You can tell when someone’s been Mel Robbins’d because—like one of my best friends this week—they can’t stop punctuating their sentences with a sanguine ‘let them’. Enough’s enough, I thought, it’s time to explore this viral theory for myself. In lieu of reading the whole book, I chose this podcast episode. I expected it to be naff—or manifest-y, like the ghastly The Secret—but I found it to be sage, sane advice for anxious control freaks. I recommend! (That doesn’t mean it isn’t also ripe for parody: this made me laugh a lot)
Making headlines over the world this week, Monica Lewinsky went on Call Her Daddy (to promote her own podcast, Reclaiming) and said that Clinton should have resigned, or found “a way of staying in office that was not lying and not throwing a young person who was just starting out in the world under the bus”. Sidenote: this was the first full episode of Call Her Daddy I’ve ever listened to. Sidenote 2: how much do you wanna bet Amanda Knox’ll be guesting on Reclaiming?
Tina Brown reflecting on her six and a half years spent editing The New Yorker is positively ambrosial:
“The staff of The New Yorker (and pretty much everyone in the world of print media) saw my appointment as sacrilege. I was, after all, the lady editor who, eleven months before, had put the naked and very pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair. Where was the gravitas? The veteran New Yorker writer George W. S. Trow called me “the girl in the wrong dress.” Garrison Keillor, the hayseed humorist from “Lake Wobegon,” quit. Jamaica Kincaid called me “Stalin in high heels.” (There’s some truth to that one.)”
Great stuff going on at Puck at the moment, like this spicy conversation between Matthew Belloni and Netflix’s Content Chief, Bela Bajaria, which you can also listen to in podcast form1. An old-school ents journalist, Belloni is not afraid to ask the awkward questions, like: Netflix keeps calling itself a prestige platform—so why do they stream so much junk?
The conversation around egg-freezing has become so casual, you’d think it were nothing more than a smear test. As filmmaker Sophia Seymour’s short film, Harvest—on her ambivalence around motherhood and her decision to freeze her eggs—shows, it’s an invasive, expensive and emotional undertaking. Mostly shot in the amniotic-like swimming pool, or her womb-like bed, Seymour is candid about her endeavour, which she imagines as a way to forestall loneliness. “I’m scared to have a baby, scared not to have a baby”, says her friend, in the swimming pool. A meditative, thoughtful short
Fyre Festival is back, despite Billy McFarlane still owing millions for the first. I don’t judge him for attempting a re-brand (I’d totally watch a doc about that Herculean attempt), because to apply normal standards to a mega-scammer would be redundo, but I do judge the people who pay up to $1.1 million for a soggy tent and a piece of stale bread. Unless… as life becomes more convenient, friction becomes the true luxury? After all, Jack Dorsey’s Stoic morning routine sounds about as appealing as Fyre Fest
This week I discovered—with no small amount of sadness—that the translation of ‘penguin’ in Mandarin is not ‘business goose. The internet is codswallop, who knew
Speaking of birds, got a picture of a seagull nicking your ice cream? Upload it to Gulls Eating Stuff, a website set up by ecologist Dr Alice Risely, to figure out the scope of a gull’s diet/ their place in the eco-system. Weirdly excited about contributing to this
I had high hopes for Pussy Island, but Blink Twice (as Zoe Kravitz’s directorial debut was re-named) didn’t land for me. The ending was fun, though
The smartest comment on last week’s thread, which nails why romantasy has become the most popular genre in literature: