Bits #56
things to read, watch, listen to, visit
Happy Sunday eve, booksenbitters! After a week of late nights on a script deadline and a family-wide edition of Hedrin (iykyk) I’m feeling zonked. I can always tell when I’m knackered because I find myself oddly moved by people’s pictures on Vinted. I feel such tenderness towards their little mirror selfies and all their personal effects in the background.
It doesn’t bode well that I feel like the greasy smear on an old canapé platter before December has even started, but oh, how I love the festive season! My husband, who is an actual Christmas superfan - I have to prise his festive jersey off him just to wash it, like a toddler - has just lugged our tree home and I will let my children decorate it first - the key here is first - before I go in afterwards with some ‘light editing’, like the bohemian renegade that I am.
Under the paywall today: my thoughts on the brilliant psychological thriller, The Beast in Me; a compelling podcast series on a knotty subject; a magician who is driving me dotty; a moving doc on cancer conspiracy theories; my daughter’s favourite ever series of books (which I’d never heard of before last week); a nutty celeb interview from the archive; and the best thing I bought this week.
We just got back from a trip to Legoland for my son’s upcoming 6th birthday and I would give it a… 6/10? Wonderful things to see, not a huge amount to do. (Tbf, a lot of it was shut. I think Spring would be a much better time to visit, not least because it was witch titty cold today.) I did love Miniworld though. Imagine being a builder on the Gherkin? The levels of zen in that workshop.
Fascinating piece in GQ on crisis publicists, who are, unsurprisingly, more in demand than ever before. (Apparently, Lively and Baldoni’s publicists were regular publicists and not crisis publicists - which is why it was very quickly a shitshow. A crisis publicist would “never put anything in a text”.)
“Just as journalism has devolved, so has our profession,” says the head of a top celebrity PR firm. “It’s a race to the bottom and no one benefits from it.”
The celebs have arrived on Substack (it’s the new Notes-app-via-Instagram) and I have mixed feelings about it. But this piece by Lizzo on why everyone is losing weight (by someone who lost weight) is vg, ditto this one by Charlie XCX on what it’s like to be famous:
“Sometimes being a pop star can be really embarrassing, especially when you’re around old friends of family members who have known you since before you could talk. The discrepancy in lifestyles becomes more and more drastic the more successful and paranoid you become.”
This piece by environmental journalist Tatiana Schlossberg for The New Yorker on learning she had leukemia moments after she gave birth, absolutely broke me. It’s so beautifully and simply written, too.
“For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
Things take an enraging, brave turn - you sense that this is the writer’s motivation for writing the piece - when Schlossberg mentions how her cousin, the US Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., “an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family”, is busily slashing so many things that keep so many people alive: vaccines, clinical trials, misoprostol, which is used to stop postpartum haemorrhaging.
“This drug is part of medication abortion, which, at Bobby’s urging, is currently “under review” by the Food and Drug Administration. I freeze when I think about what would have happened if it had not been immediately available to me and to millions of other women who need it to save their lives or to get the care they deserve.”
I lolled so much reading Leah McLaren’s piece on ‘reno brain’ and what interiors do or don’t say - about celebrities, marriages, sanity - for her newsletter, Juvenescence. I was this week old when I learnt what juvenescence means - the state of being youthful - and I’m obsessed. Plan to slug off scaly snakeskin of matrescence and slip into snakeprint leotard of juvescence, asap.
I need to get on with my ecdysis, because the time has come - and sooner than I thought it would: I’ve just learned a meme from my kid. 6-7, 6-7, she wrote all over a piece of paper last week. Apparently, this playground meme originated from a rapper, Skrilla’s 2024 track Doot Doot (6-7) but no-one is clear why and it appears to mean nothing at all. For fucks sake, can things still mean something, anything? “It’s a bit annoying” Z admitted when I asked her what she thought about it. “Why? Do you want to put it in your newsletter?”
I’ve just finished The Beast in Me and I thought it was brilliant. We all knew that Clare Danes can do bug-eyed panic in her sleep, but who knew Matthew Rhys could play a psycho with such aplomb? In Gabe Rotter’s psychological thriller, Danes is Aggie, a non-fiction writer struggling to write a follow-up to her wildly successful daddymoir of almost a decade ago (the brilliantly named, Sick Puppy), living in a beautiful house in Long Island, shrouded in grief for her son, Cooper, who was killed in a car accident years earlier and mourning the breakdown of her marriage to artist, Meg. And then the arrival of her new neighbour, Nile, punctuates her sadness. A billionaire real estate developer banished from New York by his megalomaniac father after his wife’s mysterious suicide, trailing his sweet second wife, Nile is as nasty as he is charming, in that Succession sort of way where the nastiness is part of the charm.