On Linda Goodman, Liz Greene, and the quiet seduction of making sense of love

The Aesthetics of Compatibility: Celestial Narratives of the Heart 

There is something faintly illicit—almost decadent—about reading astrology as literature rather than an instruction manual: The trio of Love Signs, Astrology for Lovers, and Charting Love with Astrology sit at that threshold: between guidance and gossip, between myth and mirror. They are not just books about love; they are artifacts of how we have wanted love to make sense. 

To read Love Signs is to enter a maximalist cosmos where romance is both destiny and drama. Linda Goodman writes like an aunt who has seen too much and refuses to be boring about it. The book’s structure—every sign paired with every other—feels almost compulsive, as if love could be solved through sheer thoroughness. And yet, what lingers is not the taxonomy but the tone: lush, excessive, occasionally unhinged. Goodman doesn’t simply describe compatibility; she narrates it, layering emotional prediction with moral suggestion, as if each relationship were already a story waiting to be confirmed. The appeal lies in its intimacy. It promises that your private chaos has already been written somewhere, that even your worst patterns have a celestial precedent. As one overview notes, the book explores “each possible combination of signs…in detail,” offering insight into everything from conflict to desire.

Liz Greene’s Astrology for Lovers reads like a corrective—cooler, more psychological, quietly skeptical of astrology’s own clichés. Greene is interested not in who you should date, but in why you want what you want. Her approach reframes astrology as a language of inner life rather than external fate. Each sign becomes less a personality type than a pattern of longing, complete with contradictions and shadow selves. She draws on myth and psychology, mapping desire as something shaped by unconscious drives as much as planetary alignments.

Reading Greene after Goodman feels like stepping out of a velvet-draped parlor into a therapist’s office. The drama is still there, but it has been internalized. Love is no longer something that happens to you; it is something you participate in, often against your own better judgment. Greene’s lovers are not star-crossed—they are self-sabotaging, self-seeking, self-aware. And somehow, that makes the stakes feel higher. 

Then there is Charting Love with Astrology, a more contemporary entry that synthesizes both impulses: the narrative pleasure of Goodman and the analytical rigor of Greene. It leans into the language of charts—synastry, aspects, houses—treating love as a system to be mapped rather than a mystery to be endured. Where Goodman offers archetypes and Greene offers psychology, this book offers structure. It assumes that love is legible, if only you learn how to read it properly. 

There has always been a kind of clinical precision to Charlie Puth’s music—a sense that every note was placed under a microscope before being allowed to exist. That exactness built his career, but it also created a distance. On Whatever’s Clever!, released March 27, 2026, that distance begins to collapse.

What’s striking about this album isn’t that it abandons polish—it doesn’t—but that it reframes it. The perfection is still there, buried in the arrangements, in the harmonic choices, in the way each track seems to breathe with quiet intentionality. The difference is that the music no longer feels like it’s striving to prove anything. It feels lived-in.

The sonic palette leans warm and familiar: soft rock textures, fluid basslines, restrained percussion, and a kind of sun-faded gloss that evokes an earlier era of pop without fully slipping into imitation. It’s a deliberate move away from the hyper-digital sharpness that defined much of Puth’s earlier work. Here, edges blur. Timing loosens. Space is allowed to exist.

That sense of space changes how the songs function. Where his past hits often hinged on tightly engineered hooks, Whatever’s Clever! unfolds more gradually. The melodies are still memorable, but they don’t insist on themselves. Instead, they drift, sometimes circling a feeling rather than resolving it. This can make the album feel less immediate, but also more revealing over time, and there’s a noticeable shift in perspective running through the record, one that suggests a life recalibrated outside the studio. Themes of change, responsibility, and self-examination appear not as declarations but as undercurrents. The writing feels closer to observation than performance—less about presenting a finished emotion and more about tracing its shape as it develops.

Some returns arrive quietly, less like a reappearance and more like a shift in atmosphere you gradually realize has been there all along. The Veldt have always operated in that space: elusive, textural, emotionally exacting. Their new single, “Black Girl,” arrives not as a reintroduction, but as a deepening.

