After a long break, we’re starting 2024 with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous 1841 essay “Circles.”

This month, we’re discussing Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” and Anne Fadiman’s “Frog.”

We’ll be discussing Shayla Love’s piece for Nautilus that was published back in December. The article is about a new therapy that promises to alleviate the pain of traumatic memories like a breakup or other heartbreak. Sounding a little like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Let’s talk it out at “Book” Club.

For this last “Book” Club of the year, we’ll be discussing Sara Spitz’s article for Vice, “The Tamagotchi Breeder on Her 65th Generation of the Digital Pet.” We’ll cover topics like the difference between passion and obsession, what digital pets teach us about needs, and whether we should be making our technology so lifelike.

July is an animal-themed “Book” Club. We’ll be reading two articles about elephants and monkeys that tell us a lot about what it means to be human.

This month, we’re discussing the evolution of the Dawson crying GIF.

At Facebook, rules around who gets banned from using the platform changed based on Mark Zuckerberg’s whims.

This month, we’ll be discussing wtf is up with J.K. Rowling, and her journey from being the world’s most beloved to the world’s most reviled children’s book author. Will we be talking a bunch about J.K.’s Twitter account? You betcha!

At our last meeting, we talked a bit about how the lack of a local news outlet in Stockton, CA, might have lead to the rise of an alternative news platform, which played a part in Michael Tubbs losing his mayoral re-election bit. In that discussion, we briefly touched on the impact paywalls are likely having on people’s access to quality news and information. So this week we’re going to read Nathan J. Robinson’s take on the subject, published in the August 2020 issue of Current Affairs.