Bits #76
on David Sedaris, the social media ban, 'tasteslop' + 20 years of Esther Perel
Hello! I hope my Brit readers are faring okay. I know we joke about how the UK loses its knickers every time it gets hot, but we aren’t set up for this kind of heat (there’s a red alert on London). Nobody has air con and the schools and trains are like furnaces. My fan got so hot last night it died a loud and noxious death. To anyone giving birth, I am sending you COOLING VIBES.
Apologies, too, for the no show last week. My son got chicken pox, I got tonsillitis, and my daughter fractured her wrist. My husband will be running away to the circus imminently.
Under the paywall: parents and smartphones; heteropessimism; grief and food; how wellness took over health; a gorgeous new singer-songwriter; and 20 years of Esther Perel.
Quick hits:
I’m so pleased Virginia Evans won The Women’s Prize for The Correspondent. It was her seventh novel, but the first she’s published - now, she tells Jack Edwards on Inklings, she has to decide if she wants to publish any of the previous six1
Jerry Hall is such a dame. The how and why of Rupert Murdoch will forever be the question
Armie Hammer talked to The Hollywood Reporter about his cannibal cancellation (and why it wouldn’t have happened if he was gay). Hunter Harris calls this, the “Serious, Sobering Magazine Profile That Will Make Everything Fine Again”
Emily Ratajkowski wrote about sex as a single mother for The Cut and the internet is incensed (the internet is always incensed). The man she calls Elder Millennial is Cat Person levels of creep
I just bought four more of these. There are way fancier mini fans, but this one is under £20 and has a vg battery life. My daughter’s has lasted 3 years so far
Every thought I have ever had on the World Cup:
My favourite thing I listened to last week was David Sedaris on Throwing Fits. Somehow this cult podcast hosted by Lawrence Scholssman and James Harris - who The New Yorker calls, ‘The Shock Jocks of Menswear’ - passed me by until now, but I can see why it’s so popular. The hosts keep their questions/ observations short, sharp and witty, never interrupt and let their guest lead the conversation. Harris’s rapid-fire intro made me laugh out loud - “I hope me podcast pretty one day”.
Sedaris, a humourist who tours for over 100 days a year, is his usual blissfully sincere, offbeat, cutting self. He buys so much Comme Des Garcons he’s invited to their shows as a VIC2 (this 2016 essay3, when Sedaris and his sister, the comedian, Amy, go clothes shopping in Japan, is one of my favourites) and gives away clothes to stylish people on the street. (He opens with “Are you poor?” Not everyone’s into it.) “Almost everyone looks better in my clothes than me” he says without rancour.
At one point, the hosts ask him how much he earns and he answers them: $3 million a year. Which must make him the most highly paid non-fiction writer on the planet. While I was listening to the conversation, I was thinking about what my favourite Sedaris collection might be. Me Talk Pretty One Day is the most famous; but I think I’d plump for Calypso. (Which also contains that Japan shopping essay.) WBU?
It took me forever to discover Apple+ and now it’s my favourite streamer. First I delighted in - and really, it’s a delight - Your Friends & Neighbours and then I gobbled Imperfect Women in a single day from my sick bed. I can’t quite work out why it’s got such mediocre reviews. It used to be a compliment to compare something to Big Little Lies - and now it’s a byword for derivative. White Lotus is heading the same way.
But then, I’m not as fussy (discerning?) about telly as I am books - I’m down with anything juicy and glossy. And Imperfect Women, starring three best friends - heiress/ philanthropist Eleanor (Kerry Washington), rags-to-riches ballerina turned socialite Nancy (Kate Mara) and scholar turned downtrodden housewife Mary (Elizabeth Moss) - is as juicy and glossy as a Vogue cover. (You know budgets are big when the broke character’s wearing Dôen.)
Basic premise: Nancy is dead and Nancy was having an affair. So who was she having an affair with, who knew, and who killed her? Bien sûr, Nancy isn’t the only one keeping a secret. They all are, their happy intertwined lives a toxic mirage. It’s like A-List Harlan Coben (in that you have to suspend a thosuand disbeliefs). I devoured it.
I enjoyed this piece on ‘tasteslop’ in The Sunday Times Style. Coined by trend forecaster Emily Segal, it means, good taste, as defined by the algo. (There’s also ‘airspace’, coined by Kyle Chayka - who I interviewed couple of years ago - to describe the omni-aesthetic of trendy cafés.)
I call it the memeification of taste and it’s something I wrote about for an essay in my book, on how internet culture has both facilitated and encouraged women to dress like facsimiles of each other. The example I used was the viral Zara polkadot dress. People were not embarrassed to own the same dress; rather, they saw it as an endorsement of their own taste. They were, in the lowest stakes kind of way, ‘safe’.
The homogenisation of style (but also popular culture more broadly) has emerged thanks to the paradox of choice (Barry Schwartz, 1975), where consumer choice has become so improbably vast and diffuse that it becomes easier just to make the same one. Of course, this is not to say everyone is doing it: the reaction from the truly fashionable has been to invest more heavily in vintage/ bespoke.
If I was writing that essay now, I would look more closely at the obsession with curation in popular culture. The reason curation - which I am doing in this very letter! - has become so appealing, is because we have not got the faintest chance of scything through it all ourselves. The more overloaded we become, the more we doubt our own taste. Outsourcing becomes inevitable.
Many thoughts on the new social media ban. For a diversity of opinion: see my interview with Jonathan Haidt in 2024 (pro ban), an episode of Top Comment with Taylor Lorenz (anti ban) and my interview with adolescent psychologist Dr Lucy Foulkes (sceptical of ban). My own view is in line with the brilliant Beeban Kidron, a film director and online safety campaigner. NB, this interview was published before the ban.
“No phones in the bedroom is possibly the biggest thing. I definitely would not give a phone until as late as humanly possible. Not at 11 years old to get them to school – I mean really late.” But parents could also, she suggests, try leading by example. Kidron keeps her own phone on silent with vibrations switched off, so that it can’t interrupt her, and checks messages only when she chooses. Isn’t she afraid of missing some emergency? “For the most part, the worst incidents in your life don’t involve a phone call, and can’t be stopped by a phone call. If there are vulnerable times, there’s no reason not to switch your phone on between 3 and 4pm, say, and then when your kids are home from school turn it off.” The point, she says, is to give other people back your attention.”