Little joys for 2026
Control the flow of electricity. Visit outer space. Explore croissant.
Here are a few humble hints for increasing your exuberance in 2026. I did a similar post for 2024, but skipped 2025 for reasons that elude me. So we’ll call this a biennial event.
Discover cinnamon-sugar croissant
Halve a croissant longitudinally and pan-fry it in butter.
Add cinnamon-sugar.
Eat.
When this idea first made landfall—”What if I made cinnamon-sugar toast using a croissant instead”—there was a rush of adrenaline so powerful I can only compare it to getting barreled.
Build a theremin
Last year Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote an essay1 about an intellectual crisis he endured after realizing that he didn’t know what a computer was—
“Forty years on [from when I first encountered a computer], the technology in the gray box is everywhere, shaping my life in every way, which is strange in itself, but perhaps stranger is the fact that I have never cared about it, just taken it for granted and seamlessly incorporated it into my life. Not once in those forty years have I turned my attention to technology and tried to understand it, how it works in itself, how it works in me. It’s as if I had moved to a foreign country and not bothered to learn its language, as if I am content with not understanding what is happening around me and just settling for my own little world.”
I won’t divulge how Knausgaard resolved his crisis, but it involved traveling 2,000 miles to a Greek island. A simpler way to get a rudimentary handle on computers would be to build a theremin with this kit. It shows you how to use a transistor to manipulate the flow of electricity in a circuit—which is a useful launchpad for computer self-education.
I know the linked kit is designed for children, but I had a patchy education and this thing met me on my level. The bonus of a theremin is that you wind up with a musical instrument that you can use to torture your neighbors.
As an aside, my first exposure to electronic musical instruments came through Suzanne Ciani, which I now understand is like saying “Frank Gehry built my dollhouse” or “Alexander McQueen designed my onesies.” To child-Molly, Suzanne was simply a woman who lived in the same town as I did—a woman whose coolness resulted not from innovations in electronic music but because she gave me a job when I was 12!
Of the job I remember nothing. Of Suzanne I remember: a) very nice person; b) made a beautiful from-scratch spaghetti sauce.
Read some books slowly
There are books that, when they are cracked, initiate an unfolding of the reader’s sensibilities. It is thrilling when this happens. You can almost physically feel your body opening to welcome this foreign book-shaped object into your being. My most recent instance was Haunts of the Black Masseur.
When I encounter one of these rare books I read it at a snail’s pace. Maybe 6 pages per hour. Unbelievably slow. The impulse is to speed through and greedily accumulate pages on the verso side but when you’re moving through a spectacular landscape, don’t you instinctively slow (not quicken) your pace to admire it? Certain kinds of reading belong to the category of “experiences too hallowed / intense to be rushed.”
In same category: prayer, kissing.
Travel to outer space and back
This is a suggestion for easy (and free) programming if you happen to be in NYC over the next couple of months. I’m calling it “To Outer Space and Back!”
There are two stops on your journey. First, find your way to The Drawing Center at 35 Wooster and enjoy the exhibit on UFOs and paranormal phenomena. The theme is loosely interpreted by people representing every slot on the sanity spectrum.
My favorite was a piece called Study for Moral/Volumes/Verbing/The/Unmind, by Shusaku Arakawa (1977). Pictured below with its creator. This is one where the technical skill and visual elan of the artist are equal to the urgency of the transmission. Not always the case with paranormal art.
Many of the diagrams involve frantic arrows and swirls. Theosophy is present.
Anyway, after vibrating through two rooms crammed with cosmic conveyance, walk a few blocks north to return to your home planet, via Walter de Maria’s Earth Room at 141 Wooster. This is a gallery filled with soil and nothing else. It was installed in 1977.
You may not take photographs of Walter de Maria’s soil. Its aroma drifts into the corridor that you cross to reach the installation; if you pause there with eyes shut you can dwell in earth’s most hospitable odor— and find yourself reminded that soil is not so much a substance as it is a process.
Feel free to ask the attendant questions, as I did, although you may not want to repeat mine, which are transcribed here—
How often is the soil watered?
About once a month.
Is the soil turned?
Yes. With a rake.
Do you get to do those things, or does somebody else do them?
I do both!
Do things grow in the soil?
Yes. Sprouts come up regularly. And sometimes mushrooms. I remove them.
What is the insect situation?
There are centipedes, but never to a degree that is a problem. Oh, and in summer we get fruit gnats. But not too many.
And then, there were some questions I wanted to ask but thought of too late. These included, How often do people surreptitiously scatter seeds across the soil? For example, have you ever noticed a spontaneous crop of marigolds or something that would lead you to suspect intervention? What is the pH of the soil?
Both exhibits are free.
Keep a running list of Recent Questions
When you have a non-urgent question, write it down and do not Google it. Instead, permit the question to loiter in a notebook or on a piece of paper taped to the wall. I’ll tell you why in a moment. Here are three of my Recent Questions:
When were scissors invented?
Which animals figure most often in fairy tales and why? (Toads seem disproportionately present, eg)
Why did thousands of years elapse between the invention of paper and the invention of toilet paper?
Ok. The reason to keep a running list is because if you do, you’ll unlock a powerful suctioning force that delivers answers to your door. Every time I write down a question, I stumble into the answer in the form of a book or expert or other superior-to-Google entity. It usually takes a few months, which adds the spice of delayed gratification.
Of course you’ll say, “Molly, what you are describing is a well-known cognitive backdoor.” But this little game doesn’t hinge on awareness; that’s why I included the example questions above! It’s not as though I learned about toilet paper yesterday.
For now I am content to consider it a mysterious mechanism, and will state for the record that I’m a reliable narrator who doesn’t believe in chemtrails / Illuminati / has no opinions about jet fuel acting on steel beams / etc.
Try it! The worst that can happen is nothing.
