Altadena, Onyx Storm, and India's latest space achievement
#5SmartReads - January 21, 2025
#5SmartReads is a Webby-honored weekly news digest that amplifies underreported news and underrepresented perspectives. My goal is to help you stay informed without being overwhelmed, and to embrace nuance and reflection over picking a side.
For Black families in Altadena, history and community burned down alongside homes (The Guardian)
“What got our Black families there was being able to feel comfortable and feeling like you are living on top of a hill,” McGrue said. “It was just a comfortable place where we were able to raise generations of families in a way that most people dream of.”
The physical damage of Altadena is immense. The emotional damage to the families who have built this community, and to Black history, is even more disastrous.
These homes (many of them housing multigenerational families) were a driving factor in how Black families built generational wealth, and these homes held invaluable memories and future legacies for thousands of families.
Octavia Butler - the matriarch of science fiction & fantasy and the author of the prescient of Parable of the Sower - was born in Altadena and buried there after her passing in 2006. The book eerily predicts uncontrollable fires in Los Angeles and the rise of a leader running on a “Make America Great Again” platform (yes, word for word).
I recommend reading Butler’s own words and supporting Black families in Altadena, if you have the money to spare.
Rebecca Yarros’s Fantasy Life (ELLE)
Happy Onyx Storm day, to all who celebrate! I am putting my phone and Kindle away and have a streamlined to-do list to power through, before I let myself dive back into Yarros’s captivating, chaotic world.
My admiration for Yarros impossibly increased after I read this interview. I value her brutal honesty about her pre-Fourth Wing career, supporting her husband’s military career (and the toll his deployments and injuries had on their relationship), the challenges of getting diagnosed and managing chronic disease, her gratitude and the cost of fame, and how they’ve all filtered into the series that has millions on the edge of their seats.
I found myself copying and pasting so many of her quotes from this interview. I’ll leave you with her words on romance as a genre, which encapsulates exactly how I feel (and more eloquently than I could ever say or write):
“I like romance because I’ve been in love with the same guy since I was 19. That’s it; he’s it. We have six kids. But when I read a romance, I can fall in love over and over and over. It’s the same brain chemicals,” she says. “So even though I’m in a very happy marriage, I can slip into a romance novel and get a boost of those endorphins.”
Romance is this beautiful place where women get to say on the page what we want, what we deserve, what healthy relationships should look like. [It’s about] destigmatizing what a woman feels she’s worth.”
#5SmartReads is all about helping you feel smarter this week.
If you want to feel better but feel overwhelmed on what to do, check out this month’s plan (mindfulness practices, workouts, meals, and more):
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