Bits #73
A hetero dose of ice hockey smut just landed. Plus: the best things I listened to and read last week
Happy heatwave to the Brits! Now’s a good time to crack out Maggie O’Farrell’s Instructions for a Heatwave. The worst moment of my bank holiday was enduring that most cur-sid of beauty labours, the bikini wax; the best moment was discovering, via my father’s tirelessly indulgent snackery, M&S’s dulce de leche ice cream bars and Magnum’s ice cream cookie bites. I am not a well woman today.
Under the paywall: a poignant piece on how childhood bullying imprints on your adult self; my latest haul of kids books for 7-12s; parenting as a French person in America; a sweet piece on the grief of adult friendship; the most healthy, helpful and not remotely restrictive cookbook I’ve ever bought; an interview with ‘the TOWIE jihadi’ that I think should be compulsory reading for understanding radicalisation; and yet another child star shares her appalling story.
Quick hits:
Word of the week from Patrick Radden Keefe, via Louis Theroux’s pod: ensorcelled. Meaning to enchant, bewitch, captivate.
Three new gizmos enhancing my daily life: a toothpaste squeezer, a cleaning brush for reusable cups and self-sealing toothpaste lids. I give such a good impression of being Type A. Just don’t ask me where my keys are, what my pin number is, or to update my phone.
Vladimir Nabokov’s letter to his New Yorker editor in 1948 reads like a genteel version of Giles Coren’s furious letter to The Times subs sixty years later:
Steven Bartlett is launching an AI-generated kids show, churning his Diary of a CEO episodes into business learnings for small people. Kids deserve so much better than podslop. Bring back Art Attack! (I can’t understand why no-one has.)
I did not watch Eurovision this year (it’s viewing figs were paltry, with five countries boycotting) but the winning song, Bulgaria’s Bangaranga, has been living rent-free in my head thanks to my sister. The chorus is dementing and catchy as hell.
The best thing I read last week was Emily Stewart on the death of quiet luxury and the new dawn of gaudy (as embodied by Lauren Sanchez) for Business Insider.
“Tacky is back in a big way. Being loud and unabashed is cultural currency in a culture that prefers signalling vice over virtue. We’re living in a digital Gilded Age where greed is again good, and the only way to prove you’re a winner is to make sure no one can look away.”
Covering Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, the return of the McMansion and why people now want their plastic surgery to be visible (“the point of ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ is that people can tell you have had work done”), Stewart describes it as “the ‘80s, but with internet.” The nickname for this new age? According to Sean Monahan - who predicted and named both ‘normcore’ and ‘vibe shift’ - it’s boom boom. A witty, well-observed, somewhat depressing piece.
The best thing I listened to last week was Foundling, an audio doc series from Tortoise (behind hit podcast, Sweet Bobby) and The Observer (the former now owns the latter). In 1987, a ‘foundling’ (an abandoned baby) was handed into the police in Suffolk, after an 18-year-old nanny, ‘Jennifer’, found it on a verge in a carrier bag.
Journalist and host Lucy Greenwell was 8-years-old at the time, and her and her sisters have always wondered who had left the foundling - Jennifer was the nanny of their closest friends, so the story formed a big part of their childhood lore, in the way those stories do. And so a few years ago, Greenwell contacted the former foundling and now mother of two, Jess, to see if she wanted to find her mother.
What follows is a series of revelations both unsurprising (Jess’s mother was very young and had told no-one she was pregnant) and shocking (several twists that I won’t give away here) - I’m still enraged, as you suspect the host is too, by the lack of accountability regarding one extremely sad turn. Greenwell is an excellent host, navigating emotionally charged waters with eloquence and compassion. Highly recommend.
The best thing I watched last week was Off Campus, a TV adaptation of The Deal, the first in a series of five romance novels by Elle Kennedy. Now when I say best, I mean that I guzzled the whole thing over two insomniatic nights. And while I’m fascinated by the BookTok sports romance to streamer pipeline (specifically ice hockey, which has led to an ice hockey boom in the UK) - indeed fascinated by the rise in sports smut, full-stop - I sort of think there should be a parental control on steamy teenage shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty, Heated Rivalry, Pretty Little Liars, etc. A pop-up that reads, you are too old to watch this.
Because surely there’s something unseemly about 39-year-old me watching 18-year-old Hannah (a gorgeously open-faced Ella Bright who I last saw in, um, Malory Towers) getting her rocks off? Like I’m turning up to a campfire with my cassette player and a DASH Water, bleating “I’m a cool mom!” Surely someone should be stopping me? And yet… here I am.
That aside, I think this show is such positive entertainment for teenagers; I wish something like this had been around when I was younger.