Bits #71: I'm back!
With much to read, watch and listen to
Hello old friends! It’s been a minute. I’ve been busy making a visual podcast for Disney+ to accompany the second season of Rivals, dropping on Friday - I’ve filmed 11 interviews so far, with 6 more tomorrow, followed by the premiere - and while I’ve been gone, Bobby Palmer, Sophie Heawood, Annie Mac and David Nicholls have guest edited Bits.
I had the most blissful time, digging into their recommendations. I am obsessed with Your Friends & Neighbours (and gasping for Frieay’s ep to drop) and have booked tickets to Tracey Emin (Sophie), can’t wait to watch Sentimental Value (Bobby), dig into the Diabolical Lies podcast (Annie), and read The Transit of Venus (David.) I love expanding Books + Bits beyond my own cultural diet - and I’m so grateful to these epic writers for manning the fort.
My list of culture recs from the 5 weeks I’ve been off bits is mad, so I’m going to go in easy, with about a third of it. More on Monday!
Below the paywall: the importance of reading beyond your years as a young person; things I ate, saw and marvelled at in Paris; a book and a podcast de-mystifying death (and the concept of ‘a good death’); some recent books, crafts, family movies and a museum I’ve loved doing/visiting with my kids; and why there are no new ideas (and that’s a good thing.)
Quick hits:
Fun fact from Lettsom Gardens: until 1752, the year started on the 25th March in the UK. The Calendar Act of 1750 reset it to January 1st. I can’t stop thinking about what carnage would ensue, if that happened now.
Not so fun fact from James Marriott: Keats was just 25 when he died, after an unimaginably horrible life. What magical odes might he have written, if he’d lived to 50?
Enriching fact that reminded me of the importance of the good news movement: as of April this year, 29-year-old engineer Harry Blakiston has fixed 74,000 windows in Ukraine with his shatterproof sheets.
App I am newly obsessed with (and I hate apps): Yuka, c/o my friend, Sarah. Use it to scan foodstuffs and beauty products and it will tell you where something is excellent, good, bad, etc. So many surprises await you! Thrilled that my beloved True Dates are as angelic as they look.
Hog Fathering’s extremely time-consuming wellness diet (as seen in GQ) is living rent-free in my head. I wish it would leave.
My friend Monica was talking to me about the ‘French Kevin thing’ the other weekend, whereupon I stopped her with a - sorry, what ‘French Kevin’ thing? (the pronunciation, of course, is the rather elegant Kevuh) - whereupon she directed me to a 2022 piece for The New Yorker by Lauren Collins about the spate of Kevins born in France in the ‘90s. It turns out that from 1989 to 1994, Kevin was the most popular boy’s name in France (peaking in 1991) but now it has fallen out of favour, and the Kevins are being treated like Karens. It’s a very fun piece with, as per all Lauren Collins pieces, some riveting French history.
“Their name was once extremely popular in France but has come to suffer a bad reputation, conjuring, for its detractors, as Fafournoux once explained, “car-tuning fans, reality TV, tracksuits—clichés of the beauf, preconceptions that hurt. (Beauf, short for beau-frère, or “brother-in-law,” signifies “an uncultivated, vulgar, narrow-minded and phallocratic man,” according to one leading dictionary, and is a whole pejorative universe in itself.) Like to-go coffee or athleisure, Kevin strikes certain French people as a gauche Anglo-Saxon import.”
My favourite podcast of recent times is Slate’s ICYMI with Kate Lindsay. Slug: “we’re online so you don’t have to be”. Highlights include the episodes with Scaachi Koul on her profile of Lindy West (and the madness that ensued after she published it) and Alex Sujong Laughlin on how “lip filler accent” is invading TikTok. I am highly allergic to audio preambles and non-specific waffle, and this is a tightly edited, waspishly eloquent dream. I plan to continue noodling my way through the back catalogue, while reading Koul’s first essay collection - which I bought off Vinted after listening to her on the pod and am hugely enjoying (has shades of Samantha Irby.)
Doing the viral rounds is this New Yorker profile of Sam Altman by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, featuring an intensely creepy AI gif. The journalists reportedly interviewed Altman 12 times for the piece (what the hell do you have left to say by the 10th round?) but it’s really about what everyone else thinks of Sam Altman, rather than what Sam Altman thinks about anything. The basic gist, of course, is will Sam Altman use AI for nefarious means, or will he stay true to its philanthropic ambition, with which he and Elon Musk conceived it? (Musk left a while ago and is obvs suing him.) In a baffling coup, Altman was ousted as head of OpenAI for 5 days, and it’s really about why that happened, how he got back in, and what that means.
Like most people I know, I find AI nebulous and ominous but this is a really interesting read, not least for what it reveals about the how delicate the moral lines are around corporate interests and science. So many geeks lured in by enormous pay cheques; so many of them now running for the hills. Or Google.
In April, I had the pleasure of collaborating with the heritage beauty brand, No7, who I have loved and trusted for as long as I can remember, on their new range, Prime Forever. It’s designed for skin preservation and protection and their message for the launch was all about preserving the moment - which MORE than appeals to me. I turn 40 next year, and I’m beginning to spend proper time, in a way I never have before, quite honestly, reflecting on how I manage my work life and my home life; how to give the best of me to my 3 small children (who need me more, not less, as they grow older) and not burnout at work. It’s something I have been really struggling with for the last few years and which I am dedicated to changing. You can watch the video below (shot by the wonderful Alicia Waite) and if you put the sound on, you can hear the poem I wrote for No7 - an ode to slowing down.
If you like live interviews and live in London, here are 3 I’m doing over the next few months that I’d love to see you at!
On 29/05 at St James Church Piccadilly, with Elizabeth Strout, re: her latest novel, The Things We Never Say
On 03/06 at St Martins-in-the-Fields for How To Academy, with Malala Yousafzai, re: her new memoir, Finding My Way
On 01/07 at Waterstones Trafalgar Sq, with my fave Bobby Palmer, re: his new novel, Main Characters.
The Devil Wears Prada was always going to be a tough act to follow, but I’m an easy crowd, which means I loved it. Sure, there’s no way on earth that Andy would live in an apartment that lush on a Vogue Features Editor salary (nor would she go to Milan Fashion Week) and her love story was unconvincing, but a Dior-clad Emily (now divorced, with twins, dating a fake-tanned technocrat played by Justin Theroux) and a sage Stanley Tucci (still worrying about the chowder) were predictably delicious. And that’s just it: I want predictable and I want delicious.
Miranda’s journey of vulnerability was very 2026, but I’m always down for a shattering of the armour (“I wanted more fashion, less woke” remarked someone to me who did not) and I tittered at the cameos, featuring the likes of Tina Brown - who wrote a very funny piece about her experience on set. (Related: Osman Ahmed’s slightly more serious and also very good piece for her letter, Private Parts, on interviewing at Vogue and being told she should work at Vogue India.)
The main question I had afterwards was: how much did Diet Coke pay for that product placement? Followed by: how much did Dior pay for that product placement? Followed by: was it more awkward for Meryl Streep being on the cover of Vogue with Anna Wintour given that Streep has always rebuffed Wintour’s invite to the Met Gala, or for Wintour, given that Streep is literally playing her?
My husband and I went to Paris to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary a couple of weeks ago, and we stayed in a jewellery box of a hotel that I have been telling anyone who’ll listen to visit. I’d picked up a flyer the last time we went to Paris, 3 years ago (we usually visit in December, for our snogaversary - infinitely more important than one’s wedding versary) and it’s been on my pinboard ever since. I booked it, curious to see if it was as adorable as it looked online. Reader: it was.