One of the best things parents can do for their children is read to them. Reading together creates a bond through shared attention and presence, seeds children’s imaginations with stories, exposes them to new vocabulary, and lays the foundation for a lasting love of reading and the ability to entertain themselves without screens.

Here is a list of around 90 children’s books that I have enjoyed reading with our daughter (age 2.5) from infancy onward. My criteria:

• They hold a child’s interest.

• They have some educational value.

• They, or the stories they contain, can be read in one sitting.

• They are well written and use language in interesting and creative ways.

• They feel authentic and not mass-produced or written just to cash in on a brand.

• They are tolerable for adults and have enough depth that they don’t drive me crazy when read over and over again.

The book list is divided into three sections: best for infants and young toddlers; best for older toddlers; and additional recommendations (ideal ages vary).

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Best for infants and young toddlers

• ABC (Xavier Deneux)

• All the World (Liz Garton Scanlon)

• Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? (Bill Martin Jr.)

• Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault)

• Dear Zoo (Rod Campbell)

• Goodnight Moon (Margaret Wise Brown)

• Is Your Mama a Llama? (Deborah Guarino)

• Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale (Mo Willems)

• Little Blue Truck (Alice Schertle)

• Llama Llama Red Pajama (Anna Dewdney)

• Madeline (Ludwig Bemelmans)

• Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes (Eric Litwin)

• Rain (Manya Stojic)

• The Pout-Pout Fish (Deborah Diesen)

• The Stray Dog (Marc Simont)

• The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Eric Carle)

• Where’s Spot? (Eric Hill)

Best for older toddlers

• Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse (Leo Lionni)

• Amos & Boris (William Steig)

• A Sick Day for Amos McGee (Erin E. Stead)

• Chopsticks (Amy Krouse Rosenthal)

• Chrysanthemum (Kevin Henkes)

• Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type (Doreen Cronin)

• Clifford and the Grouchy Neighbors (Norman Bridwell)

• Corduroy (Don Freeman)

• Curious George (H. A. Rey)

• Doctor De Soto (William Steig)

• Frog and Toad Are Friends (Arnold Lobel)

• Frog and Toad Together (Arnold Lobel)

• Harold and the Purple Crayon (Crockett Johnson)

• Sofia Valdez, Future Prez (Andrea Beaty)

• Something Big Has Been Here (Jack Prelutsky)

• Stone Soup (Marcia Brown)

• Swimmy (Leo Lionni)

• Sylvester and the Magic Pebble (William Steig)

• The Dot (Peter H. Reynolds)

• The Giving Tree (Shel Silverstein)

• The Gruffalo (Julia Donaldson)

• The Little Engine That Could (Watty Piper)

• The Snail and the Whale (Julia Donaldson)

• The Story of Ferdinand (Munro Leaf)

Also Recommended

• A Light in the Attic (Shel Silverstein)

• Amelia Bedelia (Peggy Parish)

• Are You My Mother? (P. D. Eastman)

• Arlo Gets Lost (Wendy Wax)

• Beautiful Oops! (Barney Saltzberg)

• Because (Mo Willems)

• Blueberries for Sal (Robert McCloskey)

• Caps for Sale (Esphyr Slobodkina)

• Clifford and the Big Storm (Norman Bridwell)

• Clifford Goes to School (Norman Bridwell)

• Clifford Takes a Trip (Norman Bridwell)

• Clifford the Big Red Dog (Norman Bridwell)

• Clifford the Small Red Puppy (Norman Bridwell)

• Curious George’s ABCs (H. A. Rey)

• Dr. Seuss’s ABC (Dr. Seuss)

• Fortunately (Remy Charlip)

• Giraffes Can’t Dance (Giles Andreae)

• Green Eggs and Ham (Dr. Seuss)

• Grumpy Monkey (Suzanne Lang)

• Harry the Dirty Dog (Gene Zion)

• Help Wanted: Must Love Books (Janet Sumner Johnson)

• Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth (Oliver Jeffers)

• If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (Laura Numeroff)

• Ish (Peter H. Reynolds)

• Ladybug Magazine (Cricket Media)

• Love You Forever (Robert Munsch and Sheila McGraw)

• Make Way for Ducklings (Robert McCloskey)

• Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes (Traditional)

• My Art Book of Happiness (Shana Gozansky)

• My Art Book of Love (Shana Gozansky)

• One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (Dr. Seuss)

• Pat the Bunny (Dorothy Kunhardt)

• Peter’s Chair (Ezra Jack Keats)

• Possum Comes a-Knockin’ (Nancy Van Laan)

• Press Here (Hervé Tullet)

• Smart-Opedia Junior (Maple Tree Press)

• Strega Nona (Tomie dePaola)

• The ABCs of Art (Sabrina Hahn)

• The Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss)

• The Day the Crayons Quit (Drew Daywalt)

• The Missing Piece (Shel Silverstein)

• The Polar Express (Chris Van Allsburg)

• The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (Jack Prelutsky)

• The Snowy Day (Ezra Jack Keats)

• There’s a Dinosaur on the 13th Floor (Wade Bradford)

• Where the Sidewalk Ends (Shel Silverstein)

• Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak)

• Whistle for Willie (Ezra Jack Keats)

Ryan McCarl is a partner of the business litigation firm Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For tips about legal writing and argumentation, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing blog and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and Audible.

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Spotify’s “ghost artists” scandal

Journalist Liz Pelly, author of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, recently wrote this article in Harper’s Magazine exposing Spotify's practice of allegedly padding its instrumental playlists with filler tracks produced by disreputable labels that use software to mass-produce generic music. Doing so allows Spotify to save a buck by paying these music-mills lower royalties than they would have to pay actual artists. Spotify, in turn, steers unwitting users toward this paint-by-numbers music by promoting it in their playlists.

Some of these tracks’ listed artists have become known as “ghost artists” because the labels create fake names and backstories to suggest that the tracks are produced by genuine artists. As someone who listens to ambient and classical music — and who had assumed that Spotify’s playlists were curated based on user tastes or editorial judgment, not profit maximization — I find this practice an appalling betrayal of users’ trust.

