If you’ve got a quiet moment this week, here’s a thoughtful radio essay from Tom that explores the intersections of Victorian literature, social conscience, and what it means to truly connect with our fellows.

Yes, it turns out we can be serious sometimes. Please try not to faint.

In this piece, Tom tracks the circumstances that led Charles Dickens to write A Christmas Carol, from his disastrous American tour and the child labor reports that haunted him, to his compulsive night walks through London’s streets where he encountered the cast out and forgotten.

Within this substrate, Tom weaves together Dickens’ personal struggles, the neuroscience of human connection, and an urgent message about what we’ve lost (and must reclaim) in our age of radical isolation and screen-mediated existence.

Consider this our gift to you: a half-hour to slow down and remember that, “no one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.”

Truly, we wish you the very best of the season, and count you among our beloved fellows.

Tom, Mal, & Jordan

PS - For six years running, Jordan has been making compilations on Spotify called Hot Christmas. Here’s the latest.

And here are links to all the others:

Volume 1

Volume 2

Volume 3

Volume 4

Volume 5

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