Just recommendations of women artists from different corners of the world that matter to me today.

xx

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This Week’s Recommendations

Mercedes Sosa: The Voice of Latin America - I’m getting away with a lot in this recommendation—I’m recommending both a beautiful documentary and one of Latin America’s musical icon’s greatest discography. Mercedes Sosa was one of the most important voices in Latin American folk music, and it is extraordinary to see her career, talent and influence persevere through the dictatorships in Argentina, illness, and exile. There’s a scene toward the end of Mercedes at a Pablo Milanès concert, joining him for a surprise duet of “Años”, which brings tears to my eyes every time.

How to Get to Heaven from Belfast - From the creator of Derry Girls, this weird, funny, and yet surprisingly poignant show was a total surprise to me. I wasn’t really sure what was going on most of the time. I typically hate “whodunnit” shows. And yet this was gripping—frankly not because the plot was particularly mesmerizing, but rather because it was refreshing to see three women confront younger versions of themselves, and learn to hold them even as things get… very weird…? around their older selves.

Kelly Khumalo - I’ve been listening to “Dance Conmigo” (and at times dancing on sidewalks to it) since I first started Xeno almost eight years ago. But only recently have I ventured into more of South African singer/songwriter, Kelly Khumano'’s music, prompted by the release of her latest album, Rebirth. In Rebirth, Khumano ventures deeper, singing in Zulu, and carrying a variety of musical traditions from Afro Pop to gospel and even Spanish rhythms from Northern Africa.

Apologies for falling off schedule this week and last. It has taken me some time to find my feet under me after last weekend’s global events. As some of you know, I spent the better part of four formative years in Abu Dhabi. This morning, I saw a post from AJ+ journalist, Yara Elmjouie, where he described feeling tremendous grief over seeing footage of Tehran in flames. He described Tehran as “the one character here I know most personally. It feels like losing someone I know.” I cannot imagine the extent of his grief. It was beautiful language, though, for coming to terms with the idea that while all acts of war against humans are heinous, there is also great loss when the places that have held us are attacked or under threat.

I know and believe that it is in these moments that holding culture and art and stories could not be more important. But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that, in the shock and absurdity of the last week, that exercise has felt futile. Why talk about books or movies? Why talk about music? Will I be seen as out of touch? Will anyone be around to take these recommendations to heart? The temptation to stay glued to the headlines, or, worse still, dissociate with Bridgerton is sharp.

I feel sad, yes, and I feel wildered. But here I am. Let’s watch something different this weekend.

Dominique

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This Week’s Recommendations

Standing Up - From the creator of one of my favourite shows, “Call My Agent”, Fanny Herrero’s Standing Up follows four friends trying to make it in the French stand up underground scene. It’s a short series, and its light and delightful, but grounded in what it really makes to “make it” as a comedian.

It Was Just an Accident - Given the events of the last week, I felt remiss not to include this film, by Jafar Panahi, legendary Iranian director who has boldly used his craft of film-making to make sharp social and political commentary about his home country. In It Was Just an Accident, the main characters, all former political prisoners, are forced to confront a long-standing revenge fantasy: what would I do if I had the man who imprisoned me under my will? Panahi strikes an incredible balancing act with this movie: it keeps you both uncomfortable and entertained. If that holding that tension in your body for an hour and change feels like a stretch too far for this moment, I’d recommend Panahi’s Taxi, instead.

Dana Salah - Under the stage name King Deco, Jordanian-born Dana Salah started her career as a DJ in Brooklyn and as a songwriter for other artists and TV advertising. She was gaining some success performing her own songs written in English, until one day, during COVID, she realized she wanted to write in her native tongue. She wrote the song linked above, “Weino”, which became a resounding success. From there, Salah has worked to braid the sounds of her Palestinian ancestry with modern vocals and beats.

For Lent this year, I decided to try adding something (meditation) to my life, rather than abstaining or removing something. I shared this with my dentist on Wednesday, and she responded, “will God be okay with that?”, before promptly telling me all about the various forms of meditation that she practices and how she recommends transcendental meditation if I want to achieve the meditative state quickly. She ended her spiel by saying she doesn’t do Lent. She’s Jewish.

I’m new to Lent. This is the third year that I observe it. Two years ago, I gave up alcohol for forty days. Last year, I gave up coffee. I’ve been about 85% successful (I faltered with coffee because I went to Argentina with my dad on the last week of Lent and the temptations were just too great). When I first gave up alcohol two years ago, I took to Lent because it seemed to be a convenient excuse to develop habits I’ve long wanted to incorporate into my life. But frankly, I was also motivated to observe Lent because, after living in Abu Dhabi for four years, I felt a little envious of those who observe Ramadan. I admire the community, the spirituality, and the annual routine of reflection among others. I wanted my own version of that.