Audio quality

Qobuz (like Tidal, another solid alternative) offers significantly higher audio quality than Spotify. Qobuz can stream lossless audio, and even its lowest setting is CD-quality. Spotify’s highest-quality setting, by contrast, is still MP3-quality; MP3s are a lossy format, meaning that some sound data is lost when songs are converted into MP3 format. Audio quality might not matter for casual listening on low-end speakers, but I can hear the difference when using good equipment.

Fair payments to artists

Streaming services exist because of artists, so they should pay artists fairly. Spotify doesn’t. Its average payout is as low as $0.00318 per stream. Amazon Music and Apple Music are only slightly better, and YouTube Music is even worse.

Qobuz pays over $0.018 per stream — more than five times Spotify’s rate — and Tidal pays over $0.012 per stream. These differences matter to artists.

The best way to support artists is to buy directly from artists’ websites or platforms like Bandcamp. (On Bandcamp Friday, the service waives its revenue share and passes funds directly to artists & labels.) I’ve started doing this more often, but streaming services remain indispensable for convenient listening and discovering new music. But everyone can help ensure that artists are compensated for the value they create by skipping platforms that use exploitative royalty models.

The Qobuz alternative

Qobuz isn’t perfect. Its name alone probably limits its market share, (though it has been around since 2007 and has a base of committed users). The Qobuz app has some flaws. Its catalog includes some metadata errors and missing tracks, especially for lesser-known musicians. Still, it lets you stream lossless audio, pays artists more fairly, makes it easy to transfer playlists from other services, and — this is astonishing these days — has a responsive customer service team. I recently emailed the company a few bug reports and feature requests, and they replied within a day.

Don’t let tech companies take you for granted.

In a world where tech giants are increasingly unaccountable, unresponsive, and politically manipulative — and where their products mediate nearly every aspect of our lives — it’s refreshing to cut ties with the worst offenders and switch platforms.

If enough people change their usage patterns, platforms that habitually ignore users’ concerns — or are owned by toxins like Elon Musk (dump Twitter/X and try Bluesky instead) — can eventually be rendered irrelevant and replaced by healthier alternatives.

Ryan McCarl is a partner of the business litigation firm Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For tips about legal writing and argumentation, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing blog and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and Audible.

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Sometimes principled people must speak up and do whatever they can to protect freedom. This is such a time.

Every living American inherited the great gift of liberal democracy from our predecessors.1 Because most of us haven’t had to fight existential battles for freedom, it’s easy to take for granted how special and historically unique it is to live in a free society governed by the rule of law, with avenues for protecting individual rights and holding elected officials accountable.

Freedom allows us to build families, communities, and businesses with confidence that the government will not arbitrarily destroy them. It allows us to go about our daily lives without fear that an all-powerful state is monitoring us, deputizing our neighbors as spies, or threatening to whisk us off the streets into labor camps or underground prisons to be forgotten.

Americans are on the verge of forfeiting the gift of liberty.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party he leads have America on a fast track toward fascism. He is trampling the Constitution and inventing implausible legal rationales to violate rights as he pleases. He has begun an assault on universities and dissenters while purging the federal government and military of officials who might resist his power grabs. He is abusing the power of the presidency — power that belongs to the American people, not to whoever holds the office — to carry out personal vendettas against private citizens, such as lawyers who have represented parties opposed to him.

The biggest red line is crossed when Trump ignores explicit federal court orders. The more often he’s allowed to get away with that, the more permanent the damage will be to our democracy. The same goes for his efforts to intimidate judges, as Chief Justice John Roberts (a conservative) just rebuked him for doing.

Our entire constitutional system depends on government officials obeying judicial orders. If the government ignores them, it can do whatever it wants, and citizens have no recourse against abuses of power. America’s constitutional democracy and the rule of law rest on this foundation. It is the federal judiciary’s job to say what the law is, and when officials ignore court orders, they are not only breaking the law but destroying the foundation of our freedom.

This week, Trump violated several federal court orders by continuing to deport people illegally — without due process — even after a federal judge ordered him to stop immediately and turn around any planes already in the air.

There is nothing conservative or liberal about officials breaking the law and working to unravel our democracy. It’s time for everyone, regardless of political persuasion, to speak up and resist however they can. Here are some ideas:

• Post about politics on your social networks and engage with thoughtful posts by others. Share your views publicly to give others the courage to speak up.

• Join and donate to pro-democracy organizations like the ACLU, Protect Democracy, Common Cause, CREW, and Democracy Docket. Also support other good causes promoting long-term political change and helping people in need.2

• Call and write to politicians at every level — especially congressional Republicans, who could stop Trump at any time but are instead actively helping him destroy democracy.

• Combat disinformation by verifying facts and challenging falsehoods online. Read and share information from credible media sources that follow traditional sourcing and fact-checking practices — sources like the New York Times, NPR, BBC, The Economist, Reuters, and the Associated Press.3 Whenever you’re in a public place like a diner or airport and you see televisions running Fox News or other propaganda, ask that it be changed.

• Attend protests, marches, and town halls.

• Work on voter registration drives.

Ryan McCarl is a partner of the business litigation firm Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For tips about legal writing and argumentation, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing blog and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and Audible.

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Last month, I appeared on the Lawyers in the Making podcast to discuss my legal career, new book (Elegant Legal Writing), views on self-education, advice for law students, and other topics. You can listen to the interview on Spotify or YouTube (the YouTube link is embedded below).

Buy Ryan's book (Elegant Legal Writing)

The Lawyers in the Making Podcast, produced by Nate Crespo, features wide-ranging interviews with law students, attorneys, and legal-tech entrepreneurs about their backgrounds and careers.

Here are some of the topics covered:

• My thoughts about adopting a growth mindset, lifelong learning, self-education, and why I see practicing law as a privilege.

• My reading recommendations for books and blogs, and why I prefer the former.

• My unique journey to law school, what I learned from teaching high school and founding the educational technology startup WordBrewery, and my experience as a law student, judicial clerk, big-firm associate, and cofounder of business law firm Rushing McCarl LLP.

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Ryan McCarl, the author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024), is a founding partner of business litigation firm Rushing McCarl LLP. Links to McCarl’s websites and social media pages can be found below or here. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and Audible.

