Thank you and good tidings!
A toast to you and the final sweet treat of the year.
Hello! I’d like to start this week by thanking you very much for reading, subscribing to and sharing this newsletter. It’s been a joy to work on and a highlight of my year. I hope it has made you smile, fed your curiosity and inspired compassion for yourself and someone else. This is my final post of 2023 and I am looking forward to more fun next year 🧡.
If you know anyone who might also enjoy Quality Sheet, why not send them a link to sign up? Think of it as a virtual stocking filler.
Ready? Let’s Get Into It (Yuh).
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Like Paris, or a hearty laugh, cats are always a good idea. (If you dislike them, please bore someone else with your disdain 😛.) What would you do if you were feline for the day? Artist Nika Sandler explores daily life through the eyes of a cat in her series “My Nonhuman Friends,” which came about after her own pet Raymond passed away. Sandler tells Dazed’s Emily Dinsdale her work is inspired by constant “thoughts of mortality and the urge to look on the other side of humanity.”
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It’s fun to joke about being in the midst of the apocalypse…until a sure sign of it crawls onto your face. That’s right, New York, parachuting spiders the size of a Post-It note are moving to the city next year! “Joro” spiders, native to East Asia, have been spotted in southern U.S. states over the past decade. But their vagabond shoes are longing to stray, so they’re migrating north—fast. Apparently, they thrive in “urban environments.” The good news is that they feed on lantern flies.
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“How could the two most devastating earthquakes in Mexico City’s history strike on the same date?” That’s the question the city’s residents asked on September 19, 2017, when a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck exactly 32 years after a previous, more tragic tremor. A third earthquake on that very date struck in 2022, triggering concerns about the city being in an “Earthly loop”. Anthropologist Lachlan Summers writes in Aeon about superstition, fear and memorialization, a process that tries to neatly wrap up significant events of the past that, ultimately, we had—and have—no control over because we never know when they might happen again. “The Earth is always happening to us,” one resident tells Summers.
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“I just liked people I liked; I wasn’t interested because they were famous,” says photographer Carinthia West, who tells i-D’s Zoe Whitfield what it was like to capture the The Rolling Stones and David Bowie during their down time in the 70s.
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When Tracee Ellis Ross speaks? I listen. When she dresses up? I take notes. The actress, businesswoman and lifestyle legend talks to the New York Times’ Kathryn Shattuck about her love of olives, her famous “first dips” and Meryl Streep reading her to sleep.
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Floating eyeballs, blooming lips and cloudy heads: Take a trip into artist Rafael Silveira’s surreal depictions of the mind. The Brazilian painter tells Colossal he finds inspiration “in the mysteries of the human psyche and in the energies, both tangible and intangible, that permeate our lives and the nature surrounding us.”
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Reddit users who once came extremely close to dying share what they felt in the moments life briefly escaped them. (May help if you’re also still recovering from S6 ep. 8 of “The Crown.”)
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Forget squares and circles—in 100 years our descendants will be pointing to children’s books and asking their kids “what’s that shape?”, only for the child to answer “an einstein!” before grinning with pride. That’s thanks to a Yorkshireman named David Smith, who discovered the new, T-shirtlike shape (some say it looks like a hat, maybe this is a new type of Rorschach test?) earlier this year. The 13-sided shape can “cover an infinite plane with patterns that never repeat,” according to Scientific American. The New York Times suggests nine things you can do with one.
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“The granddaddy of all mankind, slime is everywhere.” From fashion and sex, to nature, pop culture and beyond, the Los Angeles Review of Books dishes on the ubiquity of slime through the lens of two books released this year that examine our obsession with gloop.
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Thank you for reading! Share to sweeten someone’s holiday season—and have a lovely rest of your year.
Isabel 🤶🏾
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