I’ve struggled to convince myself that I can make meditation a part of my life. I think there’s a part of me that worries I might become weird or annoying, that I might suddenly be “that girl who meditates”. But perhaps I’m just worried about what might happen in the space that is created—the void!—when I decide to sit. What thoughts might enter my psyche? What will I learn about what my body and spirit want? I do keep myself too busy.

Anyway, ahead of another big snowstorm in New York City this weekend, here are a few recommendations. Two of them are very in-keeping with the meditative state toward which I aspire, and the third is probably more attuned to where my mind is typically, but it certainly deals with a different form of space.

‘Til next time.

This Week’s Recommendations

Erland Cooper - Erland Cooper is a Scottish composer with an uncanny ability to convey, in music, what it might be like to walk among the hills and lakes of the Scottish countryside. There’s nostalgia but also a profound rootedness in his compositions—it is as if he has the ability to hold, in notes, the way the light slips through embroidered curtains in the afternoon, or how the smell of toast rises from the kitchen, or the crunch of mist beneath your shoe when you step outside on a cold November morning. In 2021, Cooper buried the only existing copy of the master magnetic tape of his first classical album—a violin concerto in Orkney—and deleted all digital files. He left a treasure hunt of clues for fans (and his record label, ha!). A year and half later, the tape was found by two amateur sleuths. It dried out on public display in record shops in Scotland for another year and a half. It was released and premiered exactly as it sounds from the earth. The record, in collaboration with nature, topped British classical charts.

All We Imagine as Light - Prabha, a nurse living in Mumbai, one day receives a surprising gift from her estranged husband in the mail. He lives in Germany, the movie tells us, while she’s making her way through the enormity in Mumbai on buses and rails and on foot, every day, piecing together a life. Anu, her younger roommate, is in love, and when she looks at Prabha, she wonders, how could you have married someone you barely know? Anu also weaves through the city, but on a different quest: how do I spend more time with this boy, whom I love, but with whom I am not meant to be? This is a soft, subtle movie that stayed with me long after I watched it.

A Girl and an Astronaut - I love a good, ambitious but badly accomplished TV show. A Girl and an Astronaut is a perfect show when you want to watch something not that serious, when you want to escape the realm of the possible. This show moves back and forth in time: we start in the future, when a capsule launched into space arrives thirty years after it was expected, with the body of a young astronaut, alive, that has not aged more than a few days than when he departed earth. And then we move back in time, to the days before the fateful launch, where we’re excited to learn what went wrong. Come for the two handsome Polish astronauts who attempt to woo a warm, laughing young woman with red hair. Stay for the existential questions that inevitably arise when we realize we’re all just hanging out on an enormous, fiery, floating rock.

Olympic-Related BSKY Thing of the Week

Hm, I’m realizing just how useful the term “tweet” is, and how the new alternative platforms don’t have their own equivalent.

Happy Valentine’s Day. I have a headache so I’ll just stick to my recommendations this week.

Hug yourself and yours.

This Week’s Recommendations

Envious - This Argentine TV show begins and returns to the psychoanalyst’s office. The main character, Vicky, is a recently single 40-something-year-old looks around and just sees happy couples. She’s loud, colourful, insistent, and a little annoying, and she begins to ask herself, will I always be alone? This show shows that love doesn’t have to be perfect to be meaningful. It can just be, and once it is, you’ll figure it out along the way.

Juan Gabriel: I Must, I Can, I Will - I’m getting away with a lot with this recommendation. This short Netflix series is a poignant profile of one of Mexico’s most important artists, so, in a way, I’m also suggesting that you revisit JuanGa’s discography. The documentary, though, beautifully captures the creation of Juan Gabriel—the artistic persona of Alberto Aguilar Valadez—and the highs and low of his extraordinary career.

Rita Indiana - And finally, staying on the American continent (see Bad Bunny’s declaration last weekend), and also staying on the theme of double-threat recommendations, here’s Rita Indiana. Rita Indiana is both a writer and singer-songwriter from Republica Dominicana. I saw her in conversation with the Pulitzer Prize winning writer, Cristina Rivera Garza, this week at the Center for Fiction and was amazed to learn she’s very tall and she asks extraordinary questions. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by either discovery since her books and music reach far beyond the constraints of any one genre and tradition, and help you see Caribbean history anew.

Dog of the Week

No explanation necessary.

I’m not sure how much I have to say to you today. That happens sometimes, which is why this is a newsletter of recommendations and not my thoughts, like other newsletters that I’ve started and then stopped (because of the mounting pressure of having things to say!). Perhaps today I just share Xeno’s founding purpose (or remind those of you who have been around, and might already know).

