kept loving anyway, women who knew how to work... https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2026/10/12/the-movies-loved-coldeyed-assassins.html

Kimberly Hirsh

kimberlyhirsh.com

📚🗨️ “There was something embarrassing about doing as a sophomore. It just lacked dignity.” Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat

📚🗨️ “She wanted to hide in the dark and let someone else sort it all out.” Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat

🎮 Played Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney — Trials and Tribulations. I really like how they tied everything together and wrapped it all up in this one.

📚🗨️ “Maybe that was the secret truth of courage. You didn’t face danger; you just got used to it.” Leigh Bardugo, Dead Beat

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.com? And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

Finished reading: Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo 📚 A re-read. I just love Leigh Bardugo’s work. So. Much.

📚🗨️ “He’d been washed up on a familiar shore, but the sea had changed him.” Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent

📚🗨️ “You had to decide who you were willing to go to war for and who you trusted to jump into the fray for you. That was all there was in this world. No heroes or villains, just the people you’d brave the waves for, and the ones you’d let drown.” Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent

You know what word academics in the social sciences and humanities love? Bricolage.

📚🗨️ “She’d never liked that phrase, diamond in the rough. All that meant was they had to cut you again and again to let the light in.” Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent

📚🗨️ “Why raise children on the promise of magic? Why create a want in them that can never be satisfied—for revelation, for transformation—and then set them adrift in a bleak, pragmatic world?” Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent

🎧🗨️ “We don’t need to feel good to feel magical.” Lindsay Mack, “MONTHLY MEDICINE: October is Magic as Refuge,” Tarot for the Wild Soul

📚🗨️ “She read paperbacks too, one after the next like she was chain-smoking—romance, science fiction, old pulp fantasy. All she wanted to do was sit, unbothered in a circle of lamplight, and live someone else’s life.” Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent

Finished reading: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo 📚 This is a re-read, because when I tried to read the third in the trilogy, Dead Beat, I realized I couldn’t remember much that happened in the other two. Leigh Bardugo is so good at the job.

📚🗨️ “I want to live to grow old… I want to sit on my porch and drink foul-smelling tea and yell at passersby. I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me.” Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

🔖💀 Read Here Stands Loss: Lessons From Victorian Mourning Culture.

Here Stands Loss: Lessons From Victorian Mourning Culture | The Order of the Good Death

Black clothing. Jewelry made from hair. Postmortem photos. Beneath the Victorian aesthetics was a radical idea: grief deserves to be seen.

orderofthegooddeath.com

🔖💀 Read What Happens When Death Walks Into the Classroom?.

What Happens When Death Walks Into the Classroom? | The Order of the Good Death

A professor finds that teaching death and dying opens the door to difficult questions, challenged assumptions, and unexpected conversations about faith, meaning, and what it means to live.

orderofthegooddeath.com

🔖💀 Read Why Death Deserves Its Own Beat.

Why Death Deserves Its Own Beat | The Order of the Good Death

An in conversation between GraveSite co-founder and editor-in-chief Delaney Rebernik and The Order of the Good Death’s executive director Sarah Chavez.

orderofthegooddeath.com

🔖💀 Read ‘I feel like I’m cancelling out her life’: the wrenching work of clearing out a parent’s home by Stephanie Wood (The Guardian).

‘I feel like I’m cancelling out her life’: the wrenching work of clearing out a parent’s home

From old love letters to pieces of string, our homes are stuffed with stuff. When it comes time to empty a parent’s home, sorting the junk from the memory can be overwhelming

theguardian.com

🔖💀 Read Go Ahead and Laugh at Mediums. They May Be On to Something. by Sarah Wildman (NYT).

Opinion | Go Ahead and Laugh at Mediums. They May Be On to Something.

By Sarah Wildman

nytimes.com

🔖💀 Read Is Grief Dead? How Digital Resurrection Technologies Affect Bereavement by Delaney Rebernik (Journal of Medical Internet Research).

🔖 Read What if we just stopped? by Dan Sinker. I’ve mostly stopped. I rarely check Bluesky or Instagram. When I do, I deliberately avoid stuff that makes me angry. I go to NPR when I feel a need to get in touch with the news. I blog. I chat on Discord. I think my life is better for this.