Connect with Ryan McCarl: Order the Elegant Legal Writing book | LinkedIn | Rushing McCarl LLP | Linktree | Elegant Legal Writing (blog) | Second Stage (blog) | X (Twitter) | Substack | Threads | Bluesky | Mastodon

Order Elegant Legal Writing

Elegant Legal Writing is written in a voice of confident expertise that developed over time. I started writing it four years ago, but only gradually understood what the book should say and believed in myself as the person who must say it.

Although written from my perspective as a litigator and law professor, Elegant Legal Writing bears traces of previous experiences I sometimes thought of as failures or detours:

• I only taught high school for two years, but lessons learned from earning the attention of ninth graders turned out to help me persuade judges and juries.

• I never published my memoir or poetry, but creative writing workshops helped me move beyond intuition and study writing as a craft.

• I had to shut down my language-learning app WordBrewery, but I repurposed the love of words that inspired it into a new project: designing an Advanced Legal Writing course at UCLA Law.

Indeed, the greatest challenge I’ve faced as a lawyer (unruly attention) led me to the core theme of Elegant Legal Writing: an attorney should write so that busy judges with limited energy, attention span, and motivation appreciate the attorney’s briefs because they are helpful, concise, and pleasant to read.

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A book about writing will be scrutinized sentence-by-sentence. Anticipating such scrutiny can be paralyzing, but I used it to motivate me. Thousands of hours of revision, aided by many generous reviewers, went into shaping a tightly written text that gets right to the point. No digressions or fluff survived.

The book’s appearance reflects its contents and advice. Its short sections and copious examples, visuals, and white space make it look approachable and inviting, showing that it is intended to be read by busy professionals.

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The book is fast-paced and packed with information but never dense or hard to follow. Instead, it teaches by modeling its ideas. Writing mechanics can be just as abstract, difficult to explain, and soporific as any area of law, but Elegant Legal Writing creates a sense of effortless learning. Everyone who reads it will encounter new ideas and revisit core principles without having to overexert themselves to do so.

Please consider buying a copy and helping me spread the word by reviewing it on Amazon and mentioning it to your networks on social media (you can use this Amazon shortlink: bit.ly/elw-book). I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP, author of Elegant Legal Writing (U. Cal. Press 2024), and adjunct professor at Loyola Law School. For more writing tips, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing newsletter and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and elsewhere.

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But that’s OK. My involvement with the music world will be in the form of (1) discovering, sharing, and enjoying new music, and (2) helping share my love of music with my six-month-old daughter.

On that note, I wanted to post a 2023 version of the post I wrote last year about music I’d discovered in 2022.

What I listened to in 2023

Here’s a Spotify playlist.

No one but me will like every song on this list, but most modern rock fans will find something to like. The main genres represented on the list are indie rock, chamber pop, alternative rock, and indietronica. I’ve left a few of my favorite compositional ambient and modern classical tracks in as well, though I have a separate playlist for those here.

Best new artist discovered — easy call: The Beths.

Best “old” artist discovered: Yo La Tengo.

Best albums bought: Wolf Alice, “Blue Weekend” (2021); Sufjan Stevens, “Javelin” (2023); Slowdive, “Everything is Alive” (2023); The Beths, “Jump Rope Gazers” (2020); The National, “Laugh Track” (2023); Taylor Swift, “Evermore” (2020).

Sources of music discovery

- RateYourMusic.com

- Pitchfork Album Reviews

- Spotify’s recommendation algorithms

Upgrading my listening equipment

I took an interesting step forward in music listening a few months ago: after spending some time researching equipment and exploring the online community of “audiophiles” and headphones-aficionados, I decided to take the plunge and buy my first set of audio equipment designed for “high-end” listening; my setup is entry-level relative to what most people in the audiophile community use, but better than the setups casual listeners use.

These devices are commonly recommended for people interested in upgrading how they listen, and I can confirm that they make a difference and allow you to hear more subtleties in the music:

• Sennheiser HD 650 (~$310) - Entry-level audiophile-grade headphones

• Qudelix 5k bluetooth portable DAC and Amplifier (~$110) - Provides a superior listening experience for audio streams sent over Bluetooth or when plugged into a USB-C port (on an iPad or other device).

• Optional: FiiO K7 Desktop DAC and Amplifier (~$201) - For listening to music through your computer’s USB connection. Connects to headphones such as the Sennheisers linked above or to speakers.

Note that like other audiophile-grade headphones, the Sennheiser HD 650s are “open-back” headphones. These are for private listening in a quiet environment because they don’t keep out ambient noise. The noise canceling headphones I use when I need to block out external noise are Bose QuietComfort 45s, which aren’t audiophile-grade but are good for focused work.

Ryan McCarl is the author of Elegant Legal Writing (book | blog), a founding partner of the litigation firm Rushing McCarl LLP, and an adjunct legal writing professor at LMU Loyola School of Law. His previous experiences including serving as a research fellow in AI Law and Policy and teaching Advanced Legal Writing at the UCLA School of Law; working as a litigation attorney at several major firms; and founding the language-learning app WordBrewery. Second Stage is his personal blog.

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Notably, the jump also shows up in human life as groups of three cause social complexities to soar — markedly in young families. Two siblings have one relationship. But a third child results in seven kinds of ties among the siblings — three one-on-one relationships, three one-on-two relationships and one group relationship. Parents, by definition, are outnumbered, and bedlam can ensue.1

This evening I found myself living the home-life I’ve always envisioned as an ideal — with music playing, television off, a meal together at a dining-room table, a stack of books, and family — and I must give credit where credit is due. The noisy little creature with her mother’s piercing eyes and capacious lungs has, within a few days of her arrival, restructured our world for the better. What was a happy dyad of my wife and I is now, in terms of group dynamics, a set of seven happy relationships.2

What’s more, six of these relationships are new. My wife and I know each other well, but until this week, we hadn’t known each other as parents. And we’ll encounter our daughter continuously as she grows and changes. She’s not some sort of blend of us, but an entirely unique being who happens to have our genetic material and the environment we provide as starting points. I look forward to meeting her again and again.

