#5SmartReads - March 7, 2022

Interview with President Biden (Letters from an American)

The few that get elected to the presidency are often obsessed with their legacy, and nearly all have cultivated relationships with historians in an effort to understand how history will document them.

Most former presidents cultivated relationships with the who’s who of historians - Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jon Meacham - while they were still in office. But seeing Joe Biden grant a wide-ranging interview to one of my (and the Internet’s) favorites, Heather Cox Richardson, made for an outstanding conversation and an even better comments section.

This is everything a typical network interview isn’t - the questions and answers are thoughtful and lengthy, the editing is minimal, and the intention is to inform rather than profit.

Groundbreaking.

How to retrain your frazzled brain and find your focus again (The Guardian)

Finding it hard to focus? You’re not alone.

And rather than fight it, we need to surrender to the truth that focus requires a lot more than a deep intention.

It actually requires practice. And very specific practices, outlined in the book Peak Mind by Amishi Jha (though this article will help you get started on these exercises).

I’ll be doing mine as Rhaki snuggles up to me to watch the Paw Patrol Movie for the gazillionth time today…

Congress nears passing anti-lynching bill after decades of trying (Axios)

…and it’s about time.

The House passed their version of the bill with overwhelming support, and the Senate’s version of the bill has bipartisan sponsors (including Senator Rand Paul, who held up a previous anti-lynching bill) and is expected to pass as well.

Progress can be frustratingly slow and unjust. So while I’m glad lynching is about to be recognized by the federal government as the hate crime it has always been, I am saddened that it’s taken this long and so many Black men have died and their families have often dealt with unjust rulings as a result.

Hear Me Out: Shake Has A Point (Betches)

Warning - spoiler alerts ahead for Love Is Blind season 2

I’m here for the fact that America’s sweetheart right now is Deepti, the South Asian-American queen who chose herself and refused to marry a man-baby who cared more about his reservation at Nobu and raging with his friends instead of wondering why a veritable QUEEN left him at the mandip.

That said…Shake did make a single salient point during Love Is Blind’s reunion (when he wasn’t being an insufferable douche).

Love isn’t blind at all. Rather, love contains multitudes and one of them is attraction, and this show brilliantly produces what we view to be love rather than create an environment for real love to grow and bloom.

Gurki Basra (whose own journey for love has been documented on another Netflix dating show, Dating Around) writes about this with more honesty and thoughtfulness in her pinky finger than Shake seems to possess in his entire body.

On 'Bloody Sunday,' Harris reflects on the current fight for voting rights (NPR)

57 years ago to the day was Bloody Sunday in Selma, where Black voting rights marchers were attacked by White state troopers violently.

The occasion was marked yesterday with a peaceful march led by Vice President Kamala Harris, as voting rights in certain states resembles what so many Black voters faced back in 1965 and what galvanized the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Voting is one of the most fundamental rights of American citizens, and actively making it harder for some groups to vote feels like a violation of that right.

NPR does a better job than I could of explaining the history of the Voting Rights Act and what happened in 2013 for states to make it harder for some groups to vote.