Friday Five: February 28, 2025

Final Friday of February

Feb 28, 2025

Hi Consumers. I desperately want to write an essay here about how social media is making people anti-social but I’ve talked myself down from it because it feels trite. I’m only telling you this because I’ll use this confession to hold myself accountable to writing that essay, just not today. Instead, we’ll ease into the Friday Five, your weekly round-up of cathartic, joyful, content from across the digital universe.

Live Performance: Roberta Flack’s cover of “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face,” was the no. 1 single of 1972, and 53 years later, the song is just as beautiful, stirring, and haunting as it was then. She passed away this week and I keep turning back to this performance. Has anyone looked so beautiful and perfect while belting their heart out? Watching her get lost in the song and the melody feels like a secret we shouldn’t be in on, but it’s a gift that we get to witness it all these years later. May her memory be a blessing.

Relatedly, the comments on that video are so touching. In an era where comments on the internet are either “RECIPE????” or people feeling bold behind their internet anonymity (I’m telling you that newsletter on social will come soon), I miss the purity of online ‘safe spaces’ where people are just genuinely themselves. Here are a few special ones:

Czech Out This Good News: My beautiful friend and brilliant fellow Substacker

Aminatou Sow

recently shared an incredible story about some Czech beavers. These brilliant beavs banded together and did what they did best: made a dam. Little did they know (or did they?!!), they saved taxpayers $1.2 million by making their dam in a site where a long-stalled dam was planned. My favorite quote might be“The beavers began working before the excavators could even break ground.”

Relatedly, more beavers: Have you ever seen a beaver interact in the wild? This beaver, Tulip, is a rescue and she had to be taken into a home. Tulip started making a dam with random household objects!! Beavers just do that. They make dams, they solve problems, they have extremely sharp teeth that are basically made of metal because of the iron content, they are the unsung heroes of the animal kingdom.

Three things I love about this video: 1) Tulip cries like a little baby all the time 2) the wonderful wildlife rescuer + narrator says, “Everything a beaver does is to ensure they have what they need for survival” and there’s a lesson for all of us in there 3) Tulip wears an infant onesie when she has a skin infection around 2:20 mins in, and wears t-shirts after. So cute.

Chic Postage Stamps (will this be the first and last time this is a category in the newsletter? watch this space): I am easing my way into being into stamps, maybe because it feels like an ‘old-person thing’, maybe because I collected Barbies as a child and I feel the need to unlearn having precious things that don’t have a practical use, maybe because I don’t want more things in general. You should know that I cherish my Gwen Ifill stamps and only use them for special mail.

Anyway, on a recent trip to Paris, I happened upon a beautiful, family-run shop that existed to organize and curate people’s stamp collections, and they happened to sell cool stamps from around the world. This is when I started to feel some kind of way about stamps, and there’s probably another newsletter where I will show off my haul. The point here is the French are annoyingly good at making cool postage stamps. They made baguette stamps that were scratch ‘n’ stiff last year, and for Valentine’s Day this year, they made stamps featuring Pierre Hermé’s famous Ispahan - his rose, lychee and raspberry macaron.

doriegreenspan

A post shared by @doriegreenspan

How cute are these? Also, Ispahan (Isfahan in English) is Iran’s former capital and home to beautiful damask roses that make for divine rosewater, hence the name of this treat.

Joyful Internet Content:

Look at this braided rhubarb from

Ruby Bhogal

! She is beauty, she is grace, she is in one million plaits (pronounced incorrectly with an American accent to preserve the rhyme).

rubybhogal