For a band whose legacy has often been framed through the language of firsts—first-wave shoegaze, early architects of a sound too fluid to be pinned down—the more interesting story has always been about their resistance to stasis. Even now, decades removed from their North Carolina origins, The Veldt remain committed to a kind of sonic permeability. “Black Girl” drifts in on that ethos, pulling from dream pop’s haze while grounding itself in something more corporeal: movement, determination, a body in motion against constraint.

There’s a quiet defiance in the track’s construction. It doesn’t explode so much as it expands, echoing the narrative it draws from—a young dancer reaching toward something beyond her circumstances. The band doesn’t romanticize that struggle; instead, they score it with patience. Layers accumulate. Vocals hover just above the instrumentation, never overpowering it, as if insisting that presence itself is enough. This sense of accumulation carries into the broader Spanakopita EP, a project that feels deliberately porous. Part new material, part excavation, it resists the tidy cohesion expected of a traditional release. Instead, it behaves more like an archive in motion—fragments, experiments, and fully realized pieces coexisting without hierarchy. The decision to make it available primarily as a tour-only CD underscores this intimacy. You have to be there. You have to step into their world, however briefly, to access it.

Interview by Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer

There is a particular gravity to filmmakers who have not only shaped a field, but insisted on its integrity—across decades, political cycles, and aesthetic shifts that threaten to flatten form into trend. 

Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith have never chased trends.

In 2026, the co-founders of Firelight Media were named Black Public Media’s Trailblazers—an honor recognizing not only their films, but the infrastructure they’ve built to sustain others. The award, BPM’s most prestigious, will be presented at the PitchBLACK Awards on April 30th as part of a broader convening that continues to fund and platform Black filmmakers at a moment when such support is increasingly precarious.

For over two decades, Firelight has functioned as both incubator and intervention: a space where underrepresented filmmakers are resourced, mentored, and, crucially, taken seriously. Through its Documentary Lab alone, the organization has helped launch the careers of more than 100 filmmakers of color.

Nelson, a MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the National Humanities Medal, remains one of the most rigorous visual historians of Black life in America—his films resisting spectacle in favor of depth, refusing compression in an era defined by speed. Smith, a producer and strategist, has helped build the scaffolding that allows those stories—and others—to exist. Their recognition arrives in a moment of contraction. Public funding has thinned, with recent federal rescissions stripping critical resources from organizations like Black Public Media. Streamers have narrowed their appetites. The language of “content” continues to erode distinctions between rigor and volume, truth and approximation.

What remains, as Nelson and Smith articulate with precision, is not optimism—but clarity.

And, perhaps more importantly, resistance.

Documentary Filmmaking in a Time of Contraction

Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer: Thank you both for being here—and congratulations on being named Black Public Media’s 2026 Trailblazers. I want to begin broadly: how would you describe the current climate of documentary filmmaking, particularly for African American filmmakers seeking funding?

Stanley Nelson: The landscape has shifted. Streamers have narrowed their focus—primarily to true crime and celebrity-driven stories—and they’re open about that. At the same time, public funding has been reduced. We’ve seen institutions like Black Public Media lose critical support. That combination makes it much harder to finance substantive documentary work.

Marcia Smith: There’s still money, but it depends on what you want to do. If you’re trying to tell stories about history, culture, or contemporary issues, those projects are harder to fund. And even when opportunities exist, structural barriers remain.

On Market Demands and Creative Integrity

Graham-Mayer: If you were offered funding for a true crime project, would you take it? And could you make it your own?

Nelson: It depends on the story. Some projects in that space can still explore meaningful ideas—race, justice, power. But filmmakers are rarely given both funding and full creative control.

Smith: More often, you’re deciding whether to spend years developing something that doesn’t fully align with your interests.

Graham-Mayer: There seemed to be a surge of opportunity around 2020. Did that moment lead to lasting change?

Smith: It created a brief opening. There was recognition, and there were more resources—but it didn’t last.

Nelson: We saw it. The calls came in—and then they stopped.

Advice for Emerging Filmmakers

Graham-Mayer: What guidance would you offer younger filmmakers navigating this moment?

