Bits #75: I interviewed Malala
Plus, the Tracey Emin exhibition, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, telly for frazzled minds and lots of things to read
My son keeps asking me if he can watch Baby Reindeer because “it sounds so cute! I love baby reindeers [sic].”
Under the paywall: prestige telly for frazzled minds; the Nigerian scammers known as the Yahoo Boys; the evolution of loneliness over the last decade; an interview with a best-selling author who wrote 7 novels before she was published; a beautiful piece of personal writing (will there ever be an edition of Bits without a beautiful piece of personal writing? Not on my watch); and the terrifying world of clipping farms.
Quick hits:
More things we’ve been getting wrong about cortisol, truly the hormone of 2026 (sayonara dopamine, you had a good run).
If Carlsberg made lint rollers.
I lie awake at night thinking about the couples who live on cruise ships. There are so many of them.
Tenderhearted by this quote from sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who had triplets (c/o Laura Freeman):
“I am so deeply happy about the babies & want them with me all the time but I am also so deeply unhappy about not working.”
Props to Rosamund Pike who paused her performance in Inter Alia to ask someone in the audience to stop using their phone as it '“breaks the bond”. (She didn’t single them out.) We have somehow normalised the engagement of personal correspondence at the expense of communal peace and/ or entertainment. Don’t even get me started on the people on the tube who take calls on speakerphone. I did not subscribe to your podcast!
RT Sathnam Sanghera:
I went to Tracey Emin: A Second Life at the Tate Modern on Saturday (as recommended in Sophie Heawood’s Bits) and I was utterly captivated, particularly watching her 1996 short film, How It Feels. The exhibition, which brings together more of her works than ever before, is incredibly visceral: her blankets (she calls them blankets) about sexual assault and consent, and 2024’s painting, You Keep Fucking Me, not to mention all the self-portraits. (The nude polaroids of her in her studio, with that adorable little bob, I just loved them, she looks so gorgeous and creative and free.)
It’s about bodies and sex and assault and reproductive rights. The way she explores her abortion and her inability to paint for five years afterwards - it all felt simultaneously vulnerable and hardcore. There’s this sort of collective feminist catharsis to it - I’m not saying it was cathartic to make, I don’t think art is always cathartic, particularly ‘confessional’ art, but I felt washed clean by it.
I felt torn about seeing kids there. Emin’s work is complex and raw - if it was a film, it would be rated 18. I’m all for bringing children into adult cultural spaces, but seeing a small boy skip through the harrowing, evocative photography of Emin’s stoma after her colon cancer, as all these women moved through the passage with tender portent, as if we could feel the psychic weight of her stoma bag through her art, felt a bit weird. I can’t work out if this is terribly regressive and restrictive of me. If you took your kid and it was a positive experience for you and them, lmk!
I had the honour of interviewing Malala Yousafzai last Wednesday for How to Academy about her second memoir, Finding My Way. The book is so much more personal than I was expecting, a sweet ode to female friendship and a coming-of-age story. She writes about trying to have the ultimate student experience at Oxford (studying PPE, no less), while being financially responsible for most of her extended family both in the UK and Pakistan and heading up Malala Fund.
“People had been watching me my entire life, making sure I followed the rules, obeyed orders, stuck to the script. Since arriving at Oxford, I felt high on independence. Every choice, even the bad ones, belonged to me.”
She’s very candid in the book about how difficult it was to navigate her parents expectations: her mother (desperately homesick those first few years in Birmingham, unable to speak English and longing to return to the Swat Valley) was terrified about anything Yousafzai did that might make people talk back home, from choosing not to wear a salwar kameez at university, to refusing an arranged marriage, while her tutor had to send her father - “who treated our house like an art museum and me like the signature piece in the collection” - a letter to ask him to stop booking his daughter on paid gigs during term time, or Yousafzai would fail her degree.
Yousafzai writes about the social media abuse and death threats she receives daily, having to have Met police security accompany her everywhere she goes, weighing up whether to get married (having always witnessed it as the antithesis to education and freedom), navigating a diagnosis of PTSD (there isn’t a word for ‘anxiety’ in Pashto) and her devastation when the Taliban captured Afghanistan in 2021 and not one male leader - who’d all been dead keen for photo opps with her - would pick up the phone to help (rivetingly, or not so rivetingly, the female leaders did.)
At almost 29 years old - she was 15 when she was shot by the Taliban - she spoke thoughtfully and warmly about the woman and activist she has become, particularly when talking about the school for 700 girls she has managed to build on the rocky terrain where she grew up - something nobody ever thought was possible.
I was so pleased to be able to see Les Liaisons Dangereuses at The National, as it was written by my first ever boss, Christopher Hampton. When I first moved to London after university, I was desperate to work in journalism, but I couldn’t get an internship, and so I worked a year’s maternity cover as a PA to a screenwriter. I was a shit PA. I’m a very good touch typist (still am, hire me) but I was always forgetting my keys and I impounded poor kind Christopher’s car three times. Yes, three. Hire me!