In most domains involving the exercise of reasoned judgment, subject-matter experts will always be needed; their creative work cannot generally be performed by an AI system. AI systems are better at breadth than depth. The new large-language models (“LLMs”) such as ChatGPT are astonishingly good at searching for, compiling, and summarizing information, and they will only improve at such tasks. But they are less likely to be able to meaningfully add to the store of human knowledge in domains that traditionally require deep expertise.

If you write academic books or articles and teach in higher-education settings, as I do, you often need to rely on peer-edited publications prepared by scholars with deep expertise in their subjects. For example, since I write and teach about writing, I often need to consult the best reference sources to ensure that my recommendations about word usage are correct. Similarly, as an attorney in the business of giving legal advice and writing litigation briefs, I consult Black’s Law Dictionary rather than Google to check my understanding of unfamiliar legal terms.

For most information-lookup tasks for which people consult reference works, however, superficiality is acceptable. When I encounter a rare word in a book on Kindle, I can highlight the word to see its definition, and that’s good enough for my purpose of learning a new word and understanding the sentence.

That’s one reason why Wikipedia has turned out to be so successful. When the site first became popular, I remember it being spoken of with mistrust and disdain because any amateur can edit its pages. But the site turned out to be accurate enough for most purposes, even if you can’t rely on it as a scholarly source.

ChatGPT has made the process of looking up and compiling information much easier than ever before. If your goal is to educate yourself or create study materials for high school and college students who are still acquiring broad familiarity with a subject, ChatGPT has already superseded all other methods I know for compiling study guides and other learning materials.

Here are a few examples of how I’ve used ChatGPT to create my own study and reference resources for subjects in which I am a relative beginner — decoding Hebrew script (that is, learning to pronounce it without necessarily understanding it), learning rhetorical figures, reading a book about linguistics, and learning unusual vocabulary found in literature (currently, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights).

Four examples of using ChatGPT as a learning aid

Example 1: Learning literary vocabulary

My query to ChatGPT:

For each of the words below, provide a concise definition of the word as well as two examples of the word being used in literature:

• counterpane

• forsythia

• paratactic

• purdah

• seraglio

Portion of ChatGPT’s response:

Counterpane: a bedspread or coverlet; Examples from literature:

“She pulled up the counterpane to her chin, and curled her feet inside the sheet, feeling a kind of exhilaration she could not explain, as if she had swallowed a happy pill.” - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Half of a Yellow Sun”

“I lay down and pulled the counterpane over my face. The last thing I remember was hearing the wind howling outside.” - Emily Bronte, “Wuthering Heights”

Example 2: Learning to decode Hebrew

My query to ChatGPT:

For each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, tell me the most common Hebrew word used in Passover blessings. Include vowel symbols.

Portion of ChatGPT’s response:

Sure, here are the most common Hebrew words used in Passover blessings starting with each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, including vowel symbols:

• א - אֲבָהָת יִשְׂרָאֵל (avahat Yisrael) - Father of Israel

• ב - בְּרוּכָה הִיא (brucha hi) - blessed is she

• ג - גְּאוּלָתֵנוּ (geulatenu) - our redemption

• ד - דַּיֵנוּ (dayenu) - it would have been enough for us

• ה - הַגָּפֶן (hagafen) - the vine

Example 3: Understanding a technical term

My query to ChatGPT:

What does Walter Nash mean by the term “syntactic recursion” in his book Designs in Prose: A Study of Compositional Problems and Methods?

Portion of ChatGPT’s response:

Syntactic recursion is a concept used in the field of linguistics and cognitive science to describe the ability of human language users to generate complex sentences through embedding clauses within clauses. This property of language is considered to be an important component of our cognitive and linguistic abilities, and it allows us to communicate an infinite variety of ideas and thoughts.

Example 4: Studying rhetorical figures

My query to ChatGPT:

For each of the following rhetorical figures, provide a definition and two examples from literature: Anacoluthon, Anadiplosis, Anaphora, Anastrophe

Portion of ChatGPT’s response:

Anadiplosis: This is a figure of speech in which the last word of a phrase or clause becomes the first word of the next one.

Example 1: “The crime was common, common be the pain” - The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope

Example 2: “When I give, I give myself” - Song of Myself by Walt Whitman

As a teacher, researcher, and self-educator, I’m blown away by this technology and hope to see it put to educational uses such as those I’ve demonstrated above. In his recent op-ed about ChatGPT (beautifully titled “Our New Promethean Moment”), Thomas Friedman included a quote that perfectly describes the experience of using ChatGPT for the first time:

To observe an A.I. system — its software, microchips and connectivity — produce that level of originality in multiple languages in just seconds each time, well, the first thing that came to mind was the observation by the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and the author of Elegant Legal Writing (forthcoming, U. Cal. Press 2024). He is also an adjunct legal writing professor at LMU Loyola School of Law and former research fellow in AI Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. Second Stage is his personal blog.

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In Algorithms to Live By, Brian Christian and Thomas L. Griffiths argue that the artificial intelligence concept of an exploration-exploitation tradeoff is a useful framework for thinking about decisions we make out of habit. For example, Los Angeles has more good restaurants than I could try in a lifetime. But when I go out to breakfast, chances are that I'm going to one of my four favorite breakfast spots. I’ll be happy with my meal, but if these remain more or less the only four breakfast places I go to in Los Angeles, I'll likely miss out on places that I would like even more, and I'll lose the pleasure of variety.

