READ: On making a living at writing, and why and why not to try to do it: Emily Magazine. | “This is an essential quality of hats: they announce one’s desire to be unannounced. A hat is an advertisement for a disguise.” | Molly Lambert’s Mad Men recaps. | “She figured that loneliness lay at the heart of nearly all mental illness and that the lonely person was just about the most terrifying spectacle in the world.” | To be seen, to be heard: Roxanne Gay reviews Erica Lorraine Scheidt’s Uses For Boys.

LOOK: A collection of dancing leaves. | We Need a Horse, a kids’ book by Sheila Heti (pdf) | Present Journal, a tumblr. | Remember Hilary and Jackie? I loved this film. | The Petite Kitchen sugar free recipes always seem SO much nicer than the #iqs ones. Not that I am even attempting to quit sugar, being a complete willpower-free zone. | First Position: a ballet documentary. | I finally got the courage to look at our wedding photos.

THINK: Brave and strong Angelina Jolie. We never really know what is happening in another person’s life. | Female representation in films is at its lowest level in five years. | The joy of accounting: some tips for all freelancers but especially UK ones from Kris Atomic. | Michaela McGuire on one of the worst parts of Twitter: people tweeting at each other about how they’re angry about the same thing. | Artists using social media have transformed the notion of a “work” from a series of isolated projects to a constant broadcast of one’s artistic identity as a recognisable, unique brand.

LINKNESS: My wrap up of the week’s top strategy + creativity + marketing reads on Nextness.

At first I didn’t look at them because we went to Australia. Then I told everyone I couldn’t get them onto my Mac Air, but that was sort of a lie and really I was just too scared to go through them. What if they didn’t match up to how perfect everything was in my mind?

(When I say perfect, I don’t mean wedding blog-perfect. For one thing, gorgeous Hackney Town Hall was covered in ugly scaffolding like an awkward teen with braces. It was so cold and windy our umbrellas turned inside out going from the ceremony to the reception. And I had just found out I was pregnant, so I couldn’t drink any of the wine! But it was just so happy.)

Anyway, four months later, I’ve looked. The wedding photos are beautiful. Thank you Jonathon.

Today, a short READ.LOOK.THINK: Lost cat. | “Becoming an old woman has been a sexually liberating experience for me. It has given me, among other things, a great ability to love generously, since I am not impelled to act out that love.” | Anne Frank’s diary isn’t pornographic. | Judd Apatow vs. Miranda July. | Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott. | Australian Writers Guild launches new TV drama screenwriting competition. |”Should we be in the business of ranking whose experience gets to count as such? Or which is more valuable, worthy, creative? And who gets to be such an arbiter?” | A quick post on Google Reader, RSS and blog housekeeping with the shut down of Reader only 50 days away.

LINKNESS: My wrap up of the week’s top strategy + creativity + marketing reads on Nextness.

I follow loads of RSS feeds for fun and for work, and all year I have felt smug about what I consider my clever set up of them (Google Reader in Firefox for personal, Chrome for work; a combo of Instapaper and Buffer and Twitter and Google Bookmarks to keep track of everything). But disaster has struck. While it’s happy to bore us to death with things we don’t want, Google has removed support from Reader and will be shutting it down in July.

I am currently trialling a solution that involves Feedbin ($2 a month! I would be happy to pay that to Google if only they’d take it) and Reeder. My hope is that by funneling Feedbin through Reeder I will get its smooth, efficient reading experience without its grey-paletted ugliness. Other people have found good (free) replacements in the form of The Old Reader and Feedly.

As for following my blog and READ.LOOK.THINK, there are three options in addition to the full RSS feed:

• My mailing list. Only once a week, only READ.LOOK.THINK. Sign up here; this is what it looks like.
• Facebook. One link a week, only to READ.LOOK.THINK. Like on FB.
• Bloglovin.’ (I really don’t know what this is at all.)

Do tell me if you hear of a good RSS reader between now and July. I have high hopes for Digg’s, and you can sign up to be notified when it’s ready.

And just like that, winter was gone, and life had some beauty and meaning again! London, you are a place of extremes.

READ: “Real life, perhaps, was waiting for me on the other side of the web browser…” Back online after a year without the internet. | No surprise that I loved The Woman Upstairs. It felt very Margaret Drabble or Fay Weldon to me, the type of stuff I binged on in high school. Claire Messud gets angry. | Dialogue is just two monologues clashing and speech is structured in a way that allows interruption. | SAVE NOTHING. | Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig search for happiness. A profile in The New Yorker. | Men never ask what they should call women’s pain, so they call us crazy.

LOOK: The Cowgirl Way on Miss Moss. | Ricotta dip with garlic, thyme, chilli and lemon zest. | Some photos of my April.

THINK: The Hillsborough Stadium disaster and the Boston Marathon bombing: “disaster will never be separate from your experience of the disaster” in Grantland. | How the internet influences what we wear. | ” the internalised misogyny that allows you to assume, without questioning, that self-actualisation cannot simultaneously include mothering.” | Early dialogue between parents, children stems teen smoking. | Is this the real reason why I’m not on it? Hardcore narcissists are put off by Facebook because it reveals that they are not the center of everyone else’s universe. | Homes for sale in Britain for one pound. | What nobody remembers about new motherhood. | Alpha women: how feminism created a new class divide. | No one, male or female, should be ashamed of leaving the workforce.

LINKNESS: My wrap up of the week’s top strategy + creativity + marketing reads on Nextness.

