Good evening! This week I found out that Books+Bits is the No.1 books newsletter in the UK, with 84,000 readers. This feels pretty special for something I started on a whim 2.5 years ago—7 months up the duff with my third child—just because I wanted a place to dump my culture recs that wasn’t Instagram. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It means a lot to be here.
Below the paywall today: two mini essays about 1) what I think people misunderstand about ‘journalistic integrity’ (and my concern for media literacy in general) and 2) why I don’t think everyone leaving legacy media for Substack would actually be a great thing. (I promise it’s not all bad vibes.) Also—gear change—the tracksuit bottoms that I wear every single day to work and could not live without.
I got to tick something off my bucket list last Saturday, when I interviewed former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in London for How To Academy. I enjoyed her memoir on why leadership needs more kindness—although the part I liked the most is about her upbringing, as a Mormon and the daughter of a police offer. (You can see where her sense of duty and service comes from.) I’ve never interviewed someone on stage with such an ardent audience; they clapped after every single thing she said. I felt like I was in the presence of a real celebrity. (The only other time I’ve felt this is when I interviewed Margaret Atwood. I was 38 weeks pregnant and she had to help me off stage.)
Seven years ago, at my mother’s insistence, I had a landline installed at home. I used to airplane my phone all day when I was working and it drove her dotty not being able to get hold of me. (Immediately. Lol.) Unfortunately, once my children started pre-school and everything became Whatsappable, my landline days were over. But I got to thinking about landlines again this week, when I read this cheering piece in The Atlantic by Rheana Murray about why landlines encourage connection and could be the most persuasive thing when it comes to stemming the smartphone tide. I am 100% down for this when my kid turns 10.
"We've really gone from the era of peak TV to the era of personalized [sic] TV” one streamer exec told Business Insider this week, when discussing how AI has changed TV. In the same way that fashion went through a period of monogramming everything (it almost became cooler not to have your initials on your clothing/ tote/ diary), I think we need to resist bespoke TV. It is only by stumbling across something, that we find ourselves open to new ways of thinking, or learn something we know nothing about. Fuck the algo! Let’s invite the friction back in and watch something totally random. I’m taking suggestions.
I recently wrote about Mina Holland’s memoir, Lifeblood. I saw this week that The Observer magazine have extracted part of it. It reads so beautifully, on what it is to mother a desperately ill baby, but also just to mother, period—so I wanted to share it here for anyone interested, but who hasn’t got time to read the whole book.
“In her Neapolitan novels, Elena Ferrante writes about the character Lila’s “dissolving margins”. I had inhaled these books a few years back, but not truly known what she’d meant with this phrase until now. The pressure to be a good mother makes me feel as though I am melting; I can’t contain this sea of worry within the framework of myself. I am all liquid.”
I read this piece about scam farms by Olivia Acland with my jaw dropped. There are over 375,000 people working in scam farms in South East Asia, many of whom have been trafficked there by Chinese crime gangs. Lured there with the promise of a fake job, they are imprisoned in the farm and given a target of $20,000 a month (usually Westerners scammed out of their life savings) netting the crime syndicates $50 billion annually. Acland interviews a sports teacher who left his home in Sierra Leone for what he thought was a well-paid job at an international school in Thailand, only to be starved and tortured at a Burmese scam farm for 11 months. (He is back home now, traumatised and broke, his wife having assumed he was dead.) This is a fascinating, harrowing investigative piece and sensitively reported.
I walked past Saucy Books today on my way to a meeting, and popped in for a gander. It’s London’s first romance bookshop and it’s so fun and inviting. I snorted when I saw the SMUT HUT. Every book has a little sign as to what type of romance it is—single parent, sports romance, queer romance, brother’s best friend, best friend’s brother, holiday romance—etc. I’m not really a romance reader (although weirdly I read Mills & Boon by the dozen aged 9) but if you are, you will be in heaven.
The best longread I read this week was Andrew O’Hagan for The LRB on Joan Didion, explored through four books by, or about, Didion: Notes to John (her private diaries—there has been much controversy over their publication), Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik, The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne (Didion’s brother-in-law) and a biography, The Uptown Local: Joy, Death and Joan Didion by Cory Leadbeater, who was once Didion’s assistant. It strikes me as odd that I have read more about Didion the cultural fig, than I have Didion’s own writing—something she would no doubt hate and which I must remedy at some point—but this piece is so good, so thorough; searching and poetic. What sets this piece apart from the many, many others on Didion, is that O’Hagan knew Didion and he spends much of the piece considering her separated-ness as a person, and in her writing.
“Throughout the meal, the topics would come and go (writers, the theatre, magazines, New York) and she would say single, uncertain things which were somehow crystalline even in their uncertainty. Again, the quality of her listening never varied. Some people are self-conscious in a way that doesn’t reach out to others, but Joan’s self-consciousness made us complicit – it was all part of her beautiful skill.”
