Note: This post is republished with the latest date following any major revision.

The following is a selective and personal collection of media recommendations that I have found worth revisiting in my lifetime. List items appear in no particular order other than that in which they were recalled from memory.

The trope goes, “how do you know if someone is neurodivergent? They’ll tell you.” Yet, if we ever met IRL, there’s only a 0.6% chance that I would have told you I’m autistic because for the remaining 99.4% of my life, I just didn’t know. As it turns out, I’ve been trying to make sense of the world around me with physiology not suited to the majority of it.

David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster is widely praised for its insight and depth. It challenges readers to rethink something as everyday as eating lobster. The essay made me stop and think about two important ideas that I thought deserve more attention. First, the assumption that a lobster’s attempt to escape equates to the human concept of suffering and second, the larger reality of the food chain and circle of life.