So, back to music. Taking my cue from President Obama, who puts out an annual list of music he has been listening to, here are the best finds from my year of listening:

Sources of music discovery

- RateYourMusic.com

- Pitchfork Album Reviews

- Spotify’s recommendation algorithms

Music I liked that was released in 2022

Albums

(Ordered alphabetically, with favorites asterisked. Genre labels courtesy of the RateYourMusic.com community):

*Alvvays, Blue Rev [indie pop / shoegaze]
*Dry Cleaning, Stumpwork [post-punk, indie rock] — notably "Kwenchy Kups" and "Gary Ashby"
Alex G, God Save the Animals [indie rock] — notably "Runner"
Arcade Fire, We [art rock / indie rock]
Bartees Strange, Farm to Table [indie rock] — notably "Wretched"
*Bear's Den, Blue Hours [indie rock]
Big Thief, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You [indie folk]
Billy Eilish, Guitar Songs [singer-songwriter, contemporary folk]
Black Country, New Road, Ants From Up There [art rock, post-rock]
Carly Rae Jepsen, The Loneliest Time [dance-pop]
CASTLEBEAT, Half Life [dream pop / hypnagogic pop] — notably "Looking for Something" and "Research"
Florence and the Machine, Dance Fever (Live at Madison Square Garden) [indie rock] — notably "King"
How to Be Dead, Inersophobia: The Fear That Everything Will Stay Exactly the Same [Midwest emo / indietronica] — notably "100 Things to Say Before You Die"
Kurt Vile, Watch My Moves [folk rock]
Metric, Formentera [alternative dance / indie pop]
Of Monsters and Men, Tíu [indie rock / indie pop] — notably "Visitor"
Pinegrove, 11:11 [indie rock / alt-country]
Regina Spektor, Becoming All Alone [chamber pop]
Shannen Moser, The Sun Still Seems to Move [contemporary folk]
Soccer Mommy, Sometimes, Forever [indie rock] — notably "Still"

Singles

Men I Trust, "Billy Toppy" [post-punk]
*The National feat. Bon Iver, "Weird Goodbyes" [indie rock]

Other artists discovered

Anais Mitchell [folk pop / Americana] — notably the original cast recording of Hadestown
Another Michael [indie pop] — notably "New Music"
Billy Strings [progressive bluegrass]
Bonny Light Horseman [Americana / contemporary folk]
Brambles [ambient / modern classical] — notably Charcoal
Broken Social Scene [indie rock / indie pop] — notably "1972" and “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl”
Car Seat Headrest [slacker rock / indie rock] — notably "Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales" and "Sober to Death" from Twin Fantasy
Clem Leek [ambient / modern classical] — notably Rest
Emperor X [singer-songwriter / slacker rock] — notably "Erica Western Transport"
Frightened Rabbit [indie rock / indie pop]
Katie Pruitt [singer-songwriter / contemporary country] — notably "Expectations"
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard [psychedelic rock] — notably "Magenta Mountain"
Nora Brown
Phoebe Bridgers [singer-songwriter / indie pop] — notably "Killer + The Sound"
Sam Fender [heartland rock / indie rock]
Silver Jews [indie rock / slacker rock] — notably "Random Rules" and "How to Rent a Room"
Silversun Pickups [indie rock / alternative rock] — notably "Panic Switch"
Snail Mail [indie rock / indietronica] — notably "Headlock" and "Madonna"
Talking Heads [new wave / post-punk] — notably "Naive Melody (This Must Be The Place)"
Taylor Swift [pop rock] — notably "exile (feat. Bon Iver)"
The Beths [indie rock / power pop] — notably "Expert in a Dying Field"
The Mountain Goats [indie folk / singer-songwriter] — notably "This Year"
The Smiths [jangle pop / indie pop] — notably "There is a Light That Never Goes Out"
Throwing Muses [indie rock / alternative rock] — notably The Real Ramona
*Wheat [indie rock / slowcore] — notably "Don't I Hold You" and Hope and Adams as a whole
Widowspeak [dream pop / indie rock] — notably "Plum"
Young Jesus [indie rock / art pop] — notably “Pattern Doubt”

Old favorites rediscovered

Adrianne Lenker [singer-songwriter] — notably "anything"
Fleetwood Mac [pop rock] — notably Rumours, "Landslide", and The Dance
Jimmy Eat World [alternative rock, emo-pop] — notably Clarity and Integrity Blues
Neko Case [alt-country, singer-songwriter] — notably "Hold On, Hold On"
Pink Floyd [progressive rock] — notably "Comfortably Numb," which used to be my pre-race pump-up song before cross-country and track races.
Third Eye Blind [alternative rock], A Collection — notably "Blinded (When I See You)" and "Motorcycle Drive By"

Other frequent listens

Ben Howard [singer-songwriter / indie folk], Collections from the Whiteout
Bon Iver [art pop / indie folk], notably Bon Iver, Bon Iver but really everything
David Ramirez [singer-songwriter / Americana], We're Not Going Anywhere
Future Islands, As Long As You Are [synthpop / indietronica] — notably "I Knew You" and "Hit the Coast"
Message to Bears [ambient / post-rock], Folding Leaves
My Morning Jacket [indie rock], "One Big Holiday"
Son Volt [alt-country], "Windfall"
Strand of Oaks [indie rock / indie folk], "Weird Ways"
The Killers, Pressure Machine [heartland rock / alt-country] — notably "Quiet Town" and "Pressure Machine"
The New Pornographers [power pop / indie pop], "The Bleeding Heart Show"
The War on Drugs [heartland rock / indie rock], I Don't Live Here Anymore (notably "Occasional Rain" and "Change") and Live Drugs (notably "Pain," "Under the Pressure," and "Eyes to the Wind"), but really all their work since 2017's Lost in the Dream
Vallis Alps [ambient pop / indietronica], "Fading" and "Serity"
Watchhouse (f.k.a. Mandolin Orange) [Americana], Some Jubilee, "Next to Nothing," "New Star"

Ryan McCarl is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP and the author of Elegant Legal Writing (forthcoming, U. Cal. Press 2024). He is also an adjunct legal writing professor at LMU Loyola School of Law and former research fellow in AI Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. Second Stage is his personal blog.

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Sure, Top Gun was the film equivalent of particularly tasty junk food. But the movie executed that role to perfection. At every turn, the movie had the potential to derail itself with cheesiness, but it seemed like the filmmakers were aware of and deftly managed that risk.

I decided to scroll through the Rotten Tomatoes ratings to see what critics were saying about the movie, and my eyes naturally landed on the party pooper in the room, the sole negative reviewer — Jeffrey Overstreet, who concluded:

Top Gun: Maverick is a shiny, well-executed barrage of clichés. And it ends up reinforcing archetypes and values that I see as root causes of destructive afflictions in our culture. As much fun as it is when a familiar formula is well-executed, this movie is also an altar to America’s obsession with youthfulness, its exaltation of white super-men (showing people of color as inferior), its worship of heavy artillery, its insistence that we not think much about the consequences of violence, its permissiveness toward what we now wisely call “toxic masculinity,” its adoration for recklessness rather than integrity, and (sigh) its objectification of women as trophies.