When I first landed in New York City, fresh from four years floating in cosmopolitanism, world-leader-ism, and “whoa the world is so much more than I imagined”-ism, I was surprised to find myself around new people. The newness of the people wasn’t about the types of people, but rather their thoughts. Though New York City was, is, among the most cosmopolitan cities in the United States (perhaps the world), I was struck by how self-referential it was. What happened to the world, out there, as I had come to know it?

I was twenty-two and, of course, I thought that all the critical theory I had learned through my humanities degree had bestowed upon me the mission to “change the world”. I was outraged to see, playing out before me, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that intellectuals and scholars from formerly colonized societies must operate with a kind of dual vision, as opposed to their counterparts in the “colonial center”. In the “periphery,” thinkers must be fluent in both their own traditions and in European thought, because European concepts, categories, and historical narratives have become universal reference points. But the expectation doesn’t go the other way: when writing about European and other colonial “centers”, thinkers don’t need to engage with thinking from the periphery. They have all they need.

What happens, I wondered, if you flipped things? What happens if you can’t refer to the colonial “center”? What happens if you can only write, think, or speak from and about the periphery? Where might we go? And so Xeno was born: a publication that, for the most part, refused to center stories, news, and art from today’s colonial “center” (namely, the United States).

It’s amusing to think back on this philosophy, almost ten years later. We weren’t perfect, but it was a fun experiment that taught me how relative the boundaries between the center and the periphery really are. I remember fielding queries about stories from Alaska and Puerto Rico, and ultimately deciding they were too proximate to the contiguous United States to fit our worldview. I’m not sure I would decide the same for Puerto Rico today, despite the country’s prominence on the “colonial center” stage this weekend with the “Bunny Bowl”. I also, frankly, don’t know what to do about most of Europe—but it seems like they don’t know what to do with themselves, either.

Anywho, enjoy a set of recommendations of pieces that mostly wish the world were better than it is. See you next week.

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This Week’s Recommendations

424 - This band, hailing from Costa Rica, was first formed on April 24th, 2009—hence the 424. Despite my mind’s best efforts to call them “four-two-four”, they go by “cuatroveinticuatro”, fourtwentyfour in Spanish. Their music is a tight, soft, moody rock, with touches of 90s guitars and 80s synthesizers, perfect for windy mornings, overcast skies, and large sweatshirts. And while I recommend spending most of your time with their original songs, try dipping into their cover of Luis Miguel’s “Chica de Humo” for a bit of lightness.

Eva Lasting - This Netflix-Caracol series tells the story of a bewildered group of young men in Bogotá as they navigate their discomfort when their school shifts from all-male to admitting its first female classmate. Eva, the new classmate, bears tribute to her namesake: she represents temptation, knowledge, curiosity, and daring, all of which had previously felt inaccessible to her bumbling male peers. Alongside Eva, who, at times, veers a little too far into the territory of Hermione, the boys learn to appreciate reading, dancing, writing, politics, and even philosophy. This is a fun, idealistic representation of adolescence, from which we all have a little to learn.

Perfection - I picked this book up last year, like many good books, mostly by chance, on my yearly pilgrimage to Daunt Books. I was taken in, of course, by the mention of the city of Berlin in the flap copy. It is tempting to describe the book’s plot: a couple in Berlin goes through cycles of seeking. Seeking what? That’s where it falls apart. They say they’re looking for meaning, themselves, perhaps. But every time they find the thing they thought they wanted, they’re surprised. Was that not what we wanted after all? The couple floats through choices, anchored by a flimsy belief that if they just keep trying all the things that others around them seem to like, they may also feel as happy as the rest. It is a quietly searing read—as much as I tried to hold myself high and mighty, far from the novel’s pesky protagonists, by the time I got to the end, I couldn’t help but see just how like them I could be.

Word of the Week

Surprisingly, despite receiving a handful of delightful messages about Giant Sloths, it appears that my “Fact of the Week” newsletter prompted a mass exodus (i.e., three people unsubscribed). While it might have been the sheer number of typos that I let slip into the last missive or simply a disdain for emails, I prefer to tell myself that it was The Sloth. So we’ll try something new this week: a word of the week.

‘Til next time.

I didn’t grow up around snow. The first time I saw snow was deep into my college career, on a Spring Break trip. My boots, accustomed to warmer climes though bought in Denmark, couldn’t handle the salt and grime and slush. By the end of the trip, the top tore, exposing sock. Months later, I got them repaired—I think—by a friendly Ukrainian man with an ancient shop on the Upper East Side, and they came back with a bandage of brown leather.

