The power of human connection
Happy Valentine’s Day, which began as a matchmaking lottery in ancient Rome
To the cynic, Valentine’s Day is a crass, over-commercialized Hallmark holiday on which Americans will shell out some $25 billion this year. To the romantic, Valentine’s Day is all Instagram hearts, “Luv U” candies, and buying some of the nearly 250 million roses grown annually for the occasion to give to a loved one.
To mark the day, we asked a handful of publication editors on Medium who regularly feature essays about love and relationships to share some of their favorites. Covering themes ranging from adoption to grief to the inspirational power of a one-eyed, songless bird, the selected essays don’t skew either cynical or conventionally romantic. To the extent they share a theme, they are all “stories about the power of human connection,” as my colleague Ariel Meadow Stallings put it.
We love that.
To read all of the stories, with the editors’ notes on why they selected them, click here.
What else we’re reading
- Writing on the morning after the Super Bowl, Raven J. James noted that Usher’s performance was an ode to the southern Black experience, featuring unmistakable elements of southern Black culture, from the HBCU marching band (Jackson State University’s Sonic Boom of the South) to fraternity rituals “akin to an HBCU homecoming
event” to roller skating. The result, James notes, was “a love song dedicated to Atlanta, the South, and Black joy.” - Also writing the day after the Super Bowl — a.k.a. the day Beyoncé announced two new songs and teased an upcoming country album—Whitney Alese explains to anyone who might have found the artist’s choices surprising why both house music and country music are, in fact, deeply relevant to Beyoncé. “She isn’t randomly choosing genres of music to try as some bored artist who needs something new,” Alese writes. “She is intentionally revisiting the music of her own story, from the dance rhythms of House music she learned to love through her Uncle Johnny in Act I to now the Country music she grew up with in Texas for Act II.” Beyoncé’s artistry is a testament to the fact that Black people made country music what it is today.
- In “The Rubik’s Cube,” Nir Zicherman doesn’t just learn how to solve the infamously maddening puzzle with his daughter, he explores the math that underlies the solutions. Did you know that any of the 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible ways the colors on a Rubik’s Cube can be distributed can be solved in less than two dozen moves? Right, neither did we.
From the archives
Because my kids are the appropriate age, and we’re in the middle of the 2023–2024 college admissions cycle, I hear lots of chatter about that subject. That’s what inspired me to re-read “So What If They Did? Thoughts On Affirmative Action,” the impassioned defense of that practice Savala Nolan wrote last year in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling against it. The line I’ll never forget: “Affirmative action is deserved. There is no shame in benefiting from medicine, there’s just the truth that medicine was necessary.”
Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Written by Jon Gluck
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb, Harris Sockel, & Carly Rose Gillis
Every weekday, the Medium Daily Edition offers useful, human perspectives to help you become a better reader, writer, and thinker.
Want to receive this as an email? Sign up here.
Want to browse the best of Medium? Explore staff picks.
Unlock a library of unlimited knowledge and insight with a Medium membership.
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com