Blossoms outside Violet, London Fields, the canal, Victoria Park, weeds, listening to the Cazalet Chronicles on audiobook.

READ: “Let love not fall from me though I must grow old.” Reminded this week of the love story of Judith Wright and Nugget Coombs in The Monthly. | Feeling a bit cross having to wait so long for The Interestings and The Woman Upstairs compared with the book-lovers I follow on Twitter, who – by being American or professionally bookish – got to read them months ago | At home with Claire Messud and James Wood. | G R I M E S’ manifesto: “I don’t want to have to compromise my morals in order to make a living.”  | “My own envy swells up when confronted with artists who seem free to be artists. My biggest obstacle to that is not money (though of course that’s an obstacle), it is myself.” | I love Meanjin’s What I’m Reading series.

LOOK: In the first major international showing of her work, this little-known Muslim woman artist, who is now 97, has been restored to her rightful place as a significant figure in 20th century art. | The London houses/flats on Freunde von Freunden. | Poets without clothes. | Internet of Dreams, the new blog from Joanne McNeil.

THINK: A worker noticed a koala had been sitting stationary in broad daylight on top of wood piles for over an hour. | What is a nervous breakdown? | Australia: The costs are spiralling. | Whiteness is a race rather than a neutral default. | Leading men age, but their love interests don’t. | Trees call for help.

LINKNESS: My wrap up of the week’s top strategy + creativity + marketing reads on Nextness.

READ: … “for no reason other than that they want men they’d rather die than fuck to want to fuck them.” | Moves in contemporary poetry. | “I take my selfies because I am that guy who, unless he takes the picture or suggests it, doesn’t get his picture taken.” | Hard work. | On Vic’s dad, Mike + Vic’s favourite book.

LOOK: Beautiful idea. Paper Trail Tours: walking writing tours of Melbourne.

THINK: News is bad for you and giving up reading it will make you happier. | How not to say the wrong thing to someone who’s sick. | “This lifestyle wouldn’t work if women were raising their perfect, happy, locavore children in the middle of the woods with no internet connection.” | “When avoidance prevents one from dealing with life, it is maladaptive. But when avoidance is proactive and part of active coping and agency, it helps the person control the accelerator, brakes, and the track switches. It is a useful adaptive activity.” | “The guiding principle should be that we are the seekers after answers, not the repository for people’s anger. In the first case, we have to be dispassionate even when the issues arouse great passion. In the second case, we are simple fellow-travellers in sympathy; we are not leaders. And in these times, above all, people want leadership.” Tony Blair’s advice for Labour.

LINKNESS: My wrap up of the week’s top strategy + creativity + marketing reads on Nextness.

READ: How to be loved. | My ego is like a full moon tide chart. | “I constantly doubt my own ability to create like those I study and admire.” | Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin’s post-scandal playbook. I can’t at this moment think of two people I could bring myself to empathise with less. | On memoir: “I don’t owe you my life served up on a platter.” | “I feel quite, sort of, naive and open to things.” Elizabeth Jane Howard.

LOOK: Brilliant dancing in this video for Benjamin Biolay’s ‘Padam.’ It is a great tragedy for me that I am not myself a spindly man. | Sassy Magazine scans. | This blog: something concerning everything occurring.

THINK: Creative jobs versus financial stability. | “Men are still the arbiters of taste, the cultural gatekeepers, and the recipients of what little attention still gets paid to books.” | Live first, write later: the case for less creative-writing schooling. | Wanted – decent female characters for long-term relationship with screenwriters. | “What’s interesting about the rise of a teenaged girl as a staple of big, prestige, often anti-heroic dramas is that these characters function as built-in critics of the behavior of the adults who are at the ostensible centers of the shows they share.” How prestige drama quietly became young adult fiction.

LINKNESS: My wrap up of the week’s top strategy + creativity + marketing reads on Nextness.

READ.LOOK.THINK is no longer on hiatus. Life must go on, despite the cold. As I write this – in April – it’s snowing. It’s hard to convey what this crappy summer-followed-by-a-long-winter is like, emotionally, to people not experiencing it. Spring: where has it gone? | Should we be worried about the weather?  | The cultural, economic and social effects of missing a spring are severe.

READ: Some happiness. I wrote about becoming a mother and why I am going to let myself be excited about it. | A child’s isolating illness is a real ‘echidna book‘ for me. A tragedy, I have nonetheless read it in both the paper New Yorker (for free at a cafe) and online more than a few times. Hemon wept as he wrote it. | Sarah McCarry on slut-shaming reviews of Uses for Boys. | Notes from a Bookshop: March.

LOOK: Longform Podcast with Molly Young. A frank discussion of power – and the importance of structure and income that a full time job can provide a writer.  | I love Miss Moss’s music mixes. | I have a new bag from Rib and Hull! | Watched and liked: some eps of Top of the Lake from the geniuses at See Saw films, and After the Deluge (2003). | Wires and Lights, Crikey’s new TV blog. | Stylish Australian literary podcast Paper Radio. | Some of my photos from Melbourne + Callala Beach + Sydney in summer.

THINK: Ratchet has become the umbrella term for all things associated with the linguistic, stylistic, and cultural practices, witnessed or otherwise, of poor people. | Australians don’t know how lucky they are. | How to build functioning families? Tell children their story. | The best and most intuitive summary of people’s behaviour at work that I’ve seen.

LINKNESS: My wrap up of the week’s top strategy + creativity + marketing reads on Nextness.