Q2 2023: Is It Beauty That We Owe?

Autotheory, the Feminine Heroic, and Merchandizing the Void

Painting by Volker Hermes

Welcome to What a World, a newsletter about meaning, relationship, design, and the connections between them. Here you’ll find writing and links concerning resistance, liberation, social change, and art (meaning); community and friendship, spirituality, family systems, romantic and platonic love (relationship); and organisational design, world building, speculative futures, and critical theory (design). The space between them all is where I like to spend my time.

I’m Hanna Thomas Uose, a writer and organisational designer, researcher, strategist, facilitator, and coach. I’m a Co-founder of the consulting firm, Align, where I have worked with UN Global Pulse, Greenpeace International, Liberty, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Free Tibet, and the National Union of Students, among others. I was previously Chief Product Officer at 350.org, Co-Founder of Level Up, and Campaigns and Culture Director at Ekō.

I’m also completing my MA in Prose Fiction from UEA, and in 2022 won the Morley Prize for Unpublished Writers of Colour for a novel-in-progress.

You are receiving this because you signed up to my last newsletter, The Quarterly Review. These will still go out every quarter, with the added bonus of a very occasional longer form post, all under the umbrella of What a World. If you’d like to read some of what I have written before, visit my Substack and check out the pinned posts like The Trauma of Zoom or Mission, vision, values, metaphor. If you’d like to unsubscribe from this new configuration, no hard feelings! Just hit the button at the top of this email.

Now, on to the recs!

The Quarterly Review, Q2 2023

• Autotheory

  • Pod: Armchair Expert, Jane Fonda

  • Speech: Claiming an Education by Adrienne Rich

  • Poem: Now I Become Myself by May Sarton

  • Pod: The MIT Press Podcast, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism

  • Book: The Years by Annie Ernaux
    

• Food

  • Recipe: 3-Ingredient Frozen Coffee

  • TV: Beef

  • Poem: I Remember the Carrots by Ada Limón

  • Essay: Merchandizing the Void by Kelly Pendergrast

  • Essay: Why is the thought of cooking so dreadful? by Shon Faye
    

• Going Through It

  • Essay: 21. on going the distance by Naomi Shimada

  • Pod: Going Through It (season two)

  • Poem: If You Are Over Staying Woke by Morgan Parker

  • Pod: Talk Easy, Michelle Williams

  • TV: Tiny Beautiful Things
    

• Is It Beauty That We Owe?

  • Pod: Bad Blood, The Story of Eugenics

  • Pod: How To! How to Love Your Face

  • Poem: Is It Beauty That We Owe? by Janice N. Harrington

  • Pod: We Can Do Hard Things, Don’t Tell Glennon to Love Her Body

• Happiness

  • Poem: Happiness by Raymond Carver

  • Pod: Normal Gossip, The Only Single Girl at Disney

  • Comedy Special: Wanda Sykes: I’m An Entertainer

  • Poem: Ways of Talking by Ha Jin
    

• Heartbreak

  • Poem: Closure by Omotara James

  • Mixtape: Heartbreak is a Vehicle

  • Pod: If Books Could Kill, The Rules

  • Short Story: The Depressed Person by David Foster Wallace

  • Pod: The Heart, DAD

  • Pod: This Is Love, Sampson & Baylor

• Places to Intervene in a System

  • Anthology: Abolition Science Fiction edited by Phil Crockett Thomas

  • Book: Against Borders by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha

  • Report: Holding Our Own: A Guide to Non-Policing Solutions to Serious Youth Violence

  • Article: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System by Donella Meadows

  • Essay: Retrospective Age by Grace Denton

  • Pod: Today in Focus, Cost of the Crown

  • Agency: Transforming Film

• The Feminine Heroic 

  • Essay: Generation Connie

  • TV: Poker Face

  • TV: Somebody Somewhere

  • TV: The Diplomat

  • Essay: The Feminine Heroic by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  • Article: The Irresistible Cool of Bernice Bing by Jonathan Griffin

  • Pod: Witch
    

• Saw It Coming

  • Pod: Death, Sex & Money; Leaving the Extreme Right, and a Marriage, Behind

  • Interview: Leslie Marmon Silko Saw It Coming

  • Essay: ‘The Road’ Is the Best Parenting Book of All Time by Kathryn Jezer-Morton

  • Speech: The Tufton Pragmatists by Zadie Smith
    

• Wild

  • Essay: Are You Thunder or Lightning? by Sophie Haigney

  • Essay: The dancing species: how moving together in time helps makes us human by Kimerer LaMothe

  • Poem: To Pose A Chicken by Judith C. Root

  • App: Merlin Bird ID

  • Radio: Wilding

Things I made

• A playlist of songs listened to in Q2

• Last summer I was lucky enough to host a workshop on worldbuilding for MAIA and it is now online! Worldbuilding, speculative futures, design fiction… whatever you call it, it’s a key tool in the strategic toolbox to help us plan for and have agency within an ever more complex world. I’d love for you to check it out.

Where to catch me

• Substack!

• Threads!

• And I have some capacity opening up in the autumn for new work projects. If you or your organisation needs support with org design, alignment, research, foresight, or coaching then get in touch at hanna@wealign.net.

Have a lovely summer folks,

Hanna