Happy Friday! I have sifted through my in-tray of cuts, open tabs and brain debris, to kick off your weekend.
Below the paywall today: micro-dosing joy; summer clichés; my love for the endangered 2nd class stamp; my favourite nonagenarian; yet more summer reading lists (I can’t get enough); the column I think should be prescribed reading; and—my mind is still blown—does the body actually keep the score?
A quick events update for any Londoners:
❋ I’m hosting a panel for Toast (that divinely serene brand that makes me feel calm the second I step in store) on Friday 5th September at 7pm. I’ll be in conversation with biologist and author of Explaining Humans, Dr Camilla Pang, and poet and actress, Greta Bellamacina, on the topic of living curiously. I’m so looking forward to this.
❋ And on Sunday 16th September, I’ll be interviewing Jung Chang—the author of one of the biggest books of the 90s, Wild Swans—about her new novel Fly, Wild Swans, at The Royal Geographic Society for How To Academy. I’m thrilled to have an excuse to re-read Wild Swans, too. (In the spirit of killing multiple birds—swans?—with one stone, we will be doing Wild Swans for September Book Chat.)
This is such a good piece on something I had been grasping to name recently: dermorexia, which is the obsession with flawless skin. Jess DeFino apparently coined the term but I heard of it via Amelia Abraham’s piece for The Observer, where she explores this new obsession. Dermorexia holds a similar profile to body dysmorphic disorder and while it only affects 2% of the population, I think it is ambiently touching so many of us: it is, quite literally, the water we now swim—or wash our faces—in. One dermatologist told Abraham that she’d recently seen a 12-year-old, who’d come in with a bag of 40 products with a combined value “of a small family holiday”. As DeFino told me in 2022, when I interviewed her about the myth of good skin, we are not meant to have flawless skin. Particularly, not a teenager.
This is a really interesting longread on Constance Marten, by Clair Willis for The LRB. It offers a different (much deeper) angle than the news coverage of this tragic case and is worth reading in its entirety.
“Her combative behaviour in the courtroom probably did her no favours with the jury, who might have preferred a tearful defendant expressing regret and repentance. And it certainly annoyed the prosecuting barristers, who increasingly spoke of her with derision when the jury (and the judge) were out of the room. She was too posh for her own good, too used to having her own way. I often thought it could have gone differently. The higher courts in England are constructed around privilege, and Marten came from the right background. She knew these public-school types from childhood and should have been able to fit in, to make her privilege work for her. But she seemed determined to sabotage her social advantage. She treated the barristers with disdain (including her own barristers). She refused to acknowledge that anyone had the right to judge her, which is a tricky position to take in a courtroom. The court fought back.”
My god, this made me laugh. Anthony Hopkins in that bloody awful Skims face shapewear that everyone’s writing about.
I am a huge admirer of Isaac Chotiner’s work for The New Yorker, particularly his Q&A column (The New Yorker’s exec editor, Michael Luo, calls it “being Chotinered”) and he has been publishing excellent work during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, interviewing key figures you wouldn’t otherwise hear from in the West, about things that do not make sense—like the Israeli govt’s denial of mass starvation in Gaza. Last week he interviewed Amit Segal, the chief political correspondent for Israel’s Channel 12—one of Israel’s mot prominent journalists and a fierce Netanyahu-ist—about what he thinks is happening in Gaza, if not starvation. Devastating, as you would expect, but extremely revealing, too.
Walter Goggins is every bit as earnest and tender as I’d imagined. In this heavenly interview with Emma John back in April, he explains how he was raised by “seven women” (his mother, his grandmother, his aunts), was terrified of having a son (“I’ll let him down”), finds being separated from said son “extremely painful” and was once shamed by the grandfather of a girl he was dating for looking at him too intensely.
“I had someone recently say to me, “Your energy is way too intense for me.’ I thought about responding, ‘Well, your energy isn’t intense enough for me!’ But I held back. I said, ‘I understand that, everybody’s not for everybody. But I am where I am, and I love it.’”
Heart twanggg. His son is a lucky boy. (Sidenote: I still can’t get over that he has a glasses brand called Goggins Goggles—marketing genius.)
I fell down a Google hole last week of celebrities who have Anglicised their names (because Hollywood is a basic bitch and cannot allow for cultural diversity). You likely already know of Jennifer Aniston (Anastasakis), but did you know Natalie Portman was Neta-Lee Hershlag, Eric Bana was Eric Banadinović, Nina Dobrev was Nikolina Konstantinova Dobreva and George Clooney was George Cloonopolous? One of those is false, you have to guess which. Also, Bruno Mars was Peter Hernandez and Joaquin Phoenix was Joaquín Bottom. (Yes, the whole family changed their surname from ‘Bottom’ to ‘Phoenix’ and I can quite understand.) I can still remember when I found out that Marilyn Monroe was Norma Jean Baker. It blew my mind.
Speaking of Eric Bana, his new Netflix series, Untamed, where he plays a special agent investigating a series of mysterious deaths in Yosemite, is a solid binge. Not massively unique and by inevitably rather sad, but stunning Yosemite scenery and stunning Eric Bana.
And I thought TOXIC, a debut feature from Saulė Bliuvaitė about a bunch of Lithuanian teenagers in a working class suburb trying to become models was absolutely brilliant. It’s about poverty, girlhood and the coercive fashion industry. There’s a rich history of very young models being sent to America from Eastern Europe and treated appallingly—this film feels like the bit before that. It reminded me of Andrea Arnold’s work, but a bit more stylised.
Lolled at Grazia’s recent feature on the top summer clichés. Of the 11 I can see (I’ve only ripped out 2 pages, I think there were more) I tick 4.