Walking around New York City this week, with its mountains of grey snow frozen under temperatures well below zero in any system, has been an exercise of the imagination. At the office, I heard someone say that this is normal where they’re from—it doesn’t snow that often there, but its so cold that the snow stays for months, and all new snow piles over the old. What would happen if more snow came down, now that this one isn’t melting away? On the sidewalk, I heard someone exclaim, “Oh, how I love Canada in the winter!” I looked up at the skyscrapers, confused. And on some digital platform, I read someone write that it is colder in New York City than in Anchorage, Alaska. Imagine that!

It is tempting to want to be somewhere else. But the somewhere where we are is always becoming someplace different, else. I hardly recognize the land(city)scapes outside my window cloaked in snow. There’s more ice today than yesterday. The snow has taken on all kinds of colors. New pathways are carved into the ice each day so that strollers and walkers can keep rolling. And in three months, this will all be a distant memory. (I hope?)

For all of us who are finding the outside to be too much, here are some recommendations for your weekend. I think each of these represents a “somewhere else” to visit without leaving your bed.

‘Til next time.

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This Week’s Recommendations

Shintaro Sakamoto - Shintaro Sakamoto started his musical career as the frontman of the underground Japanese psychedelic rock band Yura Yura Teikoku. In 2011, after the band broke up, he launched a solo project, with music that was a significant departure from the rock persona he adopted for Yura Yura. His first album, How to Live with a Phantom, is groovy, warm, nostalgic, and playful. I’ve linked to a song from his latest album—the fifth—released only last week, called Yoo-Hoo. Apparently, Shintaro’s guilty pleasure while on tour is drinking beer in the afternoon.

The Elephant Whisperers - This bright, soft, 39.5-minute documentary was produced at the Mudumalai tiger reserve, which is part of the Nilgiri biosphere reserve in Tamil Nadu, India, 30 minutes from where Kartiki Gonsalves, the director, grew up. It portrays a gentle coming-of-age story—human and animal alike—of a couple who take in and care for orphaned elephant calves. Gonsalves, travelling around the region, one day stopped at the reserve and met baby elephant Raghu. His caretaker and co-protagonist of the film, Bomman, encouraged Gonsalves to return, which she did. “The three of us would happily splash along the river, and I would spend hours scrubbing Raghu and rubbing his tongue. He absolutely loves his tongue being rubbed. He enjoyed pulling my hair and splashing around in the water. We would stick our tongues at each other.” The film was inspired by Gonsalves’ love for Raghu.

Things that Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck - I loved Erpenbeck’s Kairos, so when I saw this tiny tome at the nearby bookstore, it was easy to slip it atop the pile of books that were being rung up by a helpful clerk. The book is a small collection of essays, a micro memoir, perhaps, or just jottings from a detailed study of time going by. Each essay is born from an instinct to preserve what is still alive—or perhaps no longer is. It’s a beautiful exercise in holding, gently, to the things that make us, while also appreciating—no, honoring—that the fact of their eventual disappearance is what makes them worth keeping.

Fun Fact of the Week?

In the earlier version of the Xeno File, I used to close the newsletter with a “GIF of the Week”. I considered it, friends, but I realized it was too millennial, too of a past age, and it might hurt my cool girl brand. So, I’m going to experiment with a few things until I find something that can comfortably take the place of that which has now disappeared. This week’s experiment is inspired by my friend Tatiana, and her recent infatuation with the Ice Age.

Sloths, during the ice age, used to be huge! There were variations across species, but the largest were as big as elephants. They prowled around the American continent until about 12,000 years ago, when they became extinct (likely the result of humans (hunting)). There was a population that lived for a little while longer on the Caribbean islands. Radiocarbon dating suggests some fossils in Cuba lived until 1550 BCE, almost 6000 years after their cousins on the mainland disappeared. They ate leaves off trees like giraffes.

Believe it or not, the last time I wrote to you was six years ago. We were two months into the COVID shut down. I was sitting in my home in Mexico City, surrounded by green leaves bright in the early summer sun. The city was the least contaminated I have ever seen it. Most days, I could see the volcanoes—typically shrouded in smog—from my street. As peaceful as my surroundings were, however, on my screens, I saw the world quiver and shake. I watched, for example, the Israeli Army bomb the building that housed the AP, Al Jazeera, and other international news outlet offices in Gaza. Building residents were given an hour to evacuate. This was, at the time, the latest in a long line of asymmetrical escalations of violence against Palestinians at the tail end of Ramadan that year. I watched Colombian citizens restart protests that, temporarily paused by the virus, had begun in 2019. They demanded better social policies. The police shot at them. And, of course, I watched as the virus raged in Mexico and beyond. I remember the ticker counter on the top right corner of the television when the news was on. New deaths and contagions per day. The cumulative sum. It was disorienting.

