Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

Resource Roundup

You may be feeling helpless right now in the face of what feels like a mountain of injustice, violence, and fear. That feeling is understandable—and intentional. Those who are enacting state-sanctioned violence are counting on your overwhelm, your paralysis, and your inaction.

Great news, though—there are more of us than there are of them. You don’t have to do everything. In fact, the very best way to defeat authoritarian violence is for each of us to pick one thing and commit to it. So let’s do that, today, right now. Pick one thing, commit to it, and do it. Here are a list of options:

• Sign a petition to Minnesota officials for an eviction moratorium during federal occupation 
• Minneapolis Rapid Response Emergency Defense Fund
• Support Near North, Minneapolis Families Affected by ICE Raids
• Support South High School Minneapolis Families
• Support Keith Porter’s Family
• Learn the identities of your representatives. Call them and show up at their offices and interrupt them at dinner to demand that they protect your community. 
• Attend your local school board meetings and local city council meetings. Find out where to start at civicsearch.org.
• Take first responder training and legal observer training and de-escalation training.
• Observe and record state violence to provide evidence that will protect those who are being targeted by authoritarianism. 
• Sign up for your local ICE Rapid Response teams.
• For a more comprehensive round-up of specific ways to help folks in Minnesota, check out this Resource Hub document put together by @ziibiing 

No matter what you do, now is a good time to shore up your media literacy. Click here to download a pdf of some media literacy basics, dive into some deeper questions here, and continue learning fundamental skills of media literacy here.

I just got back from Los Angeles, where I spent a couple of days running catering and craft services for a beloved friend’s film shoot. It was surreal to have such an idyllic experience of artistic collaboration. The people who were working on this film were interesting, kind, thoughtful, and absolutely shockingly brilliant. The film itself is funny and poignant and represents a level of artistic accomplishment I wouldn’t have thought possible. I am so fortunate to have gotten to be part of the endeavor.

I went into the shoot hoping to create a minimal amount of waste. I shopped at Costco (my beloved) and tried to keep the menu streamlined. Here are some of the things I cooked:

• Salad Feast! This is a meal structure I love, involving several different types of salad (click that link to read my truly dire confession about wedge salads), scaled up or down to meet the degree of appetite that must be sated. For this one, I made a curried chicken salad; a roasted-garlic pasta salad; a lemony herby potato salad; a four-bean chili lime salad; and a cucumber-avocado salad with furikake. 
• Tomato bisque and roasted carrot-ginger soup with crusty french bread.
• Quartered toasty pitas stuffed with chicken salad and cucumber salad.
• Pasta in red sauce (made with the leftover pasta salad and leftover tomato bisque as a base) with roasted garlic and marinated lemon-herb artichoke hearts.
• Sticky garlic glazed chicken.
• Blueberry-mango cobbler with a candied lemon zest oat crumble.
• A fuckton, and I mean truly a fuckton, of hard boiled eggs.

It was a blast. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I can’t wait to get to shout at all of you about this incredible film my friend has made when the time comes.

Make Me Better is a Most Anticipated Book of 2026!

According to… 

• Goodreads
• CrimeReads
• BookPage
• Men’s Health
• Literary Hub

Pre-order it now at Bookshop.org or wherever you get your books!

Currently Reading: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

A note from Gailey: I read this a million years ago and it didn’t land with me. In the time since, everyone on earth has told me I would love it. So I’m listening to the audiobook now and… everyone on earth was right. It rips. Tartt’s narration makes all the difference – she’s a master of voice and tonal nuance. I’m having the time of my life.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

Featured New Release: Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy

Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Forceful. Hurting. Perceptive. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of all: Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesn’t know why she wants him. Is it his passion? His life experience? The fact that he knows books and films and things that she doesn’t? Or is it purer than that, rooted in their unlikely connection, their kindred spirits, the similar filter with which they each take in the world around them? Or, perhaps, it’s just enough that he sees her when no one else does.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

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In the meantime, remember: Do what you can. Care for yourself and the people around you. Believe that the world can be better than it is now. Never give up.

-gailey