The album opens not with a statement, but with a drift—into texture, into space, into something quietly unfolding. Instead, Marie Krüttli builds a world that reveals itself gradually—through texture, through atmosphere, through the slow unfolding of feeling into sound. On No Fear No Gear, written, composed, and produced by Krüttli herself, the album carries the intimacy of authorship at every level. It feels held, considered, and yet unguarded. If anything, this is a record about removing the guard entirely.

Krüttli’s relationship to the song is fluid here. Melody is present—often strikingly so—but it is never fixed in place. Each track behaves like an environment rather than a structure, something you move through rather than arrive at. Sound stretches outward: lush, then sparse; aqueous, then brittle; intimate, then suddenly expansive. The arrangements breathe with a kind of tidal logic, receding just as they threaten to overwhelm.

What she is shaping is not just music, but space. And within that space, emotion is allowed to exist without hierarchy. Sung primarily in French, her mother tongue, the album feels close to the body—close to breath, to sensation, to the small, internal shifts that often resist translation. There is a clarity to the emotional language here, but it is not didactic. It is felt before it is understood, absorbed rather than decoded.

Love, in No Fear No Gear, is not singular. It fractures, multiplies, contradicts itself. Desire sits beside fear. Devotion beside uncertainty. Motherhood beside the question of whether to mother at all. On “Mother and/or Not,” Krüttli approaches that question without resolution. The song holds tension rather than dissolving it—the pull between care and autonomy, between expectation and self-preservation. There is guilt here, but also defiance: a quiet insistence that identity does not collapse into role. It is one of the album’s most vulnerable gestures precisely because it refuses to conclude.

Guest Author: Audrey Jackson

There is a moment in the making of almost anything when the work stops feeling like yours. It happens differently for everyone. For the painter it might arrive mid-canvas, when the image has moved far enough from the original vision that neither version seems true anymore. For the writer it comes in revision, that strange grief of encountering a sentence you once loved and no longer recognizing the person who wrote it. For the musician it is sometimes the recording itself: the work fixed, final, suddenly separate from the body that produced it.

This estrangement is not failure. It is, in fact, the work telling you it is alive.

The Process Is Not the Product

We live inside a culture that is deeply invested in outcomes. The finished novel. The released album. The gallery opening. The cultural object that can be held, reviewed, purchased, remembered. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to complete things, with wanting your work to exist in the world where other people can encounter it. But the process, the actual daily texture of making, is almost never discussed with the same seriousness as the product. We talk about what artists made. We rarely talk about what it cost them to sit down, again, and begin.

Process is unglamorous. It is Tuesday morning with coffee going cold and a blank page that refuses to cooperate. It is the sketch you made at midnight that seemed, in the low light, like the beginning of something real, and looks, in the morning, like nothing in particular. It is the repetition. The return. The discipline of caring about a thing before anyone else does.

And yet process is where the self actually lives. The finished work belongs to the world. The making belongs to you.

What the Body Knows

There is a reason artists talk about their work in physical terms. The painter who says she feels when a composition is right. The poet who knows a line has landed because something releases in his chest. The choreographer who can only find the movement by moving, who cannot think her way to the answer from a chair. The body holds what the mind cannot organize. This is one of the deep truths of creative practice: that intelligence is not only cognitive, that knowing is distributed through the whole self, and that some of the most important artistic decisions are made below the threshold of conscious reasoning.

This is also why creative work is so hard to explain to people who don’t do it. The process resists the language of strategy. You cannot reverse-engineer presence. You cannot optimize your way to a poem that breaks someone open. The work asks for something more total: a willingness to be uncertain, to not know, to stay in the room with the unresolved thing until it begins to resolve itself.

The artist is not someone who has answers. The artist is someone who has learned to live inside the question.

Loss & Longing is the second installment in the Publik / Private “V’ Series—an intimate gathering of fourteen poets whose work spans centuries, continents, languages, and forms. Edited by Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer, this collection traces the delicate, unbreakable braid between love and absence, devotion and distance, memory and desire.

From the aching tenderness of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the spiritual urgency of Rainer Maria Rilke to the sensual immediacy of Bernadette Mayer and the metaphysical transcendence of John Donne, these poems refuse easy consolation. Here, longing is not something to overcome—it is something to inhabit.

‘V’ Series: Loss & Longing

Read here.