And yet, here we are, almost six years later. I’m writing to you from my bright apartment in Brooklyn. Outside, the temperature is minus 12°C, and we’re expecting “a motherload of snow”, as a “polar vortex” and “the Blizzard of the century” both creep over the city this weekend. Out there, beyond the cold, the world feels completely… deranged?… again? It’s funny to remember the days of COVID—I earnestly believed that was the “craziest it will ever be”, and yet. I suspect most of you are well-versed in all is and is not happening, so I won’t bother repeating it. I have felt quite wiggly about it all, as I am sure you have, but in moments, I catch a little serenity. The latest bought of serenity has, fortunately, stayed with me a little longer than expected. It was brought about by Annie Ernaux’s The Years, a novel I read for the first time over the no man’s land between Christmas and New Years.

In The Years, Ernaux does something simple but remarkable—she shifts the autobiographical lens, typically focused on an individual, onto a collective. The short novel sketches life, as Ernaux lived it, between 1941 to 2006; the fads, the concerns, the cultural icons, and, most of the time, its anxiety. I was amazed, as I turned each page, to read that almost every “era” that she catalogued had some version of an acute unease: scarcity after WWII, mutually assured destruction, the latest televised war, AIDs, the fall of a world order. I was comforted to learn that along with celebration, sex, and politics, fear was a constant in Ernaux’s life. Yes, things are hard, but they were also hard six years ago, and twenty-two years ago, and forty-five years ago, and sixty-seven years ago before that. I don’t mean to exculpate all that is happening today or that happened yesterday—rather put it in perspective. Some things are worse today, but some things are also much better. When I pay attention to both sides, it is when I’m able to find serenity.

And so, the Xeno File. Rearranging my books last week, it suddenly seemed obvious. It was time to pull this project out of the sock drawer. There’s no better balm to the wiggles and jiggles of the time than to remember we live in a big, beautiful world, and search for beauty, connection and hope in stories, images, and tune. Let’s see how long I keep at this. For now, it's a pleasure to be back in your company (or inbox).

This Week’s Recommendations

Mon Rôvia - Mon Rôvia stylistically takes his name from the city with the same name in Liberia, a country he escaped as an infant, alone. He moved over to this side of the Atlantic, to a country that I cannot name given the conventions of this newsletter, and grew up in there and in the Bahamas. For some years, Mon Rôvia experimented with different genres of music, until one day he posted an acoustic, playful cover of a song on his TikTok, and a friend of his—and now manager—said, “That’s It. Stick to the Ukelele.” His songs are soothing, familiar, but also a little unexpected, perfect to pair with coffee in the morning. Though he hasn’t returned to Liberia, Liberian musicians have begun posting videos interpreting Mon Rôvia’s songs online and the Liberia music awards recently named him outstanding artist of the year for 2025. “It’s been the biggest joy of my life,” he says, “to be welcomed back to a place I didn’t think I would ever be welcomed to.”

The Secret Agent - Nominated for this year’s Best Feature Film by the Academy Awards, The Secret Agent is a masterclass in storytelling. One begins the film feeling rather confused—the title of the film tells me that there should be a Secret Agent, I thought in the opening scene, but I can’t place the protagonist under that title. The movie reveals itself little by little, asking you, the viewer, to stay with it, step further into it, despite never satisfying all you’d wish to know. Aesthetically, the film enraptures; delightfully playful, startlingly graphic, and yet also beautiful.

On the Calculation of Volume I - I don’t know where to begin with this (series of) book(s). I suppose I should start with the basics: the author is Solvej Balle. It is the first of a series of seven books. The plot revolves around a woman, Tara Selter, who discovers that she is stuck in the same day—November 18—while everyone around her seems to inhabit “normal” time. It is Groundhog Day, yes, but only if you introduce Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and existential questions about the meaning and nature of life. Only the first three installments of the series have yet been translated into English—the fourth is due April 14th. I’ll close by saying that time takes on an extraordinary proportion in these novels. You might roll your eyes and say, “another infinite loop of time book?”, but I think that’s what’s so interesting about Balle’s work. She has taken the genre up, I’d argue, as a challenge, and, like her protagonist, is trying to find a way out of it. In each book, we accompany the writer and protagonist on experiment after (unsuccessful) experiment, convinced that we, too, may never escape. But perhaps that’s the point. It isn’t about escaping the genre, but rather learning what all we can do within it.

I’ll see you next time.