Damn it, he is right. But should we allow that to ruin the fun?

When I look back on the experience of watching the movie, I recall fleeting experiences of unease at the film’s glorification of war and hypermasculinity — in which the ideal man is represented as a tall, muscled bro who lives for outdoor thrills, spends his free time at the gym or beach, welcomes physical combat and roughhousing, and doesn’t do much reading or thinking. That’s an archetype that excludes me (a bisexual who reads poetry and won’t ride a roller coaster) and caused me discomfort for most of my life as I tried to reconcile my preferences with those of the men around me. There is no place for me in Top Gun’s world.

I still had a hell of a lot of fun watching the movie, however. Many of our escapist pastimes can’t stand up to critical scrutiny, and some totter on the edge of being indefensible. The first example that comes to mind is American football. It’s hard to defend a sport that beats the brains out of young men — most often young men who come from low-income communities and lack access to educational opportunities. Nevertheless, I’ll watch every Michigan football game this fall, just as I have every fall since my infancy in Ann Arbor when I was carried to games in a backpack.

One approach to dealing with such dissonance is to hold fast to one’s values and abstain. Another is to compartmentalize, putting intellectual and political considerations out of one’s mind for long enough to have fun and participate in the community spectacle. The remaining options — of not thinking about these difficulties at all, or (much worse) of belittling those who do — are forms of weakness that should be rejected.

(Photo by NASA on Unsplash)

Ryan McCarl

Five Supreme Court justices are preparing to eliminate women’s constitutional right to decide for themselves, in consultation with their physicians, whether to continue an early-stage pregnancy. This will allow Republicans to enact laws throwing reproductive health professionals and the women they serve in jail.

Almost fifty years ago, in Roe v. Wade, the Court struck down a Texas statute that made abortion at any stage a crime. Conservative activists, animated by a mystical belief in fetal personhood, have fought for decades to restore such criminal penalties for abortion. The Court is preparing to grant them their wish.

In Republican-run states, each woman’s individual circumstances, healthcare needs, and personal values will be rendered irrelevant as their power to make reproductive decisions is transferred to the government. Republicans will elevate the supposed rights of a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus above those of the pregnant woman. The effect of these abortion bans will be to treat women as government incubators and conscript their bodies to the conservative cause.

Conservatives do not see this as an encroachment on liberty. Rights to bodily autonomy and privacy interfere with the conservative project of improving society’s morals by regulating sexual behavior, so conservatives do not recognize or value those rights. Their concept of liberty includes a right for gun aficionados to own semiautomatic weapons, but not a right for women to make their own reproductive decisions in the safety of a doctor’s office rather than in an alley and under threat of criminal prosecution.

Anti-abortion activists claim to believe that at the moment of conception or soon thereafter, a fertilized egg (and later embryo or fetus) acquires personhood and the rights that personhood entails. They say that this entity, which begins as a clump of insentient and unconscious cells and which is wholly dependent on the mother’s body for survival, has a “right to life” that overrides the mother’s right to make decisions about her body free from government interference. They say that terminating this biological potentiality is equivalent to murdering a conscious human being who is part of a family and community.

I question whether such beliefs can be seriously held, but people may believe in any absurdities they like so long as they do not try to force those beliefs upon others.

Unfortunately, social conservatives are rarely satisfied with the live-and-let-live condition of freedom, and they seek to impose their moral code upon others by force. Though presumably they would not want the government forcing them to have abortions, they ask the government to force women to either continue an unwanted pregnancy or face criminal prosecution. But these busybodies who think they are better positioned than individual women to make women’s reproductive decisions are spectators with nothing at stake and no specialized knowledge to offer.

The central task of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system is to limit the power of such meddlers to impose their preferences upon their neighbors. Federal judges guard the limits of government power: the boundary between matters of right and matters of politics. When a decision is reserved to individuals as a matter of constitutional right, third parties who feel strongly about the decision, but do not stand to suffer legal harm if they do not get their way, cannot force their point of view on the individuals most directly concerned.

Once the Supreme Court has eliminated the right to reproductive privacy and placed women at the mercy of fanatics, Republican politicians across the country will declare open season on bodily autonomy. They will introduce police officers into the medical clinic and override individual reproductive health choices with one-size-fits-all regulations. It is a testament to the power of self-deception that these same politicians call themselves champions of limited government.

Ryan McCarl (Home | LinkedIn | Twitter) is a founding partner of Rushing McCarl LLP, the author of Elegant Legal Writing, and a former research fellow at the UCLA School of Law.

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In summer 2019, one of the most serendipitous events of my life occurred: I met attorney and entertainment guru John Rushing in Los Angeles. John is a larger-than-life character — a Texan with an Oxford degree who has sailed to Antarctica and filmed it with virtual-reality cameras. He’s one of those rare individuals who radiates talent and charisma such that when they enter the room, they become the center of the action. When I rack my brain for comparable people, the first one who comes to mind is Bill Clinton — but John comes across as more sincere and caring.

John and I met because he hired me to tutor him for the California Bar Exam. He was already licensed in two other states and had nearly a decade of experience working as an attorney at Sidley Austin LLP and elsewhere, but California’s exam is no joke. John put in full days of intense study and hired me in three-hour increments to talk through practice questions.

When John passed the exam in November, he invited me to a steak dinner at Musso & Frank in Hollywood to propose that we start a firm together. As he jokingly put it, “You’re too smart and I’m too old to work for someone else.” And so Rushing McCarl was born. In the months that followed, we formulated business plans and gradually deepened our commitment to the idea before signing a partnership agreement, building an incredible website, and jumping into the deep end. I’m excited to join Rushing McCarl full-time in July, once my fellowship at UCLA Law ends.

If you’d like to support Rushing McCarl, the best way to help is to keep us in mind for referrals. Another thing that makes a big difference is when people follow us and share our content on social media. We have a blog and are active on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Meetup, and Twitter.

Here’s a video John and I made this week to introduce ourselves:

I’m thrilled to be going into business with John and confident about our future.

