On Saturdays, I reserve this space to celebrate the writing of other people. I shared a whole lot of wonderful articles over the course of the last twelve months. As I usually do as one year gives way to another, I am picking a half dozen of my favorites. These are the pieces that stuck with me the most. Rather than offer further reflections, each selection is accompanied by an excerpt. Their words are better than mine.

An Open Letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Who Thinks My Daughter Is a Tragedy by Anaïs Godard

She is five. She does not speak in sentences yet, but she knows how to answer a joke with a smirk. She organizes her markers by color, then chaos, then color again. She plays baseball without rules, which is probably the right way to play it. She hums when she’s thinking. She hums a lot.

When another child’s upset—before the adults notice, before the child even cries—she takes their hand. She leans her forehead against theirs, gently, like she’s checking for a fever only she can feel.

Disney Used to Be for Everyone. Not Anymore. by Daniel Currell

More than ever before, Disney and companies like it have access to data showing them who is willing to spend what for which experiences. “Disney is an analytics company that happens to do movies and parks,” Mr. Testa said.

Over my three-decade-long consulting career, I saw industry after industry use this kind of information to shift their focus to the big spenders in its customer base. Banks, retailers, hotels, airlines, credit card issuers, manufacturers and universities all learned that their richest customers didn’t just spend more than the rest; they spent multiples more. Many companies found that if they didn’t focus on their richest customers, they couldn’t provide competitive salaries to staff members, increase returns to shareholders and attract capital to invest in new products. Whereas in the 1970s and before, the revenue driving corporate profits came from the middle class, by the 1990s it was clear that the big money was at the top.

Dear Tilly Norwood: Some Blunt Advice, Actress to “Actress,” From Betty Gilpin by Betty Gilpin

Anyway, I was at this theater festival in a two-hander play — oof, lots to explain here, Tilly. Sorry if I’m going too fast. A “play” is when “actors” (flesh-bags of milk with wrinkles and secrets) stand on, like … a wooden floor? A floor that’s higher than the carpeted floor. Those elevated, wrinkled milkbags then yell and whisper at each other. Don’t worry. They went to college for it! Sometimes there are hats. I’m not explaining it right. I want you to be excited about being an actor. I promise, it’s the best.

Searching for Bobbie Gentry by Sarah Kendzior

One would think that after “Ode to Billie Joe” — a commercial success and lyrical masterpiece housed in the University of Mississippi library next to Faulkner — Bobbie Gentry would be allowed to do whatever she wanted.

To believe this is to not understand how women are treated in creative industries. When a woman has an unconventional hit, the reaction is often to try to contain her, even sabotage her. Success does not protect female writers — not even from their own publishers.

The Republican Plot to Un-Educate America by Astra Taylor and Eleni Schirmer

At their best, colleges and universities are not just places where people get trained in a skill or earn a degree; they enable people to grapple with bigger questions—to find out who they are, to unlock what they want to be and do, to discover how the world is made, and to dream how it could be remade differently. This is why authoritarians find education so threatening, and why the reconciliation bill must be understood as a strike against our freedom to question, learn, and choose our fates. Even, or especially, when that process challenges authority.

a famine of beauty by Carrie Courogen

The personal connections we make to artists do not make us unique or special; I am not the only person to ever harbor an obsession with Robert Redford. I suppose anyone who loves film loves him, and I suppose anyone who loves him has a story about how his work influenced them in some way big or small. And yet, our personal connections with artists are unique and special. I am not the only girl to ever love Robert Redford, but I am who I am because I loved him, and that people know that detail about me tells me, in some small way, that they care for me, too.