Bits #81
things to read, watch, listen to and chew over
Pinch punch first Thursday of the month. I’m back from my sojourn of nectarines and nutella biscuits (everyone knows the former negates the latter).
I got stung by a hornet while I was away and it was like being electrocuted. The pharmacist kept shouting ICE ICE like an incantation and it took every fibre of my being not to shout back BABY. She then sold me the second strongest antihistamine of my life. The first, since you didn’t ask, was on an island off Costa Rica on my honeymoon. I got a shot in my butt and slept for 17 hours straight. Sometimes I wonder if I ever woke up.
In case it’s not already apparent by the drunk 3am vibes of this dispatch, I am writing this during the fever dream of school holidays. I love them, in all their logistical chaos, but I also forget how to talk like a human.
Under the paywall: two brilliant investigative podcasts; a shocking longread from one of my favourite journalists; being bad at your phone and not wanting to get better; and two true crime docs that have restored my faith in the genre.
Quick hits:
Gen Z can’t be doing with handbags — 44% of them think they are old-fashioned and instead favour a “girl grip” or an “everything claw” to hold their sunglasses, phone and lipstick. JUST CALL IT A HAND.
Stevie Martin on shops: “Every item of clothing really does currently fall into one of two categories: Y2K pop star shooting sex music video in sex shed with water dripping from ceiling (sex) or older woman attending the theatre.”
Dolly Alderton to a young single woman: “You should not be accepting that you’ve missed a boat aged 32. There are still plenty of boats — at 32 you’re in a veritable regatta.”
If you’re struggling to read and want to carve out the time to do so (the crucial word there is want) why not try novelist Naomi Alderman’s Couch to 5K reading challenge? It’s had a huge response.
Thanks to Josh Barrie for introducing me to the meditative bliss that is Marco Pierre White cracking eggs. The penis tower of egg shell hats 🤌
I recently found out that my husband has never seen Brokedown Palace and I can’t get over it. I thought that weeping over the Kates behind bars was a vital millennial experience! Like: The Beach, Titanic, Austin Powers. Like: you couldn’t get a visa for the noughties unless you’d seen it. Was it more niche than I realised? Please, weigh in, I must know.
An MP is taking Elon Musk to court, after thousands of fake sexual images of her were created by Grok and circulated on X. Jess Asato, who called it “a gross violation of dignity”, hopes the case will set a legal precedent against deep-fake misogyny, which is becoming an issue in schools.
Loved every second of Harling Ross’s sister makeover. A reminder (that I have roundly ignored since I was a small child) that you really don’t need much.
Two weeks ago, nine out of the 10 bestselling paperback novels in the UK featured a woman being murdered (c/o author Wendy Jones). That is a truly grim sentence to type.
Vogue’s Old Masters shoot starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, shot by Szilveszter Makó, is absolutely gorgeous — my favourite magazine shoot I’ve seen in years. I keep coming back to look at the pictures. Unsurprised to see that the stylist was Tabitha Simmons, she never misses.
Last year, I was asked to write a new introduction to Maeve Binchy’s 1994 novel, The Glass Lake. It’s such an honour to be asked to do stuff like this. The edition is now out, here’s the first paragraph.
“There are things that remind me with almost painful clarity of my mother: Elnett hair spray; the jangle of a charm bracelet; and Maeve Binchy. Those fat books of Irish women’s fiction, with their pale nature covers and curly Maeve Binchy lettering across the front. It was less that I thought that Maeve Binchy could not be mine — and more that it was very much hers. It can take even the most avid reader a disarming amount of time to realise that the things that were always for your mother, are now things for you, too. (And more terrifying: that you might have become your mother.)”
The Invite totally surpassed my expectations — 10/10 recommend. The entire cinema was hooting with laughter. It’s a close-up look at a marriage disintegrating which somehow manages to be really feel-good. Adapted from a Spanish film which itself was an adaptation of a Spanish play — I’d love to watch it as a play, get it to the West End! — the entire set is just one apartment, featuring a cast of four, who use every inch of the space to brilliant effect.
Miserable music professor Joe (Seth Rogen) and frenetic, frustrated artist turned stay-at-home mum Angela (Olivia Wilde) are meeting their upstairs neighbours — louche fire-fighter Hawk (Edward Norton) and sexy psychotherapist Pina (Penelope Cruz) — for the first time. Their meet-cute is delightfully skewiff: Joe plans to ask his horny neighbours to stop having such loud sex (Angela loves the loud sex, loves that Pina is achieving glorious orgasm every night — does Joe know how hard it is for a woman to experience that?), while Pina and Hawk are there to see if Angela and Joe fancy an orgy.
It’s such a clever film — there’s this ominous feeling that never quite goes away, like any minute now it could descend into a Get Out-style horror — with brilliantly witty dialogue (h/t screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack) and everyone inhabiting their part so completely. (Cruz is my favourite; both sexily soulful and drily pragmatic, she sounds just like Esther Perel, who was a consultant on the film.) It’s a very physical comedy, but much more than a farce — Pina facilitates a really tender conversation between Joe and Angela, and Hawk has a very moving backstory. I hope it gets director Olivia Wilde the credibility she was denied in all the Don’t Worry Darling brouhaha.
A distinctly less humorous look at polyamory comes courtesy of Swingers, recommended to me by one of my best friends. It’s a six-part audio doc written and reported by Catrin Nye for BBC Wales, about the dark underbelly of the UK’s most popular swinging website, FabSwingers.