Ryan McCarl (LinkedIn | Twitter | Home) is an attorney and educator in Los Angeles who is committed to lifelong learning and growth. If you’d like to receive new Second Stage posts by email, please click the button below to subscribe:

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Driving back from the appointment in Fontana, I passed on listening to audiobooks (Farnsworth’s The Practicing Stoic and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) and blasted music instead. I felt hope for the future, relief at having made it through the pandemic without getting sick, and excitement for approaching events: seeing my family in Michigan for the first time in over a year, traveling to Japan for a long-delayed honeymoon, going to bars and concerts again, etc.

I also took a moment to feel amazed at and grateful for human accomplishment, especially scientific accomplishment. What people do and have done with their minds is astonishing. Developing vaccines for a new disease in just a year was an unprecedented, historic feat, and scientists and their supporters (including the governments that invested in purchasing early doses) pulled it off.

This achievement serves as a useful reminder: we should always be cultivating our minds and turning them toward useful ends. Vaccines were made possible by education, curiosity, and perseverance in the pursuit of understanding.

Ryan McCarl (LinkedIn | Twitter | Blog) is an attorney and educator in Los Angeles who is committed to lifelong learning and growth. If you’d like to receive my new posts by email, please click the button below to subscribe. Subscriptions are free unless you choose to pay:

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I once read a journalist’s tweet opining that people become less open to new music after their early 20s. There may some truth to that — all our tastes tend to calcify as we age — but premature closures of the mind should be resisted. The older we get, the more we need to force ourselves out of our comfort zones and keep exploring.

To that end, I am going to devote some posts in this newsletter to music that I think is worth your time. The first artist I’ll cover is Ben Howard (Home | Wikipedia), because I just received my pre-order of Howard’s new album (Collections from the Whiteout).

To be honest, I don’t love the new album, but I appreciate how Howard continues to experiment. Each of Howard’s albums has been radically different from the others. The two must-buy Howard albums to date are his first and second LPs, Every Kingdom and I Forget Where We Were.

Here are some Howard tracks I would recommend for new listeners. If you don’t like one, try the others:

• “Conrad”

• “Promise”

• “Nica Libres at Dusk”

• “I Forget Where We Were”

• “Far Out”

• “Burgh Island”

Ryan McCarl (LinkedIn | Twitter | Blog) is an attorney and educator in Los Angeles who is committed to lifelong learning and growth. If you’d like to receive my new posts by email, please click the button below to subscribe. Subscriptions are free unless you choose to pay:

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I just attended my second Ohanasi Kagawa Japan–U.S. online conversation event, in which I spoke with a kindergarten teacher, IT professional, and big-data entrepreneur from Osaka, Tokyo, and Yokohama. In each one-on-one session, we spoke for ten minutes in English and ten minutes in Japanese. Topics discussed included:

• Terrace House

• COVID-19: Apparently, only 0.5% of people in Japan have been vaccinated. That doesn’t bode well for our plans to visit Japan in July.

• Kentucky Fried Chicken’s rise, through an ingenious marketing campaign, into Japan’s go-to Christmas meal.

• The fact that Trump visited Japan in 2019 and refused to eat Japanese food, choosing to go with a well-done burger instead.

• Plato, my cat, who jumped into my lap during one of the conversations.

I’m a big fan of this event and its structure. It’s pretty remarkable to be able to have face-to-face conversations with ordinary people across the ocean who are working to improve their English skills. International exchanges of this kind are rare but so important, and I want to seek out more of them.

Relatedly, I’m attending my first Esperanto event via Zoom tomorrow.

Ryan McCarl (LinkedIn | Twitter | Blog) is an attorney and educator in Los Angeles who is committed to lifelong learning and growth. If you’d like to receive my new posts by email, please click the button below to subscribe. Subscriptions are free unless you choose to pay:

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I sometimes tell people that practicing law involves “feeling the fear and doing it anyway,” again and again. You’ve never structured a company before, but that’s what the client needs. You know nothing about hemp genetics, but that’s the client’s industry. You’ve never filed or argued a motion in this particular court, but that’s what the occasion calls for. Your client is depending on you to protect their rights and assets.

There is no choice but to move forward and get the job done. But you’ll do it, you’ll survive, and you’ll grow as a result. And, as I once heard another attorney say, you’ll develop “callouses” related to that part of your practice. Similar tasks will be far easier the next time you need to perform them.

Life is full of experiences like this, of course — this phenomenon isn’t limited to lawyering. Giving a speech, taking an acting or cooking class, trying a new art form, joining a new community, going to a networking event for the first time, speaking a foreign language: in any of these situations, you may not feel fearless. You may feel social anxiety, perfectionism, and self-doubts about your appearance or capabilities.

But if you feel the fear and do it anyway, you’ll grow, and you’ll more fully realize your human potential.

Ryan McCarl (LinkedIn | Twitter | Blog) is an attorney and educator in Los Angeles who is committed to lifelong learning and growth. If you’d like to receive my new posts by email, please click the button below to subscribe. Subscriptions are free unless you choose to pay:

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People who hear of my love for languages sometimes ask me how many languages I speak. I find that question difficult to answer because the answer fluctuates. In particular, while reading skills seem to remain mostly stable over time, speaking skills deteriorate if you don’t use them.

Further, if you study several languages, they can interfere with each other — for example, I was speaking Japanese last night and said está bien for “that’s good” because I had spoken Spanish a few hours earlier.

Luckily, items in one’s long-term memory that go dormant can be revived. I haven’t used Italian extensively since 2006, when I studied abroad in Pisa, so my spoken Italian skills feel rusty almost to the point of being lost. But I know that with a few weeks of review and a few conversations in Italian or days in Italy, I would recover most of those skills.

I am not as courageous about speaking other languages as I was in high school or college. I’m afraid of the accumulated rust. Social anxiety and feelings of perfectionism — e.g., “I’m not as good as I once was, so maybe I shouldn’t try” — lead me to shy away from speaking opportunities.

But I’ve recently been on a language kick and felt a rekindling of my old desire to be a polyglot. A few weeks ago, therefore, I visited Meetup.com to find local Japanese and Esperanto speaking groups, and I signed up for a Japan–U.S. networking event.

