Hibernation treats

An incomplete list

This was meant to be a big robust list of books and TV and film to send you all off into the dark winter nights, but higher education and our ability to talk to each other are in a gotcha crisis and the violence continues here and there.

In other, tiny personal crisis news: we lost a beloved elderly cat over the weekend— the first pet I’ve ever watched die, peacefully, on a table in a vet’s office housed in the back corner of a Petco, itself housed within a grim subruban strip mall. My two kids cried by my side as we pet our little guy goodnight and goodbye and watched him stop breathing. This the day after celebrating my littlest kid’s sixth birthday, which was bittersweet but mostly beautiful, as kids’ birthdays always are, all of it made extra heartening by measuring our joy against the ongoing destruction of human life abroad, and our complicity in that loss as Americans.