Good Sunday! I can’t decide if the weirdest thing I read this week was that male ducks have corkscrew-shaped penises (while lady ducks have spiralling vaginas), or that Jaden Smith is the new creative director of Christian Louboutin. It definitely couldn’t be that Jimmy Kimmel was fired for stating the obvious. And can we all agree that we have reached peak cultural Ozempification? In a newsletter last week, Business Insider referred to the iPhone Air as “an Ozempic iPhone”. Enough already.
Under the paywall today: three podcast recs; psychic motherhood; celebrity momagers; Chinese footnotes, what we aren’t taught about marriage; my YouTube guilty pleasure; and South Korea’s intense fandom.
Last Sunday, I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Jung Chang for How To Academy about her new book, Fly, Wild Swans. A recap of Chang’s extraordinary life growing up in Mao’s China during The Great Famine (man-made, it killed 40 million people), The Great Leap Forward (where all citizens - including children and doctors - spent every day feeding metal into furnaces to make steel) and The Cultural Revolution (a time of tremendous violence, where students beat up teachers, books were confiscated, cinemas were shut, music was banned, and teenagers were put to work destroying flowers/ trees/ grass, because gardens were ‘bourgeois’), the book is also an update, of sorts, on Chang’s life, and work, in the 34 years since she published Wild Swans.
Wild Swans was one of the biggest books of the ‘90s - it has sold 15 million copies globally, despite being banned in China. Fly, Wild Swans, Chang’s fifth book, is a love letter to her mother - whom she cannot visit on her deathbed, as she can no longer visit China - and an exploration of her evolving relationship with her home country (including riveting tidbits about interviewing Imelda Marcos, Henry Kissinger - a weird apologist for CPC - and the offspring of dictators like Castro and Stalin) and China’s return to a capitalist communist dictatorship (an addling oxymoron) under Xi Jinping. We didn’t even touch on the One-Child policy, which I’ve been thinking about constantly since I read Barbara Demick’s astonishing new book. More on that, soon.
Trivia from the week: Leonardo DiCaprio was originally cast as Patrick Bateman (I can see it), Paris Hilton has a Sliving Spa (a mash-up of “slaying” and “living”), Julia Roberts’s birth was paid for by Martin Luther King (love this) and John Wayne’s real name was… Marion.
I gobbled The Girlfriend, an adaption of Michelle Frances’s 2017 thriller, which hits all the notes you want it to hit. Robin Wright (also director) is Laura, the coddling mother of a handsome, spoiled doctor, Daniel, who brings home a new girlfriend, the audaciously bold Cherry. Things escalate in expectedly Freudian ways (with some nice class commentary) to dramatic conclusion. It’s brilliantly well cast, with a very British script and it’s also the first time I’ve seen a character called Pandora. Her first line? (Paraphrasing) “I had a lot of alcohol and narcotics last night”.
This week I discovered History Can’t Hide, the brilliant newsletter from Kahlil Greene, aka ‘the Gen Z historian’, after his piece on Gen Z’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death went viral. Greene has a similar thesis to Ta Nehisi-Coates (that it’s impossible in a post-literate world to say that words are not a form of violence), but I found Greene’s Gen Z angle particularly compelling.
Speaking of a ‘post-literate world’, I borrowed that term from Times columnist James Marriott, who wrote a state of the nation piece on Substack this week, about TikTok politics and our loss of cultural literacy:
“[M]ore and more people are impressed by the kinds of highly emotional charismatic and mystical appeals that were the foundation of power in the age before widespread literacy. Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy.”
I think a lot about how people imagine themselves to be literate in things that require vast amounts of knowledge and nuance (complex lawsuits, contagious disease, geo-political wars), while being no longer literate in things they should be: the difference between a social media platform and a broadsheet newspaper, and a citizen journalist and a broadsheet journalist; how a headline cannot - should not - tell a full story. I don’t agree with some of Marriott’s Haidt-like conclusions around smartphones, but the piece makes some brilliant points. Recommended related reads: Against Empathy by Paul Bloom and Vexed by James Mumford.
Seamus O’Reilly’s column for The Observer magazine is my weekly upper - should it ever end, I would go into mourning. In his latest, he questions Daddy Pig’s (as in, father of Peppa) reputation as feckless and useless.
“Daddy Pig… may be slightly overconfident but is also a warm, caring and attentive father, beloved by his family and seemingly everyone who lives within the topographically demented hills of Peppatown. He’s also a civil engineer, like my own dad, so maybe I’m drawn to forgive warm, caring fathers their foibles if they include the sort of overconfidence which once led my dad to proclaim he “could speak most European languages at a push”, because he’d learned Greek and Latin in school”.
After Martha is a devastating and beautifully written long-read by Paul Laity in the LRB about his daughter, Martha, who was 13 when she died. Her parents, Laity, who is the editor of the LRB, and Merope Mills, executive editor of The Guardian, have written heart-breakingly about their daughter’s entirely avoidable death and worked tirelessly to change the law. With Martha’s Rule, inpatients and their families can request an urgent, independent review when a patient is deteriorating. Had Martha had this (when her parents could see she was going into septic shock), she would still be here today.
A very good interview with Matthew McConaughey by Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian this weekend. You could look at MMcC and think he’s a bit of a cheeseball (he’s just published a book called Poems & Prayers), but when you read about his extraordinary life - he was kidnapped aged 18; his parents got married to each other 3 times; his mother broke the same finger 3 times from prodding his father so vigorously; said father died making love to his mother - you learn there’s a lot more going on under the charming hood. ‘Hate’ and ‘can’t’ were like cuss words in our household. You could say ‘cunt’ but you couldn’t say ‘can’t’, is one memorable line. Here’s one of his newly published poems:
Best thing you can do for your marriage.
One way to surely get ahead.
Is get rid of that king-size mattress.
And sleep in a queen-size bed.
I adore Philippa Perry’s advice column (which she recently migrated to Substack) and this reply to a woman who doesn’t want to invite her mother to her wedding, felt particularly prescient. I am curious about what feels like a growing trend for emotional emancipation, where adults are unwilling to see their parents as fallible humans beings, with whom their relationships are still evolving. (I remember reading a comment somewhere, from a woman whose 80-something father was disabled. “I found out he voted Trump and I’ll never wipe that fucker’s butt again.”) Perry’s no nonsense response explains why making your wedding day about not inviting a parent, might not offer the liberation you expect.
Barry Ronan’s The Great Art Fraud about Jay Jopling’s protégé, Inigo Philbrick, who famously siphoned off (and spent? hid?) $86 million from his billionaire clients before going on the run with his Made in Chelsea fiancée, is the jauntiest documentary I’ve watched in ages. The already compelling story is made even more enticing by the fact that both Philbrick and his fiancée are wonderfully unphased. “You could say he’s a criminal” says the immaculately groomed Victoria Baker-Harbour, “but who hasn’t broken the law?” As the hugely rich YBA Jake Chapman notes: “It must send a shiver down the backs of every other collector and gallerist because they know by one degree of separation they’re just doing the same”. Philbrick’s method was disarmingly simple: he bought and sold shares in famous works of art for his clients. The same shares.