That event took place last night. Nora asked beforehand whether I was excited, and the honest answer was “no.” I was terrified, as I haven’t spoken Japanese in years and didn’t want to feel incompetent. I caught myself looking for excuses to avoid the event.

But I went through with it anyway, and I had a blast. The event used innovative software called Remo in which you can visit different virtual tables and talk with whoever is sitting at each table. I ended up having fun conversations with two people across the ocean: a Japanese homemaker and a retiree who cleans parks. We switched between Japanese and English so that each of us could practice the other’s language.

At first, I felt that frustrating barrier in which you know what you want to say, but can’t find the deep-buried words. You feel you have forgotten even the basics. But as I listened to my Japanese conversation partners, I started thinking again in the language, and the dam suddenly broke: I could speak again. The skill is still there in my mental “muscle memory.”

I didn’t just reawaken my Japanese skills, however. I overcame fear and stepped outside my comfort zone. That is the only way to grow.

Ryan McCarl is an attorney and educator in Los Angeles who is committed to lifelong learning and growth. If you’d like to receive my new posts by email, please click the button below to subscribe. Subscriptions are free unless you choose to pay:

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The most frustrating stage in the life of many projects involves waiting for a third party to take action. As Tom Petty sang, “The waiting is the hardest part.”

Waiting is on my mind right now because I have a few writing projects under publisher review, and the publication process is maddeningly slow and uncommunicative.

The norm for writers is to not hear anything back from the publishers to whom one submits work. If you do hear back, it is usually through a form rejection notice. Here are the possible publisher responses to a writing submission, in order of likelihood:

1. No response or acknowledgment at all.

2. A form acknowledgment that the submission has been received, followed by silence.

3. A form rejection notice.

4. A personal (human-written) rejection notice, perhaps with an explanation.

5. A statement from a human that your work is being seriously considered, and that the publisher will get back to you at some time in the future.

6. An acceptance notice.

I have two book proposals — Elegant Legal Writing as well as Fluent Kanji, a guide to learning Japanese script — under review with academic publishers. So I am waiting anxiously for news but have little information about how long the reviews should take.

Waiting has always been difficult for me, but here is my coping strategy: while one project is stuck at the “waiting” stage, move a different project forward or start a new one. Sometimes I can parlay my frustration at waiting into a burst of productive energy.

Ryan McCarl is an attorney and educator in Los Angeles who is committed to lifelong learning and growth. If you’d like to receive my new posts by email, please click the button below to subscribe. Subscriptions are free unless you choose to pay:

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I am currently writing a book called Elegant Legal Writing that is based on the curriculum I developed for my Advanced Legal Writing course at UCLA Law. While I work to get the proposal accepted for publication, I’ve decided to start building an audience for the book and sharing its content in a new blog. Though the blog and book are targeted at lawyers and law students, they will include many general-purpose writing and productivity tips that non-lawyers may find valuable.

I encourage you to visit the blog and subscribe. Here are the posts so far:

• Elegant legal writing: how lawyers can convey their ideas in a clear, logical, and inviting manner

• Why should lawyers invest in their writing skills?

• Convey your ideas straightforwardly

Ryan McCarl is an attorney and educator in Los Angeles who is committed to lifelong learning and growth. If you’d like to receive my new posts by email, please click the button below to subscribe. Subscriptions are free unless you choose to pay:

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Today, I submitted a paper called The Limits of Law and AI to 79 law journals. It doesn't feel like a masterpiece, but it is done, and sometimes “done” has to be good enough; some projects just need to be gotten off one’s desk and out the door.

The paper is the result of eighteen months or so of research about artificial intelligence and its applications in the legal profession.

Most writers struggle with perfectionism, and I am no exception. Writers commonly fear that they don’t know enough about a subject to write about it, that a project doesn’t really matter, that what they've written about is uninteresting, or that a piece isn’t up to par for one reason or another. Such negative thoughts can prevent us from picking up the pen in the first place, or from finally putting the pen down and sending a piece out for publication.

In the case of my law-and-AI paper, I experienced a bit of impostor syndrome because I lack the mathematical background to understand how machine learning and neural network tools work in a technically in-depth way. I understand them pretty well, but not in the same way a computer scientist working in the field understands them. This is a very different feeling than the feeling of expertise I have about certain legal issues or matters of writing style. My AI expertise, such as it is, feels shallow by comparison. Some aspects of that subject will always be beyond my intellectual capabilities.

Of course, one need not fully understand the inner mathematical workings of neural networks in order to write about them or form an intelligent opinion about them. So I was eventually able to complete my paper, which includes a nontechnical explanation of how neural networks and other machine-learning technologies work. But I had to drag the paper across the finish line.

At times, writing it felt like writing my M.A. thesis in 2008, an experience I described in my memoir manuscript Timeblind as follows:

Every day, I would show up at the international relations building and take out my laptop. Before starting to type, I would comb the political blogs for polls and news about the 2008 election—I believed to a certainty that Barack Obama would win and wanted to confirm that belief again and again. Then I would pick up a copy of the New York Times and skim the whole thing.

Finally I would force myself to start the day’s work. I tried to hammer the thesis into existence, dragging it from my mind sentence by reluctant sentence, berating myself constantly for the resistance and restlessness I felt.

I sometimes feel a paralyzing aversion to tasks that feel overwhelming and unmanageable. I can force myself to do them, but I put them off as long as possible, and even the smallest step toward completing them requires the brute force of willpower rooted in extrinsic motivations such as the threat of public failure.

Tasks that begin as adventures can take on a cloud of negativity. The more times we sit down intending to work on a project and then turn away from it, walking away after a few hours having made no progress and produced nothing but feelings of guilt and self-doubt, the more unpleasant the task becomes and the harder it is to begin next time.

By pausing to recognize how difficult this particular project has been for me, I can give myself permission to feel good about getting it off my desk and into the publication market. Sometimes, finishing itself is the accomplishment.

For those who do not know me, I am an attorney and educator in Los Angeles who is committed to lifelong learning and growth. If you’d like to receive my new posts by email, please click the button below to subscribe. Subscriptions are free unless you choose to pay:

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